Today was the last day of E3 2010, and Brett and I put our lives on the line to bring you as much coverage as we could muster. We’ve got some follow-up stories and galleries in the works but in the meantime you can spend a few minutes staring at Brett’s big beautiful face while he tells you what he thought about this year’s show.
Milkstone Studios are a small team of Spanish developers intent on “making fun games whilst having fun doing them”. With three titles under their belts, I caught up with their head programmer Alejandro González Fiel shortly after lavishing their most recent title MotorHEAT with praise to find out a little about their development process and their newest title Avatar Ninja.
I’d venture to say Dwarf Fortress is the most rich, complex game I’ve ever played. The game uses a modified ASCII character set for graphics, and yet it works my computer harder than Bad Company 2. The game’s main objective is simply to survive, and yet there are pages upon pages of documentation for the best methods of doing so. Dwarf Fortress was released in 2006, and has become a huge hit among PC gamers. Even if you’ve never played Dwarf Fortress before, you may have heard of the famous “Boatmurdered” game, where several players took turns playing the same fortress (I recommend you read their stories, it’s absolutely hilarious).
Dwarf Fortress has an extremely advanced system of variables; Dwarves have likes and dislikes, personalities and desires. The environment has an advanced physics engine, complete with its own fluid dynamics model. Unlucky miners can cause cave-ins or accidentally exposes a magma flow.
The entire game was the brainchild of two brothers, Tarn and Zach Adams, and is currently being developed by Tarn. It’s obvious Tarn has worked extremely hard on developing the game, and just released a massive patch a few days ago. Wanting to find out more about Dwarf Fortress and its progress, I decided to contact Tarn for an interview, who was more than willing to talk with us. Read more →
Wex had a sit down chat with Nathan Fouts, president of Mommy’s Best Games last weekend. Mommy’s Best Games make games, good games; like Weapon of Choice and Shoot 1UP (which is only 80 MS Points).
One of the coolest stalls at PAX East (at least in my opinion) was the one for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. The Game Lab brings students from MIT and 40 of the best students from Singapore together to make some very cool games. They also work with a lot of the smaller indie game makers in the local area to, in their own words, “become a hub for the Boston indie gaming community”.
Over the weekend quite a few of us were at PAX East checking out all the great games being played (check out our PAX East podcast for more). One that I was most looking forward to getting my hands on was Devil’s Tuning Fork. We had a chat to Jason Pecho, one of the guys behind the game, to find out more.
To play the game for yourself, or to find out more, head over to the Devil’s Tuning Fork official site.
If you’re interested in seeing more indie game coverage from PAX East, we also had a chat with the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.
What goes in to making an Indie Game when you start with nothing? Earlier this month Jon reviewed the Xbox Live Indie game Herman. The game got a generally positive review and I contacted the game’s creator, Todd Snarl, to let him know. We had something of a chat about the game and Snarl made mention that he has “retired from the game business”.
Curious to know why and to find out more about the process behind one of the most interesting indie games on the XBLIG service, Snarl kindly agreed to an interview, his last formal addition to the gaming world.
I caught up with designer/producer/one-man-army Eskil Steenberg at GDC this year, and interviewed him on his incredible one-man-project: Love. Check out the video below then read on for part one of our interview.
[Editor's note: Dan's been getting his hands on all the cool toys at GDC this week. Earlier today he chatted to Josh Bays, Product Evangelist for Sixense and Scott Szyjewicz who is the Manager of their support group to talk about their PC TrueMotion controller]
Negative Gamer: Ok, so give me a rundown on this.
Josh Bays: So this is the Sixense TrueMotion dev kit. This is a wireless, magnetic tracking system motion controller. It is a magnetic base, plugged into the computer via USB, power and data. Generates a magnetic field six feet out, a twelve foot sphere, or ‘œplay area’. Anywhere within that area is where you’re going to get high fidelity, precise, motion controls.
So you can see on screen my movements of my hands on the controller are going to be reflected very precisely in the game. So my hand is now holding the crow-bar, instead of the Sixense controller. If I tilt it a little bit, or move it a little bit it’ll be reflected, it’s 1mm of position position precision and one degree of orientation. Read more →
Battle of the Immortals is a new, free-to-play MMO from Perfect Worlds (who published site favourite Torchlight) due to enter into closed-Beta testing in a couple of months. The game is already out in China and is undergoing some serious westernisation to get it geared up for the North American audience.
