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Spore Dev Down On the Wii
An anonymous reader writes "As reported by IGN, Spore developer Chris Hecker made a very quotable statement at a traditionally contentious GDC panel. At the 'Game Publishers Rant' event Wednesday morning, Hecker stated that he thought the Wii is a piece of sh*t. He went on to refer to it as 'two GameCubes stuck together with duct tape.' He also took Nintendo to task for not taking games seriously enough. 'It's not clear to me that Nintendo gives a s*** about games as an art form.'"
Chris Hecker & his coworkers look like he's putting out a great game, but he needs to take himself and what he does a little less seriously. As a games consumer I care less about what neato tricks a developer can contort the console CPU into doing and more about how much fun it is. Which is why I'm getting a Wii, as soon as, well, I can find one locally!
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
"It's not clear to me that Nintendo gives a s*** about games as an art form."
Listen - I love insult comics. But look at you - stringing together accusations and a couple expletives and acting like you gave Nintendo a thrashing? Hmph - it's clear to me, you don't give a s*** about insulting as an art form.
Go listen to some Lisa Lampanelli, and THEN try it again, you miserable excuse for console troll.
Ryan Fenton
P.S. As you may have noticed, though I do like my insult comics, I personally suck quite badly at the game myself. You should see me in traffic - a dejected 'dude, you suck' is about at far as I can manage. Just saw the insult, and thought I'd give Lisa Lampanelli a plug.
Strange, I read about this a few hours ago and checked this guy's wikipedia entry, which for some reason got deleted a couple of hours ago.
According to the deleted article Spore will be this guy's first game to be released. Apparently he is known in the dev circles, but he has never released any game he has worked on, and he is probably part of a large team developing Spore.
And I would not be nitpicking here if his arguments made a lot of sense. No fanboy of any kind here, just someone who does not really like lazy or incompetent devs bashing things for the wrong reasons.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
There is SOME truth. I own a Wii and hardware wise it isn't a graphical and processing monster. The core enjoyment comes from the controller. As a long time PC gamer (although I own all 3 last gen consoles) I have never felt comfortable with FPS controls on a gamepad. The Wii controller on the other hand is very intuitive for me to use.
I've purchased 6 games for the Wii (not including Wii Sports) and all have offered something interesting but a couple have shown limitations in the hardware. I really enjoyed Elebits but the last levels have some severe frame rate issues when you start flinging around vehicles and buildings. I also enjoyed (after turning the sensitivity WAY down from default) Call of Duty 3 but the graphics were inferior to Call of Duty 2 when played on a PC. COD 3 perhaps suffers more because the game needs to look more realistic than Elebits. Despite the issues I still feel that the control scheme for FPS style games is better than a gamepad and will get better as developers get used to the Wii remote. Here's hoping the next Metroid shines.
I am also disappointed that games like Rayman and Super Monkey Ball don't have well fleshed out multiplayer modes. The Wii really shines when you have a couple friends over and some sort of overall multiplayer mode structure around the mini-games would make this even more fun. I look forward to Mario Party but I would love to see something with a less inane board game component. Even something like the old Epyx Summer Games/Winter Games titles would be great.
I don't honestly think the Wii competes directly with Xbox 360 or PS3. It isn't trying to beat those consoles in the areas they have carved out. Much like the DS versus the PSP I think we will start to exclusives on the Wii that just wouldn't be much fun on a system without a Wii style controller. We are already seeing updates of DS games like Trauma Center and Cooking Mama. We have heard vocal support from companies like EA and Activision for Wii games. If the Wii continues to sell well I think we will see a lot of games developed to cater to this different, more casual market.
The Wii isn't the end all be all of game consoles, it's an interesting tangent that hopefully will continue to bring us new ways to play.
I currently don't own a HDTV and I do most of my "hardcore" gaming on a PC. I have a couple kids and Nintendo family friendly games are a good thing. I certainly don't rule out purchasing a PS3 or Xbox 360 a couple years down the road but right now for how I game and how my family games there isn't a point. But that's just my situation - I know there are a bunch of players who want Resistance or Halo 3 and couldn't care less about Mario.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I know pro sports people do infact play what is essentially a game - but I thought that didn't apply to video games and that games were still supposed to be fun.
