Good porting means balancing and mitigating the strengths and weaknesses of each platform. If Console A has less graphical power than Console B, then THAT version might get geometrically simpler models or smaller textures or a lower framerate. If Console C has the juice to perform full physics on a moving car while Console D doesn't, your build for Console D will have a simplified physics model.
That costs a lot more money and time than just focusing all development on one platform and releasing a shoddy port for a second or third, or even less development money is not to release a port at all. Remember that unlike a PC that a great deal of development tools for each platform are platform specific, meaning that even if they don't have to scale back the graphics on a port they still have to expend a lot of effort just to get the exact same thing running at the same quality level.
In summary how to get your game noticed? Make a really good game.
I think you're really on to something. How to get your song noticed? Make a really good song. How to get your movie noticed? Make a really good movie. How to get your tv show get noticed? Make a really good son- I mean tv show. Holy shit you are a super-genius!!
It's kind of annoying that they are so focused only on the higher quality and famous games rather than the long tail of every game ever made for a system. Maybe that will come later, but it would be nice if you could read one of those 'worst games ever' articles and follow a link and buy it for 50 cents on the virtual console and actual see for yourself that it is the worst game ever.
Please Zonk give up on your so called "game reviews." I had the pleasure to work as a reviewer for a number of years, and with some truly talented folks... and you, sir, ain't got it.
These "reviews" are just sad. I say it every time, and know it is always an instant ticket to -1's-ville but I've got Karma to burn. No one enjoys them and certainly no one is compelled to buy a game based on your words. They are like a self ego booster or something I guess for you, but what they show is how difficult it really is to write a solid review. They take lots of intelligence, time, attention to detail, and personal investment... and it is clear that you fail on every one of them.
Give it up already.
Please rAiNsT0rm give up on your so called "slashdot posts." I worked as a professional slashdot poster a couple of years ago. You can confirm this by considering the fact that the last sentence is true.
I would like to take the time to point out in specific detail why your post is so bad, but I have other more professional quality posts to make (though I am now retired I sometimes like to return and post now and then). Instead I will just have to say in several different ways that your post is not so good. You do not have the goods, take it from me. But your post does serve a valuable instructive device to other hopeful posters in the multiple mistakes that they might make, the most major mistake being that your post clearly lacks things that are good about my earlier pro posts.
By the way, last I head, this game was being published by EA, don't we hate them? Or were we always at peace with Eurasia?
That's only if you join the slashdot monolithic ideology club. Editors and posters and moderators who don't join are entitled to all have different individual opinions.
That thought would be correct except he specifically stated only his son, Christopher, could do so.
Unlike Lucas who has no problem with others dabbling in SW mythos, even directing and writing, etc., Tolkien was extremely picky and protective of his work. This is a well-known fact.
In any sane copyright system it all would be public domain by now. There'd still be plenty of True Fans who only would take the ordained word of Christopher as to what derivatives are canon or not, but approved or not I'd have every right to sell my hobbit porn fan-fiction alongside it.
Consider: how many authors create a language -- a full language -- for their work? Tolkien made five. How many develope an entire chronological cosmology -- from beginning to ending. How many create an entire mythos for this world? How many write an extremely detailed history from first created of a race until its end? How many do this for multiple races: dwarfs, elves, humans. Mind you, after all of this, almost as an after thought, he wrote LoTR -- as a filler for his world.
Ah, the false idol of worldbuilding- M John Harrison has a great response to this kind of worship of details and background over story:
Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn't there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn't possible, & if it was the results wouldn't be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder's victim, & makes us very afraid.
Damn straight, because an altruistic act for the benefit of underprivileged children in developing nations is totally bullshit and poor kids can just fuck right off.
But any number of organizations are trying to appeal to that sense of altruism, doing all sorts of different things in developing nations. Being able to own the laptop would be a huge differentiator to help me make up my mind if I were to choose which among those organizations I want to support. And what if the laptop is a piece of crap? Better to find out for myself than on 60 Minutes five years from now. Or maybe it is the coolest thing ever- then all of a sudden I'm really excited and now I'm giving more money than before and writing software and evangelizing the project (by showing people the laptop in operation, not just telling them about it).
Is this just a retread of those cartoons, or is it a different plotline?
Some of it looks okay- but there's one spectacularly lame scene where the trooper yells 'get ready!' dramatically, and then the door slowly opens to reveal: 5 of those dorkbots from phantom menace going 'pew-pew'.
