DrIntrovert

Regardless of what recording software you use, you're going to need to compress the video afterward if you want it to be a reasonable size. Pretty much any video editing software will work, I use ffmpeg (simplicity for a simple task like this). Just make sure you don't compress out the quality too much. I wouldn't recommend compressing the video as you record, because you are going to want the highest possible quality for the initial video.

I want developers to focus on making games that focus on fun gameplay over all of the flash and explosions. I don't care whether the game is a really impressive experience visually, the most important element of any game is whether it is fun to play, not whether it is pretty to look at. Too many recent games have been all style and no substance.

The only way I own any Mega Man games is via the collection that was released for the Gamecube that has jump and shoot reversed and runs horribly.

Great blog! I think that a game's ability to involve the player is the real strength of the media compared to books or movies. A designer can even have a specific story in mind, but still allow the player to learn it from the environment. Super Metroid is a really good example of this. There is a deep and very specific narrative, with emotions evoked by the music and environment at certain times. But there's never a word of text or dialog used to explain any of it--the player learns all of the story from the context of play. Compare that to Metroid Fusion or *shudder* Other M and you'll see that the reason those games are inferior is how verbose they are, and how linear.

I'm not qualified to say anything in this debate other that Gen. 4 was so bad that I quit the franchise. My favorite is Gen. 2, but I think it may be a function of my age, as I was too young to really appreciate Gen 1. Other than Glitches, I get a really creepy Missingno with my name, and some jerk on the playground told me how to do it, so my main memory of that game is sheer terror.

When I first played Wind Waker, I couldn't figure out that you were supposed to use water on the bomb flower to open the path to the second dungeon. I felt really dumb when I figured it out because I was ten-ish at the time and generally was beyond that level of stupidity. (I think it might actually tell you to do it...).

I've been really enjoying Charles Stross's stuff lately, I got started with Accelerando, which is licensed under CC-non-derivative and available for free on-line, and liked it enough to start going through the rest of his novels. He's generally the most forward-thinking speculative fiction author writing today, in my opinion. Some of it might be too dense for some people though, if you want something that is just a fun ride. (For the record, I don't subscribe to the more extreme singularity ideas in real life, I just think they make for a good SF book).

Dammit, my condition for buying one of those overpriced and underpowered pieces of garbage was "if they release Earthbound or Mother 3 for it." Now I'm super pissed because I want to support them releasing that game, but in order to do so I have to purchase their hardware to buy an 8 dollar virtual console title. I didn't actually think there was any chance of them ever re-releasing that game. I'll probably use the machine for other virtual console titles, but I don't know if there's anything else coming to the system I'm really interested in. They must be really desperate if they're going to that stage to try to rebuild goodwill. Don't know if it worked on me yet. I'm still on the fence about it.

@selbie I don't disagree with the general concept, but I feel like we could still use the same names, and just define those genres based on what the core player interaction is. Changing the names around confuses everyone, and makes the labels useless to most people.

For example, some shooters (like Team Fortress 2) where the core mechanic is competing against other players would be defined as Competitive FPS games (which would also include games like Call of Duty because it is defined as the main reasons people play a game) because competition is the reason the player is continuing to play, where a game like Half-Life 2 would be defined as a Story-Driven FPS game because the main reason the player continues to play the game is the story.

You can easily do this with other genres as well, the point is to take existing genres, so people will understand the starting point, then re-define them based on the core reasons the player plays the game.

@beachthunder In this system:

Portal: Story-Driven Problem-Solving First-Person-Puzzle game

Tetris: Challenge-Driven 2d-Puzzle game

Super Metroid: Exploration Character-Growth Side-Scroller game

Nethack: Exploration Challenge-Driven Character-Growth Luck-Based Role-Playing-Game

The modifiers are listed in order of their significance to the player experience, and would be abbreviated on a box (No one writes out RPG in real life, do they?).

Not only are you buying points, but on the Xbox you can only buy them in specific amounts--you can't just buy the point value of a given game, leading you to have useless Microsoft points laying around if you don't plan them carefully.