For me the most enjoyable part of creating a design treatment for a game is designing and developing characters. The attached gallery is of three characters for a game concept called Paradious Island. They were heaps of fun to create and I'm really pleased with how they've turned out!Hopefully I'll have some sort of protoype of the game running in the next few months that I can offer up to you guys to play. In the nearer future I'll try to keep you up-to-date with more art and some completed doc
1. Always On - What if my PC isn't connected to the Internet, Valve?2. Automatic Updates - If it's broke, then I'll get the patch (it's given me time to write this, but I'd rather be playing CS Source).3. Random Crashes - Yep. It's fucked.4. Pop-Ups - I don't give a shit about Super Flying Space Ninjas, even if it is using the HL2 engine.5. Random Crashes - Fucked, again.
I am an electron travelling through a vacuum. I’m accelerating because of a potential difference between the cathode, from where I have come, and the anode, to which I am going. The energy I have is being converted from the potential I had at the cathode to kinetic, the maximum of which will be reached at the instance just before I reach the anode. At that point my energy, in Joules, will be equal to the product of my mass and velocity.My path will be an arch, the radius of which will be defined
You’re always supposed to remember where you were for monumental junctures; JFK; 9/11; Shenmue III. Perhaps not. There was no frantic en masse hysteria jamming the telephone networks as relative scrambled to inform dearest. Water cannons. Riot vans. Plastic bullets. All obvious by there absence.Your Sega Apathy invigorates a sense of hatred in me for you, most likely. Shenmue III is the game - the only game - I want to play, ever. At that point in which the game falls in to my hands I will be co
For years I’ve been an adamant console-only gamer. For me the very thought of PC gaming was linked to the smell of sweat emanating from a LAN party: The very words LAN and party muddled together makes me sick. Who would consider a gathering of fully-grown men as a party? It seems a little inept. A little Peter Pan.For the first time ever I’ve need a state-of-the-art PC. I need something tasty for 3ds max, the 3D design package that is used industry-wide and PC exclusive. And so I had to purchase
So Rockstar have riled everyone again, this time for something that wasn’t included in a game – fully clothed non-penetrative sex. Excellent.The only way to actually access the ‘Hot Coffee’ mini-game is either with a mod for the PC version or Gameshark code for the PS2, both of which require access to the Internet. Surely young impressionable John would be better off whacking himself senseless at TheHun.com, thus negating the difficulty he had to endure to buy this adult rated game?Moreover, one
Everybody loves the story of underdog made good. That was Sega’s story during the Genesis years, yet it quickly turned to a Greek tragedy that could have been penned by Bill himself.In 1994 Sega’s whimsical nature, especially towards periphery, took the form of CD-ROM add-on the Sega CD (Mega CD to us PALites). Its failure, for my own ends, was its success.The problem with the Mega CD was as much Sega’s poor handling of the system, and its lack of loyalty towards it, as it was it’s timing. There
I’m in a bit of a gaming rut. I’ve got loads of games, but nothing to play; nothing that’s grabbing me.I bought four games recently. The first I dove in on was Vice City, which I don’t find as great as everyone makes out. Okay, so you can run around and kill people in a frenzy of power over digital life, but when couldn’t you in a videogame? The mission difficulty gets ramped up pretty early on and the ‘plot’ is pretty, well, crap.Secondly, DOA: Xtreme Beach Volleyball. No volleyball (xtreme or
The sun bleaches the sandy landscape of my prison; the walls that confine me are craggy and crumbling but infused with an esoteric magic. I grab the hand of the Princess and pull her towards the monumental monoliths. The gates electrify; like a lightning leader between the Princess' soul and the gates themselves, banishing the shadowy demons that stalk her and me. We’re in this together. She’s Yorda, and I’m Ico.This is an interactive poem, not a movie. All that is frivolous without beauty is ab
I’m doled up in my best and at my Grandma’s house, sleep deprived with the smell of sprouts and over-boiled cabbage mingling in my nostrils. It’s Christmas Day. There’s a big present in the corner, I’ve opened all mine but I know that I’ve not had my lot, and everyone is denying its ownership. It was my Sega Master System II. I cried. Years later a Game Boy and then a Mega Drive followed. Each one was exciting and special; it was almost as if some magic had been infused in to the plastic casing
I’m going to assume, as a classic gamer frequenting an Atari website, that you, the reader, has some familiarity with Asteroids. If you don’t then you need to source the game and play it. Fast.The thing that is perplexing about this very old game is the amount of truth it holds; it’s realistic not in it’s representation but in it’s working. It adheres to the laws of inertia: that a body will continue at a uniform velocity unless another force is applied to it to oppose the motion. On earth we ar
