Phelps might just be the world's finest sporting star. No current team-based sportsman comes anywhere near matching his greatness - Cristiano Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Tom Brady, Kobe Bryant you have truly been surpassed.
The only current sportsman that have any legitimate shot at being considered alongside Michael Phelps are Federer and Tiger Woods (Nadal hasn't dominated for a long enough period yet). But still even considering the success of Woods and Federer they come nowhere close to the dominance shown by Phelps in winning 11 Olympics Golds and 2 Bronze, making him the most successfulOlympian of all time and he still has a chance at another 3 golds at this Olympics. The guy just seems to break - his own - world records constantly, he just keeps getting better. I've never seen dominance on this level before, and i don't think i ever will.
As a games writer your primary responible is to infrom the players, but it's also fantastic to find out that developers appreciate your work enough to list them on our their blogs. It's always good to know that the guys and girls behind a game have read what you've written about them, and/or their creations - it's the next best thing to meeting and talking to them personally.
So it was great when i saw that Jonathan Blow has listed my review of Braid on the game's blog! I missed the chance to speak to him personally at Develop 08 a couple of weeks back, so knowing he has read my positive comments is the next best thing.
Games that generally make you stop and think about just how much potential the medium has are exceptionally rare. Too many games seem like clones of each other - run around and collect this, clear this room of enemies, hit these buttons in this order - but Braid, from developer Jonathan Blow, is certainly no copycat.
The quality of the visuals alone are enough to make you fall in love with the game, doing away with fancy technical graphics and instead focusing on a distinctive artistic style that will surely stand the test of time.
With all puzzle games though the true test lies in the quality of the gameplay. I'll just say that if anyone out there is currently working on a puzzle game it had better be bloody good because Braid just raised the bar a good 7 or 8 notches. Best XBLA game to date? Absolutely. Best 360 game? Quite possibly.
At a recent NCSoft Media Day i managed to get some time with upcoming MMO Aion: The Tower of Eternity. Now, i'm not a big MMO fan by any stretch of the imagination but this particular game looks very promising. Graphically it's easily the finest MMO i've ever seen and the player v player v environment arena sounds much more in-depth and substantial than your standard PvP realms.
Develop 08 is over, so I thought I'd share part of my write up of it...
2K Boston’s Ken Levine - joined on stage by Bioshock co-creators Nate Wells (lead technical artist), Chris Kline (lead programmer) and Bill Gardner (head of level design) - kicked off the conference proper with a session entitled ‘Bioshock and Awe’. Mainly focusing on the creative forces that lead to the final version of the game, the session described how it’s important for developers to work as a single unit (as opposed to isolated groups each with a different task; AI, design, sound etc.) and to keep an open mind about your ideas possibly being a load of twaddle.
In an attempt to demonstrate just how important it is to listen to feedback Nate Wells explained how an early build of the game involved a boss known as ‘Eelman’, a disfigured creature that slithered across the floor. “It’s as good as it sounds,” said Levine. “… It could turn invisible” continued Wells “[but] its main attack was making you feeling awkward”.
The guys went on to talk about how it’s important for games companies to hire people from a diverse range of backgrounds, saying that many games feel so similar to each other because they’re made by people who know nothing but games. “We're hiring designers at the moment,” said Levine “and we want the guy who's buying Dungeons and Dragons on the first day, but we also want to hire the guy who's into the movies of Truffaut. Bringing that mix of people in is really important.”
In fact Levine referred to himself as “the pretentious one”, often taking ideas and inspiration from classic French art-house cinema, only for Bill Gardner to bring him back to reality by telling him that no-one will buy the game if the content is too obscure or inaccessible. Levine admitted that in it’s early stages focus groups found it difficult to play through the game, “I mean, try asking people if they want to play a first-person shooter in an objectivist art-deco dystopia.” - apparently, the answer was no.
Conversation turned to talk of the upcoming Bioshock movie and how Levine is particularly pleased that director Gore Verbinski and screenwriter John Logan are working on it. Levine praised Verbinski for creating films that packed a visual punch and as such was a perfect choice for recreating the world of Rapture on film. Likewise Levine was confident that Logan was the perfect writer considering his work on Howard Hughes biopic ‘The Aviator’ as, we learnt, Rapture’s Andrew Ryan was based on Mr Hughes himself.
The session also spent a little time discussing whether or not the purchase of Irrational Games (now 2K Boston) by Take-Two in 2006 hampered Bioshock’s development. Levine was adamant that it didn’t, and went so far to say that due to a sense of creative freedom formed by the guys at Rockstar (also a Take-Two company) the company had faith in projects that challenged the established formats. “Take Two was a unique company because they'd been through the wars…” Levine said, “…they understood the artistic importance of something. The audience is not a bunch of mouth-breathing Neanderthals. The audience is ready for this sort of thing.” Amen Mr Levine.
The online haven of John Robertson, games writer and general slacker. You'll find links to my articles, a bunch of goofy stuff and some pretty boring opinions.
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