One thing I had not considered is that because Sony is both a content publisher and a hardware developer, that the company has an internal conflict over Copyright policy.
The problem is that with respect to music and movies, Sony does not enjoy absolute control over both the medium and the content. Sony DVD's and CD's must work on any other CD or DVD player, and Sony DVD players and CD players must work with any other music CD. With the Playstation this is not a problem, since they control the entire platform.
I think that the reason that Sony does not fully back the mini disk platform is indirecly explained in the article. Sony's hardware divisions would love to make Minidisk a dominant format. But Sony Music wants to sell assloads of music CD's. To do that, they must sell to the established platforms. And that is not the minidisk.
I think that being both a consumer electornics company and a publisher is probably not a great advantage. You cannot pursue a business plan with your electronics that can harm the business model of the publishing arm. Sony could not do the MP3 player because the publishing arm did not want to in any way hurt the sales of CD's.
The only real upshot to this is that all PS3 games will essentially get a few more months of dev time to polish their titles, which may result in an unusually strong launch lineup.
The downsides to this are numerous, though. Many people may discount Nintendo, but even with their declined marketshare, Nintendo is not the sort of company you want to give a chance to play catchup in any sort of way. This will also give Microsoft a bit more rope. Whether Microsoft uses that extra rope to hang its self or to help build some momentem for the 360 is another question entirely.
Another problem is that the PS2 is already in decline, due to hype over the next generation of consoles. I am damn sure that while Sony would love to wring every last penny from that cash cow, that they dont want to let their best available retail offering to be the underdog against the 360 or Revolution for very long.
Between a handfull of articles about a bunch of weak 'me too' potential features for the PS3, and the way that Nintendo is steadily edging out the PSP due to the PSP not having any high profile killer apps, Sony is looking alot weaker right now then I would have expected. And if history has proven anything in the game industry, even giants can fall.
It sounds to me that Sony is considering this as more of a checklist item then a headline feature. They have not been pushing their online component very hard at all, compared to say, the power of the cell processor.
If this was meant to be a serious feature, it would have been mentioned and covered long before now. But since Microsoft has proven its self with Xbox Live, and Nintendo has been talking about the access to their back library for some time, it sounds like Sony is getting a bit worried.
First, a week or two ago, someone brings up a story about a possible Revolution like controller scheme. Now were hearing about downloadable games. It just reeks of damage control marketing to me.
It also does not help that Sony does not have all that much in teh way of classic, evergreen titles to draw on. Most of their monster hits have recent iterations available, and those iterations are often in the vein of Gran Turismo, where the new ones are just going to be better then the old ones. I am sure they have some titles that qualify, though. You cannot get into Sony's current position without having any enduring hits.
I would say that I would be very surprised if any propulsion of the sort noted here will be put into production in my life time. But I also have no doubt that we will at some point, discover a way to permit us to distant stars.
We wont find this breakthrough if we dont look for it. As long as the false and impossible ideas are shot down, whats the harm in listening to these wild ideas?
Afterall, some day, someone my actually be on to something. It would be a shame to disregard the idea just because it sounds impossible on the face of it.
When you port any game to a system that cannot give you the exact same sort of input as the originating system, you will run into problems. If a game used 2 analog sticks originally, you cannot make the exact same game on a system with only one analog stick.
You can make a game that has a close resemblance, but thats about it.
Now, I think that one of the big reasons that the PSP may be suffering is that too many developers and publishers are porting games to that system rather then writing entirely new games. specifically for it.
The Nintendo DS does not suffer as much from this problem for two reasons. One is that most direct port type games from earlier systems have already shown up on the Gameboy Advance. The other reason is that the new interface pretty much demands new types of games.
I dont think that Nintendo made a choice to not have Grand Theft Auto on their platform. They did make a choice not to make games in that vein, but but that is not quite the same thing.
I am concerned for Nintendo's long term success if great games do not come out on their console simply because they have aquired an image of being child friendly. Trying to skew their market towards people that are not traditionally gamers may turn out to be a great strategy. But you cannot deny that peoples perceptions play a huge part in their purchasing decisions.
Pokemon is a great game. I know this because I have played through and beat it. But I only played the original just this January. I did not purchase or play this game previously because the overwhelming cuteness of the surrounding fad repelled me. And I bought the Gamecube at launch with Super Monkeyball.
The cute factor can blind people to the presence of an excellent game. In Nintendo's case, the accumulated cute and kid friendly factor has turned consumers off to their platform.
I am what I consider to be a pretty big fan of Nintendo. I own a sizeable selection of titles for my Cube, and will likely buy the Revolution at launch.
