Tag: GDC

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Games Nothing Like the Sport

There has been a couple of games that have been released recently that have taken the mantle of being unrealistic sports games.

These aren’t sports simulators, they are games that use a sport that is familiar to most people and make a new kind of game that does something unique while still having a basis in the original source material.

The first title that comes to mind is Golf Story for the Switch. Golf Story is a role-playing adventure game that uses some elements of golf in its adventure game gameplay. The character hits a ball at elements or holes of the world map to complete objectives and open up more of the world. This isn’t too far from traditional RPG story-telling progression.

The next title that comes to mind is Adult Swim’s Pool Panic that was announced this past week at GDC. Pool Panic is touted as “The world’s least realistic pool simulator game” by its developers. The game has the player using pool elements to complete single player or multiplayer levels. The game looks like a puzzle game with pool elements. I think Pool Panic looks amazing and I can’t wait to play the hell out of it. Adult Swim humor with a fun pool style game.

I’m sure there are others that I could add to this article but I can’t think of any at the moment.

I would like to see more developers utilize sports in a non-traditional way like these two games above. In the same way that Zach Gage, turned the solitaire rules and chess rules on their heads and made some interesting variations on those games.

It seems like Switch is a hotbed for indie game development. It might have something to due with the fact that sales are strong and the business model of the eShop isn’t based on free games, unlike the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. I hope that these games do well for themselves and it encouages developers to do some more exploration in the area.

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Tetsuya Mizuguchi Won’t Let Trance Vibration Die

Allegra Frank wrote a Polygon piece about Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s latest attempt to make  “trance vibration” a thing. He originally tried to bring the device to the masses with Rez’s original release on the PS2 but that didn’t fare well.

Lumines Remastered was featured at the Nintendo Nindies, their indie games booth at this year’s GDC.

The game Is the same great game that we played on the PSP and, for some of us, bought again on the Xbox 360 marketplace while that was still in it’s infancy. Even though we’ve purchased this game twice, the Switch version might be the most exciting version because of the console’s ability to do HD rumble with the Joy-Cons. Mizuguchi tasked Resonair, the developer, to use the console’s HD rumble to add “trance vibration” to their port of the game so the player can feel the game while playing it.

The player feels the game by strapping two Joy-Cons to their legs while controlling the game with another set. I hope that in the final version of the game the player will be able to strap their Joy-Cons to their legs like they want but play with a Pro Controller instead of having to buy another set of more expensive Joy-Cons.

It was Frank’s description of using the controllers that really put me over the top when it came to my desire to play this game.

It’s like going to a well-lit club where you’re the only one there, and yeah, you’re playing a video game, and that’s kind of weird, but for some reason nothing about this is pitiful — it’s a supremely chill-ass solo hang.

Nintendo definitely threw some weight behind it’s console this week with their Nindies presentation. Lumines is a game that, even though I’ve purchased it twice, I am very much looking forward to buying a third time.

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Nintendo is Tryin’ to Flip the Script

Aya Kyogoku from Nintendo
She's probably thinking about how many Bells she owes Tom Nook's shady ass!
Aya Kyogoku from Nintendo
She’s probably thinking about how many Bells she owes Tom Nook’s stingy ass!

Nintendo has been in the news a lot lately. Much of the internet would have us believe that they have been in the news for their lemming like dash towards the cliff of obscurity. Of course these kinds of headlines catch our attention and provide very “clickable” for the sites that publish many of these stories, but when one reads through the digital piles of garbage and starts to look at the real stories that are being written about Nintendo we see that Nintendo is a company that is daring to change the way that we think about video games. Yes! While continuing to make the same games over-and-over.

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