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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Back at the GDC Game Design class I took, one of the things they really stressed was “fiction.” Making sure your game adhered to a fiction could help set it apart, make it stick in someone’s head, or even help make your game mechanic make a bit more sense. It’s important for something [...]

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Awhile back Clint Hocking wrote a pretty kickass piece critiquing Bioshock’s Ludonarrative Dissonance. For a long time I wasn’t sure what the hell he was getting at with the word “Ludonarrative,” and after I just recently did an interview for a gaming journalism student, I learned that he had combined the terms “Ludology” and [...]

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I just tried the Army of 2 demo tonight, and I have to say that I think that while making a game all about co-op play was an incredibly great idea, making a demo that must be played with another human being was a colossal mistake.
I just wanted to get a taste of the gameplay, [...]

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While I would like to investigate what GLaDOS says in this section (I invite players to unpack the audio and listen for themselves, or play through the final sections of the game again), I wanted to first explore what GLaDOS does throughout the game of Portal for this final critique and analysis of the game, [...]

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Every good story needs a love interest, and it should come as no surprise that Portal had one with some very comical overtones. The Weighted Companion Cube has captured the hearts of millions? hundreds of thousands that have played the game, myself included, and now can be purchased as lovable merch on t-shirts, or [...]

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Just about every game hits a point where they need to start talking about fine tuning the balance of how their combat works, and oftentimes, guns are usually brought up as the proper way to get the balance ball rolling. Normally, this is a pretty good argument to base a balancing conversation on, but [...]

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As far as epic level hoppers go, Cave Story might have been legendary for its day, but there’s a really hot new web game making the rounds, called You Have to Burn the Rope. A classic 16-bit throwback retro level hopper, every minute of it a satisfying romp into childhood nostalgia.
There’s been a lot [...]

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