Funambulism » games

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...]

The Death of the Non-Gamer

Grill — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 15:37:14 +0000

To the tune of: Kate Bush – Pi

As a PR and journalist, I’ve been frustrated by the non-gamers and anti-gamers – the people who haven’t played or would never play games – and how they control the media. As the years have gone by, their hold on the mainstream has been eroded and the review sections of most national media are now games-friendly but the main news pages are still run with an ethos that is often anti-games. I’d argue this is because the people running these pages are either older people who’ve never seen the point in trying [more...]

Marketing A Gay Game

Grill — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 12:43:48 +0000

To The Tune Of: Tom Robinson Band – Glad To Be Gay

Again, this was a think-piece for a magazine that didn’t get used. The hypothetical situation was a game is about to released with a gay lead character; do you think that game would stand a chance at retail? If not, why not? If it landed on your desk, how would you go about marketing it? Here are my answers.

eNCHANT arM (Enchanted Arms) had a very strong gay character called Makoto.

I think it would stand the same chance at retail as any other game, but the clear [more...]

Interview: Transgaming & CCP on Mac Gaming

Grill — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 15:39:49 +0000

To the tune of: Tim Curry – Sweet Transvestite

Another interview that I felt guilty about woefully under-using in a feature. Still about making games for Apple Mac, but this time I was talking with Transgaming, who convert PC games to Mac for large publishers and developers, and with CCP, who’ve used Transgaming to transfer Eve: Online to Mac.

Gavriel State

TRANSGAMING: CTO, GAVRIEL STATE.

(Which is an awesome name.)

What differences in tech are there between a Mac and a PC? From a hardware perspective, Macs and PCs are very similar these days – they share elements [more...]

Interview: James Brown, Ancient Workshop

Grill — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 18:48:01 +0000

This is an interview I had left over from a feature, and it seems a shame to waste it. It’s with a Mac developer, James Brown, who is the entire staff of Ancient Workshop and it’s about Mac gaming.

To the tune of: Belle and Sebastian – Funny Little Frog

The Frog Prince

Tell me about you. I worked in the mainstream games industry for 10 years (including stints at EA & Lionhead) but recently went indie. I have a game called Ancient Frog which is currently out for the iPhone and, in expanded form, iPad. Internally I also [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...]

E3′s Finest Trailer

Grill — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 10:43:17 +0000

This is a new music-shooter from the chap who made Rez, Tetsuya Mizuguchi – it’s operated through Microsoft’s new Kinect motion-detection system and is meant to convey the sound-colour linkage of synesthesia. Sadly, as it’s colour-oriented, I’m aware that I’m probably never going to be able to enjoy this, in the way I couldn’t enjoy Space Giraffe.

I sincerely hope that this is all in-game footage – mainly because I can’t believe that it could all be rendered and because I’ve been hoping for something that’s a graphical leap forward, not in terms of quality necessarily, but in terms [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...]

The Dreams In Which I’m Dying

Grill — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:00:25 +0000

To the tune of: Mad World by Tears for Fears.

Dr Greg Slaps Me Awake

First Dream (Nightmare): Mass Effect 2 interactable highlight encapsulating a plastic dinner tub, endlessly tesselating and overlapping.

Second Dream (Nightmare): A hole through the tiled splash wall behind the cooker in our old house, a hole that’s like something has bored/burned through wood but it’s tiles. Me and my mum lever the tiles off and there’s two openings behind the plaster. The right one is an old cast iron oven door and, when we open it, there’s still a fire in there, reassuringly glowing. [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...]

Added Extras

Grill — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:04:06 +0000

(This is a response to Rob Fahey’s Special Editions piece on Gamesindustry.biz) . To the tune of: Yo, Ho – Disney There are three things that are going to keep gamers buying games rather than pirating them. Those are community play (achievements, online play, friend lists, chat, etc), fear (in my opinion, generally inducing negative emotions in the general population is something to be avoided as much as possible) and bonus content, such as DLC and Special Editions. Special Editions, in particular, are the future of boxed games..

A 1C Shop in Moscow

Why? Let’s look at Russia. Russia [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...]

Moral Incontinence (akrasia) and Technology

Grill — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:45:16 +0000

To the tune of: Akrasia by James Falzone

I have a problem with tech – I’m morally incontinent (stop your giggling at the back, Jenkins!), in that my mind is slightly spoiled so it strongly seeks pleasure, even when I know that the good thing is something else. Plato called it ‘akrasia’, and it implies a lack of moral control.

This has been a problem since my university days, when I couldn’t be dragged away from my computer, by hell or high water. It used to sit on, in my room, 24 hours a day, normally with the door open [more...]

Thoughts On Closed Systems and Video Games

Grill — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:26:00 +0000

Predictably, Microsoft have just announced the new Games For Windows Live will also support full game downloads. Manufacturers, having taken over all the development studios, and recently the Indie and casual devs too, are now taking over the distribution channels too. It’s likely that we’ll see the first full, true AAA game distributed solely through the Playstation Network in the next year; full games are already available on the PSPGo. Even Nintendo distributes games through its Wii store. These all make it easier for consumers to get access to new and old games. So what’s the problem?

The key issue here [more...]

41st Least Hideous: Games Journalist

Grill — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:39:00 +0000

Oh, the pride. I’m the 41st least hideous person in the games industry. Out of 50. Eesh.

Identity Crisis.

Grill — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 10:37:00 +0000

For any users of Skype out there, my username is Griliopoulos. Duh. For MSN, it’s iddleyiddle at hotmail.com. For Google Talk it’s daniel.griliopoulos at gmail.com. On Xbox Live I’m OXM Grill (but email me first, as my list is always full.) On Lord of the Rings Online, I’m on Snowbourn and my name’s Warslow Wobbleguts. If you’re on any social networking site, my full name’s my name. If you’re on any other site with profiles, I’m likely to be on there with the name Griliopoulos.

Legacy Names On Planetside, I was Picoc. In City of Heroes, I was both of [more...]

Achievements Quandary

Grill — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 14:11:00 +0000

Xbox 360 achievements let you get points that total up to mean exactly nothing. Hence, I feel no obligation to play games for achievements and even feel a little disgusted with myself for playing games with achievements. Hence, I don’t want to play Xbox 360 games.

However… I also get a feeling whenever I’m playing a game that doesn’t have achievement points (PC or even Wii) that I’m wasting my time because I could be getting points. No matter that I don’t want to, no matter that I think they’re a worthlessI grinding measurement towards inevitable death, I still get [more...]

Armchair Generals

Grill — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 15:21:00 +0000

Gameplayer – Australia’s Premier Gaming WebsiteFeature: The Armchair Generals – Official Xbox 360 Magazine It’s no fun being the odd one out. As the only team member with an attention span counted in hours rather than seconds, I’m regularly taunted in the office for loving PC strategy games. The other team members treat me as if I’m backward and nerdy; and it’s true I do love strategy games, tactical combat games, turn-based games. Yet there’s a shift going on, a shift of strategy developers towards consoles, both in the numbers being developed for the Xbox 360 and how they’re being [more...]

Ego Blogging

Grill — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 18:47:00 +0000

A few more of my 360 reviews and previews have popped up online:

Def Jam: IconBrian Lara CricketSuperman ReturnsBattlestations: MidwayShivering Isles (preview)