Archive for the ‘Video Games’ Category
Mapping for Left 4 Dead 2
I have been absorbed in another mapping project over the last week or so. This time it is for Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2). For those who haven’t played L4D2, it is primarily a cooperative online game where you and three teammates try to survive the zombie apocalypse. Which mostly involves killing hundreds of zombies.
I had been wanting to try Hammer (the map editor for the Source Engine) again, because I hadn’t used it since the original Half-Life was released. I was probably around 13 or 14 then. Left 4 Dead has game mode called survival where the players are confined to a relatively small area and tasked with living as long as they can. This provided a small, focused mapping task that I thought would be a good exercise to help me get a grasp of the editor in case I wanted to do something larger later.
At this point the map is fairly far along and I already have some videos up on YouTube. I thought this would be a good point to talk about the design decisions behind the map and what is left to do before release.
The unfinished (but not forgotten) toys
So this is the other half of the discussion I started the other day with an article about games I didn’t love, but still managed to finish. This other half involves games that I thought were good, but for some reason I can’t bring myself to play. Not that I won’t play ever them, but these are great games that always seem to sit idle while I play others, both good and mediocre.
So why do these otherwise great games get pushed aside? In some cases the problem is clear. GTA4, for example, has two very clear reasons. The first is that not having checkpoints means enormous chunks of time can be rendered pointless because of small mistakes; ie. getting killed. The other is that although the cell phone and the relationships that came with it were interesting and valuable to the story, being punished for not going to the strip club while I’m already very busy (ie. trying not to get killed) kept me from just fooling around. Doing whatever you want in a GTA game is one of the great draws to the series, but you were constantly dragged away to play some dumb mini game. If you didn’t get punished for saying no, I could put up with phone calls, but losing friendship benefits over darts was irritating.
Others aren’t so clear. There can be much more subtle reasons that a game doesn’t get chosen for my occasionally sparse video-gaming time. These are the cases I want to explore a little more. These are games that I have enjoyed and have won several awards each. Why aren’t I playing them? Well, Mass Effect 2 is really good, so playing it keeps me from playing these others, but there has to be a reason I stopped playing them in the first place…
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Why do I finish mediocre games?
A month or so ago when I was playing Red Dead Redemption I had written a blog post talking about everything that irritated me about the game and why it shouldn’t have gotten a perfect score from any reviewer. I never posted that article because it became too much of a rant. I still believe that all of my complaints are valid, I may even have some that I would add to the list, but it got me thinking about more interesting things than just complaints. The main idea that came out, and was actually the title of the article, was “Why do I keep playing Red Dead Redemption”?
That article only touched on that question for a paragraph near the end, but thinking more about the question I realized that there were other interesting examples it could be applied to in my library. The question is less about RDR and more about why I would keep playing a game I have so many problems with, but not play other, better games that I haven’t finished? There are quite a few great games I haven’t finished in my library, which is odd because of how much I enjoy seeing a game through to the end.
So I have decided to write two posts on the topic. This is the first and it will focus on games that I knew weren’t perfect, and in some cases didn’t enjoy, but still managed to somehow finish them. The next article will be about those games that I have enjoyed, but can’t seem to bring myself to finish them. I won’t bother to list good games that I have completed, or the bad ones that I didn’t, because those don’t require explanation.
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Torchlight Custom Level Part 3: Jungle
The time to reflect on part three is upon us. I had predicted that this section would get completed much faster than the previous one, the type of prediction that usually curses a project. In most ways it did go faster than the previous level, even though the overall time I put in was probably more. This level is both larger and more complex, so my previous experience helped keep development from getting out of hand (I will talk a little about that later).
I have to admit that it wasn’t as smooth as I had originally hoped though. Most of this is due to SunkenTemple tileset, which comprises most of the level. I thought the transition to this tileset was going to be a straightforward as was to move from the Crypt set to the Cave one. It didn’t really work out that way.
Torchlight Custom Level Part 2: Caves
The next section in my Torchlight dungeon is based in the caves tileset. As the player leaves the crypt they travel through a cave that has some of the crypt architecture incorporated into the environment. This section has moved along much faster than the first, but has been significantly larger and more complex.
