Recently it became a widely reported news item that the Xbox 360’s lack of a guaranteed hard disc drive was “holding back” the development of Grand Theft Auto IV. But in a thinking, reasoning reality, this shouldn’t have been news at all. Having to struggle against the technical limitations of all consoles is, indeed, one of the chief challenges (one might say problems) with the multi-platform development strategy in place at the major publishers. During the PS2/Xbox time period, the PS2 “held back” dozens of games because of its own lack of a hard drive and mostly inferior specifications. Now the tables have reversed, but multi-platform developers are still mostly doing what they have always done – develop for the lowest spec machine and then port upwards.

At any rate, there is nothing in the Microsoft requirements that says a game can’t work better with a hard drive as long as the game works at all without one. In other words, developers for the 360 are quite able to take advantage of the hard drive if they have the time, ability and inclination to implement a system that can work in either case.

I honestly didn’t start this journal intending solely to criticize dopey game industry articles, but here’s another that I can’t resist, entitled “Why Is Game Dialogue So Cheesy?” In order to investigate this issue (which is, to be fair, true and a legitimate concern), our author speaks to just two sources: a publisher-side producer at Vivendi Universal, and a fellow game journalist – incredibly, at no point is anyone who has actually written game dialogue consulted. I suppose it wasn’t deemed important enough for an article that is merely pretending to be about the dialogue and story in video games. Unfortunately, it goes downhill from there:

This is the sort of thing to which we developers ought to pay more attention – in response to Denis Dyack’s rather frenzied comments on how games ought to be marketed, industry journalist N’Gai Croal runs a piece in which he asks a marketer about how game should be developed. Now, I don’t particularly agree with what Mr. Dyack has been saying (more on that later, perhaps), but to turn the tables on him this way strikes me as pointless and condescending. Allowing this moronic marketing rejoinder to what is actually a real and legitimate concern from a genuine creator in our industry only highlights the disrespect with which the industry treats its own lifeblood. Am I being too harsh? After all, maybe this person has some useful insights. Why don’t we take a look:

As a cost-saving measure, Activision has joined the ranks of publishers that do not print the full credits for a game in the accompanying manual. Rationally, this may seem like a small, perhaps inconsequential loss in the overall battle for the recognition of talent and hard work (the credits can still be seen in-game, after all). But it’s somehow saddening all the same. Not everyone hungers for fame or recognition beyond that of one’s close friends, but as a kind of professional courtesy it doesn’t seem prohibitively expensive. A name in print is nice, as any journalist will tell you.