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A Plea For Game Devs To Aim Higher
A recent article written by Mike Acton of Insomniac Games challenges video game developers to broaden their ambitions and fight to get back to their rebellious roots. Quoting:
"[W]hy is it that game developers are beginning to drown in a culture of fear, or more specifically, a fear of change? Is it because the gaming world has gone too corporate and is no longer exclusive to small teams of genius misfits and creative underdogs? Is it because the demographics of game players—once made up almost exclusively of teen boys—has widened to include nearly everyone from 5-50? There are people who would deny that it’s fear of change that keeps them where they are. There are those that are content with the status quo because they believe that they have a formula 'that works' and there’s no good reason to risk a major change when they already successful with what they’re doing. ... Game developers are, at their heart, futurists and this is what they need to do now—put themselves ahead of the times so that they can surpass the stale leadership and old models that are holding them back"
Formulaic... like the film industry has been numerous times in the past (and perhaps today)? This sort of thing breaks down as soon as the audience gets bored of it.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Back when Ken and Roberta Williams founded Sierra game development was a very different scene from today. (Read Steven Levy's Hackers.)
Today game development is an industry, employing a huge amount of people. Much like movies, games need to sell for people to pay their expenses and live their lives.
It's likely that games, like movies, will develop an art scene where things are developed independently or funded by grants beforehand. But the mainstream stuff? Let's just say that the ship has sailed. Apologies for my cynicism...
.: Max Romantschuk
Where's the equivalent of You Don't Know Jack for modern consoles? Buzz is a good start, but you can do better, I'm sure! Is that too high budget? I'm 34. I play with my wife and sometimes with friends. I PAY for my games. I demand some respect!
For some reason the expansion of the target audience to 5-50 caused game model ideas to revert to the stone age. It's a greenfield people! It's your next frontier for excellent games. Get to work!
... from a very, very long time ago. It deals with the same topic, but it's much better. So good that I chose to take it as a mantra of my own. Definitely worth reading: link
right...
"Is it because the gaming world has gone too corporate and is no longer exclusive to small teams of genius misfits and creative underdogs"
While its true you have large corporations producing last year's games with better graphics, you shouldn't discount the indie scene.
I got the last humble bundle (and the ones before that) and its amazing how fun and different certain game concepts are. Support smaller developers who you feel are creative enough for your likes, and the industry will get better. If everyone keeps buying 'generic shooter with better graphics VII', then the industry will churn out more of those.
Because the average AAA game development budget is now eight figures. Next question?
When it comes down to it, it's the money. That's it.
And I don't necessarily mean it's about the big companies wanting to turn over a $billion on their latest iteration of some regurgitated franchise with non-inventive gameplay or anything like that.
But even us Indie devs... we WANT to make innovative, new, fantastic games that push the very boundaries of what one perceives as a "video game", but we're bogged down by the one thing - money.
We have the technical skill, many have the experiential drive and knowledge and oft put together teams to satisfy every criteria except one - money. Someone has to pay for it, and unless you're an ace at marketing or speaking "bank manager-ish" you don't stand a chance. Government funding, grants and even venture capital is drying up. No-one wants to take a risk.
And if they're not risking their money, then (many) video games developers aren't risking their companies, teams and time to develop these games.
Shame, really.
It's not about sales. It's about innovation growing stale in triple-A game development. Developers and publishers don't want to take risks anymore so you'll see more copying of ideas being done than innovating for themselves. It is the indie market where the real innovation is being done these days.
The reason for this is simple though. Many indies work on their games as part of a hobby or on relatively small budgets, where taking a risk is a choice they can make all by themselves. A game developer that works on a $100 million+ title can't afford to take risks because that scares away investors. Investors don't want risk. They want profit.
I didn't get the impression those guys drowned in a culture of fear, considering the topics they tackled and the approach they took with the story.
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
I agree that the big studios are just rehashing the same ideas (and often badly at that) but there is plenty of innovation coming from indie developers and mod makers in the community. Look at DotA, which started as a simple UMS map in Starcraft, got ported to Warcraft 3 and has managed to spawn an entire new genre. Or in the indie space we have games like Minecraft and Terraria that are forging the way for yet another new genre of games where the player has the freedom to rebuild/shape his entire game world. That's where I'm betting we will see some really interesting and fun games appear in the future, some more sandboxy like Minecraft and some more like real games (similar to Terraria).
