Planet Nectarius

Audiosurf is an amazing game for music lovers.. There’s an upcoming patch in beta, which adds Last.fm scrobbling support, which I dreamed of from the start.

This will make Audiosurf an MMOG. It enables a persistent record of the players path in the game. It does lack the scores next to the play counts however. For me though each play through a song is an achievement in it’s own right. To track that journey is something I crave. Perhaps that’s what makes things like last.fm and twitter so popular anyway, in a way they are social games, to be able to share and display progress is a requirement.

There really is a convergence between social networking sites and gaming like mechanics. This new patch is really a leveraging of emerging experiences that enhances the user experience of both, all through the power of web 2.0. How’s that for some buzzwords?

Lets say last.fm is a game and our profile is our character. I find it interesting that initially when playing audiosurf it I felt like I wasn’t able to ‘improve’ my last.fm character. This is the same experience I have when I use my mp3 player (which doesn’t track my song play count), which frustratingly is most of my music time these days.

PA has just announced Greenhouse. This is very positive news. I’ve always wondered why steam doesn’t have more indie games. Considering the success of Audiosurf people are certainly willing to buy them.

One problem with steam is it has some really really bad games available there, browsing is a hassle and thus browsing comes up with lots of crappy games. Greenhouse looks like it’ll have high standards.

As far as I’m concerned the more competition for digital distribution the better. It’ll force innovation.

I’ve been playing the demo of Aquaria. It’s stunning.. It really gets across a sense of exploration.

I also like that once you buy the full version you can use your saved games from the demo. Especially since the demo seems rather long so far. Once I get to the end I’m positive I’ll get this one.

Kotaku has an article about Faith and a .45. Which they summarise as gears of war with kissing. The two main characters kiss after each level.

In single player mode from what they say you play as the guy, if you die the girl will bring you back to life with a “kiss of life”. This seems fairly typical gender roles wise, but I wonder if they’ll let you play as the girl and have the guy be the one to give you the nurturing kisses. I’m guessing no. The thing I really want to know is, in multiplayer do they have the same dynamic? Can you play coop? Do the characters kiss after each level in coop? Honestly I think that would be awesome. It would provide many sexy moments of awkwardness in lounge rooms around the world. Would two boys fight over who gets to play as the guy?

Personally I’d want to play as the gal. She’s a redhead! Though from the screenshot her outfit does look a bit out of sorts with the time period. It’s supposed to set during the great depression. If I play this with a gal, I’m positive we’ll both play the opposite sex. I’m not even sure this has multi player. This is the first time I’ve heard of the game and I may never play it, but it’s certainly added a spark to my day. Just think of the teenage boys squirming as their characters kiss each other, while they secret enjoy it. I’m sure it would happen with two girls playing too, but I get the impression boys are extra squirmy and reactionary at highschool age.

I wanted to buy the PC version of puzzle quest ages ago, but didn’t want to buy it form the online stores that had it. THQ had their store, but you had to pay extra if you wanted access to the download for an “extended period”. So I actually lobbied the publisher to include it on steam. Which I rarely do. I’m not sure if it made a difference or not, but Puzzle Quest is now available on Steam.

I’ll be buying it tonight

The cool thing that excites me about metaplace, is we’ll be seeing worlds for communities to just hang out in. Instead of just a forum or whatever attached to a webcomics, news sites, or blogs, we’ll be able to hang out in little worlds attached to existing communities. I think people will be surprised at just how awesome the games and worlds that people will fork, iterate, fork, merge, borrow, will become.

There’ll be people dedicated to making mmo templates that are specifically designed for being borrowed by website communities.

As an example, it’s pretty inevitable that Penny Arcade will be forced to make one filled with Gabe’s art. I think they even mentioned that in a post once.

Currently MMO’s usually need to create communities from scratch. Web 2 has given us extremely deep and numerous social networks in many different forms. It’s a huge market really. I think metaplace will succeed because it is trying to fit in snugly along side the current web concepts. It will complement existing frameworks and communities, not try to take advantage of them. I think it’s more of a tool than a gaming space.

Think of building a site.. Hmm now we need a blog, we need forum, we need a flickr page, we need a metaplace. If it works it wont be the only option, others will eventually compete, but it will definitely be the first.