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Trends in gaming

on 9 Dec, 2008 in Games

A nice overview of the current state of gaming if you haven’t been following the industry too closely lately.

Some quick takeaways:

  • Over 50% (US) adults now play video games. 40% + are female.
  • Gaming industry is worth 34 billion worldwide – bigger than movies, music & books.
  • Closer ties between gaming and movie industries. Gaming starting to pull talent from the film industry as well as create it’s own entertainment franchises (including movie spin-offs).
  • World of Warcraft really is a phenomenon. With 10 million+ active subscribers, it’s over 10 times more popular than any other MMOG.

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Galcon for iPhone: Pure genius

on 3 Oct, 2008 in Fun, Games, Geeky

If you’ve got an iPhone or iPod touch I’ve got three words for you: Buy this game. Galcon is smart, challenging and deep, and makes the most out of the iPhone’s touch-screen and internet connectivity.

If you’ve ever played the boardgame RISK you’ll be familar with the gameplay: take over the map by moving your troops from territory to territory, the bigger the territory the more extra troops you’ll get from it. But where RISK is turn-based and slow, Galcon is realtime and pure frenzy. In this way it crosses the line into what can only be described as “action-strategy” – an ever-elusive gaming genre that’s so hard to get right, but so good when it’s pulled off.

While Glacon is a fun single-player game with a few different modes to keep things interesting, it’s in multiplayer mode that it really shines. The unpredicability and emotional involvement of human adversaries makes the game endlessly replayable. So far I’ve always found plenty of online opponents, and because of the game style you never have to wait long for a game.

Although I rate Galcom as the best game out there for the iPhone at this time – Rolando is due out soon, and judging from the trailers looks set to be extremely entertaining and popular. We’ll have to wait and see.

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Learn to code by playing games

on 19 Sep, 2008 in Flash, Fun, Games, Geeky

Click to view game

I’ve often thought that games are good at teaching you how to code, because they force you to identify and order game rules and rule patterns in your brain. But this fun little puzzle game called Light-bot literally gets you thinking like a programmer by requiring you to string together movements into reusable functions to complete each level. Oh and I’m stuck on the level above, can a real programmer please help me!

UPDATE: I managed to get past this level eventually, of course I was looking at it all wrong. Out of interest, this was level 10 of 12, so it’s a fairly short game and well worth putting aside half an hour or so to have a play with. I managed to get through the whole game by only using 185 moves – if you can beat that you’re bloody legend!

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