Microsoft have never admitted to a design fault in the early revisions (at least the first 11m units shipped) of the Xbox 360, because this would open them up to a class action law suit. The warranty extension they were eventually forced to roll out is worded to make no mention of the cause of failure - simply that the RROD error code must be triggered. If Microsoft officially acknowledge that their design was faulty, and that virtually ALL the machines they shipped in the first year WILL break with prolonged use, they would be looking at compensation and a product recall. The fact that they earmarked $1.1bn for the warranty extension gives some indication of the greater cost that a recall (and being ordered to scrap the faulty stock) would have incurred.
1) It's not? Funny how this seems to be said a lot by people at Microsoft, or developers with an X360 game recently released. Aside from the additional processing resources, the fact that you've got 5x more storage and guaranteed access to a HDD is a significant advantage.
2) The PS2 wasn't "way" less powerful than the GC/Xbox, had hardly any decent software in the time it had the market to itself, and was the most expensive home console on the market for most of it's commercial life. People bought into the PS2 in significant numbers because it played host to most of the games that they wanted to play.
3) I don't think the guy said that PS3 games ran through Linux. Just that the fact you can use Linux to run apps on the PS3 is perceived as a threat by MS.
4) www.gamesforwindows.com - Doesn't seem like the actions of a company that's trying to bury the PC as a games platform.
The reason the 'review' reads like it does is because the author has been coached by Microsoft PR. It's not even subtle.
It immediately gravitates to comparisons with the Xbox 360 (nearly all slanted to topics that Microsoft are keen to put high on the PR agenda, i.e. network play and features of the front-end - most of which were only patched into the X360 dash months after launch anyway). There's scant mention of what the games are like to play or what's due to launch over the coming months. No mention of third-party software support, backwards compatibility, Linux, or comparisons to the Wii, of course.
It seems to just be another of the hundreds (if not thousands) of online distribution portals, only with an arbitrarily limited pool of content, and marketing copy that actively insults anyone who might dare to consider games created in a professional environment might be valid entertainment.
Indeed, the requests are absolutely not controversial or unusual in any way.
The fact that the (narrative-driven) game in question is available (in Japanese) in Japan is irrelevant, and Luke Smith's reliance on this fact as a rationale for his actions is totally unacceptable. The vast majority of 1UP's readership won't have played the game and won't have gone out of their way to look for spoilers and game movies.
Pretty much everywhere I've seen reporting or commenting on this story has scoffed at Luke's self-righteous tone, 1UP having a well-earned reputation as a corporate PR mouthpiece that makes IGN and Gamespot seem like fiercely independent mavericks by comparison. You can bet that this 'spat' would not be publically aired if the publisher's requests concerned a high profile game (with a major advertising spend attached).
In short, this is an ill-judged, grossly unprofessional publicity stunt on 1UP's part, which has backfired badly.
"The rationale is that when people do a global search on Flickr, they want to find photos," Butterfield said.
Don't dictate how users should use your service, jackass. If people are finding screenshots when they want photos, they should learn how tags work. Flickr should focus their efforts on making their UI less horrific instead of whining about completely subjective issues.
I don't want to look at people's boring Second Life shots, but I don't want to look at their boring everyday life photos either. Flickr's policy presumes that people do not (cannot?) use screenshots as a means of expression, or as appreciation of notable game art and design.
"Frankly, Sony's destroying the one benefit a console ever had: the hardware was standardized."
How, exactly? PS3 *GAMES* will still have to comply to a fixed set of TRCs. New models won't break compatibility with old models on pain of massive consumer and content provider headaches. Remember the outcry when the PStwo broke PSone back-compatibility for a handful of titles?
There are many ways the hardware can be revised and upgraded without risking catastrophic compatibility issues. It's still a controlled platform.
Traditional console industry model: design a piece of hardware, keep it completely static for six years and then mothball it and start from scratch. This made sense 20 years ago when consoles were made from cheap, older components and many aspects of the technology (storage, copy protection, IO) hadn't been nailed down. It's harder to justify now - it's hugely inefficient for the hardware manufacturers and risky for developers who have to learn a new system, not to mention prohibitively expensive for everyone.
Nintendo have already moved away from this approach (with the DS and Wii being at their cores an augmented GBA and GCN respectively), it stands to reason other hardware companies will be eager to do the same.
