Slashdot Mirror

Top Ten Shameful Games
Virtual Boy, I liked the console, though :S
Post 16-bit Nintendo Failures
Atari Jaguar
Screwed up atari/nintendo agreement. My favourite.

Top Ten Shameful Games
Virtual Boy, I liked the console, though :S
Post 16-bit Nintendo Failures
Atari Jaguar
Screwed up atari/nintendo agreement. My favourite.

The only thing is misses? RPGs.

You may have forgotten a little title by Bioware called Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. It won game of the year at Gamespy.

Just in case you forgot to read the top of the page...

Thanks to an anonymous reader for suggesting abstruse information on Ultima creator Richard Garriott's mysterious new MMORPG, Tabula Rasa, as referenced in a recent Slashdot Games post dealing with Korean MMO behemoth NCSoft, who purchased the nascent game for "$33.4 million in stock and cash" back in 2001. An online chat transcript from early 2003 noted that "many people that worked on [cancelled MMO Ultima Online 2] are now with NCsoft working on Tabula Rasa", and more recently, a Richard Garriott lecture at the Austin Game Conference mentioned that the game "will most likely utilize a massively multiplayer metaworld for player matching and instantiated spaces for smaller groups of matched players", but almost nothing about the game has yet been revealed. The clearest indication yet comes from several recently-posted pieces of concept art, as noted earlier this week, showing an alien planet called Eera as the main setting, and mentioning such oddities as "Eeran Wastelanders [which] will
beguile you with psychic hallucinations."

FP

Answers own question: April 2004

mitch

I love how GameSpy continually puts out these best gaming etcetera opinion pieces to simply spark the fanboy debates. The last page even has some useful essential links (scroll to the bottom) that must not be missed. :)

I am not immune, however. So...

Nintendo rules the artificial demand department with the "chip shortage" of 1988 which affected Zelda II more than any other title. Hmmm.... They also seemed to have a low supply of N64 consoles in 1996. One of my fondest Christmas-ish moments was walking into a toy store on Black Friday and asking if they had any N64s. The clerk told me that he had just got off the phone with someone who had to cancel their layaway and asked if I wanted it. I simply said "no thanks."

Sony had the hype/demand machine chugging in 2000 when they launched the PS2 at more than twice the price of the Dreamcast that had a bigger library of quality games. Those lucky enough to get a PS2 that year were treated with marginal titles, a way to play their PS1 games and DVDs and not much else. Majora's Mask came out in 2000. This is one of the most misunderstood games of all time. Most players hated it due to it's manipulation of time, but it is a very fine game.

My personal favorite holiday gaming season would have to be 2002. Some of the finest games of all time came out during this season. GTA: Vice City and Metroid Prime are must have games for any (mature) gamer. Platform lovers who usually stuck with Nintendo systems would be shocked as Super Mario Sunshine proved to be a slightly above average game. The PS2 meanwhile had the incredibly superb Ratchet and Clank. Even the Xbox had a slight edge as Jet Set Radio Future was being shipped with the system, unfortunately, the only other platform game for the Xbox was the terrible Blinx so it didn't have that big of an edge. :)

Anybody remember Fighter's History?
I've never played either Crazy Taxi or Simpson's Road Rage, but Fighter's History was practically a palette shift of Street Fighter 2. Capcom took DataEast to court, and lost. The judge felt that while there were definitaly similarities, Fighter's History was a different game of the same genre.

Uncanny Simularities"

Quick Summation Half way down

I'm surprised, I remember the entire thing so vividly, but I just can't find more resources about it on the web....

Sangloth
I'd appreciate any comment with a logical basis...it doesn't even have to agree with me.

Or search yourself: PS2 Review list on gamespy

Or search yourself: PS2 Review list on gamespy

Or search yourself: PS2 Review list on gamespy

I don't mind games with violence, but I wish they would ban games that suck.

