SpiderMonkey

At least we have the Eurovision song contest though, right? HARD ... ROCK ... HALLELUJAH!

Has anyone come across any good write-ups for talks at GDC? I mean write-ups that are juicy and in-depth and interesting if you actually want to learn about design, as opposed to the skin-deep consumer news site write-ups. Blog stuff, I guess, which makes it harder to find among the deluge of "Developer of last Christmas' popular game said this vaguely newsworthy thing!" (I'm trying to avoid sounding really lazy. I don't have any links to share. Yet? )

There's so much to complain about in this game, but when it gets down to it, I'm just having fun playing (splitscreen coop). I wish they'd spent another month fixing the inventory problems and improving the pacing of some encounters, though.

Cool, thanks Dan. Remo serves up some Clint Hocking: http://gamecareerguide.com/industry_news/22910/gdc_clint_hocking_on_.php

I used to be bothered by the intense consolidation that is currently doing the rounds in the industry. Recently I stumbled upon a perspective that helps me feel that it is in fact a good thing. See, the chat behind all of these consolidations is about competing in certain genres. Bioware was apparently a good fit for EA because it meant they could compete in the RPG genre, where they previously had no presence. Activision merged with Blizzard because they wanted a cash-printing MMO without the effort and risk of developing one from scratch. But quite soon, these publishers will be so big and so few that they will all have all their genres filled. Then what do you do when previously you had, say, one driving game team and one driving game franchise, and now you have multiple driving game teams but you only want/need to keep one driving game franchise? You tell the other team that if they want to keep their jobs, they need to come up with something new and exciting, and you give them the resources they need to go away and make it happen. (Let's ignore the obvious Need for Speed / Burnout counterpoint here, which makes driving games a bad example to choose.) So then, my assertion is that beyond a certain point in size, publishers will inevitably move away from risk-averse and towards innovation, because that is the only way they will be able to continue growing. And what is more, they are fast approaching that point (or perhaps they are already over that hill, with even EA embracing original IP). A lot of talented people who are currently slaving away on Overcrowded Genre Competition #32 will be off in exciting new pastures and we'll soon see a golden age of new ideas because of it. It's like Nintendo's new business philosophy, except it doesn't involve cheaply made mini-game collections.

I think they will be required to do it, simply because shareholders will demand they continue growing the business and shareholders will simultaneously demand that they do not compete with themselves. When there are only 3 publishers, there can only be 3 WWII FPSs.

Given they are on the west coast, if your times are correct, I can't say I'd be too bitter about someone staying in work until 3am so I could have some stuff for free for my entertainment product.

Please tell me you did not accept that answer.

Ouch, good luck getting unbanned. I'd love to know how many staff Valve have to employ to deal with this shit. 97.5 hours in two weeks. I know Counter-Strike is addictive, but it's pretty impressive to manage 14 days of 7 hours a day. He could be so much more productive with his life, say, by joining WoW.

No one I know wants to make Wii games. I guess it's that whole "it's not next-gen!" shit - from an artist's perspective or a programmer's perspective, it isn't. It's what you've already been doing since 2000, and you're ready for something new. Spaff's point is solid - the crop of "oh shit we really missed the boat on this one" games should show up next Easter and then next Christmas. But it'll be interesting to see if the dev teams have been inspired to create awesome things, or if the publishers have said "oh it's a casual market, we needn't bother trying, so let's skimp on budget and dev time".

Re: your scenario, Ginger: I think the editor has already failed if he's put his site into a situation where it will fold if one single advertiser pulls out.

Yeah, I'm totally with Duncan on this one. The criticism is totally worthless. Be quiet and wait for release is the only credible stance; none of this "I speculate it will be like this, and I don't like what my imagination comes up with". It's like gaming self-harm in its extremity, proactively seeking out reasons to be miserable.

That's interesting as a strategy. It had certainly struck me that they were publicising it this loudly, this early, as part of a recruitment thing for the studio. If they weren't in Montreal, they'd stand a pretty good chance of getting an app from me within the next 6 months.

