Jake

Also (from what I've read and heard and inferred.. never made my own game obviously), most of the game's design is done on paper first, and some stuff is prototyped (even possibly including funky NPC/AI stuff) but isn't necesarilly prototyped with the final engine. I think usually when guys say "oh and we'll have this awesome thing right here but we haven't done it yet" they don't ever mean "we haven't done any of it yet," they just mean "it's sitting off half-done somewhere else in the office, but isn't yet in any condition to be dropped into this otherwise final-condition demo level. That's my take anyway.

Regarding multiplayer on a single PC: You guys have played You Don't Know Jack, right? Come on, surely you have. That's probably the best single-PC multiplayer success story.

<strong>What will Spaff look like when he's about 45?</strong> </div> <hr size="1" style="color:#000000" /> <!-- / icon and title --> <!-- message --> <div><img src="http://www.sidetalkin.com/Images-General/gibisidetalkin.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></div> <!-- / message --> Yep

Yeah, while its true that everyone had a friend with a NES, not everyond had one at all. Not even ever upper/middle-class white family with two boys had a NES Lots probably did though.

Hiring an additional office manager and programmer can't be a bad sign though no matter how you look at all the ridiculous details in their job descriptions.

Whatever you've just done, it scares me.

A bit more POP stuff in an interview on IGN: And from the end... I'm not sure what to make of this yet... I suspect I'll need to play the game before figuring out exactly what he means. They're being pretty fast and loose with "adventure" "puzzle" and "action" throughout the interview, and throughout the first game even, so... yeah.

Though Q1 singleplayer doesn't really do it for me anymore, I jump at the chance to get in on (and lose at) some Q1 or Q3 multiplayer whenever the opportunity arises (rare these day).

I saw this nice editorial on Slate about how as game graphics become more and more realistic (but still fail to be 100% realistic), they're often falling into the trap of getting so close to real but not quite, that on some level people start rejecting the characters, stop empathizing with them, and to a point are spooked out by them. The article's short but sweet. Definitely worth a read. I don't know if I agree in every instance with what they're saying. It's definitely far easier to read the emotion off of the performances of the characters in Beyond Good and Evil, or Toy Story, than it is in the Gamecube Resident Evil Remake, or the Final Fantasy movie, but that's not always the case. For example (possibly the only example), the Half Life 2 character animation demos were extremely impressive and not at all death-mask-like, though even those characters were significantly more stylized than the gaming industry's current obsession with what "real life" looks like (that Alias game, the Bond game, most Japanese survival horror, SSX Tricky even).

Coming in GTA 6, surely. Drink too much, get a beer gut, have to piss constantly.

Its highly likely that you're being blinded by wishful thinking. Psychonauts is a 3D console-style platformer, with play controls built around a console controller. On top of that, PC games are very rarely as profitable as console games*, especially when they're PC ports of a wacky 3D console style platforming game. I suspect PS2 or a hold-off on release until XBox 2 are the two possible meanings (if any) that can be culled from that "cross-platform" remark. As nice as it would be to have Schafer back on the PC, I really doubt we'll be seeing that with Psychonauts. (That's not to say I wouldn't mind being wrong.) * Preemptive Sales Disclaimer: Yes it's been known to happen even in recent times that PC games outperform console games, but to say that in this case would be comparing Psychonauts to Warcraft 3 or Half Life, which we all know is 100% unrealistic.

Whoa nice!! Congrats. You might have to write an article about it and get fired

When I got my PC I went out and bought the Platinum Pack, and then said "f this I don't want to bother installing it all, I'll just get it in pieces via Steam." Whoops. Okay so now when playing Opposing Force there is a Steam download screen beween all the load areas (they fortunately fixed that for regular Steam Half Life single player), and on top of that, Blue Shift isn't Steam compatible? I have to install it all after all. >: That said, Steam is a really good concept and I think once they get the kinks worked out it will be extremely awesome. The way the full Half Life 1 can be streamed to your client in portions as you play is awesome.

That parallel holds true to a lot of long-running mass entertainment, especially the kind that change hands over time like many game sequels and long-standing television shows. Its also depressing if you happen to be a fan of the thing that starts to suck.

Except that Wing Commander was a game first. That's a huge difference. You're not allowed to compare Wing Commander the game to Wing Commander the movie, or Super Mario Bros the game to Super Mario Bros the movie because in those cases its the movie that's the cheap licensing tie-in, not the other way around. Riddick is the first hollywood import to the games industry (of note at least) that's significantly outdone its parent movie franchise.

