Late Night Game Design with Gabriel Kay

Game Season

2008-12-06T19:56:00.003+02:00

Lots of new games have been released that are of top quality, or at least look interesting to say the least, and I've had very little time to write about anything. But finally I have a few minutes and a desire to update with a bunch of games waiting on my shelf, maybe only for historical purposes so I can look back and see "oh that's what I thought of it"! I'll write shortly about a few games every now and then.

Motorstorm: Pacific Rift
I have absolutely no idea why this and the one before it got anything even close to an 8/10 in reviews. The handling is terrible, you drive into walls constantly, there is absolutely no sense of speed and the levels are confusing. You only learn where to go after a few laps because of steep hills shadowed with tree branches or whatever and that's not how it's supposed to be. The graphics are screenshot-worthy at times but there are some effects that look horrible.

Burnout Paradise
Some don't like it but I think they're don't really understand how to play it. Burnout Paradise requires a different type of approach, you can't expect to retry a failed mission again for example, the idea is to create a more casual game, which is fine for me. You get new vehicles, want to upgrade your license, drive fast (that's what this game does amazingly well, you really feel like you're going at insane speeds), and all of this is done via casually doing a race/stunt run/etc. and if it fails then so what, drive to the next intersection and try another one. The game could be a bit clearer about which events you've completed already for this license but it's fine. The open world theme isn't that good for racing games because of taking too many wrong turns, etc. Midnight Club LA is quite a good game but then Need For Speed Undercover is not. None of these are great. They used to do them better back in the day (NFS Underground and NFS Most Wanted). Burnout Paradise is fun in a casual sort of way but you shouldn't have to tell your players how to play your game, outside of the basic game rules obviously, because currently I don't think everyone quite understands the beauty of this game.

Dead Space PC

2008-11-08T11:58:00.005+02:00

The guy's helmet. That's all that made this game distinctly different for me before it was released. Because other than that it seemed like Doom 4. Now having played it, I feel my guess was right.

It's an action horror game in space. Like Doom. I've never been scared of the whole Alien space horror genre. This science fiction horror thing just seems too "cool" (with all these H.R. Giger Aliens with sleek designs and lasers flying around like Star Wars) to be scary for me outside the cheap sudden startle moments.

I've been hearing lots of people talk about how scary the game is and basically general praise towards how well it's done. Maybe it's the PC version but I don't agree at all. First off, the mouse lags behind terribly causing controlling to be fairly annoying. You get used to it in-game but the menus suck, just like in Fable 2. Oh and I'm not playing this with the XBOX 360 pad since I finally bought the Microsoft box and have the controller in use there. Maybe I should have played Dead Space with it since the mouse and keyboard combo just doesn't feel as good. But nothing would've helped the fact that when aiming with a weapon your vertical axis slows down, probably to try and help you with the cutting off limbs mechanic, but it's just more annoying than intuitive.

One thing I have to mention in the beginning here is the absolutely terrible narrow field of view and camera angle. The idea, I believe, was to create a claustrophobic feeling inside the ship and have the monsters feel like they REALLY get in your face at close range. The problem is you don't see enough and can't show the player anything really magnificent. They do try though but many times you actually miss it. Some people have said they don't mind the FOV being zoomed in like that and some have said they really dislike it. Having it zoomed in like this makes you lose sense of 3-dimensionality a bit too which makes things look almost orthographic at times and making sense of big rooms becomes more difficult than it should be. There aren't many big rooms in the game and the linearity might turn some people away (no, the guidelines on the ground weren't really needed) but a game like this wouldn't work in wide open spaces. The camera angle doesn't help either. Resident Evil 4 did it right, Gears of War 2 did it right. In Dead Space the camera is way too low making your character basically cover up the whole left side of the screen.

There are a lot of clichés here. An empty space station with audio logs and baby demons was done in Doom 3 (games never have any young kids you can kill, but demon babies are OK), flesh monsters running around that were once human but were infected with a virus and some crazy bad guy thinking this all has something to do with religion and Gods. But there are also unique concepts which I just feel aren't used well enough.

The no gravity zones and space areas don't offer anything new. Jumping from surface to surface in the no gravity zones was a let-down for me. Before the game was out I thought you could fly around freely and get this nice "they can attack from anywhere!" feeling going, but having started the game and realizing how the character controlled I realized the mechanic was going to be something different or it would feel too stiff to control. What it turned out to be was boring and it makes you lose track of where you were going too much with the way the camera handles. A smoother flow to it would've helped for example. The space areas just deplete your air reserves and muddles out sound a bit but in reality you can't hear anything in space. That didn't stop George Lucas though.

The monsters are a simple bunch. Shoot off limbs to win. In a way it's interesting and new but when you can't really kill them any other way (you can but it's so much easier to chop off limbs) it will get a bit repetitive. The weapons cater to that end a lot though and despite them being a fairly unique set, they just don't have as many uses. All I did was use the weird chainsaw gun contraption from start to finish. Oh and the monsters not following you through closed doors is a mood stopper to an extent.

The sound effects are something to be highly praised here. They are absolutely magnificent and have power to them that games rarely have. When you stomp your foot down on a crawling monster you really get the sensation that what your doing is crushing bones. The ambience effects are slightly overdone though, not that the effects are bad, just that there's too much going on. It's interesting to listen to no doubt but I would've gone with a more subtle mood and emphasized on the scary moments.

Speaking of scary moments, this is no Silent Hill. All the scares you'll get are sudden startles when a monster jumps out from behind a corner or your communication device goes on and one of the other characters sends you a message. Yes, the sound from a beginning video transmission is a bit too loud and imposing. OK, it needs to get your attention but pacing them during quiet moments would've been enough anyway. While we're at it, there's been talk about the pacing in general. Some say it's good and others don't really agree. I feel it works (you get quiet moments and then fights) but it's a bit dull. You don't have any real puzzles to solve (slowing time and moving things around aren't interesting core gameplay mechanics because they have been done to death and neither of these are used to create actual puzzles where you have to think longer than 2 seconds) and all you're basically doing is running around linear passages shooting monsters every now and then within very precise time intervals. It's more like a 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 3 minutes, 5 minutes loop instead of having more variety.

The lack of a HUD is excellent. Your information is shown on your character's back and it works very well. You can manage your inventory, look at the map, see audio logs, etc. through a menu that opens up next to you as a 3D plane like in Midnight Club LA for example. It's pretty neat. Other than that the inventory sucks. You don't have enough space (even though you can expand the available slots by buying a new tier of armour) and thus have to choose what weapon to gather ammo for and make room for health packs. The idea of a mechanic like this is obvious from the plethora of games that came before Dead Space but I've always hated it. Give me Simon the Sorcerer's hat!

The animation is done well except for a few interpolation glitches in taking off and landing (of the player character and enemies) in no gravity areas. The story is full of boring "fix the engines" types of missions and at one point we even get an attempt to match the Bioshock botanic garden type of environment (I'm not saying plants haven't been done before Bioshock) but it doesn't deliver apart from the amazing coughing monsters that just sit around and spread toxins into the air. The lack of real life items also makes this feel too sci-fi to my tastes. Star Wars always had the nightclubs, music and a good scope of human emotions but Dead Space only has a soda vending machine. It doesn't feel like an authentic environment despite the few benches here and there. It's a hard subject to get into because obviously there are medical labs and similar areas but all in all it gives off a sense of being generic and simply too sci-fi as stated above.

Supposedly this engine is up for sale and was supposed to compete with Epic's Unreal Engine but I don't see it as battling in the same league at all. Epic's engine looks so much better and runs smoother. I haven't seen the developer tools for this one though so who knows. Anti-aliasing (even though clearly present in the options) and anisotropic filtering don't seem very good and you actually get quite blurry visuals at times, and finally the textures are very low quality often (this is most likely due to the fact that it's supposed to run on consoles too and them having less memory causes problems if porting something that was tuned for PC usage only). Having played Gears of War 2 now just strengthens my opinion.

The game does keep you coming back for more for some reason and even though the general theme doesn't interest me one bit after Doom 3, I just can't help but come back to it wanting to find out what happens in the end. I'm very close to the end now but I have a strong feeling that nothing interesting or unique will happen and the game will just be brushed off as another Doom clone.

Warhammer Online - Age of Reckoning

2008-09-25T14:01:00.002+03:00

Decided to try it out too because Rock, Paper, Shotgun had an interesting piece about it a while back where the writers discussed the beta. They seemed to enjoy the game and said it was very much like World of Warcraft, one of my favorite games ever. So I thought maybe it might be good and if it's not then at least it'll be interesting to see how many ideas they took from WoW. Let's not get into the whole "but WoW stole many ideas from Warhammer and other MMOs". Plagiarism is different and this is not it. WoW is the most successful MMO ever and even though it took a lot of the core ideas from other MMOs that came before it, it was the first one that did it all right. The results can be seen by anyone.

Anyway, Warhammer. When you first start it up the similarities with WoW are made extremely clear. It's a good thing in a way because you'll know exactly how to move your character, how to talk to NPCs, how to navigate your UI, how to chat with friends, and so on. It even looks like WoW. The graphical style is very similar but then again this is how Warhammer has always looked in the books when I used to paint those little miniatures as a kid. But all in all Warhammer feels like its own game.

PvP or RvR as they like to call it is the main focus of the game I would say. The areas are locked into tiers and you fight over them by taking over locations and forts. The battle never ends and that's what's interesting about it. However, if you're of higher level and try to enter a lower level PvP zone you'll get a penalty in the form of transforming into a chicken. On one hand I understand this but then again it would feel a lot cooler if at the level cap (lv40 is the current maximum) you could fight over the entire world and not just at the few zones made for the level cap.

There are siege vehicles and turrets that you can use to repel enemy attacks too and they're done quite well. When aiming a huge bow for example you get a specific UI for it with a crosshair and instructions on what to do. You can also buy different things like rams and pots of boiling lava that you can put on pedestals at pre-defined spots near a fort that you're trying to take over or keep under control. I would prefer if you could set them up where you wanted but that might create some bugged situations and might be hard for the developers to implement. In the beginning now things haven't really been that hectic on the PvP front. There are a few sieges sometimes but not that many people take part in them. It would be good to have some kind of way to entice people to take part in these bigger events, for example giving rewards other than an experience boost that you currently have for taking over some parts. For example raise the experience gained from killing enemy players by 20% or something really meaningful for a while. People like going after the level cap in MMOs even though Warhammer seems to want to focus on taking levelling up slowly. It's just human nature to go faster to the end and a level cap makes it feel like the end unless some drastic changes are made to the core MMO design structure. Maybe they're more active on full PvP servers.

There are 2 ways to do PvP. Either join a scenario which is like a battleground in WoW. This can be accessed directly from a button above your minimap which makes joining these fights easier and faster than WoW. The other way to do PvP is to walk into a PvP enabled zone in the map/area you're currently in. Every map has those areas and when you walk into one you get a countdown from 10. If you don't leave the area or attack anyone before the time runs out you get PvP toggled on. There are of course full PvP servers where you always have PvP on but I tend to think those are for Counter-Strike kiddies :)

With PvP being in such a big role here it's weird that handling your character isn't done very well. You can move around just like in WoW but there's one major difference, the net code is buggy. The game was released in a rush, obviously because WoW's new expansion is out in a few months and releasing any MMO up to roughly 3 months after it is a death wish. But somehow Warhammer still feels very polished which is nice, however it does lack in certain places and maybe the reason it feels polished is that after playing the terrible Age of Conan I've lowered my standards. I shouldn't because I'm always looking for very high production values and Warhammer isn't one of those games. It's still buggy, some quests can't be completed, mob AI is odd and the net code is bad. What do I mean by net code? I mean the way information is sent back and forth between the player and servers.

The game doesn't lag exactly, meaning that I can run around fine, but what can happen and does happen very often is enemies standing in place and after a moment they teleport somewhere completely different and continue walking. It's like the information of the NPC's location wasn't sent correctly to the client side machine. Also, when fighting, especially with spells, you can never be sure if what you're casting is up to date. This is especially evident with damage over time instant cast spells. In WoW when you repeatedly press a button to cast a DoT spell fast after your global cooldown is over you can easily keep track of when to stop pressing because your cooldowns will show you the exact time the spell was cast. In Warhammer your cooldowns bounce around oddly sometimes showing 1.5 seconds left after a cast and sometimes 0 seconds because the information isn't handled well between the two ends. I think this has something to do with trying to make information flow faster than really needed because we all know in an MMO world nothing is exactly as it seems. Things that you're seeing now happened already a few seconds ago. However, WoW takes this into account and you get a very balanced PvP aspect to the game. That's why Arena matches are such a competitive area in WoW. In a game like Warhammer, where PvP is the main focus, you would expect more focus on the handling of information. Currently 1 vs 1 matches aren't about skill at all, but rather about who gets the most commands through the system by bashing buttons or who's of higher level and thus does more damage. PvP is simply about big groups running back and forth shooting and hitting each other randomly. I'm not saying NPCs don't sometimes act weird in WoW but that is definitely minor compared to Warhammer.

There's also a lack of character feedback. What I mean is you don't feel like you're really playing your character. Sometimes your spell doesn't show any visual effect, sometimes you don't hear sound effects at all for it and in many cases sound effects weren't even added for a specific event. For example, casting a fireball type spell on the Magus class causes a sound effect to start when you press the button to cast it. However, this sound effect ends before the casting time ends, whereas in WoW every cast has a looping effect that lasts even if you get spell pushback from someone hitting you and thus the cast time increases. In addition to that you don't get an audio clue when the cast really end and the fireball goes flying. To top it off you get no sound when the fireball hits your target either. This simply makes you feel like you're distant from the game world.

Healer and Tank. Theses two classes are a bit problematic. I played a dwarf tank for a while and got utterly bored within the first few minutes. It takes ages to beat down one enemy. You're making people not want to level up such an important class if you take away all their abilities to perform alone. Healers are the same but can be better used when playing with friends because you can heal them and do damage yourself. I didn't get very familiar with the classes but this is the impression I got and I would definitely put more focus towards the important classes being cooler to play. WoW has done that too but in the beginning it was hell and even now levelling up a warrior is much harder than say a warlock.

The level design in Warhammer is interesting. It seems like some artists (not game designers) were given the world building tools and set loose with only a few requirements as to where to place camps for the 2 factions order and destruction. The reason I say this is because the maps look quite good (absolutely amazing in some areas, for example The Inevitable City), but they flow badly at times. The gameplay isn't good and the overall design is very linear. It's not like Age of Conan though, which is a good thing, but it's far from WoW. You can only run to the next map in line and between tiers (2 maps per tier) you get a loading screen. This does not create an open world feel. The maps funnel players toward certain areas and don't give you the same sense of freedom as in WoW. The maps aren't bad though and the quests do move you around a bit but in my opinion for an MMO it should be way more open. Some of the distances between areas aren't great either, especially seeing as you have no means of moving faster between them.

Having no mount also makes things annoying because there are only flight paths at one camp in each map. The camp near the PvP zone. This is good once you understand it but it took a while to grasp. It would still be better if all the other camps had flight paths leading to the RvR flightpath. Without a mount moving around is very slow and having played a few alts up in WoW I feel very bored running around. On the other hand, you get a mount at level 20 for 15 gold and at level 16 (when I quit playing) I had over 17 gold already. I can only hope the mounts are a big enough speed boost.

You have a sort of compendium with you that you can open to check up on quest progress, monster kills, titles and so on. A lot of the ideas are taken from WoW again but the book itself is a very nice touch. The linear gameplay lends to not only making the PvP aspect work better but also to building a story for your character chapter by chapter as you progress onwards. You will unlock different stories and chapters as you explore the world and complete quests and you can read about them in your book. There are also lists for each type of monster you've killed and special quests for them like each one having a quest to kill 25 of that type and you get an experience bonus. It's an extremely cool idea. Also, titles are more frequently given out than in WoW and you can get some really nice tasks like clicking on yourself 100 times gives you the "Ow My Eye" title. Funny stuff for sure! Giving players things to unlock is cool like the XBOX's achievements, but then giving them the opportunity to show off that achievement in a big way like a title above your character name is even cooler. Everyone likes to stand out from the crowd.

You level up by getting experience by killing monsters and doing quests. Same old same old. But you also can gain experience by doing PvP which is another example of how much this game focuses on the PvP side of things. You get PvP quests and there's also a separate PvP level called Renown Rank. You have a special talent tree for the renown points you've earned too that gives stuff like more health, more experience or gold from killing PvP players, and so on. Very nicely done. There's also your core talents that you can buy when you level up and add to your action bar and then some special talent trees like in WoW. These are simplified though in Warhammer and also work linearly. You go through them in order out of your 3 different talent specializations. 25 points in total at the level cap and 15 points in each of the 3 trees. Somehow I didn't get these to work though so I don't know what the idea was. I unlocked the first one and couldn't use it. The spell wasn't found anywhere.

In WoW there are gems for your gear and in Warhammer there are talismans. In Warhammer there are 3 slots for tactics too: Core, Renown and Tome. These are like 3 buffs you have on all the time. They could cause you to shield yourself against some damage at times or gather more gold when killing PvP enemies like stated above. It's a nice addition. There's also a morale system which is a bar that gets bigger the longer you fight and more you get hit I supposed. The bar has 4 stops in a linear fashion and you can set up rank 1-4 morale spells on them. When you fight long enough you reach rank 1 and can use the spell there, which could be an instant cast fireball that does a load of damage. Once used it goes on cooldown and the morale bar resets. It's a very interesting tactical addition especially for longer fights. If you're killing single enemies alone then you can also use the morale bar because it doesn't immediately reset after you go out of combat. Your health and action points (mana) recharge so fast anyway that it's not a problem. You also get a rolling experience boost the more enemies you kill in a row without the boost resetting. This is a cool idea that makes "farming" that much more fun and Blizzard should think about implementing something like this into WoW too.

The gear you get, at least early on, is an issue again. Players look the same because everyone basically gets the same gear. It seems later on you'll start getting more stats like spell damage and so on but for now the stats also seem very simple. The game seems fairly balanced (not perfect by a long shot) for now though so it's fine. But the gear still looks very much alike for the same classes. You can color your gear though which is a very nice addition but not all pieces will accept color. You can also add little tokens to your shoulders for example that further distinguish your look but up to now I've found no real visually great additions, they're all just small pieces. People like to stand out from the crowd as I said earlier. Give them more opportunities to do so.

The UI can be changed quite nicely in Warhammer. You have a UI editor directly in the game and that's a big plus. You should be able to set your key bindings directly in the UI editor though. Now you have to go through a menu that has every action listed in alphabetical order for some odd reason. That means Left, Right, Up and Down (as in movement directions) aren't listed next to each other but all over the list. The UI editor is nice though.

Animation is quite nice when up close. Characters walk past you and their heads turn to look at you. It's all very cute but then when they're further off some form of highly annoying animation degradation is used. It eats up frames from between and makes it look like you're viewing some old keyframes only. At least give us an option to turn it off because I don't think something like this should be that affected by the net code if at all. The textures also, especially on bigger areas like mountains, are extremely blurry and this is one of the reasons the game actually looks worse than WoW. WoW is the same throughout, under your feet and in the mountains, but Warhammer looks highly detailed under your feet but very blurry in the mountains because of low resolution textures used to drop system requirements. Anisotropic Filtering does not help here, the issue is with the game engine and how it renders things. The player characters also look bad up close but I guess in a game with huge fights and focus on PvP you'll want to create easily distinguishable (and this is probably why the gear looks the same too) classes at a distance and not really something that's perfect up close.

All in all Warhammer is a nice game with very many ideas from WoW but also lots of great ideas of its own. The game feels like its own game but still very familiar to those who've played WoW, which isn't a bad thing. Now if all those idiots who whine about comparisons between WoW would shut the hell up. This game is like a tribute to WoW. It's a lot more linear and the net code along with character response rates gives it a big minus but all in all I'd say it's a great way to spend a few months while waiting for Wrath of the Lich King, or if you're an anti-WoW kind of person maybe you'll find your new favorite MMO in this simpler and fairly buggy but still second best kind of MMO.

Crysis Warhead

2008-09-24T22:54:00.005+03:00

I took a chance and decided to try Crysis Warhead. I didn't think it would really be any better than Crysis but they seem to have tuned the engine better this time, in that it doesn't crash as often and doesn't have weird textural problems. Or then it's because I'm now running Vista and DX10 instead of XP, otherwise the system is the same.

The guns sound good, there are lots of interesting choices and just enough room on your character to carry a few (not too few, not too many) while making it possible to choose the ones you like best but also keeping it limited enough to make you take the best ones for the current situation. The suit enhancements are great and all can be used to create your own way of playing, run through fast, jump to high places, go invisible.. And by the way the sounds muting down a bit when going into invisible mode is a very nice touch.

The levels are nice and cut-scenes are done very well this time round. Last time it paled in comparison to Call of Duty 4. This time the action and tasks you are set out to do are a bit more interesting but still mostly generic it they don't really put the levels to good use. There's still the freedom to choose which direction you want to approach from but in a game that people generally only play through once what's the point? Maybe add some better side missions, like hacking into computers or sniping an important sergeant, that you get great rewards from like UI modifications that give you a different color and layout or add a radar that shows hidden areas or something. The lead character's British tough guy accent annoyed me. The enemies see you from way too far and I don't think occlusion is handled very well. In Unreal Engine 3 even a leaf from a tree in front of your view will cause the background to be occluded and thus making the whole thing faster, whilst in Crysis Warhead you can experience insane framerate drops even inside small huts that have nothing but a few walls and a chair.

I had some fun in the first few forest sections with 1280x960 resolution (usually all games run at 1600x1200 fine on my top of the line Geforce 8 series, Core 2 system with 4gb RAM), and with graphics set to "Gamer". Try to put these in order by the way: Gamer, Minimum, Enthusiast and Mainstream. That's how Crysis Warhead lists the graphical settings for Low, Medium, High and Very High in whatever odd order it was. Quite silly and not really needed. It doesn't simplify it for anyone and neither does it make it "fun".

Anyway, the game was running OK until the first snow mission. Then everything slowed down to around 5 fps. Turns out it was the effect above the mountain basically and turning down the shader quality helped a bit because of the ultra complex shaders used in the scene. The problem is that stupid mountain shows all through the snow areas and thus you get an insane drop of framerate for quite a few levels. Sure it looks nice but Crysis Warhead is once again nothing more than a complete and utter mess regarding performance optimization. At one moment your system runs the game fine and the next you suffer lag like no other. If you want a game to feel consistent then you need to optimize your levels and make sure it runs the same way throughout the experience. I don't want to go and tweak every little graphic setting separately for each section of the game.

Crysis Warhead looks good but is optimized like shit. Seems like a fairly fun game too, just not worth getting until computers have advanced a year or two. Or if you want another take on benchmarking to complement your Futuremark Vantage software.

It gets even more ridiculous when during an extremely visually complex area you have to stay and defend against a swarm of monsters coming at you with 5 fps instead of running through with Maximum Speed on like I tend to do and just hope for the best. Sure you can tweak your graphics down again but Crysis is all about looking good (in outside tropical areas, because inside it looks generic, boring and simple) and with your graphics down it looks like Duke Nukem 3D. With gameplay that's not even close to Duke Nukem 3D why not just download the old classic on XBOX Live Arcade and play that instead.

Devil May Cry 4 PC

2008-09-21T17:07:00.003+03:00

- Focus on being cool. From the way the characters speak to the way your character slides across the floor with his sword to the side after taking a big hit that knocks him back.

- Supposedly it doesn't work quite well with a mouse and keyboard combination but I'm using the XBOX 360 for Windows controller again.

- New hero, Nero. The hand is a cool concept, albeit not exactly new, and it offers a crucial boost to the feel of the game I would say. It makes you feel like you have more control over what's going on around you. Sometimes I don't like new lead characters like in MGS2, but seeing as I haven't played the previous parts of the series I can't really say much here. Dante's still in though later on.

- Cloth effects are very nice on the heroes and animations are smooth all round.

- The music is nice and the mood is good. Overall it doesn't seem to have as much of a personal identity as God of War or Ninja Gaiden, the two that it could easily be compared to. Even though all three are different games, I would say the whole demon thing, up to their design in a way, is much closer to Ninja Gaiden though.

- The gameplay is very classic in that you move from area to area basically, some of which are gorgeous and others which are simpler. Developing a game like this can easily create a feel like it's not all a complete whole when different level designers are building parts and others simply know more about aesthetics and use more visual effects, but generally all the views of mountains and other larger landscapes are done well whilst smaller corridors sometimes look more plain. These areas sometimes get cut off with the red demon walls again, just like in other games of a similar genre, and then you have to fight off some monsters until the walls open up again allowing you to advance. It's been done already and feel a bit old since the gameplay really is nothing else than moving from area to area killing a few baddies. There are the occasional small puzzles but they're in such a small role here it's barely worth mentioning. The level design is very linear too with certain areas that you can open later. Mostly I think it might've been cooler on a console. You also visit some of the cooler locations rather fast and then they're over, like the forest section.

- The enemies are sometimes a bit dumb in design and maybe too far out. Demons with stitched clothes that look like scarecrows don't really match any stories you've heard as a kid. Other than the evil scarecrow man or something, but none of these look like a traditional scarecrow. There are some great enemies too though and the overall design of the enemies and items is still pretty good. The enemies that change from sword to flying rodent, or something, are again far-fetched as an idea but are done very well. They transform very fluidly and the 3D is perfect with no textures left Z-fighting or anything. The mini grim reaper type of monster is also amazingly done. The black smoke that creates a sort of cloak around it is amazing and moves very nicely. There is one problem though, in certain parts these guys tend to want to go inside walls and hang out there for a while until attacking you.

- The bosses are among the best I've ever seen. The fights could've used a bit more tuning in that they could've required you to play more with your character. Sure you're jumping around avoiding attacks but mostly they're quite easy affairs that require some button-mashing. They do look amazing though and move around very well. The game is worth buying simply to experience the bosses. The stone slabs alone where they come out from are a great and interesting idea.

- The orbs with faces (different types, used to buy powerups for example) are great and look very nice after defeating a boss and a bunch of them come rolling at you. It makes you think of some crazy drug-induced nightmare from a Studio Ghibli movie. Like the 3 crazy heads (Kashira) in Yu-Baaba's room in Spirited Away.

- The secret missions are a good idea but why does dying in them affect the normal game you're playing? Also, they require you to play the game mechanics more than play the actual game, which is annoying in some of them like the jumping platforms where you have to get up to the top within a given time limit. The problem is because of how Nero handles in the air it's actually hard to aim him at the correct spot even though you see perfectly well where it is you have to go. Nero can't be moved around when he's falling down, ie he has no air control after the peak of a jump. Which sucks.

- The menus aren't very good or clear. It's a console translation of course but why the fuck does it take so long to exit the game again (see Assassin's Creed... ugh)? Systems -> Quit mission -> B -> Yes -> Start Game -> Quit Game. Can't all menus have Quit to Main Menu and Quit to Windows options??

- I only found out near the end of the game that the idea is for you to actually spend your points on talents you want for the current level and then redo them for the next level because you get all the points you've gathered, and then spent on skills, back easily by choosing to redo your setup. I kept thinking that you'll start getting exponentially more points near the end like in other games and thus eventually get all the skills, but that's not the case. Maybe this could've been made clearer. The ability to automatically choose them all makes it easy for casual players.

- The difficulty is quite easy on normal. If you choose a harder mode you'll have to focus more on the fighting but in a game where the fighting isn't THAT fun, I don't see why you would want to. Seeing as there's a lack of real puzzles and adventuring/exploring too I don't know what exactly you're supposed to be playing here.

- Some of the puzzle mechanics (other mechanics than fighting) seem far fetched like punching around the moving pillars. First of all it doesn't really suit a game like this where you can move around freely in the 3D space without constraints. A more logical solution would be if the pillars were set on tracks so that they only moved in 1 of the 4 general directions and you'd have to punch them at the correct time to pass closing walls or they'd bounce back to hit you (with all those spikes) or something similar. Now it feels a bit too loose and you don't know where it's going to fly off to, or if it's going to move at all since some little bump in the wall can cause it to not go where you want it. This happens rarely though. Also, the random dice game rooms are dumb. You have no control over where your piece will land when hitting the dice and thus it makes an annoying random element that will piss you off eventually if you can't get to where you have to go in order to proceed. Something like this should be optional.

- Gloria's tits bounce all over. Then there's Dead or Alive, Soul Calibur, Ninja Gaiden.. I'm not really a big fan of enormous digital bouncing breasts made of jelly although it seems the Japanese are.

- The camera angles seem very amateur at times. They move to show something in a way that's not "cool" (as the game attempts to be) or productive/helpful. A good example is the part where Nero is running along a snowy ledge after the first big flame boss to the temple (or whatever it was) and the camera is following him. The following is fine but it changes angle about 3 times always to something a bit different and again right behind him. If you're going to change camera angle it needs to be for a reason like showing a new area or room, not just for the sake of it and roughly into the same place it was in the previous shot. The cameras change according to a volume, like in there types of games it seems to be, and you'll get the same angle and distance to the character always when standing in a certain spot even though the cameras sometimes move, but they'll always move the same way.

- Jumping isn't very fun. It's odd and too fast. It needs to be smoothed out a bit and like stated above, some air control would be good.

- Nero cries too much. Some would call this emo. It's annoying mostly. Nero's and Dante's attitude might annoy some people but these "young cool guys" have been done to death in a million games and it doesn't come as a surprise if you've looked at any of the screenshots or read about the series before trying a game.

- The cut-scenes are very well done and the camera angles there are mostly professional. Nothing like MGS4 but certainly up to the "required quality standards" in games currently.

- The language seems a bit mature at times with stuff like "Go blow yourself" being said and flipping the middle finger. Although I'm not 100% sure that was meant to be his middle finger in one cut-scene... it sure does look like it though and would fit the scene, even though a bit tastelessly.

- Why does the image stretch out as if you were in widescreen mode after completing a mission? It looks ugly. Console translation lazyness I bet.

- The final and most important point about the game is the overall game flow. You play to the "end" with Nero basically after which you play backwards through everything again with Dante. The idea is quite dumb to begin with BUT it could've been executed well if you ran across some other areas of the level as Dante. For example you saw a cliff high up that you couldn't reach with Nero and then when coming backwards you would be on the cliff with Dante. There are a few things you can only unlock as Dante later on but they hardly make it worthwhile. You even have to kill all the bosses again. 3 times to be precise. First as Nero, then as Dante and then once more all of them one after another. I know some games love to do this (Viewtiful Joe for example) and it's "old-school" in a way but I think it's closer to cheating your players than actually making things more complex. Of course you need to have a certain amount of belief in your own bosses if you're going to trust that players can get so good at the fight they'll bash through it in no time the next go, but mostly it feels like artificially adding length to the game. Maybe it's a western/eastern difference.

- Overall not as beautiful and interesting as God of War and not as precise in combat as Ninja Gaiden. So what's left? The bosses look cool and the game relies on being "cool" to play, and it is up to an extent, but overall it's the weakest of the three series in my opinion. It's still a decent game though.

Soulcalibur IV PS3

2008-08-25T01:13:00.006+03:00

Fighting games. I'm not that big a fan of them even though I really looked up to Street Fighter 2 back in the day (probably more because of its amazing character design and awesome graphics, which still to this day make me smile whilst playing it on the Wii Virtual Console). I've never been against beat-em-ups but it's just not the genre I'm most interested in. Nevertheless, I've almost always bought the newest Tekken and Soulcalibur games because they do represent the top tier in the genre and the character design has been phenomenal. Soulcalibur's newest version still has the oddly stupid stories and dumb voice acting but at least the character selection menu's music is great. It's also still about the weapons as much as it was before and you won't find any boxers here.

In Soulcalibur IV (SCIV) you can progress sort of naturally through the game and the difficulty curve is excellent. So, I've chopped up the game into PHASES below each one getting more complex and meaning you learn more about the game and become more involved. That's part of the reason I love SCIV, they developer really knew what they were doing. It attracts beginners in the genre as well as hardcore fighters.

PHASE 0.

First of all you notice the game looks absolutely amazing. Nothing to add to that, it looks great and the animations are extremely smooth. It felt really good to finally play a real fighting game after a long time with no new note-worthy releases in the more hardcore sector.

Basically you could go and do some training first off. Not everyone does it in the beginning but that's why this is Phase 0. You can practise whenever you want and the practise mode is excellent, unlike Smash Bros Brawl, which I wrote about a while ago. You get to view lists of all your chosen character's moves, you can even see the character perform the move and what it should look like, you can set up your opponent with simple scripts so you can test out attack patterns, your health always replenishes thus making it impossible for you to die except in certain arenas due to a ring out, and so on. If you wanted you could set your opponent to the hardest difficulty level and keep fighting for 30 minutes. In the end you'd have a much better understanding of the speed the game moves at and you'd basically become a better player. Training is actually worth being in this game.

PHASE 1.

SCIV starts off easy by letting you play through Story mode on NORMAL difficulty and thinking "I'm not too bad!", whilst in reality NORMAL seems to be the "ultra-easy" one. You just feel like you're better because it's not called ultra-easy! You get a lot of in-game currency for completing story mode (which is a short 5 stage romp through some bad guys in regular 1 on 1 fights) and thus you can open up all the "locked" character pretty fast by buying them after a few playthroughs. This is how they reel you into the game and get you familiar with the system. At this stage it's still button mashing that'll get you through.

In each stage of Story Mode you have a certain amount of bad guys up against you ranging from 1 to 4. They could have special abilities too such as preventing you from doing grab moves or something. It's an interesting approach because you have to fight these bad guys in a row with the same health bar. You might have an ally or two to accompany you though at some points and those you can switch with at any time. The other character rests while not fighting and regenerates health slowly. You also can't switch too fast between them because of a timer but it's quite fast in replenishing itself so that's not a concern at all really.

PHASE 2.

After completing Story Mode on normal difficulty for all the characters you start wanting more from the game. There are a few options, move on to Tower of Lost Souls (yes, the name is generic and sucks) or go for Arcade. Generally I would think people are scared of the Story Mode's HARD setting still at this point so they go for something else but little do they know that Arcade Mode is actually comparable in difficulty for the last fights. Arcade mode is a traditional fight against 9 other characters in stages in-between which your health does replenish.

Tower of Lost Souls is actually more interesting but still generally a simple trick to make the normal 1 on 1 fighting (or Active Matching Battle, AMB, where other characters can swap in whilst another regenerates health) seem different. It works well enough and just like in Smash Bros Brawl, the Subspace Emissary seems like a good idea but doesn't work, I'm happy they didn't go that route with SCIV. They focused on what works best. It's just a different way of looking at things like the world map in Soulcalibur 2.

PHASE 3.

During the end of Phase 2 you'll get more interested in the Character Creator. Some people have no doubt tried it out in the very beginning already but you're not going to get a lot out of it until you've played the game for a while first to understand how everything works and what's really needed statistic-wise. Sure you can make a cute anime inspired chick with a huge sword but if the armor statistics don't work then the character will be useless.

So, what you need is to level up one of the character styles (level 9 is the max and can be achieved with a few hours of play). This is one of the interesting things you start noticing that the manual lacks. The manual is in fact extremely vague. There are good tips to get your started but the way Soul Crushes and Critical Finishes are explained makes you think they're the same thing. There's a lot of stuff in the game that's not easy to understand and the logic seems far off but once you put some time into it everything becomes clear (or search around the Internet a bit, even with the lack of good FAQs on Gamefaqs you can find some stuff through Google). Anyway, once you level up a character's style (note, the character doesn't level up, his or her fighting style does) you can use that style on your own characters (or modify an existing one) and with a higher level style, buy better skills for your character. There are lots of different skills all placed under nice World of Warcraft type icons (yeah icons aren't a WoW thing, it's just that these ones look like they could be direct spell icons from WoW).

