Friday, September 30, 2005

We MUST Force Women to Develop and Play Games

When writing the article about “SitC Online”, I was reminded of all the talk about how we need women game developers to make games appealing to women. There was an article about this in Game Developer back in February. Let’s look at that idea, shall we? Probably the most successful game with women (not counting web-based flash games like “Bejeweled”) of all time is “The Sims”. That was designed by... ummm... Will Wright. Crap. Bad example. Well what about games designed by women? Let’s look at the work of Stevie “Killcreek” Case. There’s a good point! She designed “SiN” and “John Romero’s Daikatana” all veritable hits with the female audience.

The real problem is current game developers (including male game developers) try to make fun games. Apparently, women aren’t interested in fun games since they don’t buy the current games even when they are really fun (including many titles which aren’t the least bit degrading to women). Only women can unlock the secret of what women desire in a game. Since apparently it’s not fun (current game developer’s goals), it has to be some mysterious thing that you need two X chromosomes to discover... It must be something along the lines of “Barbie’s Dress-up” or “Spend the Night”, both female targeted games. Plus, men need women to tell them that their ridiculously proportioned female models are ridiculously proportioned and are a turn off to potential women gamers. Men can’t tell and definitely need women game developers to inform them... But really, male game developers are targeting the wrong demographic. Rather than selling sex, which sells quite nicely as the creators of “Dead or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball” can attest to, they need to take a risk and explore the uncharted waters to get the female audience. Really, few games (even ones with women developers) have reached out to the female demographic, so from a financial success it may seem very risky, but it clearly isn’t if you have enough women developers on the team.

Maybe, when it comes down to it, most women just have better things to do. Maybe game playing doesn’t appeal to them. Maybe that’s part of the demographic. Different demographics have different tastes, and maybe video games just aren’t the average woman’s cup of tea. But really - every article that talks about attracting women into games just sees them as a demographic to expand into. Really, that’s what we should be talking about. How can we take money from women - not how can we provide them with quality entertainment. But, the Rubik’s cube on how to get women interested in gaming just hasn’t been solved yet. The secret will be miraculously cracked when we get enough women in the industry.

Most of the female game developers I know like the same type of games as male gamers. They are attracted into the industry because they like the games the industry produces now. So, what we must do is find women who aren’t interested in the regular games and make them design games. They are the untapped demographic, so we should have them designing what appeals to them. Stay at home mom that enjoys a good game of minesweeper now and then? We can draft her to make the next women’s hit game!

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Re-Revolution

So, since everyone loved my accurate comparison of the Revolution controller to the Evolution controller, I will now do a comparison of quite possibly the most coveted and revolutionary feature of the Revolution: the backwards compatibility. As I said before, everyone really wants a Revolution for one feature: the backwards compatibility. The Revolution’s main competitor for backwards compatibility is the Yobo Gameware FC Game Console. So, let’s take a look, shall we? Game Support
Nintendo will have to re-release all the games it wants to be emulated. It can of course, re-release it’s entire back catalog, but Nintendo will have to push third parties to support their service as opposed to re-releasing in “Super Mega Awesome Collections”. Probably some classic games like “Bible Adventures” will never get released. Nintendo hasn’t mentioned cost, but you’re smoking too much wacky tabacky if you think Nintendo is going to give them away for free. If they did, that’d eat into their precious re-release series on the GameBoy, which they can’t have. The FC (Probably short for Family Computer, the name of the NES in Japan) Game Console will play any cartridge. ANY CARTIDGE! So, it will play any NES game you already have, or plan on getting. If you’re a true gamer, you have your old NES games buried in a closet somewhere, it’s just your original Nintendo stopped reading cartridges. Problem solved with the FC! It plays them all flawlessly. You’ve probably already bought all the games you want to play at least twice (NES, GBA) anyway, why buy them a third time? FC Game Console wins here.

Video Quality
Nintendo has already said they won’t support true HD resolutions (just 480p). The FC supports a composite video connection. Although in order to support 480p, they need to support component connections, so Revolution has a bit of an advantage here. All in all, I don’t think NES games video quality is limited by the connection, so it’s a draw.

