I hate (i.e. love) to out my friends, but I have to share this message I just got over the Playstation Network from someone who shall remain anonymous because he’s normally a bigshot RPG writer who specializes in PC games.
dude — if you still have LBP 1 would you mind hoping on for a sec and “hearting” me as a player? I literally need just one more heart for the platinum trophy. Yes, I have become “that guy”
I happily complied by loading up Little Big Planet, giving him a heart, and then admiring his platinum trophy.
In not necessarily but possibly related news, congratulations to Stefan “Desslock” Janicki for his first platinum trophy on the Playstation Network. It wasn’t that long ago that Stefan, a longtime champion of hardcore PRGs on the PC, derided console systems as the platform of “magic mushroom games”. Now he’s the proud owner of the platinum trophy for 100% completion of Little Big Planet.
Sony’s trophy system is wonderful for how it recognizes the relative difficulty of different achievements by awarding trophies of different colors. I’ve got plenty of bronze and silver trophies, and even a few golds. But as a guy who has no platinum trophies and a predilection for the Xbox 360 controller, I have a lot of respect for those of you who’ve reached for the platinum.
As someone who has been exceedingly vocal about his difficulties watching movies that show children in peril, I can totally get where this guy, Geoff, is coming from as he tries to watch the Dead Island game trailer. I’m a sensitive and protective father too. I can get past this if the filmmakers know what they’re doing, but I’m always going to be more uncomfortable watching something with a kid in danger than I was before I became a father.
I love this guy’s reaction–aside from the Polish slurs. Dude, lay off the Poles!–but it wasn’t my own. Is that because I’m father to a son? I doubt it. I think it has more to do with the fact that this is completely haunting and earned my appreciation, as hard as it is for me to watch. It is one of the most beautifully edited pieces of work I’ve seen in a long time. It’s heartbreaking. The image of the girl on her dad’s back will not soon leave me.
Still, I respect your reaction, brother. I’ve been there. Hope I can talk to you someday and let you know that while your Dad-ness forced you to miss beating Dead Rising 2, the Case West DLC is totally SFD.
“Never played as her before,” the anonymous person playing Sivir types.
“Me neither,” is my chat response. Meaning my champion, Ezreal.
“Me too,” types the dude playing Blitzcrank.
Solidarity. We have waited just north of ten minutes for this match to begin, and we are bonding before heading into the fray. Not with small talk either. We are revealing our little insecurities before heading into battle. I think this is a good sign.
Every now and again I’ll come across a level whose sole purpose is to share an element of design with the LBP2 community. Sometimes the creator does this to get some love (hearts, thumbs up) from the players. Sometimes this is done for the sole purpose of sharing something new, at least as far as I can tell. Today’s level, LBP2 Bounce Pads, seems to be the latter. Before you get through the starting gate a warning pops up announcing, “Please note this level is just a demonstration of bounce pads.” What follows is a pretty nifty demonstration. You bounce all around collecting bubbles and racing against a clock. In the screenshot above my sackbot is bouncing at hyper-speed between floor and ceiling pads. At the end of the level, you get another text bubble.
I allow this level to be copied so you can “object capture” the bounce pads. PLEASE DO NOT REPUBLISH MY CREATION!!! Thanks.
I can’t say I really understand what all that is about, as far as getting the difference between “object capture” and publishing the designer’s creation, because I have absolutely no understanding of how any of these creation tools work. But I like this sharing aspect, and I wonder if it is, indeed, just for the joy of sharing, or if there are pins or trophies involved. Doesn’t really matter. This was a cute little diversion either way. I’m just curious.
I’m also increasingly pleased with the fact that the creators of LPB2 decided to label the area where you experience these levels “Community”.
I’m not up on my Star Wars lore, since I lost interest forever as of about half way into the text crawl that opens Phantom Menace. But apparently an evil grey duck named Darth Sidious (pictured) figures prominently. Lucasarts announced today that he’ll be an unlockable character in Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars. You can jump into an insufferable Flash game featuring Mr. Sidious by going here, hitting enter, typing “darkside”, and then hitting enter again. Quack quack!
