Games Gone Feral

Apologies for the interruption in service…  SurrealGameDesign is on hold for a while, but in the meantime I hope you enjoy some of our previous content here on GamesGoneFeral.

Welcome to the mythic land of Eldibrom—an enormous open fantasy world with brave warriors, enormous monsters and powerful wizards! And while they’re off questing and having glorious adventures, you’ll be skulking around in dark corners, taking their things from them!

You are Rick, an illiterate pig-farmer, and you’re sick of knights and princesses thinking they’re so big: doing heroic things, everybody loving them, strutting around like they’re so handsome and cool. Life’s so easy for them. But maybe they’ll think twice when they get home and notice all their shit’s missing, huh? (more…)

Growing up my parents always thought video games were a waste of time and so only allowed me to play every other day for thirty minutes at a day. It was absolutely torture. I loved them so much I would sit in front of the tv while it was off with a NES controller in my hand going through the levels of super mario bros. in my head while doing all of the motions on the controller. Suffice it to say that I have loved video games, especially ones that push boundaries (be them artistic, emotional, speed, graphical, or any other) for my entire life.

I am one of the few people that liked Super Columbine Massacre RPG. I don’t like it because I thought it was a good game (truth be told, I’ve never actually played it), but I like it for the discussion it sparked throughout the entire gaming community. Elephant came out as a movie much earlier than SCMRPG did, and yet it was much more widely accepted as a piece of art than the game was. It’s a shame, but I don’t believe that people have accepted video games as a true artform quite yet although some certainly get very close (I’m looking at you Okami and Bioshock). I think that these days a lot of the games that come out have either sequelitis or play it safe too much. I’m looking to change that as I think video games can really tell stories and interact with people in a way that no other medium can. I don’t think we’re even close to causing emotions in people like music, film, or tv is quite yet. I can’t wait for the day when we can make people cry, laugh, and feel sad all within the span of a half hour of gaming. I think we’ve just touched the edges of what we can do and we, as game developers and designers, are going to have to really push the boundaries. I also love the indie gaming scene. It tickles me to think that people make games on their own time and come up with stuff like Cave Story and Everyday Shooter. The former was made completely buy a guy in his spare time over five years. All of the art, sound, programming… everything was done by him. Not only is that an achievement, but it’s a really fun and polished game as well. (more…)

After recovering from a trip to the Chicago office for a technical design summit, I finally managed to crack open Super Mario Galaxy and give it a whirl. Considering it is apparently proving out to be the greatest game of all time, my expectations were high.

I was an incredibly huge fan of Super Mario 64, which I put up as my favorite game of all time. That game was a pioneer in so many ways, and its gameplay still holds up quite well today. It had an extremely workable camera that was tuned for each area you went through, and along with its controls, they went unmatched for many years after its release. (Maybe Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, another favorite of mine, finally matched it?)

Of course I was waiting for this game because I would love another Mario 64. Unfortunately I went through this same anticipation five years ago for Super Mario Sunshine and was gravely disappointed. I ask around a lot about what was wrong with Sunshine and I get very vague answers. It had all the trappings of Mario 64, but why did it fall flat? Thinking back I think it was an uncompelling package, another “island paradise” with arbitrary block puzzles sprinkled in. More offensive was that damn backpack/watergun thing. Mario is about motion, and that “clean up the gunk” spray nozzle thing required me to keep Mario in place. What were they thinking?!? Seeing that nobody that I know liked it (and even reviewers retroactively dis that game), but it still netted a 92% on GameRankings, I certainly have to take all the hype for Galaxy with a grain of salt.

So Sunday I cracked Galaxy open and was drawn in. In a couple of good sessions I went through two full galaxies and probably about 25 stars. I’m a completionist so I went for all the secondary objectives first before moving to the next area.

Here are a pile of impressions:

• The Wii control scheme, for maybe the first time in my experience, isn’t annoying at all. You move Mario with the stick like you always did, but somehow the disconnected nunchuck feels better than a gamepad stick might, because it isn’t a big slab and can be tilted to help orient you to the action.
• Thank fucking god they ditched the “flip the wiimote to jump” thing that they toyed with a couple years ago. You just press the A button as you’d expect, which doesn’t give you the 1/4 second delay you get with gestural motion in most Wii games. That would have killed Mario.
  • This is hopefully a very good sign for Wii. It seems like when it was introduced, everyone out there was trying to use fancy whirls and flips to do mundane things. Tilt the wiimote to steer? Wow, dude, you just invented the joystick. Shake the wiimote to make Link attack? You just invented the button, asshole.

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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…)

Hi there! Glad you could make it! Take your shoes off, grab yourself a nice drink of something comfortable and here, let me light that cigar for you. No, the other end… Oh wow, is that Cuban? Very nice!

I’m Simon Cooke, and I’m a Principle Technology Engineer at Surreal. (I bounce around a lot; I’ve also been Lead Gameplay Programmer on our currently unannounced super-secret-squirrel title, and before that I was Lead Tools Programmer on Suffering: Ties That Bind).

I got my start in this industry at the tender age of 15, working on ports of Prince of Persia, Lemmings, Populous and Zub (if you know that last one, you’re probably British) for the SAM Coupé home computer (and if you know what that is, you’re either British, Czech or from New Zealand). And then for a while I threw it all away and became a journalist (I used to write the Spec Tec Jr column in Your Sinclair magazine in the UK, as well as a number of other not so gamey magazines).

