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A Gamer's Manifesto
Krimszon writes "The top 20 things you always knew were wrong about games, but were afraid to talk about, since you thought that was just the way is was."
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Ah: jumping puzzles.
The most annoying part of FPS games, which require you to take a break from gleefully blowing the crap out of your enemies to make meticulously-timed jumps across platforms, like you've suddenly turned into Mario or something.
Personally, my biggest pet peeve is that the AI in strategy games hasn't advanced significantly in the past 10 or so years. More annoyingly, playing "harder" settings on these games doesn't change anything about the AI, it just lets the computer "cheat" to produce things quicker than you do.
Is the article claiming to speak for all gamers ?....the voice of gaming ?....oh dear oh dear oh dear, now I understand why the site is called pointlesswasteoftime.com
Oh yeah I didn't understand the mention of Perfect Dark Zero, I thought it was previewed on that MTV show and turned out to have Quake 2 level graphics.
We get so overjoyed every time an enemy actually shoots from cover in a game that we forgive the fact that real, advanced A.I. is as much an unfulfilled promise as the flying car. Where are the FPS bad guys who can adapt their strategy on the fly? Enemies who themselves have six different guns and switch up according to what the situation calls for? Bad guys who work in teams, who strategize, who create diversions to distract you? Where's the enemy Solid Snake who sneaks up on you with the silence of a ninja's church fart?
While I generally agree with the author's complain, I can recommend him a game with quite decent enemy AI: Operation Flashpoint. However, this is also a good example why too good enemy AI can be bad for gameplay. In Flashpoint, you can really be killed by Russian sniper or sneaking soldier just behind your back - but it's as exciting as getting blue screen of death when playing. You just die - and that's it. Personally, I found it surprisingly boring and quite happily returned to totally unrealistic, AI-foolish "Max Payne 2".
I read this a few days ago, but I gotta agree with a lot of what this guy is saying. Some of his points can be debated, like save spots, but most of them are just dead on, like bad AI.
I was thinking previously that in the next gen sony and MS were just going to make more of the same games, and that hopefully Nintendo would give us a real revolution in which there are new gaming experiences. However, after reading this I remember there IS still room for shittons of innovation in the current gaming paradigm of a screen, speakers and a gamepad. Nintendo is sort of taking an easy way out by innovating in other areas than these fundamental, obvious and real problems. If the other guys who are making plain old video games with the same old interface can address many of these issues you can be ready for some games that will sell by the millions.
Maybe this is how there will be a PC gaming comes back. If the next gen consoles dont' fix these things, perhaps some newer PC games will buck the trend and we'll have us a revival.
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The simple fact is that gaming companies have dropped the "let's be innovative and unique" idea long long ago. What was the most innovative and unique game to come out last year? Katamari Damacy? Donkey Konga? And how many copies did these games sell? The bulk of the gaming world unfortunately resides in the teenager category. And what do these kids want? Well look at how they dress or what they're into. These kids want something that they think will make them look cool, IE: the most overhyped product to come out. Take GTA: San Andreas for instance, that game to me was a big fudge up compared to VC. First they promised us so many things, then didn't deliver. Some of the things they did give us were lacking some of the depth and options they said they'd give us. Very few game developers want to take a risk due to the high cost of development. And most studios won't let them even take that risk even if they have a cash cow. If the game does bad the company is basically done for given the fact it probaly cost them at least 5mill to develope it. So what do we REALLY need? Either lower development costs, or more expensive games. Why? Because the average gamers again doesn't care about what has great gameplay or something unique to it, they want what the game with the best graphics, the most hype, and the one they're friends are likely to get. Yeah I probably screwed that up somewhere.
I eagerly bought one of the first generation PS2s when they came out, in the hope that ps2 game developers would continue the playstation tradition of releasing good war strategy games. Games like Command and Concur, or Allied General, or maybe a decent civilization type strategy game. But no. So now the damned thing sits idle because I got sick of playing car crash and kill games (grand theft auto), FPS games (red faction et all), I never liked the final fantasy games, etc etc etc. I like pretty graphics. But this 37yo wants a game that takes more planning than pressing a button to take out the enemy or jump at the right time. I'm bored with these damn games and haven't bought a new one in over a year. That can't be good business. How 'bout some better games folks? --M
While I agree with the author's frustrations, I think his complaints are a bit vague and airy.
Do you really think the game programmers of the world are sitting there, reading this article, and smacking their foreheads? "Oh! They want BETTER artificial intelligence! Damn it, why didn't they say that before!? And they want ORIGINAL games. Thankfully, I have all these original ideas for games that nobody has ever though of before!"
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
France is the number one maker of computer games outside Japan and the US.
Care to quote your figures?
The EU constitution put Europe in a much stronger position to leverage the world gaming market and push superior products into the channels.
Again, care to back it up?
Being in the UK, it irks me that people can be so selfish... the French are basically pissed at Chirac so they have to go punish Europe, and the gaming world, at large.
Although anger at the French government probably played a part, the voters were also pissed that their taxes were going to fund programs in the poorer Eastern European nations (added to the EU without their consent BTW), at the same time these nations were stealing their jobs. With unemployment so high in France, this is not an appealing situation. And the Netherlands is next, along with the UK, in voting NO for similar reasons.
You walk into a room full of traps and puzzles to disarm them... you are well on your way to getting through the room.. when suddenly.. BAM! You have just stepped on a tile that locks the way out. What do you do now? Leave the way you came in... and PRESTO! all the traps are reset and everything is back to how it was before you entered earlier.... that always gives me a chuckle or two...
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
For crying out loud, why do they have to tap their feet or nod hypnotically while the game is paused.
It's annoying as hell. So annoying that I'd rather not play than have that crap going on while momentarily diverted to some actual paying work
Obviously if this guy thinks AI is bad.. he has never played Counter-Strike with a group of 6 bots on hard... they use different guns, and distractions, and autohead shots... well.. 2 out of 3 aint bad.
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
More than half of your potential customer base are penisless. They have money. They like doing fun things.
"How in the name of Islamic Fonzie did we ever let games get away with "Loading..." screens? The Gamecube doesn't have those, not on the games made by Nintendo. Hell, the 8-bit NES didn't have load screens 20 years ago."
Bwahahaha... that guy gotta be kidding on that one
seriously. One of the best games I have ever played is Lumines, and it was the cheapest game for my PSP.
...
... I know I am bloody registered!
Anyway, the article is so right in every point, and it just shows my double why I don't play much games anymore, and why I haven't bought a PC in more than 5 years
FSPYQIS
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
Can anyone please give me a list of the games and mods used for making these screenshots?
Thanks.
Maybe it goes back to what you grew up with, but the videogame "Type" that I always loved the most was "Adventure Games". I was a major Sierra and Lucasarts junkie as a kid ... I lived for each release of Kings Quest, Monkey Island, Quest for Glory, Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle, etc ... then then doom came out (yes I know wold3d was first, but doom was the *BIG* hit) and Adventure games stopped getting made, and videogames got dumbed down forever. Instead of intellecutal challenge and witty writing, we got button mashig, searching for ammo, and looking for what switch opened that door. Grim Fandango (1998) was the last *GREAT* Adventure game. To put it in the words of a friend of mine, "I actually feel a sense of loss that the game is over, like someone has died and won't be a part of my life anymore." Has anybody ever felt that way about a FPS?
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Almost every game does this. In Lord of the Rings: Return of the King there's actually a "run out of a crumbling building" level and where stones rain down on your head and block your path. So the biggest difficulty in the level is that you can't jump over a knee-high stone because THERE IS NO FUCKING JUMPING IN THE GAME.
This one really hits home, because it's exactly the reason that I didn't buy Guild Wars. Yeah, it might be a really fun game otherwise, but it's like your character is on rails. Hey, there's a cliff. I think I'll run off the edge... hmmm, nope there's an invisible wall preventing me from moving. In a game that's supposedly a cross between FPS and MMORPG, this is just super lame.
For all of it's fault, at least in WoW I could explore terrain, climb mountains, and roam aimlessly if I wanted to.
Hey, I think I just saw boobies in there! A must-read!
www.weberseite.at
I consider myself a good game critic. This article was right on about just about everything ... except:
... ... free pr0n.
As a rule, a console is a better game machine than a cheap PC because all it does is play games.
A console is a DUMB PC COMPUTER! All it does is play games - of one variety. I can play console games from multiple consoles on my PC.
And it's upgradeable.
AND
*DrugCheese rants*
The Civ games are a perfect example of a failed AI, and many RTS games are similarly crippled. When you played on a higher difficulty in CIV (all of them) the AI player didn't get any better, he just got a bigger and bigger attack and defense bonus, and got ten extra turns before you were allowed to start playing. It resulted in situations where my fusion-tank unit would attack their bow-and-arrow barbarian unit, and LOSE!!! The same thing happens in RTS games, where the AI gets a resource bonus, and extra time to play before the player gets to start. LAME!!! I'm not even a very good programmer, but I can write a better AI than Sid Meier?
He's only complaining about his gaming preferences. I don't think the FA applies in full to every game-player.
1. The fact that the next generation of consoles won't have CPUs that do out of order execution has nothing to do with AI. It has everything to do with the fact that nobody knows a good way to make AI that "thinks" beyond following a bunch of rules. We know how to make better graphics, though, so we do that instead. Figure out a better way to do AI, and we'll do it.
2. Katamari Damacy. Rez. The whole "party game" genre, which didn't really exist 5 years ago. There are games out there that bring something new to gameplay, but you have to look for them. Oh, and if you want more games with innovative gameplay, buy them instead of the ones that look pretty but are just a rehash of the same old thing.
3. It's like a nuclear arms race. Whoever disarms first is in a bad position. See item 2 for how to fix this.
7. Less to do with copy protection than high seek times and low bandwidth with current optical disk technology. That plus increasing quality of content to satisfy the graphical arms race, which compounds the problem.
8. Sure. Just don't complain when the game costs more to cover the week long voice recording sessions.
9-11. Good points. But how are we supposed to tell the gamer anything about their status without breaking the immersion?
12-20. Yup.
It's just impossible for a small company to create a small, nice, innovative game for a console. A new great idea along the lines of Tetris would never make it, no matter how addictive or playable the game was. All the new games are gigantic with minimized risks and huge budgets, and the price will be set accordingly. (The Sega Sports NHL/NBA/NFL 2K5 games being a notable exception to the rule.)
Game budgets have risen to the same ballpark as movie budgets, but, for console games, there is no alternative analoguous to independent films.
I have these new games that are pretty to look at and everything, but why do I miss a bunch of old, simple games from the C64 and Amiga days?
This is so typical of online gaming review sites these days. I blame MTV for the whole smash. People these days have so little attention span that extreme hyperbole is used just to ensure that people will read for more than 5 seconds.
I only found one item in there that was valid. The rest was over the top free porn! attention grabbers.
Oh look, but I can do hyperbole too. The designers of that game took time to make sure that the emotes for the female characters are very evocative. And - as an added bonus, body parts jiggle when subjected to sudden movements.
Playing with pixel dolls has reached new heights! Who the heck needs AI with jiggling?
UT AI impressed me. The bots fire in the direction youre running, not where you are. And they actually hide and make mistakes like people do too. I wished the aimbots of counterstrike 1.5 had that kind of intelligence, rather than vibrating all around and having a really good aim
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Finally, sense has prevailed and someone has wrote down all their pet peeves and, guess what, they are pretty much what every gamer has been saying since the dawn of time.
The author must be a mind-reader because I've always had the same concerns in mind. Now, let's just hope that someone "up there" with a brain listens to him and Half-Life 3 breaks none of these sacred rules.
This comes from # 16 - Don't use the online capability as an excuse to release broken games
The first time we hear the word "patch" in relation to a PS3 or XBox 360 game, we're taking the console back to the store. Filled with our shit.
"Where's the enemy Solid Snake who sneaks up on you with the silence of a ninja's church fart?"
/. i have real life around me 24/7 and that's for free. if i invest precious time and money for playing a game, i certainly don't want more of the same.
this is obviously just another example of the ironic fact that most gamers would make very bad games if they were to design one.
it's simply amazing how many of them have no idea of what makes a good game.
they always cry for more, more AI, more realism, more micromanagement etc.
but all those things have nothing to do with a good game. they might make a good simulation, but games are supposed to be fun, a good simulation would be as frustrating as real life. excluding
[i have an opinion and i am not afraid to use it]
I really hate it when people squawk about AI in games! AI is only fun up to a point, and I have a very strong belief that any game with a strong AI should be designed to last only as long as that AI is going to be "fun." Therefore, you're automatically limiting the replay value of your game by including AI. In order to counter that, you'd have include some other features (that have probably never been seen before).
I personally play games to do one of three things: kill some time, challenge a friend (read: human opponent), or develop myself mentally or physically (chess/ other strategy games). AI is not the end all be all for me. Others may view it differently, but AI is not going to make a FPS game "more fun" for me unless that game has my emminent boredom in view as a design feature.
Some genres may benefit from AI more than others, but in the end AI is only 1 of many features of gaming, and focusing on it without a much broader scope in sight is not going to make significant advances in game design. Sure it would be nice to have smart enemies, but it's only going to be as good as it is implemented, which takes us back to having a good design in the first place.
A developer can't magically make "bad design" elements go away. At some point a designer has to do something that he knows will hurt his game. Either because of a techinical limitation, or by the direction of a project lead bad things end up in games. A clever designer will make the player accept their failing, almost as if it were part of the game. But a bad developer makes no effort to disguise, or soften-up their bad design features. So yeah... I don't thnk gamers should be asking developers to do away with bad design elements altogether, as they are inevitable, but rather to disguise them better. design your problems into your games. This is great game design. What most gamers are asking for is pretty much impossible.
Wherever did he get this idea? It is completely unrelated. "Unpredictability" only harms in-order processing at the scale of single assembly instructions (nanoseconds). A good bot should hardly do something unpredictable more often than once every other second.
And for that matter, more advanced AI algorithms, such as ANN or SVMs, are usually massively parallelizable and very easy to predict. The Cell would be ideal for such applications.
I was going to write a long point-by-point discussion (and partial refutation) of the points listed in this article thing. It would of course take forever, no one would read it, and the problems would still be there at the end of it.
:(
Most of the things in the article (having shorter load times, better AI, no invisible borders, etc) are things decent game developers strive to do on every title. However, many of these problems are hardware-bound (you can only stream data from dvd so quickly regardless of how you optimize your code), knowledge-bound (AI isn't exactly a solved problem is it!), or practicality-bound (yeah, "come up with a new genre" is easy to say, you do it, find funding, get it published, etc.)
Another few quick points -
"bullshit" about graphics is indeed bullshit, but it *sells games* and people put up with it for some reason. Trade description laws might well apply, if they do, use 'em!
Save points are a fairly nice way of saving progress in a completely linear world, like for instance Halo. Less so in free-roamers like Resident Evil, but thats just my opinion. I can see why developers use them, and I've worked on games which have them in, and its better than the alternative. They're not there to save space!
Sports game commentary will suck for quite some time, game DVDs aren't 9Gb (usually, anyway), and commentary is difficulty not because of how much speech you record...
"Superimposing shit" on the screen is going to happen until you can come up with a way of conveying all information without text (or sound, because deaf people play games too y'know). Even cunningly hiding it like in The Movies isn't getting rid of it.
And do you have some kind of magical map that shows you floor layouts of places you've never been before? No? Didn't think so. How do you find your way around? Exactly.
Hmm. This turned into a huge post.
Game dev and music blog
> it's evident that he doesn't know what he's
> talking about.
Something is a challenge for the developers, therefore he doesn't know what he's talking about? He didn't say "adding good AI is easy, get on it"; he said that good AI was a seriously lacking element in modern games. And he's correct.
I think he's pretty much right on on every point, and the fact that developers would have a lot of work cut out for them has nothing to do with whether he "knows what he's talking about".
No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!
How about someone out there makes a good hockey game for the console (or any other sport other than football, for that matter)? Well, not that I care much anymore because I've been taken over by PC FPSs, so now I hate consoles...
But, back when I played on Gamecube/X-Box I had always wished there was a hockey game out there with really good gameplay that actually looked somewhat realistic, where the players in it looked like they knew how to skate and where you couldn't make a 180 turn in a split second like you were some super skater.
I think as far as sports games go (team sports at least, this doesn't include racing or whatever), nothing really lives up to the football games out there on consoles. I guess it's just really hard to make games like basketball and hockey work as video games.
The author asks for a game where you're on a desert island, and surviving for food, building shelter, and the likes.
Well, here you go, buddy.
Survival Kids (gamespot.com).
One of the greater games that just slipped under the radar (like so many of them often do).
DECAF!
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
Well, this was just one long troll article. True, in recent times, the gaming industry has turned "Hollywood." That is, they are putting out franchise games, movie-based games, and other crap because they do not want to risk spending development money on a flop. Better AI would probably just cost too much more to program, so they use what they already have. I think alot of these accusations are true for PC games in the last few years, but the consoles have been full of innovative games (see Nintendo GameCube). Needless to say games like GTA were quite innovative at the start.....but after about 5 installments, it does get somewhat old.
Its so true.
If you want a game that's truly a challenge, it will have to be against human opponents.
Things like Counter-Strike (without cheats), fighting games (Tekken, DoA, etc), or occasionally strategy games (C&C, Empire Earth, Civ).
