Game Idea: Star Wars via Oculus Rift and Wii mote
The Game: Star Wars Jedis mutha-fucka. Do I have to keep typin’
The Mechanic:
The combo mechanic I had is kinda simple, but can add a bit of depth to the game. The idea is we’re going no HUD for the game, much like how Metal Gear Solid 5 is changing their approach to keep the focus on the visuals around you rather than the patrol map and vision cones from its previous games.
Having a large a lot of peripherals for you gaming set up, console or pc, helps build senses of immersion into your gaming experience. Your plastic guitars and tennis racket molds help shape the perception of what you’re playing, helps creating the illusion of the rock star or tennis pro.
But for games where the peripheral isn’t as obvious, what are the things that can be done to construct a better experience of a game?
For myself, the biggest asset in my collection is a 5.1 sound system. Having a game’s environment completely envelop one of your senses to a more realistic degree help dissolve the wall between virtual and reality. Actually, that’s the intention of most peripherals. Giving your body extra information to help it believe the reality that you’re perceiving. In the case of my 5.1 sound system, when the sound design is of a master class, which it tends to be for adventure games or suspense games, then the sound system makes it more believable to be in the perceived environment.
Continue reading “Thoughts on: Non-Obvious Gaming Peripherals”
To build up hype over a game, what do you think is more effective? We get them in the form of advertisements, cinematic trailers, gameplay trailers, demos (== early access [paid demo]), and other various forms of promotion.
I prefer gameplay trailers because I’m generally more interested in how a game plays, but it should depend on the game itself. Gameplay videos don’t make the most sense when you’re promoting a game with a heavy story, in which case having a strong narrative and a teaser is extremely important. Games like The Last of Us, Uncharted, Bioshock Infinite, and World of Warcraft have both gameplay and cinematic trailers, but unless we’re new to the series a gameplay trailer is unneeded. We already know the basics of the gameplay so try to draw us in with a teaser for the story. Just don’t go ham-fisting the entire story into a one-minute spot like most movie trailers today. You still want some surprises to be had when the player actually goes to play the bloody thing.
Continue reading “Thoughts on Trailers (Gameplay and Cinematics)”
Nintendo has a lot of series under their monolithic umbrella of games. Mario and Zelda games get trotted out in a near yearly cycle. Fire Emblem has had a lot of success in a once per generation fashion. Pikmin and Star Fox skipped a generation but are still able to perform to current generation expectations.
But what about the old franchises that were Nintendo staples? Metroid had a handful of games in the previous generation but has no titles coming out in the near future. Kirby has had titles every so often, but has had to re-invent itself over the past few games to seem fresh in idea.
Continue reading “Where have all the Metroid’s Gone? (Nintendo Change-ware Neglect-ware)”
As anyone in the industry should be telling you, graphics doesn’t equal fun and some of the most costly things about a game are graphics. Large teams of artists, designers, story writer, motion capture crews and voice actors, all working together to make a large-scale game what it is. Not just the graphics. Graphics aren’t a substitute for fun, but it can help amplify it. We don’t necessarily go into every game looking to have fun the whole time, but to think, to experience a different world and to get lost in a well told story for a while. It’s our form of escapism that we choose to occupy our reality with. One that is interactive and one that isn’t necessarily possible in our own reality.
Large scale productions don’t necessarily give you fun, but they give you opportunity. Opportunity to develop a mature design, develop detailed backdrops and sceneries, get the best voice actors in the market to bring all the characters outside of their reality and accepted in ours.
I will preface this with not every big budget game does this well, and I prefer indie games because they have a better sense of identity with how the product should be. That being said, there are sources of entertainment to be had in both the big-budget market and the small-budget one.
Continue reading “More Money for a Better Entertainment Ride? (Movies vs Gaming costs)”
Having your own personal space means that we tend to accumulate things that pique our interest. Games, Toys, Movies, everything gets littered around our space because we tend to use them. But what about the things that embarrass us? When guests come over, then we start scrambling for places to hide our little secrets in hopes that they won’t embarrass us to people we’d rather not have knowing.
But in the age of the computer and online pornography, we don’t have hard copies lying around unless we prefer living in the stone-age with a dvd/vhs remote in our offhand instead of a mouse. Because of this, let’s roll the clock back to, say, 1998. If you want a video of 2 fine ladies and a donkey, or men with frozen bananas, you need to have a hard copy of it. But of course, you don’t want any of these things being found.
Continue reading “Game Idea: Hide Your Porn (Classic Edition)”
The premise is easy, it starts out as an adventure game with a dash of tedium but only for a short time. You’re running errands for people, say 10 errands total around a city. It’s a bright day, you know where to go, probably takes about 15-20 minutes to complete while building some sort of character story in-between. The whole of the city should take probably 5-10 minutes to run through in broad daylight.
Continue reading “Game Idea: Where I’ve Been (Suspense Adventure)”
Looking at the scale of some of the online multiplayer games, it’s always fascinating to see how people always complain that only a small subset of things are usable in competitive play. In Halo or Counter-Strike, only a handful of weapons are considered good and the rest are never touched unless you’re in very constricted situations and the less-preferred weapon is the only option. League of Legends has over 100 champions to select from, but you only see about 30-40 played the majority of the time. Player-vs-player (PVP) in World of Warcraft tends to have the same team layout in their 2v2 and 3v3 arenas making the meta-game predictable after playing for so many iterations.
Developers do try and balance these problems, but re-balancing takes a long time to complete. When you make something (gun, character, class) weaker or stronger, it changes many other aspects of other classes. Which character’s are good to support them, who does the original character do well against, who does well against this character. Many aspects change because of small changes that the developers make to try and re-balance the game, making things that were perceptively weaker -> better and making things that seemed overpowering -> weaker.
The mechanics are simple. For your main character to get stronger, e.g. better stats, higher level, more weapons or abilities, your allies in combat have to get weaker. You start with a level 1 sack of potatoes with little ability of his own but is accompanied by one or two bad ass no-McGuffin types. As you play through the game, the player gets chances to steal the powers of his allies to make himself stronger. You can balance this out by requiring the use of each character throughout the game, so you have choice of power-transfer but you make parts of the game harder for yourself.
Continue reading “Game Idea: Transfer Powers from Strong Allies to your Character”
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