### You can be upset that they failed at making a decent fighting engine for Dreamfall but you shouldn't be upset for experimenting and trying something new.
Thing is, they didn't try something new, they did the same thing that as annoyed adventure gamers for already a decade or more. Full Throttle had similar issues, Indy 4 had them, Broken Sword 3 had plenty and many many other adventure games suffered from bad action sequences as well. Bad action sequence are nothing new, they have been done before and basically *never* worked, in the best cases they where few and far apart that they didn't annoy much, in the worst cases they ruined the whole game.
In Dreamfall its the same thing over again. What makes matters worse is that a few fights are completly pointless, they are not justified by the story, they don't make sense from the characters point of view, etc..You could simply have cut them and would have been left with a better game. And just to give an example how bad the fighting engine is: The game features a few unbeatable monsters, fighting works by automatically locking to a target, so if you come to close to such an unbeatable monster, you are *stuck* in auto-lock-on, you can't end the fight and run away, your are already dead the second the auto-lock-on triggers.
That of course doesn't mean that adventure games shouldn't ever have action sequences, but action sequences have to be properly integrated into the gameplay and story to work. You can't just create the worst fighting system ever created and hope it will somehow improve the game, since it never did and never will work that way.
Fahrenheit is among the only games that I have ever seen pulling it of successful, since it didn't just give you a random mini-game, but used the action as a means to improve the interactivity, i.e. you want to lift something heavy -> you have to press L+R in quick succession (Track&Field style), so you don't just watch animation of the character lifting something, but you actually feel that lifting something requires work. Also the game didn't just was a standard adventure game + action sequences, the whole control scheme itself was quite original as well. You use stuff with the analogstick, not with buttons, i.e. open a door you push the stick forward, want to pull something, push it backward, etc. so you don't trigger actions, but end up controlling the arm of the character. The dialogs also made use of this and where in realtime, rather then waiting for you to select an answer. Last not least it of course also had a story that actually supported the action elements, when your character has a Matrix-style chase with the police, you kind of have a hard time to tell that with your standard "use shoes with feed" gamemechanic.
The best thing of the system in Fahrenheit however is that you could easily expand on it: Have a player that doesn't like action sequences at all? You could make it possible to just switch them off, since most stuff is done via cutscenes, you could simply create an option to just watch them instead of playing them.
Now all this of course doesn't mean that Dreamfall is bad, in fact in terms of story its among the best things that have happened in this millennium, but it does have quite it share of rather obvious mistakes and it should be criticized for them (i.e. 1UP 4/10 rating actually does have a reason, not that I agree, but I can understand it) and I hope that they will do better in Dreamfall:Chapters.
Yes, they also happens to be all written by the same guy. I am not claiming that there are no longer are any 2D games, but it are definitively are not tons, but just a tiny few.
### What is, to us, a distributed and self-replicating system of nodes to distribute information (in the form of text "articles") worldwide is,
In all the decade that I have used the Usenet, I have never encountered a free provide that actually provided the *.binary.* groups, in fact most people considered posting binary to the Usenet a pretty stupid idea and in many Usenet hierarchies its not even allowed in the first place. Usenet.com, Giganews and friends really don't look to me much like a harmless Usenet provider, but more like a for-pay Warez Server, that just happens to not use FTP but NNTP to move the files around.
Super Paper Mario, just like New Super Mario Bros., is a games that celebrates the good old times and little else, which is ok, but on its however neither really is all that good, they are not, bad but they don't hold a candle against a MarioBros3 or Yoshis Island. And that is basically the problem I have. When there is a new 2D game these days, it is either some tribute to an old classic, a sequel/update (StreetFigtherHD) or something of those new "abstract" games, where you have a lot of colorful shapes (everyday shooter, geometry wars, etc.), but little if anything in terms of character and story.
Now there is nothing wrong with any of this by itself, but I miss the days where you had your set of nice looking hand-pixeled characters, a little story and a colorful world to explore. 2D itself might not be dead, but pixelart is certainly on its deathbed.
Half the games on that list aren't even fully 2D, but 3D with restricted movement. The other half is made up of decade old series or derivatives from them (Street Fighter, MetalSlug). Original 2D games are near non-existent these days, except for a few ones left on the DS, but even there its mostly sequels or already 3D or well, both (Metroid, Zelda:PH).
I do love 2D games, but there really isn't much at all left these days, especially when you want original content instead of just some new food to celebrate nostalgia.
### An NC-17 movie can still be released just as an AO game can be released.
A AO game can only be released if its for the PC, Mac or Linux. Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony don't allow AO stuff on their consoles. So while the retail chain is a problem, Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony are the bigger problem and need to be overcome first.
About the anonymity of the raters, I really don't see a problem with that by itself. The problem with the MPAA, as far as I got from the film, isn't that the raters are anonymous, but that the explanation given for why a movie got its rating aren't disclosed or at least not equally (i.e. small studio simply gets an NC-17, without further explanation, big studio gets detailed list on which parts to cut or change to get a lower rating).
Because its not as good as Mario64 and many previous Marios. It has nothing to do with nostalgia, Mario64 simply is the better game (more scenarios, more actual jump'n run, no "clean this, clean that" quests, much better balanced, less frustrating, no load times, no dumped down swimming, etc.). There is lots and lots of what is wrong with Sunshine, its still a good game, but not as great as we were used from previous Marios. That said compared to other non-Mario jump'n runs its still great, but it could have been so much better.
### The damn ratings systems are screwed six ways to Sunday, and need to be updated in order to give an accurate idea of the content.
Excuse me, but if people already fail to understand the current simple rating system, how is making it *more* complicated going to help? Just for the record the current rating system *already* has more in-depth informations then just C, E, T, M, AO, just look at the back of the box:
GTA IV: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Strong Sexual Content, Use of Drugs Halo 3: Blood and Gore, Mild Language, Violence
Hard do understand? Nope. Not detailed enough? I don't think so, all the core issues are listed. Anything that isn't provided by this info? Maybe, a link/url to a webpage that contains more detailed informations about the game would be nice for parents, but you can't really fit all that much more info on there without covering half the cover.
