A few weeks ago I linked our followers to a mysterious twitter happening involving a certain @bill_l4d, @francis_l4d, @louis_l4d and @zoey_l4d, and now Infovore’s Tom Armitage has lifted the bile-soaked, bullet-riddled veil on just what’s been happening:
One of the most wonderful things in [Left 4 Dead] is the banter between the four player characters. There’s so much dense, specific scripting, and enough dialogue so that it rarely repeats. I thought it would be interesting to see if you could simulate the four players’ dialogue over Twitter, sharing some state between the bots, but also finding a way to make them communicate a little with each other…
They run a scenario, they bump into boss zombies, they find stuff, they get hurt (and help each other), they get scared (and reassure each other). At the moment, there are some dialogue overlaps; my main work at the moment is adding more unique dialogue for each bot. Bill is sounding pretty good, but the rest of them need work. It takes about 2-3 hours for them to run a scenario, and it’s usually fun to watch. (And, as you can see, it makes sense to follow all four of them)…
I think my favourite aspect of it, though, is that at times, watching the bots play together is a little like magic. The first time I saw them talk to each other, cover each other whilst reloading, help each other up after a Boomer attacked, I felt a little (only a little, mind) like a proud father. They’re dumb as a sack of hammers, but they look convincing, and that was the real goal. It’s fun to watch them fight the horde amidst all my other friends on Twitter.
Tom set the game afoot again earlier today, the results of which you can see here (thanks for the handy link, Waxy) — alongside some more personal messages that might sound familiar.
If we hadn’t already had Keita Takahashi’s fantastic Noby Noby Boy holiday greeting, this would’ve made a great replacement: 23 year old (and himself curiously Hyrulian looking) Fredrik Larsson doing a multi-instrumental version of Legend of Zelda’s Wind Waker theme.
There’s not much to do here but watch and gawp at his “quick christmas experiment” — he’s similarly blasé about his Mega Man 9 rock medley, though at least he admits that one took him four times as long.
An excellent year-end list from designer Steve Gaynor which focuses (with minor spoilers intact — unfocus your eyes to get past the bits you might not want to see) on the top ‘moments’ rather than games perfectly pointed out one of Grand Theft Auto IV‘s greatest charms:
In both scope and fidelity, it’s safe to call GTA4 an epic production. And really there was no better investment made than their decision to embrace Euphoria character physics…
Nowhere is this better showcased than in the game’s implementation of a drunken state: Nico and his drinking buddies stumble, lean, wobble, catch themselves, trip and fall with amazing dynamism, fully expressing a feeling of being out of control of one’s own body, and providing enormous comic relief as well.
For as much as it was a technical achievement, it was an acting one as well: Niko’s drunken dialogue diversion back into old-country pidgin English made him so much more complete and sympathetic a character, particularly his cab-hailing “yellow carrrr!”
Read the rest of Gaynor’s list for more excellent momentous choices from Yakuza 2, Rock Band 2, and No More Heroes.
Though still not the platform it needs to come to, in another surprise holiday move, Hudson announced that Kloonigames’ Crayon Physics Deluxe (which was also just finally released on PC for those that pre-ordered) will be coming to the iPhone in a matter of weeks.
From the video above, the game does look significantly less fiddly than I might’ve imagined despite the lack of stylus control (my fingers fumble across the landscape in the iPhone’s Line Rider, hence the worry): try the freeware sketch-platformer Trace (YouTube gameplay) for a general idea of what we can expect.
Very much enjoyed this recent column by Chris ‘Save the Robot’ Dahlen on a future of “user-generated, machine-mediated content” in games. Given the examples we’ve seen of the 90-9-1 rule falling short in games like LittleBigPlanet (his implication being that there’s a lot of thumb-twiddling waiting for that top 10 percent to create and share), Dahlen suggests a number of mediated ways to pull recognizably personal content into games:
Ever since Twitter exploded, people have written many programs to parse and analyze and psychoanalyze what people are typing. How about just porting it into a game? In The World Ends With You, players can “scan” the thoughts of the people around them. The canned text written for the game is good, but I’d love to eavesdrop real-time in real Twitter feeds.
– So many games include bathrooms. Why can’t we all write on the walls?
