black-and-white posts

Peter Molyneux, one of the true pioneers and innovators in the PC game industry, will be honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award during the 2011 Game Developers Choice Awards ceremony. The event will be held on March 2 as part of the 2011 Game Developers Conference.

The UK native Molyneux co-founded Bullfrog Productions in 1987 where he helped to create a number of classic PC games including Populus, Syndicate, Dungeon Keeper and many other titles. He left Bullfrog and founded Lionhead Studios in 1997 which made the Black and White titles and The Movies for the PC. While he has moved away from the PC platform in favor of the Xbox and Xbox 360 with the Fable RPG series, Molyneux will return to the PC platform in 2011 with the planned release of a PC version of Fable 3.

Sometimes you just need to sit down, slide a floppy into your A: drive, and enjoy gaming retro style. We know this all too well! That's why we have a list of the best and brightest from days long gone. These are some of our favorite games of all time, and we're sure that you'll love them as much as we do, if not more. Welcome to Boot Disk, and enjoy the retro ride!

Peter Molyneux is known for his grandiose statements and his involvement with several of the most famous gaming franchises out there. Populous was a game he worked on, as was Theme Hospital, Fable, and Dungeon Keeper. However, perhaps the best-known example of his excessive hyping is the real-time strategy game Black & White. While it was certainly built up in the eyes of the public far more than it should have been, Black & White is hardly a bad game. In fact, looking back, it's a classic that got hammered initially, but only grew more and more likable as it aged. While that describes a lot of games, it fits Black & White the best.

The folks who write about games for a living can be very guilty at times for hyping a game before its release. Sometimes theymake it sound like it's a done deal that it will be the greatest game ever made when it come out.. Heck, some folks even give out awards at E3 for games that are not even completed or just shown in trailer form. So you have to expect that on occasion a game comes out that, for whatever reason, doesn't quite live up to all of its promise, previews and PR.

In the past decade there have been many such PC games like we have described. These are titles that are not bad per se (that would be Daikatana) but just didn't have what it took to live up to the expecations that gamers and especially game journalists had for it. Big Download decided to pick 10 such games from the past 10 years that, for one reason or another, had high hopes but just couldn't cut it.

Click on the image above to continue reading 10 games that didn't rise above the hype

Identity is a fluid concept, particularly in today's Internet Age. When your self is displayed by an avatar whose image is infinitely mutable, the potential for mischief is great -- as is the potential for true representation. Some people use their avatars as masks to hide behind, while others see them as a means to finally show the world what their real selves are like.

In games, however, there is often a more limited set of choices available to the player. Massively multiplayer online games offer a wide range of options, and non-MMOs usually have far fewer. When you're playing a first-person shooter, for example, regardless of the ostensible story, you are the gun, not an actual character with a personality. The question is, then, does it matter if you don't get to play as yourself? How important is the concept of identity in a game?

Ahh, the tyranny of the blank page. For a writer, there is nothing more daunting than staring at an empty space with a deadline looming. Yet that's what wordsmiths do every day -- dig deep to find the content, the signal amidst the noise. However, it's one thing to sit and write a novel, where it's just the writer and the story, with the audience taking a static, non-participatory role. When one writes for a video game, the audience becomes an active part of the experience, and the writer must take that into account.

Yet often, the player merely sits through the story portion of a game, frequently told through cutscenes. Even those games which tout branching storylines with multiple endings do little more than offer closed choices, offering only the illusion of audience control. Are there any real choices to be had to affect a game's plot? Do narratives merely interrupt gameplay? What exactly is the role of story in video games?