#games (175 links)
- Hyper Light Drifter | Indie Action RPG heart-machine.com
Games for your iPhone and iPad can be pretty hefty. By the time a media-rich title’s done expanding after download, it can easily munch 1 GB or more of your…
- Discord - Free voice and text chat for gamers discordapp.com
Discord is always completely free to use with no gotchas. This means you can make as many servers as you want with no slot limitations. Wondering how we’ll make…
- Deathwatch - Tyranid Invasion rodeogames.co.uk
- How GOG.com Save And Restore Classic Videogames | Rock, Paper, Shotgun rockpapershotgun.com
“Hunting for distribution rights is essentially detective work,” says Marcin Paczyński, Head of Product at GOG. “Rights can repeatedly change hands or be split…
- Mastering Transistor – Tips From The Developer gameinformer.com
- Supergiant Games - Transistor supergiantgames.com
Transistor is a sci-fi themed action RPG that invites you to wield an extraordinary weapon of unknown origin as you fight through a stunning futuristic city.…
- Shadowrun: Dragonfall harebrained-schemes.com
Shadowrun: Dragonfall – Director’s Cut is Harebrained Schemes’ biggest Shadowrun game to date, and the definitive Shadowrun RPG experience available on PC. Now…
- Run An Empire - A real world strategy running game runanempire.com
In Japan, they play Monster Hunter everywhere. You’ll see groups of people in parks and cafes, or on packed commuter trains, handheld consoles clutched in their…
Yuck. Dark patterns.
- The Life And Death Of Skyrim’s Lydia | Rock, Paper, Shotgun rockpapershotgun.com
Via jamesholloway.
- The Multiplayer Battle Between Steam and the Mac App Store | The GameAgent Blog! blog.gameagent.com · Archived on
Including handy cross-platform "Aspyr Games With Multiplayer" status
- Typing Karaoke typingkaraoke.com
I did not. But then I am not an architect or spouse thereof.
One goal of this was to figure out how much of the variance in score comes from the tile order and how much comes from the board, given that a tile order would be expected. It turns out to be about half-bag, half-board. [...] The blank is worth about 30 points to a good player. [...] The Q is a burden to whichever player receives it, effectively serving as a 5 point penalty.
Via kevan.
- The Wine Adventurer - Ale Trumps thewineadventurer.com
Ale Trumps® features a selection of 34 of the UK's top ales and is played along the lines of other Trumps games, under the following categories: the age of the brewery, its production level, the strength of the beer, its depth of colour, its rarity and refreshment potential.
- The Post That Cannot Possibly Go Wrong | MetaFilter metafilter.com
- Can’t play, won’t play | Hide&Seek - Inventing new kinds of play hideandseek.net
Gamification is the wrong word for the right idea. The word for what’s happening at the moment is pointsification. There are things that should be pointsified. There are things that should be gamified. There are things that should be both. There are many, many things that should be neither.
Soho! is a game of skill and judgement for 2-6 players of all ages inspired by the two things for which this small, historic patch of London is famous around the globe: its pubs, and its one-way system.
"Let's Gamify The World!"<br /> <br /> No, let's not.
- Pawned. Gamification and Its Discontents slideshare.net
Excellent presentation from Playful 2010.
Via tomtaylor.
- GameDevBlog: Story Games - My New Obsession gamedevblog.com
Raph Koster once said he became disillusioned with games because, after working to come up with a method to universally describe them, he realized that they're all basically math. And that's yet another reason why story games are so freaking cool - they aren't. (Well, technically they are, because the universe is math, but you know what I mean.) With D&D it's pretty easy to see through the story through to the underlying math. But with some of these story games, it's the story that matters - the math just pops up on occasion in service to the story, to resolve disagreements or escalate.
Via infovore.
- Hacker News | Yes, and that's an important observation. I'm not willing to accept that it's im... news.ycombinator.com
I'm not willing to accept that it's impossible to create a legitimately enjoyable game experience in the confines of the short attention span Facebook model, though. Scrabble, for example, lends itself perfectly to asynchronous, light, casual play (cf Scrabulous, Words with Friends). But it's legitimately fun at the same time. You're rewarded for imaginative approaches to solving problems. You can play with no skill or lots, but either way, you'll always find ways to get better. Most important: You're genuinely spending time with your friends. Sharing an experience that creates a memory. This is a big deal. This is missing from almost every other pseudo-social game.
