More on Mario Galaxy, and Some Thoughts on Portal as Well0
Matt posted in Games on January 22nd, 2008

This post started as a response to some comments posted on my rather long post on Super Mario Galaxy. It seems like despite my large quantities of words, some people misunderstood what I was trying to say. Perhaps I approach writing like programming. I want to solve a problem – communication. I keep typing and typing solutions (words and examples) until I think I’ve solved it. Perhaps brevity could become clarity with carefully chosen words. Either way, I feel my original post had interesting points and examples enough to fill pages and pages of text. Well, it seems I have more to add because I want to explain myself to commenters, and I think would be better suited to a full post. So, I’m going to repeat the comments and then respond to them.

Ziv said: “I completely disagree with your assessment. In fact, I wish games were, in your definition, less accessible. The thing I loved most about Super Mario 64 were the hidden areas that gave little to no hint of their existence such as the tiny painting that leads to tall tall mountain, the princess’s secret slide, the entrance to the haunted house level, and the secret slide in tall tall mountain, as well as the various 1-up mushrooms placed in out of the way locations that only appeared when you did certain things (such as the one-up mushroom that only appears when you do a handstand on a certain tree east of the castle. They gave incentive to explore the entire map (which worked out extremely well with the non-linear nature of SM64 maps), and were a huge treat to find. You, however, propose that everything be handed to the player on a silver platter, and that any and all challenge be eliminated.”

I think you are misunderstanding what I’m proposing. I’m not saying that the game can’t have challenging or secret elements. I think those are good. If you look at Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters, there are skill points that unlock cool cheats and other fun stuff as a reward to the players who want to take the time to really master the game. These skill points really do take a lot of skill to get and are very challenging. I haven’t been able to get them all myself and I worked on the game for over a year! I’m not saying that games shouldn’t have stuff like that. I’m saying that if I want to play the game all the way through, they should make it an enjoyable experience for me even if I’m not the most skilled gamer (and I know I’m not very skilled). For example, they could make the first 120 stars with Mario more accessible and make playing through with Luigi super challenge mode, and I think that’d be great. An unskilled gamer like myself I could play through all the levels and see all the content without getting frustrated by things that require too much trial and error.

I think a game that did this really well was Portal. They went out of their way to make an accessible game that would be fun for all skill levels. In fact, one of my few complaints about the game was I thought the early training segments were too easy and slow… I was getting impatient to get my portal gun, but after that, everything was really awesome. Because many Portalers are more talented than I, or are way more into it, they provided special challenge modes of the puzzles that were offered in the regular campaign. Those aren’t for me, but they provide that extra enjoyment for the skilled player. As well, Portal had quite a few hidden rooms that included some great stuff like a pin up girl with a picture of the weighted companion cube taped over her head. I’m not saying you should get rid of this stuff. Rather make all your content accessible to all skill levels, and then spend a bit of time making extra stuff for people who want more. One may argue that you only have to get 60 stars to beat Mario Galaxy. While that may be true, I don’t feel like I’ve beaten the game when I’ve only seen half the content. Ratchet and Clank, Portal and Resistance derived their challenge modes from the content they already had, so I don’t feel like I’m missing half of the game by not playing them.

Biovee said: “Well on some things I agree with you, like the camera angles and minigame controls. But I’ve never had problems with the Wii-mote, I think it rocks! As for the “unforgiving enemies”, well, it’s supposed to be challenging; I find the game to be quite easy if you ask me. Also the puzzles such as that fire torche incicdent [sic] and other things like how to kill certain bosses or reach certain spots are quite enteraining [sic] to me. It proves you ned [sic] a lot of intellect to progress through the game.”

Firstly, I’m afraid I’ve been misquoted. I didn’t say anything about unforgiving enemies. The enemies were very simple and didn’t put up much of a fight. That was never my complaint. In general, and perhaps we disagree on this point, I don’t think any of the puzzles required intellect in Mario Galaxy. In fact, I’d argue that what you call puzzles aren’t really puzzles at all. As a comparison, would you consider the task “guess what number I’m thinking” a puzzle? I think this is more analogous to the examples you cited in Mario Galaxy and many challenges in video games. In video games, you are presented with a world that doesn’t behave like our own. You can do a limited set of things, and those can only affect the world in ways that are programmed in. Every challenge in a video game has a solution unless the game is impossible. Normally the solution is created by the game developers and that’s the only solution.

When you are presented with something in Mario Galaxy, you have to either get the solution that the game designers intended or exploit bugs like I did in the case of the strange looking box. Now, the difference between something that is just puzzling and something that is a game of “guess what the designer is thinking” is that the mechanics need to be introduced and the solution needs to come from combining the mechanics you know in a logical way.

So, because figuring out these solutions aren’t building on knowledge that you have gained, they aren’t really puzzles. They are more guesswork. How did you know that lighting the box on fire would cause something cool to happen? Probably it reminded you of the tiki torches in the Legend of Zelda. What if Galaxy was the first video game you ever played? It probably would be very difficult to come up with the idea that you had to light that on fire because something magical would happen. There’s nothing analogous to that in the real world nor was this mechanic introduced earlier in the game. So, what do you do? Guess. If you happened to guess what the designer was thinking, then you win! Otherwise, keep trying stuff until you beat the challenge. It was the same with the first bowser fight. Nothing like that had really been presented before, so solving it was just a matter of running away until he happened to burn his butt. Once I saw that, I figured out what to do, but it really isn’t much of a puzzle.

Going back to Portal, I think there’s a game that did puzzles “right”. The first levels introduce you to every mechanic every application of the portal technology that you’ll need for the later levels. The puzzles come from combining them in interesting ways. This was one of the reasons I think people enjoyed Portal so much. You never had to bang your head against a table or guess random things in order to solve the puzzles. It was all about applying the mechanics that they thoroughly explained. In fact, my other complaint with Portal was there wasn’t enough actual puzzles (once you get passed the too long training stuff). Even still, I think it was much better that they did the slow training than having you “guess” what the properties of the portals are. For example, if they didn’t tell you that the velocity into the portal was converted into velocity out of the orientation of the following portal, some people would have trouble making that connection. It’s not really that noticeable when you put portals that you just run into, players who don’t try the experiment of putting portals on floors and jumping in, wouldn’t figure it out. Instead, they walk you through all the core mechanics, so you have all the skills necessary to solve the puzzles.

You’ll notice I qualified the statement about combining the mechanics with “in a logical way”. The reason for this is because if the solution arises from something that is illogical, then you still have to guess what the designer was thinking. A good example of this is old school adventure games, and their decline probably relates to that people don’t like guessing what the designer thinks. I’ll use another example to prove my point. In the greatest adventure game of all time, Sam and Max: Hit the Road, you get a golf ball fetcher and a severed hand. In order to progress in the game, you have to use the severed hand on the golf ball fetcher and stick it into the world’s largest ball of twine. The mechanics are simple and already introduced. You have items that you can use on each other and the world. The solution to the game is highly illogical. In most old school adventure games, you had two options – trial and error or use the hint guide. Many adventure games used to come with the solutions in book form that you could turn to when you ran into trouble. The copy of Sam and Max: Hit the Road Full Talkie Edition that I have came with the hint book. I was hoping with the new Sam and Max games, they would have advanced the genre with a more modern approach to guiding the player through the game, but it was still like the games of old, and I found myself constantly turning to a walkthrough.

Although some may like the type of puzzles presented in Super Mario Galaxy, I feel that they are the old school sink or swim guess what the designer is thinking style gameplay. These to me aren’t very compelling and are ignoring the advancements we’ve made in game design in the past several years. There was plenty of good stuff in Super Mario Galaxy, but I don’t think these “puzzle” elements are included.

Super Mario Galaxy: Good but Needs Improvement4
Matt posted in Games, Wii on December 24th, 2007

Super Mario Galaxy currently has a score of 97.3% on gamerankings, which is an average of all the reviews. For a while it was even higher and the number one rated game of all time. Currently, it’s 0.3% lower than the Ocarina of Time, which has reclaimed its gold medal. Is it deserving of this high praise? I don’t think so, and I’m going to devote a lot of words to win you over to my way of thinking.

Since I don’t want to be flamed for the rest of my life, let me preface this by saying I liked the game. I played through and got all 120 stars. There were a lot of cool things in it like gravity switching around, and they really did some cool stuff with small worlds and the like. Had I not liked it, I wouldn’t have gotten all 120 stars. I love platformers and few people are making pure platformers these days, so it was fun to finally play another good platformer. Having said that, I’m going to break the bad news to you. I’d give the game a 7.5 out of 10. Now before all of the Mario fans burn down my internet server, I’d say that my review scale (which perhaps I will use in the future, but it seems rare I get a chance to play a game these days or write on my site) is not biased towards the high end of the review spectrum like most game reviewer scales. If I see a game I’m excited about gets a 75% on gamerankings.com, I probably won’t even play the demo. That seems odd because the scale is essentially wasting half of its gradations. So, my personal scale is nice and linear. 7.5 is good on my scale, sort of like 1up, but the text of the their 7.5 reviews don’t seem to support that. If I had to convert it to a reviewer scale, I would need a complex formula and statistical analysis, but if you’re really twisting my arm, I suppose I’d guess it’d be about an 8.25 out of 10 in reviewer land.

Now as I said I liked the game and found a lot of things in it cool. I’m guessing one can read about those things at one of the numerous game review websites where the reviewers are so enamored with the game that they hope to carry Super Mario’s babies. Because I’m relatively long winded and not sure anyone’s actually going to read this to the end, I’m not going to waste words to sing the praises of the game that you’re probably familiar with. So, let me focus on the negatives despite that I think there are many positives - otherwise I wouldn’t have said it’s a good game.

First and foremost, the Wii specific aspects of it are really bad. Now, this is just my opinion, and I’m sure many disagree, but since this is my blog, I’m going to say what I think. Collecting star shards is no fun. I don’t really enjoy dragging a cursor over the screen. Sure, it’s not the main focus of the game, but if you want to unlock certain galaxies, you need a ton of star shards, so I found myself constantly dragging the cursor over the screen. Perhaps my sensor is a bad place, but I have to hold my arm up in order to point it at the screen. When you play for hours at a time, this can get really annoying, so I always dreaded collecting star shards. I also worked out a system where I could sit a certain place on my couch and prop my arm up with a pillow in order to keep pointing the cursor at the screen. Lazy? Perhaps, but I don’t play games to get exercise – I play them to relax.

