This is interesting, but I seriously can't help feeling that the guy comes across as frankly hysterical. I know marketing guys are supposed to be enthusiastic, but he sounds like a parody of himself at times. Some of what he says is undoubtedly true; the section about the PSX and the Eye-Toy certainly sums up what happened pretty well, although personally I feel that the PSX was doomed from the start by Sony's rather erratic level of committment to it. However, a lot of the other stuff he said strikes me as unadulterated rubbish. I mean, I'm really, really glad that he told me Mario 64 invented 3d graphics. In my own foolish little way, I'd believed that my PC had been doing them in one form or another for years before the N64 even existed (and frequently far better than the N64 did them).
Also, if innovation or quality or whatever all stems from the controller, I'd love to know why the Gamecube has far and away the nastiest of the controllers for the current generation consoles (well... if we count the S-controller as the X-box controller, rather than the original 2-tonne beast). A malformed right analogue stick, awkwardly placed and erratically sized buttons and a button shortage that makes a lot of cross-platform titles unfeasible has added *sooooo* much to my gaming experience. He has a point about the 4 controllers thing; the lack of that on the PS2 is a serious flaw, next to the X-box and the Cube. To say that Nintendo has cornered the market on interface innovation is an outright lie, though. I've been seeing innovative controllers on the PC since time immemorial (ranging from my old Thrustmaster F-16 to a bizarre turtle-device which lets you control games by tilting the shell) and of the recent console-based controller innovations (dance-mats, eye-toy, pop'n boards), none of the most notable have come from Nintendo.
Moving onto games, I'm slightly curious as to why he spends so long talking about the Game Gear, given how long-dead the thing is. I'm pretty sure that the real causes of its decline and death were its size and price (both of the unit and of the games), which made it implausible as a hand-held console. As to the type of games people play on a handheld console, I think this is a little more complex than he makes out. Sure, quick-blast games have a market on consoles, but I think that more serious efforts can also work. Hell, Nintendo's biggest success in the handheld market of recent years has been Pokemon, which is essentially a Final Fantasy game with some of the cutscenes stripped out. Not really the kind of thing which works for a quick blast, but the actual core Pokemon games (as opposed to Stadium etc) are only available on a handheld console.
Which brings me onto this issue of "transportability". I think he's drawing exactly the wrong lessons here. Ports have, in the past, had a pretty poor track-record. Largely, this was because they either tried to move an arcade game where the gameplay wasn't fun and the attraction was the technology onto a home platform (eg. Afterburner) or else the ports to many platforms were done in a hurry and were deeply flawed compared to the original game (eg. Street Fighter 2). These days, ports and cross-platform titles work much better; Grand Theft Auto 3/VC was ported off its original platforms onto the X-Box in a manner that actually improved on the original (sharper graphics, custom soundtracks). Resident Evil survived its transition to the Gamecube pretty well. Of course, Nintendo's attitude here has often been a bit odd. I do wonder whether the story of the N64's unsuccessful struggle for dominance against the PS1 would have turned out differently had Nintendo actually made a proper Pokemon game for the thing. With the Dual-Screen, they're actually making it much harder for them to go cross-platform on any of the games which use the touch-screen, as equivalents don't exist on other platforms.
The upcoming DS vs PSP battle is going to be interesting. Nintendo are clearly more worried than they have been by any of their previous r
Yeah, I realised my Keeper/Master error the moment I clicked submit. However, I strongly disagree that these were his only two good games. Syndicate was absolutely revolutionary and also had perhaps the most satisfying weapons of any game ever. Theme Park has created an entire spin-off genre and was a surprisingly competent business management sim which managed to marry ideas that had existed before (with some modifications) to a concept that actually made mainstream gamers want to play it. Oh, and Powermonger was pretty fun as well, although I've got to admit that it's been a loooooong time since I played it, so I don't remember it all that well.
It sounds like you're just bitter because you didn't like Dungeon Keeper. I take your point that it felt at times like a standard RTS, but it did offer many features that were new to the genre. You couldn't control large numbers of units directly, but you could possess individual creatures and fight through their eyes. The experience system for the creatures can be seen as an early precursor of the heroes system we've seen in more recent titles such as Warcraft 3. In many ways, Dungeon Keeper was a long way ahead of its time.
You're certainly in the minority for having liked Black & White, although you're entitled to your opinion and it'd be a boring world if we all agreed.
I think the critics' reaction to Black & White highlighted a lot of what was wrong with the video gaming press at the time (and perhaps continues to be today). When a huge new title came out, there was an overwhelming urge to be the first to have the full review. For the monthly gaming mags, this wasn't necessarily a problem if they had a full month to play the game before their next issue. However, if it arrived a few days before the deadline, then they had to hurry. With online gaming sites, beating the competitors to print can mean reviewing a game in a matter of hours (just look at the recent Doom 3 reviews and the difference in review quality between those who tried to get out first and those, like IGN, who held off for a couple of days).
Black & White was good fun for the first few hours. I found it was only about 6 hours play that I started getting seriously annoyed with the game and that its flaws started to show up. Chances are, many of the first reviewers were stopping playing and starting writing before this point. I remember that several gaming magazines expressed regrets in later issues that they'd ranked the game so highly and said that if they'd waited longer, the reviews would have been more balanced.
I read a lot of "Peter Molyneux sucks/doesn't deliver/is nothing but a shameless self-publicist comments in this thread. I have to say that I disagree entirely.
It is, I feel, beyond all doubt that Black & White was not a very good game. Indeed, it was a pretty damned awful game, with tedious mechanics, some serious flaws in the camera system and an underlying concept which turns out not to have been as much fun as it should have been. However, it *was* a serious attempt to be innovative and to do something different. How often do we get heartfelt pleas in the comments threads on slashdot for games designers to be more innovative? How often do we get rabid fanboys shouting "I only play Nintendo/Sony/Nintendo/X-Box/Nintendo/iD/Nintendo games because they're the only people who innovate"?
This is why so many designers are reluctant to innovate. Innovation is an easy thing to get wrong. The over-riding impression I got while playing Black & White was that it had come very, very close to being an excellent game, but had somehow gone awry just inches short of the goal and detoured into the land of awfulness. I don't blame Molyneux for this; as I say, innovation is hard to get right.
I hate it when people pre-judge a game before it appears and I'm a long way from being a Molyneux fanboy, but you have to admit that other than Black & White, the guy has one hell of track record. Look at Populous, Magic Carpet and Dungeon Master; all games which did things that nobody had done before and none of which were surefire commercial hits. Molyneux may have made mistakes, but nobody could reasonably accuse him of being a Derek Smart figure, built entirely on bullshit and never having delivered a decent product. You can't even accuse him of being a John Romero figure, with most of the notable successes being based on collaborations where many now feel the real talent was in the other partners. I say give the guy an break and go into fable with an open mind.
This highlights what was, for me, one of the biggest problems with Doom 3, namely the fact that iD confused "what's cool at first" with "what's cool for the entire 20+ hour game". Not being able to have a pistol and a weapon drawn is neat and scary at first, taking me right back to the original Silent Hill. After about 5 hours, it's started to get more annoying than scary because, of course, the combat is a much bigger and more frequent aspect of the game than it was in Silent Hill. When you get to and they take your flashlight away, it's back to playing "bump the wall to find the way forward", which took me right back to the old Eye of the Beholder games (in a bad way).
It's not just this trick that gets over-used. The first time an imp spawns behind you during a fight, it scares the hell out of you. By the 20th time, it's getting old. By the 200th time, you can turn around and shoot the imp with your eyes closed.
Doom 3 is a good game... probably the best actual game we've seen from iD since the original Doom. However, I also agree with the criticisms in the IGN review (8.9/10 strikes me as pretty much bang-on, as scores go).
In fairness to X-Box Live, the fees are pretty miniscule (30 quid a year here in the UK) and the quality of service is generally excellent, far eclipsing the quality of the PS2's online offerings (aside from FFXI, which is a slightly odd case).
What *will* annoy me is if I have to pay to play EA games online on the X-Box on top of X-Box Live.
This seems to me to be a fairly obvious example of "preaching to the choir". The guy was deliberately playing to those most likely to be watching the press conference, namely the Nintendo hardcore crowd. Quite probably, he enjoys getting such an ecstatic response on a personal level. However, playing to your immediate crowd on an occasion such as this is frequently a very bad idea. Look at the debates surrounding the recent US political conferences. The pundits were quite right in saying that the candidates, in order to be a success, would need to play to a wider audience than the party faithful.