"The only way I can see them using up the space on a BluRay disc is to have a bunch of full-HD FMV."
Think harder.
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion fills a DVD (half of that with dialogue alone). As does GTA:SA, with its shitty PS2-quality textures and heavily compressed audio. As do an increasing number of MMO games. The PS3 is going to be around for five years, developers would rightly baulk at the idea of fighting the storage limitations of DVD for the whole of that time.
Making this component of the system optional is not viable, as it would split the platform.
If only there was some kind of computer network where we could research products and services at our leisure...
But less facetiously, you are absolutely right. It should be a basic requirement for people to be able to check out what they're buying, at the point of sale. The major obstacles to this are the carriers' control over the channel, and the prohibitively expensive cost of data traffic (for screenshots, demos, etc.).
Here in Europe we're just starting to see free demos of mobile games which are time-locked or content-locked and can be bought and unlocked straight from the application. This is a big, big step in the right direction and hopefully the US isn't too far behind.
(Then you'd be able to discover that not all the games available are free-Flash-style affairs, and $5 really is peanuts;)
This is a very broad generalisation. Obviously very demanding twitch-based games are out of bounds, but many other kinds of games aren't adversely affected at all. Every control scheme has limited scope. I can't play a fighting game on my PC keyboard, or most flavours of RTS with a joypad.
"The LCD screens on most phones have horribly high latency, making action games hard to play."
This may have been an issue three of four years ago. Virtually any phone you buy today has a screen much like those found in the GBA micro or the iPod Video. Screen technology has moved on, blurry Atari Lynx-style screens just aren't manufactured any more.
"The low horsepower of most phones prevent development of complex games."
This one is true to an extent. Cramming Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion into a phone and selling it for $5 isn't going to happen. However complexity isn't a function of the quality of a good game.
The amount of complexity available on mobile (assuming a developer is targeting the broadest sweep of handsets currently in use), is roughly comparable to the 16-bit era consoles/micros, and obviously nobody is going to argue that those platforms lacked the capacity to play host to substantial games.
"You create high-end hardware that caters to the needs and desires of hardcore gamers, as well as lifelong gamers, in a way that Playstation (even the new one) will have to catch up to for a long time."
If you think that hardware power has any bearing on the desires of actual hardcore gamers, you really ought to rethink whether you should be calling yourself one, or presuming to speak for others.
'Final' as in 'production version'. It seems extremely unlikely that there would have been any significant changes to the Cell design for some months now.
I love how Kotaku's summary is lifted uncredited from MS PR-bot Major Nelson's blog. The involuntary straw-grasping ("could be XBLS for PS3" - translation: "I am unwilling to believe the unambiguous announcement that online play is not going to carry a subscription fee on PS3, thereby completely and utterly screwing Xbox Live") gives it away though.
"It's now March of 2006. They do not yet have, to my knowledge, working hardware for the video game end of things. They don't have working Blu-Ray drives, and in fact the specs there are changing. (latest news: no degradation on analog HDTV sets, which is good.) They don't seem to have decided on a final feature set. I think a November launch might still be possible, but it's gonna take a lot of overtime by a LOT of people. And they'll have to decide on their final feature set _right now_ and push like hell to make it happen."
Because as we all know, new games consoles hatch out of eggs the night before they're available on store shelves.
Thank you for bringing to light the oft-forgotten fact that it is, of course, impossible for new hardware or software to be further down the road of development than has been publically announced. Just look at the iPod Nano.
It seems that this Wagner James Au character hasn't become any more qualified to write about games since Old Man Murray used to tear his clueless, self-absorbed drivel to pieces five years ago.
Most previews are positive? Holy shit! Previews help to sell games? Bring me the fucking Bat-phone!
Publishers are interested in publicity, not critical acclaim in reviews that are six weeks late and which nobody reads. Magazines want as much repeat business as they can, so if they know that readers want to hear about a certain game, they can string out their coverage for months on end. Previews have never, ever, in over 20 years of games magazine publishing, served as a forum for criticism. NOBODY has EVER claimed otherwise.
This proposterous swaggering about "naming and shaming" of journalists DOING THEIR JOBS serves no purpose other than to make it painfully obvious that WJA hasn't the faintest idea of how the specialist press works.
