Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community  

Go Back   Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community > Interests > Tilted Gaming


 
 
LinkBack Thread Tools
Old 11-22-2005, 09:56 PM   #1 (permalink)
Myrmidon
 
ziadel's Avatar
 
Location: In the twilight and mist.
Gamers Manifesto...

Forward this to EVERYONE you know in the gaming industry...

http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/...manifesto.html

if they could just get rid of the pet peeves listed there, things would be so great.
__________________
Ron Paul '08
Vote for Freedom
Go ahead and google Dr. Ron Paul. You'll like what you read.
ziadel is offline  
Old 11-22-2005, 11:01 PM   #2 (permalink)
is a tiger
 
Siege's Avatar
 
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Good read. A lot of those things I gripe about too.
__________________
"Your name's Geek? Do you know the origin of the term? A geek is someone who bites the heads off chickens at a circus. I would never let you suck my dick with a name like Geek"

--Kevin Smith

This part just makes my posts easier to find
Siege is offline  
Old 11-22-2005, 11:32 PM   #3 (permalink)
Junkie
 
Excellent points. The problem is that the industry is risk-adverse and only willing to make licensed crap or copycat games.

Money talks people. Vote with your dollars. Stop buying crap. And don't buy a game because just because it's pretty. Will Wright put it best, "Are we trying to get games to be photorealistic? There's no point, movies have been photorealistic since the beginning and many of them still suck." (paraphase)
FngKestrel is offline  
Old 11-23-2005, 05:16 AM   #4 (permalink)
I am Winter Born
 
Pragma's Avatar
 
Location: Alexandria, VA
Amusingly enough, a good friend of mine (who works on AI programming for one of the games screenshotted in the articles) was sitting next to me when we first saw that. He pointed out that the second point regarding AI was correct - that future processors are more geared towards graphics than AI computations, and so the quality of AI just won't be as good, as the producers are more interested in shiny games than smart games.
__________________
Eat antimatter, Posleen-boy!
Pragma is offline  
Old 11-23-2005, 05:18 AM   #5 (permalink)
C'mon, just blow it.
 
hulk's Avatar
 
Location: Perth, Australia
Strangely enough, there's one major publisher who's not afraid to take a risk when the situation calls for it

Yay Nintendo! Hopefully their kookyness will shame others into trying it.
__________________
"'There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person,' says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex."
-- From an IGN game review.
hulk is offline  
Old 11-23-2005, 05:29 AM   #6 (permalink)
Metal and Rock 4 Life
 
Destrox's Avatar
 
Location: Phoenix
That article, and website are truely great reads.

Its like they took my inner thoughts on a lot of things, and put it into a webpage.
__________________
You bore me.... next.
Destrox is offline  
Old 11-23-2005, 06:58 AM   #7 (permalink)
wouldn't mind being a ninja.
 
MooseMan3000's Avatar
 
Location: Maine, the Other White State.
Except... one of his early points was that there should be wide diversity of games... yet he continually bashed attempts at new types of gameplay. Yes, a wide variety of homogenized games is the way to do it. Er, wait.

I mean, he made some good points... but he was reaching for 20. He should have left it at 10. Ah well.
MooseMan3000 is offline  
Old 11-23-2005, 08:04 AM   #8 (permalink)
Getting Medieval on your ass
 
Coppertop's Avatar
 
Location: 13th century Europe
It's a common courtesy to actually post the article, not just link it:
Quote:
The Sony Playstation 3 is going to cost $465.00.

In the desolate economic climate of post-apocalyptic 2006, I'm thinking that's going to be a lot of money. Now, it's true that at E3 Sony was boasting the Playstation 3 could crank out 1.8 TFLOPS, or 1.8 trillion FLOPS. If that many FLOPS were piled together they would fill the Grand Canyon, assuming each FLOP were the size of a muskrat. So what do gamers want from all that money and FLOP? Just ask them.


20 things gamers want from the seventh generation of game consoles



1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.

Look at the little guy. The one on the left. The one who's just a head.



I mean, let's face it: strategy is all that guy's got going for him. He has no limbs and he's already on fire.



And yet, did anyone stop being impressed by Doom III long enough to notice he and the other bad guys were flailing at us with the same straight-line Ulysses S. Grant calvary charge that failed them twelve years ago in Doom 1? Even Far Cry had bad guys that went into spinning seizures when they got confused.

We get so overjoyed every time an enemy actually shoots from cover in a game that we forgive the fact that real, advanced A.I. is as much an unfulfilled promise as the flying car. Where are the FPS bad guys who can adapt their strategy on the fly? Enemies who themselves have six different guns and switch up according to what the situation calls for? Bad guys who work in teams, who strategize, who create diversions to distract you? Where's the enemy Solid Snake who sneaks up on you with the silence of a ninja's church fart?


"Do NOT duck inside those doors, men! Honorable warriors need no cover!"


Chances of that happening...

Almost zero. One, there's more and more focus on multiplayer for this sort of game. This takes some of the pressure off programmers because in multiplayer, other humans supply their own A.I. Even the ones who are complete morons.

Two, as developers have lamented, the guts of the new consoles are geared to make the gaming equivalent of dumb blondes. It has to do with the fact that both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily.

That means the next generation of games will likely play just like this generation. Only shiny.






2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...

Why isn't a there a spy game where we actually get to be a real spy rather than a hallway-roving kill machine? You know, where we actually have to talk to contacts and extract information and tap phones and piece together clues, a game full of exotic locales and deception and backstabbing and subplots? A game where a gun is used as often as a real spy would use it (that is, almost never)?

Where's the game where we're a castaway on a deserted island and the object of the game is to find food and clean water and build a shelter, a game where we can play for one month or six months, because whether or not we get rescued is randomized? Where every time we restart we get a different island with different wildlife and vegetation and water sources?

Where's the game where we play a salty Southern lawyer who has to piece together evidence to exonerate a black man falsely accused of murder, breaking down witnesses and spotting inconsistencies in testimony?



Half of the gamers are now over age 18, and almost a quarter are over age 50. Where are the games for the old-timers? Where's the game where we get to play as Dr. House and diagnose mysterious illnesses while crushing the patient's spirit with cruel insults? Where's the game where we're a pre-op transsexual where the object of the game is to gather enough money to complete the operation?

Considering how broad the gaming market is now, there is a remarkably narrow range of games out there. Could this be what the news wires were talking about last year when they spoke of a "crisis of creativity" in gaming?

Chances of that happening...

See item #1. If the new consoles are built with a graphics-first mentality, how easy is it going to be to make games that stretch the boundaries of game logic and player freedom? And if so, can we at least have our damned adventure games back?

But there's another, less-obvious side of that muffin: if a machine is so "advanced" it can draw a photo-realistic city in the background of every level, that only means that developers now must to hire somebody to render that photorealistic city instead of pasting on a bit of flat, blurred wallpaper. That means game development costs are skyrocketing and that leads to the big-budget Hollywood blockbuster syndrome. Bigger investments means developers must "play it safe" for fear of losing their ass. And that means fewer and fewer oddball "niche" games like those mentioned above and more quickie knock-offs based on movies.