Right now, the vast "middle-ground" of the console market belongs firmly to Sony. The X-Box and the Gamecube are largely locked in separate niches, or, to continue the political analogy, confined to the opposite extremes of the political spectrum. Microsoft at least seem to realise this... recent signs are that they're trying to diversify their games and move away from the PC-style fpses that have been their bread and butter to date. Nintendo, on the other hand, haven't really shown such a tendancy yet. As the sometimes quite shocking level of pro-Nintendo bias on slashdot shows, there is an audience for Nintendo's titles and ethos. However, this audience is largely detached from the gaming mainstream. The challenge for Nintendo over the next console generation needs to be to expand their fanbase with a wider range of titles and genres, while keeping their hardcore satisfied. Providing you encourage third party developers properly, there's no real limit to the number of titles for your system and no reason why development of your "core" titles has to suffer. Sony understand this well... the vast number of titles for the PS2 means that pretty much anybody can find games they like for it. Neither of the other consoles has really developed "sleeper" hits, outside of the usual popular genres, like Disgaea or the Naval Ops games.
I'm sure I'll get modded down for this. It's bound to have upset a good number of fanboys. However, those fanboys might want to stop and consider whether the signals they're sending to the parent company are really the best thing for its long-term health.
Yeah, that figures. The information I had on DOAX breaking into the top 10 is pretty old now, while Ninja Gaiden is a pretty recent release. The amusing thing is that pretty much every X-Box owner in Japan would have had to have bought these two games for that to happen. Interesting to see if these will start getting more common as MS increases its focus on the Japanese market.
How can you mention Dead or Alive without mentioning Xtreme Beach Volleyball? So far as I remember, this holds the entirely laudible distinction of being the only X-box-only game to have made it into the Japanese top 10. It probably also holds some kind of record for the number of derogatory jokes it's inspired.
The weird thing is that it isn't actally that bad a game, nor is the content particularly shocking. It's... like... girls in bikinis. You've seen worse on Baywatch. In fact, here in the UK, you can walk into a newsagent and buy worse in a mainstream tabloid newspaper (eg. The Sun, The Star) and those are sold for a few pence each with no age restrictions. I guess it's a good illustration of how double-standards apply to video-games.
I do have a good bit of sympathy with the main point of the gamesindustry.biz article. I don't believe in outright censorship or banning of games (although I don't object to an age-based classification system), but I do recognise that there is an argument over this which needs to be won and that games like Manhunt really aren't helping the case.
The Grand Theft Auto games were at least innovative in terms of gameplay (or at least, GTA3 was... Vice City perhaps less so). With Manhunt, by all account, the only selling point are the buckets of gore and the explicitely sadistic objectives. I saw a news article the other day saying that American Magee was intending to make "the most violent game ever"... but why? If you look at the world of movies, you'll find plenty of violence. However, the movies at the Manhunt end of the spectrum tend to be relegated to the straight-to-video category of "video nasties" and you don't normally get well known directors setting out to make "the most violent movie ever" (well... maybe Quentin Tarantino does, but at least his movies have other qualities, a la GTA3).
Ultimately, the great "videogames are evil" argument still has a couple of years to run. These arguments are inevitably won from the middle-ground. While I would support the right of developers to make whatever games they want, it would be nice if they had the common sense to keep things a little more low key for the time being. Right now, the only good news is that the anti-video-games crowd haven't done a good job of grabbing the middle-ground either.
It's been a slow couple of years for the PC games industry, and for the fps genre in particular. Until the release of Farcry earlier this year, there had been little in the way of technological progress since iD released Quake 3. Since then, we've seen countless games using Quake 3's engine, but little in the way of genuine innovation. 2004 promises to change this; there have been three really promising titles this year, namely Farcry, Doom III and Half-Life 2.
The middle of these three titles in terms of release date, Doom III has perhaps the most impressive pedigree. iD software created the first modern fps with Doom, over 10 years ago. Since then, their Quake series, while often felt to be lacking in terms of gameplay, has given us the technical milestones that have marked the progression of the genre. Doom 3 has been in development for four years and from the very beginning of its development, we've been told to expect something groundbreaking.
Some retailers jumped the gun slightly on iD's release date. This meant I had a chance to play the game early and was coming to the end of it just as most players were getting started. I'm writing this review on the basis of a single playthrough on the "normal" difficulty setting and I've not yet really touched on the multiplayer, so I won't be factoring that in.
iD have made it clear from the beginning that we'd be needing an absolutely monster PC to play this game well. I don't really have one. The system used for the purpose of this review was:
So, with the preliminaries out of the way, how does the game shape up?
Pretty well, all things considered. On loading up, I'm confronted with the normal array of options. I customise my controls to my liking and then decide on some graphics settings. I'm a sucker for detail and will generally put up with a bit of framerate loss in return for an extra touch of "wow factor". First of all, I try the "ultra" detail settings in 1024x768 resolution. It takes me 30 seconds to find this is completely unplayable. No real surprise there. So I change the detail level down to "high", which, annoyingly, requires me to quit and restart the game. To my surprise, things now run fairly well. Although I experiment a bit further, I end up playing through the game with these settings. By and large, it's pretty good, although a couple of the bigger areas do cause fairly severe slowdown,
The opening sections of the game are very much reminiscent of Half-Life. You wander through the colony while people go about their lives and work around you. Expect to spend several minutes more than is strictly necessary here, just gawping at the level of detail. The visuals really are like nothing we've seen before. Farcry's outdoor sections were stunning, but the effect broke down indoors. Here, the indoor areas look almost photorealistic at times. There's a solid, gritty feeling to everything and it all fits together very well.
You're given a few "go to point A then point B" objectives and then, predictably, all hell quite literally breaks loose. It's hard to get over in a review just how terrifying it is when everything goes wrong. My reaction as the people around me started deforming into hideous monsters was verging on outright panic. I stayed in a pretty much constant state of fear for about the next 5 hours of the game, with occasional resurgences right through to the end.
Once the shooting starts, the nature of the game stays pretty much constant. You get an objective, usually to go to a location or find a way of opening a door, over your communicator. Accomplishing the objective involves moving through a sequence of rooms and corridors, dealing with any enemies you come across with extreme prejudice. As I've already said, this is extremely scary at first. Everywhere is very dark (more on this later) and the enemies really are quite unpleasant. Expect
Resident Evil: I came to this fairly late, in its Gamecube incarnation, having already played the excellent Silent Hill games and Forbidden Siren. I couldn't believe how much random wandering around and backtracking seemed to be involved, which really wasn't helped by either the annoying control system or the strictly limited inventory. I know survival horror games are supposed to be fairly slow-paced, but I object to artificial contrivances designed to make me play "ferry the items around".
Halo *is* boring, once you've played around with the vehicles for half an hour and seen the basic weapons and enemies. After this, you've got umpteen hours of fighting through identikit rooms against identical enemies. The guys at Bungie seem to have a serious fixation with the "copy" and "paste" functions.
Wind Walker would, I knew, be contraversial, because it has such a fairly rabid fanbase. This is partly why I'm so negative about it. I bought it (and a Gamecube at the same time) largely on the basis of the floods of praise I'd read about it from a number of sources, most particularly on slashdot. To find out that it was just a fairly boring platformer, with a plot that sent me to sleep, tedious dungeons and serious amounts of time spent just travelling between locations was a real let-down.
The dullest games aren't always the fairly-obscure 10 year old console releases. There's plenty of tedium in the sales-charts on the most modern systems.
Not played all of the games mentioned in the article, although I agree with the author on those that I have. A few further suggestions:
Halo (single-player): sure, the multiplayer's fun, but single-player Halo seemed to basically amount to killing vast numbers of identical monsters over and over again with a couple of samey weapons, while moving between identical rooms. Fun for the first 30 minutes, then unadulterated tedium.
Unlimited Saga: Normally, I love Squaresoft's games, but god only knows what they were thinking with this one. Hideous interface, soul-destroying combat system a plot it's hard to care about and dismal visuals.
Resident Evil: sure, it may have pretty much single-handedly created the Survival Horror genre, but when I finally got around to playing this, I was struck by just how tedious it was and how much backtracking it involved. The Silent Hill games and Forbidden Siren are far superior.
Gran Turismo 4: Prologue: I'm sure the final product will rock, but why anybody would want to spend more than 15 minutes playing this is beyond me (yes, I am just bitter because I spent 20 quid on it).
UFO Aftermath: I bought this expecting an update of the old X-com formula. Instead, I find they've gutted out everything that made the X-com games enjoyable and not even updated the graphics significantly.
All of these would have to be in my top 10 most boring games. Other dishonourable mentions - bad, but not quite bad enough to make it into the top list - would include: Aliens vs Predator Extinction, Zelda: Wind Walker, Super Smash Brothers Melee, Unreal 2 and all of the Tomb Raider sequels.
I believe X-Wing alliance didn't sell so well, despite it being, in my opinion, the best of the series (TIE Fighter was great, but degenerated into rather annoying supership-wars towards the end). I think the final Wing Commander game (Prophecy?) also bombed commercially around about the same time. Since then, Space Flight Sims haven't been seen as mainstream and as, I suspect, they're quite expensvie to develop, nobody really wants to take a chance on them.
