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My Top 5 Most Anticipated Games of 2010

Kurt — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 05:40:49 +0000

It seems like everyone about now is talking about lists, making lists themselves, linking to lists of lists, or listing to one side while list-ening to a podcast about another list.

Shut up, it’s been too long since I’ve written anything. Bear with it.

I figured instead of listing what I thought was the best of 2009, I’ll take it to the future with the games I’m most excited about. As a game developer (especially working at perfectionist-filled, and often haterade-drinking Naughty Dog) it becomes difficult to enjoy games and anticipate things being awesome. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a trailer and scoffed: “probly gonna suck”. So I find that me being excited about a game is a rare occasion worth writing about!

It will be interesting to see at the end of the year what I really enjoyed, and what really DID suck.

Red Read Redemption
Right now, this has got to be my most anticipated game. There really aren’t that many western games made, and I don’t understand why. I remember playing Red Dead Revolver and really enjoying it, and even Lethal Enforcers 2 on the genesis had all the crazy wild-west shootout stuff that’s never really been replicated recently. The most recent trailer looks to have train robberies, gatlin guns, shooting bears, dragging dudes behind your horse(!), and most promising of all: an intriguing story. Just hope they refined the hell out of the GTA shooting. At the very least, I hope it sparks a resurgence in the “Western” sub-genre.

God of War 3
It may be an embarrassment to admit this, but I had never actually played God of War until the remastered collection just came out. I now see what all the fuss is about. GoW1 freakin’ holds up! The combat is gorgeous! (in a game design-y way, not a visual way) The story is simple, but I got pulled into it pretty easily. And the final boss fight was insane! The potential for what can be done on PS3 fills my imagination with all kinds of cool and crazy shit. Especially with these Titans I keep hearing about. I guess I should finish GoW2 first.

Medal of Honor
I have hope that the reboot of this franchise will take MoH back to what made the first games so amazing to me: an awesome story, and a sense that one man is changing the course of a massive war. It’s modern day, and it’s afghanistan so I hope it’s based on real events. I mean, it’s no WWII but grounding it in reality makes it soo much better. I guess I’m excited because I think “it’s time” for EA to take back the war game crown. I believe modern war and good story can co-exist, and I think EA believes again! All has been lost, you’ve been wallowing in the dark night of the soul, now let Act 3 begin, find synthesis and give MW a run for their money! I’m rooting for you!

Split Second
As a huge racing game fan, it’s good to see the genre getting new life. How to make a better racing game: amazing crashes? No, Burnout has that covered. Super-realism? Uh uh. GT and Forza will crush you. The answer: blow up every fucking thing that’s NOT the car. Buildings, planes, the track itself! I know I will never get my beloved Need for Speed shortcut-laden, jump-filled, exotic-car-infused “good ‘ol days” back, but this looks like a step in the right direction. I LOOOVED Pure, so Blackrock’s take on hazard-filled street racing should be nothing less than fuckin’ rad.

Gears of War 3
This hasn’t been announced yet, and no I don’t have any “insider” info, I’m just assuming that it’s highly likely that a gears 3 will drop in 2010. Believe it or not, one of my most enjoyable experiences of 2008 was playing Gears 2 co-op with a stranger the night of release, and finishing it in one sitting. I don’t care what anyone says, I thought a level set inside a monsters digestive system was pretty frickin’ awesome. I respect Gears for knowing exactly what it is (testosterone, in game form) and just going all out with it. I’m curious where they go from here, gameplay wise. More traversal? Stealth? More manly chainsaws? No matter what they come up with, I’ll definitely be there day one with a friend.

Others Worth Noting
It’s worth mentioning that I’m super amped about Bayonetta, but it comes out Tuesday, so my anticipation will be quenched. And it’s a waste of energy to anticipate anything from Valve like HL: Episode 3 or Portal 2 as I’m sure both are years out. But if they did announce for 2010, those would go to the top of my list.

Sadly Un-amped About…
After playing the recent demo, I can’t seem to get myself excited for Gran Turismo 5. This is a small tragedy because I’ve been a die-hard GT fan since the first. Even the graphics didn’t excite me. Probly Dirt 2 spoiling me on fancy damage modeling and more arcadey gameplay. It’s probably just been too long. The desire will come back.

