Crackdown Demo on XBOX LIVE (k3nshi)

So I downloaded the 1.something GIGABYTE Crackdown demo and gave it a whirl on single player mode. It's pretty much GTA meets Demolition Man, with nice 360 visuals of the environment. So that's progress at least. Meanwhile I found the gameplay pretty unsubstantial. The AI is rubbish - I mean you play the part of some kind of supercop, and yet gangbangers decide to get out of their vehicles and fight it out with you? Please.

As far as I'm concerned the best rendition of a city environment in a game is still Syndicate Wars.

So everyone's talking about the Pope and how apparently he said games are perverted.
But at the same time, everyone is quoting this:

"Any trend to produce programs and products -- including animated films and video games -- which in the name of entertainment exalt violence and portray anti-social behavior or the trivialization of human sexuality is a perversion,"

which is in fact, completely reasonable and very true. It's stuff like this that makes me thinks games journalists are either malicious rabble-rousers, or just complete thickos.

MS Points are rubbish... (k3nshi)

Prices should be in pounds.

Sony's PR Saviour... (k3nshi)

...and perhaps the most refreshingly honest commentator in gaming today. David Jaffe interview over at 1UP. Show.

Blast From the Past (k3nshi)

I was clearing out some files in Kenshi HQ, when I came across some old print outs of articles from various websites. Amongst a load of programming related articles, I found a gaming one from a great games website from back in the day. A games website which I had almost completely forgotten about. The site is still up with archives of all its former issues.

So without further ado, please point your browsers at www.loonygames.com and take a little trip back in time.

Golf War was beginning... (Sir Clean of Hands)

Inspired by another of Meh's bizarre utterances, and driven forward by a caffeine rush and team spirit, I decided I wanted to make a game starting only with the title being set in stone - GOLF WAR.

Meh, Kenshi, Corps, and I basically sat in #edge talking rubbish about what the game could be, and together managed to thrash out some kind of general plan (though reading up it looks more like rambled nonsense).

First off, I wanted to make a game and not care if it's any good. As long as it ends up finished, then I'll be happy - shite or not. No idea who has time to work on it besides me but am not caring at the moment - as long as all of #edge can give an opinion and tell me when stuff is pointless or stupid or rubbish then that's totally enough.

Kenshi suggested it be done in either Java or Flash... no reason not to use either really, though Kenshi probably just wants to be able to play it on his Mac which is alright by me (no reason for anything to be XP-only in this day and age). Blitz is pretty easy to use to make stuff like this as well, and that's pretty universal so far as I know.

At first my idea was for it to be either top-down like Cannon Fodder, or side-on like Metal Slug, and Corps voted in favour of top-down, contributing some ideas on how combat could work. I voiced my desire to make it a tag-team style affair (i.e. Golfer & Caddy characters working seperately and together with different abilities) and possibly an isometric Head-Over-Heels like design. At this point Corps started being spacky and talking bollocks and it got a bit hard to follow, but we clarified our mission to keep it simple and not to worry about it looking less than professional.

Corps said he could do some music. He's quite busy so probably won't, but hopefully he can give advice on how music is actually 'done'.

Meh chipped in with the idea of it being like a shooter with the golfer hitting projectiles back at the enemies, which we all liked the sound of. I suggested that the golfer have a block so you don't immediately die when trapped by a bullet wall, but everyone laughed at me and called me gay. Corps then had a genius moment - using the Caddy to catch the bullets as a combined shield/ammo charger, like the white/black of Ikaruga in two halves. As far as I can tell this is the game everyone wants for now, and it sounds well within my meagre abilities as an artist and coder.

I don't really WANT to be making it by myself mind, so if any of you fannies don't mind doing tiny bits here and there when you're bored then that would be awesome. We don't have a deadline, and the bare minimum is good enough.

Let's make something!

Scratch (k3nshi)

MIT releases Scratch:

Scratch is a new programming language that lets you create your own interactive stories, games, music, and art.

Scratch is now available as a free download!

Coming in February: an all-new Scratch website where you can share projects.

More info here. Could be useful for games development?

fl0w: February, honest guv... (k3nshi)

IGN get told by Sony that fl0w is coming out in February.

Next Up... (k3nshi)

Shadow of the Collosus is on order. Sold out at most places, Amazon claim they'll be able to get it in 2-4 weeks. We'll see...

Gears of War... (k3nshi)

...dusted. I got bored of the last boss battle in Hardcore mode, so I switched it to Casual to complete it properly. I did actually kill the boss on Hardcore - grenade tagged him, but I blew up as well. So I got the achievement of killing him, but NOT the end of game ending. Anyway its over. Cant say I thought it was a particularly good game, but it was ok.

Kudos to Epic for letting you switch difficulty levels midway through the campaign though. And on-line co-op should be mandatory on simillar titles.

And more importantly its the first game I've completed in 2007. Next up: Tomb Raider: Legend.

LOLCANO (k3nshi)

More over at Manifesto Games' site.

