Games at Geek Skillz http://www.geekskillz.com/tags/2 Articles tagged with Games at Geek Skillz. Mon, 05 May 2008 16:28:00 EST Mon, 05 May 2008 16:28:00 EST en-us For Oblivion Book Collectors http://www.geekskillz.com/articles/for-oblivion-book-collectors Elder Scrolls, Games

Yes, I'm still playing Oblivion. It's a rare game that I don't get bored of after so much time.

My latest and greatest character is a Hermaeus Mora worshipper, that crustaceous blob with the great library. How does he read with lobster claws for hands? Anyway, I designed a house for myself using the construction set and put some big book shelves in it. My plan is to collect all the books in the game that I can find. Oblivion has a lot of books. Lots! This quest should keep me entertained until the next Elder Scrolls game comes out.

So, I needed a way to keep track of my character's growing library. Which books do I already have back at home? Which ones do I need? You get the point. Having just bought iWork '08 for my Mac, I decided to give it a try by creating a list of all the books. And so I did.

For all the other Elder Scrolls geeks out there, I'm sharing this checklist. It doesn't export well to Microsoft Word format, what with all the fancy layout I did with iWork. So it's only available in PDF and Pages format.

Get the files at the Oblivion Book Collector's Checklist page!

Let me know if I missed any books or if there are typos. Or just let me know if you're a book collector like me!

]]> Mon, 05 May 2008 16:28:00 EST http://www.geekskillz.com/articles/for-oblivion-book-collectors [Review] Hellgate: London http://www.geekskillz.com/articles/review-hellgate-london Games, Hellgate: London, Rants, Reviews

Hellgate: London was a game I got excited about when I first heard about it, and then lost interest when I heard more about it, and then got excited about it again for some reason I can't remember. Feeling the urge to get a new game in early November, I picked up Hellgate: London, thinking it could be that game that would replace my current favorite games, or at least be a contender for my attention. Getting a new game is a thrilling experience for gamer geeks like me. Going to the game store, rushing home with the box in hand, putting the disk in the drive, watching the installer status bar inch towards 100%, and then hitting the "Play" button. Thrilling, I tell you!

That was the high point of Hellgate for me. Actually, for the first few hours playing the game, I was still having fun. But things went downhill real fast and it didn't take long for that sinking feeling of disappointment to ruin it all.

At its core, somewhere deep and buried, is a good Diablo-style action-RPG. Random magic items, supposedly random levels, lots of loot, endless monsters to kill, fast action, and everything else you expect from the Diablo formula. But you have to overlook a lot of flaws if you want to relive the endless fun of Diablo.

I'll start by listing the things about Hellgate that I enjoyed, because it's proper to say nice things about something before insulting the crap out of it.


The Good:

The Marksman: Playing the marksman class is great fun. Marksmen get to use many types of guns that are truly unique and can change the feel of gameplay a great deal. Using the Firefox (yes, Firefox) launcher is nothing like using a machine gun, and the option of using one small gun in each hand lets you have two different gun effects going off at the same time. I often chose to use two guns just because it was fun, even if it might have done less damage (which is hard to say... see later). The marksman doesn't suffer from the annoyances, bugs, and quirks of the other classes because you're just firing guns and shooting grenades. That's basically all there is to the class.

Weapon Sets: Hellgate lets you create three weapon sets that you can switch between using F1, F2, and F3. So, you can equip your machine gun on F1, equip two one-handed weapons on F2, and equip a sniper rifle on F3. This makes it feasible to switch between different weapons effortlessly so that you can use fire damage on monsters weak to fire, then switch to electrical damage for another monster, go into sniper mode with your sniper rifle, and so on. Setting up my arsenal of weapon slots was definitely fun, I'll give Hellgate that.


