Slashdot Mirror

Amazingly, despite not being re-playable, IGN gave it a "Lasting Appeal" score of 7.5: http://ds.ign.com/articles/117/1179462p1.html

I LOVED the remake Atari made of Pong for the PS1/PC -- Put that on a mobile device it was great fun, IMHO.

Each "table" being a different experience, eg: a football field that plays like foosball (with gophers making holes that "transport" the ball, or a table that tilts as you move the paddles about, each with a different "effect" that could be activated, and "powerups" as well. There was even a "secret" classic Pong game in the stars.

It got less than stellar reviews, but everyone I exposed it to agreed that it was fun to play with. (hmm)
The first level featured Penguins! What's not to like?

People watch people play Starcraft? Oh this is just a Korean thing...

Actually, a lot of people watch other people play Starcraft 2 professionally and non-professionally outside of Korea. Look at the number of views in the videos in these channels: most of them have tens of thousands, some exceed 100,000. These are just some of the biggest channels, there are many others in youtube.

Not to mention the SC2 competitions outside of Korea: MLG, NASL and IPL -- these are the big leagues, there are many other smaller competitions going on every week.

And the dozens of SC2 streams in justin.tv and other streaming sites (TeamLiquid has a list on the right side of the page).

According to IGN, their latest information is that it will have a triple core PPC processor, similar to the one in the Xbox 360 but running at a higher clock rate. They also claim it will have an AMD R700 based GPU (that's the Radeon HD 4XXX generation).

If we changed the word "sport" to "professional hobby" would that make you feel better? But even the non-physical activity description is valid

sport
[spawrt, spohrt] Show IPA
–noun
1.
an athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess and often of a competitive nature, as racing, baseball, tennis, golf, bowling, wrestling, boxing, hunting, fishing, etc.
2.
a particular form of this, especially in the out of doors.
3.
diversion; recreation; pleasant pastime.

Yesterday IGN had their for Pro League matches, I recommend you watch set 3 to know what eSports is about. People who don't do this professionally cannot reach that level of play, and that's why it's a sport.
http://www.ign.com/ipl/videos

We, Starcraft 2 Players, would love to have many of you join us. However if the game has to be compromised for some of the reasons I have seen in these comments, then continue entertaining yourself otherwise. There are a significant number of people who are able to make a living off being a profession Starcraft 2 player. Their livelihood and the entry of others into that realm of survival are dependent on Starcraft 2's competitive nature as an eSport. Those who are unfamiliar, the eSports scene for Starcraft 2 is huge and just getting bigger. Off the top of my head a few going on: Global Starcraft 2 League ( http://gomtv.net/ ), North American Star League ( http://nasl.tv/ ), Major League Gaming ( http://mlgpro.com/ ), IGN Pro League ( http://www.ign.com/ipl/ ), TSL, various local tournaments happening everywhere, King Of The Hills with open invite to various divisions with cash prizes. Just look at the coverage on YouTube and Justin.tv The linked article this refers to, I feel, is that the game designer realizes the error of his cool additions purely for the sake of fun. A good example of this in action is take a look at the success of Nightmare Chess as a game and if you look into how difficult it has been for many to keep tournaments going. Balance and stability is more important than cool and crazy for long term fun. Blizzard's willingness to keep the stability of Starcraft 2 over chasing hype is admirable in my eyes.

Here's a huge rumor-dump for the new Nintendo console which may or may not be announced at E3 (JSYK, all of this was reported before from other websites; this is just a compilation of the rumors).

To summarize for the lazy, the controller may have a touch-screen, the system is more powerful than a PS3/360, and it looks like a modern version of an SNES. This is all just rumor and speculation though, so we'll have to wait and see. If the rumors are true, then I'm really excited! I used to play those Gamecube games where you connected GBAs to the controller ports so each player had his own screen, for games like Four Swords Adventures and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (which are both a BLAST to play with friends, btw). It was even useful in the occasional game like Sonic Adventure 1 and 2, Mega Man X Command Mission, and Pokemon Colosseum/XD, for example. This seems just like that awesome concept, but mixed with the DS and on a much more massive scale.

