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Wow. A bit harsh, dontcha think?

You must've bought Rez too, huh?

Wow. A bit harsh, dontcha think?

You must've bought Rez too, huh?

Heheh, for the record, this wasn't intended to be a pc vs console thread though it was inevitable given what I wrote in the top post :)

Modding is cool and all, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility in the console world and unfortunately there are a lot of mods that just suck - hardly an excuse against modding in general, but I personally have only played a handful of good mods (and despite what I have said, I play a lot of PC games - just less and less every year).

That reminds me of another nice thing about console games - NO PATCHES! Heheh, except occasionally a bug will make it into a console game, and then we're screwed.

I'd argue that the software has come a long way, perhaps not in handwriting accuracy, but in integration with modern software.

And hot-damn if I'm not impressed with Alias Sketchbook, designed for Tablet PCs in particular. Just look at what Gabe threw together, this sketch. Looks real, doesn't it?

I'd argue that the software has come a long way, perhaps not in handwriting accuracy, but in integration with modern software.

And hot-damn if I'm not impressed with Alias Sketchbook, designed for Tablet PCs in particular. Just look at what Gabe threw together, this sketch. Looks real, doesn't it?

I'm sure a lot of you have read this already, this being Slashdot and all...but Gabe over at Penny-Arcade recently acquired one of these crazy Tablet PC contraptions and was thrilled with it. See his post about it (below Tycho's) over at http://www.penny-arcade.com/news.php3?date=2002-11 -27. Apparently these things are great electronic sketch books for artists (not that many artists I know can afford the damned things...)

For an example of a sketch made on it, go here

For an example of a sketch made on it, go here

Gabe over at Penny Arcade picked up a tablet PC. There's plenty of reasons listed over there, so you can stick the innovator branch of the 'digital artist' category in the list of demand sources, as well.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/news.php3?date=2002-11 -27

Also, check out Penny Arcade for their view of how TabletPCs make sketching the comic easier.

Artists (Scroll to third section)

bears outside?

-G

"FWIW, Square is effectively a first-party for Sony and they have the extremely lucrative Final Fantasy franchise. Sony also has GTA and Metal Gear Solid."

Square lost ~120 million on their movie. The result: Tactics Advance, Crystal Chronicles, and more for Nintendo platforms. Not exactly 1st or 2nd party anymore.

Mech Assault is just a Live! game to play. It's not very deep, especially compared to Steel Battalion (which I also own and enjoy).

"Of course, none of these are a big as Mario or Zelda, but they're beginning to lose their shine a bit.

Mario's shines were good, but it was just Mario64++. I think Zelda will be a great hit, though. Especially with the preorder disc in Japan, rumoured to also be coming to North America. 3 games for the price of 1! Nintendo is really pulling out the stops to make up for the N64.

I recommend the MNGS philosophy to anyone and everyone. If your web site won't let me in, I will do something else rather than jump through hoops to get in. It's not like I lack for amusement or research material anyway. Sites that don't suck as much generally manage to do just fine with unobtrusive and well-targeted ads, minimal or repeated images (thence low bandwidth requirements), and maybe voluntary subscription. The anti-anti-popup whiners just don't want to bother doing a good job, so they try to fence you in instead.

Scientists getting rich.. HA! Now *that's* rich :) Actually, It's already hard enough to get some funds to do any kind of research that some scientists must resort to such practices just to be able to continue their work.

Maybe that guy went a bit quickly to the patent office, but still... scientists don't have hats made of money :) Also, would you like all your research to come to halt because some other doofus patented your idea? Its a problem with the patent office, not the scientist.

PA said it best about these stupid people and their stupid commercials.

When you say M$....

People like you, who constantly quote past MS security holes, must also be constantly reminded that popular UNIX software is not without vulnerabilities. If you are expanding the scope to bugs that have been solved for years, I'd like to remind you that there are serious exploits for Apache, OpenSSH, bind, and sendmail. This selective memory that you zealots seem to have isn't getting us anywhere. There's plenty of valid ways to criticize Microsoft, but constant reminders of past exploits is not one of them.

PA Installation Guide

Tech Support

PA Installation Guide

Tech Support

Something else to buy

...here...

Obligatory Penny Arcade reference.

Of course, as with all things, I believe Penny-Arcade has the best commentary on the subject.

Yeah, because Microsoft loves to confuse the market, because confusion = sales!..? Huh? Also, please refrain from using the phrase 'M$', for reasons defined here.

This pretty much sums up what's wrong with online play.

Solve it, and yes, you've got a Killer App.

Harry Knowles is a stupid fucker...

I find it just as funny as User Friendly (link deleted to save the innocent) but with better cartooning.

