Wow, that is an awesome post dude. Downloading the demo right now, from that video I'm guessing it's at least 150% better than Cave Story. Hopefully all those gauges don't just amount to shit I won't have to learn to clear the game.

EDIT: ok wtf is going on here lmfao

As expected, Wikipedia just redirects me to a "Call your representative." page. Archive.org, here I come.

Google Cache works too, and is probs more convenient.

What I don't see the point in is that places like Backloggery, Imgur, etc. (aka: useful specialized sites which also don't have the attention of the entire Internet on them) are participating in this too.

"The IGF isn't what I personally think it should be, my subjective opinion is more correct than your subjective opinion, therefore the IGF is corrupt, broken, and/or wrong."

Summarizing for anyone just coming into this thread.

derp.

Yeah, funny ain't it?   I wonder on what kind of authority people think their subjective opinion is more correct though.

Their experiences, expertise, and how well they're able to support/explain it? Just because an opinion isn't universal doesn't mean that it's suddenly immune to discussion or that some conclusions aren't more intelligent/supportable than others.

That being said, Frozen Synapse better win this shit or else I will be forced to declare the IGF judges unintelligent in my professional capacity as a world-class trained psychologist who is a TV star on the weekends. Seriously, I have the IQ charts right here:

So come on dudes, prove that you know your stuff!

EDIT:

so i think it'd be preferable to have some system in place which recognizes niche games. this is probably not the igf's role however, an alternative set of awards which recognize niche games (having a lot of winners in a lot of small categories, like "best setting" and "best villain") might be best

Genre-specific awards and also some minor aesthetic ones like you mentioned would be cool (along with that "best writing" award), and also help the whole strategy/xRPG/etc. problems. Of course the current general consensus among the gaming community seems to be that "GENRES STIFLE INNOVATION!!!!!! " so welp.

my problem with this game is that it looks too easy. the mario levels were easy enough just for mario alone, but these other characters are way overpowered for those mario levels. look at this trailer for how easily the blaster master tank tears through the mario levels:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=iv&src_vid=lE1K9yNDNA8&v=ZGwMqUB2Ceg&annotation_id=annotation_67072

Yeah. It would be literally impossible to balance all these completely different characters for the same set of Mario levels while still managing to keep all their unique properties and physics. Also, Retro Game Challenge wtf.

The game will probably be a neat novelty at least. Style clashing is annoying, though (even moreso than the last one, since this is 16 bit so the styles are more complex.)

Both NES mockups are cool, but I think I like Gribbin's better. I thought it didn't follow NES palette restrictions at first too for the tiles, but then I checked and it does (even though you'd need a really weird palette layout and also sprites for the path/highlights.)

Wow, that Infinity vid is pretty cool. It seems to use a VWF too (though the font is pretty bland.) Wonder how that's possible on a tile-based system, just having a bunch of separate tiles for text and ORing each letter to them on the fly seems too slow/too much VRAM space required.

Sounds like pretty awesome stuff. I remember that the second Harry Potter GBC game used a similar trick too for textboxes but I'm not sure, and it doesn't look nearly as smooth as the gradient you guys have. Looking forward to seeing more, homebrew stuff is always cool.

Also st0ven that looks gorgeous.

I wish he'd go back to writing really long posts that made no sense instead of short ones that make a little more sense. The "yo wassup niganiganiga, gays ain't mind disorder they thought disorders" one is still maybe the funniest thing I've read on this forum, barring some parts of the ESB thread.

Why hate? He's telling the truth in a way. Well, at least 80% of the people I've dealt with are idiots like said.

It's not that a lot of people in the planet aren't dum, it's that he's basing this claim on a Youtube video which was obviously edited to be funny and specifically highlight stupid people.

The Last of Us: starring Ellen Page and Liam Neeson. Seems like a fairly interesting premise for a game, even though it's basically I Am Legend with a less good-looking protagonist (and no doubt lots of generic zombies will be involved), but after Heavy Rain and L.A. Noire I can't really get myself looking forward to another "cinematic" game.

Also yes Noah! makes good posts. When is he going to make that topic about how Cave Story is bad and Hellsinker is way better, I want to read it.

(There's no such thing as creation or destruction, only transformation. But anyway.)
Antybaner, how do you want to fix the world?

By killing all the evil homosexuals!!!!

So kinda like The Sims?

Someone else brought this up recently too, and I don't really know. On some level I feel like being in control of multiple characters at the same time doesn't gel well with the idea of a CRPG (where the point is to be immersed within the role of a single character), the scenario isn't very appealing to me, characters take actions on their own by default unless the option is disabled, and there's way more boring micromanagement than meaningful decisions that affect the overall narrative. Even if it is a role-playing game, I don't think it's a particularly interesting one.

It seems like we do have RPGs, then... but at various levels of fidelity. From what I've heard about Dwarf Fortress's Adventure Mode, it's quite close to what you're describing (lots of freedom, very few pre-made scenarios, a reactive world). Maybe even closer than a lot of table-top RPGs, which also direct you through linear storylines.

