Posts by KungFuSquirrel

ohhh, you tease.

In this thread, we discuss how awesome Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 will be, provided they put in a couple less brain maze minigames. Shack has a preview up here: http://www.shacknews.com/extras/2007/06 ... an_rr2_1.x

The sandwich minigame sounds stupendously awesome. Also hope the rail shooter sections are as awesome as in the first one.

This is also the thread where Furyo announces that since Ubi Paris is handling Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 instead of Ubi Montpelier, Michel Ancel has been given the green light to begin work on BG&E2.

...please?

enjoy your newfound freedom from id!

Quote from Fletch

I turned mine off.

Indeed. People... use that bar...?

That's not Gearbox; what the hell?

kidding. good luck and such!

some nice stuff in here; I like!

/me finally gets around to building cs map

Quote from leileilol

well the truth is, if it were called "Ass monkey 5 the war on teror and oil" no one here would've cared unless a mapcore member worked on itYou're all falling on franchise fanaticism

If Duke Nukem Forever were "Jeff Conventional Bomb II" and/or not made by 3DRealms, you wouldn't be anticipating it and defending its development cycle after 10 years. No different here.

Yeah, it's franchise fanaticism. Blizzard has earned every ounce of respect they've gained over the last decade-and-then-some; they've consistently delivered solid and polished titles that appeal to both the hardcore and casual markets. Starcraft is still one of the top games of the RTS genre. When you've built that kind of pedigree (as few studios have done), you deserve some excitement over your games.

edit: now, should SC2 fail to deliver, that'll be cause for concern with the next Blizzard title, but they're running on a free pass right now.

Even with a new race, C&C3 is just as much C&C as SC2 should be expected to be SC.

Koko: If money alone drove Blizzard's decision to this project, we'd be looking at an announcement for new WoW expansions instead. And it still looks plenty creative to me, at least within the bounds that keep it worthy of the name Starcraft.

Well said, twiz. Company of Starcraft or Supreme Starcraft just wouldn't work. While it's great when games in a genre cross-breed a bit and use the successes and failures of others to build better games, there's a point where the genre is split up enough that you have to just stick to your guns and do what you do best. Which, in Blizzard's case, is make a Blizzard-style RTS game.

I'm stoked. Visuals look great in motion, the new units they've shown so far look really well-designed, and... it's freakin Starcraft 2.

that test question (or one of them, at least) is based on a map of mine that got cut or last I knew, it was.

It's pretty commonplace for design and programming to have on-the-fly tests. I had one myself during my recent interview process (well, in two of the four hour-long sessions) and it left my head spinning afterwards, haha.

Well, it didn't look bad, but most of it was just really bland. Characters looked terrible and wooden. Textures were mostly meh, at least on buildings. Outside stuff tended to be ok.

Definitely high points, like oblivion gates and the towers within, but on the whole there just wasn't much to get excited about. A bland looking version of the concepts we've seen would be really disappointing.

I love the concept art they've done and I'm curious to see how they'll approach the gameplay but after Oblivion I just don't have faith it'l look anything near. I'm bracing for sort of blurry bland content in the actual game

Hoping for better of course, but I just was not impressed visually by their last outing.

Nah, deservedly so. Those games rule.

That said, their other efforts haven't been nearly as strong. I imagine they'll hit gold again with Lego Batman, but something tells me the Transformers movie game won't go over as well.

Important announcement via Chris Remo of the Shack, who had the chance to check it out recently in addition to episode 2 (of which there is a preview here)

Quote from Chris Remo

You guys see that big crazy insane laugh he does while firing? That's in the game, it actually looks and sounds like that. When you're killed, the camera does a quick snap-zoom up to your killer and freeze-frames it, and if you're killed by a Heavy you get a freeze-frame of this big beefy Russian dude with this massive grin on his face lit up by a muzzle flash. It is awesome.

http://www.shacknews.com/ja.zz?id=14398717

Ok, so I don't know how good the port job actually is, and Halo 2 wasn't as solid as Halo, but I have a serious issue with this:

Quote

Halo 2 has no puzzles that I can recall, no notable physics events, a handful of interesting scripted scenes, and no memorable emergent glories at all.

