What constitutes 'realism' in the first place? I remember being very impressed with the guard's walk-cycle animations on GoldenEye years ago, but I also feared that when I dropped a guard with a headshot, I might go over to him and find the wallet had fallen out of his pocket, to display the photo of his wife and kids and I'd never be able to play the game again.
Do you want to be able to get forensic on the results of a sniper shot ("Look! Sinuses!")? Does having a car's brake discs glow red under heavy braking in a race game make any appreciable difference to the game, especially if the 'realism' is thwarted somewhat by the usual drawback of 'licensed cars'='no damage modelling'? Does accurately mapping the tread pattern in GT5 actually have any effect on the car's handling?
I don't know if I could handle genuine AI in video games. I think I have a hard enough time with Artificial Stupidity. There are already games with CPU enemies that can see your muzzle-flash from 800 yards away, and shoot you in the chin from the same range. I've just been playing Uncharted 2, and if the guards and enemies actually knew how to use cover and flanking manoeuvres, you could never actually progress past the first level. When it's you and a pistol against multiple enemies with armour, shotguns and grenade launchers, they can't be allowed to be particularly bright, or they will be as unbeatable as they would be in real life.
What does bother me is the level of stupidity on the civilians in some sandbox games. How many times have citizens in GTA walked past 10 yards away, oblivious to the fact that I'm murdering someone in broad daylight? At least in Prototype, the citizens will react if you 'hulk out' in front of them and run away, but leave the area, go back 30 seconds later, and everybody's walking around perfectly normally, like they hadn't just seen me beat someone to death with their own spleen. And how 'realistic' were the GTA series anyway, where there was nobody under the age of 18 in the whole city, and no schools, so there was no way you could ever kill a child.
I seem to recall that games like Theme Park etc. have little personal 'scripts' running for all the patrons of the park - how hungry they are, how bored, thirsty and the like. Would it be possible to have the same for a sandbox city, even down to your approval rating, in a superhero game? Crush one too many criminals with a squad car, and have to go rogue and vigilante, instead of being the media's latest craze.
Realism is difficult - I appreciate this. Designing a world to give players maximum freedom is much more complex than the very tightly-controlled worlds we're currently being offered, where wood does not burn, glass does not break, and a rocket-launcher will not break through a wooden door. As long as we're willing to accept these strictures and just keep buying and playing the latest iteration of whatever 3D engine is the current hot property, there is no reason whatsoever for any games company to attempt to offer us any semblance of true realism.
Every motorcycle I've seen made in the last 30 years has had a kill switch on the handlebars. It just shuts down the bike's entire electrical system and stops the engine. It's intended as a safety feature if you're in a situation where you don't want to have to take your hands off the controls to reach the key. Also, as I understand it, if the bike's crashed, but the throttle's wedged on, all you have to do is hit the Big Red Switch, rather than trying to reach the key while the bike's hopping around because the rear wheel's making intermittent contact with the tarmac.
Seriously - an Off switch within emergency reach of the driver - how complex a concept is that?
OTOH, what are these cars doing with such massive embedded systems in them? I've seen numbers in the tens of millions of lines of computer code being bandied around as indicators of their size and complexity - WTF does a *car* need all that computing power for? I've driven dozens of cars without a single microchip in them - they started, they stopped, they did everything you'd reasonably expect a piece of personal transport to do. What does adding all that complexity get you, apart from a car only officially licenced and approved dealers can work on because nobody else has the diagnostic software...? Oh wait...
I should have been clearer in my distinction. It may seem as though I didn't rate Larson - I do. I have all the books and can probably quote half the jokes from memory. But there has never seemed to me to be a relationship there. Krazy has Ignatz, Pogo has Albert, Wellington has Old Boot, and Calvin has Hobbes; from those relationships, much of the humour flows naturally, just from the inherent nature of the characters. That is what I see at the heart of a true strip. I know many of the Far Side gags rely on knowledge of scientific details ("Surely you know I would only devour my own husband!"), and they are almost all superb, but I don't see the heart in them that I do in the other strips.
I must say, I'd never considered nature itself as the protagonist in TFS - I'll bear that in mind when I re-read them next.
I have yet to see anything as wonderful in any other strip as the Eyeballs in the Sky sequences from The Perishers. One joke running in the top half of the strip, and phenomenally detailed and complex crustacean insanity scuttling along the bottom of the strip. Unfortunately, there is almost none of Dennis Collins' beautiful artwork available on the web - the few strips online seem mostly to be later ones by Bill Mevin.
I admire Bill Watterson's skill at depicting wildlife and woodlands - some of his coloured Sunday pages are tone poems to foliage, but the world that Dennis Collins drew is the one I grew up in.
There have been a handful of geniuses, who've happened to work in the comic strip field. George Herriman, Walt Kelly, Berkeley Breathed, Garry Trudeau, Maurice Dodd and Dennis Collins, and Bill Watterson. Why such a small number? Because true genius is rare and special, whatever field the artist is working in.
I don't count Gary Larson in the same field - he was quirky and brilliant, but there's no continuity in his works - there's 5,000 individual gags, but no heart, nobody there we care about. I also don't count Charles Schulz - Peanuts is simply the nastiest strip ever written. It's cold, and bleak, without an ounce of love or sweetness about it. Nothing good ever happens to anybody - it's existentialist horror.
Calvin's world wasn't perfect - Moe was a bully, school was appalling, and things sometimes went wrong. There was fear and loss from time to time, and nobody else ever saw the world quite the way he saw it. But there's magic there, and adventure, and love in a variety of flavours. They are books I could sit and read with my child when he was Calvin's age and younger, because they are good art, excellent stories and a total blast for the imagination. The Sunday strip poems often featured wonderfully whimsical language and the wordplay in the strip itself was second only to The Perishers.
I'm delighted that Bill Watterson stopped when he thought he was done. Delighted he chose not to let MegaCorp plc rape his creations, and slap them on underpants, lunchboxes and disposable cups from the burger joint. Delighted that Calvin and Hobbes didn't get shoe-horned into some Moral of the Week shitty TV show, with a cute catchphrase, and cheap-as-chips animation. What he created is art, and it's a minor miracle that he managed to resist the dollar signs, and what must have been startling numbers of zeroes after them, in order to keep the tale of a boy and his tiger real and magical.
If he ever comes up with another story he really wants to tell, I have no doubt he will.
The changes this would make to society are too great. The politicians would never allow common people to have that much freedom. No borders, no passports, no way of stopping people from going where they wanted, when they wanted. And that's without assuming any purpose more nefarious than a cheap weekend in Amsterdam.
One asshole with one of these and a pocketful of golf balls could cause carnage in a city centre at rush hour - no way to track or find the culprit afterwards. As long as there's idiots who think throwing rocks off motorway bridges is a fun thing to do, there'll be idiots who'll be delighted to abuse this even worse. Drug dealers, criminals of any kind who want to make a clean getaway (get 10 feet off the ground and nobody's catching you, no matter how fast the police car).
It's not the physics of flight, or fuel capacity, or engine efficiency that will stop us ever getting personal flight vehicles - it's the politicians who will legislate it out of existence for all but the very rich, because whatever rich people want is always all right. And they'll do it in the name of safety, and it'll be for our own good. There'll be a huge furore in the media when the first one crashes and kills someone, and that'll be it done with.
I still remember a dream I had about 10 years ago, in which I went into my local video store and asked for a copy of Rain Man, but with Arnold Schwarzenegger in both lead roles, and being asked to wait 5 minutes while the computer re-formatted the film appropriately and applied his voice pattern.
There's different kinds of frustration. There's not knowing what to do next (Myst). Perhaps worse is knowing what to do, but not seeing how you're meant to be able to accomplish it.