The biggest problem right now is that you simply can't buy an XO laptop, its not even clear if you ever will be able to. That is kind of discouraging to me as a developer.
The whole 'you're too privileged to be able to buy this' attitude of Negroponte turns me off to the whole project. Unless I and every other potential contributor can actually own one, there's no way to get really excited and motivated to help.
I really hate the underwater scenes in movies or levels in video games. Everything moves so slow, the sound is muted, and you can't see very far into the distance (which is great for crappy graphics engines).
Does anyone else find it extremely tasteless that we entertain ourselves with games about war in the Middle East, at the same time as real people are actually being killed and injured in real fighting there?
I guess there might be. People call GTA tasteless, and there are actual murderous carjackers in real life. If some elected politician or someone else in a position where taste matters were promoting a violent video game, I might think less of that person, but I don't have the same expectations for video game developers and the average players.
If I were an Iraqi, I would probably think: what a bunch of smug, thoughtless bastards.
It probably is pretty far down on their list of things to be mad about.
Don't try and foist your problems with RPG onto me.
I am constantly amazed by high rated slashdot posts that complain about other people's complaining- not addressing the content of their message but that they brought it up at all. Typically they also imply that they as a helpless passive user of the internet were coerced or tricked into clicking on a link and by cruel magic their eyeballs were made to traverse across a few paragraphs, taking up precious minutes. Are you whining about the slashdot editor, the submitter of the story, the writer of the article, or the original site that hosted the article- or the vast conspiracy that brought them all together with the sinister aim of mildly annoying you?
What the article suggests already seems pretty standard in the more straight-forward games that are already heavily scripted. What I would like to see is for developers to making losing fun in games where there is no scripting- like Civilization. In games like Civ a game can take a long time, and losing completely can take a long time- and it's hard to tell sometimes whether you've just experienced a minor hiccup or that one city you lost is going to be followed by another and another- so you should reload and save that one city, and after reloading a few times you realize you just can't win, you might as well quit and restart.
With strategy games like Civ your playing skills are not going to dramatically improve over the course of one game, and your AI opponents don't start out smart but then sometimes become stupid, everything is pretty even- so any early indication that you're not going to win means starting over- there's no real chance of some dramatic reversal where you are fought back to one city but by some miracle can turn it all around.
It also takes a long time to win, the enemy never has a dramatic reversal either- if you know you're going to win and everything is going your way it can be very boring actually following through to victory.
But it would be interesting to try to address that. The game could cheat, altering the rules to make the game more interesting- maybe it wouldn't do it everytime, but would be unpredictable. Or success would be redefined.
Of course, the other side of this is when I suspect this is the token unbeatable boss, I don't waste any potions, and just lose on purpose -- oops, game over. I guess this wasn't the token unbeatable boss.
Bastard developers will probably eventually addresses this by killing your characters for a real game over if the game detects that you didn't try hard enough, but continuing on with the plot only if you do use up most of your potions.
I gather you have a thing for beauty pageant girls (and annoying people who are masturbating? That's a new one to me), but I still don't see what's wrong with bringing news of injustice to a public forum. If you yourself don't care, the internet makes it pretty easy to not click on things you aren't interested in- but why is it necessary to tell everyone who is interested to shut up and that they would be better off yanking it to Miss America or whatever that other thing you're into is?
Most people will be upset by my post subject, but it's a question that needs to be asked. What are the actual damages here? Viacom's not claiming ownership - they fucked up. If their fuck up causes damages, there is legal recourse for this. If this is the case, then the victim should seek those legal recourses. Or STFU.
It's possible that Viacom will see the slashdot story and will not send future takedowns for this video. It's possible that readers of this story have also gotten videos taken down unfairly but only now realize they aren't isolated cases. It's possible readers will contribute money to legal defense funds for this case or others like it. It's possible that in a free society that one method of redressing wrongs is to bring attention to those wrongs to a wider audience. It's possible that the public image of Viacom will be so damaged that they will be more careful about takedown notices in the future. It's possible that in a society with a free press the government will move to restrain the actions of corporations that are being abusive, but only when the outcry has reached a sufficient level. It's possible you are fucking moron and can only whine about other people who have more important things to say than you.
