One stop site for gaming news goodness

I use to rely on Game Tab for all my latest gaming news in one place, but Alltop has a very good gaming page with feeds from lots of sites.  Check it out here!

www.passfieldgames.com

Knytt Stories design tour

David Rosen of Wolfire Games has posted a Design Tour video of the whimsical Knytt Stories by Nifflas. 

Design Tour - Knytt Stories from David Rosen on Vimeo.

After you watch the video, download the game frome here.  It's free and fun to play.

www.passfieldgames.com

Scribblenauts

5th Cell have made some very interesting games on the Nintendo DS. Last year they released Drawn to Life, following that up with the Tower Defense inspired Lock's Quest this year.

And next year they will be releasing a game that sounds like it could be quite innovative indeed. That game is called Scribblenauts, and this time it's a puzzler for which the tag line is "Write. Anything. Solve. Everything."





The goal is to help the main character Maxwell reach Starites that are placed in each level. You do this by writing the name of an object which appears on the level for Maxwell to use. According to 5th Cell you can write anything. Football. Ladder. Shark. As long as it's suitable for kids and not trademarked, you can bring it into existance.

It sounds pretty exciting. I'll be interested to see how many real world objects they manage to cram into the DS.

In the meantime, you can find out more in this IGN interview.


www.passfieldgames.com

Bug with Animal Crossing for the Wii

I'm a huge Animal Crossing fan and was excited to have picked up a copy today to play with my daughter. A big selling point of the game is that you can transfer your DS stuff to the Wii - and having played the DS version a lot, I was excited to get my cool DS gear into the game.

I followed the on screen instructions, downloaded a program to my DS and ran it, but got the following message:

An incorrect DS Game Card has been inserted. Please turn the power off, insert the Animal Crossing: Wild World DS Game Card and try again.

Right. So I rebooted the Wii, rebooted my DS and tried again. And again. And again. I even got my old school silver DS out and tried it. But no luck.

So, I went off to the internet to find out what was up and thanks to these forums I discovered that the Aussie version of the DS game is actually a US version, and that the Wii game (which is a UK version) will only work with the UK DS cart.

It's already hit the news, so I'm hoping Nintendo patches the game - and soon! This is a big feature - it's mentioned on the box and the game actually asks you if you want to do it in the opening sequence.

If it's not fixed soon I imagine there are going to be a lot of frustrated kids (and adults) in Australia this Christmas...

www.passfieldgames.com

Keynote Komplete!

I did a keynote on Wednesday at this years Interactive Entertainment conference here in Brisbane.  I spoke about the impact of researchers and academia on game development.  

While researching the topic I uncovered a lot of interesting facts about the early years of game development and was surpirsed at how many of today's genres were defined in a university setting - from RPG's to FPS's - it's eye opening.

I'll post up some of my notes with links later.

www.passfieldgames.com