Rock, Paper, Shotgun

This is really neat. Picked up from Indie Games. They had Jim Munroe go to GDC with a press-pass and write up his experiences in the form of a text adventure. It’s actually more of a text-based game than a text adventure (i.e. you shouldn’t be having any problems with the parser as long as you REMEMBER the instructions at the start), and actually somewhat splendid. You can play it online in Java here, for the java-hating here and for those who use an IF interpreter, its actual code is here. And some more explanation follows…
Read the rest of this entry »

At the last GDC the industry big brains were sat around telling us how games would one day be remotely rendered on big computing clusters and then streamed to our TVs. The big unveil at this year’s GDC has proved them to be correct. Maybe. OnLive is a service on which you use superfast broadband (1.5mbps minimum) to play games on a remote server. You just plug it in to any “entry level” PC or Mac, or hook it up to your TV, and play. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have the latest 3D card: because the remote server does the rendering and streams the result to you. That’s the theory anyway, and it’s a theory a bunch of big name publishers have signed up to. Watch the OnLive spokesman Steve Perlman make his big claims after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few months ago Mythic’s Creative Director Paul Barnett and myself went into a London bar, set a tape rolling and got mildly smashed. Only now do I dare return to these hours of tape to transcribe a series of topic-by-topic interviews. We pick up where we left off last time, with Paul about to explain why he went to Futurism-festival LIFT rather than this industry’s mecca, the Game Developer’s Conference. And it’s much more fun than him hating San Francisco.
Read the rest of this entry »

Could this be the future of PC gaming? Battlefield Heroes has the potential to be one of the most important games the PC has ever seen. Free to play, funded by advertising, super-accessible, playable on a low-spec PC, and still attempting to capture some of what makes a classic PC title so entertaining to play: it’s one of the smartest things EA/DICE have ever done. And it’s funny, too.

Past the jump: my impressions from the GDC demo, the trailer, and the some screenshots.
Read the rest of this entry »

To Part One.

All award ceremonies, apart from those occasional horror sessions that are conducted completely in earnest, have something of a raised eyebrow about them. This was never truer than in the case of the Independent Game Festival Awards and the Game Choice Awards that followed. The IGF awards managed to take the piss out the pretensions of indie gamers, attack the credibility of their sponsors, and still leave room for a dig at the big mainstream publishers. It was exactly right. The Game Choice presentation that followed basically validated what everyone had said about Portal being awesome, and gave Bioshock a pat on the back too, presumably because Erik Wolpaw couldn’t be made to collect all the awards without suffering heart failure.
Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most impressive sessions I was able to attend at GDC was the discussion of Open Worlds in the context of the development of Prototype, as hosted by Tim Bennison and Eric Holmes of Radical Entertainment. Much of the presentation was focused around the nature of developing open world environments and the way in which systems interconnect to provide options for players within those kinds of game worlds. Interesting stuff, if spider-diagrams of game systems and possible player actions are the kind of thing that draw you in.

The showpiece of the session, however, and the reason many of us were there, was to watch Holmes play through a large slice of the game. And, well, I think my interest in this game has now been validated.
Read the rest of this entry »

Rather than simply delivering tight, hard news, we at RPS like to provide you with rambling, impressionistic wittering found nowhere else on the web. What follows is a record of my GDC 2008 trip, in all its self-indulgent detail. Are you sitting comfortably? Then let’s begin.
Read the rest of this entry »

At last we have some evidence of the mounts in Age of Conan, and they look pretty good. Using eyes, watch:

Parts 2 and 3 below.

Read the rest of this entry »

When you find out Dave Jones is making a game, there are three steps one must take:

1) Sit up.

2) Read everything.

3) Want.

This is the guy who has brought us Lemmings, Grand Theft Auto and Crackdown. You know, that’s all. And now he’s turning his studio, Realtime Worlds, to the MMO. APB. And why should you be interested?

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the more interesting sessions at this year’s GDC was entirely off-campus. Dave Perry invited a load of chums to lunch, with a select press audience. Present were people like Raph Koster, Peter Molyneux, EA’s Neil Young, Chris Taylor, Dave Perry and some bloke from Sony. And then they all had a good chin-wag. Annoyingly, Rossignol was present – as he’s never going to shut up about it – and has written up the session for Videogaming247. In it, he says things like…

This led Phil Harrison to point out that games are taking too long to make. “The speed of iteration has to change,” said the Sony giant. Koster argued that games were shamed by the web, whose speed of iteration of web-sites was lightening fast. “Flickr patches every half hour!” he exclaimed.

I suspect more from the session will emerge over the coming weeks, but in the mean time, Next Gen have some quotes over here.