Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra :: I feel like I'm reading Newsweek

[quote name="FABIO"]or some other mainstream rag in which the audience has never played a videogame [quote name="Gamespot"]Rather than fighting dragons to rescue princesses, both games would have dramatic elements that suggested ill-fated characters in ruinous circumstances. [/quote] The game wasn't about rescuing princesses? No shit. Such is the epic tragedy of star-crossed characters in ruinous circumstances. [quote]Levine recalls the irony of trying to give five-minute presentations for a game that can't be explained in five minutes.[/quote] How about, "IT'S THE FUCKING SEQUEL TO SYSTEM SHOCK"? Their entire PR team is fired. [quote]"Movies don't scare me," the general manager explains matter-of-factly. [/quote] Matter-of-factly? That dude is <i>cool as ice</i>. [quote]Rather than making players out to be extremely powerful, they would instead be fragile bit players caught up in a hostile world. [/quote] In the steps from concept to final product, someone misread "players" as "guns". [quote]One of System Shock 2's more-bizarre enemies was the abused lab monkey. These unhappy chimps had been subjected to horrible experiments, causing them to become feral. Though they were extremely fast and difficult to kill, they came about in the game by almost pure coincidence. According to Levine, much of the game's animation was recorded with clunky old motion-capture equipment and an equally clunky old SGI-rendering machine. One day, the team was actually ahead of schedule, and they still had use of the equipment for several hours after the regular motion capture had been completed. Urged by his companions to make the most of the expensive equipment, Levine's first thought was, "well...I do like monkeys..." The rest, as they say, is history.[/quote] Gotta love all the work that went into the careful design process. "The repo man isn't coming till tomorrow, so we might as well keep using this equipment even though we're done with everything." Then the guy in the tinfoil hat chimes in, "well, I <i>do</i> like monkeys...." Okat that article wasn't quite as ass-kissing as I was expecting. You gotta love how nearly every paragraph mentions Levine's growing sense of dread that the game is going to suck.[/quote]