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Breaking Through the Retail Glass Wall
Posted by Maggie Greene at 5:00 AM on September 7, 2008
The typical method of keeping games in glass cases works like a charm when it comes to reducing theft, but stymies impulse buys — something the game industry is working to change as companies attempt to appeal to ever broader markets. The San Jose Mercury News has a reasonably interesting short piece on what companies are doing in an attempt to broaden their appeal, get games out from behind glass and locks, and encourage people outside the target 'gamer' audience to pick up games on a whim. Of course, there's the problem of dealing with retailers' wants and needs:
A simple and scaled-down strategy game (it was an entrant in the 'Java4K competition,' where entries could not exceed 4096 bytes), FkConflict is still a lot of fun and good to while away a chunk of time that you probably should be doing something else with. The mechanics are pretty simple: pick your territories; territories get turns each round in random order; first player to get all territories on the board wins.
Emily Short has an interesting response up to some comments made by Playfirst's John Welch in 
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.
The Escapist has an interesting article up on mainstream industry types who went indie — it delves into the reasoning behind a move, as well as the challenges and the positive aspects of moving from big studios to independent development. People making the transition have had to unlearn 'mainstream' habits or pick up new skills (like learning the tools of the PR trade) — and even with the plethora of portals and distribution options, the 'independent' distribution channels are still fraught with pitfalls, from distribution limitations to piracy:
While the weekend timewasters at Kotaku are generally free, and Now Boarding — an indie time management/sorting game that has a nice, slightly retro aesthetic — isn't, the demo is lengthy and engaging enough to waste an hour or two on a lazy Saturday. The point of the game is to manage your airport empire and keep the poor slouches stuck at the terminal or on the plane reasonably happy, or at least not hopping mad. The $US 20 ($US 15 right now) price tag for the full version seems a little steep, but the demo portion has already gobbled up time this morning that I should've been dedicating to plowing through another couple of thousand pages on Japanese colonialism. Frankly, sorting flights is a hell of a lot more fun — and this is a nice, reasonably polished little game that is fun to play.
The announcement that you knew somewhere in the back of your brain for that the game that you've all been waiting for is here: Yes, that's right, the Wii is getting a Hardy Boys game. Titled Hardy Boys: The Hidden Theft, the game is already slated for the PC and follows Frank and Joe as they investigate a vault burglary — only to find themselves at the centre of a major investigation! Jesse McCartney and Cody Linley (who?) from Hannah Montana (oh) will do the voicing duties. Don't think of this as a point and click adventure but a waggle and click one.
I really like the idea of turning classic literature into games, mostly in the form of 
Bored this summer? GamesRadar has an appallingly expansive (10 pages!) listing of a wide, wide variety of games available for free, with just about every genre under the sun represented (including the classic 
