Posts by Thrik

Holy shit, the new snippets at the end of the trailer look fantastic. I mean I knew the new Battlefield game could contain that kind of stuff, but shieeeeeeeet.

Countdown is over and now we have:

http://www.aperturescience.com/glados@home/

I have to say, this is one hell of a gesture towards indie developers — using a high-profile release to generate sales for games most people would never even hear of. Granted it's a bit cheap and probably quite frustrating for those gagging for Portal 2, but it's nice to see that even after so long Valve is committed to the little guys.

Hmm, not sure. I've not encountered anything like this — has anyone else?

I'll clear all forum caches and do a forum recount (refreshes all last post data everywhere) just in case there's some kind of blip after the maintenance I did a few days ago, beyond that I wouldn't know without considerably more investigation.

I can't imagine what might be causing this to happen to you. What do you see?

I just read through all this, most excellent.

It does sadden me you've not managed to get an industry job D3 because there're no end of opportunities you could probably take advantage of and people who'd help you out. You've clearly always had great talent and determination to be the best within your limitations — unfortunately you've chosen to stick to limitations that're very outdated. I suspect if you were to seriously tackle stretching modern engines to the same limits you push HL1 to you'd be a master of your craft.

I hope eventually your circumstances and mindset hits a point where you are able to get an industry job because I hate to see such passion kind of go to waste.

I just find it an exceedingly lazy way of marketing. I support Battlefield and liked the group ages ago, but it's becoming a very common practice for PR departments to use really cheap incentives to get people to spam all their friends with requests. The worst case I've seen is the new upcoming Tribes game, where they've literally done it like half a dozen times thus far for things like a new piece of concept art.

Just so you don't panic, I'm letting you know now that at some point within the next day (hopefully this evening) the forums will be taken down for roughly a few hours while I do some necessary maintenance. There'll be little perceptible difference except perhaps improved speed, however it'll pave the way for more interesting additions that'll be coming in the near future.

Agreed. Lamest practice ever.

Just finished LittleBigPlanet 2. Wow! Really, really impressed. I'd honestly say it sits alongside Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario World, etc as one of the finest platformers in gaming history. I thought there'd never again be an addition to that hall of excellence yet here it is.

It pushes boundaries and expectations so much that it literally makes LBP1 look like a basic prototype in comparison. The level design and production in particular is incredible: so much more detailed, so much more dynamic, and so much more innovative gameplay-wise.

There're so many small enhancements that make it sit well above its predecessor. To list just a few:

• 
  [*:115lu86w]Extensive use of sprites and 2D visual effects, including complete retro-style levels
  [*:115lu86w]Ability to directly control anything using native controls (like this:

)
[*:115lu86w]Actual overworlds rather than a long chain of levels
[*:115lu86w]Regular cool-as-fuck bosses
[*:115lu86w]A storyline that — I never thought I'd say this about a platformer — builds up to a genuinely epic final world
[*:115lu86w]Less emphasis on being able to see how levels and such were put together and more on simply looking awesome
[*:115lu86w]Extensive use of NPCs, cutscenes, and humour
[*:115lu86w]Gadgets: grappling hook, heavy lifting gloves, and gun that can shoot anything the level designer chooses
[*:115lu86w]Tremendous soundtrackAs far as I'm concerned this is up there with the best of the best. An absolutely fantastic experience that will leave you with a huge smile on your face, in large part because of the extremely loveable cast. And I'm only talking about the core single-player game — not touched the online or creation side yet.

To answer an earlier question: yes level designers have complete control over player physics (or rather gravity, which basically makes it more or less floaty). However I do maintain that the base physics work perfectly with the insane level design seen in LBP2.

Holy shit just broke a thousand posts in this thread.

He clearly never had his heart in it, though. What he probably meant was he wanted to quit his job and live a life of luxury on his current earnings, and would spend a bit of time as necessary updating it and/or hiring others to do so so he can earn even more.

If I had money like that rolling in I'd be enjoying my time rather than spending it on work too. It's not like he owes anyone anything.

To be honest the whole HDTV issue was resolved by most developers within the first year of this generation starting: games should still be perfectly playable and understandable regardless of resolution and screen size (within sensible limits). It's not that hard to scale GUI elements and stuff according to resolution, PC games have been doing it for decades. And if no such resolution info is available, plan for the worst and make sure everything is readable on a small SD display.

Really no excuse for it nowadays. HDTVs might be practically ubiquitous in the US and UK, but shitty-ass displays continue to be widely used elsewhere around the world.

Congratulations to him. I like that he mentions how he feels bad about not being able to keep up with demand, which is completely understandable. It's not like he set out to do Minecraft as a full-time fuckin' job — it was just a hobby project that went viral, and now he just wants to enjoy his new-found wealth. The expectations of the dickhead who made the graphic above are ridiculous.

