PC Gaming News Message Board older than one year ago

This is a test. Do not be alarmed. Try to stay calm. This part is also a test.

I’m periodically amazed that there hasn’t been a modern update of Sim Earth, the genius of which was that it made me feel equal parts scientist and god, both of which are unattainable goals in my actual life as I have no aptitude for reality or divinity. Doesn’t matter because we’ll all be bald space marines within the next twenty years and I’m sure some sort of shaving implement and stick-to-wall training will be provided. Meanwhile, I’m still looking for the next great Science-God game and I’ve found Discovery, a free browser-based offering. It’s short and fairly simple, given that its scope is the creation and contemplation of a world, but it is an interesting little toy. Try it.

Maybe it is my inner nostalgic taking over, but I don’t find it too hard to see life in these blotches of colour. The biggest and most damaging limitation is the size of the world, which doesn’t provide the proper scope for fusing continents and sinking mighty land bridges, but the game is perhaps more about discovering the limits of structure rather than unlimited horizons.

Via Jayisgames.

Last July, spacefaring game developer Richard Garriott won $28 million in a court case against former employer (and Tabula Rasa publisher) NCSoft, claiming that he was forced to sell his stock in the company at a low point in the market following his termination. NCSoft appealed the decision, and, after more than a year of further legal struggle, an appellate decision was reached in the 5th Circuit Court: Richard's getting paper.

"It would be unjust to allow NCsoft to sit back during trial, observe Garriott's litigation strategy, and then demand a new trial on damages when it dislikes the verdict," the ruling reads. Garriott's former victory was not only upheld -- NCSoft now owes him $32 million with interest and attorney fees. With that kind of cash, he could buy back his old manor, and build, like, five new manors on top of it. Or he could just go into space again; in the long run, that's probably the better investment.

The build of Diablo 3 being shown at BlizzCon 2011 last week did have a few polish updates, but generally it was the same content previously available in the beta, which we've covered thoroughly so far. Diablo 3's Technical Director Wyatt Chang agreed while chatting with me last week that the game is basically content complete, but the polish phase is far from over. "Content complete for us usually means things like voice recording, art, assets are in place, but it doesn't mean that things like the tuning, balance, and game systems are in place."

The team is still working hard on some of the core concepts, however -- one issue that's come up lately is whether players can switch skills on the fly or not. In the beta, says Cheng, "you can play with your skill window open, and you can switch skills in the middle of the fight, which has some upsides and it's very cool in one regard, but on the whole, I think it's sort of a more negative experience, and a lot of people in the community have agreed." Just recently, the team was dealing with things like "how many Pages of Training you can have in one stack," so they are starting to dive into the nitty gritty of how the game will work.

THQ have just announced (instead of sending me the email they promised) that Space Marine has received an update adding a co-op mode. Called Exterminatus, because there wasn’t a sillier word, if you load Steam you should find it updates automagically with the new option. (And you can laugh at 360 players, who don’t get this yet.)

Exterminatus follows the recent trend for co-op modes, of rather than letting two people play through the game’s campaign, instead it’s a score-based endless attack from waves of enemies, with up to four players working together. I’m told you can play as the Tactical Marine, Devastator, or Assault Marine, along with all their weapons and perks.

There are two “scenarios”, Assault On Hab Center Andreas, and Escape From Kalkys Facility, both of which will have a global leaderboard for competitive willy-waving. For the maximum wave, you can also add score modifiers, and complete “dynamic challenges”, which will increase the game’s difficult. And any experience you gain throughout all this counts toward your regular multiplayer ranking, because that’s just the way it is.

Did I mention this was free? It’s free. That’s good.

Brain-witching turn-based strategy-creator Vic Davis (aka Cryptic Comet) has announced something new: The Occult Chronicles. Davis says: “I’ve set my occult adventure strategy game in a lovecraftian mansion replete with ghosts, monsters, cursed items of all kinds and any other haunted mansion trope that I can come up with.” It’s got character creation like Solium Infernum, says Davis, but the game has a streak of adventure to it: “The whole game is basically one big map exploration. You play an agent of the O.D.D (Occult Defense Directorate) who has been assigned to check out some bumps in the night at an ancient estate out in the country.” And when is it due? “The art is being completed and all the encounters have been mapped out and the data entry has begun. I’d wager that it should be ready this Spring but I’ve been proven a liar every time so we’ll have to see about that.”

