Video Games

Sometimes I wonder whether or not ambition is a good quality for game developers to have. While it's apparent that innovation keeps the gaming industry from going stale, there's a big difference between actually being innovative and just really wanting to be innovative. In the worst cases a developer can start to sound like a blowhard, promising things that will never actually come to fruition. Take Peter Molineux, founder of Lionhead Studios and perennial promiser of the sky. He began as one of the true pioneers of video game design with imaginative titles like Populus and Magic Carpet. But by the time his much-maligned god-game Black & White came out, no one actually expected his games to be everything he'd cracked them up to be.

Molineux isn't alone in talking up games that don't deliver. The nature of video game design lends itself to overreaching. Read more

The advent of high speed Internet has breathed new life into many genres of video game. The first-person shooter has become something of an electronic sport and role playing games have blossomed into Massively Multiplayer Online experiences.

But what are MMO's if not the next step in the logical progression of the classic dungeon crawler genre? Teams of fantasy warriors slashing through an endless stream of monsters to get treasure and just for the fun of it... that's a premise that's practically as old as video games themselves. Early Atari romps like 1975's Adventure proved there was a lot of potential in the genre, while more vivid later efforts like The Legend of Zelda in 1987 cemented dungeon crawlers for long-term viability.

But before Nintendo gave Link his first maddening romp through the Water Temple, Atari produced an arcade game that would inspire some of the most popular titles in history. 1985's Gauntlet was revolutionary in a lot of ways. One of the most prominent was its Texas Instruments voice-producing sound chip. Read more

As video games have gotten more mainstream, the ever-increasing demographic of players has caused the industry to operate much like Hollywood. The games that sell today are shiny, action-packed and at best decidedly middle-brow. Because of this, that old PC mainstay, the adventure game, has gone the way of the dinosaur. Back in the 1980's and early 90's, the most impressive games had low pixel count graphics and a text parser at the bottom of the screen. They were excellent for their storylines and the sheer cleverness of their unique gameplay. There was no such thing as a predictable adventure game.

Before graphics came into play, the text parser was all that distinguished a game from a short story. Companies like Sierra Games dominated the fledgling industry. Because computers were expensive and rare enough to not exactly qualify as kid-accessible toys in the early 80's, Sierra created a few adults-only games. Read more

Little Big Planet is a fantastically cute game for the Playstation 3 which is suitable for the whole family. Released towards the end of 2008 it is a puzzle game featuring platform game-play and allows for a huge amount of user-generated content.

Players control on screen avatars known as Sackboys or Sackgirls and they can run around, jump, hang onto objects to swing and fly and also drag or push objects in order to navigate their way through the diverse levels. Starting off in your own personal pod you can play through a story mode which features fifty pre-built levels ranging from small mini-games to large involved environments.

Visually speaking the game is absolutely gorgeous and the Sackpeople are super cute with terrific animations and loads of personality. The imaginative backdrops are extremely creative and the graphics are fantastic with objects crafted from various materials each with their own unique physics properties. Read more