Mouselook

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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Where’s the Joy in Pad Demos?

Martyn Zachary 3 Comments

Those with a firmer, stronger grip on their joysticks might not have even noticed this development, but personally, I would rather like to know whatever happened to old-fashioned, mouse-powered gameplay demonstrations for first-person shooters? Over the past few years, I’ve found myself increasingly irritated with various PR departments’ keen intent on demonstrating their games on consoles and/or with gamepads only.

The key to successful gameplay exhibition, after all, is authentic exposition. While the generic idea of the trailer is to lure the player in, convince him or her of the game’s meritorious mechanisms, gameplay trailers are not as disconnected from actual gameplay as it would seem on the outset; Think of competitive play, for example, wherein even the most infinitesimal intricacies matter: DPI, polling rate, sensitivity, inversion, crosshairs, macros, bindings, et cetera et cetera. My primary question is, then, why are we not seeing these features in trailers?

A very recent example – one I’m sure most of you have seen by now – can be found in the form of the latest BioShock 2 multiplayer trailer, found below:

The footage above has been clearly recorded with the questionable aid of the gamepad: The first-person camera movement looks imprecise and tardy; most of the third-person action on display, then, consists of arrow-straight movement, sluggish posturing and general standing-about. Two more gameplay video analyses, of Resistance 2 and Singularity, after the jump.

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