In
their Question of the Week feature, Gamasutra recently asked their audience what kinds of games would
be most suited to the Revolution controller and which specific concepts they'd like to see using it in the future. The
overall response?"OMG the Lightsaberz0rz are teh rule!"
Not that there's anything wrong with prancing around the room and hacking off limbs with a beam of light, but we feel that the Revolution has a bit more potential than merely indulging us in our geeky Star Wars fantasies (though admittedly, that's an important feature of any console). Luckily, some of the other responses raised some more interesting issues.
"My big fear is that the Revolution is going to over-popularize shallow physical gaming such that everyone starts doing it and suddenly cooking simulators and orchestra-conducting games are going to be popping up on all formats," says Lionhead's impossibly named Tadhg Kelly. This is known as the Eyetoy phenomenon, where developers get stuck on gimmicky features and fail to take true advantage of the platform's capabilities. We have no doubt that several lazy developers will be satisfied with releasing shallow adventures in fishing, fly-swatting and carpentry--that's just the nature of this kind of technology. Fortunately, we won't be buying lame games like that. We'd rather go for intricate, first-person Harry Potter role-playing games.
"Imagine having to speak the spell you want to cast, and using different wand movements to create variations on the spell (maybe the closer you are to a 'correct' movement the more powerful it is, or maybe you can flick it in different directions to throw people about)." Ben Droste from Krome Studio sure makes a convincing pitch for the next Harry Potter film tie-in which, just like the previous entries, will be "the darkest one yet."
Finally, the prize for most spot-on comment goes to Johnnemann Nordhagen, who works for SCEA of all companies. "Trying to shoehorn existing genres into the controller concept is not the exciting part of the new system, although I don't doubt we'll see some excellent interpretations of things like RTS games. To me, the promise of the new controller is that it allows new types of games." If the Revolution hosts nothing but old genres with new controller schemes, it wouldn't exactly be living up to its namesake. The whole point of reinventing the controller is to allow for gameplay that couldn't possibly work on traditional controllers. You know, like lightsaber duels.













Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
2-17-2006 @ 3:49PM
PodMonkeys said...
That Harry Potter idea sounds great! Speaking and motioning would be a great combo for HP as a game.
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2-17-2006 @ 4:52PM
travis o said...
you know, I hadnt even thought about Harry Potter...anyone up for a little quidditch?
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2-17-2006 @ 5:21PM
God said...
There goes SCEA, "The whole point of reinventing the controller is to allow for gameplay that couldn't possibly work on traditional controllers. You know, like lightsaber duels."
I think everyone including Sony Peeps are fixated on Light Saber duels! lol!
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2-17-2006 @ 5:22PM
darkhomer said...
hp sucks.
fps' will be one of the better (if not best) game tipes on the revo.
--darkhomer--
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2-17-2006 @ 5:24PM
Anticrawl said...
I wouldn't mind having a first person action rpg with one kick ass physics engine. One where objects take damage and real time changes based on how they are acted apon in several manners, including force, which is how heavy they are times the acceleration. You could say point the controller and grab, for instance a crate, by pressing the z button. Lift it and toss it lightly, nothing happens, toss it with a little more force, it makes some noise. Then pick it up and ram it into the wall as hard as you can and have a satisfying crunch of the wooden crate. I don't care what kind of a BS filter is put on the said game, be it cooking, fps, or an adventure game. They are as fun as the next. So long as the level of interactivity and debth of gameplay is as high as I now require it to be for this console it'll be fantastic. The Revolution has a lot to deliver in my eyes, but mostly it's the developer's responsibility.
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2-17-2006 @ 5:43PM
Parlod said...
You pretty much said it, Anticrawl. I think interactivity will be one of their main focuses.
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2-17-2006 @ 5:45PM
Anticrawl said...
