Comments on: Oh Screw It, I’ll Mention The Revolution

By: Let Them Eat Facts, by Pentadact, who is secretly Tom Francis

Let Them Eat Facts, by Pentadact, who is secretly Tom Francis — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 03:25:01 +0000

[...] trying to address those curiosities. In descending order of wantedness! wii controller Yeah. I was pretty wild about the idea, but I was dreaming of something more precise and reliable than this. Without those qualities this [...]

By: Pentadact

Pentadact — Tue, 01 May 2007 21:42:44 +0000

Asians don't generalise.

You four, commenting within three minutes of each other on a very old post with very similar comments and no full stops, have aroused the suspicion of both Spam Karma 2 and myself. But I, like Spam Karma, have to admit that there seems to be at least one human behind the bigotry, so I won't delete it.

By: Glenn Newbins

Glenn Newbins — Tue, 01 May 2007 18:39:14 +0000

Asian are two small to make wii sticks

By: Nathan White

Nathan White — Tue, 01 May 2007 18:38:09 +0000

Asians have slits

By: Vincent Dour

Vincent Dour — Tue, 01 May 2007 18:36:50 +0000

Asians have weird eyes

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 01 May 2007 18:35:56 +0000

Asians rock at Wii

By: Jason L

Jason L — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 19:04:00 +0000

Idly, and a great deal later: On second thought, while a Star Wars saberfest is basically inevitable and will undoubtedly be fun, they're not especially well-suited to the controller. Too much clashing and holding. I'm confident that devs will find a way to make it reasonably good, but still.

Instead, give me Western fencing. Sensitive, fast, spacially precise, and if you're doing it at all right the rumble pack's all you need.

Also, wot a pity that there will never be a Deus Ex game on Revo, eh?

By: Jason L

Jason L — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 14:06:03 +0000

If Chronicles of Riddick isn't rereleased for the Revolution, someone's not doing his job.

By: Jason L

Jason L — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 12:59:25 +0000

Oh fark. Fighting Games. Ragdoll Kung Fu aside, just wait till the first Guilty Gear hits for this.

By: Jason L

Jason L — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 12:18:46 +0000

I don't know the Unicode/Windows charcode right now, so this'll only work in places that read raw HTML. Some fora may have switches for that. Thee HTML code is available from the best concise HTML character reference page I've found. (Save it as HTML-only to get rid of the horrible background.) In this case, character #9835.

By: Pentadact

Pentadact — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 08:27:13 +0000

Ooh, how do you do those? I've always wanted to be able to musicify things I say.

By: Jason L

Jason L — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 23:24:00 +0000

♫ Look out! Here comes the Spider-man! ♫

By: Jason L

Jason L — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 13:01:43 +0000

Really! How odd. I can't imagine trying to hit buttons accurately with my off thumb. I won't even go into controlling a camera/aim stick because I avoid it as much as possible with my on hand.

By: JohnMid

JohnMid — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 12:10:51 +0000

I always wondered how right handed people managed with all the existing pads being clearly left handed.

By: roBurky

roBurky — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 09:13:33 +0000

I think there should an important psychological difference in games that use this control system or the DS's touch screen.

When you give input to a game with buttons, controlling an avatar works well, because then you can see the direct effect your pushing of a button has. When you're poking/stroking the world with the DS' touch screen, then that action translating into something an avatar does is less natural. It works a lot better if you are, in fact, someone poking the world, and the consequences come from your poke.

I think it will be the same with the Revolution controller. Contolling an avatar with it will not work as well as /you/ doing something with it. Whether it's your actions being translated into the world like that Gametrak game, or DS-like world poking.

By: Graham

Graham — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 01:25:09 +0000

The more I think about it, the more I get excited about potential swordfighting. The tactile nature of the new controller should improve gun fights, giving you a greater sense of being there, and making the whole experience more fun and stylish. But there's something about the idea of having an epic melee fight that just makes me buzz. Melee combat is always more cool, and wouldn't it be awesome to - to quickly nab your suggestion Jason - kick some Sith ass? To get to the end of a fight and say, "I did that." To actually control the sword, block the attacks, and counter them in a literal fashion, rather than with some crude button combination?

I hope this lets us feel like heroes. Badass heroes.

I want to scream, "Yeah, IN YOUR FACE MOFO!" at a computer character as I unleash a can of whoop-ass upon him. The kind of in-the-moment aggression and adrenaline that the added physicality should provide.

By: Jason L

Jason L — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 00:22:41 +0000

Tangent - I'm right-handed, but it's nice that left-handed people will finally have a situation where they're unshafted.

