Category: Games

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Ben Kuchera, interviewing the CEO of Days of Wonder:

Hautemont joked that Google created a platform so open that it’s barely a platform anymore. The physical versions of Ticket to Ride are a specific size, and it takes a non-trivial amount of work to make that game fit well on digital devices with comparatively small screens. The good news is that with the iOS platform you need only aim for two screen sizes to hit 100 percent of all devices.

Things are not nearly as simple when you look at Android as a whole. “When you take [a game] to a platform that has dozens of different form factors, screen ratios, and so on, the work is not quite as simple. The question for us, it’s not that I don’t like Android… the question is how could we do that in a way that is satisfactory, and that’s when things start falling apart.” Everyone wants a version of Ticket to Ride that plays at least as well as the iPhone or iPad version, and they want it to run perfectly on their own phone or tablet, running their own version of Android. Trying to deliver the quality Days of Wonder is known for across all the variables of Android is simply cost prohibitive, and Hautemont has no interest in lazy ports.

Besides, there’s also the issue of customers paying for the game.

The Android ecosystem simply makes things too hard for both developers and users.

There’s something to be said for simplicity.

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Harry Monogenis for Destructoid:

Beatshapers and Tribute Games have announced that Wizorb will be made into a PlayStation Minis title and launch on the PSP, PS3 and PlayStation Vita sometime “in June” with a $3.99 price tag.

The Vita version is sold. I tried this game out as an Xbox Live Indie, but couldn’t bring myself to purchase it (a common trait to all XBIG games for me).

It’s a great fit for a handheld.

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Etsy listing:

This listing is for a custom knit baby Mega Man suit. It includes a knit helmet, arm bands, long booties, and a diaper cover/soaker. All items are knit in 100% wool yarn. This Mega Man suit is knit in bright blue, with lighter blue accents. I can make this in virtually any color combination you would like. If you’d like something other than the blue, please include your color choice in the notes to seller at checkout, or through a convo. If no alternate colors are specified, the set will be knit exactly as shown here.

FRIGGIN’ RAD.

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Jim Sterling:

You can’t count on a publisher to be original or inventive when it comes to our entertainment, but they always seem brilliantly innovative when it comes to selling us more crap. Sony is today’s bright little star, having patented a way to inject commercial breaks into your play sessions.

Sigh. As if the Dashboard ads on Xbox Live—a service I pay to use—weren’t enough.

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EFF:

Television networks are having a busy month trying to stamp out new TV-watching technology, including telling a court that skipping a commercial while watching a recorded show is illegal. Yesterday, Fox, NBC, and CBS all sued Dish Network over its digital video recorder with automatic commercial-skipping. The same networks, plus ABC, Univision, and PBS, are gearing up for a May 30 hearing in their cases against Aereo, a New York startup bringing local broadcast TV to the Internet.  EFF and Public Knowledge filed an amicus brief supporting Aereo this week.

What’s next? Putting a camera on my TV to make sure I don’t leave the room while the commercials are on?

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The celebration of this was yesterday, but I couldn’t not post it.

Sean McIndoe:

For those who don’t follow hockey, or who didn’t follow hockey about two decades ago, or who find themselves wondering why the one Toronto fan in the office has spent all week wearing a black armband and irrationally berating anyone who has nice hair, this Sunday marks the anniversary of one of the most notorious missed calls in hockey. It’s been 19 years since the night Kerry Fraser didn’t call Wayne Gretzky’s high-stick.

Detroit fans have plenty of hate still hanging around for the guy, too. Every time I see him as an analyst on TV I got a little reflexively grumpy.

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Lily Burana for the New York Times:

What brings the tears to my eyes is not just the bereaved young woman, but the Marine who stands behind her. In an earlier photo in the series, we see him building her a little nest of blankets on the air mattress. Sweet Lord, I cry just typing the words, the matter-of-fact tenderness is so overwhelming. So soldierly. But in this photo — the one that lives on and on online — he merely stands next to the coffin, watching over her. It is impossible to be unmoved by the juxtaposition of the eternal stone-faced warrior and the disheveled modern military wife-turned-widow, him rigid in his dress uniform, her on the floor in her blanket nest, wearing glasses and a baggy T-shirt, him nearly concealed by shadow while the pale blue light from the computer screen illuminates her like God’s own grace.

