Game talk

This is the catch-all category for stuff about games and game design. It easily makes up the vast majority of the site’s content. If you are looking for something specific, I highly recommend looking into the tags used on the site instead. They can narrow down the hunt immensely.

  • Imitating life TOO closely

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 6 Comments

    Spotted via New World Notes: Ryker Beck’sTutorial For Photoshopping Avatar Skin Imperfections.

    Yes, that is right, we are now to the point where we not only have to cover over the imperfections in real people, but also in non-real people.

    This is a good example of what I mean when I talk about the fact that we have imported a bit more of real life into virtual worlds than may be strictly healthy. On the Internet now, people now know you’re a dog thanks to voice, increased realism, etc — but at least you’re an airbrushed dog.

  • Windows Mobile games you can’t have

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 18 Comments

    At least, according to their new “app store” style marketplace (coming this fall) policies, laid out in this file: MarketplaceContentPolicies.pdf (application/pdf Object).

    • Any content with prolonged and/or excessive use of firearms or weapons or other content that facilitates the use of firearms or weapons
    • Any content that depicts decapitation, blood splatter, killing, gore or cruelty
    • Any content that depicts excessive violence
    • Requests or instructions to injure or otherwise harm a specific person or group of people
    • Repeated blows or shots inflicted upon people/creatures, violent blows to the head, guns/weapons pointed at head, impaling, exploding body parts, guns/weapons pointed towards reader/audience, depictions of fatal injuries, strangulation/choking, inflicting wounds with swords/knives
    • Excessive and gratuitous amounts of blood and/or fleshy body parts, blood spurting from wounds
    • Cruelty to animals
    • People/creatures on fire

    Gotta love the specificity. How do you get gratuitous blood– or any, for that matter — without depicting guns, knives, blows, choking, swords… Guess we won’t see Plants vs Zombies, N+, Prince of Persia or any Tom Clancy games on here…  I also like the “guns pointed at reader” which seems explicitly created to prevent the James Bond title sequence from making an appearance. 🙂

    Hmm, so Space Invaders… do they count as creatures, I wonder?

  • UO goes to China (again)

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 11 Comments

    EA to redesign Ultima for China, sez the news.

    Of course, we have been here before, sort of. Some anecdotes:

    • During the early days of UO, when PKing was rampant, we notice a major issue in servers hosted along the Pacific Rim — much higher rates of PKing, harassment complaints, etc. We dig in, and it turns out that we were seeing lots of warfare and animosity between players from Asia and players from the US.
    • Hong Kong servers suffered for a while from triad gang wars being imported into UO. Guilds would form that matched the gangs, and the streets of Britain would run with simulated real-life blood.
    • Years later, I visit China, and I am surprised that anyone even knows who I am, since China never officially got a UO release. I was told that UO servers running either pirated servers or gray shard servers probably hit as many as 400,000 players across China.

    The article I have read on this doesn’t offer a lot of details, but I think there is a fair amount of potential for this project.

  • An interesting industry picture

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 12 Comments

    At present, Newell explained, games [AAA ones, anyway! – Raph] require an investment of between USD 10 million and USD 30 million before development can even begin. “There’s a huge amount of risk associated with those dollars and decisions have to be incredibly conservative,” he said.

    Valve: Gamers should fund development // News.

    Meanwhile on the other side of town…

    yep, there are 300 games  a day coming on the iphone.

    @deantak, aka Dean Takahashi, journalist

    and

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