console market > pc gaming market ps2 market > xbox market therefore: mgs3 market > halo 2 market > half life 2 market keep in mind that the shashdot crowd might be a little (obviously) biased in this respect. your average joe gamer with a ps2 in his living room and no computer (or maybe a basic desktop pc without a graphics card to brag about) couldn't care less about half-life 2. the only blockbuster game that really stands a chance of overshadowing mgs3's release is gta:sa.
A cogent argument could be made suggesting that Spielberg's 'game design intuition' was the single greatest cause of the great video game crash of 1983. The man may make some good movies, but I'll never listen to a DAMN thing he says regarding games, because he obviously has no clue what he's talking about. I'm surprised neither Walter nor Chris brought the great ET debacle up in their articles.
On another note - increased realism is not going to be and never was the driving force for good games. it's been a driving force for the industry, the millions of fanboys who eat up a few extra mole marks on their polygonal models and the graphics cards companies who happily sell us upgraded machinery every six months, but we've been seeing the same old, tired, incredibly conservative games and forms of gameplay for years now.
The first time I cried from playing a video game was playing WWF Wrestlemania (or something like that) for the SNES. I picked it out for my ninth or so birthday because I saw some screenshots in Nintendo Power, and they looked so photo-realistic that I wanted to play it. After taking it home and turning it on, I was appalled by the simplistic button mashing that grew tedious after only a few minutes. I cried all night for being so easily tricked by the lure of realism, and vowed never to give realism in games any thought again. I still have that cartridge today as a reminder.
Hmm...Ethernet, DVD, mass storage, now full USB peripheral compatibility...why doesn't Microsoft pack its XBox2 with a VGA connector and a stripped-down version of Longhorn for web, chat, etc?
In the article, Lester mentions Microsoft's push to produce standardized 'levels' of preconfigured computer setups that would guarantee compatibility with specific games. How is this much different from what the XBox2 will try to achieve? Really, the whole console/pc distinction is pointless now that they're using the same exact technologies and components...the only thing consoles have going for them is a stricter standardization and millions of dollars in heavy marketing.
I certainly commend Microsoft's effort in 'opening up' the console architectures. We've come a long way from Nintendo and its draconian licensing policies of the 80s and early 90s. But remember, the closer we come to achieving the ideal open-architecture pc-like console, the closer Microsoft comes to being able to use the full power of its Windows leverage to dominate the backbone of the console gaming industry (and crushing Sony's hardware stronghold in the process). Of course, as a gamer, I'd gladly give them the world if it gives me more control over the games I play and more design freedom for the games that are developed.
Word has it that Codemasters, creators of the Game Genie devices, simply failed to develop effective measures to prevent rampant cheating in their virtual world.
All the good films that are remembered tend to have these same elements. They get you involved with the characters and the story and help you form emotional attachments.
Games are not films. Characters and story? Emotional attachments? Tetris? Chess? Good films will be remembered for vastly different reasons from good games. Yes, you can use the computer games medium as a cheap, alternative mass media narrative distribution outlet (which has been a very lucrative approach recently), but that's precisely the reason why games still lurk in the low-brow 'pop-culture' corner of the public sphere, despite building on a history of over 40 years and a history of game-playing that spans several thousand more.
At first glance I read the story headline as 'How to Lose an Erection'... Although I suppose reading any story involving Janet Reno would be pretty effective there as well.
The touch-screen alone will allow you much more intuitive control of games that depend on selecting objects in a 2-dimensional playing field (think Maniac Mansion, Lemmings, any RTS game). Basically, the days of manipulating that clunky joypad-controlled cursor all over the screen are gone. And this is a GREAT thing with tosn of possibilities.
I'm still a little skeptical of how it'll turn out in practice, though. My experience with touch screens in the past has been that they're still kind of clunky themselves because they're not precise enough to use with your thumbs and I wouldn't even think of trying to tap a screen with a stylus while simultaneously holding the controller in both hands and having access to the d-pad and action buttons.