Arcen Games’ Chris Park (i.e. the dude who made AI War and published Tidalis) has posted an extensive update on his next game, A Valley Without Wind. It’s mainly a bunch of technical stuff, but it’ll give you a sense for how the game is coming. To get really excited about A Valley Without Wind, here’s the product page.
Park has a penchant for long explanations, which are great for those of us already sold on his games. I love his patch notes for AI War, for instance. But he needs a more concise sales pitches for the uninitiated than that entire page. For instance, the answer to “What is A Valley Without Wind?” should be “a procedurally generated infinite open-world post-apocalyptic fantasy survival RPG with permadeath from the guy who made AI War”. Or, to put it in less wonky terms, Din’s Curse meets Minecraft.
The current schedule is to make an open alpha available to the public next month, with a final release later in the year.
Felicia Day reveals in this Jimmy Fallon appearance that she’s been training with daggers for months, all in the service of promoting Dragon Age II, which comes out on March 8. Miss Day has written and starred in a webisodic elf saga, shot in the woods around LA, which won’t be out until this summer.
Telltale’s upcoming Jurassic Park game features the best product placement a shaving cream company could ever hope for.
The game storyline picks up on the stormy night as Jurassic Park began to fall apart — when Dennis Nedry stole a Barbasol can full of invaluable dinosaur embryos. He died trying to deliver it. He never knew it contained a tracking device. That same night, a desperate smuggler infiltrates Isla Nublar, hunting the canister and its precious cargo. She collides — literally — with park staff trying to evacuate. They are trapped together as the park collapses, left behind with the newly-freed dinosaurs. When InGen launches a perilous rescue operation, mercenaries, saboteurs, and survivors are thrown together in the struggle to escape the island. They confront T. Rex, Velociraptors and other dinosaurs in spectacular showdowns. As human agendas clash, secrets of the park are exposed, and a new threat emerges: an eerie, nocturnal predator stalking the group, hunting them relentlessly across the island.
Community level designers in LBP2 can give details about the level in a little text bubble that appears as the level loads. Some folks take advantage of this by begging you to heart their level. Some folks simply describe what the player can expect, in whatever language. Some folks apologize:
Hello ! This is my first level so there are maybe some problems and it is maybe short but, please, be cool :] [Minimum 2 players]
I’m usually not a fan of artists opening with apologies. The thing about these community levels that I haven’t really mentioned before, though, is that they are all works in progress. Perpetually. It took me awhile to get hip to this. Having been burned by the Special Editions(tm), I’m not crazy about revisionist artistry. But here I’ve come to respect it, and even find my interest piqued by it. A couple of designers whose levels I’ve featured in Daily Little Big Planet 2 have contacted me to let me know they’ve tweaked the level and have asked me to give it another go. One time, as I was trying to figure out how to upload extra pictures, I saw a screen of the revisions one designer had been making to a level. It showed revisions leading up to a moment three minutes before. That designer was still working on the level and I’d finished with it hours before.
The community world in LBP2 is far more alive than I initially realized. There is fluidity here, and I find this exciting. The above quote, appearing in the details for the level It ‘s everyone destiny, is a perfect example of this. I find this level mesmerizing. It’s mysterious, and it’s got atmosphere–partly because of the haunting music–and because of that the fact that I’ve gotten stuck doesn’t bother me. The designer admits there are glitches here in the opening tags and in the above text. Cool. I like where you’re going…I’ll come back and give you more chances. Especially since I only now noticed, after playing your level a few times, that it requires more people than just me. My bad. Regardless, props for being honest about where you are.
The game has been going on for a while. It’s a close one! Characters are changing dramatically as they get up to levels 13, 14, 15, where their distinct abilities are coming into their own. Dire stuff is happening all around. Now equipment is powerful enough to really matter. I’ve got Karma up to level 14, even though I’ve been mostly sharing a lane. One guy on the other team is level 17 already! We’ve traded a couple of turrets, but no one is getting steamrolled yet. It’s getting real.
I look over at everyone’s level on our team to see how we’re doing. Dingus is level 7.
