Xeneth

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Posts posted by Xeneth

  2. Posted

    Its been said over and over but the game you are playing after you have control over the composition of your party is so far away from where you started the game at its silly. Game went from poor to fine to pretty cool to sweet to hell yeah. It's now my favorite Final Fantasy.

    Wow, what a comeback! ...Interesting.

    I dropped out of the FF cult when VIII taught me what pain is. Before that point I had never completed a game OUT OF FRUSTRATION AND RAGE instead of fun and accomplishment... Never again.

    So, I haven't enjoyed a Final Fantasy game since VII, (Or a JRPG since Persona 3, come to think of it...) but this sounds pretty DIFFERENT. I generally like things that stand out and work differently.

    Unfortunately I don't have a PS3 yet, and I usually insist on playing things on the "Lead SKU" but I may give this a cautious try down the line. I'm sure it'll be a nice deal by the time I'm equipped.

  3. Posted

    It would be interesting to see an overview that attempts to get a sense of what it means today to get a game design degree.

    Man, would it EVER!

    I once dreamed of going to Digipen when I first read about it in an issue of Nintendo Power as a kid... But, as I moved closer to the heart of the industry I started to hear very mixed things regarding game development education. I recall attending an "icebreaker" event once where a small panel of devs from Insomniac, Factor 5, Raven, and a couple of other studios were on hand answering various questions on the topic of breaking into the industry... Education was the ONE thing they could not seem to come to any consensus about! Some said they wouldn't even look at a resume that didn't have at least a CompSci. bachelors on it, others disagreed and said that some of their best hires were modders they could sculpt fresh out of High School. At the time, the sudden debate was very confusing for me. Looking back, I see now how young our industry is, (comparatively) and what a high % of our luminaries just sort of stumbled into the profession. It makes advice on the subject interesting to digest, that's for sure...

    I get the impression that I'd be MUCH higher on the ladder if I had made the choice to go to a school for making games, but on the other hand, in the current job market/economy the credentials really are no guarantee of a decent position. I meet too many talented people still looking and underpaid/overqualified devs to think that there are any guaranteed prosperous paths through game development at this stage.

  7. Posted · Edited by Xeneth

    Can't get past a boss in Labyrinth. I'm about done with this, it's made for people who are not me.

    Aww. It's true that it does NOT fuck around in spots. For me that just reminded me of times when games were more punishing and that nostalgia can carry me through frustrating patches, but I can totally see how you might be put off.

    As for the producer guy in that video, not sure if I'd say he seems UNCOOL per se, but definitely putting out very generic games media drivel and riding mentally on Pixel's coattails on this... yeah.

    It took five whole years?

    Well jeeze, they just don't make Japanese like they used to, do they?

    Dunno how I missed THAT comment... for a one man game it's fairly deep and polished. Also, I'm pretty sure he made it while fulfilling other life responsibilities of work/school/whatever he had going on at the time. Game dev. shite takes a LONG time if you only have a certain % of yourself left over to work on it and you don't get help from anyone else. A lot of "solo" games technically have elements borrowed from others, especially music, as creative parity/skill with art, design, and coding is tough enough... Pixel makes chiptunes on top of all that?

    Five years, ten? Whatever, my hat's already off.

  9. Posted · Edited by Xeneth

    AHHH!! You got me!

    Dang it Chris, I was turning it up as you faded the end out to hear the background remarks more clearly when you blasted me with the conf grenade action reporter theme at full volume. You totally meant to do that, ow ow. I am seared.

    Re: the whole "Is WoW at all representative of evolution" thing... Without getting TOO far into arguing semantics, the only place I think evolution as a concept is represented in WoW is the way the raiding community influences itself. Supply and demand get created by the class and skill tree mechanics, and people in that part of the community create and shape their characters to fill niches with the demands of their peers in mind. Interestingly, Blizzard appears to have been making a deliberate effort to take the edge OUT of that "ecosystem of roles" as they tweak things to make raiding more accessible. Hooray theme parks...

    Evolution requires interaction of some sort, and I don't feel like the inevitable growth of a character on it's own qualifies unless it affects and/or is affected by something else.

    Basically, evolution without interaction is just growth.

