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Yeah, it looks absolutely ghast... I'm sorry, what were you saying? I wasn't paying attention...

EQII is a game that will focus most of our content on the individual and smaller groups, while EQ's endgame encourages large raid forces to play the high-level content.

This just means the gfx engine can't handle the amounts of people it requires to create anything what made EQ great.

Jesus, it also looks ghastly.
With the behemoth World of Warcraft looming over the genre I forsee that the only reason this project might not flop would be the well known IP.

Final Fantasy I = NES game

Final Fantasy II = SNES game (in America at least)

Final Fantasy I = NES game

Final Fantasy II = SNES game (in America at least)

About twelve weeks ago I purchased a new graphics card for my computer system. My system is almost exclusively built for gaming and includes a superb 5.1 surround system. I purchased a Radeon 9200 AGP video card which is the low end of the new cards. I was running a 32 meg Viper V770D which is a great card but didn't support the TNL (Texture and Lighting) one of the "newer" effects that hardware gives you. I had a couple of games that required this and I couldn't run so I purchased the new card with 128meg of ram expecting some pretty good performance increases.

To tell the truth other than getting the TNL support the Radeon 9200 was completely unimpressive. The Viper ran just as good with 32 meg of ram and was three years old. Anyways I downloaded the demo of "Far Cry" which, low and behold, happens to be the "first game of a series of new ones being released to take advantage of the new hardware" these games include the upcoming releases Half Life-2 and Doom-3 (yes they are coming out and very soon). Anyways this unknown german developer releases this Far Cry game so I download the demo and "I CAN'T RUN IT"..... ok fine something is wrong with the demo (lots of demos are trash and can't be ran by many systems).

I don't think much of it till about two weeks ago when I decide I want an even better video card and I put out some "serious cash" for a Radeon 9800 PRO 128meg 8xAGP card. Well I got the performance boost I suspected from a new video card and then some. This card has it's own fan on it and also requires not only power from the AGP slot but has to be connected directly to the power supply (preferably a 300watt one which fortunately is what I have).

Well after the new upgrade I decide to try Far Cry again and boy did it run! This game is the most impressive FPS graphically that I have ever seen! I can't even begin to describe how incredible this new technology is but suffice to say it's worth every bit of the 250 bucks it'll cost you for a good video card.

I have heard a lot of people on /. State that they can get into platform gaming a lot cheaper than PC gaming. Let me fill you in on something peeps, go check out game reviews like the one at www.gamespot.com for Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic and others that are available on PC and platform systems both. You will notice that not only do the PC versions normally have extra content but also that they typically always get the "HIGHEST MARKS" of any of the versions available.

You may pay a little more but if a truly great game comes out and the PC version has a little extra content and also the best graphics, sound and controls of all the versions then to me "it's worth every penny".

they're playing whack a mole!

s/remember/remembers

By the way, I also found a cool gamespot article about "Groundbreaking games from computer history," one of which is Stunt Island.

Yes.

You've made your point, though. I was absolutely shocked when I realized how few new series were PC-exclusive. Almost everything is released both on console and PC, or is a continuation of old series that took off back when the PC/console sales ratio was tilted more towards the PC.

Now, that doesn't mean that there are necessarily less games for the PC. Given the number of profitable consoles and gaming systems out there, exclusives are are *lot* less common, for the PC or for a console.

The main disadvantage of the lack of exclusives is that developers have to go least-common-denominator when doing their design work.

They can afford to open the previous generation's source because they want a large body of programmers familiar with their engines. This puts pressure on developers to chose an id engine over someone else's.

Would be good in theory - if each different generation of theirs engines where similiar. For better or worse, they are often not. The obvious case here being the jump from Doom to Quake, but even each iteration of the Quake engine has had significant changes that would make a change over far from trivial.

Case in point would be Daikatana - if anybody was going to be "familiar" with id's engines, you'd think it would be a former co-owner and employee. Originally Daikatana was designed and written using the Quake engine, which John Romero had been working with while it was being develop. Then, when the Quake II engine made it's first appearances, Ion Storm decided to change over to it; afterall it would give them coloured lighting, hardware acceleration and it was based on the Quake engine, so it couldn't be that hard, right?

