Marek

Having just seen the GameSpot videos I must say it looks unexpectedly good. I actually got extremely immersed watching some of those videos, and I wasn't even playing the game! It looks really, really well done. I totally have to play this game. Has anyone here played it yet? Any first impressions?

I thought it was kind of a wacky game that was more of an experiment and not very long or big or good. Then I saw the trailer. Then I got goosebumps. Then I saw the trailer 67 more times. Then I collapsed. Then I woke up and saw the trailer again and again and again. It's clearly one of the best game trailers ever made. Just think of how well it sold the game. You were immediately like "OH NO THIS GAME WILL OWN ME SO HARD". It really wanted to make you go out and buy the game. Genius. By the way, here's a bit of a mystery and maybe someone here had the answer. About 30 seconds into the trailer there's a soundbite of Manny saying "...blablahblah ... Laaaand of the Dead" and then you see the stand where you get the bread and the balloon animals. But there's people walking around and it looks like a cutscene that never made it into the game. There was also a screenshot of this released as part of the very first batch, when the game was announced. Is this a hint at some kind of intro sequence that was never used? The weird thing is... you can see the communist guys in there who are supposed to be in Rubacava, not in El Marrow.

It was a rhetorical question so you're supposed to say "yes". (The soberness of the characters was done intentionally to contrast with the extremeness of them being in space. The whole overarching theme of the movie is that while man uses more and more tools (with space faring taking it to ridiculous extremes) mankind also becomes more and more detached. That's a perfectly valid reason for making the characters so cold, even though you may disagree with it. For the record, I do know what you mean about it making the movie a bit less enjoyable.) Anyway, we were talking about Loom.

Erm that was kind of the point though?

Indeed, there's nothing like a great trailer to get you excited. Though most trailers are in fact lamentable, with words like "CONSPIRACY" fading in on a black background, then showing some gameplay that has nothing to do with conspiracies of any kind (but everything with some kind of random, unexciting encounter with an enemy). Some trailers try just a little harder, but still end up blarting stuff like "Discover A Land Enraged" onto the screen. What the fuck is a land enraged? Do I want to discover that? Tell me something about the game! Conclusion: most trailers are sad. If game developers can't do them properly they should either demand more time from their publishers or outsource it. Sorry to be so negative. :noskatebo I do like games actually. I play them a lot.

I think the ultimate horror game would be very much like this crazy movie I saw yesterday. > protagonist opens drawer "OH MY GOD MAGGOTS AND SNAKES!" > protagonist goes to living room "OH MY GOD MAGGOTS AND SNAKES!" (close-ups of maggots, snakes) > protagonist hides in closet "OH MY GOD A BOX OF MAGGOTS AND A BOA CONSTRICTOR!" You wouldn't really have to do things in this game except just running around, screaming. It'd be glorious. And hey, pixels are free, so you wouldn't even need an animal trainer.

Erm Dogman (Huz?) in case you're from the US let me say that in Europe traditional phone-based internet access is charged by the minute, which is not good for downloading larges file over a crappy modem.

Haven't played a demo in like 8 years. That statement is probably false but who cares. :noskatebo What I mean is... I haven't really thought of demos much at all in modern times. Though maybe that's also slightly affected by seeing games a lot at press events/shows, on friends' consoles, or at college where there's lots of gaming fiends. I can usually peek at screens and get a general impression that way.

It's a butterfly. A butterfly with a bomb.

Your avatar is win.

Cool! I played The Simpsons game on the PC (with the crappily done port) However my best memory of playing arcade games was when our neighbours were celebrating their wedding anniversary at a hotel/restaurant place that had a tiny arcade in it. I should probably mention that arcades are hard to find in Holland. In America every beach or shopping center seems to have one, but over here it's just a lone pinball machine in a bar somewhere, or like one or two arcade games in the lobby of a casino or bowling center. Few dedicated arcade gaming areas, sadly. So I was pretty jazzed up when I saw the arcade games at that hotel/restaurant as I was bored out of my skull. The neighbour gave me and two of his nephews $100 to spend and we used it all to play a GREAT sidescrolling fighter jet game. I think it started with your fighter departing from a flight deck that hovered in the air. Anyway, when we spent all that in two hours or-so, I blagged another $20 from my mom, and those nephews got money from their parents as well. So that was probably the most money I had put in a game machine ever. Which was nice, cause it wasn't my money. And it allowed me to stay far away from the super boring wedding anniversary dinner. Wow. This was actually an experience I had half-forgotten and I'm glad this thread somehow triggered it back. Sorry if this story wasn't that exciting and in fact bored you to tears.

You are not alone. Lost Vikings was meticulously designed to be awesome.

Okay, I'll go with a less obvious one. I bet not as many people will be going "oh fuck yeaaaah that game" but whatever. This is my post, so move aside and make room for this screenshot: The Simsons: The Arcade Game. It was fried gold. I played it to death in two player co-op mode with the girl next door when I was around 10 probably. We never got past the dream world, but today I found out it was only two levels away from the end. Damn!

