Gaming is a curious hobby. Ever since it’s move into MTV advertised audiences, rapidly exploding production costs and the ever fastening move into the mainstream-stream of mainstream media it seems the number of games that are just like some other game that came before – but with a little twist, addition, tweak or just a… [Read more…]
August 31, 2010
The recent “in-thing” for any modern game to have seems to be a mechanic that measures how good or bad a player is behaving. Be it a moral meter, a “karma system”, honor-meter or whatever else this kind of contraption is called, the player’s actions are being measured to be either good or bad. Very… [Read more…]
August 25, 2010
One recent mechanic found in a insanely fast rising number of modern game designs are morality systems. Those are inherently worthy of their own discussion, so I will leave discussing those systems specifically to another time, while taking them as a primer for a discussion about something else: Gameable character customization. Gameable character interaction. Background… [Read more…]
August 23, 2010
Dragon Age: Origins was an interesting beast. A game that went back to the traditions it’s creator BioWare abandoned after finishing up Baldur’s Gate II in 2000. Basically, the gameplay these titles use attempt to closely mimic the mechanics and dynamics found in desktop roleplaying. Which in case of Baldur’s Gate is hardly surprising, since… [Read more…]
August 20, 2010
The numbers are a bit fuzzy and not a hundred percent reliable, but still the message is clear: The TV market still has room to grow without an entirely new generation of technology that will force the consumer to re-buy everything from his TV to his media player to his movie collection. HD did that,… [Read more…]
August 13, 2010
Video games sometimes seem to be a Peter Pan like medium, stubbornly refusing to grow up.
August 7, 2010
Rockstar’s latest masterpiece suffers from a disease a lot of current games have contracted. Minigamitis. Essential parts of the game are handled via elaborate subsystems that exist outside of the gameplay structure of the main game. These subsystes bring various problems to the table, especially the dueling minigame. The dueling minigame slows down time with… [Read more…]
June 17, 2010
Ubisoft is trying to reinvent the sneaking genre with Splinter Cell: Conviction, the fifth part in the series so far. Taking hints from the stealth gameplay mechanics implementated in Chronicles of Riddick and Batman: Arkham Asylum, this installment tries hard coming up with a fresh approach to lurking-in-shadows. It’s the Riddick-games Conviction borrows it’s new… [Read more…]
June 14, 2010
The day started with a little catastrophe, as my horse fell to it’s bloody death in a canyon somewhere northwest of the McFarlane Ranch. I was on the way to Hanging Rock, to take care of some ne’erdowells that had a nice bounty on their heads, when I found myself lost in said canyon. Luckily,… [Read more…]
May 26, 2010
Six years ago, Hideo Kojima made Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, a game that split from the established Metal Gear Solid formula in a lot of ways. One of the more radical overhauls of the gameplay, was the omission of one of the predecessor’s most iconic in game tools and icons, the “soliton radar”,… [Read more…]
September 10, 2010
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