Games, I guess.
Quite a few political minded shooters coming out in the near future. Despite the fact that I’m completely sick of shooters after making it all the way through The Darkness and Bioshock (plus Gears of War, and yes I’m still bitter about that damn Mad World ad), deep down there’s still some wretched part of me that’s curious about these games. My lizard brain, or something.
Also titled, massive spoiler alert. Sorry, that’s MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT.
Note, this isn’t a review - whatever nice (or bad) things I might say about their writing, both games have other notable flaws (god Zero Punctuation is funny).Â
Rubbish. Don’t get me wrong, the Halo 3 “Museum” ad is a smart piece of advertising, just like the Gears of War “Mad World” ad was also brilliantly done. And, meanwhile, both games I’m sure will be/are very good.
But those ads having ab-so-fucking-lutely nothing to do with those games. The mere fact that those ads are connected with those games incenses me to no end. Yes, maybe I’m still pissed I bought Gears of War because of seeing that ad, I don’t care how many times I may have played through it anyway.
It’s a sad state of affairs when minute long ad can inspire more emotional depth than any single minute out of the game it advertises. I’m jumping the gun here on Halo 3, but that was certainly true of Gears of War – even sadder when you realize the writing in Gears was well above average.
An FPS that doesn’t blatantly rip off Aliens.
10 out of 10.
I usually manage to avoid writing about AI – mainly because it makes me think about work. Work is fun and all yet, inevitably, still work (yeah, I know, I’m really fucking profound in the morning).
But I’ve been meaning to mention this one poster from AIIDE ’07 (sadly, didn’t get to go myself): Player Autonomy vs. Designer Intent: A Case Study of Interactive Tour Guides (via AIGameDev).