In my opinion there are basically just three things how the rating system could be improved:
1) Use age instead of letters, since age is much easier to remember then what any of that eC, E, E0, T, M, AO is going to mean, especially since movies have a completly different set of equally hard to understand letters. USK, BBFC and PEGI use age and I think its far easier to understand. And of course the ESRB as age due, but written in a tiny font above the big huge letter.
2) Keep the detailed list as is, but move it to the front of the box, so nobody can miss it. PEGI sucks in that area due to cryptic symbols, USK doesn't provide a detailed list in first place, don't know about BBFC, ESRB is doing by far the best in this area.
3) Make ratings mandatory, forbid sales of video games to people below the recommend age. Now I am sure many people will disagree with me, but I for one much prefer a state enforced rating system then one that is enforced by marked dominance alone. Beside it being equal to all, it also has the advantage that you can go against it if it gets out of control, unlike a privately enforced one which is much harder to attack. PS: Yes, I have seen This Film Is Not Yet Rated and I don't really want to get the video game rating system borked in such a way.
### OSS developers certainly have a whole bunch of good coders - and writers, in a pinch.
Writers, as in story, dialog, etc.? Since if so, I really would like to have a few of them, still strugling to find some of those for Windstille.
### But we'd definitely need folks creating those models for the display first! The tech is there, but the art lags a bit.
Going from a 3d engine that can render a bloomy 3d model to a fully fledged game is still a *long* way. It is a start for sure, but you need a little bit more then a few 3d models to make a game out of it, especially when it should be a good one.
Where did you get that from? I mean sure, professional artists might prefer to work for money, but so do most professional programmers. Communities like deviantArt on the other side don't seem to have an exactly hard time to find great artists. Which isn't exactly surprising, since there are far more artists around then programmers.
I have done a lot of work for free software games (Pingus, SuperTux, Lincity-NG, etc.) and while my work isn't exactly up to commercial standards, it is 'good enough', most people seem to like it. Thing is, I am not exactly super talented, I'd say that 3 out of 10 people are easily as talented as I am or even more so when it comes to graphics, I couldn't say the same thing about people being able to program, these are far less. Now ok, having some talent, doesn't mean that you can create a texture for a game, you need to know a thing or two about graphics formats, how to use Gimp, Blender and friends, but compared to learning the ins and outs of C++, OpenGL and all that stuff, that is really the easy part.
### But without the latter, any game looks and sounds 1995ish
I personally wouldn't have a problem with games looking like 1995, heck, I wouldn't mind games looking like 1990, if they where actually good games. However that isn't the case, most games don't feel like a finished game from 1995, but more like a game that is 15% done from back in 2000. The thing isn't lack of graphics, but lack of everything. Just a random engine with random graphics and a few random test levels doesn't make a compelling game, at best it makes an interesting techdemo, but nothing more.
In the end I think there are four core problems:
1) Lack of free art resources: not every sound effect or grass texture needs to be recreated from scratch, neither does a model of some real life car or plane. Many could be reused and there are many free resources like this around, issue is that very few of them have licenses that work together with free software, some don't have any at all and trying to track down the creators and collect permission for every grass texture often just isn't worth the effort, it is often faster to recreate from scratch. The commercial world has tons of collections of textures, sound effects and stuff, the free software world has basically none that are large enough to be really useful.
2) Art pipeline: just calling for more artists is one thing, but as soon as they arrive most projects end up in deep trouble, since they don't have any proper pipeline in place to turn a model done in Blender into something that is usable in the engine. The existing export scripts are often out of date or not provided in the first place, many free engines only provide usable export scripts for 3Dmax and friends and some really don't have anything in place at all. How many polygons a model is allowed to have, what resolution a texture should have and all that stuff is often also an open question without clear answer, leaving the artists pretty much in the void. At this point in time many distributions don't even have packages of Gtkradiant, which just raises the bar even further when it comes to level creation.
3) Organisation: As mentioned, there are millions of artists around. But with a random techdemo without much concept behind it you can't really attract them. In fact many games would be better of when they would start with a clear concept/design document, instead of a random techdemo and that design document better be created by somebody good at storytelling/gamedesign or whatever the game is actually going to focus on. Programmers as you said it, often just aren't up for this task. The hard part here is getting the people with the good ideas together with those that have the knowledge to implement it. A good game isn't created by a huge set of random contributors, but by a relatively small team where everybody knows what the goal is and constructing such a team is a
### Many otherwise excellent games have poorly designed characters,
Could you name them? Most of the free software games I know have poorly designed 'everything', its not a issue of graphics, its an issue that goes from bad code, over to the lack of tools right down to the complete lack of a solid core game design (aka nobody knows what the hell they actually want to accomplish). So fixing the graphics would help little to nothing to create a compelling game.
Nope. The issue is for most part game design and after that simply lack of contributors, since programmers are very hard to come by too. But game design is really by far the biggest issue. As long as people just clone an already existing game engine it might work without much coordination, since the goal is clear, but as soon as you try something even just a little bit new it gets insanely hard to find the right people and communicate the ideas across the whole team or even just getting them motivated to actually work on some goal instead of just write random code.
I have seen *far* more games that struggle with "we have no clue what we want to archive" then teams that "we know what we want, but we lack artists to finish it". In fact I have yet to see a project to which the later applies, while of the former kind there exists dozens or even hundreds.
Re:There's nothing left that wikki doesn't know!
on
Has Wikipedia Peaked?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
### Notability is just another spam filter.
The problem is that notability is far to often used as a wildcard to delete articles over topics the admin simply no clue about. I have seen this happening with a lot of articles on open source games, a whole bunch of them got deleted or threatened to be deleted, sometimes even with the topic locked afterwards (hint: if an article exists in many different languages and people are continually trying to recreate it, there might actually people interested in the topic). Now some month later the idiot admins seem to have been overturned and all the articles are back again. But doing uphill battles against admins just isn't fun. When a random idiot is doing vandalism that can be annoying enough, but when the admins turn out to be the bigger problem, something is fundamentally wrong.
1) A beginner option would be a very bad idea, since the user can't really predict what "beginner" actually means, i.e. 20 years of video games might still not help me a thing to figure out how this or that attack exactly works in a game or that it doesn't exit at all. Instead tutorials should simply be written in a less stupid way, i.e. don't teach me how to walk and look around, since those are trivially figured out by just touching the controller, neither have a instructor tell we for a minute which button is for shooting, just give me a little hint about that and be done with it (see God of War, Operation Flashpoint and such which explain new function via HUD).
