The latest Homer in Silicon covers the casual farm-management game “FarmCraft 2”. It has some unusually story-directed level design and pretty slick gameplay, if you like this kind of thing at all.
Category: video games
Two links
Enthusiastic, spoilery review of Make It Good from someone who doesn’t generally seem to be a big fan of IF.
Cellcraft, an RTS-style game about cellular biology, from the creator of Super Energy Apocalypse. More thorough review to follow later, but the short version is: I think the tutorial is paced wrong, and the interface has a few dozen things that I would tweak. On the other hand, by the end I was thoroughly enjoying this despite the quirks, and recalling some things about golgi bodies and the endoplasmic reticulum that I haven’t thought about for quite a while. And the silly, cute story provides a bit of motivation for the whole thing.
Homer in Silicon
on Love and Death: Bitten, a hidden object game with some Twilight-esque aspirations. For the genre it belongs to, it does quite a few things right — I don’t love hidden object gameplay as a rule, but this was much better than most, and did an above-average job of making the mechanics and the story fit together.
That said, at the end of the day the story it’s telling just isn’t very good — for reasons that overlap with not-very-good stories in many other games.
“Designing Morality in Games”
There’s an interesting post on designing games with moral choice (and moral ambiguity) over at Gamasutra, which looks at the Bioshock games especially and speculates about the value of moving away from super-simplistic black-and-white good and evil, which is a pet peeve of mine as well.
Something the article doesn’t touch on much, though, is why we are including these moral choices in the first place – something I think we need to know in order to decide what sorts of structure and context should be provided. Are we making a rhetorical point about something we believe? Are we telling the story of how a particular character in a particular context wrestled with moral decision-making? Are we pushing the player to explore his beliefs about a difficult situation (a la The Baron or Fate)?
Homer in Silicon on Fallout 3
Here.
Latest iPhone Games
I have a problem with my iPhone game playing. There are the games I think I ought to want to play on the iPhone, like the special edition of Secret of Monkey Island, or Beneath a Steel Sky — games I want to play in general, that I’m pretty sure I would enjoy, and that happen to be pleasantly cheap and portable in this format.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 