GTA:SA for the PC. A mission where you have to shoot down a plane with an executive or somebody on board. It's impossible with a mouse, and I haven't bothered to buy a PS2 style controller yet.
Simpsons Hit and Run for GC. Very late in the game there's a mission where you have to ferry toxic waste back and forth between the school and the nuclear plant within a time limit, and if you crash too hard the waste blows up and you have to drive all the way back for another one. Cheats that make your car go faster don't help, because the faster you go the harder the crashes will be and more likely the waste will explode. I know I'm only two levels away from beating the thing, and other than that it's a great game (earlier difficult levels let you skip them, but now at the end it doesn't do that anymore).
Resident Evil Zero for GC. I thought this game was pretty decent compared to my experience playing RS on the PS1. I made it into some mansion where there's some stairs to a closet with monsters that take a couple of shotgun hits to kill. Only I don't have that much ammo, and all other weapons are too slow. I've been thinking of starting over on the easy difficultly level, but the thought of having to go over all the same stuff again has prevented me from trying.
Spy Hunter for the GC. I didn't beat the first level on the first try, the game seemed so shitty I never tried it again.
Freelancer for the PC. This game seemed pretty good for a while, then I went a little too far out for the upgrade levels of my ship, and got into a mission where there's a save point halfway through in the middle of space. I reload that save and am killed pretty soon after, and I think I either copied over earlier save points or didn't even want to have to replay the first half of that mission even once.
That's an awesome idea. I'm sure there's all kinds of things they could think of in the form of downloadable content that they could reward players with. Sure, it's called 'unlockables' when the content is already there in the game, but this would allow them to develop the content later- if no one bothers to play the game much then the developer needn't ever waste that additional money developing bonus content no one was unlocking anyway.
There are parallels to episodic gaming here, but with a twist: Instead of nickel and diming the player for that bonus content, they would instead wait until some threshold in achievement points had been reached- the threshold being the sum of all achievement points of all players. They could even advertise their intent and this sum total could be accessible online (I don't use XBL so is anything like that available?)- the sum could either be reached by a lot of players earning a few points or a small group of players earning a lot of points each.
It would kind of be a collaborative game on top of the existing game, and would incentivise players not only to play the game themselves but also have them helping out and encouraging other people to play also.
To drift completely away from the original topic, the developer could still develop the content ahead of time (when the team is still together) and the unlocking of the content by aggregate achievements could then be automated and undelayed.
There's no real freedom of speech argument to be made here, because no one has stopped these guys from making the game, no law was passed to restrict or bury it, and no one has been arrested for being involved.
It's not Freedom of Speech as protected by the first amendment, it's about whether the festival wants to be seen as supporting daring and controversial works or passing all decisions past their sponsors. If they do the latter then the whole festival is a sham and no self-respecting game maker should submit their game or accept their award.
FTA: Ledonne said that he bears no ill will toward the festival, but that the decision to pull the game does raise concerns about freedom of speech . . .
I'm confused. How is the decision by non-governmental entities that something is undeserving of their support or attention a threat to freedom speech?
The game developer did his talking when he made the game. If Congress was directly shutting him down, that would be a problem. Other people deciding that his game is in poor taste or too soon or just plain wrong, and taking their money with them when they leave, is perfectly normal and legal. There is no constitutional right to be heard, only to speak freely. The intended audience can blow the speaker off at will.
It's not about free speech in the legal context of the constitution or government, but this particular festival and the reputation it wants to have. If the game festival wants to run all it's game choices past the opinion of the mob it can do so, while at the same time those who would prefer a more free and independent festival should criticize lapses in their judgement in the hope that they will not be so cowardly in the future or else: the threat not being that the supreme court will say they violated the Freedom of Speech but that we will not pay attention to the festival and game developers will not submit their games or accept awards in protest.
I think I'll appreciate episodic games more after they've been around for a while and I can either pick up an episode that was originally $20 for $5 or I can buy an entire 'season' with an entire story arc in one bundle for a reasonable price (e.g. less than it would have been to buy them each individually when they were brand new).
I'd also look forward to initial episodes being released for free or bundled with magazines or other kinds of promotions. Longer, semi-self-contained demos in other words, like Doom and Quake I shareware episodes.
