vimes

I don't know if there is such a thing as European aesthetics when it comes to game or to gameplay ... I remember an Idle Thumbs podcast talking about this and the Settlers series; but to me, the overwhelming majority of mainstream and even indie games are culturally neutral. Arguably though, half of Miyazaki's movies take place in a make believe Europe - at least Miyazaki said he required the architecture to be that way - and in turn, Ghibli aesthetics is beginning to be have a pretty big influence on Level5 games (the Layton games feels very European). Mistwalker took a Polish composers story has a background for their game and the characters in that game are dressed with japanese-deformed version of 19th century European clothes. Maybe not super relevant, but it exists.

Holy shit, this is awesome : I've just watched Gilbert's, Mechner's, Molyneux' and Wright's postmortems (and watch a big part of the Braben's) and I'm amazed by two things. First, all of them are very good technical people - even Molyneux! - that grew to be awesome designers ... and they seem to remember everything in extreme details! It makes me wonder how the coming game designers - who I expect will be mostly formally trained (it's already starting) - are going to shape the industry in the coming 10 years. The second suprising thing is that even though they all tell stories of games being made by accident - it was mentioned in the podcast, but I didn't imagine it was that systematic- all of these are deeply linked to the character of their creator ... it's not just about finding an idea by accident or finding a neat trick : some of them agonize over the game like Mechner, some other are doing shortcuts like Molyneux, some of them are stumble upon while making tools etc ... it's very interesting and slightly encouraging to know that whatever you're doing is feeding some kind of random generator that might produce something innovating in the short/long run. I was most impressed by Mechner's who seems to be a very 'sensitive' perso(for a lack of a better world) and a better speaker than what I anticipated and thank god for Wright and his interests in fields that might not seem game related at first : it's for that kind of diversification that save the game industry from cannibalising itself and that 'inspired' me to join it rather than, say, work on insurance companies software. Anyway, this bumped my enthusiasm as much as Seamus Blackley's talk with Spector did a few years back.

Other than that, there's no way I'll be able to join, but that's an interesting idea.

Still waiting for the Beta pass to arrive.

It's funny : you can't carry 20 bucks, but you can still carry your registered gun. If this comes to pass, I'd hate to be a convenience store's clerk in a poor neighborhood...

Actually, the shoulder movements and the "rigging" of the mouth and eyes are pretty impressive; they just need to smooth out transitions, remove the jittering feedback after a strong change and have a better rigged cheeks. In terms of acting, the most recent animatronics of the Disney parks are way more impressive (Jack Sparrow's is pretty good but I can't find a video that does it justice) ... and they found a very good alternative for facial animation through projection ( )Then again, it escapes me why would anyone want a realistically looking human obot ? Is there any direct application of this beside entertainment in parks?

Just to clarify : I have no stance whatsoever toward games that are very difficult and not accessible - I'm not a fan of them - but they are a matter of taste and you can justify those choices pretty well. For instance, I disagree with syntheticgerbil, when he says that "certain amount of precision or twitch gameplay" is "frustrating to those that are "hardcore,"" : Rock Band or Guitar Hero on highest difficulty is not for everybody but I know a huge amount of people that live for the feeling of achievement of getting 5 stars ... and the path to that doesn't seem to be that frustrating to them. The only thing that really bugs me is very low usability : it's interesting to make some of those unclear - otherwise you couldn't get the sense of experimentation - but when all of them are unreadable, I really loose the will to give the game a chance.

I've learned about Usability in Human Computer Interaction; but the strict sense of the term applies badly to gameplay... So, the best approximation to judge a game's usability is asking wether or not the player can : understand what is requested from him / what problem he is confronted with identify and select the tools that are available to him comprehend what is the impact of those tools in the world If game design decisions, bugs, artistic choices or whatever come in the way of saying "Yes" to all those things, then the usability is compromised. Difficulty covers different layers of gameplay : the complexity of the problem to solve the tolerance to improper input (e.g. if you've got a reflex challenge, the time window in which the input it still considered to be on time) the punishment's magnitude for bad input of failure to solve problems. And lastly, accessibility covers the evolution of the complexity, tolerance and punishment. From my experience, manic shooters are very usable but some of them a clearly not accessible, and they are always difficult .

