Today is my son Carl’s first birthday.
It’s hard to fathom that in a year he’s grown from that little tiny human being I held in my hands the night of the 27st of May 2005 to the big boy that’s running around in our (very) small 2 room apartment at breakneck speed.
The alway funny Futurama series can now be found on YouTube. Most of the episodes are online although not in the best quality.
… please.
It will follow the adventures of two thirtysomething gamers who wind up getting recruited by the Department of Homeland Security. They’re tasked with leading a whole army of gamers in a battle against monsters from a game they’ve clocked, who have now come to life.
[via Eurogamer.net]
That looks so unreal, that it’s almost scary… that’s even as bad as Tiger Woods “smiling“.
A long time ago I played most of Ratchet & Clank 1, but for some unknown reason (or at least I don’t remember the reason) I never got around completing it, but I remember clearly that I liked it very much. So I picked up Ratchet & Clank 3 the other day almost for free the local videogames pusher.
Boy is that game great or what… I know I say this a lot, but this game is one of the funniest and most accessible games I’ve played for a long time. Guitar Hero might top it for “coolness-factor”, but this game really deserves some praise. At least it deserves to be recognized for one of the best platform games ever made.
It’s already an old game (released in 2004 – and that being one of the reasons for it being super cheap) but in my book it stands and one of the best games made for the PS2 platform.
Again you follow the main characters the lombat Ratchet and his robot companion Clank around the galaxy in order to save the day. The evil Dr. Nefarious is planning some very evil schemes and must be stopped before it?s too late. Captain Quark is missing-in-action and is presume dead.
The story follows a used path that sound familiar to most, but the presentation of it is top-notch. I for one could stop thinking about how Futurama influenced this.
You are given missions that must be completed in certain order to advance in the game, same same. But around one third through the game it starts splitting the missions in a more random order. It uses hub-structure instead and it works really well. You get around revisiting some of the same places more than once, but the challenges presented are almost always different.
I for one hate (as in H-A-T-E) backtracking. If a game uses backtracking it for me shows that the game designers ran out of ideas and had to reuse the same locations / world over and over again. But because of the hub-structure it works very well in R&C3. Another reason why this works is, I believe also due largely to the weapons and gadgets of the game that upgrade and gain new abilities the more you use them. Common for all of them are that they are over-the-top ridiculous, hence using them is really fun.
It’s been a long time since I’ve played a game that makes so much fun a everything, include itself, and remains fun even after hours of play. I cannot recommend this game highly enough, and at the very low budget price there absolutely no going wrong with this game.
This month marks the one year anniversary of The Carnival of Games.
A little over a year ago, I tossed out the idea of holding a blog carnival for fellow gaming bloggers. The idea was well received and since then, we?ve had thirteen other carnivals. So now, here we are, one year later. Welcome to the first annivesary of the Carnival of Gamers. Step on up and wander around the Carnival of Gamers.
I did a short piece for the very first carnival about roleplaying in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, but unfortunately haven’t found the time to do another… you know, kids and stuff…
But a very big Happy Anniversary must go to Tony Rice for his tireless work for bringing this wonderful Carnival together, and may it last for many years to come.
Today I handed in a paper on design patterns for level design. It’s a paper I’ve been working on on the side in the last 12 weeks. As this is a side project the scope is rather small, but it might very well be a topic that I’ll explorer further in future projects or in my master thesis.
I have made an analysis of these multiplayer levels from popular first-person shooters (FPS):
From Day of Defeat: Source:
From Unreal Tournament 2004:
From Battlefield 1942
And have from that analysis compiled what I believe to be common practices of development and have formalized these in Level Design Patterns:
Read much more about these patterns in the paper itself.
Download the entire paper here (PDF ~ 2.01 MB)