General show:

• With its unabashed “nerdcore” attendee list, PAX is better described as a mini-GenCon than a mini-E3. They have an impressive size for being a fairly young show, but it still is very much centered around fandom of the Penny Arcade comic. The sessions with the authors and on the PA game were some of the hottest tickets, as opposed to other sessions talking about more “serious” topics of development.  Not surprising, it’s not supposed to be a GDC or anything, despite heady topics about PR and episodic content.
• On the upside, it actually had a fairly impressive turnout of games in playable form, including many that I hadn’t seen before in any form. I assume that falling at the same time as Leipzig gave the publishers some ready-made material to show.
• Aside from what I mention below, there was a great spread of playable games:  Haze, Eye of Judgment, Metroid Prime 2, Conan (console), Heavenly Sword (a new demo), Warhammer Online, a big America’s Army thing, and several dozen more I’m not thinking of here.
• Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony and EA all made an appearance, which is impressive given recent news that E for All won’t have that sort of backing.
• Overall PAX surprised me with an air of “legitimacy” as a serious show. It would take a couple more years, but if it ultimately balloons into a notable national event, it’ll be cool for Seattle.

Kane and Lynch:

• I was able to sit down and play through an entire level… this is the Japanese street battle against cops that you’ve probably seen videos of. They did a great job of maintaining a feel… all the civilians running around gave it a good feel of chaos, even if they were just there to block shots and fall down dead. As you can probably guess, the game’s pretty grim.
• This game was one of many ones that I played that use the Gears/Killswitch cover scheme. Here, it felt pretty good. AI used cover extremely well, with multiple animations to shoot out of cover at a number of angles and heights. If you flanked them, they did an impressive job of adjusting their stance to keep cover.
• In the demo I was grouped with a bunch of nondescript allies who fought alongside me, so I don’t know if I was Kane or Lynch, and my partner didn’t really strike me as any different as any other ally. That said, the feeling of directing a group was good… These guys looked cool coming up alongside you and firing out of cover… You could direct them and it felt okay, even though I didn’t always see a big impact from the commands: “go there”, “attack this” and “follow me”.
• The control scheme read like a scientific calculator manual, with multiple commands on the D-pad and L3 sprinting… Bleah.
• The demo was a fight along a directed path, with none of the usual “open world” experience you see so much.  I must admit that I went up to a car whose door was open (for cover) and almost expected to be able to drive, but in the end the game was better without it… allowing there to be a lot of detail in smaller spaces. This gave a pretty intense experience… however, I still didn’t get a feeling that the characters they were marketing were distinct in any way, other than having to fight cops a lot.

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune:

• In this one I played in a small playground with a bunch of climbing pillars and a courtyard fight against modern pirates.
• The climbing didn’t really stand out to me much, except for the fact that the animation was crazy-smooth. The problem with its smoothness is that sometimes my character felt “lazy” or slow. In general it had all the Prince of Persia-style climbing mechanics you expect…  I didn’t really engage in any climbing puzzles in the demo.
• In contrast, I really enjoyed the shootout I had. There was something a bit more personal in my combat with these enemies… I took cover (once again) like Gears, but there was something about the feel of the shootout that felt intense. The videos really don’t do it justice.
• At the same time, while the renegades I fought were pretty generic, how they moved and the personality of the shootout that really made it seem like they were dangerous people. This is something that Half-Life and a couple other games do, but isn’t always the case… more often you’re afraid of “a bullet” or “an explosion” than you are of an organized, motivated group of people. I think it delivered that feel really well to me. Since I didn’t get that feel from the videos, I’m trying to figure out why I felt so strongly, whether it was control, or responsiveness, or how the enemies were moving, shooting and constantly trying to flank me.
• Melee combat was cool too, a sort of side-on, slow-mo affair that had a good visceral feel. Of course everyone does the up-close takedowns now (again you could credit Gears’ chainsaw for this).

Lair:

• I picked this one up and played it for about five minutes. It was really hard to get into… My dragon steered by tilting the controller, which was not particularly responsive and always led me to want to touch the sticks (which controlled the camera). If there was a way to reverse direction, I didn’t know what it was.
• The game is definitely a child of Rogue Squadron rather than what I was hoping for, a spiritual successor to Drakan. Generally I was flying from checkpoint to checkpoint, destroying distant targets with flybys. I felt like I had already experienced all there was by watching the videos online.
• One thing that using the tilt-sensor allows you to do is to load up BOTH sticks, D-Pad, all four shoulder buttons and all face buttons with commands. This game gave Kane and Lynch a run for its money in terms of control complexity. I guess it comes from those sim roots.