As far as the second screen, as a three-year dual-monitor user I know how much easier it is to multitask with a set of applications open on separate screens and simply switch your gaze (and mouse) between them as opposed to constantly shuffling windows around. At the same time, I don't see streamlined console games having the same multitasking requirements, and I think the second screen will just be used as a place to put those mini-maps and status windows that used to be squeezed into the corner of the screen. It might make the main gameplay windows less cluttered, but I'd rather just have a larger single screen.
I give Nintendo credit for trying something new, but I'm still haunted by Virtual Boy flashbacks. They'll have to do a lot more than produce a gimmicky hardware platform if they truly intend to reintroduce innovation to the dying video game industry. Like, for example, I hope they design new games for the platform as opposed to port existing franchies and retro remakes with cursory touch-screen and dual-screen support. But this is definitely a start.
A while back (Oct. 28, 2003), the Librarian of Congress granted certain classes of works a three-year exemption from the DMCA. The classes of interest are:
(2) Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete.
(3) Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.
I know these classes apply to old, obsolete console systems, but couldn't they apply to CD-ROM anti-circumvention programs for games that are no longer being manufactured, because in that case the original CD-ROMs themselves are the necessary systems? If so, copy-circumvention programs like this would have a legal, legitimate use.
Of more general concern is the fact that such special exemptions need to be made in the first place, suggesting that the whole DMCA is bogus in the first place.
Name a game that had Myst-like gameplay (regardless of the graphics quality) before Myst itself? I can't think of a single one.
How about Zork. Or Adventure, for that matter. They're all part of a genre called Interactive Fiction, and I personally don't have much interest in them.
Both Jordan Mechner and Rand Miller based their entries into computer game design around elaborate, cutting-edge graphics. The popularity of Prince of Persia (and Karateka originally) was because Mechner used primitively-rotoscoped sprites to create fluid character movement. Myst, of course, was the first CD-ROM that allowed you to navigate through a pre-rendered CGI environment. In my opinion, neither piece was particularly innovative or fun to play as a game because the focus was on storytelling and visuals. Now that computer graphics are getting closer and closer to photorealism and it's getting harder and harder to differentiate a game on graphics alone, the industry is beginning to shy away from them as their main focus (as evidenced by the middle-ground position taken by the designers in this article). Of the three designers here, only Will Wright will make an impact in the future because he's the only one that was actually creating innovative games from the start. The others were just low-budget filmmakers working in an underdeveloped medium.
Many of the bigger names in the industry 'are' technical, but they're also artistic, and they mainly hail from the days where only 2 people may be working on a game, forcing programming and artistic expression into one condensed job.
Chris Crawford is one of the bigger names in the industry. He wrote The Art of Computer Game Design, a seminal book on game design, in 1982, and founded the GDC in 1987.
As far as I know, his main beef is not with proven game designers like Warren Spector and Will Wright, but with the gamedev company-sponsored university classes that teach 'game design' as a mix of computer graphics and software engineering and nothing else, and the fact that that world is so completely separated from the guys talking about 'embodied virtual experiences' and 'hypertext narrative' in the English and Film Studies departments across campus.
Crawford may not have anything nice to say about the game industry, but he knows a lot about games. Listen when he preaches, just don't take his words as gospel.
I totally agree with him that there is still an unpleasant divide between the academics and the engineers. It's great that people are starting to take games more seriously and I still believe that the current trend will result in a much more mature (in the intellectual sense, not the Playboy-Sims game sense) industry.
However, here is where I disagree with Crawford - I don't think the video game industry will emerge from its 'puberty' once interactive storytelling takes off and the humanities people are finally able to add their 'emotion' into games, but I think it'll happen once academics master the formal elements of games, build theories from the ground up and recognize things computers are inherently good at, like real-time distributed communication and number crunching for complex systems.