However, the games that we truely play together or even competitively, are of a different vein.

We recommend:

Jardinians - "Like Breakout, But With More Gnome Bouncing", Fun to play competitively, and you can make your own levels to challenge each other. (Just make sure you can beat your own level)

Text Twist - Kind of a word jumble game. There's a free trial, give it a chance, it's a addictive. Fun to play cooperatively.

Super Collapse 2 This is an interesting puzzle game which is best played solo.

Spider Solitare - This one was free courtesy of Microsoft. Sure it's solitare, but you can play cooperatively too.

Monopoly Party - This old stand-by never dies. We stick to classic, not the weird "party mode". The CPU's are kind of stupid, but it's still a good time, especially with more people. The best part is, nobody has to be the bank, so games go sooo much faster.

Old NES ROMS - We have a hacked xbox that has a ROM emulator loaded on it and we love to play Super Mario 2 and some of the classics. And now we're talking about building a MAME/XNES Cabinet.

...now if only I could break her into Linux.

VOIP is not just a TCP/IP connection. Based on the H.323 standard, the network must be established to support VOIP telephony to gain a QOS standard for audio and video. This basically means voice and picture packets get priority over other forms of transport on that network, and call routing is optomized depending on available telephone gateways etc.

This is not like connecting two machines via TCP/IP, and therefore is not an issue for individual users who want to connect their machines for communications purposes.

The regulations will effect entities set up for the purpose of providing a communications service for a fee; again, that does not include you using Roger Wilco or TeamSpeak to talk to grandma over the internet. Additionally, these tools will not provide the sound quality consistent with H.323 network connectivity - and will not support such services as POTS gateways or 911 service, which the service providers must also provide by law.

Don't lose any sleep over this. Individual network users have nothing to fear (unless the FCC goes completely froggy - in which case, all bets are off. However, the FCC chairman is leaning away from regulating anything on the internet - so regulating individuals is the furthest thing from his mind atm)

I don't follow Gamespy's reviews/reviewers to the T, but this article is the first I read..
http://www.gamespy.com/reviews/november03/dx2pc/in dex.shtml
..where the game, played to completion, was reviewed more thoroughly and rated four stars. Based on the reviewer's comments, it felt more deserving of less stars. It's even commented upon that the length of the game is only 15 hours compared to the 40+ of the original.

I feel the length, the already-mentioned items (odd interface, unified ammo, non-localized damage), the lack of the "Classic Deux Ex" attribute system, simplified controls... all leaves me wondering if the designers didn't really have their hearts committed to the creation process.

Everquest players are spread across hundreds of servers. A typical server on Everquest has players. Is that still massive? It's less than 100k players in a single environment...

If at some particular time of the day, nobody happens to be logged in to any Everquest server, or perhaps only 30 people are, is the game therefore not at that moment considered a MMORPG? Woops, nobody logged in right now, we're downgraded to just an RPG.

Rubies of Eventide was designed and implemented with the intent of having a large number of simultaneous, interacting players. The vagaries of marketing and business have led to their goal number of players per 'server' not being attained. I don't feel that this in any way causes them to cease to be the type of game they intended to be, a MMORPG.

Stating "Oh, they never had a lot of customers, they aren't a MMORPG" in my opinion has little communication value. If someone asked you "What genre of game is Rubies of Eventide?" would you seriously go and count the subscriber base before answering? I do not believe the majority of people asked that question would hesitate, given a brief description of the game, to answer MMORPG. So perhaps you need to inspect your definitions?

The labels for genre haven't change. There is no new MMORPG label that can be safely tacked on by publishers before the fact, they have the same one they always did, RPG or even ORPG. MM comes later when a number of people decide to start calling it that.

