Burnout: Revenge review

27 November 2005

Another game review from yours truly over at Pixelsurgeon: Burnout Revenge.

“… it’s worth forgiving for the stories you’ll take away from it: tales of near-misses, spectacular crashes, and the time you did a power-slide between two oncoming buses, and as was so excited as a result that you crashed into a wall. Give it a chance, and you’ll be rewarded with some of the best arcade racing in a while. It’s good stuff, but it’s not quite – DINGDINGDING – awesome, gold, or perfect.”

The quote will make sense if you’ve played the game – or read the review.

Castlevania: DoS review

27 October 2005

Self-promotion again: over at Pixelsurgeon, a review of the latest Castlevania game, Dawn of Sorrow. This time round, the series moves onto the Nintendo DS. It comes with a huge recommendation for me – the review will explain more, but basically, it’s invariably fun to play, has lots of longevity (and some killer bonuses I didn’t have space to write about), and harks back to a slightly bygone era. Fun to write, too. I’m really looking forward to having the chance to write more about games. Up until now, I’ve mainly been biting people’s ears off about them, so this new outlet will no doubt please those unfortunate enough to have listened to me droning on.

Kenta Cho shmups for OSX

13 October 2005

Webpage detailing ports of Kenta Cho’s shmups (shootemups) to OSX. Noiz2sa and Rrootage had been available for a while, but this ports all of them – Torus Trooper and Tumiki Fighters are good, but Gunboat is probably the standout of those three previously unavailable ones. They work pretty well, and they’re colossal fun. Cho’s shmup games have been available for a while on PC; it’s great to see them all ported to OSX now.

So at the weekend I picked up Far Cry: Instincts. It’s a very good game – pushes the Xbox graphically in ways you couldn’t dream (trumping even Riddick) and has a great fun set of multiplayer modes.

What’s really interesting, though, is that it has an excellent mapmaker. Far from letting you just move around tiles, it lets you mould terrain, build structures, and plan complex maps – and then play them online with your friends. It’s been really well designed – the controls are superbly mapped to the Xbox pad. It still takes a while to make a map, but it’s not tricky to make some quite complex ones.

Anyhow. When you’ve made a map, you “publish” it – this doesn’t upload it anywhere, it just seems to verify it with your online name (Gamertag, in Xbox parlance). And then you can host games with your friends, with your map. They will, of course, have to download it from you, but that takes a few minutes, and then everyone can play.

Here’s where it gets clever. When they come to host a game, they’ll find your map – which they just downloaded – is on their list of maps. So they can host a game with the map you created. And if it’s a good map, they may well do.

And so then everyone they play with gets to use your map. And so, if you’ve created something really good, it’s going to spread virally very quickly; players will say “this map is good, man, you should play it”. At its logical conclusion, as many people will have your map as the ones the game comes with, and then you’ve entered canon. Wheras PC games (which are usually very moddable) have a distribution network of the Internet, Xbox games don’t have the same freedom for downloading new content. So Ubisoft should be applauded for letting the players become one big viral network, in which they ‘catch’ maps off one another.

The game’s online implementation has the customary Ubisoft online flaws, but in terms of how easy it is to make brand new content – and, more to the point, how easy it is for that content to propagate based purely on merit – it’s really something special. I can’t wait to see what happens when the map-makers get really good…

Revolution

16 September 2005

Everyone knows about it. The designers are going nuts, the gamers are going nuts. I’ve been having mental explosions since this morning and that’s been most enjoyable.

The Nintendo Revolution controller has been unveiled. It’s very, very, very important.

I don’t quite have time to articulate the mental explosions right now – and indeed, many people are hitting the same nails on the head as me. Gillen is probably the most succinct:

“If you don’t like the Revolution controller, you are fundamentally part of the problem and killing the fucking art form”

He is fundamentally right.

Katrina: The Gathering

15 September 2005

Katrina: The Gathering. Possibly tasteless. Possibly a little spot-on. It’s funnier if you can play Magic, obviously. [from dan]

Serious games modding

06 September 2005

Pasta and Vinegar links to this entry in the Serious Games Summit programme about modding Half-Life 2 as a visualisation tool. Absolutely fascinating.

“The games press is often painted as corrupt, lazy and – as I mentioned – fundamentally stupid. This is because we tend to be corrupt, lazy and fundamentally stupid.

It’s not entirely our fault.”

Kieron Gillen has put up a full transcript of his talk from Free Play, a conference in Melbourne. In it, he explains to independent developers how to leverage the power of the gaming press – who, after all, really care about indepedent developers, whatever it may look like from the outside. It was probably a great talk. It’s certainly a great piece of writing, if only because it clearly explains the hectic, rushed, pressurized world that is magazine publishing to an audience who – whilst they might not understand publishing or journalism – certainly understand hectic, rushed, and under pressure. Well worth reading.

Flash game of the day:

09 August 2005

Flash game of the day is Suburban Brawl, straight outta Carnegie Mellon‘s Entertainment Technology Centre. Build houses by drawing them – very Pac-Pix. I wasn’t that good at it, and, as a quick project, it obviously have rough edges – but it’s got great visual charm and it’s lots of fun. Top stuff.

Costikyan at Free Play

02 August 2005

God, I’d forgotten just how well Greg Costikyan writes some times. In particular, his presentation to Free Play in Melbourne, downloadable from this post, makes its (very worthwhile) points well. If the games industry doesn’t collectively wake the hell up, and snap out of being marketing-and-publisher-driven, it could find itself in deep trouble. Greg explains this point in his slides in, well, a little more detail than me.