Dark Sector:

• I was shocked to see this playable, six kiosks, with open slots always available.  I’m not sure whether there’s big buzz around the game or not.  I played through a chunk several times, but I’m not sure how far I got (it was pretty hard).
• There was hiding behind pillars and seeing them disintegrate as they are shot up, which I got my fill of in Stranglehold. For some reason the cover didn’t feel as cool as it did in Kane and Lynch or Drake’s though.
• My glaive was probably my deadliest weapon when I threw it (my SMG seemed weak against enemies, they just kept getting back up), but I didn’t feel like I had experienced it the way it was supposed to be used…  I just saw a blurry thing go to the enemy and make them fall over.
• I didn’t get far enough in the demo to try out the “elemental powerups” to it, which is what I’m interested in trying.

 It was interesting posting to that crowd…  It was a group that was pretty academic-heavy, so getting content from a developer was a rather novel thing.  As a result, I kept this first article rather general.

Play Appraisal 1: Observations of a Developer

At the time, with a smug “experienced developer” sense of authority, I felt fairly certain of what GTA IV held for us. When they finally released that first trailer, I was surprised… they made a couple of choices I expected, and some others that I didn’t.

What led me to my assumptions were a few elements that I felt were key to the original success of the franchise:

1) The GTA series is pure Americana. Pop culture oozes from it, from the advertisements and radio stations, to the culture around guns and cars, and their acquisition. Sure, back in the stone age there was a GTA expansion in London, but the series has been locked and loaded on the U.S. since it became a phenomenon with GTA III. With the former DMA located in Scotland, this is no accident… we’re seeing America exaggerated through the lens of an outsider, and Americans and overseas audiences are eating it up.

GTA had to return to the U.S. with number 4. The only question was what city? Liberty City makes total sense… Once the series tackled Miami and California, there really aren’t any remaining cities with the worldwide recognition and cultural punch. (Sorry Chicago and Seattle, you have limited visibility to gamers in, say, Spain.) Plus, New York is still the most iconic American city there is.

2) GTA has always been both stylish and stylized. For all the controversy and violence in the game, it was never graphically realistic… and that worked in its favor. The situations were so over the top that when you caused a 10-car pileup or were pounding on someone with a baseball bat, was counterbalanced with the style to create a more amusing image than ghastly… sort of like Bugs Bunny with a bloody chainsaw. Sure, gamers have clamored for more realistic graphics like they always do, but I was genuinely surprised that they moved closer to photorealism with the new one.

While gamers have become more desensitized violence in games, there still is a line there as you approach realistic victims and more realistic results of your actions. I worked on the Soldier of Fortune series, which depicted accurate wounds, with enemies screaming and the whole close-up-and-personal ordeal. It did fairly well for its time, but it was a decidedly hardcore affair with no pretenses of mass-market sales numbers. I always felt that one thing that allowed GTA to get away with what it did without crossing that line of repulsion was that their characters and physics were so over-the-top. It’ll be interesting to see how their turn towards the photorealistic goes.

3) GTA has always delved into romanticized crime cultures. The Mafiosos and Miami drug smugglers of GTA III and Vice City have long been given a shiny, appealing gloss in movies and television. As nasty as those people could be, there still was a bit of fantasy that made people ask themselves “what would it be like?” With San Andreas, the series took a turn towards the L.A. “Boyz in the Hood” gang culture, which was a bold step since it’s much less romantic than the other two… However, it had a huge well of rapper and hip-hop culture to delve from, so it’s no wonder that it was an equally huge success.

The biggest surprise with GTA IV then is the choice to move away from all that and dig into the Russian mob… The player is a new immigrant pursuing the American dream. It’s compelling because it is by far the most iconic story in New York City. However, keeping the player under the foot of the Russian mob is shockingly removed from previous titles. There’s no fantasy in that at all… the Russian mafia are well-known as a bunch of very dangerous and scary individuals. Very few souls dream idly of that life. Plus, with the player remaining reasonably poor for the duration of the game, there will be less of a carrot of “living the high life” once the story is played through.

Of course who am I to question a company that has created a series that has grossed over a billion dollars in sales? The gameplay will be awesome as usual. The rabid fanbase will follow the well-told tale wherever it leads them. While most new franchises get about 30 seconds to snare a consumer’s attention, where a crime drama centered on the Russian mafia would almost certainly fail, GTA IV will be a success. It would take a quarter or less of the sales of GTA’s previous incarnations to be a success, but it’ll be interesting to see what the impact of these choices will have. Perhaps it’ll open people’s eyes to even more interesting stories for games to tell… let’s hope so.