Warren Spector

WARNING: i’m low on battery, so there are raw notes ahead, I’ll clean it up and make it intelligible later

Warren (the System Shock and Deus Ex guy) is talking about making great stories in games. He’s talking about the static worlds that are populated by static characters. Pacing is crap. Games get harder as they go along, as the players capabilities increase. This makes the games slower as they proceed, not anything else.

Games should be about something. Most games are all surface, rescue the princess, save the world. Nothing else. Bioware, maybe Valve are the exceptions. Five approaches to storytelling. Rollercoaster (linear game narrative. Mission 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. No real choices, just the appearance of choice, at best.

Second way, is the retold story. Games like WoW, Tetris, etc don’t really have a story. There’s no overarching narratives (or if there are, then most people don’t know about them.

Will Wright school – You make your own story. It’s just pure play. Requires creative people who want to create content.

Shared Authorship – branching storyline, like Wing Commander. Or alternately, you build a world and send people to different places at different times. Linear mission structures wtih different acts that have different sub-objects.

Procedural story generation – no script, player is in control of the whole thing. Tools ensure that the story is always interesting and powerful. Facade.

Refine vs. Replace – Do what works and make it better each time. Letting players choose mission order however they want is way more work than it’s worth. Faction interactions are a good way to do stuff. Track trends, rather than make them choose gates.

Must reward work from games well. Accomplishing story goal, getting something good, etc. Big or small, rewards are important. If I don’t do this, my brother will die is more compelling than getting a long straight piece in a hole.

Gamers can be paralyzed by choice. You need to give players cues and constrain them a bit.

Warren’s talking about character design being shitty, and representations not being particularly good. Warren likes the Miis, and says that people are more attached to their Miis than to whatever other character they play as.

In a game, you have a very limited game world, where people are locked on rails. Worlds, not sets. Make sure that players never see the limits of fidelity, fill it with scripted and simulated info. You have to make people believe that it’s a real world.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance

So, despite my local Gamestop employees best efforts to keep me from playing the game (“No sir, all eight copies behind the counter are preordered by people who haven’t been able to pick up their copies in the last five days”), I’m about two hours into Marvel Ultimate Alliance, and while it isn’t going to change the world, it’s been polished until it’s quite shiny and good.

Unlike the previous Raven beat ‘em up/action RPG X-men games, Ultimate Alliance gives you control over a boatload of characters from the entire Marvel universe, from Captain America and the rest of the Avengers to the Fantastic Four, on down to fan favorites like Daredevil and Deadpool (Flash-based playable character list). The basic concept is simple—take 4 superheroes of your choice, team them up, and smash your way through dungeons filled with both easy-to-defeat minions and a variety of supervillains (Mysterio, Scorpion, and Dr. Doom have showed up already).

It seems like the goofy everyone-must-be-running-the-same-resolution limitation is gone in the Xbox Live multiplayer, although everyone is still tied to the same camera, I don’t find that too objectionable. There are definitely better games coming out soon—Gears of War and Guitar Hero 2 both hit next week—but Ultimate Alliance is an entertaining diversion, and it’s something I can even see Gina playing with me and some friends on Live.

Splinter Cell – WTF?

I finished the new Splinter Cell game on my 360 this weekend, and while I really dig the new “Double Agent” gameplay, where you have sets of conflicting goals for each mission–both the NSA and the terrorist organization you’re infiltrating will tell you to do stuff, and you actually have to make tough choices. The addition of tons of hiding places throughout every map is also a major improvement. In every room there’s at least one place to hide, but many rooms have three or four desks and beds to crawl under and lockers to hide in. Forcing the player to make tough choices is definitely something I can get behind.

There are a few things I really strongly dislike. First, the ending is really abrupt. Like Halo 2 abrupt. There are multiple endings depending on the choices you’ve made, but the game basically just stops. That’s weak, especially considering the events of the game. However that problem’s minor compared to the hack-job that they ran on the multiplayer portion of the game.

The 360 version has no narrative-driven co-op levels that I can find (12 missions shipped on the original Xbox version of Double Agent). Instead it ships with a bunch of co-op training missions that feature insanely difficult AI with perfect aim and knowledge of your every move, whether it can see you or not.

I really enjoyed playing co-op in Chaos Theory, when I managed to get another person available with an hour or two to spend on a mission. I’m not the first person to talk about this, but the removal of the booby-trap gadgets (and the motion sensor vision mode) from the mercs takes away a lot of the fun of the merc portion of the multiplayer game. The new mode is much faster paced, but it lacks a lot of the sublety of Chaos Theory and Pandora Tomorrow’s sublime and complex multiplayer game.

Pre-order the Wii? Probably not

I got up a few hours early this morning to get a shot at a Wii preorder from my local Gamestop. By the time I arrived, roughy two hours prior to opening, there were about 40 people in line, for a store that said they had roughly 20 consoles coming. By the look of things, the first ten or so people had spent the night sleeping on the pavement in front of the store.

I’m just going to wait for the overpriced bundles online :)

Edit: Looks like my wonderful wife managed to score one after she dropped me off at work! Yay Gina!

11,753

That’s the number of zombies I had to kill in order to finish Dead Rising, which is far and away my favorite Xbox 360 game so far this year. It’s a strong contender for my favorite game on any platform. Of all the games I’ve played this year–and the list is very long–ranging from BF2 to Oblivion to Titan Quest to Hitman to New Super Mario Brothers. I’ve even done a few things I didn’t think possible–I played Prey and I enjoyed a Tomb Raider game. But, Dead Rising hits all my buttons just right.

If you’re not familiar with the game, it’s fairly simple. You play a photojournalist trapped in a mall filled with thousands upon thousands of zombies, and your ride isn’t going to be back for 72 hours. You can use virtually everything in the mall as a weapon, from trash cans and benches to baseball bats and chainsaws. And it’s vital that you keep good weapons on hand–without them, you’ll have serious problems fighting your way through the zombie hordes. And I do mean a horde–there can be literally a thousand zombies onscreen at any given moment.

If that was all there was to the game, it would be good; but there’s more. Instead of zombie boss monsters, the many bosses you’ll face are human psychopaths. Each one has different weapons and strategies, and all require a slightly different tack. Defeating them frees other people and gives you access to other weapons and even vehicles.

To maximize your score, you need to take exciting photographs, escort survivors, and figure out what caused the zombie outbreak in the first place. When you finish the story mode, there’s plenty left to do, whether you go back and save more surviors, or just go out and slay all the zombies.

The save system initially frustrated the hell out of me, but I’m quite fond of the way it works and the way it encourages you to play the game. I’ll talk about it more when I can keep my eyes open.

Another one bites the dust

Back in February, my first Xbox 360 stopped reading discs properly, but five short days later and I was back in business. Keen-eyed readers might remember that I mentioned I was having some crashes in Dead Rising a few days ago. Tonight, the other shoe dropped, and the 360 totally conked out. Luckily, I still have extended waranty left, and they’re going to fix it again. Still, it seems more than a little ridiculous to have to return a game console twice in about 9 months.

Dead Rising is crashing

Wow, what a drag. I’ve managed to change my play style to suit the Dead Rising savegame system, I’ve killed almost 8000 mindless zombies (and about 15 psychopaths), and when I get to the end of the game, my Xbox 360 hangs. That’s not a good sign. It looks like a heat-related issue, there’s visual corruption over the entire screen, and I have to hit the power button to restart the console. Weak sauce.

I’m especially pissed since I stayed up late to finish the game, and we’ve got to get the dog to the kennel by 8AM tomorrow morning.