Marek

Although Red Alert was a prequel, it really felt like it was at least half intended as a seperate brand. The way Kane was written into the story was a bit silly. (That said, when I first played Red Alert and first saw Kane make a brief appearance I was pretty much hyperventilating.) They created such a great universe with C&C1. Kane was a *great* villian, the cutscenes were grand and often humerous and the whole backstory about the tiberium added a sense of mystery. Then somehow C&C2 messed it all up. C&C: Generals is possibly the best C&C game in terms of gameplay and balancing, but its setting is ridiculously bland compared to the original series. C&C: Generals is addictive as fuck when played over a LAN. I know pretty much every pixel of that game.

It was the sub title for the original Command & Conquer 1. Supposedly it was going to be a trilogy ... Tiberian Dawn, Tiberian Sun and Tiberian Dusk. Alas, the C&C franchise has split off into things like Red Alert and Generals that are good games but they have nothing to do with the C&C universe.

EA Pacific is excused though given that Tiberian Sun was such a letdown, and Generals was actually a good game (albeit nothing like the previous C&C).

I was a member for only a month and I can still view exclusive complete videos. I also somehow got signed up for a free trial of MCV and still get it to this day (like a year later) with only some occasional gaps of 2 or-so issues. I'm not complaining.

I was beaten by someone who has only ever played Pacman and Prince of Persia 1. That's what I really meant to say. I took the shortcut by saying "girl", in a 1989 kind of way. I blame pop culture too!!! Let's talk about Bomberman. Do you like Bomberman? If so, why? And how much? What's the best part? Which version of Bomberman do you prefer? In what situations have you played Bomberman? In what situations did you wish you were playing Bomberman but weren't?

I know, I know ... it's actually very cool, in fact in this particular case it turned me on, but I don't want to admit it.

Craftsmanship and artistry are definitely not synonyms. A plumber can be said to be an excellent craftsman, which means he practices his trade with great skill, but that doesn't mean installing a waterboiler or bending a lead pipe is art. Similarly, while a lot of arts require craftmanship (such as carefully handling of tools or technical know-how) a lot of art doesn't. I was going to say that I agree that in most cases you have to master a craft in order to create art, but I don't agree that they're one and the same. :noskatebo:deranged:

Yes, but now we can do it all over again here like it was the first time! Do you feel the excitement?! Okay, then ... call that craft?

Rag doll kung fu fighting? Whaaa?

I'M THE THREAD CHAMPION!

