Lair Director Blames Others

With the media ferociously pouncing on the would-be best seller title Lair for the PS3, the game's director Julian Eggebrecht had some choice words of wisdom to explain. (see: points finger away from Factor 5)

The blame game starts simple, you know, standard Macbeth style ghosts in development.

"That was the start of one catastrophe after the other — deaths in the family at the worst time [and] sudden surgeries for key members, which bounced the technology off-track. And just in general, every single time there was a crucial delivery, something bizarre went wrong — all the way to power outages when writing the master disks."

Ok, so accidents happen, but I refuse to believe that because of these events the game's controls went from gold to garbage. Someone's "intelligent design" set this one up for failure, not the goblins in the closet.

Eggebrecht went further, backing off the ghost angle to blame Sony and their hardware.

"That is exactly the kick of creating a first-year game: exploring the not-yet-finished hardware and growing the technology while the hardware is coming together," Eggebrecht said. "I think both 'Rogue Leader' and 'Lair' gave a good stab at poking into the depths of the systems for such early titles, and from that you have a second-generation growth opportunity that surpasses most developers that jump onto the bandwagon later."

While I will admit that first gen titles for new consoles tend to be shakier as things aren't fully tested, there have been quality games shipped at release with new consoles *cough* Halo *cough* Mario 64. That being said, atleast here Eggebrecht states that this will give them some insight as to what to do better for their title on the platform.

While Lair may not be shaping up to be the must-buy game that will sell PS3's, it's a decent show of what not to do when a new system comes out. The developers saw that the system had SIXAXIS controller support and chose to use it because it was there, not because it made for a better control scheme. Having developed for consoles like the Wii and Nintendo DS I strongly encourage using the system's strengths when they strengthen the game, not when you need a bullet point on the back of the box. With that in mind, they could have used controller movement for something, but possibly not made it a crux of gameplay when they admit that moves like the 180 degree turn can only be performed 8 out of 10 times.

\\drew