A few years ago, at Slamdance, we were introduced to a game we liked very much, called Rumble Box. A beat-em-up game with characters made of cubes and spheres, cel-shaded graphics and a cool mechanic whereby the parts of your bested opponents assist you in your climb to the top — what’s not to like? […]
Category Archive: rants
Positivity Part 1: Royalties
24 Mar / by: M&R / 24 comments /Rather than continue to be negative — which apparently only works if you’re a fast-talking British bloke — let’s instead look at what was great about XBLA. Part 1: high royalties. Why does a high royalty rate matter so much? All it really means is a bit more money for us greedy developers, right? To […]
In Defense of the Apparant Shitstorm
22 Mar / by: M&R / 77 comments /Well, apparently our Gamasutra interview is controversial. Probably we should do what all the professionals have advised us to do, and just stop reading comments — it is the internet after all. But let’s instead take one last stab at dialogue. First of all, everyone we’ve worked with at Microsoft have been terrific — […]
meta-review: Bionic Commando remake
16 Oct / by: M&R / 26 comments /Wow.. this is exactly what’s wrong with commercial games. When we first heard of this project, we were worried that yet another grappling/physics-based game would be coming to take on Robotology. After watching the video, all we could think was “this is the sound of a great game being F’d in the A”. They couldn’t […]
Platform-Specific N+ Levels: Bad Choice?
04 Jul / by: M&R / 12 comments /We just came across this comment (by NAUGHT); it caught us rather off guard as we never considered having different levels for each version of N+ to be a bad thing. In fact, using the same maps for DS/PSP was suggested by the developers, and we actually argued against it since we figured it might […]
Make It For Yourself
08 Jun / by: M&R / 13 comments /the following excerpt is from an actual interview: — [GAMEMAG]: Speaking more generally, how do you feel about the game now? [INDIEDEVELOPER]: We’ve been delighted with [INDIEGAME]. It did great in the reviews, and its been really popular with our fanbase and a whole new bunch of people too. It’s our most popular game to […]
Casual Lames
03 Jun / by: M&R / 21 comments /Let’s face it: casual games are demeaning to the entire game development community. In other media, “casual” products are more commonly referred to as “trash” — you have your trashy romance novels, your lip-synching boy bands, your cheesy reality tv and your god-awful Uwe Boll flicks. In other words, material that’s been cynically engineered with […]