Slashdot Mirror
The Art of Downloadable Game Development
The Guardian's Games Blog looks at how the development of downloadable games has shifted over the past several years. As an example, they point to Capcom, its recent reinvention of the Mega Man franchise, and an upcoming game called Flock. Quoting:
"[CEO Paddy Sinclair said], 'The first thing we realised was, it wouldn't be as easy as we thought. Luckily we're funded privately so we had the luxury of getting it wrong. It was very... educational. We learned very quickly that, no, you can't write a game in three months. We also realized we'd need a bigger team than just two or three.' 'The XBLA market has really evolved,' continues business development head, Chris Wright. 'If you look at the very early games they were simple ports — single-player, retro emulation titles, and you can kick those out very quickly. That market is disappearing. If you're going to do retro remakes you have to extend it, you have to add multiplayer. If you're going to do something new, it has to be bigger. We've got a team of 10-12 people working on this title. If you look back, it's what we would have had on PS1, and the game is probably of the same sort of size. It's not the huge budgets of a retail title, but it's not a trivial undertaking, either.'"
From what I see most XBLA titles are dual-analog shooters or stuff like that and while the effects and such get more and more advanced the core gameplay just gets clunky. Then again I've only played the demos of most and those rarely get much past the tutorial. Seems to me like this upmarket trend here is just adding superficialities and needless complication.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Shame the wii retro console titles don't have any graphical filter work done on them. Depending on your loyalty to bad graphics, I found it difficult to commit to playing Donkey Kong Country with such awful pixelation (regular large lcd tv) when I could just as easily play the superior, smoothed (via emulator) and very functional version on my xbox 1.
I think that Nintendo sold us short on that (rather than the idea that they the left it that way for the purists). I'd rather play DKC on a nintendo but the difference is massive and stays in line with my impression of the Wii. Which is, that it is a console dominated by mediocre exploitation of the mainstream crowd it has sucked in. The amount of truly horrendous (and non functional) software out there for the Wii is staggering. Once upon a time, you couldn't put a game out if Nintendo didn't think it was up to scratch.
I record my sleeptalking