Idle Thumbs 126: Old Growth Artisinal Dot

[BigJKO]

A Wii U is inevitable in your future, Jake. It is your destiny.

[Badfinger]

Why is Mario a cat? I cannot get past this.

[Nappi]

Because he picked the catsuit power-up. It's that simple really.

[Roderick]

Because Japan has a fascination for cats, just like tanuki and frogs, apparently. Also raccoons.

 

Mario just likes to wear the skin of slain animals, alright?

[tegan]

Super Far Cry Bros. 3

[Brannigan]

Super Far Cry Bros. 3

hmm, seen plenty of 1up mushrooms rolling down hills for sure.

[CaptainFish]

Because Japan has a fascination for cats, just like tanuki and frogs, apparently. Also raccoons.

 

Mario just likes to wear the skin of slain animals, alright?

According to PETA , he does. (find their gross game on your own)

[Jake]

SAVE THOSE RACCOONS AND FROGS FROM MARIO

[feelthedarkness]

Super Vivisection Bros

[dibs]

That was a good episode. It made me want to go and rate the podcast on itunes. Which I did after I sat through 5 minutes of itunes, icloud, quicktime updates

Now rate them on your PS3!

[RubixsQube]

SORRY, I WANT TO WRITE MORE GIBBERISH ABOUT MARIO/NINTENDO/THE MARIO 3D WORLD TRAILER

 

I have been playing Rayman Legends on a WiiU (since I am a baby child, and own a WiiU) and thinking a lot about platformers. I'm a big fan of the genre, because it is so broad. For instance Rayman Legends is a very good game, and does a lot of things I think that Sonic developers should have done, in terms of making a fluid, flowing, excellently precise game. I think that New Super Mario Bros. fills a very different niche than Rayman, in that it presents a very clean Mario experience, and while it was fun, it was like eating a big bowl of vanilla ice cream. Yeah, it's ice cream, but come on, where are the toppings? (As an aside, have you watched any of the NSMBU videos that Nintendo themselves put out? They're almost playing a different game)

 

So, getting back to the episode, there's a certain amount of hesitation by Jake to discuss Super Mario 3D Land, but it's obvious he's been really enjoying it. It's a very well made game, in a large part because the Mario Galaxy folks really understand why someone might be playing this game. I like how we're really in a great time for thoughtful video game experiences, where it seems that people who make games are paying attention to their audiences in the right way. Not so much thinking: "what do they want, let's give it to them", although there is a great deal of that, but rather, "what decisions can we make that lead to enjoyable play in our audience?" (I assume that this is probably key on game developer's minds, but it seems as if there is more success in the last few years at this aim) The key to the Super Mario 3D World Trailer, for me, is that it is very cogent of what it is about the Mario series that initially hooked people. There's a lot of weird, and a lot of strange excitement, but damn if it doesn't look like someone has spent a lot of time thinking about where the game sits in the landscape of platformers. There's been one million Mario games in the main series, but it's good that they're attempting to capture some of the weird essence of the series, and I really hope it lives up to the trailer. 

 

OK, SORRY, TOO MUCH THINKING ABOUT SOMETHING DUMB

[clyde]

What is a "very clean Mario experience"? How does Rayman not provide it?

[RubixsQube]

The Mario games essentially paved the way for what a modern platforming game is, and for the most part have stayed the course, without taking any huge risks. They experiment very little, and this is why they're so enjoyable. New Super Mario Bros requires you to run from one end of a course to the other, and there are a variety of the same enemies you've seen before, along with some environmental hazards. The visuals are clean and bop along, and even the dark, grim cave or Bowser's Castles levels seem pretty cheerful. The best levels, the ones you remember the most, are ones where they mess around with the formula. Again, I really enjoyed NSMBU, and played it to completion, smiling and loving it, but it won't stick in my mind like I think Rayman Legends will. Rayman Legends changes things every level, throwing novel input methods at the player, as well as interesting game types at each turn. It's almost...messy? There is a throughline (collect the things) to each level, but it's surprising how much they attempt. I think that the game also offers classic ("clean") platforming in the style of a Mario game, but it immediately takes a left turn and now your character is running along to a mariachi Eye of the Tiger, or sneaking in a Jules Verne inspired underwater pipe maze, or fending off lightning bolts from Zeus. I suppose maybe I'm not super clear, in which case, I apologize. I've thoroughly enjoyed both games, but I think that my taste in games tends to veer towards what pushes boundaries and takes chances. 

