September 20, 2003

Game Tester

I got to test Crystal Dynamics' upcoming games last night. The first one I tried is called Whiplash; our friend John is one of the top programmers for it. It's a cool game concept: you play a weasel, named Spanx, who is trying to escape from a large corporation that tests its products on animals. The trick is that you are attached to a rabbit, Redmond, by a handcuff, so you use the rabbit as a weapon (by swinging it around and smashing items and people.) The company is cleverly called Genron, and makes some pretty wacky stuff. The voice acting is great. They got the guy who does a lot of movie trailers (you'd recognize his voice) to do the Genron commercials that are playing throughout the game. It's still a little buggy, and I managed to do some weird stuff that wasn't normal (the best was somehow catching both Spanx and Redmond on fire near the beginning of the game, and not being able to put them out at all for the rest of the level!) It's an awesome game concept and I'm really looking forward to seeing the final product.

The other game I played is the one Gary's been working on: Legacy of Kain: Defiance. This is the 5th game in the Soul Reaver/Blood Omen vampire series, and it's looking great. In this game you play both Kain and Razael, in alternating chapters. I don't know what the end goal is, but I only got into the first eighth of the game. The look and feel is very similar to Soul Reaver 2, but they've added some new features. My biggest game-play complaint was the difficulty of the jumping puzzles, which there seem to be a lot of, at least in the first chapter. I let Gary do some of them for me, because it would have taken me forever to get through them (if I had managed at all...I am terrible at jumping puzzles.) My biggest design complaint was Kain's method of gaining health, which is by sucking blood. I didn't have too much of a problem with that after he fought with guards, but I found the people (mostly, or perhaps all, women) chained to the wall offensive. After playing for awhile, though, it just sort of became second nature, which in retrospect is also rather disturbing. Like Whiplash, I am eagerly waiting for Lok:D to be released in November!

Posted by Jen at September 20, 2003 08:56 AM
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