Sunday, June 22, 2008

The Consoles of Our Ancestors

9:00AM Owen Good | Back when I was your age, we played games that sucked and were no fun and we liked it, because it built character, and building character was fun (it was an early form of achievement farming). In fact, we used a slide projector to create finger-shadow combatants for Mortal Kombat, and it was a hoot when granddad had to roll the dice correctly in the correct order to get a fatality. So that’s a big brown blip on the bullshit radar, isn’t it. Yeah, thought so. Instead for you, GamesRadar has a comprehensive timeline of all of the video game consoles of the 1970s and I was surprised to learn just how many there were besides the 2600 and the Pong console. Oh, some family friends had the Fairchild (above), that made visiting their home like going to a foreign country where the toilets flushed backward. Except for the Odyssey (actually, we only saw the Odyssey II) I don’t think anything other than the Atari retailed in my hometown. Then again, we didn’t get a McDonald’s until 1980. We had to have our birthday parties at a typewriter repair shop. And we liked it! Consoles of the 70s [GamesRadar] More »

Weird Artistic Timewaster of the Day: Immortality

7:30AM Maggie Greene | We’ve mentioned Jason Rohrer’s weird little works before, in the form of Passage and Gravitation; now with his ‘Game Design Sketchbook’ column at the Escapist, he puts up new little games monthly. This month features the theme of life, death, and immortality (appropriately called Immortality): We generally assume that immortality is good, just as we assume that death is bad. Of course, universal immortality (all six billion of us) would be physically impractical. But what about individual immortality? What about for you? If you could become immortal, would you? Immortality is a game about that question, and it’s also about the converse of that question: Does death have some fundamental value that we usually ignore? Immortality [The Escapist] More »

More Castle Crashers Characters: Ninja and Skeleton

7:00AM Owen Good | The Behemoth aren’t fools, they understand that adding ninjas not only adds awesomeness, it compounds it. (Seriously, try it out. Take any noun, say “plus ninjas”, and tell me if it’s not awesome. Christmas. Oregon Trail. My cousins’ confirmation. Told you.) So word’s out via the official blog that you can count on Ninja as another character, and Skeleton as still another. Ninja carries a sai and a coffee mug, described in a pureley def4. That has to be an inside office joke. The mug is purely defensive. There’s also a haze/halo around Ninja in the screens provided by The Behemoth, so does that include invisibility, camouflage or teleporting, or is that just a motion effect? Dunno. Second character just announced: Skelly, whose weapons seem to include a sword and a bow-and-bone arrow. Plus from gameplay screens, he’s either blocking or projecting some kind of energy attack. Full screens after the jump. More »

More on the Playstation-edu Initiative

6:30AM Maggie Greene | We mentioned the new Sony Playstation-edu initiative when it was announced; now, Senior Manager of Developer Support at SCEA Mark Danks explains a bit more about the program and it’s goals (and the cost). If colleges and universities enter into this sort of relationship with Sony, they will have lovely legal language to follow, but can get access to PS2 and PSP dev kits for $AU 2,100 and $AU 1,055 a pop, respectively: More »

A Journey Into the Servers of Darkness

6:00AM Owen Good | “The server I found myself on was an odd, unsettling place”, writes Alec Meer, exploring Team Fortress 2’s “Achievement Servers” for Rock, Paper, Shotgun. “The tiny, custom map placed the red and blue spawn points right next to each other, removed the wait period between respawns, dropped a single capture point in the middle and placed intelligence briefcases at either end. A small pool of water was placed awkwardly in a corner, and health packs scattered in bizarre columns. No-one could ever win this map – it was set up to repeat forever”. More »

Casual is Complex: The PopCap Model

5:30AM Maggie Greene | Gamasutra has an interesting interview up with some of PopCap’s people — co-founder John Vechey, CEO David Roberts and PR director Garth Chouteau — talking about the PopCap model and structure and the casual market at large. It’s a reasonably lengthy interview with a couple of gems contained within: It is very much a multiplatform, multichannel, multipartner business where our goal is to get our games anywhere they’re going to be great, anywhere we can. If your fridge can make a great Bejeweled experience, by god, we’d have your fridge playing Bejeweled. More »