Audio Quality
Whether the Revolution will support better audio connections than RCA cables has not been announced. It’d be nice if they supported Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS, but considering they aren’t supporting HD really, it might not be that likely. Even still they’ll have to at least support Dolby Pro-Logic II to be backwards compatible with GameCube. How does this compare to the FC? It’s mono. Considering all the NES games are in mono, I don’t think this is a real disadvantage. Potentially, you can have noise on an analog cable, but I doubt anyone will notice when playing NES games. Draw!
Hardware
The Revolution will support a Power PC chip with an ATI GPU giving it the performance it needs to emulate the performance of the original NES. Nintendo has said that performance is not a goal of the system design though. The FC has “high performance” according to the cover of the box. The FC edges out the Revolution because it is “high performance” compared to the lukewarm performance Nintendo has promised for the Revolution.

Control
The Revolution has a fancy controller with gyroscopic and positional sensors. The FC has “Easy button operation” according to the box. I’ll have to agree with that statement. Although you can tilt a Revolution controller to the side and use it like a really large and crazy original NES controller, your fine friends at Yobo have improved on Nintendo’s original design by offering a slow motion button and rapid fire B and A. On top of that, you can use all your old Nintendo hardware, Zappers, The Advantage, Power Glove, Robotic Operating Buddy, and so on. If you really want the wireless that the Revolution offers, you can use some Freedom Connection to make any controller wireless. Unfortunately, I don’t think the official NES Wireless Solution, The Satellite, will work since the plug layout of the controller ports is different on the FC. If you don’t want to maintain pesky line of sight, then you can get a brand new radio controller, with the same technology that the WaveBird, Revolution, and Xbox 360 controllers have. The FC wins again!
Price
The Revolution will be cheaper than other next gen systems, but will it be cheaper than $20? I think not. Victory for the FC.

Availability
I got mine at E3 last year, in Kentia Hall, the red-headed stepchild of the LA Convention Center. Nintendo of course was there (in one of the two real halls), and I imagine the “FC Game Console” isn’t approved by Nintendo, so the salesman is lucky that no one ever goes to Kentia Hall... Bad for business, but good for staying out of jail. Anyway, if you want an FC, you can find one pretty easily on Ebay or by searching on google. The Revolution isn’t currently available, so I think the FC wins again.

Overall
The FC won or tied in every category, so rather than investing a ton of money in an Nintendo Revolution, why not buy an FC and second hand games from flea markets? Yobo Gameware FC Game Console is better than the Revolution!

Saturday, September 24, 2005

Creativity is Unnecessary

In talking to many people about the Nintendo Revolution, the main selling point is not the controller. It’s the backwards compatibility. Everyone is excited about playing classic Nintendo games over again. If you look at a lot of titles these days, everyone is jumping on the re-releasing bandwagon: “Midway Arcade Treasures 1-3”, “Taito Legends”, “Sonic Gems/Mega Collection”, “Sega Classics Collection”, “Tecmo Classic Arcade”, “Namco Museum”, “Intellivision Lives”, “Capcom Classics Collection”, “Megaman Anniversary Collection”, and the list keeps going on and on. Nintendo, always ahead of the trends, was pioneering this with “Super Mario All Stars” for the Super Nintendo, long before the current re-release craze. So, this leads me to believe that we as game developers no longer need to make new content. We just need to repackage old good games and sell them over again. Think about it: count how many times you bought “Tetris”. A lot more than once, I’ll tell you. I even had “Welltris”, a “Tetris” clone in a well where the pieces could go on four walls and a floor. Man, that game was sweet. The only reason people over 10 buy a GameBoy is to play the re-releases of Nintendo games.

If your conscious bothers you when you re-release a game that is less than 10 years old, you can just do a straight port with updated graphics, like the GameCube version of “Resident Evil”, “Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes”, and the oft-rumored “Final Fantasy VII” remake. If you want to get really snazzy, you can “update” classic gems. There’s a lot of this going on: “Ninja Gaiden”, “Metal Gear Solid” (The BIG G will bet you that 99% of the MGS fans never even heard of, let alone played the Nintendo game), “The Bard’s Tale” and the new “World of Final Fantasy VII” or whatever blasphemy Square is doing to their precious IP. (Did I say blasphemy? I meant... errr... What a great business move! Saps like myself will totally buy anything that says “Final Fantasy VII” on it... Well, I suppose I won’t buy the cell phone games, but still...)

So, why haven’t all the publishers caught on yet? It’s essentially free to re-release all your old gems, and people will buy them! Someone at Interplay or Acclaim should be taking notes. I’m sure they could make a “Best of Interplay” (Fallout, Descent, Battle Chess, The Bard’s Tale [the original, not the remake], Out of This World) or “Acclaim Classics” (NBA Jams, Turok, Arch-Rivals, Smash TV, Mary-Kate and Ashley: Girl’s Night Out, and... well, it doesn’t matter what’s on it, as long as the name is cool, people will buy it). These products would save their bankrupted companies, unless they already liquidated their IP, so they couldn’t re-release their back catalog.

