By John Walker on December 9th, 2010 at 2:26 am.
It’s time for another round of my favourite gameshow: Guess The Genre! Watch the trailer below from indie audio and video production team, Digital Media Workshop, and try to guess exactly what type of game Prominence is going to be.
So my first guess was space strategy. Then I figured maybe a more simplistic space shopping game. But maybe a first person shooter? Or, could it be – ooh, third person adventure. Here’s the story:
You awaken…
A glow too dim to be anything but emergency lighting illuminates the room. Computer screens and electronic equipment here remain dark, unpowered and unresponsive. A gurney, some sort of sophisticated surgical device, an overturned medicine cart, a bioscanner…nothing looks familiar. Or does it?
What is this place? How did you get here? What has happened?
We’ll keep an eye on it.
It’s? I don’t get it?
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I am eternally grateful that the people on this site not only know the difference, but they actually care enough to point it out. Allow me to join the movement: John, if that apostrophe is a joke, please explain it to us lesser folk. If it isn’t, please remove it post-haste. We rely on RPS to bring proper grammar and punctuation to the masses.
I wish I were kidding.
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It is? Am I missing something? Is “it’s” no longer the contraction for it is or it has? Am I asking questions about grammar on RPS? What has my life become? What brand of breakfast cereal should I buy?
When I see posts like this I have to wonder if my entire life is a lie.
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They mean the one in the title.
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@johntheemo: The title of the post is “Sticking It’s Nose Out”. It should be “Its”.
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Ahahah, God, I’m blind. Well, I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t decide to be super-snarky about it, eh?
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I am angry. ANGRY ABOUT GRAMMAR
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It’s obviously a Stephen King reference.
(I haven’t actually watched the trailer. But it might be!)
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John probably meant to write “Sticking Its’ Nose Out”.
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No, not it’s OR its’ unless it’s an obscure joke. GRAMMUR LEZZON TYME!
It’s is the conjunction of it, and is. It means it is. As in, it’s silly that so many people use the wrong it’s or its.
Its is possessive ownership, as in, A male Peacock in mating season will use its feathers to attract a mate.
Its’ would only be used if it was a proper noun, like say if your best friend was literally named Its. This can be gray territory, but generally this would be the only use.
Not sure if you should use its or it’s? Generally, if it’s fits, use it instead. If it’s a conjunction, use the base words to see if it fits.
AND S’TOP PLACING APOS’TROPHE’S EVERYWHERE FOR NO REAS’ON!
Thank you.
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@DJ Phantoon:
Their holding there children hostage, over they’re!!
Your wrong, sir.
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How could you people be so nitpickety as to argue over proper grammar when you could be having so much more fun guessing what time of game this is?
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“The brains of a pedant however full, are vacant.”
(sorry)
Also this looks curiously awesome.
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lurkalisk: Indeed; I too wish to know what time of game this is. I think it will be a morning game… around 7:30 am… late April, or early May… of 1908, if I’m not mistaken.
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You people terrify the life out of me.
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“The brains of a pedant however full, are vacant.”
Oooh, I like that. That’s going in my general put-down repertoire. Thanks!
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http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ive-noticed-a-minor-grammatical-balls-up-on-your-site-can-i-tell-you-youre-stupid/
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Wow, really?
Give the guy a break man, he posted this at 2am. Stuff like this just happens, I don’t know why people get so up in arms about it. Even if you’re deliberately overexaggerating it’s still pointless.
There’s a pretty massive difference between knowing the correct grammar and making the odd mistake, when you write as much as these guys sometimes you just go into auto-pilot.
Yesterday I was writing something about “peace”, probably a couple of paragraphs, then I looked back over it and realised I’d consistently written “piece” instead and it looked ridiculous. Does this mean I don’t know the difference between “piece” and “peace”? No, no it doesn’t. I just had a lapse in concentration.
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Argh, trolls stop trolling. Seriously though, what does it mean? I think MD is right that he meant it as a Stephen King joke that just buzzed the barnyard and not a one of us farmhands looked up.
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I loathe incorrect apostrophes, and one of my favourite things is to take photographs of the most egregious examples (shop names, prominent signs, advertising campaigns across London for education).
So yes, this was a 2am mistake, due to tiredness. Embarrassing, ugly, and offensive to good grammar. The more sensible thing to do is politely point it out by email, and then it gets fixed.
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GRAMMAR! ANGER!
GRAMMANGER!
