Since my laptop has been broken, I've managed to get my Japanese PS2 to play nicely with the PAL telly, which means I can play all my Japanese games again. I've been trying to finish Biohazard (Resident Evil) 4, which was one of the most critically and commercially acclaimed games of last year, a massive leap forward for the series, blah blah blah, and you know what? I hate it. It's awful. It's almost interesting to play it just to see how much of it I find irritating. Now, the original Resident Evil, back on PS1, was very much a survival horror game, pitting you in a creaky old mansion with the occasional (note: occasional) zombie wandering around the corner, and puzzles to solve to progress to different parts of the mansion and through the story. It worked wonderfully well, and here's why: it worked on a scary horror level because it used fixed cameras, deliberately placed so you couldn't see what was around the corner, or in other circumstances was perfectly placed to show a zombie bursting out of a cupboard behind you, something horror movies do with aplomb. It was also stubbornly third-person, making each battle a panic as you tried to aim properly, and altogether was genuinely scary - no-one ever forgets that corridor. The puzzles were also interesting and challenging, and this gives it an interesting game-within-a-game dynamic, as you simultaneously wander around the house, evading zombies and working out how to open the various doors. This also makes it interesting for the other people sitting on the sofa who aren't playing - you can get involved with the puzzles, and enjoy watching your friend getting freaked out as he or she's stalked by those frogmen things.
Now, four iterations down the line, all that has changed. First of all, it's much more action-orientated. 95% of what you're doing is shooting stuff. This gets dull, and it's also not scary at all - you know there's going to be something around the next corner because there's always something around the next corner. The story and scriptwriting is APPALLING - you couldn't do worse if you tried. The puzzles are also moronically simplistic - the instructions and hints are all in Japanese and I've spent less than ten minutes on any one. There's also something fundamentally irritating about the setup. In RE1, I think you're a cop sent to investigate some strange goings-on, and then get trapped inside the creepy house which is by now surrounded by zombies and your radio doesn't work. Fair enough. In 2, you're a cop working late, and when you try to leave work everyone's turned into a zombie. Ok, hackneyed and derivative yes, but at no point can you say 'why don't you just run away' or 'why aren't there any reinforcements'. In RE4, the President's daughter has been kidnapped, and you've been sent in as the ultra-tough special-operative one-man-army. With one crappy pistol and a knife. Come on people, tools for the job. The zombies and mutants being far-fetched doesn't matter - the problem is that even in the game's world, they'd send in a bit more than one bloke for the rescue mission. I've died countless times, no matter how close I get the daughter keeps getting (re-)kidnapped, and I can't help thinking - where's my backup? Where's my crack team of special forces commando types, kitted out in kevlar body armour and heavy assault rifles - if I had them this would be over in twenty minutes.
The thing is, you have to give the player the tools to do the job. All this one-man-against-all-the-odds stuff is crap and boring. The reason there's so much of it is that designing co-op is hard - creating AI squad members that will help the player and respond intelligently to his or her orders is difficult to do and very difficult to do well. A zombie just needs to lurch towards you and attack when it gets close. You can write code that does that in an hour. A squad member needs to follow the player, open doors, not get lost, respond to orders, decide whether to shoot or run, duck or cover, flick switches, pick up items - you name it. You've also got to be a bit clever with your level design - you want there to be multiple paths and interesting logic problems for the player (along the line of the puzzle where you have to get the fox, chicken and grain across the river), and multiple ways of doing them too. This is potentially weeks or even months of work - and you still need to write the zombie code. However, there are a load of things in RE4 that I think they could easily have done without. There's this whole system of quick-reaction tests, where a certain (scripted) event happens (eg a column falling down, a sniper's bullet), and you have to press a certain combination of buttons to avoid being hit by column/bullet, (and if you mess up, getting the game over screen, waiting for the game to load exactly the same room that it was just using, and then trying again with the clairvoyant-like knowledge of what's about to happen). This would have required a lot of work too - new input handling code, timing stuff, loads of special-case art assets and movies which are only used once in the whole game, potentially weeks or even months of work. They really don't add anything to the game - they irritated me, and even to people who quite liked them, they're still just a gimmick really. It doesn't add any interesting abilities or choices to the player, it doesn't enhance the gameplay or widen the possibility space or anything, it's just a showy set-piece. + 0 - 0 | § ¶A New Language
Guest Device: iBookG4 (aka Mum's laptop, akpa (also known privately as) Silly single-buttoned Fisher-Price My First Laptop)
Just finished day 4 of my new job. I'm now a Software Engineer (seeeeexy) at Ideaworks3D, and am working on the mobile version of Metal Gear Solid (!), which is pretty cool actually - at least it's something that people will have heard of, and not something crap like poker. It's hard and quite a steep learning curve, but I'm keeping up. There's not much of a formal process for new people, and so far it's been (in a nice way): 'Er, well here's the engine, there are some examples in this directory, have a tinker and try and get your head around it.' Anyway, today I've now got the actualy game source and will be working from that, so it all feels a bit more legit. The other people are nice - far less geeky than some of the places I interviewed at. So far I've been pretty quiet, which feels a bit like a step back after the larger-than-lifeness of being a JET, but you can't exactly go strolling into a new office full of people you don't know and say in a loud and booming voice 'I am Nick from England! Let's play... Grandmother's Footsteps!'
It's good to be working again though - all the job hunting stuff was quite exciting in a way, but I still spent way too much time with not quite enough to do, which in turn makes just pottering around somehow rather unsatisfying. And it's nice that I can still sort of cut it here, without my JET rock-star status. One of the things that never stopped being tiring was that even towards the end of JET, I still couldn't read anything official or documented, and so even though the office was meant to be run in English, we still got lesson plans through in Japanese as well as all the old books, and I'd still have to ask Arai-sensei to help me. Now of course, being back in England, I get to work with perfectly readable things, like this:
// create scale vector, apply to scene node and also add it to SPhysicsTerrain
vector3df terrainScale(10.0f, 1.0f, 10.0f);
terrainNode->setScale(terrainScale);
// create SPhysicsTerrain
SPhysicsTerrain terrain;
terrain.terrainNode = terrainNode;
terrain.terrainScale = terrainScale;
// create Terrain entity
IPhysicsEntity* terrainEntity = physics.addEntity(&terrain);
while(device->run())
{
driver->beginScene(true, true, SColor(0,100,100,100));
smgr->drawAll();
driver->endScene();
// worry about accurate timing later
physics.update(100.0f);
}
Hmmm...