Oh man what a shame. The Tick vs. The Tick is possibly the best episode of a show where every show has great moments, and over half of them are at least extremely good.
That's almost as much shame as the fact that you probably won't see the animated The Tick on DVD for decades down the road. Rights issues suck.
If a long-and-involved RPG is implemented well enough, it'll entice casual gamers into playing it. And don't misunderstand me -- what I was pleading for wasn't reducing all games to a lowest common denominator, but rather that games stop being so insular and impossible to understand and enjoy unless you're already steeped in a genre's contexts.
This is one of the reasons I'm not so interested in playing FPSes, or sports games, or fighting games; who but each genre's adherents will really understand everything that genre has to offer? Fighting games are especially bad in this regard -- there's a whole terminology behind them that's incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't spent a good amount of time discussing fighting games. I don't have the time to get a BA in fighting games just to have fun with Capcom's latest Super Pummelfest.
While its a cool idea, and the homebrew stuff on the dreamcast shows that people would be interested in it, it's just not going to happen. How many companies supported having random people producing games for their console?
Here's all the proof I need to see that it *could* work: Little Fluffy Industries, a listing of various and sundry cool web games. They tend to post roughly two or three a day (with the occaisional hiatus). Make a console-shaped valve to channel this creative output, and Nintendo just might have something.
I can't help but think mentioning the game in a discussion on originality in gaming is becoming almost cliche, but here goes. The interview with the KD guys in Game Developer magazine (posted on the web here) has a section where they talk with the guy in change of the music:
... The music/soundtrack of the game came out really well. Games and music have a lot in common. I have really had enough of the standard "the boss battle has music with tension" approach, however. In Katamari Damacy, there is no boss and there are no enemies, so we created a soundtrack that's original to the game.
I'll let Yu Miyake, our sound director, tell you about the music he created in his own words:
"Takahashi, the director, allowed me to direct the music any way I wanted. I would never have been given that kind of creative freedom working for an ordinary director. My goal was to have the music appeal to everyone, and so I tried many different methods of directing and creating tunes in order to have that appeal."
A little later:
"We were very serious when creating the music. Most game music nowadays is pretty forgettable. I wanted to create a soundtrack that would stick in player's heads, sort of like an evil curse. I also wanted to avoid using a single musical genre. Everything from the selection of the vocalists to the selection of song lyrics, was carefully considered."
Also worth reading for the process by which the "Nah, nanananana, na na..." song, so winningly alluded to by me in the subject line, made it into the game.
I never finished Skies of Arcadia. I lost interest shortly after the point where the player had to search Deep Sky for that stuff, I forget what they were.
I almost never finished Grandia. After I finished the first disk, I didn't continue far into the second before something else came up, and by the time I had time for Grandia again, I had forgotten most of what I was doing. While recently I went back, started over, and finished the whole thing, it strikes me as odd that it took me so long to do so -- Grandia has great writing, head and shoulders above most other games, and is usually a joy to play.
This has only been getting worse over time. I've actually yet to finish Zelda: Minish Cap. The problem, as I see it, is that if I get interested in something else, maybe a project or a book or another game, then my chances of going back to the original game decrease dramatically.
I think the best way to handle this, however, might not be to make games shorter, but provide more continuity links to player who stop playing for a while. Maybe recaps of the story at periodic intervals, that kind of thing.
The only one of those I'm prepared to grant you is Petz, and it was hampered by the fact that there wasn't really all that much you could *do* with your pet. I had Catz for a while, long ago, and it got old fast. Nintendogs looks like it'll last longer, in that you can actually take your dog for walks and enter him into dog shows. In short, it has game-like challenge elements, instead of just being a virtual space in which you play with a virtual animal.
Eh, when you're right you're right. I picked up the rest of the Zelda series up when they released the promotional disk for Wind Waker. There will be a good number of other games released with it too, I'm guessing, besides Zelda, and those might be cool to play. But I have all the old-school Zelda now, I'm thinking, I'm thinking, I'll ever need.