Simply looking at the term as used by publishers, the media and development companies will show this to be untrue. Games are labeled MM before they're even in beta. Gamespy lists MMOG as a distinct genre, and in its listing of games which fall under this genre has many games (City of Heroes and Dragon Empires) which are as of yet unpublished, so certainly they don't have over 100k subscribers... MMOG is a buzzword, publishers and the like don't hesitate to apply it when it'll benefit them. While you might not consider it to apply to games less than an order of magnitude of the number of players on a typical quake server. This is massive? A typical conceptual 'server' on everquest has only a few thousand concurrent with less than 100k subscribers, most everyone else does.

Everquest players are spread across hundreds of servers. A typical server on Everquest has players. Is that still massive? It's less than 100k players in a single environment...

If at some particular time of the day, nobody happens to be logged in to any Everquest server, or perhaps only 30 people are, is the game therefore not at that moment considered a MMORPG? Woops, nobody logged in right now, we're downgraded to just an RPG.

Rubies of Eventide was designed and implemented with the intent of having a large number of simultaneous, interacting players. The vagaries of marketing and business have led to their goal number of players per 'server' not being attained. I don't feel that this in any way causes them to cease to be the type of game they intended to be, a MMORPG.

Stating "Oh, they never had a lot of customers, they aren't a MMORPG" in my opinion has little communication value. If someone asked you "What genre of game is Rubies of Eventide?" would you seriously go and count the subscriber base before answering? I do not believe the majority of people asked that question would hesitate, given a brief description of the game, to answer MMORPG. So perhaps you need to inspect your definitions?

The labels for genre haven't change. There is no new MMORPG label that can be safely tacked on by publishers before the fact, they have the same one they always did, RPG or even ORPG. MM comes later when a number of people decide to start calling it that.

Simply looking at the term as used by publishers, the media and development companies will show this to be untrue. Games are labeled MM before they're even in beta. Gamespy lists MMOG as a distinct genre, and in its listing of games which fall under this genre has many games (City of Heroes and Dragon Empires) which are as of yet unpublished, so certainly they don't have over 100k subscribers... MMOG is a buzzword, publishers and the like don't hesitate to apply it when it'll benefit them. While you might not consider it to apply to games less than an order of magnitude of the number of players on a typical quake server. This is massive? A typical conceptual 'server' on everquest has only a few thousand concurrent with less than 100k subscribers, most everyone else does.

Ugh, meant GameSpy and Gamespot

Or Return to Castle Wolfenstein where you can play as German vs US forces, or Battlefield 1942 again where you can play as a Japanese attacking US forces, yeah, those kind of games don't sell at all.

Gamespy stats seems to indicate other though. By the way, the second most popular mod for Half-Life is a WW2 mod where you can play as Germans.

To the Gamespy Feedback Page

Counterstrike regularly boasts more than 100,000 players at peak times. Live stats can be found here.

It would also be interesting to see simultaneous online numbers from these games: Sony's Everquest having more than half a million players; Lineage has over two million players in South Korea.

However, good for Microsoft. Xbox Live has some really good games on it at the moment, most notably Crimson Skies.

hows (Ultima)IV compare to final fantasy tactic's story?

I never got to tactic's. I'm not saying games today lack storylines, or aren't as good as they were before. What I am saying is that the RPG's back then had storylines that could stand up to todays games. I did play FF7, and I would say U4 stands up well to that storyline. (and yes, I did enjoy FF7)

Here are two links to storyline descriptions for Ultima IV.

gamespy

some random website I found on google

There is an article that came out just today about the game phantom (looks cool). They even have a few screenies. here

I am posting as AC, no karma-whoring today!

Ergo, the topic for an old Gamespy Grudge: Pong Paddle vs. Duke Nukem as an Old, Old Man.

At least they found them. I wonder if they are patching for the manner in which Valve's source code was pumped out?

Maybe paranoid game developers will start writing games for GNU/Linux...

In order to add, it would first have to meet, then somehow exceed the current offerings.

That sentence makes no sense at all. I guess it's just a weird reach for some clever rhetorical hook. If I join a football squad, but can't beat the current striker, I'm still an addition to the team.

