Spore Dev Down On the Wii 315
An anonymous reader writes "As reported by IGN, Spore developer Chris Hecker made a very quotable statement at a traditionally contentious GDC panel. At the 'Game Publishers Rant' event Wednesday morning, Hecker stated that he thought the Wii is a piece of sh*t. He went on to refer to it as 'two GameCubes stuck together with duct tape.' He also took Nintendo to task for not taking games seriously enough. 'It's not clear to me that Nintendo gives a s*** about games as an art form.'"
sony? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:sony? (Score:4, Interesting)
Something I find odd is that a Wiki Admin deleted his bio barely an hour after this article went live.
Wiki Deletion [wikipedia.org]
Google Cache [72.14.253.104]
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Art form? (Score:3, Insightful)
Pathfinding? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm impressed (Score:5, Funny)
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Can game developers be Divas? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Can game developers be Divas? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps this is an admission that Spore wont be any fun? But that will be OK because it's art and we will buy it for that.
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1) He has apparently been involved [mobygames.com] with a number of successful games.
2) Maxis did some great stuff, pre-Sims. Sim{City 2000,Ant,Farm,Earth,Tower} were all unique, enjoyable games.
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Good link, but a closer inspection of the titles Chris Hecker is on the credits for, shows that he is only ever listed as "Special Thanks" - meaning he had as much involvement as Dolby Labs Or IBM.
Agreed, they made fun games. They obviously want a change of direction (the Sims wasn't that successful) and have employed the Salvador
Re:Can game developers be Divas? (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best_selling
It is, but it doesn't come close to the best selling console games of all time, sadly. (16mil vs 30mil and 40mil)
Having said that, The Sims -is- a great game, but aimed at a different audience than their old games. I'm amazed at how many expansions they've managed to sell. Seasons? Pets? WTF?
Wright has said that all his Sim games are different, but in the same vein. The Sims was just a natural progression of it. Spore takes all this Sims games, plus some games like Civilization, and wraps them all into one. I find this amazingly hard to believe (even after seeing the videos) and I'm very much looking forward to finding out exactly how well it was all put together. If I tried it, I think it'd be amazingly disjointed and it would be like 8 seperate games, 1 after the other, instead of smoothly moving from stage to stage.
We'll see how it comes out.
As for the Wii... Wright has already said he plans to have it on ALL consoles, the PC, and even phones, I believe. There's not much change he'll ignore the Wii.
I agree with the sentiment but... (Score:3, Informative)
ie. MUCH More than 16 million copies
are Super Mario Brothers (NES) and Tetris (GB) both of which were pack ins with their respective systems and not ACTUALLY sold.
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I suspect that one's mostly for kids. My nine-year-old loves it.
Re:Can game developers be Divas? (Score:5, Interesting)
Foot, meet mouth.
Re:Can game developers be Divas? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it's funny that a game developer sees really awesome graphics as mandatory and fun as optional. It kind of reminds me of a lot of game review sites that will give a game a high rating just because it looks pretty and has shiney bits.
I've seen this way too many times to count:
"Although the controls are sluggish and unintuitive and the game play is repetitive and tedious, the graphics really well done....9 out of 10."
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RTFC (Score:3, Insightful)
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Clearly he doesn't view himself as a mere game developer, he's an artiste!
In my day, we had to walk 5 miles in the snow ... (Score:3, Informative)
CS: The 2600 doesn't have a two-dimensional bitmap.
Chris: What!? You mean the bitmap can only hold one scan line worth of image?
CS: Well, not a whole scan line.
Chris: What?
CS: Did I mention that background pixels are about 1/4 inch in width.
Chris: Arrgh! Give me a Wii, give me a Wii!
News At 11, Industry Insider Hates Nonconformist (Score:3, Interesting)
Chris Hecker & his coworkers look like he's putting out a great game, but he needs to take himself and what he does a little less seriously. As a games consumer I care less about what neato tricks a developer can contort the console CPU into doing and more about how much fun it is. Which is why I'm getting a Wii, as soon as, well, I can find one locally!
Re:News At 11, Industry Insider Hates Nonconformis (Score:5, Insightful)
He's just putting his foot down now before all the Wii is first party games and movie licenses. Toss in a DS and PS2 port ever so often. I think he's already too late for that personally. All Wii users seem to want is more Wii sports and mini games, and he's actually standing up and saying that's not good enough for Spore.
