http://www.theantnest.com Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:04:42 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Continuing the 2007 theme, I went back to Bioshock a few months ago, working my way through Fort Frolic (absolutely beautiful) and past the twist. I liked that latter part quite a bit too, so I was interested to read this piece by Clint Hocking, giving it some pretty sharp ... http://www.theantnest.com/archives/2008/player-avatar-alignment-in-bioshock/ I'm way behind on hip platforming games. Braid and LittleBigPlanet will make it to my thumbs soon enough, but these days, I'm still trying to get through the backlog of big hitters from 2007. Today: Super Mario Galaxy. What really brought the game to my attention was this talk from the ... http://www.theantnest.com/archives/2008/notes-on-super-mario-galaxy/ 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 ... http://www.theantnest.com/archives/2008/spore-drm/ 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. http://www.theantnest.com/archives/2008/red-ring-of-continual-embarrassment/ "[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 ... http://www.theantnest.com/archives/2007/i-love-this-doctor/ The Tribes series is a line of first-person, multiplayer-centric action games, originally developed by Dynamix, which focus on team and class based combat in open landscapes. The first game, Starsiege: Tribes (1998), offered a unique experience in an era of tightly enclosed, corridor-based shooters, and capitalised on the early, explosive ... http://www.theantnest.com/archives/2006/notes-on-tribes-vengeance/ Many a Half-Life fan has tried to discern the true nature of the G-Man's mysterious role in the game's universe. It has often struck me that perhaps that universe is the wrong place to be looking. On the train journeys that bracket the games and that serve as a metaphorical ... http://www.theantnest.com/archives/2006/half-life-2-episode-one-review/ One of the more curious aspects of the city-based game, which has blossomed in this console generation, is the dichotomy between those games which strive to emulate a real city and those which do not. The genre heavyweights, the Grand Theft Auto games, boldly embrace cities which, whilst clearly inspired by ... http://www.theantnest.com/archives/2006/virtual-real-cities/ 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 ... http://www.theantnest.com/archives/2006/real-ant-nests/ 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 ... http://www.theantnest.com/archives/2006/e3-2006-dark-messiah-video/