Richard Naik's blog

Disclosure: This post has nothing to do with gender, sexism, or the like.

Playing inFamous made me think of other games that I've played where I have the ability to make choices that effect the story or other parts of the game—to be "good" or "evil" so to speak. And after some thought on the subject, I discovered I was hungry and made a sandwich. After that, games such as Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, BioShock, Morrowind/Oblivion, and Fallout 3 came to mind. The question that I pose is this—what makes a good way to allow the player to "choose" their path while not pandering to ideological extremes and still providing an engrossing experience? Ideally I would be able to chose virtually any action I wanted, and have the game respond accordingly regardless of what I chose. Is this even possible? Or has it been done already?

Finished The Longest Journey last night, and it was fantastic, if not a bit awkward at times. The "battles" are strange in that since I can't fail, I can stand completely still and do nothing while the monster just looks at me and waves its arms. I'm aware that Dreamfall has a combat mechanic but my friends tell me that it isn't very well done. I'm curious if something akin to Shadow of the Colossus (which I haven't played) or the new Prince of Persia would work here.

Team Fortress 2's "classless" update dropped recently, adding the new King of the Hill game mode, several new maps and some pretty significant class changes (despite being classless), the most prominent of which are the return of the Scout's double jump while using the Sandman (at the expense of 30 health) and allowing the Engineer to repair one end of a teleporter (including removing Spy sappers) by repairing the other.

I very much enjoy Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2. I have over 100 hours logged both games and I continue to play today. So, when I first heard the announcement of Left 4 Dead 2 less than a year after the release of the original, my thoughts were of the skeptical variety. A sequel? Really? They hadn’t even released the map tools for the first game at the time. And where the hell is all the DLC Valve promised?

First off, allow me to introduce myself as this is my first "official" blog post. The name is Richard, and I've been here about two months and it's been fantastic so far. I think that's enough about me for now, so let's talk about something that's actually cool.

Recently I reviewed Aquaria, a fantastic title from indie developer Bit-Blot and winner of top honors at the 2007 IGF awards.

Aquaria is currently available only on the PC and Mac, through both their website and Steam download. The minds behind the game, Alec Holowka and Derek Yu, were kind enough to speak with me about their work and their company.