The debate is a bit stale and overworked, so I only have two contributions: 1) Everyone seems to be doing primary development on Xbox and then porting to PS3. You can go on any forum and find people who will argue with me on this, but I think this guarantees that the PS3 version is at best "as good as" the Xbox version. At worst, it's of lower quality (crappier frame rate) or released late (depending on company priorities). This is happening a lot this Christmas. 2) If you are willing, wait until after Christmas. The picture will be much clearer then. If the PS3 has a good Christmas, it has a good future. People will start developing for it more and more studios will use it as their primary development platform. If it has a bad Christmas, it's going to get fewer and fewer exclusive games and sloppier ports, so you may as well go Xbox (assuming you like the exclusives it has so far).

Obviously, those are the assumptions and allusions that allow them to get away with this shit, earning the sympathies of the Daily Mail crowd, and which always turn out to be a pack of lies.

I'm scared. Tomorrow it gets released properly. Which means tomorrow, the barrier for entry is lowered from "credit card => over 18" to "mummy I want it, MUMMY I WANT IT". In-game chat has been so pleasant these past few weeks; the only thing that gets said are helpful words of advice. Every single game of Counter-Strike I've played in the last year has had someone insulting someone else within 10 minutes of me starting playing and a full on slagging match within 30. Please be nice. Please be nice, children.

Haha, when I was thirteen and our school had just got connected to the internet, the cool thing to do was to download a copy of this. That's so absurd that you'd even get arrested for it as a kid, let alone take to court over it. And to think my physics teacher used to tell stories of how he set off explosives in trees as a schoolkid - he was so geeky, he used the leaf damage to study the blast shape.

If you have a PC hanging around (and are able to travel back in time/otherwise put yourself in a situation where you can't play Halo 3's version of this), you should check out the many Half-Life 2 zombie mods. They offer an implementation of this and are very good fun, like you say. Zombie Horde was the one I played last year. (But when I went back to it a few months ago, it had gone to shit because they backed off on their "we should do this make the game more fun" instincts in favour of "this is what our vocal minority forum posters demand, so we'll keep them happy even if it trashes the game".)

Okay, so now I've played through, what, half the campaign in two player coop? Up until the bit from the very first trailer for the game, anyway ( ). The boss battle before this part ( ) was irrefutably seriously badly designed (as well as far less epic than they thought it was - ), and the whole thing has been stunningly mediocre so far. I guess the 10/10s mean the multiplayer or something? Because right now the single player is a 7. I went into this game trying to find the awesome, and everything - I wasn't trying to be cynical, but this is kinda depressing.

I haven't played the game, so I can't really say whether it deserves a 10 or not. Either way, these things are immensely cyclical in today's internet world. Who wants to read the guy taking a shit in your cereal and giving it a 7, when instead you can read the guy who's gonna make you even more excited than you were before. It's not in the interest of the games press to give bad reviews to heavily hyped games. It costs them pageviews and magazine sales, which in turn costs them money.

Except of course, games aren't made like sausages, and the order of what gets made needn't have any relation to how it's arranged in the final box (and indeed can change many many times before it gets into the box). The quality of a particular piece of game content is proportional to how many cycles of iteration it receives, which means people looking at it and providing feedback and then that feedback getting implemented. The start of the game gets more attention from everyone involved, because everyone is acutely aware that you only get one first impression.

My impression was that they put an awful lot of thought into the design, so that it can validly be considered its own game. I don't think its fair to call it a rip-off of anything. If it's turned out bad, I think it's more likely the fault of some bad assumptions about what audiences would enjoy.

I'm deeply fascinated to know how the numbers will compare to Halo 2. What is the comparative install base at this stage? It can't be nearly as many Xbox 1's as they had in 2004. Or can it?

Ouch, I thought console gaming was meant to work out cheaper than PC gaming, at least from a hardware perspective. Must've been a pretty sweet TV?

Oh seriously, please don't bring that "OMG is Orange Box worth $45, no wai!!" bullshit over here too. This place might be a backwater in terms of activity, but that's no reason to turn it into a backwater in terms of floating piles of faeces and toxic froth. Buy it, or don't buy it, just please spare me the whining at ONE games site today.