The reality is if it wasn't for those "samey" games that only appeal to the mass market, there wouldn't be any dough to make "innovative" games. Although this has been a pretty dry summer, I think the ratio of innovative games has been pretty good over the life cycle of the current-gen consoles. Not every movie can be Napolean Dynamite, because people like car chases. Not every game can be Katamari, because people like playing simulated Football.
I think you'll always see a dip in innovation at the end of the cycle, as more teams move onto ramping up for next gen, but that will be followed by a rash of bizarre games at the very tail end of the cycle (like the Sea Monkeys game on PSP, or Easter Bunny's Day out).
Bottom lime: all Greg seems to do is write gloom-and-doom articles about the game industry. If it sucks so bad, go get a different job.
I'm sorry, I'm in the game industry, and I see all the problems he discusses. But it's no different than film, animation, book publishing, etc. It's always going to be a slog to survive commercially while realizing creative visions that don't appeal to the mass-market.
I mean, really, as far as gamers seeing stuff they think is cool, go hang out at an actual EB with actual, money-spending gamers. They see stuff they think is cool ALL THE TIME. No, it may not appeal to the videogame design elite, but the average consumer is being well served, voting with their dollars, and growing the industry.
It's cool to say the game industry is doomed, but I haven't seen very good evidence of it.
I was just playing Flatout this weekend. It's a simple game made by a small team. In essence, it's like Pole Position with better textures and a better damage model. But you know what, it's really freaking fun. Looking at their home-grown ragdoll physics stuff is great. The music is cool. I got my $50 worth. The notion that there's somehow something intrinsicly wrong with the "Pole Position" model -- simulate a real world car race -- is totally elitest and fucked, in my opinion. (Oh, and somehow the Flatout team, laboring in the slave world that is the game industry, managed to cram in some totally funny -- and innovative -- mini games... I guess because it's not Katamari, though, it doesn't count as innovation.)
Have you ever compared the speed-feel of using a crappy XP machine (say my 1.3Ghz Pentium M laptop) to, oh, say a top-of-the-line OS X machine? The PC wins hands down, every time, in tests like "opening a folder with lots of files" and "launching an application."
I'm sorry, because I keep wanting to buy a Mac, but they're f-ing SLOW. Maybe they can run Photoshop filters like no one's business, but I actually spend a lot more time manipulating files in the Finder/Desktop or whatever than I do actively running filters or rendering frames or something.
All my Mac friends (and for the record I used to be one -- I can see my SE sitting on a shelf 5 feet away from me as I write this) are like "you can turn off all the slow Finder animations," but no one at the Mac store has ever been able to demonstrate this to me. Whereas with XP, in like two minutes I had it looking like Windows 95 with no time-wasting animations or giant, child-size icons.
I know this is going to come off as a troll and I'm sorry: I really want to buy a Mac, but the UI speed seems slower than it was in System 7.0 on my Centris, and that's just frustrating.
Except, the only reason to go to New Orleans, a hot, sweaty, generally unpleasant place, is for the awesome architecture! (And the fantastic food, obviously.) Seriously I am so bummed that so many awesome, rad, buildings are going to be wrecked. It's never going to be the same. I almost went there this summer, but was like "eh, we can go to New Orleans anytime, let's go to Michigan..."
You'd think, but when they tried to replace that mainframe at my mother-in-law's insurance company (where she'd been working as a programmer since the 1950's -- when they advertised for "girls who are good at math"), they totally screwed it up and ended up just having to use their new systems to interface with the mainframe, because they couldn't get their actuarial tables to work right. To hear her tell it, the math in the cached lookup tables in moderns systems is full of errors. I don't know if that's true, but I never doubt a grandmother whose shelf of "grannyware" like PrintShop and Reader Rabbit is broken up by things like the IBM 360 System Operators Manual and textbooks on COBOL. (This remarkable woman can rattle off the Z80 instruction set by heart, but finds GUI-based things like AOL "complicated," and sends all emails in ALL CAPS.)
The parent is right on, but to be fair, sometimes it's not driven by the HR manager, but by the team members who are like "I don't want to have to train somoene, we need someone who knows X right off the bat."
Damn straight! Jason's been the ONE PERSON to take on documenting a very important, but largely unpreserved, portion of our computing past. BBS culture was k-rad.
Thank you for reminding me how old I am, because I get your horrible Bobby Mcfarrin reference. There's a lot about the young turks I work with that makes me feel bad for them... They don't know who Hong Kong Fooey is, a lot of times they don't really understand how computers actually work inside, they don't really appreciate cable or VCRs or hard drives because they never lived without them,etc. But on the plus side, they won't get the reference, or get that f-ing song stuck in their head for the rest of the afternoon...
