I didn't mean in terms of the technology. To the average consumer, provided the technology is "good enough", it doesn't really matter. What I meant was in terms of the user experience.
The PS3 and the Xbox 360 have:
- a very similar games library with fewer exclusive games than in any previous cycle; - exclusives which often tend to act as mirror images of each other (eg. Halo vs Killzone, Gran Turismo vs Forza); - controllers with some variations in shape, but exactly the same number and arrangement of buttons; - very similar online stores; and - broadly similar graphical capabilities, as reflected in most games.
Compare with any previous console generation and it's hard to find two which ran so close to each other in these terms.
Well, on the basis that pretty much any gaming console these days is a walled garden (at best), the answer is a resounding "maybe"?
It wouldn't actually hurt to have another entrant into the games console business (even if this proposal doesn't look too much like a console). Sony and MS's current offerings are actually unbelievably similar - I don't think I've ever known a console generation where there was less to actually separate two competitors. At the same time, Nintendo look increasingly like a successful toy manufacturer, who have feet of clay when it comes to actually making interesting games - and in attracting decent third party developers.
A credible new entrant (sorry, Infinium Labs) could potentially give the industry a shot in the arm. Apple may or may not be the people to do it - there's a hell of a lot I don't like about the company and its principles. However, their recent approach to software pricing indicates that they might at least bring something interesting to the table.
I think I disagree with this (not 100%, but certainly with the core message). In the last console generation, the Gamecube was certainly capable of moving graphics on a par with those of the Xbox and better, in theory, than those of the PS2 (though Square and a few other PS2 developers managed to do truly incredible things with that hardware). The decision to go for a low-powered Wii was, I think, nothing more than a bit of marketing positioning - which paid off handsomly in the short term but is now looking unwise as a longer term move unless Nintendo can develop a successor).
As for innovation and creativity - I'm sorry, but Nintendo are the last place I'd look for that in game design. Nintendo have made some interesting and novel toys - like their motion control - but their game design is stuck somewhere between 1993 and 1996. They have a reputation as innovative, but in reality, they long since retreated to their comfort zone.
At the same time, we've seen genuine innovation elsewhere, on other platforms. Valkyria Chronicles, for the PS3, was the single most innovative game I've seen in the last decade. The Mass Effect games are a synthesis of action and role-playing done in a way that nobody had previously tried. Portal pretty much created a whole new genre of dark-sci-fi-comedy-puzzle-fpses. And there's plenty of innovation in the $2 phone-game market that has Nintendo so worked up.
It's true that the lower Wii development costs attract shovelware to the system - just as they do the handhelds and, in a slightly different sense, to the PC. However, I think there's also the fact that Nintendo have themselves set low expectations over production values and general quality on the Wii. How many Wii games - both first-party and third-party - use an annoying series of tweak and wibble sounds instead of voice acting? Blame Nintendo for that - they set the pace. And look at how the motion control gimmick itself has been devalued over time - with Nintendo leading the charge. Mario Galaxy 2, which should be a Wii flagship (and which is undoubtedly one of the better games on the platform) relegates motion control to a bit of IR-pointer work and mapping "waggle" to a button. If you set the bar this low yourself, then don't be surprised when the third party developers follow - and your system gets a reputation for crap.
It's a pity, really, because the few really decent third party games that come out for the Wii tend to disappear into sales oblivion. I always feel sorry for the (excellent) Dead Space Extraction, which only managed to sell a few thousand copies and ended up being rescued by a PS3 port.
Nintendo seems to have developed a pricing problem all of its own of late, which has nothing to do with $2 phone games. I'm pretty sure this has contributed to Nintendo's current profits slump, at a time when the company should be using its large installed base for the Wii to really rake off the cash.
The company just seems to have some really, really odd ideas of what a game should cost. It's most notable in the Wii's online store, where in the UK, direct, unmodified ports of 25 year old arcade games (many of which are hardly timeless classics) often tend to be priced in the £6-£8 range. Things are mildly better in the US, I believe, but the prices seem out of whack.
I absolutely don't want to hold up the Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network Store as paragons of value for money, but they certainly offer a better deal than Nintendo's online shop (and have much more consumer-friendly terms of service as well, which link games to an account rather than a console). Compared to the classic game packs you can pick up on Steam and other PC services such as GOG, Nintendo's pricing looks positively extortionate. If Reggie wants to talk about games that would be over-priced at $2, he should look at the stuff like Exed Exes and Commando in his own online store - which he's trying to sell for four times that price.
Things aren't much better on the boxed-game front either. As we get further into this console generation, the general quality gap between Wii games and games for the other consoles and the PC is widening. There are a few honorable exceptions, but most of the Wii games released these days tend to feel short and shallow. And yet despite this, and despite their increasingly painful graphical shortcomings (with most Wii games still struggling to match the best the PS2 had to offer), the games tend to be priced at roughly the same level as games for other platforms (usually a few $ behind the PS3/360 games and a few $ above the PC games).
If I were Nintendo, faced with the dramatic profits slump they've seen, I'd be looking to boost volumes of sales by pitching more boxed games at the more realistic $30 (or £20 in the UK) price-point and slashing the prices of titles in the online store. If you sell more games, you keep people using their Wiis. And if you keep people using their Wiis, they will buy more games for it. Sony managed to achieve that virtuous circle on the PS2, but despite their installed base lead, Nintendo haven't managed it this generation.
I think you're absolutely right to say that copyright has gotten out of control. I think pretty much anybody who reads slashdot regularly would acknowledge that.
However, that's not to say that there isn't a case for copyright, in its original form. I think what the comments on this thread - which at first glance look quite uncharacteristic for slashdot - show is that a lot of people have a gut instinct for what is right and wrong in relation to copyright (which may vary from person to person) and that for most people, the submitter falls on the wrong side of it.
Tetris is still relatively recent (less than 30 years old) and the submitter doesn't seem to have actually tried to add any value. My instinct is that in a world with good and sensible copyright laws, this would fall on the wrong side of them. The problem is that in the absence of such laws and the absence of a sensible political debate on said laws, we're left just feeling a bit muddled about it.
Games developed for the 3DS will be designed to run on the 3DS's hardware, which, while still relatively low-powered, is substantially more powerful than the DS/DSi. In gaming terms, "backwards compatibility" generally refers to the ability of a newer console to run games that were designed for a previous generation (and the 3DS has this - it will run DS games).
Of course, given that every Mario game since Mario 64 has basically been the same, you will probably be able to get away with just breaking out the Mario 64 DS cart and then pretending really hard that it's a new game. Same should work for Zelda.
If I was engaged in fighting a war, or a counter-insurgency operation, then I know one thing. There is nothing I would love more than for my enemy to be using the Call of Duty games as training sims. Just think of all the fantastic lessons they could learn from them:
- Don't worry about taking a few bullets. As long as you can duck behind cover, you'll be perfectly fine in 5 seconds or so.
- Charging through an artillery barrage, mine-field or other incredibly dangerous intensely dangerous situation is absolutely fine, provided you can work out the precise sequence of steps that the developers wanted you to take. There'll be convenient cover every 10 paces or so.
