Neighbours From Hell Feature

It’s never easy to talk about a game that is in its early stages. As soon as eagle-eyed journalists saw the press release from Jo Wood they viewed this as a game slightly different from the norm. It was only a matter of days before interesting quotes, comparisons to other games, were being made. With its straight to the point title, stylised graphics and innovative ideas, it was a game that needed further investigation. From the first screenshots you could easily assume it was a kind of Wallace & Gromit meets Little Computer People game. Michael Paeck - the main man at JoWooD - was assigned the task of answering questions put to him by Derek dela Fuente.<br><br>We have all seen TV programmes where you see outrageous, some shocking, video footage of incidents between neighbours where someone is doing some dirty deed that offends the other. (It might be embarrassing but you can’t stop viewing!) It starts off as an innocuous event but goes on to become a real war between neighbouring factions. First one neighbour upsets another, which in most cases is done unintentionally and then the other tries to either go one better or tries to catalogue the dirty deeds for all to see. It could be you have the music on too loud, or your kids chucking food over the neighbour’s car - no matter what - the end results is all-out provocation! With all this in mind, creating a game along those lines seems a mightily good idea and Michael clarified some of these thoughts.<br><br><b>"Once the basic idea of annoying a horrible neighbour came up, everyone in the company agreed it was a very accessible concept for a game. Coming up with horrible things to do to your neighbour was quite easy, although turning them into situations that are fun to play wasn't. We were partly inspired by movies such as Amelie and A Fish Called Wanda, but we mainly relied on our demented imaginations."<br><br>"Since the game is set in a fairly normal suburban house, it can be said to be a bit like 'The Sims', but the gameplay and tone are quite different."</b><br><br>The team creating the game consists of three programmers, three graphic artists, a game designer, and the producer. They have a strong background in the RTS genre and have developed The Nations 1 and 2. They have excellent understanding of complex game systems and 2D display engines. <br><br>In 2001 it was decided internally to develop a few smaller games, while at the same time preparing for the transition to real-time 3D. One of these was a highly addictive puzzle game called Pusher; the next one is NFH (Neighbours From Hell).<br><br>The basic overview of Neighbours from Hell is that you are the star of a fantastic new TV show. Cameras will track your every move as you set your fiendish traps as you try to cause mayhem, disarray and distress. The more objectionable you are the more likely you are to upset your neighbours which results in favourable TV ratings and maybe even winning prestigious awards. You must however be aware that your neighbours and alert guard dogs are watching you and if they catch you then the show will be taken off air.<br><br>Jo Wood has managed to create a unique platform for a concept that everyone will understand and find amusing. With such shenanigans you can present off the cuff ideas in a 'real world' but create your own comic strip formula. The question posed - does this slightly comical way of presentation lessen the impact? <b>"The comic look and tone allows us to include wilder gags and generally to make the game funnier. Also, it avoids problems with the censors... The game portrays problems you can find in the real-world, but offers solutions that would probably get you sent to jail..."</b><br><br>NFH is divided into episodes, which are grouped into seasons. You can play any episode you like of the first season - once you've successfully completed half of the episodes, the second season is unlocked, and so on. Additionally, there's a tutorial season where you can learn how the game works.<br><br>The game takes place in the neighbour's house. As you advance through the game, new rooms are opened up with new potential for mayhem. All of the things you can interact with offer some way to take revenge on your neighbour. The use of red herrings was avoided because they confuse and frustrate people.<br><br>Understanding the implications in causing your neighbours distress is easy but in the content of the game and the TV rating was explained. <b>"The viewers rating is a reward for how well you are doing: the funnier the havoc you're causing in your horrible neighbour's life, the more the audience will laugh and the higher your score. The neighbour is a 'dim' sort and will tend to blame bad luck for his misfortunes - unless he catches you in his house, in which case he will become very unpleasant."</b><br><br><b>"Like in any good sitcoms, we decided to focus on a small number of characters and the relationships between them: the horrible dim bully who is the scourge of the neighbourhood, the poor guy living next to him who has decided enough is enough, the neighbour's dog and parrot who are living in terror of their nasty master, plus occasional side characters such as the neighbour's mother (who is even nastier than her Neanderthal son), and the kids who are trying to play outside."</b><br><br>Eager to get to the core of the game, the situations and events that will annoy and antagonise your neighbour brought forth some interesting ideas. In a typical scene from a later level, the neighbour turns off the water mains in order to repair the sink in his bathroom. If you turn on the water mains while he's out, when he returns to the room he'll get sprayed with water. He'll run back to the cellar to turn off the water, where you can have another shocking surprise in store for him...! Adding to this it appears there are many possibilities for gags hidden in an episode, and you can execute them in any order. You don't need to make the neighbour walk into every trap to finish the episode, but you'll get bonus points for setting up the gags so the neighbour has no time to calm down, driving him mad with rage. You can advance through the game even if you don’t find all the gags, but you can then go back later and try to improve your score, which has its own rewards.<br><br>The interaction between the neighbour and Woody, the player character, is very primitive and non-verbal. Woody has to be quiet to avoid being spotted, and the neighbour is too dim to express his feelings, except through violence.<br><br>Linking the game show to the onscreen mischievous acts is done seamlessly and it goes without saying that doing well in an episode means the audience likes it, viewer ratings go up, and a new season is commissioned. <br><br>Surprisingly, the game is in 2D, which therefore gives a more intuitive feel to the controls and cameras. (<b>"We tried to make the interface as easy to use as we could, by basing it on proven interfaces that have been around for a long time, and by sitting down with players and seeing where they had trouble and fixing those areas."</b>)<br><br>As mentioned because the team has experience with 2D display and pre-rendered 3D, they've achieved a very high-quality look which is consistent on a very broad range of hardware - much broader than what is usual in the games industry. Neighbours From Hell plays the same on a computer from 5 years ago as on the latest state-of-the-art machine. This was done purposely to make the game accessible to as large an audience as possible.<br><br>NFH offers nice skills, plenty of challenges and humour. Gameplay, originality, humour appears to be the real focus and not many games can offer all three. Take your hat off to Jo Wood, who summed up this title as being <b>“Like no other game before it, Neighbours From Hell allows you to live out the fantasy of taking revenge on all the dim-witted, evil-minded retards you've ever had the misfortune to live next to."</b>