The simple fact is that if you still buy games magazines in 2006 then your judgment is already in question; if you pre-order games based on fucking previews then God help you: you are part of Wagner James Au's audience, you are probably part of (rumour-mongering tabloid vermin) Kotaku's regular readership and YOU, not the publishers, not the magazines, are the fucking problem.
...in his inimitable 'special' style. Not as brutal or prolonged an assault on the English language as his classic Mario Kart DS review ("the gameplay is addictively fun") but some gems all the same:
"The game's tutorial makes it clear from the get-go that your aim is speed, to an extent, but the real way to impress the title is by blowing stuff up."
Why not read that back now, seeing as you obviously didn't when you wrote it, and see if you can rephrase it in intelligible English?
"As a 360 game it would be hard for Full Auto to look bad"
They're complaining that Microsoft impose unworkable technical and contractual limitations on third party developers who want to bring MMOGs to the Xbox/Xbox360. Which is absolutely correct.
How does FFXI running on PlayOnline 'prove' that you can run an MMORPG through Xbox Live, exactly?
Oddly, I find RE4 to be perhaps the only console game that requires stick-controlled aiming that makes it work. You very rarely have to move your aiming reticle through large arcs, and in most cases monsters come at you in a fairly slow and manageable fashion. It's all about small, precise corrections to your aim. Also, it's great to finally play a game where pistols aren't weak and/or hopelessly imprecise over a distance. Even the shooting gallery is more enjoyable than frustrating, given a little concentration.
I'd be more worried that PC FPS-style aiming would make the game too easy.
That's an interesting take on the story. Of course, publishers are constantly looking for excuses for poor performance, the current favourite being supermarkets selling games at lower margins.
Unfortunately, the concerns about the second hand market have a grain of truth. If you walk into a specialist retailer or most high street entertainment stores in the UK, a significant proportion (25%+ in some cases) of the stock will be used. You won't see any used CDs, books or DVDs. I understand the situation is even more extreme in some US stores.
The problem is that retailers already have a far too powerful bargaining position over the publishers (anyone who thinks that the rash of bandwagon jumping games or games based on familiar themes that accompany any big hit is not at least partially a result of retailer pressure is naive in the extreme). They can basically decide the fate of games and even entire genres by refusing to stock them.
If 25% of a chain of stores is filled with preowned games that the retailer can obtain for far less than their wholesale price, retailers will force increasingly untenable pricing on publishers, and will stock fewer and fewer games.
You cannot argue for more variety and originality while at the same time cheering on retailers for holding a gun to publishers' heads and demanding they only deliver high-profile sports and cop killer games.
We live in the real world where sadly 95%+ of the public who want to play games don't have the awareness (or even the means, on any of the mainstream consoles) to use online distribution (yet). The lifeblood of the industry is people picking up new games on store shelves. Reducing the size of that window of opportunity hurts everyone in the chain, and does not discriminate based on how well the publishers are run.
MIDP 2.0 has supported multiple button presses for some time now. Which is probably why mobile games have spanned many genres other than puzzle games (what's wrong with puzzle games?) for the last several years.
We're never going to see Windows Mobile adopted as an industry standard as it flatly ignores the reality of the market: that consumers want phones with wildly different capabilities and form factors. The lack of standardisation in the current market is a horrible mess, but you can't wish it away. In broad terms, the situation is no worse than when developers had to support half a dozen different 8-bit and 16-bit micros, and in both cases developers have overcome the problem.
Nice theory, the problem is that Zuma is a direct copy of Puzzloop. It's identical in all but name and graphic theme.
None of the other games you compare are direct copies of each other. A game being in the same genre as another game does not make it a 'rip off' of the original game.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft have never admitted to a design fault in the early revisions (at least the first 11m units shipped) of the Xbox 360, because this would open them up to a class action law suit. The warranty extension they were eventually forced to roll out is worded to make no mention of the cause of failure - simply that the RROD error code must be triggered. If Microsoft officially acknowledge that their design was faulty, and that virtually ALL the machines they shipped in the first year WILL break with prolonged use, they would be looking at compensation and a product recall. The fact that they earmarked $1.1bn for the warranty extension gives some indication of the greater cost that a recall (and being ordered to scrap the faulty stock) would have incurred.
