So I’ve mentioned before that I’ve had way too many games to play and not enough time to play them. I thought I’d try a little experiment to see if I could go 120 days without buying a new game.

I lasted fifty days.

And it’s only because a certain PS2 RPG came up on special on an online store for a decent price and I already own part 2 of the series.

Of course I don’t have time to play it and it will sit on my shelf for some time. But at least it won’t slip into the void.

Didn’t get that much done programming wise for the game this month.
Instead I have been working on more storyline / project management style stuff. I’ve sketched out the map for episode one and a basic storyline and am beginning to make an asset list for items that I will either need to make myself or outsource as commission pieces.

Two notable things however.

1. I bought a 22″ Monitor to go alongside my 19″ – This should make me more productive.
2. I got a copy of The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design – And its a darn good book. I’ll probably pass it round once I’ve finished with it.

So that’s it. Nothing much to report, but checking in none-the-less.

According to my stats Caverns of Underkeep has been beaten 100 times!

And I’m still not one of them.

I’ve got a long queue of games that I would really like to get through. As many of these games are more than a couple of years old, it’s no wonder why I haven’t got one of the current generation consoles, or upgraded my PC to play newer titles.

The queue is looking something like this…

1. Portal (Second time, with commentary)
2. Half-Life 2 (and the rest of the Orange Box)
3. Beyond Good and Evil
4. Disgaea
5. Kingdom Hearts (I & II)
6. Digital Devil Saga II
7. God of War I & II

And the list goes on, but we’ll probably start going into the list for 2010.

So who wants a shorter, tighter and more focused gaming experience? I often find myself wishing that games were shorter as I’m playing them so I can get to the end and on to the next thing.

I’m the same with books too, I look at books > 300 pages with just a tiny hint of suspicion.

So in about two weeks time is a 48hour game programming event held at Waikato University. Which is about 2 hours drive south of my current residence. I’ll be attending along with a couple others I know from AGW.

It looks like the two primary tools being used are Game Maker and XNA – I might just have to have a play around with XNA before I go, just so I don’t spend the first 4 hours working out how to go into full screen mode and get a sprite moving on the screen.

48 hours is a ridiculously short time frame to make a game. Usually I take 48 hours just to decide what resolution to use, but now I’m going to have to do all that and thensome along with sleeping, eating and showering – I have a feeling its going to be a very, very unhygenic event as one or two social decencies may fall by the wayside as the deadline looms.

I haven’t been blogging about the progress of rQuest lately because well, there hasn’t actually been much progress done. I have a break from work at the end of next week so that gives me some time to steam ahead and get some features coded.

I’m moving the code to use SDL rather than SFML. The main reasons behind this transition are:

• SDL already supports Mac. Its coming in SFML but I’d rather that it was already implemented. The Mac market is a particularly important one for my game, so having a cross-platform graphics library from the get go is pretty handy.
• I don’t actually need any fancy 3D effects. I’m not planning on using hardware accelerated rotation, scaling, lighting or alpha blending so all those features of SFML are not really required.
• I perfer SDLs blit based model of placing graphics on the screen.
• Hundreds of games already use SDL and it seems pretty solid.

SFML has some really good ideas behind its framework, but for this type of game. I think SDL suits my needs a little better. If I do ever get around to creating another 2D shooter, then I think SFML would fit the bill a little nicer.

In other news I finished playing Psychonauts, and it is the best game ever. I’m a huge Tim Schafer fan and if you haven’t played it yet and want to experience one of the most original action adventure games ever you owe it to yourself to check it out.

Also, over the last couple months I’ve helped out with an entry in the retro-remakes contest. If you ever remember a platformer from back in the day called the New Zealand Story, be sure to check out the AGW entry into this years retro-remakes competition available here.

I’ve also started to play Persona3 and its one of the most interesting jRPGs I’ve played. As a general rule I perfer western RPGs, but thats probably because so much of what we get over here are simply Final Fantasy clones. I’m only 10 hours into the game (apparently its a 70-80 hour game) but I’m already inspired to check out other games in the Shin Megami Tensei series.

I got my monthly paycheck today so I went to the shops and came back with one of the new Playstation 2 slim models. This is a bit of an event because I haven’t owned a games console since the Sega Megadrive some 12 years ago.

And while I’d like to have one of the next gen consoles, the PS2 has an extensive library of games and is priced at NZ$200 (Roughly twice that of a cheap DVD player.) And I don’t have to go out and buy a new HD TV to take full advantage of it’s capabilities – Made it a far more attractive purchase.

Thankfully PS2 titles are also alot cheaper than their next-gen counterparts, and as the PS2 lifecycle is essentially at its end – Much like how some people think that 70s music is better than modern music, time can be my filter and I can pick up the ‘must have’ titles with the full retrospective advantages of hindsight. Nice.

So I picked up two games Kingdom Hearts and Shadow of the Colossus and am enjoying them very much. I had to keep giving the controller to my flatmate in Shadow of the Colossus, not traditionally being a console gamer has made me somewhat retarded when it comes to 3rd person action titles. But the game is very epic with an amazing art style and accompaning score.

I also noticed when I was at the games store was how annoying it is when the store doesn’t have the games I want – I looked in the PC section and there was just nothing I wanted (they didn’t even have the Orange Box in stock) its like I’m not being targeted as a consumer anymore.

Thankfully the PC is an open market and anyone can develop for it – And with the exception of some really big titles, It looks like indie games and digital downloads are going to be the primary source (for me at least) for PC games.

There are many studies cited in the media about possible links between video games and violence, probably because the results of these studies can be used to push certain agendas – It can be beneficial to a particular group to find a co-relation (Statistics cannot prove anything, that’s the first law of statistics in case you didn’t know) between violent tendencies and video-game habbits – or vise versa, c’mon lets be fair

But what I want to know is what has been done using video games as an attempt to understand how humans learn? We are amazing parrallel processing machines, capable of pattern recognition far beyond that of any computers created thus far.

Lets take an example from my latest game Attack of the Meeplings – A large component of the game (and of many other games in the shooter genre) comes from learning the patterns that the game presents to you. The game is entirely deterministic, i.e the same every time you play, and it’s this determinisim that allows someone to learn the game and improve their abilities.

Taking Earok as an example – Sorry to pick on you Earok I find it pretty amazing that someone can go from 3000 to 12,000 to 38,000 pts in only three goes. There must be somekind of fancy processing going on in the brain to be able to improve that much in such a short time span.

So I created a game club account with BigFish Games today because I really wanted to play PuzzleQuest. Which is an unusual match3/RPG.

Yes, you heard right! A match3-RPG, who would have thunk it?

Not wanting to pay full price for the game, I thought I’d check out their game club. Which basically means if you join you only play $7.99 US for any game in their catalogue provided you buy at least one game per month for the next 12 months.

Now, I’ve bought quite a few games online before, but never from a major portal, so I wanted to see if there would be more on offer than the usual fare of casual-cutesy-crap.

Luckily, Big Fish actually do have a reasonable collection of games that I would actually pay money for, if you like point-and-click adventure games (and I do) then they have a number of them. But for some reason they put them in the puzzle->simulation category?

It’s a pity that the arcade->shooter category is looking pretty scrawny, but than again there are a few other indie game surprises scattered about throughout the catalogue.

So all in all pretty happy as $8 per game is pretty darn cheap.