Once again, I’m getting a late start. I’ve made some improvements to my stupid game from last night, but I don’t have time to mess with that right now. It’s looking like some decent progress has been made on our main project. Time for me to get to work! I’m going to get my level editing on.

Our first evening is winding down. Pasty has been doing all kinds of fancy physicsing. Chuck has been playing terrible music and also programming. Sullivan has produced some hilarious art. I should have a lot more details to post tomorrow, but for now I will present to you my contribution for the evening: Teh Stupid Gaem!

It’s pretty dumb. Just click on the dude to make him jump over the bad thing and you win. It was thrown together using jQuery. It’s not nearly as awesome as what the other guys have been working on, but it’s something.

See you tomorrow!

What’s up, folks? This is your pal Mandrake LIVE BLOGGING from the official Tiny Gods Game Jam taking place at la casa de Chuck. We’re jamming some games and pounding down some Mountain Dew Throwback.

Pasty is doing some coding. Ran and Idan are tossing around some design ideas. Sullivan is drawing lots of pretty pictures. Chuck is setting up some source control for us. I arrived a bit late, so I’m still trying to snag myself a worthwhile role. I figured I might as well document things.

The theme for the Global Game Jam is “Deception” but we’re going with “Escape” because we don’t let anybody tell us how to jam. I’ll post more as progress is made.

Borderlands killed my soldier, Rolando, once and for all. He was level 32 and I had finally found him a set of 4 weapons with elemental damage that I liked.

He had a caustic shotgun that turned bandits to slime in no time flat.  He had a shocking machine gun that depleted shields and dealt heavy damage at an ungodly rate.  His SMG did 4x fire damage and was great for settings those hard-to-see critters ablaze.  His new shocking sniper rifle was adequate and thoroughly useful.

I’d just put two points in a skill that regenerated health for him after every kill.  His class mod increased the magazine size for every weapon for everyone in the game by over a quarter.  He was a nice guy but he didn’t take no shit from no skags.  He will be missed.

Yes, I saved the game and no, I didn’t interrupt it.  I was playing with someone else at the time and that character (Brock) is intact, while mine is pushing up daisies.  And to make matters worse, WordPress is being a total bitchass about the formatting of this post. Reported the bug on the Gearbox forums.

I may be a little late submitting my thoughts on Project Natal to the BLOGOSPHERE, but after reading the 923465th article about how cool Natal is going to be and how it is going to revolutionize the gaming industry, I decided to finally throw in my two cents. Yep. That’s right. I’m throwing in both of my cents. I’ve got two shiny new pennies and I’m trowing them and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.

Before I get to the negative part of this post, let me just be clear that I think Natal is amazing from a technological standpoint. Are you fucking kidding me? A device that can read my movements and facial expressions and recognize inanimate objects and then feed all of that information to software that will actually DO things? That’s awesome! Johnny Chung Lee is one of the minds behind Natal, and I respect his work a great deal. I think it’s great that we have talented people like him doing research on how humans can effectively interact with computers. I just don’t think that research translates as well into games as a lot of people think it should.

Natal has been compared to the Wii more than once. This might be where my problems start. “Natal will revolutionize gaming the same way/more than the Wii has,” they say. Really? That sounds awesome. You know where my Wii is? It has been sitting, unused, under my Xbox 360 for about a year. Do you know why it is sitting there and not being used? Because I don’t like to move around frequently. The novelty of flailing my limbs to make my virtual avatar do cool things took a long time to wear off, but it did wear off. Now Microsoft wants to introduce something that will require me to move even more and to potentially be even more coordinated to accomplish tasks? Fuck you guys.

After watching a bunch of the corporate promotional BS marketing videos, I realized something else. Developers working with Natal claim that one of the biggest barriers to creating an immersive experience is the controller that the player holds in their hand. However, I have seen many cases in Natal demos where people are moving as if they are interacting with an object, but without holding anything. The only example that comes to mind immediately was the racing game. A girl held her hands out and moved them as if she were steering a car, then pulled into the pit and her dad got up to change her tires. All of the actions in this particular part of the demo seemed, to me at least, like the complete opposite of an immersive experience. Using your body as a controller doesn’t always make sense. Why would you use technology that removes all tactile interaction with your software to introduce software that impersonates tactile interaction with virtual objects? It don’t make no sense to me.

