Electro-Mechanical Magic.

Lets take a look at some pre-electronic arcade games.  

 

 

 What was in the arcades before the advent of video games?
 If you said one-armed-bandits and slot machines you are half right. Because mechanical based arcade games machines shared the floor with the more long-lived pin-ball machines and bandits from far before even I was born.

These arcade games machines were all initially very much mechanical based.

 

I’ve read first-hand accounts from the people responsible for building these machines and it appears that, towards the end of their run at least, the building process became more of a suck-it-and-see ‘black art’ than a precise science. Many of the people responsible for fixing these electromechanical marvels would freely admit to ‘not know exactly how or why they worked in the way they did half the time.’ The ‘science’ of these machines had evolved into an ‘art’ in much the same way early bedroom-coders would later forge the beginnings of the multibillion dollar/pound video-game industry.

 

One of the most collectable of these is the ‘World Series’ game released by Rockola in 1937.

This was pretty much a mechanical device, but did have some minimal electricity-run components, so technically this was an early electro-mechanical gaming device.

A Review of AMY (PS3 & Xbox 360)

I’ve decided to have a look at those quirkier or somewhat left-of-centre games that got panned in the general press and internet review sites. First of all I intentionally picked a few games that I had never heard off, which consistently got low reviews from the main media sources, and then I did some internet research, before playing them with an open mind whilst remembering the on-line and in-print comments. I intended to see if I thought all these games are genuinely awful, or if there is possibly something more to the general review trends? After all there’s truth to the old axiom ‘know your audience.’ Me, well I’ve absolutely no idea who reads this stuff: So this one’s for you Anon...

Panned Games - Review 1: AMY

The first game on my list was AMY by VectorCell. This is a first person horror-survival game, where you take control of, Lana. A character who, as well as trying to survive in an epidemic ridden world, also has to take care of Amy, a young girl who appears to have some undisclosed form of autistic communicative difficulties. 


The back-story revolves around your attempts to escape the city with Amy in tow.

The game-play is primarily puzzle based, with the Amy ‘companion character’ having three main functions. The first being that you must keep Amy safe; this is done ether by keeping her close (calling for her and holding her hand) or by hiding her. The second function of Amy is to aide in puzzle solving. This can range for something as simple as getting her to crawl through a space where the main character couldn’t fit and press a button to activate some mechanism or open a door etc, to more complicated puzzles where you must place her in certain positions in order to perform some action(s). Then move her around with a combination of instructions; getting her to move and perform a series of simple commands that help accomplish a task; always bearing in mind that she is more vulnerable when away from your direct control.

The third, and most intriguing, function of Amy is to protect your protagonist from the infection. When separated from Amy the main character will slowly become infected, leading to your eventual death if you can’t find Amy in time and don’t have any serum handy.

The best indie games on PSN and Xbox Live

Indie, or Independent, game releases have been gaining momentum and notoriety on the PC for some time now. And over the past few years they have turned into a legitimate force on the two main console platforms as well...

The main problem with Indi games has generally been deciding exactly what an Indie game is. Some people seem to forget that ‘Indi’ simply stands for ‘independent’ and generally try to define the games by their game-play or genre, normally calling anything that’s outside the mainstream gaming gamut and ‘Indie’ game. This never really works though, because there’s nothing to stop an Independent developer making a game which is firmly within the mainstream game style, and some of the major developers have released the odd quirky game over the years..

The grey-area comes in trying to define exactly what an Independent publisher really is, and isn’t. Although, I think it’s faire to define a few (but still rather fluffy) rules...

They are not financially backed by a publisher.

They are generally promoted by small or start-up companies.

They tend to be produced by individuals or groups, who may form small companies.

They generally rely heavily on on-line ‘digital-distribution’ markets.

They tend to have much less (or no) resources and budget than mainstream games.

They are not limited to an allocated budget or development schedule and time-frame.

Development is not generally steered by any controlling (corporate) interests.

They do not require publisher approval: many self-publish.

They often rely on the artistic ability, creativity, imagination, and experimentation

 of an individual or very small team.

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.