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?