Perhaps Bully uses violence to make an interesting statement about the nature of bullying in schools. Perhaps it encourages players to consider whether the violent activities, while fun in the game, may actually be a poor course of action in real life. Perhaps the game suggests that violent retaliation is a legitimate response for a victim of bullying. We'll have to wait for the game to come out for us to assess its merits, but developers in Rockstar know the answer right now.
The reality is that the current political climate does not make the First Amendment a sufficiently bulletproof document to fall behind in the face of proposed governmental censorship. Games like Bully could either be making important statements that the First Amendment was intended to defend, or they could just pointless tripe designed to move large numbers of SKUs. Either kind of game will spark outrage from certain outspoken politicians. If loud enough, such outrage leads to the possibility of the governmental imposition of censorship standards in the future. Games haven't managed to earn the respectability of older media, which means its future is still very much subect to the whims of senators, congressmen and judges.
Some battles are worth fighting and some aren't. The games industry is in a position to pick its battles based on the games that it chooses to release. At this point of time, it's important to make sure that games that have violent (or sexual) content do have positive traits that would also make them defensible in the vocal-public court of opinion, so that court precedent can be set that protects the right for all kinds of games to be published in order to protect the few that use potentially objectionable material in a moral or thought-provoking manner.
Part of this can also be helped with sufficiently stringent industry rating. I am of the opinion that adult gamers should specifically consider taking the extra effort to seek and buy AO-rated games so that publishers can see the AO rating as economically viable. But that's quite a different discussion, best saved for another thread.
What's "obvious" now that the game is actually on the market wasn't "obvious" when the game was being designed. The proportion of women on the design team of the original The Sims was also pretty high. If you compare The Sims to other games Maxis had at the time, The Sims is a considerably more accessible design. It could easily have been designed as a zoomed-in SimCity 3000, but it's not; it's a dramatically different game. You're not building a house, you're playing with creatures. I'm not claiming it's better or worse, just different.
What about the aesthetics of the game? From the Simglish to the animation to the goofy furniture descriptions to the kind of music (admittedly not that different from SimCity, but still different). Can one reasonably expect that a game with a 40% female development team will look and sound like a game with a 95% male development team?
The fact that you know "3 different girls" who play the game is an example of why you'd like to have a large female component in your design team. Developers always tend to design a game they'd like to play themselves. It's possible to do it otherwise, but it takes a lot of discipline and rigor. The more women you have in your team, the more women you may be able to get to buy your game.
No one's claiming that less competent developers should be joining the industry. However, one does not necessarily need to evaluate competency on creativity. Different roles in a big dev house require different skills...managing, systematic analysis, communication, etc. A strength in any of the above, combined with a little respect for the medium itself, can be a real asset to any game developer...male or female.
For those who care, go spend $450 on your next-gen console, and $50 bucks a game.. but I'm tired of my game and console graveyard building up and wasting space. Next stop, eBay!
They're only wasting space if you don't play them any more. Arguably, if you don't own the games, you won't even have the option of playing old games if Infinium goes under. For me, that's a no-no.
However, it's true that a subscription plan would work great for certain kinds of gamers, e.g. folks who don't want to be playing old games. It's not that different from Netflix.
There was a PS2/Xbox game released by Lucasarts in early 2004 called Wrath Unleashed. I wouldn't call it an Archon sequel or remake, but it certainly draws lots of inspiration from Archon. Pity about the long load times (at least on my Xbox). If you've got $10 and a preowned bin nearby, and desperately need some console hex-map turn-based strategy, it isn't that bad a game.
Talking with an EB games staffer (and GT fan), I heard there's an online version of GT4 slated for later in the year. While it's unclear whether it'd require you to own the non-online version of GT4 to play online (I'm guessing probably not), apparently it'll let you import your non-online GT4 data into the new version.
