One of my favourite indie authors is Cliff Harris, otherwise known as Cliffski. His background includes stints doing game development at Elixir and then Lionhead. Upon leaving Peter Molyneux’s outfit he moved into indie games, starting out with niche title Democracy, following up Kudos, Rock Legend, and Democracy 2 (amongst others), all available from the Positech website.

Cliff’s rants are not for the faint-hearted, in particular when it comes to the topic of piracy. However, he did a very brave thing and confronted the problem head on, putting out a public question on his blog asking why people pirate games.

In this post he talks about what happened, the mass of responses that he got, and how he is reacting to them. I urge you to go and read his page directly and I’d also like to add a few comments of my own.

There are thousands of gaming podcasts around the net but, to be honest, most are dull as dishwater. There are a few exceptions, notably Ben Croshaw’s Zero Punctuation over at Escapist Magazine. I did just find this gem blogged about on Destructoid, however.

It’s a great parody featuring Bizzare Creations’ Geometry Wars, or rather the making of it.

I popped over to the LoadingReadyRun homepage and found another good video, this time featuring Wii games that never made it. The last couple are particuarly funny, stick with it! This video is probably not for the easily offended; you have been warned.

 

Tags: geometry wars, humour, podcast

LATEST: Shacknews is reporting the pricing as an error, however the debate is still very relevant as XBLA prices are definitely on the increase and I expect Castle Crashers to be 1200 or perhaps 1600 points personally.

A storm is brewing over indie games Castle Crashers and Braid. A Japanese website has published the proposed price points for these much anticipated titles, 1800 points and 1200 points resepectively. Meanwhile the blogs at Behemoth and Destructoid (amongst others) are filling up with riled users unsure what to make of it all, as you can see by the Destructoid image below:

The first thing to say is that I expect the Western price point of Castle Crashers to be 1600 points rather than 1800, but I can’t confirm that with any insider knowledge right now. I’m sure the matter will be cleared up ASAP, possibly even today.