Remowned

A couple of months ago, I conducted a pretty lengthy interview with adventure gaming legend Ron Gilbert (The Secret of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, Maniac Mansion, etc.), and for various complicated reasons it was only just published yesterday on Gamasutra. We discuss Gilbert’s recent projects, including his own title DeathSpank and its Diablo influence (yes), how he feels about the game industry these days, and the merits of the Hollywood production system.

It was nice to see Gilbert a whole lot more cheerful about the industry than he was the last time I interviewed him, then alongside my colleague Jake Rodkin–although something that didn’t change was my vaguely embarrassing tendency to start asking four-paragraph questions toward the end.

As before, he was a good sport about it.

I was pointedly concise with my reaction, but it should be clear enough that I am fairly excited about the just-announced Diablo III. With the possible exception of Tetris, Diablo II almost certainly tops my personal lifetime list of most gameplay hours dedicated to a single game. For some five years or so, my friends and I played it off and on - several of those years considerably more “on.” I just reinstalled it the other day, and have reached Act IV.

Along with the inevitable internet furor that has arisen in the wake of the announcement (and in the days leading up to it, as the storm cryptically but powerfully approached), there has come an explosion of gamer-generated research to try and sate the hunger for rapidly-depleting new information about the game.  Much of this deals with singling out the personalities behind the game–and though none of this is secret information by any means, I have not seen it centralized or given full context.  So here you are.

First off, Leonard Boyarsky–one of the three co-leads on the original Fallout–now serves as lead world designer on Diablo III. Boyarsky also contributed to Fallout II before leaving with the other members of the original Fallout big three (Tim Cain and Jason Anderson) to create Troika Games.  He’s been at Blizzard for nearly three years now, and in an upcoming Gamasutra interview (look for it on Wednesday) he notes the game has been in the works since 2004.

Then, we’ve got Dustin Browder, a former Westwood Studios employee who lead the Red Alert 2 and Command & Conquer: Generals projects (more…)

In the comments of my last post, my esteemed Thumbs colleague Duncan pointed out another terrible property of most video game voice recording, one on which I have often commented elsewhere.  It is the tendency of voice actors, under poor direction or using poor scripts, to perform an interrupted statement by actually stopping where the ellipses or dash occurs in the script, rather than actually being interrupted.

Now, in this case, it’s slightly more understandable.  I realize that most games aren’t budgeted to actually have actors in the same room during the same session, able to play off one another and cut each other off if the script calls for it.  But, in the end, there’s really no reason the actor can’t simply record a longer version of the line, and have a sound designer or editor cut it off convincingly.

There’s also no excuse for that unintentional pregnant pause that inevitably occurs between the end of the interrupted actor’s painfully weak trail off into ellipses, and the so-called interruption.  With the amazing dynamic sound blending and manipulation that goes on across five channels in so many of today’s games, it should not be too much to expect a sound engine that can, in a completely pre-scripted sequence, position two recordings close enough to one another to produce a vaguely realistically abrupt interruption during a–

Sound designer: Can’t be done, you see, because–

Snake: METAL GEAR?!

Attention all video game writers voice acting directors:

When you have a voice line that is intended to sound like a corrupted, spotty voice transmission, from which words are missing in order to convey a sense of urgent desperation and loss of control, please record the actor reading a version from which the words are not missing, and then have your sound team edit it to actually sound corrupted and garbled.

On top of that, how preposterous must it feel as a voice actor to actually perform something like that? I realize that video games aren’t necessarily the cream of the prose crop to begin with, but this is more of a technical issue than a creative one.

Come on, now. This isn’t hard. Why do, time and time again, video games feature actors actually reading the lines with the words omitted? It is painful to my ears to hear a person reading something like, “Can’t being overrun oh God we’re Johnson is please help they’re here and.” Except there are pauses in between every other word which my brain, after a lifetime of interacting with humans and being able to discern what an artificial pause sounds like, is supposed to interpret as signal loss.

That is awful. Really, guys. If you’re spending tens of millions of dollars on a game, especially a dialogue-centric game, you can afford to write a few extra words for the two instances of this scenario in your massive script of hundreds of pages, and yet I hear this cringe-inducing faked transmission crap all the time. BioWare, pay attention.

It isn’t that hard! It won’t even increase your budget! I promise!