[clyde]

So Mario games have fewer variables that they permutate thoroughly, while Rayman games add more variables before they have demonstrated all possible mixtures?

[tegan]

One thing I really miss is that earlier Mario games did tend to have weird one-off segments. It's why people love things like Kuribo's Shoe or Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy.

[RubixsQube]

I think that's potentially what I mean. That's very succinct! I was thinking about this before bed last night. My favorite platformer, and indeed, video game, of all time is Yoshi's Island, which is the prototype on which a game like Donkey Kong Country Returns or Rayman Origins/Legends is based. It came out late in the life cycle of the SNES, and just threw so much at the player, with new game types, and weird boss battles, and one-off levels like Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy (I'm with you, Tegan) which created a compelling reason to keep playing the game. Instead of pulling you along through the game based on momentum, they pull you along with novelty and creativity. This is a much harder way to build a game! But ultimately, I find it more rewarding. This is why I want to play Super Mario 3D World, because it seems like the developers have a similar mindset. 

[BigJKO]

Hmm.. in my memory Mario 3d Land threw different, weird mechanics at you almost all of the time.. Weren't some of the one-offs?

[RubixsQube]

I agree! I really enjoyed Super Mario 3D Land for this same reason. In my discussion I'm contrasting Rayman Legends and the New Super Mario Bros. series. Super Mario 3D Land and the New Super Mario Bros series are two different developers within Nintendo. The NSMB people make these games and the Pikmin games, awhile the SM3DL people made Mario Galaxy 2, and Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. (My kind of people!)

[hexgrid]

Whoa interesting! Pressure-based ones always SEEM way laggier to me but it's probably because, Nintendo-hardware aside, they're used in situations where they're being driven by abysmal CPUs (like credit card signature terminals).

 

Here's a followup:

 

http://appglimpse.com/blog/touchmarks-ii-touchscreen-latencies-in-flagship-tablets/

 

Here's the relevant image:

 

http://appglimpse.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/touchmark_graph_ftablets_rev2.png

 

 

So, the best tablet on the market has (handwaving around the range) 5 frames of lag (sure, I've rounded up from 4.5, but so does the game you're playing in all likelihood, unless it's running its world simulation faster than the device frame rate), and the worst measured is over a sixth of a second.

 

That's fine for turn-based games and the like, but for anything the least bit twitchy it's hideous.

[BigJKO]

I wonder what the input lag will be on those Made for Iphone controllers will be? Maybe that'll help establish a more viable market for twitch games on iOS..

[hexgrid]

I wonder what the input lag will be on those Made for Iphone controllers will be? Maybe that'll help establish a more viable market for twitch games on iOS..

 

Those ought to be no worse than console wireless controllers; probably a frame of lag at worst, unless Apple or Logitech does something spectacularly stupid.  That said, is anyone going to buy them?  The value prospect is dubious.

 

Some background here; I'm an indie developer, I've worked on PC, console and mobile.  I'm looking at this both from the point of view of a technically savvy customer and a developer who wants to make money on his games.  I have preferences (if I had a magic wand, Sega would still be a force in console hardware and I'd be making games on their systems), but ultimately I have to go where the money is.  I'd rather make money with a game I like on a platform I'm not thrilled with than starve shipping on a platform I like.

