I blogged before about the unforgivable omissions from one of gameFAQs lists; now I have to blog about full-blown blunders. This list about the Top Ten Characters that Would Succeed at the UFC got me cringing so many times I can't quite remember. To name a few:the list talks about "Sambo" as a little known martial art, whereas it's the one Fedor Emelianenko practiced -and Fedor is the most succesful HW in the whole MMA world, beating BJJ master Antonio Nogueira, wrestling UFC champion Mark Coleman, or K1 superstars such as Mirko Filipovic. Fedor has dominated the sport as no other MMA practicioner has, ever.It talks about imagining a mayor like Haggar sorting things out with his fists-as if Jesse Ventura hadn't been governor of Minessota, or Schwartzenegger hadn't ground'n'pounded Triple H in a WWF bout -go check that out in youtube. It talks about a Capoeira artist never having stepped foot in a MMA ring - go google Mestre Hulk, or search in youtube for Mark Kerr vs Mestre Hulk.

It makes one wonder what's the use of such lists.

I never though I knew much about the ZX Spectrum until I saw this list in GameFAQs entitled "The top 10 Spectrum games". It's not that I consider myself any expert as regards the old Zilog Z80 machines, but watching that list I can tell you the guy who wrote it was a late Spectrum player, probably owning one of the latest models (perhaps the one with an attached tape player). I myself remember the birth of the machine, and I hardly would go as far as the launch date of the vast majority in that list to pick a top 10 for the Spectrum. In fact, there are unforgivable omissions there from many of the greatest publishers and franchises the ZX Spectrum saw. Namely, ultimate's Sabre Wulf / Underwulde /Knight Lore saga. The Knight Lore game was one of the first (if not the first) to feature that isometric truly three dimensionalgameplay that would yield so many great titles such as Alien 8, Movie, Head over Heels, Batman and many others. Talking about Batman and HoH -at least Match Day by Ocean made it to the list.

But not to mention Odin Computer Graphics LTD... Titles such as Robin of Sherwood, Nodes of Yesod, or the unforgettable Heartland... Masterpieces of creativity such as The Trap Door, platformers like the great Manic Miner series, Dynamite Dan, Bogaboo the Fly, Frost Byte, or Wally's awesome franchise with gems like Pyjamarama or Everyone's a Wally, classics like the Horace games, space shooters like Ad Astra, fighters like Barbarian (featuring one-hit-kills including decapitation) or The Way of the Exploding Fist, arcade racers such as Spy Hunter, Pole Position or Enduro Racer(or even simulators like Checkered Flag), RPGs like Druid or the awesome Avalon, space sims such as the great Elite (even Elite II is IMHO one of the best PC games ever made), text adventures like The Hobbit,or unclassifiable masterpieces such as I, of the Mask. To omit all of Dinamic's great titles: Babaliba, Army Moves and its sequel Navy Moves, Freddy Hardest... Dinamic, a Spanish game development company that produced so many top notch, state-of-the-art Spectrum games. Spain did create a lot of AAA Spectrum titles, to tell the truth, from the Three Lights of Glaurung (or whatever the English translation is), to Camelot or West Bank. Some of them were rebranded and released abroad by other companies with different names.

PC days are so different. AAA titles coming out of Spain are few and far between. Some (like Commandos) have enjoyed moderate success, but it's Hideo Kojima's latest Castlevania the one who might put spanish game development in the spotlight once more . I really look forward to see those glory days of Spain game development companies releasing great AAA titles once more.

One of Activision's visible heads has just caused a turmoil with his statement that Activision may drop Sony as a target platform. Reasons were twofold: higher development costs, and smaller customer base. Easy as it may be to develop for the PS3 or the PSP, MS has got the best development tools for their platforms and both Nintendo and xBox have sold more consoles (which is not saying the PS3is a sales flop).

Superior hardware was one of the PS3 selling points (BluRay aside). But something in E3 got me thinking. It was Forza Motorsport 3. With a brand new graphics engine, the xBox seemed to render awesome sandboxes (the Montserrat track is nothing short of stunning) at jaw-dropping drawing distances, with very detailed car models,processing complex car physics, all at 60 fps on full HD. Now, the PS3being capable of better output (which may well be the case) is not the question. What is really the question here is whether getting better results really pays, both quality-wise and in terms of return of investment. I went back to see the HD review of Gran Turismo 5 prologue, and it really doesn't look much different from FM3. FM3 had such graphics that, during the E3 show, I had a hard time telling actual cars footage from ingame footage (video resolution played a role there, probably). GT5 may look as good or even better, but it certainly cannot look better than photorealistic -something both GT5 and FM3 are very close to achieve already. Most important, GT5 doesn't look 100€ better than FM3.

Just how much sense does it make to improve on the PS3 or xBox 360 hardware on terms of processing power? Indeed there's room for improvement -even a high-end PC would struggle to move Crysis at highest settings and resolution, but it's probably wiser to research on lower production costs meaning lower price tags, more sturdy hardware, and better software such as development tools and optimized (and possibly genre-specific) engines. After all, it doesn't look like a new super HD standard will arrive in the next couple of years, so 1080p at 60 fps will pretty much be the bestquality for some time.

A lesson to be learnt from next-gen consoles is that hardware performance is not an absolute, and depends on affordable prices and development tools that empower game devs to get the most out of the machine with the least effort. If improving on these consoles means 500€ / 600$machines with high development costs and diminishing gains quality-wise, then Sony would be better off strictly sticking to their 10 year product lifecycle (a good thing IMHO) and Microsoft might as well adopt it too.