It is now the last week of school pretty much, next Tuesday I’m going to present my thesis in front o a bunch of people and after that it’s over, my two years in school to become a Game Designer. I’m one week away from being an educated game designer on paper.
I have spent this week with fixing the last pieces on my thesis but also to read and look at pictures at a dream I have had for a long time. The dream is to visit Machu Picchu in Peru and last Sunday I found a traveling agent who had a 14 day long trip to Peru where you should walk the Inca trail up to Machu Picchu but you would also visit another old Inca place which haven’t been commercialized yet which means that there is a lot less people there. The name of this other place is Choquequirao and is only available by foot; it’s a two day trekking trip to get there and two more days to get back. I want to go so much; I really like everything that has to do with South- and Central American history with Inca’s and Maya’s. I spent the whole morning reading about the Inca trail and later I ordered a book that Hiram Bingham has written who discovered Machu Picchu around 1911, the book is about the discovery and I’m looking forward to read it.
History is something that always has interested me, if there is a documentary on the television about some findings in Israel or the Egyptian pyramids I usually end up watching it as I find most stuff fascinating. I think it is impressive that people find stuff that has been hidden for 100’s of years like pieces of jewellery or a tomb. It isn’t South and Central America history that interest me and I would like to see a game sometime where you can plan your own expedition in hope to find a lost city and making it the goal, not defeat an enemy and especially not putting in a third part that usually is abnormal as in Uncharted. No, it should be about exploring the jungle, take in the views and feel the atmosphere, maybe you meet a native tribe that you ask for help or just spend a night at. When you finally find what you have been looking for you should get a wow feeling and get a dumb smile on your face.
The problem with such a game is that people want a goal, there should be things to shoot and it should be free roaming but they then complain about the world being too big and that it is hard to find stuff and to know where you should go. Maybe I should write all this down in my idea folder as it evolves more and more into a game synopsis. I know one thing for sure and that is that the gaming world /community aren’t ready for such a game yet. They still has to shoot down a lot more stuff before it would sell.
I’m also thinking of getting a new hobby or interest, trekking. Trekking is walking with a fancier word, but it is not a word to use when walking down town, it is used when walking great distances in the nature. I think that if I am going to be able to walk the Inca trail I have to train and trekking seems nice, see the nature and get some fresh air. Tomorrow me and Lisa will try a walking route we found up on the mountain yesterday and hopefully it’s nice and not too long because then I will miss my appointment at the barber. But yeah, trekking could be something for me and it would be nice to “fjällvandra” /walk in the mountains in Sälen.
Here are some links for info about Machu Picchu and Choquequirao as well as a slideshow of pictures from the latter.
I am trying to finish Star Wars: the Force Unleashed on my 360 and it causes major frustration. I’m cursing the game for its bad controller and strange design solutions. I have to warn readers that there might be some spoilers in the text but nothing really important.
I got the game through a deal at the local Game store and I have had it on my radar for a while or pretty much since last summer. I tried the demo and liked it but I never found the right moment to buy it.
The game starts off pretty easy with a couple of simple levels and I probably ran into my first major problem at Felucia where I was overrun by several enemies at once which ended up with me dead. This kept on going for a while but I learned how to deal with them all after a while and finished off a couple of levels. Although today have been the worst day so far, I am at pretty far into the game now and its starts to get really hard from time to time. At the moment I am stuck at the first location on the level because it is so many enemies at once that attack me that the first time I tried I died instantly. After several tries I have now defeated two AT-STs but after that a bunch of super soldiers arrives and I gave them a good match but they killed me and I thought that no, I have to write about this game now.
The game’s bright side is the graphic that looks pretty, from time to time there are environmental puzzles that has to be solved which is nice when they have a physic engine to play around with. I also like the level design.
On the game’s darker side I can mention an unreliable camera, a complicated control and bad design choices such as letting the enemy attack too frequently making it impossible to survive. Let’s start with the camera; it works as long as you are running through the environment and it most of the times works during battles but in boss battles someone decided it would be cool to put the camera away from the character showing all the surroundings. It feels more like Soul Calibur then a third person action title at those times and it doesn’t really work that well either. The only good thing about the boss battles is that there is often only one enemy to defeat which makes the auto lock function work properly which usually can be hard to get the hands around making many of the force lightening I fire away end up in thin air. To lock on to an enemy I have to press the right bumper button on the 360 controller or R1 on a PS3 controller I would believe. But it isn’t playable to always lock on to enemies as you have to push several buttons to attack and kill them anyway. It is a lot of irritation and no fun missing the enemy that is a second away from killing you.