3. Don't bullshit me about your graphics

How, in 2005, can there still be gamers taken in by EXCLUSIVE SCREENSHOTS of games that are obviously taken from cutscenes and have NO connection with what the actual game will look like? I blame the developers formerly known as Square for this. They're the ones who ran their entire ad campaign for Final Fantasy VIII with shots like this:



...for a game that looked like this:



Now, that was a great game and the actual game looked fine for its time. But stop treating us like morons. Wait a second... news coming in now, yes, we have an EXCLUSIVE SCREENSHOT OF PERFECT DARK FOR THE XBOX 360.


Drool!


Wow! This must be one of those new second-person shooters we've been hearing about where you spend the whole game looking at the hero's fucking eye. Because surely from now on they'll demonstrate the awesomeness of their game only with shots from the game, right?

Chances of that happening...

...are directly proportional to whether or not you'll stop falling for it.


4. Nipples?

Speaking of adult games, where are they? Politicians bemoan the bloodthirsty horror of video games, but really the standards are almost Victorian when compared to R-rated Hollywood fare such as Sin City and Kill Bill and Cinemax's Voyeur Safari IV: Dildo Island. You get a little harsh language and some comic-booky sprays of gore, but that's about it. There is an "AO" (Adults Only) ESRB rating for games, but when is the last time you saw it?

We're not for speeding the moral degradation of the modern world, but imagine a Hollywood where only PG-13 movies could get made. Say goodbye to everything from Shindler's List to The Matrix.

Chances of that happening...

We've got one hyphenated word for you: Wal-Mart. The largest game seller in the world simply won't stock games with the "AO" rating. Period. So those games won't sell and developers won't make them. So until they invent new and varied and Wal-Martless ways to sell the games, we're stuck with the AO games found only in our fantasies.




5. And on the opposite side of the nipple coin...

Developers will be shocked one day when they notice that the world is full of women. It's true! More than half of your potential customer base are penisless. They have money. They like doing fun things. And yet, how do you think they feel when they play a game where the heroine looks like this:



Yeah, that's what she wears into battle. Thong-length kimono, no bra for those flopping DDD breasts.



And this is years after analysts told developers that women would happily play games if they didn't feel so objectified by them, and several decades past the point where they should have even needed to be told that. Have you guys ever met a woman? Then why don't you try making just a few games that don't play off of a 14 year-old male's idea of womanhood on the apparent hope that he'll play the game one-handed?

Chances of that happening...

Sadly, the proven money-making designers in the industry are the same ones that have given us Dead Or Alive Beach Volleyball and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (where the main character rampages though a city populated with violent men and sex-crazed street whores). As it turns out, they’re all men. The female demographic is seen as something that can be “targeted” by adding features to existing games, such as in-game clothes shopping, in-game makeup application and in-game cute animal pets. Game creators aren’t just casually missing the point, they’re showing a unified front of stupidity.

There is hope however. Like all industry, it is inevitable that females will eventually forge their place in the world of game design. The female designers will burst on the scene soon enough, heaving their giant bosoms of talent and creativity and brandishing their black thongs of diversity.


6. All of the new consoles will have hard drives. Use them.

When we're on our deathbeds, we're going to wish we could reclaim the time we spent wandering around for save points long after we were done playing every night. Imagine if your word processing program did this, refusing to let you save your progress until you typed six more paragraphs. Or, made you retype your last paragraph six times while zombies tried to shoot your cursor...

The analogy sort of breaks down there, but the point is we shouldn't ever see a "save point" in a game again. Limited saves were invented for consoles that didn't have the memory to let you "quicksave" (where you can save at any time, any where, with one keystroke like on a PC). To keep that physical limitation and pretend it's a gameplay element is like Superman 64 claiming its programmers' inability to render any background scenery was "Kryptonite Fog."



There is not one single reason in the known universe for even one more game where the save point is ten motherfucking minutes away from the boss, forcing me to fight my way down the same hallway each of the 62 attempts it takes me to beat the guy (I'm looking at you, Metroid Prime).

Chances of that happening...

The XBox port of Doom III lets you quicksave. It can be done. Surely the gaming industry will hear our concerns and act accordingly!




How in the name of Islamic Fonzie did we ever let games get away with "Loading..." screens? The Gamecube doesn't have those, not on the games made by Nintendo. Hell, the 8-bit NES didn't have load screens 20 years ago. Our favorite TV shows don't load. DVD movies don't load between scenes. The animals at the zoo don't load.

Yes, the hardware can do it. But developers don't think it's important.

Think of it this way. When you're bored at work, what do you play? Solitaire. Why? Because you don't have to spend 5 minutes looking for a CD-ROM, 5 minutes watching corporate logos and 5 minutes watching load screens. You click and you play.

Game designers: we're really busy. Lots of us got kids now, and second jobs and mistresses on the side. You want to sell your console games to the millions of people who are lucky to get 30 uninterrupted minutes to play a game? Fix this first.

Chances of that happening...

Well... our PC's have hard drives and they still have load times. It's a little thing we like to call copy protection, keeping us from installing the game on the hard drive and passing it on to a friend (especially if said "friend" works the return counter at the store we bought the game from). But surely the video game industry will have to find another way, because every time I see a load screen, I alllllmost have time to start reading a book.

I suppose that's what it will take, somebody making a click-and-play game and gamers buying it in droves. And as soon as that game goes on sale I'm gonna borrow a copy of that bitch from somebody.


8. I understand that John Madden was raised by wild boars...

...and that he learned his few English phrases phoenetically from watching reruns of Wild World of Sports. But EA, if you want to get me revved up about Madden 2006 on the XBox 360, don't show me a damned screenshot that's obviously from a cutscene...


Gosh, do you think that's gameplay there?


...and instead promise me that you won't play the same Madden commentary sound files on every fifth play. "Whoa, he looked like he was hit by a truck! A five-ton truck hauling a trailer!" Yes, you'll hear that one six motherslapping times in one game of Madden '05. YOU HAVE A HARD DRIVE NOW, taking data from a 9 GB DVD. You have NO excuse to keep recycling the same mindless observations over and over and over again until we're pointing at our television with a shaking finger and screaming "EAT ME, JOHN! JUST EAT MEEEEEEE!" as most of us do now.

Chances of that happening...

Have you ever actually watched a real game where Madden was in the booth? Yeah, that's pretty much the way he really talks.


9. Immersion and the invisible hand of God

If pretty graphics are king, it's time to remember what pretty graphics are for: immersion. For whatever its faults, Doom III knew this.

Immersion means soothing to sleep the part of our brain that remembers we're not intergalactic bounty hunters or world-class athletes. And that part of us is rudely jostled awake when our snowboarder bounces off an invisible wall in midair...


Boink. Wait a second! I'm a virgin!


...because he strayed from the race area. I understand you can't have infinite space, guys surfing right off the mountain and taking a snowboard tour of Asia. But put a cliff there. Cliffs are solid. Empty air is not solid.

