You know, a certain someone at school put me up to this but even before then, I still had second doubts about the post. I made a post about how I really dislike Plushy Knight and stuff. Just recently, I took the post down--I didn't feel good about it. It wasn't meant to say the game sucked in terms of quality but how I personally didn't like it. Well, I didn't mean to upset people so I apologize if I came off as too harsh. I was tired and didn't put enough thought into it at the moment.
So Plushy Knight is one of these FIEA games. Plushy serves as the father-figure for Gemma the girl as he fights ghosts, giant spiders, and stuff. It's not that I hate the game but it serves as the complete antithesis/foil to the games I like. So we got this emotional adventure with a coming-of-age motif versus exciting, "rock-and-roll" racing games. It just doesn't bode well for me. It has nothing to do with my opinion of teddy bears, swords, or the people who pitched/developed the game.
Anyway, if you like the game, whatever, no big deal to me. No one likes it when the game they love working on comes under scrutiny like that. There's a ton of games I dislike a lot more than Plushy Knight so don't take what I said so don't take it seriously.
...if it means anything, I really like Teddy Grahams:
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But now things get more serious because now some (I don't know the percentage) of students at FIEA have read this blog. So that's great. For the first year & a half of this blog, it was me in my own little world. You had me in real life and me on the Internet. You gotta keep your worlds apart! Now worlds collide and everything I say on the Internet has serious repercussions in the real world.
This stuff ain't new. Yes, it's true that many people go all-out in these caustic rants like Maddox, Angry Video Game Nerd, Vote for the Worst, radio talk show hosts, etc. but that's because that's their entire life. On the other hand, my occupation is video game design which is completely different because it's supposed to encompass "everybody." I can't go around rambling about how everything sucks--Electronic Arts, Burnout, World of Warcraft, etc. cause it will kill me some day. I have to play politician and shove it for now? Where's the fun in that? And not just in personal relationships--if you're going to work in some hierarchal company like EA or Sega, you can't rock the boat that much. Get what I'm saying?
"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt" - Abraham Lincoln. Or Mark Twain. Or Samuel Johnson...no one knows for sure.
Better do a better job and concealing the blog (from the hardass business types, at least). If anything, I'll quit with the FIEA stuff since it detracts from the Sega racers and it is volatile cause I obviously have a new audience here to consider.
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I will talk about FIEA one more time. So the vertical slices were last week, no? The surviving games are Battle Fortress Tortoise (my game), Plushy Knight (the art is fantastic, the idea is original, and the presentation was great), and Penned (educational game set in the Edgar Allen Poe world). Two games were cut--Apocalypse Valley (Facebook game) and 1st Edition (kid with super powers fights villains). It was widely considered that BFT and Plushy were shoe-ins to survive and Apocalypse Valley was dead in the water so it was down to Penned vs. 1st Edition--who will survive...one, both, or neither?
I was disappointed that Penned got picked over 1st Edition because 1st Edition was my very first choice out of the games to work on. This 1st Edition game was pitched as being colorful, cool, and being some badass superhero with customizable powers. However, in my honest opinion, it devolved to a generic beat-em-up with a rooftop setting--something that has been done to death in superhero stories. Penned seemed like cannon fodder since the beginning but they really hauled ass in the last two weeks, upped the lighting, and made it look more professional. So congrats to Penned, they gave a good presentation that day.
Now personally, it's also a bit disappointing that two of the three games (Plushy Knight, Penned) are third-person, sword-slashing adventure games. Make that three if Battle Fortress Tortoise adds a bayonet to the end of the crossbow. So I was hoping there was a bit more variety to the mix but that's just me. I'm not one of these "OMG ZELDA/FINAL FANTASY" guys so swords aren't my thing.
Hey, I'm just calling it like I see it. I have no personal vendetta against these games since it would be petty of me, plus those guys worked their asses off and deserved to make it.
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It's also worth mentioning that at the vertical slice presentations, the panel was made up of FIEA instructors and Electronic Arts employees. During the BFT presentation, one of the lines went down like this:
PRESENTER: We intend to release this game for XBLA and Steam.
EA TOOLBAG: How about Origin?
I was about to jump over the table and give this guy a proverbial beatdown but I didn't want to jeopardize the team's chances. Remember, keep your mouth shut.
But when you think about it, these capstone games are funny...if you were to go over to EA and pitch to them a game about fighting hyenas on the back of a giant tortoise or a plushy bear fighting ghosts with a sword, you'd get your ass thrown out on the street. It's all Madden & Dead Space over there, baby. But whatever, since we're in college, we might as well have fun having some say over which games we make when there's nothing at stake here.
Like I said, I'm done with FIEA stuff, onto Sega where the good stuff is. Thanks Tom Carbone for rocking the boat.
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