I really hope Lucasarts do reconsider making another X-Wing game at some point, provided it is actually a PC-based, flight-sim modelled game like the old ones. I've noticed a bit of an upswing in the quality of Lucasarts games over the last year or two. They're not back to the dizzy heights they were in the days of Sam & Max and the X-Wing/TIE Fighter games, but things have come a long way from Force Commander and "Episode 1: Gungan Yoda Adventure Cash In". The Rogue Squadron games on the Gamecube aren't bad at all, even if the focus is a bit too much on repeating missions for my liking and Jedi Knight 2 was a competent fps (hated Jedi Academy though). He's hoping they're feeling brave enough to re-open an old genre.
Just watched the trailer. The lighting effects are excellent... best I've seen in a game so far. Monsters also look superb, in terms of both design and animation. Enviroment in general is pretty spiffy... I like the writing on the walls in blood.
On the down-side, I think the weapon effects, particularly the plasma gun, really do look quite lame. Certainly no better than what we've already seen in UT2k4, if not slightly worse.
Also, the trailer gives me some cause to worry about the gameplay. As I understand it, the idea was that this would be a game that would play heavily on the "fear" aspect, and I find constant combat to be a huge fear-negating factor. I'll be upset if the gameplay does turn out to be "just another fps". Of course, it's perfectly possible that they thought they needed to show constant combat in the trailer and that this isn't representative of the full game.
Yeah, I know it's an old story, but it has a moral to it that's always worth remembering.
Never trust a journalist, especially when he's asking you questions.
As part of my job, there's a possibility that I'll have occasional, peripheral contact with the national media. As such, I've been given several lessons on the big DOs and DON'Ts. It's clear from reading the forum URL that somebody kindly mentioned that these guys violated pretty much all of the basic rules. Broadly speaking, these are as follows:
1) Never assume the journalist is on your side or shares your perspective. This is probably the most critical of all. On TV, hotshot journalists are usually portrayed as giving their victims a hard time... screaming into their faces and asking obviously penetrating questions to leap right to the bottom of the matter. This is bullshit. Any journalist worth his salt, who isn't acting up live for the cameras, knows he isn't going to get answers this way. A journalist will usually adopt a friendly tone; he'll pretend to be on your side, willing to let you put your view out to the unwashed masses. He'll seem reasonable, he'll seem to care about the same stuff as you.
Don't fall for this. Ask yourself where he's coming from and what his angle is. Most importantly, try to look at yourself as he sees you. The guys interviewed for this article were too enthralled by what they were doing to give this the slightest thought. They thought it was wonderful that they'd built up a community around their hobby. The journalist doesn't think this; he has a broader perspective, he's seen other hobby-based communities and this is nothing special to him. Judging by the article, what he saw was a tragi-comic group of nerds indulging in an undignified hobby at the expense of what he and his readers considered to be a normal, successful life. Had the subjects possessed even the slightest bit of savvy, they would have seen this coming.
2) Never tell a journalist anything you don't have to. This isn't saying you should lie; that's generally a spectacularly bad idea. But don't volunteer *any* information you don't have to. Bear in mind my first rule; the journalist may have a very different take on this information to your own. Be especially cautious in social situations, especially parties. The effects of alcohol and an urge to show off can be lethal there.
3) Be aware of what other information the journalist has access to. No journalist will base his story on a few interviews with people with an obvious interest in the matter at hand. If you have an embarrassing livejournal, he *will* find it. Believe it or not, journalists know how to use google.
4) Do not overestimate your own "rights" compared to those of the journalist. TV is a real killer here. When you see an interview on a TV show which goes "off the record", it's easy to believe you can stop a journalist repeating your words just by telling him "you can't print that". This is bollocks. There is no such thing as "off the record". Moreover, I'd consider it *extremely* unlikely that any of the people mentioned in the article questioned have anything even vaguely approaching a case for libel. Even if they did, they'd get a tiny apology in 9pt font tucked away in the corner of page 37. Modern democratic societies give a lot of protection to the press, for a lot of good reasons. We all expect our politicians to be held to account; don't be surprised when the same standards are applied to you by the press.
Sorry to rant... it just seems that the utter lack of savvy demonstrated here is too clueless to let pass. Press interest in gaming in general has really kicked off over the last few years. If you ever find yourself being approached by the media, please, for the love of god, bear this in mind.
This is a tough one. On the one hand, I can understand the phenomenon the article talks about. I've never played WW2 Online, but I remember the publicity when it launched; easily horrible enough that I never felt any inclination to try it. I'm sure this dissuaded a lot of other potential customers from ever picking up the game. I'm also sure that a lot of those who did pick it up dropped it again after a month (obviously, I don't know for sure, but I'd guess it gave you the first month's subscription free when you bought the game, as most MMORPGs seem to).
However, those that were left after the initial exodus were probably those whose interest in the game was deep and genuine enough that they were prepared to stick with it through the initial difficulties. Once the problems start getting patched out, it's easy to see these players forming a pretty deep bond with the game. However, what I'm less sure about is whether a MMORPG which suffers a terrible launch can then draw in new players at a later date. Obviously, there's going to be a certain word-of-mouth effect surrounding the people who still play the game; many of them will try to sign up friends. However, this alone won't be enough to have a huge effect on the player-base.
The other approach to drawing in new players after a horrific launch is to release a massively hyped expansion. Witness SW Galaxies and the forthcoming space expansion. With Galaxies, they may well have some success, because the pre-release interest in Galaxies was like nothing I've seen before for a MMORPG and I know the number of players who lost interest when it was announced there would be no space combat at release was pretty large. Whether this will actually work in practice and whether the technique can be adapted by other games without the huge license to support them remains to be seen.
Developing a MMORPG is a huge risk for a developer, as demonstrated by the number we've seen cancelled before release lately. It's a difficult market to break into, not least because of the relatively high initial costs for players when the game is released. (On a side note, I have NO sympathy for those who claim a MMORPG shouldn't charge both a purchase charge and a monthly fee. Developers need to do this, it's simple economics. After the years spent developing the game, the developers will almost certainly need some hefty cash-flow straight after release just to stay afloat, hence the box-costs. The monthly fees then pay for continuing support). With some recent MMORPGs such as FFXI proving that you CAN do a good roll-out, patience for sloppy MMORPG releases is at an all-time low. Sure, it's possible you can recover if things go pear-shaped, but why take the risk?
I'm a bit bewildered by how we got from the figures in the article to the conclusion that "the Japanese aren't interested in online gaming".
54.3% wouldn't be interested in a "premium" online game. I can only assume this refers to subscription based titles such as Everquest, Star Wars Galaxies and Final Fantasy XI. This leaves 45.7% who potentially would be. These figures do not sound massively out of line with the figures in the US and European gaming markets. By their very nature, as well as their reputation, subscription-based massively multiplayer games are going to exclude a pretty large section of the gaming market. In particular, penniless students are going to be put off by the price, under-18s are going to be put off by the fact that many of them require a credit card for subscriptions (which usually then involves getting dad to pay) and then you've got the people who just plain prefer another genre.
Final Fantasy XI has a huge Japanese player base, despite broadband being pretty much essential for it. I've said for some time that the reasons that the Japanese don't tend to play online games as much is that they just don't get online games marketed at them. The PC and the X-Box, which are far and away the most popular (and in my opinion, the best) platforms for online gaming have a negligable presence in the Japanese market, by virtue of the nature of the games sold on them. When Sony/Squenix finally sold a game that both appealed to Japanese tastes and required online play, the results were spectacular. For Nintendo to continue to ignore the potential of online gaming in Japan is nothing short of madness.
I've been playing FFXI pretty heavily since November. As you'd expect from a Final Fantasy game, the plot is a fairly large part of it.
However...
It isn't a "normal" Final Fantasy plot and comparing it with these is a good way of observing the limitations that going massively multiplayer puts on a game's "central" plot. The Final Fantasy series is pretty well known for its distinctive main characters. Love them or hate them, Celes, Cloud and Squall are pretty much part of the canon of classic gaming characters. By contrast, in FFXI, the player character is nothing more than the player's avatar in the game world. Sure, if you play the game's plot through to the conclusion, he's probably going to end up saving the world or something (I don't know for sure... I've not got there yet and people in-game are very good about not spoiling the story). However, the player character is far closer to what we're used to seeing in "Western" CRPGs, particularly those based around the AD&D rules; a blank-slate upon which the player can try to impose his own personality, so far as the rules of the game will allow. Of course, this is one respect in which MMORPG games go far beyond traditional CRPGs; while in, for example, Baldur's Gate, you might get three basic options for conversing with an NPC, one good, one neutral and one evil, communication between players in a MMORPG is almost completely unrestricted.
