BoRT April ’09 [The Wire]

A note before I begin this Blogs of the Round Table post, you may have noticed that there is a drought of content on this site. This was mentioned before at the beginning of this month. The main reason—aside from poor time management—is that these last weeks of April mark the final weeks of the semester. As I am preoccupied with papers, presentations, and undergraduate grading my time has become criminally limited. I will try to post at least once a week, but until mid-May I will be predisposed with other responsibilities for the coming weeks. With that in mind, let us begin this BoRT entry.

BoRT Feb’09 [Paranoid Android]

I have long considered the idea of contributing to CorvusE’s “Blogs of the Round Table” over at Man Bytes Blog. But time and ambivalence have reserved my position to an onlooker more often than a participator. Therefore it is almost poetic that my first entry for BoRT not only comes late in the month but also branches off from Travis Megill’s January BoRT entry over at The Autumnal City. In it, he proposes the idea of designing a game from a literary source: Philip K. Dick’s cyber-punk, science fiction novel A Scanner Darkly.

A lot of something out of nothing

There has been little or no discussion of Katamari Damacy designer, Keita Takahashi’s PSN game Noby Noby Boy. Of the few articles I’ve found, reviewers have noted its eccentric charm, simplistic design, and lack there of on any sense of traditional conceptions of what makes a game. There is no goal; no objective; no threat. What instead has occurred is that many people have settled on the notion that Noby Noby Boy is basically a toy. Reviewers have either decided that it is a fun little demo that requires a short period of your time to get the gist of what the game is all about and then put it down forever or that the game provokes a sense of play that many gamers had in their childhood when picking up a videogame for the first time.

With the press of a button

I had originally planed to write a piece about Ubisoft’s franchise-rebirth entry in the Prince of Persia series early last month, but a number of circumstances were laid against me at the time. Michael Abbott has taken it upon himself to blog dutifully about the series and has set up a cross-blog symposium on the title. So I decidedly placed my hat into the ring and will provide a short entry on my impressions on a specific element in the new Prince of Persia regardless. But perhaps element is not the correct term. Rather, it is the description of an approach towards streamlining interactivity, narrative, and response that is rarely seen in modern videogames.