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The Best Of GDC
Gamasutra's Question of the Week has been asked and answered, and from around the game industry there were brought forth opinions on The Highlights of GDC 2005. Overwhelmingly, people saw the "Burning Down the House" and "Spore" presentations as the most interestng, with a few other folks digging other parts of the conference more. From the article: "I think Nintendo's keynote speech was the most interesting moment for me. Coming a day after Microsoft's keynote, it highlighted the clear divergence between these company's platform strategies moving forward. If you're a gamer at heart (and have the heart of a gamer) root for Nintendo, as they seem to be more interested in gameplay innovation than making an uber-media-micropayment device. (HD-gaming be damned!) - Anonymous" The Puzzle Pirates and Game Atoms talks were probably my most amused moments during the conference. After all, Raph's talk had little monsters and the pirates brought rum.
I've been a Nintendo fanboy all of my life, but lately I've branched out to all consoles, but I agree you do have to like how Nintendo seems soley focused on games. Only problem is that innovation doesn't always sell, ala GBA & GCN Connectivity and Virtual Boy, and Nintendo seems to be designing the "Revolution" based on innovation. It's a pretty risky manuever on Nintendo's part and hopefully it'll pay off.
This article just highlights some of the cliches and falsehoods about Nintendo that have become common currency recently, particularly on slashdot.
Fact is, Nintendo haven't been worth rooting for since the SNES generation. However, they're adept at "talking the talk" on innovation and gameplay, which gets them plaudits from the slash-horde. It's often said (usually as a strawman argument by Nintendo fanboys) that Nintendo games are only for kids. This isn't true. Anybody who's worked in a school at any point in the last five years will know that Nintendo games don't even register in the average kid's consciousness. Nintendo makes games for the people who were kids in the 80s. Most of these people still have nostalgic memories, rose-tinted by age, of what gaming used to be like and have, over time, acquired this arrogant view that only they are "real gamers". Read the line in the article about the "heart of a gamer" to see what I mean here. The average Nintendo gamer these days doesn't actually play all that many games... he just keeps the Gamecube and a few of the old franchises around for sentimental reasons.
Nintendo are, in some respects, masters of PR. They spin their biggest limitation (lack of R&D budget, relative to Sony and MS) into their greatest virtue by shamelessly plugging the "gameplay not graphics" line. This would be fine... if their games actually had gameplay which appealed to people beyond the narrow spectrum outlined above. I own Zelda Wind Walker, Mario Sunshine and Mario Kart 64 and believe me, I consider them all a waste of money. Their gameplay was old-hat by 1995, in 2005 it seems ridiculously shallow. Nintendo's performance at GDC was typical form for them - promises of focuses on "innovation" and "gameplay" over the next year and, as usual, large segments of the gaming press and the slash-horde seem to have swallowed it hook, line and sinker.
So, what will we actually see from Nintendo over the next year? We may or may not see a reissuing of one of their old franchises with updated graphics. The new "darker" Zelda looks nice in a visual sense (mind you, so did Wind Walker, once you got used to the whole cell-shaded thing), but if the gameplay isn't basically the same tired, old-hat stuff as we saw in Wind Walker, I'll eat my hat. We'll probably see a new "gimmick" game designed to sell more expensive, one-off controllers, like the recent bongos and the whole "must have multiple GBA (and no, DSes don't count) to do multiplayer" thing. This will no doubt be trumpeted as innovation.
It's not all been bad news on the Gamecube recently... Resident Evil 4 did a pretty good job of re-imagining the whole Survival Horror genre and in that respect, yes, it was genuinely innovative. It was also a third party title, making it something of a rarity on the Cube.
However, before the slash-horde rushes to moderate this troll or flamebait, I'd ask them to stop and consider whether the company they feel so passionately about really is worth their support. Nintendo are, like MS and Sony, a "big bad company". They get away, in the eyes of the slash-horde, with practices that other companies would be instantly damned for. They've not always been nice to competitors and have exploited their monopoly mercilessly in the handheld Department, where until the PSP appeared on the horizon, they had refused more than a bare minimum both technological and gameplay innovations for many years. MS and Sony aren't perfect either, but it seems that their games departments are more in touch with what gamers genuinely want.
If you're a gamer at heart (and have the heart of a gamer) root for Nintendo, as they seem to be more interested in gameplay innovation than making an uber-media-micropayment device.
