Games

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a big fan of tower defence games. Field Runners is a particular favourite, though the iPad version of that has been badly broken since an update before Christmas.

The Creeps! HD, Super Squawk Software, £2.39

The Creeps has long been a favourite of mine on the iPhone and late last year the developer, Super Squawk Software, put out an iPad version. It’s a fun take on the genre that requires you to stop the creeps which are coming out of the cupboard and trying to get under a child’s bed. There are lots of quirky graphics and the gameplay is challenging but… Read More

World of Warcraft encourages screen breaks - but other games don't

Games are the world’s biggest and fastest growing form of entertainment. From 59p iPhone games to £60 console epics, they rake in billions a year, and the biggest launches such as Call of Duty: Black Ops – $360 million in a single day – easily rival Hollywood’s best. Only in a game can you fly across the universe, build your own world, become Indiana Jones, or fight on the beaches of Normandy.

At their best, games are fantastically engaging and fun, and thanks to the internet, they’re also highly social – I’ve made good friends through games that… Read More

This Christmas, instead of gathering around a board game after lunch or flopping on the sofa to watch The Great Escape, many families will be powering-up the video games console – at least, they will if Microsoft has its way.

Kinect, launched in the UK yesterday, makes it possible to play games on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 without using a controller. Instead, a camera tracks the player’s movements, allowing them to control the action with their body, using gestures and voice control. It takes the Xbox one step further than its rivals. The Nintendo Wii has had motion controller since it launched in 2006 and Sony released its own motion control system – PlayStation Move… Read More

If you’ve missed all the talk of 3D TV this year then you must have been living in a cave somewhere. The hype is set to move into a higher gear over the next few weeks as the launch of Sky’s 3D channel approaches. The channel has already been showing sport fixtures in 3D in pubs across the country but this will bring a wider range of programming into people’s homes.

There are games too. Sony PlayStation 3 owners can already get a 3D starter pack from the PlayStation Store and there are several 3D games in the pipeline – most excitingly, Gran Turismo 5 and Killzone 3 (above).

In a way, games are a more… Read More

How do you make a racing game? Hire a team of designers and coders, make a virtual world and send imaginary cars speeding through it? No. Much better to get busy with cardboard, a remote control car and on old arcade machine to make a new kind of thing: a mix of video game and the real world.

Malte Jemlich of sputnic.tv, a group of German designers for film and television, have done just that and built Racer 0.2, an analogue version… Read More

It’s become something of a truism that when you’re playing a video game online and getting thrashed you are almost certainly getting beaten by a teenage boy. They are, after all, very into games and they have plenty of time on their hands in which to practice.

Women are more likely to play casual games, such as Farmville

However, the stereotype might not be true, at least according to research from ComScore. In terms of minutes spent playing games online, the heaviest users are women aged over 55. They spend more of their time gaming than any other age group, male or female.

Now, of course, they probably aren’t playing the same… Read More

This is very exciting news. Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio behind Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle and My Neighbour Totoro, is reported to be venturing into video games:

“Ghibli’s “Ninokuni,” a joint project with game developer Level-5 of Professor Layton fame, debuts on the Nintendo DS handheld console in December and on Sony’s PlayStation 3 machine next year. Industry insiders predict a smash-hit in Japan, where Ghibli’s “Spirited Away” still reigns as the country’s biggest grossing film of all time. The film won an American Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2002.”

If the films are anything to go by, expect lush visuals and weird, weird stories.

Deus Ex was released almost 10 years ago but it remains one of my favourite video games. I haven’t played anything else that conveyed the sense of being genuinely open-ended while also offering an addictive thriller plot that piled one crazy conspiracy theory on top of another.

Tom Francis, of PC Gamer, has written an excellent article explaining some of the things that made Deus Ex so good:

“That’s the last wonderful thing about Deus Ex, something that makes playing it feel like a process of discovery nine years and twenty play-throughs later. It doesn’t just let you take liberties, it expects you to. There’s no reason to kill the man you’re sent to interrogate, but you can, and so there’… Read More

If you haven’t played Portal now is your chance. The multi-award-winning video game is free for PC and Mac users until May 24 as part of a promotion for download service Steam.

Portal is a bewildering and original game from the makers of the Half-Life series, Valve, who also happen to run Steam. Armed with a portal gun and advised by a computer, GLaDOS, the player has to negotiate a series of test chambers. The portal gun can fire a portal entrance into a surface in one part of the chamber and a portal exit into another part of the chamber. Walking through one will transport the player to the other.

The result is a mind-bending puzzle game that’… Read More

Back to Wolfire Games, the software company, I mentioned last week. Here’s their advice for tackling piracy:

“When considering any kind of DRM, we have to ask ourselves, “How many legitimate users is it ok to inconvenience in order to reduce piracy?” The answer should be none.”

If only more companies (and industries) felt the same way.