In 2007, Jason Rohrer created Passage, a game that brought art to video games in a new way. Boyer sat down with Rohrer at GDC for a preview of his new game. The game requires two players, one to play and one to be the non-artificial intelligence. Boyer’s piece is beautifully written and designed. I really love what Boing Boing is doing with publishing.
I just purchased Heavy Rain for my PS3. It’s been getting fantastic reviews, but I’ll talk more about the gameplay after I make some more progress.
In order to play the game, you need to copy a multiple-gigabyte-sized installaition package to your PS3’s hard drive. It takes about 15 minutes. Quantic Dream, the game’s developers, obviously knew this, so they included a graphical sheet of paper with the game and displayed instructions for building the origami figure featured prominently in the game.
When people talk about user experience, this is the kind of thing I like to bring up. Quantic Dream knew you couldn’t do anything else and you’d likely be annoyed at the wait, so they gave you a fun task to while away the time. Before I even played the game, I loved it.
Gnilley is a game where you yell and it kills your enemies or opens a secret passage or does something awesome. Instead of explaining it more, I suggest you watch the awesome video.
The video shows a demo made for the Global Game Jam, but they’re working on making a full version. This seems like the perfect game for parties and pissing off your neighbors.
Panic collects some stunning video game boxes produced by Accolade between 1984 and 1990. The Killed Until Dead box is my favorite and nothing like anything out there now.
Remember the Canabalt Scoreboard I built a while ago? I decided to add a couple things. Semisecret, the game's creator, is going to be adding a global leaderboard in the next update, so I thought I'd some things that will remain useful and parse some of the data.
Historical Data
Since I started tracking data on October 4th, I've captured 25k scores. As of today, the average score is 3965m. When you break it down by the type of death, it's 3728m (fine mist), 4082m (hit wall) and 3686m (fell). I think it does a decent job of showing what obstacle is hardest to avoid (hitting a building above or below the window).
If you go to the site and click on the stats tab, you can also see a list of the highest score for each day since I've tracked scores and a pretty graph of how people are dying, broken down by day (seen to the right). It's also an interesting look into how often people are posting their scores to Twitter which I imagine correlates closely to total usage.
User Scores
You can also now look at all of the scores you've submitted. For example, here are mine and here's iSpacemanSpiff, who has the highest score right now. If you want to look up the scores of anyone else, just go to the main page and do a search.
More Information
I have other data I'd like to get up there, specifically the average score per day, to see if people are improving overall. And if any of you like the graph, I built it using the Javascript library, Bluff. I like it a lot and have also been interested in using High Charts, but that's fodder for another post.
The more I build this out, the more I think this would be a useful tool for developers. I know many collaborative FPS and MMPORG games use stats to change how the game works and I think iPhone developers with global leaderboards could learn from this data too.
"If you bought a Wii over the last few years to play casually with family and friends, New Super Mario Bros. is not the game for you. If, however, you are an old-school Nintendo fan who laments that the company has spent so much time and money chasing soccer moms and grandparents with so many recent concessions to accessibility, New Super Mario Bros. is just what you've been waiting for." Pulling out the credit card now...
I don't want to over-Canabalt all of you, but bear with me as I get this out of my system. Below are a few items, some of them obvious, that might make the game a little easier for you.
Going too fast? Run into a box. The game takes longer, but going slower makes it a lot easier.
Tapping the screen more lightly results in a lower jump.
You can play the game using your own music. If you have a song playing when you launch the app, it will lay the sound effects over that. If you are a serious nerd about it, you could have a song that is silent so you can focus on the sounds of the game.
When a bomb is dropped, it makes a noise one building's-length before it lands.
A bomb always lands in the dead center of the building
The NYT profiles the new Rock Band: Beatles. Best quote by far, "The Rock Band Network is so potentially consequential that Harmonix went to great lengths to keep its development secret, including giving it the unofficial in-house code name Rock Band: Nickelback, on the theory that the name of the quintessentially generic modern rock group would be enough to deflect all curiosity."
Robocop is my favorite song off the latest album and this video with all-original artwork, created by myk31, makes me happy. There are Double Dragon, Mega-Man and Punch Out! references, to name a few. I encourage you to watch it big, in HD. I also encourage you to check out the artist's site. He's got plenty of cool illustrations.
It won't be out this year, but there's a lot of potential here. Each piece has been done in various ways, but the video demo shows a seamless experience. I'm hopeful the product lives up to everyone's high expectations.
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