“In good game design failure is a part of the learning process. When first encountering cacodemons in Doom you might die, but you can sense what you did wrong and charge back into the game with a better strategy. In an adventure game it tends to be all or nothing.”
Veteran game designer Tadhg Kelly brutally disassembles the point-and-click genre, suggesting that, while contributing hugely to the development of videogames as we know them, they were simply bad games.
Consider, if you will, the mighty Brumak. How fitting that the Gears bestiary should include a hulking, bipedal reptile. Strip away its gratuitous arsenal of machine-guns and rocket launchers – enough firepower to make the Earth resemble a planet-sized hunk of fruit with a bite missing – and the Brumak and Tyrannosaurus Rex could be cousins. Palaeontologists once peddled a view of dinosaurs as fabulously brawny creatures with walnut-sized brains. Many hold the Gears Of War series in identical regard.
Sony has confirmed at the Tokyo Game Show that it will begin distributing the PlayStation Suite software development kit (SDK) in November.
The SDK allows developers to code software in C# for release on PlayStation Vita, hardware certified under a licensing programme, as well as other PlayStation Certified devices. At the moment the only systems that fall under that banner are Sony Ericsson's Xperia Play, and Sony Tablets S and P.
The latest in Namco Bandai's Tales series, Tales Of Xillia, is the new Japanese all-formats number one.
The PlayStation 3 RPG sold over half a million units in its first week on shelves, outselling its nearest competitor, Resident Evil: Revival Selection, by almost six copies to one. Sales of PS3 hardware got a predictable boost, with almost 65,000 units sold. 3DS sales slowed slightly week on week to just over 49,000 units.
There’s a simple and pleasantly old-fashioned design principle running through the centre of BloodRayne: Betrayal: first, make it difficult, and then make it rewarding. So instead of a mere double-jump, you get a beautifully animated double-height backflip that you can only pull off by dashing one way, spinning on your heels, and then leaping at just the right second.
Through the rise of casual and then social gaming, the slow demise of the traditional retail model, and the explosion of the high-end smartphone market, the videogame industry is in a state of flux. Which company, then, is the dominant force right now? Is it Nintendo? Apple? Activision? Zynga? In fact, it might be none of them. Arguably, it is a company set up in 1990 in Cambridge, a company that many consumers have never heard of.
Is VVVVVV a good name for a game? It certainly was, suggests James Dilks for Kill Screen, saying that it captures a claim for uniqueness, standing out over a raft of other indie game names. We'd be inclined to agree, though we've also always slightly resented it, for fear we haven't typed the right number of Vs.
Apple has removed Phone Story, a game satirising the unethical processes in the manufacture of gadgets like the iPhone, from the App Store.
Codemasters has confirmed that it plans to close its internal Guildford Studio as part of a restructuring drive that will see headcount increased at its Warwickshire and Birmingham studios.