Saturday, December 24, 2005

Psychonauts, awards, shelf-life and the games industry

Awhile back Adric told me I should check out Psychonauts. Oops, I didn't. Til now.
Aside from him, I'd never heard of the game. Never seen it on the shelf at EB. Never seen it advertised or discussed on a website. And you guys know I do go to EB and games websites a lot.

It would seem, a great many people are in the same situation.

Which is a tremendous pity because Psychonauts is no longer available in many places at all, (officially discontinued) and it's an extremely bad time for this game to not be on sale.

Many of you will remember my disdain last month when we went searching for Myst IV: Revelation (one of my favourite games, obviously, and the penultimate in the Myst series - from September 2004, winner of GameSpot's Best Adventure 2004) as a birthday present for someone - to find that it had been discontinued after just over a year.
A week ago we tried to find a game for my brother, Sid Mier's Pirates! (November 2004) and found that it too had been discontinued.

Well Psychonauts was released in April. April 2005. And it's gone already. What a sorry state the game industry is in. It sold, apparently, less than 50,000 copies. I wouldn't mind if it was a crap game. Or even an average game. But that's not what I've heard.

The GameSpot awards for 2005 are in full-swing, and I've finally discovered Psychonauts. The reason I've discovered it is that it has completely cleaned up the awards. Check this out:
GameSpot:And GameSpy awards (cbf getting links):
  • PC - Special Achievement in Art Direction
  • Xbox - Top 10 Games of the Year - 7th
  • Xbox - Best Platformer
As you can see - it's a really well-respected game. I've checked out the videos and played the demo and I agree - it looks like one of the big winners of the year, and it's a crazy, zany platformer from the creator of such great games as Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle (going waaay back).

And Nobody played it!!!. No wonder I think the gaming industry is going downhill, with games like Half-life 2 and World of Warcraft which I own and enjoy taking all the awards and sales last year - although I enjoy them I don't think they're as good as Half-life or Warcraft 3 respectively - and this year that trend continuing, with all the big games being horrible dark shooters like F.E.A.R. and battlefield shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield 2. The creative and innovative games are losing. Psychonauts is a prime example.

Read this recent article! (with interviews with Psychonauts creator Tim Schafer).

And while we're on the awards, what happened to the big finale of the Myst series, Myst V: End of Ages? It was nominated for Best Adventure Game (which its predecessor won last year), and was one of only two respectable games in that field this year. Sadly it lost to Indigo Prophecy.

To be honest, I'm not mad... Looking at IP, it seems to be a pretty good game, with a good rich story (it beat Psychonauts in the story category) and nice graphics. If I wasn't a Myst fan I might agree...

And my other game of 2005 (yes, there are only 3 games this year which I feel deserve any attention at all), The Movies, didn't seem to win or be nominated for anything on GameSpot.. not sure why, it seems like everyone thinks it's a great game... my theory is it came out too late to get nominated and will be in next year.

Anyway long story short I found a company in *BRITAIN* which is selling Psychonauts and ordered it. It won't be here for xmas but they tell be it's on the boat! We also found a company in the *US* which is shipping Pirates! so Dave should be happy too.

Long story short: you can still find these games! And they're pretty cheap to order from overseas as well. I might do this more often if they come in good condition, with proper packaging, etc.

Anyway go check out Psychonauts!!! I'll tell you what I think of it when I get it.
And have a Merry Christmas!

Friday, December 02, 2005

New Summit Website

It's another one of my "look guys, at what I've been making for the past 3 weeks" posts. :)

My games studio, formerly known as Summit Interactive, is now known as Summit Worlds, and has a brand new website!

I've learnt a huge heap about web design with all the lovely features of CSS and XHTML, so this is pretty much the most advanced and compliant website I've made. I'd really like to thank Tim for his help - he's been answering my emails all day every day for weeks!

Here it is:
Summit Worlds Online
I've also registered a new subdomain at cjb.net - www.summitworlds.cjb.net, but I'm thinking of changing because as you can see it places a nasty ad at the top (until last week, cjb.net was also serving up annoying popups but they seem to have stopped...)

I think it looks kickass but we'll see what you think.
Also check out the Evermoork pages, since that's a totally different style.

In other news, Firefox 1.5 is out. I like some of the new features, but it doesn't look like they're any closer on the Acid2 test, and there are a couple of annoyances with the new version that weren't in the old one:
  • The default theme seems to have very few icons for menu items, etc. What happened to them? Although it's supposed to just be a "niceness" feature, I find menu items help you find what you're looking for much faster than just text.
  • On Linux (KDE) I used to have a nice theme which made it look like KDE, which is totally and completely nicer than the ugly GNOME look. I can't use that theme with 1.5 and the other themes which try to make it look like KDE all have ugly problems.
  • Also on Linux, 1.5 seems to use the ugly and clunky GNOME file open/browse dialog. 1.0 used to use the KDE file chooser which, once again is heaps nicer (it's like the Microsoft Windows one, and let's face it - that's good).
PS. GNOME really sucks. I don't know what you GNOME-advocates see in it. (Tim, I'm looking at you!)