For the big studios it is simply to risky to invest in new (unproven) ideas when they have to recoup millions in development costs. But once a concept is proven in the mod or indie space the big studios will eventually pick it up and polish it. Again, look at DotA, a small mod project, and now we have Heroes of Newerth, League of Legends and DotA2 all competing in that space. Once the concept was considered proven big studios decided to invest in it.
I just really wished that they would stop forcing console UIs on to the PC versions of games. Just watched a video review of Dungeon Siege 3 today and the whole UI looked like a big console-port clusterfuck. Is it really too much to ask that you have separate UI implementations for the console and PC versions of games? Really?
I have a bad feeling the corporate bigwigs look at track records of 'what sold' every other time and thus basing it on what looks good in the frame of an advert or commercial and not what will give the gamer a lasting worthy entertainment experience. -and focus groups are usually so trendy they are on another planet to the rest of us
Lets do something constructive, list of Indie games which 'aim higher' or whatever. Just to give each other/interested people a few interesting games to play which aren't the generic mass produced things.
Who wants to start us off?
Headshot!
Where's the equivalent of You Don't Know Jack for modern consoles?
Released earlier this year. http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-3/you-dont-know-jack
Nah, that joke will only work if there comes a time when Game Developers Lead the Industry again.
Ice Cream has no bones.
the presentation of artwork, hiring of actors for 3D modelling and the massive development means that the average 3D game costs around $8 million. if users expect games to be of this standard, anyone expecting an independent team to develop something that's "competitive" is pissing in the wind. about the only possible hope is a free software massively collaborative effort, based around existing work and engines, such as WorldForge for MMORGs or the Quake or Doom 3D engines for 3D games.
Frozen Synapse
Looks interesting. Is there a demo? It's not quite clear to me what the gameplay is supposed to be like.
There's a demo (I believe) and it's on Steam anyway.
It's kinda like a X-COM/UFO turn-based shooter but where both players turns are submitted independently and then played out simultaneously (so your perfect plan that you submitted may go awry because your artillery gets shot from behind before he can move by someone you couldn't see).
Each "turn" is 5-seconds of gameplay and you can only issue orders in between turns (and take as long as you like - it can be anything from 10 seconds to play-by-email timings until your opponents sends *their* turn) with the next 5 seconds decided by a central server depending on the orders given and what happens in the world in those 5 seconds.
Units are few and maps are all the same "electric blue" but with different layouts, objectives, mix of units, etc. Certainly good fun and very nice if you miss X-COM-by-email from the past.
No. He's saying the evidence of stagnation is when you walk past the PC games at E3 and you cannot tell them apart because they're all soldiers running around with guns.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
It's exactly the same reason as to why we're now getting prequels, reboots and an insane number of sequels now in the film industry. You can keep the same concept, same characters, tweak the story line and graphics a little bit and you're good to go with minimal effort - but still get a good trunk of money by the end of it. Then when you've flogged the horse until it's knackered, you can put it to rest and finally start again.
Game devs use a formula that works because... well... it works. Duh.
The devs don't have any control over the games. The guys with the money do,
This guy has read all kinds of things into what happened and made up an interpretation for them that hasn't much connection to reality. Earth calling Major Mike...
- I've got bad karma because I won't parrot everyone else's opinion
What strikes me as odd is when people complain how things used to be great and how it used to be so good back way back when...
Except when they start mentioning the old hits, the classics, they don't seem to understand that in the years that those games/movies/music/etc came out, there was a dozen crappy counter examples. TV has gotten much better, but that is the exception, not the rule.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
The easiest answer would be to not make a game that costs that much, then. A 200 person team and photorealistic graphics are not necessary to make a good title, and too often I find that such goals make for pretty eye-candy but crappy gameplay. For example, have you ever played Crysis? Looks great, but I can name a half dozen shooters that were twice as fun to play.
Preorders.
