Planetside 2 trailer from out of nowhere. Unreal! Tell me what you think!

Can I say Nextgen? Oops, I just did. I hate that word. Thank-you Areanet for kicking the bar aside and ratcheting up a whole new one.

Oh Guildwars, how you disappointed.

There were so many good things about it, most notably the visuals, but also the interesting quests, fun combat, an innovative henchman system, cool spell-effects and general polish. For the time, all of these virtues seemed great when held up to WoW’s cartoony, cutesy style.

So what was the problem?

Well, it comes down to this. When I explore a world I kinda want a world in my world. And this was GW’s biggest problem. Everything was an instance. Everything. Locations, quests, exploration, PVP, bossfights, all of it. Yes, all of that was clearly intentional. But precisely the opposite of what I want in a “Massively” multiplayer online RPG. This design decision obviously gave developer ArenaNet cost-savings. It solved continuity problems within a world of shared play, which was a common criticism levelled at the popular MMORPGs of the time. But without a contiguous world to explore, filled with people and places and surprises, it just felt terribly lonely.

And that was it. Constant loading screens and player hubs were simply not what I was looking for in my life. I moved on.

And so, it would seem, has ArenaNet.

I recently happened upon something or other mentioning something or other about Guildwars Two. I remember supressing a yawn. My interest in anything Guildwarsish would be coloured by my original disappointment. But nonetheless, I had a look. And within a short while, discovered something shocking, interesting.

Guildwars Two looks like it’s an actual MMORPG!

Excited so far? Well, I’ll keep goin’. Not only does it look like an honest-to-goodness world, but that world looks freakin’ awesome! Watch this vid for proof :

Aside from the clever blending of ArenaNet’s always-gorgeous concept art into a flythrough trailer, some of the key points from the developer blogs yield these tidbits…

• GW2 is a persistent world
• Will incorporate event-based public adventures
• Implements true 3D environments and physics
• And… the elimination of the stale healer-tank-dps silliness

From these points alone, together with the conceptual feel of the original, doesn’t it sound better? Doesn’t it sound like the game they should have made in the first place? Hindsight aside, I’m all tingly about it. Guildwars had a lot going for it, but it’s great to see they’re looking to address its predecessor’s main failings. Mix that into a game with some intelligence and innovation, and it sounds like win. I’m hopeful.

Follow ‘em on FB, I did.

Driving often makes me think about futurism. How will we be regarded by generations far ahead of us, peering into the soup of the 20th and 21st centuries? I think one of the least interesting aspects of our society is how horribly inefficient modern-day automobiles look and act. We’ve engineered and over-engineered a century-old technology that spends most of its time idle, slow, pollutive, noisy…

And weaponless.

From the original PS2 Wipeout to my PSP’s Wipeout Fury, I realised that the “Wipeout” franchise is/was a staple of my console experience. But it took a while after getting my PS3 to realise I could actually own this game, and load it, and play it, any time I wanted. What a thought! I went to eBay immediately.

This is a racing game. I’m not merely stating this, I’m emphasizing.

This is a racing game. With guns. With speed. With grace and efficiency. This is the realisation, in game-form, of what a futuristic race-driven society should be, but without the sugarcoated gloss of Speed Racer. I could live here. A future of rolling basslines and turboboosts channels a berserk Gibsonian dystopia, but as long as I’m in the seat of my Feisar Systems Mark II, who the fuck cares right?

Maybe our future societies won’t be as evolved as we’d hope. Or maybe we’ll choose this as our future. Whatevs.

Wipeout HD/Fury is an intricate replication of the Wipeout formula I first enjoyed many years ago. Even the PSP versions of the tracks, the vehicles, the music, are identical and lovingly presented here. And why mess with a winning formula?

My kudos goes to the physics – and they matter. Strafe left, kissing the track wall at 400kph, and the sixaxis purrs. Shunt another car as you cut in from the outside, it rumbles angrily. The bass-heavy sound effects make you cringe as you land from a 100-metre turbo-assisted jump. And the feel of the vehicles in this game make your real-life vehicle, even if made by Lamborghini, seem like a by-product of the Mesozoic Era.

If I were to find gripes about my rediscovered PS3 Wipeout experience, it’s that there is no way to choose a music track like you can on PSP. I think they literally just forgot this feature, and it’s needed. I also find the newer elements in Fury, like “Battle” and “Destruction” modes to be dull. Yes, I know I have weapons, but please don’t take the race out of my racing game.

Despite this, Wipeout is an experience. And after 10 years of life, it still delivers on “that stuff”, you know, that stuff that makes This A Racing Game.

It’s a tricky little thing. Tricky and weird. My early forays into LBP’s bouncy, plush little world have been entertaining and interesting. Under my girlfriend’s ever-patient tutelage, I’ve finally experienced what everyone else was blogging about last year. Do I love it? Well, there are so many good things about this odd little creation. The visual and quirky style, the polish, the kinked out puzzles and wacky kinetics are just so unique. I expected weird, but came away surprised.

In my clumsy state of console retardation, I die a LOT, I whine and wonder blankly at the wonky camera angles and impenetrable platform logic. The only time I seem to do well is when it’s clearly by accident, or when my lovely playmate rescues us by solving a puzzle or escaping the crocodiles.

This game doesn’t survive long play sessions. I’m used to extended sessions of play, interspersed with unhealthy episodes of bad food and caffeine, but I reach a marked distraction point with LBP. The cuteness wanes into frustration, my nominal attention span wanders. I don’t often care about what I’m doing as I nudge the little puppet along the various platforms, pitfalls and otherworld physical rules. However, jumping straight in for a short visit seems to work well. I get overwhelmed by cuteness, am entertained and challenged, and come away with an overall good impression.

