Bungie Vs. Miyamoto - Fight! 379
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.
The thing is that it's true (Score:5, Insightful)
Not news (Score:4, Insightful)
It has no merit what so ever.
Frank Connor Missed the Point (Score:5, Insightful)
This is irrelevant... (Score:4, Insightful)
What's the big deal? (Score:2, Insightful)
All but the most diehard fanboys will admit that Halo was never anything truly revolutionary, but rather just a so-so generic sci-fi FPS that just happened to come out for hotly hyped up-and-coming new console. The first game suffered from HORRIBLE interior design and bland gameplay, and the second had a nearly-universally decried terrible ending.
If not for the fact that the Halo series succeeded so well in making the first enjoyable console FPS multiplayer experience since Goldeneye, complete with fairly (compared to some games) balanced multiplay, and the fortunate happenstance of colliding with the excellent idea that was XboxLive!, the games would have been destined to be little more than a footnote in gaming history, rather than the sales juggernaut into which obscenity-screaming 12-year old gamers have turned it.
Personally, I'd rather play Half-Life 2 or its multiplayer components on my PC, but that's just me, and I don't begrudge Halo for the successful niche it has carved for itself.
Argument That Will Never End (Score:3, Insightful)
Bungie is the Porsche of the gaming world.
Miyamoto seems to look for something new with each game. Trying to find new ways to engage the user. He comes at each one with a flair and a passion. He's not doing the same thing over and over. Some games work. Some don't. But you do have a wide variety of games to choose from that caters to your particular interests.
Miyamoto (Nintendo) is the Ferrari of the gaming world.
Rounding out the analogy Blizzard is the TVR [wikipedia.org] of the gaming world. Love-it or hate-it design, completely insane and riddled with problems, yet you can't help but keep playing.
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.
Re:The thing is that it's true (Score:2, Insightful)
The fact that Miyamoto, clearly one of the most inspired game designers to ever live, even bothered to compare his work to theirs should be more than they could ever want. From their game designs they clearly don't deserve that much respect.
Maybe Miyamoto should start up a "hardcore" FPS game, though. Because even if it were the worst game he'd ever designed it'd still mop the floor with anything Bungie has put out this century.
Re:Is Halo really that great? (Score:3, Insightful)
Gameplay is relatively easy, cheating is minimal, and there are TONS of customizable options to set up whatever competition you want to do easily (the BIGGEST bonus).
"Rather touchy aren't they" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Argument That Will Never End (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The thing is that it's true (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a similar situation to the Final Fantasy franchise, more specifically FF 7. While everybody and their sister who grew up in the 90's will swear that FF 7 was the greatest RPG ever made, they probably never even heard of Baulders Gate, Fallout, or NETHACK.
Re:Is Halo really that great? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except, of course, for Goldeneye.
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.
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.
Re:The thing is that it's true (Score:3, Insightful)
Well you could just be looking at the question through the lens of nostalgia.
Re:The thing is that it's true (Score:3, Insightful)
And seriously, MP is NOT a first person shooter. It may technically fit the bill, but that's only a technicality. The types of skills it requires and the fanbase are nothing like Halo or Counterstrike. It's basically a sci-fi Zelda where the camera happens to be first person... One look at the tastes of its fanbase will cue you in.
Here's a clue, if something's commonly called "the first-person shooter for people who hate first-person shooters". And people who love FPSs hate the game... then maybe it really ain't a first person shooter at all, it just looks like one.
Re:The thing is that it's true (Score:2, Insightful)
Not the graphics, or story, or control scheme, but as I understand it the physics engine was pretty advanced. I was following Halo 1 development and one of their mottos was "better gaming through physics". I was very disappointed when Bungie was bought by MS. I didn't play Halo until it came out for the PC and by then it was definitely nothing new. I just can't bring myself to play a FPS with a gamepad. I mean, that's just WRONG!
Re:Is Halo really that great? (Score:2, Insightful)
Compared to HalfLife2 I found Halo pretty original and innovative, compared to the likes of DeusEx, OperationFlashpoint, Riddick or HalfLife1 not so much, but its still far from the shovelware WWII shooter.
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."
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...
Re:"Rather touchy aren't they" (Score:2, Insightful)
Holy crap! It was a joke, people. A joke! He was essentially saying that they don't care, and was having a little bit of fun with it, having a little bit of fun with people like you who take this crap so seriously.
