The Roundup is back for another hit of my writings from the past two weeks, and making a welcome return some links to interesting pieces written by other people.
Hit the jump to see what I have in store this week.
I must say I am quite enjoying doing these Roundups, they let me see what work I have done over the past couple of weeks and think ‘ah, I am able to do some productive shit!’
As I mentioned the other day, the main piece to share is my gues post on RPS called China and the Future of Gaming. Heavily inspired by my dissertation, this is a look at the role that gaming plays in China at the moment and what censorship there is on games. Pretty interesting piece for anyone who cares about the industry side of things. Read the comments for debate over usage of Wikipedia!
Over at Gaming Daily I look at The Opening Levels of a Game which pretty much was a chance for me to talk a bit about the awful opening to Drakensang.
Done quite a lot on The Reticule in the past two weeks, more than I thought I had actually! First off I looked at the Experimental Gameplay Project and the first batch of games to come from it here. Expect me to do more like that when the next set of games are released.
I reposted an interview originally done here with Javier Maldonado about Masq. After that I got in touch with Javier again and have learnt some interesting things about the future of Masq, hopefully I can reveal all soon!
An early build of Majesty 2 was played and written about. The game seems interesting, especially for its take on controlling your heroes.
Finally I looked at games on Facebook and I went back to the Omaha landing level from Medal of Honour Allied Assault and wrote about it.
A busy couple of weeks there I must say. Now to get back to watch le Tour de France!
In a change to the usual schedule I bring word of my first article to be published on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. The piece is called China And The Future Of Gaming and is an extension of my dissertation with a focus on games in the most populous country in the world.
This is part of a series of guest articles to appear on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Lewis Denby wrote about Galatea and Phill Cameron should see something published sometime this week.
The Roundup will still be coming this Friday, don’t worry about that!
By the time you read this I will be heading off to my graduation ceremony, the joys of scheduling posts in advance! It has been a busy couple of weeks, I have been working on a secret project so there hasn’t been much time for other writing.
I did my usual column over on Gaming Daily, this time I looked at Evil in Games which led to some interesting debate. I am currently working on a piece looking at the new games from the Experimental Gameplay Project which will be published soon enough on The Reticule.
In other news The_B has joined the staff at The Reticule (and Gaming Daily incidentally) and I must say it is good to have Ben working with us. He is a great writer and has already written some good stuff.
Expect more stuff in the next Roundup.
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: