Founded Spiderweb Software in 1994. Has written many games, including the Exile, Geneforge, Avadon, and Avernum series. Avernum 4: Greed and Glory out now!
Seattle
Joined October 2013
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Avernum 4: Greed and Glory is out! The 31 year old cult classic Avernum series is back as a unique indie RPG set in a vast underworld nation.
Fight a monster plague. Explore the depths. Be loyal or treacherous. Get rich and famous! Huge & full of fun.
store.steampowered.com/app/3…
In addition to a very nice interview, Retro-Replay wrote a history of our earliest games. Before the consumer web, before online stores, when AOL was the Internet, we were hawking our RPGs. Here's some fun ancient history!
LINK: retro-replay.com/exile-histo…
Jeff Vogel retweeted
I gave a very long, fun interview to Retro-Replay.com about surviving in the indie game business for a very long time. Plenty of humor and cynicism from a bitter old mercenary. Thank you for the great questions!
LINK: retro-replay.com/jeff-vogel-…
I gave a very long, fun interview to Retro-Replay.com about surviving in the indie game business for a very long time. Plenty of humor and cynicism from a bitter old mercenary. Thank you for the great questions!
LINK: retro-replay.com/jeff-vogel-…
Jeff Vogel retweeted
New Blog Post! I review Splatoon Raiders, Schedule 1, Big Walk, Sir, We Have An Orc Problem, and Nubby's Number Factory. Turns out that Indie games are good. I also snark about Grand Theft Auto 6, an activity that never makes people super mad.
LINK: bottomfeeder.substack.com/p/…
New Blog Post! I review Splatoon Raiders, Schedule 1, Big Walk, Sir, We Have An Orc Problem, and Nubby's Number Factory. Turns out that Indie games are good. I also snark about Grand Theft Auto 6, an activity that never makes people super mad.
LINK: bottomfeeder.substack.com/p/…
Jeff Vogel retweeted
Dear frontier AI employees,
when leaving audio logs around the office, please remember to intermix:
1) reports of what happened
2) tragic personal anecdotes
3) creepy forebodings
4) the locations of useful access keycards and passwords
This will greatly help the protagonist.
Reviewing Splatoon Raiders
Some years back, Nintendo tried to make a unique twist on first person PvP shooters, something unlike anything done before. Was easy to roll my eyes at this. I mean, how many devs have tried this since Doom came out?
Then they released Splatoon and pretty much nailed it. It is a terrifically innovative game. Basically, it's a shooter where your ammo is ink. The ink damages your enemies, but it also paints the ground. You can only move easily on ground that it painted. So gameplay is a constantly balance between shooting to claim territory and shooting to knock out your foes.
Alas, not everyone could enjoy this, because it was an online PvP game. Not everyone is into those. If you are, but you haven't played Splatoon yet, it will take a long, long time to get competitive. Not only do you have to learn to play a new way, but you will be playing against 360 no-scope obsessives who will ink you into oblivion.
But good news! Splatoon Raiders is a Splatoon game, and it's a fast-paced single player arcade game. You get to experience all the unique gameplay (and the very odd setting) without getting instamurdered by Level 813 deathmasters.
It's basically long series of quick light, action-heavy levels of killing evil, goofy salmon monsters with paint, using an extremely finely honed battle system that's very satisfying. It's fast-paced, not overly long, and great fun. It's nice to enjoy innovation that works.
Rating: My Children Love All Things Splatoon And It's a Lucky Thing I Liked the Game Because If I Didn't They Would Put Me Into a Home / 10
I know Grand Theft Auto 6 is out and I'm not sure how I feel about it.
I started playing these with GTA3. Played these games for decades. I loved the cartoony gameplay and amorality. And then Rockstar's games just got heavier and heavier. Convinced they were saying Deep Things.
GTA5 was the first game in the series I haven't finished in many years. I got filtered by the flying section. Why did why wacky shooty game suddenly turn into a demanding flight sim? After piloting my plane into a hill 50 times, I gave up. It was a relief, as I was really tired of hanging out with its grim, aggressively unlikeable, utterly charmless protagonists.
(At least Niko Belik and his cousin were funny.)
And Red Dead Redemption 2? Can we finally say that game wasn't fun? With its repetitive, totally on rails missions? Obnoxious interface? The world's slowest, most awkward to control characters? Man, it was a struggle to plow through the back half of it. Snow effects were nice, though.
And now GTA6, the Biggest Game Evar, is almost out. With incredibly sparkly trailers featuring a truly disciplined lack of actual gameplay. Made in a time when the anarchic, offensive looseness of the older games is something game companies can no longer manage. AAA just doesn't do "silly" anymore.
Anyway, I hope it's good. I might buy it. Once it fully downloads, in 2029, I'll let you know what I think. :-/
I finally watched Hellraiser. It was fine. A nice mix of sincere, goofy, and horrifying. An exceptionally moist movie.
But ... So it's about these demons that try to take you away to this infinite universe of pleasure and pain. Promising. And then all they ever do is hang people from hooks. It's their go-to move! Oh, look. Susan touched the cube. Get out the hooks!
Even the hicks in Texas Chainsaw Massacre had more variety in their repertoire than this. Disappointing lack of hustle and ingenuity in our demon overlords.
I'm not saddened by this announcement. The sadness came over a decade ago, when I knew the Bioware I loved no longer existed.
Never forget: Great work isn't made by organizations or intellectual properties. Great work is made by geniuses. When the geniuses are gone, only the shell remains. From then on, you only get disappointment and the occasional vapors of greatness-that-was.
See also: Star Wars. Star Trek. Lord of the Rings.
I'm a few hundred puzzles into Order of the Sinking Star, and it is, indeed, fantastic. Yes, it's a box pushing game, but it plans to be the LAST box pushing game. No meat will be left on the bones.
The puzzles are really well put together. Compact. No extra elements. You are given a seemingly impossible situation and you have to explore the capabilities of the few parts you are given and figure out a new way to use them. Really ingenious stuff in here.
Highly recommended. I've already gotten well over the $30 worth, and I have a LONG way to go.
I looked at Steam Next Fest, and some of its 8000 (!!!) demos. They did indeed look awful AI-sloppy. Today the algorithm switched to showing games that had lots of interest, so most of the AI won't be seen unless you look for it.
This is, indeed, successful curation. Done the only possible way: By actual players picking games they like.
I've seen people online call for Steam to be more active in curation. This can't happen! For Steam to sort through 8000 demos and figure out the "good ones" is not a solvable problem. If it was solvable, they would have done it years ago.
The answer to the AI "problem" is: Things will just be worse now, and there's nothing that can be done about it. But, I mean, it's indie video games. What makes you think things have to be better?
A pretty dire showing, but there are two winners here that arguably were the best pictures that year: Parasite and Spotlight.
Yeah, everyone is talking about how thoroughly mediocre Shape of Water and Green Book were. I liked Moonlight more than most.
But someone should point out what an excellent movie Spotlight is.
Jeff Vogel retweeted
New blog post about AI! Explains why you should make up your mind about AI now and never think about it again. Until it takes your job, or kills you and nobody takes responsibility.
Just because it's not alive doesn't mean things won't go craaazy!
LINK: bottomfeeder.substack.com/p/…
