by ·Comments Off on Steam and Digital Distribution

Last week in talking about constant internet connection requirements, I mentioned Steam, a digital distribution service from Valve, one of the most respected, beloved and successful studios.

Steam is a service where you can buy digital copies of games and manage them under a single utility. You can download your purchases to any other machine you own with Steam installed, it will update and patch your games automatically, it will resolve several troubleshooting issues for you, and you can even maintain a friends list making it very easy to jump into multiplayer games with people you know.

The service also requires an internet connection to function properly, and is a form of digital rights management and not only restricts but prohibits the resale of games that you’ve purchased.

I initially was never a fan of Steam because I didn’t like my games all being tied into a single service and didn’t like being held hostage to an intermittent internet connection, but more recently I have come to accept the service. It gets my seal of approval just because it provides enough extra value to justify what it takes away from me. It did this by offering me older titles that I can no longer get working on my modern machine fully patched and running fine, by offering me newer titles for prices that are less than a pint and by introducing me to the world of crashing other friend’s multiplayer games and all of us as a result grabbing impromptu unplanned entertainment.

However, Steam is not without its drawbacks and in my view can only operate in a vacuum. There are several other companies that are trying to do the same thing and this could make for an awkward gaming landscape in the years to come.

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by ·Comments Off on Swordquest

Games can and should entertain.  They can be frivolous or deep.  They can be artistic or irreverent.   They can be funny or they can be grim dark and serious.  Sometimes, a game can inspire.  Swordquest is one of those inspirational games.

First of all, a quick confession.  I have never played the Swordquest series, but being inspired by this series isn’t quite as simple as just the games themselves, but their whole construction, what approach they took and the wider context of their release.

Swordquest was a series released for the Atari 2600 in the early 80s when video gaming was still finding its feet and developers were still experimenting with what they could do.  Just about everything that came out for the Atari were highly abstract due to the limited technical prowess of the console and when looked at today appear almost like impressionist art.  In fact, a lot of indie developers today are enraptured by the impact of pixel art that stems from playing games on machines like the Atari.  The Swordquest series is no exception to these trends on the machine but represents something greater and shows a potential for games that has yet to be realised again.

Swordquest was a competition.  It was a game where players would ultimately be fighting against each other to win real world treasures made of actual precious metals and gems and the fighting would take the form of a series of punishing puzzles and lateral thinking exercises.  This is nothing short of exceptional.

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by ·Comments Off on The Death of the Arcade

The gaming press often rolls out the odd nostalgic piece about arcades and how they were the prototype for gaming as a social activity and introduced hundreds and thousands of people to the hobby.  I often read these with a certain amount of awe as the gaming landscape they describe might as well be from Mars for all the sense it makes to me as I’ve never had an arcade experience in this way.

An arcade is a large, normally noisy, room full of game cabinets that eat your money in exchange for a goes on any particular game.  In my experience spanning the 90s to today, the games situated within tend to be punishingly difficult side scrolling beat-em-ups or shoot-em-ups, fighting games along the lines of Street Fighter, racing games often complete with a steering wheel, pedals and gear stick, or shooting games with their own gun peripherals.  In the early days of video gaming and technically before my time, things like Pac man or Donkey Kong started off in cabinet sized machines and the arcade was in actual fact where you had to go to do your gaming before the advent of home consoles.  Until relatively recently, the actual computing power of an arcade machine was vastly superior to anything you were likely to have at home.  The early console versions of arcade games in the 80s were often mere shadows of their technically superior cabinet dwelling cousins.

I recently watched something by the highly articulate and ever insightful Bob Chipman about the death of the arcade and unusually, nothing really resonated in the episode for me because I have no fond memories of arcades.  This is partly because I suspect they were never quite such a massive thing in the UK, partly because I’ve lived in a very rural area for most of my life, and partly because whenever I was confronted with an arcade machine, they tended to be far too expensive.  I vaguely remember being confronted with the occasional arcade machine in pubs when I was growing up and being fascinated by the flashing lights and how exciting they looked, but even at a young age being knocked back by how much money you had to continually feed into the things.

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by ·Comments Off on Monday Morning Fuel: Desktop Dungeons

Here’s a beautiful little time eater for you.

Desktop Dungeons is a free turn based dungeon crawler game that is astonishingly difficult to stop playing and can be a challenge to the point of aggravation.

Each play through will be randomly generated meaning you’ll never quite play the same game twice and in order to get through it, you’ll need to think on your feet and use every available option to you.

The best part for me is that although it’s horribly addictive, each session will only last around 10 minutes, so you can play a quick round before you go and do something else if you’re willpower is up to scratch.

Of course, one of the other reasons I probably like this so much is because I’m such a sucker for pixel art.  By default, it looks something like this:


This is the sort of light-weight-with-substance game that is rare and effective.  You can have a quick bash around on it at lunch time or you can accidentally lose and evening to it.

Although still technically in beta, Desktop Dungeons is fully playable and already highly polished.  You can download it for Mac or PC at the Desktop Dungeons website.

by ·Comments Off on This Week’s Tortoises – 8-14 August 2011

This picture sums up my personal highlight of this week.

This week we have seen rioting in London, legal wrangling in the gaming world and I managed to find a needle in a haystack.  This weeks tortoises have been the following:

A little commentary on Bethesda’s trademark action in Trademark Trolls:  Scrolls and Bethesda v Mojang.  (I realise that looks like [Scrolls and Bethesda] v [Mojang] now but is actually meant [Scrolls] and [Bethesda v Mojang].  Some inadvertent eats shoots and leaves stuff there.)

My most popular post to date with The Return of the Cat, which makes sense because it’s about a cat and this is the internet.  I am seriously considering becoming a cat blogger (as in somebody who blogs about cats, not a cat who blogs).

Concern over the way that the media is trying to classify Technology as a Scapegoat with their remarks about how it was largely orchestrated through Twitter.

The aggravating nature of requiring Constant Internet Connections for Gaming and just how far the internet has come for this to be viable.

Another Tortoise Butler film with Portal 2 Music Video – Exile Vilify By The National in which highly talented people achieve deserted London shots by getting up at stupid ‘o clock, film high quality video clips in a short space of time, and I make posters and buildings that aren’t there in Photoshop.

A growing trend in iOS games for Delayed Gameplay Games which tell you when you can play and not the other way around (now with a wonderful comment from someone who I can tell has been deeply wounded by this sort of game).

This week’s iPad/iPhone Game:  Dream Track Nation, a simple time trial racer with buckets of charm.

We finish the week on two posts about how to make comics, with How to Make Comics Part 1 making soft reassuring noises that you don’t need a full blown graphic design studio and How to Make Comics Part 2 blowing simplicity out of the water by talking about my method of colouring things in using Photoshop.

 

That’s all for this week.   I hope you’ve had as productive and satisfying week as I have and have thoroughly enjoyed the weekend as much as I’m hoping to, as I am writing this on Saturday morning (which means I’m communicating with the future I suppose).  Also just want to give a small self indulgent plug, but I have now passed all of my NCTJ exams and am officially fully qualified as a journalist, so if you want to employ me for a commission or an actual job, drop me a line at davidDOTofDOThingATgmailDOTcom and we can talk!

-Ding