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@Jim – You would hate the Green King pub near me which advertises their fine range of lager’s on a large sign attached to their building.
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The best apostrophe abuse I ever saw was outside a pub near where I work, during the Ashes:
“Watch the Ashe’s here!”
HOW IS THAT ANYWHERE NEAR CORRECT OR SENSIBLE
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@John:
Ohhhhh. My (our) bad. Thanks for fixing it, anyway.
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The problem with ambiguous trailers like these is that now I have huge expectations of this being a combat oriented space fighting game where you can get into ships and walk around and I know Im going to feel crushed when I realize it’s just a survival horror FPS set in space.
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It didn’t strike me as ambiguous. It’s Space Myst.
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Judging by the footage in the trailer – I’d guess this game will be a first person adventure.
At least my first thoughts were System Shock with the atmosphere of Myst.
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Aha! Exactly what I was thinking. Well done that man!
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My guess is that this is a science fiction adventure game.
The trailer ends with the words “A science fiction adventure game”
Coincidence? YOU DECIDE!
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Space Amnesia?
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Oh, gods. PLEASE let this be Space Amnesia! I would buy that twice!
If it isn’t, Frictional, you have your next assignment. GO!
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First person puzzle/adventure. Akin to the later Myst games.
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Yeah, it’s pretty obviously Myst in space but with a 3D environment that, from the looks of things (that little snatch of an up/forwards arrow), you still have to click on to move through.
Hopefully it isn’t as random and as trial and error as Myst was though. God those freaking enigmatic levers and dials. What were they even doing.
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Thirded. Cleaner looking than the Myst 3D game though, so it has that going for it.
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Fourth’d (is that right?).
If this was going to be a sci-fi survival horror FPS, a monster would leap out of a vent and eat your face in the last 5 seconds. It didn’t, so I’m going for a pure adventure “solve the puzzles in space” game. That could be good, or very bad, depending on the writing. The writing in the trailer seems very space opera generic.
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I believe Fourthafied, fifthatronicked, sixalized and sevenalated are how the sequence goes. Because knowledge is power.
Fifthatronicked. I like how the level design is quite bare and textural detail is almost non-existant. Adds a strange quality, that.
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All right apart from one: It’s sixualised.
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+1 (I’m not even going to attempt to say septuplemised)
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Octoplated, although it might have inventory combination stuff, making it a mix of pure myst and older school stuff.
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Looks like the game won’t allow free movement which is a shame (if the latter part of the video is gameplay footage).
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I doubt this will be a survival horror FPS maybe a get out of the room kind of game?
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I was sorta thinking that. It definitely looks like it could be a really big and complicated room escape… which might be awesome!
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first person point and click survival horror in space
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Reminds me of RAMA in a good way.
Oh, my young impressionable mind, what tricks did you play to me.
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I once took an afternoon off work to play (and complete) Rama. Good times.
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You completed that game? I got tired of seeing Arthur C. Clarke telling me I buggered it up again and again. Maybe I should dig it up again now that I’m an adult with finely honed adventuring skills.
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Yes, I stuck at it. I am not sure if I even used a walkthrough or not – I can’t remember doing that. The curtains were shut and I was completely immersed for quite a few hours until I reached the end (just in time for my girlfriend getting home, so that I could pretend I’d been doing something productive all afternoon instead, like writing a novel).
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I’m going to guess it’s a future game.
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Medieval survival horror MMO. The spaceships are just to throw you off. You heard it here first.
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Space Penumbra.
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+1 to that, amigo. space penumbra fo sho
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We can only hope.
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Space Penumbra, but guessing from the footage, you can’t move from the center of the room. Going back retro style to those 4-directions labyrinth games!
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Hidden object game, obvs.
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FP Adventure game and I haven’t even looked at the trailer. Tip off? Only a FP Adventure game would have a name that ambiguous and pretentious.
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There’s that word again.
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Yeah, maybe all games should now be called by a strict practical convention.
Gun-shooter#23
Racing game number 6
Calling something “prominence” is neither ambigous or pretentious.
I think we have a ban on anyone using the word pretentious for the next 3 months.
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Is it just me, or does the screen at the beginning of the article, and the game’s description, both closely match The Infinite Ocean? I’m just going to ignore the trailer and tell myself that it’s a sequel!
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That’s what I was thinking myself, actually. I played that a few days ago and then today I played Digital: A Love Story after seeing it posted on this site. I believe that this site may have a pro-AI-feelings agenda.