The worst case about tutorials is often that they are blocking, you have to listen to totally uninteresting explanations and only after that you are allowed to perform that actions, this is stupid. If I already know the game or are clever enough to figure it out myself, I want to be able to just do it without the talk. A game should talk to the player when he is stuck, not stuck him by with all the noisy talk.
About the DS save game system, yep, thats great, especially because its a function of the device, not the game. So it works almost everywhere (except GBA titles...) and also important it feels 'right'. Similar function implemented in software often feels quite wrong, especially on the PC (Hey, why it is deleting my savegame?!). It would be good if the big consoles would have similar function where you could just send the console into standby and repeat exactly where you left of, thus giving you basically a save-everywhere, but without allowing quick-save-orgies. Wii has this for some virtual consoles, however not all from what I understand and not for any Wii games.
2) RE1 came before the analogstick, so its control scheme is understandable and basically the same for most other games of that era. They however really failed to fix it in later games, while you could later use the analogstick, the games never made use of it, most annoyingly you could only aim up, down or straight, not half up or half down, thus making proper aiming not hard, but simply impossible. This really should be another rule every game should follow: If you use the analogstick, then use it properly, not as dpad emulation (almost all 2D shoot'em ups suffer from this).
3) This is something where I disagree, at least for consoles. With consoles you don't develop games in a vacuum, you know what controller the player will be using and thus overly configurable controls will only mean that the player will end up with non working controls. Say you have a game where you have to sneak and you have mapped the dpad to walk, woops, can no longer access sneaking and game gets impossible. The balance would of course also be totally ruined by stuff like that, since dpad controls work quite differently then analog ones. In those cases where would dpad and analogstick can be used equally well, they should simply allow to use both at the same time and luckily many games already do.
When it comes to touch screen vs dpad it depends, in some games like Advanced Wars it really makes no difference and both are allowed. In other you really can do it only one way, i.e. Kirby wouldn't work without the touchscreen. There are cases where it could be configurable, but isn't, like Starfox, but that isn't really much of a usability issue and more an issue of idiot game design. Some developers feel the need to force the touchscreen and mic on you even where it totally isn't up for the job, the solution here is to just not buy those games, since they are really broken by design, not by accident. Usability arguments can't fix idiots at work (finger pointing at Factor5... sorry, guys, different platform, same lets force "new cool and totally unusable control on user" problem).
4) Very true, however rewind can often be extremely difficult to implement when cutscenes are run in-engine, but at least pause really is a must-have and its something that really should be enforced by q
In terms of storytelling they are certainly preferable over non-interactive, however when it comes to the issue of cutscene skipping they are far worse then non-interactive ones, since you can't skip them and since there really isn't a proper way to implement skipping. There simply isn't a clear line where the cutscene begins and the gameplay ends and so no easy way to implement a skip.
The problem with a completly free save system is that you end up in quick-save hell where you keep saving after each and every tiny obstacle instead of focusing on the game. In many sandbox games that can be a good thing, since it allows you to easily test out different tactics and stuff to see how they turn out, which after all is half the fun in a sandbox game, but in a quick linear action game it would likely do more damage then good.
I think a good compromise would be to only allow free saves when you are clear of enemies or behind cover, its kind of the way it worked in Operation Flashpoint (XBox). It wasn't directly enforced by the game, but due to its one-hit-kills mechanics you would think twice before just saving at a random spot, since a enemy behind you could kill you in an instant, rendering your save useless, since you only had one per mission. So you ended up always going behind cover and laying down before entering the save. In Outcast (PC) it was enforced, you could save freely, but before being able to do so, you had to do a special in-game action, which took a few seconds, so it couldn't be performed while under enemy fire.
The thing is, it only takes one of them to break the whole game. In both Prime1 and Prime2 I ditched the game after being stuck on those bosses for to long and only picked it back up month or even years later. What made the Prime games especially annoying is their tendency to respawn enemies, so you can't do it in a tactical way as in other games (move forward, kill enemies, fall back, save, repeat, till the way to the boss is clear). Prime games only are fun as long as you don't die.
This really is one the core issue of game usability: Never ever force the player through the same challenges again that he as already mastered. The problem with a hard boss is basically never the hard part, but the easy part which you have to replay again and again just to have access to the hard one, be it pieces of the level or earlier boss phases. Same issue is hugely important for cutscenes and savegames, when you have to watch a cutscene for the first time, its basically never an issue, its only when you are forced to watch them again that they become highly problematical. Savegames on the other side are the tool that should be used to minimize exactly this repetition, but getting the balance right between quick-save-orgies and uninterrupted-challenges can get hard.
While many points in the article are valid, it fails to discuss that some of their "solutions" have severe negative consequences, which can do far more damage then the original problem:
1) Auto-Save: In Halo this works because you have clear cuts between the levels, so when you mess up the checkpoint you can resume at the start of the level. Other games don't have such clear cuts, so you really don't mess up a users game-state without asking first. Another solution would be to have special auto-save slots beside user created ones or just saving to a new one instead overwriting an existing one. But the good solution depends heavily on the game in question and with a lot of non-linear ones, just letting the user do the saving is still the best, a little auto-saving as backup when the game crashes or such can however always be useful.
2) Kind of a non-issue, if a user doesn't know where the start button is he likely will have huge problems in the game, so just forcing him to look at the controller right at the start doesn't really sound like a bad idea.
3) Remappable controls are nice, but not without its dangers, since in quite a few games you might end up with custom configurations that just don't work for the game and makes certain special moves or combos impossible, something that might be impossible for the player to know right at the start, when those combos are only available much later in the game. I would however still allow it, since without it some input devices might be unusable with certain games. On consoles this is generally a much smaller problem then on PC, since on consoles the games tend to be optimized for exactly that controller, while on PC you really can't know what kind of input one might through at the game. The best solution trouble caused by custom config is of course to have a default config that is so good that the user just doesn't see a need to mess with it.