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> something really different and new?
Yes. And so does everyone else. The sales of Mario rehashes, Virtual Console style stuff on Wii and XBox is through the roof - much higher than any expectation. Nintendo release old SNES and NES games for the DS. They released the old Mario games on a single cart for the SNES and even bundled the console with it (I miss Mario Allstars more than you can imagine)
Son
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Do you have any numbers on this? Sure, the VC and XBoxLive do sell stuff, but I think a large part of that is because it is cheap, not because the games are old rehashes. A bit nostalgia is always a nice thing, but Zelda:TP already had for to much of it and felt like a rehash, not like a good game and my interest in rebuying all the old NES and S
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Which is why when you hit the wall at 180MPH, you bounce right off.
Re:News At 11, Industry Insider Hates Nonconformis (Score:5, Insightful)
As an owner of pretty much all of Nintendo's consoles, I'm not sure what the hell you're talking about. Are you telling me that Twilight Princess is the same game as A Link to the Past? Or that Super Mario Sunshine is the same game as Super Mario World?
Or are you implying that there are no artistic, fresh games on the DS? Kind of... absurd. The Wii will go the path of the DS: Some movie licenses, sure, but also a ton of innovative games you simply can't get on any other console.
Seriously, if anyone can be accused of constantly rehashing old ideas, it's certainly not Nintendo. Ever looked at the games available for Xbox, Xbox 360, PS2 or PS3? Frankly, I feel like I'm living in some kind of bizarro alternate universe.
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Nintendo is hardly the only developer with rehashes.
And besides, sales of the DS are um, a bit higher than that of the PSP.
If Nintendo decided the DS2 [or whatever] would basically be the DS + faster cpu + more ram and say motion sensors
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I dunno, but I don't see any evidence at all that "the same games we played on the SNES" or even on the Gamecube are at all on the table.
Nintendo has provided a controller that pretty much guarantees a rethink of the game. Sony has provided the same thing as last time, only faster.
Re:News At 11, Industry Insider Hates Nonconformis (Score:4, Insightful)
All Sony really has to do is use the real time weapon swap to flip the DS and the Wii and hit the weak point for massive damage. I think maybe Sony's brother spilled coke on the controller so it's L and R buttons aren't working.
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If the rehashes are fun, then sure. That's why I play games, after all.
I don't play games to experience art. I go to the museum for that.
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With all due respect, I picked up a DS < 2 weeks ago and I'm currently addicted to Final Fantasy III. My fiancee and I have logged more hours on the Wii playing Super Mario Bros., Super Mario World, The Legend of Zelda, Columns, Donkey Kong Country, and Zelda:Links Awakening than we have playing Wii Sports, Zelda:Twilight Princess, Red Steel, Dragon Ball Z, Rayman, a
Re:News At 11, Industry Insider Hates Nonconformis (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft and Sony talk about "games as art" on their websites.
Nintendo doesn't, but makes the most "art" type games of the three.
Apparently Hecker equates "art" to "high budget productions". Is a movie like "Pi" any less art then "American Pie" because it didn't have "next gen" recording equipment?
Besides; ever since slamdance(?) pulled the Columbine game, it seems the public isn't ready to accept games as an artform yet.
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Like it or not, artistic and fun are too different (but not mutually exclusive) things. And they aren't, generally speaking, the things that Nintendo is t
Narrow definition of art (Score:5, Insightful)
You're saying that for an author to produce art it has to be a novel or epic-poem, for a painter to produce art it has to be a grand mural, or for a composer to produce art he has to produce an opera.
A haiku can be art, graffiti can be art, and a pop-song can be art
Sometimes the most important way to define art is that it changes the medium after it has been produced
Whether some people would like to admit it or not, Wii Sports could be seen as art because it was produced by the artists frustration with complicated control mechanics and massive budgets; and the industry will never be the same for having experienced it.
Re:Narrow definition of art (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that may be Christ Hecker's problem as well. I'm just gonna copy my comment from gamesarefun...
How is it Nintendo's job as a console developer to push games as a "legitimate art form?" Or Sony's? Or Microsoft's? Criticizing the development side of their buisness for the type of games they produce would be valid, however the job of the console side of their business is to produce a machine that will sell well and will enable developers to easily produce games that will sell well.
