You may (or may not) have been wondering why there hasn’t been a post on here in a while. I’ve been building a new blog system which integrates with the rest of the site much better, and it’s almost ready to go live!

What does this mean for me?

The Facebook page will continue to publish updates as usual, but if you’re following the blog on Tumblr or subscribed to the RSS feed before November 2010, you won’t receive any new posts from the dcf Games Blog after next week. To continue getting updates, you’ll need to do one of the following:

• “Like” davecheesefish Games on Facebook to get updates in your news feed
• Subscribe by email to get posts delivered straight to your inbox
• Follow me on Twitter, and get other bonus rambling from me too!
• Subscribe to the new RSS feed

The Facebook page and new RSS may go a bit screwy when the switch actually takes place (some old posts may come back up), but it should be fine after that. I’ll be migrating comments over in the following few days.

Why are you doing this?

A variety of reasons, really (Tumblr’s recent reliability issues, the lack of integration with the rest of dcf Games and the hassle of basically having to maintain two seperate sites being the main ones). Bringing the blog in-house and keeping everything together in one place just makes it easier to keep synchronised and provide new services in the future.

Sorry for the inconvenience this change might cause.

The global game Jam has started in Newport! Follow our adventures through the next 43 hours on the live stream above (I’m probably on the far left, in the hat, almost certainly doing something stupid), and via my Twitter feed. You can send us messages through Twitter too! And we’ll read them!

If you’re working hard at another jam site, good luck and have fun!

I’m going to be giving a guest lecture at the University of Wales, Newport this Friday afternoon, just before the Global Game Jam! Topics to be covered will include the basics of PHP and MySQL, getting XNA to play nicely with a web server, and building a basic global high-score system, with practical work setting up your own high-score server in one afternoon. Why not incorporate global high-scores into your GGJ entry this year?

If you’re a Newport games student, come along and listen to my network-based ramblings! If you can’t come along and if there’s enough interest, I’ll also put up an abridged version as a tutorial on davecheesefish Games sometime in the next couple of weeks.

This weekend, there are no less than THREE indie game jams going on simultaneously, and guess what? I’ll be doing my darndest to enter all three.

This week sees the Experimental Gameplay Project (1-31 Dec, theme: “Drawing”), Game Prototype Challenge (13-20 Dec, theme: “Immortality” and “Thin Ice”) and Ludum Dare 19 (18-20 Dec GMT, unknown theme) coinciding in the same 48-hour period. Making one game to fit all of them in two days can’t be that hard, can it?

Credit to Chris Kaitila (Breakdance McFunkyPants) for getting this idea into my head. If I die during this, it’s his fault!

For the last month, Alec Stamos of Ultimate-Nerds.com and I have been locked in an epic game-development battle for indie honour.

• The contest ran from 5th-30th November.
• Only 30 hours were allowed to be spent on anything going directly into the game.
• Publicly licensed materials (graphics, sound, code libraries, etc.) were allowed, as long as they were declared in a readme file with the game.
• No bleeding on the furniture.

The development stage is over, but now I need you! Voting has begun to find November’s winner!

How do I Get the Games and Vote?

Go to the game announcement posts on IndieKombat.com to download both games: About Turn (my game) and, if you must, Ninja Art Game (Alec’s game). If then you think my game’s the best, vote for me in the poll on the right-hand side of the page! If you like Alec’s game better, erm… there’s no need to vote. Your votes really do count - as I write this, there are only 2 votes between us! The winner will be announced at the end of December.

I’ll be continuing to work on my game, adding more levels and gameplay elements, and generally making it better. You can track the ongoing development now at Indie DB or Mod DB.

Last weekend saw Eurogamer Expo 2010 at Earl’s Court in London, part of the London Games Festival 2010. Despite being booked onto a non-existent bus, tube strikes, tube maintenance, roadworks and the bus company not stopping where they said they would, I actually managed to get there and back alive on the final day of the event, Sunday.

Overall I was impressed by the organisation and range of games on display but there was a sense that we were seeing the left-overs from the previous two days. Some of the booths in the careers fair were empty and there were very few staff from developers and publishers to be seen. I still had a good time but in future I’ll make sure not to go on the last day. The hot dogs sucked.