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Could they have made the interface any more like Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, at all?
Sooo… I’m going to guess Uru in space. And from the looks of it, without the charm. That’s a shame.
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I’m not sure about charm. But without the jumping, which is not a shame at all.
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It’s clearly a Zuma clone with RPG/Strategy/Adventure elements.
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Genre: Screensafer…
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I’m going to stick my neck out and guess that it’s going to be a point-and-click science-fiction adventure that combines exploration and puzzle-solving to unravel a mystery through physical clues, audio recordings, data archives, and a damaged central computer system in need of repairs.
I also suspect it will be coming out in 2011 for Windows PC’s.
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I was struggling to understand at first. “[...] guess exactly what time of game Prominence is going to be.” Ain’t that suppose to be “type” instead of “time” ?
If it is I guess it’s going to be Myst / Atlantis / Titanic /etc. adventury game.
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Ditto with the “space adventure” genre. And John is probably just manipulating us with the title, cackling gleefully as our blood pressures rise over a skillfully ‘misplaced’ apostrophe.
Also, hello to you, RPS masses.
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It aka Pennywise. What if you had many Pennywise the clown would the plural of that be Its?
Anyways… it looks lika posh escape the room game
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Ooooo, interesting!
Reminds me very much of this upcoming game that RPS should really cover:
http://www.indiedb.com/games/copernicus-one
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Calling it now, ‘Prominence’ refers to some kind of solar flare.
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I’m having the most wonderful Crystal Key flashback. The things I love about the Crystal Key are in this trailer. And in promotional material for the Crystal Key for that matter. the little circle as the center reticule is what really sent me back, though … not sure how many other games use that cross-hair, but something had been nagging me since a large alien power ran into some even larger SNAFU of unknown nature. It had a lot of flaws, and I never finished the damn thing for various reasons, but something about that game got me really excited, other than it being rather pretty for the time. The same thing is drawing me in here.
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I think this should explain what this game’s all about:
http://i830.photobucket.com/albums/zz222/Dozer1986/myst2.jpg
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Holy shit he has amnesia GOTY.
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errr….. straight from the game site:
“With a highly immersive setting and first person viewpoint, Prominence is a point-and-click science-fiction adventure that offers players a chance to explore and discover the secrets behind a unique and mysterious high-tech facility.”
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Looking at the trailer makes the game too easy.
I predict it’s going to be a corridor painting simulator.
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Looks like a Science Fiction Adventure Game to me, which I deduce from in being in its tagline at the end.
KG
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Well yes, the point of the game was to guess as the trailer goes on.
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Ban ‘im, Walker!
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Any game (or book, or movie, or any other form of creative writing/direction) whose synopsis contains the phrase, “nothing [blah]. Or does it?” makes me want to stick my head in a bucket of Thatcher’s tampons.
They also appear to not have discovered textures, specular lighting or bumpmaps. Which for a point-and-click Myst-style puzzle game where you don’t even have to contend with moving lightsources is odd.
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One thousand points for that shudder-worthy image. Tampon Bucket. Tampucket.
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Oh come on, the bucket’s bone-dry and dusty now.
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The notion of a free roaming first person adventure puzzler ala Penumbra and amnesia with a sci-fi setting thirsting for System Shock blood got me throbbing.
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It’s free roaming but not in the WASD sense but in, from what i could tell from the trailer, discrete chunks of territory where you click on a direction and advance.
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It’s _obviously_ (look at the last part of video) a point-and-click Myst-like game in a 3D-environment.
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Dont get fooled, I seen very good fake of 3D in an adventure demo cycles ago, Imagine what can they do now.
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Peggle: Dead Space?
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Point & Click Adventure, same as Call of Duty, or Diablo.
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Paint and Puke arventure, I was right the whole way.
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This looked promising until I realized it was a point-and-click adventure where you “navigate” static environments, probably looking for impossible to find pixels
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This reminded me of “The Infinite Ocean”
Anyone else get that vibe?
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Prominence – set in Mass Effect 2 where everyone has died and there are no lighting details.
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Looks like either a point n click or a Penumbra in space type of deal. Interesting trailer though.
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Sim City clone.
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Very trekkie visuals.
And I’m going to join those that say this is another Myst clone.
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Can I be a cool rebel and call it a Mission Critical clone?
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Still better than the Arkham City trailer, whatever it is.
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