Video game company blunders

[Wanzerfan]

Okay this is a thread I wanted to get going for a while, and I just got around to starting it.

My biggest complaint in video games is the transistion from the cabinet to the console.

The biggest culprit is the way Capcom handled the release for the console version of X-Men vs. Street Fighter. A local video game store (when it still around) had it running on a PS-X when it first came out and I decided to give it a try. Imagine my suprise when I hit the medium punch and medium kick buttons to tag out my fighter when nothing happened. The end result was I had my ass handed to me with both characters. I thought tagging in characters was an intregal part of the game. IF IT'S IN THE ARCADE CABINET IT SHOULD BE ON THE GAME DISK YOU DEVOLOPING MORONS!!!.

Namco made the same blunder when the changed the name of a game from Soul Edge to Soul Blade. Way to go pissing off arcade purists, numbnuts.

What are your video game nightmares?

[Gaijin]

Okay this is a thread I wanted to get going for a while, and I just got around to starting it.

My biggest complaint in video games is the transistion from the cabinet to the console.

The biggest culprit is the way Capcom handled the release for the console version of X-Men vs. Street Fighter. A local video game store (when it still around) had it running on a PS-X when it first came out and I decided to give it a try. Imagine my suprise when I hit the medium punch and medium kick buttons to tag out my fighter when nothing happened. The end result was I had my ass handed to me with both characters. I thought tagging in characters was an intregal part of the game. IF IT'S IN THE ARCADE CABINET IT SHOULD BE ON THE GAME DISK YOU DEVOLOPING MORONS!!!.

Namco made the same blunder when the changed the name of a game from Soul Edge to Soul Blade. Way to go pissing off arcade purists, numbnuts.

What are your video game nightmares?

The Saturn X-Men vs Street Fighter kept the tagging. Another reason the Saturn was my favorite over the PSX. It was purely due to PSX's memory limitations. Saturn + RAM Cart = fighting game goodness back then.

Soul Blade was renamed due to legal issues.

Neither was a "blunder". Not like they really had a choice.

Wouldn't this fit in the video game thread?

Edited July 27, 2009 by Gaijin

[Gubaba]

The Saturn X-Men vs Street Fighter kept the tagging. Another reason the Saturn was my favorite over the PSX. It was purely due to PSX's memory limitations. Saturn + RAM Cart = fighting game goodness back then.

Soul Blade was renamed due to legal issues.

Neither was a "blunder". Not like they really had a choice.

Wouldn't this fit in the video game thread?

The video game thread is only for Macross games, isn't it?

As for renaming a game...who cares? Let's say they changed the name of, I dunno, "Mario Cart" to, hmmm, "My Boyfriend Taught Me Bionic Sex!" Is that really a big deal?

As long as the gameplay is untouched, does the title really matter?

[mikeszekely]

The video game thread is only for Macross games, isn't it?

The subforum, yes. The "All Things Video Games" thread is for video games. But I don't even think that one's too hard and fast, considering that a lot of games wind up in their own threads... or games get talked about in the console threads, because we've got, what, five of those?

As for renaming a game...who cares? Let's say they changed the name of, I dunno, "Mario Cart" to, hmmm, "My Boyfriend Taught Me Bionic Sex!" Is that really a big deal?

As long as the gameplay is untouched, does the title really matter?

Yep.

No, to me a blunder is more like DoA Xtreme Beach Volleyball. It's like the PC game Sexy Beach, if you replace the sex with a crappy volleyball game. Which would be the equivalent to making a movie that's like Terminator, except instead of going back in time to kill Sarah Conner, the robot goes back in time to give her a balloon.

[David Hingtgen]

DOA XBV2 is much worse, if you can believe it. That's quite high on my list of "I want those minutes of my life back".

[mikeszekely]

DOA XBV2 is much worse, if you can believe it. That's quite high on my list of "I want those minutes of my life back".

