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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I have a feeling I’m not alone in saying this, but as a gamer, I often like to have a “standby” game despite however many other games I’m playing.  I might be twenty hours into the latest Persona, and at the same time slogging through mission six in whatever new military FPS is out, but I still like to have a game I can sit down and play for five, ten, fifteen or however many minutes I have available and not feel like I’m obliged to play for the long haul.

Sitting down to play an RPG these days is usually an investment of hours or play per session, and often times interrupting an FPS mid-level feels disruptive and breaks the action (if you are lucky enough to be able to save mid-mission at all).  So, in those times when you’ve got the gaming itch, but not a lot of free time, you need something to fill the gap. 

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A few weeks back, I was watching a series of Developer Diaries from the folks at Codemasters about the (at the time) forthcoming Flashpoint 2: Dragon Rising. While a lot of it was your run-of-the-mill “hey our graphics are great” and “hey check out our cool AI,” the one that really drew me in was their explanation of their “Hardcore” mode.

For those of you not familiar with the original Operation Flashpoint, it was a modern military FPS whose main claim to fame was a gritty sense of realism.  Flashpoint was not a run n’ gun kind of game; running and gunning, in fact, was probably the quickest way for you to lose.  Flashpoint was, in a basic way, a military “simulator.”  The player had limited information about where enemies were, getting shot once or twice would probably kill you, and an awful lot of the game was simply spent running from one waypoint to the next.

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