Yeah they do that too.

Why was I not informed of this name change?!

I don't think you should look at the DS as something that will transport you to lush new dimensions of shatteringly intense gaming pleasure, despite the fact that Nintendo's PR is throwing the word innovation around pretty generously. People aren't expecting that much of the PSP either. I see the DS very much as a swiss army knife ... there's ton of crap on it and some games might use it well. It's got the connectivity, the microphone, two screens and the touchscreen. It's too bad Nintendo put the emphasis so much on the two screens, because it's really just a sort of gameboy deluxe with lots of bells and whistles that are interesting. As far as gimmickness goes, I think the PSP is slightly more guilty of that than the DS. PSP is not gimmicky in a "whoah look at this input method" kind of way, but more in the Nokia N-gage kind of way. You know ... "hey it's not just a game console, you can also play music on it, watch movies on UMD, plug in your MemorySticks (you've got tons of those right?) and if you flip it around and press this button it turns into a small picknick table! How convenient!". The DS' gimmicks can at least be used in games, and moaning about how games will surely not use them is missing the point a bit in my opinion. We already know games won't use PSP's MemoryStick port or its movie and music playing capability. That said, there are still a million ways in which the DS could fail and I won't deny that. The PSP is definitely bigger than a Gameboy. It's probably 1.5 times the size of a GBA SP, at least based on my quick glance at the thing at E3. The shape makes it seem twice as big as an SP though, since it's so wide. In all the promo pics that came out, people wear neck cords to hang their PSP on. I'm sure that will be really hip and cool and fashionable, but it also hints at how the PSP might be inconvenient to take with you as it probably won't fit in your pockets. I don't want to wear that thing on a neck cord, thank you. Mind you, I have no bias in favor of any company. I currently don't own any handheld device. The only reason I actually care is because I want my first handheld to be one of the upcoming generation.

Thank you. I nicked it from another forum all by myself.

With all due respect, I think this thread is a typical example of "game Y does it horribly, therefore the whole idea/style/technology is clearly stupid". You see that a lot in the adventure game community where everyone says 3D is crap by default... until finally some nice 3D adventure games come along and people start making sense. Toon-shading or other non-photorealistic rendering are just techniques, and it can be done both good and badly. I think Dragon Quest VII is a recent example of toon-shading taken into a new direction that really makes it seem handdrawn. Futurama is clearly an example of a crummy toon-shader combined with bad models. It's not an example of why toon-shading is always crap. (Hopefully GameSpot allows external links.)

http://www.adventuregamers.com/rss.php For news just go to news.google.com. It has it all ... no need for RSS

Okay, I'm not sure if my example is one of those large sweeping ones (3D vs 2D) or if it's one of those more subtle ones that you're after, but what immediately came to mind was "emergent gameplay". I think it was kind of blasted onto the game dev scene by Harvey and Randy Smith. Basically the idea of emergent gameplay is that you don't set every solution in stone -- you merely create a bunch of rules and let players discover their own ways of responding to those mechanics so that solutions would "emerge". A game like GTA has quite a few examples of players finding really creative solutions to some of the missions. Anyway, that was sort of seen as the game design ideal for a while. Then at this year's GDC everyone was like "oh shit oh shit I tried to force emergent gameplay into my design and now the inner fabric of my game is falling apart". Warren Spector, who I think has a natural tendency for extremes or overthinking too much*, basically gave a presentation that said "We were all wrong. The experiment has failed. People don't want emergent gameplay or lots of non-linearity. Wooooo linear pre-scripted games all the way!" Just before Peter Molyneux began his presentation, he snuck in a little extra bullet point in one of his slides that said something along the lines of "emergent gameplay is a pain in the ass". Incidentally, Fable's design has been made a lot tighter in the past year or-so. It's still very open-ended, but not nearly as much as it was initially conceived ... and it's probably become a better game as a result. So I think that's an example of a certain style of game mechanics that got out of control and then backfired again. *) In the "love story" game design challenge, Warren Spector said "it can't be done" and talked about really extreme stuff like simulating tactile contact and pheromones or maybe something else in that order of insaneness that I forgot the specifics of. Will Wright and Raph Koster just came up with game designs based on online matchmaking or love as a narrative theme.

I don't think the dichotomy here (sorry, my vocabulary has been polluted) is realism vs. wacky shit. It's realism vs. abstraction. You could do Half-Life 2 or MGS in an abstract style without changing the tone of the story. I'm not sure if it would be fitting, but going more abstract doesn't mean you immediately need monkeys playing banjos and whales falling from the sky. The Scott McCloud book referenced in the article explains that really well. I guess this applies to the discussion, though there's some pages that give better examples.

Jibba-jabba should only be used in conjunction with "fool" and "quit yo'".

Raytracing in Wolf3D's engine. Now that would be impressive.

Hark. Hark. Hark.

I agree. Though for me it's not about not having time. The thing is ... if I made decision A the first time through I probably felt that was best, or liked that choice the most. It's hard to force myself to pick B, C or whatever the next time through.