But then why does Google enable this? If it's so terrible and no one should use Google for this purpose, you'd think the CEO would put the kibash on his product enabling the behavior?
Just because a game is a sequel doesn't mean it can't be innovative. It just means it will have some relationship to a previous game (continuation of the plot, similar mechanics, etc.). I don't think anyone bagged on (the book)Return of the King because it was just a sequel to Two Towers.
If you look at, say, the worst case, which is EA's Madden, from year to year the developer, working on a very short schedule, includes a number of innovations and experiments in football gameplay.
You may not give a shit about those innovations, or even define them as innovations, because none of them look or feel like Katamari Demacy or Rez or Parappa the Rapper, or the other games that videogame snobs define as officially "innovative", but Madden 2006 is -- if you actually examine it and play it -- significantly different (and better) than Madden 2002, for instance.
I have to admit I am sick to death of people saying "I never play games anymore, and where's the innovation?" I see innovation and attempts at innovation in just about every game I play. But not every attempt at innovation is going to be successful or fun.
However, reality doesn't sell game magazines, so I guess we'll have to put up with the punditry whether it bears any reality to the facts on the ground or not.
Yeah, I think we had an idea what was happening to the Japanese cities, since we were doing it in public and on purpose. I encourage anyone who's interested in the end of World War II to read Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire , which examines first-hand Japanese and American sources and delivers a some compelling conclusions, about the strategic bombing and A-bombing. (It's also really well written.)
The one that stays with me is the notion that the next step in Allied bombing campaign, once all the "military targets" in the cities were destroyed (which happned, of course, to burn down the flammable cities around them...), was to start bombing rail heads. According to the author, the rail system in Japan was so important for food distribution, that even if Japan had surrendered after that, once it was done, a huge portion of the population would have starved to death.
While it's pretty much impossible to comrehend the horror of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (as well as many other horrible incidents from WWII -- rape of Nanking, Nazi death camps, etc), we should always consider that those bombings may **not** have been the worst case scenario, and had we not dropped them, in fact things may have turned out worse both for the populations of the US and Japan.
Yes, you click and hold down the scroll wheel, and this places the cursor into "free scroll" mode -- at that point you move the mouse to scroll the contenst of the window in any direction. I understand more modern PC mice have a scrollwheel that can tilt to perform this same function without clicking, but I don't have one.
I guess you do lose the functionality of clicking and holding the scroll wheel, but I've never noticed a situation where I've been like "if only the scroll wheel button was free!"
Apparently the scroll wheels makes clicky noises without actually clicking. My biggest question is why the 360-degree scrolling is supposed to be a big deal. I can do that now with my primitive, non-optical, non-wireless, non-USB, Microsoft mouse -- just click in the scroll wheel and scroll in any direction....
That was a great special... showed them making the laser sounds by hitting high tension wires (the were supporting telephone poles IIRC) with metal mallets. Of course, now that would be some kind of Patriot Act / DMCA violation...
PacBell owns the sounds its wires make when struck by mallets by long-haired terrorist types, etc.
$5/month is a fair price for a safe harbor email and dial-up account. I've had my AOL account for 10+ years and while I rarely if ever use it (it's not even installed on my machine), it has come in handy a couple times when I was in some distant place (Tokyo, Prague, Iosco County, MI) with a phone line and no easy-to-locate internet cafes. Wifi makes this less of an issue, but you never know when you're going to end up someplace (like Oscoda, Michigan) where there is simply no public wifi to be found within 50 miles.
(Confidential to people travelling to Iosco County, Michigan: just get an Adelphia cable modem installed and bring your wireless router. Installation, service, and cancelation is worth the $50 if you'll be at your cottage for more than 7 days.)
"Ahhh... I understand. You're mistaking the names of the players for interogative questions! Mr. Who is the name of the player who plays first based..."
Janus, god of the doorway. Planet X is basically the gateway planet to the solar system, and where we'll probably put the customs building when we get around to it.
The Zodiac was an awesome machine; it had a *fantastic* screen, as high quality as, but better resolution than (480 x 320) the PSP.
But even Sony or Apple level marketing would not have helped in the game space, IMHO. Unfortunately, in their first (and it turns out only) rev of the machine, the 3D performance just was not there. Most of the 3D games looked like PC games circa 1997; software rendered badness.
It also launched at a time when the PDA market started to take a nosedive, and I think that hurt the VC-rasing that would have helped marketing. Finally, the PSP was announced, with top 3D support, and that was the begining of the end IMHO. I don't think I even turned on my Zodiac after I got my PSP, even for E3 I just made.jpgs w/ all my appointments on them.
