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You want a perfect description of what is wrong with the modern COD just watch Yahtzee's take on Black ops. Yes I know he is a smartass Brit, but sometimes a smartass Brit is what you need. I have to agree that "hooked to an IV of pop rocks" is a good description. You have to build tension, and having shit blowing up every 2.6 seconds doesn't really do that, at least for me.

But then again I'm probably not in the marketing demographic, as I have NO desire to run around like a loonie in MP knifing people.

The problem with the statement is that they are metrics of success rather than potential.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/3006-Metrics

Metrics are backward looking, not forward looking. They examine what worked, and help the developers polish existing mechanics to the hilt. That's exactly what happened with CoD. It's an incredibly polished franchise that's enjoying tremendous success as a result of iterative improvement since CoD4's innovative improvement.(And yes, CoD4 was an innovative and difficult first steps, putting persistent leveling into an asymmetrically balanced FPS was breaking new ground, and required clever design decisions that were not done in other games/genres that used leveling, such as BF2)

But metrics have limitations. They provide no information on ideas that are truly unique because if it really is a unique idea, there is no existing data. They cant have new ideas based on metrics. The most damning problem is that it fosters a risk-averse mindset, when they base all changes on metrics, and are suddenly confronted with the challenge of a new idea, they'll balk at the sudden lack of data because they're so used to having it.

So even though CoD is doing great, and they have metrics that continue to polish it, the metrics don't give them any assistance in keeping it /fresh/.

Sooner or later, the minor improvements won't be enough to hold onto an audience that's grown tired of the core game mechanics, and they'll need to do something groundbreaking again. It's been 3 games after CoD4, they should be worrying now while they're selling well, rather than wait for a future game to bomb and wonder what happened. Worse, what if they decide the future game shows that the franchise is burned out and discard it? They may never realize that it could have been revitalized for years to come if they just take a few risks with it...but the metrics of a failed sale will tell them to just ditch the franchise.

The first two episodes were fine. EP1 was released June 2006 and EP2 was released October 2007; they had a reasonable amount of content considering the (relatively) short development cycle. At that pace EP3 should have been released around February 2009; unfortunately it is now April 2011. The thing that bothers me is that we haven't really heard ANYTHING about EP3 (or Half-Life in general) other than tidbits like this. Hmm, where have I heard this before? Oh yeah, Duke Nukem Forever. My personal belief is that they have given up on episodic content and incorporated whatever they already had for EP3 into HL3, though we probably won't see the fruits of that labor for another couple of years.

And then it will vanish and no one will admit it ever existed.

And then it will come back with horns and nuclear symbols, and was apparently "always like that".

And then it will vanish and no one will admit it ever existed.

And then it will come back with horns and nuclear symbols, and was apparently "always like that".

And of course, I hurried to post the message above and I forgot to mention this other presentation they made about Sexual diversity in games and how sexuality can influence the story and gameplay : http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2520-Sexual-Diversity

... and created this nice presentation that's worth watching : http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2505-Sex-in-Games

Well I'd have to say what the worst was, in no particular order because it was ALL painful, the bad acting, the damned "meesa massa" Jar Jar ebonics, the queen and the kid (although seeing him grown up was worse, way to make a bad ass into a wussy boy!) and the ever obvious "we cooked this up to add a new toy" like that stupid race.

Frankly it is high time for "Spaceballs 33 1/3rd, the search for more money" although Lucas has managed to slaughter so much of the franchise on its own its practically a parody unto itself. To steal a little of Yahtzee's review of Force Unleashed II "proof that no once profitable franchise is so dead that you can't jump on its stomach and sell whatever liquids shoot out of its nose" which at this point is a pretty damned good description for the Star Wars franchise as a whole.

Personally I'm just waiting for the R2D2 vibrators and the Jar Jar "Messa hit that!" panties. After all why pretend to even give a shit about anything but $$$ after Phantom Menace? You might as well embrace your inner Gene Simmons George, you've done shat on the franchise so bad that 100 of the best screenwriters of all time couldn't save it now.

