Elderlands: Bringing Back Retro Gaming

While most people got their first taste of online gaming through early MMOs such as Meridian 59 and Ultima Online, I was a little bit late to the party. In fact, it wasn't until the early 2000s that I actually realized there were games you could play online with other people in a persistent environment.

My first MMORPG experience was with a tiny game called Dransik. It was an open beta isometric affair in development by Jason Ely, who was a former Ultima Online dev gone indie. I played from open beta all the way through the commercial release of the game with several fond memories and plenty of friendships still cemented outside the world of Dransik.

A big part of having fun in Dransik was making your own fun, since the few quests that were scattered about the game were usually broken or completely worthles, aside from the guild charter quest which required a ton of effort both from yourself and six other people. When I finally finished the quest line, I formed a guild with the tag HELL, which stood for Hell Hunters. HELL was mainly about player harrassment. We were one of the biggest troll guilds in the game and while I can't say I'm proud of that fact now, back then it was insanely fun.

Alien Fortress 2: The Future

This past week has been a good one for Steam users. If you aren't aware, Black Cat Games was absorbed by Valve and commissioned to release an updated version of their Alien Swarm game for the Source engine instead of Unreal. I'm not really sure how long the project has been in development, but I recently found the time to sit down with it and I found it highly enjoyable.

However, being a big Team Fortress 2 fan, I couldn't help but feel the game had taken inspiration from the best class based first person shooter on the market and re-cobbled the classes to fit its shoes. Alien Swarm features four different classes, each with two different characters for a total of eight characters to choose from. The classes are Officer, Special Weapons, Medic, and Tech and while the class diversity is somewhat lacking compared to TF2, each class could potentially be shoe horned into the game with the exception of the Spy.

Party of Sin: Looking Good!

Party of Sin is an Xbox Live Arcade game that is currently in development by CrankShaft Games. They've been hard at work on their project since I first learned about it in March and over the course of just a few months, they have really been chipping away at the style of the game. Watching the development of games is something I have always enjoyed because of the drastic changes that can occur, so developers who document their process well will always receive tons of attention from me in this regard.

The first few updates on the website explain the process of designing each character, with Greed, Lust, and Pride each having a unique process. The over all design of the characters is interesting and I've always enjoyed seeing how people arrive at different designs. Concept art is one of favorite things to behold because of the many changes characters can go through. The CrankShaft team really has their work cut out for them, because they are personifying each of the seven deadly sins.