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Prototype’s a game about having absurd powers – here I am surfing a man’s corpse – and you earn a steady stream of new ones until the end of the game. Those powers are what makes it fun. But the sheer number you have access to by the end of the game turns the controls into a finger-breakingly awkward mess of accidental stunts misfiring while you desperately will your hoodied twat to do what that combination of buttons used to or should do. There’s also a redundant level of redundant redundancy: there are about seven powers that deal damage to everyone around you, and no reason to use any but the one that deals the most. The best powers are good against both large infected like Hunters and armoured vehicles like Tanks, and the only other type of enemy, crowds of zombies or soldiers, are never a threat. You fall into a pattern of using the most powerful for every situation, and your brain disengages.
I’d trim the powers dramatically and give each set a narrower range of uses, so there’s a reason to switch between them. I’d also make each upgradable three times, so that you still have loads of options for what to spend your experience on. I’d also want dangerous enemies among the crowds: military deathsquads with guns customised to seriously hurt you, and proto-zombies with claws like yours that really sting if they reach you in one piece. It’d give power sets one more thing to be good or bad at, and coupled with stronger differentiation could require that you actually think about which to use and upgrade. Here’s how it’d work:  This power doesn’t let you do anything new, just increases the damage of all your basic combat moves. There’s no point in using it until you upgrade it to be more damaging than your proper powers, when it becomes so powerful that there’s no point in using anything else. In both cases, it poses no interesting decisions. I’d scrap it completely.  Primary attack: slash while running. Lets you plough through crowds hardly breaking pace, is okay against Hunters, bad against tanks. Upgrades increase the speed you move while attacking, up to full sprint. Secondary attack: digs one hand into the ground to stop dead and swing the round in a wide arc, doing damage proportional to your speed when used. Decent against everything. Jumping attack: lunges claws-first at a target, skewering fleshy ones or latching onto vehicles for a hijack. Upgades increase how far you can lunge. Currently, since claws are less damaging and no faster than other powers, they’re just flat out worse. I’d make this the only mode in which you can pick up and throw large objects. Picking up the wrong thing is the number 2 cause of death among prototypes, a recent study revealed, so assigning one mode to be the chuck-stuff mode means you’re never going to grab a taxi instead of an army sergeant in any other mode. In a similar vein, you should be able to pick up weapons in any power mode, only when you’re a normal human. The previous Claws secondary attack was cool but had little to do with claws – I’d keep it as a Devastator move instead.  Primary attack: pounds slowly directly ahead, no splash damage. Slow against crowds, okay against Hunters, great against tanks. The idea is that this mode should be all about flinging your enormous weight about, dropping on stuff and knocking choppers out of the air. Right now this is an anti-tank mode that’s not as good against tanks as Blade or Musclemass, and its star move is an elbow drop that’s not as good as the Musclemass Bullet Dive, so it’s utterly redundant.  Primary attack: Whips ahead, killing things in a long but narrow cone. Meek against everything, but potentially hits more stuff at once. Upgrades increase length of whip and hence size of cone. This mode would still be for when you’re concentrating on a specific target, whether to hijack it, eliminate it quickly or keep damaging it while staying away from it.  Primary attack: slashes and moves forwards at a decent rate. Okay for crowds, great for Hunters, not great for tanks. Upgrades increase speed. The only trouble with Blade as it stands is that it’s great against tanks too, which makes everything else except Musclemass obsolete. And Musclemass makes Blade obsolete.  All moves scrapped except punch, kick, flying kick and bodysurf. Anything that doesn’t require a specific keypress can stay in as an automatic flourish. And as mentioned, this is now the only mode in which you can pick up and use weapons. Useless, all scrapped for simplicity.  Shield: as current, but upgradable to increase the amount of damage it can take before breaking.
I like the current ones, but I’d like even more the ability to specialise, find cool combos of Defense and Offense powers, then upgrade the bejesus out of them.  Free running is already fun, but it’s reliant on using this very artificial airdash that shoots you forwards in a not very physically convincing way. It also really hurts my fingers to do it a lot. I’d like it if, once you were airbourne, there was only one control: Glide: press jump while airborne to toggle. All your velocity, downward and otherwise, is translated into forward velocity, letting you get enormous speeds by jumping from a great height and activating it at the last minute. Once gliding, you can angle it up to gain height and lose a bit of speed, or down to lose height and gain speed. The idea is to combine it with wall-runs along skyscrapers to gain height without losing speed, then spend that height on an extra boost by diving.
Currently, Prototype has over fifty distinct powers that require different button combinations. This would be a little over twenty, all told; none that require simultaneous button presses and none with overlapping controls. But the hope is that it’d make it a more complex game, because the fifty powers it currently has don’t have even twenty meaningfully diffrent uses – they have about six.
