Simon

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Posts posted by Simon

  1. Posted

    When I'm writing an essay, drawing, designing a webpage, or doing anything that requires me to focus my mind and be productive, I find music really helps. I feel bored if there's not some kind of soundtrack to what I'm doing. It doesn't have to be any particular kind to work for me, recently it's been a lot of soundtracks though.

  2. Posted

    Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is pretty great on the Xbox. One plus over the PlayStation 2 version is your own custom music in there as 'tapes' (although the radio stations are great, of course, and deserve much listening to). It is quite an in-depth game if you are going to get into actually doing all the missions though, so perhaps doesn't fit your request for simple gaming. But, the great thing is that you have so much freedom - it's hard not to enjoy the game on some level, as you're not forced to do an annoying mission over and over. You can take a break and do drive-bys from a golf buggy or whatever. It's a adult game in its dialogue and themes though, so bear that in mind.

    I enjoyed Indiana Jones And The Emperor's Tomb. I read somewhere that it was the perfect rental game, which I'd probably agree with (it doesn't take long to beat and you're unlikely to go back to it, at least not straight away). Basically it captures the action elements of the Indy movies in a great way, with fun beat-em-up gameplay. Like the old-skool Streets Of Rage if you're familiar with that - several different neat moves you can string together, to have fun bashing the bad guys around. It's very simple in level design and nothing groundbreaking, but is just fun whilst it lasts.

    Nearly everyone here loves Beyond Good & Evil, I haven't actually played the Xbox version but I'm sure it rocks. Definitely get hold of that one (it's super-cheap these days too).

  4. Posted

    Usually I spill a drink all over it, ruining the contacts so that it types everything totally wrong. It's like the keyboard itself has got drunk and is slurring its words. Then I find a replacement buried deep in the garage. The one I'm using right now is missing loads of letters on the keys, probably as its suffered from fingertip-sweat over time. It's actually survived a water spillage, though it was close. Anything stickier and you're screwed, I reckon.

  5. Posted

    I hadn't seen it before, but I assumed it was some kind of placeholder. Maybe a cool box art would be like the logo at the end of the trailer - there's a black silhouette of Raz with his goggles as yellow circles, yellow lines around his head (signifying mind powers), and a kind of globe thing behind him. Just put the trailer on and jump forward to 1:00.

    Without really knowing what the game is really like to play it's hard to say what kind of box art would suit it though. Needs to look ultra-cool to shift lots of copies though.

    * Edit: Whoa, tabacco and Chris just posted the same thing whilst I was typing, everyone loves the trailer logo! For the record, I also dig the logo on the products page. Not that keen on the 'new' one as seems more generic and less to do with the game. The trailer logo has the 'spy' feel to it, and the website logo (whilst a bit too complicated for a box) has the mind-power-aura type thing going on.

  6. Posted

    I got Babelfish to translate it from Dutch, resulting in a confusing mess that told me to "Celebrate coloured new screenshots of DF's Psychonauts". The text itself seems to have no new info on the game, but these screenshots rule. They seem action-packed and platformy, which is quite different from most of the shots I've already seen. Nice to get more of an idea of the big console-platformer aspect of Psychonauts.

    Has anyone seen this box art? Not sure if it's the finalised thing but it has same the logo design from that Dutch site with the new screenshots.

  7. Posted

    Tim said that they were about to go into a period of intense polishing in the Gamespot interview, so presumably it really is ultra-intense, and they can't even break the workflow to post new stuff on the web. They probably haven't even slept in the past month.

    I want to find out what happens next in Action Comics though. Life just feels pretty empty without the continuing adventures of the 2HB crew. Also Nathan, Indy, Chewbacca, and Raz's weirdly wonderful creations.

  10. Posted

    Half-Life had the same effect on me - loved the experience but wasn't interested in replaying the whole long thing. But Splinter Cell and Max Payne 2, replayed these again and enjoyed them.

