Life hasn't been all work as I did find some time to finally get back into GTAIV. It may have been a year late, but better late than never. Rockstar excelled at creating another living, breathing world to play in (even if the pedestrian banter did become a bit repetitive). Liberty City steals the show in its depth, breadth and diversity. I thoroughly enjoyed the story even when it seemed to meander into no mans land, drifting from away from the heart of the story, but the climax brought it all back around to a satisfying and shocking end.
Obviously, there are issues that persist from earlier entries in the series, namely combat. At this point, the developers should just rip off gun play from someone who does it right, like Epic's Gears of War style. And hand to hand needs to be overhauled completely. Button mashing never works and trying to finesse it was to sloppy as well. It was also a shame to see that the music stations didn't play as prominently as before. I can still remember most of GTAIII original music, Vice City's 80's sound track and San Andreas's gangsta rap, but Liberty City's music was largely forgettable and too eclectic.
After spending enough time to 100% complete the game (yes, I even took the time to kill every damn pigeon), I can easily say that I enjoyed every minute of it barring the frustration from some of the more difficult achievements.
I spent some time with GTA: Chinatown Wars as well. Unfortunately, not too many people bought the game, but it was well worth every cent. The smaller screens obviously shrink the viewing area, making driving and shooting somewhat difficult, but the developers made up for this by making cars more durable and a robust lock on scheme. Also, I have seen few games that put the Touch Screen to such fantastic use. From making and throwing Molotov cocktails to car jacking to keeping someone alive with shock paddles to guiding a parade dragon, the game continued to surprise me with new ways to use the Touch Screen. And because the circumstances vary widely and rarely overlap, the actions don't become repetitive or boring. Also, about the drug dealing aspect of the game, while controversial, there is something to be said about the basic supply and demand economics that it can teach.
I have yet to be disappointed by any of the Grand Theft Auto games since the jump to 3D, even the hand held versions. I have no doubt that Rockstar will continue to push boundaries and provide immensely entertaining games for years to come.
So, after all of the controversy they stirred up, Konami has backed out of publishing 6 Days in Fallujah. Obviously, they incurred a heaping dose of wrath for what many considered insensitive and ill timed considering the conflict in Iraq continues at this very moment (my brother just returned from his second stint in Iraq, which was his third to the middle east). It is unfortunate that the very vocal minority will get their way in the short run and will have seemingly stopped the release of this game unless developer Atomic Games can find a brave new publisher.
It sad that the dichotomy of our industry is that we want the creative freedom to make "art" but can't stomach the potential financial loss if that backfires. But the scary thought of industry execs self censoring is not the only issue here.
Without knowing much more than the game existed, it's hard to say if we'll be missing anything at all. Would it have been just another shooter or would it have brought to new light what happened in those six bloody days? Would it have transcended above a "game" and deliver an experience that a documentary could not? That what the developer's proposed as they said that "games are not just toys."
I'm afraid I'm skeptical. It seems to me that they set out to create a linear, but vivid and accurate, recreation of the battle. It that sense they would most likely be very successful at telling the story they want but miss the point of what games can bring to the table. Games allow us to solve problems and make our own choices. Players are not led by a director through a scene but create their own story through play. Instead of going down the alley to the left, maybe the player leads his squad down the right and they are all ambushed and captured. Maybe the player successfully neutralizes the threat in Fallujah with minimal casualties and the skirmish is no longer as historically significant. Maybe the player decides the threat is too great (or not great enough) and never enters the city at all. These divergent paths change the course of history and take away from the developer's attempts to create "game-amentary."
There have been many, many war games. It is a popular setting as it lends itself easily to good versus evil, right versus wrong. But the Iraq war is not that black and white. Could Atomic Games create a game where there are no winners and the "good guys" die a lot? Sure, I like to think we could progress our medium to that level.
But it probably wouldn't be much fun. And it most likely wouldn't sell as well as the new Call of Duty.
Debt is clearly a problem for many people, myself included, just look at the state of our economy. Unfortunately, there aren't too many ways for people to educate themselves on the subject, especially not in games. A while back, I gave some thought to how to design a game with the player managing his debt as a major component of the game play. Obviously this would be a game about educating the public, not necessarily entertaining them.
