No Time To Play
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Weekly Links #3

It was a week with few gaming news that caught my eyes, and I was busy with other creative work, but what's there is pretty awesome.

Let's start with a game that's just too unique not to mention: Heroes of a Broken Land, a combination of strategy, city building and... first person dungeon crawling. I've always liked hybrid games like that, and seeing that people still make them was nice; the gaming world is way too fixated on genres nowadays.

Next we have Matt Chat, a beloved game critic, expressing some doubt about the measure of success. As an amateur game developer myself, and more recently writer, I can certainly sympathize: yes, we've all been conditioned to think that "success" means throngs of followers and a fat bank account. Whereas for example all I have is a piece of software mentioned in Wikipedia and a few other bits and pieces that people constantly seek out. But as I wrote long ago, real success is long term. And as Matt Chat points out, you can't please everyone anyway. Unless, I would add, you cater to the lowest common denominator, and we all know where that leads. So my intention and advice is to persist, persist, persist. Not that it's any guarantee of success, but without persistence failure is a given. And not even trying is just too sad.

Another fascinating piece of writing is Shamus Young explaining just how powerful modern computers are (hint: it's downright scary) and what game developers could do with it instead of stupidly and unsustainably try and render ever more polygons. I'd comment more on it, but it's a rather big topic, so maybe some other time.

Last but not least, here's a video of a game a friend sent me -- a tournament-based, one-on-one 2D fencing deathmatch, like the first Prince of Persia on steroids, except with even worse graphics. And yet it looks crazy fun. Lucky we went through this indie revolution as of late, eh? Enjoy, and see you next week.