Our Daily Beard – 17/02/13

Greetings fellows!

What’s going on today? Not a great deal!

I’ve been working lots of evenings, not seeing anyone and trying to remain focused on my projects. Part of that is using Twitter more- and I am slowly starting to love it.

A big reason for loving it is that I was followed, quite out of the blue, by a game maker and novelist called Andy Gavin (@asgavin).

Now, for me, this is Big Deal Central. Andy was a co-founder of Naughty Dog, who made one of my favourite games of all time. Crash Bandicoot? No, silly. RINGS OF POWER.

Not played it? Get a Mega Drive emulator pronto. We’re talking about a massive, maaaassiiiive RPG with a sprawling story over a huge world. Short version: Rod of Creation is like God’s remote control, it was split into several rings each denoting a trait or quality like Intuition, and scattered to the corners of the planet. Our plucky heroes find them, battle evil, chill out. Each character belongs to a school, like a magical/warrior class. So simple, but a massive world with its own factions, economy and terrain types expands from this. Ships, dragons, trading, tons and tons of dialogue, Easter eggs – the works.

It wasn’t perfect. The isometric view was jerky and the controls were awkward. It had game-ending bugs. The 16 bit faux-medieval music and sloshy colour palette combined to make everything slightly off-kilter and nauseating (actually that sounds worse than it is – I remember it quite fondly!).

Thing is, all these things made it all the more awesome, because this was the first time (for me) playing a console RPG which was big and detailed enough to have bugs and control issues and all the rest.

Anyway, the point is that I was a huge fan of this obscure game and being able to chinwag with one of its creators was like meeting a celebrity. So long story short – Me = chuffed.

Have a good Sunday everyone!

 

 

[sociable]