Almost every game does this. In Lord of the Rings: Return of the King there's actually a "run out of a crumbling building" level and where stones rain down on your head and block your path. So the biggest difficulty in the level is that you can't jump over a knee-high stone because THERE IS NO FUCKING JUMPING IN THE GAME.

Game makers: it doesn't have to be a jumping game for you to give the characters the basic ability to jump low obstacles that all humans have. And when I walk up to little ledges that are 10-inches off the ground, a ledge a toddler could crawl over, and you arbitrarily don't let me pass because it's not a jumping game, you remind me of what I'm really doing: playing a game. We're to the stage where it should be a minimum requirement in the game universe: rock should act like rock, air should act like air and humans should move like humans.

Chances of that happening...

The new hardware can certainly handle it; realistic physics are part of the chunky graphics stew the new games are so good at brewing. This should only get better, unless, as I suspect, the game makers secretly hate us.


10. And while we're at it...

Let's rid games of all arbitrary barriers.

Don't show my character casting magic meteors that smash mountains in one scene and in the next send me all over the dungeon trying to find a single key to a rickety wooden door that looks like it could be knocked in with a strong shoulder. Make it a magic door, a huge door, fine, but don't make it an arbitrary door that only remains closed because that's what the plot requires.

Also, don't have me toting around 500 pounds of high explosives, 2 different kinds of missile launchers and a nuclear fusion cannon and still make almost every pane of glass I come across totally unbreakable. It was cute that I could shoot Coke cans off the tables in Doom III. But then I shoot the magazine sitting next to it and it doesn't even show scuff marks. It's 2005! Give me environments that realistically react to what I do! Yes, it matters. It's immersion, bitch!

Chances of that happening...

Actually, pretty good. The fact is that breaking glass looks very pretty in a game and it undeniably appeals to the vandal that lurks in the heart of every single teenage boy. Realistic models of entire houses instead of say, just a hallway, are entirely possible now. And that impassible, rickety old door way will soon be the high-resolution, animated, magical force field (already a feature in Half Life 2, thank you very much).


bzzzzzzzzzzzt



11. And while we're still at it...

...Let's ban all IAC's (Immersion-annihilating contrivances). These include:

Superimposing shit on the screen. And by "shit" we mean "words." Fatal Frame 2 was one of the most awesomely atmospheric games ever made... until you took a snapshot of the second ghost and the words "CORE SHOT: 396pts!" popped up. Spooooooky!


"Mr. Frodo! Is that you behind ORC HEWER?"


"Cinematic" camera angles. No, thank you. Understand that we need to see what our character sees. As soon as you start panning the camera around Mario for no better reason than to see the pretty sunset on the distance, we lose control. And here's another tip: If you have a single level where the player's character is required to run toward the camera, send the fucker back for more programming because you're not done yet.

Shitty voice acting. When it's good it's great, when it's bad it will haunt your nightmares for years. Isn't the world full of unemployed actors willing to do voice work in exchange for food or, you know, Heroin? "Do it with feeling this time, Cody, and I'll make the spiders in your brain go away!"

Chances of that happening...

The cameras in 3D games have actually gotten worse (Mario Sunshine's camera system wasn't half as smooth as Mario 64's) because in the game-making world camera and player controls are decided-on after the game's pretty artwork. When 3D games were new the only question was, "how can we make the controls as responsive and fluid as 2D?" Now it's, "how can we show off these really cool-looking trees? That's what the little sons of bitches care about!"

In short, the first 3D games were designed around their cameras, now they're designed around their graphics.

As far as shitty voice acting, one, voice acting doesn't sell games. Both Eternal Darkness and Grim Fandango had wonderful acting, with accents and everything. Combined, those two games sold 278 copies. So if we really care that the rendered dragon in the cutscene sounded suspiciously like a high school drama student, we're not showing it in our buying decisions.

Also, remember that these cutscenes have to be dubbed in several languages (English and Japanese at the very least) and it's done with ONE set of animated lips. They don't re-draw the whole damned thing just to dub it. So you get the awkward situation where the poor voice actor is trying to match the lip movements to a line that was animated in Japanese and that's probably even harder than it sounds.


12. Don't bullshit us on the difficulty

Gradually tougher enemies, more enemies, mind-bending puzzles, it's all good. It's all fair. But DO NOT try to artificially make your game harder with:

Arbitrary triggers in RPG's. Why isn't the Dark Elf waiting at the Black Temple like he said? Because I haven't talked to every fucking person in town yet. Can we at least write in some kind of actual cause and effect here that might make some kind of actual sense to me? Because I don't get any sense of reward or accomplishment by randomly activating subroutines via mind-numbing repetition.

Ammo starvation. I'm looking at you, Resident Evil for the Gamecube. I have a gun. LET ME USE IT. Don't pretend your game is "challenging" because you only give me four bullets to kill eight zombie dogs with.

Confusing, mapless floor plans. Did you remember when you were a kid and you got bored on weekends, how you would go to a large building, a hotel or a hospital, then wander around for several hours looking for a certain room? While zombies attacked you? Neither do we. That's because, much to the surprise of FPS game makers everywhere, wandering around lost in hallways isn't fun.

If you game wizards are so proud of your sprawling levels and alternate routes, GIVE ME A MAP OF THE LEVEL. If I'm not playing to have fun, then why the fuck do you think I'm playing?

Instant-Failure Stealth Levels. Ack. This brings back horrible memories of a Goldeneye level where if you tripped an alarm, an infinite number of bad guys poured forth. We knew a man who failed that level 37 times, then got the Infinite Health cheat for it and came back. He intentionally tripped the alarm, the guards rushed out. Laughing maniacally, he proceeded to shoot those fuckers for four hours, killing 1,183 of them - 682 with groin shots - before his thumbs cramped up. Your game should not create this kind of bitterness.

Unnecessarily difficult end levels. I've worked for 50 hours to get to this point in the game. Don't make me watch the "Loading..." screen and then the fucking climactic cutscene 75 times, once for each attempt to beat the last boss. And don't make the method of attack so fucking obscure and specific that nothing short of a trip to GameFaqs will get me through it. Talk about killing immersion...

Speed Cheating. That miraculous burst of catch-up speed from your opponents. CPU tacklers and recievers do it in Madden. I'm also looking at you, every racing game ever made.

Hard games are fine. We like a challenge. But be fair about it.

Chances of that happening...

Remember that all of this is a method for extending the life of a too-short game. So ask yourself this: do games seem to be getting longer, or shorter? And as games get more expensive to produce, do you expect them to have more levels, or fewer?

The shorter the games, the more they're tempted try to extend the playing experience via arbitrary, infuriating obstacles.


13. Don't bullshit us on the game's features

"Marine, we need you to head to the depths of the compound to rescue a scientist that is being held hostage by Satan and his manyfold minions. Here's your pistol and eight rounds of ammunition. Good luck."