- Enemy soldiers will employ a combination of two cunning tactics. Some of them will run straight towards you, firing sporadically. Others will hide behind a piece of cover, which they will stick their heads above at predictable 3 second intervals. Don't worry too much about numbers; you should be able to take down a dozen or so at a time.
- If all else fails, hole up on a hill against overwhelming waves of enemies. It might get sticky for a while, but after 5 minutes or so, stirring music will play and reinforcements will arrive to save you.
I was with you for your first sentence. You're absolutely right, people do have an unfortunate tendancy to come up with excuses for the perpetrator in these cases. Unfortunately, you then go on to ruin it by coming out with another excuse - "the Government made me".
I think I've come to the conclusion that some people are just evil, murderous fuckwits and will sieze upon any opportunity to cause death and destruction. Free will and all that.
This is a strong contender for "lowest point in the history of journalism about video games". At the very least, it's tied with the whole MS Flight Sim and 9/11 "controversy". It's hard to see it as anything but an insult to those who died or were injured in the incident.
You're making a number of assumptions here that I don't think can be supported. First, we know nothing about the reason for the ban. Nobody's said. There's a tweet from MS saying that the kid's mother has been informed of the reasons for the decision. In fact, there's evidence that MS do have a review/appeal process; there have been cases of false-positives in the past, which have been over-turned. However, where such false positives occur, they tend to affect a large number of people and become news in their own right.
Second, you are assuming that MS is using some kind of stats tracking for its anti-cheat. I do have experience with anti-cheat and I can tell you now that for skill-based games, relying on stats tracking for any kind of anti-cheat, let alone one that is allowed to institute bans, is absolutely ludicrous. Nobody with any brains is doing this. MS are not doing this. What happens if you end up with a top-end gamer who jumps online for a quick match and gets put into a game with a bunch of newbies?
There are a few instances where you can use stats-based automatic tracking. In strategy games, it is possible to calculate the maximum possible level of resource acquisition. If somebody is exceeding this, they're cheating. But that is absolutely not the same as looking at the kills/deaths ratio in an fps. Clever games these days have a matchmaking system which looks at a spectacular kills/deaths ratio and doesn't say "this person is cheating" but rather "I will match this person against people with similar ratios in future".
I'm also surprised that you are willing to grant this kid elite powers of gaming supremacy, but not the ability to hack around with his console.
As you say, public server adminning does tend to throw up a higher number of issues than tournament adminning. However, it is still generally 100% possible to have a review and appeals mechanism, particularly for admin-detected cheating. If your customers are paying £40/year to play on your servers, you are going to have a review mechanism at the very least. Of course, my experience is that the majority of the time, the people who get hit by anti-cheat measures are indeed cheating (not true in every instance, but it does generally hold up). As most people who get a ban will appeal, this means that most appeals get rejected. Which in turn gives the impression that there isn't an appeals mechanism.
This is true these days. However, I'm really talking here about the 2000-2003 time-span, when aimbots were rather less sophisticated. They evolved and improved over the time I was involved, for sure. As a league admin, you absolutely needed to stay on top of the cheating scene so that you knew what you were up against. However, at the time I gave it up due to work committments in 2003, it was still possible to spot Counter-Strike aimbots by careful scrutiny of replays.
Wallhacks were harder, as there was a good degree of psychology involved. For instance, good players generally knew which walls and crates people tended to hide behind and to scan accordingly. We only ever did one "admin detected" ban for a wallhack, in a very, very blatant case (in a low-division match) where a player was not only targetting other players through walls, but happily tracking them and following their movement. We had a few similar cases where the evidence just wasn't quite strong enough.
I have no idea what goes on behind the scenes at Microsoft and how they detect and handle cases of cheating. However, for quite a few years during my postgrad days and early years of employment, I was involved on the admin-side of the (PC) online gaming scene, and spent a lot of time dealing with cheaters. I have a few thoughts based on that:
A ban for just "being too good" is highly improbable, assuming that MS have even mildly competent people working on this. Back when I was running a (major, UK-based) Counter-Strike league, the kindest description of my own level of play would have been "slightly better than average". There were players in the league who could have beaten me with their eyes closed. My admin team contained people who had a range of ability levels, but none of them were top-tier players.
Adminning top-division games was therefore something that had to be taken very seriously. Accusations of cheating were always rife in CS, though in my experience the actual level of cheating, outside of a relatively small proportion of badly adminned public servers, was never as high as it was commonly perceived to be. Making sure that average players were able to tell whether a top level player was cheating or was just plain good was, therefore, one of the main challenges for an admin team and one that was taken very seriously indeed.
We had a number of principles in place regarding accusations of cheating (or independent admin suspicions when no accusation had been made). These were:
1) Any flags raised by the Valve Anti-Cheat were treated as reliable. If VAC says a player is cheating, they are kicked from the match and the league immediately. They can appeal, but would need to show very convincing evidence that there had been a false-positive (nobody ever managed this, all we ever got was "OMG my brother installed cheats").
2) Knowing that Valve Anti-Cheat was, at the time, fairly easily defeated, admins were expected to know the signs of cheating and to watch for these. We had a library of video clips that all new admins were expected to study, some of which showed players who were using wallhacks or aimbots, others which showed clips that were just of very good players pulling off shots that looked suspicious, but which were recorded at LANs and verified as legitimate.
3) If an admin suspected that a player in a game he was refereeing was cheating, he did not stop the match or kick players. No bans were given at this stage.
4) Admins recorded all matches as a matter of policy (both for anti-cheating and because players liked to download the replays later). The admin of the "dodgy" match flagged a concern in private to the senior admins.
5) 3 other admins, including at least 1 of the senior admins (usually me) scrutinised the demo from the alleged cheater's point of view. There were reliable signs of cheating (as opposed to good or lucky play) that could consistently be spotted. One classic, though by no means the only sign, was an instant-flick moment of the crosshair to an enemy, completely out of line with that player's usual mouse-sensitivity.
6) If 2 of the 3 other admins (with one of the two being the senior admin) agreed that there was cheating, then the player was banned from the league and the results of games they had played in were overturned (subject to appeal). If there was no consensus, then the original admin who raised the concern was thanked for their diligence (there was no harm in privately flagging suspicious activity - I always encouraged it) and no further action was taken.
In around 75% of cases, all 3 reviewers would agree that there had been no cheating. In around 95% of cases, 2 of the 3 agreed that there had been no cheating. We averaged around 3 player bans per season, of which 2 were usually as a result of "technical" (ie. VAC) detections. I am confident that none of the "admin" detections that were confirmed were false-positives.
My point is that this is the degree of scrutiny we applied to what was, for most of its
Well done to Gearbox for finishing this off - it would have been a sin if it didn't see the light of day in the end. The previews look good and I'm looking forward to picking it up when it reaches Europe on 6 May (PC version, of course, the Duke doesn't need some stinking console). I'm hoping for a shooter which emphasises funky weapons, crazy situations and bad jokes over "balance" and other hardcore trappings. Back when I was a student, DN3D was always the game for a fun blast while Quakeworld was for whose who took things a bit more seriously.
Anyway, Gearbox, how about you get cracking on Aliens: Colonial Marines now - or will that be done "when it's ready"?
