Surprises, Favourites and Disappointments of the generation

This generation of gaming has been filled to the brim with many unforgettable titles. Some came from out of the blue, others were destined for greatness before they were released and others were somewhat of a disappointment. Here are a few standout titles that I think shouldn't be forgotten, either for their greatness or downfall.

Of course these are all my opinions, please feel free to tell me how you feel differently.


LittleBigPlanet

I'm starting with my favourite. If you were to ask me my favourite game of all time, I would probably answer with this game. Retrospectively I was setting myself up for a huge disappointment. My thirteen year-old self watched the first demonstration of the game at GDC more than twenty times. I showed it to as many people as I could, including my parents who couldn't understand my excitement. Not to mention how devastated I was when the game got delayed a mere few weeks due to a song lyric. Despite all of these things LittleBigPlanet managed to beat my expectations. I will never know how that happened.

LittleBigPlanet also fundamentally showed the industry how to properly interact with player made content, in-game.

Hotline Miami

Never have I felt so satisfied and guilty at killing countless NPCs. Hotline Miami managed to feel garishly brutal and stylish at the same time. Everyone should play this game.

Skyrim

For me this is an example of over-anticipating a game. There were times I couldn't put this game down, but unfortunately those weren't long lasting. In the end the automatically generated quests killed the game for me. I didn't feel like a stealthy cat stalking through the night, I felt like I person playing a game to level up, or get better gear. That said, I should definitely give it another chance.

Assassins Creed

The first time you perch atop a building and peer across the city below is something you don't forget.

Fable 2

Interestingly enough Fable 2 was due to come out on the same day as LittleBigPlanet. Looking back I wonder if this was a simple coincidence that two of my favourite games were released very close to each other. Maybe an outside factor made me love these two games so much? Either way Fable 2 was the first game I was compelled to actually role-play. The day began with me gazing into the sunset as I chopped firewood. Later I would say goodbye to my wife Alex before I went into town for my next heroic contract.

I won't bore you with how much this game captured me, but something clicked. I was hooked in a way I had never been before. I wasn't playing because the game was fun or challenging but because I had a personal attachment to the world around me.

Fable 3

The army of brilliant English actors wasn't enough to convince me on this one. Ultimately it was an experiment that went wrong. But that's my opinion.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

This is some of the most fun I've ever had with a multiplayer title. The unbalance in the weapons meant winning was all the more satisfying when you managed to do so in such a stupid way. Call of Duty 4 was definitely a better game, but that doesn't change the fact that only using a throwing knife was so good.

MineCraft

There is a lot to say about this game. But essentially it opened me up a world of indie-games, dramatically changing my tastes in video games. For that I am hugely grateful.

Diablo 3

An interesting lesson for many people in the industry. It may have played like a dream, but had numerous sticking points. Blizzard showed us exactly what shouldn't be done, hopefully we will all learn from the mistakes they made.

Fez

Fez does many things that I thought to be impossible. The world felt so consistent and well thought out, even glitches in the game felt like they were supposed to be. It's a game that sets itself up to be an innocent plat-former only to break every rule that it created. If you haven't played it you might think I'm speaking gibberish. However, if you have the time and patience to experience Fez you will be blown away.

So there's my small collection of stand-out games. There are many games that I missed, maybe I will add more over the next month. Either way, I will be happy if the new next generation is half as good as this one.

Bear Pursuit V1.11

The "full" version is now complete, this means you can actually complete the game, and the majority of bugs have been successfully ironed out. Download is below!

The game now includes:

• 35 different levels, most consisting of a number of threats (bears) with multiple ways to get past the given situation. 
• Bears are animated, not fully but enough for the time being.
• Bears make growling sounds when they see you.
• There is now an objective, collect the boat parts and bring them back to your cabin.
• If you die holding some boat parts they are dropped where you die.
• Collectable tent item that lets you change your spawn point.

Known problems:

• Bears have a tendency to get stuck in walls if they chase you when you are standing too close to a wall.
• You can abuse the utility of the tent making the game too easy.
• The game is too difficult before you get the tent.
• Music resets the first track too often.
• Some levels are far too difficult when tackling them from different directions.
• Better grass texture, that looks better when repeated.
• Better wall graphics.
• Better overall controls.

Possible future additions:

• NPC villages.
• Possible side quests and stories to make the game more interesting.
• A* path finding for bears to make them more versatile.
• Different types of terrain, desert, snow, cave etc.

Download - https://www.dropbox.com/s/nhyicrhrqfoeat8/BearPursuitV1_1_1.exe

If you want please report any bugs or ask me a question, feel free to contact me.

NyleGaming@gmail.com

http://www.Twitter.com/NylePudding

Bear Pursuit V0.24

Recently I have been busy working on a small game for my extended project. It's nothing special but everyone has to start somewhere, don't they? Edmund McMillan has said a number of times he made over 30 small games before they caught any attention. They also say to be a good novelist you must first write one million words.

 So here's my first game, it's been through a number of iterations in my mind but I finally settled on a "free roaming" game where you get chased by bears. Which is why it's called it "Bear Pursuit".

There are a few more things I need to add before it's finished so I'll do a few more of these posts with different changes I have made to the game along with a download link for that version.