Once upon a time – in the 70’s to be precise – Atari, Milton Bradley and Disney sold us a dream of the future. In this Utopia reality and the organic is replaced by the virtual and geometric. Everything is synthetic; our music is the creative formation of saw waves. The frivolous is stripped and texture makes way for emptiness. Baron and clean was the way the future could only be.This is Battlezone. This is Tron. This is Vectrex.The bubble burst and everybody decided that this wasn’t the future
Here's just a quick update and a couple of photos.Ikea'd to hell. I really love the picture and frame, it's the 12" single sleeve from Primal Scream's Kowalski. To the right of the CD stand is a 'media stand' that houses my Playstation collection as well as my DVDs, CD singles and other junk. The green box is full of GBA games and an SP. You'll notice my projector above the sofa, which happens to be very comfy!Outrun 2 from my Xbox looking mighty fine. The projector needs a little bit of adjustm
For a long time I’ve wondered why one of the greatest classics was never remade, when even lesser titles were getting reiterations. Paperboy it seemed, to me at least, was overdue a revival, it would benefit well from a full 3D environment. It wasn’t until I read Steven Pool’s ‘Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames’ for a second time that I realised that a remake would face so many problems.Paperboy played on a simple fixed isometric viewpoint and you only had one direction of travel, forw
I’m a man at the prime of his life and in the most important juncture of time in human history, yet my concerns are not with the famine, exploitation and starvation of the third world, but of ten year old videogames and iPod batteries. Bizarrely it’s this apathy that has driven me to write.At the moment I’m more concerned about Ryo Hazuki avenging his father’s death then I ever was when I learnt about the awful Boxing Day Tsunami. Yesterday I even contacted Sega of Japan to find out if Shenmue O
Getting bored of Shenmue after spending 50,000 Yen on capsule toys just to get a glimpse of Dremacasko, and only finding Megdra Brother, Sataro and a thousand binsbein 2, I broke my ‘complete one start one’ rule by popping on DOA: Xtreme Beach Volleyball.The game’s development team, rather famously, featured a single man dedicated to ‘breast dynamics’, and I can only assume another man dedicated to ‘game’. In near an hours worth of play I watched fifteen minutes of FMVs, spent half an hour recei
I know he’ll be in there, how could he not be on a day like this? There is only one door too. I’ll have to walk past him. Same seat almost everyday; he sits there so he can pester people in to chatting with him, as if they liked him. He liked me. If I was lucky he’d be having a piss, or getting a pint. The problem is that he doesn’t get pints or go for pisses; he just sits and pesters people. Bastard. I was almost nervous. It made me feel sick. The cold chill in my fingers gives way to a warm t
Like with any screen media, concept recirculation plays a rather heavy part in the videogames industry, yet on the odd occasion a really truly inspired game slips through the net. A single game can force the future of videogames from a stagnant pool of shit to an exciting evolution. Here is my shortlist of the five games that have been the most important and why.5. Space InvadersTaito’s 1977 game was the first to see fully animated sprites, it caused a shortage of the 100 Yen coin used to play i
Someone once said: ‘Arguing on the Internet is like the Paralympics - even if you win you’re still retarded’. Harsh, I find, but fair. It’s in the very essence of human nature that a bunch of fanatics communicating in complete anonymity will argue. Argue for the sake of argument, because it is their nature to believe that they alone are possessors of all knowledge. You know who you are.So, perhaps calling the Xbox ‘soulless’ was too poetic for the medium of forum? The pedantic took the topic too
So, I've spent the last month, or two... or three, decorating. The pinnacle of all this hard work is the creation of my gamesroom, something which I've never had room for before. Although it's very far from complete yet, especially as there is very little storage and everything is stacked in a big walk-in cupboard, I've already had my first session. Me and a mate threw down some Dreamcast - the big box in the second picture houses over a hundred games - in the form of Shenmue and 18 Wheeler.The
I’ve been visiting and posting at AtariAge for what seems like millennia, in fact it was one of my earliest Internet experience. The Als (not that you see or hear much of Alex these days) were even kind enough to host my short-lived AA-beating website 'Atarinvader.com', at their own personal expense. If you never got the chance to visit the site then you can go back in time via The Web Archive and have a peak.With all my days of forum hopping I’ve become a bit of a gaming curio, I’m not either a
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