More Amateur Hour
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I wrote this post – a rant I’ve bored many friends with about how BioShock should have ended – on the 10th of October 2008, but never got round to taking shots for it. Then on February 10th, I got to see what 2K Marin are doing for BioShock 2. And annoyingly, some of it overlaps with what I suggest here. That meant a) I couldn’t post this, since this would look like me leaking the details I was under a non-disclosure agreement to keep secret, and b) by the time I could post this, those details would have been announced and it would seem woefully unoriginal. I’m posting it anyway. It’s my plan, in ten steps, for what should happen after your encounter with Andrew Ryan in his office.
1) As in the game, Fontaine forces you to hand control of Rapture over to him using Ryan’s key. You can’t help but obey. I’m also going to add a few comments on these steps as I go along, there’s no need to read these if you just want the gist. This one’s a note about voice acting. Atlas has a very exaggerated, slightly comic Irish accent. I wish that when he turned out to be Fontaine, his true voice was very plain, deadpan and serious: I think the contrast could have felt really menacing. Instead he turns into just a different kind of sing-song histrionic moustache-twirler, and that’s a shame.
2) Tenenbaum manages to reach you on the radio for the first time since you entered Ryan’s office. Having heard about your command phrase, she asks if you would kindly DROP THE GODDAMN RADIO then meet her at her nearby hideout. Seriously dude, once you’ve found out someone who can violate your mind is on the other end of it, you lose the goddamn wireless. If the Would You Kindly command to pick it up in the first place prevents that, TURN IT OFF. Either way, since Tenenbaum knows about your conditioning, she could order you to do it. This is fridge logic at its worst.
3) At the Little Sister sanctuary, Tenenbaum impresses on you that Fontaine is nearly unstoppable now that his genetic key is tied to Rapture, since Vita Chambers now work for him rather than you. This factor never came up in the game, but to me it seems like the most important part of the handover of control to Fontaine: it would make him invincible, and you vulnerable. Double strange since 2K evidently wanted you vulnerable for the final fight, but didn’t seem able to think of a reason why you would be. So instead we get an unspeakably lame text box popping up to tell us that we are, just before we ascend to fight Fontaine. A good design tenet is that if you need a pop-up text box to do something, it’s not worth doing.
4) She explains that the only way to stop someone who’s invincible within Rapture is to flood the whole city. You have to breach a wall in the central ventilation system, but the only thing that could drill through glass that thick and survive the ensuing flood is a Big Daddy. The whole mood of the game is about the menacing inevitability of the sheer force of the sea. Enormous work went into making every room and every corridor of the whole city scream “THIS PLACE IS GOING TO FREAKING FLOOD!” To make a game about this place which ends without oceanic incident is pretty goddamn absurd.
5) You have to become a Big Daddy. Tenenbaum tells you how, and says to meet her at the bathysphere station you came in on once you’ve breached Central Ventilation. Near the Little Sister orphanage, there’s an iron-maiden-like steampunk machine that stitches you agonisingly into the suit. People who say BioShock should have ended in Ryan’s office surely can’t have paid much attention to the game thereafter. Some of the most fascinating places and moving scenes are in that final section, and the places where Little Sisters and Big Daddies are indoctrinated are two I’d want to work in before all this.
6) Once Big Daddied, you’re virtually impervious to the Splicers between you and Central Ventilation – you can drill them in the face or charge them with right mouse to knock them flying. When you reach it, there’s an obvious crack in the glass there to drill. It’s tough to model what happens to a live human when you put a conical drill into them, so let’s just have them die when it hits. There’d be no pacing reason to make this section challenging – it’s the reward for the terrible thing you’ve just done to yourself. Vita-Chambers no longer work for you, so challenge runs a higher risk of frustration anyway.
7) When the wall is breached, the force of the ocean smashes you into the opposite wall. But once recovered, you can stomp out of the wrecked room and out onto the sea bed. All around you can sea water surging through Rapture’s walkways and buildings, spreading out from Central Ventilation. I was slightly sad that after that enchanting vista on the way in, you never got an impressive overview of Rapture’s scale again. This would be that, but with a twist of drama.
8) There’s an airlock that gets you into a room adjacent to the flooding station, but the door between the two slams shut just as you arrive. Through the glass, you see Fontaine wade over to the bathysphere where Tenenbaum is helping Little Sisters inside. He cocks a custom shotgun and blows her away without a word. Her body bobs and twitches in the water, Little Sisters scream blue murder. There’s only one way out. Tenenbaum wants it for the sisters, Fontaine wants it for himself, and whatever your plans, you need it.
9) There’s a conspicuous crack in the glass between the two rooms which you can drill through to break in. Some Little Sisters are already inside the Bathysphere, the rest are huddled on a windowsill by the door – the water is thigh-high on Fontaine in here, so it’s already too deep for them to cross. A watery end – both to the game and to whoever dies in this scene – seems appropriate.