- Game Mechanics - the new black - Jon Carder joncarder.com
"Over the next decade we’ll see game mechanics become ubiquitous amongst companies. Consumers will migrate in droves to companies who properly deploy game mechanics because doing business with them is more fun, rewarding and even addictive." Makes me feel slightly queasy.
Reference. Refusal to actively compete/collect.
Via momorgan.
My error in the first place was to think I could make a convincing argument on purely theoretical grounds. What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art. That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games. This was pointed out to me maybe hundreds of times. How could I disagree? It is quite possible a game could someday be great Art.
There were a handful of records released in the late 70′s and early 80′s that contained computer programs as part of the audio. This is totally insane, and totally great.
"I remain convinced that _in principle_, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say "never," because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form."
"Mattel said there would be no hard and fast rule over whether a proper noun was correct or not." Had to double-check the date on this. April 6th.
- The Escapist : HeartGold and SoulSilver's Pokéwalker Requires Thousand Mile Trek escapistmagazine.com
"Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver are sold with an included Pokéwalker, which is a pedometer that can provide neat extras in the Pokémon games. Pokéfans can put Pokémon in the device and also use it to find items along certain "routes." According to Bulbapedia, unlocking every route in the Pokéwalker can only be done by walking a minimum of 1,000 miles."
- Less Talk More Rock- Boing Boing boingboing.net
An entire generation seems to have become used to experiences clogged with menus and text, spammed with awkward cutscenes, choked by voice acting, mangled by incongruent narrative, segmented by load times, stalled by informational messages. These elements serve to undermine the aesthetic coherence of the work -- they can dilute the magic, they can interrupt the flow, they can disrupt the basic audiovisual communication, they can break the spell.
Via infovore.
This is brilliant. But argh, Farmville. "The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness."
- GDC 2010: Design in Detail: Changing the Time Between Shots for the Sniper Rifle from 0.5 to 0.7 Seconds for Halo 3 « Double Buffered doublebuffered.com · Archived on
Some notes from the session Design in Detail: Changing the Time Between Shots for the Sniper Rifle from 0.5 to 0.7 Seconds for Halo 3 presented by Jaime Griesemer from Bungie.
Via infovore.
- Game Design, Psychology, Flow, and Mastery - Blog - External Rewards and Jesse Schell's Amazing Lecture sirlin.net · Archived on
"The unspoken premise of [Jesse Schell's] DICE 2010 lecture is that people are prisoners to external reward systems. "External reward" is practically a curse word to me, a thing I'm ever vigilant against. I don't need experience point systems giving me a false sense of mastery, or Xbox "achievements" for watching the opening movie of a game (that's a real one). But people absolutely are driven by external rewards. So much so that Schell doesn't even question it, he simply takes it as given."
Via infovore.
Are some games intentionally designed to keep you compulsively playing, even when you're not enjoying it? Oh, hell yes. And their methods are downright creepy.
Via shrinkwrapped.
Why, then, did we throw everything we'd learned out the window when it came time to design achievements? I think that's what bothered me about early Xbox Live achievements more than anything — as goals, they violated too many game design guidelines. Too many of them wouldn't make any sense as in-game goals for progressing through content.
Via paul.irish.
"A player's motivation is more complex than "to have fun." Think on it closely and you'll agree – everyone plays to scratch a particular itch, and some games serve some itches better than others. While plenty of the details are complex and subjective, it's possible to divide play motivations into four different groups."
Because we are so fixated on what the next thing might be, we hurry to get the current thing out of the way, even if that means doing the minimum required rather than playing with style. In this sense, games’ standard strategies of motivation are strangely demotivating.
With Love, we’ve got a pristine world with its own complex set of rules, ripe for discovery. One of the downsides of playing a game like World of Warcraft is that everything’s been done, every problem solved, every nook explored. In Love, nearly everything needs to be worked out. If you play Love now, you’re doing the work of a pioneer.
Via headlessness.
- BBC News - Video games recognised by Ivor Novello awards news.bbc.co.uk
Writing music for games also requires a number of specialist skills compared with conventional film scoring, such as non-linear and multi-layered composition.