Game idea stream of thought

A game about mice and politics.  You run a nation of mice.  Your mission is to improve the standard of living so you can join the international league of creatures.  Mice, because mice are cute, and the game must be cute. The game is subversive.  The game will fool children and their parents into thinking they’re buying a kiddie game but in reality its a very serious game about politics and family and how the two can intertwine disastrously.  Economy is nuts and berries.  Every so often a mouse in your family will approach you asking for a government project he can skim berries off of.  This happens frequently.  If you refuse them, they will try to raise a rebellion against you.  If you give in to them, a whistleblowing mouse will appear out of nowhere and crush your credibility, and a rebellion will ensue.  There are no easy answers.

Oblivious

In the span of 6 or so hours, I have reached the rank of “bloodletter” in the arena, helped a half orc find out the truth about his vampire father, and flushed out a den of thieves taking refuge in an abandoned fort, and made it my own. I love this game.

Oblivion is on the way!

My copy of Oblivion is in the mail! I spotted it in ebay for 300 pesos and instantly got it. For an original game 300 pesos is dirt cheap. I still have very fond memories of playing Morrowind, so finally getting my hands on the follow-up to that games is phenomenal, even more so now that I have a video card that will eat the shit out of it ( or at least display it with respectable settings).

The beauty of both these games is their ability to insert you into a fully realized world, with its own politics, guilds, clans, and whatnot, then it allows you to do whatever you please. I played probably 40 plus hours of morrowind without even touching the main storyline, but had loads of fun just running around the world and exploring places that I’d never been before. I described it before as a single player MMO, where there was no one around to ruin the illusion that you really were in this fantasy world. In the span of time I’d played I’d discovered numerous cities, become the head of the fighter’s guild, had numerous warehouses scattered across the continent, and in short lived a fantasy life that I’d only imagined in books before. It sounds geeky as all hell, but dammit if it wasn’t one of the purest, most spectacularly immersing gaming experiences I’ve ever had.

Here’s hoping Oblivion will capture that magic.

Spore sounds amazing.

Spore and the things you can do in it sound absolutely amazing.  There’s too much for me to tackle in a post, but here’s a scenario: Say you have a creature, then you send out that creature to explore other planets while you maintain control over your home planet.  If at some point you decide to explore other planets, there’s a distinct possibility that you might see a form of your creature that evolved in a radically different direction than you had intended, because other people’s planets would have had a different effect on them.  Or for example, when dealing with an alien species your choices are no longer to simply choose diplomacy or war, you can do things like attack their food supply to make them weak or distract them with gifts and entertainers so much that they’ll forget to upgrade their military capabilities and fall easily to your army!

Read more about Spore here and listen to the guys on GFW radio discuss it in their podcast here.

Company of Heroes is so awesome

This is not a game review. This is. This is me creaming myself over a video game, which would sound pathetic if you haven’t played company of heroes. But if you have, you will understand where I’m coming from, and I’m sure you would welcome me into your saggy, creamy arms.

Where to begin? The fully destructible environments? The numerous ways you can use to destroy your enemies? The variety of mission types? The fact that this is a world war 2 game that somehow manages to rejuvenate a genre that’s been resurrected 20 times over? The way everything seems calibrated to bring the maximum amount of tension to a situation before granting you a reprieve?

For example. One of my favorite missions is a “defend the base” type of scenario where german panzer companies are bearing down on my HQ. I have no armor, and one measly anti tank gun to fend them off. Otherwise I have to make do with discarded panzerschreks and stickybombs that my valiant riflemen throw onto the mechanical monsters. A timer is counting down the number of minutes before reinforcements arrive. At 2:00, the germans have encroached into my territory, and the tanks are laying down fire on my AT gun. The seconds feel like years as urge my riflemen to play chicken with a panzer to distract it long enough to gain a few precious seconds, madly clicking left and right and watching the turret slowly catch up. The panzer shoots at my squad and I watch as the ragdoll physics of the game enable my men (and their body parts) to fly gracefully into the rubble of what was once a cathedral. The panzers are bearing down on my AT gun. A lone gunner struggles mightily to load the cannon to fire when suddenly…

“reinforcements have arrived”

And they’ve brought Shermans with them goddamit. The shermans take care of the damaged panzers, and in a short span of time, I’ve retaken the battlefield and sealed victory. That’s the kind of experience that Company of Heroes has to offer, so it’s well worth the money. Also, I think certain 8-series nvidia videocards offer it as a free pack-in game, so you can save some money if you’re looking to upgrade your box.

