### My point is simply that graphics don't make the games, gameplay does.
Gameplay alone isn't enough for many games, you also want to have story, character design, interesting environments and such and good graphics help to bring them to life. Graphics are of course not so important that one should push the price into the unaffordable like the PS3 did, but neither are they so unimportant that you can just slap last generation technique into the box and sell it as new and get away with it in the long run.
Just look at the games you listed, do you want the nice smooth vector graphics of a Flow or Warning Forever to be blown up as a pixel mess on a HD-TV? Wouldn't you prefer to have them as smooth as their creators intended them to be? Having graphics rendered in 1280x720 or 1920x1080 on a display that supports the resolution looks a heck of a lot better then the blurry mess that the TVs scaler will make out of a 640x480 signal. The Wii can't even do anti-aliasing on games as simple as Wii Sports, sorry, but that just isn't exactly what I expect from a next-gen machine. Focus on gameplay is alright and perfectly ok, but totally ignoring the graphics isn't exactly a good thing.
### Imagine I claimed some right to pull out a gun and imprison people for depicting pink sunflowers.
Set a five year old in front of a sunflower and set it in front of a horror movie or Doom3. Which will 'influence' him more? I doubt that it will be the sunflower. Now I might not need the government to restrict video games, but how about rating them? Do you consider the ESRB useful? And if so, why, given that you consider video games having no negative influence on us.
### The non-nutjob discussion is that the nutjobs have already done an exhaustive search of existing studies and funded their own studies trying to support this.
The nutjobs are looking for the wrong problem. There is no direct "play video game" -> "get violent" relationship, end of story, I don't need a study for that, that in turn however doesn't mean video games aren't influencing us, in probably negative or probably positive ways. So far I haven't really seen much study in how video games actually do influence us on a larger scale, which I think there is little point in denying. As said, its not about ban vs no-ban, its about what they do to us know, what they might to in 20 years when graphics will approach photo realism.
### The only reason the discussion is still going on is that the nutjobs keep harping on it and pushing for it.
I don't think so. The main reason is simply that there is far to much violence in video games. I don't need some nutjob to tell me that, I just need to look at the available games. Maybe its just an evolutionary phase in the development that we will get over with sooner or later, but its definitely something that is limiting the medium as it is right now, because there is simply so much more that one could do in a video game.
### How about not NOT claiming some right to pull out a gun and forcibly imprison people who refuse to comply to your claimed "common sense" when all scientific evidence indicates that that supposed "common sense" is wrong?
Which scientific study claims that extreme violence has no influence on younger people? I don't know any. Set a bunch random five year old in front of Doom3 and you might pretty quickly be able to proof that there indeed is some influence. I am not claiming that that video game violence leads to real one, just that there is influence and probably not a good one.
### Recently Slashdot ran a story on this experiment which in fact turned out with gamers being MORE sensitive and MORE disturbed and MORE reluctant with non-game harm/violence against a virtual person.
Now I haven't read the whole study, but from the conclusion I can see nothing that the study has anything to do with gamer vs non-gamer, instead it simply claims that people react similarly when torturing a virtual character as when torturing a real one. That would pretty much proof exactly what I am saying, video games do have influence and just because its virtual doesn't mean it doesn't have an impact on you. This really isn't a surprise, I mean if the brain had a magic switch that would automatically get flipped and filter out any influence when we know something is not real then the whole movie industry would have gone bankrupt long ago. People scream, cry or get scared by movies all the time, even so they know perfectly well that everything is fake.
### And god-forbid a kid see something like a "Gruesome war documentary". They might develop an accurate grasp of war,
At the right age, yes. If they are too young they will understand nothing of the documentary and just have nightmares for the coming weeks.
### Yes, you're right... you do have a right to pull out a gun and forcibly imprison people to eliminate any risk that that might happen, that it is appropriate for you impose censorship legislation against "harmful information"
Limiting the access of younger people to harmful material has little to do with censorship, if the parents are ok with it, they can simply give their child access to it, the whole point is to make it harder for the child to get access to it themself.
### they damn well no less deserve equal protection and equal law criminalizing anyone giving the kid religious conversion materials.
Which already is the case to some extent, christan teachings are kept out of schools.
Anyway, back to the beginning: My point isn't that violent games should get banned or not, just that I would welcome some meaningful non-nutjob discussion about the issue. This isn't just a think-of-the-chidren thing, it is also a pretty gamer relevant one, for a simple reason: playing FPSs the whole day simply gets damn boring. Where is the storytelling? The non-violent interaction with NPCs and such? By restricting themself to violent content the gaming industry is stopping a whole lot interesting games from happening. The Sims or Myst pretty impressively demonstrate that there is a huge market for non-violent games, which is still in large part is still unexplored. It would be much easier to make the nutjobs shut up if there would actually be some serious alternative to the violent games, but so far there simply isn't, a handful of non-violent games doesn't change that.
### It is not up to the government to interfere in what entertainment I can access
If you are old enough the government has of course no right to interfere with what you can access, but why shouldn't it have some say about what the kid can have easy access to? In Germany selling movies or games to kids below the rated age is forbidden, this however neither limits your access nor does it stop the parents from buying the games for their kids, even if they aren't old enough. The regulation simply puts power where it belongs: into the hands of the parents. I fail to see what is so bad about that.
### The problem is this: One side has decided, arbitrarily, without any compelling evidence whatsoever, that video games are harmful to children.
How about good old common sense? Do you let your children watch hardcore porn? Gruesome war documentaries? Horror movies? Now how exactly a child might react to all that depends on the age, his personality, his parents and a bunch of other things, but I think there is no question that it will react to such extreme stuff quite different then to the latest Disney movie. Age regulations aren't there for no reason, but for most part because of good old common sense and not because violent stuff makes you go Columbine.
The question how all those violence influences people is a worthy one for discussion, but claiming that there is no influence is just plain ridiculous.
The Wiimote gives you two kinds of data, the coordinates of the IR LEDs of the sensorbar in 2D, which used for pointing, the x,y,z accelerations. It actually doesn't give you exact orientation, you have to derive that from the accelerations, which only works as long as you don't move it, else acceleration and gravity will overlap and you will have a hard time telling which is gravity and which is movement of the Wiimote. Also the orientation you get that way is limited to X and Y axis only, the Wiimote can't detect rotation around the Z axis via the accelerometers, however to a limit extent it might be possible to get it from the sensorbar.
