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Last week, I bought Kameo, a full price XBox 360 game, and Marble Blast Ultra, an XBox Live arcade downloadable game for a fifth the cost.

One of these games has myself and my flatmates addicted, the other I'm working slowly through mostly out of curiousity. I'm sure I don't have to tell you which one is which.

This is not to say that smaller, easier to play games are the way forward, or giant stunning masterpieces are a bad idea, it's just an example. However, I do strongly believe the only thing pushing up development costs is the developers themselves.

Let me go back to Kameo: the game is stunning. Fight scenes involving the main character and a few thousand trolls are incredible. The environments are richly detailed, and all have their own distinct character. However, I mostly find it over complex. There's nothing quite as frustrating as losing the camera behind a beautifully rendered tree while a couple of trolls beat you into the ground!

Developers need to focus on what's important. Make the game pretty, but not so much that it's over complex. Focus on making levels interesting, over attractive. Ensure the difficulty curve is effective, and you're most of the way there - you want to make sure the player is always challeneged, but never frustrated.

Realistically it will be a rare game that actually needs the hidef resolution and can't simply be displayed in a lower resolution

I thought rare games were supposed to be Xbox 360 exclusive.

I do worry though if Revolution will have enough power to handle high end AI and physics simulations.

Given that its rumored CPU specs are similar to those of Xbox 360 (a few PowerPC cores), physics and AI shouldn't be a problem.

Besides, simple stylized physics can be more fun for players. Compare the cylindrical hitboxes of Counter-Strike classic to the more detailed ragdoll hit regions of Counter-Strike: Source to see people clumsily bumping into each other in crowded areas because ragdolls don't slide around one another as easily as cylinders do.

having all the game houses making all the games for your console.

Microsoft seems to realize this, their strategy seems simple; BUY ALL THE GAME HOUSES!

So far this doesn't seem to have worked to well for them with the exception of Bungie, although I personally think Halo stinks. Rareware hasn't released a decent game for the Xbox yet, and Microsoft had to shut down/sell their entire Sports division now that EA and Take-Two have shut them out of Football and Baseball. Most of the games I've enjoyed on the Xbox have been put out by Ubisoft, which is still owned by the Guillemot Family and releases most of their games for all consoles(Prince of Persia, Beyond Good and Evil).

First: MS did not buy Rare. They bought only 49% (IIRC) of Rare.

The weird thing about the MS purchase of Rare: Their first-post buyout game was released for the GBA. In fact, on their release schedule since 2003, they have more games for the GBA than they do X-BOX (4 nintendo games to 3 xbox games).

Given how slowly Rare release titles, MS must be in this for the long haul (it was a $375 million purchase), as it'll take years before Rare even comes close to selling that much product. particularly if they've got a significant portion of their workforce developing Nintendo handheld games...

I'm going to keep saying this until everyone in the world knows. Rare NEVER explicitly stated that there were no push-button cheat codes in GoldenEye. Actually, they released one of them voluntarily - the extra characters in multiplayer code - and that was enough to allow someone to reverse-engineer a whole slew of other ones. These had been used by Rare for debugging purposes and Rare had - perfectly reasonably - assumed that nobody would ever find them, and so not bothered to remove them.

When it became clear that the game-hacking public was smarter than they'd anticipated, Rare wised up. Though PD doubtless originally contained similar codes, they were removed before the game's release because they wanted people to play the game properly.

Rareware themselves said it best on one of their letters pages (which was removed from the site when they moved to Microsoft):

Look. We've told you that there are no push-button codes in PD. If there were, and we wanted to keep them quiet, we wouldn't address the issue at all. We wouldn't lie about it to your faces. Despite what you seem to think, we didn't do that with GoldenEye (the GE push-button codes were only ever intended for Testing purposes and were hacked, not officially released, at a later stage), and we've no intention of doing it now.

And on another occasion:

There. Are. No. Push. But. Ton. Codes. For. Per. Fect. Dark.

This is hardly news to those of us who are paying attention: Rare (point #8 in the article) has been going down the tubes for far longer than one might imagine. Check out their back catalogue: They've made five (count them) games in the last three years, and only Conker's Bad Fur Day was any cop. That was long before the Microsoft sale.