What law says I have to start out the game with none of the fun shit promised on the box art? Again, is this not just a cheap way of extending the life of the game? In FPS games built entirely on the anticipation of using gigantic, phallic-symbol weapons, why not start me out with a damned machine gun and 200 rounds of ammo and go up from there?

Racing games pull this, too. Why do I have to spend 40 hours driving a minivan just to get enough money to buy a Honda Civic? Why can't I have access to all of the content right away? What if I don't feel any satisfaction in "unlocking" the game features I already paid real-life money for and just want to fucking race the Ferrari on the box art!

Chances of that happening...

See #12. Though I want to give a shout out to the Metroid Prime games for giving us infinite ammo on the default gun. Think about how your life would have been different if your gun had never run out of bullets, my friend. You wouldn't be in that Mexican jail right now, I can tell you that.


14. Seriously, get rid of the crates

The crate has long been held up as an example of lazy game art design, a crutch that game level decorators have been falling back on for fifteen damned years. Come to think of it, have you ever actually seen one of those wooden crates in real life? And did you smash it to see if there were bullets and medicine inside?



But here we use the crate as a symbol for all lazy, recycled game design. Of course there's some innovative stuff out there...



...but for every one of those, there seem to be 30 games that are, for instance, set against the backdrop of a post-apocalyptic future. I understand that lots of game designers remember the futuristic cyborg movies of their childhood. But remember the only reason those films took place in an apocalyptic future is because it was cheaper to film in a burned-out factory than to build actual futuristic sets.

Games should have no such limitation. Use your imagination, guys.

Chances of that happening...

Well, the technology really is getting amazing now. Look at how gorgeous the textures are on this shot from Half Life 2:



I mean, that's actual wood grain there. That looks like you could reach out and actually get a splinter from that crate. And look at one of the few E3 screenshots released for Quake 4:



I mean, that crate has been upgraded with a wicked-awesome skull on it. Though I guess it could just be a box full of skulls.


15. Stop the Short-Sighted Business Bullshit

Patents. Did you know there's a patent held by some microscopic software company on spherical camera controls in realtime 3D, and they're starting to level lawsuits against EVERYONE? Did you ever wonder what happened to force feedback, controllers that push your hands around so you can feel the action in the game as well as see it (we're talking real force feedback, not controllers that vibrate like pagers)? Somebody has a patent, that's what. Did you know you can't have mini-games during a loading screen because of patent law?

Exclusive sports licenses. Say goodbye to NFL football anywhere but with EA. That's right, they signed a deal with the NFL saying nobody could make games but them. So every other pro football game, including Sega's, will be back to using fictional teams so get ready to play as the Dallas Zombies with all-star QB Cletus Fuckhat.

Cashing in on Crappy Genre Knockoffs. For every Grand Theft Auto, there is a Driv3r. For every Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic there is a Fight Club: Soup Befouler. This is no joke. A movie goer will bitch about a movie he "wasted" seven bucks on. But to leave $55 at the game store and find out you got a knockoff turd in return? That's some serious customer dissatisfaction, my friends. And it will bite the industry in the ass some day, unless somebody wakes up.

Chances of that happening...

Excellent. I like to think that some day the businesses of the world will wake up and realize they're part of a greater whole, that the energy devoted to cannabalistic infighting means ultimate doom for all. The leaders of the great religions of the world will realize that all of us, Muslim, Christian, Jew, all want the same for humanity. Women will realize it's the pale, studious type they want instead of the quarterback of the football team, and everywhere we walk, bunnies will dance a path for us. Dance, little guys! Dance!


16. Don't use the online capability as an excuse to release broken games

The first time we hear the word "patch" in relation to a PS3 or XBox 360 game, we're taking the console back to the store. Filled with our shit.

But surely the console industry, always more business savvy than their PC counterparts, will avoid making us gamers their unpaid beta testers.

Chances of that happening...

...again depends on how many turd-filled consoles they get stuck with. In other words, the consumer always gets exactly what they'll put up with.


17. Don't let other features distract from gaming

As a rule, a console is a better game machine than a cheap PC because all it does is play games. So does anyone else get worried when Microsoft and Sony both boast about their machines' ability to rip MP3's and play movies and chat online and do your taxes?

Doesn't every feature that gets added, by necessity, take designer's time and energy away from the features that make for great gaming? Don't most of you reading this already have the ability to play movies and MP3's and chat online without your future Xbox 360? Wouldn't you prefer your game machine devote all of its muscle to gaming and nothing else?

Chances of that happening...

Nintendo has stuck the most reliably to the "games first" mentality, and look where it's gotten them. When the PS1 could play audio CD's, the N64 couldn't. When the PS2 could play DVD's, the GameCube couldn't. The result...



Uh, yeah.

It's no surprise, then, when Sony President Ken Kutaragi says "The PS3 is not a game machine." Thanks for the honesty, Ken!


18. Don't use online play as an excuse to bleed us dry

Imagine a world where games are streamed to your console seamlessly and quickly, never having to leave your home to buy or rent games, never a worry about games being out of stock, never having to line up outside of a store at midnight dressed like Samus to get the next hot title. Now imagine developers releasing games a few levels at a time and charging you for each. Imagine games released in "chapters" where you never get to play the final level because the first levels didn't sell well enough.

Awesome! The same CNN story quoted above says:

"Microsoft also plans to greatly expand its online network in its next generation, letting players and developers form their own marketplace, selling in-game content for real-world cash via small micro-transactions. Racing game enthusiasts, for example, will be able to buy a faster car to give them an edge in the game for a slight bit more..."

Finally, we can have a game world where, like the real world, the rich kids have all of the cool stuff! While you're fighting for 50 hours on an XBox roleplaying game to get the +50 Magical Shield of Shielding, some snotty kid just went out and bought one with real-world money thanks to his $150.00 weekly allowance from Daddy!

Chances of that happening...

Not even we're pessimistic enough to think they'll follow through on this. Lots of bullshit gets thrown around in the pre-console hype and speculation, so we'll assume somebody misspoke there. Then again, you take a starving college kid and inform him that he can actually earn an income by aquiring rare video game items and selling them for actual "can buy burritos with it" dollars... how can you stop him?


19. NO MORE JUMPING PUZZLES IN FPS GAMES

We'll try to be calm and avoid the violent hyperbole that spoils so many gaming websites, but are you telling me that Congress can hold hearings about steroids in baseball, but they can't do anything about jumping puzzles in first-person games? YOU CAN'T SEE YOUR MOTHERFUCKING FEET. IT DOESN'T WORK.

I understand this occurring in games like Turok 3. That's why they're called bad games. But Half-Life 2? Are you serious? BOW YOUR HEAD IN SHAME.

Chances that it will get bet-

-THEY SHOULD HAVE NEVER DONE IT IN THE FIRST PLACE. EVER. WHOSE IDEA WAS THIS? I DEMAND TO KNOW. WAS IT TUROK? WAS TUROK THE FIRST? THE VERY FIRST FUCKING PERSON TO EVER PUT A JUMPING PUZZLE IN A FIRST-FUCKING PERSON GAME SHOULD HAVE BEEN FIRED, TIED DOWN AND HAD HIS EARS FILLED WITH PISS.