10) Fontaine attacks you immediately, and his weapon is vicious enough to significantly hurt you. He’s an unspliced human, however, so a single ram or stab of your drill kills him gruesomely. Only for him to respawn ten seconds later, from the nearby Vita Chamber. The idea, of course, is that your final fight with Fontaine should be a reversal of all those Big Daddy battles you’ve had. They were big and tough, but you could respawn again and again. It always seemed like the hardest decision to make in BioShock was not what to do with the Little Sisters, but whether to attack the Big Daddies in the first place. Getting to feel what it’s like from their perspective could be a fun play on that. At this point, you’ve got two options: A) If you don’t care about the Little Sisters, you’ll have to physically drag the ones already inside the bathysphere out before there’s room for you to get in. You can leave them splashing in the water anywhere. Once you’re in, closing the door behind you activates the bathysphere. Before it rises, Fontaine appears at the window, screaming something you can’t quite hear through the glass. You ascend, and the end scene rolls. B) If you want to save them, you can pick one of the huddling ones up from the windowsill in your enormous hands and carry her over to the bathysphere.
End scene: You, as a Big Daddy, standing motionless as the water rises time-lapse fast, everything zipping in motion-blur streaks around you. As soon as our view is underwater, everything goes silent and slow. The body of a little sister drifts slowly past behind you, its back to us. When all is still, Fontaine suddenly scrambles into view, thrashing spasmically, screaming bubbles, clutching his throat, red in the face. After some violent jerks, he lies completely still. A few seconds pass, then a light flicks on in the background. We cut to a close-up of it: after a beat, the Vita Chamber doors slide open and Fontaine bursts out again, screaming bubbles louder and louder as he thrashes towards us, and his terrified face almost fills the frame before we cut to black. Fin! Obviously this needs to be re-rendered a few different ways:
More Amateur Hour, BioShock
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MagoRibia: Hello, I'm new here and want to say hello, all what I love to do is playing games so decide to share what I know better I have several favorite games and now I'm playing this game http://www.playcrg.c... ...Tanks.html
please share your games too :) :) | ||||
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It turns out that if you start talking about Mirror’s Edge in the Future offices, pretty soon a small crowd gathers to weigh in. In a group of editors and writers – one who gave it nine out of ten and another who thinks five was too high – it turns out we mostly agree. We all love to run, and we all get angry when we’re stopped by something difficult. Most of my suggestions for the combat with cops would make it less difficult, and hopefully less awkward. But it can’t get so easy that you don’t feel threatened, and the grander issue is that it needs to be more avoidable. So this is about that. The police choppers already work well as a propulsive force for the chase sequences that doesn’t often lead to death or frustration. But I’d like to change each of the three types of ground enemies, and how they’re used.
Cops: Not allowed to fire until they’ve issued two verbal warnings (“Freeze!” – “Stop or I will shoot!”) giving you a window to take one out or escape. Obviously once you’ve attacked one, others in the area can open fire. When they do hit, damage is much more serious – two hits kill – but they’re still wildly inaccurate. It becomes more of a tactical puzzle about how not to get shot, and the way forward never depends on turning a slow valve, climbing a slow pipe or working out where to head.
SWAT: Armoured and with two-handed weapons, these guys can’t be disarmed. But they’re only ever sent after you, so you never have to get past them to progress. They can be killed with stolen cop weapons, knocked out if you drop on them, or pushed into danger by a melee attack.
Chasers: Right now these guys have tazers, which are just kind of annoying. I think they should have mace. They should be knocked back by any melee move – to their death if they’re on a ledge – but if they get right up to you, they grab you and spray a blinding teargas in your eyes, sending your vision haywire and making you scream. You can try to flee while blinded, but if you don’t get away your third macing incapacitates you, and it’s game over. Being chased was the perfect way to escalate Mirror’s Edge, but the Pursuit Cops are just so lame in combat; dancing about, tickling you with electricity and mild punching. I want to be freaking terrified of these guys. It would help if they didn’t look like dorks.
So one set is easy to deal with, another is hard to deal with but easy to avoid, and the last is hard to deal with or avoid – so do whichever you’re best at. I found lots of fun ways to lure Chasers into positions where I could knock them off a building, but bizarre rules meant that more often than not, I was the one knocked back by the crucial blow. I was saying the other day that no matter how often the game explicitly tells you to stop and fight, the player still tries to run right past. Replaying the early sections at lunch today, I realised there’s actually a forced pop-up message in the prologue chapter that says “Always try to get away from enemies.” It couldn’t feel more like two different games that were code-merged at the last minute.
More Amateur Hour, Mirror's Edge
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Post Maker: I'll have to give that a look then; the majority of levels were frustrating enough to play through once, so the idea of playing them while timed didn't appeal to me very much. If they have that ghost info though, I'm willing to give them a proper try.