I think PC gaming may end up switching to genres uniquely suited for a home computer. Games that use web data as part of their play, games that sit on your taskbar most of the time and work on their own things while you word process, games that communicate over the internet with other copies of the game, distributed.net-style, for multiplayer purposes and thinking hard about individual problems. (Of course, this would give us games that require a privacy policy, and games that are actually phishing scams....)
P.S. If you go out and patent any of the things I just mentioned, I will hate you forever.
Nintendogs' success came beginning the week of April 18th, the same week DS sales spiked. It was the #4, #5 and #6 game, among all games sold in Japan, for that week. It seems fairly likely that Nintendogs was behind the DS' success.
The DS' continued sales lead over the PSP is probably due, mostly, to other things. That "quiz game" mentioned is actually Work Your Brain, which is based off of a self-help book and is intended as a sort of IQ-raising training program. Something I, myself, would like to play around with one day if they make an English version.
It's also possible that they've established positive momentum after Nintendogs, that is to say, that the buzz has shifted back into Nintendo's court. Time will tell.
Well, considering that you can teach your dogs tricks using the microphone, participate in various events with it, and allow multiple dogs to interact with each other in the same room, it's got a *bit* more going for it than a Tamagotchi. Tamagotchis are interesting in direct proportion to what the pet itself is capable of. Word is, they've actually done a pretty good job of modelling dog behavior, though I'm sure it's not perfect. (And the tricks seems to be hardcoded into the system, though there are a large number of them, I'm guessing you can't turn any ol' piece of dog behavior into a new trick.)
Hey lookit, instead of saying "misconceptions," they said "mythconceptions!" Ha, ha ha! That fills me with all kinds of respect for their opinion, that the article is titled just like Aunt Sally writing for the local church newsletter!
#1: "Many in the industry feel that games are simply software, and that they cannot be patented. This is untrue. To the contrary, patents may be obtained on "anything under the sun that is made by man,"4 and computer programs are no exception."
Right, and that's exactly what we're mad about, sport. This is actually a rather new aspect of patent law, which has, in other fields, resulted in things like patenting business methods, which is more obviously wrong to non-geeks. Software patenting is still wrong, however.
The patents listed, like one my Microsoft on a method of scoring, are all wrongheaded and could just as easily used as examples of why game patents are bad. Take a look at the footnotes at the end -- apparently Sega patented the customers that scramble out of the way of your cab in Crazy Taxi! Damn you Sega, for the patent, and for wrecking my respect for one of my favorite games with knowledge of the patent!
You can even get patent protection on purely ornamental designs associated with games. These patents, known as "design patents," protect ornamental aspects of items, such as the distinct appearance of a game console (U.S. Design Patent No. D452,282) or an onscreen icon (U.S. Design Patent No. D487,574).
Ornamental designs outside of software are irrelevant to this discussion. Design patents of digital images, frequently used by Apple, are not innovation stiflers to that degree, so they're not really what we're mad about.
(Notice how I cleverly include you into my perspective, with the clandestine use of the word "we!" Not that this is very risky, this being Slashdot and all....)
Many of these "mythconceptions" (I cringe just typing that!) are more along the lines of "hey look at how easy it is," and "look at all the cool things you can do to punish people!" My primary objection to software patents is that, if you're *not* a big corporation, you can put yourself into a lot of legal jeopardy just by programming a random idea you had, if it happens to intrude onto someone's technological backyard. The field of computer programming is uniquely suited to be advanced by hobbyists, that's how we got Linux after all, so these patent issues affect us rather heavily. However, these same issues also affect the "outside world" as well, as I noted before about business method patents.
Myth 5. The "spirit of innovation" works best when there is a free market of ideas, and consumers are better off if video games are not patented.
A classic argument among those who feel that the entire patent system should be abolished. You might want to make that argument to your representative in Congress, because unless the Constitution is amended to do away with patents, they're here to stay.
Gee thanks, my dear jerk. As it happens, the Constitution makes allowances for protecting ideas "for limited times," but leaves the precise means of this protection up to Congress, wherein was authored the worst of our current patent system. Thus, to change things you needn't amend the Constitution, but just the specific law. You can bet that the Founding F's didn't forsee the ability to protect ANYTHING by way of a patent.