Nice subtle troll. You really don't think User Friendly is funny, do you? Then again, I don't read Angst Technology, so I can't say whether or not your comparison is correct. If it is, then double kudos for your troll, by pimping another terrible comic.

To quote Tycho of Penny Arcade, "People will pass up steak once a week for crap every day." I think that sums up User Friendly quite adequately.

I find it just as funny as User Friendly (link deleted to save the innocent) but with better cartooning.

Nice subtle troll. You really don't think User Friendly is funny, do you? Then again, I don't read Angst Technology, so I can't say whether or not your comparison is correct. If it is, then double kudos for your troll, by pimping another terrible comic.

To quote Tycho of Penny Arcade, "People will pass up steak once a week for crap every day." I think that sums up User Friendly quite adequately.

Here's some online comics that might be worth checking out:

Sluggy - Students, aliens, ghosts, psychotic rabbits, evil kittens. One of the oldest and niftiest comics online.
User Friendly - Linux, geeks. You get the idea.
Megatokyo - An online manga following Piro and Largo whilst stranded in Tokyo.
Schlock Mercenary - Not too good art, but usually a very good and suitably sci-fi-ish plot.
Clan of the Cats - A modern-day witch cursed to change into a panther. Good artwork.
RPG World - Great art. A parody of almost any role playing game (the console variety) you'd care to play.
Ghost Cat - It's a cat! It's a ghost! It's ghost cat!
Elf Life - Elves, fairies, barbarians, time travel, romance, comedy, and very well drawn as well.
Exploitation Now! - An anime-ish comic with good art and an interesting, if sporadic, plot.
Real Life - It's real life. Except it's not. Reasonably funny.
Penny Arcade - The mother of all gaming comics. Very funny :)
Sephen - A relative newcomer, but wow! Great pencil-work!
8-bit Theater - The grandpappy of all sprite comics. I think. It's funny anyway. Go read :)
Demonology 101 - Fantastic art, fantastic plot! If only it came out more often! Ah well, the world isn't perfect.

Oh, and I can't really get away without mentioning my brother's sprite comic, Pixelated!. It really isn't bad. No, really! :)

Its certainly not a cost or resource issue (just click the little icon of the paint bucket or gradient tool).

It might be a skill issue, as its very easy to take something that looks nice in black and white, and botch it up by adding horrid colors.

Penny arcade is a great example of a colored comic.
sinfest is a great example of a black and white comic.

It's more to do with the artists personal preference than anything else. Some dilbert comics are B&W, some are in color.

" Xbox Live is doing better than expected, but the total numbers are pretty intimidating for MS. Last I checked (2 weeks ago), the score is:

- approximately 8 million GameCubes
- approximately 10 million XBoxen
- approximately 52 million PlayStation 2s

By those numbers, it's safe to say Sony has wrapped up this round, if you're looking for a 'winner'. "

I thought I'd highlight your comment about the Xbox Live! There are 10 million potential customers who spend 50$ USD and get it all working out of the box for one year. Everything is tracked, you have a friends list, and they even include VoIP for you to chat. I'm even tempted to look in to Xbox Live! without any games as a VoIP solution for keeping up with distant relatives, since it's so cheap and easy! How many PS2 online games support voice chat? Right, SOCOM.

How many of those 52 million PS2s will support online play? Let's see... " Sony, too, is selling add-on hardware to gamers who want to play online; a spokeswoman said the company hopes to sell 400,000 adapters this year. "

You may be asking yourself why they expect to sell so few. To most people, the PS2 is just a DVD player that also plays their legacy PS1 games.

Of the 10 million potential Xbox Live! customers, quite a few million of which will probably go for the easy-to-use service, vs. the 400,000 PS2 people. Besides, if you've ever gamed online for a long time, you know that to get a continued quality service, you need to put money in to it. Myth2's public servers went away because Bungie never received money for it, so did a lot of the "free" online service parts of the Dreamcast games. I'm confident that as long as Xbox Live! gets money, the servers will be there. I don't feel the same way about Sony or Nintendo's (lack of) plans.

how gay are you?

Gabe still owns you. Sorry buddy.

PA is a little bit faster than slashdot when it comes to game news.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/news.php3?date=2002-11 -04

A first-person Starcraft?

Someone tell Penny Arcade.

" Pareto efficient economy, monopolists must be heavily regulated. Microsoft however, just doesn't fit the bill. "

Go read the findings of fact. Judge Jackson found them to be a monopoly. Monopolies do exist without the explicit permission of a government (Standard Oil). The market is best served by innovation based around a set of of open standards (IEE1284, for example, and the printer companies). MS uses the fact that it is a monopoly to leverage their proprietary standards, forcing all companies to kow-tow to them, rather than finding the natural market balance. Once one company has enough power to dictate what the market does on such a level, it is a monopoly. Just like Sasktel, who dictates exactly how much internet access costs in Saskatchewan.