Learning the character creator is a task on its own and it took a while for us to figure out that when choosing an armour piece the game shows your statistics as if you didn't have any armour on for that slot as opposed to what you would have if you replaced your current one. It gets even more complicated when certain armour pieces overlap one another graphically and thus can't be worm at the same time removing the other. This makes it look like you're gaining a percentage of health whilst actually losing a numerical value. Would have been better if they simply made the conflicting armour piece's graphic turn itself off automatically but still let you keep it on for the statistics it provides. But it seems the pieces that cause overlaps have better statistics anyway.

The menus are OK for a console but seeing only 3 pieces of armour at a time is a bit limiting for an HD resolution.

PHASE 4.

The requirements for Honor awards become more central to play because you get new items for your custom characters with each 5 Honor bonuses you collect. There are things like "Clear story mode with Darth Vader", "Clear arcade mode" and so on. They range from the easy to insanely hard and some of the descriptions in the Honor (Rewards) menu itself are too vague. For example, most of them keep track of your progress like the Honor for doing counters, which shows how many you currently have, whilst some like acquiring all the available weapons for 5 of your characters doesn't show any progress even though you've already acquired all for 2 characters for example. Also, it doesn't say anywhere that there are 8 weapons per character (which is fine because some things can be left a secret for the player to discover) or that you actually have to buy the weapons too and simply unlocking the right to buy them isn't enough (this is silly because once you buy all the 8 weapons for one character and don't see the Honor slot for the reward updating, you assume that's not how you do it, luckily the Internet had some helpful forum posts through Google).

Custom characters also become very important for the Tower of Lost Souls gameplay mode which is quite fun. You progress up floors fighting difficult enemies with 1 health bar as briefly mentioned above. There are secret "chests" on each floor and tips on how to obtain them. The requirement could be something like "switch character 3 times" or "block 5 attacks". The thing is that they get harder from Floor 11 onwards and without custom skills set up for a character you've made, you're going to have a harder time. With custom characters you could also have more than 1 health bar of health but this requires that character's fighting style to be of higher level and for you to have unlocked a few Honor rewards to get to choose the really nice pieces of armour.

You start learning more about countering and blocking at this Phase too and basically should have realized a while ago that you can't survive some fights without moving a lot and watching carefully what your opponent does. There are lots of mechanics that become apparent here such as blocking at the exact correct time and stuns through such manoeuvres. There is also the Soul Gauge which is a ball next to your health. It starts off green but can turn blue (good) if you attack a lot or red (bad) if you play passively and just hold your guard up. The only function it really has is to speed up gameplay so that nobody wants to go to the red side. The reason for this is if you're completely red and your health bar starts blinking red too, you go into a state called Soul Crush, the moment your opponent breaks 1 piece of armour from you and presses L1, they perform a Critical Finish and you die immediately, no matter what your health is at the time. This isn't explained well enough in the manual but it might be because it's wanted to be kept a mysterious thing. I just found it more annoying because L1 did nothing by itself when the opponent was simply flashing red. This brings us to armour which each character has 3 pieces of (high, mid and low). Repetitive attacks to a certain area will break your opponents armour from that slot or in Soul Crush mode the armour breaks a lot easier.

PHASE 5.

Many people will try online mode earlier but it might be best to go and play with the real pros only later after you've learned to play the game a bit. However, at some point you'll want to go online due to the few Honor rewards you can get from it (such as playing a set amount of games and winning some, etc.).

I've heard about online mode being laggy but I haven't had any problems with it yet. I haven't played it too much though but everything has worked fine and it's always nice to set up a quick game against someone in another country. You can see statistics for players and leaderboards and you can use your own characters which is great. It's not very complex but there are enough options to get you by and it matches up people fast which is extremely important. People also have a level there so you can play and win to progress along and the system matches you up against someone closest to your level from those available. I've fought against people 20 levels higher than me who go down easily so either they didn't focus as much that time or the levels don't work as well but it does seem fair because you only gain a small amount of "experience" per win.

Update: Been playing online a lot more recently and there are a few things that bug me. First of all it seems like you can't level up without actually winning a fight even though you do get points ("experience" if you will) for certain things like first attack and so on. The opponents seem to be really difficult during the night but it's probably because only the hardcore play then. But it doesn't matter when you play, you rarely get matched up with someone near your own rank (at least at the lower levels). I don't know if the system matches players up but I'd hope it does. The highest level player on the leaderboards is around level 200 and I've been put in fights against people 100 levels higher than me, so that gives you an idea of the "fairness" of some fights. However, the queue times are quite short possibly because the system doesn't wait so long to find someone perfect to match you up against. I would've wanted an automated "re-search" each time it fails to find a group for you though because currently you'll have to choose the "search for game" function manually every time you're late to enter a game (meaning the technical side of it, not related to the player's speed). Also, the whining about having lag doesn't seem to hold any water, I've played over 100 games and in only 2 of them was there lag. And I'm on 2mb WiFi. You really start to learn to play the game after honing your skills on one character you like online for a long time. The levels are spread out between normal games and games where you can use your custom equipment and skill setups. Mostly it's best to go for simply 200% health. I find it odd you can't play tag team games with your friends on the same console against people online though. It would be fun to switch around. Maybe it's a technical limitation, who knows. Also, sometimes people seem to disconnect mysteriously after I win. I'm not sure if it actually counts as a victory then or not, maybe there's info around the net about it. It seems bugged in some way at least because right now the Honor rewards screen has a different number for "Current record" on wins as opposed to what my online account says. All in all, online play is quite fun and even though the levelling up system is fairly weird (in addition to the above, if someone 50 levels higher than you wins you in a fight, they still get full experience points sometimes taking them halfway through the next level already after levelling up, which is odd in a way. Doesn't the levelling slow down later on?) it all works quite nicely.

Everything in SCIV is related to gathering some bonuses and making your custom characters better and thus performing better. The character creation UI isn't the best and seems a bit confusing at first (and why do you have to have text directly on TOP of the character when choosing whether to buy new pieces of armor? You can't see the character well then!). Finally after you've cleared the entire game you can keep playing random matches online when you feel like some good fighting. I really love the game and being able to change the absolutely terrible voice overs from English to the original Japanese ones is excellent. Although hearing Darth Vader say something that's not in English seems odd. The game is an excellent fighter for those looking for some in-depth skull bashing with weapons.

There's one empty character slot between Darth Vader and The Apprentice in the character selection screen so I'm hoping it's for Yoda in a future DLC, but people have been wondering about it all over the net. Speaking of DLCs, the XBOX360 version of the game got a patch with new items for all regions but the PS3 version patch hasn't been released in Europe yet, which is frustrating as hell. I have no idea why it's not possible to release it here too when it's out in other regions already and also on the XBOX360 here. If the reason has anything to do with money, release schedules or bureaucratic crap then I'm going to be pretty pissed off. I highly doubt there's any technical issues with releasing a simple DLC such as this seeing as it's already out in the US.

Siren Blood Curse

2008-08-05T02:49:00.004+03:00

I love how it's written like that without anything to separate the Siren name from the secondary title sort of. This is a sort of semi-remake of the original (some things are the same but it's got a lot of new stuff too) but split into episodes that you can play in any order. Get the whole pack for 30 euros or pay 40 euros in total after realizing after the first one that this game rocks like hell. I'm not even going to start about the file sizes (around 700-1000mb per episode, 12 in all) because fast connections are so common all over the world currently so it shouldn't be a problem at all. Besides, it's fun to download a real full game, especially if you haven't done so before. The only thing I wonder about is why release them as episodes and why do you have to download each episode pack in each chapter separately? If you release episodic content then why not release more later like a TV series instead of everything at the same time?

The graphics are up to date for the PS3 although at times the shadows are a bit too defined. The transition from light to dark is very rough and if you thought Doom 3 had too many dark areas this one will be like walking in a pitch black room at times. Areas that are important for gameplay are mostly well lit though. I know the overall visual experience here is something that not everyone might like and at times it is a bit too unclear especially with your huge character in front of the screen blocking most of it. It works well enough in outside areas but the game has lots and lots of small corridors and houses that really don't come to justice because you can't see enough. Obviously you can switch to 1st person perspective but a game like this is meant to be played from 3rd person view because of the different characters you play. 1st person mode doesn't even support strafing whilst moving forward/backward and turning is slow. It's meant for short usage to explore corners and such anyway. The slightly artificial darkness is there to add to the horror experience though and it makes you feel even less in control of the situation.

Speaking of controls, I heard they were bad but this is classic survival horror and it works just fine for it. You have to base your game's difficulty on how the player character moves and it works well here except for a few parts with flying enemies that shoot at you. I've heard of the sniper zombies in the original version that people hated but gladly they have been removed from this version. You have to make the difficulty fair to the player and can't have enemies that require you to turn around at fast speeds without a quick "turn 180" action on the player character like in Resident Evil 4.

I have to say I played the game through on Easy mode. I thought I'd focus on the story more and not worry about fighting because in horror games I'm more interested in the adventure aspect than than killing anything and I was a bit afraid the fighting might be an annoyance at places like other survival horror games have proven with limited amounts of ammo and so on. When you get to choose your difficulty I would list them as "I prefer story" and "I prefer action" because choosing Easy makes you think you're a wuss. Or then simply Normal and Hard but that wouldn't be accurate really. It's a tough call because you don't want to make players then think, if they chose "I prefer action" that they're losing out on some story elements which wouldn't be the case obviously.

The story is fairly good but it reminds me of Resident Evil 4 and Silent Hill. Resident Evil 4 came after the original Siren in 2005 (original Siren in 2003). The Silent Hill references are obvious because a few of the developers that were working on the first Silent Hill worked on Forbidden Siren. It's interesting to see the story for different perspectives because you get to play so many different characters. It gives a sort of variety while still keeping the story intact. There are some risks to an approach like this, for example people might not feel as emotionally attached to the characters when there are too many of them. It's fine in Blood Curse though and seeing your characters as zombies when playing with other characters is cool. The chronological order of things is a bit weird because you're not entirely sure why you have to run through a certain area again and why your friend isn't a zombie anymore whilst they clearly were one in the previous chapter. Speaking of chapters the episode system works like a charm. It has the classic "Previously on Siren" types of flashbacks in the beginning of each episode and the "Next time on Siren" clips at the end. It felt really cool even though I know Alone In The Dark 4 announced the feature on their game earlier but I never got around to playing it.

I have to say part of the scare factor of Blood Curse is lost because it's so spread out over little areas and you know you just have to get to the end of the map basically. Obviously the easy difficulty setting also does its fair share of calming things down. Luckily the game doesn't rely on sudden scares which I think are a really cheap way of creating horror. Only in the very beginning do you see a zombie burst through a wall but nothing compared to some bullshit moments in Resident Evil 2 and Silent Hill. I raise my hat to games that make you play on the edge of your seat because of the atmosphere. There's enough variety in things you have to do but there aren't enough maps really. You find yourself running through the same areas a lot. Not too much but its right there on the line, if a few of the levels were repeated just one more time I would've been very disappointed.

More about the gameplay, it's actually interesting because the game is a mix of stealth action (Metal Gear Solid, Thief,..) and horror, making it stand out from the survival horror camp. The enemies, for some reason, don't react to your light but who cares, it's WAY too dark when you put it off even though a subtle high definition range type of system is in play, in which your sight adapts to darker areas after a while when moving indoors for example. Lighter areas grow and you see more.

The inventory is a bit weird. I only realized in episode 11 that you can actually see how many bullets you have left. Why doesn't it show it in the main screen? I know they're trying to reduce HUD information though (you can't see your health either, although on easy mode you can take quite a lot of hits so it doesn't matter really). In that episode I also figured out that a Shibito Brain (a type of enemy) doesn't always look the same. Finding them is a pain, even with sight-jacking which I'll get into later. The game should tell you more distinctly how to track it down or what it looks like, perhaps with a glow around the enemy or them talking very distinctly (fast and high for example) when you're in sight-jack mode.

There are way too many weapons. Each of them have their own finishing animations which makes me wonder why resources were put into making them. They don't take a lot of space (talking megs here) but they require a few man-hours to implement. Animations and all. The game isn't exactly about killing, so half the current amount of weapons would've been just fine even though it's nice to find different items you can use always. I tend to beat down all the enemies I encounter rather than hide because they go down fairly easily on this difficulty setting and it's scarier to let them live and try to sneak past! I like the fact that they get up after some time but then again why can't you just rip their heads, arms and legs off or something to stop them from getting up?

The animations are obviously not motion captured and the characters' hands flail around loosely quite a bit. They don't seem firm. Makes them look weak and made of paper sort of, but this is an "issue" in many games. Nothing really bad but you notice it especially when in a few other games it's done so well (Uncharted, but then again that was motion-captured).

So, what about the feature that sets this game truly apart from the rest, sight-jacking. It's fun and all, and it's a feature that needs to be implemented in the very early stages of design to work well. For this series it was in all the way from the beginning so things work well. The action doesn't pause when sight-jacking so you need to be careful which is fine. Sight-jacking automatically comes on when an enemy spots you and I think it can be turned off from the setup menu if you don't like it. It slows down the framerate quite a bit (maybe on purpose, so as you don't run around with it on always, as if losing around half your screen already isn't bad enough). You can "bookmark" monsters and see what they see. It's a fun little feature and used cleverly in a few cases (looking at your friends in another room to check a clue from the environment). The monster growls and talking is very nice too and their movement is fun to follow. Voice-acting is terrible on the story character side (goes so far as to completely break the mood a few times), of which to note especially is a Japanese man who tries to talk English sometimes. It's not a problem that his English is bad, not everyone can speak the language, but it's like the actor never spoke a word in his life and is reading from a piece of paper. Truly horrible to hear him speak.

When you play the game you get to open up extras that tell more of the backgrounds of your characters. Some of these are really great like short video clips and so on. I like checking through the archive screen to find out all these little things that have been collected along the way. I think you get them simply by completing episodes. Completing the game gives you a summary of how well you did along with some "achievements" like not killing anyone etc. I've never been that interested in playing through highly linear story-driven games a second time (there are a few exceptions with some games that are just too good like CoD4) so they're not that interesting even though you can go through the game in chapter mode. It's not like Call of Duty 4 where you can show off the levels to your friends because they're all so different, this game is pretty much the same from beginning to end but not in a bad way, just in a "not much replay value" way for most of us. The ending is a bit weird and having a heavy metal background myself I found the final song to be insanely stupid :)

So that's Siren Blood Curse. I think it's an excellent game with fun gameplay for an excellent price. It's scary but not to the extent that you truly feel sick when playing it :) Silent Hill did that to me at numerous occasions but I still consider it one of the best series ever. The terror you feel when going through endless hospitals, misty streets and schools is too much at times in the Silent Hill games. In Blood Curse you have the fun "previously on" and "next episode" clips as well as a feeling like you're progressing from place to place in smaller blocks between which you can relax and have a Pepsi or something.

I'm a huge horror fan so maybe that's why but for some reason this game really hit a sweet spot for me. It's different enough to keep you interested to the very end and it plays well. Probably the best game on PSN currently.

Metal Gear Solid 4

2008-08-01T20:48:00.002+03:00

The glorification of cigarettes returns.

In the movie "Thank You For Smoking" Nick Naylor says to Jeff Megall, when talking about product placement of cigarettes into a Hollywood blockbuster "Now what we need is a smoking role model. A real winner" and Jeff replies "Indiana Jones meets Jerry Maguire" to which Nick adds "Right, on two packs a day", in MGS4 Solid Snake is that role model.

Enough about cigarettes, it's just something that caught my eye from the beginning when Snake lights up during the installation of the game, which by the way is silly because it's done in segments across the game. Isn't the whole point of installing content on your system to make things go faster in the long run? Why not let you install everything in one go even if it takes 45 minutes? I don't care as long as all the future loading sequences between gameplay are thus left out. Obviously people still don't get it because I see a lot of whining on forums about install sizes on games.

First of all, this is a Kojima game in all areas again. There are more cut-scenes to look at than there are gameplay segments and they probably last longer when counted together too. There are the same "what the hell was he thinking?" and "holy crap that's cool!" moments here as in other MGS games. Among the former there are the classic "hey honey, let's talk about deep love in the middle of the battlefield". The same game mechanics are there but once again it feels even more weird because of the level design. Don't get me wrong, the level design is great, but let me explain.

The gameplay mechanics from the first MGS game on the PS One worked very well in tighter corridor-like areas with a fixed camera angle. You had the radar and knew in which direction enemies were looking and could "calculate" exactly where you could move as to not get caught. I think one of the most important things of any game is that you can play it just for fun and progress along the storyline while feeling like you're part of the world (the controls work like you'd expect them to, the mechanics are logical, etc.) but at the same time, if you're a more mathematically inclined "play-to-win" type of person, the gameplay mechanics allow you to use that to your advantage to really play the game instead of only experiencing it (hard to find a word for what I mean here). World of Warcraft is an excellent example, you can play it and enjoy the lore and shoot some shadowbolts at enemies or you can study just how much damage each of your spells does and really optimize your character to perform the best way possible while taking into account the game's restrictions (set of rules).

MGS4 feels awkward at times because the camera movement is free and the levels have a lot of diversity ranging from height differences (in some parts its odd how you can't climb up onto a surface while in other parts you can) to how open or restricted certain spaces are. I can't really put my finger on what exactly causes the gameplay to feel a bit off at times but I really believe it's the old MGS mechanics in a more complex setting than before. The free camera was already given in MGS3: Subsistence, and it felt odd there too. The jungle seemed a lot harder than it was. Maybe it creates a false sense of added difficulty. Sometimes you can just run through a level to the end while at other times you really need to watch out for enemies. Another thing that was weird for me was the NPCs (allies and enemies alike) getting an exclamation mark over their heads when they see you in battle. The game still moves by the old set of rules even in a big battle which is strange. Why not just let the player run around like traditionally without having to feel like you're not really a part of the game world unless you get that ! above someone's head. Distinguishing allies between enemies in the beginning was odd as well even though the coloring of their nameplates tries its best to help you out. HD resolutions can produce quite a tiny nameplate.

The game is beautiful to look at that's for sure and the sounds are amazing but once again the voice acting is absolutely terrible. I don't know why David Hayter is such a legend among fans of the series but I think part of it comes from them knowing that he's not good and it's a sort of joke. At least that's how I want to believe it because everything he says sounds so fake. I'm a big fan of the X-Men movie he wrote though so the guy's not completely talentless, just not a great VO actor. Snake isn't the worst though, what annoys me above anything else is the voice of Otacon/Hal Emmerich. He sounds like a whiny little bitch. He looks a lot like Hideo Kojima though in a way.

Otacon actually relates to the game's ONLY bug that I found and that was when at a certain point in the story he takes his glasses off and wears contacts supposedly for a while, he still does the "fixes glasses with right hand" animation when talking in cut-scenes. You could say he's just scratching his forehead but with the animation being exactly the same, I don't really buy it. Other than that the production values show. This game cost around 150 million dollars. The budget was clear in GTAIV but in MGS4 it's a different story to an extent. I feel like they spent too much time developing areas that aren't central to the experience. Take for example if you look through the entire graveyard scene when you turn the game on (behind the main menu), you'll be treated to different TV commercials or something. These aren't any quick "superimpose some hamburgers over a scenery" types of things either, they're extremely well made demos that could win first prize at any demoscene competition and it's clear a lot of time was put into them. This is just one example, but it seems like resources for useless animations and things like that upped the budget for this game a whole lot when in reality it could've been made with a lot less money. Some will argue that they're the icing on the cake and I'm not condoning them or anything but there's quite a lot of it and personally I wouldn't have spent so much time on filler material.

So, the attention to detail is great. Weapons are modelled very well and looking through the end credits you see there was a specific team working on them to make them as realistic as possible. It's an interesting game because it really does mix hyper realism with total fiction and sometimes absolutely silly concepts. The levels are also full of detail but one thing that annoys me about them is all the crap you can collect. I've sort of got this thing stuck in the back of my head that I need to collect everything there is in any level in games if there is an inventory to store them in and it's not overflowing (ie max ammo already). Then I proceed to save all the stuff for a "sticky situation". It's all good up to this point, but the thing is the sticky situation never comes. This is a problem in MGS4 because I want to collect everything on the level and with the save system being what it is, you're left running around a lot.

The save system isn't great. You can save your game whenever you want.. sort of. Because when you save your game it just checks where the previous checkpoint was and saves you there, with the items you had the first time you crossed that checkpoint. What this means is if you die, you'll have to go through the entire level again picking up all the stuff you missed. And since you get money for those weapons you pick up that you already had, you'll want to be sure to get them all. You can never have enough money! Checkpoints aren't really my choice of save system because the player never knows where the next one is unless you create a % counter or something that shows precisely when the next one is coming and that will never be accurate enough because of boss monsters, level design, and so on. Just give a free save system and set difficulty accordingly. It doesn't matter where your character starts on the level, as long as you get to keep what you gathered. MGS4 is a lot about the items so the save system should work hand in hand with that.

Then again, you can always buy whatever you want on the battlefield, even during a fight. Just pause the game and go shopping. This means you'll virtually never run out of ammo because you'll never run out of money because you constantly keep looking for items to pick up along your travels. Right? You do don't you? I haven't heard of anyone having problems with money in this game so it does seem that's not an issue. You can't just go and buy 200 rockets in the beginning (also due to weapons opening up later on in the story) but you'll have enough to get by.

The story is good and has some interesting points. It also raises discussion which is good. The characters are interesting enough. There's enough variation to gameplay and it has a motorcycle action scene that rivals Call of Duty 4 is Hollywood quality presentation, which is quite interesting because MGS is more of a sneaking game. In MGS4 you really need to go all out at times and blast everything that comes at you. Knowing what weapons or items you have at your disposal through the store helps a lot but isn't necessary to play through, it just makes it harder if you don't know what you have. The auto-aim is quite terrible though and doesn't lock on to anything until you're facing in exactly the right direction. One thing it does do great is allow you to set auto-aim on and off from one button unlike GTAIV which was annoying because you had to go through a menu if you didn't want to target random passers-by when trying to aim at a pidgeon. MGS4's auto-aim mechanic forces you to focus more on your own playing which I think is a deliberate design decision. It's still not a full on action game.

The cut-scenes reign once again. There are definitely a full-length movie's worth of cinematics, all made within the game engine itself, with hundreds of animations and lots of motion capture. It looks great but there's too much of it, although saying that about a MGS game is redundant since it's one the series' defining points anyway. In MGS4 you're given some nice options during some cut-scenes. You get to play a little during them in the form of Quick Time Events so you can't even put down your controller for its duration. The flashbacks to your past are a bit too fast and could be made slower to actually give you a view of what you're really seeing but then again I'm guessing it's trying to be artistic and portray that it is in fact a memory and that you shouldn't remember it fully. I would still increase their time. Anyway, you also get to control your little Mark II/III robot in the briefing cut-scenes which is a nice touch. Overall you don't really have to use it during the missions even though you could do some reconnaissance or electric zapping/bomb disarming. You actually have to disarm bombs only once in the story. One last thing I will say though, the greatest thing about the cut-scenes is you can pause them with the Start button. It brings up a pause menu with 2 options, either continue watching or skip it. Exactly what I would have always done in every single game in some way or another. The worst is when in games you press Start and it automatically skips the cut-scene and you can't even pause it if your phone/doorbell rings.

Which brings us nicely to another topic and that's flow. The story and gameplay flows well, well paced action vs. sneaking ratio, and you get to see different types of areas now unlike the world of MGS2 but the problem is it feels a bit disjointed. As with the disarming of bombs, the town sneaking mission feels very different to the rest of the game. You need to have variety for sure, but not too much and maybe MGS4 could've had a bit less or better yet found a way to merge them together a bit better. That's a huge topic so I won't get into details about it but visual aspects that span different areas bring things together nicely like advertisements, people or best of all a companion (and I don't mean invisible robots).

Product placement. Apple seems to be invested in MGS4 with the iPod and their laptop that Otacon uses. The iPod is a nice touch and downloading content off the Internet for FREE for it (as well as new suits, etc.) is a great idea. The Playboy magazines are funny as ever and for some reason Assassin's Creed is mentioned in the end credits along with Ubisoft. I'm not sure I caught that reference while playing through the game though. Obviously all the weapons have real names as well but I'm not too sure how the "digital rights to reproduce an image of a weapon" are handled by the real life morons who make semi-automatic guns for a living.

Controlling Snake is done well enough but why can't he sprint? I found at times that Snake simply ran around too slowly. He has a huge bunch of animations and some of them are never used like flipping over when in the prone position, or maybe I just never found them useful. Snake runs around like a girl holding his weapon. No disrespect to females meant here :) Snake has a certain finesse when handling guns. Also, when Snake gets shot multiple times his "Uah!" sound just repeats over and over again with the same sound file making it sound like "Uah!Uah!Uah!Uah!Uah!Uah!" which I think is some kind of trademark of the series again and doesn't exactly bother me but it does sound funny. Another nice design decision is when after cut-scenes you get back control of Snake your UI shows up before the camera has had time to fully sweep behind you. It's a really nice way of showing you that now you get to jump into the action, which most of us will be more than happy to do after another 40 minute cut-scene.

The boss encounters are excellent. There is enough gameplay otherwise too (although I would've preferred some more gameplay over maybe 1 hour of cut-scenes as it currently is) but the bosses are really the high points. The 4 beauties are quite interesting and resemble creatures from horror games. They are intimidating and you have a high respect for them. The first time you get to fight one of their beauty forms is a cool experience but then it gets repetitive a bit even though they're quite easily killed. There's another additional feature if you don't kill one of them for a long time and just keep running around. You get a totally crazy photo shoot mode. One of those classic Kojima WTF moments. Anyway, the bosses are different and learning their tactics is well done. They're not too hard and their tactics are clear enough. Raging Raven isn't as good though and sometimes it can get frustrating to figure out why the boss doesn't take damage. You can mostly figure out a way to kill them fast like Crying Wolf which seemed to be too hard at first was actually dead very fast when you combine some nerve-calming pills, night vision and a sniper rifle. The fights use fun mechanics that require out-of-the-box thinking such as going up against Vamp.

I haven't played the online mode yet and currently it doesn't interest me at all because nobody I know has the game. I guess it's an interesting addition knowing how much work they've put in on it.

MGS4 is a great game but at the same time one that relies way too heavily on cut-scenes. I literally fell asleep 5 times during the last one which comprised of a conversation between Snake and Big Boss. At least there's the freely downloadable MGS Database on the Playstation Network so you can catch up on what the hell is going on in the unnecessarily complex monster of a narrative. I don't have problems with complex stories (Mulholland Drive, The Fountain) but ones with too many dumb plot twists and silly events (proposing to someone during a battle isn't a silly idea in itself but the way it was executed in MGS4 was silly) don't interest me. Maybe something is lost in the translation and playing without the terrible VO acting would help but I can't be bothered to actually READ all that again.

Everything in it looks great, it just isn't really a game as much as it is an interactive movie.

Taking apart the Wii

2008-07-26T02:30:00.004+03:00

A part of of being a game designer requires you to have a general idea of what platform you're working on and what its limitations and highlights are. If you're a programmer you need to know exactly what you're working with obviously but someone who is simply writing the script only needs to have a general idea of what's possible and what's not. Then again, for quite a few years anything has been possible by using your imagination. If you can't have a war with 10,000 soldiers, all modelled into 3D, on the Playstation One then you can fake it by having the bulk of the fighters as sprites in the background away from the main playing area. It's not like the script writer cares if the scene uses vector or per pixel lighting, all he cares about is the story and mood.

Anyway, my point is that it's good to know what you're working with (this time from a purely technical sense, but not concerning processing power) and such an opportunity presented itself to me and a friend when my Wii started making a strange buzzing sound every time a Wii game was inserted and spinning. I had this problem for around 6+ months already but never got around to doing anything about it and sort of learned to live with it (although that wasn't the case as the end of this post will prove). The sound was terrible and when playing late at night with low volume on the TV the buzzing sound would come out on top easily. My Wii guarantee had run out so I decided to open it up myself. A special tri-wing screwdriver was needed so I ordered one from a store here in Finland. It came in a few days in a small envelope into my mail box.

I realize a technical guide to breaking your console isn't exactly a topic to be covered in a game design blog, and my reason for doing so as stated above is stretching it, but I'm interested to find out how these things work in reality and maybe it's a fresh take on another type of topic for once.

A few notes when opening up some technical equipment:

- Unplug the device. Don't plug the device in before you assemble it again if you're not sure of what you're doing. Having said that though, you could probably take apart any console today, plug it in and turn it on to check how it works without getting electric shocks or anything but do keep in mind that parts need to move so be careful. And if someone goes and kills themselves because "Gabriel said it was OK" then you're an idiot. Don't do it.

- Get a digital camera and take pictures of different angles when it's still in one piece just in case you need to reference it later.

- Set the screws and pieces you get on white pieces of paper. If you open up one "layer" and find you need to open more screws under that one, put those screws on another piece of paper and mark it with a pencil so you know what goes where.

- Keep your eyes open and move slowly. What I mean is check that the piece you're going to take off doesn't affect other pieces, don't use force because you might break something rip a wire off its socket, and watch out for springs that might get loose.

- Don't touch any circuit boards after rubbing your socks on the wool carpet. Touch some separate piece of metal first.

So, what was making the noise in my Wii? I saw a few videos on the net about opening the console and read some horror stories about having to solder a piece of a tiny cog back in but luckily my problem wasn't nearly as severe.

On the Wii you start off by opening the sides. You remove screws from both sides of the console and then from under it. A few of the screws are hidden under white stickers and the soft "legs" used to hold the console a bit off the table when in the horizontal position. Remember to take the black faceplate off from the side where the Gamecube controllers and memory cards are inserted in order to get to the screws under it. Also, note that you need to take the small battery out of the console too thus resetting your system date and time among other small settings (don't worry about save games, they're written physically into memory and do not require any power to keep them there).

To take the front cover off, as shown above, you need to bend 2 pieces of plastic on the sides a bit inwards after removing all the screws from the sides and bottom. After that you will see a small wire that attaches to the led lights on the CD drive's entrance. You can carefully disconnect the wire because it fits right back in when you're done. You can still use the reset, eject and power buttons on the console itself but they're quite small so using a screwdriver or something similar can help.

After this you can open the top of the console and you'll see your CD drive which is held down by around 5-6 more screws.

In this picture we've put the power cord back in and turned the power on. We wanted to see where the sound came from or if it had actually disappeared. The sound was still there. The 2 screws I have marked in red were the problem, but we didn't know it yet at this point, so we continued to lift up the CD drive by opening some more screws and seeing what was under it.

When lifted up, this is what the CD drive's cover looks like. Once you lift it up the white parts in the picture are set free if there's a CD in the drive. They are held in place with springs and getting it back closed can be a difficult task but it's doable. Their task seems to be to adjust accordingly whether there is a Wii game disc, Gamecube game disc or no game disc inside. This possibly gives information to the console on what to expect because they seem too weak to actually guide the disc and the next phase proves that they're not needed to operate the disc.

The same 2 screws as shown in the second picture are marked in red here as well. We turned on the console and the sound was gone. After ejecting and re-entering the CD all seemed nice and quiet. We started thinking the white plastic pieces detecting the disc type were the culprits. We then put that part back after some fiddling around with the springs (there's a parallel cable inside that needs to be tucked inside a slot in the console to close the cover here so look out for that too).

The sound was back when we turned it on again and thus we started pressing the console from different parts seeing if that would silence it. None of the white parts did it, they actually made the sound even worse. Then I realized that the piece of metal holding the disc had plastic pieces that might have been scratching against the metal and all of a sudden the sound was gone when pressing down on it.

The weird thing is that the 2 screws shown on the images with the red arrows actually had to be loosened. That would mean they either had gotten tighter on their own (which isn't physically possible) or something else under the CD drive (or around it close to the metal piece) had loosened up a bit. I loosened the 2 screws and everything started working. The Wii was very quiet again just like it should be.

It turned out to be a very easy solution since those 2 screws aren't really a problem to find, although you do need the tri-wing screwdriver. If by loosening those 2 screws I caused something that'll end up in a big explosion a year from now then too bad, but right now it's been working perfectly for a month after the "operation" and Mario Galaxy seems a lot cooler. I've started playing games on the Wii that I just brushed through and didn't feel like playing a lot. Maybe the lesson here is that game designers need to take into account strange human behaviours and habits too. Even though a console flaw doesn't trace back to a game designer in any way, it's interesting to see that something you choose to ignore because of habit can stab you in the back by diminishing the enjoyment you might get from a game that is in no way related to the overshadowing problem.

You should've been able to swim in Assassin's Creed.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl

2008-07-17T17:31:00.003+03:00

One of my friends said this game was the reason he bought a Wii. I wasn't that anxious to try it out and having it being released in the US millennia before it washed ashore in Europe didn't help either.

The thing is that there are lots of people going nuts over this game with their videos on Youtube and angry replies to anyone with anything negative to say about it. Remember when Yahtzee got bashed for stating his opinion on the game? I even linked to his reply video because it was that good. Anyway, this is simply yet another Smash Bros. game, same old same old.

Before I go into the game I have to say that despite the fact that there are lots of control schemes available, only one really works and that's the traditional gamepad approach a la Gamecube Controller. You could use the Classic one too but the fact that it dangles from your Wiimote makes me ignore it completely for any game. The Wavebird is your best choice if you want to be any good at this game just like with Mario Kart Wii.

I have to start with the one point that I don't see many complain about for some reason. I guess that reason is that I'm alone on this issue but it sure does bother me. The issue is control. The characters behave oddly and the cancellations for their moves are annoying as hell. You don't get an exact idea of what it is but the game is fast and your movements seem too slow to keep up with the pace. When you start hitting in one direction you can't change direction until your animation comes to a full halt and it gets even more annoying when you press one button enough times to get a combo off and thus an even longer animation. It's better to have a short hit animation and check for direction facing changes from the player's controller between each one and also not have a long combo from a single button.

But that's also part of what Smash Bros has always been about, easy button mashing. Of course the better players will be better but the new guy can always have a chance. We played a few games with some friends of which one was a girl that doesn't like games at all. She beat us a few times easily. It's partly to do with you losing points for falling down and on a subconscious level nobody wanting to hit the pink Kirby played by the girl I guess, but the game is still fairly beginner-friendly.

Anyway, back to the controls, another thing I find them lacking is precision. This is painfully evident in the platform jumping sections of the single player Subspace Emissary (SSE) campaign. The jumps vary WILDLY, to say the least, between characters and thus getting to know one character well is vital, however in SSE you have to switch characters between every level. The other thing that breaks precision is the dash mechanic. You have to "jab" your joystick to the side fast, instead of gradually pulling it there as you normally do, in order to make your character run. This doesn't work very well because your motion has to be really damn fast and takes getting used to and because it's on the same joystick as your regular move you'll keep trying to jab the stick a bit to the right to line yourself up for a jump (you know, taking fast short steps to get exactly on an edge for example) but instead end up running off the cliff altogether. Happens often in the Home Run Contest special mode. You also start running often when trying to switch directions like turning to the right when you're facing left and thus you sprint too far to the right.

Let's just say Viewtiful Joe did the controls better. Learn from there. Both games are fairly similar in the end.

I already wrote of the characters being very different and how that can be a bad thing, but it can also be a good thing. It's fun to know that they really did put thought into them and some are slower, some faster, some are different versions of each other (Fox and Falco) and so on. There's a lot to choose from when you unlock all of them. However, I don't think it really needs pointing out but without Nintendo characters this game wouldn't have sold nearly as much. For me the novelty value of having Mario beat the living shit out of Peach wore off on the N64. Unlocking the characters has always pissed me off though, it makes no sense in a game that you play with friends even though you could unlock them with your friends by playing hours of brawl mode but I think Yahtzee summed it up well enough to not go deeper into it. I just think unlocking characters and levels should be implemented better into multiplayer like doing events with 2-4 players. There are some events now but not for more than 2 players and they're not very interesting. Just the basic, "Kick ass and get reward" affairs. Some of them have a bit more imagination like collecting coins but mostly they require you to beat some AI controlled fighter. Yay.