“Level with Me” is a series of conversations about level design between modder Robert Yang and a level designer of a first person game. At the end of each interview, they collaborate on a Portal 2 level shared across all the sessions – and at the very end of the series, you’ll get to download and play this “roundtable level.” This is Part 1 of 7. A few years back, Dan Pinchbeck and I were crowned “frontiersmen of modding” by Jim Rossignol. I felt like prom queen all over again. While I promptly sank into relative stagnation, Dan concentrated his powers into a brilliant point of light — a full-fledged retail reboot of the 2008 Source-powered ghost story mod Dear Esther, fresh from the beach with amazing art design by Robert Briscoe, backed by the Indie Fund, and now looking better than ever. (Warning: there are mild spoilers for the endings of S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat and Metro 2033.)Robert Yang: So how’s it going? What’s the last thing you did for Dear Esther?

Dan Pinchbeck: We’re in the middle of porting to the Portal 2 engine, which Rob [Briscoe] and Jack Morgan are wrestling with, and Jess [Curry] just re-orchestrated the soundtrack. It’s weird, it’s my baby, but it’s an awful lot of Rob’s vision too.

RY: Aren’t you worried your own voice will get diluted?

DP: No, I’m not. I’ve resisted a cult of personality in games. If there’s going to be any auteurship, then you need a collective vision as a studio and more realistically as a small studio. But as I’ve said with this rebuild, it’s a collaboration, and now Rob and Jess have brought as much to the table as I have, and I feel really lucky that we have these people with their visions aligned.

I think what I like about games is how you don’t have a clue who made most of the games you play. “What do you think of 4A Games?” Well, who’s that? Metro 2033! You don’t have a clue who made it, and I think that’s a good thing. I don’t pick up a game because Warren Spector made it. It’s either good or it’s bad, the same as any other product or art piece.

RY: But some people see “Warren Spector” and think it’ll be awesome.

DP: Yes, but he’s perfectly capable of making bad games (… in principle.) I don’t care how long it took or why they made it. I just want a good experience. I don’t think it’s limited to any type of team. Anyone can make a turkey.

RY: I guess you’re this weird blend of industry / retail, and academic / research stuff now? What’s that like?

DP: It’s like banging your head against the wall until you bleed. There’s loads of issues – how people are employed, contracts… it’s hard to make those two worlds meet. No one’s tried to take a publicly-funded research project and convert it into a release on Steam, but we’ve always argued you need to put your money where your mouth is, that if you want to talk about games you ought to have a deep understanding of what it’s like to build them. I’m very impatient with people who keep going, “Games should do this.” Well, build the things and just find out!

RY: What are you finding you can’t do with Dear Esther, with the new commercial / retail focus?

DP: It certainly helps that the quality of the assets is exceptionally high. The quality of Rob’s artwork, Jess’s music, the quality of Nigel [Carrington]‘s voice over – and vaguely so, the quality of my writing – definitely help with opening doors to someone like Valve to talk about licensing. We’ve kind of smuggled something quite niche or experimental on the basis that these assets are AAA quality. We’re also really lucky with Indie Fund. They just really got behind it, saying ,“we’re not going to tell you what to do with your vision, now that we’ve given you the money.”

RY: I bring it up because – you may not want to hear this – I felt like the best voice over chunks were the ones that were less, uh, “British,” I guess? I mean, I had no idea what a “semi-detached” was, for example. [In the US, we call them “duplexes.”]

DP: Right.

RY: I liked the passages that were mini-stories, incidents I could picture in my head. Then sometimes he says 10 metaphors in a single sentence and it’s totally disorienting. Which can be good, but I was wondering if you were streamlining it or making it more accessible or anything?

DP: In some places we’ve added new speech cues, like 4 instead of 3. There is some stuff that should clarify some things, a couple new combinations of the new script that radically alter what happens, which was deliberate. When it first came out, we were looking at what people were saying in the forums and thinking, “Wow!” There was one in particular where there was none of that really in there but it was such an interesting take on things. I wanted to just drop a couple more hints in there, to see if anyone else picks up on it.

For me, writing in general – and I think there’s a lot more scope for this in games – I don’t think things have to make sense. We don’t require logical, causal sequences in many other art forms. With Dear Esther, it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand anything so long as it creates the right mood. There’s also a lot of rationalizing going on here; really, I just sat down and wrote it. In FPS’s it’s always, “save the world, save the universe, it’s huge,” but I liked the idea that a game could be about something ridiculously small, with no meaning to the wider world, yet it means everything to the people involved in it.

