PixlBit

Posted on 01/10/2012 at 11:56 AM | Filed Under Feature

I could've swore it was you who said that Julian, but I was wrong. I called shenanigans on all the wrong people and created division and near-mutiny within the crew, it was a tale for the ages, one of political intrigue and betrayal lol.

I didn't know SH4 was meant to be a new IP, looking back they should've either went with the new IP or just rethought the mechanics and level design. The brand name is good for sales and the SH universe allows for great stories but that doesn't mean the game was going to turn out great, and it didn't at least mechanically. I didn't design the game but I feel terrible that you weren't even able to finish the game.

One of my pet peeves is when a game is built so specifically that there's a clear way to play it wrong and right, and they don't let you know. For example Portal is a game that has clear rules and a right way to play it, you need to solve environmental puzzles and have good timing, and they give you time to learn these things and teach them to you and things get more difficult as you go. In SH4 they put you in combat situations but don't tell you the ghosts are invincible and the right option is to run. They give you friggin guns but don't tell you that you can't use them, and the right thing to do is just suck it up and save them till you need them possibly hours from now. Being deprived of ammo in games like the Condemned series worked for me, because even when I was out of ammo the game was playable and I could literally fight tooth and nail to survive a brawl. In SH the deprivation of ammo is just a game breaker. It makes me mad that they give me a sweet pistol and shotgun and I get penalized for using them to shoot at the monsters that want to kill me. Don't give me weapons then. Make it a stealth, evasion, survival game with a horror setting. Similar to the problem Mirror's Edge had, remember when we talked about that a while ago? If you can't do weapons right and weapons aren't working well or fitting into your design, just get rid of them and think outside the box instead of shoehorning guns in and letting gamers play wrong.

That was one of my biggest frustrations with the game: the fact that you can easily and irreversibly screw yourself over and not be able to progress in the game. It's not only entirely possible but it's easy to find yourself walking into a boss battle without any ammo for a gun, broken melee weapons, no health, no health items, and basically no hope to move past it to the rest of the game. Players are left thinking that either they suck at Silent Hill games and should quit, or that the game is poorly designed and they should quit. Both thoughts would be a designers nightmare. Another huge bad sign was when you said that the invincible enemies weren't scary, they just pissed you off because they restricted you from exploring or advancing the plot. I had the same problems and it sucks because the SH universe it great and I want to explore it freely at times. Not to the point where it gets boring and I feel no danger for hours in the game, but exploration, spectacle, and mystery need to be key to a good SH game.

Posted on 01/09/2012 at 05:59 PM | Filed Under Blogs

Sorry to hear about your uncle, it's great you guys are working hard to raise the rest of the money for a proper funeral. I hope the rest of the grieving process goes well for everybody and everything goes well for you guys despite the loss.

I don't own a PS3 so I hadn't heard of Modern Combat Domination till today. I'm on IGN right now (ended up there only because of screenshots) looking at some screen shots and it looks really cool, I bet it's a ton of fun. The fact you went 39-4 in 15 minutes is pretty sweet. I don't play competitive multiplayer much but when I do it's been Halo, CoD, and most of all Team Fortress 2. In Halo I get a lot of kills but I also die a lot, I'm like canon fodder and a killing machine all at once lol. I like to switch tactics all the time. I'll spend a life (anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes for me) being a camping sniper, then I'll die, get bored of it, and also because I don't want to be known as a camper, I'll spend the next life in close quarters scrambling around and beating people to death.

Like you I'm also surprised how few team players there are out there at times. It's one of the reasons I don't like competitive multiplayer much. When it goes bad, it really goes terribly. However when it goes well, it goes incredibly and beautifully well. It feels so good to work as a team and succeed, and I had the best experiences doing that in Team Fortress 2. Like Halo, my lives in TF2 never last for too long, but I switch classes each time and try to use skills the team needs right at that very moment. Maybe at the moment I died, our team was playing a capture the flag match and at that very moment we desperately needed a spy to camoflauge himself, wander in, and get a jump on the enemy for at least a few seconds and our strategy would somehow work out. So I'd do it, it would work, and we would all feel like a million bucks. There's nothing like winning.

