metabloggin’

By: Derek Yu

On: June 4th, 2007

Raigan and mare, collectively metanet, the Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker of independent game development, now have a shiny, minimalistic new blog. It’s only been up a week or so, but already it’s racking up some great content. Everything from information about their new game, Robotology:

The high-level direction for the game was “Umihara Kawase + parkour”, in a world where the environment was not just static platforms, but moving, mechanized, segmented “robots”. (Link)

…to a wonderful diatribe against casual gaming:

The casual games industry, and to a certain extent most of the commercial games industry, is in this way similar to the fast-food industry: churning out cost-effective products with an utter disregard for any factors beyond what will appeal to the greatest number of people. (Link)

I actually don’t find casual gaming to be too offensive. Of course, the rampant cloning is disgusting and I personally would never find much creative satisfaction in making such a game, but… well, as an example, I was at the bank a couple of weeks ago and I told a banker there that I was making a video game, and she got excited and told me that she like to play games in her free time. And what do you think she plays? Fucking Bejeweled! But the fact is that Bejeweled allowed me to have a connection with a middle-aged woman. And that sounds very wrong, but my point is that it was because of Bejeweled and not, well, Cave Story, that allowed this woman to appreciate what I did for a living, and so there has to be some kind of value there, right?