These are all entries bearing the tag games.
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Gaming in the Goldilocks Zone
Posted on March 25 2008 — games — 3 comments
It seems to me that we have been seeing a new trend in PC gaming recently. One one side, we have the old established juggernauts of old, companies like Epic, id and Blizzard, who churn out massive new games every 2-4 years. One the other, we have casual games so simple and innocent as to border dangerously on the vapid, often delivered in the form of a Flash application somewhere. But, in between the two, we are seeing an entirely different class of game, rapidly gaining ground at a surprising pace.
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Sbore
With Penny Arcade's recent mention of Spore, veteran game designer Will Wright's latest brainchild, I feel like mentioning the game, too. I've long held the (strangely uncommon) opinion that while Spore is pretty cool from a technical standpoint, it's also probably going to turn out to be a pretty terrible game if they don't do something drastic some time soon.
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Unlock This
Posted on January 10 2008 — games, game design, unlockables, konami, castlevania, smash bros — 0 comments
A common feature of newer games, especially games that feature "optional content" that needs to be explored, is the concept of the unlockable. In the Soul Calibur games (as well as many other fighting games), they take the form of new weapons and costumes for the characters as well as a few new characters. The EA Lord of the Rings games lets you unlock cinematics, concept art and other such trivia as you progress through the game. Sometimes, entire games can be unlockable—Metroid: Zero Mission for instance, has the original Metroid available after you finish the game.
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Thinking With Portals: Test Chamber 23
Do you like Valve's hit 3D first person puzzle game Portal? I sure do. Enough to take a crack at Hammer and churn out a custom bonus map, which is now available for download right here! Good luck, <subject name here>.
Screenshots
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Heroic Mechanar: Second Time's the Charm
I've just had my second brush with the Mechanar on heroic mode, and it went much, much smoother this time, mostly due to the fact that we skipped Sepethrea entirely. After dying a couple of times and cheesing the elevator 6-7 times on the way to Pathaleon, we finally kicked his ass. He was hard, but not ridiculously hard; in fact I felt the challenge level was just about right for a heroic instance. And the loot! I walked out of there with four Badge of Justice, but also a Defender's Tanzanite, Capacitus' Cloak of Calibration, the Abacus of Violent Odds, and Edge of the Cosmos! No Sun Eater yet, but damn, this was a mighty fine run, even after the 20g spent on repairs.
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Heroic Mechanar: First Impressions
As some of you may know, I play World of Warcraft as a Protection warrior these days, and I've been Revered with the Sha'tar for a while now, which means I can run Heroic Tempest Keep dungeons. After collecting enough gear to have about 495 defense and 12,300 health, I decided to go for a whirl in the Mechanar, an instance well-known for being generous with Badges as well as dropping one of the best pre-raid tanking weapons, The Sun Eater.
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Doing screenshots wrong
So I was checking out Fury, this PvP game currently in closed beta. I don't have an account or anything, but I know people who do. Anyway, after glancing at the screenshots section I realized to my dismay that the Fury people fell into the same trap as so many others: the screenshots they posted are completely useless.
