Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
how much did sony have to pay him to say THAT?
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
It must have been hard to build an industry changing motion sensing controller with spare GameCube parts and duct tape. Nintendo must have hired MacGyver!
It sounds like some game developers take themselves way to seriously.
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.
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 guess it depends what makes a good game. Tetris was great, and didn't require complicated AI.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
"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.
we're still waiting for Spore... of course, once you do ship, all is forgiven.. at least until I get bored with the game and wonder why there's no multiplayer (and don't give me that "asynchronous multiplayer" crap).
How we know is more important than what we know.
Obviously he's never seen the envelope art in Nintendo Power.
This is the same guy who blasted the PS3 and 360 for being graphical powerhouses.
I've got one word for this guy: HYPOCRITE!
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
Make a system that doesn't suck? This guy has got to be high or something. How could something so successful suck? Not to mention the fact that the moron has completely disregarded the DS for all it's artistic content (A little game about a little hotel comes to mind). Finally the system has been out for what, 5 months now? You want art? Art takes time, and for the record, dogs playing poker is not art, spore, although cool, not art, Killer 7.... a pain in the ass, but probably art. Send this arse back to highschool where he belongs
but that's just my opinion -Mr. Miller
I am amazed how good news for Sony is ridiculed in post after post and bad news for Nintendo is dismissed with complete one sidedness.
While Sony Home may not be the greatest thing, it is definitely a big announcement and a good step forward. Similarly, the rant against Nintendo probably arises from a disgruntled company but it is something to think about.
There is an utter lack of objectivity in gaming related discussions on Slashdot. With what I would expect the demographics here to be, it definitely surprises me. For someone like me, who is trying to decide which console to buy, these discussions are extremely frustrating for their lack of objective analysis.
It is truly sad that a good post about PS3 is tagged "fanboy" just because it is about PS3
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
"It pains me to say this but I recently just took a job at EA. However, I worked for Will on the game you just saw, so.. [laughter] I'm going to rant about How Sony And Microsoft Are About To Screw Your Game Design. Look, how are we going to get where gameplay, graphics and physics are all evenly well balanced? At the moment we're the 120lb weakling, except nowadays his right arm here, graphics, is enormous."
--Chris Hecker, GDC, 2005
To paraphrase his annual edgy developer commentary:
"Game consoles aren't designed exclusively around my own personal favorite part of game design at this point in time."
This is notable? This is news? 95% of game developers probably feel this way. User interface people adore the Wii for exactly the same reasons next-gen artists and AI/physics programmers are frustrated by it. Parents adore the Wii's price for the same reason that high-end next-gen developers abhor it (because big honkin processors, it turns out, are not particularly cheap).
The real problem with his claim is the idea that serious and/or artistic games need massively powerful AI or physics routines in order to affect players. I do not agree that powerful technology is the only key to making an artistic game, or a game that has an emotionally powerful effect on people, or a fascinating narrative. Art direction and writing and getting rid of the publisher committee-approval ideology is a lot more important than neural networks. I am sure that there are certain types of artistic games that will become more prevalent as computing power increases, but to pigeonhole artistic games as games that have really good AI...isn't that just a little self-centered?
What was disturbing to me about his rant was not what he said, but how ill-defined his terms were. He professed that Nintendo does not take gaming seriously as an art form. What is this "art" he speaks of? As someone who studies philosophy, it's very important to me that such an objective argument as "Nintendo hurts art" is defined properly.
... dare I say "in the box" developers... improve AI so that the same old game is harder to the same old player. While this may be nice when playing a genre game, I fail to see the argument that it has been applied artfully from system to system. Granted, it can be. It just has not thus far and I do not see a majority of developers as taking full advantage of it any time soon.
When one speaks of art, they speak of aesthetics. What he argues is that function possesses the highest form of aesthetics. This is an extremely shaky ground for argument. One could easily weigh other factors of a game in with beauty... graphics, challenge, and enjoyment seem to be the pervasive accounts of beauty in gaming. Let's focus on these three and see if we can try to understand why Nintendo chose to focus on enjoyable rather than pretty and smarter games.
