We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

I have a Dazzle and wow I sure wish I had an HD Dazzle instead.

The general consensus on the xbone is that the few people who liked the original xbone system concept with the digital used games (which i think would have been a mockery of everything that term stands for, which is a mockery in of itself) and the theoretical sharing system think that Microsoft's backpedaling has deprived them of the features they wanted, and the people who they were trying to reason with have already either thrown their lot in with Sony and have plenty of other points to use to reinforce the decision they've made (a strong psychological factor present in all decision making is the desire to be seen as consistent with an identity they've chosen even in the face of other factors) or plain don't trust Microsoft after seeing the extent to which their rights were going to be sold like livestock to the highest bidder.

It's likely that this will only barely save it from being a complete trainwreck. At the very least, for the reason I gave above plus laziness, few if any will be changing their preorder plans which were set as soon as Microsoft revealed Hitler Satan Jr. to the world.

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it is a joke, get it

Well, for starters, I don’t think there is a healthy discussion about unconventional boxart without mentioning Phalanx.


That... just wow. Fedora bluegrass guy.

What does he have to do the game? Nothing at all. Apparently they just had a fairly generic-looking shmup on their hands and felt that they needed do something to catch someone’s, anyone’s attention. Personally, I think it worked, but some people still say it’s one of the worst box arts ever. I think those people miss the point. We would not be talking (as much) about this game today if it weren’t so... odd!

It’s an interesting challenge, actually. I’ve tapped the “random game” link on MobyGames many times now and have yet to see a game where both (1) there are people you can consider lead characters, (2) they aren’t on the cover. In this experiment I am also discounting enemy characters, since they are either so common or so notable that they almost count as lead characters, covers that have only a symbol and/or logo, entire genres where any of these things is one of the going idioms (that includes horror and sports at least, but surprisingly also a number of fantasy RPGs from all over the world), reversible cover back sides, and Mmes. Not-Appearing-in-This-Game.

Well, at least I learned a new thing from this. LEGO Friends is a game that exists. I looked it up. Oh my gosh, you guys. So there is basically no graphical connection with LEGO bricks in any way, including the Scala sets it was ostensibly based upon. And the animation... the animation. Bwah-inducing.

Yeah i couldn't think about anything other than Phalanx, but i think it doesn't count as a "legitimate" boxart.

Zelda games from the original NES one up to Majora's Mask all have only the Zelda logo with some small alterations though, but that's actually kinda lame. Alttp's super famicom's boxart would be pretty cool if Link wasn't in it, in fact, the cartridge looks pretty darn cool without him.

What about Ico's EU/JP's boxart?

she said it didn't count cause they're clearly visible as two stick figures on the cover

Many people do not realize it because of the simplistic gameplay and cuteness, but Katamari Damacy is fairly artsy-fartsy. I mean, in the credits you roll up all the countries of the world and are praised for eliminating their borders. The second game is some weird meta-commentary on fanservice.

Oh, definitely. In Japan, kawaisa is very often treated as another aesthetic that’s there to use (or abuse), instead of as an aesthetic that is always lower on the pecking order of art (not that it doesn’t have its critics).

We can translate that word as “cuteness”, but it can be a little more inclusive than that, particularly compared to English where we often hear or use the word “cute” dismissively as well. Game designer Zack Wood (who studied the craft in Japan for a couple years) says, “it is not as simple as just being ‘cute’; my understanding of kawaii characters is that they are expressive, endearing, and easy-to-read.”

Also, by coincidence I was looking at the cover of Doom the other day, and for the first time I realized there was another space marine in the background. Poor guy only existed on the box art. Either that or he is Doomguy and the space marine front and center being dragged to Hell is just plain toast. Or they’re both insignificant; that’s also possible.

i also thought it was funny that they followed the story of that one family throughout the first game and then it culminates with them getting folded into the moon

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is that little guy the main character or just some dude?

is the main character just some dude?

at any rate, he's not featured particularly prominently. until i checked, i didn't even know there was anything on the cover other than the title.

I'm a huge fan of the WarioWare series. The only one I missed was Twisted! (yeah, i even played snapped.) I assumed it would be a cheap cash-in, since it was the second one for the Game Boy Advance, was released after the excellent DS installment (in America at least), and was made to sell a device that only got used in one other game. Apparently people are telling me it was the best of the series. I may have to pick it up.

Yeah, Twisted is actually really fun.

The Warioware series was my jam when I was a kid. Though I don't buy handheld games that much anymore I want to get Rhythm Heaven - people have said it's a lot like WW and it looks super weird/fun.

e: This just in, Adam Orth biggest assclown in the universe

I love that this got tagged "cyberbullying."

haha
assclown indeed

as far as rhythm games, I want to like them. some of them look fun even. but I have literally no rhythm, and it makes games that rely on it impossible to play...

Rhythm Tengoku is much easier than Bemani virtuoso performance insanity.

