Thanks Sally. Fans of Prereview know that I tend to rant so, in the spirit of "dance with the one that brought you" here's my first post.
I'm a video game junkie, but I do have to confess that I'm getting a bit burned out. Here's a short list of things I'm getting sick of.
- Strafing. Every shooter/platform game can be won by understanding how to move and shoot at the same time. Make it harder or different. If I see an enemy moving I shoot slightly ahead of them or I shoot with a larger weapon, but the AI never does that to me. In general, as long as you shoot and move you live.
- Hello my name is Snake and I'm the CIA's best agent with super duper abilities, yet I cannot step over this knee high log. If you want to make the game realistic, then let grown men and women step over logs. Climbing ladders should not be rocket science either. I've died way too often at the foot of a ladder for want of the ability to climb it without pressing some fucking action button. AND I shouldn't have to have been a trucker for five years to be able to back up while crawling. Video games that pride themselves in realism need their own Dogma movement.
- Let me accurately throw or drop my grenade, you bastards.
- God I hate performing combo "tricks". As soon as I have to memorize combos I feel like my life is ebbing away in a sad unending succession of video games, instead of the happy unending succession of video games I intend it to end in. A Teken fan I am not, (although I like talking to Teken fans because y'all are freaks.) Tony Hawk underground actually makes me want to buy a skateboard and sell my PS2, not because it's inspiring but because anything (including broken limbs) must be better than memorizing "X-Y-Square" every time I want to perform a "goofy-foot oly to flipside 360".
- Boss fights are always the same. "Oh, it's really big, but that means its slow so I should get in close!" No fucking shit, just like every other boss fight ever. And if you've figured out how to move and shoot on top of that you'll never die, I promise.
- I don't give a shit about your stupid fucking story. Tell the story in the game not in cut scenes, or not at all. Here's the back-story to my favorite commodore 64 game "KILL HIM, MY ROBOTS". What more do you need? All Your Base Are Belong To Us, indeed.
- I wish Katamari Damacy would make the local news for every 100 million times someone takes offence to GTA. And I also wish that North Americans could get the money to make cool innovative games. Here's a brilliant idea What if Japan was a market for video games?! If a game won't sell really well here but will in Japan, then make it here and market it in Japan! OMG! I know, I'm a fucking genius.
- I guess that's all for now. There's plenty more I've yet to play Grand Tourismo 4 but I hear that you can still gain advantage by driving into people in the corners with no repercussions or damage to your car, a problem which has plagued the franchise since its inception. Anyways, feel free to comment with your video game pet peeves.
Joester, you are a potty mouth. Welcome to the blog!
Sally promised me that when the Pope dies, I get to take over the blog for Vatican election commentary. So enjoy it while you can, Joester, 'cause when the old guy goes, I take over, and we won't be discussing any more video game pet peeves, no sireee, it'll be the fight for world spiritual domination that we'll be chatting about (until I see that puff of white smoke over St. Peter's.)
Fair enough but if they decide go with PopeBot I want back in.
I notice you didn't say anything about voice recognition. Remember Lifeline?
know what really bugs me about video games these days? the use of the word 'iteration' by game reviewrs and industry mouthpieces to describe the latest sequel to a game. look the word up - it means something done over again or repeatedly(!) please try a word that wont painfully remind me how few original games are being made now. i totally agree with you about button combos, that kind of learning by rote seems, to me, to be the opposite of what games are about, which is a kind of of learning by discovery. is there a game where you can invent your own combos on the fly? i understand that these moves are tied to pre set animations but i'm sure consoles and computers must now have enough hp to make this a possibility.
Joe, I just remembered you live in SF now. Shit! I should have dropped a line. I was just there for (wait for it) the Game Designers Conference, which gave me all sorts of wild optimism for the industry. It's put on by the people who do gamasutra.com, ie smart-as-fuck people who love games. Case in point, a gamer's answer to Dogme:
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010129/adams_pfv.htm
And re: story, who cares? I am on your side. Being a narrative-makin' guy I would like to think games need story, but they don't. They're more like pop songs... they CAN have a story, but by no means must.
I will be doing a story for eye and theculturalgutter.com soonish about the Katamari guy's great talk at the GDC. Inspiring!
Hey I didn't post the above! there is an imposter lurking. hmm any how, i agree with him and i know who you are!!! Iam so sick of cut scenes that you can't skip over. Like several in GTA vice city which i had to endure over and over due to my lack of skill. If i have to hear someone say 'Lets fight like men with big cahones!' one more time i think i'll take up scrabble or something.
