Splatterhouse in Australia?

[AmericanWarMachine]

A Few Notes on Weapons:

1) Guns need to be reffed to as whatever their gun-type is in a game, that is all. I don't need to, nor do I want to, know the name of the weapon I am using, and I certainly don't need several variations of the same iron-sighted, recoil-riddled boomstick. Just a simple name such as "Pistol" or "Shotgun" or "Shuriken-and-Lightning-Deathpipe" will suffice.

2) Guns need to be FUN again. Back in the day, guns always got their job done. They were fun, there were plenty, and you were encouraged to use the biggest, baddest gun you could find. That is not the case today. Instead, you are almost always restricted to infinite ammo of the base starting gun (usually a very weak pistol), with about 8 or 9 bullets for the fun gun. This always leads to you never using the special gun because of the "But I might need this later" feeling, and you have to trough through a horde of enemies with really fun laser-rifles and grenade-launchers while you're stuck with a bag of peas and a bendy straw.

3) Where are all the swords ands chainsaws? Other than Left4Dead2, there haven't been ANY chainsaws in almost any games that have been a viable part of game-play since GTA Vice City. Why the hell not? They're fun, they're iconic, they're always desired, and they're so amazingly rewarding! I'll take a Chainsaw over a Shotgun any day.

4) Shotguns need to actually be shotguns. I'm not sure why, but Shotguns seem to be given this idea that they have an effective range of 20 feet, TOPS, in every medium they are represented in. Yes, I understand that a REAL shotgun would dominate in every game, but what's so bad about that? If players don't abuse the shotgun, they're just going to abuse another weapon anyways, so why not let them have their cake and eat it too?

5) More health, health-bars, and health packs. If you were to stub your toe in a game like Modern Warfare 2 you'd probably end up on the ground in Last Stand or looking at the Kill Cam from a broken cinder block's devious perspective. Also, it would be nice if I could actually see a good representation of how much health I have. This way, I can judge what I should do. Case in point: Left4Dead(2) allows for the players to see exactly what their health is at, from this, they can determine what is and isn't a proper action to take. A red screen can only tell me what I hurt myself, but if I can actually see how much damage something did, I can get a point of reference. ALSO, health packs are much more appreciated over regenerating heatlh. Oddly enough, regenerating health RUINS games for me. There's no penalty to being hurt anymore, I can do whatever stupid thing I want in a game and just sit behind a cover and regenerate my health for no penalty other than 5 seconds of staring at some poor-resolution gravel. True, this can be fun from a "dicking around" standpoint, but I don't see how this can be viable if a game wants to pass off any kind of a challenge.

 

[goddz001]

cant help but feel sorry for australian gamers sometimes.

 

[OurGloriousLeader]

Really good A.I that makes it a challenge to defeat enemies, otherwise it's just sadism.

 

[xqxm]

Sounds great. Here's my addition:

Later in the game you unlock some sort of Psy-augmentation /gravity gun / deus ex machina that makes you able to pick up enemies in the air with your mind. (Or gravity gun. Or whatever.).

You can then use these alive and flailing enemies, ideally shitting their pants in fear, and just slam them into their comrades like a human battering ram.

Perhaps pick two up at the same time and just beat them silly against each other.

 

[tahrey]

I like the way you think on the discombobulatable bodies front, though it's not a new idea so much (the "ripping off an arm and beating the owner to death with the soggy end" part might be). One point of note: have the head be various parts as well. Else how are you supposed to cleave it in two (vertically or horizontally) with a big sword or axe, nick off a nose/ears/scalp, smash a jaw, gouge eyes?

Get the guys from Apogee and iD in whilst you're at it, to talk tales of Quad Damage and Ludicrous Gibs, I'm sure they'd be happy to help out upping the bloody entertainment quotient. There's gotta be at least 100 different ways to dispatch a Quake zombie with a rocket, well-aimed grenade or point-blank double barrelled shotgun to the head after all, and I still reminisce about letting loose a salvo of Drunk Missiles towards a closely spaced group of grunts and bathing in the scarlet rain.

 

[tahrey]

A Few Notes on Weapons:

1) Guns need to be reffed to as whatever their gun-type is in a game, that is all. I don't need to, nor do I want to, know the name of the weapon I am using

I'll admit to having tired of traditional-type FPSes at least 5 years ago. Apart from something like CS or MW/COD where its sort of justified, have games generally drifted away from the old fists-chainsaw-pistol/x2-shotgun/db-chain/nailgun-plasma/railgun-various_uberweapons (grenade/rocket/bfg/etc) progression? Even GTA seems to keep it quite simple.

