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But that just means Tim Roberts gets off. And we wouldn't want that, would we?

In case any of you have forgotten: Penny Arcade's take on the issue

There really are a lot of assholes online. People say and do things they never would in person

No shit.

I believe this is the one you where thinking of.

Games are supposed to be all about making Will Wright feel like a God.

Your only role is to purchase the game, then sit in Awe at his Magnificence.

He also mentioned that one of the shows would follow the adventures of a young Luke Skywalker . . .

I don't see why so many people are negative about this prospect. I mean, how could this possibly go wrong? ;-)

Well, reading your posting made me remember this:
http://penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-04-27& res=l

Its times like this that you have to link to penny arcade

Heh. Man, one of these days, I'm gonna add penny arcade to my list of regular webcomics. Aw, who am I kidding?

...BSD guys are a lot like Linux guys, except they have kissed girls.

The way I like to say it is: "BSD: It's like Linux, but for grown-ups!"

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-06 -15 The point about showing commercials about anti-piracy in a theatre full of people who have just payed to watch the movie is just too much. Ossus

...BSD guys are a lot like Linux guys, except they have kissed girls.

Its times like this that you have to link to penny arcade

Stuponfucious

You cristian bigot. Maybe caning children is better in your opinion. I am not defending the guy here, but in some states anal sex is illegal. Get on with times man. This guy is a perv, I'll give him that much. I really doubt he is really intending go out to molest one hundred and five children. Maybe we should imprison everyone who is playing violent video games. Like when:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2001-12 -03&res=l
I can elaborate in the same manner, but if you got an ounce of intelligence you will get the point.

River is made out of chocolate!

If you like a webcomic, and it has great attributes... why try to steal from it and depreciate the people who work hard on those webcomics???
On the otherhand If you are developing a webcomic and it has great attributes... why not copywrite or trademark your work???

For great web comics, visit:

http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/

http://www.penny-arcade.com/

I find your assessment of the Lizardman interesting.

I don't think it's accurate to call what little I wrote as an assessment of him.

But FWIW, when I first read about him I though "Oh good greif, another attention seeking self obsessed up-his-own-arse philosophy student." which he indeed is (a philosophy student that is), based on what he had to say.

I could certainly admire him as an original and dedicated professional entertainer, if I hadn't heard the utter bollocks he's come out with in interviews - in particular about how it's all about him doing a deep and meaningful psychological experiment and human interaction (rather than the more accurate reality that he is an attention whore and he gets a kick out of mutilating himself in unusual ways, which I think is fine, as long as you honest with yourself and others about your motivations).

Some people can't stand anyone leaving the flock

I'm socially extremely progressive and liberal as it goes, but I'm thinking that's doesn't conveniently fit into your view of the world (which consists of simple toadying 'sheeple' and their primitive closed mind-spaces I would not be surprised to learn).

I think this is eerily relevant to this discussion, as I dare say a few people not too far removed from characters in this strip are taking part in this thread.

I quit the goin' out because it was too expensive based upon my desire to have other hobbies.

I am only trying to point out that an individuals goals, opinions of what is "professional", and what constitutes success in life aren't the same as the other 8,999,999,999 people on the planet.

Instead of trying to disrespect people who don't live up to your mold of "successful", find people that do and hang out with them and let everyone else be. That's my opinion.

Every time I hear people diss gamers, I can't help but think of this

Obligatory PA

Should we thank the gods this never made it or be upset it was never given a fair chance?

This isn't your father's trilogy

will be very happy. On another note, they did make some pretty good games. System shock was badass, at least I remember it being, seeing as I haven't played it a long time. Its cool to see people that like games so much make their own expansion even after a company is belly-up.

Well, given that Dvorak happened to guess once, I guess he figures why not try again? Too bad he wasn't guessing about doughnuts.

ala the first frame of this comic

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2004-09 -27&res=l

Did you mean this comic?

Online games have the potential to transform entertainment into a global-community exercise, breaking down borders, cultural and language barriers, and even political prejudices

Ouch, man, have you ever actually ever seen an online game going on? Breaking down prejudices is the last thing going on. What are you, some kind of mexican jew lizard?