Friday, September 23, 2005

SitC Online

I don't know if you read Gamasutra, but I found out about an interesting new product called "Spend the Night". It is "a female-centric, sexually-themed multiplayer dating game and community". One of their new employees's said, "There’s a myth that women aren’t interested in erotic content, which is totally untrue. Women are just as interested in sex as men are, but there is little in the way of online content for this vast market." Someone should take this a step further. They need to add a license to get the mass-market appeal! Women interested in sex? What license matches that? "Sex in the City" of course! Think about the great gameplay "Sex in the City Online" would have! You can have promiscuous sexual romps in the safety of your computer screen! You can meet up with your girlfriends and talk about the important issues in your life, the things that really matter: promiscuous sexual romps. I mean, people complain that women aren't interested in games because they are reduced to sex symbols. Now women can do the same thing to men! I mean because really, the problem with objectifying women is not because it's degrading and reinforces men equating them to objects, it is the unfairness because men aren't treated as objects too! It's all about equal treatment even if it's bad treatment. So, think about all the fun things women would do in "SitC Online". You could buy expensive clothing, where the amount of cloth in the garment is inversely proportional to the price. You could have sex. You could go shoe shopping and organize them in your massive shoe closet. You could have sex with strangers. You could wear your fancy shoes and slutty clothes, go out, pick up a guy (or multiple guys) and have sex with him/them! I can't imagine a game that would be MORE appealing to women, except maybe we also need to make a "Desperate Housewives Online" to get the coveted older women demographic. This game is the breakthrough title that game developers need to finally solve the problem of women not being interested in games.

Sunday, September 18, 2005

The BIG G sez console gaming is dead. Long live PC gaming!

Many people are complaining that the next gen hardware is too expensive. $399 for the Xbox 360?!?!? Sony has said that PS3 is going to be expensive, so it’ll be at LEAST $399! The BIG G sees the cause for concern, and the only solution is to turn back to PC gaming. Just think, you can get next gen graphics if you spend $500 x 2 for dual Nvidia 7800 graphics cards (using SLI to run both), $1000 on a Pentium 4 3.46 GHz Extreme Edition, and then $400 on 4 gig of RAM. The best part is, once you drop probably about $3000 on your super PC, none of the current games will really take full advantage of your monster hardware. By the time games are made that actually can squeeze the full power out of your hardware, they’ve come out with Pixel Shader 5.0, 64x Anisotropic Filtering and 256 bit floating point color values (double precision for each color channel), so you’ll just have to replace your hardware again. For the consumer that can’t afford $399, there’s always PC gaming to turn to.

Friday, September 16, 2005

Revolution vs. Evolution

As The BIG G suspected, Nintendo was hardly revolutionary. The BIG G already has that controller, except it was made by Gamester and for the Playstation 1. They even ripped off the name: the PS1 controller is the Evolution, theirs is for the Revolution. Let’s compare, shall we?

Appearance
Revolution: A glorified TV remote
Evolution: A futuristic power glove
Winner: If I’m gaming, I want to look like I’m doing something other than navigating a DVD menu. If my neighbors look in on me and I’m playing Revolution, it’ll look like I don’t know how to work my DVD player. If they see me with the Evolution, they’ll be like, “Man, that guy’s a sweet gamer!” Hells yeah I am. Evolution wins!


Buttons
Revolution:
Two main game buttons plus a D-pad
Evolution: Seven main game buttons plus a D-pad. Plus it has an LCD display and some buttons that correspond to it, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what they are supposed to do since it didn't come with an instruction manual.
Winner: This was a close call because the Evolution is missing R1 for no apparent reason, so it’s certainly not very good at controlling PS1/PS2 games. Also, if I wanted to use analog mode, the controller pressed triangle when I moved it up and some other button when I moved it down, so it’s not very good at all, BUT a two button controller is like a one button mouse! I refuse to use a mouse with less than 5 buttons (including a scroll wheel) so how on earth can I deal with a two button controller?!?! Evolution wins again.


