July 2010
2 posts
4 tags
Meeting the Needs of Players
I had a brief conversation on Twitter with the designer Alexander Ocias. This is the same guy who made the very interesting Loved, which is a clever piece worth a few minutes of your time to play through if you haven’t yet. Anyway, I saw this tweet of his:
I’ll include a function in my games to turn off the audio the same day I include a function to turn off the graphics. And the...
3 tags
Nitpicking a Classic: Castlevania: Symphony of the...
I saw a couple weeks ago that the classic Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was on sale on Xbox Live for five bucks, and I decided to take the time to revisit this old classic. It’s a game with a remarkable reputation: it frequently shows up near the top of game critics’ “best-of” lists, and deservedly so: it’s an excellent game. It’s loaded with secrets,...
April 2010
1 post
4 tags
Final Fantasy XIII
Final Fantasy XIII is getting an outstandingly bad rap in the gaming press. Metacritic rates it as the worst Final Fantasy ever, though I don’t know how worthwhile that metric is (I’ll never understand the logic of the critics that lauded the deplorable Final Fantasy VIII, which was a bad game at its release and is a bad game now.)
Say what you will about the pacing, the plot, or...
March 2010
3 posts
“This egregious, unethical practice [charging for a random chance for a better...”
– David Sirlin, on “money-driven treadmill games.” Brilliance from Soren Johnson et al. here.
4 tags
Class-Based Design and Team Fortress 2, Part 1
I said earlier that I wanted to talk about the dynamics of Team Fortress 2, and here it is. In my earlier post about Star Trek Online, I discussed the challenges of designing a class-based team multiplayer game. I will define a “class” as being a pre-configured set of abilities (or ability options) designed with the intent that a) most abilities are unique to configurations, b) most...
3 tags
Exploring Strange New Worlds in MMO Design
I managed to get my hands on a beta key for Star Trek Online before the game’s launch. I approached the game with a sense of cautious enthusiasm. On the one hand, the game had switched developers, design paradigms, and guiding concepts during its development cycle. On the other hand, if the game carried through on its promise to offer the experience of being a part of the Star Trek...
February 2010
2 posts
3 tags
Chime
If there’s one genre I’m an absolute sucker for, it’s abstract music games. Whereas games like Rock Band and DJ Hero try to replicate the experience of playing music, abstract music games (Rez, Lumines, Vib Ribbon, and the like) eschew that goal for the simple objective of trying to connect the player to the music. So when I heard about the music puzzler Chime, I figured it...
2 tags
Seth Killian Doesn't Get It
Capcom’s community manager Seth Killian, usually fairly on-the-ball with his analyses of community trends, totally drops the ball on the issue of unlockable disc content:
DLC costs money because it costs additional money to create. Those costs are the same, regardless of whether the created content gets delivered on a disc, or as a download. I can understand wanting as much as you can have...