Why the Current State of the Wii is Depressing1
Matt posted in Games, The Industry, Wii on May 21st, 2009

I have trouble finding games I want to buy on the Wii. I want to like the Wii, but there are just no games besides Super Mario Galaxy that I really feel are worth playing in the entire library of software. I quit Zelda after an hour or two because I got sick of hearding goats and cats. I’m sure the game gets better, but I just couldn’t force myself to go through the boring start. I wrote a small novel on my thoughts on Super Mario Galaxy on my blog, but the short answer is that I thought it was good and not great. It could have been great had I had a second analog stick and no motion controls. If you are curious as why I felt that way, get a big cup of coffee and start reading here and here. Wii Sports got dull for me pretty quickly, and I don’t much care for WarioWare. Sega let me down with Nights and Samba de Amigo. To be fair to the developer, Samba de Amigo couldn’t be done well on the Wii due to the fact that the Wii-mote can’t sense height, but perhaps the developers didn’t realize that was the case until after the signed the contract. This year, I’ll probably pick up Klonoa once it price drops despite that I already have the PS1 game, and House of the Dead: Overkill once it gets cheap despite that I hate the Wiimote as a light gun (because it isn’t). I’m a huge House of the Dead fan, so just like I picked up Nights and Samba de Amigo despite their abysmal reviews (although I got them pretty cheap), I can’t NOT buy a House of the Dead game. (I didn’t buy House of the Dead 2 and 3 for Wii though because I already have both games.) Two games (neither at full price) is a really really WEAK year. In fact, I think I bought Nights and Samba de Amigo this year, so if that’s the case, I bought NOTHING for Wii last year, which is probably the first time in my life I didn’t buy a game for a current gen console for an entire year. I even bought an SNES game last year, so it’s really strange that there was nothing on the Wii that I wanted. Maybe they’ll be some surprises for this year at E3, but after Nintendo’s snorefest last year, I doubt it’ll be anything I care about.

Anyway, I was complaining about the Wii being a huge disappointment to a friend, and he mentioned that the only game he felt that used the Wii well was Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. I’m not really a Metroid fan, and I don’t play FPSes without a keyboard and a mouse if I can help it, so I’m not really interested in that game. I told him that the real problem is that the general Wii market doesn’t want games like that or games that I personally would enjoy for that matter. I thought of a clever way to illustrate it that seems worth sharing with my blog reader. (Hi dad!) Compare the following:

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
Release date (US): 8/27/07
Release date (EU): 10/26/07
Release date (JN): 03/06/08
Budget (estimated): $5,000,000 [This is an estimation by me with very little information to go on, so I make no promises to the accuracy]
Sales (estimated): 1.53 million (source: vgchartz.com)
Review Average: 89.64% (source: gamerankings.com)

Carnival Games
Release date (US): 8/28/07
Release date (EU): 10/26/07
Release date (JN): ?? (it sold a negligible amount in Japan, so it doesn’t really matter)
Budget (estimated): $500,000 [This is an estimation by me with very little information to go on, so I make no promises to the accuracy]
Sales (estimated): 3.29 million (source: vgchartz.com)
Review average: 59.21% (source: gamerankings.com) 

Metroid Prime cost 10 times as much in my estimation (actually, it’s probably more, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt). There is only one day difference in the release dates as well, so both were selling under the exact same market conditions.  I think it’s impossible to find titles with such similar release dates internationally (only one day difference in the US and the same in Europe. Both titles didn’t break 100k in Japan, so it’s moot). Metroid was a great game according to critics and Carnival Games was a stinker. Now as a gamer, you’d probably want to see more games like Metroid Prime 3. But if you worked at a publisher, which project would you greenlight? Metroid Prime 4 or Carnival Games 2? If you chose Metroid Prime 4, you probably wouldn’t keep your job for long since publishers are in the business of making money - not doing favors to gamers.

In the end, I think Nintendo’s blue ocean strategy of making a casual console worked too well. The loyal Nintendo fan base are the real victim’s of Nintendo’s newfound success. Luckily, there are enough titles that I want to play on other consoles (PS3/360 and pretty much every other older console), that I’ll cope. However, I feel rather sorry for a gamer that chose the Wii over a 360 that isn’t really interested in the casual titles.

PS: No I haven’t played World of Goo. I want to, but I’m going to play it on PC because I think the mouse makes a better mouse than the Wii-mote. I bought Strongbad and Sam & Max for PC as well.

Super Mario Galaxy: Good but Needs Improvement6
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.

More Wii-actions and Some P-Wii-dictions5
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.

Wii-actions and Wii-views3
Matt posted in Games, The Industry, Xbox 360, Wii on November 21st, 2006

I have had about an hour of time to play with my brand new Wii. In the limited time that I’ve played Wii Sports (about an hour), I’m not very impressed with that game. My overall impression is that the motion control doesn’t work as well as I would like, there’s a lot of randomness, and there’s no way to get feedback on how to improve your technique. I’ll break it down by sport.

Baseball – Baseball could have been cooler, but I think they dumbed it down to the point that it’s not very interesting to play. All the players do is pitch and bat. Pitching could have been more interesting if they tried to interpret your motion as an actual pitch, but instead if yo u want to throw a curve ball, you hold down a button combo. Batting just requires swinging. I think that it’s all about timing and how fast you swing (but again, I’m not sure because they don’t give you any feedback). Up and down motion doesn’t matter. The outfielders’ behavior seems random. Will they catch your pop fly? Not if you are lucky.

Bowling – I found this frustrating. I’m not exactly sure how it determines the direction the ball will curve from your motion. Your throws don’t always go straight and I’m not sure what I need to do physically to curve the ball. Also, in this game, the Mii’s gestures don’t match yours. Rather, to bowl properly, you have to match the on screen character’s motion. I found this frustrating also. I thought the whole point of the motion control was so that the in game avatar could match your motions, not the other way around. Rather than informing you that you have to match the character, it gives messages informing you that your timing is off, but doesn’t really explain you should look at the position of the Mii’s arm for an indication of the proper timing. Maybe I’m just slow to pick up these things, but if I, a video gamer for life, have trouble getting it right, won’t non-gamers? Maybe not. Maybe it’s naturally intuitive for non-gamers, and I am inhibited from approaching it in the same way because I’ve used traditional gaming interfaces, but I doubt it.

Boxing – I didn’t play this for very long, so maybe I’m a bad judge, but I had trouble getting the different moves working, so I decided to resort to my Mocap Boxing technique of flailing wildly, and I managed to best my friend who was trying to play for real.