20. Horizontal consoles have been a curse for as long as gaming has been around. I'm not playing another game until I get a machine I can stand on its side. My entertainment center only has three inches of free space and flat consoles are the backstabbing Judas in my life.

Hey, you're in luck!

Last edited by Coppertop; 11-23-2005 at 08:08 AM..
Coppertop is offline  
Old 11-23-2005, 09:31 AM   #9 (permalink)
Lover - Protector - Teacher
 
Jinn's Avatar
 
Location: Seattle, WA
Man I'm a gamer at heart and anything that improves the industry is definitely in my best interests. This guy sure has a lot of BAD arguments, though.

Quote:
And yet, did anyone stop being impressed by Doom III long enough to notice he and the other bad guys were flailing at us with the same straight-line Ulysses S. Grant calvary charge that failed them twelve years ago in Doom 1? Even Far Cry had bad guys that went into spinning seizures when they got confused.
It really doesn't sound like this guy has tried to program AI or even studied game theory very much. There's entire research fields devoted to the study of games and their overall "funativity". One of the more important discussions is precisely this. It's actually EASIER to develop ungodly AI than stupid AI. Give the NPC's knowledge of everything.. every entity, it's viewport, its movement, its size, etc. They'll never miss, because they have 100% perfect aim. Anyone who has played against expert Counter-Strike bots has seen this.. they know where you are long before you even know they exist, and they one shot-kill every time. As soon as you start to do REALISTIC AI, you have to start calculating what it should know when, how accurate it should be, etc.. etc.. Furthermore, you ALWAYS want AI to be "challenging, but beatable." Otherwise, no one would play. Remember, people play games to have fun, and part of having fun is winning at least SOME of the time. Introduce other game design concepts like convexities, and you can interest the gamer even more.

Quote:
Chances of that happening...

Almost zero. One, there's more and more focus on multiplayer for this sort of game. This takes some of the pressure off programmers because in multiplayer, other humans supply their own A.I. Even the ones who are complete morons.
EXACTLY. I think this is a very important point, and I think it defeats his whole argument. I'd MUCH rather have game developers focus on MULTIPLAYER than Artificial Intelligence design. Why? Becuase humans are fare more confusing, diverse, and challenging than any computer-generated human can ever be. I rarely play single-player games anymore, because no matter how intelligent the AI is, it doesn't compare to a well-trained and practiced human.

Quote:
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...
This one is just entirely silly.. there are clearly defined sets of genres, and there are games for all of them. The fact that they're not available on the new consoles is a twofold nonpoint: these games are still under development, as not every game releases with the console. Furthermore, popular games are determined by the MARKET. I don't think I'd be that interested in playing the "spy game" he's talking about. And I tell you what -- the hundreds of marketing and game-interests surveys that major producers do every year tell a different story about what people in general think is a good game. If these small genres he described were popular, there would be more games developed for them. Look at Katamari Damacy, for example.

Quote:
Where's the game where we get to play as Dr. House and diagnose mysterious illnesses while crushing the patient's spirit with cruel insults? Where's the game where we're a pre-op transsexual where the object of the game is to gather enough money to complete the operation?
WTF? I'll take my car-stealing, cop killing, prostitute smashing gang member game over that ANY day.

Quote:
..and almost a quarter are over age 50
And I call BULLSHIT on this statistic. I've seen tons of demographic studies in my Game Design classes, and none of them even come near his overzealous approximation. Without a source, this is like saying that 3/4 of all statistics are made up.

Quote:
How, in 2005, can there still be gamers taken in by EXCLUSIVE SCREENSHOTS of games that are obviously taken from cutscenes and have NO connection with what the actual game will look like?
This point is spot on, and I'll leave it. However, he shot himself in the foot later with..

Quote:
How, in 2005, can there still be gamers taken in by EXCLUSIVE SCREENSHOTS of games that are obviously taken from cutscenes and have NO connection with what the actual game will look like?
He's obviously never studied advertising or marketing. People don't want teeny little pictures of what's going on in the game. That's what the BACK of the box is for. The front has to catch your eye and trigger a name-response. "Hey, I recognize that eye.. that's PERFECT DARK!" *flips box over*.. "Oh whoa, it looks neat.." My own personal first law of advertising is that you have got to grab their attention immediately, and game-scenes cropped to a 5 x 6 or smaller size to fit the front of a DVD/CD box isn't going to cut it.

Quote:
We're not for speeding the moral degradation of the modern world, but imagine a Hollywood where only PG-13 movies could get made. Say goodbye to everything from Shindler's List to The Matrix.
This argument doesn't even follow. Having strict game rating systems does not prevent any type of game from being created. It only ensures a game is correctly labelled based on its' content. It doesn't *PREVENT* anything above PG-13 from being made, it just makes it less likely to be produced. Just like movies, there is LESS of a market for hardcore adult games, and so market forces drive this, not game design companies or ratings administrations. The "emotional plea" at the end to make you feel this is worthless, because having an AO rating has nothing to do with banning movies above PG-13.

Quote:
Developers will be shocked one day when they notice that the world is full of women. It's true! More than half of your potential customer base are penisless. They have money. They like doing fun things. And yet, how do you think they feel when they play a game where the heroine looks like this:
Solid point. Nothing to say here.

Quote:
There is not one single reason in the known universe for even one more game where the save point is ten motherfucking minutes away from the boss,
This argument, again, reeks of no education into true game design. This is part of a "convexity" of difficulty. "Save-anywhere" savegames make the game MUCH easier than it could be otherwise. Imagine, if you will, that you can save at any given microsecond of the game. You know that a hard boss is coming up, so you save every second into the battle until you make a bad move. You just restore the save from a second ago, and try again until you get it right. This defeats the entire challenge of the boss, as you can break it down into scripted "one button combos" instead of the seven-move combo toss that you were supposed to be able to use. The further apart you make the saves, the more challenging you can make a game. This, coming from the guy who wanted more challenge in his games. Obviously, this has to be tempered with realism (two saves throughout the entire game), but making MORE savepoints just dices an otherwise enthralling, challenging game into "who can restore saves more quickly.."

Quote:
How in the name of Islamic Fonzie did we ever let games get away with "Loading..." screens? The Gamecube doesn't have those, not on the games made by Nintendo. Hell, the 8-bit NES didn't have load screens 20 years ago. Our favorite TV shows don't load. DVD movies don't load between scenes. The animals at the zoo don't load.
This is absolutely garbage, and reeks to me AGAIN of an uneducated bafoon. Show me ANY modern hardware that can dynamically create and store game entities without any preloading, and I'll be amazed. When you're dealing with hundreds of megs of sprites, meshes, animations, AI every second, you need to have some of it in quickaccess RAM, not stored on some slow-accessing CD-ROM. His "solution" would be to make video games like a buffering WMV. Ever tried to buffer an WMV over the internet on 56k? It doesn't really preload anything, and tries to load as it plays. What this results in is a bandwidth chokepoint.. you watch about 6 seconds of the movie and then it stutters and tries to buffer some more. If you let the movie buffer BEFORE you watch it, it's decidely smooth and uninterrupted. I'd much rather wait 30 seconds for a load screen than have to watch my game stutter for 5 seconds everytime it needs to reload some entities.

