Game Design & Dev

So, let me guess... You haven't played Rochard yet. In fact, there's probably a pretty good chance you haven't even heard of it—and that's a damned shame, since it's one of the best download-only titles I've played all year. I gave it an absolutely glowing review, but a game like this deserves more. So, in my pursuit of fighting the good fight, I'd like to present this brief interview I was fortunate enough to have with the Lead Level Designer of Rochard, Samuli Viikinen.

Unlike previous entries in the Deus Ex franchise, Human Revolution has a clearly characterized protagonist. Except for his extremely dry sense of humor, J.C. Denton was essentially a blank slate for the player, and Alex Denton had even fewer set characteristics. Adam Jensen, on the other hand, comes into his game with a long, involved backstory and several pre-existing relationships.

The boss battles in Deus Ex: Human Revolution suck. Hard. The people of the Internet appear to agree on this notion. While they aren’t game-breakers, they are clumsy and uninspired bullet sponges whose design runs counter to the nature of the rest of the game.

I covered this a bit in the review, but it's important to reiterate—leveling up implies things to the player that Dead Island doesn't deliver. Extra health is meaningless, extra damage is meaningless—over the course of the game zombies will always take the exact same number of hits to kill, so all the experience I'm gaining doesn't seem to serve any purpose.

During the "Females on Female Characters" panel at PAX East 2011, Susan Arendt argued briefly in support of Tripitaka (Trip), a character from Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. This appreciation seemed bizarre to me, so the moment stuck in my mind. Enslaved was a gorgeous game with phenomenal voice acting, decently expressive gameplay, and very bad writing, of which I thought Trip was a prime example.

There have been a lot of advancements and positives for console gaming over the course of this console generation. Many games sport high-definition graphics and top-notch sound. Online play gives players the option to be social with friends all over the globe, if they so choose. The rapid rise of social media has put the industry and its fans closer together than ever before. Gradually, though, this generation's negatives and general anti-consumer trends have wiped out a lot of of those positives for me.

The console video gaming industry has successfully trained consumers to expect downloadable content for most new games over the course of this generation. We know it's coming. It's rarely a question of if… but when.

Rage was one of the games that impressed me at E3 back in June. It had a Borderlands vibe to it, but substituted more realistic graphics than the cel-shaded approach that Gearbox Software had taken. The game ran at 60 frames per second, even at an early stage, and was fun to play. My interest level shot up for Rage, and it had been on my wishlist with growing excitement.

I must begin with a disclaimer that I didn't like Shadows of the Damned very much, and I'm not sure if I'll bother finishing it (this coming from a man who didn't even give up on Flower, Sun, and Rain). The gameplay is standard, if unusually finicky, third-person shooting that borrows a stun mechanic from Alan Wake, the art direction is not particularly interesting, and the humor is something I'm about 20 years too old to appreciate.

Those of us who spend a lot of time discussing the various artistic and narrative merits and failures of games often try to avoid "fun" as a measure of success.  For one thing, it's so subjective as to be meaningless: plenty of people seem to think that Mortal Kombat or Gran Turismo or flight sims are fun, and I personally would rather watch paint dry.