Paul Barnett on Favorite Games

Long ago Rock Paper Shotgun had a long interview with Mythics Creative Director Paul Barnett. They have been doing a series of articles based on that interview since June 25th. Resently they posted a new article where they talk with Barnett about his favorite MMO’s which end up just being his favorite games. You can find the full article here.

The closest thing I can find in a modern gaming era to Elite is GTA3. Which is a sort of mixture of Elite and Pac-man. You look at Pac-man and goes… gobbles dots, avoids ghosts, picks up power-pills, eats ghosts and cherries. You look at GTA and it goes – gobbles money, avoids policemen, picks up mega gun, shoots policemen picks up special things in maze. Take that, with Elite, you get GTA3. And that’s being exceedingly mean to GTA3, which I think is exceptional, so I’ll note that on top of that, GTA3 also does something which the Americans are completely confused about: if you want to realise America, what you need is lads from Britain who have only ever watched Miami Vice, Dukes of Hazard and American Movies, and preferably have never been to America. Because the Americana they will realise is an excitable, strangely out of focus bizarre Americana which is wholly fitting. If you actually give it to Americans to realise, they will actually map the city correctly, the police will arrive at the correct response time, they’ll all be carrying the right guns and the amount of prostitutes per square foot will be correct. While the British will go… it’s like this, innit? There’s a big boat. You don’t wear any socks. You get a big machine-gun. There’s lens-flare when you do a jump with your car.