DIGITISER
  • MAIN PAGE
  • Features
  • Videos
  • Game Reviews
  • FAQ

5 EXAMPLES OF GAMING HYPE THAT NOBODY REALLY BELIEVED OR CARED ABOUT

19/7/2018

24 Comments

 
Picture
Hype - derived from the word hyperbole (derived from a Greek word meaning "excess") - is the use of exaggeration as a rhetorical device. It emphasises points, and - in most definitions of the word - isn't meant to be taken literally. Though, of course, we sometimes forget that, and often do take it literally, because we just wanna believe, man.

​<COUGH>Crowdfunding<COUGH>


Gaming has long been a competitive and cutthroat market, with overheads the size of whales. Most games companies would do anything to have the edge on their rivals - even if that means debasing themselves with half-truths and outright lies. In other words: hype. 

Here are just five times reality never really lived up to the marketing. 
BLAST PROCESSING IS, LIKE, FAST AND THAT!
Picture
When Sega found its Mega Drive/Genesis facing off against the Super Nintendo, it began making a big deal about the console's "Blast processing". It sounded good, but nobody knew what it actually meant - least of all those within Sega itself.

Supposedly, this "Blast processing" gave Sega the hardware edge over its rivals. In reality, it was little more than a fairly meaningless PR term, coined by - among others - senior Sega producer Scott Bayless, who has since gone on to describe the phrase as "ghastly". 

He honked, in his defence: "The PR guys interviewed me about what made the platform interesting from a technical standpoint, and somewhere in there I mentioned the fact that you could just 'blast data into the DACs'. Well they loved the word 'blast' and the next thing I knew Blast Processing was born."

Admittedly, it was merely a neat way of packaging Sega's supposedly faster hardware in an easy-to-understand phrase, but unfortunately, that phrase also included the word "processing" - the marketing equivalent of asking "I wonder how my nan's doing?"  in the middle of foreplay. 

"Sega Genesis has Blast Processing. Super Nintendo... doesn't," crowed the ads. This led to a worried Nintendo fighting back with a series of advertorials which painted Blast Processing as a myth.

Not all of Nintendo's counter-claims were accurate, but having been on the receiving end of a campaign which portrayed them all as nerds wearing "glasses held together with tape" (coincidentally, Bayless himself appeared in one of these print ads, depicting him as one of Sega's in-house super-cool dudes) the gloves were off.
SADDAM HUSSEIN IS GOING TO USE THE PLAYSTATION 2 TO START WORLD WAR 3!
Picture
Shortly after the release of Sony's PlayStation 2, a report surfaced on the news site World Net Daily that Iraq leader Saddam Hussein had - due to a shortage of PC hardware in the country - purchased as many as 4,000 PS2s, with the intent of using them to power his weapons of mass destruction.

"Most Americans don't realize that each PlayStation unit contains a 32-bit CPU every bit as powerful as the processor found in most desktop and laptop computers," read the entirely sexed-up (i.e.; made-up) story.

 "A single PlayStation can generate up to 75 million polygons per second. Polygons, as noted in the DIA report, are the basic units used to generate the surface of 3-D models - extremely useful in military design and modeling applications. Bundled PlayStation computers could also be used to calculate ballistic data for long-range missiles, or in the design of nuclear weapons.

"Iraq has long had difficulty calculating the potential yield of nuclear devices - a critical requirement in designing such weapons. Networking these computers might provide a method for correcting this deficiency."


After the report - which was so very obviously planted by Sony's PR team - gained traction, a senior UK intelligence source reportedly described it as "nonsense", adding: "The suggestion that there's a shortage of standard PC hardware in Iraq is silly. PCs are commodities like cars and washing machines, and they can get as many PIII and P4 PCs as they like, sanctions or no sanctions".
MACHINE CODE IS WELL EXCITING!
Picture
Most gamers care about one thing: whether the games are any good. Something they do not care about is what programming language was used to create a particular game.

This was a lesson that had yet to be learned during the home computer boom of the early 1980s, when games were often sold on the promise that they were created with something called "Machine Code". It was implied that games made using "BASIC" - again, most of us didn't know or care what that was either - were, I dunno, slower and worse, or something.

Yes, I admit, I was semi-impressed by games which boasted of their Machine Code credentials, but only ever in a sort of Emperor's New Clothes kind of way. Always at the back of my mind was a little voice whimpering: "Yes, okay... but... but what does that actually mean?"

The only people who cared about any of this were massive nerds - and there were a lot of them left over from the era when home computers were used for actual computing. The rest of us just kind of took their word for it that Machine Code was a good thing, without really having the incentive to dig further into the matter. Even researching Machine Code for this article has given me an aneurysm.

