Tag Archives: video games

I Love You, Kill Screen, But…

This is what I get quarterly from Kill Screen for $40 a year; just shy of 100 pages:

This is what I get from the Grantland Quarterly for $48 a year; about 340 pages including a pull-out style section:

To be fair, Kill Screen is full color and has a lot more content that either isn’t available on the website or is delayed there after the print publication. (Grantland is done in 2-color groups and has mostly content that was published on the website about six months earlier, but it’s hardcover.)

I love both publications and think that they are both full of a lot of very, very good writing, but there’s a value comparison here that’s not in Kill Screen‘s favor, especially considering that Kill Screen has ads and Grantland Quarterly doesn’t.

No; Really – Buy Quarrel Today

Nathan Brown for Edge:

“We heard the same justifications for passing on it over and over again ad nauseam. One signal came through clearer than any other among the general noise of reasons why Quarrel wasn’t for them, and that was this: ‘Gamers don’t buy word games’.”

It’s a claim Anderson naturally disputes, and with Quarrel launching today on Xbox Live Arcade, he calls on gamers to buy a copy – “Or four, it’s only 400 MSP” – and to “tell everyone you can about the game. Discovery remains the single biggest challenge facing original games these days by far.”

I plan on proving them wrong later this afternoon (and I already have it on iOS). Join me.

Nimblebit with the Call Out on Zynga

Huge high five to Nimblebit—developers of Tiny Tower—for this image that’s making the rounds today:

Click on it; it’s way too big to slap into a post.

This is shameful: the dual currency system, the game basics, even the stocking of items and the favorite job mechanic would all seem to be directly lifted, would they not?

Lots of people have been wondering if Zynga is foundering; this certainly doesn’t make it look like they have much magic left right now.

(Seen on VentureBeat, Destructoid, et al.)

UPDATE: Nathan Brown writes for Edge on a noticeable trend developing with Zynga.

The Making of Madden NFL

Tom Bissell for Grantland with a fascinating behind-the-scenes on how Madden is made every year:

Every year for the past three years, key members of Madden NFL’s development team have traveled to the Bay Area suburb of Pleasanton, Calif., to meet with John Madden himself at his production company’s office building. There, Coach Madden and the dev team discuss identifiable trends that have emerged in professional football over the past year and spitball ideas about how these trends might be implemented in gameplay. Coach Madden is also briefed on the creative direction and “feature set” of next year’s game. Once that’s done, Coach (as he’s called) and the dev team watch a fully catered afternoon’s worth of professional football games in a large studio space that Coach built after retiring from broadcasting a few years ago.

I—like, I am sure, many others—did not have any idea that Madden was as intricately involved in the development of each game as portrayed in this article.

It’s a great read on how EA Tiburon works to create a fresh take year after year, and some thoughts on the future of the king of sports video games.

ESA Drops SOPA Support

Stephen Totilo for Kotaku:

The Entertainment Software Association no longer supports the Stop Online Piracy Act, the controversial anti-piracy bill that was shelved earlier today in the House of Representatives after a week of fierce online protests.

The people who bring us E3 simply don’t want to bring us SOPA anymore. The bill’s got problems, they say.

Of course this only happens once the fight for these two pieces of legislation is essentially over (though Marco Arment is correct that a new one is always looming).

Penny-Arcade hit the weirdness of this right on the head. The ESA does good quite often, but in this case it was just plain wrong. One has to wonder if Red 5′s actions caused any other studios to threaten to take their E3 budgets elsewhere.

Red 5 and SOPA/PIPA

Dennis Scimeca for Ars Technica:

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg for PC game developer Red 5 Studios. Not only has the studio blocked access to the beta of free-to-play open-world shooter Firefall for the day, but it also revealed last week that it is pulling out of the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) showcase, which is run by the SOPA-supporting Entertainment Software Association (ESA).

Red 5 will also use the $50,000 it would have spent on a promotional E3 booth to start The League For Gamers, a grassroots group it calls “a gathering place for gamers, developers and industry supporters who want to stand against legislation that’s detrimental to the games industry.”

Read the rest, including an interview with CEO Mark Kern. The ESA, like many other industry associations, can be a good thing. But it can also be a bad thing when it claims to speak for all its member organizations.

It’s refreshing to see a developer standing up for this.

Genki Bowl VII

Tom Chick’s quick review of the Genki Bowl VII DLC for Saints Row: The Third has prompted me to write some thoughts I was saving for tomorrow.

He says:

The Genki Bowl DLC is weird for weird’s sake, and frankly, it’s not even that weird. A giant ball of rampaging pink yarn is just an immutable Katamari. The new pink catwomen homies are no stranger than the costumes you’ve probably been wearing all along. A pink convertible with mounted flamethrowers sure would be cool in a game without VTOL cycles, TRON tanks, and a moon buggy.

I want so much to disagree with this, but I have to say that I’m unfortunately disappointed with this first DLC pack in much the same way.

The Third was a great ride and definitely worth my money, and to support Volition for making it I dropped the money on the season pass for the DLC sight-unseen. But Genki Bowl VII is missing almost everything that I liked about the base game itself.

It’s a series of derivative diversions that aren’t as fun as the material that they are supposed to push to the next level of crazy.

Apocalypse Genki is a harder and more confusingly-laid-out version of Super Ethical Reality Climax. Super Ethical PR Opportunity is an Escort mission, just not as difficult or novel. Sexy Kitten Yarngasm is the Tank Mayhem diversion but without a cannon and with hangups on the world geometry. And Sad Panda Skyblazing—though a unique diversion that’s like nothing else in the game—is an exercise in frustration that’s over as soon as you figure it out.

The bonuses for completing these things aren’t even very interesting, especially if you are playing with a character that’s already reached the endgame. There’s little enjoyment to be had in running them co-op (though it does decrease the difficulty a bit). And there’s a moment in the closing cut scene where it’s blatantly obvious that they didn’t record lines with The Third‘s uniformly excellent voice talent.

I had high hopes for the DLC based on my experience with the base game—but it was such an over-the-top piece of performance art that perhaps anything they do at this point is going to fall short.

Ben Kuchera + Penny Arcade = Potential Awesome

Tycho:

There’s an incredibly short list of people I trust to tell me the truth about the industry, even if I don’t always want to hear it, and Ben Kuchera is on top of that list.  You may already be a reader of his at Ars Technica, where he’s been in charge of their gaming coverage for…  well, ever.  Until today, I guess, when I hired him.

We’re bringing him on to create industry coverage you can read without holding your nose, essentially; I want a perspective, I want a Curator for the Internet’s gaming content.  In a couple words, I want something less insulting and disposable.

Ben has ben one of the best voices in games news for a while now and I am extremely interested in seeing what he will be able to do with this move. This is a good thing for the state of games “journalism” and news reporting.

So like the opposite of the Kotaku Core announcement.

Genki Bowl VII

I bought the Season Pass for it as soon as it was in my hands, but the first DLC for Saints Row is released next week:

It is known by many names: “The greatest specatacle in sports,” “The most dangerous game,” and “Holy [redacted] I can’t [redacted] believe I [redacted] [redacted].” It is the one, the only, Genkibowl VII!!

As a special surprise, the Professor has allowed his very own Genki Girls to theme the new games after themselves. Sail through the skies with Sad Panda Skyblazing. Fight through dark, shark-infested jungles in Angry Tiger’s Apocalypse Genki. And crush your way to victory in Sexy Kitten Yarngasm. But don’t forget to help Professor Genki maintain his excitement before any public appearances in Super Ethical PR Opportunity.

I am hoping this is exactly the kind of insanity that I think it is going to be.