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4/4/2004
I've been playing Far Cry a little bit. I'm playing on a machine that's close to the best you can get. Athlon 3200+ or thereabouts, FX5900 Ultra 256MB, 1 GB of RAM, etc.
It's a tough game! I'm on the default difficulty, and I got smoked several times near the beginning of the game.
The game looks nice, as everybody says, but I'm not impressed with that. The frame rate drops severely when I actually have to shoot people, which is bad. I can drop the detail, sure. But I don't understand why various reviews are talking about how good the engine is. It's not that good. It has a lot of nice features, sure, but that's only one aspect. The other (more important, if you work in console land) aspect is how efficiently it uses the hardware. A truly impressive engine is one that can do a lot with a little. With Far Cry, it's my hardware that's impressive, not the engine. With a game like Halo 2, where the hardware is very limited, the engine is very impressive.
At GDC, the most impressive technical feat I saw was real-time lighting and bump mapping. Huh? They were done on PS2, for the first time as far as I know. Sure, you can do a lot more on PC that has 25X the power, but so can everybody.
Posted at 15:04 by thrill
Two words I really hate:
Automagically.
Guesstimate.
Not so bad when you hear them, say, once every lifetime or so. But when you see that one person every day, and they replace the right word with one of those non-words every time...
I mean, an estimate is already a guess. Why add a redundant prefix and mangle the word at the same time?
Hey man, it's innovation with language! INNOVATION!!
Posted at 01:23 by thrill
3/24/2004
Game Journalists - the Dregs of the Industry?
I don't know why I hate game journalists so much. Perhaps it's because they are generally terrible at the basics of their profession--writing. Or, should I say, "Perhaps its because they are generally terrible at the basics of they're profession--writing."
How often do you read something completely idiotic, like "the game's biggest downfall is the number of clicks required to perform any action. LUCKILY, there's an advanced interface option that allows you to do what you need with fewer clicks...?" Yeah, it was Lady Luck, not the design team, whom you can thank for putting in the option.
It also bothers me how little journalistic integrity these game writers possess. "Here, we'll fly you out to our studio, set you up in a posh hotel, give you free stuff, and take you out to the strip club. Joe Developer was going to go on vacation after 3 months of 100-hour weeks, but instead we're going to have him walk you through the game and tell you exactly what should be in your review. We'll show you so many of the good parts of the game that you hardly even need to play it yourself to write that review! (and we hope you don't play it much, because we're shipping the game with dozens of bugs)"
I also dislike them because they don't understand games nearly as well as they think they do. To them, anything different, anything that requires more pressing of buttons, is a good thing. Let's look at one of the more talked-about "innovations" of late, the pitching meter in MVP Baseball 2004. You press, hold, release, and press again to throw your pitch, losing accuracy if the last press is mistimed. Well, there are about 120-130 pitches for one team in a 9 inning game, so you're doing this thing that many times per game. Guess what? You get pretty good at it after 1 or 2 games. So good, in fact, that you never mistime it again. And every pitch you throw is perfect, even when your pitcher is dead tired. Interactive? Yes. Different than what the competition is doing? Yes. But is it a good thing? Does it add to the game? Make it more realistic? No, not in the least. How many MLB pitchers hit their target exactly on every pitch? None. This inherent flaw with the pitching meter trivializes the pitcher/batter showdown, takes away strategy and realism, and adds meaningless tedium to the controls. But it's different and it makes you push more buttons, so according to game journalists, it's a good thing.
One of these days I'm going to talk about "innovation," a word misused, abused, and overused by publishers, developers, PR, and the media troglodytes. It's not about games being fun anymore; it's all about being innovative now. But what exactly does it mean to be "innovative?" Not as much as you'd expect.
Posted at 20:27 by thrill
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