Brighton Games Developers – Relentless and Black Rock
Posted by guycocker in gamespot, video games on September 16, 2008
Today, I headed to Brighton to visit two development houses that were born in the city. Relentless Software are probably best known for the Buzz! series, of which I’m a huge fan, while Black Rock Studio is behind Pure, which is looking like it could be the sleeper hit of the winter.
We managed to see how the Buzz! team is currently expanding on the first PS3 game with PlayStation Eye features, allowing people to take photos as they beat people around the world. Then it was 100m down the road to Black Rock, with their very impressive new racing game Pure. As a fan of stunt-based racers like Motorcross Madness, I can’t wait to play more of this incredibly polished racer.
Aside from the seeing the games, it was great to spend the day hanging out in a game-making environment. Relentless and Black Rock may be close enough to see into each other’s windows, but they’re very different companies too. Relentless has enjoyed massive success making casual games, and perhaps reflecting this emerging market, the studio imposes a strict 9-5 working day for its employees. Black Rock, personally selected by Disney head Robert Iger to push the company further into the videogame market, has a more traditional feel but still retains an element of fun. There’s free ice cream on hand, toys in the meeting rooms, and Black Rock-branded sweets in the form of…well, black sticks of rock. They are in Brighton, after all.
What both teams had in common though was a genuine sense of passion and energy for their respective titles–these are definitely places we could have spent longer at. Finally, it was great to see GameSpot user WillMorkai join us for the Relentless visit, who won after entering a competition on our forums. Relentless spent time explaining game development to Will, and they seemed to be genuinely interested in discovering his opinions about the games market. As a potential games programmer, I wouldn’t be surprised if young Will finds himself at Relentless Software again sometime in the future.
In short, it’s days like these that make you glad you’re working in the games industry. Our Brighton special edition of Start/Select will be up on Friday, so stay tuned for our full interviews with these two leading studios. In the meantime, here are some photos I took of the day.
Wipeout HD Videos
Posted by guycocker in gamespot, video games on September 15, 2008
I spent a good majority of my day today playing through Wipeout HD on the PlayStation 3. The game plays really well, with improved handling since I encountered it earlier in the year. I’d say I made it about halfway through the single-player campaign during the day, the highlight of which was becoming the number one ranked player in the world in a number of races. Sadly, I doubt that will last even ten minutes once the game is released later this month.
Anyway, I took a number of videos as I was playing, so ahead of the review, gorge yourself on some of these rather fine videos for a taste of the finished game.
Sony PlayTV Review
Posted by guycocker in tech, video games on September 15, 2008
Sony’s PlayTV arrived in the office a while back and I was lucky enough to give it a whirl ahead of its release. Aside from an ugly box and a lack of a PSP transfer facility, I like PlayTV, and if I had a PS3 I would definitely check it out. In-depth impressions will be going up on GameSpot shortly, but in the meantime here’s a video I captured during testing.
Moving my Blog Host
I’m in the process of setting up another blog, so I thought I would consolidate my hosting to one company. After researching the options, I had a ‘eureka’ moment when I found out the hosting package I bought for my girlfriend offered unlimited domain support, allowing me to cancel my GoDaddy hosting, move two blogs over and save myself quite a bit of money over the year!
It’s a nightmare moving over a blog with its databases, but I actually learned a lot more about how these things work along the way.
guycocker.com on iPhone and iPod Touch
With the new iPod Touch being released yesterday, I thought I should update my blog to work with the site. Thanks to the excellent BraveNewCode plugin, the site should now automatically format itself for the iPod Touch and iPhone whenever you visit on the device. Let me know what you think!
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