Canalside Studios a student-run commercial games development company, staffed with students from the University of Huddersfield.
They’ve just placed joint second in the Microsofts Dream/Build/Play XNA competition, which should lead to their game being published on Xbox Live.
We bought a Wii on my birthday - not as a birthday present, just because we had wanted one for a while, and they happened to be in stock in game that day.
We love it, but have a few issues:
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Finally! I knew those 360 Connect guys would come through.
HD video streaming
Connect360 now supports WMV+WMA video sharing, allowing you to stream HD quality video right to your living room!
Yup! just dump you WMV format movies in your Movie folder - job done.
Caveats as always - you need the free Flip4Mac installed (which I described can be used to convert to WMV files (you can’t convert with the free version), and the WMV files need to be in a format the 360 can read.
This took them about 4 weeks to integrate - good going! Buy this product folks - $20 (about £12) well spent.
This weekend saw the launch of the Phantasy Star Online for the Xbox 360 - a week of free play (apart from next Tuesday when Xbox Live goes off for a day for ‘maintenance’). When I got home from work on Friday the demo was ready to grab, so I started the download. Several hours later close to a gig was there, and I started the game.
Well, I tried to. I couldn’t connect. Perhaps the game doesn’t begin until Saturday, I thought, so I tried on Saturday.
I couldn’t connect.
Sunday - no joy.
It seems I’m not the only person with this problem - Joystiq reports the same, and a simple search on Google reveals the same.
I suppose it could be the sheer weight of people trying to get online, but since the game is due to be released in a week this better not be the problem. Except now it has coloured my opinion, making me think the servers won’t be able to cope. Good going Sega - with this and the utter garbage that was released as the Sonic demo you are doing a great job at not selling your games.
I’d just popped over to WE last night to find that he is writing the Castlevania animated film.
Apparently I can now tell people that I’m writing a CASTLEVANIA animated film for Project 51 Productions.
So, um. Yeah.
Project 51 will be setting up a production blog for CASTLEVANIA in the near future.
This is the closest thing we can have to a guarantee that this won’t be pish.
You know, I managed to write Consolevania in both my text and headline. Those Weegies have corrupted my soul.
I’m starting to hate Dead Rising. Some parts of it are excellent - a huge shopping complex filled with zombies, where you need to survive. Killing the zombies in hundreds of ways, finding and rescuing and escorting survivors. Even the storyline is fairly engaging.
Why-oh-why do I feel that the game is ruined by pointless boss battles?
Take the guy in the gunshop - You have to hide behind shop displays. He fires a shotgun at you 6 times, then reloads. In those seconds you can dart out, aim at his head (or try to, the Dead Rising gun aiming is a joke) shoot, then duck for cover again. To beat him you have to shoot him in the head about 20 times with the sniper rifle. That’s right, 20 or so shots to the head with a sniper rifle - he’s not a zombie, just a regular human who owns a shop that survives several shots to the head.
I’m not expecting realism here - the games is a zombie infested mall where you cure yourself by drinking orange juice, and learn new combat skills by taking photographs. So, realism is already out the window.
But there are several boss battles, and they are just TEDIOUS. You build up a nice momentum, hacking your way through hundreds of zombies with swords, sledgehammers, knives, all of whom are impervious to pain and die after a few hits, then the game slows to crawl while you fight a human. Hit them. Hide. Hid them. Hide. Repeat.
To me, the game reeks of lack of focus testing. What is focus testing? Focus testing is where you take groups of people with various skills and get them to play your game, then modify the difficulty of the game to suit them. You can’t use normal testers for this because after playing the game for a year or two years they know how to do everything. Normal testers know how to play the game, normal gamers don’t.
That’s the thing about boss battles, once you figure out how to defeat a boos, it’s not hard, just tedious, boring and meaningless. Boss battles serve to piss players off until they have learned a sequence, then serve to bore them.
10 days ago I wrote that Xbox Live Arcade is great for developers. Since then Jeff Tunnell from Garage Games has written a post on his blog giving some more information, and hinting at figures and used Marble Blast Ultra as an example.
He wouldn’t say how much it cost to develop, but hinted at between $100,000 and $300,000 as an average cost and then stated
I can’t give the exact figure, but the Marble Blast Ultra budget was at the higher end of the current budget range.
I’ve never known how much of the cash was spilt between Microsoft and the developer, but that seems to be based on the amount of work/help on the part of Microsoft.
“The publicly available information on this is that the distribution fees for bringing a game to XBLA is 35 to 70 percent, depending upon participation by [Microsoft]“
That’s 35-70% of the profit going to Microsoft, a much larger scale than I had anticipated.
Anyway, it’s a good read, so pop on over and have a look.