Two of those games are versions of Nintendogs. The other one, in what can only been seen as a good sign, is the DS Bomberman, which uses both the classic game and art style of the game along with supporting 8-player games. (Are we finally getting a Bomberman equal to the sainted Super Bomberman back on the SNES? I certainly hope so.)
But back to Nintendogs.... that week when Shiba and Friends was #4, the other two games were #5 and #6. Added together, and it would have placed second, right behind a Romancing Saga game (and interestingly enough, displacing the GC Fire Emblem to #3).
Ah-ha! I KNEW someone was going to bring that up! But that wasn't a simulation, it was fairly flat. What I'm talking would have real math behind it, and it would be the entire focus of the game, Sim-style.
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...
Okay, suggest one. And I don't mean just come up with a goddamn stupid setting, I want to hear about the gameplay and why it's fun, and why it isn't just a variation on an existing genre, and why it's actually a practical idea with current-day technology.
Not so easy, is it?
Well actually, there's dozens of those kinds of games. Many of them are popular for a while, but don't get picked up upon by the rest of the industry. Like:
* Lawyer games (like an upcoming DS title whose name escapes me) * A surgery game (there have been a couple of these so far, but one's another upcoming DS game and the other's almost forgotten now) * Firefighter games (Brave Firefighters) * Of course, Crazy Taxi (Sega made two sequels, but the only other similar game had a Simpsons license)
Oh, you want completely *original* genres? How about: * A fantasy merchant simulation? You've bought swords and Cure potion from them for years, why not set up your own place! * A multiplayer magic combat game where all the spells are created by the players? I did some work on an idea like that once upon a time, and I'm certain it'd work. * How about a fantasy world simulation where the player doesn't actually interact directly with it? I've done a *lot* of design work on something like that and I know it'd work too.
Hmm, I said "I'm certain it'd work" twice in a row. Maybe I should explain. A game's structure, that part of it that gets copied over and over when a genre is defined, are not obvious things before their creation. It's easy to look at at FPS and say, "well of COURSE they did it that way." Hindsight is 20/20. But people had to actually invent that style of play.
Just saying "name a genre" is rhetorically disingenuous, because anything someone comes up with will have to be *invented*. I could spin ideas that would be cool all day long (President simulation! Porn star adventure! Alchemy swordsman! Rubber band wars!), but they're meaningless until someone figures out a way to make them work. And that's not something you can do meaningfully within a Slashdot post.
Which isn't to say people shouldn't go through that effort. Just that I wish more people would.
A game player's response to the developer
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A Gamer's Manifesto
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· Score: 2, Interesting
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...
The fallacy of this statement is laughable. Games don't simply exist. The reason that a particlar game genre is produced again and again is become you asshats keep buying them. Again and again and again. Want more games like Katamari Damacy? Then buy the game.
Um... I did. Actually, I went in halves for a used PS2, *then* bought Katamari Damacy, making its effective cost to me $85.
Despite my doing what you said, there wasn't any other PS2 games I was interested in. B-but... I bought Katamari Damacy!
What is my point? My point is this: I like clever, original games, and will buy them, and in fact buy nothing except them. But there are millions of idiots who buy Ultra-Madden 200X. This means big companies, chasing profit and mindful of opportunity costs, go after that, to the deteriment of things like Katamari Damacy.
Thus, there is very, very little out there that interests me, other than that which is produced by Nintendo, who, for all their faults, still know how to make clever games most of the time. Meaning that I buy, primarily, Nintendo. Meaning a number of idiots on Slashdot would call me a fanboy. Argh.
5. And on the opposite side of the nipple coin... A game these day costs in the tens of millions of dollars to release. A company is simply not going to risk that kind of green (and possibly the fate of the company) on an analyst's hunch. There has to be something more than a gut feeling to release that kind of game.
If the gut feeling is had by an analyst, then I agree. If it's by a developer, or a master designer, then I think you're smoking crack, sorry to say. They probably know their field a lot better than an analyst. Or a marketing department.
Ultimately, what the article says is "Game companies won't take chances because games cost too much to make." Meanwhile you object to that, saying, "Game companies won't take chances because games cost too much to make." The article said it with regret. You seem to think it's unavoidable, and thus people shouldn't complain. Me, I think I'll continue complaining.
