Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Retractible Swords

I've always liked strange fictional weapons. Recently, I've been noticing myself really liking retractible swords and wishing I could get one somewhere. There are collapsible ceremonial swords, but those aren't actually useable. This recent interest of mine is probably due to spending large amounts of Dishonored. There are crossbow pistols on the market, which I do like, but Corvo's coolest gadget by far is his sword. It extends out if the handle like a lightsaber, only it's made of metal. It even has a slight curve to it, which makes it more difficult to make in real life, but much cooler looking, plus it has more slicing power that way. There are other examples of cool retractible swords, but besides the one briefly wielded by Sulu in the newest Star Trek movie ( the next one looks pretty great by the way), I can't think of any more right now. It's a fairly simple concept, but as radical as Star Wars was when it came out, now there are so many franchises with characters who wield retracting energy blades that I find myself more impressed by a metal one. I also feel like a retractible metal sword is the best of both worlds since it's extremely easy to hide and carry around, but it has the comfortable weight of a metal blade. As far as I know, hard energy blades have little to no weight and therefore require very different skills from traditional swordsmanship. Not to mention the fact that the weight of the blade can put some extra force behind your strikes. And it would also be a bad idea to twirl an energy blade around like cool people in movies since if your hand slips, it would be much easier to cut yourself in half than with a metal blade. Admittedly, there are some situations where a lightsaber would be more useful, but since I don't plan on getting into any of those situations, I would prefer to have a battle ready retractible metal blade than a lightsaber.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

First Person Daredevil Game

Big news, everyone! They've just announced an upcoming first person action game staring Daredevil, the Man Without Fear! Check out these leaked screenshots at the bottom! Just kidding. But a Daredevil game would be pretty nice. Obviously it would have to be mostly third person since seeing through Matt Murdoch's eyes wouldn't be very useful. But I think a sort of first person focus mode would be cool. The screen would have to be all black except for the outlines of things and people detected by his hearing, his radar sense, and any other sense that can be justified. It could be used to either detect objects and places of interest, or hidden enemies. Or it could be used to temporarily slow down time during combat. If the latter, there would have to be a time limit to it. Maybe when a combo meter is filled, focus mode could activate. Or it could just be used as an alternate mode of perceiving the environment and be switched on an off at will. Making this a stealth based game would be a bad idea, but it could borrow a bit from Splinter Cell and have the light sources in the environment be destructible so then Daredevil has the advantage since nothing is different for him when it's dark. When it's completely dark, his senses mode would be activated automatically, but combat would still work normally. And combat skills are what should be used to defeat bosses. NO QUICK TIME EVENTS. I hate boss battles that consist only of dodging attacks until the boss is stunned, then completing an otherwise meaningless sequence of buttons. And no henchmen or environment boss battles where the villain just happens to have some piece of technology or pet monster or army of thugs. As for who the bosses should be, I think it should definitely have Kingpin and Bullseye, and I think Jester would make a cool addition. There's a comicbook issue where Daredevil goes through his maze of doom, then fights him mano a mano, so that could be a cool video game. And that's pretty much all the ideas I have for a Daredevil game. Until my next post, farewell!





A Hawkeye FPS

There have been some good Marvel games, and also a fair amount of bad ones. There are a few though that will probably never be made, but I feel like they would be cool. Like a first person shooter staring Hawkeye. It could benefit from the popularity of the Avengers movie, and be the only fps to my knowledge where your only weapon is a bow, which would make it new and interesting instead of a generic COD clone with a new label on it. I haven't played the newest Crysis yet, but from what I've seen and heard, the bow mechanic works pretty well in that, so a Hawkeye game could have similar bow gameplay. It would have to be a little less overpowered, but I think Clint's different arrow types could fit well into an upgrade system, along with perk trees involving accuracy, attack damage, and things like that. There should be a lot of arrow types, but not too many ammo pickups besides basic broadhead or maybe blunt tip arrows. I don't know about you, but I would totally play this game if it was made (unless it was made by EA, since I can easily see them charging money for additional arrow types... Ok that was a joke, but I still don't feel like EA would be a good fit). As far as traversal goes, one f Barton's most common arrows is the grappling hook arrow, so that could become an important gameplay element. Maybe the player could start the game with unlimited grapple and nonlethal blunt tip arrows and acquire more as the story progresses. I feel like grappling around the map just wouldn't be that fun if you always had to worry about running out of grapples. Rocksteady did a fantastic job with Batman's grappling hook, so something like that would be cool where there are grappleable points marked on the HUD and firing the grapple has its own button so you never have to equip it. Also the camera should move to third person while zipping up to a grapple point. Maybe a little bit of stealth gameplay could be thrown into the action, but definitely not too much. Maybe sneaking to get in position to attack or something like that, but when it comes to taking enemies out, I think this game should be an action packed shooter more than anything else. And that's all I have to say about this genius idea for something I want.