However, freedom of expression doesn't necessarily translate into a good plot. Square-Enix obviously put a lot of effort into making FFXI's plot as compelling as possible; there are a good few twists and your perceptions of some of the NPCs will shift dramatically over the course of a game. However, while a traditional Final Fantasy game will last around 40 hours, getting through the FFXI plot is likely to take closer to 40 days. Plot events are, by the very nature of the game, much more widely dispersed. For example, to do the plot mission required to gain rank 4, you'll need, at the very least, a party of characters of about level 35. To do the next mission, for rank 5, you'll need a party of approximately 10 levels higher. Moving from level 35 to level 45 will require several weeks for any player who can't stay in game every hour of every day. As a result, the plot sections seem few and far between and are never really going to form the bulk of the player's impressions of the game. There are lots of optional quests that expand the player's knowledge of the game-world, but they're not what I'd call "plot".
There are other potential options for doing plot in a MMORPG. One is to adopt the Eve Online approach, and have the devs write a plot based around the events that occur between groups of players in the game. Of course, I understand that this has been known to backfire spectacularly, when a group object to how the devs have portrayed them. You can also try to let the players write the plot as they go along. However, this relies on having a large number of players willing to put time and effort into creating the story and willing to accept roles for themselves that aren't "savior of mankind, ruler of the universe" and who actually have the talent to write. I suspect that a very small proportion of the current MMORPG player-base truly fits this bill.
To sum up, a plot can add a lot to a MMORPG and can be an important factor in enhancing a player's enjoyment of the game. However, it's never going to be among the most central parts of the MMORPG experience, on the basis of current designs, and what I'd say to any current MMORPG developers is that it's far more important to get the play mechanics and the player-economy right before worrying about plot.
I was OK when I last replayed FF6 until I got to the airship. The utterly lame 3d effect and the complete lack of any height on the map completely ruined the visual effect for me.
I'd be staggered if you'd actually beaten everything FFX has to offer in 35 hours game time. The Blitzball alone for Wakka's celestial weapon upgrade can't really be done in less than 20 hours, as you have to win a lot of games. My final save time on my second playthrough, on which I did everything up to and including beating penance (this includes all Monster Arena bosses and the Dark Aeons) is 135 hours. I saw the first of the big plot twists coming, but I kind of think you're expected to... it adds to the tragedy of the situation.
Just for information, FFX-2 is great fun so long as you don't go into it with any expectations based on previous FF games. It's much lighter in tone, very different in structure and pacing and much harder than FFX. FFXI is, in my opinion, by far the best "traditional" MMORPG released to date. Oh, and I really wish I hadn't wasted my money on Crystal Chronicles; as far as I'm concerned, the Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance games do the same thing better.
I'd disagree. FF6 is good... certainly my favorite of the NES/SNES Final Fantasies, but I really don't think it holds a candle to FF6, FFX or FFXI. FF6 didn't take me anything like 60 hours on first playthrough... my final save from that is at 38 hours, and that's with all of the characters obtained and a good few of the sidequests unlocked. I don't have my final FF7 save any more, but I'm pretty sure it was just over 45 hours. My FFX final save from my first playthrough is on 46 hours, and FFX-2 is on 42. I've got about 23 days in-game time in FFXI.
I'd also say that FF7 has the stronger story. FF6 is essentially just a fantasy story - an extremely well done one, by all accounts, but not a great departure from what we've seen elsewhere. FF7's plot really was something different from anything we'd seen in a game before; heavy shades of some of the more surreal anime/manga, such as Akira. I'd also rank FFX's plot higher than FF6's... there's a lot going on in FFX and it has a bit more of a point to it than some of the other games.
Graphically, FF6 looks far more dated than FF7. Most of the sprites are just plain ugly by today's standards. In fact, I'd say FF7's graphics have stood the test of time better than FF8's or FF9's. The fairly minimalist character models have a certain stylistic quality to them and don't look as... erm... "cluttered" as the FF8 or FF9 models.
The FF7 summons really didn't bother me. The only summon that takes more than a couple of seconds is Knights of the Round, and unless you plan on fighting the weapons, you probably won't be seeing much of that. The lengthy summon animations only really started in FF8.
As far as gameplay and mechanics goes, I don't think there's much to choose between FF6 or FF7. They've both got fairly straightforward levelling and combat systems, which don't really give you many options. It's fairly fluid, but ultimately, I'd rather have the better range of choices you get in FFX or FFX-2.
If I had to rank the more recent FF games (leaving FFXI apart, as comparisons there aren't really relevant), I'd probably go: FFX, FF7, FFX-2, FF8, FF6, FF9.
Notice how it's always Nintendo making dire predictions about the gaming market shrinking? Notice the story on slashdot a few days ago about how the Japanese games market is stagnant, despite impressive ongoing growth in the US and Europe? Want to hazard a guess whether there's a connection?
This is really an illustration of a lot of what's wrong with Nintendo's marketing strategy. Their Japan-centric attitude, more pronounced than Sony's, has essentially seen them get slaughtered in most of the rest of the world during this cycle, even by a console from a notoriously disliked OS developer who'd never made a console before. Here in the UK, when we hear of a great Gamecube title released in Japan, we don't usually assume we have a cat in hell's chance of ever seeing it appear in our stores. I guess the situation might be better in the US, but the UK alone is a large and expanding market, never mind the rest of Europe. Sony and Microsoft don't need to worry about the games market contracting; their sales are telling them something very different, as they're focussing on much healthier markets.
Don't get me wrong, Nintendo do have some good games. However, it's a pretty small number compared with number that have appeared for the X-Box and, in particular, the PS2. Somebody above mentioned Disgaea; that's a great example of a superb (really, it is, if you haven't played it, do) sleeper hit, of the kind of which Nintendo desperately needs. The Naval Ops games are another good example; almost zero publicity bar word of mouth, and yet I noticed them racking up impressive sales on this basis. By contrast, look at Eternal Darkness for the cube. A superb game, which would have been a hit on any other console, but which, due to the Cube's audience, never got anywhere in terms of sales.
As one poster above said, Nintendo are in danger of being killed by their own fan-base, who are driving them down a particular road, oblivious to the fact it's a dead end.
I don't see any great mystery here, nor do I see any particularly complicated factors or dark forces at work in the background. It's unlikely to be related to the Japanese recession; as I understand it, the Japanese economy has now very much turned the corner and was actually more severe in 1997, when, according to the article, the market was at its peak.
I just see this as a natural return to the norm from an absurdly high peak. The market's previous strength reflected a depth of obsession with gaming that was unlikely to be sustained. For a long time, the industry has talked about the Japanese game market on the same level as the US and European markets. When you consider the population of Japan (127 million) compared with the population of the United States (293 million) and Europe (200 million for just France, Germany and the UK, which is excluding a lot of big nations), this begins to seem absurd. I suspect we'll see the Japanese games market continue to "decline" until it reaches a level roughly proportional to the US and Europe.
From what I've seen, not all movie-based games suck. Not by a long stretch of the imagination. However, as a general (horribly general) rule, I think they can be broken down into two groups.
First of all, we have games which come out within the same immediate time-frame as the movie they're based on. These tend to suck. Examples include, but are by no means limited to: Enter the Matrix, Fifth Element, Terminator 3, etc, etc, etc. I'm sure you can think of many more. This is where Chronicles of Riddick breaks the rules; it falls into this category and doesn't suck. But most games in this group are, and always will be, cheap attempts to cash in on a movie whose brand has a short shelf-life.
The second group contains games based on movies or movie franchises which appear when the movies aren't the hype-of-the-moment. In general, these tend to be games based on *good* movies, since only the better movies stand up over time. Examples here include: Aliens vs Predator games (excluding the recent console RTS), Blade Runner (the adventure game - it's aging now, but it still rocks) and Terminator: Future Shock (and Skynet). Perhaps because the movies aren't flavour of the moment, these games have more freedom to move into expanded universes and craft a plot that works well for a game, rather than a movie.
Of course, half-way between the two groups, we have the Star Wars games, some of which rock and some of which suck. I think, however, that the same rule holds true here. Think about it... in the early and mid 90s, before the prequels, Star Wars games tend to rock. We have the SNES platformers/shooters, the X-Wing and TIE Fighter series etc. Sure, there's the odd dud, like Rebel Assault, but at least they're innovative duds. When Episode 1 comes out, the quality of Star Wars games, even from an objective, non-Jar-Jar-bashing point of view falls through the floor. We get a few utterly forgettable shooters and third-person games. Even today, when the license has recovered a bit from its nadir, the best games (Kotor and JK2) are those which are based more heavily on the universe of the original trilogy.