However, I am also concerned that Nintendo has run, and continues to run, a considerable risk in alienating the traditional hard core gamer audience. They do this by lacking games that appeal to a mature audience. From their own studios, the best game they have to appeal to that crowds tastes is Metroid. They have had mature games show up on the console, but they have not remained exclusive to their platform (think Resident Evil 4).
Now, Nintendo could possibly remake the entire video game market if they succeed in their push to put games out that appeal to non gamers. But its foolhardy to alienate what is likley the most loyal and consistent audience for videogames.
I am not saying that I want to see a slew of games that showcase screaming, bleeding, killing, and explosions. But I would like to be able to play a well considered and sell made R rated game.
Grand Theft Auto did not get press because its a very violent game. It got press because it was a very violent game that happened to be a very well made game. I dont want Nintendo to be the company that has great non violent games. I want Nintendo to be the company that has ALL the great games.
Lionhead is best at trying new concepts, and in creating games that give players a great deal of leeway in how they want to play. But they are not so good at creating games that trigger the 'must buy' reflex in the average consumer. Alot of that is that their games, particularly the gameplay, dont seem to be the sort that lend themselves well to typical marketing campaigns. Black and White was a fine game, but how do you sell someone on the notion of spending hours training a giant cow?
The games are excellent in the most abstract and fundamental sense. Be a god, good or evil as you choose. Be a villian or a hero. But the gameplay often falls just a bit short. I would say that Fable is probably Lionheads most commercially viable franchise. Black and White and Movies are just too hard for marketing to sell.
The simplest way to create a monster hit is to have fundamentally solid gameplay mechanics paired with a style and tone that both compliments that gameplay, and that the intended audience can identify with even without being hard core gamers. I believe that most of Lionheads problems are primarily stylistic.
This article has nothing of substance to it. Sony tends to be very good with their marketing and propaganda most of the time. They decimated Sega with it and they are trying to do the same to Microsoft and Nintendo. The problem is that the Revolution is nearly entirely immune to being counter hyped at the moment.
When Sega made claims for the Saturn or the Dreamcast, Sony was able to make claims that set them above that level. They could come out cheaper, or with better graphics, or with better games. But Nintendo mostly keeps its mouth shut. There are no set specs for hardware other then a vague 'gamecube times 2' for graphical power. The controller is, at the moment, something that Sony and Microsoft have no direct answer to. There is nothing on the laundry list of features for PS3 that is comparable at the moment.
The weakness of this article as propaganda says alot about the situation. The best response to the Revolution that Sony has right now is an add on periphereal to current generation hardware. Their response to the appeal to casual gamers is to have downloadable flash games. Now, some flash based games are fine, but I would never pay to play any of them. The one thing I am certain of is that Nintendo is not going after causal gamers with cheap 2D flash based games. They are going after them with the best their game developers can offer.
So at best, I would say that Sony has no idea what to do about Nintendo. They are unsure if Nintendo is going to even be worth responding to seriously. So the best they have to counter it is a throwaway rumor involving a half measure with a camera and some flash software.
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Removing a HUD is not an easy task
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Off With Their HUDS!
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The reasons that HUD displays exist is that they do their job quite well. They convey information to the player very directly and very simply.
If you were to try to make a fighting game without a health meter, you would have to convey the state of health of the player in a different manner. This could probably be done through modifying the character animations, and by changing certain key textures. But this solution will require custom art assets for every player in the game, and it would need to be quite detailed. This will add months of development time to what should be an otherwise very quick job. On top of that, while the efforts to remove HUD Elements to increase immersiveness can be very effective, such efforts do not deliver the most bang for the buck in terms of improving a game.
Using the above fighting game example, I would much prefer to have the developers add extra characters, or more combat moves.
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Cinematics cannot be the central focus
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Cinematics Do Matter?
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Cinematics can, and often do, enhance and improve a game. But I do not think it is a good idea to have the cinematics eclipse the gameplay as a selling point.
The primary reason I stopped playing the final fantasy titles was because the cinematics became much more important then the gameplay.
The primary problem is that non interactive elements in games are not very replayable. Once the novelty of watching a long animation sequence wears off, I want to be able to skip it. And if I am forced to sit through a 30 second clip for the 19th time or so, I get very annoyed.
I suspect that the Gamerscore thing is one of the few elements that Microsoft has come up with that will be ripped off by Nintendo and Sony. It is such a simple idea, so easy to implement, but its implications are huge.
While its obvious that many gamers will simply not care one way or the other about their gamerscore, many of the hard core gamers will. This will have several consequences. some of which are already being noticed, and are mentioned in that article.
- Gamers will play games they otherwise might not just to pump their score. - Games will probably incur a longer shelf life as gamers try to wring the last few points out of a game - Gamers in X-Box live will have an idea of what games are being played by their friends.
There are several things I can see happening with these gamers scores that may take a while to become apparant.