Jim. I totally flaked on the game developers conference. I thought it was going to be all industry bullshit until it was too late. Next year I'll go, although next year I'll be in school. It sounded great though. I love the Dogma link too - not sure about the "no strange controllers" one but mostly I'm down with it.
Sally. I'm still kinda in love with Lifeline, it was so wonderfully bad. I think I'm going to get a copy of it second hand. For those who don't know LifeLine was a game for the ps2 that you controlled though a microphone. You were giving the character on screen instructions and she would follow them out or more often than not do something random and fatal. There were voice recognition problems, and Japanese to English translation problems that makes the game a wonderfully fun disaster. For instance, she would only open the briefcase if you said "look in the trunk"
Mnobody, if that is your real name, y'all gotta lay off the mushrooms cause they're messing with your memory. Both of you. But you're right, cut scence you can't skip are especially bad. There's only ever been one good cut scene in the history of video games and that was half way through Final Fantasy VII when the female romantic lead dies unexpectedly. A crystal ball rolls out of her hand and bounces down the steps of a fountain forcing the PS to kick out all the graphic oomph it can. It was breath takingly cheesy and wonderful. After that, there's been nuttin'.
OK, the old guy is still breathing, so I will admit that I enjoy your complaints about games. From where I stand, I'm amazed that any good games get made, the majority of the ones I'm paid to program are major stinkers. (it's lucrative, so I take the money and run)
The move and Shoot issue is because there is always someone in the client's organization who never play games, and therefore if they keep on losing they think the game is broken. Ditto, for the president or vice presidents of the client company, they must be able to win the game.
The super duper guy not being able to make it over a log? (I'd like to leave that rule in the new dogma, it cracks me up)
Inaccurate grenade tosses? just bad programming.
I hate games when I feel like I'm learning a software. (Too many misguided game design teams think they are adding complexity to the experience.) I want game play to feel like crack cocaine. Successful games give an easy intuitive entrance to the user, with options to employ some of the more obscure functions.
The cut scenes make me crazy too, that is generally because the creative director has too much influence, is madly in love with the graphics and thinks the user wants to see them over and over and over. When I'm developing, I don't add that useless stuff they demand until just prior to a launch because I hate looking at it when I'm debugging. b/t/w there is always a secret key code or action in the game for skipping that shit that the developers use, they don't always take it out.
I'm with you on the love of fromage. I once was programming a hockey slapshot game, and I used a bunch of hilarious Warner Brothers type sound effects for the missed shots. Unfortunately, the clients were quite reverent about hockey, and made me change them to realistic sound effects.
I have that problem with the progress bar. I'm testing the "ding" at the end and have to wait until it's all the way done to hear it. And because it's mechanical there's no freaking way around waiting for it.
So the progress bar only works at one speed?
We all drop typos once in a while, but if the guest moderator does it right after teasing a poster about being on drugs he looks dorky.
Also regarding drugs, an interesting article in the weekend Globe&Mail about optional drug effects designed into the gameplay in the new 'Narc' game. Coke makes you move real fast, LSD makes you see bizarre monsters, etc, but they also make you black out and lose stuff. Sounds neato.
L.M. - the bar, speeds up and slows down and even stops. All very random (or as random as Director can be which my engineer friend has implied isn't acually very random at all.)
Von Bark- I was teasing two posters, not one. And I'll take your word on the typo - I hate rereading my own posts.
For some strange reason, when I looked at the picture, I imagined the bar behaving evenly. (foolish of me)
I used to work with a tech lead who tried to explain the limitations of Director random to me. He also devoted a lot of time to trying to program a better, more random random with lingo. Crashed a lot of games that way, but those were the days of that blameless atmosphere where you could always claim a director bug screwed everything up. (This also led to a lot of fun travel since we were the only ones who could use the softwares without crashing the whole system)
Should have added that what you are actually doing with the progress bar is even better than what I thought you were doing, (and even when I was wrong, I really, really liked the idea.)
YAY! My shameless self promotion is working.
