Posts filed under: Press
I live in a freezing apartment in upstate NY. Rent is $750 a month. I buy groceries at Wal-Mart. I buy clothes at Target. I drive a 1994 Honda Accord that was a hand-me-down from my sister. Yet, somehow, this happened:
MTV.com:
“The guy that made this game is nuts.”
Wired.com:
As the sole creator of the upcoming Xbox Live Arcade game Dishwasher, Silva found himself the poster boy of Microsoft’s efforts to “democratize game development” at the Game Developers Conference. The Utica, NY independent gamemaker shared the stage with game design luminaries like Tomonobu Itagaki and Peter Molyneux at Microsoft’s GDC keynote.
LA Times:
The 26-year-old from Utica, N.Y., paid his way through college by scrubbing dishes at a diner. That job might help him become the Quentin Tarantino of video games: He used it as inspiration for “The Dishwasher,” in which the title character becomes a ninja and slashes his way out of a kitchen overrun by villains.
Ars Technica:
“James has quit his job… it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.” James Silva quickly became one of the stars of the GDC this year, and the video Microsoft created to highlight his game and one-man-team ethic showed that it knows how cool James Silva is. Microsoft desperately wants a piece of that cool.
For the record, Microsoft never quite came across as desperately wanting a piece of my cool, but I thought that quote was too good to leave out. The XNA team are just about the coolest bunch of geeks I’ve ever met; it was awesome meeting up with them for classy San Francisco dining–I got to meet the team behind the tech that the Dishwasher is based on and they got to meet the guy behind the game that shows off their tech. There was a lot of mutual gushing.
February 28, 2008
Short update–here’s a link to the video Microsoft made about me.
Also, a trial of The Dishwasher is available to everyone on XBLA for a very short time, here are instructions on downloading it.
February 24, 2008
Well, I finally made it back home Friday morning, after two nights in O’Hare. The Friday morning flight was even delayed twice–which is what happened with the previous two flights before they were canceled. Nice little scare to end the trip with!
In other news:
The kind folks at xbox360fanboy.com plugged The Dishwasher again. From the post:
High in potassium and hella’ delicious. We say good job to you Mr. (XNA all-star) Silva, Dead Samurai looks amazing and the extreme amount of blood and blurring effects makes our eyes water with happiness. We say, bring on the dish washing!
Read it!
February 9, 2008
It turns out I wasn’t the only one who got a kick out of that last video. It got picked up by some pretty high profile gaming blogs and news sites.
From Destructoid:
I’m excited for The Dishwasher because it represents something different on the XBLA horizon. I, for one, have had enough of the standard XNA fare with its miniature graphics, thrown-together “pew pew pew” gameplay, and disgusting overuse of the same red/green/blue/purple color palate. This game is stylish, it’s fast-paced, and it looks challenging and incredibly fun to play. It shows developers out there that a little creativity with XNA can go a long way.
From Xbox360fanboy.com:
How exactly the guitar sections — in which players match button inputs with corresponding prompts — meld with the game proper we have no idea, and honestly don’t care. All we know is it looks like glorious, violent fun.
From XBLArcade.com:
Along the way we have been granted various glimpses into the world of this dishwashing rampage. And perhaps those earlier videos left you wanting more? If so a new trailer has just arrived that features more blood, more insane massive damage combos, and more…guitar?
Thanks as always to these great sources for the coverage. I keep feeds on these sites, so it’s always a bit of a surprise to see The Dishwasher show up in the wild!
November 8, 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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