Three days until GTA: San Andreas!  Local Gamestop confirmed my reservation and that they are selling them at 7 PM on Monday.  Of course, I may have to play it at the office (since it's not quite appropriate fare for the 3 yr old)...

I play a lot of games but the modern GTA games have really sucked me in like no other.  I've played both of them to completion several times (no, I haven't quite gotten a 100% rating... close though).  The sense of a world that they create is just absolutely amazing.  My brain has a complete map of Liberty City and Vice City and those spaces are easily some of the most real video game spaces in my mind... maybe even more so than things I helped create like Citadel Station or the Von Braun (partly because there are no secrets or sense of exploration for me in those).

GTA:SA looks like yet another ridiculously good GTA game.  They have so upped the ante on volume and quality of content compared to the rest of the world. 

Sadly there's already a ripped version floating around the "internets".  Not too surprising really, but sad regardless.  Once you release a disc to the duplicators it is SO much easier for it to leak out one way or another.  That said, piracy doesn't hurt a good console game nearly as much as it will hurt a PC game -- the barrier to entry on pirating a console game is just so much higher.  It happens, of course (and overseas, on a professional scale) but most people don't have mod chips or DVD burners.

Then again, rentals pick the pockets of console developers much more than they do for PC devs, so maybe it all balances out on the karmic wheel of justice.

All I know is that I have 3 days left until my trip to San Andreas can begin.  The few lucky bastards I know in the industry who have already played it (legitimate copies, of course) say it lives up to the hype...

Of course, I'm still in the middle of a thousand other games... Xavier and I are playing Paper Mario (though the story is a bit too complex for him to follow still), and I'm 80% of the way through Sly Cooper 2 and still loving it.  I finally gave Rome: Total War a shot and while I have a few complaints it is a very nice package overall -- well worth a look.

Aside from sounding like a bad James Bond movie title, I'm referring to the technique of using limited resources to generate tension for the player.  I still love to read threads on my older games, and System Shock 2 seems to generate interesting ones from time to time, like this one on QT3.  The attacking tone of it aside (trust me, you get used to having a thick skin if you want to read any internet commentary on your work), the sentiment of "not enough ammo + too many respawns + weapons break too often" is a pretty common one to hear.

Clearly, we mistuned those parameters in some fashion, but I also think that we were going after a specific effect that many players just found uncomfortable.  It was a conscious decision to make ammo limited, so that you would feel like you were always in threat.  Creature respawns are there to make sure there is a) no empty backtracking and b) to keep the player always on their toes.  Weapons break during combat so that you can have some tense "oh crap!" moments where suddenly the rug is pulled out from underneath you.

If I had it to do over again, I would have drastically reduced weapon breakdown (but not eliminated it), maybe introduced some weapons that specifically needed to be repaired before they could be used.  I definitely would have added some sort of "ammo scavenger" ability in the Marine skill set so that people who wanted to play it more as a run-and-gun could do so if they built their characters that way.  Creature spawning is a tough one.  I think some of the complaints come from people who didn't understand that alarms increased the respawn level and so mistook the "punishment" respawn level as the default.  But that clearly that isn't the only issue here. 

An interesting though experiment ... would people who enjoy (in that horror movie way) the fear/tension of low ammo inherently tend to pick ammo scavenger in order to allay that fear?  And if so, would we as the game designers basically be giving them a way to reduce their own long term enjoyment of the tension of the game?  When working on a "sandbox" game like AOM the mantra was always "let the player define their own fun" but I'm not quite sure that is as applicable in an "experience" game like SS2.

Alternatively, it could just be that the excitement and tension that comes from insufficient resources is just not for everyone.  It's clear to me that the game needed some better "backstops" for people who rode the economic spiral down too far.  We intended the resurrection mechanic to help those people out (since you can always bum-rush the monsters with a melee weapon over and over) but that's a pretty junky solution.

On the games front, way too many good games to play as is apparent to anyone who plays games at all this season.  Dawn of War, Kohan 2, and CoD: United Offensive are getting some good playtime on my PC lately, with Evil Genius and Rome: Total War next in the docket. 

Xavier and I are still plugging away at Sly Cooper 2 but now he's decided that Murray and "Turtle" are the only characters worth playing -- leaving me to do the Sly missions by myself.  The game remains incredibly polished and fun.  I've also been playing a little of Crash Bandicoot: Twinsanity, which is genius and yet so horribly flawed in many ways... I'll try and write some thoughts up on it in the future.