I was a bit vague in my description because some of the details are up in the air. What relationship should the bar have to the computer itself are still a question. I'm thinking of having very little on the screen now.
wow, von bark- a new narc game? my fave old skool arcade gaMe. sounds like the new one is even more morally ambiguous. joester you may have forgotten one great cut scene. duke nukem 3d episode last mission. when fighting the boss (ez 2 beat-just move and shoot), duke utters the immortal line 'i'm gonna rip off your head and $hi+ down your neck" and in the cutscene that follows... well, i thought it was tastefully done. yeh nobody -get off the shrooms or at least save some 4 me
Ha ha, gimmie some of those super mario shrooms! geesh we need help.
The only games I play are driving simulators. I agree with the "punt with impunity" issue with Gran Turismo. It's very irritating that they don't try to model this. I try to race clean, but I have been known to muscle through if I need the championship points.
- Get the physics right. Many driving games aren't true simulations. I can get a sense in under 60 seconds. I bought one based on the BTCC (awesome) that has a bunch of British tracks (fucking awesome). But you can jerk the steering wheel from side to side at 140 mph without any risk of a spin. That game went straight into the reject pile.
-All driving game tracks have too much geometric perfection. Sorry, not real. Learning, and learning how to deal with bumps, dips, tilts, roughness, concrete patches, wet line/dry line etc. are fundamental aspects of learning a track. I've got a story about a cold-tire transition from concrete to asphalt that involved a visit to the body ship. That kind of stuff is completely glossed over in driving games.
-Going agricultural is fucking hard. Don't let me shortcut across a patch of grass and bounce off guardrails with impunity. These are very bad habits.
-Intelligent competition. Give the "drones" some personality and strategy.
-Tepid force feedback. I talked with one of the guys on the Atari team that did "Hard Driving". The force for the steering wheel comes from a massive electric wench motor. Someone found a bunch of these in a surplus warehouse. Atari had to incorporate safety mechanisms in the motor drive circuits to avoid inadvertently snapping the gamer's forearms like twigs. I want one like that.
|
Thanks Sally. Fans of Prereview know that I tend to rant so, in the spirit of "dance with the one that brought you" here's my first post.
I'm a video game junkie, but I do have to confess that I'm getting a bit burned out. Here's a short list of things I'm getting sick of.
- Strafing. Every shooter/platform game can be won by understanding how to move and shoot at the same time. Make it harder or different. If I see an enemy moving I shoot slightly ahead of them or I shoot with a larger weapon, but the AI never does that to me. In general, as long as you shoot and move you live.
- Hello my name is Snake and I'm the CIA's best agent with super duper abilities, yet I cannot step over this knee high log. If you want to make the game realistic, then let grown men and women step over logs. Climbing ladders should not be rocket science either. I've died way too often at the foot of a ladder for want of the ability to climb it without pressing some fucking action button. AND I shouldn't have to have been a trucker for five years to be able to back up while crawling. Video games that pride themselves in realism need their own Dogma movement.
- Let me accurately throw or drop my grenade, you bastards.
- God I hate performing combo "tricks". As soon as I have to memorize combos I feel like my life is ebbing away in a sad unending succession of video games, instead of the happy unending succession of video games I intend it to end in. A Teken fan I am not, (although I like talking to Teken fans because y'all are freaks.) Tony Hawk underground actually makes me want to buy a skateboard and sell my PS2, not because it's inspiring but because anything (including broken limbs) must be better than memorizing "X-Y-Square" every time I want to perform a "goofy-foot oly to flipside 360".
- Boss fights are always the same. "Oh, it's really big, but that means its slow so I should get in close!" No fucking shit, just like every other boss fight ever. And if you've figured out how to move and shoot on top of that you'll never die, I promise.
- I don't give a shit about your stupid fucking story. Tell the story in the game not in cut scenes, or not at all. Here's the back-story to my favorite commodore 64 game "KILL HIM, MY ROBOTS". What more do you need? All Your Base Are Belong To Us, indeed.
- I wish Katamari Damacy would make the local news for every 100 million times someone takes offence to GTA. And I also wish that North Americans could get the money to make cool innovative games. Here's a brilliant idea What if Japan was a market for video games?! If a game won't sell really well here but will in Japan, then make it here and market it in Japan! OMG! I know, I'm a fucking genius.
- I guess that's all for now. There's plenty more I've yet to play Grand Tourismo 4 but I hear that you can still gain advantage by driving into people in the corners with no repercussions or damage to your car, a problem which has plagued the franchise since its inception. Anyways, feel free to comment with your video game pet peeves.
- joester 3-16-2005 11:26 pm
Joester, you are a potty mouth. Welcome to the blog!
