I don’t understand Spore’s DRM system. DRM is tolerable when it works and when it does something positive for me. (I adore how portable my Steam games are.) But when the game was reportedly on torrent sites before release, what business benefit are EA achieving? It’s the perfect way to put an on-the-fence customer on the wrong side of the fence (that would be me).
Instead, I’ve spent the week having a blast with X-Com. And playing a classic 15 years later highlights what I find most distasteful. If you’re serious about making games with real lasting value, why shackle them like this?
In Brief
If it hadn’t gone that way already, I think this is the point at which a piece of good design (simplify the whole “my electronics device is acting funny” dance) becomes a mistake immortalised in textbooks and design courses everywhere. Microsoft sure do have a thing for iconic failure messages.
“[The blood spray] orientates itself perpendicular to the character you’re hitting, and deliberately moves outside the silhouette. So it sprays away from the character even if you shoot from the front. This is distance based. It doesn’t care too much when you’re up close to a character and it’s big on screen, but when you shoot from a distance it sprays to the side.”
‘This is all your app is: a collection of tiny details’, Wil Shipley recently said. When it comes to Team Fortress 2, the details are so damn fascinating and instructive. Oh, what I’d give for the source code to the Critical Hit system.
One problem with machines reading natural language is that they don’t cope very well with metaphor. Case in point: I get a steady stream of search engine traffic from people looking for information about ant nests. Seeing these visitors on my referrers list causes me a degree of guilt at clicks wasted and searches frustrated. But as fortune would have it, one of my favourite sites recently put up a couple of articles about ants and ant nests, allowing me to redirect these folk there and assuage my conscience.
Do check out Tracking Ants and Nest-casting on BLDGBLOG - they’re both great reads. If you’re here for both ants and games/simulations, I recommend to you the fabulous but flawed SimAnt, which I’ll maybe write about in more detail one day.
This Dark Messiah video is one of my favourite things to come out of E3 2006. As well as some stunningly beautiful environments, it reminds me a lot of some comments Gabe Newell made last year about Valve’s goals for Half-Life 2: Episode One: “You don’t want to have a sense that there’s a box around the NPC and you see these boxes bumping into each other. You want to have a sense that they’re in the world interacting with things closely, like they can reach out to stuff, they can push things to the ground, they can kick things. … Have it not be that sort of fakey box-box interactions.” The great thing about this video is that it looks like Arkane is applying that approach to the player as well as the NPCs.