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The Slowdown

A blog by vrap in General

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About this blog

A blog for those who spend more time thinking about gaming than gaming

Entries in this blog

Top Five Left 4 Dead 1/2 Custom Campaigns

In August 2010, Chet Faliszek announced Valve would begin to rotate biweekly custom-made campaigns on the official servers of Left 4 Dead 2: Every two weeks we are going to feature a new community campaign on our servers. We will feature one campaign at a time to make it is easier to find games. We?ll be keeping it featured for two weeks so people can familiarize themselves with the maps for competitive play. Though we wholeheartedly agreed with Valve on their choice to start their campaign
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Prepare The Canons

Fear the Reaper Not much longer now before the Reapers arrive to wipe out galactic civilization. Mass Effect 3 is almost upon us, and I?m hardly ready. For anticipation is not just a case of checking the calendar and willing the days to advance quicker, there is work to be done before March 6th comes around. Few games in history have featured what is the Mass Effect series? main selling point: the ability to carry your save forward into the sequels in order to retain your character and the dec
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Isaac and the ?Grotesque Body Horrors?

In his PopMatters article ?Fearing God, Fearing the Body: The Theology of ‘The Binding of Isaac’?, G. Christopher Williams discusses various aspects of Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl?s ingenious (and mildly blasphemous) Zelda/Roguelike hybrid, The Binding of Isaac. Although his reading of the game astutely homes in on the “meatier” parts of Isaac – that is, the implications of the game?s loathsome representation of the corporeal -, I do nevertheless want to point out some omissions in William
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Rockstar Games and Genre

This brief discussion on Rockstar Games and their use of generic conventions originates from a very intriguing comment found on our favourite website in the whole wide wo…web, Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Over there, my half-assed ass-essment of the company as ?soulless? in my earlier post, On The Love Letter, was earnestly brought into question. The question is as good as any and the topic actually warrants a brief discussion. This time, I am not referring to Rockstar Games as ?faceless?, “insensitiv
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On The Love Letter

I want to take the time to briefly celebrate the spectacular achievements of a minigame currently (and very, very deservedly) making the rounds in the video gaming blogosphere. The game in question is axcho and knivel?s Flixel game The Love Letter. (Go on, open the link and play the game right away. Do it! Just get back here once you’re done.) The Love Letter deserves to be played because it manages to grasp something of the Real ™, of the very nature of human interaction, in a way that is rarel
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Dear Esther Review

2008?s Dear Esther, a Source modification developed by thechineseroom, originally a research project group at the University of Portsmouth, was perhaps the most singular game release of that year. In a sense, its arrival brought with it some degree of legitimacy to modifications with narrative and writing in mind. Encouraged by the game?s overwhelmingly positive reception and feedback, and the initiative of esteemed level designer Robert Briscoe, writer and designer Dan Pinchbeck set out to rem
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Quote of the Day: Jim Rossignol

The message for the games industry is clear: you don?t have to have pretensions to art ? because here is a game that could not be more unpretentious in an artistic sense ? for your game to have a serious message. Even the manshooter can be about something, without having to carefully distance itself with irony or hyperbolic absurdity. But crucially there is also scope to do shooters differently on a mechanical level. They do not have to be linear rollercoasters, nor multiplayer menageries. They
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Quote of the Day: Rich Lawrence

Most of the key people involved in this publish, on the game team and our platform side, have been here very long days and every day leading up to this. I just had to tell some folks that had been here for 30+ hours to go get some sleep. If there was any way I thought we could be certain you’d be able to play with everything correct tonight, we would have done that. -Rich Lawrence, SOE CTO, on the EverQuest II F2P downtime </img> </img> </img> </img> </img> Source
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Quote of the Day: Richard Garriott

No, I did all the art, I did all the sound effects, I wrote every line of text, I wrote every line of code, I wrote all the manuals, the prequels and all the way up though Ultima 4 were almost entirely solo endeavors, in every aspect. It was a one-man band. -Richard Garriott, in interview with IndustryGamers </img> </img> </img> </img> </img> Source
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Quote of the Day: Terry Gilliam

?You just sit there and watch the explosions,? Gilliam said. ?I couldn?t tell you what the movie was about. The movie hammers the audience into submission. They are influenced by video games, but in video games at least you are immersed; in these movies you?re left out. In films, there?s so much overt fantasy now that I don?t watch a lot because everything is possible now. There?s no tension there.” -Terry Gilliam @ Hero Complex </img> </img> </img> </img> </img> S
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When Are Bad Ideas Good Ideas? Goats vs Nazis and Dropsy

Kickstarter, bless ‘em, have made possible many projects that would have been much, much harder for indie developers to initiate only a few measly years ago. We’ve seen plenty of really interesting projects receive funding via the platform, including Kentucky Route Zero, Octodad 2, Star Command and Blade Symphony. Goats vs Nazis, then, is the latest game project to kickstart their development with the platform. I don’t even know where to start – or end, for that matter. Certainly, Goats vs Naz
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Rage in Numbers