The Bad:

The Story: Wow, the story in this game is a stinker. I can hear some people protesting, claiming that Diablo's story wasn't very impressive either, and that no one plays an action-RPG for its story. But Hellgate's story is so bad it can't be ignored. I just can't bear the thought of playing through the last act again because it is so unbelievably stupid and painful to experience. The story is complete nonsense. I would say that the story was written while someone was on drugs, but I don't want to insult drugs like that. None of it made sense. None of it. The ending consists of fighting a demon who appears on the front of the game box, with very little explanation. Most disappointing villain ever. Diablo at least set up Diablo as this terrible demon who needed to be stopped. But the demon at the end of Hellgate has no history or story at all. Is it really so hard to foreshadow the end boss as a big bad guy?

The Writing: Ok, "writing" and "story" are basically the same thing, but I really hated this aspect of the game, so I'm including it in two sections. It's my blog and I can do what I want to! The writing is terrible. NPC dialog tries to be funny, but falls flat, and it gives very little information. Every NPC is a clown, cracking jokes or talking nonsense in a sad, sad effort to get a chuckle. Even worse is that some of the jokes are voice-acted so that you have to listen to them every time you want to sell your loot. It's ok for games to have humour, but it should be suitable in some way. Hellgate does a good job of creating a dark, post-apocalyptic atmosphere, but it is often ruined because all the NPCs are total buffoons. For the benefit of the Hellgate writers, here's the definition of "Toon" from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America website:
Toon. A comic relief character generally intended to be recognized as such -- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are toons (most of Shakespeare's comic relief characters are toons). Toons have a limited place in fiction; an excess of them can render an otherwise serious work trivial. (CSFW: David Smith)

Cinematics: The cinematics in between each act are nonsense, much like the rest of the story. Without spoiling anything, they show a floating book. To accompany the floating book is a narrator who makes no sense at all. He just babbles some cliches and random words. Why even bother with cinematics if the writers have no content for them? Awful.

Skill Descriptions: Hellgate has skill trees like in Diablo 2 and World of Warcraft. Want to know what each skill does? You can try reading the skill descriptions, but they often won't help. To understand what most of the skills do, you need to spend precious skill points and try them. Since there's no way to get those skill points back, you'll end up wasting points on skills you don't like. The fix for this problem? Hire better technical writers. But you already know how I feel about the writing in this game... Unhelpful skill descriptions is just another symptom of a bigger problem with Hellgate. Alternatively, they could allow characters to "re-spec" (re-assign skill points any way you like), but I can understand why the game designers don't want to allow that.

Weapon Damage: Similar to the poor skill descriptions, it is very difficult to know whether one weapon is more powerful than another. All weapons have a number on them, but the meaning of that number is a mystery. It doesn't tell you how much damage you do, although that's what I assumed until finding a weapon with a much lower number that did a lot more damage than my current weapon. Most games now use the "damage per second" metric to tell you how much damage weapons will do, but Hellgate doesn't. Just like skills, the only way to tell the power of a weapon is to try it. Even then, it's hard to tell which weapons are more powerful most of the time.

Guide the Fist to Victory!: The quest "The Wall", where you must "Guide the Fist to Victory!" is a vomit-inducing stench of awful. It's unbelievable that someone at Flagship had played the quest, thought it was good, and decided to leave it in the game. This quest forces you to play a real-time strategy mission where you must control four useless soldiers from a top-down perspective and kill a boss somehow. The quest doesn't work well, and is completely broken in multi-player. If you do the quest in a party, every party member shares the same camera but controls different units. So, if you move north and your friend moves west, the camera can only show one person at a time, often oscillating between different viewpoints so that no one can see anything. Have no doubt, you and your friends will be yelling and screaming at each other in frustration. If you want your friendship to survive, you'd better start laughing about how bad the quest is. It's actually pretty funny. Flagship, what the hell? This quest is deplorable. And what's worse is that there is another quest like it closer to the end of the game. You will again need to control a unit in the same way (The Lightning), and it's just as bad.

