The Prime games' engines are pretty rock solid. They are quite expressive (to handle all of first-person, morphball, and later screw attack an the same game locations) with few glitches (good or bad). There are not many bad glitches like loosing the artifact in Elite Research or the Echo targets in Main Research. You'd have to be really good (in an M2K2 way) or really bad at the games to run across them anyway.
To me, the techniques and sequence breaks come in 2 flavors: smarts and abusing programming corner cases. The early Prime tricks almost all involved jumping off of scenery or fancy bomb jumps. Things that become totally obvious once you see them. Then there are tricks like the scan/combat dashes and bomb space jumps (bsjs), which take advantage of unforseen transitions and corner cases in the game engine.
Of course we want Retro to make a better game, but that involves them working to fix these "nagging issues". QA people are now probably trained to try jumping on things (LOL - Crypt laser), and the programmers hardening the code. I can only imagine that fixes in later versions of the same game come from the shame that a room designer or programmer would feel when their "mistake" has "compromised" the game, and not from a decree to fix things from up high.
The next game will be awesome, and our smarts will be there as well as new game physics to abuse. Don't expect something as big and as early as SJ first, however. The "SB blocks" ala Echoes and split worlds ala Hunters will most likely have a localized effect in any big break we get. Hopefully the multiple worlds will feel more like Prime, then the less connected Echoes. In any event, it should be fun (to play as well as try to SB)!
To me, the techniques and sequence breaks come in 2 flavors: smarts and abusing programming corner cases. The early Prime tricks almost all involved jumping off of scenery or fancy bomb jumps. Things that become totally obvious once you see them. Then there are tricks like the scan/combat dashes and bomb space jumps (bsjs), which take advantage of unforseen transitions and corner cases in the game engine.
Of course we want Retro to make a better game, but that involves them working to fix these "nagging issues". QA people are now probably trained to try jumping on things (LOL - Crypt laser), and the programmers hardening the code. I can only imagine that fixes in later versions of the same game come from the shame that a room designer or programmer would feel when their "mistake" has "compromised" the game, and not from a decree to fix things from up high.
The next game will be awesome, and our smarts will be there as well as new game physics to abuse. Don't expect something as big and as early as SJ first, however. The "SB blocks" ala Echoes and split worlds ala Hunters will most likely have a localized effect in any big break we get. Hopefully the multiple worlds will feel more like Prime, then the less connected Echoes. In any event, it should be fun (to play as well as try to SB)!
