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Bungie Vs. Miyamoto - Fight!
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon May 14, 2007 12:36 PM
from the not-that-combat-heavy dept.
from the not-that-combat-heavy dept.
Last week Gamehead's Geoff Keighley interviewed Shigeru Miyamoto, and the well-known designer tossed off a mildly controversial comment. Keighley asked him if he felt as though he was losing touch with the American audience as a result of the popularity of games like Halo. GameDaily reports on Miyamoto's response: "I could make Halo. It's not that I couldn't design that game. It's just that I choose not to. One thing about my game design is that I never try to look for what people want and then try to make that game design. I always try to create new experiences that are fun to play." Bungie took exception to that, and Frank Connor retorted in his interview with Joystiq: "Yeah, well. I just want to go on the record and say that Bungie is hard at work on a side-scrolling platform game featuring some plumbers -- I'm not going to say what their ethnicity is, it's none of anyone's business -- but we took that as a gauntlet, a sort of glove slap, and we're going to respond in 2D scrolling style. That's all I'm saying." We discussed that article, along with several other pieces of Halo 3 coverage, this past Saturday.
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In an interview with the San Jose Mercury News, Shigeru Miyamoto makes it plain that he's extremely pleased with the way the Wii has changed the face of gaming. He says that he gets the feeling that 'because of the Wii, people ... are finally taking notice of videogames again.' The interview goes on to discuss some ways in which Miyamoto hopes to capitalize on that 'notice', including the possibility of introducing new Nintendo characters sometime next year: "For characters, we came up with the concept of the Miis and that allows people to come up with their own characters. Maybe next year sometime, we may have new characters in the same way we came up with Pikmin when we introduced the GameCube."
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Well... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Halo's popularity (Score:5, Insightful)
-Lee
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The thing is that it's true (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The thing is that it's true (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking ill of a legend like Miyamoto is not something I would do, and I think the guy at Bungie comes off a little arrogant for doing so.
Disclaimer: The last Nintendo console I bought was an SNES, so I don't think I could be counted as a Nintendo fanboy.
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Re:The thing is that it's true (Score:5, Insightful)
True, but the difference is that Super Mario Bros. was revolutionary when it was first introduced, as evident by the numerous SMB clones that followed in its wake. I'm hard-pressed to think of a popular game that played like SMB before SMB was introduced.
Halo, on the other hand, was just the latest iteration of a long line of FPS inspired by Doom and Wolfenstein 3D.
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Re:The thing is that it's true (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:The thing is that it's true (Score:5, Insightful)
Where you might say, "Think FF7 is a real RPG? Try playing Baulder's Gate or Nethack", I might say, "Think FF7 is a real RPG? Try playing Tales of the Abyss or Ar Tonelico". Seriously, we're talking apple's and oranges here.
East vs. West, Console vs. PC, RPG vs. jRPG... each side takes a different spin on tabletop gaming... jRPGs concentrate on the story element, western RPGs capitalize on non-linearity. Whichever you think works better is up to the audience.
I personally would fall asleep 10 minutes into Baulder's gate. Ar Tonelico might make you do the same.
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Re:The thing is that it's true (Score:5, Insightful)
Excellent observation.
And for what it's worth, I'd like to point out that popularity is a pretty complex issue. We seem to operate under the assumption that it's some kind of direct relationship to quality or some other simplistic explanation (e.g. like how good the controls are). The modern narrative about popularity when it comes to art is that blockbusters are kind of mundane and inoffensive with enough explosions/sex/(pick your easily reproduced element to look down on) while the *real* talent shows up in indie/niche creations that you have to be intelligent/free-thinking/(pick your vaguely cool counter-cultural trait) enough to really get.
And while I'll agree that Creed and Nickelback basically suck, the Beatles and Pink Floyd were really good. So sometimes the popular stuff really is good, and sometimes the niche stuff really isn't (no example here: not looking for a flamewar).