RY: It’s like lower stakes, but more personal stakes.

DP: Right, massively high for an individual. I was playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat, and at the end of it – it’s so brilliant – they go, “let’s just get on the helicopter then!” And then there’s no climax. It’s like getting into a taxi at the end of the night, and when you think about it… that’s actually quite cool in a way.

RY: It’s not a cop-out?

D{“ No, it… it would be a cop-out, if it wasn’t so completely unusual. No game has the balls to say, “and then you wake up and it was all a dream.” It’d just be fantastic to throw that in the player’s face.

RY: Uhh… I don’t know. Isn’t that kind of lazy?

DP: Totally! And it’s interesting that it’s lazy! But everyone goes on and on how game writing is already lazy, and we haven’t even stooped to the same poor tricks in film or literature…

RY: … So we should?

DP: Why not? It’d be a bit of a laugh. I guess I’m a bit of a tourist. I don’t need a game to be world-changing. I’m a huge Just Cause 2 fan, a Dead Rising fan. And they just do stupid stuff to pass the time. While I do quite a bit of intellectualizing during the day, I’m also quite happy to just take a chainsaw to a zombie’s head for half an hour.

There’s quite a bit of rhetoric, that “games are failing to evolve” and “need to be saved” and I’m actually pretty ambivalent towards that, I’m actually quite happy that I can pick up Resistance 3 and be a complete neanderthal for a couple hours.

RY: Yeah, I agree. It’s a fallacy of progress. It’s science envy, physics envy.

DP: I guess it’s all been hard work and a lot of fun, and when you get around to actually building the thing – like Dear Esther, putting two years into it – I kind of want to enjoy making it a little bit.

RY: Speaking of making, I remember seeing this photo somewhere, of you and your team sculpting the levels out of clay? Is that true?

DP: Yeah, we got 4 or 5 kilos of clay and just dumped it on a table. I’m a writer, so I really just humiliate myself whenever I get into any kind of program, and I can’t draw –

RY: But you’re a sculptor?

DP: No! I thought… Josh [Short], who was the artist, I wanted to tell him, “I wanted to be able to see this from here” and “that from there, with this scale and angle,” and we tried this flip-pad of pictures but it looked like something out of a serial killer movie – so we just grabbed this massive lump of clay and slapped it on the table and hacked it into a broad shape.

RY: And it worked?

DP: Yeah, it worked actually! Most of the issues from the original build came from neither of us using Source before. Most of the principles of design worked, and that was indicated when Rob went in and rebuilt it and most of the level design has remained intact. The only level that has dramatically changed is the last one – it’s much much bigger. Before, we built the mountain and things were popping in and out… it was just hideous. We spent 2 months trying to sort it out. Now, Rob’s sent me the final level and I’ve just – wow. It’s so far beyond the original.

RY: Actually I think that worked to your advantage. Not to disrespect you or anything, but if a more experienced modder were working on that – the conventional thinking and knowledge of technical limits would’ve stopped them. Being an outsider helped you make this crazy giant mountain that was destroying the engine.

DP: Yeah, you’re not going to win all the time, but there is a place for… naivete. You can fail in academia, as long as it’s in an interesting way. There are things we learned from Korsakovia, things that I probably wouldn’t have the balls to try unless we knew some things – and most commercial games stop way short of that. Well, until Frictional [Games] came along and did everything we wanted to do in Korsakovia but better. It was kind of vindicating.

RY: What I took away from Korsakovia was that you were trying to directly represent fragmented identities through level architecture, making it difficult to navigate – and I think the result was, I don’t know – you can’t… do that?

DP: Certainly if – if you’re going to do that, you need to spend more time and money. Korsakovia was made basically by one person in an absurdly short of time – Adam Griffiths, who’s now at Rebellion. I can’t keep beating him up, when I would say, “I want it to do this and this,” and he was going, “but Source can’t do this,” and I said, “yeah, I know.”

The last level he made was beautiful. There’s still nothing like it out there. He had the whole thing orbiting a central pillar, so you have the entire level spinning with other components spinning on a different tilt –

RY: And then Source exploded?

DP: Well in Source, if you have a room tilted at 45 degrees, all the furniture will slide through the crack between the wall and floor –

RY: Like a tiny one unit crack?