Enjoy, and if you're reading this please give me some feedback.

Download - http://www.mediafire.com/?8q6nu65f5jaedpe

List of things to add

• More levels (currently only 16, I plan to do 49 in total)
• NPCs, nothing special here, they will be very similar to signs, perhaps they will wander around too. But they will contain useful information and tell jokes.
• A goal, currently there isn't one at all. The goal will be to collect a number of items in different locations and bring them back to your cabin. If you die with an item it will be where you died, along with a gravestone.
• Ability to place stones, this will be for the player to mark out locations they have already been, or haven't been yet. Or to just make pictures. :D
• Roaming bears, bears that gad around at the their own free will. This will be fun to program, but might end up looking bad as bears may easily get stuck in objects or walk off the map.
• Implement "one-way-walls". These are the walls you often see in Pokemon and Zelda where you can use them to jump down from a location, but you can't use them the other way. I've already programmed these but haven't done any pixel art for them. Plus I'll have to change bears to work correctly with them.
• "Random placement Machines" to make exploration more fun I thought it would be cool if you were randomly placed somewhere in the world and you had to find your way back home. This would mean creating a difficulty curve would be near impossible(since the player could spawn anywhere in an early stage of the game). But it would provide a good use for the placeable stones. 
• Add Bear shadows, and do Bear animations.

Weather integral to gameplay

Individually we are greatly effected by the weather everyday, it determines how good we feel (for some more than others), it helps us decide what we do and sometimes how we do something. But weather in video/computer games is mostly lacking any of the effect it has in real life.

Sure there have been many impressive simulations of weather in gaming, Red Dead Redemption and Far Cry 2 come to mind as good examples. But imagine if those visually impressive scenes could also add depth and variety in terms of gameplay?

Here are a few simple ideas that could make weather more interesting, in a few different genres:

• A greater amount of monsters hide away in caves when it's stormy, so outdoor travel is more safe but venturing indoors isn't. Additionally different creatures would happily go outside in the rain (giant frogs?).
• Trees and plants could die in harsh warmth and cold, trees could be uprooted in strong winds changing the landscape and blocking roads. 
• Roads could be harder to drive on in wet and icy weather, this has already been done before but NPCs driving on the road could also have a greater chance of crashing.
• Certain dungeons and areas could become inaccessible at certain times of year due to floods, lakes can be crossed in the winter when they are frozen over.
•  (This is getting very ambitious) Small villages could be flooded resulting in many NPCs homeless, giving innkeepers in areas that aren't flooded a greater amount of income. 
• In the same respect to NPC dynamics, crops could rot in bad harvests resulting in less food for nearby areas. Possibly resulting in families of NPCs dying, or in good harvests families becoming more wealthy.

A number of these ideas are greatly ambitious, and could easily become repetitive and annoying if they were simply scripted. What I am saying here is so much can be done with weather and we should explore it further.

Before ending this I just want to acknowledge there are a few games which have added gameplay and depth due to weather. Those games being ARMA 2 and a few mods for Minecraft, please tell me if you can think of any others which drastically change gameplay.

For now, Adiós!

"Real Time Games"

Unfortunately when you mention games that involve a "real time" element, many people associate them with the likes of FarmVille style "Cow Clickers". Where to get a reward you have to wait long periods of time, only to do the same thing over again.

I personally think there is quite a large amount of potential in games which involve an element of real time. For instance Animal Crossing, a game I've personally never owned but one I like very much; makes good use of routine, seasons, an open-ended nature and real time events to make the world seem more real and interesting.

As someone who is very fond of games and hopes to be very much involved with the industry in the future,  I think of many ideas for games. Some good, some bad. I've often shied away from telling anyone my ideas, with the worry they'll get "stolen". I've recently decided this is a stupid way to go about things, as said by TotalBiscuit and many others the games industry is hugely iterative. Helping each other is one of the best things we can do to makes games more compelling.

So here's my idea for a game, involving many elements I mentioned about "real time" before.

Walking through the street, a man yells and runs up to you, the distraction of his putrid odour and big shaggy beard leads you to miss everything he mumbles. Everything except for the last thing he says: "Meet me by the inn, tomorrow at midnight".

If this scenario happened in say, one of the elder scrolls games, that NPC would be simply waiting there every day at midnight. You would find the location, press the corresponding key or button, wait until midnight and then talk to him. What if you couldn't do that? What if you had to play the game at midnight and then walk to the appropriate place in-game to actually meet him? Many people would claim that's a dumb idea, but hear me through. Lets say as the player, you forget or can't be bothered to meet the NPC at that time or place, but you decide to go to the inn the next day. To your horror you find your smelly, shaggy beard friend dead on the floor.

What I'm getting at here, is imagine if quest story-lines kept on going whether the player intervened or not. You could do this without a real time aspect sure, but the addition of real time would mean players are forced to not be very involved in some quests, which is paramount to the general experience of a game like this.

Anyway, thank you for reading this post on a few of my ideas, of course implementing this into a game wouldn't be easy at all. The disadvantages will be something I go into in another one of these posts, as it shares some of the same problems as cow clickers.

Please express your opinion about this, is this a terrible idea, am I crazy?

Adiós!