Slashdot Mirror
Vanishing Game Genres
turpie writes "CNET's Gamecenter is running a story about dying game genres, their arguments seem valid for some genres like Flight Sims, and but are stretching it a bit for others like RTS (StarCraft) (they may not be too original anymore but I wouldn't say they're dying.) I'm also wondering what this leaves us apart First Person Shooters (ala Dooom & Quake)?" For that matter, since the first person shooter, I don't feel like a new genre has really appeared in awhile.
Anyone who thinks this has remained ignorant of 2 very important projects:
1) Blizzard's Warcraft III
2) Valve's TeamFortress 2
Warcraft III is a bit different than an RTS -- it's really an RTT, Real-Time Tactical game. Action will focus on smaller party size, not unlike more recent party-oriented games such as Baldur's Gate and Diablo 2. Rather than a party of 6 or 8, though, players will work with a squad of a dozen or so -- with required specialist and leadership roles. This will compel force-mixing nicely, breaking out from the old RTS problem of the "superunit" that allows any player to dominate.
TF2, on the other hand, will present an RTS idea where the objects being direct on screen are actually *OTHER PLAYERS IN FIRST-PERSON SHOOTERS!* This is about as exciting as 'net team play is likely to get in the next few years, and if you haven't checked out what Valve is doing in this regard, I'd highly recommend stopping by their web site. The game will feature some great technology -- but more importantly, it will feature game play ideas that are brilliant evolutions from what we seen today.
Is the RTS dead? Perhaps in the form of "gather resources, build units, advance technologies, repeat." But they are far from dead.
Consider the possibilities of RTS scenarios in which the units are real people! Morale, fatigue, situational awareness and ability to command will become more important that click-speed and fps.
Half-Life had the alien planet, yes, and it sucked royally.
Too much console-style gameplay (jumping puzzles abounded) and it was just dumb.
The vast, vast majority of people I know either hated or stopped playing HL when they got to the alien planet. It was just that bad to lots and lots of people.
I was always of the opinion that they should have come up with another few areas of the complex to explore, or some underground, or something. ANYTHING but the crappy alien world.
What happened to games like Metal Gear and Zelda, 2/3D overhead view that was more maze/puzzle. Those were the most time consuming things I had ever played. Speaking of puzzles, what about things like phantasmagoria, I haven't seen RPG/puzzlers in ages.
..for me would be one that combines Elite(space travel + trade) + System Shock (FPS + discovery) + Civilization (research + build up)
I'm definitely bored by bare FPS (shoot all that moves) - just pulling the trigger is too less interaction for me. The games I wasted incredible amount of time on: Civ, Deuteros, Millenium 2, Elite, Final Frontier, XCOM, Railroad Tycoon, Carrier Command, Mid Winter.anyone want to play a game of Colossal Cave Adventure? we have a game running on the Ultimate Bulletin Board at Floor42 (reg. required)
Or download your own copy from here and play it yourself
perhaps gaming needs to take a step back - and then fork?
JOIN !LINK CLUB!
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
The PC works best for games with greater depth, like Sim City, Civilization, hard core flight sims and the like. But it's a smaller market so developers don't get kudos from their shareholders for going there
-----------------------------
-----------------------------
If you can't blind them with brilliance, baffle them with bull.
And what about the soldier sim? Games like Delta Force 2, Rainbow Spear, Shadow Company and top of my chart, Hidden and Dangerous, don't count as FPS in my book as they're all about squad tactics and using team members with different strengths and weaknesses. Game slike that have only recently started to appear.
Games like Metal Gear Solid and Tenchu are also hard to place in the FPS band. They're stealth'em ups
If you think there is a decline in genres (something I'm not so sure of) then it's probably down to growth in consoles. Consoles are less flexible in their control methods so it's not possible to do a flight sim with 90 odd controls.
