The “Hint: Shoot enemy to kill them” isn’t even funny because in Day of Defeat: Source there is the exact same hint.

Fortunately I made a new discovery. It is Metanet’s blog (the folks behind N) – http://www.metanetsoftware.com/blog/ 
I can wholeheartedly recommend it. There isn’t much of it (I read the whole thing in one go) but there’s a lot of value in it. Like their view on casual games, I could write that stuff myself.

So that’s all, I’m just sharing the wealth cause I’m happy some people share my reality. It’s not only me that has crazy ideas like: games should be made for fun.

I remember years ago when I was playing Test Drive I had to figure out the best and fastest route for the car to drive on. It was part of the fun, a learning experience. So now when I drive a real car I know how to cut those corners and give the finger to anyone that was in front of me. Well you don’t have to think about it anymore with a new DEFAULT option (remember stupid people never play with the options) called Best Line. You can see how evil it is on the following screen I took it personally with my digital camera “Print Scrn”:

The next great feature is game difficulty levels. What’s bad about that?
Game difficulty used to set how tough are your opponents. Not anymore. The new game difficulty levels are as following:
Casual, something I don’t remember and King.

Wow! I wanna be king! I’m gonna play that level it will be tough as hell! Why is it more difficult than the others?

Because you have to use the brakes on your own.

Apparently on the first level the game brakes for you entirely, on hard corners and such. The second level helps you with controlling the speed on the turns.

It’ll take me months of figuring out how brakes work until I can play the King level… fortunately I have the Best Line so I don’t have to think about where I’m going. I just have to focus on keeping the car on the green line.
Hmm… I was trying to think of an old arcade game to compare it that was 2D and the only thing you had to do is focus to stay on a line, but I can’t think of anything. This must be the stupidest game ever.

At least we have the graphics. With EA’s famous touch for the level of details we don’t have to worry about that. Or do we? Take a look.

Apparently 300 programmers and artists didn’t notice that the driver has no butt.
Not to mention that he doesn’t move his arms while driving, I think 15 years ago Car & Driver had better attention to details.

They are cool and fun to watch. I was watching a trailer for Call of Duty 4 the other day. The cinematics are nice, the music is decent, the graphics are excellent, some ragdoll effects etc…

…but when you actually download a demo of the game, it’s all the same crap.

• You walk straight and you shoot bad guys.
• You want to go right, you can’t because the map makers didn’t forecast this.
• You go back to the “designers” path, you spot a civilian, you kill him.
• The game ends cause you’re not “supposed” to kill civilians (when in fact it is just lazyness of the developers cause they don’t know how to handle the plot if you kill an important character)
• I press alt+f4 and then shift+delete on the game folder

I have been waiting for a long time now. Soldat  is 5 years old. During this time no game has come to take place of the number 1 side-view multiplayer action game. To be honest I am very dissapointed. There are similar games and some that might be considered direct Soldat clones. I want to list all of them in a future article, this is just a prelude to what I want to write about. I’m asking for a little help. If you know any game that you might consider a Soldat clone please post the link in the comments.

I don’t know why Soldat doesn’t spawn clones. It surely isn’t because a side-view game is harder to make than others? The map rendering is laughably easy to do, I think I programmed it in one day. The physics aren’t much harder than any other game (I also did it in one day after reading Advanced Character Physics). The animations and skeletal system are just clever ideas, they don’t need much brain power to do. And all of it is open source, I’ve sent many times the code to my physics to people that wanted it. Nothing came out of it.
Liero has countless clones. Maybe it is because Soldat doesn’t lack anything, Liero lacked multiplayer that’s why many people wanted to make it better. I don’t know.
I remember Grand Theft Auto didn’t have any clone until… they made Grand Theft Auto 2. Nobody did a clone of GTA, one of the most succesful and innovative games in history!

“But Michal aren’t you afraid that a clone will destroy Soldat and take all of it’s players away from you?”. Well no, that would be a good thing overall…

I want a good Soldat clone because nothing improves products as competion. It would motivate me to increase expectations and quality. I want to see what the limit is and then cross it. I want to make better games. But because there is nothing to compare Soldat to, the only thing I can compare it to is… Soldat. That is what I am doing with my new game, I’m making every aspect of it better than Soldat.

If there would be a decent clone there would be something else to compare with. There would be a competition and we’d steal each others ideas. There would be an arms race in features! Guess who would benefit from this most? You, as the player!

