The 8bit era is usually viewed with dewy-eyed affection, but as EvilRedEye discusses, it also produced some games that are probably best left there. Reacting to Arkedo’s Jump, made for Xbox Indie Games, he questions its lack of a save system – for if you run out of lives, you have to start over from level one. Making a game hard as a nod to nostalgia doesn’t seem to be the right approach. Older games were often hard due to hardware limitations, with constrained storage meaning repetition was needed to fill out the experience, and many games originally intended for the arcade, where finishing the game with a single credit was bad for business. While there is a place for nostalgia in game design, perhaps developers need to think a little harder about whether the mechanic they are bringing back was left behind for good reason.

The Dreamcast promised up to 6 billion players online, but as Savagehenry says, even today the reality is rather more limited. Online shooters have yet to offer games with large numbers of players as standard, Battlefield 2’s 64-player tussles are the exception rather than the norm. Course, Sony’s MAG is coming up, which will allow up 256 players and is therefore sure to make Savagehenry very happy. But is bigger really better? Can a 256-player war in MAG offer the same tight thrills as a good two-on-two match in Halo 3?

Jason_Seip discusses narrative consistency in games. Picking out Dead Space as an example, he says that presenting mining equipment as weaponry makes a lot of sense in that game’s setting, but the decision to prevent players from also using it to cut through debris and walls breaks that consistency. Trying to make a more 'realistic' experience means that developers must be vigilant for inconsistencies that create by adhering to otherwise traditional approaches to game design.

Videogames are subject to intense scrutiny at the moment, notes Peadar, from accusations of racism in Resident Evil 5 to depictions of the Japanese army in Call Of Duty: World At War. As a result, he can’t help but be concerned at the hundreds of kills he has to make in Uncharted 2. Killing goons perhaps shouldn’t be an automatic reflex, and more of a choice you are sometimes forced to make, he wonders. Uncharted 2, is of course, fundamentally a shooter, so fewer goons would mean less game, so perhaps the real issue here is that Uncharted 2 makes you identify a little too much with its world?

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