*Looks over at DoaX2 on 360 shelf, nods sadly...*

The worst part is when you keep playing anyway. "That suit's perfect for Hitomi! Just a few more Zack dollars... if only the volleyball mechanics were a little better..."

[JB0]

The great Sega VS Sega war.

Infighting between Sega America and Sega Japan after the Genesis decimated their market position so incredibly fast.

The 32x fiasco never should've happened. The Saturn should've been sanely designed and properly supported.

But it was more important to Sega Japan that Sega America looked bad than that Sega maintain a position of power and relevance in the market. And hey, it worked!

When your company is actively sabotaging itself, something is EXTREMELY WRONG.

[wolfx]

Very recently:

The Ghostbusters Video Game which was during its prototype stages promised by its developers to take full advantage of the PS3 system and utilise its power...ended up looking really bad on the PS3.

The reason? They had to dumb the game down to fit into the XBOX360 so it ended up looking better on the XBOX than it did on the PS3.

[Keith]

WHY DIDN'T THE NEARLY FINISHED PS1 VERSION OF POLICENAUTS COME OVER HERE, BERNIE STOLAR!!!

Also, Working Designs when they went "too" far and started dubbing spell casting in games, as well as their rendition of the Rayearth theme song.

[taksraven]

The Mechwarrior 3:Pirates Moon expansion disk that made it so your mech had a spotlight to see with at nighttime. The previous game, Mech 2, had the "Light Amplification Mode" which was far superior. Very dodgy game development there.

And also, the level in Pirates Moon when you had to jump over a gorge on your way to and from combat. How stupid was that?

Taksraven

[JB0]

WHY DIDN'T THE NEARLY FINISHED PS1 VERSION OF POLICENAUTS COME OVER HERE, BERNIE STOLAR!!!

Also, Working Designs when they went "too" far and started dubbing spell casting in games, as well as their rendition of the Rayearth theme song.

Seriously, do you listen to yourself?

GRRR, THIS GAME TRANSLATION COMPANY IS TRANSLATING THE GAME! THIS IS EVIL!

[Keith]

Seriously, do you listen to yourself?

GRRR, THIS GAME TRANSLATION COMPANY IS TRANSLATING THE GAME! THIS IS EVIL!

Dubbing isn't translating, it's ruining!!

"I SAVED THIS JUST FOR YOU"

Edited July 27, 2009 by Keith

[ruskiiVFaussie]

Not continuing with Gunstar Heroes license. Make a proper sequel Treasure/SEGA! (on PSP please)

whoops - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunstar_Heroes guess they did continue a bit further, i gotta get me some roms!

Edited July 27, 2009 by ruskiiVFaussie

[F-ZeroOne]

Seriously, do you listen to yourself?

GRRR, THIS GAME TRANSLATION COMPANY IS TRANSLATING THE GAME! THIS IS EVIL!

For a view of translation from the other side, I would suggest seeking out Terry Pratchetts "Discworld Compendium" or Jonathan Clements "Schoolgirl Milky Crisis", which highlight some of the challenges involved in translating. Although I will point out again that Wales is not in England, Del Rey, though it often stands in for it in Doctor Who.

Edit: I've just realised I might be accusing Del Rey of the same thing I'm trying to defend! I don't read Japanese, and its possible the geographical error I'm talking about was made by the original manga creator. In which case, there is a classic translation dilemma: do you translate exactly what it says, and hear the cries of "Oh, noes!" from actual British people [1] or do you correct the error in translation and then hear the cries of "Oh, noes!" from the "translations must be 100% accurate at all times!" people?

The various attempts to smash down on the import markets...

[1] They exist, apparently. I'm told I might be one.

Edited July 27, 2009 by F-ZeroOne

[Valkyrie Hunter D]

Anyone else remember Ace Combat 3's U.S. release? Ugh.

[mikeszekely]

Anyone else remember Ace Combat 3's U.S. release? Ugh.

This one comes up a lot, but when I played it before I knew how edited it was, I loved it.

[shiroikaze]

Namco made the same blunder when the changed the name of a game from Soul Edge to Soul Blade. Way to go pissing off arcade purists, numbnuts.

