I’ll save you the eight minutes: you exploit a bug and/or design flaw to make super-powerful gear. Which I guess makes the news because it took longer than previously to exploit a Bethesda game?
The Binding of Isaac is NOT a roguelike. It takes more than random dungeons and a high level of difficulty to merit that description; a roguelike must also be turn-based. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike#Gameplay
Accounting error in the post: you say “profit” when talking about money Zynga takes in from customers when you mean “revenue”. Profit equals revenue minus cost. If they really spend $300 for every $150 in profit, that means $450 in revenue and an amazingly successful business. If they spend $300 and only take in $150 in revenue, that’s a loss of $150 (or, if you prefer, a negative profit).
So do you mean that plenty of hardcore gamers play The Sims or Harvest Moon (no relation to Farmville)? Both of those series have sold well for over a decade.
No, Zynga will fail because they don’t really make games. They make colorful work emulators where you do the same thing day in and day out, punctuated by decreasingly interesting random events and increasing needs to harass your social network friends.
You hold right on controller two for the super-jump cheat in Mega Man 3. You become invincible by jumping into a pit and letting Mega Man’s energy drain to zero while holding right (though it seemed like only certain pits worked this way). That disables your arm cannon and only worked as long as you did not pick up any energy. Up + A on controller two freezes enemies—not all the regular ones, but it does work on most bosses.
I don’t think of the Duck Hunt secret as a cheat as you could play it competitively, with player two trying to evade player one’s shots.
Agreed on calling them arcade sticks instead of fight sticks, if only for two reasons. First, “fight stick” sounds grammatically awful. Second, it makes me want to say “the first rule of fight stick is: don’t talk about fight stick” and people think way too highly of that movie.
Please stop comparing video games to movies. Video games have a key feature over movies—interactivity—and that feature makes a world of difference. With interactivity, you have the possibility of agency: can the player save his fellow soldier from that fatal shot? If the designer has a strict linear script, the player cannot, and will likely feel frustrated or manipulated. If the player can save his buddy, you now have a branch in the script. The bigger the effects of branches, the more script you have to write, dialogue you have to record, etc. Given that gamers do not usually replay a game to see alternate branches, you’ve just spent a lot of money for little gain when you could more usefully spend it to improve the part of the game that every player will see. And that assumes the player lets the results land where they may; many players will reload and retry until they get the desired outcome in a scene. Not only have you as a developer again wasted money on the undesirable branches, the player has also destroyed any emotion (earned or not) present in the scene.
You cite the specific example of the soldier’s story. I submit to you that you actually do not want to play that. If you want the real experience, the hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror, you have a number of problems. First, you have to find a way to induce the boredom, and given that the average gamer can’t wait 30 seconds for a loading screen and fumbles for the skip cutscene button after 5, there’s no way to do this. You also need to replicate the discomfort of tromping around in full gear in trenches, bad weather, or what have you, probably hundreds or thousands of miles from home in a land where nobody but your fellow soldiers speaks your language and really you have nobody but those men to rely on. If you can pause the game to answer your friend’s call and pop in some pizza rolls, there goes that. And the sheer terror of war? That comes from the fact that you have a very real chance of ending up permanently injured or even dead. No way can you replicate that with a Game Over screen. Even deleting a dead character’s save doesn’t come close to the consequences of real battle. You’d need to have some sort of fully immersive virtual reality system with serious, permanent consequences to experience the soldier’s story. If you could develop such a thing, I don’t think you’d call it a game. That sounds a lot like “real life” as run in the Matrix, or what we call reality.
Renegade Kid's next eShop game: Bomb Monkey
Mar 7th 2012 10:54PM (Joystiq)SSX soundtrack surprisingly doesn't feature The Avalanches
Feb 9th 2012 1:12AM (Joystiq)Yes, yes, a million times yes. Don’t know how they can make an SSX game without Finished Symphony.
How to kill a Skyrim dragon with a single arrow
Feb 2nd 2012 11:25PM (Joystiq)The Binding of Isaac closing in on 450K sales
Jan 28th 2012 5:05PM (Joystiq)Zynga's paid $300 per new user in the past nine months, says analyst
Jan 22nd 2012 12:31AM (Joystiq)Zynga's paid $300 per new user in the past nine months, says analyst
Jan 22nd 2012 12:26AM (Joystiq)So do you mean that plenty of hardcore gamers play The Sims or Harvest Moon (no relation to Farmville)? Both of those series have sold well for over a decade.
No, Zynga will fail because they don’t really make games. They make colorful work emulators where you do the same thing day in and day out, punctuated by decreasingly interesting random events and increasing needs to harass your social network friends.
The origin of the Konami code, as told by its inventor
Jan 16th 2012 4:20PM (Joystiq)You hold right on controller two for the super-jump cheat in Mega Man 3. You become invincible by jumping into a pit and letting Mega Man’s energy drain to zero while holding right (though it seemed like only certain pits worked this way). That disables your arm cannon and only worked as long as you did not pick up any energy. Up + A on controller two freezes enemies—not all the regular ones, but it does work on most bosses.
I don’t think of the Duck Hunt secret as a cheat as you could play it competitively, with player two trying to evade player one’s shots.
The Joystiq Joystick, chapter 1: Parts
Jan 11th 2012 10:20PM (Joystiq)Agreed on calling them arcade sticks instead of fight sticks, if only for two reasons. First, “fight stick” sounds grammatically awful. Second, it makes me want to say “the first rule of fight stick is: don’t talk about fight stick” and people think way too highly of that movie.
Pro snowboarder Travis Rice leaves Wyoming for the slopes of SSX
Jan 10th 2012 12:54AM (Joystiq)Editorial: 'I'm tired of saving the world'
Dec 29th 2011 1:33AM (Joystiq)You cite the specific example of the soldier’s story. I submit to you that you actually do not want to play that. If you want the real experience, the hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror, you have a number of problems. First, you have to find a way to induce the boredom, and given that the average gamer can’t wait 30 seconds for a loading screen and fumbles for the skip cutscene button after 5, there’s no way to do this. You also need to replicate the discomfort of tromping around in full gear in trenches, bad weather, or what have you, probably hundreds or thousands of miles from home in a land where nobody but your fellow soldiers speaks your language and really you have nobody but those men to rely on. If you can pause the game to answer your friend’s call and pop in some pizza rolls, there goes that. And the sheer terror of war? That comes from the fact that you have a very real chance of ending up permanently injured or even dead. No way can you replicate that with a Game Over screen. Even deleting a dead character’s save doesn’t come close to the consequences of real battle. You’d need to have some sort of fully immersive virtual reality system with serious, permanent consequences to experience the soldier’s story. If you could develop such a thing, I don’t think you’d call it a game. That sounds a lot like “real life” as run in the Matrix, or what we call reality.