Another thing that has killed me several times in TFU is the enemies attack frequency which is a bit too high. If you get knocked down by a rancor he will be able to attack you again before you have been able to get back up on your feet and this isn’t only for the rancor’s but for all enemies. It is annoying to not being able to protect yourself from several attacks just because I am knocked down a bit too long.
At one sequence in the game you have to use the force to get a Star destroyer down to the ground by twisting and turning your sticks on the control. This made me quit playing a couple of times, screaming out in anger over the stupid control and whoever programmed it. More than taking down the Star Destroyer, you have to kill of several Tie fighters by throwing stuff at them. I pick up the object and pointing the left stick in the direction to where the Tie fighters are and I send it away and I see it fly in the opposite direction. I don’t get it; my character is looking straight forward so in his point it should be flying in the right direction but it doesn’t. It took me a while to get past this part of the game and after it I have now decided to start call the game Frustration Unleashed.
Another annoying thing is that when you want to upgrade your character or change crystal in your light saber the game has to load for a while and when going back to the main menu it has to load again. I believe it could have been done better but then I don’t know that much about programming.
A funny or weird thing is the numerous cameos and appearances of other Star Wars characters. For instance in the beginning you encounter Shaak Ti which is one of my favorite characters in at least the Lego Star Wars games. Other characters showing up for short or longer periods are Obi Wan Kenobi, Darth Maul and Princess Leia. It’s weird to see someone like Darth Maul since he died already in the first movie, Episode 1, but it feels like the developers have put him in there just to make some crowd happy and to make it feel more Star Wars than it already is.
The Star Wars feeling is there when playing around with the force and throwing storm troopers around in the environment. Some planets doesn’t have that much Star Wars feeling to it but it might be because it hasn’t been visited in the movies but the developers have made a good job to introduce new planets to the universe. I am going to round this off here and now or I’ll be up all night complaining about the game. The game is frustrating but it is still pretty good and well worth a play through.
I am getting stocked up on games, I buy more games than I play through and I never finish any games so I start to think that I should take me the time and play the “oldest” game in the pile and continue forward and not buy any new titles. This of course has its drawbacks such as; what do I do if I get stuck in a game? Or what do I do if I want to play a racing game instead of an RTS game?
Another interesting question is if it is necessary to play through all games even when I am not a huge fan of them. That’s the case with Star Wars the Force Unleased I bought last week, it is a good game but is it really worth playing through? It probably is and I already finished three levels out of something like ten and so far it haven’t been boring, just a bit hard from time to time. With Infinite Undiscovery I have, if you look at the standard play through time, something like six hours left. That could be one single days playing if I sat a whole day or I could at least finish it off this week if I want to but instead I play Pixeljunk Monsters on my Playstation 3 as I just found the Trophy Challenges which are stupendously hard sometimes but they can offer a lot of game play when you want to play for an hour or so.
Today I received Saints Row 2 from a guy who got my Mirror’s Edge, some may say it is a stupid trade but I played through half of Mirror’s Edge and it was a lot of stress and far from as good as I wanted it to be so I probably won’t miss it and if I do, I’ll just buy it again as I still have the save file.
Last week internet exploded with a lot of news, a supposedly leaked video of Beyond Good and Evil was found, Sony bought the release rights for the Ghostbusters game in Europe limiting the release to a Playstation release only making the Xbox and Wii versions being pushed on to the future. I am not sure if I like it, Atari said that it is for the greater good and a way to maximize profit or something similar but I would say it is the other way around, they now loose half their customer base, if Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 had 50% of the market each, and when the 360 version is released I believe the hype have cooled off and it won’t sell as many units as it could have done. Unless they fix everything that the reviewers says is bad with the game making the 360 version a superior version but I don’t think they will do that. And about the leaked BG&E video, I think it is fake since you never get to see Jade’s face which, if I were Ancel, would show and it was just to made up I believe, the flow is beyond any players controll. The future will tell if I am right or wrong.
The video isn’t official even thou it say so, follow this link to the source as it is the staff of Destructiod who have added all the button mashing sequences.
The biggest news of last week was that Duke Nukem Forever has been cancelled after 3D Realms has shut down. This game that I personally read about in a old PC Gamer from 97 or 98 have been under development for a long while and it is a wonder that they haven’t released anything yet. I watched a video that have showed up on the internet that shows some game play sequences and what struck me the most is the way the enemies, the AI, works. They seem to be very intelligent and behave different each time and I must admit that I would like to play the game but unless Take2 makes something out of it, I will never get the chance.
But thing if it is all a big marketing campaign, what if they actually is done soon and all of this is a way to show of the game to raise a forthcoming sale. They should be out of money by now but what if it actually is done and they release it this summer. That would be cool and I promise it would sell a whole lot of units as they have triggered the interest by last week statement.