Dismantle: The game has what I thought was a good feature at first. Instead of dropping items or carrying them back to town to sell, you have the option of dismantling loot to get small, stackable scraps that can later be used for crafting, upgrades, or selling. In theory, it's a great feature that improves on the Diablo formula. But soon you'll find that you're spending a good chunk of your time using the game's awkward interface to dismantle the hundreds of useless items that you picked up, one at a time. If you see your party members standing still instead of helping you in a fight, you can be sure that they are busy dismantling their items. In other games, you would suspect that they lost their internet connection or their computer crashed. But in Hellgate, they are dismantling items. This problem can be easily fixed with a "dismantle all" button or "dismantle all non-magic items". Titan Quest fixed this problem by giving you the option to ignore all non-magic and/or inferior items that drop. You won't even see them, so they'll never find their way into your inventory. Hellgate could easily add the same feature and it would go a long way to make the game more fun.

Levels: By themselves, I rather like most of the tile sets in the game. I especially like fighting in the London streets, the ruins of pubs, flats, and cars all around. The problem is that after you have been playing for a few hours, you have seen nearly all the level designs. After a few more hours, you will be dying to see some colours besides brown and grey. Set pieces like the British Museum and Piccadilly Circus are a welcome relief, and are very well done. Also, the game claims to be randomizing the levels, but I don't see it. Every street level looks the same to me. Every sewer, the same. Every basement, the same. Every hell citadel, the same. I'm sure there are slight variations, but the randomization is far too subtle to provide any variety. Also, since the game has the word "hell" in the title, you would think that hell would be an impressive place. Nope. Hellgate features the most boring, unimpressive rendition of hell I've ever seen. As for the hellgate itself, it provided the funniest moment in the game for me. When I first saw it, I thought I was looking at a rainbow. "Oh, isn't that pretty! Oh wait... that's the hellgate!? Mwahahaha!" If only the NPCs were that funny.



Conclusion

Ok, I think I've pummeled Hellgate: London for long enough now. It's bruised and bleeding, and I almost feel bad about it. The game can be pretty fun to play, although I didn't enjoy most of the classes. As a marksman, I had some good times. Hellgate is not beyond hope, given another year or two of development.

I tried to play it a couple of times lately, but couldn't get back into it. I don't want to dismantle any more items! I don't want to guide the Fist to victory ever again! The final level with the guy on the cover of the box is torture and I don't want to do it! There are too many things in the game that aren't fun.

If you're looking for a good action-RPG released in the past few years, I highly recommend Titan Quest. I can't recommend Hellgate: London to anyone for any reason.]]> Thu, 03 Jan 2008 14:55:00 EST http://www.geekskillz.com/articles/review-hellgate-london [FREE] Last Oblivion Download http://www.geekskillz.com/articles/free-last-oblivion-download Discounts, Elder Scrolls, Games

For one week, starting Monday, October 15, the last official downloadable plugin for Oblivion will be available for FREE! It's the long talked about Fighter's Stronghold, which was rumored to be called "Dragonfire Castle", but isn't.

It's a castle. You want it.

Also included is a taxidermist. How long until someone creates a plugin to allow a stuffed Adoring Fan? I bet it will be available by next Wednesday. Go to it, modders!

Download it here on Monday.]]> Fri, 12 Oct 2007 13:14:00 EST http://www.geekskillz.com/articles/free-last-oblivion-download A Little Oblivion Machinima http://www.geekskillz.com/articles/a-little-oblivion-musical-machinima Elder Scrolls, Games, Machinima, Music

After discovering Red vs. Blue years ago, I've been a fan of machinima. For those who haven't yet discovered this art form, it's where videos are created using footage from video games. Often, a new soundtrack is added to the video to tell a new story or re-interpret the game somehow. New dialog, new music, whatever. It's the visual version of what DJ's have been doing for decades: remixing existing work to create something new.

I just discovered some amazing musical machinima based on Oblivion by Stuart Maxwell. He remixes both the audio and video from the game to create hip-hop in "Not Bad Work For Some Folks", a bad dream in "Drugs", and funny drum'n'bass (vsnare?) in this one:


I don't think he knows me...


Reynald Jemane is my favorite Oblivion NPC, so I was sold in the first two seconds!

My personal favorite by Maxwell is "Drugs", but it's a bit heavy and surreal for most folks, I'm sure. But if you like surreal stuff, definitely check it out. It's a beautifully directed dystopian nightmare.

