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Clever creative type roBurky has just put up the significant first chunk of an in-game diary/experiment/story he’s been working on: Alice and Kev. He’s made a father and daughter in the Sims 3 mismatched, homeless and destitute, then tried to manage their sad lives as best he can. He’s updating it pretty rapidly, so subscribe to mainline it through your RSS vein. Naturally it’s funny. But the grim honesty with which the Sims 3 ends up modelling the self-perpetuating consequences of being dispossessed in a dysfunctional family is actually quite affecting. That’s not something you often get in a game diary, and Robin’s quiet observational tone brings it out well.
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 A few things to say about this:
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Thomas "Padre" Lawrence: Man, this stuff is going to be awesome to Audiosurf, especially stuff like "Tumbler" which utterly changes tempo several times through.
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 My guide to surviving a zombie apocalypse over at the PC Gamer blog.
More Left 4 Dead
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Jason L: Annoying and tiresome, actually.
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 Multiwinia pays tribute. | ||
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Jason L: I usually surf graphicsless, so I thought this was going to be a sombre callback to a certain cube in the first game - a holy war over a Temple of Lost Innocence, or something. But that is cute.
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 Chris spotted one of the two remaining unannounced Pyro unlocks in the new Meet The Sniper video. Which is awesome, by the way. For the Demoman’s reaction, the slowly filling jars (also featured on the title card, I notice), and “Yes, yes he did.” You see the gun fire once, but the muzzle flash is unspecific. There’s a better pic of it over at Chris’s. The shape resembles a flare pistol, but then there are plenty of more exotic devices that you’d probably make like a flare pistol if you had to model them in-game. Update! clever people were right, it’s a Flare Gun! Full unlockable details and the shocking truth about the big Pyro change blogged over at PC Gamer, plus a few tidbits from Robin Walker on how it’ll all work. I rudely interrupted his game of Defense of the Ancients before breakfast this morning, intending just to say “This sounds ace!” but ended up asking a lot of annoying questions. | ||
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Pentadact: One on one, at close range, he's definitely got a lot of control. I'm talking about the more common situation of being up against a huge concentration of enemy players at medium-long range, any one of whom can dodge your rockets and most of whom can survive a direct hit. The fire output of a bunch of guys is enough that you can't afford to wait around and plant a shot where your last victim will land, and at reasonable range it wouldn't reach him in time to ensure a hit anyway.
These are the situations where a lot of Soldiers think they should charge forward to start getting some actual kills, but my experience suggests it's more effective to be content with scoring occasional, partial damage on a few people to build up your crit chance, which is when you start really causing carnage in the awkward, dangerous, sub-optimal situations you spend most of the game in. | ||||
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 No-one seems to have noticed except Eurogamer, who failed to link it, but Sporepedia is already publicly accessible. This is the online field guide to all the creatures people have created with Spore, and the source from which the game will eventually populate the planets you play in with AI-controlled versions of the races people have made. Right now it’s mostly Maxis folks and a few journos creating, and I think we can conclusively say Maxis are better at it. If you stumble on a Horncrested Bristlefrog up there, though, that’s my first proper stab. The incredible thing about Sporepedia is that those thumbnail images you see are the creature files. Drag that image right from your browser to the game window, and it loads that creature in all its scampering glory. The creature’s DNA is actually coded into the metadata of a 25 kilobyte PNG image. It takes a long, long time to get the test-the-limits urge out of your system – which is probably why they’re releasing the editor so far ahead of the game. Because you don’t really appreciate how exciting a prospect Spore is until you get past the “Can I break it?” phase (yes, oh God yes) and create something you truly love. The more personal a protagonist is to you the greater your invest in its plight, and it doesn’t get much more personal than a species you’ve hand-built from clay and vertebrae. Next: Best creations, My creations.
More Spore
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muffin: Ok when the first talk from Will Wright came out along with him showing the audience the game...it looked amazing!!
However when i bought the game they had changed soo many things...n its worse now! In the creature stage there is no real hierachy of the food chain...i found myself just annihalating everything in my path! which got a bit boring after a while.... The amoeba stage is too short..and there are not enough parts to unlock! The space stage gets very annoying after a while as i spent ages flying to a distant area...then sudenly a virus breaks out on my home planet and i have to fly all the way back just to kill 6 creatures!!!! WTF it just became a bit boring after a while and unexciting... However it was a good attempt at a fun, interesting, and chalenging game by Will Wright. You have to start somewhere?? | ||||
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If you don’t habitually read six thousand words of comments after a scrollbar-breakingly long post, you may have missed that Cloak Raider’s put together an awesome comic strip of my suggestions for the Engineer unlockables, using Garry’s Mod. The portable Sentry in particular is winsome to the max: I picture the Engy pushing it round like a trolley. The wheels are even little Team Fortress 2 logos, although that might just be coincidence. Click through for the full thing:  Looks like Valve had a chance to get started on my list while I was away. Nice work so far, guys, but in future I’d appreciate it if you’d run any name-changes by me first.
More Team Fortress 2
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ImperialCreed: Well done Cloak :)
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When game designers roll out their boilerplate ‘I’m so tired of samey action games’ rant, the ‘cool ideas I don’t have the guts to make’ list they include with it is supposed to be full of interesting game designs that would never get made because they’d be commercial disasters. Your ideas wouldn’t get made because they wouldn’t be fun. You didn’t think them through. | ||
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TomP: Yes but an you "intercept [a] kid as he creeps back from the bathroom" ? Surely that would be great fun.
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The Team Fortress 2 Experience
Murder Inc.
A Stab At Meet The Spy
Tim Edwards
Craig Pearson
Graham Smith
Rich McCormick
Richard Cobbett
Chris Livingston
Jon Blyth
Also Tom: I'm suprised there hasn't been some kind of PCG Sim-cast after the success of the Spore one - surely PCG readers would love to share their creations with each other? (Although again, can't physically check how that would be possible, if it is.)