The Controversial Saga Of The Zombie Massage Makers

October 20th, 2010

This was a really fascinating read about a developer's attempt to get an admitted cash grab game into the Xbox Indie Game Marketplace

The Controversial Saga Of The Zombie Massage Makers.

Jeremy Eden believed this past summer that he had concocted the recipe for a hit. It would be, he and the rest of JForce games thought, their second big success.

This great new thing would be a cheap downloadable Xbox game, of sorts, that would satisfy the public's proven appetite for three things the public had already shown — statistically — it loved: Xbox avatars, zombies and massage.

Then, one day in August, Jeremy Eden made a mistake.

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Why you shouldn’t play the lottery

September 28th, 2010

A gent by the name of Rob Cockerham has created a lottery simulator that pretty much encapsulates why you shouldn't play the lottery.  Here's a quote from my results:

You played 1040 games of Mega Millions. It cost $1040. You won $108.

Incidentally, the highest single win was $10.  The first time I ran the simulator, I only won $56.    Also:

In the 504234 times this simulation has run, players have won $27696303
And by won I mean they have won back $27696303 of the $504234 they spent (5492%).

This part is inaccurate at the moment (probably due to server hammerage).  The number of times the simulation has run went down between my two runs, but the amount of money won went up.

Incredibly Depressing Mega Millions Lottery Simulator! (via Boing Boing, which explains why his server is getting hammered right now).

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The Brainy Gamer: Unplayable

September 22nd, 2010

The Brainy Gamer's got a great blog up right now about his experience asking younger gamers to play an old classic.  Both funny and a little bit depressing, ultimately more enlightening than anything else.

It mostly came down to issues of user-interface, navigation, combat, and a general lack of clarity about what to do and how to do it. I had supplied them with the Book of Mystic Wisdom and the History of Britannia, both in PDF form, but not a single student bothered to read them. "I thought that was just stuff they put in the box with the game," said one student. "Yes," I replied, "They put it in there because they expected you to read it." "Wow," he responded.

The Brainy Gamer: Unplayable.

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Discovery at PAX: Retro City Rampage

September 9th, 2010

So that hypothetical question I asked last week?  Turns out to not matter so much, because while I was at PAX, I saw that there's a game in development that is very similar (but superior!) to what I was thinking about doing.  It's called Retro City Rampage.  It looked like a blast!

A parody of the open-world action genre, Retro City Rampage takes modern game mechanics and mashes them into an authentic 8-bit experience.

It's one half fast paced arcade game, the other half a hilarious story mode!

It's all the driving and shooting you'd expect and a whole lot more! With missions that twist pages straight from classic game experiences, you get to re-live and rewrite history in a way only a modern anti-hero could!

When it comes to enemies, weapons are only the beginning! Put on your boots and jump on their heads! Toss 'em around to knock the rest down! Become truly unstoppable with awesome power-ups!

Through its world, characters and missions, Retro City Rampage lampoons the entire 8-bit era --from its games to the TV, movies and pop culture!

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Hypothetical Question: Perspective

September 2nd, 2010

Imagine for a second that I'm working on a kind of old school game.  Imagine further that as I'm working on said game, I'm open to suggestions and other sorts of help from the Internet at large, rather than going it alone.

Now, if I were going to do that, it's possible that the game would feature a sort of overhead-ish perspective for some/most/all of the game.  There's a decent chance that this game would feature sort of arcadey actiony gameplay.  If that were the case, a combination of my indecisiveness and the fact that I'm just not an authority on visuals might lead me to be unable to choose a perspective.  So imagine you're in the position that you're imagining that I'm in.

Here's some screenshots of some older games with some  overhead perspectives that I think might be good for visualizing what perspective this imaginary game might take.  This hypothetical me could definitely use some feedback here though, as this isn't my area of expertise.

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The Adventures of a Noob – Star Ruler

August 31st, 2010

The Adventures of a Noob is a recurring column in which I dive into a (potentially) complex game without reading the manual, FAQ, any help files, or playing a tutorial. I then catalog my first impressions and thought process as I attempt to figure out the game. This may end up being amusing, or it may end up being informative. Hopefully a little of both.

Note that in these types of articles, information in regular font represents my thought process/knowledge at time of first playing. Addendums in italics represent information I learned after the fact, inserted into the article to clarify which of my original thoughts were accurate and which were leading me astray.