If these rumors are true (or aren't as awesome as it really is), then Nintendo shows, once again, that dedicated hardware can be much, much better than a PC for gaming.

PS: I'm no Nintendo fanboy; I just like them a lot more than the competition. I have a PS2 and might get a PSP/PS3 used sometime.

It's common knowledge that BitTorrent is only used for copyright infringement! Wait, that can only mean that WoW players are all pirates! And here I thought it was only the Threepwood Guild. But then, what do I know, I don't play.

It's true ATI doesn't have NVIDIA quality drivers; I've never heard of ATI drivers destroying a card. The GTX 590 drivers, however, have a driver issue with their "power limiter" that is supposed to prevent card damaging overvolts. Then there is the whole fan debacle from the 196.75 drivers. I realize people are going say it's what they get for overclocking, but if you add a feature it isn't the user's fault for using it.

[Sources]
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GeForce_GTX_590/26.html
http://www.sweclockers.com/artikel/13710-geforce-gtx-590-brinner-i-sweclockers-testlabb-drivrutin-boven-i-dramat [Swedish]
http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/53563/Nvidia-196-75-GPU-Drivers-Bugged-Causing-Fans-To-Fail-Cards-To-Overheat

> Mirror's Edge was crap,

I'm a game programmer, designer, and my friends know that I tend to be very vocal about ranting (-negative) and rave (+postive) about games _with_ very specific design (& implementation) reasons WHY said games are good/bad.

You haven't listed _any_ reasons.

I am going to include what I emailed my friends back in Dec '09 when I finished it.

Raves

+ Story was engaging enough for me to actually finish the game - it was half-decent. I was entertained. Maybe I had no expectations, or was able to put all the hype aside. Regardless, they could of easily messed this one up, and was thankful EA didn't fuck it up or make it worse then it could of been.

+ The martial arts mini-boss battle with the white assassin was REAL interesting to figure out how to beat. The hand-to-hand combat was neat when you were able to execute the timing.

+ Artistic / Beautiful (over-saturated) world, even if bordering on "bland." The main menu definitely has a very cool look to it when you stop and considering it is all being rendered in real-time was used to be pre-rendered cut-scenes just 5 years ago. The "visuals" of the game reminds me of originality of the pre-rendered cut-scenes of Privater.

+ Music was awesome and fit the mood perfectly. Rank 11 / 10 .

+ The game is literally a puzzle game -- where do I go next. I enjoyed the last few levels of the game the best. Initial frustration turned to joy of figuring them out.
http://www.mahalo.com/mirrors-edge-kate (Start watching around 5 min mark)
http://faqs.ign.com/articles/953/953471p8.html (or start here)

+ You can skip the cutscenes! Thank-God.

Rants:

- Unfortunately, most of the time you have no clue how to actually get where you are supposed to go. Yes, I used the built-in hint to view. I still spent far too much time trying to figure out how the heck to get up there. Yes, this is a VERY fine line between spoon feeding the player and forcing him to solve difficult puzzles. While the overall level design was good, the individual specific environment hints of where to go next was terrible. The levels were for the most part, not intuitive. Which leads me to my next point...

- I grok the point of the game. I really do. You pull off all these amazing moves in one zen flow of execution and it feels fucking fantastic!

The hard Reality of the situation: You spend 1 minute figuring out where to go next. You die. You figure out that jump / climb, then you get stuck again trying to figure out the next 'segment'. Repeat ad nasuem. This constant interruption on trying to figure out how to make your way from 'Start' to some vague 'Finish' location, TOTALLY breaks the flow of the game. Each time you die, you figure out a little more of the "path" you are supposed to take. Finally, after 20 deaths, you can "chain" all the movement together, it feels awesome to do all these "stunts", and you think "this game has potential !" Then you die, and you realize you are a new checkpoint and you get to do it all over again until the chapter is done. LOL.