Gyroscopes
Revolution:
3D tracking (like a 3D mouse) with tilt
Evolution: Just tilt
Winner: considering that the tilt just plain sucks, I can only imagine that the new 3D tracking makes it even worse, so I’ll stick with my Evolution here.
Game Support
Revolution: Probably not much because it’s going to be darn hard to port to the system, and even harder to use the controller well.
Evolution: All of PS1 and PS2 games.
Winner: Although there’s limited degrees of functionality for the Evolution in most games, I’ll go with the Evolution here again just because of the sheer volume of titles.

Overall
Evolution wins
!!!! Sorry Nintendo, you failed to out do Gamester’s crappy barely functional PS1 controller.

Thursday, September 15, 2005

Next Gen IS PHYSICS

So, everyone knows that with the next gen we have hit the graphical peak. The processors are so powerful that we can reuse the extra computing horsepower for the second most important thing to gameplay: physics. Now we can start designing games that have the realistic immersion of real life. In Doom 3, you could shoot a box, and it would role realistically. That was really cool! It made the game way better. Crates are a staple in every game. Now we can have crates that can stack and fall! Think of the great gameplay scenarios that opens up. If you destroy a crate on the bottom, the others will fall down. Now they are a navigation hazard! Doesn’t that sound fun? We can start having real world physics for other things too. We can have realistic jumping physics so your character only moves like a foot in the air. (I don’t know about you, but when I jump, I don’t go flying up to twice my height) We can greatly enhance my favorite thing in games: falling damage. We can have the player hit the ground with a real impact, do a rigid body simulation on the leg bones, and fracture them if you fell from too far. Then for the rest of the game, we can use an IK solver to simulate how you’d walk when your legs are broken in the particular place.

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

The next exclusive license purchases

EA bought the exclusive NFL football as a service to the gamers, so gamers wouldn’t get confused about which was the “good” football game when they went to the store. Well, I think more publishers should do this. Let’s take Marvel for example. EA has “Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects”, Vivendi Universal has “Hulk”, Activision has both “Spiderman” and “The X-Men”, THQ has “The Punisher” and Microsoft has the Marvel MMORPG. Which one should you buy? Someone should buy the exclusive license so you no longer have to choose. If someone is buying the license to all Marvel properties, someone should also buy the rights to all of a movie studio’s properties. Sony can already do it. Imagine if the “Spiderman 3” game only came out for Playstation 3, since Sony Pictures is making the movie. Any company could by rights to all of Paramount’s properties. Then they could have crossover battles between the Rugrats and Star Trek! That’s what I’m looking forward to play! While they are buying exclusive movie studio licenses, why not get the exclusive license to make games based on real life? I’m sure that if you pay someone enough money, they can work it out so you are the only publisher that can make games based of reality. Crap, while we’re at it, why doesn’t a game developer get the exclusive license to make games? Then they’ll be no confusion on which ones to buy! They’ll all be the high quality that consumers look for, since only one company will be doing them.

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

The next XXXX vs. XXXX game

Ever since X-Men vs. Street Fighter, the crossover versus battle games have gotten very popular. There’s Marvel vs. Capcom, Capcom vs. SNK and “Marvel: Rise of the Imperfects”, which is essentially Marvel vs. EA. I’m telling you what the next big one is. It’s “Kellogg’s vs. General Mills: Cereal Fight 2K6”. These breakfast cereal behemoths have been battling for your bowl real-estate for decades, but now they can duke it out in a virtual battle. Think about the great cast of characters. In Kellogg’s corner, there’s Tony the Tiger, Toucan Sam, Dig’em Frog, Snap, Crackle and Pop. Fighting for General Mills are the Trix Rabbit, L. C. Leprechaun, the Honey Nut Cheerios Bee, Count Chocula, Frankenberry and the viscious Boo Berry. As an unlockable, Quaker has added the ultimate character, the Quisp Alien into the mix. Think about all the great attacks. Tony the Tiger’s vicious battle roar can be combated by the Leprechaun’s magic charms. The Dig’em Frog can do a hop attack against the Trix Rabbit’s.... well, come to think of it, the Trix Rabbit just sucks. He can’t even get some cereal from a bunch of lousy kids. Sure he may be a master of disguise, (although he looks like a rabbit wearing clothes to me, but maybe the kids in the Kellogg’s universe are idiots) but he can’t even grab some cereal from mean and obnoxious kids. Well, there’s always a worst character in fighting games, it looks like we’ve found ours. Here’s a screenshot from the menu selection screen:

Monday, September 12, 2005

People Just Don’t Understand Target Videos!

