More and more and more and more people play and make games. And budgets gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. So it’s getting more and more and more and more difficult for small independent developers to get noticed. Witch is a pity as they make better and better and better and better games.
Continue reading ‘Play indy games!’
Archive for the 'Game design' Category
Being a big fan of games on both boards and consoles, I’ve been following closely the latest joint venture of Sony, Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast; The Eye of Judgment. This is basically a tactical card game that can be played using the PlayStation3 to help out with the book-keeping and spicing up the game with battle animations. The result looks very much like the chess-like game seen in Star Wars - parodied so brilliantly somewhere in Season 2 of Fururama. Anyway, here’s some initial impressions of the game.
Continue reading ‘Horsie to pointy guy six’
“Inspired” by where the debate in the keelwater of my “I’m beginning to see the lite…”-post has gone, I feel the need to define some concepts once and for all (,pompous as it may seem) - or at least give it a healthy try.
Continue reading ‘“Open or closed gamers?”, that is the question…’
My good friend, and composer of contemporary music; Lewis said when I showed him Electroplankton on my DS: “This is the future of music - if we are lucky.” A very fitting reaction indeed. This title by Toshio Iwai is neither a “game” that is not a game, nor an “instrument” that is not a instrument and not really a “music composing tool” that’s not a music composing tool. It’s more in the lines of a composition - an interactive composition. An interactive composition inspired by video games as well as music software and musical instruments.
Rythm based games are in the wind these days. At least in my wind, or the area of the wind I’m in. Anyway; I have been playing three quite different, but all very good rythm based video games lately. The two first I had to import from Japan; “Daigasso! Band Brothers” and “Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!“. That the third one, “Mario & Luigi - Partners in Time“, is so heavily dependant on rythmic patterns came more as a surprise to me.
Continue reading ‘Games and Music’
LA Weekly has a fascinating read out on Nintedogs entitled “Nintendogs puts existentialism in the palm of your hand”.
Turn based games are in the wind these days. At least in my wind, or the area of the wind I’m in. Anyway; three quite different, but all very good turn based video games have been released lately. First the Advance Wars Dual Strike for the DS, then Rebelstar Tactical Command for the GBA and some days ago Civilization IV for the PC. All brilliant games - all with their own approach to turn based (war) gaming. Reading the latest documentation on the mod-capabilities of Civ4 made me want to mod it’s strategic and epic approach into the Advance Wars’ tactical and fast one.
Continue reading ‘Idea: Civilization Wars’
This weekend there was a conference on comuter game aestetics in Bergen, my home town. Lots of fascinating subjects were on the “programme”. Since I’m in Lyon nowadays I could unfortunatly not attend this, but I took the time to read articles on aestetics nevertheless. I found this one by David Hayward especially interesting.
Continue reading ‘Games and aestetics’
Some 10 days ago I posted a small piece on games and girls - some thoughts on why girls play less games than boys. I ended this by stating that maybe we need more game designers without the infamous Y-cromosome to attract girls to the world of gaming. Well; GameDev.net’s Sande Chen has just added another entry to their series of Women in Game Development.
Gamasutra has just published an in depth look on the relationship between style and substance in games. The author of the article defines substance, in short, as the “rules of the game” - the gameplay and style as the rest - theme, sound, graphics etc. He makes a point of that style can be used to facilitate the learning of the rules of the games. We touched this here in gglob earlier, when discussing Storytelling and games based on Raph Koster’s “A Theory of Fun…”.
Continue reading ‘Substance and style in games’
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