An unhappy pig man. He doesn't want you to eat bacon anymore (but knows you will anyway).
A tree by the edge of a curb. I want to make a painting of this someday.
I just wanted to take a moment to share some screens of the game You Still Won't Make It, which I am working on with Vetra Games (Uriel Griffin, Jake Almond, and Jesse Venbrux). Development has been slow at times and fast at others, but it's coming together, and we will hopefully have the game out later this year.
In case you haven't played the original game (You Probably Won't Make It), YSWMI is more or less the same type of game: a skill-based platformer where the player simply needs to navigate the character from start to the finish, through a series of increasingly challenging rooms.
Naturally, I'm in charge of the graphics. And though the project is, graphically, a large departure from the original game, I'm happy to say that it's also a vast improvement. That's not to say the original graphics were bad - they got the job done - but there was a lot of room for some creativity on that front, and so far, I'm very pleased with how it's looking.
This is essentially what the game looked like when I got my hands on it some months ago:
And here are a few screenshots from our sequel, which is a work in progress at this point:
Quite different, eh? But still the same (brutal, fun) game underneath all of that.
Though I'm continuing to develop and add new graphics to it, I just recently finished enough to actually have the game play without a bunch of ugly placeholders everywhere, and that's a great milestone to achieve. We're looking forward to getting this game out later this year, and hopefully many people out there are looking forward to playing it, too!
After spending some time trying to work my way through the various tracks of Mario Kart 7 on 150cc mode (the highest difficulty), I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that the game is broken. In all other aspects, I love Mario Kart 7. I think it's a great game. But the outcome of the races are too random at the 150cc level, and at that level, the game simply just isn't fun.
I remember, many years ago, reading an interview with Valve about the making of Half-Life, on why that game was such a great step forward for the medium. One bit that always stuck with me was about how they made the game more fun by helping warn the player about upcoming threats and obstacles.
I don't remember the exact example they gave of this, but it amounted to showing cracks on the floor and having the player observe little bits falling off into the abyss before the player actually encountered a portion of the game where the floor would break under their weight, and they could fall and die. Something like that, anyway.
This struck me because it was such an obvious concept. Half-Life is more fun because the observant player could avoid random death. Obviously, random death is not fun. It teaches the player nothing, and it feels cheap.
And that's why Mario Kart 7's 150cc mode seems so broken to me. It doesn't matter how well I take the corners or how lucky I am at drawing weapons. The randomness of the largely unavoidable arsenal of weapons the enemies are constantly throwing at me negates any skill I might have. It feels cheap to get hit by a blue shell at the end of an otherwise perfect race, especially when it's lobbed into play by a computer-controlled player.
Because of this, each time I attempt to play the game on 150cc mode, no matter how relaxed or passive I'm feeling at the outset, I am a total, utter, frantic lunatic by the time it's over. My heat is racing. I'm upset. And most of the time I don't come in first.
That isn't fun for me. I really want it to be, but it just isn't. It's not worth the frustration.
It's funny how your brain's memory works. Things that you haven't thought of in decades can suddenly come back and fill you with feelings that were, at one time, something more familiar.
I experienced this the other day while going for a walk. My girlfriend and I were walking past a school where little league baseball games are almost constantly being played. I never really pay much attention to it, but for some reason the sounds of the games really grabbed me for a moment.
Ping! An aluminum bat made contact with a baseball. The small crowd of friends and family went from talking to enthusiastic yelling. A few yelps from people with loader voices, chirps of encouragement, and then all became quiet again as the play came to a close.
I didn't see what had actually happened during that moment of excitement and I couldn't make out the names people were directing their cheers at, or even what they were actually saying for encouragement. But the general feeling, the pitch and tone of it all, really brought me back to my youth when, for a few years, it was somewhat normal for me to have to go to baseball practice and wake up early to go to games on the weekends.
I've never been much of an athlete, so I didn't always like having to do those things, but I still remember it being fun, in a simple sort of way. I suspect that might just be the rose-colored glasses of lots and lots of time having passed that has made me forget the things I didn't much like, but maybe it's better that I remember it just for the good parts.
Anyway, it's funny how easy it is to go back to those thoughts, even after just about 20 years of never once having thought about it. Transported through back in time by the sound of an aluminum bat!
Back in 2010, a week or so before Halloween, Double Fine Productions released Costume Quest. Somewhere between then and a month or two ago, I bought it on XBLA, and I finally got around to actually playing it about a week ago. It's a cute, fun little game, and I enjoyed it.
It's basically a light RPG-type game, where you run around neighborhoods trick-or-treating houses, collecting candy, costumes, and battle stamps (which improve your abilities in combat). Encounters with monsters are the meat of the game and trigger a sequence where the cute cartoon children and silly monsters morph into giants who do battle over the town in a turn-based RPG style. It kind of reminds me of that episode of South Park where the kids morph into anime characters and battle each other.
The cartoon graphics are crisp and colorful, and the sound design is simple, but does all the appropriate things. Controls are easy. Overall, it's a shorter, but quality title - the quality of which I've come to expect from Double Fine.
If you haven't played Costume Quest yet, I'd recommend it. Maybe save it as a little Halloween treat for later this year.
Is there a reason why The Beatles' music (in digital format) hasn't expanded beyond iTunes yet?
It's really disappointing to me that I can't buy their music anywhere online unless I want to buy a disc and have it shipped to me or unless I want to use iTunes, which I don't. Surely there's money to be made by ending exclusivity with iTunes, and if there's anything the recording industry likes, it's the sound of piles of money rolling in. So, what's the deal?