The shake to spin mechanic was a terrible idea in my opinion. In the September issue of Game Developer magazine, Mick West wrote an excellent article on programming responsiveness. Although Galaxies does not suffer from the latency of pipelining the game logic, the lack of responsiveness is created by the time it takes to do a gesture. I think it probably takes at least a tenth of a second from when you set out to spin to when it actually spins just because you have to shake the controller back and forth before it registers. This is just completely unnecessary. Perhaps some of you can do it faster, but I can’t imagine anyone can do it as fast as pressing a button. So that aspect of it is frustrating especially when you are trying to do very time critical things like spinning at the apex of you jump in order to do a high jump. Getting that latency as small as possible is important. For example, try playing a game that’s running at 10 frames a second. It doesn’t feel very responsive, does it? That’s because it takes a tenth of a second for your input to be reflected. That’s normally why people like games to run at 60 frames per second rather than 10 or 20.

In addition, the camera is bad for platforming. Mark Cerny said the things to work out in pre-production are camera, character and controls, and those are really the three most important things in a game. For the most part, the camera is way too far back. This causes problems in several ways. Firstly, if you were to do your spin attack against a goomba, it often misses because you can’t accurately judge distance because the camera is so far back. There is a recharge timer on you spin attack, so missing your initial thrust gives the goomba the chance to hit you. Now, you are down to 2/3 hit points. Getting a coin gives you that hit point back. If there are no coins around, you can jump on the goomba to squash him and get a coin, but landing on his head is tricky because it’s difficult to see where you are going to land – again this is because the camera is really far back. There are many challenges that are made unnecessarily difficult because of the camera. There was one where the world was made out of cake (the cake is a lie) and moving floors with holes in them that would have been fun if the camera weren’t so terrible. I couldn’t see where I was going to land, and if you ended up in the wrong spot you fell to death. There is no camera control, so this only makes this problem worse. (You sometimes can change the camera to another preset angle with the dpad, but often that is disabled) Camera control would at least allow me the ability to put the camera in a better spot for the particular jump I’m trying to make.

Additionally, there are minigames that use the Wiimote poorly for a frustrating experience. The first example was Ray Surfing. You have to point the wiimote at the screen and twist to steer. This would have been 100 times better if you could just use the analog stick. There was a similar one where you used it like a giant joystick and had Mario roll around on a ball that was sort of like Monkeyball. This would have been better with the joystick too. The reason is because the joystick autocenters, which is quite helpful as well as you can easily see where its sensitivity starts and ends, whereas with these you never know how much you have to rotate it to get to the “max”. Some of the other annoying challenges use the Wii-mote pointer functionality in an unnecessary way. There’s one where you have to race someone with pull stars that was frustrating and seemed like it could have been accomplished easier just using the analog stick to select the pull star target. Perhaps not, but either way, it was frustrating and not too fun. Lastly there was a challenge where you use a pointer to determine the direction you’d blow a bubble with Mario in it around obstacles. That was frustrating too, and would have been much better just by using the analog stick to determine direction.

I’m of the opinion that the interface should not BE the game, but rather be the best way to control the game. The challenge in these minigames was created by the interface, not by the actual game design (although one could argue that the game design includes the interface). The interface creating the challenge seems like bad design. I would argue the wii-mote enables new opportunities that would work out worse without it – such as Wii Tennis. If a game would work out better with an analog stick, then why not use it? I think the developers of the poorly received PS3 game Lair are kicking themselves for not realizing that. I’m not trying to say that these minigames were as bad as Lair, but I think that they were poorly designed. As well, defining a completely new mode of interaction for each minigame or different mode can be very difficult for gamers to adjust to. Maybe I’m just terrible at games (which is probably true), but besides the fact I don’t care for sports, I have a lot of trouble playing sports games because the interface changes depending on whether you are on offense or defense. Granted, most of my sport game playing is from the Genesis/Super Nintendo era, and maybe this has changed now that controllers have 20 buttons on them, but I would always hover my finger over the button I had to press most. When possession of the ball changed, I would often forget that I should move my finger to another button and press something that I didn’t mean to. For example, I could go up to the net in a basketball game and pass the ball instead of shoot because my finger was over the button I was using to defense. You don’t need a radically different interface to do the minigames in Mario Galaxy – in fact, I would argue it would fit better if you keep the interface the same. In the games I work on, we deliberately try to keep the interface as close as possible throughout our regular games and our minigames in order to avoid that problem.

On top of these complaints, the game is far too unforgiving. Perhaps the reviewers weren’t frustrated by this because they play games for a living, but I unfortunately spend most of my time making them and not playing them. Here’s a good example. I tried to collect the 100 purple coins in the Honeycomb galaxy, and on my first attempt, I got hit by a boulder that knocked me into the black hole, killing me and erasing my purple coin count of 40 some coins. No matter, I thought. It didn’t take me that long. The next try, I collected 97 purple coins and was busy waggling to spin across the vines. You jump from one vine to the next, and I guess I did an in air spin because I was still waggling my Wii-mote from the previous vine (not realizing I dismounted), and somehow I managed to fall into the pit. I didn’t think it was possible, so I wasn’t being super careful, so that was really frustrating. Now, I didn’t mind getting the first 40 coins over again, but I had 97?!?! What game design purpose does that serve collecting the coins over again? Perhaps one would argue it adds to the challenge, but I play games for fun. I enjoy the individual challenges presented with finding and getting each coin, but doing them over again if I happen to fail is just plain frustrating and feels like a waste of my time. If someone wants to try to get all 100 coins in one life for the challenge of it, they are more than welcome to, but I don’t think it’s a good requirement because it will frustrate people like me. Unfortunately, for me, my story gets worse.

I have shaky hands. I’m not going to be a surgeon, but luckily, my career as a video game developer is doing fine. Now, I’ve previously complained about the problems inherent with the shake to spin, and so it just so happens there is a tricky platforming segment where there is honey that makes you walk slower on platforms with large gaps over the black hole. I did this successfully the time I got 97 coins, but I was getting sloppy because I was displeased at having to get them over again. When I tried again, I failed because the camera was really far, so I didn’t really line up my jump. I wasn’t being careful. Perhaps it was my fault, but it would have been an easy jump if the camera weren’t half a mile away. Now, I managed to fail this section at least five times in a row after that. Sometimes I would miss the platforms entirely because of the camera. As I kept failing this, I got more and more nervous for this section causing my hands to get less precise, and I’m not sure how this happened, but at least three of the times, I died because I accidentally triggered the spin attack while in air, thus killing my momentum and plummeting poor Mario into the dark abyss. The way I actually ended up passing this segment was I held the Wii-mote against my chest to ensure I wouldn’t shake it accidentally.

Now, one could blame my shaky hands for this. I know I’m not the only one with shaky hands. Additionally, many gamers like myself move the controller when doing tricky jumps or difficult sections. It’s almost an unconscious reflex. You want Mario to go the extra distance? Move the controller to give him a boost! It doesn’t have any effect, but try looking down at your hands when you game or watch a friend play. You might be surprised to notice the unconscious movement of the controller. I’m guessing this might be more common than you think. So, whatever the reason was, Mario’s spin air attack thing was triggered incorrectly at least three times causing me to feel cheated by the controls.

I would argue that most of the time, when a gamer feels cheated, they are right. People (non-game developers especially) don’t really take into account the point of video games. The point of video games is to entertain. Any time someone feels cheated, they aren’t being entertained. Even if the game is playing fair, and the user moved the camera away from a bad guy and got shot in the back, the gamer still feels like it was a cheap shot even though it was the gamer’s input that caused the bad guy to go off the screen. It’s the game developer’s job to program the characters that aren’t controlled by the player to create a fun experience. That includes designing them to not make the player feels cheated. So, for example, if an enemy is off screen, it should try and get on screen before shooting. Alternately, it can give indication that it’s firing from off screen by showing a targeting reticle or something along those lines.

Additionally, no one likes to do the same thing over and over again. Here’s a good example from my own career. On Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters, I did the boss fight on level 8, Dayni Moon. Now, this boss fight was a lot of hard work, and I coded several different stages as well as I did some tech work in order to get a large amount of animated corn in a virtual cornfield that stretched as far back as the camera could see (well, maybe not QUITE that far). In the shipped game, there were no checkpoints between the stages of the boss fight. Putting them in would have been nontrivial, and when I was working on this, I was short on time. Perhaps that’s not a good excuse, but to be honest, I wanted people to play the boss for a while because I spent so much time on it as well as I thought it was really neat from a technical standpoint, so I figured it’d be okay. Unfortunately, the final balancing wasn’t as thoroughly tested as we would have liked, and it turned out that final stage of the boss was really tough especially if you didn’t have certain weapons. The result was when I asked people how they liked the game, most people mentioned that boss was too hard, and they were sick of replaying the fight over and over. It hurts to hear that because that was what I was most proud of in the entire game, but perhaps if we had more carefully balanced the numbers and added those checkpoints, people would have remembered it as one of their favorite sections of the game! Perhaps not, but my point still stands – no one likes to repeat the same thing over and over again.

I think that this frustration caused by the challenges presented as well as the controls make it accessible to a smaller audience. Perhaps accessible isn’t the right word, so let me explain what I mean. Most game designers (or at least the successful ones) want to entertain as many people as they can. This makes financial sense because you will sell more games as well as is more fulfilling as a game developer. In order to do that, you want to make everyone who wants to play the game, have the ability to get enjoyment out of it without giving up in frustration. A game that frequently frustrates people will make them less likely to want to play the game, which means less purchases as well as less people to entertain. So, in order to make a game more accessible, you want to ensure that everyone who wants to play the game won’t give up out of frustration. Certainly, this may not be possible, but you want to minimize all frustrations.