- Bad save-points. There was even one point where the save-point was BEFORE a cutscene, so when you died you had to skip it all the time. WTF? Place the dam save-point AFTER. If cut-scenes weren't skippable, I think this would of been a pretty major deal breaker.

- Was too easy to accidently skip the cutscenes. The first time I played I actually ended up skipping the cut scene when ending the first level because I didn't realize my direct action was over !

- The world is BARREN. Aside from a few pedestrations you see down below on the street, you never see anybody "normal" in any of the offices or indoors aside from Police or a few people dependent on the plot. Even the inside offices were "too clean." Not even a secretary was around ??? Grand Theft Auto was (partially) suc

Actually, Halo was originally supposed to be a Mac RTS.

PC and Mac.

Quick google will serve you well.

Word.

Have we learnt nothing from the past?

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3255/3179101952_3f729a500a.jpg
http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/image/article/538/538263/starship-troopers-20040812003517858_640w.jpeg

As IGN Editor Charles Onyett had mentioned in his previous article, these gather and kill quests were fairly standard, but were framed within the story in such a way that I never felt like I was doing tedious chores. http://pc.ign.com/articles/114/1142629p1.html/

Actually, it looks like they are going to use a updated version of GameBryo. http://pc.ign.com/articles/111/1112464p1.html

> vast majority of people playing games at 720p max

Your comment skirts around the issue, but is not entirely accurate. It is not the players, but the game devs themselves that are "not demanding" a new console. The PS3's RSX is ~= 7800 GTX. Most _games_ DON'T render at the native 1080p but at 720p simply because most (PS3) games are GPU bound. (XBox 360 games are CPU bound if you are curious.) That said, currently the SPUs are _still_ under underutilized. Naughty Dog said this a few years back, but it is slowly getting better:

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/832/832114p2.html
"I'm more impressed with the hardware the longer we get to work with it. Imagining trying to develop Uncharted without the Blu-ray drive, without the hard drive, or without the Cell processor makes me wonder what kind of game we would have ended up with. It certainly would have required a lot more compromises than I would have been comfortable making. And much like the PS2, I think the longer developers work with the machine, the better the games are going to get. For instance we are only using approximately 1/3 of the processing power of the SPUs on the Cell processor in Uncharted."

The presentation "Getting Unreal Engine 3 to 60Hz" isn't (yet) available on Devnet, but thankfully can be found here...
http://www.scribd.com/doc/15118967/Hitting-60Hz-in-Unreal-Engine

Other presentations (GDC 2009) worth reading are
* The PlayStation®3's SPUs in the Real World - A KILLZONE 2 Case Study
* Practical SPU Usage in GOD OF WAR 3

It will be REAL interesting to see what Polyphony Digital (Gran Turismo 5), and Team Ico (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus) since these two studios are known to typically push the PlayStation (2 & 3) to its limits.

Cheers

fear http://bluray.ign.com/articles/112/1120480p1.html

stupidity http://movies.ign.com/objects/481/481316.html

fear http://bluray.ign.com/articles/112/1120480p1.html

stupidity http://movies.ign.com/objects/481/481316.html

Who cares about achievements?

The people banned for cheating in single player obviously care about achievements. Otherwise they would have used the blizzard-supplied cheat codes. Using those codes does disable achievements though. I guess if hadn't cared about achievements they wouldn't have been banned.

http://cheats.ign.com/ob2/068/850/850126.html#81970

http://pc.ign.com/articles/820/820692p1.html

PC gaming only constitutes a third of the total gaming market. Consoles constitute the rest.

That's not a prediction, that's just a fact.

But what is the rest of the coverage besides recycled PR anyway? Personally I just try and get a sense of a game I'm interested in and then stop looking at coverage on it. I just want to see the basic idea of the game and what mechanics it uses, as soon as I'm interested then I cut off coverage because I don't want anything spoiled, not even the introduction. In other media I also avoid trailers because of how much they will spoil the actual movie for example. The way a game starts is meant to draw you in and intrigue you, and if you hear a lot about it beforehand, it doesn't have the same impact when you actually play the game.