Golf - This is probably the best of the bunch. I’m not huge into golf games, but I can see how actually swinging the club is more fun than stopping a moving bar at the right location. I still ran into a bit of frustration when trying to swing softly. I would swing slowly, and it wouldn’t pick up the motion. Then when I finished my swing, the character was holding the club in the wrong position relative to mine. Again, there isn’t much to this game as far as user control and all that. You can’t hook the ball. You just control the speed at which the ball is hit. The nice part about this game is that it seems clear that swing speed is all that matters.

Tennis – This suffered from similar problems as baseball in terms of what motions are taken into account. You don’t have to move your characters. They move automatically, which isn’t as annoying as outfielders that can cost you the game, but it seems like it always play doubles, and you can’t control which character swings if you are playing for both of them. Several times, I wanted the front character to dive for it, but instead the rear player swung, and there wasn’t time for the rear player to swing again when the ball was close to him. I suppose I could get used to the timing, but it was still a bit frustrating. The game seems like pong with gestures. Although pong was a great game for the time, if I have a sophisticated input device, I’d like to have more control of the game than when the character hits the ball (and maybe how hard).

So, all in all, I’m a bit disappointed with Wii Sports. The motion controls usually work more like gestures than actually having control of the object. Moving the Wii-mote is more fun than pressing a button, but these games don’t seem all that good regardless of input mechanism. Hopefully, more interesting titles will come out that use the wii-mote better. I’m interested in Trauma Center. I haven’t gotten a chance to play it, but I might enjoy that better.

I also got a chance to play Zelda for about an hour, and I’m surprised it’s getting such good reviews. It would have been good two years ago, but now it seems dated both graphically and gameplay-wise. The graphics don’t even seem that great for a GameCube game when compared to something like Resident Evil 4. That’s certainly excusable though. Graphics don’t make a game fun, but they do help create an immersive experience. The gameplay seems dated for many reasons. Firstly, there are no voice overs. I don’t think this is excusable. In order to have good graphics, it’s hard work because developers have to squeeze the maximum performance out of the system. Playing voice overs is not very difficult at all from a technical standpoint. Sure you have to get voice actors to record them, but it adds a lot to the game in my opinion.

Another main reason the gameplay feels dated is because there is only one solution to every problem. Hopefully, you won’t mind the small spoilers, but this example is hardly a plot point. When you go into the first city, there are two people with problems that obviously need fixing. One problem is the shop owner is missing her cat. The other problem is a woman is missing her baby cradle. I figured I’d try and get the shop owner her cat first because I wanted to actually get a weapon. (The store sells a slingshot) So, the cat ran away from me when I walked over, so I tried to herd it over to the shop. I did this for a while and almost got the cat where I wanted it to go, but it eventually got stuck under the bridge, so I figured that wasn’t the best way to go about it. I tried talking to the shop owner, but I had no choice to try and tell her where the cat is. I talked to her husband, and he didn’t mention the cat. Of course there is no dialog tree at all since Link is apparently mute. Okay fine. I figured I’d do the baby cradle thing. That got me the fishing pole. I caught a fish, and the cat followed me. I tried to walk into the store with the cat following me, but when I entered the store, Link was unable to communicate to the melancholy shopkeep that the cat was just outside. Her husband was outside, but he apparently isn’t interested in recovering his wife’s cat. He just said the same thing he said to me 5 minutes ago when I wanted to talk to him.

There’s no camera control, and the camera has a lot of collision problems. I can understand that implementing a camera with proper collision can be difficult on something with limited CPU time like the Nintendo 64, but the Wii has a lot more horsepower. A good camera can be done without taking too much of the CPU on the GameCube, so it definitely should be feasible on the Wii. Although The Incredibles, which I worked on, may not be the most enjoyable game, it had a darn good camera on all three previous gen SKUs (including GameCube). Not having camera control is really frustrating. It was always nice to line up the camera behind your character before attempting a jump to ensure that the character will make the jump distance. Unfortunately, this is not possible. In the limited time I’ve played the game, I’ve already missed a jump because I couldn’t line the camera up with the gap.

On top of all this, the game starts off slllllllllloooooooooooooooowwwwww. I’m not saying it won’t get better, its just that usually you want to grab the audience with some exciting stuff, so that they’ll want to play more. There was an interesting article in Game Developer Magazine about this (The Power of Pacing in the August 06 issue), although I disagree with some of the examples the author gives. (I loved the beginning of Psychonauts, which he criticizes) Upon watching me try to lure a cat to the shopkeep, one of my friends said that he was no longer interested in the game anymore. I’m going to bear the boring beginning in the hopes that it picks up soon, but I don’t know how many menial tasks I can stand.

Another flaw is that it’s Zelda. Although that may not seem like a flaw, I’m trying to say that it’s the same Zelda that you’ve been playing every iteration barring Zelda 2 and Majora’s Mask. Interestingly, the two titles where they changed the formula are the most hated of all the Zelda games (besides the CD-i atrocities). The Zelda formula never changes, and frankly, I’m getting sick of it. The Wii-mote is just an input mechanism to control exactly the same things that all the Zeldas have. I want innovation! I want gameplay advancements. Besides changing the way you do the actions in Zelda, it’s the same game as Ocarina of Time with an added wolf mode, and although I haven’t gotten the opportunity to play as the wolf, I’ve read that it’s nothing all that special. If I wanted to play as a wolf, a friend has mentioned that Okami has better lupine combat. Is Zelda a bad game? I haven’t played enough to judge. I doubt that it’s bad. But I can say that it is not worthy of the the A+ reviews it’s getting because many of the problems I have will persist throughout the game (especially the camera problems). Why is it getting such good reviews? Because it’s Zelda. Gamespot posted a review giving it an 8.8 and fans freaked out so much that one editor wrote the following:

“It’s the same damn game we’ve all been playing for the last 15-odd years. Hey, guess what? You get to go into dungeons…and find items…and put together pieces of heart to make new heart containers. I haven’t gotten very far into it, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Triforce is in the mix at some point. There’s a difference between tradition and ossification, and Nintendo’s been content to let this series stay the same for too damn long. What’s more, in a lot of ways it’s actually getting to be pretty annoying.”

Interestingly, the post has been pulled down, but kotaku posted a quote while it was up.

