(no subject)
So, over break I played a game called GUN on the Xbox. It is apparently also out for the PS2, PC, and Xbox 360. It is gorey, violent, racist, sexist, too short, too small, has zero replayability, shitty controls, a rushed story, and is completely awesome. It has great gameplay: it is very similar to Grand Theft Auto as a Western. I haven't stopped thinking about this game since I beat it, and mostly I think about how I could have made it better. One of my biggest gripes about it was the difficulty level. There were 4 difficulty choices: Impossible to lose unless you have never played a video game before, pretty easy, near impossible, and impossible. At least, that is how it seemed to me. Changing difficulty, as far as I could tell, only changed health or damage, depending on how you look at it: it takes less shots to kill you and more shots to kill bad guys as the difficulty goes up. One innovation in several recent games is that there is no difficulty level; it changes to suit you. Die a lot, and it gets easier. Don't die at all and it gets harder. GUN would have benefitted from this, and could still have difficulty levels which make missions more difficult or enemies more numerous. I LOVED the checkpoints in missions and the ability to retry the missions immediately upon death. GTA could use something similar, in my opinion. I HATED that when I beat the game, it gave me a couple overpowered items, but no place to use them. I couldnt replay the missions at all (not even the poker missions!). So, I used them for the only thing possible: I slaughtered the two towns in the game. I would have rather put them to good use, but the only other encounter with people were random bandit attacks that hadn't posed any challenge to me since halfway through the game. So, whay am I ranting about this? I have no clue, although, I have to admit, it has rekindled my interest in programming, as I would like to get to a point to make these things better in games.