There have been situations with games such as Super Smash Bros Brawl where they drip feed you with information, every day you see a new character, or a new move, or a new item you will be using in the game. By the time the game comes out I'm sick of it already and I don't even want to see it anymore. Or sometimes development time will drag on and paying attention to a game's coverage is like torturing yourself, such as with Dragon Quest IX or Duke Nukem Forever. In that case, coverage will often turn me off of a game, and if I already know I want to play it, what's the point? I've got better things to do.

Nowadays I just listen to a few podcasts where people don't talk so formally about their experiences and they often talk game theory which is much more interesting to me compared to regurgitated PR. I would recommend A Life Well Wasted, The Brainy Gamer, Gamasutra Podcast, In-Game Chat, Irrational Behavior, Mobcast, and Retronauts. If you also like those, you might like Geekbox, RebelFM, 1up Oddcast, Weekend Confirmed, Player One Podcast, Joystiq Podcast, Gamers with Jobs, Drunken Gamers Radio, IGN GameScoop and CAGCast. Hey, it makes work and commutes go by fast.

the accuracy and responsiveness are a step up from the Wii

Not according to IGN.

My only issue is the lag: there's definitely a millisecond delay between your hand and the on-screen representation with Move and Sports Champions. Disc Golf is great, but I do admit having to work with the lag by letting go of the button just a split-second before the natural release point in my swing. That's where the Wii controller excels: there doesn't feel like there's any delay in its one-to-one motion.

Source: http://ps3.ign.com/articles/112/1121705p1.html

Here's why.

If you look, the game holds the DSI sideways. There are important values on the left, while picking numbers on the right. If you're playing, you're constantly covering the left screen with your left hand when using the stylus on the right side.

That would be a great idea for solving a problem completely and totally unrelated to the problem at issue.

Here's a review of Base 10:

http://ds.ign.com/articles/100/1004859p1.html

Have a look at it, and then tell us whether swapping the button controls that are never used in the game would have any impact on its accessibility to lefties.

And yes, most people find jokes about pedophilia not funny

Are you sure? Most people I've asked found this sketch hilarous.

Whatever you do, remember what happens when you try to jam electronic devices.

No, at least not in North America: http://dreamcast.ign.com/articles/164/164534p1.html

The PS3? Well we all see how well that's doing.

Doing pretty well at 38+ million installed.

Sales of the console itself haven't been good and game sales have been weaker still

Looks like your info is somewhat out of date. The PS3 is right on the heels of the 360 which had a year headstart and will probably overtake it this year or next. Sure, neither is a Wii, but then again I think that's something a lot of us are glad of.

The settlement should involve setting up programs like this. http://ve3d.ign.com/videos/70914/PC/Sid-Meiers-Civilization-V/Trailer/Civ-Anonymous-Trailer One more round...

When I used to play America's Army, which was created by the US Army as a recruiting tool, they had all of the multi-player game types written from both sides. I dug up an IGN article describing how this worked:

The terrorists are holding a UN envoy hostage and you, as the Army team, must infiltrate the area and confront and defeat the terrorists. But the other team doesn't think they're terrorists. Instead, they get an Army briefing indicating that they've been asked to defend the envoy from possible abduction by an infiltrating terrorist force.

That way everyone could play for the "good guys". Everyone could fight for the cause they thought was right, which is usually how war works anyway. There wasn't any controversy about you shooting at people who thought they were playing as "America", because while you played they looked like "terrorists".

The system was clever, and probably appropriate for this application (I don't think the US Army wants to encourage people to shoot at them), but as we have games based around modern conflicts, people have to play both sides. It is "just a game". Cops and robbers would be pretty boring with no robbers. Should we not watch heist movies because it encourages people to steal money? Modern Warfare 2's No Russian mission (in which the player is undercover as a terrorist and has the option to massacre civilians with no penalty) created controversy in the US, but the overriding opinion was that it right to include it in the game. How is this any different?