To add to my last post. It could be a game where you decide how you play it. The basic character would be a character, with whatever clothes suits it, starts a game armed with nothing but his hands, and every object in the game can be affected in some way, either destroyed or used to benifit the character. Like I said with the crate. I wanna be in danger in a game, out of say bullets if I bought a gun or however it will be in the /said/ game and just like start pickin up random stuff to use as a weapon or an aid. Like I'm being chased, sure I could just run, and do it all the conventional way, or I could take a random ally, slow down and push over some convieniently placed barrels in the path of my chaser and while he's slipping or tripping on them pick one up and beam it at his skull, denting the barrel and effectively stopping the chaser. I say, if the developer is to lazy to let us utilize something put in the game, then don't put it in. Nothing pisses me off more than glass you can't break, fake doors that look like they are panted on in areas they think you won't think to look, doors you can't open, if it's locked, we should be able to bash it in if our character and the situation permits. When my gun runs out of ammo in a fps, I don't want it to vanish or have a red x on it. I wanna take that gun and just start whaling on people or objects the way I want to, toss them at people, cars, in the air and have them fall back down and hit me in the face. It's not hard to do, and I've seen it done before.
What's the point of having a game, which is suppose to be a form of interactive entertainment if almost all you have is this BS piece of software trying to act like a movie that scripts the scenarios beforehand. If I wanted to control how a movie played out and when it played out I'd go rent a dvd and press the slow button and tap on the pause button to variate the fps, from 1 to 60 depending on how hard I wanna tap and just do that for hours on end.
Those kids on the internet in the old days had it right. Back in the day I could get online, and download a free game. A game that would give me a pool of weapons to select and render an image of my desktop or whatever I had open at the time and let me go to town on it in anyway I wanted to. I could burn it, cut it, hammer it, chainsaw it, let termites eat it. Let the termites eat it while burning the ants and smashing them with hammers while covering the desktop with their blood and cracking it like glass. All at once. God those were better days. Now they temp us and taunt us with things we can't have. It's like torture.
The examples above are expressed generally in a violent way because.. well lets face it. Violence is something very easy to describe and everyone understands.
Pixels for my people,
Anticrawl
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2-17-2006 @ 6:19PM
Anticrawl said...
I would rather pay 50 dollars for a well written, fully interactive game called say "Trash". Where the developer has just one small city, hell even a warehouse, or just a house for that matter. With everything a normal person has in it. And whenever you are stressed or looking for entertainment. Go pay this said house a visit. So much fun can be had in a world like this. Go run a bath, find a bucket, get some water from the tub and dowse your computer in it. Or say set up a massive, umm I forget what they are called, but it's like an action reaction thing, like dominos except for more interesting and things affect other things in a ridiculous way to eventually set off say a toaster to cook some toast. Run all the water in the house and plug the drains, get your kaiak, and try kaiaking down the stairs, run as fast as you can and don't stop and see what happens, go into the bathroom/kitchen or whathave you and get an aerosol can, the a kitchen knife, but the two together and see what happens. I mean come on. I always thought of games as being a way to experience things you otherwise can't in real life. I know you're thinking, well wait, you can't kill people the way you can in halo in everyday life. Yeah true, but that's so one demensional. Can you honestly say something like that doesn't sound increadibly fun as well as having an insane replay factor. I mean the simple feature of being able to do something with the abundancy of crates in todays games alone would make me happy. Half Life 2 did that, and it made me happy, and I didn't even get the chance to play the game. It's a start to getting back on the right track.
That 50 dollars would be well spent on the simple Trash game instead of tossing it away to say a new tony hawk game. A game where when you are on a board riding and you bump into a wall you go 'ugh' and kinda magically start drifting down the road in the opposite direction. If I wanted that level of interactivity I could go sit in a corner and masterbate and get the same effect without having that annoying repetitive fake skateboard wheel one concrete sound.
Pixels for my people,
Anticrawl
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2-20-2006 @ 4:10PM
loban said...
Half Life 2's gravity gun using the Revolution's controller.....O....M....G!!!!!
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2-22-2006 @ 7:30PM
Guy said...
"Or say set up a massive, umm I forget what they are called, but it's like an action reaction thing, like dominos except for more interesting and things affect other things in a ridiculous way to eventually set off say a toaster to cook some toast."
You're thinking of a Rube Goldberg machine.
I agree, that would be a great game...or, say, a freeform fighting game where two controllers could directly control your fists or something, that'd be sweet too.
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4-22-2008 @ 10:53AM
Anticrawl said...
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4-22-2008 @ 11:02AM
Anticrawl said...
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4-22-2008 @ 11:04AM
Anticrawl said...
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