Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Prey, mostly
I'm on the fence about Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth, which hits tomorrow. On the one hand...
- It's a new 360 game
- I was a huge RTS fan when I was a computer gamer (ended right around Total Annihilation - which was great, it just ended)
- It controlled quite well at E3
- All sorts of multiplayer
- It's one of the less obnoxious uses of the license
On the other hand, I'm right in the middle of playing several gems I just never got around to before (Panzer Dragoon Orta, Pikmin 2), and I'm pretty sure that I'm picking up Prey next week. The demo is good - very old-school in some of it's level and character design sensibilities, with a few well-utilized gimmicks (wall-walking, spirit-walking, portals) to keep things fresh and tasty. I'm a bit sick of the Doom 3 engine being used exclusively for space stations with organic bits and pieces, but you'll remember that I enjoyed Quake 4 and art design really can't get more bland than most of that game. It's a PC shooter through and through, I won't deny that; you can tell Duke Nukem was it's biggest influence when it started life a decade ago. It feels fine on the 360 pad, but the gun combat just isn't that viscerally satisfying (even when compared to it's engine-sharing brothers).
The appeal is really in it's gameplay gimmicks, and how they fit in the context of an otherwise typical shooter. Walking around on certain walls and ceilings is obviously a nice visual quirk, and make for some interesting vertigo-inducing puzzles, but it also introduces a few subtleties that make the experience more than the sum of it's most obvious uses; enemies can attack from almost any direction, so your radial awareness has to fundamentally shift while you're playing the game. Also, your battle tactics are only as good as your imagination (especially in multiplayer) - it takes a certain breed of hero to run away up a wall and ceiling until they're overhead their pursuant enemy, only to drop down behind them and shoot them in the back as they give chase.
Spirit walking begins as a nice extension of the modern Prince of Persia school of game design, where dying isn't fun - every death brings you to an ethereal plane where you must shoot down several of your enemies' spiritual representations to be thrust back to life. You can also leave your body at any point in the game once you attain the ability, see things you can't usually see, go places your body can't (and flip switches somehow), and shoot people with your magic arrows of physicality. It's not always central to the gameplay, but it's utilized often enough to feel sensible, and having you leave the confines of your first-person approach (somewhat) adds a nice dimension to your interaction with the world.
Lastly, portals are just fucking cool. Walking into a box in the corner of a room and emerging into a completely different room on the other side is just sweet. My favorite example (which you've probably read about elsewhere) takes place when you enter a room with two objects in it: a small glass case with a hovering sphere in it, with a portal box a few feet away on the floor. You soon realize that your only way to advance is hopping into the box, which shrinks you down and plops you on the sphere you saw behind the glass. You only realize this when a (seemingly gigantic) alien walks into the room just as you had minutes ago, looks into the case, and flips a switch to summon tiny minions to fight you (which play similarly to the Ratchet and Clank/Psychonauts spherical worlds). It's a nice Escher-esque moment, and I very much look forward to similar instances of surprise throughout the rest of the game.
I was also going to write about the mechanical abortion that is Chromehounds, but I don't want to put myself in a bad mood. But hey, remember when I said I want XBL content?
- It's a new 360 game
- I was a huge RTS fan when I was a computer gamer (ended right around Total Annihilation - which was great, it just ended)
- It controlled quite well at E3
- All sorts of multiplayer
- It's one of the less obnoxious uses of the license
On the other hand, I'm right in the middle of playing several gems I just never got around to before (Panzer Dragoon Orta, Pikmin 2), and I'm pretty sure that I'm picking up Prey next week. The demo is good - very old-school in some of it's level and character design sensibilities, with a few well-utilized gimmicks (wall-walking, spirit-walking, portals) to keep things fresh and tasty. I'm a bit sick of the Doom 3 engine being used exclusively for space stations with organic bits and pieces, but you'll remember that I enjoyed Quake 4 and art design really can't get more bland than most of that game. It's a PC shooter through and through, I won't deny that; you can tell Duke Nukem was it's biggest influence when it started life a decade ago. It feels fine on the 360 pad, but the gun combat just isn't that viscerally satisfying (even when compared to it's engine-sharing brothers).
The appeal is really in it's gameplay gimmicks, and how they fit in the context of an otherwise typical shooter. Walking around on certain walls and ceilings is obviously a nice visual quirk, and make for some interesting vertigo-inducing puzzles, but it also introduces a few subtleties that make the experience more than the sum of it's most obvious uses; enemies can attack from almost any direction, so your radial awareness has to fundamentally shift while you're playing the game. Also, your battle tactics are only as good as your imagination (especially in multiplayer) - it takes a certain breed of hero to run away up a wall and ceiling until they're overhead their pursuant enemy, only to drop down behind them and shoot them in the back as they give chase.
Spirit walking begins as a nice extension of the modern Prince of Persia school of game design, where dying isn't fun - every death brings you to an ethereal plane where you must shoot down several of your enemies' spiritual representations to be thrust back to life. You can also leave your body at any point in the game once you attain the ability, see things you can't usually see, go places your body can't (and flip switches somehow), and shoot people with your magic arrows of physicality. It's not always central to the gameplay, but it's utilized often enough to feel sensible, and having you leave the confines of your first-person approach (somewhat) adds a nice dimension to your interaction with the world.
Lastly, portals are just fucking cool. Walking into a box in the corner of a room and emerging into a completely different room on the other side is just sweet. My favorite example (which you've probably read about elsewhere) takes place when you enter a room with two objects in it: a small glass case with a hovering sphere in it, with a portal box a few feet away on the floor. You soon realize that your only way to advance is hopping into the box, which shrinks you down and plops you on the sphere you saw behind the glass. You only realize this when a (seemingly gigantic) alien walks into the room just as you had minutes ago, looks into the case, and flips a switch to summon tiny minions to fight you (which play similarly to the Ratchet and Clank/Psychonauts spherical worlds). It's a nice Escher-esque moment, and I very much look forward to similar instances of surprise throughout the rest of the game.
I was also going to write about the mechanical abortion that is Chromehounds, but I don't want to put myself in a bad mood. But hey, remember when I said I want XBL content?
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