There are niche titles that don’t try to appeal to everyone. These can be successful, but by definition don’t have the widespread acclaim or massive sales that games that target being accessible to everyone can have. Have you heard of Steel Battalion? If you don’t recognize the name, you probably heard of the mech game for Xbox that was $200 and came with an enormous controller. This is an example of a niche game, but also proves to be a good example of a game that goes out of its way to be particularly inaccessible. Now, I’m a peripheral whore. I own every crazy peripheral they make. I own light guns, dance mats, drums, robotic operating buddies, both Resident Evil 4 chainsaw controllers as well as the katana PS2 controller. Because of this, I had to buy Steel Battalion. I invested $200 on the game, so I wanted to like it. I read through the 40 page instruction manual with a fervent vigor. I was a bit confused because of the sheer amount of controls presented. I expected it to be difficult, but I couldn’t wrap my head around all the information contained in the instruction manual. (They printed an 8.5″ x 11″ size book for this too. This isn’t 40 tiny pages in a booklet that fits in the jewel case) I assumed there would be an in game tutorial because with a system this complex, they’d have to give you some training. I popped the disc in my Xbox, assembled the massive controller and hoped for the best. I was presented with a picture of a dude who I guess was supposed to be the instructor. I was presented with a text conversation with no voiceovers. He said he was my teacher, and I’d be starting the training program. Good I thought! I certainly need it. Then he informed me that the base was under attack, and my very foolish character volunteered to pilot a VT (vertical tank – their name for mechs in the game) with no training whatsoever. I failed the first mission a couple of times, which deletes your save because your character dies, but that didn’t matter because I had no progress to speak of. I finally sort of got the hang of the game and beat the training level and the next level or two. I was playing the third or fourth level, and it was a complex mission. I was doing pretty well or so I thought until my mech ran out of batteries. I didn’t even know my mech RAN on batteries. I knew it ran on fuel and the fuel consumption varied based on what gear you were in. Apparently the VTs don’t have automatic transmissions. Perhaps it was an optional, but the government wouldn’t pay the extra dough for it Now, besides the gear you are in, the fuel consumption also varies based on the gas pedal as well as a dash/stabilize pedal, which consumes 1.5 times the fuel that it does when you aren’t pressing it. I knew all of this but nothing of a battery. Well, I knew you could buy a boom box to listen to in the cockpit, and I’m pretty sure you had to buy batteries for that, but I didn’t know anything about my mech running out of batteries. My mech was stuck in the middle of a battle unable to do anything at all because of the battery problem. I eventually bailed out (which one of my friends found the most enjoyable part of the game) and tried again. I was defeated in battle and the game deleted my save file because my character died, so I had to start over. When purchasing the game, I was aware of this “feature”, but I assumed that they’d either make it difficult to die, or give me more time to eject. Perhaps it took me too long to realize my mech was exploding, but I would think for a mechanic that unforgiving they would have made it painfully obvious that I needed to eject and given me enough time to do so. Anyway, I was pretty pissed. I didn’t get the hang of the game yet, and I was already forced to start over. I figured I’d try and beat the system and figure out another way to back up my save. I tried to copy it to a memory card, but the way it works is that it creates “title data” and no specific game saves, and you can’t copy the title data to a memory card. So, I figured I’d mod my Xbox and then use the homebrew programs to copy the data right off my hard drive. There were other reasons I wanted to mod my Xbox, (have you heard of Metal Wolf Chaos?) so I figured I might as well. I’ve had a modded Xbox, but I haven’t been interested in going back and playing Steel Battalion, but I hope I will at some point in order to get my money’s worth.

I think a good design rule of thumb is if someone wants to play your game, you should make it accessible to them. I really wanted to play Steel Battalion, and I really wanted to like it. The designers however did not cater to the portion of the audience that is perhaps not as good at games or not as patient with the sim aspects of the game. Getting back to Mario, the designers didn’t do a lot of things to make it accessible to a wider audience – one who has less tolerance for repeating sections over or perhaps one less interested in unforgiving challenges.

Maybe the only game that is accessible to everyone is Tic Tac Toe. Even if games cannot be universally acceptable, many designers are trying to make their games more accessible through various design decisions. Plenty of games do dynamic difficulty adjustment. Many games including ones that I’ve worked on actually adjust the difficulty based on how many times the player dies. This makes the game accessible to a larger audience than just the hardcore gamers. Rubber banding the enemies in racing games is another example of this. In a similar vein, I was thinking how some great games (such as Half Life 2) actually try to be accessible to people with disabilities. I believe they have an option to subtitle all sound effects for the hard of hearing, which can be important because often gameplay is communicated with audio cues. For example in a horror game, a ghost may be behind you, which could be communicated by footsteps or scary noises that a deaf player would miss out on. 1up wrote an interesting article on disabled gamers and the problems they face.

Certainly, not every game can work for people with disabilities, but subtitling is an easy thing for developers to do and helps it be more accessible to people who are deaf. The December issue of Game Developer magazine has a good article called “The Accessibility Game” about making games for people with various impairments. I’m not saying that Mario should make the game playable by the blind, but rather that accessibility is a spectrum and the more inclusive you are of various abilities and disabilities, the larger your audience is.

Another thing that accessible games try to do when you get stuck is presenting dynamic help messages in order to make it more accessible. Ratchet and Clank and Kameo are both examples of games that featured this. Kameo offered an option for how soon they would present the help messages if they thought you were stuck. This is a great way to help stuck players out when they can’t guess what the designer was thinking. Nintendo seems like they haven’t advanced in terms of game design from the Nintendo 64 days. I’m a bit ashamed to admit that I gave up Twilight Princess after two hours. The reason for this is because I felt like I was playing the old game of guess what the designer is thinking. I don’t think people enjoy that game, and I think that’s why the adventure game genre is dead. Previously, I was mourning their loss, but then I played the new Sam and Max games and realized that’s why adventure games haven’t been missed. I talk about Zelda in my earlier post, Wii-actions and Wii-views (although that pun seemed so clever a year ago, I’m ashamed of it now).

Super Mario Galaxy had a similar example, although I’m ashamed to admit in hindsight, I probably should have been able to figure out (unlike the Zelda example). Now, skip to the end of this paragraph if you don’t want a solution to a puzzle that’s probably pretty obvious to people other than me. In the Freezeflame Galaxy, the fireflower was introduced. It was on a side path, and I killed some enemies with it. That was pretty cool except for the shake to throw a fireball was annoying. I went back to the main path and there were some pillars with platforms on top, an up arrow and a pole that was close to them. Judging from the up arrow, it was obvious that I had to go up. So, I went up to the top of the pole and tried to jump with a spin in order to land on the platforms on top of the pillars. I could probably succeed in doing this one out of five times. I think the times that I made it, I was aided by a potential glitch because I hit the ceiling, which was liquid hot magma, bounce off with reverse gravity and landed back on the platform. Now, I realized that this probably wasn’t the “right” solution, but maybe it was just a hard jump, and I could have made it had I not hit the ceiling. I jumped around and I couldn’t reach anything although I noticed there was land on the ceiling that seemed to be where the level progressed. After a lot of trial and error, I managed to get there. (I found an easier way to get up there and reverse the gravity by wall jumping between the pillars) Now, that was a total glitch, but the solution was more obvious to me at the time than the actual solution, which I found later. As it turns out, there was a little box that I was supposed to light on fire similar to Zelda and the tiki torches. Perhaps I didn’t realize it because I was thinking like the old school Mario games where fireballs were only used for attacking. Perhaps I’m just dumb. Perhaps the art was bad because it didn’t look like something you could light on fire. Regardless of the cause, it sure would have been nice had they made this puzzle more accessible to me with some dynamic hint system. I did however figure it out in a later level where I was presented with a fireflower and the same little box. I would have kicked myself if that where physically possible because I instantly made the connection this time.

This leads me to my next point. Nintendo seems to approach the development of this game similar to a Nintendo 64 title when there have been many advancements in game development since then. Here’s a good example. Super Mario Galaxy continues with the antiquated notion of lives. Pretty much all games these days let you keep trying when you fail with infinite lives. In Mario Galaxy, if you lose all your lives, not only do you lose the progress in the level you are working on, but you are forced back to the main menu for some unknown reason. You have to then press A + B at the main menu, select your save game and navigate in the hub world back to the level you are working on. I have no idea why they implemented it this way. Certainly this is one of my smaller gripes to be sure, but it’s mystifying that they’d make it so inconvenient when you lose all your lives. Also, there is no autosave, which is just bizarre. It prompts you to save all the time rather than background saving whenever you make any progress. I also can’t understand this decision. In “The Incredibles”, we realized 3 or so days before gold that we didn’t have an autosave. Although that game is not in the same caliber as Super Mario Galaxy, I threw together an autosave system at the last minute really quickly, and was horrified that it wouldn’t pass the technical requirements (of which there are a ton for saving), but we didn’t have any problems. If I can throw together an autosave system in less than a day, you’d think that Nintendo first party could manage to support it in one of their flagship titles. Again, it doesn’t make or break the game, but it seems like a silly oversight, especially when this game has probably been in development for many years.

Continuing along the lines of Nintendo is stuck in the 64 days, there’s very, very, very little voice over. Why?!?! WHY?!?! I could understand they didn’t have the memory to do that on the Nintendo 64, but the Wii has a full DVD for audio. Many large role playing epics have come last generation out that fit on one DVD with tons of recorded dialog. There’s so little dialog in Mario, I can’t imagine space was a consideration. They recorded a few noises and words for some of the characters, but I can’t imagine why they didn’t record all the lines. Speaking of, I’m sick of the silent protagonist. I’m not the only one because Rick Luebbers, a designer at Surreal wrote a blog post about it, but for whatever reason, Midway took it down. I understand that you are supposed to fill the role of the player character, but for one thing, I enjoy being able to choose what to say. Sure, it’s not the same as being able to say whatever I can imagine, but it’s a passable substitute until natural language processing improves. Mass Effect has a good dialog system, and it really increases the immersion. Even if I don’t get a choice in my character’s dialog, I wouldn’t feel like I’m playing a mute. Not having a character speak seems like they aren’t really in that world because everyone I know reacts to speaking with a response. It’s especially bad when they draw attention to it. (”You’re the silent type, aren’t you?”) Perhaps other people snicker at that, but it only frustrates me more when they draw attention to the fact that my character can’t speak. I don’t think I can illustrate how silly not having the main character speak is better than this video, Zelda: A Heart for a Hero.

