How to steal designs - a beginners guide

How to steal designs - a beginners guide

I recently needed to steal the look and feel from somebody else’s design, wait, I meant, I admired the look and feel and wondered what font they were using.

To find out what font they are using I found a tool on the website: http://www.identifont.com/

To identify the font they start by asking you various questions about the font, they also display images to help you understand the questions better.

After asking the questions they recommend fonts that are similar to the one you are looking at.

It is a quick and easy way to find that font you are looking for.

A tale of two New York cities

A tale of two New York cities

I imagine that the people of New York live their lives in absolute fear. They spend their lives running from cover to cover because at any given moment there is some monster mercilessly hunting them down. 

Alone in the Dark and Prototype are both set in the city of New York. In both games you wake up after being experimented on. In both games the experiment goes wrong and the citizens of New York get butchered. 

In part one of this article, I will review Alone in the Dark. Next week in part two, I will take a look at Prototype.

Alone in the Dark

I obtained a copy of Alone in the Dark and immediately regretted it. To be fair… I think the game was really designed for the X-Box / PS3 controller and not the PC keyboard.
To control your character is just impossible. Literally every key on the keyboard is assigned some action. Think I am kidding? Even the print screen button does something. Some of the actions are useless, for example x blinks your eyes (what!?).  Trying to hit all the keys you look like Jerry Lee Lewis playing piano. (Previous sentence might contain hyperbole)

The first level you play has you jumping from rock to rock like a Super Mario Brother and with the keyboard; it is just not possible to control your character. I kept falling over stuff and off stuff and soon just gave up.

Maybe the game gets better later on and maybe if I tried for 125 more hours to learn how to control my fall-down-drunk character the game could have been fun, but I simply don’t have the patience.

 

 

Alone in the dark still sucks.

Remember when I reviewed Alone in the Dark (AITD) and called it a piece of shit? The game really sucks but I gave it some benefit of the doubt, I played it on a PC but the game seemed to be designed specifically for a console.

Well, I played it on an Xbox and the game is still a piece of shit.

A hallmark of horror / survival games is the fact that the controls are hard to use. The developers purposely make you feel clumsy, you feel out of control, if that monster attacks now you won’t be able to escape, you will be doomed. This mechanic heightens your sense of fear, but the AITD developers confused fear with annoyance and mind numbing boredom. The controls for this game are so clunky doing the smallest of tasks is a chore.

Then for some reason the developers felt that it was necessary to spontaneously change the camera angle for no reason while you are walking. Walking along minding your own business and BAM suddenly you are staring straight up the dude’s backside. Or at his legs, or his forehead, etc, etc. it really sucks. This game sucks. Don’t bother spending your valuable resources on it. Don’t bother wasting your valuable bandwidth pirating it. Avoid!