Like I said in my post, the PS3 has the capability to region lock but does not use it. You sometimes see region codes on the boxes, but I have no idea why, because the games are not locked. I have PS3 games here, with US and EU region labels on the boxes, both of which work just fine on the same (unmodified) PS3.
Taking your three requirements in turn and looking across all of the current "big" console platforms:
1) PS3 games aren't region locked. Ever. The console technically has the capability to implement this, but it has never been turned on. Sony won't certify region locked games. That said, some games are released for specific markets without translations. Unfortunately, this is probably unavoidable; the margins on "small" games in a lot of markets (particularly Japan) are pretty thin and requiring every game to be released with (at the very least) an English translation could kill development in many cases.
Microsoft leave the decision of whether or not to region lock games up to individual publishers. In the early years of the 360, a majority of games were region locked. These days, around 75-80% of 360 games released in the US and Europe are not region locked (and it is fairly easy to find out which are). Japanese 360 games do still tend to be region locked, though even there the balance is shifting towards liberalisation. Microsoft never region lock the games that they publish themselves.
Wii games are region locked. Always. Nintendo won't certify without it. They like to maintain control over what gets released (and played) in specific territories.
2) Third party controllers and the like do exist for the PS3. That said, various security updates over the last year or so have shut some of these down and a few older 3rd party controllers (though not all) will stop working if you update to the latest firmware (which is pretty evil). However, the PS3 does use a standard hard disk, so you can swap the default PS3 for a bigger one without having to buy expensive Sony hardware. You can plug any old keyboard and mouse into a PS3, if you want (and a small number of games will support this).
There are a few third party controllers for the 360; they are not outright forbidden, but are not officially supported either. Hard disks, wireless networking adapters etc are all over-priced MS branded stuff; no 3rd party options here. Again, you can plug in a standard keyboard and mouse, though MS do offer their own "official" versions as well.
There are a tiny number of third party controllers for the Wii; Nintendo tends to strongly disapprove, though. There are plenty of third-party "peripherals" - plastic shells that hold a Wii-mote and supposedly enhance the experience in various games. Given that these are just dumb pieces of plastic containing no electronics, there is nothing that Nintendo can do about any of these, though it would probably like to, given the ridiculous prices it tends to ask for its own offerings (given these really are just moulded plastic).
3) Unless you are seriously good at both hardware and software, you are not going to be doing this for any of the current consoles.
So in short, none of the 3 consoles meets all of your tests, though if we were giving scores, the PS3 would get something like 1.8/3 (it comes most of the way on your second point, but not all the way), the 360 would get 1/3 (giving it a half point for a general drift away from region locking) and the Wii would score around 0.2/3 (minor credit because you can get third party accessories if you look hard enough).
What's not in the summary or TFA is that this is the first handheld to be "fully" region locked. The PSP was region locked for movies, while the DSi had region locking for the online stores. But this is the first handheld where titles bought off store shelves will all be region locked. There's been evidence for some time that Nintendo are the most anti-consumer of the three console developers, but I think this is probably the final proof.
Combined with the console's price-point, this really does make me wonder where Nintendo are going with this. They've put it at a price tag which, like the PSP, is going to put it out of reach of most of the playground demographic, at least until Christmas. And yet among non-Japanese grown-up gamers, one of the biggest uses of handhelds is for when you go travelling. I'm not going to sit at home and play on a handheld, in general, when I have proper consoles and a gaming PC in my flat. Why should I peer at a tiny screen and cramp my hands up for a handheld's controls when I could be gaming in comfort? And my commute? I suspect that like many people who live in or near a major city, my commute on public transport is just too crowded and too rattly for handheld gaming. When travelling abroad, however, handhelds come into their own, and that's when I've gotten most of the use out of my PSP and DS. But if I can't pick up a game when I'm out in the US for the flight back to the UK? That's not going to make me happy.
The handheld market is huge in Japan. Rather less so in wider Asia, I think, particularly in Korea which remains very PC-centric. To be honest, I partly suspect that the handheld market is so big in Japan because Japanese gamers tend, going off sales statistics, to be a little... shall we say... insular in their tastes, meaning they tend to stick to games from their domestic developers. And what their own developers give them are handheld games. I think the reaction to the announcement that Valkyria Chronicles 3 would be a PSP game shows that a lot of Japanese gamers have no particular deep-rooted affection for the handhelds - they just go where "their" games are.
You are absolutely 100% correct though about the "big name developer" issue. There really seems to be a culture in Japanese games development of venerating the "big men" of the industry and never, ever deviating from what they do or trying to evolve it over time. This is driving Nintendo into the ground and I think it's becoming a serious issue for other developers; Polyphony Digital particularly sticks in my mind, as Gran Turismo 5 has some deeply dated design elements that seem indicative of a similar culture.
I'm not sure whether this is a cultural phenomenon or rather a reflection of the fact that every time some individual Western developer starts to build up their own personal hype in a similar way, fate and hubris usually conspire to land them flat on their backside. I mean, John Romero was getting that kind of following; then Daikatana happened. Warren Spectre came out of Ion Storm smelling of roses thanks to Deus Ex, but has had enough mishaps since then that he's never really become an object of industry veneration. CliffyB... well... he has a string of successes to his name, but he also seems to delight in taking a persona that wins him at least as many enemies as friends. Meanwhile, if you look at the really successful Western developers of recent years; I'm not sure how many people could even name the founders of Bioware or Bethesda without jumping to wikipedia.
Yeah, that's right, and it highlights what is possibly Square-Enix's biggest problem (and I say this as a former fanboy) - they suck at retaining talent. Those external shops who are doing the development on the better games that Square-Enix publishes - half of them are Square-Enix (or often Squaresoft) veterans, who worked for the company back when it was still making good games (and I count FF12 as the last really good game that they put out).
Look at Mistwalker, who put out the best Final Fantasy game of this console generation (even though it happened to be called Lost Odyssey). The credits for their games reads like a "Who's Who" of the glory days of Squaresoft (though even Mistwalker seem to be losing the plot a bit now). Square-Enix need to work hard to attract people like that back.
Like it or not, FF13 was starved of resource by Square-Enix. But as any project manager will tell you, there is more than one kind of resource. FF13 had plenty of budget. It had no shortage of artistic talent. But it was deprived of the company's core games development talent and of any sensible kind of project management. Go read the interviews that followed FF13's launch, when Square-Enix realised it had a turkey on its hands and began the blame game (which we've seen even more pronounced on FF14). The game had a huge number of artists working for many years to produce assets for the game - artists who just aren't needed for the low-budget graphically primative handheld and Wii games. What it didn't have was anybody putting work into developing game mechanics or even a storyline to hold the game together. This is why we got a game that was graphically beautiful (on the PS3, at least), but which just did not work as a game.
Meanwhile, the people who knew how to design games were off doing stuff like 356/2 Days on the DS. Now sure, those games have some pretty neat gameplay elements, but they are always going to be constrained by the limitations of the hardware. It's not just graphics; a lack of RAM in these systems constrains the size of the play areas you can use and so on (hence the mission-based structure that a lot of these games tend to take).