Graphics: Since the PS1, graphics seems to be the focus of most games. Higher texture density, more polygons, faster processing. These were what made a game "good" for a very very very long time. And while game sales were still increasing, more and more gamers were complaining that games seemed too much like their predecesors. Racing games were prettier, but they were still racing games. Fighting games had more characters with greater detail, but they were still fighting games. Sandbox games like GTA were getting sharper graphics and interfaces, but they were still GTA. Gamers were catching on that the industry is merely eating glitter to make the same old crap sparkle more.
Smarter: With the same old games comes the same old play. The only way to improve this is through design changes, which serves for temporary "newness" but quickly becomes associative in a near one-to-one nature from previous games in the genre. Final Fantasy games, for example, had a completely different play style from game to game, but functioned on the same basic prinicples as the last game (until 12). Fighting games may have different dynamics of button mashing and combo systems, but they were still button mashers. And racing games? Pfft. So in lieu of breaking the mold and trying to make games that challenge the mind in new ways, developers
Enjoyability: Remember the first time you played a side fighter? Remember the first time you played a virtual fighter? Remember the first time you played an RPG? Remember the first time you played GTA? Wow, wasn't that fun? And so much so, it's had many gamers chasing the carrot on the stick for the companies that put out those games ever since. Remember the first time you played a 3D game with an analog stick? Do you remember all the other games you played using the same analog stick? That was enjoyment you got out of EVERY SINGLE GAME from a simple interface change. Nintendo has been the pioneer in that market since the Super Nintendo (and arguably sooner). Sure, they made a lot of sacrifices to graphics and processing power. But let's face it, the Wii is enjoyable. They chose a different definition of "art". To Nintendo, making games a social experience, making them widely available, and making them "fun" was what "art" is. To Nintendo, their system is THE system to progress video games as an "art form".
To say that Nintendo does not do for gaming as an art form as much as the other two major systems does is rather blind, I think. No other company has been as influential on the other two systems as Nintendo. Top buttons on the d-pad? Sony used it. Trigger buttons? XBox. Analog sticks? Sony and XBox. Force feedback through controller rumble? Sony took it again.. this time illegally. And now, full motion sensing capabilities... SONY TRIED TO COPY IT. So my question to this man would be,
Finder of the any key.
According to him, the XBox 360 and Playstation 3 suck because they push graphics over gameplay and Nintendo sucks for pushing gameplay over "art".
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
First off, I have to question Chris Heckers developer quality, since he's one of the I need more power because I can't get my stuff run fast enough people. Quite often the issue is that the resources at hand aren't used optimal, either because the tools at hand lack the quality or the developers lack the quality. For example, I'm really impressed with Final Fantasy XII: the developers managed to squeeze quite nice graphics out of the total of just 36MB RAM they have at hand, especially the level of detail implementation is really good. Overall, the PlayStation 2 is a very good example at how developers had to learn to use the resources they have available: the first generation PS2 titles looked awful compared to the games that hit the market in the last few months. And I also remember playing around with graphics programming on my 80386. I never managed to have it do smooth animations, let alone smooth scrolling. Yet others proved that the hardware was not the problem (e.g. Doom), so the problem wasn't that the machine wasn't fast enough, the problem was that I didn't understand to use the resources adequately.
Also, the guy completely ignores Nintendo's situation: unlike MicroSoft and Sony, they don't have money to burn. They have to make a profit off their consoles from day one since that's all they do. They don't have other businesses with which they can make money (apart from licensing, of course). So they can't subsidize their consoles like MicroSoft and Sony do (they sell their consoles for less than their production costs).
This and other issues led Nintendo to conclude that they can't compete with this generation of consoles from MicroSoft and Sony. So if you can't play in the same market as the other guys you have to find another market, and that's just what Nintendo did, and successfully so. They managed to attract people to the Wii who wouldn't play console games otherwise. I know two couples who never had a console but found the Wii to be fun and bought it. They are both in their mid-/end-twenties and only now entered console gaming through the Wii and simply don't care about the PS3 or XBox360 since they don't appeal to them. Chris Hecker simply doesn't recognize that Nintendo is targeting a completely different audience than both MicroSoft and Sony.
