January 2010
1 post
Defending an Airport
Much has been said about the Airport level in Modern Warfare 2 (where a player stands alongside a small squad of terrorists committing mass-murder, with the freedom to join in). However, I haven’t heard much attempt to defend its presence in the game.
I like to ask myself why developers made their games the way they did, so - What are the positive aspects of the Airport level? It’s...
September 2009
1 post
The irresistible lure of hidden value
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the first multiplayer trailer for Modern Warfare 2 is this screen:
Every other clip in the trailer is actual gameplay footage. This sticks out as the only one that shows the game’s menu screen. Beyond its role as establishing shot, what is it doing there?
The answer for me lies in the large bank of icons on the left. There are fifteen of them, but...
July 2009
1 post
Gaming archeology
The return of LucasArts adventure games fills me with joy. Like many, it’s a question of where to start, and like many, I chose The Dig. There are many things I could say about it, but then I found John Walker had said most of them already.
He chose to look at the game without its context, which is certainly a worthy thing, but it did skip over the angle I found most fascinating. Despite...
June 2009
2 posts
Kaboom
The nazi-zombie mode in Call of Duty: World at War is a real delight. Four players defend a spot against wave after wave of undead. To aid in their quest, a number of power-ups are dropped by zombies returning to the grave.
One power-up in particular kills all the zombies currently alive - “Kaboom”. But it doesn’t do it immediately. It announces the power-up and then waits a...
March 2009
1 post
Console control considerations
I don’t get on with console controllers and first person shooters.
I’m not sure precisely when it changed, but these days, it feels like I’m firmly in a minority of games players. The times I’ve dabbled in console FPS games have proved consistently frustrating, knowing that I would be enjoying the game if only I could hit a barn door. The only threat to farm buildings I...
October 2008
2 posts
Player-Avatar Alignment in Bioshock
Continuing the 2007 theme, I went back to Bioshock a few months ago, working my way through Fort Frolic (absolutely beautiful) and past the twist. I liked that latter part quite a bit too, so I was interested to read this piece by Clint Hocking, giving it some pretty sharp criticism. Hopefully I can summarise it with some degree of accuracy: He argues that the story emphasised freedom and choice,...
1 tag
Notes on Super Mario Galaxy
I’m way behind on hip platforming games. Braid and LittleBigPlanet will make it to my thumbs soon enough, but these days, I’m still trying to get through the backlog of big hitters from 2007. Today: Super Mario Galaxy.
What really brought the game to my attention was this talk from the game’s director, Yoshiaki Koizumi. Specifically:
“The concept was to play with Mario...
“[The blood spray] orientates itself perpendicular to the character you’re...”
– ‘This is all your app is: a collection of tiny details’, Wil Shipley recently said. When it comes to Team Fortress 2, the details are so damn fascinating and instructive. Oh, what I’d give for the source code to the Critical Hit system.
Notes on Tribes: Vengeance
The Tribes series is a line of first-person, multiplayer-centric action games, originally developed by Dynamix, which focus on team and class based combat in open landscapes. The first game, Starsiege: Tribes (1998), offered a unique experience in an era of tightly enclosed, corridor-based shooters, and capitalised on the early, explosive growth of online action games to become very successful....
August 2006
1 post
1 tag
Half-Life 2: Episode One Review
Many a Half-Life fan has tried to discern the true nature of the G-Man’s mysterious role in the game’s universe. It has often struck me that perhaps that universe is the wrong place to be looking. On the train journeys that bracket the games and that serve as a metaphorical transition between the Half-Life world and the real world, Gordon has one major companion - the G-Man.
Who...
July 2006
1 post
1 tag
Virtual Real Cities
One of the more curious aspects of the city-based game, which has blossomed in this console generation, is the dichotomy between those games which strive to emulate a real city and those which do not.
The genre heavyweights, the Grand Theft Auto games, boldly embrace cities which, whilst clearly inspired by real cities, are very much their own creation. By contrast, many of its competitors, such...
May 2006
1 post
This Dark Messiah video is one of my favourite things to come out of E3 2006.
As well as some stunningly beautiful environments, it reminds me a lot of some comments Gabe Newell made last year about Valve’s goals for Half-Life 2: Episode One: “You don’t want to have a sense that there’s a box around the NPC and you see these boxes bumping into each other. You want to...
