I think the issues you talk abou here are interesting. I would say that the opening the paragraph that you use to link in to these issues is something I don't personally see - my sense of my backlog which is something I'm very aware of is not something that has a connection to me feeling that games are more important to play at their time of release. I'm ok with games later and feel that they still hold their value though I concede that occasionally I want to play a game at the same time as other people to be a part of the zeitgeist and the discussions that follow soon after - the last example of that for me is Portal 2. In general though, I'm more and more ok with playing games whenever.
I think I'm ok with remakes of games making others obselete. Some things have just moved in ways that are only positive wwithout any negatives. They are other improvements that come at the cost of losing other things for value and in those cases I agree that it can be good for people to try out those things - that won't be for everybody though. There are some gems of games and types of gaemplay as well from the past that have just never been followed through on since then and where something really valuable has been lost - even more important in those cases that those things aren't lost where they're useful. It's probably most important that future game designers know about those old games so that the best tthings can find a place in new generations of games.
This reminds me that Paul Barnett (frequent Bombcast contributor) said that he was bringing up his son by starting him playing the earliest generations of games and gradually working him up through the timeline of games so that he took in all the important games of the past and games have gradually progressed - that sounds a pretty amazing way to go about things for that kid. One of the things we can lose the most by forgettting the past is how amazing what we have today currently is in many ways.
Interesting to read your thoughts - I'll be following in case I find other things interesting that you write.
It's easy for people to point at recent games and try to make some sorts of conclusions but I think that's being a bit too game-centric with perspective. These guys have been doing this for years and Bioware has become the megalithic conglomerate in the recent ones. They've probably gone as far as they can go and I'm sure the enterprise doesn't feel like it once was - maybe the size is now too much for them to want to cope with on a long-term scale. You can understand that they just wanted something different and that other life issues affected things.
The other question about whether this will have much material aspect on Bioware's games is also hard to answer. There's lots of great people there I reckon and hopefully that will work out, though who knows if the successors will arise from inside Bioware or outside of it.
Hey, so I thought this might be of interest to people. I just watched this video from the NYU Game Center lecture series where they had Tim Schafer presenting on that occasion and it features a really interesting and funny game idea Double Fine were pitching to an unnamed publisher who decided there weren't going to pursue it in the end. This lecture is from 5 months ago but I can't remember hearing about this from anyone at that time and I reckon others might also be clueless to this and yet still be interested to hear about it. It's worth watching just to hear some witty dialogue written (and even voice-acted) by Tim Schafer but the idea they had was intriguing: to use the Kinect to register gestures based on specific emotions that you want to cause people in the game world to feel for other people/objects in the game -e.g. love, fear, trust. And you're doing this as an ancient dagger with a soul trapped in it that can influence anyone who takes hold of you while in the meantime there is a crazy backdrop of a wedding on a boat where everyone has different competing motivations. It allows for you to be passed between many different people and experience different branching plots and endings which Tim admits might have been over-ambitious and very hard to implement.
I remember at the time of the Kickstarter that Tim mentioned that the success was a welcome one after a team had just experienced the pain of having a project they had been working on cancelled. Maybe this is that project he was referring to - though I don't know how much work these prototypes constitute for DoubleFine and so maybe this one is just another smaller early stage project.
It would be a crime if a half-serious but mostly dumb Giant Bomb humour, Persona-style Giant Bomb web-comic wasn't the result of these awesome designs.
Agreed.
I knew the art was good, but that 'shop a few posts back that puts Jeff by Chie makes it fully evident just how astutely the art style was emulated. Fantastic.
Anyway, this is what I managed to whip up in an hour or so. It's in the same vein as the Hardcore Dave shirt, and it could use some polishing, but the idea's still there. I apologize in advance for any inaccuracies, the original picture is super low res.
That's really cool. I think to make it work like the original still does you need to be able to see the look of hope, exhiliration, expectation etc. in the faces so probably needs a least some mouths and maybe eyes - could still be kept minimalistic though. Well done for the effort though - the original certainly is quite low-res that you're going off of.
This was the moment of truth, and I think a stylized version of this would be awesome.
Here's why!
- There's a team.
- There's Brad.
- People are in poses that should be immortalized. Even if it's just Brad.
- It would spread cheer to all that see it.
