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Category Archives: Nonsens
Might and Magic: Heroes Kingdoms
Det verkar som om jag har fastnat lite för Might and Magic: Heroes Kingdoms. Just nu liknar min spelarinsats mer Sim City än Warlords men det ändras förhoppningsvis snart.
DJ Hero, GH the TV Show…
Only a few days ago I complained about Lego Rock Band, now it’s Activision turn to come with even more new about the music gaming industry. Taken from Kotaku today we have news of DJ Hero, a game to feature yet another controler, and also a new TV Show for Guitar Hero. Is there no end to this? A few years back all game companies did was FPS and RTS, now it’s all MMO and music games. I just hope that of all the money flowing into Activision Blizzard (and other companies) goes to at least some good development of new fresh ideas rather than this extrapolation of the allready successfull.
Future of Gaming Consoles (take 2)
There have been many people claiming they are sure that gaming consoles as we know them are on their final generation. The reasons this has been claimed are many, from technical superiority of computers to simple sales statistics of the Playstation 3 and X-box 360. All this have been discussed earlier on this blog back in august last year. I now want to lift another very high argument that I believe the future of console games are safe: simplicity.
If you buy a game for your computer you need to make sure it runs on your current hardware. Still if you meet the requirements you are sometimes disappointed by the actual performance you get which leads you to endless trails of software and driver upgrades, operating system optimization, hard drive defragmentation and other maintenance chores. In the end you might end up having to upgrade some hardware to be satisfied. Even worse, since the computer is most likely used for other things there is sure to be some malfunction sooner or later due to viruses or other causes.
A gaming console on the other hand is a dedicated piece of software and hardware which is streamlined to play the games you buy. Reversely the games are streamlined to run on exactly that machine. This is optimal both for buyers and developers. The games require less testing before released since only one (or a few) possible machines will be known to run the game. When you receive a game it will be tested for exactly your conditions and will require no effort on your part to experience it the way the developer intended it.
More than this most game machines are so simple to operate, you insert a game and you play. As of late some machines have endeavored to become complete entertainment machines and started looking more like HTPCs than gaming consoles and in doing so have become more complicated. Maybe this is yet another reason for the success of the currently simplest machine on the market, the Wii, which still have on-line connectivity but in a much more modest form than it’s cousins PS3 and X-box 360.
In conclusion, when I want to play a game I want to relax. Give me something simple!
The Princess is in Another Castle
Thanks to “science” we now know that the princess is in another castle in only 87,5% of the time. Thank you science. And thank you Kotaku for bringing me the best news as usual.
Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers
Killing zombies in a Bikini feels quite different if you are using a Wii remote or not…
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Title
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Platform
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Avg. Ratio
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Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad Publisher: D3 Number of P/Reviews: 12 |
Xbox 360 | 22.5% |
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Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers Publisher: D3 Number of P/Reviews: 11 |
Wii | 69.5% |
Taken from gamerankings.com 17th feb 2009, search for Onechanbara.
Taking consequences in games
In recent news there have been talk about the lack of consequences in games in general. There are very few moments in gaming history where your desicion acctually makes a huge difference and change the gameplay ahead (while there are desicions, there is often only one real option that advances gameplay).
While examples such as BioWares “Mass Effect” where certain decisions change the way the game playout are hard to find BioWare themselves state that they will bring consequences back in their upcoming Star Wars MMO. In traditional games you can often save the game at a point just before a major decision is made and thereby go back and change the choice if you ever regret it, in MMOs you rarely (if ever) can save your progress as all is happning continously in an on-line world. This puts the use of consequences to the test since a player needs to be able to “feel” all those decisions as they should be interpreted in the game. If a player recieves a quest to go chop someones head off he will most likely go chop someones head off without ever contemplating if that is a really good idea to do or not.
In other news the develops from Fallout 3 says they’ve restricted the gamers from being able to kill children in the game as they do not believe it’s something a player should be able to do. With school shootings in several countries this might be a very responsible choice from the developers but it really just walks around the larger issue of lack of consequence. What if you could do whatever you wanted in the game, but that some actions just carry a too high a price for your character or gameplay.
There are other games where the killing of some innocent characters have been restricted, in Blizzard’s World of Warcraft for example there are children that cannot be killed even by the opposing faction. This restriction have instead made people do put in extraordinary effort into killing a “non-killable” character, like draging a huge dragon from the other side of the planet into a major city just to see those “immune” characters suffer. This sort of behaviour is of course considered highly inappropriate by the game masters (Blizzards empolyees who act as “police” in the game) and if you are ever found doing such “game breaking” behaviour you risc being banned. Again, what the world lacks is consequence, if either you draged a huge dragon into the city or killed a child for that matter there should be some kind of penalty for your character but there is not!
Then again… this is games we are talking about, should we restrict games? “World of Warcraft” have some 10 million active players, I very much doubt “World of Consequence” would have the same.