The whole cliff-hanger ending concept is pretty stupid unless the likelihood of a future episode is also gauranteed. If the buyer knows there will be a cliff-hanger ending, and thinks it's possible the game won't sell well enough to gaurantee the next episode (because it's not called 'Half-Life), they will know not to bother with the first episode- this sort of counteracts the entire principle of episodic games where the publisher thinks it is easier to take risks when in fact games may be more conservative and punish risk-taking.
You argue that games should become more realistic in a broad sense, but then mention game balance. Allow me to state the obvious, but the Real World is rarely balanced. The symmetry -- and in some cases the balanced asymmetry -- of the opponents are one of the things that makes games fun. No one would want to play the one-on-one game of Tree Ant vs Kid with Magnifying Glass.
Well, I suppose the balance can be addressed artificially by lessening the realism of the game, e.g. the winning outcome for the Tree Ant would be to light the Kid on fire, and a player of average skill and motivation would be able to achieve that after a few tries- or by redefining success outside of the reality of the game, Tree Ant wins by barely escaping or living longer than it might be expected to. Sure, the more surreal artificial balancing sounds more fun initially, but the second approach could add a lot of realistic detail instead of placing the player in a cartoon world, and gradually expand on grand themes of ecology, love, hope, and the transmigration of souls...
Balance by making everything at parity (in the case of multiplayer games), or paper-rock-scissors like, or highly asymmetrical by having a smart player with lots of health against hordes of dumb AI entities that can be killed with few shots (balance game by adjusting health and enemy quantity), has been the standard for a long time, but I think there's a much larger space of balancing approaches out there that result in more realistic and interesting games, but require a lot of effort to discover and craft into playability.
The problem is they'll be recording modern porn at 1080p. I want my old grainy, barely color balanced, and sure as hell not a model porn.
All jokes about not wanting to see porn-star or actor imperfections, the solution is to just shoot more cinematically- when people only watched movies in the theaters (effectively big-screen high-def), the imperfection of models was not apparent because they tended to make the shots wider and show more people on-screen and get more scenery in the shot. It's when you're shooting with the low-def video market in mind you have to get super close up to see detail in the characters face. Although, for the forseeable future there will be a lot of people still watching in low-def and on small-screens (video ipods or phones), so there probably won't be a transition back to wider camera and more all-encompassing camera angles.
Slashdot Mirror
Good porting means balancing and mitigating the strengths and weaknesses of each platform. If Console A has less graphical power than Console B, then THAT version might get geometrically simpler models or smaller textures or a lower framerate. If Console C has the juice to perform full physics on a moving car while Console D doesn't, your build for Console D will have a simplified physics model.
That costs a lot more money and time than just focusing all development on one platform and releasing a shoddy port for a second or third, or even less development money is not to release a port at all. Remember that unlike a PC that a great deal of development tools for each platform are platform specific, meaning that even if they don't have to scale back the graphics on a port they still have to expend a lot of effort just to get the exact same thing running at the same quality level.
In summary how to get your game noticed? Make a really good game.
I think you're really on to something. How to get your song noticed? Make a really good song. How to get your movie noticed? Make a really good movie. How to get your tv show get noticed? Make a really good son- I mean tv show. Holy shit you are a super-genius!!
It's kind of annoying that they are so focused only on the higher quality and famous games rather than the long tail of every game ever made for a system. Maybe that will come later, but it would be nice if you could read one of those 'worst games ever' articles and follow a link and buy it for 50 cents on the virtual console and actual see for yourself that it is the worst game ever.
Please Zonk give up on your so called "game reviews." I had the pleasure to work as a reviewer for a number of years, and with some truly talented folks... and you, sir, ain't got it.
These "reviews" are just sad. I say it every time, and know it is always an instant ticket to -1's-ville but I've got Karma to burn. No one enjoys them and certainly no one is compelled to buy a game based on your words. They are like a self ego booster or something I guess for you, but what they show is how difficult it really is to write a solid review. They take lots of intelligence, time, attention to detail, and personal investment... and it is clear that you fail on every one of them.
Give it up already.
Please rAiNsT0rm give up on your so called "slashdot posts." I worked as a professional slashdot poster a couple of years ago. You can confirm this by considering the fact that the last sentence is true.
I would like to take the time to point out in specific detail why your post is so bad, but I have other more professional quality posts to make (though I am now retired I sometimes like to return and post now and then). Instead I will just have to say in several different ways that your post is not so good. You do not have the goods, take it from me. But your post does serve a valuable instructive device to other hopeful posters in the multiple mistakes that they might make, the most major mistake being that your post clearly lacks things that are good about my earlier pro posts.