To make it short: I believe it when I see it. So far most Wii games used prerecorded motion, aka glorified button presses. Some games, such as Wii Sports, also take the speed into account, but those only work because the motion itself is very limited. Real 1:1 mapping just doesn't work with the sensor in the Wiimote, you can however of course get a lot closer to it then Zelda, which really was just lame in terms of input.
### If left unchecked, people like this, and attitudes like these, will lead to the widespread disappearance of personal responsibility.
Jack Thompson might be a nutjob, that however doesn't mean that violence in video games and other media isn't a problem. You know, personal responsibility is a door that swings both ways, just because people should take care about themself or parents about their children doesn't mean that McDonalds, the cigarette industry or video game developers should get away with selling whatever they feel makes them the most money while totally ignoring the consequences. They have responsibilities as well.
I am not saying that video games should be banned, but its sad that there is so very little room left for meaningful discussion of such topics. You either get the 'every should be banned' nutjobs or the people who want everything totally free and unregulated, no matter the consequences, while in the end the best would probably be something in between those two extremes.
It doesn't look fake, but it does look like they are simply using pre-recorded motions, just like almost all Wii games out there. So instead of the robot mirroring your motion, you have to to mirror a predefined motion to trigger a prerecorded motion in the robot. Looks cool, but it is pretty much useless for actually controlling the robot, since its really no different then pressing the "cool sword swing motion"-button.
The Wiimote can't give you accurate position data, so thats pretty much all you ever get.
### There are so many fps games out there that you can choose any setting, play-style, weapons that you want to play with!
And yet FPS games with meaningful NPC interaction (and by that I don't mean shooting NPCs) are still extremely rare, haven't seen much games that come with non-linear levels either. I mean yeah there was Deus Ex and Operation Flashpoint half a decade ago, but since then very little at all has happened in those areas. The FPS genre is probably the one that has the most room for painfully obvious innovation. Its not done to death, its just that developers are cloning each other over and over again instead of taking a simple step to look at the whole picture, there are still tons and tons of things that no FPS ever did.
### such as rechargeable health bars Wooopie.
Which actually was quite a big innovation, not because it takes a programmer five minutes to implement, but because it changes how you play these games quite a bit, i.e. taking cover becomes far more important. The rechargeable health bars also meant we could get finally rid of the stupid health packs. Not every innovation has to be Katamari-style to be meaningful. That said a game needs of course a little bit more then just a rechargable health bar to become interesting.
In the end I think the problem is that development happens to much in terms of genre, instead of simply taking the story/setting that they have in mind and trying to make the best out of it without caring if its FPS, RPG, Action-Adventure or a little bit of everything.
I think that this is the core reason why stories in games suck for most part, they are considered fillers, stuff that doesn't really matter at all and that is simply there to fill a few holes that the gameplay left. No surprise that you don't get a good story that way. As long as developers continue to consider story as filler things won't change. It is like with movies, if you simply take the story as filler between your special effects filled space battles you will end up with junk.
I think more developer should start to use games as story telling medium and let the gameplay serve the story instead of the other way around. Not only would that lead to better stories, but also to new gameplay innovation. I mean shooting random stuff is fun for a while, but what really has changed in the last 20 years in terms of interaction with the gameworld? Is throwing the gameworld itself at the enemy via the gravity gun the best we can come up with? What has changed in terms of NPC interaction? Most 15 year old text adventures still put todays games to shame in that aspect, since many todays games simply have any and even those that have, don't really move beyond standard dialog trees.
I don't think that the 'freedom' in games is the reason for this, since truth to be told, most games don't really offer any freedom at all, with a few exception. Most games are incredible linear and adding a decent story wouldn't take any of that already non-existing freedom away. Its simply that most developers don't even care for story.
Did some research on my own, what I found is this (somebody who actually has a Wii feel free to correct me):
Wii itself has 512MB flash RAM and ~2100 free blocks. A 2GB SD Kart provides ~16384 free blocks. F-Zero is 99 blocks large. DonkeyKong is 19 blocks large.
This means that one block is 128kbytes large and in turn it means that the Wii reserves around half its Flash content for non-user stuff (firmware and such). If that block size is correct it means that F-Zero is 12MB large while the plain ROM dump should only be around 1MB. From this it looks like the Wii can only hold around 20 SNES titles.
VC games are a lot larger then a plain ROM dump, most likly due to the manual, emulator and whatever they add to it. Somebody who own Wii can probably post the exact numbers, but from what I remember they are all in the range of 10-20MB, even old SNES and NES games.
### Interactivity and the depth of control and manipulation you have over you virtual character. [...] Imagine prince of persia on "automatic" where the computer navigates the level and fights for you. ###
Interesting that you mention Prince of Persia, since that game (SoT, but also the former 2D ones) is in large part what I call an "on-rails jump'n run" and its good exactly because of that. What I mean with 'on rails' becomes obvious when you compare it with a standard FPS.
In a FPS you basically control a cylinder in a polygonal world, you can move it around, you can make it jump and do stuff, all your actions are almost 1:1 applied to that cylinder and that cylinder interacts in very primitive ways with the polygonal environment. For example if miss a ledge, you simply fall, if you want to shoot at something you have to pixel-perfect align your gun to hit and stuff like that. You control your avatar in a very exact fashion in those games.
In PoP on the other side you don't control a simple cylinder, instead you control an 'actor', if you miss a ledge you will not fall, your actor will grab the ledge. Same if you want to walk over a narrow bar, the game requires you to do a bit of balancing, but opposed to a FPS games, in PoP you simply can't fall from that bar, since your actor automatically makes sure that you follow the right path and simply hold on to that bar when you lose balance. This continues with the fighting system, instead of having to exactly pixel-perfect perform an action you just press the jump button and then the sword button and the Prince will perform crazy acrobatic stuff, for most part completly automatically.
That doesn't mean that interactivity isn't important, what it however means is that pixel-perfect control isn't needed or even good for a game. Imagine there would be a perfect game controller that could track all your body movement, now that would be quite some fun for a while, but you could also say good bye to all the crazy acrobatic stuff, since you simply couldn't perform them, you would be limited to moves that you yourself could actually perform, quite a though limitation.
