Ninja Dodo

"Bonjour Mainstream"

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Even the demo of BG&E didn't really grab me. They completely failed to put any of the 'character' of the game across. It seemed like just another average platformer.

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Yeah I think the bad advertising was a big fault, one of my friends said it just looked like Jak\Metal Gear Rip Off, which it is. The strengths of the game are barely rooted in the gameplay.

Also they should've just bit the bullet and made the main character a wild talking pig, the 'independent woman' character did nothing to establish the game as unique.

EDIT: I agree the demo was piss poor.

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I was just kidding about them not being good. Sort of. I've only played the first two, and I don't love them, but I think they're okay. Jak II got on my nerves a lot for much the same reasons that Prince of Persia: Warrior Within did: forced edginess, emphasis on violence. Though I didn't like Jak & Daxter nearly as much as Sands of Time, the drastic change in the atmosphere of Jak II was jarring and at times, embarrassing. Though I actually think they pulled the 'dark' stuff off better than Warrior Within, as Naughty Dog had the good sense to (occasionally) make fun of it. But the plot and characters in Jak II I found incredibly annoying. It was quite astonishing that Daxter went from the most annoying character in the first game to the least annoying in the second.

Actually, gameplay wise, I think BG&E and Jak II have a lot in common - there's the big gameworld hub for you to freely drive around in, an emphasis on story and characters, vehicles, minigames and a ton of useless shit to collect. While the stuff I just listed is hardly exclusive to those two games, I think they do play very similar.

I also have only played the first two. My first impression of Jak 1 was "so what?," but it slowly grew on me because of the good level design, writing and animation. I thought the story was a bit thin, and the collecting was a bit much.

The second was the complete opposite, my first impression was "WOW THIS ROCKS," because the quality of the graphics, animation and writing were all immediately apparent. As the game went on, the hub city went from a mild inconvenience to a near game ruining experience. The vehicles controlled TERRIBLY, were too fragile and there was no direct route to anywhere.

I actually liked the story of 2 much more than 1, because.. it had one. Jak 1 was like "ok, here's a new area!, collect some shit then unlock the next area! ..where you'll COLLECT SHIT!" Jak 2 had logical mission progression, a lot of funny dialogue and jak's angst was layed on a bit thick, but it was justified and never embarrassing, to me at least. The only annoyances in the game, aside from the stupid hub city, and everything associated with it, was the voice of the mechanic chick, and probably something else that I've forgotten since I beat it.

None of this has anything to do with BG&E, though, which I still think is very different from jak 2, aside from the hub city and collecting (from jak 1). Mainly because the platforming in BG&E is literally foolproof. I don't think there was a single situation where I could have come up short on a jump if I tried, and there were always invsibile walls near cliff edges. Another dissimilarity is that Jak doesn't have much stealth at all, which is pretty much what the entire second half of BG&E is dedicated to. Also, jak2 didn't really have levels, it had areas where you would carry out a few missions at different points during the game. BG&E had areas that, once you had completed the objective, you pretty much never saw again.

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That's a good point about the stealth and linearity, I'd actually forgotten about the stealth aspects to be honest. In that respect, yeah, Jak II doesn't prioritise cunning so much as shooting your way through.

I was also fairly ambivalent about the first one, the second, I think, is bound to provoke a much stronger reaction, regardless of whether it's positive or not. I actually really liked the hub city for some reason - I'm still not that sure why - but the novelty wears off once you realise there's nothing to do except crash and explode. I don't agree about Jak's angst/bloodlust being justified, though. I mean they justified it fine in that game, but when you look at it and Jak I, it doesn't hold up. It's clear they wanted a 'darker' Jak after finishing the first game, but their way of justifying it was right after Jak I he suddenly gets captured and tortured for two years in, like, the first sixty seconds. And then you're on to shooting things. It's such a hurried and abrupt bridge between the personality-less Jak I and snarling Jak II; there wasn't any effort put into that at all.

I hated the voice acting too, since you brought that up. Jak was played by a guy called Mike Erwin, which I bring up because I've seen him in other things and absolutely can't stand him.

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"Beyond Good and Evil was kind of fun, but let's face it, who wants to play a slut and a pig?"

Who -doesn't-?

I mean, other than "everybody"?