​Well done. You're all very clever. 
THE NINTENDO 64 IS AS POWERFUL AS A SILICON GRAPHICS WORKSTATION!
Picture
As fondly remembered as the Nintendo 64 may be, it was nevertheless sold on the back of a lie. To wit: Nintendo's "Project Reality" or "Ultra 64" (as it was known at various points) would be as powerful as a Silicon Graphics workstation. And we all knew how powerful Silicon Graphics workstations were, because we'd all seen Lawnmower Man.

Admittedly, Nintendo and Silicon Graphics entered into a partnership with the best of intentions - announcing that the jointly-developed hardware would "be unveiled in arcades in 1994, and will be available for home use by late 1995 ... below $250".

​Indeed, when those first arcade games were revealed as Killer Instinct and Cruis'n USA (somehow they failed to use the power of Silicon Graphics to calculate how to correctly abbreviate the word 'cruising'), the hype went into overdrive; getting graphics of that quality in the home would be unprecedented. Oh, we were all very excited!

Admittedly, the N64, when it finally emerged, could handle 3D graphics incredibly well compared to everything that had come before it, but... y'know... not quite Silicon Graphics-well. When Killer Instinct and Cruis'n USA did eventually appear on the system, they were a significant step down from their arcade incarnations, and we all felt pretty stupid for having assumed they'd be anything different.

A shamefaced Nintendo was forced to admit that the arcade versions of those games never even ran on Ultra 64 hardware in the first place. Worse still, for the home version of Cruis'n USA, Nintendo censored one of the arcade version's most popular features: the ability to run over innocent animals.

Upon learning of the censorship, lead developer Eugene Jarvis wailed: "It seems like they don't have a sense of humour. I don't know what's wrong with these people..." 
COLOURS... SO MANY COLOURS...!
Picture
Poor old Commodore. With the winds of change blowing its Amiga brand into oblivion in the mid-90s, it did its best to move away from home computing into consoles - retooling its hardware into a console: the inevitable disaster that was the CD32. In true Commodore style, it failed to keep pace with the times, its foot still firmly in an era when people cared about things like "Machine Code", and how many colours there were in their games.

Commodore made a big deal about the CD32 being able to display 256,000 on-screen colours from a palette of 16 million - with one particular TV ad depicting an awed player declaring "Colours... so many colours" like he'd just seen the face of God.

This colour boast was slapped all over CD32 marketing and the hardware's packaging, failing spectacularly to impress anybody. Surely nobody had ever sat down to play a game and thought: "Imagine how much better this game would be if there were more colours..." had they?

For the modern equivalent of the Machine Code/so many colours phenomenon, please see 4K graphics and games running at 60 frames per second.

Yeah, whatever. I went there. Fight me.
PARUM-TA-TA-TA-PARUM! SEND AN EMAIL TO THE DIGITISER FRIDAY LETTERS PAGE:
digitiser2000@gmail.com
24 Comments
alb
19/7/2018 10:15:03 am

Remember when Your Spectrum or whatever would give over eight pages in the middle to MACHINE CODE? You had to have a compiler, then you too could happily spend six weeks typing in in hexadecimals on a rubber keyboard, only to miss the mistake you made on character 825 which rendered the whole thing pointless.

Reply
MENTALIST
19/7/2018 10:37:36 am

I'm getting a bit confused about all this, partly because I didn't have my own Spectrum, and would have been a bit young for advanced programming it at the time, anyway, but it seems like there are a number of incorrectly-used terms being flung about here.

In order for all this to make sense, "Machine Code" in this context is probably referring to assembly language, which would have required an assembler, rather than a compiler. Machine code is literally the bits that are passed to the CPU, and assembly language is a human-readable set of keywords and associated data that corresponds to that. Having people type out a Spectrum executable directly as a series of hexadecimal pairs seems a bit harsh, even for the 80s.

Assembly language programming was still important up to the Playstation 1 days, in order to get the best possible performance out of software. And little bits of it here and there are still used in places like subsequent Playstation vector unit processing, original-Xbox era programmable shaders, and its conceivable that Arm assembly might still be used significantly in some 3DS titles, given the processing deficit of mobile devices - certainly it was used by software I worked on for equivalently powerful phones.

And still, even though most of the high-performance bits of games software is written in what would be described as high-level, compiled languages (i.e. C++), the skills associated with assembly language processing are still required for some of the more extreme bits of optimisation, and might involve looking at the machine-code output of your compiled code, translated back into assembly language in a debugger.