- Games could have unlockable content based on gamer scores acheived in other games. Think of this as an extension of the Pokemon 2 cartrige strategy; in order to play 100% of a game, you are forced to play other games.
- It is probable that contests will be held where the gamerscore is a key component, such as 'first person to get all 1000 points in this game gets a free trip to E3'. Or 'first person to get 100 000 gamerpoints will get $100 000.
- It is probable that some games may get an additional shelf life simply by awarding gamer points if the game is played after a certain date, using the time / date features of the console.
- Matchmaking services will likley utilize the gamerscore to avoid Newbie Stomping.
- The data from gamerscores might be used to target in game advertising. If a player is known to like first person shooters, he may be seeing more ads for action movies.
The one thing I see as being absolutely necessary to happen is for Microsoft to become more involved in deciding how many points and how fast they should be given out. If it becomes too easy to get points from playing 'crapware' titles like "Barbies pony adventure", the hardcore audience will probably start to complain quite loudly about it.
I think that the Hulk movie failed because it took entirely the wrong approach to the character.
Audiences were expecting to see a large green giant kick ass all over the place. This did not quite happen. We got a few decent action sequences, but the villian, and the primary conflict, just did not deliver on the expectations we needed.
I think that the movie would have done better if they had made the movie focus on Banners guilt for the damange caused by the Hulks rampages. It also would have been intresting if they stuck closer to the comic, and had Bruce accidently kill his father.
It would have also helped if they used a different villian. The Absorbing man is not a bad villian, but they re-working of the origin so that Banners father was a super powered villian was frankly quite excruciating.
Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of how Russia's space tourism got started. Someone asked, and Russia said something like "No, it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars just to do the study". So the rich guy paid for the study, and that eventually led to that first space tourist.
If Russia says "No, we cannot afford to have police enforcing this", it may be that the RIAA may be willing to kick in the difference.
Given the huge number of social and security issues that Russia faces at the moment (corruption, poverty, keeping track of its nuclear arsenal) I expect that they will put this item pretty low on their list of priorities.
If the RIAA really wanted this to happen, they would pretty much have to offer to pay for the enforcement and prosecution. I would not be suprised if Russia would accept an offer that involved the RIAA paying for the police salaries, especially since the police would also server more useful functions.
Then again, I dont really like the ramifications of a corporate funded police force that had the full backing and authority of the state.
Good thing that I am basically talking out my ass then, I suppose.
My primary travel game is Dr Mario for GBA. It is a game thaty is easy to pick up and put back down when needed. I also travel with a Zelda game and Fire Emblem.
Given the sort of person who views this site, this is probably not stricly necessary. However...
SPOILER ALERT: THIS POST CONTAINS KEY PLOT ELEMENTS OF THE BOOK
One of the things I see as a probable cause of conflict is that some of the key scenes in the movie, and key scenes of character development, is that Ender basically gets picked on, and then retaliates by beating is antagonizers to death.
Now, given todays mass market, I dont expect that Warner Brothers wants to spend a hundred million or so on a sci-fi epic and then have to cripple potential box office gross by slapping an R rating on it. The main character is essentially a very likable child who is very smart and a great leader. They want to get children in to see this thing. They wont be able to do that if they have to get an R rating on the movie. But given the brutality of these scenes, I dont see how they can do justice to them without showing the brutality.
If Warner had their way, I would have to guess that they would like to see it cut out entirely, or have Ender not kill them. But I doubt that Orson Scott Card will let that happen. One of the reasons that Ender is ultimately chosen is that when he has to, he strikes without mercy and utterly destroys his opponent. There is no way to portray the character of Ender properly by having him pull a half assed beating on Bonzo, or that first bully, that lets them live.
Beyond that, I dont see any other likley cause of conflict with a script. Like any novel adaption, it will have to be cut down for time constraints.
I just dont see how being publicly traded would put you in a better negotiating position with respect to dealings with a publisher. It can worsen your position, if the publisher were to buy up a non trivial proportion of your shares. Then in addition to being dependant on that publisher for funding, you may find yourself obligated to take a deal from that owner / publisher when you could get a better deal from a different publisher.
The only way to improve your negotiating position with a publisher is to be in a position where you do not specifically need that publisher. There are not many ways to do that. If you can self fund the game, you can hold out for a more favorable deal. If you can pitch the game to multiple publishers, you can play them off one another and maybe get a bit of a bidding war for your game title.
As near as I know, the only reason to take a company public is for the owners of that company to make money by selling part or all of their stake in that company.
I can see plenty of downsides. It opens them up to potential takeover by a publisher if they fail to hold onto more then 50% of their shares. It makes them answerable to shareholders, which may curtail creativity in favor of cutting a profit. But how does Bioware / Pandemic benefit as a company from this move?
