What do I play?
I meet with a lot of customers. It is soon obvious that I am a hardcore gamer - as is everyone in the game technologies group. Sometimes, at the end of customer meetings, I am asked what I am playing right now. That's a fun question. I also often get a similar question of the form "You work in the games group - you must play a lot of games." The fact of the matter is that I play fewer games now than I did before starting the games group. Or to put it a somewhat different way, I will quote Chris Taylor who designed the great game Dungeon Siege - one of the myths of game development is that it is as much fun to make games as it is to play games. So, I don't play a whole lot - but I do get to play a little.
One of the ironies of my job is that I truly believe that networked games will explode in popularity and we have a great opportunity to thrive in that market - but I don't play networked games. I am pretty much a single player gamer. Although, Jeff (our server architect) claims that I would love City of Heros.
To get to the point, lately I have been playing a number of games. I played and finished Painkiller and Doom 3. I am currently working on Knights of The Old Republic and Far Cry. I also have Syberia 2 in the queue. Games I am looking to pick up include Myst IV, The Sims 2, and Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 (download the demo - it looks amazing). Oh - and like every other gamer on the planet, I eagerly await Half Life 2. On my phone, I am playing the great standby's of Solitare and Tetris - which completely goes against my view that mutliplayer community games are the true calling of mobile games. But, like I said - I don't play many networked games. On my n-gage I am playing Splinter Cell - but I want to get to the Call of Duty Preview that the n-gage folks so kindly forwarded me. :^) And finally, I am playing Apprentice of The Force on my Game Boy Advance SP.
That does look like a lot of games, but I really don't play much. I squeeze in maybe 15-30 minutes a day. Which brings me to this - unlimited in-game saves is a must. I understand all the arguments for and against, but there are lots of gamers like me who can't sit down for 1-2 hours just to get a little gaming fix.
I really do want to try out a networked game. Maybe it will be City of Heros. I like the idea behind Star Wars Galaxies, but it has way too many bad reviews. Everquest 2 is about to launch - but it's really not my type of game. I may get my feet wet with Toontown online. It looks really good - and I think if Disney put some real marketing muscle behind it - it truly could be the first massively multiplayer game to cross demographic boundaries.
So, what do I play - lot's of different games in small quantities. One of these days maybe I should take a vacation just to play games.
Posted at 12:23PM Oct 19, 2004 by dtwilleager in General | Comments[1]
Posted by Kevin on October 19, 2004 at 03:32 PM PDT #