You picked a terrible example with Metal Gear considering that IS a 2D game. Maybe you mean Metal Gear Solid or are you really arguing about downgrading 2D games into text-only games?
and the Mario sequels forever left such a stamp on the genre designers still, even unconsiously, follow in Nintendo's footsteps when doing anything that resembles a 'platformer.'
Not really, modern "platformers" resemble something like Quake more than Mario. It seems they're adding more and more guns while removing the jumping parts because jumping in 3d just isn't as much fun.
You didn't mention the old people that get drawn into gaming with the Wii despite never having played a game before. It's less because the gameplay is novel (they haven't played anything before so anything is novel to them) but because it was designed for accessibility. It's a common meme to claim Nintendo is for kids but that's really not where the growth came from, they always had cheap, kid-friendly systems yet they've been pushed out of the market until they got the Wii out. It was not a "backlash" against the wannabe-adult games but a strike against the "hardcore" gaming that built up so many conventions and so much complexity that it's completely unapproachable for anyone who didn't join as a kid.
You don't have to make a sequel to sacrifice "art" for profit. Wii Sports has pretty much zero artistic expression but brought in massive profits (by selling Wii systems to many people), same for Brain Age and such. These are still "risky" (not really since they didn't cost much and Nintendo probably knew they'd sell well but they weren't just rehashes) and experimental concepts but there was no art involved, at least none beyond the art of getting the gameplay to work and appeal to so many people despite sounding really stupid in concept.
Art is mostly ego masturbation for the developer, a way of saying "look how awesome we are to put this much art into our game!". The art is really just tacked on, artwork, stories, music, etc pasted onto the game to increase the value by secondary means. Often the artsy games still fail to show much creativity in the core component, the game itself. In fact it sometimes seems like these artists see the game as something that gets tacked on the art and sometimes even compromise the game itself for the art (look at the number of Wii games that insist on using their own character models instead of Miis in order to get their own graphical style, leaving the player out of the decision process of how he'd like to be represented).
How many games are really art? I don't mean games covered in art but games that ARE art themselves. Art that would not be possible in any other medium (ignoring restrictions like sane play lengths for movies and such). Would Ico lose its impact if it were a movie? Would Rez be pointless if it was a visualizer/screensaver? Would Final Fantasy or Metal Gear Solid suffer from having the gameplay between the cutscenes removed? On the other hand, would Wii Sports be anything if it didn't have the core gameplay?
Art always has to work within the constraint of profitability and it seems that gaming does not want to acknowledge that, instead claiming that art has to exist independent or in spite of profitability.
If you object to calling Wii Fit a game you should try playing it. Plenty of modes are games in addition to being exercise (snowboarding, DDR-like step aerobics, etc).
Perhaps this developer needs to grow up and realize that not everything has to be liked by everyone. I had a grandfather who never ever had a telephone. Never needed it, never wanted it. Does that mean telephones are without value to those who use them? That the telephone companies needed to worry about this "lost" customer?
Not if it's one or two luddites but it looks like we're talking about several milions of people, enough to propel the former last place in the console market into the first place just by tapping those groups.
I think too many devs just dial up the complexity in the wrong places. Look at a PS123 or Xbox 360 controller, many games actually use every single button and d-pad direction on these things and even then run out of buttons and bind the analog stick clicks as well! The resulting game consists mostly of running around and shooting anything that moves, interspersed with cutscenes that seem to follow a script that would be considered bad even for a B-Movie.
However, many games are so linear that every play-through is essentially the same and most interesting game situations that can arise just from the interaction of the player and game probably happen throughout one playthrough. Sure, you won't listen to the same track or CD non-stop but you'll probably mix it into your playlist and thus have it get played more often.
It's the Christmas double-or-nothing bet, releases go up fivefold, sales double. Everyone hopes that THEIR game will be the lucky one out of five that gets double sales.
I don't know the conditions but iPhone users seem to be quite willing to buy games for their phone. Other than that, just develop a prototype game and get a freaking office already, there are plenty of very small teams working with Nintendo dev kits for things like WiiWare. Or maybe realize that you can't always get everything you want.
Were you really planning to sell a game for use on flash carts? That sounds like a terrible idea. Stay with cheap PC games, even those have a larger market than paid-for flash cart games.
And as for buying something else. Please tell me where I may buy a Sennheiser EW300G2 IEM system that is in a correct frequency band?? Thats right, they don't make any!
If so, what will end up happening is that gold prices go up 25%, but the market essentially stays the same for the most part.
