The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer

Category: Wacky Peripherals (Page 2 of 4)

Romantics= Buzzkills

The Romantics are suing Activision (the publishers of Guitar Hero) for including a cover of ‘What I Like About You’ in Guitar Hero II Rocks the 80s. Developers Harmonix are not mentioned in the article.

The twist – the Romantics concede that they gave Activision the right to include a cover of their song, but feel that the cover was TOO FAITHFUL. The fact that it sounds so alike ‘infringes on the group’s ability to control its own likeness’.

On the flip side, any Guitar Hero/Rock Band fan will tell you that playing covers of songs that aren’t faithful are downright painful. Evidence A is the so-called cover of Rage Against the Machine in Guitar Hero II.

Guitar Hero III First Musings

Played just a little bit of Guitar Hero III last night. Played it unlocking stuff on easy (wife wanted to play, and her wrist is still not up to 100% from her surgery), so your mileage may vary.

The new wireless guitar is awesome. It feels good, it’s responsive, and has the most accurate ’star power’ detection since the first guitar from the first game. So at least in this one area, it’s an improvement. The song list is also mostly good, although there is one tier where it seems your entire song list is 70s songs I could care less about.

Things I didn’t like:
1) Whoever thought it was acceptable to ship a rhythm game where activating star power causes a notable framerate hitch, throwing off your rhythm, needs to be taken out back and pummelled.
2) I was expecting to be shocked and disgusted by the ’strip club’ level – or at least be forced to pretend to be so for my wife’s benefit. Turns out, I got one entirely clothed dancer who … danced bored. Really, we’re playing Rage Against the Machine, and she’s dancing like she just downed a bottle of valium. I was actually insulted – because I could have sworn my rocking deserved better than that.
3) I think my wife counted 15 fonts used in different places. It felt like a bad MySpace page. Somewhere, an art director needs to be hit with a clue stick.
4) They replaced my beloved Pandora with a Japanese schoolgirl? Are you kidding me? God, she was awful.

And then we get to the boss fights. It turns out they are exactly as non-fun as I thought. Even worse, they are anti-fun. If these boss battles ever came into contact with actual fun, the universe would fold onto itself. This is a clear example of a place where design should have iterated on the idea, and then afterwards gone to a bar and shared a beer while talking about how collossally bad a game design decision it turned out to be. Instead, they shipped it.

Original comments thread is here.

Has Guitar Hero Lost Its Way?

Despite having perhaps the best song list so far of the Guitar Hero franchise (”One” and “Welcome to the Jungle” were perhaps my two favorite songs back in the day), the public mood seems to be souring on Guitar Hero III, and interest is ratcheting up in the competing product Rock Band, which of course is being put together by the team that did the original Guitar Hero.

It probably doesn’t help that Guitar Hero Rocks the 80s was widely received as a quick and dirty cash in (really, $40 bucks for no new venues, no unlocks and 6 characters?), but that’s only a hint of the problem. Raph was among the first to spot trouble, when he spotted this article pointing out mocap for strip clubs. Continue reading

Rock Band and Guitar Hero Updates

This morning, somebody sent me the following link with this quote: “I have seen the second coming of the party game, and it is called Rock Band. All hail.”

Now that the developers of Guitar Hero (Harmonix) are working on that, the owners of the Guitar Hero franchise (Red Octane) have their work cut out for them. They’ve released an abbreviated song list from Guitar Hero 3, which includes Smashing Pumpkins, Tenacious D and the Beastie Boys. My favorite part: according to Wikipedia, Living Colour went to the studio to re-record ‘Cult of Personality’ after the original masters could not be found. More dubiously, ‘battle mode’ will grant the ability to mess with your opponent’s guitar playing, such as breaking his strings or overloading his amp. Continue reading

Im N Ur Disn3yL4nd, B0mb1n Ur G1ant M0us3

Check out Goggles, a flight sim where you can bomb locations pulled directly from Google Maps. You can even bomb your own neighborhood, in theory, although I didn’t try due to the fact that the instructions started with ‘how to delete your internet cache’.

Now imagine merging that with Photosynth, with a little help from Streetview.

Pretty soon, bombing your own school won’t be limited to disgruntled emo teens anymore.

Why I Love the DS

Sim City DS is coming to America. Among the new features announced on Kotaku:

Feautures like being able to sign off on proclamations using the stylus as well as put out fires by blowing into the microphone…. I’ve often said that the one thing missing from Sim City was the ability to blow on it.

I find this utterly fascinating, in a “I want to try it, but now I’ll never play this game while in the Doctor’s Waiting room” sort of way.

Mouse Nuts

I really liked this story about Guitar Hero, not so much because I’m an admitted GH fanboy, but because it uses the phrase ‘mouse nuts’ to mean, precisely, ‘not a lot of money’.

My old General Manager at Origin used to say this a lot. For him, it was a shorthand way to say, “based on the amount of time we’ve spent talking about this stupid, trivial problem, have we spent more time in employee salaries talking about it than it would have taken to just fix it?”

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