June 2008

Mini-games are for Mini-gamers AND Busy-gamers

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I recently read an article on Insomnia titled "Mini-games are for mini-gamers." To summarize, the article basically says indie gamers promote indie games because they're too stupid to play the more complex games.

I do agree with some of the article's points, and probably a majority of the so-called "indie" games fall in the category mentioned in the article. However, indie/doujin games do have their usefulness, for example, at work I can play a quick game of *insert favorite indie game* during my coffee/lunch/secret break, but it's almost impossible to play more complex games like Warcraft 3 or Counter-Strike without getting noticed (although I did hear a friend of mine played Dota during work).

The Procedural Generation Competition

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Well, well, well, the PGC, also known as the Procedural Generation Competition. is finally in its final stage. With a whopping 60 submissions, boy are there some gems among the submissions. TIGSource should really do these kind of contests more often. The only downside is the deadline--seems like many projects could have done a lot better with more time.

For me, one of the themes of this competition seems to be the unplayability of games, whether due to some stupid .NET compatibility or others...and judging by reader feedbacks in the competition forum, I'm not the only one.

I've listed some games below that I've been keeping my eyes on throughout the competition. Note I've played/tried all of the submissions (other than the ones I can't get to run, of course, thanks to crappy computers in China), and the ones below have made a pretty big impression on me.

"The Next Worlds of Type-Moon"

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Not really news, but Type-Moon has updated their sites with sections for all three of their newly announced games, with the subtitle of "The next worlds of TYPE-MOON."

At the moment nothing we don't know about are available, the only things up are some character art and sketches of the games, all of which were already featured in the magazines released last month.

Still waiting for Tsukihime 2 and the next volume of DDD though :/ On a side note, look for a big Type-Moon feature soon...