Microsoft and Sony produced consoles with lots of graphical power and a high price tag. Nintendo produced a console with a new method of control and a cheaper price tag. It is now the developers' jobs to produce whatever type of game they want, "artistic" or not, for whichever consoles they want.
If Chris Hecker feels that the type of games he wants to develop require the horsepower of the PS3 or 360 that's fine. If however he feels that the higher level of graphics is a _requirement_ to produce "art," then he clearly doesn't have any notion of what art really is.
(I would certainly have trouble defining what art really is myself, but i'm not so deranged as to try to claim that it requires a high definition display or any other specific kind of media to produce.)
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Movies aren't art because of the type of special effects it has.
Literature isn't art because of the font and page layout.
So why should games' artistic value be judged by their visuals? If anything can make a game art, it's the gameplay.
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Rez (PS1/DC)
Lumines (PSP/mobile phones etc)
Every Extend (freeware PC version/commercial PSP version)
Elebits (Wii)
Katamari Damacy (sp?) (PS2)
LOOM (DOS, Mac OS, Amiga, Atari ST, FM Towns, TG16)
I don't see any Nintendo games. Nintendo games are "good clean fun" as another poster said, but they aren't art.
it all depends... (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess it depends what makes a good game. Tetris was great, and didn't require complicated AI.
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I take it that no Xbox, PS2 or pre-2k PC game had complicated AI, then. Yes, you can run into CPU limits but I'm
Exponential? Not really... (Score:2)
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This guy should pull his head out of his arse. Serious artistic medium is all fine and dandy, but people get games to have fun playing them, not to sit back and appreciate the aesthetics of the artform, or the complexity of the AI. That's what developers do, not players. Nintendo understands this difference, while MS and Sony take the highbrow road to their detriment. His game isn't headed for the Louvre, it's headed to someone who wants entertainment and enjoyme
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And Tetris provides the next-gen gaming experience he has been waiting for exactly how? Just because there are games that are fun without AI, doesn't mean that games with AI are any less fun, even for casual gamers, just look at The Sims.
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The DS and the Wii. ;)
I tout the Wii not because I stopped playing games years ago, but because the message it sends is necessary to the industry for survival. It's the same reason I laud the DS. The industry was suffering from internal hemmorhaging, losing gamers yearly. Most causal players had been shed, and the hardcore were even beginning to be shed (see the incredible decline in Japan prior to the DS). The
Eek! (Score:5, Interesting)
Listen - I love insult comics. But look at you - stringing together accusations and a couple expletives and acting like you gave Nintendo a thrashing? Hmph - it's clear to me, you don't give a s*** about insulting as an art form.
Go listen to some Lisa Lampanelli [insultcomic.com], and THEN try it again, you miserable excuse for console troll.
Ryan Fenton
P.S. As you may have noticed, though I do like my insult comics, I personally suck quite badly at the game myself. You should see me in traffic - a dejected 'dude, you suck' is about at far as I can manage. Just saw the insult, and thought I'd give Lisa Lampanelli a plug.
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Well, you wouldn't be the only one.
*BA-DUM-TSHH*
At least they shipped something.. (Score:4, Funny)
Nintendo doesn't support games as art? (Score:2, Insightful)
And you know what's sad about this? (Score:2)
I've got one word for this guy: HYPOCRITE!
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PS: What I've written above doesn't mean that I don't think the guy's probably an asshole.
Wikipedia? (Score:2, Interesting)
According to the deleted article Spore will be this guy's first game to be released. Apparently he is known in the dev circles, but he has never released any game he has worked on, and he is probably part of a large team developing Spore.
And I would not be nitpicking here if his arguments made a lot of sense. No fanboy of any kind here, just someone who does not real
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You can read the old entry at Google's cache [216.239.59.104] until googlebot realises it's not there any more. The article is kinda miserable, and you can see why it was deleted; he simply isn't notable. Too many others like hime.
Personally, I l
I may be mistake, but I don't think it sucks..... (Score:2, Insightful)
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well... (Score:2)
Two words for you: Britney Spears (Paris Hilton was an acceptable answer too
Unbelievable responses (Score:2, Insightful)
While Sony Home may not be the greatest thing, it is definitely a big announcement and a good step forward. Similarly, the rant against Nintendo probably arises from a disgruntled company but it is something to think about.
