Nearing the End of the Semester

Well it's almost thanksgiving and that means it's almost the end of another semester here at Champlain College.

A couple things have transpired since my last update about what I'm doing. One, Chris Crawford came to the school to do a lecture and workshop with us. Which ended up being two lectures. But it was still interesting. For those who don't know, Chris Crawford worked at Atari back in the day and then he worked on making games for the mac. Which surprised me cause you know... macs don't really do games. But anyway, time went on and he worked on some other projects and NOW he is working on storytron.com. It's a website where you can play a story that is completely character driven. This is relatively unheard of in the Video game world as it is really hard to do programatically. He's basically retired from the world of video games and is now focusing on Interactive Storytelling. Which is very similar but while he was talking you could tell that he had certain feelings about how you interact with people in games that not everyone agrees about. But he was still very interesting to talk to and to hear his thoughts about interactivity.

The second major thing that happened was MIGS, or the Montreal International Game Summit. I don't have the money to pay for this on my own so I had to get a scholarship to go there. Which was great. I met a few industry folks and got their business cards. Which reminds me I'm working on making my own. I have an old one that is pretty terrible so I didn't bother bringing any with me. But I have an idea for a new one that I was inspired slightly by the card I got from Jason Holtman, who works at Valve. When I finish it I'll post up some images or mock ups so you can see what it looks like. But the good news is that Holtman said that my senior team project sounds like something that valve would be willing to put on Steam. So now the only thing standing between my group and greatness is my group AND don't think I'm not lumping myself in there too. It's a group effort we'll succeed or fail together.

But I met a lot of interesting people at MIGS and learned a bit too. Now I just have to continue the networking process which means emailing all of them and keeping in touch. Which is the hard part for me, because I went to MIGS last year and didn't keep in touch with anyone because I tried to send an email or two out but I just didn't know what to say. So hopefully I can do better this year.

Senior team project is going smoothly. We're almost done with our vertical slice of the game. All that's left is for me to fix a couple bugs and then hand it off to the artists really. And then do some more tweaks and such until we finally hand it in. As is the case that you are always doing tweaks. Everyone in the group has decided that this prototype level is in terms of gameplay not really what we want from the game. But at this point we can't change the level. It showcases the puzzles and such that we can put into the game which we like but we want more jumping in the final version, less safe areas. But maybe that's a bad idea. We need to playtest for that. But again at this point we just want to get a solid prototype level down and figure the rest out next semester.

Advanced Seminar is going well too. I've got the card game pretty well balanced. It's just a matter of making it pretty and finding any loopholes and such in the rules that the players may exploit. I also need to tidy up my documentation a little bit because it is definitely not in the best of shape, the lack of needing to communicate with others has left me a little unconcerned with the design document, but some of the folks I talked to at MIGS said that I should include my documentation in my portfolio so people can see how I think.

That's about it for this month. See you al next month. Happy Thanksgiving.

Resident Evil 5 for the Xbox 360

So here we are again. Another month, another review. I have to say though. I'm a little scared. I've hit the point in my gaming career where a lot of games just don't interest me. So I've basically matured to the point where I'm not like a puppy chasing after every game that comes along... Which is cool I guess, but... it also means I'm not sure what I'm going to review next Month... We'll see if I find anything to talk about in between now and then.

Also in a special note about this review. I've noticed that my previous reviews were pretty wordy and I realize that people probably don't want to read all that. So I'm going to try and keep each section down to a single paragraph. If you disagree with this decision please comment on this post. Or even if you agree, please comment. I'd like to know I'm being read.

