I can’t believe this, but I just now discovered that Warren Spector has a blog. I was scanning through the various postings when one in particular caught my eye. “Am I a gaming hypocrite?” In the article Warren discusses both the shortage of games of a similar play style to his own, and also the virtues of not having to think to play a game. Heres a preview.
So it’s a fair question, why DON’T I make games like that? Why do I spend so much time playing and ranting about stuff that doesn’t give players much to think about or much control over their experience? Why do I love games with no story at all? Why do I spend hours and hours staring at a screen until my eyes bleed trying to figure out how to beat some boss monster in some dungeon in some fundamentally silly game that’s nothing more than a way to pass some time? And why oh why did I spend all that time fighting some dude named O’Chunks?
It’s an excellent read, check it out here.
The Australian site Gameplayer has an interview up with the Director of Dark Sector at Digital Extremes, Steve Sinclair. In the interview he talks about how UE3 is causing games to be delayed.
“A lot of promises were made about the Unreal III engine, particularly on PS3. But as we see now, the time frames haven’t been met and now a lot of games using it are being held up.†Digital Extremes wanted to dictate its own release schedule.”,
I personally find this hillarious as Dark Sector was originally announced in Feb 11th, 2000 way before Unreal engine 3 was available or considered yet they somehow choose not to use it anyway. It’s bad enough that Dark Sector was originally a Massively Multiplayer FPS with space travel (a wicked sweet concept) and now its a Sci-fi stealth game but Digital Extremes takes 8 years, making a game using their OWN engine and they cast judgement on Epic? Maybe Digital Extremes should have used the unreal engine. Maybe then they would have released the game already.
I thought Sony made a good move lowering the price of the PS3 by $100, and obviously it was a good move by sony too, increasing their sales, at least as far as amazon.com can indicate. Then I read this on Kotaku
We’re no longer in production for [the 60GB PS3], so once that product is gone from the retailers shelves, then we’re back to the $599 SKU only, so it’s not like we have a two-price strategy here in the US market, which we found out very early on, that consumers react mostly to having one SKU as opposed to two.
Ok, so sony didn’t REALLY lower their price by $100, they are just having a firesale to get rid of an inferior product. When the 60gb PS3 sells out, that means that the lowest end model of the PS3, is still going to be $599 and for that extra hundred dollars everyone gets $7.20 worth of Hard drive.
At the going rate of $0.36 a GB (thanks pricegrabber) 20 Gig comes out to $7.20
Thanks Sony.
Actually, I do have something nice to say about Sony. The PS3 is currently the front runner, by a large margin on Folding@home. Folding @ Home of course is the protein folding distributed computing project that is utilizing protein folding, in order to find cures for alzheimers and other neurological diseases. Tho, I must say I get a kick out of how many Teraflops the PS3 is computing. (at least when this gif was made.)
Credits for the image, and original story of course go to Tom writes a blog
Ok, this was odd. I just got back from doing a bunch of errands in a neighboring town about 30 miles away, so I figure I will buy myself a birthday present and get Viva Pinata.
So I go to Wal-Mart and they do not have the game. It is not sold out, they do not carry it. The electronics clerk called a few other stores, one had it, but the other did not.
What irks me, is why would my local store not carry the game? Surely its relatively popular, they carried two other Rare 360 games, Perfect Dark and Kameo. They had every other high profile game I can think of, including Gears of War, but that wasn’t what I was wanting. Anyone else ever experience their local chain not carrying something as basic as this?