Due to a strange quirk of my gaming history, I never played a numbered Civilization game beyond the original Civ (also known as Sid Meier’s Civilization: Build an Empire to Stand the Test of Time). That game I utterly consumed back in the early 90s when it was released, probably completing the game with every possible combination of civilization and victory condition.

Civ II, for example, wasn’t released until 1996, five years after its predecessor (I had spent much of that intervening period playing Civ), and at that point Quake, and then the mod Quake 40K/Chapter Honour (boy, there’s a site I haven’t seen in ages), become my time-sucking game of choice.

During most periods of my life, I’ve tried to consistently play games in a variety of genres—in the 90s, I was mainly into adventure games, shooters, and strategy games—but I’ve also generally had one game that lurks in the background, filling the cracks in my gaming time between this title or that title. Civ was probably the first game to hold that honor. (more…)

There is much confusion over what exactly Portal: Still Alive, an upcoming Xbox Live Arcade release of Valve’s excellent platformer-thing, is. After all, it was announced amazingly vaguely during Microsoft’s E3 press conference, and there was little followup. So I asked Valve’s Doug Lombardi, and he explained it to me.

Portal: Still Alive is a standalone version of the original Portal that can be purchased through Xbox Live Marketplace.  In addition to Portal itself, it will include a number of levels that are not part of the game’s story, and do not feature story-related elements such as GLaDOS voiceover.

The game is exclusive to Live Arcade, at least for a while, but PC players can get basically the same experience right now anyway. Here’s why.

You may have seen Portal: The Flash Version, a clever Flash-based tribute to Valve’s game. You are slightly less likely to have seen the Portal: The Flash Version MapPack, which recursively ports the Flash game’s levels to Portal itself.

Still Alive’s bonus content consists of 360-certified versions of the levels from that pack. So if you’re a PC Portal owner who, like me, was feeling excluded by Still Alive’s bonus content, fear not: you get to play that content first, and for free.

A little while back, some Shackers entered a contest whose entrance requirements were to write lyrics for a song about video games–the criteria were pretty open, the entries just had to have verses and maybe some choruses. Song stuff.

Anyway, quadeh’s entry won, and I wrote and recorded a song based on his lyrics, as well as the lyrics of several other entries. For reasons I no longer recall, the content never really officially wrapped up, but I did release a few tracks to the Shack community. Today, out of the blue, I cleaned up my recording of quadeh’s song a bit, and now you can listen to the new and improved version here.

It can be streamed above, or downloaded directly. Entitled “Gordon’s Crowbar Blues,” it chronicles the early exploits of everyone’s favorite theoretical physicist button pusher/homicidal maniac.

PapaBoo, a non-gamer playing through the seminal first-person shooter Half-Life, soldiers on. Now his exploits are being documented at the dedicated web domain howdoiplaygame.com, which anyone who is familiar with hardcore games should be sure to read right away. He is now supplementing his descriptions of in-game progress with screenshots.

If you are unfamiliar with PapaBoo’s Black Mesa journey, start from the beginning. What is most fascinating is how he is beginning to think in the context of what the game demands, having started his play session with absolutely no existent framework for FPS games. Coincidentally, just today I was thinking about when I first played Half-Life way back in 1998. It was a borderline revelatory experience, unlike any shooter I had played. Many of its demands were uncommon for the genre. Still, though, I had a familiarity with shooters in general, and my experience with adventure games and other types of video games gave me a baseline for video game logic, which is somewhat tangential to real world logic.

PapaBoo, of course, does not have that foundation. His experiences are priceless, because they are so uncommon–I doubt many non-gamers take their first voyage into the world of full 3D interactive worlds by way of something like Half-Life. (more…)

Though I play a lot of games, I finish relatively few of them. Often this is simply because I feel I have exhausted most of what a game has to offer before it is even close to being complete. Most games seem as though they last as long as they do either because that is what gamers want (at least, what the small contingent of forum-dwelling hardcore gamers want, or think they want) or because they are such expensive products, not because they actually have ten or twenty or thirty or sixty hours of genuinely fresh and entertaining gameplay packed inside.

Some games are all about breadth over depth, about exploration over linearity, but there are still not all too many of those that need to be as huge as they are. They also give gamers ammunition for slamming shorter games. (”I played Oblivion and GTA: San Andreas for three hundred hours each,” one might exclaim, “so why would I pay $60 for BioShock?”) I am glad games like this exist, but they should clearly not be any length benchmark for different types of games. Multiplayer games are obviously a different beast entirely.

For years, I have been hoping for games that are cheaper, more densely packed, and on the whole shorter. Many of my most memorable gaming experiences have come from such games, and this is surely at least in part because those are the games I actually finished–Beyond Good & Evil, Ico, Full Throttle, and so on. Still, these are full-budget games with essentially full single-player experiences and full prices. It seems like there could be something else. (more…)