Sometimes the game engine is a little bit broken - it used to annoy me no end in Perfect Dark that sometimes (just sometimes) a weapon would be at your feet and you simply could not pick it up. Maybe the boss monster has an unusual attack pattern and is only vulnerable to having acorns thrown at his toes, while, mysteriously, a rocket launcher to his face has no effect.
A lot of the stupid frustrations have been taken out of play by the internet - "How do I do X"-level frustrations are mostly taken care of by walkthroughs. It's handy to know that you're failing because the only way to kill the vampire is with the Holy Stake, which you forgot to pick up on Level 3.
I think sometimes difficulty-level frustrations can come about because of play-testing. If testers have been playing the game for months, they may have gotten significantly better at it than most people would ever do in normal play. Consequently, they can find levels easy to complete, and bosses very straightforward. So the difficulty level gets ramped up by doubling the hit points for all enemies, and suddenly the game is too hard for 95% of the final audience.
The worst frustration is when a game goes on the shelf, or back to the shop as a trade-in, because it reached a certain point, which was simply impassable - a race I couldn't win, or a boss I couldn't beat, and that's it - the rest of the game is forever closed to me. I'm tone-deaf - finally managed to get to the second island in Myst, listened to the musical tone key for the bunker and realised I was never, ever going to be able to finish the game.
and hours of computer time, to make someone look *exactly* like themselves. Truly uncanny. And completely unimpressive, as they could just be, you know, lying their asses off about the whole thing.
If the actress under the fake face had looked completely different at the end, then that would have been impressive. Otherwise, who's to say they didn't just film the real actress the whole time, and claim to be digitally replacing her features while doing nothing of the sort.
I had a discussion with a friend some years ago about how long it would be before we could go into a video shop and ask for 'Rain Man', but with Arnold Schwarzenegger in both lead roles. I think it had been triggered by the idea that Sony had licensed the model human data based on Kevin Bacon in 'Hollow Man', as it had cost so much to digitise that they weren't going to use it just once. I seem to remember reading that a lot of the FX shots in Spider-Man 1 were done using that digital human, just with a Spidey skin, so there was a question about whether you could use the film in a game of 6 Degrees.
Assuming these guys are telling the truth, how long before actors start having their faces 'preserved' digitally at their peak, and still appearing as they were in their 20's or 30's decades later, even on a completely different body?
Games are not supposed to be a reflection of real life. Which is a bit odd given the huge efforts on the part of so many developers to strive for near photo-realism in their graphics, which makes the disconnect between how they look and how they behave even more obvious.
If the player was given a "realistic" weapon of the next century, which was capable of spewing thousands of armour-penetrating rounds at your enemies while you smoke a cigar with your free hand, how challenging would that be? Depends on how long it was before I came up against someone with the same gun, and how good my armour was. I'd expect to have a few advantages as the protagonist.
If you could kill the biggest and most heavily armored creatures with a single shot to the eye-hole in its mask, when would you ever have to run, or hide, or grit your teeth as you wonder if it's going to round the corner before or after you finish reloading? All the time, right up until it held still long enough for me to make that extremely difficult shot.
The rules of Doom are simple. Enemies take a certain number of bullets to die, up until which point they are unhindered by the damage they've already taken. Which was fine 15 years ago, when that simplistic damage model was all the engine could handle. These days, the game engine should be capable of working out what the damage means in terms of enemy mobility, morale check, all the things you'd find in any half-decent tabletop RPG. That again, is affected by the enemies - maybe zombies don't feel pain or fear, or need to make morale checks, but perhaps an enemy soldier should be screaming in pain, which might be affecting his buddies.
What you're talking about is a real-world simulator, which is entirely unpredictable and impossible for the developers to build into any kind of challenge. Impossible, no. Difficult, yes. Which is why they haven't bothered doing it yet, because it would mean hard work and creative thought, rather than just another generic 3D engine that does 5% more polygons a second than the last one
Do you really want to be crawling around on the floor just because a zombie with a shotgun put some buckshot in your foot from across the room? Maybe. Don't you think that could add a little tension to the gameplay? Crawling desperately across the floor, trying to get to the slap patches while returning fire, and hoping they haven't smelled the blood...
Drake's Fortune got it right. One shot in the head from a 9mm round could kill any opponent in the game, except the very final boss. Of course, this meant you had to aim for the head, rather than going for the safer body shot. Get caught in a crossfire and you could be dead in a second. You weren't some heavily-armoured space marine with 13 separate weapons, you were a guy in a Hawaiian shirt with a handgun, and as such you had to make use of all available cover. It worked really well. Not 'extreme realism', whatever that's meant to be, just realism. Guns kill people.
Okay, it's not the actual guns, it's these little hard things, but you know what I mean.
The major problem now with game creation is that it has become a multi-million dollar business. Yes, you can still do a one-man/small-team game, and get it published and sold on the web - the Geneforge series is a prime example.
But 3D world engines are expensive, ones with good physics models are more so, and while the techies might be gleefully contemplating the number of individually-lit bits of phenomenally complex maths they can make it do, the marketing guys are wondering if there's going to be tits and/or blood to help flog the copies to the perceived demographic of 14-25 year olds. And there lies the problem - go to a development house with a wacky gameplay idea that nobody's ever done before, and they'll want proof positive that it's worth doing. Instead, suggest that they recycle last year's 3D engine, but make it zombies instead of mutants, get some students in to do level design, and someone to write 3 minutes of plot (Zombies are bad - kill them), and they're looking at a much cheaper option to have another full-price game on shop shelves.
Case in point - Eternal Darkness on the Gamecube. Scary game, pure eerie atmosphere and Lovecraftian tones, and an inspired Insanity aspect to the gameplay. Never has a game scared me so much as when I went to brush a fly off the screen only to discover it was on the inside... It sold very few copies and although critically acclaimed, was a major commercial flop. If it had been Tomb Raider - Eternal Darkness, how many more copies might it have sold?
Smaller, indie games may well be where the next great ideas come from - Narbacular Drop, Eets, and fLow spring to mind, but as long as the big publishers want their money supply uninterrupted, they'll keep taking the safe option and churning out stuff they're convinced the public want to buy. Ridge Racer 7 - gosh, I wonder what you have to do in that game?!
It's going to boil down to a simple question - will they sell more copies of the software if it has the Doom name/franchise attached, or if it's marketed as a brand new thing?
It's not necessarily realism in the game I'm after, more in the environment. Once you've accepted that you're battling demons on Mars, then realism is right out the window. But as soon as limitations are artifically placed on how the world reacts to your presence, and how you can interact with it, then the willing suspension of disbelief begins to erode.
Many of the items I listed have been with us since the earliest games, because the systems they were running on could not support such levels of realism. Enemies had X hit points, and functioned perfectly until hit points reached zero. Glass did not break and wood did not burn because they were just textures on otherwise non-destroyable items. These days, with very powerful systems available, there is much less excuse for games designers to repeat those same problems. But they've become almost part of the game genre conventions. Making the engines react properly is obviously a good deal harder than the more simplistic worlds that almost all video games currently replicate. That doesn't mean we should be content to accept workarounds designed to allow games to run on very old systems.
Trust me, you get shot in the knee, you're limping for a lot more than 10 seconds. I tend to like the newer model of player damage used in Drake's Fortune, and Call of Duty 2 and 3 (not played 4), where the screen goes grainy and blurry, but if you can get to cover it'll recover in a few seconds. I don't interpret it as actual physical damage, because nobody heals that fast, not even Wolverine. It works if you think of it as you getting more and more hyped up under stress from near misses, and if you stay in the firefight, or don't get behind cover then someone will get a bead on you and kill you with one shot. Futuristic games get a bit more leeway, as they can have any combination of nanobot-laced slap patches and massively powerful painkillers to allow the protagonist to recover swiftly from almost anything short of decapitation.
