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I think this was a fine post that gave me something to think about, but I disagree. Generally, people on forums get angry if they DO NOT get any feedback. Then things get ugly because that is frustrating. If developers are relatively active (they should at least answer when they are directly asked something) then a forum will most likely run nicely and be a constructive place. Also, people have to feel that problems are being fixed, or they will get annoyed.

Of course, there are always morons (this is the Internet we are talking about, after all) so there is need for moderators to warn/ban in order to ensure that the community is as pleasant as possible.

I have two examples to back up my views.

The Sports Interactive forum (they make the Football Manager series): http://community.sigames.com/
This is an example of a very good forum that is quite constructive. Sure, sometimes there are rants and so on, but it doesn't seem to scare the developers who post A LOT, and certainly answer all (semi-)important questions. This ensures a constructive atmosphere. Of course, the moderators are very active also in order to close ridiculous threads and so on.

An example of an impossibly bad forum, on the other hand, is the EA Sports FIFA forum: http://forum.ea.com/uk/categories/show/10.page
In here, the developers NEVER answer anything, and a few worthless community managers once in a while (rarely) give the most feeble and useless replies. Also, people are NEVER banned or even warned no matter how amazingly stupid they act. The result is a forum that is a complete mess. A billion threads are created and people are almost constantly angry and abusive (it sure doesn't help either, of course, that almost no problems in FIFA are fixed).

Probably the target audience for FIFA is somewhat less mature than that for FM, but still I think moderation and developer replies are key to having a constructive community.

My favorite comfort games are just games that I can pick up, play a bit until I'm bored, and then return. This means games that have no real "conclusion" or plot, or else just simple time wasters.

• Football manager
• Ms. Pac Man
• SimCity
• X-Words Deluxe
• Civilization IV

Some of them still are. I have done zero hours of actual work this week because of a certain newly-released game :-)

It's like music, or films, or just about any other creatively-based industry. 90% of the stuff produced is mass-market plasticised sugar-coated crap, but there's always that 10% left over that makes the whole process worthwhile - of course, my 10% might not be the same as your 10%...

I came to realize that PCs have started producing games that are fundamentally the same ones as the ones you get on consoles

Sometimes games are technically superior on the PC than they are on the consoles. There are also many I can't play without a mouse and keyboard (and not just Quake and friends, think Baldur's Gate 2 with all its keyboard shortcuts), which isn't an option on consoles at least AFAIK.

There are also some types of games - ones that you don't just pick up and play for ten minutes, basically - that I don't think are really suited to consoles at all. Equally, there are some games - usually ones involving dance mats, light guns, or other funky hardware - that I don't think work well on PCs.

YMMV, of course, but I think to achieve gaming nirvana you still need a console *and* a computer. Hopefully in five years this statement will no longer be true, but I've been hoping that for twenty years now and it hasn't happened yet.

Oh and 3- Computer games have become obscenely ressource-hungry,

I am in violent agreement with you on this one, but then I can remember saying the same thing in 1990 when I had to upgrade the memory in my Atari ST from 512k to 1Mb so I could play Powermonger. Irritatingly this sort of "push the boundaries by releasing a game that isn't quite runnable on the hardware available today" attitude only used to be taken by luminaries like Molyneux or Carmack (who could be forgiven, as they made up for it with the games they released), whereas now everyone seems to think all PC gamers have upwards of £2,000 to spend on hardware every year.

Personally my favourite game is still the original arcade version of Defender.

Here are the Accoona results for "Soccer Manager 2005". It seems like a very generic name, so I don't know if it's the same as "Worldwide Soccer Manager". Xinhua is running an article with screenshots. It's quite likely this might be the title by Sports Interactive (or a bootleg of it), but unfortunately you need to be a member of their forums before you can search any information on their message board.

Not only do I get dragged into the occasional VGA Planets game when all my friends snap and get the craving for it, I also take part in what amount to the Forgotten PBEM games -- online sports management sim leagues.

You have a franchise, you micromanage operations for say, a weeks' worth of games, then send in files and insuructions to a commissioner who process and runs them, then saves and posts the updated gamefile and within a couple days the entire process in repeated again. Instructions and processes incluse contract offers, sending people up and down to and from the farm, making trades, setting lines and/or lineups for particular games, managing ticket prices... it's as involved as a Conquer Space game like VGAP, if not moreso, and even as other PBEM gametypes are dying out online leagues are still going strong -- look at EHM, OOTP, CM/FM or Front office Football.

PBEM's doing fine overall. For all those highly-detailed management games, it'll be around as a genre as long as email remains around. It just has no penetration with the FPS, twitch crowd anymore (thank god).

-- Primis.

Championship Manager 4 requires 1024x768 (although that's very much not an FPS :)).

Although these figures are just for North America, American/Canadian sports games (hockey, basketball, American football, nascar, etc) always sell badly outside of North America.

Everywhere else the "global" sports like F1 or soccer tend to do a lot better (e.g., soccer games like Championship Manager sell by the truckload everywhere but the US).

I think this goes some way to explaining the Xbox's lacklustre sales in the other two big video game territories (Europe and Asia: just behind the GC in Europe, behind just about everything in Asia). Different cultures prefer different things, and the Xbox is very much a product of the US (the PS2 did well everywhere because it was out there first, and had an installed base of existing Playstation owners to sell into).

All the excitement of soccer without actually any of the playing.

Yeah, who would have thought this concept would become the #1 best selling game in the UK ever?

see Championship Manager.

******

LLM, I'm doing Fiorentia Viola

Personal experience alert!

At university I was known as "computer boy" by a group of girls, as they could all see me playing Championship Manager for hours in my room. One of them married me eventually, so its not the problem it could be :)

My point is... Excessive drinking and partying made me fail my first year, not gameplaying.

Til Madden '04 comes out, I've been obsessively playing Championship Manager 4, a football* game with similar concerns...

linky
*if by football you mean soccer