I envisioned an RPG-style game where the player had limited income resources and needed to rely mostly on loans and credit as a means of paying for in game necessities and items. The ultimate goal was to show the player how quickly one can drown under the weight of debt in the face of shrinking income and increasing interest rates.
Well, it seems someone has beaten me to the punch as Brian Haveri, a grad student, has released Debt Ski. This flash game is simple but quite effective at showing how hard staying out of debt can be. It's a fairly simple platforming game; the player moves a pig on a jet ski from left to right collecting "income," paying for necessities like rent and trying to avoid luxuries like iPods. At the of each level the player has to be in the black to keep playing or take on debt. If the player can't afford his necessities of accrue too much debt, it's game over.
I didn't spend the month of March watching college basketball. Nope, I spent it catching up on some of the games I missed in the crowded holiday season.
The first game I tackled was Dead Space. This game hit on almost every cylinder. The atmosphere was brilliant and tense, especially the audio as I played through most of the game while wearing headphones. The controls were tight, allowing the player to move and shoot (unlike some other horror game) all while managing your inventory in real time. But it was all of the little things that made this game great. For example, the character's head moved with the cursor as the player navigated his HUD and that all of the pertinent player information was built right into the character model really drove home the immersion. With the minor exceptions that many of the missions were fetch quests and the 3D map was finicky (I remember it being much more fluid and readable in Metroid Prime), this game stood out for me as one of the great experiences of this last year.
The next game I devoted my time to was Mirror's Edge. This game, mush like EA's other gamble Dead Space, was served by beautiful art direction and audio. The parkour mechanics translated rather well to the first person genre and offered some brilliant moments of free running that were both nerve-racking and exhilarating. If that was the whole game, I would place it up with Dead Space as a must play. However, the hand to hand combat was absolutely dreadful and, unfortunately, is unavoidable at set pieces throughout the game. Which leads me to my next negative point about the game - if parkour is about going anywhere, why was there really only one correct path through the game? If the level design was opened up more to allow craftier players to find paths to avoid enemy encounters while other could charge through, run and gun style, this game would have far exceeded any one's expectations. That being said, it warrants a sequel if only to see where the developers can take this and hopefully improve upon said short comings.
I then moved on to Tomb Raider: Underworld. This game was a mess, with some sketchy controls and camera; the game even crashed a few times throughout my play through. In addition, many times I felt like I had no idea what to do next and I was forced to rely far too heavily on the hint function in the menu for direction. Unfortunately, this seems par for the course for a Lara Croft adventure, but I forged ahead anyway because, graphically, it was a pleasure to look at and the story line was intriguing because of how set up Norse myth as a basis for all other mythologies and the (fictional) reality that forged those myths. In the end, I would say that I had fun playing through the game but technical issues marred the experience.
I ended the month with Resident Evil 5. I know I've been tough on the game for its unwillingness to evolve but, you know what, I ended up really enjoying it. I still stand behind the idea that the game has one of, if not the worst, first impressions of any game ever. With the controls they way they are and then to throw the player right off the bat into a confined area with a boss and numerous fast moving enemies was a recipe for disaster and I image that many people who didn't give this game a chance was because he or she didn't get past this part. It's a shame because once this section is over, the pace settles down and the player can settle into a groove that lasts through the end of the game. I ended up playing through the game several times to get some of the additional achievements but the game gave me no incentive to try the Mercenaries mode, Co-op or the dowloadable VS. mode but I imagine someone that is a huge fan of the series would dive right in to them. At the end of the day, RE5 will have to go down as a contender for game of year (so far), which is not something I expected to say after my time with the demo.
The April 2009 cover of Game Informer has revealed what has already been rumored: Big Sisters. I really like their design, they appear sleaker, speedier, maybe even stealthier than our lumbering Big Daddies of old. One commenter I read speculated that they could be as agile as the spider splicer, which is a scary thought.
One thing that struck me is that in the original game, the Big Daddies foreshadowed what the player would become: a protector of the Little Sisters and a father figure for them, literally donning a Big Daddy suit. Does the inclusion of a Big Sister imply that the main character for Bioshock 2 will be a woman? I guess will have to wait at least for the next issue of Game Informer to find out.
