Archive for the ‘Features’ category

[stone] We Need Some Console-ing

August 30th, 2010

Well, my last post caused something of a stir on my twitter feed over the perceived “complexity” of some social games and whether or not the “average Joe” wants a complex game. That was fun, but consigned to Twitter.

However there was another debate on Twitter that stemmed from my, slightly strong worded, response to Rockstar’s announcement of “No current plans to bring Red Dead Redemption to the PC platform.” There was a glimmer of hope with “If that should change, we will let you know.” but for me that wasn’t good enough. I followed that tweet with a comment that perhaps one day developers will regret not supporting my beloved PC as a gaming platform as well as they could. This comment crossed one of my followers feed and they responded by saying that PC games were dying. Throw in a comment about PCs becoming “retro” and my response about how the new army of developers aren’t getting into PC gaming now and we have the basis for a ranty blog post.
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[stone] Casually Socialising

August 28th, 2010

I think it’s about time I got my blogging shoes back on now I’m at home for the summer. No more exams or coursework that needs to be done, just plain sailing for a while. Something that many people are talking about now are those little games on Facebook called “social games”. Some love them, many people do in fact, others loathe them, the thing is, I don’t know where I should stand.

Farmville

Farmville

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The Story of Dahou.se

August 28th, 2010
dahou.se

Get into dahou.se!

Multiplayer gaming naturally leads to communities and groups forming around certain games, whether they be clans, competitive teams, or just good friends. And I, of course, am not immune to this phenomenon.

A good friend of mine, Lasse Havelund and I have long been partners-in-tech on the interwebs, playing games together, running a dedicated server just for the hell of it, fooling around with Linux, and so on. Lasse, not so long ago, discovered a little game from a little-known game developer called Valve (Some of that sentence may have been a lie). This game was called Left4Dead.

Left 4 Dead is a 4-player co-op game, which relies heavily on communication and teamwork to work effectively, and as such, Lasse made some friends. They played together all the time, and even more when Left 4 Dead 2 made an appearance. A Mumble server was created to help them chat more, in and out of game.
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[stone] The War on Drugs

August 26th, 2010

The great thing about doing a university course on developing games is that you get to play games and call it research. The even better part of this is that as a member of the game development society (a founding member, no less) I have access to quite a few Steam games via the university steam accounts. One such game is Drug Wars.

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Why I no longer have any money

July 12th, 2010

If you are a PC gamer, you will probably use Steam, Valve’s digital distribution platform which is kinda known for occasionally having insane sales. Well, One such sale has recently ended. As well as reducing near everything in the Steam store, if you checked back every day you could get your hands on some even further reduced games. And that I did, here’s what I bought and what I think of them so far.

FUEL was my first purchase, at around £5. I’d read the hype that was happening before it’s release, with it’s ridiculously huge open world and the like, but for me the game was a let down. After banging my head against the wall whilst the necessary Games for Windows Live installed and updated itself (Closing the game around 4 times in the process, I mean, what the hell GFWL, why would you do that?), I leapt into the game. Well, no I didn’t, because I needed to adjust the graphics options, which you can’t do ingame. Sigh. Another restart of the game later and FINALLY I can start playing. And.. well.. I really didn’t like it. The actual racing felt clunky and rigid and the way of accessing races, whilst probably the best way to do it with such a large world, took you out of the game. Ditching races for the moment I decided just to explore, and whilst my surroundings looked nice, everywhere felt kinda samey.. Even climbing to some of the game’s Vista points just got me to see the same stuff in a prettier way. Having said that, the weather and light cycles were really enjoyable. Driving along a clifftop path whilst the sun is setting was the most fun I had in the game. What really killed it for me though is the poor GPS, if you’re going to have a game hyped up because of it’s huge gameworld, you might want to make sure it’s usable.

» Read more: Why I no longer have any money