I think the openness, NPOV and version history are far more important then their non-commercial nature. That they are non-commercial too is a nice addition, but not really critical as long as the other things stay in place. That of course doesn't mean that Wikipedia should be run for profits, but I wouldn't really mind seeing Google Adsense instead of those "Please give us money"-banners.
Except of course that this isn't StarTrek, Columbia couldn't have reached the ISS even if they wanted to, fuel is a rather limited resource in current day spaceflight.
That underwater fish boss in Metroid Prime 2 and in Metroid Prime 1 there was some big space pirate that broke out of a glass tank (not real boss, more like extra huge enemy), neither of which had a save point near them or at least none that I found before encountering the boss. Those were the two events that caused me to ditch those games.
Anyway, there really is nothing good about Metroid Primes save system, its pretty much as awful as they get, rare and easy to miss savepoint just aren't fun, especially in a game that is completly structured around rooms, where it would be trivial to have a checkpoint in every room.
The problem with the POP:Sand of Time series was that you could still die in the classic way. You had the time rewind mechanic to recover a few times, but that was a limited resource, if you run out of sand you where game over just as in every other game. Now they did manage to story tell around the game over quite nicely in the first game, but that didn't much change the fact that you where game over and had to retry. Another thing is was that a reset point wasn't a save point, in Warrior Within it got quite bad, since often you would end up on a resetpoint with little energie and no sand. Forcing you to actually quit the game to return to the last real savepoint and retry from there, since the resetpoint was just worthless. In terms of plain old reset points I like the new Tomb Raider series a lot, they have lots of resetpoints and every resetpoint automatically saves and refills your energie, so there is extremely little punishment for dieing, even without doing anything special with the story or game mechanics.
I always enjoyed how the Metroid Prime games had a save point just before any major boss.
I absolutely *HATED* the Metroid Prime games save system, because quite a few times it didn't have a savepoint before the boss and you had to walk for ten minutes to reach the boss, which was extremely annoying and caused me to ditch both Metroid Prime 1 and 2 and not finish them until a year later or so. What made Metroid Prime worse then most normal FPS is that its structured into rooms and featured respawning enemies, so you couldn't just shoot the way free to the boss, run back and save, no, you had to play the same thing again and again, because the monsters would respawn either way. Another big problem with Primes approach is that you actually have to find the save point, when the left door leads to the boss fight and the right one to the savepoint you have a big problem when you choose the wrong door, a checkpoint should be something that you are guaranteed to hit before the boss fight, not something hidden in some side way.
You mind as well just take all the risk out of the game, and turn on the invincibility cheatcode.
A cheat code lets you cheat through a game without actually overcoming the challenges proper, if on the other side you just have a reset mechanic, you don't cheat, you still have to solve all the challenges the game offers, its just the annoying replaying of stuff you already know that gets reduced.
Now of course that isn't a clear cut thing, some reset points refill your health while others don't, so they kind of cheat, but on the other side you don't want end up stuck in a near death condition on a reset point (case in point Half Life 2, having an autosave a fraction of a second before a grenade under you explodes).
Anyway, in the end I don't think that any reset mechanic would work for every game. In a racing game there is no clear save-spot to which a game could automatically reset you, on the other side the time-rewind mechanic that lets you retry a turn works quite great when you mess up. Its really not so much about removing challenge, but about making failure interesting. Failing in a game should teach you something, give you the option to try something different next time, it shouldn't be something that forces you to replay the parts of the game you already solved, often times to near perfection.
I find those ways to skip trough a game highly problematic, since they destroy the immersion for me completly. I don't want to skip the game, I want to play it. Case in point, Crimson Skies on the PC, there was a mission where you had to fly a five minute race against somebody else before the real mission would start, the real part of the mission was hard so I died a lot, the race was easy and had to be done again each time. Even so the game had the option to skip the mission I never used it, because I wanted to finish that mission proper. In the end I never finished the game, since that mission just got to annoying, a savepoint or reset point after that stupid race would have helped a lot. All this is especially true for games that tell their story in the game, you can't skip stuff without missing pieces.
Those really have little to do with consoles, PC games had plenty of all of them as well and the video in the last issue isn't even a real game, its a ROM hack meant to be nearly impossible to solve.
