Hipster Shit “I've always thought that Joust thing looks like boring non-game hipster shit.” That was someone’s comment on a forum thread created to promote Sportsfriends, a collection of games (including J.S. Joust ) that has an active Kickstarter campaign as of this writing. The thread was started not by someone involved in Sportsfriends, but by a user of the website who was baffled by the la...
Quite simply: I’m baffled. I haven’t played Hotline Miami . I’m not going to buy Hotline Miami . I’m not going to pirate the game, either. I have no interest in playing the game because I don’t see what there is about Hotline Miami that isn’t pure adolescent nonsense. Feel free to correct me on any details, but I’m not giving the developers of this game the time or money required to play it. I...
“Let’s face it: Games, in general, suck.” Jason Rohrer said this in his wonderful “ The Game Design of Art ” article from 2008. Obviously, we haven’t faced it and such an indictment still rubs people the wrong way. Earlier this year, Taylor Clark wrote a portrait of Jon Blow that many saw as an ignorant slight against the medium they love so much. Though accusations of exaggerations in Clark’s...
I'm still waiting on my copy of the game to show up, but I just read something that I feel an urgent need to comment on. My opinion may change after being better-informed by, well, actually playing the game, but knowing that people are skeptical about the inclusion of multiplayer in Mass Effect 3, this RPS write-up about its influence on your playthrough's ending has me fascinated (the article...
For once, I'm making a game that's primarily for fun (no artgame pretense D:). I think it's pretty cool, but I could certainly use some feedback to make it as good as possible. You can find it here: http://www.devinwilson.net/WP/pit-chess-test/ The password is pctest. Thanks! Edit: playing it some more on my own, I think it needs to be more difficult. Maybe drop pieces on every move, but only i...
I don't know. So, there's some game jam thing this weekend. Pirate Kart V. I don't totally get it. It seems like an opportunity to make ridiculous games, but even if it's not, that's what I did. Maybe you've heard of Mad Dog McCree. Well, now there's Man Dog Macree . I hope you like it? Yeah, I hope you like it. Wear headphones. Maybe don't turn them up extra loud. Oh, by the way, IT'S SUPER DUMB.
I just finished playing Indigo Prophecy . Well, Fahrenheit, to be totally accurate. Now, seeing as this is a blog on a website about video games, I'm going to espouse my opinions of said video game. I really didn't like it! I completed it in basically one sitting, so it had my attention for a good while. Most of the time I wasn't way into it, but I was certainly interested in seeing how things...
I recently wrote a blog in which I kind of called out game designers for making uninteresting games. You can find it easily if you want to, but I'd like to open another thread to discuss a broader concern I have, one that certainly informed my wanting to write that blog in the first place. This isn't me trying to spam; I just wanted to open up a less formal discussion about it. see how informal...
Let me quickly preface this blog by saying that, in the following text, when I use the word “game”, I’m using it to describe any sort of digital, interactive thing that at least resembles a game. I participated in my first Ludum Dare this past weekend, and managed to pump out a game within the first seven hours of the competition (and another one in the final few). Obviously, it’s not a complex...
Hey everybody! I'm tired! It's past 4 AM where I live, but I'm happy because I just made a video game in less than 7 hours! You guys like video games, right? So, if you don't know, Ludum Dare is a game development competition in which game developers (including Notch , famously) have 48 hours to make a game based around a theme that isn't revealed until the competition starts. This time around...
Now, I love Minecraft . I love its look, and I've had a ton of fun playing in Hardcore Survival mode since its official release. I also love simply exploring the beautiful, procedurally-generated worlds. Most importantly, though, I love how well Minecraft illustrates some beliefs I hold about games: 1. All games are educational 2. All games express values I think that if you look really closely...
HEY EVERYBODY! If you have the internet and a computer that means you're reading this with your internet-connected computer (and your parents' permission, I hope)!!!!! I have a new game because I make games and if I didn't keep making new ones I wouldn't be able to say that I "make" games, it'd be more like I "made" games SO HERE WE GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO It's an experimental art "game" about...
So, a few weeks ago I got the crazy idea to write music every day. No, EVERY day. At least two measures. People who write prose try to sit and write every day, so why shouldn't I? If you're interested in following the results of this nonsense, I'm going to (try to) upload what I write every day to this tumblr . I may miss a day here or there (you know how things can be), or not be able to (easi...
I'm here to defend Matthew Rorie . THE MAN IS FOND OF PUPPIES. How you gonna play him like that? Well, I'm sort of defending Matthew Rorie. I'm here to argue in favor of Alpha Protocol . Admittedly, it's been a while since I finished playing it, but it comes to mind because I've been thinking a lot about interactive fiction these days, and reading Chris Crawford 's awesome book about it. Even t...
