Spore Creature Creator is good fun, and I’m delighted to discover that both it and the full Spore game will arrive in a native Mac version, so I don’t have to mess around with Parallels to play what looks to be an extremely fun sandbox game. Sadly, however, I can’t buy the full version for my Mac in the UK, or pre-order the full thing. How irritating.
The procedural animation and texturing is simply awesome by the way, hats off to the team.
Apparently our favourite gaming-related “lawyer”, Jack Thompson, has walked out of a hearing, claiming that the judge doesn’t have authority to preside over aforementioned hearing. Associated is a rather verbose letter, in which he seems to perform his usual trick of going off at 7 different tangents at the same time using bizzare language and repeatedly referencing how he, The Mighty Jack Thompson, has saved the world.
This is the same person who seems hell-bent on banning any video game which is more violent than The Adventures Of Fluffy Bunny Rabbit in Cotton Wool Land (not a real game) since it scars the poor children and makes them want to go decapitate police officers using chainsaws and then urinate down their throats.
This is the same person who throws legal threats at anybody within 100 yards who mentions his name, the name of anybody he has sued (which is an extensive list) or the name of anybody he has sent a legal threat to (an even longer list).
This is the same person who goes off his nut about how God has sent him on a mission to clean the world of the violent smut which is degrading today’s society every time that somebody points out that he’s talking bollocks.
You get the idea. Please, hurry up and debar him so we can finally be rid of his endless rambling about how far up his own backside he is.
Dude, you sound like an idiot. Game looks mildly entertaining though.
So, there I was idly clicking through iTunes when I stumbled upon the trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Despite Mr. Ford looking a bit older (well, significantly older to be honest) it still looks like it could be somewhere on the other side of awesome.
I then, given the nature of the intertubes, went clicking around a bit and found my second dose of awesome of the day. LEGO Indiana Jones: The Game. All three classic films in LEGO goodness.
It’s an MMO, but with LEGO. What more can I say, other than official site lives here.
I reckon next year I should be able to collide my robotics/AI units with my elective Games Design unit and build an exmersive game, or at least an interface to one. What is exmersive you say? Simple, it’s the opposite of immersive.
There has been a trend in gaming to bring gamers deeper into the gaming world. This is awesome for some games whose worlds are amazingly crafted with some stunning story and environments. FPS like the Half-Life series and Bioshock instantly spring to mind as worlds which are carefully built for the player to just drop into. Likewise with RPGs and pseudo-RPGs such as Grand Theft Auto 3 (VC/SA included) or World of Warcraft. Even some top-down simulation such as Command and Conquer can really drag you in with its amazing backstory and the work which goes into keeping the ‘world’ working and believable even though when you sit back you realise it’s only a few pixels on a screen. Immersive gaming is taking that same world and trying to drag you into it through means such as VR glasses or enormous projected screens. Alienware have a big curvy screen which fills your peripheral vision and is a good step towards taking this into the home.
Exmersive gaming, on the other hand, is the opposite. You can go on with your daily life and the game is brought out into the real world, with the computerised ‘players’ (Robots in my case) interacting with normality. There have been some attempts at this collision mostly by puzzles such as Perplex City, but they again try to bring players into believing the game world. Here’s where exmersive is different, for example in this RPG:
You get given your ‘quests’ by robotic or static computer terminals, and the chances are your quests will have a bearing on the real world. Since if this happens anywhere it’ll be round campus, you may well get a quest to take some printouts down to the admin office in return for which you will gain experience (Allowing you to undertake bigger quests) and a reward (Print credit, for example).
Another possibility would be to involve real people as actors in the game (Perhaps clash with some robots somewhere) and only have the computer being a Dungeon Master of sorts, instructing people in what roles to take. Hook up some gadgetry to detect movements and you’ve got yourself a real-life Dungeons and Dragons. Sweet.