Guns are deadly, bullet wounds are not trivial, and most explosives are extremely powerful. Two D-cell batteries in a simple torch can last for tens of hours. Any time a game designer messes with these very simple rules, it means they're doing something wrong.
Wolfenstein - great idea. Doom, brilliant sequel. Doom 2 - nice, more levels. Quake, wow.
Doom 3 - where's the duct tape? Or string - anything really. Where's the £4.99 headband torch I keep in my backpack?
Nobody really wants to break the FPS formula, least of all the guys who practically invented it. It'll be Doom with shiny graphics, more polygons in the average monster's arse than comprised an entire level from the original Doom, and it'll still be shite, because it's been done to death now for 15 years. The shotgun will be a great weapon for 90% of the game, and be the only weapon for which there's ever enough ammo. Despite being set in the future, and on some alien world, the weapons will have been toned down to the sort of sub-standard kack you wouldn't give to a modern day grunt. Nobody involved with the game will have the slightest idea about current or future military hardware, or know where to find a copy of Jane's Infantry Weapons. There will be no metalstorms, no gauss rifles, no sabot rounds, no poison darts, no armour-piercing rounds. The sniper rifle will carry 5 rounds at best, and any weapon capable of killing an enemy quickly will have almost no ammo available as that might render it somehow useful. You will find weapons dropped by other groups of people who'd been previously ambushed by the monsters. Quite why you'd want to pick them up is unclear, as they clearly didn't do their last owners a blind bit of good.
As for the environment, if there's enough light to see, it'll be drab and featureless as otherwise it might be possible to work out where you are. The colour palette will be green, brown, and grey. Wood will not burn, glass will withstand a rocket launcher if it has a bit of chicken wire in it, and despite carrying around 200lbs of explosives, the door will not open if you don't have the access code. Using a grenade to go through the plasterboard walls will not be an option.
The monsters will not react in any way (stagger, pain, fear) to being shot in the nose with a.45 hollowpoint. Until you do it enough times to kill them at which point they die instantly, but until that point they will be at full combat effectiveness. You can kneecap a monster and it will still be able to chase you at full speed. If a monster is armoured, you can shoot it in its eyes and open mouth as much as you like without hurting it unduly, because they are every bit as heavily armoured as its scaly, plated hide. Half the monsters will have ridiculous hit points, and the big ones will be somehow impervious to your weapons and the laws of physics until the point where they rear up and reveal their weak point.
In short, it will have every flaw that every other FPS has, but because it's got the magic word 'Doom' written all over it, it will sell many copies and the usual fanboys will be sucking its dick because it's so shiny.
Here's something I'd love to see happen before they write one line of code on this game. Line up every developer, and designer who's going to work on the game, and shoot them in the thigh from 4 feet away with a.22 air pistol. They can wear jeans, so the pellet won't penetrate skin. As they're rolling around on the ground in pain, or hopping and screaming and cursing, tell them to remember what it felt like when they come to design the weapons, the monsters and the monsters' reactions to getting hit.
I wonder how Stan Lee feels about this stuff. Used to be that comic books were special places - the only places you could see this sort of thing. Until very recently, if you wanted to see transforming aliens, or 250 giant horribly be-weaponed Shi'ar battlecruisers, the pages of a comic book were the only place you could see it and have it not look like shit. You want to see the Kree-Skrull war, you need either $1M per minute CGI, or Neal Adams and a pencil. I stopped reading comics some time ago, not just because of the expense, but because it felt like the one thing they could do that no other medium could do had been superseded.
Does Stan Lee have a cameo in Iron Man? I don't mind if he does, because without him and a couple of other guys, none of this would be happening. He could have a 5-minute spot to cha-cha across the screen in a pink tutu singing the 'This Is My Cameo' song, and I wouldn't begrudge him the time.
Or £300 for a PS3. Tough call. Oh wait, I'm on an ASUS K8N mobo, so I'd need to upgrade to a PCI-E capable motherboard, with a new CPU and RAM as well, plus a copy of Vista for all the DirectX-10 shininess.
Think I'll just wait for Win7 and skip a handful of hardware iterations. Given that the current rig plays HL2 and Far Cry at a decent resolution with full shinies, I can't work out why UT3 either looks nice but runs at 2fps, or runs at 25fps but looks like an Atari 2600 game.
'Paradoxically, at a moment when technology allows designers to create ever more complex and realistic single-player fantasies, the growth in the now $18 billion gaming market is in simple, user-friendly experiences that families and friends can enjoy together.'
I played through Mass Effect as a Paragon. I had a save near the end that allowed me to see the four Paragon endings with the minimum of fuss. Great. Can't be bothered to go through the whole game again to see the four Renegade endings, at least not any time soon. All those endings, all the cinematics and voice-overs, they all cost money - animators, actors, studio time. Wii boxing can have exactly one of two endings - you win or you lose, and the same code handles both. Yes, technology allows designers to create huge complex worlds, but with great complexity comes a great price. The demographic of gamers seems to be skewing older, as people who gamed as kids grow up and get jobs. For me, this certainly means there's less time to sit down and immerse myself in (say) Fable for hours on end, but an hour or so playing winner-stays-on boxing, or bowling on the Wii with wife and son after dinner is a good way to get some exercise and spend some fun time with my family.
Now if they made a multi-player Fable, with different characters, maybe viewed from a top-down perspective, we'd play that together as well. Can't think of anything like that on the market though...
There was an article ages ago about this, and the Nintendo guy said something I thought was very telling about their attitude to customers. He said they were ramping up production as far as they could, but to stretch the supply chains any further would mean dealing with component manufacturers and suppliers they neither knew nor trusted. Yes, the result would be a larger supply of Wiis, but a much higher percentage of defective machines; either as soon as the customer got it home, or soon after purchase. They didn't want that to be associated with their brand, and said they'd rather manufacture less consoles, and have them work properly, and hope people would be patient and understand.
Compare and contrast Microsoft's attitude of denying the problem for ages, then setting aside billions to handle defective machines under extended warranty. My Wii's seen daily use since launch date - all I've ever had to do was change batteries in the Wiimote. If it does break down, I'm stuffed as far as getting another one is concerned, at least for a few more weeks.
More to the point, it's not like they took a hammer to it, or kicked it around the room like a football. They dropped it maybe 18 inches and shook it lightly, and it *died*. A $350 robot dinosaur was rendered inactive by treatment far more gentle than it might expect to receive at the hands of most small children. Even if attempting to treat it well, children are capable of being clumsy and forgetful. And if they're not attempting to treat it well - if they're going to throw it down in a temper tantrum when it doesn't do exactly what they wanted it to, it's not going to last 24 hours in the hands of actual children.
That's not a toy for children - it's a toy for adults with too much money.
Well done. Just in case anyone on t'internet had missed that rather scathing review of a lackluster 3PS, now everyone and their dog are emailing each other the link and determining never to buy the game, even when it shows up in the 4 for £20 bucket at Gamestation.
We need a few more review sites like Zero Punctuation - no game ad revenue means no pressure from advertisers and the freedom to be honest. Metacritic is pretty good for spotting the paid shills too - if most reviews are around 7 but there's a couple of 10s, then guess who took out full page ads with their magazine...?
Unfortunately, Kane & Lynch would probably have been a perfectly acceptable game a couple of years ago. Now it just looks drab and repetetetetive. Although it's a hackneyed phrase, in the last year or so the bar has been significantly raised as to what constitutes a AAA-title. With so much top-quality software competing for the same chunk of gamer's cash, games have to be different, quirky, and good to stand out. Kane & Lynch isn't, so it doesn't, and it's not alone. There's dozens of games on the shelves for every system under the sun that only qualify as 'also-ran'. You might pick them up if you see them cheap enough, but there's no way anybody sentient is going to pay full-price for them.