Honestly, I don't think he cares what you think. This was directed at other developers -- and Nintendo itself. Remember the name is 'Game *Developer Conference'. He wants Nintendo to change before it's too late for them to get out of the trap of DS and GameCube rehashes. Do you seriously want to play the same games you played since the SNES over and over -- never getting something really different and new? That's what he's arguing with just a little bit of venom turned up to be sure it gets across.
He's just putting his foot down now before all the Wii is first party games and movie licenses. Toss in a DS and PS2 port ever so often. I think he's already too late for that personally. All Wii users seem to want is more Wii sports and mini games, and he's actually standing up and saying that's not good enough for Spore.
You have to define what a game being art means. Videogames are an art form of their own, you can't judge them by the same standards as films or music. Personally, I think there is art in, for example, Mario64's level design and its perfect blend of challenge, reward and novelty.
The weird thing is;
Microsoft and Sony talk about "games as art" on their websites.
Nintendo doesn't, but makes the most "art" type games of the three.
Apparently Hecker equates "art" to "high budget productions". Is a movie like "Pi" any less art then "American Pie" because it didn't have "next gen" recording equipment?
Besides; ever since slamdance(?) pulled the Columbine game, it seems the public isn't ready to accept games as an artform yet.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I doubt the guy even believed it himself. The conference needed a little controversy to spice things up, the online gaming rags promoted it to get more page hits, and now Slashdot does the same.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
> Do you seriously want to play the same games you played since the SNES over and over -- never getting
> something really different and new?
Yes. And so does everyone else. The sales of Mario rehashes, Virtual Console style stuff on Wii and XBox is through the roof - much higher than any expectation. Nintendo release old SNES and NES games for the DS. They released the old Mario games on a single cart for the SNES and even bundled the console with it (I miss Mario Allstars more than you can imagine)
Sony do the same thing with myriad rehashes of Crash, Spyro, Gran Turismo (same game, same cars, SHINIER SPECULAR HIGHLIGHTS, same lawnmower engines, MORE LEAVES ON THE TREES).
Modern games are only an artform if you think accurately modelling the wind on the leaves individually makes your car go any faster round the track.
As an owner of pretty much all of Nintendo's consoles, I'm not sure what the hell you're talking about. Are you telling me that Twilight Princess is the same game as A Link to the Past? Or that Super Mario Sunshine is the same game as Super Mario World?
Or are you implying that there are no artistic, fresh games on the DS? Kind of... absurd. The Wii will go the path of the DS: Some movie licenses, sure, but also a ton of innovative games you simply can't get on any other console.
Seriously, if anyone can be accused of constantly rehashing old ideas, it's certainly not Nintendo. Ever looked at the games available for Xbox, Xbox 360, PS2 or PS3? Frankly, I feel like I'm living in some kind of bizarro alternate universe.
You get what you sow. Sony used to be great, but they have constantly fucked with their customers for a few years now. Nintendo used to censor their games and be generally jackasses, but in recent years, they've put out great, fresh hardware and fun, innovative software, and they've shown that they've changed for the better.
People are annoyed at Sony, and they are happy with Nintendo.
So we have a so-so new product announcement from Sony, basically copying Miis, Achievements, Second Life, and adding an unhealthy dose of Micropayments. Big suprise, people don't fall for it.
Then, we have some developer basically explaining that the Wii is shit. Big surprise, people don't agree.
Both companies get what they deserve right now. So, what's your point?
You got some amazing posts today, including some kid who thinks The Sims was Maxis first big hit. HA!
This guy is a pro and works for a company that has been making fun games when SERIOUS power was 8mhz.
However since that day two things have happened. We have got more and mhz on our cpu's which at times seems to be only used to update the graphics. It is of no doubt that the Wii in this department cannot compete, pure polygon/texture/fps count it is going to loose to the 360/PS3 and ALL consoles will SUCK donkyballs increasingly so compared to the PC.