Another really annoying thing about this game and most Nintendo first party games in general is the inability to speed up text boxes. The text slowly scrolls out as if someone were reading them. There is no voice to go along with them. Normally the text is fairly worthless as well. I really don’t care you are the famous “Bill Board”, and yes I’ve heard of you. I’ve heard of you the last 10 times you’ve introduced yourself in very slow to appear text. The way games should do speaking and conversation is like they did it in Jade Empire. The voice starts and the text shows immediately. If you have already heard the line before or if it’s uninteresting, you can read ahead and skip it before it completes. I think this is the best way to do it because you don’t have to listen to the line over again if you are like me when playing RPGs and talk to people over and over to try and get more information out of them. Nintendo’s solution seems like the worst of both worlds. There’s no voice AND you have to wait until you can get all the information.I guess that perhaps the best conclusion to draw from this is that had the game come out 10 years ago, it would have been absolutely amazing. It seems like they are blazing their own trail forward based on what worked for them in the past while ignoring advancements made in other games. Perhaps that’s why Miyamoto has never heard of the Ratchet and Clank series? When I was at Heavy Iron, everyone was talking about how good Ratchet and Clank was, so I played the games in order to find out what they were doing right. It turned out I loved the games (and got to work on them myself), but I’ve played other games I didn’t particularly care for just as reference in order to try and understand what people like about them. For example, I didn’t really care for God of War. After finishing it, I thought it was okay, but there were other games I’d rather play that I’d enjoy more. After playing it, I learned perhaps why the game was appealing to others, and with that knowledge, I hope to do my job better. Perhaps that’s something Nintendo is missing. What would have made an amazing Nintendo 64 game is missing advances in accessibility that I feel the industry has made since. Gamers’ sensibilities have adapted to these modernizations, which makes old games and old feeling games hard to play. Here’s a good example. I was super excited to play the Mega Man Anniversary Collection. I remember loving Mega Man growing up and the games being amazing. When I played it, I didn’t get very far before getting the game over screen. My Mega-enthusiasm was not satiated until I played for quite a while and never managed to beat a robot master thus getting a password to record some forward progress. I even tried a later Mega Man game for Playstation that made when game length was a measure of content not difficulty, and even that was difficult and required repeating large sections of levels. So, my Mega-thirst did not feel quenched, but I gave up. I’m definitely not going to revisit that game unless there’s some awesome cheat codes for it. Perhaps although I was still thirsty for mega-action, perhaps I did receive a dose of the cure for my Mega Man bug. I had forgotten that a staple of the Mega-series was an unforgiving difficulty and that I had the most fun playing NES games with my Game Genie.

Perhaps I’m not in a position to critique a game that will probably outsell every game I’ve worked on at this point in my career. It certainly has better reviews than any game I’ve worked on and anyone else for that matter who didn’t work on the Ocarina of Time. While both of those may be true, neither means that the game was flawless – that the game couldn’t be better. Perhaps people are willing to overlook the flaws for the time being, but if Nintendo continues their trend of not keeping up with the rest of the video game developers, perhaps they won’t always be so successful.

A Defense of the ESRB4
Matt posted in Games on October 22nd, 2007

I think the ESRB has come under fire from all sides recently. Some people argue that it is too lenient whereas other people decry it as too restrictive. It’s my opinion that all this criticism is not the fault of the ESRB, but rather a misunderstanding on what the ESRB is and what it tries to accomplish.

Firstly, let me talk about the big kahuna – the “Hot Coffee” debacle. When people first discovered it, I argued that the game should not be re-rated. The developers didn’t mean for people to see it, why should it affect the rating? I thought it wasn’t something that someone would run into by playing the game ordinarily. One would have to go looking for it. When it was only in the PC sku, I argued that one could just mod the game to put in all the nudity they wanted, and it would have the same effect. When they unlocked the hot coffee in the console game with gameshark codes, I began to see things differently. I had a game genie for the NES, and it was a consumer product that I used when I played games as a child. That’s fairly accessible to a child as well as any non-tech savvy consumer. Now, let’s pretend that a father was informed of the ESRB ratings. He deemed that all the gore and violence and other terrible acts of depravity in San Andreas was perfectly acceptable for his child to play. However, he was not okay with sexual content. Despite his full understanding of what the ESRB rating entailed, his child could get at content that he wasn’t okay with them seeing (assuming the child had a gameshark). This made me realize that my earlier feelings on the re-rating were incorrect.

Now, one might think my example is ludicrous. Why would a parent let their child play San Andreas? That’s not up to the ESRB to decide. The ESRB does not legislate morality. The ESRB’s job is to come up with standards and metrics so parents and gamers can determine what type of content they’d like to purchase. Even if the content is not accessible or not easily acceptable, the consumer is buying a product and has every right to know what they are getting on their disc. Let’s use another media as an example. If I bought a DVD and encoded in the disc is some sort of snuff film, I’d be outraged regardless of whether it were accessible by using a menu or not! When I purchase something, I don’t just think of it as a product. I think of it as a vote of support. The reason for that is because to the publishers, if people buy a product, that means that people are interested in that type of content. If no one buys it, then the publishers will stop making it. So, when I purchase a game, I’d like to know what content I’m getting on the disc. If it’s content that I think is acceptable, then I don’t feel bad about purchasing the game and supporting further development of that type of content. Now many people don’t see it that way, but perhaps these are the same people that don’t vote. In the business world, you vote with your wallet, and that’s the best way to show your support or disgust with a particular title. So, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to rate everything that the consumer is purchasing because if the hidden content is found (which it usually is), consumers might regret their purchase.

I have a vague recollection that there was a golf game or other tame game for PC that someone put a pornographic file on the disc before it went to mastering. Unfortunately, I cannot remember the details of this incident nor find any information about it, but I think that further illustrates my point that all content should be rated on the game disc. Perhaps one might argue that console games shouldn’t have this restriction because their content is often hidden away. One can just as easily stick a console game in a PC in order to look for bonus content. In fact, Sonic Adventure for Dreamcast was on the proprietary GD-ROM format, and it had extra wallpapers that were accessible when putting the GD-ROM into a standard CD-ROM/DVD-ROM PC drive. I think this ties back to my earlier example of an informed father buying a game for his child and the kid getting content that he was not aware of. Perhaps that family has a filter on the internet to filter out other inappropriate content, but the resourceful child could still get access to tools to decode a console game image file. Perhaps this seems like a silly example because if the child were that technically savvy, he or she could most likely find ways to get around the internet filter. Regardless of how contrived the situation is, I think it’s very reasonable to rate games based on the content for this very reason.

Another high profile title that was re-rated was the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Many people incorrectly attributed the naked skin to a modification. The content was found on the disc. In order for the content to appear, you needed to modify the game. But, if the texture was there, then it is on the disc being purchased and should be rated in my opinion. The other controversy over the re-rating is that the game stayed at Mature instead of Teen because they found some rotting corpses hanging in a prison as well as heads on spikes. I think that level of gore is consistent with the ESRB Mature rating instead of Teen, so that seems reasonable.

Next, I’d like to talk about the Adults Only rating. Take Two felt that the Adults Only rating for Manhunt 2 was unfair because it effectively kills the game at the retail. In my opinion, it’s silly to take this issue up with the ESRB. The game is clearly for adults only, and if the ESRB deems that its content is worthy of the “Adults Only” rating, I would agree that’s a reasonable rating for the game. The real issue is not with the rating, but rather that Nintendo and Sony won’t allow an Adults Only game to be published for their consoles as well as retailers probably won’t carry the game. Those policies are independent of the ESRB. It’s akin to an NC-17 or unrated version of a film. Some films make it to the theaters with NC-17 ratings. For example, Ang Lee’s latest film “Lust Caution” has received an NC-17 rating, and some theaters are going to show it. However, most retailers will however carry unrated movies that would have received an NC-17 rating. Movies similar in vein to Manhunt 2 like Hostel have a very gory unrated version available at plenty of retailers. The question is – why will retailers that carry essentially NC-17 films not carry Adults Only games? That should be something that Take Two takes up with the retailers, not the ESRB. The other problem with the rating is that the platform holders won’t allow content with that rating to be released on their system. There are many reasons for this. It is understandable that they want to maintain standards that their consoles represent. But, again that’s not the fault of the ESRB. Sony did not want pornography to be released on Betamax, and some people think that’s one of the reasons the format lost. But, it’s quite possible that some people bought Betamax over VHS because they did not want to support a format that would allow content that they disapproved of. Whether it would have any affect on console sales is open to speculation, but I would argue it’s a free market, so the platform holders should restrict whatever content they feel is in their best interest.

Certainly, it would be easier for the ESRB just to lower their standards and rate Manhunt 2 a Mature game and not condemn it to “retail suicide” than to convince stores and platform holders to allow an “Adults Only” or unrated game. I’d argue that’d be the opposite of what the ESRB is supposed to do. They are supposed to as objectively as possible rate a game based on the content regardless of the retail pressure of the publisher. Manhunt is definitely not the first game that had to get content adjusted to see a US mature rating. Some other notable examples were the Punisher, Indigo Prophesy and Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude. I’ve played all three games, and to be honest, I’m glad the content was modified. The Punisher was just sadistic, and I didn’t miss more graphic scenes of torture. Leisure Suit Larry would have been just plain pornographic if it weren’t censored. I was very disappointed my purchase because I was expecting the lovable loser succeeding against all odds in impressing women instead of a crude game revolving around graphic 3D representations of carnal relations. Perhaps I should have expected that since Al Lowe wasn’t involved, but hindsight is 20/20. Indigo Prophesy besides having the worst ending out of any video game I’ve ever played (and I’ve played a ton) had gratuitous sex scenes that took away from the game in my opinion. If they were more graphic (as they were in the European release entitled Fahrenheit), I think it would take away even more. There may be people who wanted this extra adult content, but they had the option of importing the European version of Indigo Prophesy or buying the adults only uncensored downloadable version of Leisure Suit Larry. The publishers of these particular titles didn’t complain. Instead, they worked with the ESRB in order to achieve the rating they were targeting.

Finally, the last big controversy surrounding the ESRB is the issue of user created content. The escapist has a well thought out article about the Obvilion re-rating scandal. The thing I disagree with is that the author seems to fault the ESRB with re-rating the game based on a “mod” despite that the content is on the disc. Does user created content affect the ESRB’s rating decisions? No. Now, let’s look at the facts here. As far as PC games are concerned, there are many PC games with naked skins freely available on the web. Quake III as well as most first person shooters have user created skins with nudity. Quake III has never been re-rated. I read there are even mods for games like Britney’s Dance Beat that insert nudity. That game wasn’t re-rated. Someone created naked skins for Dead or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball for Xbox. That game wasn’t re-rated. So, I think the author’s assertion that the game was re-rated based on a mod is incorrect. The game is rated based on what is on the disc. As I’ve discussed, I think that’s a very reasonable standard.

