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Who's your favourite video game character?.

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15:06 / 06.04.04

New threads are soooo overrated, banshee.

Having worked in the software development business in NYC for many years, I can tell you that Rockstar is a totally unprincipalled ripoff monster of the first order. That's how software companies make their rent in this town. Similarly, I would watch out for schools offering courses like that. They also need to make their rent and will draft a computer science or english lit professor into a course that is likely to put asses in the seats.

I have a friend who has compared game development to putting on a Broadway show, and that seems pretty apt.

15:06 / 06.04.04

Rikku, Lulu, Yuna, Quistis, Selphie, Rinoa, Sorceress, Tifa, Aeris, moogles and chocobos.... Yes, I like Final Fantasy. And girls.

The stories/endings in Tekken never really help very much so I'm quite interested in what the whole Nina/Anna Williams thing is about. That's one way to hold a player's interest: make no sense.

Miner Willy's quite charasmatic.

And I have to say Link too, if only for a masterstroke of synchronicity: Got Wind-Waker on my birthday last year, started game, gave him my name and woudjabelieveit, the action begins on "my" birthday. Looks a bit like me as a kid, too. It felt like a specially made avatar, just for me. May have subconsciously started to wear more green since then...

15:08 / 06.04.04

Regarding breaking into things.. Anyone know how(or rather where) to actually make an education out of gaming and such? Here in norway there are one place and its NOT cheap..

16:50 / 06.04.04

My favorite video game character (for like six or seven years now) is Voldo

I like Voldo for a lot of reasons.

I like Voldo because he crab walks. I like him because of his lethal scissor gloves. I like him because he can fight just as effectively when his back's to you.

I enjoy Voldo for his sense of fashion. He not afraid to wear a thong. He's not afraid to wear fetish gear. And he's not even afraid of wearing a blindfold in battle.

I admire Voldo for his athleticism, on and off the Stage of History. I love his combat as performance art techniques. I just get tickled pink when spins his victims around on the tips of scissors.

I even delight in the little sounds my voiceless Voldo makes. What would he say if he could talk? What does he dream about? Is there someone special somewhere waiting for Voldo to come home?

I love Voldo.

17:42 / 06.04.04

Voldo is a pervert and a freak. I hate him. He's also really difficult to control, if I recall. I might just have to get the Dreamcast out in a moment and KO him many, many times. With EVERY other character.

18:38 / 06.04.04

Banshee: (yes, this is thread rot, but it keeps getting mentioned, here and elsewhere)

Programming? Art? Design? For the first two, you usually want a proper four-year degree with specialisation in CG stuff from either side. You want to latch onto an underpaid internship and prove you're worth keeping around. You want little shiny demo things. You want to be willing to move to some rather unexpected places. And you want to check Gamasutra.com and places like it often. Design and production, I haven't a clue besides knowing there are some places that get designers out of their own mod communities from previous games.

I'm a game programmer, and while I haven't been doing it long, I've been watching the hiring process here and talking to coworkers imported from other companies about how it is elsewhere, as I've a few friends trying to luck out like I did and break into it. The pay is crappy considering what programmers can get for ungodly boring soul-sucking jobs, but it pays the bills and I keep my soul.

--

Oh, and my favourite video game character? I'm not really sure.. I agree with the commentary that NPCs and side characters often make better Characters, because they're not made to be transparent background for the player's actions. There are characters that serve as both PCs and NPCs throughout game series, and they tend to be some of my favourites, no matter how cheesy they are, because they have personality from their NPC days, and they get the mental screen-time by being able to play as them. I'm a bit obsessive over Alucard... mmm, my thing for pretty goth boys and tortured heroes. Yeah. There are far better characters out there, but I'm biased.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

06:46 / 07.04.04

Knight of the Old Republic show a new way of doing an RPG, but it still drags you along int he story for the ride (like the Final Fantasy games). If they could open it up a bit more like Morrowind, I think they could beat the GTA "open game world" all to hell.

That said, I like the characters in KotOR a LOT, and each of them were interesting...too bad the way you found out about them was such a pain in the ass.

lonely as a cloud...

07:15 / 07.04.04

Some of the characters in KOTOR were a royal pain in the ass...'specially the good guys. Yeah, you did kinda get dragged along in the story, but you could change the order of events to some extent. Plus I prefer having a party of characters rather than going solo the whole way like in Morrowind.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

09:13 / 07.04.04

Much as I like freedom in games, a scripted story can be just as good... if it' a well-scripted story. And if it's well-enough scripted, it doesn't seem like a story. That was what I thought was wonderful about Deus Ex- while being a lot more freeform than most of its contemporaries, it's still fairly scripted. But it SEEMS like it isn't- like the best movies or thrillers, everything seems to occur naturally, rather than because it fulfils a function (well, to an extent, anyway)- you feel like you're actually a character in the plot, rather than an actor in it. Which is what makes it absorbing.

NOW I want to see characters I can believe aren't just ciphers or scripted dummies. (Yes, it'll be a long time coming... but remember when you first played Elite, and couldn't ever imagine how games could get beyond that?)

From what I've seen of Far Cry, enemy AI seems to have come a long way... okay, it's still a bunch of nameless zeroes with a few lines they can shout, but they're actually reacting and stuff... (again to hark back, remember the first time you met the marines in Half Life? Just started that again... and they're STILL damn impressive.) again, this would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

A balance between scripting and freedom is what made Deus Ex such a gripping story... if the same approach could be taken to characters, we could have something wonderful. And perhaps a bit scary.

15:26 / 07.04.04

About getting a job in the game industry, every article I read where the question is asked to some hotshot game designer has one answer in common: work on a mod. Tough go, though. most mods disintegrate before the 50% develpoment mark gets hit.

00:05 / 08.04.04

Been thinking about this more, and I've decided that Beyond Good & Evil's Jade is one of the most effective characterisations I've seen in a game, especially in terms of player characters. The game does an excellent job of pulling you into the world, giving you NPCs who seem to have independent lives and rely on and react to you/her, then doing nasty things to them and making you feel her sense of loss. I guess I also found myself admiring her, which is one of the things you get regularly in decent novels, films, etc., but I've never experienced in a game before.

I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that she's so far away from any of the usual video game stereotypes?

00:33 / 08.04.04

Conker.

The TVR Tamora in Project Gotham Racing 2.

And I can't believe no one has mentioned Ico.

nedrichards is confused

10:47 / 08.04.04

Also Jade has killer lipstick and is a photojournalist.

10:53 / 08.04.04

"Beyond Good & Evil" was very good at characterisation, both of Jade and the NPCs. I mean who couldn't like Peyjj, or Double H. I also liked the Prince in the new Prince of Persia game. There was a character who developed and changed & who you actually cared about. I thought the relationship between him and the Princess, though a bit cheesy, was very well done and made you care more about both her and the Prince

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