Sunday, August 17, 2008
Atari Games Too Bad to be True
11:00AM Owen Good | Watercooler Games saw this earlier in the week and gave a detailed deconstruction of how a Free the Falklands! concept would be graphically impossible on the Atari 2600. I took one look and knew it was satire because one of the writers for this site, Jason Torchinsky, is a comedian and a name I remember as the editorial cartoonist of The Daily Tar Heel back when I was at N.C. State’s Technician in the early 1990s. But play along, because it’s funny. Why look, his site, the Van Gogh-Goghs, have unearthed from some New Mexico landfill documented evidence of 11 scrapped projects for the Atari 2600! The casualties included such licensing/adaptations as Bosom Buddies (a cross between Kaboom! and Donkey Kong, and Kramer vs. Kramer (like Pong with children). My favourite, because I like poop jokes, is Gunther Gebel-Williams’ Cage Cleaner. The bogus rationale for the bogus game sounds like pure pre-video-game-crash self-b.s.ing: “You can’t blow up asteroids in real life, but you sure as [expletive deleted] can clean up [expletive deleted]“. The Best Atari 2600 Games You Never Heard Of [The Van Gogh-Goghs, via Water Cooler Games] More »
How Weight Watchers is Like an RPG
10:00AM Owen Good | I need to lose weight, and the Weight Watchers points concept actually resonates with me, as I attempt to do something similar with my home meals, I just don’t count the calories like I should. But damn, it is hyperbranded as a female diet plan, and I’m self-conscious enough printing out a Men’s Health diet at the office. Still, Wired’s Clive Thompson has a different take on why WW works — it’s actually an RPG. The Weight Watchers program is designed precisely like a role-playing dungeon crawler. That’s why people love it, stick to it and have success with it. And it points to the way that we could use game design to make life’s drudgery more bearable. [...] Weight Watchers’ points function precisely like hit points; each bite of food does damage until you’ve used up your daily amount, so you sleep and start all over again. Play well and you level up — by losing weight! And the more you play it, the more you discover interesting combinations of the rules that aren’t apparent at first. Hey, if I eat a fruit-granola breakfast and an egg-and-romaine lunch, I’ll have enough points to survive a greasy hamburger dinner for a treat! More »
Ratchet & Clank: To be Continued in 2009
9:00AM Owen Good | 1Up’s played Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty (drops next week on the PlayStation Network) all the way to the end, and got the above teaser screen. Insomniac has said nothing, but it’s doubtful they’d tease anything other than a full retail release this far out. 1Up notes that it looks like Insomniac will be switching between Resistance and Ratchet titles every other year which is definitely pulling its weight for the PS3. Ratchet & Clank Continue the Quest in Fall 2009 [1Up] More »
Indie Dev Asks ‘Why?’ and Pirates Reply
8:00AM Owen Good | Independent developer Cliff Harris, of Positech Games, asked pirates why they choose to pirate his games, promising them immunity and anonymity in exchange for their honest rationales, which he would aggregate and post on his blog. They reciprocated, and of about six reasons, a righteous indignation at DRM seemed to lead the list. Harris is actually responding to the gripes in both the pricing and de-DRMing of titles in the future, with his own reasoning why it’s a good idea. More »
Button Mashing Has Its Virtues
7:00AM Owen Good | Tried and true foreplay methods. One: write the alphabet. Two: Konami code. Find out where they put the start button on the jump. More »
The ‘Narrative’ Straw Man: We’re Not Doing That Badly
6:30AM Maggie Greene | Michael Abbott of the Brainy Gamer has a great piece up on the straw man of the ‘quality of narrative’ debate that’s been going on in the industry for quite some time now: things aren’t as bad as the collective we make them out to be. Really, they’re not. Sure, there are broken promises along the way, disappointments here and there, and certainly the future to look towards — but there are plenty of games who are doing pretty damn well, considering that most can agree that narrative design for games is in its relative infancy: More »
News
The Godfather II: Trailer
6:00AM Owen Good | Even though it got very repetitive and ultimately fell short of my expectations, and others’, I still played The Godfather: The Game to 100 percent completion. After seeing this and reading A.J.’s impressions, I’m willing to give EA another shot with The Godfather II, seen here in the debut trailer that released earlier today. The intimidation animations and gunfire executions look like reprises from the first title, but you get a look at the “Don’s View” map, which takes the game’s flow away from a roam-the-streets looking-for-trouble model and into a more subtle, decision-making context. Plus, I love period pieces. And Fredo’s moustache. More »
Saturday Timewaster: Attention Hog
5:30AM Maggie Greene | From Chris Basmajian comes a darling, piggieful little game called Attention Hog. As the titular attention hog, your job is to capture the attention (and love) of as many people as possible, while avoiding bacon and nabbing power ups to make your job a little easier. Basmajian says the game “reflects some of the social and psychological trends present in social-networking communities, including self-promotion, social anxiety, obsessive need for peer validation, and distraction as entertainment”. Heavy stuff. Ian Bogost notes that while he’s “happy to see a game that critiques today’s attention culture, but I’m not sure Attention Hog reaches the level promised in the description”. Still, while I’ll admit to being a sucker for cartoonish pigs (my little Monokuro Boo collection is probably a touch unseemly for a 25 year old), it’s adorable and worth a few minutes of time on a lazy weekend. Attention Hog [Chris Basmajian via Water Cooler Games] More »KORE Resurrected for Wii from ‘03 Xbox Title
5:00AM Owen Good | Here’s the debut trailer for “K.O.R.E.”, which we’re told is the resurrected The Kore Gangthat was planned for Xbox way, waaaay back earlier in the decade. Now the “outvasion from inner space” is coming to Wii. Looks like a madcap action/platform sort of in the style of Destroy All Humans. You get to run around as one of three mad scientist aliens in funky exoskeletons. The developer is Snap Dragon Games. So do you like teh “K.O.R.E.”? Do you not like? There’s an 11-minute gameplay video on the jump if you want a closer look. No word on release date. More »
