Just finished Uncharted. In the spirit of Indiana Jones, Romancing the Stone, or The Mummy, Nathan Drake is a likeable, wise-cracking everyman, who also happens to be a terrifying cold-blooded serial killer. This is just the tally from my trophies:
Killed 20 enemies with a brutal combo
Killed 100 enemies with headshots
Killed 20 enemies by shooting from the hip
Killed 50 enemies with the PM 9mm
Killed 20 enemies with the Desert 5
Killed 30 enemies with the MP40
Killed 50 enemies with the AK47
Killed 50 enemies with the M4
Killed 50 enemies with the SAS-12
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Gamespot likes Metal Gear Solid
MGS4 won 8 awards at Gamespot this year:
Game of the Year, Best Story, Best Graphics (Technical), Best Boss Fights, Most Memorable Moment, Best Action/Adventure, Best PS3 Game, and ...
Best Voice Acting.
"It's impossible to call out Metal Gear Solid 4's impressive voice acting without first discussing David Hayter, the voice of Solid Snake. His throaty growl has charmed series fans for years, but his presence is even more imposing in the explosive conclusion."
[speechless]
Game of the Year, Best Story, Best Graphics (Technical), Best Boss Fights, Most Memorable Moment, Best Action/Adventure, Best PS3 Game, and ...
Best Voice Acting.
"It's impossible to call out Metal Gear Solid 4's impressive voice acting without first discussing David Hayter, the voice of Solid Snake. His throaty growl has charmed series fans for years, but his presence is even more imposing in the explosive conclusion."
[speechless]
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Feed the Animals
I dunno if this is new to anyone else, it's a month old, but I just found this link (and its siblings) and it blew my mind.
Rather than trying to explain from my own ignorance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_the_Animals
And grab it here for name-your-price, but I think the videos are alot more fun - I'd have a hard time recognizing all the music on my own.
Rather than trying to explain from my own ignorance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_the_Animals
And grab it here for name-your-price, but I think the videos are alot more fun - I'd have a hard time recognizing all the music on my own.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Manageable Complexity
Just came back from watching Indy IV.
************************
Very Minor Spoiler Alert,
that you probably already
know if you've watched any
of the trailers
************************
Sean Connery is *not* in the movie. They say he "died" or something, then go back to punching bad guys. Shia LaBeouf *is* in the movie, and he takes on the standard Indiana Jones role of runner-up, doing the 2nd half of all the good-guy action sequences.
I did think it was interesting, given how much they must have offered to get Harrison Ford to sign on for the film, and the fact that this is almost certainly the last Indiana Jones movie, that they didn't pull out all the stops and bring in Sean Connery, Gimli the Dwarf, and everyone else from the previous movies.
But I suppose the screenwriters were a little too smart for that, and a little smarter than many game developers. Indiana Jones has a pretty specific formula - you've got Indy in the center, a 2nd character for him to make snide comments to and to do silly 2-person co-op punching stunts with, and then one or two additional allies that mostly bumble around and remind you that he's not like the other "professors." This isn't an X-Men movie, and trying to have more than a couple substantial characters would take too much away from the action, especially if you're trying to tie everything up in a finale. For examples, see X3, Pirates 3, LotR 3 (even Tolkien made that mistake). The last Potter book is a brilliant counter-example, but they've already announced they'll have to take two films to do it justice, so I think it still proves my point.
But how often do you see a video-game sequel that for each new feature remembers to throw out an old one? Starcraft 2 comes to mind - I heard that the number of unique units was going to be similar to the original, in order to make each unit meaningful. But too often we view each feature as an incremental, always-positive improvement, and why throw out perfectly good code while you're adding more code? It's easy too forget the cost of complexity, the narrowing of demographics that occurs when your tutorial only covers the new features you've added for the sequel, and the pure intimidation factor of having 20 functions mapped to the controller, even if all of them would be fun on their own.
You're best off just finding the base formula that "works" for your game, and executing that, no more, no less. Hell, this advice ought to be heeded even if you're making the *first* game in a series. And best of all, doing less is cheaper, too!
