I just downloaded PopCap game’s newest – Bejeweled Twist. The first couple versions of Bejeweled games grabbed me right away. This one? Meh.
But then, I decided to start paying attention to what the game was offering. The concept is simple – spin a set of four jewels, try to get three in a row. It lacks the immediacy of the original, but it gives some new twists that add depth and strategy. Here’s a video someone else made showing a bit of gameplay.
Read more of what I saw in the game below the hump. More »« Less
The all time 5 worst game launches? Honestly, that’s a list that has to be tough to narrow down to just 5. Still, 1Up has managed to highlight the worst offenders. One managed to recover quite nicely and become one of the highest rated games of all time, but the delivery and verification process at release was insanely bad.
2. Steam/Half-Life 2
Yes, yes, we all love Steam now. It’s the model of digital distribution and community management in PC gaming right now, utterly shaming Microsoft’s embarrassingly inept Games for Windows Live initiative. But back in the day, we were even harsher on Valve than we now are on Microsoft — because the official launch of Steam on November 16, 2004, which coincided with the launch of Half-Life 2, was an utter nightmare.
Wall-of-text warning on the original article, though. Seems the web-layout folks might want to educate the writers on the importance of more paragraphs and other visual breaks.
My brother just sent me a link to a SharkBait article which references an old VHS video series from Vestron Video in 1982 that tells you how to beat a variety of Atari 2600 games. The article has this Raiders of the Lost Ark game guide, and since I remember so well playing the game, I thought I’d put it here so I can always remember how great it was (well, always meaning until YouTube removes the video or shuts down).
If you click on that video and go to the YouTube patch, you’ll find links to other video guides, plus a number of other Atari 2600 game-related videos. Oddly, when I look there is a link to a “worst games on the 2600″ video, which suggests Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the worst games on the Atari 2600. The video below that is the video guide for the game Superman, which actually is on my list of worst Atari 2600 games ever.
If you’d like to know more about the Raiders game shown in the video, I highly recommend Atari Age as the source for pretty much all 2600 and other Atari console information. Click on the little Pac-Man looking icon in the top right corner of the screen to get the ROM, and then get the open source emulator Stella for running it.
See how powerful the CryENGINE2 is, assuming you have a sufficiently powerful machine to drive this.
Not as good as looking out real-world locations, but extremely impressive for a game engine. Most of the engine driven stuff is flatter or duller than the real-world video, but I’m still looking forward to being able to run something with CryENGINE2 when I make my next system upgrade. (via Joystiq)
I hadn’t even heard of this game before, but Sumotori looks worth trying just based on these videos and the 96K download size. In fact, if you are still stuck on a 1200 baud modem connection and find 96K too large (psssst – this page is bigger than that), you can instead get a tiny 29K version.
This is simply awesomesauce in a little controller. While catching up on my Penny-Arcade reading for the day (and by the way, might I recommend the PennyPacker extension to you if you are a Mozilla user), I caught this video of a project to make a head-mounted device to give a user the visual sensation of a truly three-dimensional image on a monitor.
The first minute or so of the video might seem a bit boring, but it’s a setup for a really neat demonstration of the effect of real spatial movement effecting the display. I tried snagging some images from the video to show the effect, but it’s the motion and not the image that makes the effect so cool. In motion, parts of the image do appear to stand several feet out from the screen, and moving forward will put you behind those parts of the view so you don’t see them any more.
OK, I’ve finally join the masses of gamers who have finished Portal. Color me very impressed. I started playing it because I understood it to be a first-person puzzler. I stopped around level 14 to play other games, but after reading high praise from so many other sources I finally came back and finished it today. The last 3-4 levels are just brilliant, and the gameplay portion after the last real level was very, very impressive. As so many others have done, I’ll pass on giving away the ending completely for those that haven’t finished it. I do recommend you finish it if you have the Orange Box and haven’t completed Portal yet.
Once I finished, I started looking at what others had to say about the game. This lead to stumbling on some YouTube Portal videos that are just great. Below the break, I’ll pop out a couple I really like. They are speed runs of some of the tougher or more puzzlish parts near the end.
The Nintendo Wii gaming console started selling late last year. It has been almost perpetually scarce, as skyrocketing demand, far better pricing than the more capable yet more traditional Sony and Microsoft systems, and limited production capacity have given Nintendo the enviable problem of being able to sell every console they can make and still have gamers looking for more. As nice as it would be for this problem to finally be resolved as we head toward the 2nd holiday season of Wii availability, Nintendo of America big-dog Reggie Fils-Amie says we still will have to look harder to find the Wii than competitors’ systems.
As yet unbeaten in the console sales charts since it debuted in the US last November, Nintendo’s Wii has consistently outsold its competitors by healthy margins. However, far from reaching its saturation point, the Mario Factory has yet to meet demand for its console. According to Nintendo of America president and CEO Reggie Fils-Amie, that situation isn’t going to change as the already-booming gaming industry heads into its busiest time of the year.
I want one, but haven’t been able to convince the wifey-person to get one. And I’m not willing to face the hell I’d suffer were I to just buy one – I already spend enough on computer hardware and software to know better than to push my luck.
I just downloaded PopCap game’s newest – Bejeweled Twist. The first couple versions of Bejeweled games grabbed me right away. This one? Meh.
