Left 4 Dead 2 was announced at E3 this year. A group of disgruntled gamers have since started a boycott of the game. I don’t want to speak about the specifics of the boycott, but instead, touch on what this means for the games industry.
Have you ever played an underwhelming game? It might be a lack of choice, depth, emergence or fun. Today I’m going to discuss why many games lack that key ingredient to succeed, giving specific examples of how Dawn of War II (DOWII) and Battlefield Heroes (BH) both miss the mark. I’ll finish up by giving [...]
Game Damage is a pilot for a new TV show about computer games. It was created by Yahtzee (Zero Punctuation and infatuation of The Sneech), Yug (who worked with me at Auran for a bit) and Matt (creator of AustralianGamer along with Yug). The show isn’t bad, and considering it’s a pilot is worth watching. It’s [...]
I have a lot of dreams about what I’d like to see in the future. One of the strongest dreams involves game development education. To put it bluntly, I’ve been unimpressed by what I’ve seen so far. There are a number of courses around but none of them have stood out as being amazingly good. [...]
So as most people will have heard by now, EA has brought Bioware (and Pandemic). I, as many people on the net, think this is one of the saddest days in gaming history. Check out the pic to the right of what Mass Effect’s new box will probably look like.
Over the weekend I had a little spare time and decided to try out Haaf’s Game Engine (HGE). After spending the last year working on BSG and as long as I can remember on CIC I decided to make a small game that would take less than a day. The finished product came [...]
I’m obsessed with Company of Heroes, it’s official. All my other games have taken a back-seat as I spend all of my gaming time playing online. So why is it so good? What makes it stand out, and why should you start playing it?! Below are my list of reasons why this is [...]
Hi guys,
This is just a quick post to say happy Easter and let you know how things are going at the moment. Things at work have been going crazy leading up to big milestones so I’ve been putting in 10+ hour days for a while now. This has left me little time to [...]
Introduction
Having ‘more’ of everything in a game does not necessarily make it a better game. I’ve spoken about this before with Paraworld and this topic has come up again, this time with Supreme Commander (SC). I was a big fan of Total Annihilation, SC’s spiritual predecessor; however this game seems to have added [...]
Computer Gaming Weekly released their first 100 magazines for free download on the net a while back. I was reading through the first issue (November 1981) and I stumbled across an article containing a section entitled “Programmers: Are They Good Enough”. While this is a nostalgic and interesting read, it begs the question: 25 years [...]
Over the past two days the first Game Connect Asia Pacific Conference has been held in Brisbane, Australia. It replaced Australian Game Developers Conference (AGDC) which was closed down earlier this year. I went along to the conference and found it quite informative. I took my iRiver with me and recorded the speeches I went [...]
I see the biggest challenge facing Indie game development stemming from the two major types of people who develop the games. The first group have plenty of time to make games, but don’t have the skills to do so. The second group have the skills but have no time to make them. [...]
I’ve been requested by Shiva to write an article on the “Importance of finishing what you start”. Whether you’re an indie developer, looking for a job in the industry or running a large game development house, finishing what you start is important for you.
After the excellent response to the programmer’s personality test I wrote I thought I’d look a little more into the beast that is a games programmer. Rather than giving a list of questions to be answered I thought I’d give a list of the qualities I’ve seen in good game programmers over the years. Some [...]
I’ve played a few demos over the past weeks and I’ve found a recurring theme in the good ones; that less is more. To aid in my explanation I’m going to compare two demos that have come out recently; Company of Heroes (CoH) by Relic (makers of Warhammer 40K) and Paraworld by SEK [...]
Sign up for the Hyperbol beta, download it, and play it. I found this a few weeks ago and thought it was so-so after playing for 30 mins or so, however after playing a few games on the LAN at work, I’ve seen the full depth of the game, and it is the best [...]
As I mentioned a few weeks back Cavemen by Lightworks Games has just been released. To encourage everyone to buy it, and to help give feedback to one of the creators (Walter, who used to sit next to me back on MVH) I thought I’d write up a quick review.
Has anyone else found themselves wondering where all the good games have gone? Other than a few diamonds in the rough (Oblivion, Civ4, Galactic Civilizations 2) there seems to have been a distinct lack of excellent games of late. For the past few years I’ve been working on ways to enjoy games as I used [...]
After playing Oblivion I’ve been thinking about how decisions for adding features to games are made, and how it could be improved. I think the best way to judge a feature is on its benefit to cost ratio. That is, how much it adds to the game against how ‘expensive’ it is to [...]