While I'm on the subject of music, I also would like to ask why Amazon's mobile app, at least the Windows Phone 7 version, doesn't give me access to my cloud-stored music.
Apple, Microsoft, Google, Last.fm, Pandora, and a slew of other services can all stream music stored online... so why not Amazon as well? They already automatically store all of my music purchases online, they have a huge network of content servers across the globe, and they've got an app out for all the major mobile platforms. It seems like a no-brainer.
Like many people out there, I've been playing Diablo 3 over the last week or so. And while I did participate in the beta, I mostly did that just to see how the game would run on my machine; I didn't really dig into the game until now. Here are a few things I've been thinking lately as I've played:
- The mouse clicking is intense, and while the case could be made that it's a pure control concept or that it's a nice throwback, sometimes it can feel a little stale. I just hope I don't end up accidentally breaking my mouse.
- I'm really happy Blizzard decided to get rid of town portal scrolls. Using up inventory slots for something you almost always had to have was stupid.
- The cinematic scenes are epic. I'm honestly kind of surprised Blizzard hasn't begun developing its own in-house game-to-movie crossovers. They obviously have the talent.
- The graphics are good, even at the lowest settings. It also runs on my years-old laptop, which is pretty neat. I'm afraid of overheating it though, so I don't play on that machine much.
- It's hard to really nail down why, but the game feels (or rather, maybe it just looks) a bit like World of Warcraft. It just seems oddly familiar, which isn't really a bad thing I suppose.
- The required internet connection is a little weird, especially at first. Playing a single player game with a latency indicator on the HUD is strange. I understand why they did all this, but for people with spotty internet connections / networking hardware, it's kind of a drag.
- It's a bummer that Blizzard couldn't get the launch right. After spending a few days just looking at my shiny new pre-loaded game, I finally installed and then spent the first hour of launch trying to log in, but the game's servers were borked- no doubt totally crushed by thousands of people trying to log in at once. It's disappointing to me that Blizzard, proprietor or the world's most successful MMORPG, can't nail a launch that involves heavy server load yet.
- Co-op play is seamless and easy to do, thanks to Battle.net.
Despite a few drawbacks, I'm enjoying my time with the game. This is definitely a more accessible Diablo, at least so far, and with achievements, weapon crafting, lots of rare items, and all sorts of stat combinations, there's no shortage of rewards for putting in time with the game.
It'll be interesting to see if that dynamic changes when Blizzard unleashes the cash-powered auction house in a few days; there's already one in operation that uses the in-game "gold" currency. Since the core of the game is still a single player experience though, the player remains well insulated from all the madness that comes with the auction house. And that's probably a good thing, lest Diablo 3 start feeling a little bit too much like World of Warcraft.
I have to admit: I'm curious about Windows 8. This probably doesn't come as that big of a surprise, since Windows has been my primary OS since my family first got a computer about two decades ago, but I still consider it significant, seeing as Win 8 is looking to be such a departure from previous incarnations of the software.
I'm not particularly excited about the metro interface, since I've been using it on my phone for a long time now. I'm actually more interested to see what kind of tablet devices manufacturers will come up with for it, and how they will factor into the flow of all the other devices we already use.
I'm still of mind that a tablet is a pretty pointless addition to a lineup which already includes a desktop computer, a laptop, and a smart phone. But I think that if it becomes possible to use a tablet as tablets are used today, but also dock it to a workstation to use a laptop/desktop type machine, it makes much more sense than a tablet-only device, like an iPad. Especially for someone looking to replace an aging laptop, but who hasn't yet bought into the whole tablet thing.
That's not necessarily my situation; I'm still pretty happy with the continued performance of my years-old laptop. But I have to admit that a Win 8 tablet might be enticing, if it turns out to be as versatile as it seems it could.
We'll see in the coming months, I guess!
Recently, a few of my friends have made comments to me about how I "hate Apple". I just wanted to take a moment here and clear the air on the subject.
I do not, in fact, hate Apple.
Am I critical of some of the stupid things they do? Sure. But I am that way for many things, including things that I really enjoy using / being a part of.
I do, however, hate Apple's throng of fanboys; that loud, angry minority of Apple users who will argue how great their new iDevice is while they're lugging it through the mall to their local Apple Store to get it repaired. But instead of going on and on about why I hate Apple zealots, here's a good real-world example (the first comment on this article from 9to5mac.com):
I'll stay with my two-year-old opinion. iOS and Mac OS X will never merge, but they will continue to complement in feature set (Mac to iPhone to iPad to Mac, and so on) and connectivity (iCloud, etc.). One day, iOS and Mac OS X will get canceled after Apple creates a new OS that reinvents computing. When they find a way that's got the precision and speed of the mouse and keyboard and the ease-of-use and mobility of the touch screen, they'll implement that input method into the new OS. I give it 5 years (up to 10) - otherwise, another company (I'm not betting for Microsoft - they never did anything extremely innovative, IMO) may become the new Apple.
I've bolded the worst part. The whole comment is bad, but the ignorance, arrogance, and stupidity that went into drafting that single bolded sentence is mind-blowing to me. It's like reading the words of a religious zealot. Totally ridiculous.
So long story short, I don't hate Apple; I hate its pretentious, die-hard fans. And just to keep things fun, here's a short list of other fanboys I can't stand, in no particular order:
- PlayStation/Sony fanboys
- Dallas Cowboys fanboys
- Halo fanboys
Anyway, that felt good to get off my chest. Feel free to leave me a love letter in the comments about it.