4) Skipable Cutscenes: Good idea, but can easily lead to people skipping cut scenes by accident, thus missing important pieces of story unintentionally. Solution would be to make cut scenes skipable, but making the skipping hard so that it isn't triggered by accident (i.e. use 'start' instead of 'a', press that skip button twice, require the player to use the option menu for skip, etc.), especially on the first play through. Also cutscenes should be visible from outside of the game if possible, quite a few games already feature a menu option that lets them rewatch past cutscenes, but by far not all.
5) Cameras can get annoying, quite true, so getting them right is important. One thing I am wondering: On a TV/movie set walls are often removed to make room for the camera, allowing the camera to be placed in location that are outside of the room itself and would be physically impossible if the room would be real. Games on the other side basically never do this, instead they let the camera collide with the fourth wall. Any reason for this? Or any games that do otherwise (aside from top-down RPGs that leave away the roof)?
6) Not sure I agree with this, having button that do nothing can often feel wrong and as games aren't designed in a vacuum, but always for a special machine with a given controller, I think the extra buttons should be taken into account. Of course one shouldn't change the game all that much for it, but sometimes non important additional functions can be nice (i.e. in Ico you could zoom onto your character with a button, nothing relevant to the game, but a nice additional function). Ability to quick-change weapons or such can also be done with buttons that don't have any real use otherwise.
7) Speaking about closed captions, turning them of is ok, but nothing that important. What I find much more important is to allow mixed languages for captions and speech, some of the few games that do this are Dreamfall and Fahrenheit, which allow you to independently select language for subtitle and speech. Its a little thing, but its great to be able to play a game in a foreign language and
Your questions completly miss the point. The real question is: Why did Microsoft design the console that can't reliably work in the same environment as every other console in the last 20 years? The fault is at Microsoft for designing a piece of junk that just fails far to often, even when handled with care.
I am just sick and tiered of people blaming the users for faulty hardware, which at this point in time there really has been proven more then once.
A nice video about the The Paradox of Choice is available at Google Video. It is an interesting topic, but I don't think it applies all that much to parallel programming. The issue isn't that there are to many languages, but simply that there are a bunch of very well established languages that provide you little to no help with writing parallel programs properly, so everybody just continues to write their programs the way they did the last 20 years and thus takes little or no advantage of the available multiprocessor systems. And I doubt that just reducing the choice would help much at all about that right now, since we really still don't know how to write parallel programs on a large scale (i.e. in a way that everybody can and does it), so some more research and experimentation is needed.
### Blender may be a great engine. But the interface is a crime against logic, nature and makes me revise my opinion on whether or not true Evil exists.
Could you elaborate on that? I mean, I can understand that people have trouble with the Blender UI, it certainly has issues due to being heavily focused on keyboard shortcuts, but "crime against logic"? There is nothing in Blender that makes opening a file hard, its not the standard OS file dialog, but its not all that different either. Applying a texture, ok, that can get difficult, because it is difficult and depends heavily on what the export plug-in supports, a texture setup that Yafray or Blenders internal renderer might render fine is often impossible for a game engine to handle. Blender just happens to be a general purpose app and not something like Milkshape that is specifically designed for gaming, so things can get more complicated.
How about those unhappy with the Blender start a page in the Blender Wiki detailing all the tasks they wanted to archive but couldn't do to Blender being more illogical then it should be? While the Blender developers might oppose a completly UI rewrite, since there really is no need for it, they have been quite open to cleaning things up and fixing them.
I have used Vi (a little bit here and there) for ten years and still absolutely hate it. On the other side I never had all that much issues with Blender.
Anyway, one of the big problems with Blender is that its lacks 'explorability', it can get near impossible to find a certain feature of your own or figure out what a button does without looking it up in the documentation, since a lot of functions depend on certain pre-conditions and if they are not met they will simply do nothing, but if you stay close to the documentation and just use IRC channel #blender once in a while when you are completly stuck you really shouldn't have all that trouble to get stuff done. It however depends heavily on what you want, for example if you want to do architecture, something like Sketch-Up is *a lot* easier, even if you have used Blender for years, since Sketch-Up is a tool designed for exactly that job, while Blender happens to be a general purpose 3d app that can do almost anything, but isn't always the best at a certain job. I'd suggest you watch the introduction video tutorials and then move up from there.
Here a very quick intro of the basic movement:
left mouse button moves the cursor right mouse button selects middle mouse button rotates/moves/zooms the camera (hold shift or ctrl)
c centers on cursor numpad gives top/bottom/left/right views (try shift) numpad-5 toggles ortho and perspective projection
space gives the menu
tab switch between object mode and edit mode - this is one of the core things you have to understand, object mode moves objects, edit mode lets you edit vertexes
x removes stuff e extrudes stuff in edit mode b gives you a select rectangle, pressing b twice gives you a select 'brush' g moves stuff r rotates stuff s scales stuff
Use Ctrl-numpad0 to make the currently selected camera the one used for rendering (this one is certainly way to obscure and could need a improvement in the UI)
Pressing keys twice often toggle the mode (r rotates around axis, rr rotates free) and holding shift or ctrl also changes modes as well.
That is basically all you need to know to get started with basic modelling.
I think one of the arguments that it comes down to is that when you create a binary you end up including code that is in the includes and that code goes into the final binaries. So any binary that uses a GPL header file gets contaminated with GPL code. Of course that arguments kind of falls apart as soon as you might have a include without macros or inline function or a language that doesn't have includes in the first place. So the GPL kind of only works fully with C-like languages and even then not always. It of course gets even more funky, since the FSF themselves argues that you can't/shouldn't have copyright on APIs, since that would make any API-cloning (wine, lesstiff, etc.) impossible, which however is really the only thing that would stop you from mixing non-GPL code with a GPL library in the first place.
So yep, I fully agree that a lawyer might interpret this quite a bit different then the FSF would do, but on the other side, doing some GPL and non-GPL mixing is just asking for trouble, if nothing else, it will make sure that such an app would never make it into any of the Linux distros around.
### Since when did linking with a library mean that you have obligations to the developers of that library?
Since forever? Thats the reason why there is a GPL and a LGPL after all. Now if a judge would strike it down in court is a different issue, but its certainly the way the FSF interprets it.
Slashdot Mirror
### You can be upset that they failed at making a decent fighting engine for Dreamfall but you shouldn't be upset for experimenting and trying something new.