Everything else is too easy. The only difference between easy and hard on some games is the amount of enemies. Granted, yes, that does make it harder, it doesn't make it any more exciting. There's only so much enemy-slaying you can do before it loses its excitement.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
That manifesto is surely filled with angst. Although I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't be with the state of game consoles. I liked the point about the dehumanization of women.
Half of the gamers are now over age 18, and almost a quarter are over age 50. So only about a quarter of gamers are between 18-50 years old? Come on! Don't make up statistics out of your ass and expect me to take them seriously.
--- "End Of Line" - MCP
Basically, I think the rule is: a gamer should NOT be aware of the cruel hand of God fucking with him.
If you ever say, "Damn you, (programmer)!" then there is something wrong. (well, unless Will Wright is peeing on you, but that's another story) There should never be moments so arbitrary or evil that you're snapped out of the game universe to curse the designer. A door which you JUST walked through should not suddenly be locked, for no reason at all, just to prevent you from going back to that save point you passed two rooms before. (I'm looking at you, Metroid Prime 2 - and your older brother DIDN'T DO THIS!)
Or if you're near the endgame... You've got all the keys and magic spells... And all you have to do is march into the Temple and kill the evil wizard... this is NOT the time to make you go on a scavenger hunt all over the fucking map for a ludicrously high number of pieces of an arbitrary key which has no purpose except to draw out the last act! *cough*WindWaker*cough*
(if I pick on Nintendo, it's because if any game design company should know better, it's them)
It's really simple. Just ask yourself - if this were a MOVIE, would I believe in this event? (Paul Anderson and Uwe Boll movies excepted) Would I believe that the characters need to spend three months item-gathering? Would I believe it's necessary for the heroes to take a break from the plot to crossbreed giant chickens? Could I conceive of a world in which a character is unable to climb over a ten-inch high barrier?
If the answer is "no" then there is no excuse for having it in the game.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
Numbers: 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, some of 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, and 18 are all well answered by the Splinter Cell series, especially SC3 (the squad tactics used against the player in SC3 are scary. I remember one mission where two enemy combatants alternatively laid down suppressing fire while the third came up and flanked me). It seems like this guy has been doing too much lame gaming on the PS2 and older PC games.
"GIVE US BETTER AI!" Yeah, like it's that easy.
Most of the graphics we have today, were at one time in this same category "of yeah that's easy". If you were to say in the days of Commander Keen, "I want a 3D game where you can run around multi-story levels hunting various types of bad guys and have realistic lightining effects and I want to be able to play with my friends who live 1000 miles from me" you could have said the same thing. The point is that adding better AI can be evolutionary and it doesn't have to be true "AI"... the enemy characters don't actually need to have self realization and contemplate whether what they're doing is good or bad... they just need to have more complex alogrythms that allow them to cooperate, or take advantage of the terrain around them. It shouldn't be that hard to program a simple alorythm that says, when under fire and there is a door near by, take cover or call for backup. Start with simple behaviors like this, and continue to build the AI engines and over time you'll have truly sophisticated AI that will kick the crap out of you every single time.
The article makes the insinuation that 'PS3's Cell CPU uses "in-order" processing' making real time AI impossible, however the system specs for the PS3 released by sony indicate that they have 7, yes SEVEN parallel processors running on this guy. What is he talking about?
We don' need to steenken' teraflop, multi-core gizmo for that, you maggots, we've had it for years -- NETHACK!!!
Nethack is the One True Game!
Nethack will not divorce you!
Nethack will make you 'l337!#@
Nethack!
I'm really curious about that. Didn't the first CD-based games have Space Invaders to play while they loaded or something? (Hell, I kinda wish Warcraft III did, and I play that off my hard drive.)
I would like to know who hold the patents on 'spherical camera controls' (I'd also like to learn what the hell that actually means) and decent force feedback.
'Cause I'd never heard of this stuff before, and I'm kind curious.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Why isn't a there a spy game where we actually get to be a real spy rather than a hallway-roving kill machine? You know, where we actually have to talk to contacts and extract information and tap phones and piece together clues, a game full of exotic locales and deception and backstabbing and subplots? A game where a gun is used as often as a real spy would use it (that is, almost never)?
I take it that he didn't play Deus Ex (the original). I think it is the best game of all time. It is rumored that you could win the game without shooting a bullet.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
If you play Quake 3 and want a better AI I suggest taking a look at Spiterbot. It eats away a lot of CPU, but the programming of that bot is just amazing. I would say this is definently one of the top AI programming I ever wintessed.
http://www.progamer.ru/download/view.php?id=28
because who wants an enemy that actually fights back, right?
I have to take issue with the quick save argument. Some games are ruined by the ability to quick save as it removes all challenge from the game as you can just reload to the point a few seconds before you died. It removes any fear of death
I'm more in favor of well placed save points.
Preferably auto save points like Halo has.
> 1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.
they did in the privateer remake. some enemy ships shoot just as well as the player does, use the full capabilities of their ships, and fly in this really annoying sort of tight corkscrew that ruins autoleading.
of course, these are wing commander players, so they're masochists who enjoy reflying a mission 20+ times. (kurasawa 2, anyone?)
>
The Sony Playstation 3 is going to cost $465.00.
In the desolate economic climate of post-apocalyptic 2006, I'm thinking that's going to be a lot of money. Now, it's true that at E3 Sony was boasting the Playstation 3 could crank out 1.8 TFLOPS, or 1.8 trillion FLOPS. If that many FLOPS were piled together they would fill the Grand Canyon, assuming each FLOP were the size of a muskrat. So what do gamers want from all that money and FLOP? Just ask them.
20 things gamers want from the seventh generation of game consoles
1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.
Look at the little guy. The one on the left. The one who's just a head.
I mean, let's face it: strategy is all that guy's got going for him. He has no limbs and he's already on fire.
And yet, did anyone stop being impressed by Doom III long enough to notice he and the other bad guys were flailing at us with the same straight-line Ulysses S. Grant calvary charge that failed them twelve years ago in Doom 1? Even Far Cry had bad guys that went into spinning seizures when they got confused.
We get so overjoyed every time an enemy actually shoots from cover in a game that we forgive the fact that real, advanced A.I. is as much an unfulfilled promise as the flying car. Where are the FPS bad guys who can adapt their strategy on the fly? Enemies who themselves have six different guns and switch up according to what the situation calls for? Bad guys who work in teams, who strategize, who create diversions to distract you? Where's the enemy Solid Snake who sneaks up on you with the silence of a ninja's church fart?
"Do NOT duck inside those doors, men! Honorable warriors need no cover!"
Chances of that happening...
Almost zero. One, there's more and more focus on multiplayer for this sort of game. This takes some of the pressure off programmers because in multiplayer, other humans supply their own A.I. Even the ones who are complete morons.
Two, as developers have lamented, the guts of the new consoles are geared to make the gaming equivalent of dumb blondes. It has to do with the fact that both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily.
That means the next generation of games will likely play just like this generation. Only shiny.
Article continues after this ad...
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...
Why isn't a there a spy game where we actually get to be a real spy rather than a hallway-roving kill machine? You know, where we actually have to talk to contacts and extract information and tap phones and piece together clues, a game full of exotic locales and deception and backstabbing and subplots? A game where a gun is used as often as a real spy would use it (that is, almost never)?
Where's the game where we're a castaway on a deserted island and the object of the game is to find food and clean water and build a shelter, a game where we can play for one month or six months, because whether or not we get rescued is randomized? Where every time we restart we get a different island with different wildlife and vegetation and water sources?
Where's the game where we play a salty Southern lawyer who has to piece together evidence to exonerate a black man falsely ac
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
No, but I'm using adblock, which kills a number of external .js scripts as well.
I have a friend, who in playing the UT2k4 campaign, was in a 1 on 1 deathmatch with a bot. He stayed one or two ahead of the bot the entire match, up until he was one kill away. The bot then owned his soul, up until the point where he was just one ahead of my friend.
:)
The bot then hid for the entire rest of the round, and waited for the time to expire.
It ran away from him, and waited out the clock, causing it to expire.
They also say that UT2k7, they're completly revamping the AI, to be much, much, much harder. That's perfectly okay with me, I could use a good challenge
> 1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.
they did in the privateer remake. some enemy ships shoot just as well as the player does, use the full capabilities of their ships, and fly in this really annoying sort of tight corkscrew that ruins autoleading.
of course, these are wing commander players, so they're masochists who enjoy reflying a mission 20+ times. (kurasawa 2, anyone?)
>6. All of the new consoles will have hard drives. Use them.
(in short - save points bad. quicksave good.)
this i disagree with. quicksave leads to people playing the game like this: take two steps forward, save, see enemy, restore, take one step forward, ambush enemy, take 2% damage in ensuing fight, restore, take five steps back and launch rockets at enemy's general position.
i watched a friend of mine play through half-life like this - he said it was boring, too tedious, and never challenging. gee, i wonder why.
> points 9-11: immersion, immersion, immersion.
not being able to jump an obstacle - bad. invisible walls - bad. but they're both conventions to aid in two things. a) so you have some fucking clue where to go and b) so the game designers don't have to map every nook and cranny and can concentrate on the parts of the level you're actually supposed to play. as far as heads up displays and such overlays, again, the amount of immersion they break is directly compensated for by the gameplay benefits, as long as they're done well. a giant floating hand telling you where to go? bad. car radar in the 1930s (as in mafia)? good, because it compensates for not having mirrors or a realistic field of view. iff in crosshairs, hell, crosshairs themselves in FPSes (or even disabling the trigger when your gun is aimed at a friendly)
- good, compensating for the expertise and eyesight your character is supposed to have.
> 19. NO MORE JUMPING PUZZLES IN FPS GAMES
agreed. if i wanted jumping puzzles, i'd play mario. or i'd play a third person game that lets me see what the fuck i'm DOING - ie oni, jedi outcast/academy, prince of persia:sands of time...
for more, video game design cliches and video game design flaws [although that has more to do with the classic ones, like being killed by falling off the bottom of the screen to a place you just came from.]
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
This entire manifesto is nothing more then self-serving bitching and moaning.
"...we need more innovation in games...."
I call BS. Goto any library and you can classify ANY book into one of two 'genres'.
Fiction & Non-Fiction
Everything else is a sub-classification or sub-genre.
We don't need NEW ideas for games, we just need a better evolved game.
My wife has a handfull of games that she loves. The Sims, RollerCoaster Tycoon, Creatures, Lemmings, Zoo Tycoon.
None of those were groundbraking at the time, they are simply evolved from an existing game style.
Repeat after me: Just because it's old doesn't mean its bad.
Games do not need to be shiny or flashy to be fun, some excellent old games just need a tune-up to be awesome again. (MOO2, Space Taxi, DOTT, Civ2 (great job on FreeCiv guys), Tribes (if it could only be patched to use OpenGL. Legends always crashes on me).
Here is an idea: look at the games that were made for the C64, and let those evolve! It was a very large "game-platform" and because of limited resources focused on gameplay.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
However, I do play a lit of simulators. Mainly flight simulators, but also more "down to earth" simulators like Operation Flashpoint. These games need to have great AI, because they would be completely unplayable if not. They also usually have a physics model unparallelled in any other type of game. Take a look at IL2 Sturmovik for a good example.
Imagine that... There already exists games without artificial barriers, with great AI, with real physics, no indestructible doors and realistic movement.
I guess the problem is that as soon as you make such a game, it suddenly becomes a "simulator" and therefore not interesting anymore for most game-playing consumers. That's why unrealistic crap like Ace Combat sell way better than the realistic counterparts.
No, he does not know what he's talking about. AI is not something you just polish up like "we want darker storyline."
True AI is an open problem in academics. Open means unsolved, by the way. It's like asking for anti-gravity elevators!
"AI" as 99.99% of laymen seem to call it is merely an elaborate hack. I could directly script a line of actions and with a relatively small number of branch points most people will think "wow! that's a smart AI." When it's not a smart anything, it's just a bunch of decision trees I wrote by hand.
Core AI hasn't gotten anywhere since it all started decades ago. They don't even know what they're really looking for they keep chipping off new, unrelated fields of research like linguistics.
Where's the game where we're a castaway on a deserted island and the object of the game is to find food and clean water and build a shelter
:)
This game looks like it could fit that description.
Where's the game where we play a salty Southern lawyer
Here's another.
Where's the game where we get to play as Dr. House and diagnose mysterious illnesses while crushing the patient's spirit with cruel insults.
That would be fun, but there's a surgeon game coming out for the DS too.
I find it interresting that both his examples are games that are coming out in the near future. But I do get his point : these kind of different games are very few and very far between.
It has to do with the fact that both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily.
I'm sorry, I completely fail to follow why this is a limiting factor in the games artificial intelligence. Could somebody please explain for me?
From TFA...
"both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily."
That is more than a simplification. The in-order processing eliminates the transistors used for out-of-order execution, and puts the burden on the compiler writer to avoid dependencies/cache misses.
Some of the extra transistors are used instead on the other cores. Overall, this means way more processing power and should mean better AI... if the programmers can code good AI in the first place.
It's so funny because it's true! Had me laughing so much I just got Coke all over my desk.
K Man
Uplink a fantastic small game by introversion and ported to the mac by ambriosia (whom I adore) - yes, it's not a PRETTY graphics based game, and it can be a bit cheesy at times, but VERY immersive, and puts you in a fundamentally different role than a shot-em-up or make-my-army-win kind of game. Darwinia isn't half bad either.
OK, I am not a gamer and I hadn't seen Clones until last week on TV, but I am interested in graphics and adventure/SF/fantasy/whatever-the-heck-Star-Wars-i s-supposed-to-be. I also channel-flipped into Clones about halfway through, where in a great piece of Lucas dialog, Padme orders Anakin to "follow my lead" and they go into the battle droid factory.
Something about that part of the movie seemed so cheesy for something as big-budget and hyped as Star Wars, and I couldn't put my finger on it. Padme and Anakin go down this long corridor when suddenly all of those buzzing winged monkey creatures come out of the walls, and then Anakin defends himself and Padme by hacking them up with his light saber. I guess Padme leads by crawling through a hatch to fall into the actual droid factory with Anakin following that lead into the same mess, where they have escaped the buzzing winged monkeys but Anakin not only light saber all of the droids but also dodge these stamping presses of the droid assembly line while Padme rides around in a foundry ladle.
If it weren't for all of us being fans of the Star Wars franchise, when you think of it, this kind of hero and damsel in peril cliche gets much, much better treatment by the Indiana Jones movies. But there was something I just didn't get about the Clones scene until I read the Gamer's Manifesto post. The hero triggered the alarm and had to fight off hundreds of BWMs (buzzing winged monkeys), for no good reason to the plot or the character or the story apart from when you walk down some long corridor with nothing in it, hundreds of BWMs will appear from seemingly nowhere -- it is just the formula. Also, after escaping the BWMs, you will have to fight droids and have to engage in what I guess is called a jumping puzzle -- avoiding the stamping presses, and I guess, also jumping across moving platforms now that I think about that scene in Clones.
Not only is single-handed combat against hundreds of BWMs followed by a jumping puzzle a gaming cliche, it has crossed over to become a movie cliche, and I guess it is just as lame in the movies as it is in games.
Good points ... really, some 30+ games are on my shelf for simple mistakes like these ... probably will never touch them again ....
... and what really pisses me off, are the ones that are only missing the final boss ...
... .... (SW 3, doom 3, others have it on xbox)
....
....
... running around, complete one mission, "destroy/burn/shoot some stuff" ... very few games allow you that ....
:(
I have a shelf for "finished" games
Not mentioned, is the good tendency of being able to set difficulty during a game/campaign
while does not sound fair for some games, it is really annoying to restart a whole game because you just cannot beat the one whatever monster on the 12th map
Super hard games: some hate, I really like the "post apocalyptic" view of terminator (the new game driving/shooting) however that was the most annoying "no save/reply it 100 times" annoyance I encountered in the last 3 years
playstation especially japanese import games have a tendency to be super hard
I agree, sometimes you only want to have 30 minutes of fun
"Dinner is ready" OKOK "gotta find a save point"
reply: yeye see you in an hour
Two, as developers have lamented, the guts of the new consoles are geared to make the gaming equivalent of dumb blondes. It has to do with the fact that both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily. That means the next generation of games will likely play just like this generation. Only shiny. In the way of factual correction, in-order fetching relates to how a processor chooses the next instruction. In-order vs (you guessed it) out-of-order fetching generally relates to how processors deal with dependancy issues in pipelines. Out-of-order is considered to be more technically sophisticated in that it attempts to mitigate stalls (periods where no meaningful instructions are being run) caused by cache misses, memory loads loads, or pipeline length differences between instructions. Processor fetching style would have no effect on the AI quality of a game. It does NOT introduce any randomness or modify the end result of AI code . I'm not sure what the author's implication is here, but from my POV, fetching isn't the problem, its AI routines in general. We generally take for granted the ability for high-level abstraction of concepts and information. Add to this the inherently scripted nature of game AI, and it becomes intractable to see a real, coordinated assault from bots. In parting, carefully consider how hard it is to coordinate activities with other humans. If it were such a simple concept, we would have no need to train our Army in room-to-room and in-city combat, and traffic accidents would be a thing of the past. Furthermore, consider how to arbitrate disagreements bewtween various humans or AI bots. If you can write code that can handle all of this dynamically and are crippled by in-order fetching, please let me know so I can steal your code and make millions. =)
Blog: http://richardrandomrants.blogspot.com/
Gamer's Desiderata
It's a good thing the gaming industry doesn't listen to players, because we'd all quit playing within a week.
