report

My seminal games:
The Sentinel: The first time I felt the presence of a geniune enemy – one who could destroy me and needed to be conquered. Avoiding him and his minions while traversing these odd little levels provided years or fun for me.

Midwinter II. It felt like a world I could inhabit, even as crudely realised as it was back then.

Thief: The first time I remember guile, patience and observation being valued and rewarded over the simple and nigh-on ubiquitous concept of perpetual combat.

@Lachlan: The first Battlezone was an amazing game, largely because of the slidey feel of the craft you were driving, and the fabulous terrains you got to drive them in. I adored the very realistic looking moon terrain the most, and wished more of the game could have been set there. To my mind realistic non-terrestrial environments have never been bettered, sadly. Also, how about that whooshing roar sound from the engines as you flew off a cliff and landed again? What an immersive experience that was!

report

Seriously, someone needs to show that video to the Japanese or German car designers (although I suspect the latter are still enjoying their ‘Nazi Supermen are our Superiors’ video).

report

You say this, yet then go on to describe a bunch of things the game did that very few games ever made have done (I haven’t played it, so I don’t know how well the comments apply), so I’m curious about this comment; whether it holds up or not is irrelevant if it has done unique things like that, and it sounds like it fully deserves every mention it gets in the history of gaming (and, in fact, would be a crime if it wasn’t)

Their innovations being unique implies that said innovations weren’t taken up by future creators — since they apparently got left behind by history, regardless of merit, there’d be no point including them as any more than a footnote in a ‘historical nar–

Why are we talking about this?

Anyway, I’d have been interested to see more game-makers try messing with goal/endgame conventions after Ultima IV. I can see why they didn’t — I’ve racked my brains trying to think of how I’d TOTALLY MESS WITH THE MINDS OF GAMING’S MONOSEXUAL PATRIARCHY (oops, went a bit ‘Torchwood’ there, *ostentatiously kisses gay man*) without just, y’know, ripping off Ultima IV myself, but I’m sure there are plenty of answers out there. U4 has a final dungeon, and a ‘network’ of quests to give you the impetus to travel, but largely you progress in its thoroughly open world by living in the accordance with the 8 Virtues, thereby becoming the Messiah (or just a Very Naughty Boy if you used the Skull of Mondain. Tisk tisk!)

Heck, I’d have been pretty happy if the Ultima games thenceforth all became refinements of the U4 ‘plan’ — increasing the sophistication of ‘Virtue-tracking’; chucking in some neato side-quests containing extra armaments and moral quandaries that affect your Virtue standing; branching chains of consequence according to your particular moral leanings; fixing that horrible combat system…

report

report

Counterstrike (1.3-6 + CS:S) and Call of Duty (1-4) taught me:

- Aim for the back of the head in short bursts.
- No-one likes snipers.
- Having a scoped weapon does not make you a sniper.
- Players called “Vasily Zaytsev” are not snipers.
- Avoid standing about in open spaces.
- Keep X-hairs at the head level of a crouching enemy.
- Reloading going round corners/through doorways = pain.
- Few people are cheating, but there are lots of bad losers.

report

report

The Battlezone series taught me that RTS and FPS genres could merge seemlessly, each genre providing to the hybrid something neither knew it lacked. It also showed how fun sliding around in low gravity could be, and did some lovely alien environments (anyone remember the Venus chemical fog?). Alas, there never was an RTS/FPS hybrid that sold well.

And System Shock 2 taught me a good design team could make any location believable, with a little effort and thought. For me half the fear in that game was generated by the way the environment /made sense/ – in most FPSes, corpses on the floor were just doodads. In Shock 2, you actually started to look around and try to work out what had killed this group of heavily-armed people…and was it still around?

report

Betrayal at Krondor was another one that had an impact. Not necessarily the way it chose to technically realise it’s world (it looks like a gouraud-shaded golf game with naff digitised actors pasted on top), but the completely unbound from convention, MacGuyveresque design ethos: exploration was a mix of Dungeon Master and Midwinter, combat was straight out of an early Ultima, cities were matte paintings with hotspots, and much of the plot recounted through plain old screens of text. It had word puzzles and grave robbing and overwrought descriptive prose for trying to use the wrong objects with each other.

Bioware’s games were (by their own acknowledgment) massively indebted to the basic RPG mechanics (skills, inventory, etc) but went down the route of specialising their engines and trowelling on tons of ‘content’.

More recent action games (starting with Mafia) have been a modern take on this ethos, not making a driving or a fighting engine, but making a great generalised engine that can support a wide range of activities as the plot demands.

While I’m going off on one, I should probably mention Silent Storm as well. The turn based tactics paradigm with a simulation taken to extremes that haven’t been replicated, well, anywhere. I would buy a game that reimplemented it’s mechanics in a modern engine in a femtosecond. Give it a character-driven story and you’d have an episodic game that could run and run.

report

report

He’d set up an AMS for himself so he kept popping back in the same area – I don’t think the thought of running away went through his mind, even with 6 Reavers floating around overhead.

That video was awesome – even had a couple of things just about right (GPS, self driving vehicles (see DARPA Grand Challenge)).

report

The teamfortress 2 previews way back when made me dream of multiplayer games where you could drive anywhere in tanks or fly or walk, engaging in delicious tactical teamplay – Battlefield 1942 and BF2 brought those, though didn’t pull off teamplay anywhere near as well as NS. Teamplay shouldn’t be something that’s coerced with point systems, but something absolutely necessary to survive.

report