Fire Hose in the News
I don’t know what’s going on lately but it seems like Fire Hosers and Slam Bolt Scrappers have been popping up in the news all over the place. You probably already heard the good news about our impending release on the PlayStation Network, but in case you missed it here is a sampling of all the other fun stuff out there on the intarwebs!
The Dejobaan guys have a kick ass new website, Indie Superstar, and in their debut Indie Water Cooler features a ridiculous conversation between Andy Moore (Fantastic Contraption), Jeff Rosen (Humble Indie Bundle), and yours truly! Best Quote: “What you produce with your Indie status may very well be shitty, but it doesn’t make you less Indie. You’re just a Shitty Indie. “
Gamespy also has a kick as new column (apparently kick ass new things are a trend?) called the Indie Spotlight, and their first highlight is Slam Bolt Scrappers! Nathan Meunier’s article is fantastic and definitely worth a read. Best Quote: “Fire Hose Games’ debut puzzle brawler is soaked in awesome.“
James Bishop over at DIY Gamer wrote a well written and thought provoking article on a “less is more” philosophy where game developers are sometimes better served by trying to do one or two things well instead of spreading themselves too thin, and used Slam Bolt Scrappers as an example. Best Quote: “Simpler does not equate to worse in any way.”
Rodney Brown over at Mass High Tech put out a nice article on us getting picked up by Sony Online Entertainment, but was that picture of me really necessary?
Oh, and let’s not forget the E3 coverage! Josh Fernandes at PlayStation LifeStyle wrote a nice piece on us about his impressions. The Couch Athletics guys called us one of the 5 games you don’t want to miss from E3, and actually had us in company with Comic Jumper and Bionic Commando Rearmed 2! Wicked.
We’re super psyched that everyone likes our game, thanks for the press! If anyone out there is looking for info on us or our game please reach out to us, we’re happy to chew your ears off.
July 15, 2010 | | Comments (3)
Category: News
Tags: Andy Moore, Athletics, Bionoic Commando Rearmed, Bishop, Brown, Comic Jumper, Couch, Dejobaan, DIY Gamer, Fantastic Contraption, Fernandes, Gamespy, Humble Indie Bundle, indie, James, Jeff Rosen, josh, Meunier, Nathan, News, Rodney, Slam Bolt Scrappers, superstar
E3 2010 Round Up
Alec and I spent the last week in sunny, sunny LA at E3, the video game press hoedown. And we got some press! Specifically, there is a kick ass article on Joystiq by one Alexander Sliwinski reviewing our game, and there is another awesome piece onSBS at PlayStation LifeStyle, courtesy of Josh Fernandes. Rock on!
But you already know about our game if you’re here, and this year had a heavy focus on new gaming hardware, so let’s talk about the stars of the show: the PlayStation Move, the Microsoft Kinect, and the Nintendo 3DS (by the way, how hilarious are the models pretending to use the systems in those links?). I’ve seen a lot of articles and comments around the interwebs claiming that Nintendo “won” the show (if such a thing is possible) with their 3DS, and that the Move and Kinect had a weaker showing. I personally don’t agree with this assessment, as I think that the unveiling of new hardware by Sony and Microsoft shows a shift in their marketing strategies.
Both the Kinect and Move are designed to compete with Nintendo, but in different ways. The XBox is currently a system for “hardcore” gamers, guys who have grown up playing games and still want to spend lots of time with new titles. This reputation may have caused it to do well with men but the system trails with women, especially behind the popular Wii. MS has recently been trying to broaden the scope of who the system appeals to with the addition of Netflix and Facebook to the system, and the Kinect will go even further in this direction. The games coming out on the Kinect aren’t designed for hardcore gamers, they’re designed for their girlfriends, wives, or non-gaming friends. These people think Halo and GTA4 look stupid but might be willing to give a dancing or fitness game a shot. And bridging the gap between gamer and non-gamer can be incredibly important in a home where there are such disparate views on gaming. So think of the Kinect as a “gateway controller” for older non-gamers living with hardcore gamers.