I believe this jerk here probably has something to do with that:

http://kotaku.com/5273141/trademark-troll-...edge-taken-down

Edited July 27, 2009 by shiroikaze

[Knight26]

The user interface on freelancer, keyboard and mouse on a space sim, give me a break, I wanted to use my throttle and rudder, and have ships that travelled at different speeds.

[JB0]

Dubbing isn't translating, it's ruining!!

It is translating, in a form you don't care for.

It's also notable that SCEA typically REQUIRES a dub(ask Konami what happened to Symphony of the Night), so it's not like they had a choice ANYWAYS.

As long as they're dubbing the story scenes(which is a requirement for a mass-market video game, whether you like it or not), dubbing the battles is required if you want to look like you expended any degree of care whatsoever. Otherwise you have one character with two voices.

Personally, I'm still mildly annoyed off that Tales of Destiny has no translations for the victory quotes.

And that Namco decided the appropriate way to handle voice-only cutscenes was to delete them rather than dub them. I grant that they would've done a BAD dub. But hey, I'd know what they were saying, and they wouldn't have had to slice out content because it wasn't in english.

More recently... SRW: OG Saga: Endless Frontier has voice-only conversations after battles... in authentic, undubbed, japanese.

Not grunts, attack names, and other miscellany. Actual inter-character conversations.

Spoilers: most english-speakers don't understand japanese. That's why they buy english games.

This is not an english release.

[nugundamII]

Fcuk

ok I bitched

[Radd]

Very recently:

The Ghostbusters Video Game which was during its prototype stages promised by its developers to take full advantage of the PS3 system and utilise its power...ended up looking really bad on the PS3.

The reason? They had to dumb the game down to fit into the XBOX360 so it ended up looking better on the XBOX than it did on the PS3.

I thought the reason it looked worse on the PS3 was the PS3's RAM limitation?

Either way, the 360 is a much more popular, and therefore more profitable, console to develop for. So game developer's hands are tied if they want to make the money. Not a blunder to put your effort where it will show the biggest payoff.

[Einherjar]

Advent Rising. All of it. Can anyone believe that was supposed to be the start of a trilogy or franchise?

True story: When I was living in a dorm during one of my college days, an eccentric friend of my roommates was swearing the whole time he played it because of so many bad design decisions. Choppy frame rate, bad controls, cheap difficulty, etc. I never played it, but seeing him, a decent gamer, getting frustrated while watching the production values and difficulty he had to work with on the screen, it was clear the game was crap. Then, after leaving him alone for a few minutes, he suddenly stormed out of dorm room with a potty mouth because he died during a tutorial sequence!

[mikeszekely]

I thought the reason it looked worse on the PS3 was the PS3's RAM limitation?

That's more or less what I heard too.

While I'm not denying that I've seen some great-looking PS3 games, I haven't actually seen any that make me stand up and say, "Yes, the PS3 is clearly more powerful than the Xbox 360!" Multi-platform games are 90% of the time identical, and when they're not RAM limits or shoddy porting on the admittedly-more-difficult-to-program-for have the PS3 version getting the short end of the stick more often than you see a well-programmed port that really takes advantage of the PS3's hardware. That's not exactly what I'd call "dumbing down to fit in the Xbox 360." If anything, it's the other way around.

[eugimon]

I thought the reason it looked worse on the PS3 was the PS3's RAM limitation?

Either way, the 360 is a much more popular, and therefore more profitable, console to develop for. So game developer's hands are tied if they want to make the money. Not a blunder to put your effort where it will show the biggest payoff.

yeah, it's not because they "dumbed it down" but because the PS3 memory structure limited the size of the textures they could use.

[Chronocidal]

The user interface on freelancer, keyboard and mouse on a space sim, give me a break, I wanted to use my throttle and rudder, and have ships that travelled at different speeds.