The criticism seems to point towards auto-saving not being handled particularly well rather than anything else, which just makes the lack of quick-save that bit more conspicuous. I'd imagine if the auto-saving were more frequent and intelligent people would be far less ticked off, and I'd hope Crytek considers a patch that steps up the frequency of checkpoints. Ideally before I play it.

Seems kind of funny that this all kicks off like a week after you were ripping into STALKER for not handling auto-save very well Rick. Though obviously I doubt you were much involved with how Crysis 2's auto-save was handled.

Unless you were...

That is one seriously sad bastard who made that graphic.

Gotta say, I'm fairly reassured by those magazine scans. It looks like it does still largely take place in Brazil, but we're going to see the events between him being a somewhat restored NYC cop and a ruined private security agent in Brazil. Considering the main theme of Max Payne has always been him losing everything, this should work quite nicely. I'd glad we get to experience that, rather than simply starting the game as this bum like everyone assumed.

The key thing is that aesthetically the game now looks pretty awesome and completely in the vein of Max Payne. Pretty much all the screenshots have a distinctly shadow-filled noir atmosphere, and some of them look like they could have come right out of the preceding games. We're inevitably going to see some daytime stuff, but it seems clear that it's going to be less rather than more — and even there it looks a lot more dreary than the 2009 shots.

Hope rising.

I'm guessing it's been majorly overhauled since the original announcement. It was meant to come out in 2009 and now it's slated for 2012+, which screams of a complete reworking.

They have to have taken note of the huge backlash, because this is a much-loved IP and if they don't tread carefully it's going to completely tank. I don't have a problem if they've still decided to use their 'Max Payne goes crazy in South America' type theme, as long as they approach it in a much more noir-ish direction and bring back the dark atmosphere we expect from a Max Payne game.

The new images do look much better — even the one where he's in a Hawaiian shirt is suitably dark, and the fact he has hair in at least one image is promising. It's looking like the game will either use flashbacks or take place over quite a stretch of time, which I kind of like the idea of as it's a surprisingly underused concept in games. This could easily mean a large portion of the game doesn't take place in South America at all, which would explain him having hair and detective-type clothes in the image above.

I think Rockstar originally tried to be edgy by taking a game famed for its darkness and making it bright, but after the massively negative reaction realised this was a stupid idea and have spent the past couple of years making their concept fit into the Max Payne mould rather than vice-versa.

It's worth bearing in mind that most developers aren't given enough time to do everything they want to do. It's all well and good saying it'd only take a few weeks/months to do certain things, but when you're already working crunch hours and barely managing to get everything done for what is probably a tough mother fucker of a deadline it's not really an option — at least not until a post-release patch (more sales = more likely to get them).

Not that I'm defending things missing from Crysis 2 or anything like that, but the chances are if Crytek had the time to sort certain things out they would have. Yes project leads would have made decisions regarding what needs to be left out, but it would have been a case of 'It's either X or Y that goes, which is it?', not 'Let's get rid of this because you know what, fuck PC gamers!'.

It's a tricky issue, this. I'm not an advocate of doing the same shit in sequel after sequel because it becomes tiresome, albeit the easiest way of pleasing existing fans. But then if it becomes too different it loses the essence of what drew people to the original in the first place.

Crysis is a good example. After Far Cry, Crysis, and Crysis: Warhead I'd completely had my fill of the jungle theme. They did it, they mastered it, and really there was nowhere else to take it. Crysis 2 had no choice but to do something different, but the original essence was maintained: a series of large 'arenas' where you're free to play around quite a bit, but don't have complete freedom (apart from in certain parts).

Max Payne 3 on the other hand seems to be completely missing the essence of the originals, which was a dark and deeply atmospheric experience. This is no surprise because I've not encountered another developer as capable as Remedy at building up a tremendous atmosphere, with Alan Wake being their finest example IMO. But then the question becomes: is it better to miss the essence or just not do a sequel at all?

I'm learning towards this sequel being unnecessary, with those resources better put into a new IP. But then Rockstar might surprise us and despite initial impressions — which could be intentional misdirection to spark controversy and discussion — the game could indeed match the kind enveloping atmosphere Remedy are known for.

We'll see. But I'm not going to write it off just because of its setting. If I were in the habit of doing that I'd probably have never played Metal Gear Solid 3, which despite its wildly different Russian jungle setting after two games set primarily in confined indoor spaces and remote locations turned out to be pretty much the best in the entire series.

Quote from killertomato

already posted in the cool pics thread ¬¬

congrats!

also: you always remind me of:

[Blocked Image: http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSxV3DZsC8nCZU-XTfqwFS6ZEVHEy2nLgfXKXYSNkutSfbltQaW6Q&t=1]

lol