This week we welcome spaceship expert Brian Rubin (his credentials here) to help us determine the greatest spaceship of all time, whether Supernatural is just for tween girls, and who would win in a Dance Dance Revolution last-man-standing showdown.
For our posts of the week, Brian chose this thread of Terminator geekery, Tom chose this announcement of the impending Fallen Princess Enchantress beta, and Jason chose this discussion of 2K’s other X-com game.
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The Old Republic has the same sense of morality that’s present in the other Bioware games. The choices you make often give you light or dark side points. These points are combined, light subtracting from dark, etc, to give you an overall score. For instance, Willy has 3,900 points towards the dark side because I have 250 light side points and 4,150 dark side points.
Morality has never been so easy!
After the jump, diplomatic immunity… revoked Continue reading →
All Zombies Must Die is the other sequel to a very good twin-stick shooter about killing zombies that jumps genres and aggressively shoves bad writing in your face. But unlike the similarly misguided Zombie Apocalypse: Never Die Alone, this one from the developers of Burn Zombie Burn has its gameplay smarts still intact.
After the jump, JAFZG? Continue reading →
I’ve saved the most unique for last. I have a love-hate relationship with Square Enix’s games. I’m not a huge fan of their bread and butter Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy series, which fall into the category of typical JRPGs. I enjoy when they do something different, such as Chrono Trigger or Kingdom Hearts. In fact, the only reason I tried Final Fantasy 12 was because I read that all the hardcore fans hated it. Turned out it was one of my favorite games that year.
After the jump, Square Enix gets trippy Continue reading →
One of the most valuable lessons for videogames to learn is that they aren’t movies. I love this Gamasutra interview with Ken Levine about working with actors for Bioshock Infinite, partly because it digs deep into a process that eludes too many videogames: how to effectively use actors to capture the human element. But I really like the following anecdote, which gets to the heart of the matter that videogames can’t just do things the way movies, comic books, or TV shows do them. Understanding the limitations of a videogame is a fundamental part of the design process.
You gotta work with the tools that you have. You also have to make sure you’re not trying to do things that you can’t support. I think one of the first lessons I learned in the game industry, in my first few weeks, I was working on a Star Trek Voyager game that never shipped, and I wrote an opening cutscene for the game. I was a writer on it.
The last part of the opening cutscene I wrote in the stage directions, “The camera pulls in on Janeway’s face, and we see her eyes widen in terror.” Now this is 1995. Janeway’s face was a bitmap that was approximately maybe 32 by 32 pixels.
And my lead programmer said to me, “Dude. You’re not pulling in on Janeway’s face, and her eyes are not widening on terror. She’s sitting there, 32 by 32 pixels, you know, doing nothing.” And I was like “Ohhhh. Okay. I need to figure out different ways to get these emotions across.” That was a very valuable lesson.
Too many videogames are still trying to “pull in on Janeway’s face” in some manner or another. As Levine puts it at the end of the interview, “Whenever you find yourself fighting against your toolset, you’re not going to win that fight”. And now I will resist the temptation to reel off a list of recent videogames that should have known better and still lost that particular fight.