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Having played it through three times in English and once in Italian, it’s starting to look like I might be obsessed with Mirror’s Edge. This is my fifth post about it, and not my last. But even I think the combat is weirdly bad, and so easily fixable that you start to wonder what went on in DICE’s offices. There’s no way they had a roomful of testers play this and everyone said “Yep, seems fine.” The three parts of it suck in different ways, and my proposed fixes are of equal obviosity.
Like Tuesdays, the melee combat in Mirror’s Edge has no feel. Despite loading-screen guff about run-ups giving your flying kicks more damage, every blow bounces off every enemy, triggering a fake ‘stagger’ animation. Nothing is physical, everything is the result of abstract rules. If I, an unarmed action hero, manage to run at a firing gunman and flying-kick him in the face before he kills me, it has to knock him down. Look into your hearts, DICE, you know this to be true. It’s a fundamental axiom of awesome, like glass breaking when I dive through it. The same goes for slide-kicks to the groin, which should lift your victim momentarily from the ground as he’s propelled backwards onto his ass. Punches should be weak, of course, which is precisely why there shouldn’t be any. You’re a slim woman with unprotected hands, it’s just not wise to hit someone wearing full body armour. If you’re sprinting when you collide with them, the impact should make them stagger. If you’re stationary, Attack should do the same as Disarm – recall that the Disarm button is actually the “Beat them up and disarm them” button.
Waiting for an enemy’s weapon to flash red during a specific frame of the same nonsensical shoulder-nudge they each perform is preposterous. I feel like I’m standing there as a favour to the game’s animators, because they only know how to show me grabbing a wrist in one particular position. It’s a terrible challenge, relying either on using slow-mo so slow that the wait becomes boring, or learning the animations by rote to anticipate the absurdly brief red flash. Design tip! You’re supposed to hide – not force me to study – ridiculous conceits like canned animations. Disarming should always work – slowly if they’re firing at you when you initiate it, quickly if they’re staggered or prone. Enemy’s shouldn’t try to nudge you with their weapons in close combat: you’re still in front of their gun, there’s no reason for them to stop firing. Instead they should start to run backwards as you approach, trying to keep you at a distance.
I love all the different words reviewers have found for this: loose, hollow, shaky, weak, fuzzy, bland. Obviously to make an unprecedented free-running game you can’t devote the time and budget it would take to make a really punchy shooter too. I wish DICE had seen the bright side of this, though: they didn’t have to! Shooting doesn’t have to take up the player’s time or be their source of fun. You can just have guns outright fucking kill people, the way they actually would. Hitman’s the closest model of what I’m talking about: it doesn’t make a great shooter and it doesn’t have to. You spend most of your time in situations where you can’t viably open fire, so enemies don’t have to be tough and interesting challenges when you do. They can just die. Once you’ve got hold of a gun in Mirror’s Edge, it should make a lot of noise, have a lot of kick, miss a lot at range, but kill when it hits. If some of this sounds like it would make the combat too easy, that might be because I think the combat should be easy. But I also think it should be used in a completely different way, and I think I’m going to have to make that post number 6. P.S. Graham’s blog Zeitgasm has also been redesigned, and is also harping on about Mirror’s Edge in tones I mostly agree with. 83% though, honestly.
More Amateur Hour, Mirror's Edge
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Anthony: The reason that Faith bounces back when she kicks is because they have tough armor. I semi-agree with you though. A flying kick should definitely cause a CPF policeman to fly backward. The more armor they have, the more recoil bounce (like the PK SWATs for example). I think the punches should still be in, it's particularly useful if you get cornered by a CPF. Also, they nudge you to push you back to continue shooting you as you stagger. They're tough, no reason to back up defensively. As far as shooting goes, I think it's perfectly fine. I've heard people say that the aiming is poor or whatever but I think it's just them because I nail 'em every time. Perhaps an auto aim feature would be useful?
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To commemorate my 100th hour playing as him, and since he’s clearly next in Valve’s update schedule, it seemed appropriate to take a swing at a Meet The Spy script. It’s a moronic undertaking, of course, because the real one will be humiliatingly superior. He’s an easy target, because he’s basically made of dramatic irony – but that also leaves a minefield of awful clichés to step around. Anything that involves someone we believe not to be a Spy turning out to be a Spy is automatically dross. I love the bit in Meet The Sniper when our man wonders aloud whether he’s been spotted – and is then copiously shot at. Acknowledging the concerns that go through your head playing as him felt truer and funnier than these scenes where the starring class automatically wins against all-comers. So this script is mostly focused around the characteristic moments of playing a Spy. I reject the perception that he is unwaveringly aloof: aloof, sure, but he’s all about the wavering. No other class experiences more moment-to-moment panic or humiliation. A warning, though: it’s long.  1. INT — BRIEFING ROOM — DAY — PRESENT The title card vanishes to reveal the edge of a table. With a sudden bang, a blue briefcase is slammed down onto it, then clicked open by two gloved hands.