Or make sure your PayPal account never has significant funds by withdrawing funds frequently - okay unless you do earn lots in a very short period of time. Another example is the temporary freeze of the funds for World of Minecraft was just reading about that - recent case took weeks to undo - can happen just because of unusual pattern of activity as in that one: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/103385-PayPal-Freezes-750K-in-MineCraft-Devs-Account

I'd say that is the biggest problem with what they call "horror" games today, they think spewing guts and blood equals horror when it just equals gore porn.

Yahtzee at Zero Punctuation nailed the problem when reviewing Dead Space 2 I think. Instead of building tension with sound and glimpses of the monster the game gets two inches from your face right from the start and has some guy's face melt in front of you. That isn't horror that is just gross out. He said the game reminded him of a child that beats its head against the wall for attention, no subtlety at all.

The last truly scary game I got to play was Nosferatu: the wrath of Malachi which with VERY primitive weapons you were let loose in a castle to try to rescue your family and there was no way to memorize because the rooms would shift, even between saves. Walking into a room and finding you've got THREE coffins and have less than 2 minutes to run through there and stake their asses (because once a master vamp rose your ass was grass, damned near impossible to drop with their speed and strength) while extremely creepy but subtle music floats around in the background? Now THAT is scary!

I don't see HalfLife2, or DeadSpace2 as a horror game. They just try to shock you. If you want a true horror game, try amnesia, http://www.amnesiagame.com/
Play it at night, in the settings they recommend (lights off, no distracting sounds, headphones)

I stopped playing the first time after 1 hour and 20 minutes, because I was just to freaked out.

Zero punctuation says it better then me:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/2092-Amnesia-The-Dark-Descent

I enjoyed the game, yes it had its flaws and several obscenely annoying choke points (the assault team with automatic weapons in the warehouse of exploding barrels, and the rooftops of snipers near the end). However, it just made me want to get through and beat it.

I did win the achievement Leap of Faith, without shooting anyone, on hard too.

A agree with a lot of comments and several scathing reviews (like Yhatzee, but for me it's originality made up for it.

Like Assassin's Creed to Assassins Creed II - Ubisoft listen to the criticisims and made a much better flowing game. I expect DICE would have done the same with ME2 - hopefully kept it as a FPS too.

Um, Duke Nukem Forever has a release date now, May 3rd, 2011.

If DNF is released, surely the end times must be upon us!!!

Um, Duke Nukem Forever has a release date now, May 3rd, 2011.

So has cold fusion, it"s in the summary: end of 2011, so December 31st at the latest.

I think you mean May 26, 2009.

Um, Duke Nukem Forever has a release date now, May 3rd, 2011.

Not sure if everyone heard, but the game will be a first of it's kind as far as how you control the FPS character. Rather than "up key for move forward" you will need to move each body part individually... Check out one of the :
earlier reviews

Or they can sell games at "impulse buy" prices to get folks through the door and then hope they can also sell them something more expensive, like I've seen my local Gamestop do a time or two. That is one of the things I like about Good Old Games, pretty much everything on the site is at impulse buy purchases, but hell wandering around retail you never know what you'll find.

Just this weekend I popped into Fred's with my GF to pick up some compressed air I perused through their disc stack while she was looking at housewares and found Mercenaries II for $6. Since I had seen Yahtzee's review which stated while braindead it was still mindless fun I figured what the hell. I gave it to my nephew who is having quite a blast hijacking tanks and blowing up buildings.

So while I have no doubt eventually online will beat retail for PC (especially thanks to all the stores only carrying console games for the most part) as long as there are cheap games to be had folks will still shop at B&M. With consoles I don't see retail going away until the game companies finish fucking everyone with first use killing keys tied to consoles, which frankly will be suicidally dumb. Most folks I know with consoles trade the games they are bored with for discounts on new titles and thus buy more new games, but frankly it wouldn't be the first time greed destroyed a market.

What does that have to do with banned x360s being cheap and plentiful? What does that have to do with the fact that counting used and refurbs you are probably looking at 3 to 1 on x360 VS PS3 in the marketplace, thus helping to drive used units even cheaper? What does that have to do with MSFT's ban hammer creating a huge pile of pre hacked x360s that you can simply drop your "back up" games on? What does that have to do with DVDs being much easier then BDs to download?