As a side note, Bioware / Pandemic are not the first pure developer to become publicly traded. Digital Illusions is also a publicly traded company, and have been for some time.
A few years ago, I decided to specifically watch for product placement, so I tend to notice it enough to make note of it. In general, I keep an eye out for shots that contain an identifying product logo when the logo adds nothing to the story. Some placement, like the Mc Donalds placement in The Fifth Element, are blatant and hard to miss. In I Robot, Wil Smith's "retro" possesions (shoes, music player), arent so subtle. The intrusive ads in Minority Report are odd, they are blatant, but the mechanism for the advertisement is relevant to the plot. Others are easier to miss; Jackie Chan movies seem to feature a Pepsi logo of some sort more often then not.
Even good product placement is not too hard to spot if you look for it. In general, if manage to notice that one person has, for example, a Nokia phone, then its a safe bet that every other phone will be the same brand. The car driven by the principle character is a favorite target for product placement. Soft drinks are most often one or the other.
24 Usually handles product placement pretty decently, but I concede that they do a suprising amount of it. The placement for Cisco was perhaps the most blatant, but not quite jarring enough for me to make too much of it. 24 Product placement tends to encompass the following products (that I have noticed),
Computers: Alot of CTU equipment is Dell. Season 4 had a few Alienware laptops as well. Cell Phones: I think Jack uses a Nokia phone. Cars: A great deal of Ford SUV's. It appears that Season 5 may use Toyota placements, based on the teaser from the Season 4 box set.
I consider bad product placement to be any sort of product placement where the product in question becomes the focus of the camera instead of the story at hand. 24 Usually does ok, the Cisco placement aside. They do alot of it, but its done as tastefully enough that it does not annoy me.
I see no way that the publishers can get around this.
At the exteme end of it, they wont stop garage sales, or me selling a used game to a friend.
Also, Electronics Boutique (or whatever they are called since the merger with Gamestop) makes money off of this. And EB is a key retailer for games.
The only long term viable way for the publishers to stop this is to stop selling physical media versions of their games, and require that the console be connected to centrally located servers and stream the games. While I think that on demand gaming may come about, I dont expect many gamers to go for this arrangement, unless the service is lightning fast and error free. Some people enjoy replaying games, and wont want to repurchase a game they bought in full a few years ago just to replay it.
Video games, and to an extent, DVD movies, are a tricky sort of gift to buy for a number of reasons. The article does a good job of indirectly summarizing the difficulties, despite seeming obvious. And while many Slashdot types will gripe about articles stating the obvious, consider for a moment how many tech support calls really are solved by asking the user to turn on / plug in the computer?
For Games or DVD's, there are only two key things you need to do right:
1) Dont buy something they wont play 2) Dont buy something they already have
Gamers will buy the obvious favorites for themselves within about a day of their release. Getting them the game they have talked about for months wont help you because they will buy it themselves. If they are broke, you have a shot, otherwise, they will beat you to the punch.
You can get some luck buy getting something similar to the sort of games they like. If they loved Resident Evil on the game cube, you might get them Eternal Darkness, or the Call of Cthulhu game for X-box. You can also get around the issue by buying things like extra controllers, or memory cards, or paid year of XBox Live.
Some of the best gifts possible are things that the recipient would like, but will not think to buy for themselves. But if that seems like it requires knowing the recipient too well, you can always get them a hot cocoa sampler box.
Marketing is a very strange beast to deal with as far as game development go. In many cases, the budget to market the game is much greater then the budget to develop the game.
Marketing can make sure that the people who would actually like the game manage to buy it. It cannot make a crappy game better, but it can make an average game profitable.
The problem, as I see it, is when the Marketing for a game forces the game to be released at an arbitrary date. The TV and Magazine spots must be purchased well in advance, and the hype machine needs time to spin up. Games ship with bugs because the marketing requires that the game launch on time. Once the marketing campaign starts, in many cases, the game must ship. Especially if the marketing is more expensive then the development of the game.
In a perfect world, the game would be finished, or at least finished enough that its a very stable late beta. But that basically only happens for companies that can get away with saying the game will ship 'when its done'.
The only company I have known to delay a game after the advertising geared up was Nintendo, and that was for Twilight Princess. In every other case, the publisher will either ship and patch, or they will go into "game design with an axe" mode, and just ship a piece of crap that satisfies the "Technical Requirement Checklist" or Lot check tests.
And if a game is low profile enough that it does not warrant a big marketing campaign, they may just axe the title if they dont think they can turn enough of a profit to justifiy marketing the game.
Marketing is important, but not so important that it should dictate the development schedule.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing I had not considered is that because Sony is both a content publisher and a hardware developer, that the company has an internal conflict over Copyright policy.