For some World of Warcraft machinima, check out Burning Twilight.]]> Wed, 03 Oct 2007 17:54:00 EST http://www.geekskillz.com/articles/a-little-oblivion-musical-machinima Time For An Upgrade http://www.geekskillz.com/articles/time-for-an-upgrade Elder Scrolls, Games, Geek Loot, Reviews

My big red Alienware PC is now about two years old. Seems like I just bought it. *sniff* As I mentioned earlier, I bought BioShock, the smash hit new game that doesn’t work. Well, this game really showed me how old my computer is. The graphics are still good, and oh-so shiny, but the framerate just isn’t high enough to allow me to react fast enough to the zombies... er, mutants... er, splicers? I don’t know, whatever they are. They’re zombies with a stupid name.

So, disappointed, I switched over to playing Oblivion again. I still love that game. Then I thought about making it run even better. I mean, eventually BioShock will get a much-needed patch (right?!) and then I’ll want to play it. So, I downloaded the Computer Internet to my hard disc driver, and found that video card prices have dropped delightfully! I was expecting to see the latest cards being sold for $300 or more (Canadian dollars), but found one of the recommended upgrade card (see Tom’s Hardware) for as low as $192! Wow, a PC upgrade that’s cheaper than an XBOX 360? Too good to be true.

The Tom’s Hardware upgrade guide I referenced describes my PC perfectly. It’s like they wrote it for me. But instead of following the advice strictly, I just bought the video card and ignored the CPU upgrade suggestion. Turns out it was a fine decision, because now I’m playing Oblivion with things turned up almost to max! BioShock looks better too, but still crashes all the time. So my “old” hardware wasn’t the problem. It really is just a broken game.


Much of my joy in Oblivion comes from my characters. I like to take lots of screenshots of them. And now they look so much better. I can now use the “self shadows” option, which means that their clothing, armor, weapons, and other body parts (arms, nose, cheek bones, etc.) cast shadows onto the character. I’m playing a character who is often sneaking through the shadows, so seeing him wearing a hood that cast shadows over his eyes is video game geek heaven! Skulking in the shadows is way more fun now!

Another advantage to this simple, cheap upgrade is how well it handles the dense, lush forests in the game. Combat in the grassy forests always brought my computer to a crawl with my old nVidia 6800GT, giving me about 5 to 10 frames per second, which was a bit frustrating. Now forest battles are glorious and gorgeous.

Self-shadows is still my favorite feature though. Seeing the shadow of my sword on the goblin’s face right as it’s coming down will never get old.

If your computer is in need of a quick fix, check out the 8600GTS. It seems to be a prime time to upgrade right now, and this card delivers a lot of power at a low cost.

Oh, and for fun, check out a realistic and hilarious review of BioShock. Apparently, I’m not the only one who noticed how much of Fallout was stolen... I mean, how inspirational Fallout was to BioShock. I can’t embed the video here, so you’ll have to check it out at The Escapist.]]> Sat, 08 Sep 2007 19:49:00 EST http://www.geekskillz.com/articles/time-for-an-upgrade Bioshock Keeps Me On Edge http://www.geekskillz.com/articles/bioshock-keeps-me-on-edge Games, Rants

I jumped on the bandwagon and bought Bioshock for Windows last weekend. It was time for a new game, and this one looked interesting. It’s a first-person shooter, which is definitely not my favorite genre. But it takes place in an underwater art deco city where you use magic, guns, and listen to tunes from the 1950’s while mutants jump at you from the dark! It was made for me.

So, I load it up and play through the prologue, where you survive a plane crash. Next I approach this spooky tower, enter the elevator, and then a cool Fallout-style black and white film plays, followed b...CRASH!!

Crap. Ok, hit the reset button on my computer, and reload. Turn down some of the video settings, and do it all again. I successfully go down the elevator without a crash! Awesome! Then I explore for a while, kill mutants, and then... and then... and then... and then... and then...

Crap. The game froze up. And that’s pretty much what playing Bioshock on Windows is like. The game is supposed to scare you and keep you on edge, but it’s supposed to be fear of the mutants, not fear of crashes. All I’m on edge about is when the next crash will happen. Can I save my game without a crash? Can I safely open this door? Will searching this container crash the game? Talk about keeping you on edge!