Gamasutra’s column Blogged Out, referenced a blog post by Stuart Roch from Treyarch that suggests that Gears of War’s 95% percent was undeserving. Now, I absolutely love Gears of War, but I have only played the first half an hour, so it’s quite possible I haven’t played enough for the issues he mentions to get on my nerves. (However, I managed to have some issues with Zelda that got on my nerves during that same duration). Now, assuming Gears of War was not deserving of its 95% review scores (which Stuart admitted he hadn’t played enough of the game to rule that), and I feel pretty safe in saying that Zelda doesn’t deserve a 96.5% on gamerankings.com, which it currently has. Why would it be that reviewers would rate them so highly?

Part of it is that the scale seems very skewed. A 70% is considered bad. If I don’t know anything else about the game other than the review, I don’t want to play a game that receives a 70%. If the scale ranges from 0-100%, you’d think that 50% would be average. I suppose the way it works is like the way we are graded (at least in the US), but with 50% being the norm, there would be more room for reviewers to point out inadequacies with an otherwise great game. Also, I think reviewers want to give ratings that the fans will agree with. Although this may go against journalistic integrity, fans don’t like reading reviews that they don’t agree with. 1up.com had some backlash with its review of Neverwinter Nights 2, and of course, as Stuart mentions, Eurogamer had backlash about its review of Gears of War, and Gamespot about its 8.8 favorable review of Zelda. I imagine some fans might want to turn to other news sources to find one more in line with their own preferences in gaming, so it may not be in site’s best interests to alienate the readers. 1up although they took down their review of Neverwinter Nights 2, they still gave it a relatively bad score in its re-review. So, what can we do? Who can we trust on reviews? I think all too often people forget that there is no way to objectively review a game, since whether a game is good or not is a matter of opinion. I really enjoyed Sudeki, but it only has a 73% on gamerankings.com. Does that mean it’s a bad game? Does that mean it’s an only okay game? Well, no. That just means reviewers didn’t like it as much as I did. Sudeki certainly didn’t have a lot of hype or fans following it, but it was similar to Zelda. Had Sudeki been released as a Zelda game, would it have gotten higher reviews? I’d say so because people would want it to live up to their expectations. Sure, Sudeki may have changed too much of the Zelda formula, (which I think is a good thing) so Zelda fans might have complained (like they did about Majora’s Mask and Zelda 2), but I guess Zelda fans don’t mind playing the same thing over and over again.

So, Sudeki would have gotten higher reviews if it were a Zelda game because of all the Zelda fans that would want it to be good. I know I wanted Sonic Heroes to be good since I really love Sonic, so I thought it was a pretty good game while playing it, but in hindsight, it wasn’t very good at all. What about Gears of War? It is a new IP. That’s very true, but it had a lot of expectations before it came out. Everyone I work with can tell you that I have been raving about Gears of War since I saw CliffyB’s demo at E3. Certainly there were a lot of expectations because of all the hype, and I’m sure people who were excited about it wanted it to be good. Now, I’m not trying to say that Gears of War wasn’t deserving of its high marks. When I play more, I can be a better judge of that. But, I think people who are excited about any title want it to turn out good and that includes the reviewers. It can skew the results. If you listen to the 1up yours podcast for 11/17, one journalist goes on at great length about how Twilight Princess is the best game ever, but another seems to have the same viewpoint as I. Could it be that the huge Zelda fan had a lot of expectations, and he wanted the game to live up to it? It’s hard to say, but I would say yes. I may be guilty of the same thing for Gears of War.

Virtual Virtual Boy0
Matt posted in Wii on October 3rd, 2006

The year was 1995. I was 13 and hooked on Nintendo. I was the proud owner of an NES, SNES and a GameBoy. I thought Nintendo couldn’t lose and was very excited about the promise of their new system, Virtual Boy. It came out for a whopping $180, which was expensive compared to the other Boy Nintendo had (which started at $109). My mom had the foresight that it would drop in price, so she didn’t buy it for me then. (She also had the foresight to not buy me the Power Glove. She said we could wait until it was $30, but when it was $30, I no longer wanted it. I guess the marketing effect of The Wizard had wore off. Interestingly, if my mom, a non gamer, [I’ve tried to get her interested in games with no success] can figure out that a product is going to flop, it’s amazing that people at the company that made it can’t) When it went down to $70, she finally thought the price was low enough, so I became the proud owner of Nintendo’s latest and greatest (although, it went down to $30 when they were trying to get rid of them, so maybe she should have waited longer). I picked up a bunch of games for about $4 a pop from Blockbuster (they did rent them for a bit, but by this point, they had given up). Many people complained about the monochrome graphics, but red happens to be my favorite color, so I didn’t mind. I thought the games were pretty cool too. From Red Alarm, which actually featured 3D rendered wireframe graphics (most games were sprite based), to the games that would have had a better home on another console like Panic Bomber (which was a Bomberman themed puzzle game similar to Yoshi), I thought 3D could make any game better. I read all the health information and took it seriously. I tried to set the IPD (inter pupil distance) correctly, although I was never able to set it up so all four corner icons were perfectly clear. I took breaks when the game recommended it in order to prevent eye strain.

Despite my care for the safety warnings, the day after a gaming session, I would have terrible headaches. It wasn’t too hard for my parents and I to figure out that the Virtual Boy was the cause of them. My parents had to pry the Virtual Boy from my eager hands, since after receiving a taste of gaming in true 3D, I didn’t want to be constrained in 2 dimensions again. Despite my parents returning my original Virtual Boy, I ended up buying another Virtual Boy off a friend a few years ago. The only problem is that I am afraid to use it because I may suffer though the terrible headaches.

Now, with the Virtual Console for Wii, all the Nintendo consoles will be replayable for those who missed them, save one, the Virtual Boy. Now, many of you may say that they can’t do the Virtual Boy without the special headset. If the Virtual Boy were full color, that may be a problem, but because it’s monochromatic, it perfectly lends itself to red and blue 3D. If you recall, Square pioneered this on the NES with Rad Racer and 3D World Runner. I don’t know if you had any better luck with the 3D modes in those games (press the select button to toggle the amazing 3D effects), but they certainly didn’t look 3D to me. Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves feature 3D with red and blue outlines, but to be honest, it really hurt my eyes. I promised myself before I started the game that I would play it through all the 3D segments with 3D enabled (only a few levels allowed you to turn on the 3D mode thankfully), but by the end of the game, I was dreading the 3D segments. I’m not trying to discourage you from playing Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves. It’s a great game, and I really enjoyed it, but I would definitely recommend against the 3D segments. It’s a great novelty, but not worth enduring the eye aches.

