Today I saw for the first time this video about the incredible facial animation technology for the upcoming LA Noire, Rockstar Games’ soon-to-arrive, gritty looking crime thriller. The game, from what I’ve read and seen, allows you to see real live emotions through the faces of the characters in the game, and allows for a whole new element of realistic, lie-detecting gameplay, adding an incredibly realistic new angle to the concept of a crime solving game. I can’t wait to see this in action in the full game, but until then I’ll just have to be content with seeing amazing videos like this one:
What an awesome new prospect on the horizon for gaming and technology! What next? Real pain when shot in Call of Duty? Actual money pouring into our bank accounts when we sell stolen cars in GTA 4? Some we’d like, some we wouldn’t, but the fact is things are getting more and more advanced and there’s no telling what we could see in even a year’s time! I can’t bloody wait! That is, just as long as I don’t ever have to see Orlando Bloom or Justin Bieber’s face in any future games…
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
Now and then one can’t help climbing aboard the hype train. You work yourself up into a frothing frenzy in anticipation of some new game whose trailers and screenshots make it seem like the best…thing…EVER. That’s how I felt about Conker’s Bad Fur Day when I first read about it in N64 Magazine (before the internet butchered the magazine industry). They did several preview write-ups about it in the years before it was released, and it changed from being a cutesy 3D adventure, to merely looking like a cutesy 3D adventure plastered with a layer of adult filth. I couldn’t have been more excited to play it. Did it live up to my expectations? Hell yes.
The first horror game I ever played, and I never got beyond the room in the attic where the wolf attacks you. All 5 polygons of the terrifying beast were enough to send me fleeing from the room, leaving my father to deal with it.