While industry veterans have been criticizing the state of storytelling in games, Naughty Dog lead game designer Richard Lemarchand thinks the situation is quite the opposite.
"I think we're in the middle of this incredible renaissance in video games," he said at the 2008 Games for Change festival earlier this week in New York. "We've had this huge explosion of creativity in the last few years."
Speaking on a panel with other industry bigwigs about how social-change games can be profitable for the mainstream games business, Lemarchand, who worked on "Uncharted: Drake's Fortune," said he evens thinks games can be as influential as great literature.
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Every dog has his day...
And today is that day for one video game dog (or wolf).
This year, we've embarked on a quest to find the Greatest Animal in the History of Video Games. First, we had judges choose the best horse.
And now, our fine panel has chosen the Greatest Canine in Video Games from a list of nominees that we listed last month (along with readers' suggestions).
This time around, our judges panel included:
- Brian Crecente, managing editor of Kotaku
We've weighted each judge's top three picks, and the winner is...
PaRappa the Rapper, who topped the list for three out of our four judges. Meanwhile, Brown from "Rule of Rose" took second place, and the undead dogs from "Resident Evil" were third place.
And the Readers' Choice winner: a four-way tie, with readers giving props to K.K. Slider from "Animal Crossing," Amaterasu from "Okami," the "Duck Hunt" dog and Sam from "Sam & Max."
Do the judges know what they're talking about? Read on for the judges' individual choices and reasoning. First up, Evan Wells of Naughty Dog... Read more...
What is a "platformer"?
Or what isn't a "platformer"?
That's the question that came up in my interview last week with Naughty Dog's Amy Hennig, the Game Director of "Uncharted: Drake's Fortune," which is in stores tomorrow. According to her, "Uncharted" is not a platformer.
The third-person action-adventure game is similar to "Tomb Raider" and "Prince of Persia." While there's plenty of shooting/fighting sequences and some puzzle-solving, "Uncharted" is still essentially a platformer at its core: The player navigates Nathan Drake as he scales ledges and jumps to and from suspended platforms. So if it's not a platformer, what is it?
Reps from Sony and Naughty Dog (the development studio that created "Crash Bandicoot" and "Jak and Daxter") have been calling the game "traversal," so I asked Hennig to explain...
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"Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune" is a third-person action-adventure about a modern-day treasure hunter.
But according to "Uncharted"'s Game Director Amy Hennig, it could've been "BioShock" or "Resistance: Fall of Man."
I caught up with Hennig on the phone earlier this week to talk about Naughty Dog's first release for the PlayStation 3 (in stores next week), and we discussed how they came up with the premise for "Uncharted." When the Sony-owned, Santa Monica-based developer of the "Jak and Daxter" series was tossing around ideas for their first next-gen game, a slew of concepts came up -- including ones that may have been similar to "BioShock" and "Resistance: Fall of Man." So what happened?
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While industry veterans have been criticizing the state of storytelling in games, Naughty Dog lead game designer Richard Lemarchand thinks the situation is quite the opposite.