Monday, February 28, 2005
Devil May Care
As I understand it, Devil May Cry 3 is incredibly difficult. This is frustrating me without even having played it, and is draining a lot of the excitement I had about picking it up on Thursday. The reason that this one bothers me more than usual is two-fold: firstly, they went out of their way to make this game more difficult for the U.S. release - our Normal mode is Japan's Hard mode; secondly, it's an action game - it exists (or should, at least) purely for fun and fast-paced excitement, not tedious five-minute battles that rely as much on luck as memorizing button combinations.
The best action games, and fighting games for that matter, all share a common approachability - they're easy to get into and do decently well in, but tough to master and learn the intricacies of. Ninja Gaiden is an exception to the rule, but I still think it didn't need to be as hard as it is (Tom is playing it now, and he'll soon understand the Alma anguish). I also understand Itagaki's approach with Gaiden, that he wanted it to be learnt and played more like a fighting game than anything else. While he achieved that, it was more by necessity than player choice. Games should be flexible enough to allow you to choose your level of investment, and DMC is definitely something you should be able to pick up and play for five minutes. What makes this an even larger problem is how fickle American gamers are - if they're not having fun within the first minutes they're not interested. You can bet DMC3 will sell well initially, but I'm sure plenty of those copies will be traded right back in once people find out that they can't pass the second level. I'm hoping it's not as bad as they say, or that I'm good enough to not have a problem with it, but I have little faith in either.
My other thing to bitch about today is this: If someone working on an Xbox2 game is to be believed, few, if any, XBox2 games will run at 60fps. To me, this is inexcusable. Plenty of people, such as my otherwise brilliant co-writer Tom (who is currently squinting to read this), can't even hazard a guess as to what framerate a game runs at, and can't sense slowdown until their character actually stops moving. For those of us that can see every fluctuation in that area, you'll appreciate just how much better a 60fps game looks than a 30fps one, even at a lower level graphically. The PS1 didn't have many, but I vividly remember the ones that did; the current-gen systems have a much larger handful of these games, but they are far from the majority. Did Moore's Law just skip this category? Nothing but the most technologically complex games should run at anything less than 60fps in the next generation, and even that shouldn't be the case. If the PS3 is able to provide this while the Xbox2 cannot (many recent rumors have suggested it will be the hardware-superior one this time), it would heavily influence my multiplatform purchasing decisions. Developer's just need to get it together and overcome this hurdle, lest I toss and turn every night for the rest of my miserable life.
The best action games, and fighting games for that matter, all share a common approachability - they're easy to get into and do decently well in, but tough to master and learn the intricacies of. Ninja Gaiden is an exception to the rule, but I still think it didn't need to be as hard as it is (Tom is playing it now, and he'll soon understand the Alma anguish). I also understand Itagaki's approach with Gaiden, that he wanted it to be learnt and played more like a fighting game than anything else. While he achieved that, it was more by necessity than player choice. Games should be flexible enough to allow you to choose your level of investment, and DMC is definitely something you should be able to pick up and play for five minutes. What makes this an even larger problem is how fickle American gamers are - if they're not having fun within the first minutes they're not interested. You can bet DMC3 will sell well initially, but I'm sure plenty of those copies will be traded right back in once people find out that they can't pass the second level. I'm hoping it's not as bad as they say, or that I'm good enough to not have a problem with it, but I have little faith in either.
My other thing to bitch about today is this: If someone working on an Xbox2 game is to be believed, few, if any, XBox2 games will run at 60fps. To me, this is inexcusable. Plenty of people, such as my otherwise brilliant co-writer Tom (who is currently squinting to read this), can't even hazard a guess as to what framerate a game runs at, and can't sense slowdown until their character actually stops moving. For those of us that can see every fluctuation in that area, you'll appreciate just how much better a 60fps game looks than a 30fps one, even at a lower level graphically. The PS1 didn't have many, but I vividly remember the ones that did; the current-gen systems have a much larger handful of these games, but they are far from the majority. Did Moore's Law just skip this category? Nothing but the most technologically complex games should run at anything less than 60fps in the next generation, and even that shouldn't be the case. If the PS3 is able to provide this while the Xbox2 cannot (many recent rumors have suggested it will be the hardware-superior one this time), it would heavily influence my multiplatform purchasing decisions. Developer's just need to get it together and overcome this hurdle, lest I toss and turn every night for the rest of my miserable life.
// posted by Nick @ 12:54 AM 
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