Shmee.Me

March 19, 2015March 19, 2015

Pixels Just Might Get Me To See An Adam Sandler Movie!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYmWApVVA_I

Adam Sandler movies have been terrible as of late, but Pixels from Sony pictures just might get me in to a theater. It is about aliens who use our classic video games to wage war against us, and the only people that can save us is a bunch of losers who spent all their time in arcades in the 80s. Yes Futurama did this a long time ago, but it looks pretty fun. I just hope that they don’t Adam Sandler it all up (they probably will). We will see how this turns out in July.

March 5, 2015March 5, 2015

GDC 2015 Highlights!

Usually there isn’t a lot of news that comes out of the GDC (Game Developers Conference) since it is primarily a show for developers not the public, but this year was a little different, so I thought I would give you some highlights.

Everyone is in to VR now:

Oculus Rift showed that VR could be done well and cheaply, and since then everyone has jumped on the bandwagon. This year Sony showed off more of its Project Morpheus which will work with its PS4 due in 2016, but Valve and HTC’s Vive stole the show. Apparently it is the best VR headset ever demonstrated, so we will see how that turns out.

More Set-Top Boxes:

Valve is not content to stay on your computer it wants a piece of your TV as well. It announced that Steam Box, a PC based console, will finally launch this year, and it is also launching the Steam Link. A little box that Streams your PC games to your TV, so that if you already have a gaming rig you can play your games anywhere in your house. It is an interesting concept, and for a certain subset of gamers I can see it being very attractive. nVidia announced a new Android TV based console that is part of their Shield line. It can stream games from the internet as well as play games locally. We will see how that works when it launches for $200 later this year.

nVidia wants AMD out of the game:

nVidia has been busy launching new video cards in its great GeForce GTX 900 line, while AMD can’t seem to get their Radeon R9 300 series out the door, so nVidia went for the knockout blow by announcing the Titan X. It has 12 GB of RAM and 8 Billion transistors. I am sure this card will cost a mint, but there is nothing faster than it on the planet.

Game development is now free to try:

You can now download and try to make your own games using the Unreal Engine 4 or Unity Engine 5. Tools like these used to cost upwards of $10,000 a license, but now they are available to anyone. These are not the stripped down versions either. You are getting the full set of tools. Once you are start to make money you will have to pay for them, but if you just want to try it out you are free to do so.

Microsoft’s one OS world comes in to focus:

Microsoft is getting serious about only having one OS. At the GDC it explained more about its universal app store, updates on the new DirectX 12 API, Xbox to Windows 10 cross play and cross buying, Xbox One to PC streaming, and lastly a bunch of new games coming out to its platforms using the ID@Xbox program. Most notably Elite: Dangerous. I think it is clear that Microsoft sees itself as an underdog at this point, and is working really hard to try and be a dominant player again. We will see how their plans work, but at least it is good to see them truly trying again.

It has been a great GDC, and still has a couple of days left, but all the major players have had their say. If anything else noteworthy happens I will update this post. I can only hope next year’s GDC is as interesting.

February 25, 2015

New Batman Arkham Knight Trailer!

Oh man I cannot wait for this game! It is the third Batman game from Rocksteady, and since the first two are classics, the expectations for the third are off the charts. I am interested to see what Scarecrow will bring to the table as the main villain since his levels were always a lot of fun in the past games. It will be trippy if nothing else. June 2nd cannot get here soon enough.

February 16, 2015February 16, 2015

Don’t Hate On Developers For Dreaming!

Recently famed developer Peter Molyneux came under fire for his new game Godus. People were saying that he lied to them to get them to fund Godus on Kickstarter, and now he is abandoning the game and moving on to other things even though Godus isn’t finished. I don’t think he lied, I think his problem is that he likes to dream big, and then share those dreams with anyone that will listen to him.

This is not a new problem with Molyneux, he has always loved to talk about his crazy ideas for games. His original idea for Fable was a real world simulation that would allow you to plant trees and gardens and then come back years later and see the forests you planted, or see tiny villages grow in to massive cities. Obviously that is not what we got. Fable ended up being a fun, but light action RPG with a good control scheme, a unique conversation system, and it let you be good or evil. Still good, but not what was originally talked about. There have been two sequels, and in each one time has passed and things have grown up, and that has been cool to see, but there were no forests that I have planted.

Now had Molyneux promised a fun light RPG people would have been happy, but no the internet rage was great. It still flows today. It is like a hot stream of magma. It never cools. With Godus again his dreams got away with him. He wanted to create the greatest god game off all time, but with a budget of just under a million dollars, he was never going to. Instread he created an interesting little time waster that translated well to tablets, so he focused on the iPad version. If this was normal development, this would have been fine, but since this was Kickstarter, the backers are wondering were their amazing game is.

I like that Molyneux dreams big, and I like that he shares those dreams with us. Every other developer is so tight lipped that you never know what they are thinking until they show us a very polished trailer done by a highly paid marketing department. I understand that it is frustrating to not see the games he was talking about, but at least he wants to create them. His problem is that the reality of what he has to work with gets in his way, be it money or processing power.

I will say that his treatment of the winner of Curiosity, their odd digging game, could have been better. They should have worked hard to make him a PR plus not a nightmare. I am hoping they will do right by him in the end, and he will get to be the mega god or whatever in the final version of Godus.

I love to hear people talk about their dreams, so it is refreshing to hear developers share what they are working towards. Still maybe they should save those dreams for Ted talks or interviews, and not post them to Kickstarter. I think we could use a few more dreamers like Peter Molyneux in the game business, and maybe, just maybe we as gamers can try and keep our hate to a minimum. Maybe it would also be wise not to preorder his games.

February 11, 2015

Shmee Lights A Candle For Shadow Realms!

EA/BioWare has decided to pull the plug on the four on one dungeon crawler Shadow Realms. The Paladin and I both quite enjoyed our short time with this game, but it looks like they could never get it working they way they wanted. It was always an odd game. It was going to be released episodically with the story parts single player, but the fighting multiplayer. You got to choose whether you were one of the good guys or played as the Shadow Lord. It was fun to see a developer trying something new, but the folks over at EA probably got cold feat when it looked like the public at large wasn’t getting the concept. I hope the devs making the game manage to keep their jobs and just move to a different project. We will see.

Part of me is wondering if the lawyers at Tops and Microsoft were wondering where their royalty check was since the story and setting concepts were so close to Shadowrun, so EA just decided not to deal with it. Whatever the cause, we are down one more RPG. I will light a candle.