Quote:
won't play the same Madden commentary sound files on every fifth play.
Does he want speed or quality? This man just can't decide. Especially if you somehow expect the game to not load ANYTHING, you're not going to get quality sound assets. The more of these "different" sound clip assets that you add to a game like Madden, the bigger the game and the more you need to preload to ensure continuity. The re-used soundclips are annoying, sure.. but programming dynamic ones? ENORMOUS in complexity and resources. Until we master real-time sound generation from text (with something other than a robotic voice) this is a pipe dream. We have to stick with pre-generated audio, just as we stick with pre-animated graphics.

Quote:
This should only get better, unless, as I suspect, the game makers secretly hate us.
Emotional appeal, nothing to see here. He knows its as false as it can get, but he's got to garner your support for the next one.

Quote:
Let's rid games of all arbitrary barriers.
I hate running into invisible walls as much as the next guy, but this is what we call an infinite decision tree. Unless you limit the choices the players have, your decisions become infinite, and so too does your gaming budget.

To illustrate.

Player can go either A or B

........A
P
.........B

From A or B, player can go to C or D / E or F.

............C
............D
........A
P
.........B
............E
............F

It keeps going and diverging until you have 50 seperate paths to follow. To quote our author, "How in the name of Islamic Fonzie" do you expect that to be programmed? You have to converge those decision trees back into smaller amounts of choices if you ever want the game to be finished. That's why you have to have artificial barriers, son.

Quote:
Superimposing shit on the screen. And by "shit" we mean "words." Fatal Frame 2 was one of the most awesomely atmospheric games ever made... until you took a snapshot of the second ghost and the words "CORE SHOT: 396pts!" popped up. Spooooooky!
I can follow this argument in RPGs. You really don't need to know the name of the enemy, although I think that it adds to the immersion level, personally. "Ohh I got killed by a Rock Golem.." not "Ohh I just got killed by that rock thing with the big arm.."

However, taking away "superimposed shit" in a FPS? No HUD? No Player names? I think that would make for one of the most confusing games you could play.

Quote:
Arbitrary triggers in RPG's. Why isn't the Dark Elf waiting at the Black Temple like he said? Because I haven't talked to every fucking person in town yet. Can we at least write in some kind of actual cause and effect here that might make some kind of actual sense to me? Because I don't get any sense of reward or accomplishment by randomly activating subroutines via mind-numbing repetition.
This is a very solid argument -- could have been taken directly out of a Game Studies textbook. Cause and effect is a VERY important concept in game design, and any time that the world doesn't appear to act in the way a player believes it realistically should, its going to be frustrating. Having a person not be where they say they're going to be is frustrating in real life, we don't need it in our games.

Quote:
Ammo starvation. I'm looking at you, Resident Evil for the Gamecube. I have a gun. LET ME USE IT. Don't pretend your game is "challenging" because you only give me four bullets to kill eight zombie dogs with.
This is realism. How many people do you know that can carry around an ak47 and 900 rounds for it? I'm sorry if you find ammo limits restricting, but it makes AIMING more important than SPRAY N PRAY. Good thing? Yes.

Quote:
Confusing, mapless floor plans. Did you remember when you were a kid and you got bored on weekends, how you would go to a large building, a hotel or a hospital, then wander around for several hours looking for a certain room? While zombies attacked you? Neither do we. That's because, much to the surprise of FPS game makers everywhere, wandering around lost in hallways isn't fun.
ABSOLUTE contradiction of his point earlier. Remove all artificial boundaries? I think not, you'd be lost in the metaphorical hotel. You have to limit the player's movement, or you end up in situations like this. If you limit the player's movement, you have to do it with artifical boundaries. One or the other.

Quote:
This brings back horrible memories of a Goldeneye level where if you tripped an alarm, an infinite number of bad guys poured forth.
This, again, is realism. If you felt like you could trip an alarm and still live, what's the point of avoiding the alarm? If I were truly a super-secret international spy in a building loaded with alarms, I wouldn't want to set one off, no matter how many bad guys game forth. Odds are, however, that they'd easily outnumber me because they're armed to the teeth and know where I am. Perhaps infinitely many enemies is not the solution, but you must certainly make the reward for NOT tripping the alarm far better than the reward for tripping the alarm.

Quote:
Unnecessarily difficult end levels. I've worked for 50 hours to get to this point in the game. Don't make me watch the "Loading..." screen and then the fucking climactic cutscene 75 times, once for each attempt to beat the last boss. And don't make the method of attack so fucking obscure and specific that nothing short of a trip to GameFaqs will get me through it. Talk about killing immersion
This sounds like he wants cookie cutter games that he can beat in 5 minutes. Sure, it was frustrating trying to figure out the Up down left right left right A B A A B move, but wasn't it rewarding when you figured it out? I'll deign that the argument about having to watch a cut scene repeatedly is obnoxious, but certainly lowering the difficulty of a game so that you can beat it without being challenged is NOT a good thing in the face of good game design.

Quote:
What law says I have to start out the game with none of the fun shit promised on the box art? Again, is this not just a cheap way of extending the life of the game? In FPS games built entirely on the anticipation of using gigantic, phallic-symbol weapons, why not start me out with a damned machine gun and 200 rounds of ammo and go up from there?

Racing games pull this, too. Why do I have to spend 40 hours driving a minivan just to get enough money to buy a Honda Civic? Why can't I have access to all of the content right away? What if I don't feel any satisfaction in "unlocking" the game features I already paid real-life money for and just want to fucking race the Ferrari on the box art!
If you're so concerned that you're not getting the Ferrari, save your money for a real damn one. For the rest of us GAMERS, EARNING the Ferrari gives us a sense of accomplishment, and driving it is that much more orgasmic after driving the shitty car with the slow transmission and horrid steering. If you've ever cheated and gotten the awesome car from the beginning of the game, it's FAR less satisifying.

Quote:
15. Stop the Short-Sighted Business Bullshit

Patents.
No disagreements here, as a self-proclaimed internet revolutionary, copyright and patent law are the truest spawn of satan.

Quote:
16. Don't use the online capability as an excuse to release broken games
Excellent point. We saw this with the release of Battlefield 2 -- it was far less tested than it should have been before release, and they've realized that now. Being able to test the game AFTER you release it is no excuse for having poor QA test cycles.

Quote:
18. Don't use online play as an excuse to bleed us dry
Quality.

Quote:
19. NO MORE JUMPING PUZZLES IN FPS GAMES
Man -- you just bemoaned the inability to jump over the stuff in your rant about artificial barriers. Make up your mind. I personally don't like jumping puzzles, but if you give the player the ability to jump, why not use it?

