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Monthly Archives: July 2008
A sure thing…
-Who plays computer games?
-Boys!
-What does boys like?
-Girls!
-What kind of action does boys like?
-Zombie movies!
8-bit for life
It’s with great joy I see lots of my old favourite games from 20 years back make a come back on the market. Some have resurfaced as handheld games while others are downloaded or played on-line. How is it that when we have consoles that can outperform anything we had 20 years ago we still look back to those old games and bring them to life? Wii have a built in virtual console souly for the purpose of redistributing old games (which however is starting to be used for new games as well).
The battle of the gaming market is almost always fought in media by counting the number of units sold, here Wii (24,5 million sold units) just overtook Xbox360 (19 million sold units) and the Playstation 3 is far behind (14 million sold units). One seldom mentioned fact is that both the Wii and Xbox360 are far surpased by both Playstation Portable (PSP, 37 million sold units) and most of all Nintendo DS (70 million sold units!). The major part of the gaming market is now in hand held devices.
What I’m getting at is despite the highly advanced PS3 and Xbox360 that can make incredibly advanced games it’s the hand held devices with far inferior technology that actually sells the most. The price of the units are surely also a large factor in this (the Wii and hand helds are much cheaper than PS3 and Xbox360). A game published on the PS3 or Xbox360 is expected to have superiour graphics and use the extreme hardware to the maximum, if not it’s a dissapointment. This creates a heavy presurre on developers to invest alot of time into making the game perfect (graphics wise) and only major developers can afford this.
On hand helds, or even better downloaded content, the technology is no longer a basis for judgement. While graphics do play a major role (and perhaps using the available pixels and colour depths as best as one can) it will no longer become a central role in the verdict on the playability of the game.
Games will invariably become better looking as the consoles keep getting better, I do however believe that there will always be a market for simple games like those on hand helds and downloaded content today. It’s simply to much fun in 8 bit!
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_consoles
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Can’t wait for Spore?
While we can’t play the full game we can put our imagination to work creating new species! From Gamespot I found a download link for the creature creator!
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Does games change the way we think?
A couple of days ago I posted a video of Will Wright talking about his latest game Spore and what consequenses he hope it would have on the way we think about our own world. Players experience in a game what happens to a world with long term effects of for example pollution and that they have to act to stop it. These are things happening to our own planet right now but so slowly that we hardly notice it ourselves in a lifetime.
Another totally different aspect of how we think occured to me while playing Super Paper Mario on the Wii. In this game they play with the idea of having a 2D world in a 3D environment and what strange effects that could have. Some monsters (and our hero) have the ability to shift between the worlds while most of the game is set in normal 2D format. By experiencing old limitations of the 2D world and seeing the possibilities of shifting into a 3rd dimension might change your view on our own world and it’s 3D boundaries. Can we shift into a 4th dimension? Is the 4th dimension time and what would happen if we could move through it? These are questions nobody asks except, as Stephen Hawking once noted, children and a handfull och scientists. What I’m getting at is if the games we make let’s our children become more open minded about the world we live in.
I believe myself to have very good ability to think of abstract things, if this is due to me playing alot of games where you have to keep track of maps and items or if I’ve played these games due to me having this ability I cannot say. Most likely it’s a little of both.
Zelda – the guinea pig
Why is it that the major title Zelda always gets to use the “latest technology” first on new Nintendo platforms. While I love the Zelda series and collect them all I still find it hard to accept some of the game design choices they’ve made in recent games on Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS. With this I mean the use of the Wii remote and the stylus for DS. These new technologies are interesting and useful in many games but in Zelda: Twilight Princess and Zelda: Phantom Hourglass they feel almost forced in there just to show us what they can do.