There is an utter lack of objectivity in gaming related discussions on Slashdot. With what I would expect the demographics here to be, it definitely surpri
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You reap what you sow (Score:5, Insightful)
You get what you sow. Sony used to be great, but they have constantly fucked with their customers for a few years now. Nintendo used to censor their games and be generally jackasses, but in recent years, they've put out great, fresh hardware and fun, innovative software, and they've shown that they've changed for the better.
People are annoyed at Sony, and they are happy with Nintendo.
So we have a so-so new product announcement from Sony, basically copying Miis, Achievements, Second Life, and adding an unhealthy dose of Micropayments. Big suprise, people don't fall for it.
Then, we have some developer basically explaining that the Wii is shit. Big surprise, people don't agree.
Both companies get what they deserve right now. So, what's your point?
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Just because he might have complaining about to much focus on graphics doesn't mean that he thinks its a good to just completly give up on graphics, which the Wii however pretty much did. The problem with the Wii is that Nintendo completly gave up on advancing the hardware, they upped the Mhz a bit, added a bit more RAM, but not even close to the amount that would have
Re:Unbelievable responses (Score:5, Insightful)
Guitar hero is totally awesome, but as far as I know, it's on its way to other platforms. I haven't heard about Buzz. If Sony really wants into the casual market that Nintendo is after, they need to chop about 60-70% off of their console price. Of course, that's not really feasible for them in any sane economic sense right now. Sony may really have understood what "people" are after, but if that's the case, it's a new revelation for them. And sadly they've painted themselves into a corner by designing a console less for the generic "people", and more for the "hardcore gamer".
That was their decision to make, and there's plenty of money to be had in that market. The occasional frothing Nintendo fanboy aside, most of the generic people who have been having fun with the Wii are perfectly happy to let the powergamers quietly play whatever they want. It's too bad the "hardcore" crowd can't show us the same curtesy, instead feeling the need to constantly remind us that they think we're playing with a gimmick, and all of our fun is going to suddenly dissappear one day.
While quite rudely put (Score:3, Interesting)
I've purchased 6 games for the Wii (not including Wii Sports) and all have offered something interesting but a couple have shown limitations in the hardware. I really enjoyed Elebits but the last levels have some severe frame rate issues when you start flinging around vehicles and buildings. I also enjoyed (after turning the sensitivity WAY down from default) Call of Duty 3 but the graphics were inferior to Call of Duty 2 when played on a PC. COD 3 perhaps suffers more because the game needs to look more realistic than Elebits. Despite the issues I still feel that the control scheme for FPS style games is better than a gamepad and will get better as developers get used to the Wii remote. Here's hoping the next Metroid shines.
I am also disappointed that games like Rayman and Super Monkey Ball don't have well fleshed out multiplayer modes. The Wii really shines when you have a couple friends over and some sort of overall multiplayer mode structure around the mini-games would make this even more fun. I look forward to Mario Party but I would love to see something with a less inane board game component. Even something like the old Epyx Summer Games/Winter Games titles would be great.
I don't honestly think the Wii competes directly with Xbox 360 or PS3. It isn't trying to beat those consoles in the areas they have carved out. Much like the DS versus the PSP I think we will start to exclusives on the Wii that just wouldn't be much fun on a system without a Wii style controller. We are already seeing updates of DS games like Trauma Center and Cooking Mama. We have heard vocal support from companies like EA and Activision for Wii games. If the Wii continues to sell well I think we will see a lot of games developed to cater to this different, more casual market.
The Wii isn't the end all be all of game consoles, it's an interesting tangent that hopefully will continue to bring us new ways to play.
I currently don't own a HDTV and I do most of my "hardcore" gaming on a PC. I have a couple kids and Nintendo family friendly games are a good thing. I certainly don't rule out purchasing a PS3 or Xbox 360 a couple years down the road but right now for how I game and how my family games there isn't a point. But that's just my situation - I know there are a bunch of players who want Resistance or Halo 3 and couldn't care less about Mario.
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Art vs. Fun (Score:4, Interesting)
I know pro sports people do infact play what is essentially a game - but I thought that didn't apply to video games and that games were still supposed to be fun.
So are game developers not even trying to make games fun these days then?