Thing is, they didn't try something new, they did the same thing that as annoyed adventure gamers for already a decade or more. Full Throttle had similar issues, Indy 4 had them, Broken Sword 3 had plenty and many many other adventure games suffered from bad action sequences as well. Bad action sequence are nothing new, they have been done before and basically *never* worked, in the best cases they where few and far apart that they didn't annoy much, in the worst cases they ruined the whole game.
In Dreamfall its the same thing over again. What makes matters worse is that a few fights are completly pointless, they are not justified by the story, they don't make sense from the characters point of view, etc..You could simply have cut them and would have been left with a better game. And just to give an example how bad the fighting engine is: The game features a few unbeatable monsters, fighting works by automatically locking to a target, so if you come to close to such an unbeatable monster, you are *stuck* in auto-lock-on, you can't end the fight and run away, your are already dead the second the auto-lock-on triggers.
That of course doesn't mean that adventure games shouldn't ever have action sequences, but action sequences have to be properly integrated into the gameplay and story to work. You can't just create the worst fighting system ever created and hope it will somehow improve the game, since it never did and never will work that way.
Fahrenheit is among the only games that I have ever seen pulling it of successful, since it didn't just give you a random mini-game, but used the action as a means to improve the interactivity, i.e. you want to lift something heavy -> you have to press L+R in quick succession (Track&Field style), so you don't just watch animation of the character lifting something, but you actually feel that lifting something requires work. Also the game didn't just was a standard adventure game + action sequences, the whole control scheme itself was quite original as well. You use stuff with the analogstick, not with buttons, i.e. open a door you push the stick forward, want to pull something, push it backward, etc. so you don't trigger actions, but end up controlling the arm of the character. The dialogs also made use of this and where in realtime, rather then waiting for you to select an answer. Last not least it of course also had a story that actually supported the action elements, when your character has a Matrix-style chase with the police, you kind of have a hard time to tell that with your standard "use shoes with feed" gamemechanic.
The best thing of the system in Fahrenheit however is that you could easily expand on it: Have a player that doesn't like action sequences at all? You could make it possible to just switch them off, since most stuff is done via cutscenes, you could simply create an option to just watch them instead of playing them.
Now all this of course doesn't mean that Dreamfall is bad, in fact in terms of story its among the best things that have happened in this millennium, but it does have quite it share of rather obvious mistakes and it should be criticized for them (i.e. 1UP 4/10 rating actually does have a reason, not that I agree, but I can understand it) and I hope that they will do better in Dreamfall:Chapters.
### like these (all original)
Yes, they also happens to be all written by the same guy. I am not claiming that there are no longer are any 2D games, but it are definitively are not tons, but just a tiny few.
### What is, to us, a distributed and self-replicating system of nodes to distribute information (in the form of text "articles") worldwide is,
In all the decade that I have used the Usenet, I have never encountered a free provide that actually provided the *.binary.* groups, in fact most people considered posting binary to the Usenet a pretty stupid idea and in many Usenet hierarchies its not even allowed in the first place. Usenet.com, Giganews and friends really don't look to me much like a harmless Usenet provider, but more like a for-pay Warez Server, that just happens to not use FTP but NNTP to move the files around.
Super Paper Mario, just like New Super Mario Bros., is a games that celebrates the good old times and little else, which is ok, but on its however neither really is all that good, they are not, bad but they don't hold a candle against a MarioBros3 or Yoshis Island. And that is basically the problem I have. When there is a new 2D game these days, it is either some tribute to an old classic, a sequel/update (StreetFigtherHD) or something of those new "abstract" games, where you have a lot of colorful shapes (everyday shooter, geometry wars, etc.), but little if anything in terms of character and story.
Now there is nothing wrong with any of this by itself, but I miss the days where you had your set of nice looking hand-pixeled characters, a little story and a colorful world to explore. 2D itself might not be dead, but pixelart is certainly on its deathbed.
Half the games on that list aren't even fully 2D, but 3D with restricted movement. The other half is made up of decade old series or derivatives from them (Street Fighter, MetalSlug). Original 2D games are near non-existent these days, except for a few ones left on the DS, but even there its mostly sequels or already 3D or well, both (Metroid, Zelda:PH).
I do love 2D games, but there really isn't much at all left these days, especially when you want original content instead of just some new food to celebrate nostalgia.
### An NC-17 movie can still be released just as an AO game can be released.
A AO game can only be released if its for the PC, Mac or Linux. Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony don't allow AO stuff on their consoles. So while the retail chain is a problem, Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony are the bigger problem and need to be overcome first.
About the anonymity of the raters, I really don't see a problem with that by itself. The problem with the MPAA, as far as I got from the film, isn't that the raters are anonymous, but that the explanation given for why a movie got its rating aren't disclosed or at least not equally (i.e. small studio simply gets an NC-17, without further explanation, big studio gets detailed list on which parts to cut or change to get a lower rating).
### Why do people not like this gem?
Because its not as good as Mario64 and many previous Marios. It has nothing to do with nostalgia, Mario64 simply is the better game (more scenarios, more actual jump'n run, no "clean this, clean that" quests, much better balanced, less frustrating, no load times, no dumped down swimming, etc.). There is lots and lots of what is wrong with Sunshine, its still a good game, but not as great as we were used from previous Marios. That said compared to other non-Mario jump'n runs its still great, but it could have been so much better.
### The damn ratings systems are screwed six ways to Sunday, and need to be updated in order to give an accurate idea of the content.
Excuse me, but if people already fail to understand the current simple rating system, how is making it *more* complicated going to help? Just for the record the current rating system *already* has more in-depth informations then just C, E, T, M, AO, just look at the back of the box:
GTA IV: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Strong Sexual Content, Use of Drugs
Halo 3: Blood and Gore, Mild Language, Violence
Hard do understand? Nope. Not detailed enough? I don't think so, all the core issues are listed. Anything that isn't provided by this info? Maybe, a link/url to a webpage that contains more detailed informations about the game would be nice for parents, but you can't really fit all that much more info on there without covering half the cover.