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This is interesting, but I seriously can't help feeling that the guy comes across as frankly hysterical. I know marketing guys are supposed to be enthusiastic, but he sounds like a parody of himself at times. Some of what he says is undoubtedly true; the section about the PSX and the Eye-Toy certainly sums up what happened pretty well, although personally I feel that the PSX was doomed from the start by Sony's rather erratic level of committment to it. However, a lot of the other stuff he said strikes me as unadulterated rubbish. I mean, I'm really, really glad that he told me Mario 64 invented 3d graphics. In my own foolish little way, I'd believed that my PC had been doing them in one form or another for years before the N64 even existed (and frequently far better than the N64 did them).
Also, if innovation or quality or whatever all stems from the controller, I'd love to know why the Gamecube has far and away the nastiest of the controllers for the current generation consoles (well... if we count the S-controller as the X-box controller, rather than the original 2-tonne beast). A malformed right analogue stick, awkwardly placed and erratically sized buttons and a button shortage that makes a lot of cross-platform titles unfeasible has added *sooooo* much to my gaming experience. He has a point about the 4 controllers thing; the lack of that on the PS2 is a serious flaw, next to the X-box and the Cube. To say that Nintendo has cornered the market on interface innovation is an outright lie, though. I've been seeing innovative controllers on the PC since time immemorial (ranging from my old Thrustmaster F-16 to a bizarre turtle-device which lets you control games by tilting the shell) and of the recent console-based controller innovations (dance-mats, eye-toy, pop'n boards), none of the most notable have come from Nintendo.
Moving onto games, I'm slightly curious as to why he spends so long talking about the Game Gear, given how long-dead the thing is. I'm pretty sure that the real causes of its decline and death were its size and price (both of the unit and of the games), which made it implausible as a hand-held console. As to the type of games people play on a handheld console, I think this is a little more complex than he makes out. Sure, quick-blast games have a market on consoles, but I think that more serious efforts can also work. Hell, Nintendo's biggest success in the handheld market of recent years has been Pokemon, which is essentially a Final Fantasy game with some of the cutscenes stripped out. Not really the kind of thing which works for a quick blast, but the actual core Pokemon games (as opposed to Stadium etc) are only available on a handheld console.
Which brings me onto this issue of "transportability". I think he's drawing exactly the wrong lessons here. Ports have, in the past, had a pretty poor track-record. Largely, this was because they either tried to move an arcade game where the gameplay wasn't fun and the attraction was the technology onto a home platform (eg. Afterburner) or else the ports to many platforms were done in a hurry and were deeply flawed compared to the original game (eg. Street Fighter 2). These days, ports and cross-platform titles work much better; Grand Theft Auto 3/VC was ported off its original platforms onto the X-Box in a manner that actually improved on the original (sharper graphics, custom soundtracks). Resident Evil survived its transition to the Gamecube pretty well. Of course, Nintendo's attitude here has often been a bit odd. I do wonder whether the story of the N64's unsuccessful struggle for dominance against the PS1 would have turned out differently had Nintendo actually made a proper Pokemon game for the thing. With the Dual-Screen, they're actually making it much harder for them to go cross-platform on any of the games which use the touch-screen, as equivalents don't exist on other platforms.
The upcoming DS vs PSP battle is going to be interesting. Nintendo are clearly more worried than they have been by any of their previous r
Yeah, I realised my Keeper/Master error the moment I clicked submit. However, I strongly disagree that these were his only two good games. Syndicate was absolutely revolutionary and also had perhaps the most satisfying weapons of any game ever. Theme Park has created an entire spin-off genre and was a surprisingly competent business management sim which managed to marry ideas that had existed before (with some modifications) to a concept that actually made mainstream gamers want to play it. Oh, and Powermonger was pretty fun as well, although I've got to admit that it's been a loooooong time since I played it, so I don't remember it all that well.
It sounds like you're just bitter because you didn't like Dungeon Keeper. I take your point that it felt at times like a standard RTS, but it did offer many features that were new to the genre. You couldn't control large numbers of units directly, but you could possess individual creatures and fight through their eyes. The experience system for the creatures can be seen as an early precursor of the heroes system we've seen in more recent titles such as Warcraft 3. In many ways, Dungeon Keeper was a long way ahead of its time.
You're certainly in the minority for having liked Black & White, although you're entitled to your opinion and it'd be a boring world if we all agreed.
I think the critics' reaction to Black & White highlighted a lot of what was wrong with the video gaming press at the time (and perhaps continues to be today). When a huge new title came out, there was an overwhelming urge to be the first to have the full review. For the monthly gaming mags, this wasn't necessarily a problem if they had a full month to play the game before their next issue. However, if it arrived a few days before the deadline, then they had to hurry. With online gaming sites, beating the competitors to print can mean reviewing a game in a matter of hours (just look at the recent Doom 3 reviews and the difference in review quality between those who tried to get out first and those, like IGN, who held off for a couple of days).
Black & White was good fun for the first few hours. I found it was only about 6 hours play that I started getting seriously annoyed with the game and that its flaws started to show up. Chances are, many of the first reviewers were stopping playing and starting writing before this point. I remember that several gaming magazines expressed regrets in later issues that they'd ranked the game so highly and said that if they'd waited longer, the reviews would have been more balanced.
I read a lot of "Peter Molyneux sucks/doesn't deliver/is nothing but a shameless self-publicist comments in this thread. I have to say that I disagree entirely.
It is, I feel, beyond all doubt that Black & White was not a very good game. Indeed, it was a pretty damned awful game, with tedious mechanics, some serious flaws in the camera system and an underlying concept which turns out not to have been as much fun as it should have been. However, it *was* a serious attempt to be innovative and to do something different. How often do we get heartfelt pleas in the comments threads on slashdot for games designers to be more innovative? How often do we get rabid fanboys shouting "I only play Nintendo/Sony/Nintendo/X-Box/Nintendo/iD/Nintendo games because they're the only people who innovate"?
This is why so many designers are reluctant to innovate. Innovation is an easy thing to get wrong. The over-riding impression I got while playing Black & White was that it had come very, very close to being an excellent game, but had somehow gone awry just inches short of the goal and detoured into the land of awfulness. I don't blame Molyneux for this; as I say, innovation is hard to get right.
I hate it when people pre-judge a game before it appears and I'm a long way from being a Molyneux fanboy, but you have to admit that other than Black & White, the guy has one hell of track record. Look at Populous, Magic Carpet and Dungeon Master; all games which did things that nobody had done before and none of which were surefire commercial hits. Molyneux may have made mistakes, but nobody could reasonably accuse him of being a Derek Smart figure, built entirely on bullshit and never having delivered a decent product. You can't even accuse him of being a John Romero figure, with most of the notable successes being based on collaborations where many now feel the real talent was in the other partners. I say give the guy an break and go into fable with an open mind.
This highlights what was, for me, one of the biggest problems with Doom 3, namely the fact that iD confused "what's cool at first" with "what's cool for the entire 20+ hour game". Not being able to have a pistol and a weapon drawn is neat and scary at first, taking me right back to the original Silent Hill. After about 5 hours, it's started to get more annoying than scary because, of course, the combat is a much bigger and more frequent aspect of the game than it was in Silent Hill. When you get to and they take your flashlight away, it's back to playing "bump the wall to find the way forward", which took me right back to the old Eye of the Beholder games (in a bad way).
It's not just this trick that gets over-used. The first time an imp spawns behind you during a fight, it scares the hell out of you. By the 20th time, it's getting old. By the 200th time, you can turn around and shoot the imp with your eyes closed.
Doom 3 is a good game... probably the best actual game we've seen from iD since the original Doom. However, I also agree with the criticisms in the IGN review (8.9/10 strikes me as pretty much bang-on, as scores go).
In fairness to X-Box Live, the fees are pretty miniscule (30 quid a year here in the UK) and the quality of service is generally excellent, far eclipsing the quality of the PS2's online offerings (aside from FFXI, which is a slightly odd case).
What *will* annoy me is if I have to pay to play EA games online on the X-Box on top of X-Box Live.
This seems to me to be a fairly obvious example of "preaching to the choir". The guy was deliberately playing to those most likely to be watching the press conference, namely the Nintendo hardcore crowd. Quite probably, he enjoys getting such an ecstatic response on a personal level. However, playing to your immediate crowd on an occasion such as this is frequently a very bad idea. Look at the debates surrounding the recent US political conferences. The pundits were quite right in saying that the candidates, in order to be a success, would need to play to a wider audience than the party faithful.