Actually, during the podcast you did a really good job at telling an Insider Story of Interest and of the Game Industry without sounding like you were boasting about it while not passing any judgment about people involved. That's very, very rare in my experience ... and yes, Remo's way of inquiring about things must have helped.

I completely missed that, thanks! Is this the same Mark Leblanc that was in the Spector courses? Also- [email protected] for Chris, Sean & Jake ...- in the show, you've talked very briefly about the "indie fund" session; you've got any more info, comments about it? You also mentioned, Kickstarter and similar schemes, are there any that are dedicated to games only ? I'm trying to put a bit of my money where my mouth is, but I have yet to find the perfect portal for gaming projects.

There's only one meaningful thing to do in this kind of event: donate.

I kind of vowed not to be negative here, but the new camera setup for the town hall area really pissed me off : the change of angles are utterly confusing, getting in and out of a screen is sometimes painful (e.g. in front of the theater), for some reason there's a huge invisible wall on the street, the over-the-shoulder camera uses a weird referential to analyse inputs, and from angle to angle, Marty gets teleported for no reason, breaking the sense of space and distance. I found the first episode very unengaging, but this one highlights even more the terrible lack of polish of this series so far : not only are there bugs and glitches but the puzzle designs are not well thought through . For instance, the only way to help Edna in the final showdown made NO sense : changing cover or making Biff fire at the bottle doesn't buy her any time, but popping out of only the first cover does? and one puzzle between the lengthy cinematic of emptying the bar and the one starting the final showdown was to autosolve a puzzle by having Einstein smell yet again an item... I really like the idea of this feature, but it's way overused. The cinematics and animation got a bit better (parker was the highlight), but like the first episode, the quality s still all over the place (awkward pose, linear blending of orientation, bad timing in dialogs) ... but yeah, elmuerte is right, the third episode seems to have balls in terms of storytelling, so there's still some room for awesomeness.

Thread Revive! What great, great game; it feels like - finally - someone understood GTA San Andreas' take on open environments and pushed it as far as possible: there are a lot of different mood, a good balance between urban and rural area as well as toys to play with everywhere. What really took me by surprise is that the designers didn't simply throw the player in an AI nest hoping emergent gameplay would make the experience, fun. In fact, the core of the game is a huge amount of non-emergent mechanics (driving cars, planes, helicopter, bikes, doing stunts on those, using the grappling hook, freefalling, fighting, planning attacks; etc) that have been expertly crafted and tweaked with lots of love. By that, I mean that it would be hard to find faults in the cameras, controls and overall feeling of any of those... and seeing their amount and diversity, it's pretty amazing. And I appreciate that a lot. What's best is that most of those fairly accessible elements have some kinds of trick to them (like the slingshot effect of hook+parachute over a hill) which means that you can get a definite edge out of them if you're willing to train a bit. Beside that, the emergent part is still there, but it's fairly limited wen you think about it (patrols, civilians, air support) and the complexity of all those gameplay types is the truly responsible for putting the fun in the emergent system : you can deal with those events in a lot of different way; my current favorite is fleeing from air support with a skillfull mastery of the hook/parachute/hook loop. Despite the overall craziness of the game, I believe it's been very tightly designed; with a very strong constraint : everything needs to go back to blowing shit up. Even the very good economic system is built around that... it took me about 8 hours to be interested in the black market : after a few stronghold missions, I wanted to stop improvising and start doing recon, getting the proper tools, having a plan and see it through. Back then, I had a very nice stack of money and parts so I upgraded the explosives, bought the assault rifle and the plane. I majestically completed a few missions until I realized I was pouring more money than what the game was giving me back; and I ended penniless, having to resort to harassment operations again ... but at that point, the AI had cranked up the difficulty and a level 3 threat meant fighting against three chopper at once; and when you're running out of pistol ammo; it gets the adrenaline rushing. That really gave second boost of interest to the game, and I'm looking forward to having money again to make up for those dire times. My only gripe is the scenario of the campaign and the overall tone of the writing - currently, I'm not in the mood for a fake B-rated movie and that's what Just Cause wants to deliver. I wish they just dropped the pretense and found a way to have those few milestone missions without having to put any story in it. 2 more things: the game is now a cult classic in Singapore thanks to the hilariously horrible accent pulled by Bolo Santosi's voice actress, as well as the utterly wrong use of lah/loh/leh. the north-west island is very atmospheric; if you haven't checked it out, you must.

