Determinance screenshot

Archive for March, 2009

Visiting the Village: Episode 3

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

Visiting the Village: Episode 3

Good things come in threes, and so does Visiting the Village.  This week, Ian and I wrestle with space stations that appear inside people’s houses, Derek Smart and underwater bad guys.  We also have a special surprise for astronomy fans…No, we really mean that: astronomy fans.

Here’s those essential links:

Auntie Pixelante vs. the IGF – via Auntie Pixelante

The Path – Tale of Tales

Spiderweb Software sales figures – via The Bottom Feeder

Corewar – via Gamesetwatch

Game writing from the inside out – via Gamasutra

Councilman allegedly emailing racist games – via Gamepolitics

Derek Smart RPS interview – via Rock Paper Shotgun

Zeebo – via Gamasutra

Max Payne 3 – via videogaming247

Confessions of a Star Wars Galaxies CSR – via Fidget

Underwater video game bad guys – via Tiny Cartridge

iTunes!

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

iTunes!

We have iTunes now – the artwork keeps appearing and disappearing – apparently this is normal and nothing to do with me!  Gotta love it.  Remember, you can still subscribe to the RSS feed like normal people to avoid all of that nonsense.

Visiting the Village: Episode 2

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

Visiting the Village: Episode 2

We burst forth with show two!  Featuring The Rock, Ian calling someone an “idiot” and even more arguments about Change 4 Life.

Links for this episode:

Worlds.com suing various people – via Massively

Dark Forces Retrospective – via Eurogamer

The Big, Fat Question – via Eurogamer

Blu-ray forever! – via Joystiq

GTA Chinatown Wars review – via Eurogamer

How indie video games helped bridge the culture gap – via Gamasutra

Bob’s Game campaign was viral – via Destructoid

New Sega Megadrive – via CVG

Alpha Protocol Trailer – via Gametrailers

The Rock bashes Doom – via MTV

P p p podcast

Monday, March 16th, 2009

P p p podcast

As requested, we now have an RSS feed which will let you subscribe to just podcasts.  That is here.

If you are a Twitter user I am tweeting quite regularly about Village-related stuff.  Follow me here if you’re not already!

We’ve submitted to iTunes so we’ll hopefully have an iTunes link for you whenever Apple want to give us one.

Saturday emails – Paul explains sound

Saturday, March 14th, 2009

Saturday emails - Paul explains sound

While reading this mildly interesting interview on GSW with the Night Game people I came accross this quote, and mailed it to EC to see if there was anything interesting there.  The quote:

On Cave Story, I used AWave Studio, and a whole bunch of VST plugins for sound generation. We used a lot of sounds from GXSCC which is a really neat GM compatible chip synthesizer

Aparently translates to:

“We used [some deeply weird-ass *converter program* I've never heard of], [just a generic term for things you might use that wouldn't be compatible with the first thing mentioned].  We used a lot of sounds from [the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen] which [takes a protocol from the early 90's and then replaces all the sounds with "chip tune" ones].”

And, on some other level, translates to:

It’s like someone asking me what I use to make music and then me starting by talking about the options I set in LAME to encode to 160kbps with a lowpass filter at 16.7k and then going, “Oh yeah, sometimes I like making noises with the PC speaker”.

Post 1000

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

Post 1000

And to celebrate post 1000, I am drinking vermouth, ginger ale, and bitter lemon.  At 4 in the afternoon.

It’s fitting that we start the podcast at least near 1000 – I hope you guys like it.  It’s a great thing to be doing, and as we go along we hope to add features on game design and indieness… anything that works really.  I need to thank EC for doing such a stellar job on the engineering and music, and also the presenting – can you tell which one of us did radio for three years?  Also a huge thanks to Jimmeh, who does a lot of our web stuff.

Anyway, subscribe to us and let me know what you think.

It will be over soon, I promise!

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

It will be over soon, I promise!

Still testing various things…

A big huge thanks to Jimmeh for helping us out on the web side, as ever, and cheers to everyone who has been giving us good feedback on Episode 1.  Really looking forward to the next one.

Visiting the Village: Episode 1

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

Visiting the Village: Episode 1

Welcome to VTV 1, where Ian and I tackle the gaming issues of the day, including streakers and Poland.

Here’s the promised link to Chrontendo.  I also neglected to mention our source for the Brandon Crisp item which was Joystiq.

Thanks to Binster for the background music!

Download the episode

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Getting closer

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

Getting closer

Changes, I’ve made seem to be working. SEEM!

Tuesday morning

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

As you guys see, we have some lovely new art at the top of the blog.  The formal announcment of why we have the new art will be tomorrow.

I’m feeling pretty stressed out today, and I think I’m going to take two days off of doing any Synapse work.  I’m still not precisely sure what the best thing to do next is, and I need to get out of this funk to find out.