So I am going to attempt to write down some of my impressions from the Infamous demo I have been playing since Friday. Infamous is developed by Sucker Punch who developed the Sly Raccoon series on Playstation 2 and infamous is there first game for the Playstation 3.
It takes place in the future and the player takes control of Cole, a man who was the center of a disaster which granted him with electrical powers, much like Pikachu. Cole is able to use his electrical powers to do god or bad in the city as the game uses a good or evil scale changing the powers that the player is able to use as well as Cole’s appearance. Cole, as he his kept together with electricity, can draw the electricity out of stuff such as cars, phone booths and roof fans. When he does, he also regains health making it a quick heal function which make it a lot less frustrating during missions when your life is dropping.
Cole is agile and when he is drawing electricity he bends over to the source which especially is shown when he is standing a top of a source, he then puts down his hands and tilt his body to align it with the source. It looks great and it is well done by Sucker Punch not giving Cole one draw animation and uses it whenever he is standing.
Moving around in the city is done with ease as Cole has no problem jumping between poles, roofs and cars. It is really easy to get Cole to climb up on the train railway or a house wall to reach the roof, he can also glide on electric lines which boosts his speed and when he lands he make it with a boom. One of the less good things with Cole’s climbing is that when climbing a wall, you have to jump to get up and not just press up on the controller. It is an ability that is quite unusual in games but in Assassins Creed it was done with the player pressing in a button I believe and Altair moved up as you wanted. It is not a big problem in Infamous but I think it could have been done in another way.
The city is good looking, with the demo starting in a less fortunate area; it is dirty and cold but not done in an excessive way. It looks like a city taken from a comic book as is the whole game and the video sequences. Some video sequences seems to be done in the game engine with a cartoon shade over it and some are drawn comic book strips presented very well taking the story forth.
I haven’t finished the demo yet as it is a large one; it starts off with a mission where you have to move a train around the city by standing on the first train wagon. On the way different enemies turns up and the train stops forcing you to kill of the enemies and filling switches with electricity to make the train moveable again. This also gives the player a bit of freedom to explore the city around the train cart but I have to warn anyone who is going to play the demo that don’t run off to long since the mission gets failed when too far away from the train. When moved the train and rescued the persons on it you are transported to the next mission which lets you move from point A to B in the city. It is filled with enemies, I think they are called Reavers but I am not sure so I will continue to call them enemies, and you can either hunt a lot of them down on the way to point B or you could run and avoid them all. It is up to you.
The third mission of the demo gives the player an opportunity to play as the evil Cole and here you have to defend a place from advancing enemies using Cole’s power. It was kind of hard but Cole threw cool grenades as evil as they split up and exploded.
Cole has different powers and those I have explored are the shockwave, the shock grenade, the shock bolt and his ability to levitate, when he jumps he can slam down in the ground causing an electric shock around him as well. The shockwave sends cars and enemies flying, it is used during the first mission to move crashed cars off the track to make way for the train. The shock grenade is great and sometimes handcuffs people into the ground when they have been hit. The shock bolt is the main weapon of Cole and could be compared with a normal gun, he shoots with it damaging or killing enemies and he can explode barrels of petrol with it. Cole is also able to use kicks and punches to defeat his enemies with every hit sparkling of electricity.
I didn’t have any expectations on Infamous before I tried it but as I have played it a couple of times now I must say I really like it. I would have liked the demo to give the player the opportunity to choose mission but it doesn’t, you have to play them all in one play through, but the finished game will give the player the opportunity to explore the city and probably chose his mission as he or she wants to play. Sucker Punch has made a great job and this is hopefully one of the titles I’ll be playing this summer.
So, the last couple of days I have played a selection of games, Midnight Club LA, Lego Star Wars, PES2009 and today I tried the Infamous demo but I will give that its own post. I downloaded two of the trail versions of this week’s Xbox Live Arcade releases, Arkanoid Live and Space Invaders Extreme.
Space Invaders Extreme was a strange experience, I barely understood what happened during some of the moments but it is Space Invader in a psychedelic costume, very strange and far from the old game I believe. But I got some vibes from Rez as the controller shook with the beat of the music.
Arkanoid Live is a bit cooler experience than Space Invaders Extreme, it is Arkanoid but in HD pretty much but they missed one thing that for me ruined the experience, the size of the ball. The ball works fine in the beginning when there it is impossible to miss a block but when only five blocks is left it gets frustrating and it always misses with a minimal amount of space. It might be that the collision detection is centered at the middle of the ball and the block and thereby it only hits when those points collide… probably not the reason. I spent a couple of minutes to erase the last five blocks which I think is a bit too much and I say they should make the ball a bit larger, doesn’t have to be a lot but a little bigger at least. Another thing that caught my attention was that the game have been blessed or cursed with a story, since when do Arkanoid need a story. It is something about space and that they being attacked or something by blocks but it just feels weird to read a story in a game like that. Arkanoid Live is still an addicting game that I spent 20 minutes with last night when I played through the trail version which is a couple of levels long.