What I did like about certain indie games (Minecraft, Zomboid, Terraria, Wurm Online,...) is the fact that they release an early stage demo, offer preorders and preorder benefits, and take feedback into account. This way people will preorder/buy the game if they like the demo and the potential, and you get their feedback to make sure they recieve exactly what they asked for when the game is complete.
I know this is a smal-scale plan, and I don;t think it would recoup the entire costs of an 8 milion project, but I still like this way of doing business.
Personally I think Mike Action is blind, and doing him self a disservice.
I think we're currently in a second golden age of video games. Loads of people seem to forget about all the crap that used to get produced decades ago, people were freer to make what they liked and most people generally made shit. The ratio of good games to bad is so much better now than it ever was.
But that is not going to stop people ignoring what is around them and looking to the past with rose-tinted glasses.
Make it worth the 60 dollars you ask, and i might actually start buying games. Minecraft is better written than most games, and got my 22$.
..it's the publishers. Most publishers will only play it safe, sticking to established brands and themes. I'm sure there are a hell of a lot of game dev studios out there with great game ideas, but what's the point if no-one will publish it?
Playing devil's advocate, perhaps the publishers have a point. Today's game-buying community loves franchises (FIFA, Final Fantasy, Mario, Zelda), loves playing the same game over and over again (CoD) and virtually ignores great new games (Enslaved, Bayonetta).
"You heard the man, Tubbs.. get undressed."
I got your new Jack right here.
I'm with you on that. Sure AAA games from the major publishers may be somewhat bland (still good in many cases though), but the Indie scene is making the running so well that it hardly matters.
It also is something of a US/western thing. I'm becoming a real fan of Russian game development, there have been some absolutely fantastic Russian games in the last few years. Ice Pick Lodge's The Void for example firmly answers the question "can computer games be art?"
Honestly, this is a great time for computer game development, at least on the PC. We've got good, solid AAA games with huge budgets, and a burgeoning Indie scene turning out more innovative new types of games than I've ever seen. Added to that is maturing games industries in Eastern Europe and Russia bringing a new perspective on games. Hopefully this carries on, or we may look back at 2011 as a golden age.
This sig all sigs devours
This "WTF is Frozen Synapse" shows the gameplay pretty clearly: linky.
Gotta warn you though, the guy is pretty damn enthusiastic, but with reason ;-)
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
...I find games are better than they've ever been - whether or not they're doing something new. They're more accessible, more immersive, better-written, with a more in-depth and convincing set of stories. Innovative gameplay quirks, while fun, aren't the point of video games any more. We've come a long way from "Come up with a new mechanic, write a paragraph justification in a manual, sell for $10" that was around twenty years ago.
Now, games are about telling stories or creating a world. Look at the Halo series, the Half-Life series, the Mass Effect series, the recent Modern Warfare games. You have games as a medium to tell a story now, and an interactive one at that. I vastly prefer a re-used gameplay mechanic to tell an interesting and original tale with believable characters to a beautiful mechanic with nothing to keep me interested beyond the thirty minutes of "Huh, that's cool."
Never underestimate the stupidity inherent in all human beings.
I was with you until you mentioned Terraria, a game that just rehashes Minecraft in a rush to make a buck.
The whole point is that the current AAA titles are all aiming for the *median* gamer. The indie market covers MORE than the AAA titles, for the simple reason that 20 hits at 5% groups usually hits wider than 1 hit at 50%... and the real figures are way over 20:1.
But it's a trap for AAA: everywhere the go from there current local maxima means higher costs and lower income.
Indies don't have that problem, plus many of them will fail thereby leaving those that remain to further seek out great new directions and signal starting points for newcomers and reboots.
Best of all for PC gamers, there is little monopolisation and lock-in distorting the market: you're free to play MW, CoD, DoD CS, and NetHack all on the same hardware (you probably don't even need the latest drivers for NetHack). Angry Birds is on every mobile device (even Nokia). Console gamers aren't too oppressed even.
The vast majority of what the Wii sees is shovelware that imitates anything decent Nintendo puts out themselves, this is happening all over again with Kinect and Move. As fun and original as Guitar Hero was, they've managed to kill the series in a few short years because they milked it so hard it's heart and lungs came out.
