Posts filed under: Games
Well, not quite that exciting.
But thing are moving along pretty well, albeit a little delayed (I think I’m 2 weeks off schedule currently, but who’s counting?)
One interesting little bit of fun is localization. The Dishwasher is coming out in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Chinese. Since I drew my own font, I had to add all sorts of special characters to the graphic. For Japanese and Chinese I had to change the way the game handled fonts so that it could draw some using my font and others using a SpriteFont (the alternative would be hand drawing a couple thousand Asian glyphs). It took a couple of days to get everything working right with all of that, but the big hassle comes with adding changes.
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October 10, 2008
So, here we are: Braid’s on XBLA for 1200 points, and now Castle Crashers has hit XBLA for another 1200 points. They’re two excellent games (I unsurprisingly gravitated toward the latter, going as far as to dub yesterday “Castle Crashers Day”) and they both embody much of what the indie games industry can do right. Also, they’re both taking some of the most ridiculous flak I’ve ever heard over their price.
Such gems include:
“$15 for 5 hours of single player?”
“I could get [insert old game name here] for $5 less at Gamestop!”
“If it were $10, I’d pay, but at $15 it’s just too much.”
Probably my first reaction should be to not listen to anything morons say online.
However, assuming I failed to do the first part, here’s my second reaction: (more…)
August 28, 2008
No, not that Oblivion.
I have to wonder how “marketing” efforts from 100 years ago would have stood up to today’s. People made things they thought people would like, they marketed them in ways they thought would appeal, and everyone went on their merry way. Today, we have focus groups, market research, and all sorts of other data aimed squarely at allowing us to craft the most precise, effective marketing campaigns ever. Market research is an iterative process–each generation of marketing is more effective than the previous. But wait–this isn’t an anti-capitalist rant! It’s an anti-people rant. Bear with me…
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July 24, 2008
By now you probably know that I’m a Ninja Gaiden fan. If you’ve read any reviews, you probably also know that the biggest complaint leveled at Ninja Gaiden 2 is that the camera is broken–nay, adversarial. Here’s my take:
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June 11, 2008
I should probably put up a disclaimer regarding comments:
Disclaimer: Anonymously posted flamebait will be summarily deleted.
Moderation is in effect!
Also, I should clarify my remarks on repetition and the titles I used as examples. I really liked Halo 3 and God of War 2. I just felt that Halo 3 was over too quickly without giving the player enough chances to play with a lot of the toys. Likewise, God of War 2 was an amazing game, but DMC3 was really more my cup of tea–I liked replaying levels over and over until I could take on the harder difficulties. Basically, my argument is that familiarity can be a good thing.
Granted, apologizing for honest criticisms of games is no way to win over the flamebaiters, but I should probably do my best to not come across with too much negativity.
October 9, 2007
I just thought of another game that could’ve used more repetition: God of War 2.
Granted, it was an amazing game with some crazy cool parts, but like Halo 3, some of the protagonist’s badassery was dampened by the fact that you would be thrust from one completely unfamiliar situation to the next with no common frame of reference. It’s the classic picture of a vengeful hero who has been going in circles in the west wing of the antagonist’s base because he can’t find the right lever or whose quest of revenge comes to a very non-epic end when he doesn’t notice a particular climbable rock wall during an intensely cinematic moment and plunges with the platform he was riding on into the lava for the sixth consecutive time.
I thought Bioshock really nailed the whole repetition thing. Little variety in monsters, recognizable environment hazards (oil slicks, water, security systems), good level layout and a nice checkpoint arrow.
Also, The Dishwasher was in magazine (an Edge magazine, to be exact). Here’s a cell phone screenie:
The article is mostly on XNA, but it’s nice that they put some juicy screens in there.
October 8, 2007
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