Why would anyone want to buy the February version of GT4, then? Well, given that most of the modifications you can perform on your cars (and the cars themselves) aren't obtainable until you put many hours into play, this means that folks with the older GT4 will be hopping online with tricked-out rides while those just buying the online version would be racing stock cars. This won't make a difference in the long-term, but that would certainly suck for new adopters for the first couple of months.
Sega GT did a similar thing, releasing an online version after the non-online game had been on sale for a long time, so even though this is hearsay, I'd be biased towards believing it. Not that this is necessarily a winning marketing strategy...
Was the subject header meant to be a deliberate reference to Rice-boys, car owners who mod their cars to look "fast" while often crippling actual performance? "Street Ricer" seems particularly funny in the context of NFS:Underground.
No doubt, I'll be in line if a straight sequel of Rez is released. I'm just a lot more interested in what Mizuguchi could do if given a free hand. He tapped some very compelling concepts in Rez, and I'd be disappointed if he decided to only apply those concepts to a Panzer Dragoon-style shooter. It's the completely new ideas in his head that I want to see, not just the refinements of the old ones.
That being said, sequels are certainly part of the bread-and-butter of game sales. Not only do sequels give the chance for a franchise to build its the fan base and re-sell a tested formula to its old customers, they often give developers a chance to put in ideas that had to be dropped for the first one, refine existing game mechanics and update games using newer technology.
Both Sega Rally and SC5 garnered some decent fan support when they were released (at least, among people who raced in the arcade and people who had Dreamcasts), and IMHO, their sequels were actually better games. I don't think Mizuguchi would necessarily be opposed to doing a straight sequel of Rez, since he seems quite sympathetic to the opinions of fans.
As for Sega's involvement in ordering the sequels, SC5 didn't break any sales records, but gave Sega a lot of press worldwide. Based on that, it's entirely reasonable to think that a sequel would sell much better than the original. Note that the JP sequel of SC5 came out relatively quickly... it just took a long time for it to be ported, published and localized for US PS2s.
Between Space Channel 5 and Rez, when Mizuguchi says that his next game would be a sequel to Rez "in his mind," I don't see that as an indication that the next game would necessarily look or play like Rez at all, and that should be a good thing.
I doubt Mizuguchi is interested in making a straight sequel of Rez... he seems rather too imaginative for that. I personally hopes that he takes the synaesthetic ideas in Rez in a direction no one expects. The Kandinsky/Tron hybrid is done, and it's excellent... hopefully his 'Independent' status gives him more breathing room for even stranger, unique ideas.
Remember, one of the things that makes novels, films, and, yes, games, great is there ability to engage the viewer/player emotionally.
I'd like to add that the inclusion of weighty issues in games need not come at a sacrifice of escapist and recreational qualities. I just finished playing the remake of Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, and it was interesting to be reminded how the plot dealt with political issues that, IMO, made for a more interesting game. One one level, the game has your basic "Terrorists have a nuclear weapon; stop them" plot, but it then goes on to say how they got the nuclear weapon, why it's easy in a post-cold-war environment to do so, why someone like Solid Snake may find himself in a building full of nuclear weapons lying around, and discusses the general problems that arms reduction had in the 90's. Furthermore, despite the sci-fi quality of the genetically-enhanced soldiers, some of the basic concepts are rooted in real work related to the Human Genome Project, and though the game is clearly a worse-case-scenario fantasy, I'd argue that the game is more exciting because of the plausibility and relevance to real issues. If nothing else, I'm glad the designers put some research and thought into why the characters are fighting instead of presenting an entirely fantastical story that might have once existed as a fiction-writing assignment in their high-school days.
Clearly, the game still has flaws, even in the remake. They're pretty guilty of the 'hit you over the head' method of storytelling, whether it's talking about arms reduction, love, or maniacal bosses that you have to kill. Still, I'm not going to begrudge them for trying, and a lot of people seem to have enjoyed the oiriginal or the remake. I feel that games like Metal Gear Solid and Deus Ex are engaging because they take some current issue and try to take it to its logical extreme, when the stakes are high.
