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Weekend Confirmed Episode 41: New Year's Eve Special
by Garnett Lee, Dec 31, 2010 9:00am PSTFor this New Year's Eve 2010 show--the second of our two holiday specials--Shane Bettenhausen joins Garnett, Brian, and Jeff for one final 2010 recap and then a lengthy gaze into the crystal ball to see what may lie ahead in 2011. We catch up some with what Shane's been playing with friends back home from music games like Dance Central and Rock Band to developing thumb blisters at Super Street Fighter IV ... oh, and, uh, Sonic IV. Your responses from our SModcastle live show seed the conversations in the second segment with topics like why we really want to get our hands on the Nintendo 3DS. In the second half of the show all attention turns to 2011--the games, the trends, and, of course, predictions!
Weekend Confirmed Ep. 41 - 12/31/2010
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Listen to Weekend Confirmed Episode 41 (player window will pop-up)
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Weekend Confirmed comes in four segments to make it easy to listen to in segments or all at once. Here's the timing for this week's episode:
Whatcha' Been Playin?: Start: 00:00:00 End: 00:30:24
Whatcha' Been Playin (cont) and the Warning: 00:31:28 End: 01:01:43
2010 Wrap-up and 2011 predictions: 01:02:45 End: 01:32:02
Featured Music "Shake Shake Boom Boom" by Those Crosstown Rivals: 01:32:02 End: 01:35:08
2011 predictions (cont): Start: 01:35:08 End: 02:13:08
In the Featured Music segment this week it's Lexington, KY based Those Crosstown Rivals with "Shake Shake Boom Boom" from their album The Day After Yesterday available now on iTunes, Amazon, and cdbaby. Show them some love if you like what you hear! Keep up with Those Crosstown Rivals on their Reverb Nation page, Facebook page, and Twitter.
Original music in the show by Del Rio. Get his latest single, Small Town Hero on iTunes. Check out more, including the Super Mega Worm mix and other mash-ups on his ReverbNation page or Facebook page.
Jeff can also be seen on The Totally Rad Show. They've gone daily so there's a new segment to watch every day of the week!
Our Official Facebook Weekend Confirmed Page is coming along now so add us to your Facebook routine. We'll be keeping you up with the latest on the show there as well.
Comments
Did that make sense to anyone else?
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Don't lecture me about movies, I studied film and media about a decade ago, and am all to familiar with things like framing and composition, pacing, colour choice, dialogue and whatever. Are these really the things that keep you playing a game? As opposed to, say, play control, learning curve, physics, balance, I'll grant pacing, structure, internal systems... you know, the gameplay? The part where you play the game? The thing you've just paid an arm and a leg for in the first place?
Does being a better movie really make a game a better game?
Sure, there's similarities in that the parts of a game that are like a movie have many similar components to movies, but they also have parts that are like a game, and if those parts don't give back in proportion to the effort you put into them, then it doesn't matter how good the other parts are because they're superficial aspects of the game to begin with.
To what extent does having good movie-like qualities excuse shitty gameplay for being shitty?
Do people really disengage from enjoyable games because they don't like the story?
What would you prefer, an aesthetically pleasing camera angle, or a functional one?
I though this was obvious, but movies don't actually have gameplay in them, they don't make those demands of the player, and they need not take gameplay concessions into account when being storyboarded. This is a good quality in movies, it's what gives them the freedom to control every frame of what people see, and every second of what people hear, to the point where they can push the audience, and then get away with it because the audience accepts that everything is under control, whatever is going to happen will happen regardless of us.
Let's take a game from which I disengaged, Super Meat Boy. What do you suppose you caused me to disengage? Did I not like the aesthetics? Did the story not satisfy? Or was it missing that fucking jump for the 50th fucking time, OMG, fuck this, who the fuck designed this fucking game and what the fuck is fucking wrong with them? (my tone may have given away the answer)
This isn't about putting anything on a pedestal. I actually think the comparison does as much a disservice to what makes movies good as it does to what makes games good.
As much as they might be aesthetically similar, they are structurally different, and that structural difference is very, very important. Most of the games getting GOTY might have been story heavy, but they're also specifically telling stories that are conducive to having a structurally strong game built around them. This is a hard limit for games, the story can only go so far as a game can be built around it. Japan has been able to push that line a little farther by making games that are basically novellas with music and graphics, but even those generally stand separate from "actual" games.
Movies can tell stories that games can't, and in ways that games can't, because they're so much less beholden to audience interaction. Movies can be uncomfortable, unpleasant, at times slow, and ambiguous because sometimes that's the point. Games can ape these techniques in their story elements, but if someone were to make a game where the gameplay sucked on purpose because that's the point, no one would stand for it.
And for the record, an RPG player might expect an endless grind, I'm a Pokemon fan, so I know the feeling all too well, but in grinding, they also expect a little thing called levelling up, which gradually makes it possible to fight stronger monsters and reach new places, all of which is a direct return on investment for the time sank into the grind. The actual threshold might be different for everyone, but there is a point where grinding without an adequate return will drive away most players.
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