Speaking of multiplayer, WiFi play sucks. Sakurai said in an Edge magazine interview that only lately are the Japanese people getting more into online play, and judging by Nintendo games I would say it sure looks like it. Why can't you play with your friend on the same console like in Mario Strikers Charged or Mario Kart Wii? Spectating matches and betting your coins on who wins is fun but other than that it's really only possible to do simple fights against friends or random people. Where are the top player charts, servers to upload your levels to, online achievements, custom matches, etc.? I couldn't even find a multiplayer game when I checked. So nevermind WiFi.

They've done a lot for the game it seems with all the different things you can unlock but the problem for me is that most of them are totally useless. I never understood the trophy thing for example. Why on earth would you want to collect these boring looking 3D rotatable items (that have been done in every game) and even worse, why would you want to set up 4 of them and take pictures of them?? Taking pictures in general is cool during matches but a trophy picture room? Geez. If they wanted to spice it up a bit then create in-game action figures of each character that you could freely move the limbs around (might be too hard to set up to control for a console gamepad) or then simply have preset animations you could run to create your own machinima. That would be fun. Currently there's not enough useful stuff in the game but again, I think I'm alone on this.

The stickers are a nice idea and a good mechanic, although only for SSE. It's a sort of simplified way of adding a role-playing element to the game. The problem is there are too many characters and each one has their own sticker setup. Seeing as the stickers can have effects that only affect certain characters (like adding lightning damage) you can get to fine-tune your character army nicely but it's not really needed to pass the game, which is a good thing too to not complicate this casual game. The idea that they disappear if you take one off from a character's trophy's base (good idea too) is explained well by them being stickers and the glue surface thus gets worse and doesn't stick anymore. All in all a good simple idea.

So what about SSE then?

The cut-scenes are absolutely amazing. Not because they have some new effects or anything, but they are smooth, very fun to follow and use no speech but still succeed in telling a great story. A story that's very dark I might add. The Master Hand boss even has blood dripping out of its wounds at the end! In a Nintendo game! Scary stuff. I really feel bad for Lucas, that little kid went through hell in Earthbound/Mother with his mother dying and all and now you see him fight for his friend Ness. The cut-scenes rock. Even cooler is the character selection before levels where the cut-scene stops and you get 1P and 2P arrows on top of the characters letting players choose who they want to be in the coming level. It's got an awesome sense of style when everything just stops from the fast frantic action and you get control. Introducing the characters is done well too by once again stopping time and showing their name in a very simple, non-glorified, huge font for a while. And to top it all off the story is funny and I found myself actually laughing out loud at some of the things that happened.

But the thrills of SSE end there. The rest of it is a chore. It's boring to play and the terrible control the game has shines through on center stage in this mode. It's not nearly as bad in crazy brawls but jumping and oldschool side-scroller action is not for Smash Bros. The engine just isn't built for it, BUT I have a habit of saying that anything can be made to work if done right and that applies here too. If SSE was done by emphasizing short fights against harder foes in detailed locations it might be more fun. Now I find myself just running through to the next level exit hoping to see some more cinematics. But then you have to go back to another level of boring stupidity. There are trophies and stickers locked in secret rooms but I couldn't care less and therefore haven't fully completed nearly any of the levels.

Later on SSE gets even more annoying. First, you get to the areas where the camera scrolls onwards in some direction as you have to keep up or you die. I've always hated this. A good example of bad design is a section where you have to jump up some platforms and the camera keeps panning up. If you jump up off a platform to the next one and let the camera pan past the last one, then jump back down where it should be you die. I know the idea is that you have to keep up with something and thus this adds to the speed and adrenaline level when you get baddies attacking you at the same time but I find it odd that the camera fucks you over. It's the same as in the earlier Resident Evil games where Leon would definitely see a zombie at the other end of the corridor but you wouldn't as the player because your camera angle is set to only view half of the area. I think these types of things should be a thing of the past and you should see what your character sees. If you want a platform Ice Climbers area where you have to keep jumping up then add a pool of rising lava to the bottom to explain the scenario a bit instead of saying "the world outside the camera doesn't exist". The second thing that annoys me about the end of SSE is the last level. It's called The Great Maze and that's enough said really. It's a huge maze and thank God for the map you get when pressing start. If hell was all about boredom this would be it. The idea of the black stuff eating the little worlds is cool but reliving through each and every one of them is dumb, why not make your characters walk on miniature versions of a few of the coolest levels instead to give it a cool new flare.

SSE is a good idea in general but these game mechanics don't lend well to it. There are some bosses along the way but they're really more about button mashing than actually avoiding many of their attacks. The last boss is the worst of them all because he teleports all over the place and have to take your time trying to catch up.

The AI is slightly annoying at times too. It tends to do the opposite of what you do. When you press a certain directional C attack for example, the Wii knows you pressed it so obviously the enemy dodges at the exact same time numerous times in a row making it feel very inhuman. The difficulty can get quite high though as seen when unlocking the last character I got, Wolf (who I thought was Link's wolf form from Twilight Princess, which would've been cooler). It's not exactly a game you play solo anyway though so nevermind the AI.

The graphics aren't very different to Smash Bros. Melee for the Gamecube even though the textures are more detailed. You still get the annoying ultra-far zoom out in some levels like the Zelda castle and New Pork City levels. If it was HD it wouldn't matter.. It's also very inconsistent at times partly because of so many different characters from different types of games. The characters themselves fit together fairly well though but the surroundings don't always. I probably wouldn't have had photographed food drop as powerups. Better draw them or make sprites from simple 3D. Also, the target practise levels look like something an amateur did graphically. Their flow and playability is good though with precisely positioned walls and paths.

There are still some really interesting ideas and cool designs (getting Sonic and Snake in is a big deal, really cool), but it's mostly from the old games already. How about the Double Dragon brothers as playable characters? Or maybe Megaman. I'm sure their choices rely on copyrights and what character is hip/"in"/trendy currently too but I felt it didn't have enough despite all the reviews stating how much there is to gather. There is a lot but it's a lot of rubbish. Taking screenshots and video of your play is very cool and should be implemented in every game. Then there are these little things like pressing down on the directional pad when using Snake against Yoshi, you get an interesting little conversation:

S: Otacon! What's this lizard thing?
O: That's a Yoshi. It's a dinosaur from Yoshi's
Island.
O: Watch out for its long, chameleon-like
tongue. If it gets you, you'll be swallowed
whole.
S: It lays eggs and throws them, right?
...Then it must be female.
O: ...Actually, it's a "he". At least, that's what
it says.
S: It talks!?
O: Yes! It talks! Well, kind of...
S: Now you've got me curious. ...How about I
capture one so we can see what they taste
like?
O: Uhh, Snake...

The game reminds me of Kingdom Hearts in the way that KH wouldn't have sold well either if it weren't for Donald and co. But we've already covered that. It's why I bought this game too, I'm not that big a fan of fighting games. Although Soulcalibur IV and Street Fighter 4 both look amazing..

The level editor in Smash Bros. Brawl could use some work too. First off, why do you need to "unlock" some pieces you can use by creating some crappy simple levels first? I would understand it if you unlocked huge piles of advanced pieces at a time that you could fine-tune and thus need more experience with the editor but since it's all very simple (and yet frustrating) I don't see the point in holding you back. It's just so you could have something more to unlock for the sake of unlocking which isn't a good thing. The editor has too many things I would change to start listing them all here. I'll just say that the user interface is done a lot better in the menus of the game (even though sometimes you get lost trying to find what you wanted because they're found behind some weird Vault option instead of Data or whatever). One key point is that you have to scroll block by block to the left of the screen, away from the level pieces, to get to erase some part and you if you press A to place a piece you get sent back to the piece selection area. It would be more logical to swap A with Z and thus Z only places one piece whilst A lets you place as many as you want. Overall it's a nice addition to create your own levels but the interface isn't very good. If you're thinking "but it's a console game, you can't have too complex an editor in it!" then have a look at Timesplitters 2 on the Gamecube for example and see how that's done. It's even 3D and works a whole lot better. Level building is a creative process and having to pause every now and then to navigate the menus is counter-productive.

The Music is Smash Bros. Brawl is great but again tunes we've already heard. They're remakes in a way and hearing Sonic's first song in the Green Hill Zone level was awesome. There are songs used in TV ads and the main song is by the legendary Nobuo Uematsu so I'm not really complaining on this front. The actual Latin lyrics to the song, with English subtitles, are shown along with the end credits to SSE and it makes the song 100 times cooler. Collecting the CDs to unlock the songs might be a bit dumb again but these guys sure like to emphasize the COLLECTING aspect. There are some guides on Youtube, found by searching for CD Factory, that show you how to make custom levels that can be used to "farm" these CDs so that helps a bit whilst at the same time showing how a community comes together for a solution to a problem in a game.

I'm not so sure about the game balance in the game. It seems to work fine and with some of the movement tweaks implemented to combat problems in Smash Bros. Melee, Brawl seems to be a better package altogether. These problems were supposedly related to people locking others in place by bashing some buttons thus causing the game to be called broken by some of the more hardcore fighting game people. After spectating a few WiFi matches I can say that I'd probably get my ass beaten by the skill some people have. People know exactly what each of the power-ups do that might drop on the playfield and they use them wisely in conjunction with their own character which they've mastered.

This doesn't really feel like a game that needs to be absolutely perfectly balanced, it's just a casual fighting game with a twist and even though the controls annoy the hell out of me, it's fairly fun in a group of friends. Not really worth 56 euros though, but that's probably just me again.

Megaman ZX Advent

2008-07-08T15:12:00.004+03:00

The newest Megaman on the Nintendo DS is a mediocre game at best.

I decided that it would be time to try some oldschool Megaman action about a month ago and we bought Ninja Gaiden DS and Megaman ZX Advent with a friend of mine. Turns out the Megaman series has changed a whole lot and not for the better. The difficulty still tries to be there though.

The first thing a player like me, who missed all the Megaman games since Megaman 3, notices is that things have gotten a lot more complex. It's no longer the simple jump and shoot affair. The Mario games have kept their simple appeal still after all these years even though they too have had some ingredients added to the cake. Some things have been kept the same like the levels being split into smaller areas with doors and sliding through those doorways when the camera pans to a new area. It looks silly now when you run up to a doorway that's on the X axis so-to-speak (the ones you press left and right on, not up) and your character remains in his or her running animation and if they're coming down from a jump they remain in the air.

You get to choose one of two characters to play with and generally all that really does is changes the graphics of who you're using. They have different stories but it's not that different. Still, a nice little addition but hardly one worth mentioning on the back of the box. The characters also talk during the important story scenes which is nice for a DS game, the problem is the voice overs suck. Everyone sounds like a childish little whiny kid. I wanted to kill Model A in real life, and I'm not one to complain about Jar Jar Binks. There is one extremely odd thing about speech though and that's the fact that it pauses every time 1 "speech bubble" of text is shown on screen. The game waits for you to press a button to continue. This would work fine if it was just written text but when there's speech as well it's odd when it pauses in the middle of a sentence to wait for you to press A. I would've just scrolled the text inside the speech bubble and finish at full stops, then let the player scroll up and down through the text if they wanted to check back on something. OR have the option to remove speech for that matter..

There's also way too much boring cut-scene crap in the beginning. This is something I feel strongly about, unless your game is the next GTAIV (and even in those cases possibly better not), it's good to let your player control the character within the first 2-3 minutes. And I don't mean moving to a door and then have another 5 minutes of cut-scenes. There is a very simple reason for this: the player doesn't have an emotional bond with the game yet. You can't start talking about love during the first few minutes when your player doesn't even care about your lead character. You have to let the player learn to love your game for what it is, and this is one of the things ZX does badly, it starts off with boring in-game 2D animations and long speeches. If GTAIV: San Andreas starts with Niko Bellic as the lead character, you can have a good 5 minutes of cut-scenes and people will still feel excited, but if there's Long John Silver as the new hero who's an Irish sailor just released from prison, I don't think people will want to sit through that 5 minutes as eagerly.

Fighting in ZX is another low point. It should be interesting and fun because that's basically what the whole game is about, but it's not fun. The problem is that when you start out you wonder why the stylus isn't used to aim or something, and why you can't shoot in other directions than forward. As the game progresses you get different forms that you can change into. The good thing is that changing into these forms pauses the game so you can do it in peace, the bad thing is your character says "A Trans!" and does a small animation only after you've scrolled through your menu of available character forms (and there are too many) and thus wasted too much time. The worst part is that all your basic character movement needs are spread over all these different forms and thus if you want to crouch you have to change to a certain form, if you want to shoot up change to another form, if you want to swim change to another form.. this is definitely NOT how you handle additional skills.

In addition to that, some of your different forms have silly abilities that are used in maybe 5 parts of the entire game briefly. Skills such as climbing up a vine. In later Super Mario or Ratchet and Clank games this was done very well by giving you abilities later on that you could use to get to areas you saw before but didn't know how to get past, like getting the bee suit to fly up to a high ledge. The difference in ZX is that there are way too many abilities of which 70% are totally useless and should be included in your basic Megaman form. The rest of the abilities aren't used very intuitively. Stuff like the queen bee form in which you can lift certain blocks is a good example of this. They need to narrow the abilities down to maybe 4-5 and have each of them play an important part in the game. There can be different weapons like in Megaman 2 (or Ratchet and Clank for that matter) of course but things that change the way you play the game drastically need to be thought out well. I understand the idea of ZX is to have the different forms but you can't force it, you have to have some real reason to have those forms, not just because "we wanted different forms".

Another thing that causes the abilities to be so boring is the level design. The levels look nice mostly with the clear and colourful graphics but their design isn't too exciting. They're missing so many things it's hard to list here. One level in a sort of city environment has a nice idea of protecting civilian drivers in a traffic jam from an enemy ship attacking from above, but the rest of the levels are quite boring and unimaginative. There are no real puzzles to speak of and the music, which was fantastic in Megaman 2, is complete shit apart from the Tower of Verdure theme which is fairly good. The levels have boring themes mostly and not enough interesting platform sequences or such.

The checkpoints and save points in the levels are terrible. You can run up to a checkpoint and open it with a form of currency (or get it open for free on the easier mode) and you don't get to save. The thing is, why the hell doesn't it save your game? I understand that it doesn't let you teleport back to your base because the idea is that teleports are one way only, but when it doesn't save it's almost useless. You don't want to run all the way back to save and in most cases you can't because some door gets locked behind you. The only reason I see for these is if you die you get resurrected at one (sometimes you get resurrected at a doorway and not the checkpoint so I don't get the logic in it, and when your lives end it's game over anyway and the checkpoint is lost because you have to start from your save location), and possibly so that you can go back to a certain part of a level to open up the secret areas or other areas unlockable later on with the abilities you've acquired. The game is so boring that you don't feel like going back anyway.

Speaking of difficulty, there are 2 choices in the beginning. Either beginner mode, which is too easy, or normal mode, which is ultra hard. The difficulty is totally messed up. Normal mode tries to stay true to the Megaman series' difficulty level but fakes it by not giving you enough lives and making checkpoints cost money to activate as well as when you die you go way back to where you last saved. The game even tells you to "save often!", how is that possible with the save points few and far between and behind locked doors? The bosses take a hell of a lot more beating on normal mode and you have to know what's coming in order to beat anything, it's improbable you'll beat anything on your first 5 tries, and with 3 lives you're back to the save point again. I beat the game on beginner mode because I got stuck on the first boss on normal. In the end you get to face all the bosses again in a classical Japanese "fuck you" moment as well as an end boss with more than 1 form to kill. The bosses themselves are fairly interesting fights but the save system and lack of a true "normal" difficulty mode make them either pushovers or demons sent from hell to annoy gamers the world over.

Then we get to the map itself that stays on the lower screen mostly throughout the game. There are 2 modes, either a weird blocky representation of the current area you're in, showing the exits in the area, or then a world map with levels inside strange circular blocks which is incredibly hard to understand as well as almost totally useless. Stick to the classic world map view with an island drawn from a bird's eye view or something next time please. This new crap isn't informative enough or fun. It gets worse, the map disappears when playing some character forms because they have their own little features. You can't even turn the map on yourself because there is no option for it. Character features include showing a close-up view of where you are currently with a little orb showing you items, it's cute and all but if you want to have a look at the map you have to change your form to something that allows it.

Finally, if all that doesn't get you bored enough there's the side missions. Who would really want to do all of them is beyond me but it's a good idea. Just not something suitable for this game exactly. You can get missions from people around the world which adds nice immersion, gives you more to do in the world as well as makes it feel more like an open world. You can move around pretty freely when you've open up an area but with the level design as it is, you don't really want to. You want to go forward and see if the game has anything interesting to throw at you but it doesn't. A good example of a dumb side mission is the digging aspect. You meet up a few people along your travels who are standing in front of a pile of rubble blocking a passage. If you pay them some of the game's currency they'll start working on opening up the path. You have to come back later and pay more so they'll continue working and so on until they reach a door or something. The problem is that the path just keeps getting longer and longer and you keep running deeper with no real prize, until you've ended up paying a lot for this one tunnel and realize your prize is a new NPC with another quest with mediocre rewards. I would've made the tunnel shorter and added different coloured rubble at different layers near the entrance so you don't need to run a long way inside every time you come back. The system itself for determining when you can open more of the tunnel is quite classic, it checks how far you've progressed into the game and decides if the person digging the tunnel has gone past the current section of rubble. The thing is, once again, if you go in at a later time, you can run out and back in again to get the digger to progress his digging operation because you've already progressed through the required parts of the game. Maybe consider using the DS's time feature of the game's played time.

I'll be waiting for Megaman 9 for the Wii's Wiiware service. That's one brilliant idea, make an oldschool Megaman 2 looking game and release it on a download service. I'm waiting for Megaman 9 more than most other games coming out with higher production costs. Megaman ZX Advent isn't designed well with it's boring levels, crappy voice acting, spreading of core 2d platformer abilities that have been default since Contra over too many character forms and simply trying to make things more complex than they need to be.

Unreal Engine 3 - start making levels

2008-07-04T01:10:00.021+03:00

Unreal Editor 3 is a way into the industry. One of many ways.

There are, among a few others like the business and marketing side of things, 2 general paths you could take when deciding what you want to do in the gaming industry, you can either be the engineer or the artist. Good programmers are brilliant minds like John Carmack, Gabe Newell or Tim Sweeney that can come up with interesting new effects and love to research the newest technologies. Good artists are people who might not know how to program a game but know how to make it work on paper, they could be either designers of some sort or concept artists, musicians, and so on. These are people like Nobuo Uematsu, Ron Gilbert and Sam Didier.

Level designing is something in between nowadays. When I used to make levels for Duke Nukem 3D, I would get a bath spa level running in 2 hours. Nowadays you're getting closer and closer to CAD drawing and even to 3D software like Maya. You need a fair bit of "engineer" in you to make this kind of art. Unreal Editor 3 (UE3) needs to feel like an extension of your arm because when you're trying to create those complex scenes you have in your mind, you can't stop to think where "that one button" was or you'll lose your train of thought. Nowadays it takes 6 hours to create a small 1 vs 1 level.

That's why it's so damn frustrating that the editor crashes every now and then when you push the wrong buttons. Big programs/engines like this have thousands of lines of code and finding the reason why it crashes every now and then because of a function you could avoid using isn't easy, and probably isn't even something the developer of the tool is that interested in looking into. I find it odd though that these programs then cost thousands of dollars. UE3 comes free with Unreal Engine 3 games like Unreal Tournament 3, but 3D Studio Max 5.1 cost thousands back in the day and it used to, on rare occasions, corrupt your save file. You have to use "Save as.." for every save and make it a new file in case the last one got corrupted. This isn't a joke either, my 3D lecturer at the time was from Futuremark and he's the one who warned us about it. Anyway, the UE3 program itself is supposedly "Beta" to some extent and Epic doesn't directly offer support for it (not like it's documented anywhere anyway, I wonder what kind of documentation/help engine licensees get..), so it might not be representative of the real "tools" given out and with the source code you can mess around with anything really.

I've tried to cook one of my maps recently after installing UE3 on the Vista x64 machine and it crashes the editor every time it gets to the "Loading map" part of the process. After 4 full installs of the game, sometimes getting it to work and then getting it to bug again, and fiddling around with command line options like "nohomedir" which forces Unreal to forget "My Documents" exists, I figured out the problem. First of all, UE3 works in 2 main directories, one being your install directory of the game and the second being \Users\UserName\Documents\My Games\Unreal Tournament 3\UTGame. From that directory you can see the maps you've been making, both unpublished and published (cooked). In the \Unpublished\CookedPC directory you can see the different packages you've saved, for example in \Environments you could have NEC_Wires.upk and think that nothing is wrong. The problem is that NEC_Wires.upk is already a package that comes with Unreal Tournament 3 and if you save your own package changes to a name of a package that came with the base game, you're going to have problems. Problems as severe as crashing the editor without even letting you in and making some people format their HDD cursing over not being able to make levels. Why is there even an option to save with the same filename then? It's not even an option, it simply saves it as the same filename when you click yes to a dialogue that at no point stated "clicking Yes on this will crash your system". There's not a lot of help online either for UE3 so you're left to experiment with this buggy program.

Learning UE3 isn't that hard but there really isn't enough out there to help get you started. The tutorials by 3D Buzz only come with the collector's edition of the game, which I couldn't get in time, and that's quite lame. Why do they want to limit the amount of people learning to use their engine and thus possibly buying it in the future for their own company? The "official" tutorials are also online on Game Trailers but half of them refused to start for me. However, there are some good places to start so I'll list those. The thing is, if you're a beginner you really need to start from the very basics and some of these tell you how to build a skybox but if you don't know what a skybox is in the first place you'll feel lost.

- Triggz at Game Trailers (the whole system is really messy, try to find what you can).
- 3D Buzz (choose Unreal Tech from the Video Category menu on the left).
- Hourences is a hardcore mapper with some good tutorials.
- Waylon Brinck's UE3 tutorials for a course he did.
- Architectonic, UE3 tutorials.
- Unreal Technology site, Epic's site is mostly for Licensees but also has some good mod resources.

The best bet is still to get the official tutorial videos that come with the Collector's Edition (CE) of Unreal Tournament 3. They're found on the first link posted above but the site is messy, the videos are smaller and some people seem to have problems loading some of them. Get to know what BSP and Static Mesh means and you're on your way to creating new worlds.

When you open the editor for the first time it can look very daunting. There are lots of buttons and you don't know where to start. It's not too bad if you've done stuff with the earlier versions of the engine but for new users it might even turn them away, but if you're going to give up that easy then level designing is definitely not for you.

The tutorials help when they start from the very basics and that's why the ones that come with the CE version are so great, they start from the very beginning and take care to explain everything. You can learn a lot from the movies just by having UE3 open while watching the videos. The guys there talk in an excited tone and don't seem bored at all. They also don't mention any crashes and the weird "bugs" or "terribly odd features" that do appear are brushed aside like for example sometimes moving an object get bugged so you try to go left with your mouse but the static mesh (or whatever) goes up. The Reference Coordinate System had turned to Local instead of World and for some weird reason follows the local plane not only visually but also strictly with the mouse.

For any new wannabe level designers I'll tell you this, to get an idea of how your level will be made you will generally be following this order:

10 Steps To Creating A Level In Unreal Editor 3

1. Sketch and Draw. Plan out your map by getting reference pictures (or in the best case individualised concept art) and draw a sketch of how you want it to look. You want to know how the flow will work and you want players to be able to move around freely and have many paths into 1 area and perhaps some closed out more dangerous areas too for powerful pickups. You don't need to worry too much about pickup placement yet though. It would be good if you knew the different themes available in the game you're working on. For Unreal Tournament 3 the most important packages are:

\Environments
ASC - asian/chinese/japanese theme (curved roofs, lanterns,..)
HU - human theme (buildings, cars, wooden doors,..)
LT - liandri/futuristic town (buildings, neon signs,..)
NEC - necris/alien (tentacles, alien architecture,..)
NR - norse/middle age (very few resources)
UN - universe/world/nature (caves, water, grass,..)

\Effects
Envy - particle effects (smoke, water,..)

\Sounds
A - all sound effects and music

2. BSP. Use Primitives and edit vertices in Geometry Mode to get your basic layout done. You are basically working with very simple blocks at this stage. It'll look like Duke Nukem 3D. Also, remember to save your level with the appropriate tag in front early on to enable the gun mesh, double jump and correct settings for when you test it in the editor. Here are the tags in Unreal Tournament 3:

DM-LevelName, Deathmatch
CTF-LevelName, Capture The Flag
VCTF-LevelName, Vehicle Capture The Flag
WAR-LevelName, Warfare

Remember the jump heights for the character if the game supports them. It's best not to use the max values because it becomes very hard to actually get on top. It's possible but not good for a gaming situation. In Unreal Tournament 3 they are:

55 units for single jump - I would use 50 at most to make it easy.
90 units for double jump - I would use 85 at most to make it easy.

Also, as explained above, use room/corridor sizes like 256, 512, 1024 and 2048 to be sure that fitting Static Meshes in isn't a problem later on. Remember to have the floor and ceiling at one of the major grid lines (this can become a problem in Additive space if you create a Hollow Primitive, I would advise against making those for main rooms anyway, build your own walls) because you don't want to later realise your small 2 unit difference creates a bigger problem.

Nothing but the building blocks for an Unreal Tournament 3 level.

3. Static Meshes. Start adding Static Meshes to create the look of your level. Add any terrain you want and get a Skybox up if you need one. Static Meshes are the most important part of your level in terms of "wow factor". You can really create some crazy things by freely adding and combining different pieces together. It'll look like something from the first Unreal Tournament game at this point.

Your level starts forming. Create the general look and feel.

4. Lights. Add the lights to get a feel to your level. Don't overdo it or your scene will look bad, try to limit the amount of colour you use if you want realism. Remember to tweak the Shadow Resolution on objects if you want. Remember though..

On terrain a lower shadow resolution number means you'll get a lower quality lightmap.

BUT

On BSP surfaces a lower shadow resolution number means you'll get a higher quality lightmap.

Try not to get confused. Also, turn OFF the Cast Shadows function of your Skybox in it's properties if you want your Skylight to have any effect on terrain. Skylights tend to act weird sometimes. Once you turn on your lights for the first time your level will look very different to what you thought it would be. Simply put, it will look a lot cooler and you will feel like a magician. You should also get to know (do a Google search) what Vertex Lighting, Tessellation and Lightmaps are, especially if you want to bring in your own 3D meshes.

5. Interaction. Create your Interpolation Actors such as doors and lifts. You need to make the Static Meshes, that you added earlier, move. Remember, they will need Dynamic Lighting as opposed to Static Lighting that you've used up until now because a moving object will be pitch black without a Dynamic Light on it. Also, you'll need to get into Kismet at this stage for certain features in your level. Remember, plug in the "wires" to the left side of your new object and out from the right side of it. Have a look at Matinee too if you need cinematic elements but this should be implemented a bit later, just keep it in mind.

6. Effects. Add any Particle Systems like water dripping down from the top of a cave or wind blowing outside in a field. Add fog and a Post Process volume if you want Bloom or Depth of Field effects. You don't want to overdo these either because too many effects in one room combined with lights will cause some serious framerate drops. Always remember to monitor your progress through the Light/Shadow Complexity and Texture Density views.

7. Blocking Volumes. With lots of Static Meshes all over the place you'll want to make sure your players don't get stuck in some tight space. I feel that they use this a bit too much in Unreal Tournament 3. Every single surface is covered in Blocking Volumes and I can't help but think it's a bit redundant. It even gets annoying in-game when you're playing and want to jump to some interesting roof spot for a good sniping position. Simplifying your level by using Blocking Volumes to guide the players can be used to an advantage in fast games like the Unreal Tournament series but games like Rainbow Six should allow players to fit into tight corners more. The absence of a jump feature affects level design a lot in Rainbow Six though, but that's another topic. You might want to design Matinee stuff here as well if you're doing a Single Player story driven experience for example. It's best to do this after Collision is in place for obvious reasons.

Make sure the player doesn't get stuck if running along walls for example. Create "slopes" like this to guide them along.

8. Paths. Enemy AI needs to move around and building paths helps them understand where they can go. You should do this at a fairly late stage or else you might run into problems when changing around parts of the level.

9. Audio. Music and sound effects. You want to make your final atmosphere by looking at the level and running through a completed design and adding what you feel fits best. I kind of wished there was a better system for sounds in UE3 (for example Previewing should be easier) but it works OK for now.

The finished level in the editor with lights, collision, audio, bot paths, etc. The idea was to create a small 2-4 player map with a dark moody futuristic atmosphere. The level needed some powerful items in dangerous places. More info on that at the bottom.

10. Cook. Remember to publish your map by cooking it. By doing so you'll have 1 file with your full map that you can distribute to your friends or send online for others to play. There are some problems though, as I learned the hard way, and those are that you should have any custom assets in your same working directory as the map from the very beginning (or you might have to remove them all from your level and redo them) and don't save packages with the same name as the base game's packages or you might end up in an infinite crash loop like me. UE3 doesn't even warn you that it's saving by the same name, it just does it when choosing to cook your level. Be careful.

Another thing that got me quite annoyed at first was the lack of a real keyboard layout image/list that shows what the different buttons do in UE3. There are buttons for a lot of different things and you might wonder why something is not working when you have the feature turned off. You can turn viewing of different things on and off in the viewports from the small arrow down named "Toggle Show Flags". You can view the buttons used to toggle paths, BSP, etc. from there. Some other important keyboard buttons are:

Left Mouse Button (LMB), or Right or Both and Drag
Move the camera around in the selected viewport.

L + LMB
Add a default white Point Light with brightness 1.0.

L + CTRL + LMB
Add a Point Light with brightness 0.2 that matches the surface colour you clicked (for faking radiosity).

CTRL + A
CSG: add. Sometimes might refuse to work. Select and deselect, then try again.

CTRL + S
CSG: subtract. Might refuse to work, same as above.

A + LMB
Add selected actor from actor class browser. You can also right-click and choose to add the actor from the menu there if this is proving unresponsive as it sometimes does.

S + LMB
Adds the currently selected Static Mesh. Usually it's fine to add it just through the right-click menu because you only need one and can then duplicate it with ALT pressed so you're not going to use this as often as A for actor classes because those trees have a tendency to close themselves.

. + LMB
Thats a period. It adds a path node which is very useful for when you want to make paths for your AI to move through since you'll be putting a lot of them down at times. Just remember to do this near the end of your level after collision is finalised and all pickups are placed (they act as path nodes too as you can see from the Actor Classes tab).

Space
Swap between the 3 main Widgets. If you want to manipulate the size of only one side of the selected object then you'll have to choose the Non-Uniform Scaling Widget from the top of the editor window or set your own values at the bottom right.

Middle Mouse Button Drag
You can measure distances like this. Useful to see what ratio you need to fit an object into an area for example. Have your Windows Calculator open in the background and measure the size of the area and the object, then divide those two and set the value in the left-most Draw Scale box at the bottom. Try to use default room and corridor sizes to fit Static Meshes in by default. Those are 256, 512, 1024 and 2048 for example.

CTRL + ALT + LMB drag
Select everything inside the area. Remember this will add to your current selection. Either left-click first on one object or them CTRL and left-click to select/deselect multiple.

ALT + LMB drag
Create exact copy of whatever you drag, rotate or scale.

ALT + SHIFT + LMB drag
Create exact copy of whatever you drag, rotate or scale and follow any movements you do with the camera.

CTRL + LMB/RMB
Manipulate terrain in Terrain Editing Mode.

F4
Open selected actor's properties. Same as right-clicking an object in one of the viewports.

F5
Open selected BSP surface properties.

H
Show only BSP. You can toggle only Static Meshes/Sprites/Collision off in the "Toggle Show Flags" menu.

Home
Center all viewports on the selected object. Very useful.

End
Drop the selected object onto the level just below it. Useful to place things on the ground and not have them floating around. Be very careful with leaving walls and such in the air, your level will lack finesse.

Ctrl + 1-9
Sets a camera angle to that spot for the keys 1-9 (not on the numeric keypad).

1-9
Brings your view to the place that camera was set to, see above. Useful for tweaking screenshots of your level or if you have mountains in the distance and need to edit them up close and then quickly get a view from where the level is played from you can make 2 cameras and swap between them while working.

A good understanding of some 3D software or a CAD program will get you far. UE3 is a lot simpler than any 3D editing software but it can get quite complex the deeper you go into Kismet. Luckily it isn't as boring for us non-programmer types as writing LUA code for WoW modifications but it's not exactly easy to figure out unless someone tells you the basics. There are good videos out there to get your first door/lift moving.

I really like the Unreal Engine and it's the only one that you can really consider buying right now if you're going to go for someone else's engine and not build your own. id Software haven't spoken a lot about the new id-Tech 5 engine and Monolith no longer license their LithTech technology (I never saw it as anything special anyways, they seemed to lack the real drive to push forward, and one of those brilliant minds like Tim Sweeney and John Carmack). As for Cry-Engine 2, I'm not even going to bother finding out if you CAN buy it, Unreal Engine 3 is optimized so much better and is a highly polished engine when it comes to the games themselves. Crytek just seems to want nice screenshot machines. I've had numerous bugs in both Far Cry and Crysis (can you give up on the dumb 'cry' name already?) with tree textures getting stuck on the player viewport from the other side of the island creating looooong stretched textures and I still don't know why Crytek don't all just transfer to Futuremark to work on PC benchmarking software. Games are supposed to create a feeling of false reality so to speak and Unreal Engine 3 does that just as well currently when judging the technology of the engines because it's optimized better. I don't buy games that make your frame rates die with a computer that cost 1500 euros. Enough Crytek ranting, I just don't get their what they're trying to contribute to gaming.

The crashes get me furious at times but UE3 has mostly worked very well and at least it hasn't corrupted any of my work files. You have to learn to use it, and I don't just mean learn where the buttons are but also learn how to not crash it and cause problems for yourself. But that's the same with many big programs as I wrote earlier. I don't get the bugs but I'm going to continue making some cool maps because that's a great way to prove to a possible employer that you have vision. Here are some pics of the completed map DM-Remedy that I made for the sake of this post.

Rocket Launcher - The most powerful weapon in the level is a rocket launcher. You can only find ammo from one place (the bridge in one of the rooms) and therefore it's not going to exactly end up being a "bunny-hop-rocket-launcher" level. I still love the fast shooting rocket launcher as a weapon in games even though some people dislike the idea. There are no translocators in this level so you'll have to use your jump. To get the weapon you have to jump from a pile of rubble to the railing and from there up to the pedestal that holds it. It's not an easy jump either and you might fall down into the lower pathway which will set you back a bit. Risk vs. reward.

Med Health - The idea was to have a health powerup that didn't do anything if you had full health but one that you could go to if you had survived a tough fight or one you ran from with low health. The medium health fit that purpose well. You can approach from 2 directions as the arrows show and do a double jump to the other side of the small room to get it. It's still risky but if you can do the jumps fast it can easily save your life because you can jump into the other room from the health to escape pursuers.

Lower Paths - The lower pathway has a shield belt at the corner but if you decide to go for it you'd better not enter from the sides here, but from the room in the middle so you can get out fast. The fairly narrow corridor is blocked on both sides so you'll easily become prey to all the weapons in the level (Flak Gun, Rocket Launcher, Bio Rifle, Link Gun and Shock Rifle - all of which are powerful in these types of small areas).

Tentacles and Invis - There is an invisibility powerup spawn point here which works great in 1 vs 1 games. It's a bright area of the level with a crack in the corner showing a landscape with mountains (terrain), a skybox and a town in the distance, covered in a Post-Process Volume for a Depth of Field effect, that's being overrun by Necris tentacles. There are some tentacles coming through the walls here too.