************************
Very Minor Spoiler Alert,
that you probably already
know if you've watched any
of the trailers
************************
Sean Connery is *not* in the movie. They say he "died" or something, then go back to punching bad guys. Shia LaBeouf *is* in the movie, and he takes on the standard Indiana Jones role of runner-up, doing the 2nd half of all the good-guy action sequences.
I did think it was interesting, given how much they must have offered to get Harrison Ford to sign on for the film, and the fact that this is almost certainly the last Indiana Jones movie, that they didn't pull out all the stops and bring in Sean Connery, Gimli the Dwarf, and everyone else from the previous movies.
But I suppose the screenwriters were a little too smart for that, and a little smarter than many game developers. Indiana Jones has a pretty specific formula - you've got Indy in the center, a 2nd character for him to make snide comments to and to do silly 2-person co-op punching stunts with, and then one or two additional allies that mostly bumble around and remind you that he's not like the other "professors." This isn't an X-Men movie, and trying to have more than a couple substantial characters would take too much away from the action, especially if you're trying to tie everything up in a finale. For examples, see X3, Pirates 3, LotR 3 (even Tolkien made that mistake). The last Potter book is a brilliant counter-example, but they've already announced they'll have to take two films to do it justice, so I think it still proves my point.
But how often do you see a video-game sequel that for each new feature remembers to throw out an old one? Starcraft 2 comes to mind - I heard that the number of unique units was going to be similar to the original, in order to make each unit meaningful. But too often we view each feature as an incremental, always-positive improvement, and why throw out perfectly good code while you're adding more code? It's easy too forget the cost of complexity, the narrowing of demographics that occurs when your tutorial only covers the new features you've added for the sequel, and the pure intimidation factor of having 20 functions mapped to the controller, even if all of them would be fun on their own.
You're best off just finding the base formula that "works" for your game, and executing that, no more, no less. Hell, this advice ought to be heeded even if you're making the *first* game in a series. And best of all, doing less is cheaper, too!
Sunday, May 18, 2008
The Truman Show
The Truman Show (yes, haha) was on cable over the weekend. One of the scenes shows them setting up a street for Jim Carrey to drive to work. All the extras get into positions midway in the street and the shops, and don't "turn on" until he comes around the corner. That way they don't have to pay actors to continuously populate a town, they ferry them around and only pay for people in a small bubble around Jim Carrey.
Reminded me alot of streaming, open-world games - it's an almost exact analog equivalent for what we do in a streaming world. But in both cases - the only reason we go to such absurd lengths to start and stop pockets of reality around the protagonist is because of resource constraints. It'd be easier, and take less work and thought (although far more resources), to just fully populate the entire virtual world, 24 hours of every day. So while on the one hand, in both cases, we have a world that when perceived by the viewer, is extremely dense, populated, and realistic, we're actually cutting corners wherever we can behind the scenes.
I think this shows how much further we have to go, technologically, before we really "have enough" processing power, memory, etc. Everyone will be clamoring for the Xbox720s and PS4s as soon as new games are demoed, because out of the hundreds of corners we cut currently to simulate reality, some number of them can then be simulated fully. And we can never really say "technology has progressed far enough for photo-realism" until we're not constantly running around behind the scenes, moving everything in and out in a tiny LOD bubble around the player, a result of our pushing the available resources to their absolute limit.
I think players don't realize all the things they're missing out on, because they're not in the meetings where we say "that wouldn't be feasible," and then we trade manpower for CPU cycles and memory registers, doing our utmost to hide it all behind the scenes, and to avoid begging the question "why didn't you do..." But come the next 10x jump in performance, some number of those crazy ideas actually become feasible, and games get better.
Until I'm lazy and wasteful at my job, we don't have anywhere near enough technological resources available.