Now, I don’t know if you read sites like Penny Arcade or 1UP, but there was a big stink about the Next Gen Madden video looking way worse than the original target video. This may come as some surprise to you because IGN reported the following: "But before you dismiss the commercial, the people at Tiburon say that some of the Madden team didn't want these visuals seen, not because they are setting the bar too high, but too low. Seriously, they say that these are the visuals they were shooting for originally, but that the team now feels that they will be easily surpassed.” 1UP said that they might just be using placeholder animations that they will replace by release. They don’t know much about games development because Tiburon has to be just fixing bugs now in order to launch with the 360. Minor animation tweaks is the best we’ll get.
So if all that’s the case, how do you rectify the two sides of the story? EA says they’ll do better than the target video, but the gameplay looks much worse! It’s simple really. The target video shows the quality of the pre-rendered cinematics (FMVs) in the game. Tiburon thinks they can play even better quality video than that on the Xbox 360, and they’re probably right! I’m sure you can do perceptibly lossless video compression on a video like that, even if the video is rendered at 720p resolution! That’s all target videos show. They are to give people an idea of what is to come for cinematics.

Sunday, September 11, 2005

Game Designers are Obsolete

Everyone thinks that game designers get to make all the important decisions about what goes into a game! WRONG! Marketing gets to pick. The marketing department really knows the gamer, understands the gamer, and knows what makes a quality game, so they should take even more responsibility away from the game developers! The marketing department should say exactly what features are necessary for a good game, and then programmers should implement them. Game designers visions just might conflict with the true visionaries in the marketing department, so we shouldn’t have them. They know that bullet points on the back of the box, not the quality of the game inside, sell the products!

Saturday, September 10, 2005

“World of Warcraft”? Screw that! I’m talking “World of The BIG G”!

The problem with MMORPGs are they aren’t immersive enough. They don’t have a consistent version of a realistic world. That’s where I’ll one up them with my genius MMORPG idea. It’s called “World of The BIG G”. It features 10 playable races: humans, orcs, elves, trolls, halflings, dragons, rocks, chickens, robots and dinosaurs. You can also breed the two races, so you could be a half chicken, half rock. That’s what I’ll play as. It’ll be in a rich fantasy environment, and you can choose awesome character classes like: wizard, warlock, morlock, witch, refrigerator repairman, warrior, knight, thief, one of those crazy guys that spray paint themselves silver and stand really still in big cities for tips, clown, killer klown, robot, and taxi driver. Everyone will have to be perfectly in character at all times. We’ll outsource to the moon (see earlier entry here) to have a board of GMs that will censor every piece of dialog typed in real time in order to make sure it’s in character. For example, if you are a wizard, you have to speak everything in poetry. “I’ll cast my exploding lung spell on that dragon” becomes:
“Ye dragons of olde, hear my curse,
Soon you will be taken away in a hearse.
Dragons see, and dragons scream,
Not after they taste my exploding lung cream.”
If you are a one of those crazy guys that spray paint themselves silver and stand really still in big cities for tips, anything you type is automatically censored because those guys don’t talk at all. If you are a taxi driver, every other word you type is replaced with profanity, and it’s misspelled to simulate a thick accent. It’ll be the perfect MMORPG experience!!!!

Friday, September 09, 2005

The Gontroller

Everyone makes a big fuss about the supposed innovation of the Nintendo Revolution’s controller. Nintendo’s not innovative. They just take old technology and re-brand it. The BIG G offers you here the REAL innovative next-gen controller. The BIG G calls it “THE GONTROLLER”. It’s very simple really. Below is the image from The BIG G’s patent application:

The bottom pad goes on the ground. The player stands on the swivel base. It’s a ball joint, so the player has to lean his/her entire body to tilt the pad. The ball joint registers the orientation of the player both leaning of the pad and twist. The ball joint doubles as a pressure sensor, so it can tell when the player jumps off of it. This is the only truly revolutionary controller design. Think about it. You want the character to walk forward? Just lean forward. You want the character to jump? Just jump. You want the character to circle strafe while firing in the upper left quadrant of your screen? Well, too bad!

Thursday, September 08, 2005

Forget globalize! Solarize!