FWIW, Halo is my favorite game of all time on any system. From NES, Sega, SNES, PS, XBOX, GC, Wii, 360 (consoles I've played) and over a decade of PCs, I prefer Halo. Why? The story. Just visit ILoveBees.com and you'll get a glimpse of the thought and talent that goes into the world creation. Does this have anything to do with how popular the game is? There's no way to know. Did they get the gameplay just right? Hit the market at just the right time? Was the story good enough to develop an initial core of fans who pushed the game to the frat boys that made it a blockbuster? We'll never know, in my opinion, and the only lesson is that oversimplifying popularity is for fanbois and trolls.
Now go listen to "Indier than Thou."
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Re:The thing is that it's true (Score:4, Informative)
A couple other Nintendo people helped with the game design also, not just Miyamoto, including the original designer, Yoshio Sakamoto.
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Re:The thing is that it's true (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:The thing is that it's true (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:The thing is that it's true (Score:5, Insightful)
It is by and large Marathon 4/5/6, there's plenty of evidence it takes place in the same Universe, etc, and is only separated by a large amount of time. Since they also created Marathon, this isn't a huge shock. Marathon was groundbreaking mostly in that it brought an interesting storyline to a FPS game, other than that it was really Mac;s answer to Doom. Of course, Doom was just a revampled Castle Wolfenstien 3-D, which was a 3-D version of an old Apple II game, which probably traced its roots back to the old Bezerker game (which never bothered to explain why you were in a maze running from deadly robots), which probably draws inspiration from an old movie, which was inspired by an old story, which was...
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Re:The thing is that it's true (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:The thing is that it's true (Score:5, Insightful)
The graphics on Halo suck. At the time Halo 1 was getting really popular I got into a discussion about the graphics with a roommate. He was comparing Jedi Outcast at 1600x1200 with Halo at 640x480 and saying that Halo was better. This is the kind of mentality that most Halo fans have. To them, Halo is "Just Better(TM)." I had to just ignore him, as I've had to do with everyone else who says anything about Halo's graphics being good at all. Jedi Outcast was not even trying to be a graphics power house, it was running off an old engine and it still looked better with a Radeon 7200.
Level Design? My goodness, man, what are you smoking. Have you even played the library level? After about two minutes you don't even know which direction you're going, which direction you came from, and you can't even count how many times you've seen the exact same stuff over and over again and again. The maps on the ships aren't much better. Sure there are big areas outdoors, but those are repetitive as well, they just don't feel like it when compared to the monotony you just sustained from every indoor environment.
I don't know how the control scheme compares with other console FPS, but I didn't think it was all that great. It was fine, but the only thing I thought even worth mentioning about it was that you could throw a grenade without having to switch to that weapon. I won't get into a comparison between control schemes for PC-based and console-based games, because that's been done, and is somewhat irrelevant to why Halo was popular on a console, but there wasn't anything special about the controls.
Multi-player is kind of hard to judge. There are lots of games that have better. Comparing time played, as of right now, Counter-Strike has over 5 billion minutes of play logged each month. Adding in CS:S and CS:CZ nets closer to 7.5 billion minutes each month. Since it's inception, Xbox live has logged a total of 2.3 billion hours, or to put it in similar units, 138 billion minutes. Let's be generous and pretend that Halo 2 accounted for every last minute (Halo 1 wasn't on Xbox Live so we can't include it). It would take Counter-Strike 18 months to equal that. IOW, one game does in 18 months what an entire service does in 72. Yet we don't have Counter-strike in the headlines every couple of days do we?
That's somewhat off-topic however. The thing Halo has going for it, I conjecture, might be that it has no bots. People are forced to play with others if they are going to do it at all. But then you'd be crazy to play it on the same box. You get 640x480 divided by 4. A whopping 320x240 in all of its interlaced glory. I did that once, every one talked about how cool it was. I was too busy trying to adjust my eyes to being able to see what I was even looking at. I must say that I enjoyed my time despite the screen size, but that's called a party. It wasn't because of Halo. I would have had a much more enjoyable experience playing UT, Trackmania, or any other game where we each have our own screen, or where the screen is shared more efficiently, such as Wii sports or something. I hate to be a poor sport, but the reason we have Halo stories all the time is beca
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Not news (Score:4, Insightful)
It has no merit what so ever.
