Highlights from GDCE

Gamasutra has been reporting all week from the Game Developer's Conference Europe, and they've got plenty of interesting wrap-up materials to peruse. Developing for the PS3 covers some of the expectations developers should have when dealing with the cell processor, the PSP 2005 Overview takes a look back at the performance of Sony's handheld, and The Game Design Mashup: What do Grannies Play? takes a lighter look at the development process. From the mashup article: "The theme for the Game Design Mash-up was particularly apt in a development age highly concerned with diversity - devise a game for Granny. Robin laid down the rules of engagement and asked some important first questions: the audience is mainstream, casual, female and gray. How do we reach them? Who is your Grandma? What would she play?"

Comments

Zonk

[Anonymous Coward]

"More from GDCE" is better suited to you.

oghc

[HanClinto]

Well, oghc just finished God of War today. Though perhaps that's not the kind of gamer grandma they're targeting. :)

police

[Apreche]

My grandma likes to watch any television show with police, lawyers, detectives, etc. Make a way for her to interactively get the same type of entertainment, but have fresh content. Perhaps a very simple video choose your own adventure. A serial one spanning many episodes that come out once a week or so. My grandma would like that once you got her to play it.

She also plays Mah-Jongg. Old Jewish lady Mah-Jongg, not tile matching pyramid game or the real chinese game. Make a way for her to play that online that is simple and comfortable. Voice control would probably be best. They yell out the tiles as they throw them out. If the grannies had headsets and the tile they yelled actually caused it to be thrown down, that would really do the trick.

Re:police

[KDR_11k]

There's a game called "Byzantine", first person adventure game for the PC. My mom loved that and she falls into the same demographic as your grandma. The game isn't episodic but it has an integrated hint system for those who aren't as good in the solving puzzles department and is fairly forgiving when it comes to dying (you can restart just before you died, no losing progress here). May be a bit hard to find as the game is pretty old.

PSP Hardware

[ZosX]

Now this is truly news for nerds.

The developer's comments on the PSP hardware were great. Not much has been reported (at least from what I've seen) about the actual power of the hardware and the differences between a PSP and a PS2. Interesting how the CPU is roughly 1/3 of the power of a PS2 along with the memory bus being about half as fast. While the DS is nowhere near as powerful, it is interesting to see that the PSP is not quite the PS2 in your hands that sony wants you to believe. An interesting read for sure.

Note to Zonk: Keep more news like this coming. It is a whole lot more interesting than the typical PSP vs. DS vs. Xbox 360 vs. PS3 crap we've been hearing about for months, and quit linking to 1up every single day for chrissakes! If someone wants to read 1up they can easily browse over to their site.

Re:PSP Hardware

[Winterblink]

When was the PSP ever marketed as a handheld-PS2? From any article I've ever found, it's always been mentioned to be somewhere between the PS1 and PS2 in terms of raw power. They certainly never gave any indication it would be on-par with the PS2.

And I agree, I like news like this which is just news, not biased console-wars or console-bashing articles.

Re:PSP Hardware

[ZakuSage]

Well it's not so much that the PSP's CPU is a 3rd as powerful as PS2's; it's that with the cap at 222MHz rather then it's full speed of 333MHz, it ends up a 3rd as powerful. Apparently, softare on the UMD can bring the CPU speed up to 333MHz if the developer wants to or is allowed or something, much like many homebrew games for it do. It's been rumored that GTA: Liberty City Stories and GT4: Mobile will do this out of neccessity.

Also notewourthy is how the PS2 has a really powerful CPU (for it's time at least) that had to do things in software that PSP can do in hardware. PSP also has an actual GPU, while PS2 only has a "Graphics Synthesizer" that relys on the Emotion Engine to function since it doesn't calculate floating point operations.

Re:PSP Hardware

[ZosX]

Yeah, I think Sony learned a lot of lessons from the PS2 hardware debacle. Having a GPU with, what, 1 meg of VRAM or so, and with little to no support in hardware for basic functions like anti-aliasing (don't know the actualy figure) was ludicrous at best. Having 2 seperate co-processors (more like vector units) to make up the emotion engine became an assembly programmer's nightmare as well. It will be interesting if Sony can deliver on their promise of a compiler taking care of the complexities that the PS3 Cell's 7 vector units will bring into the mix. Parallel processing is a complex problem indeed.

Re:PSP Hardware

[rohlfinator]

"When was the PSP ever marketed as a handheld-PS2?

In just about every press release Sony has written.

From Sony's website: "With gaming at the product's core, PSP features graphics rendering capabilities comparable to the leading in-home console, PlayStation 2, bringing an unmatched gaming experience to a portable platform..."

Re:PSP Hardware

[Winterblink]

comparable
Pronunciation: 'käm-p(&-)r&-b&l, ÷k&m-'par-&-b&l
Function: adjective
1 : capable of or suitable for comparison
2 : SIMILAR, LIKE (fabrics of comparable quality)

That doesn't sound anything like "equivalent".

Re:PSP Hardware

[psocccer]

adj.

1. Admitting of comparison with another or others: "The satellite revolution is comparable to Gutenberg's invention of movable type" (Irvin Molotsky).
2. Similar or equivalent: pianists of comparable ability.

Source, sounds a lot like equivalent to me.

the one game

[Kuku_monroe]

I found Who wants to be a millionarie games to be really fun for grannys, its not a game that requires fast-actions or anything. But its pretty fun.