I don't know, is it useful to say that we don't have "true" RPGs? What's a "true" fighting game? Or a "true" platformer? Are we defining these genres by what they imply semantically, or is it based more on convention?

I guess you could say, while there have been some pretty cool experiments (like Planescape: Torment, Fallout 2, or Deus Ex, and apparently the Gothic series too but I haven't played those yet), the genre hasn't really come into its own yet thanks to technical and design limitations. I remember Gilbert and I had a huge discussion about the current problems facing action recognition, natural language processing, etc. in game AI back in some thread, but I can't find it right now... Either way, I'll look more into DF's adventure mode, although the setting and initial setup seem lame (only goal is survival) and that's something that would be important for this type of game.

Is this the new artware-is-it-a-gam argument?

Nah, it's a bit less important than the art thing. All the "artware" (how many terms do y'all have for these things) stuff is p. obviously games.

I guess all this stuff should be split into a new topic, since it's not very relevant to the IGF aside from the article that Craig Stern wrote.

What does this mean? In most games you're literally playing a role...

In most traditional narrative-heavy games you're not playing a role, you're being directed through a predefined one. In a true RPG the player would have an extremely high degree of freedom that would let him be able to actually act out any decisions he would want to make if he was in the same situation as his avatar (in other words, role playing), with the game world around him adjusting and reacting dynamically. It's an important and interesting problem which ties into a ton of other CS concepts, and like I said in my edit the new game by the Facade guys looks fairly interesting in this regard (at least as a small tech demo for what might be possible in the future; I doubt it'll be very good as a game, and the scenario doesn't really seem that interesting to me.)

I think that people equate stats and leveling up with RPGs because of all things that amount to classic pen-and-paper roleplaying games those are the easiest to implement in computer games, and for a long time they were the only ones.

I agree with this but I don't think it's necessarily right, and I also think it leads to some really weird genre categorizations where stuff like Seiken Densetsu 3, Guardian Heroes and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night are all lumped into the same "action RPG" genre despite playing completely differently (as well as old Fallout and Fallout 3 both being called WRPGs, etc.) I think the games listed in the article, as well as the posts in this topic, make the confusion over the term clear enough. (Which is weird, because the author of that article seems to know what I mentioned above and even talks about stuff like player freedom, dynamic worlds, and nonlinearity...in the same breath as predefined narratives. It's a bit confusing.)

That being said, the main point that the IGF seems to favor less narrative-heavy games and that JRPGs/WRPGs rarely ever win much seems true. When it comes to action games, though, the only real difference between the ones getting "snubbed" and the ones that aren't is the stat-building component, and that doesn't seem to be enough to help further substantiate the claim that a huge category of games isn't being properly looked at.

I think an RPG is literally a role playing game and no one has made one yet in videogame form, much less submitted one to the IGF. Instead, what people commonly refer to RPGs are games in any genre which have stat upgrading elements combined with a heavy focus on narrative.

EDIT: well, there's that thing by the guys who made Facade. but i doubt that'll amount to much more than a tech demo

I'm trying to imagine a post-scarcity, post-death society and I can't think of anything but hell on earth. Especially that post-death part.

Wait, how exactly does post-scarcity even remotely work in any sort of way at all if no one is dying?

Noah! have I ever told you that you legitimately make some of the best posts on this forum

In most grinding-heavy games it doesn't take that much time or effort to become overleveled for an obstacle, especially when compared to the time or effort it would require to stay at said obstacle and find a strategy to get past it. Likewise it doesn't take much avoiding enemies to become underleveled either. In addition to the mechanic being anti-meritocratic (i.e. unfair) it also leads to a situation where most of the time the player's avatar is either a war machine who can steamroll through everything without worrying about getting damaged or a weakling who turns fighting regular enemy fights into tedium, unless you specifically limit yourself and try to find the sweet spot inbetween (which isn't a fun thing to do.) There are exceptions, though, like the Souls series where despite the possibility for grinding being kind of disappointing anyway, it would still take a shitload of it to completely get rid of the need for proper thought and just steamroll through the game.

I think Fallsburg is getting it pretty well here. Giving the player a powerful weapon with infinite ammo that can be used at any point for the entire game and then expecting him to never use it is a pretty dumb design decision. Ideally you'd just get rid of the weapon, and then the player would have more fun and you'd have a better game. This is completely different in degree from making one simple decision at the start of the game on a menu, or opting out of a prompt when you lose three lives in a game that lasts half an hour.

WTF? Could have sworn it didn't. Just Googled it to check and people have made mods for inserting it in and everything, and console workarounds. Maybe that was in a later release or something. Either that or I played it the best way possible without knowing it.

EDIT: oh, it was inserted in a later patch after the first release. okay, glad to see my memory isn't going defunct.

Assuming you were responding to my post:

If someone is having fun by quicksaving and reloading to get the optimal solution, why deny it to them?

My issue with these types of systems isn't that people abuse them. Even if I think they might be robbing themselves of something by doing so and would try to inform them if they told me about it (like I said to 1984), if they want to then they can. But not including a feature in the first place isn't "denying" anything to anybody.

