IvoryTowerGamer said:
What new gameplay titles did Analogue sticks and trigger buttons open? And what were they able to do that a mouse and keyboard/joystick couldn't?
1. You go try to play Super Monkey Ball or any number of other analogue-controlled, multi button leveraging games - any FPS from Quake onwards, or even Starfox for chrissakes - with an original Atari joystick or a NES gamepad and let me know how well you get on. It's what helped us evolve beyond simple platformers with commands stretching to "move left, move right, jump, crouch, shoot" without having to lug a keyboard around everywhere, force a single thumb to multitask between eighteen buttons all in one place (you ever see the Jaguar pad?) with the other fingers being redundant, or trying to execute fine control of your avatar or a vehicle with some kind of crazy pulsewidth modulation on the stick/pad (like what I had to do in Gran Turismo when my dualshock's analogue functions failed).
2. Keyboard and mouse is fine if you're a committed PC gamer who wants to stay sat at a desk, probably solo (or if in a group e.g. at a LANparty, still with a fairly large zone of personal space around yourself and the machine) operating the evolved hardware and human interfaces of what is, let's face it, an overpriced business machine. However, neither of those peripherals has really caught on in the console market, despite occasional attempts to introduce them... and that's because they're bulky and fiddly, and require both a desk or other firm surface and a reasonable amount of space to operate. All things which you don't really find in a lounge, amongst the sofas and low-level coffee tables and drinks and bowls of chips. Plus you'd never make it work satisfactorily on a mobile device (again, it's been tried), at least not for gaming purposes.
They probably don't do anything that a KB/mouse can't, except for being a lot more convenient and compact.
Oh yeah, also, show me a keyboard with analogue pressure sensitive keys, a satisfying gun-like action (or intuitive gas/brake and/or up/down paddleshift for driving games, without a need for a an actual wheel + pedals), or haptic feedback (ie vibraton)? At least one that isn't a massively expensive beast that's unlikely to find much favour amongst people who are used to paying £200 for their entire system (including a pair of controllers) that plugs into the TV & hifi, rather than £1000+ just on the system box, then a dedicated screen and speakers as well, AND fancy, expensive gaming peripherals that, once you've got hold of two keyboards and two mice (and/or a joystick or two), run to £200+ just by themselves... OK a basic one of each is only £5, but their level of sophistication and ergonomics are more like the NES pad than a Sixaxis.
Plus you don't tend to get many PC titles that support two or more keyboards and two or more mice plugged into the same machine. Until relatively recently (ie the advent of USB being used for *EVERYTHING*, AND USB2 (bandwidth!), AND computers coming with a good amount of USB ports onboard so you don't have to spend more on cards to supply extra ports, or on performance-reducing, clutterific external hubs.
poiumty said:
No. Go read the definition of the term "norm". Standard controllers were the norm ever since consoles were invented. They have nothing to depart from. They have always been there.
I'll have to stop you there, because what we consider a "standard controller" these days wasn't really set in stone until the advent of the NES, with plenty of different setups tried beforehand (paddles, wierd telephone type things, probably a theremin or two even, and all kinds of wierd joystick-ish thingies) - AND during it's run as well. The lightgun could be thought of as a very limited-axis kind of Wiimote. There's also the power glove and stuff like that, which IIRC had a tilt sensor in it, and there have been other tilt-sensing devices besides. The venerable joystick as a normal (rather than optional and mostly geared towards flight sims) method of control for some platforms didn't finally bite the dust until the early 90s, at which point it had sprouted all manner of extra bits rather than just 8 directions and a fire button.
(You did sort of acknowledge some of this... at the same time as instantly dismissing it as unimportant. So, meh.)
IvoryTowerGamer said:
Just because controllers are the norm doesn't mean they aren't awkward for some people. There are still some people that refuse to play FPS games with anything but a mouse and keyboard. That doesn't mean that controllers are a gimmick.
Keyboard and mouse are highly awkward or even unusable for some other people, and alternative input methods are available to help them get by with the tasks they wish to do.
But the fact of their existence and (perceived) necessity doesn't make them any less niche, and wouldn't make them seem any less gimmicky if a set of them were released as an experimental new control method with the next generation of consoles.
