First off, I think this game would pretty much rock as it would explore more of Bruce Wayne's past as he fights to become Batman. As I have decided based on recent animated movies of Batman...he's not looking for closure or healing from his parents' death, he's looking for revenge and ways to take out thugs whose mission is to terrorize Gotham.
I think Team Ninja could do this quite well since they did a pretty good job about making Samus look vulnerable in Other M, sure she was still the cold-hunter shell gameplay-wise and still taking out the enemies, but maybe some players want to see not only what batman is saying, but what he is thinking. Batman's a genius and I think team ninja and WB could collaborate into showing players why batman is so smart, maybe even through mental/physical puzzle elements into the game just to showcase how batman thinks.
Also this game should show in a Ninja Gaiden-esque way that Batman is a trained-killer, not actually killing people but show that he has more to him than just beating up people randomly.
That and I think unlike the somewhat mundane and ugly bink cinematics that kind of plagued Arkham Asylum, have the CG branch of Team Ninja due their thing and make movie quality cinematics and cutscenes like they did for Other M. Batman should have entertainment goodness, and low resolution bink crud doesn't cut it.
That and I think with this entertainment value in mind, this batman game should have enough east/west elements that it is still entertaining for not only people playing it, but for people watching it also.
Like I said in the last post, Batman's origin is not that he is healing through taking out criminals...the pain in his parent's death is still fresh and he is just as angry as ever...and while he doesn't really show it, the use of showing batman's thoughts maybe should show that he is less or more angry than he appears. Also through this campaign maybe the developers should showcase where batman gets his day to day motivations, and in these motivations show that he is restless and eager to kick butt.
Also, knowing the highly detailed perks of the Ninja Gaiden III engine, I think it's safe to say that Team Ninja's engine should be used to showcase the more gritty look this Batman game should use. It's not meant to be like the Arkham games, so why does it have to look it? That and maybe the NG3 nature of having thug regulars one away from batman after getting their butt kicked would be a nice effect.
With that said, it would be nice if the music was more akin to modern/electo-orchestra similar that of The Animated Series, which pretty much had the best music of pre-Warner Premiere titles. That and Batman's art style should showcase his pain and freshness.
I think this is it for now, thanks for reading.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Frowned Upon or Who-dun it?: Why don't game developers collaborate more (with each other)?
With a wealth of old and new ideas in the gaming industry, one of the most rare occasions is for studios to actually STOP competing for a sec and actually shake hands on a project and collaborate to bring a new or old franchise more originality.
From bringing Link into SCII, to Team Ninja redefining the classic style of Metroid games pre-Prime, these games while being large departures at least keep franchises new and fresh even if the departures are almost alienating to fans of the previous vision.
Metroid: Other M is not exactly a "bad game", but its hard to re-adapt to TN's arcade like controls where the FPS mechanic is few and far between, that and actually giving Samus a more vulnerable personality gave some fans like me the impression that the game tried to make Samus too human from her almost cold-hunter shell in Prime.
That said, without Collaboration in a broader sense we wouldn't have some of the most blockbusting titles that are pretty much better than companies native titles, such as Marvel VS Capcom being easily a better franchise than the notoriously famous yet bland Street Fighter Series due to almost an additional plethora of characters, features, and the like.
Due to this, there are some collaborations just begging to happen, such as one I thought of earlier today, that WB/Rocksteady (Batman Arkham) should at some point collaborate with Team Ninja to make a Japanese-style Batman game (maybe explore Batman's ninja/samurai training background). Also it would be interesting to see Batman partake in a more Ninja Gaiden atmosphere that helms to more of the recent anime/premiere adaptions of Batman.
But my issue with this is, why don't people do it more often. Yes competition is the most known way of stimulating new and fresh ideas, but recently that hasn't been the case. Series like Battlefield and Call of Duty don't win in competition for new ideas, they win competitions by sticking to OLD ideas and keeping people in their markets by just having them play pretty much the same gameplay through each new title.