The results of Square-Enix's strategy have been plain in the performance of their games lately and their financial results for the last year or so (for which see google). The handheld and Wii games get ok-ish reviews and do not exactly set the charts on fire in terms of sales (they tend to do ok-ish in Japan and underwhelmingly in the West); they don't cost much to develop, but they're not exactly setting the world on fire. At the same time, the big-budget main-series FF games take forever to develop (remember, no effective project management) and get panned on release. If I remember, FF13 had pretty decent initial sales, but these fell off a cliff as word of mouth basically torpedoed the game below the waterline.
In short, Square-Enix does need to put its resource focus back onto its big-budget AAA titles; but by resource, I mean development talent, not money.
As for Japanese gaming falling behind the West; wake up and smell the coffee. It's clear you're a Nintendo fanboy - and one of the minority who hasn't been through the disillusionment process yet. Don't worry, it's not necessarily a permanent condition; I was a Square-Enix fanboy until the last couple of years cured me.
As a games developer, Nintendo have fallen comprehensively behind the West (and have now realised this and are trying to catch up; witness Metroid: Other M, though I wouldn't categorise that game as a success). They've fallen into another common Japanese gaming trap; failing to identify which elements of their old titles to preserve and which to discard. Hence we still get the antiquated lives system in Mario Galaxy 2, and hence we still get the same damned plot over and over in Zelda. You may like it, but the rest of the world is moving on. Nintendo's market these days are nostalgic 40 year old neckbeards who don't really like games, and new-entrants to gaming. I suspect they're not getting much in the way of repeat custom. Still, as I say, Other M (which does try to adapt elements from Western gaming in a fairly major way) is a first sign that they have, belatedly recognised this and are trying to adapt. Sure, Other M isn't great in itself, but it's a sign that there's hope for them.
Still, it's unfair to harp on Nintendo. Other Japanese studios have been just as guilty of failing to adapt to the current generation; even those who had some early successes. Look at Sega; they put out the sublimely good Valkyria Chronicles, which was one of the absolute stand-out games of the current console hardware generation, which married artistry and technical prowess perfectly and which managed (almost uniquely for this console generation)
I think that's right to some extent. Thinking back, there were certainly Western developers who took an interest in the PS1 in a way that we hadn't seen on the SNES or Genesis. I know there was a sort of intervening console generation between those two, but my memory is highly hazy - certainly neither I nor any of my friends owned anything from then. The words "Sega Saturn" do stir up some inexplicable feelings of disappointment and regret, however.
I think you've correctly identified two of the three big franchises of the last console generation; the third is, of course, Final Fantasy. The West did start to make a strong challenge during the last cycle; Bioware's push onto the Xbox was probably the biggest case in point. But I often got a feeling last cycle that developers like Bioware and Bungie were taking games that had PC (or Mac!) roots and pushing them onto console hardware. Just as we saw the PC getting "nasty console ports", the consoles of the last generation had no shortage of games that felt like "nasty PC ports".
This generation, the Western developers have just felt more... comfortable... with the console platforms. Ok, they've not made inroads on the Wii, really, but the Wii is of declining importance as this cycle goes on and its hardware falls too far behind the curve to be of interest to a lot of developers. Games like the Gears of War series on the 360 and the Ratchet & Clank games on the PS3 have felt like bona fide console games and have defined this generation in a way that the West never quite managed last time around.
The high end titles have suffered (13 and 14) because there has clearly been a lack of development focus on them. It's clear that Squenix's emphasis has been on bad-to-middling handheld titles, like the (entirely pointless) Dissidia games, the Kingdom Hearts handheld titles and rubbish like Crystal Chronicles on the Wii. The company was doing just fine right through to FF12 (which was difficult to get into, but pretty awesome when you did). It really only is with the advent of the current hardware generation that their output has gone to hell.
It's symptomatic of wider Japanese gaming, I think. Outside of a few exceptions, Japanese developers have never really got to grips with the PS3, 360 and the modern PC in a way that the West has. As a result, I think Japanese console games now lag behind their Western counterparts to roughly the same extent that they led them by in the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube generation.
My concern about building something quick on the unused assets from FF13 was that we would, once again, end up with a game designed by artists rather than by games developers. If you read the post-release interviews with Square-Enix about FF13, it's clear that they had guys in a room creating artwork for years, with no idea of how it was going to come together as a game. The storyline, battle system and character development was all a last minute thing. If Square-Enix are sat there now saying "wow, we have a lot of unused art, let's cobble something together again", then there's no guarantee it will work out better than FF13 did. They don't need to do a new engine or anything; FF13 probably looks about as pretty as things are going to get on the current console hardware generation. What they do need to do is sit down and design a game, and then work out from that what artwork and other assets they need.
Actually, on FF6 vs other FF games, I tend to find Kefka slightly over-rated. One of the things I liked about FF13 is that there isn't a central "human" villain. Pretty much the whole world is out to get the protagonists.
Ever since FF7, I have bought new FF games as soon as they are released, without even bothering to look at review scores. I'm including at least one of the re-releases or remakes of 1-6 in that assessment. There are very few franchises or developers I accord that treatment to. The Gran Turismo games and Bioware titles are probably the only other examples.
Following 2010, which saw both FF13 and FF14 released, the series will not get this treatment from me in future. The games get to go through normal pre-purchase scrutiny and if I don't like the look of what I see, I'll have no hesitations whatsoever about leaving them on the store shelf.
There are two possible interpretations for this. The first, and kindest explanation, is that they have realised that they created some interesting fiction for FF13, but that they badly mishandled the game in general. They now want another stab at telling a story in the game-world they created, but with the game done better this time and with a proper ending to the story.
I could live with that. FF13 actually has a very decent plot for most of its duration (certainly the darkest of the FF-series plots, darker even than 6). The problem is that the gameplay is terrible and that they write themselves into a corner with the story at the end, such that they can only resolve it through a massive deus ex machina which doesn't fit with any of the narrative they'd built to that point. If they want to take another stab at the game world and do it right this time, then I'm ok with that.
If, on the other hand, they're just panicking about Square-Enix's currently precarious financial position and looking for a quick and easy cash-cow that they can pull together with unused assets from the original game (remember, they apparently created enough artwork to make a game twice as long as what they eventually released), then I'm a bit more skeptical. I am not playing another game which amounts to running down a corridor for 25 hours doing identical trash fights, breaking out into a small square room for a couple of hours, and then going back to the corridor for a final 5 hour slog.
Square-Enix have lost the plot badly during this console generation. They were masterful with the PS2 (I still think Kingdom Hearts 2 was the best game ever released for that platform), but these days, they seem to make a bunch of shovelware low-budget titles and to completely mishandle their big-budget ones. They said for FF13 that it just wasn't practical to do towns and sidequests on the current hardware generation, due to development costs. I hate to break it to them, but Mistwalker had already done it with Blue Dragon and (in particular) Lost Odyssey, the latter of which leaves FF13 in the dust.
Somebody really needs to go around S-E's offices with a hammer and smash all of their DS, PSP and Wii devkits. The company was at its best in previous cycles when its focus was on developing games for the upper-end hardware. They need to rebuild their focus on the 360, PS3 (and PC) and actually show us that they're still capable of that.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't mean in terms of the technology. To the average consumer, provided the technology is "good enough", it doesn't really matter. What I meant was in terms of the user experience.