Reply
alb
19/7/2018 11:04:02 am

Apologies, I am getting terms mixed up. I can't find a Spectrum example, but here is a typical page from a Commodore 64 magazine of machine code for a game called Space Blaster.

http://www.shardcore.org/retrogeek/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/space_blaster_machinecode.jpg

superfog
19/7/2018 11:22:41 am

alb is right in this context, machine code is literally the numbers the processor pulls from memory, the numbers (machine code) tell the processor what instruction to do (like add/subtract) and also things like which registers to operate on (i.e. add R0, R1 and place result in R0)

assembly language is the closet you can get to controlling this behaviour precisely (unless you handcraft the numbers by hand), although even this does guarantee the ordering of the instructions due to pipelining, out of order execution.

I still write little bits of ARM assembler, mostly for things like context switching between different processes and in things like bootloaders. Also inline assembly is used in C when the compiler environment may not have a method of telling the processor to do something, for example I have a bare metal compiler setup and if I need to switch of interrupts then I use a macro which resolves to a bit of inline assembler to issue the cpsid ARM intruction

TLDR: superfog is a boring programming type...

MENTALIST
19/7/2018 11:27:28 am

Holy shit, that IS typing out an executable directly, as a series of hex pairs. Specifically, that's a BASIC program to save a great big chunk of data to a file, which is presumably an executable.

I think that's probably the magazine publisher missing the point of machine-code programming. What's the point of publishing an example that's completely opaque?

Surely whoever produced the executable data in the first place used an assembler, rather than having to convert the machine code syntax to individual bytes in their head, or on a sheet of paper?

Actually, a bit of spur-of-the-moment research leads me to this thread:

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/3314/how-were-the-first-zx-spectrum-games-written

Which reveals that much early commercial software, including Sinclair's own, was written in Spectrum assembly language, and cross-assembled on different, more powerful computers, then copied over. That implies that some early amateur developers who wanted to build native executable code must have been doing the work of an assembler by hand, since it was sometime in 1983 before Spectrum-native assemblers came out, assuming they were inclined to acquire one.

Fuck me, I'm glad I was born 15 or 20 years too late to have to put up with all of that nonsense.

superfog
19/7/2018 11:41:43 am

MENTALIST, typing in hexadecimal code was luxury back in those days, if you want to have a fun read google up "The story of Mel"...

I'm wondering if those early magazine listings were by people who had written their own simple assemblers, it's actually not that difficult to do so, but maybe the speccie's low memory could have made a parser implemention unfeasible.

@purplephlebas
19/7/2018 10:20:28 am

While not a single creature or close to it the industry has hyped nothing more than the MMORPG.

• Truly collaborative gaming! *It is pretty awful as a single player. Oh and everyone is 13 and Russian*
• 300 trillion systems to explore! *All eerily familiar*
• Unique character creation system! *You can give an elf large boobs*
• Authentic [well known franchise] experience! *Please, we've thrown a lot of money at the licence. [Franchise favourite] will appear honest*
• Progressive story telling! *Not a lot will happen in release 1.0, and you'll pay for good DLC down the line*
• entirely freestyle experience tree! *we really can't think of a way to avoid grinding. Sorry*

Not to say I didn't enjoy EverQuest, nor waste a lot of my life chatting up a Dutch Twi'lek in SWG. But since...meh.

@purplephlebas

Reply
superfog
19/7/2018 10:21:16 am

That PS2 story is not as outlandish as it sounds, when I was working at CERN way too many moons ago there was talk of getting a load of PS2s to build commidity compute clusters, it was the days when they were changing from having "proper" supercomputers to racks of bog standard PCs networked together. The PS2 was cheaper than a PC back in the day which I think was the motivation...

If you are buying 4000 units of anything than the unit price matters a lot.

Or maybe Saddam really, really liked MGS2...

Reply
Klone
19/7/2018 11:36:37 am

The US Army did build a cluster of consoles, I forget if they were PS2 or PS3s, but it is a thing that was done.

Reply
Klone
19/7/2018 11:39:52 am

Sorry, Air Force.

https://m.phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomputer.html

But a research company did it with PS2s. Bonus: This article references the Iraq thing too.

https://www.geek.com/games/researchers-create-a-playstation-2-based-supercomputer-553365/

MENTALIST
19/7/2018 11:47:19 am

That was the PS3.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

That was the sort of high-minded experimental business you got from Ken Kutaragi, before Sony management shitcanned him in favour of getting Mark Cerny in to design a games console that concentrated on being a games console.

superfog
19/7/2018 11:53:56 am

Yep, and those PS3's were running Linux, until Sony's infamous update:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/05/how-removing-ps3-linux-hurts-the-air-force/

Col. Asdasd
19/7/2018 11:14:40 am

I guess the Xbone's 'power of the cloud' debacle is still too fresh for such a list.

I'm sure I remember a lot of fuss being made about a processor or a chip inside a gaming console that was more powerful than the computer that put the first rocket on the moon. Am I making it up? I think I might be, because presumably that kind of tech would have arrived very early on in the medium's history.