I'll only bug you guys about this after Friday if it's simply to thank you . I really need your help, though. Okay, so, if you've read my Child of Eden review, you know I'm a huge Tetsuya Mizuguchi fan. He's my game design hero (not to be confused with the upcoming Activision -published Game Design Hero). There's a game development contest over at Kongregate that I've submitted three entries in...
So, I saw on Twitter that SEGA is doing a weird thing. They're putting out a demo for Sonic Generations on XBLA / PSN for 20 days. I've downloaded and played said demo. It's Green Hill Zone from Sonic the Hedgehog . Now, I grew up playing a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic 2 . Sonic is etched into my most nostalgic of nostalgia centers in my brain. Hey buddy!! But not that creepy, green-eyed...
So, I thought Tron: Legacy was pretty rad. I thought the soundtrack was even better. So what'd the universe go and do? It offered an awesome remix album! Isn't that awesome? Evidence: D-D-D-D-DIGITAL FRONTIERS ALL UP IN THIS. I haven't spent much of my life listening to electronic music, so I don't fancy myself an expert on it...but if this album doesn't have some awesome highlights I'll derez...
Well, yesterday I had the brilliant idea to learn Fiixel in less than 30 hours so I could make a last-minute entry to the Kongregate Project Eden contest. I'm exhausted from coding and all that good stuff, so I'm not going to write a whole ton about it here. It's called ffShmup, it's available at the link above, and it's part of a contest that means an awful lot to me. I've submitted two other...
As both an entrant in and fan of the Project Eden music game contest over at Kongregate (which I won't directly link to, because I've annoyed everybody enough with that), I've noticed something about a specific kind of game, and this blog is just going to be me getting a very strong opinion off of my chest. Games that create levels based on music are never as much fun as they seem on paper. To...
Hey everyone, The game that I entered into the Kongregate Project Eden contest ( which could still use your ratings , as the contest is still going on) is now available on the iOS App Store and I'm throwing five promo codes at you fine duders. Here's the link to the game . And here are the codes: AXXL4FWM33K9 4P4FMWY33EXH 7EETHPPP9F6F R9734PK7TKE9 3YMWNYJ9K3LT Hope you like it! If you're too la...
So, I am a huge fan of Tetsuya Mizuguchi. Rez is the game that made me realize that games could be more than shooting dudes, jumping on goombas' heads, or scoring goals. Naturally, as an aspiring indie game designer, I freaked out at the opportunity to enter a game in a contest being judged by him over at Kongregate. I've spent the past month working on this game and it'll be available on the i...
Hey gigantic bombers, I make games at school. The one I made this semester is probably one of the best things I've ever done in any form of media. I think it's good and I hope you think so, too. It's named Dhp129 and you can play it at my website .
Hello! It's been a while since I blogged, but today I had two ideas on my mind that seemed like they could be expressed well in a blog! Here goes! Fake Poker is Dumb At first, I thought Full House Poker was free like 1 vs 100 was, as well as (for a time) the XBLA Texas Hold 'Em game. I watched the quick look and figured "this might be a decently enjoyable, easy way to get some achievements". Th...
Hey, I'm a really disappointed guy. Without going into specifics in this blog (because I don't feel like making a bad situation worse), I'd like to pose a situation to all the Giant Bombs in the audience tonight, and ask what they think the outcome should be. I entered a contest being held by a software company, of whose software I already enthusiastically use. Their software is free, but they...
I wrote this as a note on facebook and i want more than the hundred or so people i'm friends with to read it, so i'm posting it on a website about video games. if you actually read this, you'll realize that it's not about politics (which i'm internet-savvy enough to know is a sore subject). i just think that the sentiment is too important not to express to as many people as possible and i recko...
I'm almost done with my penultimate semester of undergrad at the University at Buffalo and, as such, I've been finishing up some projects this week. Here is my final project for my Virtual Worlds class, made with Unity . It's called On and On... and the title refers to the Tenori-On, a piece of hardware for making music designed by the dude behind Electroplankton , Toshio Iwai . If you like mak...
Hey! I'm makin' games and such at school and my professor wants me to do some honest-to-goodness testin'. If any of you delightful bomber giants would be kind enough to take a few minutes and play my (unfinished) game and give me feedback (via the survey I've set up), it'd be greatly appreciated. All you have to do is play a game and then click some buttons and/or type. You were going to do tha...
I wrote a review of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Spoiler: I found it pretty and pretty offensive. I feel bad simply linking to another page in a blog, but the movie (or, at least, it's appeal) is so deeply entrenched in video game culture and history that I feel like sharing it with the GB as well as the Screened is a must. Edit: if you are about to comment without reading the whole thread, kno...
