I received a bit of a surprised I booted up Tomb Raider: Legend for the first time this week: I found that Lara would walk around, without instigation or any gamepad presses on my behalf. At first I thought it was a problem with the controller, so I unplugged it and plugged it back in again. The problem persisted, so I thought that maybe, just maybe it's not a bug, and I decided to watch and wait to see where she was ambling off to.
Turns out it was nothing special - she just paced over to a cave wall and kept trying to press on forward, oblivious to the obstruction in front of her. Obviously it was just a bug and, barring a second similar incident later on in the game, I've been able to play through the game just fine. However it dawned on me that, if it had turned out to be an idle animation, that if left unattended Lara would just start walking around and investigating the environment without you, well now, that'd be worth noting. It wouldn't have to be anything big - just checking rocks, peering at the local fauna, simple tasks like that would have been a really nice touch.
Too bad it was just a bug.
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#1 hobbie Aug 12, 2006 04:24am
I can think of plenty of sidescrollers where the character has some special animation for a few minutes of 'no play'. It'd be cool to see it done in some current/next gen game.
#2 Glenn Turner Aug 12, 2006 10:22am
There are loads of games, current and prior generation, that have ide animations. I'm talking about idle 'behavior', where the character actually interacts with the environment instead of standing there tapping their foot, or so on.
#3 WholeFnShow Aug 12, 2006 11:59am
I'll personally put the idle animations in Earthworm Jim 2 on the top of my list. The poor little hula was both sad and hilarious.
#4 Soup Aug 15, 2006 09:49pm
idle animations are easy, since they're applicable anyplace the character is standing.
idle behaviors would have to be tailored to at least several different surroundings, if not specifically for each room. It would be interesting to see that as an in-game hint system, though. given enough time waiting in the same room, the chaacter finally figures it out for themself kinda thing.
#5 Fiddytree Aug 15, 2006 11:14pm
You mean like if you leave the controller alone for a long enough period of time, the game beats itself?
Sonic of course comes to mind, but he never did any interacting with the environment itself
#6 Soup Aug 15, 2006 11:26pm
well, figuring something out and actually doing it are two differnet things in my eyes. more of just, he/she just says it outloud