Monthly Archive

Poop of War

Now you may be wondering why I’m suddenly being so immature. Well, it’s occurred to me recently that any game entitled “__ of War” is bound to sell at least a million copies. Let’s analyze this.

• God of War
• Gears of War
• Frontlines: Fuel of War
• Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War
• Men of War

And that’s only to name a few. So I am hereby throwing my hat into the ring and creating, “Poop of War.” It’s basically Battleshits Online. However, you play it in real life. What you would do is place “Poop of War” decibel meters in bathroom stalls. When two people enter adjacent stalls, the meters light up and a match has begun. When the light on your meter flashes green, it’s your turn to poop. The decibel meter then records how loud a crap you just took. After three rounds from each person, a winner is declared, and this person is awarded with… special “Poop of War” brand toilet paper! Then you input your user name and password and your score is recorded online.

Yeah so all of a sudden, new people onboard NightRise. I know right? Crazy. And there’s likely to be more soon. So I’d like to officially welcome Alicia Forrest, our new Lead Environment artist and Julia Smith, our Lead Caffeine Addict. I dunno if that’s a job that’s, you know, worth money, but it looks good on business cards.

A lot of stuff at this year’s GDC that I missed out on. Now Phil Harrison is leaving Sony, EA wants to buy Take Two, a drunk guy tried to steal “Still Alive” for “Rock Band,” Gears of War 2, lots of new stuff from Street Fighter IV, plus obviously the parties and morning board games and coffee. We should do board games and coffee at Monty. Like someone should just bring board games to Byte and we play between 7:30 and 8.

With that I end the first ever “There in Spirit.” Keep an eye out for the “Game Developer’s Exchange” (GDX) one.

So I’ve been working on something in Flash that I’m thinking of developing further. And by further, I mean a lot further. For fans of “Raptor: Call of the Shadows,” I’m thinking you’ll be in for a treat. =)

New stuff for Unreal Engine 3. Soft body actors, better lighting, better shadows, all stuff that gets a big thumbs up from me.

And now my take on “One Hundreds Dogs.” Brenda Brathwaite, a professor of mine and a competitor in this years Game Design Challenge at GDC, has designed what could easily become the next Jetman on Facebook, although it’s more along the lines of Parking Wars. I’m just talking in terms of popularity. It is a game where you and your dog must network to meet many, many other dogs and complete challenges issued to you on Facebook. I don’t know if these challenges are real or virtal; I’ll ask her on Tuesday. However, if they were real, this would be like Parking Wars meets I Love Bees. A very strange combination if you ask me.

I love WordPress and I hate Apple. The Quicktime update popup just made me computer crash for the umteenth time. So I finally gave in and updated. Hopefully that will stop that from happening, but I swear I’m on the verge of uninstalling Quicktime, iTunes,  and even selling my iPod Shuffle if this keeps up.

And now for an idea I had about an hour ago for a game called, “Awesome Opossum” (not to be confused with “Awesome Possum“). In the game you would play as an Opossum collecting food. As you collected food, predators would come at you, tracking you by your heartbeat. You could calm your heartbeat down by feigning death and then the predators would not be interested in you. However, as the game is on a time limit, you would get less points for feigning death overall.

So. Yeah. Gears of War 2. My take on it?

Inevitable.

We all knew this would come around when Mark Rein announced “Gears of War 4.” “Gears of Four?” No idea.  I will say I enjoyed the teaser trailer, especially when Marcus rammed the chainsaw into the Locust’s back. That was sweet.

However, you all know how I feel about Gears of War. It’s an awesome game hampered by terrible squad AI. Meanwhile the enemy AI is fantastic. Then there’s the story. Or, more appropriately, lack thereof. Relieve these problems and Gears of War 2 has the potential to be an awesome game. Will it be as ground-shattering as Gears 1? Eh, probably not. Then again I felt the same way about Halo 2 and look what that game did. Gears will probably end up being the 360’s Halo. Epic has an advantage, though, in that they are using the same engine this time around, and are probably reusing a lot of resources from Gears and UT3 (which ALSO reused a bunch of resources from Gears). So a November release date doesn’t seem all that insane to me. I definitely think it’s possible. Not only that, it’ll be a lot cheaper to produce than the first one.

Other stuff!

• Castle Crashers: Looks adorable and addictive. Two things that go really well together. Just look at Chuzzle.
• Online Co-Op in Fable 2? So you’re telling me I can jump in on anyone’s single player game and go co-op AND keep the stats I earn? SWEET!
• “On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness” this Summer. Praise DivX!
• Lots of Games for Wii fit. Cool. No complaints here.
• Champions Online? Oh HELLZ yes. I can’t wait to see what Cryptic does with their next superhero MMO. I’ll be trying it out the first chance I get. I had quite a bit of fun in City of Villains (was even told that my character had “the best bio ever”)  so this could be a lot of fun. Or it could be exactly the same as City of Heroes/Villains but with better graphics. We’ll see.
• XNA on Zune? I hear it’s difficult enough to program in it for the 360. Programming for the Zune sounds even more tedious.
• 360’s Red-Ringing mid-conference. Hi-larious.
• Mental Gaming. You heard me. Like remember the first episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” with The Traveler, and how he uses the power of thought to send the Enterprise to a completely different part of space where everyone’s thoughts are coming true? No, er, me neither.

Stay tuned tomorrow for Day 3 of “There in Spirit - GDC 2008.”

I’m not at GDC. This upsets me greatly because well… I wish I was at GDC. I think it would be sweet to throw down in some Risk or Carcasonne with the big names in the industry at breakfast. Plus, I mean, they supply the coffee. You can’t beat that.