Future improvements on the level include:

Ceiling - I need to get the ceiling in most areas to look a bit better. I added some windows to make it seem more complex along with the rest of the level but some other areas are still lacking. It's important to keep a consistent feel to your level and don't leave too many empty areas with the basic underlying BSP showing because that gives off an amateur vibe.

More height variation - This is a simple level but the ceiling is basically at the same level throughout and this creates an amateurish feel. I'm going to have to change heights in certain areas but I don't think I'll look into this map that much anymore, I'll start focusing on something different, preferably something outdoors and maybe with vehicles.

Here's a fullscreen picture of the level being created in UE3. It'll look quite complex in the end but since you've built everything yourself from the ground up one step at a time, you'll know where everything is. Don't get discouraged when looking at the complexity of the maps that ship with Unreal Tournament 3, they spent months on each one just to get it looking as good as possible because they're trying to sell the engine too. There are some not-as-awesome-looking maps in the bunch too and they too have a few issues with overlapping textures and such. Maybe check out some other company's UE3 levels like those in Rainbow Six Vegas 2. They're simple and a lot less complex, just don't take those as a reference for what to strive for, they're simply a good beginner's guide. Somehow it just feels they either don't know how to use the engine fully (I believe most Unreal Engine 3 licensees don't really know everything the engine is even capable of) or had too little time. Anyway, it's good to compare. That's also a problem with buying a ready-made engine, because of all the small little quirks and how the engine works, many games are bound to look the same to an extent. Partly because someone else does the futuristic world type of game too and copy elements from Epic's own games, for example in Mass Effect you can see some of the same type of architecture as in Unreal Tournament or Gears of War. Obviously it's a longshot to state something like that but it's very possible some 3D modeller was influenced along the way, so what. Another thing is that when you put cool features like the Bloom and Depth of Field effects in Unreal Engine 3, developers are bound to use them because they feel they have to since they paid for it. Doesn't apply to everyone, I know, but it's something Epic needs to keep in mind, keep the engine as "genre-independent" as possible. Make it easy to create anything with it. It's working nicely for now at least so I'm not complaining.

Gears of War 2 - multiplayer chat with Cliff

2008-06-26T16:18:00.003+03:00

It's Gears of War 2 time again! I love the Unreal Engine so I have to link any Epic content I find.

Gears 2 looks like it's fixing a lot of the problems that the first Gears game had and in the video Cliff Bleszinski talks about a lot of the cool new multiplayer aspects. I view the XBOX 360 multiplayer community as a bunch of swearing little Halo kids with microphones but that doesn't make this game's ideas any worse. There are some brilliant concepts and we'll see how they turn out. I'm tired of seeing games with Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Capture The Flag as game modes. This looks to bring some interesting new ways of playing. Looking forward to it.

Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 PC

2008-06-25T00:55:00.010+03:00

It's like Rainbow Six: Vegas.

RS:V was one of those games that was a mainstream success (over 1.5 million sold) released on as many gaming platforms as possible and developed by one of the biggest companies out there, Ubisoft. It was one of the new school of Rainbow Six games that strayed away from its PC roots and dumbed down a lot of the key gameplay mechanics that made these types of tactical Special Ops shooters so fun. Apparently they're going towards an even more simplified direction in the future.

The thing is, I loved Raven Shield and the Athena Sword expansion. The box it came in was covered in a covert ops type of mask with eyes looking at you that were on the cover itself. What an awesome idea. We used to play that game for hours with a friend, doing co-op Terrorist Hunt missions.

The stories were never that complex (and they aren't nowadays either even though they try to be), it was more about planning your attack and then executing it. Setting points where the other team would stop and issuing GO-codes to them so you could rush rooms of enemies with carefully placed flash bangs from multiple directions. All of that's gone in Vegas. I hear it was simpler in Rainbow Six: Lockdown already but I never got to playing that one.

The thing about Vegas is that I always thought the idea sucked. I couldn't understand what was so cool in restricting the game to one repetitive theme. A Vegas level would've been OK but a whole game, no thanks. Sure Vegas and Vegas 2 both feature levels in the single player campaign that AREN'T in Vegas but they're obviously the minority. I never finished the first Vegas game though so I can't speak much for it but now that I've finished Vegas 2 I have a few things on my mind.

First of all, reviews have said that the graphics are fine, and specifically in a Finnish magazine that they're "up to date". This is a game running on Unreal Engine 3 and apart from the 3 leading heroes themselves, the single player campaign looks worse than the Haze demo. I smiled when I read this post on the Ubisoft forums because having used UE3's material editor, I feel exactly the same way with this guy, but Vegas 2's graphics can't just be fixed with some bump mapping. The kid who wrote this probably isn't a "pro" himself either but it doesn't make him wrong on the subject. I never thought the Haze demo looked bad though but apparently everyone else has a problem with the graphics in the game. Vegas 2 (the PC version) looks dull and stupid at times. At other times it looks passable but with rushed oversimplified textures. Some of the casino areas manage to look semi-OK. It seems this game just had to be developed simply because of the money there was to be made. I know the whole Vegas idea is tougher to do when nothing like it has really been done before and maybe it's just a personal matter but I don't care for it. Also, in between missions when you fly to a new destination on the chopper you see the towns/areas below you and they look absolutely terrible. Unreal Tournament 3 did it right, Call of Duty 4 did it right and GTAIV did it right when viewing from above from a chopper.

Second, the single player campaign tries to go for some kind of dramatic storyline but it simply fails. The levels are once again very linear compared to the older more hardcore Rainbow Six games where you had a level and could choose between different paths from where you wanted to approach. Comparing this to what the guys at Infinity Ward pulled off a while back, puts the two games in totally different leagues. Chasing Mr. Terrorist through a populated area (where you see no civilians, just hear them), taking care of a nuke on a train, and seeing the smoke of a biological bomb come through the door in a sports arena without actually seeing anyone around just aren't the types of scenes I'd consider well done. I know they're trying to cut back on required resources but there are already 3D models and animations for civilians in the game so why not have a few of them running away from the bomb and a few hands and legs show through cracks in the door when the smoke comes through to make it at least a bit more believable (although that would raise the age limit for the entire product, but there are other ways to make the scene seem less "cheap"). Maybe it was a rushed game. Actually, I'm quite positive it was rushed.

The single player campaign also gets quite annoying at times because with your team you're nearly unstoppable but during the few missions near the end (which comes quite fast once again) when you're alone the pace of the game changes too drastically. You really have to look out for everything because 1. now everyone's only shooting at you and 2. the levels are designed in a way that you're either next to some exploding barrels or you're in a room full of windows and bad guys surround you from every direction. The last fight and talk with the big baddie is more of a boring "let's get through with this already" scene than a dramatic climax.

Oh and it's OK if you don't want the player character to be able to jump but at least let him step over small Japanese style tables for crying out loud! Now you have to go around even those. The annoying "trick" of using a tipped over table in front of a staircase to block your passage is used here way too often as well. Just move the damn table and go up the stairs! Anyway, back to the issue of no jumping, it's easier to design tables into the levels that are low enough to be stepped over (some designer Ikea shit) instead of designing all the levels with all the furniture pushed to the sides because you don't want the player to get trapped in a sea of stools.

And third, Vegas 2 doesn't really offer enough new features to justify itself as anything more than an expansion.

Other than those points though, I think there are a lot of things that have been done right in the game. It's just that those features come mostly from the first Vegas game.

The cover mechanic is excellent. It only bugs out in a few minor places where your character refuses to take cover because the door's hinges are in the way or something else equally trivial blocks your path. The cover mechanic recognizes doorways and lets you look past the door itself onto the other side of the wall sort of making a 180 turn. It's hard to explain, but all of it feels very natural and that's exactly how any feature in a game should be. The player has to feel like "of course that's how you do it" instead of "damn, why can't I do this or that?". Even in multiplayer games you see your friends looking past corners so that the direction where they're looking in is shown by smoothly animating the character to look into that specific direction. There's a lot of professional programming in this game but it still has problems in the traditional problem areas like AI, which is odd at times. Your fellow team members might not follow you sometimes or they don't shoot at the terrorists.

The roleplay elements are good. You gain experience and the fact that they've split the bonuses you get into 3 different fighting techniques creates variety and makes the player try out different things. Kill through cover, CQC, Kill using grenade, etc. Unlocking weapons isn't that great because you'd really want to try out everything in the beginning and see which suits you best but keeping armour and visual upgrades locked is a good idea. The higher level you are the more you'll be noticed in your unique looking gear. It's like an MMO where everyone wants to look different!

Multiplayer is the same great fun. We've been playing Terrorist Hunt again and even the single player missions (or should I say campaign at this point) can be played as co-op which I highly praise since I think almost every game should have co-op. I'm sick and tired of deathmatch and I never saw the need to "beat" my friends in any game. Anonymous people sure :) A really cool feature about the multiplayer was that we noticed our mouths on the characters moved when we talked into our microphones. It's not exactly lip-synced but definitely adds immersion and is easy to add. It was odd though that voice communication in its entirety only came in after we patched the game.

Some things I would've liked from the multiplayer game would've been the possibility to go prone. The levels in the single player campaign were designed so they didn't need it but in multiplayer it would add a lot more tactical freedom and some areas would be a lot better if you could really hit the dirt. Speaking of viewing things from close to the ground, why was the snake camera removed from the Terrorist Hunt mode? It would've been great to set targets your friends could see through the door too. Also, planning ahead your missions like in Athena Sword and the games before that would've been great. At least let the players draw with the mouse on the map so that you could tell your team-mates where to go and how you plan to attack. Voice communication works too but it could be so much clearer with a drawing.

Using the rapel feature is also very weird in multiplayer because you become extremely vulnerable. There's no way you can get to cover fast enough and with only a pistol you can't really defend yourself either. The risk vs. reward ratio isn't balanced enough because the places you can use the rope at aren't worth it. They should lead to important sniper positions that cover a lot of the level and only have 1 exit, the rope.

The enemy spawns were a bit interesting in the Terrorist Hunt mode too. They don't all spawn at once. That really sucks if you want to throw a grenade through a window in the building on the other side of the street. Sometimes nobody dies so you accept that there was nobody inside but then when you go through the door you get shot. It would've been better to focus on the range that the enemies aggro you from than having them all come rushing at you, because now there's a mod that does spawn all the enemies at once and when you shoot at one and he calls friends, you get the entire level after you. Also, if you start out in a room with 2 exits, A and B, and you run out through A and come to the other side of B you will, in some levels, see an enemy standing there. However, if you exit through B there will never be an enemy at that spot possibly because he would kill you too easily. We tried this many times with a friend of mine and the enemy always spawned when we used exit A, but never when using exit B. So there's some kind of "smart spawn system" at play here which makes things even more simple in the long run.

Overall the game is quite nice. The single player missions right from the first level are quite underwhelming graphically with their simple textures and boring environments. Some of the luxury apartments later on in the single player campaign are OK and makes me wish I could live there but then you look down the balcony at the terrible and simplistic "town" below and realize "oh yeah, this is a game". Immersion is lost. The multiplayer levels look a lot better though and there are some nice remakes of old maps. All in all it's a good game but seems to focus too heavily on cashing in on some more Rainbow Six action when there's nothing really new to offer and it feels rushed.

Ghost Recon should've stayed as the arcade Clancy game whilst Rainbow Six could've kept the hardcore fans busy. Splinter Cell had it's spot as the Thief/MGS/sneak around game. But apparently there are more casual console owners than hardcore gamers nowadays.

Pre-production and The Cerny Method

2008-06-18T19:32:00.009+03:00

Mark Cerny is a designer of video games and former president of Universal Interactive Studios. Currently he runs Cerny Games and works as a consultant for game development studios (sharing his knowledge regarding what people tend to like and what comes off as good gameplay and what will be boring, as well as pacing/difficulty issues). He has worked on the Crash Bandicoot, Jak & Daxter and Ratchet & Clank series, of which the latter two are amongst my favourite series. That's why I hold this guy in such high regard.

Mark has defined a certain "way" (referred to as the Cerny Method) detailing the development process of a game to get the best results. This includes an extensive pre-production phase and lots of open testing. The method is quite focused on the types of games he has worked on (Ratchet & Clank for example) and needs a bit of tweaking if you're trying to implement it on the development cycle of a wildly different genre like sports. Nevertheless it's a very good basis for game development since game development itself doesn't exactly have any rules and is a very creative process. Different developers have wildly different ways of approaching tasks even though there are many similarities too. Take, for example, the fact that some developers have cola machines and bean bags in the working areas of the office whilst others might have tightly packed cubicles and a separate "game room" for R&R.

I'm going to go through the different phases and main concepts of the Cerny Method and give my own opinions on them as well as write what I know about the game design and development process.

A basic game design process from start to finish goes as follows:

Basic concept -> Design documents -> Technology documents -> Build the technology -> Build the game

- Pre-production -

The Cerny Method focuses heavily on the pre-production phase during which you create your basic game flow and a short working section of the game itself. The production of the game itself (if it ever gets to that stage) is more about creating assets, taking those assets and implementing them into the world(s) within the game and tweaking gameplay.

Before you totally commit to a project it's important to figure out what it really is you want to do. That's a given. 20 years ago 1 person could make a game, nowadays games can have near 1000 people working on it. During pre-production the publisher would already be paying for you to create something nice. Ideally. But even before that you need an idea that's interesting so the publisher puts any money into play. During pre-production you're trying to prove to the publisher that your game is worth making. Or if you're working from your own funds it depends a lot on how the studio is structured, do you have other people working on another game, possibly a sequel to another successful franchise already, or how do you handle all the other people without a real job at the time. Pre-production is a smaller scale process that involves only a few people really. Some coders, artists and designers (the core team, most possibly team leaders). Not even sound and music is necessary. You're trying to make the First Playable.

- First Playable -

The First Playable is something that shows you know what you're doing basically. It showcases your game. 1 level. This is where the Cerny Method differs a bit from some genres because you can't exactly have 1 "level" in an ice hockey game. While trying to get to this goal you are keeping the publisher informed of all your choices because they're the ones who, in the end, will either green-light or cancel the entire project. If they choose to cancel the project generally they keep the rights to the game as well as all assets you've created but they're not allowed to further use them to create their own game. Why? Because they've paid for everything up to now. You can however buy the game and rights back from them. The price comes from the amount of money + time they spent on your studio. The publisher is still left at a disadvantage because they're paying for it and don't know when your project will be ready. They however have an accurate budget and the costs aren't very high yet, plus they're running other projects most likely at the same time, so it's not like the end of the world for them if your game doesn't work out. For you it might be though because your future work depends on that green light.

During pre-production your core team will be creating prototypes and testing different things. You can try anything out, like jump height, character movement speeds, etc. during this phase but once you are past pre-production all of the core mechanics must be set in stone. Changes have been made in some games later on and some games have even failed because of them. Adding in a big feature very late in development will most likely cause problems with previous mechanics and how the game is played, but not always. A well planned (designed) game has a much bigger chance of succeeding in the market than one that is designed while making it. The Cerny Method states that around 5 versions (no less than 3) of the game should be made and the 4 first ones discarded. This doesn't mean starting from scratch every time, but finding different ways for the character to move and creating new levels. This way you learn, I agree with that, but starting out with the knowledge that you're going to discard your work isn't a good premise. I would focus on making the character move very well around an empty level. Make the character responsive and pace it well so that running speed is good and jumping doesn't slow down the pace too much (for example) and after that create 5 levels around the speed constraints. Then again sometimes your first level will be the best one like the very first onslaught level ever made for Unreal Tournament 2004, ONS-Torlan by Hourences. Discard anything that doesn't work and possibly re-use good ideas from the discarded ones in new and improved levels. Maybe that's what Mark meant though, I never got a chance to ask him.

The other good thing about pre-production is that you don't have any milestones. You'll need an ending date which might be 3-12 months from the beginning of pre-production but all in all you won't have to worry about timetables too much. A good way to cut back on the time spent in this phase is to use middleware if possible. Create a Total Conversion for one of the Unreal Engine games for example, you can use the same assets in your own engine since file formats are quite easy to manipulate. Depends what kind of game you're creating obviously so check what engines are available. The best way is to create your own engine still but using middleware is an option.

- The 3 Cs -

So, what do you need in order to define your game? Mark says "Character, Camera and Control" (the 3 Cs).

My interpretation is that by Character he means an interesting premise (story and the people who inhabit your world) as well as something that sticks your game out above the rest. Something that gives your game character, like the time manipulation element in Max Payne, the environment in Bioshock or the realistic free sandbox world in GTA.

By camera I'm quite sure he is referring simply to what you see because in many games the camera is still a problem and can twist and turn into weird unexpected angles. It's a hard one to program and sticking to preset camera angles alleviates that problem but causes other restrictions. Resident Evil 1 was annoying with its static cameras because you couldn't see something your character saw and enemies could move from screen to screen as if the world was real unlike the enemies in Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword (analysed below). God of War has another solution for the camera, it moves along predefined paths and thus doesn't mess up whilst still giving the game a more dynamic feel as opposed to static cameras. It works very well for a game like that but a choice like this has to be made very early in development because with a predefined camera you don't need to draw certain walls and a world built around predefined camera paths might look boring, simple and "uneven" if given a free-look camera all of a sudden. There's always an exception to the rule though since Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence gave a freely controlled to the player and it worked out fine.

Control means exactly what I explained a bit higher up on this post. This is something I would focus on a lot. You want your character to move fluidly and at a consistent pace. You pretty much determine the speed of your game by this because this is what the player will see most of the time. Control also would refer to how you interact with the world and what affects your character. Menus and inventories aren't that important yet.

Apart from these 3 Cs you want to have extensive chats with your art lead about how your game should look. The look is the first thing that gets people excited and personally I would rank it among the top 3 requirements for any game (Mood - looks and sounds good, Control - fun to play, FPS - good technology) but that's another story. Remember the first pictures you saw of Bioshock? What about GTAIV? On second though GTAIV might not be a good example because a lot of the excitement came from the previous installations of the game. Bioshock was a bit of System Shock too though but still vastly different. You want your game (and especially First Playable level(s)) to look amazing.

Your key technologies should be in place after the pre-production phase is over. These are things like lighting, AI, pathfinding and terrain drawing algorithms for inside and/or outside areas. This sounds like a lot but you can always tweak them further later. The basic concepts should be in place because you want your game to be in a fairly working condition for your First Playable. Remember holistic design if your game is an open world like in GTA, Crackdown or Saints Row. This means that with so many different game mechanics sort of "colliding" with one another, you need to be aware how all the little bits and pieces will affect each other and create a whole. For the First Playable on a GTA-type of sandbox game, you could simply have a small area of your town playable as well a car to drive around in.

- Vital Chaos -

In a nutshell what pre-production is is, as Mark puts it, vital chaos. What he means is messing around with all sorts of ideas and trying things out now because later on you should be generating content for your game instead of playing around with the basic building blocks which you're basing the rest of the game on. Try different jump heights, try different graphics, and so on.

- End of Pre-production, First Playable & Macro Design -

At the end of pre-production you will have completed 2 things. The First Playable and the game's Macro Design.

The First Playable, as mentioned above, is a level (or segment) of your game that is good enough to be released to the public. Obviously it never will be released because it's a rough cut from within your game and makes no sense on its own really when the story is taken into consideration. It's meant to be a showcase of what your game is about so your publisher will green light your project and accept to fund it.

The First Playable includes: player and enemy behaviour, items, missions/tasks/quests, NPCs, basic technology (like I said above, you can tweak this later), the art direction your game will take, variety, scope of the game, and so on. Basically you will know exactly how your game will work. "You" meaning the lead designer and possibly the entire core team working on pre-production.

Macro Design refers to simple documentation about your work. It's good to document things you do but Mark seems to prefer having as little on paper as required. I see his view on this as well but documenting all your ideas helps you evolve and advance on those ideas and thus end up with the best ones in the end. People don't remember everything. The simplest way is to have a mobile phone with a recording capability and as a game designer always record your ideas. A PDA is even better (because of the touch screen you can write on) if you're on the bus and don't want to be seen speaking to yourself (even in the age of hands-free telecommunication) or you don't want to let others around you hear your "best idea ever".

5 pages is enough during pre-production for a Macro Design document. Apart from that you could have notes of whatever you want to keep in mind. Post-its work too and sticking the newest ones on your monitor is something I've seen many developers do. The Macro Design document however, is quite short and contains: character information and move set (what (s)he can do), simple story outline, game mechanics (are there vehicles, guns, ..), level/world structure, level/world content (what do you do?), overarching structure (how does everything work together? bosses, missions,..), and a Macro Chart. Your Macro Chart will list everything that the game will hold, all the game mechanics, etc. This is like an Excel chart detailing the flow of your game, like how levels are structured, what NPCs you meet and where, and so on. Notice though that in Bioshock for example, a lot of the game's world story elements were implemented later on during the design phase. The Macro Design document doesn't have to be restricted to 5 pages. You can go over if you have concept art (always helps) or other non-linear attributes that need explaining (like if you're working on an RPG) for example. The idea is to keep it short though. Don't go into too much detail.

- Cancelling Projects -

Here's the hard part then. Mark says that if at any phase during pre-production you notice that the game project isn't working out and the game lacks features that make it truly fun and unique, you should scrap the project. I find this quite hard to accept though. If you've decided on going ahead with some idea and gotten this far it might be extremely hard to cancel something. I'm not saying it can't happen but a lack of passion in the first place might get you caught up in a situation like this. Therefore make sure you, as the lead designer, and the rest of the core team really feel like this is a game you all want to make. When coming up with ideas as to what game you want to work on next (and possibly take into pre-production) make sure your ideas are current. See what's been posted on Kotaku during the last 10 minutes. What are the current trends. Study other games and how they've tackled some obstacle. You see this in games a lot, smoke effects look the same in some games, even core mechanics have been copied (Diablo -> Hellgate: London, some of the same development team or Knights of The Old Republic -> Mass Effect, same company). Sometimes you'll notice during pre-production or full on development that someone else is working on a game very similar to yours. Don't be let down and don't let this affect your choice to cancel the project! Unless your game isn't working out anyway. 2 games that are based around the same themes will always end up being vastly different because so many people have their own little inputs in both projects. David Jaffe spoke about this once referring to a case when he felt discouraged by finding out that some other developer was making a game based on the same themes that he was. The point is that cancelling a project can be something you don't even see as an option because of all the time spent on the game and the emotional value, but keep a clear head and always make sure you are doing something worth your player's time. We're here to make money too.

- After Getting The Green Light -

So, when you get green-lighted, what happens?

You begin full development of the game. Your core mechanics are all in place but everything needs to be fine-tuned and tweaked to be better and all the actual content has to be made. The story needs to be fleshed out from the outline you had set. During pre-production you might have, for example, determined that killing the stone golem boss gives your character the ability to turn into stone, during actual development you might add a conversation your character has with the stone golem before fighting him as well as other NPCs thanking you for killing the golem because he used to terrorize their cats during the night. Remember to also tweak the difficulty because this is something that's hard to do before the full game starts to come into place. Do you want guide posts (optional) or on-screen tutorials (compulsory) helping the player?

You also focus on the Micro Design. Take your Macro Chart and for every concept or line of text/Excel cell there, write a detailed description. You need to explain what your game really is about. Write character/world/game flow definition documents, and technical specifications for your game. Don't worry though, the more technical documents are handled by the technology lead generally. This is where Mark suggests writing more, and I agree that there will be quite a few documents (or pages in a document, depending how you want to format it), just try to keep it simple and easy to understand if a new person is brought in on the project because they need to know where to find the information you've agreed on with the development leads a year ago. Documents are also extremely useful to simply keep track of things in, you know who said what. Print them out or have them on the company Intranet, doesn't really matter. You can even colour-code documents by printing them on differently coloured paper so you know which one you're talking about in meetings when someone takes out the blue one.

- Testing -

Finally, I'll mention testing because the Method lists this as something quite important. I agree. This is referring to gameplay testing and not searching for bugs or compatibility issues. It's hard to know what the public sees as hard when you've been involved in your own game from the start. Someone might find the character movement to be too clumsy to get over a box in the game world. You're not making a game only for yourself, you're making something that the largest amount of people possible will be interested in.

Gameplay testing should be done as early as possible and obviously in-house. You can't start sending your game files to anyone. No amount of DRM will protect your game enough and alpha versions have leaked of many popular games. The higher profile the release the better care you need to take.

Mark says to test your game when you're 1/3rd done, which is quite early. This helps programmers to keep their code clean as well because you don't want bugs to appear and if they do you want to eliminate them fast. It's not cool if your game crashes when you've just called in 10 people from the street to test it. Your game will not represent its final state but you'll know how people see it and what might need changing. The core mechanics need to be in place of course but things like difficulty and level design can be changed quite drastically at this stage. Test your game 2-5 times during production. It's easy to get students from a nearby school for example. Just put up an announcement on their bulletin board and you will without a doubt have at least 5-10 interested people. They don't need to be paid anything because it's exciting enough to see something the rest of the world will only see maybe 1-2 years later. Make sure they sign some papers though so none of the information leaks and if some story element contains a big plot twist you don't need to show it, it's mostly about testing playability anyway. Watch them play and see where they get stuck, how long it takes to complete a level, where they die, who died and does the player have any experience with these types of games from the past. Also, try to get a wide variety of testers, not just fans of your game's genre. You want a broad look. However, people who play action games will mostly buy your game so test with your focus audience too.

The rest of it is production which involves lots of crunch time, tough milestones and the publisher making sure they're getting their money's worth. That's another story though and because there aren't any "rules" as to how you develop an entertainment product like a game you can do it a number of ways. Team communication, a good Intranet, good SCM tools..

Even though games are a creative art (yes, games are art) it can be controlled to an extent to make the process clearer. Imagine if you're in a band and actually found a formulae to make hit songs. This is basically what the Cerny Method tries to do for games. Even though it doesn't guarantee a blockbuster, I'm quite sure having a good battle plan will lead you that much closer to victory. And if that's not enough then contact Mark Cerny at Cerny Games and ask him to come work as a consultant for your game. Although I'm not too sure his services are that cheap, and he might not have time.

The Cerny Method surely has good points but it's not applicable to everything and, as noted, requires quite a bit of fine-tuning for certain projects. Then again with all the talk of the game industry being such a bad place to work (especially in big companies) how can you manage such an extensive pre-production phase? Smaller studios seem happy like Insomniac but the people working for big names such as EA (remember the 'EA Spouse' blog?) might not be. It might be the fact that big companies employ lots of people and if you piss off lots of people, they'll write about it and thus it'll seem like everyone working in the game industry is overworked, tired, pissed off and poor because smaller company employees don't feel the need to write about how "good" their work is. I'm sure lots of small companies have problems too. There's pressure in every line of work and maybe people who work in entertainment thought they'd get off easy because it's.. entertainment. I do not know but I don't give a fuck if I'm seen as the blue-eyed newbie who'll work his ass off for minimum wage, I'll be there and prove that I can be the next Kojima.

Damn that sounded lame. :) At least you can have high goals. Keep truckin'.

I do have a few questions that I'd like answered though:
- Isn't it hard for new developers to find funding (a publisher) in the first place even for the pre-production phase without a lot to show yet?
- What do the rest of your team do when you're in pre-production?
- When do you create the development tools?

Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword

2008-06-17T16:43:00.005+03:00

I wasn't too interested in this one, partly because I was more into God of War as a game and obviously things look a lot better on the PSP due to its higher processing power and graphics capabilities. I'm talking about Chains of Olympus here. However, now that GoW:CoO is in the past, I decided to get NG:DS.

The first trick the game throws at you is the flipping of the screen to a more N-Gage type vertical system (like Brain Age on the DS). Which sucked in N-Gage. There's a reason human eyes are more accustomed to WIDESCREEN than "VERTICALSCREEN" and it relates to how our eyes are situated on our heads.. Anyway, NG:DS has two screens. One of the first ideas Nintendo gave to developers, when introducing the DS, was that you could have a map on the other screen. I was scared that suddenly the map would become a tool that you couldn't live without and would have to use constantly when past games did fine by having it accessible through a menu (or maybe have no map at all). But it's worked out fine and NG:DS actually needs a map. The static pre-rendered screens are fine and all but with the pre-set camera angles you might sometimes lose your way without the actual map.

The vertical view works fine. All the other buttons work as the same dodge move so you can choose how you want to hold your DS. I have the first model so it works out fine by holding the console from under it with my left hand, thumb on the R key, and controlling the game itself with the stylus. There's an option for left-handed players too, which is done well, just flip the console around.

People have been raving about the great graphics in NG:DS but for some reason, maybe because of GoW:CoO, I really don't get it. They're pre-rendered backgrounds with very few interactive or moving elements (the waterfall doesn't even move in the first scene where you fight Momiji) and the amount of pixels on the DS screens makes it look worse than it should. "Should" meaning what the general standards are nowadays. Then again, Nintendo isn't focusing on graphics during this generation of consoles obviously. Games like Advance Wars and Phantom Hourglass look great on the DS, NG:DS not so much. It doesn't look bad. It's just not that great.

As for the gameplay itself, it's actually quite fun. Controlling Ryu with the stylus is simple (up for jumping, slash at an enemy to hit, touch to do a ranged attack, scribble randomly on the screen to power up a super attack, draw symbols to do magic,..) but somehow entertaining. Your DS screen will probably get a beating worse than WarioWare with this game but it can take the hits. My launch DS touch screen is still working perfectly (albeit with a few marks) even after hundreds of hours of gaming by me and my friends.

Near the beginning of NG:DS I started to wonder if this type of control scheme would hold up as interesting for long enough. The game itself isn't that long but it's not exactly short either. It's not interesting enough to retry again on the harder difficulty like GoW:CoO was, but during the initial play-through it didn't get boring at any point. I can't really put my finger on why though. That's what's so interesting about this game, something so simple being fun.

As for the Ninja Gaiden name, it sure does feel like a Ninja Gaiden game. Almost too much. The playability itself is quite similar with the fast and frantic non-stop action (which is very well done for such a small screen and different control mechanic). Even the same bat-ridden vertical chasms that you have to wall jump to the top are here. I find those a bit weird though, you have to do a slash attack back to the bottom to kill them all and then climb back up to get the next batch. Obviously players want to get them all as long as they repop because of the yellow spheres which equal money. Luckily if done right you can gather up your combo points as well because with speed you can get to the top again before the combo resets. Speaking of repops, there are obviously other situations where you can "farm" the yellow spheres better. Some rooms, after cleared, will repop with the same enemies when you go back one room and then re-enter. This is a nice way to buy the powerups needed, just like in previous Ninja Gaiden games.

The other thing that is similar to the XBOX, PS3 Ninja Gaiden games is the world. The same village, same fire/ice themed worlds, same bosses, similar enemies.. The story is different but I found the world to be too similar. I was hoping for more original bosses.

About the bosses.. They're all extremely simple affairs, which you just dodge around and strike a few times. The only annoying bosses come at the very end which are only annoying because they hit you for loads of health. But this applies to the whole game as well, the enemies are simple and you get boxed in to certain areas with pop-up walls (just like in God of War as well) and they won't open until you kill all the enemies. There's a certain amount of baddies and once they've all spawned (and died) you get to move onwards. The enemies don't follow you to the next screen so you can skip some fights like this, but then you're not getting the yellow spheres.. Anyway, I think difficulty is a bit iffy for a few reasons. This is a Ninja Gaiden game so I was expecting something harder but then again the control scheme is fairly limited and you can't make the enemies too difficult or the player will start feeling frustrated because you can't do anything, due to the stylus control mechanic, to avoid the damage. The enemies who cast a spell that makes an area under you that you have to move away from were a good idea, more of those types of ideas would've been good. But mostly the game is filled with enemies that just run at you and you won't get hit even once by just bouncing all over the screen and attacking from the air, followed by a few ground attacks. You get high combo scores and good Karma (which can be sent online and compared to others, but that feature wasn't too interesting) too so it's not exactly a "cheap tactic".

More variety to the enemies would've been good since this whole game is basically about fighting. The puzzles there are aren't exactly hard and they're few and far between. Blow into the mic, shoot the blue spheres,.. actually I can't think of any others, just those two. The fighting is easy so they could've implemented more hazards that you need to steer clear of.

The levels themselves are quite linear. The map helps because, as said above, the camera angles change a lot. I was hoping for a bit more open paths and panning camera moments. There are a some screens where the camera pans a bit to follow Ryu but mostly it's just one screen and once you run to the edge (maybe with a tiny bit of panning) it loads the next screen. Maybe a DS limitation, I don't know, but I never really liked the Resident Evil 1 way of doing things (although in that game it was annoying because you knew the character could see the monster but you couldn't because of a game mechanic, the camera, not showing it). In NG:DS you don't jump up on ledges a lot either (except the vertical chasms) and all the screens seem rather flat. There's no swimming or quick sand or anything interesting in the terrain really. Not even levers you have to move crates on! There are breakable icicles in one level but no breakable crates like every other game.

The cut-scenes are very simple with pictures and almost no animation whatsoever. But, I liked them. Especially the ones with the old woman. She seemed scary! It's very well done to portray such emotion through simple pictures.

Overall, I liked the game but it's not really good enough for a second play-through. It really does feel like a Ninja Gaiden game though and it's fun to complete once. I would've added more variety but this seems like a small release for the team in between bigger ones (Ninja Gaiden 2) so I don't know what their budget was or how much resources they had to develop it. Fun game nonetheless.

Mass Effect PC (and no XBOX360 controller support)

2008-06-06T00:29:00.017+03:00

Well it finally came out on the PC and it doesn't support the XBOX360 Controller for Windows.

---- Begin personal controller whine ----

I had to get Xpadder to make it work, even though looking to the far left causes camera problems. I know that Bioware wanted to create a real port of a console title and not just a sloppy replica but why would you take away controller support from those who want to use it? I read on the Bioware Mass Effect PC forums that some people were wondering why you want to use a pad controller for the PC. Well, here's a few reasons (some of which I've already mentioned in earlier posts):

1. I like adjusting the character's speed with analog sticks ESPECIALLY in real time shooter games.

2. The pad has less buttons and thus is easier to find what you're looking for.

3. The pad is mobile and you can sit back on your chair.

4. The rumble effect adds a nice feeling.

5. The XBOX360 controller is one of the best controllers ever created (button-wise and ergonomically) right next to the Gamecube controller.

The only down side is that with a mouse you can aim better, but since the game was made on a console first what's the big deal? It doesn't seem like they changed the game mechanics regarding combat. Usually developers take away auto aim (which compensates for the pad control) on PC versions, that's it. Controlling Crysis on a pad is hard, controlling Assassin's Creed is not. I've played enough Goldeneye on the N64 to be a pro with the pad (obviously beating mouse + keyboard combo players in deathmatches is a different story) and it's all about learning to use it. People whine about console controllers being inaccurate when they're not even giving them a chance. But why try harder when you already know how to use something else? That's why this goes both ways, why not have keyboard and mouse support for console games? Consoles have USB ports nowadays. You could have K+M listed next to those people's names who are using that combo just like in Mario Kart Wii you get a wheel next to those who use the wheel because supposedly you don't control as well with it. Maybe create a filter to create servers that only work with game pads then. But maybe you're spreading out your user base too much then. I still want pad support BACK in my single player RPG.

---- End personal controller whine ----

OK, the game itself is great in every other way except a few key issues.

