Metal Gear Solid 4

Developer: Kojima Productions
Year of release: 2008
Platform: Playstation 3
Official website: http://www.konami.jp/mgs4/us/index.html

Metal Gear Solid 4 is one of those games that every hardcore gamer should play ... IF you have played the previous MGS games in the series. I myself have played the 1st (psx), 2nd and 3rd (PS2). I loved all of them. I have tried playing the NES versions, but I just couldn't get into it, it was too old for me. Since the 1st MGS on the PSX, I have been a big fan of the series. The game has everything that I like. A mature and deep story, Mecha, cool cutscene with great camera angles and superb voice acting and ofcourse exciting and thrilling gameplay. There aren't that many games out there that have all these good elements in them.

A lot of my collegues say that you should never buy a console just for one game. I share this opinion, but when MGS4 got released I was really thinking of buying a PS3. It was the price back then that made me think twice. Later on I did buy the PS3 in October '08 and MGS4 was one of the games that I bought on the same day as my PS3, together with PES 09, Dead Space and Armored Core For Answers.

Of the games that I bought I wanted to play MGS4 the most, but I just knew if I would play MGS4 after work, I would not have any night of sleep. So I just waited for the X-mas holiday, so that I could spend all day and night on MGS4. It toke me 3 sessions to finish the game on hard mode. Each session was more than 10 houres. I can remember that when I saved for the first time, I had played for 12 houres. There are just so many good things in the game, I just couldn't stop playing. It toke me 30 houres to finish the game. I got the eagle emblem. After that I was like, What now!? I want more MGS!

The biggest difference between MGS4 and the first 3 games is that you can play it as an action shooter instead of a stealth espionage game. You can play the game in different styles, you can run into the action and kill everything that moves in 3rd person or first person style or you can play it the original style, stealthy and sneaking. That is what I did, sneaking around waiting for an opportunity to sneak by or surprise an NPC and grab them from behind. The only thing that contradicts is that when you sneak alot, you'll might miss the beauty of the environment. While sneaking you stay low on the ground and close to walls, you avoid big open area's in which you might miss some of the good stuff.

The sneaking play style got me 30 houres of gameplay. When you do a more action shooting playstyle you can probably finish the game under 25 houres. Having the sneaking element in your gameplay is an easy way to extend the gameplay duration. While sneaking you will move slowely, stand still and hide for a few seconds or more, while as a player you still have as much fun and excitement when sneaking by an NPC.

Making the game an action shooter has defenitly appealed to a wider audiance. Action shooters are 'in' these days. By going in 1st person mode, you can really see how nice the graphics are.

MGS4 ties the first 3 games together and puts an end to the interesting and deep story of the saga. I have never seen another game that would cover so much of the story of previous games in the serie. All the characters that were in the previous games are introduced with flashbacks during the cutscene.
The story is so complex and detailed that they could easily make a movie trilogy or more out of it.



There are just so many good things with MGS4 I could go on for a while with all the remarkable events that are in this game. The game has many remarkable moments.

The good:

• Excellent and detailed story, I haven't seen a game before with so much story and tying previous games together to an ultimate climax.
• Amazing cutscenes, nice camera positions, always interesting and often epic. Some might say that they are too long and that games don't need cutscenes, I say be happy that they have put so much effort in making these cutscenes so well.
• Different play styles, you can play the game as an action shooter or sneaking and any style in between. There are just so many ways to pass by enemies, shoot them, sneak, use CQC to take them out or use your Mark 2, a remote controlled small robot to stun your enemies.
• Mini games and easter eggs, in the game there a lot of mini games, riding on the back of a bike, controlling Metal Gear Rex, riding the mark 2 around during mission briefings,and even a 1 vs 1 fighting mini game. Same goes for easter eggs, there often reference to other games, posters of stars, photo shoots with the beauty and beasts and even the playboy magazine is in the game.
  

The bad:
In my opinion there is nothing bad about MGS4 only some small improvements that would make the game even better.