Oh right, this time we're shooting Americans.

Actually, I'm optimistic about this in Civ V. The AI has been split up into layers, IIRC, with each opponent actually coming up with a strategy to victory based on personal preferences and game conditions. So one civ (Ceasar, maybe) might lean towards military action regardless of game conditions, but another could find itself in a strong cultural position and then aggressively persue that goal. This is a bit different from previous versions in that the AI is taking account of the ongoing game and the player activity better, and I'm hoping it makes the "one true path" harder to follow (since the AI will adapt better).

IGN has a write up with a lot of the AI details: http://pc.ign.com/articles/107/1075587p1.html

Let's be clear: I'm a Space Nerd, and proud of it. I grew up on Astounding/Analog - still have a loft full of back issues from the '30s. My son and I read space books every other night - I can't get Footprints on the Moon without weeping like a baby, just as I do every time I watch Kennedy's Rice speech. Just got me again.

But, NASA, NASA, what were you thinking here? I 'played' this mess for all of 10 minutes, then it was "delete local content" time. It's neither fun, nor educational, it's just a tedious frustrating mess. The only thing it inspired me to do was to bust out my copy of Space Colony and play through it again with Son #1.

Hopefully next time NASA will make up their minds whether they're making a game or a simulation, and stick to it.

hiring talented personnel with experience playing the finest RPGs of the past twenty years.

Just find the people who did Wizardry 7 (aka Wizardry Gold) and Wizardry 8. The voice acting alone (and the interactions between NPCs and party members) sold me on Wiz8. One of the few RPGs I've owned that still gets played through every couple of years.

Silly blue Toad, you're supposed to be grab Peach's hand, not her _____.

a point it was in minutes before people started posting his personal information, twitter account, facebook, name of his wife, kids, their house from google maps... etc

http://vnboards.ign.com/world_of_warcraft_general_board/b19789/113357330/p1/?20

Needless to say Blizzard started forum banning people.

http://gear.ign.com/articles/765/765614p1.html

These were going for around $10 on ebay a while ago.

I can smell your cunnnnnnttt!

I bit my wrist! Look at it bleeeeeed!

Yup. Hey, it could be worse, they could have advertised the game as a platform feature and then forcibly disabled it after it was paid for.

Apologies I forgot to mention that in the original post. I read it as a part of an IGN article. Source: http://uk.xboxlive.ign.com/articles/109/1096446p1.html

Version 10.1 is considered a fix for this. http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/55171/Critical-Flash-Vulnerability-Discovered-Please-Upgrade and http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

Clearly its safe to assume you've never seen it -- or read anything about it.

Clearly you're dead wrong. I've been following the project since it was first announced. "A system that can track skeletal positions of four people at 30hz, with almost zero latency, while grabbing images of all four people, positioning them accurately in 3D and using a matrix microphone setup to track who is talking at any given moment" sounds fantastic in theory, but everything I read of the execution indicates that it's lacking. Impressions from their GDC demo were particularly damning. Here's one write-up: http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/107/1077003p1.html

Has Natal been reprogrammed to address all these problems since March? Are developers no longer calling it a "big, buggy mess"?

Is Natal intended to be used with a secondary controller or not? So far I've seen no indication it is. If that's how it's designed, why have all press materials I've seen shown people with no controllers or accessories? If we're going to get a "gun" accessory to go with Natal so we have a trigger to pull, any idea on the cost?

What sort of "outside the box" games are they developing? I guess we'll get some idea at E3...

One might think that...

"Sony Hit With Fourth Class Action Lawsuit" - http://ps3.ign.com/articles/109/1092140p1.html

In at least some cases, malicious content is handled by making the mods open source (i.e., released as code), many of the others by the mods using a proprietary format that is only read by the game engine.

Neverwinter Nights was released by Bioware in 2002, and still has a lot of active online servers and an active modding community.