Still, it's a bummer, because it was a really nice PDA, the joystick enabled a great, easy-to-use interface w/o having to resort to tapping (better than the current PSP front-end interface, truth be told). I definitely missed mine when it got stolen from my car.
At my office, IM is used only for communicating with Elders. Everyone else just sends text messages to each others' phones. It requires you to be consise, doesn't require an immediate, polite reply (as IM can), doesn't require 100% attention like an actual phone call. In short SMS rules.
The nice thing about the Solatube and similar things is that they don't have the disadvantages of skylights -- glare, too much heat, etc. -- and they are relatively easy to install (don't need to build a well in the celiing, etc, because they can fit between studs). They also work in places that would be pretty tough for a skylight to fit.
I don't have one yet, but I am planning to buy soon.
The PSP's CPU is software switchable from 111-333Mhz, but currently Sony only supports, in its libraries, running at 222Mhz. Hackers have gotten some homebrew apps running at 333Mhz, but no official apps do yet.
Maybe they should start painting the foam again, as called for in the initial design spec. I know if was heavy and expensive, but it might stick together better.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you'll always see a dip in innovation at the end of the cycle, as more teams move onto ramping up for next gen, but that will be followed by a rash of bizarre games at the very tail end of the cycle (like the Sea Monkeys game on PSP, or Easter Bunny's Day out).
I'm sorry, I'm in the game industry, and I see all the problems he discusses. But it's no different than film, animation, book publishing, etc. It's always going to be a slog to survive commercially while realizing creative visions that don't appeal to the mass-market.
I mean, really, as far as gamers seeing stuff they think is cool, go hang out at an actual EB with actual, money-spending gamers. They see stuff they think is cool ALL THE TIME. No, it may not appeal to the videogame design elite, but the average consumer is being well served, voting with their dollars, and growing the industry.
It's cool to say the game industry is doomed, but I haven't seen very good evidence of it.
I was just playing Flatout this weekend. It's a simple game made by a small team. In essence, it's like Pole Position with better textures and a better damage model. But you know what, it's really freaking fun. Looking at their home-grown ragdoll physics stuff is great. The music is cool. I got my $50 worth. The notion that there's somehow something intrinsicly wrong with the "Pole Position" model -- simulate a real world car race -- is totally elitest and fucked, in my opinion. (Oh, and somehow the Flatout team, laboring in the slave world that is the game industry, managed to cram in some totally funny -- and innovative -- mini games... I guess because it's not Katamari, though, it doesn't count as innovation.)
I'm sorry, because I keep wanting to buy a Mac, but they're f-ing SLOW. Maybe they can run Photoshop filters like no one's business, but I actually spend a lot more time manipulating files in the Finder/Desktop or whatever than I do actively running filters or rendering frames or something.
All my Mac friends (and for the record I used to be one -- I can see my SE sitting on a shelf 5 feet away from me as I write this) are like "you can turn off all the slow Finder animations," but no one at the Mac store has ever been able to demonstrate this to me. Whereas with XP, in like two minutes I had it looking like Windows 95 with no time-wasting animations or giant, child-size icons.
I know this is going to come off as a troll and I'm sorry: I really want to buy a Mac, but the UI speed seems slower than it was in System 7.0 on my Centris, and that's just frustrating.
Except, the only reason to go to New Orleans, a hot, sweaty, generally unpleasant place, is for the awesome architecture! (And the fantastic food, obviously.) Seriously I am so bummed that so many awesome, rad, buildings are going to be wrecked. It's never going to be the same. I almost went there this summer, but was like "eh, we can go to New Orleans anytime, let's go to Michigan..."
You'd think, but when they tried to replace that mainframe at my mother-in-law's insurance company (where she'd been working as a programmer since the 1950's -- when they advertised for "girls who are good at math"), they totally screwed it up and ended up just having to use their new systems to interface with the mainframe, because they couldn't get their actuarial tables to work right. To hear her tell it, the math in the cached lookup tables in moderns systems is full of errors. I don't know if that's true, but I never doubt a grandmother whose shelf of "grannyware" like PrintShop and Reader Rabbit is broken up by things like the IBM 360 System Operators Manual and textbooks on COBOL. (This remarkable woman can rattle off the Z80 instruction set by heart, but finds GUI-based things like AOL "complicated," and sends all emails in ALL CAPS.)
The parent is right on, but to be fair, sometimes it's not driven by the HR manager, but by the team members who are like "I don't want to have to train somoene, we need someone who knows X right off the bat."
no, no. The customs of those in far off Australian are very similar to your own. Their language even seems to be a derivitive of American.
