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You sure 'bout dat?

So I guess we're calling any post which disagrees with you a hyperbole?

So you are saying Pac-Man was a pretty version of Tetris? Donkey Kong? What about Unreal or Unreal Tournament? Or Quake? Doom? Those games may have had something resembling a story or plot, however they were pretty much a joke. Gamers loved those games because they had fun gameplay and some of them had an immersive environment.

I used GTA as an example because of the gameplay, not the perspective. In fact, the only version I played was GTA 2, and it had a satellite view likely due to limitations of the machines it played on. The artifical view certainly made it less immersive--how often are you floating 100 feet above your body?

I also don't think you understand what makes an RPG. That genre is more or less based on the principle of the user creating a character and working with the character to make it grow. Any stories are usually for explaining why the character is there or give the character something to do. They are often simplistic at best, but accepted because the story isn't the reason the game was bought in the first place.

There are very few videogames where the story isn't total laughable crap. Warcraft 2 is one, however the story is in the manual, not the game.

When I complain about cutscenes, I am saying nothing should stop gameplay. Ever. I don't mind the villan chatting away or clues being given or something being presented, however I should still be able to control my character. They should just play the sound clip and let me hack away at the beast.

...and then you go into the fixed camera of the Resident Evil games? Have you ever tried to play them??? I had #3 and Zero, and the fixed camera made moving and targeting quite difficult. Yeah, I suppose this series was one exception where the story was a great compliment to the game. However the interface didn't work. Just look at all the complaints about the "tank" like interface.

Resident Evil's clunky remote-control-tank control interface was a necessary evil ... But here is the same crappy control we had in 1996 made worse by the small directional pad and tiny graphics of the DS. In some of the wider shots, it can be very difficult to see which way your avatar is facing, and since facing is the basis for movement in RE's turn-left/right-push-up-to-walk-forward control layout, this can create some frustrating moments. Okay, I admit it: I wanted to smash my DS even more than I wanted to smash my PS1 controller 10 years ago.
-- Will ' Jayson' Hill -- Resident Evil: Deadly Silence Review

What about card games? They are nothing like a movie. They have no plot. From what I've seen, my mother seems to play them the entire time she is home, and she is retired, so that is a lot of time. If the game doesn't entertain her, then why does she play it so much. The only other games she plays are hangman, the memory game (where you match blocks with the same symbol), some sort of line game, and a codebreaker game. None of those have movie qualities or have a story. I know these are the only games she plays because I fix her computer nothing else is installed.

I know video games and movies are not realistic. I was talking about realizm of the objects and such. No one is going to belive a game which is just made up of simple geometric shapes and blobs...unless that is part of the game. If you use characters which look like real people or at least some reasonable facsimile, trees, mountains, dirt paths and such, the user will be much more likely to believe the environment.

By the way, you separate paragraphs using the <p> tag.

• Pitfall
• Spy Hunter
• Tron

Then you're behind the times. Here's one story, here's another, and, what the heck, one more.

The timeline goes something like this: Valve said before E3 that an Xbox version of Half-Life 2 was in the works. Not long after E3, a guy at Microsoft (David Hufford, a product manager in the Xbox group) was quoted in the Puget Sound Business Journal as saying that the Xbox version of Half-Life 2 wasn't coming. About 24 hours later, Valve had reconfirmed that Xbox would get a version of Half-Life 2 and, in fact, the online version of article in the PSBJ had been CHANGED (as opposed to corrected/retracted - a practice I despise) to remove the reference to Half-Life 2 not coming to Xbox.

Now, obviously, this is something that could change down the line (the earliest possible date for Xbox Half-Life 2 would probably be summer 2004) if Valve decides that the Xbox hasn't got the juice to do the game justice, but right now at this moment an Xbox version is in the pipeline.

Set 40 years before the events of the television series, the Battlestar Galactica game tells the story of a young Ensign William Adama in his first assignment aboard the Galactica. As the young hero, players will have to turn the tide against an overwhelming Cylon fleet as they tangle with swarms of fighters in frenetic space combat over a series of story driven missions ranging from search and destroy and escort sorties to infiltration and reconnaissance operations. To help tip the scales in their favor, players will be able to take control of five different ships including a Colonial heavy bomber and a Cylon Raider, each with their own unique flight models and weapons loadouts.

