tecznotes

WMMNA, via Eyebeam:

Julian Oliver is investigating the second-person shooter format, what it might look and play like. In this take on the 2nd Person Perspective, you control yourself through the eyes of the bot, but you do not control the bot. Your eyes have effectively been switched. Naturally this makes action difficult when you aren't within the bot's field of view; thus both you and the bot (or other player) will need to work together, to destroy each other.

This reminds me of my senior year at UC Berkeley, perfecting my game of multiplayer deathmatch GoldenEye. This was one of the few games I had seen at that time which allowed simultaneous split-screen competitive play, and the secret to getting really good was to stop watching your own screen, and watch the other three. It really did start to seem like a second-person shooter after a while, when tense standoffs were resolved by carefully watching what the other players could see, and reacting accordingly.

The other split-screen game we liked was Mario Kart, where viewing the other screens didn't help quite so much.