61 Frames Per Second : gran turismo

Not Quite 4D, But Close: The History of 3D Gaming

John Constantine — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Videogames were born into a flat, two-dimensional perspective and they are bound to an inherently two-dimensional delivery system, but, from their inception half a century ago, they have been trying their damndest to simulate a bonafide world of depth. For half their lifetime, games have let us move into a world instead of just on it and, today, the simulation can be almost unsettlingly real. The racing tracks of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, the jungles and glaciers of Crysis, not to mention Far Cry 2’s African savannah, all feel like our world, even when they don’t behave exactly like it. After all, cars tend to crumple when they run into other cars, and grass tends to bend and warp when you step on it. (Not to mention the lack of robots and aliens in real life. Oh, and getting shot will kill you, not force you to hunt for a medpack.) But even full fantasy landscapes like the lush solar-systems-in-miniature of Super Mario Galaxy create a familiar sense of space. It has been a long, difficult journey to get to this point, though. Edge Online is running a fascinating, densely technical, history of 3D in games and it’s an eye-opening read. The only thing missing from the overview is a footnote in gaming history, but is important all the same.

Rick Dyer, the designer behind Don Bluth’s lushly animated Dragon’s Lair, made Hologram Time Traveler in 1991. Time Traveler sucked. Its timed button presses meant to be gameplay were unforgiving to say the least. But the technology created some impressive three-dimensional illusions. An FMV game with actors playing cowboys, Indians, and all sorts of baddies, it was projected through a CRT television surrounded by an enormous half-dome mirror that turned the characters into mock-holographic objects. Why was this crappy little curiosity an important moment in 3D game design? Because if Miyamoto has his way, holograms will be back in a big way come Wii3.

Check out the article right here.

Related links:
Style Over Substance: Why I'm In Love With WiiWare's "Art Style"
Finally: Playing Street Fighter IV and Super Street Fighter II HD Remix With Seth Killian
Design Resurrection: How Capcom Finally Proved That It’s Game and Not Graphics That Matters
R.I.P. Xbox 720 and Playstation 4: The Future of Gaming

Gears of LittleBig Fable Music: Considering the First-Party Blitz

John Constantine — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

October brought its true fury and grandeur to New York today. It took three days, but the nattering leftovers of summer finally drifted out to sea like so many dead leaves and left behind the lowlight and intent wind so particular to the month. Walking down the street, I could smell it, looming like bonfire smoke and Halloween parades: game season.

I hold no love for the business structure that sees some ninety-percent of the year’s most ballyhooed games releasing all within a tight ten week window. It leads to sensory overload and, for the devoted gamer, it adds to already-big backlogs. But I’d be lying if I said it isn’t always exciting. All of the hype, all of the previews, leaked screens, developer showcases, and high, high hopes all lead here and it always begins in October. Holiday 2008, as it were, is going to be a particularly interesting season considering that it is gaming’s first to witness true third-party agnosticism. Nigh on every publisher from East and West is releasing their biggest games on any and all platforms available. (There are rare exceptions. See Sega’s Valkyria Chronicles, Valve’s Left4Dead, and a number of Wii titles.) This brings even closer scrutiny to the console holders' offerings; more than ever, first-party games need to be system sellers. They have to act as ambassadors, convincing casual and hardcore gamers alike that if they put money into such and such a system, there will be more where that came from.

I’m fascinated by what the Big Three are bringing to the table and how those games reflect their mutual identities. Nintendo is Nintendo, releasing just two Wii games, with the new god of the Touch Generation, Wii Music, and its long tail economics prophet, Animal Crossing: City Folk. I have no idea how people will receive Wii Music giving Guitar Hero’s ubiquity. If everyone with a Wii is already used to one type of music game, one that requires you to actually, you know, play, will they actually want to pay fifty dollars for a gimped version that offers none of the manufactured exhibitionism?

Microsoft has got the quantity and the most traditional variety. Between Fable 2, Gears of War 2, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, and (possibly) Halo Wars, they’ve constructed a blanket of sequels covering the genres of old so thoroughly, it’s a wonder most players don’t curl up inside and take a nap. Microsoft is also taking two more stabs at currying casual favor with You’re in the Movies and Lips. Gears will do spectacularly (though not Halo spectacular), Fable will do well, and provided it actually comes out, Halo Wars will sell on its name alone, but it remains to be seen if Microsoft can finally, after so many attempts, steal a slice of Nintendo’s pie. Kids don’t know who Banjo is and it’s not clear that the young adults who do still care, You’re in the Movies doesn’t seem like an obvious draw, and Lips has Singstar to deal with in Europe and America’s apparent ambivalence towards purely karaoke games. Low, low price or not, the Xbox 360 still looks to be the gamers game box during the blitz.