Oh right, absolutely nothing, you just wanted to wave your "I have a PS3" fanboy flag. Well good for you, here is a prize. Of course it doesn't change the fact that part of what I do for a living is help to wire people's homes so they can get the most out of their equipment, therefor have probably a little more experience than you in this area, and have found more than a few PS3s being used almost exclusively* as high end BD players. So enjoy your console and feel free to ring in when you actually have something to say other than "PS3 Roxorz!"

*- Almost exclusively in that with the exception of God of War and a few other first party titles the PS3 just plays BDs. If given a choice between the same game on both platforms I've noticed they will nearly always pick the x360 due to the much nicer multiplayer experience on XBL.

I wrote about the disastrous Star Wars Galaxies "New Game Enhancements" in my June 2007 Escapist article "Blowing Up Galaxies."

You know you're going to get caught when you sell this stuff from the US, under your own name, on big name websites.

According to another article, that isn't even what got him caught. Instead, it was that he emailed a spreadsheet containing the details of his criminal enterprise to his work email for his day job.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/escape-to-the-movies/2552-Tron-Legacy

Nice review...

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/105665-Woman-Claims-to-Own-the-Sun (escapistmagazine.com) Not so sure about the having to live on the sun for three years though...

I noticed earlier on my news rounds that Lucas has already denied this

Consider these cases:

1. I post 1.4gb of credit card numbers online in the ideal that it will destroy the financial system and create world anarcho-socialism.

My bank sends me a new card with a new number and new expiration date. I am inconvenienced during the time I can't use that card.

2. You write a novel; it takes you two years. I post it online in Kindle, Nook and Sony reader formats.

Hard and soft cover sales are unlikely effected. The fans of the author shun the pirated copy.

3. You take out $20m in loans to make a movie or a video game, and you spend five years of your life on the project, hoping that you can leverage this into a career. I post your game or movie online before it is released.

This happens quite often. Hollywood and the gaming studios are posting record profits. As for how you manage to leverage a $20 million dollar loan on your debut, I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.

We'll never know how sales are affected because we will never know if the people downloading would have bought it anyway,

From http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/experienced-points/7225-Experienced-Points-Piracy-Numbers:
How many people use the pirated version as an extended demo?

Assuming someone tries a game and then goes out and buys it, they are basically indistinguishable from the previous group who buys it and then "pirates" it. They're just doing it in a different order. In any case, these two groups combined simply can't account for more than one in nine downloads.

However, if you're willing to entertain an anecdote (which is the only thing we have to work with in a situation like this where nobody will show their cards to anyone else) then the story of iPhone game Tap-Fu is fairly instructive. The creators tracked both pirates and customers as they submitted high scores. They even kept track of how many people (as identified by their device) played as a pirate and then later as a legit customer. The result:

Not one. Ever.

Remember that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data". One case doesn't describe the industry in general. Also remember: None!

We may never know for sure, but there are indications.

...but what's really lost is the newness of the material. If your neighbor reads the newspaper, figures out which are the good stories, and then tells you about them while you're fishing, what incentive do you have to buy the newspaper?

The experience of not receiving the stories as remembered by my neighbor. His ideals on which are the "good stories" probably differ from mine.

We -- the hackers of today -- need to think long and hard about this. By destroying the ability of others to profit from their work,

Wait. What? Also from the Escapist article linked above:

How rampant is piracy?

In 2008, Reflexive looked at the people who submitted high scores for Ricochet Infinity and found that 92% of all players were using pirated copies of the game. Also that year 2DBoy reported 90% piracy on World of Goo. Last year developer Beautiful Game Studios' claimed that Championship Manager was the victim of a 90% piracy rate. During the week the Demigod was released, publisher Stardock found that 85% of all players looking for a game were pirates. All of these are PC titles.

It's very interesting how close all of these numbers are, despite the diversity of the games themselves. Casual and hardcore. Esoteric and mainstream. Indie and big-budget. DRM and DRM-free. N

Having virtual farm is pointless if you can have a real one.

So I guess you don't play military shooters either because you could join the real army? Just because you could do something in real life, doesn't mean it is practical or worth the effort. Let alone the fact that most games portraying "real-world" activities have as much to do with the real world as an alien shooter.

And more important - what fun is doing chores?!

This, this and this link explain quite well why the chores of FarmVille are "fun".