So are game developers not even trying to make games fun these days then?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Probably not very much. This guy is a loon. I've shipped more videogames than this joker (hes shipped ZERO) and I couldn't hope to be half as opinionated as this pompus prick. Doesn't seem he can commit to a project long enough to actually ship the game as it stands. Find it amusing how hes bitching about the Wii when he pisses & moans elsewhere that there is a lack of creativity in the industry, while wanting alternative markets and models for small-scale video game production. I could have sworn thats what the Wii has going for it most. Guess hes sold out too far to, "the man".
Something I find odd is that a Wiki Admin deleted his bio barely an hour after this article went live.
Wiki Deletion
Google Cache
I've spent considerable time pondering the possible aesthetics of video games, and agree with you that any list of pure specs cannot lead to higher aesthetics. Tetris was simple in every possible criteria, but still could be seen as one of the more beautiful games ever, much like primitive cave paintings. Your last paragraph captures this perfectly.
- interactive-art-aesthetic.htmls -as-art-revisited.html
/. has been inundated with philosophers lately! I'm very happy that the esoteric crowd is ranting too!
That said, though, no one really has analyzed the aesthetics of games, and many people say that they cannot be aesthetic since they are A) mass produced for market, and B) interactive. I disagree with both of these premises, btw.
Its late, and I'm lazy, so I'll just link to articles I wrote about this topic:
http://nonservium.blogspot.com/2006/09/prelude-to
http://nonservium.blogspot.com/2006/12/video-game
Yeah, self promotion AND laziness, I now embody the modern internet.
Obviously his idea of art revolves around complexity, and not the limitations of the medium. If he was a poet he would be Kerouac with massive free-flowing strings of consciousness, and his haiku would be as broken and unstructured as Kerouac's too. This is a relatively routine distinction in art, some people think that the limitations of a medium or style increases its merit, while others are too lazy, limited, of whatnot, to see the point. This is becoming more and more common in digital media, we're spoiled by ever increasing power, and have a hard time respecting even out current low limitations. Imagine this guy developing on a 8-bit system, or worse a text adventure!
I personally think that good are is a sort of metaphorical collaboration between the artist and the medium.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Hecker said the console isn't powerful enough to provide the next-gen experience he has been waiting for ... Although he stated the system is "severely underpowered," Hecker noted that he wasn't simply referring to the Wii's graphical capabilities. He wants to spend a console's CPU making games more intelligent, and he has found the Wii doesn't have the power to process things like complicated AI.
I take it that no Xbox, PS2 or pre-2k PC game had complicated AI, then. Yes, you can run into CPU limits but I'm betting 90% (WAG) of AI problems grow exponentially in which case it'll hardly matter. With dual core CPU most games should be able to dedicate a full core to "everything else" including AI, did games get a lot smarter? No? Sure, sometimes throwing enough power at it works, we now have 3000++ rated chess computers that no human can beat, but it's usually the least efficient way...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I think it's fairly ironic that the guy works for the company that makes The Sims, one of the ugliest, most technologically behind games I know of that just happens to be addictive and have a crazy following, yet he blasts Nintendo, company that makes the most technologically behind game systems that just happens to be addictive and have a crazy following.
Foot, meet mouth.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
But there is a caveat that often happens with games that are CPU based at the core and fun based as a secondary feature. It's wonderful that developers are always trying to push the limits of games, but often times what happens is that a game falls into repetitiveness. A simple example is Oblivion; wonderful game, great while it lasted, but most people have moved beyond it. Is that what art is supposed to be? Momentarily glorified, but quickly overlooked?