Carmack says... (k3nshi)

Carmack:

The scope of what we have to do in a modern game is too much now for one person to do everything. But any time you break past the point where one person can manage all aspects of it, there's this incredible cliff you fall off in terms of average effectiveness and productivity. As soon as you need to divide a project, everybody is less efficient than the one person originally doing it. Plus you have the parasitic management overhead on top of all of it."
Carmack refuses to take on the role of manager -- he'd rather program. "The sad part is, I could probably do, effectively, at least half or two-thirds" of the programming for a modern game single-handedly, he says.

Read the rest over at Wired.

Manifesto Games - Costikyan follows through (k3nshi)

"We're here to create for games what indie music and film provide: an audience and market for creativity and individual vision, defying the big publishers' mediocrity and hype. Join the indie games revolution today!"


Manifesto Games - Greg Costikyan's implementation of his Scrathware Manifesto. Nice to see someone with the balls to put their money where their mouth is. Some nice things I've noticed whilst looking at the site for 2 mins:

• They have the Zork games playable in the browser, with links to downloadable versions


• They have listings for games on Mac and Linux too

This has great potential.

Quake 2 Love (k3nshi)

GoW can't touch this.

EA Innovation (k3nshi)

Over at GamaSutra, EA drone Alain Tascan said:

"I mean, we just did Superman Returns and all the sports, but we feel that we are now ready to take big bets on new IP, and not bet the farm on the established titles. And we think this is something that people are going to react well to, because EA is not known for this.

"I mean, if you look at the comments of people on some of the things I've said and they say, 'how can you dare talk about innovation?' And that's what we want to prove that as a company we can do it."

I am of course just messing. EA used to have a real reputation for innovation in the early days. And whilst most of their output these days is somewhat lacking, they still do some really nice stuff. As for Tascan, anyone who is prepared to go out against the hype and point out that Gear of War lacks innovation, is fine by me.

EA FTW.

Why isnt there... (k3nshi)

...an open Xbox LIVE profile thing available for indie/shareware/freeware games?

Or is there?

Cause for concern? (k3nshi)

The Bungie Weekly Update sayeth:

We realize this latest announcement will spur a lot of questions, most of which we simply don’t have the answers to. While Bungie is obviously involved in the development of the beta and game itself, we don’t make the decisions regarding when, where and how the game content ultimately ends up in your hands. It’s really cool that our fans have the opportunity to share in our game early and in some ways actually help us polish the final product but ultimately we’re just developers – the business and consumer side of things are left up to our partners at MGS. As we get additional info and answers to your questions we will pass them along in future updates.

Lets hope Microsoft strategizing isnt going to fuck up Halo 3, the Halo 3 multiplayer experience and especially not the single player experience.

Take us to Defcon 3.

Doom, Quake and Apple (k3nshi)

John Romero:

Why do I care so much about NeXT computers? Because we at id Software developed the groundbreaking titles DOOM and Quake on the NeXTSTEP 3.3 OS running on a variety of hardware for about 4 years. I still remember the wonderful time I had coding DoomEd and QuakeEd in Objective-C; there was nothing like it before and there still is no environment quite like it even today.

When id Software was stationed in Madison, Wisconsin during the winter of 1991, most of us were gone for the Christmas holiday - except John Carmack. John's present, which he bought with $11,000 of his own money, procured by walking through the snow and ice to remove from the bank, arrived during the holiday and he spent the whole time learning as much as he could about the computer and started working on vector quantization algorithms for compressing graphics. His test graphic was a 256-color screen from King's Quest 5. After his research was done it was agreed that the entire company needed to develop our next game on NeXTSTEP.

Romero, writing on how NeXT technology (the basis of Mac OSX) was pivotal to the development of Doom and Quake.

Certainly helps with the the motivation to learn Objective-C.

Don't look back in anger... (k3nshi)

Over at Salon, a Looking Glass article (it's not new):

"We ended up ... spending the company's sanity and morale by throwing together this thing so [Eidos] could have a product in that quarter, when Ion Storm hadn't shipped a product in all that time. While Daikatana was busy not shipping, and while they were writing blank checks to John Romero to do Daikatana ... they told us basically to ship [Thief II] by their fiscal quarter or die."

Meanwhile another article on Salon, reviews the book "Masters of Doom" and slams the author of the book, id Software and Doom:

No: while gamers were scraping the floor with "Wayne's World" bleats of "We're not worthy!" whenever Romero swaggered by them at game conventions, the industry's real Nirvana, Blue Sky Studios (which later became Looking Glass) was holed up in a New England studio, quietly putting out its genuinely innovative games in relative obscurity. Blue Sky could have overthrown the status quo. But for many reasons, most of which have little to do with talent, id would always overshadow its betters. Instead of advancing the medium, id's Texas smack talking rude boys obscured and impeded gaming's potential by spawning needless controversy and inspiring an oncoming slew of mediocre imitators.

And now, with "Masters of Doom", it looks like they'll get to help rewrite history, too.

Let's hope BioShock keeps the faith, otherwise I suspect someone at Salon is going to be pissed.