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I actually liked the Beyond Good and Evil print ads I saw. There was one with Jade with her back up against a wall and text saying "TRUST YOUR GOVERNMENT" or something like that. That sounds cheesy :shifty: but it looked really good to me. The colors were awesome and it really captured the tone of the game for me (at least the "dungeons") without coming off as faux hardcore.

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Wait, isn't Ancel making a King Kong game after the new movie by Peter Jackson?

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I actually liked the Beyond Good and Evil print ads I saw. There was one with Jade with her back up against a wall and text saying "TRUST YOUR GOVERNMENT" or something like that. That sounds cheesy :shifty: but it looked really good to me. The colors were awesome and it really captured the tone of the game for me (at least the "dungeons") without coming off as faux hardcore.

"SUPPORT YOUR GOVERNMENT". It's on the cover of my box, and my cd case, and all my cds.

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I think the slut thing is less of the game's falt and more of the guy just being an asshole. I know people who just refer to any attractive woman as a slut.

I think that this quote may not be bad for Ancel. When you think about it, who really wants to control a girl and her pig?

Tim Shaffer:

Designers need to create a character for the player to relate to. He's got a foolproof trick for where to begin: he asks himself, "Who's the coolest character in that world?" Who's the coolest pirate? The coolest biker? Wouldn't it be cool to be the Grim Reaper himself?
"All games are wish-fulfillments," he explained. And this led into a great anecdote relating to Psychonauts: originally the main character was an ostrich. He loved it. He said there was this cool control scheme where one stick would move around and the other stick would peck. All of the ostrich's powers came from the fact that he was mentally imbalanced and had multiple personalities. Then, he caught himself, and asked himself: how many people fanaticize about being a insane ostrich?

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Well, that philosophy has worked for Tim a few times now. Ben and Manny oozed coolness and it was awesome to step into their shoes. But I'm not sure that it's quite the golden rule of character design, more just one good way of approaching it. There's a whole range of really fun games that don't have especially cool player-characters. Even staying within the LucasArts adventure games, Monkey Island and Day Of The Tentacle had you playing perhaps 'uncool' people - a wannabe pirate, and a nerd, respectively.

Although Guybrush was a bit of a bumbling fool, the pirate/voodoo world he inhabited was very cool and fun to explore in those games. Also, as he was always trying to become a pirate, it was a friendly way to bring the player into the world, if you catch my drift there. So I think that kind of character makes sense too.

Obviously, I haven't played Psychonauts, but I feel like leaping to the conclusion that Raz is kind of the middle ground in that cool-wannabe character spectrum. Apparently, the game isn't going to let us play the ultimate Psychonaut straight away, but we'll learn the powers and become 'cooler' as we get to use them all. It's tying the character development up in the 'rewards' of gaming, which are also obviously pretty important. Sorta like getting a powerful gun for the first time in an FPS.

So yeah, I don't think Beyond Good & Evil deserves any flak for having a green-lipstick-wearing girl and a pig mechanic as its main characters, if those are really so lame. So far, the world is really well-developed and the game is plain good fun, which is what I'm enjoying about it.

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Tim has said, in the coolest character vein, that one aspect of Guybrush (which I think often goes overlooked) is that (despite his goofiness) he always had a comeback, he could almost always get the last word, or get a jab in at what anyone else said. That wasn't as true in the latter sequels, but in 1 and 2 it was very often the case. And in a universe where your pirateness is measured in insults, thats not too bad. Arguably that wasn't 100% of Guybrush's character or anything, but I think that aspect of his character was mostly Schafer's doing.

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Yeah, thinking about it, that was part of Guybrush's character in the first two, and a lot of fun. I always wonder who wrote which lines. I tend to imagine the very best stuff that makes me really laugh to be Schafer's doing, rightly or wrongly.

Meathook: Who are you?

Guybrush: I'm a pirate, cannonball-head. Who are you?

Meathook: I'm Meathook, and I think you've got a little attitude problem.

Guybrush: And I think you've got a little hair problem.

Meathook: Geez! You just don't know when to quit, do you?

Guybrush: Obviously, neither did your barber...

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I've only started playing BG&E this very weekend. Based on what I've played so far, I can't quite see what made it so inaccessible. The whole photography angle is clever and makes the gameplay unique, yet it's not hard to get the hang of.

I think marketing and word of mouth play largely in a game's success, and it's harder to get attention in a crowded release season, especially with the price of games. So I'd have to go with the Christmas release theory.

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