Spector Says Critics "Misunderstand" Epic Mickey

[omegawyrm]

This kind of "us vs. the developers" crap that you guys perpetuate really gets on my nerves.

 

[Vladamir69]

Can people please reserve judgment until they actually play it. What if you made something and everyone else refuses and flat out says it sucks without even trying it. Wouldn't feel too good would it?

the problem with that is that the reviewers actually played the game. Sometimes you have to take something at its face value. When everyone is agreeing on something I would like to believe that its true. On the other hand if lets say about half of the reviews found there to be little to nothing wrong with the game i would be more inclined to going out and trying myself. Till then the Wii will gather dust.

 

[park92]

this guy will tell you why this sucks

 

[Phokal]

All reviewers also agreed that WoW had "9" or "10" graphics when it was released.

Edit:

Also, Planescape Torment got worse reviews than Epic Mickey.

They also all loved GTA4. But the majority of the forum community seems to hate it.
Sometimes, these things just get blown out of proportion. This wouldn't be an issue if the Wii had demos, or wasn't hated by the majority of the "hardcore" gaming community. Most are just bitter this didn't come out for the 360/ps3.

I'm not sure why games are categorized into "awesome" or "sucks." Whatever happened to the B+ games/movies/comics? Sometimes, it doesn't need to be better-than-everything-that-came-before to be worth playing.

 

[viranimus]

Yeah... Ok.

Perhaps it is that people dont understand it. I mean it is possible, albeit unlikely.

What I really think was its bigger hinderence would more likely be having the protagonist as mickey mouse. Even if they were using this as a vehicle to reshape the mickey mouse image.. its still mickey mouse, a mascot who has been out of favor at least as long as ive been alive and I would wager even longer.

I would lay even money had the game been remapped with an original protagonist, and perhaps the difficulty scaled up a bit so as to not play to the under 8 crowd, it would have done adequately.

 

[mjc0961]

Saying that players misunderstand your game is an instant drain of your credibility and/or respect, at least to me. Also, what is he talking about with that "everybody gets it wrong" nonsense in reference to third person games and cameras? Plenty of games get it right. I'm just going to assume that the only other games he checked before opening his mouth are Tomb Raider games.

Jak and Daxter for the PS2 never gave me any camera trouble, and that was back in the very early 00's.

There are also ways to mitigate the harm a clumsily-integrated/limited camera can cause; remember the coin trails in Super Mario World that would show you just where you're supposed to jump, to compensate for the fact that the camera couldn't possibly show you where you're supposed to go next? Remember how Assassin's Creed II had "might wanna look over here" warnings pop up on screen when something consequential was happening out of view of the dramatically-angled camera? Remember in Gears of War, how pretty much all firefights were head-on confrontations (unless the designers felt like planning a cheeky ambush, a la several points in the Locust Hive) because taking cover would constrict the camera in such a way that makes fighting two adjacent groups at once unfairly difficult? Gears even had a feature where the game would prompt you to hold down a button to make the camera lock onto meaningful events, because there's a good chance the camera would keep you from ever noticing otherwise.

Hell, even the HUD in FPS games qualifies, since there aren't many ergonomic ways of using a first-person camera to assess ammo count and player health, and the little "you got shot from the right" hit markers in games of the same genre compensate for your limited field of vision, along with the deprivation of the senses that would compensate for this, such as touch ("ow, I just got shot in the right shoulder") or Doppler hearing ("hey, I heard gunfire come specifically from the right, in the distance"), peripheral vision ("hey, I quickly glanced to my right and saw something, instead of tracking my gun all the way over there to look"), and perhaps most importantly, the fact that nine times out of ten, you'll never see the tracers of rounds being fired at you, making it impossible to know where to take cover and where to lay down suppressing fire. I know the latter part is realistic, but this is one of those instances where "real" equates to "cater to the camper".

Point is, just because you can't design the be-all-end-all of cameras doesn't mean that you can't find ways to keep it from hampering the game.

Very well said, sir.

 

[NickCaligo42]

Oy. It was bad enough to see Tim Schafer doing this with Brutal Legend, trying desperately to tell us that his game absolutely wasn't an RTS. This...

... No, I take it back, that was much, much worse than this.

Still, I don't get it. Spector made a platformer. There's jumping puzzles all over the damn place. There MUST have been some notes about this in playtesting, this can't POSSIBLY be coming as a surprise.

EDIT

This kind of "us vs. the developers" crap that you guys perpetuate really gets on my nerves.

Yeah, come to think of it the Escapist seems to make a point to set us against the devs an awful lot of the time, don't they? There's all the shitstorm surrounding FF13 and 14, the Ubisoft DRM fiasco, the Schafer incident I noted above; it seems like every so often they set journalistic phasers to maximum firepower in the interest of making some creative team the bad guy. :\ I'm not going to retract what I say because it legitimately does seem a bit odd to me, but I've gotta say you have a good point and I'm going to think twice about supporting one of these threads from now on.