Another problem with the flight sim is that the emphasis is on realism and, in the end, except for the hardcore aviator no one can be arsed to learn how to fly that precisely. Especially when they also have to manage the campaign, set all the way points, load the ordnance and direct 4 wingmen to their targets at the same time.
That'll do me for now...
-- "Sponges grow in the ocean. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn't happen."
I am sitting here and trying to think of the last time I saw a truly revolutionary game, and I just can't think of one. I would say Half-Life, but when you come down to it, it's just another FPS with a great story. I think Thief was a wonderful game, what I call first person RPG instead of an FPS, but it got bogged down in the same old "walk the maze, flip a switch, avoid the zombies, get the prize, good mouse" formula that so many games seem to end up with. I think a large part of the problem is people who have great ideas, and make an incredibly fun game to start with, but then don't know where to go with it. In the end, the game then just becomes routine and the only reason you keep playing is to see the endgame video.
Oh well... Anybody know of any other game companies around now who now provide a similar quality of entertainment?
-- A computer without COBOL and Fortran is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup and mustard
You are absolutely correct. I cannot stand the way PC games operate. I heard Deus Ex was a great game so I downloaded the demo to test it out and it was horribly slow, this is with a TNT2/450MHz K6/128MB of ram. What the hell do I need to do to keep up with the computer gaming market! All I ask is that the PC game market create a standard base game system and release standard (OPEN) interfaces that scales well with newer systems [Not DirectX]. Also they should simplify gameplay. Yeah consoles are not very flexible but who cares! All of my console games work! Best yet I don't have to install conosle games either!
:>.
I nearly choked when I saw the visuals for Chrono Cross and realised I was playing on a system with 2MB of RAM and 90MHz proc. Many PC game developers do not even spend the time pushing technology to the limit before jumping on to another techonology.
That produces games that are incompatible with older systems, and games that are buggy. At least it's pretty
Counter-Strike: Half a million active players can't be wrong!
The Descent games are first person shooters that give you a hover ability. There's nothing flight or simulation about it. A flight simulator seeks to give you something more, perhaps a link with reality.
When Quake came along, it allowed you look up and down, and shoot independently of which way you were facing. It required you to actually aim your weapon once in a while, rather than just pound on the control key every time you see a few pixels moving in front of you. That, and the ability to play in huge deathmatches, made it much more immersive. Doom never succeeded in creating the illusion of being in the action for me.
Even the "two-and-a-half-D" games (Marathon, Dark Forces, Outlaws, Duke Nukem 3D, etc.) were vastly superior to Doom. The only reason Doom stayed on top was because there were so many keyboard-jockeys that had invested hours and hours into developing their Doom "skillz", who did not want to adapt to games where they were newbies once again.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
You all are going to laugh, but, yes, there have been new genres that have gotten very popular. The most notable is dancing games. This started out with such PSX games as PaRappa the Rapper. Now, accessory 'dance mats' for the very popular Dance Dance Revolution are easily available, and gaining in popularity. This falls into the category of 'All the rage in Japan' and actually involves exercise, something most gamers could use. COmpanies are tryign new genre's all of the time. Someone only need to think of the money Tetris brought in, and it should be obvious game companies want BADLY to bust a new genre open. For example, there is a four seat racing game at my local arcade. Sound normal? Not quite. It horse racing. You play jockey on the horse, and the movement of your rocking and the movement of the horse's head determines your speed, not to mention looks really funny to onlookers. WHat about Silent Scope? Maybe you would just call it a 'really, really First Person Shooter', but thats a crock. You could call it 'A Gun Game', but comparing this to Operation Wolf isn't even fair. I feel Konami should be praised for this game, because it was original, well played out, and damn fun. Don't pigeon-hole yourselves. A lot of people don't see the inovations because they stick to what they know they like, such as RTS, RPG's, FPS, etc. Keep your eyes open and see the new stuff, and give it a shot. Besides, if *YOU* can come up with a genre that hasn't been tried, but would be addictive, Let me know and we'll sell it for a ton of cash. Toodles
Toodles D. Clown
I have to disagree with you. Adventure games are -NOT- dead. They just don't look like they used to.
