Wednesday, 31 Jan 2007

I’ve played Bungie’s Myth I and Myth II a lot. I mean a lot. I think they are possibly the best computer game series ever.   I think about games a lot. I’ve tried a lot of  games but nothing has grabbed me like the myth games. Halo is fun and very addictive, but it lacks the large team play of Myth, and First Person Shooters are not my favorite style game.

Here’s what I would like to see in a game:
(Basically I want a game that is so mythlike as to be all but indistinguishable from what I imagine a new version of Myth would be like.)

Other than the basics of really good graphics, an engaging solo mission mode with good sound/soundtrack, great audio, multiplayer competitive and cooperative modes of play I look for:

1) full 3d environment with very flexible (and customizable key/mouse assignments) pan and zoom camera.

2) NOT First Person POV (or at least not _locked_ into FPS mode). Ideally would have ability to switch between FPS and free-moving (e.g. not locked to an individual player controlled character) camera.

3) Focus on squad/team based unit management with flexibility for individual unit control or larger armies

4) Destructible scenery/models/objects

5) Should support a variety of Multiplayer/ffa and team/coop games

6) Allow customization of any game element from scenery to maps to terrain to weapons, and provide tools to modify the game elements to the user community.

7) From the game player’s point of view, make adding 3rd party customizations (including new maps/levels/missions etc) to a player’s version of the game as simple as possible - either via some similar to Myth kind of simple-to-use-by-the-player plugin/mod/patch architecture, or possibly via an embedded game-enhancement online search/download/install feature.

— additions

8) Allow individual units or squads or entire armies/teams to be given a set of commands or functions or tasks to carry out ‘autonomously’ - using prescripted actions. To use the famous Bungie described example of what was supposed to be in Myth: TFL until their scripter left the project: A player could select all their ghols and assign them the script/task of ‘roam around the map collecting dwarf skulls and pile them up at x location’. The tasks should have a priority assigned to them so the game AI can choose the more important priority when assignments conflict. e.g. “Move out of missle range if attacked” could be given priority over “Go to position x,y on the map and wait there”. The unit-action-scripts should be easily traded so players can share scripts with other players.

9) To prevent unit-action-scripts from becoming the cheat-nuclear-weapn-mods that might allow bad or mediocre players with 133t scripts to beat much better players, there should be an option in the hosting screen to turn off/disable scripts so the host of multiplayer game would have the option of disabling scripts for a particular game, or disabling all but ’standard/official’ scripts, or better yet for pure equality - have the option of disabling all scripts that aren’t in the host’s script folder (assuming the host is willing to share scripts) or maybe better yet, disabling all scripts that aren’t shared by everyone in the game.

10) Build in a ’share files’ option into the hosting multiplayer interface so a game host can make his/her plugins/maps/mods/scripts downloadable by players who join a game he/she is hosting. Better still would be option to ’share but ask for permission’ so that if a player clicked on a host’s file to download it would notify the host who would have to ‘approve’ either that specific request or ALL requests for that particular file.  [As in Myth II v1.6 the game should provide players and host an easily accessible list of all non-standard plugins/maps/mods/scripts being used in the current (about to be started) game]

11) Units/scenery/models should have an elevation property, and should be able to exist and (if relevant) move around above ground, player camera should be able to follow airborne objects/units/etc.

12)Similarly, units/scenery/models should be able to be positioned underwater, and the player camera should be able to travel thru and display underwater environments.

13. Allow ground/elevation to be transformed. e.g. craters, blasting cliffs apart, digging holes, etc.

I am sure there’s more, but that’s my short list of what I want to see in the ultimate game. [In the meantime I would settle for a multiplayer game version of Massive (the Lord of the Rings battle rendering software), but long term I want it all.

Tuesday, 30 Jan 2007

I don’t understand the “inundate the customer with emails because that will make them want to buy our product” school of marketing thought. Seriously I don’t.  This morning, of the 300+ junk emails in my inbox, over 100 of them were for replica watches. Yes, ONE HUNDRED EMAILS ALL FOR THE SAME PRODUCT ARRIVED IN MY JUNK YAHOO EMAIL FOLDER IN THE SPAN OF 24 HOURS!. In the same time that Jack Bauer can save the USA from nuclear bomb toting terrorists, all these spammers can do is send me 100 identical emails about their replica watches.

Friday, 26 Jan 2007

Received another tip from Frank last week. a $5 bill in envelope bearing a variation of the familiar instructions “Paperboy, have a drink on me. Frank”.

Personalitywise, Frank is probably my favorite customer. He manages to squeeze so much personality and sincerity into so few words - he just has an amazing economy of language.

Thursday, 25 Jan 2007

A few months back I heard a song by Eliza Gilkyson, and just fell in love with her voice. A lot of her material is more countryish than I generally go for, and sometimes her voice has that country edge I don’t find all that pleasant but overall I just love her voice.

After hearing her a lot on internet radio stations I was listening to (folkalley.com, pandora.com) I got curious about her so did a little reading and was suprised to find out that her brother had been the guitarist (Billy Zoom) in the LA punk band X.

Just today, following a link for an artist I wasn’t sure who it was I found out it was her. Read her bio and discovered her father was a noted songwriter who penned several top ten hits for himself and others who later in life went to work for Disney. In 1968 he received an Academy Award nomination for writing “The Bear Necessities” for the motion picture The Jungle Book. Her dad wrote my undisputedly favorite disney song of all time “The Bear Necessities”?! Must be the coolest dad ever.

Tuesday, 23 Jan 2007

i like to think that the internet is the great repository of all knowledge where little known facts are stored and can be used to resolve all manner of disagreements between people who *think* they know something because they don’t know any different and people who actually know something that’s not a popular/common thing to know. but it’s not.

i also like to think that creators of original creative material will be recognized for what they do, but by and large they aren’t.

case in point? a pandora internet “radio” station i listen to played the song “Torn” made popular by Natalie Imbruglia. A few years ago I heard the song played by the band/artist that wrote the song (they had recorded the song _before_ Imbruglia covered it). It was a much darker version and I liked the song a _lot_ more than the poppy Imbruglia version. I thought I would add the original artist who wrote the song to my pandora station so I did some google searching to find the author and it took me over an hour - and that is KNOWING that there was an original author. I FINALLY found one single reference to the song’s writers that had the name of the woman i heard sing it on the radio.  If I hadn’t known the song was written by someone else the first 55minutes of searching would have led me to believe that Imbruglia was the author.

Once I knew her name, I can find ALL kinds of references to her as the author of the song, but … without knowing her name, can YOU find the author of this song without looking at the CD itself?  If you can, let me know what search terms you used because i like to think I am a better than average searcher and i couldn’t find this fact anywhere.