I’m currently cutting my blogging and commenting to a minimum to concentrate on my work so I apologize if I haven’t been too responsive in the last days. Nevertheless, I have briefly tried two new games and I would like to hold my first impressions to possibly pick them up later.

Burnout Paradise
With the Ultimate Box out I thought it was a good moment to get that into my library. I think Zero Punctuation got it pretty much spot-on: it seems like the logical progression to go from the modular tracks of the old Burnout parts to a free-roaming game that is Burnout Paradise. But there is an important difference. Racing is about going fast on pre-defined tracks. If there are no pre-definded track, players must choose their own track IN ADDITION to going fast. Navigation is a pretty demanding task and Burnout Paradise doesn’t really help with it. I already played enough to get the Burnout License which could be called the casual playtrough. I’m still don’t feel anywhere near to familiar in that convoluted city.
On the other hand, the way Criterion has been working on making Burnout Paradise a whole PLATFORM rather than a game is quite impressive. I applaud that. Also, I haven’t even tried online yet and I’ve heard it makes up a big part of it’s appeal. The problem is that right now, I don’t seem to have the time required to get familiar with the city on order to enjoy it with other people. I miss the old days where you would just have a track and grind it for milliseconds *sigh*.

Mass Effect
Oh look, it’s a massive Dancing Bearware. Which means the impressive thing is that this behemoth of a game works at all. It’s constantly glitching, you discover barren or unpolished parts from the very first second. The worst is the interface design. It’s downright insulting. Every single design screen has a MAJOR usability/information design flaw. I’m not kidding! I’m keeping track of them and will point them all out in a Game Design Review. All this makes the game more difficult than it actually is.
But then you run into some very fine crafted islands of win. Some characters look stunning. They also hired some smart scientific advisor to write plausible high-quality science into it. In the end, when you get to control your spaceship, it becomes very much like a next-gen version of the evergreen Star Control II. So I’m a bit ashamed that I was somehow… hooked.

From me to you with love: the DOS System Font

A faithful recreation of the DOS / IBM PC System Font. Monospaced with very short descenders and thick font weight for better readability on low fidelity CRT displays. Makes me want to optimize AUTOEXEC.BATs all over again.

Including original “More Latin” characters and custom made “Extended Latin A” characters for good international compatibility.

Now here is a surprise: I gave the Hawx demo a try and I felt compelled to write about it. It is a Tom Clancy game about modern air combat. Now, I could go off on a tangent now how I hate military and how I found myself surprised playing Call of Duty 4 – I guess it is mainly because of its narrative qualities. Hawx seems just exactly like the dull “War is awesome, look at the technology”-type of bullshit I would avoid for miles. Even the name sucks.

Yet, I saw things in the demo which made an impression on me. They introduced two very interesting gameplay tweaks which might have the potential to turn the tables for the whole combat flightsim genre.

First, you get some automatic assistance to perform cool maneuvers. So whether you are attacking a ground target that is hidden between houses, want to get behind an enemy airplane or dodge an incoming missile, you can press a button and you will get a virtual corridor of gates you have to fly trough to get yourself in the correct position. This feature addresses a lot of problems I had with modern combat flightsims. You never really knew how you are supposed to react to incoming missiles. Whenever a missile was inbound I would freak out and try to do some fancy maneuvers and the missile would hit me anyway. Also, getting behind enemy planes always was very annoying because at the speeds of today’s planes the enemy is a formless blip on your HUD most of the time. It is impossible to judge distances, velocities and flight directions properly. The automatic corridor thing really help perform the cool flight tricks you want to do.

But the most impressive feature is the second one: you can double tap a shoulder button to enter a totally different mode. They call it “disengaging the limiter” or something. Basically, the camera suddenly zooms VERY far out so your plane appears very small. It also doesn’t point in your flight direction but pivots around your plane to focus on important objects like the selected target or incoming missiles. In this mode, you can use air brakes to perform outrageous maneuvers. The team took upon many super high-tech developments in hyper-modern fighter jets called “supermaneuverability”. It looks like and it is actually what drifting is for car racing: you intentionally get the plane in a position where it is almost out of control but you recover before you totally loose it so you can perform mind-boggling tricks. This stuff is actually real too, you might be familiar with the Cobra Maneuver?

Well, you can do all that and invent your own tricks in Hawks. It’s all there just by the press of the button. With the very unusual camera, you get a good feel for your spatial movement and you can actually use these tricks to dodge missiles without assistance and do some insane dogfights. It all feels very natural and freestyle.

As I said, both functions are potential game changers and could revitalize the genre. You can see both features in action is this video:

I have only one problem. I can imagine that it gets old very quickly. After all, all you do is fight planes and tanks over and over again. I think the new mechanics would benefit from a sci-fi scenario with a wider variety of challenges. Think fights against giant Monsters, Independence Day Ufo’s, Robots. Especially the freestyly supermaneuverability mode could be used to set up some pretty awesome levels. Until then, I might pick this one up and if you have a 360, try the demo and tell me what you think.

I’m back from Casual Connect Europe.

I had a great time! The presentations were ok. I guess my problem was that most of them were either producers or from marketing and so the topics they covered were a bit remote and dry. We need to change that! Game Designers need to get more involved, especially the small flash developers!

But I was happy with my talk (video coming!) and the thing that made it all worthwhile was the opportunity to get in contact with a load of very interesting people. So if you are raeading this: you guys are awesome! Thanks again to Mr. Badim for having me!

I’m in a bad mood but this one cheered me up a bit. I already wrote about the awesome font creation tool Fontstruct before. I checked them out again and guess what: they FINALLY added features for letter spacing making the toolset pretty much complete. This is a free, simple, sexy and incredibly powerful tool for creating and manipulating fonts. A must-bookmark! I updated my 3 fonts a bit and with the new features I might be inclined to even complete a 4th one which I abandoned back then due to lack of spacing features. Here are they:

This one is a clone of the Link’s Awakening font. I adjusted the word spacing so it is more legible now. Note that you will have LOTS of foreign characters with this one. Them italics need room!

This is a clone of Arial in 9pt. It includes a few of a bit screwed up characters but sticks faithfully to the original. I made this because Arial sometimes messes up the spacing at this small size even if the letters stay legible. Great if you use Flash and want to ensure that your Arial stays crisp and legibe at this small size. Also it will look the same on pc and mac. This one also includes a ton of foreign characters.

This one is an adjustment of the excellent 04b03 font which I think is the smallest you can go with a pixel font. I know they are smaller ones but those are clearly beneath the legibility threshold, especially in longer texts. Reading text with this one may not be comfortable but reasonably possible. My only alteration was making the 1 equally spaced as the other numbers so you can print number in columns. Useful if you need to output a lot of numeric data in little space and still want to keep things legible.