One of the things I’m noticing in my playthrough of Assassin’s Creed (although they aren’t the only ones doing this) that is bugging me a lot lately is this mis-placed idea that the character animations always have to “line up” with what he’s really doing in the world.  Somehow “next-gen” has come to mean “more [...]

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For quite a few years I’ve been impressed with how amazing the Project Gotham’s team is at rendering reality, and while playing PGR4 the other week, I saw that the only two U.S. cities represented were Vegas and NYC. At first I was a bit bummed because I honestly don’t have any real authority [...]

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But the tanks? A serious disappointment. They were obviously nothing more than armored pickup trucks with a turret attached to them, as far as the code was concerned. They didn’t do anything that an actual tank could do. Hell, sometimes, they couldn’t even drive in reverse uphill, and I won’t even get into the “friendly” AI driving worse than a NY cabbie. Still worse, the optics on them were non-existent. I.E. they had none. A current day Abrams tank can accurately hit a target two miles away. Crysis takes place, what, ten years in the future and I can’t get a set of optics on the thing even half as good as a sniper rifle? Hell, I’ll even take the assault scope optics here. Just give me some optics. But none? Completely inexcusable. On foot I’ve got my choice of two different scopes and a pair of smart binoculars with a laser/shotgun microphone. Am I to believe there was no room for a pair of binoculars on this tank?

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Awhile back I mentioned that my number one rule in game design is: Gameplay is King. It will always be king. There is nothing that should ever trump it. Not the art, not the license, nothing.
Except for one thing: Jedi.
It goes without saying that Jedi are extremely popular in geek/nerdlore/culture. [...]

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Was playing some Naruto:  Rise of the Ninja at work today, and did some head-to-head vs. mode combat.  It turns out it was good research/competitive analysis, because Naruto only uses two attack buttons, and it seems that’s the direction a lot of modern titles are heading in for combat as well.  The idea is that [...]

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Awhile back Clint over at ClickNothing did a great critique of Bioshock, and it got me thinking that designers should be doing this regularly. As an industry, we have countless outlets for reviews of games; a consumer level media wrap-up of a “buy it or not” standard. But what we don’t have is a professional [...]

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