And then there’s Sony. Two of Sony’s four games are pure Playstation standards, totems of a threadbare empire: the basketball game and the racing game. NBA ’09: The Inside and Motorstorm: Pacific Rift should do respectably, catering to the audience they’ve always had on Sony’s boxes (though Motorstorm is filling in for Gran Turismo and Namco’s seemingly adrift Ridge Racer series.) Though, admittedly, that audience is not quite so big as it once was. Insomniac’s Resistance 2 is also interesting, the sort of first-person shooter heavy on single-player, narrative thrills and massive multiplayer variety that gamers were desperate for in 2007, before Halo 3 came out. Given the success of the original, though, and Insomniac’s pedigree, Resistance 2 could be a break out moment for Sony when it goes head to head with Gears 2.

Sony’s fourth game, due in just two weeks, is this fall’s true wild card. I have absolutely no idea what LittleBigPlanet is going to do when it finally comes out, whether the massive marketing push Sony’s put behind it has impregnated the world’s mind with that game’s intimidating possibilities and inviting façade. It’s impossible to say that LBP will draw in a traditional audience. As much as it’s a platformer, the fact of the matter is that the game can be anything you damn well want to be. It could change everything, a game that fundamentally alters the mainstream’s perception of what a game can be, or it can shrivel and die on the vine, a fondly remembered ambition years ahead of its time. I honestly have no idea what to expect from LittleBigPlanet and that’s exciting in and of itself.

Game season’s started. You can feel it, taste it, and see it all around. Get ready, dear reader. We’re going to have some very tired thumbs by the time 2009 comes knocking.

Related links:

Lowering the Standard: Why Nintendo’s Hardcore vs. Casual Commitments Aren’t the Problem
Christmas in Nintendoland: The Tokyo Conference
Miyamoto Says, "It Would Be Great If Music Education Started With Wii Music."
Five Games That Will Be Awesome to Remake in LittleBigPlanet
E3 Day 4: No Blades, No Bows. Leave Your Weapons Here.
E3 Day Two: Spin, Malaise, Sony’s New Clothes, and Nintendo’s True Disruption

Brett Favrerererer Wins: The Inexplicable Popularity of Madden

John Constantine — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

You may or may not have noticed this whilst reading 61 Frames Per Second, but we don’t talk about simulators that often. Personally, and you’ll most likely find this true of the rest of the team, I don’t play Gran Turismo or Microsoft Flight Simulator. If I’m playing a videogame, I want my cars going too fast and defying physics a la Burnout. If I’m playing a videogame, I want my airplane to be shooting many other planes while looking awesome and defying physics a la After Burner. The same goes for sports. Tecmo Bowl, NHLPA ’93, and Hot Shots Golf are fun because they don’t provide authentic football, hockey, and golf experiences. This is why I’ve always been somewhat mystified by the Madden franchise’s massive popularity; in its modern incarnations, it is a brutally realistic simulation of football. In order to play Madden well – not competition level, but actually using the game’s mechanics properly – you need to have both a deep understanding of the actual sport’s rules as well as the game’s incredibly complex controls. Football rules, sure, but how did a game so hard become so damn popular?

Anyway, Brett Favre-mania got me thinking about it. The Madden cover-Methuselah will apparently do quite well for the Jets. So says a Madden simulation conducted by EA. Sheesh.

Many thanks to Deadspin for the linkage.

Related links:

Trailer Review: Tecmo Bowl – Kickoff
Guns and Football: The Ten Best Selling Games in America

E3 Day One: Microsoft, Sony, Final Fantasy, and For Whom the Bell Tolls

John Constantine — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 23:00:00 GMT

There was a very brief period of crossover time, between 2002 and 2006, when E3 was still a gargantuan, money-wasting event and high-speed internet access was ubiquitous. During these years, gamers across the English speaking world regularly crashed websites following videocasts and liveblogs of press conferences as the biggest game announcements of the year hit the public. In the wake of the old E3’s dissolution and 2007’s lackluster event, the press cycle for the games industry seemingly changed forever; game announcements, platform holder initiatives, and publisher events have been spread out over the last eighteen months, no longer restricted to only a handful of days in the summer leading up to the usual holiday deluge of high-profile releases. The days of “breaking the internet” appeared to be over.

Then Microsoft announced that Final Fantasy XIII would be coming out for the Xbox 360 and it was the good ol’ days all over again.

Today’s big reveal has not only overshadowed all other big E3 news so far, including all of MS’ other announcements, it’s emblematic of a genuinely important shift in the way we as players are going to consume games going forward. As development costs have risen, third-party game exclusivity has been declining. Square-Enix’s commitment to multi-platform releases is one more nail in its coffin, if not the final one. What this is ultimately going to mean is that videogame consoles are going to further diversify beyond the current generation. It means that consoles are going to stop trying to compete solely on the software front and move into the realm of unique experiences, a la Nintendo’s Wii.

