Best patent illustration ever.

...to translate their niche adventure game, Rhiannon: Curse of the Four Branches, which is (fairly obviously) based on the Mabinogion. They want to do it in Welsh, but there are only three of them and they're all English monoglots, and they can't afford the dosh (as a tiny wee indie developer) to translate all 30,000 words of the text.

They say they're looking for a "school, a language society or a group of Welsh-language adventure gamers who might be able to help."

I reckon they'd be better off creating an online community to do it, rather than finding a pre-existing group.

The irony is, most of the kids making games now probably never used the computers that kickstarted our industry, a 16 year old for instance, wouldn't have even been born when Commodore imploded, taking the Amiga with it...

Good grief.

From an interview at the Dyson site (the game, not the hoovers, and if you haven't played it, do so.)

Ever designed a board game? Or a card game? There's a site - thegamecrafter.com - to which you can upload all your artwork and they'll print and manufacture all the bits and send them to you. How cool is that?

It's all a bit too hypey, isn't it? I'll believe it when I see it.

Found on Richard Bartle's blog. Which anyone with an interest in gaming, particularly MMORPGs, should read. After all, he was one of the blokes who started it all.

An absolutely beautiful indie strategy game with abstract, crisp graphics. Download it - it's stunning. It runs on Windows and Linux, and you should be able to run it on a Mac by using Mono on the command line or using Wine.

...is still in the industry! Working as marketing manager for Mythic Entertainment (now part of EA), who are working on the Warhammer MMORPG. Due out in Autumn. A Warhammer MMORPG. Ugh.

Anyway, great picture down that first link. He's not changed a bit.

This is just sad. A tiny British games developer (there's only three of them, apparently) has produced a point and click adventure (remember those?) which has managed to get a wide - albeit budget - release in the States. Whereupon it becomes obvious that an awful lot of the artwork is ripped off from other games. Really - go and have a look, they've just taken screenshots from Oblivion, UT2004, Morrowind and a few other games and slapped their own stuff over the top. Here's an example - on the left, LoL, on the right, Thief: Deadly Shadows:

How did they think they'd get away with it? Perhaps they'd promised an all-singing, all-dancing 3D game for their new reworked version, realised they couldn't do it, and panicked. However, the wikipedia entry suggests there were allegations of plagiarised art from that earlier Amiga version, so maybe this really was something they thought they could do with impunity. Or maybe they used the stolen artwork as placeholder - to be replaced later with their own work - and didn't have time, or perhaps foolishly showed it to the publisher who loved it. Hm.

The more we think about that last possibility here in the office, the more likely we think it is. Many smaller publishers don't know much about games - their expertise lies in retail marketing. They wouldn't recognise the stolen images, and perhaps wouldn't understand why perfectly good placeholder art needed replacing. They also wouldn't understand why the new artwork would take so long to do, pressurising the developers still further. Who knows?

I'm not excusing them, but I can see how a bedroom coder team could get themselves into such difficulties.

UPDATE: I'm not one to judge by appearances, but look - three dodgy geezers from Maidstone.

Scanned in Atari 2600 box covers.

This article, linked to by BoingBoing, describes why we (well, some of us) can't resist surfing the web. It's apparently because we get an endorphin high from viewing new and richly interpretable information. Interesting - because for me it also explains why I like the games I do.

I'm a neophile, which probably just means I'm wired to get a hell of an endorphin kick from new, deep information. But I have terrible coordination and reflexes, and I don't particularily enjoy conflict or adrenaline rushes, so I don't get a massive kick out of visceral action gaming - twitch gaming. So the games I like provide me regularly with dollops of interesting (and beautiful) New Stuff which I have to think about in order to keep playing the game.

My favourite game is probably Ico - there's a bit of fighting but it's not a problem, it's mainly just a case of wandering around a beautiful, huge castle solving puzzles. Every new area is a massive endorphin hit for geeks like me; a new wodge of beautiful, inventive worldbuilding I have to get involved in to solve.

Shadow of the Colossus didn't entirely work for me, because the environment, while lovely, wasn't deep enough. And the monsters were fundamentally the same fight over and over again - not much new data there. And I was shit at the fights, because of my dreadful coordination.

Portal works beautifully - each new level is a world I have to get involved in. They're not particularly pretty, but they are very cleverly designed and have to be explored and engaged with in a new way because of the game's novel mechanic. Also, of course, there's always a new bit of comedy from GlaDOS waiting for me when I get to a new level, which is a massive hit of new, quality data in itself. But largely I loved it because I didn't have to jump through too many frustrating time-dependent and coordination-dependent hoops to win the level. I just had to analyse the puzzle successfully, and then put my analysis into practice, with just enough acrobatics to make it require a few tries to get it right.

Now, it seems to me that most games are designed for another sort of person - a competitive person who likes adrenaline rushes, exercising their reflexes and coordination, practicing physical skills. There are currently few games for those of us who get that same visceral kick from thinking and exploration. Oh yes, we'll play the twitch games because there's often enough interesting stuff in there to keep us hooked, wading through the combat parts even though they're a chore.

But where are the exploration games like Ico and Myst now? Why don't they sell well? Because the article seems to say that everyone, to a large extent, should be sucked in by this sort of dynamic.

Or are most gamers really jocks and not geeks?

Should have blogged this last weekend, really, when I played it. This was a triumph. I'm making a note here, 'huge success.' It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.

Seriously (and if you'd played the game right through you'd realise that I wasn't being entirely serious) it's the best game I've played for ... well, probably decades. It's a short game, about 3 hours, but it's beautifully designed, with innovative puzzle-based gameplay based around the idea of a gun which makes pairs of 'portals' - holes in space through which you can go. Walk (or fall, or jump) through one hole, come out the other. Fire one directly above you and one at your feet and you'll fall forever. And that's it, really - but where the game shines is the amount of work that's gone into the puzzle design, and the writing. It's the most beautifully scripted (as in dialogue) game I've played since the old days of point-and-click, essentially a two-hander between your (silent) protagonist and an all-seeing, passive-aggressive, cake-obsessed supercomputer.

Oh, and the ending is utter, utter genius.

It's been voted Best Game of 2007 by quite a few people - not bad for effectively a student project, which was just added to the Orange Box compilation as a filler...

This is a copy of Koudelka I've borrowed - a long forgotten PS1 game. Why is it special? It's special because it's a Japanese RPG set in Aberystwyth. Or at least a Japanese manga version of Aberystwyth, written by someone who's never been there, who just saw it on a map and thought, 'ooh, how exotic.' The lead character was born in Abergynolwyn for pity's sake! This should be a laugh.

(OK, I've mentioned this game before, but never seen it until today.)

Update: Don't bother. It's dreadful. Appalling graphics (even for the PS1!), no life to the plot, no action apart from randomly stumbling around hard-to-see cluttered rooms with a static viewpoint in search of unlikely items, and random encounters of the worst sort.