It exports matches to YouTube and cost $10 (in lots of 2), so don't bother with the demo! Buy it if you like any game on the axis between Chess and Day of Defeat.
Ugh. Give me Unity (3D not the gnome p.o.s) any day.
I am currently starting my own independent game company. If you tell all the big players what they are doing wrong and how to do it better, my chances for success will drop drastically. Sure I could then just go and work for them and get my ideas published anyway, but I don't see any downside to letting major labels die in puddle of their own mediocrity and letting small new startups pick up the slack.
Insomniac games has been milking Ratchet & Clank since 2002 and Resistance since 2006 with no new IP's in the meantime. They are a failure as far as aiming higher and innovating goes.
Indirectly, yes. Mostly this is because EA can afford the impact of warezers, whereas indies cannot.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
While you're at it, can you please develop a creative new Facebook game ideas as well? It seems that almost every Facebook game out there is a variation of farming game. They all give you X number of energy points to do something, and then require you to show up every X hours to collect something or risk losing it.
Yeah, Yeah... I should be ashamed at myself for even trying these games out. I know, I know.
Most video games cost millions to make. Why would a major company risk that money by taking chances on a new style of game or innovative major feature? The new, innovative stuff appears to be getting done on small games like minecraft and angry birds. There is not as much money invested, and very few devs, so they can take bigger risks. As these kinds of games get more successful, expect the big companies to make their own versions.
If you're developing some flash game out of your basement, it's easy to take risks and try something new. But if you've got a budget in the millions of dollars - where a sales disaster could put the company under - it's a lot harder to stray too far from the audience's expectations. Much like the movie industry.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Got that right, I do flash gaming for a living but only because I don't get to choose the technology. If I had my choice unity would certainly be it.
Got Code?
I spent last evening playing Angry Birds in my Google-Chrome browser.
I was going to point this out (I've been reading through the replies but haven't seen this obvious point), these simple $3 games for mobile devices can translate over to PCs, especially technologies like flash. Many are small, easy to play games that can hook a wider audience. This is the pac-man and tetris hook - the games are very simple, but also very engaging.
When people are working on those AAA games you mention, there's a team of developers and huge investments. They're not looking to innovate, they're looking for a good ROI. You will not likely see "epic" scaled innovative games... if innovations are to happen, they're going to start at the small level and work themselves into the epic games slowly.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I can't believe that someone from Insomniac Games, who has worked on what... 3 series (total) over their 15 year existence... is commenting on innovation.
They were the developer of the first 3 Spyro the Dragon for the PlayStation, 8 of the Ratchet & Clank titles (the eighth being All 4 One, due out this year), and 3 Resistance games (number 3 due out this year or next year).
I don't know about Resistance, but the other two series are notable for introducing 1-2 new gimmicks in each new game rather than real innovation.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Those games have been around a lot longer then facebook, loads of webgames use the same mechanics. It's something about doing something and getting a reward that triggers an addictive reaction or something like that. In any case, doesn't work on me.
I think this is a case of looking on the past with rose-colored glasses. Of course it seems that the industry used to produce more interesting and innovative games, as the innovative and interesting ones are the only ones you remember; the rest have long been forgotten/sold/thrown away, etc. Trust me, shovelware mass-produced crap has always been a large part of the computer gaming industry. I really don't think the problem is getting any worse.
Gotta love slashdot. Defending downloading and playing games without paying for them and then having the nerve to complain that game developers aren't putting any money into developing innovative titles.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Seriously. How many games have you bought in the last 12 months?
This is a problem where an industry eats itself.
Gamers have gone nuts. One of my neighbors lent us their Wii. Yeah, I know, I'm probably one of the only people in the country that doesn't have one. They asked, and I said OK. So they brought over this huge basket of stuff. Controllers, guitar, skateboard, and a slew of at least a dozen games. There were like 5 variations of "rock band". We had fun with it, mainly playing the sports games. I had to wonder what they spent on it, and how much time they wasted playing it. My 3 kids loved it (all under 7), but quickly became much more annoying. They wanted to play all the time. So we returned it.
I just think that we participate in this MORE MORE mentality. We have to have more all the time. Get a new game, play it 24/7 for a few weeks, then buy another new game. So ask yourself if you're supporting this system. How many game systems do you have? I know some guys who have 4.