I would also enjoy spending time being a medic. I made a friend on XBL one time because we kept ending up in the same matches and he would be a heavy and I would be his medic. He would walk around blasting people with his mini-gun and I would constantly be healing him, and occasionally we would use our temporary invincibility ability and plow through the enemy base or through a barrage of engineer turrets. It was so much fun. Sometimes you don't actually have to kill anything or engage in much combat to contribute to a team and objective. TF2 rocks, it's definitely my favorite.

Posted on 01/09/2012 at 04:51 PM | Filed Under Feature

Thank you Rob I appreciate it. Lol sorry I called shenanigans on you. The segment where SH4 came up went by pretty quickly and from what I remember it consisted of Julian saying that it wasn't a good game and at least one other person agreed with him and the conversation moved on, must have been Jason or Patrick. At the very least I'll just call out shenanigans on Julian and single him out. Lol Julian, I know you're out there, if you read this...shenanigans!

Posted on 01/09/2012 at 01:59 PM | Filed Under Feature

Sorry I'm late to the parade guys, but I just got the chance to listen through today and thought you guys really fit a lot of good stuff into this episode, it was awesome. However there was some shenanigans when everybody agreed on Silent Hill 4 not being a good game! It absolutely was infallible and anything you say bounces off it like glue and you know. I forgot how that saying finishes. So...nana nana boo boo lol. Just kidding. I never played the first three SH games and SH4 was my first experience with the games. It was mechanically insufferable and it was the most trouble I've ever had trying to figure out level designs, puzzle logic, and how to simply survive and progress the plot. SH4 was the one of the first games that I had to obsessively use an online walkthrough for. Not because the game was tough and I was some feeble mind that couldn't conquer it, but instead because the game was so hard to make sense of. There were some puzzles and situations I literally wouldn't have ever made the "right" reasoning and problem solving that the designers had in mind.

Everything was so cryptic and sometimes the way to make it through an encounter space, grab items, solve puzzles, and survive, was just odd and the game never trained me to do it. If I ever was to make it through SH4 without a guide, it would literally be because of luck. There's no skill involved when you enter an area and ghosts are chasing you down, you have no health, have a golf club that doesn't do any good, you have no idea where you are, where you're going, what needs to be done, and essential items are neatly tucked away in corners and you have to run for your life yet accomplish objectives and tasks that you had no idea even exist.

So much of that game was bullshit, but even with all that craziness I still loved the game because of the settings and the story. It dealt with issues I had never seen before and took me way out of my comfort zones. There were prisons where kids were being tortured and brainwashed, all your neighbors are weird and have their own cryptic fucked up little narratives and apartment rooms you explore, there was an antagonist that has this tragic story of being abandoned by his mom and he's delusional thinking that the apartment room is his mother and uh, it's just much easier to say he's fucked up but his story is sad and if he just stopped killing people you could sympathize with him and try to understand him. The characters and narrative was so different than what I was accustomed to, which was always one-dimensional violent aliens and tyrant kings or wizards. I don't ever want to play SH4 again, but it sure left a powerful impression and I'm glad I played it.

I'm really excited for the new Rainbox Six game and I'm in love with the target game-play footage because the gameplay serves the story and those are the kind of games I want to make and play. When the sniper team is on the bridge atop the support columns providing overwatch and repels down the bridge to the road proper to engage, shooting as they go down, and the whole sequence is interactively getting you from point A to B, that is so much more fun than just making the player take an elevator and wait for a 5 or 10 second cutscene or even worse a loading screen. It would be so much cheaper and easier to just make it non-interactive and just cut some corners, but it appears they don't want to cut as many corners as desiners are accustomed to cutting and that's why I get excited. I don't know how the logical/ethical choices and narrative will play out, and how much they will effect us emotionally, but I'm more exicted for the gameplay and that's what I want to see. Making the gameplay mechanics, environment traversal, and combat more versatile, cinematic, fluid, abstract, and dependent on the situation at hand makes it much more interesting to me. If it just follows old design ideas algebraically and keeps the status quo, I'm not going to want to play it.

