The End Justifies the Means

By: ARelativelyHotGirl

On: August 10th, 2006

ZenOfSudoku

From the olde news department: Charlie “Flayra” Cleveland, creator of the excellent Half Life mod Natural Selection (which kicks the crap out of the spazzy Tremulous, imo) has unleashed his latest masterpiece…

Zen of Sudoku! Uh, say wha?

Yes folks, its a game so revolutionary that you’re urged to “consider telling your parents or grandparents about it”. The idea is to make money off of Zen to help keep Charles afloat while he and the team put together Natural Selection: Source, which will be released commercially on Steam.

In an older post on Charlie’s blog, he speculates that “Instead of either making immersive shooters for a hard-core audience or puzzle games for a casual audience, we can make medium-technology games that are easy to pick up and play yet have a long-term appeal and artistic messages.”

I long for the day when this type of market becomes popular. Until then, expect heaps more puzzle clones. (I’ve often wondered why we can’t release one skinnable version of each type of puzzle game and be done with them once and for all)

  • Albert Lai

    Welcome to the team! We would usually have a party, but a tornado scattered the TIGSource editors across the country, so that’s physically impossible now.

    I have to agree with you. It seems that we can just take a puzzle game, release a customizable UI, themes, and more or less replicate every puzzle game in existence.

  • Zaphire

    Sounds like its time for an epic quest to recover all the lost TIGSource members from around the world… then placing them into neat rows of 3, destroying them once and for all!!

  • http://rav.realitybytes.tk ravuya

    Well, I don’t necessarily agree with the casual games market, but I guess if it pays the bills for now.

    What I definitely don’t like are the charlatans who grind out match-3 after match-3. Put some effort into it.

  • Zaphire

    Roger that! :)

  • failrate

    I’m working on a new form of hardcore casual game. It’s a match-3,000,000 game. It requires a very large screen to play. Estimated gameplay time is 3 days per level.