Games aren't about how perfect your actions are mapped into a game, but for most part quite the opposite, games present you a crazy world in which you can control an actor, this actor will perform your commands, but he will perform them in a large part on his own, you say jump and he will figure out to move his feed to actually perform it. The important part is to limit the commands to a good subset, so that you neither have to give exact orders about each and every totally unimportant detail nor to just give a command and then 'watch of movie' type of situation. Games are about meaningful interaction with the gameworld, it is important that games give you the choice when you need it, but a lot of choices can really be done automatically by the game itself.
### However, if you forget parts of the game, I don't think you should blame the game for that.
Why not? There are dozens of games out there which make getting back into it very easy by providing proper hints and some other that totally fail to provide any hint at all. For example why can't I get help about an item in a Zelda game when I need it? Why do they explain me only exactly once how to use an item and never again? Wouldn't it be far more immersive when I would only get the help when I actual need it and want it, instead of having the game explain stuff to me when I really don't need it (Zelda:TP explains you over and over again how much a 5 rupie piece is worth...)?
My favorite in 'getting back into the game' is probably The Longest Journey, since it not only gives you a simple dialog log, but it gives you a diary, a thing that reads like a real diary and not just a quest log, so you not only get good hints on what to do next, but also nice additional information about the characters past and other stuff.
### maybe you should take some notes?
I think the days of 'draw your own map' like on the C64 or NES are long over. Why do only so few games allow me to take notes in-game? Why can't I scribble stuff on that in-game map I got and mark doors for which I need a key and such? Zelda:Phantom Hourglass seems to be one of first games in a long while to allow that. Most other however give me a auto-map and nothing else, if I want to take notes I have to take pen&paper.
### These days all Zelda games give you a helper character to talk to if you forgot where you had to go. Usually the important words are even highlighted.
The helper character is pretty much worthless when you hadn't played the game for longer periods of time, since it only gives you a single hint, you can't talk to him about specific subject, you can't ask him about the location of his 'highlighted word', about how to use an item or whatever, it gives you a single hint and nothing more. More often then not that hint is rather useless unless you already have a good idea what you are doing.
### I haven't heard of one episodic series doing that, what are you referring to? HL2 Ep1 has a big sign on it saying "does not require Half-Life 2".
None specific, the point is simply that episodic gaming should start with an episode, not with a full price game. While you might not need Half Life 2 in a technical sense to play Episode 1, Ep1 builds on top of the full price game (story, characters, weapons, etc.) and isn't much of a self standing story by itself. Even Half Life 2 itself isn't exactly a self standing story either, its cleary build to patch more episodes to its end.
### One sixty-hour game should theoretically take just as long to complete as two thirty-hour games.
Wrong. The problem is that a game requires you to learn its rules, it button combinations, its story, its items and all that stuff, all that takes time, plenty of time. The problem however is that you will forget many of those stuff again after a while, not completly but quite a bit of it. Especially with Zelda this is a *huge* problem, since that games provides no quest log whatsoever, if you ever forget how to use a critical item or where an important location was you are totally lost in that game with little chance to ever make it back, even with a walkthrough it can take quite a while to get back into that game. Those issues of course also arise with a 10-20 hour game, but the chance is much less likely, since there is less knowledge you need to know and the chance that you finish the game before you get interrupted for a week or a month in which you can't play is much greater. Zelda makes issues worse by not allowing you to save in the middle of a dungeon, remembering that there was a room with a special door that you might want to visit again once you have done this or that isn't much of a problem 30min later, but trying to remember that three weeks later can get pretty hard, especially when you can't save with your hero standing infront of that very door.
And there is of course also the time-waste factor, most 60h games simply are that: a waste of time. A game has only so much deep in it and sooner or later you have explored it all, all that is then left is grind, the problem is with a 60h game the grind vs fun ratio gets out of balance. With a 10h game you might have 8h fun and 2h grind, with a 60h game on the other side I have yet to see a single one which provides more then 20h of actual content, most contain easily 40h which are pure grind without any substance. Many people simply have better things to do then to walk through a 40h grind just to see that 20h of story that is worth to see.
The problem with episodic gaming these days is simply that it is done totally wrong. Episodic gaming should offer two main advantages: frequent releases and a cheap price per episode. What many companies however do is: high price with very infrequent releases, not only are the episodes them self expensive, you also often need to buy the base game at a full price. Having lackluster cliffhanger endings contributes of course a lot to the frustration, or is anybody here that was happy with the ending of Half Life 2 as is?
In the end I think the core problem however is not only bad execution, but also trying to turn games into episodes which simply aren't fit. Episodic games makes most sense for story driven stuff, it doesn't make that much sense for action games where all the next episode is going to offer is more stuff to shoot at. Patching a cliffhanger onto a non-existing story is of course a bad idea as well, since it will just give a feel of being ripped off instead of interest in the next episode.
The good old adventure genre is probably by far the best candidate for episodic games, a lot of existing adventure games already could easily be broken into episodes (MonkeyIsland is divided in four parts, as is Grim Fandango, Longest Journey is broken into many chapters, etc.) with no changes at all, so it shouldn't be that much of a problem to create a new game in the genre that fits nicely into episodic releases. Only trouble is that the genre is not exactly alive that much, however Sam'n Max gives some hope.
Anyway, in the end I hope that sooner or later the developers will figure out how to do the whole episodic thing right and I hope that it will lead to more story driven games then we have now. There certainly is some potential in breaking up the long development cycles of games into tinier pieces, but there is of course equally much which can go wrong.
I think the true reason why the Dreamcast failed is rather simple: Because Sega stopped selling them.
The Dreamcast production was already stopped a year before Gamecube and XBox where even available in all territories. How can it succeed when you can't even by it? Looking at the numbers there are still 10mil Dreamcasts sold while 20-25mil XBox and Gamecubes, which actually looks quite good for the Dreamcast, given that Gamecube and XBox had a solid 6 years longer to sell.
I kind of doubt that the Dreamcast would have had much problem in the long run, sure it might not have beaten the PS2, but as Nintendo shows, you don't need that to turn a very solid profit, especially considering that the Dreamcast had a ton of very good games, which later got ported to both XBox and Gamecube. If the XBox and Gamecube didn't have all those Sega games they would have been a quite a bit less attractive.
