“All games journos should be forced to make a game,” says Zombie Cow’s Dan Marshall

STOP WRITING NEWS AND GO MAKE A DAMN GAME, NATHAN!

You’d better do it, Dan Marshall used the word “Forced”.

I was planning on making a game about riding in a truck with Mal from Firefly and shooting things, but then Bungie developed it and called it Halo 3: ODST.

And while I do think that’s a catchier title than “This is a game where you ride in a truck and shoot things and Nathan Fillion’s there, I guess,” Bungie took my idea. So now I can’t make a game. Ever. Because that was my magnum opus, and now my dreams are crushed.

Yes, you should all be forced to make games, or at least work in QA at a dev for a bit…

I’m sometimes shocked how little game journalists seem to know about the development process. Stuff like expecting features to be simply added or removed a few weeks before release!

@G1GAHURTZ:

I learned all I know about game development from this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbIWN8bufWI

And his mom said he would never get ANYWHERE with these games.

“our loyal flock of readers”

BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA !

LOL!

Yeah, ‘tighten up the graphics on level 3′ is a classic…

“I was planning on making a game about riding in a truck with Mal from Firefly and shooting things, but then Bungie developed it and called it Halo 3: ODST.”

Every film critic should make a film. Every food critic should try cooking for 150 people in a restaurant…

Nonsense. Journalists (or critics – whatever) should stick to writing about games. Just don’t be an asshole about it and understand the fact that no-one really sets out to make a bad game.

I dont think any journo has ever said that a dev team has went off with the intention of making a bad game from the start (maybe a cheap cash-in but not an actual bad game).
But in the end if a game is crap then its crap, we cant have people throwing roses because real people worked on something otherwise there wouldnt be any need for critics.

“I dont think any journo has ever said that a dev team has went off with the intention of making a bad game from the start (maybe a cheap cash-in but not an actual bad game).”

I’d be impressed at any journalist who could even so much as net a job with the kind of attitude you described. That level of stupidity is usually only reserved for the commenting fanbase.

all game journo’s make a game and all crime journo’s should stab a hoodie… could be the dawn of a golden age

I don’t think journalists should have to make a game. What they should have to do is undergo the same kind of very public praise and/or criticism that they have the power to level at games developers. Comments sections like this do the job quite nicely, but it’d be interesting to see it formalised somehow.

In fact it’d be nice to see that done outside of the games sphere as well.

We used to have a game journo critic here.

He’s gone now.

He who shall not be named…

Well – one without an axe to grind would be better I suspect. Objectivity and all that

oh you mean Mike Bowden? cause surely you don’t mean Shatner

Oh TEA, despite your recent notoriety you’re still very much LTTP.

I agree with him to a degree as much as I think that Movie critics ought to make a movie before they area allowed to crit other films. Its like men telling women that Child birth isn’t that hard.

I think it’s a load of shit.

In no way do you have to be able to create something in order to criticise how enjoyable you found it to be.

“In no way do you have to be able to create something in order to criticise how enjoyable you found it to be.”

No, but that’s not the whole story.

It comes down to unrealistic expectancy and incorrect understanding. Some reviewers still believe that developers are making the game right up until the Gold Master goes out.

They think that devs should spend their time ‘fixing’ all of the bad opinions that they came out with in their previews, and that this is how the development process should be.

They don’t seem to understand that the game is content complete at Alpha stage.

They don’t seem to understand that most games start out with a scope twice as big as the final product ends up being, and that loads of things usually get thrown out to get the game running properly.

Reviewers are still in the habbit of slating games for certain points, but then not even bothering to think that there is no alternative. For example, a reviewer marking a game down for looking a certain way, when the way that it looks has been forced by the design.

If they actually had to sit down and go through all of the head scratching that devs do, they might do a better job of marking games down for the right reasons…

Um… G1GA, I hate to disagree old chap, but in many cases games *are* being made right up until GM. It’s just that the the core gameplay mechanics are usually set in stone around the alpha/beta stage.

Tbh, all reviewers really need is to understand how games are financed, not made. At the end of the day, many of the decisions people complain about are due to a lack of time, money and resources, not lack of creativity.

“Um… G1GA, I hate to disagree old chap, but in many cases games *are* being made right up until GM. It’s just that the the core gameplay mechanics are usually set in stone around the alpha/beta stage.”

Well I’m currently working on my 14th game, and never has it happened on any of the games that I’ve worked on that anything gets added/removed after alpha without the game being delayed for at least another quarter.

After alpha, there generally isn’t time to do anything other than bug fixing and optimisation.

“Reviewers are still in the habbit of slating games for certain points, but then not even bothering to think that there is no alternative. For example, a reviewer marking a game down for looking a certain way, when the way that it looks has been forced by the design.”

Then the design is bad? The result is the same, it looks bad.

I think that unless a a critic is talking about a specific bug, something broken about the game that its just an opinion anyways and we all have them. I have to agree with G1GAHURTZ on this one, how can you quantify a game or what you could or couldn’t do if you haven’t done it yourself. Sure, you can say a muffin doesn’t taste good but unless you’ve made a muffin yourself, you can’t really go any further into it than that without guessing. I’ve heard many a game journalist make complaints about things in games that should have been done this way or that but have no idea how those things area actually done or how they could have been done differently if indeed they could have been done differently at all.

“Then the design is bad? The result is the same, it looks bad.”

That just emphasises the point completely.

Devs don’t intentionally go out trying to make a bad game, or an ugly looking game.

They spend months and months agonising over decisions and coming to compramises to get the best out of difficult situations.

For a reviewer to come along now, and say: ‘Wow! That looks s**t! I don’t care why… Graphics: 2/10′ shows just how little they know about the game development process.

I’m not talking about games that look worse than other games in their genre. I’m talking about games that are the best looking game in their genre, way better than any other similar available game, but some muppet reviewer comes along and can’t even recognise this.