• /
    • Archives /
  • August 2011

Archives For August 2011

The New Gig

August 30, 2011 — Leave a comment

I haven’t forgotten about you, tiny little corner of the Internet. You’re not being neglected. Well, OK, to be honest you sort of are, but not without good reason. It’s not you, it’s me.

I’ve been working with the online entertainment people at The Dallas Morning News to try to get more video game coverage into the publication, both print and online. They’ve done a little bit in the technology section, which has been fine, but as a reader of the DMN I’ve always wished there was more. So we started with the QuakeCon 2011 coverage (thanks to everyone who read that and followed the madness on Twitter!), and we’re slowly creeping forward and seeing how things go.

So I just started blogging for the Pop Culture Blog over there at DallasNews.com. Unless something crazy happens, I imagine all of my posts will be under the video games category, so it’s pretty easy to find me. That’s why I haven’t posted here at BrittonPeele.com in a couple weeks. The blogging energy I have at the moment is going there.

Also, it’s just been slow on the content front. I’m writing stuff, you just won’t see it for a bit. The fall video game season also just kicked off, so I’m hopefully about to get more busy with reviews and whatnot.

In Uncategorized
permalink

QuakeCon 2011 Coverage

August 19, 2011 — Leave a comment

I covered QuakeCon 2011 in Dallas, TX for The Dallas Morning News. I provided plenty of tweets throughout the four days of the event in addition to a full wrap-up story in print and online. I also took the opportunity to write up impressions of all the games I saw and played.

I was also fortunate enough to make two non-print media appearances to talk about the show:

In Gaming ,
permalink

QuakeCon 2011: Tribes Ascend impressions

August 18, 2011 — Leave a comment

One of the causalities of the way modern shooters (like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and its many recent clones) do online competitive play is that it feels really slow if you grew up playing the likes of Quake III: Arena and Unreal Tournament (UT2k4 was my game of choice).

 

Sure, it rarely feels like you’re moving in molasses in these newer games, and they can certainly be enjoyable (CoD wouldn’t be worth so much money if people didn’t find it fun), but I really miss the high-speed antics of the classics. Rocket jumping in the original Team Fortress in order to make awesome flag captures? Yeah, I miss that.

 

Tribes: Ascend is taking us back to those glory days by bringing back the beloved Tribes franchise and gussying it up for a modern audience. It’s set to be a free-to-play experience (I’m not sure if they’ve detailed how everything will work, yet, but I believe you at least pay to unlock different classes), and it’s looking great. I had an opportunity to play the upcoming PC game on the QuakeCon 2011 show floor, and I left hungry for more.

Continue Reading…

In Gaming , , ,
permalink

QuakeCon 2011: Prey 2 impressions

August 17, 2011 — Leave a comment

Like the Skyrim demo before it, the QuakeCon 2011 presentation of Prey 2 was more or less the same as the demo shown at E3. This was most evident when GameSpot’s Maxwell McGee, sitting next to me, closed his laptop near the start of the demo and stopped taking notes. So if you only want detailed descriptions of what that demo looked like, you can find them elsewhere.

 

But I wanted to write a little bit about Prey 2 anyway, because I think people could be a lot more excited about the game than they currently are. The original Prey didn’t exactly set the world on fire – it was pretty good, but nothing amazing – and I think people are under the assumption that Prey 2 will be more of the same. But frankly, it’s a bit odd that this game is billed as a sequel to Prey rather than something completely new, because it really is extremely different.

Continue Reading…

In Gaming , ,
permalink

QuakeCon 2011: Skyrim impressions

August 16, 2011 — 2 Comments

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim presentation at QuakeCon 2011, from what I could tell, covered the same territory as the E3 demo shown to press earlier this year. As such, there are plenty of preview articles online giving you a blow-by-blow recap of what happens. So instead of doing that again, I want to give you a glimpse of how the QuakeCon audience reacted to different game elements, and how I myself feel about what we were shown.

 

It’s worth noting that the Skyrim presentation broke the record for most attendees at a QuakeCon demo, and it showed. There was a line that snaked around the hotel before employees allowed people into the sizable main stage where the presentation took place. They let the few of us with press badges in first (remember, I’m pretty sure this was the E3 demo, so I don’t think most press members bothered with it), and then all hell broke loose. The crowd was very, very loud, and very excited.