This reads like it's written by the guy that did the HL2 review that also did the Q4 review and seems to have a little checklist of arbitrary buzzwords and bullet points to use to demonstrate how every game he plays isn't HL2. Yeah, Quake 4 was mediocre and bland, but knock us for being mediocre and bland, not our lack of Combine (plus, while we deserved the 70 we got, the review the guy wrote read much higher than that, go figure).

I mean, Halo is a straight-up shooter and about as simple as you get in that regard without turning to the extreme Quake 4 got shoehorned into - we had "solve puzzle" and "defeat boss" buttons ffs - why should it be arbitrary expected to deliver "physics events?" Why do we need to find the "emergent" buzzword somewhere inside? And what does this guy expect from scripted scenes? By my recollection there were plenty... Any more and he'd probably be complaining the game was too scripted.

It's perfectly fine to not like Halo, and a bit more fine to not like Halo 2. But come on, don't give me this "oh, it doesn't have physics puzzles" BS, at least complain about stuff like "The narrow FOV and slow player movement is a chore for those expecting familiar PC FPS control" or "There's still a lot of copy/paste level design which, while the areas are still fun, still gets old after a while." Or whatever. This habit of attaching checklists to games based on achievements of other games is really lame.

I'm installing C&C3 right now, actually; was very tempted by the 360 version but I own every other major installment on the PC so I couldn't turn my back on it

Also just got Cooking Mama and Mario Kart DS. Yay!

Otherwise playing the new Crackdown pack and Catan on the 360, and Hotel Dusk (which is awesome) on the DS.

Quote from Sindwiller

We make the interesting part (style etc.), you do the boring part (make the level itself)?

Someone clearly has never worked from or with concept art before.

Yeah, it is. Similar with DoD, I think. Only difference is they'd already released and Valve was just paying for the content that was included at the time.

...which re-emphasizes that it's a proven model.

This is pretty much exactly how the first Natural Selection worked. Aside from merk and Relic25 with Bast and Hera, all the other official maps came about by Charlie tossing out the NSTR to the community and basically hand-picking maps to enter official playtesting.

FMPONE hit the nail on the head; not only does it a) help Charlie and the rest of the core team get NS2 out the door at lower cost than dealing with full-time salaried positions and b) lower the risk of committing to just a couple people (who, in this sort of online-only setting, can be awfully flaky at times), it's a fantastic opportunity for entry-level amateur designers to have work featured prominently in a potentially (and hopefully ) major project. NS1 under my belt practically counted as having a shipped game.

I can only speak highly of how well it worked the first time around both for NS and for my own personal gain; I can only imagine it'll do even better for both this time around.

Quote from Defrag

Yeah they're initially nice when you start using Source after being used to GoldSrc, but that's exactly why they seem nice -- they are familiar. Too familiar. Once you get past the fact that the tools are familiar to you, you realise what you're missing. Tinkering with Doom3 ed was an eye-opener to say the least.

You run into that with every toolkit, though, and the grass is always greener. While working in Radiant, there were plenty of things I missed about Hammer, and now working in Unreal there's plenty of things I miss about both Radiant and Hammer - but when I go back to one of those, I miss things from UnrealEd. Some people swear by GTKRadiant over stock Q3/D3 Radiant, but to me I see an editor that's thrown out all the usefulness of the stock stuff in favor of a far clunkier interface.

All 3 of these editors (Hammer, Radiant, UnrealEd) use variations of tools that are virtually unchanged in the last 10 years. Each company is so rooted in their respective toolkit, that radical change just isn't worth it, so you get incremental updates that they've built to improve their own workflow.