Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Sundays! They can be for all kinds of stuff. Singing, dancing, rejoicing. But it’s possible you’re having a quieter time. You’re sat down somewhere with a glowing screen, and you’re filtering through information. So much of it… Here comes some now.

• Read of the week, for me at least, was the Frozen Synapse post-mortem: “Commercially, our targets were: Focus completely on digital; achieve Steam distribution; sell over 100k copies within a year from release without a significant marketing spend; create a game that would be popular with core PC gamers; we wanted to make something that would really appeal to readers of RockPaperShotgun!” Well, that’s always a good idea.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sundays. Sundays are for dreaming of another world. Or perhaps Another World, depending on what sort of dreams you have. It is also for skimming across a week of internet links and wondering how all this could happen – why doesn’t everyone just sit down and have a rest? Eh? It makes little sense to me.

• I wanted to link to this post by Jeff Vogel (which I got to from this follow up), but actually it’s worth checking out a lot of the stuff on his blog. Vogel makes turn-based RPGs in a fairly traditional way, and makes a living from that, and as such his insights on what it means to be indie have a depth that other, less experienced indies perhaps do not: “The 10000 Hour Rule is about crushing dreams. It’s about understanding that there are limits to what you can do in the all-too-short period of time we spend on this Earth. It’s about giving people who have achieved mastery the respect they deserve. It’s about, before taking on a new task, honestly evaluating whether we can afford to give what it takes to complete it. And it’s about forgiving yourself for not being able to play the guitar like Hendrix.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Sundays are for wondering if you will ever sleep again, while cradling a steaming cup of hot drugs. Perhaps, in those grey autumn hours before the sun has managed to struggle out of its own slumberings, you will start going through the week’s writings about games. It’s been a good week for that, at least.

• Chris Dahlen’s piece on imaginary games journalist Rachael Webster is quite the thing: “This was the one big hiccup in the project: nowhere on the site did we advertise that Rachael wasn’t a live girl. Alternate reality games are a special illusion that only works if the audience discovers the trick. The worlds they build aren’t stuck in a television screen, or cheap and obvious like the backdrops at a miniature golf course. They’re pervasive, delivering their fiction straight to your everyday world—to your email, your phone, even to spaces in the real world. They’re fiction without borders, and they can make the player feel as if, to use the most common expression, they’ve “fallen down the rabbit hole.””

Read the rest of this entry »

Sunday mornings are for realising that it’s going to be a slow week of typing because you bought a new keyboard and it’s just ever so slightly different to the old one, which means one extra bad key hit per sentence. Sigh. At least it glows in the dark.

• Brandon Sheffield’s Game Changers article appears to be a sort of predictably zeitgeisty filler material in the subjects that he picks, but having read it I think it’s actually a genuinely important overview of where we are right now, looking who is changing the industry, and why. On the Humble bundle project: “One of the project’s additional successes comes from its ability to retain that indie feeling while growing massively. As the bundles have gotten more successful, they attracted the attention of investors. Sequoia Capital provided venture funding of $4.7 million to the bundle’s future growth, which is a decidedly un-humble amount of money.” These are the companies worth paying attention to. Humble alone is interesting enough because it is generating significant wealth for indies who might otherwise have struggled to break even. That success is indicative of where the “indie” revolution has got to, now: people have worked out exactly how to get the games to the players, and the money to their bank accounts. And that’s worth being aware of.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sundays are for repair. The battles of the days and nights before can be forgotten with a cup of tea and some time with a friendly, glowing screen. Let’s see where that takes us.

• “Things I Ate In Skyrim”: “I found myself at a crossroads. I could follow the stony trail toward Riverwood, the game’s first village, or I could take the road less traveled. That’s when I noticed the lovely insect floating above my head. The butterfly lit upon a large rock, then took to the air. I looked up, plucked the creature out of the air, and checked my inventory. I’d already plucked its wings from its body—presumably to be mixed into a potion. Rather than waiting to find a use for this strange reagent, I ate the wings.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Sundays are attempting to recover from GameCity 6. I was only there for a day, and I’m almost dead. That said, I did sit through a full eight hours of Thrilling Wonder Stories the day before, which meant by my brain has way too much to process. So Sundays are for digesting massive input. Here, why not try it yourself?

• PC Gamer play Artemis, the starship bridge simulator thing: “Uhurich McCormick: I’m working the communications rig and am supposed to use the ship’s arrays to chat directly with the things hanging in space around us: to secure docking permissions, check the status of allied ships, things like that. I’d previously been wittering away happily with the station’s manufacturing teams to get some more photon torpedoes, but out in the inky blackness of the void, there’s no one to talk to. Aww. Wait, we’ve just scooted past something! Some red dots on the ship’s scanner. I call over to Graham and ask for his expert analysis on what they are. “Red dot things, over there!” he squeaks. Thanks, Graham. Are they hostile? Let’s find out.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Sundays! Sundays are for wondering what the week ahead may hold, but also for looking back at the previous week’s scribblings of the internet’s mad scribes, and plucking them apart for clues. IS there anything useful in there? What have they been saying? Read on for elucidation.

• Not really a PC-gaming link winning the Sunday Papers this week, but Ben Goldacre’s request that Susan Greenfield publish her claims about videogames destroying kids’ brains in a scientific paper is reasonable and important: “This week Baroness Susan Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford reportedly announced that computer games could cause dementia in children. This would be very concerning scientific information. But this comes from the opening of a new wing of an expensive boarding school, not an academic conference. Then a spokesperson told a gaming site that’s not what she means. Though they didn’t say what she does mean.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Sundays are for writing cryptic introductory paragraphs that lead into a list of videogame writings collected from across the internet. What could it possibly mean? Let’s see if we can decode the cypher.

• There’s a lot been said about Rage this week, here’s Dead End Thrills’ take on it. It’s interesting to see what megatextures mean for taking someone intent on taking screenshots – yes, there are some spectacular vistas, but just don’t look too closely: “It’s an old-school faker. The abrupt colour-grading that simulates HDR; the tiny flocks of birds against a flat and frozen sky; the vast shadowmaps imposing the stage’s authority on the actors: these aren’t ugly, just conspicuous. Then there’s sparse virtual texturing (aka the MegaTexture), an illusion so data-intensive that it would, some suggest, take something in the region of 80-130gb more data to give it the consistent detail you’d expect.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Sundays are for driving across the hills, and through the forests. Sundays are for getting home to a cup of a tea and a boiled egg, and realising there’s still a compilation of the week’s words to do. These are those.

• This week’s winner in the game of words is this dictionary development studio jargon that has been compiled by Gamasutra. I am sure some of them are fallacious, and I have never been used in anger, (while others are just silly), but I couldn’t help smile at “Gone All Kurtz”, “Save the Astronauts”, “Eating Your Own Dog Food” and “Pink Lightsaber”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sundays are for nervously reading the Sunday Papers, and thinking about what might appear in them. Oh well, worse things happen at sea. Let’s have a look at all the things that can only happen in videogames.

• It’s a big one to start: Eurogamer ask the question “How Bad is PC Piracy Really?” The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that no-one really knows. Here’s Capcom’s Christian Svensson: “We looked at quantifying what the real losses are,” says Christian Svensson of the PC Gaming Alliance and Capcom, “and it’s incredibly hard to do, because you end up having to do a set of cascading assumptions that you have no real ability to validate in any meaningful away.” More insightfully, there are a lot of good points made about how and why companies choose to use DRM, but I think it’s Guillaume Rambourg from GoG who sums my feels up best: “”Piracy is some kind of ghost enemy, and chasing a ghost enemy is a pure waste of time and resources. The only way really is to make the whole gaming experience easy, convenient and rewarding for the users – this is the only way to fight against piracy.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Sundays are for a breath of fresh air. They are also for sitting in a cold room somewhere in The West and meticulously combing through the internet for clues. Let’s see whether we can find any.

• BitGamer’s Craig Lager has taken some time to investigate microtransactions. This is definitely an important topic: “There’s little point in diving into Korean MMORPGs that explicitly follow the ‘pay to win’ business model, as those games will be deliberately imbalanced to favour regularly paying customers. Western developers, however, claim to avoid falling into this ‘pay to win’ genre; which begs the question of whether they’re telling the truth or just selling empty promises. Thus, these are the games we’re going to analyse – flip the page to see the seven games we’ve chosen to look at.”

Read the rest of this entry »