So many games come out and it looks like they're not quite finished. With the sheer expense of developing anything these days, you'd think the dev studios would be tempted to actually finish a game, test it properly, and make sure they've got a quality saleable product.
Because everything should be allowed in the game world - the only penalties and rewards we need are those in the game itself. I tried to play one of the Splinter Cell games once - it was unspeakable. I'm trying to stop a madman from detonating some unholy terror weapon and killing hundreds of thousands, and my controller calls a halt to the mission because I accidentally shot a civilian. Yeah, sorry and all, didn't mean to, but let's have a little perspective here. Let me finish the mission - give me the silver or bronze achievement award instead of gold, let me go back and try and do it perfectly when I feel like nailing all the gold awards, but when I'm trying to save hundreds of thousands, cut me some slack over one accidental death!
Mercenaries was another one, there's one particular mission where there's a huge firefight going on, and suddenly, up comes a message saying I'm due them $100K of my earnings because I shot the CNN reporter. Wow. I didn't even know there was one there! There's seven different automatic weapons going off over here, but you're sure it was me? What the hell was the idiot doing sticking his head up in the middle of a gun battle anyway!?
Those events were crap enough - don't go adding Civilian Killer to my gamertag as well.
"Supreme badass" isn't available as a starting option as that's the default setting for your character! You're meant to be a tough, battle-hardened marine who's survived to make N7 - highest special-forces rank in the game world. I'm saying that's an inherent problem for an RPG - starting with a character who's already supposed to be fully skilled and experienced - once you do that it isn't a classic RPG any more. To answer your other point - it's unlikely that competent game design would allow you to max out all your stats. If you had (say) 80 pts available at creation, but it would take 110 to max out all stats, you can't have everything cranked to 11. However, you could decide for yourself what kind of character you build, and still have replay value by choosing other combinations for those 80 points. And yes, I'd expect a fully trained soldier to be able to use any weapon he found - it pisses me off no end that my vanguard-class character can't use a sniper rifle at all, as he doesn't get the aiming point. How fricking dumb do you have to be to be unable to work out how to use a rifle with a 'scope? Especially when you're meant to be special forces?!
The role-playing aspect of it could remain effectively unchanged - you talk to characters, make conversational choices, follow the clues, or miss them if you don't have the skills. Levelling up does not equal role-playing.
As for the time aspect of this - yes you can have a game which focusses on significant events in a character's life - generally that's the point of most media. Your character can become a Spectre within a few hours of play time, but he didn't get there by mailing in his boxtops. This is the culmination of years of training and experience, all of which is laid out in the backstory, but not represented in the character you get given to play with.
Traditionally, in an RPG, you start out weak, and build up skills and abilities as the game progresses. Which is fine if you're some naive farmboy who's come home to find his family killed and his house burned down, and who has vowed to make those evil (plot points) pay for what they've done. Start with a leather jerkin and a quarterstaff, and build your way up to being a parahuman by the end of the game.
But how do you handle level progression when you're supposed to start the game as a fully trained whatever-it-is? In Mass Effect, you start out as a highly-trained uber-warrior who's supposed to be hard as nails, yet you can't shoot straight, your weapons are ineffectual shit, and you'll get beat down by just about anybody until you put some points into your combat skills. Bioware had the same problem with Jade Empire - 15 years in a martial arts school as their star pupil in the pre-game scene-setting, but weedy as hell in the actual game until you spent some points. At least KOTOR and KOTOR2 had reasons in game why you didn't have, or couldn't remember your actual abilities.
It's just that everyone's going on about the brilliant story, and yet completely missing the fact that in order to shoehorn it into a traditional RPG engine, they've had to bend it all out of shape. Why would you make your elite troops buy their own guns with their own money? Because hoarding gold and trading it for stuff has been a mainstay of D&D since pencil and paper days. Why would you issue special forces soldiers with guns that overheat after firing three rounds? Because shitty starter weapons are generic to the classic RPG advancement-based structure. Doesn't fit the storyline at all, but it's a tired old staple of the genre, so just make the player do it.
Even being given the option of having all the character-design points at the start of the game would have been a good idea. Once your character's created, that's who and what he's going to be until the end of the game, because that's who he's become in the last 15 years of special forces training. The events of the game last about a week in game time - tops. What are you going to learn in one week that's going to override everything else you've ever learned?
The actual plot and characterisation, and the sheer scope of the game is fantastic - showing what they can do with a KOTOR-style game when not tied to the Star Wars universe. But the overall framework of the story makes no sense at all, and that just rankles. I'm sure that due to the massive financial success of the game and all their others, they're perhaps not too worried about one gamer's opinion, but everybody else seems to be queueing up to suck Bioware's corporate cock over this damn game, and I feel like the only person who's spotted that nobody could have heard Kane say Rosebud...
It had those little plug-in VMUs that weren't just a memory card - they had their own power, an LCD screen, a D-pad and two buttons. Certain Dreamcast games could download mini-games onto the VMU, which you could play on the VMU itself. When the VMU was re-connected to the Dreamcast with the main game, you could upload your scores, which would unlock items etc. in the main game that couldn't be unlocked any other way. The games weren't amazing, having only 128K RAM to work with and a 48x32 screen, but the idea was ingenious.
If there were games for the PS3 that could do that, there'd be more reason to buy a PSP. For example, I've recently been playing through the two KOTOR games, and it would have been nice to have a Pazaak game to take away on a handheld. When you reconnect the game, your winnings would be transferred to your main character. There are certain game types that translate well to a small screen, and short bursts of available play-time. And certain ones that don't. I crash often enough in Burnout through a VGA cable onto a large screen - trying to resolve fast, complex 3D images on a tiny handheld screen in variable light, and possibly while physically moving - yeuch.
What's this about Sony and Nintendo not allowing Adults Only games to be made for their consoles? In the UK there were various games for the N64 rated 18 (Perfect Dark and Conker's Bad Fur Day among others) and there are several games for the Wii which are certified 18 (Scarface and MK Armageddon at least). All the GTA series (i.e. their biggest sellers) have been 18-rated on the Sony machines.
This is the top rating in the UK - not to be sold to any person under the age of 18. If that's not Adults Only, then what is?
Skip the level? What an amazing idea! Almost as though I as the player made a choice and actually had it affect the way the game plays out! You know, if that concept could be applied to a few more games, it might just work.
And any time a cutscene makes your avatar do something that you as a player do not want to do, yes it sucks, yes it has always sucked, and no, there's no excuse for it except lazy-ass game design. Forcing a deus ex machina on you because the 'plot' has to go the way the game designer wants it to go, and the engine can't handle multiple player choices, well you might as well start making 'choo-choo' noises because you're being railroaded.
Go play Geneforge. Do anything you want, at any time you want. Kill friendly NPCs, kill people who are vital to the plot, pick fights you can't possibly win, the game will not stop you. Assuming you survive, you can still finish the game and get an ending. You might miss out on a load of loot, and the 'good' endings, but your choices have always been the driving force behind the way the game plays out. No cutscenes, no railroading, ever. If one guy can make this happen in 4 games and counting, how the hell do all these big dev-houses manage to get it so spectacularly wrong so often?
What do you do then? If you truly are the lone soldier/spec ops/cyborg going into the enemy installation, and there's 30-40 guards in there that are any smarter than a stick, you're toast. Unless you like playing stealth games, which to me are the ultimate in pointlessness - yes, you can be the super-soldier, harder than the entire regiment of 22 SAS, but you've got to sneak everywhere and not fight, otherwise you lose. What fun...
There are some things in generic games design that need fixing, and have needed to be fixed for a long time. Wood and cloth should burn. Glass should break. I have a gun, the door is padlocked; no, I don't think I need to trudge to the other side of the map to get the key, thanks.
