Thursday, June 11th, 2009
The number fourteen has literally no significance. This week, we dive heroically into the turbulent waters of gaming ephemera, tackling Alabaster, violence and motion sensing among other stimulating topics. Why not join us? Why not?
Check out links from the show on our official Google Reader page.
Thursday, June 11th, 2009
Morning all. Podcast will be up very shortly. I’ve just got a couple of quick notes here that don’t really fit in with the site enough for full postings. If you come here for your high powered games analysis, don’t bother reading on.
- Symantec; McAfee pay back money they gained illegally with “auto renewals”. I don’t use anti-virus software, but my Mother does, and as I bought her the initial version of her anti virus software (I know I know but she wanted one of the big-name ones) I got done by this a couple of years back. I called them and asked them what the hell they thought they were doing charging me for a renewal without asking me and they folded straight away, which is always a sign that a company knows it’s doing something dodgy. I’m posting this because it’s a pretty disgusting tactic and, as usual, I advise using one of the free AV softwares if you have to at all.
- I’m still mildly annoyed with Eurogamer (and Edge) for giving Red Faction a 7. Tellingly, those are the two publications whose score-strategy I like least. Whenever a magazine goes on about how “5 should be the average”, they miss out several important facts. First, 5 should be the average, but not over the subset of games they review – over all games. Magazines will tend to review the better games, so the magazine-wide average should be higher than 5. Second, these 5-is-the-new-7 evangelists always misuse the term”average”. When we say “average” game, we don’t mean “median” game, we mean a game which is kind of ok to play. 50% of games are not at least ok to play for your average, non-specific-genre-fan gamer. I personally like the old Arcade-magazine 5-star system (not to be confused with out-of-five, which just tends to be out-of-10 divided by 2), where 1 star is bad (< 55%), 2 stars is playable-but-not-great (<70%), 3 stars is worth-a-look (< 80%), and 4 and 5 are good and great respectively. We don’t need all that granularity at the bottom end.
Sunday, June 7th, 2009
Played this for about eight hours since getting it yesterday, and it’s my Gotee so far. I have absolutely no idea what Eurogamer are doing giving this a 7 – it’s so good looking, technically accomplished, original, genre-forwarding, and packed with fun that even if it’s not your thing I don’t understand how you don’t give it an 8. It’s also, in my opinion, better than Far Cry 2 in every direction. I can’t recommend this enough.
Saturday, June 6th, 2009
I’m a PC guy at heart, and my favorite genre is probably the FPS. The consoles have a ton of interesting FPSes that I basically can’t play – I just find it impossible to use the standard dual-analogue (SDA) control system.
I know a lot of people are perfectly happy with SDA – many will tell you they can be as accurate as they could be with mouse+keyboard, and most will tell you it’s less accurate but acceptable. Me, I have a massive black spot in my head for it – I just hate it.
These things are preference, but I can come up with one slightly dodgy “objective” reason why I think the SDA system is bad. When trying to aim quickly, you want to control the position of your crosshairs. The left analogue stick, however, controls the velocity of them. Why am I being asked to convert between the two, mentally, when trying to shoot someone before he shoots me?
I’d like to see if I can come up with something better.
Here’s my proposed dual-analogue FPS control system, Dual Analogue Absolute (DAA). The left stick controls the crosshair’s position on the screen (think Goldeneye with R held down). Move the left stick to the top right, and the crosshair will be at the top-right of the screen. The space of the left stick is basically mapped to the screen, so if you see an enemy and he’s there on the screen, you understand instinctively (after a bit of practice) that you need to move the left stick here. To actually rotate your view, you simply hold down the left stick’s bumper and move it.
If anyone knows of a game which has this control system, comment it as I’d love to give it a go. If I’m bored today I might throw a demo together for the PC using the 360 pad.
Friday, June 5th, 2009
We’ve had some exciting developments this week, with both the final concept and logo for the game being completed. I’m very proud of these (and please with the work our artists have been doing), as we now have a strong direction for the in-game art itself.