– I’m a sucker for a good Flickr mash-up. If you throw in a few tags and search for photos marked “interesting,” you get fascinating results – for example, my favorite one, Snapp Radio: an Internet DJ plays a song; Snapp Radio looks up the tags for that song on Last.fm; it uses those tags to find relevant photos on Flickr. Sometimes you get photos of the band, but in one case, I was listening to a Clash song and saw street riots, pictures of George Bush, and awful mismatched furniture – the colors “clashed.” It’s a bit of a parlor trick, but I’d love to see more games use pics this way, for a collage effect or just for a headtrip. I understand Little Big Planet will be able to import your pics by right about now. But I’d love to integrate with Flickr as well. Surprise me.
We’ve quipped Jason Rohrer’s low-res memento mori Passage here a few times, and last week saw the surprise release of the game to the App Store.
While the PC version of the game remains freely available, as with PuzzleQuest, there’s something nice about having the game literally on-hand to introduce it to new people.
Still best left mostly undescribed so as not to over-explain the punchline (though you can cheat via Rohrer’s artist’s statement), there’s good reason Passage has become the de facto art-game champion: its circumspect metaphor is perfectly extended by its interaction and the experimentation of repeat playthroughs.
Christmas Eve. Finally the house is quiet, and the lights are dimmed to twinkles. All the hard work is over, the fridge full of once-a-year delicacies and everyone else has gone to bed. But I’m still up, as I always am, to have a last, long look at the tree. Or rather, at the boxes under the tree. The big boxes. The biggest box.
If you’re a gamer, there’s something different about Christmas, something different about those boxes. Part of my work this year has been helping with the launch of the UK’s National Videogame Archive, and it’s meant having a lot of interesting conversations with interesting people about what a game museum might look like. My favourite suggestion so far was that we recreate a childhood Christmas – that childhood Christmas, when whatever it was that changed your life arrived.
So you’d book your ticket, and pay your money, and there when you arrived – alongside the Big Trak or the Tracy Island or whatever it was your sister wanted – there’d be a box with your name on it, wrapped in that papery paper you don’t seem to get any more – and you’d be allowed to rip it open and turn it over and over and over and look at the pictures of Rygar or Pole Position or whatever it was, before taking a deep breath and letting rip on the flaps. At which point a security guard would probably escort you from the premises.
As an idea for a museum exhibit, I admit, it needs a little work, but I’d still love to do it. My big box – my big boxes – would have an ST and a monitor in them, and the tiny, shiny screenshot that I’d pour over would be of Ranarama. (more…)
Before the site goes any darker and the posting gets even lighter for the remainder of the week, I just wanted to drop off one last little gift, drawn exclusively for all of you Offworldians by (obviously) Noby Noby Boy creator Keita Takahashi.
Hope everyone’s having a happy holiday, and thanks for all the smart comments and well wishes we’ve received over our first month here.
Fallout 3, Grand Theft Auto 4, Left 4 Dead, Metal Gear Solid 4, Rock Band 2, Mirror’s Edge, Spore, LittleBigPlanet — as we’ve reached the end of the year, the lists have become as plentiful as they have predictable. So, instead of reshuffling the same list of 10 (admittedly amazing) games as everyone else, I’ve taken a different path and put together The Offworld 20.
Covering every current platform (PC/Mac/Linux, PSP, PS3, Xbox 360, DS, iPhone, N-gage), the 20 isn’t just a list of independently made and under-appreciated games, it’s a list of the games that celebrate what makes Offworld Offworld: the beautiful and the bizarre, and the games trying to push the medium forward and give us something we’ve never seen before, in whatever incremental way.
In it you’ll find time-manipulators, slacker assassins, satellite viewed superheroes, vector vegetation, bubble blowers and balls of tar, techno invaders, spirits of the wind, and, refreshingly, not one single space marine.
I’ve compiled and written up the list in no particular horse-race order other than alphabetical, and included the best examples of gameplay so you can see it in motion — let us know via the comments below if there’s anything you think we missed.
Doctor Octoroc has succeeded in just squeezing by and delivered the full version of his previously mentioned 8-bit Jesus chiptune holiday album by for Christmas. And while it doesn’t have the ‘Metroid title music inspired “Silent Night”‘ we hoped for, he did make good with a similar ‘Kraid, Rest Ye Merry Mother Brain,’ and a ‘Icarus! The Angels Sing’ that more than makes up for the loss.
The album’s available for a free download, or a full physical package for a $15 donation.
