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Bad to the Bone

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 08:08:56 -0500

So I abandoned this blog of mine and I have no intention to ever return to it regullary, but from time to time I stumble upon some gems of game/mod industry that impress me so much that I simply have to share it with anyone who happens to stumble upon my lair on moddb. The thing is, yesterday I was sitting in the holiest of rooms in my apartment (i.e. toilet), takin' you-know-what and reading a local gaming magazine when I noticed a smallish review of a simple indie game called Gravity Bone. It looked very casual - nothing special, but my trusted reviewer pointed out it is a game everyone should try. I didn't really give it much thought and I returned to the PC browsing the web just tired and bored with myself when I remembered about this game, found in on the internets, installed it and gave it a go. I was literary blown away - it was short (20 minutes or so) and sweet adventure game, built atop of Quake 2 engine (KMQuake II) and it remembered me a lot of a game very dear to my heart - No one lives forever. Now I won't go describing a gameplay or anything, because I would have ruined the game for you, but take my advice - go download it at Blendo games, browse for "Gravity Bone" and spread the word - I guarantee you will spend 20 quality minutes of your life. Picture representing minimalistic, yet likeable TF2 like art direction

Death on Wednesday

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 17:05:59 -0500

Age of Empires Imperialism A rumor came up yesterday about Ensemble studios closing it's doors. The studio is notable for it's Age of Empires series, and was lately working on Halo Wars(they still are working on it btw). Well rumors turned out to be true, Microsoft stated, I quote:[quote=Microsoft] This was a fiscally-rooted decision that keeps MSG on its growth path [/quote]. Shane Kim, MS corporate VP of interactive entertainment offers similar point of view on Edge. More interesting comments came on behalf of Wild Tangent CEO Alex St. John - he said that MS is "ramping down" it's investments in 360 and is entering a "recovery phase". For more interesting info click all the links in this post, you will be smarter and more beautiful afterwards (g33k is c001)!

Ruby Tuesday

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 08:22:29 -0500

Few all-important industry news came up at the very beginning of the week, things so important that they can't wait for Sunday to be revealed. EA & Ctytek announce Warhead ready PC In one of the worst marketing moves EA (which became kinda' cool in the latter half of the present decade) made in recent times they announced Crysis-ready PC for 700$. Head over to Shacknews to learn more about this. Brad Wardell talks about Gamer's Bill of Rights In my first blog entry I wrote a little something about this theme, now Shacknews made an exclusive two part interview on the subject matter. It's stuff that's definitley important for us gamers. Here's a story Brad told which clearly shows the bullshit we as PC gamers have to face: [quote=Shacknews]And another guy bought a game, and he's in the armed forces, he's in Iraq actually..... So he gets a game, it's single-player only--you can probably guess what game it is, pretty big-name game. And he can't play it because it insists on connecting to the internet to play it. And he's just like, "That's it. I can buy an Xbox 360 or a PlayStation 3, and I'm not putting up with this. It just works."[/quote] There's more stories, but I have to save some of those for Sunday when there's a big deficit of gaming/industry news, you'll be able to live without them, but you will not survive if you don't read the two stories above.

Heavy Industry v.2

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 08:17:06 -0500

Not as much shocking gaming news as one would expect this week, here are THE news (well, not really ) Oddworld Creator Talks Consoles and PCs I really don't want to sound like I have some kind of grudge against consoles. Some of my fondest gaming memories are from playing famcom as a kid and I'm just about to buy PS3/Xbox360(haven't decided yet) but some disagree: [quote=Lorne_Lanning]...I think the consoles are a problem...anything that makes development more expensive, rather than better, faster, cheaper, I think is a step backwards.[/quote] Emil Pagliarulo About Writing a Fallout 3 Whole lotta love Fallout. Nuff said. Another studio picks up Unreal Engine 3 Black Foot studios pick UE3 as their engine of choice for their game Sky Gods - here's what they have to say: [quote=BlackFoot]Sky Gods will focus on a complete co-operative game experience centering on Special Forces operations, specifically HALO (High Altitude, Low Opening) and helicopter insertion missions. BlackFoot Studios plans a worldwide release of Sky Gods via digital distribution in the first quarter of 2009. [/quote] Lengthy Spore Interview While you're listening to THE MAN, check out the Metacritic and Gamerankings and your local gaming store.