    I can't ever fathom how some adventure gamers claim to love replaying, say, The Longest Journey. WhyTF would you wanna subject yourself to that moronic ducky+pliers+glove+tampon puzzle over and over? Especially when you already know the solution? Story? puh-LEEZ, you already know what happens, the only excuse left is that of sentiment, and I find that to be a crock of bs. Just an excuse to avoid better replayability titles like Beyond Good & Evil, or Windwaker.

    Adventure games lose a big something after the first play - the challenge of the gameplay. But personally I really enjoy replaying some of them from time to time, at least the old LucasArts adventures. My appreciation and love for those only increases with each replay. I admit there's probably some element of pathetic sentiment/nostalgia in that I can go back to Monkey Island 2 or Grim Fandango yet another time, but at the same time I'm enjoying the animation, the art, the music, the storytelling, all over again. The way I see it, I probably watch my favourite movies many many times a year, knowing exactly what's going to happen, but I still find it an enjoyable experience. I probably notice and like new things about them every time.

    If I played games just for the challenge or to 'beat' them then I could see the argument, because virtually all the classic adventure games are the same puzzles every time. But I enjoy a lot of other stuff about games than just the beating of them.

  11. Posted

    Yeah, you're right. I suppose I've just always seen consoles as transient things that I don't hold on to, and sell on once the next-gen is coming up. The PC has always been what I play games on the most. That said, it's sad to think I don't I own my old Megadrive (Genesis) and its cartridges anymore, perhaps I should show more love for the consoles.

    The Xbox follow-up might end up being backwards compatible anyway, and that's probably my next console.

  12. Posted

    I don't think there's any rules about platformers being fundamentally the wrong kind of game for PCs. With Psychonauts I think it will be more an issue of it having been optimised for the Xbox from the start, and so most will probably agree that is the superior version once it's released. An Xbox is still a pretty formidable platform in that developers know the specs of all the Xbox gamers are the same, and can gear the game totally towards that.

    Hopefully the PC version will be a good port though, as I won't have an Xbox forever, and I will probably want to play Psychonauts forever. A whole lot of fans of Schafer are PC people, so it's important that it's ported well. I'm eager to find out the minimum specs for the PC version, if it supports a game controller, etc.

  13. Posted

    I have just received 6 more, which anyone who wants one can have, so that's about 30 invites currently on offer on Thumbs. Looks like no-one has to go hungry for a Gmail account here.

  15. Posted

    I'm probably well over halfway through the game, and I find that KOTOR's environments do feel quite boxed-in. Being constructed in levels it has to suffer at points from that. Areas that should probably feel sprawling and vast like Kasshyyk's shadowlands or Tatooine's desert feel closer to Doom maps than a rich RPG landscape.

    As for the story's linearity, that's something that rarely bothers me in RPGs. Being a fan of adventure games I don't mind an RPG focusing in on one basic tight storyline that everything branches off. It's ultimately less true to what an RPG should be, but it never detracts from my enjoyment of a game. KOTOR so far comes close to the kind of Star Wars game I've always wanted to play, with a few cons.

    One is that, whilst there's a lot of freedom to roam around in KOTOR, the quest management kind of encourages you to focus on one planet at a time, and also a bunch of load-times (at least on the Xbox) make going back and forth between places less appealing. Ideally I'd have more inter-planetary side-quests, and more ease of/encouragement to travel.

    Also, there are some repetitive story elements, I've had to break into a Sith base twice to get someone to help me now, which frankly feels like once too many. Whilst you can say the Star Wars franchise itself is repetitive in the extreme, I think the epicness would be helped by slightly more varied questing. Bioware did do a great job, though. I think it's the only game that has succesfully captured the Star Wars feel - perhaps one of the few of recent years that has even tried, rather than just dropping the galaxy wholesale into a tried-and-tested genre.

  17. Posted

    This is great. I love the art style of Psychonauts that I've seen so far, and I now consider myself a genuine fan of Scott Campbell. Also whenever I've seen Peter Chan's concept art in the past it's been amazing (some Grim Fandango sites have some awesome designs from him).