Right now, the vast "middle-ground" of the console market belongs firmly to Sony. The X-Box and the Gamecube are largely locked in separate niches, or, to continue the political analogy, confined to the opposite extremes of the political spectrum. Microsoft at least seem to realise this... recent signs are that they're trying to diversify their games and move away from the PC-style fpses that have been their bread and butter to date. Nintendo, on the other hand, haven't really shown such a tendancy yet. As the sometimes quite shocking level of pro-Nintendo bias on slashdot shows, there is an audience for Nintendo's titles and ethos. However, this audience is largely detached from the gaming mainstream. The challenge for Nintendo over the next console generation needs to be to expand their fanbase with a wider range of titles and genres, while keeping their hardcore satisfied. Providing you encourage third party developers properly, there's no real limit to the number of titles for your system and no reason why development of your "core" titles has to suffer. Sony understand this well... the vast number of titles for the PS2 means that pretty much anybody can find games they like for it. Neither of the other consoles has really developed "sleeper" hits, outside of the usual popular genres, like Disgaea or the Naval Ops games.
I'm sure I'll get modded down for this. It's bound to have upset a good number of fanboys. However, those fanboys might want to stop and consider whether the signals they're sending to the parent company are really the best thing for its long-term health.
Yeah, that figures. The information I had on DOAX breaking into the top 10 is pretty old now, while Ninja Gaiden is a pretty recent release. The amusing thing is that pretty much every X-Box owner in Japan would have had to have bought these two games for that to happen. Interesting to see if these will start getting more common as MS increases its focus on the Japanese market.
Heh, sorry. I was talking from the perspective of the "games are evil" gutter press and ambulance-chasing lawyers. cf. the story on Manhunt
How can you mention Dead or Alive without mentioning Xtreme Beach Volleyball? So far as I remember, this holds the entirely laudible distinction of being the only X-box-only game to have made it into the Japanese top 10. It probably also holds some kind of record for the number of derogatory jokes it's inspired.
The weird thing is that it isn't actally that bad a game, nor is the content particularly shocking. It's... like... girls in bikinis. You've seen worse on Baywatch. In fact, here in the UK, you can walk into a newsagent and buy worse in a mainstream tabloid newspaper (eg. The Sun, The Star) and those are sold for a few pence each with no age restrictions. I guess it's a good illustration of how double-standards apply to video-games.
I do have a good bit of sympathy with the main point of the gamesindustry.biz article. I don't believe in outright censorship or banning of games (although I don't object to an age-based classification system), but I do recognise that there is an argument over this which needs to be won and that games like Manhunt really aren't helping the case.
The Grand Theft Auto games were at least innovative in terms of gameplay (or at least, GTA3 was... Vice City perhaps less so). With Manhunt, by all account, the only selling point are the buckets of gore and the explicitely sadistic objectives. I saw a news article the other day saying that American Magee was intending to make "the most violent game ever"... but why? If you look at the world of movies, you'll find plenty of violence. However, the movies at the Manhunt end of the spectrum tend to be relegated to the straight-to-video category of "video nasties" and you don't normally get well known directors setting out to make "the most violent movie ever" (well... maybe Quentin Tarantino does, but at least his movies have other qualities, a la GTA3).
Ultimately, the great "videogames are evil" argument still has a couple of years to run. These arguments are inevitably won from the middle-ground. While I would support the right of developers to make whatever games they want, it would be nice if they had the common sense to keep things a little more low key for the time being. Right now, the only good news is that the anti-video-games crowd haven't done a good job of grabbing the middle-ground either.
It's been a slow couple of years for the PC games industry, and for the fps genre in particular. Until the release of Farcry earlier this year, there had been little in the way of technological progress since iD released Quake 3. Since then, we've seen countless games using Quake 3's engine, but little in the way of genuine innovation. 2004 promises to change this; there have been three really promising titles this year, namely Farcry, Doom III and Half-Life 2.
The middle of these three titles in terms of release date, Doom III has perhaps the most impressive pedigree. iD software created the first modern fps with Doom, over 10 years ago. Since then, their Quake series, while often felt to be lacking in terms of gameplay, has given us the technical milestones that have marked the progression of the genre. Doom 3 has been in development for four years and from the very beginning of its development, we've been told to expect something groundbreaking.
Some retailers jumped the gun slightly on iD's release date. This meant I had a chance to play the game early and was coming to the end of it just as most players were getting started. I'm writing this review on the basis of a single playthrough on the "normal" difficulty setting and I've not yet really touched on the multiplayer, so I won't be factoring that in.
iD have made it clear from the beginning that we'd be needing an absolutely monster PC to play this game well. I don't really have one. The system used for the purpose of this review was:
Pentium 4 2.0ghz Northwood
512 mb RDRAM
Geforce 4 Ti4200
Sound Blaster AWE 32.
Not exactly obsolete, but hardly cutting edge.
So, with the preliminaries out of the way, how does the game shape up?
Pretty well, all things considered. On loading up, I'm confronted with the normal array of options. I customise my controls to my liking and then decide on some graphics settings. I'm a sucker for detail and will generally put up with a bit of framerate loss in return for an extra touch of "wow factor". First of all, I try the "ultra" detail settings in 1024x768 resolution. It takes me 30 seconds to find this is completely unplayable. No real surprise there. So I change the detail level down to "high", which, annoyingly, requires me to quit and restart the game. To my surprise, things now run fairly well. Although I experiment a bit further, I end up playing through the game with these settings. By and large, it's pretty good, although a couple of the bigger areas do cause fairly severe slowdown,
The opening sections of the game are very much reminiscent of Half-Life. You wander through the colony while people go about their lives and work around you. Expect to spend several minutes more than is strictly necessary here, just gawping at the level of detail. The visuals really are like nothing we've seen before. Farcry's outdoor sections were stunning, but the effect broke down indoors. Here, the indoor areas look almost photorealistic at times. There's a solid, gritty feeling to everything and it all fits together very well.
You're given a few "go to point A then point B" objectives and then, predictably, all hell quite literally breaks loose. It's hard to get over in a review just how terrifying it is when everything goes wrong. My reaction as the people around me started deforming into hideous monsters was verging on outright panic. I stayed in a pretty much constant state of fear for about the next 5 hours of the game, with occasional resurgences right through to the end.
Once the shooting starts, the nature of the game stays pretty much constant. You get an objective, usually to go to a location or find a way of opening a door, over your communicator. Accomplishing the objective involves moving through a sequence of rooms and corridors, dealing with any enemies you come across with extreme prejudice. As I've already said, this is extremely scary at first. Everywhere is very dark (more on this later) and the enemies really are quite unpleasant. Expect
Resident Evil: I came to this fairly late, in its Gamecube incarnation, having already played the excellent Silent Hill games and Forbidden Siren. I couldn't believe how much random wandering around and backtracking seemed to be involved, which really wasn't helped by either the annoying control system or the strictly limited inventory. I know survival horror games are supposed to be fairly slow-paced, but I object to artificial contrivances designed to make me play "ferry the items around".
Halo *is* boring, once you've played around with the vehicles for half an hour and seen the basic weapons and enemies. After this, you've got umpteen hours of fighting through identikit rooms against identical enemies. The guys at Bungie seem to have a serious fixation with the "copy" and "paste" functions.
Wind Walker would, I knew, be contraversial, because it has such a fairly rabid fanbase. This is partly why I'm so negative about it. I bought it (and a Gamecube at the same time) largely on the basis of the floods of praise I'd read about it from a number of sources, most particularly on slashdot. To find out that it was just a fairly boring platformer, with a plot that sent me to sleep, tedious dungeons and serious amounts of time spent just travelling between locations was a real let-down.
The dullest games aren't always the fairly-obscure 10 year old console releases. There's plenty of tedium in the sales-charts on the most modern systems.
Not played all of the games mentioned in the article, although I agree with the author on those that I have. A few further suggestions:
Halo (single-player): sure, the multiplayer's fun, but single-player Halo seemed to basically amount to killing vast numbers of identical monsters over and over again with a couple of samey weapons, while moving between identical rooms. Fun for the first 30 minutes, then unadulterated tedium.
Unlimited Saga: Normally, I love Squaresoft's games, but god only knows what they were thinking with this one. Hideous interface, soul-destroying combat system a plot it's hard to care about and dismal visuals.
Resident Evil: sure, it may have pretty much single-handedly created the Survival Horror genre, but when I finally got around to playing this, I was struck by just how tedious it was and how much backtracking it involved. The Silent Hill games and Forbidden Siren are far superior.
Gran Turismo 4: Prologue: I'm sure the final product will rock, but why anybody would want to spend more than 15 minutes playing this is beyond me (yes, I am just bitter because I spent 20 quid on it).
UFO Aftermath: I bought this expecting an update of the old X-com formula. Instead, I find they've gutted out everything that made the X-com games enjoyable and not even updated the graphics significantly.
All of these would have to be in my top 10 most boring games. Other dishonourable mentions - bad, but not quite bad enough to make it into the top list - would include: Aliens vs Predator Extinction, Zelda: Wind Walker, Super Smash Brothers Melee, Unreal 2 and all of the Tomb Raider sequels.