The point is not about making games easy, but about not forcing you to replay the same shit over and over again when you die. The whole reason why hard games can be annoying is because you have to play the *easy* parts of them a trillion times to reach the hard ones, then you die quickly and repeat the easy parts again. The fun part is overcoming the hard part and thats what a game needs to focus on instead of punishing the player for failure.
What Prince of Persia does different is that it in cooperates its reset mechanic into the game world. In other games you die, then see a game over screen, then restart the game at the last save point, in Prince of Persia on the other side you simply can't die, there is no game over screen, its all handled fluently without interruption in the game.
My personal take on it: It sucks. Well, probably not, I haven't really looked that deep into it, but the last time I tried the first thing that was instantly obvious was that the terrain wasn't destructible like in the original and that was one of the things that made the original amazing back in its day. I just don't see much point in a remake when it removes one of the most important features of the original.
Over here in Germany shippings quite often arrives as soon as the next day. So in terms of shipping I couldn't be happier. However Amazon does still have lots of fault. For one there is their search engine, which totally sucks, spell a single character wrong and you won't find anything (i.e. Spiderman vs Spider-man). Their product catalog is also full of stuff that is either no longer available or only through third party and there is no easy way to filter that out or to see shipping cost for those third parties in the search list. Their user interface for third party stuff is also terrible, since it is in a complete different corner of the webpage then then normal orderings and requires a seperate login, which is pretty confusing and feels like a quick hack. And last not least there is the trouble that they don't properly group items, you have a DVD and want to see the page of the sequel? Can't do that, there is no button for that. Its even worse for comic books and other stuff, finding all the books that belong to a series is quite annoying and often requires a visit to Wikipedia to find out what is out there. And finally there is their pricing scheme, which feels very arbitrary at times, since for some products the price varies greatly over the course of a few days, so it becomes quite a guessing game to buy a thing at the right time.
But even with all those faults, Amazon is still quite a bit better then all the competition I tried so far.
But wouldn't you agree that there are many cases where pointing at the screen or moving the controller in space is a more effective abstraction?
Not really, there have been very few Wii games that actually show that it is better. Wii Sport makes great use of the Wiimote, but lots of other stuff just use it for pointless waggle minigames or don't use it much at all and falls back to a standard control schemes (Galaxy, SmashBros). In addition to that you also have the problem that the Wiimote just isn't good enough for many games, its motion sensing is very limited (Nintendo is trying to fix that with MotionPlus next year) and it also lacks a second analog stick, which makes camera control in third person games pretty awful.
That's a pretty subjective point.
Not really. You just have to look at where the money goes. The big stuff like Dead Space, Fallout3, Bioshock, Assassins Creed and whatever all goes to Xbox360, PS3 and PC, the Wii on the other side gets only some minigame collection. And on top of that the good third party stuff, like Zack & Wiki, doesn't even sell well on the Wii, given even less reason to release bigger games on the Wii.
Hardcore gamers are generally not going to understand the point of it.
Thing is, back when the Wii was new all the fanboys claimed that third party would just jump to it now that it is successful and how everything would be great and awesome in the near future. That however never happened, third parties continue to develop their big titles for the other consoles and not the Wii and the promise of great new control scheme has mostly turned into a waggle fest. As a console platform I consider the Wii a failure, since there simply aren't many good games, as Wii Sports-machine on the other side its a stunning success, but 250EUR is a lot of money for a single game, especially considering that the much more powerful Xbox360 60GB sells for 200EUR (German prices).
AC above is clearly an idiot. The abstraction is a neccessary evil, not a feature.
Depends, many people enjoy doing crazy jumps and moves and fighting monsters and stuff (yes, that includes Mario games), which they couldn't perform when they would be wearing a a mo-cap suit and have perfect 1:1 mapping. Abstraction helps you do stuff you couldn't do in reality, complete lack of abstractions just puts you back into reality, which is not where most people want to be when they think about games.
Motion-sensing controls and peripherals (like the Wii Fit board) give the user more intuitive interaction with the game
And yet I have never seen such huge obtrusive tutorial texts as in Wii games on any other console. Those games sure have to explain a hell of a lot of stuff for their "intuitive interaction".
This is where game developers (and non-133t gamers) WANT to go
Really? How come third party developers largely ignore the Wii and focus on Xbox360 and PS3 instead?