The PS3 and the Xbox 360 have:
- a very similar games library with fewer exclusive games than in any previous cycle;
- exclusives which often tend to act as mirror images of each other (eg. Halo vs Killzone, Gran Turismo vs Forza);
- controllers with some variations in shape, but exactly the same number and arrangement of buttons;
- very similar online stores; and
- broadly similar graphical capabilities, as reflected in most games.
Compare with any previous console generation and it's hard to find two which ran so close to each other in these terms.
Well, on the basis that pretty much any gaming console these days is a walled garden (at best), the answer is a resounding "maybe"?
It wouldn't actually hurt to have another entrant into the games console business (even if this proposal doesn't look too much like a console). Sony and MS's current offerings are actually unbelievably similar - I don't think I've ever known a console generation where there was less to actually separate two competitors. At the same time, Nintendo look increasingly like a successful toy manufacturer, who have feet of clay when it comes to actually making interesting games - and in attracting decent third party developers.
A credible new entrant (sorry, Infinium Labs) could potentially give the industry a shot in the arm. Apple may or may not be the people to do it - there's a hell of a lot I don't like about the company and its principles. However, their recent approach to software pricing indicates that they might at least bring something interesting to the table.
I think I disagree with this (not 100%, but certainly with the core message). In the last console generation, the Gamecube was certainly capable of moving graphics on a par with those of the Xbox and better, in theory, than those of the PS2 (though Square and a few other PS2 developers managed to do truly incredible things with that hardware). The decision to go for a low-powered Wii was, I think, nothing more than a bit of marketing positioning - which paid off handsomly in the short term but is now looking unwise as a longer term move unless Nintendo can develop a successor).
As for innovation and creativity - I'm sorry, but Nintendo are the last place I'd look for that in game design. Nintendo have made some interesting and novel toys - like their motion control - but their game design is stuck somewhere between 1993 and 1996. They have a reputation as innovative, but in reality, they long since retreated to their comfort zone.
At the same time, we've seen genuine innovation elsewhere, on other platforms. Valkyria Chronicles, for the PS3, was the single most innovative game I've seen in the last decade. The Mass Effect games are a synthesis of action and role-playing done in a way that nobody had previously tried. Portal pretty much created a whole new genre of dark-sci-fi-comedy-puzzle-fpses. And there's plenty of innovation in the $2 phone-game market that has Nintendo so worked up.
It's true that the lower Wii development costs attract shovelware to the system - just as they do the handhelds and, in a slightly different sense, to the PC. However, I think there's also the fact that Nintendo have themselves set low expectations over production values and general quality on the Wii. How many Wii games - both first-party and third-party - use an annoying series of tweak and wibble sounds instead of voice acting? Blame Nintendo for that - they set the pace. And look at how the motion control gimmick itself has been devalued over time - with Nintendo leading the charge. Mario Galaxy 2, which should be a Wii flagship (and which is undoubtedly one of the better games on the platform) relegates motion control to a bit of IR-pointer work and mapping "waggle" to a button. If you set the bar this low yourself, then don't be surprised when the third party developers follow - and your system gets a reputation for crap.
It's a pity, really, because the few really decent third party games that come out for the Wii tend to disappear into sales oblivion. I always feel sorry for the (excellent) Dead Space Extraction, which only managed to sell a few thousand copies and ended up being rescued by a PS3 port.
Nintendo seems to have developed a pricing problem all of its own of late, which has nothing to do with $2 phone games. I'm pretty sure this has contributed to Nintendo's current profits slump, at a time when the company should be using its large installed base for the Wii to really rake off the cash.
The company just seems to have some really, really odd ideas of what a game should cost. It's most notable in the Wii's online store, where in the UK, direct, unmodified ports of 25 year old arcade games (many of which are hardly timeless classics) often tend to be priced in the £6-£8 range. Things are mildly better in the US, I believe, but the prices seem out of whack.
I absolutely don't want to hold up the Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network Store as paragons of value for money, but they certainly offer a better deal than Nintendo's online shop (and have much more consumer-friendly terms of service as well, which link games to an account rather than a console). Compared to the classic game packs you can pick up on Steam and other PC services such as GOG, Nintendo's pricing looks positively extortionate. If Reggie wants to talk about games that would be over-priced at $2, he should look at the stuff like Exed Exes and Commando in his own online store - which he's trying to sell for four times that price.
Things aren't much better on the boxed-game front either. As we get further into this console generation, the general quality gap between Wii games and games for the other consoles and the PC is widening. There are a few honorable exceptions, but most of the Wii games released these days tend to feel short and shallow. And yet despite this, and despite their increasingly painful graphical shortcomings (with most Wii games still struggling to match the best the PS2 had to offer), the games tend to be priced at roughly the same level as games for other platforms (usually a few $ behind the PS3/360 games and a few $ above the PC games).
If I were Nintendo, faced with the dramatic profits slump they've seen, I'd be looking to boost volumes of sales by pitching more boxed games at the more realistic $30 (or £20 in the UK) price-point and slashing the prices of titles in the online store. If you sell more games, you keep people using their Wiis. And if you keep people using their Wiis, they will buy more games for it. Sony managed to achieve that virtuous circle on the PS2, but despite their installed base lead, Nintendo haven't managed it this generation.
Yes and no.
I think you're absolutely right to say that copyright has gotten out of control. I think pretty much anybody who reads slashdot regularly would acknowledge that.
However, that's not to say that there isn't a case for copyright, in its original form. I think what the comments on this thread - which at first glance look quite uncharacteristic for slashdot - show is that a lot of people have a gut instinct for what is right and wrong in relation to copyright (which may vary from person to person) and that for most people, the submitter falls on the wrong side of it.
Tetris is still relatively recent (less than 30 years old) and the submitter doesn't seem to have actually tried to add any value. My instinct is that in a world with good and sensible copyright laws, this would fall on the wrong side of them. The problem is that in the absence of such laws and the absence of a sensible political debate on said laws, we're left just feeling a bit muddled about it.
Which is a bit like saying that since both the PS2 and 360 have DVD drives, you should be able to put a PS2 game into a 360 and just run it.
Check out the hardware specs for the 3DS; it's running on very different hardware to the original DS.
Erm... no.
Games developed for the 3DS will be designed to run on the 3DS's hardware, which, while still relatively low-powered, is substantially more powerful than the DS/DSi. In gaming terms, "backwards compatibility" generally refers to the ability of a newer console to run games that were designed for a previous generation (and the 3DS has this - it will run DS games).
Of course, given that every Mario game since Mario 64 has basically been the same, you will probably be able to get away with just breaking out the Mario 64 DS cart and then pretending really hard that it's a new game. Same should work for Zelda.
If I was engaged in fighting a war, or a counter-insurgency operation, then I know one thing. There is nothing I would love more than for my enemy to be using the Call of Duty games as training sims. Just think of all the fantastic lessons they could learn from them:
- Don't worry about taking a few bullets. As long as you can duck behind cover, you'll be perfectly fine in 5 seconds or so.
- Charging through an artillery barrage, mine-field or other incredibly dangerous intensely dangerous situation is absolutely fine, provided you can work out the precise sequence of steps that the developers wanted you to take. There'll be convenient cover every 10 paces or so.