In my opinion there are basically just three things how the rating system could be improved:
1) Use age instead of letters, since age is much easier to remember then what any of that eC, E, E0, T, M, AO is going to mean, especially since movies have a completly different set of equally hard to understand letters. USK, BBFC and PEGI use age and I think its far easier to understand. And of course the ESRB as age due, but written in a tiny font above the big huge letter.
2) Keep the detailed list as is, but move it to the front of the box, so nobody can miss it. PEGI sucks in that area due to cryptic symbols, USK doesn't provide a detailed list in first place, don't know about BBFC, ESRB is doing by far the best in this area.
3) Make ratings mandatory, forbid sales of video games to people below the recommend age. Now I am sure many people will disagree with me, but I for one much prefer a state enforced rating system then one that is enforced by marked dominance alone. Beside it being equal to all, it also has the advantage that you can go against it if it gets out of control, unlike a privately enforced one which is much harder to attack. PS: Yes, I have seen This Film Is Not Yet Rated and I don't really want to get the video game rating system borked in such a way.
### They're providing you with a full free game
So what? That doesn't make installing spyware or trying to do so any better.
### OSS developers certainly have a whole bunch of good coders - and writers, in a pinch.
Writers, as in story, dialog, etc.? Since if so, I really would like to have a few of them, still strugling to find some of those for Windstille.
### But we'd definitely need folks creating those models for the display first! The tech is there, but the art lags a bit.
Going from a 3d engine that can render a bloomy 3d model to a fully fledged game is still a *long* way. It is a start for sure, but you need a little bit more then a few 3d models to make a game out of it, especially when it should be a good one.
### Many artists will make things for money ONLY.
Where did you get that from? I mean sure, professional artists might prefer to work for money, but so do most professional programmers. Communities like deviantArt on the other side don't seem to have an exactly hard time to find great artists. Which isn't exactly surprising, since there are far more artists around then programmers.
I have done a lot of work for free software games (Pingus, SuperTux, Lincity-NG, etc.) and while my work isn't exactly up to commercial standards, it is 'good enough', most people seem to like it. Thing is, I am not exactly super talented, I'd say that 3 out of 10 people are easily as talented as I am or even more so when it comes to graphics, I couldn't say the same thing about people being able to program, these are far less. Now ok, having some talent, doesn't mean that you can create a texture for a game, you need to know a thing or two about graphics formats, how to use Gimp, Blender and friends, but compared to learning the ins and outs of C++, OpenGL and all that stuff, that is really the easy part.
### But without the latter, any game looks and sounds 1995ish
I personally wouldn't have a problem with games looking like 1995, heck, I wouldn't mind games looking like 1990, if they where actually good games. However that isn't the case, most games don't feel like a finished game from 1995, but more like a game that is 15% done from back in 2000. The thing isn't lack of graphics, but lack of everything. Just a random engine with random graphics and a few random test levels doesn't make a compelling game, at best it makes an interesting techdemo, but nothing more.
In the end I think there are four core problems:
1) Lack of free art resources: not every sound effect or grass texture needs to be recreated from scratch, neither does a model of some real life car or plane. Many could be reused and there are many free resources like this around, issue is that very few of them have licenses that work together with free software, some don't have any at all and trying to track down the creators and collect permission for every grass texture often just isn't worth the effort, it is often faster to recreate from scratch. The commercial world has tons of collections of textures, sound effects and stuff, the free software world has basically none that are large enough to be really useful.
2) Art pipeline: just calling for more artists is one thing, but as soon as they arrive most projects end up in deep trouble, since they don't have any proper pipeline in place to turn a model done in Blender into something that is usable in the engine. The existing export scripts are often out of date or not provided in the first place, many free engines only provide usable export scripts for 3Dmax and friends and some really don't have anything in place at all. How many polygons a model is allowed to have, what resolution a texture should have and all that stuff is often also an open question without clear answer, leaving the artists pretty much in the void. At this point in time many distributions don't even have packages of Gtkradiant, which just raises the bar even further when it comes to level creation.
3) Organisation: As mentioned, there are millions of artists around. But with a random techdemo without much concept behind it you can't really attract them. In fact many games would be better of when they would start with a clear concept/design document, instead of a random techdemo and that design document better be created by somebody good at storytelling/gamedesign or whatever the game is actually going to focus on. Programmers as you said it, often just aren't up for this task. The hard part here is getting the people with the good ideas together with those that have the knowledge to implement it. A good game isn't created by a huge set of random contributors, but by a relatively small team where everybody knows what the goal is and constructing such a team is a
### Many otherwise excellent games have poorly designed characters,
Could you name them? Most of the free software games I know have poorly designed 'everything', its not a issue of graphics, its an issue that goes from bad code, over to the lack of tools right down to the complete lack of a solid core game design (aka nobody knows what the hell they actually want to accomplish). So fixing the graphics would help little to nothing to create a compelling game.
### The issue is artists.
Nope. The issue is for most part game design and after that simply lack of contributors, since programmers are very hard to come by too. But game design is really by far the biggest issue. As long as people just clone an already existing game engine it might work without much coordination, since the goal is clear, but as soon as you try something even just a little bit new it gets insanely hard to find the right people and communicate the ideas across the whole team or even just getting them motivated to actually work on some goal instead of just write random code.
I have seen *far* more games that struggle with "we have no clue what we want to archive" then teams that "we know what we want, but we lack artists to finish it". In fact I have yet to see a project to which the later applies, while of the former kind there exists dozens or even hundreds.
### Notability is just another spam filter.
The problem is that notability is far to often used as a wildcard to delete articles over topics the admin simply no clue about. I have seen this happening with a lot of articles on open source games, a whole bunch of them got deleted or threatened to be deleted, sometimes even with the topic locked afterwards (hint: if an article exists in many different languages and people are continually trying to recreate it, there might actually people interested in the topic). Now some month later the idiot admins seem to have been overturned and all the articles are back again. But doing uphill battles against admins just isn't fun. When a random idiot is doing vandalism that can be annoying enough, but when the admins turn out to be the bigger problem, something is fundamentally wrong.
1) A beginner option would be a very bad idea, since the user can't really predict what "beginner" actually means, i.e. 20 years of video games might still not help me a thing to figure out how this or that attack exactly works in a game or that it doesn't exit at all. Instead tutorials should simply be written in a less stupid way, i.e. don't teach me how to walk and look around, since those are trivially figured out by just touching the controller, neither have a instructor tell we for a minute which button is for shooting, just give me a little hint about that and be done with it (see God of War, Operation Flashpoint and such which explain new function via HUD).
