Vote for the Best of 2011!

January 3, 2012 | Darrin | 5 Comments

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Darrin’s 2011: Year in Review

January 2, 2012 | Darrin | 3 Comments

Year of the Puzzle Game?: There are lots of puzzlers every year, but this year the lineup was unusually good. A handful are worthy of special mention: Catherine, Portal 2, Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes, and Cubixx HD. Catherine … Read More

Programming Tools Part 2

September 18, 2011 | Darrin | 5 Comments

A lot of people contacted me about my last post on Sony’s development tool choice for the upcoming PlayStation Suite. Many people agreed with me, but many others did not and honestly believe that Microsoft/C#/Visual Studio is really the best, easiest, and most popular way to program software.

I can summarize my rebuttal to that in three words: The Strange Loop. This is one of the best, if not the best, programming conferences that covers the most cutting edge programming concepts, applied technology, and paradigms. There are lots of programmer conferences and meetups, but this is the main event. This really gives you a feel for what the brightest programmers of today are really passionate about. (by the way, this is a yearly event, going on right now, and my current manager, and several coworkers, flew to St. Louis on their own dime because it is that good).

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Microsoft Taking Over Sony from the Inside?

September 15, 2011 | Darrin | 30 Comments

Say it isn’t so. Sony’s new PlayStation Suite is 100% Microsoft based. I had really held Sony to a higher standard than this. I thought Sony was about championing end product innovation rather than ramrodding choice-free Microsoft technologies onto developers … Read More

Sony’s Head Mounted Display: HMZ-V1

August 31, 2011 | Darrin | 12 Comments

At CES 2011, this was demoed as a mere concept, now it’s scheduled to be a real shipping product.

• Twin 720p OLED displays. Supposedly this provides higher image quality than traditional LCD displays.
• Optical lenses give the viewer a widescreen 45-degree horizontal viewing angle. The lenses simulate a 750-inch virtual screen with a virtual viewing distance of approximately 20m (quoted from Sony PR, yes they are mixing metric/English units).
• Stereoscopic 3D support that works at full brightness that is 100% crosstalk free.
• HDMI in and HDMI passthrough
• Requires wired connection to separate processing box.
• Integrated Virtual Surround Sound Audio.

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Is Console Gaming about to go Portable?

August 17, 2011 | Darrin | 24 Comments

If there isn’t another big home console for a few years, and the Vita delivers the roughly PS3 level hardware performance that Sony is claiming, why would people stick with home systems?

Console gaming is the last non-portable holdout … Read More

Catherine Review

August 9, 2011 | Darrin | 10 Comments

RPGS

When I was a kid, I *loved* the classic stat-builder stat-battle single player RPG with a pulp fantasy or sci-fi back drop. Today, I feel that some RPGS cling too tightly to a dated view of what RPGs used to be. I’m more interested in games that deliver a fresher style of game play. Catherine is a prime example of this.

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Lack of Innovation? A Counter Point…

July 25, 2011 | Darrin | 16 Comments

Pedro wrote a great post on the lack of innovation in games. I’ve heard this a lot lately. Here, I’d like to present the counter point to that general sentiment.

Too Many Shooters, Too Many Sequels

Are there too many … Read More