With his tuft of beard and twinkling eyes, Stewart Kosoy looks more like a dungeon master than the co-founder and head of product development at a game investment firm. Perhaps that’s appropriate. After all, if you assumed that his job at Digital Capital suggests a degree of professional disinterest when it comes to the business of creating and selling interactive entertainment, you’d be wrong. Kosoy has been working in the industry for more than 25 years, and he got into the business in the same way that most people do: as a player.
One of the really magical things about games is that they have the strange power to make you feel so much better about life. Frustrated by work? I recommend Robotron. Tangled up with complex problems? Use Spelunky to shuffle your psyche back into order.
While the mere mention of Beyond Good & Evil is enough to make some fans teary-eyed, it won’t be memories of the game’s searing mechanical innovation getting them emotional. After all, Michel Ancel’s beloved action-adventure can seem conservative once you pick it apart.
Oculus Rift, a 3D virtual reality gaming headset, has reached its $250,000 Kickstarter funding goal three times over, and at the time of writing is closing in on $900,000, with a million surely only days away.
Oculus Rift, a 3D virtual reality gaming headset, has reached its $250,000 Kickstarter funding goal three times over, and at the time of writing is closing in on $900,000, with a million surely only days away.
Back in 2009, roughly a year after the global economic recession began, Gavin Raeburn did something drastic.
A physics-based puzzler where projectiles are fired, objects collapse and stars are earned: it’s easy to see why Rovio chose to take Snappy Touch’s Casey’s Contraptions under its wing. The rebranding process has seen the original’s rougher edges sanded down, though the focus-tested result isn’t altogether successful: Alex makes for a rather bland host, barely featuring beyond brief appearances at the end of a stage to smile gormlessly at your efforts.
UPDATE: Oculus Rift is not, as reported below, John Carmack's creation. The Id co-founder tweeted last night to confirm that "I have no direct ties with Oculus; I endorse it is a wonderful advance in VR tech, but I'm not "backing it".
Replayability is an oft-debated concept in game development. Developers value it because we have the impression that players want it. The reasoning goes that highly replayable games represent greater value, and thus we should aim to make our games as replayable as possible. At a time when the cost to develop and market a triple-A blockbuster can reach $100 million, one of the best ways to make sure your money is well spent is to make sure the customer feels theirs is as well.
One of the oldest – and most reliable – tricks that action games can play is to dial up the number of onscreen enemies, moving from tutorials against individual disposable foes and building towards scenes of obscene, slowdown-inducing crowd control. However, it’s probably not surprising to learn that the contrarians at Platinum Games have decided to take the opposite approach with their first Wii U game.
Starting Anarchy Reigns, we go straight for Bayonetta. But playing just a few seconds of Platinum’s multiplayer-focused brawler – known as Max Anarchy in Japan – is enough to reveal this isn’t the same witch who starred in the studio’s 2009 masterpiece. Just like everyone here, she has a dodge, but you can only use it when a move’s animation is over.
Flurry’s reach and insight into user experience is as comprehensive as one can imagine in a market as diverse as mobile games.
Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima secured the Castlevania name for 2010 action adventure Lords Of Shadow, developer MercurySteam has revealed.
In an interview, producer Dave Cox tells us that Konami gave the Castlevania licence to MercurySteam, only to take it away after the publisher's Japanese higher-ups deemed the proposed new direction for the beloved series to be "too radical".
The allure of New York City for game designers is obvious. The Big Apple’s landscape is compact and full of render-friendly straight edges, yet also provides a complex obstacle course full of spectacle and familiar sights. That jagged manmade horizon looks great when plastered across a skybox, while Manhattan’s parks, wide avenues and elegant towers can even be used to dictate the pacing of a campaign and the placement of its set-pieces.
Star Wars MMOG The Old Republic will adopt the free-to-play model this autumn, Electronic Arts has confirmed.
The move, announced following the release of EA's financial results last night, is not a full switch to free-to-play; the existing subscription model will continue to run alongside it. The game will only be free until players reach the current level cap of 50 - EA said in June it would be raising it, but has yet to specify what the new limit will be.
Sony’s $380 million acquisition of Gaikai has "validated" the cloud gaming industry but limiting the technology to certain devices is missing the point, according to Bruce Grove, UK general manager of Gaikai rival OnLive.
Zombies are often associated with pandemics, but their outbreak in pop culture is reaching worrying levels, as they slowly but surely infect every strata of the market. Their spread through the game industry has been particularly virulent, to the point where it seems that few titles are safe from their corrupting influence, be that by design, mod or spin-off.
Aged 16, Matthew Harris thought he wanted a game industry job. After a week of work experience at UK developer Rare, he knew he wanted a game industry job.
Patrice Désilets, creator of the Assassin's Creed franchise for Ubisoft, believes the first game in the series is "the purest" because it gave players a degree of freedom that subsequent games have shied away from.
Many games have followed in Canabalt’s breathless footsteps, but few have added much of significance to the basic auto-runner format. It’s not surprising: in the face of such purity, guns and upgrade systems tend to feel like a dilution rather than an evolution, while more elaborate ideas often collapse under their own weight.
Many games have followed in Canabalt’s breathless footsteps, but few have added much of significance to the basic auto-runner format. It’s not surprising: in the face of such purity, guns and upgrade systems tend to feel like a dilution rather than an evolution, while more elaborate ideas often collapse under their own weight.