Maybe if the squad was already at full capacity, adding me doesn't supply anything new, but that's exactly what the poster was suggesting.

And when there's a question of if a new contender is good enough to be considered, it should be held up not against the best of the others, but the worst- for that's the one who'd be displaced first.

introduced into genre ruled by Battlefield 1942

BF1942 currently has 9000 players online, a huge chunk of them in the non-WWII Desert Combat scenario*. Meanwhile, the Activision's Quake-engine games (forked throughout several variants) have 16000 players total.

*It's really funny how the success of Desert Combat has undercut EA's future plans for the "Battlefield" franchise. They were plainly intending to step through 20th century wars in a commercial series, starting with Vietnam, and now a free mod to their own game is becoming suffocating competition to their new releases.

There is an interesting article at How Stuff Works that explains how chess programs work: article. Also, here is a link to a related story.

good night.

It made the Reader Top 10

Tron 2.0

Tomonobu Itagaki, leader of Tecmo's Team Ninja, seems to disagree with you in the following quote from Gamespy's Tokyo Game Show coverage:

In addition to expected tweaking, Itagaki is considering making the game more difficult. "I feel that Japanese gamers are a bunch of wimps. American gamers are more hardcore and I want to make it challenging for you guys," (emphasis mine) he said.

My feeling is that certain types of games simply tend to have a higher difficulty than others. Fighting games can be made difficult in a lot of ways (often by making AI opponents "cheap bastards") while turn-based RPGs tend to be easy as pie (just keep leveling and you can kill anything).

It may be true that games have drifted slightly downward in difficulty over the years, but I think that contributing factors are better controls and interfaces that are easier to get comfortable with. It doesn't hurt (help?) that people in my age group (I'm 31) have been playing video games for many, many years now and so are going to grasp the intricacies of a game much faster than someone who cut their teeth on the Playstation (or even the DC, PS2, GC or Xbox).

What I'm looking for in a challenge is something that is difficult but not so difficult that it's going to take me weeks (or months) to master. If it takes that long, it's probably not going to be worth it. For challenges like that, I'd rather go learn another language or play guitar.

Soul Caliber is a good looking game- but please steer your attention to 'Voodoo Vince'. I got the demo, and this game looks absolutely fantastic. The game looked *nearly* as good as the cinematics. The game is cartoony, so they weren't going for realism, but I thought it looked better than any game I have ever played- even on my PC. Screen shots

Metal Arms- awesome game. Great graphics. It will be on all 3 platforms. Metal Arms will be a good thing for Nintendo, one of the better 3rd party non-sports games that they will have.

If more games like Metal Arms come out, then a $99 GameCube makes sense. But even if the box itself is $99, I would still need to buy more controllers, memory cards, etc. (right?) so having multiple consoles is more expensive than just the initial buy-in

Soul Caliber is a good looking game- but please steer your attention to 'Voodoo Vince'. I got the demo, and this game looks absolutely fantastic. The game looked *nearly* as good as the cinematics. The game is cartoony, so they weren't going for realism, but I thought it looked better than any game I have ever played- even on my PC. Screen shots

Metal Arms- awesome game. Great graphics. It will be on all 3 platforms. Metal Arms will be a good thing for Nintendo, one of the better 3rd party non-sports games that they will have.

If more games like Metal Arms come out, then a $99 GameCube makes sense. But even if the box itself is $99, I would still need to buy more controllers, memory cards, etc. (right?) so having multiple consoles is more expensive than just the initial buy-in

"Even though Nintendo is probably losing money now on the GameCube, this is the move that Nintendo may be hoping will close the little gap between Xbox and GameCube in worldwide sales, and help it gain a solid lead over Microsoft in the coming months."

Actually, Nintendo doesn't want to close the gap between XBox and Gamecube in worldwide sales... because that would make their lead smaller. I get my facts from this GameSpy article which Slashdot linked to less than a week ago.

