David Acevedo's Blog

1. Shadow of the Colossus  It has an incredible atmosphere, challenging game play and deep pathos. It's hard to capture a mood with a game and this game captures it perfectly. 2. Silent Hill I played this game in Japan while healing from a broken clavicle. The way it uses sirens and background noise to evoke dread in the player is unmatched. The game set a tone and kept it throughout. It was like diving in into my favorite horror stories. It was the first game that felt truly cinematic and the first that scared the shiatsu out of me. 3. Legend of Zelda Without complication this game rewarded exploration. By eschewing experience points it created a simple mechanic of hearts that was easy to understand and powerful. I still remember burning a tree and finding the Level 8th dungeon, before my neighbor did.  4. Castlevania The challenge of this game was incredible! The music was pulse-accelerating and you had to be precise, ...

This is a response to Denis' blog . Here is the apparent problem with lots of RPG games: the encounters can favor either combat or exploration skills and characters that are good at one tend to be bad at the other so supposedly on type of character is bored during combat encounters and vice versa. Denis proposes that players use two characters. It's a neat idea.  I was thinking about how lots of RPGs degenerate into dice-rolling combat and "I want xp" fests. I liked the idea (also from Denis' blog) to only give xp for treasure that you spend on wasted stuff, like a wine, women and song. ("Brave, brave sir Robbin, sir Robin ran away...") But I remembered an idea I had a while back when I was considering what would make a good rpg game. I though that it was interesting that you had monks in RPG that are anything but monk-like, are really just fighters with less hair and bare fists.  I realized that part of the reason for this is that there was no incentive...