- Enemy soldiers will employ a combination of two cunning tactics. Some of them will run straight towards you, firing sporadically. Others will hide behind a piece of cover, which they will stick their heads above at predictable 3 second intervals. Don't worry too much about numbers; you should be able to take down a dozen or so at a time.
- If all else fails, hole up on a hill against overwhelming waves of enemies. It might get sticky for a while, but after 5 minutes or so, stirring music will play and reinforcements will arrive to save you.
I was with you for your first sentence. You're absolutely right, people do have an unfortunate tendancy to come up with excuses for the perpetrator in these cases. Unfortunately, you then go on to ruin it by coming out with another excuse - "the Government made me".
I think I've come to the conclusion that some people are just evil, murderous fuckwits and will sieze upon any opportunity to cause death and destruction. Free will and all that.
The Russian media must clearly be correct. Nobody ever attacked an airport before.
This is a strong contender for "lowest point in the history of journalism about video games". At the very least, it's tied with the whole MS Flight Sim and 9/11 "controversy". It's hard to see it as anything but an insult to those who died or were injured in the incident.
You're making a number of assumptions here that I don't think can be supported. First, we know nothing about the reason for the ban. Nobody's said. There's a tweet from MS saying that the kid's mother has been informed of the reasons for the decision. In fact, there's evidence that MS do have a review/appeal process; there have been cases of false-positives in the past, which have been over-turned. However, where such false positives occur, they tend to affect a large number of people and become news in their own right.
Second, you are assuming that MS is using some kind of stats tracking for its anti-cheat. I do have experience with anti-cheat and I can tell you now that for skill-based games, relying on stats tracking for any kind of anti-cheat, let alone one that is allowed to institute bans, is absolutely ludicrous. Nobody with any brains is doing this. MS are not doing this. What happens if you end up with a top-end gamer who jumps online for a quick match and gets put into a game with a bunch of newbies?
There are a few instances where you can use stats-based automatic tracking. In strategy games, it is possible to calculate the maximum possible level of resource acquisition. If somebody is exceeding this, they're cheating. But that is absolutely not the same as looking at the kills/deaths ratio in an fps. Clever games these days have a matchmaking system which looks at a spectacular kills/deaths ratio and doesn't say "this person is cheating" but rather "I will match this person against people with similar ratios in future".
I'm also surprised that you are willing to grant this kid elite powers of gaming supremacy, but not the ability to hack around with his console.
As you say, public server adminning does tend to throw up a higher number of issues than tournament adminning. However, it is still generally 100% possible to have a review and appeals mechanism, particularly for admin-detected cheating. If your customers are paying £40/year to play on your servers, you are going to have a review mechanism at the very least. Of course, my experience is that the majority of the time, the people who get hit by anti-cheat measures are indeed cheating (not true in every instance, but it does generally hold up). As most people who get a ban will appeal, this means that most appeals get rejected. Which in turn gives the impression that there isn't an appeals mechanism.
This is true these days. However, I'm really talking here about the 2000-2003 time-span, when aimbots were rather less sophisticated. They evolved and improved over the time I was involved, for sure. As a league admin, you absolutely needed to stay on top of the cheating scene so that you knew what you were up against. However, at the time I gave it up due to work committments in 2003, it was still possible to spot Counter-Strike aimbots by careful scrutiny of replays.
Wallhacks were harder, as there was a good degree of psychology involved. For instance, good players generally knew which walls and crates people tended to hide behind and to scan accordingly. We only ever did one "admin detected" ban for a wallhack, in a very, very blatant case (in a low-division match) where a player was not only targetting other players through walls, but happily tracking them and following their movement. We had a few similar cases where the evidence just wasn't quite strong enough.
I have no idea what goes on behind the scenes at Microsoft and how they detect and handle cases of cheating. However, for quite a few years during my postgrad days and early years of employment, I was involved on the admin-side of the (PC) online gaming scene, and spent a lot of time dealing with cheaters. I have a few thoughts based on that:
A ban for just "being too good" is highly improbable, assuming that MS have even mildly competent people working on this. Back when I was running a (major, UK-based) Counter-Strike league, the kindest description of my own level of play would have been "slightly better than average". There were players in the league who could have beaten me with their eyes closed. My admin team contained people who had a range of ability levels, but none of them were top-tier players.
Adminning top-division games was therefore something that had to be taken very seriously. Accusations of cheating were always rife in CS, though in my experience the actual level of cheating, outside of a relatively small proportion of badly adminned public servers, was never as high as it was commonly perceived to be. Making sure that average players were able to tell whether a top level player was cheating or was just plain good was, therefore, one of the main challenges for an admin team and one that was taken very seriously indeed.
We had a number of principles in place regarding accusations of cheating (or independent admin suspicions when no accusation had been made). These were:
1) Any flags raised by the Valve Anti-Cheat were treated as reliable. If VAC says a player is cheating, they are kicked from the match and the league immediately. They can appeal, but would need to show very convincing evidence that there had been a false-positive (nobody ever managed this, all we ever got was "OMG my brother installed cheats").
2) Knowing that Valve Anti-Cheat was, at the time, fairly easily defeated, admins were expected to know the signs of cheating and to watch for these. We had a library of video clips that all new admins were expected to study, some of which showed players who were using wallhacks or aimbots, others which showed clips that were just of very good players pulling off shots that looked suspicious, but which were recorded at LANs and verified as legitimate.
3) If an admin suspected that a player in a game he was refereeing was cheating, he did not stop the match or kick players. No bans were given at this stage.
4) Admins recorded all matches as a matter of policy (both for anti-cheating and because players liked to download the replays later). The admin of the "dodgy" match flagged a concern in private to the senior admins.
5) 3 other admins, including at least 1 of the senior admins (usually me) scrutinised the demo from the alleged cheater's point of view. There were reliable signs of cheating (as opposed to good or lucky play) that could consistently be spotted. One classic, though by no means the only sign, was an instant-flick moment of the crosshair to an enemy, completely out of line with that player's usual mouse-sensitivity.
6) If 2 of the 3 other admins (with one of the two being the senior admin) agreed that there was cheating, then the player was banned from the league and the results of games they had played in were overturned (subject to appeal). If there was no consensus, then the original admin who raised the concern was thanked for their diligence (there was no harm in privately flagging suspicious activity - I always encouraged it) and no further action was taken.
In around 75% of cases, all 3 reviewers would agree that there had been no cheating. In around 95% of cases, 2 of the 3 agreed that there had been no cheating. We averaged around 3 player bans per season, of which 2 were usually as a result of "technical" (ie. VAC) detections. I am confident that none of the "admin" detections that were confirmed were false-positives.
My point is that this is the degree of scrutiny we applied to what was, for most of its
Well done to Gearbox for finishing this off - it would have been a sin if it didn't see the light of day in the end. The previews look good and I'm looking forward to picking it up when it reaches Europe on 6 May (PC version, of course, the Duke doesn't need some stinking console). I'm hoping for a shooter which emphasises funky weapons, crazy situations and bad jokes over "balance" and other hardcore trappings. Back when I was a student, DN3D was always the game for a fun blast while Quakeworld was for whose who took things a bit more seriously.