Concept: 2/5

The concept of this game is pretty terrible. The Resident Evil Series has this weird rut, where the head designer of the first game made that one and then moved on to other projects and they just kept rehashing that idea over and over and over again. He finally said enough is enough and came back to work on Resident Evil 4 to try and get them to make something new and it worked he jumpstarted the series again. Now that we're on to Resident Evil 5 though... they're just rehashing his idea from 4 again... It's just horrible. The only thing I give it props for is actually having a "zombie" infestation in Africa. Maybe it's because I live in America but every Zombie media I've seen has taken place in America, or England for the 28 whatever series. So Resident Evil 5 gets credit for taking "zombies" out of America and Europe. I'll explain why I put zombies in quotes in the Entertainment section.

Graphics: 4/5

The graphics are amazing. I mean other than a couple facial quirks of one character I think they're damn near perfect. And the facial quirks, I learned from watching the bonus DVD that came with my copy, were little ticks and stuff that the actor did when voice acting and motion capturing the character. Capcom did a lot of motion capturing, they did a lot of story boarding with the cut-scenes, heck they even motion captured the actor's faces when they were voice acting. In the end they spent a lot of money on the graphics for this game and it shows.

Sound: 3/5

Sound is normal in Resident Evil 5. There's nothing particularly amazing about it but at the same time it's not bad. It's doing its job which is to make the game feel right without being distracting. There isn't really much to say about the sound. Other than in the "making of" video in the bonus DVD when they talked about the music and such it definitely made me feel that if I were a musician I would almost exclusively want to work on soundtracks for movies and games. It just seems like a more stable and entertaining job than being part of an orchestra that plays the same 20 famous songs by the same 8 famous dead guys over and over again.

Playability: 3/5

The game handles itself pretty well. There's the all time Resident Evil complaint of not being able to shoot and walk at the same time. But that helps lend to the scariness because it means you can't just shoot everything and keep moving you have to become a target before you can start shooting which makes it tougher and like I said scarier. This game also focuses heavily on co-op. To the detriment of trying to play this game by yourself. The AI of your partner is so abysmal that as soon as I learned that I drafted one of my roommates to play with me and we worked through the whole game together. So this means that this game is 2 player only, really. So I went from Ghostbusters which was single player only, to Resident Evil 5 which was 2 player only. Which was nice I guess. My other complaint about the playability of the game is that during the final boss there's a sequence where you have to do certain things in the perfect order otherwise he will one hit kill you, so as you're learning how to do this you will be replaying the same sequence over and over again for probably close to 20 minutes.

Entertainment: 4/5

OK. Time to explain "zombies." Here's the thing, ever since RE4, there are no more zombies in the Resident Evil  universe, well none that you fight anyway. You are instead fighting people infected with a special germ, plant, seed thing which makes them mindless slaves. But it's easier to say "zombies" than to say "people infected with a special germ, plant, seed thing which makes them mindless slaves" so everyone still calls them zombies. Now as for the story of this game it's pretty good. For fans of the series it will explain a lot of the history of how Umbrella Corporation was founded, where the T-Virus, G-Virus, etc. came from, and what's been happening with two or three of the original characters that kind of fell off the face of the planet as far as the series is concerned. So there's a lot of fan appeasement in here. Also the story while not the most mind blowing thing ever, is solid so it will be enjoyable too. A note of warning though. This game is only enjoyable for the people playing it. So if you have people that like watching games being played. They probably won't enjoy it. Mostly because since this is really a two player game each player will be staring at their half of the screen and the people watching won't know where to look and it will be confusing for them.

X-Factor: 2/5

There's not much x-factor here. There's no replay value, there's no feeling of attachment to the characters. It's all about playing with someone else. This game will give you a good couple nights of hanging out with someone and enjoying a story together. But once those couple nights are over... this game is going to go into your library and you're probably never going to look at it ever again. It's a onetime game. You play it onetime and you're done. That's all there is to this game.

Overall: 19/30 AVERAGE

If you're a fan of the Resident Evil Series, or more specifically Resident Evil 4, than you'll love this game... That is you'll love it if you have a person to play with. If you're by yourself you'll probably grow frustrated, annoyed, and not want to play anymore, if you do have a partner in crime it will be a nice fun experience that the two of you can share together.