Blake was snooping around the Infendo offices the other day asking the writers about original IP due out for the Wii this year, and I was honestly less than helpful. I think I grunted something about how Disaster: Day of Crisis might be out this year and then went back to playing Super Mario Bros. 2, which I had dusted off in a fit of nostalgia over the weekend.

Unfortunately, I forgot about De Blob. Shame on me, because it’s looking more and more like one of the true gems of 2008 for the system and a defining moment for developer Blue Tongue (THQ publishing). (more…)

For a moment in late December, and just for a moment, I was transported back in time more than 15 years to a period in my life when desktop computer towers had Turbo buttons, clocked out at around 44 MHz and even the nails-on-chalkboard ping of a consumer-grade 14.4 modem was still a twinkle in some telcom engineer’s eye. It was, truly, a frightening time with much uncertainty.

But this momentary time travel, contained wholly in my mind’s eye, was not so much a sadomasochistic jaunt into non-digital caveman times as it was one into a time period that also happened to be steeped in rich video game/PC gaming nostalgia. You see, while the technology we used was enveloped in an now-unimaginable Dark Age, the game genres we played upon it were some of the most imaginative the world had ever seen. Within minutes of loading a new game, we gamers were transported to fantastical new worlds complete with pirates or space quests, and the mechanical wheezing of a struggling 250 MB hard drive was relegated to being a minor annoyance in the background.

One of the earliest and best examples of this phenomenon was the point-and-click adventure game.  (more…)

While driving amongst the frozen snowbanks of Massachusetts today, I had an epiphany. Or a revelation. Or something.

Basically, I wanted to play a new, updated, wonderfully 2-D version of Jaleco’s Super Nintendo maserpiece King Arthur’s World on either the Wii or the DS.

Since I’m a sucker for video games (Nintendo in particular), I figured this could be the beginning of a series of meandering short posts about games for old Nintendo systems that would do well on the company’s new systems. Call it the WiiWare folder, but in King Arthur’s case, I’m willing to make a DS exception. Just this once.

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A new article over at the Escapist got me a tad excitable today because it features one my favorite genres: the adventure game. More specifically, it deals with how, over the years since text-based adventures were the norm, the adventure game has become, in a word, cluttered.

The Escapist’s Atul Varma:

Adventure games, at their core, are about solving puzzles. The fun lies in figuring out how the pieces fit together, not going through mind-numbing tedium to figure out where the pieces are. As adventure games ascend to higher resolutions and more complex, realistic environments, players have to spend more time figuring out what their tools are rather than actually using them to play the game.

Of course, all this isn’t to say visuals are bad; it’s rather that today’s adventure game developers don’t usually understand the difference between making an adventure game that’s just pretty and one that’s fun to play.

This is a normal progression. Developers today, I think, are still casting out their wide nets to see what resonates best with gamers. Pretty but short? Cluttered with 3D or cel shaded? There’s no right answer to any of those questions, but there will be something that “just works” in the near future (my two cents anyway).

A good place to start? The DS has several lukewarm titles already out in 2006/2007 that are a solid effort. Zack and Wiki on the Wii is looking promising too: not too cluttered, not too loud, and above all, hands-on experiences seem to indicate it’s, dare I say it, fun to play.