Those who know me will probably also know that I’m not easily impressed by games and my opinions are usually against what everyone else thinks. Plus I’m very good at changing my mind. With that said, here are my thoughts on some of the games I played at Eurogamer Expo 2010…

Games

Gran Turismo 5

After having played GT3 A-Spec and GT4 on the PS2, it’s an improvement. Not a big one, but an improvement nonetheless. The handling of the cars feels new and more realistic, doing what you’d actually expect them to instead of just sliding into the nearest tyre wall. Graphically, it looks amazing - the textures on the cars and circuits are much higher resolution and the models much more detailed than in previous installments, and the series is now heading firmly towards proper photo-realism.

The 3D - I’m not sure if it’s my brain or the game, but I couldn’t see much difference between the 3D and 2D versions of the game on show (except of course that if you didn’t wear the glasses, the 3D version was all fuzzy). You could tell that the HUD was supposedly in front of everything else, but the actual track and car still looked pretty flat to me which was somewhat disappointing for my first experience with a 3D TV.

If you’re a total racing fan, I’d say go for it. There’s a vastly improved line-up in the garage (a notable addition being Ferrari) now housing over 1000 cars, and over 70 tracks including the 13-mile Nürburgring Nordschleife, my personal favourite from GT4. It’s certainly not a bad game and if I already had a PS3 I’d probably buy GT5 without a though.

F1 2010

Definitely one for hardcore racing and F1 fans, not the occassional arcade boy-racer. The graphics are amazing, the gameplay is polished to a mirror shine and the tracks reproduced pretty much faultlessly. You can pick out every piece of gravel stuck in your tyres after your inevitable first-corner trip off-road. Barge someone out of the way deliberately and you’ll get a black flag penalty. Brake while going around a corner and you’ll just slide, as it should be (I’m looking at you, Gran Turismo 4).

Unfortunately, I’m not a devout F1 fan and I think that’s the one problem. Some people will be driving the lives of their favourite racing drivers in their favourite racing teams; I’m driving one of a handful of very similar cars on one of 19 similar tracks, which personally I can see getting repetitive rather quickly.

Mafia II

Rule number one for presenting your game at an expo intended to make people want to buy it: Make the demo fun.

Mafia II instead had me walking across town to my mum’s house, manually opening the front door, manually closing the front door, *cutscene*, opening another door, closing the other door, getting into bed, *cutscene*, waking up, going back through the door, talking to “mum” (in a *cutscene* on a console display stand with no speakers or subtitles), opening and closing the front door again, walking to a friend’s house several blocks away… several doors and numerous cutscenes later (no hurry, nobody was queuing to play it), I had finally been allowed to drive a car, albeit fairly slowly and with terrible handling, but had yet to be given anything else to do and finally gave up to find something less mind-numbingly tedious to waste my brain cells on.

The worst thing (if you hadn’t already noticed from the weird emphasis in the above paragraph)? Cutscenes! Too. Many. Cutscenes. Break. Flow. Like. Putting. Full. Stops. In. Between. Every. Word. In. A. Sentence. Except where I was wandering off the predetermined path looking for something to destroy in the name of anarchy, there was at least a cutscene every 20-30 seconds! If you’ve gone to the trouble of making an interactive game rather than a movie, stop taking control away whenever something interesting happens, leaving me simply walking as some kind of underpaid camera-courier in between.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

Criterion Games’ last release was Burnout Paradise back in 2008, and they haven’t deserted the crash-and-bash style racing in their new offering, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit.

The Expo setup consisted of eight Xbox 360 stations linked together for consecutive multiplayer races throughout the day. The controls will be familiar to veteran Burnout players - left trigger to brake, right trigger for throttle, A for boost - but this time you also have the D-pad with various articles of weaponry at your disposal, including spike traps, jammers and road blocks. Of course, you can always resort to ramming your opponents if all else fails! The particular game mode we were playing was a rolling start, with the cops several metres behind the “racers”. The player who finished the race in front won, meaning you weren’t just up against the other team but against your own kind as well, which seemed to negate the need for two different teams in the first place.

This time round there are real licensed cars in the game, a change from the made-up brands starring in previous Criterion games. Models mentioned on their website include the Koenigsegg CCX, McLaren MP4-12C and Pagani Zonda Cinque for the racers, and the Ford Shelby GT500, Bugatti Veyron 16.4 and Lamborghini Reventón for the officers among us.

