>> ^ForgedReality:
Sorry, I can't agree. What was it that you enjoyed most about the gameplay? Or was it just the setting?
For me, I dunno. Nothing really ever jumped out at me that made me want to play it. It felt kind of "meh." I just couldn't get as into it as some people apparently could. I tried, but certain things really bothered me, like the annoyingly typical Unreal Engine graphics (AA issues, "everything is shiny" syndrome, etc), incredibly weak feeling weapons that seemed like they should have had a lot more impact on your enemies, the repetitiveness of the single player experience...
I'll admit, at first, the visuals and the atmosphere were kind of cool, but that all quickly melted away for me because it just didn't feel all that fun. I think a lot of the longevity it had was due to impractical things like collecting tapes and stuff for background information--the kind of thing that had no bearing on the actual game itself.

The gameplay was nothing exceptional, but definitely better than games like Fallout 3. And I totally understand when things like technical issues or how the gameplay "feels" can ruin a game. Also I agree that there is a lot of repetitiveness. The repetitiveness, however, stems from the limited variety of enemies that you fought - and not from repetitive level design as in the first Halo game.

Like I said, I never considered the gunplay to be a strength of Bioshock, and those negative aspects that you mentioned never really bothered me. For me, the setting was always the real star of the show. From lush underwater rainforests, to the opulent decadence of the operahouse, to the run down squalor of the underwater slums, no one has ever put together such a spectacular cast of locales with such believable fidelity. And each locale has its own story to tell - told through flashbacks and journals - of how it was twisted into the macabre and fallen vision that you see before you. Throwing you in alone into this creepy and hostile world, run by a powerful and malevolent madman, created a sense of danger and desperation evoked by great survival horror games like System Shock 2.

For me, Bioshock was one of the few games that managed to transcend the limitations of gaming and provided an interactive experience.

I hate when he just slams games for the sake of slamming, I really liked Bioshock 1 and I absolutely loved Bioshock 2, most of the things he points out as annoying/pointless/unoriginal are simply not... gathering with the little sisters is an absolute blast, it also compliments the improved combat system and the level design, setting up an area for a fight is much more satisfying than in the first game, especially when playing on harder difficulty levels. The dynamic between yourself (as a big daddy) and the little sisters is plain awesome, walking around with a sister on your shoulder and hearing her comment on things you do never gets old. The game is much longer, the levels are interesting, nothing feels repetitive, the finale is great (it sucked balls in the first game), I could go on and on about the great dialogue and the new weapons/plasmids but the point is: this game rocks, it's more than a worthy sequel and you'd have to be retarded to dismiss it the way he does (an observation I remember making about him after seeing his review of Demon's Souls).
Ranting can be fun, but when you're doing it from a so called "intellectual" point of view there's kind of no point to it when you wouldn't be able to recognize quality if it crawled up your ass.

the >> ^dannym3141:
I suppose he doesn't go into enough detail to cover the absolutely hemorrhaging catastrophic PC-multiplayer failure of this game.
It could have been the next big online "scene" thing, with big money involved. cod4 was kept alive in the online scene for a long time thanks to people modding the game and all the customisation really kept the game popular for a long time. It basically kept IW afloat, kept them in business, and allowed them to make mw2.
IW, in their infinite wisdom, thought that customisation and modding was theft and piracy. They decided that they could SELL people these updates rather than let the community make content for itself. As such, they removed dedicated servers - you play on a P2P system not too far off from the xbox/console style where your ping is always very high as you connect to another person's computer. You have to use the matching system which basically matches you with the lowest ping server in the style you request that it can find. This ensures heavy lag for a lot of people, moderate lag (over 100ping) as an average, and virtually unplayable for a few. When the map changes, they have a system of "migrating" you which basically tries to keep your experience uninterrupted but mostly disconnects you. One of the IW guys actually was quoted "I've been playing mostly with 100ms and that's just fine!"
They disallowed any kind of modding or customisation, instead opting to bring out DLC for the PC. This includes not allowing any kind of demo recording and there's no developer console.
Because of the P2P system, you are limited to a very small number of people playing in a server, meaning large battles aren't possible anymore because a person's pc (which is hosting the game live) just isn't usually capable of handling so many connections.
There's a shed load more. http://www.modernwarfail2.com/about/ . They really screwed up and shat all over the PC fans which basically kept the franchise alive and allowed IW to make a lot of money with this game. They did a direct port from console to PC not only because it was easy, but also because it allowed them to control the game rather than the community. Whilst console users are used to all the above complaints and have chastised PC users for their pickyness, PC users are used to much better things and the PC multiplayer of this game is abhorrent to them.
I think some people have made dedicated servers available by hacking the game, not sure though. All of this was true as of release date



the whole level system would make the game incopatable for proper dedocated server play , i think its fine as a console game , but they should have maby worked on the game for another 7 months doing a proper pc version esentauly as separate product.

