[Chell’s suit] is not supposed to look like a sexy Marvel superhero suit. It’s supposed to look like it was designed without any thought of making her look attractive. We don’t want to make her be unattractive, but we want to balance that out. Chell is a test subject, so she should look like one. –Matt Charlesworth, concept artist, Valve
Valve
Portal 2 Official
Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike and Half-Life) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced Portal 2 for shipment this coming holiday season.
Portal 2 is the sequel to 2007’s Portal, which won 70 industry achievement awards 1)http://store.steampowered.com/news/3559/
Even if the game is now official, the Portal 2 ARG, nevertheless, is hardly over: In the press release above, the underlined letters form the word “drattmannh0nee”, which in turn can be used to log into the BBS, as user “drattman” and pass “h0nee”.
Man. And it comes with co-op.
Anyway, in other related news, GameInformer’s April issue will come with neat Portal 2 wraparound covers:
References
On the PC, Only the Maximum Settings Are Canon
The eternal cycle that plagues us PC gamers is the constant need to upgrade our hardware, to keep up with the newest and shiniest games. It’s not just the fact that we need a rig that passes a new game’s minimum requirements and barely manages to run the game at all – we desire more than that. We want to play the game at its maximum possible visual settings, so that we can see it in its full glory. I’ve wondered, though, whether it really is just a craving for the best eye candy that drives that desire in me.
When I play a game at less than maximum settings, there is a nagging feeling I get that is separate from the disappointment in the reduction of graphical fidelity, or the dismay that my PC is getting long in the tooth. I find myself wondering if I’m really experiencing the game as it was intended by its creators. Developers speak more and more about wanting to deliver an experience to gamers, and wanting them to play it just how they envision 1)http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3162366. I think about the interpretation of what I see, and whether what I’m seeing is ‘canon’. If the object detail is down so low that I can’t tell what a character is wearing, am I missing a crucial point about that character? If I make a certain conclusion about a room that I wouldn’t have if I could only read the writing scrawled upon the walls, is my understanding of what happened ‘non-canon’? It’s a minor point but it’s something I keep thinking of in an age of games that are finally able to tell stories with every kind of narrative device available.
Of course, console gamers don’t face this dilemma at all. A console game plays the same on every unit of that console, and developers have a lot more control on how the game will look and perform without having to think about different hardware combinations and permutations. So I’m just restricting this thought experiment to PC games. There are a number of questions that follow this thought. Does it really matter if the graphics are not at the very max? Would you even be able to glean some higher level meaning or nuance from the details? Are we at the stage in game technology where this would matter, and developers can use this level of detail to add subtle enhancement to a games story and atmosphere? If so, in what games released today would it make a difference? A few games came to my mind immediately, and I’ll restrict my selection to just these few already installed on my hard drive so as not to belabour the hypothesis.
References
Quote of the Day: Steam
Oh my, the Valve Time countdown timer hit zero and Steam got clobbered. We’ve added more kerosene, primed the engine, pulled the crank and kicked the server a few times and it looks like we can continue with the sale for another day. Thanks for your patience. –Steam News
Your Attention, Please
Some video games we lambaste for holding our hands, others we chastise for letting us wander. For developers, then, balancing the flow of progression means… a walking of the tightrope. On this topic, then, I would like to share with you two interesting articles that I have recently read.
In “Guiding the Player’s Eye”, Matthew “Gangles” Gallant directs our attention to the complexities of orienting the player in a three-dimensional world by illustrating, via a generous amount of example screencaps, Valve’s use of various visual cues:
The best approach is to guide the player organically, catching their eye with elements that fit seamlessly into the game world. In this school of thought, Valve is peerless. 1)http://gangles.ca/2009/05/26/guiding-the-eye/
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