Since I’m not a big RPG fan, I can’t get my panties in a bunch over FFXIII or Mass Effect 2. But these games may just be big enough and talked about at the office enough that I take the plunge. We’ll see.

Mashups of the Day

Kurt — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 19:35:14 +0000

Apparently out there on the internet, unbeknownst to me, there are entire sites dedicated to mashups. “Mashup” of course is one of those words people love to hate, but for better or worse it is attached to anything on the internet that uses an api and is remotely cool. I guess DiggKiller qualifies. In the past few days, I’ve been selected as a “Mashup of the Day” on two different sites. The first is programmableweb.com. I found out about this by checking the referrer traffic for my site and noticing the domain, and checking it out. The site must not have that much traffic, because I never heard of it before and they only forwarded me about 60 hits. Also, there are currently no “comments” on the page, a good indicator of anemic traffic.

The second site looked a little more credible. It’s mashupawards.com and I was notified of my award through an email (which means they actually had to visit the site, read my little blurb at the bottom and find my email address). They even urged me to choose a cool badge to display on my site, like this one:

At first I thought this was a lame excuse to get more traffic to a second-rate site, by picking a cool thing everyday and then linking back to their site with these awards. It’s a classic technique to increase traffic and google ranking. But then I noticed that the site actually looks pretty badass, and they don’t have a single advertisement on it. How to they make money? Who knows.

I guess the thing that’s truly amazing is that in the land of web 2.0, sites exist that give out awards every day that are HAND PICKED by the site’s creators, instead of being automagically chosen by user voting and complex promotion algorithms. It’s refreshing to see some people kickin’ it old school, and to me, kind of gives these awards more value. I just remembered fuzzwich does that too. Maybe it’s a new wave of retro-humanized editorial voting systems? Maybe I just spend too much time on digg.

I was wondering why the number of plays tripled overnight…

Kurt — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:16:33 +0000

This is kinda cool. My game DiggKiller is now considered a “hot new game” on Kongregate, and thusly appears on their front page. See if you can find it:

Good shit, if you haven’t played it yet do it!

DiggKiller is now on Kongregate

Kurt — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 02:49:27 +0000

Kongregate is a pretty sick flash games community where a bunch of people play a bunch of flash games. I just submitted DiggKiller to it, now that the digg-craze has died down a bit, I’m reaching a new audience. Plus they share their ad revenue with me. YAY! Doesn’t look too bad, despite being scrunched a little smaller than the original size. Had to finagle some of the code to get it to work, and for some reason, the hi scores throw security errors when they try to load, despite the sounds, and the digg stories loading from offsite. Whatever. It’s cool.

Check it out on Kongregate

or Play it on my site (hi scores work)

This is epic..

Kurt — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 14:20:02 +0000

If you go to digg.com RIGHT NOW, you’ll see this on the top 10 sidebar:

.. that is all.

It’s sooo.. meta!

Kurt — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 10:45:39 +0000

So I’m pretty sure my game has officially “blown up” on digg. Right now it’s getting close to 800 diggs and rising quickly. The cool part about this is.. since the game is a popular gaming story, it shows up in the game itself! And people have caught on to cheating and have starting posting “fuck suck colbert environment epic kevin rose ipod” (these are the keywords that trigger powerups) comments all over the place on digg to give themselves a helping hand when they play. I’ve got to say, it’s pretty cool to be blasting away at a story in my game that IS the game.. it’s kind of like, the matrix or something. No, not really. Image below:

..and when I kill it, I get every powerup in the game simultaneously!!.. truly epic.

If you haven’t played yet, click to play!!

DiggKiller: The Game

Kurt — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 14:30:39 +0000

This is what I’ve been working on for awhile. It’s a sick 2D space shooter that implements the digg api. You shoot at enemies that increase in difficulty as they increase in diggs, and you collect comments from the stories that are scanned for keywords to give you powerups. It’s pretty cool, you should play it!

Click Here to Play it!