Look, I'm not saying gaming is bad, I've played games since I rode my bike to the arcade with a pocket sagging with quarters. I even bought/restored/collected arcade games for several years. I still play a few games on my computer (liking Red Eclipse and Super Tux Kart at the moment) but you have to throttle yourself. If you feed the gaming industry machine, it will do nothing but grow and get lazy.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
When you're playing with your own money, you can do whatever you want, either in independent films or independent games, and only need to sell to customers
Such self-distribution isn't always possible. Some leading video game platforms have middlemen that decide who can and can't develop games for the platform, with a selection process biased toward established companies rather than indie startups. And just avoiding those platforms isn't easy because not all video game genres work well on PCs or smartphones. I can go into more detail if you want.
If you're really interested in where the edges of the industry are being expanded, I suggest checking out the guys at GamersWithJobs.com, especially their weekly podcast. It's the best roundup (on a regular basis, even!) of the industry, with a slant towards this type of non-generic gaming. They also come at it like many of us probably do: slightly older gamers ("alpha gamers") who have been playing since the late 80s/early 90s, and who are as much interested in as they are concerned by the commercial evolution of video games. No affiliation, just a fan of what they do.
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
Support smaller developers who you feel are creative enough for your likes
If I remember correctly, the Humble Indie Bundles are PC-only, but not every gamer is a PC gamer, and not all game concepts work well on PCs. How do you recommend that such "smaller developers who you feel are creative enough" get their products past the middlemen and in front of the audience?
To get success in the indie market you don't need huge amount of content and art quality. You'll need a solid game.
"Nice solid game you got there. I watched the video, and now I'm interested. Too bad it's only for PC and Mac. If you made it for the Wii or PS3, I'd buy a copy. No wait, you can't, because Nintendo and Sony won't let you." What do you recommend for a developer in this position?
Aiming higher is tough at $0.99. Although the future of gaming seems to be that the first one is almost free, but items cost money.
Looking ahead, what's coming? Visuals can continue to improve, but the limitation is the art budget.Movies can now have full photorealism. It just costs upwards of $30 million per hour of screen time. Crowdsourcing? Visit Second Life. Not that many people have the talent to do good art. Also, you need art direction to get a consistent look.
The big revolution in recent years has been better input, allowing the user to do more things. It used to be that the only thing you could do well in video games was shoot. Even moving was limited. Now there's dance, skateboarding, musical instruments, etc. That's progress.
Location-based entertainment could go further in that direction, but it's almost died out. The fighter-plane simulator centers are almost gone.
The success of Farmville amazes me. I can see that some people might like it, but the scale of the thing is far beyond what I would have expected. Happy Farm in China has even more users, but there it's people who moved from the farm to the city that form the bulk of the user base. This is an indication of the real future of gaming - new social money-extraction technologies.
Actually, from the screenshots I've seen, it's not just that three different games have soldiers running around with guns. It's that three different games have soldiers running around with the exact same fucking gun and the exact same extras attached.
Honestly, I hope that at least some will be single player and moddable, because then maybe I can make or port my own guns to it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
More shooters that aren't based in either modern times OR World War II. There are a lot of other conflicts in history that could serve as the setting for a decent FPS or open world game. Spanish-American War? World War I? Civil War? Revolutionary War? Korea? Vietnam?
Is it because they're afraid to show anyone other than Germans, Imperial Japanese, Terrorists, or Aliens in a negative light?
It's not easy to advance on all fronts at once. If you've got a big team struggling with cutting edge technology, it helps a lot to have everyone on the same track with a nice, clear plan that everybody's well familiar with. There's nothing better for that than having a finished product to point to, and say, "We're doing this, only better, with our new technology, bigger budget, more sophisticated techniques, and greater experience." The same thing is happening in film, since visual effects are advancing so fast.
There are all sorts of highly original games being made. A lot of the real progress in gameplay is being made in low-budget games that don't get all that much attention because they aren't beautiful like the high-budget games. It just makes sense to prove your gameplay concept with cheap little ugly games instead of wasting a lot of skilled people's time on an experiment. You can always do a sophisticated remake later.
