Category: Gaming

The six billion pound franchise that’s made in Scotland

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In case you missed it, Brian Baglow has the reminder, over on Scottish Games: While it’s too early to provide reliable sales figures, industry analysts are forecasting sales of 20-25,000,000 units in the first twelve months and generate a billion dollars in sales in the first month. With such positive reviews and the reception thus far, this figure does not seem unreasonable. As of December 2012, GTA IV alone had sold over 25,000,000 copies. …Globally, the series has sold 125,000,000 copies to date, generating around $6,000,000,000.  The games have received almost all of the awards it is possible for them

Vancouver for 66 hours

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I’m off to Vancouver today to attend Unity3D’s ‘Unite 2013′ conference. Let’s see what the cross-platform game engine behind Temple Run, Bad Piggies, Triple Town, and more, has to offer. And I’l’ be back in Scotland by Saturday morning, hopefully outrunning any jet-lag in the process.

The story of Missile Command

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Microsoft once had a collection of Atari Classic games for Windows 3.1 (on 2 1.44″ floppy disks) and the help files had a short history of each game. Polygon’s article and interview with designer Dave Theurer reminded me of that help file, but with a lot more detail. Theurer and Adam got rid of all the unnecessary components — including a radar idea, which had an arm sweeping across the screen, only revealing a portion of it at a time — and started putting that manpower and time into polishing the other areas of the game. “To make it simple,

Come on you apes, you wanna live forever (with a Lumia)?

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Halo finally reaches Windows Phone, and I’ve a monster review posted over on All About Windows Phone: It’s good. It’s bloody good. But there is room for improvement. The presentation, top down look, and slight 3D graphical look are all fine. The level design, small but perfect, works as well. I have a tiny issue with the control system, but it is easily played around. In that sense Halo works with no major compromises damaging the game. The lack of multiplayer is slightly upsetting, but not a huge mis-step in the grand scheme. The inclusion of freemium to try and

The sobering reality of Candy Crush and freemium gaming

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The issue is not that Candy Crush is raking in a reported $633,00 per day on a freemium model, it’s that the app is going to be held up as ‘something that’s possible’ with the current freemium model. Like a gold rush, we’ll see more games turn to this model, which extract more money out of users (over a longer timescale) for games of dubious quality that start out as ‘skill’ and slowly morph into ‘you must pay to have any success’. It’s feeling a lot like Las Vegas. For a more sobering look at the issue of freemium games,