A lot of mods, content, and scripts for the Neverwinter Nights and other games are hosted on the Neverwinter Vault here: http://nwvault.ign.com/

I'm a DM and developer for a Neverwinter Nights persistent world known as Narfell. http://www.narfell.us/

or because they've got a 54% estimated failure rate?

It seems is easy to be a guru on the internet. You can make lots of weird predictions, and some will be right.

Like this 2006 comic:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/05/01/
And this today news:
http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/54532/Activision-Bungie-Sign-Ten-Year-Publishing-Partnership

And this part of the reason Penny Arcade is still relevant.. theres a lot of predictions, and some are right.

It's not individuals that paper companies need to worry about in my opinion. When you have major gaming companies like Ubisoft claiming that they will no longer manufacture paper game manuals then you have a the beginnings of a major problem (at least if you are in the paper industry or whatever). If large companies stop printing manuals for games, or software, or stop printing instruction manuals for home appliances, and so on, you'll probably see an even bigger impact on paper companies than the losses of individuals skimping on paper use.

I don't print anything anymore. I don't own a printer. And I doubt that I will need one in the future. However I buy tons of video games, movies, appliances, and so on. If those things stop coming with paper manuals and books then it will make a difference.

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/108/1084491p1.html [Ubisoft Removing Paper Game Manuals]

Never mind that people actually pay more for "collector's editions" of games, which generally are just more packaging... http://cache.kotaku.com/assets/resources/2007/01/img273.jpg http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/924/924565/fallout-3-collectors-edition-20081028113013731_640w.jpg I suppose Ubisoft would need to focus on making consumers happy as opposed to squeezing them for every last penny.

http://gear.ign.com/articles/106/1065534p1.html

I don't think Apple devices will ever support flash.

It was advertised quite heavily at launch. Tons of people use playstations as cell development platforms because they are about 1/10th the cost of a "real" cell computer. Sony itself made a yellow dog release of linux for it. Here is a link talking about YDL from 2006 : http://ps3.ign.com/articles/748/748255p1.html

I'm really shocked Borderlands wasn't included in the original article.

My first thought was Alone in the Dark, however I never saw it played on the xbox360. All I know is the demo videos looked impressive in terms of lighting and creative use of items, and after deciding not to buy it for $20 at Fry's, I knew something was wrong when I bought it for $7 at Target. The article's author uses the term "borderline unplayable", and so I thought of Alone in the Dark. I know it wasn't highly rated for the xbox either, but I've held out an expectation that on the xbox one could actually move your character and look around without going to ridiculous amounts of effort (and it still not responding properly). Combined with the "realism" of easy deaths, and I ended up with having to do 20 reloads just to walk past something. A game that bad, from a company with money and resources, doesn't make sense to me, so I attributed to the PC version. If movement was as broken in the xbox360 release also, I guess they just didn't do any user testing at all.

Borderlands really jumped out as a console port, but for my (single-player) purposes it's worked well enough, aside from some poorly chosen default key bindings. Mass Effect 1&2 were both absolutely acceptable to play on the PC (I hear there is a bigger issue with ME2 on consoles connected to standard def tvs than with PC play). Bethesda's games are PC friendly enough also. For me the main issue isn't "When PC Ports of Console Games Go Wrong", it's more the increase in PC ports of console games, and the effect that it's having in general. FPS games in the manner of Quake 3 just don't work on a console: there isn't enough speed and precision to pull off a 3/4 spin, rotate up 80 degrees and make that pin point rail shot, carefully adjusting for the 300ms lag. Such games all but don't exist now, supplanted by the Gears of War generation (or perhaps MW2 generation) of FPS, as these games can work both on consoles and PCs.

The games I listed as working perfectly well on both PC and console do just that, but I can't shake the feeling that the appeal of releasing a game on multiple platforms results in game play that is either watered down or increasingly generic.

http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/40241/Ubisoft-Allegedly-Releases-Crack-As-Official-Fix