Starship Troopers : Kudos to Strangelite

Here: http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthrea....php?t=17491239

For the Lazy ones among us:

Ultra_Extreme wrote:

So often it is that, at some impromptue hour, an epiphony should strike that imbues me with an urge to form a discussion on these boards. Indeed tonight, or should that be this morning, i have been struck with a ponderingment. Now whilst I am fully aware that that is infact a completely made up word, i will use it anyway because i like the way it sounds. If you have become confused thus far after suffering too many hours at the hands of c-grade scriptwriters doling out generic "dialogue B", i shall digress; Ive had a thought and i wish to share it with you all

The end of Call of Duty 2 was subdued, this is not to say it was not a good game, indeed it was, moreover infact i would go so far as to say it was an excellent game. However the ending was subdued. Germans attacking from all sides, tanks rushing in, guns, bombs, planes.... "Subdued?" you ask "Subdued!?!? Whatever did you want?". Well at the time nothing at all, however after having finished the game i happened upon the surprising experience that was Starship Troopers....a small game from a small developer that, in my humble opinion, could indeed form the basis for a rather unexpected advancement in gaming.

So why would i call the ending to call of duty 2 subdued? Well in retrospect after having fought through a few levels on Starship Troopers , it didnt really feel like a war. I mean, the sounds certainly sounded like there was a large scale war going on, and the corpse numbers even were a pretty reasonable reflection of a war. But why was it, i had to ask myself, that in the last defence of (snip spoiler snip) the germans chose to attack 5-10 at a time from individual borders? No wonder they lost really.

Now the bugs, ha! Thats a different story, the bugs know how to fight a war! It is as i stand on the gunnery tower, ready to defend the outpost in the wilds of errrm *thingy* that i see the future of gaming, i see it flowing over the hill in front of me, rendered to a perfection that even surprises my SLi graphics cards for a second, swarming into view are HUNDREDS perhaps a thousand or more bugs. And i stand, for rather a second longer than i should, mouth ajar, in a sort of awe at the scene unfolding. In war there must have been many occasions, the battle of Rawks Drift (the film Zulu..) being a classic example, that few have stood against many and looked upon the battlefield and gone "my god! we cant win!". Which is how i felt playing this mission, utterly overwhelmed, and thats a gaming first.

Lord of the rings: Battle for middle earth promised it and instead delivered a passable RTS with none of the grand scope or scale of the films. And indeed many other games throughout time have threatened us with incredible levels of enemies on screen, indeed in a custom battle in Rome:TW you find the only other time that i know of a developer delivering on this promise. For the most part you get a segmented, burst release type of event, whereby the devs can go "see look in the whole level there are a total of 11million enemies, we just show em to you in groups of five because thats how they like to hang out" When what they really mean is "we couldnt get our engine to render any more enemies at once because we are lazy bums that got screwed by our over zealous marketing department". This fact goes largely ignored by the gamer because outside of the RTS genre it is not really expected, sure its nice when a set peice now and again allows the feel of 10 or so enemies attacking at once, but lets be fair, its not much like real life is it. Its like in the Grand Theft Auto series, for anyone that has ever walked down a busy area of a large city, from london through paris to new york, theres not a lot really goin on in liberty city is there, my local town in west Wales is in fact substantially busier. But wouldnt it be nice.....well would it? thats what im going to be asking.

Strangelite, the developers of Starship Troopers, have in my opinion done a great job of bringing the movie to the land of gaming. Sure the dialogue is hammy...and thats just the stuff from the film, added to this is the even hammier amatuer voice-overs, and clips from the film rather inexpertly woven in do make for a slightly bumpy experience on the story-side of things. Who was it that said "Dialogue doth not maketh the game"? Well me, i expect, but then when compared to, i quote:

"Jill? Is that you jill?"
"Barry? Help me please the door won't open"
"Step away from the door Jill, im gonna kick this door down"

It's actually not so bad, and the above sadly oscar-overlooked quote comes from another game that forwarded it's own genre to new and dizzying heights, Resident Evil.

The game itself is what truly counts, the aesthetics only add to the content, its the bit you play that matters and this is precisely where Starship Troopers gets it right. While Infinity ward were busy sampling 50 ways to say "look out its an MG32" and "Krouts! To the north east!" and Monolith were figuring out where to put their DX9 rendered scary little girl and her fire. Strangelite were doing what developers are supposed to do, and developing a genre that has long since stagnated. Now before all you people with the game start sending "WTF's" hurtling along the cables, i'll say it now, it's not an amazing game, it's okay for sure and as ive stated at some length, technically excellent, but not amazing in itself lest i sound like im polishing a turd albeit an accomplished turd that has been lovingly crafted in a manor that might sugest it has only had one, careful, lady owner. But still the gameplay does something new, and without a doubt that is something everyone must long for in the FPS genre. So it all comes down to numbers in the end, and size quite definately matters here. Putting modern hardware into scale over beauty, size over substance if you will, is not something most developers will tackle, preffering to keep things small, clever and pretty. Now starship troopers is quite pretty, certainly keeping up with current technologies, although the troopers models do leave a little to be desired facially, they are functional. The landscapes are very nice, although the walls look a touch 'wet' and 'plasticky' at times, but hell maybe they are . The arachnid models however are superb, limbs can be blown off, the eponymous nerve-stem takedown is in, they even have the detailed mouths fiull of eyes straight outta the film, all in all pretty sumptuous, even given their tendency to get stuck in walls and scenery. But its the numbers of them that appear on screen that makes the game. Fighting off a horde, however good they look with all their DX9 majiggery, is not fighting off a horde when there are only 7 of them, its not even a "hor"... ahem.

