Since I haven’t posted any news about the games I am working on (Brutal Legend is awesome, btw, and my personal game is finally heading towards some simple playtests), how about a game I worked on years ago?

1UP FM’s Podcast crew has spent the last portion of several shows talking about their recent experiences playing through Psychonauts.  It’s way, way better than a review, and a different experience than a focus test.  I don’t know if it’ll be interesting to people who didn’t work on Psychonauts, but I found the podcasters surprisingly insightful about what they liked.  It can actually be fairly difficult to talk intelligently and accurately about what does and doesn’t work for you as you play through a game: so many inputs combine to create your experience that it can be difficult to isolate any real causes.  The 1UP crew, though, does a solid job.  I actually took notes.

In case you’re interested– and I don’t actually know if it’s interesting to more than 40 or so people– you can get to all the relevant podcasts from their main 1UP FM page.  The relevant bits are:

7/28 - 1:09:28
8/04 - 1:16:15
8/11 - 1:22:39
8/18 - 1:15:15

(Thanks to several DFers for providing the dates and timestamps.  I merely copy-paste!)

We finished the mosaic.  It’s 4′x2′.  I fail at thumbnail resizing, so just click it.

Really, with the massive power-to-cost difference, there are only a few areas in which consoles pale compared to PCs, when it comes to gaming.  If I had to pick three, they’d be: the lack of a mouse+keyboard; the lack of open access to thousands of independently developed games; and the lack of really long installs, during which the game copies itself to your hard drive for seemingly no improvement to load times.

While some of us have been able to replicate that experience by purchasing Metal Gear Solid 4, now there’s finally a chance for the rest of us.

As you may have already heard– either because all your WoW-playing friends started calling you, or you started calling all your non-WoW playing “friends”– Blizzard has launched their new, insanely beneficial Recruit-a-Friend program.  The reasons, and some uses, are already well-covered here.  I’d like to discuss another use, which is probably my favorite.

Your higher-level newly-WoWed friend can just grant you levels if they outlevel you.  This eliminates the messy business of giving out your account info to powerleveling services– just pay them money, let them buy a new account, level it up, and send you levels.  This is now the safest way of powerleveling, and coincidentally, it also makes Blizzard the most money.  To get your brand-new character up to 60, the powerleveling service would have to buy two copies of WoW.  AFAICT, this isn’t even against Blizzard’s terms of service.

WowInsider reports that Wrath of the Lich King will let you play fetch with your pets.  Sure, WoW’s non-combat activities are fairly paltry.  On the other hand, Blizzard just keeps adding little bits here and there.  Furthermore, even WoW’s combat activities retain little to no similarity to the leveling game.

What’s the purpose of 80 levels of grinding in order to get more pets to play fetch with?  What’s the rationale behind a level 58 requirement to watch an in-game stand-up routine?  If they implement player housing, will there be a PvP rating requirement on some of the flashier couches?  A 100+ hour barrier to playing with your friends has always seemed steep, but at some point the barriers of a conventional MMO just start to seem unfathomably bizarre.

This excellent post on games for 10% attention brought my attention to a blog that’s a bizarre combination: photography, volleyball, and games.  I say it’s bizarre not because those three items don’t match, but because it’s an almost perfect match for one particular reader of this blog.

If you are not that reader, I apologize for this post.