This guy does have some good points, especially re: obnoxious savepoints, misleading advertising and jumping puzzles, but many times he's asking for things that would destroy the fun of games.
For example, having instant-save anywhere sounds fun until you have it, at which point you realize there's no challenge to a game. You can just play like an idiot and rewind whenever you make a mistake. At that point you could throw your console controller into a paintmixer and it would eventually "win". Fun = gone.
And the parents point about "good" AI is excellent also. we enjoy beating up lots of stupid guys in a game because it puts us in the driver's seat, controlling the game flow. If this guy wants good AI's with a selection of weapons, he should fire up some bots in Quake or UT and get his fill of immaculately aimed rail guns up his ass every 5 seconds. Wheee!!!
That said, a few elements of good Ai *used sparingly and appropriately* will do wonders to enhance immersion.
Back to the main point, people don't often realize that the things they are aggravated about during gameplay are the same elements that make them enjoy the game when it's done.
at the same time these nations were stealing their jobs. With unemployment so high in France, this is not an appealing situation.
France has suffered structurally high unemployment which has hovered around 10% since the early 1980s, and you are trying to claim that it is somehow caused by Eastern Europe 'stealing jobs' since the union? That is nonsense at best and sophistry at worst.
We had the same arguments when Portugal and Spain joined, but perhaps you would have been against that too. Inevitably, money goes to those who need it most, I see that as only fair.
And the Netherlands is next, along with the UK, in voting NO for similar reasons.
Err, no, for entirely different reasons, in fact in France the No vote was evenly divided between the far right (Le Pen), the communists and half the socialists - hardly a united front - I wonder what sort of treaty we'd have if they all had a hand in writing it; probably they'd still be arguing over which capitalists/foreigners to blame for their woes in the preface.
First, your complaint is muddied. Is your complaint the common one about spearmen having a chance against tanks? Blame math. A tank attacking a fortified position will be fighting against defensive bonuses as well as the spearman. So you see little dude with a stick, but in reality the numbers of those units (memory fails on the exact values) add up to a potential chance of death. Blame the designers, not the AI. AI is irrelevant in this case, it's a failure of the game rules, if it's a failure at all. In civ the units are merely abstractions to numbers, and complaining about tanks vs. spearmen is complaining about math. As for you writing a better AI than Sid Meier, how would you do so? So far no programmer has come up with a good AI for Go, and I dare say that game is simpler than civilization.
I tell you, Rez's Trance Vibrator was revolutionary! Revolutionary, I say!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
FTA:
"I understand you can't have infinite space, guys surfing right off the mountain and taking a snowboard tour of Asia. But put a cliff there. Cliffs are solid. Empty air is not solid."
Tribes II had, as best I could tell, a totally unlimited play area. You could stray from the "battle zone" and litteraly just fly for ever. And the terrain it generated remained the same as you flew back, so it wasn't just recycling. I had got into a couple duels where me and the other guy fought until we could no longer see the battle area. Now that was a fight that sucked to win.
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
Almost zero. One, there's more and more focus on multiplayer for this sort of game. This takes some of the pressure off programmers because in multiplayer, other humans supply their own A.I. Even the ones who are complete morons.
Not only that but they ought to work toward creating a multiplayer experience that is more realistic. Just because some twelve year old kid is controling that enemy soldier doesn't make the game any more fun than if it were just a bot. Every time I have gotten into a multiplayer game hosted on the internet it turns out to work about like this: Every player runs blindly through the level like they are crazy and high on methamphetamines shooting everything they see. If it is a team game then the only change is to shoot everything they see but stop if they realize it is their own team's color. How many soldiers do you think charge through alleys shooting people and picking up ammo and flak jackets? Their have been a few but they usually get awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. For anyone that wants to go back home, that's a sure way to make the trip in a body bag. Multiplayer games should be designed so that wild hotdogging heroes buy the farm just like in real life.
If you're going to correct someone, at least be right. You interpreted the statement as "half of all gamers are over eighteen, and a quarter of those are over fifty." This is not what was said.
Let's break this down, in a very slightly simplified format:
* Half of gamers are over eighteen.
* A quarter of gamers are over fifty.
* All gamers over fifty are also over eighteen.
So, you take a representative hundred gamers. Fifty are under eighteen. Twenty-five are over fifty. How many does that leave between eighteen and fifty---that is, under fifty but over eighteen?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Is this really true? I hadn't put much effort into finding a real feedback steering wheel for a driving game, but I had assumed they were available. Actually feeling the wheel loosen up when you start skidding makes racing games an order of magnitude more realistic. They have this in a variety of arcade games (Rush the Rock comes to mind, but I know I've played others)...are they really all only available from one patent holder?
Totally agree, especially save points, and tedious tasks - if i wan't to do boring and repetitive work i'll get a boring and repetitive job. I don't want to earn virtual money, unlock virtual levels or do any sort of 'work' unless it involves blowing things up, shooting stuff or moving at high speed. If a game has a story it should keep me on the edge of my seat at every second wondering what will happen next, if it makes me kick my console in rage because i have to repeat 20 minutes or drive to some obscure location 10 miles away that i already drove to 20 times then its failed.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
5. And on the opposite side of the nipple coin...
Developers will be shocked one day when they notice that the world is full of women.
If previous slashdot posts about the near-monastic working conditions at game companies are correct (exceedingly long hours "worshipping mammon" at the keyboard), the developers won't know this until some time after they leave companies like Electronic Arts and quit programming games.
If you're seriously bored with the lack of AI and realism in current games, have I got the solution for you!
It's called US-Soldier. What a wild game! You don't have to buy it. Just sign up. You start by running around endlessly and having some guy yell at you for trival things. This goes on for weeks while you learn the rules of the game.
Then, the playing action begins. You get physically relocated to some hot-dry shithole on the other side of the world. Surrounded by thousands of the enemy. You can't tell them apart from ordinary people, but it doesn't matter because everyone hates you just for being there. The enemy has hundreds of years experience fighting new gamers like you. They know all the tricks. They communicate in a special language that you or anyone on your game team can't understand. But they know how you think from watching your television shows and movies. They have a secret religion that enables them to kill anyone without remorse and to accept their own and their fellow gamers deaths without hesitation.
Such incredible realism in this game. And your enemy's gaming stategy is based on the experience of a permanent hot war that has been going on there since you were born. They were gaining combat experience while you were watching cartoons. They've already made all the mistakes in this combat game and they won't make them again, but you will.
Just like an arcade game, when you're done playing, you get sent right back to begin again.
And just like every other video game, no matter how good you get, in the end, you always lose.
Sign up now!
(I've developed several titles, including the top selling PC game a few years ago. And no, not the Sims.)
1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.
Actually, this is the point of the cell processor. The cell is meant to allow lots of pipelined tasks to happen with little additional overhead. This means that the difference between a "simple" AI and a complex "AI" (in terms of performance) is little different. And the cell is actually seperate from the RSX, which is the graphics chip from NVIDIA.
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...
The fallacy of this statement is laughable. Games don't simply exist. The reason that a particlar game genre is produced again and again is become you asshats keep buying them. Again and again and again. Want more games like Katamari Damacy? Then buy the game. No, pirating a copy doesn't count. Want games of alternative genres? They're out there. They're just not advertised and they're not always available at your local Best Buy. They will often be at your smaller game store, or available online. So get off your lazy ass and go vote with your dollars.
3. Don't bullshit me about your graphics
We wouldn't have to, except that by the logic in argument 2 this seems to be the #1 thing that people care about. You vote with your dollars. Your mouth is saying "graphics don't matter" but your wallet says "grapihcs are all that I care about. Shit in the box as long as the graphics are top notch." Doom 3, Unreal 3, Half-life 2... All top sellers because of their stellar unrelated gameplay?
4. Nipples?
5. And on the opposite side of the nipple coin...
A game these day costs in the tens of millions of dollars to release. A company is simply not going to risk that kind of green (and possibly the fate of the company) on an analyst's hunch. There has to be something more than a gut feeling to release that kind of game. I mean, when's the last time you bought a Japanese dating simulation? (NSFW)
6. All of the new consoles will have hard drives. Use them.
Agree.
7. Loading...
As soon as you come up with a mechanism to physically get 16 megs of data off a DVD rom faster than 1 second, I'll be all over improving load times. It's truly staggering how much data has to be loaded from disk and how frequently it has to be done. On the PC, fire up ye old task manager sometime and turn on the I/O stats for the process. Then be shocked as your game loads multiple gigs of data from disk over the run of the game. All in the name of that "immersion" you're looking for.
8. I understand that John Madden was raised by wild boars...
This hooks in with #7. Bottom line, consider the requirements of this. It's a simple M*N cost to have more sounds. (M events by N events per sound, assuming a flat distribution of sounds). Of course, one could argue (successfully) that an increase in all sounds isn't necessary, and just in the sounds that come up again and again. Of course, you could also forsake the Madden franchise in favor of a lesser known football series. (This would also have the side benefit of ceasing to support the EA cartel.)
9. Immersion and the invisible hand of God
Agree. This is generally just laziness (or a very tight schedule).
10. And while we're at it...
I sort of agree here, but I see the other side of the coin as well. I mean, if I let you get to areas that aren't important for gameplay, then I need to populate them with content. You also might become lost and frustrated, which is something I don't want to happen either.
11. And while we're still at it...
I agree, with the caveat that this is a genre-specific complaint. For example, I don't mind health bars imposed in an RTS, because I realize it's just a game that I'm playing. On the other hand, having numerous hea
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
UT2K3 drove me nuts. The enemy bots didn't seem any better than the original UT (which is fine, they where excellent there), but your bots where dumb as bricks. In UT, I'd leave my whole compliment of bots to defend and be pretty sure I could at least get back in time to keep the flag from being taken. In 2k3, they're a bunch of babies or something, requiring constant attention, and can't make it to the bathroom without getting blown to hell, let alone to a flag...
Sorry, just venting. I loved the game until the later levels. I know the AI's great, but the balance on the bots could've been better. The AI was more than good enough to support it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
No, really. I want to know which company patented the loading-screen game.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
FTA: 2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...
Uh... because they don't sell?
For years and years I moaned about how bad gaming was and why wasn't there more titles like Thief or even Alice. I found my simple answer in talking to other gamers (mostly consol gamers) as they said "Thief?, Alice?".
These games never did well enough because people WANT UT, they WANT Half-Life.
Even tho Thief and Alice never break too far from the FPS mold they are different in many ways. It just isn't appealing to have a title that is hard to relate to another title. Break away titles are going to be a hard sell because the first time most gamers buy one and get burnt it'll be the last time they buy one. Alice, to the best of my knowledge, never had a demo version. I think that's important in bringing gamers to a new title that isn't based on the last 75 shoot 'em up games released this year. Thief did have a demo and I couldn't wait to buy it after playing the demo. It was a sale based on a little extra effort by the publisher.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
unoriginal. Not even remotely worth reading
One of the points (probably the only point) I dissagree with is his obvservation that the cpus of the newer machines all use "in order" processing to ill effect. He paraphrases a developer who claims that "out of order" execution is there to make "crappy code run better.", and the lack of out of order execution turns the new machines into "dumb blondes."
The author then runs with the idea, claiming that the cell and xenon processors will be unable to deliver really complex ai because they are "tuned for graphics" and nothing else.
It is really hard to explain why this is not true. It's hard to communicate this to someone who isn't a programmer, and someone who hasn't taken courses in computer engineering and compiler design.
Frankly, I was quite suprised when I didn't see any negative reactions to this statement from other programmers. For what it's worth, I'm most excited about the raw cpu power of these new systems, and I can't wait until I get the chance to develop for them.
for great justice, this sig has been moved
He should add Deus ex Machina to the list. Asides from one of two things i felt really relieved after reading this that i wasn't the only one to have experienced what he talks about.
This guy are sick.
The desired result is not necessarily to generate true AI - the point is to create a virtual opponent that's smarter than a sack of hammers.
The article author isn't asking for true AI. He's asking for an opponent that can respond flexibly according to circumstances. If that means a script of actions, cool.
To borrow your analogy, he's not asking for anti-gravity elevators. But he's being forced to use the stairs, and he's saying, "Gee, there should be a better way of doing this." Sure, an anti-gravity elevator would be pretty cool, but he'll settle for a regular mechanical elevator, because that's what he's looking for.
Seriously, can we make a petition out of this thing? I'd like to fax a few hundred thousand copies to EA, et. al.
neslted in point one of the article is a link to an IGDA developer's panel. interesting opinions and information from a few insiders:
/ burn_the_house_.html
http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2005/03
A better question though might be "How does better AI make a game more fun?" Because that's what it all boils down to, right? You could have some fancy pants neural network that enemies operate off of, learning from all of the player's actions. They could get smarter, duck around corners, anticipate your next attack, and whatnot. So what? Granted, it depends on the genre. If you're going for something halfway realistic, like a Rainbow Six-type game, it would make a difference. But the Doom example he cites - Doom is and always was a arcade corridor shooter. And despite all of the pseudo-System Shock 2 details in Doom 3, doesn't really stray from that. Arcade enemies don't have to be tremendously smart. What's more important is that you're having fun mowing them down with your weaponry, getting your butt kicked every now and then, but generally prevailing.
pre-op transsexual where the object of the game is to gather enough money to complete the operation?
That game will sell like hot cakes. That will be the future of the Grand Theft Auto series. GTA5: Preop, set in Rio de Janeiro.
Awesome.
I like crates ... ... ... ... ...
And the random little thing I can just bash
or open
Gives me something to do before I rush to the next thing in the game
Kind of that pokemon theory of life
"got to catch 'em all"
The spell checker did me in here. *sigh* I should have re-read before hitting submit. --M
I didnt realize that John Becker was a gamer. Funny article though.
"When they invent bitch slaps that can go through a monitor you better f'ing duck" --deft (253558)
"seriously. One of the best games I have ever played is Lumines, and it was the cheapest game for my PSP"
To each his own, but (on a slightly different tangent here) I myself just got a PSP two days ago with enough extra money to purchase at least 3 games. I picked up Wipeout Pure for $40 (I'm a big Wipeout fan), but... even as I have heard very great things about Lumines (and I extremely enjoy puzzle games, too), it's own $40 price tag is very hard to swallow for a puzzle game. I know it's a very fresh puzzle game with a lot of eye candy and music, but I can never seem to justify paying as much for a puzzle game for something so much more sophisticated (for any system, PSP or otherwise... and I suppose the same could be said for games that simply milk old un-innovative formulas a little too much). $40 is slightly below the usual all-around home console game $50 price-tag, and there's currently talk of pushing it to even $60, possibly within the next year.
I guess my pet peeve with video games is that they're just getting so expensive, that being based on the fact that the gameplay/"life" of each game seems to be growing shorter and shorter. I realize there are still plenty of games that will give you at least a good 15-20 hours of gameplay, but as of late I've been picking up too many $30-40 games that only seem to last me 4-6 hours tops... even as little as 2-3 in some cases.
Of course, I do acknowledge that I am well aware of the rising costs and longer development cycles for video games in general, as they grow more and more complicated to produce, and I'm not trying to whine and cry "foul!" at the industry, but as a hard core gamer (and collector) it truly is an expensive hobby. It's something I don't like, but it's the way it's gotta be to keep on kicking, I suppose.
This guy hit the nail on the head.
I like the part about AI.
Harder should not always mean more enemies but smarter enemies. Ememies with some basic tatics would be impressive.
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
In fact, second person games really exist. like ADOM (http://www.adom.de/), which tells you what have you done all the time along: You feel slightly exhausted today. You enter Terinyo, a tiny hamlet. You hit the large dog and slightly wound it. You feel very very bad. You die...
Basically I blame the 3d camera angle cinematic bs on the game console ... ... or Sony ... or Whoever ... ... ... to the folks developing for those platforms. ... in fact ... may involve all the console providers to come together to develop a industry standard ... .. ... ... they really did a good job w/ that ... ... But they handled many of the camera issues well. ... ... ...
If Microsoft
Actually gave a crap about consistency of games on their platforms
They'd provide a well-thought-out game engine that took care of these issues in a standard way
This
Considering that most games are released for every console.
I would imagine the engine would handle more then just how to handle the senerio when an object shows up between your character and the camera
I'd like to see the object just become transparent
Sort of the way Gobblin Commander handled this issue
The rest of the game sucked ass
Any way
I would imagine these engines could address issues like quick save
As well as provide an AI'esc rules engine that developers could just attach to
early termination of rant
for hiring Imperial Stormtroopers. Just be glad you're not laying siege to a forest moon.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The article had a few really good points with which I whole-heartedly agreed but his inability to write the article without the use of profanity was a real turn off.
Halo's AI was the first lure before the multiplayer took over. Play the original campaign and you'll realise how much AI can make a difference
Have you tried some of the japanese strategy games for the PS2 ? Disgaea, phantom brave, etc.
Someone give the writer of TFA a cookie. Like every geek of my generation (12 when the Atari 2600 came out) I used to play a lot of games on my computers. But the only thing I've seen in the past decade that interested me at all was Myst... or was that more than a decade ago? And some of the things this "manifesto" complains about are a large part of the reason: it's pretty much all just a bunch of high-frames-per-second eye candy in genres I find incredibly boring. Maybe when they start making games for people who aren't retarded 15-year-old boys with hard-ons for sports and the military, I'll give them a look. Until then, I'm gonna see if I can get an Infocom emulator running on my computer and play Zork.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I'm a professional game developer, and for the most part I think this guy's a moron. Here's why:
Where are the FPS bad guys who can adapt their strategy on the fly? Enemies who themselves have six different guns and switch up according to what the situation calls for? Bad guys who work in teams, who strategize, who create diversions to distract you? Where's the enemy Solid Snake who sneaks up on you with the silence of a ninja's church fart?