 

iOS devices are pretty impressive for mobile systems, and they're as powerful as desktop machines from a decade ago, but as the basis for a game system they have... flaws:

 

- the app store's pricing model and disastrous discoverability problems mean that free to play is going to remain dominant; some people are getting lucky or have savvy marketing, but for every good non-freemium game that is doing well on iOS there are a thousand equally good non-freemium games making too little money to ever cover their development costs

 

- at best, freemium means... well, I hope you like MMORPGs a lot

 

- more likely, freemium means I hope you like farmville mechanics paired with licensed nostalgia or cutesy critters, and games where skill matters only until the game convinces you to spend money to make up for the carefully-tweaked impossible difficulty ramp

 

- freemium mainly means if it can't be made on a 3 to 9 month development cycle with a team of less than 8 people it probably isn't going to happen

 

- the number of people who are going to carry around an MFI controller so they can twitch game on the bus is too small to consider -- if you were going to do that, why not carry a 3DS or a Vita instead? -- so we're only really talking about the home gaming market

 

- Apple is requiring that games with MFI controls have touch-based fallback controls (ie: you have to be able to play the game fully without the MFI controller), which means most games will wind up either having really shitty touch controls or will restrict their use of MFI controls to what they can reproduce well on the screen -- this also means it's harder to do things like declutter the GUI

 

- for the cost of an iThing capable of decent gaming (ie: not the older models, and with at least 32G of storage) plus the AppleTV and the MFI controller you could have the PS4 *and* the XBone with money to spare

 

    The last point is going to be exacerbated by the speed with which the mobile market is developing.  The PS3 is six months older than the original iPhone.  You can still get a PS3 and PS3 games, and the generation shift is just coming now.

 

    We're on the 7th generation of iPhone hardware in essentially the same amount of time, and half of the models of iPhone released in that time are no longer supported (iPhone, iPhone3, iPhone3GS, iPhone 4).  The original iPad has pretty much dropped off the map as a target for game development due to its general lack of speed and memory, and the iPad3 is going to follow it very soon (the iPad3 is the first retina model; it quadrupled the number of pixels of the iPad2 without a corresponding increase in memory and graphical horsepower).  I wouldn't be surprised if the Apple event on the 22nd shakes up the iPad line and gets rid of the non-retina iPads entirely, which would put the iPad2 on the endangered list for game support as well.

 

    The next iPad is about to come out, and it's almost certainly going to be a 64bit model, which means we're creating another point of obsolescence; you can be damned sure that two models later Apple is going to declare that iOS9 won't support "legacy" devices with 32bit CPUs.  That'll be everything from the iPad4 and the iPhone5 and iPhone5c and back obsoleted, plus all current models of iPod.

 

    So, if you were planning on using an iPad and an AppleTV instead of a PS4 or an XBone, you're probably looking at replacing the setup at least once over the life of the PS4.  Probably twice.  You'll be paying a premium each time for features like compactness, lightness, battery life and portability that, while important in a mobile device, are entirely unimportant in a game machine displaying on a TV.  You're going to get some decent games if you can find them in the sea of crap, but nothing of the scope or depth routinely seen in PC and console titles.

 

    And to get that, you're going to be paying a major premium.  The games will be cheaper, sure, but the "good enough" iPad is currently $600, the "good enough" iPad mini is $430, and those have a ~2 year service life before the new games will start treating them as legacy devices and iOS upgrades start to seem like they're making things worse rather than better.

 

    I'm sure some people will go for it, probably based on the "I have an iThing anyways, so all I need is $150 worth of additional hardware to turn it into a half-assed PS2/Dreamcast/GameCube era console", but if you actually want a game machine I don't see why you wouldn't get a steam box or one of the new consoles.  The quality of the games is much higher, with significantly more variety.

 

  If you want a *cheap* game machine that still has way more variety of games and much higher quality games than iOS, get a PS3 or even a PS2, and raid bargain bins and (in the case of the PS3) the online store.  Or buy a bottom of the line PC, hook it up to your TV, and buy a bunch of stuff from gog.com.

[Jake]

iOS game pad support could be the beginning of whatever AppleTV becomes, if anything. That would be a place where you could see someone buying/making a controller.

(Even if it's just laying groundwork - encouraging iOS devs to consider controller support now, so there is a foundation of controller-ready games as year from now.)

