Anlässlich des kommenden Gears of War 3 engagierten Microsoft und Epic Tom Bissell, Autor von Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter sowie Verfasser einiger Romane, um ein buch über das Design und die Geschichte der Gears-Reihe zu verfassen.
Das Werk trägt den Titel „The Art and Design of Gears of War“ und behandelt so ziemlich alle Aspekte des Gears-Universums, von den ersten Designversuchen bis zum bevorstehenden letzten Kapitel der Serie. (Obwohl ich nicht so recht glauben kann, dass dies wirklich das „letzte“ Gears-Spiel sein wird.)
Die Website Grantland, für die Tom eine Videospielkolumne verfasst, veröffentlichte vor kurzem einen längeren Auszug aus dem Buch, den man sich nicht entgehen lassen sollte. Hier einige Zitate:
“These days, Gears of War, despite being one of the most critically acclaimed games of this generation, earns the occasional knock for lacking innovation. The august authority, Wikipedia, in its summary of the first Gears's reception, makes note of this, citing some spanking admonishment courtesy of Eurogamer: "[L]et's not pretend that we're wallowing in the future of entertainment. What we have here is an extremely competent action game."
The first time I played Gears I was not monitoring its innovation levels, but I was certainly struck by its competence. Gears was so polished it practically gleamed. From the mold and dried blood all over the walls and floor of the prison in which the game opens to the naturalistic voice acting, and from the responsiveness of the controls to the way its enemies behaved under fire, its attention to detail was like nothing I had seen.1 The more I played Gears, the more it drew me in.
Über die im Spiel zum Einsatz kommenden Waffen:
That, of course, and the combat, which has an Isness as intense and significant as anything in the game, despite such initially ridiculous-seeming weapons as a chainsaw-bearing assault rifle and bolo-chain grenade, the tossing of which looks like a rejected Olympic sport. I know that my French friend and I had a couple big laughs the first time we chainsawed a Locust in half, the first time we popped out of cover and pumped fifty rounds into a Locust chest, the first time one of us twirled a frag grenade and lobbed it into a crowd of Locust and watched them come apart in a burst of stumps and gore. How could such horrific imagery be so funny, so weirdly exhilarating, and not push the rest of the game into tonal incoherency?
Und mein absoluter Lieblingsausschnitt, indem sich der Autor über die Unterschiede zwischen Steuerung mit Maus/Keyboard und Gamepad auslässt:
Hardcore PC-shooter fanatics still lament the genre's Great Console Migration, and they maintain that the controller provides only a fraction of the mouse's precision. Almost certainly, this is true. But Bleszinski understood something vital: If the shooter is about a visceral connection between player and avatar, action and reaction, perhaps nosing a mouse along a felt pad was a poor approximation of the shooting experience. Perhaps the approximation of holding a big rattling piece of hot and deafeningly noisy metal made precision somewhat beside the point. Perhaps the messier controls of the console shooter actually had the potential to make shooting profounder, somehow. Many developers who went from PC to console shooters never understood the necessity of this leap and thus never made it themselves.
Der gesamte Auszug ist mehr als lesenswert, nicht zuletzt deshalb, weil die einzige Möglichkeit, das Buch in die Hände zu bekommen, darin besteht, die $150 teure Epic Edition des Spiels zu erwerben.
The Art and Design of Gears of War [Grantland]
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