Funambulism » PC

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...]

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...]

Cult Games: Minecraft

Grill — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 12:19:06 +0000

To the tune of: Guns N’ Roses – Sweet Child O’ Mine

I gone and done wrote something about Minecraft:

Gamers, especially PC gamers, give the impression of being more than averagely intelligent. It’s a self-selecting set – a group of people who have the desire for and capability to buy a top-end computer and keep it tickety-boo – that requires dosh, patience and technical knowledge. However, despite their divergent nerdcore qualities they still manage to share a herd mentality, wheeling around to chase tropes like migrating swans. Perhaps the selection criteria are too rigorous, but there’s a very [more...]

The Money Farm

Grill — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 11:15:49 +0000

To the tune of: Money, Money – Cabaret

The Money Farm

Buy a PC Gamer-approved product every day this week and you get reward points. You’ve levelled up, now you’re a PCG Ambassador, so you get a PCG fan kit. Meanwhile, your health insurance is incentivising you to walk as it’s worried about your heart rate, and a tobacco firm is incentivising you not to read The Guardian because of its coverage of cancer risk. You get an achievement from the local council for not giving money to a tramp, and your eyetracking device is giving you bonus points for reading every line of an advert (but not the small print). It’s a nightmare and [more...]

Solving MMO review problems

Grill — Sun, 16 May 2010 16:37:39 +0000

To the tune of: Nina Nastasia – Our Discussion

As an MMO reviewer, I’ve felt both privileged (at occupying a niche few are equipped to explore) and also terrified (at a reviewer’s complete inability to perceive the whole game). As Quintin Smith found last week, and Ed Zitron found previously, reviewers, no matter how professional, can’t just hop back into an MMO when it’s been updated and hope to review it. Especially not, as those two found, when the audience they think they’re talking to isn’t the audience that actually reads and responds to the article. Here’s a putative structure for [more...]

That Mordin Moment: The Unusual Case of the Singing Salarian

Grill — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:30:09 +0000

To the tune of: The Element’s Song by Tom Lehrer

It’s 2010 and my jaw is hanging like it’s been wired open. I can’t believe what I’m watching on screen. The wise-talking pensive scientist / special operative who’s been fighting robots and aliens and stuff at my side, is… singing. And, in the deep darkness of the far future, in the lab of my one-of-a-kind spaceship in uber science-fiction action-game Mass Effect 2 what he’s singing is… Gilbert & Sullivan? Particularly a parody of a Modern Major General.

It’s 2007 and I’m munching on a buffet at Bioware’s offices in [more...]

Red Write Hand

Grill — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:18:31 +0000

To the tune of Red Right Hand by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

I gone and done wrote something, hic:

I’m Big Daddy Delta, terror of Rapture, splitter of splicers, defender of the weak, diving suit fetishist extraordinaire. I’m stuck on one side of a door, there’s a broken window and a yellow glowing switch a few feet away. I have a clever hacking dart gun, which requires my simply pressing a button when a needle on its meter passes through a certain colour. I shoot, I score… and get a mild electric shock. I repeat. Again and again. [more...]

Through Looking Glass, Darkly.

Grill — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:00:22 +0000

To The Tune Of: Hey, Hey, 16K by MJ Hibbert Having launched the Official Xbox 360 Magazine, it would be surprising for me to say that I’m platform agnostic, but possibly more surprising to say that I’ve been a PC gamer all my life. PC wasn’t my first love – that was, of all things, the Acorn where we played multi-player Risk in school lunch breaks – and I didn’t have any games systems myself until a very late purchase of a Master System 2.

I just used to watch friends play them on their systems, Amigas and Commodores, [more...]

A Week In Politics

Grill — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:17:38 +0000

Order! Order! Following the Parliamentary Education Services release of their edutainment flash-game ‘MP For A Week‘, I’ve written a bit of analysis over at Nicholas Lovell’s GamesBrief of the title, covering its accuracy, education value and entertainment value.

The axe that the commons authorities want to grind is razor sharp – this game makes the average stolid backbencher look amazingly active and busy, hurrying between constituency and parliament, justifying that great wodge of cash we give each MP every year (around £175,000 including expenses, each), and the huge number of MPs.

I’ll be sending Nicholas my expenses bill later.

[more...]

Monkey Island 2 in 3D using Cryengine

Grill — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:34:00 +0000

Beautiful, though the music convinces you more than the imagery.

Game Pricing

Grill — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:14:00 +0000

(Some thoughts I supplied for a piece about on a big games website that got spiked because of politics…)

Question 1 (Of 1)

1. Do you believe that the recently rumoured price-hikes of triple-A games in the UK are justified. If yes, why? If no, why?

From an economics point of view, it’s entirely rational. If you believe, like a good Ayn Rand pupil should, that businesses do best when unfettered from regulation and morals, and that businesses doing best is best for the rest of us, then companies should be allowed to set their own prices, [more...]

Sick of Cake

Grill — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 20:24:00 +0000

Look, I’m tired of your pathetic cake jokes, m’kay? I mean the vast majority of them aren’t even jokes are they? They’re Proustian madeleines, reminding you of something very personal only you and the elect understand; they’re just you saying the word cake and then giggling like a schoolgirl doped up with nitrous oxide and poppers (innocent m’lud, I have access no to NO2). You make me ashamed of my virtual friends, you really do.

So I’m going to supply for you, my lovely overly self-referential chums, a near-complete set of cake and baking-related puns, just so we don’t [more...]