I think one of the core problems that makes developing software hard these days are the limitations of the programming languages we used, more specifically their limitation to express *what* one wants to do instead of *how* to do it. Simple example: If I want to read a file in C I have to fopen() the file, fread() my bytes out of it and finally fclose() the handle, maybe even dynamically allocate the buffer with malloc() and stuff. By writing that I however don't express what I want, but instead I express exactly how it should be done.
As soon as I want to do the same thing differently, say read a compressed file via zlib, it all becomes a mess, since now I am stuck with a munch of different read/open/close function that look pretty much the same as the ones before, but are all incompatible. Next step now is to abstract it via something like struct IOStuff{ ReadFuncPtr read; OpenFuncPtr open;...} to have an interface that works with both gzread and fread, this however only works so long till I have to interact with some for foreign code that has its own IOStuff structure, it does the same as mine, but again, a little bit different and 100% incompatible, the whole wrappering starts all over again. A few days down the road and I am stuck with wrappers stacked on wrappers, that do pretty *nothing* beside working around limitations of the language. And that happens a lot in programming.
The solution to this would be a language that gets much closer to what I want to do and much less into how I want it to be done. In Haskel for example I can just write 'readFile "foobar.txt"', there is no opening, no closing and most important the file is *not* read in completly as it would be in your average scripting language (Python, Ruby, etc.), instead the reading of the file is delayed till you actually start to access the returned string. Now I am not saying that Haskel is the solution, but functional languages seem to get a lot closer to allowing to specify the 'what' instead of the 'how' then imperative languages.
Another important aspect is that such a language to be practical needed to allow one to specify the 'how' as well, thus allowing manual optimizations in the places where they are needed, many how the higher level languages so far fail to do that.
Todays programming is just to much based on duct-taping to work smooth and easily and I am not sure that will ever change until we kind of restart from scratch.
### Keep it "Trek" and it's just not that fun as a video game.
I think the adventure genre would disagree with you.
Re:Too bad vi sucks
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The Birth of vi
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· Score: 2, Insightful
### Insert mode. Overtype mode. That's modal. I suppose you're against that.
Actually it is bad, so bad that Microsoft and a bunch of other keyboard manufactures moved the 'Insert' key which switches between those modes and made it only available via weird Fn-Key combinations. For a lot of people it causes a lot more trouble then worth it and truth to be told, for writing text I have never actually used the mode myself, the only reason when I use it is if I program and have to change some stuff where overwriting is faster then hitting delete or using regex (say multiple lines below each other where a '+' has to be changed to a '-' in only a single column).
### Vi is really two separate applications; one for entering text, and one for editing text.
And that is the thing I never understood about Vi. Sure, from a historical context it makes sense, since ed didn't had a full-screen interface one had to separate entering of text and editing and since vi is kind of build on top of ed, it kept it that way. The limitation to write via a 300 baud modem didn't really allow anything else either of course. But from an interface design point of view today, where we no longer are limited to 300 baud modems, it just doesn't make much sense at all. When I type text there never is a clear distinction between inputing it and editing it. In the strict sense inputing means straight forward typing, no backspace, no cursor movement no nothing, just text from left to right, all those other stuff is reserved for the edit-mode. That however is totally not how I or anybody I know works. I constantly jump around, insert a bit here, a bit there, go a few words forward or backwards, mark and delete a little here and there. Switching modes between each and every of these operations, which just take a few second or less, is totally annoying, and the Esc key not being placed in an exactly ergonomic position doesn't really help much either.
In short I simply don't get how to use Vi the Right Way[tm], since it works completly different then I work and think. I have never meet anybody who either could show or explain to me how to actually use Vi, since those that used Vi often just did it either by force, since nothing else is around on some Unixes or since they simply gotten used to it over the years and haven't bothered to look at the alternatives, but so far I have meet nobody who picked Vi because of how great its user interface is. And looking at Vim and all those other later Vi clones which constantly blur the line and allow you more complex movement even in edit mode I just have some doubt that there actually is any benefit.
One one last word to the chaining of commands that Vi can do: Begin able to delete the next 5 lines, sentences, paragraphs or whatever via a simple two letter command sounds nifty in theory, but I have yet to meet any real world example where that actually would be useful, I mean how am I supposed to know that it are exactly five lines and not six, or ten and not eleven? Am I supposed to count them by hand on the screen? How exactly is that faster then just jumping the cursor down to where I want it to actually delete and start deleting? Instead of blindly typing a delete command and hopping that I haven't miss counted the number of lines, sentences or whatever.
Maybe its time for somebody to just place a camera above his shoulder and show some of the mighty power of Vi in real life and upload the result to Youtube, since I really have a very hard time to 'get' Vi and I have actually used that thing for a few years for all my config file editing, but it really didn't help in understanding it at all.
I think one of the core problem with episodic content today is that many games simply don't work for it. In many games it takes around an hour to get familiar with the controls and get the initial tutorials done. If the whole episode however is just three hours long that however will leave a rather disappointed feeling, I mean who wants to walk around a third of the game in a tutorial? And even worse, repeat that process with each and every episode? If I haven't played a game for a few month I have pretty much forgotten all the buttons and have to relearn from scratch, especially if its a game that relies on magic button combinations to get stuff done.
Todays games are often designed to be played in multiple long sittings, you can't just play for 20min and continue later, the game expects you to sit around for two hours to get stuff done. Combine that with episodic content you either end up with something that stays a tutorial forever or something that will get impossible to play once episode 2 comes out.
In the end episodic content only makes sense for those games where both gameplay and story work for it and neither require much relearing or reexplanation. It is of course also important that episodes get released at regular intervals and not just 'when they are done', since if it takes a year for a new release, why should I care? I could just as easily wait another year to get a full game then.
Adventure games are, due to their story driven nature, probably the best for episodic content. Many adventure games today could already be easily broken into episodes with no changes at all, imagine Grim Fandango where each year would get released as separate episode. However for many other genres episodic content could be pretty problematic and not beneficial at all.
Slashdot Mirror
### My point is simply that graphics don't make the games, gameplay does.
Gameplay alone isn't enough for many games, you also want to have story, character design, interesting environments and such and good graphics help to bring them to life. Graphics are of course not so important that one should push the price into the unaffordable like the PS3 did, but neither are they so unimportant that you can just slap last generation technique into the box and sell it as new and get away with it in the long run.
