by ·Comments Off on Pavlov’s Keyboard

Today I added a new page to the site:  Games!

This is in fact for games that I myself have created.  My current project has been to try and get a game finished, and I have achieved this!  As with anyone attempting anything vaguely creative, getting projects finished is a big deal for me and even though this is a small project, I shall instead be celebrating ever so slightly this evening.

The game is called Pavlov’s Keyboard and is available to download for free.

The game is about memory and conditioning.  As an experiment it doesn’t completely work, but as a learning exercise it’s been fantastic.  Regardless, I now have the tinkering bug, so maybe I’ll get some more projects on the go and finished off.

I’ve really taken inspiration lately from the Indie Games movement and hope to join their lower-hobbiest-ranks with a bit more practise and dare I say it effort.

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As is occasionally the case, it can take a Flash game to  shake you out of a feeling of vague frustration when it comes to games. 

May I refer you to  a game called Time Goes By (Via Red Tower Games) which is strangely beautiful, the first stage in particular.

There are undeniably a couple of little frustrations with the game, but for the most part it has a wonderful feel to it that lifted me up ever so slightly.

There is often a question that gets bandied about various sites as to whether games can ever classify as art (Or as I have genuinely seen the question raised once “Is gamez art?”) and for the most part, we are stuffed into a general “not really” answer, but things like Time Goes By here are the sort of thing that raises the answer closer to a “sometimes they can”.

by ·Comments Off on Gaming Frustrations Part 2: Assassin’s Creed II

There are two things to note about the title of this post:

1)      Read aloud it sounds like the score from a football match.

2)      This looks like it is following on from an earlier post.

Number 1 is of course wrong, and number two is misleading.  I was originally going to talk about Assassin’s Creed II in my previous post but I got caught up discussing the binary nature of existence.  Needless to say, also on my to-finish list was the slightly more recently released Assassin’s Creed II.  This doesn’t really need you to have read part one, but maybe there’s a theme.  They’re both published by Ubisoft and I think they use the same game-engine, so that’s something I guess.

Just a quick note, “frustrations” might be the wrong word for this one, because I realise now that I’m not really frustrated with this game so much, just moderately baffled by something it managed to do, but I wanted to have a couple of blog posts with “Part 1” and “Part 2” after it to make it look coherent, despite the fact that they’re really about different things.

This post is spoiler-riddled so if you’re interested in not knowing how this one ends, look away now and come back another day.

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by ·Comments Off on Gaming Frustrations Part 1: Prince of Persia

I’ve held back from going off on one about computer games for quite some time now, because quite frankly there are a million and two other sites and blogs out there that will always do it better.  However, it’s probably unavoidable as I have been maintaining a lifelong love affair with games and still do to this day along with many other refusing-to-grow-up individuals such as myself who continues to baffle parents as to why we haven’t grown out of this yet.

I have a strange condition whereby over the last couple of years, I have become increasingly susceptible to marketing, advertising and the hype machine of modern society that wants you to spend money on the Next Big Thing.  I blame this on working a boring nine-to-five week and then being sucker punched by gimmicky adverts that promise a little glimmer of excitement, but that’s beside the point.  The point is, that as a result of this condition (lets call it buying-new-things-syndrome:  BNTS) I have made a few purchases that have then somewhat languished as I either haven’t had time to use them or they just haven’t held my attention for the same amount of time that I expected them to.  This is in particular relevant to various games that I may or may not have bought over the past couple of years and then left to sit on the shelf in a state of semi-completion.

Yesterday evening and this evening, to relieve a little bit of angst-ridden stress, I decided that I’d cross what I could off my “to finish” list.  Behind the cut, I shall be talking about the rebooted Prince of Persia, so if by any chance you don’t want to know the score, look away now.  There may be spoilers, although at this point, considering that the game has been out for over a year, if you even know what I’m talking about, chances are these spoilers are akin to finding out that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father*.

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by ·Comments Off on 10 Different Ways to Play the World of Warcraft
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As a point of argument to suggest that this game is probably considered mainstream by now, I picked up this image from the website of the Daily Telegraph.

I’m writing this post for three different reasons.

1)  I want to put another post up.

2)  I love Warcraft unconditionally despite the abuse it puts me through.

3)  I hear lists are fun.

It is no surprise to anyone who has played any game of any type, be it on a computer, with a deck of cards, or on a board, that everyone has different ways of playing games.  Just as Monopoly can range from a light hearted exercise in casual sparring using passive business acumen to a three-day friendship breaker ending in somebody having to call an ambulance, any Massively Multiplayer Online Game can be played in many different ways.

I’m going to look a little closer at some of the ways I’ve witnessed my own particular online poison of choice being played.

If you have absolutely no interest in online games, or in Warcraft in particular, feel free to skip this post.

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