A review of Slender:

Are horror games getting more or less horrific?

With the rise of a plethora of big-name horror based games, and game-series; released for the PS2, original X-box, and even the Dreamcast; it looked like horror, and survival horror in particular, was a genre that was here to stay by the 32/64Bit era.

Then something happen.

I'm not entirely sure what, why, or when but the (planning and resource based) Survival-Horror game suddenly seemed to die out.

By the time Resident Evil 4 came out it seemed to popularise the notion of far more action based 'horror' games, and the RE series never returned to it's roots after this, apparently, despite recent proclamations to the contrary. Not that I'm blaming RE4 for this demise, but in the current climate most commercial horror games are taking the RE4 action based route, and not necessary basing their new games around the purer 'horror' aspects that a lot of the older games did.  Some of the independents, on the other hand, seem determined to get right to the beating heart of what makes a horror game. And Slender is one of those games gaining a reputation in the scare stakes...

The games you will never see!

So... you think this post is going to be about unfinished and/or cancelled games...

Well you're wrong!

After accidently discovering an audio-only game called BlindSide on the Desura site I decided to have a rummage around the Internet to see if I could find any more titles like this and discovered the unique, strange, and sometimes apparently quire disconcerting world of Audio Games.

Audio games seem to have their roots in the add-on speech synthesisers that could be used with some old-style text adventure games (or interactive fiction, as they are now known) before a niche market for games aimed at the blind user emerged. With the advances in sound control these games made came an opportunity to appeal to a wider, and more commercially lucrative, audience. The Audio game is fast becoming a recognised subgenus that is now making some important inroads into mainstream gaming platforms.

Google goes OnLive as Sony gets Gaikai!

Welcome to the heavyweight game streaming wars...

Two things happened in the world of on-line game-streaming recently:

1)      Sony bought over Gaikai, currently the only real rival to OnLive.

2)      Google signed a deal to incorporate native OnLive support into Google TV.

At first sight this may not sound like much of a problem, just the integration of this emerging technology into the more established marketplace... Well on first sight maybe, but this has already caused some unease even before any set-top devices utilising these technologies have been released.

Google and OnLive have announced that both the OnLive service and its proprietary controller device will be incorporated into the Google TV service. Support for the controller will be ‘baked in’ to the software, and the streaming service will be available as a Google TV app, regardless of the manufacturer producing the set-top hardware.

This means that set-top boxes like Sony’s NSZ-GS7, which incorporates Google TV, would ‘in theory’ be capable of running the OnLive games streaming system. There was some initial speculation that this would indeed be the case, but then support for OnLive seems to have been quietly pulled.

All your clouds are belong to us!

Have you ever wondered why the Internet has always been represented by a cloud symbol?

Well a cloud is intangible; it doesn’t have any defined shape, and is in constant motion. When viewed from a distance it seems like a tangible entity, but when examined up-close all sense of structure and solidity is lost. Sound familiar?

Simply put, the Internet has always been one large unmappable information-cloud.

Now a staggering amount of personal information is beginning to accumulate, and float around, in this cloud. This information only looks set to increase with the advent and growth of ‘Could Computing’ resources. As the Internet will be offering increasingly interactive, and personalised, remote services

You may not have heard of it but in late 20011 a group of researchers from Ruhr University in Germany released a paper called "All Your Clouds are Belong to us." This caused quite a bit of restlessness within the ‘cloud computing’ fraternity, as the paper revealed basic security vulnerabilities in various cloud platforms  including, but not limited to, some of Amazon's services.

Amazon has since released a statement to say all these issues have been resolved.

Dear Esther: The world's first Interative poem?

A Review Of: 'Dear Esther' by 'The Chinese Room.'

I've heard a lot of rubbish said about 'Dear Esther,' both from the pro and anti lobbies.

So I decided to give my own take on this rather unique peice of entertainment software.

Okay, I didn't call it a game, you probably noticed that, well I'll come back to this latter...

The program was originally released in June 2008 by 'The Chinese Room' as a 'Half Life 2' MOD. Later a much-improved stand-alone version was subsequently provided as a full stand-alone release through Steam in 2012. This is also now available through the

OnLive service.

'Dear Esther' is essentially an interactive story at heart. There are no puzzles to solve and no guns to shoot. In fact there are no protagonists at all, so any weapons would be a mute addition...

The story is told by allowing the 'player' to wander freely through a 3D landskape, where the plot progression is marked by peices of auidio being delivered over the ever changing background music at randome points as the player progresses through the landscape. This audio loosly describes a journey, or back-story; through seemingly disjointed peices of a letter, or the unnamed narrator's reflections.

Should we be keeping the Internet Free and Private?

I’ve been taking a look at some ways to hide your Internet identity lately.

Why you ask? 

What have you been up to? 

Well, nothing really. And that’s the thing most information gathering trolls rely on, people assuming they don’t have anything worth hiding. Because of this most Internet users have no idea just how much information is being built up about them.

You may not care, but you may also be shocked to find out just how much the Internet knows about you and your family.

Most security applications are based on hiding your IP (Internet Protocol) address, the number (or address) that identifies where you are connecting to the internet from, your ‘provider.’ From this the provider (the company you use to access the internet) can then find out who you are by backtracking who this IP number was assigned to.

Now first off all I want to reassure people that all those ‘I know your IP address’ threats you may have gotten from scare-ware sites trying to sell you ‘protection’ or ‘security’ software don’t amount to anything. You can’t be directly attacked by anyone knowing your IP address; if a site didn’t know this the internet couldn’t work...

Iz bin reedin a book about lolCatz & Anonymous /b/

If this title gave you ‘lolz’ you probably already have a good idea of where I’m going with this.
If you haven’t a clue what I’m havering on about... well take a deep breath and prepare to enter the internets underbelly, the err nether-regions that are 4chan and its ilk.

The book is called ‘Epic Win for Anonymous, How 4chan's army conquered the web.’ and it does indeed heavily refer to the lolCats phenomenon, especially in the opening chapters. But its main thrust is in poking around in 4chan and its history, as well as seeing what Anonymous things can be stirred up... Yes, that’s definitely, or defiantly, anonymous with a capital ‘A.’

The book is actually fairly heavy reading in parts. It doesn’t help that it starts of by attempting to explain memes, and Internet memes in particular (very basically, memes are self replicating ‘viral’ ideas), although I can see why the author thought it important to explain this before entering the main focus of the book. This isn't an exposay of the Anonymous group, nor is it the steriotypical rant about 4chan filth, but it isn't trying to suger-coat or defend anything ether. It's a decent propper open-minden and informed look at the culutre and history behind the modern on-line world of 4cahn and Anonymous. It is amed at 'normal' people who may have only ever heard the explotative rants in the press, there is another, different, story to be told and I think this book makes a decent and unbias attempt at telling it.

So what has all this got to do with computer games you ask?

Well not a lot directly, but the book got me thinking about the internet’s influence on games and the current games industry, and it’s sub cultures. There are a lot of hacker types in 4chan... No, I don’t mean what you are probably thinking (although they undoubtedly are also there). Good old-fashioned ‘hackers’ are codies at heart, programmers that do what they do because they like it. And nowadays they are unfortunately becoming dying breed.
Mixed in amongst the legions of angst-ridden teenagers, cam-girls, and general shock-merchants are the uber-savvy indi-programmers and general computer geeks of yester-year and tomorrow.