Welcome to the second Roundup here on evo-gamer.com, I hope that people who read this find it useful to keep track of what I am writing and any other interesting bits and pieces I spot along the way.
Hit the jump and see what there is this week.
The Roundup is a new feature I am planning to put up quite regularly, say once a week or once a fortnight. It will be a collection of links to pieces of writing I have done that I want to highlight, and maybe a bit of blurb about what I have been up to. I may also throw some links of other interesting things in. Lets do this thing!
First order of business, I got a 2:1 in my BA (Hons) Modern History and Politics degree. Hell yeah! In other news I have recently started doing some writing on Resolution and I will soon be writing semi-regularly on GamingDaily
Oh and as I haven’t actually mentioned it here before, I am currently spending most of my writing time on The Reticule which I am involved on with Greg Wild, Steve Peacock, Phill Cameron and Mattias Tammet, or more commonly StalinsGhost, SteveTheBlack, The Poisoned Sponge and Mythrilfan.
After the EU election results last night saw the BNP get two MEPs elected there was some Twitter chat, at one point Jim Rossignol said Perhaps the reason there isn’t a liberal, technology and media savvy party to vote for, is because no techno-liberals ever go into politics.
If you hit the jump you will find a ‘manifesto’ for what I think a techno-liberal party would stand for. Note this isn’t a real manifesto in any way, shape or form.
It was brought to my attention by Twitter that the micro-blogging app has been blocked in China. Mashable reports that Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail.com and many other sites have been blocked ahead of the 20th Anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre on June 4th.
This is nothing new, in researching my dissertation into Chinese Internet Censorship a trend emerged where the state authorities started clamping down on peoples’ freedom to use the internet at times of political tension. Twitter has become a very useful tool for people to express their opinions, and it is only in the past 12 months that it has reached the popularity it has now.
Blocking Twitter and Flickr shows how serious the Chinese authorities are when it comes to preventing the spread of information which undermines the credibility of the government. I have long held the belief that the internet is a home for freedom of expression and in the case of China, I feel that the internet has a large part to play in shaping the future of the country. I won’t say that simply because of the internet we will see democracy in the country, but I do feel it is important in enabling Chinese people to share things with others.
As an aside my dissertation is well and truly complete, and so is uni! Results are but a week and a bit away, can’t wait to see what grade my dissertation got!
Who would have thought that such a simple twist on tower defence games would produce such as marvellous game as Plants vs Zombies. Whilst some of PopCap’s recent efforts may have been a bit lacking in originality (I’m looking at you Peggle Nights!) Plants vs Zombies shows that the casual game developer has a lot of great ideas still hidden away.
As the name suggests there is a battle raging as the Plants have to stand up tall in the face of the barbaric Zombie invasion. The battlefield, your very own back garden at first and later the roof of your lovely homestead. If just one Zombie breaks through your defences then it is game over, your humble Plants failed to hold out.
One of the two guys behind this mod posted about it on the Half-Life 2.net forums, it looks pretty interesting and well developed for five months of work. Kingdoms Collide is a fantasy themed total conversion mod for Half-Life 2. In the own words of one of the developers of this mod in their post on the forums:
The idea of the game is to have really fun and balanced online multilayer combat with a very high potential range of skill and is all found within a beautiful fantasy setting, the character using a third person camera (so the melee aspect makes sense, unlike FPS camera melee games where people run around like headless chickens unable to see their suroundings). Also, like most typical fantasy RPGs we wanted to have a good level of character customisation in choosing a unqiue weapon and skill set that suites you – as well as making each player able to have unique role within their team enabling incredible depth to teamwork, tactics and strategy!
Video of an early alpha below:
I remember playing some jigsaw puzzles as a kid, often when on holiday to some wet part of the UK. You would spend hours trying to find the last dozen or so pieces you need to finish the puzzle before you give up the hunt knowing it is a waste of time. Thankfully for all you puzzlers a solution is at hand with Gaia 3D Puzzle. It is pretty much a jigsaw puzzle game that you can play on your PC, what is great is that you can use any picture on your hard drive as the picture for the puzzle.
I decided to use a screenshot from World of Goo, upon selecting which picture I wanted I was able to chose what size I wanted the puzzle to be. You can have anything from 12 pieces to 1938, imagine that, nearly 2000 puzzle pieces, and you will never lose one of them. Brilliance. Other options before you start playing allow you to change what shape the pieces are and whether you can rotate them, this all makes for a nice challenging game if you so wish.
Of course, once you start playing it is all very easy, simply click and drag the puzzle pieces into the place you think they should go. Once you match two pieces together a very satisfying ‘thunk’ sounds off and the pieces are nice and secure. While some might say that the charm in jigsaw puzzles lies in trying to force two pieces together, this is much simpler and less stressful, I would take this option any day.
I must make a brief mention of the fantastic camera, while it won’t be truly useful when trying to complete the puzzle you can zoom in and tilt the camera to get some great shots of the puzzle as you put it together. You also get some nice light reflection at different angles, it really makes for some nice images.
This game is not going to appeal to everyone, but it is great fun taking apart and putting back together some of those amazing screenshots you will take of games, and it will be very good when you have a nice photo which you just want to make into a jigsaw. I am not sure if $20 is the best price for this, but it will be money well spent for some people. A good game overall.
If you have you ever wondered what the beginnings of World of Goo were like then fret no more, 2D Boy have taken the time to show off what the early stages of development were like. In this first part of their childhood snapshots of the development process you can see what the game was like in August 2006 after a week of development. Really interesting stuff, you can even download a verision of the game at that stage of development if you so wish.
There was some big news recently in the Battlefield series when it was revealed that two new games in the series were coming to the PC in addition to the previously announced Battlefield Heroes.
However, many people were in uproar over the fact that no mention was made of a Battlefield 3, a true successor to Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield 2. Hope may be at hand though, in the latest issue of PC Gamer UK Patrick Liu (producer at DICE) was asked if Battlefield 3 was in the works. His response:
Ben Cousins, he did say we were working on five Battlefield titles. You do the math.
If that isn’t giving it away, I don’t know what is!
Update: After getting in touch with DICE for a comment I was simply directed to Battlefield.com and DICE.se for information on any upcoming projects. Needless to say neither site contains any information about this.
The_B has slaved away for hours to create the following video where he looks at the recently announced Scout Update for Team Fortress 2.
Warning: this video contains explo-cans