BabbyMan is better than RumbleMan!
Microsoft loon Kudo Tsunoda once again raises eyebrows with his claim that it is:
almost laughable the way people hold on to rumble as the holy grail of haptic feedback … The overwhelming thing we’ve discovered is that rumble is such a rudimentary form of haptic feedback
What is haptic feedback one might well ask? It refers to the tactile interaction between player and control pad as they enjoy tight, concise control schemes and satisfying rumble feedback while seated in a comfy chair. You see haptic feedback is something singularly lacking from Microsoft’s epilepsy simulator, so naturally tactile input is a benighted technology of the past used by backwards looking manufacturers like Sony and Nintendo, and of course musty old dinosaurs like us who enjoy sitting down while having fine grained control over our gameplay input. As awful and obnoxious as Wiimote waggle is, at least the Wiimote is something in your hand with buttons. In many instances Wii games are able to be played (to varying degrees) from a sitting position, how often is this likely to prove the case for a babby game? What does a babby game even look like when played from the couch (a hypothetical to be sure)?
UNDERBOOB: Now without tactile feedback!
Tsunoda readily admits that he was apprehensive about developing a control scheme with no physical feedback, though such trifling concerns were quickly dispelled when he was able to see that player’s “responses to the visuals were different when they used their bodies as controllers”. Ok, so his misgivings about the control scheme are dismissed by the audience response to the visuals, logical disconnects aside I can certainly see how the graphical prowess of such abject copy-cat dreck might be somewhat mitigated by the requirement that one flail about like a retard with Parkinson’s playing with a toaster in a bath-tub in order to use Kinnect. Perhaps this might make for an apt bullet point to the project babby sales pitch: GRAPHICS LOOK BETTER WHEN IN MOTION (you, not the game)! Alternately the graphics might look finer still if you refrain from looking in the direction of your television entirely. At any rate Tsunoda seems to think this marriage of loose controls and visuals is a winning combination:
We’ve gone so far past anything that can be done with rumble, or that kind of restrictive thing you have to hold. It’s been creatively liberating to work on this stuff.
Indeed, the man seems to have pushed right through the awesome-barrier and come through the other side …
Weekly Murfreesboro update:
Mosques still unwelcome
Chrono WRPG?
In a piece of the more bizarre news to surface this week Obsidian, makers of the much maligned Alpha Protocol, have flippantly thrown their hat into the ring of future Chrono endeavors. Fresh from the announcement of their unholy union with Enix Square for the production of Dungeon Seige III, Obsidian man Feargus Uquhart identified the Chrono series as the Enix Square property they would most like Obsidian to work on in the future.
I am still most displeased at Enix Square's liquidation of the Chrono 3D project
Uquhart sees the Chrono series as a natural fit for the WRPG genre owing to its open ended structure and sci-fi/fantasy sensibilities, which he believes would benefit greatly from the western approach to dialogue trees and mission structures. As distasteful as it sounds to have the next installment in the Chrono series crafted by the purveyors of Bioware B-sides, I am not about to yell “blasphemy” and condemn this possibility out of hand. Consider for the moment that Obsidian would likely be capable of producing a better quality sequel than modern day Enix Square, and one which would no doubt be more enjoyable to play. In an age when Enix Square’s internal studios are plumbing ever greater depths of ineptitude with their poor programming and ever poorer game design, and while an ever vaster share of their output is being farmed to incompetent western developers like Double Helix (of Silent Hill: Homecoming infamy) , might not Obsidian’s custodianship of Enix Square’s RPG catalogue be the lesser of all available evils? Though of course a greater mercy still would be for Enix Square to allow the series to remain dormant, as Chrono is the one property that they have not as yet managed to completely bollocks up.
Worst Company of the Week:
Activision
ACHTUNG JIGGLYPUFF!
With the suit well underway for 40 past and present Infinity Ward employees over their unpaid bonuses for Modern Warfare 2, details are beginning to emerge which appear to not only vindicate Zampella and West’s account of events, but also serve to bring the picture into sharper relief. According to the claimants 60% of their bonuses were withheld in a crude attempt to strong-arm employees into developing Modern Warfare 3 by November 2011, this was of course following on from the events which saw mass interrogations of Infinity Ward staff and the unceremonious dumping of Zampella and West on the grounds of treason. According to the suit Activision contracted external security to block off the building’s exits and conduct interrogations wherein employees were bound to secrecy. The suit alleges that in a subsequent meeting, notorious CEO Bobby Nodick promised to pay Infinity Ward’s outstanding bonuses by the end of the month, yet they were never to materialize, when confronted about the outstanding sum in April Activision CFO Thomas Tippl allegedly stated “get over it”.
With such a callous disregard for employee wellbeing, it is perhaps little surprise that Activision has taken out worst company of the week. That any employee should have to fight so hard for what is owed them is, on the face of it, reprehensible, and any employer adopting this approach is of course to be abhorred by all right minded individuals. Infinity Ward may well have stood to lose some employees in response to the police state mentality with which Activision prosecuted their case against Zapella and West, yet holding bonuses to ransom was always going to see them lose the entire studio for a certainty, and cost them a greater figure in remunerations beside. So well done Activision, you are truly poor company.
Runner up:
Oliver Motok
eMotok on his way to make another lyric update!
I prefer my (under)boob with tactile feedback.
- http://kudodouche.wordpress.com/
- I’d rather not see a Western developed Chrono game. Unless they were getting the fellows that was doing the CT Resurrection (Pictured Above). I’d rather see Them give it to Level 5 to do, as they have been able in the past to make Toriyama art look good in 3D.
- I’m surprised that Activision hasn’t had any office shootings yet.
Also UNDERBOOBS!