After that, all that's left to be done is to create a thriving indy scene and bring game development to the masses, raise public opinion and awareness of games as a medium by creating them for their artistic merit as opposed to their marketability and popularity, and finally, acknowledge the enormous educational potential of games and wholeheartedly integrate the study and play of games into our educational institutions all the way from elementary schools to university departments.
These are some of the first new NES games developed in years
Hardly some of the first...There have been tons of homebrew NES demos and full games developed within the past few years. Well-polished games like Chris Covell's Solar Wars and Kent Hansen's Bombsweeper are polished games that put Bob Rost's own self-proclaimed 'NES game of the century', Sack of Flour, to shame - if not on code complexity and dev team size, on well-polished game design and playability. Not to mention the promising Megaman: Vengeance homebrew game being (slowly) developed by the folks at Dragon Eye Studios. The rom hacking community has produced plenty of other high quality rom hacks that do amazing things with the NES.
Either way, I think it's a cool project. I first discovered the student class webpage a month or two ago, and I'm glad that the class ended successfully.
the company mentioned they "are determined to expand their reach across all forms of media, not just limiting themselves to the gaming market"
You mean sort of like when they attempted to do so three years ago, failed miserably because they found out that their pathetic video game sagas couldn't cut it in a mature entertainment industry, and released a slew of godawful Final Fantasy games to make up for their monumental loss?
I saw this site earlier today before the/. article was posted (and the site went down), and I have one thing to say: 3d artwork and music does not a playable game make. Might make for an interesting fan demo (especially to appease the masses of Squaresoft fans out there who cream their pants over this kind of stuff), but don't ever expect this to turn into a game worth glancing at. If the people involved had any clue as to what they're doing, they would build the game around emulating the game mechanics first, and layering a framework for building new custom content on top instead of the other way around, much along the lines of what the Zelda Classic project accomplished. But then again, the fact that they've been working on this same idea for four years and have nothing to show for it except for some pretty looking 3d screenshots pretty much speaks for itself.
Is there an equivilent hacking/programming culture for the NES? That'd rule big time.
Indeed there is. The NES hacking community has done amazing things with classic games such as Metroid and the Mario, Zelda and Megaman series. The community has evolved from simple graphics and text hacking to recreating entirely new challenging levels, intricate assembly code modifications (ever wanted to play Megaman in time-attack mode, or Mario 3 with a day/night system?), and there are even some interesting homebrewn games in development. Check out The Challenge Games Community for a good starting place. Be sure to check out Mario Adventure and Zelda Challenge as two good examples of high-quality hacks.
There's also an older community dedicated to producing translations of Japanese console games that do similarly intense hacks to NES games, but with a more practical objective. The Whirlpool is a good starting point here. Check out FFII,III,IV (hard type),V, Star Ocean, Seiken Densetsu 3, Tales of Phantasia and Dragon Quest V,VI for some of the completed translations of high-profile games.
Wow, are you one of those guys that buys the same car year after year, because the damn things just keep getting re-released annually?
No, that is an inappropriate analogy because cars from the 1980's still drive on highways today, and it would be ridiculous to design them otherwise. A more appropriate analogy would be a car that only ran on the roads that were built in the mid 80's, so if you wanted to drive anywhere in the 90's you had to buy a new car, and continue that expensive cycle every 5-10 years...
I don't mind and in fact support the idea of continuing to make classic games available for generations of newer players who have never bought or played the originals. It's the fans of the originals who end up buying the new games for nostalgia or simply to play the game again that are getting shortchanged by short-lived console platforms and the tactics developers use to capitalize on it. Even us fans of classic games don't have enough floor space to keep our old NES and Atari machines around after upgrading to XBoxes and Playstations.
Think how ridiculous it would be to buy a Windows '98 game a second time because you upgraded your system to XP.
'Portability' is not a feature of a game itself, it's a fabricated 'feature' created by preventing you from playing your legally purchased games on newer platforms.