Also I am not sure you understand grinding. Quicksave abuse is savescumming, which isn't really grinding so much as rigging the slots in your favor.

They both stem from the same design "principle" on a larger scale. In autosave-only games (or games with bad checkpoints), the developer decides to "balance" the save structure for "everybody" by making the players determine it, instead of making the decisions about pacing themselves. This is retarded, because how is the player supposed to know how to pace himself in your game to make it balanced and engaging, especially when he has the option always lingering to fuck up that pacing at any point if he feels too overwhelmed? Similarly, in games with grinding, the developer decides to "balance" the difficulty for "everybody" by putting in an unrestricted leveling system instead of implementing a proper skill-based difficulty progression themselves. This is also retarded for similar reasons (though I think grinding is a far worse design flaw than save-anywhere.) Like I said, if I ever fail in a grinding-heavy game I feel underleveled, not outstrategized. In both cases, the player is forced to determine a fundamental element of the game's system that the developer should have already taken into account but failed to, and in both cases it creates a sense of uncertainty about the game's balance which the experience would be more enjoyable without.

When you start saying that users shouldn't be allowed to save anywhere, you are outright dictating the pace of the user's experience as well as what session times will be. Users hate this.

Well, yeah. Is there something bad about forcing users to adhere to certain restrictions? Most, if not all, good games do this. And the session times would be like 10 minutes between checkpoints at most, and a lot of the time half of that. If you can't stand the idea of replaying through that little a few times then you're probably playing a bad game. Did you think the original Far Cry was a bad game because you weren't allowed to save everywhere? What about console shooters, like Bulletstorm? And why aren't people clamoring for save-anywhere in other genres, especially traditionally console-exclusive ones like 3D action games? It's not a developer's responsibility to keep providing a convention that can hurt their game just because many people have grown used to it.

Also, as mentioned, manual saving allows players to revisit sections of a game that they necessarily don't want to play all the way through the game for. For example, before each major branching speech interaction in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I perform a manual save. That way I can see both sides of the coin without being forced to play through a game which has no relevance on that decision.

I agree that autosaves are harder to implement in a game like Deus Ex or an open-world title with a more freeform structure. I still know that I'd prefer them if they were at all possible to implement, though. And something like your example could easily be done with autosaves/checkpoints, too. Just keep track of the player's saves as usual and let him copy some to a separate place in case he wants to revisit certain parts. You could even put checkpoints before the branches if you really wanted.

Yeah exactly. Just think of excessive quicksaving as a cheat.

Hard Reset actually has quicksaves as cheat codes lol. That might be another solution.

Someone should seriously make a strategy game where you play as all these different factions and the goal is to stop everyone else from getting popular and winning at IGF. Weapons could be replaced by marketing tools like tech buzzwords ("procedural generation") or 8-bit nostalgic 30-year-old appeal, and when you get enough money you could step it up a Notch by hiring hitmen or bribing TIGSource moderators to edit out negative criticism of your game and give you frontpage publicity instead of your other indiependent opponents. Trade and diplomacy could also be changed thematically to forming social connections at conventions with big-name developers so you can gain perks in art, programming, etc. which help you meet deadlines and raise your popularity meter. The game ends when you win at IGF, get picked up by Steam, and recieve your first 10/10 IGN review.

I've actually been playing through Mega Man Zero for the first time recently, and it might be the best MM game I've played (I don't know if it's better than X4 just yet.) Great level design, and the bosses are leagues above any other series in the franchise. Also seems like it'd be a really fun game to speedrun, with a lot of the levels seeming to have multiple faster routes which the player can access and blaze through using the dash move and spinning saber jumps. The only real downside is that it's a GBA game, which means a more cramped screen and field of visibility than would have been ideal, and the DS version doesn't seem to fix that even though it probably could have. I'm also against unrestricted leveling systems like what they did for the weapons on principle, but it doesn't seem to do too much damage to the game's quality overall.

people are probably going to hate me for this but a lot of "classic" nes games look kinda bad to me.

A lot of earlier ones like the original Mega Man or Castlevania don't look too hot, but by the end of the console's lifespan I think developers had figured out how to create a unique type of aesthetic around its limitations. Many of the best-looking games (stuff like Shatterhand, Batman: Return of the Joker, Ninja Gaiden III, Vice: Project Doom, Akumajou Densetsu) used black as the darkest shade and dithered with it to create a cool "gritty" look, and on the opposite end stylistically you also had some pretty great-looking "cartoony" games like the later Megamans, Kirby's Adventure, and Gimmick!. On emulators 25-50% scanlines and a small bit of NTSC artifacting seem to help too (but not very much, or else it looks really nasty -- I have custom settings in Nestopia's filter, in between the S-Video and RGB presets.) They're not the best they could be though of course, and I'm sure that if the developers had made the games during the 16-bit or 32-bit eras they would have looked significantly more awesome and detailed, but I don't think they necessarily look bad.