Dunno, the cutscenes I saw in HL games (didn't like the games much so I didn't play very far) weren't really interactive, you could move around and see the puppets dance from another point of view but in the end they'd play out their lines and then you get to proceed.
Tetris. Super Mario Bros. Pong. Plenty of big first successes had actual difficulty instead of rolling over and letting the player win every level in 1-2 attempts. There's a good chance this whole "games must be easy" crap is caused by a misperception, noone really tried challenging it lately.
The core audience got older and games have to adapt.
Or simply drop the "core" audience. Seems to be a really profitable plan actually.
Spending 5 minutes on a challenge can be too much or too little, it depends on how the challenge is designed. Since long playtimes are expected these days games tend to bloat up with a lot of filler, of course making the player focus on beating filler won't do much. Now, strip out the filler, up the chalölenge and you probably got a better game.
Strangely the Wii's new market does seem receptive towards challenge. Of course a game with a 30 hour main campaign won't benefit from making each part so hard you need 4-5 attempts each (resulting in a 120-150 hour game...) but when the game is challenging you can also get away with shorter main campaigns as the player will simply take longer to play through the same amount of content and you zhave no need to add filler.
No, frustration is when the fun leaves you. A good game can remain awfully difficult but the moment your character croaks you just hit "retry" and try not to die in the same way again. A bad game makes you want to quit playing. Frustration comes (at least for me) when the failure doesn't seem to be really avoidable, when it seems like it was the game's fault rather than yours that you died because some control element refused to react or because some enemy pulled an unstoppable attack combo, etc.
I found the interactive cutscenes of Resident Evil 4 (even though it's just "push the button in time or die") to be a lot more interesting than non-interactive ones simply because it means that cutscenes are no longer harmless. You can't sit back and enjoy the show while your character is in mortal danger, you actually have to keep your guard up in case anything dangerous happens and you need to react.
The problem is not so much balancing the difficulty itself but removing sources of frustration such as trial and error gameplay, tedious gameplay parts, control issues, etc. If your game is good enough to keep the player engaged you can have a lot of difficulty, if the game's a fairly monotonous slugfest even moderate difficulty can become frustrating. Especially the death setback is important: What do you have to redo? A long but easy autoscroller before you get to the hard part? Maybe you lose experience that must be regained by repeatedly killing some weak monsters? Maybe it's a difficult platforming section with swarming enemies that knock you off the platforms? A long and insanely hard autoscroller before you reach the even harder boss (welcome to the machine)? What's important is that the parts you redo are not boring, that you don't have to redo them too often, that you have a reasonable chance of progressing through an area without wasting several tries on it just to see where all the invisible spikes come out of the walls and that you can see what went wrong (it doesn't help when you keep dying and don't understand why).
The actual difficulty is less important than the game around it. Of course it can be too easy or too hard but often it's just too sucky instead.
And fortunately, we are not electing a king. The damage Obama can do is fairly limited. He isn't going to be able to put through a truly radical agenda, even if it's all a ruse to be come President.
I hate to pull a Godwin but Hindenburg thought the same thing and look how that turned out. Not that I assume Obama will do anything like that but thinking that democracy is a panacea against tyranny can be a fatal mistake.
There's a bit of a difference between an FPS and a fighting game, in a fighting game often the response times are counted in frames and some actions (e.g. parries) need to be performed in a frame window measured in the low single digits (sometimes 1 frame!). FPSes often have linear behaviours (e.g. projectiles travel in a predictable path), in a fighting game the whole point is to be hard to predict.
Fun? High art? This is a business! The only thing it needs are high sales and as it happens "high art" doesn't sell. What do we need it for? So we can stroke our egos for sitting in front of "art" instead of toys?
Besides, the kind of "art" people try to put into videogames is usually stupid anyway, they try to duct tape great stories or graphics or sound onto a regular old game but spraying deodorant on something doesn't make it a flower. They glue art to their game and then wonder why people tell them they made a bad game. Often the game itself is just a crappy standin used to tie all the other parts together (and potentially sidestep the fierce competition in that part's main market, how many videogame storylines can rival a good book? How many videogame cutscenes can rival a good movie?) yet the result is sold as a game and as such gets judged by the alledged main component: The game. A game has a purpose (sometimes fun, sometimes not as seen in e.g. Wii Fit) and it is measured by how well it fulfills that purpose.
Sure, if you want to make a pure artistic game feel free to get some money and make it, just don't expect to ever make a profit on something you built while ignoring the market reality.
p.S.: Games can get relevancy from way more than just art, in fact I'd wager more people know about the Wii games like Fit and Sports than do about any art game.
