Wonderland: BlizzCon pics

 Posted by (Visited 4233 times)  Game talk
Aug 042007
 

Wonderland: BlizzCon pics

It’s very big, bigger I think than I was expecting, but also very anti-social: everything that you could want (clothes, food, playmachines) has a MASSIVE queue, and then there’s lots of blank space in between.

It’s funny how apt a description this is of World of Warcraft itself, in some ways. Like game, like con? A pity that the con can’t be instanced. 🙂

I had dinner with the folks from Kingdom of Loathing just the other day — they play quite a bit of WoW — and we spent a long time talking about the ways in which design choices select for players and the way in which players gravitate towards design choices.  Referencing WoW specifically, we talked about how much the game selects for people who come to it with friends, and how unsocial it can feel for someone there by themselves. The case was made by them that you don’t want to meet all those people anyway. 🙂

No one game fits all, of course.

Art Games: Best Indy Titles

 Posted by (Visited 12306 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking
Aug 012007
 

This is very flattering. Mentisworks has done a selection of the best indie “art games” which is featured on the front of Indygamer. Andean Bird placed on the list, alongside titles like Facade, Flow, Raspberry, The Endless Forest, The Marriage, and many more intriguing titles. Given that the Bird is still at version 0.5, that’s quite august company to be keeping.

 Quite unlike anything else out there, Andean Bird offers a leisurely glide across the landscape to the accompaniment of beautiful music. It does manage to instill some of the qualities of flight, yet that same endeavor is hampered by its lack of fullscreen capability.

Hmm. Fullscreen is about two lines of code, I should add that.

Anyway, the latest version is 0.5, and it’s here (PC only, zip file… sorry, I haven’t compiled a Mac version in eons).