Wow. Here’s a game I’m really looking forward to playing. Outcast: Second Contact is a modern remake of the 1999 science fiction adventure-game Outcast. I loved and played though all of the original, which at the time had a great story, top notch voxel graphics and a live recorded orchestral score.
Outcast: Second Contact will be shown during Gamescom 2016 in Cologne, from August 17th to 19th. The game is set for release in early 2017 on PC, Playstation 4 and Xbox One.
I love a good game any day and here is one that I enjoyed immensely, Firewatch.
I have to admit I kind of missed all the hype when it was released back in February. Somehow I thought it would be about looking out for and report wildfires. Turns out that’s not at all what it’s about. Instead it’s a really beautiful mystery game set in the Wyoming wilderness, where “your only emotional lifeline is the person on the other end of a handheld radio”. Great story and.. yeah a really good game. Available for Windows, Mac, Linux and Playstation 4. Check it out if you haven’t already.
When I was a teenager in the early to mid 80s, the only place where you could play really good games in Sweden were either in the arcades or at the local burger joint. Playing games like Gyruss, Ghosts’n Goblins and Bombjack was what converted me into the gamer I am today.
At one point I actually owned a couple of arcade cabinets as well. In the mid 90s they started to become cheap enough for a private consumer to buy. Emulation was still not good enough so you had to buy real arcade boards on Ebay. Each board contained one game so you could imagine the space this would take up when you got 15-20 games.
Anyhow, the documentary The Lost Arcade is about the legendary Chinatown Fair in New York City. One of the last arcades in the western world. I haven’t seen it yet, but will as soon as I get the chance. Now watch the trailer below!
I got this in my feed a few weeks ago and boy does it look awesome. The PocketChip is like the Commodore 64 all over again, only more hipster and in 2016. Also it’s a lot cheaper than the C64 back in the day, only $49 intro price.
So what does it do? Well, games of course and there seems to be lots of them. And it comes with tools to create your own games or change the code of all existing. Also you can make chip tunes on it, and there’s a sequencer for creating more “professionally” sounding tunes. Click here for more resources on Pico-8 game development.
I also like the technical limitations of the device, as it says on their website: “The harsh limitations of Pico-8 are carefully chosen to be fun to work with (and) encourage small but expressive designs…”
When I was 16-17 years old I wanted to work as a computer games developer. This was in the mid-’80s and Sweden didn’t have the games industry of today. The founding members of Digital Illusions (Battlefield etc) were still a team of game crackers calling themselves The Silents.
If you wanted to work as a games developer in Sweden you either had to land a freelance job or do it all by yourself and then try to get some interest from a British distributor or games company. My first try in game development was a space shooter for the Commodore 64 that I did together with my friend Stefan Valter. We took too much time developing it (due to school, life, etc), so by the time we had playable a demo ready, the Commodore 64 computer was phased out by the Amiga.
My next try to get into the game industry was to develop an Amiga game together with my friend, Johan Lundin. It also took way too long to finish, because of, you know… life and other such things. But, we did actually finish and release it, in 1995, just in time for the big Commodore bankruptcy and the commercial death of the Amiga. All companies started to move on to the PC so good luck finding anyone interested in our Amiga game. We did actually sign a contract with a distributor, but that’s another story. In the end, we decided to release it as shareware and forget about the whole thing and the thousands of hours we invested in it. Let’s be frank. It was a flop. There were some reviews. People hated it. End of story.
This game was called Cybergames (This was before the unrelated Cyber Games tournaments started). Thanks to the internet it’s still out there. Today I found a Polish review of the game, from 2006, which is kind of amazing considering Cybergames was released 15 years ago.
If you know polish, here’s the review. If not, you could always look at the pretty pictures. ;-)