The output of the Wii is far worse when it comes to games (no anti-aliasing, no motion blur) then it would be with video, yet people still buy the thing like crazy. So I doubt that it would matter much. Anyway, I think the bigger problem would be storage, Wii's 512MB are tiny, you would have to stream everything and you couldn't even buffer a larger part of the movie temporary.
Fast forward a 1000 years. Will anyone be able to reverse engineer the media and formats, especially given that the media will mostly be highly degraded.
The joy with exponential growths of storage space is that it can not only hold all the stuff you need today, but also *all* that stuff you used to store in the past. Today I can have all stuff ever released on the Atari2600, C64, Amiga, early PC and a bunch of other devices on a SD card, i.e. 20 years of computer history in the size of my fingernail and of course I can store all the emulators and source code along with it. You likely won't be able to read it in 1000 years, since then the storage might be completly degraded, but given how computers are all networked and stuff gets copied around all the time, you likely will find a copy of it somewhere on whatever that Internet is called then. Storing the whole Library of Congress today takes storage space that costs less then $1000, just for reference.
I think the biggest danger for long term storage has nothing to do with the storage device or the format, but simply copyright. Copyright forbids to build a public archive of newer stuff, so very few are doing it. You still find most stuff out there if you search long enough, but there is little or no quality control, so you get quite frequently digital degeneration (i.e. video recoded multiple times, bit flips, etc.). Add to that, that many of the original media might be degraded beyond recovery when copyright allows it to enter public domain, you might end up with quite troublesome mess in 100 years down the road.
I don't really think the immersion has much to do with casual vs non-casual. The game that made the Wii popular is after all Wii Sports, the closed thing to holodeck-bowling we had in video game history, so immersive that people have destroyed their TVs while playing it. Now given that is a different kind of immersion then say Halo, since you are not immersed into a different kind of reality, but more into an extension of the real reality. But since there wouldn't be much point in doing space-bowling with laserguns, I think thats totally ok.
I find it hard to argue against immersion, since I think its simply the wrong word to talk about in this context. I see immersion more as a measure of how close a game got to achieving its goal, not as a fantasy vs reality thing. Some games just couldn't derive any benefit from a fantasy world, while in others its absolutely critical, but that doesn't mean that one is more immersive then the other. And certainly breaking the immersion can't really be good in any game, no matter if its Uno or Halo (i.e. a crash would be one of the most blunt immersive breaking events in a game and that is of course better avoided).
I think what the article is trying to talk about in the end is really just story telling, i.e. how deep of a story does a game need to be good? And all I really can say about that is: It depends. Some games are fine with no story (Uno), some do fine with a minimal amount of story (Mario) and other are pretty much all story (MonkeyIsland).
Its a pretty wild mix, some levels contain classical adventure elements, while others are plain jump'n runs and others feel more like a Zelda-like action-adventure. The game overall is a little uneven and has plenty of annoying spots, but it also features some insanely awesome ideas.
Most are pretty terrible, some are enjoyable, but none of them comes near the old classics. The Telltale Games are probably the best new ones these days and they release new stuff quite regularly.
Seriously, where exactly are all those new games on the Wii? Wii Sport, sure, that has some new and innovative gameplay (if you ignore Gametrak which was released on PS2 a few years earlier...), but other then that? Galaxy could work with a standard controller just fine, Metroid Prime 3 is a standard FPS with Wiimote controls, nice, but nothing special, Zelda:TP worked on the Gamecube just fine, so did RE4, Okami on the PS2 was fine as well, PaperMario doesn't make much Wiimote use and so on. Whats left? Zack & Wiki, No More Heroes and Bloombox, maybe a small handful of other stuff, but there really isn't much. Most Wii stuff is just old standard gameplay with a bit of waggle thrown in. Really new innovative stuff happens on the Wii just as little as everywhere else. A new controller simply doesn't mean much if all the underlying game mechanics stay the same.
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I think the openness, NPOV and version history are far more important then their non-commercial nature. That they are non-commercial too is a nice addition, but not really critical as long as the other things stay in place. That of course doesn't mean that Wikipedia should be run for profits, but I wouldn't really mind seeing Google Adsense instead of those "Please give us money"-banners.
