Games: November 2006 Archive Page

--Asteroid's Revenge

This resembles a videogame version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the modern play that retells Hamlet from the perspective of two minor characters.

The website calls it "Asteroids Revenge," but I'll excuse the mistake.

Video games are a viable storytelling medium, but the trouble is that video games always have the same protagonist, which is the player. And he always has the same set of motivations, which is to kill and don't die. That's not conducive to great novels. We have a character with this negative motivation and that character makes a lousy fictional protagonist. --Orson Scott Card discusses his new book/game/comic franchise, which pits the Red States vs the Blue States, in an interview by John Gaudiosi --Orson Scott Card Builds an Empire (Wired)

Interesting claim from an unrelated article: "In the last 20 years, Lucas' vision has arguably been far better expressed in video games than in movies." --Forget Film, Games Do Sci-Fi Best (That claim depends entirely on the criteria you choose to use when defining "best").

I made this with cleverpig.com's Whack-A-Pig tutorial.

One day when we're literally halfway through SQ4, Mark and I were called into Ken's office. We were asked what we thought about using the (dumbass) point-and-click interface that they were using, in I guess it was King's Quest 5 then, and what we thought about putting it in SQ4. We said we wanted to keep the parser. Ken and Bill Davis asked us to talk about it together and then tell them what we wanted to do the next day. After the meeting, Mark and I agreed without hesitation as we walked out Ken's office door that there was absolutely no way we wanted the point-and-click. The next day when we came in, Bill Davis tracked Mark down and asked him what we'd decided. Mark told him that we'd decided to keep the parser, to which Bill instantly replied something to the effect of, "But you can't do that. Ken has already decided that you have to use the point-and-click!" --Scott Murphy --Scott Murphy (Adventure Classic Gaming)

Legendary Sierra designer Scott Murphy, co-creator of the Space Quest series, reflects on the disappearance of the text-based parser that was part of all the early Sierra games.

--Percentage of Chart Which Resembles Pac-Man (themot.org)