Random Thoughts After Modding, Playing PSO, Watching Bad Movies

Or as I sometimes call it, Saturday.

One of my downfalls as a modder is that I don't like to sweat the details. I love playing with the gameplay portions of a mod but generally get quickly bored with nearly anything else. This include HUD work and map design. Sadly for most of what I'm trying to finish in UT2004 right now, it's mostly HUD work and map design. I used to like map building, but in this age of static meshes, complicated volumes and tricky sky boxen - I'm just outmoded. I spent two hours on HUD stuff yesterday and just about clawed my eyeballs out. This isn't really helped by the fact that to adjust things in UT2k4's HUD code, you pretty much change a few digits in a very long properties value, recompile, launch, look and repeat.

Phantasy Star Online is amazingly impressive considering that this version we have for the GameCube (Wii) is essentially unchanged from the Dreamcast version, except with splitscreen and the content additions from over the years. That Blue Burst died a somewhat ignoble death (being nothing but a financial burden in the long run) is somewhat sad to me. Sure, there's little things I'd love to change like targeting, weapon swapping and the like - but the core of the game is as brilliant as the day it was born. What it really needs, of course, is a payment setup like Guild Wars or Dungeon Runners ... not WoW. It's a small team instance, not a massively multiplayer ... and people have learned to pay accordingly.

PSO would make such a killer DS title, or even a Wii one. It also a gold mine for a 2D roguelike.

Commando is a hilarious movie by nearly every measure of comedy, right down to the appearances of Alissa Milano and Bill Paxton in the film. It occurs to me that if we want to compare video games to movies, the problem isn't so much that it's not at all valid (though I attest it is not completely valid) ... but rather that many video games are just stuck in the 80's, narratively speaking.