All I Wanna Do Is kekekekeke
From the day that man learned how to use tools we have always known the satisfying crunch of watching things go splat. My theory is that all technology is derived from the pleasure of exploding things. It starts with Og hitting a prehistoric squirrel with a club, then he looks out over the valley and begins to wonder exactly how he's going to hit all those animals with clubs. Sooner or later we're bound to invent the Hummer 2.
Nowhere is this as true as it is in video games, however it's quite often criminally underrated. People try to spend time developing the graphics or the physics but in the end all we need is a really satisfying splat every time we hurt something. I'm not calling for the end of storytelling in games, Lord knows we couldn't go back to the NES era without some serious mass medication. I'm just saying, sometimes it's fun to just watch something go splat. For example ...
Alien Swarm is a UT2004 mod which is played from an overhead perspective. You cooperatively take on a horde of aliens with your teammates using one or more marines, which you can adjust stats, level up and equip them to the teeth. I joined my first game last night and promptly got my ass handed to me. On Normal mode the aliens are pretty tough, I'm pretty sure the aliens go to school for a few years to learn the finer points of ass handling. However, once we switched from Normal to Easy mode the game was actually manageable. It was also a lot more fun.
What changed really didn't have anything to do with the difficulty, I was enjoying the challenge before. It's just that the aliens were so much easier to kill. It allowed me to hurt so many more things than I could before that I really started to enjoy the game. It also kept us from restarting the game every 30 seconds (literally) because someone would get eaten, accidentally drop all their equipment, or just break a nail. But it's not just about quantity, heavens no. One of the things that Alien Swarm has is great sound effects. Each corpsey explosion sounded better than the last. The gibs flowed like wine. Very chunky, bouncy wine. Maybe it really wasn't like wine at all.
The point is, in this case the great, frequent explosions made the game for me. It's surprising what kind of effect that can have. In the Myth games, for instance, explosions were very gratifying. There were even various points in some levels where they'd just give you a bunch of satchel charges or a herd of wights to explode. For no reason other than to watch something go boom. And it was fun!
Serious Sam is probably the poster boy for Â"explosions are funÂ". My major drive to complete the game was to see if I could get bigger and bigger weapons to shoot things with. The cannon was probably the largest weapon I have seen in an FPS so far, and it felt so good. Enemies flew to pieces at the sight of the thing. Really, there wasn't much else to the game. The environments were bright and a refreshing change, thankfully the trend seems to have caught on. Graphically the game was no slouch either. As far as gameplay is concerned though, the entire game consisted of things appearing then exploding. Rinse and repeat.
I'd like to make my own game, Captain Explodey. You star as a man bitten by a radioactive stick of dynamite, who now can make anything explode at will. Your weapons will be unnecessarily large and powerful. As the game progresses your weapons will get even more unwieldy, and the explosions will be more gratifying. Soon, even the buttons in the interface will explode when clicked. Try to quit? Boom! Want to save? KaBlam! Then eventually you'll meet the final boss, Admiral Explodey, your mentor turned villan. I don't want to give away the ending, but it involves lots of explosions, with possibly some puppies thrown in for good measure.
You know, I'm not sure if it makes me sad but I'd probably still play this game. I might not pay $50 for it but it would be a fun trip. Maybe I'm easily amused. In fact I'm pretty sure this is indeed the case. However there's no denying that a good explosion can make all the difference in the right hands. So, do you believe in the power of ridiculous violence like I do? If so, are you a publisher that wants Captain Explodey to get the game he deserves? Just email me, I'll tell you where to send the check.
Pyroman[FO]
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Strongbad already had a game called Your Head A Splode! But I think there is clearly more room for games in the "explosions cuz they kewl" millieu.
Xbox Live: hubbinsd
I'm down with the Captain Explodey. Color me one of the Myth guys that piled 60 satchel charges under my ill-fated party and tossed a cocktail in just to watch the parts fly. And fly they did. Funniest thing that ever happened was killing off my entire party like that except for the dwarf... he was on the side tossing the bottle in. After precisely 1 minute 43 seconds, the dwarf -- standing there, minding his own damned business -- gets his head lopped off by a ghol cleaver that had been bouncing around the level at roughly the speed of light since the explosion, and had just managed to acheive the perfect trajectory to off said dwarf.
So, bring on Captai Explodey. Admiral Explodey is toast, man.
Rock Band Name Generator!... too funny to merely be coincidence.
"Truly, this mishap has set back the swamp sciences several years." - H.P. Lovesauce, lamenting a tragedy.
Playing Coop Myth was dangerous for precisely that reason. Whoever got the dwarves had better be damn good or you all ended up exploding. They'd also better not be bored or they'll blow everyone up just for fun. Which is really one of the reasons Myth was so much fun, even when you lose you win! Dying meant fun explosions and body parts.
"We've learned irishmen have huge nipples, and that intellectual film critics are all huge gaywads. But most of all, we've learned that creeping corporate influence over the news media ... protects us from terrorism" - Norm Archer, Onion Movie
As Rise of the Triad so succintly immortalised it:
"Ludicrous gibs!"
I'm with you 100%, Pyro. It is a difficult (and strangely disturbing) thing to try and explain to a colleague just how magnificent it is to watch an opponent erupt into a shower of blood and body parts in something like UT2k4. And all because you shot them with a big, nasty gun. In the head.
