Unfortunately I was instantly confronted by his evil brother, error 75. Good thing I pre-ordered Diablo 3 digitally so I was sure to be able to play it right away. Also a good thing I took the day off. Oh Blizzard.
Woot! I attempted to hint at this release in my last post about Triage, but I honestly didn’t want to say it outright since things can always fall apart when you least expect them to.
I was contacted by a representative of GamersGate a couple of weeks ago and was naturally thrilled at the opportunity to have my games carried by them. I’ll admit that this is partly because GamersGate is a large eTailer, but also because GamersGate is a Swedish company. Some small measure of national kinship is alright, isn’t it?
The price is the same as on Desura and the same rules naturally applies, namely that you only need to buy the game once and can then use it on both PC and Mac.
So, I posted a sad realization a while back which stated I was done with my favorite pure survival horror series (Silent Hill). Yet observant readers of this blog mailed me questioning my statement since the majority of SH games have since popped up on my games played list. Did I speak out of turn, do I, in fact, still enjoy Silent Hill? No and no. I decided to play through the entire series one last time and then that’ll be that. While I’m still rating the first three games as recommended it’s simply because I still find them quite excellent, but I’m not enjoying them anymore.
One reader took issue with the fact that I gave SH4 a lower score than Homecoming, and I can certainly see his reasoning, but here’s mine. Homecoming isn’t a great game, but it’s not a terrible one either. The PC port is extremely buggy, almost to the point of being unusable, but once you learn the quirks most of the game will work just fine. The combat system might not be great, or Silent Hill’y, but it works. SH4 on the other hand.. it’s one gigantic inventory management, backtracking, escort quest with immortal enemies. It pretty much took everything I despise and rolled it up into a ball of pure annoyance. I don’t like it. At all. Even though I think the concept and story of SH4 is a lot more interesting than Homecoming and, even, SH3.
Having beat Homecoming I’ve only got two games left, Shattered memories and Downpour. I’m rather looking forward to Shattered Memories since I’ve never played it and I’ve heard it does a couple of interesting things with the Silent Hill concept. Downpour I won’t actually play, I’ll either watch when a mate plays it (if I can beat SM in time) or just check out a Let’s Play. The Vita only game just fills me with regret by proxy. “focusing on cooperative multiplayer action rather than traditional psychological horror.” Why would you.. why couldn’t you.. just why?!
UPDATE: Just figured I’d add that I really enjoyed shattered memories. I do understand why people object to it and I, also, found many aspects of it to be flawed (especially the repetitive and unvaried otherworld chase sequences).
But this shattered memories symbolizes what I really enjoyed about Silent Hill; it’s a journey within, not without. SH is as much a part of you, as a part of the world that you visit. I’d play more SH games like this for sure.
I know, I know. It’s not really summer yet. Weather has just been extremely funky in the last number of years. Yesterday it was so hot that we immediately turned on the BBQ and had a nice dinner on the balcony. Today it was bloody frigid.. but naturally I perservered in order to enjoy a nice single malt and cigar.
It took about two months but the paperwork finally stopped churning and I figured out how to twist the knobs while simultaneously pushing the buttons. Triage is live on Desura! Now, this by itself won’t mean much (except some nice exposure to people who would never have found the game otherwise) and I still have to perform my extremely delayed guerrilla marketing campaign.. but it feels pretty darn good. And the good news doesn’t even stop there, I’ve got another great announcement coming up in the next month or so. Triage is on a roll.
But what’s going on besides that? I’ve previously mumbled what my next game would be but, as usual, I changed my mind a while back. Now that I know my games can be sold via established PC/Mac stores it changes the outlook quite a bit.
I’m not quite ready to divulge what the next game will be, since it’s in a mostly broken alpha state, but I can tell you what it aims to be (mostly because it’s so hazy right now that I can hardly make any sense of it myself). The basic concept is a *ahem*; card based exploration, rogue-like, survival sci-fi/horror adventure game. Oh yeah, try to say that one five times in a row and not stumble. More details on that are upcoming when there’s something worth posting.
Jack Tramiel (Polish: Jacek Trzmiel, Trzmiel means bumblebee) (December 13, 1928 – April 8, 2012) was an Polish-born American businessman, best known for founding Commodore International,[3] the manufacturer of the Commodore PET, Commodore 64, Commodore 128, Commodore Amiga, and other Commodore models of home computers.
Rest in peace. Your devices shaped my early life and helped define what I would spend my life doing. Thank you.
No, this isn’t a post about the new downpour. I’ve got no intention of picking it up since it’s not coming to PC (yet, or ever).
I just played through SH: Origins and while I understand that it’s probably the least Silent Hill’y of the games (although I’d argue that Homecoming is much worse in that regard) it made me realize that I’m pretty much done with the survival horror genre.