    Also, now I'll need even more courage to send in my crappy reader mail question I've been thinking about... ah, well.

    Also, also, you guys were getting VERY close to the Super Mario World "Athletic Theme" with your whistling. Never QUITE there, just close!

    zC7ILAUyeGg

  12. Posted

    Actually, the biggest advantage he had over Mechner, was Mechner already accomplished what he set out to do, thus giving him a really strong foundation to see what worked and what didn't so he could revise this core idea.

    Absolutely! Looking back, I may not have mentioned this because at the time it seemed super obvious... Props for pointing it out, because after rereading it seems super missing from the explanation. This example of taking a mechanic from a game that came before and refining it is particularly noteworthy because:

    • The source and follow-up games are not entries in the same franchise (or even genre, really)
    • The games are not by the same creators (or publisher, etc.)
    • The refinement arguably WORKED, and didn't feel like one game taking a bite out of another!

    We're very used to this process, but it usually occurs across sequels, it's almost always within the same genre, and when it's not either of those, it tends to be less "evolution" and more "copy-cat cache-in".

    That they don't make any sense, have any consistent theme, seem related to the game (except in very vague ways), or really add as much to the experience as the designer thinks they do.

    They didn't add much for me either, but there is one awesome thing about the presentation that might get overlooked! This is something that I brought up when demoing the game for some of the designers at our company, actually. The text that the designer clearly wanted to give to the player was present, and that's his choice... But NONE of it is required reading. As a completionist, there was no way that I could personally walk past those pedestals without reading their contents, but a player COULD. Choice is one of the most valuable things we've got going for us as a medium, and I think books you can walk right past is a brilliant way of delivering story that isn't integral to gameplay. Props to Blow for not making his poems pop-up dialogue boxes or unskippable cutscenes with motion graphic text. I may not like the writing very much, but the presentation really holds up.

    I think it's really interesting how divisive Braid is, while still being unifying: Everyone here agrees that it's fun, worthwhile, and a must-play... But we all have wildly different gripes about it. One of the marks of successful media is that it's sort of culturally invasive in ways that encourage us to look closer, form opinions, and communicate with others. If there were nothing about Braid that bugged us, there'd also be nothing much to talk about.

    "Hey, did you play it?"

    "I liked it. It was just... good all around. I liked all parts equally."

    "Yeah, me too..."

    "Yup."

  14. Posted

    We are saddened by the lack of Conf Grenades being cast into our foxholes, but eager to to get some impressions from the conference nonetheless!

    We're in crunch mode at work here, so I couldn't sneak into this year's show, despite living a couple of BART stops away from it... grrr...

    NEXT YEAR I will be all up in GDC. It will be glorious.

  15. Posted

    I think watching a game of starcraft 2 pros with some good commentary is awesome. I will never be as good as those guys but it's a blast to watch and try to apply those strategies to my game.

    This!

    I totally buy complex RTSs as an "e-sport" for a variety of reasons I won't go into here. I'm terrible at micromanagement-heavy games like Starcraft, but seeing two people that know what they're doing going at it always puts me on the edge of my seat. I could watch an endless series of those Starcraft 2 "battle reports" they were releasing for a while; something about the commentary in those works for me as well as any "real" sport. It's hilarious and awesome when we get all worked up over a a damn SCV scouting the map and avoiding death!

  16. Posted

    Everything you have written in this post is correct.

    HOLY-

    *Falls out of chair*

    I'm... I'm sorry! I didn't mean to, I thought I was being funny, honest.

    SWEET Mario Kart DS shot! You're in battle mode, right? blowing your balloons up while trying to steer at the same time is hilarious. I love the crazy positions and faces we get into when we're totally absorbed in a video game- Immersion personified!

  17. Posted

    Great read!

    I've definitely experienced what you're talking about, but usually from the other end...

    I've lived with several different people now who declined to play, and would rather just watch me do it. One of the big reasons I'd get if I tried to press a controller or a keyboard into another person's hands was that they really wanted to see the "whole picture" and the stellar visuals without having to worry about gameplay. One person even bought a couple of games specifically for me to play when they're around, turning it into kind of a movie experience for them that apparently they weren't interested in trying attain the skills to reproduce personally.