Yeah, I'll root for Nintendo once they start supporting these "innovative" devices with more games. My DS has been collecting dust for quite a while. Each new game now doesn't bring anything new to the table. The touch screen concept has been driven to the ground already with just, what...12 games out for it? If the Revolution's "innovation" is going to be the same situation, then they can forget it. I love my Gamecube and everything, but the DS has really soured me.
Theres a key difference between the keynotes, sony took the slide show aproach (which is quite useful, but boring) MS talked about the benefits of their new dashboard for _DEVELOPERS_ which is a lot, because the new xbox handles a bit like windows (so is complex but at least you get a lot of work done for you) and the "HD era" (whatever they think that means) they actually dropped some interesting marketting data that DEVELOPERS can use. And gave away their XNA beta (which is not a bad tool) and some HDTVs which is good because they want you to DEVELOP your games for it. (and yes they were trying to bribe us quite a bit.)
Nintendo keynote was emotional and all but as a DEVELOPER I can tell you this, it was completely USELESS 2 hours show, out of of their new games.(?) "look my game has voice recognition" yeah it says so right here in the SDK you sold me "Look you can make music and a dog hear you!" thanks N I wouldnt have figured out how to use a mic for that "Look we can play mario kart wirelessly!" Yeah N is called wireless networking my laptop has it too. "CHECK OUT OUR NEW ZELDA GAME!" gee, thanks I would never find that one at www.gametrailers.com, then we get the "good games come from good gameplay not good graphics" speech, in case you are new to this, we get that speech each generation for the last 15 years if you have a copy of Nintendo Power magazine, you probably will find the speech right there.
"Our new graphics chip is called HORYWOOD! and we have one called BROADWAY too! our new console is going to be VERY GOOD" thats the best piece of technical information Ive ever got! my game is going to be 200% better thanks to that!
Seriously guys the reason why everybody liked N keynote better is because it was meant for E3 not GDC it was an ad show not a developers keynote.
We needed specs on the new system, whats the situation with networking (probably the only valuable piece of info was that they support wi-fi now) and what benefits we get for working with them (they have already stated their console is not going to be pretty compatible so most games are going to be exclusive, what benefit do _I_ as a developer get with that?) also whats the deal with the DS and their new GBA? when is going to be released? how are they going to handle 2 handhelds, etc. etc. they didnt even care to mention it.
Anyway for me the best of the show, was the "amy heckerling" design contest. not only you got to see some of the best game designers at work you actually discovered the obvious route is not always the best, and that fun ideas are always a good aproach, (at least good for a laugh and some impulse buys) that was pretty educational And the engine Mollineux showed off was just _sweet_
Go ahead MOD my day!
More opinions here
As the GDC yellowshirt volunteer who did the data entry for the paper evaluations they hand out for Burning Down the House and the Spore presentation, I can verify that this Best of List is quite likely correct.
For Burning Down the House, numerous people wrote in 6's and circled those, writing in comments that their only complaint was that it didn't go on long enough. A handful of people dinged certain speakers point-wise. But for each person who saw fit to ding Laurel or Zimmerman, many more sang their praises. In talking to people I heard that Laurel had a certain wry humor that was lost on some people who might have taken her too literally, and a handful of people thought Zimmerman interrupted too much. But the mean was 4.67 out of 5 or higher for all speakers. It would have been much higher if our data entry system accepted numbers higher than 5, as significant amounts of people wrote in 6's. The mean overall score for the session was, if I remember right, 4.90 out of 5.
Here's a transcript of Burning Down the House if you want to read for yourself what was said. It can't quite capture the energy of the discussion though.
http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2005/03
As for Will Wright's talk on Spore, well, it was overwhelmingly positive. His score was a mean of 4.98 out of 5 with 212 received feedback forms. Numerous write-ins of 6s and 10s which just get counted as 5 by us yellow-shirts. Overwhelming positive comments also, including many people making liberal use of f* bombs in comments such as "f***ing great!!!11" or "f*** me!!!". ; -) Only negative comments were, of course, that no room is large enough to hold the audience Will attracts and we all want him to talk for hours at a time instead of just one hour.
I'll have to recommend a google search for "Spore screenshots" if you want to know more about that, as EA immediately went into info control mode and even shut down the movie theater re-broadcast immediately after. This was received with groans, grumbling and one person shouting "Challenge Everything!"
But the consensus that these two talks were among the highlight of the GDC is supported numerically. I didn't do the numbers for it, but I'd also suggest that the Experimental Gameplay demonstration was extremely excellent as well.