Zelda: Twilight Princess was one of the first games to come with the Nintendo Wii and had originally been developed for the Gamecube (to which it was released simultaneously) and throughout the game I feel it’s more of a Gamecube game than a full fledged Wii game. To “make it Wii” Nintendo seems to have decided to make all Sword movements based on the motion sensetive Wii remote and this annoys me. Zelda is an adventure game to me more than a action game and even if it was possible to use the remote to slash your enemies I’d love to keep the “traditionall” gameplay (which I think can be done using a classic controller).
When I recently tried out Zelda: Phantom Hourglass I get the very same feeling, that Nintendo overuses the touch screen to trivial things like moving. It feels like they did it “just because they could” and wanted to show off their new great technology. Again a second option to at least be able to move without the stylus would have helped alot.
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Posted in Nonsens
Tagged Game design, Nintendo, Nintendo DS, Stylus, Wii, Wii remote, Zelda
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No innovation? E3 proves me wrong!
Yesterday I made a post critizising the lack of innovation in the game industry. While some 3-4 games are projected to take 30% of the total market there are still games being produced that are not main stream. Off all the articles from E3 I think I was one of the few who acctually found the news about Flower to be one of the more exciting news to come out of E3 so far. While I do not have so much information to go on this is exactly the kind of games I love to find among all the noise the major games does. A game simply meant to project a feeling more than a highscore or headshot. I eagerly await more information about this game!
E3 videos from Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony
Microsoft:
First out still the only one not featured on Gamespot for streaming yet.
Nintendo:
Sony:
Wanted: A Virutal Console and SDK
I lack innovation within the gaming industry. Game development have become a very long and very very expensive process, this holds even more true when it comes to the console market where just the license (if you even can get one) costs several thousand dollars. With the current state of the gaming industry only very popular titles are being developed, often based on winning concepts like “first person shooter”, “real time strategy” or lately “massive multiplayer on-line”. Rarely do we get to see innovative projects, but sometimes it happens, like Spore which is due for release in September.
As a programmer I would love to give game programming a try, even for just some silly never to be used games. The leap to try it is a huge one though, especially if anything near the latest technology is to be used.
What I would love to see, as the topic indicates, is an Open Source Virtual Console (OSVC, VC) with a Service Development Kit (SDK). This VC could then be adapted to be used in whichever system you wanted to play the game. If we take the Allegro project for example, this is an excellent base to use but the “problem” is it only works on Linux and Windows. What if this base could be used on the Virtual Console of Nintendo Wii for example! Or if you could program your own cartridges for the DS. Now all the major developers would resist such a development because they want the monopoly to sell the games on their machines. Further complications are that this virual machine could be programmed to host pirated games like for example all the NES ROMs floating about on the Internet.
While on the topic of ROMs, these are what I’d want the OSVCs games to be compiled into. The reason being security and portability. If you download and run them you know that they are run within a virtual environment that will be the same everywhere and also that it will not directly access your own system and possible do harm to it. Games that saves data could easily be solved using virtual memory spaces, as to not effect the current system and provide an interface to whatever memory options are available (hard discs, usb, internal flash of consoles etc).
The development of Open Source in “business programming” was first rejected and frowned upon as an impossible business model. Today we see many major companies supporting open source and the free exchange of ideas. The same development in the gaming industry has yet to happen, here more of the opposite is happening namely companies selling dedicated hardware with exclusive software which of course you have to buy both. Again, what if there where an open source alternative as game console? Or even better what if the current consoles supported open source software?
I believe if such a change did happen we would see alot more innovation in the gaming industry.
Do not misstake the virutal console I’m talking about with Wii’s Virtual Console for old games, while sharing similarities I want a open source alternative with mutliple vendor support.
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Gamespot E3
During E3 I will have a special RSS-feed from Gamepost on my blog for easy access to the latest news!
Duke Nukem is back!
Seriously! Stop laughing allready! It’s not Duke Nukem Forever, it’s Duke Nukem Trilogy – made for handheld consoles. This is news the newly ressurected Apogee Software brings us in a recent press release. Let’s hope they truly return this time and that hopefully they make something new as well (they used to be very innovative) and not only cash in on old games.