BUT that is not what this guy is talking about. He is complaining about lack of power to power NOT the graphics but the game itself. The AI.
AI is often ignored by gamers, we note it when it is bad but in most reviews a decent AI will take second place in importance to the graphics. I have no idea way I mean sure the human race has developed above such supervisial OOOH SHINY!
Eh where was I?
However in the background the AI code has been getting a share of the increased processing power and it shows. Today's AI in games is still nothing to worry any real human but if you ever make the mistake of playing a game from the dark ages you can see just how moronic the old ai's were that had to run on ancient hardware.
This guys complaint is that the Wii with it's simpler hardware just doesn't deliver enough oomph to power the AI in games.
First off, this guy works for Maxis, a game company that has NEVER produced a single OOOOH SHINY game. In fact all their games heavily depend on AI. This has been a problem for them before, their games never looked as spiffy as say your average FPS but offcourse the AI in them was still making your computer sweat. If you ever designed your own FPS level with AI monsters you know how fucking difficult it is to get them to walk straight down a corridor EVEN with massive pre-proccessing. In the sims you got easily a dozen AI all finding their way around a constanstly changing enviroment. While you maybe only seeing the effect of all your girls queing up for the same toilet and peeing themselves (Mmm, there might be a reality show in that) the fact that they even can do that requires a lot of code to be run.
There is a reason the full sims never appeared on the consoles, they just can't do it. (Try them if you don't believe them, the console versions are extremely reduced in capability compard to the PC versions)
Spore, if it delivers what it promises, is going to be much the same. For it to work there must be some serious number crunching going on in the background, yet ALL people see is the graphics.
Maxis can't produce a game that don't look the part. The graphics must pass a certain level or people just won't buy it. I am sure there is a market for a game with amazing ai and 8bit graphics BUT sadly maxis is to much into making a profit to explore that segment. Shame on them.
His claim is then that if a game is going to have passable graphics the Wii doesn't have enough horsepower left to power the AI. It is something PC owners have ALWAYS known. In some games you can alter your settings INCLUDING the ai difficulty level, lower it and performance improves. It is even simpler in the modding scene, lots of user made content mentions that you need a higher specced rig for their content then the original game simply because they upped the number of AI's in the game.
An old example is transport tycoon. A train game from I think the 386 days. If in those days you had more then a 50 or so trains in the game it would start to grind to a halt as the CPU simply couldn't cope. Nowadays a hacked version of the game happily runs with hundreds of trains of any length using the increased horsepower NOT just for graphics (increased resolution) but to run the AI for all those extra objects.
If you take the same game and try to port it fairly to all the gaming machines out there then the Wii is going to have to be the one with the smaller levels (less memory) fewe
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
Seriously, I wonder whether people even bother to read things before leaping to the defence of their console of choice. "Oh no! He said bad things about Nintendo! Quick - to the ad hominem arguments and Chairman Miyamoto's Big Book of Wii Talking Points!"
For those who take a slightly more settled approach to life, it's easy enough to look at the title of the session. It's the Game Publishers Rant. This isn't supposed to be about rational discussion - it's throwing out exaggerated bile-fuelled versions of reality for the sake of engendering discussion. Look at the previous rants from the Game Developers Rants sessions in the last couple of years. The games industry is dead. Too many people whine about games not being innovative enough. Sony and Microsoft are going to screw your game design. Gaming has degenerated into a procession of Hot Babes - Sexy babes! Lesbian babes! Killer babes!
Do you think all of those things were intended as true statements? Of course not. Taking these rants as a genuine representation of the opinions of these developers/publishers is like assuming [url=http://maddox.xmission.com/]Maddox[/url] is an in-depth social commentator putting forward a model for how we can change life for the better. Take a chill pill, remove that radish from its current uncomfortable location, ignore the agenda-laden reporting from certain sites and enjoy the rant for what it is.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Um rehashes? Like Halo, Halo 2, Halo 3? Like the 7 versions of Ghost Recon? What about GTA? ...