Of course, this could also be an April Fools joke. If so, why, Game Informer, why?
Capcom may or may not be aware that some people found the controls in the Resident Evil 5 demo to somewhat cumbersome to say the least, myself included. Either way, they are doing their best to defend it. Producer Jun Takeuchiexplained,
We went in knowing that we weren't making a typical third or first person shooter; we were making a Resident Evil game. It was important for us to go with the design choices that would make the best Resident Evil game that we could. When it comes to Resident Evil, we feel that by imposing a restriction on the player you actually increase the tension that they feel while playing.
I really have to disagree here. Tension is not the same as frustration. The entire time I spent with the demo, about an hour, was spent fighting the controls. It had been a few years since I had played Resident Evil 4 but I couldn't get to grips with the controls. It wasn't even the fact that I had to stop to aim; I really think that when they brought the controls from the GameCube controls to the 360 controller, they weren't sure what to do with all of the extra buttons and made the controls overcomplicated.
The other problem I had with the scheme, and the idea that there the same as RE4 so what's the big deal, is that while they updated everything else, the controls stayed the same. There are more enemies and the enemies are smarter and faster but the player feels slow and dumb. It's not really a sound strategy to shoot a couple of zombies in the legs, run to the other side of the room, turn and repeat until they're dead. This tension, it's tedium.
Finally, I just finished plying through Dead Space. That game is tense. And guess what, you can shoot and run at the same time. Look for my thoughts on Dead Space later this week (preview: I loved it).
I beat Fallout 3 last week. Wait, I need to repeat that: I beat Fallout 3 last week. We'll come back to that point latter.
Fallout 3 was at the top of my list of missed games this last Fall. I picked it up for my birthday and spent the better part of February exploring the vast wastelands of post-apocalyptic Washington D.C. In the end, I spent about 120 hours with the game which is about half of what I spent in the world of Oblivion. Since I had not played any of the previous Fallout games, Oblivion was my point of reference for what to expect. This may have tainted my early experience.
Right off the bat, I was trying to play the former like the latter and it just didn't work for me. In Oblivion, my character was a brutal yet stealthy melee attacker. I struggled with this at first until I reconciled with the V.A.T.S. system. It felt like the game was forcing me to play a first-person shooter or a ranged character from Oblivion (which I hated for the most part). As I grew more accustomed to the new system, it felt more natural and lent itself to more strategy even if I couldn't sneak up on many enemies. It helped that my character quickly leveled up rather quickly as well.
But at first, locales seemed far and few between in the beginning. Traveling the vast countryside most definitely captured the essence of a barren, oppressive and bleak world, almost to game's detriment. Playing in small chunks of time, about an hour, I was struggling to get from placed to place in one sitting due to sheer distance required to be traveled. Going back to the Oblivion comparison, there were always areas to explore between story checkpoints, I didn't have this experience in Fallout 3. And again, I reached a point where I abandoned the story quest and found myself exploring the wastes with great joy, moving from place to place rather quickly.
The story was largely forgettable (but Oblivion's was as well), involving some annoying fetch quests to advance with a few rather jolting turns. Which made switching gears from saving the world to just wandering the lands so much more appealing. It really becomes an open-world adventure when the player is left to their own devices and adopt the life they want to live, hopping from place to place, inserting himself into the lives of others and changing them for the rest of their lives. On one hand, I would almost like to see a game like this drop the player in a world with no story and just let them create their own way. On the other, the story provides structure but there is no way that the game should end just because the main quest is over.
These quibbles with the game may be due to the way I played and every one's experience will be different, but it still leads me to believe that the pacing was wrong throughout the game. There are abrupt shifts between nothing to do and too much to do or struggling against the enemies to feeling like a one-man, unstoppable army. But then again, I spent 120 hours with the game. I clearly enjoyed it, right? Well, of course I did. I just didn't enjoy it as much as I hoped due to the sheer joy and satisfaction I garnered from Oblivion. Fallout 3 was a solid experience with a few hiccups, but left me longing for the return of the Elder Scrolls series.