At the time of writing, the main support topic for Rage on the Steam forums has been viewed an amazing 475,000 times. The comparable thread on Bethesda’s forums – a whopping 140,000 views. In addition to the most egregious issues with texture popping above, Vsync, Anisotropic filtering and texture quality settings were only added in a patch. The first (1st) and only (1) patch. Certainly, omitting these more fine-tuned customization features in this day and age is not in the least unheard of, bu
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Ensnaring Customers: Spiderweb Carnage Sale

I’ll let Jeff Vogel, the man behind the Seattle-based RPG game company Spiderweb Software, do the talking: Glorious October Carnage Sale! In celebration of a fantastic year (releasing Avadon and putting out our first titles on Steam and the iPad), we are permanently lowering the prices of everything we sell by 20% or more! Even better, for the entire month of October, all of our products for Windows and Mac will be 10% off! In his blog, Vogel also outlines his motivations for the change in
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The Indie Stone: Brave-Faced & Hard-Headed

“Ah, but The Indie Stone is a brave-faced stone.” -Brendan Caldwell In what can only be described (in suitably hyperbolic tones) as the most unfortunate development process ever (Duke Nukem Forever, you say? Ptsch! Ptschhh!), the Indie Stone have had their dev laptops stolen. According to the team, the latest update – and as such, months of work – to Project Zomboid was lost due to the game being backed up between the two stolen machines, yet seldom externally. A massive, repetitive witch-hunt b
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The Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle

I was almost going to let this pass by without making a note. Another Humble Bundle has gone up, but it’s one of those in-between ones without a number; moreoever, it was initially offering only one main game, which felt somewhat off and going against the community vibe that the previous bundles have had. But when that one game happens to be my favourite indie game of the year, and on top of that they go and add my second favourite indie game of the year, I just can’t deny it acknowledgement. Th
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Hard Reset Review

Disclaimer: Blade Runner was not harmed in the writing of this review. For those potentially coming fresh off Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the cyberpunk action-adventure of the moment (also included on our list of recent cyberpunk titles), Flying Wild Hog?s début throwback FPS Hard Reset might take some getting used to. After all, the game?s name could and should be taken in reference to its status as an earnest homage to ?all those forgotten Dooms, Quakes, and Painkillers?. What the ex-members
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Do Ya Feel Lucky, Cyberpunk?

Cyberpunk is much-loved here at the Slowdown. If there?s one thing I and Martyn have in common, it?s our fondness for cyberpunk masterpiece Blade Runner. Ridley Scott?s neo-noir thriller has had a considerable influence on the genre since its release almost 3 decades ago. Neuromancer and Ghost in the Shell are two other favourite stories of mine that have inspired countless movies and games. So it has been a pleasure to notice a growing number of games cropping up recently that celibrate cyberpu
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Rumble In The Bundle

The Humble Indie Bundle is back with a new sale in the name of indie games and charity. You know the drill, pay whatever you want for a set of DRM-free games, and divide your payment into portions going towards the developers, charity, and the bundle initiative itself. I?m a little late in posting but fret not, there is still plenty of time before this offer expires. As is the norm for this project, the reception has overwhelming and the sales numbers have already crossed the $1 million mark.
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Welcome To Earth

The Mass Effect series is on its way to becoming an epic trilogy, perhaps the most cohesive trilogy in games if it achieves what it set out to do. BioWare first introduced the sci fi saga in 2007, with a promise of a story that would span three games, each a self-contained episode of a much larger overarching tale. Moreover, they promised a personalized experience that recognized the player’s decisions along the way and shaped the world and events around those decisions, right up to the conclusi
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There Is Something In The Sky

E3 2011 is in just over a week, which is just enough time for me to catch us up on some games that I am very much looking forward to. We’re just about halfway through the year and there have been some great titles already, but some of my most anticipated releases are yet to come. We’ll start with one that has recently had a fresh round of press coverage ahead of its E3 showing. The last time we looked at Irrational Games’ BioShock Infinite, Martyn walked us through the newly unveiled teaser tra
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Fractiv, Offsetting

Anybody still fondly recall Project Offset, the FPS/RPG Intel bought for internal development? Unfortunately, this grand and ambitious project got canned by Intel quite some time back. The good news, though? Surprisingly, old members of the Offset Studio have already set up new shop in Santa Clara, California under the moniker Fractiv and have even released their first game, Lane Splitter, for the iPhone and iPad (with Android to follow shortly). As cheesy as its premise is, the game !The bad
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No Deal for Dead Island

? supposedly created by the Glasgow-based animation studio Axis Animation ? has already been viewed far over 3 million times on Youtube, with an equal amount of tweets to go. Its popularity has, in turn, turned up quite a fair bit of misinformation that now surrounds the project. As things stand, a clarification to our earlier report is in order: Unlike previously reported, no movie deal for the game has yet to be made.In speaking to LA Times? 24 Frames, Koch Media representative Malte Wagener s
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Gemini Rue (P)review

Gemini Rue, an IGF 2010 Student Showcase winner under its previous title, Boryokudan Rue, is Joshua Nuernberger?s first full-length commercial title that successfully follows up on the promising path already travelled by the developer’s first adventure game title, La Croix Pan. Dave Gilbert?s Wadjet Eye Games is to publish the game today, 24th of February, and a demo was made exclusively available at GameFront yesterday. The game, a film noir/sci-fi adventure, is of two separate halves: Players
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