Loved Bioshock. Enjoying Bioshock 2, a few hours in. Congratulations to friends up at 2K Marin, for the successful launch. May the sound of cash registers ring out for them.So why am I writing here? One design element I’ve found in my first few hours warrants questioning. Remember the respawn system of Bioshock? Death in [...]
Story is where an RPG should shine – even a hybrid RPG like this one. The RPG player demonstrates a willingness to take things at a slower pace, to invest himself into character and story, and to relish the narrative. So let’s look at the Mass Effect 2′s plot [Spoilers!]: Hero is killed by aliens, [...]
At the end of the day, Mass Effect’s sequel is a disappointment. Believe me, I know I’m swimming against the current here. EA/Bioware gets to put a big trophy on their mantle – a 96% Metacritic. That’s the fourth highest score for a 360 title, ever. So am I insane? Maybe. But as I played [...]
Sure it’s an all-around good game. Hours and days later, I keep thinking about Arkham, and I reconsider what you can guess about my development experience (officially: no comment). On this face of it, designing a Batman game presents significant challenges at the high level. First, you’ve got this Batman guy. He’s a great character [...]
For the second time this summer, I find myself playing a game based on a movie. Yeah, I know that technically Arkham Asylum isn’t based on The Dark Knight, but … let’s just say that they have a lot in common. Shared protagonist, villain, and tone. Oh, don’t take my word for it. I lie [...]
At the office yesterday I witnessed some verbal urination on zombie proliferation. Here I was gleefully slaughtering countless numbers of the walking dead without a thought to the success of their nerfarious campaign. Count up some of the recent IP: Dead Rising, Left 4 Dead, Fallout, Bioshock, Prototype, Mass Effect, Dead Space. There’s more. Zombies [...]
So how can we fix or, with more modest ambition, improve moral choices in games? My goal would be to encourage players to treat moral decisions as any other game decision, instead of opportunity to slide a progress bar. Choice gets more interesting when different choices have things to recommend them. There’s value in the player weighing long-term vs short-term [...]
If you haven’t played it, inFamous is a platform-shooter. It replaces firearms with electic powers that are indistinguishable from shooter gameplay, right down to the controls. So it’s Crackdown on the PS3 with updated art, though the art does not approach the best graphics that the PS3 we’ve seen. I like the comic book-style cinematics, [...]
I’ve been playing a lot of inFamous, and I enjoy the game a great deal… thus the hours of time in front of the PS3. But there’s something missing. This is superhero game, and quite simply, I don’t feel like a hero. (Actually, I’m playing evil, but nevermind.) When I surf the power lines, I [...]
In the early days of the shooter, before the genre took over the world in popularity and number of titles, creating a multiplayer mode was the obvious thing to do. These games were simple shoot’em ups, and the AIs were the brightest, so good competition meant having a human controlling your enemies. Plus, you didn’t [...]