I think it's pretty commonly known that paypal sucks. Not that long ago Paypal locked the account of the indie developer of Minecraft for no good reason, holding over $600k hostage.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2414-Facing-Controversy

This link contains a discussion on gaming controversy, and provides a detailed look at what happened to Six Days in Fallujah.

Extra Credits make a compelling case

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/1923-Innovation

Not all. Some play that tradeoff game until consumers protest enough. In heaven.... http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/comics/stolen-pixels/8286-Stolen-Pixels-241-The-Gaming-Afterlife

What if Zynga had done this, do you think FB would have banned them for months?

Zynga DID do this, but yeah, FB doesn't have the balls for that.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/104556-Zynga-Sued-Over-Facebook-Leak

Personally I feel you can't trust a demo

FTFY. I can't count how many times the game as a whole sucked much more than the few moments they put on the demo.

Personally, I like Zero Punctuation reviews.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/comics/critical-miss/8093-Critical-Miss-34

The Escapist's webcomic Critical Miss seems disturbingly accurate.

Actually, that term is often used for games with 3D graphics but 2D gameplay (Smash Bros., Kirby, New Super Mario Bros., LittleBigPlanet) OR for games that have 2D graphics and 3D gameplay (Golden Axe, Streets of Rage, Toejam & Earl).

In short, "2D" and "3D" aren't great terms alone to describe videogames - there's many ways they can be applied. As it stands, we could end up with a 3D game played in 2D in 3D vision. (Smash Bros. 3D, anyone?)

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/892-2-5D-Hoedown

Yahtzee has a bit of commentary on the stupidity of these changing terms at the start of that video.

Brazil wasn't always a haven for piracy. After all, up until the mid-'90s, the games market in Brazil was overwhelmingly legal; companies would officially launch and provide support for consoles, such as Tectoy (Sega) and Gradiente (Nintendo). The piracy epidemic only came about with the combination of exceptionally high taxes (EGM Brazil estimated in their March 2005 edition that at least 45 percent of the price of a PC game consisted of taxes), the low income of most Brazilians, the lack of an effective government anti-piracy program and, ironically, the very factor that helped make games more mass-market: the change of media from cartridges to CDs, making it much easier to copy games.

For many years now, Brazilian society has seen piracy not just as commonplace, but as the default way of buying a game. This has had a profound impact on society in general and those who play games in particular.
...
What can we say will happen in other countries where piracy is becoming more prevalent? If big markets, such as the U.S. and Japan, become more afflicted by piracy, you can reasonably expect the industry will shrink and that hardcore gamers will probably be the most affected. After all, the people who are more inclined to pirate games are younger, more tech oriented and, above all, spend more of their time and income on games. Losing these players wouldn't be a death blow to the industry, but you could expect publishers and developers to compensate by trending toward casual games and MMOGs (one of the few types of PC games that is still hard to pirate).

If Brazil's example teaches us anything, it's that the games industry is more vulnerable to piracy than it may be willing to admit. After all, games in Brazil went from a legitimate marketplace to an underground economy in less than half a decade. It demonstrates that if the conditions are just right, it's not all that hard for piracy to become the norm.

Is this the inevitable future? I hope not. But the current economic crisis will make the lure of piracy stronger than ever. You can be certain that both gamers and the unscrupulous will act upon this temptation, creating a more extensive pirate infrastructure in the process and laying the seeds for a difficult future for the games industry.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_201/6059-A-Nation-of-Pirates.2

The first is out here.

A quick search through visible comments (sorry I couldn't be arsed to click enough times to load them) all showed no mention of 'Loading', so I assume no yet mentioned the awesome LoadingReadyRun's rebuttal:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/loadingreadyrun/1629-Scientists-Rebuttal-to-ICP

The first thing that came to my mind when I read this was "And how many people on this council are going to use their new power to further their own personal interests in the game?" Eve is such a cutthroat environment that *anything* that blurs the line between player and developer will only cause problems and bring into question the developers' objectivity. There have already been several scandals involving CCP employees caught playing the game. This will only cause more problems.

Yahtzee? I didn't know you read slashdot....

However, if you publish, then you may inspire people with actual marketable skills - coders, artists, QA people - to get on board and develop a demo of it.