Also you keep seeming to assume that gamepads post-date the use of keyboard/mouse for gaming, when actually it's the other way around - and, if we keep things strictly commercial, joysticks predate the use of the solo keyboard (... given that there was a LONG period of games being in people's homes, but mouse-using computers not having hit the market).
If anything you should be considering the use of mice for FPSes as the gimmick. I don't remember it being an option in Wolfenstein or Doom, for example. You wanted to circle-strafe, you had to make sure you either had a good quality keyboard or chose your keybindings very carefully, even though after you were done playing you'd have gone back into windows to finish a report or something.
IvoryTowerGamer said:
aquaman839 said:
They may not be gimmicks but they are being used as gimmick. Also on the gimmick scale they are way more gimmicky than HD graphics and real physics, because those were up grades to the gaming tech that everyone can use. 3d Tvs are very expensive and for the most part the motion control for the PS3 and Xbox360 are gimmicks, because they were cash in add ons. I really don't think you know what a gimmick is.
What is a gimmick then?
A flashy, oversold, desperate new add on or feature of spurious value when held up in the cold light of day, pretty much. Particularly if overhyped and used as a marketing tactic for an otherwise unspectacular main product. Like a car sales promo that relies heavily on it having free mudflaps with a celebrity's face on.
Hmmm, does this look anything like how they're being used to drive up the flagging sales of PS3s and XBoxes, or how they were used to create some buzz of uniqueness around Nintendo's make-or-break comeback console after the relative market failures of the N64 and Gamecube (even though the new device had barely twice the power of its predecessor)?
As aquaman says, the physics engines and hi-def graphics aren't really gimmicks or anything that should even have been unexpected - these things have been gradually and continually improving since the dawn of videogaming, it's only that we're now pushing quite close to the limits of what separates the game world from a 2D window into easily observable full reality, and of what quality is available from typical broadcast-focussed consumer goods, that it's becoming something that manufacturers are proudly pointing to rather than quietly toiling away behind the scenes to make as good as possible within the previously much lower limits.
The PS1 was most comfortable at quarter-SD resolution, but could come
close (not all the way up) to full SD if you asked it nicely - all in 15 bit colour - and could give you reasonably realistic physics for a limited number of in-game bodies (e.g. six to ten cars on a track and maybe a few fragments of crash debris each if you accepted some slowdown). This in contrast to the full-ragdoll-army-plus-masses-of-particles physics of current games, with 1080p output in 32bit colour ... or the simplistic one- or two- body physics in Pitfall or Mario, on a roughly one-ninth (or worse)-SD resolution display in a handful of somewhat ugly colours.
But now we're hitting that cap, any such improvements will likely take a back burner again and they'll have to find some other thing to point at, and it'll be something that's far less of a genuine improvement this time.
My main purpose was to point out the irony in how quick some people are to call Nintendo's consoles gimmicks when many of the other consoles' hyped features don't really affect gameplay either.
BLAST PROCESSING! And the 32X and original CDROM decks.
Though, on the other hand, Mode 7 and SFX-2...
(Wierd... i'm not normally a Nintendo diehard by any means. Funny what happens when you take a historical view)
IvoryTowerGamer said:
Danceofmasks said:
The biggest problem with the 3DS is this: Nintendo says every game has to be perfectly playable without turning on 3D. So ... by definition, they made it a gimmick.
So does the fact that PC games are made to be playable at low resolutions say the same for HD?
No, because most "low" PC resolutions are, at worst, equivalent to EDTV (640x480 60p or greater), and in reality most of them are practically on the same level as 720p.
The text can often be hard to read at anything below 1024x768 - or, certainly, below 1024x600, which is the lowest screen rez you can guarantee once gutless stuff such as EeePCs are excluded - and going lower doesn't often produce any significant speed increase unless you're doing something fairly light on polygons but high on effects on an integrated chipset. Take a general PC game and bust it down to a resolution that would more accurately simulate a standard def console experience (with all the bandwidth and kell factor issues, you're likely looking at 512x384 if not lower on a pin sharp, progressive, RGB or lossless-digital coupled PC display) and tell me how playable it still is.
High resolution is a good thing, and we've actually had it for quite a long time. I played enough games at 1024x768 in the early noughties, and that's only a little narrower (and slightly taller!) than 720p HD. I'm happy to follow it all the way up to proper "retina" type screens. Very impressed by the clarity available from my brand new smartphone, in fact (pin sharp... 800x480 progressive in the space of 3.7 inches... that's a hell of a lot of DPI and it uses it well. No pixelation or mashing of potentially important detail here!)
IvoryTowerGamer said:
tahrey said:
I think I already covered this, but have many developers actually used this feature? I've played enough 3D-games-on-2D-screens where depth perception wasn't any kind of issue though - there's enough other cues. One-eyed people can still pass driving tests...
Yet people must pass a depth perception test to become a military pilot.
There's a bit of a difference there and I'm not sure what your point is, and there's a whole new argument that could spring from it.
Do they need it to be able to shoot up a target accurately? Unlikely, they have targeting systems to do that. Military pilots do not rely on the force. If they are actually manually targeting things with their cannon, then shit's got terrifyingly real and their main systems are presumably all knocked out. But at the distances they fight at, depth perception still won't do a great deal and they'll be relying on other distance cues like atmospheric haze. Your eyes are separated by about five centimetres - how much useful parallax is there going to be with a target that's a hundred thousand centimetres or more away when you're trying to eyeball it?
Do they need it to fly the plane around? Probably not. I can handle flight sims just fine in 2D. Also if you have doubly redundant instruments, you're taught to rely on them rather than your senses, because flying by the seat of your pants other than when it's utterly necessary is something that can get you killed. Senses can be fooled a lot more easily than a pair of isolated artificial horizons, altimeters and charts.
Landing on an aircraft carrier may be a trickier prospect without depth perception, but you can probably still do it alright.
But, if you don't have functioning depth perception, are you maybe going to have double vision at times? Or a susceptibility to other visual defects? Perhaps it also affects your peripheral vision or ability to operate the close-up controls (which will be on your desk whilst gaming) ... or to avoid running the plane into the hangar door frame when maneouvring it in or out, as you're judging which of two things that are approx twenty thousand centimetres away with few other depth clues are closer to you (but how often do you do that in a game?).
Perhaps even one properly lazy eye that doesn't contribute much to your overall vision, or doesn't have particularly great tracking/focussing/iris muscles, so if you're injured by an attack on your plane and lose vision on one side, you're as good as blind because you can't rely on the remaining 2D vision in the other eye to get safely back to base?
To be honest, I don't know why the military require their pilots to be fully binocular other than it being just one more selection criteria in order to get The Best Of The Best (one presumes they're not short of fighter pilot applications). But in the situation where civvy life is far more on the line, and you're more likely to need good judgement of distance, clearance, size and approach speeds on a near-continual basis - IE driving a car at speed on our crowded streets - if you only have one eye but can prove under test conditions that you're not about to suddenly run into a tree that "loomed up out of nowhere", they'll let you take to the road.
But maybe I'm just overly experience or jaded or something after 20+ years of playing games with 3 dimensional rendering of the gameworld but not binocular 3D output and rarely having any issue with the "flatness". Go play my oft-stated classic favourite Stunt Car Racer, attack "The Hump Back" track's titular feature at maximum possible speed (if your engine isn't flaming, you've done it wrong) and tell me you don't get a bungee-jumping sense of "whoooaaaaaaaaa!!!" out of it ... despite the flat filled polygons and the 2D rendering. It's the idea and perception of the thing as much as anything. The brain is a marvellous thing ... it fills in the extra details and can fool you that a stunningly simplistic representation of the world is actually quite real.
Necromancer Jim said:
I'm not saying that makes it a gimmick. I'm saying that it really fucking sucks for me.
I might already have said, but having sampled it - it's a nice trick, but I think it'd ultimately drive me mad within 15 minutes. Same as motion controlled games on smartphones. I've tried a few with my new (adult) toy... Yes, I can see how the multi-touch screen can add a certain something (even if it is really just like having a mouse: angry birds et al remind me a lot of "Crazy Golf" from about 1990), it's easy, intuitive, doesn't get in the way. The motion / accelerometer type games? Gimmicky. I have to turn the screen away from myself at some points to carry out some of the moves. WTF? And the sensitivity is arbitary and unknowable in advance, accuracy can be iffy, etc, and woe betide you should try to play the game whilst laid on your back.
IvoryTowerGamer said:
Nexus4 said:
Physics are a gimmick? Dr Freeman would like to have a word with you about that!
Man, if every game used physics as well as HL2 I would not have used that as an example in my post. =)
The 1980s and early 90s called, they want you to come take a look at some of their games which actually make reasonable use of realistic physics. It's not a new thing. Just the power for computing lots of them at once has gone up ... and the more glaring thing when you think about it is the sheer number of games which HAVEN'T had convincing physical effects down the years, even though the capability was there. Half Life 2 really shouldn't have stood out if everyone else had already been doing their best work. Realistic physics in a game that purports (at least some) realism should be taken for granted by now.
mjc0961 said:
I still don't see why so many people believe this nonsense. Being able to see things more clearly and having a longer draw distance has certainly added a hell of a lot more to games than making everything look like paper cut-out bullshit ever will.
If the 3D effects look like paper cutouts, either whoever programmed the example game(s) you tried got it badly wrong, or there's something up with either the 3D system being used itself, or your own depth perception.
You can have fully organic or spherical etc objects with generated 3D, same as you can in real life. Perhaps what they're doing is some kind of GPU-cycle-saving cheat where the visible part of the item is rendered in a backbuffer, then blitted to the screen in two slightly different places for each eye according to its average depth, rather than being fully rendered twice?
Heck even the wierd-ass Autostereoscope mode of Magic Carpet didn't look all Paper Mario.
IvoryTowerGamer said:
Honestly though, how often is pixel to pixel accuracy actually necessary in today's games? Most shooters (where it seems like it's be the most beneficial) have realistic bullet spread, so any extra accuracy is pretty moot. Unless you happen to be Quake 3 railgun fanatic, I don't really see it being a defining issue.
Maybe it's not a factor in shot accuracy, but it could certainly be one for telling friend from foe at a distance, or indeed friend and/or foe from "similarly coloured dirty smudge that's part of the background", or figuring which way they're moving if they're going slowly.
Follow your argument down far enough and we'll be back in the days of the old F16 and F19 combat flight sims where your enemies were, thanks to the resolution, rendered as one-pixel dots until you got up within about a klick of them, and their true shapes weren't all so obvious until it was almost too close to fire. OK, most of the time, it wasn't that critical, because you didn't need to easily judge their direction of travel or what they were, as you largely shot with homing missiles and had a cheat-a-riffic full colour targeting computer display linked to a 360 rotating camera with god's own zoom lens. And should you need to gun someone down, it would tell you which way they were going and you'd just have to drop your bead on their pixel, or one pixel to the left or right as appropriate, and fire, and get a hit.
But if that computer's knocked out, then what? Being able to see your target from a few miles out with a natural level of detail would be invaluable (a moderately knowledgable planespotter could stand in my back yard and say what the model of passenger jet going over was even with them cruising at 5 miles high, I bet; the copy protection was based on identifying planes by silhouette + major features), and you could make a good assessment of which way they were going, how fast, and if they were likely to have spotted you, in order to break out the cannons or to take manual fire control of a heat-seeker or two.
Plus it becomes a lot harder for people to sneak up on you just by taking advantage of pixelsmash.
You see, yet?
And yet people still dismiss the practical applications of 3D and motion controls.
ITG... bring them to me.
So, games should be in HD now because we have HD TVs? Does that mean that once 3D TV become more common we should have 3D games?
Well, why not. But it doesn't have to be essential for every last game. And a game shouldn't become unplayable if you can't do 3D - OR HD.
Why? Because we can assume, if not in fact damn near guarantee most people who want to play videogames have at least one eye with reasonably sharp vision, even if that requires corrective lenses (cheap and easily available), and a television set that will provide at least half decent SD output.
You start requiring one or the other and you end up freezing people out of your market, and that's hella bad for sales. There are those with vision that simply isn't good enough for HD but they can deal with SD (astigmatism, cataracts, etc), or they don't have and can't afford to upgrade to HD (or have spent the money that would have gone on an HDMI cable on a new game instead), or they only have one eye, or they have a lazy eye or other visual handicap that means they can't process normal binocular vision properly (like Johnny Depp!). Heck, you even have to make sure your title is colourblindness compatible if you don't want to cause issues and offense (maybe why everything's brown now?
), so it's just one more aspect of the same thing.
So since PC developers include the option to play their games at lower resolutions, does that make HD a gimmick?
Again, if you can find me a current PC game where there's an option to go below 640x480 progressive in all seriousness, or a wide spread of them where the minimum recommended monitor rez is below 1024x600, I'll be quite surprised.
Eternal_Lament said:
Motion Controls: Whether or not you think the Wii has good games or if the Kinect and Move work, there is one thing that is undeniable: all three (all four if we include Sixaxis) have failed in proving that some games out there can only work with motion controls.
Wii Fit? Any of those dancing games?
Wii Fit can be played sitting on your couch and waving the controller around if you forego the balance board parts. OK, the game still can't really be controlled without the motion device, but that's because it's been engineered that way, same as you could engineer a pack-in showcase game for any new controller technology to be hard or impossible to control (or simply nonresponsive) without use of your new thing. That doesn't so much make the control system less gimmicky, and make the game
itself also a gimmick alongside them.
Dancing games can be played with a joypad quite easily, as can guitar hero if you have double jointed thumbs. There's no magic to them, they just co-opt the joypad inputs on a novelty shaped controller.
(Oh wait, you meant the Wiimote dancing games. No, sorry, still gimmicky. Perhaps if you had a crossplatform one where you stood on a dancemat, with a Kinect capturing everything that wasn't defined by the question "where are your feet?" and the wiimote or sony move pretending to be a microphone, it'd be slightly less so. It's a bizarre prospect anyway ... it teaches you dances that are done with one hand. So, less dances, more handjives for maimed war veterans. Why not just go to night classes and learn it properly?)
Eternal_Lament said:
Much like 3D, the reason why motion controls can but don't work is because game makers aren't trying to make games that would only work with the feature but are rather trying to make games that have been made before but have the feature of motion controls. One could argue that analog sticks at the time may have had the same reaction, but consider this: analog sticks were meant for one type of game, games that took place in 3D environments as opposed to 2D ones. Analog sticks and 2D games often didn't work together all the time, so game makers didn't make 2D games that used analog sticks, they made 3D games that functioned properly only once analog sticks were introduced.
3D games functioned quite well with a mouse and keyboard.
ON. THE. PC.
DUMBASS.
STILL mixing the apples in with your oranges. How many massmarket motion control systems does the PC gaming platform have? Oh... I think it might be NONE. So far, anyway. It's almost inevitably coming after all.
Also we have had analogue joysticks LONG before Sony took the genius step of putting two of them in the middle of a joypad. The introduction of analogue directional control to the gaming world was NOT the big innovation (Pong had analogue input FFS), but the way in which it was presented and packaged that finally made 2-player Robotron (to use a 2D! example) a practical living room concept, rather than being confined to the arcade or the garage of an enthusiast gamer.
Aurgelmir said:
The difference between innovation and gimmicks is simple can be summed up by one little word: "Needs"
Fair enough. Very few games need HD or advanced physics, why aren't those also considered gimmicks?
They DO, though. Or at least, they certainly benefit from it. Even if it's a subtle improvement or effect that the casual observer doesn't pick up on because it's integrated in a non-obvious manner, aiding the gameplay without being the reason for the game's existence. Otherwise we'd all still be playing Asteroids in less-than-CGA resolution.
mad825 said:
em, graphical quality is subjective?
I agree, but not when the addition of an extra graphical feature has an impact on gameplay. IE, the different between color/monochrome graphics.
Absolutely. Or even poor colour (e.g. Sinclair Spectrum, CGA graphics on PC) vs even the most basic half-decent colour (C64, EGA) which makes everything a touch more convincing and opens up a lot more possibilities for game mechanics based on display. EG you can have indicator lights with more than 2 or 3 colours, or have a decent amount of overlapping but still distinct wires if there's a subgame where you have to trace them. Lots of zombies all crowded in one spot with an about-to-be-munched human in the middle so you have to pick off the baddies whilst not hitting your friend...
Flare Phoenix said:
It's going to do jack-all for 2D side-scrollers for one thing...
I dunno, you could have, say, a LittleBigPlanet sequel which could make use of it. I never could properly get the hang of determining which depth level my sackboy was at. That'd be a fairly subtle but very useful application of the tech.
And I agree with you about 2D sidescrollers... unless... someone were to make a first person sidescroller! =)
Even if you gleefully ignore all the Sonic and other titles that have done this sort of thing in the last few years, there's always Mario64 and its descendents which have had enough sections along those lines.
Ugh. anyway. Enough for now