Taking Norse and Chinese mythology to drive its story and with a strong focus on equipment and player v player combat, the game is making a lot of people rather curious. We caught up with the game’s Product Manager, Jon Belliss, for more information. Read more →
We all have an opinion on it. Left 4 Dead 2 is coming out sooner than expected and some people aren’t too happy about it. The original game was said to come as “a service” rather than a game. Valve, the game’s makers, suggested regular updates were in the pipeline on par with those their other multiplayer game, Team Fortress 2, is enjoying. With the announcement of the game’s sequel, doubts have been raised over whether that content is still coming to the original game.
Fans were none too happy about the news and soon a Steam group titled L4D2 Boycott was formed, a group that passed the 20,000 members mark today. To get to the root of the issue and to get reactions to some of the criticisms aimed at the group, I spoke to one of the group’s admins, Mr.Pancakes. Read more →
As Pyroph’s excellent interview with Prof. Doug Gentile is not only very interesting, but also rather long, I thought it a good idea to create a shorter, digest version of the interview. Basically a collection of the more interesting quotes. If you find any of this even remotely interesting, I can not recommend enough having a read of the full interview.
The topics Dr. Gentile covers, in my opinion, are among the most important issues modern gaming faces, and yet, probably the most overlooked by gamers themselves. What with them being energy drink-riddled husks of minuscule attention spans. BEES! Good, thought I had lost you there. Read more →
[Dr. Douglas Gentile is a developmental psychologist, and is an assistant professor of Psychology at Iowa State University and the Director of Research for the National Institute on Media and the Family. His experience includes over 20 years conducting research with children and adults. He has published research on violent video games, on prosocial video games, on how video games may improve laparoscopic surgical skills, and most recently on video game "addiction." You can visit his site at www.drdouglas.org ]
Recently Doug Gentile published his most recent study, stating that 8.5% of American youth showed signs of addiction. It was picked up by a lot of major gaming sites, bringing along with it controversy among commenters.
You can read about the study here.
Dismissal of studies and research is common among gamers; fear of anything bad surrounding their hobby creates a defensive barrier denouncing all claims. This interview’s purpose is to better inform gamers about research, the “addiction” debate, and how researchers are not the evil antagonists that everyone makes them out to be. Read more →
The world of the gaming enthusiast press is expanding at a staggering pace. Where there were just a handful of sites and blogs three or four years ago, now there are dozens starting up every day. We have sites covering our beloved gaming from every conceivable angle. This site right here being one of them.
Another such site is HipHopGamerShow.com, the home of Gerard Williams, aka The HipHopGamer. Blending the worlds of Hip Hop and gaming into a growing community of loyal fans, I don’t think anyone could doubt the unique style of The HipHopGamer.
NG: So, what is Hip Hop Gamer, and how did it all begin?
HipHopGamer is now a brand representing the urban side of videogaming. For many years when people talk about video games the first thing that comes to mind was little nerdy kids on there pc’s or consoles playing games and talking about geeky tech and electronics, but there’s a whole other community out there full of gamers from the hood that go hard at playing games as well so now that hiphopgamer is here and it’s real it brings a voice and change to what people label as a gamer now. It all began when I was only focusing on doing music but I really didn’t like the shady shit going on in the music industry, I always loved games my grandma (HipHopGranny) put me on to that so one day I was looking at DLB’s videos and they were interesting but then he stopped so I was like was up what’s going on, then I was watching Judge Mathis and he said find something that you love to do and get paid for it and that’s when it hit me. HipHop and Videogames both are my passions so let me put it together and make some money and create entertainment and now I’m doing a interviews with the great staff over at NegativeGamer.com Read more →
I’ve recently got in contact with Eskil Steenberg, the one man team behind the MMO called “Love“. After popping the question if he would be oh-so-kind to sit down with us and have an interview about his game, he kindly agreed. Now if you have no earthly idea what Love is, please read Gavin’s article here about it prior to reading through the interview.
Danshir: What got you wanting to make a video game like Love? What inspired you to make a game that must be a huge trial to do by yourself?
Eskil: The simple answer is I could do it, and I didn’t have anything else to do.
Danshir: Considering how many employees are needed to make an MMO, let alone maintain it, how daunting have you found it to perform the task of many by yourself?
Eskil: I’m developing all kinds of ways to make it easier but it is still very daunting. Even if I make it 100 times easier, I still have to work twice as hard.
Danshir: How will some of the more basic gameplay mechanics work? Will it TRULY be total freedom to manipulate one’s environment?
Eskil: No, the manipulation of the environment isn’t a very big part, the most important part is that the game itself can modify the world. The fact that i sometimes let the players do it too is more of a bonus than the main gameplay.
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