I have that Zelda disk as well, the one with the 2 NES games and N64 Zeldas. It's really awesome because my favorite Zelda game Majora's Mask is on that disc and I love having the ability to play it even though my N64 is long gone.
I was able to pick up BG&E on Amazon for just under $15 so I thought that was pretty nice. What interests me the most about the game is the light stealth mechanics, the platforming, exploration, and action. Not long ago I did that blog about The Hobbit and BG&E reminds me a little bit of it through the art style and the mechanics. I'm guessing BG&E should be a bit of a better game than the Hobbit, and that just interests me even more. I really just want a good platformer, stealth, adventure kind of game to play.
I never played Dino Crisis but I think dino games have everything going for them and just haven't been executed in a terribly good way yet. I watched the Jurassic Park movies as a kid and love those movies, and when the early Turok games on N64 came along I was in love but I don't exactly want to play that kind of arcade-y dino shooting gallery anymore. I love the concept of dinos in a game and when the 2008 Turok reboot came along I was super excited and full of nostalgia for the N64 Turoks that came before, but I was let down quite a bit. It's a perfectly playable game and it's not a bad game at all, it's pretty fun at times and hey it has dinos! But it's not a good dino game, and I'm tired of those kinds of experiences.
The movie Jurassic Park kind of was on the right track. If you watch Jurassic Park, it's not about action/shooting, at all. That movie is about awe, suspense, horror, and survival. You feel the awe when you come across the beauty of the dinosaurs and see scenes like a Brontosaurus grazing on grass. You feel the suspense when you get the chill in your spine knowing that you might have Velociraptors hunting you. You feel the horror when you finally confront a dangerous dinosaur, and you feel the primal survival instincts when you come to the realization, "Wow I'm living in an environment full of dinosaurs, this could go very badly and I can't just sit back in awe like a tourist!"
I'm not saying dino games should play out like early Resident Evil games, because I hate the mechanics of those games. I think a dino game should be very psychological and try to make you feel like a small species surrounded by larger sometimes beautiful, sometimes disgusting, sometimes harmless, and sometimes dangerous dinosaur species. It should be a bit Splinter Cell, Uncharted, Resident Evil, Bioshock, and whatever else. Dinosaurs in games like Turok have just become something you know you can blast into bits. I want dinosaurs to be brought into a more realistic light and be portrayed as real animals in a real ecosystem that can absolutely effect the player's survival, how the player moves around an environment, and the dinosaurs should be able to affect each other as well.
You made great points Jesse. I'd love more dinosaurs, new environments, a narrative with more crisis, open level designs with flexible encounters, and multi-player would be awesome too.
Oh yea! I think that went over my head at first lol. We had a lengthy discussion all about RPGs after last weeks' Pixltalk. There was a conversation going all the way up until the next week's episode lol.
I love RPGs but I also love it when the mechanics of RPGs are used as features in games that mix a variety of genres. With all this mixing going on and the common complaints of mechanics being watered down, I wanted us to start questioning first of all what RPG mechanics really are. Secondly I wanted to us to explore what mechanics really matter to us and what we really care about in our RPGs. I was poking at Julian a great deal and digging deeper and deeper into his experiences with mechanics in Mass Effect and now I feel like understand his point of view vastly better and I agree with all the points he makes. It really was a cool epidsode and ensuing discussion.
That's really cool Mike. I saw a little gameplay of it from time to time in addition to all the discussions they had over the game and it looks like a lot of fun. I'm not sure what the RPG elements are like in regards to inventory system, weapons, armor, abilities, stats, or lack thereof. I just saw a bit of the movement and exploration mechanics, the dialogue choices, some sneaking around I think, killing, and not too much else. I also really liked to hear that the story and choices you make aren't very clear, they're more in the grey subtle moral areas.
I've wanted to play this game on 360 really badly for a long time. For months during Feedback podcasts G4's Matt Keil would rave about the game on PC and try to intice his co-workers to play it. All the raving and discussions on the game grew on me. The game seems like it would be amazing to play and the fact their fleshing it out for consoles it awesome. No, it's awesome sauce. Yea, +1 to awesome sauce.
I've had a 360 since 2006 and never used a single Microsoft point. I've never understood them or had them explained to me. To me they seem silly, like Disney dollars lol. I'll be happy if the create something else, hopefully better, than the MS Point system.
Everybody's old man voices were great. Patrick was spot on, Julian sounded hilariously bad as an old man, and Rob sounded exactly like the creepy merchant from Resident Evil 4. Lol right? Think back, "Hey stranger! Whata-ya buyin? Whata-ya sellin? Come back anytime, ye heh!". Rob was channeling his inner creepy merchant when he did his old man voice lol.