So, I just finished Braid. I am not sure what just happened, but it was well worth the effort. Every puzzle designed in this game was brilliant. Many of them made my head hurt with and caused me to question my gaming abilities but the ones I solved on my own (I had to turn to the Internet for help on some of them) left me with an overwhelming sense of pride and satisfaction.
Jonathan Blow, the designer, set out to create a beautiful game that pushed genre boundaries and encouraged people to really think about what was going on. Personally, I don't think the game offered the closure provided by completing the game, and the complementary Achievement, but the game play was absolutely solid. I look forward to getting lost in another Jonathan Blow game, whenever that may be.
I've sung my praises for 5th Cell before and it seems they are unstoppable. With an exclusive reveal last Friday on IGN, I think they've cemented themselves as one of the most creative and daring DS developers out there at the moment (and probably the most sought after).
After watching the video for Scribblenauts, I immediately begin thinking of the possibilities this game has. The concept is simple yet has the potential to very satisfying.
Creative director Jeremiah Slaczka had the following to say about the player's possibilities when faced with a tree puzzle.
You could write "axe", and then cut the tree down using the object you spawned. You could write "shuriken" and throw that at the Starite in the tree and knock it down. It's all based on real physics and interaction, so there's nothing pre-canned. You could write anything though; imagine you write "goldfish" for some reason, well a goldfish would spawn and sit on the ground. It wouldn't help you at all in that puzzle, but you could do it.
Oh, how I can't wait to get my hands on this game.
It's been awhile since I mentioned demo design, but I came across one that was particularly perplexing this last week. Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix not only has the longest name ever, but it also has the distinction of having the shortest demo ever, if you only have one controller. I downloaded the demo on Xbox Live and fired up the trial version only to find out that only two-player local matches were available. I didn't have a second controller so, for me, the demo was over.
I imagine most gamers have a good idea of what the game play is going to be about in a Street Fighter title but one of SSF2THR's draw was the updated in game sprites. If I don't get to see them, how can I make a purchase decision? If the game is going to force me to play two-player, at least give me online in case I don't have anyone to play with. I count Street Fighter 2 as one of my favorite games of all time and this was almost an automatic purchase, but the demo totally floored me and I lost interest. Oh well, Street Fighter IV will be out soon enough.
Pixar has recently released a second trailer for next year's new film, Up. As most may already know, THQ has the exclusive rights to publish games based on the Pixar license. A couple of summers ago saw the release of Cars and we had the second best selling game of the year only falling behind Madden. We had over a billion dollars in sales that year (with the help of a couple of quality PC releases and the WWE license) and things looked good. Fast forward a couple of years and things are not looking as rosy for my company.
One of the things that has taken the blame for our shortcomings have been the performance of this license. First, Ratatouille underperformed last summer and then Wall-E suffered the same fate this summer. Ratatouille's failure was justified because it was about a rat and people might find that "icky." But when Wall-E did the same, people said, "WTF? He's a robot, how did he not sell?"
I don't think it was a over saturated kids and casual market that did these games in (it didn't help), but rather that Pixar is creating movies that are way over our designers' heads.
I'm not saying that the designers didn't understand the movies; I'm saying that the themes did not translate into an interactive form very well. In fact, it's debatable if anyone could have done it at all. Games as art is a current hot button topic in our industry and the themes that Pixar put forth would trouble the best minds our industry has to offer.
Cars was a no-brainer: it's a movie about a car, who races. The design document must have written itself (I'm kidding). On the other hand, can Ratatouille or Wall-E be boiled down to a simple platformer? Remy teaches us in Ratatouille that anyone can become anything the want, regardless if he's a rat or a woman or French (sorry, I kid again). And Wall-E teaches us the importance of conservation and loneliness and the need to be loved even if you are just a robot with a single directive. Up looks like it depicts the feeling that life has passed one by and you're running out of time to seize the moment. These aren't simple concepts and they most certainly aren't conveyed by collecting 100 trinkets while hopping your way through a linear level.
I think our biggest weakness when it comes to the Pixar license is that we attack them from a literal angle and just allow the player to replay through the story. What I'd like to see us do is allow the player to step into the shoes so to speak of these dynamic characters and explore some of these deeper themes. I don't want to play the movie, I have the DVD for that. I want our license to create an experience that can be fun for all gamers but evokes the weight of the emotions that each film brings to the screen. It won't be easy, but I think it's possible.
