Gaming Week 30: The Walking Dead: 400 Days (PC/Mac)
I was blown away by the Walking Dead back when I played it in January, as I’m sure many of you have heard from many publications, its a landmark game for story telling, and certainly has a uniqueness to it that’s hard to find elsewhere. 400 days is a piece of DLC to go on top of the walking dead, and is seen as a separate chapter on the chapter select screen. Each story is about 20 minutes in length, with a Epilogue that follows after completing each characters story. So for £3.99, its a nifty price for an adequate amount of content. Each story feels like a fully realised game in itself, with characters feeling extremely rich and deep. It makes you wonder what other game studios are doing with their writing staff, or whether Telltale Games have stole all the good writers of our time. When you select…
Shadows!
As you may or may not be aware, I’m using Unity to make my current project as I have experience with the platform from my university dissertation and it’s very easy and fast to get a working prototype up and running. It’s always been my thinking that once I get to a certain point in my game, I would pay for the pro version of Unity, to allow my game to take on a fidelity level similar to that of a PS3 or 360. It seems that’s no longer the case! With unity 4.2, they’ve included hard shadows for free! Take a look: This is fantastic, and allows for my game to finally start taking shape. Every day that I work on it, I get a little bit closer to what I want to produce. It’s amazing.
Gaming Week 29: McPixel (PC/Mac)
McPixel was raved about years ago due to the developers choice to help and support people who had pirated the game through the Pirate Bay, and after it being on the Steam Summer Sale for only £0.59, I really couldn’t miss the chance to give it a go. McPixel starts as it means to go on: by making you click all over the screen in order to progress through the game. It’s the same as how you’d play a classic adventure game, so it’s pretty simple to grasp. McPixel is a bomb expert that needs to save the day in many different circumstances. Sometimes the bomb is in plain sight, other times it’s hidden, at the end of the day your job is to find the bomb and defuse it within 20 seconds. I didn’t mention that McPixel is hilarious and damn right random. Some solutions require you doing things…
Screenshot Monday
So I’ve decided to show people what my game can do so far and what I’ve implemented, so here it is: The only problem I’ve ran into so far is working with the iPads accelerometer. When the app first loads up, it grabs the iPads current accelerometer speed on the y-axis, and subtracts that from all further movements. This works fine for allowing the user to keep the iPad in the initial orientation they had, but means moving down on the y-axis is very slow, as it has less room to choose from. This should be fixed soon.
Gaming Week 28: The Last of Us (PS3) Part 2:
This is part two of my weekly review for The Last of Us, where I will break down it’s level design, gameplay, and give some conclusions of my own on how I feel about the game. The levels in The Last of Us are absolutely beautiful, giving a really immersive and realistic surrounding that really helps to immerse oneself in the world. Forests are wonderfully built to allow a bit of exploration, whilst also being linear to make sure a player does not get lost and stays on the right path. The level design can be a bit predictable at times, meaning if you’re exploring with Ellie and you all of a sudden see some bottles and bricks scattered around, you know that an enemy encounter is about to go down. I found this annoying to my game experience, as it broke my immersion whenever I would be happily exploring…
Gaming Week 28: The Last of Us (PS3)
This weeks review is on a game that has received a lot of attention recently, with many people calling it the game of the decade. I decided I had to see this for myself, so I popped down to Gamestop, and bought myself a copy for $60. (It’s still strange to write that, and $60 is the same price as back home so I was all good for it). For the purposes of length, this review will be split into two, with the first part today concentrating on premise, story and characters, and tomorrows part focusing on the gameplay, level design and conclusions. So, The Last of Us is based in a post apocalyptic world where zombies roam the earth. These aren’t normal zombies, they’re infected, which is slightly different and more believable than zombies; the first stage of transformation is crazed “runners”, who will beat and bite ordinary people…
Gaming Week 27: Poker Night 2 (PC)
For this week I wanted to review Poker Night At The Inventory, the first Telltale Games poker game, but I found that everytime I went to start a new tournament, the game would crash on my Mac, and since I have no access to a PC at this moment in time, I had to make do and play the second game in the series. This isn’t a bad thing at all, in fact I’ve heard the second game is definitely a lot better than the first, it’s just that I wanted to see the evolution of the series for myself, not take other peoples word on it. So without further adue, here are my impressions of Poker Night 2 by Telltale Games. So as you can tell from the title of the game, Poker Night 2 is a game about poker, with a sprinkling of recognisable characters as your rivals.This…
The Ouya and its many problems
I start this article by saying that I’ve had the Ouya a few days now, and am thoroughly enjoying the emulation software on it. I’ve managed to get my collection of classic Sega and NES games running perfectly, and it really takes me back to my childhood having a dedicated experience for games. When I emulate games on a PC or laptop, I can easily get distracted due to the multitasking nature they inhabit, constantly switching to facebook to message people or jumping out of a game to look up a news article breaks the immersion video games offer. The Ouya fixes this for me by being on a TV like a dedicated games console, making sure I concentrate on just the game, nothing else. So whatever else I say about the Ouya, I do like it, and feel like has a great (if not scary) future. In this article…
