-
"
hen I finally got around to playing Portal, I was a bit surprised at how much the Internet loved the companion cube. Sure, the cube is pretty great, but in my mind it pales in comparison to the turrets, the real scene-stealers of the game. In fact, they inspired a Veruca Salt-esque covetousness in me. I wanted one. Badly. And, of course, it just wouldn’t be the same if it didn’t talk…" I had forgotten how much I loved the turret dialogue. You monster.
-
"Apple has already built its TV. It’s called the Apple TV and that’s why it’s called the Apple TV. Because we’re supposed to be rethinking what a TV is. The TV is not the screen with seven different inputs for your players and boxes and game machines. The TV is the content and the buttons we touch to get to that content."
-
" A physical model of Eindhoven rolled onto a drum and attached to a piano. A form of player piano with the city as the score." Just beautiful.
-
MeFi thread spun out of my Roguelikes post; some great comments and insight, and what a cast!
-
"There was one guy on the steps of a building and proselytizing the end of the world. My guess is that he was doing it for jokes, but if you’re in the middle of it with your friends exploring a world covered in blood, then there’s something in our understanding of the Black Death in the Dark Ages and people announcing the coming of the end that plays into the social fear." Kill Screen interview on the Corrupted Blood outbreak in WoW.
-
"…a genuinely meaningful social mechanic can create its own share of problems. Facebook friends are not necessarily one’s actual friends. Players often announce their names and character details in various forums, hoping to find “fake friends” to fill out their list. Doing so creates three advantages. First, the more friends the player has, the more opportunities for his character to be borrowed and thus earn friend gold for the player. Second, high-level friends make combat far easier because of their high stats and upgraded skills. Finally, a surplus of friends allows the player to bypass the rest time restriction." How do you get around all this? Johnson explains all. It's a really lovely piece of genuinely social game design.
-
"The CSM [player-run council] is a dirty election. It’s a third world election. Anything that’s allowed under the EULA in Eve is allowed in the election. You can buy votes, dead people can resubscribe and vote, you can scam people for votes, so it’s hardly an iconic democracy. So, this coming election, almost every major candidate you will see on the council will have been backed by a null sec plot. In advance, we’ve all met and spoken to one another to decide on the issues of the day. So I’m not going to be a voice in the wilderness. I’ll be speaking alongside people I’ve been fighting with or working with diplomatically for years."
This interview is full of some great moments – nice to see the "1% problem" acknowledged by a player, but gosh, you can see the appeal of that 1%. This line was particularly acute.
Rogue On The Sofa
01 April 2011
I’ve been playing a lot of Torchlight recently.
This is not the first time I’ve played a lot of Torchlight. I played a lot of it on Windows, at a desk. I bought it again and played a lot of it – mainly on trains – when it came out on the Mac. And now I’ve bought it a third time, on the Xbox, and am playing it from my sofa.
I know why I’m quite so engrossed. It’s not just that Torchlight is a fine iteration of the dungeon-crawler, walking the tightrope between light-hearted entertainment and dense inventory management just so. It’s something more personal, that takes me right back to the dawn of Tom-as-a-gamer, embedded in the core of my gamer DNA.
I’m playing a lot of Torchlight, because, when I play it, in my heart, I know I’m really playing Rogue.
My first post over at the Hide & Seek blog, in which I write about Roguelikes as casual games, why I love them so, the ways they’re casual (and the ways they aren’t), and what the current state of Roguelikes is.
-
"EON has a full-time staff of six, headed up by editor Zapatero (known to his grandma as Richie Shoemaker), who told Wired.co.uk that around two-thirds of the content of the magazine is written by EVE players, who are paid in in-game currency for their work. It acquires the reserves of in-game cash to pay its writers by selling ads to in-game organisations, like banks or insurance companies, which pay their ad bills in the game's currency too. The setup means that gamers who play EVE have more ways to make in-game cash than just mining or trading in the game universe. They can also be a journalist, reporting on galactic events." This is completely brilliant/nuts. Also: I love the idea that people want to collect the historiography of the universe.
-
"Jennifer Brook, who makes artists’ books and iPad apps, speaking earlier this year: “Craftspeople are technologists, and technologists are craftspeople; the only difference is the velocity of the material they choose to work.” Humbly, I would add a further qualification, a further dimension. Celerity, or “proper velocity”, is velocity which takes the effects of relativity into account: the observer is travelling too; we are all travelling in time. The material has its own celerity." Oh, gosh, that's marvellous. Both parts.
-
Nice lo-fi sound effect tool.
-
Totally marvellous: photographs of New Zealand arcades in the eighties. Lovely they're online, as well as in the world, and must get around to that essay at some point.
-
"So there's a cosmonaut up in space, circling the globe, convinced he will never make it back to Earth; he's on the phone with Alexei Kosygin — then a high official of the Soviet Union — who is crying because he, too, thinks the cosmonaut will die.
The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won't work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, "cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.""
The terrible, sad cost of the space race. Warning: contains a graphic image of human remains in an open casket. Also: is, in many ways, very upsetting. But this is history, and it must be documented.
-
Totally lovely montage of arcade-game death/loss animations. Watching this: I really forgot how beautiful Afterburner looked in the arcade.
-
"Robert Downey Jr really sells the idea of being a design engineer. To be fair, the Iron Man script does him the great service of having him have to build himself a new heart in a cave in Afghanistan, thus having to make imperfect things and fettle them to fit. That feeling gets slightly lost later in his super-engineer pad where apparently nothing needs filing when it comes back from the rapid prototyping machine. But he still manages to exude a kind of mad joy at making things, a fundamental character trait in the way that having nice breasts is not." Sophie on the emotional truths of storytelling.
-
"I'm not going to lie to you; fugitive.vim may very well be the best Git wrapper of all time."
-
"Where does this go from here? DVD boxes that have screens on them, that are players too. Or perhaps simply projectors. Player and media combined as a single usage item. Experiments like this have been around for ages but are mainly novelty items. I think we need more of this silliness, relating to what I said recently about dreaming and being experimental. We need seemingly crazy ideas like stickers that are screens. That's how we create the new stuff, from the random throw-away ideas." More hopeful monsters.
-
"I would separate out the true independent developer vs. the hobbyist," says Fils-Aime. "We are absolutely reaching out to the independent developer. Where we've drawn the line is we are not looking to do business today with the garage developer. In our view, that’s not a business we want to pursue." Sustainable, maybe, but sad at the same time.