Zoom out to reveal a Red Team SPY as he slouches down into a chair, Blue Team corpses of various classes strewn around the briefing room. He takes a wad of papers from the briefcase, licks a gloved fingertip for purchase, and leafs through them uninterestedly. As usual, his accent takes a drunken tour of Western Europe as he speaks.
He rips the topsheet from a dossier, draws his cigarette case, opens a small compartment containing tobacco and, in a deft yet impossible to animate movement, rolls it into a smokeable.
He reaches down and lifts the nozzle of a dead Pyro’s Backburner and lights his intelligence roll-up on the pilot light. He takes a few puffs, then points it at us.
With a black loafer, he gently kicks the cranium of a dead Heavy at his feet. A lump of part-chewed Sandvich drops from his slack craw and his tongue lolls out.
 2. EXT — DUSTBOWL, TUNNEL — DAY — PAST Our red Spy, running along a tunnel, cloaks. We can still see him as a red silhouette. Blues pour in: a HEAVY, SCOUT, PYRO, DEMOMAN. The Spy has to flatten himself utterly against the wall to avoid brushing the Heavy, dash to the other side to avoid the Scout, dive clean over the Pyro just as he blasts a gout of spychecking flame, land into a forwards roll, and stand up face to face with the obviously intoxicated Demoman, who chooses that moment to stop dead and take a swig of his bottle. The silhouette tries to go round him to the left, but the Demoman staggers in that direction as he drinks. He tries the right, with the same result. He gives up and stands impatiently as the Demoman glugs, and glugs, and glugs. The silhouette looks at its watch, taps its foot. At last the Demoman advances, veering drunkenly into one wall then the other, and the silhouette tiptoes carefully around him. And slams into an identical blue silhouette, shimmering in and out of visibility.
Both step back in apparent shock, draw their revolvers, then cautiously circle one another until they have switched. Then, without taking their eyes off each other, they walk backwards in their original direction, and eventually turn to run full-speed.
The blue silhouette ducks round the corner and decloaks – a fully visible BLUE SPY, smirking. Simultaneously our man exits the tunnel…
 3. EXT — DUSTBOWL, CAP 3 — DAY — PAST …and slips away to the side, decloaks and straps on a paper mask with a Spy’s face on it.
He waits until the Blue Spy also exits the tunnel in search of him, and gives chase just inches behind. As he does so, a blue MEDIC spots them and gives chase. The three run to:
 4. EXT – DUSTBOWL, APPROACH TO CAP 4 — DAY — PAST
Meanwhile our man is swishing and thrusting his knife just centimeters from the enemy’s back, and finally he cuts a corner that his target does not. The knife sinks in, our man’s mask drops to the floor, the real blue Spy’s eyes widen, and he drops to his knees.
Our man leaves his knife in his victim’s back, and instead pries the Blue Spy’s knife from his hand before he collapses.
We dolly with the Medic as he arrives on the scene, just in time to see the Spy take a different corridor back to Cap 3. We lose sight of the Spy just before arriving back at:
 5. EXT — DUSTBOWL, CAP 3 — DAY — PAST We cut to a close-up of his narrowed eyes as they scan his team for suspicious activity, then pan across the team itself: A SNIPER squats on the control point on the far right, peering down his scope. A SOLDIER trundles forth from the trench in the center. On the left, an ENGINEER and a Spy wearing an unconvincing Engineer mask stand either side of a level three SENTRY, facing away from it in opposite directions. The Medic’s gaze pauses on them, then pans slowly back to the Soldier, none the wiser. Before the Engineer leaves the frame, he turns and notices the Spy standing next to him. He reacts and thumps his wrench menacingly into his open palm. The oblivious Spy, without looking round, reaches back and slaps an Electro-Sapper onto the Sentry. We pan away before we see the Engy’s reaction, as the Medic suspiciously watches the Soldier rocket-jump over his head, but we hear:
And the sounds of vigorous Sentry-wrenching and sapper-fritzing.
He turns and leaves for the front line.
6. INT — BRIEFING ROOM — DAY — PRESENT The Spy is lounging in the same seat where we left him, makeshift cigarette halfburnt and forgotten in his right hand, twirling an Engineer’s hardhat on his left. He contemplates the hat.
The hardhat slips from his finger and clatters to the briefing-room floor behind him. The sound snaps him out of his reverie and he sits up straight.
7. EXT — DUSTBOWL, CAP 3 — DAY — PAST The Engy chases the disguised Spy around the Sentry, the Spy slapping Sappers on the device, the Engy knocking them off with his wrench. By now they’re wading noisily through a heap of thirty bashed-in sappers on the ground. The Engy suddenly reverses direction to catch the Spy, but the Spy doubles back just in time to stay out of range.
