Looking for last-minute Christmas gifts? Give the gift of mobile gaming! Electronic Arts (EA) and Gameloft are having their annual holiday sales just in time for Christmas. If you've got a gamer on your shopping list with an iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, a mobile game will make the perfect last minute present. Games that are usually anywhere from $2 to $10 are now on sale for just $0.99, and there's lots to choose from.
The days of entering left, right, left, right, up, down, up, down, a, b to cheat your way through a video game are long gone. With achievements and trophies in existence, game developers have, for the most part, removed cheats from video games.
From The Day of the Tentacle to Syberia, adventure games have come a long way. We now have games developed exclusively for the Google Android platform and iPhone. The newest game is the episodic Fragment 3D, a point and click adventure game focusing on the adventures of a robot who is left to rust in the underworld. You will have to help him escape and help him unearth secrets and conspiracies.
Getting money to make a AAA game is hard. When anyone is lucky enough to get the funds they need, it usually comes from a giant game publishing company that wants the rights to the game, not to mention complete control. Those publishers have shareholders who demand a high return on their investment, so they avoid risk when choosing game projects to fund.
Nicholas Entertainment Group (NEG) is a Polish independent game publisher that recently got their hands dirty with development. Their first game (with Intoxicate Studios) is the forthcoming horror first-person shooter Afterfall: InSanity, which comes out next month—dangerously close to the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3 and Assassin's Creed Revelations release dates. That's some stiff competition for small company, especially since it's a $35 debut game.
Last Thursday, on October 7th, indie game developers from around the world walked down a red carpet in Santa Monica, California in the hopes of winning an IndieCade award. We previously discussed the IndieCade festival and conference, but the award show is a smaller, more inclusive event that provides finalists the opportunity to see their project on stage with rewards by sponsors such as LG, who presented this year’s ceremony.
Game design is sedentary work. Generally its practitioners do their work with their butts planted securely in front of a computer in an office (be it home or away) as their muscles and verbal skills atrophy. Even game journalists are prone to this condition. Not so with Colin and Sarah Northway (pictured below), the husband and wife team behind NORTHWAY Games. Not only do they make really cool indie games, but they do it with just a laptop while traveling the world meeting indie developers of...
University video game design programs have been spreading like wildfire around the world over the last ten years. They allow students, researchers and game developers to work on their craft in an academic environment away from the harsh realities of the market, and have led to some interesting products like Fl0w from USC and Ulitsa Dimitrova from Germany. Both games take on topics not often addressed in mainstream games and do so in simple, poignant ways that aim to influence the rest of the ...
Sitting in the dentist’s waiting room, I found I couldn’t browse the internet on my smartphone anymore. My eyes were tired from reading and there were no headphones to listen to music. There are no magazines at this dentist’s office, just an old TV playing Russian music videos ad nauseam. Mostly female Russian singers, and curiously enough they all shared similar traits: they can’t dance. They look gorgeous, but the best they could do is small movements and two slow moves at best- a huge diff...
If you’re unfamiliar with League of Legends, you’re either not into PC gaming or you haven’t spent much time on the internet. Riot Games officially released League almost two years ago, and since then it’s become a huge hit. In fact, the Santa Monica based company recently announced that the DOTA inspired game has 15 million registered users, 4 million unique logins each month, and 500,000 people playing the game at any given moment.
At GDC 2011 this past March, three of the world's best game designers participated in a contest called Game Design Challenge. Each presented their vision for a game that fit the prompt "Bigger than Jesus: games as religion" before an audience, with applause to determine the winner. Jenova Chen, John Romero, and Jason Rohrer all spoke, and Rohrer won in a landslide with his revolutionary game called Chain World.
For more than a decade, free-to-play games with microtransactions (also called In-App Purchase or IAP) by which players can pay real money for in-game content have been the industry standard for online success in Asia. Mainstream American gamers have long resisted these "freemium" games, with World of Warcraft and other subscription based online games reigning supreme, and being seen as more AAA than their free-ish counterparts. Casual games developers have encountered no such problems, and m...
Scrabble has invaded just about every medium out there. It started as a mere board game, but has since spawned numerous board game spinoffs and variations, an electronic version, mobile apps for just about anything (Android, iPhone, iPhone, iPad and Kindle), games for both PC and Facebook, and video games for handheld consoles like the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. Heck, it's even on the PlayStation and Xbox 360 gaming consoles. And it hasn't forgotten about film. You can see Scrabble featured in...
