1UP FM Plays Through Psychonauts
Since I haven’t posted any news about the games I am working on (Brutal Legend is awesome, btw, and my personal game is finally heading towards some simple playtests), how about a game I worked on years ago?
1UP FM’s Podcast crew has spent the last portion of several shows talking about their recent experiences playing through Psychonauts. It’s way, way better than a review, and a different experience than a focus test. I don’t know if it’ll be interesting to people who didn’t work on Psychonauts, but I found the podcasters surprisingly insightful about what they liked. It can actually be fairly difficult to talk intelligently and accurately about what does and doesn’t work for you as you play through a game: so many inputs combine to create your experience that it can be difficult to isolate any real causes. The 1UP crew, though, does a solid job. I actually took notes.
In case you’re interested– and I don’t actually know if it’s interesting to more than 40 or so people– you can get to all the relevant podcasts from their main 1UP FM page. The relevant bits are:
7/28 - 1:09:28
8/04 - 1:16:15
8/11 - 1:22:39
8/18 - 1:15:15
(Thanks to several DFers for providing the dates and timestamps. I merely copy-paste!)
September 16th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
I’ve been listening to these, and I have to say I’m quite tempted to try psychonauts out again. Especially to play Milkman Conspiracy and Lungfishopolis… so good.
September 16th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
Yeah, I’m quite tempted to play through Psychonauts as well. Not actually “again”, in my case.
September 17th, 2008 at 1:16 am
It is so weird to me that you never really played through your own game, but at the same time I can understand that in working on it you probably had had enough of it by the time it was released. I guess its a weird experience for me because I’ve never felt like the target market of something I’ve worked on, but I’ve always assumed if I was making a game I’d think it was teh bestest game evar and play it all the time.
September 22nd, 2008 at 7:06 pm
It’s more that it’s hard to step back from seeing everything as bugs and shortcomings. “Oh, crap, how did that make it into the final game? Ooh… that’s kind of jerky. We should fix that. That would have had a lot more impact with a different camera shot/shorter delay/different effect/better explanation.”
I think it’s actually been long enough that I can step back from those, and see the awesome parts of the game for what they are. I’ll have to spring the 10 bucks on XBLA and give it a shot.