UDF #3

Much more combat tonight, well-mixed with climbing and jumping around the jungle and later in a fort. The story has slowed down, mostly because there is a lot of action while Drake catches up with his female sidekick. Hopefully things will get more lively when the two are together.

This isn't Tomb Raider. So far, there really aren't any ways to explore an area and puzzle out how to get from point A to point B. There is always only one way forward, and you can find very tiny niches to explore along the way, but that's it. Tomb Raider would at least throw you into a big room that acts as a hub and you explore different areas from there, possibly in an order of your choosing.

New weapons: RPG and an Uzi. Liked the Uzi. RPG go boom, but loooong reloads.

Spectacular scenery.

One thing that's a little weak about the jumping and climbing is that when you're scaling a wall there really is only a direction and a button push to go where you want to go. There isn't any timing, except when you get onto a breaking ledge. There isn't any figuring out which ledge to go to, since there is always only one direction forward and one back.

I'd like for level designers to feel a bit more free to put in some dead ends or means to make the climbing challenging. Here, I think the right thing to do would be to copy MGS2 and have Drake be limited in how long he could hold on by his fingers. That pressure would make the climbing sections a lot more tense, I think. If not that, then something.

If Tomb Raider went for the killing, you should see this game. I got a reward in the game for 30 headshots. Since I'm usually firing like mad, you can imagine that 30 headshots only happens after a hundred guys or more have died. Oh, and I got a 50-kills-without-dying reward, so that gives another measure of how many generic bad guys have died at my hand. I know it's not feasible to record 30 different actors doing bad guy voices, but would it hurt to use some modest modulation on 2 or 3 actors to make those voices sound slightly different every now and then? That way when I hear "I'm going to get you, airplane man!" for the 20th time, it doesn't sound like the previous 19 times...