Following on from yesterday's look at Cambridge-based chip manufacturer ARM's ambitions to get its silicon into ever more gaming hardware, we chart some of the landmark devices powered by the little known company's processors.
Where do the ideas for games come from? Well, for a start they don’t usually get thrown into the ring as one-line pitches. You can do that with movies because movies – all movies – are more similar to each other than games are. A movie is just a story; a game is an experience.
Where do the ideas for games come from? Well, for a start they don’t usually get thrown into the ring as one-line pitches. You can do that with movies because movies – all movies – are more similar to each other than games are. A movie is just a story; a game is an experience.
MotoHeroz is a cuddly toy you hug to your face, only to realise a second too late it’s in fact a surly porcupine. The 2D platforming racer’s facade of Nintendo cheerfulness – tracks corkscrew through cartoony forest, ice, desert, water and sky environments; buggies hit the ground with a pillowy bounce; and both coins and collectibles lay tucked around each level – masks a sobering challenge that slaps you down for the tiniest imprecision.
“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.