Half Life 2 wasn't really story immerse, but the way it told the story it did was remarkable, you didn't really get forced to sit back and watch the cinematic, you got swept up into it.
I.e. you stand in the center of it instead of in front of it, having to work the camera yourself to see the cutscene and hear the dialogue. It's kinda like those talking puppets in theme parks where you push a button and they do their dance.
5-8 hours may be long or short depending on the kind of game, I'd certainly not want to play an arcade game for 8 hours straight. Of course it works better when the game is actually difficult and to progress you must improve yourself, not just your character. Then the length becomes almost unimportant as the time you need to finish the game depends on your growth speed, not the actual length of the game.
Hell, there were stock explosions in the 8 bit age, you could see the same damn sprite in almost any game, be it Descent, C&C or whatever else that I forgot.
Well, videogames can use their interactivity to show causality and express their own message.
Somewhat OT but one idea I had for a game that was designed just to be a message is a game where you are the leader of a church or sect or whatever and your goal is to please the god (if one exists, that's decided randomly, if none exists the goal is to get as much money as possible) but you are never directly told the truth about the god or his demands. All you see is prophets that could be real, misguided or malicious, events that could be divine or natural, etc and you'd have to form a doctrine based on what you think the happenings mean (e.g. does the god hate gays or promote homosexuality? Does he support the rich or the poor? Does he want war or peace?). At the end you're judged based on how many people you saved or doomed with your doctrine and preachings. The message would be that we cannot know whether a god exists or if he does, what he wants since all we see can just as well be random as it can be the will of the god.
Go play Spring then, it allows zooming out until you see the whole map if you want to (I usually play in a zoom level that's further out than other games allow but not THAT far out).
Slashdot Mirror
Dunno, the cutscenes I saw in HL games (didn't like the games much so I didn't play very far) weren't really interactive, you could move around and see the puppets dance from another point of view but in the end they'd play out their lines and then you get to proceed.
Tetris. Super Mario Bros. Pong. Plenty of big first successes had actual difficulty instead of rolling over and letting the player win every level in 1-2 attempts. There's a good chance this whole "games must be easy" crap is caused by a misperception, noone really tried challenging it lately.
Intro screens are usually not considered cutscenes, the "cut" part is understood to mean "cut away from the game".
The core audience got older and games have to adapt.
Or simply drop the "core" audience. Seems to be a really profitable plan actually.
Spending 5 minutes on a challenge can be too much or too little, it depends on how the challenge is designed. Since long playtimes are expected these days games tend to bloat up with a lot of filler, of course making the player focus on beating filler won't do much. Now, strip out the filler, up the chalölenge and you probably got a better game.
Strangely the Wii's new market does seem receptive towards challenge. Of course a game with a 30 hour main campaign won't benefit from making each part so hard you need 4-5 attempts each (resulting in a 120-150 hour game...) but when the game is challenging you can also get away with shorter main campaigns as the player will simply take longer to play through the same amount of content and you zhave no need to add filler.
Try Megaman 1 on the Game Boy. You can jump two tiles high. Elec Man's attack is three blocks tall. Go figure.
No, frustration is when the fun leaves you. A good game can remain awfully difficult but the moment your character croaks you just hit "retry" and try not to die in the same way again. A bad game makes you want to quit playing. Frustration comes (at least for me) when the failure doesn't seem to be really avoidable, when it seems like it was the game's fault rather than yours that you died because some control element refused to react or because some enemy pulled an unstoppable attack combo, etc.
I found the interactive cutscenes of Resident Evil 4 (even though it's just "push the button in time or die") to be a lot more interesting than non-interactive ones simply because it means that cutscenes are no longer harmless. You can't sit back and enjoy the show while your character is in mortal danger, you actually have to keep your guard up in case anything dangerous happens and you need to react.
The problem is not so much balancing the difficulty itself but removing sources of frustration such as trial and error gameplay, tedious gameplay parts, control issues, etc. If your game is good enough to keep the player engaged you can have a lot of difficulty, if the game's a fairly monotonous slugfest even moderate difficulty can become frustrating. Especially the death setback is important: What do you have to redo? A long but easy autoscroller before you get to the hard part? Maybe you lose experience that must be regained by repeatedly killing some weak monsters? Maybe it's a difficult platforming section with swarming enemies that knock you off the platforms? A long and insanely hard autoscroller before you reach the even harder boss (welcome to the machine)? What's important is that the parts you redo are not boring, that you don't have to redo them too often, that you have a reasonable chance of progressing through an area without wasting several tries on it just to see where all the invisible spikes come out of the walls and that you can see what went wrong (it doesn't help when you keep dying and don't understand why).