Personally, I do not think online-playable games are the place to look for real change in video games. Online games require infrastructure-- sometimes not much, sometimes a lot. Sometimes you can cut down almost entirely on how much infrastructure you need by some clever design, such as Spore uses. But in general you're going to have additional costs for an online-play game. And the greater those costs are, the more risk-adverse the developer-- or more specifically the people funding the developer-- will become. MMORPGs in particular, since they require a fantastic amount of infrastructure, are probably the most homogenous, unsurprising, boring portion of the entire game market.

But we are seeing some interesting backlash against the whole risk-averse thing, and some really interesting things are beginning to emerge. Interestingly, most of the really interesting things right now seem to be in the budget title area. The game I probably got the most out of that I've gotten recently is this absolutely bizarre nintendo DS thing called "electroplankton". I imported this from Japan about a month ago on the assumption that it would never be released in America, only to find a couple weeks ago that... it's planned to come out in America now. But anyway. It isn't really even a game, exactly. It's just ten little generative music toys where you mess with the touchscreen and automatically generated music results. But it's fun as hell. I play with this thing for days at a time without getting bored, while if you passed me your average full-price FPS I'd spend eight hours playing through the single player campaign once and then throw it away forever, since I'd seen all there was to see (of course, I paid full price for electroplankton since I imported, but anyhow).

I don't think this kind of reaction is unique to me. I'm curious what's going to happen when people start to realize they have more fun with quick cheap katamari damacy or tetris like games, than they do with the current trendy video games that are basically high-budget interactive movies that, were we judging them by the standards of movies and not video games, would not be very good ones.

I work around 30+ programmers and various other help desk folks and support teams....of which most of them have a computer at home and at least half of them have laptops.

Not a one of them has a mac. I personally do not even know anyone who owns a mac.


From this we can conclude we mac users don't need your software, we don't need your help, and likely, you don't even appreciate french coffee.

Browsing the web inside a game? Somehow this reminds me of Penny Arcade comic. Yeah, I'm Karma whoring...

Thats exactly what I was thinking the instant I read the article (in ref to tamagotchi). Sorta makes me thing of this PA comic too.

Since one of the more frequent comments here is "FFXI wasn't underwhelming, it was a great success!" I need to explain why it was entirely underwhelming.

First off, let's remember that Star Wars Episode I was also a great commerical success. It can hardly be called anything but underwhelming.

Final Fantasy XI was an EverQuest clone. It didn't bring anything new to MMORPGs, it just rehashed what had already been done, just with an anime style and ultimately bland graphics.

The graphics look nice in screenshots, until you realize that every zone looks the same. Zones are all basically a uniform color. The desert zone is sandy. The forest zone is a dull olive green. The mountain zone is a dull orange.

The mobs don't even change. The same blue crab that spawns in the streams of the starting area also exists in the uniform-green "moss cavern" areas. They look identical and have the same abilities. Except the first crab is level 5 and the second is level 70.

Actually, FFXI did bring new things to MMORPGs. Unfortunately, they were all bad things.

Like the Inconvenience Fairy, which ensured you and your friends would waste the first week after buying the game before ever seeing each other. (Blizzard's server problems have more to do with their "auto-choose server" system misbehaving, so a lot of people wound up on the same servers.) Then there's the ridiculous con system which marks targets that can kill you five times before you hit the ground a "decent challenge".

Oh, and the job system. This is had the most promise, but it essentially forces you to play the same content several times (which you're really going to do anyway due to the zones all being alike and the mobs being basically identical). Ultimately the job system was a brilliant way to force people to replay content, since every job has a "support job" that must be leveled separately from the "main job". So if you reach level 40, you'll also need to have effectively played an alt to level 20, too. Yay.

Then, of course, there was the forced grouping. I can understand that groups are important to Japanese gamers. I think that grouping should be more effective than soloing. However, in FFXI, there was nothing to do outside a group. You spent all your time actively looking for a group. Want to move the "story" (yes, there's a story you can play through) along? Find a group! Want to quest some? Find a group! Want to level? Find a group!