Aesthetic design. The textures are lovely, some areas look absolutely amazing, but it comes nowhere near the worlds you had in Anachronox for example. Even Beneath A Steel Sky (even though that was a 2D game) did the "futuristic world" better. You need some real life sense in the world and right now it really feels like a console game. You're running at times through empty corridors just so textures can load and you have less to load. The Flux bar in the fairly beginning of the game is a good example, the dance floor is behind a staircase and the whole place is fairly empty not to mention the U shaped weird path (probably for area loading purposes on consoles, but it just comes off as a useless twist in the road and feels like a very oldschool solution when GTAIV shows it can be done in other ways, maybe it's just the unreal engine's limitations) that leads to the bar. You need room for your AI buddies to run around in, that's true, but they already get stuck on crates during firefights. Anachronox wasn't as good a game as Mass Effect but I had a more fun time exploring the world with it's shady alleys, appartment complexes, red light district, bars, clubs, etc. It felt real unlike Mass Effect. Making simple soul-less rooms with nice textures and slapping some people in (some of which talk) doesn't make a lively world. GTAIV did this nicely btw, but I'm sure everyone knows this already. GTA3 did it very well already. The world needs believability and in Mass Effect I was hoping the next planet I went to would look more realistic or feel like home up to some degree (we're on alien planets, of course they can't look too real, but you need to have a certain sense of fake reality that makes the player feel at home, but maybe everyone just isn't so into architecture as me and they'll shrug this off as another Internet whiner bashing a great game). Mass Effect never felt real, it felt like a video game. On a console.

That's why I wanted to use the XBOX360 controller too, to not unknowingly associate the keyboard and mouse control to something more complex that you usually find on computers. But that's just my personal problem between console ports.

Another problem I have is with the UI. I never played the XBOX360 version and I understood Bioware made big changes to the UI of the PC version (one of the reasons XBOX360 controller support wasn't included) but currently it's a bit messy at first. The character equip screen could have the gun mod and maker info in tooltips when you mouseover them, it could also show all 3 group members' equipment at the same time and under it one big inventory for all the mods you have gathered so you could drag and drop them from there. If screen space is an issue in lower resolutions then have one character at a time with arrows on the left and right to scroll between your current group, and/or all group members' names at the top (because we tend to read from top to bottom, unless you really want to cater for Asian needs too). They've added shortcuts, like in a few recently analyzed games here WoW and AoC, to the numeric buttons for the PC version. This way you can set special traits to them and access them faster than on the XBOX360 through the dial menu, but I feel this doesn't alter combat too much, although with mouse aim I'm sure you can be more effective on the PC, but this game isn't about high scores.

The map is a bit odd and you can't zoom out completely in some areas which means there's almost always something to scroll. You get side missions but accessing your logs to see what you needed to do/where you needed to go could also be simplified by showing the mission on your HUD that you just picked up. I know this WoW quest-grinding methodology isn't exactly the best way to show objectives in a game where you should have been following the conversation leading up to the task, but some simplification like this could've been used. I also understand that Mass Effect tries to keep the core gameplay UI itself clean except for the radar, but why the hell doesn't the radar show a map then with all objectives and objective arrows pointing in the right direction if you're not near it?

Shepard gets flashbacks during a few points of the game and during these you see some real life footage of micro chips/circuit boards. It's a bit on edge with being done in bad taste (remember old adventure games with static backgrounds and real actors that didn't look like they fit in at all?). It's not bad but it's borderline. I never liked Red Alert's cut-scenes. Yeah, the mighty Kane isn't so mighty. It's like calling David Hayter a good voice actor.

There are lots of planets but only a certain few progress the story. Some you can't land on and others are generic landscapes where you get little missions to drive around with your Mako vehicle (which behaves very oddly but works) and do some kind of gathering, killing, etc. They're good places to find some nice gear for your team but might get a bit boring if you want to play through again. I found it odd you had "character classes" in this kind of fairly linear console RPG. I just chose the default John Shepard guy and went from there. Although I did regret not changing his first name to Jack early on but what can you do. The other characters in your party are pretty dumb and fights rely on using them well. Sometimes one of them doesn't follow me, they get stuck on crates (like mentioned above) and they get themselves killed by running out in the open a lot.

Your allies should take cover too but they don't a lot of the time, especially if you command two of them in the same place. One of them stays standing behind the other one in the open saying "destination blocked!" or something. The game has 2 things that are taken directly from Gears of War (UE3 engine) and those are the running effect (camera perspective zooms a bit) and the cover mechanic. There are obvious stone slabs and whatnot scattered around and when you press up against you when wielding a weapon, you take cover. It's not a bad thing but it would be interesting to know how these mechanics came to be implemented into the game.

I know the "Silent Hill" grain filter brings a certain fuzzyness which is good (without it things would look too .. sharp and "machine-like" if you have any idea what I'm trying to get at) but the odd shadows at the left and right sides of the screen are weird. I hated the same effect in Burnout Paradise where it occurred at the top and bottom. I don't know what the idea is, maybe it's to focus on what's going on in the middle of the screen but it's not good. These are things that different people feel differently about but it really annoys me just like it does in Burnout Paradise. Some people found the Bloom effect in Age of Conan to be annoying, I thought it was great, although too taxing on the system to keep on. Maybe this shadow thing in Mass Effect could've been limited to cut-scenes.

Animations don't interpolate well at times. Once again. When talking to an NPC and they finish their sentance, before they start the next one their head will usually clearly jump back to the default position. It's a subtle flick but it would look better if it moved smoothly.

Everything else in Mass Effect is great though. The story is interesting, the races are very well created (graphics and story) and explained in the Codex you carry with you. You can really learn a lot about the world and the world itself is interesting and doesn't feel fake (I mean backstory and lore, not the level design). And it's good that you don't have to read any of the codex if you don't want to. If you do however, you'll get some nice knowledge of the world. And a well designed world it is, with depth and attitude just like Bioshock.

The gunfights are good enough and even though I haven't found the modifications and level-ups to be that interesting with their WoW type "talent trees" of sorts, I'm sure they complement the gameplay well enough in the long run. Aiming is smooth and there are enough variables to keep things interesting with bullet damage, recoil, over-heating, etc. Some fights are hard though and cause frustration. I don't know if I'm supposed to be in the area yet or should I come back later. The enemies don't have any level showing and the damage numbers are hidden so you don't really know why the hell you keep dying all the time. Are the enemies too high level or do they scale? Whatever the case is, it's not explained well enough.

Conversations are very well done I have to say. The characters have personalities and are interesting to look at. Sometimes they aren't animated perfectly but in a game with so much speech as this one, it's good enough and they do show a lot of personality at times with subtle gestures like lifting an eyebrow. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune did it better but we're talking about a completely linear story and thus more time to focus on every spoken word for the development team. One thing I really like about Mass Effect's conversations are that before the last line of text has ended you get your little circle of topics (which is a lot better on the pad than with a mouse) from which you can choose a short phrase refering to generally what you will ask next and in what tone. General/main topics appear on the right whilst additional questions appear on the left. They're short enough for you to read them whilst still listening to the NPCs last lines of speech so that you can choose one even before the NPC finishes talking if you want to, this way your character is ready to continue talking without any interruptions in between immediately after the NPC has finished. It's fast and fun. People don't have a lot of useless things to say either which is good. There's a lot of talking but none of it is irrelevant.

The thing with dialog is that you can either say good things and be the good guy or you could say bad things and be the bad guy. How you handle situations determines what kind of person you are and that's nice. The system is very similar to Bioware's previous similar title Knights of The Old Republic (KoTOR). That got me thinking about the other similarities and it actually boils down to the reason I never finished KoTOR, the level design. It was the same as in Mass Effect, uninspirational mostly and linear without enough reality blended in. Theres a lot to the conversation mechanics though and that keeps it interesting, depending on how your good and bad sides are, your character might say something a bit different to what you expected through your own reply. Sometimes things do get a bit irritating when you can't say what you really want to say because either the option isn't there or it's there but it's greyed out (meaning you need to spend more talent points in charm or intimidate skills). That's annoying and they're taking this a bit too far in that respect.

I kind of wish the camera angle would be more like in Resident Evil 4, a bit over your shoulder but still showing most of your character's upper body. Currently your character fills too much of the screen in default stance (weapons holstered). When you take out your weapon the view changes to a more RE4 type of angle, which is good to emphasize action.

Oh, and as for texture loading issues on the XBOX360 version, I've only had it happen once or twice and only for a few seconds at most. Nothing compared to Age of Conan. The Unreal Engine loads textures when you enter a new level in Unreal Tournament 3 so with this limitedly seamless world (elevators load sections somehow but sometimes you get loading pauses with a disc icon in the middle of the screen in addition to the elevator ride) I guess it needs to load textures at some point. All in all I'm fairly happy with how little loading the game has (or how well it's been hidden) with the Unreal Engine (highly modified engine I'm sure) even though I think the core engine itself doesn't support seamless gameplay directly. Update: I've started seeing low resolution textures on cut-scenes (like a shirt on an NPC). It might be that the textures ARE low resolution but I'm more inclined to think the engine didn't load the high resolution version. I stayed and watched but it never got around to doing it either, so I'm not sure.

There are also some problems with shadows. Sometimes they flicker on character faces and look grainy due to the post-processing filter. The characters look good otherwise though, except Shepard seems to have a dumb look always. It's because of his eyes and if they were more squinted and not as wide open, he wouldn't look so "out of it".

And I want cooperative multiplayer. It would've made things so much more interesting. I want cooperative multiplayer in every game though. When one player starts a demo both see it, whatever, it's doable but needs to be kept in mind from an early stage of development for engine limitations (of which there are none in UE3, except if Bioware modified it a lot) and gameplay mechanics like physics, puzzles and boss fights to name a few.

I like Mass Effect for the story and its slight resemblance to Anachronox and Deus Ex, but the world just isn't convincing for me. It looks great with Unreal Engine 3 running it but sometimes you feel like you're running down an empty corridor just because of console limitations. There are rooms that repeat themselves and empty areas with a few chairs and NPCs. I want to see it to the end though but it's slightly uninspirational. That's the only real flaw that I can think of, the others are just minor things only noted because this is a game design blog game analysis and not a fucking game review. The "levels" need more free roaming space (I'm not talking about the boring looking empty planets you do side-missions on) and need to be more logical/closer to real life. Once again, I understand it's alien technology but you can't make empty boxes as rooms and claim "these aliens had no sense of design!" when clearly the design team had a lack of inspiration/time. It's still a game but it needs to feel just real enough to take you on a journey. That journey is a fairly uninspirational cliché space rampage (the textures and architecture isn't that hard to come up with when it's all been done before already) but with a very interesting story and some nice gameplay mechanics.

Update: Looking back at the game later on, I think if it didn't have the excellent story that it does I wouldn't have even played past the first few hours. The fighting is mediocre, levelling up doesn't seem like something you want to specifically strive for and the level design is terrible as stated above.

MGS4 out soon, too much story?

2008-06-02T01:16:00.012+03:00

That's Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of The Patriots. Not too long now before you can pick yours up from retailers. This is one of the two biggest releases for the PS3 to possibly ever come out. The other being GTAIV obviously. And by big I mean lots of people are waiting for it, they're hyping it to hell and a shitload of money was spent developing it.

Anyway, MGS1 was great. I bought it and really enjoyed the espionage action in it even though I'm not really the biggest fan of these sneak games. The only problem was that it had way too many and too long cut-scenes with just a radio showing 2 people's faces talking about boring stuff. I'm a big fan of storytelling but it went a bit too far.

Then came MGS2 which I played through and in the end was left mouth open. Not because it was the greatest game I ever played but because I couldn't understand what the fuck had just happened. It had way too long cut-scenes (you CANNOT start a game out with a huge long cut-scene, you have to give the player some game time because that's what they're there for, GTAIV has just enough intro to get you in the mood without pissing you off) and too much talking resulting in a plot that made absolutely no sense at first. So I sold the game to a friend of mine and decided to forget all about it. It wasn't bad, it just had a lot of great gameplay ruined by dumb design decisions regarding storytelling.

MGS3 I picked up a lot later because MGS2 killed the interest in the series for me. I've only played the first jungle areas in MGS3 because the PS3 I've been playing it on has the european software emulation of PS2 games and it crashes every now and then. I can't be bothered to plug in the PS2 for it. Maybe I'll play it one day. But what really got to me again were the dumb parts in the beginning that made absolutely no sense. Having done military leadership training here I know that the things this "super soldier" does would be TOTALLY out of the question in an infiltration situation like the one portrayed in the beginning of Snake Eater. I have a few quotes below from 2 people on the QT3 forums that I found extremely satisfying to read because to me it feels like they couldn't have hit the nail on the head any better.

So, here are 2 quotes about the MGS series. I find them brilliant and I couldn't agree more because I've been thinking the EXACT same things for so many years and always thought nobody agreed with me and everyone was a Kojima fanboy.

Jason Cross writes:

They're technically brilliant, full of amazing character art and animation and in-engine cutscenes and stuff. But Kojima obviously wants to make movies, because he takes a lot of badass fights and stuff - stuff that by all rights you should be playing though - and turns them into cutscenes so he can get fancy camerawork and lots of bullshit dialogue in there. And while they're all very impressive technically, they're horribly dumb.

MattKeil writes:

I think the true breaking point for me was the beginning of MGS3, in which it was made abundantly clear that they'd completely given up trying to make the "OMG KEWL BADASS" actions of the characters in the cutscenes match the actual dialogue in the game. Snake does a HALO jump into the jungle, releases his parachute. This is just after he's been told the mission is an ultra-secret black op and he can't even leave bullet casings behind. The parachute floats away into the jungle. Then he dramatically removes his helmet, re-enacting the iconic "Snake reveals himself" title sequence that has been in all MGS games. He tosses it away, despite the fact that it reads U.S. Air Force on the damn thing. Then he gets on the damn phone and whines at The Boss for nearly 10 minutes, despite being told earlier that if he's not at the extraction point in 2 hours, they're leaving him there and he can walk home.

You can't have everyone spouting dramatic Tom Clancy military shit and then have them act like petulant teenagers in an anime harem comedy. I played the demo at TGS 2007, which had great gameplay, an amazing battlefield environment, and some really cool moments, only to be rewarded with a cutscene that featured a Power Rangers sight gag and no less than three diarrhea jokes. I can only speculate what a 90 minute MGS4 cutscene will offer up.

With all the talk of long cut-scenes in MGS4, I'm getting second thoughts on whether to buy the game or not. Having seen all the trailers about the game I think I'll still give it a shot for the simple entertainment value but I'll be more prepared this time. A quick change of words through a static boring radio system is all I'll be up for, if it seems to drag out I'll just skip it (actually, I don't think Kojima-san will allow you to skip story elements). Story is great but games are still games.

The dialogue always seemed dumb at points and completely inappropriate for the situation. But then again that's what Japanese developers do a lot, you get Phoenix Wright talking during court like a 15 year old and even the judge is a complete moron, that's just how it is. The MGS series has always had some very nice design ideas that make the player go "wow cool!" and weird scenarios that make you go "wow what the hell?". Boss fights in MGS1 and MGS3 come to mind.

I'm sure MGS4 will sell like hot cakes all over the world because it's cool to own and try it out if only for the visuals, but I honestly feel like this series is taking the story element overboard even though I love a good story in games. At least reviewers aren't repeating the pathetic 100/100 rampage of reviews as they did for GTAIV. MGS4 still seems to be doing pretty damn well according to metacritic. It's probably a good game though, albeit covered with a bit too much pointless yapping.

Note: Why does Blogspot adjust line spacing after using the block quote tag? The later paragraphs have every line closer to each other than the first paragraphs.

Age of Conan

2008-05-26T19:13:00.054+03:00

Bought the Collector's Edition which has a very nice art book with over 100 pages. I'll keep updating this post too as I progress. I wanted to try AoC simply because WoW was getting a bit boring. I'll go back to WoW when WoTLK comes out because it's a fantastic game obviously but AoC seemed interesting enough to try in the meanwhile. I'll be making some WoW references here and there just because Blizzard has proven to us they know what people like in an MMO. Those of you wishing to express negative whines about WoW need not bother replying, the sales speak for themselves and you're the minority. Everyone has their own opinion of WoW but clearly it's a successful game, whether you like it or not.

This is about AoC however, so I'll try to stay away from WoW and try to express my views from a game design fundamentals sort of perspective. It'll be hard because WoW does so many things right.

Good points:

- Some very beautiful sceneries. It requires a bit from your system to ramp up the graphics but if you do then you'll get to enjoy some amazing surroundings. The problem is that it's inconsistent and at times you'll be looking at some very ugly walls.

Some nice surroundings.

- Story. The beginning grips you instantly and the entire storyline in Tortage is very nice. You get to know the problems of the people and help them out. You learn how they are related to each other and what their likes and dislikes are. They have personalities (partly thanks to the next point I list) and seeing their names fight alongside you in the end is very rewarding.

- NPC speech. The NPCs in the starter zone (Tortage) are voiced well. After that the minor NPCs only communicate through text. More story-centeric characters have speech still though. Anyway, the starting zone NPCs are interesting and have very varying accents. Their voices suit their builds/faces and some of them you may find annoying and some downright sexy. Captain Phoenic (can be found on top of the broken ship, drunk at night or sober during the day, near the path to White Sands Isle) had an especially interesting voice. The guard at Tortage's main gate is voiced especially well too. Having said that, some of them seem to have accents like they're from Uganda but their faces don't match exactly. But we've had enough stereotypes in games anyway so it doesn't matter. Redrik sounds like Erling Ellingsen. But maybe it's just the strong Norwegian crappy acting :)

- Fighting is fun but supposedly not for all classes in the beginning (Bear Shaman). I don't know how each character progresses, and I probably never will since I don't plan to play that long, but the more hands on approach seems cool. It's like you're playing Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero but fighting at the same time. Like Patapon but not as cute. These kinds of combinations bring a lot more to the table if they're done right, for example you could find counters to certain attacks and make attacks faster if done in the right order (lower left attack followed by an upper right attack). But Funcom hasn't focused too much on them in the PvP sense so this isn't an online Street Fighter by any means. I wouldn't expect MMO lag to allow such a system yet anyway. But even though characters also have collision detection, there are so many instanced areas lag isn't as big a problem as in other more open worlds. Then again, collision itself is a problem in some situations, like blocking doorways. More on that later.

- Resting. You get an ability called rest that you can use when out of combat. The ability has a 5 second cooldown which means you can use it pretty much whenever you want. It's like eating in WoW, all your stats replenish at a faster rate, except you don't have to pay for anything!

- Interesting areas. The areas that there are are mostly pretty nice. They flow well (linear though, very linear) and have moody places. However some paths come to dead ends and you wonder what the hell that was about. Maybe it's a place for future content, maybe not, but in a more open world you don't really mind blocked passages as you do in a game where you run down a linear path only to find there is no treasure at the end of the rainbow.

- Loading screens. They're very elegant and nice to look at and the design of the surrounding UI (bars on top and bottom, with info box on top left) is very simple yet to the point. It has 2 bars, one for content loaded from the server (yellow) and the other for content from your HDD (red), which is very nice. It also vanishes nicely when it has loaded your content. The only weird part about it is the picture with Conan looking at the player with a serious gaze. It's a slightly intimidating picture that gives an uneasy feeling and I wouldn't have included it. Obviously not everyone will care but Conan's head should be turned away from the player looking into the distance.

- Some interesting quests. The quests try to differ sometimes like making you talk to some people to find who the real thief is (detective work) or run through some checkpoints in time (sort of like a race), but ultimately it's the same "Go kill 10 boars" and after you run back the NPC says "Go kill 10 big boars", meaning those big guys next to the ones you just killed. And reading the quest text is quite boring unless you really want to get into the world so I just clicked through selecting the first option always knowing that it would end up with me getting a quest marker on the map and the conversation being over. Having said that though, there are some really funny conversations to be had so I wouldn't say the NPCs are boring, just that maybe taking away OOC chat and your UI drags you away from the gameplay itself too much and players tend to want to click through fast (I questioned people on general chat about this and nearly everyone skips quest textes, choosing the first option always). There's one very good thing though, and that is that if you are required to gather some kind of drop from mobs, they always have a 100% chance to drop it. 8 wolf pelts = 8 dead wolves. After the grinds you end up doing in WoW this was a VERY welcome change. There's a catch though, let's say you have to kill Rats for 10 Rat Teeth. Well, to make the quest last longer with this new system Funcom has situated 10 Rats in between a group of 40 Snakes. Along with the other people farming the area, it'll end up taking longer than you thought getting those Rat Teeth simply because you can't find 10 Rats.

- No repair costs. Enough said. However, feat respecs cost and it's not like you can be a damage dealing tanking class, you'll need to respec in order to do the other task like a professional. Note that the lack of real group and raid experience at this point still leaves me a bit open on this subject. Have to see how the game works at the later levels. Maybe.

- Quest map shows exact locations where to find what you're doing. No need for outside websites. Although, sometimes it's a bit odd and you don't see the end location of a quest but that might be just another scripting problem when making the quest (more on scripting later).

- Music. I'm glad they provided a soundtrack with the Collector's Edition because the music in this game is quite enjoyable. It was odd to hear a female voice actually singing (not any words, but singing nonetheless) but also very refreshing. The sound effects are also quite good (in addition to the voice overs as mentioned above). There is one funny thing though, when you play the soundtrack CD on the computer and look at the file info (through Media Player for example), the first track's artist section says "Blizzard.com" whilst the other tracks say "Knut Avenstroup Haugen" (the name of the guy who made the music for AoC, most likely including the first song). Somehow I don't think Blizzard.com made the first song and someone's been visiting rival MMO developer websites during development of AoC.

- Fonts. Yes the fonts are great. Clear, stylish, work well in different sizes, portray the world well, and so on. After you install AoC you also get a truetype font called Hyborian which you can use in Photoshop for example when you want to create your own Conan fan art, website or whatever.

- Funcom is updating their game. They really do want it to work. There are updates every 2 days (well, it's just the beginning, we'll see how well they keep it up) which might be annoying in a way because you have to download the newest patch always (I've downloaded an additional over 900mb now since installing) but they seem to fix issues that are annoying me. The newest patch added more familiar colors into the chat frame ("from other MMOs" in their words, which means "from WoW") and a few more tweaks. The chat still needs work (mainly the ability to customize channels better) but it's getting better. I doubt they'll get to fixing the more serious bugs in the game engine anytime soon though, and that's a letdown. More on those bugs below. At least they fixed a lot of the game since beta.

- Dying. Yes, dying. Because when you die you get resurrected at one of the checkpoints that you have to find for yourself. In an open (albeit slightly linear) world it works very well. You get a small debuff for 30 minutes but you can get rid of it by fighting your way back to where you died, assuming there are repops of course, and clicking on your tombstone that got left behind on death. Not everyone knows about this and they complain about the debuff on death but this is far better than paying for repair bills and being forced to run back to where you died. There is a downside though, and that's the fact that you can cleverly use dying as a means of quick travel too then. You get the debuff but it's not really that troublesome. Therefore I suggest making the debuff quite a lot more powerful. Another way of teleporting around, this time without even getting a death penalty, is by changing your instance. You can't pick the checkpoint you spawn at and it doesn't always spawn you on the closest one (I don't understand the mechanic in it really, I think it's bugged) but at least it gets you past repops of elite mobs after you've completed your quest and don't want to fight your way back through. Cheating or clever use of game mechanics, you decide. They won't ban anyone for it at least, although a change might be coming. Update: Instance changing has been fixed so that if you want to change instance you need to be within 5 meters of a resurrection point.

- Monster design is very nice. There are some very interesting designs and player characters are also fairly good, keeping in mind this is a low fantasy setting and thus strives a bit more towards realism. However, you don't have a lot of choice towards armor and thus classes at the same level tend to look similar to each other.

- Guild towns are a nice addition. Currently the areas mostly have just some foundations built for towns but the system is nice. You have instances of the world area (surprise surprise) and in each instance a guild can buy a certain area and build their town on it through vast amounts of minerals. That's why mineral veins are always empty though as I explain later. I'm eager to see the reality of how fun guild towns will be when people get them up and running fully and some guild warfare starts.

Bad points:

- It's not really an open world. First of all, everything is very linear. The first 20 levels are obviously meant to be like that but even when you get into the open world you're restricted to moving in a certain direction. There are maps and only a few exits for each map that have specific routes and loading screens between them. In addition to that, everything is instanced and you might not find your friend even though you're standing in the same place (so many people keep asking in chat about this, you have to actually change instances through a menu to get into the same one as your friend). It's like a linear RPG with servers for people to play together. The world itself is quite small too spread between around 8 adventure areas (where you kill enemies and level up with quests), 3 main towns (which vary in size a lot), 3 gathering areas (these are huge and boring with almost no enemies. they're meant for guild towns though so who knows if it'll be cooler later on), the dungeons (probably over 20 smaller instanced areas known as dungeons ranging from totally boring simple 1 texture caves to broken quests in broken dungeons to some OK designs) and Tortage itself where you start the game from. People like open areas more so I'd definitely go for a more open world experience. You can block progression easily with higher level monsters at the borders of new regions (those who REALLY want to see that region will try to find ways through, but even though it'll limit most people you'll want to give the player freedom). People seem to think the game only really begins when you get out of Tortage, I don't really get it because Tortage is a lovely zone. Leveling alts through it might not be as fun but at least there are 3-4 different general paths per culture/class, I forget which one it goes by. I don't really like the linear design though. What adds to the feel of this not being an MMO is the day/night cycle. Realtime is much better for these types of games. Now it's going at a 3x rate.

That's the entire world. You can only travel to the locations with icons and not really freely.

- Bigger bags cost a hell of a lot and the item tooltip doesn't even say how many slots you get.

- Items. I understand the desire to not end up with +34482 strength at the level cap but starting out from 0.1 is a bit awkward. It's clearer to have whole numbers so why not do that. Also, some items require a higher level than the one you currently have on and yet have the same stats. It's like they didn't create enough stat progression documents to describe exactly how much items are supposed to be worth at which level. These stat progression documents aren't shown to the player obviously (just like iLvl, item Level, isn't shown to players by default in WoW) but they are a very good basis to see what stats you should have on items. Every stat should have a value and each level item should have a max value. You could stick as many stats as you want on the item but they can't go over the max value of the item level.

- The 3 main towns after Tortage are pretty terrible. Tortage as a starting zone is obviously built to be perfect all around which it mostly it without any half-assed graphical areas, but then you get into the real world and start finding where slacking came into play. The Stygian town of Khemi is absolutely terrible. Old Tarantia could look a lot better too with some better use of colors and textures, not to mention overall aesthetic design. Conarch village is a village, not much to it. The 2 settlements apart from Conarch have a good flow, meaning you get from place to place well. But Conarch is too linear and makes you run a bit too much. Sort of like Darnassus in WoW but even there the design is nowhere as linear as any given town area in AoC.

- System requirements to get decent graphics. I had to upgrade to 4 gigs of RAM to not go through loading hell each time I entered a town, but that was because of the high requirements for Vista x64. The graphics are sweet if you have everything on full, if you have everything on low.. I don't know how you could enjoy this game. I'm not one to hail graphics over gameplay but the gameplay here is a bit iffy overall. I liked the route Blizzard took with WoW once again where they conciously decided to cater to a wider market. WoW STILL looks amazing. But I'm not whining, AoC runs fine on my system even though it's got Vista. It's just a design decision and I think Unreal Engine 3 looks a lot better than AoC and runs at much smoother framerates due to excellent optimization.

- Inconsistent design. Keaira or Keira? One of the lead characters' names was spelt differently in two places in the game's printed documentation. OK you might not think it's a big deal and it usually isn't but it's one of the main characters and things like this ring warning bells for me. Why? Because if something like this isn't settled among the team so well that everyone has it burned into their mind then how will the other areas be? And my fear proved correct, the inconsistency issues are found throughout the game. Graphics varying from extremely beautiful to Everquest 1 quality. The production values are nowhere near the quality of Nintendo games or, obvious comparison for a lot of people, WoW for example.

Some areas are simply lacking in every way.

- User Interface. It's not very good. The health bars and maps are good enough but setting up buttons isn't very good (for example, if you assign the "3" key to a spell that was set to the "F" key and then try to set another spell to the "F" key it won't let you until you press Apply to set the previous change and thus get rid of the F key being bound before) although that can be fixed, setting up chat windows isn't good (there was a chat patch that helped a bit), you can't move around objects enough, some buffs are shown in different places (top middle and bottom left) whilst all debuffs are bottom left (they're too far apart), groups can't be managed well, guilds can't be managed well, and so on. There will be mods and changes will come to the management issues but with another famous MMO out that shows you exactly how you can do it well, I find it odd they wanted to reinvent the wheel and while doing so forget to implement some features altogether. We have yet to figure out how to make a raid group too. A GM said "I don't know, try to make groups of 6 and then the leaders of each group invite each other"... difficult much? Also at level 40 my Guardian got 2 extra attack directions (lower left and right) as do some other classes, and it completely messed up my previous settings on its own by removing my buttons configurations on the spots where it wanted to set its own new buttons. In addition to that the control configuration window's button numbers don't correspond to their locations anymore on the action bars. This isn't a bug either, it's just a very twisted and overly complicated way of going about the issue of having new general attacks.

- Combos and Abilities don't have enough information. This ties in with the above point. Things aren't clear enough in general. You get a new Combo when you level up and start wondering how you're supposed to use it when the tooltip says almost the exact same thing as that other Combo you just got as well and no numbers for damage are anywhere in sight. So you have to test it out yourself.. for ages. Because these things don't just become clear magically with one test. There is also a lack of general terminology, which should be vital to games of these sizes (read: MMOs). What I mean is, some Combos have tooltips saying stuff about killing wild hogs or whatever when in fact the Combo has nothing to do with wild hogs, it's just trying to be closer to lore, the Combo works on any monster. They should be more to-the-point.

- Icons. I'm talking about the small square graphics used for combos, abilities and spells. They look good mostly but they're not very well spread out per class. There are lots of different color schemes to them but it would make a lot more sense to mix colors within a class so that the icons don't end up looking like each other. In this case they've tried to make it consistent so you feel like the icons all belong to the class you're playing. WoW already proved that it's not needed (for example Shamans having Earth, Frost and Flame Shock spells that are all very different in color but mildly similar in design). What happens in AoC is that it takes an unnecessarily long amount of time to get used to your spells and you can't keep track of them as well. Use the same type of design for similar effect spells (like categorised self-buffs that you can only have 1 of at a time out of 3 for example) but not the same color, use varying types of angles for the pictures in the icons and not just "a person shouting" in different colors even if drawn a bit differently. Icons should also have very clear lines and not try to be too artistic with oil paintings or something like some seem to be in AoC.

- Stable servers compared to WoW on release? That's what the people are saying at least. But what they don't seem to understand is WoW is an open world only restricted by realms. There are no loading times and instances are only there to limit mob tagging by other groups and to enforce cooldown on the possibility of good loot. Of course AoC is more stable, it's like playing a game of Battlefield 2 (technically speaking).

- Very buggy engine. I'm talking about stuff such as:

.. You can walk through rocks at numerous locations where a level designer forgot to turn on clipping for the static mesh. These aren't small stones, I'm talking about huge rocks that you're supposed to walk on to reach another location.

.. Textures and NPCs not loading fast enough (this was an issue in WoW too and isn't necessarily a bug though). Some better algorithms for loading in range characters could be worked on.

.. Characters and terrain lighting changing from very dark to very light in one flick when you move a bit in some direction.

.. Nighttime being so dark you have to turn off all the lights in the room you're playing in. This is a bug because when you go into your Video Settings and switch your Shadow Resolution to something else than what you currently have it at, all of a sudden you get moonlight in the game. However, this disappears again after a while and everything becomes very dark. It's playable but a lot harder than needed and many people complain about night being too dark.

.. Shadow "stripes" across the land sometimes. It's like the whole world turns into a zebra, half bright half dark. Tends to happen only in certain zones and it doesn't exactly cover ALL the land, some parts are left out as if the stripes just end in a straight line. It tends to happen when you get on your mount in those areas. Probably something to do with the lighting changing sometimes too.

.. Overall artistic design is nice in some parts (Tortage ofcourse because it's the starting zone, although the sprite leaves of the trees look odd when you look up at them and turn around) but it's not consistent and thus some other parts look like they're glued together from unmatching components. Sometimes textures bug in the terrain too like in the second picture below.

Regular in-game screenshot.

Custom highlight/shadow filter applied to show how much the trees differ from their surrounding color palette.

A simple edit showing roughly how it should look like.

.. Females' breasts jumping around sometimes during cut-scenes. For a game where you can set your bust size, it's sure odd they didn't focus on cut-scene breast design!

.. Quest and instance bugs. Running through doors that are supposed to be locked but have no clipping, falling through the world and dying, quests chains only progressing partly but then you get stuck, etc. Some quests don't work at all.

.. King Conan is the main character in this game (wouldn't you have guessed!). His castle's door is labeled conans_castle_zonedoor when your mouse is over it (which is obviously similar to the doodad tag in WoW, meaning temporary). The NPC in front of his room has a quest for you but you can't talk to him and probably that's why you can't go in to see Conan. Once again, this is the main character in the game we're dealing with.

.. Problems in NPC conversation scripts where you could end up in loops that amount to nothing. These are easily fixable but nothing they'll consider priority for now. There aren't too many though. QA and level designers/quest designers/scripters should be more careful.

.. I got a debuff once that had the following effect: "movement speed reduced by 35% for 15 seconds". Problem was that it never counted down the seconds. I hadn't disconnected either because I could fight monsters and other people were running around the place (and not just in straight lines). And after a minute or two the game caused a BSOD and my computer rebooted itself.

.. NPCs turn to face in some other direction during cut-scenes making them look like they're not really talking to you.

.. Other players (or your own minion) standing between you and an NPC during cut-scenes so you don't see the NPC. This is easily changed by simply removing all other player characters during cut-scenes. Funcom chose to do character conversations in a more traditional adventure game manner than WoW which has simply windows with text and you click "OK" and the quest is yours, so therefore they need to consider the pros and cons of such a decision.

.. Having the camera point to an NPCs crotch during cut-scenes, or other weird place. I don't know how their system works but focusing the camera always on the NPCs face wouldn't hurt in addition to the above point so that NPCs don't turn to face other players that start talking to them for some reason. Sometimes NPCs move around a bit, for example you start the conversation when the NPC is sitting down and then she stands up during the talk, the camera never follows and suddenly you're left looking at someone's chest. With bugged breasts jumping all over the place.

.. The characters' technical side of the animations are also terrible and interpolation once again doesn't work well. You can see problems in animation when you get off the boat in the beginning of the game and Kalanthes comes to greet you and gets down on one knee. He flips from his standing animation to his kneeling animation in 1 frame without anything happening in between often (not always, but the animation is still quite bad). The animations themself are OK but for example trying to jump up a hill makes your jump animation bug at times so you get stuck in the falling frames for a few seconds while on the ground already.

.. Almost every single NPC you talk to has texture overlapping issues. Mostly due to clothes/gear not sitting on them very well. Clothing/gear also causes problems with your character. Sometimes my Herald of Xotli loses her hair after transforming back from the demon form and with certain chest + legs combinations of armor she loses the upper parts of her thighs due to the texture not loading for the pants. Possibly because the chest item is considered a dress and usually in those you don't see legs, but some of them are shorter and the legs get chopped off maybe because of some animation or mesh overlapping that might occur with longer dresses.

Long hair is gone and parts of legs missing.

.. Collision detection. It's a good and bad thing. With collision combined with NPCs loading on your screen late, it's not very easy to use autorun to go through areas because you get stuck in invisible people. However, they have put thought in NPC patrol routes so that if you're standing on one and an NPC comes towards you, it'll pass through you. This prevents two things, 1. you won't be pushed aside and into any problematic areas and 2. pathing won't get messed up because the AI doesn't understand where it is anymore (if it's not done right). Or then like some idiots tend to do on PvP servers, completely block a resurrection point with mounts so resurrected people can't move away while others gank them. They could remove clipping from your character after resurrecting by adding it to the resurrect or game join buff you get that gives a limited invulnerability. This is another example just copied from WoW (no honor gain when zoning) but not implemented fully. But I don't know, maybe it's meant to be like that and that's why I hate PvP. I wish there was a more sensible PvP mechanic (like the one explained in my post about the next big thing).

