According to 2K Marin's Kent Hudson, there are a few core qualities an enemy character should embody in order for playing a game to be fun. Most important among these is predictability. An enemy can be difficult to beat, but the player needs to be able to learn its movements and adapt to its strategies. Otherwise, attacks are coming out of nowhere and there's no way for the player to anticipate and adapt.
Makes sense. If only the team at 2K Marin had realized this before creating the Big Sister.
"We painted ourselves into a corner," says Hudson. "We made an error of innocence."
BioShock is one of the most surprising games of this generation. First of all, it isn’t inspired by a real-life conflict, a film or another game series, but a moderately successful novel called Atlus Shrugged by Ayn Rand, which put forward a philosophy called Objectivism, or ‘rational selfishness’.
BioShock’s writer and Creative Director, Ken Levine, and his team are now working on BioShock Infinite, a departure from the dark, dystopian corridors of Rapture into the bright skies of Columbia, a floating city named after the female personification of the United States of America. The PS Blog recently had the chance to sit down with Ken to talk about the philosophies that underpinned the original BioShock and how, if at all, these are being applied to BioShock Infinite.
These days, truly great game idea are quite hard to come by. With all of the sequels, HD remakes, and general gaming bullshit that has come out lately, we really have to wade through these titles, and find the games that are actually good. After we cut through all the sludge and grime, we come upon games that have these really good ideas that we have been searching for all this time. The only problem is that when we find these games, they dont always live up to what they could have. There are three games in specific that fit the description of games that had great idea, but relatively bad execution.
A rather unique take on five games you may have missed when they were new. Well, they’re cheap now, and they’re still awesome
This is the kind of news that truly informs readers. After the prerelease hype interviews are over, the real interesting stuff surfaces :)