Yes, my joy, my longing, my preciousss is finally over. Now, let me qualify this statement. I’ll still play survival horror games since there’s still tons of great games being made. But the classic Silent Hill angle is dead to me. Since Resident Evil has turned into a shooter and Alone in the dark has never really had a successful follow-up (2 and 3 stunk no matter what anyone tells me, the 2000 remake was quite enjoyable but it was a shooter).
From now on I’ll look to games like Amnesia to get my thrills. I realize most people will just shrug but this is sort of a big thing for me. The Silent Hill series has been one of the few that I truly loved to play and re-play. I’m not sure if I’ve gotten too old, if I’ve gotten too critical or if the games have just gotten too formulaic but even the classic SH1 and SH2 don’t hold the same appeal anymore. You can only fill in a crossword puzzle so many times before it becomes a tad boring.
A scene from Origins (ironic, since this is the game that made me come to this sad realization) is the perfect representation of how I felt when I played one of them for the first time. I was crawling on my hands and knees, not knowing where I was or really where I was going. I was crawling away from horrifying creatures and I knew that there was something even worse in front of me. And I loved every minute of it. I’ll truly miss those days.
For some reason I’ve always adored nazi era flicks that deal with the occult. I’m not sure if it’s that both topics are somewhat taboo and the two combined result in something even more disturbing. Either way there’s been quite a few good horror gems, but less so in recent days. The last one I really enjoyed was “The outpost”. Before that I’m also fond of “The bunker” and “Deathwatch”. You’ll notice that all of them are quite old (ancient in internet years) and there really hasn’t been that many lately.
Or at least I thought so, until I stumbled across “Devil’s rock“. It’s pretty darn good. While not delving quite as deep into the nazi sub-genre it does combine elements of it perfectly with the occult. The movie gets right into the plot, a lack of exposition seem to be a key element of this sub-genre, which is great since we all know the general backstory of the war. If you enjoy horror movies and/or this particular blend then do watch it.
“Set in the Channel Islands on the eve of D Day,two Kiwi commandos, sent to destroy German gun emplacements to distract Hitler’s forces away from Normandy, discover a Nazi occult plot to unleash demonic forces to win the war.”
Whenever I run a beta for one of my games I get people on Linux asking me if they can participate. Every single time I have to turn them down. This is especially painful since I used Linux exclusively for almost 8 years straight. The reason isn’t that I don’t want to support Linux, it’s that I simply can’t. The engine I’m using, Unity 3D, doesn’t support Linux as a build target so I simply cannot create a Linux port of my games.
Now, that’s fine. The majority of engines don’t support Linux, it’s just a matter of fact. I shouldn’t fault Unity Technologies for their decisions since its their product, if I don’t like it I could use one of the myriad of open source engines. I don’t since I prefer Unity 3D. But I do fault them because the numbers simply don’t add up.
A very common statement I’ve seen around the Unity 3D forum and elsewhere is that “adding a linux build would only increase your total sales by 1%”. One might wonder where they got that number? Is it because Linux’ userbase is about 1% of all users? If so their argument is based on a faulty premise. Ubuntu is expecting to hit 200 million users in 2014. Would a 200 million people strong target audience not be enough for you? It certainly would for me. Even 20 million would be twice the population of Sweden. Somehow retail stores in Sweden make due just fine with a 10 million target audience. Following that logic they should all move to some other country since our 10 million population just isn’t large enough to warrant any investment?
I made 100% of my profit from designing Linux specific software. 100%. From that 1%. And you know what? It went swimmingly. Redhat recently surpassed the billion dollar worth and make 100% of their profit from that 1%. Yes, what I just referred to was enterprise software. Yes, that’s entirely different from games. But it proves that the numbers game is totally irrelevant in real world examples. Now let’s switch focus to the topic at hand; games.
For some reason Unity Technologies holds Mac as their darling. They started out as a Mac exclusive company and app but only took off when they hit mainstream with their windows port. I’m just not sure why they’re so focused on Macs in general. Yes, the total Mac market share is larger than Linux, but the windows market share is much, much larger than Mac. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to focus entirely on windows, then?
The mere notion that “there’s no money to make in Linux” manages to annoy me even more every single time an indie humble bundle rolls around and the Linux users consistently and without fail manage to generate more money than the mac share. So that 1% beats out the 10% Mac users. That’s real world proof that defies the nay-sayers logic. I’m certainly not saying they should abandon their Mac build target, I’m a mac user myself, but keep focus on the actual numbers, please.
I think most of their arguments stem from misinformation but a lot of it is probably derived from existing toolsets and their strategies. You see, games aren’t like productivity tools. With games you buy one, play it for X number of hours and then mostly forget about it. Very few people replay all of their games, I don’t erase crossword puzzles to fill them in again, do you? That fact generates a perpetual market that has worked so well for the entertainment industry. You don’t stop watching movies because you’ve found your favorite movie. Nor do you stop reading books after having read Shakespeare. It works differently for productivity tools.
Once you’ve learned Photoshop CS, Maya, Office or whatever else you use for your productivity tools you continue using that indefinitely or until something better comes along. If you’re already using something that only exists on a specific platform then you’re using that platform. Thus you wouldn’t care if there was a Linux port of Photoshop released, you already have everything you need. In that scenario the 1% increase in sales actually makes sense.