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WOW isn't popular because it's fun. It isn't. It's popular because people get sucked in and have to become "the best" even though that is physically impossible, and while you try to do that impossible, you pay your game tax monthly... most MMOs are like this, but it's not limited to them.
Compare to a good RTS- it takes planning, good
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Overgeneralizations (Score:2)
SS Sporetanic (Score:5, Funny)
This guy always hates everything anyways... (Score:4, Insightful)
--Chris Hecker, GDC, 2005
To paraphrase his annual edgy developer commentary:
"Game consoles aren't designed exclusively around my own personal favorite part of game design at this point in time."
This is notable? This is news? 95% of game developers probably feel this way. User interface people adore the Wii for exactly the same reasons next-gen artists and AI/physics programmers are frustrated by it. Parents adore the Wii's price for the same reason that high-end next-gen developers abhor it (because big honkin processors, it turns out, are not particularly cheap).
The real problem with his claim is the idea that serious and/or artistic games need massively powerful AI or physics routines in order to affect players. I do not agree that powerful technology is the only key to making an artistic game, or a game that has an emotionally powerful effect on people, or a fascinating narrative. Art direction and writing and getting rid of the publisher committee-approval ideology is a lot more important than neural networks. I am sure that there are certain types of artistic games that will become more prevalent as computing power increases, but to pigeonhole artistic games as games that have really good AI...isn't that just a little self-centered?
What is art? (Score:5, Insightful)
When one speaks of art, they speak of aesthetics. What he argues is that function possesses the highest form of aesthetics. This is an extremely shaky ground for argument. One could easily weigh other factors of a game in with beauty... graphics, challenge, and enjoyment seem to be the pervasive accounts of beauty in gaming. Let's focus on these three and see if we can try to understand why Nintendo chose to focus on enjoyable rather than pretty and smarter games.
Graphics: Since the PS1, graphics seems to be the focus of most games. Higher texture density, more polygons, faster processing. These were what made a game "good" for a very very very long time. And while game sales were still increasing, more and more gamers were complaining that games seemed too much like their predecesors. Racing games were prettier, but they were still racing games. Fighting games had more characters with greater detail, but they were still fighting games. Sandbox games like GTA were getting sharper graphics and interfaces, but they were still GTA. Gamers were catching on that the industry is merely eating glitter to make the same old crap sparkle more.
Smarter: With the same old games comes the same old play. The only way to improve this is through design changes, which serves for temporary "newness" but quickly becomes associative in a near one-to-one nature from previous games in the genre. Final Fantasy games, for example, had a completely different play style from game to game, but functioned on the same basic prinicples as the last game (until 12). Fighting games may have different dynamics of button mashing and combo systems, but they were still button mashers. And racing games? Pfft. So in lieu of breaking the mold and trying to make games that challenge the mind in new ways, developers
Enjoyability: Remember the first time you played a side fighter? Remember the first time you played a virtual fighter? Remember the first time you played an RPG? Remember the first time you played GTA? Wow, wasn't that fun? And so much so, it's had many gamers chasing the carrot on the stick for the companies that put out those games ever since. Remember the first time you played a 3D game with an analog stick? Do you remember all the other games you played using the same analog stick? That was enjoyment you got out of EVERY SINGLE GAME from a simple interface change. Nintendo has been the pioneer in that market since the Super Nintendo (and arguably sooner). Sure, they made a lot of sacrifices to graphics and processing power. But let's face it, the Wii is enjoyable. They chose a different definition of "art". To Nintendo, making games a social experience, making them widely available, and making them "fun" was what "art" is. To Nintendo, their system is THE system to progress video games as an "art form".
To say that Nintendo does not do for gaming as an art form as much as the other two major systems does is rather blind, I think. No other company has been as influential on the other two systems as Nintendo. Top buttons on the d-pad? Sony used it. Trigger buttons? XBox. Analog sticks? Sony and XBox. Force feedback through controller rumble? Sony took it again.. this time illegally. And now, full motion sensing capabilities... SONY TRIED TO COPY IT. So my question to this man would be,
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Re:What is art? (Score:4, Interesting)
That said, though, no one really has analyzed the aesthetics of games, and many people say that they cannot be aesthetic since they are A) mass produced for market, and B) interactive. I disagree with both of these premises, btw.
Its late, and I'm lazy, so I'll just link to articles I wrote about this topic:
http://nonservium.blogspot.com/2006/09/prelude-to
http://nonservium.blogspot.com/2006/12/video-game
Yeah, self promotion AND laziness, I now embody the modern internet.