Reminded me alot of streaming, open-world games - it's an almost exact analog equivalent for what we do in a streaming world. But in both cases - the only reason we go to such absurd lengths to start and stop pockets of reality around the protagonist is because of resource constraints. It'd be easier, and take less work and thought (although far more resources), to just fully populate the entire virtual world, 24 hours of every day. So while on the one hand, in both cases, we have a world that when perceived by the viewer, is extremely dense, populated, and realistic, we're actually cutting corners wherever we can behind the scenes.
I think this shows how much further we have to go, technologically, before we really "have enough" processing power, memory, etc. Everyone will be clamoring for the Xbox720s and PS4s as soon as new games are demoed, because out of the hundreds of corners we cut currently to simulate reality, some number of them can then be simulated fully. And we can never really say "technology has progressed far enough for photo-realism" until we're not constantly running around behind the scenes, moving everything in and out in a tiny LOD bubble around the player, a result of our pushing the available resources to their absolute limit.
I think players don't realize all the things they're missing out on, because they're not in the meetings where we say "that wouldn't be feasible," and then we trade manpower for CPU cycles and memory registers, doing our utmost to hide it all behind the scenes, and to avoid begging the question "why didn't you do..." But come the next 10x jump in performance, some number of those crazy ideas actually become feasible, and games get better.
Until I'm lazy and wasteful at my job, we don't have anywhere near enough technological resources available.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Pox Nora
Tried out Pox Nora for the first time this weekend. Some of my initial experiences:
- clicked through from a banner ad on some other site - they have some fantastic art for the game, enough to get me to download and play it.
- After installing, realized I had downloaded it before a year or so ago, but never played it because it was multiplayer only.
- MP-only games are extremely intimidating. I don't like learning how to play a game while immediately competing with potentially rude strangers online.
- Tutorial was generally good, but I had difficulty successfully hosting and starting a game - couldn't figure out how to select a starting deck. Got to watch a series of people to sign into my game lobby, hear me say "Help, this is my first game, it won't let me start the match," and then immediately log out without offering any suggestions.
- Like I said, MP-only games are extremely intimidating. I haven't even started my first match yet, and already feel like an idiot surrounded by jerks.
- Eventually got a match started, and I looked to be clearly winning, at which point my opponent quit out and it registered as a victory to me. Bailing out before the end of the match is pretty annoying, but hey, I won my first match! That helps me feel alot less dumb.
Pretty good initial experience. I wonder if there's a way to strongly bias MP games towards letting a new player win the first time. Just about the best way to encourage your player to stick around, although for most multiplayer games that's largely out of the developer's control.
I really prefer games like Star Chamber that give you a limited AI you can play against to initially practice the game. Even if the AI sucks (like in Star Chamber), it allows you a stress-free, public-humiliation-free forum to practice and learn the game. Reminds me of a Valve GDC talk about learning new gameplay mechanics:
"The speaker explained how their testing showed that the learning rate diminished if the player was put under any type of pressure during training time or, even worse, exposed to any sort of peril or even combat situations. Clearly, stress makes us go back to basic survival strategies rather than trying new ones. "
Even though a competitive-player AI is hard, and would only really be used as an extended tutorial, I think you have to sink the time in to make one for a game like this, or you lose half your customers. Hell, I clicked-through, downloaded, installed, and booted-up the game a year ago, only to never play it because I didn't want to look dumb online.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Mass Effect is Awesome
If you're a fan of science fiction, you really have to play Mass Effect. And when you play it, you really should read all of the codexes you get. From a pure fiction and universe-building perspective, Mass Effect is some of the best hard science fiction I've encountered in any medium. Handily better than any other sci-fi videogame or movie, and in the top-tier of science-fiction novels. The game devotes probably 20 pages of text to the tactical details of plausible, hard science-fiction descriptions of FTL and mass-effect-generating ship-to-ship combat, and as far as I've seen, the game doesn't even have any ship-to-ship combat. It's amazing.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Happy New Year!
