Dance Dance Immolation!

Just seen this in the newest PC Gamer, called Dance Dance Immolation its what I think should be outfitted to all dance rhythm games frankly - rhythm based games and pyromanicacy go so well together I find.
Take a normal Stepmania powered machine and attach several propane flamethrowers to it, if you shuffle you booties correctly it fires jets of flame harmlessly into the air if you don't it fires them into your face. Of course what would be a pretty short one-time type of game is made replayable by the inclusion of a fire suit normally used in chemical spills and raging infernos.

I can't help but think of the Saw series of films, with the main adversaries making ever disgusting machines of disfiguration if you succeed in the task of self perversion you can free yourself if not, bam! That’s what the audience came to see etc

I can't help but think there could be a series of gaming related machines - fail to come top in a multiplayer last man standing game and you really won't be respawning again.

More here: interpretivearson.com/ddi

Gears of tried and tested

So thanks to my 360 owning friend I’ve played and completed Gears of war, good grief is it short but overall very good the context sensitive control system overall works pretty well with you slapping your back against walls with aplomb but I found as with most things that are over simplified to a single action the game often caused me to jump out into fire when I just wanted to move into cover - a word on cover, every object in the game be it a chest of drawers a wall or a pillar is recognized as cover with the areas in the game being broken down into competitive puzzles more than anything else, simply rushing head first into the enemy will get you killed with the game taking a more tactical edge, something that surprised me coming from Epic a developer who previously worked on Unreal Tournament a fps as gristle headed as you get.

The environments in the game are presented in a linear fashion, clear one section of baddies and the game will proceed to the next often in the form of a cut scene or NPC interaction, the game constantly loads the next segment in the background so your never presented with a loading screen something I want to see more developers doing as it was very effective in immersing me in the story and mood.

Control wise it did remind me allot of Resident Evil 4, it has the same over shoulder view and maps the same context sensitive actions to a single button, tilting and panning the camera around your onscreen avatar.

All in all, gears of war is a more traditional game a huge blockbuster of a game - a world in a peril, boss battles, huge weapons and even bigger characters in a climate that’s constantly trying to be new and fresh its nice to see a game still it touch with its action film roots.

Gah! Intergrated chipset evil!

So I was over a friends house today to play with his spangly new computer, several games underarm I checked the pc's specs everything checked out multicore this gigabytes that but wait! GAH! What was this an Integrated Intel chipset? Something which in some of the more nerdier circles is whispered in hushed tones of revulsion. He would be unable to play most of the games I had brought and the ones he could run would be reduced to 'orrible juddery slide shows of PC gaming's current finest.

Why the hell do Intel do this? They dress up these things to read like the second coming of the electronic messiah in advertisements but when you get down to it there about as powerful as a calculator, like every other sector of the hardware league Intel and AMD are in a constant battle to produce the fastest zippiest processor, even at the budget end of the spectrum there processors are still more than adequate to run a modern game respectably so why are there graphic chipsets so crap?

Of course you could argue that these onboard graphic chipsets aren't really graphics sets but merely something to display windows, perhaps display video and the ever cheeky office game of solitaire, while it falls to dedicated video card makers ATI and NVIDIA to produce something that caters to anybody wanting to do anything more demanding than run Windows but with the recent purchase of ATI by Intel rival AMD this has been put into question.

Microsoft's next iteration of Windows Vista, has a new graphical interface named Aero glass that pretty much demands a card capable of displaying these complex graphical titbits, a bog standard Intel integrated job by simply won't cut it. This coupled with the ever increasing popularity of high definition video endures that the casual e-mail sending, web surfing pc user is going to require something much more powerful.

Of course its the corporations that ultimately control this, PC makers such as Dell concentrate on the more recognisable indicators of a systems power in advertisements when targeting there casual pc using audience the choice of graphic chipsets often seems like second fiddle to the more recognisable representations of a pc's power namely a headline dominating processor speed and ram size these are the numbers the general public understands, so long as it sounds big and flashy its ok.

Additionally its companies like Dell's biggest customers that also effects this the most not the casual pc user but the IT sectors of gigantic corporations if it costs a IT manager an additional $5 to increase the graphics chipset to something approaching respectable speed what’s the harm but increase that over 50,000 pc's and suddenly you see why graphic cards are sill are luxury.

