Wiebo de Wit's thoughts about game development and more…
Check this out: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=165540
It’s a cry for help from the hardcore gamer.
Has the time now come when the hardcore gamer who used to laugh at Nintendo and their kiddie games are finally experiencing the truth that the world does not rotate around them? The hard-core gamer is suddenly surrounded by people who like to play cooking and bowling games, who are having fun without killing every bumpmapped, mipmapped, shaded, physics enabled, reverse kinematic animated 3D object appearing on screen. This cannot be! Games are not about fun, they are about staring seriously at your HDTV, gripping the pad with sweaty palms and obtaining Achievements! The world is put upside down because of Nintendo and their ‘disrupting the market’ strategy.
Nintendo ironically is a victim of this change as well. Zelda: Phantom Princess has not been the success (in Japan) that Nintendo hoped for. Miyamoto himself has said that the majority of Japanese Wii owners does not want to play a lengthy action RPG. The majority of these Japanese Wii owners must be casual gamers. I wonder how Metroid Prime: Corruption will fare.
The change is in motion and there is nothing the ”only true gamer” can do about it. He can only hang on to his 15 button gamepad and hope for the best.
I’m just kidding. There will aways be a market for hardcore games, but it will have to compete more with the market for casual games. Now don’t get me wrong: the hard-core market is and will remain huge, and CliffyB’s brother is over reacting.
Shacknews – Xbox Live Arcade Update
Ahh, so here is the unofficial confirmation that Geometry Wars is indeed coming to the PC. We just had to wait for Vista! duh.
They are missing a great opportunity though for not letting the PC version access the Xbox Live scoreboards to really create one big GW community. I guess there were either technical difficulties (I cannot image) or nightmares about cheaters/hackers (I can image) when this decision was made.
It was ofcourse a situation of not if, but when this was going to happen. The heated debates about the availability of GW-clones for the PC were of course started because Bizarre knew they were going to port the game to Windows and they did not want to lose their future customers.
[sarcasm mode on] And there we were, thinking they wanted to protect their IP, ”innovative gameplay”and their ‘graphical uniqueness’. 
[/end sarcasm mode]
I was never asked to pull my clone Grid Assault from the internet but I think that is because it is time-locked and not given a definitive release… We’ll see what happens once the PC version of GW is released.
With ‘it’ I mean ‘me’ ofcourse. I’m sorry for not posting anything this last week but I’ve been working my @$$ off, making long days and not even having a free weekend. Things are settling down though so I thought I’d post a little update…
We (me and my collegues of course) have been migrating some 450 users from Novel and Windows 2000 to Windows 2003, and migrating their mail from Groupwise and Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2003. The users were located in 5 different locations, each with their own Windows or Novell domain. ouch. It was an interesting but troublesome project, as the original environments hadn’t been properly adminstered for a long time. We faced a lot of last minute surprises and undocumented features But we made it.
On the gaming front, last weekend I got ‘Gears of War’ for the Xbox360. What a game! I love it, and I’m starting all over again on hardcore this next weekend. I need a HDTV, sniff:)
No programming has been done since last week. I had too much on my mind. But, the testbed went fine and I think the game has potential. but first I have to develop some better versions of the following:
I’m looking forward to creating a kick ass particle engine. I think I will start with that. Even if the game will become shitty, we can always use a good particle engine!
Today is my day off from work. Last week I’ve spent my evenings mainly in a dusty computer room. I decided to take a day off to compensate… yay. I didn’t take a day off because it’s Friday the 13th. I couldn’t care less about things like that.
The client I was working for started ranting on about how great his 10 year old AS400 was, as opposed to his buggy Windows 2003 Small Business Server. Now I know that SBS is not the greatest product in the world. Adding that many roles onto one server cannot be good for stability etc, but once I noticed they had added two other database engines, one mission critical application and that they were running out of disk space I had to enlighten this man that he was walking on thin ice… He still believed the AS400 was more stable because it was an AS400, not because he had only one small application running on it… some people.
The Thrust Extreme version I have now is feature complete for the classic part of the game. Last night I began work on additional features:
Today I gotta buy a new suit, because I soon will be checking out a possible new employer. Wish me luck.