These days, I’ve left the green rolling pastures of industrial inner-city-center Manchester and moved to the much greener, lakier and mountainier fjords and volcanoscapes of Seattle. And I’m loving it. Where else in the world can you commute by driving over a bridge that’s floating on a lake? (more…)

Like a madeleine for Proust, the sights and sounds of an old video game can bring a whole host of other sensations welling up from my memory. The music from SNKs Crystalis fills my nose with the smell of an old friends carpet, while I can’t think about Tron without tasting a slice of cheeze from the Village Inn Pizza Parlor in Champaign, Illinois- a place I spent many of my parents quarters while they socialized after a softball game. It makes sense that many of my stronger memories would be associated with games. I am, after all, one of the newest members of Surreal’s Systems Design team and I’m living the dream! If you’ll bear with me for a few (or more) paragraphs, I’ll tell you how I got here.

My parents probably never expected that I would one day be earning a living doing anything related to video games. Oddly, I owe it all to my dad. He was an avid pinball player, and while he was flipping that metal ball around, I was entranced with the colorful, noisy, and just plain action packed videogames that were dominating the arcade. By the way, thanks, Dad.

I got my start in the industry working in the QA department at Volition, hometown heroes and creators of classics like Descent, Freespace, Red Faction, Summoner, and Saints Row. It’s pretty cool that answering an ad in the jobs section of the local newspaper let me make the giant leap up from pizza parlor bartender to Game Tester! I think I got the job because I wrote an essay for my application on why Thief was one of the best games of all time. My future boss agreed, and I started my real education in making games testing the sequel to Red Faction for the PlayStation 2. I went on to test games for almost 2 years before I took a risk and quit to devote myself to getting a job as a developer. I traveled along the west coast for a month after that, submitting my resume to various development studios. In Seattle, I was lucky enough to land a job at Gaspowered games in nearby Kirkland. After a few years at Gaspowered, I took another chance and left to work with a startup company, Primate Games, on a project of my own design. That risk didn’t work out quite as well as the last one, and the company had to fold shortly after I joined the team. However, my brief time there was an invaluable experience in getting a project started from the ground up.

Now I hope to put that experience to good use here at Surreal! I’m really excited about working with everyone here. In the few weeks I’ve been here I’ve seen how much everyone here really loves playing and making games, and that passion is inspiring. I’d love to tell you about our super top secret project but… then it wouldn’t be super top secret anymore. Keep checking our company main page for announcements, and thanks for reading!

Like many of the people here at Surreal I am a shooter fan at heart. I have played almost every FPS and Third Person Shooter to come out for the XBOX and the XBOX 360. Unlike Peter, Jim and others I didn’t grow up during the days of Quake. I played my share of Doom II and Marathon, but my days were spent playing GoldenEye and Perfect Dark for the Nintendo 64 (with a controller).

I have been a console shooter for as long as I can remember. I have logged enough hours over XBOX Live playing Halo 2, Gears of War and every other shooter to call my XBOX my “mistress”. It is my opinion that the peripheral that a player uses is not what makes them twitchy. You are either a “twitch gamer”, someone with lighting quick reflexes and great reaction times, or you are not.

I consider myself a “twitch gamer” so much so in-fact that when I play Halo or Gears I will actually expose myself for you to shoot at, counting on the fact that I will be able to kill you before you can shoot again. I have spent all my time playing shooters with a controller. I have trained myself to be fast and accurate with my thumbs. I play with very high sensitivity and have great control. The high sensitivity allows me to turn fast and being a twitch gamer I am able to keep my accuracy. Sure mouse and keyboard players are fast, but they can’t even accept the possibility that a controller is competitive. To them a controller is inferior.

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Ragnarok is upon us! Yes, the great battle that has been foretold by all the oracles of Hype and Providence: Guitar Hero III vs Rock Band!! The sky itself will be ripped asunder as… right. And so on– you get it.

People have been playing Guitar Hero for a while now. Some people are good at it. Less people are very good. Then you have those that have surpassed mortal bounds. You know at least one of them, right? Those face melting bastards that can chew through Jordan on expert, blindfolded, with one hand tied around your mom. What challenge could Guitar Hero III possibly throw at them?

Well how about this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_znMI5hRxKY

Madness, you say? Sparta, even? Well what about Guitar Hero’s elder sister, Dance Dance Revolution! If foot-flavored insanity is more your style: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dodMPp7XAyI

Maybe you’re more the galaga, Space Invaders type? A little top down space shooting to calm you at night before you sleep? Or maybe this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PP-mePr1-ZQ (more…)

As I mentioned last week, I recently got back into gaming in a big way after a lengthy hiatus. This makes it sound a lot simpler than it actually was, however—like I woke up one morning, announced my intention to play more video games, then discovered a big pile of consoles under my pillow.

It turns out gaming is complicated business. Should I pimp out my PC with all the latest hardware? Buy a console? Which console? A handheld? Which handheld? My choice, I soon learned, spoke volumes about me as a person. If I chose to game on a PC I could position myself as an intellectual, the sort of pipe-smoking man of leisure who might enjoy a complex strategy title before retiring to the study to leaf through some Proust over a glass of port. If I bought a console, on the other hand, I could position myself as a mouth-breathing retard.

It seemed like a no-brainer, until I remembered that I’ve never actually bought a PC game before that didn’t involve at least ten frustrating, tedious hours of fussing around with video card settings, installing drivers, then eventually giving up and falling back on my default leisure activity (surfing for free pornography on the Internet, the hobby that asks for little but gives back so, so much).

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