The Epic Mickey origin story was completely surreal. Also, it's awesome to see you all acknowledge that being indie is hard: I was amazed by the amount of people in studios backed up by big publishers saying "If everything else fails, I can still go indie.", making it sounds like it's a ride in the park when I imagine that, for 80% of the indie dev, it's really putting your balls on the chopping block.

I grew tired of this debate not-so-recently, but anybody's who's interested in the history of art, aesthetics and criticism should read the Brian Moriarty conf' Forbin linked to : it's full of information about the history of Art (most interesting stuff is at the end), has a very fresh analysis of kitsch as a real aesthetic movement and Moriarty's really articulate well his opinion. I don't agree with some of the stuff Moriarty says about choices/Will/etc ... and the end piles up a huge amount of reference and show-off quotes; but it's a damn interesting read. It's decided : next year, I'm going to GDC. I'll sell my liver if I have to.

I wish "Whose Line" was still on, to have him as a special guess.

Oh, I really like the background story; I hope it's properly used in the campaign... I'm actually surprised because their two core characters don't seem to really lend themselves to the manly-manly-MANLY satirical angle : a disabled scientist corrupting its wish to bring the world to him and a scientist who help the disabled; that's pretty rich stuff on its own, isn't it ?

Spotted on Kotaku : ySWPxEYeNMg at 26s and on. Am I mistaken? If i'm not, I though he was community manager at Media Molecule ... are they working with Free Radical/Crytek UK ?

Four clicks into the faq of the website...

Aaahh, meaningful discussions intertwined with non sequitur segway.... I really missed this. Thanks guys! The discussion about the Mechanic/Dynamic/Aesthetic approach really picked my curiosity; any link for the paper mentioned by Chris? Something along the line of the Kangaroo Jack Tagline stunt happened to me : a trailer for "Nick of Time" on the French channel M6 tried to convey the 'profound' dilemna of Depp's character by saying : "Now he must choose between saving his daughter and killing the future president". It ran for two weeks, everyday, at prime time, and nobody around me seemed to be bugged.

I completely agree; I'm very happy that Double Fine is choosing this way of making games because I get to see more of their output. It might not always be for me or top notch, but they are one of those few studios whose games transpire with the personnality of their authors; And I love that. I also hope this approach proves to be successful so that heavy publisher studios like the one I'm working in would be more confident about taking the plunge. Heavy weight games with long dev cycle are very gratifying in their own way, but I'm pretty sure everybody involved in gamemaking would prefer working on those every 2 or 3 years while making shorter games in between. I know I do.

It seems the Brad Muir, one of the two Brûtal Legend's Game Designer, is Trenched's project lead. The artistic direction isn't particularly noteworthy (is it me or do the characters look a lot like Freedom Fighter's ?), but it seems to be something between Shogo and EDF - and since I haven't played a mecha-game in over a decade; I might bite.

This was release mid-2010 but there's no mention of it here, so I thought I'd share ... Desura is a portal for mods (most of them free) which looks a hell lot like Steam and is supported by Valve, Rockstar and LucasArts, recently joined by Crytek. The beauty of this portal is that it makes trying mods very simple : put the mod in your cart, download it and a shortcut will appear in your game list. No manual installation, no console, no fucking up the original files ... it's pretty great. It also interface pretty well with Steam : upon requesting a mod for a game you already purchased there, it will detect automatically it provided that you installed it and ran it once. For Valve products, it will also cue some download that are needed (like the Source SDK). Of course, it's not perfect : the downloader threw at me very obscure errors when my connection got cut or when I tried to login before having confirmed my subscription they also have a full-game store which dilutes a bit the original intent even though it's supported by ModDB, only a fraction of what's on the site is actually downloadable. the integration with Steam is so good I wish you didn't have to open an account on Desura at all. but it allowed me to play Call of the Fireflies anf Raining Day for Crysis, as well as Dear Esther in about an hour; which I would have shied away from if I had to set all those up manually.

Mechwarrior has just been uploaded!

Thank you GoogleMap.