Stuff I know going in:

Star Ruler is supposed to be huge, strategic, with lots of cool AI and randomization stuff.  Oh, and it's a space game with a silly name.  Yes, that's really about all I knew going in.  I don't even think I'd viewed the official page I just linked.

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Unamommer is my new Favorite Site Ever

August 30th, 2010

In a thread over on NeoGaf, I got linked to a blog called the Unamommer (awesome name, btw).  The thread in question was discussing the recently released Elemental: War of Magic, from Stardock entertainment.  The nerdier parts of the gaming Internet have been abuzz about some controversy about the game's release, but I don't really have anything meaningful to add to that particular discussion, so I'm mostly going to leave it alone.  Elemental could use a little more polish, certainly, but it'll come.

Instead, I want to talk about the Unamommer blog, and particularly her take on Elemental: Destiny's Embers.  Destiny's Embers is a novel accompanying the War of Magic game, set in the world of the campaign, and presumably crossing over at some point.   If you're like me, you have already instantly written it off as terrible by virtue of it being a game-related novel.  This is where the Unamommer comes in.

The Important link gets it's own line:

Unamommer » Blog Archive » Elemental: Destiny’s Embers

From perusing her site a bit, it seems like the Unamommer's M.O. is to read bad books, and then write snarky reviews about them.  Some choice quotes from her review of Destiny's Embers:

In my last review I drew a distinction between fun bad and facepalm bad.  Fun bad books may have terrible plots or characters but there’s a baseline level of competency that keeps the book readable.  Sentences may be simple, but they are still constructed in a way that generally makes sense and the writing itself fades to the background, leaving you focused on what the actual story is trying to tell you.  Elemental is not one of those books.

Her favorite Character in the book?  I'm glad you asked:

The dress is actually my favorite character in the book. A few short pages later she is accosted by bad guys and they have a conversation about the dress. Her thoughts reveal to us the backstory and political importance of the dress. After she is rescued from the bad guys by the clever orphan boy she has a crush on and a handsome knight, she flings herself into her father’s arms while sobbing and he stops to notice the dress before noticing the knife wound on her neck.

Sounds like that character had a lot of competition though:

So anyway, the story follows a couple of difference people around. There’s the Clever Orphan and the Magical Princess who are off to find some sort of magical artifact that is a circlet that is also an orb. Along the way they pick up The Bad Guy’s Henchman Who Is Not Half As Clever As He Thinks He Is, a golem, and a Thief With A Heart Of Gold who has been cursed to be unnoticeable to everyone except the orphan because the orphan is, obviously, special.

I highly recommend heading over there and reading the rest of the review.  It's fantastic.  Anyway, Mrs. Unamommer, I have subscribed to your blog, and hope others do as well.  I look forward to the next review!

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Captcha Your Imagination: Comatile Mom

August 26th, 2010

Get Adobe Flash player

I've started making quick prototypes of games out of captchas, because really, "why not?"  A general post mortem follows.

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Penny Arcade! – Words And Their Meanings

August 25th, 2010

Today's Penny Arcade has started a bit of an online dialogue, focusing on the topic of buying games used vs. new.

Penny Arcade! - Words And Their Meanings.

A quote from the accompanying newspost:

The idea that THQ is somehow "disrespecting customers" with this kind of rhetoric misunderstands the situation as completely as it is possible to do so. In a literal way, when you purchase a game used, you are not a customer of theirs. If I am purchasing games in order to reward their creators, and to ensure that more of these ingenious contraptions are produced, I honestly can't figure out how buying a used game was any better than piracy. From the the perspective of a developer, they are almost certainly synonymous.

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My Oblivion Mod List

August 23rd, 2010

Off and on lately, I've been replaying Oblivion.  I tend to do this with any Bethesda RPG... play it extensively when it first comes out, and then revisit it years later after modding it into a mostly unrecognized state.  This makes the game feel almost like a sequel at this point, because of how little I remember and how different the gameplay experience is.  It also almost makes me want to revisit Morrowind (again) with crazy mods.  Maybe I will down the road.

In any case, several folks have asked me about the mods I've been using, and so I've decided to share the rather extensive list I'm using, as well as some thoughts.

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