:-), I think I'd go for it. "faster" doesn't mean 3GHz PPC, currently [iirc] it has a 66 and 33 MHz ARM processors. Bump those to 133 and 66, give it 16MB of ram instead of 4MB and it will have plenty of room to grow.
Nintendo is hardly the only developer with rehashes.
And besides, sales of the DS are um, a bit higher than that of the PSP.
If Nintendo decided the DS2 [or whatever] would basically be the DS + faster cpu + more ram and say motion sensors
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I believe there is some confusion over the term developer here. A lot of people use it to mean a company that creates games. In this context Hecker is working for the developer of Spore.
I don't think Hecker is even a Jr. Developer or anything of the sort of the actual game though. He's just another indie hack who wants to think games are some art form (as if we need that particular elitist disease in video gaming).
He's got a bit of a reputation as a ranter about this sort of thing. It's no surprise he'd take this sort of position because Nintendo's mantra of "just make it fun!" is pretty much directly opposed to the idea of games as an art. It's kind of amusing he works for Will Wright though considering Will is probably the most likely dev in the industry to throw art out the window and worry about fun factor first.
He's just mad because they're selling like hotcakes and he can't make a game work on it.
I think you are using a very narrow definition of art ...
...
... Games like Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros, The Legend of Zelda, Star Fox, Mario Kart, Mario Party, Brain Training, Nintendogs, and Wario Ware have all changed how the industry sees games or how a genre is seen.
You're saying that for an author to produce art it has to be a novel or epic-poem, for a painter to produce art it has to be a grand mural, or for a composer to produce art he has to produce an opera.
A haiku can be art, graffiti can be art, and a pop-song can be art
Sometimes the most important way to define art is that it changes the medium after it has been produced
Whether some people would like to admit it or not, Wii Sports could be seen as art because it was produced by the artists frustration with complicated control mechanics and massive budgets; and the industry will never be the same for having experienced it.
You misspelled 'Riiiiiiiiiiiiidge racer!'.
All Sony really has to do is use the real time weapon swap to flip the DS and the Wii and hit the weak point for massive damage. I think maybe Sony's brother spilled coke on the controller so it's L and R buttons aren't working.
It's been a long time.
Music isn't art because of how the sleeve looks.
Movies aren't art because of the type of special effects it has.
Literature isn't art because of the font and page layout.
So why should games' artistic value be judged by their visuals? If anything can make a game art, it's the gameplay.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I have to point out that the only two games that are REALLY breakaway sellers
ie. MUCH More than 16 million copies
are Super Mario Brothers (NES) and Tetris (GB) both of which were pack ins with their respective systems and not ACTUALLY sold.
Perhaps it could be stated more simply: a console (no matter what console) isn't a personal computer. It just ISN'T. It's a video-optimized, hard-coded processor with extremely limited inputs which usually uses the extraordinarily-shitty "standard TV" as display.
Duh?
And yes, products can be developed that will run on both, but the compromises required to make it a 'console-able' game are immediately obvious on any PC - look at Oblivion. The most popular (and one of the quickest-released) mods take advantage of the better resolution of a monitor to immediately make the bag/inventory system 100% more useable, with more data displayed, clearer/smaller text, etc.
So when he says "the WII is crap" what he's really saying is that "we're pissed that they optimized this for something other than controlling our game, because we're having to make ridiculous, possibly fatal compromises to try to sell into that market".
Is this a shock to anyone who's played a RTS on a PC and then on a console? No mouse = serious suckage. Spore = RTS strategy = (WII+no mouse) = suckage.* Brilliant insight, dude.
* yes, I know the WII has the point-click thing going, but watching people play at length, first their click targets are HUGE because it doesn't have nearly the precision of a mouse, the response-time of a mouse, nor (apparently) the sample rate of a mouse. WII controller is only a feeble mouse-emulation at best.
