online games

Review – Opoona

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If a game contains art, is the game itself art? Is it moral for the local populace to manipulate an alien child into doing their bidding? What in the hell does that old engineer want with a sand weasel? These questions and more are asked in Koei’s latest published game, Opoona.

Reviews have not been altogether friendly to Opoona. I am here to tell you that yes, it may well be a horrible game. It has an occasionally annoying camera, a bad translation, and it’s easy to get lost even in the first dome-city. I am also here to tell you that I still really enjoyed Opoona despite these flaws.
But is it art?

I’ll get the bad parts out of the way first. First off: No voice acting. Sorry. I didn’t care; hell, I didn’t even notice until I realized the whole game sounds very uniform and ambient. →  Read the rest

Online play – the kids aren’t alright

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Gamasutra recently posted an article about how annoying people in online play may very well be hurting sales. Regardless of whether this is a stretch, any discussion from developers about the problem of griefers is welcome. Like it or not, multiplayer features are becoming critical to the success of a game, so it is important to see those making them look at the issues that surround providing a good online experience. Otherwise all those Gamespot reviews that call for multiplayer everything start to look even sillier.

The more I play Call of Duty 4, the more I notice the trends among idiotic players. Among your older players, the supposed majority of the gaming world, you get your typical racists, wanna be gangsters, and so on. The most annoying of the bunch, the people who frequently teamkill, spam the voice channel, and use foul language and racial slurs until the words lose all meaning, seem to be in the 18 and under crowd. →  Read the rest

Sins of an Innovative Developer

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Sins of a Solar Empire is such a complicated game that I felt compelled to write an accompanying editorial with my review. Because Ironclad has tried something new and fresh, there are more than a few kinks to work through. At least in the current infancy of the game, a big issue Ironclad is tackling is whether a developer caters to the larger gamer audience crowd–even if they’re wrong, or the people playing the game the “right” way.

For various reasons, the game is very difficult to learn to play properly. In no particular order, let me throw a few out there:

1. The single player AI is too easy, to the point you don’t need to utilize counter units, so you don’t learn much about units

2. There’s no campaign to make you learn to use different units in different situations to make up for the general AI being terrible

3. →  Read the rest

What happened to competition? From arcades to gamerscores

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Remember high scores. You don’t see them around very much, though they still pop up in some of my favorite new games. But why exactly did they begin to disappear? We generally hear explanations involving the rise of story based games and other such nonsense, but when three of the most popular games of the decade are Halo, Madden and World of Warcraft, it is tough to accept this as an era of Single Player. There must be another reason.

Before we look for that reason, we should start from the beginning and look at the nature of the high score. There were surely hacks and exploits available in some classic games (as any Street Fighter fan will know), but I would like to think they weren’t commonplace, and that more often than not the list of high scores in an arcade cabinet was the honest work of skilled players. →  Read the rest

Best Game Ever – Master of Orion 2: The Battle at Antares

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Master of Orion 2: The Battle at Antares was probably the defining game in the 4X genre (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate); it set the standard for a decade of games. Featuring a robust tech tree, intricate ship design, active ship combat, a big, goodie filled universe, and intense colony management, MOO2 had it all. Despite being well over a decade old, the game still has a level of depth that has been unmatched by its successors. Additionally, even though Microprose is long out of business (gobbled up by whomever), the game’s support has been taken over by fans (Lord Brazen, for those interested), who have kept the game playable on KALI and have steadily eradicated the last remaining bugs in the game. As exciting as it is to have a game so old with such a following, it also depresses me that the industry has yet to produce a worthy sequel. →  Read the rest

The Propaganda Project: Phil Harrison

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Phil Harrison — Executive Vice President, Sony Computer Entertainment

A Brit who comes off worse in writing than person.

(For an explanation of what this article is, please read this.)
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Bitchy comments
“Nintendo knows its target audience, because it has really narrowed that down; and it’s pretty much defined by a boy or girl’s ability to admire Pokemon.”

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“The idea of a handheld rivalry with Nintendo is an irrelevance, those formats don’t appear in our planning. It’s not a fair comparison; not fair on them, I should stress. That sounds arrogant, maybe, but it’s the truth.”

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Something the PS2 was widely criticized for – and which Microsoft in particular has played up very much – is being extremely hard to develop for. How does PS3 compare in that respect? →  Read the rest

Weekly News We care About Wrap Up – 4.7.06

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Bloated cash cow, I choose you!

Nintendo engineers talk about the process of designing the DSLite
I personally find this article to be fascinating. More interviews with hardware designer’s would be a welcome thing.

Nintendo has great year financially
Despite having a dead console, Nintendo made a lot of yen this past year, thanks to the “favorable” performance of the DS. Maybe one day they’ll stop living off of handhelds and Pokemon and be a real player in the console wars again.

First Amendment bitch slaps anti-game lobbyists
Said the judge, “Video games are a form of creative expression that are constitutionally protected under the First Amendment. They contain original artwork, graphics, music, story lines and characters similar to movies and television shows, both of which are considered protected free speech.” →  Read the rest

Review – Weird Worlds

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Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space
Developed by Digital Eel
Published by Shrapnel Games
Released 11.4.05

Deep space
Unknown seldom means good in deep space…

I am one of those lucky people who is blessed with a job that is mostly unsupervised, and is prone to periods of downtime. As a result, I often find myself paid to play video games. Unfortunately, I am often required to get to work on a moment’s notice, thus precluding most online games from combating my work boredom. Further, my work laptop can’t quite run Civilization 4 at the speed I’d like it to. I found myself stumped for something good to pass the time.

I had seen a plug for Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space on Penny Arcade a few weeks ago, and figured what the hell. →  Read the rest

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