How many times are videogame companies going to expect people to dish out money for the same exact games? These 'technological update' port/remakes are completely against the progressive nature of technology because they depend on the suppression of our rights to play games that we have already purchased. Instead of allowing people to continue to play classic games they have already paid for on new hardware (via official emulators and hardware ROM extractors and the like), they rely on the short life-cycle of console systems to sell us the same games again in a new packaging. While they do update the technological presentation, they don't make any significant changes, or even create superficially different levels and challenges to make the games any different the second (PSX), third (WSC), fourth (GBA) time around. It's even more revolting than sequelitis. If they -must- remake, instead of making a re-re-re-release of FF1-2, why don't they remake FF3 for once and use the opportunity to localize the only Final Fantasy still officially missing in the US? While it's proven to be more successful to re-release classic games on new hardware than to actually develop new games, it also shows that the monolithic Square can't come up with any better games than their last-ditch effort twenty years ago when they were a two-bit videogame company on the verge of bankruptcy (which, oh the irony, is what the 'Final' in FF actually stood for at the time).
Re:Nice rebuttal to that "video game crash" articl
on
The State of AI In Games
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
David Wong does say that graphics advancements have leveled off in recent years, but he's not making this point at the expense of ignoring advancements in game AI or physics engines. His point is that pitching the same old rehashes of rigid game genres with some incremental technological advancement to give it novelty value is leading the industry nowhere. Besides, whereas graphics are (by definition) a fundamental element of video games, AI (especially the pathfinding sort mentioned in this article) and physics play only marginal roles in just a few existing popular genres, and are by no means present in all video games. How is better AI going to matter in multiplayer games where there's more than enough REAL AI (human players) available? Or how is a new physics engine going to significantly alter the way we play, say, strategy games that don't depend on realistic physics for their essential gameplay? Looking to AI or physics as the technology that will solve the video game industry's many problems isn't the answer.
Slashdot Mirror
console market > pc gaming market
ps2 market > xbox market
therefore:
mgs3 market > halo 2 market > half life 2 market
keep in mind that the shashdot crowd might be a little (obviously) biased in this respect.
your average joe gamer with a ps2 in his living room and no computer (or maybe a basic desktop pc without a graphics card to brag about) couldn't care less about half-life 2. the only blockbuster game that really stands a chance of overshadowing mgs3's release is gta:sa.
Now that Steam has pioneered the biggest online game delivery system to date[...]
Second to BitTorrent, of course.
Two words.... E.T.
A cogent argument could be made suggesting that Spielberg's 'game design intuition' was the single greatest cause of the great video game crash of 1983. The man may make some good movies, but I'll never listen to a DAMN thing he says regarding games, because he obviously has no clue what he's talking about. I'm surprised neither Walter nor Chris brought the great ET debacle up in their articles.
On another note - increased realism is not going to be and never was the driving force for good games. it's been a driving force for the industry, the millions of fanboys who eat up a few extra mole marks on their polygonal models and the graphics cards companies who happily sell us upgraded machinery every six months, but we've been seeing the same old, tired, incredibly conservative games and forms of gameplay for years now.
The first time I cried from playing a video game was playing WWF Wrestlemania (or something like that) for the SNES. I picked it out for my ninth or so birthday because I saw some screenshots in Nintendo Power, and they looked so photo-realistic that I wanted to play it. After taking it home and turning it on, I was appalled by the simplistic button mashing that grew tedious after only a few minutes. I cried all night for being so easily tricked by the lure of realism, and vowed never to give realism in games any thought again. I still have that cartridge today as a reminder.
Hmm...Ethernet, DVD, mass storage, now full USB peripheral compatibility...why doesn't Microsoft pack its XBox2 with a VGA connector and a stripped-down version of Longhorn for web, chat, etc?
In the article, Lester mentions Microsoft's push to produce standardized 'levels' of preconfigured computer setups that would guarantee compatibility with specific games. How is this much different from what the XBox2 will try to achieve? Really, the whole console/pc distinction is pointless now that they're using the same exact technologies and components...the only thing consoles have going for them is a stricter standardization and millions of dollars in heavy marketing.