These sorts of deficiencies were just about tolerable 10 years ago - we accepted that computers just weren't fast enough to do all the things we wanted them to do. What's the excuse now, apart from the fact that most programmers are just doing things the same way they've always done? I'm still waiting for the first engine that gives gamers and designers real sandbox freedom and the ability to improvise. I carry a reasonable amount of pocket trash - a small butane lighter/torch, a couple of mini multi-toolkits/Swiss Army cards, a small roll of masking tape, a small coil of cord - the sort of things that are very hard to improvise, but with which you can improvise a great many things. It's long annoyed me that secret agents, superheros, mega-cyborgs, vampire hunters etc. never seem to have pockets. A chair leg and a knife and a couple of minutes - instant vampire killer, whereas in any standard game, if you don't have the official +5 Stake of Slaying, then Count Alucard isn't going down.
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What constitutes 'realism' in the first place? I remember being very impressed with the guard's walk-cycle animations on GoldenEye years ago, but I also feared that when I dropped a guard with a headshot, I might go over to him and find the wallet had fallen out of his pocket, to display the photo of his wife and kids and I'd never be able to play the game again.
Do you want to be able to get forensic on the results of a sniper shot ("Look! Sinuses!")? Does having a car's brake discs glow red under heavy braking in a race game make any appreciable difference to the game, especially if the 'realism' is thwarted somewhat by the usual drawback of 'licensed cars'='no damage modelling'? Does accurately mapping the tread pattern in GT5 actually have any effect on the car's handling?
I don't know if I could handle genuine AI in video games. I think I have a hard enough time with Artificial Stupidity. There are already games with CPU enemies that can see your muzzle-flash from 800 yards away, and shoot you in the chin from the same range. I've just been playing Uncharted 2, and if the guards and enemies actually knew how to use cover and flanking manoeuvres, you could never actually progress past the first level. When it's you and a pistol against multiple enemies with armour, shotguns and grenade launchers, they can't be allowed to be particularly bright, or they will be as unbeatable as they would be in real life.
What does bother me is the level of stupidity on the civilians in some sandbox games. How many times have citizens in GTA walked past 10 yards away, oblivious to the fact that I'm murdering someone in broad daylight? At least in Prototype, the citizens will react if you 'hulk out' in front of them and run away, but leave the area, go back 30 seconds later, and everybody's walking around perfectly normally, like they hadn't just seen me beat someone to death with their own spleen. And how 'realistic' were the GTA series anyway, where there was nobody under the age of 18 in the whole city, and no schools, so there was no way you could ever kill a child.
I seem to recall that games like Theme Park etc. have little personal 'scripts' running for all the patrons of the park - how hungry they are, how bored, thirsty and the like. Would it be possible to have the same for a sandbox city, even down to your approval rating, in a superhero game? Crush one too many criminals with a squad car, and have to go rogue and vigilante, instead of being the media's latest craze.
Realism is difficult - I appreciate this. Designing a world to give players maximum freedom is much more complex than the very tightly-controlled worlds we're currently being offered, where wood does not burn, glass does not break, and a rocket-launcher will not break through a wooden door. As long as we're willing to accept these strictures and just keep buying and playing the latest iteration of whatever 3D engine is the current hot property, there is no reason whatsoever for any games company to attempt to offer us any semblance of true realism.
Every motorcycle I've seen made in the last 30 years has had a kill switch on the handlebars. It just shuts down the bike's entire electrical system and stops the engine. It's intended as a safety feature if you're in a situation where you don't want to have to take your hands off the controls to reach the key. Also, as I understand it, if the bike's crashed, but the throttle's wedged on, all you have to do is hit the Big Red Switch, rather than trying to reach the key while the bike's hopping around because the rear wheel's making intermittent contact with the tarmac.
Seriously - an Off switch within emergency reach of the driver - how complex a concept is that?
OTOH, what are these cars doing with such massive embedded systems in them? I've seen numbers in the tens of millions of lines of computer code being bandied around as indicators of their size and complexity - WTF does a *car* need all that computing power for? I've driven dozens of cars without a single microchip in them - they started, they stopped, they did everything you'd reasonably expect a piece of personal transport to do. What does adding all that complexity get you, apart from a car only officially licenced and approved dealers can work on because nobody else has the diagnostic software...? Oh wait...
Never mind.
I should have been clearer in my distinction. It may seem as though I didn't rate Larson - I do. I have all the books and can probably quote half the jokes from memory. But there has never seemed to me to be a relationship there. Krazy has Ignatz, Pogo has Albert, Wellington has Old Boot, and Calvin has Hobbes; from those relationships, much of the humour flows naturally, just from the inherent nature of the characters. That is what I see at the heart of a true strip. I know many of the Far Side gags rely on knowledge of scientific details ("Surely you know I would only devour my own husband!"), and they are almost all superb, but I don't see the heart in them that I do in the other strips.
I must say, I'd never considered nature itself as the protagonist in TFS - I'll bear that in mind when I re-read them next.
I have yet to see anything as wonderful in any other strip as the Eyeballs in the Sky sequences from The Perishers. One joke running in the top half of the strip, and phenomenally detailed and complex crustacean insanity scuttling along the bottom of the strip. Unfortunately, there is almost none of Dennis Collins' beautiful artwork available on the web - the few strips online seem mostly to be later ones by Bill Mevin.
http://themagicrobot.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/eyeballs22.jpg
http://www.shadowgallery.co.uk/perishers.html
I admire Bill Watterson's skill at depicting wildlife and woodlands - some of his coloured Sunday pages are tone poems to foliage, but the world that Dennis Collins drew is the one I grew up in.
There have been a handful of geniuses, who've happened to work in the comic strip field. George Herriman, Walt Kelly, Berkeley Breathed, Garry Trudeau, Maurice Dodd and Dennis Collins, and Bill Watterson. Why such a small number? Because true genius is rare and special, whatever field the artist is working in.
I don't count Gary Larson in the same field - he was quirky and brilliant, but there's no continuity in his works - there's 5,000 individual gags, but no heart, nobody there we care about. I also don't count Charles Schulz - Peanuts is simply the nastiest strip ever written. It's cold, and bleak, without an ounce of love or sweetness about it. Nothing good ever happens to anybody - it's existentialist horror.
Calvin's world wasn't perfect - Moe was a bully, school was appalling, and things sometimes went wrong. There was fear and loss from time to time, and nobody else ever saw the world quite the way he saw it. But there's magic there, and adventure, and love in a variety of flavours. They are books I could sit and read with my child when he was Calvin's age and younger, because they are good art, excellent stories and a total blast for the imagination. The Sunday strip poems often featured wonderfully whimsical language and the wordplay in the strip itself was second only to The Perishers.
I'm delighted that Bill Watterson stopped when he thought he was done. Delighted he chose not to let MegaCorp plc rape his creations, and slap them on underpants, lunchboxes and disposable cups from the burger joint. Delighted that Calvin and Hobbes didn't get shoe-horned into some Moral of the Week shitty TV show, with a cute catchphrase, and cheap-as-chips animation. What he created is art, and it's a minor miracle that he managed to resist the dollar signs, and what must have been startling numbers of zeroes after them, in order to keep the tale of a boy and his tiger real and magical.
If he ever comes up with another story he really wants to tell, I have no doubt he will.
Go read Bob Shaw's 'Vertigo'.
The changes this would make to society are too great. The politicians would never allow common people to have that much freedom. No borders, no passports, no way of stopping people from going where they wanted, when they wanted. And that's without assuming any purpose more nefarious than a cheap weekend in Amsterdam.
One asshole with one of these and a pocketful of golf balls could cause carnage in a city centre at rush hour - no way to track or find the culprit afterwards. As long as there's idiots who think throwing rocks off motorway bridges is a fun thing to do, there'll be idiots who'll be delighted to abuse this even worse. Drug dealers, criminals of any kind who want to make a clean getaway (get 10 feet off the ground and nobody's catching you, no matter how fast the police car).