Posted on 01/03/2012 at 05:48 PM | Filed Under Feature

@Mike Great point. If all the readers want is catharsis in their gaming reviews and they aren't getting it, it's a legitimate fear that they might not want to use journalism or go read something at all. Strategically and intellectually I come to the edge of a cliff as to what to do with that whole situation. It's quite simple because it's all supply and demand, but it gets deeper than that because it makes journalists ask themselves, "What kind of content to do I actually want to put out, and will anybody care?" Taking the evil scientist route, ideally I wish I could uniformly and neatly rewrite data in the brains of the masses so that everybody would have the same understanding for what critical analysis is compared to catharsis and everybody would be efficient and organized in knowing where to go to get each interaction. With those definitions programmed into people and that foundation set, a journalism site could literally provide all of those needs for an audience because they could give critical reviews but also allow users to have personal blogs, forums, personalized profiles, etc, to express their emotions resulting in much needed catharsis. When people are online they should have the information necessary to educate them fairly and critically on a topic, but they should also have avenues for more abstract thought, expression, and interaction. One site that gives readers the chance to exercise both hemispheres of the brain and have the interface and features to efficiently and entertainingly satisfy both. Most sites just see this divide between reason and emotion and decide to go for one or the other, and so the definitions of a "review" evolve over time. If one site does reviews and they are very emotional and viewed as biased, it becomes normal, if one site seems very cold and calculated, it also becomes norm for the audiences. There's no boundaries set, no standards, structure, or uniformity. Reviews should based in critical thinking, but the more personalized features of a site don't have to be. There has to be a way of giving the readers what they need without them necessarily knowing it or thinking about it. Ironically I think that if a site has the variety of content, the interface, and features that satisfy the readers, the readers shouldn't really notice it. They will just use it. When a person's car is mechanically sound and running, they aren't thinking about the engineering, they just drive it off into the direction of their choice. The mechanics in a car are very organized and they try to keep definitions consistent, and when it's all organized and the different features are doing what they do, the car just works.

Posted on 01/03/2012 at 04:42 PM | Filed Under Feature

I like how Mass Effect 2 came into the conversation lol. I loved how they added depth to the Geth by giving them culture, choice, and division. In ME1 the Geth were just fodder and henchmen of more important and colorful characters. In ME2 the Geth became colorful and important by themselves due to the choices made with the writing. You learn that the Geth you have been killing all this time have just been a small division of the entire Geth society which has broken off from the majority and decided to worship the Reapers. I was fascinated by their collective processing, compounding intelligence, speed of light consensus, and intellectual depth. They're so alien yet so relate-able, which makes them terrifying but capable of being reasoned with (so it would seem).

I rewrote them and saved the dissenters from being destroyed so they might become allies later on. Intellectually I labored quickly over it when the choice came up, and I thought about what was the better choice and in the end I decided I didn't want to be "good" or "bad", and I just decided to make the choice I myself would make. I'm exited to see how that decision plays out in ME3.

Earlier in the conversation when you both were talking about reviews and the situation that exploded after Duke Nukem's release, I agree that when it comes to reviews most people already have their mind made up. When most people read reviews I think they often just want catharsis. Reviews aren't about catharsis, they should be about analysis. People want to see a reviewer have the same experience they had, or experience the same emotions, purge those emotions together, and preferably have the emotions be the exact same. It's quite human and understandable because catharsis is a beautiful thing, but reviews probably aren't the right channel to engage in it. When Nukem came out and its reviews were deservedly low, and fans started lashing back out at the journalism community, all those zealous fans were quite insufferable and irrational but at the same time I felt sad for them because they were looking for catharsis in all the wrong places. Even people who play and love shitty games deserve to be happy, play their games, and share their emotions about it with each other.

Posted on 01/03/2012 at 03:03 PM | Filed Under Review

I agree with Angelo, the message and context of Bioshock is very deep. The story, atmosphere, and context is more compelling than the sum of all the rest of the parts of the game. I never found the gunplay very fun and I wasn't in love with the plasmids but I think the mechanics and gameplay still worked well enough in its time.

What enthralled me with Bioshock was trying to figure out Rapture and I had such an unforgettable time wandering around and picking up information that painted the picture of Rapture's concept and the philosophies of Andrew Ryan. I found myself thinking and analyzing in a video game in ways I can't remember doing before. It ended up not having anything to do with good versus evil, there was no princess in a tower, and no apparent victory or loss. It was much more intricate and adult than that. It was more about emotional engagement and an observation of how human emotions and philosophies can have the greatest of intentions but can cause the greatest of conflict simply because the people wielding them are still simply human and susceptible to fear, betrayal, revolution, greed, violence, etc.