I don't see the problem with a gorgeous new Zelda, Halo, Madden, and Starcraft every few years, when we're still getting creative games like Portal, World of Goo, Dwarf Fortress, and Minecraft. It's what the audience wants.
As for the me-too shovelware, that's unfortunate but inevitable (as are the experiments that are plain failures). There are lots of customers who pay up front for games without doing any research (the grandma factor), people who haven't played many games are easily impressed, and unsophisticated investors: someone is going to exploit them, either maliciously or accidentally.
Learn Japanese RPG -- lrnj.com
I was going to point this out (I've been reading through the replies but haven't seen this obvious point), these simple $3 games for mobile devices can translate over to PCs, especially technologies like flash. Many are small, easy to play games that can hook a wider audience.
Although your point is good, one thing I noticed after getting hooked on "Plants vs. Zombies" after getting it free from Amazon (regularly $2.99) was that the Windows version is $19.99.
Sure, there are more "extras", but the main game is identical, and many of the extras aren't available until you complete the main game once. It might be worth $20 based on time of play, but I suspect that the $3 mobile version will keep me occupied for far more than 15% as long as the Windows version. I think they'd be better off pricing the Windows game at around $5 and adding some sort of DLC where the total outlay would be about $15 if you bought everything. This should do what you suggest, and allow them to hook a wider audience on a huge platform (I think Windows still has more installations than Android and iOS combined).
I am an indie developer myself. I develop without any regard of publishing. If the idea goes OK with my target audience, I just need to code it.
Likewise, many of my fellow indie devs aren't constrained by market studies, publisher input, or anything except direct consumer suggestions or even fixes.
Games in the "industry" are too regulated and expensive to allow such freedom. Look at some open dev diaries from pros, and you will find a lot of "this feature was added/removed because of something our publisher/whatever said".
The fact that consoles keep scaling graphics wildly, just manages to raise development costs and make the product suffer more because of the investment making it risky.
For the console, the only legit development channel for non-established devs is the Xbox Live Indie Arcade
So let's assume I can come up with $1,175 for this ($399 for a PC newer than mine, $299 for an Xbox 360 with a hard drive, and $159 per year times 3 years for App Hub and Xbox Live Gold). Now how do I translate an existing game's game logic to C# or another language supported by XNA (notably, standard C++ is not supported) so that I can write a new graphics engine for it? Or should all games designed for Xbox Live Indie Games be designed from the ground up as exclusive to Windows and Xbox 360?
amidst a sea of crap, though
How do you recommend that an indie developer's products get noticed?
I'm not counting hardware costs, assuming people have a computer and a phone already, and probably a console.
I already have a PC, but it runs the wrong operating system (something other than Windows), and a retail copy of Windows costs almost as much as a new PC with an OEM copy of Windows, so I'd have to replace it. I already have a phone, but it's the wrong one (Audiovox 8610), so I'd have to replace it and get a substantially more expensive calling plan than the one I'm on. I already have a console, but it's the wrong one (Wii), so I'd have to replace it.
Halo 4, Call of Duty 7, EA War Shoot Kill Securom Crysis of Duty 2011 Episode 3000! Look at how high those numbers are!
The sad truth is that's what people want -- utter shit -- and as for-profit companies they're obliged to make it.
You've got the indies producing all kinds of games, you have social games, big budget games, mmos, varying price points for whatever you budget can handle and more games, and different types of games, available than ever before.
Nintendo and Sony won't let you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiiWare
http://warioworld.com/apply/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob's_Game
Nintendo won't let just anyone develop for its platforms. One has to have a dedicated secure office and a track record on someone else's platform before qualifying to buy a Nintendo devkit. This pretty much rules out releasing one's first completed game on a Nintendo platform.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_Live_Arcade
Did you mean Xbox Live Indie Games or Xbox Live Arcade? These are separate programs. As far as I can tell, the organizational qualifications for Xbox Live Arcade are identical to those for Xbox 360 disc games. And due to XNA framework limitations, Xbox Live Indie Games appears to require in practice that games be exclusive to Microsoft platforms.
There's a demo (I believe) and it's on Steam anyway.
