Funambulism » games

The 10/10 Question

Grill — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 10:25:49 +0000

View the story “The 10/10 Question” on Storify

Interview: Matt Woodley of Domark, on Championship Manager and Football Manager.

Grill — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:27:07 +0000

For the “Making Ofs” I do for PC Gamer, I always interview too many people. After Miles Jacobsen proved not as forthcoming as I’d hoped, for legal reasons, he recommended I talk to Matt Woodley, who has always worked with the series. And I did. [more...]

Planescape Torment: Retrospective – What can change the nature of a fan?

Grill — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 09:30:02 +0000

Amidst the dusty annals of video gaming, there are games only mentioned in hushed tones. There are games that are traded in back-alleys, games where the few extant copies are guarded in by hooded, pale-faced men who worship the old gods Mintah, Ammygah and Com O’door. Games where only one person has ever played it, and he whispers its plot endlessly from his isolated, padded rooms in Bedlam… [more...]

Creative Assembly Interview: Huge Retrospective

Grill — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 09:30:52 +0000

This was an 10,000 word interview on 10/8/2011 conducted for a feature written for PC Gamer; it covers the entire history of Creative Assembly. We used so little of it, I'm putting the rest up here for kicks. [more...]

How Starcraft beat Chess: Blizzard looks back on the world’s best strategy game.

Grill — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 13:30:02 +0000

With Battle.net, Diablo and WOW behind them, it's probably fair to suggest that PC Gamers have probably spent more millions of hours on Blizzard's games than any other company's. With the upcoming release of StarCraft II we spent an hour chatting to three team leads of the original game, now all working inside Blizzard on StarCraft II. They are Frank Pierce, the executive vice-president in charge of product development (he oversees all the new games), Bob Finch, the lead software engineer on (he makes the engines and decides on game features), and Sam Didier, Senior Art Director (he makes the world look o-so-pretty). In line with their history of fantasy roleplay, if anyone fancies LARPing this, Frank Pierce's voice suggests a paternally-growling Tauren, Bob Finch is an tinkering Gnome alchemist, and Sam Didier is some sort of excitable Goblin with ten tonnes of hi-ex strapped to his endlessly-whirring noggin. [more...]

Modding Skyrim: understanding what modders want

Grill — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 09:40:57 +0000

This is an interview with the anonymous modder Vorians, who’s worked on the Unique Landscapes and Better Cities mods for The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion. I was interviewing him to talk about Skyrim for this piece on What Modder’s Want for Gamespy, but he didn’t reply in time, so I’ve posted it here. [more...]

Unfinished Symphony: The Hunt for Red Orchestra

Grill — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 11:00:30 +0000

It’s 1941 and Nazi Germany has just invaded the USSR, its erstwhile ally. SS counter-intelligence soon detects a range of radio signals from communist and socialist sympathisers, embedded at all levels of European society. Since the SS call transmitters ‘piano’ and supervisors ‘conductors’, they name this nascent resistance network the Rote Kapelle - the Red Orchestra. Despite early successes, it’s soon crushed. [more...]

A Fresh Breeze: The Witness & Jonathan Blow

Grill — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 08:10:20 +0000

I was lucky enough to get a chance to interview Jonathan Blow, creator of the most challenging game of this generation "Braid", and play a very early version of his next puzzler The Witness; so early that only the core structure will be preserved when it's finally released. [more...]

Robot Dance; The Aesthetics of Deus Ex 3

Grill — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 10:59:30 +0000

At the beginning of the year, I sat down with Jonathan Jacques-Belletête, the Art Director of Deus Ex 3, to talk about Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s baroque influence, how Warren Spector helped them justify the style differences with Deus Ex 1, and why the future will be yellow. This originally appeared as a piece on IGN. [more...]

Journalism; when is it justified for a writer to work for free?

Grill — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 00:52:31 +0000

The Controversial Bit: yesterday morning, I posted on Twitter the following: Hypothesis; people who write for free are using their secure financial situation as an unfair advantage. Any antitheses? I got plenty. [more...]

Interview: Casey Wimsatt, Symbionica on how games help the Autistic.

Grill — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 15:01:41 +0000

Again, this was research for a feature I did for PC Gamer on disabled gaming. Casey Wimsatt makes games proven to improve the social skills of children with Autism. [more...]

Interview: Jesse Schell on gaming, the social sciences, identity loss and behavioural shaping.