.. You can swim up waterfalls. Oh and swimming in general. You can't press "jump" to move up, you have to aim up which sucks. But then again there aren't any underwater fights so you don't really spend a lot of time there. There are however underwater pickups and it's hard to target those with the water making such an odd wave motion it's hard for you to keep up with the item with your mouse. In all honesty though I haven't really seen any good underwater systems. God of War's way simplifies it a lot but also makes underwater navigation easy. Super Mario Galaxy absolutely sucks at underwater sequences. I think it'll only work after you are given a tight control scheme like WoW and a true 3D perspective (like 3D glasses) so you can judge distances. It's a lot easier to judge distances on ground than in the air or swimming without true 3D.

.. You get stuck on obstacles. Your character just stops and doesn't keep running (hopefully to get past it by sliding a bit). Also, try running into a wall. You either start sliding very fast to the left or right. OK, it's not that big an issue but wait till you get out into the wilderness and climb up a mountain, then on the path up there's some weird little edge in the terrain and your character goes running off the cliff. Oh, the game does have a mechanic that stops you if you're running directly down off some jagged terrain, although I'm not 100% sure if it's a mechanic or a bug again, but it doesn't always work. So down you go and you die. The fall mechanic itself is quite OK, if you fall from a slightly high place you move at a slower pace for a few seconds until recovering from the fall (although you do get the cripple debuff a bit too easily and it lasts too long from smaller drops). It's like you hurt your leg, which is quite cool. But fall from too high and you die. And this fall height is fairly realistic, so don't go thinking this is WoW again.

.. You can't see people in your group on the minimap. Through a recent patch sometimes you see single people as blue markers but other times you don't see anyone because it seems they're too far away (which should be exactly the reason why you want to see them anyway to know where they are!). Apparently your team mates also disappear if they're on the map on top of an area marked for a quest with the circle.

.. Sometimes the camera continues moving in some direction even though you're not moving the mouse but still have the left mouse button pressed.

Lots of things like this break complete immersion. I realize MMOs never really have problem-free launches but this isn't a server issue, this was fixable before it went live and there are way too many bugs for even fanboys to try and justify it (oh they do try) with "launch turbulence". Maybe Eidos pushed to hard for a release. Why not take note of how other MMOs do it right?

Water looks nice in some parts..

..but not in others.

- Gathering professions suck. The mechanic is so that you have mineral nodes (such as a tree or some rocks) and they replenish themselves over time. There are two problems in this: 1. the nodes don't change place this way and thus 2. the nodes are always empty because people farm them to death. WoW's mechanic of having random nodes pop up around various maps was and is much better. You need to gather only 1 type of mineral in the beginning to get the profession itself. At least you can get all the gathering professions in the game. Just one primary job (or whatever it's called) at level 50 though.

- After level 40 you get a mount (if you pre-ordered or have enough gold, 1g for skill, 2g for mount, and at level 40 you have around 40 silver usually which makes the currency a bit odd at first). The rhino I got from pre-ordering is useless. I would think it should move at least a bit faster than running on foot, but no. It even uses up the same stamina you do while running and thus you can't run very long with it. I know they're making the mounts different but isn't the main point of getting a mount later in an MMO to make travel faster?

- Money. Gold, Silver, Copper and Tin. The only reason to have Tin in the equation is to make Gold even more valuable (which was the case in real life back in the day). At level 40 people generally have 40 silver, as stated above, but that's roughly the same % ratio you would have in WoW at level 40 compared to what the mount costs there. The problem is HOW you get the money. Farming instances. This just seems dumb. The best way is to level past the instance level and farm the bosses for silver solo. The whole value of money is a bit off too, there's not enough income change when you level up.

- Instances/dungeons. Apart from the whole world being instanced, there are also different types of dungeons. Public and private. Public meaning it's just like the area you entered from, open for everyone. Private is your own instance that you can enter alone or with a group. The thing is that some of these have normal monsters and as such as soloable (weird concept but something I was long wanting for WoW as well) but then there are those with elite monsters (that is unless you chose the elite version for the soloable instance).. it all gets quite confusing. The quests are marked with an icon with 3 people next to each other referring to it being a group quest which still doesn't clarify if it's for a dungeon or in the game world itself, apart from the subcategory where the quest is. But that's not always accurate either and I've had quests show up in the wrong instance tab. The quest log is messy, you don't even see which quest you have completed other than by clicking on it and seeing what your next objective is (I guess their logic is that since you haven't gone and returned it yet to the NPC that gave it, it's not completed). The quest log has a map too which is a good idea and as said somewhere above showing your quest goals on the maps is a good idea but sometimes that doesn't work either and there's nothing really where the X points to.

- Moving between places is a bit boring and slow. With the linear worlds it's not really an option either. You go in one of two directions and that's that. Mount doesn't really help.

- Low fantasy. It's not a bad route to take and some find it interesting but low fantasy mostly doesn't interest me. There's some debate over the distinction between low and high/epic fantasy but I find AoC's world more closer to the term "realistic" than WoW or Warhammer Online due to close to real-world environments and the clear lack of non-human player classes. Obviously there are monsters in the wilderness and supernatural things going on but that's why it's still fantasy. Anyway, the Conan world isn't the most interesting environment for many people and not having distinct sides for PvP takes out the drive to kill the other team members a bit in a lore sense. In WoW you have the horde and alliance and you can always go after "that annoying cow/gnome!", but here you're all human.

- Huge install. At around 24gb of data (and requiring more during gameplay) you need quite a bit of space for the game. With 500gb HDDs costing 75 euros it's not that big a deal but it's still a huge amount of information and comes on 2 DVDs. I guess there's a lot of high quality textures not to mention the speech and music. The world itself doesn't feel that big compared to WoW but that's not a fact, just a gut feeling.

- 15 euros a month for something that doesn't feel like an MMO is too much for me to continue past the first free month. At least for this. WoW is 13 with VAT so what's the big deal, I know they don't NEED 15 euros a month to keep developing AoC.

The game seems fun in it's own way but it's buggy as hell and inconsistent. Production values aren't very high and it's lacking a finesse. The world is as interesting as a low fantasy setting with Conan could be. But I'll have to keep playing to see how it works out in the end. It just seems too linear and not like a real MMO.

I know that comparing to WoW now isn't smart since one of the games has been out for 3 years whilst the other is 3 days. However, I've always looked at things from a design perspective, being more critical towards games, and I will say with complete confidence that apart from server issues (in which these 2 games cannot be compared anyway due to technological differences) WoW was much more stable and bug-free on release. Sure it had its flaws just like any game of that magnitude but it never felt like you just wanted to go "awww come on!" when you realized you couldn't climb a flight of stairs because every time you got to the top you fell through them back to the bottom. Polish is what AoC is lacking and it seems like they should focus more on having a professional lead designer and lead producer working on the job, 1 person per job, instead of people here and there making their own design decisions and implementing them without a lot of testing. Or maybe the lead designer and producer should do their job (harsh, I know). Don't blame the QA guys for all this, it's not just bugs. Maybe the development tools weren't that great or the makers of the tools didn't give enough tutorials, who knows. I hear HeroEngine was used, to what extent though, no idea. Can't really get into too much detail in this area since it's all speculation when you don't actually work for Funcom.

Some more interesting AoC adventures:
AoC Screen 1 - Sounds like you're walking on water here.
AoC Screen 2 - Swimming in air.
AoC Screen 3 - Climbing in air.
AoC Screen 4 - Zooming into your character.
AoC Screen 5 - A dungeon that looks like it was made by some amateur fan.
AoC Screen 6 - The entrance to a dungeon. You can't get much more insignificant than this.
AoC Screen 7 - The striped shadows bug. Notice how it ends at the top right in the mountains as if stopping into a wall.
AoC Screen 8 - A secret passage in a dungeon consists of a vine on a wall that can be climbed, which leads to nowhere and then causes you to fall through the world and die.

I doubt AoC will manage to keep too many subscribers because after you've seen it for a few weeks it gets a bit boring. There are still people praising AoC on OOC chat (general channel) but they're around level 15, so I think many of them will drop out later. Fun game for a while if you can look past the insane amount of bugs and linear world. And yes, WoW has been out longer but AoC came out NOW, why not take notice of what they did right and use that instead of leaving things like they were during the stone age of MMOs. The reason AoC has sold this many copies in the first place is definitely not because it's about Conan, but more likely because of the first time MMO players from WoW that want to try another MMO.

I think I'll go check out what mah cousin Roman is up to.

Update: Here's some end-game experiences from the known guild Nightmares Asylum who have been playing AoC recently, trying to get some raid content down.

Fura writes on AoC forums:

AT the moment there is 4 zones that is considered raiding zones.

Vistrix Lair - Dragon Encounter - Seriously bugged - Zone Crashes after a period of Time - Dragon can be next to the raid and just disappear - Dragon can just run off at any time and reset - Trash mobs just reset at any time they wish. No loots drop - no quest items will drop either - its totally unplayable

Yakhmars Cavern - Worm Boss - Zone Crashes very often - Mob can be next to you and just disappear - loots flash on screen for a second and then disappear - no quest items drop to complete quests - Encounter can be exploited.

Kykilys Lair - Mobs frequently bug out once pulled and return to full hp or just run back to their spawn points - zone frequently crashes. You can get the mobs to fight each other and semi-exploit the place.

Black Citadel - 1st Boss bugs out on second stage of the fight not allowing any advancement into the place.

The most annoying bug in the world is raid members crashing which they most frequently do and then the raid and their guild does not show up until about 30-40 mins later once that happens they auto disconnect.

Raid formations is just plain stupid and a leader cannot move any people in the raid around in groups.

raids dont even end up in the same zone instance most of the times.

So the citys are not working, the pvp system is not working, the hi end raids are most defiantly not working, the ui way off from being finished, there are serious game breaking bugs still in this game and I feel that its even worse than most betas out there. and were paying for this.....? Shouldn't there be some kind of law preventing them from false advertising a game as they were boasting about high end raiding, massive pvp, great crafting etc... and none of its in the game. isn't this false advertising or something?

I cancelled my subscription already and have been doing casual AV in WoW again. PvP is so much more fun there even with all the whiners.

Assassin's Creed

2008-05-21T17:24:00.006+03:00

I was suspicious about this one when I first heard it was coming out on the PS3. When it was released I heard the game was buggy as hell and I believed they tried too hard to get the animation to work well in crowds and it ended up being choppy. That was from a demo trailer of the game some time before release. As it later turned out they had fixed the animation problems.

Anyway, what finally made me decide to pick this game up was reading a few posts by a programmer that frequents a forum I joined who seemed to be a cocky know-it-all :) He made some good points though in some posts (not all) and someone said he's a good programmer so I decided to find out who the guy was. Apparently he worked as a programmer for Assassin's Creed (AC). So I was at the local Gamestop and decided to pick up the PC version ("Director's Cut") just to try it out.

First of all, I have the XBOX360 Controller for Windows and prefer to use that on console ports like Bioshock because it's an awesome controller and a keyboard/mouse combo lacks 2 features it has: rumble and analog sticks to precisely control character movement speeds. So I didn't really experience the troubles of getting a good configuration for the keyboard/mouse like some players are reporting. Secondly, I run a Windows Vista x64 system which supposedly isn't even supported in the out-of-the-box version of AC. After hearing about all the bugs and problems people had with the game crashing I guess I'm lucky or something but the game has worked perfectly, in DirectX 10 mode, from the beginning.

The game itself looks amazing. The animation is absolutely fantastic. Altair moves around extremely realistically, feet sticking to the ground. He doesn't slide around almost at all (you notice a bit of sliding when increasing your speed by slowly tilting the thumbstick, but you can't do that on a keyboard). His animations are near perfectly interpolated and everything is very smooth and yet responsive. The control scheme is fun too, with Y controlling the upper body, X and B the arms and A the feet. Pressing RT changes your moveset which is a fun idea and great to control on the pad. Running around and jumping from rooftop to rooftop is great fun with RT + A pressed. It's a simple system that doesn't require a lot of user feedback. You have to steer a bit but you're not forced to press jump always when there's a gap. This is a great example of a working mechanic that's far from complex but still provides hours of fun. I think the fun comes from the amazing animations and graphics combined with the player having enough to worry about already with the guards around and seeing where to aim next. You feel like you're floating along the rooftops with Altair.

What's even more amazing is the animation of the horse you can ride around with. Animals are hard to get right partly because you can't exactly motion capture them, at least not easily. Zelda does the horse animations quite well (Twilight Princess is great on the wolf too) but this one has a certain finesse and realism. Turning 180 degrees when standing still looks great and works well.

The story is quite alright but some people might be put off by the whole Desmond overlaying bit but I didn't mind too much. I guess if you want to set a game in some year in the past it might be good to focus on that time completely and not bring in any weird plot twists like that but it's been done before, although a bit differently. For example the first 2/3 of Half-Life being against soldiers and the rest on an alien planet, or Uncharted for example. It's good to change things around somewhat but some people prefer realism over sci-fi and they won't finish the game then because they don't care about the alien planet. AC's story is a bit like that, it's a bit risky but most won't mind.

The dialogue at times is extremely dumb. Altair's VO is pretty bad and seems like he tries too hard to sound like a cool assassin or something. It's not like the script helps either, because every line Altair says is arrogant and stupid. The modern day accent I understand because it's related to how the Animus works but I'm pretty sure the Animus' job isn't to create crap acting. However, some of the things the ordinary people on the streets talk about is done quite well. The beggar women that come up to you to ask for a few coins are well done. Altair and some (not all) of the conversations he has with others is childish and dumb again but nothing compared to Heavenly Sword.

Technically it's pretty great apart from the bugs people have been talking about. I haven't had any though but I hope the newer patches fix them for those people who have them. The gameplay itself is also very fun.. but only up to a point. See, here's the problem, the game world itself starts repeating itself quite a bit. This has been talked about a lot and I'll try to focus on how to fix it.

First of all, there seem to be enough interesting moves and things to do at first but first it gets repetitive and then it gets boring. The stories for people who need to be assassinated are quite interesting and cool but the locations are bland and the way you get to the assassination itself begins to get annoying. It was fun to find the highest points to survey the area at first but it's done too often. Reduce the number of towers by half at least and make them cover a bigger area.

Also, finding information is boring. These could work as side-quests that you could do if you wanted to further enhance your character. Perhaps give Altair more health (as opposed to getting ranks back by completing assassinations). Currently the Templars and collecting Flags is useless because you don't get anything from them. Ever heard of concept art galleries or "making of.." videos? The only thing Altair can collect is daggers by pick-pocketing, which is a good mechanic because 5 daggers is the maximum you can carry and since they're quite deadly more than that would be overkill. I could've lived with 3 daggers even.

What the game needs is more variables. As partly stated above, losing all your ranks and getting them back one by one after completing missions is a bit too straight-forward. A better solution would have been to include a few real missions based on the tasks in the investigations before each assassination. What I mean is something that's been scripted out before-hand and each with their short story and cut-scenes. Something that changes more. Maybe even take away some of the regular investigations because there are too many of them now and you only need 2-3. The PC version obviously got some more added because people complained but it was the easy solution. Although not having the "roof running" bits in the console versions was odd in my opinion since a guy with the parkour talents of Altair needs to run on rooftops. I thought it was a given when first hearing about the game.

The guards still remain a mystery to me. Some of them get angry at you for weird reasons and it was hard at first to understand what I was "allowed" to do and what not. But once you get into the game you start understanding how they work and you learn to escape from a bunch of them easily. Having the guards in 3 poses, each determing a different type of awareness, is a fairly good idea because you have to keep your eyes open too. There are a few problems still though that strike me as odd, why do city gates need to have guards that don't let you in unless going with scholars and why do guards in the kingdom area attack you no matter what you do. I'm sure it's some important plot thing but gameplay-wise it was quite annoying. And if you attack the final assassination target in some town, you can't lose the alert level anymore before killing the target. I also don't get why there isn't a sneak option or why when moving your analog stick a bit doesn't cause Altair to first start out sneaking. It feels odd to just walk behind a guard to assassinate them quietly. Too many moves maybe? And obviously you can't pull off something like that on the keyboard without yet again an extra button.

What about the game world itself? There's a central hub called the kingdom and 4 towns. The idea of your memory opening the routes to new areas is quite nice. But everything looks the same. Someone argued that it's not like everything looked different with fire mountains and icey lakes during 1911 AD around Jerusalem, but that's where the line between realism and gaming comes into play. You need change. You cannot have the same town printed 4 times and call it a day. There are differences obviously but they're definitely not big enough. A casual player won't even notice them. One way to create more meaningful environments is landmarks. Look at GTAIV and how they did it. It's all very realistic but also each island has a very distinct overall feel. AC is a more serious game than GTAIV obviously but it's still a game. Maybe add fog in one of the towns or emphasize the poor and rich districts better. Currently there's not enough to seperate them. And finally, don't use the same types of structures. Yes, I know there weren't any McDonalds' or Empire State Buildings but once again, it's a game. Make an important lake, add some fishermen, the doctor assassination was a great idea but the theme of the hospital should've been used more. So what if hospitals (or "care houses", whatever they were) were small buildings, elaborate on the idea a bit to create diversity for the player. What makes the towns seem even more boring is the fact that you simply open up new areas in them as the game goes on and they don't differ enough.

Then there's the hub called the kingdom which is mentioned above. It's a good hub basically but a bit too linear. The problem again is you don't have anything to do there except ride to your next town. If there were more RPG elements you could buy different armor for Altair or earn money by killing, maybe the investigations could earn you some money too or even experience. Later on in the game you get to teleport from place to place so you don't ever have to use the horse again. I just find it silly but at least there is a teleport option because the design of the game doesn't make it very fun to travel between any areas. The towns only have 1 entrance (although they have various exits) and the linearity and lack of things to do kills the free-roaming spirit you have when playing other games with sandbox type worlds.

AC is a cool game but flawed by dumb design decisions, some of them quite unbelievable (exiting the game without pressing Alt-F4). But maybe it was fixed in a patch, I don't know. The only drive I have to even open up this game anymore is to show my friends how fun it is to run on rooftops and how cool it looks. Gameplay is boring but they probably got so far in the development cycle fine-tuning the crowd mechanics and animations that they ran out of time to create an actual game. But I hear it's a trilogy so maybe the other parts will be better! Here's hoping because AC is a great game flawed by not enough change.

The Next Big Thing

2008-05-21T12:43:00.012+03:00

I was showing my father GTAIV a week ago and he looked at it and asked "What's next? What's a better game than this?". So I got to thinking what the next best thing could be and it proved hard. Now after a while of getting used to GTAIV and getting over the "new" factor I think I can answer the question better.

When GTAIV came out it seemed like it was a culmination of everything a game was supposed to be, at least for me. A sandbox realistic world with a great story. So what could possibly be better? Well, for one, I've been playing World of Warcraft since release and it holds part of the answer. MMO. Bioware are working on something fairly secret still at this point and it looks to be an MMO. If it is then Bioware is the one that might actually get it right as opposed to all these other attempts at beating or even rivalling (or even getting close to) WoW. You need a company with a strong background of successful triple-A over 90/100 rated games. There's also the APB game license that's been flung around a bit lately but who knows what'll come of that. It's not a secret developers are looking into an MMO GTA clone.

So what do we need for the next best thing?

- MMO. It's the future (and present) of gaming. You'll be able to play any game online with friends or just stay in offline mode and play alone. You don't need the RPG elements for it to be an MMO although people usually like making their character better. However the problem with MMOs is that without severe instancing every action you see others do is around 3 seconds late. You can't have very accurate 80 player counter strike matches.. yet.

- Realistic world. The fantasy setting has been done to death. There's been enough futuristic worlds too. So what about an MMO set in 2010, or somewhere around it. There could be 2 sides, basically the good guys (Order) and bad guys (Underworld). You could choose to play an officer of the law (later levels to mayor or general of war, etc.) or a criminal (later levels to a drug overlord/kingpin or dictator, etc.) or something else. 2 sides, a few basic classes per side and a few expertise branches per class. Not too many to make PvP balancing a living hell though. But those can always be made to work with enough pre-planning of making limits for damage output, etc. What would be cooler than driving your car around town like in GTAIV but seeing that all the other cars are actual players. You could phone your friend up and go meet them at a cafe sponsored by some real world brand like Starbucks or Robert's Coffee. The players who chose law enforcement would get experience from taking care of those who decide to break the law and those who break the law get experience from successful heists. If the criminal manages to evade being seen by the police players for 30 seconds their character skin turns into something else and they can just walk past the police portraying the effect that they don't know who he is and where he went.

- A touch of the paranormal. Something that hasn't been done in MMOs before either is horror. Sure there's Duskwood in WoW but it's not exactly horror although it's a fairly moody/spooky place. What I mean is that it would be boring to fight simple thugs and officers all the time. We need some corn fields or mansions as instances that have weird monsters in them. This is a touchy area because it has to be done right for it to work. You can't go overboard but too much realism in the world shys away some people (like Age of Conan and Assassin's Creed). Maybe even make it possible to start a character of a third side (in addition to Order and Underworld) after you've reached level 50 for example, and this character would be a member of the Paranormal faction. It's like a special character that dedicated players play. If the paranormal vs. realism factor is implemented well then this character could be created when starting the game already.

- Public Quests. This is being done in Warhammer Online and it's a great idea sort of like what I explained above. You might see 3 cops running after a burglar and you decide to help by tripping the burglar. You get a share of the experience points and thus took part in their "quest" without even clicking to accept it or read through any quest text.

- Mercenaries and the ability to program them. A mercenary is an NPC for hire that you can buy for a certain time interval and use to help you. There has to be some form of penalty (like -50% experience) to using it because in an MMO the player should be encouraged to play with others, however with my vision of all games supporting multiplayer in the future it wouldn't really matter if you play with mercenaries or other players as much. Anyway, you would be able to use simple click and drag actions to "program" the mercenary to do things you want, sort of like the Gambit system in Final Fantasy XII. Comparing to current MMOs, this way you'd have a healer and tank for quests if you can't find any at that time.

- Mods built by other companies as little add-ons/expansions. Rarely do games allow other companies to cash in on their success directly with their own expansions. Well, for obvious reasons yes, but what about allowing expansions that come up as downloadable content. Take for example a clothing store in the game world. You walk inside and get a prompt asking if you want to buy the expansion (the shop). Your credit card is billed (after some password/code checks just like when setting your account subscription) and you walk inside the store. X% of the money goes to the company that made the clothing store in the game (real life brand Adidas for example) and Y% goes to the developer of the game as royalties. Now your character can buy real brand clothes (with in-game money this time) and the store will always be open to them. Or maybe you can always walk into the store and your credit card is billed only after you buy clothes. Cafes could provide special buffs agreed upon by the developer and 3rd party expansion creator. The developer could even make a list of possible character enhancements they allow others to use as to not let others completely mix up the game with their wild buffs. Maybe Mercedes Benz doesn't want their cars to be wrecked in a game so it might be better to focus on only games developers making 3rd party add-ons without real licenses. Maybe Nike wants to add their sports shoes anyway.

- RPG or not. RPGs tend to have longer life spans because of the fact that you can almost always make your character even a little bit better and because of the emotional attachment to your character. In the past RPGs were thought of being more towards the hardcore gamer crowd but numerous japanese console RPGs and obviously World of Warcraft have proved otherwise and nobody feels intimidated after hearing a game is an RPG. With an RPG tag a game obviously requires a lot more tweaking to make everything work well together. Level caps and how long it takes to level is another issue though and people with more time will obviously level faster but the casual players need to feel like the game is for them too.

- Customized buildings. Obviously not everyone can have their own house because of the lack of true architects in the playerbase (the game world would lose its look because of all the random houses around, even if players were given pre-defined blocks to build from) as well as lack of space and other technical limitations. The technical limitations will be lifted in the future no doubt but destroying the look of the world is still quite a problem. Guild housing can be handled through an instance portal but that kind of defeats the idea of having a distinctive area. What about architects? A player could prove their skill in building aesthetically pleasing structures and complete a test in an architect bureau inside a game and an authorized GM would judge it and give the player an architect pass if he sees fit. These players can design houses for other players and a house limit could be set for certain areas in the game world. The houses could also cost a high amount so as to limit them, or only build a house for a month and have a house cap in the world. There are lots of options how to do it. Yes, it's a radical idea but if done right it could be immensely fun and the architect idea limits house builders and helps keep the game theme sensible still. There are some truly amazing fan made Unreal Tournament 3 levels out there. Then there's the thing that houses don't exactly add to gameplay in a traditional MMO because what would you gain from it? A "well rested" buff that increases happiness by 5 for 1 hour? Housing is more of a virtual world idea like Habbo Hotel or Second Life where you don't necessarily play but live a virtual life. But in a GTAIV:MMO type game criminals could rob houses and house-owners could set up security measures or call the police who are having a snack in a nearby Dunkin' Donuts.

- Gangs/corporations (guilds) and gang wars. You could arrange a deal where one party brings 1 million in game currency and the other party brings a rare diamond (that gives a +100 strength buff to any gang member in range) they stole from some museum. If you want to do this without the authorities finding out (police players can scroll through all real world regular transactions and find out about illegal trades) you have to agree on a meeting in a dark alley and not use the regular trade window but instead both players put the item on the ground and someone from the other gang picks it up. What if one gang tricks the other by then picking up both items. An all out war would start and killing the player with the dropped loot would cause them to drop it unless they manage to stay out of combat for 5 minutes. Something like this could create endless fun scenarios by having gangs check for places where they could do these illegal trades at night, finding good vantage points for their snipers, etc. And what if the police find out about it and go bug the area when the criminals aren't there yet? What if there's a snitch that tells the police about the meeting if they pay him 10,000 game currency. The police will want this information because they get a big experience boost (or items) from stopping such a high profile trade.

- Gang/corporation stability. A big problem in many MMOs is that members switch from guild to guild because there's no real reason to stay other than the people and possible progress/success in defeating game content. So what if we had these sorts of professions that only could be learned while in a gang/corporation and if you leave you lose it? For example something that makes your character better or makes earning money easier. People wouldn't want to quit guilds either. The only problem would be if the gang leader wanted to disband the gang. Certain incentives to not do that would have to be implemented, for example the gang leader gets more and more powers and special garments through the mail the longer (s)he is the leader of a gang. If you leave the gang you lose all your benefits. This could include a unique T-Shirt with the words "BIG BADDIE" written on it or even a golden crown that increases movement speed. These "presents" would be better the more members (individual accounts) you have in your gang. This way big gang/corporation leaders would be feared and you would see them coming. Previous MMOs haven't rewarded leaders enough even though I know through personal experience that a successful guild's leader(s) has done exponentially more work to get the guild to that point than any other member.

- Modern day city professions. What I mean by this is not something like gathering simple leather to use in making a jacket, but working as a delivery man to pick up the cargo of leather from China and bringing it to retailers around the world, or learning the arts of parkour making it easier to get away from someone chasing you, or maybe learning to pilot a helicopter and giving rides to people for money because that's a damn fast way to travel in a city, or fisherman, or butcher for McDonalds, or whatever else that can be found in a modern world.

- Fair PvP. To limit the amount of ganking there would be ranks on people. Your name tag on top of your character shows your current state (through color for example). Killing innocent players (those significantly under your level or those fighting another enemy at 20% lower health than you or something) means you get marked as a killer and if someone kills you they get more PvP points from it and it takes a more time for you to resurrect with each death inside 1 hour without doing any damage to anyone (thus preventing friends farming PvP points together too), and if you take it too far you get a movement speed penalty and are not welcome in bars, cafes, etc. anymore and quest givers refuse to give you quests for 5 hours. You can also plead for mercy when marked as a killer but people can still kill you, however they get a mark for being a merciless killer (no debuff though). This type of system has a lot of potential to be developed into something great for those who shun away from PvP servers nowadays due to the group ganking, as proved partly by Ultima Online back in the day.

- In-game machinima tools. People LOVE their WoW movies. Sure you can record videos easily by using a tool like Fraps but what about the camera? You want control over your own masterpiece so why not implement a system like in EA's sports games where you can replay your own actions. For a massive game like an MMO you'll probably need a button to start "recording" the movements of you and those within a roughly 500 meter radius of you. After that you could look at the footage you got and rewind/forward it however you like while adding your own camera angles and simple titles/credits and finally making it into an avi file. For the more hardcore you could even go and import the resulting .avi files into a video editing software like Adobe Premiere or Sony Vegas and add some post-processing effects. How do you use this video then? You can upload it onto the in-game TV network in which other players can check out your videos in their appartments, bars or stores. People can vote on the videos and the top 50 are only kept for each week or something so that server capacity doesn't become an issue. Limitations can be set on the amount of videos in the service at one time or the size of a single video. These videos can span across every server/realm.

- In-game raid/PvP spectating. What does this mean, it means that if a group of people joined an instance you could click on the instance portal and follow their progress through the eyes of one of the players. This would be good for people waiting as reserves to join a guild (organisation/gang) raid. They could follow the action. Also for PvP, you could follow the game with a 10 second lag so as you couldn't give tips to the other side. These matches could be shown "live" (with the lag) on the TV channels in the world.

So what it really boils down to is that all signs are pointing towards a realistic modern day MMO. I'm guessing Bioware are making a futuristic MMO but who knows. It does look pretty certain they ARE making an MMO because of this quote found on the Hero Engine site:

Gordon Walton, Co-Studio Director of BioWare Austin wrote:

At BioWare we selected HeroEngine because it had the most sophisticated and complete development tools available for building an amazing online experience. Our team wanted a great rapid prototyping environment and to work with experienced MMO developers. HeroEngine from Simutronics is a perfect fit for BioWare Austin's requirements.

(Bioware Austin is going to be in the headlines a lot during 2009-2010, mark my words.)

I suspect it's not modern day though, and APB is a bit iffy. Or maybe this post was just about what I'd personally want to see and having the resources I'd bet on something like this definitely and go for it. However, MMOs tend to have long development times for obvious reasons and who knows what's happened after 3-4 years from now and what types of games have come out. Update: it seems like the Bioware MMO game might be Knight of The Old Republic 3, which would be a let-down.

If someone wants to fund a modern day city meets paranormal horror MMO project (that doesn't take itself TOO seriously) then I want to be a part of it.

Haze - bad reviews?

2008-05-21T01:43:00.006+03:00

It's not out yet so there's really very little need to whine about it as most haven't even played it. But..

How did the reviews end up giving it such low scores? Looking at metacritic currently the best score is a 65/100. There has to be something wrong with it then hasn't there?

I'm pissed off actually because I was hoping for something really fun to play. Sure, the nectar idea wasn't that fun at all and the story seemed mediocre even though I always go for story driven games, but I was hoping for Free Radical to do their job right like their track record shows. Ok, hell it was overhyped way too much (as written in my post about overhyping). The overhype stands out even more when you're not even advertising any new game mechanic or technology. Nectar isn't new enough.

I wanted something that played very well and had fun weapons. I wasn't expecting it to be the greatest FPS ever but it looked fun. The demo had some odd quirks to it like your own buddies running in front of you (AI apparently is a sad affair in the full game) and that guy in the aircraft who was dying taking 7 second pauses between sentences. If it was meant to portray that he was in bad shape then why didn't your character interfere by asking if he's alright and acting more worried. Oh yeah wait, the nectar makes you not care. I think it's just too far fetched.

Interesting that the guy you saw in almost all the Haze promo videos, Rob Yescombe, was also the lead writer and the story got a lot of flaming in the reviews. He seemed like the type of guy always that talked a lot but didn't necessarily know how to design for games. Ok I'm not trying to act like a dick, he's a cool guy but it just sucks for him advertising the game so much when his contribution seems to be taking a lot of the shit in reviews.

As for the comments about the graphics being sub-par.. I know it's running at a resolution of 1024 x 576 whilst being upscaled to 720p but I prefer framerate over a few pixels. The demo looked OK even though it wasn't exactly what I expected from the game. Obvious comparisons to Uncharted's jungles arise, Uncharted coming out clearly as a better looking game. But it wasn't BAD. So what was so bad about it that IGN decided the graphics were 4/10? Maybe if there were texture problems in the full game (like they seem to incline) I could understand, but the demo looked fine.

The game is out in a few days so why not pick it up and try it out yourself. I don't get the flaming, and I still think this is all a plot by evil corporate monkeys to see how many copies an overhyped game will sell even after it gets bad reviews. I REALLY wanted this game to be good, hence this post. The thing is I'm not too sure I want to spend 70 euros for it now if it really is that bad. Maybe I'll wait a bit for a few more reviews. It's a sad day.

At least the PS3 is getting Killzone 2 and Resistance 2 in the far future. Metal Gear Solid 4 is closer up though.

Inside Epic

2008-05-14T22:49:00.005+03:00

Epic Games. Here's a great video of The Escapist getting a visit to Epic HQ and interviewing the Cliffmeister.

The thing is, I realized I watch these kinds of videos a lot. I read through anything and everything about this industry daily. I search through all the gaming sites and RSS feeds to find out what's going on and who said what. I work on personal or group related projects that aren't even meant to make money 5-6 hours per day just because I love it so much.

There is no better industry to work in for me than games, and with this amount of passion I don't give a fuck what the bitter "I hate crunch time" industry veterans say, I'll go in and experience it myself then. I'm sure there's a place for me with games.

Cliffy's office seems like a room from some dream. Naughty Dog, Insomniac, Free Radical.. those kinds of offices are breeding grounds for creative output. I want to see more INSIDE videos of game development houses.

Zero Punctuation and a good video

2008-05-08T17:50:00.007+03:00

I generally don't like Zero Punctuation. Sure it's witty and fun but it's also doing something the Internet really doesn't need more of and that's flaming. There's a nice way to talk about games as well, but if you like Yahtzee's style then that's fine, keep watching. Anyway, there was one video that really says so many things right that I had to post it here too.

Link to The Escapist

How is this related to game design? It's got some good points about reviewing games, that's why.

GTAIV

2008-05-04T00:38:00.023+03:00

There's going to be so much to write about this game, I'll just keep updating this post. I was close to not even starting this because I've been keeping World of Warcraft topics on the down low as well due to it being way too big a subject to cover. You could cover smaller areas, that's true, but after 3 years of playing it, I would have too much to say. But GTA isn't an MMO so what the hell.

GTAIV Special Edition - Game, bag, storage box with keys, key ring, soundtrack, art book.

- The attention to detail is wicked sick. There's so much going on you can't possibly begin to understand the amount of hours spent creating all the static meshes, the products you see in the world, the story, the characters, everything. The physics are very nice and it really is fun seeing Niko get scratched or hit by oncoming traffic. I'm anxious to see what Metal Gear Solid 4 will be like since it supposedly had even higher production costs. They said around 1000 people worked on GTAIV, I'm not surprised.

- The hype was insane but this is one of the few games that really does live up to the expectations. Sure it feels like a GTA game but it's got so much more and that's what sequels are about anyway. The Metacritic average for GTAIV (PS3) is still 100 after 23 reviews. I would rate the game a strong 95 definitely but that average of 100 is just absolutely retarded. Reviewers just made themselves look like stupid little fanboys.

- The characters are insanely hyperactive once again. Everyone acts like they're on pills. I know they're meant to be over the top but it takes away from the realism a bit when you just meet a new guy and are ready to kill for him. Obviously Niko is a cold blooded bastard but at one point near the beginning of the game he says something along the lines of "I promised myself I wouldn't kill people anymore!" but he sure seems to take all the other killings so easily. But hey, in an open world it's nearly impossible to make a story work PERFECTLY because the player can do whatever they want in between story cinematics. It's done well enough here.

