Guinness World Records has released the results of its online poll asking gamers to decide who the all-time greatest game characters are. More than 13,000 people participated in the vote on Guinness’s official website and it looks like nostalgia stole the show, with only two post-2000 characters making the top 10. Halo’s Master Chief, who originally debuted in 2001, took the number three spot, while Kratos from God of War, first seen in 2005, placed ninth.
Eight of the chosen characters are humans or human-like creatures, one is a hedgehog, and one is a yellow circle with a mouth. Nintendo was the only publisher to have created two of the characters on the list, with Link placing second, just below his Italian plumber colleague, who, of course, took first. Its interesting to think weather or not that they considered the different era’s of the character’s included, you wouldn’t enter sonic cira 2005 now would you…..
1. Mario (Donkey Kong, Nintendo, 1981)
2. Link (The Legend of Zelda, Nintendo, 1986)
3. Master Chief (Halo: Combat Evolved, Microsoft, 2001)
4. Solid Snake (Metal Gear, Konami, 1987)
5. Cloud Strife (Final Fantasy VII, Square, 1997)
6. Pac-Man (Pac-Man, Namco, 1980)
7. Lara Croft (Tomb Raider, Eidos 1996)
8. Gordon Freeman (Half-Life, Valve, 1998)
9. Kratos (God of War, Sony, 2005)
10. Sonic (Sonic the Hedgehog, Sega, 1990)
3D Paradise Paintball is the latest development in gaming via SNS. It has been presented by the Chinese company Cmune who develop games and applications for social networks. 3D Paradise Paintball has been listed in the top 5 Apple Widgets and the company have been awarded ‘Start-up of the day’ by Microsoft.
The game itself is a first person shoot ‘em up. It surprised me in many ways as being much more advanced than I had expected. The 3D rendering, map sizes and designs rival those of early millenium top-end development releases of the same genre, which, in my opinion, is already a triumph for a free online based and hosted game.
I was also impressed by the loading time, I was expecting to have to download a series of random plug-ins and watch a progress bar for the next 30 minutes, but even this ‘hunk of junk’ desktop of mine was in-game within 3 minutes.
All this mechanical and technical effort is let down slightly be some actual game play issues. The rather strange avatars leave something to be desired and I found it difficult to differentiate between friendlies and enemies at a glance.
The absolute, most important aspect of an FPS, for me, is the hitbox activity, which unfortunately seemed almost non existent. I mean, every time I actually managed to hit another player, I would decrease their health by the same value where ever the shot landed (apart from maybe the head, its quite difficult to tell where you hit). On another occasion I wasted several shots trying to ‘pwn’ this ‘n00b’ that was running away from me, despite my cross-hair landing perfectly in the guy’s back for at least 10 shots, I failed every attempt. Years of gaming experience would suggest to try shooting slightly ahead of the character to account for ‘bullet time’ but this too was without success. Truth is, I just couldn’t work out (bearing in mind I only had the chance to play for a short while) where, how and what affects the hit-boxes. But hey, its not like its trying to be Call of Duty or CS:S is it.
Overall, 3D Paradise Paintball is years ahead of it’s ‘Flash’ game competition and will only improve on their next project. I have every confidence that the Cmune team will be big news in years to come. Good job guys.
