*click*

They hand out Guinness World Records for everything nowadays ....

Many people will not know that stealth in metal gear was used because of original msx2 vdp limitations!

On an interview of Kojima i read that he used stealth because msx2 could not display more than 4 sprites per row without flicker,so that limitation had somehow to be hidden.(we are talking about double sprites,as i know msx2 can easily display 8 sprites per row).

That limitation of msx2 was the reason we have metal gear today.A great example that we should never have too much freedom in our hands.(freedom in that sense is the best gfx card or tons of ram).On one hand evolution is something we cannot neglect yet we should never sacrifice our imagination.Kojima did not have the freedom of using a nvidia geforce card with 1024 mbytes of ram in 1987.He had to find a way to overcome the limitation of 8 sprites.

The lack and limitations of msx2 machine boosted one man's imagination to create a good game based on stealth.If msx could display more sprites i am sure this would not be the game we all know now.Stealth because of 4/8 sprites per row.Good limitation if you ask me!.

How likely is that to happen in 2008?What limitations do we have today when gfx cards dvd roms,blue ray,and gigas of ram are used?

Unfortunately imagination is long gone!everything is lost in the name of gfx and sound.

Where is that little thing that a programmer would have to struggle and fight with the memory map of the machine.The frustration that one would have to squeeze more data in a 16kbyte segment,and find a way to have a faster interrupt handler for greater effects?Feel the frustration that he has to write better psg like tune because 3 channels seem to be so few.

Nowhere!

All is sacrificed for gfx and videos.People are sometimes so empty in their lives that they want to see a real like video to shake their imagination.Back in the 80-90 decade some pixels that represented a sprite could trigger our imagination and our brain could create the greatest "movie" like in our thoughts.(being empty in that sense is not always bad,i mean that our craving for good gfx and sound almost leaves the gameplay area of games out!)

Those were the days,and i wish that we could learn something from that area and use it nowdays.

Now most people that go to universities or study in classes programming lessons do not learn machine code.

"Machine code is difficult and uneeded in our time"
Yet miracles have happened because of it.

Nowdays windows and operating systems steal the programmer of his imagination.Faster graphics cards and sound cards offer even a newbie the way to create wonders.

But all these are same,repetations and boring...empty wonders.The same and same.Nothing spectacular.Each work seems like it is the same.

I know what i say will make lots of arguments to appear,but this is my purpose,to hear other people's opinions.

Good morning....it is 6:35 am in greece

Amen to that

g'murnin'.
I agree, 99%

I disagree 99%
(sorry for bumping an old thread, but I just had to react to this)

I think faster CPU's, more memory, etc has helped creativity in games tremendously.
It's easy to get all warm and fuzzy out of pure nostalgia, but the reality is that 99% of the old games were all the same and most of them sucked too.
If mr. Kojima got his idea because of a limitation in the MSX' hardware, it is because of mr. Kojima's creative genius, not because limitations are good.

No, I think creativity is in the minds of people, not in the limitations of hardware.

I have to react to that reaction ...
I too believe strongly that constraint is the mother of creativity.
We learn it the hard way in the automotive industry where I work.

Of course, creativity is in the mind of people, you are right about that, but it is triggered under specific conditions, limitations and constraints being some of them. And in the case of Metal Gear, it is indeed a strong case : the story told above is exactly what happened.

My point is that while I agree (that's the 1% I agree with ) that a constraint might in some circumstances trigger creativity, constraint far more often than not just limits creativity.

Maybe it's also a bit of a chicken & egg discussion. Which was first: creativity or constraint?
I for one strongly believe that creativity came first, and that creativity is mostly fuelled by opportunity, not by limitations. It's creativity that can turn a limitation into an opportunity, it's not that a limitation makes opportunity out of creativity (I hope I'm still making sense here ). A subtle but important difference imho.
A limitation is just that, a limitation. It limits stuff, such as creativity.

When there is a problem people are forced to think about a solution, and sometimes come up with great ideas, which they never would have thought about if the problem wasn't there.

Indeed, the new technologies give us possibility's to create things we could never dream about, but without that trigger, we probably never will...

I agree that problems can trigger people's creativity for solutions, but what I have a problem with is the notion that technical limitations are good and progress is bad for creativity (which is exactly what nikodr stated). In my opinion that's reasoning backwards.

I also don't agree that games nowadays have become less creative. On the contrary! The new possibilities of today's hardware allowed for many great innovations in gameplay and the rise of a whole wide range of new genres.

It all depends on the person who's about to get creative. If the person is a beginner or otherwise not very creative then the person may want the aid of limiting borders in order to set a course (read: let the limiting factors guide him). If the person is very experienced and creative however, the person may want to set his own borders or otherwise set course without borders. Any existing borders may obstruct that course then.

Oh, and the expression: "real artists never blame their tools" is also wrong..

"It all depends on the person who's about to get creative. If the person is a beginner or otherwise not very creative then the person may want the aid of limiting borders in order to set a course (read: let the limiting factors guide him). If the person is very experienced and creative however, the person may want to set his own borders or otherwise set course without borders. Any existing borders may obstruct that course then."

Yes, that makes sense, and is actually kind of my point.

With all due respect and without trying to be offensive, but in my honest opinion I think nikodr's post (is he still here?) got it all backwards and smells like a "everything was better in the past" kind of attitude that is usually found with old people, and which in itself is not a very constructive or inspirational attitude.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't enjoy nostalgia like MSX, but to say that 4-sprite limitations are "Good limitations" and that "imagination is long gone" because we don't have such limitations anymore is just taking nostalgia too far.

No i am still here.And i disagree with your posts erikd.

