Ms. Pac-Man is Eating My Head

Over on Idle Thumbs, Alex Ashby did a pretty nice writeup of my NTI talk.
I got away fairly unscathed, especially compared to Peter Molyneux.

Comments

[Brett Douville]

Hey, good talk! I wish I had been there to see it.

You know, I think people give Molyneux a bit of a bad rap. He's a consummate showman, yes, but all things considered I find very little wrong with that. He makes lots of promises, and sometimes he can't deliver. But he dreams big, and that's something I like to see. I've never been to a Molyneux talk where I haven't come away from it excited by the possibilities of my medium. If he were here in the States, or I could get away to England for a few years, I'd honestly love to work with him, I feel certain I'd learn a ton.

I've seen a fair bit of lamenting that Black & White wasn't everything it could be but I would spend fifty bucks again right now for the first four hours I played that game; I enjoyed those four hours immensely and they were worth the price of admission for me. I'm not certain that there are other designer/director/whatevers out there that could have come up with that game, and given us that creature.

[Jeffool]

Kudos on the positive write-up.

And I have to agree about Molyneux too. Some of my favorite movies are ones that (to me) are good and have a potential that I can't find a word for. For a reason I can't always put my finger on, there's a quality about them that makes me love them. Often smaller movies like El Mariachi and Six String Samurai, sometimes even bigger (and sometimes cheesier) ones like Vanilla Sky or Pirates of the Carribean. My opinion is that Molyneux either has, or can realize, that potential in games. They may not be 'legendary' like he would prefer to make them (and we would prefer them be.) But they're always worth reinstalling/playing occasionally. Just last year I was playing Dungeon Keeper again. And I can't wait for B&W2.

[Obi Busta Nobi]

Great article on your talk! I agree with Brett, wish I could have attended. I thought the Spider-Man 1 comment in the article about the swinging being "crap" was amusing. What will they say about number 2 after number 3 comes out I wonder?

Sorry, no Peter Molyneux comment to make right now. Except, that it is good to dream big!

[SpiderMonkey]

The guy isn't criticising Molyneux's games. He's criticising Molyneux's unfailing ability to say he's going to talk about some exciting, informative subject and then all he does is give a PR demonstration of his games. That doesn't seem like unfair criticism to me. People don't go to industry events to be marketed to, they go to them to learn.

Is it unreasonable to be offended when the title of the talk completely misleads you as to the nature of its content? It's not like it was a one off either, his GDC talk was pretty much the same. "Gameplay Moves Forward into the 21st Century" - or just "Hi, here is The Movies, here is B&W2, we're more interested in getting a good write-up on Gamespy than on saying anything interesting to you today."