It's kinda like a X-COM/UFO turn-based shooter but where both players turns are submitted independently and then played out simultaneously (so your perfect plan that you submitted may go awry because your artillery gets shot from behind before he can move by someone you couldn't see).
Each "turn" is 5-seconds of gameplay and you can only issue orders in between turns (and take as long as you like - it can be anything from 10 seconds to play-by-email timings until your opponents sends *their* turn) with the next 5 seconds decided by a central server depending on the orders given and what happens in the world in those 5 seconds.
Units are few and maps are all the same "electric blue" but with different layouts, objectives, mix of units, etc. Certainly good fun and very nice if you miss X-COM-by-email from the past.
So, basically a re-make of Robosport?
There are more choices than ever. If you don't like what's coming out of the big corporate game companies, then don't purchase from them. The internet allows everyone to become a distributor. There are plenty of small indie developers with widely varying gameplay. Some of it is crap. Some is awesome.
As we continually push the limits of computing power the capabilities and expectations have grown in stride. Maybe what can be done with our new hardware is only partially understood by the programmers. From the days of doom to quake to quake 2 to doom 3 the ground that was taken in each programming step marvelled gamers. With limited computing capabilities, only so much time could be spent on certain areas in the programming aspect. Increase the computing power and the capabilities of a game go from a still bmp image to sprites to complex particle systems which change the story from kings quest text at the bottom of the screen to diablo characters to world of warcraft and its thousands of real time character interactions. the point? the programmers need to know what they have within their grasps
I'm not a big fan of Terraria, but I do feel it's different enough from Minecraft that it deserves to be its own game. Its RPG-ish sense of progression is much stronger than Minecraft's and its sidescrolling style is not to be overlooked. I can totally imagine Terraria being born from someone looking at Minecraft and wishing it had gone in a different direction.
I think Terraria has room to develop into an interesting game, but it's so light on content at the moment I believe it's hard to say it wasn't rushed out to make a buck :P
Is it really too much to ask that you have separate UI implementations for the console and PC versions of games? Really?
One problem comes when developers don't even bother to include the console-style UI in the PC version for those people who have home theater PCs. It might have something to do with greed: console multiplayer often allows one copy per household, and they're trying to sell one copy per person.
based on the parent post and hence agreeing with the grandparent's second point
I didn't personally enjoy the Enslaved demo as much as a colleague of mine did, but certainly Bayonetta was (in my opinion) a quite enjoyable game with a surprising amount of replayability and more depth to the combat system than I am coordinated enough to explore at the higher difficulty levels.
Without any useful detail I don't know why the parent poster believed those two games are awful, but publishers only want to publish games that are going to sell, and the gaming market is wide, varied and fickle enough that the most accurate predictor of "will sell" is "the previous one with the same name sold", followed closely by "the identical game by a different publisher sold".
Paul "TBBle" Hampson
Paul.Hampson@Pobox.Com
Over the centuries handbags have gone through many adaptations and fashions, but the word handbag was only coined in the 1900s. The start of the twentieth century also heralded the type of handbag we would recognise today - with Handbags getting increasingly smaller and the introduction of handbag fasteners, inner compartments and locks. But that is enough history: clearly the most important time period in terms of handbags was the fifties, which saw the rise of the ultimate handbag designer houses; including Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Hermes. Like Chanels Number 5 perfume, some of these handbags have become instantly recognisable fashion icons; signifiers of the rich and the famous. Sadly, though, this means that showing off your new Louis Vuitton at the office party, or having a stash of Gucci handbags in the wardrobe, is out of the price range of almost everybody. We should be grateful for the Internet, for perhaps giving us mortals a chance to own a genuine Gucci handbag without having to win the lottery or shoplift. The web is so full of second hand designer handbag dealers that auction giant Ebay have branched out with their own dedicated handbag site, e bags. Even better, high street shops and even hypermarkets are increasingly living up to the ideals set by the exclusive and expensive designer houses, and it has never been more possible that you can buy a handbag for eight dollars and pass it off as a unique one-off! Truly this decade ought to be the decade of the handbag: and specifically the stylish and affordable handbag. Handbag fans rejoice!