I certainly commend Microsoft's effort in 'opening up' the console architectures. We've come a long way from Nintendo and its draconian licensing policies of the 80s and early 90s. But remember, the closer we come to achieving the ideal open-architecture pc-like console, the closer Microsoft comes to being able to use the full power of its Windows leverage to dominate the backbone of the console gaming industry (and crushing Sony's hardware stronghold in the process). Of course, as a gamer, I'd gladly give them the world if it gives me more control over the games I play and more design freedom for the games that are developed.
Word has it that Codemasters, creators of the Game Genie devices, simply failed to develop effective measures to prevent rampant cheating in their virtual world.
All the good films that are remembered tend to have these same elements. They get you involved with the characters and the story and help you form emotional attachments.
Games are not films. Characters and story? Emotional attachments? Tetris? Chess?
Good films will be remembered for vastly different reasons from good games.
Yes, you can use the computer games medium as a cheap, alternative mass media narrative distribution outlet (which has been a very lucrative approach recently), but that's precisely the reason why games still lurk in the low-brow 'pop-culture' corner of the public sphere, despite building on a history of over 40 years and a history of game-playing that spans several thousand more.
At first glance I read the story headline as 'How to Lose an Erection'...
Although I suppose reading any story involving Janet Reno would be pretty effective there as well.
The touch-screen alone will allow you much more intuitive control of games that depend on selecting objects in a 2-dimensional playing field (think Maniac Mansion, Lemmings, any RTS game). Basically, the days of manipulating that clunky joypad-controlled cursor all over the screen are gone. And this is a GREAT thing with tosn of possibilities.
I'm still a little skeptical of how it'll turn out in practice, though. My experience with touch screens in the past has been that they're still kind of clunky themselves because they're not precise enough to use with your thumbs and I wouldn't even think of trying to tap a screen with a stylus while simultaneously holding the controller in both hands and having access to the d-pad and action buttons.
As far as the second screen, as a three-year dual-monitor user I know how much easier it is to multitask with a set of applications open on separate screens and simply switch your gaze (and mouse) between them as opposed to constantly shuffling windows around. At the same time, I don't see streamlined console games having the same multitasking requirements, and I think the second screen will just be used as a place to put those mini-maps and status windows that used to be squeezed into the corner of the screen. It might make the main gameplay windows less cluttered, but I'd rather just have a larger single screen.
I give Nintendo credit for trying something new, but I'm still haunted by Virtual Boy flashbacks. They'll have to do a lot more than produce a gimmicky hardware platform if they truly intend to reintroduce innovation to the dying video game industry. Like, for example, I hope they design new games for the platform as opposed to port existing franchies and retro remakes with cursory touch-screen and dual-screen support. But this is definitely a start.
A while back (Oct. 28, 2003), the Librarian of Congress granted certain classes of works a three-year exemption from the DMCA. The classes of interest are:
(2) Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete.
(3) Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.
I know these classes apply to old, obsolete console systems, but couldn't they apply to CD-ROM anti-circumvention programs for games that are no longer being manufactured, because in that case the original CD-ROMs themselves are the necessary systems? If so, copy-circumvention programs like this would have a legal, legitimate use.
Of more general concern is the fact that such special exemptions need to be made in the first place, suggesting that the whole DMCA is bogus in the first place.
Name a game that had Myst-like gameplay (regardless of the graphics quality) before Myst itself? I can't think of a single one.
How about Zork. Or Adventure, for that matter. They're all part of a genre called Interactive Fiction, and I personally don't have much interest in them.
