Despite not having played the game (and despite having no desire to, for required-time-investment reasons), these panoramas from the World of Warcraft still struck me as stunningly beautiful. I especially like how each scene is bursting with colour and thus visual excitement. (So often game screenshots and environments are a depressing morass of greys and near-greys).
Monthly Archive for November, 2005
The Guardian exhorts its readers to do their bit for the games industry this Christmas. I like their suggestions, but personally I prefer a more positive approach - to buy an original, but poorly selling title - than the mostly negative ones they suggest - withholding from purchasing games in popular genres. An extra sale on top of five figure total sales is going to make a far larger impact than one lost from a seven figure sales total. Besides, if there’s good money to be made exploiting a popular niche (WW2 games/etc), then it’s better that that money is coming into the industry than going elsewhere. And I can continue to hope that some of that money will go towards exploring new niches via original titles. Right?
Since I’ve not played anything new in quite a while, I picked up a copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas yesterday. Short summary: It rapidly proved just as intoxicatingly good as previous installments in the series and so it didn’t get put down until long after I should have been in bed.
While I played, I jotted down some notes - things I noticed about the game’s design, things I liked and things I didn’t, obvious things and subtle things - various thoughts provoked by playing the game. Some of these probably merit closer inspection in the future, some of them are pretty minor observations. For now, I felt like just throwing them out there in a relatively raw fashion and so, what follows are my observations from a day in San Andreas.
The real and the virtual intersect as Gorillaz play live. There’s something distinctly mesmerising about both the concept and its execution (plus I like the music). For those parts of you that like to know where the strings are, the Times points them out.
Early screenshots of Splinter Cell 4, depicting a Sam Fisher stripped of headgear and futuristic weaponry, suggest that perhaps Ubisoft agrees with John Tynes when he says previous titles in the series have become bogged down with complex gadgetry.