Adam Foster has released the 2nd episode of his rather excellent Half-Life 2 map series MINERVA: Metastasis. Short and sweet, it’s a lot of fun. I keep hoping he will get some voice work done for his “unknown third party”, but maybe he’s not into that. We’ll see what episode 3 brings. In the meantime, he shares his thoughts on level design with Idle Thumbs here. Interesting stuff.
In Brief
How refreshing to read about the look of an FPS game without having to hear a string of “normal map” this, “pixel shader” that buzzwords. Richard Jolly talks about how Splash Damage arrived at the visual style of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, a game which also proves how effective and powerful good screenshot composition can be to a game’s marketing.
“I heard once that a paranoia is just another form of self-absorption. If you think that everyone is out to get you, then you must think the world revolves around you. That intrigued me a lot, because I liked to imagine the inner world of this person where the whole world revolved around him, where even the streets wrapped around his house like spiderweb, with him in the middle.”
Tim Schafer discusses making Psychonauts. Surely some of the greatest level design ever to grace a game.
When pondering Roger Ebert’s comments about games and art a while back, I wondered aloud whether the story in Tim Schafer’s Full Throttle would be much changed if it was presented as an animated film rather than a game. Rather pleasantly, it seems someone a couple of weeks later had the same thought and decided to put it to the test by cutting the game into a full-blown hour long film. Check it out here.
Nintendo executives are rarely seen in public these days without mentioning their “Touch Generations” series of products, which aim to get non-gamers playing (and buying) more games. Nintendogs is the most prominent member on both sides of the world, but the other major standard bearer of the series, Brain Training, has yet to see a release in either America or Europe. Brain Training’s precise nature has remained something of a mystery to me, so I enjoyed reading this writeup on the game.
Knowing more about the nature of the game, I’m really eager to see whether it plays out the same success when transplanted from its native habitat to the west, early this year. It’s intriguing to watch how Nintendo handle the novel marketing and retail challenges the game poses.