Anyway, Gearbox, how about you get cracking on Aliens: Colonial Marines now - or will that be done "when it's ready"?
Like I said in my post, the PS3 has the capability to region lock but does not use it. You sometimes see region codes on the boxes, but I have no idea why, because the games are not locked. I have PS3 games here, with US and EU region labels on the boxes, both of which work just fine on the same (unmodified) PS3.
Taking your three requirements in turn and looking across all of the current "big" console platforms:
1) PS3 games aren't region locked. Ever. The console technically has the capability to implement this, but it has never been turned on. Sony won't certify region locked games. That said, some games are released for specific markets without translations. Unfortunately, this is probably unavoidable; the margins on "small" games in a lot of markets (particularly Japan) are pretty thin and requiring every game to be released with (at the very least) an English translation could kill development in many cases.
Microsoft leave the decision of whether or not to region lock games up to individual publishers. In the early years of the 360, a majority of games were region locked. These days, around 75-80% of 360 games released in the US and Europe are not region locked (and it is fairly easy to find out which are). Japanese 360 games do still tend to be region locked, though even there the balance is shifting towards liberalisation. Microsoft never region lock the games that they publish themselves.
Wii games are region locked. Always. Nintendo won't certify without it. They like to maintain control over what gets released (and played) in specific territories.
2) Third party controllers and the like do exist for the PS3. That said, various security updates over the last year or so have shut some of these down and a few older 3rd party controllers (though not all) will stop working if you update to the latest firmware (which is pretty evil). However, the PS3 does use a standard hard disk, so you can swap the default PS3 for a bigger one without having to buy expensive Sony hardware. You can plug any old keyboard and mouse into a PS3, if you want (and a small number of games will support this).
There are a few third party controllers for the 360; they are not outright forbidden, but are not officially supported either. Hard disks, wireless networking adapters etc are all over-priced MS branded stuff; no 3rd party options here. Again, you can plug in a standard keyboard and mouse, though MS do offer their own "official" versions as well.
There are a tiny number of third party controllers for the Wii; Nintendo tends to strongly disapprove, though. There are plenty of third-party "peripherals" - plastic shells that hold a Wii-mote and supposedly enhance the experience in various games. Given that these are just dumb pieces of plastic containing no electronics, there is nothing that Nintendo can do about any of these, though it would probably like to, given the ridiculous prices it tends to ask for its own offerings (given these really are just moulded plastic).
3) Unless you are seriously good at both hardware and software, you are not going to be doing this for any of the current consoles.
So in short, none of the 3 consoles meets all of your tests, though if we were giving scores, the PS3 would get something like 1.8/3 (it comes most of the way on your second point, but not all the way), the 360 would get 1/3 (giving it a half point for a general drift away from region locking) and the Wii would score around 0.2/3 (minor credit because you can get third party accessories if you look hard enough).
What's not in the summary or TFA is that this is the first handheld to be "fully" region locked. The PSP was region locked for movies, while the DSi had region locking for the online stores. But this is the first handheld where titles bought off store shelves will all be region locked. There's been evidence for some time that Nintendo are the most anti-consumer of the three console developers, but I think this is probably the final proof.
Combined with the console's price-point, this really does make me wonder where Nintendo are going with this. They've put it at a price tag which, like the PSP, is going to put it out of reach of most of the playground demographic, at least until Christmas. And yet among non-Japanese grown-up gamers, one of the biggest uses of handhelds is for when you go travelling. I'm not going to sit at home and play on a handheld, in general, when I have proper consoles and a gaming PC in my flat. Why should I peer at a tiny screen and cramp my hands up for a handheld's controls when I could be gaming in comfort? And my commute? I suspect that like many people who live in or near a major city, my commute on public transport is just too crowded and too rattly for handheld gaming. When travelling abroad, however, handhelds come into their own, and that's when I've gotten most of the use out of my PSP and DS. But if I can't pick up a game when I'm out in the US for the flight back to the UK? That's not going to make me happy.
The handheld market is huge in Japan. Rather less so in wider Asia, I think, particularly in Korea which remains very PC-centric. To be honest, I partly suspect that the handheld market is so big in Japan because Japanese gamers tend, going off sales statistics, to be a little... shall we say... insular in their tastes, meaning they tend to stick to games from their domestic developers. And what their own developers give them are handheld games. I think the reaction to the announcement that Valkyria Chronicles 3 would be a PSP game shows that a lot of Japanese gamers have no particular deep-rooted affection for the handhelds - they just go where "their" games are.
You are absolutely 100% correct though about the "big name developer" issue. There really seems to be a culture in Japanese games development of venerating the "big men" of the industry and never, ever deviating from what they do or trying to evolve it over time. This is driving Nintendo into the ground and I think it's becoming a serious issue for other developers; Polyphony Digital particularly sticks in my mind, as Gran Turismo 5 has some deeply dated design elements that seem indicative of a similar culture.
I'm not sure whether this is a cultural phenomenon or rather a reflection of the fact that every time some individual Western developer starts to build up their own personal hype in a similar way, fate and hubris usually conspire to land them flat on their backside. I mean, John Romero was getting that kind of following; then Daikatana happened. Warren Spectre came out of Ion Storm smelling of roses thanks to Deus Ex, but has had enough mishaps since then that he's never really become an object of industry veneration. CliffyB... well... he has a string of successes to his name, but he also seems to delight in taking a persona that wins him at least as many enemies as friends. Meanwhile, if you look at the really successful Western developers of recent years; I'm not sure how many people could even name the founders of Bioware or Bethesda without jumping to wikipedia.
Yeah, that's right, and it highlights what is possibly Square-Enix's biggest problem (and I say this as a former fanboy) - they suck at retaining talent. Those external shops who are doing the development on the better games that Square-Enix publishes - half of them are Square-Enix (or often Squaresoft) veterans, who worked for the company back when it was still making good games (and I count FF12 as the last really good game that they put out).
Look at Mistwalker, who put out the best Final Fantasy game of this console generation (even though it happened to be called Lost Odyssey). The credits for their games reads like a "Who's Who" of the glory days of Squaresoft (though even Mistwalker seem to be losing the plot a bit now). Square-Enix need to work hard to attract people like that back.
You're misreading what I said.
Like it or not, FF13 was starved of resource by Square-Enix. But as any project manager will tell you, there is more than one kind of resource. FF13 had plenty of budget. It had no shortage of artistic talent. But it was deprived of the company's core games development talent and of any sensible kind of project management. Go read the interviews that followed FF13's launch, when Square-Enix realised it had a turkey on its hands and began the blame game (which we've seen even more pronounced on FF14). The game had a huge number of artists working for many years to produce assets for the game - artists who just aren't needed for the low-budget graphically primative handheld and Wii games. What it didn't have was anybody putting work into developing game mechanics or even a storyline to hold the game together. This is why we got a game that was graphically beautiful (on the PS3, at least), but which just did not work as a game.
Meanwhile, the people who knew how to design games were off doing stuff like 356/2 Days on the DS. Now sure, those games have some pretty neat gameplay elements, but they are always going to be constrained by the limitations of the hardware. It's not just graphics; a lack of RAM in these systems constrains the size of the play areas you can use and so on (hence the mission-based structure that a lot of these games tend to take).
