God of War, Counter-Strike, 360 Design at GDC

Some more great writeups of GDC events are now available. Gamasutra's coverage continues to be comprehensive, with articles on the localization of Counter-Strike, the development of God of War, and the a design postmortem on the Xbox 360. God of War: How the Left and Right Brain Learned to Love One Another discusses the ways the dev team balanced the needs of the artists, designers, and programmers to create a cohesive title. The Localization of Counter-Strike in Japan gives the reader some object lessons in what it's like to take western ideas and translate them to an eastern culture. Finally, Ophelea wrote to mention a GamersInfo.net story on the design of the Xbox 360. From this last article: "The user interface was one of the more difficult designs to accomplish. While the original Xbox had 250MB of space to utilize, the Xbox360 had only 4.5MB uncompressed or 1.5MB in total! Not only this, they expanded on the original Xbox's 45 screens and grew it ten fold to 450 screens! Several iterations were gone through with the end result being a combination of several of these schemes."

Comments

Re:250mb of space for an interface..

[RexRhino]

There are several reasons... some good, some bad.

The good: 128kbits is the "standard" for MP3s nowadays, and by not including a lot of settings in ripping, they simplified the interface. 128kbit is a good bitrate. It is pretty small, but sounds OK. Also, higher bitrate may take too much resources if you are playing an mp3 while playing a game. Because this is a game console, and not a PC, I think it is a reasonable decision.

The Bad: Anything more could have DRM implications? Perhaps making crystal clear copies of a CDs would violate some sort of copyright law, or at least piss off the RIAA or something. I haven't actually ripped any CDs on my Xbox 360, but I am assuming they are saved as a proprietary format, locked for that specific machine, so they cannot be copied, correct?

The good news is, you can set file sharing with a PC, and play MP3s ripped at any speech you want from your hard drive! The Xbox 360 HD is only 20 gigs (with a lame 13 gigs left over after the Xbox 360 stores it's system information), so I wouldn't even bother putting big audio files on the Xbox HD.

CS neo has school girls being raped by a tree

[cttforsale]

nuff said

Re:Japanese can't handle terrorism?

[raptorjb007]

The problem with Japan is...that it's full of Japs.