Videogames are fixated upon corridors, be they literal or otherwise. But why, and is it a problem? | As I wandered thirsty as a cloud round this year’s Eurogamer Expo show in London, I was struck by how many of the games on show were, fundamentally, games about moving successfully through corridors. At the same time, lots of showgoers were obediently shuffling slowly down invisible corridors in queues, wrapping themselves snakelike around innumerable booth corners for the chance to sprint through the lightly disguised corridors of the hottest playable preview code, such as COD Blops 2 or Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.
While they were inching down their queue-corridors, many of these people were playing other games on their 3DSes or Vitas to pass the queuing time. A videogame corridor is possibly the simplest way to create epistemic suspense through spatial engineering. The corridor is inherently authoritarian, seeking to corral unbounded biological movement into unnaturally linear paths. Illustration: Marsh Davies. Postmortem: Arrowhead Game Studios' Magicka. [In this candid and thoughtful postmortem, Arrowhead Game Studios CEO Johan Pilestedt describes the haphazard "process" behind the Sweden-based development of the PC game Magicka, showing how lack of experience can lead to pitfalls, even when you have the best advice.] As I enter the office, I notice the couch in front of the TV is still out of place from the video interviews we did last week.
On the wall hangs a spoof Magicka poster, and in a glass display near to the door is our first big award -- the "Swedish Game Awards 2008" trophy, and beside it is Extra Credit's "Most Unbelievable Awesome Fun" award. Programmer Peter Lindgren and CFO Robin Cederholm are discussing their weekends -- it's Monday at Arrowhead Game Studios and I can't help but think how we got to this point, much like Frodo and Sam must've wondered as they returned to the Shire after their long journey. 1. A Child of Love 2. Oblivion is Bliss 3. From the start we had this saying -- "that's too much fun.
" Mighty Vision: Maturity. A young artist's work looks different to that made by someone older. I consider this maturity a neutral quality; not better or worse. In many ways mature work is superior; someone who has honed their craft and observed human nature over many years creates with a deep understanding of what they're doing, knowing how to apply conventions perfectly and when to break them to achieve the exact effect they're aiming for - not just for the sake of it. But youthful work has its own value, the energy of exuberant joyful ambition and experimentation, discovering ideas for the first time and getting excited about them in a way that a jaded older person can't anymore, still believing they can change the world. Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash isn't clearly 'better' or 'worse' than Anathem, but it's much more energetic. Split Enz's Time and Tide isn't 'better' than Mental Notes - although it is easier to listen to.
Videogames are a mature medium, and over-focused on maturity. Gaming Sequels: A Developer's Headache | Pixelbedlam.co.uk. Hitman: Absolution has ended a six-year long wait for another sequel in the much-loved stealth franchise. Despite scoring what can be described as very strong scores across most reviews (it’s currently sitting at 81 for Xbox on Metacritic, one less than its predecessor) it has greatly upset some fans of the series due to slightly changing the formulae of the previous four games.
“Hitman is dead, Police suspect Blood Money isn’t involved. Remember that beloved Hitman series? Well it’s been killed!” Obviously Metacritic user reviews should always be taken with more than a pinch of salt (Bioware know all about this) but it does highlight a massive dilemma developers face when making new instalments of well-established franchises. Fans of previous Hitman games grew to love the tried and tested formulae.
Six years though is a long time in gaming. Many negatives reviews could be summed up simply by saying: “It’s not Hitman: Blood Money.” It is, of course, a problem that will never go away. From Torment to Eternity: Chris Avellone on RPGs. The Kickstarter phenomenon that swept the industry in 2012 has been dominated by projects from established figures who made their names in the 1980s and '90s. These projects trade on nostalgia from fans of genres and game design styles that major publishers have since come to regard as too risky to fund. Obsidian Entertainment creative director Chris Avellone is revered among RPG fans for his work on Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment (among many other credits).
He is one of the most prolific writers working in games -- he personally penned the bulk of Torment's 800,000 words -- and is regarded by many as one of the industry's finest. Avellone dipped his toe in the crowd-funding stream early, signing up in March to assist with Brian Fargo's Wasteland 2, on the condition that it could reach a $2.1m "stretch goal" for its funding (which was easily surpassed). Gamasutra recently sat down with Avellone to discuss Project Eternity and his work more generally. That setting is incredible. Wii Feature: Revolution: The story of Wii. In 1998, a journalist for The New Yorker asked Bill Gates which of Microsoft's competitors he feared the most. "I fear someone in a garage who is devising something completely new," he replied. Gates's belief was that there is no greater disruptive force than innovation.
The biggest business rivals continually smash against each other in a war of attrition, but nothing has more potential to upend the entire system than a bold new invention. Zoom Three years later, just months after Gates handed control of his software empire to Steve Ballmer, one such unknown garage inventor was knocking on the company's door with an idea that would change videogames forever. Microsoft declined his offer. His name was Tom Quinn, a serial inventor based in California who, in certain obscure corners of the internet, is described as "the man who invented the Wii". In September 2001, Nintendo quietly bought a minority stake in Quinn's company, called Gyration. "But the meeting went terribly. Endless Space: When Triple-A Developers Go Indie. From its start in a fourth floor apartment (no elevator) in Paris in early 2011 to its final release on Steam on July 4th 2012, Endless Space was both a work of passion and an unexpected adventure for our small team.