I think I’ve had my monthly fill of cutscenes.  In the last six hours or so, I completed both Metal Gear Solid 4 and Mass Effect.

And then I won three rounds of Catan.

The question about Spore’s true audience is something that remains unanswered by pretty much everybody–potentially even including the development team to some extent, as far as I can tell.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not looking forward to it. Probably like a lot of gamers, I’ve gone through something of an Spore excitement sine curve. I recently checked some of the game out over at Will Wright’s Emeryville studio, however, and I’m now climbing back up to the apex of that curve, mainly due to an extended conversation with Soren Johnson, lead designer of Civilization IV and now on Wright’s team. Like most people, he wasn’t able to nail down who the game’s target is–more encouragingly, he indicated Wright is rarely as concerned about that than he is about simply making whatever game he wants to make, which is uncommon in the games industry and fairly ridiculous within EA, but hey, he made The Sims.

He did make me excited, though. One of Johnson’s roles on the team is to serve as something of an advocate for core gamers, to ensure Spore is an experience they can not only tolerate but enjoy. It’s a fitting role; while Spore consists of numerous gameplay phases, it is most dominantly a strategy game, and Johnson comes from one of the industry’s premier strategy developers. He even successfully lobbied the team to put in three levels of difficulty, to ensure those who want some level of challenge can get it. The thought of a game that cycles through individually-playable homages to Pac-Man, Diablo, Civilization, Populous, and more is one that the nostalgic gamer in me cannot refuse.

The full transcript of my chat with Johnson, conducted with my coworker Brandon Sheffield, will be up on Gamasutra at some point in the future, but for now you can check out the rest of my thoughts on Spore (also now up at our blog GameSetWatch), including different demographic angles and the impressive social features the team has planned.

*Correctly, “For whom is Spore?” The More You Know.

When Mass Effect was released, I noted that I would love to see a game like this (or, really, this very game) with much of the combat stripped away, putting the gameplay emphasis on the already-excellent dialogue system that provides a framework for hugely enjoyable social interactions. You can help characters, confound them, double-cross them–it was, and it remains, the best part of the game for me.

But I will say this: while I would still be enormously interested in a game–many games!–such as the one I describe, I picked up Demiurge Studios’ PC version of Mass Effect this week and it almost feels like a whole new game. (more…)

In the opening staff roll to Metal Gear Solid 4, there is a standalone credit for a “Rumble Director.” That is awesome.

Just about all my free non-music time at home over the past two weeks has been dedicated to Rockstar North’s Grand Theft Auto IV, whose story I completed just seconds ago. As some of you know, I rarely finish games these days–in most cases, I really don’t feel most games actually have enough fresh, compelling gameplay to last the number of hours it takes to complete them. This makes my completion of GTA4 all the more impressive–it’s not just that I finished a game, but that it is such a massive game.

Everyone has said a billion great things about GTA4 so I’m not going to list them all off. Rockstar North indeed managed to create a bafflingly well-realized world with an impressive level of fidelity and life. It’s been said, and I agree.

For my part, the thing that impressed me most–and led to me completing the game at all–was how brilliantly Rockstar balanced on the midpoint between overexaggerated absurdity, believable mundanity, and genuine gravitas.

The first of those was established in the original Grand Theft Auto and Grand Theft Auto 2, laying the seeds for the crucial third entry; the second trait was most significantly introduced (perhaps moreso than necessary) in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas; and the third has been generally on an upward curve from III to Vice City to San Andreas; but it has not been until GTA4 that all three were so expertly set against one another.

Most appealing to me, perhaps unexpectedly, has been the mundanity. (more…)

As some of you may know, I currently serve as Editor-at-Large at industry trade publication Gamasutra.  Today, we ran a piece of mine looking at the idea of subtext in games, with an examination of titles such as Half-Life, Grand Theft Auto, Ico, No More Heroes, Full Throttle, and BioShock.  Here’s an excerpt:

On the surface, Full Throttle is a badass neo-noir biker murder thriller with hard rock music (on that level alone it is already more novel than most game premises), but underneath it is a melancholy reflection on the American frontier and the inevitability of invasive industrialization.

If you have any interest in a dialogue- and puzzle-driven game, Full Throttle isn’t overbearing or preachy in the least, but there’s a lot to chew on. Its subtext is essentially literary, hinging on classic themes of American fiction.

If you like, go check out the whole thing.