1) It's not? Funny how this seems to be said a lot by people at Microsoft, or developers with an X360 game recently released. Aside from the additional processing resources, the fact that you've got 5x more storage and guaranteed access to a HDD is a significant advantage.
2) The PS2 wasn't "way" less powerful than the GC/Xbox, had hardly any decent software in the time it had the market to itself, and was the most expensive home console on the market for most of it's commercial life. People bought into the PS2 in significant numbers because it played host to most of the games that they wanted to play.
3) I don't think the guy said that PS3 games ran through Linux. Just that the fact you can use Linux to run apps on the PS3 is perceived as a threat by MS.
4) www.gamesforwindows.com - Doesn't seem like the actions of a company that's trying to bury the PC as a games platform.
The reason the 'review' reads like it does is because the author has been coached by Microsoft PR. It's not even subtle.
It immediately gravitates to comparisons with the Xbox 360 (nearly all slanted to topics that Microsoft are keen to put high on the PR agenda, i.e. network play and features of the front-end - most of which were only patched into the X360 dash months after launch anyway). There's scant mention of what the games are like to play or what's due to launch over the coming months. No mention of third-party software support, backwards compatibility, Linux, or comparisons to the Wii, of course.
It seems to just be another of the hundreds (if not thousands) of online distribution portals, only with an arbitrarily limited pool of content, and marketing copy that actively insults anyone who might dare to consider games created in a professional environment might be valid entertainment.
Indeed, the requests are absolutely not controversial or unusual in any way.
The fact that the (narrative-driven) game in question is available (in Japanese) in Japan is irrelevant, and Luke Smith's reliance on this fact as a rationale for his actions is totally unacceptable. The vast majority of 1UP's readership won't have played the game and won't have gone out of their way to look for spoilers and game movies.
Pretty much everywhere I've seen reporting or commenting on this story has scoffed at Luke's self-righteous tone, 1UP having a well-earned reputation as a corporate PR mouthpiece that makes IGN and Gamespot seem like fiercely independent mavericks by comparison. You can bet that this 'spat' would not be publically aired if the publisher's requests concerned a high profile game (with a major advertising spend attached).
In short, this is an ill-judged, grossly unprofessional publicity stunt on 1UP's part, which has backfired badly.
"The rationale is that when people do a global search on Flickr, they want to find photos," Butterfield said.
Don't dictate how users should use your service, jackass. If people are finding screenshots when they want photos, they should learn how tags work. Flickr should focus their efforts on making their UI less horrific instead of whining about completely subjective issues.
I don't want to look at people's boring Second Life shots, but I don't want to look at their boring everyday life photos either. Flickr's policy presumes that people do not (cannot?) use screenshots as a means of expression, or as appreciation of notable game art and design.
"Frankly, Sony's destroying the one benefit a console ever had: the hardware was standardized."
How, exactly? PS3 *GAMES* will still have to comply to a fixed set of TRCs. New models won't break compatibility with old models on pain of massive consumer and content provider headaches. Remember the outcry when the PStwo broke PSone back-compatibility for a handful of titles?
There are many ways the hardware can be revised and upgraded without risking catastrophic compatibility issues. It's still a controlled platform.
Traditional console industry model: design a piece of hardware, keep it completely static for six years and then mothball it and start from scratch. This made sense 20 years ago when consoles were made from cheap, older components and many aspects of the technology (storage, copy protection, IO) hadn't been nailed down. It's harder to justify now - it's hugely inefficient for the hardware manufacturers and risky for developers who have to learn a new system, not to mention prohibitively expensive for everyone.
Nintendo have already moved away from this approach (with the DS and Wii being at their cores an augmented GBA and GCN respectively), it stands to reason other hardware companies will be eager to do the same.
"After all, I don't think Joe Sixpack is going to be comfortable swapping out a hard drive on a PS3 any more than on a "real" computer."
The fact both the PS3 and the Xbox 360 have user-replaceable HDDs kills that theory.
Not to mention the USB ports.
"The only way I can see them using up the space on a BluRay disc is to have a bunch of full-HD FMV."
Think harder.
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion fills a DVD (half of that with dialogue alone). As does GTA:SA, with its shitty PS2-quality textures and heavily compressed audio. As do an increasing number of MMO games. The PS3 is going to be around for five years, developers would rightly baulk at the idea of fighting the storage limitations of DVD for the whole of that time.