This is the idea that I really think the T-shirt should be based around, so please excuse me as I dedicate an absurd amount of words to argue for why I think this should be the case:
Having the Team Brad logo going around the world is good for capturing the people movement (although it lacks the context) but if you want to capture the moment and moreover the experience of the hour (and previous) leading up to the moment, which is what makes it special, then a stylised version of this picture/still would be perfect. The essence for me in this experience is whether Brad was able to break out of that cycle of trying again and again against this difficult achievement before he finally he made it - Team Brad was about supporting Brad against all those odds and past failures to get past that barrier and this picture captures perfectly the in between moment when the jubilation is already starting to break forth but it's not there yet - Brad is just firing that final shot and we're all holding our breaths to see if it makes it - Team Brad is still having to believe that he can do it.
With that in mind, this image is great because it has Karen posing as if she's firing the gun herself, giving the context for what's going on and showing how everyone else watching was experiencing the moment of Brad's success vicariously with him (we were shooting every bullet ourselves with him). With 3 other people supporting Brad it does give it that sense of team as csl316 says above and everyone's on the edge of their seats willing Brad to make it and expectant as you can see with Pope clutching the mic who supported him so well during it all.
So yeah, if someone has the skills my suggestion is stylising this image like what has been done for Brad celebrating for his beers and with "Team Brad" or "#TeamBrad" below it and maybe "I believed" just above it because that's what is was all about to be a part of Team Brad. The one thing that might lack is the sense of everyone else watching around the world so it could be an option to have computer screens circling around that image with cartoony people watching and waiting with mouths open and fists clenched to see if Brad succeeded. Just a thought.
@simkas: It's all right here for now http://www.twitch.tv/giantbomb/b/332162377. Last 4 minutes or so for the special moment. I think the winning run starts at 9:11:37.
Even though I would be unlikely to ever (want) to play this I being compelled to submit a shedload of stuff to this. It may become my hobby whenever I have a spare moment over the next weeks to add another idea.
I'm quite proud of "I reckon the mushrooms that power-up Mario are a metaphor for ________. " among others.
@Atlas said:
Black card ideas:
"It sucks when you look in the fridge, and all you have to eat is..."
"Instead of organised religion, I live my life according to the teachings of..."
"You can take the ____ out of _____, but you can't take the (second blank) out of (first blank)."
"I almost dropped out of college to pursue a career in..."
"I can't help but think about ____ while having a conversation with ______"
"The first time I saw two men making out, my first instinct was to..."
White card ideas:
Giving over to the dark side.
An unnecessary hemorrhage.
Forgetting to bring your phone to the bathroom when you poop.
Defying the laws of physics.
George Brett's pine tar bat.
The swollen breasts of a woman pregnant with quintuplets.
A white man trying to dance.
Sleep apnea.
Trying to find a good pizza place at 3am.
The Rape of Nanjing
A vagina with teeth.
Mastication.
Female circumcision.
Flipping off a bus full of disabled children because it cut you off.
The euthanasia debate.
Beating an autistic child at his own game.
MC Hammer
Realising that you're outnumbered by people of the opposite race.
The Jewish Diaspora.
A woman's gay friend.
EDIT: Didn't read the whole post, if I had I'd know that this isn't the place to submit ideas. But here's what I came up with, if you think there are any winners in there let me know and I'll submit the best ones.
A lot of those are pretty good. I think "Mastication"would probably go down well with most people that would play this but many others too.
Staring across the table to Thirty Flights Of Loving, it could be viewed as a brief, almost throw-away interactive experience that can just be appreciated as a breezy and bright first-person adventure trying to cleverly tell a non-linearly woven crime story … and then it’s all over. I think it will remain obtuse and unsatisfying to some but I’ve always been one to be won over by style and so I’ve found myself captured by Thirty Flights’ gaze while becoming more enamoured the deeper I look into it. The mesmerising feeling this gem, polished to a sheen, was able to create in my mind while playing is too easy to take for granted.
(If you are decided on playing Thirty Flights of Loving now or at any point later on as you read this, just know that the sooner you stop reading the fresher it will be as an experience for you but there won’t be any true spoilers till the story section.)
Brendon Chung who designed it as the prequel to the beloved freeware game Gravity Bone has once again achieved so much with so little (if you do want to read about Gravity Bone then I suggest reading this post by ThatFrood, who runs out of larger font sizes by the end of it in trying to persuade you to play it). Thirty Flights has even less in it that would characterise it as a game as it pushes closer to what is a filmic experience and yet I don’t think its interactivity is redundant despite it succeeding best in two areas that film is particularly at home with: atmosphere and pacing.
