I read this yesterday: Gameplay is King: Story is Distant Second. It’s an interesting read and one which I almost completely agree with. For games, gameplay is the most important aspect and should always be so. If it’s not then it likely stops being a game and becomes something else with gameplay elements. That isn’t to say those other things aren’t valid or equally enjoyable for what they are.
Or, more fully, Stephane Bura’s Handy Guide to Genre Distinctions in Videogames. Through the wonders of Twitter, I came across Jay Lake’s Handy Guide to Genre Distinctions and suggested that we might need something similar for games, which is why Stephane created his version. Cool or what? 🙂
I was looking over the site, GamePeople, which seems to be a gaming site aimed at a slightly older audience who are not harcore gaming fanboys and also not the “typical” casual game player. In a sense, it caters to gamers who might not other wise be properly served by the bigger sites that seem to have almost created a strong polarisation with little overlap. The GamePeople audience seems to fit into another area of the Venn diagram.
The previous post about this “lost game” with the scene between Emily and Crawford was lifted directly from the original scripts. Because the development was cut short, I never had the chance to do a final editing and polishing pass over the whole game. Here is the same scene given the editing treatment. It’s a lot tighter and makes use of the visuals much more.
Considering the game first came out three and a half years ago, I thought that the days of new reviews were over. Then earlier this evening I was sent a link to a great review over at Alternative Magazine Online.
Here is another scene from the never-to-be-released game. This is about two-thirds of the way into the game.
It would seem that some people have sent me e-mails that I’ve not received, which is a pretty serious problem when I do most of my work through e-mail contact and the like. If anyone reading this has sent me anything recently (the past week) can you please try again. I’m trying to resolve the …
Some photos have been posted of the Games Forum Germany conference on Facebook and show most, of not all, of my fellow speakers. I’d like to say, once more, how much I enjoyed attending and speaking. A big thank you to the organisers for inviting me.
…I’ve learned that I’ve got to treat it with caution. My first impressions of Twitter were that it simply consisted of sub-trivial nonsense, but I stuck with it and realised that it’s a lot of fun and can also be very useful if you follow the right Twits. People who regularly post links to interesting …
I’m reading Untold Stories at the moment – a book of collected writings by Alan Bennett. I’m in the section in which sections of his diaries have been printed. It occurred to me as I was reading them that the tone is a little peculiar. They read as if they were addressed to a reader …
A large part of yesterday was spent updating the blog to WordPress, but I’m glad I made the move. Now I have I realise that Blogger wasn’t really designed to give the user proper control over his or her own blog, particularly if they wanted to host it on their own domain.
Importing from Blogger is proving to be problematical. 🙁 Update: I seem to have imported them into WordPress okay but there are a few peculiarities. Tags don’t seem to be displaying at all. Some weirdness with the layout, too, but I’m sure I can sort that out.