The entity now known as Amplitude Studios was the brainchild of Mathieu Girard and Romain de Waubert. Unhappy at the existing crop of space-based 4X games and desiring more creative freedom than they had as executive producers at Ubisoft, the two of them decided to strike out on their own. As Romain later said, he wanted to "...fill bookshelves at home with all the games I wanted to play that were never developed. " The only way to do that, they agreed, was to go it alone. When we first got together, we used "Star Empire" as the working title. Star Empire would be a space-based 4X game, using some of the classic mechanics from games like Civilization and Master of Orion. We also had to think about what we could do to make the game stand out in an increasingly crowded market: Postmortem: McMillen and Himsl's The Binding of Isaac. How did a game destined for failure become a cult smash?
In an article originally written for Game Developer magazine, Edmund McMillen (Super Meat Boy) discusses how he added religion to The Legend of Zelda, mixed it with a roguelike, and came out with a surprise hit. On paper, there is simply no reason for a game like The Binding of Isaac to have become as huge as it has. It makes no sense -- and this is coming from the person who believed in it the most. I knew Isaac was special, but if you asked me to bet on whether Isaac would sell over one million copies in less than a year, I would have bet against it.
You see, The Binding of Isaac was made to clash against mainstream games -- it was designed to be a niche hit at best. When I started working on The Binding of Isaac, I was still haunted by the end of Super Meat Boy's development, and the hoops we had to jump through to get there. The Binding of Isaac started in a weeklong game jam. 1. With Isaac, my goal was to create "magic. " TEDxKids@Brussels - Gabe Zichermann - Gamification. Features - Postmortem: Humble Hearts' Dust: An Elysian Tail. In this candid and detailed postmortem, developer Dean Dodrill tells the tale of the challenging and largely solo development of Summer of Arcade hit Dust: An Elysian Tail, a title that took him over three years to create. I had always loved video games, and thought making my own would be cool. Late in 2008 I read an article in OXM detailing what was possible with a new programming language, cryptically called XNA.
I had never programmed before, and besides a short contract doing cutscenes for Jazz Jackrabbit 2, had never worked on a video game (I'm actually an animator/illustrator by trade). For years I had been feeling the call to make my own game -- something small, like an 8-bit NES title. The OXM article convinced me to download the free tools and just try it. This is the story of how Dust: AET came to be, along with what went right and wrong during production and launch. A week of rudimentary tutorials later, I quickly realized you have to make EVERYTHING from scratch!
1. Why We Love Persona 4. My adoration for Persona 4 is less about escapism and more about the positive messages it enforces. Acceptance, courage, friendship, selflessness, all those important things and more that are encouraged. I also think Chie and Yukiko are extremely positive representations of ordinary teenage girls. Chie is an easy example because she represents that constant concern so many young women struggle with over ideals.
Not being pretty enough or feminine enough, struggling with insecurities while still enjoying the things that make people look at you askew and wondering if that makes you less in their eyes. Her constant struggle for self-balance as she comes to realise that being a person, being a female, isn't just about makeup or being demure, but embracing the things that make you stronger and happier overall. Yukiko took me a while to warm up to, because initially I thought she was just there to be the token soft-spoken, beautiful, ideal girl, but eventually I realised that was the point. Mario’s Film Folly: The True Story Behind Hollywood’s Biggest Gaming Blunder - Features. In honor of the 20th anniversary of the Super Mario Bros. movie (released on May 28, 1993), we wanted to share with you this piece from October 10, 2011 about the troubles plaguing the film.
For all their absurdity, the Super Mario Bros. games follow a straightforward template. An Italian plumber adventures in a magical land, fights evil monsters and rescues a princess. It’s simple, but Nintendo’s vibrant fairy tale could have been fertile ground for a Hollywood fantasy epic. Instead, when Super Mario Bros. released in 1993, it portrayed a version of Mario that was worlds away from Nintendo’s vision. The Mushroom Kingdom had been turned into a neon-lit cyberpunk city where dinosaurs had evolved into humans. Bowser was a leather-suited politician fascinated by mud baths.
Fire Flower SaleBy 1990, Super Mario Bros. was one of the biggest intellectual properties on the planet. As always, Nintendo was cautious with its property. Death March: The long, tortured journey of Homefront. It was a holiday party, but it hardly felt like a happy occasion for many of the Kaos developers and their partners. Mid-December of 2010 was a fleeting break in the middle of a brutal crunch as the studio tried desperately to finish Homefront, publisher THQ's most ambitious stab at breaking into the alluringly lucrative AAA military shooter market.
The work schedule was so all-consuming that one developer likened it to exile in Siberia, and relationships inside and outside the studio were also fracturing under the pressure. Now, at the holiday party, all those people and all those tensions were gathered under one roof to celebrate the close of a lousy year and prepare for uncertainties of the next. Tradition dictates that the head of the studio give a speech and a toast at the company holiday party, and creative director / general manager Dave Votypka had his work cut out for him this night.
Votypka got up to the front of the room and looked over the crowd. The room went dead. Upselling.