April 2006
1 post
1 tag
The cavalry charge of Oblivion
The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion is out, and garnering critical acclaim and great sales.
At the beginning of the week, Bethesda (the game’s developer) announced a series of paid downloadable add-ons to the game, the first of which is some armour for the game’s virtual horses. This turned out to be quite the controversy - one place I saw the announcement clocked up over 400 comments.
...
February 2006
1 post
“I heard once that a paranoia is just another form of self-absorption. If you...”
– Tim Schafer discusses making Psychonauts. Surely some of the greatest level design ever to grace a game.
December 2005
3 posts
I’ve seen a lot of discussion recently about this Japanese fighting game. The fighters are young girls and the twist is that to make any damage permanent, you need to catch your opponent off-guard and take a picture up their skirts. Japanese and Western cultures differ in many ways, so I can’t profess to know what the creators’ intent is with this. Others seem more sure they know...
Ebert on video games, Part 2: Tomorrow's Games
[This is the second part of a two-part post. The first part can be found here.]
When attacking tomorrow’s games, there are two major strands to Roger Ebert’s arguments.
Firstly, he gives a glimpse of the manner in which he considers film and literature to constitute art: “Video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured,...
1 tag
Ebert on video games, Part 1: Today's Games
[This is the first part of a two-part post. The second part can be found here.]
Film critic Roger Ebert caused a stir recently by declaring “I believe books and films are better mediums [than video games]”.
It’s tricky to know at what level to respond to his comments. He readily admits to being “unfamiliar with video games” but sees this as no obstacle to holding...
November 2005
2 posts
A day in San Andreas
Since I’ve not played anything new in quite a while, I picked up a copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas yesterday. Short summary: It rapidly proved just as intoxicatingly good as previous installments in the series and so it didn’t get put down until long after I should have been in bed.
While I played, I jotted down some notes - things I noticed about the game’s design, things...
First impressions of Trespasser
Trespasser was a game that passed me by when it was first released. Though I found myself aware that it joined the hall of fame of games that suffered from overhype and underdelivery, my knowledge of it was, until recently, best summed up as “that Jurassic Park game with the physics and The Arm”.
With the arrival of proper physics simulations in games (and specifically, their...
October 2005
3 posts
Feature Creep in The Escapist
Sometimes you read something and when you finish it, you just think “thank you for putting into words just what I was thinking”. This article discussing feature creep (of the non-software engineering variety) from the consistently excellent The Escapist left me in just that frame of mind.
The Splinter Cell example was something I could closely empathise with. I got a lot of mileage...
The health system of Call of Duty 2
When I started writing about the rather radical overhaul that the health system has received in Call of Duty 2 in my previous post, I found myself writing, well, quite a lot. It made more sense to spin it out into its own post, so here it is:
Gone is any kind of visible health bar and any health packs, and in its place is regenerating health that is invisible to the player unless they sustain...
Notes on Call of Duty 2 demo
Call of Duty was my introduction to World War 2 shooters; I missed Medal of Honor: Allied Assault since I was having too much fun with my Gamecube to keep up with PC gaming. I really enjoyed the experience, so news of a demo for the sequel was met by a speedy download, install and playthrough of it.
The original Call of Duty was notable for the clear focus of its design. It set itself a small...
September 2005
3 posts
Notes on Zombie Horde
Zombie Horde is a modification for Counter-Strike: Source which seeks to recreate the chaotic struggle of a group of humans attempting to defend themselves from a mindless onslaught of the undead. Or perhaps not so mindless, since not only are the humans in this scenario player-controlled, but so too are the zombies.
Just a few simple rule changes from normal Counter-Strike - the zombies get...
What is a Manhack?
“Station 8, do you copy? Station 8, are you there? We have confirmed reports of manhacks. Repeat: they’re filling the underground with manhacks.”
Step One: Give it a menacing name, and tell your players about it. But don’t let them see it - just let their imaginations play with it for about 10 minutes of game time.
A little later, after the player has been forced...
Digital Actors
As a level designer with an interest in single player experiences with strong narratives, I’ve recently been giving some thought to characters in the context of games.
Valve’s PR for the Source engine frequently refers to its character animation capabilities as “the ability to create expressive digital actors” [1] [2], but to what extent is it true to call a digital...