He jumps to slap a sapper on top of the Sentry.
He ducks to affix one underneath it.
As the Engy pauses to reach each one with his Wrench, the Spy catches up behind him and shivs him in the spine. At the precise moment of impact, his mask drops to the floor.
His eyes close. The Spy begins to brush dust from his suit and opens his mouth to speak, then…
…his eyes widen in alarm, and he dives into the nearby hut under a hail of fire. We cut to a Sentry’s-eye view: a green nightvision-style view of the scene with an overlayed wireframe. A box around the entrance to the hut is labelled:
After lingering on it for a moment, it pans abruptly to the corpse of the Engineer, draws a box around it, and adds the tag:
The view pans back to the hut, and our Spy is now standing exactly in the “MEATBAG” box wearing the Engineer mask again. The view zooms in on the mask and clarifies the resolution, then a box pops up labelled:
We see gurning mugshots of each of the nine classes flicker past, the Pyro in a party hat, the Demoman holding up an identity plate at a police station, the Scout in the Heavy’s headlock, until it settles on the Engineer, which is labelled “FATHER”. A new line prints below this:
As it writes, the Spy approaches and withdraws another Sapper. This is highlighted in a box labelled:
The Spy slaps a sapper directly over our view, turning everything black except the text.
8. INT — BRIEFING ROOM — DAY — PRESENT Our man has his feet up on the table, tapping ash into a Soldier’s upturned helmet on the desk.
9. INT — DUSTBOWL, TUNNEL — DAY — PAST Our Spy is trundling along in a theatrical imitation of the Heavy’s gun-burdened waddle, clutching his tiny revolver in both hands as if it is enormously heavy, wearing a Heavy mask and bellowing for a Medic in a pitch-perfect Heavy voice. Soon the Medic returns from the frontline and latches on to him.
The Spy takes a moment to strap on a new Heavy mask that bears a broad grin.
Soon they reach the four attackers the Spy passed on his way in. As our Spy approaches, we see a close-up of his grinning Heavy mask, and we move into slow-mo as he pointlessly slaps a baleful one on top of it. His balisong rises gradually in his hand until it is poised to strike, then the three Heavy masks fall from his face in rapid succession: angry, happy, grim, then his real expression: a contorted rictus of fury and dark anticipatory delight. His knife curves slowly downwards, but before it hits we cut to:
10. INT — BRIEFING ROOM — DAY — PRESENT The Spy swings his legs down off the table and leans towards us, eyes narrowed, intense.
He draws his balisong from his blazer pocket and raises it for emphasis.
With the final word he brings his knife down a third time, but an instant before we would see it hit, we cut back to: 11. INT — DUSTBOWL, TUNNEL — DAY — PAST Close up on the Medic’s face – a vision of dismay. There’s the characteristic critical-hit backstab boom! and:
We see flecks of blood splatter the Medic’s face, causing his horrified expression to flinch. Another critical-stab sound:
Another stab, another splash of blood, another flinch:
Stab, splat, flinch:
The Medic’s face is now glistening with blood. His eyes narrow, he grits his teeth, spits a gob of swallowed blood to the floor, and we pull back to see him draw his Ubersaw. Dolly with the Medic as he pursues the fleeing Spy. As they exit the tunnel towards Cap 4, we cut to the chase from the side: the Doc is clearly gaining. But when the Spy reaches the large rock near the cap, he suddenly trots to a halt, spins around and calmly draws his cigarette case. The Medic is an inch from him when he comes into view of a level three red Sentry on his right, which-
-pummels him gracelessly into a rock. The spy brushes at a speck of blood on his suit, and begins:
Hot spurts of blood geyser horrifically from the Medic’s gibbering corpse, splattering the Spy. The Spy irritably wipes his face with a gloved hand and starts again.
The spy glares at it, soaked in blood.
Cut to:
 12. TEAM FORTRESS 2 LINE-UP SPLASH The usual suspects, the usual tune. Zoomed, of course, to our man. Beat.
13. INT — BRIEFING ROOM — DAY — PRESENT The Spy is still stabbing the table in a frenzy, woodchips and spittle flinging in all directions, when finally he senses us and looks up, suddenly aware of what he’s doing. His stabbing hand slows until the knife-tip is just tapping gently on the table’s lacquered surface, then he composes himself, flips the knife’s blade back into its housing in a complicated twirl and tucks it back into his jacket pocket.
He tosses a dossier back into the briefcase, clicks it shut, takes it by the handle and stands up.