(Guns) were fun, there were plenty, and you were encouraged to use the biggest, baddest gun you could find. That is not the case today. Instead, you are almost always restricted to infinite ammo of the base starting gun (usually a very weak pistol), with about 8 or 9 bullets for the fun gun.

I'm not sure what old game you're referring to... even in Doom or Wolfenstein (the one that proudly claimed to be "3D"), you could get plenty of clips and shells for the workaday sidearm and boomstick, but had to be careful to ration your power cells for the plasma and BFG... or maybe you always played with "IDDQD" god-mode on?
(what am i saying... of COURSE you did. EVERYONE did. Just as everyone tweaked things in the Quake console for extra ammo/health/armour, low gravity, noclip/flight and crazy view angles. That sort of stuff also makes it more fun - Gary's Mod sandbox style )

Where are all the swords ands chainsaws? Other than Left4Dead2, there haven't been ANY chainsaws in almost any games that have been a viable part of game-play since GTA Vice City.

Seriously? I'm going to have to boot up San Andreas now and check
I think it's probably because on the whole, ranged weapons are a lot easier and more satisfying to use than melee ones. Certainly a lot *safer*. As is in real life, so is in most games. The chainsaw was pretty cool to use for a bit in the old 2.5D games, but after the first few goes quickly got banished to the "weapon of last resort" bin, as it was slightly better than using fists and was genuinely the only one with infinite ammo.
Besides you can generally get the same effect by just running someone down.

The question I feel like asking is: have we got enough RPGs and flamethrowers? Both are weapons with fantastic comedic/entertainment value and surprising flexibility. And remember: Ninjas can't catch you if you're on fire.

Shotguns need to actually be shotguns. I'm not sure why, but Shotguns seem to be given this idea that they have an effective range of 20 feet, TOPS, in every medium they are represented in.

Real shotguns actually don't have a great effective range, certainly if you want it to have much stopping power against anything more than a fox-sized opponent, and usually don't have a magazine that will store more than 4 shots. They're built as utility and close-range hunting firearms rather than proper offensive weapons. What you're probably thinking of is a rifle, one built to take large calibre rounds, possibly in a 10+ bullet magazine, rather than an un-rifled 12-guage twin barrel with a very limited shot capacity that fires cartridges of lead pellets.

Close up, they'll take your face off in a very ugly and effective fashion, but once the target is more than a few seconds' sprint away, all the accuracy and stopping power is gone, and you'll only realistically take down a pigeon (or a clay substitute). There's a reason that large-game huntsmen (deer, big cats, whatever) use hunting rifles instead. It's because that kind of gun will pwn the shotgun in any condition other than close-quarters combat where you won't be able to squeeze off more than a few rounds.

Sawn-offs are even worse and only suitable for pushing in someones face during a bank raid.

I'll take a proper semi- or full-automatic assault rifle with a 15+ shot magazine for preference, thanks.

More health, health-bars, and health packs (...) ALSO, health packs are much more appreciated over regenerating heatlh. Oddly enough, regenerating health RUINS games for me. There's no penalty to being hurt anymore

THIS, so badly it hurts. It's taken away some of the challenge element, for a start. Maybe you could have an "easy mode for wimpy people" setting with regenerating health, a "normal mode for people who aren't dicks", and "hard mode for double hard bastards" (well, people who think they are) which either removes the healthpacks or gives you the number that it would have, had it been designed as a regenerative health game.
Because I can sort of suspend my disbelief on the grounds of "there might actually be something in the healthpack that can help my avatar recover from a gunshot wound, and the sequence in which s/he finds suitable cover and attends to the wound has been cut for flow and brevity", but not so much "we have unmentioned super soldier healing powers, so if we hide here for two minutes the shrapnel literally just falls out of us and doesn't even leave a scar".

Also try to include as much of the dialogue as possible from that mental old Doom comic. Or at least, any parts that would seem funny in the game's context. It may be stupid, but it'll certainly get the post-ironic fanboy vote. Combat Quips? are always a neat addition anyway, just ask Duke Nukem ... erm... ahem. OK maybe not.

When hell freezes over... only one man is badass enough to relight its fire...

 

[Benjamin Beckmann]

if you think about it, dead space (2) has most of those aspects

 

[Oedipus 3000]

One of the most horrifying aspects of modern video gaming is with it's obsession with gore and tits, gore most definately then tits but tits none the less.

it has flooded the medium so fucking much that you can't find any E rated games unless they have some professional sports player on it.