I believe this photo has had such a long viral life not just because it is so honest but also because it is so modern.

For a lot of people, Memorial Day has become something that’s more about a day off work, cooking out, and sales at your favorite stores. It’s yet another thing that we’ve seen fit to over-commercialize until lots of people don’t even know what it really means.

Read the whole thing. Sadly, the Rocky Mountain News is no more, and I wasn’t able to find the original piece on the shell of a website they have left.

UPDATE: My buddy Ken found some related photos in a slideshow at the Times here.

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If you regularly play games that require manual scorekeeping, you should check this out:

It’s from Matt Rix, the guy who made Trainyard (which was coincidentally enough one of the games discussed in the article I linked yesterday).

The static screenshots of the app didn’t convince me, but seeing it in motion really sells it. It’s a universal app and it’s free for a limited time.

Thanks to Lance Willett for pointing me to this.

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That’s right; I backlogged a game! In between Gears 3 and MW3 and everything.

This is going to be brief, as there’s not a lot to be said that hasn’t been already. The tl;dr version is that if you find a cheap copy of this and you like Mass Effect 2-style RPG action titles but aren’t picky about a riveting story, you should give this some time.

Things I liked:

  • Neat ideas like putting conversation options on a timer to force you to choose
  • Consistent attitude-based conversation options were easy to understand
  • Conversation and mission choices actually had a noticeable effect on the game later
  • Espionage is a great idea for an RPG setting
  • First story twist was delivered early enough that I didn’t see it coming

Things I didn’t so much like:

  • Bad script, disjointed story, good voice talent, but bad voice direction = meh overall story impact
  • Every character is a striking archetype; there are few surprises
  • The main character is barely likable
  • Final story twists come all at once and make the endgame a total disaster
  • Suffers from typical Obsidian half-doneness

Things I hated:

  • Game design lets you make decisions that you might not want without any kind of warning because of bad level design
  • I don’t think I ever saw a character smile, except maybe that one time
  • Combat is uninspiring (even broken a lot of the time) and pistol proficiency is an “I win” button for boss fights
  • It’s an RPG with boss fights
  • Helicopters

Alpha Protocol is an espionage-based RPG, which was enough to get my attention when it was in development (I think this is a logical RPG setting). However, it hit some pretty rough reviews when it was released, so I tabled the idea and certainly wasn’t going to drop $60 on it. I had the opportunity to snag a copy for about $12, and I’m pretty happy I did.

The game does a very few things right but mostly throws out a few promising ideas that don’t seem to have been given enough time to bake. At first I found the game to be really exciting and novel, but as it wore on I realized that it was falling back on old ideas and in the end wasn’t particularly engaging. The characters were memorable enough and the stable of voice actors was pretty great—it’s too bad that the words they said weren’t as memorable, nor was the voice direction solid. A lot of the story came across as flat.

The largest sin that it committed in my eyes was that it tried to take the story threads and characters from the first three missions and then weave them together in the final mission as some kind of cohesive story. It didn’t work and just served to cheapen the impact of the choices that were made earlier. It felt like the writers ran out of ideas and had to stretch beyond their abilities.

That said, I did manage to enjoy it pretty well in spots and put in a couple of pretty long play sessions with it, so something was going right. At less than $20, it’s a decent buy if you like action RPGs. Just don’t expect anything revolutionary. I think it would have been a decent franchise to revisit in a sequel with some additional polish, but as it didn’t sell very well that’s not likely to happen.

It gets a “hm, this was interesting yet flawed” from me. Honorable mention goes to Nolan North’s turn as Steven Heck, which was one of the better parts of the game.