Left 4 Dead Tower Defense?
Just like Zubon, I’m a little Tower Defense crazy.
Left 4 Dead strikes me as ripe for a Tower Defense mod. It already revolves around defending as gameplay, plus it has waves and waves of not-so-mindless zombies ready to go. The AI director could probably be tweaked for it nicely. If I had the coding skills (or at least more familiar with the SDK), I’d start a mod project, but I don’t so here it is as a suggestion.
It doesn’t have to be Towers, just auto-targetting / auto-killing devices of some sort. I’m imagining all sorts of devilish traps that could be placed in some of the narrow corridors and hallways typical for Left 4 Dead maps. Maybe movable barriers too, so the pathing of the zombies could be altered. Then the glorious gibbing of zombies would abound!
This could end up a little more like Dungeon Keeper than Tower Defense, but that’s great, since I’d count Dungeon Keeper as the epitome of build-and-turtle defense games.
Without LAN, I won’t buy Starcraft 2
I’m not a huge fan, although that’s part of the point, because I’ve purchased most of Blizzard’s games anyway. I appreciated the Warcraft RTS games more, but the idea of Starcraft 2 has been growing on me. I love a good RTS and the genre has certainly slowed down.
This is exactly the style of game that I like playing on a LAN or directly with friends. For an RTS I’m not interested in some match-making service, competition ladders or ego-driven stats comparisons (oh god, the clicks-per-minute tracking I’m assuming they’re gonna do). In this case, a centralized stats service is actually a turn-off, the e-peen waggling of Blizzard fans is already hella annoying.
I’d also prefer the immediacy and quality of service of my own PC, my own network, or peer-to-peer directly to my friends in near-local networks with great ping (meaning same city, without bouncing thru a server somewhere south of the border). This is not a click-and-wait RPG, immediacy matters or the game style is changed.
I’d be interested in buying the game, not a game service. This isn’t an MMO.
The paradox is that Blizzard is doing this to avoid piracy, but it’ll give a compelling boost to LAN cracks and bnetd. Update: PvPGN is probably the better solution.
If Starcraft 2 ships without ways to opt out of the “community service” and play directly (LAN or peer-to-peer), then I’m just not interested. It wasn’t super high on my radar, but this just shoved it under it.
Monkey Island is back
I’m smiling.
(interactive video widget thingy from LucasArts removed because it was annoying with the autostart, you can view it here.)
Why is there no “Ask me about Loom” button?
Firefox 3.5: Shadows and Web Fonts
Update: And the codecs issues for <video> have people (on the working group) in a tizzy. Talk about timing.
Firefox 3.5 is out today and it’s a doozy of an update. What’s the big deal? Well some pre-CSS3 toys and goodies are in it, some of which were already added to Webkit (Safari & Chrome).
Some notable features:
- Audio, Video and Image embedding features are being added directly into Firefox via the <audio>, <video> and <canvas> tags. We’ve been viewing video on the web for eons, but it’s always been via plugins (Flash) or external programs (Quicktime, Windows Media Player, etc.), now the browsers are getting theses capabilities built-in (previously Firefox did not play sounds directly for instance). Standards for content directly in the browser are a bigger deal than they sound, because it will make cross-platform webapps so much easier to create.The Canvas features are especially cool, it’s not just a display method, it’s a drawing method for creating images.
YouTube already has support cooking for the video tag to replace Flash videos. I haven’t checked Webkit’s status on these features, but if it’s similar to Firefox’s… fully web-based apps could replace many of the iPhone’s apps (although it depends how much Apple intends to adopt or block the standards & codecs). I can already imagine creating games with this stuff.
- Web Fonts are possibly the biggest improvement to web-browsing since images. It’s been 16 years that we’ve been stuck with a small handful of ‘web-safe‘ fonts that exist on most PCs. There have been other kludges to embed fonts into websites as images, or provide links to download and install fonts manually, but Web Fonts embed directly: Allowing specific font faces to be shown by default with no compromising tricks.Web Fonts aren’t a shoe-in tho, there are still rights issues over who owns the fonts and which ones you can legally embed, but it’s past time when we should just be able to do it and decide typefaces for ourselves.
- Rounded borders via -moz-border-radius. Images are typically used to round borders, cut up into sections for backgrounds on the page. More recently JavaScript has been popular for rounding borders within the browser, but having them directly as CSS is more convenient. Unfortunately Mozilla (Firefox) and Webkit are tussling over the implementation, but hopefully they’ll both settle on how to interpret the CSS3 standard border-radius. Meanwhile, using separate -moz and -webkit markup works nicely.Example:
Browser
- Shadows via -moz-box-shadow. The inset and multiple shadow options make this feature very flexible, almost as much as Photoshop’s shadows. Combining shadows can make buttons that would usually be images, which is incredible. These make me want to recreate my theme here so I can simplify changes and save on bandwidth & display times to boot. The more we can do directly in the markup and without JavaScript or cutting up a bunch of images, the better.Simple Example (Firefox + Safari + Chrome):
Browser
Complex Example (Firefox):
Browser
I’ve already applied some of these to my theme here. I started adding rounded corners to my comment bubbles, it was so easy I just kept going with the rest of the theme. It’s cleaner and a breeze to maintain compared to fiddling with a bunch of carved-up images. These gracefully fall-back to the older standards, so while IE will end up looking plainer, it’ll still be fully usable.
Firefox, Safari and Chrome in total make up about a third of web-browsers. While there are still inconsistencies, it’s great to see them advancing these features. Hopefully it’ll be a kick in the pants for Microsoft to get with the program and update IE likewise.