-Styopa
This article mentions it, but it's easy to miss. Chris was talking in the annual "Developers Rant" forum, which is sort of an tongue-in-cheek, humor-laced exaggeration-fest. I'm sure he doesn't hate the Wii *that* much. His point was he wishes it was a faster, basically. You have to be able to see through the satire and wit, to understand what he's talking about.
Of course I wasnt there though - it's possible he could have taken it too far, it's always hard to judge where that line is and this guy seems to enjoy pushing that line.
FUNK!
Pathfinding and physics are all well and good -- indeed, I would love MORE processing power for pathing on Supreme Commander (fex). However, just because the Wii can't do EVERYTHING doesn't mean it can't to SOMETHING -- and do it well. I'm enjoying the Wii immensely, and that's all that really matters to me.
With all due respect, I picked up a DS < 2 weeks ago and I'm currently addicted to Final Fantasy III. My fiancee and I have logged more hours on the Wii playing Super Mario Bros., Super Mario World, The Legend of Zelda, Columns, Donkey Kong Country, and Zelda:Links Awakening than we have playing Wii Sports, Zelda:Twilight Princess, Red Steel, Dragon Ball Z, Rayman, and Marvel Alliance.
So, do we really want to play those games? Yes, yes we do. And I've been emulating games on my PC since 2000 (since I could play some of my arcade favorites that never translated to consoles very well or at all). I STILL buy VC games when I can get (or have) them on the PC for free. Playing these games on the PC just isn't as fun, or I'd rather be playing WoW than Mario on my PC. The Wii is for family, party, and retro gaming for me mostly and it's priced right for it.
Does that mean I don't want to see good new games? Of course not. I'm still looking to play Trauma Center, Excite Truck, and Elebites. I look forward to Mario Party 8 as it's a simple game I can play with my family. I look forward to Metroid as well. Other than that, I'm just biding my time for some real killer 3rd party titles that will probably start popping up in a year or 2, since the Wii is getting super market penetration and developers won't ignore that, despite being 'two gamecubes taped together'.
Of course, it seems that Chris Hecker's idea of 'art' is the latest photo-realistic graphics. Less he forget, that Nintendo had some very good 'artistic' attempts at games. Heck, they had a game called "Mario Paint" where you could be your own artist. *chuckle* but seriously, the Wind Walker was one of Nintendos attempts at focusing on artistic design into a game and it was criticized by so many who think along the same lines that 'art' = 'photo-realistic'. I guess not to many people visit the art museums. Lets just say, there's a lot of interpretive paintings hanging on the walls, not just photographs.
Allow me to point out your earlier comment...
First, why would Mr. Hecker care what other people are releasing on the system in relation to how it would effect the release of Spore? It's arguing that "Hey, someone made a crappy game on the Wii so my game is now incapable of being played on the Wii". Which, of course, isn't logical. And why would Mr. Hecker care what 'all Wii users want' when he's suppose to be addressing game *Developers and convincing them to design 'outside the box'?
Mr. Hecker is simply bitter. He's crying about customers buying habits and he's blaming it on Nintendo and developers. Why? Probably because he's mad that Nintendo decided to not go down the 'more power is better' route and that the consumers liked this and responded with their dollars. Probably because they cannot have Spore do what they want it to do on the Wii and the Wii is the hottest system at the moment. This means that Spore will either have to 'slimmed down' to fit on the Wii structure to tap that huge and increasing market or they don't release it on the Wii and lose all those potential sales.
Guess what? Developers make games for a system. Companies don't make a system for a developer. If your game idea won't fit on the most popular system then you're out of luck. If you're game is so good, make it as you want it, on the system that can support it, and it will sell that system (think GoldenEye). When all else fails... there's always the PC. =)
Cheers,
Fozzy
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
* Before you hit the flame button, lemme say I love the Wii, I think it's great. I don't think it's shit at all. In fact, the potential of all of the consoles impresses the hell out of me -- and for my money, the Wii takes the lead by a mile in that race.