[melmer]

Clint hooking talking about the futureeeee
http://www.edge-online.com/features/in-the-click-of-it-the-last-generation/

Having games like GTA V streaming from your phone to your tele. if this is likely to happen in the coming years apple are going to need to create a I game pad at some point

 

(also check out my quality idle thumbs themed comment)

[hexgrid]

Clint hooking talking about the futureeeee

http://www.edge-online.com/features/in-the-click-of-it-the-last-generation/

Having games like GTA V streaming from your phone to your tele. if this is likely to happen in the coming years apple are going to need to create a I game pad at some point

 

I don't really see how that future works unless Apple does something drastic about the app store.  You might see GTAV as a $4.99 title but GTAVI will be "free to play" with a paid-for premium currency, because it's the only way to reliably make money on games in the app store.

 

All the incentives in the app store are to drive the up-front cost of games to $0.  If you want to move any copies of your game at all, you need to be on the top 50 list, and if you want to make a profit you really need to be on the top 10 list.  If you want to get on the top 50 list, unless you've got massive sales clout behind you, you need to be free because that's the only hope of getting enough people to download your game to get you in the rankings.

 

More to the point, the mobile hardware out there now is roughly equivalent to the Dreamcast/PS2/GameCube generation of consoles; heck, the Dreamcast was even PowerVR graphics, same as the iOS machines.  You could relatively trivially port nearly everything from that generation to phones.  The DS and DSi are ARM CPUs with *simple* graphics systems and low-res screens; you could port pretty much anything from DS and DSi to iOS or Android easily, with plenty of CPU and graphical horsepower to spare.

 

If that's such a compelling thing for GTAV, why isn't it compelling for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night?  Or Okami?  Where's Puzzle Fighter? Panzer Dragoon Zwei?  It's not like the publishers of any of those titles have a horse in the console race; Konami, Capcom and Sega are all pure software houses now.

 

You can get Madden, but guess what?  Free.  Except for the in-app purchases...

 

Beyond that, I don't think it's going to happen, mostly because the economics of it are stupid.  For at least the next decade the cost of a mobile device is going to be dominated by the cost of the screen, the backlight, the case, the battery and its charging circuitry, the cameras, the cellular modem, the touchscreen, the SIM reader and logic, the GPS and sensors, and jamming everything into a tiny package.  A console with equivalent power to a phone is going to cost a small fraction of what the phone costs, because of all the components it doesn't need and all of the tolerances and space requirements it doesn't have to conform to.  The console has a fraction of the parts, and will be considered tiny if it's ten times the size of the phone.  It can also burn an order of magnitude more electricity without anyone batting an eye, which means it's much easier to make it go fast without making it expensive.

 

So, I think what you're going to see, rather than phones dominate everything and consoles dying out, is that consoles will get dirt cheap.  We'll probably see the PS4/XBone generation reach the point where they're almost cheap enough to be pack-ins in cereal boxes.  And yes, if Apple allows it, they may do AirPlay or whatever if you want to play games with your phone on the big screen.  But I think instead you'll be playing Steam, PS4 or XBone games, because the consoles don't have the race-to-the-bottom app store and can compete effectively on hardware price.

 

Jake, have you found anything remotely as compelling as the new Luigi game on iOS or Android?

[malkav11]

The above, incidentally, is why I can understand the casual gamer moving away from dedicated handhelds and towards a mobile device they already carry around for other reasons, but feel there will always be some market (maybe not a -sufficient- market, but some market...me, for one) for the former. Because the mobile market drives a different sort of game than I'm interested in playing, for an interface that I mostly find dramatically inferior to traditional game interfaces. And to keep up, you end up buying devices that have a much shorter shelf-life than traditional handhelds, for much more money. (As an aside, the fact that I -don't- play games etc on my smartphone means I'm still using a model from mid-2010 without qualm. I wouldn't -mind- a spiffier model but in the intervening 3+ years apparently everyone dropped the idea of a hardware keyboard so for my purposes any modern phone would be a downgrade.)