Unfortunately, as they found out, the differences between the two were enough so that large sections of Daikatana had to be thrown away (see this, if you want to check that out). Admittedly there were many other issues with Daikatana's development, but even Romero himself said that basically 11 months of coding with the Quake engine were useless once they switched to Quake II.

Plus, id have done other things, outside of OSS, that have contributed to the community. Michael Abrash, who worked on the Quake engine, was also writing for Dr. Dobb's Sourcebook at the time. The subject of his articles? The tech that was going into the Quake engine - often with sourcecode. To put this in perspective, this was over 6 months before Quake was even released, yet there they were showing code on how to do BSP tree generation and rendering, descriptions of their lightmap system and so on and so forth. Stuff that, essentially, ended up in the game when it was released about half a year later. Hardly in their company's best interests if they want to be purely self-servicing.

Hmmmmm... that's starting to sound like a id fanboy rant, but there you go.... :)

Does anyone find this agreement weird considering one of their last titles was Beyond Good and Evil?

Here is some new news for you.

"The company's net income for the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2003, was $3.3 million, compared to a net loss of $5.4 million for the same period in 2002."

""These results mark an important milestone for Interplay. In 2003, we had a return to operating profit and substantially reduced our debt. However, we continue to operate under cash constraints," said Herve Caen, chairman and CEO, Interplay."

Sounds like they are still having financial difficulties, but it seems they haven't been kicked out yet.

Unless they're going to develop it under a bridge somewhere, it's not going to get done.

As usual, IGN is slightly off the mark. According to GameSpot's article, Factor 5 isn't just moving on to "other platforms", which most people would reasonably identify as the PlayStation 2 or the Xbox. Instead, they're moving onto the next round of console and/or portable systems.

According to Eggebrecht, the only reason Factor 5 has stopped making GameCube games was that they've abandoned current-generation hardware altogether. "It is simply because we have moved into next-generation development," he said.

I wonder how this might affect the suit, if at all with HardOCP Labs?

see here for story

Don't worry, you can take your games along too.

You make a computer based reality to keep them miserable, not happy.

Well, that explains Enter the Matrix. (And Matrix Revolutions, now that I think of it.)

In a just a couple generations Pixar will use render farms of GPUs on the PCI Express bus and the CPU won't matter. In a couple years high end video games will look just as good to the eyes of many people as movies like Shrek.

The following was snipped from the Firaxis website:

Sid Meier's Gettysburg!, released in October 1997, was voted "Wargame of the Year" by the game industry's top opinion leaders, including Computer Gaming World magazine and GameSpot online; and was also awarded with "Editor's Choice" awards from both PC Gamer and OGR. Sid Meier's Antietam!, released in December 1999, was awarded "Wargame of the Year" by Computer Gaming World magazine. Relive the excitement, drama, and action of America's bloodiest day.

The following was snipped from the Firaxis website:

Sid Meier's Gettysburg!, released in October 1997, was voted "Wargame of the Year" by the game industry's top opinion leaders, including Computer Gaming World magazine and GameSpot online; and was also awarded with "Editor's Choice" awards from both PC Gamer and OGR. Sid Meier's Antietam!, released in December 1999, was awarded "Wargame of the Year" by Computer Gaming World magazine. Relive the excitement, drama, and action of America's bloodiest day.

Microsoft is already working on a way to port xbox games to the PC. It's called XNA and was shown at this years Game Developers Conference.

Read here for more info: http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/03/24/news_60921 25.html

Megaman is coming out soon for GBA, but only the 5 Gameboy versions. See Gamespot for that. For the NES games, you'll have to go to the GameCube.

I'm with you on Kirby, though. And I like the Lolo puzzle series (I, II, & III), but I doubt there's a market for it. I only mentioned it because Lololo and Lalala were enemies in one of the Kirby games.