The review made me feel like buying the game (though I was pretty interested already), but in his last paragraph he said something that made me shudder: This is a wonderful way for Capcom to build to the release of the full game. You might chafe a bit at having to pay for it -- I'd much rather have seen this as part of some sort of pre-order deal -- but you can't argue that Case Zero is not onl...
In a recent thread about the review process, someone brought up that they think review scores are bad and should be done away with. I'm not familiar enough with the debate to know why anybody would think that, though. Review scores are obviously distorted by publishers and sites like Metacritic (which I don't think is a bad site in itself; you can't just take the numbers ascribed to products at...
Wrestling is ridiculous. I don't think many people in the GB community will come after me for saying it's dumb as hell. However, I'll totally own up to the fact that I was a big fan as a kid. I would tape Monday Night Nitro and rent PPVs on VHS all the time. I had a bunch of wrestling action figures, rings, etc and of course I spent a lot of time creating my own storylines and matches with them...
In Fall 2009, I made a Flash thingie as a final project in a class all about digital media production. It's about chiptune, pop music, Timbaland, copyright infringement, and what happens when all those things converge! Do you like C64 ? Do you like Amiga ? Do you like Windows 95 shareware?! This has two of those three things in it! I figured now was as good a time as any to share it with my fav...
http://www.last.fm/music/Devin+Wilson I just uploaded a song I recorded more than two years ago: an improvised guitar solo over a metal version of "Chocolate Rain". I know, I know. Meme's old and people doing their own versions of it isn't the most novel idea, but I'm actually pretty proud of the solo I laid down. I think it was the second take I did and, other than a small mistake I made (whic...
I love Capcom's fighting games. But I already said that in the title. I suck at Capcom's fighting games. But, again: said it in the title. However, I think it speaks volumes about the quality of said games that I have a great time needing to play my best (which obviously isn't very good) to beat the CPU on normal difficulty and get my ass handed to me if I make the mistake of playing online. Ho...
Hey dudes and female dudes, I spent the past couple days putting my more recent compositions on last.fm. If you like Steve Reich, Cynic, Meshuggah, or listening to music written on a computer (because practicing and recording instruments is so 20th Century...or maybe just work I don't feel like doing now that I'm not in high school), stop on by. If you don't like one track, don't let that stop...
I've followed the Roger Ebert-inspired "Are games art or not?" situation to some extent and there are some positions that some people are taking in the debate that confuse or disturb me. The debate as a whole seems somewhat misguided, but I'll address the following points one-by-one first: "Games may not be art now, but who's to say they couldn't be in the future?" "Some games are art, but most...
So, Roger Ebert has previously come out and said that games can't be art. Now Ebert has come out and basically said, " Ugh, I wish I hadn't opened that can of worms. " So, let me blow your mind: Roger Ebert wrote a game review in 1994. In his latest blog, he mentioned a game I'd never heard of: Cosmology of Kyoto . He wrote a positive review of it in 1994 in Wired magazine. Say what? Anyways, I...
http://majornelson.com/archive/2010/06/22/sonic-is-19-years-old-let-s-celebrate-with-some-deals.aspx If you thought $5 was too much for any of the first four Sonic platformers for Genesis or just never got around to buying them, this Thursday Sonic is getting wasted on some Labatts and Molsons and will be (personally) cutting $2 off the price of each of his 2D Genesis platformers. For whatever...
http://store.steampowered.com/sale/ea_week Mass Effect is $4.99 today and Mass Effect 2 is $23.99. No excuses. I've played through the original twice on 360 and I'm considering buying it just 'cause.
If i had to pick a favorite game, the easy answer for me is Rez . For me, Rez was a game that made me take games seriously. I've had similar moments in other forms of media: 2001: A Space Odyssey made me realize that film could be used to tell stories more awesome than Raiders of the Lost Ark (not that Raiders ain't awesome; it definitely is) and Rage Against the Machine and CKY got me to stop...
It hasn't been officially posted yet, but I can't contain my excitement if this is true: http://www.gameguru.in/xbox-live/2010/07/xbox-live-marketplace-to-include-peggle-duke-nukem-3d-and-more-this-week/ $5 is a great deal for Peggle Deluxe and I've been debating whether to get Worms 2: Armageddon for a while now. $10 might be the right price for me to grab CoD as well. BF1943 is a super-solid...
Comparing films and video games is a dangerous thing to do. Why is that? Well it's because of how similar they are as well as how different they are from one another. There's the obvious difference of how passive a movie-watching experience is vs. how interactive video games are. However, when you really get down to it: a lot of films require more active engagement than some video games. 2001:...
I know this isn't the perfect venue and I'm probably speaking to the wrong audience, but I'd like to do something good. How good this thing is and if it's even significant at all is a subjective thing, or is it? That's kind of the subject I want to bring up. Meat. The Giant Bomb staff is composed of those who may, from time to time, talk about how they enjoy eating meat. The Giant Bomb communit...