Obviously his idea of art revolves around complexity, and not the limitations of the medium. If he was a poet he would be Kerouac with massive free-flowing strings of consciousness, and his haiku would be as broken and unstructured as Kerouac's too. This is a relatively routine distinction in art, some people think that the limitations of a medium or style increases its merit, while others are too lazy, limited, of whatnot, to see the point. This is becoming more and more common in digital media, we're spoiled by ever increasing power, and have a hard time respecting even out current low limitations. Imagine this guy developing on a 8-bit system, or worse a text adventure!
I personally think that good are is a sort of metaphorical collaboration between the artist and the medium.
Art? Wii dont give a FUCK! (Score:2)
They are game console systems, to play games. Yeah! you play games to have FUN, you go to the museum to be entertained and to get insight. I love museums, all of the types. I love art (hint: when you go to UK the museums are almost always Free [as in beer... but no, no free beer]!) and I love also street art (Have any of you heard about Gaudí?). [wikipedia.org]
But when I am at home and turn on my game console is because I want to have FUN, to have fun with my friends, to have fun with my famil
He misses a few points (Score:5, Insightful)
First off, I have to question Chris Heckers developer quality, since he's one of the I need more power because I can't get my stuff run fast enough people. Quite often the issue is that the resources at hand aren't used optimal, either because the tools at hand lack the quality or the developers lack the quality. For example, I'm really impressed with Final Fantasy XII: the developers managed to squeeze quite nice graphics out of the total of just 36MB RAM they have at hand, especially the level of detail implementation is really good. Overall, the PlayStation 2 is a very good example at how developers had to learn to use the resources they have available: the first generation PS2 titles looked awful compared to the games that hit the market in the last few months. And I also remember playing around with graphics programming on my 80386. I never managed to have it do smooth animations, let alone smooth scrolling. Yet others proved that the hardware was not the problem (e.g. Doom), so the problem wasn't that the machine wasn't fast enough, the problem was that I didn't understand to use the resources adequately.
Also, the guy completely ignores Nintendo's situation: unlike MicroSoft and Sony, they don't have money to burn. They have to make a profit off their consoles from day one since that's all they do. They don't have other businesses with which they can make money (apart from licensing, of course). So they can't subsidize their consoles like MicroSoft and Sony do (they sell their consoles for less than their production costs).
This and other issues led Nintendo to conclude that they can't compete with this generation of consoles from MicroSoft and Sony. So if you can't play in the same market as the other guys you have to find another market, and that's just what Nintendo did, and successfully so. They managed to attract people to the Wii who wouldn't play console games otherwise. I know two couples who never had a console but found the Wii to be fun and bought it. They are both in their mid-/end-twenties and only now entered console gaming through the Wii and simply don't care about the PS3 or XBox360 since they don't appeal to them. Chris Hecker simply doesn't recognize that Nintendo is targeting a completely different audience than both MicroSoft and Sony.
So what does that say about the Wii and innovation (Score:2)
Game Art? (Score:2, Insightful)
Fake controversy (Score:4, Insightful)
A rant, pretty much (Score:2)
Gamers who want the MOST STUFF are really the worst kind. They'll play (and design!) any old shit as long as it gets a review score for prettiest, shiniest graphics or most surround-soundy audio. Gameplay? What's that anymore? We need a huge, epic storyline, that's what we need. Something that confuses the piss out of gamers and leaves them disappointed with a cliffhanger, when you spen
Bullshit (Score:2)
F*ck you. Who is responsible for state of gaming PC market??? Serious games??? Give me a break, moron.
Games must be ... games, not some twisted brain fuck [wikipedia.org]. And you can go to hell with all the elitist' "seriousness" crap for "hard core gamers" of yours.