Just noticed that Derek Smart released Universal Combat as freeware, and then immediately started a flamewar on Blue's News. It's good to see the internet bring in the new year with something as beautiful as this:
| 81. | Re: Derek Smart | Jan 2, 18:19 | dsmart |
|
|
Why don't you go die Derek? I have no less than three degrees - including a distance learning (something which even MIT, Princeton and everyone else is now offering) Ph.D. which I worked for an earned, am a noted math and AI whiz, have training from the likes of IBM and just about everyone who was anyone in IT back in the eighties and nineties, program in no less than seven languages (one of which I wrote, from scratch), have several publications, IP, one patent pending and God knows what else. Plus, I've been in business long before you got your sorry ass out of high school. ...if you think I got that from a cereal box, while signing deals left and right with most of the industry's top players, while working with people at my calibre, then you have a lot to learn about how real life actually works. Oh, lest I forget, I make a decent living, doing, well, nothing other than what I love doing. With your masters - assuming you ever complete it - you will never, ever, earn what I made in the last five years, in your entire lifespan on Earth. ...and I don't live in a trailer park, in my parents basement or with some whinny old coot. So yeah, go ahead, attack me. ...and gaming is my passion; not attacking people needlessly on the Net just for fun. This message was edited at Jan 5, 09:02. | ||
Friday, January 4, 2008
Endless Setlist
Finishing 4-player Endless Setlist on Hard with my family was one of the most epic videogame experiences in my life. We spent over 2 hours stuck on Green Grass and High Tides. By the time we finished I was no longer playing the drums - I was the Commander in a Battlefield game.
Monitoring 4 people's star power and crowd ratings, calling in strategic star power strikes right before the singer gets frozen out in an extended tamborine section, trying to maximize both deaths per player by keeping them unconscious as long as possible before reviving them once more into the breach. By the time we finished the song, people were shouting, arms were thrown up in the air - I've played in FPS and fighting game tournaments before, but for my mom, sister, and wife, I think that was the first time they'd experienced the kind of fiero you get from a truly epic gaming win.
After GG&HT, we still had 5 songs left, but we were such a well-oiled star-power machine at that point that Won't Get Fooled Again, Flirting With Disaster, and Run To The Hills just felt like a detente after the climax of a really good movie.
What surprised me most about Rock Band, by the end of Band World Tour, was how well the game works on a co-operative, strategic, band level. Getting past the fun of playing the individual instruments, there's still an entire game left in the player interactions. Playing drums on a guitar-heavy song, I feel like a healer in an MMO, acting as a support class for the rest of the song.
On the sucky side, because of Live's connectivity problems over the break, I wasn't able to transfer over my gamertag, so I didn't get the achievement (at least my sister did). But hearing my senior-citizen, church-choir mother getting "Awesome" rapping Sabotage and Faith No More in her soprano voice was a worthy prize.
Monitoring 4 people's star power and crowd ratings, calling in strategic star power strikes right before the singer gets frozen out in an extended tamborine section, trying to maximize both deaths per player by keeping them unconscious as long as possible before reviving them once more into the breach. By the time we finished the song, people were shouting, arms were thrown up in the air - I've played in FPS and fighting game tournaments before, but for my mom, sister, and wife, I think that was the first time they'd experienced the kind of fiero you get from a truly epic gaming win.
After GG&HT, we still had 5 songs left, but we were such a well-oiled star-power machine at that point that Won't Get Fooled Again, Flirting With Disaster, and Run To The Hills just felt like a detente after the climax of a really good movie.
What surprised me most about Rock Band, by the end of Band World Tour, was how well the game works on a co-operative, strategic, band level. Getting past the fun of playing the individual instruments, there's still an entire game left in the player interactions. Playing drums on a guitar-heavy song, I feel like a healer in an MMO, acting as a support class for the rest of the song.
On the sucky side, because of Live's connectivity problems over the break, I wasn't able to transfer over my gamertag, so I didn't get the achievement (at least my sister did). But hearing my senior-citizen, church-choir mother getting "Awesome" rapping Sabotage and Faith No More in her soprano voice was a worthy prize.
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