Run Linux, Windows, Mac, whatever on the backend, use your PS2 on the front end. Even use the handy DVD remote. Available from BroadQ or shortly from GameShark it has all the functionality I can glean from the Prismi?q box without yet another piece of hardware.

official - look at the 11th answer

alternative - Dexter

In games, the job of graphics is to maintain a consistent level of visual abstraction. We use computer graphics in games to build the impression of a character, a shiny sword or an alien world of fantasy in the minds of the players.

Back in the 8-bit days we only had low resolution 2D graphics; still, that was enough to give us a chance to experience our dreams on screen. Sure, the cars didn't look like much but we were racing like champions. The football had a few corners in it, but our team still kicked ass.

The limited graphics we were treated to were symbolic or iconic; now they are often aiming for realistic representation. Ironically, as we now have the capability to display much greater degree of realism in games, our minds jump at what they do best; pick out artifacts, inconsistencies in the patterns of representation. Realism is a double edged sword, when we are represented a picture that looks almost real we become more likely to pick at its faults than its merits.

Games as a visual media are closer to cartoons than they are to movies. Live video is rarely used, instead, the images are generated with modeling programs and digital paintbrushes. It's no accident that some of the greatest designers like Sid Meier and Warren Spector refer Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics as one of the most important pieces of literature to read if you want to make games. When I say literature, I mean it - don't be put off by the fact that the book itself is in cartoon format.

Just as well it's no accident that recent gaming masterpieces like Zelda: Wind Waker and Metroid: Prime avoid representing realistic humanoids altogether. It's also easy to see Pixar's reasoning in animating worlds that have no humans at all; living toys, silly monsters and talking fish slip under our radar of artifact perception.

Abstraction extends into all areas of game design; properly abstracted games let you complete the play in your head. Grand Theft Auto series leaves the main character almost a blank slate and The Sims speak a sort of abstract gibberish that relays the message via tone of voice. The grand master of abstractions in recent history - ICO - should not be missed by anyone who is even remotely into games.

The general ignorance about the role of graphics was summed up best by someone who said, a few years back, "Soon all games will be done with polygons so they will all look the same."

They could. Luckily for us, they don't have to.

Jouni

but this also opens up the ability to trade save game files online via a PC

The Playstation 2 has a similair device available for it, a 'Sharkport' (though a quick Google seems to reveal that they've renamed it to an 'Xport'). Taking the save files from the cartridge, it turns them into small-ish binary (200kb) files that can be transferred over the net, and stored for backups.

But there is a much more interesting thing you can do with them, assuming the Gamecube Panasonic Media Storage Card is at least similar in operation. Opening up the save files in a hex-editor and editing what you find does allow cheating and manipulatipn of the game that would normally be impossible. I've seen some hacked PS2 saves do things which not even a memory editor like an Action Replay/Gameshark was capable of. E.g. In 'Soul Reaver 2', the game would save the name and location of a dropped weapon in the save file, a little hex editing lets the player change the weapon to anything, any model stored in the games data, from a background scenery model to the last boss.

Unless the gamecube savefiles are encoded in some way that makes editing hex variables difficult ((say for example some form of compression (I'd liken it as trying to hex edit a *.ZIP file to change one of the files inside accurately)), Gamecube owners might want to get excited about the new cheating and manipulating potential for their games. I can say that, at least in the case of PS2 games, it does increase their lastability.

I just got one of the new GBC Gamesharks, with the snapshot feature. Creating Snapshots is easy, but when you go to load them back into the game, your Gameshark's memory is wiped, and it ceases to work. You have to ship it to Interact *AND* give them $10 to fix it.

For a product that lasted 10 minutes, Thanks, but no thanks. I returned two of them... might repurchase in the future if they get their act together.

Don't just take my word for it, check their message boards.

The rub is that people will have to get the new one, since the GBA's screen is horrible.

It's not horrible, just dark. The gamma of the Game Boy Advance display is 4. Gamma-correcting a game's graphics before running it on the hardware will fix the display, especially if you have a cover light or a worm light. The Doom Advance developers knew this and cranked up the brightness, and the game looks wonderful (even though it may look washed out in magazines that assume that all screenshots have a gamma of 2.2 like a CRT). The fact that Castle of the Moon 1.0 didn't gamma correct is a bug that may be fixed in later printings.