As far as I know, I don’t think the ESRB is interested in rating games based on user created content. There is always the disclaimer that “game experience may change with online play” at the beginning of all online titles. Let’s pretend they wanted to re-rate games for user created content. If they are rating games based on user input, then they should also re-rate games based on the people you play with online. I’m sure you can play Uno with many people on Live who need to have their mouths washed out with soap. I don’t think the ESRB is going to rate the game Mature just because there are very vulgar people playing on Xbox Live. People were worried about a Forza Motorsport 2 re-rating because someone created a car promoting hate, but one could hear the same hate from any online game with voice chat.

Finally, one major criticism of the ESRB is that sexual content is rated higher than violence. It is true that ESRB rates sexual content higher than violence, but I would argue that it is consistent with the MPAA’s standards and American standards in general. Other countries who feel sexual content in games are more acceptable (Europe for example got the uncensored version of Farenheit/Indigo Prophesy) feel that sexual content is more acceptable in other forms of entertainment. I don’t think one can take issue with the ESRB for this. Rather one should take issue with all the American society and work to promote change in the general beliefs of all Americans. This seems much more difficult than to change the ESRB, but I think it’s the ESRB’s job to rate based on American standards whether they seem foolish to particular outspoken individuals or not.

So, in looking at the issues that have cropped up with the ESRB in recent memory, it seems that the problems are not due to inadequacies or faults in the ESRB. In my opinion, the ESRB does its job and people who complain about it don’t understand what it is supposed to accomplish. If the ESRB failed to do its job - if it gave into pressures and gave all the games the ratings the publishers would like to receive, then the government would probably step in and regulate the content. This would be disastrous for games as an art form as well as a commercial medium. So, if people want change the standards for what video game software gets released, I think changing the ESRB is not the solution. In my opinion, the ESRB is doing a good job rating games and the fault for all these rating slip ups lie with the publisher for not appropriately disclosing all the content that the game contains. If you read gamasutra’s interview with the ESRB, you’ll notice it’s the publisher’s responsibility to disclose the content – not the ESRB’s to find it.

The Case For and Against Digital Distribution0
Matt posted in Games on July 26th, 2007

Digital distribution seems to have a lot of buzz in the industry today. Many people including myself have purchased quite a few awesome games on Live Arcade. I am among the 13 million people with Steam accounts. Certainly, digital distribution has a lot of momentum behind it, but is REALLY the future of the industry? People seem to assume that it’s a good thing, but what are the REAL advantages and problems with it?

Normally, people paint it as the salvation of the industry, and that is most likely because it’s much better for the publishers and developers. Firstly, the physical goods cost money. It’s not much, but maybe at $5 a unit, it adds up pretty quickly, especially if you have a budget release. Secondly, digital distribution cuts out the brick and mortar shops from the retail chain. The brick and mortar shops add cost in several ways. Firstly, they get a cut of the profits. According to this article, the wholesaler price for a $60 game is $47. So, if you buy a game at a shop, the retail channel buys the game from the publisher for generally around 20% less. The shipping from the manufacturer to the retailer’s warehouse to the retail shop has to be paid on top of the these costs. So, in terms of cutting costs, digital distribution is a big advantage.

That’s not to say digital distribution is free. Either running data centers or licensing space from someone else costs money. It’s going to work out to be less than the approximately $20 lost to retailers as well as shipping and manufacturing. If a company were to want to reduce the cost even more, there is always the option of sharing the files via either bittorrent or some bittorrent like client. Of course bittorrent is often used for piracy, but if it were necessary to log into a central server like with steam, then it would make it hard to pirate. So one huge advantage of digital distribution is that it is cheaper for the publisher to get it in consumer’s hands.

Another advantage is that a publisher can offer old games at a discounted price without worrying about fighting for shelf space. For example, Deus Ex was recently released on Steam. That is the type of game that would not be carried by many retailers because it’s old and won’t sell much anymore. There are already so many new games fighting for shelf space that the retailers stand to make more money off of. Putting it on Steam makes a lot of sense because it couldn’t sell at retailers, but there is still a market for it.

Digital distribution opens up new avenues for indie developers because getting an independent game into a brick and mortar shop is very tough. In order to get a game into a store, a publisher needs to invest quite a good bit of money. If they don’t think the game can get that many sales, then they won’t invest it. Now, depending on the cost of development, a game can be profitable but not profitable enough to see a release in store. Oftentimes with indie games, they are risky, so even if a game turns out to be a big hit, it may not immediately obvious by playing the gold master. Digital distribution has little or no upfront cost if you go with a  system already in place (Xbox Live, Steam, etc), so it makes a lot of sense for the publishers.

Digital distribution for the consumer is more complicated. On one hand, you can buy games and play them right then and there without ever leaving your house. Xbox Live has the brilliant feature that you can actually convert the demo for the Live Arcade games into the full game with a few button clicks. That makes it all the more appealing since you can often continue your session from the demo into the full game.

On the other hand, digital distribution can be bad for the consumer. Oftentimes despite the savings to the developers, that isn’t passed on to the consumer. I was going to upgrade Norton System Works. Downloading the upgrade was the same price as buying the boxed version, but the boxed version required an additional shipping cost. I was going to go for it and save a few bucks until I found that I’d only get to download it once. If I lost the installer, then I’d have to buy it again. I had the option of paying for download insurance or something like that, so I could download it multiple times, but at that point it worked out for the same as the shipping. I ended up buying the boxed version and waiting a few days for shipping.

I wanted to purchase Half-Life 2 when I got my new computer. I looked on Steam, and the Half Life 2 Holiday Collection was exactly the same price as it was in the store. If I buy it on Steam, more money goes to the developers. But, I don’t get a case, instruction manual and discs. As a huge game collector, I like having the physical game to add to my collection. Sure, it may be unnecessary, but for no extra money, I’d opt to have the physical item.

Now, I don’t resell games because I’m a collector, but there is a huge market for it. A large portion of Gamestop’s revenue comes from their used game sales. If you buy a digitally distributed game, you lose the option of reselling it. That can hurt a lot of consumers who regularly sell back games in order to buy new ones. It is good for the game developer because then they profit from every sale of the game, but bad for the consumers.

I do however buy a lot of used games. The reason I buy them is twofold. One is that I buy a lot of old and out of print games. Another is I get a lot of random stuff out of the bargain bin that either I don’t particularly want but is really cheap, or things that I heard about or might like that is also pretty cheap. One might think that I’d love the Virtual Console, but I actually dislike it. I like getting the games on the original systems partially because of collector’s value, but also because I like to physically own the game when I have the chance. I do however like remakes with new features like the Castlevania Symphony of the Night for Xbox 360, although its new features were actually pretty weak. Despite the original game has more collector’s value, it’s pretty pricey, so I figured I’d settle with the downloadable version. I’m probably going to pick up the PSP remake also, especially because it comes with a translated version of Rondo of Blood.

So, although I’ve never resold a game, this is an appealing prospect to many people. Another thing for the consumer that digital distribution prevents is renting games from blockbuster or gamefly. Gamefly is perhaps the worst nightmare of video game developers because the gamers can keep the game for as long as it takes to beat it and never purchase another game again. This doesn’t appeal to me, but many find it very appealing – play a game until they tire of it, and move on to a new game. Digital distribution stops both of these things for a consumer, which basically sucks for the people who play games like that. Now, gametap is a digital alternative, but it currently doesn’t support many new games nor does it run on any consoles.

So, are there any conclusions to be made? Although digital distribution can be a real win for the publishers, it’s not as appealing to the consumers in many circumstances. Because of that, it will never replace the retail channels. It is a great avenue to deliver content that wouldn’t get any shelf space in the stores, not the future of our industry at least any time soon. Perhaps publishers can slowly move to that model, but because of its downsides many consumers (including myself) will be slow to adopt it for products with a retail version available. I guess the most important conclusion to make is that the Playstation 4 WILL have an physical disk drive.

The PC is Dead. Long Live the Console!13
Matt posted in The Industry on April 20th, 2007

It’s interesting that several people are spelling the death of the console because consoles are becoming more and more like PCs. Recently, John Romero said, “My prediction is that the game console in the vein of the PS3 and Xbox 360 is going to either undergo a massive rethink or go away altogether. The hardcore gamers are going to either be playing on their PCs or a new PC-like platform that sits in the living room but still serves the whole house over Wi-Fi, even the video signal.”

John Romero’s lost some credibility since nothing he’s worked on since Id has turned out well, but Blizzard’s VP, Itzik Ben Bassat, said the following: “The PC is becoming an entertainment hub - you use it to watch videos and TV, play games, listen to music… With wireless, you can send your content from your PC to anywhere in the house, to your TV, something I already do. You can play PC on your TV because it’s an LCD screen. Consoles are becoming sophisticated PCs which sit in the living room. We’ll have to see how all this develops. Maybe in five years you won’t need a console because you’ll have one PC which delivers content all over your house.”

Finally, Paul Steed said in a recent interview that “The future of gaming is really mobile games and PC games. There’s more computers in the world, there’s more cell phones in the world than there are consoles and that’ll never change.”

They are right that consoles and PCs are starting to fill the same void. If you look at Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, there is very little difference between them and computers. They basically replace your PC for entertainment purposes. You can surf the web, watch movies, download TV shows, and play games on your big flat screen HDTV. Now, these developers are suggesting that the console will go away and the content will all come from the PC rather than the console basically transplanting the PC into the living room.

This is where I think they are wrong. These developers all come from a PC background, so they may have trouble imagining that the PC could be replaced. Firstly, I’m going to talk about why the desktop PC is becoming less and less important in homes. Then I will talk about why the console makes more sense in you living room than a PC (either located physically in that room or connected wirelessly). This should explain why I think the desktop PC at home will die and the console will emerge triumphant.

So, why is the desktop PC going to die? You’ll notice, I qualified that statement. The desktop PC at home will die. The desktop PC is always going to have a place at work, but at some point there, it may be replaced by thin clients. That’s another article for another time. In order to see why it’s going to die, we have to recognize what people use their desktop PCs for. Firstly, there is the communication aspect of it. This includes e-mail, messaging, surfing the web, etc. Then, there’s the entertainment aspect of it. This includes playing games, watching movies, TV, and browsing the internet. I’d say for at least 80% of PC users, that’s it. An astute reader will notice that consoles already do all the entertainment aspects of a home PC, and a cell phone does all the communication aspects of it. Presently, they might not do them as well, but that may change.