If gold prices can go up while increasing profits, why haven't they done so already? The cstomers don't care about the tax burdens of the seller, they just care what price they get so if they can bear a 25% increase why not do it?
The exact technical process doesn't matter, it matters that the Spiegel website initiated that process.
Re:An example of great game A.I.
on
The State of Game AI
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· Score: 2, Informative
You know how many people try to automate seemingly trivial things with scripts in Spring? You quickly run into a barrier because while the strategy may be standard the specific execution must be adapted to the situation. E.g. a commonly requested feature is an auto-dgun widget for Total Annihilation clones/ripoffs but there's tons of factors to account for, the thing costs a lot to use, it can easily cause friendly fire that, depending on the situation, could be acceptable or unacceptable and it has to be aimed properly so the shot actually connects. If you automate that the enemy player will quickly learn the pattern of your automation and adapt to use it against you. That's why the tactics cannot be automated easily, a good player will employ tactics that beat your AI. Well, unless you make it impossible to override the AI's decisions but then you'll end up with units doing stupid things and players learning the situations in which the AI behaves well or badly and exploiting that.
Real time strategy is really more on a tactical scale most of the time, strategic advantages can be countered by good tactics and a player must handle both the macro and micro (pretty much strategy and tactics) at the same time to get the maximum efficiency out of his troops. Any predictable behaviour is going to be a weakness.
Wii Fit rewards jogging at the right speed and with a constant rythm instead of high speed, I guess that should be applied to a bike trainer too.
Re:Cue the "where are MY games" whining
on
The Gym Arcade
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· Score: 1
Less free time is actually a point AGAINST 50 hour games since the content in a game is dictated by the development budget and most of those 50 hours are bound to be filler which doesn't make 1 hour sessions very engaging.
Slashdot Mirror
You picked a terrible example with Metal Gear considering that IS a 2D game. Maybe you mean Metal Gear Solid or are you really arguing about downgrading 2D games into text-only games?
That's because "big deal" translates to the epic, complicated, long, story-driven games jellomizer was complaining about these days.
I got a 360 recently and find it no easier to find games for the system than for the Wii.
The WiiWare selection is pretty good IMO and growing at a good rate (less so in Europe, more in the US...).
I think Square Enix just doesn't want VC releases of FF and DQ since they can sell DS remakes that way.
Niche market? The Wii owns roughly 50% of the market last I checked.
and the Mario sequels forever left such a stamp on the genre designers still, even unconsiously, follow in Nintendo's footsteps when doing anything that resembles a 'platformer.'
Not really, modern "platformers" resemble something like Quake more than Mario. It seems they're adding more and more guns while removing the jumping parts because jumping in 3d just isn't as much fun.
You didn't mention the old people that get drawn into gaming with the Wii despite never having played a game before. It's less because the gameplay is novel (they haven't played anything before so anything is novel to them) but because it was designed for accessibility. It's a common meme to claim Nintendo is for kids but that's really not where the growth came from, they always had cheap, kid-friendly systems yet they've been pushed out of the market until they got the Wii out. It was not a "backlash" against the wannabe-adult games but a strike against the "hardcore" gaming that built up so many conventions and so much complexity that it's completely unapproachable for anyone who didn't join as a kid.
You don't have to make a sequel to sacrifice "art" for profit. Wii Sports has pretty much zero artistic expression but brought in massive profits (by selling Wii systems to many people), same for Brain Age and such. These are still "risky" (not really since they didn't cost much and Nintendo probably knew they'd sell well but they weren't just rehashes) and experimental concepts but there was no art involved, at least none beyond the art of getting the gameplay to work and appeal to so many people despite sounding really stupid in concept.
Art is mostly ego masturbation for the developer, a way of saying "look how awesome we are to put this much art into our game!". The art is really just tacked on, artwork, stories, music, etc pasted onto the game to increase the value by secondary means. Often the artsy games still fail to show much creativity in the core component, the game itself. In fact it sometimes seems like these artists see the game as something that gets tacked on the art and sometimes even compromise the game itself for the art (look at the number of Wii games that insist on using their own character models instead of Miis in order to get their own graphical style, leaving the player out of the decision process of how he'd like to be represented).
How many games are really art? I don't mean games covered in art but games that ARE art themselves. Art that would not be possible in any other medium (ignoring restrictions like sane play lengths for movies and such). Would Ico lose its impact if it were a movie? Would Rez be pointless if it was a visualizer/screensaver? Would Final Fantasy or Metal Gear Solid suffer from having the gameplay between the cutscenes removed? On the other hand, would Wii Sports be anything if it didn't have the core gameplay?