Gaming Week 26: Evoland (PC)
Evoland has peeked my interest ever since I first laid my eyes on it. Similar to DLC quest, you travel through the world of a RPG, constantly upgrading the gameplay/graphics as you progress. This was enticing as DLC Quest was a very short game taking the mick out of the DLC culture, so I wanted to see what Shiro games brought to the table with Evoland, as their marketing approach was definitely different to say the least. You start the game as a 2D RPG, reminiscent of Final Fantasy games of yester-year. Only able to move in certain directions, you plod along opening chest after chest. Each chest gives the game a new look or feel, one chest gives the game colour, the other, the ability to move in all directions. It all quickly adds up, and soon you’re walking around the world like you’re in a Zelda game. The game doesn’t…
Gaming Week 25: Dead or Alive 5 (PS3)
I apologise for this weeks review, I haven’t been able to concentrate and I feel it shines through in it’s coherency. Being in the middle of a desert doesn’t help with my concentration. Without further hindrance, here’s this weeks review: It’s hard to write about Dead or Alive 5 as a standalone product, I feel I have to compare it to previous games in the series, which is a shame in its own right. Dead or Alive 4 was a great launch product for the 360, which I enjoyed playing with friends and alone, but I don’t think DOA5 quite lives up to that name in its own merit. I’ll split this review up into segments to better portray my feelings. Combat: Combat has slightly changed from the previous games in the series, meaning it took me a while to adjust to the new control system in place for fighting. Character’s…
Gaming Tutorials
So recently I’ve been working on gaming tutorials to get me back into game programming, which has been great. My recent project is below, it’s a space invaders clone, where you use z to fire and the directional buttons to move left and right. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/55177814/SpaceInvader.html It’s not much, but it’s definitely helping me find my way again when it comes to game development.
Gaming Week 24: Thirty Flights of Loving (PC)
Following on from last week I decided to play Thirty Flights of Loving, the sequel to Gravity Bone. This one was kickstarted as part of the Idle Thumbs podcast, and eventually was released to steam for download. It follows on from the themes and story outlined in Gravity Bone, and even has more depth than the first. You start Thirty Flights of Loving as an agent that must find his way into a secret hide out. A small poster on the wall explains the controls, and with this the game sets you on your way. Its once you set out on your mission is where you Now it may not be a coherent story, but its you that must do the job of making it one, constantly guessing whats coming next only for your presumptions to be turned upside down. Game mechanics are fairly straight forward, you no longer have…
Gaming Week 23: Gravity Bone (Mac & PC)
For this week, I decided to write about something that is renowned for being short, but shouldn’t be disregarded for being so. I’m technically on holiday for the next 3 months, and will definitely continue with my weekly gaming, but they may be smaller games. Hope you enjoy reading this, and I will update this blog more regularly on my game development progress. Gravity Bone: Gravity Bone is a small indie game made by Blendo Games, (A one man team consisting of Brendon Chung) and when I say short, I mean 20 minutes to an hour short. This isn’t detrimental to the game in any way, just be warned and don’t be surprised when it abruptly ends. In this short time, Brendon manages to create a narrative that would rival even the biggest of games, something that’s constantly got you questioning what’s going on and what’s the big picture. It’s certainly effective, playing from…
Gaming Week 22: Thomas Was Alone (PS Vita)
Note: I wasn’t going to write a full review for Thomas Was Alone due to a bunch of other games I’ve been playing, but I then realised that just because it’s an indie game, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t get treated the same as Triple-A budget games. Especially due to how much this game touched me and made me rethink my own ideas on platformers and characterisation. So here it is, a review on a relatively recent indie game, enjoy! Thomas Was Alone is a platformer stripped down to its core mechanics, a player moves a character across the screen trying to get from point A to B using different techniques. It’s not only stripped down to its core mechanics in gameplay, but also in graphics, with every character being simple geometric squares and rectangles which can move at different speeds and jump at different heights. Everything that I just said…
Gaming Week 21: Bayonetta (360)
Oh Bayonetta, I’ve been meaning to play you for years but never found the time to fit your into my schedule. I’ve owned you since you first was released onto the world, and my oh my how I was a fool to disregard you for so long. As you can probably tell from my little burst above, I enjoyed every minute of Bayonetta, and not just because of the main character. Everything from game play, to the style, to the music entranced me to my very core, making sure I constantly progressed until I had taken in all Bayonetta had to offer. So firstly: the game play. Bayonetta is a action game, if you’ve ever laid your hands on a Devil May Cry title in the past then you already know how this game will go, the difference you’ll find is the execution. In Devil May Cry games, or even…