Busy in Japan

I’ve been swamped with work and moving to my new apartment since arriving about a month ago and I have had little time to update my blogs… I will update once I get Internet at my apartment in a month’s time…despite Japan being a technologically advanced nation, there are still tons of procedural paperwork

Siren®: New Translation

Developers have had little success in building games that make gamers cry; news of David Jaffe embarking on a quest to create a game that will make gamers cry in 2005 has thus far, resulted in nothing more than that 1 article. Personally, I am much more fascinated with the emotion of fear. I am…

code::XtremeApps:: 2008

If I were in Singapore, I would sign up for this in a heartbeat….

Tower Bloxx on Facebook

Digital Chocolate is a developer of mobile games and applications notable for a several quality mobile games like 3D Extreme Air Snowboarding, Mafia Wars Yakuza and Tower Bloxx among others. The company is founded by Trip Hawkins, a serial entrepreneur who also founded EA and 3DO. Digital Chocolate recently released a Facebook version of Tower…

Lego Bionicle Defenders

Does the above screengrab from the mobile game “Lego Bionicle Defenders” developed by Kiloo and published by Disney Mobile Studios resemble any Lego game you’ve seen? Other than the use of “Lego Bionicle” licence , I don’t see anything within the game remotely resembling Lego. The gameplay itself is a cookie-cutter replica of the “Tower…

“Level Loading” versus “Level Generating”

In an interesting webinar hosted by Gamasutra and Game Developer Magazine, Chris Delay, co-founder and lead architect for Introversion Software, discusses the use of procedural content in the gaming industry. Procedural content creation is not a new technique and has been around since the time when games were distributed on floppy disks with extremely limited…

Unity on iPhone

Unity, a 3D game development tool provider, managed to get pass the gatekeepers at Apple and squeezed a deal to support game development for iPhone. Unity joins the secretive list of companies including EA, Sega and Epocrates already accepted into Apple’s iPhone Developers Program. Press Release from Unity

Observing the behaviour of terrorism with World of Warcraft

It’s nothing new to have groups of disruptive users logging in to MMORPGs with the primary objective of disrupting the gaming experience of unsuspecting players. Given the mix of dependent and independent variables in a game like WoW, researchers and scientists are observing just how these virtual terrorists act and think in order to better…

The fascination with widgets

Rockstar Games released a few radio widgets featuring music from their upcoming game release GTA IV: WKTT on the game’s website. I especially liked the retro-80s soundtrack and tongue-in-cheek radio stations featured in GTA Vice City but GTA San Andreas was horrible cause I don’t “get” the appeal of the Hip-Hop culture. Word Yo!

Management change in Second Life

4 months after Second Life’s CTO Cory Ondrejka left the company in December 2007 citing differences in strategic vision and 2 months after Cyn Skyberg’s promotion from Director of Customer Relations to Vice-President of Customer Relations, Philip Rosedale has announced his decision to “look for a new leader with more “management and leadership expertise” who…

Casual Gaming Trends (as of March 2008)

In the article “Games Girls Play”, it is stated that $2.25 billion was spent on casual games in 2007 with 54% being females over the age of 35 who are more willing to pay for these games. If we assume, on the high side, that each casual game costs US$20, this means that 112.5 million…

EA’s Spore and Sega’s Super Monkey Ball demos running on iPhone

Apple recently released the iPhone SDK and roped in both EA and Sega to demonstrate a version of Spore and Super Monkey Ball developed for the iPhone at the Apple March 6 Event. The embedded video shows EA’s Spore demonstration. The embedded video shows that Sega’s Super Monkey Ball demonstration. To make this entire series…