All the major blogs have been reporting on rumors that Dead Rising2 is in development and it is being developed by western developer Blue Castle. The original has created two camps of people: those who absolutely derided the difficulty and save system and those who praised the game for the exact same reasons. I fall into the latter group and think it would be a damn shame if the western developers took a safe route and made the game more "casual."
Dead Rising Wii already has me angry enough but if the sequel is also neutered, well, I just don't know what I would do. If the original was not insanely difficult with an unforgiving save system nor placed tremendous stress on the player, we would not still be talking about the game today. If it was a straight-up, run-and-gun zombie killing affair, it would have been lost among the glut of all the other average action games that flood the shelves week in and week out.
But Capcom didn't want that. They took some chances and created an experience that few games have been able to duplicate or have ever done, for better or worse. So, the onus to make a choice is on Blue Castle or whoever may take over the duty of continuing story of Frank West - photographer, zombie-genocider.
...but they're not pushing game play forward if it solely consists of quick time events. It seems like Quantic Dream, who also developed Indigo Prophesy, may need to start directing actual cinema instead of tacking on button presses and calling it interactive. At least it isn't porn.
In a post a while back, designer Raph Koster takes a common belief held in the industry and turns it on its head for me. It is common rhetoric amongst our ranks to place the blame for our increased risk aversion on the gamers, citing that the purchasing public is only out to buy sequels and established franchises. Hence, we have halo 3, GTAIV, MGS4, etcetera, ectetera.
But Raph makes a simlpe analogy for how this is wrong. Basically, we are used to saying that gamers like chocolate ice cream and if we ask them if they'd like more, of cource they're going to say yes. But the catch is: how is that same gamer going to know they want mango gelato if they've never had it? It's up to the developers and, more importantly, the publishers to start taking creative risks and offering crazy desserts we've never heard.
And, if you think about, many already are.
The glut of originality is starting to get stale, even for publishers. All you have to do is look at the the upcoming list of releases and there are a surprising number of original titles coming soon. Our proud to say that my company, THQ, has several titles coming up that I am really proud of, including de Blob, Deadly Creatures, and Darksiders. Even EA, a company a have historically dispised, has a number of interesting titles coming up such as Dead Space and There is also the upcoming Mirror's Edge.Brutal Legend and Wet.
As I think back, I have played a number of original games over the last year that I didn't know I would like until I played them: Zack and Wiki, Civ:Rev, No More Heroes, Portal, Puzzle Quest, N+, and Braid to name of few. Granted, many of these are smaller titles, but there have also been big budget risks such as Mass Effect and Assassin's Creed.
I have high hopes that the industry will find a balance point where sequels and franchises can coexist with the new and unproven. I say bring on more sorbert and flan! Now I'm hungry.
Dead Rising is in my top five games for the Xbox360. Its blend of action and story were very engrossing. It also made some surprising and polarizing design decisions. Many people either hated it or loved it. I was definitely in the latter.
The game was structured in a very open, non-linear fashion; allowing each player to forge their own path through the zombie infested mall. It allowed you to choose which bosses you wanted to take down and which people to try and rescue. Each subsequent play through could play out as a an individuals own mini zombie cinematic experience.
The save system and leveling up the character were a bit odd at first. In time, it all came together for me and made the game that much more enjoyable. By limiting the save locations and creating a very difficult decision upon death (start from the beginning with all of your accumulated stats or reload your last save), the game ramped up the stress put on the player. Some found less overwhelming and frustrating, I just like it heightened the experience. I had to weigh my options; should I save the couple with the wounded husband or the brothers who can defend themselves better? The leveling system adds another layer to the game that is not normally seen in action games. As Frank learns new moves and becomes more powerful, the game really becomes fun. And setting up crazy pictures for big points was good too. Since the experience carried over from game to game, it really encouraged multiple play-through.
Now we get word that Capcom is bringing the game to the Nintendo Wii. Only instead of a faithful, low-resolution homage to the original, we get a watered down, "casual" experience that wreaks of cashing in on the success of Resident Evil 4's outing on the same console.
