I would definitely classify Peter Molyneux as a PR person when he talks about his games to the press. As the head of a developer he needs to be able to continously pitch the game to his publisher and I think he just wants to talk about what gets people excited about the game, so it would be hard not to talk about features when hyping the game to the press. I don't think the features he mentions to the press were not implemented as the article suggests but rather that they didn't work with the rest of the game at a later time.
And is this really any different from any other consumer software industry? I mean, look at windows, every 3 years there is the promise of the bugs-from-the-previous-windows-have-all-been-fixed hype.. They are mostly still there with some new makeup and twice as many new bugs. And don't get me started on 3d studio max......
I don't think it was assumed testing is full time for the full time of the project.
Until you have something "playable" the programmers and designers can do all the testing and that is going to take a certain amount of time.
Also, going with the publisher approach may mean that they have an additional testing team that goes under "publisher overhead". Most titles today have way higher testing costs than $30k, but this is a low-budget project.
Genesis had an 8 MHz 68000, SNES a 3 or 1.5 MHz 65c816 (d6502 with added instructions).
Genesis had higher resolution (SNES had a 512 pixel wide mode but it wasn't useful).
Genesis had more sprite sizes (up to 32x32 but only 80 compared to SNES 128 and some problems with too many sprites on a single line).
Genesis didn't do bankswitching.
In my experience, Genesis was far less of an obstacle to program on than SNES, so in my opinion there is no doubt that Genesis was superior to SNES but I also think the SNES games were generally superior to Genesis games.
Google News still has very low coverage of things that are very important to for example Los Angeles residents, based on what real live journalists and reporters on Los Angeles news stations decide is important.
Where are the 2 hour car chases, where are the radio controlled cars 30 minute segment that I've seen 4 times now (I'm looking at you, fox 11). Where are the investigative reports into g-string related skin infections?
I'm thinking of switching to the news with Kent Brockman and Arnie in the sky for all my news needs!
Article: "What seems clear to me is that middlebrow games criticism cannot function without some reference to authors: a critic needs to know who to blame or praise, how to assign and imagine intentionality, how to accessibly discuss the intertextual relations between games."
Why is it necessary to have an author reference that is different from the developer of the game? I firmly believe that teams of talented people make better games than any single person would be able to do, and that teams of less talented people can make far worse games than you'd ever want to spend money on.
Many reviews discuss their thoughts about the game directed towards the developer, why the developer didn't do a better job with a certain feature when other developers have shown it can be better.
The article mentions Peter Molyneux, but when I read interviews with him he is always giving the development team credit, and sometimes specifies individuals working on specific features.
Games are different from many other media in that development is much more iterative. You prototype something, test it out, improve it as opposed to a movie which you really only shoot once (apart from scenes that need to be reshot at the end, but you don't refilm the entire thing just because you didn't like the feeling of a movie), so in a way authoring a game depends more on how the game works rather than design specifications and scripts, and because of that it owes more credit to the team behind it than the lead designer.
A single designer is fine for making the initial plan and the decisions for what to cut in the end but most things inbetween are more related to a software development project (You wouldn't really credit Bill Gates personally for the entire Windows XP project for example).
I don't see why optimizing for battery power performance would be much different than optimizing for cpu power performance. If you display a pause screen there really is no need to re-render the game scene every frame for example, or don't use the graphics system heavily while accessing the drive. The DS probably has a predetermined maximum power usage by using components that never drains the battery more than a guideline would specify while the PSP gives that responsibility to the developer.
I would guess Letterman viewers have the most pot smokers. My reasoning: the "will it float" segment commonly features edible items and posing the question whether it will float or not and then tries it out. This strikes me as most relevant to the market groups 'pot smokers' and 'soup chefs'.
the segment "..investigating the disappearances of top scientists.."
made me think of the movie as more like Wild Wild West than any Matrix or Episode movie. I still have high hopes for this movie in spite of most other sci-fi I've suffered recently. As long as it is not related to Star Trek or Star Wars there is still hope!
But then why wouldn't the radio stations simply piggy-back on the MSN radio service and get rid of some work of selecting the next track? After all, it is music selected specifically for this radio station and they could just interrupt the stream occasionally for commecials.
Or the radio stations could add an EULA spoken every hour to remind people that 'it is a contract violation to create a radio station which plays the same songs while branding it as representative of the selection of this radio station, "FZZZ - playing the same song over and over will make you sleep".'
Well, I live in Los Angeles and it's not showing on any of the 3 PBS stations I recieve in the next two weeks either:( PBS programming has become much less interesting lately.
"Is it just me or are game publishers dying off? Sierra, Interplay and now Acclaim are all gone"
Add 3DO to that list and see the pattern. Abandon quality and people stop buying the games!