By abreviating MS as "M$" you make my case.

Understanding why game companies fail isn't going to be explained in this article. It's something you could probalby write your economics doctorate thesis on.

Now, I'm not directly involved in the Game Industry although I have some pretty close ties with people who do. And I can't claim to be a game developer unless you count the one time I helped a friend with some coding on a crappy BBS version of PimpWyld. But still, I've been gaming for a *large* part of my life - not just computer games but tabletop pen-and-paper games, dice, card, miniatures, wargaming, role-playing, live role-playing... anyway, I've noticed some things about gaming and what makes game successful and what companies "have it".

First: we call it the Computer Game Industry, and this tends to give the impression that there is one single market for computer games. There isn't. At best, there are at least two Computer Game Markets and probably a whole lot of different sub-markets and segments and whatnot similar to the problems the Music Industry grapples with. At the top of the discussion, there is the Casual and then there is the Hardcore.

The Hardcore is the easiest to define. The Hardcore is devoted to buying and playing games. They read game-related news. They swamp servers downloading patches and demos and leaked alphas and all sorts of stuff and they fill chat rooms with inane crap that make Gabe and Tycho's comments at Penny Arcade look like wisdom. The Hardcore buys multiple game platforms. When I think of the Hardcore, I think of, well, some of the people on Slashdot. And some of my friends. We own lots of games and we come home from work and play games and then we go to each others houses and have small LAN parties and so forth and so on. We complain at the number of games we've bought and not finished, but I bet that every truly hardcore gamer has at least one title that he/she forced their way through to the end at the expense of almost all other considerations (work, sleep, sex). We proabably represent the majority of the money pumped into the game industry and we chuckle at ourselves for spending so much for this odd hobby. Of course, there are some Hardcore gamers who take the whole thing *too* seriously and bash PC vs.Console, somewhat remenicent of emacs vs. vi.

The Hardcore is growing, but not as fast as game studios want it to. In fact, the Hardcore grows pretty slow because you end up having to get directly involved in the Game Industry, or you have to get a (real) job and get sleep and get laid and all the rest of life. The vasy majority of the actual *people* who buy games are the Casual Gamers>

The Casual Industry / Market is the larger of the two in terms of population. The Casual Computer Gamer might have twenty or thirty titles to their name, sure, but the important difference is they consider gaming to be secondary (or tertiaty or quatenary...) to their other intrests. They don't *want* a new game as often as the Hardcore does. The Casual Gamer is responsible for the high sales of Buck Hunter, and also for the high sales of Diablo and Diablo II. When I think of a Casual Gamer, I think of my brother. He's got a lot of games but he only really playes about two or three of them, and I think he hasn't bought any for a year or two. Most of the others were gifts. He has a console system (an N-64) and he's considering an X-Box and his computer is an old P200 without MMX. He doesn't understand computers very well but he does like playing games.

Note that I said "like". Casual Gamers don't *love* games the way the Hardcore does.

Don't confuse "Casual Gamer" with the "Mass Market". The Mass Market are people like soccer moms and inmates and construction workers and politicians and teachers and thousands of people who don't buy enough games to keep the Game Industry going. The Mass Market is unattainable to Game Companies. Need proof? How many people in the American Mass Market still care who Lara Croft is? The movie and the TV commercials and the some from U2 couldn't make her popular or give her any staying power. Eidos would have been better off designing a better Tomb Raider game and marketing it to the Casual crowd.

So, why do game companies fail? Well, in a large part because the company is conflicted and ambivilent about who it's trying to please. Some companies don't have this problem. For example, Looking Glass made games for the Hardcore. My brother *hated* Thief; I thought it was a brilliant game. Eidos is a company in trouble because they can't make up their minds if they're trying to sell games to the Hardcore or to the Casual crowd. And, yes, Eidos is in trouble. I wouldn't be suprised if we didn't see Eidos sell off or close a studio or two in the next two years. They've got a lot of intellectual property, sure, but nobody can really convince me that the money they're dumping into Tomb Raider is going to help their bottom line. If anyone from Eidos is reading this, my advice is to stop it with the Croft-crap, release the game, and if it tanks, move on to something else. Lara is not going to be the kind of attention-grabbing mascot you want her to be.

