4:32

Personally, I ridicule console gamers for having boring, un-inspired, mentally un-challenging games. I refer, of course, to both the gameplay possibilities that a mouse and 100+ keys can bring, and the far greater ease with which indies can develop for PC.

That said, I am sure the Wii remote could lend itself to all manner of novel gaming interfaces, even for strategy games - pointing at units to select or target them, drawing strategy plans, or even providing hand (or flag, or fan) signals...

Zild, excuse me, but I find your comment a highly uneducated rant, ignoring some key facts.

I don't ridicule gamers on each and every platform for having boring, un-inspired, mentally un-challenging games in the majority of the cases, because simply that is what there is, but I do ridicule someone who is fanboi enough not to notice the rubbish particular to his/her preferred platform. And the peecee has plenty of it, AAA to shareware -- maybe slightly more than consoles, due to the lack of centralized quality control that is enforced on console platforms by their corresponding companies.

Now regarding input method as a major factor in game design possibilities, the conveyed implication that it affects game quality is easy to refute by bringing up Tetris as an example -- a game design that can be controlled by a set of 4 verbs --, I am not sure "boring", "unchallenging", or "dumb" applies to it. The only sense such a claim is worth investigating further is a brief technical clarification.
Take the Dual Shock series of controllers -- the earliest model featured 15+2 digital buttons and 2 analog joysticks (both can be "clicked" as well, thus the +2 digital buttons). In the next iterations, eight of the 15 buttons were made analog, and tilt+accelerometer inputs were also added. Or take the Xbox 360 Controller with its analog D-pad, 2 analog joysticks, 8 analog and a couple of digital buttons.
-Compares not so unfavorably to wheel, left/rite click +WASD, an input method that has only 1 analog input (mouse).

And finally, "novel gaming interfaces" as you describe it mostly means using a 20+ years old control method on a 3 years old control device. Sure, gesture-like controls now can have an extra dimension, but technical possibilities are not where innovation is due. Creativity and daring is what is most lacking, especially on the commercial side of game devving.

I would hardly call myself PC fanboi material - I own (and have owned) more consoles than PCs, I play each regularly and I dabble in developing for both.

I do, however, appreciate the advantages and disadvantages of each. In this case, I was in particular referring to the lack of strategy games available on PC, and to their general clunkiness where they do occur. Consoles and their controllers may be better suited to other types of game; I have never suggested otherwise.

Sure, the typical console controller has its advantages, and I do not deny they have come a long way over the decades, but they simply are not suited to certain types of game, and developers have failed to find good ways to use what is available. Take a company like The Creative Assembly, for example, which has in its time made some great strategy games and has also released console titles, but to my knowledge has never ported any of its strategy games from PC to console.

As for the Wii, I am not appluading the technical merits of the Wii remote (I consider the Wii a commercial success but not a technical one), merely saying that it gives the creative developer more food for thought.

As for uneducated, I must correct you on one glaring technical point: the average mouse these days has not one but three analogue inputs: X-axis, Y-axis and scroll wheel. (I'll let others argue about the vailidity of the last!) Oh, and last time I checked, my keyboard had a few more keys than you stated - otherwise this response would have proven far harder to compose!

EDIT: Although I must admit, it has been several years since I gave up on console strategy games and, given some of what I have heard, perhaps the hardware limitations have been resolved since then; I have not seen an abundance of strategy titles for consoles, although I must admit I have hardly been looking.

>we know what a goddamn DOS prompt looks like

Tangentially, I saw this line in a C# tutorial today:

"Note: The command-line is a window that allows you to run commands and programs by typing the text in manually. It is often refered to as the DOS prompt, which was the operating system people used years ago, before Windows."

All this talk about judging a gamer by their platform, and no one bothered to point out that 4:32 is actually inspired by Petri Purho et al's 4'33" from last year's Global Game Jam (which itself was the thing that was inspired by John Cage's "song", so you can only say that 4:32 was inspired by Cage indirectly)?

Well, I guess Jesper points this out on the game's website, so no harm done I suppose.

"I refer, of course, to the gameplay possibilities that a mouse and 100+ keys can bring"

Implying greater number of keys = better gameplay / more gameplay possibilities...

Just because you inferred it does not mean I implied it.

Rather than gameplay possibilities, I am talking more about ease of control (or lack of clunkiness). I think just about any game could be implemented with just five buttons (up, down, left, right, select menu option - in fact, you could use a menu to toggle between directions, so arguably you could get away with two buttons - one for move / next menu item and one for enter menu / select menu item), but that would make most games needlessly more difficult to play and therefore far less enjoyable.

thanks