Author Archives: Ethan

About Ethan

Having long been an avid gamer, Ethan found his niche in the PC gaming market, while still occasionally dabbling in the medium that got him into gaming, consoles. Usually, he finds time to play his Xbox 360 and occasionally will dust of his Wii for a bit to play with friends and family when he isn’t found locked in his room playing shooters and strategy games. Follow him on Twitter: @ethanhawkes

Game Dev Story: Mixing depth and instant gratification.

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Mobile gaming is a strange beast that many companies have been recently capitalizing on. The audience of these games is generally casual gamers, so usually mobile developers show no love for the mainstream audience. This works for the mobile platform because most of the time someone, including gamers, don’t have enough time to actually play a full on game during a train ride or in the waiting room. Although are there games that walk on the thin line of being just short enough yet are deep enough to be addicting for a long period of time. Game Dev Story is just one of those games.

A fantasy where bugs always get fixed.

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What Makes a Game—What makes a true sequel?

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“Yeah it’s pretty good, but it’s a lot like the last one.”

A topic of fierce discussion and frustration from gamers is whether or not a sequel to a beloved game is actually a fully realized new game or could have easily been an expansion. What games can be considered expansion packs; better known today as a very large DLC? Arguably, there are games that walk the line, but there are also games that have some gamers believing that developers are just plain lazy.

One of the most prolific games that have some players hopping mad about shelling out $60, is Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3. Many arguments can be made that this game being nothing more than an expansion pack or very large DLC pack for Modern Warfare 2. The most obvious issue is that the graphics remain largely the same as Modern Warfare 2. To be fair, the Call of Duty series has been running the same modified engine since the 2nd Call of Duty, but the newest modifications aren’t showing much of an improvement to a player’s view of the game’s graphics.

Can you figure out which one came first?

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