The real question is how are these devices going to replace the PC? I don’t think cell phones will replace the PC for all communication purposes immediately, but I think that over time, it will become the device of choice for communication. The main things it is lacking is a good text entry system (although the bluetooth projected keyboard is pretty awesome), and a big enough screen. The screens resolutions will increase over time, and perhaps they will come with a mini-HDMI port, connect to a TV/monitor wirelessly or have an internal projection system in the future. Communication is something important that people want to be able to do anywhere. Having all your e-mails with you wherever you go and being able to access and reply to them is a huge win. Often, someone e-mails me the time I’m supposed to meet them or location, and I completely forget, but I don’t have access to my home PC. E-mail is something that you really want to take with you wherever you go. Having all your contacts for e-mail, messenging and phoning all in one place is very convenient also.

The portable aspect of the phone is a big advantage of the mobile phone over the PC for communication purposes. But, the real question is why do I think the console will win over a PC in the living room? As all the quoted PC developers purport, the PC can live in the living room hooked up to the TV rather than a console. I think it’s reasonable to assume that the one that will win is the one that delivers a much better experience to the user. That is clearly the console. I’ll explain why.

Firstly, and most importantly is the price advantage. Console hardware is subsidized by the hardware manufacturers, which really make them more attractive to the budget minded consumer. The other main advantage is the plug and play aspect of them. You plug it into your TV, and boom! You can run everything you could possibly want. There is no installing software (besides the automatic updates), there’s no driver incompatibilities, games not running because of your system specs, and the applications are generally more stable because they only have to support very few hardware configurations. You don’t have to worry about virus protection on your console. There’s no defragmenting your hard disk.

Here’s a good example. When the very first Rainbow Six came out, I was excited about the game, so I downloaded the demo for PC. I installed the game, updated DirectX, got the latest drivers and all that, and was all set to go. I spent quite a while setting up all my attack routes, strategies, and weapon. Finally, as it was loading the actual level, and I anxiously awaiting the loading bar to finish, so I could enjoy my well laid plans, the game crashed. I was so fed up with it, I uninstalled the demo and never played again. Now, I program for a living. I’m not your average Joe consumer who doesn’t know what a driver is. If I don’t want to struggle to get a game to run on a PC, troubleshoot all the potential problems, then this platform is not ideal for the average Joe consumer. Console sales are increasing and gaining market share over PC games. Why would this trend miraculously reverse just because consoles share a lot of the same functionality? They share a lot of functionality, yes, but the consoles do it better and cheaper.

http://ps3.gamespy.com/playstation-3/unreal-tournament-2007/771700p1.html
What can PCs do better than consoles? The real advantage to PCs are the input devices – mice and keyboards. Besides tradition, there’s no reason they HAVE to be PC exclusive, and more and more console games will use them. Xbox 360 as well as Playstation 3 work with USB keyboards out of the box for all their text entry. Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus as I mentioned previously works with the keyboard and mouse for Playstation 2. Unreal Tournament 2007 for Playstation 3 will work with a  keyboard and mouse. I haven’t heard if the 360 version will support them or not, but they’d be silly not to. It would make sense for Shadowrun the first cross platform competitive game to include keyboard and mouse support on the 360 version, but I don’t think it does. Hopefully, they’ll patch it later to rectify this oversight.

Something that lends credence to my theory is that Apple, Microsoft and Sony are trying to get into these two new platforms for computing. Three huge companies, the two main competitors in the home PC platform and one of the biggest consumer electronic companies, and they are trying to get into these two spaces. I imagine this is because they see the writing on the wall and that these two areas is where the money will be in the future – not the desktop PC. Microsoft saw it before Apple since the Xbox and the PocketPC platform predate the iTV and the iPhone from Apple considerably. Sony may have had the vision of the entertainment PC first with the Playstation 2. The Xbox was apparently developed in reaction to the idea of this new Sony computing platform being in everyone’s home – without running Microsoft’s operating system on it. The PSP is trying to move into that area as well, but from the entertainment side of things. I think the communication mobile PC/phone device will be used for portable entertainment, but I would argue that’ll be the icing on the cake rather than the prime usage just because as Steed said, there are more phones in the world than gaming consoles. Certainly, the Playstation brand commands a larger market share than Sony Ericsson, so that makes sense for them.

I could reiterate my point in my typical fashion, but I think I’ve actually made my point without my usual verbosity. If you don’t believe me, numbers don’t lie. Here’s some graphs from the ESA:

More Wii-actions and Some P-Wii-dictions4
Matt posted in Games, The Industry, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii on April 6th, 2007

Although the Wii has been getting a crap ton of positive feedback, many people seem disillusioned with the system. Chris Hecker had a head-turning rant at Game Developer Conference about how “the Wii is a piece of shit.” His main complaints being that the console isn’t powerful in terms of CPU to do much interesting and that Nintendo doesn’t take games seriously as an art form.

Now, Chris has seemed to do a 180 on the issue and retracted his statements, which to many websites appeared that he was pressured by EA to mollify Nintendo and their fanatics. Whether that is true or not, he doesn’t seem to have much fondness for the system.

Also, the God of War 2 director, Cory Balrog, whose blog was linked on Kotaku, was not impressed with the Wii. His comments are as follows:

“Here are some pics of the sweet wii…though I must be honest it was not everything I had hoped it would be. It was fun…but the wow factor wore off fairly quick. The one game I wanted to play, Trauma Center, was definitely a bit of a let down. The wiimote was woefully inaccurate and sapped the fun of the game. The Wii sports golf and bowling was cool…the boxing is freaking terrible though. In the end I hope to see some cool games come out of it, though it has me worried that the whole “what new thing can you do with the controller” fad will wear off after awhile and I will have left is a much slimmer wireless gamecube. Though the gamecuvbe gave me some great gaming moments so I am not all that bummed. I am still happier playing Zelda on my Gamecube…maybe I am just a luddite like that. Who knows?”

Now, since Cory has posted a response to all the negative feedback he’s been getting. He basically clarified that he wasn’t writing off the Wii – just that he was disappointed with his initial play.

Joystiq recently posted a link about a Microsofter saying that no Wii game’s controls kicks ass. Although that might not seem so surprising, it was surprising to me to read that the Joystiq editor agreed. I thought that I was in the minority. More interestingly, Joystiq mentions Wii remote issues in cooking mama and extends them to the general case. These remote issues are largely what I’m going to talk about in this very long blog post. They also discuss one of the other problems I have with the Wii here: “It still looks like Nintendo won’t back up these amazing sales figures with some real, original Wii titles for quite some time. We’ll just have to enjoy this constant string of Gamecube ports and mini-game based Wii titles apparently.”

Now, I’m not going to say the Wii is a piece of shit. The hardware is not very impressive both from a CPU standpoint as Chris Hecker mentions as well as from a graphics perspective. I have an HDTV and standard definition just doesn’t look good anymore. But, graphics don’t make a game. I was just discussing with a co-worker how much I loved Nights: Into Dreams for the Sega Saturn and how much I love the Sega Saturn in general. Just because the graphics are bad doesn’t mean that the gameplay can’t be fantastic. Much to the chagrin of PSP developers like myself, the Nintendo DS is far outselling the PSP because it has a bunch of really appealing games even though the hardware pales in comparison. I strongly dislike the touchscreen, but I still am tempted to get a DS for games like New Super Mario Bros. and Yoshi’s Island 2. I don’t have very many games for the PSP and the only one I’m really passionate about is Loco Roco (although I do enjoy playing my own game, Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters, but I’m biased). The PSP is a tremendously power piece of hardware. Comparing to the PS2, games two years in the lifecycle of the PS2 don’t look nearly as good as Final Fantasy XII or God of War 2. Likewise, PSP graphics will be much more amazing in three or four years. DS graphics can get better, but since there’s a lot less hardware to work with, the jump won’t be as significant. But again, graphics aren’t consumer’s largest concern.

I’ve been playing Wii for quite a bit since launch trying to get into it, and so far, I’ve been unsuccessful. I’ve played a lot of Wii tennis because my girlfriend (a non-gamer) was really excited by it. I didn’t have a second controller, so we took turns playing – my girlfriend out of her love of tennis and me to defend my game playing honor. I couldn’t have her get a higher score, could I? We both ended up with scores in the 500s. Not terrific, but not terrible (Half way from newbie to pro). We both fancied ourselves as pretty decent Wii athletes. She was really pleased because she thought it felt like real tennis. I have played about three tennis games in my life, so needless to say, I’m a terrible tennis player outside the Wii. Even still, I am frustrated by the lack of feedback that is provided (as I blogged before). I don’t know what part of my swing is taken into account, how to get better because trial and error with no feedback is frustrating. There is no training mode in game to show me how to improve. Perhaps I need to hire a Wii Tennis instructor to educate me on improving my technique. Maybe that’s Nintendo’s plan. They want to start selling video game lessons, since good sport lessons are expensive. Perhaps Reggie can come to my house and coach me. If he’s busy kicking ass, and/or taking names, maybe those “Wii want to play” guys can show me how it’s done. I don’t think it’s too much to ask to have a training manual or an instruction manual that describes what input is taken into account and how to do a successful swing.

On top of that, the lower difficulties also seem to make the actual game play easier, not just the AI. When we took turns playing, we could return the ball most of the time (at difficulty 500). When we played each other, we swung and missed most of the shots. This to me is indicative of the swing timing changing based on your skill level. Although it is nice that they are trying to make it easier for people with less practice, it’s frustrating that doesn’t carry over to multiplayer. The problem with that is I can’t practice without my girlfriend to get extra skill in multiplayer unless I work up to whatever difficulty level multiplayer plays at. Probably the best solution would be to play the game at the skill level of the weaker player. That way the weaker player could stand a chance, but the stronger player would still have an advantage. Another option would be to take the average of both players and use that as the skill level. I could be way wrong about this skill level thing, but regardless of the cause, it didn’t “feel” right to either of us, and it’s up to the game developer to make that so.

