Archive | September, 2010

Lovecraft Wallows In A Starcraft II Loss

16 Sep Features Games and Gaming

3

starcthulu2-1

It is harrowing to have the veil ripped away from ones eyes, the infinite horror of that nameless alien weakness.  I go to the study, go to my office, throw dinner parties, with never the glimmer of suspicion as to what eldritch terror will grab me from the dark, pull me into an mute stupour as your sixteen carriers run ragged over my full complement of siege tanks and level 3 upgraded marines (weapons and armour!).

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Decoding John Carmack’s twitter feed.

15 Sep Games and Gaming Software Tech

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A few months ago, John Carmack got a twitter account. Typically twitter is used to express the mundane details of one’s day, sometimes to chat with others on subjects, and gives one’s followers an update on what’s going on at work.

John Carmack uses his twitter account to talk about his job. Most of the advances in 3D gaming, First Person Shooters, and game engines can be attributed to some form of the Quake engine. He works on graphics programming all day, pushing the envelope. As a result, his tweets are a jumble of jargon. Hard to understand, until now. With the magic of the internet we can look up the meaning of these words and maybe piece together what’s going on.
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My Vote For the Best EVAR: the early 90s

15 Sep Features Games and Gaming Retrospectives

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dune2_2

As others have noted, there is a challenge going on right now among MeFightClub members to name the best game.  EVAR.   MeFightClub is a group of grown-ups (in both the sense of age but more importantly in maturity) who play games (and who sometimes say EVAR).  The community was started around Valve’s multi-player shooters so there is a real love for those.  But more generally the community reflects my gaming interests: PC-centered, mature (not in the R-rated sense but in the sense that rejects the 13-yo boy’s aesthetic common to much gaming), and most of all fun.

But this challenge has been… well … challenging to me. Try as I might I just can’t bring myself to name one best game EVAR.  Part of the problem is that I am just not that decisive and just not that attached to a single game.  I am also hung up on the criteria I should use and it is made all the more difficult because one must compare games across three decades when the underlying technology has changed so much.  So should you reward Doom for revolutionizing a new genre of games or do you favor a more modern FPS because it looks and sounds better?  Do you give a nod to a game that was technically innovative and ahead of its time, like Command HQ was for the Real-Time Strategy genre, or favor the game that introduced those ideas to the masses like Dune II, Warcraft, or Age of Empires?  Do you go with a game that made you smile for days after you finished it, like I did with Portal, or award the game that sucked up the most time?  For me that might be Ultima IV, one of the Civilizations, Railroad Tycoon II, or most recently Team Fortress II.  Like I said, I can’t commit to just one game when I can’t even commit to just one criteria.

But in thinking about this problem I keep coming back to one central seed of a thought that has been growing until I realized it is the only answer I can provide.  The most important thing isn’t a single game or a genre or a company or a designer.  To me the most important period was when computer gaming grew up to embrace all of the things I currently love about gaming: PC-centered, mature, and fun.  That era I would argue is the early-1990s.

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The Most Important (Gaming Company). Evar. Of All Time.

14 Sep Features Games and Gaming

6

justagame
[There's a competition going on at MeFight Club for a blog post about "The Most Important Game Ever". You've got about a day to get your entry in. The prize is pretty sweet too.]

Wow, all time. That’s something. It’s a bit like trying to pick the single best meal you’ve ever had, or the biggest poop you’ve ever taken, or maybe “Which politician had the single biggest effect on democracy, like, EVER?”

(Sorry, it’s been a long week at school and all I really want to do is bash a few academics in their noggins and tell them, “Life is for partying, not for semantics!” But I digress.)

But the hard part isn’t that bit – it’s the bit which reads, “Most Important”. That suggests a title of such singular importance that, in a list of merely rather important videogames, it would be numero uno. El Capitan. The Big Cheese. God, if you would. The God of all videogames. Or, if you’re not religious, but instead like movies and/or the Mafia, the Godfather of all videogames.
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In(sert) Soviet Russia(n coin) …

A fascinating and lengthy blog post (made in January but it’s making the rounds now) about a visit to a museum of Soviet-era arcade games.  There are many pictures.  And I am very glad I was not a child of the Soviet 80s.

∞

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