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."

Comments

Unrealistic expectations

[yotto]

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!"

my two cents

[SomeGuyFromCA]

> 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