So Lost Odyssey. I’m on disc three (of four) and I’m enjoying the game still. The story has picked up and doesn’t spend quite so much time making speeches about “magic energy, magic”. There is one thing that still bugs me a little though and its the facial animations. No matter the situation characters have one of three facial expressions sleepy, confused and a look that says “hang on I just got hit in the head with a bowling ball and I need a minute”.
Games have reached a point where the forms look fantastic but the art of facial expressions is still beyond believable. It’s not just L.O., Mass Effect and the Darkness also had expressions that kind of knocked me out of the magic circle. Alex Vance and the Little Sisters had pretty good faces but even they had bad moments. It is those bad moments that remind me I’m playing a game and disturb my immersion.
So I started thinking back to some older games, Dragon Warrior, Zelda, etc… Games where communication was entirely handled by text. A form that is even more removed from the real way people speak and yet it seemed to work better in my head. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that when you read something you can insert your own thoughts and emotion over the text to make it more believable in your head. The new games are falling down because they are taking on the responsibility of conveying the emotion and they are doing it badly. No matter how good the voice acting their is still a little part of your brain that says “something isn’t entirely right here”.
This can only get better as the technology improves but for the time being I think developers should be more creative how they set a scene. Figure out ways to hide the fact that their characters have the emotional range of sock puppets. More shadows, more quick cuts or just write characters that are stingy with their words.
Bioshock did a good job of this. There is a ton of exposition in that game but you really only see any extended head flapping from Andrew Ryan at the end.
You know I think I also figured out why there are three women running around Lost Odyssey with huge uncovered boobs, its so that you don’t spend as much time looking at the faces.
While I am as excited as the next man about the arrival of Starcraft 2 (provided the next man isn’t a Korean) I am more excited to see what improvements have been made to battle.net since Warcraft 3. I kind of missed the boat with the original Starcraft, my mother would only buy Apple computers for our family and by the time Starcraft was ported to Mac’s most of the newbie fun was gone. Every match I played was on Big Game Hunters against people who were insanely good at the game. It wrecked the experience for me.
Warcraft 3 fixed many problems with online competitive RTS gaming, like finding an opponent of equal skill, playing on a variety of maps and easy ways to find your friends. Having that kind of back end for a Starcraft game has gotten me really excited, more so than if the game was just releasing on it’s own.
By far my favorite innovation introduced be Warcraft 3 was the ability to be an “observer” in a match of other players. You could join and watch the action in real time. Like watching a live sporting event it was more exciting than just watching a replay, the difference between watching a live baseball game and a recorded one. RTS games are stressful and after a few matches I personally would need a break. But with Warcraft 3 after a few matches you could join as an observer, relax and be a spectator.
The only downside to all this was that you actually had to be there at the start of the match to join in as a spectator. What Blizzard really needs to do is set up Starcraft 2 so that you could look at a list of games in progress and join as a spectator mid game. Kind of like flipping through channels on a TV. As long as the joining observer doesn’t cause any lag for the players in the match this would be a brilliant way to increase users on Battle.net. South Korea already has two television channels (or did?) dedicated to Starcraft replays anyway, the ability to join and watch games in progress would also turn Starcart 2’s Battle.net into a kind of pseudo-TV.
So after three years I finally quit WoW. GDC really opened my eyes to the fact that I was missing out on a lot of really great games because I was spending so much time in Warcraft. So I said my goodbyes to the three guilds I was in and canceled my account.
At first it was a release. A weight had been removed… and then… the itch. My thoughts constantly turning back to the game. Every advertisement or screen capture calling me. That little icon on my desktop. I can only imagine this is what it must feel like when recovering from drug addiction. You may not be using anymore, but you still want to.
The other thing I noticed was how boring sitting around at home is now. My other games are ok, but I can’t play them for the same lengths of time that I did with WoW. It’s actually made me feel badly for my wife who has put up with this behavior all along, she must have been bored to tears.
Ok I dont know why it’s taken this long and I’m mad I didn’t think of it first but the Ode to Joy needs to be in every casual game ever. Peggle, plays the Ode to Joy every time you clear a level. The best casual games are all about continually winning (I click something and I get points, I click something else and it glows, I sneeze and magic faeries wipe my nose). Playing the Ode to Joy, possibly the most celebratory piece of music ever written was a stroke or genius.