Just look at the games you listed, do you want the nice smooth vector graphics of a Flow or Warning Forever to be blown up as a pixel mess on a HD-TV? Wouldn't you prefer to have them as smooth as their creators intended them to be? Having graphics rendered in 1280x720 or 1920x1080 on a display that supports the resolution looks a heck of a lot better then the blurry mess that the TVs scaler will make out of a 640x480 signal. The Wii can't even do anti-aliasing on games as simple as Wii Sports, sorry, but that just isn't exactly what I expect from a next-gen machine. Focus on gameplay is alright and perfectly ok, but totally ignoring the graphics isn't exactly a good thing.
### Imagine I claimed some right to pull out a gun and imprison people for depicting pink sunflowers.
Set a five year old in front of a sunflower and set it in front of a horror movie or Doom3. Which will 'influence' him more? I doubt that it will be the sunflower. Now I might not need the government to restrict video games, but how about rating them? Do you consider the ESRB useful? And if so, why, given that you consider video games having no negative influence on us.
### The non-nutjob discussion is that the nutjobs have already done an exhaustive search of existing studies and funded their own studies trying to support this.
The nutjobs are looking for the wrong problem. There is no direct "play video game" -> "get violent" relationship, end of story, I don't need a study for that, that in turn however doesn't mean video games aren't influencing us, in probably negative or probably positive ways. So far I haven't really seen much study in how video games actually do influence us on a larger scale, which I think there is little point in denying. As said, its not about ban vs no-ban, its about what they do to us know, what they might to in 20 years when graphics will approach photo realism.
### The only reason the discussion is still going on is that the nutjobs keep harping on it and pushing for it.
I don't think so. The main reason is simply that there is far to much violence in video games. I don't need some nutjob to tell me that, I just need to look at the available games. Maybe its just an evolutionary phase in the development that we will get over with sooner or later, but its definitely something that is limiting the medium as it is right now, because there is simply so much more that one could do in a video game.
### How about not NOT claiming some right to pull out a gun and forcibly imprison people who refuse to comply to your claimed "common sense" when all scientific evidence indicates that that supposed "common sense" is wrong?
Which scientific study claims that extreme violence has no influence on younger people? I don't know any. Set a bunch random five year old in front of Doom3 and you might pretty quickly be able to proof that there indeed is some influence. I am not claiming that that video game violence leads to real one, just that there is influence and probably not a good one.
### Recently Slashdot ran a story on this experiment which in fact turned out with gamers being MORE sensitive and MORE disturbed and MORE reluctant with non-game harm/violence against a virtual person.
Now I haven't read the whole study, but from the conclusion I can see nothing that the study has anything to do with gamer vs non-gamer, instead it simply claims that people react similarly when torturing a virtual character as when torturing a real one. That would pretty much proof exactly what I am saying, video games do have influence and just because its virtual doesn't mean it doesn't have an impact on you. This really isn't a surprise, I mean if the brain had a magic switch that would automatically get flipped and filter out any influence when we know something is not real then the whole movie industry would have gone bankrupt long ago. People scream, cry or get scared by movies all the time, even so they know perfectly well that everything is fake.
### And god-forbid a kid see something like a "Gruesome war documentary". They might develop an accurate grasp of war,
At the right age, yes. If they are too young they will understand nothing of the documentary and just have nightmares for the coming weeks.
### Yes, you're right... you do have a right to pull out a gun and forcibly imprison people to eliminate any risk that that might happen, that it is appropriate for you impose censorship legislation against "harmful information"
Limiting the access of younger people to harmful material has little to do with censorship, if the parents are ok with it, they can simply give their child access to it, the whole point is to make it harder for the child to get access to it themself.
### they damn well no less deserve equal protection and equal law criminalizing anyone giving the kid religious conversion materials.
Which already is the case to some extent, christan teachings are kept out of schools.
Anyway, back to the beginning: My point isn't that violent games should get banned or not, just that I would welcome some meaningful non-nutjob discussion about the issue. This isn't just a think-of-the-chidren thing, it is also a pretty gamer relevant one, for a simple reason: playing FPSs the whole day simply gets damn boring. Where is the storytelling? The non-violent interaction with NPCs and such? By restricting themself to violent content the gaming industry is stopping a whole lot interesting games from happening. The Sims or Myst pretty impressively demonstrate that there is a huge market for non-violent games, which is still in large part is still unexplored. It would be much easier to make the nutjobs shut up if there would actually be some serious alternative to the violent games, but so far there simply isn't, a handful of non-violent games doesn't change that.
### It is not up to the government to interfere in what entertainment I can access
If you are old enough the government has of course no right to interfere with what you can access, but why shouldn't it have some say about what the kid can have easy access to? In Germany selling movies or games to kids below the rated age is forbidden, this however neither limits your access nor does it stop the parents from buying the games for their kids, even if they aren't old enough. The regulation simply puts power where it belongs: into the hands of the parents. I fail to see what is so bad about that.
### The problem is this: One side has decided, arbitrarily, without any compelling evidence whatsoever, that video games are harmful to children.
How about good old common sense? Do you let your children watch hardcore porn? Gruesome war documentaries? Horror movies? Now how exactly a child might react to all that depends on the age, his personality, his parents and a bunch of other things, but I think there is no question that it will react to such extreme stuff quite different then to the latest Disney movie. Age regulations aren't there for no reason, but for most part because of good old common sense and not because violent stuff makes you go Columbine.
The question how all those violence influences people is a worthy one for discussion, but claiming that there is no influence is just plain ridiculous.
The Wiimote gives you two kinds of data, the coordinates of the IR LEDs of the sensorbar in 2D, which used for pointing, the x,y,z accelerations. It actually doesn't give you exact orientation, you have to derive that from the accelerations, which only works as long as you don't move it, else acceleration and gravity will overlap and you will have a hard time telling which is gravity and which is movement of the Wiimote. Also the orientation you get that way is limited to X and Y axis only, the Wiimote can't detect rotation around the Z axis via the accelerometers, however to a limit extent it might be possible to get it from the sensorbar.