I’ve previously posted about outsourcing to the moon. Yeah, that’s thinking 5 years ahead when people find out that outsourcing to other countries doesn’t work. What do people do in ten years when they figure out moon outsourcing doesn’t work? THE SUN! Think about it. The sun is the greatest energy source of all time. It’s a gift that keeps on giving! The sun will be providing free fusion energy for longer than the human race will last. If you move your employees to the sun, it’ll radically cut down on operation costs since you’ll get free power. Game development places are always in sunny, nice weather places. Well, it doesn’t get any more sunny than on the SUN! Think about that. People complain that programmers never have a tan. That would soon change when they are relocated to the sun! They may get more than just a tan there, like horrible amounts of radiation, but it's worth it to look good, right?

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

The next big hit movie license

All my favorite classic movies have either been made into games or are becoming games ("The Godfather", "Taxi Driver", "City of the Lost Children", "Dune", "Bram Stoker’s Dracula") SAVE ONE - the single greatest achievement in cinematic history - "Citizen Kane"! Just think what a great game you could make out of that! It’d be part simulation because you’d have to run a hit newspaper. Part of it would be a dating simulation where you’d find a trophy girlfriend to replace your cold and unloving wife. And it wouldn’t be "Citizen Kane" without the special art collection mode! If Orson Welles would appear as Unicron in “Transformers: The Movie”, you better believe his family would let you dig him up, resurrect him in order to perform in “Citizen Kane: the Game". You better believe zombie Orson Welles would give the performance of his life.. errr. Afterlife?

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

BPU - the future in gaming hardware

What’s a BPU? Only the future piece of hardware that every gaming system will have to have. It’s a Big-moment Processing Unit. What’s a big moment? It’s a richly cinematic experience that only interactive entertainment can provide! Creating these big moments is very processor intensive, so soon we shall have this specially created processor to offload the work of creating these cinematic masterpieces. The BPU will have special instructions to accelerate the common operations in creating big moments - ridiculously over the top explosions, close or awkward cameras that make playing the game hard but make it seem more exciting, and extraneous particle systems that don’t make any logical sense. Be sure that on any hardware you are thinking about developing for, they support BPUs or BPU expansion packs.

Monday, September 05, 2005

Zeroeth Person Shooter

First person shooters may be the current genre of choice NOW, but it’s only a matter of time before there’s another innovention that improves on the winning formula. Well, ask any programmer, and they’ll tell you that you always start counting at zero, not one. So, the only way to out do a first person shooter is with a zeroeth person shooter! Just think, no longer is your view clumsily restricted to your character’s eyes. In fact, no longer do you have a view! The view was just distracting you from the real point of the game anyway. Add this radical new gameplay with some cool physics simulations, and you’ve got yourself the best selling title of the next generation!

Sunday, September 04, 2005

Outsource to the Moon

There’s a big buzz in the industry for outsourcing these days. It won’t last. Companies will soon learn that the quality of the work in the other countries isn’t up to snuff, communication bandwidth becomes a major problem, and it’s difficult to manage. Well, they aren’t going far enough. If you really want to outsource, rather than looking across the world, look up - AT THE MOON! Think about it. The moon is the perfect place to outsource. The cost of living is NOTHING! There’s no taxes or pesky governments to enforce labor laws. If you think people in other countries will work for cheap, just imagine what you can pay people on the moon. THEY’LL WORK FOR AIR, for Pete’s sake! There’s plenty of air here on the earth, but the entire moon workforce will be suffocating, since there’s not much of an atmosphere there. So, supply the moon employees with air, and they’ll do the best work imaginable because if you don’t give them air, they’ll suffocate to death.

Saturday, September 03, 2005

No button games

As technology gets better, people think we are moving towards increasingly complicated controls. That’s wrong. The future of games is in the controller with zero buttons. As a game developer, we are increasingly frustrated that we can’t ensure that the gamer is getting the experience as we designed it. So, what we’ll do in the future is have controllers with no buttons. Picture this - you put the disk in the console, and you EXPERIENCE everything the way the game developers dreamt it up. There’s no lousy controls for you (the gamer) to mess up THEIR (the game developer’s) experience. It’s exactly the vision the game developers had in the first place replayed for you perfectly! Also, we want to cut all the extra stuff out of the games that just wastes the gamer’s time. I’m thinking these new non-interactive games would be maybe an hour and a half to two hours in length. THIS IS THE FUTURE OF GAMES!

Friday, September 02, 2005

Your one stop source for the inside scoop on the game industry

Hey, The BIG G here! I've decided to create this blog to provide people inside and outside the game industry with nuggets of knowledge about the REAL state of the industry. Only I have the real insight in the future of the industry, so if you stick around here, you might just learn something!