Perfect Dark Zero? Don't make me laugh. PDZ isn't going to happen. There is no evidence that it's even in production - the character models that were floating around a year ago prove zilch. I'd be very surprised to see it this side of 2006 or the next hardware generation, whichever is later. (It never ceases to amaze me, the number of people who bought a GameCube for PDZ despite the fact that it had never even been announced... and the number of those people who then bought an Xbox for precisely the same reason...)

let me fill in that last one for you

XBOX-> Games that were supposed to come out on the N64 but were delayed, delayed, delayed

MS bought Rare in late Sept. for $375 million. I wonder how much of the $348 million reported as losses can be attributed to that acquisition.

Like them or not, MS is in the console business for the long haul whether they turn a profit within the next 3 years or not.

yeah check out rare's press release on their web site for a confirmation of those figures.

yeah check out rare's press release on their web site for a confirmation of those figures.

look for Banjo Kazooie and that squirrel Conker, and perhaps even the fairy on Rare's front page

If they buy Rockstar, THAT would be impressive. I'd consider an X-Box if they did that. Instead, they're buying Rare, who's hot new game sounds like some really, really horrible, drug-induced nightmare belonging to a 5 year old, combined with every other generic Japanimation-type game ever made.

Mortal Kombat II was released on the Super Nintendo a year later, and had full blood and fatalities. Mortal Kombat III followed a year after that and, surprise surprise, had all the gore too.

The original Mortal Kombat was released, blood-free, on the Super Nintendo in 1993. Do you judge everything around the happenings of 1993? The majority of people I know would actually take into account the happenings of the last eight years.

If people were judging Sony on their 1993 game performance, all they'd be remembering is a bunch of really bad SNES movie license games, the SNES's sound chip, and some CD-thingy being made with Nintendo. A lot has changed since then, huh?

"Hello? Nintendo focuses on Family entertainment."
"Well, if you're still under 18, then that's fine, but I am sure the rest of us adults prefer something non-mickey-mouse."

Nintendo stopped their 'mickey-mouse'ing a long while back, and there is stuff like Conker to show for that. True, many of Nintendo's first party games can be passed as 'Family entertainment', but, as +Newander+ pointed out so well, just because a game lacks gore doesn't make it a bad game. Someone truly mature would choose a good 'family' game over a bad violent 'mature' game.

But I doubt you can grasp the idea of Mario being mature, and that is why you are not.

linux-2.4.4-ac10 ? Now an anonymous coward can add code to the kernel ?

AC -10 AWARD is also something you get if you make heavy use of Body Armor in Rare's Goldeneye 007 for N64.

The press slamming it is not so bad a problem as all the developers going over to the Xbox. If they all defected, you can understand Nintendo sticking with what they've got

Nintendo already has a dead product (Nintendo 64) that it's been phasing out lately (notice only two announced N64 games in latest Nintendo Power magazine's Game Watch). But Nintendo has a nearly guaranteed winner in the GAMECUBE because kids are going to want one no matter what, as Nintendo has trademarks on popular franchises such as Super Mario, the series formerly known as Zelda (when was the last time you saw Princess Z being rescued? A Link to the Past?), and especially POcKEt MONey (gotta spend 'em all). Plus, Nintendo has an exclusive contract with Rare, who can squeeze the last bit out of even the hardest hardware. (Had Rare been developing for Saturn, the PSX likely wouldn't have killed it as quickly.)

I think Conker's Bad Fur Day proves they've given up on being sweet and innocent.

But then, Rareware were always really warped dispite Nintendo's previous image.

"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"

Metroid skipped a generation (N64), so, I guess Battletoads may have too...

Goto Rare's website and e-mail them... you never know...

/me waits hoping for DK, DKR, BK, KI, JFG, DI, PD, and BT for the Gamecube (If you're in the know, you'll know what they all stand for.... ;)

Rareware's BlastCorps area.
IGN64 Review.

I think this deserves its own genre, how about the Third Person Demolish or be Nuked genre (TPDN)?

And that music is really a bit too addictive. Well, "Time to get movin'"!