    As a player, this experience is sort of amazing- You start thinking about crazy things like overall combat pacing and camera movements/angles. You deliberately attempt to use the ENTIRE range of options, rather than "cheesing" one specific move or strategy to get through a tough encounter. I've gone to great pains to attempt to transform and script my play to make watching it more enjoyable in situations like that. For example, unnecessarily flipping a third person camera to point back toward an explosion I caused and putting the character into a crouch to make it look like a badass "Bruckheimer" moment. Hah, my Uncle learned to effortlessly navigate a certain neighborhood in GTA 3 without ever exiting the insane cinematic camera mode that randomly looks at you from helicopter shots, head on, from the perspective of the car chasing you, etc. just to make his "Subway Jump" runs more entertaining to watch.

    Look at the proliferation of playthrough video on YouTube for god's sake! If the game is even slightly popular, there's at least one complete playthrough of it available out there. Even if it's cut up into 10 minutes chunks of gameplay over the course of eight hours, there's a demand for it. I know a girl who's too scared by horror games to play them, so she just watches someone else play them online to get that additional layer of removal while experiencing the plot and horror movie vibes from a "safe" distance.

    From the watcher perspective though, there's another huge reason I agree with you that may not have occurred to some yet- I watch others play to study game design!

    There are things like difficulty and intuitiveness that are impossible to judge from the perspective of someone who routinely plays and makes games. Designers have so many visual and logical shorthands for things that we take for granted! They're almost all based on the cumulative experiences of a lifetime of playing video games... That most people don't possess. This is one of the huge reasons gaming continues to struggle with being widely accepted as an art form and a lifestyle choice, right up there with degrading depictions of stereotypes and violence that lacks consequences and pathos. We're getting better, but the vast majority of games aren't designed in such a way that a complete outsider is invited to "get it". When die hard gamers and game makers say that they were taken by surprise by the rise of the Wii or Facebook games, what they're really saying is they're unfamiliar with what serious focus testing reveals, and that paints a sad picture of entire genres and communities designing themselves slowly into a corner where the only people they appeal to are those that are already in the know.

    Observing how someone who isn't me navigates an unfamiliar series of interlocking systems is FASCINATING, and reveals just how poorly designed some of my favorite games really are. I really wish I could get more time in such a position, but a lot of people are creeped out by how little input I offer when they get stuck on something. Putting them more at ease by backseat driving contaminates what I'm really looking for, though. I'm looking for reveals like "at what point EXACTLY does someone just give up trying to figure a thing out?" I'm pretty tenacious and forgiving when it comes to a challenge, but I get the impression that most people never actually finish the single player modes of games they play. This assumption has been backed up several times, and if I want to do my "research", I may eventually need to be more forthcoming with helpful gameplay advice... It's a difficult situation to engineer in the first place, socially. People generally don't like to be studied while they're trying to overcome challenges.

    Watching other people play isn't just entertaining, it's the only way we're going to figure out how to be more widely accepted as an industry. It's the only way we're going move past "Hardcore" and "Casual".

    Watching other people play is the future.

  18. Posted

    Ah, Cave story on the Wii! Most excellent, here's hoping it encourages more from Pixel and others like him.

    The way that game transformed me almost instantly into a kid playing a SNES wrapped in a blanket on christmas morning was amazing.

  19. Posted

    Don't despair about HL2:Ep3 fellows!

    I'd be VERY surprised if we didn't learn some interesting stuff about that as part of this package!

    Pure speculation, but now that we've gotten teases out of the way in previous titles and established that they take place in the same universe, I think the tie-ins will keep flowing. Keep an eye out for information about the Tanker "Borealis" in Portal 2: What's on board, why it was built, etc. We may be able to infer quite a bit about what Gordon will be up to in his next adventure...

  20. Posted

    Re: Blow's pretentiousness

    You'd be correct that when people say this they're talking mostly about the man and his real world interactions with other humans. As I said, he's rather brilliant and he's clearly aware of that fact... I tend to agree with what he says most of the time, but not with HOW he says it.

    For example, when describing some of the source inspiration for Braid he spoke publicly about PoP: The Sands of Time. As I recall, it goes something like, "So it had this intriguing time rewinding mechanic that let you undo your mistakes which I thought was really interesting, but the way it was done sucked because it was limited- you'd run out."