There has been plenty of successful monochromatic red and blue 3D things like Spy Kids 3D for example. I remember a very long time ago, ABC had TGIF (Thank Goodness It’s Friday - their family friendly Friday prime time line up that included better forgotten shows like Family Matters and Step by Step) in 3D. What could be better than a 3 dimensional Urkel? Possibly only Jaleel White voicing Sonic! I think the problem with Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves was that they did full color characters with 3D outlines, so it managed to confuse your eyes. If you’re interested in what playing Virtual Boy with red and blue 3D is like, people have already written emulators. Here’s a screenshot:

So, Nintendo, I know you think of Virtual Boy as your red headed step child, but there are plenty of fans like myself out there who would love to play it in a more eye friendly manner! I promise I will buy every single Virtual Boy game you release on your Virtual Console even if I already have the cartridge! I’m not going to buy any of your other rereleases because I have all of the old systems and hundreds of cartridges, so you can’t offer me anything worth buying besides Virtual Boy. Please? Do I have to start a petition? Although, according to Telltale Games, those don’t work, and they had much better luck with fans just contacting Nintendo. So, everyone start e-mailing Nintendo begging for Virtual Virtual Boy!

Why is the Mouse PC Only?4
Matt posted in Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii on September 20th, 2006

I haven’t had too much time to game recently because of work, but I did buy Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus, and I’ve enjoyed it so far. Sure, it doesn’t live up to Final Fantasy VII. Yes, its gameplay isn’t original in the least bit, but if you’re like me and can’t wait for Final Fantasy XII, it’ll definitely help you pass the time. My favorite part about it is that you can actually use any USB keyboard and mouse to play with the preferred FPS controls. If you are running out to the store just because of that, let me first caution you that it doesn’t work all that well. I think they are just mapping the mouse input into joystick commands, so it definitely feels a bit wonky. I was very eager to try my preferred first person peripherals out (I got some amusement that I was using a Microsoft keyboard and mouse with my PS2), and once I adjusted the sensitivity to where I wanted it, I had to pick up the mouse  about 10 times to complete a 180 degree turn. So, I had to jack the sensitivity way up in order to turn around at any reasonable speed, but then it was too sensitive for me to aim. Luckily, there is a forgiving auto-aim that made the game playable with the poor mouse controls. Sure, it’s definitely not ideal, but I still prefer that to playing with a gamepad. (Although, when I had to do the third person melee combat, I picked up my DualShock 2). All of this has really made me wonder, why do console game developers shun the mouse?

Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 both have USB ports. You can already play at least one PS2 game with a keyboard and mouse, so I’m sure it will be possible for Playstation 3 also. Xbox 360’s dash already supports USB keyboards for entering in Xbox Live information, so I’m sure it would be easy for Microsoft to expose mouse and keyboard drivers to developers. Heck, you could even play first person shooters for Dreamcast (Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament) with a keyboard and mouse. Then why can’t I play any next gen first person shooters the way that I want to? I would enjoy Perfect Dark Zero much more if I could use a keyboard and mouse to control it. I can understand that Microsoft didn’t want to do it with the original Xbox since they were trying to fight the idea that the console was just a Windows PC in the living room. I think they managed to shake that idea, so what is the hesitation with Xbox 360? Sony is trying to convince the world that the Playstation 3 is more than just a console – it’s a PC. This may be to justify the price tag. $600 may seem like a lot for a video game console, but is quite cheap for a PC with as much processing power as the PS3 packs. But if it’s a PC, then why can’t I play games with the keyboard and mouse? Why is the PC the only system that can have the best input devices for real time strategy and first person shooters?

Some might argue that the Wii-mote will help bridge that gap. Maybe it will. I haven’t played a RTS with the Wii-mote, but I have played a first person shooter (Red Steel), and I much prefer a mouse to the Wii-mote for a first person shooter. Even if the Wii-mote is heaven for strategy and first person games, I imagine making a similar peripheral for the PS3 and the Xbox 360 would be a bad idea because of both the cost, patent infringement and segmenting the market (not everyone would buy one), but who doesn’t have a keyboard and a mouse? Maybe they aren’t USB, but I can’t imagine the USB adapter would be expensive.

I’m not purposing Resistance: The Fall of Man and Halo 3 should be mouse only. I’m just suggesting that they support the keyboard and mouse also. There is a large population of gamers  who primarily play PC first person shooters who really don’t want to play an FPS with a gamepad (myself included). Many of these gamers own a console. Why not make your console first person shooter accessible to them also? It wouldn’t be all that much work, and it can only help sales. With this generation of consoles, PCs have lost their other FPS advantage: higher resolutions. Maybe if Resistance: The Fall of Man allowed the usage of a mouse, some PC gamers would buy a PS3 also.

Now, I imagine there are some console first person shooter fans screaming, “That’s not fair!” But, let’s stop and think about that. I’m sure plenty of people playing with a keyboard and a mouse will be a lot more accurate at aiming. There is plenty that the game developers can do to balance it out by doing some auto aiming for gamepad users, but even if they don’t, why is that unfair? I could play Halo 2 online with Microsoft’s new force feedback steering wheel. If I tried to complain that it was unfair that everyone else wasn’t using a steering wheel too, I’d get laughed off Xbox Live. If you think that’s ridiculous, I’d argue it’s the same way for keyboard and mouse vs. gamepads. If you want, you can play PC FPSes with a PC gamepad (you can even use your wired Xbox 360 gamepad, and when this adapter comes out, you can use your wireless), but you’re not going to get very far. For all the console gamers that don’t want to bother learning how to aim well with a more accurate control scheme, I’m sure they could create gamepad only servers on Xbox Live, so that you could continue playing with your controller of choice. It would be easy for them to enforce that on the game side, so you wouldn’t get a griefer on your server getting headshots by using the mouse.

Until the mouse gets more support from console game developers, all hope is not lost. Lik Sang has created mouse and keyboard to PS2 and Xbox controller adapters. I haven’t used them myself, but I’ve heard that the performance ranges from quite well to not so great depending on the game. But, I imagine it couldn’t really be worse than Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus’s keyboard and mouse support, so it can’t be too bad. Once they come out with a version for next gen systems, I may have to pick one up.

Next Gen Price Wars2
Matt posted in Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii on July 21st, 2006

Next gen seems to offer the greatest spread of console pricing since the 3DO was released. How can you get the most bang for your next gen buck? Let’s look at the price points and see what you can get for it.