First, many enemies DO adapt their strategy on the fly. Many enemies DO switch weapons when appropriate. Many enemies DO work in teams. The problem is, AI isn't about the NPCs, it's about the player, and for the most part AI advances would be in areas that the player doesn't notice. Getting snuck up on? Not fun. Fun is all about keeping the player informed about what's going on so that they can react and devise and enact their own plans. There are a number of ways that AIs need to be improved, but these aren't really among them.
It has to do with the fact that both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily.
You've GOT to be kidding me. In-order instruction hurts the performance of the processors but allows them to be much simpler (and thus allows the Xbox360 to have 3 on a single core). AI is not hurt by this in the least. It's just ridiculous, and it's clear he's got absolutely no clue what he's talking about.
Why isn't a there a spy game where we actually get to be a real spy rather than a hallway-roving kill machine? You know, where we actually have to talk to contacts and extract information and tap phones and piece together clues, a game full of exotic locales and deception and backstabbing and subplots? A game where a gun is used as often as a real spy would use it (that is, almost never)?
I worked on Thief, and let me tell you, we did basically this. And guess what? Didn't sell for crap. Action is fun and interesting. The game he's describing sounds like a bore.
And as far as why we don't come up with new genres, well, we do, only it only happens every few years. The whole stealth (Thief/Splinter Cell) genre started 6 or so years ago, and lately we've created the "open city game" (GTA). I honestly find that pretty amazing, particularly given how outrageously expensive games are to develop and how necessarily risk-averse that makes publishers.
3. Don't bullshit me about your graphics
Fine, then have a clue and don't fall for it. Killzone released a movie that was blindingly obviously not gameplay footage, and they never claimed it was, and yet at this very site there was huge debate as to whether it was real or not. Take marketing with a grain of salt, eh?
All of the new consoles will have hard drives. Use them.
Actually, in MS's and Sony's infinite wisdom, they're going to be OPTIONAL hard drives. So we can't count on them. So we can't actually leverage them in our games. Sorry. Don't blame me.
Loading...
Fine, if you don't want loading, expect there to be cuts elsewhere in the game. That's not to say that loadtimes can't hurt the game significantly (including one game that I personally worked on), but we've only got X million dollars and Y years. If you think it's that important, fine, but then don't bitch about the limited scope of games.
YOU HAVE A HARD DRIVE NOW, taking data from a 9 GB DVD. You have NO excuse to keep recycling the same mindless observations over and over and over again...
We do on the Xbox. And it's more like 6GB on the DVD, and that's if we want to deal with the layer switch and the impact on QA-ability of the title. But yeah, I agree a little more variety would be good.
I'll try to rent one or two of those and see if I like it. Thanks! --M
I can't count the number of times I've caught a Harvester in C&C gazing longingly across a river at a tiny little patch of timberium that it can't possibly get to, or getting so drunk after filling itself that it decides to wander over to an enemy base get a really close look at an enemy turret.
:-) :-)
Stupid, stupid, stupid!!!
Damn things need a babysitter.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
The complaints is from one single guy and it is a rant and I respect his opinion and all that, but I don't think those opinions are all that valid. Why?
Focus tests have made it clear that these opinions are not what people are worked up about. Take the smart AI request for example. It is not hard to make an AI that is perfect for most situations, that would take all the information any human player could possibly gather over years of playing the same game, but once they are in the first thing people say are things like "The cheating bastard shot me from behind! That is not videogamy!"
Why do they put Jumping Puzzles (tm) in FPSs? Because when the publisher plays the super-streamlined hardcore FPS the first thing they are going to say is "What do you do APART from running and shooting in the game? Fer crying out loud, it is the mid-zeroes of this century, make me do something else once in a while!"
"Give us something we've never seen before"... How many of you actually bought and played mr mosquito? Sure, the game might not be as fun but if noone buys the odd game once in a while noone is going to bother making them.
I'm not defending the nearly-all games that have design flaws in them, but there are fairly good reasons why games can't evolve as fast as we all want them to and it all boils down to a marketing decision (which may include using cheap developers).
Yes, he does know what he is talking about.
As a consumer/gamer I don't give a shit how "hard" it is to implement, nor do I care if it is an "open" academic problem, and I don't care if the solution is a hand crafted set of decision trees or not. The term AI used by gamers is not true AI, and we don't care. What we care about is, when the bad guy is coming my way, and I put a b40 rocket within a foot of his head, he should do something, like hit the dirt, take cover, shoot out a light. Don't much care what, but just sitting there waiting for the next shot is stupid.
So, in the academic sense, the author may be a little off about AI. And, as one sees so often in real life, your academic interpretation of the authors need, is completely fucked up. What the author means is "I hate stupid bots that don't have the good sense to even duck", and you interpret it as "I must have code in the next game that can win Turing certification".
Please, stay in school, forever. The world does not need another pompus, asshat, compeng dork, who can somehow manage to read technical manuals for fun, yet could not interpret an end users requiremnets to save his own life.
there is a project at my university which is developing a game that is specifically centered around training soldiers which are capable of learning. pretty interesting:
http://dev.ic2.org/nero_public/index.php
-ashot
I always wondered what happened to Old Man Murray. I thought it might be the same guy, but when I got to the rant on crates in games, I knew it was him. Maybe a Fat Baby or two as well?
This article is so fucking true. my favorite part is: "Racing games pull this, too. Why do I have to spend 40 hours driving a minivan just to get enough money to buy a Honda Civic? Why can't I have access to all of the content right away? What if I don't feel any satisfaction in "unlocking" the game features I already paid real-life money for and just want to fucking race the Ferrari on the box art! " IT'S TRUE. GT3 anyone???
20. Horizontal consoles have been a curse for as long as gaming has been around. I'm not playing another game until I get a machine I can stand on its side. My entertainment center only has three inches of free space and flat consoles are the backstabbing Judas in my life.
That would be well and good that they're vertical, except for the well-known fact that vertical optical discs now have to fight gravity and rely upon more ingenious measures to keep themselves from wobbling while spinning in the drive, whereas a horizontal optical disc works with gravity, and remains flat and level.
Most PS2 owners I know come to me going "My PS2 ain't working right, it's slow to load up games now." I go over there, behold, it's vertical.. I lay it down on it's side, boom, games load up faster, less errors, less annoyance. Suddenly I am a god, jut because these guys are clueless about a few simple physics rules.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Beat the other person silly in self defense, don't get caught, (run|flee|hide|scream), play the victim, PROFIT!
I was surprised that the manifesto did not include a reference to "The Neverhood", in my opinion one of the most unusual and challenging games, with appealing claymation graphics and an intriguing sound track and gameplay.
While my karma plummits further, I might go so far as to say that we have a few Euro-philic moderators around today.
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
ok, maybe not.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
For instance, not much good music being recorded nowadays. FIX IT! Yeah, buddy, I'm just gonna buy me a cheap Sears geetar, write up some songs, and FIX IT lickety split.
Nobody writes good books anymore. FIX IT! Sure, I'll just put all my possessions/house/children in hock, buy an old typewriter, starve for a few years, while the Great American Novel fails to materialize, I get divorced, lose everything, and end up working at Starbucks while the state attaches my wages.
Windows is teh sux0rz. FIX IT! Well, Linux is teh sux0rz too, and I would, having that kind of programming competency, but it takes a whole bunch of people on board to make such things happen, and my life is too short to re-envision and implement a decent OS by myself (with NO PAY). I'm a Lone Programmer, too, not some social shill who can lure all the hackers away from Linux.
Star Wars new episodes suck. FIX IT! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA....dumbass.
Just because we don't "fix it" ourselves doesn't de-legitimize our right to COMPLAIN ABOUT CRAP. And that includes you and your feculent opinions, sir.
Whoever wrote this is just what they claim to be, a gamer, and its their perspective, but they obviously have NO idea of what they are saying from a development standpoint.
1- AI's: AI's as mentioned in an erlier post, are very resource intensive, and hard to program, if they were so easy to have a perfect AI that could do everything most ideally in a situation, this guy would be complaining about the AI's in games being too good, and probably complaning about the superior AI robots that are inslaving the human race at the time due to their unexplicit ability to do everything perfectly.
2.Yes, we do need more variety in games, but I really dont think most people enjoy the THRILLER INTENSE ACTION of looking for sheltern on an island for months, I think the closest thing would be games like Myst, Riven, etc, and that style of game, does exsist. Not to mention, there are a number of medical, law related, etc, games where you are able to play a person in that role, with realistic detail, just becuase the 'gamer' that wrote that didnt bother to look for them dosen't mean they arn't out there.
3. Yes, this is a real valid and undisputable point, while I can't agree with the FF advertisment bashing, as they didnt say it was actual gameplay screenshots, and everyone should have been well aware its an FMV, games like doom3 show actual 'in game screenshots' that are really rendered not produced in real time, and on systems that cant possibly be held by a consumer, thus giving people the idea it will be much better then is, here I agree.
4. uhhh, he answered his own question of why they arn't readily avalible on the market, and I do have a small amount of import games that have alot of nudity or sexual content, again, just because he didnt bother to look dosent mean they don't exsist, and while yes, they are extremly rare due to lack of distribution AND demand.
5. Perhaps you have a valid point, I don't know becuase im not a girl, but i've never once heard a girl complain about that kind of thing, and I know an endless amount of girl gamers.... So we can leave this one up to the girls to decied...
6. Yes, we should make more use of hard drives, but since you have to BUY one for the ps2, everyone dosent have it, meaning it sholdnt be depended on. As far as save point location, it dosent matter how often or not you can save, they do it so that you have to go through a ceritant amount of gameplay, making you more dedicated to winning.... Maybe the developers dont want you to be able to respawn 10 feet from where you die, they are just being nice enough to make you not have to go through the whole level...
7." No load screens, we gamers demand they be banned! The Hardware can do anything without loading anything!" Then he will be complaining about the level size, textures, and amount of interactive objects being smaller/lower detailed becuase they couldn't be preloaded. It's alot easier to complain about a problem then it is to find a solution. This is a perfect example of how one can demand something without knoweldge of it, my 486 can show the next line of text without preloading it, and showing a loading screen while doing so, but if you want more, it takes more, common sense.
8. Half the complaint about cutscenes erlier, half person preffernce, as the writer says, that IS how john madden really is, so I think the game SHOULD realistically represent it.
9. Ok buddy, lets see you make one single full size level with an object blocking every single invisble path, with 100% realistic character control movement functionality, and better yet 'total immersion', I won't be the first to offer you a few MillionUSD$ for the technology.
10. Man, this guy is dense, he wnats every single object to be completly interactive? Again, you show me a techonlogy capable of this on present day systems, for every object in a massive enviornment, I wont be the first to offer you millions for it....Another example of how its easy to complain about something without
It's not a tower computer case where you get more space by going vertical. It's great that I can put it horizontal or vertical, but I think the consoles will end up horizontal more often than not other than for novelty sake.
"Real time" strategy games where the AI is faster at gathering resources than you can be. Or the you missed "7 grains of X" so you lose. Limited resources sure that's a challenge but not X+1 resource needed to win.
Godo AI, gfx and originality in one Recent FPS (Score:?)
by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 30, @01:50PM
Hvae you tried Brothers in Arms?
Your non player characters will take cover when you send them to a location and lay down covering fire while you cross over.
The opponents will pin you down with suppressing fire and try to outflank you in the same way you would them
The tanks are a little mindless but other than that this is the most original fps I have ever played with great ai and gfx to match
I have yet to play online- controling a squad with multiple online players with their squads sure sounds fun!
While I do agree with most of the article's points, save points are completely essential to the gaming experience, especially any game with boss battles. Take for instance games such as Metal Gear Solid (which, don't get me wrong, was an utterly phenomanal game as well as my personal favorite). In MGS's boss battles, if you lose, you just hit continue and try again. If a boss is really hard, you might end up dying quite a few times. But the end result is, you just stop caring. "Oh crap, bullet in my head. I'll get it right this time..." Sure it's still fun, but urgency, the will to win, just isn't there because you can always just start over again with no penalty whatsoever. When you finally do beat the boss, you smile with satisfaction, and move on. This is not realistic.
Now look at Devil May Cry 3, in which you're only allowed to save between missions, not during. In DMC's boss battles, you are MOTIVATED. You just finished spending quite a while solving that puzzle, plowing through hoards of enemies, and slaying a Hell Vangaurd just to GET to the boss. You do NOT want to have to do that again. When Vergil swings that sword at you you dodge like your very life depends on it. Seeing as DMC3 is a hellishly difficult game, you'll probably lose a few times, and it will hurt. You will feel as if that was YOUR chest that just got a new hole in it when Dante goes down for the count. But when you win, when you finally land that final shot, well... not many things can match that feeling of pure joy.
So yeah. Save points can be painful sometimes, but the increased motivation, joy from victory, and immersion in the game are well worth it.
Excellent comment, sir, although the game was called Commend and Concur. It was the corporate office brown-nosing game, sir, but I'm sure in your vast experience and knowledge you already knew that, sir.
It was a simulation of sitting in long bored-room [sic] meetings where you lose points for falling asleep, but gain points and status for being agreeable to the lecturer's ideas, hence the name of the game.
I rank this game as follows:
Addictiveness: 10 out of 10. At my current job I play this game for 8 hours a day in lieu of my real responsibilities, only breaking long enough to eat a 30 minute lunch. Every single day.
Interface: 10 out of 10. Commend and Concur forgoes the traditional controller setup and makes use of verbal commands and body language to play the game. Certain system functions, like pausing, must be executing with undocumented verbal commands such as "I need to use the bathroom", but you cannot pause indefinitely.
Immersion: 10 out of 10. Creepily realistic graphics - I couldn't tell the difference between this and real life.
A.I.: 2 out of 10. The other humans in the meeting room are often devoid of life and anything creative to say. Programmers, please remedy this in the sequel.
Playability: 10 out of 10. You can play this game without thinking-... wait! I am playing this game without thinking! In fact, I'm typing up this Slashdot comment while I'm playing this game.
Solomon Kevin Chang
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
The guy moans about how women don't like games because of the massive breasts? I'd say in only a FRACTION of the games are women drawn with massive breasts. Hell, Nintendo games are hardly like porn.
Jesus, there are a LOT more muscle bound men in games than there are women with MASSIVE out of proportioned breasts, and I feel the former is also much rarer in life?
Do mean feel objectified, or inferior? God no, they just get on with it.
1x cdrom is around 150k/s while 1x dvd rom is something like 1350k/s. Therefore once the math is done, the dvd drive is about twice as fast as the cdrom drive at their respective theoretical max speeds, which are rarely reached.
I read the Gamer's Manifesto last week and I found it was very well done. Pretty much all of the 20 points mentioned are true. Games are all about eye candy now, with very few that actually provide quality game play, that is probably why I still play SNES roms. There are a few recent games that I do enjoy though, like UT2004, FarCry, Halflife2, Ratchet & Clank series, etc. All of those games have pretty eye candy, but they are also addictive and have fun/good gameplay.
I'm afraid the Game Industry has become the Movie Industry, with a huge swath of garbage titles, and only few that are worth buying.
...and apparently for the PS2 also, unless they wanted to pay someone boatloads for that first stage of Starblade, which comes up whenever the PS2 version of Tekken 5 is started.
Interestingly, they seem to own patents on Flash versions of their non-Flash games, too.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
There's a loading dock immediately outside of my office.
There's a shitload of crates out there.
And they're ALL. ON. PALETTES!
I wouldn't mind all the crates in FPS, etc, if they'd actually bother to model a palette or two but dear gods, the laziness.
Back in the day of Alone in the Dark, your character would be able to fight if you ever ran out of ammo. I don't know about others but I got even an addiction to fight some monsters barehanded.
That decayed with time. In RE, Silent Hill and AITD4 characters have null to low melée ability.
So add this to the wishlist: get a fighter like Prince of Persia into a scary plot like any game mentioned above.
I see 57005 people
The video game crash has already struck for me. I was born with an Atari 2600 joystick in my hands, but have been a die-hard Nintendo fan since 1985. Unfortunately, Nintendo has been relying on Super Mario, Metroid, and Legend of Zelda for far too long, and now they're in serious trouble. After disappointing droves of Metroid fans by not releasing a kill-the-face-sucking-freak game for the N64, then pissing them all off by making it a lame pseudo-FPS/platformer hybrid on the Gamecube, and making that ridiculous cartoony-looking Zelda game that didn't even feature Link, I don't see them recovering. Seriously, what are they going to do with Mario on their next gen system? Bring back Bob Hoskins? To be perfectly honest, I have a Gamecube only because my wife likes to play all the colorful multiplayer games (all featuring Mario), and the only reason I bought a PS2 is because a few years ago we had stacks and stacks of PS1 games and worn-out VHS tapes, and neither a Playstation nor a DVD player; I have all of 4 PS2 games and only one I ever play is Atari Anthology, and that's only because my Atari 2600 finally gave up the ghost a couple of years ago (rest in peace, old friend...). And you're never going to get a long-time Microsoft-hater like me to buy an XBOX, even if there were games I was remotely interested in. The only next-gen system I'm even thinking about right now is the PS3, and they'd better give me a damn good reason to buy one, or I'm not wasting my money. I hope it's at least a better CD and DVD player than the PS2.