What's worse is that you really can't do anything else while looking for a group. Want to fish while waiting for a group? You'll fish up monsters that kill you. Want to craft? You'll run out of materials very quickly. Most of your time is spent spamming "/shout 40 (Dragoon)/(Samuria) (Party) (Yes, please.)" while standing around the central city enjoying the lag as players laggily bounce past you.

Which brings us to class balance. Since the job system means any player can choose another job at any time, Square-Enix has absolutely no need to balance the classes. So they haven't. Dragoons? Useless. Melee? There are something like 8 jobs that are simple melee jobs. This leaves 2 tanking jobs, 1 healing job, 1 nuking job, and 3 support jobs. If you're a melee, prepare to wait. Especially if you're the wrong type of melee.

And, of course, certain features that MMORPG players are used to are just missing from FFXI. PvP? Only in a minigame. (Of course, with the classes being as unbalanced as they are, this isn't an entirely bad thing.) Kill stealing? Against the TOS and programmed to be impossible. Of course, this also means that higher level players can't help lower level players who are about to be killed.

Then there were FFXI's "linkshells" which are their versions of guilds. FFXI is the only game I know of where guilds take up inventory space. You have a "linkpearl" in

Since one of the more frequent comments here is "FFXI wasn't underwhelming, it was a great success!" I need to explain why it was entirely underwhelming.

First off, let's remember that Star Wars Episode I was also a great commerical success. It can hardly be called anything but underwhelming.

Final Fantasy XI was an EverQuest clone. It didn't bring anything new to MMORPGs, it just rehashed what had already been done, just with an anime style and ultimately bland graphics.

The graphics look nice in screenshots, until you realize that every zone looks the same. Zones are all basically a uniform color. The desert zone is sandy. The forest zone is a dull olive green. The mountain zone is a dull orange.

The mobs don't even change. The same blue crab that spawns in the streams of the starting area also exists in the uniform-green "moss cavern" areas. They look identical and have the same abilities. Except the first crab is level 5 and the second is level 70.

Actually, FFXI did bring new things to MMORPGs. Unfortunately, they were all bad things.

Like the Inconvenience Fairy, which ensured you and your friends would waste the first week after buying the game before ever seeing each other. (Blizzard's server problems have more to do with their "auto-choose server" system misbehaving, so a lot of people wound up on the same servers.) Then there's the ridiculous con system which marks targets that can kill you five times before you hit the ground a "decent challenge".

Oh, and the job system. This is had the most promise, but it essentially forces you to play the same content several times (which you're really going to do anyway due to the zones all being alike and the mobs being basically identical). Ultimately the job system was a brilliant way to force people to replay content, since every job has a "support job" that must be leveled separately from the "main job". So if you reach level 40, you'll also need to have effectively played an alt to level 20, too. Yay.

Then, of course, there was the forced grouping. I can understand that groups are important to Japanese gamers. I think that grouping should be more effective than soloing. However, in FFXI, there was nothing to do outside a group. You spent all your time actively looking for a group. Want to move the "story" (yes, there's a story you can play through) along? Find a group! Want to quest some? Find a group! Want to level? Find a group!

What's worse is that you really can't do anything else while looking for a group. Want to fish while waiting for a group? You'll fish up monsters that kill you. Want to craft? You'll run out of materials very quickly. Most of your time is spent spamming "/shout 40 (Dragoon)/(Samuria) (Party) (Yes, please.)" while standing around the central city enjoying the lag as players laggily bounce past you.

Which brings us to class balance. Since the job system means any player can choose another job at any time, Square-Enix has absolutely no need to balance the classes. So they haven't. Dragoons? Useless. Melee? There are something like 8 jobs that are simple melee jobs. This leaves 2 tanking jobs, 1 healing job, 1 nuking job, and 3 support jobs. If you're a melee, prepare to wait. Especially if you're the wrong type of melee.

And, of course, certain features that MMORPG players are used to are just missing from FFXI. PvP? Only in a minigame. (Of course, with the classes being as unbalanced as they are, this isn't an entirely bad thing.) Kill stealing? Against the TOS and programmed to be impossible. Of course, this also means that higher level players can't help lower level players who are about to be killed.