7. Loading... As soon as you come up with a mechanism to physically get 16 megs of data off a DVD rom faster than 1 second, I'll be all over improving load times.
He already covered this: figure out ways to load data during down time. Metroid Prime loads the new room during the previous one, in a rather slick fashion, though I'm sure it means that levels must be designed with it in mind. Even so, most developers put nowhere near that much thought into the process. Yet, somehow, most of Nintendo's games have little or no load times. (I hate to bring up Nintendo again, but it's true.)
5. Stop the Short-Sighted Business Bullshit Agree and disagree. I agree that frivolous or baseless patents are not good for the game industry. But if a company comes up with something truly revolutionary, I think that they should get to reap some reward from that.
Like, um, HAVING THE FEATURE IN THEIR GAME?! Sony patented a brain-centered input method not so long back that they admit doesn't even exist yet, and they don't even know how it would work! I don't see how anyone could possibly say that's good for anyone, including customers, except Sony.
If by reaping rewards, you mean exclusive access to that idea, then I have absolutely no sympathy. Building on each other's ideas is what moves the industry forward as a whole, not what holds it back. Nothing says you have to tell how you accomplished it -- if the idea is deserving of real protection, then it shouldn't be trivial for others to duplicate anyway.
BTW, what Slashdot readers tends to have a default antipathy for isn't patents, it's software patents. And ust because a bunch of Slashdot readers think something's wrong, it's not a secret indicator that that thing is right.
Enough responses, I told my doctor I'd try to lay off the extreme bitterness.
Ah, Phantom of the Asteroids! I had a disk copy of it without a game loading screen, but I'm honestly surprised anyone else has heard of that thing. I seriously played that once upon a time. Surprised anyone else remembers it.
Namco must have patented it back from the old days -- wasn't there a game in which the player could play Galaxian during a loading screen?
In any case, while most of the article was unusually interesting, this point was best of all. +10 Informative. Sorry Namco, you just lost a large chunk of the good will you got from me for Katamari Damacy....
Three reasons why Metroid Prime's jumping works
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A Gamer's Manifesto
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· Score: 1
Well, these are my explanations for it. Take or leave them.
1. The game has no leaps-of-death. There isn't a single place in the game where a fall proves instantly fatal. I'm not even sure you take *damage* from falls, no matter how far. Take out the death and you take out the reason jumping puzzles are a decidedly un-fun form of nerve-wracking. The worst that can happen to you is having to go through a few rooms to get back to where you started, or having to scramble to get off some damaging ground, and those are made less troublesome because:
2. The puzzles are done fairly. Indeed they barely qualify as puzzles, because the game doesn't feel like getting from platform to platform is a play mechanic. It's just something you do to get places. Thus, destination platforms are rarely tiny, often there's walls on the other side of jumps to help you avoid taking a fall, and the game rarely forces you to make a jump that's *barely reachable*. Since the jumps are just a way of getting around large, spacious areas, instead of an intended source of challenge, Retro Studios was free to not make them too challenging. Note that this is actually an improvement over the original Metroid -- I wonder how many players got through the whole game only to be thwarted by that damn "Time Bomb Set Get Out Fast" shaft with the half-block-wide platforms.
3. Metroid Prime isn't a game with "ground to cover," most of which will only be seen once, but a game in which the player goes back and forth across areas. The places with jumps feel like they're a natural part of the level (with the possible exception of the floating, invisible, moving platforms in a couple of areas late in the game, but those are there as an inventory barrier, not really difficult once the X-Ray Scope has been obtained). The difficulty graph of the game tends to have long, low plateaus with spikes around where bosses are, but they never really get that high. It's just not that hard a game, with much of the enjoyment coming from the moody, believable atmosphere. Less difficulty means less frustration overall, but the game's presentation makes up for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh man what a shame. The Tick vs. The Tick is possibly the best episode of a show where every show has great moments, and over half of them are at least extremely good.
That's almost as much shame as the fact that you probably won't see the animated The Tick on DVD for decades down the road. Rights issues suck.
