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Bungie Vs. Miyamoto - Fight!
Last week Gamehead's Geoff Keighley interviewed Shigeru Miyamoto, and the well-known designer tossed off a mildly controversial comment. Keighley asked him if he felt as though he was losing touch with the American audience as a result of the popularity of games like Halo. GameDaily reports on Miyamoto's response: "I could make Halo. It's not that I couldn't design that game. It's just that I choose not to. One thing about my game design is that I never try to look for what people want and then try to make that game design. I always try to create new experiences that are fun to play." Bungie took exception to that, and Frank Connor retorted in his interview with Joystiq: "Yeah, well. I just want to go on the record and say that Bungie is hard at work on a side-scrolling platform game featuring some plumbers -- I'm not going to say what their ethnicity is, it's none of anyone's business -- but we took that as a gauntlet, a sort of glove slap, and we're going to respond in 2D scrolling style. That's all I'm saying." We discussed that article, along with several other pieces of Halo 3 coverage, this past Saturday.
I guess they've never really mastered that third tenet of their design theory...
Miyamoto gains tons of respect from me for creating Pikmin which is light-years ahead of Halo. All his games have been unique, genre-creating blockbusters.
Besides, wasn't the genius of Halo the real-time IK (inverse kinematics) on the models? I thought I remembered hearing that this was their big addition to the FPS genre. Otherwise, I don't really know what's so great about Halo - it had a convoluted storyline with boring level design and bad voice acting.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
...well, I just started playing it for the first time this weekend and am about 5 hours into it or so. So far it's a solid FPS, but I don't get the hype to be honest - unless you're a x-box fanboy anyways, there's been dozens of better FPS titles to precede Halo as well as suceed it. I think the industry overhyped it as well...I could rattle off fifty games from the last decade plus without much effort that school Halo, among then SMB 1,2,3,4. It's very good, but I was expecting more: probably much so from avidly playing PC FPS titles since Wolfenstein was released ages ago. so far Halo is about a 7.5-8 out of 10. Supermario World or SMB3 are both around 9-9.5 easily
Gaming for over 25 years