SpiderMonkey

I'm a little confused by the descriptions too. Right now, I don't really think you can make something that's part way between movie and game, because players either want to observe or they want to participate. No one's really been successful at persuading players to mix and match, and if anything, so-called "next-gen design" is about keeping the story there while moving away from observation and towards participation. I'm rambling, so I'll curtail myself. I agree that no one really seems to know. It smacks somewhat of me-too-ism after EA said "hey we've got Steven Spielberg onboard" and then proceeded to be similarly vague about their intentions. It also reminds me a lot of Jason Rubin's rants a couple of years back on the perpetual subject of how the industry actively keeps "creator personalities" from emerging and being used in the industry's marketing. It just seems totally contradictory to do that, but then wheel out the film directors to great fanfare. If they think film directors can sell games, why aren't EA and Microsoft more interested in establishing the concept of "game directors" too?

Hmm yes, I suppose that if you have predicted every possible eventuality at different points in time then it is impossible to be wrong.

I think that's kinda the nature of the blogosphere (and by extension the journosphere, since so many sites seem to want to imitate blogs these days). Its mechanics (the incredibly short shelf-life of any story) rewards and encourages this amnesiac approach of posting today's events and then posting a quick shallow opinion on them, without any effort to find context. It sucks. I'm bored of having every internet fanboy believe that their opinion now carries some weight because they have a .com address or a Joystiq/Kotaku/whatever posting account, and because their populist rants get picked up by aggregating sites like Digg. I'm hoping that the coming console battle proves so different from what these 'pundits' predict that they acknowledge their irrelevance and disappear back to the message boards from whence they crawled.

Ubisoft screwed up and released a whole bunch of concept art that they didn't mean to. This forum post has some of it. (Please feel free to remove the link if you guys would rather it wasn't spread around.) Either way, most of it is really awesome. Concept art is something I normally look past - "show me the real screenshots", etc. But something about a few pieces in this batch really sparked my imagination, and I realised that my previous attitude is rather myopic. So rather than dedicate this thread to laughing at Ubi's misfortune, I wanted to ask people if they had any favourite pieces of game concept art that they wanted to share?

I'm sure they are taking that Lost game really seriously. You could kinda count that as pseudo-new IP, in that I expect they will build something with its own presence, rather than "play a generic platform game with Jack and Locke!". But yeah, I agree. At this stage, I would be expecting them to rest their premiere IPs for a year or two and do what they did early last generation - hit the market with a whole spectrum of new IPs and see which ones stick. </armchair>

Aside from every other developer on the planet getting Valve's R&D work on physics and character animation, for free? That was 4 years of tech development other developers suddenly didn't have to do anymore. Announcing a new Splinter Cell or a new PoP is a pretty major event that they want to manage carefully (so that they can go "this is the focus"/"this is the exciting new stuff"/etc rather than going "hey guys! this year's update!") and that they want to separate out so that each gets major attention. Look at how this stuff has been handled, e.g. http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=71170. It's just a list of names. I'd call that pretty damaging, especially to have Splinter Cell 5 revealed before they've even got 4 out of the door. No one has any pretty pictures to share?

Throw in a version I can use on my handheld device of choice, and you might just have me interested. Though like Jason says, it sounds mighty expensive to manufacture.

Yeah the whole thing has Chet and Erik written all over it. Hilarious stuff.

Ah right, I get you. In that case, I'm quite partial to some Trespasser now and again, despite how empty and dull it is.

Blade Runner got some pretty shoddy reviews when it was released, but I love it.

Exactly. Every summer for 3 years now, MCV have decided to send me a few free issues (presumably because I'm signed up for Develop). Every time, half the articles have been specialist retailers bitching and moaning about general retailers undercutting them with promotions, be it in anticipation of Christmas deals, in remembrance of Easter deals or in the present of Summer deals. The same tripe about "oh no, we won't be able to push our over-inflated prices down our customers' throats anymore!" I was out and about yesterday, and while I didn't see anything worth having in Woolworths, WHSmith did have HL2 for £7.50 and Battlefield:Vietnam for £5, which both seemed like fairly good deals worth passing on. Then I found HL2:Ep1 on sale for £20 and, remembering how I paid £12 for it through Steam, felt desperately sorry for those stuck buying from retail stores.