To make it short: I believe it when I see it. So far most Wii games used prerecorded motion, aka glorified button presses. Some games, such as Wii Sports, also take the speed into account, but those only work because the motion itself is very limited. Real 1:1 mapping just doesn't work with the sensor in the Wiimote, you can however of course get a lot closer to it then Zelda, which really was just lame in terms of input.
### If left unchecked, people like this, and attitudes like these, will lead to the widespread disappearance of personal responsibility.
Jack Thompson might be a nutjob, that however doesn't mean that violence in video games and other media isn't a problem. You know, personal responsibility is a door that swings both ways, just because people should take care about themself or parents about their children doesn't mean that McDonalds, the cigarette industry or video game developers should get away with selling whatever they feel makes them the most money while totally ignoring the consequences. They have responsibilities as well.
I am not saying that video games should be banned, but its sad that there is so very little room left for meaningful discussion of such topics. You either get the 'every should be banned' nutjobs or the people who want everything totally free and unregulated, no matter the consequences, while in the end the best would probably be something in between those two extremes.
It doesn't look fake, but it does look like they are simply using pre-recorded motions, just like almost all Wii games out there. So instead of the robot mirroring your motion, you have to to mirror a predefined motion to trigger a prerecorded motion in the robot. Looks cool, but it is pretty much useless for actually controlling the robot, since its really no different then pressing the "cool sword swing motion"-button.
The Wiimote can't give you accurate position data, so thats pretty much all you ever get.
### There are so many fps games out there that you can choose any setting, play-style, weapons that you want to play with!
And yet FPS games with meaningful NPC interaction (and by that I don't mean shooting NPCs) are still extremely rare, haven't seen much games that come with non-linear levels either. I mean yeah there was Deus Ex and Operation Flashpoint half a decade ago, but since then very little at all has happened in those areas. The FPS genre is probably the one that has the most room for painfully obvious innovation. Its not done to death, its just that developers are cloning each other over and over again instead of taking a simple step to look at the whole picture, there are still tons and tons of things that no FPS ever did.
### such as rechargeable health bars Wooopie.
Which actually was quite a big innovation, not because it takes a programmer five minutes to implement, but because it changes how you play these games quite a bit, i.e. taking cover becomes far more important. The rechargeable health bars also meant we could get finally rid of the stupid health packs. Not every innovation has to be Katamari-style to be meaningful. That said a game needs of course a little bit more then just a rechargable health bar to become interesting.
In the end I think the problem is that development happens to much in terms of genre, instead of simply taking the story/setting that they have in mind and trying to make the best out of it without caring if its FPS, RPG, Action-Adventure or a little bit of everything.
I think that this is the core reason why stories in games suck for most part, they are considered fillers, stuff that doesn't really matter at all and that is simply there to fill a few holes that the gameplay left. No surprise that you don't get a good story that way. As long as developers continue to consider story as filler things won't change. It is like with movies, if you simply take the story as filler between your special effects filled space battles you will end up with junk.
I think more developer should start to use games as story telling medium and let the gameplay serve the story instead of the other way around. Not only would that lead to better stories, but also to new gameplay innovation. I mean shooting random stuff is fun for a while, but what really has changed in the last 20 years in terms of interaction with the gameworld? Is throwing the gameworld itself at the enemy via the gravity gun the best we can come up with? What has changed in terms of NPC interaction? Most 15 year old text adventures still put todays games to shame in that aspect, since many todays games simply have any and even those that have, don't really move beyond standard dialog trees.
I don't think that the 'freedom' in games is the reason for this, since truth to be told, most games don't really offer any freedom at all, with a few exception. Most games are incredible linear and adding a decent story wouldn't take any of that already non-existing freedom away. Its simply that most developers don't even care for story.
Did some research on my own, what I found is this (somebody who actually has a Wii feel free to correct me):
Wii itself has 512MB flash RAM and ~2100 free blocks.
A 2GB SD Kart provides ~16384 free blocks.
F-Zero is 99 blocks large.
DonkeyKong is 19 blocks large.
This means that one block is 128kbytes large and in turn it means that the Wii reserves around half its Flash content for non-user stuff (firmware and such). If that block size is correct it means that F-Zero is 12MB large while the plain ROM dump should only be around 1MB. From this it looks like the Wii can only hold around 20 SNES titles.
VC games are a lot larger then a plain ROM dump, most likly due to the manual, emulator and whatever they add to it. Somebody who own Wii can probably post the exact numbers, but from what I remember they are all in the range of 10-20MB, even old SNES and NES games.
### Interactivity and the depth of control and manipulation you have over you virtual character. [...] Imagine prince of persia on "automatic" where the computer navigates the level and fights for you. ###
Interesting that you mention Prince of Persia, since that game (SoT, but also the former 2D ones) is in large part what I call an "on-rails jump'n run" and its good exactly because of that. What I mean with 'on rails' becomes obvious when you compare it with a standard FPS.
In a FPS you basically control a cylinder in a polygonal world, you can move it around, you can make it jump and do stuff, all your actions are almost 1:1 applied to that cylinder and that cylinder interacts in very primitive ways with the polygonal environment. For example if miss a ledge, you simply fall, if you want to shoot at something you have to pixel-perfect align your gun to hit and stuff like that. You control your avatar in a very exact fashion in those games.
In PoP on the other side you don't control a simple cylinder, instead you control an 'actor', if you miss a ledge you will not fall, your actor will grab the ledge. Same if you want to walk over a narrow bar, the game requires you to do a bit of balancing, but opposed to a FPS games, in PoP you simply can't fall from that bar, since your actor automatically makes sure that you follow the right path and simply hold on to that bar when you lose balance. This continues with the fighting system, instead of having to exactly pixel-perfect perform an action you just press the jump button and then the sword button and the Prince will perform crazy acrobatic stuff, for most part completly automatically.
That doesn't mean that interactivity isn't important, what it however means is that pixel-perfect control isn't needed or even good for a game. Imagine there would be a perfect game controller that could track all your body movement, now that would be quite some fun for a while, but you could also say good bye to all the crazy acrobatic stuff, since you simply couldn't perform them, you would be limited to moves that you yourself could actually perform, quite a though limitation.