Both Jordan Mechner and Rand Miller based their entries into computer game design around elaborate, cutting-edge graphics. The popularity of Prince of Persia (and Karateka originally) was because Mechner used primitively-rotoscoped sprites to create fluid character movement. Myst, of course, was the first CD-ROM that allowed you to navigate through a pre-rendered CGI environment. In my opinion, neither piece was particularly innovative or fun to play as a game because the focus was on storytelling and visuals. Now that computer graphics are getting closer and closer to photorealism and it's getting harder and harder to differentiate a game on graphics alone, the industry is beginning to shy away from them as their main focus (as evidenced by the middle-ground position taken by the designers in this article). Of the three designers here, only Will Wright will make an impact in the future because he's the only one that was actually creating innovative games from the start. The others were just low-budget filmmakers working in an underdeveloped medium.
Many of the bigger names in the industry 'are' technical, but they're also artistic, and they mainly hail from the days where only 2 people may be working on a game, forcing programming and artistic expression into one condensed job.
Chris Crawford is one of the bigger names in the industry. He wrote The Art of Computer Game Design, a seminal book on game design, in 1982, and founded the GDC in 1987.
As far as I know, his main beef is not with proven game designers like Warren Spector and Will Wright, but with the gamedev company-sponsored university classes that teach 'game design' as a mix of computer graphics and software engineering and nothing else, and the fact that that world is so completely separated from the guys talking about 'embodied virtual experiences' and 'hypertext narrative' in the English and Film Studies departments across campus.
Crawford may not have anything nice to say about the game industry, but he knows a lot about games. Listen when he preaches, just don't take his words as gospel.
I totally agree with him that there is still an unpleasant divide between the academics and the engineers. It's great that people are starting to take games more seriously and I still believe that the current trend will result in a much more mature (in the intellectual sense, not the Playboy-Sims game sense) industry.
However, here is where I disagree with Crawford - I don't think the video game industry will emerge from its 'puberty' once interactive storytelling takes off and the humanities people are finally able to add their 'emotion' into games, but I think it'll happen once academics master the formal elements of games, build theories from the ground up and recognize things computers are inherently good at, like real-time distributed communication and number crunching for complex systems.
After that, all that's left to be done is to create a thriving indy scene and bring game development to the masses, raise public opinion and awareness of games as a medium by creating them for their artistic merit as opposed to their marketability and popularity, and finally, acknowledge the enormous educational potential of games and wholeheartedly integrate the study and play of games into our educational institutions all the way from elementary schools to university departments.
These are some of the first new NES games developed in years
Hardly some of the first...There have been tons of homebrew NES demos and full games developed within the past few years. Well-polished games like Chris Covell's Solar Wars and Kent Hansen's Bombsweeper are polished games that put Bob Rost's own self-proclaimed 'NES game of the century', Sack of Flour, to shame - if not on code complexity and dev team size, on well-polished game design and playability. Not to mention the promising Megaman: Vengeance homebrew game being (slowly) developed by the folks at Dragon Eye Studios. The rom hacking community has produced plenty of other high quality rom hacks that do amazing things with the NES.
Either way, I think it's a cool project. I first discovered the student class webpage a month or two ago, and I'm glad that the class ended successfully.
the company mentioned they "are determined to expand their reach across all forms of media, not just limiting themselves to the gaming market"
You mean sort of like when they attempted to do so three years ago, failed miserably because they found out that their pathetic video game sagas couldn't cut it in a mature entertainment industry, and released a slew of godawful Final Fantasy games to make up for their monumental loss?
I saw this site earlier today before the /. article was posted (and the site went down), and I have one thing to say: 3d artwork and music does not a playable game make. Might make for an interesting fan demo (especially to appease the masses of Squaresoft fans out there who cream their pants over this kind of stuff), but don't ever expect this to turn into a game worth glancing at. If the people involved had any clue as to what they're doing, they would build the game around emulating the game mechanics first, and layering a framework for building new custom content on top instead of the other way around, much along the lines of what the Zelda Classic project accomplished. But then again, the fact that they've been working on this same idea for four years and have nothing to show for it except for some pretty looking 3d screenshots pretty much speaks for itself.