DP: Yeah, and it still does it! The level was going to be utterly disorienting. Which in a way is really bad level design, but if we can find out where the line of tolerance is, that’s got to be a useful thing. It’s not like we lied about the experience [players] were going to have, that we charged them for us to find out.

RY: But “gamers” still have this sense of perceived cost, like, “oh, I’m never going to download your mod again!” As if we owe them something.

DP: Well, I guess we are asking them to invest their time, and if the risk doesn’t payoff, they’ll blame someone for it. (Like Warren Spector.)

RY: About the player experience – I was looking through the file structure of Dear Esther, because I’m weird like that, and saw in NewDearEsther_English.txt you originally let the player choose to start on any level. Why take that out?

DP: I wouldn’t want people to jump in halfway though. I’m not even sure if I’d want them to, even once they’ve played it. I remember on Lou Reed’s “New York” album – on the liner notes, he said this album was supposed to be listened to like a movie, and explicitly, “please don’t listen to tracks here and there.” Which is slightly arrogant. I always hate it when people say, “this is the only way you can consume this thing.” But if you have the capacity to go into a story at any point, you’re opening the door for people to do that. For Dear Esther, it’s important to have that emotional experience building up or you’ll miss a big chunk of it.

RY: So in this version, are you going to allow players to save the game, then come back in a few days and forget entirely what happened?

DP: I don’t know. I think the game really rewards replay in a way the mod didn’t. It’s more dynamic now. There’s so much going on in the first two levels, to build up the subtle variations in experience, laying so much groundwork for what happens. You need that whole runway to take-off and get the whole experience.

RY: But how do you playtest this? How do you know that players are actually absorbing all this groundwork and runway?

DP: All the feedback on the forums that I looked over with Rob – we had the equivalent of 4 years of playtesting. With a lot of the interpretations that people were getting, I knew the script well enough to recognize some of the seeds sewn from level one.

RY: But would you have them fill out a questionnaire? How do you really access that part of a player’s brain?

DP: As a writer, I was interested in writing something that actively resists a single interpretation. It’s really bad from an academic point of view, how we can’t data-mine anything or falsify a hypothesis, but we can ask, does it feel like this is working? Artists and writers work off that basis. That’s a lot of the tension between working as a game designer and working as an academic. I was talking about this with Doug Wilson, the creator of B.U.T.T.O.N, about how you get these two really contradictory hats in one place. For me, the designer always wins.

RY: I think it’s interesting that you’re so intent on giving up all this control, but then you still want to grip a lot of it – like, “no, don’t start in the middle of the game” – but also, “oh, think whatever you want of this game too!”

DP: But that’s okay. If you look at poetry, no poet ever bitched about having to write in iambic pentameter. You work within those structures. It’s really hard to be creative without them. If you can do anything, then where do you start? As a game designer, then – you know I have to work within this model, in terms of what players and technology can tolerate, and you have to find a vision you’d find exciting within those parameters.

RY: Speaking of models – do you still believe in your theory of ludodiegesis? Because I’ve kind of been pushing it hard to everyone. I want to it to catch on. Instead of saying “groovy” or “rad,” people will say, “that was totally ludodiegetic.”

DP: [chuckles] It’s just academics making up phrases… but I really like “diegesis” as a phrase. You can talk about world as story, not plot or character. It has its own nebulous logic to it. Take Civilization, which is really problematic to talk about for narrative, but people do, and it’s usually really embarrassing. You can certainly say Civilization has a world, though.

I just want story to be talked about as a gameplay element that sometimes isn’t there. It’s part of the set of tools that a game designer uses to create an experience – and it should be thought of along the same lines, as physics or AI or something more mechanical.

RY: With that in mind, let’s see if this Portal 2 design portion of the interview will work at all. [Plays through the current iteration of the Portal 2 level. It takes about a minute.]

DP: Okay, so, uh, what do you want to do with it?

RY: I have no idea. It’s totally up to you. Do you want to add some kind of narrative to it, or… ?

DP: What about – when you shoot a portal and you go through it, you end up where you’re not supposed to be? Is that possible? Like, put a portal in that top-left window… and set your orange portal over there… and then you don’t end up in the room you planned to. Is that even possible?

RY: I don’t think – well, first of all, there’s that HUD indicator that shows where your portal is at all times.