The Move, on the other hand, is designed to capture the hearts and minds of kids. It is a shiny, easily approachable controller for the PS3, complete with a beautiful colored light ball on top. Of the games I saw demoed at E3 a majority were aimed at small children and had child actors playing the games in the trailers. I think that Sony has a long term strategy in mind with the Move wherein they hook small children with the controller now and get them to be PlayStation gamers for life. Look at Nintendo – they have an insanely loyal customer base of fanatics who remembered and loved playing the NES and SNES as children. Sony wants to duplicate that loyalty with the next generation of gamers, and the Move is a salvo designed to hook these children. And with the cheap price point of the controller they just might be able to do it.
I curious how much of an impact the 3DS will ultimately have. There are a lot of DSes out there, and though the 3DS has some cool new features I wonder how quick fans will be to trade in their older version for a new one. Then again people regularly upgrade their iPods, and it doesn’t pay to bet against Nintendo so I’m going to guess that it will turn out to be a hit.
Ultimately I’m incredibly excited about all of these systems and can’t wait to play with them all. It’s going to be a good year for gamers, old and new alike.
June 21, 2010 | | Comments (1)
Category: News, Rant
Tags: 2010, 3DS, Alexander, E3, Fernandes, hardcore, hardware, josh, Joystiq, Kinect, LifeStyle, marketing, microsoft, Move, nintendo, playstation, Sliwinski, sony, strategy
The Fire Hose D&D Campaign Begins!
Here is a guest post by Josh Diaz, a good friend of mine who has been helping me out with this D&D campaign. We’ll start a separate blog of our D&D adventures, more on that soon. And with that I’ll turn it over to Josh!
On Monday evenings, a group of heroes gathered in a crowded town square, uniting to help protect their homelands. At the same time, a group of game developers gathered in a dingy dungeon, to help learn the origins of their craft.
That’s right, Fire Hose is running a D&D campaign! I was invited by our Dungeon Master, Eitan, along with a select group of the realm’s finest scholars and sharpest blades, to come around and play in a game of 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. 4th Edition is an updated version of the long-running game, and some of the design changes look back to both the original ‘tactical wargaming’ history of its predecessors, while also drawing on the immediacy and class balancing of modern computer and video games.
The rules are long, bookish, and copyrighted — so I’ll direct your attention to Eitan’s simple, but beautiful world. As Dungeon Master, Eitan is artist, writer, programmer *and* executable: he sets up the world our characters will inhabit, and keeps everything moving while we react to new events. As such, he’s come up with a little slice of a world that was richly represented with just a little bit of advance work. Pulling from real-world sources, our characters meet in a small and frozen town stuck on a peninsula behind a mountain range. ‘What’s exciting about a small frozen chunk of isolated no-man’s land,’I pretend to hear you ask? Well, in this case, the town is host to a small magical gateway that leads to a much larger town, and acts as kind of a trading post for the peninsula and it’s inhabits. With a hook like that, characters drawn from all over the world — an elf scholar who came to visit the big city from his wooded homeland, a dragonborn mercenary from a rural mountain rookery — are given both a reason and the means to gather. But if we can get there, where else can we get? And *who* else has access to the portal?
Oh, I haven’t mentioned the invasion, the ambush, or the kobold slingers with their potions of explodey doom yet. But one of the neat things about D&D is that in the course of play, you always end up with more threads than you planned, and that just means there’s something to think about for next week. Adieu!
July 31, 2009 | | Comments (1)
Category: Events, Games
Tags: adventure, D&D, diaz, dragons, dungeons, fantasy, game, josh, kobold, playing, role, rpg
Who wants to join a Fire Hose D&D campaign?
Dungeons and Dragons is something that I’ve always wanted to play, but in shame have never really gotten around to it. Sure, I’ve played variants like Final Fantasy (the original) and Baldur’s Gate II, and last summer I even played around two minutes of an awesome campaign headed up by Josh Diaz at GAMBIT, but I can’t say that I’ve honestly ever spent time with it.
Well, no more! I’m planning on starting a new campaign using the new 4th edition rules. And I need people to join me! 4-6 people, specifically. So I thought I’d have some fun and invite you, loyal Fire Hose blog reader, to play. Want to join? Here are the requirements:
- Must live in Boston/Cambridge
- Must be free on Monday nights, from 7-10pm
- Must be super awesome, and have fought dinosaurs before
- Ideally we’ll have a mix of guys and girls, game developers and non-game developers
If you’re interested shoot me an e-mail! You can use my super secret address of my first name at firehosegames.com to profess your desire to join, and if you make the cut we’ll get you set up.