- sally mckay 3-17-2005 12:22 am
Sally promised me that when the Pope dies, I get to take over the blog for Vatican election commentary. So enjoy it while you can, Joester, 'cause when the old guy goes, I take over, and we won't be discussing any more video game pet peeves, no sireee, it'll be the fight for world spiritual domination that we'll be chatting about (until I see that puff of white smoke over St. Peter's.)
- L.M. 3-17-2005 6:59 am
Fair enough but if they decide go with PopeBot I want back in.
- joester 3-17-2005 9:00 am
I notice you didn't say anything about voice recognition. Remember Lifeline?
- sally mckay 3-17-2005 4:15 pm
know what really bugs me about video games these days? the use of the word 'iteration' by game reviewrs and industry mouthpieces to describe the latest sequel to a game. look the word up - it means something done over again or repeatedly(!) please try a word that wont painfully remind me how few original games are being made now. i totally agree with you about button combos, that kind of learning by rote seems, to me, to be the opposite of what games are about, which is a kind of of learning by discovery. is there a game where you can invent your own combos on the fly? i understand that these moves are tied to pre set animations but i'm sure consoles and computers must now have enough hp to make this a possibility.
- rusty_k 3-18-2005 1:44 am
Joe, I just remembered you live in SF now. Shit! I should have dropped a line. I was just there for (wait for it) the Game Designers Conference, which gave me all sorts of wild optimism for the industry. It's put on by the people who do gamasutra.com, ie smart-as-fuck people who love games. Case in point, a gamer's answer to Dogme:
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010129/adams_pfv.htm
And re: story, who cares? I am on your side. Being a narrative-makin' guy I would like to think games need story, but they don't. They're more like pop songs... they CAN have a story, but by no means must.
I will be doing a story for eye and theculturalgutter.com soonish about the Katamari guy's great talk at the GDC. Inspiring!
- Jim Munroe (guest) 3-18-2005 3:44 am
Hey I didn't post the above! there is an imposter lurking. hmm any how, i agree with him and i know who you are!!! Iam so sick of cut scenes that you can't skip over. Like several in GTA vice city which i had to endure over and over due to my lack of skill. If i have to hear someone say 'Lets fight like men with big cahones!' one more time i think i'll take up scrabble or something.
- the real mnobody (guest) 3-18-2005 3:45 am
Jim. I totally flaked on the game developers conference. I thought it was going to be all industry bullshit until it was too late. Next year I'll go, although next year I'll be in school. It sounded great though. I love the Dogma link too - not sure about the "no strange controllers" one but mostly I'm down with it.
Sally. I'm still kinda in love with Lifeline, it was so wonderfully bad. I think I'm going to get a copy of it second hand. For those who don't know LifeLine was a game for the ps2 that you controlled though a microphone. You were giving the character on screen instructions and she would follow them out or more often than not do something random and fatal. There were voice recognition problems, and Japanese to English translation problems that makes the game a wonderfully fun disaster. For instance, she would only open the briefcase if you said "look in the trunk"
Mnobody, if that is your real name, y'all gotta lay off the mushrooms cause they're messing with your memory. Both of you. But you're right, cut scence you can't skip are especially bad. There's only ever been one good cut scene in the history of video games and that was half way through Final Fantasy VII when the female romantic lead dies unexpectedly. A crystal ball rolls out of her hand and bounces down the steps of a fountain forcing the PS to kick out all the graphic oomph it can. It was breath takingly cheesy and wonderful. After that, there's been nuttin'.
- joester 3-18-2005 6:22 am
OK, the old guy is still breathing, so I will admit that I enjoy your complaints about games. From where I stand, I'm amazed that any good games get made, the majority of the ones I'm paid to program are major stinkers. (it's lucrative, so I take the money and run)
The move and Shoot issue is because there is always someone in the client's organization who never play games, and therefore if they keep on losing they think the game is broken. Ditto, for the president or vice presidents of the client company, they must be able to win the game.
The super duper guy not being able to make it over a log? (I'd like to leave that rule in the new dogma, it cracks me up)
Inaccurate grenade tosses? just bad programming.
I hate games when I feel like I'm learning a software. (Too many misguided game design teams think they are adding complexity to the experience.) I want game play to feel like crack cocaine. Successful games give an easy intuitive entrance to the user, with options to employ some of the more obscure functions.