Lost in transaltion (Score:5, Informative)
Essentially, when Miyamoto said he could "make Halo" what he meant was "He could make a game like Halo"
I could be wrong but I think Miyamoto was saying he makes the games he does because they're the kinds of games he wants to make; he is not influenced by the popularity of a genre or series to attempt to make games like them.
Frank Connor Missed the Point (Score:5, Insightful)
This is irrelevant... (Score:4, Insightful)
They all have good points (Score:5, Interesting)
All the game companies are good at certain things, it's just that the markets are reflective of what each company is basing their priorities on.
Microsoft was intialy trying to make the X-Box into a platform to try to force the convergence of console and PC gaming. Later when it became clear that they were really on to something with X-Box Live, they switched tactics and focused on providing top shelf online content (although the latest half hearted attempt to bring Live to Vista bodes poorly for Microsofts learning abilities).
Sony on the other hand has always been focused primarily on graphics performance. Yes they had some good games, but nothing ever revolutionary, but pretty and often fun. The primary hallmark of the Playstation platform is a shotgun approach to game development. They make as many games as they can, throw them out there and see what sticks. This approach can lead to some very good games, but also leads to some very very bad games. The primary failing of Sony is in not providing any new innovation in the latest generation of consoles. The Playstation 3 was positioned to be a multimedia convergence device, but so far the market for said devices has proved to be rather poor, and what little there is is primarily dominated by inexpensive PCs. The good news for Sony is that historically the Playstation consoles really only hit their stride after a year or two on the market, so it has the potential to outperform the competition in terms of raw power. There is also some rumbling of Sony taking online content more seriously, although whether or not they can provide a credible challenge to Live remains to be seen.
The last player on the market, and the most relevant to this article is Nintendo. Nintendo realized a long time ago that fun games, and innovative systems will out sell fancy graphics. A clear cut example of this is the origional Gameboy versus the graphically superior Gamegear. The Gamegear had a color screen and more processing power, but was more expensive, slightly bulkier, and was much more demanding on power (which resulted in it eating batteries left and right, I should know, I had one). Nintendo has always been middle of the road in terms of graphics and processing power, but what has set them aside has traditionally been their willingness to try new and innovative controls and games. Sometimes this has hurt them, and they have made more than a few products that failed spectactularly (Virtualboy anyone?), but on the other hand they have released a number of products that show some genuine innovation. I think the relative failure of the Gamecube served as a wakeup call to Nintendo, they realized that they weren't able to compete on graphics and if they were going to survive they needed to embrace the creative aspects of their game and console design more fully (prior to the DS and Wii most Nintendo products were less daring in departure from the norm of console gaming). It will be interesting to see if Nintendo can pull off the online portion of the gaming puzzle (which will be critical for all three consoles) sufficiently to keep Wii ahead of X-Box 360 and Playstation 3, of if they will fumble it and have to settle for second place.
"Rather touchy aren't they" (Score:4, Insightful)
Different strokes for different folks (Score:5, Funny)
Bungie's response sounds like, "Oh yeah well... You're a poopy head!" Given cultural differences and the possibility of a hokey translation, I wouldn't take this as a slam. Just another persons opinion.
Sounds like Bungie has been an MS company for too long. If it's not the MS way, it's wrong, you suck. Look out, flying chair!
So bungie owned themselves... (Score:4, Funny)
I mean it's like watching some idiot try to debate online.
Miyamoto you wuss (Score:5, Funny)
Miyamoto is talking small potatoes here with his "I can make Halo" boast. Miyamoto can probably make Ocarina of Time if he tries hard enough.
Re:Is Halo really that great? (Score:5, Insightful)
It came out for the Xbox and found a large population of teens that never had played another FPS.
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Re:Is Halo really that great? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except, of course, for Goldeneye.
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