More Indie Games: Offworld’s best of 08 list
I don’t have a list of my own to offer, but The Offworld 20: 2008’s Best Indie & Overlooked is a pretty good list!
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Fishing Girl
Fishing Girl screenshot As many of you know, my friend Dan Cook does game prototyping challenges wherein he creates and gives away art and a base game design, and then invites whoever wants to pick the the challenge to make a full game.
Often, the art from these pops up in unexpected places — there’s certainly a few worlds on Metaplace that are using the tilesets that Dan has donated to the community!
Well, one of those challenge games has gone commercial and seems to be doing fairly well in terms of popularity on Newgrounds. A Web developer dove headlong into Flash and created a lovely an atmospheric version of the “Fishing Girl” challenge. Dan then encouraged him to commercialize it.
Check out the review here at JayIsGames, and of course, check out the game itself here: Fishing Girl.
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The Retro Remakes Competition 2008
It has been a long week — lots of 12 hours days. I have a huge backlog of polished, AAA, commercial games to play. But instead, I find myself drawn here:
The Retro Remakes Competition 2008 Entries : Retro Remakes.
At the company’s holiday party we were just talking about the old Bruce Lee game… and there it is. 🙂 Controls just as stiff as ever, too! And there’s Fort Apocalypse…
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Anatomy of a meme, or why games journalism is iffy
It is like playing a giant game of telephone.
Accurate (The Guardian):
Game designer Raph Koster picked up on a forum thread about recruitment consultants and WoW.
Wrong stuff starts creeping in (Games Campus, which also wins a prize for the headline “How to be jobless in a down economy”):
Raph Koster at Massively picked up on a thread at the f13 forums in which we learn that a recruiter in the online media industry has been told by employers numerous times to straight-up avoid World of Warcraft players as potential hires.
Completely wrong (Softpedia):
Employers Don’t Like World of Warcraft Players
They make bad employeesOnline gaming journalist Raph Koster has posted on his blog a statement he received from a job recruitment consultant accurately showing that even though some people cite the leadership experience gained from establishing a guild in WoW, employers tend to avoid such persons.
Not only did this little story bring down the blog, but it also managed to reach the Times of London, Silicon Valley Insider, etc etc. Yeesh.
Of course, this comment on BoingBoing did crack me up:
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WordPress upgraded
We are now running the latest.
Once again, we triggered an automatic shutdown at the host. I blame the WoW/hiring story, which made it to the Times of London, the Guardian, and hundreds of other sites.