1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.
I largely agree with this one, though I also think there's room for pattern-based attacks. Doom III isn't a tense military sim with realistic opponents. It's a shoot-'em-up in 3D. The original author's missing the point here.
Where the enemy's supposed to have advanced AI, though, it needs to be better. Duh.
The End from Metal Gear Solid 3, perhaps?
To greatly oversimplify, in fact. There are plenty of approaches to AI that don't rely on scripted routines that are hit by in-order processing. And I don't believe that even the limited scripting-based AI that tends to get used these days is going to be in any way reduced from what we have now. "We won't be able to do more of the same, but faster," cries the author, in an article where he spends most of the rest of his time bitching about the fact that games are just... doing more of the same, but faster. Woo!
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...
Okay, suggest one. And I don't mean just come up with a goddamn stupid setting, I want to hear about the gameplay and why it's fun, and why it isn't just a variation on an existing genre, and why it's actually a practical idea with current-day technology.
Not so easy, is it?
There are games that break with existing genre convention - that do something new, and do it well. There have been every generation. And they've been limited in number every generation, because for each idea that works well there are a hundred total abortions.
I loathe the idea of innovation solely for the sake of innovation, and I always have done. I'd rather play a mediocre 2D platformer than a godawful pre-op transsexual simulator. It's great that despite the wailing and moaning of the people whose favourite game is bitching about the game industry innovative games still get made. And lo, some of them (like Katamari Damacy) are great. But the level of innovation involved will never make me excuse the shittiness of your game.
3. Don't bullshit me about your graphics
Don't be such a stupid bastard, then. You know what the games look like, don't expect them to suddenly become photorealistic. Apply some critical thinking here.
Yes, it's the fault of anyone who falls for it. But that doesn't mean you're subject to it if you don't fall for it - it's pretty much trivial to find screenshots online for any released game.
So would you care to explain why I should be lectured on what gamers want by someone who didn't start gaming until the PSX? That's the only conclusion I can draw from someone blaming Square for something that's been around since day one. Anyone else remember the 8-bit game boxes with the beautiful screenshots and the small print reading "Screenshots may be from a completely different version of the game - yours will be shitty two-colour graphics with hideous colour clash"?
4. Nipples?
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then. I make games for a living. Actually, gamers want AI that isn't too smart. They want to dominate and destroy the game. If they are playing against the machine, they want to be the baddest godamned thing in the universe. Now granted, this doesn't excuse AI that interferes with the gameplay, running into walls and each other and forgetting you are there if you hide in a shadow for 10 seconds. It also doesn't particularly apply to strategy games, where the strategy is the basis of the gameplay. The bottom line is, when another human repeatedly kicks your ass, it's a challenge. When the machine does, it's simply frustrating. But otherwise, a great article.
I paid for a Ford GT, by golly I should be able to use it right out of the box. I shouldn't have to play the game for forty days and forty nights in hopes of someday "unlocking" it. Locked cars and tracks are CRAP! Wake up, morons.
The manifesto asks, where are the lawyer and stranded-on-a-desert-island games? On the DS, evidently:
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
Lost in Blue
> "AI" as 99.99% of laymen seem to call it is merely
> an elaborate hack.
Ok, so he doesn't use the correct academic terminology. "AI" is, however, colloquially used to describe the perceived "intelligence" of the computer-guided opponents. And using that definition, he is 100% correct...and so does know what he's talking about.
No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!
I response to the article and your developer comments, I've got a few myself:
18. Don't use online play as an excuse to bleed us dry
So for example, you might have a game with 10 2-hour long episodes, each of which sells for $10-20. Wouldn't this really be preferable if they were released every 3 months or so?
NO! $200 for a video game??? That's the #2 reason I never play MMORPG games. I just want to plunk down my $55 and be done with it - not have to add an entry to my monthly budget for "$20 - Episode 7: The Search for More Money"
19. NO MORE JUMPING PUZZLES IN FPS GAMES
I'll take this one step further and argue that jumping puzzles aren't fun *anywhere*.
Wow, I must be in the minority here, but I like the jumping puzzles as long as there is a "save-anywhere" function so I don't have to go back and repeat the same damn thing over and over and over...
As soon as people stop rushing out to by the next Halo or the next Half-life or the next Doom, or Quake (or Unreal), (or a game based on one of those engines), then I'll have a little more faith that I can make a game with a more modest and reasonable budget that will be successful.
As someone who bought Halo, Half-Life 2, Doom 3, Unreal 2, etc. I'm anxiously waiting for the next titles.
I do think Valve's Steam will revolutionize how games are distributed and will allow more "niche" games to be developed. In the recent copy of PC Gamer, an article on Valve talked about how they will be putting out more "episodes" for Half-Life 2 via Steam in the next few months. They compared it to taking 12+ months to "put a box on a shelf" in the local store. That means less distribution costs, etc.
DeusEx managed to be a good FP shooter/sneaker depending on your choice of strategy. It fell somewhat short of the designer's aim, but it remains one of the most open ended games of my experience. And on top of all that, it was thought provoking.
So just because it's a FPS doesn't mean it has to be an intellectual wasteland. The trouble is that it's a lot more effort to write a game with good and witty dialogue and a strong coherent plot (Adventure or FPS) than it is to say "All hell has broken loose on mars - shoot anything that moves!"
It's the same deal as we see in Hollywood. Endless trouble taken with the visuals, because you can say "that looks good" in 5 seconds without any deep meditation. But if a lot of time and trouble is being spent without anything tangible to show for it (like thinking to make sure the plot makes sense, or rewriting dialog to make sure it rings true) then it's likely to be cut and replaced with a car chase/jumping puzzle by order of the management.
Honorable mention goes to Alice, which had a fascination beyond the eye candy and the graphics, but was let down by so many jumpy levels that I got bored before the end, and also to the original Half Life which told a good story over the course of the game, but never really made me think too hard.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
There was a game just released for the PS2 which shows woman's breasts/nipples. God of War. Awesome game too.
The analogy sort of breaks down there, but the point is we shouldn't ever see a "save point" in a game again. Limited saves were invented for consoles that didn't have the memory to let you "quicksave" (where you can save at any time, any where, with one keystroke like on a PC).
I don't agree with this one. I see save points as a design decision rather than carelessness on the designer's part. If you could save your game every five seconds, then where's the challenge and fun in that?? Everytime you make a mistake you can just reload your game so even the challenging parts of the game become a breeze. There are console emulators on the web that lets you create "save states" allowing you to save your game whenever you feel like it. Does it actually enhance the game? If a game is too difficult, the designers can tone it down or even add a few more save points in between.
It is of critical importance to the entire world that video games be completely consistent, have no plot holes, contain no bugs, and are basically exactly the way it would be in real life, plus the added value of a gaming world where things don't necessarily need to be like in real life.
1. Let me play the game at the most difficult level RIGHT AWAY. I absolutely hate playing a game through twice. I'd rather play a hard than a game where I have to play it on an easy setting, and then 'get' to play it again on hard.
2. Include more multiplayer options. Why can't we play multiplayer on every one of the singleplayer maps? They're obviously in the game. I understand if MP isn't the focus, they don't want to spend a lot of time on extra maps, but at least let us play on the ones that are there.
You and parent missed the article's overall point:
/. would agree that text w/ good content is better than a flash website w/ shitty content.
Focus on logical gameplay
Yes you may disagree with some of the author's nitpicks, but everyone who games, or used to game, knows that it's mostly a style/substance debate.
In the end, I think most people on
Do you still disagree?...look -----> SHINY!
Thank you Dave Raggett
i agree with all points, except one:
"magical" speed-ups in racing games! come on.
not fair. one computer apponent bumped me into the
rails. no way i could catch up now if there's no
"magical" speed-up option! please and it's cool
to have to go from average 150 i.q. processing
power to 200 i.q. processing power while riding the
magical "speed-up". i mean evern jet fighters have
a "magical" after-burner!
one last note: i miss the high tech space invader
with top to bottom scrolling and the "redicilous"
possibility of acquring all this special weapons
and extra satellit guns that follow your tiny
space ship around and being able to "grow" your
arsenal to a ship nearly a quarter of the screen
size. PLEEASSE bring this genre back!
Jagged Alliance had many of those qualities but wasn't first person and gameplay was kind of tedious. I would rather see a small tweak to the many FPS interfaces that already exist. Everyone copied Castle Wolfenstein 3D's interface and it hasn't changed much since. I would like to see the use of fatigue as a way to increase realism and inject a bit more thinking into the game.
If the gamer sprints 100 meters across a courtyard carrying 40 pounds of gear and an M-60 then he should be winded for a while. This simple change wouldn't require the gamer to press any more buttons. It wouldn't even necessarily require another gauge on the screen. The feedback could come through sound effects of the character's breathing and heartbeat.
But on the other hand, some people like the meth hopstrafe games....
I can understand that. They are only games after all. My preference is for realistic simulations without overly complicated controls but to each his own. Still, I think fatigue is a simple, easy way to add challenge to the standard FPS interface without adding any complexity to the controls. It could even be turned on or off from an options screen.
they're a bunch of babies or something, requiring constant attention, and can't make it to the bathroom without getting blown to hell, let alone to a flag
;)
Sounds like the Sims.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
simple example http://atitd.com/ (MOORPG) playing this fairly long enough to tell you "u get as good as you really are"
regards, but FPS wont get anywhere to good soon; Have a friend that doesn't even know basic english but he tuns over HL2 UT2k4 and D3 in few hours...
Games are inituitive nowdays, puzzles in games just make alot of people drop them.
Things in a rear mirror might be behind you
Where's the game where we're a pre-op transsexual where the object of the game is to gather enough money to complete the operation?
Just get a Doom demon to shoot you in the nuts.
Table-ized A.I.
I've recently looked around for alternative games and found a lot of satisfaction throu "independent" developers/companies that produce a lot of (usually) low cost but fun games. No gigabucks spent on CGs and voiceovers, but good ideas selling for low price thanks to online distribution's low overhead.
True, sometimes such games are just more of the same puzzle games, but if you look around you'll find some real gems!
Jump upgrades
Most FPSs ignore the jump except to recognize it as a basic need to get over the 10" barriers mentioned in the article.
The fact that Metroid has a number of jump upgrades adds a dynamic to jumping puzzles that doesn't exist in other games.
Last post!
Hm.. yeah. And I'll just go play BF2 when it comes out.
Consoles are still not as much fun as PC games.
whee -Me
Wow, hateful bile == +5 Funny? Who knew.
Thankfully you seem pretty weirdly detached from reality.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Real Life, a huge MMRPG, got a great review from Gamespot! Life sounds like a cool MMRPG, we should check it out!!
No game that is produced under time and market strengths can be "perfect", but any game can play to its own strengths. I'd like to see more games where the programmers don't undermine the game's own strong points.
:131 of 143", and "Time 4:31" at the end of the level. That says that Id's designers regarded those as victory conditions and tried to get players to treat them the same way.
Here's an older example of the wrong way: Hexen, by Raven Games under an Id liscense.
There are several things that counted as winning in a player's mind in an early Id style FPS:
1. Finishing the level.
2. Killing all the monsters on a level.
3. Beating your old time for 1 of the above.
4. Finding all the secrets.
Note that Id games usually gave scores in these areas - actually reporting "'Secrets 3 of 6", "Monsters
Obviously, some of these have to work against each other. You can't kill all the monsters if you take a short cut that detours right around some of them to save time. You can't cut your time by pokeing around looking for secret doors. If total fun is a combination of these, weighted by some factor that describes how important a given player thinks each one is, then total fun will never be the sum of maximal resultes in each category. But, players are free to replay with a different goal in mind, so replay motivation is high.
So, what on Earth prompted Raven to make new monsters spawn as long as the POV stays in the level? Ammo doesn't respawn, so simply staying too long means the character will always run out. You can't clean up a level and then look for secrets afterwards. If you didn't want to play like time was the most important factor, well, you were simply wrong to think that way. Raven paid to liscence an engine that could give the player 4 different possible victory conditions (and 4 sources of player satisfaction), and threw 2 of them out even though that code was already written for them, then made one that was usually optional manditory. The player's goal becomes finishing the game quickly, and replay motivation is low. What do you expect most players to say about a game that they finished fast and don't particularly want to play again?
There's lots of this: Develop lots of cool weapons (stong point), then put in a boss monster that is unkillable except by a special secret trick instead (play against your strong point).
Hire professional voices - use cheap semi-pro dialog writers.
Create some really cool opponents, do tricks with the terrain and the physics engine, and implement distinctive weather, lighting, traps, attack forms, new player character powers and sound effects - save all of them to throw at the player on the very last level of a 33 level game.
Do great graphics, then make most of the game take place in the dark. Make the commonest screen color brown. Include a flashlight, but no duct tape.
Who is John Cabal?
spellchecker strikes again. though your comment is pretty funny. :) --M
Well...it *was*, but not entirely. I think the rise of the internet has pretty much been a death knell for adventure games. For every person who gets satisfaction by not looking at gamefaqs.com through the whole game, there are fifty who will give up on a puzzle after less than a week of trying.
Back in the day, if you had a problem, you either stuck with it, or you got a friend to help. Collaboration with a friend was a great joy - "leapfrogging" and taking turns helping each other out.
Now that's actually more work than a simple google-search, and the willpower to resist just isn't there for most gamers. It ruins the fun (and hence the genre), but I really can't see a solution.
Last post!
if you havent played it, and you like adventure games, give it a try. 4 or 5 cds, but well worth the time :)
The author wrote that there is something wrong with the way that heroines are designed. He said that he thought it made women feel objectified, and that this was turning them away from games.
I disagree, because my girlfriend (29) and daughter (4) love the outlandish clothes women wear in games.
Three games that we are playing right now are: Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy: Chrystal Chronicles, and Xenosaga (ep 1.)
Pretty much all of these feature pretty outlandish clothing. We talk about it. We think it's cool.
I don't know about Ms. Floss, (pictured in the article,) but I suspect my girlfriend would think it was cool, and have no problem playing her. My daughter seems sort of blase, ("Do you like it?" "Yeah..,") but she's more focused on kicking robot ass in Xenosaga right now.
Our daughter regularly tells us, "I want to be Lulu," by which she means: "I want to dress like Lulu." She earnestly likes all these images. We let her cut and paster her old clothing, to make the outfits.
Nobody finds it particularly offensive that Lulu has big breasts.
So, I'm going to have to say: I think that one's right off the mark.
Maybe some women won't find the images appealing. Maybe a conservative christian women won't find it appealing. People who have strong ideas about what people should be, how they should dress- obviously, they're not going to like it.
But, there's a lot of women who like these kinds of things.
When I went to college, interest in anime was mostly a male thing. (Or, perhaps it was that I just went to a school that is mostly male.) But I've heard from the anime that in the younger croud, I'm guessing people aged 15-20 right now, that a lot of girls are into anime- that the ratio is even. I strongly suspect that almost all of those girls will feel comfortable with Ms. Floss.
Look at the movies that are coming out: Sin City, X-Men, - it's like we're going on a comic book fashion rampage. I don't think this is a bad thing.
It may offend more traditional sensibilities. Women from particular backgrounds may feel objectified. But: I think if we're talking about the growth of games, it makes sense to look at what this younger generation is doing and thinking.
The kid who wrote this (and I say kid, because typically adults are able to write criticism without using frantic, profanity filled pleas) really ought to spend a few minutes and think about the horrible hypocrisy he's showing. It seems apparent to me that the guy makes his games purchasing decisions based on what the cover the glossy fan boy gamer magazines and websites is showing.
There are actually quite a few games out there which are not FPS, racing games, or sports titles. He'll just have to look in a different part of the software store to find them.
Most of my favorite games (which I've collectively spent far too much time on) fall under none of these genres, and satisfy most of his complaints. At the end of the article, I thought "well, if this guy wants something that will satisfy most of his demands, he should head down to the store and pick up a copy of MS Flight simulator. It's challenging. The primary focus of its development is realism as opposed to graphics. It has online multi-player (for free). They're really aren't any restrictions in the game's world that would limit the immersion factor (the game does cap off the maximum altitude you can reach, but 95% of the aircraft you fly wouldn't be able to reach it due to physics modeling, so it's more or less a non-issue). In some of the default airplanes the pilots are drawn as women who are hardly "scantily clad". Granted, the AI is a little clunky, but in its current form it's more there for ambiance then game play.
Though I doubt he'll do it. I mean, there are no monsters to kill, nothing to blow up, and even though he says he wants games to be difficult at the start, the learning curve for most FS is pretty high. I mean, he'd probably have to read the manual and go through a number of tutorials before he could complete a short, successful flight in a Cessna without crashing. Oh, and he'd have to use a computer instead of a consul.
The Internet is generally stupid
Graphics.
Yes, definitely. I've been waiting for a graphics card that does real-time photorealistic graphics since the first time I played with Sculpt-3d on the Amiga. Raytracing is one of those embarassingly-parallelizable problems that should be hardcoded into the graphics engine, with each 16x16 patch of the screen having its own just-fast-enough GPU to render its 256 pixels over and over again. HL2 promised photorealistic graphics and water with ripples that actually produced optically correct distortions. Not quite, but we're close, and that's why the other big thing is...
Physics.
HL2 promised you could actually hit stuff and it'd break and break realistically. Your character would move realistically, so you wouldn't have the "Damn it, I can see a way through, why can't I get there? Oh yes, the game engine doesn't know there's a gap at the edge of that crate..." problem. Not quite, but better. And you can actually do things like hit a monster with a swinging weight instead of just shooting it... but only where that's been set up.
