Post 7 why not give people total control?

One thing I will never understand about game design is the seeming inability for designers to try and prevent unnecessary error and inconvenience for their players.  While there are many examples of laziness on the part of the people who work in game development (ELECTRONIC ARTS), I simply want to focus on a general feature that happens to exist in lots of games made by many different companies.  This is the ability to change your controls.

I myself wonder every time I play a game why I can't go to the options, go to controls, and simply pick which button I want to do what.  Many games have preset controller types, but many of these preset types simply switch one key, and do not give you the exact layout you might prefer.  If there simply was a custom controller type, that allowed the player to pick each function and assign it to a key, many of the errors or simply the inconvenience of having to relearn a controller layout for a game that functions exactly the same as another game would be gone.

Post 6: Dreamcast

In the late 90's, before the playstation 2 or xbox ever came out, sega unvailed its next generation system, the Dreamcast.

In the sands of time, the Dreamcast was ultimately a failure.  But the Dreamcast itself was pioneer of features that are now standard on all console platforms, and were merely dreams at the time of there release.

 First, besides the improved hardware and performance capabilities, the Dreamcast was the first system to support online multiplayer. Eventually, games were being released that had live updates and down-loadable content, just like all of the newest console games.  Many of the online multiplayers consisted of voice chat, a feature that was not supported for many of the next generation consoles until much later.

With all these new features, why did the Dreamcast fail?  The primary cause of failure was the lack of developer support for the use of the Dreamcast.  With the playstation 2 predicted to come out in the near future, with better hardware and performance capabilities, many developers decided to wait for these systems to come out to develop their games.  And since players didn't want to buy a system that wouldn't support the good games that might come out, they never bought the dream cast.  It was a vicious cycle.

Post 5- xbox live grievances

Just a short blog post today, which is a minor complaint on the multiplaye matchmaking of the new halo reach.

When connecting to games, you select the gameplay mode you want, and the game then automatically tries to connect you with other players looking for the same type.  While a simple concept that should work without too much of a hassle, the game sometimes has trouble finding players, whether it be because their are not enough online or you have firewall issues or they are too far away to play with a stable connection.

Because of this, I have found myself staring at the Halo matchmaking screen longer then I have actually been playing the game.  Sometimes, the game has has found plenty of players 17+, but we hang in the matchmaking room for way longer then nescessary waiting for one player.

Simply put, it would be a much better design to allow players to start the game once enough players are joined to actually play, and other players should be able to connect mid game.

Mac vs PC

I had not ever used a Mac until the recent decision by the computer science department to change all of the PC's in pastalab to mac.

That being said, I'd like to make note of a couple of things about Macs coming from a pc user.

In terms of natural mapping, macs really tend to confuse me due to lack of right click on the mouse.  I also find it incredibly frustrating that all of the shortcuts, which are ctrl-something on the pc, have changed to command-something on the mac.  Both of these changes seem to be ignorant attempts of making themselves appear to be different from the pc, but has only really lead to tedious moments trying to figure out why copy and paste isn't working.