There was a lot of fun to be had, and though I’ve had bad experiences with the Need for Speed series in the past (and a complete lack of any real updates for Burnout Paradise on the PC), this will be one game I know I’ll be buying some time soon.

Tech

PlayStation Move

I must admit, I was skeptical about the PS Move. Yes, it looks, feels and even smells like a blatant copy of the Wii with a glowing ball on the end. I didn’t really want to like it… but I do. It’s more responsive, more accurate, has much better graphics, and the rounded controller just feels better than the squared-off and chunky Wii one. They’ve done a better job of it, but they have taken nearly 4 extra years to do it.

The game I played was the table tennis from Sports Champions (not “Move Sports”?) and personally I couldn’t fault it*. There were complaints from other people that perhaps it was too accurate and lacked the forgiveness of the Wii, but I’m not entirely sure that’s the market they’re going for. Unlike the Wii and Kinect’s generally cute-and-cuddly and family-friendly graphic style we’ve seen so far, PS Move looks to have made no attempt to dilute (or dare I say it, “dumb down”?) what they’ve already got. Plus their advert (shown to the left) is slightly less nauseating than the Kinect one.

*Ok, one fault - the player on the left of the stand (using the pink controller) always seemed to win, though I’m not entirely sure if this was player error, game error or a specific controller failure.

Kinect for Xbox 360

On the flipside, actually owning an Xbox 360 myself, I was looking forward to finally getting to try Kinect out for myself before it hits the shelves in November.

There’s no one thing wrong with it, just a few little things that eat away at the experience. Expo-side I played a brief 2-player game of Kinect Joyride (and felt a bit of a prat in front of all the people watching, but considering the fact my living room doesn’t have a viewing gallery, I’ll overlook that for now).

The first of the niggles? The time delay. While not immediately obvious in Joy Ride (though it does account for how hard it is to stay in control), the stand next door was playing table tennis from Kinect Sports and there was an obvious half-second delay between the player’s movements and any action on-screen. Without playing it myself I can’t say whether it affected gameplay or not, but it looked awkward. Back to Joy Ride, the motion detection was also a bit shaky - not once did I nor my opponent manage to activate any power-ups we’d collected, no matter how much we attempted to punch the people to the left and right of us like it showed on the screen. Again, I’m not sure if it was the game’s fault, or the small crowd that had gathered behind us confusing the sensor.

On the stand to the left of us, they were playing the duck, dodge and jump-type minigame from Kinect Adventures, which actually looked quite challenging and possibly fun until one 7-year-old boy beat his big sister just by jumping up and down hyperactively all the way to the end of the track, bagging a massive time bonus and winning the game with no skill required other than a jumbo-size bag of blue Smarties and something fizzy.

All-in-all, Kinect seems to be confused easily and needs a lot of space but ultimately it will sell. Why? The kids were jumping around and having the time of their lives (and in some cases, so were the adults). It’s still an amazing bit of kit and provided Microsoft continue to update it once it’s released it has potential, but with the current delay, occassional glitches and sheer self-consciousness of waving around with nothing in your hands I’m not entirely sure it’s a Wii-killer in it’s current form.

End of the Day

I would’ve liked to have tried Medal of Honor, Rock Band 3 and Fable III at well but didn’t fancy each of their fairly sizable queues. Either way, the Medal of Honor beta is now free on Steam, so I’ll be playing that when I get a chance.

If you were at Eurogamer Expo 2010 or have played any of these games anywhere else, what did you think of them? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Last week was a big one on the scale of my life so far! I officially graduated from the University of Wales, Newport with a 2:1 in BSc(Hons) Games Development & Artificial Intelligence last week at a ceremony on the university’s Caerleon Campus.

That afternoon I also attended the Newport Business School PrizeGiving Ceremony, where there was an ample supply of very nice tea and cakes (mother was particularly impressed by the strawberry shortcake). As an additional bonus, I was also awarded the University’s IAP Prize for the Best Game Development Project of the acedemic year, consisting of £100 and a framed sealed certificate from the IAP (Institution of Analysts and Programmers)! I’ve probably already said this far too much, but I’d like to say thank you again to Newport Business School, University of Wales, Newport and the IAP for their support.

Here’s to the future!