But did I buy HL2 for me? No, I bought it for my kid for his birthday. I wouldn't have bought it for myself... because he wanted it and I thought it'd be interesting to look at... but I knew that it wouldn't be a good game for me, even if it was a more realistic one. Give me an interesting game, I'll buy it for myself. But the interesting games don't tend to use the good game engines. I don't know why you can't use a good game engine to build something that isn't a "twitch" FPS. Does the API suck? Is the graphics and physics tied into a genre level editor? What's the problem?
I did buy Katamari Damarci. And it's the only recent videogame I've played by myself, instead of playing it with my kids for half an hour until I got tired of being blown away by the twitch reflexes of the young.
It's called US-Soldier. What a wild game! You don't have to buy it
One problem with GTA: San Andreas is that because the world is so much larger, proportionately more of it is window dressing--3D wallpaper that you can't really interact with.
In Vice City, you could drive around looking for interesting buildings, get out and walk over to them, and go inside and wander around. Often there would be something interesting.
In San Andreas, driving around with no particular aim in mind is boring, because almost all the buildings can't even be entered.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Actually,I see this as a GREAT way for a new startup dev company to make it RICH! Most of the FPS's are made using a very limited number of engines.Instead of spending your companies time trying to make another eye candy game,Instead have the entire team build an impressive A.I script that can be ported simply to the different game engines.Then the FPS makers can spend their time making better eye candy and simply lincense your A.I. engine for the brains and BOOM-Hello profit!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The analogy sort of breaks down there, but the point is we shouldn't ever see a "save point" in a game again. Limited saves were invented for consoles that didn't have the memory to let you "quicksave" (where you can save at any time, any where, with one keystroke like on a PC).
The need for a "Save anywhere" feature is inversely related to the quality of the game. Wanting to save at arbitrary locations is a symptom, not a problem. In a well-constructed game, defined save points add to excitement and suspense.
Why would I want arbitrary saves? Because
1) The only thing exciting is the boss battles, and everything leading up to them is drudgery. (poor game design)
2) The game play completely sucks, and the only reason to play is to see what cool graphics the next level has (even worse game design).
3) Losing to the boss requires me to repeat a puzzle I've already solved, which is boring now that I know the answer (poorly positioned save points).
4) The boss battles are so insanely difficult that it takes two dozen tries to even begin to figure out how to beat him. I'm so frustrated that I have no patience for anything except fighting the boss again, but I have to do a bunch of other stuff first (poorly positioned save point, and possibly poor design, depending upon whether fighting the boss over and over is actually enjoyable).
So much truth in that article. Only differences I have are that I like having my consoles horizontal (stackable if possible. Imagine rackmount consoles! That would be awesome. And, I like scenematic camera angles a lot... in certain types of games. It works very well in Silent Hill, because you only really need enough control of the charector to be able to run away. And it helps it be even that much more creepy. It does NOT work in platformers. AT ALL.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
If you agree with so many of his points, what makes it a "troll article"?
"Cinematic" camera angles. No, thank you. Understand that we need to see what my character sees. As soon as you start panning the camera around Mario for no better reason than to see the pretty sunset on the distance, we lose control. And here's another tip: If you have a single level where the player's character is required to run toward the camera, send the fucker back for more programming because you're not done yet.
I can't agree with either of these. Chase cameras get boring in a hurry. Many of the games I've most enjoyed had cinematic cameras with camera angles well thought out. If the camera angle is bad, you're doing the wrong thing. And for games with a puzzle aspect, being able to look around is important. I've also seen a number of games with effective "run toward the camera" scenes, usually with something chasing me. I only object if there are surprise pits and the like that my character should be able to see and avoid, but I can't because I can't see them coming up. In other words, it's OK not to let me see ahead, but don't use it to artificially add difficulty.
"bad guys were flailing at us with the same straight-line Ulysses S. Grant calvary charge that failed them twelve years ago in Doom 1"
For the love of jebus. WTF is a "calvary charge"? Does someone throw crucifix mountains at you?
zork% mv *.asp
283 files eaten by a grue
I have almost never played computer games. I spent hours playing one of those stupid little stick-figure "shoot down the airplane" thingies way back in the late '70's on a dumb terminal attached to a Processor Tech (IIRC). When I realized the time I wasted, I swore off computer games for two decades.
Well, actually, back when I had an Atari 520ST, I got "Neuromancer" and played that for a while - and a more graphics-intensive version of "shooting the asteroids" crap.
So a year or so ago, I finally decided to try "Hit Man" since I liked the idea of a game that let me run around and assassinate people.
So I appreciated this remark in the article:
"Instant-Failure Stealth Levels. Ack. This brings back horrible memories of a Goldeneye level where if you tripped an alarm, an infinite number of bad guys poured forth. We knew a man who failed that level 37 times, then got the Infinite Health cheat for it and came back. He intentionally tripped the alarm, the guards rushed out. Laughing maniacally, he proceeded to shoot those fuckers for four hours, killing 1,183 of them - 682 with groin shots - before his thumbs cramped up. Your game should not create this kind of bitterness."
Boy, did Hit Man make me bitter! I trashed that goddamn game and have once again swore off computer games.
But while I was playing, I did do stuff like the article mentions. In Hit Man, the Chinese Triad gang member operate out of a restaurant. When I got bored trying to make it through the restaurant to the goal, I resorted to taking an assault rifle, walking up to the front door of the restaurant, opening it, shooting a half dozen of the guards, then backing out of the door and closing it. The guards were smart enough to try to come out in the street after me. So I shot them down one by one as they came out.
Eventually, no guards in the front room of the restaurant. Wallah!
Then I'd repeat the process in the next room with a door.
Unfortunately I ran out of ammo too soon.
Once I finally got down to the Colombia scenario (and figuring out how to get past the jaquar to get to the drug lord's base was a stroke of brilliance on my part!), I was pissed to find that merely picking up a minigun was enough to get me attacked from all sides even though I was dressed like the guards. I was also pissed to find that even though I was dressed like the guards, after killing the drug lord, I couldn't get into the drug lab to blow it up. No way, Jose! Spent HOURS and dozens of attempts!
Fuck that! I HATE Hit Man! I swore off computer games again forever.
Or at least until I can afford Hit Man 2...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Completely awesome essay.
Where's the RSS feed?
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
Correction: If Will Wright is peeing on you, something is definately wrong. :p
Haha. We always lose? Have you checked the bodycount, er, I mean score? Way to spend your Memorial Day. Dick.
I really liked the art deco style of Grim Fandango, but it was not the last great RPG. That title belongs to Planescape: Torment (1999). It has storytelling like nothing else before or since. What a shame it never sold well...
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
The enemy soldiers in Iraq are not very good fighers. Our army would rather they attack head on, since all those encounters lead to tremendous losses for the insurgents.
And for you haters, it is not about our superior weapons. After all, how many times have we heard that AK-47 are better. Rather, our soldiers are smarter, better trained and have higher morale. yes they do. Really. Stop hating.
The reason is there are still people without DVD drivers. Seems silly, but it's true. I've ordered new systems at work, and a DVD drive has been extra, not included. However, EVERYONE has a CD drive. They became standard back during all that MPC nonsense.
Now one of the things with a game release is you want it to run on as many systems as possible. It's alsways a balance between having nifty graphics, and having it work on older systems. Every system you exclude is a potenital customer lost.
Well, that goes for install media too. If you go with a DVD release, you exclude all those that don't have DVDs. Given that CDs cost next to nothing to press and glass, why not just go with those and include everyone?
I feel your pain, but it's just one of those things that isn't going to change any time soon. However some game makers are doing dual release, a CD version and a DVD version. Perhaps they'll start to do a dual release in the same box, but I suspect not because they are all still piracy parinoid.
Try Halo. It does suck, but it has legs when you look down.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
The problem is that many game universes are too self similar for people to visually find their way around. Yes, that's how we do it in real life, we don't have a map but we use visual clues to figure out where we are and navigate. However even in fairly bland areas/buildings in the real world, there is plenty of variance to cue in on. People put posters on the walls, surfaces take damage at different rates, the light is different in different parts of the building, etc. There also are a whole bunch of people walking around that you can go and ask, and they'll help tell you where to go, not just deliver a scripted response.
Many games lack that. Now it's not the designer's fault entirely, there are real limits to the amount of textures you can load in a card at the same time, but it's still a problem. You find yourself lost without a map because everything looks the same, and there's no one to ask for directions.
Everquest is an excellent example of this. I was always getting lost in zones because you'd have this wide open space, nothing descript anywhere and your "find direction" ability worked for shit. Even if I go in to the middle of the desert out here, I still am not nearly that lost, the landscape has variances, there are major landmarks (like mountains) that I can cue off of, and the sun is always there to help you know which way is which (unconsciously usually).
So if you develop a world that is very rich in detail, where everything truly looks different, then on you can argue people don't need a map. However if you find people who haven't played your game getting lost all the time, sorry, your world doesn't cut it, a map is a good idea.
There's also the fact of how much you take in at once in a game. You are limited to a 90 degree FOV and looking around isn't natural. Moving the point of view is associated with moving your character, and is generally a conscious action. It's not like eye movements and even head movements, which we tend to do all the time automatically. Thus there's less information for a person to cue in on to figure out where they are.
Generally I think maps are a very good idea in games. Being lost isn't fun, and a map just makes sure that never happens.
hateful bile = +1000 American President
Nae, I cannae rid Japanese, Laddie.
Which part is hateful bile, and who is it hateful to? The enemy or our soldiers? Sarcasdic yeah, but pretty much accurate.
The part about them always winning maybe? This is mostly true, they do usually win. The reason is because for them to win we just have to leave, for us to win we have to establish a functional democracy and then leave. That's not usually actually feasible. Usually we either get sick of it and leave, or stay forever. I wouldn't call either of those winning. The last time we succeeded in putting a country to together that we could actually safely leave was in WWII.
Yeah, he's pretty sarcasdic there, but also pretty much dead on.
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice
Wrong on ammo starvation, totally acceptable challenge element. Especially in Resident Evil. Also, it's a laugh he thinks buying in-game items/unlockables is not likely to be extremely commonplace.
Basically all of his complaints that go along the lines of OMG REPEATING PARTS OF GAME IS STUPID I HAVE KIDS ETC are bad. Requiring a player to complete a certain whole segment of a game without losing is perfectly reasonable.
Thank goodness someone else said it. I'm tired of getting shat on, dissed and dismissed for talking about this stuff for the past ten years - it is why I left the industry.
You can't change this from within the system, the vacant $uits have too much power and they simply don't care. You can't change it from outside the system, the system is too insular and amoral and is not responsive to common sense, or even examples of dissident innovative success like Katamari Damacy - and consumers,sadly don't drive markets, any more than voters drive candidates, they follow them - serve them quality, and they will cherish it, feed them crap, and they will worship it - and the other nine-tenths will simply turn off, tune out, and play solitaire instead.
The only way to change it is by treating the mainstream, commercial game industry as damage and routing around it, creating alternatives - not just alternative developers creating alternative games, but alternative distribution, alternative revenue models, alternative value systems.
90% of the potential market is waiting. Some of us are trying to do something about it. And it's nice to have some cover from folks who obviously Get It [tm]. The article was brilliant, and any developer who doesn't pay attention, who thinks they know better, deserves the STDs they'll get from the pimps who write their paychecks.Flout 'em and scout 'em,
and scout 'em and flout 'em;
Thought is free. - Shakespeare [The Tempest]
At least there are no jumping puzzles.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
Also, I have tons of free diskspace left and 2 gigs of RAM. There's no reason anything should be streaming off my DVD. Drop the entire contents on the HD, and stream it from there.
Copy protection is the only sensible reason publishers do this. Why else would they force you to keep the optical media in the drive in order to play the game? Cracking the game or using a 'virtual CD drive' may or may not solve this 'problem'.
P.S. I just bought the Episode III soundtrack. There is a big FBI logo stamped on both the CD and the bonus DVD as well as on the backside insert card in the jewel case -- thus marring the artistic beauty of these mass-produced materials.... This is ultimately pointless as the ripping tools are already out there and if the media is uncopyable digitally, it sure is copyable in the analog domain.
that's not AI. that's just playing against other live human beings, which tons of games already support multiplayers. ;p
HD Trailers
I'll mostly agree with the article, and I would like to add some things that I've seen in some games that I wish would become more standard in games.
Don't Arbitrarily Restrict Inventory:
One thing that has always bugged me, especially about RPGs, is how a given character can seem to carry an unlimited number of items, but only say, 99 of a given item. This is particularly bothersom in games such as Final Fantasy, where by the end of the game it may take 30 or 40 hi-potions to fully heal your party.
Provide a Glossary:
This was a feature I saw for the first time in Final Fantasy Tactics, and later in Star Ocean 3 (might have been in Star Ocean 2, but it doesn't stick out in my mind), and I thought it was one of the nicest features I've seen in a game in a long time. RPGs are long, time. Most good RPGs have rather complex stories, and sometimes it might be a week or two between when I get time to sit down and play. A glossary helps me to quickly go through and refresh my memory on key points.
Let me skip long animations:
The article hinted at this, but I think it's a point that is worth repeating. Long animations and cut-scenes are pretty the first time you see them, but quickly get really annoying. The best example that comes to my mind are the summons in the Final Fantasy games. I really liked how Chrono Cross has a fast-forward button you could use in a newgame+
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
So [if you're concerned about console barriers to entry] don't play games on a console.
Problem is that the PC is sorely lacking in same-screen multiplayer titles. Where's anything like Super Smash Bros. Melee (a 4-player comic fighting game) on Windows? If an independent studio wants to create a new same-screen multiplayer title, what platform should it choose?
fish and pipes
Even if the C=64 tape games did have minigames during loading, they weren't on an optical disc, so it might not count as invalidating prior art.
"Out of interest, what exactly does this modification entail? is it hardware or software based?"
It varies by the console, but both hardware and software solutions are available for all 3 of the current-gen consoles.
All of these use various means to achieve the common goal of running code which was either not approved by the console manufacturer, has been copied on to an unapproved medium, or is approved for a different region.
For anything related to Xbox mods, xbox-scene.com is the central resource for everything.
The PS2 side of things has ps2news, and Gamecube has GCdev. I don't have the URLs since I'm lazy and not involved with either of those scenes, but I'm sure they'll be the first results on google.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
Well, these are my explanations for it. Take or leave them.
1. The game has no leaps-of-death. There isn't a single place in the game where a fall proves instantly fatal. I'm not even sure you take *damage* from falls, no matter how far. Take out the death and you take out the reason jumping puzzles are a decidedly un-fun form of nerve-wracking. The worst that can happen to you is having to go through a few rooms to get back to where you started, or having to scramble to get off some damaging ground, and those are made less troublesome because:
2. The puzzles are done fairly. Indeed they barely qualify as puzzles, because the game doesn't feel like getting from platform to platform is a play mechanic. It's just something you do to get places. Thus, destination platforms are rarely tiny, often there's walls on the other side of jumps to help you avoid taking a fall, and the game rarely forces you to make a jump that's *barely reachable*. Since the jumps are just a way of getting around large, spacious areas, instead of an intended source of challenge, Retro Studios was free to not make them too challenging. Note that this is actually an improvement over the original Metroid -- I wonder how many players got through the whole game only to be thwarted by that damn "Time Bomb Set Get Out Fast" shaft with the half-block-wide platforms.
3. Metroid Prime isn't a game with "ground to cover," most of which will only be seen once, but a game in which the player goes back and forth across areas. The places with jumps feel like they're a natural part of the level (with the possible exception of the floating, invisible, moving platforms in a couple of areas late in the game, but those are there as an inventory barrier, not really difficult once the X-Ray Scope has been obtained). The difficulty graph of the game tends to have long, low plateaus with spikes around where bosses are, but they never really get that high. It's just not that hard a game, with much of the enjoyment coming from the moody, believable atmosphere. Less difficulty means less frustration overall, but the game's presentation makes up for it.
And, with these new names, put in a mini-game!
How much does Namco charge other publishers per title and per copy to license the privilege, under U.S. Patent 5,718,632 and foreign counterparts, to run one game while loading an unrelated game from an optical disc? Or does Namco even make licenses under the patent available for less than half of parent company Bandai's market capitalization before December 2015?
twenty measly dollars for a DVD-ROM.
Don't you mean "a DVD-ROM and a new case" for those people who have only one 5.25" drive bay open to the front? And what about on laptop computers?
(after a little more digging) The patent in question makes few specific references to an optical disc (elsewhere a "recording medium"), so could you provide some references for the Commodore 64 games you're talking about, which play one game while loading another?
I would sign up, but I heard there's no respawn points. I mean, fuck that - what if I get lag?
~Will
sig?
Only two cents!? You can't buy a game for that amount. You are going to have to cough up at least 50 cents before you can convince a game producer to include more multiplayer options.
Ah..reminds me of this one time i was watching my brother play UT2k3. I think it was the last level where it was 1 on 1 DM with a bot. So they're both running around, fragging each other and it comes to this point when the bot starts chasing my brother. So, he goes up an elavator/lift thingy to higher ground and waits at the top all the time firing through the opening hoping to get the bot while it was coming up. But after about 20 seconds or so, there was no lift rising sound and no bot in sight.
