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Tuesday 27 July 2010
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PR
Playstation owners won't have failed to notice the hype around 3D and Move. The latter is – of course - Sony's answer to the Wii. A handheld motion controller and camera system that promises to offer greater control and gaming opportunities, Move will be big news this Christmas. Meanwhile 3D is seen as a hugely important part of Sony's future. The PS3 is already 3D enabled – complete with some games too, luckily – and 3D TVs are in the marketplace. I recently took a look at both Move and some of Sony's upcoming 3D-enabled games – including Killzone 3 and Gran Turismo 5. Continue reading...
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Monday 26 July 2010
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Privates: sex education with small arms fire...
Three years ago Janey Walker, then head of education commissioning at Channel 4, came to an important realisation. At the time, the channel was broadcasting its education content as part of the morning schedule and most of it was going out during term time. Challenging and confrontational programmes like Crip on a Trip and Gay to Z were being aimed straight at teenagers – but the teenagers were at school missing it all.
Meanwhile, this fickle target audience was beginning to watch less broadcast television anyway. Alternative entertainment options like mobile phones, games and social networking were drawing young audiences away from terrestrial TV. Sticking out a few edgy documentaries during school time just wasn't cutting it anymore.
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PR
Those wacky characters from Toy Story 3 dominate the UK's game chart as well as the box office this week
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My gaming time was spent - as it has been for the last couple of weeks - on Xbox Live Arcade. Deathspank and Limbo mainly but also water racing game Hydro Thunder Hurricane. More thoughts on the latter soon. What has become obvious is that download games are often every bit as polished as their full-priced competitors. The downside is that prices seem to have risen. 1200 MS points (about a tenner) used to be a relatively rare price point but now it seems to be the going rate
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Friday 23 July 2010
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I've been spending most of recent gaming time on Xbox Live Arcade. The hugely addictive Deathspank and the charming Limbo are particular favourites. Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light has the potential to be as good as both of these. Out in August, here is the latest gameplay trailer. What do you think? And anyone else playing a lot of XBLA or PSN download games at the moment?
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Secret of Monkey Island: a lateral thinker's paradise...
You may well remember the first time you were ever stuck on a game puzzle. For me, it was Scott Adams' vintage graphical adventure, The Hulk, and it involved killer bees; I don't recall much else. This was the age of text-based classics like Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and The Hobbit, in which the solution often relied on you entering exactly the right verb-noun phrase: 'Go North', 'Dig hole', 'Kiss monkey' – ah, the memories. For many veteran gamers, the words "I'm sorry, I can't do that here" still bring about paroxyms of frustration.
But as games evolved, puzzles evolved too. Soon they were environmental, requiring the discovery, combination and manipulation of seemingly random objects. From Ultimate's Sabreman series in the ZX Spectrum era to the likes of Uncharted and Assassin's Creed today, we're continually shifting blocks, turning dials, and figuring out how to utilise seemingly random inventory items.
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Thursday 22 July 2010
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(Capcom, DS, winter 2010)
Sissel is an amnesiac ghost who has the power to turn up at murder scenes and rewind time by four minutes in order to save the victims. Out of this curious high concept, Shu Takumi, the original creator of the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney series, has crafted an intriguing puzzler, with super stylised anime visuals and an interesting interface that involves possessing inanimate objects. As the trailer intro points out, the game was highly regarded at E3 this year.Let us know what you think!
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Tactics Ogre: isometric tactical brilliance.
There are sections of the Gamesblog readership that I know will swoon with happiness at this news. Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, the classic tactical RPG originally released on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1995, is coming to the Sony PSP. An updated version of the game, complete with reworked visuals, soundtrack and game systems, has been developed by members of the original dev team, including director Hiroshi Minagawa.
Tactics Ogre, which like all tactical RPGs features intense and complex turn-based battles fought across an isometric landscape, was a key title in this hardcore sub-genre, earning plaudits beside the likes of Final Fantasy Tactics and Konami's Vandal Hearts (the latest instalment of which turned up on XBLA and PSN earlier this year).
The game has never secured official PAL release (UPDATE: though as Lazybones rightly points out in the comments section below, the game's predecessor and its N64 sequel are available on Wii's Virtual Console). Until now, European gamers have had to rely on imports, mostly of the re-packaged US Ogre compilations – this despite the fact that Tactics Ogre is an absolute legend in Japan. As Square's press release modestly points out, the title appeared in the Japanese gaming magazine Weekly Famitsu's 'Top 20 games voted by readers' for 14 years running.
There's no word on a release date yet, but hopefully this will kick off a tactical RPG landrush, with Sega's Shining Force III and Sony's Arc the Lad II following close behind. Any other favourites you'd like to see re-born?
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Shadowrun: the beginning – and end? – of the cross-platform FPS dream...
Dozens of video game news sites have picked up on this blog post written by Rahul Sood, the co-founder of Voodoo PC and CTO of HP's gaming business. He claims that Microsoft ditched a project to allow competitive online gaming between the PC and Xbox 360, because console owners couldn't compete:
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Wednesday 21 July 2010
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DeathSpank: spanking good fun from Ron Gilbert and co.
In video games, as in politics, nothing much happens in the summer. The publishers have finally managed to usher out all those late releases that should have been launched last Christmas, and by July, they're already looking ahead wistfully to the autumn. So unless you've saved up a little batch of neglected RPGs and epic open-world adventures, you might be forced to go outside and lob a frisbee around for the next six weeks. Shudder.
Luckily, however, downloadable digital content has come to the rescue. This summer will see a veritable picnic of digi-gaming treats on Xbox Live Arcade (which celebrates its own annual summer festival), Wiiware and PlayStation Network. Here are five to look out for...
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On Technology
Last 24 hours
- 1. Games Chatterbox Column Tuesday
- 2. If Apple wants to be a major player it needs to start behaving like one
- 3. Microsoft apologises over race-swap gaffe
- 4. Playstation Move and 3D - hands on impressions
- 5. Sex, death and government oppression: how Channel 4 is re-inventing the educational video game
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