I’ve installed Heroes V on three machines now. 4 disks. In none of the installations did it ever ask for disk 2.
It’s kind of creeping me out.
Category: Design Reviews (Page 4 of 5)
So what have I been spending time on lately? Well, other than the whole figuring out what I’m doing for the rest of my life, I’ve been dividing my focus on two games: FEAR and Diner Dash.
Diner Dash I played to have something to click around when the TV’s on – I seem to have developed a pattern now where I play one casual and one hardcore game at any particular phase of my life. Diner Dash I like a lot – sure it’s casual, and sure I’m not part of it’s target market, but… well, it’s all about optimization. I’m a sucker for optimization. I love to pore over maps to see if I can find a way home that gives me one more minute of my life every day. I’m the type of lead designer that actually gets off on building schedules, and trying to figure out the optimal path to actually getting it all done. Optimization is fun to me. Continue reading
On January 25th, merely a week ago, the HoMM community (which quaintly calls itself the ‘HoMMunity’) started a petition drive to delay Ubisoft (disclaimer: ultimately my employer) from launching Heroes of Might and Magic V in it’s current beta state. The gaming community was still smarting in the shorts from “HoMM IV: Ship It, 3DO Needs Cash NOW”. HoMM IV was considered a pale shadow of HoMM III (still considered by many to be one of the finest turn-based strategy games of all time).
The people who ran the notable HoMM community sites felt that the HoMM V beta (which is currently up on FilePlanet) did not bode well for HoMM V’s imminent release. So they not only collected signatures and started email campaigns of press releases to the gaming press, but they also employed an interesting tactic I don’t think I’ve seen used in a game community before: news suppression. Continue reading
Bought Ultimate Spider-man last weekend, been playing it since then. Kudos to those that worked on it, it’s a visual treat and a lot of fun to websling through to boot.
My one complaint is that all the fights are either way too easy or way too hard. I’m hoping things converge on the correct difficulty as I get better at the webslinging controls and the difficulty ramps up.
Did I mention that I love the art? I lurves me that tasty stylized art.
I was almost done with Psychonauts last week, perhaps two levels from the end, when I almost quit the game in disgust. You see, there was a power-up (A Psi Challenge Marker, to be precise) placed on a hard-to-reach pipe that you slid right off of if you landed. Failure required a fair amount of climbing to try again.
In no way did I need that power-up. I was far enough along that I knew I’d gain almost no benefit from it. But there’s something about me that has a ‘collect ‘em all’ vibe going through me – I just have to. This is evident in other games as well. When I play Civilization, I have to clear out all the black squares. When I play Diablo, I have to clear the whole map of critters. In this case, though, I spent about an hour trying to get this one powerup, and almost quit the game in disgust from the whole ordeal. Even though sidestepping this one powerup wouldn’t have slowed down my gameplay at all. Continue reading
I just started playing Psychonauts. I’m not very far into it, but so far all I can say is ‘what a wonderful, wonderful game’. It’s a lot of fun (if you can stand jumping puzzles), with just world-class art direction and the sort of humor you’d expect from Tim Schafer. Continue reading
I haven’t been posting all week because I’ve been taking a much-overdue vacation. Whilst tooling through the forests of Oregon, I noted to myself that this was the first vacation out of town that wasn’t either a trade show or a Christmas break I’ve taken in something like five years. This is way too long.
I’ve always been a sucker for wacky input devices, but I’ve been so far severely disappointed with my DS, partially because some exec thought it the flagship title, Metroid: Hunters, should be an FPS you control via stylus (note to anyone working on a DS game: this really sucked). Still, I wasn’t ready to give up on it, and so I picked up two games for the DS before I hopped on the plane: WarioWare: Twisted and Kirby’s Canvas Curse. Continue reading
I finished Vampire: Bloodlines a week ago, and I’m so conflicted about the game that I still don’t know what to write about it. On one hand, the game frequently made me want to put my fist through my monitor. On the other hand, I’m already trying to figure out what character I’ll play next. I haven’t played an RPG twice since I was, like, in high school. Let’s take a quick look at the good, the bad and the ugly.
This has come up a lot, but it bears its own discussion point: a lot of the time, MMO players simply bore themselves to the edge of frustration.
In a single player game, this doesn’t happen. A huge part of the reason why is that the designer has total control over the player’s skills and difficulties at any given time. In fact, most sophisticated teams will draw power graphs and emotional response graphs for their single player game, in order to draw the players through a riveting experience.
MMOs, by contrast, are an open landscape, where players can go anywhere and do anything that they want. The ability to go anywhere, including back to newbietown, hang with your friends, show off to the newbs and squash the monsters that gave you hell at level 10 in one shot is, in fact, one of the great selling points of the MMO experience. But it also introduces problems. Continue reading
What can I say? I am, and always have been a sucker for Koei’s mindless epics. They almost never break above 80% on Metacritic, but there’s something about the experience of the game that always seems unique to me, and attempts to duplicate it always fall short for me. Continue reading
Recent Comments