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New Technology vs. Old Gamer Classics
RealDSmooth writes "Codemonkey over at 2old2play.com just posted an article on the evolution of gaming, and how new technology like the XBox 360 and the PS3 stack up against the classics that got us where we are today. It's a nice look at what has changed over the years, and what has (thankfully) stayed the same." From the article: "It is expected with any new game that hits the market that a patch may exist for that game before you ever put it into your PC or console. Why? Has the market degraded to such buggy software that we have to download a few megabytes of game fixes before it's even usable? How many patches did we have to get with Super Mario Brothers or Zelda? How many crashes did these games have besides your typical game lock up due to dust on your cartridge? Were games more solid 'back in the day'?"
It's reasonable to say that new games take more resources to develop than older games. Unless we want to see higher and higher prices, cost savings must be made. Given that downloading a multi-megabyte patch is much more reasonable now than it was, it seems like an efficient trade-off. Not that I agree the trade-off should be made, but it's an obvious choice if you are going to cut corners.
Could this be a result of Nintendo's loss of monopoly on the gaming market? Back when Big N was the only dominant force in the video game market, they could probably take their time in developing solid and uncrashable games. As the summary points out, how many times did Zelda or Super Mario crash or Punch Out crash? These days though, there's always the push to release games faster and faster at an unprecidented level of graphical and technical sophistication to beat out not only competing systems, but other 3rd party providers. Just recently when Nintendo announced that Twilight Princess was pushed back, the general reaction was "OMG, Nintendo is teh suck. We want it now!!" but I'm guessing that it'll have impecable programming and few if any technical errors. It seems like the creedo these days is that it's better to release more games at 90% rather than fewer games at 100%.
The ability to target a single platform reduces bugs. Also, the more complex the platform is, the harder it is to be certain that your program takes into account all the idiosyncracies it may encounter. Furthermore, input devices have gotten more complicated.
A more complex game is going to have more chances to go wrong.
Modern games have more 3D models, scripted sequences, dynamic rendered doodahs etc etc. Many older games would easily fit on 2MB of space, moderns games you're lucky if it's under 4GB. With so much extra information, so many extra possibilities, bugtesting is far harder - the code itself can't be checked for bugs, but instead playtesting is mainly relied on to find them. Thus, many bugs will be missed, and those that are missed will require more "space" to fix, as the language describing whatever's wrong will be longer, and thus more will be needed to replace it.
A bit of an oversimplified way of explaining it, possibly, but getting across what matters.
This may be a difference in perception, as I may have payed more attention to such an opinion because I share it, and that I would tend to disregard an opposing view. It also may have been a matter of the choice of communities that I monitored.
Of course, I did see plenty of "Nintendo is teh suck" type opinions, but those seemed to be from people with a prior bias against Nintendo, and didn't really care about a Zelda release other than as an opportunity to engage in a flame war.
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Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't describe Wind Waker or Super Mario Sunshine as "buggy." They're certainly not any more buggy than the original Super Mario Bros. or Legend of Zelda, and they're far more complex.
I've only seen one Nintendo game crash (Metroid Prime), and it's only happened once to me in hours and hours of play.
I haven't played a PC game in the last few years that wasn't patched within a week of release, but most console games are definitely very playable out of the box.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
... run NetHack. I mean, what other game do you need? All this new-fangled stuff, colors, sound. Good grief.
Super Mario Bros was not a bug free game. I know of three bugs...
1. Lil Spits. While big and fighting Bowser, land on the hammer and be touched by Bowser at the same time. You will complete the level and go down to small size, but the game will be confused and still think you're big. On the next level, hit a mushroom block. It will put out a fire flower (since the game thinks you're big). Grab the fire flower. Now you're still little, but when you hit b, you throw a fireball.
2. The Fabled Minus World. At the pipe at the end of level 2 - 2, stand on the edge of the pipe facing left. Duck, jump up, and move back towards the wall. If you do it exactly right, you will go through the wall, and come out the other side in the warp zone. Immediately go through the first pipe (before the numbers appear). You will be warped to world - 1, which is a copy of world 2 - 3, except that it never ends. The end pipe for the level will take you back to the beginning of the level.
3. Get Stuck. At the end of level 2 - 3, there is a space above the exit pipe. Duck and swim into it. Then let go of the down button. You will get stuck in the wall. There's no way to get out.
All that being said, these bugs didn't interfere with normal gameplay, as usually the only way they showed up was if you were trying to show them to somebody. And even then, they weren't easy to trigger. The third one is the easiest. The other two are a little tricky to pull off.
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In theory, the new XBOX is designed to take games in a slightly different direction - via programmatically generated art. If you read some of their design articles and such, you see that the reason they went with a triple core processor (besides the shinyness) is so that a parallel thread can run alongside the main game, and programmatically generate scenery and such. So, instead of having roughly a 2:1 ratio of artists to programmers, this would (in theory) allow the programmers to take some base art model and mutate it based on a given algorithm, and thereby cut down the number of artists required to make a game.
Not that I really think its going to take off...