$200-$300
The Wii is confirmed to cost less than $250. This is absolutely no problem for Nintendo because the hardware is an incremental revision over the 5 year old GameCube console. Assuming that Wii is coming out for $249.99 (which is less than $250, and I have a feeling that they’ll release at this price despite that all their other consoles came out at $200), Xbox 360 may look mighty tempting. The problem is that if you buy the $300 Xbox 360, you don’t have any storage for your saved games. (Wii comes with 512 MB of internal flash memory). For some reason Microsoft has seen fit to charge $40 for 64 MB memory cards, which is quite expensive (Not as bad as the $30 I paid for an 8MB PS2 memory card a couple weeks ago though). For comparison, a 64 MB USB pen drive, which is basically the same hardware as Microsoft’s memory card (you can actually rewire a memory card to interface with your PC using USB) is $10 on www.pricewatch.com. So, a potential consumer concerned with price is looking at $250 vs. $340 comparing the two platforms if they want to save their games (which I think everyone does). Although traditionally, console makers make a lot of money back on the peripherals, I think Sony has the right idea allowing generic hard disks (both USB and internal, although I imagine internal 2.5” hard disks are going to be trickier to find) as well as compact flash/memory stick readers. So, that $40 memory card really hurts Microsoft for people in the budget group. If it were $300 with some sort of storage alternative vs $250, I think that would really cut into Wii’s sales with the budget gamers. Maybe Microsoft should open up their platform and allow other storage devices for saved games.

$400-$500
If you aren’t interested in either Blu-ray or HD DVD Microsoft is the clear winner in this price range because besides Blu-Ray, the $400 Xbox 360 System and the $500 PS3 console are functionally equivalent. If you’re interested in a next gen media format, the Xbox comes out behind because the 360 HD DVD add on is going to cost $200 according to quickly removed information on the Microsoft site (which unlike other Xbox 360 peripherals seems like a good deal). For $500, you could get the 360 Core System and the HD DVD add on, but you wouldn’t have the 20 GB hard disk that the $500 PS3 includes. It’s possible that Microsoft might create a new bundle where you can get an Xbox 360, HD-DVD and a hard disk for $500, but that’s unlikely.

$600
This category is the interesting one. If you are interested in all the features that Sony offers, the Playstation 3 is a much better deal. For $700, you can get an Xbox 360 premium pack, an HD-DVD drive and a Wireless Ethernet adapter (which costs $100. For comparison, you can get a wireless USB adapter that will work with the Playstation 3 for $13.59). The Playstation 3 still comes out ahead because it has HDMI and the 60 GB hard disk. Microsoft should really lower the price of their wireless adapter, or allow 360 owners to use adapters from generic vendors. Even still, there’s no way to get HDMI output on the Xbox 360, which could cripple the HD-DVD player should content providers start using iCT, which will downsample the source material if the media is played without every device that relays the signal to have HDMI (except of course the wires). There are rumors that Microsoft will release a Xbox 360 with an HDMI port on it. As much as I would love to get HDMI, I don’t know if I’m willing to buy another Xbox 360… Nintendo was pretty sneaky in actually REMOVING their HD port on GameCubes manufactured after a certain date, so maybe most consumers don’t distinguish hardware by its video out capabilities, but in the case of HDMI, it can cut the resolution in 1/4 for viewing an HD movie. (Although, that’s assuming that Xbox 360 with an HDMI port could actually display HD DVD movies at 1080p rather than 1080i)

So who gives you the best value for your money really depends on what features you want and what price range you are looking for. If you don’t care about HD and price is important to you (and you like playing games with the Wii-mote) then obviously the Wii is your best choice. But if Wii is $250 and you aren’t sold on the controller, the core pack at $300 for Xbox 360 might be tempting. Xbox 360 is the only console at the mid price range, which could prove to be the sweet spot for next gen pricing. The main downside problem with Xbox 360 is that Microsoft has a lot of markup on potentially desired upgrades (700% on the wireless adapter, 400% on the memory card and 200% on the hard disk versus the equivalent hardware prices from www.pricewatch.com), so if you don’t like what you get out of the box, you’ll have to pay quite a bit for the additional functionality. One of the great things about Playstation 3 is that if you don’t like your original configuration, you can upgrade it using PC hardware (so you don’t have to overpay for your components), but you cannot upgrade to the HDMI port, which is really bad if studios start using iCT for next gen media. Playstation 3 seems to offer the most features if you are prepared to drop $500 or $600 mostly because the Xbox 360 extra peripherals are expensive. Which one is the winner? It’s hard to say. All three have wildly varying configurations and there’s little overlap in the price points. All I know is I love my Xbox 360, and I’m looking forward to both the Playstation 3 and the Wii.

Xbox 360 Dash: What the next update should include0
Matt posted in Xbox 360, Wii on July 19th, 2006

I love the Xbox Dash. Microsoft is really turning the Xbox 360 into more than an ordinary video game console with it. They have committed to bi-yearly updates, which is really great because the platform is constantly improving and innovations/new features can be introduced over the life cycle of the product. I think everyone will agree that the ability to queue up downloads was a much needed improvement. But what other improvements are needed? Here’s my thoughts.

More Marketplace Content – Microsoft has created a great platform. I really think they should use it for more. Why not be like iTunes and create a whole new way to distribute sell TV shows in HD? I’d pay to download my favorite shows in 720p just the movie trailers they offer for free. Why not offer more movie trailers? I’m sure the movie studios would host them to get the free advertising. Plus, I can’t get enough of the “Snakes on a Plane” trailer.

Using Live Gold at a friend’s house – I wanted to play The Outfit online with my friend. The Outfit (unlike Perfect Dark Zero) REQUIRES that you have two Xbox Live Gold accounts (one for each player). We had our accounts, but we still couldn’t play. Why? Because he can’t sign in with his Live account. The only way he can do that is if he moves his Live account to my machine. The problem with that is that the next time he tries to connect his own Xbox to Live, it will delete all of his saved games as well as his Live profile. I can understand that Microsoft doesn’t want two people using one Live account, but the way it works is completely ridiculous and ruins the whole idea of Live. The whole point of Live is so you can have your gaming profile shared across games. If you can’t share your profile when you are at a friend’s house, then Live isn’t really an advantage over storing local settings on your machine. Also, I think it’s pretty lame that you HAVE to have two Live Gold accounts for games like The Outfit. I don’t know why they didn’t let you log in as a guest for the second player, but they really should have.