The problem is that with respect to music and movies, Sony does not enjoy absolute control over both the medium and the content. Sony DVD's and CD's must work on any other CD or DVD player, and Sony DVD players and CD players must work with any other music CD. With the Playstation this is not a problem, since they control the entire platform.
I think that the reason that Sony does not fully back the mini disk platform is indirecly explained in the article. Sony's hardware divisions would love to make Minidisk a dominant format. But Sony Music wants to sell assloads of music CD's. To do that, they must sell to the established platforms. And that is not the minidisk.
I think that being both a consumer electornics company and a publisher is probably not a great advantage. You cannot pursue a business plan with your electronics that can harm the business model of the publishing arm. Sony could not do the MP3 player because the publishing arm did not want to in any way hurt the sales of CD's.
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The only real upshot to this is that all PS3 games will essentially get a few more months of dev time to polish their titles, which may result in an unusually strong launch lineup.
The downsides to this are numerous, though. Many people may discount Nintendo, but even with their declined marketshare, Nintendo is not the sort of company you want to give a chance to play catchup in any sort of way. This will also give Microsoft a bit more rope. Whether Microsoft uses that extra rope to hang its self or to help build some momentem for the 360 is another question entirely.
Another problem is that the PS2 is already in decline, due to hype over the next generation of consoles. I am damn sure that while Sony would love to wring every last penny from that cash cow, that they dont want to let their best available retail offering to be the underdog against the 360 or Revolution for very long.
Between a handfull of articles about a bunch of weak 'me too' potential features for the PS3, and the way that Nintendo is steadily edging out the PSP due to the PSP not having any high profile killer apps, Sony is looking alot weaker right now then I would have expected. And if history has proven anything in the game industry, even giants can fall.
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It sounds to me that Sony is considering this as more of a checklist item then a headline feature. They have not been pushing their online component very hard at all, compared to say, the power of the cell processor.
If this was meant to be a serious feature, it would have been mentioned and covered long before now. But since Microsoft has proven its self with Xbox Live, and Nintendo has been talking about the access to their back library for some time, it sounds like Sony is getting a bit worried.
First, a week or two ago, someone brings up a story about a possible Revolution like controller scheme. Now were hearing about downloadable games. It just reeks of damage control marketing to me.
It also does not help that Sony does not have all that much in teh way of classic, evergreen titles to draw on. Most of their monster hits have recent iterations available, and those iterations are often in the vein of Gran Turismo, where the new ones are just going to be better then the old ones. I am sure they have some titles that qualify, though. You cannot get into Sony's current position without having any enduring hits.
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I would say that I would be very surprised if any propulsion of the sort noted here will be put into production in my life time. But I also have no doubt that we will at some point, discover a way to permit us to distant stars.
We wont find this breakthrough if we dont look for it. As long as the false and impossible ideas are shot down, whats the harm in listening to these wild ideas?
Afterall, some day, someone my actually be on to something. It would be a shame to disregard the idea just because it sounds impossible on the face of it.
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When you port any game to a system that cannot give you the exact same sort of input as the originating system, you will run into problems. If a game used 2 analog sticks originally, you cannot make the exact same game on a system with only one analog stick.
You can make a game that has a close resemblance, but thats about it.
Now, I think that one of the big reasons that the PSP may be suffering is that too many developers and publishers are porting games to that system rather then writing entirely new games. specifically for it.
The Nintendo DS does not suffer as much from this problem for two reasons. One is that most direct port type games from earlier systems have already shown up on the Gameboy Advance. The other reason is that the new interface pretty much demands new types of games.
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The 4th planet of this solar system is called Mars. Mars is the roman name of a greek god known as Ares.
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I dont think that Nintendo made a choice to not have Grand Theft Auto on their platform. They did make a choice not to make games in that vein, but but that is not quite the same thing.
I am concerned for Nintendo's long term success if great games do not come out on their console simply because they have aquired an image of being child friendly. Trying to skew their market towards people that are not traditionally gamers may turn out to be a great strategy. But you cannot deny that peoples perceptions play a huge part in their purchasing decisions.
Pokemon is a great game. I know this because I have played through and beat it. But I only played the original just this January. I did not purchase or play this game previously because the overwhelming cuteness of the surrounding fad repelled me. And I bought the Gamecube at launch with Super Monkeyball.
The cute factor can blind people to the presence of an excellent game. In Nintendo's case, the accumulated cute and kid friendly factor has turned consumers off to their platform.
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I am what I consider to be a pretty big fan of Nintendo. I own a sizeable selection of titles for my Cube, and will likely buy the Revolution at launch.