Warning: long rant ahead It's interesting how much the medium has a role in this never-ending debate. E.g. "Could games be art? Like this famous painting or sculpture?" A (long) while back there was an article somewhere titled "Are video games art?" The answer is "no", but the question is not properly formulated. When VoodooExtreme linked to that article they were like "hey, here's an editorial on if video games are art. In my opinion they aren't". Somehow I feel that these discussions kind of miss the point. Can paintings be art? Yes. Can architecture be art? Yes. Can dancing be art? Yes. Can a soap opera be art? Theoretically, yes. Can a random pattern of leaves in my front lawn be art? Sure, just keep an open mind. Can five meerkats doing a trapeze act while a bonobo plays the guitar be art? Freaking YES. Can video games be art? ...... pfft no. I mean, yes! The medium or format should be pretty much irrelevant. Of course, the inevitable "so what is art?" question always comes up. Everyone has their own answer. I like the saying "art is when it looks back at you", but if you're asking for a definition of that, I don't know. I suppose art is something that intends to be more than the sum of its parts, often with a strong desire for self-expression, where the process of discovery while making the art is sometimes just as important as the end product. But hey, that could be a shit distinction, and I'm sure there's examples from the world of established art that don't have any of those characteristics. I consider some games to have artistic merit. ICO, Grim Fandango, Rez, etc. But there's also some less-lauded games that probably deserve recognition for their artistic expression. It's admittedly hard coming up with names, though. The thing is, games like ICO and Grim Fandango are easier to accept as art(istic), because they have great visuals or an involving story. These are things we can easily recognize in other media. I think the real issue is how long it will take for games to be recognized based on their interactivity. Okay, so the word "interactive" has been used infinite times, and by now has probably watered down in our collective minds. What I mean is that a player does something, and a game responds to it, which the player can then respond to, etc. It's like a dialog. Surely that aspect of video games will one day be valued similar to how other artistic works are being seen for what they are at their "core"? Most installations are already highly interactive, but when interactivity exists in the context of play, in a video game, it's suddenly very different (apparently?). That will change ... games will become more recognized, but it will take some time. I mean, it took lots of artists in the late 70ies and early 80ies to turn the VHS video tape into an accepted medium for art. At first people were saying "no video tapes are not art", but that turned around eventually. Now you have whole museums dedicated to video art and installations. So there's that. On the other hand, I think you have to look at design versus art. I don't mean that in the "low culture versus high culture" or "functional versus non-functional" sense (which I think are both bunk). I mean the different mindsets. Design is often very deterministic, deliberate, rational, reflective, etc. Designers can get random inspiration from things, and use very personal experiences, but they're almost always still filtered through a very deliberate design methodology. Design is very much about navigating a sort of design space, trying to look ahead and determine your next few possible paths and picking the best ones. Art is much more a process of discovery, with very little deliberation (or at least, the artists I know try to suppress any sort of design methodology). Artists often "just wing it", e.g. "I like eyes ... I'm going to make 100 sketches of eyes, and then I'll turn 3 into paintings". It comes from a very pure desire to express (but that also means it doesn't have any built-in "this-is-shit"-control....... nevermind). Sometimes design is considered art. Architecture is all about organizing data, knowledge of materials, being able to work with a big puzzle of official requirements, proper layout, fire exits, etc. etc. It's all very technical, design-oriented and very very hard. But it's a trade that has been perfected over the years, and now a famous architect can say "okay, we're going to do all that, but this time the building will be shaped like a giant egg!!!!" That's still 90% design, cause people have to do shit in that building, and it shouldn't fall over etc. etc., but it has 10% art mixed in. If making video games the way they're made now was anything like architecture, there'd be a 100-page description (in words) of a fairly straightforward rectangular building, with a team of 50 people of different disciplines trying to make sense of it. There'd be plumbers going around like "yeah, nice creative work on that wall, but we need this space for the water pump", and then various people would be like "shit, we need some materials to finish this building! we don't have bricks! make some bricks!" and even though the building isn't anywhere near finished, the carpet guy comes in and says "Ok, where do you need this?" and the architect would be all like "no no no, you're too soon, we don't even have a carpet pipeline right now, go help the plumbers". The carpet guy, of course, knows nothing of plumbing, and it takes him a week to get up to speed. Half-way through the building process, the real estate developer runs onto the construction site, yelling "this building isn't fun enough!!!" and demolishes the project. Don't misinterpret all of the above as an insult to video game makers. On the contrary. They're pioneers. But I think once video game making gets its own established methodology, with familiar materials, designs that everyone understands, etc., then it will become a lot easier to switch modes every once in a while and do something artistic with it. Right now everyone is still (very understandably) stuck in a predominantly technical or creative design-oriented mindset, which is vastly different from an artistic mindset. Some people are really good at switching between those mindsets, but the conditions have to be right. So, yeah, on one hand I think that games need more time to ripen. On the other hand, we can probably start discussing what makes a game artistic, especially since there have already been a few games to have been called that.

I have to advise against getting a small, crappy one. Don't even bother with crappy B-brands either. I bought a small Conceptronic (?) tablet and it was a nightmare. The thing fell apart pretty soon and it was about as accurate as... something that is not accurate. Get a big Wacom or nothing. Also check if the back of the pen can serve as eraser, cause that rules. Probably all Wacom's have that now. So better save up and buy one later, I'd say.

Yeah like that art you drew for the forums. Such sugar-coated crap. Also, I give you THIS:

The more pertinent question is: would it lose some weight if you did that?

Yeah, that shit with the conspiracy guy and the randomized conversations really seemed like something Tim might have coded himself. I have little doubt about Schafer still doing that stuff since he was so heavily involved in that as a SCUMMlet. Just wondering if designers still try out the really big features of a game in a rough prototype, i.e. Sid Meier setting up gameplay dynamics for his dinosaur game, or whatever. That's really interesting. I didn't know that. Erm, GDC is horribly expensive. Check your PM inbox.

Gees, and I thought they were cell-shaded.