The actual difficulty is less important than the game around it. Of course it can be too easy or too hard but often it's just too sucky instead.
The first rule of clubs is that whenever anyone mentions any club you claim that its first two rules match those of the Fight Club!
And fortunately, we are not electing a king. The damage Obama can do is fairly limited. He isn't going to be able to put through a truly radical agenda, even if it's all a ruse to be come President.
I hate to pull a Godwin but Hindenburg thought the same thing and look how that turned out. Not that I assume Obama will do anything like that but thinking that democracy is a panacea against tyranny can be a fatal mistake.
No way, just one glance at the headlines confirms he is the most successful super-villain ever and that's before taking AOL into account!
The last poll showed a 50-50 split between Ron Paul and Obama fans IIRC, maybe a bit more Obama though.
I recall similar complaints by Relic about THQ's handling of patches.
There's a bit of a difference between an FPS and a fighting game, in a fighting game often the response times are counted in frames and some actions (e.g. parries) need to be performed in a frame window measured in the low single digits (sometimes 1 frame!). FPSes often have linear behaviours (e.g. projectiles travel in a predictable path), in a fighting game the whole point is to be hard to predict.
Fun? High art? This is a business! The only thing it needs are high sales and as it happens "high art" doesn't sell. What do we need it for? So we can stroke our egos for sitting in front of "art" instead of toys?
Besides, the kind of "art" people try to put into videogames is usually stupid anyway, they try to duct tape great stories or graphics or sound onto a regular old game but spraying deodorant on something doesn't make it a flower. They glue art to their game and then wonder why people tell them they made a bad game. Often the game itself is just a crappy standin used to tie all the other parts together (and potentially sidestep the fierce competition in that part's main market, how many videogame storylines can rival a good book? How many videogame cutscenes can rival a good movie?) yet the result is sold as a game and as such gets judged by the alledged main component: The game. A game has a purpose (sometimes fun, sometimes not as seen in e.g. Wii Fit) and it is measured by how well it fulfills that purpose.
Sure, if you want to make a pure artistic game feel free to get some money and make it, just don't expect to ever make a profit on something you built while ignoring the market reality.
p.S.: Games can get relevancy from way more than just art, in fact I'd wager more people know about the Wii games like Fit and Sports than do about any art game.
Half Life 2 wasn't really story immerse, but the way it told the story it did was remarkable, you didn't really get forced to sit back and watch the cinematic, you got swept up into it.
I.e. you stand in the center of it instead of in front of it, having to work the camera yourself to see the cutscene and hear the dialogue. It's kinda like those talking puppets in theme parks where you push a button and they do their dance.
5-8 hours may be long or short depending on the kind of game, I'd certainly not want to play an arcade game for 8 hours straight. Of course it works better when the game is actually difficult and to progress you must improve yourself, not just your character. Then the length becomes almost unimportant as the time you need to finish the game depends on your growth speed, not the actual length of the game.
What's stopping Mr. 120 Hours from using the same potion?
Where would a person playing an MMORPG 24/7 get money from? :P
Hell, there were stock explosions in the 8 bit age, you could see the same damn sprite in almost any game, be it Descent, C&C or whatever else that I forgot.
Well, videogames can use their interactivity to show causality and express their own message.
Somewhat OT but one idea I had for a game that was designed just to be a message is a game where you are the leader of a church or sect or whatever and your goal is to please the god (if one exists, that's decided randomly, if none exists the goal is to get as much money as possible) but you are never directly told the truth about the god or his demands. All you see is prophets that could be real, misguided or malicious, events that could be divine or natural, etc and you'd have to form a doctrine based on what you think the happenings mean (e.g. does the god hate gays or promote homosexuality? Does he support the rich or the poor? Does he want war or peace?). At the end you're judged based on how many people you saved or doomed with your doctrine and preachings. The message would be that we cannot know whether a god exists or if he does, what he wants since all we see can just as well be random as it can be the will of the god.
You try thinking about one thing while reading about another and still remembering what you read.
Only at low temperatures though.
Wasn't that already one of the topics in the alien court in Stanislaw Lem's Star Diaries? I thought that was common knowledge for some time already.
Go play Spring then, it allows zooming out until you see the whole map if you want to (I usually play in a zoom level that's further out than other games allow but not THAT far out).