- Characters have motion capture and lip-sync animations but sometimes they use "clever" ways of not having to animate someone as they speak, especially if that someone isn't exactly a core story character. You might have the camera pan just so that you don't see their head (through a car window) or have the other guy partly behind a tree or something. Obviously in a game this big you can't really animate EVERYONE and I don't think people will notice.

- The sleeze vs. reality ratio is pretty much in check once again. Games like Postal do it wrong where every corner of the street is littered with dumb ads and trash whereas GTAIV has just the right amount of crazy amidst a fully believable world. Liberty City is the coolest "level" ever in a game. Sometimes it goes a bit overboard though with Burger Shot employees saying stuff like "That came off the floor" when giving you a hamburger. Nobody would eat something after the person selling it says it was on the floor. I think those moments go a bit overboard, but mostly it's good fun.

- Liberty City is also the most complex level. Your first base of operations (Roman's flat) is next to a huge bridge that has paths winding in every direction. Not exactly the friendliest environment to learn. I'm good with 3D and always know where I'm going but the GTA3+ games have taken a while to get used to navigating in always, which is really cool. But now, even after 3 days of playing GTAIV intensely, Liberty City is a bit too complex to get to know. It's like a real town. Consider that a positive or negative point, it doesn't matter, since you can get around easily enough with your GPS system. But it'll surely take a few more days to get to know even the first island.

- Cars like to drift. The movement surely isn't "realistic" but it's fun and that's what counts. Nobody is claiming this to be a simulator and it wouldn't work as one. The cars are great and there's enough. Too bad we don't have bicycles anymore but it's not a big loss really.

- FPS slows down often when things get crowded, which is the same thing that happened with the GTA3 "series" as well. Nothing too drastic though.

- The new fight mechanic is nice but still clumsy compared to moving Nathan Drake in Uncharted for example. But then again Uncharted is a smaller scale game and having Nathan Drake in Liberty City might make things too slow. Niko does have some nice animations to him though and the auto aim helps, although it gets a bit odd when you try to shoot those flying rats and auto aim keeps targeting someone else walking on the street. You can turn it off yes, but that's always through the menu.

- The camera angle when driving any car is slightly to the left. I don't know why exactly but probably so that you can see in front a bit better and thus control better. It works fine though. However, with most cars (not counting Humvees and the bigger sort) the camera angle is a bit too low behind the car. Sure you can see the street but not enough, so what I've begun doing without even noticing is tilting the right joystick always when driving a tiny bit so I see more over the car. Would be nice if you could lock on your own camera angle when driving. The camera also pans back a bit to show more of the road and give a better feeling of speed when you drive really fast. It's been in other GTAs too. Somehow the game seems choppy at these fast speeds too but there's a post-processing filter on the graphics that might be part of the cause. Although in multiplayer without the other cars around you don't get low FPS when going at high speeds.

- Cars still spawn a bit weird sometimes. Since GTA3 they've done that though. If you drive around in a cool Porsche type car you'll get other Porsches spawning. If you drive in a taxi you'll get other taxis a bit more. It eases the processing and with a game that only loads when you start up and then goes seamlessly into any area, it's a good thing. They've tuned it very well again although it is a bit weird that even though the PS3 (and probably XBOX360 too) can process more things, there's still the same slowdowns as in previous GTA3 games. I think they reprogrammed the engine for 4 but maybe they used many of the same techniques. That's just speculation, we'll never know. Anyway, cars appear from behind you at odd moments but it doesn't break the feeling and they also have rules to spawning. You can't get the coolest cars in Broker. It doesn't matter if you drive a Lamborghini lookalike from Algonquin (that's a weird name isn't it?), it won't spawn others of the same type in a non-suited environment. So there's some kind of hierarchy within the car ranks.

- No texture loading issues. Yet. On the PS3. Don't know how it's on the XBOX360 but since you get to install a bit of the game on your HDD on the PS3 it works fine. Oh, and all those people whining about installing something for 20 minutes, try not to enforce the fact that we're living in a fastfood society any more than it already is shoved in our faces through the media. Go get a bite to eat and stop whining, those 20 minutes will save hours of cumulative short loading sessions during the game later on. Edit: After 20 hours of play, I've seen a few textures load slower but it's very small.

- Effects such as fire and smoke are done very nicely. The rockets flying make a nice twirling motion. Clearly lots of focus on them too, just like in CoD4 in which the smoke looks amazing.

- The Internet. Tw@. I laughed when I saw the Internet cafe. It's one of those brands that makes you laugh. You can find lots of fun stuff "online" in the game and lots of references to real life products. It's like fictional product placement. Ikea, MySpace and the numerous dating services on the real web get picked on.

- Niko's voice is done by a guy with an American sounding name (Michael Hollick). Well done and all but some things Niko says sound like they weren't done in the right accent. Then again if this person really speaks like Niko's accent then I'm wrong and it just sounded odd. Nothing to complain about here, the voice acting is absolutely brilliant compared to many many others. It's not like video games have that great voice acting anyway although it HAS gotten a lot better lately (see Uncharted). The reason for this is they do full body motion capture while recording speech. I think this is an integral part in adding realism. When developers started adding voice overs to their characters in games they used to have the lines for the actor on paper with maybe a small picture of what their character looks like and told them to read from there alone in a studio. Obviously you can't get the same amount of interaction like that because the other person isn't really there talking back at you. This was painfully evident in scenes where one character interrupted another, it usually never worked. Nowadays they still use that same technique (God of War for example) but they understand things better and it works OK, however nothing beats motion capture and speech recording at the same time as in Uncharted, GTAIV and Heavenly Sword.

Update: Lots of crap about the actors not getting payed per game sold lately. Bullshit. It doesn't work like that in the games industry and before it does, shouldn't the rest of the dev team get their share? Games would end up costing 140 euros for the end-user. Anyway, here's proof that Mr. Hollick indeed doesn't speak like Niko in real life. So the accent is a bit off at times. Who cares though. It's fine.

- I'm not entirely sure about the Niko character being that cool really. I think part of his coolness comes from him simply being the lead character in a GTA game. He's an OK guy and interesting enough but his build reminds me of an annoying person from high school too much. It's a personal thing. However, he's a bit skinny and some of his subtle motions are a bit inconsistent. It could be limitations in the technology of the animation system but during some cut-scenes he sways a bit loosely to the side giving off a slightly insecure and mentally weak feel. Don't try to argue that "he's talking to a gangster boss, you would be scared too!" because this is a guy who's seen war and injustice his whole life. The way he turns and walks away from the same meeting with the mob boss shows high self-respect and gives off the impression Niko is very sure of himself and not afraid. Basically, what I'm saying is I would've paid more attention to Niko as a character through the animations and on a more personal level maybe given him a bit more muscle. I'm no Vin Diesel fan. Tommy Vercetti was an awesome character in Vice City and even though I'm not that big a fan of Hollywood actors in games, Ray Liotta did an awesome job.

- There's got to be about 20 gigs of speech recorded for this game. I would go on about how cool the blu-ray is for storing all this information but the XBOX360 version of the game is on one DVD so I don't know how they got it all to fit. A dual-layer DVD is 8.5 gigs so I guess it has to fit in that (not to mention the high definition textures). Anyway, there's a lot of speech in it and if you die during a mission and drive back to retry it with an NPC in your car, him and Niko might have a totally different conversation the second time through. It's crazy. But then again sometimes they talk for so long you stop at the mission arrow to wait for the conversation to end before going into the cinematic because you don't want to miss a thing. I've begun trying to learn how to speak like LJ.

- If you die you go to a hospital and don't lose your weapons anymore which is excellent. If the cops get you you lose your weapons, so it's better to go out with a blast! Also, the game autosaves after every mission! No more running home to save all the time! Just save once, when you stop playing for the night... at 6... am.

- Walking animations. Niko doesn't gradually go from sneak to walk to run even though the joysticks are analogue obviously, he just walks (or runs with X pressed).

- Parking your car outside a mission start point. Your car gets teleported to the other side of the street, nicely parked and all, if you park right in front of the mission arrow where the cutscene starts from. On the PS2 GTA games it used to just make the car disappear. This approach is a lot better. The reason obviously is that the cutscene might make you walk "inside" the car in the end if it's too close.

- One of Niko's feet bugs sometimes so that his toes point to the sky even though his heel is on the ground. It can be either foot. Just looks odd when you're trying out different shoes!

- Even though Liberty City is amazing, I'm getting to a point where I'd like to see more open spaces and frankly the city thing has been done already in GTA. Sure there are the parks and some beaches (with hardly anything on them but the sand and some trash) but there's nothing like the San Andreas wilderness. Obviously that's not something you'd expect from this kind of place anyway but here's hoping the third island will have something more open than houses on every single street corner. Oh and the ocean doesn't count. Edit: The third island is nice and the differences between the 3 main islands is quite clear. It's not as monotonic as Assassin's Creed but it's nowhere as diverse as a Mario game. But hey, real life vs. a sci-fi environment. I think they did quite well. Although my comment about more open spaces still stands. But who knows, maybe the next GTAIV games are in Vice City and San Andreas again. There's been references to both areas at least and those are the first GTA game's islands but who knows if they want to basically redo GTA3 fully. Then again, you can always build a new world with the same theme. I don't mind if it's as good as GTAIV.

- The comedy club is an absolutely brilliant addition. The problem is that even though Katt Williams and Ricky Gervais did indeed create custom stand-up routines (and there's more than I expected), they're just not as funny as their regular stuff. But at least they're about Liberty City.

- Landmarks. They help you navigate your way around any game. Especially sandbox games with huge open worlds for you to play in. The landmarks are OK and they've managed to cram lots of different buildings in there but you still get lost. I'm wondering how long it'll take me to be able to tell just from a screenshot where that place is. Many of the landmarks are also the same as in the GTA3, VC and SA games. Huge park in the middle, follow train tracks above you, etc. There's not a lot more to invent though and that's what real locations are like too. However, I'm still wondering if the game world is more complex than needed. I'm not saying bigger than needed, I'm just thinking if there's too much.

- The police ring their sirens a bit if you go blazing past them through a red light or scratch them a bit now. It's a fun little addition that shows they're awake as opposed to previous GTAs where if you even touched a police vehicle you'd hear "We will open fire!". You can't have too much realism obviously because driving slowly with the masses and waiting for green lights would be a pain but the police are cooler now.

- NPCs as friends are annoying. If one of your new friends (I'm not talking about multiplayer here) calls you on your mobile phone you sort of have to answer to know what (s)he wants and thus if they ask you to go play pool with them or something and you're in the middle of something and refuse, you'll get a thumbs down icon and lose a bit of reputation with that person. It's not a lot but it sucks. If you could only go out with friends by calling them you wouldn't have this problem, but then again it's cool that others call you. But that's one thing about game design that you have to weigh, is it really THAT good or is it just not really worth it. I would've left out the reputation loss if they call you. If you call them then you have to be fast to pick them up and do stuff they like or you'll lose reputation. Speaking of which, there are 2 values for important story characters that are on your side. "Like" and "Respect". How each of them works isn't exactly clear to me yet. Maybe a bit too complicated. Sure you can turn off phone calls (sleep mode) from the mobile phone options but then you stop all story calls too and it's a bit too far inside the menus to easily do when you want to just drive around.

- There's a lot to do but most of it outside driving a car and killing people is pretty half-assed. Dating, why? Bowling, terrible. Darts, pool, lap-dances.. hardly interesting. Maybe I'm spoiled with the high polish of the Wii Sports games but they could've focused more on making the gameplay on the minigames themselves work than making an animation and pose for every angle possible for characters to shoot the ball on a pool table. Someone mentioned on the QT3 forums about not finding any more bricks to pick up and throw outside the one mission you get early on. This is a great example of an idea that wasn't really used in the long run. In Saints Row I hear you can throw around any items you find basically.

- There are a nice amount of missions at the beginning of the game. You get to choose who you do missions for. But then near the end you follow single missions (because those who get this far are most probably dedicated players who want to do everything and have no other missions left) and don't have a lot to choose from. This makes me feel like the city wasn't used extensively enough. I had 65% of the game done when I finished the last mission and 50 hours of played time. There's enough content here obviously but more missions (you don't need to make long cut-scenes for them all) would've been nice closer to the end. Also, there could be more variety to the objectives you have. Mostly it's just about going to pick up some drugs and it turns into a shootout or you have to go kill an informant. The basic stuff. More missions and more variety to missions. Less pool and darts. Then again, how many people actually finished this game?

- Too many story characters and not enough majestic themes. I think there should've been fewer story characters actually. You meet a bunch of people along the game and probably can't even keep track of who took who's diamonds and what the hell is going on in general. There's basically a story behind it all but I would've preferred to get some bigger houses in the end and really feel like I was becoming some mob kingpin or something. Now when the game ends you're still the same lowly Niko The Noob, just with a few more friends at high places. Many of the people you meet are a bit like each other too. There are the Irish, Jamaican, Russian and Italian mobsters but maybe focus more on them and and the small people around them instead of lots of different people because now it doesn't really feel like you should be afraid of anyone. Dimitri tries to be the "main bad guy" in a way but it doesn't really work out when he's not really that central in the story even though he does get involved in the biggest plot twists.

- The characters are integrated in the game world nicely (you hear about stuff you've done on the radio for example), but you could take that further by showing video of you driving around town like crazy from a "News Helicopter" (like you see with the stunt cam already in the game) or then you get to meet (and kill) celebrities. There's a bit of that with politics of course but even more would be nice. Mainly what I'd want is for you to be able to influence how the world looks. Build your own house in one of the empty spots (can be a predefined house layout, doesn't matter) or design an ad for "Times Square". You can't break the game's graphical mood too much though obviously.

- Overall the story is nice and you get to choose your own path at points. It affects the game enough to be interesting and it gives you more incentive to play through again.

- I'd like to have more clothes. There are 2 types of stores, casual clothing and suits. And there aren't enough casual clothes. How about a hoodie or something? This isn't the Sims but it's nice to customize. More roleplay is rarely a bad thing.

- Multiplayer works well and there are some interesting modes to keep your game going past the completion.

- Getting the 200 pigeons (flying rats) is a pain in the ass. There are too many and you don't get prizes in between every ten or something. The stunt jumps aren't as bad but it's still quite a task (just like in other GTAs). At least it leaves you something to do. There's also a website in the game's "Internet" that shows you maps of where you can get these and other items like armor, health and weapons, but you can't copy the locations onto your real map which sucks because now you need to either find a copy of the map online and have your laptop next to you or print it out, both of which just cause unnecessary difficulty. Then again, it's not meant to be simple. Design choice I guess.

- Why not let the player save screenshots taken from the mobile phone camera on the HDD? It can't be because of the XBOX limitations, because it's optional. I think people really like to take screenshots of their gaming (and videos, WoW proves this more than anything) so why not allow it when the camera has the function? Maybe it DOES allow you to save them because it would seem to logical but I couldn't find any way to do so.

- Speaking of the mobile phone, you get to change themes and that's OK but generally the look is quite old and I would've wanted a new looking phone entirely and not just the different background. The font on the phone is a bit hard to read on some displays even though you can make it larger. Maybe allow resizing of the phone too. What would it matter when you can decide when it's shown on the screen and when not anyway. Oh and why does your conversation get cut off when you're talking to someone and get hit by a car or something? Sometimes the person never calls back (if it's not something that'll open up a new mission) and you don't hear the chat. The chat history menu tab ("Brief") is quite good for that though.

- The physics and game mechanics in general are fun and cause lots of funny situations. Sometimes cars go flying over you and stuff that shouldn't really happen. It might be a bug or just someone getting run over by a car but it's always funny and that's partly what keeps this game so lively. There are a bunch of general rules that the AI follows like how to control cars and where to move but then there are also things that break those rules for example cops chasing criminals on the streets or some driver panicking after you shoot at their car.

- The development tools for this game must've been extensive to say the least. I'd like to take a look at the world editor because everything blends in so nicely. The textures on the road turn nicely with the roads and there are nice patches of broken asphalt in between good areas and when viewed from afar textures never tile badly (WoW's Auchindoun area, viewed from above, comes to mind). The different houses and structures were made in an separate 3D editor and then imported but the theme of the world is so well done and everything blends in together well with linked lights and electricity, etc. A lot of the stuff was done on the world editor too I'm sure, or you wouldn't get such a consistent feel. The engine has to have some view distance options as well as support for changing textures to simpler ones when going further from them (like in the game) to even run smoothly. But those things are mandatory anyway when making development tools for 3D environments.

- The multiplayer is fun. There are some great modes and I've had some good laughs with friends online. BUT.. my suspicions about lag were true. In GTA everything moves at a very fast pace a lot of the time and loading up all the same pedestrians, vehicles and physics is bound to be a problem. And that's exactly what happened. Physics is a hard area to cover online and, for example, in FPS games with ragdoll effects when you kill an enemy he might not die in the same position on your screen as on your friend's with whom you're playing over the Internet. If you shoot at the corpse and the ragdoll moves it around your screen, your friend might see you simply shooting at the floor. It depends how it's executed in the code but in GTA these things are a problem and it makes me wonder if multiplayer was decided upon later on in development. If you're riding in the passenger seat of a car and one of your friends is driving at insane speeds through the city, you'll see the car strafe a bit on turns because the algorithm is loading the correct path but doesn't stay exactly on track so it compensates. It's nothing too bad, just worth mentioning. You have to take things like this into account in online games. Another thing is the cars popping up. In single player mode GTA games since the 3rd instalment have had cars popping up from behind you, and now in multiplayer sometimes cars won't load at the same time for all players. You might see your friend shooting into the pavement but as you run around a few circles you'll notice a car pop up that's badly damaged and notice your friend was shooting at the car. These glitches aside, GTA multiplayer is still fun and done well enough. It's just that these types of games don't really work with current technology online because of the high amount of information sent. I wonder how APB will do.

Like I said, there's a lot more to discover and I'll be adding things as I play the game. This is one work of art. Game design at its best.

To be continued..

Update: I'm mostly done I guess. The game is excellent, there's not much more to it. It's got the same flaws as previous GTA games but also a lot of the more annoying things are fixed. Stuff related to gameplay itself. GTAIV should be looked at and studied and even though developers will release lots of GTA types of games now (as they did and have done since GTA3 came out), they'll make many mistakes that Rockstar didn't. Mostly their games will miss 2 main things, even if the game itself is nice: 1. the worlds will feel empty or just not fun and lively and 2. GTA is close enough to real life but also funny enough to not be real, and thus they won't sell nearly as many copies as any GTA3-IV game.

God of War: Chains of Olympus - God Mode

2008-04-23T23:58:00.003+03:00

I wrote about the game itself earlier but now that I've passed God Mode too (which, in this case, isn't the invulnerability cheat that it's commonly referred to in other games, but actually the hardest setting you unlock once you beat the game the first time) I decided to write something about it. It's the first game I actually really wanted to beat 100%. Most games I go for a normal difficulty because I'm more interested in stories and interesting situations/locations than being challenged by something that's categorized as entertainment. Anyway, the reasons I wanted to beat it on the hardest difficulty is:
1. You get to unlock things that relate to game design (Making Of: Attica video).
2. God of War is such a good franchise. One of my favorite series ever.
3. It's short enough! So actually its length plays to its advantage here as opposed to Heavenly Sword which had other flaws. GoW was also cheap when it was released.

Anyway, here are the game design questions I was pondering during my second play-through:

- Every fight is important. Enemies don't take a lot more damage than they do on normal difficulty (if any at all). You, however, are fairly weak and 1 normal hit takes about 30% of your health and health crates replenish a lot less health. You need to know the tactics to each enemy. Some of them have specific tactics that work very well, for example imps (not the harpies) and archers die with one grab and while you're doing the grab nobody else can damage you and all other enemies around you stop any attacks they've started. Very important. Also, know that every fight can be pulled off without losing any health if you're very good. Remember to block, it's one of the most important skills you have and I was surprised how many attacks you could block that seemed totally illogical (blocking a huge basilisk's bite/head butt is weird but needed).

- Enemy placement is important. You kind of need to know what's coming up next. More on that later. You really start to notice how important all the enemy groups you meet are and how your tactic changes depending on what you get. On normal difficulty you wouldn't even mind what combination you get, you just randomly choose a target or just hit them all, on god mode you have to know what they all do.

- Health box placement is important. You need to know where the health boxes are because they replenish so little.

- Health regenerates. When you die 6 times in a fight you get a bit of your health back. Each death after that replenishes a bit when you choose retry. About 6 more deaths and you'll be near full but almost never full. I think it's a percentage you gain back and if that percentage would take you over 100% health you don't get any health back. But it's hard to know how it works because it's, yet again, a hidden rule that video games excel in. I guess this rule was put in so nobody would get stuck because savepoints themselves don't regenerate you to full health like in some other games. Then again, you can survive any fight without getting hit so having health regenerate takes away from the god mode experience.

- Playing with savepoints and checkpoints. On the surface the main difference between these 2 is that with savepoints you can turn off your PSP and continue later after playing a game of Final Fantasy in between for example, whereas with checkpoints you can't turn off the PSP (standby mode works though of course). Digging a little deeper you find more meaning to these 2 features. When you've just saved your game at a savepoint you can run fearlessly into the next fight and use all your mana to just test how the enemies work and then run to the next. BUT, if you do a good job and kill the first room of monsters without losing any health or mana the game will create a checkpoint (like it always does when you beat a room of monsters) and thus you're kind of stuck because you don't want to turn off the PSP but you also don't want to do badly in the next fight and have the game create a new checkpoint with only 10% health and 0% mana left. So what you have to do is after a checkpoint be careful and kill yourself if the next fight isn't going too well and retry from the checkpoint.

- Small rooms, large enemies with wide attacks. The difficulty comes from many aspects and having 2 huge minotaurs in a small room bashing their cleavers at you isn't very fun. It's a bit lame. But what can you do, it adds difficulty. It just feels like it's used too often but since Kratos can deliver quite a whooping with the blades of chaos from range then why not take away the range. Later when you get the gauntlet of zeus you can dish out a lot more damage though but obviously the enemies become more trickier too. Speaking of weapons, if you're running forward and jump, then switch weapons in the air, with the down arrow on the d-pad, Kratos stops mid-air. What's that all about? That's like a cancellation move but in a useless place. It's a bit hard changing weapons mid-air anyway. Just nitpicking here.

There are some bugs too. Or maybe they're more like glitches they didn't think of during development. The idea isn't to use these because they're considered sort of cheating in my opinion. But everyone applies the rules of "Play To Win" to their taste.

- There are some pedestals or areas enemies can't hit you at. You can jump on ledges sometimes or aggro an enemy and have them chase you a bit back past an invisible AI wall. The level continues normally but the enemies just stop and keep looking at you from behind some invisible wall. You can just do an endless spam of plume of prometheus from there and not take a single hit.

- After fighting Charon for the first time on his boat he throws you into the prison complex. Your health will be low so just kill a bunch of the prisoners on the walls and then go save. Then get yourself killed by some of the enemies further down the corridor to the RIGHT (don't go left or the game will create a checkpoint inside that locked room and you can't get back easily). Retry from checkpoint (which happens to be the savepoint then) and all the prisoners have spawned back. Kill them again for more health and repeat. Or just die 6 times and have your health regenerate by itself miraculously. You are a God after all.

- You can at a few points pass enemies completely by just quickly running past an area where a red demon wall (the ones that block progression until you've cleared a room) should come. Somehow you miss the area that activates the script or then the script isn't fast enough to react to it. One such place is when you first enter the open area leading to where the gauntlet of zeus is located. The area would spawn a minotaur and 4 archers at first.

- One thing to keep in mind though is the last fields of elysium area. When you start killing the spirits just focus on them and ignore the spawning soldiers. Once the spirits are dead just run into the next area and the soldiers stop following you and you can start the next fight. You should have all weapons at MAX anyway at this point. Also, remember to play with the checkpoint because if you finish the fight with low health you'll get a small health crate and then you're off to face the final boss! Or you could die on the boss 12 times for near full health..

About the last boss, it's still as annoying as before. The first phase to 50% is just an endurance test. Can you uphold your block, counter, double attack rotation. It's annoying but once you get it done you can just practice phase 2 and it'll be over faster than phase 1.

And that's GoW: CoO on God Mode. It's hard, I still have nightmares of those annoying undeads throwing molotov cocktails at me! But it was fun, then again the video that got unlocked wasn't what I expected. Should've known that since the Ready At Dawn office video was only a boring music video with people making faces this would be a bit of the same thing. But I was still hoping for someone to actually explain how they did some parts of the level and what their guidelines were for it. Maybe some storyboard pictures or something. Oh well, maybe next time.

Mario Kart Wii

2008-04-22T00:21:00.005+03:00

What is there to say about Mario Kart Wii that hasn't been said about the other Mario Kart games before it? Not a lot. It's the same recycling Nintendo has been doing for many a year but we still love them oh so much for it. Because Mario Kart Wii is yet again a great game.

What we're interested in is what sets it apart from the other Mario Karts, and how do these new features work from a gameplay point of view.

- Wii Wheel. It's a fun gimmick just like the Wii itself, but after a while you notice it just doesn't work for anything other than some 50cc casual gaming. Even in 100cc mode you end up having to work for that 1st place a lot more than you would with a traditional control method. So just stick with the Wiimote + nunchuck or classic/gamecube controller. The wheel just doesn't respond fast enough. Or should I say Wiimote. Quick turns are impossible because of the reaction time. For 50cc it's good fun for the family but anyone who takes gaming even the least bit seriously won't use the wheel for very long. Except Crecente from Kotaku. Except the game's not even released in the US yet and they didn't get to try anything but the wheel at the Nintendo truck.. Oh and btw, 17 euros for a piece of fucking plastic is outrageous. Sure the Wii logo on the back of the wheel looks nice but could you please focus on what's important instead of useless shit like that.

- Online play is a lot of fun! Sure they did it in Mario Kart DS already but on the Wii you have your rating to boost up. Having played a lot of Arena PvP in World of Warcraft I got addicted to the rating system immediately. It's a lot of fun and works extremely well. The friend code thing combined with laggy Internet play has bugged me a lot with Wii games (Mario Strikers Charged! Ugh!) so this was a nice surprise actually.

- 3 new pickups. The POW block, lightning cloud and super mushroom. The POW block's mechanic is nice since it only affects people in front of you. And also, if you're in the air you don't spin out or lose your item when the duration ends. This way it further changes who ends up in what position since you can time it according to the small animated icon that appears on top of your head and hit a jump on the side of a track that you usually wouldn't get. I wish they would've let you be able to use your normal jump at the right time too to not get the POW effect but maybe it was too easy even with a small time-frame. The lightning cloud is also nice because of the new type of mechanic it brings to the table. You have to ram into other drivers which you really had no reason for doing before. There's also the thing with bikes where if someone does a wheelie and you ram into them they slow down but so do you. Once the lightning cloud's duration runs out, the person with the cloud gets zapped and turns small. The super mushroom is a bit iffy, it's good in a way because you can mow down people in front of you but in Mario Kart Wii nobody gets flattened by other players even if you're tiny. The only way to get flattened is by one of those classic blocks with angry faces on them. So basically the super mushroom is like one of those infinite speed burst mushrooms except you don't bump into anything and those angry faced blocks (thwomps) and other enemies on the screen won't mean a thing to you. All in all what these power-ups do, combined with the fact that on this Mario Kart it's a lot easier to lose your current use item thus forcing you to use whatever bonuses you get quite fast, is make it more random who comes in first, who second, and so on. Even though in online games some people do always seem to get a lead and never lose it. Against the computer it's different with the age old rubber banding though...

- Ramps. They add some nice tactical decisions. Do you take the outer bend and get the boost and power-up (power-ups are often also located on Tony Hawk style boost ramps at the sides of the track) or is it not worth it right now.

- Drifting can be automated, but then you don't get the boost. Opposed to what people say, I still think, while drifting, the blue flames turn into red faster when you drag your joystick left and right. But it's a hidden rule/mechanic so I'm not too sure yet.

- The 2-wheelers. They don't turn as well (controlling with the wheel is a nightmare and odd to boot because you don't exactly have steering wheels in motorcycles anyway) but they have a nice, albeit fairly small, speed boost when you do a wheelie. Flick the controller up and you're riding on your back wheel only. There is a setback to this of course and that is that you'll slow down a bit if someone smashes into you. All in all a nice little addition, if a bit weird since the game's name is Mario KART.

There's not much more to it. The bikes aren't that big a deal (never thought they would be), the power-ups are a good addition (although adding more than there are now isn't smart since there are a lot already) and the wheel is useless (just as expected too, pointing the Wiimote at the screen was a good idea when designing it because it's worked since Duck Hunt but accurate controlling using the motion sensors... not gonna happen without a 500 euro version of the Wiimote). Also, it's not very fun to have to play through every cup in the 50cc and 100cc modes before you can play them with either bikes or karts, first you have to play them with karts and bikes only respectively.

One thing I did find annoying, and it's been like that in all Mario Karts, is when you want to look behind you the entire screen changes to that view. Why can't you just get a small rear view mirror at the top center of the screen when you press a button and it disappears when you let go. Now you kind of lose track of where you're going and you rarely look behind you. And also, wouldn't it have been nice to aim green shells with the Wiimote pointing at the screen? Impossible to implement with the wheel while driving really and it might've made things a bit too easy.

Also, when you finish a race all the drivers coming in after you are automatically given that spot that they're currently on. Sometimes winning a single player grand prix is a close call and Bowser who's always come second would need to come 3rd or lower this time for you to win. The problem is that if you have a fairly long lead to the others and come in first everyone ends up in their current spot for the final positions for that race. What if a shell hit Bowser and he ended up in 5th place were the race to continue? Obviously it's faster for the player like this because why would you want to watch the computer race itself but with the rubber band effect it's not like it'll take long and why not give the player a choice to bypass it with a press of a button (reverting back to the positions they were at when you finished, because else you could just wait for Bowser to get hit and then lock in those positions). It's just one of those hidden rules that video games have as opposed to regular board games or games like Poker where every rule is known.

As for the items and power-ups.. sometimes they alter the end result too much. But Mario Kart never was a game of truly serious competition. The person riding in on 12th place can end up in 1st place with some lucky power-ups. Therefore, why not remove the red and blue shells when YOU are on the last lap? The positions can change around a lot during laps 1 and 2 but the 3rd one should be more about driving skill. Also, drop the percentage that you can get a bullet bill. The POW block seems OK to keep though as well as the other 2 new power-ups and green shells need to be aimed. Then again, it's a hidden mechanic/rule again so we don't know if the percentage actually drops on the more powerful items in later laps.

Mario Kart is Mario Kart. Nothing more to it really.

QA or How to get into the game business

2008-04-21T01:21:00.009+03:00

Quality Assurance. Testing the game. Everyone keeps saying "get your foot in the door". Well, the best way to do so if you don't have any previous experience in the field on a professional level is by getting in as a tester. Obviously other jobs are available too but a more probable position, especially for would-be game designers, is in the QA department.

So how do you test? One would think it's as simple as having fun playing the game, but the hours can be long and you'll more likely be sick of the game when it's released than actually think you had a "cool time testing new games".

The idea is to find all the issues and problems the game might have before it's shipped out to the masses. Your QA department (which could be roughly 10 people, depending on the size of project) needs to find all the bugs and flaws that 100,000 people will otherwise find if you ship it untested. And this is an example of a small game. So there's a lot of work in it!

Obviously the whole development team will be helping in the testing by playing the game as well but they're not the ones responsible for finding all the weird glitches and they don't have time for it either. When testing a game you'll be looking for quite a few things, here's a little starter help for those interested (note that many of these apply specifically to 3D games because that's what you mostly find on the market nowadays):

- First things first, your platform. If it's on PC you obviously have to worry about different Operating Systems, graphics cards, RAM usage, etc. But we'll focus more on the game itself.

- Repetition. The number one rule is to quickly make note of what just happened when something went wrong and try to realize what you did to cause it. The reason is that you need to obviously reproduce the problem.

- Camera. One of the biggest problems even today in any 3D game engine because of their complex nature. See if you can get the camera to jam in weird positions like get stuck in walls, etc.

- Severe FPS drops. Find areas that might cause a huge drop of frame rate. These might be often located in corners where the camera needs to go into a weird position and thus reveal more of the game world than you'd normally see for example. If you have too many polygons on the screen at the same time with moving enemies and terrain and dynamic lighting effects you might get fairly big FPS spikes. With some current engines like the Unreal Engine 3 level designers can see problem areas with color-coding inside the editor but they might miss some areas too. Sometimes the problem isn't even with the "stuff on the screen" but with something else the game is loading.

- Lighting issues. Sometimes static lights (lighting counted into the level when the level is compiled, not dynamic lights) might be rendered so that its effect ends on the ground before the next room abruptly for example. Another problem is that some static meshes (an item in the game world like a lamp) might have had their "receive light" property turned off and therefore they'll appear totally black because no light is affecting them. You need to find these types of problems and the best way is to specifically go through the level again paying special attention only to lights.

- Overlapping textures. If a level designer has a wall (WALL-A) with another wall (WALL-B) perpendicular to it that goes inside WALL-A so that it ends on the outer layer of WALL-A you will notice textures overlapping because both the geometric blocks end at the same spot instead of next to each other. It's a sort of jagged look that flickers as you move your camera/character around. Be sure to make notes of these because they can break immersion. Usually can be found on steps or in corners where the player usually might not go to when following the gameplay flow of the level.

- Confuse the AI. Try to fool the artificial intelligence of enemies or friendly characters by making them follow you long distances or trying to jump on top of some obstacle so they can't reach you but you can reach them. Get enemies to shoot at each other. In racing games try to push other cars off the track into weird places and see if they can get back in the race.

- Short-cuts. Find ways to get to power-ups or areas where you're not supposed to get to early. Try jumping against walls. See if you can fall through the game world from any place. Games usually have specific collision detection layers. These layers define where you can go and where you can't. In World of Warcraft there are quite a few places where you can jump along walls to areas where you're not supposed to get to that easily or sometimes not at all.

- Cheat. Without cheat codes I mean. Try to do whatever you can to bypass game content like running past enemies or making them get stuck (see Confuse the AI above). Find tactics that will make the game overly easy that the game designer most likely didn't intend. Be careful though, many games have tactics which, once figured out, will make boss fights or enemies a lot easier. These obviously aren't bugs of any kind. Focus on things that seem "too good to be true", like killing a boss with only one attack that's meant to stun only regular enemies but for some reason seems to work on the boss too.

- Chaotic behavior. Press every button you can during cut-scenes. Press the pause button as fast as you can repeatedly for a minute. Scroll through menu options and press all the buttons you have. If the game is a computer strategy game for example then click all over the screen using all your abilities and attacks. The idea is to test things that a normal player would never do but what is described as a chaotic behavior bug. The game might crash for example, which is what you're trying to do. These kinds of bugs should all be gone way before beta testing and maybe even before alpha. Depends how testing is done.

- Game/genre specific flaws. Focus on the type of game you are testing. You don't need to spend as long testing the camera of a football game as you do a 3rd person action-adventure because in football the camera more or less stays at one angle whilst in a 3rd person game it can get stuck in many different places and lose track of your character.

- Categorize problems. There are categories which your boss (the QA lead) will want you to know and you'll have to decide how serious a bug is. Basically what this means is how fast the programmers, or someone else, need to fix it. Is it a game-breaking flaw (game crashes when you press pause) or is it a minor graphical anomaly (textures overlapping in an area thats too dark for the player to really see).

- Learn to document your findings. You'll be required to write about every problem you encounter. How did you do it (how is it repeated), how severe do you rate it, etc. Developers usually have specific forms where you just fill in the blanks. Which build of the game was it, and so on.

- Group/focus group testing. This is another type of testing. You might be called to help assist in one of these tests and basically what could happen is the developer calls in 5-10 students from some nearby school to play their game. Basically this would be an in-house beta (as opposed to open beta) but these tests can be done through-out the development process. Mark Cerny states in his Method that you should start testing your game fairly early with outside groups like this (roughly when 1/3rd of the game is done). Study the group and make notes. You need raw statistics, where they die etc. Note that these groups shouldn't be the ones finding the bugs!