Continue Reading…

In Gaming , , , , ,
permalink

QuakeCon 2011: Dishonored impressions

August 8, 2011 — 2 Comments

While it wasn’t viewable to the general Quakecon public, members of the press finally got a solid first look at the upcoming game Dishonored, being published by Bethesda. When introducing the game to the press, Harvey Smith and Raphael Colantonio, co-creative directors at Arkane Studios, listed off a few games that could be viewed as influences on Dishonored: Deus Ex, Thief and Bioshock. And artist Viktor Antonov, of the Half-Life 2 fame, is also helping out. Sure enough, if you took some of the best aspects of all those games, you might have a general idea of what this game is.

Dishonored is a first-person stealth/action game in which you play as a supernatural assassin framed for the murder of the empress. The city he’s in has been ravaged by a plague that has already killed half the population, setting a dark tone for what could come. The world is at first familiar and like our own, but there is an interesting blend of technology and supernatural magic that sets the style apart quickly. They referred to it as a sort of “retro future industrial” look, rather than steam punk. Smith and Colantonio didn’t speak in great length during the demo, keeping much of the story under wraps, but what they did share hints at a plot thick with corruption, betrayal and conspiracy. As someone thrives on games with strong storylines, I’m excited to learn more.

Continue Reading…

In Gaming
permalink

Quakecon 2011: RAGE Impressions

August 7, 2011 — 2 Comments

Over the course of its six-year development cycle, I honestly haven’t gotten too hyped up for Rage. I just wasn’t feeling the post-apocalyptic setting, and I was sure that the fact that id Software was making it both a first-person shooter and a driving game meant disaster for either one of those halves or the other. When a game tries to do too many things, it rarely does them all well.

 

But after spending a good two and a half hours with the game from the beginning at Quakecon 2011, I think I should give the game another chance. There’s more to this title than initially meets the eye.

 

I played the Xbox 360 version of the game, so it didn’t look quite as amazing as it will on a really high-end PC, but the visuals were still impressive enough. The lighting of the world seems great, and I really like the way enemies and other characters animated. The presentation has certainly been polished.

Continue Reading…

In Gaming , , , , ,
permalink

Quakecon 2011 – Marty Stratton Interview

August 7, 2011 — Leave a comment

Shortly after Quakecon 2011 began, I had the immense pleasure of interviewing Marty Stratton from id Software. Because I was there for The Dallas Morning News, we talked a lot about Dallas (and Texas in general) in regard to the video game community, but we also touched on his opinions on casual gaming and the success of Quake Live.

 

Britton Peele: Can you tell me your name and your position at id Software?

 

Marty Stratton: My name is Marty Stratton. I’m an Executive Producer at the studio. I manage one of our development teams, but really since I started at the studio back in 2000 I’ve been a part of organizing Quakecon.

 

BP: Can you give me a brief overview of what exactly Quakecon is?

 

MS: Really it kind of has evolved from where it started. In its current form it’s a large celebration of game fans and gaming. It’s an event that’s open to consumers, which is kind of rare in our industry. Big trade shows like E3 and Gamescom over in Europe are industry only. Gamescom does have a consumer facet of it, but it’s pretty rare in the game industry to have something where people can just come in, play the games, meet the developers of those games. And that’s really kind of how it started. It started back in ’96 with a group of fans of our games – of Quake – when they met in a chat channel and said, ‘Hey, let’s get together in Dallas and play against each other on a LAN.’ John Carmack came down and talked to them – it was less than 100 people at that first [Quakecon]. And as id started to get more and more heavily involved in it, helping facilitate the volunteer effort, bankrolling much of it, the event grew from about 100 people back then to this year where we expect well over 8,000 people.

 

We have a great exhibit floor, where people can see the latest games. We have what’s called the BYOC, where people can bring their computers, hook them up to a super fast LAN that we built – the largest LAN party in North America. We have events, we debut games, we debut trailers [of products] that both id and Bethesda are working on. And we have developers that are making the games sit down and do roundtable discussions and talk about the games that they’re making and how they make them.

Continue Reading…

In Gaming , , , , , , , ,
permalink