Talking about addicting, I tried Popcap’s new game Plants versus Zombies yesterday; I have seen it on videos but never really cared about it. I have to say I am positively surprised about it, I only played the trail version but I couldn’t quit playing until the time was up and if I want to play it now I have to buy it. For those who haven’t heard about it, it is a tower defense kind of game where you have five lines of lawn to with seven or eight pieces to put plants on, on each line, you then build up a defense with different plants and protect your house from the evil zombies that are attacking.
For building more plants you collect suns which works as a resource and you have to build sun flowers as they give you suns from time to time as well. The other suns fall down over the game field on random and you just click them to gather them. From time to time, there are special stages that you have to finish, one of them I played where a bowling game where you used the hazel nut, that works as a shield for plants, and you rolled it on the line of your choice to kill of the zombies. There are several levels like this and it gives the game a variety that I think the game needs. The music sounded like they had been inspired by last year’s World of Goo which is a good thing.
The PES experience was kind of funny, I am not a big fan of football games or sports game in general but after I watched the Champions League game between Manchester United and Arsenal I felt to try a football game and give it a chance. I downloaded the Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 demo from Xbox Live marketplace and fired it up when I had gotten it down. I didn’t lose the game which sometimes is the case, but during the ten minutes that I played I succeeded in receiving two red cards for my Barcelona, first out was Puyol and a minute later was someone else that I can’t remember. I think that if I gave it a chance and really wanted to learn how to play a sports game I think I could but when downloading a demo and it only takes ten minutes to receive to red cards it feels kind of bad. I also think all the referees judges was a bit too hard or else it felt like it because the controller felt light on tackles and heavy when running around making it take ages for the players to get where they should.
I tried the X-men Origin: Wolverine demo earlier today on my Playstation 3. It is a good looking hack and slash experience with some good and bad sides. These impressions are from the demo and might not be true to the released version and the demo was only one level which limits the impressions.
It is running on Unreal Engine 3 which makes the game look good and it has the special UE3 look that Unreal Tournament and Gears of Wars, it gives the games a white layer look in lack of a better explanation. The demo takes place in a jungle themed level so the environment is filled with plants and trees and ruins from old civilizations but it is a pleasant experience killing enemy after enemy.
The fighting is handled with two buttons for punches and one for grabbing enemies and throwing them away. You can pick up enemies and use some environmental spikes to kill them, at one point I threw two guys at a wall that had long tree spits on it and they both stuck to them. You can lock on enemies and jump over them from distances which I found to be a very successful way to kill the soldiers and tribesmen that work as enemies. I locked on some guy on a cliff, jumped up to him and stabbed him a couple of time, turned around and jumped to the next guy. The auto target system might not always have worked flawless but it did a good job anyway and it didn’t always matter where I ended up as long as I got them all. The differences between the soldiers and tribesmen are that the soldiers uses guns as weapons while the tribesmen uses knifes or machetes or long sticks to fight with. The tribesmen are also a lot more agile and usually fights you face to face while the soldiers stands on a distance firing their weapons at you. Something I believe will be in the full game as well is that it is brutal, there is a lot of blood and head flies around.
Because you play as Wolverine you can take some damage and you still regenerate your health and heal the wounds on your body. This is well illustrated throughout the demo as you actually can see the wounds on his body and when they heal. It could work as a health indicator as the space suit in Dead Space but in this game you have a health indicator up in the left corner to help you keep track of your health.
One thing that I hope the full version changes is how the levels are built up, there is pretty much one way to go and it is all done in narrow pathways, in the demo version it is small pathways in the jungle and there didn’t seem to be any sidetracks to find hidden things or so. Sure it is not an RPG but a bit of choices would be nice when it comes to the level design. In the demo there is although one sequence that lets you leave the track and that is when a helicopter rises over the edge of the mountain and starts shooting at you. What happens there is for you to experience but it is quite cool.
The demo opens with a movie sequence that is not rendered by Unreal Engine but instead it is all pre rendered as in Halo Wars and they have tried to make Wolverine look like Hugh Jackman but instead it looks like a weird version of him and I think could have been done better.
I found the demo to be quite repetitive and I believe the full game will walk in the same direction but sometime repetition can work if it is done well. I played through Too Human last year and that was a repetitive but still a nice experience and I think that X-men Origins: Wolverine is a nice experience and that the full game would be worth playing through if you are a X-men freak or like hack and slash games. I will probably not buy it at the moment since there is a lot of other games out there and first and foremost a lot of games in my shelf that I haven’t played through yet.