Games for windows

I wandered into a GAME shop the other day, that place is fast becoming the sole reason for my ever increasingly jaded view of the traditional public image of games but more on that later. A quick look around any games shop confirms one thing, the PC section is shrinking skulking and further back into the shadows a sad collection of budget titles and console ports while the shelf space given to console titles seems to be ever increasing - hell the PS2 section in most GAME shops seems to almost dominate half the shop, the things almost dead yet its still given quadruple the space to the PC arguably the birthplace of all games.

While the revenue in things like MMORPG and casual online games are increasing ten fold a 10% drop in traditional titles from last years shows something’s up, with the ever shrinking public image of PC games it’s hardly surprising.

Well its fallen to Microsoft to address this issue, with there unveiling of games for Windows initiative, all console games have a standardised box layout, console name on the top perhaps on the back details of the numbers of players supported that kind of thing; with pc games its different there’s no fully standardised look with each publisher taking a different approach in presenting specifications, genre etc all the things customers look at when deciding a purchase. It maybe purely psychological but having a instantly recognisable banner and look on each pc game would make the pc look more like a viable gaming platform a brand if you will and less like a scary mix of specifications and publisher branded games to the casual gamer.

Addiotnally Microsoft are also tackling the traditional trap of the requirements box to Mr Casual gamer, working with Vista's new PC rating system the pool of numbers and stats are now broken down into a numerical score on your PC, if your PC scores a 3 and the game requires a 3 or lower than congratulations you can run it! Of course there’s bound to be mistakes in this approach but it massively increases the potential of people trying games on there PC's rather than simply being put off at the first hurdle.

Of course you could just argue that Microsoft is doing this simply to control the PC games sector much the same way it does with the 360 make the PC a closed system, they hold all the cards in the same way there trying to do with DRM for multimedia. Only time will tell

Dreamy cast

I bought a Dreamcast today for the princely sum of 20 pounds plus a copy of jet set radio, for many reasons I see the dream cast as something of a forgotten gem and standard setter, the first online console, the first proper current gen console - shudup Atari jaguar your are NOT 128 bit, the first console in which the aspirations of online game play and console to pc connectivity are realised.

There’s nothing quite like a new console even if this one is old hat to the rest of the world, the exotic looking controller, the start up jingle promising so many hours of discovering some of gaming's classics, mentally adding to your internal repertoire of games played and rated seeing where franchises started before becoming muddied by shameless ports and sequels, Sonic Adventure anyone? An opportunity to see first hand exactly what Sega did to ensure this was there last console ever made *Sniff*

I've also discovered thanks to a custom boot disc written some years ago there is absolutely no need for me to buy any of the games languishing in Amazon limbo, a quick download and burn to a bog standard cd ensures I can sample many classics which for whatever reason would be out of my reach be it region or ridiculous rarity coupled with even more ridiculous price - seriously have you seen the price of Shenmune 2? Because its a dead console there’s not the slight twinge of guilt I feel when downloading a game normally either.

Now if only I had bought a memory card with this thing I could get a bit further in jet set radio

Console Exclusivity

There’s always one thing that’s irritated me with new consoles as the hype for them reaches fever pitch and all and everything is promised of there capabilities games normally associated with the PC seem to get up and leave or even worse games originally intended for PC suddenly become console only, lured in by the Microsoft or Sony dollar, boasting there title portfolio for shiny console X.

Of course there’s several reasons why this is done, consoles are standardised things, technological snapshots of whatever was the cutting edge when they were made this presents an easy opportunity to push a new game to a consoles maximum capability's and not worry about the balancing act of high and low end pc architecture, when a console is brand new is the only time it will match the average gaming PC displaying a developers vision as well as possible but when publishers take time to port a next generation game say from the 360 to the PS2 a console now nearly 7 years old it makes you wonder why they don't bother with the PC a system arguably more than capable of hosting the 360 version. Of course sales projections come into it why bother porting a game to the pc if only X number of people are going to buy it? While porting it to the PS2 may ensures it has a massive graphical downhaul sales ensures this would be more than worthwhile.

This robbing of titles has been going on for years as far back as Elite moving from the BBC to the NES, if there’s any good from this I believe that the PC is where new games and genes are created and nurtured before they reach a level of recognition and size to be ported to a console, creating room for the next bi g thing, fad or genre all game genres began on the PC with the the possible exception of the dancing game (woo) and I can't see any reason why this isn’t going to continue.

