Quest to Nowhere

As I explained in the last post, I’m working on making a comic book point-and-click adventure game called Quest to Nowhere: Summer Days. In order to do this, and have it look good, I’m hiring an artist friend of mine to draw the comic pages for the game.

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Valve, this is an intervention.

Valve, first off I love your work. Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead, and Team Fortress 2 (at launch,) all amazing games which I have spent more time then I want to think about playing, but every moment was great and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Which is what brings me here today, having this intervention for you, you need to realize Valve that you are hurting Team Fortress 2. I know you guys love it as much as I do, and you think you are doing the right thing, that’s it’s, “for its own good,” and that you “are just making it better.” But you guys need to take a step back an really think about what you are doing.

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There was an article recently by Luis Villazon called, “Why adding 3D graphics to games was a bad idea.” I feel like in general the article is really more about how he prefers 2D graphics aesthetically more compared to 3D ones. Which is perfectly fine and all, I mean we’ve sort of mastered and completely understand how to make things look good in two dimensions, and how to convey certain ideas through two dimensional representations. 3D on the other hand is very young in comparison, so especially in the early steps into 3D gaming it was more trial and error in how best to represent things, and best to convey things to the player.

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Embed below is 1up.com new show, RSVP. It’s a really interesting round table discussion between Erik Wolpaw (from Valve, having worked on Portal as well as Psychonauts,) Dylan Cuthbert (the head of Q Games who are behind the PixelJunk games, and he worked for Nintendo of Japan on the original StarFox,) and Jonathan Mak (the one man team behind Everyday Shooter.) I love listening to game creators talk like this, you always hear some really interesting things. I can’t wait to see what they do/who they have in the next episode…. Continue Reading

Now I’ve written a number Rock Band vs. Guitar Hero posts here in the short time I’ve been doing this blog, (two is a number,) and now I feel that is time for another one. What has brought this on is the Game Informer magazine cover story on Guitar Hero IV, and you can probably guess my opinion on the game from the title of the post. Continue Reading

Mirror’s Edge is a game being made by DiCE, who are famous for the Battlefield series, but it is nothing like those games. It is basically a first person parkour game in a somewhat dystopian utopian police state future.

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After listening to a lot of GDC coverage, especially 1up’s with its podcasts talking with various game designers, I started to think a lot about narratives in videogames. Some games seem to be vehicles for a story, while some stories in games are there to move the game along. Then there are of course the games that have no narrative to speak of, and there are the ones where the player is the one that essentially creates the narrative of the game.

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The term casual game seems to be getting used a lot lately. Mostly because it seems to coincide with the rise of “casual gamers.” The reason its beginning to bug me is that although it seems to be a fairly accurate way to describe these games since they are played rather casually, but when you look at the key game elements of these games a lot of them seem/are things that have been done in games before. More specifically they were done in the early days of gaming, in those early arcade games.

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It’s been about a year and a half since the Xbox 360 launched in North America, but even before then there was a lot of talk about next gen gaming. The term is still being used for this new console generation (most likely because the next generation of consoles hasn’t been announced yet,) but although the term is still used it doesn’t seem as though people really know what is next gen gaming.

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Perhaps it seems unexpected to write an essay like this for Naughty Dog’s Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, when there are games like Bioshock or Portal which seem like more obvious games to do this sort of writing about. Granted my original intention was to write this sort of essay on Bioshock, just after I finished the game, but due to other things popping up I never got around to it. So I began to revisit the idea recently, and it just so happened that while I was thinking about that I was playing Uncharted. I think due to that state of mind I began to look deeper into Uncharted then I likely would have, and in doing so found surprisingly more to the game then I had expected.

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