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Next-Gen (”dot biz”… which will always going to sound weird to me since I read the magazine back in the day, and mourned its passing) just did a “Time Extend” feature on Freedom Fighters, one of the most underrated games of all time.

I love this game - just don’t play it on a console, because the controls are terrible. You can’t even invert the Y-axis camera control! I’ve generally had beef with IO Interactive’s control schemes for consoles - even Kane & Lynch and Hitman: Blood Money didn’t seem to get it quite right. I’m really, really surprised that an otherwise solid developer keeps striking out with their controls - just let me use the usual buttons for doing stuff! There’s no need to reinvent the wheel!

But Freedom Fighters on the PC hit me in just the right spot - I wasn’t expecting anything from it, bought it for 10 bucks on a friend’s recommendation, and was totally blown away by the solid 3P shooter action and the amazing NYC-under-Red-Army-assault atmosphere. There’s even a few neat plot twists that change the game significantly. Just check it out - it runs like butter on modern PCs and it’s a great example of well-scripted shooter gameplay that, with a few tweaks and some uprezzing, would definitely hold up today. I heard from a colleague that IO was working on a sequel, but it’s been so long that I’m not holding my breath.

Filed by sean at 11:40 am under games
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Last Friday our level team (that’s me and one other guy, on the design side) met with delegates from other departments and the creative director for a run-through of the level. It’s a pretty standard kind of weekly meeting - we’ll discuss what’s been done on the level so far, what’s broken, and what needs to be added/changed to make the level better. These are some of my favorite meetings, for sure.

In these meetings, though, as we discuss the minutiae of each “event” (a small chunk of the level), it’s frequently the case that there will be talk of features that are in the pipeline from other departments - “oh man, right here, where this [thing] falls down, let’s use that new [physically based object] simulation tech to [cause cool effect].” (I’m trying to edit things that could get me electro-shocked by our publisher.) And we, the designers, think to ourselves, “wow, I didn’t even know that we had [physically based object, which I’ll subsequently shorten to PBO] simulation tech!” The conversation inevitably skews toward the possibilities afforded by the new PBO simulation tech, since nobody in the room had really thought about using it before, and before you know it, the event has been reworked to include/feature/expand upon the “new feature.”

The problem, you might think, is that we don’t really know anything about PBO simulation tech. And you’d be right! After all, we just learned about it a second ago. But we’re assuming that our source knows what’s up with it - presumably, he had a conversation with the engineer who’s implementing this feature, and therefore figured out all the hairy details about what it can do.

(more…)

Filed by sean at 10:11 pm under games
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I just picked up The Orange Box at lunchtime at our local indie game shop and I think it’s just starting to sink in that I purchased five games for the price of one. Sure, I’ve played a couple of those games already, but that’s not really the point. Any one of these games would probably sell at $60, but to get all of them together on one disc is… surprising. (Pleasantly.) I almost feel like asking what the catch is.

I had heard that Valve was unhappy with effort-vs-sales of their port of Half-Life 2 for Xbox; I wonder if this insane deal is at least partially motivated by that experience? “You know what? Fuck you guys - here’s a deal you can’t refuse. If you don’t buy this one, it’s not our fault.” At any rate, I bet that a bunch of folks’ top-5 Desert Island Games lists are going to get reworked today…

Filed by sean at 1:59 pm under games
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