It's not the physics of flight, or fuel capacity, or engine efficiency that will stop us ever getting personal flight vehicles - it's the politicians who will legislate it out of existence for all but the very rich, because whatever rich people want is always all right. And they'll do it in the name of safety, and it'll be for our own good. There'll be a huge furore in the media when the first one crashes and kills someone, and that'll be it done with.
I still remember a dream I had about 10 years ago, in which I went into my local video store and asked for a copy of Rain Man, but with Arnold Schwarzenegger in both lead roles, and being asked to wait 5 minutes while the computer re-formatted the film appropriately and applied his voice pattern.
Not long to wait, it would seem...
There's different kinds of frustration. There's not knowing what to do next (Myst). Perhaps worse is knowing what to do, but not seeing how you're meant to be able to accomplish it.
Sometimes the game engine is a little bit broken - it used to annoy me no end in Perfect Dark that sometimes (just sometimes) a weapon would be at your feet and you simply could not pick it up. Maybe the boss monster has an unusual attack pattern and is only vulnerable to having acorns thrown at his toes, while, mysteriously, a rocket launcher to his face has no effect.
A lot of the stupid frustrations have been taken out of play by the internet - "How do I do X"-level frustrations are mostly taken care of by walkthroughs. It's handy to know that you're failing because the only way to kill the vampire is with the Holy Stake, which you forgot to pick up on Level 3.
I think sometimes difficulty-level frustrations can come about because of play-testing. If testers have been playing the game for months, they may have gotten significantly better at it than most people would ever do in normal play. Consequently, they can find levels easy to complete, and bosses very straightforward. So the difficulty level gets ramped up by doubling the hit points for all enemies, and suddenly the game is too hard for 95% of the final audience.
The worst frustration is when a game goes on the shelf, or back to the shop as a trade-in, because it reached a certain point, which was simply impassable - a race I couldn't win, or a boss I couldn't beat, and that's it - the rest of the game is forever closed to me. I'm tone-deaf - finally managed to get to the second island in Myst, listened to the musical tone key for the bunker and realised I was never, ever going to be able to finish the game.
and hours of computer time, to make someone look *exactly* like themselves. Truly uncanny. And completely unimpressive, as they could just be, you know, lying their asses off about the whole thing.
If the actress under the fake face had looked completely different at the end, then that would have been impressive. Otherwise, who's to say they didn't just film the real actress the whole time, and claim to be digitally replacing her features while doing nothing of the sort.
I had a discussion with a friend some years ago about how long it would be before we could go into a video shop and ask for 'Rain Man', but with Arnold Schwarzenegger in both lead roles. I think it had been triggered by the idea that Sony had licensed the model human data based on Kevin Bacon in 'Hollow Man', as it had cost so much to digitise that they weren't going to use it just once. I seem to remember reading that a lot of the FX shots in Spider-Man 1 were done using that digital human, just with a Spidey skin, so there was a question about whether you could use the film in a game of 6 Degrees.
Assuming these guys are telling the truth, how long before actors start having their faces 'preserved' digitally at their peak, and still appearing as they were in their 20's or 30's decades later, even on a completely different body?
Drake's Fortune got it right. One shot in the head from a 9mm round could kill any opponent in the game, except the very final boss. Of course, this meant you had to aim for the head, rather than going for the safer body shot. Get caught in a crossfire and you could be dead in a second. You weren't some heavily-armoured space marine with 13 separate weapons, you were a guy in a Hawaiian shirt with a handgun, and as such you had to make use of all available cover. It worked really well. Not 'extreme realism', whatever that's meant to be, just realism. Guns kill people.
Okay, it's not the actual guns, it's these little hard things, but you know what I mean.
The major problem now with game creation is that it has become a multi-million dollar business. Yes, you can still do a one-man/small-team game, and get it published and sold on the web - the Geneforge series is a prime example.
But 3D world engines are expensive, ones with good physics models are more so, and while the techies might be gleefully contemplating the number of individually-lit bits of phenomenally complex maths they can make it do, the marketing guys are wondering if there's going to be tits and/or blood to help flog the copies to the perceived demographic of 14-25 year olds. And there lies the problem - go to a development house with a wacky gameplay idea that nobody's ever done before, and they'll want proof positive that it's worth doing. Instead, suggest that they recycle last year's 3D engine, but make it zombies instead of mutants, get some students in to do level design, and someone to write 3 minutes of plot (Zombies are bad - kill them), and they're looking at a much cheaper option to have another full-price game on shop shelves.
Case in point - Eternal Darkness on the Gamecube. Scary game, pure eerie atmosphere and Lovecraftian tones, and an inspired Insanity aspect to the gameplay. Never has a game scared me so much as when I went to brush a fly off the screen only to discover it was on the inside... It sold very few copies and although critically acclaimed, was a major commercial flop. If it had been Tomb Raider - Eternal Darkness, how many more copies might it have sold?
Smaller, indie games may well be where the next great ideas come from - Narbacular Drop, Eets, and fLow spring to mind, but as long as the big publishers want their money supply uninterrupted, they'll keep taking the safe option and churning out stuff they're convinced the public want to buy. Ridge Racer 7 - gosh, I wonder what you have to do in that game?!
It's going to boil down to a simple question - will they sell more copies of the software if it has the Doom name/franchise attached, or if it's marketed as a brand new thing?
It's not necessarily realism in the game I'm after, more in the environment. Once you've accepted that you're battling demons on Mars, then realism is right out the window. But as soon as limitations are artifically placed on how the world reacts to your presence, and how you can interact with it, then the willing suspension of disbelief begins to erode.
Many of the items I listed have been with us since the earliest games, because the systems they were running on could not support such levels of realism. Enemies had X hit points, and functioned perfectly until hit points reached zero. Glass did not break and wood did not burn because they were just textures on otherwise non-destroyable items. These days, with very powerful systems available, there is much less excuse for games designers to repeat those same problems. But they've become almost part of the game genre conventions. Making the engines react properly is obviously a good deal harder than the more simplistic worlds that almost all video games currently replicate. That doesn't mean we should be content to accept workarounds designed to allow games to run on very old systems.
Trust me, you get shot in the knee, you're limping for a lot more than 10 seconds. I tend to like the newer model of player damage used in Drake's Fortune, and Call of Duty 2 and 3 (not played 4), where the screen goes grainy and blurry, but if you can get to cover it'll recover in a few seconds. I don't interpret it as actual physical damage, because nobody heals that fast, not even Wolverine. It works if you think of it as you getting more and more hyped up under stress from near misses, and if you stay in the firefight, or don't get behind cover then someone will get a bead on you and kill you with one shot. Futuristic games get a bit more leeway, as they can have any combination of nanobot-laced slap patches and massively powerful painkillers to allow the protagonist to recover swiftly from almost anything short of decapitation.
Guns are deadly, bullet wounds are not trivial, and most explosives are extremely powerful. Two D-cell batteries in a simple torch can last for tens of hours. Any time a game designer messes with these very simple rules, it means they're doing something wrong.
the horse is long since gone.
.45 hollowpoint. Until you do it enough times to kill them at which point they die instantly, but until that point they will be at full combat effectiveness. You can kneecap a monster and it will still be able to chase you at full speed. If a monster is armoured, you can shoot it in its eyes and open mouth as much as you like without hurting it unduly, because they are every bit as heavily armoured as its scaly, plated hide. Half the monsters will have ridiculous hit points, and the big ones will be somehow impervious to your weapons and the laws of physics until the point where they rear up and reveal their weak point.
.22 air pistol. They can wear jeans, so the pellet won't penetrate skin. As they're rolling around on the ground in pain, or hopping and screaming and cursing, tell them to remember what it felt like when they come to design the weapons, the monsters and the monsters' reactions to getting hit.