The results of Square-Enix's strategy have been plain in the performance of their games lately and their financial results for the last year or so (for which see google). The handheld and Wii games get ok-ish reviews and do not exactly set the charts on fire in terms of sales (they tend to do ok-ish in Japan and underwhelmingly in the West); they don't cost much to develop, but they're not exactly setting the world on fire. At the same time, the big-budget main-series FF games take forever to develop (remember, no effective project management) and get panned on release. If I remember, FF13 had pretty decent initial sales, but these fell off a cliff as word of mouth basically torpedoed the game below the waterline.
In short, Square-Enix does need to put its resource focus back onto its big-budget AAA titles; but by resource, I mean development talent, not money.
As for Japanese gaming falling behind the West; wake up and smell the coffee. It's clear you're a Nintendo fanboy - and one of the minority who hasn't been through the disillusionment process yet. Don't worry, it's not necessarily a permanent condition; I was a Square-Enix fanboy until the last couple of years cured me.
As a games developer, Nintendo have fallen comprehensively behind the West (and have now realised this and are trying to catch up; witness Metroid: Other M, though I wouldn't categorise that game as a success). They've fallen into another common Japanese gaming trap; failing to identify which elements of their old titles to preserve and which to discard. Hence we still get the antiquated lives system in Mario Galaxy 2, and hence we still get the same damned plot over and over in Zelda. You may like it, but the rest of the world is moving on. Nintendo's market these days are nostalgic 40 year old neckbeards who don't really like games, and new-entrants to gaming. I suspect they're not getting much in the way of repeat custom. Still, as I say, Other M (which does try to adapt elements from Western gaming in a fairly major way) is a first sign that they have, belatedly recognised this and are trying to adapt. Sure, Other M isn't great in itself, but it's a sign that there's hope for them.
Still, it's unfair to harp on Nintendo. Other Japanese studios have been just as guilty of failing to adapt to the current generation; even those who had some early successes. Look at Sega; they put out the sublimely good Valkyria Chronicles, which was one of the absolute stand-out games of the current console hardware generation, which married artistry and technical prowess perfectly and which managed (almost uniquely for this console generation)
I think that's right to some extent. Thinking back, there were certainly Western developers who took an interest in the PS1 in a way that we hadn't seen on the SNES or Genesis. I know there was a sort of intervening console generation between those two, but my memory is highly hazy - certainly neither I nor any of my friends owned anything from then. The words "Sega Saturn" do stir up some inexplicable feelings of disappointment and regret, however.
I think you've correctly identified two of the three big franchises of the last console generation; the third is, of course, Final Fantasy. The West did start to make a strong challenge during the last cycle; Bioware's push onto the Xbox was probably the biggest case in point. But I often got a feeling last cycle that developers like Bioware and Bungie were taking games that had PC (or Mac!) roots and pushing them onto console hardware. Just as we saw the PC getting "nasty console ports", the consoles of the last generation had no shortage of games that felt like "nasty PC ports".
This generation, the Western developers have just felt more... comfortable... with the console platforms. Ok, they've not made inroads on the Wii, really, but the Wii is of declining importance as this cycle goes on and its hardware falls too far behind the curve to be of interest to a lot of developers. Games like the Gears of War series on the 360 and the Ratchet & Clank games on the PS3 have felt like bona fide console games and have defined this generation in a way that the West never quite managed last time around.
The high end titles have suffered (13 and 14) because there has clearly been a lack of development focus on them. It's clear that Squenix's emphasis has been on bad-to-middling handheld titles, like the (entirely pointless) Dissidia games, the Kingdom Hearts handheld titles and rubbish like Crystal Chronicles on the Wii. The company was doing just fine right through to FF12 (which was difficult to get into, but pretty awesome when you did). It really only is with the advent of the current hardware generation that their output has gone to hell.
It's symptomatic of wider Japanese gaming, I think. Outside of a few exceptions, Japanese developers have never really got to grips with the PS3, 360 and the modern PC in a way that the West has. As a result, I think Japanese console games now lag behind their Western counterparts to roughly the same extent that they led them by in the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube generation.
My concern about building something quick on the unused assets from FF13 was that we would, once again, end up with a game designed by artists rather than by games developers. If you read the post-release interviews with Square-Enix about FF13, it's clear that they had guys in a room creating artwork for years, with no idea of how it was going to come together as a game. The storyline, battle system and character development was all a last minute thing. If Square-Enix are sat there now saying "wow, we have a lot of unused art, let's cobble something together again", then there's no guarantee it will work out better than FF13 did. They don't need to do a new engine or anything; FF13 probably looks about as pretty as things are going to get on the current console hardware generation. What they do need to do is sit down and design a game, and then work out from that what artwork and other assets they need.
Actually, on FF6 vs other FF games, I tend to find Kefka slightly over-rated. One of the things I liked about FF13 is that there isn't a central "human" villain. Pretty much the whole world is out to get the protagonists.
Ever since FF7, I have bought new FF games as soon as they are released, without even bothering to look at review scores. I'm including at least one of the re-releases or remakes of 1-6 in that assessment. There are very few franchises or developers I accord that treatment to. The Gran Turismo games and Bioware titles are probably the only other examples.
Following 2010, which saw both FF13 and FF14 released, the series will not get this treatment from me in future. The games get to go through normal pre-purchase scrutiny and if I don't like the look of what I see, I'll have no hesitations whatsoever about leaving them on the store shelf.
There are two possible interpretations for this. The first, and kindest explanation, is that they have realised that they created some interesting fiction for FF13, but that they badly mishandled the game in general. They now want another stab at telling a story in the game-world they created, but with the game done better this time and with a proper ending to the story.
I could live with that. FF13 actually has a very decent plot for most of its duration (certainly the darkest of the FF-series plots, darker even than 6). The problem is that the gameplay is terrible and that they write themselves into a corner with the story at the end, such that they can only resolve it through a massive deus ex machina which doesn't fit with any of the narrative they'd built to that point. If they want to take another stab at the game world and do it right this time, then I'm ok with that.
If, on the other hand, they're just panicking about Square-Enix's currently precarious financial position and looking for a quick and easy cash-cow that they can pull together with unused assets from the original game (remember, they apparently created enough artwork to make a game twice as long as what they eventually released), then I'm a bit more skeptical. I am not playing another game which amounts to running down a corridor for 25 hours doing identical trash fights, breaking out into a small square room for a couple of hours, and then going back to the corridor for a final 5 hour slog.
Square-Enix have lost the plot badly during this console generation. They were masterful with the PS2 (I still think Kingdom Hearts 2 was the best game ever released for that platform), but these days, they seem to make a bunch of shovelware low-budget titles and to completely mishandle their big-budget ones. They said for FF13 that it just wasn't practical to do towns and sidequests on the current hardware generation, due to development costs. I hate to break it to them, but Mistwalker had already done it with Blue Dragon and (in particular) Lost Odyssey, the latter of which leaves FF13 in the dust.
Somebody really needs to go around S-E's offices with a hammer and smash all of their DS, PSP and Wii devkits. The company was at its best in previous cycles when its focus was on developing games for the upper-end hardware. They need to rebuild their focus on the 360, PS3 (and PC) and actually show us that they're still capable of that.