DP: Yeah. That’s a shame, then. [Portal 2] was so linear for me. Like I had to find this one thing…

RY: … Especially the underground part, where you’re looking for just that little bit of white wall.

DP: It ended up being weirdly less creative in that regard, like an FPS where there’s literally only one target and one bullet. [contemplative silence] It would be interesting to have an identical second room, that isn’t the first room – it’s always kind of my thing, to take the player in one direction but make it something else.

RY: Okay, copy the entire thing… um, is this how you work on Dear Esther? Hover over someone’s shoulder and tell them what to do?

DP: The new game we’re starting – there’s a huge design document with just the bare minimum. Event lists, asset lists, the scripts, the full player walkthrough… it’s not, “this wall is this height,” but it’s more about capturing the mood of the space. I think it’s great to give them as much of a free hand as possible.

RY: Is it frustrating? Because I’m having to collaborate on a project right now, and it’s frustrating me – or maybe I’m just a control freak.

DP: I thought of it as: if I want to do this, then I have to be able to communicate the design I want to people to do the work, because otherwise there would be nothing. So much of it is about finding those people.

… So what if you – um, you go into the lift, when you go into the exit?

RY: What? Which exit? I’ve cloned it.

DP: How many rooms have we got now? Three exits in the same room?

RY: In the top view, you can see this is where they start – then these two rooms are exactly the same.

DP: Shall we – no, that’ll just be messing with people too much – when they go in the lift, they find themselves back in the same room again.

RY: [laughs] Okay.

DP: … And then they do it again! And the impression is, the first time, they’ll go, “I’m back in the same room again! Ah, I get it!” Then when they do it the third time, they’ll start thinking something’s wrong.

RY: Like there’s a puzzle to solve here.

DP: Yeah, but there isn’t!

RY: [laughs] [unintelligible muttering]

DP: I was talking about this with the co-designer on the new game: how do you get people to think there’s a puzzle, but there isn’t – or think there’s a maze, but there isn’t – you’re just screwing with them. How do you do that in a way that’s really pleasurable? It’s about finding those spaces, where you can’t slide into a comfortable mode of play, where you go, “ah, I’ve seen this, I’ve been through this before.” One of the things we’re doing with Dear Esther is how it all might look exactly the same, but the change in details is really subtle, kind of like a “find that one object” thing.

So maybe do some graffiti so you feel like you’re going through these repetitive rooms, but it’s changing as you go back through. There was… have you played Metro 2033?

RY: No, haven’t had the pleasure.

DP: Heh, I’m not sure pleasure is the right word, but there’s a sequence where you’re running around in the sky and corridors are being built around you as you go, and you run until you see a weird bad guy – then you turn around and run until you see another bad guy – so then you turn around, 180 degrees, as if you were running back towards the first bad guy – and you can’t figure out if it’s a maze or not. You can either just run blindly, or stop and be aware that you’re being played with a little bit.

The wall that’s directly below you…

RY: Yes?

DP: If the player keep going forwards, they’re in a constant loop, so they have to go back into the lift they first came in, and that’s what takes them out.

RY: Wait, so they go back into the entrance elevator?

DP: Yeah, they turn around to escape, otherwise they just stay in the loop forever. They keep solving the same problem again and again and again.

RY: Well, the counter-intuitive thing with that is… the way I thought I’d do this is you choose one of the exits, you go in, you go up the elevator, then I teleport you back through the logic that controls the entrance elevator – but when you come up in the entrance elevator, you should be able to turn around and go back into the entrance elevator… and then leave?

DP: I don’t know. That’s really pretty simple, isn’t it? But it’s kind of weird.

RY: No, no! I like that.

DP: Because you just said, you wouldn’t do it? So what happens when the penny drops after just going around in an infinite loop?

RY: I do like the idea that you have world state changes, to indicate that there’s some kind of progress being made.

DP: What if you have some debris, down in the pit, and you just move it around a bit? And you notice it’s kind of moving?

RY: Wait, so what’s the solution? Or is there no solution?

DP: To this? Go back.

RY: Go back.

DP: Yeah, just have that trigger disabled – and enable the trigger after they solve the puzzle once. So the second time they go through, they can just turn around and go back in.

RY: Hm. The tricky thing is the way Portal does all the logic. These are all in instanced map files, so then you have 4 different VMF files all talking to each other… I’ll figure it out though. That implementation you described will work. Anything else you want to add?

