Tag Archives: Video Games

Nimblebit with the Call Out on Zynga

Huge high five to Nimblebit—developers of Tiny Tower—for this image that’s making the rounds today:

Click on it; it’s way too big to slap into a post.

This is shameful: the dual currency system, the game basics, even the stocking of items and the favorite job mechanic would all seem to be directly lifted, would they not?

Lots of people have been wondering if Zynga is foundering; this certainly doesn’t make it look like they have much magic left right now.

(Seen on VentureBeat, Destructoid, et al.)

UPDATE: Nathan Brown writes for Edge on a noticeable trend developing with Zynga.

The Making of Madden NFL

Tom Bissell for Grantland with a fascinating behind-the-scenes on how Madden is made every year:

Every year for the past three years, key members of Madden NFL’s development team have traveled to the Bay Area suburb of Pleasanton, Calif., to meet with John Madden himself at his production company’s office building. There, Coach Madden and the dev team discuss identifiable trends that have emerged in professional football over the past year and spitball ideas about how these trends might be implemented in gameplay. Coach Madden is also briefed on the creative direction and “feature set” of next year’s game. Once that’s done, Coach (as he’s called) and the dev team watch a fully catered afternoon’s worth of professional football games in a large studio space that Coach built after retiring from broadcasting a few years ago.

I—like, I am sure, many others—did not have any idea that Madden was as intricately involved in the development of each game as portrayed in this article.

It’s a great read on how EA Tiburon works to create a fresh take year after year, and some thoughts on the future of the king of sports video games.

ESA Drops SOPA Support

Stephen Totilo for Kotaku:

The Entertainment Software Association no longer supports the Stop Online Piracy Act, the controversial anti-piracy bill that was shelved earlier today in the House of Representatives after a week of fierce online protests.

The people who bring us E3 simply don’t want to bring us SOPA anymore. The bill’s got problems, they say.

Of course this only happens once the fight for these two pieces of legislation is essentially over (though Marco Arment is correct that a new one is always looming).

Penny-Arcade hit the weirdness of this right on the head. The ESA does good quite often, but in this case it was just plain wrong. One has to wonder if Red 5’s actions caused any other studios to threaten to take their E3 budgets elsewhere.

Red 5 and SOPA/PIPA

Dennis Scimeca for Ars Technica:

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg for PC game developer Red 5 Studios. Not only has the studio blocked access to the beta of free-to-play open-world shooter Firefall for the day, but it also revealed last week that it is pulling out of the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) showcase, which is run by the SOPA-supporting Entertainment Software Association (ESA).

Red 5 will also use the $50,000 it would have spent on a promotional E3 booth to start The League For Gamers, a grassroots group it calls “a gathering place for gamers, developers and industry supporters who want to stand against legislation that’s detrimental to the games industry.”

Read the rest, including an interview with CEO Mark Kern. The ESA, like many other industry associations, can be a good thing. But it can also be a bad thing when it claims to speak for all its member organizations.

It’s refreshing to see a developer standing up for this.

Genki Bowl VII

Tom Chick’s quick review of the Genki Bowl VII DLC for Saints Row: The Third has prompted me to write some thoughts I was saving for tomorrow.

He says:

The Genki Bowl DLC is weird for weird’s sake, and frankly, it’s not even that weird. A giant ball of rampaging pink yarn is just an immutable Katamari. The new pink catwomen homies are no stranger than the costumes you’ve probably been wearing all along. A pink convertible with mounted flamethrowers sure would be cool in a game without VTOL cycles, TRON tanks, and a moon buggy.

I want so much to disagree with this, but I have to say that I’m unfortunately disappointed with this first DLC pack in much the same way.

The Third was a great ride and definitely worth my money, and to support Volition for making it I dropped the money on the season pass for the DLC sight-unseen. But Genki Bowl VII is missing almost everything that I liked about the base game itself.

It’s a series of derivative diversions that aren’t as fun as the material that they are supposed to push to the next level of crazy.

Apocalypse Genki is a harder and more confusingly-laid-out version of Super Ethical Reality Climax. Super Ethical PR Opportunity is an Escort mission, just not as difficult or novel. Sexy Kitten Yarngasm is the Tank Mayhem diversion but without a cannon and with hangups on the world geometry. And Sad Panda Skyblazing—though a unique diversion that’s like nothing else in the game—is an exercise in frustration that’s over as soon as you figure it out.

The bonuses for completing these things aren’t even very interesting, especially if you are playing with a character that’s already reached the endgame. There’s little enjoyment to be had in running them co-op (though it does decrease the difficulty a bit). And there’s a moment in the closing cut scene where it’s blatantly obvious that they didn’t record lines with The Third‘s uniformly excellent voice talent.

I had high hopes for the DLC based on my experience with the base game—but it was such an over-the-top piece of performance art that perhaps anything they do at this point is going to fall short.