I’m not alone here. Plenty of discussion on digg.com reveals similar stories and pissed off customers. This is a broken game on Windows. Similar stories aren’t heard from XBOX 360 customers. So we can see where the game developer’s priorities were.


Bioshock on Windows is Not Finished!

Quality assurance in the gaming industry is garbage. I’m sure that the QA folks know how to test and are finding bugs. However, the game companies don’t care. Once they get to a release date, most companies will ship the game and patch it later. Or not patch it. They must know that the bugs exist, but they’re more interested in making their quarterly results than making customers happy. Ship the game, expect complaints, publish happy financial numbers, and release a patch sometime later.

There’s no incentive to wait until a game is finished. You can’t return a game to the store after you find out it doesn’t work. As soon as you break that precious plastic wrap, you’re on your own.


Bioshock Gameplay Tips

Here are some tips for surviving in Bioshock:

1. If you don’t have a second monitor, buy one.
2. Keep Windows Task Manager open on your second monitor so you can Alt-Tab to it and kill Bioshock.exe.
3. Keep the reset button of your computer within easy reach.
4. Update your device drivers to pass the time. It probably won’t help, but at least you’ll accomplish something.
5. Have a game that works installed on your system, like Oblivion or anything by Blizzard. These games are made by companies who actually delay their game release dates when they are not finished their games. That’s right, instead of getting instant cash and pissing off their customers, some companies choose to finish their games enough so that they run for more than a few minutes at a time.

Rumors say that a patch for Windows customers is on the way. Isn’t that nice. What will they do to make me forget that I got screwed by buying this game? I should have downloaded an illegal copy.

In the meantime, the company says that you need some beta video card drivers. But the install for those drivers say they can’t find any updates... And besides, I’m not installing unfinished drivers for an unfinished game. That’s an unacceptable policy. Did I pay for the Bioshock Beta, or what?

Most games take some effort to get running on Windows. It’s rare that you can install a game, load it, and enjoy. You usually have to adjust the screen resolution, choose which type of shadows your computer can handle, adjust the draw distance, tweak the grass density, choose the water reflection mode, adjust the texture quality, adjust actor detail, enable or disable specular highlighting, choose the appropriate anti-aliasing mode, see how much high-dynamic range lighting affects performance, and so on and so on until you can find the right mix of visual quality and frame rate. And that assumes that the game doesn’t crash when you load the game, start a new game, enter a new zone, load a game, jump into a tree, stand on the blue brick, swing a dagger while wearing the gauntlets of ogre power, dance and cast magic missile without any pants, or whatever might turn the game against you.

I think it’s time I bought a console and give up gaming on Windows forever. That would mean that I wouldn’t need a Windows PC at all! Is it time to buy a Mac desktop now? Hmm... I can see that day coming.


Some Happy Thoughts

To Bioshock’s credit, I still want to play it. I will wait patiently for a patch and see how things turn out. It seems like it could be a beautiful game. It is clearly inspired by Fallout. Just look at the men and women washroom signs. There are countless other allusions to Fallout in the game, like the black and white film vignettes and rusty retro architecture. It’s great! The art deco architecture, underwater urban environment, and retro 1950’s music make for a cool steampunk-ish world.

It will be a great game when it’s finished, I’m sure.]]> Tue, 28 Aug 2007 22:45:00 EST http://www.geekskillz.com/articles/bioshock-keeps-me-on-edge Hellgate London: What It'll Cost You http://www.geekskillz.com/articles/hellgate-london-what-it-ll-cost-you Games, Hellgate: London, Rants, Virtual Worlds

The hype machine at Flagship Studios has finally answered the burning question on gamers' minds: How much will the monthly subscription fee for Hellgate: London cost? See the price and their explanation here.

As I wrote earlier, I was hoping it would be a fun diversion like Diablo. But I'm not willing to pay a bill every month for something like that.

As the official site says, the game is free to play... as long as you don't want any updates.