Then there were FFXI's "linkshells" which are their versions of guilds. FFXI is the only game I know of where guilds take up inventory space. You have a "linkpearl" in

http://www.penny-arcade.com/search.php

The fruit fucker is a recurring character in the online comic Penny Arcade. Unfortunately I don't have any links to strips in which he was featured.

This is the kind of thing I wish Sony would hear. They actually stand to profit from giving us what we want and opening up 1.5 to homebrew, via sales of memory cards and probably more systems, yet they don't!

Tycho of Penny Arcade had a little rant the other day that I thought was quite succinct. Here's an excerpt:

How would I distinguish the PSP from full platforms? Let me count the ways:

* Full platforms can play any audio type, or allow applications to do so. . . .

* Full platforms can play any type of video, or allow applications to do so, and these videos should be able to use the entire resolution of the screen. . . .

* Executable code

I'm willing to bend on this one if you give me the other two. But letting people expand the functionality and value of your hardware isn't some imaginary thing. People write whole browsers and operating systems and every other Goddamn contraption, just because it's there. They'll make your product the kind of phenomenon you couldn't pay someone to create.

This is the kind of thing I wish Sony would hear. They actually stand to profit from giving us what we want and opening up 1.5 to homebrew, via sales of memory cards and probably more systems, yet they don't!

Tycho of Penny Arcade had a little rant the other day that I thought was quite succinct. Here's an excerpt:

How would I distinguish the PSP from full platforms? Let me count the ways:

* Full platforms can play any audio type, or allow applications to do so. . . .

* Full platforms can play any type of video, or allow applications to do so, and these videos should be able to use the entire resolution of the screen. . . .

* Executable code

I'm willing to bend on this one if you give me the other two. But letting people expand the functionality and value of your hardware isn't some imaginary thing. People write whole browsers and operating systems and every other Goddamn contraption, just because it's there. They'll make your product the kind of phenomenon you couldn't pay someone to create.

Jesus, is that true?

Jesus, is that true?

go to a show and buy merch there.

Yes, do not forget to feed The Merch.

Ahh, it's not for critics? Or do you mean to say, "It is a space opera so long as you ignore the things that make it not a space opera"? This space opera crap is bogus. It is demonstrably NOT a space opera, but just another movie, and poorly done at that.

If it's a space opera, you can point out how it follows a space opera's structure. Since you can't without skating over the parts that disprove that, yours and Ebert's statements are junk. Also, WTF is a "space opera" anyway? That's not a genre.

They've all founded their own effects houses, and what you see is just as much the product of their creative output as any other part of the movie.

I.e., they bought the effects. I can respect the work that they've done as being quite good, but Lucas leans so heavily on that one aspect of the movie that it ruins the rest of it.

Put another way, it's very easy to make a million bucks if you have a million bucks to start with. It's not shocking that Lucas's movie has good effects--all he had to do was write a check. Contrast Star Wars with Doctor Who. One has great effects, one doesn't; one has great characters, one doesn't; one is painful to watch even though the production values are high, one is fun to watch even though the production value is painfully low.

Lucas is considered to be a great film maker by whom? He's rightly considered to be a very successful film maker, but that is not the same thing. His one "good" movie is American Graffiti, which along with Empire Strikes Back he does not have sole writing credit for. Lucas is a heck of a producer, but otherwise he should leave the actual film making to other people.

...SciFi persist in making these dreary, crappy, rehashed programs ... have you even watched the new BSG? You sound like you're talking out of your ass on this one. BSG is articulate, funny, insightful with great characters, dense interpersonal conflict, etc. Hell, the one where the President stares down the Cylon suicide bomber is the sort of thing X-Files would have done in its first few seasons.

A pox on SciFi

From your parents' basement you stab at thee, huh?