    So, agreed that tying this ability to an in-game resource is restrictive and definitely makes the power less interesting and fun to use, but I don't think he gave them credit for tying that system to the combat and rewards for defeating enemies. One of the advantages he had over Mechner was that his game is FAR simpler- It's ALL about that time bending mechanic, were PoP has to try to find ways to blend combat and more traditional storytelling in. He can be very dismissive when talking about other people's work. Looking for less "it sucks" and more "felt like a missed opportunity".

    And while I think Braid tells a beautiful and sad story, the one I was "reading" did not take place in the text... it took place in the puzzles, visual symbolism, and artwork. I think the text story layer tries a BIT too hard to be deep and mysterious, sometimes "missing" the player by logical inches. If his writing style's goal is for every single player to have a different impression of what it's all about, mission accomplished. But is that really "depth"? I think it's more "malleability", personally. Not necessarily a negative trait, depending on who's partaking.

    And for the record, I'll take Blow over Cage any day! I like to pick nits, but I genuinely love braid and am looking forward to what's next.

  21. Posted

    I may just be sold on this.

    And creepy is in the eye of the beholder where human-animal hybrids are concerned!

    The approach presented here IS rather hilarious, though.

    For me, there's a kind of human/animal blend uncanny valley that you can avoid by being near the edges of the graph. For example, a regular person that has a couple of animal traits added, like ears and a tail can be sweet... Or animals that have a few human traits, like walking upright, (if they don't already) or wearing clothes are neat, (think Maus) but there will always be that troublesome midpoint, which I'm guessing is what you mean by "furry".

  22. Posted

    When you say you're losing middle click functionality, you mean that apps with references to that button aren't recognizing it when you've got setpoint installed?

    Make sure that thing is mapped to "Universal Scroll" or "Mouse 3" or something in Setpoint I suppose... can't really investigate too deeply as I'm running Razor software these days.

    That sucks. I like mapping stuff to those extra buttons in games, it's damn useful.

  23. Posted

    Is it just me, or was Steve REALLY workin' that Boost Remo nickname?

    Almost sounded like he was compensating/striking back for his (what must be, from his perspective, sort of terrible) nickname a bit.

    I get the impression that "Scoops" has really caught on and stuck outside the 'cast. I have (probably inaccurate) images of him sidling up to his desk at work and having his boss and another guy who comes in fairly early say, "Mornin' Scoops!" while he chuckles on the outside and seethes, "Yeah, cause that never gets old guys" internally...

  24. Posted

    Finished the first case!

    Progress will be slow, I only really play it during my train commute...

    Highly enjoyable thus far, but I agree that without the courtroom scuffles, it feels like something's missing.

    A direction I would love this series to take: You play as a duo Detective and Attorney. Gameplay bounces back and forth between the Logic system/adventure game investigation and courtroom confrontation/press system.

    I'm envisioning some great "tag in, tag out" mechanics where new evidence is needed in the middle of a heated trial. The player takes control of the detective with a mission of tracking it down and delivering it while switching back to the courtroom in between important sub-finds to stall the proceedings with creative pressing and bluffing...

    *drool*

  25. Posted

    Oh hells, a Logitech mouse that doesn't use setpoint?! How old is that thing?

    Wait, they probably made setpoint backwards compatible that far... THAT'S the Logitech button customization app, at least the one with real options that they support.

    Try it?

    Where on earth did you get this "intellipoint" software? Tell me it's not on some disk that shipped with that thing years ago... Overarching advise: Throw any CDs that come with your mainstream computer hardware away, especially if the manufacturer is a big one like Logitech. The companies that maintain these drivers and helper apps usually end up releasing a new version to address defects and conflicts within weeks of the thing shipping. No matter how good their compatability lab is, the consumers WILL break it. The latest versions of drivers and software will always be online.

    Now, DO NOT follow that advise for everything! DO keep the disks that came with your motherboard, DVD drive, RAID controller, USB hub, anything that goes inside your case that isn't the sound or video card basically. For example, your motherboard CD probably has some useful BIOS shite on it that you'd need access to if it all went to hell and you couldn't access the internet on another computer.

    Hope this helps somehow.