This is another classic "Jake states the obvious and then descends into ranty town" post, but I'm sorry to say I just can't help it. That article about "real" characters in games in fact looking like freaky death masks reminded me of something I was thinking about a while ago. It's extremely frustrating to me (especially in video games since that's what I happen to spend too much of my free time thinking about) that people, even smart people, get so sucked into the proclamations of what is the "right and wrong" way to do things or what the "next big thing" is that they fail to realize that most of the time it's simply a fad, a trend, a part of a natural cycle. I'm not talking about the Grand Theft Auto scenario: coming up with one unique idea and having 60 copycats appear. Though that's probably related, what bugs me is more subtle and less talked about. Look at the characters in Hitman, Mafia, Silent Hill, Splinter Cell, Resident Evil (GC RE1 remake, and RE0 specifically), look at most of EA's 3rd person movie licensed games (and some of their sports and EA Big extreme sports games). They're all billed as "realistic" or "real" but its just a style. I don't mean that in the "the style they chose was the style of real life instead of a cartoon," I mean its very specifically a style. Everybody in those games is built nearly the same. Everyone has the small eyes, the slightly overdone cheekbones and foreheads, the clothes are just a little bulkier, more pronounced than they should be. People claim that this is an evolution towards mimicking reality, and maybe that's true to a point, but despite the claims of marketing (and possibly even the claims of confused art directors), higher polygon count and the occasional appearahce of a "stubble beard" texture on manly faces aside, in quite a few ways these characters are no more or less "real" looking than the weird slightly too thin arm and legged guys everyone was calling "real" in video games five years ago, especially when you put them up next to a real person. Granted, there are some exceptions (like the fake Pierce Brosnan Bond in Everything or Nothing), and obviously with the newer stuff there is a lot more clarity and detail, but for the most part... no. Photographs were used for the clothes textures! We scanned their face in for the face texture! So what? The fact remains that in 20 years I could make a retro throwback Video game that is in fact very intentionally stylized in the "classic early 2000's 'realism' style." I would get rave reviews for my hilarious retro throwback to those goofy cheekbone cartoon guys with the over baggy suits and big foreheads and hands. What I'm saying is this will pass. In five years someone will come up with a new look, coupled with some extremely crisp renders, that every magazine, marketing department, and EB salesman will talk about as "the new realistic look," and we'll talk about how weird the Hitman's forehead looked, and how cool it is that they fixed it in the new ones. Granted, I've picked a really really stupid example to prove my point (something Chris will surely point out ). After all, yes, the new "real" stuff does come a lot closer to "real" than the original Half Life, or the PS1 Madden games or something, but I think I've still made sense decently. Shit. I had a good 3 other examples I was going to go off on (maybe actually examples you will agree with), but I got too into the creepy face thing and now I've forgottten. Basically the fact that right now there are art directors or whoever telling their modelers "this is how you make a person look real" and then just explaining the "right" and "wrong" quirky modeling and texturing shortcuts to make something read as an emoting moving human... I dunno it seems like it's just the "in" way of making the "in" look. Please help me! There are a million other examples of this. I'm not talking about "people all using 3D when they could use 2D," or "everybody copies Half Life." That sort of stuff is related (and could very well be the same thing and I'm wrong), but the fact alone that they've been talked into the ground makes them different enough to not be directly addressed in this forum thread If you feel able, try to bring up more specific examples... there's currently a "no cutscenes!" thing going on right now, for instance, which has been gaining steam since Half Life. While telling a story entirely in-game is a noble persuit, and a cool idea, the "no cutscenes" idea has occasionally, in fact frequently, been thrown around as "the next true step forward in games" or "the real correct way to tell a story with games!" Doesn't that seem like a load of crap to you? I love games that have no cutscenes, and its definitely a new thing, but in time it will pass out of its position as "the right and only way to tell a true game story," and fade back into what it really is: a style. So, help me out here, throw your two cents into the ring and/or hat and/or other analogy, and let's talk

Go game designers!

If the game is good, you should be doing the heavy breathing

You're opening up a lot of cans of worms which deserve their own threads. "What gamers really want versus what they say they want," and "'Realistic' gameplay versus 'realistic action movie' gameplay." Nobody wants to get shot once in a game and start shaking and drop to the floor until medically treated... even in *slightly* more realistic stuff like erm... dunno Splinter Cell?

Your avatar disagrees!

You're totally confusing me now You're saying that Fry has been drawn walking with his left foot forward, and then with his left foot a little more forward, and then with his left foot a little more forward than that and then his left foot starting to touch the ground etc from every single angle? He's probably been drawn standing still head on from all 360 degrees, but not every frame of his walk cycle, every frame of him jumping, every frame of him transitioning from jumping to catching a ladder, etc. And for sure none of that stuff has been drawn from, say, five degrees higher than head-on, or six degrees higher It seems like there's a lot more work than you imagine to be done if you truly want a 2d animated character to work in an interactive environment. It worked in the original Dragon's Lair because the entire game was basically 'prerendered.' There were only two or three things you could do in each scene, always with a fixed camera angle. It played the exact same animation each time you walked through a particular door, he ran the same speed down each particular hallway. A properly drawn 2D game that behaves anywhere nearly as properly as a realtime 3d/cel shaded game would probably be the coolest thing that was ever made (and would probably get made in Japan), but it would be such a painfully huge undertaking that I can't imagine anyone ever funding it.

dont forget AG's rss feed

If you're asking for properly drawn 2D sprites in a 3D game, you're either asking for Duke Nukem 3D or Doom 1/2 style where the sprites are always facing you, (which looks absolutely terrible), or you're asking for animators to in fact animate every single character movement from not just 360 degrees, but in fact from every angle above and below... how is that going to be done without simply cel shading a 3D object? What you're requesting is impossible with a realtime camera (unless you want to pay about 3 billion dollars), and nearly as impractical if you want to have a cinematic camera ala Broken Sword 3, Eternal Darkness, etc.

Face death mask thingey aside (since its in fact a bad example, sorry I used it it was all I could think of to get my brain moving on the subject), most of these things (emergence, no cutscenes) are in fact good, cool ideas. People just get too excited by them and blinded by their newness and declare them "the future," and talk about them far too excitedly and exclusively for a while, while other good ideas that don't fit the current mold of what is "good" or "correct" get left behind (until they're put on a pedestal as the ideal real future of games five years later).