Quote:
20. Horizontal consoles have been a curse for as long as gaming has been around. I'm not playing another game until I get a machine I can stand on its side. My entertainment center only has three inches of free space and flat consoles are the backstabbing Judas in my life.
Waa waa waa.. one final gripe for an uneducated baffoon who managed to pull 5 or so solid arguments out of 20 "gripes" in his so-called manifesto. This man is certainly not the new headstone of game improvement. Let someone with a real education do that, please.
__________________
"I'm typing on a computer of science, which is being sent by science wires to a little science server where you can access it. I'm not typing on a computer of philosophy or religion or whatever other thing you think can be used to understand the universe because they're a poor substitute in the role of understanding the universe which exists independent from ourselves." - Willravel
Jinn is offline  
Old 11-23-2005, 11:17 AM   #10 (permalink)
I read your emails.
 
canuckguy's Avatar
 
Location: earth
"Instant-Failure Stealth Levels. Ack. This brings back horrible memories of a Goldeneye level where if you tripped an alarm, an infinite number of bad guys poured forth. We knew a man who failed that level 37 times, then got the Infinite Health cheat for it and came back. He intentionally tripped the alarm, the guards rushed out. Laughing maniacally, he proceeded to shoot those fuckers for four hours, killing 1,183 of them - 682 with groin shots - before his thumbs cramped up. Your game should not create this kind of bitterness. "

that one described me perfectly! ahahaa
canuckguy is offline  
Old 11-23-2005, 09:23 PM   #11 (permalink)
Junkie
 
Carno's Avatar
 
Meh. It was a good read I guess, but this guy wants every game to be perfect.

He's an idiot.

EDIT: One good quote I got from the forums by a poster named Herr Terror:

Quote:
On the subject of load times... I remarked on the article to my unemployed roommate, who informs me that that load times are an integral part of the video game experience because they allow for something he called "hitting the bong" between levels. One can only guess his true meaning, but it would seem that at least Microsoft is well aware of this industry need.

Last edited by Carn; 11-23-2005 at 09:27 PM..
Carno is offline  
Old 11-23-2005, 10:29 PM   #12 (permalink)
Junkie
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by JinnKai
Man I'm a gamer at heart and anything that improves the industry is definitely in my best interests. This guy sure has a lot of BAD arguments, though.
Sure he's jumps to some conclusions, but he also has good points.


Quote:
Originally Posted by JinnKai
It really doesn't sound like this guy has tried to program AI or even studied game theory very much. There's entire research fields devoted to the study of games and their overall "funativity". One of the more important discussions is precisely this. It's actually EASIER to develop ungodly AI than stupid AI. Give the NPC's knowledge of everything.. every entity, it's viewport, its movement, its size, etc. They'll never miss, because they have 100% perfect aim. Anyone who has played against expert Counter-Strike bots has seen this.. they know where you are long before you even know they exist, and they one shot-kill every time. As soon as you start to do REALISTIC AI, you have to start calculating what it should know when, how accurate it should be, etc.. etc.. Furthermore, you ALWAYS want AI to be "challenging, but beatable." Otherwise, no one would play. Remember, people play games to have fun, and part of having fun is winning at least SOME of the time. Introduce other game design concepts like convexities, and you can interest the gamer even more.



EXACTLY. I think this is a very important point, and I think it defeats his whole argument. I'd MUCH rather have game developers focus on MULTIPLAYER than Artificial Intelligence design. Why? Becuase humans are fare more confusing, diverse, and challenging than any computer-generated human can ever be. I rarely play single-player games anymore, because no matter how intelligent the AI is, it doesn't compare to a well-trained and practiced human.
I think his desire is that if a game is 'next generation' then it should be next generation in more than just a graphical aspect. I agree with you that a human player is infinitely more interesting to play against than an AI. (Although, in many RTSes I play, many people are trying to emulate a computer with perfect build orders.)

Quote:
Originally Posted by JinnKai
This one is just entirely silly.. there are clearly defined sets of genres, and there are games for all of them. The fact that they're not available on the new consoles is a twofold nonpoint: these games are still under development, as not every game releases with the console. Furthermore, popular games are determined by the MARKET. I don't think I'd be that interested in playing the "spy game" he's talking about. And I tell you what -- the hundreds of marketing and game-interests surveys that major producers do every year tell a different story about what people in general think is a good game. If these small genres he described were popular, there would be more games developed for them. Look at Katamari Damacy, for example.
I disagree here. Marketing and game interest surveys cause publishers to avoid innovation and become risk adverse. Publishers want to cater to the money, err people, but even the people can't imagine what's over the horizon. That's why even though something as interesting as the GBA link up to the Gamecube was interesting, only 3 or so games took advantage of it. And I fear that the same thing will happen with the Revolution. It's quite a catch-22. Publishers are unwilling to adopt a new technology until gamers show a willingness to use it, and gamers are unwilling to use it until they see a publisher create a game that takes full advantage of it.

I'm reading 'Ten Faces of Innovation' by Tom Kelley from IDEO. His opinion is that most consumers can state that they want something faster, prettier, better, but that for true innovation, you have to get away from them.


Quote:
Originally Posted by JinnKai
WTF? I'll take my car-stealing, cop killing, prostitute smashing gang member game over that ANY day.
Fair enough, but someone out there likes Dr. House and wouldn't mind playing him. The game industry can touch on any number of subjects and can fill any sort of niche. How else do you explain Michelle Kwan's Skating? Lego Adventure Island? Redneck Rampage? Nancy Drew Mysteries? There exists a game out there for everyone. Publishers willing to seep into those niches have the potential to tap into some markets.

Quote:
Originally Posted by JinnKai
And I call BULLSHIT on this statistic. I've seen tons of demographic studies in my Game Design classes, and none of them even come near his overzealous approximation. Without a source, this is like saying that 3/4 of all statistics are made up.
I agree here. Statistics need references.

Quote:
Originally Posted by JinnKai
This point is spot on, and I'll leave it. However, he shot himself in the foot later with..

He's obviously never studied advertising or marketing. People don't want teeny little pictures of what's going on in the game. That's what the BACK of the box is for. The front has to catch your eye and trigger a name-response. "Hey, I recognize that eye.. that's PERFECT DARK!" *flips box over*.. "Oh whoa, it looks neat.." My own personal first law of advertising is that you have got to grab their attention immediately, and game-scenes cropped to a 5 x 6 or smaller size to fit the front of a DVD/CD box isn't going to cut it.
I agree with your point, but having had to make marketing and advertising screenshots, I have to state that I hate marketing and advertising for the bullshit they ask us to generate.

The other point to consider is that most marketing and advertising is created 6 months before the release of a console game, because that's how long it takes to run it through the process of approvals and whatnot. You're lucky if you have an alpha build and can get images that don't suck at that point.