Games aren't about how perfect your actions are mapped into a game, but for most part quite the opposite, games present you a crazy world in which you can control an actor, this actor will perform your commands, but he will perform them in a large part on his own, you say jump and he will figure out to move his feed to actually perform it. The important part is to limit the commands to a good subset, so that you neither have to give exact orders about each and every totally unimportant detail nor to just give a command and then 'watch of movie' type of situation. Games are about meaningful interaction with the gameworld, it is important that games give you the choice when you need it, but a lot of choices can really be done automatically by the game itself.
I don't think he wants to stack them, but instead simply concat them:
e 8af31caff27c0f8f7a5a3a
md5sum foo -> 4f1cbee4972934c3beccc902f18242a7
sha1sum foo -> 3c92a387f898a31d2e8af31caff27c0f8f7a5a3a
md5sha1sum foo -> 4f1cbee4972934c3beccc902f18242a73c92a387f898a31d2
That should definitely not weaken anything, it will require some more CPU and storage, but thats it.
### However, if you forget parts of the game, I don't think you should blame the game for that.
Why not? There are dozens of games out there which make getting back into it very easy by providing proper hints and some other that totally fail to provide any hint at all. For example why can't I get help about an item in a Zelda game when I need it? Why do they explain me only exactly once how to use an item and never again? Wouldn't it be far more immersive when I would only get the help when I actual need it and want it, instead of having the game explain stuff to me when I really don't need it (Zelda:TP explains you over and over again how much a 5 rupie piece is worth...)?
My favorite in 'getting back into the game' is probably The Longest Journey, since it not only gives you a simple dialog log, but it gives you a diary, a thing that reads like a real diary and not just a quest log, so you not only get good hints on what to do next, but also nice additional information about the characters past and other stuff.
### maybe you should take some notes?
I think the days of 'draw your own map' like on the C64 or NES are long over. Why do only so few games allow me to take notes in-game? Why can't I scribble stuff on that in-game map I got and mark doors for which I need a key and such? Zelda:Phantom Hourglass seems to be one of first games in a long while to allow that. Most other however give me a auto-map and nothing else, if I want to take notes I have to take pen&paper.
### These days all Zelda games give you a helper character to talk to if you forgot where you had to go. Usually the important words are even highlighted.
The helper character is pretty much worthless when you hadn't played the game for longer periods of time, since it only gives you a single hint, you can't talk to him about specific subject, you can't ask him about the location of his 'highlighted word', about how to use an item or whatever, it gives you a single hint and nothing more. More often then not that hint is rather useless unless you already have a good idea what you are doing.
### I haven't heard of one episodic series doing that, what are you referring to? HL2 Ep1 has a big sign on it saying "does not require Half-Life 2".
None specific, the point is simply that episodic gaming should start with an episode, not with a full price game. While you might not need Half Life 2 in a technical sense to play Episode 1, Ep1 builds on top of the full price game (story, characters, weapons, etc.) and isn't much of a self standing story by itself. Even Half Life 2 itself isn't exactly a self standing story either, its cleary build to patch more episodes to its end.
### One sixty-hour game should theoretically take just as long to complete as two thirty-hour games.
Wrong. The problem is that a game requires you to learn its rules, it button combinations, its story, its items and all that stuff, all that takes time, plenty of time. The problem however is that you will forget many of those stuff again after a while, not completly but quite a bit of it. Especially with Zelda this is a *huge* problem, since that games provides no quest log whatsoever, if you ever forget how to use a critical item or where an important location was you are totally lost in that game with little chance to ever make it back, even with a walkthrough it can take quite a while to get back into that game. Those issues of course also arise with a 10-20 hour game, but the chance is much less likely, since there is less knowledge you need to know and the chance that you finish the game before you get interrupted for a week or a month in which you can't play is much greater. Zelda makes issues worse by not allowing you to save in the middle of a dungeon, remembering that there was a room with a special door that you might want to visit again once you have done this or that isn't much of a problem 30min later, but trying to remember that three weeks later can get pretty hard, especially when you can't save with your hero standing infront of that very door.
And there is of course also the time-waste factor, most 60h games simply are that: a waste of time. A game has only so much deep in it and sooner or later you have explored it all, all that is then left is grind, the problem is with a 60h game the grind vs fun ratio gets out of balance. With a 10h game you might have 8h fun and 2h grind, with a 60h game on the other side I have yet to see a single one which provides more then 20h of actual content, most contain easily 40h which are pure grind without any substance. Many people simply have better things to do then to walk through a 40h grind just to see that 20h of story that is worth to see.
The problem with episodic gaming these days is simply that it is done totally wrong. Episodic gaming should offer two main advantages: frequent releases and a cheap price per episode. What many companies however do is: high price with very infrequent releases, not only are the episodes them self expensive, you also often need to buy the base game at a full price. Having lackluster cliffhanger endings contributes of course a lot to the frustration, or is anybody here that was happy with the ending of Half Life 2 as is?
In the end I think the core problem however is not only bad execution, but also trying to turn games into episodes which simply aren't fit. Episodic games makes most sense for story driven stuff, it doesn't make that much sense for action games where all the next episode is going to offer is more stuff to shoot at. Patching a cliffhanger onto a non-existing story is of course a bad idea as well, since it will just give a feel of being ripped off instead of interest in the next episode.
The good old adventure genre is probably by far the best candidate for episodic games, a lot of existing adventure games already could easily be broken into episodes (MonkeyIsland is divided in four parts, as is Grim Fandango, Longest Journey is broken into many chapters, etc.) with no changes at all, so it shouldn't be that much of a problem to create a new game in the genre that fits nicely into episodic releases. Only trouble is that the genre is not exactly alive that much, however Sam'n Max gives some hope.
Anyway, in the end I hope that sooner or later the developers will figure out how to do the whole episodic thing right and I hope that it will lead to more story driven games then we have now. There certainly is some potential in breaking up the long development cycles of games into tinier pieces, but there is of course equally much which can go wrong.
I think the true reason why the Dreamcast failed is rather simple: Because Sega stopped selling them.
The Dreamcast production was already stopped a year before Gamecube and XBox where even available in all territories. How can it succeed when you can't even by it? Looking at the numbers there are still 10mil Dreamcasts sold while 20-25mil XBox and Gamecubes, which actually looks quite good for the Dreamcast, given that Gamecube and XBox had a solid 6 years longer to sell.