    But - I can't bring myself to spoil the characters and locations of the game, so hopefully this stuff will stick around on the net and I can check it out once I've played and loved the game itself.

  18. Posted

    It's the lack of sensitivity to the fans that pisses me off. LucasArts were well aware of the fans' anticipation of the game, and despite the very vocal protests against the cancellation, half a year on we've heard nothing more. I find it hard to accept those few sentences of explanation, and they've have never been expanded upon. They just seem faceless and uncaring.

    Whilst I'd never get depressed or hateful about a game being cancelled, finding out Freelance Police had been axed was the single most disappointing moment of my gaming life. Moreso because it was LucasArts letting me down, and LucasArts was truly one of the first things I remember feeling I was a fan of. I suppose I'd started to lose faith in them, but the day it was cancelled was a big turnaround in my opinion of them.

    As for the E3 trailer, I don't know how any fan could have seen that and not been almost jumping for joy - I thought it was incredible. It felt like conclusive proof that the game was going to kick ass.

  21. Posted

    I think it's mid-October, not certain though.

    I think the idea of Fable is that whatever hero you end up being, you'll have an edge and be unique to your game, because, as they showed in the video there's so many different variables of how people view your actions etc. At least that's the idea of it. It's supposedly far from a basic split of good or bad, which is neat. I think KOTOR dealt with good & evil choices very well, but this sounds even more sophisticated in that respect.

  22. Posted

    I wasn't sure whether Fable was going to be a great, or an ambitious failure. Often the games that promise oodles of open-ended gameplay are ultimately quite shallow - for example, Daggerfall was massive but after a few hours play you had pretty much done everything of interest that the game had to offer. All the quests and towns were the same, and it got boring fast.

    The video is promising stuff though. These guys seem to understand that you can't just give a player 'freedom' in a big game world, there's got to be structure and all the interactions in place to make it a varied and interesting experience. I agreed with all their ideas about RPG design and admired their arrogance in doing it their own way and not drawing inspiration from other games. Molyneux seemed to be constantly apologising for reneging on various promises/ideas and the game not being perfect, but hopefully that's just modesty - rather than him secretly knowing it sucks and trying to curb hype.

    If I get Fable, I'm really going to try to play it evil. I wanted to do that in KOTOR but I couldn't bring myself to do it.

  23. Posted

    Tintin is a weird little bastard.

    Wasn't Tintin and the Picasos that weird one with the aliens? Or was that Flight 714?

    I have Tintin and the Picaros around here somewhere.

    The crazy one with the aliens/volcano/hypnotist was Flight 714, and Picaros is about revolution in San Theodoros. I think those were the last two books that were finished.

  24. Posted

    Yeah, that Tintin basically has very little personality but still holds together all these great comic adventure stories is a strange thing. But I think if you asked Tintin fans who their favourite character was, it would rarely be Tintin, more likely Captain Haddock, the Thompsons, Calculus, or Snowy. Tintin's effect if he has one is probably not to be likeable in that way, because he is such a blank slate.

    Scott McCloud (in Understanding Comics) has something to say about Herge's use of very intricately detailed backgrounds along with the very iconic cartoonish look of his characters. He likens this to the very strong Japanese comics tradition of 'masking', that is making the main character fairly nondescript, in a very vividly realised world - thus allowing the reader to imagine themself as the hero in this very real world.

    To follow this through, this is particularly effective amongst young readers with Tintin himself, because as you say, there's little we know about Tintin except that he's a young boy. He's not just visually a blank slate, but as a personality too. Lots of young readers can identify with that. He is a reporter, but that's basically an occasional excuse for an adventure (I think there's one instance in of him filing a report in all of the comics).

    Incidentally, a lot of Tintin fans aren't keen on how he is in the last finished book - Tintin And The Picaros - because Hergé made him more of a character, by showing he drove a moped and practised yoga. Oddly here, the lack of character is preferred.

    The 'masking' thing is an interesting idea, but I know that for me, it was always about enjoying Haddock's alliterative insults, and the great fights and close escapes. I don't think I ever wanted to be like Tintin.