Skip to main content

Addendum - Starships on a tablet

By

Hmm. I went on a short trip with my windows 8 convertible laptop (long story, my good win 7 one died).

I was astonished at how poorly the game worked with the touch screen interface enabled. It can't have been tested very well, because key buttons - like the ones to buy up the ship system you selected - didn't even respond to taps.

I'm wondering what's going on at Firaxis. When a one man shop like Zero Sum can produce both an excellent game and completely normal windows behavior, how come a place with years of experience on the platform messed up so badly?

Perhaps they are losing interest in the PC, and in the rich games that live on it. Although if that's the case, why are they doing so much on iOS and ignoring Android, which is both a much larger market and (in my experience) more attractive to high end geeks?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This article didn't quite change my life, but it was the most worthwhile thing I've read in a while

By
I like the games I like, and I'm no longer in the business of making games, so in many ways this article is not to my address. But it was still really worth my time to read carefully. It never gets anywhere near the stupid misogynistic pseudo-editorial "defense of games" crap that I'm not naming to avoid the still-raging humans pretending to be flamebots, and it comes from the opposite, and very constructive direction. And it quotes Tim Gunn more than once, in a very on-topic way. Tim Gunn is an awesome individual, even though I doubt he's ever been in the same room as a videogame for long. http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-11-07-video-games-are-boring
Post a Comment
Read more

GW2 Heart of Thorns, after some serious play time

By
The first week or two after Heart of Thorns went live, I was a bit disappointed. Playing on, first because four of my friends and I always play together on Mondays, I got a little more of a philosophical handle on how the expansion changes the game, and I'm no longer ambivalent about having bought it - I love some parts, and I just had to learn that the "different kinds of fun as you feel like it" game design is now painted in broader strokes - especially you should only go into one of the new zones if you feel like the activity that is going on in it. Roughly speaking, HoT adds four things to the game: A new character class, a new "elite" subclass for each class, a new form of progression at L80, and a bunch of new zones with their story. Of these, the zones are the most visible and important, and the mastery tracks are the most novel and IMO successful, so I'll leave those for last. In thinking about these changes together, I think I see a philosophica...
Post a Comment
Read more

The highest bang-for-buck thing in Fallout 4

By
So, I had a hankering for some first-person murder hoboing the other day just when Steam put Fallout 4 on sale, so I gave up my plan to wait for the GOTY edition. It's mostly living up to my expectations, good and bad, based on reviews and on previous Bethesda games. The ostensible plot hook (lost baby) is completely underwhelming (sorry, clicking a blob of pixels a couple times can't compare to bonding with a real baby) but irrelevant to the game anyway. The main plot sounds potentially less stupid than the one for FO3. The settlement stuff is not quite as bolted onto the side of the game as I expected - taking time and perks to improve your settlement network can pay off in upgrade mats. But the thing that surprised me most pleasantly was remarkably simple. If you choose a somewhat common name for your character, the voiced robot butler will actually call you by name (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Codsworth/recognized_names). I didn't know this going in, and my first ...
Post a Comment
Read more