Analogue, meet Digital. Digital, meet Analogue.

Osmo. Play Beyond the Screen

If you’re one of those people bitching about Flappy Bird no longer being available on iOS, I suggest you play Badland.
The gameplay is great and much more varied than Flappy Bird, and the artwork is gorgeous.

If anything is true in this world, it’s that there’s a market for anything. Anything.
Take this recently-funded Kickstarter project, Ever, Jane, “a virtual world that allows people to role-play in Regency Period England.” The goal was $100,000, they hit $109,563.
Judy L. Tyrer, the creator, explains in her video the players need more to do in the game than “just gossip.”:

“So we’ve planned a series of mini-games: Dinner parties, balls, estate management [!], landscaping [!!], sewing, embroidering, card games, farming, hunting, fishing…”
This sounds like the most boring game ever conceived. I’m not hating on this project by any means—ok, I am—I’m just in shock. I love video games, I’ve never been a fan of MMORPGs. I probably shouldn’t knock it until I try it.
According to the FAQ, Ms. Tyrer is keeping the ‘legal distinctions’ between men and women consistent with the time period. The FAQ also mentions the game, “will provide historically accurate racial diversity.” I guess if we have video games glorifying stealing cars, we can have a game where the white people are the ruling class, women are inferior and you can diving into mini-games of embroidering.
If we’re making video game worlds based on classic literature, can I request an MMORPG of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road? A game where I can speed across the country, get loaded with my writer friends, go to parties, meet girls, run from the law, hang out in Greenwich Village and sleep on peoples’ couches?
Update: It looks like someone has made one of the most boring games ever, Waiting In Line 3D

At Gamasutra, Leigh Alexander talks about the importance of the mainstream console business:

Here is a hypothesis: right now, if I wondered about the precise depth of the HDMI ports on a PlayStation 4, there would be multiple outlets where that information exists. How stable is the optional living room stand accessory? Someone has reported on it. Here is a new console generation: We have exhausted our analysis of the hardware. We have fetishistically lavished attention on whatever details are available, because consumers want to know.

How many kinds of numbers do you need to know to be able to provide every possible detail about an Xbox One? Specifications: Resolution, USB, API, CPU, GPU, DDR3, esRAM. You have to learn to speak a second language. Teardowns, unboxing, hyper-attention to the guts of these brand-new machines, and fan-made detective work about what it must or mustn’t be like to develop for. Someone is an authority on the message board. Someone else has derived unverified but viable previously-unseen details from a foreign language report.
I said I was going to get a PS3 when it came out and I never did. I’m saying it now with the PS4.
Maybe—as much as I may enjoy a new shiny PS4—I just don’t care enough.

I recently downloaded the LucasArts iOS game, Tiny Death Star. I blame it on the double-pronged nostalgia attack of 8-bit graphics (a la the NES) and Star Wars, two integral elements of my childhood.
Tiny Death Star is a freemium game. Shit, I hate that word. Freemium means technically, superficially, it’s free, but in order to play at a reasonable pace and acquire upgrades and rewards, you have to make in-app purchases.
I can’t make a blanket statement and say I object to every app with a freemium business model. I specifically object to in-app purchases for games. My reason is simple: in a game, I expect progression based on my skill in playing, not on the size of my wallet.
In Tiny Death Star, acquiring certain properties is only possible if you buy in-app ‘bux’ and ‘credits’. The alternative is intially waiting hours and eventually waiting up to days to accumulate credits. As for bux, the only way to acquire them is to follow instructions from the (tiny) Emperor. Based on the price of certain items and the slow rate at which you’re awarded bux, it could take months and months of gameplay to make minimal progress.
Below is a screen grab of the Imperial Bux Store:

The fact that there is even the option to buy $99 worth of bux is bullshit.
This is not fun.
This is being squeezed, nickel-and-dimed, dare I say extorted, on a tiny scale (and by tiny I mean big).
I tried this game for a week but have since deleted it from my iPhone as it was clear I was getting nowhere fast. The only reason this game seems to exist is to jam more money into LucasArts’ pockets.
Count me out.

gdgt’s review of the Ouya:

The Ouya is lovely to look at and the idea of an Android console sounds great, but in this case beauty is only skin deep.
Yeah, yeah. You’re already thinking what I’m thinking.
Design isn’t about how something looks, but how it works.
via DF

via

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has some smack talk about the iPad:

Huang went on to explain that the iPad is capable of games that are “vintage 1999,” while the Kepler Mobile chipset can handle high-dynamic-range lighting and active shadows, features not found in today’s mobile games.
He’s CEO of a graphics processor company who’s chips are not in the iPad, so I understand why he’s saying what he’s saying.
I just hope he understands what makes the iPad the most successful tablet in the world. It’s not the graphics processor (It’s worth noting the CPU in the 4th generation iPad is no slouch).
A game’s first priority is to be fun. Bleeding edge graphics are nice to have, not a requirement—particularly on tablets. In fact, there’s a whole sub-genre of 8-bit games that’s hugely popular on smartphones and tablets. Three I have on my iPad 2 are Canabalt, Ridiculous Fishing and The Incident.

Taken from Jason Santa Maria

OK, I lie. They did show a controller on stage.

Looks like those secondary screens will be getting a lot of use while we wait until the end of 2013 for the PS4 to ship.

Tearaway looks like one of the most clever games I’ve seen in a long time.
I haven’t followed the PSP VIta closely at all. I had no idea it had those touch capabilities.
via Twitter and Forbes

Zombies will always infect videogames, because gamers need something they can shoot guilt-free.

—The Escapist

Games Beat: Will Wright says games are headed toward ubiquity, diversity, and art

“Almost every new technology is an amplification of our body,” Wright said, “Computers, the internet, social networks expand everything. The most important thing they expand is our imaginations and our brains. I think of games as imagination amplifiers. We can construct these elaborate worlds, play with them, share them back and forth, and this is one of the culturally most impactful things that our medium can offer.”

Maybe it’s why some of us are trying to archive it like it’s art.
I’ve been tuned to the importance of gaming in our culture ever since my brother turned me onto Jane McGonigal‘s book, Reality Is Broken.