Of course its just as bad as when traditional PC games are 'consolofied' (swish!) then ported back to the PC at a later date, Deus ex 2 while a passable game on the Xbox just doesn’t compare to the PC's original and the PC port of Halo is frankly more than a little lack lustre (sorry Michael it really is) when compared to thorough bred pc fps games.

Still in a few years we'll all be emulating 'Console title smash!' on our pc's so whets there to worry about?

The industry as of now

Like any industry the games industry is growing faster than anyone could have predicted, once purely the realm of the talented bed room coder the games industry itself has warped and transformed into a global industry employing thousands and thousands of specialised people much the same way the film indsutry began to diversify as talkies started; the increasing complexity and additional rise in development costs has meant development houses have had to outsoruce much of the work to third parties usualy located in poorer countries were the wages are generally lower, great news if you've just started a game art course, with the prevalance of the internet many people can now work as contractors for hire moving from one developer to another producing a specified model when requested a good example of this would be the poop in my mouth chap
who has built up a solid portfolio of work for potential clients - this global bulletin board is great for attracting much more potential employment but it also places you in competition with every other would be game artist.
This decentrilisation of development houses could mean that people who work together for many months of possibly years may never meet face to face - im not sure of the outcome of this but having a global pool of talent instead of the people who could get to the offices each day could have an enormous increase in the games quality or it could make it a confusing mess like Splinter Cell: Pandora's tommorow the multiplayer element being developed in Shanghai and bearing little relation to the main game. Communication is always key it would seem be it if the person is across the room or across the continent.

Course as games do become more expensive and longer to create publishers are going to want to see a profit to this title however many million's they've poured into game X - a prime example would be publisher EA until recently working overtime there was considered normal and developers worked long in to the night getting a title complete before its projected release date, if a game misses the holiday scheudule there bound to make less but when anything is rushed the quality suffers.
This increasing rush to get games out and recylcing the same idea's means games are slowly but surely losing there creative appeal to many. Additonally developers at EA signed a lawsuit against EA alleging they had not payed them for working hundreds of hours of overtime, images of some developement sweat house are hard not to imagine.

Story and charecter

I pity the fool who dosen't want to play this, yeah

Forget all your tactical realism mods that seem to be churned out nonstop, i've found the best mod ever Battlefield 2, look! It replaces all the butch soldiers and vehicles with lego charecters - who dosen't wanna drive around as Mr. T i wonder?

All a question of control

Being more of a pc orientated good ol' keyboard and mouse kinda chap there weren't many console pads I thought I had sampled but giving it a few mins thought made me realise how many I’ve come into contact with over the years and they all seemed to leave some kind of lasting impression on me, I still maintain the best pad ever was the original megadrive pad, it followed the D-pad on the left, face buttons on the right mantra originally devised by Nintendo's NES controller something of a missing link to past controllers which before it were simply a mish-mash of buttons crammed onto a pcb squezzing buttons in wherever there was space, ergonomics being a Swedish armchair manufacturer or something then.

I think as games became generally longer and people began investing more and more time into them, the design and functionality of the controllers became more important would the original super Mario be quite as good if it wouldn’t on the NES' standard setting controller? If making the fat plumber jump over Piranha Pete was too hard, would the game be as popular as it was and still is? A console pad links the player to the onscreen protagonist be it a soldier in ww2 or a high speed dragster if the game controls difficultly because of a poorly designed console pad the game will ultimately suffer, a controller has always been about making a design so streamlined and unrestrictive to a players thoughts and reactions to any given situation that his or her reactions and decisions are displayed instantly without them having to look down and remember the controls.

That’s why I think Nintendo's Wii is trying a more adventurous route, forget the fact there trying to target a wider audience by making it look less like a scary console, a console pad has always been translating a players thoughts and reactions to the screen. Pressing a button is far too mechanical for emulating the swinging of a sword, having the player actually physically swing his/her 'sword' makes it far more real and visceral than merely pressing a button. it should be a real test for more bizarre methods of control to see it the wii and its unique style of control will succeed, judging by the ridiculous levels of preorders worldwide I think merely having a new way of playing games is increasing the hype more than anything else.