Sure, you’ve heard the hype, you’ve seen the reviews, people claiming its the highest rated game ever since that zelda game that wasn’t all cartoony, the one where link plays the flute.
I know, you can’t get the demo cause Steam has been slammed harder than a $2 whore at an IGF afterparty, so you don’t know if you can really trust those reviews yet.
WEELLLLL, hold your horses cause the folks over at SDF have broken the story wide-open.
That’s right, 5/10 overall score. Some pretty serious flaws pointed out, I mean, compressed textures, yesh, why didn’t they just make the game on HD-DVD instead of using loss-less compression techniques on everything, I mean, just cause the image is 100% accurately reconstructed doesn’t mean you can’t tell those bits are missing! Yea, I think I’ll wait for BioShock to hit the PS3, because even a $4,000 cannot compete with the god-machine that Sony has created.
August 21st, 2007
I would like to say for those who have not played Resident Evil Four, and wish to remain ignorant of the plot, you need to stop reading this analysis.
Those who choose to continue should note that I’m posting the analysis in a rough form, my ideas aren’t fully fleshed out and I might change my mind about certain things, especially if the comments encourage me to.
Still reading? Awesome, well onto what I’ll be talking about. Overall I feel the game centers around a few key themes: Isolation, Scarcity, Fear (no surpise, its horror-survival game).
The opening movie to the game quickly sums the previous game and the initial cutscene drops the player off into the woods of a foreign town. The player is forced to venture into the town alone, his partners stay behind. The muddled grays of the dirt and the dark depressing leaf-less forrest offer up a sterile, dead welcome for the player as s/he begins the game. The villagers in the town speak a foreign language, and as shown in the first encounter, are very hostile to the player. The first encounter also kills the two men partners the player began with, isolating him/her even further. While the player does have a radio to communicate with, the transmissions are not player-initiated, you cannot call upon someone to help you. The communication serves to direct the player to points of interest, keeping him/her focused on the rescue mission.
Companionship is not the only scare resource in the game, ammunition, money, save points, and just about any other benifition item is in very short supply. While exploration of the area is rewarded with ammution, money, or other items, the additional powerups only help a small amount. Regardless of how much the player explores, nothing turns up in abundence. The scarcity in the game forces the player to run away from encounters at times. The scarcity punishes the player more for each mistake (a missed shot, getting hit, taking a wrong turn). The game’s plot also follows with the scarcity theme, the player does not know where the girl is, what is happening to the town, and how to stop it. Just like the items, plot details are rationed out slowly and there only an abundance of questions.
Isolated from help and equipped with few resources, most likely players will begin to panic, which leads to another strong theme: Fear. The first hostile encounter transforms the entire enviroment into a frighting place. Houses might contain zombies and even escape paths might have bear trap hidden in them. The music helps highlight times when the player is in danger, if a hostile creature is attacking, music will play. Silence quickly becomes the player’s friend, as it indicates a safe state to rest, though that is not always the case.
By placing the player in a truly scary situation, the game is able to create enjoyment when the player survives. Each encounter brings with it a reward, always progression of the story but perhaps also health, ammo, or money. The three themes are strongly expressed in the beginning chapters of the game, but as the player progresses, other elements are thrown into the mix.
Those additions will be discussed in a future post.
August 19th, 2007
As I age and grow to appreciate the meduim of interactive entertainment commonly refered to as “video games”, I’ve begun to dispise game reviews. To be fair, they serve a purpose much the same purpose of a shallow movie review, is the game any good, should you sink $40+ into the game. I’m dissapointed because these critics fail to look at the soul of the game, they usually treat the product as mere commodity. Lets just have the basics: are the graphics good, do the controls work okay, do you like the sound effects and music, are the puzzles interesting. Sure, people review movies the same way, I mean *exactly* the same way but they also know to look carefully at certain movies. Aside from the themes, the acting, and even the politics of a movie, people discuss film techniques. “Children of Men’s” extremely long takes did not escape the keyboards of most reviewers, nor did Steven Spielberg’s use of frame-dropping during “Saving Private Ryan.” But in any given video game review, the finer details of the game seem to be lost. What’s worse, even reviewers who notice the deeper effects usually just label them as “cool” without any further discussion!