Ian has been working on the single player design, and we’re really hoping that we can execute a decent campaign mode which will please both those interested in a narrative driven game, and those who just want a series of interesting gameplay-driven challenges. While I do want there to be a compelling narrative, as close to the one I came up with during pre-production, it’s very important to me that there’s nothing annoying and obtrusive. I get as bored by irritating cutscenes and dialogue trees as everyone else: we just have to make sure that the story can be told economically and lends weight to the action rather than detracting from it.
Next week, we’ll be working more on single player, I’ll hopefully be developing the game website a little further, and hopefully we’ll be able to show some progress with the in-game art itself. I’m making progress with our PR list, and an official announcement of the game will happen as soon as I’m satisfied that we’ll be able to get it out to enough places.
If you’d like to help us out (we appreciate it!) please digg the latest episode of Village on Digg – Digg.com
Friday, June 5th, 2009
Eurogamer have a pretty interesting Natal interview up. We talk about it a little on this week’s podcast, but I have a few extra observations.
First, in 2006 I met with a company who were in final talks to sell a “two-camera, full-body mapping” technology to Microsoft. We met because we wanted to see if Determinance should work with this tech – it never came to anything, but given what I was told about their product I would be extremely surprised if it wasn’t the first part of Natal. I don’t offer any conclusions, but it is interesting to consider how long it took to get to this stage, and the way in which Natal is being marketed. It’s also mildly interesting that they don’t mention the 3rd party company, but kind of imply that it was a fully internal product. Not at all surprising mind you – but this is the kind of datapoint which makes for more informed analysis of first party decisions.
Second, here’s an exerpt from the interview:
Say I’m tracking a wrist, which is what I do for Burnout. I can look at that on a single frame and I can see what direction, acceleration and confidence I have for that joint. Why is that interesting? Because it allows me to not only know where you are, but to know where you’re going to be. This is how we do the directing and the predictive behaviour.
If you think about swinging a baseball bat, by the time you’re halfway done with the swing, I know not only where you’re going to end but when you’re going to end. There are very precise and predictable ways so you can have that immediate payoff of my baseball bat hitting the baseball.
…What? Surely you… will actually be hitting the baseball though? Why do you need to predict anything?
This says to me that no matter how advanced Natal is, Microsoft are still very much thinking in terms of gestures. You wouldn’t need to predict anything if you were actually mirroring the player’s actions and responding realistically. This shows that it’s a big consideration for them that the game knows before you do it what action you’re performing… which really is a very wiimote way of doing things.
I’m also not making a value-judgement on this – my work on Determinance and Guile has shown me that players often really don’t want full analogue control over everything. Game design is partially about making the set of choices the player has the correct size – too big is just as bad as too small. I think we can probably all agree that Wii Tennis is too limited in this regard, but I’m also sure you don’t want people to actually have to be good at tennis to play a mainstream game.
This is a tangent now… but how far is this going to go in Golf games? It seems to me that Natal or MotionPlus could both get pretty close to simulating real swing mechanics… in which case, will the average player start having a handicap in the tripple-figures?
Next up:
Or you could have a hardcore gamer like me playing a game with a controller, while a non-hardcore person sitting next to me enjoys the experience by playing with Natal. I could be having my Halo experience with the controller and the friend next to me, who’s not a hardcore gamer, could be throwing grenades or driving the Warthog or doing any number of things with Natal.
Wow. Natal as the noob control option for games? That’s an insane, amazing idea. That is facing the problem of accuracy vs ease in a controller head on. I love this idea.
So we have a custom chip that we put in the sensor itself. The chip we designed with Microsoft will be doing the majority of the processing for you, so as a game designer you can think about the sensor as a normal input device – something that’s relatively free for you as a game designer.
Sounds like the signal processing is pretty hard work – I can see no reason for not doing it on the 360 itself unless it took considerable resources.
Thursday, June 4th, 2009
Episode 13 is here to save you from latent superstition! This week, among other things, we discuss Monkey Island, tiny emulators, and some of your own probing questions.
Check out links from the show on our official Google Reader page.
Thursday, June 4th, 2009
Hey guys. Apologies for the late podcast this week – we had a few technical difficulties. Will be up in the next few hours.
You are currently browsing the Visiting the Village: The Mode 7 Games Blog and Podcast weblog archives for June, 2009.
