More general design nonsense tonight (it comes back to gaming eventually, stick with me here), but I was smiling walking out of seeing Wall-E thinking about the character designs for Wall-E and Eva. On the surface, they’re simple enough. One’s a boy. The other a girl. One’s old. One’s new. [...]

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Stop me if I’ve gone on about this before, but I’ve been wondering if user created content (specifically on consoles) is something that we really want to be courting as an industry, or even as gamers.
On the surface, yeah, this sounds like a very good thing.  I think mainly because we’re all operating from the [...]

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I just read that the Still Alive map pack (which evidently has been available free this whole time for PC) that is due to be released for Portal on the consoles is going to be missing the voice of GLaDOS.  I recall when I learned a map pack was coming being super excited for a [...]

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Maybe it’s the old coot in me, but this preview comment by Richard Mitchell from Xbox360fanboy regarding his hands on playthrough of the Fallout3 presser just made the hair on my neck stand up and immediately put me off:
Some things must be made clear. One, I played Bethesda’s Fallout 3 today. Two, I have never [...]

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It’s no secret that I love all things that are designed well*. I’m constantly complaining about how everyday things could be designed better, let alone games, and it’s rare that I find things that are designed so well that I can’t nitpick them here or there or find subtle ways that they can be [...]

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Now that I’ve had awhile to play with the Pyro update, which is a very cool update to the class, I have to say there’s still a few things which bug me about the class/update:

The Backburner isn’t easily identifiable. It looks almost just like the regular/default flamethrower. I kept losing to other Pyros [...]

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So by now you’ve heard that everyone’s favorite Russian is the new crewmember to get the update treatement in TF2. While reading 1Fort today at lunch, I noticed that Chris was discussing ideas about what kind of weapons the Heavy might get, following Valve’s internal criteria for the Heavy update.
I figured that I haven’t [...]

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I was watching yet another video for Prototype today at work, marvelling how they all look exactly the same yet are claiming to show some new content, when I heard the Exec Producer or whoever it was bragging about how intelligent their Parkouring AI was. The AI for the Player character. The Player [...]

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Hi, sorry for the updates, folks, but I’m on vacation this week so things’ll be a bit light.
However, something happened today that I got to participate in which got me thinking that in multiplayer gaming we need to not only award first place, but “award” last place, as well.
My family has this annual golf competition, [...]

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I read a fascinating speech by J.K. Rowling (yes, that J.K. Rowling) that she gave for Harvard’s commencement ceremony this past week, and couldn’t help but smile and nod my head while reading about her life lesson she relates to the graduates.
The speech is about failure and imagination, two things which, coincidentally, game design is [...]

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