Making this component of the system optional is not viable, as it would split the platform.
I heard this crazy rumour that some games are going to be released at the same time as the machine. 'Launch' games, I believe the term is.
If only there was some kind of computer network where we could research products and services at our leisure...
;)
But less facetiously, you are absolutely right. It should be a basic requirement for people to be able to check out what they're buying, at the point of sale. The major obstacles to this are the carriers' control over the channel, and the prohibitively expensive cost of data traffic (for screenshots, demos, etc.).
Here in Europe we're just starting to see free demos of mobile games which are time-locked or content-locked and can be bought and unlocked straight from the application. This is a big, big step in the right direction and hopefully the US isn't too far behind.
(Then you'd be able to discover that not all the games available are free-Flash-style affairs, and $5 really is peanuts
"A cell phone has a lousy interface for gaming."
This is a very broad generalisation. Obviously very demanding twitch-based games are out of bounds, but many other kinds of games aren't adversely affected at all. Every control scheme has limited scope. I can't play a fighting game on my PC keyboard, or most flavours of RTS with a joypad.
"The LCD screens on most phones have horribly high latency, making action games hard to play."
This may have been an issue three of four years ago. Virtually any phone you buy today has a screen much like those found in the GBA micro or the iPod Video. Screen technology has moved on, blurry Atari Lynx-style screens just aren't manufactured any more.
"The low horsepower of most phones prevent development of complex games."
This one is true to an extent. Cramming Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion into a phone and selling it for $5 isn't going to happen. However complexity isn't a function of the quality of a good game.
The amount of complexity available on mobile (assuming a developer is targeting the broadest sweep of handsets currently in use), is roughly comparable to the 16-bit era consoles/micros, and obviously nobody is going to argue that those platforms lacked the capacity to play host to substantial games.
Many providers/vendors offer games for a one off payment that you then own forever.
The fact that you typically can't transfer the games to your new handset if/when you upgrade is another matter...
"You create high-end hardware that caters to the needs and desires of hardcore gamers, as well as lifelong gamers, in a way that Playstation (even the new one) will have to catch up to for a long time."
If you think that hardware power has any bearing on the desires of actual hardcore gamers, you really ought to rethink whether you should be calling yourself one, or presuming to speak for others.
'Final' as in 'production version'. It seems extremely unlikely that there would have been any significant changes to the Cell design for some months now.
I love how Kotaku's summary is lifted uncredited from MS PR-bot Major Nelson's blog. The involuntary straw-grasping ("could be XBLS for PS3" - translation: "I am unwilling to believe the unambiguous announcement that online play is not going to carry a subscription fee on PS3, thereby completely and utterly screwing Xbox Live") gives it away though.
"It's now March of 2006. They do not yet have, to my knowledge, working hardware for the video game end of things. They don't have working Blu-Ray drives, and in fact the specs there are changing. (latest news: no degradation on analog HDTV sets, which is good.) They don't seem to have decided on a final feature set. I think a November launch might still be possible, but it's gonna take a lot of overtime by a LOT of people. And they'll have to decide on their final feature set _right now_ and push like hell to make it happen."
Because as we all know, new games consoles hatch out of eggs the night before they're available on store shelves.
Thank you for bringing to light the oft-forgotten fact that it is, of course, impossible for new hardware or software to be further down the road of development than has been publically announced. Just look at the iPod Nano.
It seems that this Wagner James Au character hasn't become any more qualified to write about games since Old Man Murray used to tear his clueless, self-absorbed drivel to pieces five years ago.
Most previews are positive? Holy shit! Previews help to sell games? Bring me the fucking Bat-phone!
Publishers are interested in publicity, not critical acclaim in reviews that are six weeks late and which nobody reads. Magazines want as much repeat business as they can, so if they know that readers want to hear about a certain game, they can string out their coverage for months on end. Previews have never, ever, in over 20 years of games magazine publishing, served as a forum for criticism. NOBODY has EVER claimed otherwise.
This proposterous swaggering about "naming and shaming" of journalists DOING THEIR JOBS serves no purpose other than to make it painfully obvious that WJA hasn't the faintest idea of how the specialist press works.
