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Alien Swarm Can Be Played As a Terrifying FPS
AndrewGOO9 writes "With a few simple commands from the developer console, Alien Swarm can go from being played as an isometric top-down shooter to a first-person perspective. Surprisingly easy, it does make the game, which was released for free via Steam earlier this week, a lot more terrifying. But, anyone who is at home playing games like Modern Warfare or Halo should have no problem slaughtering their way through wave after wave of creatures. In fact, it poses the potential to make the game easier for people who would've otherwise struggled with the overhead view."
An alien game that'd be good. I've been playing AS since it was released and am loving it.
Or it could be played.... you know, the way it was designed to be played
Are we seriously saying that a few console commands in a game are now front-page /. material? Really?
WTF is wrong with the editors?
Yeah, yeah, I'm new here...
and you tell me this when i have finished the game 12 times?
My son is playing AS right now with a few of his friends. I yelled over "hey did you know that AS can be...." "yeah yeah, played as a FPS.. it sucks"
All of which were 100 times more terrifying than what I saw in the video.
An inordinate amount of attention for simple game.
In other headline news, Starcraft 2 can be played as anything, thanks to a gnarly editor.
More first-person shooters.
I doubt it, Aliens are constantly coming from all directions including from behind and catch up in seconds or even fractions of seconds, particularly in the harder difficulties.
also constantly maintaining the optimum strategic positions relative to your teammates is a necessarily in Insane mode, and it only takes running in front of your team mate while they file a few times to kill you.
That being said it would be easier to shoot in the z dimension, in the rare instances that it is necessary.
and their is nothing really nothing i have not mentioned about the game that makes FP view harder then top down.
So it would be more then possible, at least at easier difficulties, but I think that insane mode would be near impossible if not totally impossible.
But then some people could just be very stilled at FP squad based tactics and make it work perfectly fine, but then their are a lot more pope playing FPSes then top down shooters.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
...Space Invaders as a first person shooter. The original alien swarm.
I just watched the video. It looks almost as terrifying as Doom.
(uncommonly referred to as isometric view)
Never try to sound smarter than you are, because someone who actually knows what they're talking about will show you up. Isometric view points in a game specifically refer to when the plane is tilted to a certain perspective, usually 45 degrees. It is possible to have 2D perspective that is not at all isometric, since to be isometric, it needs to be fixed that all along each axis, the scale is the same, meaning that there's no foreshortening or vanishing points.
Further, when it's actually applicable, isometric is commonly used. The only reason it would be uncommon is if it's not applicable.
You, sir, are an idiot. Isometric and 2D are not, at all, the same thing. Alien Swarm is neither, regardless of what people who are utterly unfamiliar with both terms seem to think. Believe it or not, these words have actual meanings, although you clearly don't understand them.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
This story has shown me a terrifying game.
But not the one it indicated.
http://thumb-culture.com/2010/07/22/xbla-review-limbo/
What the hell?
Whoever tagged it that is severely misinformed. This involves nothing with the tampering of the source and more of messing with commands and cvars. It's more elementary what people call "modding" these days by passing around .cfg files of aliases.
Think Mageslayer's crappy first person view.
And we all had to know this why?
1 Get your own blog ...
2 Whine on that
3 Leave this one alone
4
5 Forget profit, I would love it if I could read one thread without anyone having to be modded off-topic or troll.
...
Did anyone else get the feel of the original doom while watching that video? The mostly gray world, the green acid, the minigun sounds, sideways sliding doors and most importantly the layout of the levels with their lack of much vertical dimension and quite a few square rooms? really felt like it was 95 again for me.
Time Pilot 1984 was a kick-ass 2D scroller. But then I am a dinosaur whose FPS skills peaked with Quake and UT (where you could always set your FOV to whatever you wanted, IIRC). Whatever. I'll still kick your schoolboy ass at paintball or conkers or petanque or tennis or nine ball. "Never give a sword to a man who can't dance." - Confucius. Oh, and you can stay on my lawn, I don't give a shit about it.
Why not script it? I guess you just have to do everything yourself.
Just bind p for a handy point-of-view toggle.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
be played at terrifying frames per second?
someone needs to make some proper hud-guns skybox and proper cross-hairs and we will have a great shootem-up fps here
Left 4 Dead still isn't available as a Mac title...and now this. Which is completely bizarre, because Alien Swarm was originally available for the Mac; it's based on UT2004...available for, oh, you know, 6 years?
Please help metamoderate.
Looks and sounds like the thing of nightmares despite the fact it isn't focused on graphics of rotting monsters or etc.
Perhaps it's the shadows, evoking a sense of fear in us. When something is shrouded in shadows, its appearance is hidden causing us to fill in the blanks with our own terrifying imagination.
I'm also reminded of the Twilight Zone episode The Eye of the Beholder since we can't see the boy's full appearance. Who knows what horrors lie beneath?
