This post is originally from Just Make Money Online. Please respect copyright.
This post is originally from Just Make Money Online. Please respect copyright.
This post is originally from Just Make Money Online. Please respect copyright.
This post is originally from Just Make Money Online. Please respect copyright.
This post is originally from Just Make Money Online. Please respect copyright.
This post is originally from Just Make Money Online. Please respect copyright.
This post is originally from Just Make Money Online. Please respect copyright.
This post is originally from Just Make Money Online. Please respect copyright.
This post is originally from Just Make Money Online. Please respect copyright.
This post is originally from Just Make Money Online. Please respect copyright.
We are gathered today to remember Supreme Commander, born in 1997 under the name Total Annihilation. This enfant terrible of the RTS world bucked the trend of Command & Conquer and WarCraft clones to provide something sprawling, meticulous, and without much personality. It changed its name in 2007 to Supreme Commander, but it wasn't fooling anyone. It was still that same Total Annihilation rebel, playing by its own rules, casual RTSers be damned.
Today the Supreme Commander you knew and possibly loved has died.
Early on in Battlefield: Bad Company 2, during a mission that the ESRB has somewhat spoiled, you hear an absolutely frightening and ominous sound. Its inspiration can easily be found in things like a foghorn or the tripod from Steven Spielberg's version of War of the Worlds, but even so, it's still a surprising and unsettling noise. The way it completely assaults your speakers and rattles your subwoofer serves as a perfect example of some of Bad Company 2's phenomenal sound design -- one of the many things that developer DICE has gotten right this time around.
Sure, there are a lot of improvements (and even a few missteps) within Bad Company 2, but the sound design is particularly noteworthy. It's not just that the guns sound realistic (as far as I can tell), but that DICE's sound gurus have tweaked, amplified, and reverbed them enough to sound terrifying. Sniper rounds carry an ominous thunderclap in passing. Assault rifle bullets alternate between cracking the air and forcibly puncturing whatever surface -- flesh, wood, stone, or metal -- they impact. The way a light machinegun erupts during gunfire indicates that it's designed expressly for the purpose of murdering your enemy. Other sounds, such as the crunch of footsteps in the snow, the creaks of collapsing buildings, or the chattering of jungle insects, contribute to what is one of the best soundscapes in a modern FPS (especially if you set your audio to the "war tapes" soundmix).
Debates over its final boss fight aside, God of War 2's ending made for good theater: Greek Kratos rode on the titan Gaia's back as she scaled Mount Olympus in pursuit of a gods vs. titans face-off with Zeus and friends. It served as a big cliffhanger -- literally or not, depending on your taste for puns -- which set up God of War 3 as the final game in the trilogy.
Looking back on that ending now, it seems clear that the developers knew what they had in mind for the third game all along, but at the time it left a lot open to interpretation. Would it be an entire game on the side of the mountain? Or might Kratos participate in some kind of War of the Monsters-style spin-off?
Final Fantasy XIII is a game at a crossroads. It's stranded at the intersection between the desires of an existing fanbase, the fading popularity of a genre, a legacy of cutting-edge visuals, and the rising cost of game development. It's a creation that displays the compromises of its development process at every turn, yet to its credit, it doesn't feel compromised. It's defined by creative tradeoffs, yet it embraces those potential shortcomings and transforms them into integral components of its design.
FFXIII is ambitious and daring, not to mention gorgeous and energetic. It approaches the concept of "role-playing games" with ruthless pragmatism, lopping off hunks of RPG tradition like a doctor operating on a terminally gangrenous patient. Traditional towns are too difficult to manage in light of the demands of current technology and art design? Whack -- they're gone. Free-roaming exploration too difficult to implement properly? Chop -- there goes the nonlinearity. Micromanaging turn-based combat bogs down the pacing of battles? Snip -- let the AI handle it.
This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. Just use the contact form if you want to submit a question.
Allison asks:
I'm considering setting up a website. Do I have to register a business before being able to charge for advertising space or other services I might offer? Do I need to pay taxes on that revenue?