So we thought, wow, the AI is pretty decent not to follow such an obvious trap. Since it took so long, we figured that by now it probably ran off to some alternate route, so my brother jumped back down through the opening. Lo and behold, the bot was still there, waiting at the bottom of the lift and it blasted him to smithereens.
Now that is smart AI. I know human players who can't even play that well.
What's the average size of a PC monitor? 17" if we're being generous.
Don't most newer PCs come with a composite or S-video output connector, which connects to most larger televisions? And don't they have several front-panel USB ports for attaching gamepads? I personally have a 17" VGA LCD in front of me and a 27" composite CRT behind me, both connected to my PC. And I've also seen college students play Smash Bros. crowded around a 13" dorm-size TV set.
You tried one question. Did you have an answer for the other: If an independent studio wants to create and publish a new same-screen multiplayer title, what platform should it choose?
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...
The fallacy of this statement is laughable. Games don't simply exist. The reason that a particlar game genre is produced again and again is become you asshats keep buying them. Again and again and again. Want more games like Katamari Damacy? Then buy the game.
Um... I did. Actually, I went in halves for a used PS2, *then* bought Katamari Damacy, making its effective cost to me $85.
Despite my doing what you said, there wasn't any other PS2 games I was interested in. B-but... I bought Katamari Damacy!
What is my point? My point is this: I like clever, original games, and will buy them, and in fact buy nothing except them. But there are millions of idiots who buy Ultra-Madden 200X. This means big companies, chasing profit and mindful of opportunity costs, go after that, to the deteriment of things like Katamari Damacy.
Thus, there is very, very little out there that interests me, other than that which is produced by Nintendo, who, for all their faults, still know how to make clever games most of the time. Meaning that I buy, primarily, Nintendo. Meaning a number of idiots on Slashdot would call me a fanboy. Argh.
5. And on the opposite side of the nipple coin...
A game these day costs in the tens of millions of dollars to release. A company is simply not going to risk that kind of green (and possibly the fate of the company) on an analyst's hunch. There has to be something more than a gut feeling to release that kind of game.
If the gut feeling is had by an analyst, then I agree. If it's by a developer, or a master designer, then I think you're smoking crack, sorry to say. They probably know their field a lot better than an analyst. Or a marketing department.
Ultimately, what the article says is "Game companies won't take chances because games cost too much to make." Meanwhile you object to that, saying, "Game companies won't take chances because games cost too much to make." The article said it with regret. You seem to think it's unavoidable, and thus people shouldn't complain. Me, I think I'll continue complaining.
7. Loading...
As soon as you come up with a mechanism to physically get 16 megs of data off a DVD rom faster than 1 second, I'll be all over improving load times.
He already covered this: figure out ways to load data during down time. Metroid Prime loads the new room during the previous one, in a rather slick fashion, though I'm sure it means that levels must be designed with it in mind. Even so, most developers put nowhere near that much thought into the process. Yet, somehow, most of Nintendo's games have little or no load times. (I hate to bring up Nintendo again, but it's true.)
5. Stop the Short-Sighted Business Bullshit
Agree and disagree. I agree that frivolous or baseless patents are not good for the game industry. But if a company comes up with something truly revolutionary, I think that they should get to reap some reward from that.
Like, um, HAVING THE FEATURE IN THEIR GAME?! Sony patented a brain-centered input method not so long back that they admit doesn't even exist yet, and they don't even know how it would work! I don't see how anyone could possibly say that's good for anyone, including customers, except Sony.
If by reaping rewards, you mean exclusive access to that idea, then I have absolutely no sympathy. Building on each other's ideas is what moves the industry forward as a whole, not what holds it back. Nothing says you have to tell how you accomplished it -- if the idea is deserving of real protection, then it shouldn't be trivial for others to duplicate anyway.
BTW, what Slashdot readers tends to have a default antipathy for isn't patents, it's software patents. And ust because a bunch of Slashdot readers think something's wrong, it's not a secret indicator that that thing is right.
Enough responses, I told my doctor I'd try to lay off the extreme bitterness.
But you forgot the most important part. The final ledge will be just beyond the range they can actually jump. It'll be ALMOST achievable, so they can feel sure they'll get it the next time they try it, but it will always be just a bit too far.
Oh yeah, and no save points.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I don't want to spend 30 mins on some level only to have to leave 10 minutes from the end, and therefore have to start the level all over from scratch the next time.
A lot of console games have solved this problem: save points every 3 minutes or so for permanent saving, and quicksaves that are deleted once you load them (to solve the problem of interruption without enabling the cheating strategy of take a step, get hit, quickload, rinse and re-cheat). Or should I just reset your score to 0 on a repeated quickload?
why can I play my game uninterrupted ... When I have > 1GB of memory ????
Then why can't you just make a RAM disk and install your game there?
However, many of these problems are hardware-bound (you can only stream data from dvd so quickly regardless of how you optimize your code)
On PC, Xbox, or next gen consoles, try optimizing out DVD access entirely by copying the entire game to a folder on the hard drive and not reading the DVD after the game has been installed. Let the player play Minesweeper or Solitaire or Tetris for 10 minutes while the game copies itself.
knowledge-bound (AI isn't exactly a solved problem is it!)
But you can get your programmers to avoid at least some of the dumb mistakes in the previous generation of titles, can't you?
Save points are ... not there to save space!
Try telling that to somebody who has 8 kilobytes (not megabytes, kilobytes) to save the state of the game on a handheld game platform, and larger save chips increase the replication cost, forcing your developers to take less pay.
And do you have some kind of magical map that shows you floor layouts of places you've never been before?
Magical map? No, a recon team that scopes out the area before the boss sends you in. Not all games can use the excuse that the player is on the recon team, and even given that excuse, the map on the player's in-game PDA could start with a copy of the low-detail map in the lobby, so that the player's mission is to explore the environment specifically to bring in those details needed for the next mission.
1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.
...Where's the game where we're a castaway on a deserted island and the object of the game is to find food and clean water...
This is not really what we want; it's actually not always fun. What we actually want is AI that will a) surprise us, or b) do something that appears clever. In some of the better, faster-paced games, there a decent amount of intelligence on the part of the enemy -- (ever see how enemies in Half Life 2 will try multiple doors to get to you?) but we're so busy running and gunning, that we don't notice it.
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before.
I'll be -1 Redudant and point out, say, many of Will Wright's offerings, (PA notwithstanding). Hell, they even bring up Katamari later on in the article. I was somewhat agog at the article's next complaints:
Why isn't a there a spy game where we actually get to be a real spy rather than a hallway-roving kill machine?
Games such as Thief and, to a lesser extent, Splinter Cell, fulfill the former; and the underrated (but difficult-to-play) Robinson's Requiem and (again, to a lesser extent) Notrium are among the latter.
5. And on the opposite side of the nipple coin... Developers will be shocked one day when they notice that the world is full of women. It's true! More than half of your potential customer base are penisless.
Absolutely; I think companies will flock to that as the "next-big-thing" eventually. Here's my timetable for buzzwords:
2004 - Shadows and Lighting
2005 - Realistic Physics
2006 - Emergent Gameplay
2007 - Appeal to Women
10. And while we're at it... Let's rid games of all arbitrary barriers.
Again, I agree; and I wonder if, should we start building games differently, (e.g., if more elements are handled by simulated systems rather than scripted events), will we see more of this? I care less about this from the standpoint of immersion, and more from the standpoint of the ability to solve problems as I want to solve problems. This seems less a matter of horsepower and more a matter of game design. It's not slow CPUs preventing us from doing this. Is it?
________
Epidemic Groove - A combination of real-time-strategy and action on a cellular level.
We're indie. We're working on our 14th game.
Why the hate for Sokoban on page 7?
Stop hating
I'm terribly sorry. Forgive me High Lord Bush, for I have been "hating" on the army for wanting them to come back immediately, or better yet, have never been sent out of our country in the first place.
For penance I shall pray for every last one of them to die a glorious and honorable death, for this is the True Way of loving our soldiers.
First of all, nobody hyped the Halo 2 AI much. All the hype was for the Half-Life 2 AI, which got completely killed. I mean, they couldn't even stick to scripted tricks that they know how to do. No, they had to cut a boss and completely script certain scenarios, and the only excuse I've ever heard is that we don't have enough CPU.
Bring 'em on! By the time I can see HL2 on full detail at a steady 60 fps, I'll be more than able to run their good AI.
But, Halo 2, although it has intentionally stupid AI sometimes (do you really expect a Brute to be much for strategy?), it also has done some crazy things to me, and even crazier things to my friends who play on Legendary. True, Legendary is pretty cheap -- instant one-hit-kill headshots from Jackal snipers or three plasma shots from a fully automatic weapon to kill you -- but from what I'm told, the AI learns and strategizes.
I'm talking about, watch an Elite say something to another Elite, then they cut around in a pincer maneuver around the sides of the area, while a third Elite in a Ghost charges you from the front. Or, sneak up behind a jackal sniper placed obviously in your path and bash him to death, and have it work the first time you play through, but the second time, he hears you, spins around, and one-hit-kills you.
It could be a lot better, but to be honest, I like it right where it is. That way, I'm encouraged to do co-op mode, just because all of my CPU allies are fucking morons. And, for that matter, I bet that for all your chess/go/sudoku strategizing, those skills probably have to be completely re-learned for modern games.
Now, if only more games had co-op... What I really want is not MMO, but -- say -- Half-Life 2, in which Alyx is at least as much of a badass as Gordon, but in different areas -- maybe she's one of those black-ops ninjas? Or maybe she builds stuff, MechAssault style -- and where I can network two computers and play through the entire game with a girlfriend. We could even be split up for long periods of time. You could even still script our meetings -- maybe she has to catch up to me to give me the RPG so I can kill the strider, and until then, I have to survive in a courtyard with three of them and come up with inventive ways to keep Barny alive.
Or, while I'm brainstorming, maybe we do want some less linear games. Not GTA-style -- you still want somewhat of a linear plot -- but more like Jak II and III -- a massive, dynamically-loaded world, where you very rarely find the borders, and yet you still have some purely linear sequences and a lot of things you have to do. That would take some of the pain out of co-op -- maybe you have simpler goals, like "kill the final boss", and lots of tools to collect to do that, and you can have an 8-person game.
It could even work, if we could save multiplayer games.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
"Score"? You mean like where Afghanistan is lapsing back into chaos now that we're too busy in Iraq to shoot the Afghan warlords in the ass when they step out of line? Democracy points: +10 having an election, -8 for nobody caring and no military or police force to make them care. Did you think these people would get together and say "Hi! We're your new government!" and the people who lost the election would say "OK!"? No, the losers did what they've done for the past 2 or 3 centuries: Grabbed their guns and claimed a city or two for themselves.
As for the body count, remember that shooting the civilians makes the counter-terrorists lose.
If I can buy a dime bag and get high for ~2 hours
What happens when you're fined $750 to $30,000 for possession?
which is why I usually only buy RPGs. $55 for ~30-40 hours is a decent deal.
What do you do once you get stuck? And what do you do if you buy a console and then no decent RPGs come out on it *cough*N64*cough*?
Wow, too bad that's utterly subjective and impossible to determine before the patent is awarded.
Couldn't the examiner have looked at Namco's application, compared it to the existing loaders for Commodore 64 tape games that would let you play some simple 4 KB game while the main game was loading, as well as Windows 3.1 OS's ability to run Minesweeper while doing something else, and not awarded U.S. Patent 5,718,632 to Namco?
The cell is all about streaming math-intensive tasks. It is not designed to execute object-oriented code or even traverse a linked-list.
The Cell processor is a PowerPC general purpose CPU connected to several DSPs. The PPC CPU in the PS3's Cell is clocked significantly faster than the 0.3 GHz MIPS Emotion Engine of the PS2. Even if there's a lot more branch misprediction delay, the brute force of the higher clock speed probably makes up for that *cough*Pentium 4*cough*.
People are fixing music by 1) making their own music
How is it possible to be certain that you're not subconsciously infringing someone else's copyright when you write your own song?
2) supporting local talent
Problem is that local talent too often plays in bars. "Go away, you're not 21."
and 3) buying from artists they like instead of the big names they hate.
How can somebody without a computer, without Internet access, or without broadband Internet access find a decent band? Ninety-nine percent of FM radio in pop genres plays only major label music.
In games like Civ it's possible to have strong computer opponents that play by the same rules as the player. But in FPS, MMOGS and RPGs it's just not possible. Computers are just logic machines.
The next generation of consoles may offer performance that makes slightly better AI possible, but it won't be much better - in fact it may well be worse because the focus is more on eye candy.
First of all, I'd like to say that Slashdot's human-testing images are getting ever-more unreadable and are approaching the point that I can't read them. Guys, if we've reached the point that the OCR is that good, you just need to use a new approach to distinguish between robots and people.
Okay. On to story commentary.
My one, overriding point is that I think that this guy frequently asks for something to alleviate something that irritates him, but doesn't consider what would actually happen if he *got* that thing.
We get so overjoyed every time an enemy actually shoots from cover in a game that we forgive the fact that real, advanced A.I. is as much an unfulfilled promise as the flying car. Where are the FPS bad guys who can adapt their strategy on the fly?
(a) This is hard to do. Really, really hard. Every CS student who goes in and takes some basic AI classes immediately thinks "Gee, I can just ram all these variables into a neural net and have a learning AI". Then they get time last in the development process, and then discover that it isn't actually so easy to produce "intelligent" behavior. A second problem is that most AIs provide a reasonably consistent behavior. It may be kind of stupid to have a monster run straight at a character, but at least it's not the monster running in the opposite direction and shooting at his own comrades. That's easy to happen in a "learning" environment, because you have to deal with something that can change its logic significantly. AI has a lot of input variables involved, and it's hard to test every case available, and just one screw-up really breaks the illusion. With *humans*, this isn't a problem because every person has a huge set of knowledge that we call "common sense" that will override stupid behavior. We can't just produce an AI with common sense (well, maybe we can, but if so, it's going to have much more important impacts than making FPSes slightly more fun).
(b) Real AI isn't necessarily fun. It's exciting to mow down mobs of stupid enemies, because you're vicariously enjoying the equivalent of a superhero. Think about what happens in real life, with real, human-level AI. There are no 5000 person killing sprees that go on for days. Someone kills maybe twenty people, a SWAT team hunkers down, sits in a negotiation position, and maybe shoots the guy. That's not fun or exciting (well, unless you want a SWAT simulation).
(c) Screenshots sell games. AI increases replayability. Nobody (nobody statistically significant) plays a game for fifty hours and then decides whether or not to buy a game. Not surprisingly, the bulk of the cycles go to better screenshots.
(d) Remember that *you* had fun with enemies that come right at you years ago. Now, you know all the techniques to beat simple strategies like that, and you want something new. But lots of people didn't spend vast amounts of time learning these strategies, so straight-at-me still works nicely for them.
(e) If you want it, convince reviewers to review it. That means longer review times. That means players being willing to wait for later reviews (and not just going to the first review, which discusses graphics and cosmetics). Players seem to pretty consistently go to the early reviews. To really know a game well, I'd say that a (knowledgeable) gamer would have to play it start-to-end, possibly a few times, though this depends on the genre. No mainstream Web reviewers are going to do this, because it takes so bloody long.
It has to do with the fact that both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily.
I haven't followed the XBox or PS3 design at all, but this smells an awful lot like random bullshit from someone without a technical background. V
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
i'd be more worried about the head shots
My 2cents... That was an outstanding, and funny article. Thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Didn't necessarily agree with everything, but with all that was said, no one can claim 100% agreement. Still a great article.
Now onto a question... awhile back I saw people starting to use head gear to play games. I figured, this has to be a new deal in gaming, and wondered why it never took off. Talk about immersive capability... you have complete control over what the user sees, and for a couple bucks, you tack on some headphones to boot and you've got audio as well. No more hunching over a screen, wishing like hell that your roommate would turn off the light behind you. You start building the turn and look capability into the headset, and now you've got more overall control (meaning some combination of finger work + mouse + fractional head movements for glancing around) Anyway, I always thought headsets with 3d style viewing would be the wave of the future... apparently I was wrong... Anyone out there know why headsets never took off?
This movie caught your point dead on; when Tim and Sigourney have to go through the stamper thing
she complains about the stamper being put in the ship just to create a pointless problem; this scene was priceless.
Really though, pointless activity isn't limited to games. Most movies these days have gratuitous chases, gore, swearing, and sex that do nothing for the plot but just titillate/shock the viewer.
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
Yes but as long as you don't speak their language you won't be annoyed by "OMFG U FAG LOL" comments.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Too long to post here, so I posted at my website.
Or, sneak up behind a jackal sniper placed obviously in your path and bash him to death, and have it work the first time you play through, but the second time, he hears you, spins around, and one-hit-kills you.
So how did that happen? Has the ghost of the killed sniper told all other snipers: "Beware! Better listen and turn around if you hear someone approaching or you might share my terrible fate!".
Or is there only one sniper that gets resurrected every time you meet him?
This is the game learning, not the NPCs...
I don't need a signature.
Patrol in your hummer for hours/days on end until you get randomly blown up. Game over.
No need for reloads or respawn points
Those Metal Gear Solid games really sold like crap, didn't they?
-( koutetsu )
The reason is because for them to win we just have to leave, for us to win we have to establish a functional democracy and then leave.
Would you first establish a functional democracy in your own country, please? Or did you mean puppet regime? Well, you've already established the previous one in Iraq. That didn't turn out so well, did it?