Except of course that this isn't StarTrek, Columbia couldn't have reached the ISS even if they wanted to, fuel is a rather limited resource in current day spaceflight.
That underwater fish boss in Metroid Prime 2 and in Metroid Prime 1 there was some big space pirate that broke out of a glass tank (not real boss, more like extra huge enemy), neither of which had a save point near them or at least none that I found before encountering the boss. Those were the two events that caused me to ditch those games.
Anyway, there really is nothing good about Metroid Primes save system, its pretty much as awful as they get, rare and easy to miss savepoint just aren't fun, especially in a game that is completly structured around rooms, where it would be trivial to have a checkpoint in every room.
The problem with the POP:Sand of Time series was that you could still die in the classic way. You had the time rewind mechanic to recover a few times, but that was a limited resource, if you run out of sand you where game over just as in every other game. Now they did manage to story tell around the game over quite nicely in the first game, but that didn't much change the fact that you where game over and had to retry. Another thing is was that a reset point wasn't a save point, in Warrior Within it got quite bad, since often you would end up on a resetpoint with little energie and no sand. Forcing you to actually quit the game to return to the last real savepoint and retry from there, since the resetpoint was just worthless. In terms of plain old reset points I like the new Tomb Raider series a lot, they have lots of resetpoints and every resetpoint automatically saves and refills your energie, so there is extremely little punishment for dieing, even without doing anything special with the story or game mechanics.
I always enjoyed how the Metroid Prime games had a save point just before any major boss.
I absolutely *HATED* the Metroid Prime games save system, because quite a few times it didn't have a savepoint before the boss and you had to walk for ten minutes to reach the boss, which was extremely annoying and caused me to ditch both Metroid Prime 1 and 2 and not finish them until a year later or so. What made Metroid Prime worse then most normal FPS is that its structured into rooms and featured respawning enemies, so you couldn't just shoot the way free to the boss, run back and save, no, you had to play the same thing again and again, because the monsters would respawn either way. Another big problem with Primes approach is that you actually have to find the save point, when the left door leads to the boss fight and the right one to the savepoint you have a big problem when you choose the wrong door, a checkpoint should be something that you are guaranteed to hit before the boss fight, not something hidden in some side way.
You mind as well just take all the risk out of the game, and turn on the invincibility cheatcode.
A cheat code lets you cheat through a game without actually overcoming the challenges proper, if on the other side you just have a reset mechanic, you don't cheat, you still have to solve all the challenges the game offers, its just the annoying replaying of stuff you already know that gets reduced.
Now of course that isn't a clear cut thing, some reset points refill your health while others don't, so they kind of cheat, but on the other side you don't want end up stuck in a near death condition on a reset point (case in point Half Life 2, having an autosave a fraction of a second before a grenade under you explodes).
Anyway, in the end I don't think that any reset mechanic would work for every game. In a racing game there is no clear save-spot to which a game could automatically reset you, on the other side the time-rewind mechanic that lets you retry a turn works quite great when you mess up. Its really not so much about removing challenge, but about making failure interesting. Failing in a game should teach you something, give you the option to try something different next time, it shouldn't be something that forces you to replay the parts of the game you already solved, often times to near perfection.
I find those ways to skip trough a game highly problematic, since they destroy the immersion for me completly. I don't want to skip the game, I want to play it. Case in point, Crimson Skies on the PC, there was a mission where you had to fly a five minute race against somebody else before the real mission would start, the real part of the mission was hard so I died a lot, the race was easy and had to be done again each time. Even so the game had the option to skip the mission I never used it, because I wanted to finish that mission proper. In the end I never finished the game, since that mission just got to annoying, a savepoint or reset point after that stupid race would have helped a lot. All this is especially true for games that tell their story in the game, you can't skip stuff without missing pieces.
Other Console annoyances include:
Those really have little to do with consoles, PC games had plenty of all of them as well and the video in the last issue isn't even a real game, its a ROM hack meant to be nearly impossible to solve.
The point is not about making games easy, but about not forcing you to replay the same shit over and over again when you die. The whole reason why hard games can be annoying is because you have to play the *easy* parts of them a trillion times to reach the hard ones, then you die quickly and repeat the easy parts again. The fun part is overcoming the hard part and thats what a game needs to focus on instead of punishing the player for failure.