As if though it is almost frowned upon or blame-stricken for studios to collaborate since new ideas are almost hypocrisy and blasphemous. Kind of like how Other M was almost completely destroyed by critics because of giving Samus Aran a real personality, even IGN's article title being over-the-top with "Killing Samus".
I might not have liked the new Samus, but I don't think they actually BUTCHERED the character as IGN's persecution specifies. The only reason she DIDN'T have a personality in Prime is it was a bare-bones FPS made by an american branch of Nintendo, and usually the usual blunt perspective of FPS games is that the character has no real personality. Japan loves and is famous for creating exasperating character backgrounds and personalities, and while we don't openly admit it, they are pretty much the kings of taking a bland franchise and giving it life with an amazing story. You go from Prime where everyone's two-dimensional from Other M where everyone seems like an actual person.
I'm pretty sure Team Ninja could do the same with Batman. While he is a mean bad-butt take-all-names beat-em-up, the only reason he became batman is to take out his anger and parents' death on criminals. Maybe Team Ninja can explore his inner pain while he is actually doing his vigilante work. Batman's a jerk to his enemies, and maybe some people want to know why in game-play form.
This pretty much ends my rant for now, hope you enjoyed this thought-provoking post.
Thanks for reading,
Cyrain.
From bringing Link into SCII, to Team Ninja redefining the classic style of Metroid games pre-Prime, these games while being large departures at least keep franchises new and fresh even if the departures are almost alienating to fans of the previous vision.
Metroid: Other M is not exactly a "bad game", but its hard to re-adapt to TN's arcade like controls where the FPS mechanic is few and far between, that and actually giving Samus a more vulnerable personality gave some fans like me the impression that the game tried to make Samus too human from her almost cold-hunter shell in Prime.
That said, without Collaboration in a broader sense we wouldn't have some of the most blockbusting titles that are pretty much better than companies native titles, such as Marvel VS Capcom being easily a better franchise than the notoriously famous yet bland Street Fighter Series due to almost an additional plethora of characters, features, and the like.
Due to this, there are some collaborations just begging to happen, such as one I thought of earlier today, that WB/Rocksteady (Batman Arkham) should at some point collaborate with Team Ninja to make a Japanese-style Batman game (maybe explore Batman's ninja/samurai training background). Also it would be interesting to see Batman partake in a more Ninja Gaiden atmosphere that helms to more of the recent anime/premiere adaptions of Batman.
But my issue with this is, why don't people do it more often. Yes competition is the most known way of stimulating new and fresh ideas, but recently that hasn't been the case. Series like Battlefield and Call of Duty don't win in competition for new ideas, they win competitions by sticking to OLD ideas and keeping people in their markets by just having them play pretty much the same gameplay through each new title.
As if though it is almost frowned upon or blame-stricken for studios to collaborate since new ideas are almost hypocrisy and blasphemous. Kind of like how Other M was almost completely destroyed by critics because of giving Samus Aran a real personality, even IGN's article title being over-the-top with "Killing Samus".
I might not have liked the new Samus, but I don't think they actually BUTCHERED the character as IGN's persecution specifies. The only reason she DIDN'T have a personality in Prime is it was a bare-bones FPS made by an american branch of Nintendo, and usually the usual blunt perspective of FPS games is that the character has no real personality. Japan loves and is famous for creating exasperating character backgrounds and personalities, and while we don't openly admit it, they are pretty much the kings of taking a bland franchise and giving it life with an amazing story. You go from Prime where everyone's two-dimensional from Other M where everyone seems like an actual person.
I'm pretty sure Team Ninja could do the same with Batman. While he is a mean bad-butt take-all-names beat-em-up, the only reason he became batman is to take out his anger and parents' death on criminals. Maybe Team Ninja can explore his inner pain while he is actually doing his vigilante work. Batman's a jerk to his enemies, and maybe some people want to know why in game-play form.
This pretty much ends my rant for now, hope you enjoyed this thought-provoking post.
Thanks for reading,
Cyrain.
Monday, October 3, 2011
Spilling the beans: How do you REALLY tell the difference between pure story info and spoilers?