No Time To Explain is the first game by two man indie developer tiny Build Games. It's a fun and very stylish platformer in it's own right, available for $10 from the tiny Build website. Articles about the game on RockPaperShotgun, Destructoid, and other prominent PC sites helped it develop substantial hype and raise more than $26,000 via Kickstarter to fund development.
I've been unreasonably excited about Dungeon Defenders (NOT DUNGEON DEFENDER!) for almost a year. Playing it at PAX did nothing to damper that enthusiasm. I had a chance this week to speak with co-founder/development director Jeremy Stieglitz and marketing diretor Philip Asher from Gainesville, Florida based developer Trendy Entertainment to find out a little more about the game, and how it came together.
One of the biggest video games events of the year is about to happen in Japan tomorrow, when the Tokyo Game Show (TGS) kicks off. If you've never heard of it, just think of it as the E3 of the East—a video game extravaganza open to both businesses (Thursday and Friday) and the public (Saturday and Sunday). And even though it hasn't officially started, TGS has already released some grand announcements, specifically about Nintendo's future lineup and a precipitous drop in their share prices.
We've all seen FOX News commentators get worked up about silly non-issues. It occurs more than we'd like, but what happened last week on popular morning show FOX and Friends was not only a misleading and pointless attack on video games, it was an unintelligible attack on a mediocre and forgotten game from 2007, along with a handful of recent indies that no FOX and Friends viewers, or any of their close family members, had ever heard of before this broadcast.
Like a great acting performance, making a really good game is all about choices. While creating or playing a game, those involved have to constantly make small choices that will affect the outcome, either positively or negatively. And the only thing worse than choosing wrongly is not choosing at all. Too many games, especially today, stick to what they're supposed to do from the get-go and avoid making difficult, small, meaningful choices to differentiate themselves and make their performance...
Dead Island (PC, PS3, 360) had the worst launch of any game in recent memory. The wrong version of the game was released on PC, matchmaking was down for three days on PC, saves were deleted without notice making people start from scratch, and the Feminist Whore (a file found describing one of the character's skills) fiasco. The game just wasn't ready for release.
The used video game market represents a huge portion of retail game sales. It's the only avenue in which most people can afford to buy AAA games. But game publishers aren't exactly big fans of used game sales, since they only benefit from gamers buying new ones. GameStop and Best Buy are huge corporate interests, so EA and the rest of the big publishers out there have not been able to push them around on the issue of used game sales... so far.
Many of the indie games featured at PAX Prime have been in development for years. That's how long it takes to make a great game. But the two-man development studio in eastern Europe called Stabyourself has existed for less than a year and has already created two games—three more are on the way. They may be spitting out games left and right, but they've got a few to be excited about.
This week's roundup features three games that I've either never bothered to play, was unable to play due to PC technical limitations, or haven't played because they've just been released. None of these three games cost more than $15.
Indie developers and their games have enjoyed massive success distributing through Steam, notably Zeboyd Games and Carpe Fulgar. While that bodes well for the future of indies on the platform, Steam has to devote a lot of front-page real estate to AAA games and thus can't promote small indies as well as a dedicated indie game distribution service could. IndieCity out of the UK seems like it could be that, but today a consortium of three German game companies launched their attempt at beating ...
Grand Theft Auto 3 was the biggest video game of the last decade, by far, introducing open-world adventure games to consoles, a genre that now rivals shooters and sports games for market dominance. A huge map, decentralized narrative, and myriad of interlocking quests and objectives that happen in a flexible order all became hallmarks of the "new" genre, along with the ability to shape the morality and reputation of your character. And most importantly, all of the quests and stories are compl...
To most gamers, video games are largely devoid of place. In the post-arcade era, the only real world locations most associate with video games are GameStop and the couch. But there's so much more to them than that!
It's a hell of a lot easier to make money selling an indie game now than it was four years ago. But it's still a rough game.
The Australian government has a dysfunctional history with video games. Any regular Yahtzee Croshaw follower can attest to that. The Parliament has established a series of unfortuante regulations that make games both highly taxed and overregulated in price. Bringing any goods all the way to an island in the bottom of the world is expensive to begin with, and new games in Australia can tip the scales at $80 or more.
