Spaff

Golden Joystick Awards: Farcical list of "winners"

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It's just a shame that people seem to prefer a proper dedicated handheld experience.

Actually, I kind of agree with that. It would be a pity if the DS was the only handheld around, because as much as I love the system and it's style of games, there is some merit to having immersive handheld experiences. However, that still doesn't mean that a game shouldn't be tailored to the handheld platform.

Here are my main complaints about LCS ... (I wrote this a while back in another forum):

  • you can't skip cutscenes until after they've loaded
  • when you die, you lose all your weapons. Early on, it's no biggie, but as you start getting great weapons, it's kinda annoying to start over. What this essentially means is that you're going to have to load the game up over again, drive to your next mission, wait for the cutscene to load, THEN skip the cutscene, and then hopefully finish the mission. It takes me a good five minutes just to get started on a mission!
  • you have to drive back to your appartment to save. This is so that Rockstar don't need to save the "state" of all the people in the city & such. But why couldnt they make it such that you could save anywhere (while not on a mission) and when you load the game, you'll start up in your apartment?!

Now note that each of these points not only tailors the game better to the handheld platform, BUT it also doesn't compromise the immersive gameplay. I love that this is (more-or-less) GTA3 on-the-go, I love that there's a proper storyline, proper dialog, proper cars, proper physics and a huge city. In other words, I love the fact that the game is a completely immersive experience.

What I hate is that Rockstar didn't take into consideration that I get 20 minutes to play this game a day. And this ...

Of course - the pervading attitude is that the PSP is exactly that - a portable PlayStation (2).

... is no excuse. Because like you said, it's a *portable* PS2. That means I'll be playing it on the go. That means I may not have all the time in the world to play it. That means I'll probably be interupted while playing.

I really love the immersive handheld experience, since I don't have much time to play on "proper" consoles at home. But I am completely convinced an immersion and standard handheld considerations can co-exist.

SiN

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What I hate is that Rockstar didn't take into consideration that I get 20 minutes to play this game a day.

That - along with your suggestions - is exactly what I meant by "fundamentally bad design".

Don't get me wrong; the PSP is a very impressive piece of kit and I wouldn't mind one myself -- just this morning I was getting moist reading all about Vice City Stories. But I don't think that many developers are really making the most of what's there and what it has to offer gamers.

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Quite.

I like how choosing not to accept fundamentally bad design automatically makes me some rabid [F-word] fucktard.

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.

Yes, because those technical restraints have no influence on shaping the nature of those games.

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.

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Thanks for the clarification, SpiderMonkey.

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.

I haven't played New Super Mario Bros., but the Mario Bros. series in general has always been about short, varied levels. These translate well into what might be referred to as "highly portable" games, because they can be consumed as intended through very short periods of play.

You'll recall that the Grand Theft Auto series originally started along very much the same vain, with most missions lasting no more than a handful of minutes at a time. However, the GTA series underwent a radical gameplay shift with the introduction of 3D, not only with the graphics but also with the depth of the story and the mission complexity/duration. To whit: the original release of Vice City Stories had several missions which, if played to completion, could take more than an hour to finish successfully. Using that example as a reference, I don't feel the experience would translate well to a portable console without first undergoing some optimisation for the target system's implied shorter play times. Supporting instant game saves would go most of the distance in addressing this problem, but would not provide the outright solution. (Whether the PSP is capable of this or not, for logistical reasons, is academic.)

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.

Absolutely not. Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow has become one of my favourite games of all time and, last time I checked, I had played it in excess of 15 hours. But it's when this play typically occurs - and for how long - that people take issue with the term "portable".

What I'm trying to say is that straight conversion just wouldn't work in many of cases, but a little tweaking is often all that's required. Failing to do this annoys people, because it's bad/lazy design for seemingly no reason.

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I really think that it's high time that they elevate the GDC-awards to a higher status as far as the general media are concerned. The game industry desperately needs an "Oscar" and the GDC seems to be the only real possibility as there are simply too many idiots with internet access out there.

And on the whole PSP issue I think that Sony really dropped the ball. They thought they could do no wrong after the PS2 and somebody figured out that they could essentially do a PS2-portable and that's what they did. Without making any assessments about the fact that this in essence was a completely new market. Obviously the original offense that GTA:LCS should not be best portable game of the year is down to the fact that GTA is immensly popular and Rockstar don't HAVE TO give a fuck about really adjusting the gameplay for a portable because people buy it anyway. Should they have done so? Yes.

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And on the whole PSP issue I think that Sony really dropped the ball. They thought they could do no wrong after the PS2 and somebody figured out that they could essentially do a PS2-portable and that's what they did. Without making any assessments about the fact that this in essence was a completely new market.

Oh please. The PSP is a fine system thats selling well. Sony did not "drop the ball". It would be like saying the Xbox and Gamecube are failures because they came 2nd and 3rd respectively. They didn't fail, they just didn't do as well as the PS2.

Oh, and Sony did their research. It'd be foolish to think a big corporation like Sony wouldn't do their research. Like Spider said, they're trying to do portable games differently. It's a different approach, but it's a valid one.

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.

But that is bad design. My commute is 20 minutes long and I still couldn't enjoy the game, and I'm an absolute GTA fanboy! Read my post at the top of the page over again. Each of those suggestions would make LCS completely suitable for 30-minute, 20-minute and even 10-minute sessions without ruining the immersive console experience that Sony want to promote with the PSP.

SiN

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Oh, and Sony did their research. It'd be foolish to think a big corporation like Sony wouldn't do their research. Like Spider said, they're trying to do portable games differently. It's a different approach, but it's a valid one

Doing research doesn't necessarily make it right. I'm sure they did "research" when they decided to put rootkits on their music CDs.

Anyway, this is pointless. Can't we all just get along and agree that EA winning Publisher of the Year is complete :fart:

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Cheers, man. Where's the love for the publishers that are releasing the not-shit games?

Although I'll admit that I bought VCS earlier today... not bad. :shifty:

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Wouldn't that be like making film awards for people that don't watch films?

MOST INTERESTING MOVIE BASED ON THE TRAILER

BEST MOVIE THAT EVERYONE ELSE WAS TALKING ABOUT BUT YOU HAVEN'T SEEN YET

Hah, that's exactly what Golden Joysticks are like :P

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