I agree with Julian on the excessive tutorials. Tutorials are necessary in games, but it's easy to let it become handholding and invasive or even disruptive (Jules brought up the Batman detective mode reference). Not long ago I was thinking in the shower (Some people sing in the shower, I think about game design lol) about how to do tutorials differently in sophisticated games. In a classic game like Super Mario a tutorial can be accomplished in a matter of moments because there's only a few mechanics and possibilities in the game They can pause the game, bring up a window, and give you notes to tell you how to jump and run. As sophistication increases and more mechanics are added to a game, teaching a player how to play becomes more intellectual or philosophical in a way, and less A= jump. I think Portal 2 did a perfect job of getting me to learn new mechanics and use them through observation, interpretation, and experimentation.
It's quite a marvel too because take a moment to think about the general mechanics that are implemented in the game, and then the physical properties or principles behind them. Momentum flinging uses gravity, velocity, increasing momentum, and as the difficulty increases you have to fling yourself while observing the environment and using quick timing to establish new portal sets that will keep you airborn until you get to a destination. It's not an easy game with easy concepts and mechanics yet kids and parents alike are capable of playing it together and learning fairly organically. The game just lets me watch and learn from the environment, interpret what I see, and most importantly experiment. It doesn't insult your intelligence, and it expects that the human beings of different ages playing the game will have the creativity, reasoning, and observational skills to understand and go experiment till they get to the end.
Valve employs designers and playtest analysts like Mike Abinder that not only study computer science but also study psychology, and it's for good reason. A "tutorial" is a simple teaching tool that can teach you to jump and crouch, which Portal 2 does as you move around in the beginning of the game. However the more sophisticated the game becomes the more you need a sophisticated design and philosophy as to how players will observe, interpret, and experiement with complex concepts. The learning of mechanics is more hands-on and organic in Portal 2 and as the difficulty increases the player learns and adapts without the game stopping, letting you read a text book, holding your hand, and letting that continue as more mechanics are introduced. We should absolultely give players more credit and challenge them while creating an environment in which they can organically learn the skills necessary to overcome the challenges we design. Everybody learns differently (hands-on, visual, verbal, etc) and a game should include some of each teaching technique, but I think in a video game, especially since it's interactive, the hands-on learning is the most important.
Organic and hands-on learning is more fascinating that anything because it comes naturally to humans, it's how we evolved. We didn't learn to hunt mammoths by opening a text book or waiting for somebody to hold our hands. We observed, interpreted, and experimented. Sometimes we died, sometimes we lived, sometimes it failed, sometimes it succeeded. Even the humans that can be classified as "stupid" or of low intelligence are still, in the grand scale of things and in comparison to other species, capable of extremely clever thought and abstract problem solving. This could be used in game design to challenge players and avoid excessive or ineffective learning techniques or tutorials.
Onto the other ranting, I try to be a green person, but I'm with Julian on the booklets. Since back in the day booklets were always the first part of the new game ritual. Back in the day I could buy the bare bones standard version of any game and it would come with a legit box, artwork, and an instruction booklet that was like 40 pages long and contained story, characters, pictures, description of weapons, vehicles, items, spells, skill trees, in addition to the configuration and credits list. Back in the day I could buy a new game, look at the final 2-4 pages of the book and see who the level designers, testers, audio guys, and everybody was. Nowadays it's all on the disc (to save paper, money, and time) and it's just a quiet lame film-esk scrolling list. It seems like the people who make games don't get to take as much pride in it anymore, it's shifted in favor of the business side and productivity side.
These days you have to pay extra money for collections editions just to get insight into the developer's culture, get some fan service, and feel connected. When I open up Assassins Creed 2 or Modern Warfare 3's standard case I just see an eco case, disc, and a like 11 page manual where there's more siezure warnings than anything else and I feel no connection to the product and culture at all.
My favorite new game ritual of all time was with Halo Reach's collectors edition because it was the best fan service I've ever had from start to finish. When I got the game I spent over an hour looking through all the cool shit Bungie put into the package like the fictional news reports, pictures, documents, and ultimately reading though Dr. Halsey's personal journal where she details her hypothesies and experiements behind her Spartan-II augmentations, her selection process of indoctrination candidates, her conceptualizing and manufacturing of Cortana, and the invasion of Reach all told from her perspective and all the beautiful hand-drawn pictures the Bungie artists put into the journal. Then at the end of Reach instead of just letting a boring text list go by, Bungie had a message to their fans (as they did in all the other Halos) in addition to funny pictures of the people on the development team and personal messages from all of them. I was so happy with Reach's collectors edition that it was no longer a simple product. It became passion, art, and the actual artists themselves that I could connect to and I just wanted to cry. It really meant a great deal to me not only artistically but most of all as being a fan of the universe they had been developing over the past 10 years.