But, a while ago, I discovered that more mature discussion had been taking place all along, people hand spent time analyzing games such as Metal Gear Sold 2.
And more recently, I’d stumbled across an amazingly well written article in Edge about Mario Sunshine.
These thoughts came to my mind as I’d finally got around to playing the Wii version of “Resident Evil Four.” My enjoyment of the piece has inspired to me to write about it as the work of art it is. Merely telling you the game is pretty, its fun to shoot zombies and the plot is engaging is dis-service to the work.
Wish me luck, also if you know of any other critical analysis of other games, please post them in the comments, I’d love to give them a read.
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August 14th, 2007
The Futureplay version of Conformity is done, its sent off. I wonder which game is going to beat it….oh well.
But wait, its a work of art!
Update: 8-11-2007
The point of the game is RESISTING the pull from outsiders. The inside shape represents your uniqueness, you start as a unique shape (ever session starts with a unique shape, cause well you’re all unique 
)
Outsiders constantly pull your shape apart, trying to get you to stick to their notion of what you should be. You need to resist their pull while being careful not to pull tooo hard, cause if you implode you lose.
As the outsiders gain control over your shape, your heart fills with darkness until you become a conforming fool.
This project will probably always be a Word In Progress, so I’d love to hear your input. Also, thanks to TimS for being the first to comment, thanks for the feedback buddy! You can give him a hand by helping with his AWESOME Beta.
Download it and experiance horrible peer pressure all over again, resist and you’ll win. Give in and die, or resist too much and you’ll end up stabbing yourself.
August 10th, 2007
Often times when minds meet in a creative meduim like game programming or software development, there’s lots of bickering. From tiny details to large ideas, scale is irrelevant when it comes to these divisive issues. Currently the Maw!Soft folks are struggling with what some believe to be the best weapon concept ever created, while others view the weapon as the dumbest weapon concept ever created and will stab out their eyes if it makes it into the game.
Thus is the power of the mere idea of the Chainsaw gun:
Imagine the possibilities, the chainsaw gun could work as:
1.) Rocket-powered chainsaws which fly towards enemies at great speed and slice them in half as though they were hot knives and the enemies were here butter.
2.) Grenade-like chainsaws that arc out of the gun and point downwards, bouncing slightly off the ground before turning off. These would be great if the player had the high ground.
3.) Spinning chain-saws which are flung out of the gun, when they meet and enemy, they spiral flesh and blood like a lawn-sprinkler…of dooom!
Perhaps there’s other ways to exploit this great idea, and oh yea, when you run out of ammo you can pickup the chainsaws you shot out and raise keep slicing and dicing. That’s right, its one of those rare guns where the bullets keep on given even after you use them!!
So, yea, the other side to this argument is something about the gun being silly or something….yea….so anyone wanna voice their opinion on if they love / hate this idea?
July 6th, 2007
Scott and I submitted one of our concepts to the FuturePlay competition.
The idea is #3 from from my GDC Inspiration post
and for you lazy fools, the ones who aren’t gonna follow the link:
“Unconformity: This one is hard to explain, you’d have a spring-rigged shape which is constantly being pulled or pushed at various points to be turned into something else. So, you might start with a circle but the forces that be try to turn you into a square. Its all about resisting their draw while filling yourself with joy. This came from Mr. Fun-Motion’s talk and the general innovation buzz which is always a part of any game discussion ”
So, Scott had done his vision of the idea ,you can check it out at Steve Swink’s site (ha! take his bandwith!!)
I’m working on my realization of the game, basically, taking Scott’s code and hacking it to pieces.
Anyways, we’re pretty excited about getting in, apparently 50+ game concepts were sent and ours passed their screening process!!!!