I was also able to put the planning stages to better use during this section of the dungeon. The cave section started out as an incredibly small sketch, one that I hadn’t given very much thought to when dreaming up the overall dungeon. I had expected it to not be much longer than the crypt section, mostly just a way to get to the outside areas of the level. It turned out to be much more.
Random Game Thoughts Vol. 1
I often have random game thoughts, some more insightful than others. A couple of times I’ve considered writing them down, but I’m finally getting around to doing it for once. There are a couple older ideas I’ve wanted to elaborate on, but for now I think I will just stick to a couple of game thoughts I have had recently.
As the picture shows, the first of the two thoughts is about Super Paper Mario for the Wii. It is actually more of a complaint. The Paper Mario games are the slightly more RPG-like games in the Mario universe, though it hardly goes deeper than having more than one hit point. One thing this game does have in common with many RPGs is a lot of writing. Writing is fine, especially when there is quality humour to be found in the script, and I don’t mind reading in place of voice-overs.
Torchlight Custom Level Part 1: Crypt
After playing through Torchlight I decided to try my hand at the editor (TorchED) in my spare time. The editor is quite easy to get into, allowing for relatively quick creation of environments using the assets from the retail version of the game. It also comes with a particle editor, logic scripting capabilities, and the ability edit and create a wide variety of other game objects.
So after a couple video tutorials and some plain old messing around I cobbled together a sketch of a level idea and dove in. These short blog entries will briefly chronicle my progress over the next little while; I don’t expect this level to take too long to create. I don’t plan on doing any sort of TorchED tutorial posts, these are more of a development diary for the mod. Posted after the break are the plans and screenshots for the first section of the level.
Unreal Tournament: The Sports Game
I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the original Unreal Tournament. There is something about the original’s unbridled ass-whoopn’ that has never quite been matched by any other game. The game was violent, blunt, and unforgiving. The arenas were rough and dark, abandoned structures given a second life as the perfect places to watch competitors fight for their own.
The games that followed (2003, 2004, III, and Championship 1 and 2) never retained that feeling. The environments became overly intricate, even delicate looking in some instances. The players went from simply dodging to flipping and twirling off walls. These are supposed to be hardened warriors, not ballerinas! Nevertheless, these games have added some great things to the series and still provide a fun, competitive gaming experience despite how far they have strayed from the original game.
Even with the series’ advancements there is one thing, or rather a collection of things, that the Tournament has never gotten: a true sports game treatment.
The essentials of a game ending
Making it to the end of a game has always been a significant milestone. Many early arcade games didn’t even have “endings”. They were often a constant barrage of harder levels until the player finally succumbed to the difficulty and hopefully got their name on the high score sheet. Most older console games didn’t have the ability to save your progress and provided a limited amount of lives. So even if a game had a story, getting to the end in single session was challenging, to say the least.
In the time since then gaming has made many changes, including saving, checkpoints, difficulty levels and regenerating health, that have made it somewhat easier to reach a game’s conclusion. With the popularity of multiplayer, some stories are also getting shorter as more development time is spent focusing on online features. Some game still make it difficult. Fallout 3, Oblivion, Far Cry, and now Dragon Age all push the length of a single player story to the extremes. But the point of this article is not to talk about how the difficulty of games has changed.
The point is that reaching the end of a game usually takes a certain amount of dedication from the player and it should be a momentous occasion. Unfortunately, sometimes it is not. An unsatisfying ending can really tarnish an otherwise good game. So I’m going to take some time to jot down my thoughts on what a good ending should have.
I won’t buy it, but I support the idea of DJ Hero
It is important to know that I am a big fan of Harmonix and my music gaming platform (yes, platform) of choice is the Rock Band series. I have also played several of the post-Harmonix Guitar Hero games, but they just don’t provide the same level of enjoyment for me. It is also important to know that as much as I have enjoyed these types of rhythm games, there is no doubt in my mind that the video game market is seeing a few too many of them right now.
I also haven’t played DJ Hero.
So then why am I writing about DJ Hero? I am writing because of all of the new music titles being released since The Beatles: Rock Band, this is the most interesting idea.
- All done. A sub followed by a community breakfast. It is a good day already.
- One breakfast done. Just waiting on number two.