Last week Mitch had endless trouble trying to run No Man’s Sky on the office PS4 with no web connection, so this week we’re looking at the internet connection conundrum. With more and more games requiring the internet to even launch, total offline gaming could be a thing of the past. What happens if you’re in an area where internet is spotty, and you can’t experience the cultural phenomenon that is Pokémon Go? Can you make games if you aren’t able to study and learn from the works of others?
We are also joined live by Dr. Kate Raynes-Goldie, Director of Games & Interactive at FTI and winner of the WAITTA Incite “Achiever of the Year” award for her passionate advocacy for the Western Australian games industry, Kate filled us in on her hopes for the future of WA game development, her thoughts on the power of the indie game scene and how our favourite small creators may well hold the key to the future success of Australian made games. You can visit one of Kate’s projects, Playup Perth, a collaborative game testing night, at the The Nostalgia Box to sample some of WA’s finest indie games. You can visit http://playupperth.org/next-playup-event/ for tickets and details.
Finally we look at pastiche & homage games. With recent high profile fan made games AM2R, a remake of Metroid II, and Pokémon Uranium, a brand new adventure set in the Pokémon world being released then pulled, we examine what it means when developers copy or imitate the work of others. Is this a vital part of remix culture, or just a plain copyright infringement?
