Browse by Tags
All Tags »
Gaming (
RSS)
Sorry, but there are no more tags available to filter with.
-
|
I really, really like a good puzzle game . So when I saw Braid announced and read the raving critics , I was quite sure this was a game for me. I really wanted to like it. Then I downloaded the trial version... and pretty much hated it. So here are some critic's citations and how they resonated for me: It's beautiful Well, excuse me but I find it ugly. To me, it looks like a Van Gogh wannabe under acid had tried to redesign Mario . But that's fine, even though I would have appreciated a saturation setting in the menu, I can love an unaesthetic, tacky game if it works well. Tight controls Sure, the time control works well and is quite instinctive to use, but the rest felt amateurish to me, shareware-like. And the moving jumps are...
|
-
|
Ever since it came out, it seems like Wii Play has been somewhere on top of sales charts and even managed to be the #2 top-seller of 2007 in the US . Let's be clear about this: even if it looks like a good deal, being only $10 above the price of a standalone Wiimote , it really isn't. It would be a good deal *if* Wii Play itself was worth $10, which it isn't by a very large margin (i.e. at least $10). As a matter of facts, if you gave me $10 to play this thing (which I refuse to call a game), I would decline. And I want the fifteen minutes I spent trying to play it back. The only person in the family who found this of any interest was my daughter but that's probably because she was 3 years old at the time. By buying this, you're...
|
-
|
Here's how to build an instrument set with two guitars/basses, a drum set and a mike that will work for Guitar Hero and Rock Band . The first thing you need to know is that the Rock Band Fender Stratocaster guitar sucks . Here's why: The fret buttons and strum bar are way too soft. It's generally unresponsive and imprecise: it will miss notes that you definitely hit right. Star power / overdrive is difficult to trigger when sitting. You don't need the additional 5 fret buttons and effects switch. The strum bar has a kind of cylindrical tip that will hurt your thumb. I's not wireless. It doesn't work in Guitar Hero . Of course, there are things to like about it. It's been modeled after one of the most aesthetically pleasing real guitars, I like...
|
-
|
What a great time to be a gamer. It seems like there is no end in sight to that steady stream of excellent games. We already got Bioshock , Halo 3 , the Orange Box , Guitar Hero III , and we're waiting for Rock Band , Mass Effect , all before Christmas. What we lack is time to play them all. This is one that won't take too long. So I'm seeing this through our arbitrary prism of Seven Deadly Sins of Game Design ... Checkpoints : the game automatically saves whenever you do something significant. Essentially, you never need to worry about saving. But you can if you want. Anytime. Perfect. Boss fights : there is one, and it's fun and balanced enough that you can reasonably beat it on your first try (I did). Perfect. Mini-games : there are none...
|
-
|
The guitar Harmonix chose for the Xbox 360 version of Guitar Hero II is not exactly my favorite guitar . The Gibson X-plorer just reminds me too much of german hard - rockers from the eighties ... and mullets . Harmonix' plastic rendition of the guitar doesn't look any better than the original of course, and white doesn't help. I've seen things at Toys'R'Us that look less toy-like . I can't do much about the shape but seeing that I had already done a red paint job on my faceplate a while ago, I thought that at least the color had to change. Here's what it looks like now: So how do you make one of these then? Well, here's how. First, here's what you'll need: A respirator. Don't even think about doing that job without one. That paint is really...
|
-
|
Yes. This being out of the way, let me explain why (just in case you haven't read one of the million reviews that already say so). Some time ago, I wrote a blog post with my good friend Fabien Royer about what we consider to be the seven deadly sins of modern game design . We pointed out that even great games such as Gears of War or Oblivion always had at least one of these flaws. So how does Bioshock measure up against those (arbitrary) criteria? Checkpoints : Bioshock has checkpoints, but they're not your (big) daddy's old checkpoints. They are non-destructive checkpoints. They don't affect your progression , they just respawn you at some specific point. This is absolutely brilliant as it never punishes the player for trying something new...
|
-
|
There are a few very obvious game design flaws that for some reason still commonly get perpetuated today. They're especially infuriating when found in otherwise good games. The only explanation I could find was artificial lifetime enhancement, which is a bad idea because it can in reality dramatically shorten the lifetime of the game since many gamers just won't want to finish it. Which also means that they won't buy the sequel either. Here's my list of sins, with a few arbitrarily and subjectively selected saints and sinners for each of them... Checkpoints No matter how great your level design is, no-one wants to play the same thing 50 times (except in Guitar Hero of course). Checkpoints made sense on consoles when memory units were small....
|
-
|
... for anything else than aiming and frantically moving up and down. In other words, slow movements aimed at the screen work well, as do fast, imprecise movements, but anything else is impractical. But let's move back a little: why am I saying that? Well, it's been a few months since I've bought the Wii. I admit I was skeptical of the Wii-remote at first but revised my judgement once I tried the system at a few friends' houses. I've been a loyal Nintendo customer for years: I've owned every portable system from the first GameBoy to the DS light, as well as a few of their regular consoles. I don't even know how many versions of Mario Kart I've bought. The reason I'm saying all that is to assure you that I'm not partial *against* Nintendo. Call...
|
-
|
I just don't understand Sony's PR strategy... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=451414&in_page_id=1770&ct=5 Read More...
|
-
|
I've finally been able to play the Nintendo Wii, and sure, I want one. I had decided not to buy yet another version of Mario Kart and that the new controller would not yield itself to most games, that it would only work for some very specific ones . After I've tried it, I still think that couldn't be my main gaming machine, but I want one anyway. The controller works very well. I didn't have the impression that it was any more precise than, say, a Gyration mouse (it was quite clumsy to use on the menu screens), but it reacts accurately to fast movements, which is what matters in games. By the way, Nintendo has already succumbed to the pitfall of thinking the movement detection was a universally good idea. It isn't. The simple...
|
More Posts
Next page »