Also, I strongly dislike the Wii’s screen positioning system (the thing it uses the IR sensor for). I want to be able to calibrate it like a light gun. I want where I’m pointing to be where it registers. That is what  is intuitive to me. For Sega Dreamcast, I actually taped a laser pointer on top of my light gun, then calibrated the impact point to where the laser pointer hit. I thought that was really cool. The light gun handled it perfectly, and I could aim exactly at the screen. The Wii is the opposite. I get a targeting reticle all the time, but it doesn’t match where I’m pointing the remote in screen space. Maybe I need to experimentally determine a better position for my IR sensor, but I’m really sick of “please point your cursor at the screen” messages. Isn’t Wii supposed to be easy and intuitive? The Wii does have a sensitivity option buried in the poorly designed settings menus, and I was able to decrease it’s sensitivity so there was less jitter, but I wasn’t able to calibrate it the way I’d like. I don’t find that easy to play with, and most if not all of the Wii sports doesn’t use it like that. So, maybe Nintendo’s most “accessible” and easy to play game omitted those controls for a reason.

The first time I played the air hockey game in Wii Play, I beat my friend who had more experience playing the game than I. Sure, I could attribute it to my great skill, but I think it was really that the he kept overshooting the sensor’s boundaries and missed all of the shots. Now, potentially, calibration is an “advanced” feature and maybe the casual gamers won’t understand, but if the first time you play with your Wii, you calibrate it, or maybe a per game calibration, it seems that it would help make the Wii easier to use.

Actually, the sensor boundaries did come in handy for WarioWare’s balancing games. I have horribly shaky hands (maybe that has something to do with why Wii doesn’t work as well for me), so the balancing game was be my bane, but when my cursor was not pointing at the screen, it just saved the last position which could be flat, and I kicked it’s ass.

As a game developer, I’m not impressed with the Wii for the same reason Chris Hecker states. There’s not much CPU to work with. I really like nice graphics, but the most important thing to me is to make a fun game. With extra CPU, I can do a lot of fun things. Perhaps this is because I’m a programmer, and what I want to do is constantly constrained by the limits of the hardware. If I want to have an object with good collision, I may not have the CPU resources to do so. Now, one might argue that fun games don’t hinge on good collision, but I think it helps a lot in many situations. For example, the camera is something that requires very complex collision. If you have more CPU time, you can come up with a  really good camera algorithm that is smooth and never blocked. Doing physics based gameplay or fluids is also very CPU intensive. Now, I’m not saying every game has to be physics based and you can’t have a fun game that has no physics at all, but being able to do some really neat physics tricks definitely can create a lot of fun gameplay. Good pathfinding can be processor intensive. All too often due to CPU constraints, the pathfinding in games ends up with situations that it cannot handle. That restricts design, which is frustrating as a game developer. Doing really advanced AI algorithms is also tricky. Sure, we can have little state machines for every enemy, and that goes pretty far, but what if you want to have an AI co-op player? We had one in the Incredibles: Rise of the Underminer, and it wasn’t very smart. Even the teammates in Gears of War aren’t very smart. Now, oftentimes, that is limited to schedule pressure and not CPU time, but if you want to do something that is processor intensive, like have your AI do a whole bunch of collision checks to discover things about its environment, you will rapidly exceed your budget and have to resort to cheating.

Now, here’s my p-wii-dictions. I think the Wii has a lot of steam right now, but before the end of the year, its sales will level out to around the Xbox 360 and PS3s sales. Why do I think that? Firstly, I think the line up for the immediate future is pretty weak. Minigames, minigames, and more minigames. Nothing is coming out that really delivers on the promise of new, deep gameplay experiences. On top of that, the new controller, while potentially liberating, has many frustrations that I as well as other gamers (at least the joystiq’ers) are enduring. It’s possible that over time, developers will get better at sensing motion, but it seems that some problems are inherent in the design (like not being able to judge the sensitivity bounds of the IR sensor). The heavy hitters for this year, Super Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime 3, are penciled in for the end of the year, but I’d say there’s a 50% chance that one of those titles gets pushed into next year. I don’t have any evidence to support that, but Nintendo’s big first party titles are known for frequently getting delayed. (Take Twilight Princess as an example) I think in 2008 and 2009 more people will own HDTVs and be craving content to display on them. Wii won’t deliver, and they’ll grow tired of the gimmicks and minigames and turn to Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. Now, keep in mind that these predictions are for the United States only. I think Japan is nuts for the Wii and will stay that way, and I’ve heard that Europe doesn’t have much HDTV penetration (although strangely, PS3 has sold quite well).

One may wonder how with so much hype how can it fizzle out? That is an easy one. Tickle Me Elmo. Two Christmases different models of Tickle Me Elmos have been the “hot” toy and everyone HAD to have one. They were very difficult to find (similar to the Wii) and very hyped (also similar to the Wii). But, once the hype wore down, no one cared. I don’t hear very many people talking about how great their Tickle Me Elmo is. As long as supply is less than the demand, people will feel pressured to buy it if they can find it. Hell, I’ve bought some stuff I don’t really like because it was “limited edition”, and I’ve worried I couldn’t find it later. I didn’t care much for Steel Battalion, but when I found out the first run completely sold out and they were issuing a second, I figured I had to pick it up, just in case I ever wanted to play it. Now, I have played it, and I found it pretty frustrating especially when it deleted my saved game. I plan on playing it more now that I have a modded Xbox with the ability to back up my saved game. A worse purchase was the Omnimusha Katana controller, which is absolutely terrible, but it was a limited run and although I couldn’t find a description of what it does, I figured I’d better drop the $70 in case it was really awesome. It turned out to be much worse than I could have possibly imagined. It was a dual shock controller on the handle of a sword, and if you swung the sword, sometimes it would register as the circle button being pressed. Even with Xbox 360, when the Elite model was supposedly limited edition, myself and a friend decided we had to buy it right away! When we discovered it was a whole new SKU, we figured there’s no rush to upgrade to the HDMI capable model, so we are both thinking about holding off. Perhaps they’ll be a price drop or a larger hard disk bundled with HDMI later. So, my point is that the demand for a product is higher when it’s the “hot” thing and hard to find. It seems that the COO of GameStop seems to think that Nintendo is holding back units.  As joystiq reports, “Compared to the PS3’s fluid supply and the fact that the Wii is comprised of cheap, proven and occasionally duct-taped parts, this is not a story that many have found easy to buy. In fact, it’s about as easy to buy as a Wii, which to this day, still seems to be a retail phantom (much like the DS Lite). Managed scarcity is a good technique for keeping your product desirable, but it comes at the expense of leaving people with empty hands, tightly clenched in frustration.”
Now, I agree completely with Joystiq’s assessment. There is no reason that Wiis should be this difficult to find. They’ve been manufacturing GameCubes for over 5 years and duct tape is cheap. In all seriousness, the hardware of everything but the remote should be trivial to manufacture since it’s just a version of 5 year old technology. Honesstly, I’m amazed how fast Sony solved the Playstation 3 manufacturing problems since the cell is brand new technology and an enormous chip. There is no excuse Nintendo can possibly make for producing so few Wiis. Just like the Tickle Me Elmo craze, the manufactured scarcity makes it a “must buy”. For now. But just like Tickle Me Elmos, when that pressure is lifted, there’ll be a lot of disillusioned consumers and bored gamers, I think. The platform will start showing it’s age when consumers buy HDTVs, which prices are dropping quite rapidly. On top of this, the FCC is regulating that by February 17th, 2009, all broadcast television is in HD. Now, I’m not sure if the FCC can regulate cable and satellite television, but if all content providers are already mastering their shows in HD, then I imagine HD cable’s penetration will increase. The two things that are preventing people from upgrading are cost, which is always dropping and already beginning to be reasonable. (For example, Amazon.com has a pretty affordable 27″ LCD for $419.99.)

Now, I’m not the only one who thinks that the Wii is overhyped. Brian Hastings, (who is falsely listed as Insomniac’s CEO), thinks it’s just a fad. Now many people are quick to dismiss his opinion because Insomniac’s PS2 and PS3 outings have been published by Sony. Although I think it’s in his best interest for PS3 to succeed, I think that he would have some say as far as what games Insomniac develops. Many people forget that they are an independent studio. They can make games for whomever they like. It just so happens that they’ve aligned themselves with Sony, and that’s been a very good alliance in the past. If Brian Hastings genuinely thought the Wii was the future of gaming, then wouldn’t it make sense for him to align himself with Nintendo?

The author, Chris Kohler, argues that the Wii is for real. Even though he makes some convincing points, I still don’t agree. Firstly, he loses credibility points for getting the title of Brian Hastings incorrect when it was even presented correctly on the Neogaf post he linked to. Firstly, he compares the battle to the DS. I think that’s a very bad comparison. The DS’s main competitor at least initially was not the PSP but the GBA. Nintendo has been the ONLY one to maintain a profitable handheld game console. All the rivals have failed spectacularly except Sony, which is putting up a darn good fight. Secondly, Nintendo in the home console wars is coming off a loser. Playstation and to a much lesser extend have gobbled up a lot of mindshare, which is similar to the PSP fighting the DS. Nintendo has the portable game mindshare, and in the portable space, Sony is the under dog.