Generally, summer is a slow time for video games, but not when it comes to Xbox Live Arcade where it's harvest season! In the last month, there have been at least four great games released on XBLA, with Bastion getting the lion's share of the attention. But the remaining three are pretty awesome, as well, and should help you while away the time spent indoors away from the brain frying heat sweeping the U.S.
The indie game scene is constantly expanding, but in 2008, Minecraft, Braid and Angry Birds had not been released, along with all of the other indie games that established the financial viability of the format. Indie games were the all-but-exclusive purview of free Flash game sites and the proud users of TIGsource.com. The Independent Gaming Source is a massive forum for indie game developers to share their projects with like-minded individuals, while seeking help and approval of their games.
Hard drive space is one of the cheapest things you can add to your computer. But people take it for granted, thus game developers have given up any efforts in keeping games compact. With all of its expansion packs, World of Warcraft takes up more than 60 GB of hard drive space, and almost any AAA game consumes a gig or two.
Facebook games are ostensibly all about connecting their players. Yet, in many ways they exist on an isolated island. That's one of the reasons traditional gamers and game franchises have avoided Facebook in the past. And all of the breakout hits so far on Facebook have been cheap PC game ripoffs from the 90s, like FarmVille and ports of other popular casual games.
Thanks to the advent of smartphones and mobile apps, Scrabble has spread like wildfire across the globe, whether it be Scrabble or one of its many popular word game spinoffs, such as Words with Friends, WordWise and Kalimat.
Japanese game shows are legendary for being more extreme (and absurd) than their American counterparts. Chris Farley immortalized the concept in a classic SNL sketch, and MXC and Ninja Warrior have both achieved great success dubbed and subtitled on American television. A big part of their appeal is how demanding they are compared to U.S. game shows. Only a few people have actually won Ninja Warrior in its 23 seasons on the air, and MXC is a constant comedy of failure and pain.
Games like Minecraft and Braid have proven that there is money to be made in the indie game marketplace, which means more and more designers are following suit, one being Zeboyd Games. The two-man indie design team released two excellent JRPG spoofs on the Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG) Marketplace in 2010: Breath of Death VII ($1) and Cthulhu Saves the World ($3). Both have been well-reviewed and spent time near the top of the XBLIG sales charts, but its success couldn't be rivaled by what wa...
Tower defense games have taught us little. We already knew that defending castles from baddies was fun and that legions of weenies are the key to success in most real-time strategy situations. What other insights have they to offer?
Fatherhood is difficult, especially when you're an octopus. That is the moral of the 2011 IGF Student Showcase winner Octodad, available for free from its website. This hilarious little title was created by a team of interactive media students at DePaul University in Chicago, and is the latest in a stream of successful indie games to come out of collegiate video game design programs. In fact, it's so successful that a sequel is in the works.
Game Developer Magazine is a prominent periodical for game industry folk to read up on their craft. For those who don't work in games, it can be a little dry, but every year they release a Game Career Guide devoted to welcoming other people into their world. Best of all, it's free! You can view the newest issue just released here in your browser, or download the PDF version.
Making a video game requires an incredible amount of work. It requires people skilled in many disciplines to work together for thousands of hours merging visual art, computer programming, game design, sound design, and music composition into a fun game. The Indie Stone is a Scottish indie development studio started, like so many others, by industry vets who were tired of corporate restrictions and wanted to make the crazy games they had always imagined.
Deep in their heart of hearts, most Americans dream of having their car festooned with missile launchers and machine guns. Anyone who cuts them off or looks at them funny in traffic could be dispensed with quick and extreme justice, leaving a real-life James Bond and his passengers free to pursue their American dreams faster than everyone else. Racing games and shooting games are among the two most popular types of video games. So why aren't there more games where one can race cars and shoot ...
Carpe Fulgur translates to something along the lines of "Seize the Lightning" in Latin. Sometimes that is enacted with golf clubs by idiots. But the three intrepid indie video game localizers who work under that name are trying to do it the right way: metaphorically. They are translating and publishing Japanese games for the Americans market—games that have seldom been seen before because every other company thinks it's mad to release them here.
