Why I doubt I'll buy one of the 2005 consoles.

[unbibium]

Hey, the 20 things gamers want from next-generation consoles were posted on Slashdot as "the top 20 things you always knew were wrong about games, but were afraid to talk about, since you thought that was just the way it was."

Coincidentally, they're the 20 reasons I'm no longer that enthusiastic about modern video games. Among the worst: loading screens, save points, Hollywood Blockbuster Syndrome, Wal-Mart Syndrome, in-game economies, and games designed to eat entire calendar months instead of individual hours. And I've been sick of crates since Quake 2: Space Warehouse.

Ever wonder why I and so many other people creamed our pants when Katamari Damacy came out? It's cute, but not cloying, it has personality, and doesn't consume your life -- the longest level is 25 minutes. And oh yeah, it's FUN. You're playing with a ball -- the most basic form of fun imaginable; ask any child.

Ever wonder why the Sims took off? Some people lament that it's not even a game, that you're just making people go to work and cook dinner. Well, for some people, it's FUN. You're playing house -- the most basic form of fun imaginable; ask any child.

Dance Dance Revolution? Dancing is truly the most basic form of fun imaginable. People were dancing before the ball or the house were invented.

That's why I love my Gamecube. Games produced by Nintendo are FUN. PS2 has a Taiko drum controller, but Gamecube's bongo controller has a platformer game. Konami invented DDR, Nintendo gave it the Mario treatment. When I used to go to video game parties at doubleonad's house, the ones I enjoyed the most were the GameCube games -- Smash Bros Melee, Wario Ware, Zelda Four Sword, Donkey Konga. These aren't projects for hermits, they're not dick-swinging contests for frustrated 14-year-olds, they're not fantasy sports camps for the sedentary. They're FUN.

That's the one thing I keep missing whenever I read recent E3 gossip -- the fun. Nobody's asking about the fun. I keep hearing about graphics, price points, software titles, what kind of DVD it'll play, whether it'll play MP3's, whether it'll stand upright. Will it make my life more fun, or will it just make me $500 poorer? I suspect the latter, and if other consumers agree, we're in for the second great video game crash.

Comments

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Aww, pentomino, you are warming the cockles of my heartlike object.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

From the list:

Two, as developers have lamented, the guts of the new consoles are geared to make the gaming equivalent of dumb blondes. It has to do with the fact that both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily.

I have trouble believing that that's really a valid excuse. Even crippled as pure logic mills, these chips have about a zillion times the raw CPU power of console games from the 1980s, yet their enemies aren't much smarter. This is a software problem.

[pootrootbeer.livejournal.com]

I was also puzzled by this passage.

Whether a CPU uses "in-order" or "out-of-order" instruction execution has no bearing on whether it's capable of making "clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games".

The same performance can be achieved using either system. In-order execution shifts a lot of the work of optimizing code into the hands of the compiler, but the gain is an enormous reduction in the complexity, and therefore cost and power consumption, of the CPU core. It makes perfect sense for a gaming console.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

I do agree that this is a software problem, and next-gen consoles should be more than up to the task of non-retarded AI. I bet my Atari 2600 could beat me at chess, for cryin' out loud. But it's plausible that, like quality voice acting, AI isn't something game companies see as worth the effort.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I KNOW my Atari 2600 could beat me at chess. It beat my ass on the BABY MODE.

This is why I laugh when people talk about chess as some sort of sine qua non of intelligence. Sure, Gary Kasparov's hard to beat. But I figure I'm probably a human being, I vaguely know the rules of chess, and I suck so bad that something as bone-stupid as an Atari 2600 could totally whip me with one hand tied behind its back.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

They mention jumping puzzles in first-person shooter games. The first game I remember seeing these in was Avara for the Mac, back in the early Nineties. The first jumping puzzle of significant difficulty was the last time I played Avara. There was one jump that I simply could not do, and that was the end of the game.

Of course, the jumping puzzles were a sidelight; Avara was mostly intended as an early network multiplayer shooter. But the computer I had at the time was way too laggy to contemplate that.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...I guess that was actually the mid- to late Nineties, come to think of it.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

What gets me about the examples of Sims/DDR/Katamari Damacy is that the gaming industry in general never quite learns this lesson for good. The first time they should have learned it was when Pac-Man conquered the world. I remember people gradually figuring out the wondrous fact that girls also liked to play Pac-Man.

But they always go back to the dick-swinging boy fantasies. Doom and Grand Theft Auto were huge hits, but they weren't so much huger than the non-dick-swinging hits that everything has to be a clone of them.

Maybe it's that the dick-swinging boy fantasies are easy to replicate without thinking too hard about design or gameplay. Making another thing that is superficially like Doom is the lazy way out. Inventing another Katamari Damacy that isn't the same game is fiendishly hard.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

This is certainly a major part of the problem. We're (game industry) also set up really heavily to only sink money into things that have yielded money in the past (since we have this publisher-developer structure that for now isn't all that circumventable). So, yeah.
Also, AI can be really super expensive; maybe what's really being gotten at here is that having both a fancy world _and_ constantly thinking AI isn't as feasible as it might be. Especially if people keep making the fancy environment fx a priority over everything else, since that's what Teh Publishar wishes, since that's what looks good in screenshots, since that's how games are advertised.
Oh, this industry. I swear. It is going to drive me straight to academia.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Note also that developers often confuse their potential audience with their existing audience/themselves.