So instead of making GDC posts this week, I have decided to create a whole new category of post entitled, “There in Spirit.” In these posts I will be sharing my thoughts on what is APPARENTLY happening at Expos like GDC, E3, E for All, etc. Why? *Shrug*

First of all, let me just say that I am EXTREMELY excited about the formation of the PC Gaming Alliance (PCGA) and have sent them an e-mail asking how I can get involved. Yay PC’s!

Next up, Audiosurf. I bought this game a few days ago and now I hear from the GDC news that it is up for some awards. It BETTER win them! Branching from that, though, is the announcement that Harmonix (Yay Boston!) is working on a game with procedurally generated content which begs a couple questions: A. Are they copying Audiosurf? or B. Did they hire the Audiosurf developers? Hopefully B. These guys KNOW how it’s done. Audiosurf is high quality awesome for only $10.

Now for some other games. American McGee’s Grimm. I give it a strong thumb up. Thumb though. Not thumbs. I shall elaborate. I love the style, I love the concept, I love episodic gameplay. I don’t like how cheesy the trailer was (minor gripe when it comes to the game itself) and I’m not sure how I feel about it being GameTap exclusive. Steam has boatloads of potential now that Valve (bless’em) is allowing anyone to put their game up on Steam. It’s like it’s begging for Grimm. Now don’t get me wrong, GameTap is cool. I just don’t see how what with the internet being as big as it is how anything can be exclusive to one medium of digital distribution. But that’s just me. Truthfully, I was really hoping to see something on American McGee’s Oz. Kind of a letdown.

I’m passing out so I’m just going to say a couple more things. Yes, I wish I was at GDC, but mostly just to see Brenda in the Game Design Challenge. Hopefully a video will be posted on YouTube or Gametrailers after it happens. If not we’ll have to make her tell us about her design when she gets back to teaching next week.

Well I think that will do. Also Darius posted a link with a very interesting Power Point presentation on MDA (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics). Normally I don’t “read” PowerPoints in my free time, but the whole MDA thing has been kicking me in the teeth since Brenda’s test. It was good to get a few questions I had cleared up. So much thanks to Darius Kazemi for posting that link.

Sleep time for mes. Expect another “There in Spirit” very soon.

Tales of Finality II

I have to say, I’ve loved Sequential Pictures ever since “Star Wars: A Lost Hope” but this might be my new favorite. They poke so much fun at game designers, programmers, and artists and they get it ALL correct. For example, this game is so simple that you use one button to do everything. And as for multiplayer:

“Ze XBox 360 has the capability of ze multiplayer and you can play with a friend, or across the world, across the galaxy. The team, we’ve been disgusting ze multiplayer for ze Tales, and we’ve decided NON!”

If glory could be in .MOV format, this is what it would look like.

Here’s a great tidbit, kiddies: never blog drunk. As much as I stand by what I said in the last post, it may have come off as a bit harsh and has very little to do with this blog in general. So even though I won’t delete it (because I don’t usually believe in censoring myself), just know that it was meant more for me than for you… I guess. Shrug. I dunno. Walk it off if you’re pissed about it.

So I get to start work for Studio 1 already even though the class doesn’t start for another 5 weeks. When I heard I should start now my heart immediately sank into my stomach. The first word that came into my head was, “What?” But now I get to work up a whole work schedule for it. Huzzah!

Here’s another great tidbit, kiddies: tests at 8am will destroy you. I just bombed one in Brenda Brathwaite’s class. Makes me feel really good about myself.

As much as I don’t want to talk about it, I really have to. So I’m going to just say this one thing:

Fuck New York Sports Fans.

I’ve tried to keep this blog clean for over a year now and I just can’t anymore. Last night’s game, and the reactions of Giants fans and/or Patriots haters was just unbelievable. Let’s take a look at the last six months, shall we?

The Patriots went 18 and 0 up to the superbowl. After the superbowl? 18 and 1. The Giants are now 11 and 6. So congratulations, Giants fans. Your mediocre team won a game.

What pisses me off the most is that EVERY SINGLE WEEK we got badmouthed. In every interview I would hear, “The Patriots aren’t so good,” or “We’d beat them 9 times out of 10.” If that’s so then how come we’ve only lost ONE GAME in the last six months? “Yeah but it’s the BIG game!” Fuck that. The BIG game was the game against Dallas many, many months ago, when we won 48 to 27. Last night we lost 17 to 14. That is NOT a big game. That is a teeeeeensy, tiny, little shit of a game. Heck, until the 4th quarter I was ready to leave the bar I was at because I was bored out of my friggin mind. Both defensive teams played great, but let’s face it. Both offensive teams played like shit. Both teams only got 2 touchdowns. The Giants just happened to get a field goal early on in the game which, normally, when the offensive teams play well, shouldn’t mean diddly squat. All it means is that the Giants managed to push just far enough to get a field goal in the first quarter. Did we let them get a touchdown that early? Nope. And that, my friends, is good defense.

My problem is with the Giants’ defense. Instead of blocking individual players, they all go to rush Tom Brady. I will point out that had the Giants’ defense decided to do their jobs and block the Patriots running-backs instead of just forcing us to Punt back to them every five minutes, they probably would have had more than a lucky win. They could have gone for an interception, but instead they just dragged the game out and forced NOTHING to happen for the entire thing.

Then there’s the Giants offense. In the course of the game, I saw Manning writhe in pain the one time we sacked him, I saw someone cry in the end zone when he didn’t catch the ball… for fuck’s sake, grow up. These are the big leagues, guys. You act like a child, you don’t deserve to wear a Superbowl ring.

Props to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, however. That was the best half-time show I’ve seen in the last seven years.

So congratulations to Mini Manning, his team, and his shit fans. Take one look at the stats and you’ll realize that your Superbowl ring is just compensation for being mediocre.