jerakeen.org

created 31 July 2009 in notes tagged games, mac and warhammer.

Warhammer Online has a Mac client, finally. Except that, rather than an actual native effort, it’s a shitty Transgaming wrapper.

I downloaded it, clicked ‘create account’, and it crashed.

I left the downloader, once persuaded to work, overnight to get everything. 20 mins after I leave it, as far as I can tell, it hung solid again. So I’m still no closer to finishing this 15 gigs of download, and meanwhile the 10 day trial account I had to sign up to to even start downloading is ticking away. I’ll be lucky if I even see the inside of the game at this rate.

I had roughly the same experience when trying both City of Heroes and Eve Online - both also shitty Transgaming ‘ports’. Random crashes, graphical glitches, the latest prettiness tends to not be supported, and they’re a lot slower than the comparable Windows versions.

It seems to me that Transgaming have done more to hurt the Mac gaming world than anyone else. The idea that you can turn your product into a Mac game OVERNIGHT, without employing ANYONE WHO SEEMS TO CARE ABOUT THE PLATFORM is an absurd thing to peddle.

World of Warcraft runs on the Mac well because every Blizzard game since the dawn of time has run on both Windows and the Mac, off the same install disk. I’m convinced that a significant chunk of the WoW user base are there for the same reason I am - there are no decent alternative (mainstream) MMO for the platform. Until recently, there were just none. Now there is WoW and three shitty Transgaming ports. I assume they won’t get lots of Mac users, because their Mac clients all SUCK. Which is self-reinforcing. Why bother putting effort into such a niche platform?

created 05 June 2009 in notes tagged games, iphone and peggle.

I like Peggle for the iPhone. A lot of it is that it’s a fun game. But it’s also a genuinely nice iPhone port of the thing. It’s a landscape game, but works both ways round, and flips sides properly. It has background music, but if you’re playing music off the phone already then it’ll start up with only sound effects, without asking you anything. It uses touch very nicely, as a direct ‘aim here’ interaction (backed up with a fine-tuning control) but double tapping anywhere will zoom in on that spot as you’d expect on the iPhone. And it flawlessly resumes from exactly where I last left it every time I start it up, so I’m not worried about leaving a half-finished game when the train gets to my stop.

Also, unicorns!

http://www.popcap.com/games/iphone/peggle

created 12 May 2009 in links tagged deveopment, games and iphone.

GeekGameBoard is a small Objective-C framework for implementing the user interface of a board or card game. Many games can be implemented in less than 150 lines of code. For my future reference - this blog entry is 12 months old, presumably the iPhone version of this might be finished now.

http://mooseyard.com/Jens/2008/03/geekgameboard-getting-c...

created 09 January 2009 in links tagged fullthrottle and games.

Not really sure if I like this, because it’s awesome, or hate it, because it really makes obvious how little game there was in Full Throttle, that most perfect of Interactive Movies.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/01/07/full-throttle-...

created 05 January 2009 in notes tagged ds, games and ninjagaiden.

While passing through an airport recently I bought myself a new Nintendo DS Lite, and Ninja Gaiden - Dragon Sword. I’m not going to bother reviewing it - I’m bad at that. But I loved it, in large part because I enjoyed playing the Xbox version ages ago (it was hard) and it plays very similarly.

The whole thing controls with the stylus (and holding any button, which blocks) and it all feels so fluid. It retains the feeling I remember from the xbox, which was that you were always moving somewhere, hitting things, but it never really felt that things weren’t under control. I’m impressed that somehow the two games play so similarly, given that the control scheme is so vastly different. All the same things worked - Flying Swallow still works well on certain sorts of enemies, others need proper block/attack synchronisation, collecting essence still works the same, you still have an annoying motivation to find a good group of respawning enemies next to a save point and farm them for money till you can buy all the upgrades… And the camera is a pain, though much less of one than in the Xbox version. It’s a fixed viewpoint, and pans, which works well except when you’re far enough away that it’s hard to judge depth and you’re flailing away at things you can’t hit.

It’s a lot easier and smaller than the first one. It’s still linear, but has a hub-and-spoke level design, a central area from which you open progressively more portals. I preferred the Xbox game, which had a long linear-ish progression that looped back on itself, bringing you back to old areas sometimes, but never in a way that made you feel that they were hubs. Well, maybe once. Being given a list of ‘here are the portals that you’ll be able to open, you’ve opened these, this one is next’ feels like a cheap way of indicating progress through the game. Maybe people like this sort of thing. But the Xbox version felt better as a story telling vehicle.

Anyway, I liked it.

created 15 December 2008 in links tagged games, iphone, junk and katamari.

This, on the other hand is junk. Sluggish right off the bat from the beginning of the first level, and gets worse as the Katamari gets bigger. The controls are weird as well - unlike Super Monkey Ball where the tilting actually affects gravity, here tilting left/right turns left and right. Slowly.

Again, a gratuitous DS comparison - just about everything on the DS that tries to do ‘real’ 3D stinks. The screen is too small and the controls too limited for it. The iPhone gets away with more, but I still much prefer a well-executed bit of 2D to this ‘depth’ thing everyone is doing.

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSof...

created 15 December 2008 in links tagged free, games, iphone, rez and touch.

It’s a tech demo in terms of length and content. But this tiny thing is a beautifully execyuted side-scrolling shooter, and certainly the closest thing to Rez I’ve seen on the iPhone so far. It’s also a really nice use of the touch screen - sweep a finger over the enemies to target, release to fire - whereas most apps I see are tending to treat the touch as merely a way of faking traditional controls. No! Look at Zelda on the DS for how touch should work. It’s also free. Go play it.

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSof...

created 27 August 2008 in links tagged dungeonsiege, games and programming.

Fascinating stuff about the techniques Dungeon Siege uses to power its continuous world. Includes scary threading, performance hacks, etc. via some other tab that’s long since been eaten by the ravages of time and system crashes (thank goodness for what little session saving Safari does) but I think I might have been tomc. (blech tells me it’s via Migurski’s uxweek notes )

http://www.drizzle.com/~scottb/gdc/continuous-world.htm

created 28 March 2008 in links tagged application, browser, games, iphone and mmorpg.

aaah, excellent. A browser-based internet mmorpg that I can play from the iphone. Been looking for something else to have my life sucked into.

http://www.kingdomgame.net/

created 22 February 2006 in links tagged casual, games and warcraft.

http://www.brokentoys.org/2006/01/30/casual-friday/

created 13 February 2006 in links tagged games, mmorpg and philosophy.

http://www.mxac.com.au/drt/FracturedReality.htm