L.A. Times Has A Go At Gaming News
Aw, it's so cute when the big, mainstream newspapers try so hard. Yeah, I'll patronise them until the day they give me a high-paying job. It's coming. I can feel it. Smell it.
Covering the rise of the indie game, the Los Angeles Times gets all frothy and excited with a plucky-underdogs-make-good approach as the little people take on the behemoths of the gaming industry. Like, for instance, Portal!
Highlighting the shift, the conference's Game of the Year award went to "Portal," which was developed by a team of students from the DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Wash. The puzzler beat out big-budget industry franchises such as "Super Mario Galaxy," "Rock Band," "Bioshock" and "Call of Duty 4."
That's right. Those impoverished folks at Valve have finally stuck it to the man, showing the big players with all the money, infinite resources, worldwide online distribution platform, massive franchises with which to package unknown games... Sorry, I lost track of my thought. Tuesday? Yes, I can do Tuesday.
The point of the piece, to reach to their defense, is that the Big Three are now publishing indie games via their pay-for downloads. So we'll see World of Goo on the Wii, and The Dishwasher on XBLA. They then get all muddled about Sims Carnival, somehow thinking it's related, but thankfully reel things back in by mentioning Google and YouTube, although strangely failing to namecheck Facebook. What are they? Unhip?
Look at me! I'm totally sticking it to them. Zing, burn, all over the place.
We like Rod Humble. And we like to pretend he likes us too. He takes full advantage of the LA Times' thinking developing indie games from scratch is the same as using a drag-n-drop game creator for the Sims, and says,
"The whole idea is to broaden the kinds of people who could make games. We asked ourselves, 'What would it be like if my mom could make a game?' "
We don't know your mom, Rod. But now we think we know where The Sims 2 Teen Style Stuff came from.