You've got nothing on me, I'm just an ordinary electrician, I, I-- BAD IS GOOD BABY! DOWN WITH GOVERNMENT!!
Shame The Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs At Midnight only got one real episode.
If a long-and-involved RPG is implemented well enough, it'll entice casual gamers into playing it. And don't misunderstand me -- what I was pleading for wasn't reducing all games to a lowest common denominator, but rather that games stop being so insular and impossible to understand and enjoy unless you're already steeped in a genre's contexts.
This is one of the reasons I'm not so interested in playing FPSes, or sports games, or fighting games; who but each genre's adherents will really understand everything that genre has to offer? Fighting games are especially bad in this regard -- there's a whole terminology behind them that's incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't spent a good amount of time discussing fighting games. I don't have the time to get a BA in fighting games just to have fun with Capcom's latest Super Pummelfest.
While its a cool idea, and the homebrew stuff on the dreamcast shows that people would be interested in it, it's just not going to happen. How many companies supported having random people producing games for their console?
Here's all the proof I need to see that it *could* work: Little Fluffy Industries, a listing of various and sundry cool web games. They tend to post roughly two or three a day (with the occaisional hiatus). Make a console-shaped valve to channel this creative output, and Nintendo just might have something.
I can't believe I forgot to mention the game I was talking about was Katamari Damacy. Argh!
I'll let Yu Miyake, our sound director, tell you about the music he created in his own words:
"Takahashi, the director, allowed me to direct the music any way I wanted. I would never have been given that kind of creative freedom working for an ordinary director. My goal was to have the music appeal to everyone, and so I tried many different methods of directing and creating tunes in order to have that appeal."
A little later:
"We were very serious when creating the music. Most game music nowadays is pretty forgettable. I wanted to create a soundtrack that would stick in player's heads, sort of like an evil curse. I also wanted to avoid using a single musical genre. Everything from the selection of the vocalists to the selection of song lyrics, was carefully considered."
Also worth reading for the process by which the "Nah, nanananana, na na..." song, so winningly alluded to by me in the subject line, made it into the game.
Considering that I've completed many RPGs, I sincerely doubt that. In any case, games cannot afford to be so elitist in their audience these days.
I never finished Skies of Arcadia. I lost interest shortly after the point where the player had to search Deep Sky for that stuff, I forget what they were.
I almost never finished Grandia. After I finished the first disk, I didn't continue far into the second before something else came up, and by the time I had time for Grandia again, I had forgotten most of what I was doing. While recently I went back, started over, and finished the whole thing, it strikes me as odd that it took me so long to do so -- Grandia has great writing, head and shoulders above most other games, and is usually a joy to play.
This has only been getting worse over time. I've actually yet to finish Zelda: Minish Cap. The problem, as I see it, is that if I get interested in something else, maybe a project or a book or another game, then my chances of going back to the original game decrease dramatically.
I think the best way to handle this, however, might not be to make games shorter, but provide more continuity links to player who stop playing for a while. Maybe recaps of the story at periodic intervals, that kind of thing.
Ah, I got the two mixed up. I have both.
The only one of those I'm prepared to grant you is Petz, and it was hampered by the fact that there wasn't really all that much you could *do* with your pet. I had Catz for a while, long ago, and it got old fast. Nintendogs looks like it'll last longer, in that you can actually take your dog for walks and enter him into dog shows. In short, it has game-like challenge elements, instead of just being a virtual space in which you play with a virtual animal.
Well...
But...
Eh, when you're right you're right. I picked up the rest of the Zelda series up when they released the promotional disk for Wind Waker. There will be a good number of other games released with it too, I'm guessing, besides Zelda, and those might be cool to play. But I have all the old-school Zelda now, I'm thinking, I'm thinking, I'll ever need.
I think PC gaming may end up switching to genres uniquely suited for a home computer. Games that use web data as part of their play, games that sit on your taskbar most of the time and work on their own things while you word process, games that communicate over the internet with other copies of the game, distributed.net-style, for multiplayer purposes and thinking hard about individual problems. (Of course, this would give us games that require a privacy policy, and games that are actually phishing scams....)
