[QUOTE="scar-hawk"]Be warned. Hype leads to disappointment. But the wi-fi feature sounds awesome.OnionTree
That is true, but I think this could be an exception. The creators have proven they are surprisingly competent. The puzzles, level design, and maybe some of the interaction may wind up below some people's expectations, but what there is, what definitely is there, has been shown, and works, makes this a game that will easily be great and highly recommendable.
I saw in one interview that, apparently, a team of people spent six months with their jobs solely dedicated to researching everything they can, adding it to the game, and going on like this for hours every day. Think about that. Aside from copyrights, vulgarity, and overly-specific things (like "legless styrofoam centaur", though I'm hoping you can make a "converter machine" for converting objects into other objects [i.e. apple converter machine]), it'll most likely work in this game. Any common animal, food, tool, profession, weapon, furniture, etc will probably work. They spent that much time constantly adding new things and going out of their way to find weird stuff, and more than likely cleaned out the biggest dictionary they could find (which may very well include Wiktionary) from A to Z.
I am sure you will be hard-pressed, I mean seriously hard-pressed to find something that doesn't work. It seems the tools they created allowed them to create these objects and their uses, relationships, physics, and whathaveyou with significant enough ease for them to fit all this stuff into the game and do it all without spending years upon years doing so.
Just the sandbox aspect of this game may very well be the greatest sandbox experience in gaming history. Likely any creature capable of holding tools will be able to use any of the tools you can make. They'll be able to ride anything you make. You can expose them to quicksand, goo, water, lava, ice, whatever.
Take this situation into consideration. I'll probably be able to amuse myself for quite a while dropping everything I can think of into an antlion's den through a convoluted system of conveyor belts and springs, and then kill the poor fattened thing with a cement truck.
Let's see. Cthulu and Longcat are in there, I'm pretty sure we'll have antlions, since they're real, in the dictionary, and appear regularly in games (Simant, Final Fantasy, Sonic, and Alex Kidd from memory). They've surely got a shrinkray in there, so they probably have some kind of growthray, so the antlion can be big enough to do this. Conveyor belts and springs are going to be there, I wouldn't doubt that for a second, give these guys some credit. Cement trucks are also very common, so these will surely be there, and cement would have the property of both hardening and probably killing virtually any living thing trapped inside.
I'm going to estimate there is at least a 90% chance that my idea would work.
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I think we'll rarely find disappointment in the limitations, and the people who find these limitations the most are probably going to be the people who dedicate themselves to stumping the game as much as possible. We don't know exactly how the game will play, we don't know how good the overall soundtrack will be, and maybe the object relationships will even have some instances that simply don't work as intended. However, unlike some ambitious projects we've actually seen quite a good amount of proof of concept.
I pre-ordered this game. I'm fully confident I'll fall in love with it. These kind of outstanding toys, that grant you so much freedom and possibilities, and challenge your imagination, I've never been disappointed in. I have to say, and I don't say this lightly, that if there are truly "tens of thousands of objects" and so many different categories and properties so meticulously designed (all wood burns is general, villain turns into werewolf in the full moon is very specific) that there are surely millions of situations the developers haven't even tried that will probably all work, that I believe this may very well be the best game I will have ever played, in my twenty years of gaming and many thousands of games played.
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But, don't go deliberately hyping yourself up. Don't even go writing and looking for ideas. Just pre-order the game, purge any thoughts about it from your mind until it's out, immerse yourself in it when you have it, and just let your creative juices flow. You'll find the most pleasure from coming up with concepts on your own and being delighted at seeing them in action. This could very well be the most ambitious game ever made, and may be the first game to succeed in it's goals to such a satisfactory degree. Don't worry about the price or the reviews. You already know there's so much that must be here, that it's worth $30 just to enjoy the journey of discovering every object at your disposal, and even this daunting task is infinitessimally smaller than the list of interactions you can create. If your reading this and don't own a DS, within the next two months you may very well find yourself with a DS, if only for this one game. This could be gaming history in the making, and one of the biggest games of all time in a cartridge the size of a Cheez-It. It's so crazy. If Willy Wonka was to make a video game, it'd probably be a little like this.
I'm willing to bet, from the good faith that any game that incorporates memes must have some guys with a healthy sense of humor, that there will be some easter eggs here. For example, putting a developer's name may have unexpected results. Putting in "5TH Cell" could trigger a hidden minigame, play a small video of the members of 5TH Cell doing something silly, or perhaps summon some kind of joke creature made up by the team. Typing in various words and phrases that wouldn't be used for anything could have special results. For example, putting in "dullard" could display a joke message saying "Blood Mode On" as a nod to the infamous Mortal Kombat code (it wouldn't actually do anything, though), putting in "antiquing" could result in a massive explosion as a Futurama reference (Bender's least used word), and even inside jokes and made-up words could be used in a password fashion to hide a handful of little secrets in there. I may be wrong, but as busy as they've been I'm sure we'll find at least one easter egg that does something unexpected, this game could easily hide a number of secrets that would be well hidden in a game like this. ;)
I've just been looking this game up recently. I'm not sure what the wi-fi feature is, exactly. As far as I can seem to find, you can share levels through the level editor. I don't know about online play, but I do know one thing. Online or locally, hopefully this game has multiplayer. I don't think it would be too complicated to implement. Something as simple as pure sandbox with multiple people would be great. It probably wouldn't be single-card, as if that matters, but simply being able to play with a friend, conjuring up whatever we want in the environment simultaneously, would be epic to say the least. Even if it's thrown in last minute and somewhat glitchy or flawed (for example, when a time machine is used, the game could freeze from two environments attempting to coexist for the two players, or the other players are forced to join the time-traveller automatically to cover up the lack of implementation for players to be in separate environments), please, for the love of all that is good, just put it in there, hide it with a code if you have to, just include it whether you can finish it or not! X_X
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I suppose it's possible to overhype yourself on this game and be disappointed. I don't think I've blown things out of proportion enough for me to ever be disappointed myself. You guys, you can all look forward to this game. Don't go out of your way, thinking the game is truly infinite by definition and could never have any limits, and that it'll bring world peace and give you superpowers. If you wind up disappointed in some way, you'll probably still like or love this game. If you can bring yourself to hate it, well, I'm afraid I don't know what to tell you. Does this really look like a game you're going to hate?
very nice post. i appreciate the effort that went into writing it :D
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