Poorly Crafted Demands For 2006

For Corvus' latest roundtable I'll update my previous list of demands which, at the very least, got this out of the deal.

So here goes.

Apple, open a game studio with the aim of developing simple but innovative titles for casual players. Sell games off of iTunes. Make games that interact with iTunes. I have a living room, an AirTunes and a big TV. Help a brother out.

I'm officially bored with simple running and gunning ... although it took quite some time. The biggest problem a title like Quake IV has is that it ignores that games like GoldenEye or Halo never existed. I was moderately OK with that on Doom III ... though I still think the controls there kinda sucked (for more sinful than the lighting). Big monsters and weapon design won't cut it anymore. Give me better control. Give me better stories. Give me better interaction.

Casual gaming, meet casual online gaming. Let's get together sometime. One of the great things about Mario Kart DS is the ability to get human players into the game so easily. Microsoft and Bungie started catching on with their Halo matchmaking and others are taking notes.

Replayability, replayability, replayability. I will say it every year. Give me games that I want to keep on my hard drive until the end of time. Give me games that I can just pick up any odd day that I have a free half hour.

X-Com for the DS. Rebelstar was nice, sure. But I missed base management and open ended campaigns. And now I want wifi multiplayer. Hey, that's what you get for making me wait for the whole thing. Make it coop and I'll give you a gold star. And a buttercookie.

Keep indies indie. Having seen the overcommercialization of mods with front row tickets, I'm hoping the same won't become true for the indie scene. Course, this is a harder line to draw since indie teams are naturally in it for profit from the get go. Just remember that market pressure begets market demands. And those demands are rarely to make crazy fun innovative risky stuff.

Stick up for yourself .... and others. The next time someone attacks the industry, stand up for them ... even if they are Rockstar. The anti-game crowd is getting louder and the industry is going to have to get on the offensive to stay the line. It's not enough to have gamers themselves getting all uppity - we gotta see industry figures become more verbal and more visible when it comes to helping parents get the real story on games.

Sony, stop the evil ... because if you pull any DRM/rootkit crap with your game division like you did with BMG, there will have to be a reckoning. A reckoning I say.

Don't release Duke Nukem Forever because honestly, that joke will never get old unless you do. Don't rob us of that.

I'm not upgrading, so deal with it. The CheapBox might get a new non-Celeron processor and a quieter CPU fan, but that's about it. Gears of War might require dual 7800s but I'll be willing to either that hardware gets cheap or I get a next-gen (or is it just gen now?) console. I've got a massive backlog of PC titles to get through on this hardware, so I'm really in no rush. If the industry wants to sell to a large PC audience, it will have to remember that not everyone throws down four grand to play games.

OK, that's all for now. I'd probably have more but work is extremely swampy right now.


Pull up a seat...





tagged: game, gaming