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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.
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If Miyamoto has heard Connor's "retort", I'm sure he laughed. Connor could be taken seriously if he said he was coming up with something new and fun that will sell just as well as Halo. Instead he said he intends to make something that he already knows people want, by implying he's going to copy Miyamoto's years-old idea, Super Mario Bros. Given the sales of New Super Mario Bros., I don't blame him. But he reaffirmed Miaymoto's comment, not countered it.
I'd say that Pikmin was pretty original (a modern Miyamoto creation). Not to mention that SMB, much like Donkey Kong, Zelda, and a lot of other Nintendo properties were original when they were created.
Speaking ill of a legend like Miyamoto is not something I would do, and I think the guy at Bungie comes off a little arrogant for doing so.
Disclaimer: The last Nintendo console I bought was an SNES, so I don't think I could be counted as a Nintendo fanboy.
I would imagine Miyamoto's games do appeal to a more broad audience. I have a hard time imagining my parents playing Halo for any period of time. However, they did sit and take a stab at Mario back when I got my NES (which I still have).
Bungie's response sounds like, "Oh yeah well... You're a poopy head!" Given cultural differences and the possibility of a hokey translation, I wouldn't take this as a slam. Just another persons opinion.
Sounds like Bungie has been an MS company for too long. If it's not the MS way, it's wrong, you suck. Look out, flying chair!
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2. Before Halo there wasn't a single decent FPS on a console, just a whole bunch of shitty ports of PC FPS games.
Except, of course, for Goldeneye.
but I'd like to know why Halo is considered by a fairly large population to be a great game
It came out for the Xbox and found a large population of teens that never had played another FPS.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
What are you even talking about? I played Halo before I had even heard of any hype for it. I did it solo, and co-op. The ONLY thing I liked about it better than any other game I had played was the co-op. It wasn't that spectacular, it still isn't that spectacular. There is ONLY one thing that make it so big, and that is the hype. I know people who will prattle on about it forever like it was God's gift to mankind. They can never tell me what's good about it. Every time they try I tell them about lots of other games that have what they are talking about. You want story, go to Half-Life, you want multi-player, see Counter-Strike. You might say that Halo combined those two, but I would say that when you are playing Halo for story, you are not playing multi-player and vice versa, so that point is irrelevant.
The graphics on Halo suck. At the time Halo 1 was getting really popular I got into a discussion about the graphics with a roommate. He was comparing Jedi Outcast at 1600x1200 with Halo at 640x480 and saying that Halo was better. This is the kind of mentality that most Halo fans have. To them, Halo is "Just Better(TM)." I had to just ignore him, as I've had to do with everyone else who says anything about Halo's graphics being good at all. Jedi Outcast was not even trying to be a graphics power house, it was running off an old engine and it still looked better with a Radeon 7200.
Level Design? My goodness, man, what are you smoking. Have you even played the library level? After about two minutes you don't even know which direction you're going, which direction you came from, and you can't even count how many times you've seen the exact same stuff over and over again and again. The maps on the ships aren't much better. Sure there are big areas outdoors, but those are repetitive as well, they just don't feel like it when compared to the monotony you just sustained from every indoor environment.
I don't know how the control scheme compares with other console FPS, but I didn't think it was all that great. It was fine, but the only thing I thought even worth mentioning about it was that you could throw a grenade without having to switch to that weapon. I won't get into a comparison between control schemes for PC-based and console-based games, because that's been done, and is somewhat irrelevant to why Halo was popular on a console, but there wasn't anything special about the controls.
Multi-player is kind of hard to judge. There are lots of games that have better. Comparing time played, as of right now, Counter-Strike has over 5 billion minutes of play logged each month. Adding in CS:S and CS:CZ nets closer to 7.5 billion minutes each month. Since it's inception, Xbox live has logged a total of 2.3 billion hours, or to put it in similar units, 138 billion minutes. Let's be generous and pretend that Halo 2 accounted for every last minute (Halo 1 wasn't on Xbox Live so we can't include it). It would take Counter-Strike 18 months to equal that. IOW, one game does in 18 months what an entire service does in 72. Yet we don't have Counter-strike in the headlines every couple of days do we?
That's somewhat off-topic however. The thing Halo has going for it, I conjecture, might be that it has no bots. People are forced to play with others if they are going to do it at all. But then you'd be crazy to play it on the same box. You get 640x480 divided by 4. A whopping 320x240 in all of its interlaced glory. I did that once, every one talked about how cool it was. I was too busy trying to adjust my eyes to being able to see what I was even looking at. I must say that I enjoyed my time despite the screen size, but that's called a party. It wasn't because of Halo. I would have had a much more enjoyable experience playing UT, Trackmania, or any other game where we each have our own screen, or where the screen is shared more efficiently, such as Wii sports or something. I hate to be a poor sport, but the reason we have Halo stories all the time is beca
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Miyamoto has at least 53 games on that list. I don't know how many Bungie has on the list (at least 2), but my guess is that it's less than 53. Was it petty for Miyamoto to make those comments about Halo? Sure. Is anyone in the gaming industry in a better position to judge the merit of a game's design? Probably not.
-Lee