I don’t know what the future will bring and if any dev team is actually working on something right now. I know that Anna of the famed Polyworks is working on something that is beginning to look cool, check it out.

If you know of any other news related to Soldat clones please post in the comments, thanks.

That’s what it needs. It is just boring as hell as it is now. All the controversy in the entire history of gaming is either caused by blood and gore or by big tits (the latter happened only once and stopped being interesting after people realized they were fake). Blood and gore is not controversial anymore since Doom. I think we have seen everything since then. Decapitated bodies, guts falling out of the belly, spiked heads, eating blood for health (Wolf3d), chainsaws, synthesized death screams. Now as you see, as cool as it is, it is a very limited area. There isn’t much you can invent more (well I have a couple ideas), just play some recent games like Manhunt. I mean there is nothing wrong with games like that, they are awesome, but they became boring. Gore is not interesting anymore. So what kind of controversy do I want?

The kind you see in every other form of art.

There is a very shy debate going on since the beginning of the video game industry about whether or not games are art or not. Some interesting points are being made, about the graphical design, music, stories etc. Games seem to be a blend of all forms of art, so they should be technically art. But art does not like technicality. This is where games fail as art. It is a completely different mind-frame. There is no place for logic in art, logic drives technology. Logic is just a human mind construct, whereas true art comes directly from Nature. It is a creation of nature, in the same way a tree is constructed or a landscape. There is no thought involved in the creation of a living being or a mountain. It is a mechanism, an analog creation. The difference between human-made and nature-made is similar to the difference between a vinyl record and a CD record. The CD is our way of seeing nature. It has been created in our minds as a description of what really there is, a sound, for us to store and re-listen to.

What’s my point? If games are to be considered art, they are the hardest craft of all. Because of that only a few selected people were able to become involved in this. The only people that could manage to build a game were programmers. A graphic designer, a musician, a concept artist cannot make a game alone by himself. A programmer can. The whole 1980’s were dominated by games made entirely by programmers. The last game to end this era in splendor was Another World by Eric Chahi. After that, more money came in, the producers became interested in this funny little industry. So the designers and artists came to an industry dominated by logically-driven-creatures (read: programmers). And this is a burden. Because we never got rid of that feeling, that we can’t make a game without a programmer. So the programmer was the most important person in the project, even though more people were brought in. These were the 90’s. Now we are coming to a new era, things are starting to change (with pre-built engines and studios specifically dedicated to creating just game content not code). But still we’re not heading in the right direction. This is why I’m writing this, the game industry is still crap.

Look at any art-form.

In literature: we’ve had Joyce which I’ll bet any money that took LSD, coke, tea or some other shit, we’ve had Kafka which was an unusual weirdo, we’ve had Hemingway which marvelously blew his brains out.
In music: Beethoven, Debussy, Wagner, all interesting characters. I don’t have to mention pop music: Rolling Stones, David Bowie and all the other drug oriented groups.
Movies: just read the tabloids.
Painting: Michaelangelo, Picasso, van Gogh and many other freaks.

My point is, in every area of human interest which involves creativity there are people that stand out. Memorable characters that the whole world knows of. This is just how it is. Individuals must become different than the rest in order to create something new.

Look at the game industry and show me somebody who is not a geek. Show me somebody that everybody knows. Who are the people behind the most popular games? Can you name the creators of Counter-Strike or World of Warcraft?? When I think really hard on this all that comes up to me is that japanese guy from Nintendo, John Carmack and John Romero. The latter even sparked some controversy with Daikatana. But how poor and uninteresting are silly business issues compared to the life of someone like Marlon Brando!

You might say that the game industry is too young. It has been around just for 25-30 years. I have to disagree. Look at the movies, it’s incredible how fast that one became an art form. The person that transformed the industry was Charlie Chaplin and he came just 20 years after the projection of the first film ever made! Watch “City Lights” and tell me if any game comes close to that level of intensity and entertainment!

So what do we need? We need interesting characters. Not game characters, but people that drive this carousel. We need somebody to show the way. Astonish. Lead. Awe. Somebody that will be on the covers of newspapers, somebody that will spark the imagination of millions. Carmack and Romero just started a transformation. There is still waiting for us a spectacular change. After that people will truly see how primitive the current game era is. Somewhere there, sitting in a bedroom (or garage) is somebody that doesn’t even know it yet, but it will come to him/her one day that it is time to show the world that games are art. Games will be art.