That screenshot of CT Resurrection only makes me think of Skies of Arcadia
God I hope they keep Obsidian the fuck away from Chrono. Sure, Enixsoft isn’t capable of making a new Chrono title worth a piss, but if Obsidian think dialogue trees would have made Chrono Trigger awesome there’s a gas leak in their headquarters.
Chrono Trigger was a linear as they come console style RPG. It was a Cliche Storm. Nay, it was a Cliche Hurricane! Pointing to the three spaceships in the series and saying, “Yo dawg Mass Effect has spaceships!” makes me really think they have not a fucking clue what made Chrono Trigger great.
@Oyashiro: Wait … is Kudo Tsunoda an American? Given his lack of facility with the English language I had just figured he was one of Molyneux’s Eurotrash Frenchies, yet that blog seems to indicate that he is American …
I have no idea, I hear he is half-Japanese… Have no idea where he is born.
Doesn’t look very japanese, just looks like a massive eurotrash douche …
Perhaps he is Half Japanese, Half Douche?
eMotok is a brilliant term.
Western CT scares me, esp. considering its art style. Hands off the past!
Bobby Nodick and his accomplices are fiends.
Project Babby is a pile of shit. Developers for it should not consider themselves game developers, but rather authors of an exercise regime. I can’t wait for “MicroSoftin’ to the Oldies”.
@Lusi: I don’t really support the Western development of Chrono, I was merely using this as an opportunity to further bash Enixsoft (cheers for that one EvilPaul), by saying that even such an awful proposal would be preferable to watching one of the Enixsoft’s internal teams flounder in the vain attempt to produce another Chrono game. I really wish they would retire the Final Fantasy franchise also, I find this whole episode in Enixsoft’s sad history to be distasteful in the extreme.
-never really gave a damn about rumble, actually.
-… when was Sqeenix’s their programming shit?
-wow, that’s fucked up.
-never played Chrono Trigger nor do I plan to so meh.
-I wonder what Bungie is thinkin right about now…
and once again this burning hatred of companies confounds me.
@Breaka – You should give Chrono Trigger a shot. One of the best RPGs ever created.
@Breaka: Have you played the Last Remnant?
Last Remnant was boring. Chrono Trigger was the last good 16-bit RPG.
Last Remnant was coding incompetence on a grand scale …
@Lane I think Mario RPG and Lufia II were both pretty good RPGs that came out later. Neither were on the level of Chrono Trigger, which was the last great 16-bit RPG.
There was also Tales of Phantasia, Terranigma, and Star Ocean. All were impressive in one way or another for 16bit JRPGs, I guess it depends on what you define as great …
Oh right, Last Remnant. considering that they we’re using technology that they weren’t familiar with I kinda overlooked that little fiasco. but yeah, damn, that was a mess up.
@Oyashiro – far too many new games in my backlog. maybe if I become rich and can buy whatever I want I’ll try it out.
To be fair, I get the impression that Last Remnant is more the outlier than the norm in terms of SE’s coding ability. Say what you will about FFXIII, the game looked freaking gorgeous.
Also, @Breaka: I played Chrono Trigger for the first time last year (DS version) and it does hold up pretty well. I don’t have the nostalgia everybody else does for the game, but it if you’re ever in the market for a traditional, not overly-long JRPG, I’d recommend it.
No, Japanese games routinely mess up their engines. Even native East Asian engines are crappy compared to the Western ones. I don’t know what it is, but find me a Japanese RPG that looks half as good as a Western game and I’ll shit you a gold brick. Aion comes the closest, and although the actual armor textures and stuff are well-designed, in motion, the graphics just never look quite as good as a Western game.
This is and of itself is not a problem. If more JRPGs went the way of Tales of Vesperia and just used cel-shaded graphics, I think that’d work better. Japan does animation really, really well, better than Western studios. But computer graphics just aren’t their fortre. A stylized-looking Last Remnant with a revamped control scheme that is not so “deep menu-based” would’ve made the game playable, maybe even fun.
Seriously, Japan, it’s 2010. Deep-menu based systems were a necessity 20 years ago. Not now. We’ve got more than six buttons on controllers now.
-People forget that SE are the one JRPG developer not able to code towns in HD, I think that fairly qualifies them as inept.
@Lane: Resonance of Fate looked half way decent (though that was mainly art style IMO). Lost Odyssey also looked quite good, and made Last Remnant’s use of UE3 look like the proper wank that it was.
-My only complaint about the Last Remnant battle system was the wild spikes in difficulty, which made it feel like the 1980′s throwback that all Kawazu’s games turn out being.
Mario RPG was a pretty fun 16-bit RPG! I don’t know how well it holds up today, but I liked it at the time. I think it may be in Virtual Console for people with Wiis that missed it.
The whole “we can’t do HD towns” thing from Toriyama in FF13 I find utterly vexing. Was it some poorly translated interview or something? To do architecture you can literally copy and paste shit everyone else has done. Need some people to do NPC duty of “go down the hole outside town; kill monster at the bottom; bring me the legendary MacGuffin”? Tell the dev team to pirate a copy of the popular 3D people modeling software and apply medieval/futuristic scifi/generic anime clothing as needed. Aside from wanting to make a *literally* linear game I’m not sure what the problem is.
It wasn’t a mistranslation, they have stated that they can’t do towns on multiple occasions, but I always read the claim as “we can, we’re just too bone lazy to do so”.
@NooB & EvilPaul – lazy ain’t the word. incompetent would be more suitable. that was a lack of direction from Toriyama was all.
@Darth – when you say traditional what do you mean? from what I’ve heard the battle system was fairly unique.
@Lane – couldn’t agree more, especially when I see gems like Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm and Valkyria Chronicles.