He tosses his lit cigarette over his shoulder as he leaves, igniting the Medic’s coat. He straightens his tie before approaching the camera. We zoom out to reveal:
 14. INT — 2FORT, BLU INTELLIGENCE ROOM — DAY — PRESENT The Spy steps through a perfectly Spy-shaped hole already cut in the glass wall between the briefing room and the intel chamber. A Spy-shaped piece of glass is propped against the desk outside. A Soldier, Demoman and Heavy guard the two corridors leading in, all facing away from the Spy, and he mimes an eenie-meanie-miny-moe game to decide who to stab first. He’s interrupted by a sudden pop! as the now huge briefing room fire reaches the Heavy’s ammo belt. All three Blues freeze, and the Spy winces as a rapid series of small explosions causes everyone to spin round and glare at him. Finally, the Pyro’s propane tank blows the entire glass wall out. The Spy stands frozen, mid-flinch, shoulders hunched, face screwed up, as the last fragments of glass tinkle to the floor and the three stare expectantly.
 15. END TITLES W/BOX ART Team Fortress 2, available now, buy it I guess, yada yada.
More Amateur Hour, Team Fortress 2
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Post 500, by Tom Francis: [...] A Stab At Meet The Spy Which, as everyone pointed out, was too long. Then Meet The Spy actually came out, and was more [...]
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1. The Invincible Hero You are ein superhero – perhaps of your own design. One super-power that wouldn’t be up to you, though, is invincibility. You cannot die. But wait! Where would the challenge be? I put it to you, sir, that you cannot die in any game. Termination of your current existence leads to reloading of an old savegame, or respawning in a different location. In the first case, the death is erased from history and never happened, and the second is not death by any sane definition of the word. Death, look it up, is pretty permanent. Currently, games punish you for your character expiring. A huge problem with all games is that they don’t know by how much – the inconvenience may be a matter of replaying the last few seconds, or trundling down the road from the respawn point (not just deathmatch games – WoW and San Andreas both use this). Or it could be hours of work, or a huge, utterly dull journey back to where you were. This is disastrous. It’s enormously off-putting to new gamers, incredibly frustrating for existing ones, and any dissatisfaction you felt with the game – particularly if it’s related to the reason for your character’s demise – is magnified tenfold. Modern games like Half-Life 2 do a good job at trying to limit this, with both frequent auto-saves and unlimited quicksaves (of which, by the way, it stores your last two – an achingly sensible precaution I’ve been begging for for years). I’d like to see time-based autosaves (every five minutes, keeps the latest two of these) in tandem with crucial event autosaves (so you can go back and make an important decision differently hours later) and manual quicksaves (for the personal touch). But let’s see what happens if you can’t die. Superheroes don’t die a lot anyway – hardly ever. The risk is never their own demise, it’s that they might fail. And the objective they might fail at is almost always saving someone. But wait! Failing is just like dying, only worse because you don’t see why you should have to restart when you’re not dead. Yeah. Let’s do away with that too. So you can’t fail? The exact opposite: you can fail. It’s okay. You carry on. Lives were lost, it was partially your fault, but there’s no reason to force you to erase that part of your life and save everyone. What’s to stop people reloading and making sure they do save everyone? There’s no overwhelming reason to stop this, but I will anyway just because it ought to be interesting: you can’t save. You can pause the game, in case the phone rings or whatever, and when you quit the game it auto-saves before it exits, but when you start it back up it loads that save and deletes it. Short of restarting the game completely, you have to live with your mistakes. So how do enemies stop you from saving people? By killing them, duh. There are three ways for this to work: a) The hostage situation. Easily the best excuse for stealth in any game – you have to take out the hostage-takers before they realise an attempt to do so is even underway. If they smell a rat, they’ll do it. Sometimes you’ll save one but in doing so alert another HT and lose the corresponding H or Hs. Sometimes you’ll do it perfectly, an artwork of silent takedowns, goon avoidance and lateral thinking. Sometimes you’ll screw it up and everyone will die, and however many goons you beat up in vengeance, you’ll still feel empty inside and you’ll still know it was your fault. This is what games should be all about – making you feel bad. b) The time limit. There’s nothing stopping you, but bullets will slow you, enemies will wrestle you to the ground and powerful blows will knock you down. And if you don’t get to the bomb before it detonates – the psycho before he reaches the victims – the controls before the plane crashes – hundreds of people will die. Being fast means dodging bullets, incapacitating nasty bad guys swiftly and dashing by the rest. c) The villain. He’s as fast as you, as strong as you and also completely invincible. He’ll pounce on you as you try to get to the innocents or the weapon of mass destruction and throw you to the floor, fling you across the room, grab you by the neck, smash you to the ground. Sometimes it’ll be the other way around – he’s trying to get to the objective and you’re trying to stop him. In both cases it’s a case of administering a blow that causes your opponent enough grief to give you time to get to the objective and do what you need to do before they catch you up. I’d love to see a system whereby prone-time is proportional to the force in newtons administered to your head – so if you use the physics system perfectly and drop the corner of a concrete block on his eye, he’s down for the count. Naturally any mission could be a combination of these – you only have a certain time after the goons discover you to get to the hostages before the villain does, and if you meet each other first it’s the fight that’ll determine the winner. It should also go without saying that we’ll need a ragdoll recovery system, whereby someone flung across the room with ragdoll physics knows how to get back up and into normal animations without too big a glitch. No small feat, but I’ve heard it’s now possible. Knocking a villain down will allow you to drag him into a position to be victim to an even more devastating attack – chuck him under a falling block of masonry, throw him into a meat-grinder. And being invincible shouldn’t mean this stuff doesn’t hurt – getting shot in the face should be a blackout as well as a knockdown, and when you awake in a second’s time, you’re groggy and weak. A good punch causes vision blurring, and sometimes you’ll be taking so many hits you can hardly see or run in a straight line. Success would mean feeling like a real hero, genuinely making a meaningful difference and feeling cool. Failure would be tragedy rather than irritation – no chore, no inconvenience, just irreplacable loss and anger at yourself. Sadness is something other mediums relish in making you feel, but games aren’t very good at yet. It is – like fear on a rollercoaster – a good thing. Irritation is never good, and games are extraordinarily adept at inspiring it at the moment.