What the announcement means for the current console cycle, where software exclusivity is still the central competition between Microsoft and Sony, is that Sony is in a legitimately dire situation. Disregarding the hyperbole getting tossed about that Final Fantasy XIII was literally all the company had left to hook a mass audience, it was the last of Sony’s third-party exclusive stable. They have now lost Final Fantasy, Monster Hunter, and Dragon Quest, the three most-important non-Nintendo franchises in Japan. Their remaining first-party exclusive franchises with a serious global audience are God of War and Gran Turismo, games that simply do not have the appeal of a Halo or a Wii Play.

Tomorrow is going to be a very, very interesting day.

Games Cost Money: Sony Cans The Getaway and Eight Days

John Constantine — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:00:00 GMT

While the salad days of the Playstation 2 are at an end for Sony, things have been looking up for the entrenched corporate monster in 2008. Little Big Planet continues to wow, Gran Turismo 5: Prologue had a healthy release in April for a game that’s little more than a demo, and the buzz surrounding Metal Gear Solid 4’s impending release is loud enough to even drown out some of that Grand Theft Auto fervor that’s been going on. The stigma surrounding the Playstation 3 – that it’s an expensive, ugly machine without many games to play on it – is slowly starting to fade, and it has everything to do with some truly exciting exclusive software. So it’s disheartening to hear that two games being developed by Sony’s own London Studio have been cancelled. Eight Days, a Michael Bay-tinged action game that fused car chases with shootouts in the American southwest, and The Getaway, a sequel to London Studio’s successful PS2 Brit-crime drama series, have both been given the axe “due to the redistribution of resources and budget.”

While I’m the first to exclaim my love for the big-budget blockbuster games coming out on the 360, PS3, and PC these days, the truth is that, for at least the short-term future, they may not be an economically feasible pursuit for most developers. Games –graphically intensive, high definition games – cost money to make. While the Halo’s of the world sell enough to validate that sort of investment, most just don’t. It’s worrying that Sony found it necessary to kill two projects, games that were shown to the public over two years ago, because of budgetary demands. But for blockbuster gaming, it seems like them’s the breaks.

Thanks to Next-Gen for the spot.

NPD Wrap: The Times Are a Changin’

John Constantine — Fri, 16 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

April’s come to a close and now, under the cold, hard light of math, three things are becoming clear. First, people freaking love Nintendo games. Sure, we already knew that, but over a million people bought Mario Kart for Wii in less than a week. Second, people freaking love Grand Theft Auto. Nearly two million people bought that in even less time. Third, our access to new videogames is going to change dramatically in the very near future. While these numbers may just look like numbers to us, to the people who publish videogames, the people who control when we get to engage these creations, the math is saying that 2008 is different. Tradition dictates that high profile, big hype games are held in reserve for the holiday push from late September through December and the rest of the year is just a slow trickle of quality goods. The math of March and April 2008 says that people will buy many, many games throughout the year, not just around Christmas. What happens now? Going forward, we’re going to see more games, more often. At least, until digital distribution destroys physical media and the whole issue becomes moot.

While the gigantic March sales numbers didn’t keep their drive through April, even with five days of juggernaut sales from Grand Theft Auto 4, all the players put in impressive showings. Wii sales kept pace, down to just 714K units from 721K, but Nintendo DS sales saw a more precipitous decline, down to 414K units from a powerful 698K despite the healthy software debut for both Pokemon Mysterious Dungeon SKUs. GTA4 moved the huge numbers expected, selling 1.85 million units with only days left in the reporting period but it failed to make an impact on HD console sales. Microsoft and Sony saw sales of their home consoles drop below the 200K mark but both companies can expect bigger sales through May thanks to GTA4 momentum and anticipation of marquee June titles Metal Gear Solid 4 and Ninja Gaiden 2. Software sales were cool on the whole. GTA4 and Mario Kart Wii dominated, but no third party was able to replicate the success Ubisoft and EA had in March with the debuts of Rainbox Six Vegas 2 and Army of Two.

Hardware Sales

Wii - 714,200

Nintendo DS - 414,800

PSP - 192,000

Xbox 360 - 188,000

PlayStation 3 - 187,100

PlayStation 2 - 124,400

Software Sales

GTA IV (360) – 1,850,000

Mario Kart Wii -1,120,000

GTA IV (PS3) – 1,000,000

Wii Play – 360,000

Super Smash Bros. Brawl – 326,000

Gran Turismo 5: Prologue – 224,000

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness – 202,000

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time – 202,000

Guitar Hero III – 152,000

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (360) -141,000

Out thanks to both Next-Gen and Kotaku for their coverage.