GameDreamer

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by GameDreamer


  1. My first attempt was a flowing organic pattern, like how cells look like under a microscope.

    Then I tried a stained-glass window look, with big bold lines.

    Then I tried a hand-drawn look, represented by cross-hatch patterns.

    Eventually I ended up with the grid pattern. All that for an orange you see for a few seconds.

    Haha, that's awesome as hell. The grid pattern really fits the overall tone of the game for some reason, but I can't put my finger on why. It's little things like this that make it really special.

    Also this:

    2012-07-19_00008.jpg


  2. GameDreamer -

    When you rip open an orange, it leaves that skin residue behind. I struggled to draw that a few times before rage-flipping my desk over and going with an abstracted checkerboard.

    Oh man, yeah, I can imagine that would be a pain in the ass. What methods did you try? Or do you mean literally hand-drawing the residue texture?


  3. The discussion on this Progresscast that mentioned the Half-Life demo totally took me back. I got it on a disc from an issue of CGW magazine and it was called Half-Life: Uplink, and somehow I remember it being a canon scenario but I could be totally wrong.

    There were a metric ton of shipping containers though.


  4. Well, as i had commented, I suspect it was probably sacrifices made in order to be running smoothly at a higher resolution. (Alan Wake, i think ridiculously, took a lot of flak for being a sub-720p game on the 360.)

    I mean, i'm talking about things like the ghost-image you'd see for a second when you destroyed a poltergeist object, or the much nicer looking shadow effects on the taken. (Which in American Nightmare are just kind of bleeding dark purple sprites all over the place instead.)

    All those cool post-processing effects are gone, and they were a big part of the look of Alan Wake.

    Also, playing through American Nightmare, i realized that Wake turns his head to look at enemies sneaking up on you from the side. Did the original game do that too? I don't know if i ever realized it.

    I think the head turning thing is a new addition, and it helps quite a bit in frantic Arcade mode situations when there's so much going on you can't hear footsteps approaching you from off-screen. I think that's why they added it, it'd be too frustrating without it I think.


  5. Yeah I noticed a lot of little visual details from Alan Wake were missing, but I'm assuming that this was done in order to keep the file size as small as possible since it's an XBLA title and needs to be downloaded.


  6. I don't know what you're trying to say here, except insinuate that everyone who didn't like it is a simpleton.

    That's not what I was implying, it's fine to not like it, I just meant specifically the people who have said things like this elsewhere such as Reddit. When they cite their reasons for not enjoying it because it doesn't have any action, that's what bothers me.


  7. I've just played it through in a single sitting, having nothing better to do on a Friday night. And you know what? I loved it.

    I'm dismayed at so many people who must be trudging through this constantly chanting to themselves, "it's the Half-Life engine, it's the Half-Life engine," apparently with their fingers in their imagination's ears.

    There are some really trite, short-sighted criticisms being spewed about this as well, such as the vegetation being two-dimensional (as in the RPS unreview).

    Really? That's the best you can come up with as critical appraisal of something? "Shoe-gazing" in its most literal sense. Suspension of disbelief is one thing; constantly driving around in your mind's eye in a giant pedantic bulldozer quite another.

    I really am stunned at just how many people apparently can't just get over themselves - or the tropes of a withered husk of a genre - and just allow themselves to be absorbed into a small group's creative vision.

    I think Dear Esther is something quite unique and special--something to be treasured and applauded. And I'm very glad I gave them some financial encouragement to do more.

    I couldn't agree more. All the negative comments about it really get under my skin. It's a thing that doesn't involve shooting people so of course you're going to have people who get "bored" by it and totally miss the original, creative and atmospheric aspects of it.


  8. I'm getting a fair amount of enjoyment out of the Arcade mode and trying to compete on the Leaderboards with friends, but the thing I most enjoyed was the story mode, as it was the primary reason I wanted/bought the thing in the first place. I'm heavily invested in the story and mythology of Alan Wake so maybe I can't really approach this objectively without sounding like a fanboy, but I would have paid the same price even if the Arcade mode wasn't included.

    I'm a huge fan of Remedy's style and the TV monologues were just brilliant and really evocative of their past work, including the Max Payne series. I suppose, if anything, American Nightmare is fan service and a nice filler until a proper sequel to Alan Wake is announced.

    [Also]: Started playing the PC version of AW with all settings maxed, and it looks unbelievable. I can't stop taking screenshots and setting them as my desktop wallpaper.


  9. Uncharted 3 :tup:

    Well, it's uncharted. I think Uncharted 2 is the best so far. U3 had a lot of annoying parts. A lot of running from things where a single mistake means a complete fail, and often drake wouldn't move as I wanted. Even less exploring in U3, and way more annoying fights. There were also a bunch of pseudo game elements which were more semi-interactive movie segments than actual gameplay (e.g. the plane segment).

    I agree, Uncharted 2 had the better campaign and sense of adventure by far, but Uncharted 3 is still impressive in its own right. The

    flashback

    stuff is really great and provided some much-needed character development.