Sony patent would interrupt gameplay to display ad
Weekend Confirmed 114 - Diablo 3, Max Payne 3, Lost Planet 3
New Zone of the Enders project underway
Carmageddon ploughing into GOG
Harry Potter for Kinect announced
Weekend Confirmed 89 - Minecraft, Uncharted 3, Mario Kart 7
by Garnett Lee, Dec 02, 2011 7:00pm PSTJeff surprises Xav and Garnett this week with tales of his first few nights fighting to survive in Minecraft. He's been hard at work with his virtual pick and shows signs of being in for the long haul with the game. Garnett took advantage of the holiday time to get into Uncharted 3. A discussion of authored stories versus interactivity follows that pulls in the far different approach taken in Skyrim as a contrast. Mario also gets good time this week with both 3D Land and Kart finding their way into Xav and Jeff's hands. The latest on plans for Mass Effect 3 and an upcoming patch to fix the patch for Skyrim top the news highlights and it all wraps up with Finishing Moves.
Weekend Confirmed Ep. 89: 12/02/2011
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If you're viewing this in the GameFly application, you can play Weekend Confirmed Episode 89 directly.
Weekend Confirmed comes in four segments to make it easy to listen to in segments or all at once. Here's the timing for this week's episode:
Show Breakdown:
Round 1 00:00:00 to 00:24:08
Whatcha Been Playing Part 1 00:24:36 to 00:49:18
Whatcha Been Playing Part 2 00:49:52 to 01:12:40
Listener Feedback/Front Page News 01:13:42 to 01:43:58
NFL Tailgate 01:44:10 to 01:51:12
Original music in the show by Del Rio. Get his latest Album, The Wait is Over on iTunes. Check out more, including the Super Mega Worm mix and other mash-ups on his ReverbNation page or Facebook page, and follow him on twitter delriomusic.
Jeff Cannata can also be seen on The Totally Rad Show. They've gone daily so there's a new segment to watch every day of the week!
Follow the Weekend Confirmed hosts on Twitter, too! Garnett Lee @GarnettLee, Jeff Cannata @jeffcannata, and Xav de Matos @xav.
Remember to join the Official Facebook Weekend Confirmed Page and add us to your Facebook routine. We'll be keeping you up with the latest on the show there as well.
Comments
We've discussed in-game time limits here in the comments as well as on the show many times. Most of us seem to agree that time limits rarely lead to fun/exciting gameplay.
Many of us (including Jeff and Garnett) have praised the final mission of Halo CE as being one of the best game endings we've ever played.
And yet........ Halo's final mission is one giant race against a big timer on the top of your screen.
What is it about that mission that works? Why does the timer make the sequence more exciting, where it simply becomes frustrating in other games?
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You mentioned that you didn't know how long the appeal would last. I've been playing since alpha, and I can't promise this will be the case for you, but the reason I keep coming back is because of the persistence of the world I created.
Every ditch you dig, every water feature you make, every bridge you build or hill you flatten, it all persists in the game world. And as you play, and expand your territory, every little change you've effected starts to add up and the world takes on a shape that you had a big part in creating, and the game gives you strategic reasons to do all that stuff.
But here's the thing. You talk about a game like Skyrim using it's environment to convey a story. Minecraft does the same thing, except the environment tells "your" story. The when why and how of all the things you created are connected to the creations themselves, which become permanent fixtures in the world (unless destroyed, of course).
One last tip: there's no shame in hitting up minepedia if you want to learn more recipes or find out how stuff works. It can only deepen your appreciation.
another even laster tip: If you haven't already, learn to make signposts. They're very helpful when exploring some more elaborate caves... and you can use them topside to name different regions of your world.
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If you could have any developer make a game from another franchise who would you choose and what game would you like to see them make?
Now this is just for fun. I'd like to hear your ideas both serious and ridiculous.
Personally I'd choose Peter Molynuex to make the next Halo game. That'd be a hoot. I can imagine him onstage at E3 saying "what if ..... follow me for a secomd .... what if ... The Master Chief ... didn't have any guns? I want to explore ... who ... the Master Chief is, not just what he shoots at"
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Do any of you long (or hope) for the day when ratcheting up the difficulty in a game means that the AI becomes smarter and can outmaneuver you, as opposed to the current method of just making the game a "one hit, one kill" affair. Most games on hard aren't even difficult, they're just cheap.
Playing through BF3 and MW3, I would see my allies downing enemies left and right and think "Hey, can I play this cool war game with you guys!?" *pops head up and gets shot once from an unseen enemy* "....Guess not." I've played more than enough shooters to become used to this, but it doesn't make it any less angering. The most infuriating part is that games don't even give you the ability to just die when you know you can't make it back to cover. Once you get hit, you know it's over, but instead of just restarting the checkpoint, the game leaves you to hopelessly scramble, and I usually just put my controller down.