Wolfenstein - great idea. Doom, brilliant sequel. Doom 2 - nice, more levels. Quake, wow.
Doom 3 - where's the duct tape? Or string - anything really. Where's the £4.99 headband torch I keep in my backpack?
Nobody really wants to break the FPS formula, least of all the guys who practically invented it. It'll be Doom with shiny graphics, more polygons in the average monster's arse than comprised an entire level from the original Doom, and it'll still be shite, because it's been done to death now for 15 years. The shotgun will be a great weapon for 90% of the game, and be the only weapon for which there's ever enough ammo. Despite being set in the future, and on some alien world, the weapons will have been toned down to the sort of sub-standard kack you wouldn't give to a modern day grunt. Nobody involved with the game will have the slightest idea about current or future military hardware, or know where to find a copy of Jane's Infantry Weapons. There will be no metalstorms, no gauss rifles, no sabot rounds, no poison darts, no armour-piercing rounds. The sniper rifle will carry 5 rounds at best, and any weapon capable of killing an enemy quickly will have almost no ammo available as that might render it somehow useful. You will find weapons dropped by other groups of people who'd been previously ambushed by the monsters. Quite why you'd want to pick them up is unclear, as they clearly didn't do their last owners a blind bit of good.
As for the environment, if there's enough light to see, it'll be drab and featureless as otherwise it might be possible to work out where you are. The colour palette will be green, brown, and grey. Wood will not burn, glass will withstand a rocket launcher if it has a bit of chicken wire in it, and despite carrying around 200lbs of explosives, the door will not open if you don't have the access code. Using a grenade to go through the plasterboard walls will not be an option.
The monsters will not react in any way (stagger, pain, fear) to being shot in the nose with a
In short, it will have every flaw that every other FPS has, but because it's got the magic word 'Doom' written all over it, it will sell many copies and the usual fanboys will be sucking its dick because it's so shiny.
Here's something I'd love to see happen before they write one line of code on this game. Line up every developer, and designer who's going to work on the game, and shoot them in the thigh from 4 feet away with a
Besides, it'd be a major hit as a YouTube video.
I wonder how Stan Lee feels about this stuff. Used to be that comic books were special places - the only places you could see this sort of thing. Until very recently, if you wanted to see transforming aliens, or 250 giant horribly be-weaponed Shi'ar battlecruisers, the pages of a comic book were the only place you could see it and have it not look like shit. You want to see the Kree-Skrull war, you need either $1M per minute CGI, or Neal Adams and a pencil. I stopped reading comics some time ago, not just because of the expense, but because it felt like the one thing they could do that no other medium could do had been superseded.
Does Stan Lee have a cameo in Iron Man? I don't mind if he does, because without him and a couple of other guys, none of this would be happening. He could have a 5-minute spot to cha-cha across the screen in a pink tutu singing the 'This Is My Cameo' song, and I wouldn't begrudge him the time.
Or £300 for a PS3. Tough call. Oh wait, I'm on an ASUS K8N mobo, so I'd need to upgrade to a PCI-E capable motherboard, with a new CPU and RAM as well, plus a copy of Vista for all the DirectX-10 shininess.
Think I'll just wait for Win7 and skip a handful of hardware iterations. Given that the current rig plays HL2 and Far Cry at a decent resolution with full shinies, I can't work out why UT3 either looks nice but runs at 2fps, or runs at 25fps but looks like an Atari 2600 game.
'Paradoxically, at a moment when technology allows designers to create ever more complex and realistic single-player fantasies, the growth in the now $18 billion gaming market is in simple, user-friendly experiences that families and friends can enjoy together.' I played through Mass Effect as a Paragon. I had a save near the end that allowed me to see the four Paragon endings with the minimum of fuss. Great. Can't be bothered to go through the whole game again to see the four Renegade endings, at least not any time soon. All those endings, all the cinematics and voice-overs, they all cost money - animators, actors, studio time. Wii boxing can have exactly one of two endings - you win or you lose, and the same code handles both. Yes, technology allows designers to create huge complex worlds, but with great complexity comes a great price. The demographic of gamers seems to be skewing older, as people who gamed as kids grow up and get jobs. For me, this certainly means there's less time to sit down and immerse myself in (say) Fable for hours on end, but an hour or so playing winner-stays-on boxing, or bowling on the Wii with wife and son after dinner is a good way to get some exercise and spend some fun time with my family. Now if they made a multi-player Fable, with different characters, maybe viewed from a top-down perspective, we'd play that together as well. Can't think of anything like that on the market though...
There was an article ages ago about this, and the Nintendo guy said something I thought was very telling about their attitude to customers. He said they were ramping up production as far as they could, but to stretch the supply chains any further would mean dealing with component manufacturers and suppliers they neither knew nor trusted. Yes, the result would be a larger supply of Wiis, but a much higher percentage of defective machines; either as soon as the customer got it home, or soon after purchase. They didn't want that to be associated with their brand, and said they'd rather manufacture less consoles, and have them work properly, and hope people would be patient and understand.
Compare and contrast Microsoft's attitude of denying the problem for ages, then setting aside billions to handle defective machines under extended warranty. My Wii's seen daily use since launch date - all I've ever had to do was change batteries in the Wiimote. If it does break down, I'm stuffed as far as getting another one is concerned, at least for a few more weeks.
More to the point, it's not like they took a hammer to it, or kicked it around the room like a football. They dropped it maybe 18 inches and shook it lightly, and it *died*. A $350 robot dinosaur was rendered inactive by treatment far more gentle than it might expect to receive at the hands of most small children. Even if attempting to treat it well, children are capable of being clumsy and forgetful. And if they're not attempting to treat it well - if they're going to throw it down in a temper tantrum when it doesn't do exactly what they wanted it to, it's not going to last 24 hours in the hands of actual children.
That's not a toy for children - it's a toy for adults with too much money.
Well done. Just in case anyone on t'internet had missed that rather scathing review of a lackluster 3PS, now everyone and their dog are emailing each other the link and determining never to buy the game, even when it shows up in the 4 for £20 bucket at Gamestation.
We need a few more review sites like Zero Punctuation - no game ad revenue means no pressure from advertisers and the freedom to be honest. Metacritic is pretty good for spotting the paid shills too - if most reviews are around 7 but there's a couple of 10s, then guess who took out full page ads with their magazine...?
Unfortunately, Kane & Lynch would probably have been a perfectly acceptable game a couple of years ago. Now it just looks drab and repetetetetive. Although it's a hackneyed phrase, in the last year or so the bar has been significantly raised as to what constitutes a AAA-title. With so much top-quality software competing for the same chunk of gamer's cash, games have to be different, quirky, and good to stand out. Kane & Lynch isn't, so it doesn't, and it's not alone. There's dozens of games on the shelves for every system under the sun that only qualify as 'also-ran'. You might pick them up if you see them cheap enough, but there's no way anybody sentient is going to pay full-price for them.
So many games come out and it looks like they're not quite finished. With the sheer expense of developing anything these days, you'd think the dev studios would be tempted to actually finish a game, test it properly, and make sure they've got a quality saleable product.
Because everything should be allowed in the game world - the only penalties and rewards we need are those in the game itself. I tried to play one of the Splinter Cell games once - it was unspeakable. I'm trying to stop a madman from detonating some unholy terror weapon and killing hundreds of thousands, and my controller calls a halt to the mission because I accidentally shot a civilian. Yeah, sorry and all, didn't mean to, but let's have a little perspective here. Let me finish the mission - give me the silver or bronze achievement award instead of gold, let me go back and try and do it perfectly when I feel like nailing all the gold awards, but when I'm trying to save hundreds of thousands, cut me some slack over one accidental death!