Player damage can at the same time be one of the most gratifying aspects (if done right) in a game, as well as one of the most disappointing (when done wrong). Doom 3 carries my hope for a splatacular tomorrow now (those exploding imps from the first game were so tasty!) - the xbox video shows heads and various other body parts being blown off with the shotgun (/glee).
Though I must add a new delicious morsel to my buffet of delight - driving over people with vehicles in UT2k4. I thusly offer an ode:
"Oh, thou Hellbender horn, how satisfying thou art to honk afore driving over yon hapless victim."
Swing harder! Swing harder!
-- Lilarcor, Baldur's Gate 2
Is "All I Wanna Do Is kekekekeke" Alien-speak for "All I wanna do is zoom-a-zoom-zoom-zoom in a poom-poom"?
I generated a virtual world in the toilet bowl this morning.
-- Podunk on the PS3's mystical, magical abilities
Yeah the game last night was more fun on easy. You could actually kill stuff - as a medic.
I first played UT2k4 and Wolfenstein:ET on a laptop. I had to turn off all the gore so that it would be more playable. Then I built my new desktop. Wow, people really explode and body parts fly all over. It's a totally new game!
kekekeke as in "OMG ZERG RUSH KEKEKE". Throwing lots of enemies at your opponent till you drown them in your own blood. Maybe it's just an SA thing, if so, now you know!
"We've learned irishmen have huge nipples, and that intellectual film critics are all huge gaywads. But most of all, we've learned that creeping corporate influence over the news media ... protects us from terrorism" - Norm Archer, Onion Movie
This is especially true of slapping cute imps in the Dungeon Keeper games.
"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject." - Churchill
I suck at comedy.
I generated a virtual world in the toilet bowl this morning.
-- Podunk on the PS3's mystical, magical abilities
Did you ever consider that maybe I'm not that bright? In case you hadn't, let's forget I said that.
"We've learned irishmen have huge nipples, and that intellectual film critics are all huge gaywads. But most of all, we've learned that creeping corporate influence over the news media ... protects us from terrorism" - Norm Archer, Onion Movie
If not, it should be.
The world must know the awesome power of our gainfully employed fist! - Lord Xan
The unattainable is unknown at zombo.com!
That song's been in my head all day since I posted that.
:sing:Shake it baby shake it baby shake it don't STOPPA!
I generated a virtual world in the toilet bowl this morning.
-- Podunk on the PS3's mystical, magical abilities
KEKEKEKE also goes with this: ^___^
Rogue
Mage
I woulda put it in the title but I didn't know if it would mess anything up. So I'll just post it here instead.
^________________^
"We've learned irishmen have huge nipples, and that intellectual film critics are all huge gaywads. But most of all, we've learned that creeping corporate influence over the news media ... protects us from terrorism" - Norm Archer, Onion Movie
That's the reason why I still have Tempest 2000 (PC) around and why Mutant Storm by the awesome PomPom guys never leaves my HD.
Hi, I'm KrazyTaco. And I like to explode stuff. It's been going on for years. Please help me.
"Thanks, KrazyTaco, thanks. I'd put it in your pooper too." -Mex
"Krazy, I love the fact that you exist." -Vector
Back on topic, one of the neat things that Bungie's Marathon games did was some (very) primitive physics based interactions. One of the neater of these interactions was an effect that would cause enemies that died from excessive explosion damage to go into a separate corpse animation that was also tagged as having a lot less weight than a standard corpse, thus causing the explosion blast to send the corpse flying all over the place.
And even neater than that, the effect worked on the player as well. So that when a bad guy took you out with a rocket, you would see (from the point of view of your mangled corpse) yourself getting launched and bounced all over the place.
Nobody has yet integrated physics based fun into videogames as well as Bungie did in Marathon and Myth. With the recent attention that physics simulators have gotten, I keep expecting someone to use them in some really compelling way. But it hasn't happened yet.
Really it extends to Halo as well, they were the first to have truly fun vehicle physics, and explosions were very satisfying.
"We've learned irishmen have huge nipples, and that intellectual film critics are all huge gaywads. But most of all, we've learned that creeping corporate influence over the news media ... protects us from terrorism" - Norm Archer, Onion Movie
Mutant Storm is an awesome find. Thanks! Great for jumping in and smashing things.
"We've learned irishmen have huge nipples, and that intellectual film critics are all huge gaywads. But most of all, we've learned that creeping corporate influence over the news media ... protects us from terrorism" - Norm Archer, Onion Movie
But gents! You have a fine example of Explode-O-Rama in freshly brewed Painkiller! Shah-weet! I love making daisies from a bunch of cannon fodder guys by sending a rocket in their midst in that game. That game was probably been devised by the Bomb Guy from Muppet show.
"Who said boom?" BOOM-SPLATSPLATSPLAT-BOOM! YEAH!
Panem et circenses
"You really need to smoke a tree first to appreciate that one." - Sanjuro
KEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKE is used because it is easy to type by using both middle fingers.
Xbox Live: Kooter06
Shogo: MAD was one of the most satisfying games I know, as far as explosions and gore go. When you shot a guy with the TOW, not only would he explode, but the nasty bits would go flying, trailing blood, and bounce around the room, and very often they'd end up stuck to the walls!
And if you shot a puny footsoldier with a mecha weapon... even better. They'd get smeared over the length of a city block.