DP: How about when you go in, it’s playing one audio file, almost like piped music coming into the test chamber. The second time in, it’s the same MP3 (something fairly classical) and you go into Audacity and just randomly pull a few notes out. You can stack up 5 different versions of it.

You know the film Inception? It’s just the same piece of music, massively slowed down. So the rooms are different, a different layer of reality – but actually it’s just a slightly screwed-with MP3.

RY: Any particular song I should use?

DP: Um… “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” The Judy Garland version for maximum freak-out value. Audio is always really great to take design in different directions without having to program and design loads of stuff, yet it has a powerful effect on player experience.

RY: But isn’t voice acting and doing re-takes and re-writing the script – isn’t that expensive?

DP: Not compared to modeling and programming! Certainly in professional game design, you can chew through 7 or 8 writers, 7 or 8 scripts – you can do all that for a lot less money than bringing on a programmer. And there are lot of writers out there desperate to write for games. It’s not rocket science, really. It’s so cheap for what it can give you.

RY: You talk about a writer like they’re just another worker on this assembly line. Isn’t it a case of too many cooks in the kitchen?

DP: For me, I feel an affinity to people like Ken Levine, people who are designers and also writers. That’s different from doing script, from doing dialog. Tom Jubert talks about narrative architecture, how it’s a process of designing the entire flow of everything, and script isn’t exactly part of that.

RY: Well, can you explain that, actually?

DP: A narrative designer says we’re going to string these events, make the scene change here, and change the emphasis here to craft a more engaging game experience – and at the end you just slap some dialog on there. That’s the standard model.

It’s what I talked about in my PhD dissertation, to say that actually those classic writerly things don’t fit well in games, but these particularly do fit well. A writer isn’t just a dialog generator; they’re the one who says, “if we sculpt the experience in this way, then we’ll get something likely more engaging.” But it isn’t always appropriate, some games just make you wish they never bothered with a story at all.

Italian versions of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”? That sounds good. Having fun with the player is always the best bit.

RY: You are a control freak!

DP: … I am a control freak. Yeah.

RY: But that’s not a bad thing. I sympathize.

DP: It should be fun for everyone, really. When you get knocked off-balance by something, you tend to have a really good experience. It’s possible even in commercial games.

Prototype did it well. It told me I’m not actually a human being at all (that’s kind of weird) and I’m not sure how I cope with being told I’m a killer bio-weapon, a virus – how I’m playing a group of cells in a body. That’s just really odd. It kept me going back to it for about half an hour, playing with my head a little bit.

RY: Isn’t that a bit like Assassin’s Creed?

DP: Oh, Assassin’s Creed! I can’t stand it!… No, [Prototype] wasn’t like that at all, it didn’t really change any gameplay, to go out and play some appalling “Desmond levels.”

It was more about how with one line of dialogue, you’ve added way more than one line of dialogue to the game, or with a couple lines of voice-over you completely spin the experience around.

RY: Thank you for your time.

Looking for the Portal 2 level? Sorry, you’ll have to wait until Part 7.

Facebook's thick, sinewy tendrils continue to twist and worm their way through every facet of the internet's expansive infrastructure, as the social giant has unceremoniously announced plans to expand the Facebook Credits system to other sites. Sandwiched between payment system and graph API updates on the Platform Update developers blog, the brief entry names Gamehouse's Collapse! Blast as the project's initial testbed, adding that interested developers should get in touch.

Rather than using Paypal or their credit cards, users now sign into Collapse! Blast via Facebook, at which point their existing Facebook Credits can be spent on virtual goods. Should the expansion progress beyond these initial testing phases, Facebook Credits may provide appsperience developers with a solution that's easier and cheaper to implement than a proprietary one. Facebook's massive existing install base doesn't hurt things either, and since adoption is the key to standardization, maybe this is the first step towards a Star Trek-esque credits-based utopian future society.

Some versions of last year's PGA Tour 12 featured a flag instead of Tiger Woods, prompting rumors that Woods would no longer be the franchise's cover athlete. Following his 2009 scandal and recent decline in rankings (he's gone from number one in the world to 55th), many expected EA to announce a replacement for the franchise...