Yes, I'm an adult, I can go out and buy as many gory gory gory games I can visibly find, but unlike most, I don't equate my manhood to how many fake things I kill.

I ask again, where is the creativity that once thrived in video games long long ago? where is the variation? where is the fun? People don't play video games nowadays to have fun with them or have an enthralling experiance, they just play it to see the gobs and gobs of gore fly onto the monitor screen. Fuck even older PC games, which never cared about experience or style once had far far FAR more uniqueness in their games then nowadays.

this will fall on deaf ear nonetheless but doe it bother anyone but me? Am I alone in this? Fuck this medium once had strong exuberance and style, almost rival to literature and cinema in it's artistic individuality, now each and every game is like a Steven Segal film.

 

[AmericanWarMachine]

Real shotguns actually don't have a great effective range, certainly if you want it to have much stopping power against anything more than a fox-sized opponent, and usually don't have a magazine that will store more than 4 shots. They're built as utility and close-range hunting firearms rather than proper offensive weapons. What you're probably thinking of is a rifle, one built to take large calibre rounds, possibly in a 10+ bullet magazine, rather than an un-rifled 12-guage twin barrel with a very limited shot capacity that fires cartridges of lead pellets.

Close up, they'll take your face off in a very ugly and effective fashion, but once the target is more than a few seconds' sprint away, all the accuracy and stopping power is gone, and you'll only realistically take down a pigeon (or a clay substitute). There's a reason that large-game huntsmen (deer, big cats, whatever) use hunting rifles instead. It's because that kind of gun will pwn the shotgun in any condition other than close-quarters combat where you won't be able to squeeze off more than a few rounds.

Sawn-offs are even worse and only suitable for pushing in someones face during a bank raid.

I'll take a proper semi- or full-automatic assault rifle with a 15+ shot magazine for preference, thanks.

Shotguns are actually very effective at distances much larger than "a few seconds sprint". I wasn't thinking of a rifle, either. I know what a shotgun is, I own several. I know how they're supposed to function, too, and clearly you do not. Shotguns are also very capable of having clip/magazine capacities well over 4 rounds... I'm really not sure where you're getting these figures from, actually.

 

[tahrey]

Fair enough then, I'm not going to argue with someone who's actually got first hand experience (...and, more to the point, owns several shotguns).

Having not got said experience myself I'm just relying on the theory and various things I've been told/shown before.

I would however ponder out loud why soldiers don't go around with shotguns instead then, particularly (if the rest of my lernings are vaguely correct) the wider blast radius could be helpful...

The figures come from said previously reported stuff, as far as I knew yer general shotgun wasn't much cop much beyond 25 yards, certainly not more than 50 (which is a fair distance when you're on the ground, and e.g. stalking some large game or shooting at a bird in the air), and a sawnoff very limited, more for close work, shock value and concealment. Lack of rifling in the barrel and all that.

And for the number of bullets, maybe it's a UK legistlation specific thing, but it seemed to have some weight in the US as well. You could stick a few extra rounds in the stock of a pump-action one (maybe 8?), but often it'd be two in the bore and two waiting to be loaded in place, if it wasn't even one of those where you had to crack it open, dump out the spent carts, and load a couple more in place manually.

Might not be fully au fait with it all but I'd hope at least some of what I've been taught is accurate?

 

[WaReloaded]

I still feel more compelled to play a game based on the story/plot more so than the graphics or gameplay, graphic violence or not.

 

[Chickenlittle]

So, basically, his suggestions just described the entire basis of Bulletstorm?

 

[The-Epicly-Named-Man]

Larger enemies need to be tricky to defeat, so that when you eventually do muderize them it should feel satisfying and not just another bag of meat.

 

[Agh-a-meme-knottle]

Now, that was a painstakingly mindless and therefore satisfying article, followed by a fun and relaxing thread. Obsessively technical descriptions of the visceral border on fetishism, but everyone here seems aware of that.

 

[Orange Calx]

I've played Shadow in front of several friends over the years and it's funny how they react to the geyser of "blood" that comes from each stab of your sword. Aside from the fact that the Colossus are imposing and wield earth shattering cudgels, there's really no other graphical, extreme violence in the game. I'd argue this was for the purpose, like many other elements of the game, of emphasis, but you'd have to extensively play the game to get the supposed effect, which doesn't explain the immediate reactions. The high-pressure geyser of blood is pretty eye-widening even without context.

Maybe it's just culture shock, since the effect is distinctly Japanese.