I totally, utterly, profoundly agree with the idea that you need to prototype things and already start producing stuff when the Big Design in your head is only half-done. I only ever worked on one (mostly depressing) indie-level game project but that's pretty much THE main thing I learned on it. Despite my feverish attempts to deny it, you can't design games on paper. A game design doc should be like ... erm, 20 pages long or-so. That's already too much for smaller indie-type games. Something like 5 is probably enough for those. Only when you prototype things you can go "deeper" into the design, because you can see where the gameplay easily breaks, or see if it's actually as fun as you imagined it would be. If you stay in the imaginary world of game design docs, you'll never really get to the bottom of it. Also, prototyping is a great way to settle arguments over the design (if you're in a team, anyway). You just make it and evaluate it together. You can go on endlessly along the lines of "yeah, but I think feature A will work great!" but when you've actually made it (no matter how shoddily coded it is) you can clearly see for yourself if it works or not, and it settles 95% of all disagreements. There was a tutorial at GDC that Chris and I went to. It was the one by Katen Salie and Eric Zimmerman. We were asked to design games in small groups using various 'board game' props as assets. By just coming up with some rules and playing them out you could find really obvious loopholes in your original thinking and adapt the gameplay on the fly. It was just a silly design exercise, but I liked how fast the rules would evolve in just 10 minutes of brainstorming and playtesting. Since prototyping is very important to games, I still think that more middleware needs to exist so that game developers can whip up stuff much easier. I mean, when the team who did Battlefield Vietnam decided to do a Vietnam-themed game, they were like "shit, okay, how do we program an engine modification that shows tons of foilage and grass, with smooth draw distance, and a way of editing it that makes it easy for level designers". So they made a complex proprietary system of a checkerboard-style field of blocks that served as containers for trees and the closer you were blah blah blah, and they created some random grass thing, and a thing that converted bitmaps to levels and shit like that. I mean, what?! There's a fair amount of jungle-based games out there already, but everyone is re-coding the wheel. That stuff should be on the shelf. Okay, obviously that's mostly a graphical aspect making for a poor example in this post, but still, I doubt the full extent of the gameplay wasn't apparent until you could actually hide behind the trees, crouch through the grass, etc. Things like driving a vehicle and bumping into trees are hard to foresee when your levels are still flat terrain. If the game industry gets that sort of stuff out of the way, programmers can focus more on coding truly new features, such as Prince of Persia's rewind feature, which as I recall required a giant animation file to be stored so that it could be played back. One thing I'm curious about... people like Will Wright and Sid Meier often speak fondly of the "old days" in which they could whip up a prototype in a few days. I wonder if those guys still touch any code. I'm really curious if they still do prototypes themselves to this day. If I had to do an interview with them that would be one of the first things I'd ask. Okay, nap time, all that talk of prototyping has made me drowsy.

Woohoo speculation. Source: http://www.1up.com/article2/0,2053,1614704,00.asp

Fact: Oom means UNCLE in Dutch! Ha! Ok, I'll stop doing these. Please. Have mercy.

Fact: in Dutch, boffen means "to have luck".

It's also shifty eyes in disguise

Well, this is really taking machinima to the next level. http://www.sorethumbz.com/swg/download.php?view.9 Quite funny.

You, sir, have made a very good point. I have never really thought of a pause button, but now that you mention it... YES, I'd like that very much.

Hi there. I figured we needed something lame to discuss, so here ya go. Does anyone have tentative plans to buy a DS, PSP or other handheld device? Which device excites you most and why? Or maybe you don't like any of them? Speaking for myself, I've never owned a handheld but I'm somewhat considering making the DS my first, if there's a couple of awesome games to go with it. WarioWare DS is one ... now we need some more. I'd be happy playing a couple of DS-specific titles on it along with some GBA titles I missed out on. I really like how the DS is sort of like a swiss knife with a million things on it that could be used by games. So a lot will really depend on the games. The PSP looks kind of like the "executive handheld". It's really big and has a sort of laptop feel to it. It seems you really have to conciously take it with you somewhere and can't just put it in your pocket. (DS is big too but not so big you need to put it in a bag.) The PSP is perhaps more likely to have some awesome launch titles, as probably a lot of current-gen developers that can't make the jump to the PS3 generation can easily convert to doing PSP titles since it's at a PS2 level of technology. However, it seems like a bulky thing, and I doubt I'd be playing movies on it or listening to music, so I'm not entirely convinced yet. It seems to me the sales of PSP could really pick up, but then maybe collapse as soon as the PS3 is there. Why buy a mobile, but bulky, PS2 equivalent, when you can have a PS3 for a bit more money? Your thoughts?

Do you really want to hold a screen while you watch a movie, though? With games... the answer is yes. You need to hold the controls anyway. But with movies ... no.