I haven’t finished it. I probably will. My initial understanding was that this was a game of toolsets and creation, of which I have yet to plunder. I probably will. All said, LBP is a fun, interesting place. One I will visit often through my PS3’s journey.

So, in the spirit a reducto of my gaming ways, I’d like to start sharing what’s been baking in my gaming oven of doom…

BORDERLANDS PS3…

This game languished on my wishlist for 6 months. Once the wait was over, however…

Firstly, choosing a character RPG-style in a shooter is not a new concept, yet unleashing fury (in a hell hath no kinda way) with a hitcounter fountaining forth from your enemies with every bullet impact, is decidely unique. Every character has a special ability, and in my Soldier’s case it was a deployable turret. Highly useful, as it turned out, really providing something to hide behind (my eyes clenched tightly shut) as the bullets and grenades rained down around me. My girlfriend chose the Siren and her shadow-walk, blasting enemies with every phase-in/phase-out, heroically saving me time and again as I cowered behind the ubiquitous crates, overturned cars, or (as it turned out) exploding barrels.

And did I say we had fun? From the design, it’s clear this game was intended for co-op play. Teaming up to venture forth into the world of Pandora, replete with quests, baddies and loot, was heaps thereof. The thrills came quickly, sprinkled with the right amount of challenge, hunt puzzles and boss fights. As we discovered the rare and epic weapons, our spirit of teamwork gradually morphed into co-opetition as ammo stores and upgrades found their way into our grimy inventories.

I truly wanted to keep going and going beyond the end-game. But the bad news : the PS3 DLC is fundamentally BROKEN! It cannot be loaded into the game by any means (that I can figure)… many drive wipes, replays and frustration didn’t get me any closer to Zombie Island. Trolling the forums was no help, alas my dreams of continued journeys through Pandora seem hopeless. And an added disappointment to learn there will never be a disc-based expansion of Borderlands on the PS3, ever… oh well, it was fun while it lasted. A lot of it.

This game gets suckier every time I see it mentioned.

http://covertcreations.com/blog/?p=243

Oh TERA. You have polish. Evidently. You have production design. Evidently. You have swords, and elves and quests. Evidently.

And the only thing you could come up with is reticle-based dodge mechanics in combat? Really? No, I mean, Really??

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/477/feature/4085/GDC-2010-First-Look-Preview.html

The only way to beat WoW is to trivialize it by an excellent, forward-thinking game. Even playing copycat won’t get you further than an infinitessemal slice of the MMORPG market. What a waste of time!

An absolute treasure of an article from Game Informer.

http://gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2010/03/17/thinking-with-portals-making-a-test-chamber.aspx

An excellent peek at the upcoming sequel to everyone’s pet favourite, Portal, along with notes about the design of the game’s devious puzzles. I’m a huge lover of Portal, hearkening back to my first experience with the concept in the student-made prototype, Narbacular Drop.

Have a look, enjoy… just wanted to share it here.

Therein Lies the Problem

This is a video of “Unlimited Detail”, a new technology from the company of the same name. They introduce their way of representing (and displaying) 3D data in realtime. Here’s the video :

My comments to follow…

This demonstration was interesting, once you dismiss the overtones of marketing and salesmanship. A search-based representation of pixels is a new concept (at least to me) that holds some amount of promise in the quest for a more efficient graphics system. To me, most games do depth very, very well. From Nvidia latest GPU pump to Carmack’s megatexture technology, there seems a clear and well understood path towards more photorealism in realtime. It’s only getting better and better as we progress, and even Carmack has stated that they’ve essentially “licked it”. To paraphrase his Quakecon talk of 2 years ago, he admitted something like, “we’re getting so good at this, it doesn’t seem to be much of a problem anymore”. I’m tempted to think that it’s not that interesting an issue to him any more!

To me, that really isn’t the problem anyway. The real issue in photorealistic gaming technology is not our ability to push geometry up on the screen. It’s our ability to create that geometry.

Games artistry is the most difficult aspect of any game that’s made today. The lion’s share of time invested in the production of games is well and truly in the balliwick of the artists, the poor beleaguered lot that patiently construct every last detail in the worlds you explore. And it’s only getting worse, not better. I know that companies employ all sorts of trick technology to speed up development time, yet despite very clever use of algorithmic production techniques (ie. SpeedTree, etc.) I do not see anything that promises to ease the burden on artists to any great degree. Something’s gotta give!

Handcrafted Worlds Must Die

And that’s where new technologies like Infinite detail’s “point cloud” system come in. The production of gaming worlds and assets goes back into the hands of mathematics, where I believe that it should be. This is not to insult the amazing talents of 3D artists at all – it’s just simply a matter of scope. As we “scale up” our gameworlds into larger and larger environs, filled with interesting and interactive “things”, it should be obvious how intractable the issue really is.

I wrote a long time ago (“The Next NextGen”, Gamers Quarter Issue#7), that perhaps one day we could “grow” our games. By that I meant algorithmically, much like the real world produces um, the real world! Based in a repeatable permutative system, a large set of parametric algorithms of sufficient sophistication will one day populate our virtual spaces, our games, our simulations. To me, Infinte Detail, with a little love and funding, seems at first blush like a healthy step in the right direction. It’s got a ways to go, but at least someone is doing something about it.

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