Mercenaries was another one, there's one particular mission where there's a huge firefight going on, and suddenly, up comes a message saying I'm due them $100K of my earnings because I shot the CNN reporter. Wow. I didn't even know there was one there! There's seven different automatic weapons going off over here, but you're sure it was me? What the hell was the idiot doing sticking his head up in the middle of a gun battle anyway!?
Those events were crap enough - don't go adding Civilian Killer to my gamertag as well.
"Supreme badass" isn't available as a starting option as that's the default setting for your character! You're meant to be a tough, battle-hardened marine who's survived to make N7 - highest special-forces rank in the game world. I'm saying that's an inherent problem for an RPG - starting with a character who's already supposed to be fully skilled and experienced - once you do that it isn't a classic RPG any more. To answer your other point - it's unlikely that competent game design would allow you to max out all your stats. If you had (say) 80 pts available at creation, but it would take 110 to max out all stats, you can't have everything cranked to 11. However, you could decide for yourself what kind of character you build, and still have replay value by choosing other combinations for those 80 points. And yes, I'd expect a fully trained soldier to be able to use any weapon he found - it pisses me off no end that my vanguard-class character can't use a sniper rifle at all, as he doesn't get the aiming point. How fricking dumb do you have to be to be unable to work out how to use a rifle with a 'scope? Especially when you're meant to be special forces?!
The role-playing aspect of it could remain effectively unchanged - you talk to characters, make conversational choices, follow the clues, or miss them if you don't have the skills. Levelling up does not equal role-playing.
As for the time aspect of this - yes you can have a game which focusses on significant events in a character's life - generally that's the point of most media. Your character can become a Spectre within a few hours of play time, but he didn't get there by mailing in his boxtops. This is the culmination of years of training and experience, all of which is laid out in the backstory, but not represented in the character you get given to play with.
Traditionally, in an RPG, you start out weak, and build up skills and abilities as the game progresses. Which is fine if you're some naive farmboy who's come home to find his family killed and his house burned down, and who has vowed to make those evil (plot points) pay for what they've done. Start with a leather jerkin and a quarterstaff, and build your way up to being a parahuman by the end of the game.
But how do you handle level progression when you're supposed to start the game as a fully trained whatever-it-is? In Mass Effect, you start out as a highly-trained uber-warrior who's supposed to be hard as nails, yet you can't shoot straight, your weapons are ineffectual shit, and you'll get beat down by just about anybody until you put some points into your combat skills. Bioware had the same problem with Jade Empire - 15 years in a martial arts school as their star pupil in the pre-game scene-setting, but weedy as hell in the actual game until you spent some points. At least KOTOR and KOTOR2 had reasons in game why you didn't have, or couldn't remember your actual abilities.
It's just that everyone's going on about the brilliant story, and yet completely missing the fact that in order to shoehorn it into a traditional RPG engine, they've had to bend it all out of shape. Why would you make your elite troops buy their own guns with their own money? Because hoarding gold and trading it for stuff has been a mainstay of D&D since pencil and paper days. Why would you issue special forces soldiers with guns that overheat after firing three rounds? Because shitty starter weapons are generic to the classic RPG advancement-based structure. Doesn't fit the storyline at all, but it's a tired old staple of the genre, so just make the player do it.
Even being given the option of having all the character-design points at the start of the game would have been a good idea. Once your character's created, that's who and what he's going to be until the end of the game, because that's who he's become in the last 15 years of special forces training. The events of the game last about a week in game time - tops. What are you going to learn in one week that's going to override everything else you've ever learned?
The actual plot and characterisation, and the sheer scope of the game is fantastic - showing what they can do with a KOTOR-style game when not tied to the Star Wars universe. But the overall framework of the story makes no sense at all, and that just rankles. I'm sure that due to the massive financial success of the game and all their others, they're perhaps not too worried about one gamer's opinion, but everybody else seems to be queueing up to suck Bioware's corporate cock over this damn game, and I feel like the only person who's spotted that nobody could have heard Kane say Rosebud...
It had those little plug-in VMUs that weren't just a memory card - they had their own power, an LCD screen, a D-pad and two buttons. Certain Dreamcast games could download mini-games onto the VMU, which you could play on the VMU itself. When the VMU was re-connected to the Dreamcast with the main game, you could upload your scores, which would unlock items etc. in the main game that couldn't be unlocked any other way. The games weren't amazing, having only 128K RAM to work with and a 48x32 screen, but the idea was ingenious.
If there were games for the PS3 that could do that, there'd be more reason to buy a PSP. For example, I've recently been playing through the two KOTOR games, and it would have been nice to have a Pazaak game to take away on a handheld. When you reconnect the game, your winnings would be transferred to your main character. There are certain game types that translate well to a small screen, and short bursts of available play-time. And certain ones that don't. I crash often enough in Burnout through a VGA cable onto a large screen - trying to resolve fast, complex 3D images on a tiny handheld screen in variable light, and possibly while physically moving - yeuch.
What's this about Sony and Nintendo not allowing Adults Only games to be made for their consoles? In the UK there were various games for the N64 rated 18 (Perfect Dark and Conker's Bad Fur Day among others) and there are several games for the Wii which are certified 18 (Scarface and MK Armageddon at least). All the GTA series (i.e. their biggest sellers) have been 18-rated on the Sony machines.
This is the top rating in the UK - not to be sold to any person under the age of 18. If that's not Adults Only, then what is?
Skip the level? What an amazing idea! Almost as though I as the player made a choice and actually had it affect the way the game plays out! You know, if that concept could be applied to a few more games, it might just work.
And any time a cutscene makes your avatar do something that you as a player do not want to do, yes it sucks, yes it has always sucked, and no, there's no excuse for it except lazy-ass game design. Forcing a deus ex machina on you because the 'plot' has to go the way the game designer wants it to go, and the engine can't handle multiple player choices, well you might as well start making 'choo-choo' noises because you're being railroaded.
Go play Geneforge. Do anything you want, at any time you want. Kill friendly NPCs, kill people who are vital to the plot, pick fights you can't possibly win, the game will not stop you. Assuming you survive, you can still finish the game and get an ending. You might miss out on a load of loot, and the 'good' endings, but your choices have always been the driving force behind the way the game plays out. No cutscenes, no railroading, ever. If one guy can make this happen in 4 games and counting, how the hell do all these big dev-houses manage to get it so spectacularly wrong so often?
What do you do then? If you truly are the lone soldier/spec ops/cyborg going into the enemy installation, and there's 30-40 guards in there that are any smarter than a stick, you're toast. Unless you like playing stealth games, which to me are the ultimate in pointlessness - yes, you can be the super-soldier, harder than the entire regiment of 22 SAS, but you've got to sneak everywhere and not fight, otherwise you lose. What fun...
There are some things in generic games design that need fixing, and have needed to be fixed for a long time. Wood and cloth should burn. Glass should break. I have a gun, the door is padlocked; no, I don't think I need to trudge to the other side of the map to get the key, thanks.
These sorts of deficiencies were just about tolerable 10 years ago - we accepted that computers just weren't fast enough to do all the things we wanted them to do. What's the excuse now, apart from the fact that most programmers are just doing things the same way they've always done? I'm still waiting for the first engine that gives gamers and designers real sandbox freedom and the ability to improvise. I carry a reasonable amount of pocket trash - a small butane lighter/torch, a couple of mini multi-toolkits/Swiss Army cards, a small roll of masking tape, a small coil of cord - the sort of things that are very hard to improvise, but with which you can improvise a great many things. It's long annoyed me that secret agents, superheros, mega-cyborgs, vampire hunters etc. never seem to have pockets. A chair leg and a knife and a couple of minutes - instant vampire killer, whereas in any standard game, if you don't have the official +5 Stake of Slaying, then Count Alucard isn't going down.