14 posts tagged “rant” (page 2)

Grabber: It's easy to generate and share your drinkingg ames

Platform: Nintendo PC+DVD-ROM, 1500ml of Tequila

Selling Points: Who doesn't like making up their own little games, especially with alcohol involved?

Game Play: Pop your favorite DVD into the drive and Drinking Game Maker will analyze the closed caption titles for words or phrases of the drinking game designer's choosing. The designer must also allocate how many drinks one must take when each event occurs.

For ease of drinking game design, Drinking Game Maker will automatically parse through the movie's script for 2 and 3 word combinations that occur the most frequently.

After selecting phrases and how many drinks, play the DVD. When the phrases set to trigger drinks come on screen, bright floating text appears over the movie prompting everyone to consume.

Fun Factor: Booze and friends over make everything better.

Yeah, I know this idea totally licks earwigs. I've been rediculously depressed lately, neglecting friends, family, pets, self, you name it except my MMORPG crack of choice. As terrible as I've been feeling, this idea was conceived without the use of alcohol. Yes. I was completely sober when I thought of this. Sad huh?
It's hard not to establish emotional attachments to a project, especially when you start working on it from pre-production. As a tester, watching bugs slide through was a bane but didn't bring about any emotional hurt.I'll get over this. I really have no choice.

Rant: Gads, I think I'm losing it with these Design of the Week ideas.  While I confident in my ability to articulate ideas now, is it just me or have my ideas this last month or so really gone down the drain?
A lot of these ideas seem like simulations of things no one else has cared to do or activities(which is something I swore I didn't want to post.) I wonder if other designers out there have felt like the quality of their work at times has slipped?

Another rant-worthy thing: The Real Price of Virtual Gold on MTV. I have a design for an MMO and it's sad, someone actually told me it needs money sinks like World of Warcraft.  I live on the west coast.  I've seen some massive sink holes. Needing something with such a horrible association feels retarded.  Dear Sonic Team.  I do love how you've designed Phantasy Star Universe to not have a lot of the idiotic crap I hear people ranting about in MMOs.  Love, me.

Grabber: Set sail for a high tech treasure diving adventure!

Platform: Wii

Selling Points: Whimsical first person action that takes advantage of the Wii's motion sensing capabilities as well as the Wii Remote's vibration. 

The Wii's Connect24 and Microtransaction systems allow for expanadbility, selling new areas to explore on the cheap.

Game Play: The game is divided up into 3 major phases.  One is pin pointing a wreck.  Sail around the world, send out deep sea scanning probes to look for wrecks.  The next phase would be to take pick the right equipment and go in.  Dive down yourself if for wrecks up to 100 feet deep but beyond that, control a robot to do the work for you.  The final phase is extracting your treasures!  Do so carefully manipuating the environment with the Wii controllers in order to keep the treasures in tact. 

Fun Factor: Exploring, discovering treasure underwater is thrilling and interesting.  A lot of people dream of uncovering a sunken Pirate's booty or a piece of the Titanic.

How to Rip Off Japan by John Andersen, posted on Gamasutra.  This is really disturbing, knowing that Pop Cap -a highly successful company in America- is simply riding off the backs of other creators.  Furthermore, abusing the fact that the creators are foreign so they'd be less likely to find out about the infringements.

When I first saw Pop Cap Game's "Astro Pop" game, bam.  It hit me. This game is a shameless, ugly rip off of Magical Drop by Data East.  I played the living daylights out of Magical Drop III for PS1. There is a fine line between inspiration, concurrent yet independent development(cultures worldwide developing the same pentatonic scales without ever interacting with one another is an excellent example of this) and outright rip off.

PopCap's CEO doesn't give a [censored] either and Mitchell's CEO knows it.
"There are no pending lawsuits from them to [PopCap.] They have certainly told our partners about [the similarity] many times. Our position is that we haven't broken any laws."

Apparently, at the Austin Games Conference, having MMO makers rant has become somewhat of a tradition.  I'm not exactly an MMO fan.  MMOs are a fairly stale rut as far as American MMO production is concerned.  Here, take a bunch of spiffy weapons, spangly particle effect spewing spells and ugly monsters. Have at you. Expect to do banal, repetitive(putting it mildly) tasks to build up your time sink - excuse me, character - so they can get to a piece of the virtual world teeming with more beasts which have statistically insignificant chances of dropping Incredibly Shiny Stuff(tm.)

I cannot deny that World of Warcraft is a runaway financial success.  6 million people, all of whom are paying to play by the month and in some cases, by the hour.  Asian markets are often given a myriad of payment options for their MMOs.  The profit is enormous, but so are upkeep expenses.  Maintaining continuous development teams, vast arrays of servers and other equipment, etc. etc. etc.  Even then, the MMO rants make one thing blatantly clear.  There's a lot of of WoW Envy going on.

Should I somehow be thrown on an MMO project, I'd be more interested in developing a flexible platform which could be tweaked into several games, which I'd target at different audiences, mainly non-WoW players. I've tried to keep up with several online games; it's not very easy when I have a regular job, a court & science show addictions to feed as well.  Getting someone to play your game *and* WoW comes across as a rather fruitless venture.  I've had people turn down real life social gatherings for WoW raids. 

The other thing I find interesting is how resistant a lot of MMO devs can be to player behaviors.  Oh no, evil Chinese gold farmers are ruining economies.  Korean and Japanese online game publishers have for the most forgotten about beating these issues and are whole heartedly joining them. 
The game pubs are selling gold. They're selling swords. Why let some punk on eBay or Yahoo! Auctions earn mad profits selling virtual items when that money could be going into YOUR pocket instead?
Hell, I'd charge small amounts of money for premium services, extra avatar customizations and things that really didn't give the premium payers a tremendous edge over the freebies.  It's not like I've got a dongle that says "swipe credit card here to win battle!"

There are great, alternative revenue streams.  When most publishers are becoming increasingly conservative and thus quelching innovation, think outside of the retail package and monthly subscription for revenue.  A lot of the innovations of Asia are powered by easy, highly accessible microtransaction systems. Japanese people swipe their cell phones across bar-codes to buy things, subscribe to newsletters, you name it!  Koreans seem to have all manners of net-currency accounts easily rechargable offline as well as online.

I do recall in the 90s right before the Dot Com bust, there were companies offering Web Money serivces where you could pay offline to get money to securely spend online but they never really caught on. You couldn't use them in many places, unlike the Asian systems.  Microsoft Points on Xbox Live Arcade are a good move in this direction and the Nintendo Wii will have a similar system set up.  Hopefully these systems will usher in an era of better gaming.