I don't have a conventional 2020 list this year. Sure, I played a few games actually released in 2020, but for the most part I played older games. I went in and cleaned up the first two games in The Bard's Tale Trilogy , and got started on the Thief of Fate , a game I originally played in my early teens. Somehow I have 70+ hours with most of BT3 left to play through. This 'remastered' trilogy o...
As much as I hate linking to Elsevier, this paper seems interesting . Selling violent video game solutions: A look inside the APA's internal notes leading to the creation of the APA's 2005 resolution on violence in video games and interactive media Abstract For decades politicians, parent groups, researchers, media outlets, professionals in various fields, and laymen have debated the effects pl...
Technical Notes on the Puzznic Level Format (PC/MS-DOS) This post contains some technical details regarding the file format used by the MS-DOS version of the Taito puzzle game Puzznic . Puzznic PC/MS-DOS options. Compression Headerless LZW with variable length code words ranging from 9 to 12 bits. The string table can contain a maximum of 2^12 (4096) entries. The initial table for codes 0 throu...
Jay Frechette just announced joining Respawn as community manager. This week I joined @Respawn as Community Manager. Thrilled to be working with these amazing people. pic.twitter.com/Pn70TRfw7W — Jay Frechette (@JayFrechette) September 15, 2016 This presumably means Abbie Heppe is no longer there. There's been no announcement of her leaving that I can find, but I hope she's well. From twitter i...
If you don't recognize the term The Osborne Effect , here's the description from wikipedia: " The Osborne effect is a term referring to the unintended consequences of a company pre-announcement made either unaware of the risks involved or when the timing is misjudged, which ends up having a negative impact on the sales of the current product. This is often the case when a product is announced t...
Officially supporting the PSVR on the PC, via something like OpenVR, would be a win for everyone involved. Sony, presumably making a profit off sold units (plus cameras, controllers), would enlarge their potential market to be larger than any one of their direct competitors, ultimately driving down costs through scale, and driving up profits through sales. Developers too enjoy a bigger market,...
I'm crying because I just learned that Ryan "Taswell" Davis died last week. I didn't know him outside of Giantbomb. I came to giantbomb because I learned of Jeff from his firing drama, and thought "there's a man with some integrity", and I fucking respect that. Started listening to the bombcast. In the beginning I couldn't even separate the voice of Jeff from Ryan, which just seems idiotic toda...
(In a previous blog post I ranted about the latest rumor regarding MS having yield problems fabbing their large APU for the XBone, and promised a follow up with some possible implications...) So, let's look at some #potentialscenarios ASSUMING that the rumors are true. ( Remember all that cloud-computing nonsense? Makes sense they'd trott that out if they knew they there were...erh... dark clou...
There's a rumor that Microsoft are having problems with the XBone. There's been rumors before that they're behind on software, but these latest rumors pertain specifically to the hardware and the combination of eSRAM and GPU. The rumor is saying that they're having yield problems, specifically related to the eSRAM. I will now go on and speculate widely. You have been warned. It is claimed that...
Pierre Terdiman, a developer on nVidia's PhysX, have put up a blog post called " The evolution of PhysX " with benchmarks over several PhysX versions and Bullet , an open source physics engine. "I felt compelled to also include the last version of Bullet (2.81), to provide an objective external reference. The thing is, there are many people out there who still think that “ PhysX is not optimize...
The review is almost unreadable. Graphics; The choice to use a small image instead of industry standard text is very odd. It's also very short, at less than 150 words (estimated) you can read it in well under one minute. On the upside, loading times are great. Sound design is non-existant, and the silent music track gets repetitive after a while. I give it a ten out of ten.
There's a growing trend with the type of anonymous online gaming found in games like Journey and Demon / Dark Souls . I just recently found out about this cool little game called "Way" through the Let's Play by Deceased Crab ( part 1 , part 2 ), though it seems to have been around since at least 2011. "Way" is a (forced) cooperative platforming'n'puzzle game where you can only make it through t...
Did one man alone resist when Zynga bought out Draw Something developer Omgpop ? His reasoning is one I share, especially with regard to being able to fully own and control projects I make on my own time. "Zynga has an Austin studio, where several good friends of mine work. Yet I had never applied to Zynga. Why? Because the company's values are completely opposed to my own values, professionall...
So this is a thing (follow through to the shop ). Anyone tried them?
Something just came across my screen which made me feel both sad and a bit angry. Morgan Webb, host on G4TV and reviewer for X-Play, tweeted : https://twitter.com/#!/MorganWebb/status/98484038662242305 " The best cake ever!!!!!!!!! Thanks Id and Bethesda! !!! I can't bear to cut it! http://t.co/zLq9Vs8 " I realize people in the business receive all sort of crazy promotional items; drinks, figur...
I've been meaning to write about this since I first completed Mass Effect 2 early this year, but with the new Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood video demo (which basically showcases the idea, though probably a bit less ambitious) out I'll cut my own ambition about a larger article short and settle for this blog post. CENTRAL ARGUMENT : Mass Effect 3 need to have a team away-mission management compo...
Graphic Adventures - Being a Mostly Correct History of the Adventure Game Classics by Lucasfilm, Sierra and Others, From the Pages of Wikipedia Graphic Adventures - Cover "Did you love to play graphic adventures as much as I did, and want to learn more about them? The book Graphic Adventures is the mostly correct history of the adventure game classics by Lucasfilm, Sierra and others, from the p...
Just discovered this amazing DMA Design history project site. DMA Design deserve their own page IMO, I'd create it on the spot if I knew how.
Like Gish (and Penumbra and game called Lugaru ) before it, the source for Aquaria was recently released. Unlike Gish however, with its quite horrible C, Aquaria is written in C++ and the code base looks to be in great shape! It is also quite a bit larger and more difficult to understand in some ways, but that's them deals. It's interesting comparing the two games, codewise. Aquaria can be stud...
I hadn't heard of this game before, but I saw over at slashdot that this physics-based platforming game called Gish had had its source code released (as is usual, only the code has been released, not the resources), so I had to take a look at it. Here's a video of the game: The code though. Wow. The code is a huge mess . No doubt it'll get cleaned up now that it's out. I'm not going to go into...