Gamesugar

March 25, 2010

The Word, Gaming’s Second-Class Citizen

Filed under: Editorial Rants — Jamie Love @ 7:08 pm

The Word
That damn Michael Tucker has derailed my entire day by posting a link to that very fine read, Less Talk, More Rock. I’ve read it eight times now while consuming coffee and having a short twitter back-and-forth with @the1console about it.

At this point I’ve emerged with a few thoughts, aside from a small bout of jealously over not having written it myself.

So let’s talk about the role of words and language within videogames, because that’s what reading the post so many times got me thinking about. And before I start, I’ll stress that I don’t feel the article implies that designers should abandon language within gaming, it simply got me thinking about the way language has been treated within gaming – which to date is very poorly and owing almost entirely to the way the industry has treated language as a tool rather than an additional artistic form of expression.

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Less Talk, More Rock

Filed under: News Feed — Michael Tucker @ 12:45 am

morerock
Superbrothers on the language of videogames:

A project starts with an idea, a vision, something that is hard to define, something kind of magic and amazing. This is step 1. This is gold. This is beautiful. You can’t yet see the details, but you have a sense for thing you want to make, and hopefully you’re swept away by it.

Usually in the creative process, the next step — step 2 — is to think about the project intellectually, to talk about it, to look at it from various angles, to plan it out, maybe to second guess it or to problem solve it, maybe reconsider it a bit. This is the talk.

The next step, step 3, is to actually make this thing, to get down to it. This is the rock. And we like to think that the process goes from 1 to 2 to 3.

This, they say, is not how things always are, thus sometimes you must rock before talking.

Less Talk, More Rock

via: Drawn!

March 24, 2010

Review – Just Cause 2

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 1:12 pm

Just Cause 2
Spending the weekend with Just Cause 2 feels like the videogame equivalent of the days when children received live ammunition as Christmas gifts, unleashed on the neighborhood to a world of seemingly limitless possibilities. Reaching for a more reasonable explanation, it was a very short ride through the fixed narrative opening before I was free to fly a jet fighter over the island of Panau, able to jump out of said plane and enter into a free fall, activating the parachute just as the buildings below slowly shifted into focus, and then proceeding to spray targets on the ground with machine gun fire. And within moments I was being attacked by a helicopter gunship, which I then grappled onto, taking out the crew and using the chopper to finish the job I’d started.

The short of it is that whatever you’re doing in Just Cause 2 has the curious ability to make the previous outrageous action seem boring in comparison. So the game is filled with opportunities for self-fulfilling over-saturated hyper-violence – and God help me I like it. The “it only does everything” nature of the game is the focus of the PR push and essentially what the back of the box conveys.

And yet it’s the little things that pulled me into taking a longer vacation in Panau. The little things are the spice of life after all, and Just Cause 2 has more than enough to prove itself a zesty game taco among the sandbox set.

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March 23, 2010

Revisiting Perfect Dark

Filed under: Editorial Rants — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 4:33 pm

Perfect Dark
I’ve been pretty wrapped up in the nostalgia of revisiting Perfect Dark since it’s revamped release on XBLA, one which gives the series enough relevance that those inclined can wax on about their attachment to Joanna and why the continuation of the franchise should be a top priority for Microsoft – such as myself.

If you only took one element of this release away with you in deciding whether it was worth 800 MSPoints, it’s hard to ignore just how much “game” Rare managed to wedge into that N64 cartridge so many years ago. If the narrative solo missions and visits to the Carrington Institute aren’t enough to keep you occupied, the multiplayer options provide an experience that scream for life on LIVE. And of course Perfect Dark offers up co-op mission play, but more importantly offers the counter-op alternative that is probably one of my favorite multiplayer experiences to date.

Setting my obvious enthusiasm aside however, there are plenty on the flipside of the positive, for whom the game is simply too dated, with a design approach to the genre too far out of line with modern FPS releases. Naturally I don’t agree, but rather than simply telling those people to suck a lemon, it seems worthwhile to revisit an element of Perfect Dark that elevates it’s old school status beyond the age of its release to show that it still has energy enough to teach us something about what the console FPS is capable of.

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The Post in Which We Speculate About the 3DS

Filed under: Editorial Rants — Tags: , , , , , — Sam Scott Given @ 12:53 pm

3DS
On today of all days (obviously to commemorate Ben and Jerry’s free ice cream day), Nintendo decides to slip out a nifty press release about their upcoming successor to the DS, the 3DS. The press release is lacking on a lot of key details, which means we get to speculate as much as we want until they tell us more.

The largest gap of information has to be about the screens. “…on which games can be enjoyed with 3D effects without the need for any special glasses.” 3D? without glasses? Well, there are a handful of routes this could take us. The main method everyone’s mind is jumping to is one recently popularized by the DSiWare game “Rittai Kakushi e AttaKoreda” – which roughly translates into “Hidden 3D image: There it is!”

What this game does is use the forward facing camera in the DSi to look at the face of the person playing (more specifically the light on the face) and tilts the environment in the game to make it appear as if you are looking into a diorama of sorts.

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March 21, 2010

SugarRush – Episode 1

Filed under: SugarRush — Tags: , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 12:30 pm

SugarRush
[podcast]http://www.gamesugar.net/podcast/SRE1_gamesugar.mp3[/podcast]
Hey Kids! It’s the very first episode of Sugar Rush – the Gamesugar Podcast – so start jumping and screaming right now!

Also consider pressing play, because we’d appreciate it.

For our first swing at the mic I’m joined by co-host Michael Tucker, who knows much more about Pokémon than I do, despite my time with HeartGold this week, and Poké-expert Kyattsuai drops by to school us in the Pokéarts and make us question whether you really can catch them all.

But wait, there’s more! Somehow we convinced 4cr’s Gregory Gay that he was doing their podcast while talking Perfect Dark and proving that no matter what we discuss, we’ll always turn it into more debate about Other M – though we also take time out to talk about Valve as often as possible too, assuming Tucker doesn’t pass out from flu meds.

[direct download] [RSS Feed]

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March 19, 2010

Catching Up With Heavy Rain

Filed under: Editorial Rants — Tags: , , , , — Rey Ortega @ 7:39 am

Heavy Rain
Let me make this clear right off the bat, Heavy Rain is a videogame. You may have heard, from other gamers or websites, or from David Cage himself, that Heavy Rain is some kind of tectonic shift in the way we think about videogames. In fact, the first trophy you receive is called “Interactive Drama – Thank you for supporting Interactive Drama”.

Heavy Rain might still be all of those things, but that isn’t for us to decide, not right now. In the future, if we see more games of this kind expanded upon, then we can talk about Heavy Rain’s place in history. For now though, and for the purpose of this post, we need to look at Heavy Rain solely as a videogame, and on that note I’m happy to report that it’s a good one.

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