Games

My best designer friend works on this. Looking forward to it immensely.

My friend works on this. He says that it's cool but that it could have been so much more. Whatever happens, it looks like it'll be the truest adaptation of parkour to date in the sense that it's very free, and the controls aren't a painful mess of FSM input windows - movement is flowing and levels aren't linear, allowing for creativity in your routes.

Can't not look forward to this for the parametric tools alone. Pulling all the game modes together seamlessly is going to be a real challenge, though.

One of the first PC games I really got into. Overcomplicated, but utterly believable. It made me a starwars fanboy more than films ever did. Note: I am no longer a starwars fanboy.

I spent my formative years modding for Quake 2. It has a special place in my heart not so much for the game itself, but for the community it created.

I love how the low level battles take their parameters from higher level gameplay. It gives context and significance to your action on the battlefield. You read sun tzu's art of war after playing this, and it's as if it were a strategy guide. Fantastic job of effectively adapting a book into systemic game form.

I hate the gameplay of games like Dragon's Lair, or Fahrenheit, or those Quick Time Events in God of War, or Resident Evil 4. They're gimmicky and pretentious. Amplitude is effectively the same thing as that, though, and I absolutely love it. I suppose its because where amplitude links your actions to consistent rules, QTE's do something completely arbitrary and unpredictable while implying that they're you're actions. But they're not your actions. They belong to some animator somewhere, being creative so that you don't have to be.

It's about government conspiracies and aliens and clandestine groups... but it's done so well that it never feels cheesey. King of FPS RPGs.

I like that Thief made a point of being focussed on one style of game play, but still had so many approaches do it. It really confuses me that Thief can tell such a good story while being very open, and yet the games in its wake want to be more and more linear.

My brother taught me how to swear playing this game.

Probably the game that made me want to design. I was a teenager at the time, and my sister introduced me to it. All her media-friends were playing it, so I figured "wow, games are for grownups too". And yes, looking back, i see the irony of that now - how "mature games" are synonmous not with thoughtful themes, but with violence and blood mainly. Which I guess are adult themes, too... just not exactly very cerebral ones.

I used to fly as close to the ground as possible until I got so fast that my wings fell off. This game made me realize how fun freedom can be in games - with zero goals, I made my own amusement.

My brother played this, mainly, but I got to pilot and shoot while he did the trading (which I was too young to get). Great memories.

I love battlefield style games. I love them even more when the physics aren't jerky and constrained. ETQW looks like it's going to give me the arcadey movement I like (Quake 3 etc.) with the team play of battlefield. Looking forward to it immensely.