Most likely not, and anyone you do attract isn't going to have any sort of proven track record. Your project is 99% likely to fail, regardless of what you do.

But if you don't publish, if your strategy is "Oooh, we have a great idea, but it's so great that we can't tell you what it is you until you sign an NDA", then you're 100% guaranteed to fail.

So make with the idea, and don't blow another opportunity like the one you just pooched by failing to provide a link to your design in a forum populated by people who could have helped you.

Better luck next time. Really, you're going to need it.

The Escapist: Why Your Game Idea Sucks

Every game developer has thousands of ideas of their own. They could not care less about yours.

Unless your game concept is a one in a million idea that only comes around once a decade (to change the face of the gaming industry and inspire a thousand and one clones), there is no market for it.

Because seriously, that's what The Escapist forum claims to be: The Internet's version of the Lighthouse of Alexandria I agree: no forum should treat its users badly or be run by whiny little mods, but when a forum makes some grandiose claim to being a bright shining example of enlightenment and then acts like this, that's not only behaving badly, that even worse.

After the community manager unbanned everyone, the follow-up posts in that thread are all fan-boyish groveling which I totally don't understand. "We shouldn't use adblockers anyway!! Thanks for unbanning! Much respect!!" Respect for what? Taking the boot off your throat? Here's some bannable "browsing preference advice:" don't read The Escapist.

Really? I'm looking at page 7 and it's almost entirely people screaming BAN ME! ADBLOCK IS AWESOME! BAN ME! Or is that just some of us going over there and acting like idiots?

After the community manager unbanned everyone, the follow-up posts in that thread are all fan-boyish groveling which I totally don't understand. "We shouldn't use adblockers anyway!! Thanks for unbanning! Much respect!!" Respect for what? Taking the boot off your throat? Here's some bannable "browsing preference advice:" don't read The Escapist.

Hmm ... bizarre neurological reaction to ordinary stuff ... sounds like the woman who became chronically easily aroused after falling off her Wii.

Employees are now working at least 12 hours per day, six days a week, yet the letter claims they are being increasingly disregarded and dehumanized by management.
Working conditions at RockStar

Maybe we need unions again?

Yahtzee did a tutorial video on this which he cleverly disguised as a review of the game Bioshock:

Zero Punctuation: Bioshock

To paraphrase, "Bioshock isn't like System Shock II, it is System Shock II.... the bad guy might as well be Shodan with a waistcoat and a copy of Atlas Shrugged... PSI powers are now Plasmids, the Hybrids are now Splicers and the wrench is now... well it's still a wrench but a different sort of wrench... everything that was cyberpunk then is steampunk now..."

At The Escapist, there was a summary of this year's gaming-related April Foolery. The article had one actually useful tidbit of information.

I now know a good acronym synonym for "gearscore", which is the current fetish on every WoW Looking-For-Group chat channel.

It's "Equipment Potency EquivalencE Number (EPEEN)"

Here you go: Experienced Points: Piracy Numbers
How rampant is piracy?

In 2008, Reflexive looked at the people who submitted high scores for Ricochet Infinity and found that 92% of all players were using pirated copies of the game. Also that year 2DBoy reported 90% piracy on World of Goo. Last year developer Beautiful Game Studios' claimed that Championship Manager was the victim of a 90% piracy rate. During the week the Demigod was released, publisher Stardock found that 85% of all players looking for a game were pirates. All of these are PC titles.

It's very interesting how close all of these numbers are, despite the diversity of the games themselves. Casual and hardcore. Esoteric and mainstream. Indie and big-budget. DRM and DRM-free. Newly-launched titles and and games which have been been out for a year. All of them are from different companies. Yet the piracy numbers are within a few percentage points of each other. I think that, unless we're going to imagine that all of these disparate parties are somehow forming this conspiracy to over-hype the effects of piracy, we can be very confident that the 90% figure is a pretty reliable number.

I don't know why you bother to contest this, anyway. It's almost as common knowledge as saying, "the average PC user is a drooling idiot." Based on the people I have met, I am actually surprised it's only 90 percent; I expected it to be more like 95 percent. No doubt, 9% of those legitimate customers were too stupid to pirate it, and the remaining 1% were the ones with morals.