True, most of them discuss political rather than social issues, but nowadays the overlap between the two can't be entirely ignored.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps Bully uses violence to make an interesting statement about the nature of bullying in schools. Perhaps it encourages players to consider whether the violent activities, while fun in the game, may actually be a poor course of action in real life. Perhaps the game suggests that violent retaliation is a legitimate response for a victim of bullying. We'll have to wait for the game to come out for us to assess its merits, but developers in Rockstar know the answer right now.
The reality is that the current political climate does not make the First Amendment a sufficiently bulletproof document to fall behind in the face of proposed governmental censorship. Games like Bully could either be making important statements that the First Amendment was intended to defend, or they could just pointless tripe designed to move large numbers of SKUs. Either kind of game will spark outrage from certain outspoken politicians. If loud enough, such outrage leads to the possibility of the governmental imposition of censorship standards in the future. Games haven't managed to earn the respectability of older media, which means its future is still very much subect to the whims of senators, congressmen and judges.
Some battles are worth fighting and some aren't. The games industry is in a position to pick its battles based on the games that it chooses to release. At this point of time, it's important to make sure that games that have violent (or sexual) content do have positive traits that would also make them defensible in the vocal-public court of opinion, so that court precedent can be set that protects the right for all kinds of games to be published in order to protect the few that use potentially objectionable material in a moral or thought-provoking manner.
Part of this can also be helped with sufficiently stringent industry rating. I am of the opinion that adult gamers should specifically consider taking the extra effort to seek and buy AO-rated games so that publishers can see the AO rating as economically viable. But that's quite a different discussion, best saved for another thread.
It's an awful lot like golf...involving vehicle accidents and needy boyfriends. Or something.
The mouse button does have uses after the initial click, but part of the fun is discovering else you can do.
What's "obvious" now that the game is actually on the market wasn't "obvious" when the game was being designed. The proportion of women on the design team of the original The Sims was also pretty high. If you compare The Sims to other games Maxis had at the time, The Sims is a considerably more accessible design. It could easily have been designed as a zoomed-in SimCity 3000, but it's not; it's a dramatically different game. You're not building a house, you're playing with creatures. I'm not claiming it's better or worse, just different.
What about the aesthetics of the game? From the Simglish to the animation to the goofy furniture descriptions to the kind of music (admittedly not that different from SimCity, but still different). Can one reasonably expect that a game with a 40% female development team will look and sound like a game with a 95% male development team?
The fact that you know "3 different girls" who play the game is an example of why you'd like to have a large female component in your design team. Developers always tend to design a game they'd like to play themselves. It's possible to do it otherwise, but it takes a lot of discipline and rigor. The more women you have in your team, the more women you may be able to get to buy your game.
No one's claiming that less competent developers should be joining the industry. However, one does not necessarily need to evaluate competency on creativity. Different roles in a big dev house require different skills...managing, systematic analysis, communication, etc. A strength in any of the above, combined with a little respect for the medium itself, can be a real asset to any game developer...male or female.
They're only wasting space if you don't play them any more. Arguably, if you don't own the games, you won't even have the option of playing old games if Infinium goes under. For me, that's a no-no.
However, it's true that a subscription plan would work great for certain kinds of gamers, e.g. folks who don't want to be playing old games. It's not that different from Netflix.
http://www.lucasarts.com/products/wrath/
Talking with an EB games staffer (and GT fan), I heard there's an online version of GT4 slated for later in the year. While it's unclear whether it'd require you to own the non-online version of GT4 to play online (I'm guessing probably not), apparently it'll let you import your non-online GT4 data into the new version. Why would anyone want to buy the February version of GT4, then? Well, given that most of the modifications you can perform on your cars (and the cars themselves) aren't obtainable until you put many hours into play, this means that folks with the older GT4 will be hopping online with tricked-out rides while those just buying the online version would be racing stock cars. This won't make a difference in the long-term, but that would certainly suck for new adopters for the first couple of months. Sega GT did a similar thing, releasing an online version after the non-online game had been on sale for a long time, so even though this is hearsay, I'd be biased towards believing it. Not that this is necessarily a winning marketing strategy...
