Tag Archives: comedy

Brutal Legend boss Tim Schafer reckons funnier games would me a broader general audience. He may have a point.

“I think it’s a subject matter barrier,” the developer told GI on reasons people are put off gaming.

“Not everybody wants to get into these super violent worlds and yet here I am making a game about broad axes and decapitation.

“But I think humour would get more people into games.”

Schafer said that GTA’s subject matter had helped bring more users into games.

“It’s getting better, it used to be that the games industry had a short list of inspirations. You had Tolkien-esque fantasy, Star Wars, and then new things get added. I think GTA brought a whole new level of inspiration. And I think the broader that gets, the more people will be interested in games,” he added.

More through there.

Ghostbusters writer and general superstar Harold Ramis has told explained to GamesRadar why writing funny games is so difficult. Basically, it’s a stupid amount of work.

“To make a game so funny with so many comic alternatives, that would be like writing three hit movies,” he said.

“The scripts are impossibly long. That would be a considerable investment. And I was thinking if you wrote that much comedy, chances are you would put it in a feature film.”

It’s repetition in comic films that keeps people coming back, said Ramis, but the same process doesn’t necessarily translate to games.

“It seems like the attraction of playing any videogame is that it gives you control over a world that you have no other access to,” he added. “Once you’ve mastered a game, you kind of lose interest.”

Full interview through there. Via GoNintendo and Kotaku.

According to this, Gamespot may change the score on its Lost Odyssey review because load times in the retail version may differ from those in the review code the site was given by Microsoft.

“We will be purchasing retail copies of Lost Odyssey this morning at our local EBGames,” said the game’s reviewer on the site. “I plan on replaying a good portion of the game this weekend and into next week to determine how great the differences are.”

“Possibly,” he said, on the subject of whether or not the review could be changed. “What happens now is based entirely on whether these improvements exist, and how drastic they are. If there are differences, the text of the review will likely be altered, and the editor’s note will be adjusted to reflect that. The score is a different matter, simply due to the rigidness of our .5-based system. I do not know whether or not these differences can turn a ‘very good game’ into a ‘great game’ based on loading times. As soon as we have invetigated the issue and have made an office-wide decision, I’ll let you know.”