Official Nintendo Fanboy Smugness & Gloating Thread

benedictw · Post by **benedictw** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 11:59 am 0

Todays Edge has a pretty content-free Wii seperate section. Some interesting bits and bobs but not earth shattering.

Ratsoap · Post by **Ratsoap** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 12:00 pm 0

Alarm wrote:

It hassles you to do household chores? Fuck that.

Seriously though, I'm starting to wish I had preordered. Wii boxing looks ace and Raving Rabbids sounds like a right laugh.

Darkflame · Post by **Darkflame** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 1:50 pm 0

I am sure there will be plenty to go around, especialy in europe.

UK isnt very Nintendo favoring, even when the rest of the world is.

I once got him to show me his specification document plan for Pikmin. I say specification plan, but it was actually just a sheet of paper with things scribbled on both sides.

A man after my own heart

HGFB · Post by **HGFB** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 1:57 pm 0

Component cable info

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=69106

Still nobody asking about Wifi security though

Yak · Post by **Yak** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 8:50 pm 0

Darkflame wrote:I am sure there will be plenty to go around, especialy in europe.

UK isnt very Nintendo favoring, even when the rest of the world is.

I once got him to show me his specification document plan for Pikmin. I say specification plan, but it was actually just a sheet of paper with things scribbled on both sides.
A man after my own heart

Quite right. This whole thing of specifying everything before coding is abomination and completely counter to how true game design actually works

.

Flabio · Post by **Flabio** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 11:03 pm 0

Yak wrote:Quite right. This whole thing of specifying everything before coding is abomination and completely counter to how true game design actually works .

For the most part, the people that design games these days aren't coders.

I like it that way, means I don't have to pretend that I actually know how to design a game properly

Darkflame · Post by **Darkflame** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 11:41 pm 0

I dont know actualy, a good coder should have many qualitys that would make them good games designers. (logical,creative thinking, knowing how best to use the engine, knowing what could be added easily without needing a design document to tell them that...)

And a coder is more likely to be completely ignorant about things that often result in horrible games. (demographics, markets, latests trends...)

Flabio · Post by **Flabio** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 11:52 pm 0

I didn't say they didn't used to be coders, some of them were. It's just that the demands of designing a game like Fable mean you're a designer full time for most of the life of the project. Most of them these days have moved up from being level designers. The real skill in game design is knowing how code and art work to complement each other, rather than knowing loads about code and nowt about art (like moi).

Yak · Post by **Yak** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 11:54 pm 0

To me code is a language I speak in order to express myself creatively.

To do it otherwise would be like having an idea for a novel but having someone else write the English for you. It would feel weird, imprecise, and overly abstracted.

Flabio · Post by **Flabio** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 11:58 pm 0

To me code is something I do to implement something someone has designed. I can interpret it how I like, change it if I think it's wrong, get into blazing rows with design when they do something daft, but ultimately I'm not designing the game. Free to design my implementation however I like, and the size and complexity of some of the things I've had to build in the past are pretty much equivalent to writing an old school game in terms of the amount of code effort.

Not the way everyone likes to make games, but it's the way the majority do nowadays, and I don't think I could do it the way you do. I'd go mad trying to keep everything in my head at once.

teamonkey · Post by **teamonkey** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 12:10 am 0

The organisational structures needed for a software team of few and of many are completely different though. At least they should be.

Acronym · Post by **Acronym** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 1:19 am 0

Also, what Jeff does isn't exactly mainstream these days; for a kickoff it's totally plot-free, doesn't have the art assets which a mainstream game has, etc etc etc.

That's not a criticism in any way, but making Fable is more like making a movie than Space Invaders - and I wouldn't expect a coder to be a playwright or a set designer, much as I wouldn't expect Tom Stoppard to be much cop at laying out an Ikaruga level.

They're fundamentally different skillsets. One's not inherently superior to each other, but expecting people good at one to necessarily be good at the other (some people will be, but they're going to be rare) has got to be a good way to be disappointed. Just look at id's recent games - terrific software engineering and technology, pretty lousy design - versus Valve's.

ThetaReactor · Post by **ThetaReactor** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 3:42 am 0

Component is very much not the standard in the US. About five years ago, my grandmother got a 27" TV that didn't even have fucking composite. RF modulators are still on the shelves at Wal-Mart. Composite is the standard, and Nintendo has made it clear that they're not going to push the newer technology.

Post by **Snakey** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 8:36 am 0

Dude. Only the shittest, cheapest TVs don't have component. $100 gets you a TV with component video. That's less than the price of a DS, and less than half the price of a Wii.

The people likely to buy a Wii will have a TV that can do it. Just like people in the UK likely to buy a Wii will have a TV that does SCART or better. Just like people likely to buy PC games will have a DVD ROM drive. Doesn't matter that you can still buy shit PCs without them, or that you can still buy floppy disks in Morrisons. Not the point, is it?

Kemper_Boyd · Post by **Kemper_Boyd** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 9:01 am 0

ThetaReactor wrote:Component is very much not the standard in the US. About five years ago, my grandmother got a 27" TV that didn't even have fucking composite. RF modulators are still on the shelves at Wal-Mart. Composite is the standard, and Nintendo has made it clear that they're not going to push the newer technology.

In what kind of bizarro world is component 'newer technology'?
Don't they want their games to look good?