You clearly have no understanding of the game development process. At all.

Hiring some "U.S. coder buddies" and some "Russian artists" is not the way to make a game that you can "sell like hotcakes." It is the way to make a game like Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, which has the distinction of being the *only* game in the history of Gamespot to recieve a 1.0. For your reference, the developer's website is at Stellarstone.com.

There are several problems with this, but it boils down to a couple of key points:

1) Making games with today's technology is very hard in the amount of time allotted to development. Basically, you have one and a half to two years to rewrite *every component of a game.* Every time we write a new engine, we reinvent the camera. We reinvent user input, and a method of displaying that UI to the user. A new networking protocol, graphics engine, AI, physics, oh yeah, and game mechanics. Considering that there are entire companies devoted to developing each of these components, and have teams comparable or larger then we have for an entire game, one can see that it is non-trivial. Writing a typical game engine requires not one or two coders, but a team full of them (typically 10-20 for a medium to large title).

2) Making games is an iterative process. This is what *really* kills overseas development, and why I feel my job (I'm a graphics programmer) is pretty secure for at least the forseeable future. You can't plan out every aspect of your game. You can plan how you think it will work, and you can implement it. But if you don't leave time in your schedule to rework that when you are done, your game will suck. Designers and artists regularly come to my desk and ask me to help them prototype something. They need code support to try something different out in game. And they need it *now.* They can't wait 24 hours everytime they need some little piddily task completed so that they can see how something works.

You say that the common US developer is shoddy, and this I cannot disagree with. But the common US game developer is far from shoddy. We work hard, and we work smart. And we are paid well for what we can do because few others can do it (in what other IT field can you expect to make 75K with two years of experience?) Out of the 30 or so coders whom I've worked closely with on various projects, only two have been useless. And both of them have since left the game industry because it was too hard for them.

You may not believe me. After all, what do I know? But John Carmack gave a speech at GDC this year which pretty much touched on the points that I made above.

It's a total rip off of Resident Evil 4 for Gamecube ... (yes I know it's not out yet, but come on ... it's SO obvious)

http://www.capcom.co.jp/bio4/

http://cube.ign.com/articles/499/499572p1.html

http://www.gamespot.com/gamecube/adventure/residen tevil4/screenindex.html

according to a gamespot article, Sony is also considering using Blu-Ray drives in the PS3...

The was announced yesterday, and there's a movie at Gamespot

You'll have to be a member (free membership) to get it there, but it's mirrored at other places around the web, including a few fan sites (such as EQii.com).

I watched it yesterday -- it's quite excellent.

I think they should all have completed Descent

Since they IR network and transfer data objects, I'm working on an infectious Tamagotchi plague. It's for the children's sake.

They need to check their facts a little better. The article claims that Nintendo created and released the SongBoy adapter for the Gameboy.

It was in fact made by a third party and resulted in a lawsuit and settlement.

Also of note is Rayman. Although the background music isn't that spectacular, the game does have some incredibly surreal music-oriented background scenery.

Another game worth mention is Zoop. This game's background music will get lodged in your head and you'll find yourself humming it for a week if you're not careful. This game is worth tracking down, even today. Although it's written for MS-DOS, it's run flawlessly under every DOS environment I've thrown at it (including several different releases of Windows and OS/2's DOS box.)

Nintendo's making profits and Sega was not. Nintendo isn't folding any time soon.

Nintendo needs to get over the gaming is for kids only thing,

They did that years ago with Conker's Bad Fur Day, and it's not like they stopped at all with the Cube; Eternal Darkness and Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes were both developed (in part) by Nintendo. In short, they have! Why does everyone still say they need to get over it? Because they also released Kirby's Air Ride? Heaven forbid that your system can play Kirby's Air Ride. I mean it's not like with Sony you're stuck with a system that can also play teletubbies or with Microsoft you're stuck with a system that can also play Spongebob Squarepants....

Seriously, do you throw out your DVD player because it can also play cartoons?