"I know that, other than Doom 3 and Thief 3, it's been a long time since I bought a new release (no, I don't pirate)."
If you didn't buy any other games and didn't play them as a buccaneer, how can you know if you like the games or not? I rarely ever play PC games anymore because I don't like FPS games, but that doesn't mean that I think all PC games are bad, I just don't know about them.
I think as long as games sell more or roughly the same amount of dollars as the year before everything is great. And as much as the press calls for innovation and complexity I rather like a lot of current and older games and wouldn't mind playing similar games again. Added complexity is mostly just annoying.
So no, I don't think the game industry is in trouble. Getting rid of a publisher that produced almost only really bad titles can not be a bad thing for game industry!
Harald Bluetooth has been dead for around 1000 years. Bluetooth the technology died to me when I tried to set up my PC with it (which never worked, but my PDA can work with other devices over bluetooth, just not my PC).
"...are all the quality they require, with my current display."
So, hypthetically, and believe me, this really is hypothetic, if MPAA were to give you a, say, 2048 x 1536 tv 5 by 3 meters big, would you then be less likely to make "illegal" (backup) copies?
They did have the phantom running (playable) at E3. The consoles were sitting on top of fairly large covered cabinets though so you never know where the video signal came from.....
While the current mindset of publishers is to capitalize on known properties (in other words, spend all their attention to copy successful games or make sequels) the growth potential with more financial backing would lie with original propositions. Perhaps not as original as lawnmover (the c64 game where you moved lawns and avoided dogs) but more likely by merging popular genres / ideas and trying to fit licensed content with new game ideas. I don't think the situation will necessarily be much better with media conglomerates running the publishers but I think it will be different.
Slashdot Mirror
I would definitely classify Peter Molyneux as a PR person when he talks about his games to the press. As the head of a developer he needs to be able to continously pitch the game to his publisher and I think he just wants to talk about what gets people excited about the game, so it would be hard not to talk about features when hyping the game to the press. I don't think the features he mentions to the press were not implemented as the article suggests but rather that they didn't work with the rest of the game at a later time.
And is this really any different from any other consumer software industry? I mean, look at windows, every 3 years there is the promise of the bugs-from-the-previous-windows-have-all-been-fixed hype.. They are mostly still there with some new makeup and twice as many new bugs. And don't get me started on 3d studio max......
"Sounds like a new way of saying "anti-aliasing""
"scaling" is another word that comes to mind..
I don't think it was assumed testing is full time for the full time of the project.
Until you have something "playable" the programmers and designers can do all the testing and that is going to take a certain amount of time.
Also, going with the publisher approach may mean that they have an additional testing team that goes under "publisher overhead". Most titles today have way higher testing costs than $30k, but this is a low-budget project.
"SNES was unquestionably stronger than Genesis."
Genesis had an 8 MHz 68000, SNES a 3 or 1.5 MHz 65c816 (d6502 with added instructions).
Genesis had higher resolution (SNES had a 512 pixel wide mode but it wasn't useful).
Genesis had more sprite sizes (up to 32x32 but only 80 compared to SNES 128 and some problems with too many sprites on a single line).
Genesis didn't do bankswitching.
In my experience, Genesis was far less of an obstacle to program on than SNES, so in my opinion there is no doubt that Genesis was superior to SNES but I also think the SNES games were generally superior to Genesis games.
DMA transfers are not really instructions though, if you specify 360 MIPS on a 200 MHz cpu then I'm missing something.
It was intended for adding dreamcast related content to music CDs, but I don't know of any CDs that actually used it.
"Specifically, the Dreamcast console contained a 200-MHz Hitachi SH4 with the capability to perform 360 million instructions per second (MIPS)"
:) Impressive!
360 Minstructions/s at 200MHz? Something paralell going on or is it really nearly 2 instructions per cycle?
"... and 1.4 million megaflops, or floating-point operations per second."
1.4*10^12 floating point operations per second
Google News still has very low coverage of things that are very important to for example Los Angeles residents, based on what real live journalists and reporters on Los Angeles news stations decide is important.
Where are the 2 hour car chases, where are the radio controlled cars 30 minute segment that I've seen 4 times now (I'm looking at you, fox 11). Where are the investigative reports into g-string related skin infections?
I'm thinking of switching to the news with Kent Brockman and Arnie in the sky for all my news needs!
For great justice! Move every 'ZIG' errh.. 'Patent'..
Article: "What seems clear to me is that middlebrow games criticism cannot function without some reference to authors: a critic needs to know who to blame or praise, how to assign and imagine intentionality, how to accessibly discuss the intertextual relations between games."
Why is it necessary to have an author reference that is different from the developer of the game? I firmly believe that teams of talented people make better games than any single person would be able to do, and that teams of less talented people can make far worse games than you'd ever want to spend money on.
