SpiderMonkey

I find the episodic debate to be largely pointless at the moment, because there are too few data points, and what data points do exist are totally skewed by other factors. Ritual made a bad game which didn't sell because it was bad - Sin Episodes success has nothing to do with its episodic nature. Valve make amazing games whose success has nothing to do with their episodic nature. Telltale offer the best data point - they work in a niche genre and have proven that the model can work well in a niche, but it's unclear how much that can generalise to others.

"Breaking News"? Is there ever any news on the Internet that isn't breaking? Anything over half a day old is technically old, stale news that isn't considered worth reading anymore. It's good to see that they still want to make their type of games, but I doubt it'll be quite the same without any big financial muscle behind them anymore. Hopefully they'll pick up a new sugar daddy soon enough.

Another dev falls victim to my failed-to-adapt theory. If you keep making games that belong in the 90s, sooner or later your luck will run out. You can't keep making mediocre products (Condition Zero Deleted Scenes, anyone?) and expect nostalgia about what you used to be capable of to keep you in business.

Nooooooooooooo! It makes movement more free, because all you have to worry about is movement. You don't have to worry about aiming because of the lock on. Compare and contrast with modern console shooters where you have to invest so much effort in the aiming, that it's hard to give time to thinking about moving. (And following on from that, shooters that make this limited movement into a feature - the "cover shooter".) It's not necessarily better, but it's so refreshingly different, as you will learn once you get further into the game and you have things leaping around all over the place. The pace of the fights is so much higher. Love it.

Someone was playing it (wario) at work earlier this week. It looked totally hilarious and masses of fun. Standard Warioware rules seem to apply though - it's for short bursts of play - if you sit down and play it like you play a normal game, you will burn it up in a few hours and miss out on a lot of the satisfaction to be had from discovering it little by little.

A better summary of that ad: Imagine the Cell processor is this fit girl. You can only get this fit girl Cell processor with a PS3.

I saw this, this morning and had exactly the same "WTF?" reaction. Sony has publically announced its design failures with regards the controller several times (first it was "oh no, motion sensors and rumble are impossible" and then it was "oh no, we can't do both cheaply enough", both of which are things their competition has achieved). That's the most conspicuous aspect to me. Not to mention the fact that no one has demonstrated the worth of its motion sensors yet, or that almost everything else about the controller is a 10 year old design, or that endless mumbling about how the charging/battery setup is inferior to the 360's controller. It screams money hats, as Marek rightly points out. I hope someone somewhere has the balls to run a "Sony buys design award" headline.

Sounds pretty neat if it's quieter. That's the main thing that's stopping me from buying one at the moment (that and the price). I wonder what this will mean for Microsoft's relationship with its customers. No one paid any attention to PS2's various hardware revisions (obviously the PS2-thin aside), but yet there's all sorts of gossip about the mere hint of an upgrade. I guess that's the nature of the internet these days, where even the most miniscule piece of shit can be major news for half a day. But I wonder how well the early adopters - a company's most loyal customers - will take to having their purchase rendered inferior. Maybe they can get away with it these days, where it's assumed that your purchase will be inferior within a year (phones, iPods, etc), but it's certainly new territory for consoles.

I thought it was harsh to give it 73 but its flaws are very easily described: - It shoots its load all at once. It doesn't build you into the various aspects of the combat gently, instead you immediately have kicking, spikes to kick people towards and ledges. Those same elements then show up again and again and again. - The story/general world is atrociously cliché and tired, so it can only lean on its combat gameplay for fun. - It's much more of a Sims-type game than a normal FPS-type game. In the former, you have to make your own fun. In the latter, the contract between game designer and player is "keep beating the game and we'll keep it fun for you". It's easy to play the game by just kicking everything over the ledge, but of course that gets monotonous and boring after a while. It's up to you, the player, to make the fights interesting by forcing yourself to vary your tactics.

Personally, 2007 should be great. Games-wise, I couldn't really care less, since I continue to find great stuff to play from pre-2000, let alone 2005 and 2006. I'll catch up on 2007's haul once the hype has passed and the prices aren't so stupid. Except Bioshock and HL2:E2. Everyone has weaknesses.

Their pick for "Worst Trend" was pretty damn lame. They had some good nominations this year, but appear to have simply gone for the option least likely to piss anyone off. For those too lazy to find the page:

Anyone know why Ubisoft's share price fell in half over one weekend in November? Check out the 3 month view on http://finance.google.com/finance?q=ubisoft. I was just casually browsing, but don't remember hearing anything that would have caused such a slump.

Yeah that seemed likely to me, but Google normally notes the splits.

Does anyone know if the Wii is region locked for Gamecube games? Is there any possibility that a UK Wii would play US Gamecube games?

I saw 5 minutes of Wii Sports the other day. I think I must be dead or something, because it looked really boring. All I could think was "for £180, I could buy a tennis racket/golf clubs/whatever and play the real thing".

My tuppence: - Drop the "I just need to break in" attitude, in favour of "I'm going to make myself someone that games companies will genuinely want". I hate the "OMG the games industry is so hard to break into" meme. If you are talented and can show you are talented, games companies will want to employ you. Open a copy of Develop and there is an article every month about how developers can't find enough staff at the moment. - Entry-level design is (by my experience at least, though it does vary) about production - making things. The paper-pushing, doc-writing becomes more important as you get more senior. Therefore you need to show ability to actually make things. There's no excuse for showing up at an interview without something. When amateur tools are so readily available, it just seems like you aren't really that interested if you aren't already doing something in your free time. A Counter-Strike map, a NWN module, a Civ mod - whatever suits the kinds of games you want to make and the kinds of companies you want to work at. Even if you think your work is kind of dodgy and crap, it's a glass-half-full thing - it will show what makes you better than other candidates, not what makes you worse than some mythical ideal. - Games design doesn't happen in a vacuum, away from other media. Learn and understand the principles of general design, product design, software design, and you will find they are all built on similar principles. Also know film, graphic design and visual language.