Art always has to work within the constraint of profitability and it seems that gaming does not want to acknowledge that, instead claiming that art has to exist independent or in spite of profitability.
If you object to calling Wii Fit a game you should try playing it. Plenty of modes are games in addition to being exercise (snowboarding, DDR-like step aerobics, etc).
Perhaps this developer needs to grow up and realize that not everything has to be liked by everyone. I had a grandfather who never ever had a telephone. Never needed it, never wanted it. Does that mean telephones are without value to those who use them? That the telephone companies needed to worry about this "lost" customer?
Not if it's one or two luddites but it looks like we're talking about several milions of people, enough to propel the former last place in the console market into the first place just by tapping those groups.
I think too many devs just dial up the complexity in the wrong places. Look at a PS123 or Xbox 360 controller, many games actually use every single button and d-pad direction on these things and even then run out of buttons and bind the analog stick clicks as well! The resulting game consists mostly of running around and shooting anything that moves, interspersed with cutscenes that seem to follow a script that would be considered bad even for a B-Movie.
However, many games are so linear that every play-through is essentially the same and most interesting game situations that can arise just from the interaction of the player and game probably happen throughout one playthrough. Sure, you won't listen to the same track or CD non-stop but you'll probably mix it into your playlist and thus have it get played more often.
It's the Christmas double-or-nothing bet, releases go up fivefold, sales double. Everyone hopes that THEIR game will be the lucky one out of five that gets double sales.
I don't know the conditions but iPhone users seem to be quite willing to buy games for their phone. Other than that, just develop a prototype game and get a freaking office already, there are plenty of very small teams working with Nintendo dev kits for things like WiiWare. Or maybe realize that you can't always get everything you want.
Were you really planning to sell a game for use on flash carts? That sounds like a terrible idea. Stay with cheap PC games, even those have a larger market than paid-for flash cart games.
And, uh, those flash carts for the DS are sold more than open handhelds? Never seen either in stores.
Wasn't the DS also the console that got stolen in quite large numbers in a pirate attack on a freighter?
Well bother. Where the heck does Nintendo expect device sales to come from now?
I dunno, maybe the millions of people who are willing to pay for the software they use?
There's no way to rule innocent men.
The SS would disagree.
Porn is inapropriate on the job because it's proof that you wasted your time on non-work-related activities.
It gets worse, I hear Switzerland is neutral on the issue!
And as for buying something else. Please tell me where I may buy a Sennheiser EW300G2 IEM system that is in a correct frequency band?? Thats right, they don't make any!
Well, now they have a reason to hurry up then.
If so, what will end up happening is that gold prices go up 25%, but the market essentially stays the same for the most part.
If gold prices can go up while increasing profits, why haven't they done so already? The cstomers don't care about the tax burdens of the seller, they just care what price they get so if they can bear a 25% increase why not do it?
The exact technical process doesn't matter, it matters that the Spiegel website initiated that process.
You know how many people try to automate seemingly trivial things with scripts in Spring? You quickly run into a barrier because while the strategy may be standard the specific execution must be adapted to the situation. E.g. a commonly requested feature is an auto-dgun widget for Total Annihilation clones/ripoffs but there's tons of factors to account for, the thing costs a lot to use, it can easily cause friendly fire that, depending on the situation, could be acceptable or unacceptable and it has to be aimed properly so the shot actually connects. If you automate that the enemy player will quickly learn the pattern of your automation and adapt to use it against you. That's why the tactics cannot be automated easily, a good player will employ tactics that beat your AI. Well, unless you make it impossible to override the AI's decisions but then you'll end up with units doing stupid things and players learning the situations in which the AI behaves well or badly and exploiting that.
Real time strategy is really more on a tactical scale most of the time, strategic advantages can be countered by good tactics and a player must handle both the macro and micro (pretty much strategy and tactics) at the same time to get the maximum efficiency out of his troops. Any predictable behaviour is going to be a weakness.
Leave rule 34 intact!
Wii Fit rewards jogging at the right speed and with a constant rythm instead of high speed, I guess that should be applied to a bike trainer too.
Less free time is actually a point AGAINST 50 hour games since the content in a game is dictated by the development budget and most of those 50 hours are bound to be filler which doesn't make 1 hour sessions very engaging.