Gaming Now

Gaming has come a long way sins the early days. With the likes of The Duke and Keen long gone. There have been many games in the very short history of video gaming, and, like everything ales, it is becoming a big market. It is growing every year, and there are more games coming out every year. There is, how ever, a big difference between the Video gaming industry and other industries that deal in entertainment.

Games can be made by just about anyone. Along as you have a net connection, and a bit of know-how, you can make a game, using one of MANY free or cheep programmes that are available to download like Game Maker and Blender. Then there is moving. Sometime, if a mod is any good, there is a chance it will be bout buy a company, and be made even better, thanks to the money that is getting put in it. One good example of this is Gary's Mod or, as it is now know as, Gmod, a mod for Half-Life 2 by Valve. After it got to version 9, Valve bout it, and version 10 was realised as a buy able product on Valve's digital distribution serves, STEAM.

Then there are the Indy (independent) games. They make up a small section of the market, but they are the driving force in most cases on new ways to play games. Most big wigs wont touch a new way of doing things, incase it flops, and they losses all there money. Indy games, on the other hand, have a bit more flexibility, as they don't have big budgets, and in most cases, there are only a few people working on an Indy game, compared to the teams of 20 or more that the big wigs have. This means that they do not have to speed as much, which, in turn, means they don't have to pay as many people, or in some cases, no one at all.

A good example of an Indy game is Mount & Blade. It is a 3^rd person RPG set fictional world that is in medieval times. The game sees you as a citizen of the land, with no real story to follow. You can become a bandit, or a slave trader, and even hire people to be in your own privet army, witch you can then use to attack other people roaming the land, whether they be guard patrols from the towns, to bandits. Pretty much anything that roams the world, you can attack to take as slaves or kill. The beast comparison for the game would be Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, but with mounted combat. Now, you probably asking why I told you that. Well, it is to point out the this is a big game, made by a small team. This team, infarct, only consists of only 2 people.

My point is that a good game is not the sum of people developing the game, but the sum of there skill. How is this different? Well, you could get 40 people in a room, and tell them to make a game. These people have little skill, if not none at all, and after the game is finished, it flops. You then On the other hand, if you get a team of 10 people, who know what they are doing, you could have one hell of a game at the end of it all.

I guess what I am trying to say is that the beast games out there are there don't necessarily have big amounts of cash to speed. This means that you need to look for the good games.

To finish of, I will point you in the direction of a few sites that are rather good.

First up, there is Mod DB. If there's a mod for a game, this place will have it, and there is also a growing number Independent games as well, witch means that ModDB could become a very big place for games.

I mentioned a program could Game Maker. Well, there website also has games that has been made with the program to download. Some a free, while others you will have to pay for.

Until next time, Josh