I believe X-Wing alliance didn't sell so well, despite it being, in my opinion, the best of the series (TIE Fighter was great, but degenerated into rather annoying supership-wars towards the end). I think the final Wing Commander game (Prophecy?) also bombed commercially around about the same time. Since then, Space Flight Sims haven't been seen as mainstream and as, I suspect, they're quite expensvie to develop, nobody really wants to take a chance on them.
I really hope Lucasarts do reconsider making another X-Wing game at some point, provided it is actually a PC-based, flight-sim modelled game like the old ones. I've noticed a bit of an upswing in the quality of Lucasarts games over the last year or two. They're not back to the dizzy heights they were in the days of Sam & Max and the X-Wing/TIE Fighter games, but things have come a long way from Force Commander and "Episode 1: Gungan Yoda Adventure Cash In". The Rogue Squadron games on the Gamecube aren't bad at all, even if the focus is a bit too much on repeating missions for my liking and Jedi Knight 2 was a competent fps (hated Jedi Academy though). He's hoping they're feeling brave enough to re-open an old genre.
Just watched the trailer. The lighting effects are excellent... best I've seen in a game so far. Monsters also look superb, in terms of both design and animation. Enviroment in general is pretty spiffy... I like the writing on the walls in blood.
On the down-side, I think the weapon effects, particularly the plasma gun, really do look quite lame. Certainly no better than what we've already seen in UT2k4, if not slightly worse.
Also, the trailer gives me some cause to worry about the gameplay. As I understand it, the idea was that this would be a game that would play heavily on the "fear" aspect, and I find constant combat to be a huge fear-negating factor. I'll be upset if the gameplay does turn out to be "just another fps". Of course, it's perfectly possible that they thought they needed to show constant combat in the trailer and that this isn't representative of the full game.
Yeah, I know it's an old story, but it has a moral to it that's always worth remembering.
Never trust a journalist, especially when he's asking you questions.
As part of my job, there's a possibility that I'll have occasional, peripheral contact with the national media. As such, I've been given several lessons on the big DOs and DON'Ts. It's clear from reading the forum URL that somebody kindly mentioned that these guys violated pretty much all of the basic rules. Broadly speaking, these are as follows:
1) Never assume the journalist is on your side or shares your perspective. This is probably the most critical of all. On TV, hotshot journalists are usually portrayed as giving their victims a hard time... screaming into their faces and asking obviously penetrating questions to leap right to the bottom of the matter. This is bullshit. Any journalist worth his salt, who isn't acting up live for the cameras, knows he isn't going to get answers this way. A journalist will usually adopt a friendly tone; he'll pretend to be on your side, willing to let you put your view out to the unwashed masses. He'll seem reasonable, he'll seem to care about the same stuff as you.
Don't fall for this. Ask yourself where he's coming from and what his angle is. Most importantly, try to look at yourself as he sees you. The guys interviewed for this article were too enthralled by what they were doing to give this the slightest thought. They thought it was wonderful that they'd built up a community around their hobby. The journalist doesn't think this; he has a broader perspective, he's seen other hobby-based communities and this is nothing special to him. Judging by the article, what he saw was a tragi-comic group of nerds indulging in an undignified hobby at the expense of what he and his readers considered to be a normal, successful life. Had the subjects possessed even the slightest bit of savvy, they would have seen this coming.
2) Never tell a journalist anything you don't have to. This isn't saying you should lie; that's generally a spectacularly bad idea. But don't volunteer *any* information you don't have to. Bear in mind my first rule; the journalist may have a very different take on this information to your own. Be especially cautious in social situations, especially parties. The effects of alcohol and an urge to show off can be lethal there.
3) Be aware of what other information the journalist has access to. No journalist will base his story on a few interviews with people with an obvious interest in the matter at hand. If you have an embarrassing livejournal, he *will* find it. Believe it or not, journalists know how to use google.
4) Do not overestimate your own "rights" compared to those of the journalist. TV is a real killer here. When you see an interview on a TV show which goes "off the record", it's easy to believe you can stop a journalist repeating your words just by telling him "you can't print that". This is bollocks. There is no such thing as "off the record". Moreover, I'd consider it *extremely* unlikely that any of the people mentioned in the article questioned have anything even vaguely approaching a case for libel. Even if they did, they'd get a tiny apology in 9pt font tucked away in the corner of page 37. Modern democratic societies give a lot of protection to the press, for a lot of good reasons. We all expect our politicians to be held to account; don't be surprised when the same standards are applied to you by the press.
Sorry to rant... it just seems that the utter lack of savvy demonstrated here is too clueless to let pass. Press interest in gaming in general has really kicked off over the last few years. If you ever find yourself being approached by the media, please, for the love of god, bear this in mind.
This is a tough one. On the one hand, I can understand the phenomenon the article talks about. I've never played WW2 Online, but I remember the publicity when it launched; easily horrible enough that I never felt any inclination to try it. I'm sure this dissuaded a lot of other potential customers from ever picking up the game. I'm also sure that a lot of those who did pick it up dropped it again after a month (obviously, I don't know for sure, but I'd guess it gave you the first month's subscription free when you bought the game, as most MMORPGs seem to).
However, those that were left after the initial exodus were probably those whose interest in the game was deep and genuine enough that they were prepared to stick with it through the initial difficulties. Once the problems start getting patched out, it's easy to see these players forming a pretty deep bond with the game. However, what I'm less sure about is whether a MMORPG which suffers a terrible launch can then draw in new players at a later date. Obviously, there's going to be a certain word-of-mouth effect surrounding the people who still play the game; many of them will try to sign up friends. However, this alone won't be enough to have a huge effect on the player-base.
The other approach to drawing in new players after a horrific launch is to release a massively hyped expansion. Witness SW Galaxies and the forthcoming space expansion. With Galaxies, they may well have some success, because the pre-release interest in Galaxies was like nothing I've seen before for a MMORPG and I know the number of players who lost interest when it was announced there would be no space combat at release was pretty large. Whether this will actually work in practice and whether the technique can be adapted by other games without the huge license to support them remains to be seen.
Developing a MMORPG is a huge risk for a developer, as demonstrated by the number we've seen cancelled before release lately. It's a difficult market to break into, not least because of the relatively high initial costs for players when the game is released. (On a side note, I have NO sympathy for those who claim a MMORPG shouldn't charge both a purchase charge and a monthly fee. Developers need to do this, it's simple economics. After the years spent developing the game, the developers will almost certainly need some hefty cash-flow straight after release just to stay afloat, hence the box-costs. The monthly fees then pay for continuing support). With some recent MMORPGs such as FFXI proving that you CAN do a good roll-out, patience for sloppy MMORPG releases is at an all-time low. Sure, it's possible you can recover if things go pear-shaped, but why take the risk?
I'm a bit bewildered by how we got from the figures in the article to the conclusion that "the Japanese aren't interested in online gaming".
54.3% wouldn't be interested in a "premium" online game. I can only assume this refers to subscription based titles such as Everquest, Star Wars Galaxies and Final Fantasy XI. This leaves 45.7% who potentially would be. These figures do not sound massively out of line with the figures in the US and European gaming markets. By their very nature, as well as their reputation, subscription-based massively multiplayer games are going to exclude a pretty large section of the gaming market. In particular, penniless students are going to be put off by the price, under-18s are going to be put off by the fact that many of them require a credit card for subscriptions (which usually then involves getting dad to pay) and then you've got the people who just plain prefer another genre.
Final Fantasy XI has a huge Japanese player base, despite broadband being pretty much essential for it. I've said for some time that the reasons that the Japanese don't tend to play online games as much is that they just don't get online games marketed at them. The PC and the X-Box, which are far and away the most popular (and in my opinion, the best) platforms for online gaming have a negligable presence in the Japanese market, by virtue of the nature of the games sold on them. When Sony/Squenix finally sold a game that both appealed to Japanese tastes and required online play, the results were spectacular. For Nintendo to continue to ignore the potential of online gaming in Japan is nothing short of madness.
I've been playing FFXI pretty heavily since November. As you'd expect from a Final Fantasy game, the plot is a fairly large part of it.
However...
It isn't a "normal" Final Fantasy plot and comparing it with these is a good way of observing the limitations that going massively multiplayer puts on a game's "central" plot. The Final Fantasy series is pretty well known for its distinctive main characters. Love them or hate them, Celes, Cloud and Squall are pretty much part of the canon of classic gaming characters. By contrast, in FFXI, the player character is nothing more than the player's avatar in the game world. Sure, if you play the game's plot through to the conclusion, he's probably going to end up saving the world or something (I don't know for sure... I've not got there yet and people in-game are very good about not spoiling the story). However, the player character is far closer to what we're used to seeing in "Western" CRPGs, particularly those based around the AD&D rules; a blank-slate upon which the player can try to impose his own personality, so far as the rules of the game will allow. Of course, this is one respect in which MMORPG games go far beyond traditional CRPGs; while in, for example, Baldur's Gate, you might get three basic options for conversing with an NPC, one good, one neutral and one evil, communication between players in a MMORPG is almost completely unrestricted.