Some of the more surreal cutscenes I have found (along with a story line that makes almost no sense) are in Sega's Super Monkey Ball 2. Excellent gameplay, but the cutscenes in Story Mode involve a baby monkey (son of two of the other monkeys) sent back in time to help defeat Dr. Badboon, who is a mad scientist hell-bent on... marrying the one female monkey in the game. And apparently in order for anything to happen in the game the monkeys have to dance around singing magical Happy Fun songs (Magical Spell is Ei-Ei-Poo!). These have to be seen to be believed. (There may be some footage of the cut-scenes here if anybody's interested, although I haven't checked it out.)

If there are any other games with *more* bizarre cutscenes that run on the current generation of consoles, I'd like to hear it.

Ultima and Bard's Tale are from a time innocent enough to label all roleplaying games as simply "RPG" and be done with it. IIRC Ultima had a clock and Bard's Tale was entirely turn-based. Then there's the old D&D games (Pool of Radiance or Hillsfar, anyone?) that we got to play on seriously primitive systems like the Apple 2. That's a graphically presented second edition dungeons and dragons simulation running without any apparent slowdown on a 1.023 MHz 6502, and the gameplay was slightly cumbersome but still in many ways (the fonts come to mind) the gameplay is on par with games of today. RPGs were some of the first games to really succeed brilliantly because they primarily require imagination - though on early systems, quite a bit of complicated programming might come into play as well to make it fast.

I personally feel that Civilization and its descendants are a genre unto themselves. (Civ CTP, AlphaC, etc.) It's closely related to the genre whose bottom is something like spaceward ho and whose top is apparently MOO3, as both are empire building games. Have you noticed also that the latest simcity is starting to gain a great deal of scale? I think in a couple more iterations we'll have Simnation (now it's something like simcounty.)

Sounds like Majestic

Look out for La Pucelle to come out in early May. It's by the same developers of Disgaea (Nipon Ichii) and looks pretty damn cool. There hasn't been much information yet, but here are some sites.

At the IGDA awards, three games were given "Game Innovation Spotlights": the EyeToy, Viewtiful Joe, and WarioWare Inc. All three of these seem quite novel and worthy of the attention.

At the Experimental Gameplay Workshop, both indies and mainstream games were shown. On the indie front, this year's Indie Game Jam games (full disclosure: I co-run this event); Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates; and Zoesis' The Demon and the Princess. On the commercial front, the creator of Namco's Katamari Damashii spoke about and demoed the game ("Was it difficult to convince Namco to let you do this game?" "Of course." was even funnier with the long pause for translation between question and answer); we had presentations about WarioWare and about the explorations of time as a game mechanic (specifically in Prince of Persia, Max Payne 1 & 2, and Viewtiful Joe).

(There were a few more presentations about more academic "games": Ken Perlin's work on natural-language-programming for kids, "Haptic Battle Pong", and I forget what else, as I was developing a fever during the 3-hour EGW.)

The winner of the Indie Games Festival's web downloadable grand prize, Oasis, is a fairly original and creative game (full disclosure: I did contract work for Oasis' developers on a different project), and since this is announced at essentially the same ceremony as the IGDA awards it has a fairly significant cachet.

So I think the Reuters reporters just didn't go to the right events at the GDC.

The story itself has plenty of debatable claims. Are gamers, as the article claims, getting more conservative, or are publishers just getting extremely conservative and releasing more sequels and focusing their marketing dollars there? Hint: nobody debates the truth of the latter.

Damn -- put the wrong link... as I was saying, the current event.

Ummm... those two articles you're linking to are in reference to previous developments around a month ago, not the current event, which is what loftydog was referring to.

Second, I'm not sure why you think a game should automatically be worth less in 15 years. The gameplay is still good. The graphics have aged, but they get the job done. The original Legend of Zelda is a much larger game than, say, the latest Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen adventure. Super Mario Bros. will take a gamer who hasn't played it far longer to complete than almost any new platformer. It's hard!

So where's the lost value? Should Casablanca automatically be less just because it's old? North by Northwest is a less valuable film experience than Road Trip?