I want to have something just to forget about all the "dog food" I have to eat every day 8 to 5. No, I do not need your "serious" sh*t - I need games I can take half hour for a ride
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P.S. And if game devel makes such comments, I can only judge that he is not up to challenge. People did near perfect (for the time) 3D graphics on 386SX@25MHz - and the games were cool & fun. Devels were not saying "486 is crap since it cannot push 1000000000 triangles we have thrown into our latest game" - they were trying to deliver best gaming experience with means available. Notice that "means available" go after "best gaming experience." Game devels need to suck less from big corporations (M$/Sony
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Look at some of the games for the N64, that was a platform. And in the end, after people spent a lot of time figuring it out, they were able to make the graphics and AI very adva
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And that's a great idea that you presented about not giving new computer science students a modern machine to start programming with. It would have a good side benefit - they'd have to start programming with a lower-level language such as Assembly or C, which would make them learn how computer software (and to a lesser, but also important extent, hardware) really works.
Some of my faculty colleagues didn't use any time thinking about what their high-level-language primitives were doing in the background
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This is funny, fanboy's in trouble (Score:3, Insightful)
You got some amazing posts today, including some kid who thinks The Sims was Maxis first big hit. HA!
This guy is a pro and works for a company that has been making fun games when SERIOUS power was 8mhz.
However since that day two things have happened. We have got more and mhz on our cpu's which at times seems to be only used to update the graphics. It is of no doubt that the Wii in this department cannot compete, pure polygon/texture/fps count it is going to loose to the 360/PS3 and ALL consoles will SUCK donkyballs increasingly so compared to the PC.
BUT that is not what this guy is talking about. He is complaining about lack of power to power NOT the graphics but the game itself. The AI.
AI is often ignored by gamers, we note it when it is bad but in most reviews a decent AI will take second place in importance to the graphics. I have no idea way I mean sure the human race has developed above such supervisial OOOH SHINY!
Eh where was I?
However in the background the AI code has been getting a share of the increased processing power and it shows. Today's AI in games is still nothing to worry any real human but if you ever make the mistake of playing a game from the dark ages you can see just how moronic the old ai's were that had to run on ancient hardware.
This guys complaint is that the Wii with it's simpler hardware just doesn't deliver enough oomph to power the AI in games.
First off, this guy works for Maxis, a game company that has NEVER produced a single OOOOH SHINY game. In fact all their games heavily depend on AI. This has been a problem for them before, their games never looked as spiffy as say your average FPS but offcourse the AI in them was still making your computer sweat. If you ever designed your own FPS level with AI monsters you know how fucking difficult it is to get them to walk straight down a corridor EVEN with massive pre-proccessing. In the sims you got easily a dozen AI all finding their way around a constanstly changing enviroment. While you maybe only seeing the effect of all your girls queing up for the same toilet and peeing themselves (Mmm, there might be a reality show in that) the fact that they even can do that requires a lot of code to be run.
There is a reason the full sims never appeared on the consoles, they just can't do it. (Try them if you don't believe them, the console versions are extremely reduced in capability compard to the PC versions)
Spore, if it delivers what it promises, is going to be much the same. For it to work there must be some serious number crunching going on in the background, yet ALL people see is the graphics.
Maxis can't produce a game that don't look the part. The graphics must pass a certain level or people just won't buy it. I am sure there is a market for a game with amazing ai and 8bit graphics BUT sadly maxis is to much into making a profit to explore that segment. Shame on them.
His claim is then that if a game is going to have passable graphics the Wii doesn't have enough horsepower left to power the AI. It is something PC owners have ALWAYS known. In some games you can alter your settings INCLUDING the ai difficulty level, lower it and performance improves. It is even simpler in the modding scene, lots of user made content mentions that you need a higher specced rig for their content then the original game simply because they upped the number of AI's in the game.
An old example is transport tycoon. A train game from I think the 386 days. If in those days you had more then a 50 or so trains in the game it would start to grind to a halt as the CPU simply couldn't cope. Nowadays a hacked version of the game happily runs with hundreds of trains of any length using the increased horsepower NOT just for graphics (increased resolution) but to run the AI for all those extra objects.
If you take the same game and try to port it fairly to all the gaming machines out there then the Wii is going to have to be the one with the smaller levels (less memory) fewe
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People love to rant on the Wii being underpowered
Console fanboyism brings out kneejerk reactions (Score:4, Insightful)
For those who take a slightly more settled approach to life, it's easy enough to look at the title of the session. It's the Game Publishers Rant. This isn't supposed to be about rational discussion - it's throwing out exaggerated bile-fuelled versions of reality for the sake of engendering discussion. Look at the previous rants from the Game Developers Rants sessions in the last couple of years. The games industry is dead. Too many people whine about games not being innovative enough. Sony and Microsoft are going to screw your game design. Gaming has degenerated into a procession of Hot Babes - Sexy babes! Lesbian babes! Killer babes!
