Console Wars II

[Asher]

That really has more to do with art direction than anything else. I'm surprised you tried to make such an argument.

[asleepathewheel]

Originally posted by Asher
That really has more to do with art direction than anything else. I'm surprised you tried to make such an argument.

Yeah, in that case I'm probably being unfair to criticize more than that game.

It was just utterly disappointing to me to see that at the end. Art direction or not, it looked to me like something I'd see on the ps2.

[asleepathewheel]

Will Wright:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/oct/26/willwright

What games do you play? And do you play for fun or research?

I try to play innovative games that are coming out – I really love Guitar Hero, I play my Nintendo DS a lot, check out things on the Wii. With the exception of Advance Wars on my DS, there's no one game that I spend a huge amount of time playing. I love Advance Wars – I used to play all these strategy games as a kid… Panzer Blitz, and all these old Avalon Hill games.

Somebody asked me what I thought next generation meant and what about the PlayStation 3 was next generation. The only next gen system I've seen is the Wii – the PS3 and the Xbox 360 feel like better versions of the last, but pretty much the same game with incremental improvement. But the Wii feels like a major jump – not that the graphics are more powerful, but that it hits a completely different demographic. In some sense I see the Wii as the most significant thing that's happened, at least on the console side, in quite a while.
...

We've got an Xbox 360 collecting dust in the background, a Wii hooked up that we use quite a bit. I don't have a PS3. I still, for the most part, prefer playing games on the computer – to me the mouse is the best input device ever.
...

We're doing Spore on the Wii

[Spaced Cowboy]

I agree, I've been thinking about this and noticing the Wii in TV shows. The Wii is the quintesential causal gamer machine. The 360 and III appeal to the hardcore gamer.

Given the strength of causal games like the sims, I suspect the Wii will continue to sell, long after the 360 and III are on the downslope.

That being said, I don't own any of them, as I mainly do pc games. I have a DS as well that I pretty much play every day, so much so, that the screen is starting to wear out, should have used a protector.

Also I have the halo edition of the original Xbox...collecting dust with a few "new to me" unplayed games. I have not gotten rid of it since it keeps my nephew entertained when my sister visits (about once every 2-3 years).

I do plan on upgrading to the 360 when the new systems come out, probably during or after xmas when I can catch a sale.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Spaced Cowboy
I agree, I've been thinking about this and noticing the Wii in TV shows. The Wii is the quintesential causal gamer machine. The 360 and III appeal to the hardcore gamer.

I've seen far more 360 in TV shows?

Asleep: Did he say those comments before or after MySims bombed on the Wii?

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by DrSpike's Hero
[T]o me the mouse is the best input device ever.

[asleepathewheel]

Originally posted by Asher

I've seen far more 360 in TV shows?

Asleep: Did he say those comments before or after MySims bombed on the Wii?

the article was dated today.

He's in england, right? I think mysims did much better there than in NA.

I actually have the game, but haven;t played it yet.

[Asher]

Now that we've actually been able to use the Wii, we can make more accurate claims about the control scheme:

http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/commentary/games/2007/10/gamesfrontiers_1022

Smooth Moves: In Defense of Really Elegant Button-Mashing

Here's how to do an "Ollie" on a skateboard:

Pump your rear foot down hard on the tail of the skateboard, while rapidly lifting your front leg up to your chest. Then jump upward on your rear leg, while sliding your front foot forward along the board. Presto: The board will jump upward with you, and you'll be standing level on it, hovering briefly in the air.

OK, now how do you do an Ollie in a skateboarding videogame? In a Tony Hawk game -- the defining series of the genre -- you hit the A button, if you're playing on an Xbox 360. If you want to pull off more-complex tricks, you add ever more Byzantine button combos. For example, pulling the left trigger, while hitting the A button, followed by the X button plus the D-pad, will execute a "pressure flip." To "wallride"? Hit Y, A, up on the D-pad -- and then A again.

Got that?

This leads us to the big critique of controller schemes: They're too artificial. Game designers take organic, fluid, physical real-life movements and turn them into random, opaque button combinations. This drives newbies away because they can't penetrate the button-combo thicket.

Indeed, this is precisely why critics have been slavering over the Wii for the last two years. Swinging your arm around is a more "realistic" holodeckian control scheme, so it is fated to eventually replace the crude, artificial controller. The controller is the ancient past of games; "sensing" your physical movements is the future. Right?

Maybe not. I'm beginning to think that the hoopla over the Wii is a bit misplaced. Because I've been playing Skate, a skateboarding game that seriously rethinks the way you use a controller -- and I think it produces results that are not only better than the average controller, but better than a Wii.