More Amateur Hour
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Lampica: Great ideas. I have always been partial to the permanent death philosophy. But in a game that is non-linear enough that starting over will not be repetitive.
NOLF did some things really well that relate to this concept in some ways. Some things I loved about the original No One Lives Forever that combined to create a fantastic experience I have yet to find in any other game. No health pickups. You could replenish your armor but your health was non-replenish-able during the course of any missions. No death traps that you had no way of being prepared for and re-acting fast enough unless you had already been the victim at least once. Many games often throw things at you that you will almost certainly be killed by at least the first time. Only after you have reloaded a save or come back from a checkpoint armed with foresight of what you are about to face will you stand much of a chance. Even with no health pickups, and even without it being an excessively easy game, I was able to play through all of NOLF the first time without dying. There were a couple exceptions to this though. The fat lady viking opera singer on the rooftop was a stupid puzzle boss that was setup so you would likely die many times until you figured out the trick, the stealth level where you had to get something from the offices without hurting anyone was a a re-load fest. But aside from those two instances the whole game could be played through as one continuous, exceeding well paced action adventure that did an exceptional job of immersing the player in the roll of their character. Getting through mission after mission without picking up health packs, or regenerating, and without dying and reloading really took the level of immersion to a level I have seldom experienced in video games. Ok, but onto my thoughts on your Invincibles concept. I think it must be key to make the failures work and not temp people to start over or make them feel annoyed, or inspire trainers to hack the autosave functionality to allow manual saving, or cause people to make backups of saves before the game can delete them. I think a good way to make that work is to make failure just as engaging as success. With great cut-scenes, interaction with the environment which should be distinctly effected by both success and failure. Easter eggs which can only be found through failure, but have some that can only be found through success as well. Like maybe even have some things that could happen differently in a mission 3 levels later because of a failure earlier. Like you must stop some villain from derailing a train by destroying his his super-magnetic gauntlet. He gets away whether you succeed or not. But if you fail he gets away with his gauntlet intact. Then much later, you have an opportunity to get that gauntlet for yourself, because of that earlier failure. The rewards system would be even better if it was randomized to some degree. So it would not become common knowledge on msg boards that if you want the magnetic gauntlet you should fail the 4th mission. If he gets away the gauntlets might appear in several different situations later in game, but they might not. And when you face that guy the first time, he enters the scen from a random directions, so based on that and how the battle moves around there could be a couple chances to use something in the environment to sever his arm without damaging the gauntlet. Also things like news that plays on TVs in the background environment here and there could be effected by successes or failures. A failure here could be used as material in some stand up comics routine in a scene much later. There could be other superheroes at work in the world. You might help them in some places and some of them may come to your aid at times. They would not always succeed either. Maybe one of them would give up on being a super hero and turn bad because they failed. Again it could be random which one because of which failure. Maybe in one playthrough it could be because of a failure where you came to their aid and that you could have prevented. Later you will have to fight them because they turned bad and it was partly your fault. But on another playthrough it's different hero that turn bad because of a different failure that you only heard about. The point is that if it is well done, immersive enough, and dynamic enough, then failure will be just as engaging as success and continue to drive the player onwards... | ||||
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Fallout Girl
Don't Make Me Play Football Manager
SWAT 4: The Movie
Tim Edwards
Craig Pearson
Graham Smith
Rich McCormick
Richard Cobbett
Chris Livingston
Jon Blyth
1. Go to area near a hive
2. Turn on Infected Vision when on a rooftop
3. Look for infected water towers since it's easier from afar
4. Destroy for ~10k EP + genetic material bonus
5. Repeat
I regarded it as a pretty quick way to obtain upgrades, personally.