Grill — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 14:25:27 +0000

Previously Creative Director of the Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio, Jesse Schell thinks hard about the future of games; he's worked on Toontown Online and teaches game design at Carnegie Mellon university. You can see his amazing DICE talk on the future of gaming here. This interview was conducted for a PC Gamer piece on Social Gaming about a year ago. [more...]

The Most Modded Games: Top of the Mods.

Grill — Mon, 09 May 2011 00:56:38 +0000

Simple question; which games have have the most mods made for them? Source: Mod Db. This lists 7,776 mods in total. Caveats: Does not include maps. Older games, obscure games I didn't look at, or games with independent communities are likely to be under-represented. [more...]

Horde It Through The Grapevine: Neologisms in Game Genres

Grill — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 11:28:00 +0000

Pretending to have read Wittgenstein, I often bang on about how words symbolise ideas, whether coherent or incoherent, and how this association comes about. To explain that in more depth; videogames are excellent non-verbal communicators, alongside paintings, movies and sculpture. Words need to be coined for new ideas drawn from important common stimuli drawn from these objects of perception. Like art, the descriptions the creator puts on something aren’t always the ones that stick. [more...]

Interview: Erik Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek, Valve

Grill — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 17:02:42 +0000

To the tune of: Jonathan Coulton – Re: Your Brains

This is an interview I did for IGN with the lead Valve writers (apart from Laidlaw), but was cut short. IGN has generously allowed me to put the full Q&A up here.

I’m going to focus on storytelling and dialogue if that’s okay, which means I guess Erik will be answering more of the questions.

Erik: Chet’s a writer too you know! Chet: Better duck, as that phone’s going to be heading towards your head.

Erik Wolpaw.

The primitive murals have developed a lot from the graffiti [more...]

RPS: Mnemotechnics and Ultima Underworld II

Grill — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 16:00:33 +0000

This is a piece I've written for Rock, Paper, Shotgun. I've reposted the whole thing below because a) my hits aren't going to hurt them and b) it's very personal to me. If you want more information about the game, go read it on RPS - the commenters really know their stuff about Ultima. [more...]

Interview: Chris Rippy, Robot Entertainment

Grill — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 16:21:46 +0000

To the tune of: Kraftwerk – The Robots

Here’s the transcript of an interview for Rock, Paper, Shotgun I did with Chris Rippy, Producer, Robot Entertainment (formely Ensemble, creators of Age of Empires) about their new game Orcs Must Die; the original preview is here:

Rippy

Why a tower defence game, not another RTS? Good question. In the history of our older company, we’ve wanted to do a bunch of different things, but it hasn’t come out in the past. There were a bunch of us playing horde mode and defence games, and we prototyped this out of merging those. [more...]

Interview: Gareth Garratt, disability campaigner.

Grill — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 14:40:01 +0000

To the tune of: Various Artists – A Visit To A Sad Planet

Gareth, gaming

Gareth Garratt is curled up in his wheelchair, his body secured in a bucket seat while his hands clutch at the side of a desktop. His chin is pressed down onto a Toshiba mouse and he’s using that to control a virtual Marty McFly, clambering around the back of a police van. Gareth’s chin is the only part of his body that seems to have fine motor control, due to the cerebral palsy he was born with.

Gareth sprang to prominence earlier in the week [more...]

What EDMs say about MPs’ attitudes to games.

Grill — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 10:30:26 +0000

A couple of paragraphs I worked up for PC Gamer, for a forthcoming article, but I didn’t end up using.

To the tune of: Tenacious D – The Government Totally Sucks

Prior to the 2010 election, all three national parties had pledged to give UK games developers tax breaks; despite being something the Tories and Liberals agreed upon, it was one of the first things to be scrapped. There has been only one debate focussed on video games since the new coalition came to power, and that was to cancel the tax breaks for UK-based game developers. Though all the [more...]

Holidays in the Kaiber Kush

Grill — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 11:35:54 +0000

All dreams begin and end with an elipsis... ...so I'm feeling a bit lonely right now. My friends have all bummed off and left me to entertain myself, except one who I'm just walking up to the top floor of the hotel to say goodbye to, before I go and find something to do. We get to the top floor, and it's a bit like an modernist pub, with banquette seating and high windows that show arid, impossible old mountains scraping at the air. It turns out my friend is meeting a buncha people including Peter Kay, the northern comedian, so I do my balloon trick (something involving a highly-inflated balloon and pratfalls, as far as I can remember) and Peter Kay outdoes me, without even getting up, by punning about balloons, whilst doing a trick where the balloon cord is trapped under his buttocks. [more...]