Many reviews discuss their thoughts about the game directed towards the developer, why the developer didn't do a better job with a certain feature when other developers have shown it can be better.
The article mentions Peter Molyneux, but when I read interviews with him he is always giving the development team credit, and sometimes specifies individuals working on specific features.
Games are different from many other media in that development is much more iterative. You prototype something, test it out, improve it as opposed to a movie which you really only shoot once (apart from scenes that need to be reshot at the end, but you don't refilm the entire thing just because you didn't like the feeling of a movie), so in a way authoring a game depends more on how the game works rather than design specifications and scripts, and because of that it owes more credit to the team behind it than the lead designer.
A single designer is fine for making the initial plan and the decisions for what to cut in the end but most things inbetween are more related to a software development project (You wouldn't really credit Bill Gates personally for the entire Windows XP project for example).
"They developed a way to get the GameCube online...something the device was never meant to do."
So the correct title for the game that came to mind when I read that sentence should be "Phantasy Star OFFline" then?
I don't see why optimizing for battery power performance would be much different than optimizing for cpu power performance. If you display a pause screen there really is no need to re-render the game scene every frame for example, or don't use the graphics system heavily while accessing the drive. The DS probably has a predetermined maximum power usage by using components that never drains the battery more than a guideline would specify while the PSP gives that responsibility to the developer.
I would guess Letterman viewers have the most pot smokers. My reasoning: the "will it float" segment commonly features edible items and posing the question whether it will float or not and then tries it out. This strikes me as most relevant to the market groups 'pot smokers' and 'soup chefs'.
You're suggesting that we should take caution before using wind power because it can change the local climate as opposed to fossil fuels?
the segment "..investigating the disappearances of top scientists.."
made me think of the movie as more like Wild Wild West than any Matrix or Episode movie. I still have high hopes for this movie in spite of most other sci-fi I've suffered recently. As long as it is not related to Star Trek or Star Wars there is still hope!
But then why wouldn't the radio stations simply piggy-back on the MSN radio service and get rid of some work of selecting the next track? After all, it is music selected specifically for this radio station and they could just interrupt the stream occasionally for commecials.
Or the radio stations could add an EULA spoken every hour to remind people that 'it is a contract violation to create a radio station which plays the same songs while branding it as representative of the selection of this radio station, "FZZZ - playing the same song over and over will make you sleep".'
Well, I live in Los Angeles and it's not showing on any of the 3 PBS stations I recieve in the next two weeks either :( PBS programming has become much less interesting lately.
"I really think that the video/tv functionality would be fantastic for someone who commutes to work on a bus or ferry every day."
:) At least you have something to do while you wait for the bus/train going the other way...
And a fantastic way to miss your stop
over 6 times the cost of GameBoy SP even :) (price was lowered to $79 today, could the release of the pmc & the gbasp price cut be related?)
"Is it just me or are game publishers dying off? Sierra, Interplay and now Acclaim are all gone"
Add 3DO to that list and see the pattern. Abandon quality and people stop buying the games!
"I know that, other than Doom 3 and Thief 3, it's been a long time since I bought a new release (no, I don't pirate)."
If you didn't buy any other games and didn't play them as a buccaneer, how can you know if you like the games or not? I rarely ever play PC games anymore because I don't like FPS games, but that doesn't mean that I think all PC games are bad, I just don't know about them.
I think as long as games sell more or roughly the same amount of dollars as the year before everything is great. And as much as the press calls for innovation and complexity I rather like a lot of current and older games and wouldn't mind playing similar games again. Added complexity is mostly just annoying.
So no, I don't think the game industry is in trouble. Getting rid of a publisher that produced almost only really bad titles can not be a bad thing for game industry!
Harald Bluetooth has been dead for around 1000 years. Bluetooth the technology died to me when I tried to set up my PC with it (which never worked, but my PDA can work with other devices over bluetooth, just not my PC).
"...are all the quality they require, with my current display."
So, hypthetically, and believe me, this really is hypothetic, if MPAA were to give you a, say, 2048 x 1536 tv 5 by 3 meters big, would you then be less likely to make "illegal" (backup) copies?
They did have the phantom running (playable) at E3. The consoles were sitting on top of fairly large covered cabinets though so you never know where the video signal came from.....
While the current mindset of publishers is to capitalize on known properties (in other words, spend all their attention to copy successful games or make sequels) the growth potential with more financial backing would lie with original propositions. Perhaps not as original as lawnmover (the c64 game where you moved lawns and avoided dogs) but more likely by merging popular genres / ideas and trying to fit licensed content with new game ideas. I don't think the situation will necessarily be much better with media conglomerates running the publishers but I think it will be different.