Every series that started out on another network with great promise has been ruined and then unceremoniously killed by SciFi (SG-1)

What drugs are you on? SG-1 is still on, going into its 9th season and is as popular as ever.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (both the Buster Crab and Gil Gerard vehicles) "Beady-beady-beady, hey BUCK!" I don't know what was worse about that show: the snarky robot or the guy dressed up in the stupid birdman outfit. If that's your standard of better SF...

But no... American SciFi audiences have been high jacked by the action/adventure crowd. Think about how lame most science fiction is today. Almost 100% of it is war stories or action movies set in the future with a bunch of lame CGI FX. It could be so much better if the focus was on speculative fiction which extrapolates REAL science with REAL social issues and shows us what COULD be if we all band together...

Gee that would be great. The problem is that there's a limited audience for non-space opera SF. The same 20 million people buy 90% of the SF out there and, as refined consumers as we may be, much of that SF will never escape this SF Ghetto. The other 90% of the population buys into that 10% you badmouth. It's a classic Long Tail. To expect them to not like mass entertainment is the same simplistic declaration of "Stop buying Britney's albums and we won't have to deal with her TV show and marriage to K-Fed"/"Stop shopping at Wal-mart"/"Stop eating at McDonalds".

So finally Sci-Fi has found a show in BSG that has the good post-Buffy/Angel character development + fantastical universe angle and you whine because it isn't Gravity's Rainbow? Get over yourself.

"And even among those that are, they're all a rip off of the same thing. Have any "popular" online comics NOT done the whole "tech support sucks HAHAHAHAH!" thing yet? Have any of them not done "end users suck and I hate working in tech support HAHAHAHA!" ... Most of them are trying really hard to be User Friendly, which itself isn't all that bad. I think a lot of people just have the idea that what they do is so unique and remarkable that THE MAN -- *SOME* MAN -- must be HOLDIN' THEM DOWN."

Your exposure to webcomics must be rather minimal. "Most" webcomics are ripping off UF? All the "popular" webcomics riff on tech support? Hardly. While a number of the long-running strips do takes on geek humor, that's understandable. When they started, us nerds were the only ones reading webcomics, and they were geared to their audience.

Take a look at The Bunny. How about Chopping Block? Randy Milholland's Something Positive, Sinfest, and Penny Arcade wouldn't make it into newspaper syndication without a major change in theme and writing. None of them ever mimicked User Friendly, and there are many more like them than there are copies of Iliad's work.

The sad thing is that this rant is seen as "insightful," when it's really just shallow and mis-informed. These folks aren't complaining that they're not superstars via their work. They went off on their own so that they could create, be rewarded for their creativity, and not have to give up a large chunk of the returns on said creativity to a third party. There's a whole passel of middle-men out there who latch themselves onto artists, and drain them dry, turn them into "product", and reap the lion's share of the rewards. Need evidence? Look at the releases from the major record labels - crap, mostly. Hollywood is busy making a ghetto-version "Honeymooners," re-hashing "Bewitched", and remaking every moderately successful flick from the 60's and 70's - they're out of "product" and unwilling to take risk, so they're recycling the same swill. The comics syndicates have been playing it safe for years, distributing humorless pabulum while bleeding away the intellectual property of the original artists. Many of the old-school comics guys went broke while the syndicates raked in the bucks on their output.

Not every artist is a prima donna. Most of them are just trying to make a living without getting raped in the process. It's something that every independent business person must deal with, but it's worse for creative folks because there's an entire industry solely based on getting as big a cut as possible from their work.

That's why I said "otherwise rightfully". It's like a two-person project at school where one person does 90% of the work and both get 50% of the credit. The understanding before the project starts is that they'll share credit equally, but the one who put more effort into the final result ends up feeling kind of bitter.

Keenspot makes money off of advertisement (and maybe other things, but I only know of the advertising part), but they need good webcomics to lure advertisers.

All I meant by that comment is that I recall that some of the webcartoonists have felt like the guy doing 90% of the work.

Beyond that, I wholly concede your point.

And the "ideally" comment was more a shot at people who start webcomics only because they've seen the success that a few have attained and want to achieve the same success. It happens a lot, and the general concensus amongst webcartoonists (based on various rants I've read and webcomic panels I've attended) seems to be that if you're doing it solely for the fame, you're doing it for the wrong reasons.

