Video Game Development at the University of Michigan

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Indigo Prophecy and New Super Mario Bros. Impressions

Indigo Prophecy:

This game is awesome. Play it if you haven't and you have a ps2. You can find this game for around $15 shipped on ebay, or for 17.99 used locally. I really enjoy playing games that make you play differently than most games, and this is one of those gems. You play as both a murderer and the cops investigating the murder trying to both cover up the crime and uncover it in the different chapters. The game plays very much like an interactive movie that never gets boring. Many small details are included so that almost…

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Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War

Platform: PC
Developer: Relic
Publisher: THQ
Genre: Real-Time Strategy
Price: $20

boxart

Minimum requirements:

  • Windows 98/2000/XP/ME
  • DirectX 9.0b
  • 1.5 GHz CPU
  • 256 MB RAM
  • 2 GB free hard drive space
  • 4x CD-ROM drive
  • 32 MB DirectX 9.0b compatible AGP video card with hardware Transform and Lighting
  • DirectX 9.0b compatible 16-bit sound card
  • Keyboard, mouse

Recommended:

  • 2.2 GHz CPU
  • 512 MB RAM
  • GeForce 3 or…

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150 Million Games Sold and Counting: Why Pokemon Is Still

Going Strong

(So you know this is going to be about Pokemon and you're still reading? Bravo.)

We all know how the Pokemon games took the world by storm about 10 years ago, but not many people know (or care) how the franchise is doing nowadays. The surprising thing is that while the series' popularity has dropped, the games continue to sell extremely well. In fact, the worst selling Pokemon game, Emerald version for GBA, still sells as well as the worst selling Mario games, and it sells better than the majority of Final Fantasy and Zelda games. So how has…

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MGS3, Eternal Darkess: Sanity's Requiem, Lost Magic

Games I'm Currently Playing and What I Like/Dislike About Them

Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence

Im on my second playthrough of MGS3 now that I have subsistence and I'm enjoying it even more than the first time. I attribute this mainly to what I consider a pretty steep learning curve especially having played through the first two before this one. The first two gave you radar and you could run up behind a guy and hold them up. In MGS3, you have no radar comparable to the first two, and you can't just run up and hold a sentry hostage,…

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Microsoft and Mechs

If you don't read this whole article, understand this:
  1. I love Mechs.
  2. An arcade-style combat sim with 2 joysticks, foot pedals, and an assortment of secondary controls is one of the best game experiences possible.
  3. Microsoft has had access to a tactical Mech game they could develop easily but have not, and this confounds me.

MICROSOFT AND MECHS

I'm a sucker for Mech games. I don't know why. There isn't any consistent reason I prefer them; but adding Mech to a game automatically makes it superior to other games. I assume most gamers…

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To The Revolution

When I think of video games, I think of immersion. The ideal video game grabs the player and keeps them engaged in an entertaining experience, and that requires a certain amount of pulling the player into the game's world. Looking to the future, I think that one day games will have the ability to be completely immersive, bringing the player of a game inside of them. From the moment I picked up a controller and moved something on an external screen, I imagined a virtual world where I myself could be the main character, participating within an interactive and deceptively…

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WSOFT: Now and into the Future II: A post-mortem of

Wolverine Soft for '04-'06

The way I see it, Wolverine Soft entered its second phase roughly two years ago, starting with the first 48 Hour contest in the spring of 2004. Before that, in its infancy, Wolverine Soft constantly struggled with organization and structure, and it nearly dissolved several times. Back in the winter of '04, our founder Ed Baraf sent a rather inflammatory email to the email list that resulted in a WSoft renaissance which carried WSoft into the second phase. The 48 Hour contest generated huge interest in the club, which led to a strong batch of new officers for…

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Collision Detection and Response

Collision Detection

Checking for collisions in a video game is just like doing a search for a value in a given data structure. Instead of using a single value as a key, we are going to use the position and shape of an object together as a key to determine what other objects overlap the object being tested. One big difference here is that testing the equality of keys (testing if the shapes overlap rather than just testing values against each other) is much more computationally expensive as the complexity of your shapes increase. As in…

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48 Hour Contest Advice

Intro/About

My name is Dave Ratti. I entered the 48 hour contest both times it was held while I was at UofM. My games were Marble Bandits and Blobby Waters. I now work in the Game Industry. I hope this article will be useful to those entering or thinking of entering the 48 hour contest. These are just my opinions and strategies that I formed from doing it twice. Some of my advice will pertain only to programmers but other advice will be more general that everyone can use.

Why Do the Contest?

The 48 hour contest…

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Rating Inflation

I found an interesting post on Joystiq a few days ago. The post is about a meta-review of Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories. It raises a few interesting points regarding "rating inflation" as it pertains to video games.

Now, of course nobody wants to release a game only to find afterwards that the reviewers think that the game is mediocre, or less than mediocre. Not only does it hurt developers' egos, but it hurts sales. With games costing millions, or even tens of millions of dollars to make, mistakes aren't taken lightly. Surely developers should not mind if…

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