Was the subject header meant to be a deliberate reference to Rice-boys, car owners who mod their cars to look "fast" while often crippling actual performance? "Street Ricer" seems particularly funny in the context of NFS:Underground.
No doubt, I'll be in line if a straight sequel of Rez is released. I'm just a lot more interested in what Mizuguchi could do if given a free hand. He tapped some very compelling concepts in Rez, and I'd be disappointed if he decided to only apply those concepts to a Panzer Dragoon-style shooter. It's the completely new ideas in his head that I want to see, not just the refinements of the old ones.
That being said, sequels are certainly part of the bread-and-butter of game sales. Not only do sequels give the chance for a franchise to build its the fan base and re-sell a tested formula to its old customers, they often give developers a chance to put in ideas that had to be dropped for the first one, refine existing game mechanics and update games using newer technology.
Both Sega Rally and SC5 garnered some decent fan support when they were released (at least, among people who raced in the arcade and people who had Dreamcasts), and IMHO, their sequels were actually better games. I don't think Mizuguchi would necessarily be opposed to doing a straight sequel of Rez, since he seems quite sympathetic to the opinions of fans.
As for Sega's involvement in ordering the sequels, SC5 didn't break any sales records, but gave Sega a lot of press worldwide. Based on that, it's entirely reasonable to think that a sequel would sell much better than the original. Note that the JP sequel of SC5 came out relatively quickly... it just took a long time for it to be ported, published and localized for US PS2s.
Between Space Channel 5 and Rez, when Mizuguchi says that his next game would be a sequel to Rez "in his mind," I don't see that as an indication that the next game would necessarily look or play like Rez at all, and that should be a good thing.
I doubt Mizuguchi is interested in making a straight sequel of Rez... he seems rather too imaginative for that. I personally hopes that he takes the synaesthetic ideas in Rez in a direction no one expects. The Kandinsky/Tron hybrid is done, and it's excellent... hopefully his 'Independent' status gives him more breathing room for even stranger, unique ideas.
I'd like to add that the inclusion of weighty issues in games need not come at a sacrifice of escapist and recreational qualities. I just finished playing the remake of Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, and it was interesting to be reminded how the plot dealt with political issues that, IMO, made for a more interesting game. One one level, the game has your basic "Terrorists have a nuclear weapon; stop them" plot, but it then goes on to say how they got the nuclear weapon, why it's easy in a post-cold-war environment to do so, why someone like Solid Snake may find himself in a building full of nuclear weapons lying around, and discusses the general problems that arms reduction had in the 90's. Furthermore, despite the sci-fi quality of the genetically-enhanced soldiers, some of the basic concepts are rooted in real work related to the Human Genome Project, and though the game is clearly a worse-case-scenario fantasy, I'd argue that the game is more exciting because of the plausibility and relevance to real issues. If nothing else, I'm glad the designers put some research and thought into why the characters are fighting instead of presenting an entirely fantastical story that might have once existed as a fiction-writing assignment in their high-school days.
Clearly, the game still has flaws, even in the remake. They're pretty guilty of the 'hit you over the head' method of storytelling, whether it's talking about arms reduction, love, or maniacal bosses that you have to kill. Still, I'm not going to begrudge them for trying, and a lot of people seem to have enjoyed the oiriginal or the remake. I feel that games like Metal Gear Solid and Deus Ex are engaging because they take some current issue and try to take it to its logical extreme, when the stakes are high.
True, most of them discuss political rather than social issues, but nowadays the overlap between the two can't be entirely ignored.