Late in several games, particularly turn-based strategy, I have a tendency to amass several units of the same type — a homogeny of military forces, if you will. I suppose that’s a personal flaw. Something attributed to lack of patience, to my need for ending things in the quickest and not necessarily most efficient manner. The side effect, of course, displaces me as a fictional agent within the game. I become a person with the realistic but short-sighted goal of game completion.
I noticed the same trend with Commander: Napoleon at War. While I won’t reveal too much opinion, I’ll say this: CNAW allowed me reprieve from my natural inclinations, though I found myself churning out line infantry near the campaign’s end in attempt to quash a heavily insulated Moscow. I’ll speak towards this in the upcoming review.
What you don’t see is that which lies beyond the war fog. While I thought my campaign would end at the closure of 1808, Moscow drug me through three attritional, ego-crushing winters. By now, I was the world’s naval power and could focus my resources toward land — almost exclusively at the eastern front. By now, French production had begun shifting to line infantry and the occasional heavy cavalry for shock.
I’m Russell. I’ll be writing for The Mac Gamer.
Chris Roper with IGN wrote a perspective on OnLive, a bit of gaming technology that could ubiquitize gaming across platforms.
Just announced at this year’s GDC, OnLive is an on-demand gaming service. It’s essentially the gaming version of cloud computing - everything is computed, rendered and housed online. In its simplest description, your controller inputs are uploaded, a high-end server takes your inputs and plays the game, and then a video stream of the output is sent back to your computer. Think of it as something like Youtube or Hulu for games.
Why’s that good? Hell, I don’t know. Titles that play regardless of my platform, titles accessible through my Mac or my television? Well, quite frankly, that slaps me giddy. As Chris Roper write:
The service works with pretty much any Windows or Mac machine as a small browser plug-in.
There will also be a console-esque device for television use. At my most vulnerable state, I could give my first born for such a service. We’ll keep an eye open.
From Eurogamer:
id Software has released an open source version of Wolfenstein 3D for the iPhone, which technical director John Carmack expects to follow up with Doom “fairly soon”.
Because of its open-source ties, the Wolf 3D port available in a zipfile on id’s site (thanks VE3D) is mainly intended for developers.
However, it does come with a fascinating, 5000-word diary of Carmack’s experience working on it, which we’ve copied and pasted below to save you downloading the 10MB file.
In it, Carmack tells the story of id’s grand plans for the iPhone and why it’s taken so long for them to come off. Apparently the Texan developer should be announcing a proper iPhone project soon “and it is cool” (thanks John), while an early Wolfenstein RPG port didn’t come off because of Carmack’s desire to use the iPhone’s hardware renderer and not just run it in software, which was what an early EA prototype did. In typical fashion, he managed to get this up and running by himself in four days.
Much of Carmack’s diary is greek to me, but it’s interesting to hear a veteran coder’s thoughts on the iPhone.
Aleks Krotoski from the Guardian interviewed Brian Greenstone at this year’s SXSWi on the success of Enigmo on the iPhone.
Continue reading ‘Brian Gr$$ntstone’
From Brains:
I sing in praise of The Path, a game that realizes - if only in fleeting brilliant flashes - the personal, expressive interactive storytelling experience video games have long aspired to communicate. The Path may not take us all the way to the promised land, but I believe it represents a small milestone in the evolution of an art form that thankfully continues to attract visionaries, naysayers, contrarians, and all manner of headstrong game makers who won’t take yes for an answer.
From what I can see The Path is a short horror story, based around Little Red Riding Hood. I’m imagining loss of innocence, a red and black colour scheme, and some Lynch type weirdness.
And the good news:
All hail Transgaming, masters of Mac gaming.
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