Gaming

So while things are progressing a bit slow at the moment I see the light at the end of the tunnel and I hope I'll get back on managing the site and developing some games in the near future! I've massed some creativity and feel really inspired to work on Project L again!

In the mean while I'm writing something about casual games and more specifically the genre hidden object games. This genre is the absolutely most popular casual genre at the moment. The latest being the hidden object game; Big City Adventure: New York City

To be honest I though that this would just be a fad in the casual games market, but as it seems the top casual games are mostly hidden object games! While the gameplay in the game are dead simple, basically click on a certain set of objects on a cluttered scene (with some variations on this) production values of the games are top-notch. The theme of the games also seem to lean towards the mystery/horror genre many of them having quite gruesome stories in them. A bit like an Agatha Christie novel.

As it seems this is a winning combo in the casual games market; keep the gameplay dead simple, add top quality graphics, music, user interface and a mystery story. Just check this list of the best hidden object games out.

So have you played a hidden object game at all? Why not? What did you think?

I just want to send a special hello to all Polish gamers playing our hard shoot em up game t.w.t.p.b.

A license to a special full version Polish translation was included in a recent issue of KomputerSWIAT, a leading polish pc magazine.

I think there have been some shifing in the twtpb highscores due to this. I'm glad you don't find the game too hard

Feel free to try our other games and join the community any comments are appreciated.

Game On!

Check out www.quakelive.com!

I think this is cool. It's kind of in the same ballpark as what we're doing here at SoP in that it combines the use of web technology and native "high performance" stuff.

I still think the Quake III Engine (the tech basis for Quake Live) looks great, and they've certainly done a good job updating the look on lots of the maps that are from the original Quake III Arena. And lots of the new maps are really curvy...

Obviously they wanted things to be automatically updated, hence the required plugin.

And yes, it probably is easier to do extensive gui and statistics stuff on a webpage rather than in a game. Remember, guis are hard...

/johno

It's a grand day for Swedish indie developer Oxeye Game Studio their strategy game Harvest: Massive Encounter is available on Steam.

Getting a game on steam is a huge thing, especially for an indie game developer and as far as i know this is the first Swedish indie to be featured on steam! Now we can only hope that the guys over at valve will turn their eyes towards other Swedish indies *hint* *hint*

Kudos for all the hard work, blood sweat and tears! You guys rock!

P.S. You should of course get the full version directly from Oxeye and not from steam if you want to give the most back to the developers.

I have spent a few evenings with super paper mario again, I have already finished it once but this game is so great I gladly play it again. Once again I marvel at the detailed level and polished gameplay!

Other than that I enyoy having vacation and only occationally sit down at my computer, but I´m planning to work more in August.