For starters, unlike most rhythm games, it has a nice introduction bit to help you improve your timing! And it usually only asks you to use controls in ways that most people could manage. So even if you’re normally pretty bad at rhythm games (I am), you should give it a chance sometime.

Animal Crossing has me basically staving off panic attacks trying to figure out a good name for myself (since my actual name won't fit in the allotted spaces since this is apparently 1992 again) and the town since I only have one shot at it. Why is the idea of locking in customisation choices so popular with game makers?

I can think of a few reasons (if we discount the observation that sometimes, people are just asinine) that such apparently commonsensical decisions are decided in non-commonsensical ways (in other words, I am redirecting my answer towards why things go wrong as opposed to why specifically you often can’t change your name or stuff like that in a game).

One is efficiency. Even if they have considered that people >90% of people won’t want to change these things, yet putting that in will take not-insignificant development time to design around the new requirements. Since video games from big companies are usually developed with this business attitude, it gets Pareto’d out due to budget constraints. It’s more attractive to work on things you can advertise “on the box” than it is to work on something that is a hidden sign of quality.

Another is the problem that changing requirements after things have already been made can take more effort than making the already-made thing did in the first place. This is a frequent problem in translating games from Japanese, if the game is already done and the problem is making a translation from it. For instance, names in Japan are unlikely to need more than a small number of characters, and sometimes the people who localize the games don’t have a lot of wiggle room to play with that despite understanding the problem—it is often assumed that text is a drop-in thing (but that’s usually not true unless we’re talking about a book here, because screen size matters), or they just don’t have an artist on hand to (for example) resize things properly. In the bad old days, the people tasked with translation often had to actually reverse engineer the game to get their job done!

Sometimes, the system has limitations or game developers aren’t creative enough to work around their own limitations (which is why you see this problem in some games of yesteryear).

Sometimes, though, people simply plan out software requirements incorrectly, and this is one of the most frequent traps because of that “unknown unknowns” problem. When you make software, you typically have a very good general idea of what you want, but a very poor idea of what needs to be there specifically. This ties in with the localization process again—you might have known about these issues if your localization team saw your design before the software and art assets were actually made (in fact, a few years ago, Square Enix revealed that they had integrated their localization people with with the rest of the developers, which is really cool... but sounds kind of expensive, too).

Finally, in developing software, particularly for “closed” systems (by that I mean ones that don’t run on the paradigm that anyone who uses the system can change anything anytime any way they want), it is easy to fall into the “set it and forget it” mentality. A programmer knows how to set a setting; that’s what the job mostly is. A programmer knows how to let someone set a setting when the programmer wants it to happen; that’s also an obvious part of the job. A programmer does not always know to let someone set a setting when they want it to happen, and it takes a great deal of foresight to plan that out even if you actually do want to work on that sort of issue.

There's also the idea that in Animal Crossing, a lot of choices stay permanent. You can't change your face, or move your house. You can relocate some community projects, but it takes some work. Animals move out, and stay out. You're not supposed to end the game without saving. The game is moving more towards a direction where you can change your choices with some effort, but there is a lot philosophically in the game that stays in place once you put it there. It's after midnight and I forgot how to write coherently.

It's after midnight and I forgot how to write coherently.

Heh, I almost never imbibe, but every post I make should be considered a drunkpost. And I try to remember to cut others the same slack.

(I have not played Animal Crossing in any incarnation, much to my regret)

isn't there an option in New Leaf to blow your house up if you don't like it

you can also stop animals from moving out if you renegade interrupt

isn't there an option in New Leaf to blow your house up if you don't like it

Seems that way.

Though I would be surprised if it didn't result in Nook charging you for the privilege of starting at the base of Debt Mt. all over again.

given the amount of bells you stockpile at a certain point, it is only time (and not even that) that will get in the way

(well, that and cramming all of your furniture into storage)

So this is a "video game rock opera" featuring the lead singers from Dragonforce and Firewind backed by the Metropole Orchestra.

I don't even

As a lover of cheesy metal the musical side of this idea sounds awesome to me, but the actual gameplay seems sketchy at this point. I dunno.

While the trailer and ideas appealed to me I spitefully didn't contribute because I don't like Doug TenNapel, even if the money isn't actually going directly into his pockets to do with what he wills

He's real into firm gender roles and against gay marriage.

As a person. I just don't want to forward money in the direction of the creative works of someone whose stance on whether I should be able to get married is "The same argument I have against letting a man take a dump in the ladies room. An office appropriate for one sex isn’t automatically appropriate for another, no matter how much a man loves taking a dump in the ladies room."

It's sort of a silly reason because that's not going to come across in the work?
I'm not actually funding homophobia (and do I smell a hint of cissexism too) or endorsing him as a person and he's not the sole member of the team. But he does have his name prominently on it and so I'd still not be comfortable with it, I certainly wouldn't judge anyone who doesn't see it the same way and just wants a nice game that almost certainly won't be homophobic in any way (it won't be homopositive either though).

He even pre-empted me by saying that his words would “be used by your people to justify a permanent boycott" so hey at least he won't be surprised.