Archive for November, 2009
November Games
Posted by: Steve Johnstone in Gaming, Home on November 28th, 2009
Dragon Age
The first was Dragon Age, which I grabbed as soon as it came out. I’m a massive fan of CRPGs, and I’ve enjoyed all of Bioware’s previous games so this was an automatic purchase. So far I’ve found it highly entertaining, and I think I’ve sunk about 50 hours into the thing.
Next comes Modern Warfare 2, which is hugely popular. I’ve heard that approximatly 2% of people in England now own a copy, which is insane. The single player game is all about the set pieces for me, so the fact that the plot makes absolutly no sense didn’t detract from the overall experience. I wish it had been longer, like the majority of people that play the campaign, but I think it’s well padded by the special ops missions. The multiplayer very close to the original, which means it’s very addictive and entertaining, and I can never get enough of the sounds of bullets hitting flesh and the ding of experience after each kill.
Thirdly I bought Assassin’s Creed 2. The original game was fun but flawed, due to some very repetative missions. This time Ubisoft have gone closer to the GTA way of doing things, which makes the storyline feel a lot more fluid. The addition of a town which you can sink your money into is a bit gimiky, but enjoyable. The movement is still a bit clunky, and I find that I throw myself in the wrong direction with startiling regularity.
All in all it’s been quite an enjoyable month of gaming.
Rule the World Game
Posted by: Steve Johnstone in XNA on November 17th, 2009
I’ve been making an XNA game for a while. It’s a clone of the board game Risk, and I’m making it it using my own game engine which I’m building at the same time. The current working title is “Rule the World”. My aim is to have a sellable game and something with which I can base future games on. So far it’s going pretty well, and can actually be played from start to end, although only using a single controller. Here’s a little bit of a sneak peek:
Risk Game Demo 1 from Steve Johnstone on Vimeo.
I’m using the Interpolation code from Nick Gravlyn’s blog, although I’ve heavily modified it in order to use it with Vectors and Colours. The menu is hand written and was a bit of a bugger to write, but I’m really happy with how it turned out. The shader is also hand written from scratch, as is the input manager. My next task is to add some loading screens, and make it all look a bit prettier.
I’m eventually planning on releasing this onto the XBox Live Indie Games, so I’m going to try and make the whole thing as slick as possible. Wish me luck!