More Classic Live Gaming – Microsoft bought Rare. Now I’m not sure how the publishing contract worked, but I imagine they own some rights to their old IP. (I know Nintendo sued about Perfect Dark, and I believe they lost) Why not release classic Rare games through Xbox Live Arcade? Nintendo is touting their virtual console as a killer app, so why shouldn’t Microsoft steal some of their thunder by re-releasing (or doing simple remakes to avoid copyright issues) classic Rare games?  Here’s what I’d like to see: Battletoads, Killer Instinct, Blast Corps, and Banjo-Kazooie.  (Let’s hope they don’t rerelease Taboo: The Sixth Sense) If those appeared on a Microsoft platform, that would hurt one of the Wii’s big selling points. That would show that Microsoft can release some classic games that appeared on Nintendo systems. Since Microsoft has bought Bungie, why haven’t they re-released Marathon? (I don’t think Pathways into Darkness is worth re-releasing, but maybe there are some Pathways fans out there) Why don’t they get a deal with Sega also to release their classics on the Xbox 360? Sega has a deal with GameTap also, so it seems like anyone can get the old Sega IP if they pay for it… (That’s assuming Nintendo doesn’t have an exclusive deal, which they may) Nintendo doesn’t have the rights to everything that was published for the Nintendo consoles, so why not get a deal for exclusive rights to the Konami back catalog? I can’t be the only one who wants to play Contra at 720p! Why not get Capcom classics on Xbox Live Arcade? Capcom is already re-releasing everything they can think of (except the classic Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers and Ducktales. Those games are awesome).

Remove copy protection on saved game files – I borrowed an Xbox 360 from a friend because it took me a while to get one. (I preordered mine, but apparently, I didn’t preorder it early enough) I created my gametag and Xbox Live Gold account on his machine and started playing Dead or Alive 4. I wanted to move my saved game, so I bought a memory card. I was disappointed to find that I couldn’t transfer it to my new Xbox 360. I ended up buying a SATA Xbox 360 hard disk adapter that would allow me to transfer my Dead or Alive 4 saved games. The saved game was still tied to my Live ID, which was a bit annoying because I couldn’t use ones that I downloaded off the internet, but at least I could back up/transfer my saved games. With hard disk failure rates being what they are and how important saved game files are to some (all?) gamers, you’d think Microsoft wouldn’t prevent someone from backing up their own saved game. So, I’m fine because I bought a SATA Xbox 360 hard disk adapter, but it is relatively involved to install (it takes a PC SATA cable and an internal power plug), and if you flip the connector around, it’ll fry the hard disk because it’s a symmetrical plug (one side is power and the other is the SATA signal). Datel has made an Xsata transfer kit, which I imagine is a lot easier to use, but also costs $50 as opposed to the $10 or so I paid for my little circuit board.

VCDs – Maybe I’m the only one who likes VCDs in the United States, but VCDs are quite popular in Asia. Almost all DVD players will play them, why not the Xbox 360? If you are trying to make it an entertainment hub, I would think supporting as many formats as possible would be the way to get this point across.

Web Browser - Why isn’t there a version of Internet Explorer available for Xbox 360? You can use a USB keyboard and with HD resolutions, surfing the web won’t be so bad. It’s not an essential feature, but it’s definitely a useful one and probably one that Sony will offer on their Playstation 3 since they even offer it on the small PSP screen.

What I’m Excited About for the Rest of the Year0
Matt posted in Games, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii on July 13th, 2006

August
Ninety Nine Nights – I wrote a long post about how great I think Ninety Nine Nights will be, so instead of reiterating that here, check it out.

Rule of the Rose – This game is promising to not only be scary, but also some sort of psychological thriller. Regardless of how the game turns out, it seems worth playing just for something refreshingly different. Something that worries me is that Gamasutra mentions the game’s “prepubescent erotic undertones” (although they don’t go into specifics), but the trailers look like a cross between a David Lynch movie and “City of the Lost Children”, so I’m excited regardless. It definitely seems genuinely creepy instead of ghosts popping out and saying “boo!”. One thing that I have to wonder is are Japanese people afraid of children? I’ve seen the Japanese versions of The Ring, the Grudge, and Dark Water (all of which have been remade in America) and I’m beginning to think that Japanese people (at least the ones that make horror movies/games) are afraid of children.

Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus – I had to look up what a “Dirge” is, and I have no idea what Cerberus’s has to do with Final Fantasy VII, but I love RPGs and action games and this seems like a good combination of the two. I played it for a while at E3, and it seemed to preserve all the good aspects of the Final Fantasy games (items, lots of weapon customizations, pre-rendered cutscenes) with a pretty solid action shooter. On one hand, I really feel like Final Fantasy VII was a closed story and there’s really nothing more interesting to say about it, but on the other hand, I certainly loved Final Fantasy VII, and I want more because I loved the characters so much.

October
Final Fantasy XII – Although I’m not sure why the lead character looks so effeminate, and I’m frightened that the character Fran was added to cater to furries, but other than that, the art looks absolutely amazing in FF XII. The world seems completely unlike any other game I’ve played, which is definitely a good thing. I believe the team said they were using middle eastern style architecture or something, but whatever it is they are doing, it certainly looks unique. and GOREGEOUS. As far as gameplay, I played this game quite a bit at E3 2004 and was very disappointed. Combat wasn’t any fun at all. When the demo disc came out with Dragon’s Quest VIII, it was clear that this is a completely different (and better) game. I haven’t heard anything but praise for the final game and it’s new take on the traditional Final Fantasy mechanics. 

Forza Motorsport 2 – Although I’m horrible at racing sim games, and I’ve barely found time to play PGR3, I’m really excited about Forza Motorsport 2. I’ll tell you the reason. It’s being designed to use the Microsoft Wireless Racing Wheel. Although there’s really no reason it has to be wireless, it has force feedback (when you use it with the AC adapter). I have the second version of the Microsoft Force Feedback PC steering wheel, and it is ABSOLUTELY amazing! I’d play a bus driving simulation game if I got to use that force feedback. I can only imagine how great of an experience it will be with a real racing sim and an amazing force feedback steering wheel. With PC games, there are many different force feedback wheels and they all behave differently. When Microsoft releases the official steering wheel, all racing games will have one steering wheel to use in order to calibrate gameplay (and force feedback effects). I imagine developers can query whether it is a steering wheel or a gamepad, so they can tune gameplay to the steering wheel, rather than the steering wheel manufactures trying to appropriately map the steering wheel’s function to the analog joystick. So, I can’t wait for a really good steering force feedback steering wheel and the flagship title that showing it off.