• AI, the AI is good in most cases but it could be better when concerning the detection of shooting sounds. I could shoot somebody down as long as another NPC did not see the target being shot at, while you would expect that the other NPC would notice the shooting sound and go investigate.
• The controlls could be tweaked better. MGS4 uses every button on your controller and some people find it really hard to do the exact action at the right time. I have heared stories of people messing up because they pressed the wrong button. I did not have much problems with the controlls but more with the movement. Sometimes it felt chunky and 'old' a little more tweaking should fix that up.
• Some boss fights could be more 'next-gen', there were a few boss fights where I had the feeling that they were too 'normal' especially the fight with Raging raven and Vamp could have been more refreshing.
  

In overall MGS4 is an excellent game with great story, awesome cutscenes, different play styles and lots of mini games and easter eggs. It is all worked out so well, making the game unique with so many memberable moments. To me it is the best game of 2008.

9.5/10

Dead Space

Developer: Electronic Arts
Year of release: 2008
Platform: Playstation 3
Official website: http://deadspace.ea.com/Default.aspx

Dead Space is the first game that I have finished since I bought my Playstation 3 in mid Oktober. I bought my Playstation 3 and the games Dead Space, PES 2009, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Armored Core For Answers in Hong Kong, where I was on vacation.
When I bought Dead Space I wasn't really sure if it was a good game. I didn't have time to check reviews on the internet to see if this was a game that I really wanted to buy. I was actually surprised to see the game lying on the shelves in Hong Kong. I was like "Wow I didn't know that it was released already!" The only thing I knew about this game was that it looks awesome and brutal and gore, all based on the few trailers that I have seen from the game. The price was also only 320 HK$ which is around 30 euro and that is cheap for a new game.

It was defenitly worth the money. The first thing that I heared about this game when I had bought it was: "it is Resident Evil 4, but in a different setting" and that is true. Dead Space really resembles RE4 and I'm sure that the designers at EA have taken some inspiration from RE4 to make this game. I loved RE4 and a game that is like RE4 in a different setting with some slightly new gameplay has to be good.

Dead Space consists out of 3 parts, the comic, the animated movie Dead Space Downfal and the game Dead Space, it is also the chronological sequence of the story.
Before I started playing the game, I first watched the animated movie Dead Space Downfall.

Dead Space is really a high quality game. Almost everything in the game is well designed.
It doesn't have that much content, but you can still get some nice amount of gameplay hours, I did 15 houres to finish the game in Hard mode.
Dead Space has 12 chapters and each chapter only has like 5 rooms where everything happens. There are only 7-8 different types of monster in the game with a few chapter bosses. RE4 has way more content than Dead Space, but you don't miss it in Dead Space.


To me Dead Space is a game that proves that if you chose a certain theme and design around it, you can create a long experience with less content. In Dead Space the theme is horror in space.
In horror games you always walk a little slower with your character, because it's dark and you don't want to be suprise attacked by monster, that can kill you in an instant. You check everything twice and sometimes you stop just to hear clearly if nothing is coming your way. That is already some extra houres of gameplay. The other thing is space and space means emptyness. You are on a space ship with only rooms and elevators, so most of the time you are walking around in small areas and in small areas you can't put that many content.

The good:

• The horror, Dead space really has some nice moments where you really get freeked for a second. Even I who has played a lot of horror games sometimes got a scare moment. Especially when you play at night with the sound volume pumped up. Also the sound effects are done well, which enhances the scare moments.
  
  
• The different weapons, there are like 7-8 different weapons and most of them feel and play completely different, which is good. Some weapons work very effective against certain monsters. And you have the statis powers, where you can slow down enemies and pick up items and fire them off, like the gravity gun in Half Life 2.
  
  

• The different types of enemies, there aren't that many different types, but they are worked out very well. They all have their different specific attacks and movements and as the player you need to use different tactics for each enemy type. This really makes the battles exciting when different types of enemies are attacking togheter.

The Bad:

• There isn't really that much bad about Dead Space. The only things that I would have liked to see was more different types of enemies and some more boss battles. There are only like 3-4 big boss battles in the entire game. Also the final boss was a little disappointing with its simple attack pattern and the limited attacks that it could do.

• The ending of the game could have been better. After you kill the final boss, you get a 25 sec animated movie before the end credits, which is a little on the short side if you ask me.