However, freedom of expression doesn't necessarily translate into a good plot. Square-Enix obviously put a lot of effort into making FFXI's plot as compelling as possible; there are a good few twists and your perceptions of some of the NPCs will shift dramatically over the course of a game. However, while a traditional Final Fantasy game will last around 40 hours, getting through the FFXI plot is likely to take closer to 40 days. Plot events are, by the very nature of the game, much more widely dispersed. For example, to do the plot mission required to gain rank 4, you'll need, at the very least, a party of characters of about level 35. To do the next mission, for rank 5, you'll need a party of approximately 10 levels higher. Moving from level 35 to level 45 will require several weeks for any player who can't stay in game every hour of every day. As a result, the plot sections seem few and far between and are never really going to form the bulk of the player's impressions of the game. There are lots of optional quests that expand the player's knowledge of the game-world, but they're not what I'd call "plot".
There are other potential options for doing plot in a MMORPG. One is to adopt the Eve Online approach, and have the devs write a plot based around the events that occur between groups of players in the game. Of course, I understand that this has been known to backfire spectacularly, when a group object to how the devs have portrayed them. You can also try to let the players write the plot as they go along. However, this relies on having a large number of players willing to put time and effort into creating the story and willing to accept roles for themselves that aren't "savior of mankind, ruler of the universe" and who actually have the talent to write. I suspect that a very small proportion of the current MMORPG player-base truly fits this bill.
To sum up, a plot can add a lot to a MMORPG and can be an important factor in enhancing a player's enjoyment of the game. However, it's never going to be among the most central parts of the MMORPG experience, on the basis of current designs, and what I'd say to any current MMORPG developers is that it's far more important to get the play mechanics and the player-economy right before worrying about plot.
I was OK when I last replayed FF6 until I got to the airship. The utterly lame 3d effect and the complete lack of any height on the map completely ruined the visual effect for me.
I'd be staggered if you'd actually beaten everything FFX has to offer in 35 hours game time. The Blitzball alone for Wakka's celestial weapon upgrade can't really be done in less than 20 hours, as you have to win a lot of games. My final save time on my second playthrough, on which I did everything up to and including beating penance (this includes all Monster Arena bosses and the Dark Aeons) is 135 hours. I saw the first of the big plot twists coming, but I kind of think you're expected to... it adds to the tragedy of the situation.
Just for information, FFX-2 is great fun so long as you don't go into it with any expectations based on previous FF games. It's much lighter in tone, very different in structure and pacing and much harder than FFX. FFXI is, in my opinion, by far the best "traditional" MMORPG released to date. Oh, and I really wish I hadn't wasted my money on Crystal Chronicles; as far as I'm concerned, the Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance games do the same thing better.
I'd disagree. FF6 is good... certainly my favorite of the NES/SNES Final Fantasies, but I really don't think it holds a candle to FF6, FFX or FFXI. FF6 didn't take me anything like 60 hours on first playthrough... my final save from that is at 38 hours, and that's with all of the characters obtained and a good few of the sidequests unlocked. I don't have my final FF7 save any more, but I'm pretty sure it was just over 45 hours. My FFX final save from my first playthrough is on 46 hours, and FFX-2 is on 42. I've got about 23 days in-game time in FFXI.
I'd also say that FF7 has the stronger story. FF6 is essentially just a fantasy story - an extremely well done one, by all accounts, but not a great departure from what we've seen elsewhere. FF7's plot really was something different from anything we'd seen in a game before; heavy shades of some of the more surreal anime/manga, such as Akira. I'd also rank FFX's plot higher than FF6's... there's a lot going on in FFX and it has a bit more of a point to it than some of the other games.
Graphically, FF6 looks far more dated than FF7. Most of the sprites are just plain ugly by today's standards. In fact, I'd say FF7's graphics have stood the test of time better than FF8's or FF9's. The fairly minimalist character models have a certain stylistic quality to them and don't look as... erm... "cluttered" as the FF8 or FF9 models.
The FF7 summons really didn't bother me. The only summon that takes more than a couple of seconds is Knights of the Round, and unless you plan on fighting the weapons, you probably won't be seeing much of that. The lengthy summon animations only really started in FF8.
As far as gameplay and mechanics goes, I don't think there's much to choose between FF6 or FF7. They've both got fairly straightforward levelling and combat systems, which don't really give you many options. It's fairly fluid, but ultimately, I'd rather have the better range of choices you get in FFX or FFX-2.
If I had to rank the more recent FF games (leaving FFXI apart, as comparisons there aren't really relevant), I'd probably go: FFX, FF7, FFX-2, FF8, FF6, FF9.
Notice how it's always Nintendo making dire predictions about the gaming market shrinking? Notice the story on slashdot a few days ago about how the Japanese games market is stagnant, despite impressive ongoing growth in the US and Europe? Want to hazard a guess whether there's a connection?
This is really an illustration of a lot of what's wrong with Nintendo's marketing strategy. Their Japan-centric attitude, more pronounced than Sony's, has essentially seen them get slaughtered in most of the rest of the world during this cycle, even by a console from a notoriously disliked OS developer who'd never made a console before. Here in the UK, when we hear of a great Gamecube title released in Japan, we don't usually assume we have a cat in hell's chance of ever seeing it appear in our stores. I guess the situation might be better in the US, but the UK alone is a large and expanding market, never mind the rest of Europe. Sony and Microsoft don't need to worry about the games market contracting; their sales are telling them something very different, as they're focussing on much healthier markets.
Don't get me wrong, Nintendo do have some good games. However, it's a pretty small number compared with number that have appeared for the X-Box and, in particular, the PS2. Somebody above mentioned Disgaea; that's a great example of a superb (really, it is, if you haven't played it, do) sleeper hit, of the kind of which Nintendo desperately needs. The Naval Ops games are another good example; almost zero publicity bar word of mouth, and yet I noticed them racking up impressive sales on this basis. By contrast, look at Eternal Darkness for the cube. A superb game, which would have been a hit on any other console, but which, due to the Cube's audience, never got anywhere in terms of sales.
As one poster above said, Nintendo are in danger of being killed by their own fan-base, who are driving them down a particular road, oblivious to the fact it's a dead end.
I don't see any great mystery here, nor do I see any particularly complicated factors or dark forces at work in the background. It's unlikely to be related to the Japanese recession; as I understand it, the Japanese economy has now very much turned the corner and was actually more severe in 1997, when, according to the article, the market was at its peak.
I just see this as a natural return to the norm from an absurdly high peak. The market's previous strength reflected a depth of obsession with gaming that was unlikely to be sustained. For a long time, the industry has talked about the Japanese game market on the same level as the US and European markets. When you consider the population of Japan (127 million) compared with the population of the United States (293 million) and Europe (200 million for just France, Germany and the UK, which is excluding a lot of big nations), this begins to seem absurd. I suspect we'll see the Japanese games market continue to "decline" until it reaches a level roughly proportional to the US and Europe.
From what I've seen, not all movie-based games suck. Not by a long stretch of the imagination. However, as a general (horribly general) rule, I think they can be broken down into two groups.
First of all, we have games which come out within the same immediate time-frame as the movie they're based on. These tend to suck. Examples include, but are by no means limited to: Enter the Matrix, Fifth Element, Terminator 3, etc, etc, etc. I'm sure you can think of many more. This is where Chronicles of Riddick breaks the rules; it falls into this category and doesn't suck. But most games in this group are, and always will be, cheap attempts to cash in on a movie whose brand has a short shelf-life.
The second group contains games based on movies or movie franchises which appear when the movies aren't the hype-of-the-moment. In general, these tend to be games based on *good* movies, since only the better movies stand up over time. Examples here include: Aliens vs Predator games (excluding the recent console RTS), Blade Runner (the adventure game - it's aging now, but it still rocks) and Terminator: Future Shock (and Skynet). Perhaps because the movies aren't flavour of the moment, these games have more freedom to move into expanded universes and craft a plot that works well for a game, rather than a movie.
Of course, half-way between the two groups, we have the Star Wars games, some of which rock and some of which suck. I think, however, that the same rule holds true here. Think about it... in the early and mid 90s, before the prequels, Star Wars games tend to rock. We have the SNES platformers/shooters, the X-Wing and TIE Fighter series etc. Sure, there's the odd dud, like Rebel Assault, but at least they're innovative duds. When Episode 1 comes out, the quality of Star Wars games, even from an objective, non-Jar-Jar-bashing point of view falls through the floor. We get a few utterly forgettable shooters and third-person games. Even today, when the license has recovered a bit from its nadir, the best games (Kotor and JK2) are those which are based more heavily on the universe of the original trilogy.