P.S. If you go out and patent any of the things I just mentioned, I will hate you forever.
Nintendogs' success came beginning the week of April 18th, the same week DS sales spiked. It was the #4, #5 and #6 game, among all games sold in Japan, for that week. It seems fairly likely that Nintendogs was behind the DS' success.
The DS' continued sales lead over the PSP is probably due, mostly, to other things. That "quiz game" mentioned is actually Work Your Brain, which is based off of a self-help book and is intended as a sort of IQ-raising training program. Something I, myself, would like to play around with one day if they make an English version.
It's also possible that they've established positive momentum after Nintendogs, that is to say, that the buzz has shifted back into Nintendo's court. Time will tell.
Well, considering that you can teach your dogs tricks using the microphone, participate in various events with it, and allow multiple dogs to interact with each other in the same room, it's got a *bit* more going for it than a Tamagotchi. Tamagotchis are interesting in direct proportion to what the pet itself is capable of. Word is, they've actually done a pretty good job of modelling dog behavior, though I'm sure it's not perfect. (And the tricks seems to be hardcoded into the system, though there are a large number of them, I'm guessing you can't turn any ol' piece of dog behavior into a new trick.)
Hey lookit, instead of saying "misconceptions," they said "mythconceptions!" Ha, ha ha! That fills me with all kinds of respect for their opinion, that the article is titled just like Aunt Sally writing for the local church newsletter!
#1: "Many in the industry feel that games are simply software, and that they cannot be patented. This is untrue. To the contrary, patents may be obtained on "anything under the sun that is made by man,"4 and computer programs are no exception."
Right, and that's exactly what we're mad about, sport. This is actually a rather new aspect of patent law, which has, in other fields, resulted in things like patenting business methods, which is more obviously wrong to non-geeks. Software patenting is still wrong, however.
The patents listed, like one my Microsoft on a method of scoring, are all wrongheaded and could just as easily used as examples of why game patents are bad. Take a look at the footnotes at the end -- apparently Sega patented the customers that scramble out of the way of your cab in Crazy Taxi! Damn you Sega, for the patent, and for wrecking my respect for one of my favorite games with knowledge of the patent!
You can even get patent protection on purely ornamental designs associated with games. These patents, known as "design patents," protect ornamental aspects of items, such as the distinct appearance of a game console (U.S. Design Patent No. D452,282) or an onscreen icon (U.S. Design Patent No. D487,574).
Ornamental designs outside of software are irrelevant to this discussion. Design patents of digital images, frequently used by Apple, are not innovation stiflers to that degree, so they're not really what we're mad about.
(Notice how I cleverly include you into my perspective, with the clandestine use of the word "we!" Not that this is very risky, this being Slashdot and all....)
Many of these "mythconceptions" (I cringe just typing that!) are more along the lines of "hey look at how easy it is," and "look at all the cool things you can do to punish people!" My primary objection to software patents is that, if you're *not* a big corporation, you can put yourself into a lot of legal jeopardy just by programming a random idea you had, if it happens to intrude onto someone's technological backyard. The field of computer programming is uniquely suited to be advanced by hobbyists, that's how we got Linux after all, so these patent issues affect us rather heavily. However, these same issues also affect the "outside world" as well, as I noted before about business method patents.
Myth 5. The "spirit of innovation" works best when there is a free market of ideas, and consumers are better off if video games are not patented.
A classic argument among those who feel that the entire patent system should be abolished. You might want to make that argument to your representative in Congress, because unless the Constitution is amended to do away with patents, they're here to stay.
Gee thanks, my dear jerk. As it happens, the Constitution makes allowances for protecting ideas "for limited times," but leaves the precise means of this protection up to Congress, wherein was authored the worst of our current patent system. Thus, to change things you needn't amend the Constitution, but just the specific law. You can bet that the Founding F's didn't forsee the ability to protect ANYTHING by way of a patent.
Hm.... I fear I may have spoken more strongly than was warrented. My apologies.
And you're right, the points I made were already made elsewhere, as I discovered after I posted. My bad.