basicly dice have got it right , look at the dice console games v the dice pc games (bf2,bf moder combat , bad company ) they do the same game but redesign aspects of it for each platform.


also the single player is utter shite its utterly pointless to play , its pretty much the same as the first one stupid bugs and bad level design + when they do good stuff they never capitalise on it I don't think infinity ward have muh of an idea about single player games design. but it seems that the majorty of people dont give a shit its like holywood films people just want to see shit blow up they don't care about anything evan slightly engaging on another level. whats more annoying is the game takes itself seriously if it took the piss out of itself to some exstent but its like infinity ward think its a war simulater.


all in all its a really good multi player console shooter game.

yah , I do hope valve do a better job on the level design , for example I don't understand where there rnt more situations where a player litraly has to retreat and lock themselves in a room , having say a large house with loads of wooden doers would be really fun

That's what we call Amygdala reaction. We saw the same issue with the BART transit cop.

Jericho fights, or "fake" fights for a living. Hes conditioned response was to fight back when assaulted from the back.

Take the hypothetical experiment for example.

We have a controlled environment with 50 "fans". 10 separate volunteer "victims" of assault. One or two assailants, mixed in with the crowd of "fans". Only 5 of the volunteer "Victims" are told that they will be pushed from behind or from the side while getting into their "vehicle".

We can guarantee that the other five, who do not know that they will be pushed or accosted from the side or behind, will react violently. Violently, I mean posture or fight in order to deter any threats.

What I gathered from this video, is that the victim was assaulted from behind by the female perpetrator. He reacted how he trains or plays. Turning around and letting her have it. When the camera went haywire, he must have lashed out at every one near him. Seeing a threat in every person there, and wishing to dispatch that threat, while displaying his prowess to ward off any other attacks.

Humans have still not evolved enough to avoid the Amygdala's process.

According to the book Mind Hacks: Human brains are still, at the base level, designed for survival. The ability to reason was the result of society and cultural evolution. However a conscious thought is fallacy. We can prove that a thought happened before our conscious mind ever knew it happened. Hence a person who kills an attacker, only to try to rationalize what just happened.

The Amygdala is powerful, and that is why Human Species has evolved and thrived. No matter how much you reason, this part of your brain will dominate the flight or fight response.

>> ^evilspongebob:
This needs to be a level in a new FPS. Or a game in itself!!


There's a level in "Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II" where you're on a ship that is plummeting to the surface of the planet and you need to find a way to get off it. As it falls, it's rolling and twisting which means the level is basically rotating as you're trying to escape. Sometimes you're running on the walls, sometimes on the ceiling, sometimes you wind up free-falling down the hallways. Oh, and stormtroopers are still shooting at you as you try to escape. And stuff is sliding around too, so you have to avoid being crushed. It was bloody brilliant. I still contend that game had the best level design of all time.

Live action platforming. Great level design.

^yes i am sure dag has the patent on "activating a button to express a preference" and "organising button activation into tabulated output".

about this thing, i thought it was pretty cool before it panned up, because i thought the level designer was using some kind of scripty stuff in it and that would be a cool simple demo that could be taken further. but then i saw the wiring and i just thought zomg, that's just... sad. like making a car out of bottlecaps. upvote for sheer... geek.

I'm excited about the possibilities in level design with LBP. This is astounding work. Here's hoping that brilliance and hard work like this will come to the fore and the myriad detritus doesn't ruin the experience.

>> ^SDGundamX:
You're entitled to your opinion. But as counter-evidence I offer up Half-Life, Starcraft, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, Puzzle Bobble (Bust-a-Move), Dance Dance Revolution--all made in the last 15 years, all wildly creative and wildly successful and that's just for starters. You could include more recent games like Guitar Hero and Cooking Mama or more obscure games like ChuChu Rocket and Ico, all of which took simple creative concepts and implemented them stunningly well. Yeah, there are lots of sequels but that's no different from the movie industry now is it? If people would stop buying them, the game companies would stop making them....
Just to keep the comment slightly on topic, I actually thought Halo wasn't all that creative when it first came out. Particularly the later level design (or lack thereof) in the first game since it got very repetitive. Just goes to show that sometimes a slight improvement on an old theme (FPS shooter) may still be hugely successful.