I kind of doubt that the Dreamcast would have had much problem in the long run, sure it might not have beaten the PS2, but as Nintendo shows, you don't need that to turn a very solid profit, especially considering that the Dreamcast had a ton of very good games, which later got ported to both XBox and Gamecube. If the XBox and Gamecube didn't have all those Sega games they would have been a quite a bit less attractive.
I think one of the core problems that makes developing software hard these days are the limitations of the programming languages we used, more specifically their limitation to express *what* one wants to do instead of *how* to do it. Simple example: If I want to read a file in C I have to fopen() the file, fread() my bytes out of it and finally fclose() the handle, maybe even dynamically allocate the buffer with malloc() and stuff. By writing that I however don't express what I want, but instead I express exactly how it should be done.
...} to have an interface that works with both gzread and fread, this however only works so long till I have to interact with some for foreign code that has its own IOStuff structure, it does the same as mine, but again, a little bit different and 100% incompatible, the whole wrappering starts all over again. A few days down the road and I am stuck with wrappers stacked on wrappers, that do pretty *nothing* beside working around limitations of the language. And that happens a lot in programming.
As soon as I want to do the same thing differently, say read a compressed file via zlib, it all becomes a mess, since now I am stuck with a munch of different read/open/close function that look pretty much the same as the ones before, but are all incompatible. Next step now is to abstract it via something like struct IOStuff{ ReadFuncPtr read; OpenFuncPtr open;
The solution to this would be a language that gets much closer to what I want to do and much less into how I want it to be done. In Haskel for example I can just write 'readFile "foobar.txt"', there is no opening, no closing and most important the file is *not* read in completly as it would be in your average scripting language (Python, Ruby, etc.), instead the reading of the file is delayed till you actually start to access the returned string.
Now I am not saying that Haskel is the solution, but functional languages seem to get a lot closer to allowing to specify the 'what' instead of the 'how' then imperative languages.
Another important aspect is that such a language to be practical needed to allow one to specify the 'how' as well, thus allowing manual optimizations in the places where they are needed, many how the higher level languages so far fail to do that.
Todays programming is just to much based on duct-taping to work smooth and easily and I am not sure that will ever change until we kind of restart from scratch.
### Keep it "Trek" and it's just not that fun as a video game.
I think the adventure genre would disagree with you.
### Insert mode. Overtype mode. That's modal. I suppose you're against that.
Actually it is bad, so bad that Microsoft and a bunch of other keyboard manufactures moved the 'Insert' key which switches between those modes and made it only available via weird Fn-Key combinations. For a lot of people it causes a lot more trouble then worth it and truth to be told, for writing text I have never actually used the mode myself, the only reason when I use it is if I program and have to change some stuff where overwriting is faster then hitting delete or using regex (say multiple lines below each other where a '+' has to be changed to a '-' in only a single column).
### Vi is really two separate applications; one for entering text, and one for editing text.
And that is the thing I never understood about Vi. Sure, from a historical context it makes sense, since ed didn't had a full-screen interface one had to separate entering of text and editing and since vi is kind of build on top of ed, it kept it that way. The limitation to write via a 300 baud modem didn't really allow anything else either of course. But from an interface design point of view today, where we no longer are limited to 300 baud modems, it just doesn't make much sense at all. When I type text there never is a clear distinction between inputing it and editing it. In the strict sense inputing means straight forward typing, no backspace, no cursor movement no nothing, just text from left to right, all those other stuff is reserved for the edit-mode. That however is totally not how I or anybody I know works. I constantly jump around, insert a bit here, a bit there, go a few words forward or backwards, mark and delete a little here and there. Switching modes between each and every of these operations, which just take a few second or less, is totally annoying, and the Esc key not being placed in an exactly ergonomic position doesn't really help much either.
In short I simply don't get how to use Vi the Right Way[tm], since it works completly different then I work and think. I have never meet anybody who either could show or explain to me how to actually use Vi, since those that used Vi often just did it either by force, since nothing else is around on some Unixes or since they simply gotten used to it over the years and haven't bothered to look at the alternatives, but so far I have meet nobody who picked Vi because of how great its user interface is. And looking at Vim and all those other later Vi clones which constantly blur the line and allow you more complex movement even in edit mode I just have some doubt that there actually is any benefit.
One one last word to the chaining of commands that Vi can do: Begin able to delete the next 5 lines, sentences, paragraphs or whatever via a simple two letter command sounds nifty in theory, but I have yet to meet any real world example where that actually would be useful, I mean how am I supposed to know that it are exactly five lines and not six, or ten and not eleven? Am I supposed to count them by hand on the screen? How exactly is that faster then just jumping the cursor down to where I want it to actually delete and start deleting? Instead of blindly typing a delete command and hopping that I haven't miss counted the number of lines, sentences or whatever.
Maybe its time for somebody to just place a camera above his shoulder and show some of the mighty power of Vi in real life and upload the result to Youtube, since I really have a very hard time to 'get' Vi and I have actually used that thing for a few years for all my config file editing, but it really didn't help in understanding it at all.
I think one of the core problem with episodic content today is that many games simply don't work for it. In many games it takes around an hour to get familiar with the controls and get the initial tutorials done. If the whole episode however is just three hours long that however will leave a rather disappointed feeling, I mean who wants to walk around a third of the game in a tutorial? And even worse, repeat that process with each and every episode? If I haven't played a game for a few month I have pretty much forgotten all the buttons and have to relearn from scratch, especially if its a game that relies on magic button combinations to get stuff done.
Todays games are often designed to be played in multiple long sittings, you can't just play for 20min and continue later, the game expects you to sit around for two hours to get stuff done. Combine that with episodic content you either end up with something that stays a tutorial forever or something that will get impossible to play once episode 2 comes out.
In the end episodic content only makes sense for those games where both gameplay and story work for it and neither require much relearing or reexplanation. It is of course also important that episodes get released at regular intervals and not just 'when they are done', since if it takes a year for a new release, why should I care? I could just as easily wait another year to get a full game then.
Adventure games are, due to their story driven nature, probably the best for episodic content. Many adventure games today could already be easily broken into episodes with no changes at all, imagine Grim Fandango where each year would get released as separate episode. However for many other genres episodic content could be pretty problematic and not beneficial at all.