Games Gone Feral

Quick recap of what I played through this weekend.

Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction

The Good:

• Great level design that effectively ramps the challenge throughout the game without becoming frustrating.
• Rewarding firefights that give you the immediate gratification of bolts and bits flying out everywhere, then the deferred gratification of weapon upgrades.
• Satisfying story that reveals a nice bit of back-story that none of the other Ratchet and Clank games have revealed.

The Bad:

• I ran in to two irritating bugs. If you go about halfway through the arena rounds and then decide to leave and go to a different planet, well, the game doesn’t much like that and asserts out in a non-graceful way. The second one isn’t as easy to find, but with my luck, I found it right as I finished a difficult fight. Jumping in to corners in some geometry seems to throw you in to a hole that you can’t get out of and stops the game world from rendering anything but the skybox.
• The weapon levels didn’t seem to have as much interesting variation as in older versions. By that I mean (and this could just be bad memory), it seemed like every few levels in Deadlocked or Up Your Arsenal, you’d get a bigger spray effect, or ricocheting bullets, without having to do anything special, I didn’t notice the bigger effects until reaching max level with the weapons. (more…)

Face it, Assassin’s Creed looks awesome. Sure, you can joke that Jade Raymond also looks awesome and that’s why you watch all the press videos for it, but the game itself also just looks fantastic. One thing stands out to me though after seeing the live demo of it at PAX this weekend, they really nailed movement.

I have this idea that’s been stuck in my head for a long time when it comes to action games: “If the player movement itself is fun and simple, the game will be much better for it.” It seems like a basic rule, but lots of games seem to lose track of the fact that the character is your little cursor of pain. Moving around in the world is the most basic part of interacting with the world, and should have the most care taken when working on it. The Assassin’s Creed team definitely seems to realize that.

What is so special about their movement? (Mind you, these observations are from the back of an auditorium) Well, it’s a combination of two inputs at most. To move you use the left stick, to move quickly, you hold the A button while using the left stick. The simplicity is amazing. That means if you’re walking, you don’t run up walls, you don’t jump, you just walk. Pressing A immediately makes the world a contextual playground, as you run to a wall, you run up it, if you run to a ledge, you jump across from it. The cool moves that the assassin can do don’t require the player to remember button combos or result in you having to awkwardly solve jump puzzles, instead it’s immediately accessible to do something cool by pressing two buttons. (more…)

Hello,

I’ve been kicking around the game industry since I was about 19 serving roles of writer, scenario designer, QA tester, tech support guy, AI designer, system designer…well, lots of hats anyways.  I’ve worked on Game Cube, PS2, Xbox, 360 and PC titles ranging from an RPG, a razor scooter game, and a beat ‘em up with super heroes.

I’m currently the Lead Scenario Designer on an unannounced project at Surreal and have been here for about a year and a half.

Working in the industry has been a childhood dream for me, so getting to do it every day makes me a little excited and long winded when I talk about some topics.   Anyways, look forward to me posting about board games and video games and pretty much anything that I would consider game play.