Yes, as has been clearly shown, time and again, by (among others) John Rambo, Master Chief and those kids from Red Dawn, it is indeed clever to attack a well organized and superiorly equipped force that has readily accessible artillery and air support head on, wearing nothing but your studly manhood and a crew-served machine gun (Fire from the hip. Remember, aiming is cheating)!
Throughout history underfunded guerilla-type armies has won countless conflicts against a superior enemy by blatantly ignoring the disparity of forces and engaging them head on in a straight fight!
You Sir, is truly a master tactician, and I want to subscribe to your newsletter.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
Definatly want better AI in games. (RTS games especially)
:P
Definatly aggree we need better game ideas.
How about a first person shooter where "shoot everything that moves" is NOT the right answer.
Something where sneaking past a guy without them seeing you might be the better (i.e. safer) option.
Something where there are puzzles to solve (by "puzzles", I mean like in games such as Resident Evil 2 where you have to find items and figure out where to use them)
Or how about a game where you get to play a cop and have to solve a crime by finding the evidence and stopping the criminals.
One game I would like to see is a game that would be a cross between Diablo II, Sentinel Worlds 1 Future Magic and Star Trek Away Team. It would be a Diablo II style action RPG with items, weapons, experience, enemies to kill, shops to buy things at, skills and abillities, quests to complete and so on. Make it a party based game where you have different members of your party who would be different races and classes (e.g. medics, hackers, close combat experts, ranged weapon experts, pilots etc) and would be given experience from party kills. Attributes and abillities and items and stuff would be much like Diablo II.
There would be ships to fly, planets to explore, alien races to interact with (kill, talk to, buy from, sell to, help out etc etc)
Another idea would be to make it with a single character instead of a party and make it a MMORPG.
Either way would probobly be worth playing.
It could be set in or it could be done all on its own.
In fact, the aformentioned Sentinel Worlds 1 Future Magic is the closest game to what I am thinking of (that I know of)
As for the line about graphics, what annoyed me the most about E3 is that none of the 3 "next-gen" consoles were on display. Sure they were showing off the look of the new machines.
But Neither Sony, Microsoft OR Nintendo had actual consoles showing actual games (or test demos, they would work too) on the real hardware.
The companies talk and talk about how fancy their hardware is, lets see more actual footage to back up that talk. Instead of talking about how the XBOX 360 can get full HDTV resolution with anti-aliasing in real time, show that in action. Show shots from Halo III (or if thats not ready yet, give some programmers and artists an XBOX 360 Devkit and tell them to push the hardware to the limits and make a tech demo).
Ditto to Sony and Nintendo (well less so to nintendo since they havent emphasized their hardware power so much).
Microsoft had a non-functioning console and a couple of G5 PowerMacs as its showing.
Sony only had pre-rendered content to show.
A few things of my own that I want to complain about
1.No more World War 2 games.
2.Much more realisim in motor racing games (if you are going to have a replica of Mount Panorama at Bathurst and are going to include the advertising signs, put the right logos on it. There has never been a bridge/overpass at Mount Panorama that says "Bridgestone" on it, it says "Dunlop". EA, I am looking at you.
Also, if you are going to have real-world racing, get ALL the teams and ALL the tracks found in the real competition (Codemasters I am looking at you here for missing out HRT in V8 Supercars)
Make the gameplay more realistic too.
e.g. include the same pitstops the real races have. If the real race has 2 fuel stops, make the simulated race have the same fuel stops.
3.Classic games. Make more of the old games available. Nintendo has it right with the Revolution being able to play classic NES and SNES games (just as long as they are emulated and not ports/remakes and as long as the emulation is good). How about more arcade companies signing up with sites like starroms.com (making classic games available either officially or through a site like starroms) is probobly quite simple and requires
next to no captial investment.
Oh and BTW, a remake of a classic game is almost certainly NOT going
Well we seem to have the problem of defining good AI. To me, good AI is NOT:
- all-knowing and predicting where exactly you will be in
.3 seconds to shoot you in the eye (for shooters)
- expanding like crazy and building up an army before you can say "Hello, Betty!" (RTS)
- using dirty tricks like knowing the map, your location, the size of your forces etc. GRATUITOUSLY (for RTS)
A good AI would:- Try various tactics to choose the best
- Model human behaviour to the max (make mistakes, get blinded by harsh light, get nervous and drop weapon, panic and freeze, panic & run away, have problems seeing in the dark, get confused in unfamiliar settings, etc.)
- Send out recon parties to scout the area
- Use terrain/environment for tactical advantage
I remember some of these features in UFO I made me very happy and immersed. It felt BOTH real and fun. UFO Aftermath disappointed me,however, due to extremely long-range deadly weapons that negated the effect of (little) terrain diversity during missions. (rant) They could have spent a few more weeks tweaking the range/damage, to make it really nice (/end rant)Starcraft would be another example of bad AI that lead to stupid and repetitive games against the computer, but it was not designed to be an RTS AI anyway...
I think the article linked to in the article says much more about this next gen gaming: This article sums up the next-gen from the developers perspective, a view I've been trying to get across to those here on /. who seem to overlook this perspective when it is the most important one!
These new consoles (especially the PS3 and Xbox 360) which are all about the numbers are going to suck at housing anything but pretty games. They both use in-order CPU's which kills all attempts at AI and gameplay improvements, these are streamlined for graphics only and this is a big mistake. After playing one or two FPS titles in HD and maybe a sports/racing title what is going to be left to play on your new console? Nothing. Thats why Sony and MS are pushing the "its not a game console" so heavily, they know developers are not going to support these systems with their high priced development costs.
Microsoft is off in left field with their grand idea to take the scum of online MMORPG's and put them on high with their SUPPORTING real life sale of virtual items, and Sony created their own ebay-like site to also support this degenerative practice. WTG, dickheads.
People need to wake up and see these new consoles are 98% marketing and 2% games, they are going to bomb bigtime... maybe not upfront on console sales (which neither of these two care about anyhow because they are taking a loss on the hardware), but on licensing, amount of games developed, and reception of the public.
Only Nintendo is aiming for the true gamers and they have it right this time, cheaper console, simple console, simple games, game delivery system, cheap development costs (this is huge!), innovative titles, and also including families and older gamers.
These are sad times for us true gamers, and when the FPS and GTA games fall flat, I can't wait to see Nintendo standing on the burning rubble of the so-called competitors.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Many people don't like being told "this is where you should end your gaming today" for any number of reasons. Maybe you want to play for another 10 minutes before going to sleep. Maybe your mom/spouse/kid/friend just interrupted you to do something important. You need to quit NOW, but who wants to lose the last 10-30 or more minutes of play?
So pause it. Or turn it off. If the game play itself is actually enjoyable, then you'll enjoy doing it again. If you don't, it's not a problem with save, it's a problem with the fundamental game design.
Maybe you just completed something you think was very difficult, and you don't want to have to do it again.
Again, this indicates a deficiency with game design. Games should be challenging, rather than difficult. So replaying a section should be an enjoyable opportunity to improve your gameplay, not a chore.
You and the developer won't always agree on what warrents a save.
The point is that well-placed save points improve the game experience. Real-life games are designed this way. When you play golf, if you blow the last few holes, you don't cross them off your scorecard, go back a few holes and do them over. You just play another game. The game is constructed such that (a) the "chunks" are small enough to doing a whole game over is not a burden, and (b) the gameplay is intrinsically enjoyable enough that it is actually fun to play again, and you always believe that you have a realistic prospect of doing better the second time around. The single biggest problem with videogames is that it is possible to keep people playing by offering novel rewards--something new to see--as a reward for continued play. This leads designers to neglect the gameplay. So instead of the game being intrinsically fun to play, playing the game becomes a "fee" that you have to pay to see what comes next.
Exploding barrels.
Crates I can understand. Crates I can see in the real world. Generally, guns and ammunition and supplies are stored in crates until someone needs them. Yeah, maybe it's a little strange that I bust open this huge crate and all thats inside is a box of shotgun shells, but I don't want the game to try and render all the useless crap that was inside. Just show me what I need.
But exploding barrels? Never seen one of those. They're all over the place in your average FPS, though. HL2? Yep, exploding barrels! Doom 3? You bet! Painkiller? What's hell without exploding barrels?
What is in these barrels that makes them violently explode after if you shoot them? And why do people just leave them laying around all over the place? Don't they know those things are dangerous? Shouldn't someone have disposed of them properly?
But no. Exploding barrels are clearly marked, and are stacked up or laying around just about everywhere. Nobody else seems bothered by them.
It's the land of the brave, and the home of the free
Where the less you know, the better off you'll be.
You're actually human and admit you only want to play about 10 hours of Rainbow Six, or Mario, or Final Fantasy.
I LIKE Final Fantasy, but I have a life. I tend to play about 30 hours in 6 months until I get sick of it. Then, when I'm unemployed I finish all the FF games I started. I'm only up to FFX, since I have steady employment. Oh, and halfway through Tactics (the original), but it's pretty much all the same after a while.
On the other hand, hardcore fans that play multiple times, like investing 200 hrs. a year in FFX to discover ALL the secrets? They will probably pay for 10 episodes.
Or maybe they understand what "Offtopic" means better than you do, and any political beliefs they might have are unrelated to the fact that you're writing about the EU in a discussion about gamers.
Developers make games, yet they are treated poorly.
Therefore they must really like making games.
Therefore they probably spend some of their free time making games.
Therefore games get made outside of the industry.
Therefore those games are not necessarily subject to the worst failings of the industry.
Therefore, assuming the world doesn't end first, you can expect games that overcome these flaws to arrive, but they won't necessarily be in a box on a shelf at EB.
The lack of convenience of gaming at a workstation can be overcome by physically moving the computer to the entertainment center, buying a couple of aftermarket joysticks, and downloading the joystick input emulator.
Honestly, gamers have everything they need to make their own games right now. Not a programmer? Get the source off sf.net for the game that most resembles what you'd enjoy and mess with it. Not a voice actor or musician? Sample sound bites from your favorite media. Not a 3D modeler? Google Poser, people make some of their models freely available and you can tweak them without getting in too deep. Not a lawyer? Don't make the game available to anyone but yourself. Would anyone else really understand it, after all?
"Rather, our soldiers are smarter, better trained and have higher morale. yes they do. Really. Stop hating."
1
Tell that to Pat Tillman. The army rangers who killed him were so smart, they shot their own guys! And these are the "best of the best" of what the US military has to offer. Stop hating? I've got a suggestion for you instead. Stop being so goddamned stupid and get a freaking clue. Start here:
"Cease fire! Friendlies!" Tillman cried out.
Smoke drifted from a signal grenade Tillman had detonated minutes before in a desperate bid to show his platoon members they were shooting the wrong men. The firing had stopped. Tillman had stood up, chattering in relief. Then the machine gun bursts erupted again.
"I could hear the pain in his voice," recalled the young Ranger days later to Army investigators. Tillman kept calling out that he was a friendly, and he shouted, "I am Pat [expletive] Tillman, damn it!" His comrade recalled: "He said this over and over again until he stopped."
http://www.43rdstateblues.com/?q=node/view/749
http://www.aisforarmy.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p=2596
Hey, I'd say that Britain still has a functional democracy. And you can't keep blaming them for their colonial past forever. Yeah, they messed up Iraq way back when, but now they're helping to fix the problem.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
" i'd be more worried about the head shots"
all you gotta do when they start shooting is jump around and strafe while yelling "YOU SEE ME DANCING? YOU SEE ME DANCING? I CAN DANCE ALL DAY! I CAN DANCE ALL DAY!"
"Sarcasdic yeah, but pretty much accurate."
Accurate?? I don't think so. Everyone over there doesn't hate us. Not even a majority of them do. It is just a few that still support Hussein and a bunch of radical muslim warriors that already hated us and decided to go to Iraq where they actually have a chance (albeit small) at getting a few Americans killed. The Iraqi people do not hate us, and if they did, it's because the same media that's telling us they hate us is giving them unfounded reasons to hate us.
So, how do you know tha they don't hate us? Did you put in your own poll? Conduct interviews with lots of people? Choose the ideological media, like Fox News, which we know is oh so trustworthy? Or did you just make it up? Seriously, I want to know how people who assert this, and ironically you see them all over the media, how do they know this?
And for your second point, if you're referring to the Newsweek article, that was tragic, and Newsweek should be truly ashamed, if they're not just withdrawing it because they felt pressured to do so. But come on, a minimum of 21,000 Iraqi casualties from the U.S. invasion and occupation? That's not enough to make people hate us?
That's gotta fit into your schema somewhere
I think it was Mortal Kombat (arcade) that said: "Winner stays...loser pays"
Is there an official Audio CD logo on there? Because I know Phillips has started pulling the rights to use the logo from CDs which use copy protection such that they no longer fit the CD Audion standard.
The 'compact disc digital audo' logo is on the CD itself so it should be a 'real' CD.
A while back I bought the LOTR:ROTK OST and had to 'jump through hoops' to get it to my PC hard disk as a compressed wave file to listen with WinAmp. I didn't have any problem space shifting the other two soundracks in the series though.
On a related note of sorts, I saw Episode III at the movies and did not notice those annoying 'cap codes' used by the studios to catch 'camrippers' and punish the theaters that 'allow them to work'.
I don't think there were any in the film because I would have noticed them being used as I have in other movies I've seen in the theaters in the past. This is all 'moot' as the film wound up on the Internet a few hours after 12:01 AM 2005-05-19 anyway.
that guy has a pretty good jump, I doubt us nerds could jump like that guy, he looked pretty fucking athletic + he has a tatoo so you know he's got us beat.
I think he just hates videogames. . . some of his comments were pretty funny (see Ninja's church fart) Like the bit about the rubber band effect in racing games. There are quite a few racing games that don't resort to that. . .
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
Your signature is incorrect. When indicating a continued decimal, you truncate and apply the "...". You've rounded it up, so you shouldn't use the "...".
I agree with many of the points on advertisement, business, and console design. However, all his game design points only seems to turn all games into simulation like Sims and, to a large extent, Morrowind. Stuff like AI, ammo distribution, immersion, barriers, and some "computer cheat" aren't there to annoy the player. They nudged the player to play the game a certain way. For example, the author clearly have some issues with Resident Evil Remake. However, Resident Evil is a SURVIVAL-horror. There's very little of that if you're given unlimited ammoes and a first person view like the author suggest. In fact, I believe that would just be a First Person Shooter.
AI" as 99.99% of laymen seem to call it is merely an elaborate hack. I could directly script a line of actions and with a relatively small number of branch points most people will think "wow! that's a smart AI
Great, you solved your own problem.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
In your last sentence, you misspelled days and before.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
(Yes, gnomes sometimes step on polymorph traps, turn into a mumak, and trample you to death, but those are rare events.)
:)
:)
If that's rare, you must be playing a variant
(Either that, or you're calling it rare in that gnomes turning into mumaks are rearer than gnomes finding wands of death in hte mines
hawk
I doubt it. What you really want is funner games. When the computer uses better A.I. most if not all games feel it's unfair. The claim the new consoles will not be good at A.I. are BS. Maybe not as good as some ideal machine but they do have far more power than today's consoles and that power will translate into the opportunity to make better A.I.
2) Give us new genres
First start buying the new genres we've put out. This is not an industry problem it's a market problem. We put tons of new genres and they rarely sell.
3) Don't show renders for ads
Again, market problem. People bought FF7 based on the cutscenes.
4) Adult Games
Agree
5) Girl Games
If there is such a thing. I still mostly think this is a culture problem not a content problem. I'm pretty sick of the complaint about busty not fully clothed women though. It's not like the games are full of whimpy pasty guys either. On the otherhand, if there is such a thing as a "chick game" (like chick flick) I think we are a long way from getting there.
6) Quicksave
To what level? Should you be able to save during a boss fight between each shot? Saves are part of the game design IMO. Would Mario 64 be a better game if you could save anywhere instead of just between levels? Maybe a better solution for Metroid would have been Zelda style saving. You can save anywhere but you get put back at a save point when you restart.
7) Loading
Agree. Except of course there is no correlation between load times and sales. If there was this would become important for developers.
8) Football
Again a market problem. Nothing will change until people stop buying Madden
9) No immersion
Mostly agree. Any level design you press the button to a open a door 1/2 a mile a way is stupid. Finding ammo everywhere. Not being able to swim. etc. At the same time, whenever I bring up these kinds of non-immersion issues with movies I always get told "But there would be no movie without them". So which is it? I'd like to believe a good movie director / screenwriter could write a movie with no stupid inconsistances and I'd like to believe game creators could do the same with games.
10) Arbitrary Barriers
Agreed although same as above. It's not as simple as it sounds.
11) ???
Mostly agree
12) BS Difficulty
Mostly agree except for the racing part. Racing games are generally incredibly boring without catchup. We've tried it both ways. Players think they don't want catchup but without it you'd never win if you were behind and you'd never interact with anything if you were ahead. In both cases the game becomes incredibly boring.
13) ???
14) No more crates
15) Stop the patents and copycat games
16) Don't release buggy games
Agree
17) Don't put in non-gaming features
Disagree. I love my modded Xbox. I mostly love my PSX. I wish the new consoles took those ideas to the next level.
18) Don't sell us online content
market problem. Don't buy it.
19) No more jumping puzzles in FPSes
Disagree. I like em. In some games they suck. Those are bad games.
20) Vertical consoles only
Disagree. I want FLAT consoles. (ie PS2, PSX) that I can then put more stuff on top of. Putting them vertical only means they are going to fall over and bust IMO. I did enjoy the article.