This Playstation blog entry for the upcoming Mortal Kombat game is mostly one of those self-serving “Hey, look at what a collaborative team we are even though we keep pointing out that Ed Boon is in charge!” write-ups. Here’s how they come up with new fatalities at the studio that used to be Midway:
Inspiration can come from anywhere — gruesome murder news stories, old horror movies, and actual nightmares have spawned more than a few of our most disturbing fatalities. There is a usually a lot of “You know what would be cool…” and “What if…” The designers pantomime many of the motions for that fatality and the reaction of the other team members in the room determine whether a fatality is good enough for inclusion in the game. Ideas with the strongest team reactions are the ones we all build on and polish into a final concept. Ed then goes on to storyboard each fatality for the motion-capture session.
I’d love to be at one of those pantomime meetings, watching the dev team act out fighting moves. I imagine they’d make Ghyslain Raza look like a rank amateur.
By the way, the pre-order incentive for the April 19 M-rated reboot is that you get a code that lets you watch fatality videos before the game comes out. The Mortal Kombat series is kind of a joke these days, and fatalities are the punch line.
I’m finding that what increasingly appeals to me in these community levels is an understanding of just that. I don’t necessarily need great gameplay in these levels. In fact, I’ve come to expect that I’m not going to get that. I run across clever moments in some of the levels, and that can be exciting, but the real draw in dipping into these levels is getting some random individual’s take on this world. A feel that I’ve landed someplace specific, with a texture or sound or sense of humor that reflects the designer’s sensibility in some way. Most of these folks can cleverly place a jump pad. It’s rare that one of them can make me lose time.
Today’s level, histoire mixe, did just that. I jumped in to sample a couple of levels before I had to head off to pick up my son from school. Before I knew it, thirty minutes had gone by and I had to hustle. Histoire mixe, made by Darkness-Thomas, achieves this in two main ways. One way is the depth of the background, which you can see in the screenshot above a little bit. That figure behind my sackbot is a garden gnome, over there to the left is a shovel resting against a fence, behind which fence you see the greenery of neighboring yards. The other way is through sound.
A lot of the levels use a fairly generic sound scheme. Random music or the seemingly ubiquitous–and annoyingly extraneous–buzzing of flies. At the start of this level you hear a buzzing. As you play you realize it’s a lawnmower in the distance. A neighbor is mowing his lawn. Other mechanical noises bully their way in, including, inexplicably, a helicopter, which I understand slightly when I realize the half-worded sign below me says, “Call of Duty” on it, followed by a helicopter full of sack soldiers. Why is this in the backyard? Can’t tell you. Does this matter to me? Nope. Because like a good short film, this level has a sense of place. I don’t know exactly what’s going on, and I couldn’t care less.
There’s a drawn-out scene in Bitter Feast in which a woman goes about her business. She’s being stalked by an evil force, played here by James LeGros, a chef upset at the bad reviews he’s gotten from the woman’s boyfriend, a food blogger.
She opens the medicine cabinet. Then she closes it and, there in the reflection, standing behind her, is…no one! Gore Verbinski closed the medicine cabinet on this gag with the unsettling opening of his Ring remake, in which two girls are stalked by a mysterious presence we never see. Amber Tamblyn opens the refrigerator, obscuring our view of the rest of the kitchen, and then when she closes it, we see standing there…nothing!
It’s the fake-out, based entirely on the audience knowing the usual horror movie tricks. It’s about other horror movies. This works in The Ring, which is a movie about watching a movie. But unless you’ve got some sort of meta commentary going on, it’s just pointless filler. Which pretty much describes Bitter Feast, a borderline torture porn, borderline comedy, and borderline commentary on the role of the critic.
The most fascinating thing is the moment that you realize — this might not happen until you look it up on IMDB after having watched Bitter Feast — the guy playing the victim is Josh from Blair Witch Project! The other fascinating thing is how awful James LeGros is as the prissy murderous psychotic TV chef. Oh, James, really? It’s come to this?
Just when you think you’ve seen nothing new, someone does something new. The Dead Island trailer tells you pretty much nothing about the game, but that doesn’t matter. It instead tells a fantastic zombie story in a way you’ve never seen and it doesn’t even have to use John Murphy’s 28 Days Later music to do it.
