Balthazar Auger

Unlike movies, game credits are often hard to find, or overlooked. Since most players don’t finish their games, developers try to place them in menus or make them interactive to have the players at least glance at them for a second.

In Raving Rabbids: Travel in Time, they’re hidden in a subscreen of one of the game’s “bonus images” menus. You’d have to know they’re there to find them!

Since I happen to have programmed the rolling credits, I saved the source text file for this occasion.

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Likeliness for a media backlash and general racial and religious controversy around this game: 100%

Likeliness that many people won’t get past the first level of interpretation when playing: 100%

Actually, this looks only like cheap provocation, whereas September 12th was a little more nuanced in its delivery of the same message. Its just too easy to interpret this game the wrong way…

Update: The story ended up pulled from IndieGames.com, after generating a storm of negative comments and racist flames. I think it managed to stay up for, what… two, three hours? I guess my 100%s weren’t that off.

Anyways, you can still follow the controversy over at the Something Awful forums.

A recent article by Soren Johnson states:

However, a more important (and actually true) first is less often mentioned – CivRev is the first Civ since the original to be designed and programmed directly by Sid. Every line of game and AI code (and probably quite a bit more) inside the game was written by Sid himself, for all three versions: 360, PS3, and DS.

I believe it’s great that just one man (even if it’s “just” Sid Meier) is able to program the game for three platforms at once. It is almost as if he acted like a modder of his own game.

Also, if you take in consideration the date CivRev was announced, now that we know only one person programmed the gameplay for two radically different platforms (more like two actually, seeing how the PS3 and Xbox are pretty much oversized computers), man, was that fast development or what!

Really, I would love seeing more of this: spend less time creating assets and more time creating gameplay! Please?

via: DESIGNER NOTES » Blog Archive » Sid’s Revolution

Over at Gamasutra:

Take-Two subsidiary 2K Games announced today that developer Firaxis is currently working on Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Colonization for PC, set to be released this fall. A “complete reimagining” of the original Colonization, it again puts the player in the role of one of four European powers seeking to establish colonial dominance over the New World. (more…)

Yesterday was the final presentation of our prototypes before a panel of industry figures, including Jordan Mechner and Benoît Sokal.

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I’ve just heard that Gary Gygax, co-creator of the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game, has passed away.

That man was virtually responsible for the gaming (video and other) industry’s place in the world as of now.

I feel… strange.

Insult Swordfighting: Books that should be made into games

I stumbled upon this through Kotaku‘s Maggie Greene. The author, Mitch Krpata kicks things off:

So many games are based on movies and TV shows. Why not games based on books? There are centuries of fantastic literature to draw from, and in most cases the source material is in the public domain — no need for onerous licensing fees.

Brilliant!

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This Gamasutra piece is a very “rare” (heh, get it?) proof that good sense still can be found amongst developers.

In a nutshell, this Rare developer talks about how his company finally realised that good elements can be found everywhere, and that it is better to talk and show respect to students (a.k.a. potential employees) than trying to impress them with how cool you are.

Really, you should read the article, if you haven’t already… The only thing that still ticks me off is that they only talk about programmers or artists, but say nothing about designers… Why do you think is that? Double standards?

Gamasutra – Video Games: Officially Art, In Europe

France has always had an ambition: to be seen in all walks of culture as a leader, a trend-setter, as “unique”, opposed to the “mass” culture. This can be experienced when going to see a movie or attending a concert: at some point you realize that what you’re experiencing is undeniably, irrevocably french. Of course, “french” is not a synonym for “good”, far from that…

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Pippa told me that SAGE were offering all of their papers for free until November 30th.

They cover a lot of subjects, but the journal that interested me the most is Games and Culture, a fairly new but already very complete publication.

To download, you need to have an account (those are free too) and a lot of time… I’m devoting this lovely and cold saturday to it.