In overal, Dead Space was a very enjoyable game to play. The graphics and sounds are awesome, the weapons and enemies are interesting, the horror setting is nice, there are a lot of things that are done well in this game.

8.8/10

Parasite Eve

Developer: Squaresoft
Year of release: 1998
Platform: Playstation
Official website: http://na.square-enix.com/games/pe/

Yes, this game is already more than 10 years old! I started playing this game this November, why?.... well in November I was google-ing for a new background wallpaper to put on my desktop. I was looking at some nice anime or game related images and I saw this interesting image:

It only mentioned ‘3rd birthday’ and some Japanese phone company so I thought it would be some mobile game. After searching some more I found out that it was an image from Parasite Eve 3. Years ago I always wanted to play the Parasite Eve series, but couldn’t find the time to do so, even though I had the game for the PSX. After a while I just forgot about it. Reading about Parasite Eve 3, which is planned to be released on PSP in 2009, made me think about it again. Since part 3 is going to be released next year, I have to play the first 2 parts.

The good:

• Combat system. The combat is partly turn-based as in most FF games and partly real time. To perform a combat action you need to wait for your action bar to fill up, but during that time you can still run around and doge the attacks of your opponent. When you choose to attack, the range is important; the guns/rifles have different attack range. So it is best to attack an enemy when it is in range. Next to standard attack Eve can also use PE powers. These are special powers, like ‘Magic’ in the FF series. During combat the PE bar will fill up slowly. Other combat actions that can be performed are the use of items and switching weapons.

• Leveling up system. You get experience for each creature that you defeat. When you have enough experience you level up. With the level up you also get a certain amount of upgrade points that you can spend on improving certain abilities (e.g. I spend a lot of my upgrade points to let the action bar fill up faster), weapon and armour. You get more upgrade points when you have lost fewer health points during that level.

• Weapon and Armour customization. Weapons and armour have there own stats and usually an additional effect, like fire multiple times for a weapon and prevent poison for armour. In the game you can find a lot of different weapons/armour. You can tweak and improve them by using upgrade points and by taking either the stats or effect from another weapon/armour and add it to another weapon/armour. This will destroy the weapon/armour where you take the stats or effect from. The interesting part is that you can only take stats or effect and not both.

The bad:

• Not challenging enough. There is only 1 difficulty setting. The game is too easy if you ask me. I finished the game in 11 hours and I probably died only 5 or 6 times from which 4 times from the last end boss, during the last mini game where you die instantly when the end boss catches you. I did spend some effort in tweaking my weapons and armour to get the best stats and for regular creatures it didn’t really matter anymore if I would dodge their attacks. That did take the tension away from combat and made it slightly boring.

Overall I did enjoy playing the game. Especially at the beginning I was really impressed by the combat, upgrade points, weapon and armour customization system.

7.6/10

Games I have played till the end

This section is added because I always wanted to keep track of which games I had finished playing.
I often hear names of games that years ago, but I just don't know anymore what kind of game it was, the good, the bad and all.

In all these years I have finished a lot of games, but I will only name the games that I have finished starting from November 2008. Simply because I can't clearly remember how I felt for the games that I played before that.

So each game that I finish will be listed here and I'll write a short opinion/review about each of those games.

I will put the latest on top of the list. It does not always have to be a new, recently released, game though. My style of playing games is; fairly new games mixed with some 'old classics'. I always try to play the good/high rated games, games that brought something new to the game industry or have a special meaning to me. There are still a lot of good games for the SNES, PSX, Dream Cast and other old consoles that I still want to play.

Most of the time when I start playing a game, I will try to finish it to get the entire game play experience as the designers and developers of the game, want me to have. I either play a few minutes of the game or I play it all the way through and it is usually all the way through ^_^.

