Well, I haven’t posted in a while. I don’t think I’ll be finishing my Final Fantasy 13 review, because of several reasons.
Lately I’ve turned my sight towards independantly-made games. Most are in good ol’ 2D. It’s kinda refreshing. 2D definitely is making a comeback overall, and there’s good reason for it. It’s still, and always will be, fun.
What makes indie games so special? Well, first you have to understand that most big companies don’t try too many original concepts when making games. When you already have a fanbase or are pressured to keep up with the trends, taking a risk and making something too different can be disastrous, and since they’re in it for the money, you can understand why great innovation is hard to find. Some Indie developers are much more risky, or go into designing a game mostly from a gamer’s perspective. There’s lots of crap too, of course, but there’s quite some awesome gems here and there.
There’s a few popular indie gaming sites, that can be found easily. I don’t really have much more to say, as indie games are less underground then they used to, so they’re relatively easy to find now. Cave Story, considered an excellent indie game, can be downloaded on the Wii, pretty cool. I think we’ll be seeing an interesting rise of indie games and 2D games.
Now, as someone who aspires to make a game, I’ve seen a bit just how much effort it takes to make one. Frankly, I’m not an artist, so for me the biggest pain is finding all the sprites I need to make the game. I’ve a few games in mind though, for when I do dedicate more resources. For now though, I’ll stick to playing them. Although there’s an seemingly-awesome gaming engine coming out soon called Stencyl that might nudge my decision to sit down and make some games.
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There’s an interesting gaming scene, which was present when I was young, but that has almost died off for a while. A program called ZZT, and what it is basically, is a gaming engine for making games using ASCII characters. So, it’s using letters and other keyboard symbols as sprites. The games can be played using ZZT. Thousands of games have been made, some pretty fun, actually. The simplicity makes it so that people don’t expect good sprites and animations, and rely on the gameplay. And I approve of that concept. Games are about gameplay, so the looks shouldn’t be absolutely necessary. And others seem to think so, because ZZT has remained alive throughout the years.
A sortof upgraded program, inspired from ZZT was made, called Megazeux. This improved greatly on ZZT, and you could draw your own sprites. It got popular for a while, but died down quite a bit. There’s still an active community, but it’s much smaller than ZZT.
I actually had fun playing different games of both these engines. But because it is simpler to make a game, there’s a lot more crappy games out there. There are well rated ones though, which are the ones you should play if you ever want to try.
If anyone’s curious about ZZT and Megazeux, here’s the sites you should be visiting:
http://www.digitalmzx.net ( be sure to check out “The Vault” — link on top — for the games. Click on ‘Everything’ once there. You can sort by rating)
That’s all for now.
