The guys over at Evil Avatar have inter­viewed Ken Levine, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor at Irra­tional Games, and asked him some really inter­est­ing ques­tions. Yeah, they even talked about Thief, one of the best games that ever was. How­ever, the first part isn’t all that much about BioShock but you’ll get some inter­est­ing back­ground infor­ma­tion on Thief and Shock 2. Part 2 is more about the new game, so head there if it’s of inter­est to you.

Jonathan: Is clearly defined choices not dumb­ing down? That the out­come is of the cardboard-cut-out vari­ety, and that they’re predictable?

Ken: No. It’s mak­ing sure the player doesn’t fall out of the bot­tom of the game.

Hasn’t there even been a game you really wanted to get into but didn’t have the time and energy to under­stand it? I’ve had that expe­ri­ence with some hard core strat­egy games – Europa Uni­ver­salis, Domin­ions 2, etc. All I really wanted was a buddy to sit behind me and help me learn how to play it and when I got stuck to point me in the right direction.

While BioShock is cer­tainly noth­ing like those 2 games, the metaphor holds. Yes BioShock inno­vates in ways you won’t find in a tra­di­tional lin­ear shooter, but we’ve devel­oped a sys­tem called dynamic train­ing that sits back and watches the player. And if the player gets lost, or clearly is not get­ting the game sys­tems (for exam­ple, dif­fer­ent ammo types vs. dif­fer­ent foes), the sys­tem will speak up and lend the player a hand, point him or her in the right direction.

But it’s also how you design your mis­sions, how you moti­vate the player.

I absolutely love the direc­tion these peo­ple are tak­ing with the game. Even if it again is a first per­son shooter, there are some points that are very sat­is­fy­ing. Player-driven gam­ing, user-choice, non-linear nar­ra­tive. These are just some mech­a­nisms to immerse the player into the game. More infor­ma­tion on that topic, such as inter­ac­tive sto­ry­telling or emo­tion­ally engag­ing game audio, is avail­able on the net. I’m so excited!

That is, in fact, the absolute truth if you’re straight. Now, there are these Dan­ish peo­ple design­ing men’s under­wear. They’re employ­ing that fact and they’re doing it very well. Check out their web­site here. Wanna watch the ad? Enjoy it.

I abso­fuck­a­lutely hate his movies. They’re all crap, com­plete and utter bull­shit. Up to date, every sin­gle one of his video game to film adap­ta­tions really sucks. Remem­ber House of the Dead? It’s been so bad, I could hardly bear watch­ing it. What about Alone in the Dark? I really liked to play this game but Boll’s movie adap­ta­tion sim­ply sucks. Then there’s Blood­Rayne. Hell, the best part is where Kris­tanna Loken let’s you see her breasts for some time. All these movies fea­ture wooden act­ing, poor pro­duc­tion, inco­her­ent scripts, stu­pid dia­logues and crap loads of gam­ing gore. All you ever get to see is one stereo­type after the other.

Now, there’s yet another movie set to come to the­aters next year: In the Name of the King: A Dun­geon Siege Tale. I already said that I like this game, didn’t I? No? Well, I do. I truly – and very jus­ti­fi­able so – fear that he’ll screw this one up as well. Accord­ing to this inter­view over at DameDaily I may be wrong. John con­cludes – after hav­ing seen a rough cut of the film – that this movie is by far the best film Boll has ever done. Addi­tion­ally, the the­atri­cal ver­sion has received pos­i­tive reviews from both jour­nal­ists and Hol­ly­wood execs. I dunno yet so I’ve gotta wait. Tell you what, I still can’t stand him.

He’s going to fuck with Far­Cry, one of the best games I’ve ever played. Damn, there are still game devel­op­ers sell­ing film rights to Boll. Is it bet­ter to have a bad film than no film at all? I seri­ously doubt it. Hope­fully, Ubisoft inter­venes often enough to stop Boll from killing this fran­chise off. There’ll be sequels to Blood­Rayne and Alone in the Dark too. Devel­op­ers have to stop sell­ing film rights to him before it’s too late …