Looks like we have a platformer contest starting up here… any other entrants? This is the start of a game by ElementCy which apparently go for more of a Conker feel than the fast paced style of Tears.
Check out Zedox’s new platformer, Tears, in this video. I have been wanting a good, fast platformer for many months now. Remember kiddies, Sonic is always better than Mario.
Age of Empires III
For those installing Age of Empires III remember that the expansion, War Chiefs, requires you to add a folder to the start menu because that is how it checks to make sure you can install it (stupid). Please note that in Windows 7 the directory for doing this is “C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\” which is NOT how it is in Vista. I had to create the directory elsewhere (I used my Desktop) and copy/move it in to avoid UAC problems.
Also be sure to update the game before running it. You can search for the patches on GameSpot or other sites. You may also wish to run it in compatibility mode.
Civilization IV
Civ IV wasn’t nearly as hard. It installed without any problems but after an update said it was missing a DLL. Go to the DirectX page and download the web installer. I know it seems backwards but it will do the trick. After installing have fun crushing enemy nations into oblivion! Update: After playing the game for about eight hours today it has suffered no less than three crashes. If you are playing Civ IV on Se7en save early and save often.
Sim City 4
Sim City 4 (I have the Deluxe Edition) installed without a single problem and even ran immediately without any problems. After nuking the region to start with a flat area I started my city and ran into a wall. It seems as though SC4 runs horridly on Windows 7. While it was not the smoothest game on Vista, I could at least run it with the settings maxed in Windowed mode with relatively few hitches. In Windows 7 with the same settings the game just skips all over the place. While turning down the settings fixes the issue, the reason is mind boggling. The major question producing factor was that when I first ran the game with my favorite settings the slowness started affecting other windows. Dragging XChat around became slow, rendering in IE8 was incredibly slow and overall responsiveness dropped like a boulder out of a plane. Hopefully it is just a driver issue and not a deep rooted problem.
As this article states, Call of Duty: World at War has passed GoW2 for number of units sold on the 360. A feat made more impressive because of its multi-platform status. I think what is most interesting is that WaW beat GoW2 after a pretty bad Beta that seemed to most to be “just another WWII game” and not some blockbuster hit.
I think what actually happened was that people who have played Call of Duty 4 slowly migrated onto CoD:WaW realizing that it has very much the same hook. While CoD4 wasn’t revolutionary, it was unbeatable in terms of playability, taking me back to the days when I first picked up an [Original] Xbox controller to play Halo. In essence, the game just works and works well in the hands of any player. On the other side, GoW2 has somewhat of a niche following due to its duck and cover system. While the new gameplay style of GoW is definately a welcomed change in the community, it just isn’t as playable as Call of Duty’s Counter-Strike philosophy.
Back in the day of Counter Strike (pre-1.6 especially) games were trying to come up with new ways to play with the same coin (shooting other people). Games like Oni certainly did wonders for the genre with its fantastic combination of martial arts and gun combat but fell short because it was also somewhat hard(er) to play. Counter Strike, on the other hand, just felt right the second you started playing it. While it wasn’t the perfect game in any category and wasn’t as polished as other games it was simple and addictive. Two components that persist in Call of Duty throughout its lifetime.
One of the biggest problems I have with the video game industry is the lack of innovation. Time and time again I see games getting awards for something that is a cheap trick, a reinvisioning of an old tactic to fool the player into thinking something deeper is happening. This happens because someone in the company, or perhaps the collective, decides that it would be cheaper and cost effective to go the simple route. Rather than drive innovation, companies employ plays from a 30 year old playbook.
For this rant I need a target to examplify my point and for many reasons I am choosing Left 4 Dead. It urks my nerves the amount of people that think this game is a divine representation of what games could be. They throw so many undeserving awards at the game it is as if it is because Valve had something to do with it. There are many cases being made for the game but I will only focus on two: cooperative play and randomized levels.
People are claiming that Left 4 Dead is the best and most innovative cooperative game to come ever. They are pointing fingers at the situations it imposes on the players which force teammates to come to the aid of others. For instance there is an enemy that can wrangle a player, pull them away from the relative safety of the group and put them in a state where self defense is impossible. This requires the other players to drop what they are doing and help the teammate being attacked. Another example is how the death and revival system is implemented. When “killed” a player is put into a last stand position that allows other players to revive them. If revival fails, the player is put into a closet in the map for retrieval, generally after a group of enemies has been slaughtered.