Copernicus shows promise by not showing the game
I have no idea when Copernicus will be coming out. That’s a common tease from the games industry and there’s good reason for it: Posting your release date too soon can stretch thin the anticipation, reducing your ability to hype close to launch. Competitors can also capitalize on the knowledge and blunt your launch with their own well-timed press releases and updates.
In the Dark
I have no idea what the game is like. That’s more unusual, but I agree with it. It’s not so agreeable to others: Keen is feeling uneasy. I understand that, gamers are accustomed to being informed and bloggers even moreso. Being in the dark makes us uneasy.
The games industry loves pre-release hype, it’s a long standing tradition that goes back to the earliest game magazines. Talking about the future is more exciting than the current. That just might be indicative of a attention-deficit fanbase, but if games have truly become mass-media: Any given game should be able to punch through that tradition and explode on the scene closer to launch.
38 Studios has been downright cryptic when it comes to talking about their game. I think that’s wise, especially if their game is uniquely different as they say. They’re in control of their product, nobody is reacting to any given feature and making assumptions based on current games.
Too many MMORPGs lately have been chasing the pot-o-gold that World of Warcraft revealed. There’s been this widespread theory that if you slap the right elements together you’ll dominate the world. And that’s how the current crop of games have been made, by “listening to the fans” and maybe a bit of “market research“. Some of them haven’t been half bad, but most have had a core of promise that failed to deliver. The more corporate attempts have been soulless. At best, they’ve provided a decent world in the same model as WoW.
Maybe, just maybe, 38 Studios is trying to make their own game without being too influenced from outside sources that would shape their product into more of the same.
What we know
We know it’s an MMORPG and we know Curt Shilling loved Everquest, so he’s likely to give a few nods in that direction. We know it’s fantasy, they’ve made it clear they don’t think fantasy is over-saturated at all, they argue it just needs better games. We know they’re in it for the long haul and they’ve got a business plan. Curt Shilling is a crafty guy, savvy and relentless, he has all the elements for a good businessman. I know that and I don’t even watch baseball.
I think Keen is looking forward to this game as much as I am. He recognizes Curt Shilling has amassed a significantly talented workforce to make the game Curt Shilling wants to play. He’s hired from the top down, respecting that he doesn’t know the industry, so he started with people that do. He also created his talent team around R.A. Salvatore and Todd McFarlane, two names that are bound to turn heads when they do need to hype, but are also likely to give his story and art direction a strong focus.
There are some parallels here to BioWare. Good businessmen that started a game company to make games they wanted to play, in a non-corporate way. A deep respect of the RPG genre, but a desire to produce unique changes to that genre. Hiring the right people for an MMORPG and letting them do what they do well.
I’m hoping 38 Studios keeps their mouths shut until they’re good and ready. If all goes well, Copernicus could arrive as a unique, complete and compelling game. Sure that’s vague, but if it’s true we’ll all play it.
Funny, I don’t feel old
Someone called me old the other day, just as a joke, but it seems to be the theme of the week. I hadn’t thought of it much, but after it was said aloud, I reflected.
Maybe it was the reflection, but nostalgia has jumped my bones. There’s that B-movie thing I posted about. I’m listening to Paul Simon (not that I ever stopped), downloading episodes of Kojak (tho mostly missed it the first time around), and wishing Paul Williams was still writing songs for the Muppets. I’m excited about Monkey Island getting a remake and new episodes. I’m remaking a level from Alien Breed 3D myself.
Even though I don’t feel it overall, there are moments when age comes to the forefront:
- Some rich guy put a golf course on the exact spot of one of my most cherished childhood locations, a place I loved for how it felt utterly remote and secluded. Near Whistler, when there was no such thing as Whistler Village, just a quiet lodge and a gas station. It still feels like yesterday, even though I visited during the bulldozing over 12 years ago. Donna found a relic from that: this rusted tool of my misery just screams old, but to me it hasn’t been there that long at all, at least not before a quarter of the area was demolished developed.
It’s still beautiful up there, but not in the same untouched way. When you remember fishing from a boat where they’ve filled in parts of the lake for property, there’s a disconnect between then and now.
- On Brad McQuaid’s blog, Ixobelle lol’d at “Progressive Metal” like it was a funny phrase and not a predominant style of music. This made me feel ancient.
- A portion of Valve’s fans freaked out about Left 4 Dead 2 while they’re supposedly still waiting for content for Left 4 Dead. I thought these irate fans must have short memories, since most of Valve’s games have been updated with mods via SDKs or they’ve been mods to begin with. I wondered if these guys were getting senile as they claimed Team Fortress 2 (a long awaited sequel to a mod) as an example of how professionally created games topped mods. Then I realized some of these fans were probably still kids when Valve came onto the PC game scene as the mod kings.
- Today I overheard someone say “before the Internet” and they were referring to the 90’s. I’ve been online in one form or another since the 80’s, which used to grant me an unspoken title of “early adopter” but now it’s more like someone who remembers black & white television (do you dream in black & white?).
- I find myself at odds with a generation that aggressively competes even during group tasks and cooperative games. Plus they seem so unconcerned about privacy issues or consumer advocacy. It’s the first time ever I’ve made serious distinctions between a younger generation, or more to the point: Distinctions that I cannot relate to and find alien. This is what makes me feel the oldest.
I dinged 40 and I don’t feel much different. It hasn’t felt very long getting here and I’m hardly done walking that road. I’m hardly ageist and I’m not a senile crank yet, just thought I’d let you know. =P
One important note: If I had the ability to roll back the clock, I wouldn’t. Even when knee-deep in nostalgia, I’m happier with right now.