I agree that there are a good number of creative and successful games, but the massive number of successful cookie-cutter games kinda rules out creativity as a 'requirement'.

>> ^xxovercastxx:
>>
imagination hasn't been a requirement in the games industry for at least 15 years. Actually, I'd argue you've got a better chance without it. Publishers don't need their sequel assembly line getting clogged up with original ideas.


You're entitled to your opinion. But as counter-evidence I offer up Half-Life, Starcraft, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, Puzzle Bobble (Bust-a-Move), Dance Dance Revolution--all made in the last 15 years, all wildly creative and wildly successful and that's just for starters. You could include more recent games like Guitar Hero and Cooking Mama or more obscure games like ChuChu Rocket and Ico, all of which took simple creative concepts and implemented them stunningly well. Yeah, there are lots of sequels but that's no different from the movie industry now is it? If people would stop buying them, the game companies would stop making them....

Just to keep the comment slightly on topic, I actually thought Halo wasn't all that creative when it first came out. Particularly the later level design (or lack thereof) in the first game since it got very repetitive. Just goes to show that sometimes a slight improvement on an old theme (FPS shooter) may still be hugely successful.

Bioshock? Crysis? Call of Duty 4?

To be brief in my responses:
Bioshock was the spiritual successor to System Shock 2, which if I hadn't played, would probably have been a sequel I enjoyed (beyond the aesthetics). It was much more dilute than it's predecessor in the RPG game mechanics aspects and far more linear in the level design. The fact that there wasn't any real specialisation or player classes made things like the psychic powers effectively just more reskins of shotguns and rocketlaunchers.

Crysis is exactly the sort of thing I'm referring to. It looks amazing, yes... But it boiled down to being another scripted on-rails ride once you got used to the graphics. It was fresh in Doom 1/2 and even as far as Duke3D, but beyond that, the innovation really stagnated (another e.g. is Prey)

Call of Duty 4 isn't one i've played yet, but I am very keen to try for the multiplayer aspect. Like Battlefield 2, your soldier improves with experience, unlocking new abilities/weapons/etc. This is what makes the game replayable, giving a sense of acheivement and status in a community. Which is why I carefully noted 'Single player FPS' as being the dead genre. The single player part of CoD4 I can pretty much assume is like I've mentioned above

Painkiller is one my favourite FPS games I've played. It lets you run & gun or creep about and snipe.

I think I died about 20 times in Hell because I simply had to run about and look at everything. It was the best endgame level design I've ever come across. Sadly the fight with Satan is a gimmickfest but it remains the only FPS I've played through three times. Most others I play once and I'm satisfied.

Ah, Painkiller. I really enjoyed that game.

Not as much as Serious Sam, though. Painkiller isn't quite as good. The enemies aren't as entertaining, and the level design is a wee bit more repetitive.

Which doesn't mean that I won't play Painkiller. I did. And enjoyed nearly every minute of it.

Just having beaten this game with 88 stars just today, I found the game's controls to be spot on. You eventually get used to how the camera reacts when it follows you around a planetoid. The direction you want move the analog in, upside down or not, is the direction Mario moves in. The spin attack via Wiimote is a bit gimmicky but as far as gameplay mechanics/level design goes, Galaxy really innovates and refines the 64 formula. Fantastic artwork and graphics with silky smooth framerate that never bogs down, breathtaking with the HD (480p I should say) cable. If games like Portal make you dizzy, good chance this one will too. Wonderfully orchestrated music from various past Mario games and a good amount of new stuff as well. Exploring each galaxy is a joy. All in all, Galaxy really is a return to form. 64 beats this slightly, but only because of how revolutionary the whole concept was at the time, not to mention nostalgia factored in.

From a design standpoint I'd say Galaxy wins out easily, there's just so many different moments that make you mumble "Holy shit!" to yourself. The whole celestial theme makes for epic stuff with a difficulty level that ramps pretty nicely as you move further along the variety of abstract/surreal platforming puzzles this game throws at you. Nintendo has returned that sense of wonder/adventure to Mario that has been missing since Sunshine (which basically took place at a crummy, boring beach resort and of course the final-and-oh-so-anti-climactic Bowser "you ruined my bath time!" tub fight, ugh!)lowered the bar substantially.

It's been a good year for gaming. Please excuse my rambling, I had high hopes for this game and it delivered. This and Portal get my official seal of approval for most innovative games of the year 2007.