I'd just love it if playing on "Legendary" and whatnot meant that the enemies would navigate the environment differently at the least, and possibly in the far-flung future, who knows, maybe even after downing one of your allies, they could steal their gear and pose as one of your own, maybe even through multiple missions. Purely dynamic, of course, and nothing resembling anything that cool will most likely ever happen. :(
/rant
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In the special features of that Blu-Ray Micheal Biehn says that the reason the movie works is because James Cameron was smart enough to have all the exposition happening on the move.
Michael's character explains the entire context of the movie to Sarah Connor and the audience. If he was just standing in a room talking about the future, machines, the time machine, the plot to kill her, it would be terrible.
But he's not. She's shouting these facts as they two of them are dodging gunfire and driving through the city. The momentum of the events on-screen carry what would otherwise be overstuffed dialogue.
The Assassin's Creed games come to mind as games that made long stretches of dialogue interesting by framing them in an action context, even if the player's action was minimal.
In AC2, Brotherhood and Revelations, there are specific missions where all you're doing is walking and chatting with somebody. It could have just as easily been two guys standing in a room facing each other, but instead, the developers show you the important parts of the city, or get you acclimated with the free-running or ziplining, or whatever. It's a small change, but it does wonders to keep a lot of dialog speed along.
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I think that now there is possibly just more pressure to do something that differentiates itself more. Of course this does also depend on how much crossover there is between Nintendo fans and others.
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So Jeff, Xav, and Garnett gave a lot of examples of fail-states that suck in games, so I'm wondering when/if fail-states are ever a good thing?
We know Jeff hates timers, so that's out. Everyone hates escort missions where when your buddy dies you fail. They don't seem to like when it's "go left or right, whoops left makes you die, go right next time." And big "FOLLOW" markers take us out of the game.
Garnett mentioned something like, "give me information to make the right decision ahead of time," in regards to decisions, but what if you totally miss the information?
An example: say you're chasing someone and come up to a fork in the path with no idea which way the guy went. There might be a puddle before the fork with wet footprints that lead one way, giving you the info about which way to follow that person in a believable context of the game setting. If you totally blow by that puddle and don't notice it, is that the game's fault, or is this an acceptable fail-state?
I just can't help but feeling that without a few of these possibly controller-throwingly frustrating fail-states, the games would feel like they play themselves, and nobody wants that either.
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In that particular section the clue to where you are supposed to go is to follow the birds (if that is the section I think is being refereed to). Not that I'm really defending that design decision but that was the puzzle and logic to that puzzle. Valve does this a lot particularly with Portal 1 & 2, however in this instance it sorta falls apart because in Portal you have much more time for your brain to set a logical path.
http://forzamotorsport.net/en-us/season_pass/
Also if you already had the extra american muscle pack via limited Edition they send you 250,000 (I think) in game credits.
However, i agree with not getting season passes if not specified what i'll be given.
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The fact is, from a gameplay and mechanics standpoint, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus barely held up when they were released, let alone now, years down the road.
No matter how artistic or interesting the vision for The Last Guardian is, if after 7 years the game comes out and shares the mechanical clumsiness than its forbearers, I don't think it will receive the same kind of critical generosity that the previous two games enjoyed.
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Look at the bright side, at least Uncharted succeeds as a cinematic experience (for the most part) in ways that Other M totally crashed and burned.
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The former are not well done, I agree.
The latter however, are one of the core pillars of the Assassin's Creed games, and part of what they do so well. IF a target flees (which depends entirely on how good you are at the approach), the thrill of running through streets, weaving through civilians, climbing up and over buildings in your path to cut-off the target at the pass, etc -- that's part of what makes Assassin's Creed so fun and dynamic to play.
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As for the shooting, I agree with Andrea on last episode when she said she was more of a fan of fantasy shooters. When you're killing 1,000 dudes during the campaign the only way that can make sense is if you're completely removed from the real world shooting down zombies and demons and locust and stuff.
I think that's why a lot of oldschool PC gamers hate today's shooters - they're trying to look more realistic but in reality probably aren't any more realistic than DOOM or Quake. Back then straight-up action shooters didn't take themselves so seriously. You can see that today in games like Bulletstorm, RAGE, Gears, and Duke Nukem Forever. Back in the "old days" on PC when a shooter was realistic it went all the way like Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon.
Back to Uncharted, I think Naughty Dog confirmed a while ago that originally they were planning something more whimsical this generation, but then grey war shooters got popular and Sony told them to make something similar to that. Thus we get Uncharted - something more realistic than Jak and Daxter but still trying to have the ND charm.
I personally thing something like Uncharted would have been better suited to a straight-up adventure game. Maybe less shooting more platforming/puzzles, maybe something like the old Indiana point n' click adventures. Maybe ND should have just gone and made a bit more of a whimsical shooter, like a more lighthearted Bulletstorm.
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What made halo's chase so successful was cortana, you need a companion character to guide you the end jump she tells you big jump gain some speed. How about a companion character saying "I got the right you take the left". Or even drake outwardly monologueing what he needs to do. Sometimes I feel game developers try too hard when a simple answer almost always works best, don't reinvent the wheel so to speak.
The cut scenes were also more cinematic than others at that time, which was fitting considering the game's subject matter.
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