What Prince of Persia does different is that it in cooperates its reset mechanic into the game world. In other games you die, then see a game over screen, then restart the game at the last save point, in Prince of Persia on the other side you simply can't die, there is no game over screen, its all handled fluently without interruption in the game.
On the Microsoft Ergonomic 4000 the went back to the classic layout, Ins/Del/Home/End and cursor keys are in the correct places again.
My personal take on it: It sucks. Well, probably not, I haven't really looked that deep into it, but the last time I tried the first thing that was instantly obvious was that the terrain wasn't destructible like in the original and that was one of the things that made the original amazing back in its day. I just don't see much point in a remake when it removes one of the most important features of the original.
Over here in Germany shippings quite often arrives as soon as the next day. So in terms of shipping I couldn't be happier. However Amazon does still have lots of fault. For one there is their search engine, which totally sucks, spell a single character wrong and you won't find anything (i.e. Spiderman vs Spider-man). Their product catalog is also full of stuff that is either no longer available or only through third party and there is no easy way to filter that out or to see shipping cost for those third parties in the search list. Their user interface for third party stuff is also terrible, since it is in a complete different corner of the webpage then then normal orderings and requires a seperate login, which is pretty confusing and feels like a quick hack. And last not least there is the trouble that they don't properly group items, you have a DVD and want to see the page of the sequel? Can't do that, there is no button for that. Its even worse for comic books and other stuff, finding all the books that belong to a series is quite annoying and often requires a visit to Wikipedia to find out what is out there. And finally there is their pricing scheme, which feels very arbitrary at times, since for some products the price varies greatly over the course of a few days, so it becomes quite a guessing game to buy a thing at the right time.
But even with all those faults, Amazon is still quite a bit better then all the competition I tried so far.
But wouldn't you agree that there are many cases where pointing at the screen or moving the controller in space is a more effective abstraction?
Not really, there have been very few Wii games that actually show that it is better. Wii Sport makes great use of the Wiimote, but lots of other stuff just use it for pointless waggle minigames or don't use it much at all and falls back to a standard control schemes (Galaxy, SmashBros). In addition to that you also have the problem that the Wiimote just isn't good enough for many games, its motion sensing is very limited (Nintendo is trying to fix that with MotionPlus next year) and it also lacks a second analog stick, which makes camera control in third person games pretty awful.
That's a pretty subjective point.
Not really. You just have to look at where the money goes. The big stuff like Dead Space, Fallout3, Bioshock, Assassins Creed and whatever all goes to Xbox360, PS3 and PC, the Wii on the other side gets only some minigame collection. And on top of that the good third party stuff, like Zack & Wiki, doesn't even sell well on the Wii, given even less reason to release bigger games on the Wii.
Hardcore gamers are generally not going to understand the point of it.
Thing is, back when the Wii was new all the fanboys claimed that third party would just jump to it now that it is successful and how everything would be great and awesome in the near future. That however never happened, third parties continue to develop their big titles for the other consoles and not the Wii and the promise of great new control scheme has mostly turned into a waggle fest. As a console platform I consider the Wii a failure, since there simply aren't many good games, as Wii Sports-machine on the other side its a stunning success, but 250EUR is a lot of money for a single game, especially considering that the much more powerful Xbox360 60GB sells for 200EUR (German prices).
What realistic options are left to us?
Try to start with educating the public, after all they are the ones who vote for those politicians again and again.
AC above is clearly an idiot. The abstraction is a neccessary evil, not a feature.
Depends, many people enjoy doing crazy jumps and moves and fighting monsters and stuff (yes, that includes Mario games), which they couldn't perform when they would be wearing a a mo-cap suit and have perfect 1:1 mapping. Abstraction helps you do stuff you couldn't do in reality, complete lack of abstractions just puts you back into reality, which is not where most people want to be when they think about games.
Motion-sensing controls and peripherals (like the Wii Fit board) give the user more intuitive interaction with the game
And yet I have never seen such huge obtrusive tutorial texts as in Wii games on any other console. Those games sure have to explain a hell of a lot of stuff for their "intuitive interaction".
This is where game developers (and non-133t gamers) WANT to go
Really? How come third party developers largely ignore the Wii and focus on Xbox360 and PS3 instead?
