Unless you’re out of work or a college student, you probably don’t have all the time you want to play games. Lo! I offer succor for your discontent, in the form of videos about games.
The 1up network has a new show called RSVP. It’s modeled off that Dinner for Five program and features Valve’s Erik Wolpaw, the guy who worked on Everyday Shooter, and another guy who heads up the Sony studio Pixeljunk. You know, I’ve never know what RSVP stands for. Apparently it means “”Répondez s’il vous plaît,” a prayer written in the damnable language of the druids. Or French. One of those.
Here is a Street Fighter IV video. If you turn off the sound you might make it all the way through!
And here we have a video from the Spore creature creator, in which the 1up crew makes a Seymour-esque plant monster. In case you haven’t heard, Spore is going to be awesome.
Lastly, we have a Bionic Commando video which makes swinging around the devestated ruins of fictionville look pretty fun.
Thanks to Gamevideos and Gametrailers for the sloppy wet kisses of consumable video content.
OK this is the last post about Penny Arcade for awhile, but
I found this cool podcast where the PA guys play Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition with a DM from Wizards of the Coast, and it’s just too cool and funny not to share.
I said yesterday that I wasn’t sure about the combat - I am now sure. The battles in this game are
very good.
So I downloaded the new Penny Arcade game yesterday, and like many I imagine, I was struck by how good the thing is. It shouldn’t be good! This is where those loud-mouthed big-word-using web-comic-making game critics get their utlimate come-uppence, right? Actually, I like Penny Arcade, so I never wished them any ill will. But it takes a certain confidence to make a game just because you have a successful web-comic about games, or just because you’re rich and popular. Who are they to make a game?
Apparently, they’re good game designers, because so far, it’s damned good.
The game is very writerly; I append that adjective in the kindest manner possible. Besides a bit of initial spoken narrative, there’s a lot of reading to be had here, whether it’s bits of dialogue between characters or descriptions of items in the environment. The game is also presented in the context of a comic strip; movement from one part of a level to the next is done by “changing panels,” at which point the characters are transported to the next panel in a strip, which can therefore change perspectives and locations. It’s a bit difficult to describe and it works very well in practice. The battle system seems cool, but I haven’t put in enough time to make any kind of quality judgement about it.
Like a new book or CD, sometimes you just know when you first press start that a game is going to hook you, that there’s something there that’s enticing and that you have to coax it out. This game is actually making me take a break from GTA IV.
This Shacknews preview of Far Cry 2 makes it seem like the game is going in a very interesting, decidely non-linear and Stalker-like direction. I’ve heard a variety of good and bad rumblings about the project, but at least you have to like the ambition. I particularly liked the fact that you have NPC allies who can die, and can’t be brought back in any way. Eastern European game design seems to be influencing more mainstream design in a lot of interesting ways. Obviously part of the reason
Far Cry 2 is going in this direciton is because of its roots, but it’s still a different team and I could have imagined them making a fairly straightforward and linear narrative-based scifi shooter that would have smited us all with its legendary god-like mediocrity.
Clicken thee unto this link, and inhale the soothing vapors of Eurogamer’s Mass Effect PC review. Mass Effect is an excellent game, and this review does a good job of investigating why that is.
Sometimes it’s difficult to unentangle an emotional response to a game and specify the hoary threads of reason that evoke that reponse, but that’s exactly what’s necessary when writing a review. You have to not only communicate what you felt when playing it but what made you feel that way. This review does that (not a surprise, since it’s written by Kieron Gillen, who consistently impresses like some kind of methodical criticism robot) Mass Effect bear-hugged me with pleasure the first time I played through it (and the second, and the third), and even though it was a long time ago that I finished the game I’m still coming to grips with why I was so emotionally invested in it, and why these types of gaming experience always manage to hook me like some sort of geek-fish that never learns its lesson.
I would also like to associate myself with Gillen’s remarks about why Mass Effect is a “ballsy” game. It really is. It takes on so many things, some of them not particularly splendidly, but it all works together. I think that people who couldn’t get past the combat or some aspect of the story are missing the forest for the trees.
Here is a new Spore video that focuses on the creature creator (which is coming out in about a month).
This video is so deliciously packed with content and insights into what the game is about. I especially love the icons on the top-right that constantly update to tell you what kind of food your creature eats, how fast it moves, its attack rating, etc. The awesome thing is that these are all generated procedurally, so it’s the organic process of molding your creature that goes into those values, you don’t just decide them on your own.
I yearn for this game.
If you’ve lately caught yourself thinking “man, it would be great to hear an interview with that guy who made Dwarf Fortress,” then you’re in luck. Because right here is an awesome interview with Tarn, the guy who makes Dwarf Fortress.
The podcast lasts about 90 minutes and the interviewer seems to have more than a cursory amount of knowledge about the game, which is always nice. Topics covered include animal castration, midget facial hair, the roots of dwarves in mythology, procedural generation and its increasingly significant role in gaming, Spore and Maxis, the future of the industry, old tabletop roleplaying games, and some questions from the Something Awful forums. It’s well worth a listen.
The NPD figures for consoles and software don’t mean a whole lot to me. They’re interesting, but in the way that reading about politics or intellectual property law can be interesting - I don’t understand much of it, and I certainly don’t have anything smart or prescient to contribute.
I am confident in one thing, however: the console war, or race, or whatever it is, is over. It was over a long time ago. The Wii won. It’s not a race anymore, and any future “victories” won’t matter very much.
The upside to all this is that there is room in the market for all three consoles. They can all make money. But that might not be enough for some of these companies.
Read this Kieron Gillen piece on Gears of War right now, because it is excellent and well worth the five minutes it takes to get through it.
Good writing informs while it entertains, and this piece does that in spades: I had never really put together how the dichotomy between western and eastern juvenalia in the games industry shakes out, but Gillen lays it out very nicely in this piece.
Speaking of Gears of War, this new footage of the game doesn’t do a whole lot for me. I liked the first game because it innovated just enough to be interesting while still keeping a bear-like grip on its FPS legacy, but I’m not sure that increasing the amount of on-screen enemies, making the graphics nicer, or increasing the size of multiplayer games is going to grab me this time around.