The worst case about tutorials is often that they are blocking, you have to listen to totally uninteresting explanations and only after that you are allowed to perform that actions, this is stupid. If I already know the game or are clever enough to figure it out myself, I want to be able to just do it without the talk. A game should talk to the player when he is stuck, not stuck him by with all the noisy talk.
About the DS save game system, yep, thats great, especially because its a function of the device, not the game. So it works almost everywhere (except GBA titles...) and also important it feels 'right'. Similar function implemented in software often feels quite wrong, especially on the PC (Hey, why it is deleting my savegame?!). It would be good if the big consoles would have similar function where you could just send the console into standby and repeat exactly where you left of, thus giving you basically a save-everywhere, but without allowing quick-save-orgies. Wii has this for some virtual consoles, however not all from what I understand and not for any Wii games.
2) RE1 came before the analogstick, so its control scheme is understandable and basically the same for most other games of that era. They however really failed to fix it in later games, while you could later use the analogstick, the games never made use of it, most annoyingly you could only aim up, down or straight, not half up or half down, thus making proper aiming not hard, but simply impossible. This really should be another rule every game should follow: If you use the analogstick, then use it properly, not as dpad emulation (almost all 2D shoot'em ups suffer from this).
3) This is something where I disagree, at least for consoles. With consoles you don't develop games in a vacuum, you know what controller the player will be using and thus overly configurable controls will only mean that the player will end up with non working controls. Say you have a game where you have to sneak and you have mapped the dpad to walk, woops, can no longer access sneaking and game gets impossible. The balance would of course also be totally ruined by stuff like that, since dpad controls work quite differently then analog ones. In those cases where would dpad and analogstick can be used equally well, they should simply allow to use both at the same time and luckily many games already do.
When it comes to touch screen vs dpad it depends, in some games like Advanced Wars it really makes no difference and both are allowed. In other you really can do it only one way, i.e. Kirby wouldn't work without the touchscreen. There are cases where it could be configurable, but isn't, like Starfox, but that isn't really much of a usability issue and more an issue of idiot game design. Some developers feel the need to force the touchscreen and mic on you even where it totally isn't up for the job, the solution here is to just not buy those games, since they are really broken by design, not by accident. Usability arguments can't fix idiots at work (finger pointing at Factor5... sorry, guys, different platform, same lets force "new cool and totally unusable control on user" problem).
4) Very true, however rewind can often be extremely difficult to implement when cutscenes are run in-engine, but at least pause really is a must-have and its something that really should be enforced by q
In terms of storytelling they are certainly preferable over non-interactive, however when it comes to the issue of cutscene skipping they are far worse then non-interactive ones, since you can't skip them and since there really isn't a proper way to implement skipping. There simply isn't a clear line where the cutscene begins and the gameplay ends and so no easy way to implement a skip.
The problem with a completly free save system is that you end up in quick-save hell where you keep saving after each and every tiny obstacle instead of focusing on the game. In many sandbox games that can be a good thing, since it allows you to easily test out different tactics and stuff to see how they turn out, which after all is half the fun in a sandbox game, but in a quick linear action game it would likely do more damage then good.
I think a good compromise would be to only allow free saves when you are clear of enemies or behind cover, its kind of the way it worked in Operation Flashpoint (XBox). It wasn't directly enforced by the game, but due to its one-hit-kills mechanics you would think twice before just saving at a random spot, since a enemy behind you could kill you in an instant, rendering your save useless, since you only had one per mission. So you ended up always going behind cover and laying down before entering the save. In Outcast (PC) it was enforced, you could save freely, but before being able to do so, you had to do a special in-game action, which took a few seconds, so it couldn't be performed while under enemy fire.
### There was only one boss in Metroid Prime
The thing is, it only takes one of them to break the whole game. In both Prime1 and Prime2 I ditched the game after being stuck on those bosses for to long and only picked it back up month or even years later. What made the Prime games especially annoying is their tendency to respawn enemies, so you can't do it in a tactical way as in other games (move forward, kill enemies, fall back, save, repeat, till the way to the boss is clear). Prime games only are fun as long as you don't die.
This really is one the core issue of game usability: Never ever force the player through the same challenges again that he as already mastered. The problem with a hard boss is basically never the hard part, but the easy part which you have to replay again and again just to have access to the hard one, be it pieces of the level or earlier boss phases. Same issue is hugely important for cutscenes and savegames, when you have to watch a cutscene for the first time, its basically never an issue, its only when you are forced to watch them again that they become highly problematical. Savegames on the other side are the tool that should be used to minimize exactly this repetition, but getting the balance right between quick-save-orgies and uninterrupted-challenges can get hard.
While many points in the article are valid, it fails to discuss that some of their "solutions" have severe negative consequences, which can do far more damage then the original problem:
1) Auto-Save: In Halo this works because you have clear cuts between the levels, so when you mess up the checkpoint you can resume at the start of the level. Other games don't have such clear cuts, so you really don't mess up a users game-state without asking first. Another solution would be to have special auto-save slots beside user created ones or just saving to a new one instead overwriting an existing one. But the good solution depends heavily on the game in question and with a lot of non-linear ones, just letting the user do the saving is still the best, a little auto-saving as backup when the game crashes or such can however always be useful.
2) Kind of a non-issue, if a user doesn't know where the start button is he likely will have huge problems in the game, so just forcing him to look at the controller right at the start doesn't really sound like a bad idea.
3) Remappable controls are nice, but not without its dangers, since in quite a few games you might end up with custom configurations that just don't work for the game and makes certain special moves or combos impossible, something that might be impossible for the player to know right at the start, when those combos are only available much later in the game. I would however still allow it, since without it some input devices might be unusable with certain games. On consoles this is generally a much smaller problem then on PC, since on consoles the games tend to be optimized for exactly that controller, while on PC you really can't know what kind of input one might through at the game. The best solution trouble caused by custom config is of course to have a default config that is so good that the user just doesn't see a need to mess with it.