Then there’s Peter Molyneux. Boy, do I hate that guy. Now that I think of it, 80% of my negativity regarding Natal can probably be attributed to his support of it. He contends that Natal will create all of these incredible character interaction experiences, and he demonstrates this with Milo. Milo is a shitty character that I don’t want to interact with. Sure, it’s cool to have the capability to interact with AI that can read your expressions and respond to speech. What happens when games start implementing that for large numbers of characters? I’ll take Fallout 3 as an example. That game was fantastic. There were tons of characters to interact with, but it was all done through predefined text conversations. If I were forced to actually talk to those people, I would have gone insane. What happens when the outcome of a conversation you have with a character is determined by your facial expressions and general disposition? Am I the only one that doesn’t feel like acting for my game console? On top of that, I seriously doubt that any AI in a game is going to be able to hang in a real conversation. We’ll hit a sort of Uncanny Valley scenario where the game characters act like they can have a real conversation with us, but ultimately disappoint us due to their limited grasp of vocabulary and syntax.

I think Yahtzee said it best when he said that people play games to unwind. When I get home, I want to plop down in my recliner, grab a beer, and play some Grand Theft Auto. With a controller. I don’t want to run around in circles and talk to my TV like some lonely and insane jackass. Actually, now that I mentioned Grand Theft Auto, I may have come up with a decent use for Natal. Maybe it can keep track of my facial expressions and general level of frustration when I crash my helicopter for the 20th time and drop the difficulty a tad to keep me from turning homicidal. That might be nice.

Somebody tell Sega I want a port of The Typing of the Dead or The Typing of the Dead 2 for cellphones!  Some 15yo chick is the fastest texter in the world (and quite prolific, sending 15k SMS a month) and I would love to see a zombie slaughtering game where the world champion was a 15 year old girl.

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Has it really been that long?  It boggles the mind.  I feel it only proper to commemorate it on TG.

So I am going to try my hand at some sort of review of Fallout 3.  I am going to break it down into two parts, the first being more of an overview of the game mechanics, like skills, stats, perks, and a little bit of background info.  I’ll try to avoid anything about the actual story or game play, leaving that for part two.

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I bought Fable 2 yesterday. I had some very high expectations despite the fact that I avoided all of the marketing hype. I have only played it for a couple hours so far, and I’d just like to post some of my initial thoughts.

I absolutely loved the first game. I thought that it was one of the most unique RPGs I had played. My only complaints were that it was too short and a little too linear. That didn’t stop me from playing it several times. I thought the character development systems that they used were great. Your character’s appearance would change depending on the decisions you made and NPCs would react to you differently based on how you looked or what deeds you were most famous for. You could buy up property and use it to make money from rent or to stash your collections of wives. There was a lot to do and I enjoyed it.

Fable 2 seems very close to being the same game, but in a bigger world. I don’t mind that at all. There are now more factors that determine your character’s appearance. In addition to good/evil we now have thin/fat, corrupt/pure, and young/old. I really want to make a character that just sits in the starting town and does nothing but eat pies. And then maybe occassionally breaks into people’s houses to steal money and then buy more pies.

The collection of melee weapons at your disposal remain unchanged, though now the choice of weapon seems to have more of an impact on your character’s fighting style. Ranged weapons now include guns. The magic system is pretty different. There is no more mana bar; instead, you charge your spells to make them more powerful. Each spell also has a surround mode and a targetted mode. Right now the only spell I have is Time Control. I can use it in surround mode and slow down time, or I can target a specific enemy and use it to sort of teleport to them (similar to the Assassin’s Rush spell in the first game.) So while I’m in combat, I can just tap the B button anytime I want and I’ll cast my Time Control spell at level 1 and slow down time. If I spend my experience points on another level of that spell, then I can still tap the button at any time to cast it at level 1. If I want to cast it at level 2, I need to hold down the button to charge the spell up. The new system makes using magic simpler than the previous game, so I might actually buy more than one spell this time.

In Fable 2 you get a dog. The dog is awesome. Mine doesn’t seem interested in helping me when I’m in a fight. I’m guessing I need to train him to attack my enemies. What he is really good at, though, is finding treasure. Not only will he sniff out chests, but he can also find items that are buried and show me where to dig.

He has found some pretty epic treasure for me so far. I was really excited the first time I heard him bark and saw him pawing at the ground. “Buried treasure!” I exclaimed as I ran to my faithful canine companion with shovel in hand. I dug up the soil in the spot he indicated and I found… (more…)

The Tiny Gods WoW guild is coming to an end.  We’ve had a good run, with Pickman, Brucie and Masvida all making it into Outlands, but things have tailed off recently.  Masvida is transferring servers, Pickman isn’t sure if he will continue playing in the expansion, and Brucie has mostly been neglected in favor of my other character, Kjëldor, who is not in the guild anymore.

For all of you who were still thinking about picking up the game, the Tiny Gods won’t be there to guide you.  Sorry!  At least now Bear has something to cry about.