After wrapping up with A Boy and His Blob, and deciding that I’d had just about enough of Dragon Age, I found myself in a bit of a game lull for the past few weeks.  My DS still had a stack of games waiting to be played from over the holidays, but my PC and consoles were sitting relatively dry.  Torchlight was still there for some time-wasting, but I was looking for something a little meatier.

And so, as I sat staring at my desktop, trying to decide what to do, I spotted a long forgotten icon tucked away in the corner: The Ur-Quan Masters.

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For the past few months, fellow writer Chris and I have been boldly taking our first steps towards actually producing our own honest-to-goodness video game.  This is a long road that began for us back in college, with many projects started, and all ending the same way: lost to the mists of time.

This time, however, was different.  Thanks to Chris’s embracing and rapid comprehension of Flixel, as well as some less lofty goals for our first project (no 3d survival horror time travel games right off the bat…), we’ve actually been able to see an entire project through to (almost) completion.

So, with that, I humbly offer Where We Remain for your consideration.  To quote Chris:

It’s a mostly-adventure, a-little-action top-down game written in Flixel. It’s closest in design to Adventure for the 2600, but it’s not a remake or anything like that. The island is quasi-procedurally generated each time you play — the algorithm isn’t that sophisticated, but there’s more to it than just a random shuffle.

Give it a try, and I certainly hope you enjoy it!

Darksiders wasn’t the game I expected it to be.

Admittedly, I didn’t pay too much attention to this game when it was originally making the press rounds.  I had initially dismissed it as another game featuring beefy dudes swinging swords and firing guns at other beefy dudes; a game that I had played numerous times before.  As the game neared release, however, I learned that the lion’s share of the writing and art had been helmed by Joe Madureira, who had written one of my favorite comics from my high school years, Battle Chasers.  A comic that featured….beefy dudes swinging swords and shooting guns at other beefy dudes.

What I expected was a straight up action game, and what I got was an adventure game with a lot of elements borrowed heavily from The Legend of Zelda.  This is not a bad thing.

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Charming is not a word that usually enters my vocabulary in the milieu of discussing games, being a word better served in terms of describing handsome rogues and quiet country inns. Yet, as I played through A Boy and His Blob for the Nintendo Wii over the last several weeks, that was the word that I found popping into my head more than any other.

The original Boy and his Blob, back on the NES, was not a game I personally played all that much. I didn’t own it, and none of my friends owned it, and this was prior to me discovering the joys of renting games from the local video store. I did, however, have a strong image of the game in my head for an entirely different reason: Nintendo Power. The very first issue of Nintendo Power I received had a large article about the game, including sweeping maps of the early levels. I remember being enthralled with the artwork going over the different flavors of jelly bean and what the blob would turn into when fed them, and I remember the images of the first level, with it’s city skyline at night glowing in the background as the boy and his friend set out on their grand adventure.

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Andrew Doull over at ASCII Dreams, a developer of roguelikes, spurs an interesting discussion revolving around the decision to implement monster surrender in their upcoming games.

Now this AI could also be used to allow a monster to surrender to you if you have sufficiently injured it. Unfortunately, this is directly contrary to a lot of the design and game play for a roguelike – you basically want to be able to kill stuff – so I’m interested in whether having monsters surrender could ever be an interesting choice. Do you know of any games where the surrender mechanic does work successfully?

As you know I am a fan of choice in games, I can honestly say that this intrigues me.  I can’t think of a single game I’ve played that has allowed me to accept the surrender of any enemy (outside of a plot-driven sequence), and it’s interesting to imagine how it would work in practice. How would gamers react when suddenly given an option beyond the simple kill or be killed we’ve almost always known?

Another year come and gone, and another year’s worth of games to love, games to hate, and games to make us scratch our heads and wonder who’s really running things at some of these companies. Sequels were spawned, new IPs introduced, and enough DLC to power a small nation was churned out on a daily basis. Now, as we get ready to see off the old year and usher in a new, it’s time for us at Spectacle Rock to look back at the months gone by and pick out our highlights and lowlights…

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The Nintendo DS has proven itself to be quite the repository for “old fashioned” turn-based JRPGs.  From remakes of old Final Fantasies to entirely new creations, a strong library has built up over the years, giving fans plenty to choose from.  With my DS as my trusty companion on my daily commute every day, I have ample time to play through such involved affairs, and I’ve sampled a pretty wide swath of those that are out there.

When I wrapped up Bowser’s Inside Story several weeks back, I sat down to take a look at what to tackle next.  Poking through Amazon’s DS listings, I spotted an upcoming title called Nostalgia.  The game was named such, as the marketing materials told me, both because of its setting and because of its “return” to old-fashioned JRPGs of days gone by.

Unfortunately, the only nostalgia that Nostalgia evokes is for the time before you started playing it.

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I recently sat down and started to play through New Super Mario Brothers Wii with the intent of putting up a review.  As I progressed through the game, however, it occurred to me that while the game is, in fact, excellent, and a great addition to anyone’s Wii library, it’s still “just a Mario Bros. game.”  There isn’t anything particularly innovative in the single-player version of the game that would warrant a full review.  With that in mind, I turned to the “new” in the title and decided to try out the “simultaneous multiplayer” that had been touted as one of the game’s main selling points.  I picked up the hotline and assembled a crack team of Mario players to tackle this game the way it was meant to be played.  I had, unfortunately, forgotten one key problem with my using my friends as a multiplayer “team”:

My friends are jerks.

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Robert is all psyched up to do a new game now. My presence seems to have that effect on him. Me, I’ve been having serious doubts about doing another computer game.

On the one hand, if I live at home for much longer I’ll go stir-crazy. What I need is a place to go. Friends. Work. Moving to Marin and doing another game for Broderbund would give me that.

But it would take time away from screenwriting. In the time it’ll take me to do a new game, I could write three screenplays. And… the games business is drying up. Karateka may make me as little as $75,000 all told, and it’s at the top of the charts. There’s no guarantee the new game will be as successful. Or that there will even be a computer games market a couple of years from now.

Jordan Mechner has posted the contents of the journals he kept while creating the original Prince of Persia. To say this is a fascinating glimpse into what it was like to be a semi-indie game developer in the age when Electronic Arts was one of the good guys (no really!) doesn’t really get at how precious this is. Read it now. It is your homework for the weekend.

I’ve never seen a yeti with a jet-pack,
I do not think I’ll see one.
But, barring some financial setback,
I’d really like to be one.

– Dirk

You want to win at Spelunky. You may not know you want to win at Spelunky yet, but you will. A great many people don’t know they want to win at Spelunky, but they should.

Here’s how.

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