Here's how you do an Ollie in Skate: You pull the right thumbstick down, then abruptly shove it upward. It's an attempt to emulate -- with your thumbs -- the sense of leaning backward and forward on your skateboard. To do a "pop shove-it" -- in which you Ollie upward while flicking the board in a 180-degree spin beneath you -- you spin the thumbstick, bien sur, 180 degrees. To brake, you pull back on the thumbstick, which leans your avatar backward, scraping the tail of the skateboard along the ground.

In essence, Skate transforms the button pushes. They are no longer random hits, but little metaphors for the swoop of an entire body.

The thing is, it works. At first, I found it hard to get used to, because I'm so accustomed to Tony Hawk-style button-mashing. Skate tricks require more-careful timing, so the first half-hour of playing the game was a frustrating montage of watching my avatar smash face-first on the ground, over and over again.

But then I stumbled into a big half-pipe, and whoa: It all came together. As I flew up the edge of the pipe and launched into the air, I found myself "leaning" my fingers in precisely the direction I wanted my avatar's body to move. When I wanted to spin in midair, I'd lean the left thumbstick the way I felt I ought to be leaning, and bingo: It'd work. Basically, I began intuiting how to perform tricks.

In a Tony Hawk game -- indeed, in almost all non-Wii games -- this is impossible. You can't infer how to do a new move, because they're all assigned to essentially random buttons. You either stumble upon a new trick through trial and error, or you consult a FAQ. But with Skate, there's a language built into the movements, an internal consistency based on the internal consistency of how a physical body actually moves.

Which brings us to the Wii. Sure, Nintendo's beloved console aims at capturing this sort of natural feel in its movements. But the truth is that it often fails, because it winds up being artificial, too. In The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, you swing the Wiimote back and forth to "slash" your sword -- but your physical movements do not really resemble what happens on screen at all. You can't really control the angle of your sword's attack, for example.

Swinging the Wiimote is just as artificial as using a regular controller -- and maybe even more annoying, because you expect that your real-life arm, swinging away in the air, ought to map directly onto the onscreen activity. I actually gave up on Twilight Princess because of precisely this problem.

And indeed, I often find myself in the middle of a Wii game wishing that the designer had simply used a regular button-and-thumbstick controller. Because while old-school button combos are artificial, they're also delightfully economical. It's like learning the piano -- hard at first, but once you're comfortable with the abstract movements, you're flying: effortlessly running backward while tossing grenades in Halo, or bouncing sideways off nine opponents' heads while readying a skull-splitter attack in Ninja Gaiden.

This, ultimately, is what's so brilliant about Skate: It perfectly splits the difference between the Wii and a regular controller. It retains the useful abstraction of classic Tony Hawk-style play -- yet infuses it with a Wii-like sense of one's natural body movements. It borrows the best of each control scheme, and avoids the worst.

All of which makes me think, hey, maybe we ought to cool down the rhetoric proclaiming the death of the controller. If controllers are too hard for newbies, maybe the solution is for designers to rethink how they're used. There's plenty of life in the old thumbstick yet.

- - -

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines.

[Asher]

EA Playground: Another bomb on the Wii.

[asleepathewheel]

Originally posted by Asher
Now that we've actually been able to use the Wii, we can make more accurate claims about the control scheme:

meh.

in some areas, the wiimote is superior to traditional controllers, in other areas, traditional controllers are superior to the wiimote.

Even nintendo recognized that the wiimote alone is insufficient at times, hence the analog pad on the nunchuk. And the option of using the gamecube controller or classic controller on certain games like Brawl.

The dual analog has been around for 10 years, I would expect it to outperform the wiimote in some areas for the first year of its life. How many games used the right analog pad (and well) during the first year of its life? It takes time to use a new scheme, just look at how the ds touch screen was underutilized for some time, compared to now (with zelda and ninja gaiden). In some areas, perhaps the wiimote will never surpass the traditional control, even after a few years out, but if you want that game on the wii, you can use the gc pad or the classic controller.

[Asher]

Mario 64 hit it out of the park as the very first game...

(So much for that argument )

The GC and the classic controllers are truly terrible, BTW. And what is the point of releasing typical controller-based games on the Wii?

[Asher]

Guitar Hero / Guitar Hero II / Rock Band developer speaks out on the PS3:

http://jbooth.blogspot.com/2007/10/ps3-misconceptions-and-spin.html

PS3 misconceptions and spin

I read various game forums from time to time, and often see gamers complaining about 'lazy ports' to the ps3. They often mention how the ps3 is the most powerful game console and blame developers working on the console for doing a bad job. Sony has all of these people duped by impressive marketing spin, and I'm often amazed at how potent this type of rhetoric proves to be. For those unaware, I'm going to break it down simply and explain exactly why ports to the ps3 will never be as good as their 360 counter parts, and why most ps3 exclusives will likely continue to suck. First, lets debunk a few common misconceptions:

"The PS3 is more graphically advanced than the 360"

Fill rate is one of the primary ways to measure graphics performance - in essence, it's a number describing how many pixel operations you can perform. The fill rate on the PS3 is significantly slower than on the 360, meaning that games either have to run at lower resolution or use simpler shader effects to achieve the same performance. Additionally, the shader processing on the ps3 is significantly slower than on the 360, which means that a normal map takes more fill rate to draw on the ps3 than it does on the 360. And I'm not talking about small differences here, we're talking roughly half the pixel pushing power.