Frankie is the guy who draws Mister Chief [wikipedia.org] as a parody of Master Chief. He's the guy who usually does the weekly updates at Bungie.net [bungie.net], in which he takes sarcastic potshots at Bungie, community members, etc. along with providing serious news about what's going on at Bungie.
In short, if you're complaining that Frankie came off as "childish" in this interview, you totally missed the point. Moreover, you probably ought to take a close look at yourself, if your reaction to a little fun poke at Potatamoto [vgcats.com] is to think the guy making the joke is childish and peevish.
Re:Is Halo really that great? (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Is Halo really that great? (Score:1, Insightful)
Halo is not a great game, it's a great console game because it was the first console FPS to come close to the quality and presention of a PC FPS. Anyone who's played Quake/Unreal Tournament knows what true FPS action but anyone who's only played console games, Halo is the best you'll ever get.
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.
Not a Slight (Score:2, Insightful)
Lost in translation (Score:4, Insightful)
I think a lot of people are mistaking Frank's comment. It doesn't seem like he's retorting, as people put it, but instead making a sly-sarcastic remark. He not affirming Miyamoto's point (that he just finds what people like and makes that), he's replying to Miyamoto's remark (I can make Halo, but choose not to) with his own remark: I could('ve) made Mario, but choose not to.
Yes, he states, "We are hard at work on a side-scrolling platform game..." But we know he's not. It's obviously a joke. He could be hard at work on that side-scroller, but he chooses not to. He's hard at work on Halo. And that's that.
Re:The thing is that it's true (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, duh. (Score:3, Insightful)
Me, I haven't found a FPS game that I like as much as Tribes 1, which is quite old. I can still have some fun in other FPS games, though. Video games are so meaningless, however, that I find it hard to be engrossed in them, and really have to wonder why people get so worked up over how good they are, or which game is popular.
Re:The thing is that it's true (Score:2, Insightful)
Halo's popularity (Score:2, Insightful)
I've said this in a previous comment, but Halo wasn't some universally popular hit. For some reason, it was very heavily hyped by the gaming press to give that impression, but the original Xbox tied with the Gamecube at only 15% of the market, so not that many have played it. Probably as many who have played Metroid Prime.
Maybe Halo 3 will be different, but if there's a relatively small fanbase waiting for it (compared to, say, Grand Theft Auto), how big could the third one be?
Off-topic question--has anyone asked Bungie if they're out of touch with Japanese audiences? The 360 is essentially dead there.
Re:Is Halo really that great? (Score:3, Insightful)
Level Design: Yes, the library sucked. Most of the game was quite good, but lets ignore that because 2-3 levels were repetitive. It's not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. Halo and Half-Life are both on a rail, and both fairly obvious about it.
Weapons: The only innovation is the gravity gun. Crowbar? Melee weapon. Crossbow? Functionally a sniper rifle. However, Halo let you use a weapon, melee, and grenades without inventory switching. The weapons themselves were stock, (And HL2 has the generic pistol, rifle, etc too) but the usage was fundamentally different in a way noone else had done before. Also, Halo rockets were guided against vehicles, just not real-time. (Lock on, fire)
Story: None of Halo, and only 10% of Halo 2 take place on Earth. Halo = Running like hell from Aliens 'A', crashing on unknown object, releasing Aliens 'B', then dealing with A and B (and A gets to deal with B too) while trying to prevent Mysterious Race 'C' from blowing up the galaxy to clean up your mess. At some points you have 4 factions going at it in Halo. Humans, Covenant, Flood, Forerunner. It's alot more complex than you pretend it is.
Half Life = Aliens take over world, resistance fights back. Cliche. (To give it the same treatment you gave Halo)
Storytelling: Both are advanced with ingame cutscenes. Half Life gives you camera control for some of them, Halo gives you camera control for some of them. Halo had some cinematic breaks in the action. Thats called 'different' not 'better'.
Multiplayer: I won't disagree with using the gravity gun + heavy objects. But a plasma grenade to the face is incredibly satisfying. And I didn't have to put away my gun to do it.
Both great games, both brought new stuff to the table. It's sad that your fanboyism blinded you. One thing I will give Halo, it didn't interrupt my gameplay for obvious physics puzzles.
Re:The thing is that it's true (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Not news (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Halo's popularity (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Halo's popularity (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd like to see a comparison between the games based on the time in which they were released, not just raw numbers.
Re:Halo's popularity (Score:5, Insightful)
-Lee