Third, and most of all, you're thinking about this from the perspective of someone who has played the original Zelda, or so I assume. If you haven't played the original Zelda... you don't know what you're talking about.

As someone who's played it, you're thinking about how much you think is reasonable to play it again. How much is reasonable to play it the first time? What about SMB, which hasn't been available in full-screen form since the SNES?

If you were picking up a game for your kids, would you buy Daredevil, new at $19.99, or would you buy Zelda? Which is a better value on the store shelves?

See, the market isn't just about you. It's about everyone. These games are being published for the first time in many years. Nintendo hasn't been cashing in on them with every system generation, or even every other. They were republished in Japan first because Nintendo knows the Japanese consider these a fine value. They were brought over here because of a great deal of interest, many complaints and such.

If you don't want the games, fine. If you want to complain, fine, it's your right. But bear it in mind the next time something you want gets cancelled, and you're making noise in public. Your complaints don't count for a piss in the wind, not because Nintendo is a filthy evil greedy corporation milking the community, but because the nutters cancel each other out.

For each of us nutters who longs for Sam and Max 2, there are dozens of people who will savage the game for its 3-D look if a petition saves it. For each of you who thinks LOZ isn't worth $20, there are dozens who do. Nintendo does real market research instead...

So I suggest you take a deep breath, relax, and buy the games pre-played at $11.99 a year from now with trade-in credit.

What's this about no killer games recently?

What's this about no killer games recently?

Actually, the slide read "Wind Waker 2: 200X", see? More like the next 6 years (but don't fret over a 990-year error.) However, IGN.com's previous interview with a Nintendo insider pretty much confirmed that another Zelda game would be on Gamecube (although that could be the multi-player Four Swords coming out, but it sounded more like a reference to a Wind Waker sequel.) Personally, I'd say by 2006, so the Gamecube can go out with a bang. As far as developers jumping ship on the Gamecube, I personally don't mind if another one like LucasArts has nothing on the agenda, since movie-licensed games that sell only on their Hollywood counterparts' names are rarely worth playing. The Gamecube's (as with most Nintendo systems) best games are the first- and second-party ones (i.e. Zelda: Wind Waker, Metroid Prime). Those alone are worth owning a $99 system, regardless of the target age group (and trust me, even Wind Waker has some humor kids wouldn't understand.)

Blizzard has yet to ever revolutionize a genre. They built their name on taking the tried and true, simplifying it a bit, and heaping on the polish. They take a few evolutionary steps, and round off the corners.

Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo - none of these franchises really did anything 'new' or 'exciting'. What they did, they did well, and they did with a distinctive style.

Excuse me? The RTS genre was hardly well established when Blizzard released the original Warcraft - it is only preceded by two games: Herzog Zwei and Dune II, so they most certainly did put a new twist on an genre that was in its infancy. Check your history here.

Many people knock Diablo as a dumbed down rogue-like, but it undeniably started off the higly popular genre of action-RPG, which has a play style that is much more adrenalyn-based than the cerebral style of the rogue-like. Prior to Diablo RPGs were stuck somewhere in CRPG Ultima*, or console Final Fantasy* copycats.

If the marketing folks really didn't think the game was viable anymore, why not release the game in its current form through their web site???

I mean, if it is so close to completion, they should be able to do a little last-minute debugging (a couple of weeks at most), put it up for sale through mail and state clearly that the game is unfinished and no future patches are planned.

It's interesting to note that LucasArts also recently canceled Full Throttle: Hell on Wheels...another game that was clearly close to completion...

The real question should be, why is LucasArts canceling projects so close to their completion dates???

Well, here's what one company that outsourced development unleashed upon the world.

A review of the "game".

The developer's "services" on their website: link

I believe This might be a good example of what outsourcing games will get you...

-B

Yeah, it's a notorious fact that Russians suck in the art of making PC games

Yeah, it's a notorious fact that Russians suck in the art of making PC games

Yeah, it's a notorious fact that Russians suck in the art of making PC games