The output of the Wii is far worse when it comes to games (no anti-aliasing, no motion blur) then it would be with video, yet people still buy the thing like crazy. So I doubt that it would matter much. Anyway, I think the bigger problem would be storage, Wii's 512MB are tiny, you would have to stream everything and you couldn't even buffer a larger part of the movie temporary.
The main adventage simply is that a Wii is connected to your TV, a PC most of the time isn't.
The question isn't who started it, but who has the power to end it.
I don't know how you can cram that entire graphic novel into a 2-hour movie.
By cutting a lot and releasing an extended version later that is 220 minutes long.
Fast forward a 1000 years. Will anyone be able to reverse engineer the media and formats, especially given that the media will mostly be highly degraded.
The joy with exponential growths of storage space is that it can not only hold all the stuff you need today, but also *all* that stuff you used to store in the past. Today I can have all stuff ever released on the Atari2600, C64, Amiga, early PC and a bunch of other devices on a SD card, i.e. 20 years of computer history in the size of my fingernail and of course I can store all the emulators and source code along with it. You likely won't be able to read it in 1000 years, since then the storage might be completly degraded, but given how computers are all networked and stuff gets copied around all the time, you likely will find a copy of it somewhere on whatever that Internet is called then. Storing the whole Library of Congress today takes storage space that costs less then $1000, just for reference.
I think the biggest danger for long term storage has nothing to do with the storage device or the format, but simply copyright. Copyright forbids to build a public archive of newer stuff, so very few are doing it. You still find most stuff out there if you search long enough, but there is little or no quality control, so you get quite frequently digital degeneration (i.e. video recoded multiple times, bit flips, etc.). Add to that, that many of the original media might be degraded beyond recovery when copyright allows it to enter public domain, you might end up with quite troublesome mess in 100 years down the road.
I don't really think the immersion has much to do with casual vs non-casual. The game that made the Wii popular is after all Wii Sports, the closed thing to holodeck-bowling we had in video game history, so immersive that people have destroyed their TVs while playing it. Now given that is a different kind of immersion then say Halo, since you are not immersed into a different kind of reality, but more into an extension of the real reality. But since there wouldn't be much point in doing space-bowling with laserguns, I think thats totally ok.
I find it hard to argue against immersion, since I think its simply the wrong word to talk about in this context. I see immersion more as a measure of how close a game got to achieving its goal, not as a fantasy vs reality thing. Some games just couldn't derive any benefit from a fantasy world, while in others its absolutely critical, but that doesn't mean that one is more immersive then the other. And certainly breaking the immersion can't really be good in any game, no matter if its Uno or Halo (i.e. a crash would be one of the most blunt immersive breaking events in a game and that is of course better avoided).
I think what the article is trying to talk about in the end is really just story telling, i.e. how deep of a story does a game need to be good? And all I really can say about that is: It depends. Some games are fine with no story (Uno), some do fine with a minimal amount of story (Mario) and other are pretty much all story (MonkeyIsland).
Its a pretty wild mix, some levels contain classical adventure elements, while others are plain jump'n runs and others feel more like a Zelda-like action-adventure. The game overall is a little uneven and has plenty of annoying spots, but it also features some insanely awesome ideas.
Most are pretty terrible, some are enjoyable, but none of them comes near the old classics. The Telltale Games are probably the best new ones these days and they release new stuff quite regularly.
I want something new, and only Wii has that.
Seriously, where exactly are all those new games on the Wii? Wii Sport, sure, that has some new and innovative gameplay (if you ignore Gametrak which was released on PS2 a few years earlier...), but other then that? Galaxy could work with a standard controller just fine, Metroid Prime 3 is a standard FPS with Wiimote controls, nice, but nothing special, Zelda:TP worked on the Gamecube just fine, so did RE4, Okami on the PS2 was fine as well, PaperMario doesn't make much Wiimote use and so on. Whats left? Zack & Wiki, No More Heroes and Bloombox, maybe a small handful of other stuff, but there really isn't much. Most Wii stuff is just old standard gameplay with a bit of waggle thrown in. Really new innovative stuff happens on the Wii just as little as everywhere else. A new controller simply doesn't mean much if all the underlying game mechanics stay the same.