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The Problem With Demos...
Plagiarize dives into the many issues surrounding good demos and bad demos, and what people should be getting out of them.
Watching the Microsoft press conference at E3 this year I think it’s quickly evident what their aim was. It was not to build some long term hopes for the future by announcing a bunch of games that won’t be ready for a long time. What it was, was to reinforce this basic fact the Fall 2007 Xbox 360 lineup is one of the best, most complete game lineups in my lifetime.
By now I’m sure most of the interested parties have heard, but for those of you who haven’t; Evil Avatar is reporting via GameDaily.BIZ that Sony is going to be slashing $100 US from the price of the PlayStation 3. Taking the much maligned price from $600 to a somewhat less absurd $500. No, I don’t want to hear about what a great deal it is for a Blu-Ray Player. I don’t care about Blu-Ray or the format war it and HD-DVD have started.
This was going to be an article questioning the readers as to whether or not the price drop would affect their perceptions of the PS3 and whether or not you were willing to run out and buy one when the price did indeed drop. However, Sony can’t buy, steal, or cajole good publicity these days and promptly denied they had such plans.
A little while ago GameTap debuted to a collective sense of “meh”. The game selection was not particularly impressive and $9.99 a month to play a bunch of old games seemed like a steep fee. But as the months went by, they kept adding more and more to the game catalogue. They also introduced a cheap first month for only 99 cents. Earlier this month I decided to take the leap and wow, this is a quality service. The game selection is excellent and the quality of the program is surprisingly nimble. The game library for this service includes three categories of games: regular “real” retail games, retro games and original games.
Frustration in gaming is something which I wrote about quite some time ago, and is still something which I think every game developer needs to be acutely aware of. That is not to say that frustrating games are unpopular - in fact I would say that Counter-Strike has single handedly proved that is not the case. However, I do think that player frustration is something that needs to be dealt with. Consistently frustrating experiences invariably lead to bad attitudes. Road rage would be an extreme example.
Given my past experiences in online browser games, this has been at the forefront of my mind throughout the development process of The Project. Seeing as it will be a game where there are no computer opponents, both the winners and losers are human. The last thing a player wants when they’re on a losing streak is to be plagued by irritating problems which serve only to frustrate, and stop the user from getting on with the game. For a project with such a big focus on community, bad attitudes are something to try and minimize.
Nintendo.
Few words mean so many things to so many people like “Nintendo.” Whether you used to play video games, currently play video games, will play video games, know some one who plays video games, or hate video games, you know the word Nintendo. You probably also have an opinion about it…or them, depending what definition of the word you are using. Despite hemorrhaging market share since the advent of the Nintendo 64, “Nintendo” was always synonymous with “video games,” though in recent years “PlayStation” has been creeping in as the generic term for the hobby.
All that has changed through the one- two-punch Nintendo laid upon the industry. Of course I’m talking about the Nintendo DS and the Nintendo Wii. Both systems were initially derided when they were announced and the former wasn’t even taken seriously in the face of Sony’s PlayStation Portable until the release of Nintendogs. However, now, six months after the launch of the Wii you still have to wait in line to get one and the last time I went shopping for a Nintendo DS Lite, I had to travel between sixteen stores in a densely populated area of America to get one. One might be tempted to ask the question: “why?” Why is it so difficult to get two under-powered game systems that are (arguably) lacking games for serious gamers? The answer is quite simple: My mom wants one of each.
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