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Oh save yourself the frustration. I played some Call of Juarez demo recently and it was a horrible experience.
Oh bugger. Well it can't be worse than fucking tomb raider jumping shit so i'll give it a go and review it even if I give up. I'm not once to quit easily though.
After nuff dicking around including having to disable NVidia AA just so it would run, I gave it a brief whirl.
Well. You can fully rebind controls and it doesn't control like complete dick. That is quite a welcome surprise. There is some partial dickness from clunky running and consolisedly out-of-control melee. The over-the-shoulder 3rd person is as pointless as ever, in fact 3rd person at all in this spoils both the control and immersion, but whatever it's tolerable. It definitely does what it says and no more. In some ways I could take it or leave it.....BUT then again, it's got bomb squigs (so cute!), the jump pack stomp attack is awesome, and the prospect of coop, well yeah count me in for that ;) Still not sure there is any coop, no word of it on the steam page (normally it has a small COOP button the side when there is).
i heard that they would release a coop version for pc after the release or someting like that
Looks like Portal. Like, a ripoff, not necessarily thematically.
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6330911/quantum-conundrum-puzzling-pc-ps3-360?tag=updates%3Beditor%3Ball%3Btitle%3B3 Took Portal, applied a fresh coat of paint, sold as different game. You can see the game play looks pretty much untouched - the portal mechanic replaced with dimension-shifting, but the same puzzle solving things of place crate on button, open door, planes that objects can't go through, lasers that power other objects, etc.
In other words, it's Portal, sans portals. i guess, but that's what most games are anyway?
all of id's games are basically the exact same shooter, with even the same types of guns. but at least with the puzzle solving genre, it's pretty much unexplored, so it'll feel a lot more fresh. I don't know, the game play doesn't seem to expand outside of Portal territory. Slowing down time is nothing new or particularly innovative, fluffy world just means you can pick up heavy things.
Portals though were pretty mind bending and very adaptable. This doesn't seem like a bad game, just like a watered down version of Portal. i guess, but that's what most games are anyway? Sure, but Doom 2 wasn't called "Hell Quest" and sold as a different game. This is just too similar to Portal in core game design. It seems like one of those Chinese games that blatantly copies a successful game and sells it off as their own. A few years ago, I was part of the Dare to be Digital competition, in which students are locked in a room for 8 weeks and told to make a game.
We based our game on one mechanic - a gun that could give objects magnetic charge. Shoot one robot with positive charge, and another with negative charge and they'd swoop towards each other and explode in the middle. some posters from the game that explain the gameplay and a screenshot We decided it was to be a first-person action-puzzle game, and began the design process. Now, after early testing, it turned out solving puzzles in three dimensions is difficult and confusing. It needs to be extremely clear what you can interact with and how. In game terms this means that the non-interactable game environment has to be fairly nondescript, and the interesting stuff has to stand out. In Portal, this meant pristine lab environments, color coding the portals, drawing lines from buttons to doors, and so on. It's a real abstraction of an environment to suit the gameplay, and it's extremely functional. When we came to develop our visual style, we realised that the 1950s aesthetic we were planned needed to be scaled back. There's no room for potted plants, secretaries desks and typewriters in the areas where the physical gameplay is occurring (although, like portal 2, you can put them in areas without puzzles), and when gameplay gets serious, you can't have distracting colours and patterns covering the walls. We decided that if a static object was to be magnetizable, it'd be bright yellow and chrome. These objects needed to be everywhere, so they became the fans and vents of the ventilation system. Part of the gameplay involved combining objects of the same size to make a bigger object, so these sizes were also colour coded (small = purple, medium = green, large = orange). We also found that our expansive multi-stage puzzles fell apart in practise unless they were rigidly compartmentalized. Thus, we started putting in doors that blocked progress until each puzzle section was completed. The environment needed to become arbitrary, homogenous, it was the only way that these odd environment elements made sense. Where portal had decided on a famously-meta interpretation of a lab environment, we went for a factory on security lockdown, and hoped the player would suspend their disbelief. The moral of the story is - by the end of the day we had something that on a surface level shared many similarities to Portal, despite arriving at each design decision from first principles. It's a testament to the design of their game. To share a familiar quote "Perfection in design is not achieved when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove." and that's why Portal 1 is held in such high esteem. When we were nearing the end of our development, we realised the similarities of our game, and had to make a strange decision. Would we take steps to distance ourselves from Portal, knowing that it meant taking the 'wrong' decision in gameplay terms? We seriously considered moving the game to 3rd-person even though it would make it harder to solve some of the puzzles. The magnetic charge was shown by objects glowing red or blue, as that's what we and players expected - but portal had blue and orange portals. Should we change it to glowing white and black? We decided not to, and I'm glad we didn't, and although we went on to win the audience vote, we perhaps deservedly had our share of criticism for the similarities. In conclusion, I'd defend the developer of this game, because a lot of the re-trodden ground is likely done so because it is the 'right' choice in response to a gameplay problem. There may be creative solutions out there to avoid similarities, and perhaps it's worth looking for them, of course. It's certainly the case that producing a first-person action puzzler funnels you down a certain path, where the similarities are much more peculiar than the similarities when making a Gears/CoD clone. I also bristle at your suggestion, Zwiffle, that gameplay is "untouched" when the Portal developer swapped out the core mechanic. You have to design completely new gameplay, and a completely new set of puzzles! It's not easy to create a satisfying puzzle dynamic with a nice difficulty curve in the FPS environment, and if she succeeds in making a compelling game with her new mechanic, then it wasn't easy, it's a great achievement. thanks for posting that, starbuck. i love reading about the design process like that. very interesting!
You have to design completely new gameplay, and a completely new set of puzzles!
That's kind of what I'm getting at. you misunderstand me - I just don't like the reaction that this stuff is there because of easiness or laziness. I'm saying that regardless, she STILL HAS TO create a whole game's worth of puzzles, with a difficulty arc and all that hard stuff. I don't disagree that she's borrowing from her back-catalogue of mechanics, but as my lengthy novel asserted, some of these tropes are very natural and useful for this form of game, and a lot of the design decisions seem almost inevitable.
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