For those of you who do not know what I am talking about – “Pioneer One” is an episodic political fiction show dealing with the theme of the Cold War and adding a light science-fiction layer to the mix. The second episode has been released and there is an easily perceivable improvement in quality over the first one, which was interesting and well made anyway.
I am yet to see “Tron: Legacy” (this weekend probably) and my expectations are not high. I foresee the movie as being full of stylish eye-candy and doing fine with rudimentary plot and average acting. But I cannot wait anyway. After all, I have been longing for the second part in the franchise for almost twenty years. Yes, the original was released in 1982 but I did not see it until around 1990.
Click, missed, click, missed, click, 48 dmg, click, mana potion, control, click, missed, click, 89 dmg… Repeat this pattern for endless hours, mix it with occasional conversations with game characters, add a simple trading system. Ladies and gentlemen, meet “Divine Divinity”, a classic fantasy hack’n'slash title from 2002 that revealed to me a frightening truth about my humble person: I have started to hate games that offer nothing more than hours of mindless clicking.
I have always liked puzzle games, especially the ones with ties to mathematics, Sudoku being the most popular one. Some time ago I bought “Everyday Genius: SquareLogic”, a small release made by a Texan company TrueThought. It is a variation on Sudoku that adds a level of complexity to classic rules by uncovering fewer squares than a usual Sudoku riddle but giving you other clues in return. Squares are gathered in colored groups of various sizes and shapes, each with its own local rule, like “the squares in this group can be ordered into a sequence” or “when you multiply all numbers in this group, you get 120″. There is quite a lot variety here, with basic operations, comparisons or squares with no info on them at all.
Some publishers and developers claim that piracy is one of the main reasons behind games not being released on PC. A while ago, Yoshinori Ono, the producer of the cult beat’em up series “Street Fighter”, said explicitly that illegal file sharing caused the latest installment, “Super Street Fighter IV” to skip the PC market:
The PC version of the original was actually a strong seller worldwide, said Ono. However, it was also “number one in piracy.”
Ono actually managed to look on the bright side of the piracy issue, saying that at least the game saw wider spread because of it. However, for the sake of protecting the Street Fighter IV IP, they cannot make it so that Street Fighter is considered “free” in certain areas.