Recent content by beleester

I'm disappointed that there was no joke that Get Even was "a bit odd." I thought Dishonored made it easier to stay on the stealthy path than most games. Get caught in Thief, and your options are basically "Get out the sword and start murdering" or "Reload last save." But get caught in...

Random thought: Someone should make a horror game with creepy hallucination sequences and a video camera, but with the mechanic that your camera shows you what's really happening (obviously, since you can't record a hallucination), so you can distinguish dreams and reality by looking at the...

There should absolutely be at least one quest which is minor enough and out-of-the-way enough that the average player won't bother completing it, but spins off some utterly batshit crazy adventure. So you send Colin the Dwarf to clear the rats from the farm, and a month later he comes back...

Korean War actually sounds like a great time to hold a shooter. Modern enough that it has jet fighters, but not so modern that you have fancy toys like drones. The Cold War means that you have a peer opponent in the USSR/China, and there's room for intrigue and twisty plots in the setting...

I think the "choose your own adventure" version of storytelling has its merits, even if it is a totally different form of storytelling than DOOOOOM. Especially in stories that integrate the choice into gameplay, like Deus Ex's pacifist/murderous split.

The later Metroid games had a simple solution to this problem: Mark the player's next destination on the map for them. You still have to do some exploring to figure out how to get there, you still have the option of breaking the sequence and trying to go somewhere else, but if you want to stop...

It's not for killing the enemies directly, it's for shaping the battlefield. Open a portal behind the enemy's cover and shoot the hell out of them. Chuck a grenade through the portal, then close the portal so you don't get caught in the blast. Portal to the high ground and close it so they...

Crafting in the Last of Us had a less obvious gameplay benefit - forcing you to choose what to do with limited resources. The trade-off between medkits and molotovs, or shivs and nail bombs, adds depth to the gameplay (not to mention makes it a lot more tense, realizing that you need a molotov...

"It's like writing fan fiction for your own property." More common than you think. DVD releases of a movie will include deleted scenes or funny shorts with the same characters. Comic books are littered with What-ifs and Elseworlds. Anime and manga often have shorts at the end called...

For the same reason that movie stores carry Plan 9 from Outer Space. It's not just bad, it's historically bad.

I disagree with this, because the annihilation of faceless crowds of our fellow humans has been a hallmark of video games since Grand Theft Auto.

I think the best ways to do interactive conversations is to focus on the reactions, not the content. Dragon Age was a great example of this - most of the time they gave you like six different ways to respond, but there weren't actually six different dialog paths. It was just the tone - one was...

Currency = XP is pretty common, actually. Any game where you buy upgrades with money rather than leveling up is essentially that.

MK vs. Touhou. It's already had a fighting game made of it. It's got a huge pile of unique and distinct characters. And it's weird enough that nobody will blink an eye at another universe showing up on their doorstep for a battle royale.

I think what you're looking for is Paper Mario. Something that keeps the classic elements of Mario (jumping on turtles and saving the princess), but takes a tongue-in-cheek look at some of the tropes (such as the Bowser stages in Thousand-Year Door) and does new things with the mechanics.