Freelancer I actually understood the control scheme for, as awkward as it was. It's hard to come up with a good interface when you're working with a wacked out rpg/space combat/insterstellar trade/fps hybrid game. For what it was, if you ignored all notions of it being a space sim, and looked at it more as an fps/rpg where you just happened to be in a spaceship, it worked much better. Player mods fixed a lot of the main gripes about the way combat worked later on.

Still in the Chris Roberts genre though, EA's (or was it still just Origin at the time?) handling of the Wing Commander franchise has been a crime against sanity. The marketing that buried the Kilrathi Saga under the glitz of WCIV, and relegated KS to uber-rare, crazy expensive game status just sucked. That was only the start though. Since then, EA has continued to sit on the license, and done nothing with it.

Given the ease of making animated cutscenes nowadays, I'm still waiting for someone to realize what a gold mine they could have if they rebuilt the original WC I and II for current computers. I would say to rebuild all of them, but only if they agreed to keep the original live action cutscenes, and just rebuild the game engine around them.

I've never been able to play Ace Combat 3 unfortunately, but from what I've read, I agree about that one. While removing the story may have actually improved some of the AC games (looking at you 6 ), that wasn't one of em.

Edited July 28, 2009 by Chronocidal

[David Hingtgen]

While I'm not denying that I've seen some great-looking PS3 games, I haven't actually seen any that make me stand up and say, "Yes, the PS3 is clearly more powerful than the Xbox 360!"

Wipeout HD?

[mikeszekely]

Wipeout HD?

Looks fantastic. No doubt about it. Even as a downloadable title, I think it's enough to justify owning a PS3 as a system exclusive.

Having said that, I've never really thought that the 360 couldn't run it.

'Course, there's always God of War 3...

Still, I don't think you really can say that one console is more powerful than the other, not in a practical sense. You can pull raw specs to argue for either, but the reality is that they're very different sets of hardware. Multiplatform games are always going to go for a middle ground, and exclusives are going to look better than multiplatform games because the developer will tailor the game to take advantage of the specific hardware.

Edited July 28, 2009 by mikeszekely

[shiroikaze]

I dunno... I tried the Wipeout demo but I just don't like it, it also looks great but it's not really eye-popping great

However MGS4, LittleBigPlanet, and Killzone 2 are indeed eye-popping. I feel like I'm missing a couple other titles...

[miles316]

Does anyone know when the game developer might max out the Chip sets on the X-box 360, PS3, Wie has anyone in the industry made any predictions?

[eugimon]

Does anyone know when the game developer might max out the Chip sets on the X-box 360, PS3, Wie has anyone in the industry made any predictions?

EA is claiming they're close to maxing out on the 360 and that the PS3 is the way to go.

But that's what they said after CoD 4, that the 360 couldn't do better and then Gears of War 2 came out and pushed the 360 further. ME 2 looks amazing too, so who knows.

[CoryHolmes]

The nerfing of KoToR II is the biggest blunder I've ever personally experienced. And as much as I enjoyed the game, I have to say that Too Human also qualifies here, if only for the sheer amount of story that didn't make it into the game proper.

[realdeal]

I got one. Mgs2 when you start playing as Raiden. Man that sucked!

[shiroikaze]

EA is claiming they're close to maxing out on the 360 and that the PS3 is the way to go.

But that's what they said after CoD 4, that the 360 couldn't do better and then Gears of War 2 came out and pushed the 360 further. ME 2 looks amazing too, so who knows.

All about optimizations. Even if you "max" it out today, you can still squeeze a bit more out of it later and later. But I rather not ask EA.

I'd like to see how games look five years down the line really.

[Cent]

EA is not the developer to turn to for reaching above and beyond or exploring greater frontiers. They're all about milking the same engine used in the previous iteration of the same tired franchise, copying over elements from other successful titles to tout as new innovative features in their upcoming games and massively try to cut down development time so they can flood the market with a whole batch of new releases with their respective support teams fading away 2 weeks after launch.

Yea. I hate EA.

[anime52k8]

Yea. I hate EA.

welcome to the club