I didn’t comment on Will Wright’s SXSW keynote about storytelling in games because I couldn’t find a good enough transcript of it to get a clear demonstration of which orifice he was speaking from. I was pretty sure it was the one he usually sits on, but I wasn’t 100% sure and so I didn’t say anything. I figured someone [...]
Filed under: game design, game philosophy, storytelling on March 31st, 2007 | No Comments »
Richard and Judy, king and queen of the late-afternoon chat-show and freelancer bunk-off hour, did a segment on World of Warcraft today. Richard was enthused, Judy predictably befuddled. I missed it. Fret not: it’ll be on Youtube soon. The spur for the piece was Caitlin Moran, the tabloid journalist who writes for the Times, who [...]
Filed under: mmorpg, old media, online games, rpg on March 29th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
#1: Killing the player for no obvious reason Example: Final Fantasy III (Square Enix, 2006) on the Nintendo DS. After you defeat Goldor the game does not progress unless you fly your airship over a specific point on the world-map. Since nobody will tell you this, you’ll probably spend a while exploring the world. One [...]
Filed under: game design, rpg on March 24th, 2007 | No Comments »
…because I’ve written one of the pieces for it. What did you think I meant? Anyway, here’s the press release: GREEN RONIN TO PUBLISH HOBBY GAMES: THE 100 BEST Essay Anthology to Feature All-Star Line Up March 21, 2007—SEATTLE, WA: What are the best hobby games of the past 60 years? Green Ronin Publishing and award-winning author and editor James [...]
Filed under: awards, rpg, tabletop on March 22nd, 2007 | 3 Comments »
Earlier this year there was a brief spate of people quoting me as having originated the phrase, “I have so much to do that I am going to bed.” I love the saying but it’s not mine and it’s not actually my motto, it’s just something that I pulled out of a fortune cookie in [...]
Filed under: personal on March 22nd, 2007 | 2 Comments »
Evidently I’ve mentioned my 1998 game The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen enough times to build up sufficient Googlejuice to bring search-queries to this blog, so I should probably talk about what’s happening with the new edition of the game. First of all, a bit of history. My name, as you know, is James Wallis. [...]
Filed under: Hogshead, retro, rpg, typography and layout on March 18th, 2007 | 4 Comments »
Sony has just released full details of the Folding@Home software that’ll be available for the Playstation 3 from the end of March. Folding@Home is a distributed-computing project that uses a computer’s or console’s idle-cycles to process chunks of data relating to the behaviour of folding-proteins related to forms of Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Huntingdon’s, cystic fibrosis, and [...]
Filed under: console, information use, internet on March 15th, 2007 | 3 Comments »
I’ve been in San Francisco. Not for GDC, which as far as I can tell exists only to provide column-inches for excitable bloggers, but for the wedding of Derek Pearcy, the former editor of Pyramid magazine, Origins Award-winning designer of In Nomine, and the man who did all the visual design for the original edition of [...]
Filed under: commercial, game design on March 14th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
So James, on a scale of 1–10 how excited are you about PlayStation Home, the virtual world for PS3 users? Next question, please. You’re not excited? The blogosphere is goobing out about it. Goobing out is the blogosphere’s job. PS Home is a virtual world for console-games players, with no provision for player-generated content and [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized on March 12th, 2007 | 3 Comments »
Why do shops in international airports sell video games? Handheld games make sense, sure, but PS/Xbox/Wii games are all region-locked. Yet I’ve never seen a sign by the display racks reading ”Warning: these games won’t work in non-European consoles and your nephew will cry and you will feel like an ass for wasting £35″ or something similar. Of course, the chance of the purchaser being able to bring the game back to that specific [...]
Filed under: business, console on March 10th, 2007 | No Comments »