... well it doesn't take a rocket scientist to notice that one of these things is not like the other. This is why I've repeated said (and have been repeatedly "corrected") that Nintendo made a big mistake not making the Wii more powerful. Nintendo has totally dropped out of the Next Gen race and are off doing their own thing. I think it's great, but it isolates the Wii from mainstream console development. And that unfortunately means that the Wii isn't going to see many triple-A titles, titles whose budgets are usually only justifiable to publishers when they can count on them being cheaply ported to multiple platforms. Wii doesn't make it so easy to stuff a PC, Xbox360, or PS3 experience into it's cute little innards. Multi-platform development takes a lowest common denominator approach in order to get a consistent experience on all platforms. The Wii is so backwards in terms of CPU and GPU power that such an approach seriously hampers what's possible on all other platforms. At the end of the day, you want your product to look as good as possible and if that means cutting the Wii out of your plans, so be it, it will happen. Sure, if the Wii continues to sell, you can count on plenty of Wii-only titles, just like there are plenty of GameBoy-only titles. But what you won't get is all the PC/360/PS3 titles. In terms of installed units (PC+360+PS3) > Wii and publishers know that.
However, from the perspective of a developer who is doing cross-platform development for PC, Xbox360, PS3, and Wii
That's why I think Nintendo made a mistake with the Wii, why I agree with Chris Hecker about the anemic Wii specs, and why I hope for a shorter-than-average life-cycle for the Wii with the imminent release of a Next Gen Wii that offers the best of BOTH worlds in terms of graphics zazz and gameplay spazz, hopefully sometime in the next three years.
+0 Meh
Man, I'm sick and tired of every creative pursuit being labelled 'art'. Programming is art, drinking tea is art, playing soccer is art... Fine art is art. Applied art is craft. Once you create something for a specific purpose other than aesthetics (anything with utility, basically) it ceases to be art.
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.
With all due respect, this is bullshit. Don't blame the hardware if you aren't a good enough programmer to make it work. This is the problem with today's developers. They expect computers to get faster and faster and need more and more memory because they're too lazy or not resourceful or creative enough to write efficient code.
One of the reasons why most games suck nowadays and are so boring is because of this very issue. Developers rely too much on hardware, faster graphics and better texture mapping in lieu of actual creative game design. Stop blaming the hardware because you have no creativity and can't program your way out of a paper bag!
I haven't seen any games I would consider art, but I have seen a lot that would have been more useful stuck to a wall or sitting on my table as a coaster than in my CD ROM drive.
> GT is a simulation which tries to be realistic
Which is why when you hit the wall at 180MPH, you bounce right off.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
He should try writing a game for the Atari 2600. That would make him appreciate the hardware riches he has:
CS: The 2600 doesn't have a two-dimensional bitmap.
Chris: What!? You mean the bitmap can only hold one scan line worth of image?
CS: Well, not a whole scan line.
Chris: What?
CS: Did I mention that background pixels are about 1/4 inch in width.
Chris: Arrgh! Give me a Wii, give me a Wii!
nice choice of platforms to support your argument. what about the n64 and gamecube?
he is simply an artist working on a masterpiece and wants a bigger canvas to work on. nothing new here. this is the exact same argument people complain about every generation: "the ps2 doesnt have enough ram", "the NES only supports x amount of colors at once", "this gamecube's disc size is too small". developers need resources. you arent going to make developers happy by limiting what they are capable of creating.
as for nintendo game sales... lets say you have 20 million consoles available, but you only release two games a year. as long as every consumer buys one game a year, you have one game thats guaranteed to be at least a 10 million seller.
in reality, you are dealing with consumers that buy ~4-10 games a year. if there are only 50 or so games available, you get some tremendous overlap and high sales, because of the lack of options.
right now wii releases have been throttled [whether deliberatly or not, i dunno] so whats happening? vc sales are skyrocketing. nintendo is making nearly [guesstimation here] 80% profit off of virtual console sales. they are selling to a captive audience. 5 million wii owners dont have anything new to buy, so why not push them to buy virtual games that are basically instant profit for nintendo? its crappy that consumers get the short end of the stick and less options, but either way... its good business.