Reply
MENTALIST
19/7/2018 11:38:47 am

The Power of the Cloud issue is still kind of unproven, since as far as I can tell, the only game that claimed to make use of it to cover a performance deficit isn't due out until next year.

But Eurogamer's recent article suggests it's unlikely to be a massive triumph of leveraging cloud computing for gameplay:

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-07-04-four-years-after-it-was-announced-crackdown-3-is-in-a-tough-spot

Reply
Spiney O'Sullivan
19/7/2018 02:16:21 pm

At this point the Xbone is probably just too far gone for it to even matter if Crackdown 3 happens or not. It may just end up being the Xbone's very own Sonic Xtreme.

Paul
19/7/2018 12:37:29 pm

Many moons ago, I worked for a software company, and the business next door dumped a whole load of computers in a skip. The boss invited me to help him see if there was anything in there of use. It was full of Silicon Graphics machines. I didn’t really want one back then, but now I think that, maybe I should have helped myself to one. Oh, well.

Let’s not forget the SGI seemed to be very much involved in the dreadful Lost in Space film.

Reply
Stoo
19/7/2018 05:15:14 pm

I think machine code is directly etching 0s and 1s into a disk with a very tiny chisel?

Reply
sunteam link
19/7/2018 06:02:08 pm

Wasn't there some sort of 'Emotion Engine' guff around the time of the PS2?

Reply
Rob Uttley
19/7/2018 06:10:56 pm

I eagerly devoured that very Toni Baker book as a 13-ish year old.

It didn’t do me any harm....

He says, staring around his sad, middle-aged divorcee Billy No-Mates bloke’s rented accommodation, filled with Spectrums and Amigas...

Ok, you might have a point.

Reply
John Veness
19/7/2018 08:35:50 pm

I had the Speccy Mastering Machine Code book too. Great cover!

Reply
Gaming Mill link
20/7/2018 04:49:43 pm

Many years ago I remember learning Z80 assembly language. It was such a chore...mainly because friends liked me to 'invent' (clone) games that they'd already got. I never got paid a penny for my efforts although one of the lads used to give me a bag of extra strong mints as some sort of reward. I presume it was a reward - unless he was trying to tell me something?

When I went to uni one of my lecturers found out I knew a bit about Z80 assembly and encouraged me to learn 16-bit assembly or something...even though it had nothing to do with my course. I had a brief go with it, mainly just to appease him. I couldn't really see the point because Pascal was all the rage and it had two things going for it: it was far easier to program in and two, it left you with a compiled finish product.

I can barely remember a thing about Z80 assembly these days.

Good times!

Reply
ChorltonWheelie
20/7/2018 07:54:46 pm

I cut my coding teeth on 'Commodore 64 Machine Code Master: A Library of Machine Code Routines'.
I still mention 'Motorola 6502 assembler' on my cv.
I work for North Korea now.

Reply
lilock3
27/7/2018 01:23:02 pm

The N64/Silicon Graphics one is an odd one, because it's actually accurate. The N64 basically was a low-end Silicon Graphics workstation. The difference was that whereas an SGI machine would spend days rendering a single frame of video, the N64 would only have 1/20th of a second (I'm being kind here...). The press and public who hyped this relationship up to suggest that the N64 would be capable of producing games that looked as good as Toy Story (other CGI films are available) in real-time were in for a let down...

Reply
Chris Wyatt
21/7/2019 12:41:22 pm

I had a go with Z80 assembly not too long ago. You *had* to use it for games on the Speccy. BASIC is interpreted, not compiled, so it's orders of magnitude slower than well crafted Assembly. Also you can write your own interrupt routine which can make the controls much more responsive. Most games written in BASIC on the Speccy play like absolute turds.

I'd used easier languages before. I did a bit of Z80 mainly to prove to myself that I could do it. It was a useful programming exercise and I feel like it's helped me write tighter high level code too.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    This section will not be visible in live published website. Below are your current settings:


    Current Number Of Columns are = 2

    Expand Posts Area =

    Gap/Space Between Posts = 12px

    Blog Post Style = card

    Use of custom card colors instead of default colors = 1

    Blog Post Card Background Color = current color

    Blog Post Card Shadow Color = current color

    Blog Post Card Border Color = current color

    Publish the website and visit your blog page to see the results

    Picture
    Support Me on Ko-fi
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    RSS Feed Widget
    Picture

    Picture
    Tweets by @mrbiffo
    Picture
    Follow us on The Facebook

    Picture

    Archives

    December 2022
    May 2022
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    November 2020
    September 2020
    July 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014


    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • MAIN PAGE
  • Features
  • Videos
  • Game Reviews
  • FAQ