Damn straight! Jason's been the ONE PERSON to take on documenting a very important, but largely unpreserved, portion of our computing past. BBS culture was k-rad.
Thank you for reminding me how old I am, because I get your horrible Bobby Mcfarrin reference. There's a lot about the young turks I work with that makes me feel bad for them... They don't know who Hong Kong Fooey is, a lot of times they don't really understand how computers actually work inside, they don't really appreciate cable or VCRs or hard drives because they never lived without them,etc. But on the plus side, they won't get the reference, or get that f-ing song stuck in their head for the rest of the afternoon...
But then why does Google enable this? If it's so terrible and no one should use Google for this purpose, you'd think the CEO would put the kibash on his product enabling the behavior?
If you look at, say, the worst case, which is EA's Madden, from year to year the developer, working on a very short schedule, includes a number of innovations and experiments in football gameplay.
You may not give a shit about those innovations, or even define them as innovations, because none of them look or feel like Katamari Demacy or Rez or Parappa the Rapper, or the other games that videogame snobs define as officially "innovative", but Madden 2006 is -- if you actually examine it and play it -- significantly different (and better) than Madden 2002, for instance.
I have to admit I am sick to death of people saying "I never play games anymore, and where's the innovation?" I see innovation and attempts at innovation in just about every game I play. But not every attempt at innovation is going to be successful or fun.
However, reality doesn't sell game magazines, so I guess we'll have to put up with the punditry whether it bears any reality to the facts on the ground or not.
The one that stays with me is the notion that the next step in Allied bombing campaign, once all the "military targets" in the cities were destroyed (which happned, of course, to burn down the flammable cities around them...), was to start bombing rail heads. According to the author, the rail system in Japan was so important for food distribution, that even if Japan had surrendered after that, once it was done, a huge portion of the population would have starved to death.
While it's pretty much impossible to comrehend the horror of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (as well as many other horrible incidents from WWII -- rape of Nanking, Nazi death camps, etc), we should always consider that those bombings may **not** have been the worst case scenario, and had we not dropped them, in fact things may have turned out worse both for the populations of the US and Japan.
Formula for a cliche, but fun, game circa Genesis/SNES era: Grassy world, Ice world, Jungle World, Desert World, Mine Cart Level. Repeat.
I guess you do lose the functionality of clicking and holding the scroll wheel, but I've never noticed a situation where I've been like "if only the scroll wheel button was free!"
Apparently the scroll wheels makes clicky noises without actually clicking. My biggest question is why the 360-degree scrolling is supposed to be a big deal. I can do that now with my primitive, non-optical, non-wireless, non-USB, Microsoft mouse -- just click in the scroll wheel and scroll in any direction....
That reminds me of the ultimate engineer phrase, which I hear at work all the time (and not always in jest)... "Yeah, it should just work."
PacBell owns the sounds its wires make when struck by mallets by long-haired terrorist types, etc.
(Confidential to people travelling to Iosco County, Michigan: just get an Adelphia cable modem installed and bring your wireless router. Installation, service, and cancelation is worth the $50 if you'll be at your cottage for more than 7 days.)
"Ahhh... I understand. You're mistaking the names of the players for interogative questions! Mr. Who is the name of the player who plays first based..."
But even Sony or Apple level marketing would not have helped in the game space, IMHO. Unfortunately, in their first (and it turns out only) rev of the machine, the 3D performance just was not there. Most of the 3D games looked like PC games circa 1997; software rendered badness.
It also launched at a time when the PDA market started to take a nosedive, and I think that hurt the VC-rasing that would have helped marketing. Finally, the PSP was announced, with top 3D support, and that was the begining of the end IMHO. I don't think I even turned on my Zodiac after I got my PSP, even for E3 I just made .jpgs w/ all my appointments on them.
Still, it's a bummer, because it was a really nice PDA, the joystick enabled a great, easy-to-use interface w/o having to resort to tapping (better than the current PSP front-end interface, truth be told). I definitely missed mine when it got stolen from my car.
At my office, IM is used only for communicating with Elders. Everyone else just sends text messages to each others' phones. It requires you to be consise, doesn't require an immediate, polite reply (as IM can), doesn't require 100% attention like an actual phone call. In short SMS rules.
I don't have one yet, but I am planning to buy soon.
The PSP's CPU is software switchable from 111-333Mhz, but currently Sony only supports, in its libraries, running at 222Mhz. Hackers have gotten some homebrew apps running at 333Mhz, but no official apps do yet.
Maybe they should start painting the foam again, as called for in the initial design spec. I know if was heavy and expensive, but it might stick together better.