As far as games based on an established IP, the Lord of The Rings games have been pretty good. The last one, Conquest wasn’t all that spectacular but the Battle For Middle Earth series as well as Lord of the Rings Online have offered tons of great gameplay to fans of the venerable fantasy series.
Indie games come in all shapes and sizes and an indie game that I particularly liked was 2009’sGratuitous Space Battles. The upcoming indie game Space Pirates and Zombies? is looking increasingly like a indie game to check out when it comes out later this year. The game is being developed by Minmax Games and looks to combine the gameplay fast paced fun of a top down shooter with the vast scope of old school space exploration games like Elite and after playing the demo, I can confirm it does this very well.
Open Mailbox. Get Rope. Examine Sword. If that sound familiar, you must be a fan of text adventure games. These were all the rage in the 80’s, back when computers didn’t have the processing power for “Graphics”, but rather used words to tell their story, with players typing in simple phrases instead of using a controller. Text gaming eventually fell out of fashion once computers that could display moving images became more common, but there’s still a small, loyal group of programmers and players who enjoy this sort of gaming, and it seems that playwrights Richard Lovejoy, Danny Bowes and Stephen Aubrey are among them, because they have created an interactive theatre experience called Brain Explode which mimics the gameplay of text adventures.
Tripwire Entertainment are the people who’ve brought PC Gamers such titles as Red Orchestra, Killing Floor, The Ball, Zeno Clash and Dwarfs. Player Affinity’s Charles Battersby had the chance to speak with Tripwire’s Vice President Alan Wilson about their past projects, and the upcoming Red Orchestra 2.
Tripwire Entertainment are the people who’ve brought PC Gamers such titles as Red Orchestra, Killing Floor, The Ball, Zeno Clash and Dwarfs. Player Affinity’s Charles Battersby had the chance to speak with Tripwire’s Vice President Alan Wilson about their past projects, and the upcoming Red Orchestra 2.
The market for video game westerns is very small, especially when you compare it to other settings like fantasy and sci-fi. It’s particularly surprising considering the immense popularity of last year’s Red Dead Redemption, but long before Rockstar put out its wild west epic Polish developer Techland has been making western games in the form of their Call of Juarez games. While the first game was good and the second game was even better, it’s unknown whether Call of Juarez: The Cartel will continue or break the trend due to its radical setting change.
Tripwire Entertainment are the people who’ve brought PC Gamers such titles as Red Orchestra, Killing Floor, The Ball, Zeno Clash and Dwarfs. Player Affinity’s Charles Battersby had the chance to speak with Tripwire’s Vice President Alan Wilson about their past projects, and the upcoming Red Orchestra 2.
Machinima is all the rage these days. That’s when people use footage from
video games combined with voiceovers to tell stories. Unfortunately, very few
people are doing it well. For
every hit like Red Versus Blue there are
hundreds of failed attempts. Such
is the case with a live Machinima theatrical piece called Romeoo and
Julietet. It’s a production of “Romeo and Juliet” performed live in
World of Warcraft.
The producers of the show have set up laptops in a theater
in Brooklyn, with a projection screen showing the in-game events. The players control World of
Warcraft characters all named after
characters in Shakespeare’s play, and they type out their dialogue in the game
while a cast of recorded voice actors recite the lines for the audience in the
theater. All of this is done live
in World of Warcraft, and anyone
playing the game can watch the performance live in-game at the same time the
audience in the theater is watching.
There
have always been plenty of licensed games available and for the longest
time they held a reputation for being poorly made attempts to cash in
on a franchise. It’s only recently that that has changed with licensed
games like Batman: Arkham Asylum topping Game of the Year lists, but one of the first quality licensed games was The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay. Escape From Butcher Bay was developed by Starbreeze Studios who was a relatively unknown developer at the time, and following Escape From Butcher Bay they developed a game based on The Darkness comics.
After purchasing tickets to
what I thought was an interactive theater production called Red Cloud Rising, I received an e-mail confirming my appointment for a
job interview at a company called
Bydder Financial at the exact time and date as the performance was
supposed to
happen. Instead of being directed
to a theater, I was given the address of a Wall Street office building
where I was to meet a recruiter for this mysterious financial firm.
Before the show had even begun, I’d
already been drawn into the world of this Alternate Reality Game.
