The message for the games industry is clear: you don’t have to have pretensions to art – because here is a game that could not be more unpretentious in an artistic sense – for your game to have a serious message. Even the manshooter can be about something, without having to carefully distance itself with irony or hyperbolic absurdity. But crucially there is also scope to do shooters differently on a mechanical level. They do not have to be linear rollercoasters, nor multiplayer menageries. They can be slow. Even contemplative. -Jim Rossignol, “On The Importance Of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” @ Rock, Paper, Shotgun
A blog for those who spend more time thinking about gaming than gaming
Featured
Hard Reset Review
Disclaimer: Blade Runner was not harmed in the writing of this review.
For those potentially coming fresh off Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the cyberpunk action-adventure of the moment (also included on our list of recent cyberpunk titles), Flying Wild Hog’s début throwback FPS Hard Reset might take some getting used to. After …
ReadInterview with Epic Games’ Jay Wilbur
Since its inception in 2008, the Dubai World Game Expo has been the annual showcase for game developers in the Middle East. In the last few years many western studios have taken an interest and have come to sponsor or give panels, including CryTech, Blizzard Entertainment, Electronic Arts, and Epic Games.
Epic had a large presence …
ReadRecent
Most viewed
Latest Post: Quote of the Day: Jim Rossignol
10/12/2011 – 15:32
Recent Activity
Comments
- That is a cool quote alright. by qptain Nemo in Quote of the Day: Richard Garriott
- Nicely written. Poor guys. Hopefully... by Richard Griffiths in The Indie Stone: Brave-Faced & Hard-Headed
- SALAM confirmed for sand nig retard. by Anonymous in Vindictus: MMO, Hack and Slash or Dungeon Crawler?
- Thanks for the comment, CWolf. You’re absolutely right, it... by Nabeel Burney in There Is Something In The Sky
- Nice write up. The video looks pretty cool. I’m a little worried... by CWolf in There Is Something In The Sky
- @RockstarGames Xperia Play and Xperia Pro have comparable specs. Is there a specific reason the game supports the former but not the latter? in reply to RockstarGames 1 day ago
- [NB] I'd love to see Dark Souls on the PC. Looks like I'm not alone: http://t.co/Rp3bIU27 http://t.co/RxDbLvPr #DarkSouls 3 weeks ago
- [NB] Have a very Happy New Year from all of us at the Slowdown! May 2012 bring us happiness, success, and more awesome games. 3 weeks ago
- http://t.co/YOabcpzt Nuclear Dawn is -70% on @GamersGate today! 2011-12-15
- Ooh - @secondquest belong to the .vg club! Woo! 2011-12-15
- More updates...
Sticky: Gemini Rue (P)review
24/02/2011 – 17:19
Gemini Rue, an IGF 2010 Student Showcase winner under its previous title, Boryokudan Rue, is Joshua Nuernberger’s first full-length commercial title that successfully follows up on the promising path already travelled by the developer’s first adventure game title, La Croix Pan. Dave Gilbert’s Wadjet Eye Games is to publish the game today, 24th of February, and a demo was made exclusively available at GameFront yesterday.
The game, a film noir/sci-fi adventure, is of two separate halves: Players control Azriel Odin, with the help of his partner Kane Harris, sneaking into the colony of Barracus in search of an informant known as Matthieus Howard. Interwoven between Azriel’s sections also figures the mysterious prisoner-patient Delta-Six, an amnesiac confined to and conditioned in a sterile facility with totalitarian, Pavlovian means.
An equal split between the two halves exists not only narratively, but also visually: On the surface of Barracus (a “New Pittsburgh,” as it is described), where habitable conditions are sustained by weather towers, where the constant presence of rainfall plagues the colony, its hammering rattle contrasting strongly with the sterile silence and cleanliness of the facility Delta-Six remains confined in. Where Delta-Six is a silent, worn-down man deprived of his humanity and personality, Azriel is a keen-eyed man of action and freedom, constantly entangled in danger, shootouts and the narrowest of escapes.
