Hjalmar Fryklund said:
First, something I forgot to respond to last night.
Treblaine said:
One solution I'd have is collect the tapes as items, and play them using walkman you have found. You have to combine the tape with the walkman using inventory crafting table, equip the walkman, fast forward, re-wind, play, etc. You could have a lot of fun with that, give tapes as proof for dialogue, hell you could find music tapes. I wonder how many people would enjoy just the concept of using a tape-player.
I actually had the same idea. In Bioshock specifically you could perhaps even have a special plasmid that allows you to fuse the tape bits on your own. It would have to be a plasmid that doesn't take up any slot space though (much like the save-little-sister-plasmid).
Hmm, I don't know if it's just me but that seems awfully silly. Plasmids are for things you couldn't do with other devices.
In retrospect I haven't cared much about the nature of Bioshock's plasmids. Getting the electro plasmid just isn't different enough from finding a tazer or some other electro-gun and just using it in the left hand. I see the utility of plasmids in enhancing the body: like an ability to heal quickly, be physically stronger, a kind of matrix "slow mo" ability. There are all things you cannot do with tools. I mean telekinesis, very similar to HL2's gravity gun. Inferno functioned very like a flare gun I've seen in a few games.
I don't know why the game can't just have a comprehensive inventory. One thing I've seen in few games is a kind of "filing system" you can find a loot sack for WITHIN your loot sack. It should be obvious, when you are packing a bag you don't throw your toothbrush and soap loose with everything else in your bag, you have a sponge bag.
Equally an inventory could have a bag within, click on the bag and that'll inventory will open like a file system on a PC and inside you'll find smaller items like the tapes and the tape-player. Tape player would have other uses, as it can record a computer code and play it back, you could just play some music.
On a side-note, I came up with an idea that combines the elements of someone recording other people´s conversations without their permission and piecing together the tape bits. The player character would find tape pieces that detailed conversations between two NPCs that had secretly been recorded by another character (using a device similar to Joseph in Amélie). You would occasionally find snippets on the tapes where the spying character would complain about how the two NPCs just wouldn't get to the point and talk about the information the spy wanted to hear about.
That's something that can work. As if it is being recorded for someone else (like the spymaster) they may appreciate the spy giving context. But I'd be careful just to avoid having the characters simply tell the story rather than let it come out more naturally.
Well it's odd when tapes are so often left around as messages and hardly ever a simple note is found.
Sure is.
Seeing as the "text logs < audio logs" argument has come up, and (as usual) gets conflated with the idea of having massage in the form of notes as opposed to audio logs, I would like to point out one thing:
Just because a written message is used instead of a tape player doesn't mean the the former can't be an audio log.
Well, an ode to the note as a storytelling device:
They add a certain sense of mystery, by removing the author's voice it's not immediately obvious who wrote it: if a man or woman, young or old, local or foreign. But you can discern other things.
Particularly whenever a message is sent that seeks anonymity, it makes a lot of sense for it to be text rather than audio.
And bioshock has the messages, it has things painted on wall, often in blood. Though I'm such a killjoy I think it's red paint as I happen to know that within a few hours blood stains turn brown as the blood cells die.
Okay...that sounds a bit over the top for message length. I was thinking of 30 second long messages myself.
Well FEAR have something like 7 back-to-back 45-second messages from apparently the same person. It would have been really nice if I had some way of constructing the messages on a timeline. As it is, it came across as an information dump that was hard to sift through.
That's the thing, I believe information dumps are best relayed with Text than audio.
Audio should be reserved for telling a story, establish a scene or character's mannerisms.
If you just want to get info out, Tex has the advantage of being easy to skim and re-read and so on.