For all players, HELLGATE: LONDON comes completely free-to-play out of the box and will offer a secure online experience... For players with Subscription* accounts ( €9.99 / £6.99 per month), Flagship Studios will deliver exciting new ongoing content including new character classes, areas, monsters, items and raid content, new game modes... [and on and on and on]

What a scam. So, you are buying a demo of the game. After a few weeks, they will start releasing updates that only subscribers get. If you aren't paying, you're left in the demo areas. As soon as one of your friends gets a subscription, then you will have to start paying too if you want to keep playing with him.

If that's the business model they want, they need to deliver the kind of content that you find in an MMO, but it doesn't look that way.

I'm sure they'll do very well. But my interest is officially gone.]]> Thu, 23 Aug 2007 20:16:00 EST http://www.geekskillz.com/articles/hellgate-london-what-it-ll-cost-you [Sale] Final Fantasy 7 Buster Sword http://www.geekskillz.com/articles/sale-final-fantasy-7-buster-sword Games, Geek Loot

UPDATE Sept. 5, 2007: This product has been discontinued! Crap.

Comic convention season is ending. If you went, you probably noticed people with all kinds of cool costumes and loot! The Final Fantasy VII characters are a pretty common sight at most cons, thanks mostly to Cloud’s giant Buster Sword.

Cloud’s sword is so ridiculously big that it only works in Anime or as cardboard... or does it?

Some crazy sword maker has created a real metal replica of this iconic sword. It is made of four steel blades that lock together into the one huge weapon. With all the steel involved in its construction, it weighs a hefty 15 pounds. If you can stand to carry this beast around at next year’s comic conventions, you’ll be sure to induce nerdgasms everywhere you go!

Check it out!]]> Fri, 17 Aug 2007 09:01:00 EST http://www.geekskillz.com/articles/sale-final-fantasy-7-buster-sword Peter Molyneux Is Rubbish http://www.geekskillz.com/articles/peter-molyneux-is-rubbish Games, Rants

The best escape for me is a good computer role-playing game, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before. So I’m interested in following the newest RPGs. What are they doing that’s new? What’s the story? What kind of character can I play? How does it evolve the RPG genre? Game developers always claim that they will deliver awesome games that will blow your frikkin’ mind and change gaming forever LOL!!1

The king of hype is Peter Molyneux, who for some reason has gotten into the RPG market. I wrote a review of his first RPG, Fable, giving it a forgiving 4 out of 5. It was a fun enough game, but I would hardly say it had many aspects of an RPG. It was more of an action arcade button-masher. Nevertheless, it was good times.

Now Molyneux is on the war path again, promoting Fable 2. I read an interview he did at Kikizo, where I found this quote which raised my eyebrows and inspired me to sharpen my knives:

”Stupidly, the ambition on this thing is I want you to measure this against any fighting game... It's amazing for a role playing game, because most role playing games are shit! Oblivion was a great game, but the combat was rubbish; we all talked about it being rubbish."

Yes, he really does talk like a ten year old boy comparing Transformers with Gobots. Most role-playing games are shit? You can’t say something that offensive without giving reasons. Oblivion’s combat was “rubbish”? His proof is this: “we all talked about it being rubbish.” Imagine trying to work for someone who presents ideas in such an immature way.


I’ll try to piece his argument together since he’s not capable. What he seems to be saying is that Oblivion’s combat was bad because it wasn’t comparable to fighting games. By fighting games, I think he means games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. I guess it’s hard to argue with him on this idiotic comparison. Oblivion sure was a terrible fighting game. And I’m glad it was! Imagine buying an RPG only to find that it’s a fighting game!

Ok, that’s probably a straw man argument. I don’t know what Molyneux was trying to say. The only clear message he sends is this: “most role-playing games are shit.”

I read the article further to find out more about his vision for the future of RPGs. He describes the target audience for Fable 2 like this:

"I am certainly suggesting that a good proportion of those people can't even control a character, and get stuck, and we're spending a lot of time getting that right. I could say draw your sword and they wouldn't even have a clue what we're talking about."

What the...?!