Just stop.
By the way, last I head, this game was being published by EA, don't we hate them? Or were we always at peace with Eurasia?
That's only if you join the slashdot monolithic ideology club. Editors and posters and moderators who don't join are entitled to all have different individual opinions.
That thought would be correct except he specifically stated only his son, Christopher, could do so.
Unlike Lucas who has no problem with others dabbling in SW mythos, even directing and writing, etc., Tolkien was extremely picky and protective of his work. This is a well-known fact.
In any sane copyright system it all would be public domain by now. There'd still be plenty of True Fans who only would take the ordained word of Christopher as to what derivatives are canon or not, but approved or not I'd have every right to sell my hobbit porn fan-fiction alongside it.
Consider: how many authors create a language -- a full language -- for their work? Tolkien made five. How many develope an entire chronological cosmology -- from beginning to ending. How many create an entire mythos for this world? How many write an extremely detailed history from first created of a race until its end? How many do this for multiple races: dwarfs, elves, humans. Mind you, after all of this, almost as an after thought, he wrote LoTR -- as a filler for his world.
Ah, the false idol of worldbuilding- M John Harrison has a great response to this kind of worship of details and background over story:
Damn straight, because an altruistic act for the benefit of underprivileged children in developing nations is totally bullshit and poor kids can just fuck right off.
But any number of organizations are trying to appeal to that sense of altruism, doing all sorts of different things in developing nations. Being able to own the laptop would be a huge differentiator to help me make up my mind if I were to choose which among those organizations I want to support. And what if the laptop is a piece of crap? Better to find out for myself than on 60 Minutes five years from now. Or maybe it is the coolest thing ever- then all of a sudden I'm really excited and now I'm giving more money than before and writing software and evangelizing the project (by showing people the laptop in operation, not just telling them about it).
Is this just a retread of those cartoons, or is it a different plotline?
Some of it looks okay- but there's one spectacularly lame scene where the trooper yells 'get ready!' dramatically, and then the door slowly opens to reveal: 5 of those dorkbots from phantom menace going 'pew-pew'.
The biggest problem right now is that you simply can't buy an XO laptop, its not even clear if you ever will be able to. That is kind of discouraging to me as a developer.
The whole 'you're too privileged to be able to buy this' attitude of Negroponte turns me off to the whole project. Unless I and every other potential contributor can actually own one, there's no way to get really excited and motivated to help.
I really hate the underwater scenes in movies or levels in video games. Everything moves so slow, the sound is muted, and you can't see very far into the distance (which is great for crappy graphics engines).
Does anyone else find it extremely tasteless that we entertain ourselves with games about war in the Middle East, at the same time as real people are actually being killed and injured in real fighting there?
I guess there might be. People call GTA tasteless, and there are actual murderous carjackers in real life. If some elected politician or someone else in a position where taste matters were promoting a violent video game, I might think less of that person, but I don't have the same expectations for video game developers and the average players.
If I were an Iraqi, I would probably think: what a bunch of smug, thoughtless bastards.
It probably is pretty far down on their list of things to be mad about.
Don't try and foist your problems with RPG onto me.
I am constantly amazed by high rated slashdot posts that complain about other people's complaining- not addressing the content of their message but that they brought it up at all. Typically they also imply that they as a helpless passive user of the internet were coerced or tricked into clicking on a link and by cruel magic their eyeballs were made to traverse across a few paragraphs, taking up precious minutes. Are you whining about the slashdot editor, the submitter of the story, the writer of the article, or the original site that hosted the article- or the vast conspiracy that brought them all together with the sinister aim of mildly annoying you?
What the article suggests already seems pretty standard in the more straight-forward games that are already heavily scripted. What I would like to see is for developers to making losing fun in games where there is no scripting- like Civilization. In games like Civ a game can take a long time, and losing completely can take a long time- and it's hard to tell sometimes whether you've just experienced a minor hiccup or that one city you lost is going to be followed by another and another- so you should reload and save that one city, and after reloading a few times you realize you just can't win, you might as well quit and restart.
With strategy games like Civ your playing skills are not going to dramatically improve over the course of one game, and your AI opponents don't start out smart but then sometimes become stupid, everything is pretty even- so any early indication that you're not going to win means starting over- there's no real chance of some dramatic reversal where you are fought back to one city but by some miracle can turn it all around.