However, I am also concerned that Nintendo has run, and continues to run, a considerable risk in alienating the traditional hard core gamer audience. They do this by lacking games that appeal to a mature audience. From their own studios, the best game they have to appeal to that crowds tastes is Metroid. They have had mature games show up on the console, but they have not remained exclusive to their platform (think Resident Evil 4).
Now, Nintendo could possibly remake the entire video game market if they succeed in their push to put games out that appeal to non gamers. But its foolhardy to alienate what is likley the most loyal and consistent audience for videogames.
I am not saying that I want to see a slew of games that showcase screaming, bleeding, killing, and explosions. But I would like to be able to play a well considered and sell made R rated game.
Grand Theft Auto did not get press because its a very violent game. It got press because it was a very violent game that happened to be a very well made game. I dont want Nintendo to be the company that has great non violent games. I want Nintendo to be the company that has ALL the great games.
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Lionhead is best at trying new concepts, and in creating games that give players a great deal of leeway in how they want to play. But they are not so good at creating games that trigger the 'must buy' reflex in the average consumer. Alot of that is that their games, particularly the gameplay, dont seem to be the sort that lend themselves well to typical marketing campaigns. Black and White was a fine game, but how do you sell someone on the notion of spending hours training a giant cow?
The games are excellent in the most abstract and fundamental sense. Be a god, good or evil as you choose. Be a villian or a hero. But the gameplay often falls just a bit short. I would say that Fable is probably Lionheads most commercially viable franchise. Black and White and Movies are just too hard for marketing to sell.
The simplest way to create a monster hit is to have fundamentally solid gameplay mechanics paired with a style and tone that both compliments that gameplay, and that the intended audience can identify with even without being hard core gamers. I believe that most of Lionheads problems are primarily stylistic.
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This article has nothing of substance to it. Sony tends to be very good with their marketing and propaganda most of the time. They decimated Sega with it and they are trying to do the same to Microsoft and Nintendo. The problem is that the Revolution is nearly entirely immune to being counter hyped at the moment.
When Sega made claims for the Saturn or the Dreamcast, Sony was able to make claims that set them above that level. They could come out cheaper, or with better graphics, or with better games. But Nintendo mostly keeps its mouth shut. There are no set specs for hardware other then a vague 'gamecube times 2' for graphical power. The controller is, at the moment, something that Sony and Microsoft have no direct answer to. There is nothing on the laundry list of features for PS3 that is comparable at the moment.
The weakness of this article as propaganda says alot about the situation. The best response to the Revolution that Sony has right now is an add on periphereal to current generation hardware. Their response to the appeal to casual gamers is to have downloadable flash games. Now, some flash based games are fine, but I would never pay to play any of them. The one thing I am certain of is that Nintendo is not going after causal gamers with cheap 2D flash based games. They are going after them with the best their game developers can offer.
So at best, I would say that Sony has no idea what to do about Nintendo. They are unsure if Nintendo is going to even be worth responding to seriously. So the best they have to counter it is a throwaway rumor involving a half measure with a camera and some flash software.
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The reasons that HUD displays exist is that they do their job quite well. They convey information to the player very directly and very simply.
If you were to try to make a fighting game without a health meter, you would have to convey the state of health of the player in a different manner. This could probably be done through modifying the character animations, and by changing certain key textures. But this solution will require custom art assets for every player in the game, and it would need to be quite detailed. This will add months of development time to what should be an otherwise very quick job. On top of that, while the efforts to remove HUD Elements to increase immersiveness can be very effective, such efforts do not deliver the most bang for the buck in terms of improving a game.
Using the above fighting game example, I would much prefer to have the developers add extra characters, or more combat moves.
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Cinematics can, and often do, enhance and improve a game. But I do not think it is a good idea to have the cinematics eclipse the gameplay as a selling point.
The primary reason I stopped playing the final fantasy titles was because the cinematics became much more important then the gameplay.
The primary problem is that non interactive elements in games are not very replayable. Once the novelty of watching a long animation sequence wears off, I want to be able to skip it. And if I am forced to sit through a 30 second clip for the 19th time or so, I get very annoyed.
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I suspect that the Gamerscore thing is one of the few elements that Microsoft has come up with that will be ripped off by Nintendo and Sony. It is such a simple idea, so easy to implement, but its implications are huge.
While its obvious that many gamers will simply not care one way or the other about their gamerscore, many of the hard core gamers will. This will have several consequences. some of which are already being noticed, and are mentioned in that article.
- Gamers will play games they otherwise might not just to pump their score.
- Games will probably incur a longer shelf life as gamers try to wring the last few points out of a game
- Gamers in X-Box live will have an idea of what games are being played by their friends.
There are several things I can see happening with these gamers scores that may take a while to become apparant.
- Games could have unlockable content based on gamer scores acheived in other games. Think of this as an extension of the Pokemon 2 cartrige strategy; in order to play 100% of a game, you are forced to play other games.