OK, enough picking on Eidos. What about Blizzard? Why are they successful? Well, a couple of factors. Not only do they know exactly who their audience is, and have a frickin' huge company backing them now, but they also have the guts to drop a project when it's not any good. Does anyone remember "Warcraft Adventures?" It was fetured extensively in the trade magazines and the Blizzard site had screenshots and even the execs were saying the game was as good a finished.

According to the people I've spoken with (no, I don't have leaks into Blizzard) the game was complete, but it wasn't fun. So they axed it. Good riddance.

If a smaller game studio tried that, they'd probably fail. Most studios are running on a game-by-game basis. Frankly, I don't know if we should care. A lot of studios produce crap games and it's a good thing they go under. Those few studios that produce crap and stay in business havn't figured out how to sell to the Mass Market, but they have found an audience with the last group of consumers we'll deal with here, The Ignorant/Uninformed.

There's a lot of crossover between the Mass Market and The Ignorant. Thing is, The Ignorant are just people who are interested in becoming Casual Gamers but either don't want to read up on what games are coming from the developers with reputation (not likely) or they just don't know where to look. And, frankly, it's a pain to keep up on all that gaming stuff, especially if you're not really interested in making gaming a big part of your life.

It's a tough business. The Game Industry is so filled with talent and there's so many people churning out stuff that it's difficult for the Hardcore to support so many companies and developers and tie-ins and action figures. And it's also filled with confused people, bad coders, impossible deadlines, spotty QA, whiny consumers, politicans with and axe to grind, and shitty ideas. Still, thank god that you can make an independent game, even if it is crap. The barrier to entry isn't as high as the pundits claim; look at people who write game mods. It's still a pretty chaotic industry, even if media giants are buying intependent studios and filling Frys and Wall-Mart with schlock.

Sure, you get massivly popular hunting games that fly off the shelves for a couple of months, but that ain't going to last and what's the real harm to society? The people who buy that kind of game represent a market segment that saturates so quickly, it's just about impossible to make a follow-up hit.

Game companies and game critics that really know what they're talking about all agree that capturing the Hardcore gamer is essential to the survival of your company. If I may bring Eidos back as an example, that is (I believe) the impetus behind Deus Ex and DX2.

Deus Ex was a fantastic game. The developers concentrated on great gameplay and a wonderful plot that would have made a good movie or sci-fi series, but the Casual Gamers didn't pick up on it until the Hardcore played it to death and raved and raved and got their friends to play. And it still didn't sell as well as Myst, but that's ok because if you plopped out another version of Myst, it couldn't sell like it used to. And they tried to anyway and it didn't sell well.

I've gone and identified at least four different types of game consumers. The market's so fractured, so indivisualistic and almost tribal in tastes that coming up with a crossover hit is just tough. That's the nature of the game. Sure I was pissed when Looking Glass closed up shop, but I get more pissed when I see high sales numbers for Pro Buck Hunter, because I know that there's going to be something like a million dads complaining to their *kids* for crissake that this game stinks and no, don't buy me another game.

Now, if there's something that the game companies aren't doing enough of and that they should be, is doing some serioud research into what people actually find *fun*. And I'm not asking for some customer survey on their website. I mean real, honest-to-god scientific methodology int what people find fun in computer games. Too many times I buy games that just didn't have enough thought put into what makes the game fun, or worse, what somebody in MarCom thought would e fun "because these elements were present in last year's Game Of The Year".

Like I said before... computer games are a tough business to be in. At some level, I'm glad for the competition. I'm glad for the "churn". Because I've played some great games in the last few years that I had only hoped for. Deus Ex, Ghost Recon, Morrowind, Baldur's Gate series, Quake, Unreal Tournament, Max Payne, Starcraft. Anyone who says that the Game Industry is stagnent and uninteresting is just stupid. Sure a lot of games are crud. "90% of everything is crud". It's a fact. Making something that's good is tough and making something that's good and sells well is tougher.

I just want more good games

Everything I ever needed to know about computer games, I learned from Penny Arcade

The reference is here.

From my parents' home in Wyoming, I stab at thee!

...or does the author of the descriptive post for this article sound like the guy in this strip

If I were him, I'd be more thankful that MicroSoft patches holes, since they still do have a rather large presence, after all.

GNU/Linux edges it out in the performance... but we all know the real reason to use MacOS.

Sorry about that list link, it was wrong... try this one instead (my "M$" clipboard added a space into my last post.)

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2002-07 -22

Circuit City tried the Divx thing years ago, but it never really took off. Hell, the players were known to be alcoholics.

I thought penny-arcade really put it best:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=1999-06 -18&res=l#

"Now you know"

Have they already discounted the possiblity of Sniper Gypsies and Miss Cleo?

kind of off-topic.... but funny as hell...

A Mapquest Experience