And then, we went over to the page with the other contestants:
http://futureplay.org/news.php?nID=7
RoboBlitz – Its using the Unreal3 Engine!! That’s what Gears Of War used..omfg!!!
Braid – Jonathan Blow already won IGF in 2006, well, cause his game freaking rules. I guess he’s trying to get win them all!
Cultivation – Slamdance, it was good enough to compete with SCMRPG, how the hell can we match that?
Toribash – IGF Finalist, well, it didn’t win anything….Great idea, IMO – Worst UI EVER! We get hits on our site “how to play Toribash” “How to do combos in Toribash” “How to beat people up in Toribash”
So, there’s four games I know are gonna kick our games ass. Whaaaaaa!
May 15th, 2007
Wikipedia has a strange community around it. Most of the time, its a pretty awesome community, but sometimes…its really really odd.
Seven Day Rougelike, anyone ever heard of this competition?
Check out its buzz….
how many of you have heard of LD48 (LudumDare)?
so, yea, about the same results…meaning similar amounts of people talk about LD48, and each year 50ish people compete in that vs the <20 people each year that hit up Seven day rougelike. BUT!!!!
LD48 is not notable?… … Seriously? Am I missing something?
and seven day IS notable because:
“All these sources, which as agreed upon by most roguelike developers are the most reliable sources for roguelike development information, do treat the 7DRL event as a very notable thing, probably even the most important event in recent roguelike development”
— http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Seven_day_roguelike
And yet, despite the buzz LD48 gets from the indie developers, the grand masters at Wikipedia don’t think its got any notability?
That kind of pisses me off, shame on you wikipedia community, LD48 is JUST as niche as 7DRL. Shame on you all.
May 9th, 2007
Our puzzle game, Boxen – Mystery Island, has been nearly finished for a few months now. Its managed to survive the perils of new artwork, new levels, even a new level clearing mechanic. But, I fear it has met its doom…the tool-tip tutorials to help the player along their journey. However, I fear Boxen may lauguish and expire in these dolldrums. I managed to slowly build up a collection of levels over time, each night I’d pump out about 10-15 levels, and spend some time playing them so I could gauge how hard they were. But, this isn’t working out for the tutorials, because each time I get near completion, I realize something that’s left out or could be explained better. This forces me to abondon all the work I’ve done, and of course swear off working on Boxen for a while and do silly non-code things like this post.
Oh well, hopefully someday I’ll wade through that mess.
So, you guys have any sorta achilles heel when it comes to your projects?
May 8th, 2007
A friend of mine started this project a while ago: Vox Imperium:
Its a browser-only turned-based (but real-time) strategy civ war game. Its pretty awesome, very very very addictive. From the stats, you can tell there’s a few people cat-assing due to his game. So, with things like this coming out, I wonder if casual gamers are going to have a new niche introduced soon, games that only require a javascript ready browser to play. I mean, sure Yahoo games has all that stuff already, but its mostly things like chess etc, but with things like the Canvas html tag, I wonder how far these games can really go.
April 30th, 2007
The 9th Ludumdare 48 hour game development competition is this weekend and I decided I might as well enter a half assed entry. The theme is “build the level you play” so my entry will be a relatively generic platformer where you build the levels you play with limited resources. Ideally the player would have to design a level that is beatable using the given resource, but because I suck at design it might end up being more of a freeform thing where you design levels and run around. I’ll be happy if I finish at all.
I’ve made a little progress. The framework for the game is in place, you can draw tiles and move a platformer guy around. Basically I’m at a point where I need some interesting power-ups, enemies and tile actions. Don’t know if I’ll finish this in time for LD48, its not worth it to push to place in the bottom 10% with a shitty unfinished game as usual, but I might just enter what I have so I can vote. I don’t have much desire to work on it and I have some social event to go to soon, but I might finish it up or play with it over the week. You can check out the current version here.
April 28th, 2007
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