Game Design & Dev

At E3 2011, as part of the Electronic Arts press conference, Insomniac Games announced Overstrike—a campy, over-the-top cooperative shooter. Around a year later, the game had received a facelift and a new name: Fuse. I spoke to Insomniac Games' CEO Ted Price about rebranding, multi-platform development, and what it is like to launch a brand-new franchise at the end of a console cycle.

BioShock Infinite is a violent game, and it has to be. That's a contrast to BioShock, an equally violent game where combat conveyed nothing about its main character and had little to do with the game's themes other than spurring the player to engage in its various economies. Any stimulus—using plasmids to solve environmental puzzles, for instance—would have sufficed. That's not so in Columbia. Violence is essential to who Booker DeWitt is, and what Columbia is. Their story cannot be told without it.

You might not have heard of a new game outfit called Modern Dream yet, but you will. They've recently released a slick 2D runner called The Button Affair, and are already starting a new project inspired by the works of acclaimed abstract painter, Wassily Kandinsky. I spent a short while chatting with Oliver Clarke, one of the members of Modern Dream, and this is what he had to say about buttons, affairs, and what it's like to start making your own games.

Extra Credits looks at employing scale (i.e. more enemies) and tone to break up gameplay and maintain a player's interest level. Extra Credits' example of a game that got this right was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare—who knew that Call of Duty could be the game to actually teach us something?

Let's get the hyperbole out of the way first. Not having a Madden game in 2013 will not kill the Wii U. It's instinctive to think that a lack of EA presence on the platform could be akin to a kiss of death, similar to what we saw with EA spurning SEGA and the Dreamcast. This is a different animal, I think.

One of the things I found most striking about BioShock Infinite is how sloppy it was. The ending, as I already discussed, is a self-contradicting mess held together only by sharply-timed revelations and plonky piano music. The quantum morass of its final moments is only one of the game's problems, though.

Above the spectacle of PAX East's show floor, in the lobby of the convention center, gaming charity AbleGamers set up their own mini pachinko parlor. With its vertically-mounted machines, loud noises and flashing lights, the Japanese devices were quite a spectacle. Curious to learn more about the sort of group that would bring them to PAX, I managed to grab Craig Kaufman, a member of the AbleGamers team, to learn more about what the charity does and how he got involved.

Intrinsic vs Extrinsic rewards. In this episode, Extra Credits tries to explain what keeps you playing through the tedious parts of games.

When Nintendo started rolling out its Direct events during E3 last year, I wondered then if this would be Nintendo's new direction. Then we got a Nintendo Direct event after E3 which announced many of the games that we would have seen at E3 in past years. It seemed to me that E3 was no longer as much of a priority for Nintendo as it once was, and I firmly believe that this latest move reinforces that line of thinking.

One of the problems with stories that use the concept of multiple universes is that the word "multiple" doesn't even begin to describe the scale of existence. Consider, for instance, the universes in which I just reached through the internet and handed you a cookie (hope you like pistachio sandies!). Now, in the context of known physical laws, this is an extremely unlikely event, so much so that if you were to try to write out the probability by putting down a 1 and writing zeroes in front of it, you could go the whole lifetime of our universe without ever reaching the decimal point.