People love to rant on the Wii being underpowered, but there is absolutely no reason that a game has to be pumping out the highest end graphics possible when it comes at the cost of game play and replay value. I don't begrudge PC gamers or Xbox 360 gamers for the "high end" games that they get to monkey around with, but truthfully, how many of these really give a lasting gaming experience? Halo 2 got it right (to a degree) in the sense that it took the content that people wanted (the multiplayer of Halo) and put it online with a small visual/gameplay update. Huge success which people still play. Since you really can't upgrade a console once it's been purchased (storage aside), what good does it do to keep pushing how far the console will go, sacrificing gameplay until you're basically watching a movie and hitting a button to go to the next scene? Might as well just watch a DVD at that point.
Instead of looking at the Wii as underpowered, I've personally felt that what Nintendo did with the Wii was to set a cap for the games; when deciding the architecture of the Wii, they obviously had two choices; try to compete in terms of power and put yet another extremely expensive next gen system on the market, or, put out a system which was more affordable and focused on "fun" games. (I realize that fun is really subjective, but that does seem to be their intent) The result is as you see; they went for an affordable machine which people could purchase. (Let's ignore the fact that it's sold out pretty much everywhere) IIRC, Nintendo had Dev kits out for the Wii pretty early on, so developers knew what they had to work with a long time ago, and presumably are still working on games as such with these restrictions in mind. Thus far, every single game that I have played on the Wii has been a seamless experience; no slow down, no extremely long loading times; I pop in the game, and for the most part, I'm playing right away. This isn't something that the 360 and the PS3 can claim for all of their games. I realize that there is less going on behind the scenes on the Wii which allows for this seamless loading, but consider the more average gamer or consumer; do you think they care about the numbers behind the scenes? No, they want to be able to play a game on their system without having to wait for the system to load everything. It could be a beautiful game for the system, but if it takes too long to load and all the user ends up with is a pretty picture, what's the point?
Ingenuity is not something that can be measured in terms of processor power or video ram; neither is fun. You don't need to sacrifice AI for ingenuity and fun. Yes, there's going to be a trade off between graphics and AI, but as to which to chose, you simply figure out which adds more to the gameplay and overall fun. The focus of games, first and foremost at this point, is to be just that; games. Can they be other things? Yes. Do they have to be other things? Not really.
By calling the Wii a "piece of s---", Hecker is in fact limiting what games can do by creating an unreasonable standard for gaming. Not everything is going to be a visual masterpiece. Not everything needs to have a runaway budget to be great. Though at this point it's just personal opinion, consider the game Chibi-Robo. Incredible game in terms of it's use of perspective to give the illusion of a really freaking big place. That sounds pretty artistic to me, playing with perspective and depth in a 3-D environment to enhance the visual features. Or Katamari, everyone's favorite ball rolling game. There is nothing special about the graphics, but the fact that it plays with perception and depth makes it an incredible game.
I think that may be Christ Hecker's problem as well. I'm just gonna copy my comment from gamesarefun...
How is it Nintendo's job as a console developer to push games as a "legitimate art form?" Or Sony's? Or Microsoft's? Criticizing the development side of their buisness for the type of games they produce would be valid, however the job of the console side of their business is to produce a machine that will sell well and will enable developers to easily produce games that will sell well.
Microsoft and Sony produced consoles with lots of graphical power and a high price tag. Nintendo produced a console with a new method of control and a cheaper price tag. It is now the developers' jobs to produce whatever type of game they want, "artistic" or not, for whichever consoles they want.
If Chris Hecker feels that the type of games he wants to develop require the horsepower of the PS3 or 360 that's fine. If however he feels that the higher level of graphics is a _requirement_ to produce "art," then he clearly doesn't have any notion of what art really is.
(I would certainly have trouble defining what art really is myself, but i'm not so deranged as to try to claim that it requires a high definition display or any other specific kind of media to produce.)
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For what it's worth, everyone I know that's working on Spore thinks Chris is a total idiot for saying this. If anyone on Spore fits the Diva profile it's him. He thinks games have to be about expensive hardware and fancy math. God forbid that games should be cheap easy and fun to play. Chris is an "artist" who is too busy doing his art to actually ship a game.