Things you don't need to worry about are game flow and difficulty generally. You'll obviously be given developer/testing tools for the game too which include things like invulnerability, teleporting and all items "cheats". Use them to the max. Depending on developer the idea is you'll not be focusing on the gameplay but rather the bugs but some developers give creative freedom to all their employees and everyone can have their say. However, keep in mind you're only a tester and if you've just gotten your foot in the door don't go telling the lead designer what you think he did wrong.

Testing can be fun for a while but it's not something many make a career of exactly, but that's good for others wanting into the gaming business because there are constantly doors opening. After internal tests and closer to completion of the core values and storyline (if the game has one) the game will enter the alpha stage where you eliminate many of the biggest bugs. After that comes the beta which is the final testing phase before release. In-house beta test phases usually involve everyone, even the artists and sound guys. Sometimes beta tests go public like in the case of many MMORPGs because that's a good way to test them with a wide variety of players.

Some bugs still get through beta and end up in the final product and sometimes the bugs are unbelievable and even with today's consoles that connect to the Internet it might take very long to fix them. In World of Warcraft there are bugs that people can remember having been there since the release of the game back in 2005, but it might be a bad example because the game itself is so huge and hard to keep track of every little thing. No game breaking bugs have stayed that long. However, looking at smaller budget releases you can find some really weird bugs every now and then.

Sometimes it can be something as interesting as a weird image. Check out this Okami Wii version's cover art article on Kotaku. Not exactly an in-game bug but I bet they are cursing themselves for not noticing it.

Heavenly Sword

2008-04-17T22:22:00.004+03:00

One of the first games out for the Playstation 3. I waited until it got a severe price-cut before buying it because of the supposed short play-through time. Down to 36 euros was enough for me. Oh well, at least I can use it as one of the games to trade in at Gamestop for GTAIV when it comes out in a few weeks.

First off, the good points: it looks very nice.. at times. The cinematics are very well done. The sound effects are good, the music is a bit too odd at times but not that bad. The first icy area you play in is a bit bland but some of the other locales are amazing. The engine is clearly built for large fights too which it handles quite well. The character design is very nice too with attention to detail (look at Kai's knees, they're a bit red because of all the time she spends on them in weird catty poses). The game starts out interestingly enough and the first time you see Nariko speak to the camera (the Heavenly Sword) and a huge blade rises from the ground you actually think you've got something special here. Nariko also has some awesome moves but this also leads us to the bad points which are found through-out the game:

- Jerky animation, look at Nariko's left foot when she's running, it's like it's missing a few frames as it jerks to the front from behind every step. Nariko's hair isn't very fluid either at times, making hair flow well isn't easy I'm sure but you notice these things when it's too far off. Also, if your sixaxis joystick has been used to play hundreds of hours of NHL, Nariko might not like it. When turning her around she might not turn smoothly even though Kratos animates just fine because of possible interpolation in the animations. Also, Nariko doesn't gradually go from walk to run animation, she does either or. Kratos' walk animation interpolates into his run animation perfectly.

- Bad FPS. Sometimes you get annoying FPS drops and all through the game it never really feels like 60 FPS. It actually feels like under 30 which is pretty bad.

- Screen tearing. You see it in Ninja Gaiden Sigma too (talking about Playstation 3 here) but vertical synchronization doesn't seem to be something consoles have the memory to uphold so there's bound to be some. Just that in Heavenly Sword it REALLY shows, for example the same level used in the demo when you're looking down at the beautiful view with the town and waterfalls and run left or right to pan the camera, things start to get choppy. This might not annoy everyone but it's very noticeable here. There's too much on the screen.

- What exactly is the main core mechanic? Every game needs one but I really don't understand what the Heavenly Sword core mechanic is. Is it watching CG videos? Because it sure as shit doesn't feel like it's the fighting. All you do is go from one cinematic to a fight in a large area, then another video, then another large area fight, then another video. There's not nearly enough exploring or any sort of problem solving. What this does is it makes the entire game feel inconsistent. It's just a bunch of fights with a sub-par button-mashing fight system one after another.

- The fighting mechanics, like stated above. You can pass the game by just bashing whatever buttons you want and make Nariko do some cool moves. There seems to be a bunch of moves and combos available with all these neat animations but none of them actually mean anything other than making the fighting look cool. The blocking mechanic is supposed to play a big part in it and sometimes you do have to block but it's hardly interesting enough. I was bored of it before the final boss battle which is in fact exponentially harder than anything up to that point. Oh and the fact that the enemies do nothing but block you sometimes forcing you to stop your button-mashing for a while doesn't make the fighting more interactive, it just makes it more annoying. You never fight against 1 enemy, there are always waves of them in 1 room and then you get to the cinematic until starting another big fight in another big room in some totally other area.

- Ultra short, just like everyone warned me. The game was over faster than God of War: Chains of Olympus. It doesn't really have any replay value either because it's trying to be an adventure game and a beat-em-up at the same time. If all the fights were different and the fighting mechanic more interesting it would work, or if it was more consistent and had some actual adventuring to tie up the numerous locations it might work as an adventure game. The constant pop-ups of "You have unlocked some more concept art!" during gameplay were odd as well. If there were a few unlockables only it would've been OK but since there are tens of them you literally get spammed with crap all the time while fighting.

- Loading times. When you die and have to load the game it takes waaay too long to get back into the action.

- Very childish. The script has some insanely dumb dialogue. The part where Flying Fox is teleporting around Bohan is just so childish I wanted to skip the rest of the cinematic. OK, the cinematics are very well done, the lip and facial synchronization is amazing but with poor dialogue nothing saves it. The themes that the characters talk about border cliché even though the main idea and concept is fine. Also, this game has bar-none the MOST annoying saying to date in any video game: who the fuck made up the name "twing twang".

So that's Heavenly Sword then. Going to trade it in definitely. Lots of potential and some amazing sceneries but gameplay beats graphics any day and there just isn't really any gameplay in this. I'm also very strict about storyline and that's why the dialogue annoys me more than it might some others, but the childish factor is still strong (Bohan tapping his metal cod piece while implying to Nariko about having sex with her was just so poorly executed as a scene it lacked any form of "intellectual feel" even though a scene like that can be done in good taste too).

What could save a game like this then? Keep the graphics guys, focus a bit more on technology and the 60 FPS rule and get a good lead gameplay designer. After the hard times the former Argonaut employees had I hope Ninja Theory can get it right on their next attempt. I'm sure that because they didn't really have a console for Heavenly Sword at first and the PS3 later turning out to be a hard platform to program for caused their own fair share of setbacks for the development of the game but being published by Sony I was hoping for something more.

Overhype

2008-04-09T20:41:00.005+03:00

Games need to be talked about before they're released to create hype. That's what developers do by releasing developer diaries (videos), pictures in magazines with a huge Omega sign and number 3 with the text "coming soon", magazines reviewing games with a biased look (Gamespot Gerstmann controversy) and so on. People get excited and it's all good up to a certain point.

But then sometimes it goes overboard and some games end up not being as good as you thought they were and some games actually ARE good but you thought they were something sent down from heaven because of the hype surrounding it.

Here are a few examples:

Halo series - I don't get what the fuss is about. Since the first Halo I've never been interested in the world. A sci-fi alien shooter, as if there aren't enough movies, books and games in that genre already. People talk about the multiplayer capabilities like it was something new, well Goldeneye did it on the N64 already. I played Halo and Halo 2 and tried to understand it but to no avail. Even if you like the series though you have to admit, it's overhyped.

Heavenly Sword - One of the first games on the PS3. Obviously the graphics are what drew people to it but there's too much that went wrong with the game. I'll write an analysis on Heavenly Sword later though. To sum it up, people themselves might've been the cause for the overhyping, it's not like Ninja Theory released exceptionally many videos about it (there were quite a few), it's just that it was the first original 3rd person action adventure on the PS3 and seemed to showcase what the system was capable of. And everyone likes some 3rd person hackin' and slashin' every now and then.

Lair - Another one that was overhyped because of two things, 1. it was one of the few games out for the PS3, 2. it looked amazing in screenshots and some videos. However, graphics alone don't make a game and the playability was terrible with the Nintendo-lickin' Sixaxis. Ratchet and Clank understood Sixaxis better, only use it for a little fun here and there.

Super Mario Galaxy - I'm not a Mario hater even though I wrote one post already about Mario being inferior to a certain make-believe animal, but this game was overhyped just like the others. Mario Galaxy was a good game though, it was fun and interesting, but apart from the skybox being comprised of stars and planets instead of a blue sky and the sun it wasn't any different from Mario 64 or Sunshine. Oh and what about the spherical world concept? Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island on the SNES. Play it through again and you'll see what I mean. Earlier Ratchet and Clank games did it too but let's not get into that. And about a spherical world fixing the ever-present problems with game cameras in 3D spaces... bullshit.

The Orange Box - I thought this was a joke. People seem to disagree with me here it seems because magazines are filled with "Game of the Year award goes to.. ORANGE BOX" type articles. I mean, yeah sure it's fun but here's why I'm so sick and tired of hearing about the Orange Box:

If you're going to make a trilogy of expansions for a game and release them in one package then pack them all together. It might be good for those 2 people who never played HL2 or Episode 1 but this is useless. I'm still not sure if you could even get Episode 2 alone when the Orange Box was released.

Team Fortress 2 is a mod. Mods are free. Some might argue that this is just as much a Total Conversion as Portal and they'd be right but to me it feels like a mod. That's a personal opinion, however it doesn't change the fact that stuff like this is made by the community for free. (Yes there are exceptions like Counter-Strike eventually going on store shelves [CS:CZ published by Valve, CS:S by Valve] and Red Orchestra for example)

Portal is a good game. If the Orange Box didn't have Portal it wouldn't have been game of the year. However, Portal is a small game and there were many indie releases that had extremely unique ideas too. Portal is worth 10 euros, not the price of a full game which it now is inside the Orange Box.

Reviewers have said that you get 5 great games in 1 box. Bull-fucking-shit. You get 1 old game that everyone has played, 2 very short expansions (1 of them old), a short puzzle game and a mod. If you haven't played Half Life 2 then OK go for it but for everyone else, what the fuck.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl - The only reason this game succeeded to sell well is because of the bunch of characters. I never really liked Smash Bros. because gameplay was too messy, but that's a personal opinion. However, I did think the reviews spoke for the games, 8/10 being the general way things were going. They were OK but not very deep (I don't mean story-wise, I mean gameplay and everything). Yeah it's fun to pick up every now and then and Brawl is just the same but the hype that went into this thing was way overboard. A Smash Bros. Dojo? This thing combined developer hype with press hype and on top of that hype generated by the people. Everyone got to talking and suddenly Smash Bros. was more awesome a game than it had ever been. Iwata interviewing Sakurai, this game has to be good!

So how does hype develop? Through the developer, through the press and through the people. In that order. The developer obviously can put as much money as they want into advertising and instead of going the traditional route of showing some pics of the game and listing the key features they can put that big Omega and number 3 to milk a brand that's already widely accepted as being great. So it's harder to create hype for NEW brands.

Unless you've got the press covering your back. And why would they do it? Money, like a few gaming sites' full background add. And finally the people, the target audience. And in a few situations those who aren't your target audience like we've seen now with Grand Theft Auto IV. People who haven't even played GTA3, VC or SA are saying they might get it when it comes out. But many of these might be the same people who get excited about something because it's NEW, because that's how the PS3 got the few overhyped games that ended up not being that great.

So what's currently overhyped?

GTA IV - Well it is isn't it? The case here though is that I think Rockstar will actually make a good game again after all these years. The thing is that the division that does GTA knows what they're doing, some other Rockstar divisions don't seem to. I believe GTA IV will receive praise and be an all-round good game. Don't read too much of the hype or YOU might end up killing it for yourself. Although, if you didn't like the previous games in the series you most likely won't dig this one either.

Age of Conan - Same thing happened with Lord of the Rings Online. I thought it was quite obvious it would happen though, they've got this license for a story which recently was a blockbuster movie, it can't go well. I'm afraid even Cory Barlog's Mad Max game isn't going to be that great either even though they supposedly pushed the entire movie production schedule back for the release to coincide with the game. But what about Conan? It's not like there's been a movie of Conan for some time. No there hasn't but looking at the videos released, and the gameplay shown even though it's at some sort of beta stage, it looks to be another game that'll sell a few copies but be nowhere near overthrowing World of Warcraft. Same goes for Warhammer Online but that one hasn't been really overhyped that much.

Wii Fit, Nintendo peripheral devices - Yeah people like to move. You're not going to get in better shape by playing a game. Well OK maybe that's not true, but this is, you're better off going for a REAL walk outside. Nintendo likes to sell plastic (the Wii Wheel is what they're calling it) for 17 euros and show it off in high profile games conferences as the main attraction to their small karting game. Oh, what about a "Zapper" that does.. nothing. That is unless you mount your 70 euro set of controllers onto it. Yay, more gimmicks.

Haze - It's going to be a fun game I'm quite sure. Free Radical isn't going to let you down. But there's too much talk about nectar this nectar that. Frankly nectar isn't even that interesting a concept so chill on the in your face crap already.

Overhyping can do lots of things but ultimately what the game is itself in the end is all that matters. The majority of people will see past the hype, they'll know if the game is good or bad. But some people might be affected more. Someone might have read every article on GTA IV and when the game finally comes out they'll be playing a totally different game compared to someone like me who's deliberately tried to steer clear of all the crap out there now. If the game is good, I'll know, if it's not I'll know that too. But what if I never intended to buy the game, would the hype driven me to it? And how would I like it then?

I'm interested to find out how Game|Life's Chris Kohler's articles evolve and what he'll think of GTA IV.

P.S. Having just looked at the Game|Life page I noticed this article. The word 'gorgeous' creates hype for the game. I don't find anything gorgeous about those pictures, maybe look at some Uncharted: Drake's Fortune screenshots.

David Jaffe interview

2008-04-03T13:39:00.004+03:00

A man that's hated and loved, lead designer of God of War, David Jaffe. Here's an interview with him in the Gamespot Behind the Games series. It has a few good things to know for would be designers so check it out.

God of War: Chains of Olympus

2008-04-03T03:24:00.004+03:00

I played through God of War: Chains of Olympus on the PSP recently and being a big fan of the series it was a delight. The small system in your hands never ceases to amaze. The game runs fluidly enough with some scenes causing a slight drop in frames per second but nothing that'll upset you. There are some really nice sceneries to look at and areas that open into a view of a huge tower or something similar.

But lets get to the points that I'd like to mention game design-wise.

- Remember the boxes/crates from Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction? Check my post on the game for a refresh. Anyway, this game has some interesting boxes too. When you hit them they break apart after a slight delay. It's like there's lag between the breaking animation which is weird. It's so small that it doesn't matter that much but it's there. Also, if you backtrack and enter an area that hasn't been streamed to memory (I think CoO assumes you're going forward, which most of the time you are anyway, so it mostly loads only whats in front of you instead of behind) the boxes you've broken might show up again and break. It happens rarely and you really have to try and make it do it to see the effect but it's like it loads the breaking animation again. I wonder why this happens in games. Why can't it remember that it's broken and doesn't need to load it at all anymore?

- The animations are directly from the previous GoW games on the PS2. It's not a bad thing by any means. I guess Ready At Dawn got off easier like that but why would you go re-inventing the wheel anyway? Kratos looks amazing and that's all that matters. I'm quite sure a lot of the assets were used from previous games but that's a part of being a sequel obviously. The thing that does stick out though is that there's only one part where Kratos sneaks on a plank in the beginning of the game and that animation is never used again, not to mention any walking on narrow planks. Again, not a bad thing, just interesting.

- Like the animations all of the same game mechanics have stayed too. At least the story and levels are completely new because the game itself is exactly like GoW 1 and 2. Dive bombing enemies, reflecting with your shield, carrying a corpse and using it as a weight on switches (portraying the lack of caring of Kratos), underwater speed burst, climbing along walls with your weapons and hitting enemies off, etc. What's new really is the one other weapon you can get near the end of the game. But that weapon is done nicely. There are also some cool looking magic effects as well as the underwater effect is really nice.

- The difficulty overall isn't too tough. I found the pacing to be a bit off at times. What I look for in 3rd person action adventure games are interesting surroundings and a good story. Obviously gameplay too but what I mean is I'm not the biggest Ninja Gaiden fan even though it's a great game, I just like GoW's approach more. So when I got the feeling that I'd like some more monsters to kill and it's been too quiet for too long, maybe pacing wasn't as perfect as it could've been. But all in all it's a very short game so not really a point worth complaining about, although for 36 euros it's got enough bonus content and entertainment value to be well worth it.

One thing I didn't like though was the last boss battle. You get your save point which is good, but after that you have to watch a video and then start a boss fight that seems like a task that's too much to handle. You also have to watch the video entirely EVERY time you retry the fight from the beginning. You can only skip videos after you pass the game once. Not a very good idea. If I would've known that phase 2 of the fight starts at 50% health AND the game SAVES itself there I wouldn't have put down the PSP for 2 days. Maybe a small P2 at the 50% mark of the bosses health could've given more incentive to get onwards but now it feels like "I don't see the health going down at all and I have to do 99 more percent? screw this". The first phase in the fight just slows down the whole pace too much, you have to avoid moves and get a few hits in then back off again. The last 50% is fine though but I'm sure again that mixed opinions will arise from the action sequences where you have to press buttons in an order. Maybe these types of sequences have something to learn of Guitar Hero type games. You need to focus too much on the button image that'll pop up and you can't really see the cool things happening in the background. Maybe the buttons falling from the top right of the screen would work better, making it a "time the press correctly" thing more than a "YOU MISSED ONE BUTTON YOU DIE" thing.

- Another thing that can lead you to problems is the fact that save points don't restore health and mana even after you load again. I know it's a design choice that's fairly sensible to keep from watering out the difficulty completely but when you end up in a new area that initiates a fight against 2 armored ghosts and 4 imps flying around and respawning and you have 1% health left after just saving, you're in trouble. Luckily with skill you can defeat any opponent without losing any health so it's doable but you can get yourself into quite a pickle if you don't keep it in mind.

- The urns of power that I was looking for through the entire game are impossible to find. The manual says there are urns, which after finding will grant you something really special. Well, after completing the game without finding any I checked online and supposedly the whole thing was a print error in the European version's manual and the items don't exist in the game. That sucked. I want to find some urns!

- Overall the levels are very well done and interesting if maybe a bit too linear. There are a few very short passages to maybe another room but most of the time there's one way to go and no others. Some of the secrets are nice but mostly very easy to find.

It's an amazing game and the replay value is great. I was hoping the Ready At Dawn video you get when you complete the game once would've had some interviews but instead it's just music on top of developers making crazy faces. I've started playing through on the God setting now which seems quite doable but I dread the day I get to the last boss again, I don't think I'll have the patience to do phase 1. Anyway, there are other interesting things to unlock and being the huge GoW fan that I am, I'm going to be playing it for a long time still. 36 euros VERY well spent.

Gears of War 2 - new technologies

2008-03-26T17:26:00.007+02:00

Another video but one worth discussion yet again. And yet again it's about Epic. But hey, they do so many things right it's tough not to applaud.

This video gives some insight to the new features in the Unreal Engine that are being implemented into Gears of War 2.

Water effects are something that will always be worked on to make it look better and more realistic. No huge improvements can be seen in the above video when compared with some other engines but the organic "meat cube" is pretty awesome.

The soft jelly-like properties can be used to do some really cool things. I have my doubts that the level designers will be able to get the full potential out of it yet for Gears 2 but it'll be something interesting to look forward to. Games tend to have very cool looking areas with some dynamic lights and moving tree branches (Ratchet and Clank on the PS3 made areas look very lively) but something like this might bring it to the next level. Sure there have been fields with grass that move as you walk through them but this is different from that. Nice work.

As for the destructible environments, it was done in Red Faction on the PS2 years ago but it hasn't been used in games that much. I don't see why not. As long as you have a finite amount of ammo players aren't going to run around blasting open every single wall. But you do have to keep it in mind from the beginning of development since you can't really have a wall that can be blown apart right next to where the level ends or where a cool hard to reach power-up would be. Even with the metal grating in between. Level designers are going to have to take more courses in CAD drawing and more architectural studies. Or not.

Anyway, it looks nice again with some minor tweaks that bring the engine forward. I just hope Gears 2 isn't as boring to play in the long run as the first one was. Ducking for cover isn't everything. More variety please.

Cliff Bleszinski interview

2008-03-25T22:14:00.004+02:00

This is a good one. The reason I'm posting it is if someone's interested you can hear one of the most known game designers talk about what makes a cool game. You know Cliffy B right? Well, he's the type of guy I would kill to be. "Lead Designer at Epic Games", one of the coolest job descriptions on the planet.

This interview was done in GDC 08 and they've just told everyone about Gears of War 2. Check it out.

Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction

2008-03-24T04:36:00.007+02:00

Tools of Destruction, the first R&C game on the Playstation 3, is better than Super Mario Galaxy.

Ok why so? Well, it's a matter of personal taste and history with both series I believe. Nintendo fanboys tend to get upset if someone says anything in even a slightly negative tone about Miyamoto-san, so they'll no doubt be angry at a preposterous claim like the one I made up there. Some people got upset at David Jaffe for making a damn joke about banana peels and some laughed at Insomniac for making statements about the similarities between R&C and Mario Galaxy, so fuck that. I love Nintendo but the Wii's age old technology, and control system that's turned out to be more a gimmick than a new design everyone else will try to follow, as well as creating copies of the same games over and over again, just isn't that exciting for me.

But here comes the part about personal history regarding certain series that I was talking about. I've played all the Mario games up to now when they came out and Mario 64, Sunshine and Galaxy don't differ from each other enough to keep it that interesting. People will argue that Mario Galaxy is a totally new type of game but in the core of the issue Mario controls just like he did in the last 2 games and even with spherical little worlds it's not as big a change as people claim. The little planets are fun and I'm not saying Galaxy is a bad game at all, far from it, but this post isn't about Galaxy.

So why wouldn't R&C be just a repeat of the same old? My history with the series, that's why. I played through the first R&C game and never touched the others. I loved the first one. I think the reason I never got into the others was they seemed to come out too soon after the first one and I didn't want more of it yet at that point, kind of like Viewtiful Joe 2. And not having enough new additions just made it not all that interesting. But now on the PS3 in brand new spankin' High-Def graphics I was sold. I hadn't played the series for a long time as opposed to Mario and really wanted to get back in.

The game looks absolutely amazing. I love how in every level when you land with your ship they take you into a camera angle of the world giving an idea of the basic theme. When you move your thumb-stick even a bit the camera smoothly pans in behind Ratchet. Smoothly being the key word, it all runs at 60fps. I don't remember if it was Insomniac or Naughty Dog that said one of their main focuses regarding technology is to get their games to run at 60fps, but it shows in both of their games. Nothing is more annoying than when you're on a high speed mission and have to aim to shoot at the enemies and because of frame rate issues you can't aim well enough (coughGTA3cough). With Ratchet games (just like Jak and Daxter) you really can't wait to see what kinds of levels they have in store for you. The atmosphere is amazing with ships flying high above you and things moving around in every direction. I just wish there were more towns and NPCs to talk to and maybe trade some items with. Yeah there's the smuggler and Ms. Apogee but I'm talking adventure game style. At least you can choose what to ask the few that there are in some cases.

Everyone knows what the reviewers have given the game and what they've said about the lovely selection of weapons, great gameplay, nice minigames, starfox-esque sequences etc. but what about the design quirks and things you might find talked about on a game design site? Well, here are a few things I noticed. I'm not saying they're bad, just that it's something interesting to look at.

- When you have to turn a screw with Ratchet, he sticks his melee weapon on it and you have to run in circles to tighten/loosen it. Normally in games (God of War and Matroid Prime 3: Corruption come to mind for example) you would rotate the thumb-stick in the direction you want your character to run. In ToD you simply hold down in any direction and Ratchet goes in circles. Obviously makes it easier but I would've gone for the circle mechanic.

- Magnetic floors aren't like Mario's spherical worlds. You become very restricted once on them meaning you can't do high jumps or long jumps anymore. Also, if you try to long jump onto a slope you tend to hit it like a wall. You can't jump off these either giving you quite a safe ride.

- Double-tapping R2 gives you a speed boost later on but it acts very strangely on slopes or terrain inconsistencies. Sometimes you really slow down when going up or down. I don't see the real use in slowing down. Maybe it's there to stop you from going off a high cliff or something but that would only apply if the ground on the ledge was tilted a bit and even then the cancellation mechanic for the speed boost isn't instant. You can't cancel your speed boost immediately after you started it, it'll only cancel a bit later and even when you press jump (or something else to cancel it) it'll keep going for a bit. This is obviously a made as a move that you use only when you're certain you can use it and won't actually go off a cliff while boosting, but the really high slow down you get on slopes still feels a bit odd.

- Sometimes when you've cleared an area and come back later you might see a box fall from the air. Apparently boxes (you know, the breakable things with stuff inside) have specific positions and when a box that has a respawn attribute (like ammo crates) spawns in mid air and you come back to that area with speed (like the double-R2 boost) you might see a box fall from the air a short ways because the last time you were there it was on top of some non-respawning boxes that you destroyed. Just an interesting thing to note. Boxes have specific coordinates I guess.

- Animation is very nicely done and smooth but it's sometimes not exactly precise. What I mean is it's done so that everything looks fluid and smooth all the time but for example if you're standing still and press the thumb-stick in the opposite direction of where you're facing lightly you'll see Ratchet start to move immediately in that direction but his body turns a bit late. So the animation "catches up" to your movement later. It's very subtle and shouldn't bother anyone but you can see it when done slowly, it's like Ratchet walks backwards for a while. It's a bit like when 3D characters don't match the ground they're on when walking when their feet go too fast compared to their speed. Like Michael Jackson moonwalking.

Those are the things that I wanted to point out. The game has an immense amount of animations and Ratchet has a bunch of moves that all look so nice and fluid that you really have to love the production values in it. One thing I do wonder about though, has anyone ever used the throwing wrench move? The one where you crouch and throw your wrench. I never did, the weapons more than take care of all range issues and it's not like you'll run out of ammo with all the vendor bots around.

The gameplay works very well and the difficulty curve is just right. You really have to understand that the weapons and knowing what they all do is an integral part of passing the game with ease. And once you do pass it you'll unlock a very nice replay mode with a racking multiplier that nets you millions and millions of bolts and raritanium along with new weapons and armor! Nothing makes me happier than a New Game + feature like good old Chrono Trigger.

Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction is one of the best games out there and was an awesome experience for me. You really get to see how much more powerful the PS3 is compared to last generation consoles. But obviously graphics are nothing if the gameplay sucks, luckily gameplay here is top notch. Super Mario Galaxy had great gameplay but the lack of graphics turned me off somewhat. HD is awesome.

Fighting mechanics

2008-03-19T19:36:00.006+02:00

You know, many of us have played fighting games like Ninja Gaiden, Street Fighter II, God of War, Devil May Cry, Tekken, Soul Calibur or Heavenly Sword, but only a few know how much work goes into designing a balanced system for it all. I'm talking about hand to hand combat and not shooter games like Doom.

The whole thing needs to be carefully planned out and lots of tweaking goes into making a successful beat-em-up for example. Street Fighter II spawned a lieu of advanced versions of the same game that focused a lot on how gameplay worked. Nowadays you could just download a patch from the Internet but back then they made a new game and added "Super" in front of it. To those not so hardcore, it might seem weird to have a "Turbo" version of the same game you just bought a year ago (albeit with a few extra characters) but to hardcore beat-em-up fans the difference was like night and day. There have been many talks about how Street Fighter II wasn't fast enough and so on but to your average gamer it wasn't that big a deal.

Anyway, what I'm saying is that fighting games have more in them than you might expect. You need special teams and quite often consultants working on the game all through the development phase who help tune the fighting and work with all the movements, blocks, animations and cancellations.

First off, you need to determine what audience you want the game to be for. Let's take an example, God of War vs. Ninja Gaiden. God of War has a complex fighting mechanic but at the same time it's very accessible to amateurs as well. You can press simple combinations of 2 buttons and see Kratos do amazing moves, if you've acquired the move in the story obviously. In Ninja Gaiden the whole game is focussed a lot more on the fighting itself and not so much the scenery and story like God of War. Ninja Gaiden is a much harder game too because the core mechanic is the fighting whilst in God of War the idea is to give you a Hollywood-esque experience while having your interaction with the environment make you believe you're in charge of what will happen next.

After you've determined to what scope fighting will play a part in your game, you can start developing it. Do you want your players to have a plethora of different attacks all accessed by long button combinations like A, B, B, A, down, left, down, or do you want the fighting to take a smaller role. Whatever you do though, you need to consider all the complex things that come along with this genre:

Animation - how long are your animations? Measured in frames, for example 160 frames. Games run at 60 fps but like DJ Goddard says, fight animations are commonly 30 fps (talking about 2D games). You need to specify at which point in your animation your character actually hits the opponent. Also, all those special effects you might want to add in need to be triggered from within certain frames of the animation, like blood when being hit in the face or something.

Collision detection - can be tough to get it right because of characters moving all over the place and animations need to sync with when your character actually hits.

Canceling moves - an integral part of many gamers' tactics include canceling your moves. This and blocking is something that can really determine how the fight ends. Do you allow your player to start a long combo animation but then simply press left to walk left and thus dodge the enemy attack or do you not allow the player to do anything anymore once they started the move? You can also assign cancels in between animations before or after the first hit frame (where your damaging hit should land) for example. Or maybe you only want the player to be able to cancel a move with the block button and nothing else.

Combos - you know how you see those lovely points/damage rack up the more hits you get in? You need all of the above to factor into making combos work. How long after the last move ended do you have to start a new move to add it to the combo counter? Does the second move become more powerful or does a different animation play when you do a basic move after a combo? Remember, you also have to combine the 2 animations fluidly.

Balance - Starcraft II and Street Fighter II. Great examples of balanced games in many people's opinion. Every move and every trick you use in your game needs to end up working together so that no character is overpowered so that it requires substantially less effort to win with than other characters do. In fighting games (and others too) a character that isn't balanced is called "broken" and if there's something wrong at a game-breaking scale then the whole game is considered broken. You don't want that.

Buffering key presses - you can't expect your players to be as perfect as computers in all cases either so how do you take key presses into account, how long (and in which frames of the animation) does your engine remember a key press for example.

Invulnerabilities/stopping time - some moves a character makes are ultra powerful and hard to execute. They might also require a certain amount of combo hits before it or require mana or a rage bar or something else to build up before using. These moves might make your character not take any damage for a certain duration during the move or for the entire move itself. You can also have a move stop time so that the other player can't do anything while your cool leap 5 meters into the air and ground slam animation plays.

Not to mention all the moves themselves. Guarding (do you lose a little bit of health or no health at all when defending against attacks, does your guard break on high damage attacks), dodging, counter-attacks, counter-counter-attacks, speed, what state/stance is your character in, push-backs, etc. So you probably get an idea that simply the fighting part, which not everyone takes so seriously, has a lot of work put into it.

That's basically what fighting mechanics require, and having written this I started wondering more about when Street Fighter IV will be out in Europe. Before that though, Super Smash Bros. Brawl. And I still haven't bought Devil May Cry 4..

Are point & click adventures dead?

2008-03-19T01:52:00.009+02:00

Here we are. I got my glass and UV light with City and Colour playing in the background, eyes burning from the ultra-white design of the blogspot posting tool, wondering what to write as my first post. You've already seen the title but right now I haven't written it yet. I worked on the site design and flow so much during the last 2 days that I think I overdid it a bit. It's supposed to be a simple blog but ended up looking like something bigger. Aw hell, so what, it's more fun to look at now. I even redrew Mario from his old version pixel by pixel.

Anyway, let's open gamedes.txt and check for something to write about. It's a text file I made with notes on stuff I wanted to really write more about at some point. ...yes, this is it. Monkey Island. Indiana Jones. Day Of The Tentacle. Maniac Mansion. Simon The Sorcerer. Space/King's Quest. Grim Fandango. Leisure Suit Larry. Sam & Max. Full Throttle. Quest For Glory. The Dig.

I loved point & click adventures. I played them all through. Sometimes with the help of a walkthrough because some problems were overly awkward and I only really wanted to look at the nice sceneries and get to meet new weird people. But nowadays they don't make them like they used to before. We've got the Sam & Max episodes from Telltale though which I'm grateful for. They've really matched the feeling of the original, best I can remember at least, and it feels like an old adventure game again.

There are some problems with Sam & Max though. 3D is all nice and fine and developers want to do everything in 3D because it's the "cool" thing to do which is fine if it's done right. Sam & Max at times feels like the camera should be further off. In Season One you find yourself clicking the ground to move around and when the camera is so close and you can't see to the sides, you end up clicking a LOT. Season Two brings along a few nice features like being able to hold down your left mouse button causing Max to follow the cursor. But why not make the whole camera freely movable (at least to a certain extent) by the player? That would be fun.

But my love for hand-painted backgrounds is too strong to be satisfied with only Telltale's 3D series. Don't get me wrong, I love the series, but wasn't it awesome when you could advertise your game on the back of the big box with something like:

"Contains over 200 hand-painted locations!"

Ah, those were the times. But wait! What about the Runaway games? They're nice but I guess what the other thing is that I'm missing is the crazy characters and totally weird worlds that Lucasarts could produce. Some of Sierra's games were crazy enough too but Lucasarts was my favorite because dying in other adventure games always seemed so dumb to me. You step on glass from a broken window and die, what the fuck just happened..?

So why don't adventure games sell anymore? Obviously they're not selling well since so few are actually making them. Well, maybe the adventure genre sort of moved more to the action-adventure section of first person shooters and third person adventures that require precise button combinations instead of casually clicking on stuff you see on the screen. I'm a big fan of action-adventure games but there was a certain depth (and still is after these years) to adventure games that you don't get in your run of the mill action-adventure. Is that why people don't buy them as much? I know the whole Nintendo Wii type of "fast games for busy lives" thing is working out well for them but I prefer depth. And you know what, I bet a game like God of War had more than 200 hand-painted scenes simply of concept art that directly aren't even in the game (except the few unlockable galleries).

The complex talk-patterns and the fact that some puzzles were simply beyond the scope of any rational thought were probably two of the things that killed adventure games. Having lots of things to talk about with a fun NPC is no problem if its done well (writing is good, VO works, animation is fun), but when you have to talk to a boring character that obviously was made in 2 evenings of planning.. it gets very tedious very fast. That's a problem I had with a lot of adventure games too. Some characters, that you just felt you had to explore fully by clicking all the sub-options in their chat trees, were designed sloppily really dragging down the flow of the game itself. And I think we all could name a few logic-defying puzzles in almost any adventure game.

Adventure games are not dead. They're living as something else with all the shiny new 3D, and they have action elements in them. But the old adventure game days have been over for a while. There are small releases every now and then but nothing even near the scope of what Lucasarts pulled off back then. It's the music, the locations, the characters, the humor (games nowadays tend to be more serious) and the atmosphere that did it for me. But hey, with production costs ranging from $10 - $50 million on high profile games nowadays (Uncharted was around the $20 million mark, Metal Gear Solid 4 probably around $70 million as a guess which is close to Hollywood movies already), a small studio could "easily" get their name out there with a really good adventure game.

The coolest thing ever would be if Lucasarts made an old-school hand-painted adventure game to accompany the new Indiana Jones movie. They're going back to the roots with the movie so why not? Bleh, you can always keep dreaming.

The Petit Opening

2008-03-17T03:29:00.005+02:00

Game Design with Gabriel Kay opens. Final adjustments are being made to the system.