There’s a lot we don’t understand about pricing games. But as more and more evidence pours in, the most common pattern appears to be: the less you charge, the more you make. There are so very many examples of this, from iOS pricing phenomena, to the extraordinary revenue generated by the Humble Bundle pay-what-you-want schemes. Further to this come comments from Valve’s boss, Gabe Newell, who recently explained how erratic pricing results can be, but the undoubtable success of offering massive discounts. And perhaps more surprisingly, they seem to have discovered the importance of using the phrase “Free to play”.

(more…)

New from Digital Eel, the wonderbrains behind Weird Worlds and Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, Data Jammers: FastForward is reminiscent of all that is good in the world. Or at least some of the things that are good in the world, like Tempest and speeding through cyberspace. The demo of this wireframey hacking-as-racing delight has been entertaining me for the past few minutes and the full version, available for $9.95, is clamouring for my attention. But my attention is needed elsewhere, so I leave it to others to discover its myriad joys. Observe the trailer, with obligatory posh-voiced computer lady.

(more…)

What is a day without spikes? Brazilian indie game Mr Bree: Returning Home is mostly about a pig repeatedly falling onto spikes and spikes repeatedly falling onto a pig. As with other spike-themed platformers, it’s rather tricky and, as the trailer shows, it has a resemblance to the fiendish Super Meat Boy, except with a pig instead of a sentient meat-chunk. Let’s be honest, there is precious little difference between the two. The game is currently in beta and shall be out on PC and Mac this winter, hopefully preceded by a demo. I’ve played a little already, enough to confirm my understanding that abattoirs are unpleasant and pointy metal things are my least favourite acquaintance.

(more…)

One of the IGF 2012 entries to catch people’s eyes is Parallax, a brain-hurting pan-dimensional first-person puzzle game from indies Toasty Games. You can see the IGF submission video below.

(more…)

Crafting a complex, logical and engaging story is difficult enough on a linear level, but building an entire world of diverging options, storylines, conversations and endings in a video game is an especially trying process. As artists ourselves, we sympathize with the plight of video-game writers and encourage them to find a process that works with their individual creativity, such as articy:draft, the "first" professional narrative-design program from Nevigo.

The above video demonstrates how articy:draft's use of "flow fragments" and a visual writing template can help eliminate plot holes, logical flaws and dead ends in convoluted stories. "Game writers can now craft non-linear plots easily," Nevigo CEO Kai Rosenkranz (Heads!) said. "The era of post-its on walls is finally over."

Whoa -- we were with you until the sticky note thing, buddy. We happen to like our walls covered in incomprehensible post-it notes; it adds a sense of psychotic drama to the office and makes us look like we're doing important, semi-permanent things in vague, scribbled descriptions, such as, "take the left fork and the right spoon," "CAROLINE" and "Yes, but we need it in Hunter Green." Call us purists, but we'll keep our sticky notes, thanks. Now if only we could find the minutes from that meeting on the importance of organization, we'll be set.

Sundays! Sundays are for wondering what the week ahead may hold, but also for looking back at the previous week’s scribblings of the internet’s mad scribes, and plucking them apart for clues. IS there anything useful in there? What have they been saying? Read on for elucidation.

• Not really a PC-gaming link winning the Sunday Papers this week, but Ben Goldacre’s request that Susan Greenfield publish her claims about videogames destroying kids’ brains in a scientific paper is reasonable and important: “This week Baroness Susan Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford reportedly announced that computer games could cause dementia in children. This would be very concerning scientific information. But this comes from the opening of a new wing of an expensive boarding school, not an academic conference. Then a spokesperson told a gaming site that’s not what she means. Though they didn’t say what she does mean.”

(more…)

Sorry I’m running late this weekend, I’ve been busy partying, of all things. This edition of the bargain bucket has been scribed haunched over a borrowed laptop in a corner of a weekend long house party (Bogdan Raczynski is on in the background). I’ve got a cider waiting for me as soon as I get this posted, so I will see you on the other side. Please lend your patronage to SavyGamer.co.uk. (more…)

Hello youse,

This week’s column will just be a quick hello and a little update about some boardgame news. I’m busy, very busy, preparing next week’s very special Halloween edition of the column. It will feature a very special video comparing some of the zombie-themed games that are on the market, and telling you which of them is the best. But that’s next week. For now, let’s see what’s happening out there.(more…)

Your parents may have told you that reading was good for you, a valuable skill that enriches life. That might be true, unless you happen to be Leah, niece of Diablo's quintessential soothsayer, Deckard Cain. In her case, too much reading leads to some sort of demonic family reunion and a hellish invasion of the mortal realm.