His target audience for this fantasy-themed RPG are people who don’t know what a sword is? They don’t know what a sword is? Or they don’t know what it means to “draw a sword”? Are there a lot of people who have never heard of a sword who are buying video games? Weren’t the Lord of the Rings movies extremely popular? Didn’t they involve a lot of swords, and drawing of swords? Even if you didn’t see the movie, you must have seen posters of the movies. And there were these shiny, metal, pointy things. If you had never seen them before, maybe you would ask someone, “Hey, what are those shiny, pointy, sharp-looking things in that picture?” “Oh, that’s a sword, you moron.”

Ok, maybe that’s another straw man argument. I don’t think so, but it’s inconceivable that Molyneux is targeting such a rare type of person for Fable 2. Let’s look at the first statement about the target audience. How many people who play video games don’t know what it means to control a character? Ever since Pong, Pac-Man, and Space Invaders, you have had to control a character on the screen. If the Pong paddles had to sit still, unmoving, completely locked in place, I don’t think it would have been quite as popular. If you couldn’t understand the concept of controlling the paddles, your interest in video games was probably nil.

Moving a character in games these days now includes more than one dimension. Now you must move your character forward, backward, left, and right. Molyneux must have an extremely low opinion of people if he doesn’t think we understand the concept of moving in two dimensions.

Molyneux is not God’s gift to games. In my opinion, he hasn’t produced a single decent game since the disappointing Dungeon Keeper games (1997). Black & White was an atrocious, infuriating game. Controlling the giant animals was a pointless exercise in frustration, adding nothing strategic to the gameplay. I remember showing Black & White to a friend, and he asked me why I played the game if it made me so angry. That was the last time I played it.

Here’s another quote that proves Molyneux has gone off the deep end:
”If I am using the attack button it means I want to do something aggressive to the nearest target!”

Innovation! The RPG Fighting Game Action Arcade Button Masher genre will never be the same!

Just one more quote because it’s fun:
”Remember, this is a role playing game: all the different weapons have different music sounds and give a very individual feel to the combat.”

That is a completely insane statement! Why do all weapons have different music sounds (whatever that means) and what does that have to do with role-playing games?? Does a dagger sound like a kazoo playing Yankee Doodle Dandy? Does a bow sound like bagpipes? What do I need to do to unlock the 1812 Overture music sound weapon?

This interview is almost as infuriating as Black & White!

My only hope is that other role-playing game designers have read Molyneux’s damning opinion of their work, that Molyneux alienates himself from his own industry, and that Fable 2 has no impact at all on my favorite game genre, because I don’t see RPGs evolving into fighting game musical weapon adventures. Go talk crazy about some other genre.]]> Thu, 16 Aug 2007 08:01:00 EST http://www.geekskillz.com/articles/peter-molyneux-is-rubbish Crayon Physics http://www.geekskillz.com/articles/crayon-physics Games

One of the websites I check out regularly is the Experimental Gameplay Project, run by Carnegie Mellon University. The challenge is to create games within one week that focus on gameplay ideas rather than graphics, sounds, story, and polish. There are so many fun and beautiful ideas demonstrated, I only hope that some of the big game development companies see these games.

My latest discovery is Crayon Physics, which is a 2D game that uses physics. You can draw shapes in crayon, and they are affected by gravity. The soothing music is a nice touch. It's a simple premise, but very fun!

Past favorites of mine:

Attack of the Killer Swarm!: Use a swarm of insects to launch people into the sky.
Tower of Goo: Another physics game, but this time the structures are somewhat elastic and bendy.
On A Rainy Day: This is a beautiful, abstract experience more than a game. A tree made of hands, newspaper boats, falling umbrellas. Experimental at its best!

In order to meet the one-week deadline, most games end up using clips of existing artwork, black and white newspaper clippings, and art sketched by hand. It feels like you are playing in collages and beautiful hand-made environments. It's often elegant and just as beautiful as photorealistic, 3D modeled, multi-million dollar games. Independent game developers can get thousands of ideas here. Who wants to make a Crayon RPG?
]]> Sun, 29 Jul 2007 12:34:00 EST http://www.geekskillz.com/articles/crayon-physics