So it turns out that if you did what you were supposed to do and played Mass Effect all the way to the end there is no way to play with their new downloadable content unless you have an old save or you play the game over again. I did not have an old save and playing the game over again takes more than an hour just to get use of your ship again. So what’s my opinion of the new content? I don’t fucking know because I can’t play it.
Why Bioware doesn’t let you just noodle around in the Normandy after you complete the game is beyond me. There were still lots of quests I didn’t do and even if I had finished them all I would enjoy just roaming the galaxy looking at the planets. This is one of those times you wish you could just sit the designer down and go “really? It’s supposed to be like that?”
So I recently started playing Assassin’s Creed again. I’m a little more than half way through the game and I am really enjoying it. The significant portion of that statement is that it took me 4 months to say it.
AC has more roadblocks in the way of first time users than I thought was possible. It’s almost like the designed the obtuseness in. “No no, this is too easy… how else can we confuse people?”
The game begins with you dropped into the game with all your weapons and abilities. You get to use them for about 10 minutes before the game stops. In the course of the next hour of game play you are stripped of all your weapons, catapulted into the future where the game play and the narrative have about zero to do with the game you thought you were playing. By the time a player is released into the world they have been playing for an hour and a half and they only vaguely remember something that resembled a tutorial at one point.
There are two things they could have done to fix this.
The first and most import would have been to let the player really play for the first hour. None of this flash forward, flash backward, your weapons: now your see ‘em now you don’t crap. This really cuts back to what I was saying about Lost Odyssey, these games last days, take your time with the content and the story. It really is not vital that you dump everything on the player all at once. The experience should be savored. No one goes out to an expensive dinner and scarfs it down and runs. Take your time, give them a drink, an appetizer to excite the body and then when they are relaxed and happy *bam* you throw the main course down in front of them.
Your game may have a lot of brilliant ideas to get to but trust me, when you hit the reveal, people will be all the happier for it.
The other option they had was to write a different story. The tale they came up with was really heavy on exposition at the front. As a result the player sits around scratching his ass going “why the hell is this game about the middle ages happening in the future?”
To be clear I am not bashing the future thing, but the way the plaer got there was so clunky the story was just not enjoyable.
Some games I produced for work are pulling in a lot of traffic.
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EDIT: Probably shouldn’t have the stats up.
Top 5 Game Titles:
1. RENO 911! Excessive Force
2. Indecision 2008 : Border Security
3. South Park: Asskicker
4. South Park: Big Wheel Death Rally
5. RENO 911! Excessive Force
Visitor only takes about 15 minutes to complete but someone needs to back these guys and make a full game out of this. Some of the puzzles are a little counter intuitive but I love the humor in it. It’s kind of like what you would get if the movie Slither and the game Day of the Tentacle had a baby.
I picked up Lost Odyssy over the weekend and I am thoroughly enjoying it. The last JRPG I tried to play was Final Fantasy 12, a game that I hated.
One of my biggest gripes with FF12 was that it introduced a shit load of characters all at once, the result being that you didnt get to spend enough time with any of them to feel connected in anyway. LO does a fantastic job of introducing characters one at a time and really letting you get to know them, their personalities and abilities. I am fine with eventually having a bus load full of crazy looking man boys and busty women in my party but dumping them all on me at once put me off.
When a game is 40 to 60 hours long we have plenty of time to get to know each other, there is no need to show me everything up front. Characters that are introduced at intervals give you time to decide if you like them and their skills so when a new one appears you know who in your party is most likely going to be spend the rest of the game sitting in the memory card playing solitaire.
Something else LO is doing well that I originally thought it was doing badly is spacing out the time between battles. LO doesn’t have you getting attacked every 10 feet the way a lot of other JRPGs do but when you are attacked the battle is serious and challenging and you feel like you accomplished something at the end and aren’t just moving the lawn when you meet a new bad guy. The few throw away fights the game does give you are actually enjoyable because you destroy the little bastards quickly and you feel powerful.
LO has its problems, the beginning of the game feels really clunky and silly, especially when people start saying things like “we will use the magic from the magic energy to magic the magic”. But after the game works out its pacing the experience really picks up.
Posted by Joseph 
Posted by Joseph 
Posted by Joseph 