The one thing I hate about COH? The massive patches. I mean seriously, I just want to play online, and I’m now downloading a 1.8 gig patch. I probably have enough time to get my tire vulcanized and be back home before the path is done downloading!

*checks download*

Actually you know what? Scratch that. I’ll have enough time to get my tire vulcanized, take a shower, go out and have lunch, and THEN maybe it’ll be done.

Street Fighter 4 gameplay video

Looks awesome.  Love the fluidity of the movement and the effects when they do their special moves.  I gotta say though, I’m not a huge fan of the art style they chose.  I mean seriously, look at the picture above.  The intensity in Ryu’s face makes it look like he hasn’t taken a shit in days or something.  It’s like they went back in time to Street Fighter 2 and made it 3d.  i would have much preferred 3d versions of the Alpha series or the Udon comic style.

Budding concept artists around the world rejoice!

Because if this is what passes as concept “art” for a triple A title like Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War, then you (and your 5 year old kid brother) should have absolutely no problem getting a job as a concept scribbler artist in the games industry.

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay is pretty

This game is gorgeous.  I’m still impressed with how it looks now, so I can imagine how gamers’ jaws would have dropped when they first saw EFBB (escape from Butcher Bay)’s back in 2004.  This is probably a byproduct of the fact that I have yet to see what a full on HD game looks like, but moviong up to EFBB after KOTOR is like having a date with anne curtis after dating mahal.  KOTOR looks like shit compared to this game, and I spent the first thirty minutes just looking at the gorgeous detail on the backgrounds and characters.  The voice acting in this game is also incredible, with actors like Vin Diesel, Ron Perlman, Dwight Shultz(Captain “Howling Mad” Murdock from the A-Team!), Cole Hauser, Xzibit and Michael Rooker lending their voices to the game.  The voice acting is so good I actually turned the subtitles off so I could enjoy listening to the dialogue.

EFBB presents a few interesting gameplay mechanics that don’t always pan out, like Riddick’s ability to hide and see in the dark.  It’s not as useful as you’d think, since the guards in the prison have flashlights, and once they gt a bead on you it’s incredibly hard to sneak back into the dark.  And if you’ve got nightvision on and they flash that light straight at you, the whole screen becomes white and for basically blinded until you turn nightvision off.  The screen also becomes a shade of blue when you’re “hidden” but it’s really not as obvious as I’d like it to be.

But my main issue with EFBB is the fact that you can’t save wherever you want.  It’s almost ludicrous that a PC game in this day and age doesn’t allow you to save wherever and whenever you want.  This might be a legacy of its Xbox console roots, but it’s rally frustrating how the game automatically saves at certain checkpoints WITHOUT making it clear to the player where these checkpoints are.  So sometimes you go back to the game after a day and you find that you’re not as far in the game as you thought you wre because your progress hadn’t been saved up to that point.  Sections of the game can be pretty hard, so this can be really, really frustrating.

After reading gamespot’s review on the game, I found out that there actually IS a quicksave and load feature in the game.  The game doesn’t let you in on this though, and it can be frustrating to someone who doesn’t realize this from the outset.

Swedish developer Starbreeze studios have put together a winner here, and by most accounts have followed up their success with their most recent game, the Darkness.  Considering I got this game at the bargain basement price of 300 pesos, This has gotta be one of the greatest buys I’ve ever made.   If you’re an FPS fan you owe it to yourself to upgrade your pc with some now affordable graphic cards and play this game, it’s really that good.

KOTOR 2 is a fucking timesink.

Seriously, I had to forcibly stop myself from playing to get a little work done.  I wasn’t bored or anything, I just knew that I had to stop playing or I’d use up the rest of the evening just playing the damn game.    It brings back memories of going to makati over the weekends just to play the original KOTOR because my wimpy computer couldn’t handle it.  I mean I would seriously drive all the way from antipolo to makati just to spend the afternoon playing the game, not to mention all the lunch hours spent happily slicing and dicing opponents with dual lightsabers.

A discussion on the effects of casual gaming on the gaming industry

On Intendo.   Just propping up my intendo peeps yo. Word.