Gears of War – I went into the Microsoft E3 theater not really expecting anything. I figured it’d be another lame video showing how Xbox 360 brings people together or something like that. I was way wrong. CliffyB was there actually explaining what was cool about the game and what he was trying to accomplish. Now, I think it’s cool that CliffyB was giving the demo not because he’s a “name” in the video game industry, but more because he’s the lead designer, so he should know the game better than anyone. It’s too often that you have someone who doesn’t understand the spirit of the game demoing it. For example, some of my friends recounted a story about how someone demoing Viva Pinata beat a pinata to death because it was in the way of the two pinatas that were supposed to mate. This completely violates the spirit of the game, and is a bad thing to show. For example, I can’t imagine Shigaru Miyamoto beating his Nintendog to death for a demo because it didn’t smile at him when he turned on the DS. Viva Pinata is all about growing and taking care of the pinatas on your island, and beating one to death because it was in the way, certainly doesn’t convey that. At any rate, Gears of War is trying to create a whole new style of action game based on cover. Sure, maybe that doesn’t sound appealing to you, but that’s what was so great about the demo. Gears of War may not be impressive on paper, but when you see the fluid movements that the player character can do, you’ll understand why I’m so excited about it. CliffyB showed that you could duck behind cover,  then shoot from either side or the top,  and go from either side or jump over it to get to the next cover point. He also explained his main design goal  - to make the controls simple. I wasn’t playing the game, so I don’t know how simple the controls are, but it really seemed like a lot of amazing moves happened because of the context sensitivity of the A button. I wrote in an earlier blog post about how this idea of simplified control scheme will make games more accessible to non-gamers. Anyway, this is defiintely a game to look out for.

Super Paper Mario – There hasn’t been a GameCube title I’ve been excited about for a while. I loved all the old Mario platformers, so I’m really excited about a new one. On one hand, I’d say that Nintendo isn’t really innovating gameplay by releasing another platformer similar to their NES releases, but on the other hand, those games were really fun, so I’d be happy to play a game like that again. It does sound like there’s some cool new things in this game, so we’ll see how good it is. At least it’s better than a rerelease, which Nintendo has a habit of doing.

November
Warhawk – This was the Playstation 3 game at E3 that I enjoyed the most. I thought the motion sensing worked better in this game than it did in any of the Wii games. The gameplay didn’t seem all that innovative, but the aircraft handled really well, and it was fun to fly with the tilt sensing. Sure, apparently you could play the original Warhawk with a motion sensitive controller, but I have a feeling the new Warhawk works a lot better.

Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess – I’m feeling quite torn about this game. Firstly, I didn’t really enjoy Windwaker all that much. It seemed like Ocarina of Time only with cell shading and sailing, and I liked the cell shading, but the sailing was really annoying. I’m worried Twilight Princess will have the same gameplay only better graphics and a few Wii minigames. But, despite my worries, I’m hoping this will be a title that really proves that the Wii input can be fun.

Sonic the Hedgehog – I love Sonic. Sonic Adventure is what sold me on the Dreamcast. That game was unlike anything out at the time. In the Mayan level, I was so amazed when Sonic was sprinting unimaginably fast through winding passageways. Sonic Adventure 2 was also amazing, and Sonic Heroes was okay. I will not speak of the abomination that is Shadow the Hedgehog. With the 15th  anniversary of Sonic, Sega is trying to return to his roots. I was super excited to play it at E3, and it was a real let down. The controls were very wonky. The newest Hedgehog, Silver, had very wonky telekinesis powers, and was difficult to platform with. That’s understandable because he’s a new character. The unforgivable sin was Sonic was also very difficult to control. Sonic has always been a bit hard to control since he goes very very fast. As much as I love the original Genesis games, I have to admit that oftentimes you run at full speed until you hit an enemy that you never could have seen. You have to collect your rings and then keep running. The main problem is the autotargeting for the jump attack is really bad. They had a section where you had to land on a small rope, and then it would spring you up, and then you had to land on the next small rope and so on. Unfortunately, the jump attack auto targeting didn’t find these ropes, so either you had to land on a narrow rope positioned in threespace, which is quite tricky, or you could hope that your jump attack would take you to it, but the several times I tried it, it took me straight into the bottomless pit. So, although the E3 demo was disappointing, I still have a lot of hope.

Why We Can’t Be Hollywood and What We Need to Do to Innovate0
Matt posted in The Industry, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii on June 15th, 2006

Many people compare the video game industry to Hollywood. Most recently, Chris Crawford in an interview with Gamasutra, explained that Hollywood has less expensive “indie movies” that innovate. He as well as others asks why can’t the games industry do the same?

The answer while not obvious is really right before our eyes. As the cost of a movie goes down, the quality doesn’t diminish nearly as much as with games. For example, I could spend a few thousand on a good DV camera, get some friends together and make a very good movie. That hinges on me and my friends abilities. The lightening might not be as good, we’d have to film on location, and we wouldn’t have any big name actors, but it could be a very good movie that is competitive with a Hollywood film. Now, there are restrictions. We couldn’t have special effects, big name actors or anything like that, but it wouldn’t have to look really amateur if we had the talent. For example, one of the funniest movies ever is “Cannibal: The Musical”. Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park fame made it over their spring break when they were still in college. IMDB.com estimates there budget was $125,000. The movie had some really bad special effects, but it contributed to the campy fun. Napoleon Dynamite had an estimated budget of $400,000, and it looked perfectly professional. Sure, it didn’t have any big name actors, but I think Jon Heder is funnier than a lot of big name comedians. Garden State is another one of my favorite films and IMDB estimates their budget at 2.5 million. Sure, that seems like a lot of money, but compare that to the $40 million or more that many Hollywood movies cost.

Now, here’s the other important thing. These indie movies cost the same to see in the theater and the DVD pricing is usually about the same too. So, despite that the Blair Witch Project cost $35,000 to make, it was able to make $140 million in the United States because the ticket prices were the same as a huge Hollywood blockbuster. If tickets cost 1/10 of that of a blockbuster (similar to how indie games cost $5 when regular games are $50), then the Blair Witch Project still would have made a profit, but it wouldn’t have been the giant hit that it was. The fact that a company can make so much money off of something so cheap means they can invest in a lot of failures and still come out ahead. If the profit margin isn’t so incredibly high, then it’s more of a risk and not worth doing.