Atmosphere
It’s almost ridiculous how strong an impression the atmosphere of many of the scenes in the Thirty Flights were able to leave on me as I played through it, given that I was often only spending seconds of time in any one of them, but despite the simplicity and sparseness of the assets, the art direction and use of sound is so strong that it works in the game’s favour and each location becomes very memorable. There is always just enough animation or an option for interaction with objects in the scene that allows it to come alive and for it to be a world that I actually believe in. I’ve often wondered at the fact that some settings from the best loved films have become so well known and familiar to people, seared into their minds, despite these places often appearing for only a few minutes on film ever. They’ve stuck around and I think I few scenes from Thirty Flights will stick with me for some time yet as well.
Pacing
If I were to choose just one thing from this game that is a revelation and potentially ground-breaking for games then it would be Thirty Flights use of the jump cut because it just works so well. In the game I’ll have just chosen to take one of three routes down corridors that were open to me and then suddenly there’s a jump cut and I find I’m hurtling down a new area. Simply not having to make the full journey down a corridor always, actually takes away a great thing about many games which is in the selling of this really being your experience because everywhere you’ve travelled is as a direct result of your control, but in its place it allows an interactive experience to more readily set a pace that better carries the thrill of an adventure. As the cut takes place the brain automatically fills in the fiction that time has passed and I’ve simply reached this new area and even more ingeniously it didn’t matter which of those 3 corridors I took because they all could have been the one that lead me to this new location as far as my brain knows. So Thirty Flights has some great travelling sequences that maintain momentum as a result but that’s not the only option the jump cut affords and which the game makes use of. In this case it can also transport you to (or flash onto the screen for a few seconds) a completely different location that falls out of sequence of a linear chronology and so juxtapose a prior happening with the current one. It can take you out of a frantic moment into a calm one and vice-versa and my reckoning is that Thirty Flights completely nails this. Even the timings of things happening within a scene or as a result of an interaction are just right to keep the adventure moving.
Story
(Some specific plot spoilers from hereon)
Thirty Loves’ format is exactly how I like my stories – with heaps of style, throwing me into the middle of situations without necessarily explaining everything that’s going on to me, leaving my brain to piece together what’s going on. As my body flew off that motorcycle leaving me standing before ‘The End’ my brain which had already been working on deciphering the puzzle of the story was left in the sudden void-like stillness to chew on the meaning at my leisure, no longer with the inexorable forward push of the narrative. I undoubtedly had some emotional reactions drawn naturally from me during the playing out of the different scenes and glancing behind me at the crashed car in mid-air brought the hit to the gut I’d felt seconds earlier in the previous scene straight back to me. However, I wasn’t fully able to satisfactorily piece the story together even after a long time of thinking. I’ve played through it many more times now and I may have it mostly figured out but there were some key things I missed the first 2, even 6 times through the game and I think it is fair observation that this story would have been most powerful if I was able to piece it together the first time through with the minimum of ambiguity relating to the key details. I accept that everyone’s brain will have a different level of speed and success with recognising and piecing together a story and so not everyone can be catered for perfectly but missing the fact that a late flash up on screen of a woman on the bed in which I’d slept with Anita was not Anita but someone else is a fairly critical thing and perhaps that could have been made more obvious – maybe it’s just me. Likewise, that Anita in the part of the chronology in which the failed raid on the airport takes place had a bionic leg and arm suggesting the accident at the end had already taken place was only realised by me on a repeat playthrough and I almost think it was expected that this wouldn’t be realised the first time through but if it could have been possible to have left more clues so that it was realised by most players after a few minutes thought straight after the ending of the game then it would have had more impact. I am totally aware this is a very hard thing to tune and maybe this was not the designed intention in any case.
Leaving on a positive note though, Thirty Flight succeeded in drawing me towards Anita and in making me having some semblance of feelings towards her despite the limited interactions I had with her not providing any real choice – nevertheless the tale being wrought coaxed me along such that those were the interactions I naturally wanted to take, even though they were based on loose inclinations that only had a second’s thought behind them. To manage that, is just one more triumph among many others which Thirty Flight Of Loving manages to achieve.
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