Do you think all of those things were intended as true statements? Of course not. Taking these rants as a genuine representation of the opinions of these developers/publishers is like assuming [url=http://maddox.xmission.com/]Maddox[/url] is an in-depth social commentator putting forward a model for how we can change life for the better. Take a chill pill, remove that radish from its current uncomfortable location, ignore the agenda-laden reporting from certain sites and enjoy the rant for what it is.
Hecker is not a developer. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think Hecker is even a Jr. Developer or anything of the sort of the actual game though. He's just another indie hack who wants to think games are some art form (as if we need that particular elitist disease in video gaming).
He's got a bit of a reputation as a ranter about this sort of thing. It's no surprise he'd take this sort of position because Nintendo's mantra of "just make it fun!" is pretty much directly opposed to the idea of games as an art. It's kind of amusing he works for Will Wright though considering Will is probably the most likely dev in the industry to throw art out the window and worry about fun factor first.
"WhatEv" (Score:2, Funny)
so he works on a console (Score:2)
Perhaps... (Score:3, Insightful)
Duh?
And yes, products can be developed that will run on both, but the compromises required to make it a 'console-able' game are immediately obvious on any PC - look at Oblivion. The most popular (and one of the quickest-released) mods take advantage of the better resolution of a monitor to immediately make the bag/inventory system 100% more useable, with more data displayed, clearer/smaller text, etc.
So when he says "the WII is crap" what he's really saying is that "we're pissed that they optimized this for something other than controlling our game, because we're having to make ridiculous, possibly fatal compromises to try to sell into that market".
Is this a shock to anyone who's played a RTS on a PC and then on a console? No mouse = serious suckage. Spore = RTS strategy = (WII+no mouse) = suckage.* Brilliant insight, dude.
* yes, I know the WII has the point-click thing going, but watching people play at length, first their click targets are HUGE because it doesn't have nearly the precision of a mouse, the response-time of a mouse, nor (apparently) the sample rate of a mouse. WII controller is only a feeble mouse-emulation at best.
Misleading article (Score:4, Informative)
Of course I wasnt there though - it's possible he could have taken it too far, it's always hard to judge where that line is and this guy seems to enjoy pushing that line.
He's right.* (Score:4, Insightful)
However, from the perspective of a developer who is doing cross-platform development for PC, Xbox360, PS3, and Wii
That's why I think Nintendo made a mistake with the Wii, why I agree with Chris Hecker about the anemic Wii specs, and why I hope for a shorter-than-average life-cycle for the Wii with the imminent release of a Next Gen Wii that offers the best of BOTH worlds in terms of graphics zazz and gameplay spazz, hopefully sometime in the next three years.
Don't blame the hardware (Score:3, Insightful)
With all due respect, this is bullshit. Don't blame the hardware if you aren't a good enough programmer to make it work. This is the problem with today's developers. They expect computers to get faster and faster and need more and more memory because they're too lazy or not resourceful or creative enough to write efficient code.
One of the reasons why most games suck nowadays and are so boring is because of this very issue. Developers rely too much on hardware, faster graphics and better texture mapping in lieu of actual creative game design. Stop blaming the hardware because you have no creativity and can't program your way out of a paper bag!
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and if you look at the Xbox 360 in the same period... NO GOOD GAMES.
Gears of Wars is no good?
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What are you retarded? That did not come out in the first five months, nay even the first 8 months. Gears of War was relaeased almost a FULL YEAR after the xbox 360 came out. Stupid Fanboy.
no need to start foaming at the mouth, because other consoles have good games, yet yours is just... gimmicky. OK, so you meant the same 5 months from launch for the three shitty. let's see, Oblivion, FFXI, PGR3, Prey (okay, this was 8 months after release), Perfect Dark Zero, Q4 and Ridge Racer 6. are these any good? wh
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This 'developer', has developed no games.
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he is simply an artist working on a masterpiece and wants a bigger canvas to work on. nothing new here. this is the exact same argument people complain about every generation: "the ps2 doesnt have enough ram", "the NES only supports x amount of colors at once", "this gamecube's disc size is too small". developers need resources. you arent going to make developers happy by limiting what they are capable of creating.
as for nint