Two Cents

Looking at Routine

Martyn Zachary 2 Comments

Please have a gander at the above promotional teaser from Lunar Software‘s forthcoming horror exploration game, Routine. Spot anything out of the ordinary?

If your answer consists of something like “Full body awareness, Deadzone aiming, no HUD, no health bars or points system” – fair enough! The developers have, after all, incorporated plenty of neat stand-out features in the game.

That being said, what I really mean is the mouselook. We’ve all just witnessed a promotional game video with MOUSE CONTROLS.

It took me a few seconds to realize just what it was that I was seeing. Seeing is believing: It all seemed so vivid, so immersive, so refreshing. On the mouse, the video paints a vastly improved, more honest view into the inner workings of the game, its architecture, and unique visual design.

To put it bluntly: This video simply could not have been made on a gamepad, at all. Thing is, I’ve moaned about this problem all the way since 2009, and this year’s (2013) E3 gameplay presentations continued the ugly trend.

Thankfully, though, we have the indies to show how it’s done on the PC. More of this please. Good job, Lunar Software!

(The game also looks good. Check it out!)

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Prepare The Canons

Nabeel Burney 2 Comments

Fear the Reaper

Not much longer now before the Reapers arrive to wipe out galactic civilization.

Mass Effect 3 is almost upon us, and I’m hardly ready. For anticipation is not just a case of checking the calendar and willing the days to advance quicker, there is work to be done before March 6th comes around. Few games in history have featured what is the Mass Effect series’ main selling point: the ability to carry your save forward into the sequels in order to retain your character and the decisions you have made over the course of the games. So fans aren’t just looking forward to playing the last instalment of a trilogy, they’re looking forward to playing the last instalment of their trilogy. Every decision you make defines your Commander Shepard, decides your relationship with other characters – possibly even their fate, and shapes a universe that is unique to your save. Loading up a game with that save will bring a story that recognises you and remembers what you have done. The series has already provided an unprecedented level of player authorship over narrative, and it only remains to be seen whether the final chapter can deliver a satisfying conclusion.

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Rockstar Games and Genre

Martyn Zachary Leave a comment

This brief discussion on Rockstar Games and their use of generic conventions originates from a very intriguing comment found on our favourite website in the whole wide wo…web, Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Over there, my half-assed ass-essment of the company as “soulless” in my earlier post, On The Love Letter, was earnestly brought into question. The question is as good as any and the topic actually warrants a brief discussion.
This time, I am not referring to Rockstar Games as “faceless”, “insensitive” or “corporate”, although we have actually taken the company to task for that as well. Instead, I’m talking about their use of ethics and morals in their games. (more…)

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On The Love Letter

Martyn Zachary 1 Comment

I want to take the time to briefly celebrate the spectacular achievements of a minigame currently (and very, very deservedly) making the rounds in the video gaming blogosphere. The game in question is axcho and knivel’s Flixel game The Love Letter. (Go on, open the link and play the game right away. Do it! Just get back here once you’re done.) The Love Letter deserves to be played because it manages to grasp something of the Real ™, of the very nature of human interaction, in a way that is rarely observed in video games.

In addition, The Love Letter is also a little marvel of economy in design: Not only does it very convincingly, effortlessly and fluidly tie in a) setting, b) narrative exposition and c) gameplay to each other, it also manages to use them, co-operatively, in conveying to (and thus actually reproducing in) the player emotions such as pressure, hurry, constraint, annoyance and relief.

With an amazing absence of complexity to boot. We are talking about an itsy-bitsy one-room, one-button five-minute minigame about arriving late to school, finding a love letter stashed in your locker, and setting out to find whomever wrote it.

Super KISS.

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Rage in Numbers

Martyn Zachary 1 Comment

At the time of writing, the main support topic for Rage on the Steam forums has been viewed an amazing 475,000 times. The comparable thread on Bethesda’s forums – a whopping 140,000 views.

In addition to the most egregious issues with texture popping above, Vsync, Anisotropic filtering and texture quality settings were only added in a patch. The first (1st) and only (1) patch. Certainly, omitting these more fine-tuned customization features in this day and age is not in the least unheard of, but finding the paragons of the PC platform since 1991 – Id Software – as the offending party is rather inconceivable, even in a gaming world where Crytek, Epic and Rockstar Games have long since bailed out.

The texture popping above is related to the game’s texture Auto-Balancer, which somehow tends to load and utilize 4096k textures instead of the much crisper 8192k (or the gargantuan 16384k textures that take most of the game’s 21659 Mb install size!). 1)http://www.geforce.com/News/articles/how-to-unlock-rages-high-resolution-textures-with-a-few-simple-tweaks

More puzzling yet is the inability for players to bind numpad keys properly – especially the number 5(!?) – leaving left-handers in a proverbial bind. Different mice and keyboards are exhibiting various symptoms as well.

Let’s not even mention the 64-bit executable. …or lack thereof. Let us however mention the missing idstudio level editor, which is apparently dependent on the very same 64-bit .exe.

To wrap up this terribly clever post before things get utterly out of hand, we could take a look at the game’s collector edition (check out the comparison photo on the left), which comes bundled with a Rage comic that not only is 2/3 the size of the normal issues, but also only contains 2/3 of the Rage story arc. Boom!

References   [ + ]

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