After writing about “luck manipulation” in tool-assisted speed runs, I got to thinking about the subject of pseudo-random number generation. This is a topic that comes up, briefly yet inevitably, on every game engine project in existence, and I think it’s a good example of a situation where implementation choices are not always as cut …
Category Archives: Games
A Game So Nice, I Played It Twice
Puzzle Quest recently joined the elite ranks of “games that I have played to completion more than once.” Months ago, I had played and finished the Nintendo DS version of the game — I enjoyed it so much that when the Xbox Live Arcade version was released in October, I bought it again and replayed …
In Pursuit of Perfection
A few weeks ago, me and Sandy went to see The King of Kong, which I can wholeheartedly recommend to just about anyone. As reviews have noted, it’s really more a movie about the people involved rather than the focus of their competition. In the movie, there is a segment that is an interview with …
Crysis Demo Impressions
There has been quite the deluge of FPS releases and demo releases lately, and it’s been hard to keep up with all of them. I noticed that the single-player demo for Crysis had been released, so after a lengthy download, I sat down to give it a shot. To give a frame of reference for …
Proven to do what?
I read an e-mail thread recently on the sweng-gamedev mailing list which jogged my memory about one of my most hated development clichés — “proven technology.” Why do I hate this phrase so much? The phrase implies a certain obvious correctness — nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, right? It conveniently ignores any facts …
An unexpected surprise
I was at Target the other day, buying some household goods, when I decided to detour into the games section. What I found on the PC racks amazed me: That’s right — almost four years after it came out, I found three copies of the PC version of Secret Weapons Over Normandy on the shelf. …
Do good games sell more copies?
This is a great analysis of PS2 game sales and Metacritic scores for games released through December 2006. There are a few conclusions that I think can be drawn from this: For a game to truly reach blockbuster status, it must be good. There are many games that are good, but which don’t sell many …
Game AI
I recently saw a link to this blog entry by Christer Ericson (of SCEA), which is a pretty amusing rip on an academic who has tut-tutted the game development community about poor AI. (Definitely check out the video linked in the blog entry to get the proper context for this entry.) I frequently see gamers …
Mask of the Betrayer is out
The Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer expansion pack is out in the US now, so go pick up a copy. 🙂 (I didn’t work on it directly, but I did help out at various stages consulting on bug fixes and feature additions, particularly relating to the toolset.)
EA Buys Bioware and Pandemic
The story is here. Since I’ve worked pretty extensively with Bioware‘s stuff before (for Neverwinter Nights 2), I feel somehow obligated to react to this…heh. This is an interesting acquisition, and while I’m not any sort of expert in corporate finance, I do not think that this is necessarily a good move for EA. Why? …