In my opinion other games could learn a lot from what these guys have done with this game. Its pretty, its fun, its gory and most importantly it does what it set out to do, and competently at that. If more games addressed their core values over popular content then we would have better games on the shelves today. Whether Starship Troopers ever made any tangible sacrifices in order to acheive what it has will probably never be known. Indeed the largely forgettable game will most likely fade into the mists, appearing on some bargain label before its time. But from where i stand i see a change, a change i hope will spread to touch the entire industry. Gaming IS all about numbers, usually ones preceeded by a monetary insignia, but i hope that somewhere a developer sets that aside and brings an experience to us the like of which we have never seen on screen, we have the technology, we just need them to use it....

R u kidding me ?

Is that all you have as a response.

If you look at it objectively, the game does do what Strangelite set out to do, it ain't the best FPS out there, mainly due to not having the same amount of backing that many other games have from the multi-national conglomorates that are EA and the like. Interestingly, if you look at Criteron, they are making "Black", they have exactly 3 times as many people working on that game than what Strangelite had. In fact their art team is bigger than Strangelite itself. On top of all this, they also have other teams working on other projects at the same time, ie. Burnout.

Not that any of this is an excuse, but maybe you could then understand that getting a game made by limited staff on a tight timescale to get a game to a standard that is at the very least is being compared to the likes of Quake4, Doom 3, F.E.A.R and the rest is an amazing feat. But you probably couldn't care less about that.

If you want a fun experience, albeit sometimes taxing, (then again the original prince of persia was ruthless, not like the games today that hold your hand all the way through), then this is the game for you. Lots of bugs with lots of killing in every direction, if you get killed, tough... you best up your game.

As a side note, it was quite refreshing to see a post on a forum that wasn't full of "WTF's" and "IMHO uR 5fps SuXoRs, coz uz a idiot!"

IMHO uR 5fps SuXoRs, coz uz a idiot!

I hit FPS overload somewhere during the BF2 release frenzy.

If game companies really, really want to do something different, than make a game that doesnt involve centering the screen on a bad guy and pressing the mouse button. The sad fact of the matter is that most gamers seem to more interested in how photo realistic the latest releases graphics are and how many FPS their uber-leet computer can drive the game at than at how entertaining the title is.

As long as gamers push the industry in that direction, then the devs will follow and we will continue to get barely entertaining, but graphically stunning, titles.

Anybody remember the days when you could get stuck, for days even, trying to figure out how to solve a puzzle? When was the last time you ran into something that clever in a game?

Originally posted by Bucky@Nov 3 2005, 08:33 PM
IMHO uR 5fps SuXoRs, coz uz a idiot!

I hit FPS overload somewhere during the BF2 release frenzy.

If game companies really, really want to do something different, than make a game that doesnt involve centering the screen on a bad guy and pressing the mouse button. The sad fact of the matter is that most gamers seem to more interested in how photo realistic the latest releases graphics are and how many FPS their uber-leet computer can drive the game at than at how entertaining the title is.

As long as gamers push the industry in that direction, then the devs will follow and we will continue to get barely entertaining, but graphically stunning, titles.

Anybody remember the days when you could get stuck, for days even, trying to figure out how to solve a puzzle? When was the last time you ran into something that clever in a game?

I agree, like in Zelda: Ocarina of time, (i know this doesnt relate to computers in anyway) the Water Temple took me like 5 days to beat..

yeah i liked that back in the day when i got stuck on a game but i thought i was getting smarter not the game companies getting easier i think i'll have a cry now

the problem is that if you get stuck, some ppl tend to go tell their friends "damn this game is too hard, I don't know wheter I'm going to finish it" so the friends will go "oh no, a difficult game, not for me" so the devs go like "oh noooooz, if we make it too hard and mentally challenging, the youth will give up or just not buy the game. so what do we do with the money we used for the "puzzle making team"? oh yeah, let's invest it in graphics"

and on the other hand, if they make a beautifull game, WITH hard puzzles that get you stuck for several days, you can't enjoy the eyecandy.

don't get me wrong, I enjoy difficult puzzles more than graphs, especially since my pc can't run high graphs

just a question, is Zelda ocarina of time any good?? I was thinking of buying it second hand for my gf, she always wanted a zelda game

Yeah, I think the last time that "got stuck for days" scenario happened to me, it was when I first played Grim Fandango, half way through the 2nd year in Rubacava... what a game!

Back onto Starship Troopers, there is a later level called Bait that alot of people are getting stuck on, saying it's too hard. Well sure it is, it's one of the last levels, it's supposed to be hard, one guy on the forums threw his toys out of the pram and uninstalled because of this... (he had it set on hard too, which in this game actually means hard).

Anybody remember the days when you could get stuck, for days even, trying to figure out how to solve a puzzle? When was the last time you ran into something that clever in a game?

Yeah i know what ya mean buck, but you know nowadays you can get the answer for a puzzle in a sec using Google or something.
Back then it was much harder to get info on a puzzle.

That reminds me, back in the day, I would have thought about the puzzles instead of counting sheep, hell, I'd even wake up believing I'd dreamt the solution. Now is that because the games were harder, or because I was young and everything seemed amazing?