• Demon's Souls - 9.3 (PS3)
  
• Uncharted 2 Among Thieves - 8.9 (PS3)
  
• Batman Arkham Asylum - 8.8 (PS3)
  
• Borderlands: The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned - 8.5 (PS3)
  
• Borderlands - 8.7 (PS3)
  
• Policenauts - 8.5 (PSX)
  
• Uncharted: Drake's fortune - 9.6 (PS3)
  
• Red Faction: Guerrilla - 8.4 (PS3)
• Street Fighter 4 - 9.5 (Playstation 3)
  
• Resident Evil 5 - 8.0 (Playstation 3)
• Metal Gear Online - 6.9 (Playstation 3)
  
• Metal Gear Solid 4 - 9.5 (Playstation 3)
  
• Dead Space - 8.8 (Playstation 3)
• Parasite Eve - 7.6 (Playstation)
  

Eye Pet

Sony's Eye Pet is the latest project that I'm working on for the Playstation 3.
Eye Pet was announced during August's Leipzig Conference.
The game uses the Playstation Eye camera and allows you to interact with your pet in you own living room.
The virtual pet will behave like a real-life pet and can interact with objects and sounds from your living room.
I haven't seen a game before that brings VR so close to your own living room ^_^

Watch the Eye Pet Trailer

And yes, the car drawing is for real.


[update 2009-07-26] A second trailer has been released on this years E3.
Watch the 2nd Eye Pet Trailer

[update 2010-03-27] Eye Pet has been released for quite a few months now and it is a great succes! The game has only been released in Europe and according to vgchartz.com it sold 460.00 copies in the first 10 weeks!

My contribution to Eye Pet:
- Involved in the full development cycle
- Improve concept designs
- Create playable prototypes for the different activities
- Development of the Styling tool and 3D car activity
- Daily contact with designers, programmers and artists from SCEE
- Accustomed with the SCRUM development and SCEE management tools

Dreams do come true when you aim for it

A lot of good things happend these last few months.

I graduated from University with honour which is really an prestige to me. And I'm really glad that my internship partner also graduated with honour.

The other good thing is that I have found a great job in the game industrie. I am working as a game programmer at www.playlogicinternational.com working on a next gen title.
Working at a game company means that all your work is classified untill the title is released. Because of that I don't think that I will update this blog anytime soon. I wanted to show my work with this blog, so that I could get a job in the game industrie and it did help. It has served it's purpose well.

Something that I want to share is the private game project that I was working on in previous posts. It was already finished somewhere in May. My university graded a 9 for the project.
I went to different game companies and showed them this work of mine and they were all very positive about it. It is always nice to be able to show people your work. Your own work says more than a million words :p
The game is called Fighter Skies and can be downloaded HERE


Fighter Skies

Fighter Skies related posts:
- New private game project
- Collecting graphics for my new game project
- Scrolling map

I'm always open for comments
Kar Ching

Scrolling map

Related posts:
- New private game project
- Collecting graphics for my new game project
- Dreams due come true

I'm still working on my top down scrolling shooter. Last weekend I decided to make the background map for my game. There is google maps with it's satellite photo's of the world, so I thought why not make a scrolling map from images of google maps. How did I do it? Simple, go to the google maps site and find a place / map that is suited. Of course chose satellite to get real images. I wanted some water in my background, so I made my background from images of the province Zeeland in the Netherlands. When you have the right location "Print Screen" and voila you have an image. You might want to cut the background image out of the "shot" by editing it in photoshop (or paint). Than go back to google maps and move the map. By pressing the "up" key you will move the map up, perfect if you don't want to change in the horizontal (x) direction. Move your map up and make a shot again, do the entire process. Make sure that you keep a small part of the previous map in your new map, so when you are going to attach them they will fit nicely. After shooting images it's time to attach the lose map images to get 1 big map image.

In my case, I was going a little far with it. I made 43 map images. Attaching the images together I had a big map of 626 x 14200 pixels. When you are working in photoshop, you might want to use the "save for web ..." option to make the quality lower and the file size smaller. My map was 15 mb but with "save for web ...", jpg, low quality it went from 15 mb to 700 kb!

I'm using the map in my game now. I had cut it up in 6 pieces because Flash/actionscript can't work with movie clips, which are more then 2500 pixels in width / height.

Here is the map, might be useful for someone who want to save the hours of print screens, cutting and attaching work ^_^


hmmm...... blogspot has decreased the image size with 10 fold