They taken much of the flexibility out of the game by creating a very linear path to plot points and eliminating Otis's side quests. Apparently, the save system has been made "less frustrating" to appease the new herd of gamers on the Wii. The camera angle has been changed to the over-the-shoulder RE4 style which caused the developers so much problems they took the photography out of the game completely. Frank is a photographer, it's the whole reason he's in the mall! Not only have the elements that make Dead Rising what it is have hit the cutting room floor, the graphical power of the Wii buckled under the weight of hundreds of zombies on screen on once. This number has been significantly decreased, but I guess will have to wait to see the final game.
Lastly, they've thrown in the mandatory "because we can" motion gestures. I'm sorry, but dare I say it, increasing the player's stress and anxiety creates a better sense of immersion then waggling the controller to swing a baseball bat. The weight and pressure put on by my nervous system is much greater then wild flailing ever could be.
I remember doodling my own levels for NES games as a kid. I also remember entering a contest that appeared in an early issue of Nintendo Power where I attempted to design a game based around insect creatures (I didn't win). Unfortunately, nothing had seemed to survive the last twenty years for me to look back on for some frame of reference. That is until recently.
Since buying my house, my dad decided that there was no reason for any of my old stuff in his garage needed to stay and could be stored in my new garage. Amongst that pile of stuff was an old board game from 1989 called HeroQuest. I had totally forgotten about the game until that point and quickly remembered how much fun I had with the game at the time. After opening the box, some yellowing sheets of graph paper and note paper fell out of the instruction booklet.
Here, I had stumbled onto a map and quest I had created for the game. I guess, you could say it was one of my first complete game designs. The action revolved around saving your captured mentor from the evil Verag and seemed to rely heavily on my Zelda influences (the player needed to find the "Sword of Power" to defeat the end boss). I also included quite a few traps and enemies, I must have been feeling especially diabolical for an eleven year old at the time.
This game still seems to hold up and is easily customizable and seems to be a descent tool to explore level design. I think I may have to dust it off and design some updated levels for this game.
This was news a long ways back (give me a break, I bought a house and had a baby). It was revealed that the Wii version of the Ghostbusters will use Wii-DS Connectivity to enhance game play. Essentially, the DS would be used as the famous PKE reader that was used in the movie. I love this design decision and implementation. This is much better than having Tingle drops bombs on unsuspecting foes.
Even longer ago, I attended the Wi Summit in Hollywood hosted by Nintendo and they went over this functionality for the Wii. The presentation was mostly boring but it sparked an idea while I was nodding off.
I've played a few card based games on several platforms, such as Uno on Xbox Live, but was disappointed that there was no way to play with friends in the same room because, obviously, every one's cards would be on the screen to see. With the use of the Wii-DS connectivity, the game could deal the cards to each player's DS and then each player would only be able to see their own cards.
It seems like a simple idea and I'm surprised that some developer has yet to take advantage of this feature in a meaningful way until now.
Unfortunately, neither is this man. That's too bad. Even though I've been a Niner fan all of my life, Favre will go down as one of the all time greats in my book, and for most football fans I believe.
This week's Microsoft Gamer's Day event saw new details emerge about some of Microsoft Game Studio's biggest impending releases. Something struck me as interesting as I was perusing the screen shots and reading previews.
Firstly, Peter Molyneux has his own interpretation of how a game should appear on screen from a preview with CVG:
It's a beautiful, striking-looking game, but what first catches our eye is how clean everything looks. There's no HUD to speak of, no health indicators, no item counts, not even a mini-map.
"If we're going to make a game that's really going to be dramatic, making people feel like they're not just looking through a portal at this world is really important. One of the problems with that is the mini-map," says Molyneux.
"We had one of those ghastly, distasteful things in the top corner of the screen, and our levels were getting so detailed that we realised that our mini-map was getting bigger. So we said, 'let's just get rid of it'."
And it does look amazing as indicated in the following screen shot. On the other hand, Silicon Knights have taken the completely opposite approach when it comes to the "head's up display." Wow! There's a lot going on in that image.
I love the simplicity of Fable2's design and will definitely be purchasing the game. However, I'm quite interested in Too Human as well but this screen shot is a bit overwhelming. I'm not sure if there's going to be a demo or not but I'm leaning towards trying before I buy this one.