It has come to my abundant recent knowledge that due to the more increasing nature of sites like IGN, Gametrailers, and Gamespot...that some of the info they give out about entertainment seems to lie in a vast gray area of story or plot details. Though we think that while a mere synopsis or detailed report of details seems unharmful, how do we objectively decipher that someone may or may not wanted to know that bit of info, and in their opinion it was really a spoiler in disguise?
This also transcends specific genres as there is a divide in the fanbase. A lot more RPG enthusiasts find story details to be more spoiler-written than say an FPS game. Take for instance a wiki article on games like Final Fantasy, compared to the almost total plot-telling of RAGE that id gave out. Then again, how these games are presented, the biggest part of an RPG is figuring out the story yourself, while with an FPS knowing more of the story ahead could change if you're motivated to buy or complete game.
Going along, there are some games that show spoilers but you don't know they are 'til you play the game, one of the biggest examples of this is Ace Combat where some of the more definitive scenes are shown in big-budget trailers to grab your interest, later to find out that some of those sequences aren't til the final missions or cutscenes.
There are also issues about some RPGs and Adventure games that show "a little too much", not in the sense of spoiling major parts of the game, but showing scenes out of context in the accidental nature of confusing more of the audience than they may have intended. This is also of course another form of marketing, as to trying to say to their market "buy it to figure out the scene and not be confused anymore". Of course the consequences are much higher about this form of details since people like me don't want to be confused about details if they want to make a solid purchase, if not that a later trailer dissolves some of the confusion from the earlier footage.
With all this said, this all entails to the final notion that most marketers or info sites overlook, just how smart some of their audiences are. People like me who have played certain genres for almost decades aren't that hard to be fooled into thinking how more or less of the game they have actually showed. I could say for a fact that while some of the FF-XIII-2 footage has left me confused, that I also know that there is plenty of room in the game to those scenes to become completely understandable(as far as FF plot-telling is able to achieve). Thus why do FPS games seem to give out more info than RPGs because after id told most of the story of RAGE, I know that they have pretty much told me the whole basic plot of the full game.
Subplots aside, I think while these kind of motives have more good than bad intentions...Companies should re-evaluate their nature of what they deem story info and all-out spoilers.
This also transcends specific genres as there is a divide in the fanbase. A lot more RPG enthusiasts find story details to be more spoiler-written than say an FPS game. Take for instance a wiki article on games like Final Fantasy, compared to the almost total plot-telling of RAGE that id gave out. Then again, how these games are presented, the biggest part of an RPG is figuring out the story yourself, while with an FPS knowing more of the story ahead could change if you're motivated to buy or complete game.
Going along, there are some games that show spoilers but you don't know they are 'til you play the game, one of the biggest examples of this is Ace Combat where some of the more definitive scenes are shown in big-budget trailers to grab your interest, later to find out that some of those sequences aren't til the final missions or cutscenes.
There are also issues about some RPGs and Adventure games that show "a little too much", not in the sense of spoiling major parts of the game, but showing scenes out of context in the accidental nature of confusing more of the audience than they may have intended. This is also of course another form of marketing, as to trying to say to their market "buy it to figure out the scene and not be confused anymore". Of course the consequences are much higher about this form of details since people like me don't want to be confused about details if they want to make a solid purchase, if not that a later trailer dissolves some of the confusion from the earlier footage.
With all this said, this all entails to the final notion that most marketers or info sites overlook, just how smart some of their audiences are. People like me who have played certain genres for almost decades aren't that hard to be fooled into thinking how more or less of the game they have actually showed. I could say for a fact that while some of the FF-XIII-2 footage has left me confused, that I also know that there is plenty of room in the game to those scenes to become completely understandable(as far as FF plot-telling is able to achieve). Thus why do FPS games seem to give out more info than RPGs because after id told most of the story of RAGE, I know that they have pretty much told me the whole basic plot of the full game.
Subplots aside, I think while these kind of motives have more good than bad intentions...Companies should re-evaluate their nature of what they deem story info and all-out spoilers.
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