Is there an equivilent hacking/programming culture for the NES? That'd rule big time.
Indeed there is. The NES hacking community has done amazing things with classic games such as Metroid and the Mario, Zelda and Megaman series. The community has evolved from simple graphics and text hacking to recreating entirely new challenging levels, intricate assembly code modifications (ever wanted to play Megaman in time-attack mode, or Mario 3 with a day/night system?), and there are even some interesting homebrewn games in development. Check out The Challenge Games Community for a good starting place. Be sure to check out Mario Adventure and Zelda Challenge as two good examples of high-quality hacks.
There's also an older community dedicated to producing translations of Japanese console games that do similarly intense hacks to NES games, but with a more practical objective. The Whirlpool is a good starting point here. Check out FFII,III,IV (hard type),V, Star Ocean, Seiken Densetsu 3, Tales of Phantasia and Dragon Quest V,VI for some of the completed translations of high-profile games.
This article is a load of Bull.
Wow, are you one of those guys that buys the same car year after year, because the damn things just keep getting re-released annually?
No, that is an inappropriate analogy because cars from the 1980's still drive on highways today, and it would be ridiculous to design them otherwise. A more appropriate analogy would be a car that only ran on the roads that were built in the mid 80's, so if you wanted to drive anywhere in the 90's you had to buy a new car, and continue that expensive cycle every 5-10 years... I don't mind and in fact support the idea of continuing to make classic games available for generations of newer players who have never bought or played the originals. It's the fans of the originals who end up buying the new games for nostalgia or simply to play the game again that are getting shortchanged by short-lived console platforms and the tactics developers use to capitalize on it. Even us fans of classic games don't have enough floor space to keep our old NES and Atari machines around after upgrading to XBoxes and Playstations.
Think how ridiculous it would be to buy a Windows '98 game a second time because you upgraded your system to XP.
'Portability' is not a feature of a game itself, it's a fabricated 'feature' created by preventing you from playing your legally purchased games on newer platforms.
How many times are videogame companies going to expect people to dish out money for the same exact games? These 'technological update' port/remakes are completely against the progressive nature of technology because they depend on the suppression of our rights to play games that we have already purchased. Instead of allowing people to continue to play classic games they have already paid for on new hardware (via official emulators and hardware ROM extractors and the like), they rely on the short life-cycle of console systems to sell us the same games again in a new packaging. While they do update the technological presentation, they don't make any significant changes, or even create superficially different levels and challenges to make the games any different the second (PSX), third (WSC), fourth (GBA) time around. It's even more revolting than sequelitis. If they -must- remake, instead of making a re-re-re-release of FF1-2, why don't they remake FF3 for once and use the opportunity to localize the only Final Fantasy still officially missing in the US? While it's proven to be more successful to re-release classic games on new hardware than to actually develop new games, it also shows that the monolithic Square can't come up with any better games than their last-ditch effort twenty years ago when they were a two-bit videogame company on the verge of bankruptcy (which, oh the irony, is what the 'Final' in FF actually stood for at the time).
We only need to look to the Mushroom Kingdom for the answer to all our problems...
/.er with negative karma...
No, you must be thinking of the LOGOsaurus.
David Wong does say that graphics advancements have leveled off in recent years, but he's not making this point at the expense of ignoring advancements in game AI or physics engines. His point is that pitching the same old rehashes of rigid game genres with some incremental technological advancement to give it novelty value is leading the industry nowhere. Besides, whereas graphics are (by definition) a fundamental element of video games, AI (especially the pathfinding sort mentioned in this article) and physics play only marginal roles in just a few existing popular genres, and are by no means present in all video games. How is better AI going to matter in multiplayer games where there's more than enough REAL AI (human players) available? Or how is a new physics engine going to significantly alter the way we play, say, strategy games that don't depend on realistic physics for their essential gameplay? Looking to AI or physics as the technology that will solve the video game industry's many problems isn't the answer.