Bioshock is a beautiful game and when I say that I'm not thinking about the visuals or gameplay whatsoever. It took me to a completely alien landscape and society and forced me to confront human nature, philosophy, and survival in that alien place.

Posted on 12/23/2011 at 03:50 PM | Filed Under Blogs

I honestly don't see anything here that makes sense to me, and I'm a huge Zelda fan. All I see in this list is a bunch of "Ganon dies, Ganon is revived, Ganon gets sealed away, Ganon freed" Take in a deep breath and continue, "Ganon dies, Ganon revived, Ganon sealed away, Ganon freed"

I was introduced to the series with Ocarina, and when Majora's Mask's Termina and 3 Day system came along I realized that the timelines, Hyrule, and the Goddesses would no longer be any of my concern, I just love Zelda games. This attempt at a timeline is actually quite silly.

Posted on 12/23/2011 at 03:15 PM | Filed Under Blogs

I love your SAT call-back Travis lol. I can understand why most people never gave it a chance. There were so many games out at the time that were greater in every sense. It's not ambicious, but although it reaches low, it manages to execute those low standards very well. It's a bit of a conundrum, it's like creating a painting that isn't very nice to look at, yet using great technique to do it. I always say that the most important part of a game's development cycle is right at the beginning before you're even in front of the computer, during the "reach for the stars" conceptual stages of the game. This game is playable, enjoyable in some ways, but it wreaks of not dreaming big.

Posted on 12/17/2011 at 04:34 PM | Filed Under Feature

@Julian I like your idea for taking out the nonsensical puzzles. Remember before RE5 came out and they said they were going for a Black Hawk Down feel to the game? I assume by that they meant they wanted to achieve a grittier more down to earth feel similar to that modern war in the desert appeal of the film. I don't think they can achieve anything like that when you have players chasing down pretty gems, magical statues, and puzzle pieces to solve slow as molasses puzzle environments. I love puzzles but the ones in the series aren't really fun to accomplish anymore and they don't make sense for the context they're in. I'm not saying puzzles are filler, but in RE games, the way they are used kind of makes them filler. They could sit down with their guys and flush out a puzzle idea, implement it, and suddenly add 20 minutes or more to the game. You add time to the game, but you don't necessarily add value, in Resident Evil's case that is. Portal is a puzzle game and it doesn't require you to shoot anybody or spill any blood, and it's great. Likewise Resident Evil shouldn't feel it has to have puzzle elements in its survival horror context. Puzzles in action games are usually a way to break up pacing after action events, but there's better ways to break up pacing than the way Resident Evil has done it.

Your idea of having the environment itself as a puzzle is great. Using a little stealth, strategy, and creativity to get through areas and survive is better than training the player to become a bullet hose. Not all games have to be a childhood superhero fantasy, there's plenty of games out there that do that very well already. I think that as a player I'd feel even more badass if I didn't have all those typical advantages our survival horror games give us, and still found a way to survive and get through any given encounter space. Your idea about having your injuries and blood attract zombies to you is great. You can give the player the option to use that shotgun, use sweet melee animations, but doing things like that should be risky just like they would be in real life. You could get injured, start shedding blood making your situation more complicated, or just die. As players most of us have been conditioned by our games to just wander into new areas, not look around much, and whenever something appears to be a threat we laugh as we blast it.

Jules imagine if we designed some survival horror levels, were watching some play-testers play through them, and instead of waltzing around willy nilly, they actually went into a space and observed their surroundings, tried to make sense of them, sensed genuine danger, and started thinking on their feet about risk-reward, a tactic, and tried to work it out. That's basically interactive survival. Artistically dramatized a bit and in a dark fantasy environment, but it would mean they were actually showing observable human traits and survival instinct as opposed to just running on autopilot through a game using all the typical "video game logic" we have been conditioned to over the decades. It probably doesn't seem like a big deal to most people but I think that would be pretty important because I would observe these people play-testing the game and say, "Holy shit, they're using their fucking brains! I'm not sure exactly what they're going to do next or what choices they will make, but all I know is that the wheels are turning in their heads. They're sitting there taking time thinking and reasoning all at different speeds, to different degrees, results, failures, and successes."

It's hard enough to get people to do that even in academic environments, imagine if they could have fun doing it naturally in your games. Having people engage in a game that way is a small step and event, but it would be pretty cool and make for some entertaining interactive experiences for the players.