The simple fact is that if you still buy games magazines in 2006 then your judgment is already in question; if you pre-order games based on fucking previews then God help you: you are part of Wagner James Au's audience, you are probably part of (rumour-mongering tabloid vermin) Kotaku's regular readership and YOU, not the publishers, not the magazines, are the fucking problem.
...in his inimitable 'special' style. Not as brutal or prolonged an assault on the English language as his classic Mario Kart DS review ("the gameplay is addictively fun") but some gems all the same:
"The game's tutorial makes it clear from the get-go that your aim is speed, to an extent, but the real way to impress the title is by blowing stuff up."
Why not read that back now, seeing as you obviously didn't when you wrote it, and see if you can rephrase it in intelligible English?
"As a 360 game it would be hard for Full Auto to look bad"
Someone hasn't played PDZ.
They're complaining that Microsoft impose unworkable technical and contractual limitations on third party developers who want to bring MMOGs to the Xbox/Xbox360. Which is absolutely correct.
How does FFXI running on PlayOnline 'prove' that you can run an MMORPG through Xbox Live, exactly?
http://web.archive.org/web/20010429231038/http://w ww.wymsey.co.uk/wymchron/cooking.htm
The experiment might have worked with some kind of Ni-Cad powered analogue bricks in 2000-2001. Maybe.
And pardon my lack of physics knowledge... but wouldn't the radiation have to be ionising for this to work?
Oddly, I find RE4 to be perhaps the only console game that requires stick-controlled aiming that makes it work. You very rarely have to move your aiming reticle through large arcs, and in most cases monsters come at you in a fairly slow and manageable fashion. It's all about small, precise corrections to your aim. Also, it's great to finally play a game where pistols aren't weak and/or hopelessly imprecise over a distance. Even the shooting gallery is more enjoyable than frustrating, given a little concentration.
I'd be more worried that PC FPS-style aiming would make the game too easy.
That's an interesting take on the story. Of course, publishers are constantly looking for excuses for poor performance, the current favourite being supermarkets selling games at lower margins.
Unfortunately, the concerns about the second hand market have a grain of truth. If you walk into a specialist retailer or most high street entertainment stores in the UK, a significant proportion (25%+ in some cases) of the stock will be used. You won't see any used CDs, books or DVDs. I understand the situation is even more extreme in some US stores.
The problem is that retailers already have a far too powerful bargaining position over the publishers (anyone who thinks that the rash of bandwagon jumping games or games based on familiar themes that accompany any big hit is not at least partially a result of retailer pressure is naive in the extreme). They can basically decide the fate of games and even entire genres by refusing to stock them.
If 25% of a chain of stores is filled with preowned games that the retailer can obtain for far less than their wholesale price, retailers will force increasingly untenable pricing on publishers, and will stock fewer and fewer games.
You cannot argue for more variety and originality while at the same time cheering on retailers for holding a gun to publishers' heads and demanding they only deliver high-profile sports and cop killer games.
We live in the real world where sadly 95%+ of the public who want to play games don't have the awareness (or even the means, on any of the mainstream consoles) to use online distribution (yet). The lifeblood of the industry is people picking up new games on store shelves. Reducing the size of that window of opportunity hurts everyone in the chain, and does not discriminate based on how well the publishers are run.
MIDP 2.0 has supported multiple button presses for some time now. Which is probably why mobile games have spanned many genres other than puzzle games (what's wrong with puzzle games?) for the last several years.
We're never going to see Windows Mobile adopted as an industry standard as it flatly ignores the reality of the market: that consumers want phones with wildly different capabilities and form factors. The lack of standardisation in the current market is a horrible mess, but you can't wish it away. In broad terms, the situation is no worse than when developers had to support half a dozen different 8-bit and 16-bit micros, and in both cases developers have overcome the problem.
"If you think that a new version of the standard in gaming benchmarks is no big deal, then YOU must be new here."
The only people this release is of any interest to:
1. nVidia
2. ATi
3. A few hardware review sites, most of whom depend heavily on advertising spend from 1. and 2.
3DMark is a worthless synthetic benchmark and has been an industry laughing stock for some years now.
Nice theory, the problem is that Zuma is a direct copy of Puzzloop. It's identical in all but name and graphic theme.
None of the other games you compare are direct copies of each other. A game being in the same genre as another game does not make it a 'rip off' of the original game.