Posts by Rick_D

  • "Modern Warfare 3" ??

    ugly, everything is looking dated as fuck and there's nothing to really make me interested. gameplay is so boring at this point, i want to look around but the ai just keeps shouting at me, enemy encounters (which is, let's face it, 99% of this game) are on the same level of quality as duck hunt. guns aren't anything new or special, story is so up it's own arsehole that i don't even care what is happening or even if soap lives or dies.

    still having situations on normal difficulty where i have in excess of 4 grenade icons around me, bloody screen so real all over the place, boring boring boring.

    i'll try some coop; maybe some mp, but really, how much different is it going to be from cod4, mw2, waw, black ops?

    i wonder ifwe are going to enter some kind of bizarre reality where they can put less and less effort into call of duty games and still sell millions. at what point are they just going to re-release cod4 at full price and 20 million people will re-buy it?

  • "Level with Me", my level design interview series at RPS

    Quote

    But when I played The Path? There's no gameplay, so what do I do? Okay, I'll just click on random stuff... oh crap, did I just get my character raped? My god. What the hell just happened. Was that even my fault? But the game wanted me to get raped? But that's a stupid thing for a game to want. Can a game "want" me to do something in that way? How can the game blame me for making a choice I didn't know I was making?, etc. and I find all those questions "FUN" to think about, "meaningful and deep like a painting"

    those sound like very pretentious questions to be honest, do you really think like that?

  • Rainbow Six: Patriots

    yeah, qte's are about as fun as fucking a dog.

    that's a metaphor i don't even need to go into more detail with, but trust me, nobody wants more fucking qte's.

    i remember the first game i worked on, we had this randomizer shit that made qte's longer depending on the game's difficulty setting (basically a programmer wanted to play with some new functions and thought this would be a good place to do it). when you played on the hardest difficulty there was a qte on the last level that was 20 buttons long.

    20 buttons long.

  • "Level with Me", my level design interview series at RPS

    i actually agree with sentura here, "weird art games" usually aren't entertaining, they are just weird "art". there has to be a point where something is either an experience played out through user interaction and doesn't have any real gameplay mechanics, or it's an actual game with actual mechanics that are actually fun and engaging.

    i have a love hate relationship with so called indie or art games, things like Limbo or Braid which are hailed as creative masterpieces with deep storytelling and artistic gameplay. whatever, limbo is a platformer with nice atmosphere and some apalling "learn by dying" mechanics. braid is so up it's own arsehole that it forgot to have consistent mechanics and a learning curve, and opted for anything goes difficulty-wise and a learning curve more line a sine wave with a budget that would have made super mario shit his pants.

    exploring mechanics is great, but how much fun would it honestly be to make a 6 hour game out of "alternative" mechanics? surely the reason games have evolved to the state they are currently in is because it's the best way to convey a story, drive gameplay forward, and sell an experience to the player. people have done some crazy shit in the past, the japanese actually made some very interesting games, and i think the ps1 had some of the most brilliantly innovative games we've ever seen, but from an end-user experience they weren't exactly the most compelling pieces of software.

    long story short, the main problem i have with art games and alternative/weird mechanics is that the people who create them seem to think that games can somehow be as meaningful and deep as a medium such as painting or writing, but personally i don't think a whacky mechanic is the way to reach those goals. play through portal 2 and tell me you didn't come away moved, having experienced a wide range of emotions from sadness through to elation. surely in this case a video game has achieved the same thing a good book has done. it's used a series of quite unconventional but well presented and polished mechanics, and weaved in a story and characters in a very professional way.

    do we really need a whacky loading screen or a fake BSOD to make it into an art?

  • Rainbow Six: Patriots

    Quote from Zombie

    Very true.

    i think you will find that circle is a perfect choice, think about the mouth shape, like an O, when you say the word "circle" you actually expend the exact amount of energy it would take kinetically to extinguish an average wax based candle.

    some things might just be too deep for the average gamer to understand.

  • Battlefield 3

    just so you know i'm getting ready to head over to sledgehammer games, and i've got some big plans for how i'm going to defend modern warfare 3. they basically involve calling you all faggots for disagreeing with anything i say.

    granted this won't be very different from my current line of public relations but i will be doing it with a ten gallen cowboy hat this time. the devil's in the details.

  • "Level with Me", my level design interview series at RPS

    i think just reading up to here:

    RY: All these games are based on human tragedy.

    it seemed like you were on the attack, maybe i completely misinterpreted it. monday morning, grumpy, no coffee, no cigarette, rick is angry and ready to get angry about anything. mondays are the peak of my menstrual cycle.

    don't change your style because of anythign i said, shit, you should probably be more agressive.

    so, when will you do me? ;(