Games aren’t the same as movies. If you make a game for $400,000, it’s not going to be anywhere close to the quality of a next gen game that costs $20 million. This is why the film model doesn’t work as well when it comes to games. A better analogy would be the CG film industry. Almost all of the CG films are really high budget, and the ones that aren’t, really show. Hoodwinked cost $15 million to make and it doesn’t look nearly as good as Pixar or Dreamworks animated films.

So, good indie or cheap games aren’t going to be very appealing to consumers because due to budget constraints, that prevents them from making them at the same quality as other titles. Now, quality means a lot of different things to different people, but one of the things that adds to a game’s immersiveness is a lot of characters populating the world. An indie game can’t have that. An indie game probably can’t afford to have a lot of unique human characters. This is something indie movie producers get for free, but it’s a great cost for video games since they either have to be painstakingly motion captured or more often than not, modeled by an artist. Now, some people say that good graphics don’t matter for games. Nintendo is betting a lot that people don’t want better graphics. I think that’s incorrect. Just as some people won’t watch a black and white movie now that color movies are available (even if it’s Citizen Kane), many people might not be interested in old generation games when they can get the latest and greatest looking games. If you can have realistic looking characters, they make it seem more real, and that lends to the immersion. Even if it’s a cartoony world, if everything doesn’t look like it’s made out of polygons or plastic (unless you’re playing a next gen Army Men game), then that really adds to the experience. I think people want that immersion. As much as I love Katamari Damacy, the graphics are pretty bad to look at and the loose collision bothers me just because it takes away from the immersion. Katamari has innovative gameplay that can overcome that especially because the games were budget priced. But, I imagine its sales weren’t several orders of magnitudes greater than the cost like for some movies. Because of that, indie games aren’t as appealing to the publishers as they are for movies.

Here’s the question that the industry is asking: is there anything that can be done to reduce the costs of next gen development so innovation isn’t as risky? I’d say yes, but definitely not the extent that it is feasible in film. Middleware helps cut the costs. Before EA bought Renderware, Criterion was trying to position themselves as the common platform that would drive costs down. No graphics library has risen up to replace them, but presumably, one could be developed. Common objects and characters could be sold/rented or publishers could come up with asset systems to share across their developers. Potentially, generic characters could be developed to meet certain clothing sizes, and then clothing could be applied just like a costume. In the end though, the benefit a company gets by using their own custom technology and art styles always makes a game significantly better, so it might be worth going the extra mile in a lot of cases.

One of the reasons that Nintendo Wii is so appealing to developer and publishers is that the cost of development is a lot less. Since the hardware is similar to previous gen, the cost of development will be on par with last generation unlike the almost astronomical cost of the new generation. This will allow each product to be less of a financial risk, so developers can afford to innovate. Whether publishers will allow them to innovate or whether any creative uses of the controller remains to be seen. I didn’t think there was anything all that “innovative” at E3 for Wii, but it may take developers a while to get accustomed to it. Unfortunately though, any gameplay innovations developed for Wii that are based on the controller (which is probably where any innovation would happen) won’t be too applicable to Xbox 360 and may not be too applicable for PS3. Despite what Nintendo thinks, I think the future of the industry is going to be with bigger budgets and better graphics because as I mentioned before, they aid to the immersiveness. Sony and Microsoft suggest buying Wii as a second console, but even if Wii is a financial success, I think most gamers will buy a PS3 or Xbox 360 also because they want to get lost in a realistic world. Only time will tell in that regard.

In the end though, I’m not as pessimistic as most when it comes to the state of the industry because I see titles looming on the horizon (Gears of War, Assassin’s Creed, etc) that are new enough for me to be interested in playing them. Yes, I agree that overall the industry produces a lot of sequels, but honestly, who hasn’t bought one? Who isn’t planning on getting God of War 2 or playing the next gen Sonic the Hedgehog? For all Nintendo talks about innovation, their staple games have changed very little since the NES days. Other than I may be able to use a pointer to shoot an arrow in Zelda: Twilight Princess and transform into a wolf, the gameplay looks identical to Windwaker, which was identical to Ocarina of Time, which was the same gameplay of the original Zelda only with an extra dimension. The two Zelda games that tried to innovate (Zelda II and Majora’s Mask) are usually regarded as people’s least favorite in the series. So, it’s almost as if consumers reward companies for NOT innovating. Mark Cerny said in the GDC panel on “What’s Next?” that with every new IP, you don’t get a return on your investment until the 3rd sequel. This is part of why there is so little innovation. People will usually buy a sequel if they like the first game, so what incentive is there for publishers to innovate? If we as consumers really want innovation, then stop buying sequels! If enough people get sick of it, then the economics will change and so will gameplay. As game developers, its a lot harder to have a say about what we work on, but if we tried to put one new gameplay element or innovation that hasn’t been done before, hopefully, it will help the industry from stagnating, and it will be similar enough to an established game or genre such that publishers won’t be afraid of funding it. For example, if your publisher wants you to make a GTA clone, put an original spin on it by having some levels that allow you to be a modern day pirate in international waters. Maybe you can take the passengers of boats hostage, or pilfer their possessions. Maybe you can work your way up in the size of boats you can steal. Maybe you can put enough unique mechanics in it that your publisher will allow you to do a game based on that mechanic for the sequel. (My apologies if GTA or some other crime game already did that. I don’t play them because I find the content offensive…) Maybe my maritime piracy game mechanic doesn’t sound all that great or it’s been done before, but it’s just an example I came up with quickly. If your entire development team tried to think of an original gameplay innovation within the context of your project, then I’m sure you could come up with something.

Maybe the key to changing the industry is evolution not revolution. CliffyB in his Game Developer magazine article talked about how he was glad other games came out that used cover as a gameplay mechanic because Gears of War revolves around the concept of cover. The fact that other games are using it warms people up to the idea. Maybe if Gears of War showed up and was the first game to use cover, people might not be interested in it. “Hiding sounds lame! Screw that!” That might be the reaction had they not seen how it worked in Perfect Dark Zero and wanted more. All in all though, as consumers and developers we drive the industry. If innovation makes financial sense, then publishers will start supporting innovative projects. If people want to buy the same game over and over again, then why shouldn’t publishers give it to them? It’s a lot easier to do that then to come up with something truly innovative. Game developers like many artists, don’t get paid to create great art. They get paid to make money for the people funding them. This is an unfortunate truth, but within these confines, I still believe we can make great games.