Google AdSense to games – making use of commercials
In recent news on Slashdot it was reported that Google is aiming to include Google AdSense in flash games, much in the same way they allready do with normal webpages. This new way of showing ads got my head spinning into other cool options that might be coming to gaming platforms. We’ve allready seen commercials for all kinds of different things in console games like FIFA and Grand Turismo. Just like in normal sports the arenas and cars are stuffed with commercial messages. What if these could come to life AND bring about a better gaming experience?
What if, you have the latest version of FIFA for example, and whenever you play it it connects to the Internet and checks if there are new ads available. These ads are payed for just like normal ads and the amount of downloads to the game can be tracked and the game can keep track of which are shown. You can also take it one step further and let the player decide which ads should be shown on the team uniform or home arena.
While the above suggestion hardly improves gameplay it does one other thing: it gives the publishers kickback on the usage of their product. This can bring about better games in two ways, first of all the publisher would really want you to keep playing these games in order for them to sell more ads so they will make sure that they release top quality games to keep this extra revenue coming. Secondly in order to make you play more an in game currency can be established that makes you gain in game money in exchange for shown ads, this currency could be used to buy on-line powerups and that can be added to the game on-line after the release. In the FIFA example a new player can be added and downloaded and saved to a memory card, in Grand Turismo a new car might become available.
World of Warcraft fitness
Think if you ran all the length your character in World of Warcraft ran, wouldn’t you be pretty fit by now?
On another note of fitness, someone in Japan came up with an idea of making Wii Fit more appealing… The solution? Have a maid run next to you! “Only in Japan” kind of comes to mind.
The future of console gaming?
I read two articles over at Gamespot concerning the future of gaming [1, 2]. Both of them paint the future (in the articles put: 2020) as pretty grim for consoles.
What Gamespot wrote…
First sign of trouble is the amount of money being invested in Xbox360 and Playstation 3 by Microsoft and Sony respectivly. The length of time these machines have to be on the market to become profitible are much longer than their predecessors.
The new trend of downloaded content will have an impact on local stores carrying games, why should they keep selling games when games are bought on-line and consoles often sold at a loss? Also games will be played “on-line” much like the MMO games of today, with the bulk of the processing being done on a central server.
Technology is making new games even more realistic and the need to keep up with technology will favour PCs over consoles. While we wait for the next leap in techonology the game developers must focus on other characteristics of the game in order to win an advantage.
And now for my take on it…
This is what they said… but let’s reflect a little. They seem to predict the future of the gaming market by pure extrapolation of our current situation. Did any of them glance at Nintendo? Did anyone notice that Nintendo acctually put up a much “lesser machine” but still beats the crap out of the two others (in units sold at least)?
I have no figures at all but my guess is Nintendo is winning this battle easily while Sony and Microsoft are pouring in money to get second place. Why? Because Nintendo did not just extrapolate, they innovated! One thing did the articles at Gamespot get right, advanced graphics technology makes developers have to look to other solutions to set them apart and that’s just what Nintendo did. Is that a bad thing? As I remember we had the same situation back in the 8-bit days, only then we only had crappy graphics and the price went to whoever could invent something cool to do with it.
As I’ve said before the game market probably needs to be re-evaluated because new techonology and better graphics isn’t the only thing we want… honestly for myself I’d much rather have a great game than great graphics.
The argument about downloaded content carries some weight, game retailers might fear this one… but why stop selling consoles? People would need them to download the content and the retailers make money on selling the consoles, it’s the manufacturer that often subsidies them.
Playing games on-line through a service is currently almost only being done on PCs (mostly MMOs). This is however an advantage that might become a turningpoint for consoles if used correctly. As I remember one of the great advantages of the old Nintendo cartridges was that the cartridges where upgraded as time went by but the console stayed the same, by allowing games to “upgrade” the console the Nintendo probably lasted much longer than it would have with a non-evolving media. Having the whole Internet as media must mean that, if used correctly, you only need to have a machine capable of displaying the graphics and handling input and leave the rest up to the “super computer” at the other end!
The days of consoles might still be numbered, maybe some hybrid “home entetrainment machine” of some sort will take it’s place. Call it a PC if you’d like (because it will much likely have better resemblance to a PC than a console), however I do not believe any of the given arguments are enough to pursuade me of this change in the future.
Posted in Nonsens
Tagged Future, Gaming, Innovation, Microsoft, Nintendo, PS3, Sony, Utveckling, Wii, Xbox 360
5 Comments
NES emulators on-line
It seems someone has been busy and made a on-line NES emulator brining old NES roms to the web!
http://www.1980-games.com/
http://www.nescafeweb.com/
You can play the old games on-line, all you need is a webbrowser, javascript and flash!
Still.. it doesnt beat the feeling of sitting down with a small rectangular gamepad and a gray box in front of the TV!