The problem? This has been done before! Left 4 Dead is forcing situations that would naturally arise if the AI should have. Ever play Ghost Recon (1) coop on the hardest difficulty? Ever been in a situation where you or squadmates are pinned down? I have countless times, after all it is the reason they call it cooperative play. Coming to the assistance of teammates is part of the formula! Forcing the issue through specific enemy abilities is a horribly cheap trick.
What about the randomization? Surely it is a innovative feature that hasn’t been done before! After all, both enemy locations and guns are randomized. Hell, even what enemies appear is randomized! Sadly, this has been done before and the randomization has a very low upper bound. What I mean by this is that with any sort of randomization like this has specific locations or enemies that may or may not exist. You know going into a level that a certain amount of objects in the game may or may not exist.
It quickly turns into a game of asking “will object A be there?” rather than “what will be next?” This “innovative mechanism” has been used many times in the past, such as in Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. When you dive into the Worldstone Level 2, and 3 in Hell difficulty of D2:LoD, the enemy locations and types are randomized. The problem is the same though: there is a known set of enemy types that can or cannot exist. You will quickly run out of new, unexpected types very quickly. This isn’t innovation! This is faked non-repetitiveness, a cheap trick to make you, the player, think that the game is more than just a set of pre-defined levels.
So what is my point? Innovation should be driving new game development, not the idea of making money. Instead of the pathetic implementation of randomized objects, L4D could employ algorithms that teach the zombies to use portions of the environment as weapons. For example a tank that is spawned near metal piping learns it can use the piping as a weapon after a player accidently blows it up. It then knows that piping is a weapon and learns to rip the piping off the wall. If this is extended to a majority of the objects in the world you quickly create an environment that is completely open. Yes, the developers should be afraid of the game breaking itself but it is a risk, a necessary learning step in the name of innovation. Gamers aren’t going to care if the game originally breaks itself because they will be too frightened of what the enemies will learn next! Imagine facing a large enemy that all of a sudden sees a pile of enemies it previously disposed of, picks them up and starts chucking them at you. Now imagine facing him again; you are expecting the same thing to happen right? Except this time instead of throwing them he swings them at you because he saw you wield a bat. He has learned through example and now you are screwed. Using a gun could mean him using a gun, each tactic you use will be used against you. The world now becomes almost real…
So if you are a game developer remember immersive gameplay is created by creating deep and rich worlds, not by faking them with cheap tricks. Also remember Left 4 Dead isn’t the only case of this, I am just using it as an example because it is the perfect example. Almost every game suffers from this to a certain degree.
I was introduced to Fruity Loops Studio recently by someone in the #xna IRC channel. I knew this software existed but only quickly glanced over it because I figured that I wouldn’t be able to do anything worthwhile. Although that is still true, I decided to actually give the demo a run for its money.
Although what I produced is pretty bad by any standard, I at least know that with some time invested into learning music theory, I could actually learn to use this program and start writing some music for my own games. Here is a little track I wrote for the intro screen in my games.
A couple of posts ago I wrote about how my expectations for the new release of Galactic Wars 3 were higher than ever. I also said that it continues to surprise me how many people download each version despite there being only a few functionality additions and enhancements. Well this release has not been any different. Since midday Monday until the writing of this post, Galactic Wars 3 v1.2 has been downloaded over 1520 times. In total, GW3 has been downloaded over 5 000 times since around May 10th. Not too bad for someone whose previous game was downloaded a mere 2600 times over the course of a few months.
Well all of this got me to thinking about the future and about how I want to distribute games. The current model just isn’t working. People have donated, but the numbers do not lie. More people rather download the game, mirror it without approval, change it, and god knows what else with it than donate to my cause and then do those things. And the reason is clear, why give a few bucks of your hard earned cash for something you can get for free from the same place? Well hopefully that will change in the future, but as of now, I can’t promise anything to anyone (not even myself). All I know is that if I had $1 (donation!) for each download of GW3, I would be a lot better off and could take time off to make more games.
At this time, I would like to thank those who did take the time and effort to donate, no matter the size: