Zero Punctuation: Mirror's Edge
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
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I fail to see why this didn't "work" ;if you're too stupid to not know where to go next when everything is bright red you might aswell be playing with no eyes.
Yahtzee Croshaw, you, sir, never cease to entertain. I love your reviews, even if I usually disagree with them. This review has given me a good hour to get away from my boring job (55 minutes of page refreshing, and 5 of watching the video).
I do have one concern, though. If you live in Australia, why are you releasing your videos at 2 to 4 o'clock in the morning?
I do have one concern, though. If you live in Australia, why are you releasing your videos at 2 to 4 o'clock in the morning?
Another great review. I could tell this game would be short when I saw the amazing graphics on the trailer, but I guess some people can just play it over and over trying to beat their previous time. I actually got vertigo on some of my falls!
thats understandable the game sucked but there is a possiblity of some other duche bag macking a simmilar game and it kick ass and takeing names
Three counterpoints:Sayvara said:
1. You imply the EA suits don't interfere with decisions made at one of their subsidiaries. Not working as a suit at DICE I can't say for sure of course and I doubt you can either (unless you are one of course) but considering EA's usual demeanor even in a developer publisher relationship I very much doubt that.
2. If GM would found a subsidiary Evil Corp. tomorrow which murders kittens and dumps toxic waste in a Captain Planet fashion all over the world, you can be sure that the shit - both morally and even more importantly legally - will come down on GM.
3. If you follow your argument logically to it's conclusion then NO game is actually made by EA as all their games are made by subsidiaries. Everything else would be a double standard born out of your liking of the games by DICE, Bioware or Maxis but general despise of anything else made by EA. While the latter would make you a hypocrite, the former might hold some weight if you regard all that money for branding (cause to take your example, a Saab is still a Saab, not a GM or GM Saab) as leftovers they want to burn before all those poor suckers come begging. But then again, any further discussion would be pointless. If you don't even believe EA that it is their game - and they tell you that in more then one way - what can I do to change that?
Off the topic of mirrors edge, noticed one of the up coming reviews is sonic unleashed and yantzee was showing the WII version 
(shudders) Would strongly recommend reviewing the 360 or PS3 version.
(shudders) Would strongly recommend reviewing the 360 or PS3 version.
What I was trying to say was that a game can be pretty flawless and you may still dislike it. And a game may be full of flaws or shortcomings and you still may like it. Yahtzee liked No more heroes, I kinda did too, but I dont know why. The story was just a mess, the combat repetitive, the graphics terrible and so on, but I still liked the game. But for some reason I found Okami a bit boring, even though it is better game than no more heroes in just about every way.Amisbro said:
Therefore, using the word standard, and saying that as long as yathzee really hates a game, he wouldn't like it either, was what I reacted at.
And I really liked the game, all its flaws considered. No problems with platforming at all. I though it played better than many third person platformers.
That really suck that you have to pay $100 bucks just because you live in Australia.
DO you have steam over there???? cause if you bought your games on it you could save about 50% of you money.
DO you have steam over there???? cause if you bought your games on it you could save about 50% of you money.
I'll stand for that now the Aus dollar is a steaming piece of shit(*clap, clap, clap* I said Keven Rudd would do this but no one listened.) but go back 3-4 months and that's when we all had a reason to be pissed, the Au dollar was worth somewhere around 94cents Us and we still payed $100 for a game.Retrofraction said:
It's like Trent Reznor(Nine Inch Nails)said, just because Australia has dedicated fans(apply's to most things from my view)doesn't mean we should have our prices jacked up.
What you forget about point 1, is the obvious fact of never actually working for a game developer. Having been a past EA Employee and working within the games industry for going on a decade now, trust me that game development even for the large corporations is nothing like the Television industry where people in suits make all the real decisions; while being completely removed from reality relying on nothing but "focus groups".Anaphyis said:
In-fact with the case of DICE, given they have provided EA with the Battlefield-Series that have earnt them quite a bit of capitial from gamers lapping up any new morsal; this tends to give a developer far more freedom because often on name alone can a game become a hit.
Hell look at Doom 3 and Quake 4... good engines, poor design decisions leading to sub-par games; but raked in the money anyway more based on name than anything else. Oh hell if we're going that far pretty much anything Sony have done in the past 5years has almost entirely relied on this factor.
Point is realistically is that Mirror's Edge was far more likely to have been almost entirely designed and developed free from EA suit tinkering because DICE have earnt that right; and given Mirror's Edge has actually done fairly decently on both Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, honestly I don't see this changing.
Realistically how things work in the Developer-Publisher relationship is, the Publisher gives a developer a lot of money. They then tell the developer, you have 24-32months to make sure we get our money back. After that the developers are left on their own for the most part, with the publishers only stepping in to try to advertise and try to make sure their money is returned.
How much interest a publisher takes in dictating how something is done always comes down to basically how trust worthy that developer is for getting their money back.
You can't expect to be an unknown company with a crazy idea, because no matter how good the game is the developer will always get scared that it might not do so well; so to prevent them pulling funding you make changes that appeal the masses.
Mirror's Edge honestly has had one of the most bizzare development stories in recent years too. DICE rather than using their own Frostbite engines that they spent a good few years developing our-sourced to the engine of this console generation Unreal 3... this is unsual in the fact that often a company will use an internally developed engine before licensing someone elses, but this is exactly what happened. More bizare is the fact that DICE then decided to alter half the source code to fit their vision, a bit like how Valve bought Quake and then decided they wanted to change almost everything for Half-Life; sure it's good to have something to work from, but realistically makes little sense when you just end up re-inventing the wheel anyway.
Another unusual aspect is that well, this was one of the shortest from development to market games we've seen in the past 2 generations. Rumours are it only took 18months, which for a Triple-A title is practically unheard of. You couple this all together with the fact that while sure there are some collision and control issues at times, realistically this is by far one of the most stable and responsive games using the Unreal 3 Engine. Epic themselves with Unreal Tournament 3 and Gears of War 2 were both extremely glitchy with noticeable loading times and "texture pop-ups"... while Epic covered that aspect with a nice "bluring" fix, realistically it's not the same as Mirror's Edge where you honestly never notice any of these issues.
DICE frankly have done something with Mirror's Edge that EA have never really been able to master themselves in the 25 years they've been going and the past 20 years they've been in game development.
Release exactly the game that was promised, provide more to a game than the demo offered, provide a stable working game that doesn't leave gamers praying for a patch, but more importantly of all... providing an entertaining experience from the moment you pick it up until you put it down.
In-fact if you notice, since the EA CEO stepped down and was replaced last year; we've seen 3 brand new franchises appear; none of which have the usual EA finger-prints like the sequals that were release during the same period. What we've been given were some damn good action games with alright in the case of Army of Two a bit too testosterone driven but for the most part damn good involving single player experiences.
Something I feel has been missing from games since this new generation has been the absence of just a good single player experience. Games moving from the "Shut-in annoymous Playstation 2" to the "Let's all pwn newbies together Xbox 360" has unfortunately moved too many games to focus more on the multiplayer over the single player imo; and it's quite refreshing that EA (and in the case of Dead Space, and Army of Two; EA First Party Developers) are the ones pushing forward with better single player experiences.
Don't get me wrong these games aren't without their flaws and foubles, but honestly despite how short each one was... I was never disappointed in that respect. Sure, like everyone else I wouldn't mind a game being a longer experience; but then it's the same no matter what.
There are very few games I've played where at the end of it I've just sat there and thought "man that was perfectly timed", as we all know that once you finish the game... if it's good it'll leave you wanting more. Luckily DLC if developers get their acts together can mean we don't have to wait another 24-32months for the next installment, but unfortunately I think the only Episode driven games we're likely to see for some time are going to be Sam & Max, or that retarded Strong Bad one.
I still think it's funny to think about that everyone is always so quick to judge a publisher especially one as large as EA, for what they hate; as if they were physically involved in development. Despite credit lists often being 150 people long, realistically these games themselves and the creative decisions made during the development tends to rest only on the shoulders of the core teams of 20-70 people from the company that made them.
Even then usually it's creative directors or company directors who are like "Hmmm, I think that's not mainstream enough"