His second main point, I also think is a bad one. It hinges on “research” showing that consumers with HDTVs aren’t ordering High Def channels and are using DVD players with composite cables because “it looks fine”. Well, firstly, I’m skeptical of this “research” since it isn’t cited. There are many studies that are conducted in a very poor manner in order to provide convincing numbers to someone who would benefit a certain result from a study. Secondly, (even if that is true) I think this is a completely separate issue. As far as High Def channels, in my area it costs an extra $10 a month to get any High Def channel, and there aren’t many of them at all. Plus, many programs (such as the news) don’t really benefit from High Def. So, I think that’s the real reason they don’t upgrade their cable. I think people who DO have an HDTV are interested in HD content. If they weren’t, why would they buy an HDTV? Using composite cables is a symptom of that the HD revolution confusing the average consumer. A good example of this is try asking your parents or girlfriend if they should use S-video or composite to hook up their DVD player. They probably won’t know which is better. If you check behind their TV, they’ll probably be using composite because that’s what the player came with or what they have lying around. With HD formats, it has only introduced more wires, and to the non-geeks, it’s not clear which is better. For example, my parents bought an HDTV. They also bought a Blu-ray player. (I’m not clear why they bought Blu-ray over HD DVD, and upon asking, they claimed I told them to, which I didn’t because presently, I’m a bit more partial to HD DVD, but that’s a story for another article. Since I have both, I’m not really taking sides, so I may be partial to Blu-ray more later.) Anyway, The salesperson at Best Buy claimed they need a $100 HDMI cable to display the 1080p signal. They purchased it. Now, if they knew what HDMI was, they would know it’s ludicrous to spend $100 on a HDMI cable. Since it is a digital interface, as long as the cable can conduct a signal, the cost doesn’t matter because it’s binary. Either the signal is there or it isn’t. That’s the big advantage to digital over analog. Noise cannot be introduced. I have a $6 HDMI cable that works perfectly. Now, what was even more interesting was that their Blu-ray player INCLUDED an HDMI cable, so they ended up returning the insanely overpriced cable. Now, if you think my parents are dumb, you’d be wrong. My dad has a PhD in electrical engineering. It just so happens that he isn’t particularly interested in home theater equipment and is unfamiliar with HDMI, and they probably didn’t do much comparison shopping for HDMI cables either. Perhaps this was a bit long-winded. Although, I imagine if you are reading this, you are accustomed to my writing style, which is wordy to say the least. My point is just that people who buy HDTVs buy them for a reason. They are interested in HD content. I’m guessing they’ll be able to tell the difference. Maybe it’s not worth buying a next gen DVD player. Probably not. Progressive scan DVD players are better, but I imagine it’s not enough of a difference for the average viewer to notice. So, if HDTV owners want HD content, I think they’ll turn to video games. And Wii doesn’t deliver.

Similar to discrediting Brian Hasting’s opinion, one might speculate that since High Impact’s first game was published by Sony, I might be rooting for Sony. On reading my blog, it may seem that I prefer Xbox 360. If you looked into my bio, you might realize that I worked for Microsoft on the Xbox Software Services team as an intern. Maybe my loyalty stems from there? Maybe those two biases combine to a hatred of Nintendo? That’s funny to me because I never owned a Playstation 1, and was often accused of being a Nintendo fanboy in high school because of my love for SNES and Nintendo 64. So, you can suspect I’m biased towards whomever you like. It would seem by Occham’s Razor that the answer to this would be that I’m just being honest. I fancy myself as an honest person – perhaps to the point that it’s a weakness. I was let down by GameCube and as I am describing here,  I’m not fond of the Wii yet.

I’m not giving up on my Wii. I’ll continue to pick up games here and there and play them from time to time, but most of my gaming time in the immediate future will be dedictated to PS2 and Xbox 360 because there are a number of titles that I’m excited about playing. I will however pick up Super Paper Mario soon, although that’s essentially a GameCube game and probably rarely uses the Wii controls, which I suppose I can’t complain, except everyone who has a GameCube and not a Wii is pretty much out of luck. I’m also mortified of Nights for Wii. If you are unfamiliar with Nights, let me say that it’s not a horror game. It’s an amazing game for Saturn unlike anything else I’ve ever played that is getting a Wii sequel. Now the reason this has struck terror into my heart is that as much as I love Sega (and I most certainly do), their output recently seems to be eroding all my favorite Sega franchises. Sonic, their most beloved, has been destroyed. Who even thought that was possible? The EyeToy Nights minigame was completely unplayable. I’m also very nervous about the new Golden Axe Riders, in development by Secret Level. If they destroy those two franchises, all they have to do is ruin Panzer Dragoon and Samba de Amigo, and my very soul will be crushed.

Why Microsoft Should Make DS Games3
Matt posted in Games, Xbox 360 on March 22nd, 2007

Now, many people may not be aware, but Rare has continued to make games for Nintendo handhelds after their purchase by Microsoft. Since the Microsoft purchase, Rare has published through THQ Banjo Pilot (GBA), Sabur Wulf (GBA), It’s Mr. Pants (GBA) and Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge (GBA). Nintendo has also published Donkey Kong Country 1 and 2 for the GBA and Diddy Kong Racing DS. It’s unclear to me whether Rare actually developed these ports or if Nintendo had someone else do the dirty work, but the THQ titles were original work done for the GBA platform. It’s unlikely that the THQ contract was signed before the purchase because otherwise Nintendo would have published them. It’s possible they were already in development before the purchase, but wouldn’t it have been in Microsoft’s best interest to bury them? Alternately, Microsoft could use the quality titles to push their platforms like Windows Mobile for handheld computers and phones. Sure, they’d make a whole lot less money by releasing it for Windows Mobile, but Microsoft is a platform company. Any profit or loss on a game barely has any effect on the profits of Microsoft, which are largely driven by Windows and Office sales. Any games that further cement Windows’ grasp on home computers or  make Microsoft’s Windows platforms on consumer devices (either Xbox 360, or a Windows CE derivation) more successful is a good move, since Microsoft stands to make more money by growing their platforms.

So, Rare’s handheld releases don’t really make sense to me. Microsoft’s licensing of their IPs (MechAssault and Age of Empires) to DS developers is a questionable move also. But, when Microsoft’s Shane Kim said that Viva Pinata makes sense on the Nintendo DS, I was confused. Now, my first thought was that they are merely trying to hurt Sony in the portable market. That may be, but the more profitable Nintendo’s handheld market is, the more losses they can sustain in the console market. Because of their continued handheld profits, Nintendo was able to easily rebound from a relatively unsuccessful GameCube console to create the Wii, which for the time being, is selling much faster than the 360 ever did. So, despite Peter Moore’s Wii love, Microsoft should start thinking of Nintendo as a rival since the Wii’s market penetration is rapidly approaching the 360s. Analysts have been quick to change their tune about the Wii after it’s been getting the warmest consumer reception out of the big three.

So, I’ve pointed out many reasons why the Microsoft/Nintendo alliance doesn’t make sense. Judging from the title, there clearly must be a reason why I think Microsoft SHOULD make DS games. The title wasn’t a clever trick – there is a reason in my opinion. It’s to successfully gain some of the kid market share, which  Microsoft has been unsuccessful in doing. Viva Pinata is similar to Pokemon. They are both targeting children. They both have video games. Pokemon is a lot more successful than Viva Pinata. The main difference? The Pokemon series is primarily a portable video game franchise whereas Viva Pinata currently only exists on the Xbox 360. The Xbox 360 costs a minimum of $300, where Nintendo’s handhelds are usually around $100. Every kid has a handheld, whereas many kids don’t have Xbox 360s. Kids are usually late adopters to the video game console war since they don’t have the disposable income of adults. So, it seems that the best way to get more kids interested in Viva Pinata would be a DS game.

Viva Pinata DS games might get some kids interested in the franchise, but it may not achieve the ultimate goal of expanding the audience of the Xbox 360 system. What Microsoft needs to do is make playing the DS game reveal secret codes for the 360 version. The codes can give you downloadable items for free or unlock exclusive content on the disc. It doesn’t really matter what it does, but if a kid is playing a game and the rewards are something in a different game, all of a sudden the kid is going to want the other game. I don’t know if there’s an official child psychology study to back that up, but here’s an example. If you tell a kid you’re giving him a present, but he has to go to his Aunt’s house in another state to receive it, I bet you that kid is going to spend the rest of the day begging you to take him/her there. So, cross promotion although it may seem pretty shameful to adults (especially having an NPC in Dungeon Siege 2 shill the PSP game), but  I think kids are less sensitive to that. In a game like Viva Pinata, I don’t think it would be bad even for adults. Viva Pinata is not an role playing game. Although it may be a very compelling game, I wouldn’t describe it as immersive unlike most RPGs. It doesn’t ruin the Viva Pinata universe to mention the fact that it’s a game. Although the pinatas may be cute and lovable, I don’t think they are trying to convince you that they are living breathing entities (do pinatas breathe?) unlike most RPGs, which are about playing a role  in another world. 

So, although I question some of Microsoft’s current handheld endeavors, creating Viva Pinata games on the DS that give you special gifts or features in the 360 version seems like a really intelligent strategy to grow the Viva Pinata brand, which Microsoft is interested in doing.

Developer Reactions to Press Reactions3
Matt posted in My Work on February 13th, 2007

Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters came out today or comes out tomorrow depending on who you ask. The press reactions so far have been pretty favorable, which has been really great to hear. Here are some links:

IGN - 90%
GamePro - 85%
Yahoo! Games - 100%
Games Radar - 80%
GameZone - 90%
Game Helper - 90%
1UP - 70% 

Now, perhaps the most noteworthy review is 1up’s. Now, I’m not complaining about a 7.0. On previous games I’ve worked on, a 7.0 was something to feel good about. What I’m complaining about is that the review is very poorly written in my opinion. If you read the review, you’ll notice that very little is about our actual game. It gives very little specifics. The large portion of it is about how it falls short of the PS2 games high standards. Now, I am a huge fan of the first three Ratchet and Clank games for the PS2. I’m well aware of how high they set the bar. If the author doesn’t think this game lives up to the legacy of the previous games, that’s understandable. That’s probably worth mentioning in the review. My complaint is although 7.0 according to 1up’s rating scale is “good”, very little of the article is spent backing that up. Most of the article is spent bashing it for not living up to its PS2 brethren. When I read a review, I’d like to know why it got the score it did, but unfortunately, this article only talks about the game in a negative light. On reading the text, I wouldn’t have guessed that they give it a 7.0. That, to me, is a sign of a bad review. The review should be supporting the score you gave. A review where the score is a surprise – completely incongruous to the article – is sloppy. Confusing the readers is not an admirable journalistic technique.

What makes it even more frustrating, is the reviewer who seems to put the previous Ratchet games on such a high pedestal is not even familiar with them. Here’s a quote: 

“Some of the gadgets are new and innovative (I’m thinking especially of the PDA, which lets you access the ammo vendor from anywhere…for a premium price).”

Now, as most Ratchet fans are aware, the PDA was in the original Ratchet & Clank as well as Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal. So, it seems that the author who is quick to make comparisons to the original Ratchet & Clank series did not have familiarity with them.

Now, maybe you think that I’m being immature or overly-sensitive to call out this poor review. But, I’m upset. I’m upset because the author is telling me that I did a bad job. That’s fine. I like hearing all different opinions about my work, so I can improve it, but it’s irritating because (in my opinion) HE’S doing a bad job at his job with the inaccuracies and inconsistencies. Perhaps, someone should offer reviews of game reviews. I don’t think this one would rate all that highly. People on the gamefaqs boards seem to agree.