Nice going, books.

In anticipation of its release at the beginning of November (though apparently the end of November for us UK folk), Snowblind have released three new trailers for action RPG Lord of the Rings: War In The North. Each trailer focuses on a different hero: a dwarf champion, an elf lore-master and a human ranger. I always think of elves as ranging, so I was a little confused for a moment, but then I remembered that human rangers are quite the notables in Middle Earth. So, videos of ranged combat, close combat, lots of dodge-rolling and horrid hairy spiders below.

(more…)

This falls into something of a grey area between trad. RPS posts and the Bargain Bucket, but I’m going to do it anyway because my last post was a trailer for a ludicrously high-budget first-person shooter and, were I to be struck down by lightning or a panther attack or angry Heroes of Might & Magic fans in the next half-hour, I don’t want that to be my legacy.

So, just a note that Farbs’ splendid Captain Forever quasi-trilogy has seen its pricetag has been shot down from $20 to a mere $9 – which also gets you all future updates in the adventure-tinged arena shooter series. It also includes a new build of Captain Jameson, which gets all RPGy. “This is an as-long-as-it’s-profitable sale, so as soon as income (sales x price) drops below regular levels the sale will end. If the games sell well enough then the sale could go on indefinitely, but it could also end tomorrow,” sez Farbs. Farbs, incidentally, is now part of the team making Card Hunter – whose latest news I shall post shortly.

My brain aches with the pulsing throb of a piece of think-meat that has been sorely overtaxed in the last 36 hours. It’s not that I’ve been contemplating the great mysteries of our time, I’ve just been playing an awful lot of computer games. Nearly 300. You see, I wanted to take a proper look at the Pirate Kart and I was ploughing through the list quite happily, finding plenty that I only had to spend a minute with and others that I knew I’d be writing about. But then, as if I were a character plucked from the mind of Hermann Hesse, I was struck by the scale of the task at hand and a deep sense of angst overwhelmed me. My faithful manservant DuPont administered smelling salts and brandy, and hours later I dictated this madness to him.

(more…)

Actually it’s more like 30-something Qix, since the first appearance of this game type was in 1981. Anyway, there’s a demo of Lightfish, which is like Qix with Flow’s visuals, over on Steam. It throws in some novel gameplay variants, of course, but the heart of it is dividing up the game space to slowly destroy your enemy’s territories. It’s possibly that this might be worth playing if you need a few moment’s distraction from the inexorable horrors of your existence. Or not.

Update: In a post on their official forums, BioWare has confirmed that Battlefield 3 owners will receive early access to multiplayer when the demo launches in January. According to BioWare's Jessica Merizan, "Redemption of the Online Pass for Battlefield 3 will unlock this early access. Owners o...

If you've never been to BlizzCon, you might not know that traditionally BlizzCon attendees get a big bag of swag. Last year, the bag featured a Deathling figurine to commemorate the then soon-to-be-released Cataclysm expansion. This year's swag bag is certainly no disappointment. The big-ticket item is a Mini-Tyrael (from Diablo) statuette, which hovers above the stand while holding a large blade. There's a second statuette in the bag though, too -- a little Mega Blocks Thrall figure...

Blizzard has a lot to talk about. Between the next version of StarCraft II, Diablo III and a possible new expansion to World of Warcraft, BlizzCon 2011 should be an interesting show...

Anticipated dungeon crawler Torchlight 2 has a minor update to its launch window, with Runic telling RunicGamesFanSite.com that the title is expected to launch during November or December ... unless "someone on the team dies." That's a far more calamitous caveat compared to what Runic told us when we checked in with the studio a couple weeks ago.

"We're still definitely on track for 2011, but have to hit all our internal milestones before we can lock in a date," Runic community maven Wonder Russell told Joystiq. "With a team this small, if one of our three programmers gets the flu, we could be screwed."

Torchlight fans should be sewing pillow suits of armor and force-feeding the devs their Flintstone vitamins, just to make sure that the $20 co-op dungeon crawler makes it out this year.

While too many people will turn away from a game like Drawn, simply because of its “casual” appearance, it’s a mistake. The previous two Drawn games have been been remarkably good, and with a third out today these are the sorts of adventure games we should be caring about. Does the third, Drawn: Trail Of Shadows, live up to the reputation of the series? I’ve finished it so am pretty much the right person to tell you Wot I Think.

(more…)