"Ok, fine, but the cell is like, super powerful"

In theory, sure, but in reality it doesn't work out that way. Game code simply doesn't split well across multiple processors. You can probably find a way to split a few things off fairly easily - put the audio on one processor, animation on another; but generally the breakup is always going to leave several of the SPUs idle or underutilized. On top of that, it's usually not CPU speed that restricts the visuals in games - it's fill rate.

"Uh, Blue Ray!"

Great for watching movies, but not so great for games. Getting data off the blue ray drive takes about twice as long as it does to get the same data off the 360's DVD drive. That translates into longer load times, or god forbid if your streaming from disk, tighter constraints on the amount of data you can stream.

"But it's got a lot more space than DVD"

Ok, you got me there - it does have a lot more space, and there is the potential to use that to do something cool, but thats unlikely to be realized in any useful way. There are tons of compression techniques available for data and I'd personally rather be able to get my data faster than have more of it. Most developers who use the entire Blue Ray drive are doing it to work around other problems with the ps3 such as it's slow loading - for instance, in Resistance: Fall of Man, every art asset is stored on disk once for every level that uses it. So rather than storing one copy of a texture, you're storing it 12 times. If you took that entire game and removed all the duplicate data, it would likely fit on a DVD without any problem. They do this to speed up load times, which, as I pointed out before, are painfully slow on the ps3. So in this case, the extra space is completely wasted.

"Once developers figure out the PS3 they'll maximize the hardware and it will be amazing"

I suspect a small number of PS3 only developers will optimize the hardware to do something cool. However, this will be an exception to the rule, and will likely involved game designs that are specifically designed for the hardware and funded by Sony. If those will prove to be fun or not is another question.

Most of the performance centric research into the PS3 has been around making it easier for developers to get the same level of performance you get out of the 360 naturally. For instance, some developers are using those extra SPU's on the cell to prepare data for the rendering pipeline. Basically, they take the data they would normally send to the graphics chip, send it to an SPU which optimizes it in some manner, then send it to the graphics chip. So, once again we see an 'advantage' in hardware being used to make up for a disadvantage in another area - a common theme with the ps3. And this introduces an extra frame of latency into the equation, making controller response slower.

So, the common theme is this; developers must spend significantly more time and resources getting the PS3 to do what the 360 can already do easily and with a lot less code. Lets look at how this translates into practical realities for a moment:

Why the PS3 version often pails in comparison to the 360 version, and why exclusives often suck:

As outlined above, getting equivalent performance out of the PS3 requires a lot of work unique to the platform, and in many cases, even with all these tricks, you still won't see equivalent performance. Thus, many ps3 games have simplified shaders and run at lower native resolutions than the 360 versions. On top of this, there is shrinking incentive to do this work; the PS3 isn't selling.

The code needed to make the PS3 work is most likely only useful to you on the PS3, as the types of tricks you need to do to make the thing perform are very unique to the platform and unlikely to be useful on any other architecture now or in the future. These issues all stem from unbalanced hardware design, and any future hardware that is this unbalanced will likely be unbalanced in a completely unique way.

Finally, there's the problem of resources. Game Development is, at it's heart, a resource management challenge. Given finite resources, do I have these five engineers work on optimizing the PS3 version to look better, or do I use them to make the game play better and fix bugs? Do I change my design to fit with what the PS3 hardware does well, or simply run the game at a slightly lower resolution on the PS3 to make up for it? Developers striving to push the PS3 hardware have often sacrificed their game in the process.

This post might come across as a lot of Sony bashing, but it's just the reality from the trenches. Sony let their hardware be designed by a comity of business interests rather than a well thought out design that would serve the game development community. They are going to loose hard this round because of it, and I hope that in the next round they take lessons from this round and produce a more balanced and usable machine.

[Kuciwalker]

I am skeptical of the claim that the PS3 actually has less graphical potential than the 360.

[DrSpike]

Surely Asher would not mislead us on a technical issue just to make a point?

[asleepathewheel]

"But it's got a lot more space than DVD"

Ok, you got me there - it does have a lot more space, and there is the potential to use that to do something cool, but thats unlikely to be realized in any useful way.

Blue Dragon requires 2 dvds, Lost Odyssey will require 4.

I'm not quite sure what "something cool unlikely to be realized" means to game designers, but I think not having to swap out dvds is at least "nice" for the user.