The technical limitations of an msx2 were used as advantage by Kojima.He is the one that said that in an interview.He also wanted to create another game in the past but he stopped it because of msx2 limitations.That was in 1986 i think but in 1987 he made metal gear.

The sprite limitations were the reason for the stealth element of metal gear.If you ask me that is a good limitation because kojima did not stop and say "I can't have more than 4 double sprites so i have to quit making that game".Instead he took advantage of those limitations,and found alternative ways around the problem.That is part of being creative.And Kojima and his development team were creative.

I love our age and our times, and of course i enjoy the past,but i can't feel a little bit skeptical regarding the games of present.Too much horsepower and sometime bad things coming out that is not worth spending our money on.

Maybe (!) the reason we are often skeptical towards games of this epoch is online gaming.Internet and the way to play online and never end the game (i think of World of Warcraft,or other games like this one).

On the other hand i have to say that Wii aproach towards gaming is something very good that i often praise.It has taken gaming experiance forward.So it's not all bad.

Quote:

The sprite limitations were the reason for the stealth element of metal gear.

The interesting debate is of course whether it was possible to come up with this stealth element without facing these technical limits of the MSX2. Perhaps someone else could, and Kojima couldn't? While Kojima is generally considered divine, one may wonder whether Kojima made Metal Gear, or whether Metal Gear made Kojima!

The lack of controlled electricity in his time didn't stop Jules Verne from writing about it in 20.000 Leages Under the Sea.

http://palgn.com.au/article.php?id=7167

It is the article that i told you earlier let's see some Kojima's opinions.

"Kojima said he would show us this evolution using his games (primarily the Metal Gear series) as an example. In the 80s, non-abstract action games were primarily spaceship shooting games, such as Konami's Scramble. Metal Gear subverted this standard by not being about shooting - it was about "trying to form the tension of hide and seek". It came about because 21 years ago, Kojima was asked to make a game on the MSX home computer, a "non mainstream" platform with specs below the Famicom (NES). It was very difficult to make an action game on such a low-spec machine, and Kojima demonstrated the limited sprite capabilities of the MSX with a quick comparison - he compared the arcade version of Gradius to the pitiful MSX port. The MSX could only display four sprites horizontally at once, and to handle Gradius it has to 'fake' eight sprites by displaying enemy ships only once every other frame, which caused them to flash on and off - "can you see the flicker" he said.

So to make a combat game he had to "change the idea". He had to come up with a concept that limited the number of sprites and bullets on screen at one time. He "thought of 'The Great Escape' [movie]" and that the concept of an escape could be done. But this wasn't good enough: Kojima felt that "games need heroes" and that "no-one wants to play a character that just escapes." So he thought "why not make my main character sneak in - a stealth game, and this all added up to Metal Gear... the birth of my stealth game." The graphics couldn't scroll, so the design had to be based on single screens - Kojima showed us a scene from the original Metal Gear (stating with humility "I'm a little embarrassed to show you this now" ), and he demonstrated the design of each screen was that four objects would never line up horizontally. The main gameplay was about avoiding being seen by a limited number of guards or surveillance cameras (he showed a scene where snake must sneak into an elevator, joking "I'm not sure why the guards are taking a break" ). When Snake was discovered, the gameplay changed to become almost a puzzle game "like Pac Man", where Snake must avoid the guards like they were Pac Man's ghosts. A final innovation came with the addition of an in-game story, because "there weren't any stories at that time in action games", and he thought the hide and seek game needed a story to justify why you were sneaking.
[....near the end of article]

"Kojima concluded with a reminder that in 1986, the hardware limitation of the MSX led to the creation of Metal Gear. With technology "evolving with the hardware", you have to "upgrade your idea." As game tech evolves, game designers "must collaborate with other professionals", and this adds together to make art. Kojima believes that game design will continue to evolve, and will "never stop evolving". Kojima finshed with the statement that "Games will continue to be a collaborative art, and I believe in this concept."

While i dont accept the fact that msx2 is inferior to the nes system,some of his ideas seem interesting.

Good to see you're still around nikodr, I hope you didn't take offense in some things I said (after re-reading some things might sound a bit rude...)
You made some interesting points in the 1st part of your 1st post, but after that it seemed to spiral down to negative thinking.

I think we all agree that the sprite limitation helped forming the concept of Metal Gear. But do we do Kojima justice here? Would he really not have come up with the Metal Gear idea without the sprite limitation? I do seem to remember he also talked a lot in interviews about how his childhood hide-and-seek games inspired him to do Metal Gear. Maybe he would have made something equally or even more amazing? I guess we'll never know.

Still, that doesn't make the sprite limitation a good thing IMHO. And I also think that the genius of Metal Gear is not the sneaking alone (although it's an important part), it's the whole package. The whole Metal Gear/Metal Gear Solid saga soaked with creativity besides sneaking!

The Metal Gear story is a good example of how creativity always wins over (in this case technical) limitations, one way or another. But that doesn't necessarily mean that those limitations are good to begin with. Great games were not always sparked by limitations, MG is probably kind of an exception.

Well, anyway, let's just agree that we disagree because I'm starting to repeat myself

I do understand your skepticism towards the modern gaming world, and in a way I share that skepticism sometimes.
However, I personally feel that some negative aspects of modern games don't come from the lack of limitations but rather the opposite. While the boundaries of technical limitations have shifted (not disappeared of course!), another perhaps much more severe limitation was introduced, and that is that the cost of creating games have exploded the last 10 years. That means that developers can't take too many risks anymore because there is too much money at stake. It kind of became Hollywood (of course I'm talking AAA games here).

Thank god there have still been so many innovations *because* of the new technologies. Sand box games, real time strategy, MMORPG, first person shooters, 3D visuals and 3D sound, motion sensitive controllers, etc.