Good Friday

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 08:12:07 -0500

Bioshock Postmortem It is a good Friday, some cool insight on game development came from 2KBoston/Australia - Bioshock postmortem on Gamasutra, an interesting read indeed! In the main article there''s a link to free Bioshock art book for those interested, so go take a look. PC gaming is dead! Read about how a PC game Sins of a Solar empire sold half a million copies on a million dollar budget, once again - Gamasutra. Publisher "blames" it on low system requirements. PC gaming is dead, part 2. Tom Jubert, man behind Penumbra says piracy problem is ''Overblown", tells why Crytek-like claims of piracy of legit vs. ilegit copies aren't really in the ratio of 1:20. Published on Edge.

Music Industry (kind of)

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 10:29:05 -0500

I couldn't wait till Sunday to post this one, Noel Gallagher ( Oasis ) touched the topic of Guitar Hero in his recent interview with musicradar, here's what he had to say: [quote=Noel_Gallagher]If it puts little plastic guitars into kids' hands and fires their imaginations, I think that's a good thing. It's harmless fun, innit. I'd rather that genre of video games than somebody getting their f****** head chopped off with a samurai sword while getting f***** by a goblin up the ar** with a laser. Do you know what I mean?[/quote] Source: MusicRadar via Kotaku.

Heavy Industry v.1

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 09:45:21 -0500

There seems to be little of industry (we know which industry I'm talking about right?) news on MODDB. A little more insight into what the big boys are doing would do no harm I presume so I will post here some of the news that caught my eye this week. Here we go: Left4Dead Interview. The latest interview on Left4Dead with Chet Faliszek [Old man Murray anyone?] came up on Shacknews today - it's a good read, but nothing really new there. Id talks bussiness. Todd Hollenshead & John Carmack chat with GamesIndustry.biz, Todd says that for PC Hardware manufacturers are probably secretly happy about piracy on PCs. Read through the interview and you'll see that he has a point there. Digital distribution milestone? Swedish games company Grin sells 130 000 units of Bionic Commando remake through XBOX Live Arcade and PSN in only a week - not bad at all. Crytek <3 consoles! Crytek became well known since the release of their gfx-monster Crysis for blame-it-on-piracy statements. Here they make another one. Alternative version would be to check what configuration average gaming computer has [info via Steam survey]. PC gamer's bill of rights Stardock reveals their proposal for (PC)gamer's bill of rights - The Gamer’s Bill of Rights 1) Gamers shall have the right to return games that don’t work with their computers for a full refund. 2) Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state. 3) Gamers shall have the right to expect meaningful updates after a game’s release. 4) Gamers shall have the right to demand that download managers and updaters not force themselves to run or be forced to load in order to play a game. 5) Gamers shall have the right to expect that the minimum requirements for a game will mean that the game will play adequately on that computer. 6) Gamers shall have the right to expect that games won’t install hidden drivers or other potentially harmful software without their consent. 7) Gamers shall have the right to re-download the latest versions of the games they own at any time. 8) Gamers shall have the right to not be treated as potential criminals by developers or publishers. 9) Gamers shall have the right to demand that a single-player game not force them to be connected to the Internet every time they wish to play. 10) Gamers shall have the right that games which are installed to the hard drive shall not require a CD/DVD to remain in the drive to play. [MrTambourineMan signs it right away] Ken Levine says he's a nerd, tells anecdote: [quote=Ken Levine on PAX via Gamasutra]He went to EB to buy a Rome: Total War expansion pack. He was checking out the box at a stop light, and two guys in a pickup truck started harassing him, reportedly saying: ‘Hey loser, what are you looking at, gay porn?’ “And I realized,” he said “that I’ve got this Fabio-looking guy on the cover. So I’m going to tell them what I think of them, and instead what came out of my mouth was ‘no, it’s not gay porn -- it’s an expansion pack to a very nice simulation game!’ [/quote] That's it for this week, any comments are appreciated. Good Night, and Good Luck