Talking of bargain bins, has anyone found anything good courtesy of this £1 PC game thing, which MCV threw such a tantrum over?

Counter-point: They do have Doug Church in their employ at the moment, so maybe they've given it to his trustworthy mittens.

Doesn't someone say this every year? Comedy timing, though. On the same day Sony go "we want to appeal to more girls and the way we've decided to do that is to release a PINK PS2! come get it girls!!! :clap:", EA gets up and says "Girls don't want 'pink games'."

oh yeah, sorry. Your quote has it wrong. Erkki said that, not me. LOL Probably, but it just seems to me that getting rid of swearwords and getting rid of idiots isn't really the same thing.

It's certainly not something I'd expect from Nintendo: - This seems to run counter to their pre-existing philosophy. The whole Friends code thing is about protecting you from idiots. - Is there really enough space on a 480p screen to start throwing loads of text up? Maybe it will just let you send one word at a time. FAG. - It's pretty computationally expensive, and while the Wii won't be slow, it's not the system I'd expect to have extra power lying around for these niceties. But you know, I'm not gonna take a dump on the concept itself. They pay people good money to know more and figure shit out better than me, the random guy on a message board. It sounds cool. If they are working on it, I'd expect them to be doing it with a particular game or two in mind (either something new built around it, or something like Animal Crossing), rather than simply to add to multiplayer FPSs.

I'd be interested to know if McGee considers any of this fading generation of consoles to have been "next-gen" compared to their predecessors. "Video card and processor upgrades" and the exponential performance jumps are what "next-gen" is, and always has been (possibly SNES->Playstation aside).

I've not played the game, so my opinion holds little weight, but still ... I struggle to consider a zombie game - AKA "we don't have to put any real effort into animation, character design or AI" - to be 'proper' next-gen design.

Just like any new generation, there will be a few studios who have the money and the talent to find genuinely worthwhile things to use the extra power for, and there will be studios who just make last generation's games with prettier graphics until those few studios have created some new blueprints for them to copy. I'm actually glad that there's so much fuss being made in advance of this generational shift about the growing costs of production. Last generation I got the impression it caught a lot of people by surprise. A whole bunch of studios closures and a whole bunch of lost jobs could have been avoided with a bit of anticipation, it seems. As for $60 games, I don't really care about whatever arguments they need to make. Gaming is already too expensive. No amount of "won't someone think of our balance sheet" is going to make me give over even more money for shorter experiences. £50 ($95 by today's rates) for a game is too expensive, and that's the publisher's problem to solve, not the consumer's.

If we're going the serious-evaluation route, I found the "I'm large and in charge" to be much more annoying than "I'm cute as a button", but like some of you say, it was a bit of lesser of two evils kinda thing.

Let's get it right ... this thing is awesome, but the one thing it isn't is free. It's a $99 annual subscription, both to make the games and to play them. I even read talk of them selling booster packs. They say you keep the rights to anything you make, but I wonder if you can even play your own games if you stop paying the subscription? This seems to be the fashion this generation. No free lunch anymore. The exorbitant costs of the competition between Sony and Microsoft are being passed directly to the customer this time. As if gaming wasn't already many people's most expensive hobby.

The film is destined to be bad simply for the reason that, since it is about the internet, one of the scriptwriters will feel obliged to include a scene of all the characters sat at a terminal hacking away, culminating in the line "I'm in".

Previously, yes; again in the future, yes; at the moment, no.

<Token statement that "5 CDs" might have become "5 DVDs" by Chinese whispers.>

I dunno, this Shacknews thread seems to paint a different picture of Quakecon for me: http://www.shacknews.com/ja.zz?id=12638070 That and all the talk from last year about people being kicked out of the hotel for spitting off balconies.