There’s also the off chance that FUD about Linux users has taken hold. You see, there’s a common misconception that Linux users won’t touch anything that isn’t OSS, GPL, or another 3 letter acronym. “Well, I won’t release my application since they’ll just go for that free stuff.” You’re right, they very well might, if there is an open source, free version of your application. There isn’t for games. There might very well be games similar to your games but they’re not the same. Productivity tools offers a means to get a result. Games are the result. It’s the experience people are after, not an end result. Thus that theory falls apart the instant you think about it.
No, there might not be enough Linux users doing professional illustration work to warrant Adobe porting it to Linux. That’s entirely right. And the argument completely falls apart for perpetual entertainment markets where there’s never only one application/game with a chokehold on the market. Gamers buy games. They don’t buy a game and then stick to it for 10 years straight. Stop listening to nonsensical arguments and give us the Unity 3D Player for Linux. Pretty please?
This will, unfortunately, be a series. I’m not sure when I’ll post the next installment but the list of canceled games I would have enjoyed is massive. Let me start out with a couple of obvious ones.
Fallout 3: Van Buren“Van Buren was the codename given to Fallout 3, a game that was being developed by Black Isle Studiosbefore the parent company, Interplay Entertainment, laid off the PC development team on December 8, 2003, effectively cancelling the game. Prior to its cancellation, Van Buren was set to carry on the Falloutseries as the sequel to Fallout 2.”
No brainer. Would I, and every other RPG fan, have bought and played it? Of course. The fallout series was unique of its time. While I’m not hating the FPS reboots they’re just not the same. Van Buren was what we were all waiting for and never got.
“Sega originally planned to release Shenmue III,[21] but over the years many have speculated that the game may never see the light of day. Various unconfirmed reasons for its delay include budget issues, poor sales of Shenmue II, and creative differences between Yu Suzuki and the more conservative management Sega installed after restructuring. Although Suzuki is still employed with Sega, he has not been involved in a major console title for years, and was not involved in the newer versions of series he pioneered, like Virtua Fighter 5.”
Let me be honest with you; I never finished Shenmue 1 or 2 myself. I watched as a mate beat most of the original and gave the sequel an honest go. But the repetitive gameplay and fact that I would at some point have to replay the (very lengthy) games when the third and last part was released made me stand off’ish. Now that we can safely assume that the third will never arrive I greatly regret not playing the games as they were released. I did buy them though so at least they got my financial support, for whatever it was worth.
The lost“The Lost is heavily inspired by Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, particularly Inferno. The setting is present day, and the main character is a waitress/medical student named Amanda Wright. Amanda is a single mother who has lost her only daughter, Beatrice, in a tragic car accident. Desperate and suicidal, Amanda makes a deal with the devil. Selling her soul, she is given the chance to plunge into the bowels of a concentration camp-esque hell in an attempt to rescue her daughter’s soul. The only aids she has in the bowels of hell are Virgil, a strange reptilian creature who Amanda must free from an enchanted sword, and four hellish beings called the Entities.”
A survival horror game that promised to be everything that Dante’s Inferno wasn’t. What a surprise, yet another solid sounding SH title canceled. And after it was finished too, that’s like rubbing salt in the wound.
Jurassic Park: Survival“Jurassic Park: Survival was a third Person Dino Crisis styled action/adventure game, that was to be released on the PlayStation 2 in the Summer of 2002. The game was canceled due to conflicts withVivendi over payments. Since the game was never completed, it did not receive an ESRB Rating. It is speculated, though, that it would have received a Teen rating.”
Really not sure about this one since I know so little about it or its development. But I have an almost childish affection for Jurassic Park games in general, yes even the brutal Jurassic Park: Trespasser.
“Destroyed by a government raid in 1928, the mysterious town of Innsmouth was left to fester in ruins for nearly 80 years. The two central characters, Emily and Jacob, return to search for the truth as they unveil the horrors of the town’s past. Destiny’s End will break new ground in the field of survival horror by featuring innovative co-operative gameplay whereby two players can each assume the role of one of the main protagonists at any time in the game and work together to overcome their deepest fears. Players will have to use both characters to defeat their enemies thanks to fantastic co-operative fighting combos. Featuring a blend of fierce action, combat and exploration, gamers will journey into a world of malevolence and horror with “Call of Cthulhu: Destiny’s End.”[1]“
Why.. oh why.. Dark Corners of the Earth (at least the first half of it) was probably the finest First Person horror ever to have been designed. Yes, I’m fully aware how much the game suffers when it turns into a shooter but the first segments still reign supreme. To have been given a coop mode might very well have reduced the annoyances of the run-and-gun degeneration the first games suffered. But on the other hand, horror thrives in isolation. Shared horror is reduced horror, as opposed to fun. Who knows, I just know I wanted (and still want) this game. Badly.
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