Posted on Monday, September 28th, 2009 at 11:03 pm
Jadestone recently released the game Harry Cannon’s Pipe Dreams on Kongregate. It features a song called “The Ballad of Harry” which can be downloaded via the Reverbnation-widget on top of the page. This is only a small part of the mobile game “Dirk Dagger and the Nuclear Zeppelin”which will soon be released on Nokia’s N-gage.
The adventure genre is almost instinct, and rightfully so. I’ve been playing video games for about 25 years and I must say, things are improving. The commercial industry might go through a “fear of innovation period” but it’s still much better than how it used to be.
I remember playing Simon the Sorcerer when I was a kid. At that time I found the story intriguing but hated the gameplay. I’d get stuck, try different things for hours, look for a walkthrough at some random BBS, ending up combining the fishing pole with the wooden figurine or something equally silly. It didn’t make sense then, it doesn’t make sense now.
The communication is horrible in Grim Fandango. You constantly get a couple of choices that you go through just to follow the story. Don’t get me wrong, the story is awesome, but that’s all there is to it. Grim Fandango would make a great movie. Gameplay though, as in what you as a player actually do, is so flawed I can only play the game one hour at a time without getting annoyed.
Every now and then I google You Have to Burn the Rope to see what’s going on in the blogo/forumsphere. A reoccuring comment is that the game makes people feel good about themselves. When I wrote Now you’re a hero I didn’t intend to do that. In a subconscious way perhaps but not intentionally.
To win or not to win at IGF? It would be great to win of course, but then again, I’m aware that we are kind of the baby brothers here. YHTBTR became sort of a meme and I think a part of the reason is because of the effort/reward ratio. No matter if we win or lose, I made a lot of people feel good about themselves and that makes me feel good about myself.
To top it all of, YHTBTR is nominated for Innovation in the 2009 Independent Games festival. I really want to go to San Fransisco to attend the awards but I’m not sure I can. The tickets + expenses will surely amount to at least 1000 EUROS which is way over my budget. Oh well, you never know what might happen.
I read some comments about the nomination and realised that some people think YHTBTR don’t belong on the list. I can’t make you like the game and if you don’t, to be honest, I’m not going to lose sleep over it. But I want to make something clear which is obviously just a misunderstanding. People who think YHTBTR was something Kian and me threw together in a hurry need to think again. To get it in perspective, let me tell you about the text on the way to the boss. If you count the hours me and Kian talked about colors, placements, alternative ideas, testing it on people and so on, it amounts to at least ten. Do the math and you’ll understand how long it took to complete the full game.
The adventure genre is almost instinct, and rightfully so. I’ve been playing video games for about 25 years and I must say, things are improving. The commercial industry might go through a “fear of innovation period” but it’s still much better than how it used to be.
Not me! I don’t play WoW anymore. But I stumbled upon an article at GameSpy which is quite amusing and grasps the feeling of playing WoW really well.
As we approached the new year, the best of 2008 awards started to pop up. I was really happy that