The cut scenes make me crazy too, that is generally because the creative director has too much influence, is madly in love with the graphics and thinks the user wants to see them over and over and over. When I'm developing, I don't add that useless stuff they demand until just prior to a launch because I hate looking at it when I'm debugging. b/t/w there is always a secret key code or action in the game for skipping that shit that the developers use, they don't always take it out.
I'm with you on the love of fromage. I once was programming a hockey slapshot game, and I used a bunch of hilarious Warner Brothers type sound effects for the missed shots. Unfortunately, the clients were quite reverent about hockey, and made me change them to realistic sound effects.
- L.M. 3-18-2005 10:41 pm
I have that problem with the progress bar. I'm testing the "ding" at the end and have to wait until it's all the way done to hear it. And because it's mechanical there's no freaking way around waiting for it.
- joester 3-19-2005 9:17 pm
So the progress bar only works at one speed?
- L.M. 3-19-2005 9:37 pm
We all drop typos once in a while, but if the guest moderator does it right after teasing a poster about being on drugs he looks dorky.
Also regarding drugs, an interesting article in the weekend Globe&Mail about optional drug effects designed into the gameplay in the new 'Narc' game. Coke makes you move real fast, LSD makes you see bizarre monsters, etc, but they also make you black out and lose stuff. Sounds neato.
- Von Bark (guest) 3-20-2005 1:35 am
L.M. - the bar, speeds up and slows down and even stops. All very random (or as random as Director can be which my engineer friend has implied isn't acually very random at all.)
Von Bark- I was teasing two posters, not one. And I'll take your word on the typo - I hate rereading my own posts.
- joester 3-20-2005 10:19 am
For some strange reason, when I looked at the picture, I imagined the bar behaving evenly. (foolish of me)
I used to work with a tech lead who tried to explain the limitations of Director random to me. He also devoted a lot of time to trying to program a better, more random random with lingo. Crashed a lot of games that way, but those were the days of that blameless atmosphere where you could always claim a director bug screwed everything up. (This also led to a lot of fun travel since we were the only ones who could use the softwares without crashing the whole system)
- L.M. 3-20-2005 5:38 pm
Should have added that what you are actually doing with the progress bar is even better than what I thought you were doing, (and even when I was wrong, I really, really liked the idea.)
- L.M. 3-20-2005 5:40 pm
YAY! My shameless self promotion is working.
I was a bit vague in my description because some of the details are up in the air. What relationship should the bar have to the computer itself are still a question. I'm thinking of having very little on the screen now.
- joester 3-20-2005 8:40 pm
wow, von bark- a new narc game? my fave old skool arcade gaMe. sounds like the new one is even more morally ambiguous. joester you may have forgotten one great cut scene. duke nukem 3d episode last mission. when fighting the boss (ez 2 beat-just move and shoot), duke utters the immortal line 'i'm gonna rip off your head and $hi+ down your neck" and in the cutscene that follows... well, i thought it was tastefully done. yeh nobody -get off the shrooms or at least save some 4 me
- rusty_k 3-21-2005 5:00 am
Ha ha, gimmie some of those super mario shrooms! geesh we need help.
- rusty_k 3-21-2005 10:42 pm
The only games I play are driving simulators. I agree with the "punt with impunity" issue with Gran Turismo. It's very irritating that they don't try to model this. I try to race clean, but I have been known to muscle through if I need the championship points.
- Get the physics right. Many driving games aren't true simulations. I can get a sense in under 60 seconds. I bought one based on the BTCC (awesome) that has a bunch of British tracks (fucking awesome). But you can jerk the steering wheel from side to side at 140 mph without any risk of a spin. That game went straight into the reject pile.
-All driving game tracks have too much geometric perfection. Sorry, not real. Learning, and learning how to deal with bumps, dips, tilts, roughness, concrete patches, wet line/dry line etc. are fundamental aspects of learning a track. I've got a story about a cold-tire transition from concrete to asphalt that involved a visit to the body ship. That kind of stuff is completely glossed over in driving games.
-Going agricultural is fucking hard. Don't let me shortcut across a patch of grass and bounce off guardrails with impunity. These are very bad habits.
-Intelligent competition. Give the "drones" some personality and strategy.
-Tepid force feedback. I talked with one of the guys on the Atari team that did "Hard Driving". The force for the steering wheel comes from a massive electric wench motor. Someone found a bunch of these in a surplus warehouse. Atari had to incorporate safety mechanisms in the motor drive circuits to avoid inadvertently snapping the gamer's forearms like twigs. I want one like that.
- mark 3-28-2005 7:35 am