This is a good catch and note that Miyamoto is always quoted as talking about the ‘feel’ of a game world or the mood it creates. I don’t think it’s very dissimilar to how many people approach games, especially at small scale - they want a world and art style that ties together the mechanics.
I think large teams and modern integrated designers fail at it because their size compartmentalizes cool bits. If the concept artists want to work on ninjas but the designers are prototyping painting you need someone capable of bridging that gap and tying a theme around it. More than the idea, the problem is having the charisma and pull to get everyone aligned and bought into it.
At small scale, this can live mostly within one or two brains. Consensus is easy, liquid, pliable. At large scale, well, we have to use bureaucracies to mediate and that’s as helpful for creativity as it is for speed.
I like this but I think it’s just, at fifty to one-hundred-fifty million dollars a license isn’t really getting you much. Licensed games are still around, they just migrated to phones because drafting behind a kids’ tv show is only sensible at under ten million dollars production cost.
I actually think they look great. it’s still doing the “trying too hard to make things more detailed” thing that remasters do, but I think the results are aesthetically coherent and appealing judged on their own terms. I’m definitely looking forward to playing the pixel remasters of 1-3 if nothing else, because all of the other remakes looked too weird/RPG-maker for my tastes.
the only thing I’m still not happy with is how the battle scenes look, but even those are much better than past attempts, and those have always been kind of awkward with the 2D games. FF6 was already a bad offender with hyperrealistic background and cartoony sprites and then overly detailed amano-based enemy portraits. the redone style is still weird looking but it’s like, weird looking in a faithful way.
Hot Intellivision Amico news following a dev portal leak
Highlights:
Much of the dev portal revolves around game-design guidelines. These lacked a specific author credit but may have been written by current Intellivision CEO and longtime game music creator Tommy Tallarico. At least one section credits Tallarico directly. Titled “The Ten Commandments of Game Design,” the passage begins with this introduction, pasted verbatim:
And lo, Tommy did play a mountain of video games, some good and many bad, and after much reflection, he carved into a tablet a list of game design commandments, and he did present the tablet to the people, and he said unto them,
“Follow these commandments and you will make good games and all will prosper.”
And there was much rejoicing.
This is followed by a list of 10 “requirements” for all Amico games, which Tallarico has publicly posted:
Various text prompts in the portal’s “guidelines” section read like a Game Design 101 manual as opposed to Amico-specific rules or limitations. They’re all archived at the previously shared link, but if you’d simply like a taste of what the text looks like, I will share one unedited segment, titled “THE SECRET SAUCE” in all caps:
The secret sauce to video games is humor, yes even in serious games. Humor is the most difficult thing to do, it doesn’t have to be “laugh out loud” but the player should feel amused. Ask yourself if Angry Birds® would be a hit if it was called The Catapult Game (without birds exploding etc.) Add humor to your games and you immediately step away from your competitors as most don’t even try. Humor entertains both males and females, so you can double your audience when you entertain both. When you come up with designs, ask yourself, “Is this for males, or females, or both?” We highly recommend you focus on both, as it doubles the audience of your game before you even start coding!
The archived dev portal itself includes a quizzical admission about Amico’s sales pitch that’s tucked into the end of a section suggesting devs should leverage each controller’s included touchscreen:
Having a touchscreen and physical buttons and input disc has also not been utilized (the Wii U failed miserably). [sic]
The “input disc,” to clarify, is a variation on the standard d-pad that can either be pressed down like a d-pad (albeit without fixed points to guarantee which direction you’re pushing) or spun like a disc (which would emulate a rarely seen control method found in arcade classics like Tempest ). By directly referencing a Nintendo console, Intellivision invites a painful question: does an “input disc” truly differentiate Amico enough from something like the Wii U, a console that “failed” (at least relative to Nintendo’s usual output) in spite of its own family-friendly reputation and critically-beloved, local-multiplayer darlings like Mario Kart 8 and Super Mario 3D World ?
For starters, questions linger about the team behind the console’s creation and production. In one example, Intellivision trumpeted its hiring of original Xbox chief J. Allard as “global managing director” in May 2020, saying he would “take charge of a wide variety of operations that are critical in launching” Amico. He left months later and said the role was “not a good fit.” In response, Tallarico alleged Allard was still involved.
The Amico team could also be in regulatory hot water if its timeline and association with J. Allard isn’t resolved. A March 2021 video presentation to angel investors via Republic.co, which was recorded after Allard’s last public statement about Amico and reviewed by Ars Technica, includes a pledge that “the co-founder of Xbox… has been making huge, huge contributions” to the Amico team. Worth noting: the system was originally scheduled to launch in October 2020, five months before that solicitation to investors was filmed, and Tallarico’s video didn’t disclose that delay to said investors.
I’m pretty impressed over here – I just tried octopath (which I’d never played before) and gears tactics (which I previously played over game pass on my Windows machine and noticed it was able to sync the save and restart from where I left off) on a 2018 MBP and the experience is very good. there is a little bit of noise in the image and neither of these games are terribly fast paced but it looks like ~10mbit hevc, about as good as realtime encoding gets, and the whole thing “just worked” for my $5/month. my only complaint so far is that they seem to want you to use a controller 90% of the time, even the games that normally have windows KBM mappings don’t always seem to here, but it worked flawlessly with my 8bitdo.
I’m assuming they have me going to a WA/OR datacentre but I typically have 1-2ms speedtest.net pings over wifi because the fibre here is good, so any latency is negligible
i guess this was announced like a month ago, but Patricia Hernandez is the new EIC of Kotaku after many years of Stephen Totilo:
she’s pledging for a new direction for the site. i guess i know Patricia a little (not well, mostly she knew everyone else around me more than i ever knew her) and i know she’s probably very sincere about this. but what that actually means, i don’t really know. this post is vague. it makes references to being more “real” and conversational about games. not sure what that means.
the big problem i have with a site like Kotaku is less the individual writers (well, depending on whom you’re talking about) but more the upper management and just the general business models of media websites these days. and we’ve had plenty of sites like Waypoint/Vice Games attempt to offer something different/better/more egalitarian or whatever but end up kind of being both unsustainable and a new mask on an old thing.
but you know, i’d like to believe. not necessarily in Kotaku itself or whatever but just like more coverage for weird/niche stuff. imagine people writing pieces of actual substance about games like G-String or Cruelty Squad whatever. i just don’t really see how that’s doable within the current ecosystem.
i guess this is another way of saying that this is the first time i’ve ever seriously considered pitching something to Kotaku.
if i do pitch it’d be more for like getting visibility purposes than dough. as i’m sure you are aware media companies pay total peanuts to freelancers. like i could expect 125-150 per article at most… more realistically like 50-100 dollars. need to think about what i’d actually pitch though.
you people should move to a 3rd world ISP country like Germany to figure out why people are still so happy with disc-based media. The exit point is your primary concern, plus the area you’re living in.
For more people than you may think it is basically irrelevant Techbro-vanity things you are discussing here, and this is a rather interesting aspect about it - success/playability is essential for companies’ business models, because i’d expect this streaming gaming genre to go high or go bust based on the masses and their experience, not just gamers in a few areas where municipal net access is OK enough… and it seems atm that they bank on the latter to keep this boat aflot, and i just wonder - why and does that really scale up (or: when?)
That’s surely a huge number on a bill, just for getting people to netflix’ games in the next… decade? two decades? I don’t see the business opportunity here, but then i am no Sony, Gates or Gaben.