Quote:
Originally Posted by JinnKai
This argument doesn't even follow. Having strict game rating systems does not prevent any type of game from being created. It only ensures a game is correctly labelled based on its' content. It doesn't *PREVENT* anything above PG-13 from being made, it just makes it less likely to be produced. Just like movies, there is LESS of a market for hardcore adult games, and so market forces drive this, not game design companies or ratings administrations. The "emotional plea" at the end to make you feel this is worthless, because having an AO rating has nothing to do with banning movies above PG-13.
You're right about market forces. And that his statement is very much a play to emotion. His prior statement is accurate, but is a disjointed thought. And his conclusion about Wal-mart brings up a point that is more widespread than just ESRB ratings. It's the fact that Wal-mart has a lot of power because of its extensive distribution scheme.

Quote:
Originally Posted by JinnKai
Solid point. Nothing to say here.
Ditto. He should look at companies like Limelife, which is focusing on females.


Quote:
Originally Posted by JinnKai
This argument, again, reeks of no education into true game design. This is part of a "convexity" of difficulty. "Save-anywhere" savegames make the game MUCH easier than it could be otherwise. Imagine, if you will, that you can save at any given microsecond of the game. You know that a hard boss is coming up, so you save every second into the battle until you make a bad move. You just restore the save from a second ago, and try again until you get it right. This defeats the entire challenge of the boss, as you can break it down into scripted "one button combos" instead of the seven-move combo toss that you were supposed to be able to use. The further apart you make the saves, the more challenging you can make a game. This, coming from the guy who wanted more challenge in his games. Obviously, this has to be tempered with realism (two saves throughout the entire game), but making MORE savepoints just dices an otherwise enthralling, challenging game into "who can restore saves more quickly.."
You're right that quicksaving marginalizes boss battles (lord knows I used it many a time), but there's also a point to be made that a good game designer place the save points at GOOD locations. Some of those designers out there, I swear, are just throwing feces at a wall and seeing what sticks.


Quote:
Originally Posted by JinnKai
This is absolutely garbage, and reeks to me AGAIN of an uneducated bafoon. Show me ANY modern hardware that can dynamically create and store game entities without any preloading, and I'll be amazed. When you're dealing with hundreds of megs of sprites, meshes, animations, AI every second, you need to have some of it in quickaccess RAM, not stored on some slow-accessing CD-ROM. His "solution" would be to make video games like a buffering WMV. Ever tried to buffer an WMV over the internet on 56k? It doesn't really preload anything, and tries to load as it plays. What this results in is a bandwidth chokepoint.. you watch about 6 seconds of the movie and then it stutters and tries to buffer some more. If you let the movie buffer BEFORE you watch it, it's decidely smooth and uninterrupted. I'd much rather wait 30 seconds for a load screen than have to watch my game stutter for 5 seconds everytime it needs to reload some entities.
Right, he's neglecting to note that NES was a solid state storage device as opposed to the optical media that everyone adopted in the PS2 generation.

But, then again, the quality of your coders can drastically affect your load times. Some games have badly placed load screens, extremely long load times and frequent load times. Many engineers these days are spoiled by the gigs of space that they are privy to on next gen machines and abuse that space with abandon. GTA has a long load at the beginning, but you never see another loading screen for a long time, if ever. In contrast, Stuntman has redundant loading screens that appear every time you start a level, even if you're just replaying the level you just attempted. I'm not really arguing his point here, maybe just blindsiding his point.

Quote:
Originally Posted by JinnKai
Does he want speed or quality? This man just can't decide. Especially if you somehow expect the game to not load ANYTHING, you're not going to get quality sound assets. The more of these "different" sound clip assets that you add to a game like Madden, the bigger the game and the more you need to preload to ensure continuity. The re-used soundclips are annoying, sure.. but programming dynamic ones? ENORMOUS in complexity and resources. Until we master real-time sound generation from text (with something other than a robotic voice) this is a pipe dream. We have to stick with pre-generated audio, just as we stick with pre-animated graphics.
Agreed, but I do also agree that it's incredibly annoying.

Whew, I'm tired. JinnKai, you type too much. I'm not trying to argue with you directly. It's just that it seemed like you were saying, "the emporer has no clothes," and I just wanted to say, "well, I think he's wearing a loin cloth."

I'll continue on the other points later.
FngKestrel is offline  
Old 11-24-2005, 04:50 AM   #13 (permalink)
C'mon, just blow it.
 
hulk's Avatar
 
Location: Perth, Australia
Well, since he didn't do it, I'll provide a source; The ESA study.

Nearly a quarter may be a slight overstatement, the figure rests at 19%.
__________________
"'There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person,' says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex."
-- From an IGN game review.
hulk is offline  
Old 11-24-2005, 07:56 AM   #14 (permalink)
The Mighty Boosh
 
djflish's Avatar
 
Location: I mostly come out at night, mostly...
It was a good read, made me laugh, but I prefered reading Jinnkai's reply
__________________
Europes two great narcotics, Alcohol and Christianity.
I know which one I prefer.
djflish is offline  
Old 11-24-2005, 01:25 PM   #15 (permalink)
Lover - Protector - Teacher
 
Jinn's Avatar
 
Location: Seattle, WA
Quote:
Half of the gamers are now over age 18, and almost a quarter are over age 50.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hulk
Well, since he didn't do it, I'll provide a source; The ESA study.

Nearly a quarter may be a slight overstatement, the figure rests at 19%.
Quote:
19% of Americans over the age of 50 played
video games in 2004, an increase from 9% in 1999.
That's directly from the ESA report.. 19% of people over 50 played games, not 19% of people playing games are over 50. A very big difference -- misrepresented statistics are dangerous.

And yes, I'll deign he had.. well.. a loincloth..
__________________
"I'm typing on a computer of science, which is being sent by science wires to a little science server where you can access it. I'm not typing on a computer of philosophy or religion or whatever other thing you think can be used to understand the universe because they're a poor substitute in the role of understanding the universe which exists independent from ourselves." - Willravel
Jinn is offline  
Old 11-25-2005, 12:49 AM   #16 (permalink)
All important elusive independent swing voter...
 
jorgelito's Avatar
 
Location: People's Republic of KKKalifornia
You guys make some great follow up comments. But I don't thnk he ever made the claim to be programmer or such. Also, it was meant as a comedy piece (which I did find to be funny and entertaining). Anyways, good article.
jorgelito is offline  
Old 11-25-2005, 05:21 AM   #17 (permalink)
C'mon, just blow it.
 
hulk's Avatar
 
Location: Perth, Australia
Quote:
Originally Posted by JinnKai
That's directly from the ESA report.. 19% of people over 50 played games, not 19% of people playing games are over 50. A very big difference -- misrepresented statistics are dangerous.
Haha, look at the pie chart just by that statistic, my friend
__________________
"'There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person,' says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex."
-- From an IGN game review.
hulk is offline  
 

Tags
gamers, manifesto

Thread Tools

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Trackbacks are On
Pingbacks are On
Refbacks are On



All times are GMT -8. The time now is 01:04 AM.

Tilted Forum Project

Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.7
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.
Search Engine Optimization by vBSEO 3.6.0 PL2
© 2002-2012 Tilted Forum Project

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360