James Cunningham reports:
''It's been a long time since the days of the Doom wad, when obscure tools were required to make maps and only the truly dedicated could create something worth playing. Level design tools have come a long way since then, and now anyone with creativity and a bit of perseverance can play game designer. While the distribution methods on the PC side of things have evolved nicely, with the clear leader in the field being Trackmania's incredible community website, consoles… Hmm… How to put this kindly…
Level distribution on consoles sucks syphilitic goat wang. That's the polite, sugar-coated version.
N+ had its online level distribution yanked by Microsoft at the very last second. Boom Blox lets you share your levels with friends, putting Nintendo in the unique position of being smarter about the ways their online infrastructure is used than Microsoft. Echochrome is even better, automatically uploading a handful of user-created levels every week or so in addition to allowing users to trade. Taking things a step farther, Blast Works: Build, Trade, Destroy will allow players to upload their levels to BlastWorksDepot.com to share with the world, and Little Big Planet will do roughly the same thing a few months afterwards. Now we're talking!''
It's important in life to maintain a broad palette when it comes to culture and the arts. Hideo Kojima agrees, as he continues to use video games like Death Stranding to introduce people to music and other elements they might not otherwise discover.
Mojang has partnered with Merlin Entertainments to build the world's first Minecraft theme park in the UK.
A three-episode live-action adaptation of the first two Yakuza video games will debut Tuesday, March 17 exclusively IGN. Each episode is about an hour long and will stream on IGN.com and IGN’s YouTube channel.
This is probably one of my favorite things of this generation, that I can make my own levels. :D