Quote of the Day: Rich Lawrence
07/12/2011 – 20:01
Most of the key people involved in this publish, on the game team and our platform side, have been here very long days and every day leading up to this. I just had to tell some folks that had been here for 30+ hours to go get some sleep. If there was any way I thought we could be certain you’d be able to play with everything correct tonight, we would have done that. -Rich Lawrence, SOE CTO, on the EverQuest II F2P downtime
Quote of the Day: Richard Garriott
05/12/2011 – 18:37
No, I did all the art, I did all the sound effects, I wrote every line of text, I wrote every line of code, I wrote all the manuals, the prequels and all the way up though Ultima 4 were almost entirely solo endeavors, in every aspect. It was a one-man band. -Richard Garriott, in interview with IndustryGamers
Quote of the Day: Terry Gilliam
02/12/2011 – 19:51
“You just sit there and watch the explosions,” Gilliam said. “I couldn’t tell you what the movie was about. The movie hammers the audience into submission. They are influenced by video games, but in video games at least you are immersed; in these movies you’re left out. In films, there’s so much overt fantasy now that I don’t watch a lot because everything is possible now. There’s no tension there.” -Terry Gilliam @ Hero Complex
When Are Bad Ideas Good Ideas? Goats vs Nazis and Dropsy
25/10/2011 – 17:17
Kickstarter, bless ‘em, have made possible many projects that would have been much, much harder for indie developers to initiate only a few measly years ago. We’ve seen plenty of really interesting projects receive funding via the platform, including Kentucky Route Zero, Octodad 2, Star Command and Blade Symphony.
Goats vs Nazis, then, is the latest game project to kickstart their development with the platform.
I don’t even know where to start – or end, for that matter. Certainly, Goats vs Nazis looks to be one part game, nine parts marketing campaign – heck, that’s exactly why we’re mentioning the project on the blog! The actual novelty value of juxtaposing goats to nazis is obviously up to the funder/player/developer to decide. If you DO feel that it’s a good idea, then off to Kickstarter you go!
As if Goats vs Nazis wasn’t enough for just one post, I also stumbled upon Jay Tholen’s Dropsy. Dropsy seems – by my estimation, anyway – to be a Windows-bound point and click adventure game about a… clown… that is manic, depressive or both? The hero, “hand-less, unintelligible, and questionably human” … “will also encounter colorful characters and mind-stretching logic puzzles in surreal, off-kilter landscapes”. Sounds a notch like Toonstruck to me.
Other than that, I haven’t the faintest idea as to what is going on here. But fret not, for there be video! The Kickstarter video gives you a fantastic idea of what you might be getting. (You’ll be getting crazy, that’s what you’ll be getting). Keep in mind that Mr. Tholen has set the funding bar for the game very, very low indeed, so don’t be afraid to pledge just because the measly sum of $225 has already been fulfilled.
P.S. Can’t believe I just wrote this post.
Rage in Numbers
21/10/2011 – 22:00
At the time of writing, the main support topic for Rage on the Steam forums has been viewed an amazing 475,000 times. The comparable thread on Bethesda’s forums – a whopping 140,000 views.
In addition to the most egregious issues with texture popping above, Vsync, Anisotropic filtering and texture quality settings were only added in a patch. The first (1st) and only (1) patch. Certainly, omitting these more fine-tuned customization features in this day and age is not in the least unheard of, but finding the paragons of the PC platform since 1991 – Id Software – as the offending party is rather inconceivable, even in a gaming world where Crytek, Epic and Rockstar Games have long since bailed out.
The texture popping above is related to the game’s texture Auto-Balancer, which somehow tends to load and utilize 4096k textures instead of the much crisper 8192k (or the gargantuan 16384k textures that take most of the game’s 21659 Mb install size!).
More puzzling yet is the inability for players to bind numpad keys properly – especially the number 5(!?) – leaving left-handers in a proverbial bind. Different mice and keyboards are exhibiting various symptoms as well.
Let’s not even mention the 64-bit executable. …or lack thereof. Let us however mention the missing idstudio level editor, which is apparently dependent on the very same 64-bit .exe.
To wrap up this terribly clever post before things get utterly out of hand, we could take a look at the game’s collector edition (check out the comparison photo on the left), which comes bundled with a Rage comic that not only is 2/3 the size of the normal issues, but also only contains 2/3 of the Rage story arc. Boom!