4) Skipable Cutscenes: Good idea, but can easily lead to people skipping cut scenes by accident, thus missing important pieces of story unintentionally. Solution would be to make cut scenes skipable, but making the skipping hard so that it isn't triggered by accident (i.e. use 'start' instead of 'a', press that skip button twice, require the player to use the option menu for skip, etc.), especially on the first play through. Also cutscenes should be visible from outside of the game if possible, quite a few games already feature a menu option that lets them rewatch past cutscenes, but by far not all.
5) Cameras can get annoying, quite true, so getting them right is important. One thing I am wondering: On a TV/movie set walls are often removed to make room for the camera, allowing the camera to be placed in location that are outside of the room itself and would be physically impossible if the room would be real. Games on the other side basically never do this, instead they let the camera collide with the fourth wall. Any reason for this? Or any games that do otherwise (aside from top-down RPGs that leave away the roof)?
6) Not sure I agree with this, having button that do nothing can often feel wrong and as games aren't designed in a vacuum, but always for a special machine with a given controller, I think the extra buttons should be taken into account. Of course one shouldn't change the game all that much for it, but sometimes non important additional functions can be nice (i.e. in Ico you could zoom onto your character with a button, nothing relevant to the game, but a nice additional function). Ability to quick-change weapons or such can also be done with buttons that don't have any real use otherwise.
7) Speaking about closed captions, turning them of is ok, but nothing that important. What I find much more important is to allow mixed languages for captions and speech, some of the few games that do this are Dreamfall and Fahrenheit, which allow you to independently select language for subtitle and speech. Its a little thing, but its great to be able to play a game in a foreign language and
Your questions completly miss the point. The real question is: Why did Microsoft design the console that can't reliably work in the same environment as every other console in the last 20 years? The fault is at Microsoft for designing a piece of junk that just fails far to often, even when handled with care.
I am just sick and tiered of people blaming the users for faulty hardware, which at this point in time there really has been proven more then once.
A nice video about the The Paradox of Choice is available at Google Video. It is an interesting topic, but I don't think it applies all that much to parallel programming. The issue isn't that there are to many languages, but simply that there are a bunch of very well established languages that provide you little to no help with writing parallel programs properly, so everybody just continues to write their programs the way they did the last 20 years and thus takes little or no advantage of the available multiprocessor systems. And I doubt that just reducing the choice would help much at all about that right now, since we really still don't know how to write parallel programs on a large scale (i.e. in a way that everybody can and does it), so some more research and experimentation is needed.
### Blender may be a great engine. But the interface is a crime against logic, nature and makes me revise my opinion on whether or not true Evil exists.
Could you elaborate on that? I mean, I can understand that people have trouble with the Blender UI, it certainly has issues due to being heavily focused on keyboard shortcuts, but "crime against logic"? There is nothing in Blender that makes opening a file hard, its not the standard OS file dialog, but its not all that different either. Applying a texture, ok, that can get difficult, because it is difficult and depends heavily on what the export plug-in supports, a texture setup that Yafray or Blenders internal renderer might render fine is often impossible for a game engine to handle. Blender just happens to be a general purpose app and not something like Milkshape that is specifically designed for gaming, so things can get more complicated.
How about those unhappy with the Blender start a page in the Blender Wiki detailing all the tasks they wanted to archive but couldn't do to Blender being more illogical then it should be? While the Blender developers might oppose a completly UI rewrite, since there really is no need for it, they have been quite open to cleaning things up and fixing them.
### Vi took be about 10 minutes to get the hang
I have used Vi (a little bit here and there) for ten years and still absolutely hate it. On the other side I never had all that much issues with Blender.
Anyway, one of the big problems with Blender is that its lacks 'explorability', it can get near impossible to find a certain feature of your own or figure out what a button does without looking it up in the documentation, since a lot of functions depend on certain pre-conditions and if they are not met they will simply do nothing, but if you stay close to the documentation and just use IRC channel #blender once in a while when you are completly stuck you really shouldn't have all that trouble to get stuff done. It however depends heavily on what you want, for example if you want to do architecture, something like Sketch-Up is *a lot* easier, even if you have used Blender for years, since Sketch-Up is a tool designed for exactly that job, while Blender happens to be a general purpose 3d app that can do almost anything, but isn't always the best at a certain job. I'd suggest you watch the introduction video tutorials and then move up from there.
Here a very quick intro of the basic movement:
left mouse button moves the cursor
right mouse button selects
middle mouse button rotates/moves/zooms the camera (hold shift or ctrl)
c centers on cursor
numpad gives top/bottom/left/right views (try shift)
numpad-5 toggles ortho and perspective projection
space gives the menu
tab switch between object mode and edit mode - this is one of the core things you have to understand, object mode moves objects, edit mode lets you edit vertexes
x removes stuff
e extrudes stuff in edit mode
b gives you a select rectangle, pressing b twice gives you a select 'brush'
g moves stuff
r rotates stuff
s scales stuff
Use Ctrl-numpad0 to make the currently selected camera the one used for rendering (this one is certainly way to obscure and could need a improvement in the UI)
Pressing keys twice often toggle the mode (r rotates around axis, rr rotates free) and holding shift or ctrl also changes modes as well.
That is basically all you need to know to get started with basic modelling.
I think one of the arguments that it comes down to is that when you create a binary you end up including code that is in the includes and that code goes into the final binaries. So any binary that uses a GPL header file gets contaminated with GPL code. Of course that arguments kind of falls apart as soon as you might have a include without macros or inline function or a language that doesn't have includes in the first place. So the GPL kind of only works fully with C-like languages and even then not always. It of course gets even more funky, since the FSF themselves argues that you can't/shouldn't have copyright on APIs, since that would make any API-cloning (wine, lesstiff, etc.) impossible, which however is really the only thing that would stop you from mixing non-GPL code with a GPL library in the first place.
So yep, I fully agree that a lawyer might interpret this quite a bit different then the FSF would do, but on the other side, doing some GPL and non-GPL mixing is just asking for trouble, if nothing else, it will make sure that such an app would never make it into any of the Linux distros around.
### Since when did linking with a library mean that you have obligations to the developers of that library?
Since forever? Thats the reason why there is a GPL and a LGPL after all. Now if a judge would strike it down in court is a different issue, but its certainly the way the FSF interprets it.