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"You in a game"

Its every gamers dream. A game starring not Lara Croft, not a short Italian plumber, not a bloke who calls himself Snake, not a blue Hedgehog, but yourself. The gamer. Sadly, unless you do happed to be a blue Hedgehog or Lara Croft, it’s pretty unlikely. Well, at least until I design games for Rare that is :-)

“Wait!” I hear you cry. “Oh Cheese of Wisdom, what about the create a wrestler on No Mercy + Smackdown?” Well, you can make someone that represents you on No Mercy, but unless you look like (or indeed, are) The Rock they are not going to look much like you. And they’re not going to act like you. And they’re not going to sound like you.

But what if a game did make an effort to incorporate the player into it? Perfect Dark tried it to some extent with the ‘Perfect Face’ feature, where you transferred a picture of your face from the Game Boy Camera to the game, and then got to shoot yourself in the face. Sadly, this feature (which reeked of awsomeness) was removed because Americans thought it would turn everyone into psychotic killers. So, it seems that there is no hope of having yourself in a game. But what if the Perfect Face feature was placed into a game like Tomb Raider, enabling you to put your ugly mug onto Lara Croft?

Although it would be funny for a bit, having Ants face on Laras body wouldn’t work. Thus, you should be able to edit the body of Lara, making her male (not needed in this example) or whatever. Just make it look like you. ‘Ah’ I hear you scream from the rooftops – ‘Is that not just like the Create a Wrestler thingy you dismissed just a second ago?’. Yes. Yes it is. So here is another idea – ever been to the Millennium Dome? If so, did you have a go on that thing that took pictures of you, and made a computer model of you? How about downloading that into a game? Then, the character in the game really would look like you. Obviously there would be a few problems – there always is when a game lets you edit stuff. But it would be very cool.

Ok. So still using the example of Tomb Raider, you know how Lara grunts when she gets hit? Wouldn’t it be very cool if it had YOUR own voice grunting? Or like, saying ‘Ow. That really hurts. Please stop it now.’ And when you kill something, you could say ‘Kiss my alien butt!’ like Elvis on PD does. Or something else. Obviously you would need a mike for this, but considering that Hey You Pikachu has already developed the technology for this, it shouldn’t be too hard.

And so, in Tomb Raider, you have you instead of Lara. With your own voice. It would be like starring in your own game.

How cool is that?

Most FPSs allow this to some extent - the whole point of the feature at the Dome was that you could then take your charecter model and import it in to Quake. You can skin characters manually, but the results are often unnexpected and you need to reshape images to fit properly.

Again, it is possible to create your own sound files and replace the standard ones with them, but it often requires finding them from a single .pk3 or suchlike, which can be hundreds of megabytes to decompress. A game which had the option to do this without all the hassle you have to go through at the moment would be a huge hit.

Yeah it would be okay…but why would I want to see my beautiful face in the games I play games? I have enough of it when I look in the mirror.

I wouldn’t mind it in a Tekken game or something though, that would be pretty cool.

Its every gamers dream. A game starring not Lara Croft, not a short Italian plumber, not a bloke who calls himself Snake, not a blue Hedgehog, but yourself. The gamer. Sadly, unless you do happed to be a blue Hedgehog or Lara Croft, it’s pretty unlikely. Well, at least until I design games for Rare that is :-)

“Wait!” I hear you cry. “Oh Cheese of Wisdom, what about the create a wrestler on No Mercy + Smackdown?” Well, you can make someone that represents you on No Mercy, but unless you look like (or indeed, are) The Rock they are not going to look much like you. And they’re not going to act like you. And they’re not going to sound like you.

But what if a game did make an effort to incorporate the player into it? Perfect Dark tried it to some extent with the ‘Perfect Face’ feature, where you transferred a picture of your face from the Game Boy Camera to the game, and then got to shoot yourself in the face. Sadly, this feature (which reeked of awsomeness) was removed because Americans thought it would turn everyone into psychotic killers. So, it seems that there is no hope of having yourself in a game. But what if the Perfect Face feature was placed into a game like Tomb Raider, enabling you to put your ugly mug onto Lara Croft?

Although it would be funny for a bit, having Ants face on Laras body wouldn’t work. Thus, you should be able to edit the body of Lara, making her male (not needed in this example) or whatever. Just make it look like you. ‘Ah’ I hear you scream from the rooftops – ‘Is that not just like the Create a Wrestler thingy you dismissed just a second ago?’. Yes. Yes it is. So here is another idea – ever been to the Millennium Dome? If so, did you have a go on that thing that took pictures of you, and made a computer model of you? How about downloading that into a game? Then, the character in the game really would look like you. Obviously there would be a few problems – there always is when a game lets you edit stuff. But it would be very cool.

Ok. So still using the example of Tomb Raider, you know how Lara grunts when she gets hit? Wouldn’t it be very cool if it had YOUR own voice grunting? Or like, saying ‘Ow. That really hurts. Please stop it now.’ And when you kill something, you could say ‘Kiss my alien butt!’ like Elvis on PD does. Or something else. Obviously you would need a mike for this, but considering that Hey You Pikachu has already developed the technology for this, it shouldn’t be too hard.

And so, in Tomb Raider, you have you instead of Lara. With your own voice. It would be like starring in your own game.

How cool is that?