Computer Games

In an early development video, Marshall even recommends setting match duration to short times because, he reminds us, football is'just kicking and goals'. So for a game jam-type thing, I thought I'd make a silly football game. After 15 months, Behold the Kickmen turned from a joke, into a commercially released game for PC and Mac. It's not interesting if a football game designer is making a football game.

Internet users outside China watched a computer defeat its national go champion, but few Chinese web surfers could see it. Censors blocked access to Tuesday's online broadcast by Google, which organized the game in a town west of Shanghai during a forum on artificial intelligence. The event got little coverage from Chinese newspapers and broadcasters, suggesting they might have received orders to avoid mentioning Google, which closed its China-based search engine in 2010 in a dispute over censorship and computer hacking. The official response to the game, a major event for go and artificial intelligence, reflects the conflict between the ruling Communist Party's technology ambitions and its insistence on controlling what its public can see, hear and read.

Unlike many classic board games, Pandemic requires cooperation, tasking two to four players to work together to halt the spread of deadly diseases. How have sites like Kickstarter helped independent game makers find an audience to back their projects? That's right, I do a lot of beta testing and usability testing, play testing, whatever you want to call it, prior to publication. Is there a sentiment among independent board game designers that mass-market games are inferior?

The design team behind Firaxis' turn-based, alien-themed combat tactics game "XCOM 2" recently did something that might surprise most people. Even before Firaxis made its game mod-friendly, players were finding ways to alter the title in significant ways. One particularly prominent mod is called The Long War, which significantly extended, revamped and rebalanced both "XCOM: Enemy Unknown" and "XCOM: Enemy Within." Rather than see mods as criticism of the work his team put into the game, Solomon sees it as a labor of love from its biggest fans.

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