GameCube worldwide sales: 9,550,000
XBox worldwide sales: 9,400,000

Granted this is not a "solid lead," but it is a lead, and one that Nintendo would want to extend, not close. If you're talking about Europe or America, Nintendo is in third, but in Japan, they're in a commanding second. Any comments about worldwide sales should reflect this.

-Kyle Orland
The Video Game Ombudsman

I can't wait to see the final product. Would be cool to be able to take control of a character and walk around first person in battle. Graphics look stunning. http://www.gamespy.com/asp/image.asp?platform=PC&i mage=/previews/september03/lotrbfmepc/14.jpg In game shot!

Wait a second... a few days ago, Gamespot said that Mortal Kombat was one of the most overrated games of all time.

Now it says that the Goro fight in MK is among the 10 best boss-fights in history? (#9)

So, for a game that seemingly has better boss-fights that any other game in history minus the other 8, it would not be a stretch to say this game therefore DESVERED its high praise.

So which is it? Most overrated or close-to best fight ever?

Here.

Score: 91

"The final word: Black and White is one of the most unique -- and enjoyable -- strategy games we've seen this year."

Yeah, ok schmeg.

An excerpt from the GameSpy review: "Although I was greatly looking forward to Final Fantasy X-2, I held a certain amount of apprehension because of all the changes Square was making to the game. After playing it for a spell, I needn't have worried..."

Don't like them? How about an IGN review: "Caveats aside, if Final Fantasy X-2 can manage to provide the same action, drama, and depth in its final four chapters that it did in the first, RPG nuts shouldn't have much to worry about come December..."

Still not good enough? Maybe the Gamespot review: "While we thought Final Fantasy X-2 would end up being viewed as an aberration in the Final Fantasy franchise, we're not so sure anymore."

Really, calm down. After all, you haven't actually played the game. Are ALL the reviewers wrong?

This in direct contrast to the GameSpy editorial Slashdot linked to two weeks ago.

I guess it's not hard to figure out where some of that $25M in capital went...

For reference, Steve didn't note it in this article, but he and Kyle have run a previous "insight" into the mystery behind Infinium Labs, and when he called the Big Cheeze to ask him about the non-existent offices, the guy threatened to press charges against Kyle.

WOOHOO!! Mortal Kombat made it!

Gamespy has a really crappy way of protecting stuff for the future articles.

Screenshot for game #1

Just change the last number in the URL for the other 2-20 games.

Funny that thousands of people every day are running impossible D&D games every day.

GameSpy: Last year, you mentioned that UT would not become an upgrade treadmill like most sports titles, yet here we are with UT 2004 shipping in around two months. Will this be a full-price product? Will there be an upgrade path for owners of UT 2003, or perhaps, a downloadable upgrade for a reasonable price? Cliffy B: Final price point has yet to be determined, but I can say with confidence that a rebate plan is being worked on as we speak for those who purchased UT 2003

Theres something really odd.
CS:CZ's release date is sometime this month. So is HalfLife2.
Valve isnt /that/ stupid, so I think theyre bundling it. I'm thinking either condition zero will ship with hl2 or condition zero will be pushed over steam this wednesday. Theres no way valve will try to compete with their own game, It just wont work.

These screenshots just further help my theory -- Those are condition zero models and maps, but with some multiplayer maps
de_prodigy
de_dust
de_chateau
de_chateau
de_aztec(with the 1.6 bridge)

The CS:CZ models can be seen on here for comparison

A Gamespy article backs this up by saying
"On the multiplayer side, Condition Zero will contain ten new Counter-Strike maps, available exclusively through the retail package. For current Counter-Strike players, a v1.6 patch should be released right around the same time the game hits shelves, ensuring online compatibility between the two games. When When we spoke with Valve a few weeks back, they mentioned that they would likely release some of these maps to the public, perhaps one very few weeks. The guys at Ritual confirmed that this was a possiblity, but nothing official has been decided yet. It's worth pointing out that Valve has historically been pretty generous with this kind of thing, and we be surprised if an official map or two wasn't released to the community within weeks of CZ hitting shelves. "

So I'm thinking they are going to push cs:cz over steam, Possibly for free or maybe just at a very low cost. Theres no way you can sell it retail with HL2 coming out in mere weeks.

