Xemu's Long-Winded Game Industry Ramblings

This is old news to lots of people, I'm sure, but this little Flash Tower Defense game is surprisingly addictive (link). I love the way simple automata can generate as lot of fairly complex gameplay. Someday when I'm not working on huge high-budget AAA games I'd love to just crank through a ton of little games like this, it's such a different experience. It strangely reminds me of Dwarf Fortress and Majesty, two of my absolute favorite "watch the automata" games...

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Anna Karenina

by Xemu on Wed 06 Jun 2007 12:10 AM CDT

On who will win the console wars... between the PS3 and the Xbox 360, it's all about who can race to $249 the fastest. Neither console will achieve PS2 numbers until it achieves PS2 prices. Economics dominate the situation, IMO.

Other factors are important -- but it's the Anna Karenina principle: each console can fail in its own unique way, but to succeed they have to all achieve some common things. To me that is price, library, power, and positioning. All the console generation winners had all 4 of these things on their side.

Wii is off to a good start on price, has fantastic positioning, but has a long way to go on library (3rd party support) and ultimately can never work around the power deficit.

PS3 is reasonable on power (though not a clear leader), has fantastic positioning. But the library is a disaster and the price even more so.

360 has the library wars won hands down IMO, their positioning is not bad if not quite as good as the Wii. But price is still a serious issue, and they don't have a clear power advantage over PS3 (it's pretty much a tie).

So the question is who can alleviate their weakness the easiest? I just don't see how Sony can deal with their price and library issues faster than the 360 can deal with their price issue. The Wii can ultimately never solve their power or library issues adequately, IMO, though I think they can gloss over them effectively enough to pull out a very solid #2 in this generation.

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Monday, June 4

Killed By Leeroy Jenkins

by Xemu on Mon 04 Jun 2007 11:03 PM CDT

I stayed late this evening after work to play some more World of Warcraft -- the Trading Card Game. While the bug for it hasn't bitten me quite as bad as Magic Online has, it has most definitely claimed a number of other people around Ensemble. A few folks are prepping decks for the WoW-TCG regionals tournament coming up in a month or two, so I was playing tournament decks against their creations to see how they fared. Good times.

The synergy between the card game and the MMO is fascinating to me. Clearly if this were just "Generic Fantasy Card Game" I wouldn't be nearly as hooked, even if the game design itself were the same (and it is quite good, second only to Magic in my opinion). But it isn't as if the characters or mechanics in the game really map all that closely to the World of Warcraft online game, either. What they manage well is the aesthetics, the Warcraft "vibe". Class names, game concepts, the set themes and settings, all evoke the essence of the game, which is a very impressive feat. There are in-jokes all throughout the cardgame (I was finished off by Leeroy Jenkins several times over the evening).

Mostly I think I'm just glad they don't have an online version of TCG. It is only the annoyances of an actual paper format that keep me from getting as addicited to this as I am to Magic Online, I fear...

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Friday, June 1

Multi-tasking

by Xemu on Fri 01 Jun 2007 12:33 AM CDT

I'm doing a lot of business travel this summer, so I broke down and got a laptop so that I can do a bit of bona fide PC gaming on the road. It's a sweet Dell XPS M1210... light enough to easily travel but with enough horsepower to actually play some reasonable games like Civ 4, World of Warcraft, etc. In fact, I'm posting this blog entry on it right now! Maybe I'll even try a little moblogging or liveblogging at the next conference I go to (Austin GDC).

Of course, right I'm using it for pure multi-tasking -- tapping away at the keyboard while waiting around for matchmaking in Shadowrun. I'm pretty compulsive about always doing something, so this is feeding right into my neurosis just fine.

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