I usually fall on the side of "love of your craft," but I can certainly appreciate the other side too.

I've really got no problem with a webcartoonist who runs his webcomic like a business, because art supplies, bandwidth and hosting do cost a lot of money. And if you're making a living off of your strip it costs that much more.

A few artists who live off of their webcomics:

Penny Arcade
Sluggy Freelance
MegaTokyo
8-Bit Theatre
Player vs Player
Schlock Mercenary
Something Positive
Ctrl-Alt-Delete

And those are just some of the ones that I read and can remember.

Think of it this way. PA and UF are both comdeians. Both are trying to go out there and deliver the funny. PA has more varied jokes while UF tends to go the Linux be are teh roxxor route. Occasionally they'll try telling the same kind of joke, maybe customer support for example. UF's material is like this http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20050328 PA's version of customer support is this http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2000-02 -09&res=l Now obviously the PA one is funnier. You know this, I know this, Illiad knows this. But the Rabid Userfriendly Fans (TM) refuse to believe anything is funny unless their overlord writes it. So they bitch about how everyone unfairly says Uf sucks, even though everyone and their mom knows UF sucks hardcore. A PA fan points this fact out, and like fanboy fights throuhgout the internet a flamewar begins.

Well, I looked at those other comics, and I disagree. I suppose you have to have lived the life of a sysadmin (down, not across) to get the most out of UF, but it is funny. A lot of those comics are heavily targetted at gamers, and while I enjoy games, I'm not that heavily into it.

Two points:

• While you're correct that most of those I linked to are gaming-related, not all of them are. And for those that aren't, the humor is often zany enough that it doesn't matter if you can relate to it as a gamer. There certainly are strips that require you to have some deep gaming knowledge, but those are few and far between. Besides, who can't relate to stuff like blister packaging, used on much more than just video gaming peripherals? See? Funny, without going the "Windoze is sux" route. Maybe the guy getting both of his hands cut off by the packaging was too graphic, which is a valid complaint. Here's PA's take on the blister packaging issue, without the gratuitous violence.
• Even if you can't appreciate them for their story or humor, all of the comics I linked to are artistically pleasing, if not amazing (PA, Megatokyo, and Mac Hall routinely astound). Of the art/story/funny trifecta, they at least have one leg to stand on. UF has none.

Oh, yeah, I was gong to also pimp Something Postivie as a strip that's not about gaming (though they do throw in some pen and paper role-playing every now and then), has decent art (below average when compared against PA or Mac Hall, but light years ahead of UF), is funny, and has an interesting story.

First, you should link to PA's comic directly, or your commentary on the strip won't make sense in a couple days. Second, black and white is not necessarily bad (Megatokyo is mostly in black and white). The problem with Userfriendly's art is not so much that it's not in color as that it's drawn with all of the skill of a three year old child. If the story was good or the humor funny, it could make up for the bad artwork. Sadly, neither of those are the case.

For the record, I just pulled a couple comics at random. As has already been mentioned, Diesel Sweeties is also good, as well as many others (ctrl+alt+del, Mac Hall when they update, Angst Technology, etc). All of these are better than UF, in story, art, and humor. If UF could pull even one of those out of its rear, it might be worth browsing once a month or so. Until then it's nothing more than a reason to laugh at people that think it's good.

Well... as someone who is not a huge fan of either comic, I prefer dieselsweeties, PA fans are not necessarily picking on a crowd but on the comics themselves.

Looking at the latest commics
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3
http://www.userfriendly.org/

Penny Arcade Advantages
Artwork:
Color, it's almost mandatory for this time in the web.
Text, the text is easily legible and easy to follow.
Drawing, the drawing is nice, again this is a must in the visual age.
Story:
The stories are relatively easy to understand and follow, even for one who is unfamiliar with concepts. It's easy to relate to being snuck into a place, to relate to a gigantic piece of crap such as E3 or most large venues (trade shows, meetings, faires, conferences...) lastly it connects on lowest common denomitator in addition to the other levels, 3 tits? Ooh boobies.