- It is probable that contests will be held where the gamerscore is a key component, such as 'first person to get all 1000 points in this game gets a free trip to E3'. Or 'first person to get 100 000 gamerpoints will get $100 000.
- It is probable that some games may get an additional shelf life simply by awarding gamer points if the game is played after a certain date, using the time / date features of the console.
- Matchmaking services will likley utilize the gamerscore to avoid Newbie Stomping.
- The data from gamerscores might be used to target in game advertising. If a player is known to like first person shooters, he may be seeing more ads for action movies.
The one thing I see as being absolutely necessary to happen is for Microsoft to become more involved in deciding how many points and how fast they should be given out. If it becomes too easy to get points from playing 'crapware' titles like "Barbies pony adventure", the hardcore audience will probably start to complain quite loudly about it.
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I think that the Hulk movie failed because it took entirely the wrong approach to the character.
Audiences were expecting to see a large green giant kick ass all over the place. This did not quite happen. We got a few decent action sequences, but the villian, and the primary conflict, just did not deliver on the expectations we needed.
I think that the movie would have done better if they had made the movie focus on Banners guilt for the damange caused by the Hulks rampages. It also would have been intresting if they stuck closer to the comic, and had Bruce accidently kill his father.
It would have also helped if they used a different villian. The Absorbing man is not a bad villian, but they re-working of the origin so that Banners father was a super powered villian was frankly quite excruciating.
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Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of how Russia's space tourism got started. Someone asked, and Russia said something like "No, it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars just to do the study". So the rich guy paid for the study, and that eventually led to that first space tourist.
If Russia says "No, we cannot afford to have police enforcing this", it may be that the RIAA may be willing to kick in the difference.
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Given the huge number of social and security issues that Russia faces at the moment (corruption, poverty, keeping track of its nuclear arsenal) I expect that they will put this item pretty low on their list of priorities.
If the RIAA really wanted this to happen, they would pretty much have to offer to pay for the enforcement and prosecution. I would not be suprised if Russia would accept an offer that involved the RIAA paying for the police salaries, especially since the police would also server more useful functions.
Then again, I dont really like the ramifications of a corporate funded police force that had the full backing and authority of the state.
Good thing that I am basically talking out my ass then, I suppose.
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My primary travel game is Dr Mario for GBA. It is a game thaty is easy to pick up and put back down when needed. I also travel with a Zelda game and Fire Emblem.
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Given the sort of person who views this site, this is probably not stricly necessary. However...
SPOILER ALERT: THIS POST CONTAINS KEY PLOT ELEMENTS OF THE BOOK
One of the things I see as a probable cause of conflict is that some of the key scenes in the movie, and key scenes of character development, is that Ender basically gets picked on, and then retaliates by beating is antagonizers to death.
Now, given todays mass market, I dont expect that Warner Brothers wants to spend a hundred million or so on a sci-fi epic and then have to cripple potential box office gross by slapping an R rating on it. The main character is essentially a very likable child who is very smart and a great leader. They want to get children in to see this thing. They wont be able to do that if they have to get an R rating on the movie. But given the brutality of these scenes, I dont see how they can do justice to them without showing the brutality.
If Warner had their way, I would have to guess that they would like to see it cut out entirely, or have Ender not kill them. But I doubt that Orson Scott Card will let that happen. One of the reasons that Ender is ultimately chosen is that when he has to, he strikes without mercy and utterly destroys his opponent. There is no way to portray the character of Ender properly by having him pull a half assed beating on Bonzo, or that first bully, that lets them live.
Beyond that, I dont see any other likley cause of conflict with a script. Like any novel adaption, it will have to be cut down for time constraints.
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I just dont see how being publicly traded would put you in a better negotiating position with respect to dealings with a publisher. It can worsen your position, if the publisher were to buy up a non trivial proportion of your shares. Then in addition to being dependant on that publisher for funding, you may find yourself obligated to take a deal from that owner / publisher when you could get a better deal from a different publisher.
The only way to improve your negotiating position with a publisher is to be in a position where you do not specifically need that publisher. There are not many ways to do that. If you can self fund the game, you can hold out for a more favorable deal. If you can pitch the game to multiple publishers, you can play them off one another and maybe get a bit of a bidding war for your game title.
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As near as I know, the only reason to take a company public is for the owners of that company to make money by selling part or all of their stake in that company.
I can see plenty of downsides. It opens them up to potential takeover by a publisher if they fail to hold onto more then 50% of their shares. It makes them answerable to shareholders, which may curtail creativity in favor of cutting a profit. But how does Bioware / Pandemic benefit as a company from this move?
