Posts by ReNo

  • Quickie thumbnail sketch

    I don't really think any offence was meant Kosmo, but the simple truth is that at a glance, he looks a whole lot like M.Bison. It was the first thing I thought of when I saw it, due to the hat and the shoulder pads mostly. When coloured and cleaned up it probably won't look so like him.

  • Action Adventure Title (Level Designer)

    There seem to be some rules about recuitment agencies witholding the company name - I've applied through a recruitment agency before and wasn't told the company name until I got an interview, and one of my flatmates got called yesterday by them and again, they didn't say who the company was (just the location...which in Scotland is normally as good as telling you the company name!).

  • Retouch

    You know, I was gonna comment on the fact I preferred her without, but then I noticed in the "why we did this" thing that she is only 14. Now I just feel like a god damn pervert. Great.

  • ESCHATON - An Immersive Spy Thriller.

    You should almost certainly drop the RPG part from the brief description then - people have expectations of somewhat customisable stats when those three letters are uttered together, and if they download something claiming some RPG elements and those elements aren't changing stats, they may well be disappointed

  • Games and product placement~

    Quote from -Stratesiz-

    Do real brands allow greater immersion or telepresence over fake brands?

    If they are set in the modern day real world, then commonly yes. If I'm racing around Edinburgh in Project Gotham Racing 2, it's more immersive due to the accuracy and presence of real shops at the sides of the roads (even if they couldn't get permission to use all that many) than it would be with some random fake things plastered in their place. When I'm snowboarding down some mountain in Amped, it's more immersive when I see the Forum logo on the base of my board than some made up thing. Football or other sports games benefit from featuring real world teams and players (both are brands in their own way), and part of that involves getting strips/stadiums looking correct which leads to more direct advertising for true authenticity. The popularity of racing games with real world vehicles and aftermarket parts rather than fictional ones is another example. Obviously these are, to an extent, core gameplay elements rather than superfluous advertising, but it still plays a part.

    Quote from -Stratesiz-

    Are fake brands - if clever spoofs - considered more entertaining than real brands?

    Done well, yes. Sadly enough though, I can't think of any off the top of my head. Also, if the brand is to appear in something that isn't contextually correct for it (ie. some modern day company featured in a futuristic game), then a suitably modified advert also works out far better. I, Robot is a good (bad) example of doing this - while it's advertising was over done, it was far better handled than it could have been thanks to "modernising" the existing brand products.

    Quote from -Stratesiz-

    Do spoof ads activate their real brand counterparts?

    By activate you mean make people think of them? If so then yes, for better or worse. Obviously it isn't as direct and requires prior knowledge of the real brand to draw the associations however.

  • Red Cross condemns use of emblem in video games

    So when you see the red cross on a first aid kit (in real life), does that mean it is somehow tied with the red cross organisation? If you search for "first aid kit" on google images, there are tonnes of them with red crosses on them. Some of them are marked as being from "The American Red Cross", but plenty of others are just from random companies like Johnson and Johnson or whatever. Is it some sort of kitemark they give out to qualifying/sponsored/licensed products? I must admit, like Kosmo I thought it was just a symbol generally used to indicate medical help, but I guess I'm wrong judging by this article. Is the white cross against a green background the more general symbol for medical help?

  • ESCHATON - An Immersive Spy Thriller.

    Best of luck - you have some really nice art and while an AK render is hardly...well...anything new, it looks solid and well made.

    If I could give one piece of advice though - never ever refer to your mod as "An Immersive Role-Playing First-Person Adventure Shooter Simulation Thriller" - it's just a horribly long list of genres, and by the time you get to the last few words it is really beginning to sound like a joke. You need something more short and snappy, or at least constructed into a nice sentence. A quick example off the top of my head (obviously this might not suit your mod too well since I know little of it)...

    "Eschaton: An thrilling action/adventure mod set in the conspiracy-laden world of the near future"

    Don't feel you need to toss out every genre that your game dips its toes in in your opening line; grab people's attention with a well worded tag line and then describe what it is all about in a few futher sentences.

  • de_corse

    OMG. Wow. Once this is released, go get hired

    I'm downloading now and will give some comments after running around. Something tells me however, I'm gonna have very little to suggest.

  • Games and product placement~

    Things like the Puma sponsored ships/themes/courses in Wipeout Pure sounded like a fairly decent idea in this vein to me - if it gets extra content funded and out the door then I don't mind the odd bit of corporate advertising. On the other hand, Puma maybe clashed with the futuristic setting of Wipeout, but as I haven't played it yet I wouldn't know for sure. It's all about making the advertising blend in with the environment really - I imagine games like "Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure" could get away with a lot of in game advertising for example, but if anything popped up in a Prince of Persia game I'd be disgusted.

    Branded entertainment in games really isn't very new, looking back to the old Quavers crisps game "Pushover", "Sleepwalker" for the charity Comic Relief, or "Zool" for Chupa Chups. In game advertising, when not in an outright branded game like the above examples however, does seem to be on the rise.

  • DODS Axi's new texture

    /hides red face in shame. Not much of a historian I'm afraid!

    Pretty accurate then, seeing what it is based on. My only gripe now is that you seem to have gone with one base colour and then dotted the various others on top, whereas in the source image the base colour varies more often, with larger patches of one of the colours that then have other colours dotted on top again. For example, the inside of his left arm (ie. the one on the right) has a large area of the lighter brown, dotted with green and darker browns on top.

  • DODS Axi's new texture

    I agree that it doesn't really look like camo at the moment. The colour spots seem awfully consistant in size and shape, and by having fairly large sections where the spots are the same colour it comes out looking rather like snake skin or something. I've never really had much luck when making any camo in the past either, so I'd be interested in hearing tips too.

  • Operation_Strike 144 Islands WIP

    Quote from von*ferret

    I dont see the point of that. I mean some people might get a kick out of it, but I find BF2 intriguing because you have so many factors that are judged in the "battle." Infantry reign supreme for a team that wants to win, but you have jets and choppers to help supress enemies. Removing infantry and armor just makes it another combat game or flight sim and for me that removes the very thing that makes BF2 unique and fun for me.

    I agree, but judging by the popularity of killboxes in DM games or aim maps in CS, I guess many others like all the good parts of games to be stripped out