Not just that:
http://www.gamesarefun.com/news.php?newsid=4781
Two of those games are versions of Nintendogs. The other one, in what can only been seen as a good sign, is the DS Bomberman, which uses both the classic game and art style of the game along with supporting 8-player games. (Are we finally getting a Bomberman equal to the sainted Super Bomberman back on the SNES? I certainly hope so.)
But back to Nintendogs.... that week when Shiba and Friends was #4, the other two games were #5 and #6. Added together, and it would have placed second, right behind a Romancing Saga game (and interestingly enough, displacing the GC Fire Emblem to #3).
Um....
Did you know that DS sales have once again surged ahead of PSP sales in Japan because of this game?
It's may be considered quite surreal, but it's true. Take a look:
http://www.gamesarefun.com/news.php?newsid=4781
Does this mean Nintendo will certainly win? No. But it's definitely an encouraging sign for them.
"Previous generation" means PS1/N64. I think you mean the previous previous generation.
Ah-ha! I KNEW someone was going to bring that up! But that wasn't a simulation, it was fairly flat. What I'm talking would have real math behind it, and it would be the entire focus of the game, Sim-style.
So, nyaah, yon Taloon-referer!
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...
Okay, suggest one. And I don't mean just come up with a goddamn stupid setting, I want to hear about the gameplay and why it's fun, and why it isn't just a variation on an existing genre, and why it's actually a practical idea with current-day technology.
Not so easy, is it?
Well actually, there's dozens of those kinds of games. Many of them are popular for a while, but don't get picked up upon by the rest of the industry. Like:
* Lawyer games (like an upcoming DS title whose name escapes me)
* A surgery game (there have been a couple of these so far, but one's another upcoming DS game and the other's almost forgotten now)
* Firefighter games (Brave Firefighters)
* Of course, Crazy Taxi (Sega made two sequels, but the only other similar game had a Simpsons license)
Oh, you want completely *original* genres? How about:
* A fantasy merchant simulation? You've bought swords and Cure potion from them for years, why not set up your own place!
* A multiplayer magic combat game where all the spells are created by the players? I did some work on an idea like that once upon a time, and I'm certain it'd work.
* How about a fantasy world simulation where the player doesn't actually interact directly with it? I've done a *lot* of design work on something like that and I know it'd work too.
Hmm, I said "I'm certain it'd work" twice in a row. Maybe I should explain. A game's structure, that part of it that gets copied over and over when a genre is defined, are not obvious things before their creation. It's easy to look at at FPS and say, "well of COURSE they did it that way." Hindsight is 20/20. But people had to actually invent that style of play.
Just saying "name a genre" is rhetorically disingenuous, because anything someone comes up with will have to be *invented*. I could spin ideas that would be cool all day long (President simulation! Porn star adventure! Alchemy swordsman! Rubber band wars!), but they're meaningless until someone figures out a way to make them work. And that's not something you can do meaningfully within a Slashdot post.
Which isn't to say people shouldn't go through that effort. Just that I wish more people would.
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...
The fallacy of this statement is laughable. Games don't simply exist. The reason that a particlar game genre is produced again and again is become you asshats keep buying them. Again and again and again. Want more games like Katamari Damacy? Then buy the game.
Um... I did. Actually, I went in halves for a used PS2, *then* bought Katamari Damacy, making its effective cost to me $85.
Despite my doing what you said, there wasn't any other PS2 games I was interested in. B-but... I bought Katamari Damacy!
What is my point? My point is this: I like clever, original games, and will buy them, and in fact buy nothing except them. But there are millions of idiots who buy Ultra-Madden 200X. This means big companies, chasing profit and mindful of opportunity costs, go after that, to the deteriment of things like Katamari Damacy.
Thus, there is very, very little out there that interests me, other than that which is produced by Nintendo, who, for all their faults, still know how to make clever games most of the time. Meaning that I buy, primarily, Nintendo. Meaning a number of idiots on Slashdot would call me a fanboy. Argh.
5. And on the opposite side of the nipple coin...
A game these day costs in the tens of millions of dollars to release. A company is simply not going to risk that kind of green (and possibly the fate of the company) on an analyst's hunch. There has to be something more than a gut feeling to release that kind of game.