Bungie went all out, connected with fans like me, and let me know that this experience I just had wasn't Microsoft's game. It was Bungie's game, they were proud of it, they hope I enjoyed it, and told me thank you. You don't get that often anymore. These days when I buy my games I often feel like I'm connecting with somebodies bank account and quarterly statement, not their art and imagination. A lot of people I know have played Halo only for the multiplayer and don't have the same connection with the franchise I do. I sometimes have a hard time explaining why Bungie, the Halo IP, novels, universe, and characters mean so much to me, but things like this are about as close as I come to being able to explain it. When I would buy Bungie games I would buy them to connect with people like Jason Jones, Joseph Staten, and Marty O'Donnell. When I buy Id games I want to connect with John Carmack. When I would buy Zeldas as a kid it was because I wanted to connect with Shigeru Miyamoto and his imagination.
I love the sound of this. I'm going to be playing Infinite on both the 1999 mode as well as whatever contemporary difficulties they have available. When I played through Bioshock even on Hard I found that I still had too many health vials and couldn't pick up new ones I would come across, and if I died I'd just end up at a Vita-Chamber and it wouldn't be a big deal. The fact there's much more diverse difficulties for Infinite sound really cool and I like how they're adressing the lack of diversity from Bioshock.
I just realized I made a mistake. In the ME series Soldiers can't use the SMGs. I was thinking about Borderlands because I play as Lilith in Borderlands and I always use SMGs. In Borderlands you have incendiary weapon abilities just like ME so I got those mixed up.
In Mass Effect 1 and 2 my soldier character has been using mostly assault rifles. I'm very picky about my weapons and when I find a gun that works for me practically, I stick with it forever pretty much and get really good with it. Like in Halo Reach I play almost exclusively with the DMR because it's accurate, powerful, and a medium ranged weapon. When I play a co-op Firefight session for an hour I'll get around 600 kills and 450 of those will be with the DMR and I'll have a ludicrous amount of headshots. My friend will get a similar amount of kills but his will be spread out with every weapon in the game. I like to play at medium range and so in Mass Effect I always use the assault rifles.
In ME1 I made due with the assault rifles but once I felt the changes in ME2 I realized how much better I liked them than ME1. In ME1 the assault rifles got the job done and eventually I became so powerful with them that they never overheated and they could put down enemies quickly. However they sounded too thin by having too much bass, not crisp, and I couldn't attach to them the way I would with Halo's DMR for example. Gears of War 1 had a similar problem because the Lancer also sounded thin and became like a watery/muddy series of thin clicks, but the Lancer didn't have enough bass whereas the ME1 assault rifles had too much bass and echo.
When Gears 2 came around they improved and changed their Lancer problems by slowing down the Lancer's rate of fire, changing the sound completely to have more bass and be much more crisp. When I was starting up Gears 2 one of the things I was most concerned about was how the Lancer would feel, and I got lucky because it was as if Epic knew the Gears 1 lancer needed to be changed and they went and did it.
I thought ME2 did some similar things with their weapons. The assault rifles had more presence, and all the little things came together to make the guns more fun to shoot. Like the smoke that rises from the barrel, and the heat effects when you reload a heat sink. The sounds had less echo, were more crisp, and have a fine balance of bass, mids, and treble.
I used the assault rifles exlcusively and any time I changed it was practical, like using the Cain to get rid of heavy mechs, or a sniper to get rid of a distant enemy. I invested heavily into upgrades for the assault rifles, and invested moderatly with the other weapons. In ME2 I thought the best looking and sounding assault rifle was the Revenant because it was black & red and pretty loud, however it was incredibly inaccurate. I also loved the Vindicator because it was very controlled, super accurate, and fired a quick 3-round burst that could put down enemies nicely when I got headshots, however it didn't look very cool. The guns all have their pros and cons, but they're a lot of fun to use.
The Particle Beam was really cool and a lot of times I was torn between taking it out on a mission or taking the Cain. I can't wait to hear what you have to say about the Mass Effect armor. I was really really disappointed with the armor in ME2. The "customization" area in the Captain's Quarters was a joke. There wasn't anything to pick from! For me there ended up only being 3 different sets of armor and they aesthetically weren't very cool to look at, weren't that different, and they had these lame tacked on perks (like 3% rush speed) that didn't make me feel any better about the whole thing. The colors weren't that special and the way you could color different sections didn't do it for me, and the patterns sucked (like the camo one or the solid patterned one), and the way you could change materials was lame. There were like 6 different material options and they were all the same except had little differences in reflectivity and a plastic or fiberglass appearance.
Oh and the options for changing your team mate's clothing was lame too. I go through hours of quests and eventually finish a loyalty mission, and at the end of all that, Miranda like me enough that she thinks it's cool to change her tight white suit into a tight black suit? Give me a break. It's nice to know that I fight to gain their loyalty just so they can have one single minor outfit change. I loved the loyalty missions themselves, but the repercussions and "rewards" weren't anything special. My crew was dressed so generically and my Shepard was dressed so generically I didn't feel like my crew wouldn't have been any different from the millions of other people playing the game.