User Friendly Advantages
Random Link... kind of cool
User Friendly Disadvantages
Artwork:
Not pleasing to look at, B&W, lots of text that's hard to read and too much to read for a comic. The art work is secondary.
Story:
Really only reaches out to a niche audience tech support or anyone who's been called on for support. It's rather elitist in nature, suggesting that users only serve to belittle tech workers. Not very funny on any level except the elitist.

That is why PA fans, or anyone for that matter might pick on UF.

Where does User Friendly fit in the scheme of things?

Ideally in the "dead and buried" category. Comics should either look good or be funny. Megatokyo looks good. Dilbert is funny (or, well, it has its moments, but is funny most of the time). Penny Arcade is both. User Friendly has neither art nor humor going for it, and thus is a waste of time.

1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.

This is not really what we want; it's actually not always fun. What we actually want is AI that will a) surprise us, or b) do something that appears clever. In some of the better, faster-paced games, there a decent amount of intelligence on the part of the enemy -- (ever see how enemies in Half Life 2 will try multiple doors to get to you?) but we're so busy running and gunning, that we don't notice it.

2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before.

I'll be -1 Redudant and point out, say, many of Will Wright's offerings, (PA notwithstanding). Hell, they even bring up Katamari later on in the article. I was somewhat agog at the article's next complaints:

Why isn't a there a spy game where we actually get to be a real spy rather than a hallway-roving kill machine? ...Where's the game where we're a castaway on a deserted island and the object of the game is to find food and clean water...

Games such as Thief and, to a lesser extent, Splinter Cell, fulfill the former; and the underrated (but difficult-to-play) Robinson's Requiem and (again, to a lesser extent) Notrium are among the latter.

5. And on the opposite side of the nipple coin... Developers will be shocked one day when they notice that the world is full of women. It's true! More than half of your potential customer base are penisless.

Absolutely; I think companies will flock to that as the "next-big-thing" eventually. Here's my timetable for buzzwords:

2004 - Shadows and Lighting
2005 - Realistic Physics
2006 - Emergent Gameplay
2007 - Appeal to Women

10. And while we're at it... Let's rid games of all arbitrary barriers.

Again, I agree; and I wonder if, should we start building games differently, (e.g., if more elements are handled by simulated systems rather than scripted events), will we see more of this? I care less about this from the standpoint of immersion, and more from the standpoint of the ability to solve problems as I want to solve problems. This seems less a matter of horsepower and more a matter of game design. It's not slow CPUs preventing us from doing this. Is it?
________
Epidemic Groove - A combination of real-time-strategy and action on a cellular level.

I start describing in great detail how this guy is peeing over my shoulder...

Yeah, Will Wright is funny like that.

Basically, I think the rule is: a gamer should NOT be aware of the cruel hand of God fucking with him.

If you ever say, "Damn you, (programmer)!" then there is something wrong. (well, unless Will Wright is peeing on you, but that's another story) There should never be moments so arbitrary or evil that you're snapped out of the game universe to curse the designer. A door which you JUST walked through should not suddenly be locked, for no reason at all, just to prevent you from going back to that save point you passed two rooms before. (I'm looking at you, Metroid Prime 2 - and your older brother DIDN'T DO THIS!)

Or if you're near the endgame... You've got all the keys and magic spells... And all you have to do is march into the Temple and kill the evil wizard... this is NOT the time to make you go on a scavenger hunt all over the fucking map for a ludicrously high number of pieces of an arbitrary key which has no purpose except to draw out the last act! *cough*WindWaker*cough*

(if I pick on Nintendo, it's because if any game design company should know better, it's them)

It's really simple. Just ask yourself - if this were a MOVIE, would I believe in this event? (Paul Anderson and Uwe Boll movies excepted) Would I believe that the characters need to spend three months item-gathering? Would I believe it's necessary for the heroes to take a break from the plot to crossbreed giant chickens? Could I conceive of a world in which a character is unable to climb over a ten-inch high barrier?

If the answer is "no" then there is no excuse for having it in the game.

First, you ask yourself "Was this film made for movie critics?"

It's not for you.