If the gut feeling is had by an analyst, then I agree. If it's by a developer, or a master designer, then I think you're smoking crack, sorry to say. They probably know their field a lot better than an analyst. Or a marketing department.
Ultimately, what the article says is "Game companies won't take chances because games cost too much to make." Meanwhile you object to that, saying, "Game companies won't take chances because games cost too much to make." The article said it with regret. You seem to think it's unavoidable, and thus people shouldn't complain. Me, I think I'll continue complaining.
7. Loading...
As soon as you come up with a mechanism to physically get 16 megs of data off a DVD rom faster than 1 second, I'll be all over improving load times.
He already covered this: figure out ways to load data during down time. Metroid Prime loads the new room during the previous one, in a rather slick fashion, though I'm sure it means that levels must be designed with it in mind. Even so, most developers put nowhere near that much thought into the process. Yet, somehow, most of Nintendo's games have little or no load times. (I hate to bring up Nintendo again, but it's true.)
5. Stop the Short-Sighted Business Bullshit
Agree and disagree. I agree that frivolous or baseless patents are not good for the game industry. But if a company comes up with something truly revolutionary, I think that they should get to reap some reward from that.
Like, um, HAVING THE FEATURE IN THEIR GAME?! Sony patented a brain-centered input method not so long back that they admit doesn't even exist yet, and they don't even know how it would work! I don't see how anyone could possibly say that's good for anyone, including customers, except Sony.
If by reaping rewards, you mean exclusive access to that idea, then I have absolutely no sympathy. Building on each other's ideas is what moves the industry forward as a whole, not what holds it back. Nothing says you have to tell how you accomplished it -- if the idea is deserving of real protection, then it shouldn't be trivial for others to duplicate anyway.
BTW, what Slashdot readers tends to have a default antipathy for isn't patents, it's software patents. And ust because a bunch of Slashdot readers think something's wrong, it's not a secret indicator that that thing is right.
Enough responses, I told my doctor I'd try to lay off the extreme bitterness.
Ah, Phantom of the Asteroids! I had a disk copy of it without a game loading screen, but I'm honestly surprised anyone else has heard of that thing. I seriously played that once upon a time. Surprised anyone else remembers it.
Namco must have patented it back from the old days -- wasn't there a game in which the player could play Galaxian during a loading screen?
In any case, while most of the article was unusually interesting, this point was best of all. +10 Informative. Sorry Namco, you just lost a large chunk of the good will you got from me for Katamari Damacy....
Well, these are my explanations for it. Take or leave them.
1. The game has no leaps-of-death. There isn't a single place in the game where a fall proves instantly fatal. I'm not even sure you take *damage* from falls, no matter how far. Take out the death and you take out the reason jumping puzzles are a decidedly un-fun form of nerve-wracking. The worst that can happen to you is having to go through a few rooms to get back to where you started, or having to scramble to get off some damaging ground, and those are made less troublesome because:
2. The puzzles are done fairly. Indeed they barely qualify as puzzles, because the game doesn't feel like getting from platform to platform is a play mechanic. It's just something you do to get places. Thus, destination platforms are rarely tiny, often there's walls on the other side of jumps to help you avoid taking a fall, and the game rarely forces you to make a jump that's *barely reachable*. Since the jumps are just a way of getting around large, spacious areas, instead of an intended source of challenge, Retro Studios was free to not make them too challenging. Note that this is actually an improvement over the original Metroid -- I wonder how many players got through the whole game only to be thwarted by that damn "Time Bomb Set Get Out Fast" shaft with the half-block-wide platforms.
3. Metroid Prime isn't a game with "ground to cover," most of which will only be seen once, but a game in which the player goes back and forth across areas. The places with jumps feel like they're a natural part of the level (with the possible exception of the floating, invisible, moving platforms in a couple of areas late in the game, but those are there as an inventory barrier, not really difficult once the X-Ray Scope has been obtained). The difficulty graph of the game tends to have long, low plateaus with spikes around where bosses are, but they never really get that high. It's just not that hard a game, with much of the enjoyment coming from the moody, believable atmosphere. Less difficulty means less frustration overall, but the game's presentation makes up for it.