Yeah I do believe there is an article on the nature of what it means for a game to be "perfect", somewhere on this very site, from the distant past?

True, but Tim Schafer didn't declare an intent to "invent the platformer genre", whereas CliffyB made that declaration about his 'new' "cover-shooter" concept. I find the hype offensive because 3 months ago, the same people who are circle-jerking over this game, were writing articles and posting on message boards/blogs, moaning about how there is no innovation or originality in games and devs just make the graphics prettier with the same gameplay and story clichés, and how they want more from their games. And in 6 months time when they've forgotten this game, they will be tapping the same shit into their keyboards. I'm sure it's a good game, though I do wonder whether it's a great one. It's the inconsistency and hypocrisy that busts my balls. Isn't this the very core of the issue? Why can't scores and review content be consistent? I think journalists do have integrity for the most part. I just think they have none when the huge hype trains come calling into town. I don't think an editor for something like IGN would have the courage to give, to use the current example, GoW a 7 if he really felt that was what it deserved. It's like taking a piss in someone's beer, in terms of how he would be treating his readers. And I don't think the person writing the review is able enough to separate themselves from the hype to write something appropriately impartial. There are plenty of examples of this happening from the past, where people have given utterly retarded scores to mediocre, over hyped games. You can't deny the phenomenon exists. You only need to go back a year and see the scores given to stuff like PD0. I'm just trying to figure out the reasons for it.

I wouldn't really call it pretentious. It reaks of high school level thinking. "Gee, what piece of music would make our ad more moving. Let's pick the most clichéd thing from the past 5 years, and bonus, we can even cash in on some of the Donnie Darko love our target audience has." It wasn't a trailer, it was a music video. Shoot and cover mechanics have been around since Time Crisis. The whole thing smacks of Emperor's New Clothes. Hype sells magazines/website pageviews (=ads) just as much as it sells the actual games. The reviewers have nothing to gain from doing anything other than perpetuating the frenzy surrounding the game. This kind of shit always happens at the start of a cycle. Good games get reviewed as if they're "omg ultimate mega games", and then 3 years later, everyone is kinda embarrassed by the scores and the hysteria. Witness also Resistance Fall of Man getting a 9.1 from IGN.

Most "issues" are constrained 100% to the internet message board bubble. I expect that the only issue that has arisen to date that will bother ordinary punters will be sticker shock.

Europe loves the Playstation brand. The PSP launched last here, in similarly near-farcical circumstances, but from what I recall, it's actually doing stronger here (in terms of comparison with the DS) than either Japan or the US. I don't expect anyone to really remember the delays or the shortages. The real fight is next Christmas, not this Christmas, after all.

Hey wow, you should both chill out. If you reread what I wrote, you will note that the noun I used was "fanboy fight". Not "fanboy". I was expressing my dismay that whenever the PSP gets discussed, someone has to wheel out the same points - "battery time LOL", "loading times LOL" - even when they aren't relevant to the discussion. And that therefore the discussion boils down to the same positions as have taken place all over the internet for months and months. I think you are wrong. It's bizarre to say that game developers would go "oh it's slow to load data off the UMD, so instead of loading a little bit to keep the load times down and doing a fun short game, we will load a lot and do a full console-style game". It's bizarre to suggest that game developers would go "oh the battery life is short, so we should make games that require really long playtimes". The technical constraints and the design choices you are complaining about seem unrelated to me. Also, Wrestlevania, "fundamentally bad design"? That was exactly my point. These aren't bad games. Do you call NSMB a "fundamentally bad design"? It's a console-style game, after all, just like GTA:LCS - except it's console-style, 1990-style. As I tried to illustrate with my analogy, and as you appear to have ignored since you took high offence to other words, there's nothing "bad design" about saying "we are going to make a game that people can play in 30+ minute chunks during their lunch break or on their morning commute", except in that the market prefers different.

Hmm, I thought I might wade into trouble with that comment ... It would be nice if the market supported both types of games. I find it a little bizarre, because people readily tolerate/embrace "straight ports" of 2D games on the GBA and more recently, some of the DS library. In that sense, it seems that people's aversions to the PSP's style of game are more based in familiarity (2D games are old and forgotten, 3D action games are current), rather than on the titles' individual merits. While I was certainly commenting on the nature of the system's games, I don't recall saying anything about battery life or loading times. So please let's not turn this into a regular, tired PSP/DS fanboy fight. Thanks. Here is an analogy that I feel is relevant: Some people buy 13" laptops, so they can use them wherever they are, e.g. on the train, in a café, etc. Some people buy 17" laptops, with the intention of being able to easily move them around, but only to use them in a few specific places, e.g. work/home or home/college. Different uses, different markets, deceptively similar form factor. The DS/PSP thing is fragmented along similar lines.

Meh, me thinks that winning an award chosen by expert game developers is the ultimate accolade. Of course - the pervading attitude is that the PSP is exactly that - a portable PlayStation (2). If the DS was replaced by the Gamecube Portable, its games would be much the same. It's a conscious, deliberate decision by publishers and Sony to make it that way. That's why when both systems were close to release, Sony were saying "different market, we're not competing with Nintendo". It's just a shame that people seem to prefer a proper dedicated handheld experience.

Can you continue to negotiate salary after receiving a formal offer letter? Especially if the previous discussions only went as far as "here's a number but I can't answer one of your questions about other benefits"? Or will I just get two fingers if I broach the subject?