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»3rd July 2008

Super Mega Space Marine Blaster

I've got so much to work with when it comes to rubbish games, so I'm calling this volume one because I'm so spoilt for choice when it comes to things that suck in this department and I didn't want this update to spiral completely out of control like the overly long classic arcade games one did.
Of the many things wrong with computer games, one of most striking deficencies can be seen if you take time to stare across the blackened morass which constitutes modern first person shooters. To illustrate my first point I've drawn a little picture for you of what constitutes your average first person shooter character.

This is what every teenage boy aspires to be.

Since Quake 1 FPSs have not really broke any new ground, there have only been small, incremental improvements on what came before. For the record Quake is one of my favourite games.
What did Quake 1 do that its predecessor Doom 2 didn't? It had a fully 3D engine and 3D enemies which allowed for more interesting levels with multiple, overlapping platforms, sloping walls and floors and generally more interesting architecture along with more detailed enemies that moved in a more natural way. The drawback was of course that levels had to be much smaller than the sprawling mazes of Doom and there could be far fewer enemies, with a maximum in the region of 100 rather than 1,000. The technology behind these games, and its limitations defined how the game itself would play and how levels, enemies and the ablilities of the player were designed. That was also over a decade and we're still in the same place, it's just anti-aliased and bump mapped. Show me a gameplay element in a first person shooter which you couldn't accurately emulate in the Quake engine... Now show me another... That's it? A round of applause for the unimaginative sell-out cretins who constitute the majority of FPS game developers!

So FPS games suck. What am I going to do about it? Well I try and be pro-active in this situations, and in the time since I last wrote a blog update I have developed an intimate knowledge of programming in C++ and using DirectX, Maya, and whatever else you need to do this sort of thing, and have formed my own independant games company. We're currently working on a number of titles and the one I want to talk about with you is my upcoming First Person Shooter called Super Mega Space Marine Blaster. what I've tried to do with it is make a game which harks back to every past FPS ever made (in the last five years or so) and try to emulate them so as to explore the boundaries of make a load of money. Super Mega Space Marine Blaster has a series of great features which you can't find anywhere else can find pretty much everywhere else.

We had so many good ideas in the early development stage that we were going to put in but we decided not to because we're lazy. We're going to blame it on a leak or something, fuck you.