It also takes a long time to win, the enemy never has a dramatic reversal either- if you know you're going to win and everything is going your way it can be very boring actually following through to victory.
But it would be interesting to try to address that. The game could cheat, altering the rules to make the game more interesting- maybe it wouldn't do it everytime, but would be unpredictable. Or success would be redefined.
Of course, the other side of this is when I suspect this is the token unbeatable boss, I don't waste any potions, and just lose on purpose -- oops, game over. I guess this wasn't the token unbeatable boss.
Bastard developers will probably eventually addresses this by killing your characters for a real game over if the game detects that you didn't try hard enough, but continuing on with the plot only if you do use up most of your potions.
I gather you have a thing for beauty pageant girls (and annoying people who are masturbating? That's a new one to me), but I still don't see what's wrong with bringing news of injustice to a public forum. If you yourself don't care, the internet makes it pretty easy to not click on things you aren't interested in- but why is it necessary to tell everyone who is interested to shut up and that they would be better off yanking it to Miss America or whatever that other thing you're into is?
Most people will be upset by my post subject, but it's a question that needs to be asked. What are the actual damages here? Viacom's not claiming ownership - they fucked up. If their fuck up causes damages, there is legal recourse for this. If this is the case, then the victim should seek those legal recourses. Or STFU.
It's possible that Viacom will see the slashdot story and will not send future takedowns for this video. It's possible that readers of this story have also gotten videos taken down unfairly but only now realize they aren't isolated cases. It's possible readers will contribute money to legal defense funds for this case or others like it. It's possible that in a free society that one method of redressing wrongs is to bring attention to those wrongs to a wider audience. It's possible that the public image of Viacom will be so damaged that they will be more careful about takedown notices in the future. It's possible that in a society with a free press the government will move to restrain the actions of corporations that are being abusive, but only when the outcry has reached a sufficient level. It's possible you are fucking moron and can only whine about other people who have more important things to say than you.
GTA:SA for the PC. A mission where you have to shoot down a plane with an executive or somebody on board. It's impossible with a mouse, and I haven't bothered to buy a PS2 style controller yet.
Simpsons Hit and Run for GC. Very late in the game there's a mission where you have to ferry toxic waste back and forth between the school and the nuclear plant within a time limit, and if you crash too hard the waste blows up and you have to drive all the way back for another one. Cheats that make your car go faster don't help, because the faster you go the harder the crashes will be and more likely the waste will explode. I know I'm only two levels away from beating the thing, and other than that it's a great game (earlier difficult levels let you skip them, but now at the end it doesn't do that anymore).
Resident Evil Zero for GC. I thought this game was pretty decent compared to my experience playing RS on the PS1. I made it into some mansion where there's some stairs to a closet with monsters that take a couple of shotgun hits to kill. Only I don't have that much ammo, and all other weapons are too slow. I've been thinking of starting over on the easy difficultly level, but the thought of having to go over all the same stuff again has prevented me from trying.
Spy Hunter for the GC. I didn't beat the first level on the first try, the game seemed so shitty I never tried it again.
Freelancer for the PC. This game seemed pretty good for a while, then I went a little too far out for the upgrade levels of my ship, and got into a mission where there's a save point halfway through in the middle of space. I reload that save and am killed pretty soon after, and I think I either copied over earlier save points or didn't even want to have to replay the first half of that mission even once.
Sure, the points can't be redeemed for anything
That's an awesome idea. I'm sure there's all kinds of things they could think of in the form of downloadable content that they could reward players with. Sure, it's called 'unlockables' when the content is already there in the game, but this would allow them to develop the content later- if no one bothers to play the game much then the developer needn't ever waste that additional money developing bonus content no one was unlocking anyway.
There are parallels to episodic gaming here, but with a twist: Instead of nickel and diming the player for that bonus content, they would instead wait until some threshold in achievement points had been reached- the threshold being the sum of all achievement points of all players. They could even advertise their intent and this sum total could be accessible online (I don't use XBL so is anything like that available?)- the sum could either be reached by a lot of players earning a few points or a small group of players earning a lot of points each.
It would kind of be a collaborative game on top of the existing game, and would incentivise players not only to play the game themselves but also have them helping out and encouraging other people to play also.
To drift completely away from the original topic, the developer could still develop the content ahead of time (when the team is still together) and the unlocking of the content by aggregate achievements could then be automated and undelayed.
