Zettai Hero Kaizou Keikaku

I was just commenting to my brother the other day about how the Disgaea remakes on the portable systems are nice, and the rumors of Disgaea 4 are nice, but I'd really like to see another non-Disgaea game by Nippon Ichi. After all, Soul Nomad and the World Eaters is a sublimely deep tactical RPG of the Ogre Battle variety (direct control over the movements and formations of small groups of characters, but no control over individuals in combat).

And then I saw this video on Joystiq: a trailer for a game which, among other things, contains a hilariously huge variety of different weapons and skills you can give to your hero.



As others have said, "First day purchase!"

The Food Debate

Yet another TF2 video:

Hexxagon Video

[EDIT: I decided to remove the original video review because of mild profanity I had forgotten about. So here's a plain video of the game being played.]

Here's a video of the classic game Hexxagon:



Hexxagon used to be played a LOT at our house in England. In fact, it's one of the few shareware games we got around to registering and thus we own a legitimate copy of Hexxagon II (not that anyone cares about registering an ancient shareware game whose company is long gone now).

So why is this post tagged "Game Development" and "Game Maker"? It's a surprise. A surprise you can probably guess, but it's not quite ready to reveal yet. Probably next week.

Centipong 2: The Nettening

"MadTinkerer’s Net is now ingame."

Woo!

Game Design Snippet: Arcade Tokens in MMORPGs

Over on Keen & Graev's Blog, they wrote about how microtransactions can ruin MMORPGs the way they're being implemented now. Having played Maple Story a bit in the past, I can testify about how annoying "cash shops" are. But there are only two other successful alternatives: subscriptions and Guild Wars-style instancing.

But maybe MMO developers should look at a microtransaction model that worked really well in the past: Arcade Tokens.

In a video arcade, you paid a minimum of 1 token to start a game, and if you ran out of lives, you could pay another token to continue. Why not, instead of charging for loot, you charged for access to dungeons and resurrection while in those dungeons?

This way there would be a true free to play section of the game. This free section would be everything characters need, plus some easy grinding & crafting & standard MMO activities. Premium sections would require 1 token for entry and 1 token for each time your character needed to be resurrected. You get to keep all loot at no extra cost, and can even trade it as normal. The monsters would be harder and the loot would be better in the premium areas, of course.

Essentially, once you have the loot, you don't need to go back into the premium areas (unless you want more of it) and could play the free part as much as you want. Players can also form teams for raiding the premium areas and pay tokens for each other if needed.