Gaming Signal: February 2008 Archives

Thursday February 28, 2008

Real Feedback

Jeff Atwood (a decent programming blogger over at Coding Horror) recently had a post about listening (or not in this case) to your users if your role is a software developer. As a part of that post, he referenced some information that I didn't realize was available. Valve has posted a slew of information about how people play their games.

For example would you care to make a guess as to how much RAM the average user of Steam has? 38% have 2GB or more. 25% have less than one GB. Amazingly, over 2500 poor souls have less than 255MB. Wow. And Realtek has come to dominate the sound card market - Creative can't be happy with that. For more on the hardware specs, you can take a look at them here.

If you go to the main stats page you can also get some interesting stats about different Valve games including the time taken to complete certain games including the classes most often played in Team Fortress 2 and the most played Half Life 1 mods. Sweet.

Wednesday February 27, 2008

Quest Quiz???

In what has to be a moment of genius, the folks over at Joystiq managed to capture some unique interviews with some of the developers who have built adventure games. The sad thing is that they only did this bit with three folks: Mike Stemmle, Steve Purcell, and Ron Gilbert. But the positive end was that they chose some really great folks to ask this archetypical adventure game question. I am reiterating the question here since I am interested to see what sort of answers we would get, but it is one I would like to see asked of more developers. Now onto the puzzle:

You're standing in front of a cave. The goal is to get inside the cave, taking care to foil the ferocious robot bear guarding the entrance first.

You have in your inventory:

(1) perforated parasol
(1) rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle
(1) sealed manila envelope
(1) miniature macaroni Tim Schafer statue

What do you do?

Tuesday February 26, 2008

All Points Bulletin - The Crackdown MMO

Realtime Worlds, the guys behind Crackdown, instead of working on Crackdown 2 are actually working on a new MMO called All Points Bulletin. But looking at the article, you can see that APB is really pretty much Crackdown in an MMO environment. But with a bunch of interesting ideas thrown in.

Check out this trailer for APB's 'cops and robbers' gameplay.

I'm up for some new ideas in MMOs, maybe this will fit the bill?

D&D Insider looks pretty impressive!

boingboing seems to have an exclusive on their hands with an article on "D&D Insider". It's not a game but actually an emulator for tabletop D&D 4.0 play. I seem to remember discussing something like this in one of our game sessions. Looks like someone else saw how useful a laptop (or lug your desktop to game night) could be for D&D. Pretty awesome!

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/02/25/exclusive-gallery-du.html

Friday February 22, 2008

Champions Online Trailer

Champions Online, the new MMO from Cryptic Studios, the MMO that lets you create your own custom powers, now has a teaser trailer.

Become all tingly below:

Wednesday February 20, 2008

Spacetime Studios at GDC

We've mentioned Spacetime Studios before. They are an independent development house working on the SF MMO Blackstar.

They are at the GDC, actively seeking a publisher for their game. To get things rolling, they've posted a 20 second clip of in-game action.

Parts of this remind me of Earth and Beyond (which isn't bad), with a lot more out-of-ship action. If they can pull off interesting travel/exploration in both space and dirt side, they will have my undivided attention.

Of course, it could just be a one-click grindfest like EQ/2. Spactime is being tight-lipped over game features at this point. I'm still watching them though.

Sunday February 17, 2008

Objectivism and Bioshock

Even if you haven't read any Ayn Rand, you probably noticed the philosophy espoused by Andrew Ryan in Bioshock. Just in case you didn't know, it's pretty much Rand's Objectivism in game form. Now I know Tim is going to love this: Brian Crescente at Kotaku has posted an interesting article (a first!) on Objectivism in BioShock.

His launching point is Yaron Brook's, president of the Ayn Rand Institute, reaction to the game. A thoughtful look at Objectivism, and how it works in the game, ensues.

Who knew whacking Big Brothers could be philosophically stimulating? Who knew Crescente could write something that isn't full of juvenile meanderings?