There's no real freedom of speech argument to be made here, because no one has stopped these guys from making the game, no law was passed to restrict or bury it, and no one has been arrested for being involved.
It's not Freedom of Speech as protected by the first amendment, it's about whether the festival wants to be seen as supporting daring and controversial works or passing all decisions past their sponsors. If they do the latter then the whole festival is a sham and no self-respecting game maker should submit their game or accept their award.
FTA: Ledonne said that he bears no ill will toward the festival, but that the decision to pull the game does raise concerns about freedom of speech . . .
I'm confused. How is the decision by non-governmental entities that something is undeserving of their support or attention a threat to freedom speech?
The game developer did his talking when he made the game. If Congress was directly shutting him down, that would be a problem. Other people deciding that his game is in poor taste or too soon or just plain wrong, and taking their money with them when they leave, is perfectly normal and legal. There is no constitutional right to be heard, only to speak freely. The intended audience can blow the speaker off at will.
It's not about free speech in the legal context of the constitution or government, but this particular festival and the reputation it wants to have. If the game festival wants to run all it's game choices past the opinion of the mob it can do so, while at the same time those who would prefer a more free and independent festival should criticize lapses in their judgement in the hope that they will not be so cowardly in the future or else: the threat not being that the supreme court will say they violated the Freedom of Speech but that we will not pay attention to the festival and game developers will not submit their games or accept awards in protest.
I think I'll appreciate episodic games more after they've been around for a while and I can either pick up an episode that was originally $20 for $5 or I can buy an entire 'season' with an entire story arc in one bundle for a reasonable price (e.g. less than it would have been to buy them each individually when they were brand new).
I'd also look forward to initial episodes being released for free or bundled with magazines or other kinds of promotions. Longer, semi-self-contained demos in other words, like Doom and Quake I shareware episodes.
The whole cliff-hanger ending concept is pretty stupid unless the likelihood of a future episode is also gauranteed. If the buyer knows there will be a cliff-hanger ending, and thinks it's possible the game won't sell well enough to gaurantee the next episode (because it's not called 'Half-Life), they will know not to bother with the first episode- this sort of counteracts the entire principle of episodic games where the publisher thinks it is easier to take risks when in fact games may be more conservative and punish risk-taking.
It's perhaps worth noting that many books we regard today as classics were originally published in an episodic style in the pulp rags of the time
Don't forget Dune was originally serialized in Analog.
You argue that games should become more realistic in a broad sense, but then mention game balance. Allow me to state the obvious, but the Real World is rarely balanced. The symmetry -- and in some cases the balanced asymmetry -- of the opponents are one of the things that makes games fun. No one would want to play the one-on-one game of Tree Ant vs Kid with Magnifying Glass.
Well, I suppose the balance can be addressed artificially by lessening the realism of the game, e.g. the winning outcome for the Tree Ant would be to light the Kid on fire, and a player of average skill and motivation would be able to achieve that after a few tries- or by redefining success outside of the reality of the game, Tree Ant wins by barely escaping or living longer than it might be expected to. Sure, the more surreal artificial balancing sounds more fun initially, but the second approach could add a lot of realistic detail instead of placing the player in a cartoon world, and gradually expand on grand themes of ecology, love, hope, and the transmigration of souls...
Balance by making everything at parity (in the case of multiplayer games), or paper-rock-scissors like, or highly asymmetrical by having a smart player with lots of health against hordes of dumb AI entities that can be killed with few shots (balance game by adjusting health and enemy quantity), has been the standard for a long time, but I think there's a much larger space of balancing approaches out there that result in more realistic and interesting games, but require a lot of effort to discover and craft into playability.
The problem is they'll be recording modern porn at 1080p. I want my old grainy, barely color balanced, and sure as hell not a model porn.
All jokes about not wanting to see porn-star or actor imperfections, the solution is to just shoot more cinematically- when people only watched movies in the theaters (effectively big-screen high-def), the imperfection of models was not apparent because they tended to make the shots wider and show more people on-screen and get more scenery in the shot. It's when you're shooting with the low-def video market in mind you have to get super close up to see detail in the characters face. Although, for the forseeable future there will be a lot of people still watching in low-def and on small-screens (video ipods or phones), so there probably won't be a transition back to wider camera and more all-encompassing camera angles.