This week is the annual Game Developers Conference, which I love, not for game announcements like we get with the other game shows, but for all the geeky developer stuff we get to see. There’s some awesome stuff coming out of the conference so far, and one of my favorites so far is the announcement of the XNA Community Games from Microsoft.
Read the rest of this entry »
Archive for the ‘Gaming’ Category
These are two of the best kills I’ve ever seen in a game. (Well, technically one is a suicide, but it’s still pretty awesome.) They’re both from Halo 3, using the movie editor thing, which so far, is one of the coolest features of the game.
Since the level cap on the Call of Duty 4 beta was raised today, I took a break during lunch to play a few games, and see if I could level up a bit.
I managed to level up to 22, completing a few challenges along the way. Before I quit, I decided to check the leaderboards, and was shocked by what I saw:
Here’s hoping they don’t screw this up - apparently Lucasarts has announced that it’s Star Wars: The Force Unleashed will be coming to the Wii.
Since day 1 of the Wii’s motion-sensing controllers having been revealed, there has been a collective sound of people making lightsaber noises, praying that the Wii would have enough midi-chlorians to be able to wield a lightsaber. Now, it sounds like that might be happening next spring.
Until then, if you’re on a Mac, and have a WiiMote - you should be able to kill some time with WiiSaber.
Anyone that’s ever played Tecmo Super Bowl knows Bo. And this is why we loved to be him, and hated to be against him.
“WHY ARE YOU HERE, SOLDIER?!!”
Super Mario War is one of the best games I’ve played in a long time. It’s essentially what you would have got, had Nintendo included a death match mode into Super Mario World.
The game has several modes, including your basic deathmatch, king of the hill, and chicken tag, where whoever stomps the chicken, becomes the chicken. The chicken moves slower than everyone else, but whoever stays chicken the longest wins.
You have access to the standard assortment of weapons, fire flowers, mushrooms, hammers, capes, etc.
The game is open-source, and works for Mac, Linux, & Windows, up to four players. I’ve found that the best way to play it with a controller pad. I’ve got a USB adapter for connecting SNES controllers to my Mac, and that’s probably the best way to play this thing. It looks, sounds, & acts just like a SNES, game, and using the controller completes the illusion.
A while back I posted a link to a page from Opera’s Developer community that contained some info on developing Wii-Friendly web pages. However, for whatever reason Opera has decided that info is no longer worth sharing, and now you’ll receive an “Access Denied” error when visiting that page.
I’ve been working on a presentation for developing Flash games targeting the Wii browser for uFlash, and I’ve been rounding up some interesting info I figured I link into one place, at least for my own use if nothing else.
Over the weekend I took some time and ported my Duck Hunt game to work on the Wii. It didn’t take much, as all I really needed to do was remove a few references to cacheAsBitmap and replace some setTimeout() calls with pairings of setInterval()/clearInterval(), then republish for Flash Player 7.
It works, and you can play it here:
Wii - wii.joshbuhler.com/duckhunt
Original - www.joshbuhler.com/games/duckhunt/
I finally finished Gears of War last night for the first time. It’s taken me a few months, as I haven’t had a lot of time lately, but it’s been a lot of fun. It’s one of the best games I’ve played in a long time. I only finished it on the Casual setting, but once I finished watching the credits, I started over again into the Hardcore setting.
Of course, I did have some help along the way - I love the co-op multiplayer mode - and Jesse was a big help one night, helping me plow through a few stages and helping me find more COG tags in one night than I’d found total so far.
There were a couple of things that bothered me about how the game ended though. As I was on the train, there was nothing that really made me feel as if I was nearing the end. Once I got to the final fight with Raam, it was a total surprise. Usually there is some kind of buildup to let you know that something good is coming.
Also, it wasn’t exactly the most difficult boss fight - sure, I died a few times - but it seemed like all it took was a few Torque Bow shots to his face, and then once I made it to the turret gun in the center of the car, it was over in about 12 seconds. The whole thing just seemed a little anti-climatic. The rest of the game was so good, that I think I was expecting a little more from the final fight.
Also, Dom is an idiot.
He seemed to fight pretty good for an AI character, but once we reached Raam, he kept charging right up the middle, immediately being cut down by Raam’s gun, or torn to shreds by the kryll surrounding Raam. No matter how many times I tried to tell him to regroup or cease fire, he would just run up and commit suicide. Idiot.