As a side note, Bioware / Pandemic are not the first pure developer to become publicly traded. Digital Illusions is also a publicly traded company, and have been for some time.
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A few years ago, I decided to specifically watch for product placement, so I tend to notice it enough to make note of it. In general, I keep an eye out for shots that contain an identifying product logo when the logo adds nothing to the story. Some placement, like the Mc Donalds placement in The Fifth Element, are blatant and hard to miss. In I Robot, Wil Smith's "retro" possesions (shoes, music player), arent so subtle. The intrusive ads in Minority Report are odd, they are blatant, but the mechanism for the advertisement is relevant to the plot. Others are easier to miss; Jackie Chan movies seem to feature a Pepsi logo of some sort more often then not.
Even good product placement is not too hard to spot if you look for it. In general, if manage to notice that one person has, for example, a Nokia phone, then its a safe bet that every other phone will be the same brand. The car driven by the principle character is a favorite target for product placement. Soft drinks are most often one or the other.
24 Usually handles product placement pretty decently, but I concede that they do a suprising amount of it. The placement for Cisco was perhaps the most blatant, but not quite jarring enough for me to make too much of it. 24 Product placement tends to encompass the following products (that I have noticed),
Computers: Alot of CTU equipment is Dell. Season 4 had a few Alienware laptops as well.
Cell Phones: I think Jack uses a Nokia phone.
Cars: A great deal of Ford SUV's. It appears that Season 5 may use Toyota placements, based on the teaser from the Season 4 box set.
I consider bad product placement to be any sort of product placement where the product in question becomes the focus of the camera instead of the story at hand. 24 Usually does ok, the Cisco placement aside. They do alot of it, but its done as tastefully enough that it does not annoy me.
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I see no way that the publishers can get around this.
At the exteme end of it, they wont stop garage sales, or me selling a used game to a friend.
Also, Electronics Boutique (or whatever they are called since the merger with Gamestop) makes money off of this. And EB is a key retailer for games.
The only long term viable way for the publishers to stop this is to stop selling physical media versions of their games, and require that the console be connected to centrally located servers and stream the games. While I think that on demand gaming may come about, I dont expect many gamers to go for this arrangement, unless the service is lightning fast and error free. Some people enjoy replaying games, and wont want to repurchase a game they bought in full a few years ago just to replay it.
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Hmm...
So under the scenario you describe, you get Resident Evil 4 and Double Dash, and your friend gets Mario Strikers and Viewtiful Joe?
Your friend is getting gyped!
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Video games, and to an extent, DVD movies, are a tricky sort of gift to buy for a number of reasons. The article does a good job of indirectly summarizing the difficulties, despite seeming obvious. And while many Slashdot types will gripe about articles stating the obvious, consider for a moment how many tech support calls really are solved by asking the user to turn on / plug in the computer?
For Games or DVD's, there are only two key things you need to do right:
1) Dont buy something they wont play
2) Dont buy something they already have
Gamers will buy the obvious favorites for themselves within about a day of their release. Getting them the game they have talked about for months wont help you because they will buy it themselves. If they are broke, you have a shot, otherwise, they will beat you to the punch.
You can get some luck buy getting something similar to the sort of games they like. If they loved Resident Evil on the game cube, you might get them Eternal Darkness, or the Call of Cthulhu game for X-box. You can also get around the issue by buying things like extra controllers, or memory cards, or paid year of XBox Live.
Some of the best gifts possible are things that the recipient would like, but will not think to buy for themselves. But if that seems like it requires knowing the recipient too well, you can always get them a hot cocoa sampler box.
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Marketing is a very strange beast to deal with as far as game development go. In many cases, the budget to market the game is much greater then the budget to develop the game.
Marketing can make sure that the people who would actually like the game manage to buy it. It cannot make a crappy game better, but it can make an average game profitable.
The problem, as I see it, is when the Marketing for a game forces the game to be released at an arbitrary date. The TV and Magazine spots must be purchased well in advance, and the hype machine needs time to spin up. Games ship with bugs because the marketing requires that the game launch on time. Once the marketing campaign starts, in many cases, the game must ship. Especially if the marketing is more expensive then the development of the game.
In a perfect world, the game would be finished, or at least finished enough that its a very stable late beta. But that basically only happens for companies that can get away with saying the game will ship 'when its done'.
The only company I have known to delay a game after the advertising geared up was Nintendo, and that was for Twilight Princess. In every other case, the publisher will either ship and patch, or they will go into "game design with an axe" mode, and just ship a piece of crap that satisfies the "Technical Requirement Checklist" or Lot check tests.
And if a game is low profile enough that it does not warrant a big marketing campaign, they may just axe the title if they dont think they can turn enough of a profit to justifiy marketing the game.
Marketing is important, but not so important that it should dictate the development schedule.
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