 

[Jakale]

What I find weird is that, in the entire interview that I could find, he only defended the camera. No word about the other aspects that people didn't like such as the repetitive fetch quests and boring fights. I couldn't even find other bits where he talked about the other parts of reviews aside from this camera thing.

Personally I thought games generally had controllable, revolving cameras for this type of gameplay.

 

[Exterminas]

Ja, that man has a point. I mean clearly nobody can be blamed for failing at a difficult task, right? That's why we give nobel prizes out for people who tried to help mankind the most, but failed at it. Like Al Gore.

Wait. No. That's some other universe I am thinking of. In this one we don't expect things to be perfect, or unbreakable, we expect them to work in their environment. Nobody expected this game to feature a perfect camera. But we expected mechanics that evoke the impression that someone on the dev-team actually took time to play the thing, before shipment.

I don't get this impression. I get the impression that the camera guys and the rest of the dev team worked on two seperate projects.

 

[thethingthatlurks]

All reviewers also agreed that WoW had "9" or "10" graphics when it was released.

Edit:

Also, Planescape Torment got worse reviews than Epic Mickey.

They also all loved GTA4. But the majority of the forum community seems to hate it.
Sometimes, these things just get blown out of proportion. This wouldn't be an issue if the Wii had demos, or wasn't hated by the majority of the "hardcore" gaming community. Most are just bitter this didn't come out for the 360/ps3.

I'm not sure why games are categorized into "awesome" or "sucks." Whatever happened to the B+ games/movies/comics? Sometimes, it doesn't need to be better-than-everything-that-came-before to be worth playing.

Reviewers give into hype. Why else would you expect games like CoD to get those 10/10 ratings? Still, reviews are sometimes important. There are gems out there that are still amazing despite some flaws, and a good reviewer will point that out. The bad reviewer, however, will focus on trivial nonsense like graphics or multiplayer.
Also, B+ is the equivalent of "very good." I think a C range is what you are looking for.

 

[justnotcricket]

OK, fine, but if your action-adventure-rpg-kitchen sink genre game happens to have platforming-type sequences in it...then your action-adventure-rpg-kitchen sink camera is still going to cause problems...

I'm not sure this has actually helped his case...

 

[Just_in_time]

the concept of this game was really good, but from i saw the trailers i didn't really find it that interesting.

Spoiler: this is the coolest game micky has ever been in

 

[Crimson_Dragoon]

No, your game has issues with gameplay mechanics that have been done better in dozens of different titles. Its not the player's fault, and hiding behind that excuse is doubly insulting coming from such a veteran developer.

 

[mjc0961]

Oh yeah. Part of your problem is putting this on the Wii. Wii Remote + Nunchuck only has one analog stick, so the camera controls on Wii games that only use that control scheme are always awkward at best. Even Super Mario Galaxy 2.

 

[Necromancer1991]

this guy will tell you why this sucks

Let me help you out with that link, when you want to post a youtube video just type ]

Again all the complaints are more nitpicks than anything else

 

[NickCaligo42]

Personally I thought games generally had controllable, revolving cameras for this type of gameplay.

Impossible on the Wii with its single analogue stick, as has been mentioned.

Motion controls are the future!

Oy. I don't know how much I've bitched about the same point endlessly; I even did a re-design of the Wiimote for a class project once, I hate the damn thing so much. You're right, though, no right analog = no camera control. Not unless you devote the D-pad to being the second analog stick, which is like giving up half your usable buttons with this thing (the crappy "1" and "2" buttons at the bottom don't count and neither do "+" and "-"). It's crude, but it at least gets the job done. RE4 got a ton of mileage with that method. But yeah, it really, really, really is a problem that limits developers in an absurd number of ways, and I swear to you that the lack of a second stick is going to be the kiss of death on motion control gaming for years to come.

 

[Jakale]

Personally I thought games generally had controllable, revolving cameras for this type of gameplay.

Impossible on the Wii with its single analogue stick, as has been mentioned.

Motion controls are the future!

I don't know about that, seems you could just as easily make a button that, when held down, allows you to move the camera with your hand as if you were adjusting a tripod. If this is a problem brought about my motion control, seems like you may as well make a motion controlled way to solve it.

Not sure how you'd do it on the Kinect since it lacks buttons...a digital button that you hold with one hand while moving the other for afore mentioned tripod effect maybe? I don't know enough about how that system works.

 

[TaboriHK]

When you are the only one who 'understands' your product, you may want to reconsider who has the lack of perception.

 

[JemothSkarii]

Way to pull a SEGA move Specter. Its not that the game is bad we just dont understand it.Of course how could I be so blind!

Oh my god, that pic, it...I just....I think I'm in love, kudos to you good sir/madam