By: Jason L

Jason L — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 00:10:14 +0000

Prescript, after typing this: If I want to talk this much, I should really get my own page. I'm sorry for co-opting your blog with my derivative opinions. I'll do so less in future.
If I turn out to be right, I said "the majority", not "the overwhelming majority" - nuance is your friend. :P And of course I'll be wrong, what do I know? You're the game journalist.

I objected to the gesture system in Darwinia for reasons of canon and "feel"; unlike the presence of the Centipedes, stickmen and Space Invaders for example, there was just absolutely no "reason" within that fiction why these Beowulfed consoles would interface with gestures. I accepted it as a means to the end of keeping the screen clear at all costs, but I felt and feel that the game should have used old-school shortcuts or just hotkeys more. .

I was unclear about "gestures". There are two points to be made there.
1. To date, pointing devices have only been able to access 2-dimensional positional data and through it, a very low-res picture of the first derivative, velocity. The RRC has direct, instantaneous access to position, velocity, and acceleration in six axes. a. Gesture commands could - could - not-suck under those circumstances. Who knows? b. With the kind of freedom Nintendo has created, the line between action and gesture blurs; gestures become things like "stroke up, then strong down over there to bring in the percussion section, twirl with varying intensity to continue the roll."
2. I'm probably unusually pro-gesture. Most of my daily-use programs have several macros mapped through StrokeIt and I have a separate gesture plugin installed in my Firefox. Despite that, I am no more eager to see them in mouse-based games than you are, for the same reasons. BnW is the only example I can think of where they fit the fiction, looked natural, and were convenient to use.
I was just referring to the very simple sort of thing Nintendo explicitly showed in its mockup concept reel, where a lady is controlling Mario with "swivel right to run right, swivel left to run left, twitch up to jump." I'd like to try playing classics like that - if it works anywhere near well, it beats bruised thumbs. As several articles have said, it's a natural thing you see kids do, even today - want to jump, pull up, oh yeah, it doesn't work that way. Now it can.

You should probably retract that suggestion to spam ideas - everyone's head is overflowing with them, I'm sure. I have at least enough willpower to not repeat ones I've seen elsewhere (Punch-Out Mwaaaa *ahem*). i. Star Wars - first way to actually play with a double-ended saber, anyone? ii. Music conducting - I'm one of those people who cluelessly "conducts" orchestral music while he's listening to it. The orchestral conducting concept interested me - but I also do it for other genres. I smell a new Frequency/Amplitude, though it would have to be called Phase or Polarization. iii. Heck, combine them: Star Wars music conducting. I think people would pay to be able to "pull" John Williams' brass up out of thin air over and over. Get a ten-man team together and throw together an applet. Lucasarts has sold less in the past! iv. I'm sure this is already in development, but the next WarioWare is going to be nucking futs.

By: Pentadact

Pentadact — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 21:21:01 +0000

Gestures? Now there's an idea. This could be a whole new universe of inaccurately explained, difficult to perform, repeatedly unrecognised gesture-based spell systems!

I actually liked Darwinia's, but it did become a matter of working out the 'real' symbol - it would accept a horizontal line for rockets. Now that it's gone, I find it wasn't as integral to the experience as I thought - my perception had been that it counter-acted the freeness of your units by making them cost you physical exertion, but I can't say the gestureless demo made any less sense without that.

I hope you're wrong about how it'll be used, Jason. I'm sure it'll take years for developers to realise just how much they can do with this, but I hope they at least think in three dimensions from the word go. A pointer for menus, fine, but in-game I want the Z-axis to have some effect. Presumably it can't work as forward and backward movement in an FPS, but perhaps some kind of speed adjustment? Sprint and walk? Also, am I nuts, or could this be used for looking and quick strafing?

Now accepting other suggestions for what kind of nusto games we can make now that we have a 3D controller. Mario Knife Fight? A shooter Western where you have to toss your gun up and catch it by the handle again after every kill? A fairground Test Your Strength minigame where you have to whack it down as hard as you can? True 3D Frogger?

The only downside to all this is that the control system in the sci-fi novel I'm planning now seems less futuristic.

By: Jason L

Jason L — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 15:32:54 +0000

It pays to consider that not all its potential is in the realm of virtual swords, maracas, and so on. Despite the desperately exciting possibilities in that arena, I would suspect the majority of games are going to use the more "dignified" aiming, pointing device, joystick, and gesture control functionalities. Uptight people can still benefit.