(This post is mostly so come wednesday if I'm right I can link to this, heh)

The solution? Discussion with gamers is going to be at its most helpful for the company during the early parts of game development, when ideas and features can be requested and demand can be built up in advance of a marketing campaign. As the project approaches beta testing, employees should cease discussion with the outside world and instead talk only with the beta testers, and interaction with gamers should be done with fancy advertisements in magazines and giveaways until the product hits the shelves.

For what it's worth, Quicksilver, developer of Master of Orion III, ended up following that same pattern, with various staff members contributing (often cryptic) information about "The Elephant"--the design document for MOO3. The initial transparency and calls for fan participation drew many people (myself included) to their official message board. This formed the foundation for a community that was sometimes compared to that enjoyed by Bioware's Neverwinter Nights. Yet as development wore on, the flow of information dried up. Rumors started flying about cuts that might be happening in the feature list. Taken in conjunction with the removal of several highly visible staff members, what happened next was no surprise.

Deprived of the information flow that kept everyone on the same page, the community fragmented. "Fanboys" versus "trolls". "N00bs" versus veteran forum members. Certainly, this is par for the course in many forums; however, the sudden loss of a certain camaraderie struck me as significant. The problem was compounded as people turned back to past posts by various staff members, trying to divine the current condition of the project by piecing these posts together into a coherent account.

The end result was a lot of bad feelings all around. Although discussion was quite civilized when there was plenty of information to worwith, a paucity of information led to abandonment issues.

In a post-mortem interview with GameSpy, Rantz Hosely--art director for MOO3 and frequent presence on the boards--acknowledged that the information flow could have been better managed, specifically in terms of making sure that fans knew they weren't simply being ignored.

Personally, I doubt anyone will be (intentionally) trying the MOO3 experiment again any time soon. Why have the actual developer manage the information flow when you can have a marketer spit out full-color glossies on demand?

Let's get a game! (Single invite only! Not all of slashdot!) I use Roger Wilco and usually only play with 2-6 people (about 40 bots for fodder though) so the team coordination actually does happen. Send an e-mail to games@networkoftheapes.net and I'll let you know when the server is up and what the password/port is.

Why would it surprise you that GameSpy would have something nice to say about it?

GameSpy Editor: "Nokia just paid us money to write about how cool their system is. Who wants to write about it?"

GameSpy Writers: (all put heads down and look at floor).

GameSpy Editor: "OK... well, Raymond Padilla; since you're playing Britney's Dance Beat you clearly have the lowest standards... write something nice."

Guess what happens when their "STEAM" content delivery system suddenly has HalfLife 2 available.

CRUNCH. No more Steam Content servers.

They say they have 1.8Gbps bandwidth, but a mere 3345 people used 1.3Gbps when the RedHat ISOs were released on BitTorrent. Centralised content distribution like Steam is simply not going to be able to handle the load for the size of files they're going to be throwing around.

Without some decentralised P2P file downloading action it's about as bright an idea as their "Powerplay" initiative (and look how that turned out).

So is Duke.

Gamespy shows 70,000 players right now. I wonder how many of them were polled. It's surprisingly easy to find out.

The closest thing to a fighting game coming out in the near future is probably One Must Fall: Battlegrounds. It's a 3D brawler based on the old concept of big, smashy robots. Way back in the day (1994) they had a 2D fighting fighting game, which was rollicking good fun.

Don't forget that Bikini Karate Babes came out last year.