I actually prefer top down. If it was first person it would be Left For Dead with aliens.
iburnaga.blogspot.com
Moderation
50% Offtopic
50% Troll
Hehe, I should have seen that coming :)
Well played, Moderators, well played indeed.
...
I tried it (before this article) with just the firstperson command not the; asw_hide_marine 1 asw_controls 0 commands, the marines head filled most of the screen and the controls were still reacting as if i was in 3rd person so i could barley turn.
FPS games tend to spawn most things in front of you.
Top-down games spawn all around you, because you can see behind you just as well as you can see in front of you.
Looking in only one direction at a time would be crippling.
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Reminds me a bit of Oddworld.
Simple yet immersive
The game itself doesn't look that spooky. The music is a little spooky but that's about it.
Kind of silly to say it has no contemporaries either when the gameplay looks exactly like LBP, only the graphics are slightly different. You could actually simulate the graphical style in LBP though, by switching the colour filter on the level, locking the camera view, only using black for the platforms, completely blackening the main character with an explosion at the start, etc..
which is totally what she said
Yes, I saw this had been added to XBLA the other day. I clicked through and had a look at the screen grabs, it looks pretty creepy, although I wonder how long it would take for the effect to get old and whether there's some substance to the game.
Thief: Deadly Shadows - The Cradle
This will be the last time you feel tension in a game.
Seriously? Could we get something remotely interesting for a change? I've not even downloaded the game and I could tell you exactly how to do this, its really, really not even remotely difficult or complicated in any way. I will very shortly be removing slashdot from my RSS feeds.
Your post is hilarious when read out in a posh and pretentious English schoolgirl's voice.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Congratulations on making me laugh with the verbal equivalent of smashing a zombie around the head with its own severed arm. I would also like to bear your children.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
A combined view, where 70% of the screen is first person and the remainder is top down, might be interesting to see. The top down view could serve as a "super radar".
Syndicate was one of my favorite isometric games back in the day... I must have brought those five floppy disks to so many friends' houses.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Yeah, saying the durian is a unique food is silly when its mechanics are the same as any other fruit, only it looks and tastes slightly different. You could actually simulate the style of a durian by filling an empty sea urchin with custard and almond, eating it while on the toilet after eating a ton of beef to recreate the pungent smell, etc etc etc.
Seriously, what kind of philistine are you? :(
But I forgot, this is slashdot. We are great at commenting on things we have never tried ourselves.
Also, if you type the konami code...
I'm not saying it isn't a good game, or even that it isn't visually unique compared to what's gone before, but the gameplay itself sounds and looks exactly like LittleBigPlanet.
I also read the sentence about it having "no contemporaries" as being more about the game than the artistic style, I guess I read that part wrong. But I still think the style could be copied pretty easy in LBP (which was also pretty chilling/creepy at times, though probably not in the same way).
If you had played LBP and done any significant level building in it I suspect you'd actually realise what I meant. The level editor is so comprehensive that people have created side scrolling shoot'em'ups and Tetris clones inside it for crying out loud. No doubt there will be Limbo tribute levels available soon enough.
which is totally what she said
In fact, someone's already made an attempt:
http://videos.apnicommunity.com/Video,Item,322728528.html
The visual style is pretty much exactly the same as limbo as I suspected could be done, though the guy that made it isn't great at designing level layouts by the look of things.
which is totally what she said
But since it switches to 800x600 without actually resizing the graphics to such, I can't play it. Nice going Valve.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
+1 for CLIVE BARKER'S Undying, what a hidden gem!
And no one will give a fuck that you're gone. Hey, it'll be just like your parents!
First Person Tetris
I'm with you, actually. I played Dr. Mario against a friend for at least two hours a few days ago, and once you're in the zone it's almost a pure contest of wills as opposed to getting the good gun or the high ground.
Your brain is not a computer.
Very Cool, and thanks for sharing...but...
Not really First person Tetris: For me True First person would have you Inside each Tetris piece, as if it were a vehicle, or creature, with "eyes" that you were seeing first person from:
This is following the orientation of the tetris piece, but not its perspective: To be truly first person your view ahead would be first that of a blank wall, then of stacks of blocks, looking like rooftops.
A) You would not be able to see gaps under pieces, and would have to use depth perception to tell how deep or tall each stack of blocks was (is that hole two deep or three)?
B) Even worse your perspective would rotate when you rotate the piece, and you would have to face - away from the bottom of the screen, and loose sight of where you were going, you would have to line up, and determine the number of turns, and then turn and "back In" blind. (Bonus though, when you face up, you should be able to see the next piece that coming down, (though you could only see the bottom of it)
Spend some cyber modules on the psionic 'Enhanced Motion Sensitivity' ability.
I bought it a while back while trying to track down the last of the damned red eggs in the Von Braun nacelle. It's amazing how quickly a radar screen turns one of the most atmospheric games of the late 90s into a rather pedestrian shooter.
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