Run out and get yourself the game "Deus Ex", and play it for a while.
Yes, it is in the first person perspective.
Yes, you can shoot people with guns.
But, it has an adventure plot and action. You can play the entire game without killing a sole! And there is multiple solutions for multiple types of characters.
The game was developed by like 3 programmers, and 12 writers. It was made like an adventure game.
I'm gonna stop sounding like a Deus Ex salesman now. My point was... adventure games haven't died, they are just adapting to the first person perspective, which is the popular thing now.
-- "Almost everyone is an idiot. If you think I'm exaggerating, then you're one of them."
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Yeah, I miss those games.
Back off, man. I'm a scientist.
Amen to that my brother. I've wasted more hours playing nethack this year than any other game I've ever played. Well, it's probably close to silent service (I loved that game for some reason, I had it for the C64 and then the DOS version, I would love to see that on linux). I have Q3, and it's fun, but it doesn't suck me in like nethack.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not your typicall gamer, and I'm not in the majority, but I agree with you 100%.
Monkey Island, Kings Quest are adventure games. They are definitely few and in between. But, you can always check out games like Sanitarium, Grim Fandango, and the upcoming Monkey Island game.
I grew up with Apple ][ games (I still have miniposters for a few!), so have followed game genres from character based (nethack, larn), text based (Dungeon, Adventure), puzzle solving, simulation, arcade, action, and so on for pretty much the gammet of hardware between the 70's and present.
... they were actually fun and still are. I can think of a few games I'd really love to see (and would certainly pay good money for) come out for my PC or Linux workstation or PDA, etc. Sadly, when game companies did bring a few great games over to PC's, years back, they utterly ruined them by putting too much extra crap in them for some II, III, etc.
Something which should be obvious is the excessive number of variations on StreetFighter-like, sports, racing and 3D shoot-em-ups. Ultimately these things have pretty much been beaten to death, which probably explains the rise in popularity of card games.
I'm so bored of these things, I'm going back and digging up old games and playing them again, because
IMHO it's certainly time for game companies to take a deep breath, sit back with a brew and think about what really is fun and how to put it into a game. Perhaps some inspiration could come from old Atari 2600, C64, Apple ][ games. Until then I'll have to resort to emulators and abandoneware and keep coaxing my tired old Quantum drive to spin up one more time on my old Amiga.
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
1) The adventure games are dead becuase kings quest, space quest, and the like SUCKED I mean has anyone actully played them, I used to on my old tandy, and Im sorry to say but a crappy sentance based interface and a story line in which you die every few seconds made these games playable to only a few die hard freaks. As far as myst goes yeah the graphics were awsome but then you have to think that the only people who could play it are those who arn't die hards (die hards never bought a new computer they were to damn busy playing police quest). Now myst on the other hand was to damn easy for us, becuse after we got over the inital shock of its awsome graphics, we realized you could beat the dam game in under 5 min (if you still havent figured this out im not taking the time to explain it now). So we have a bunch of die hard freaks who are content with crappy games and dont buy new computers that can handel todays games, and a bunch of people with desecnt computers who dont like the games cause though pretty they arnt all that fun...
2) What makes a combat flight sim? REALISM! What kills a combat flight sim? REALISM!!! What we did is we created games so real they became to hard for the average use to play and have fun with. Face it were obviouly not all qualified to fly the moden jet fighter, so why try when its not really fun. Anyway these REALISM games replaced all the actually fun games, for example Pacific Strike, this game was awsome, it wasnt too hard but challenging...but more important it was FUN!!!
So realism killed the fun games, and the realistic games wernt fun enpught to keep the average user intresteding the genre. Thus it died.
3) RTS games now this is an intresting one, What I think killed this genre what CRITICS, every game that came out was over critisized, resulting in low sales and thus underdevelopment of the genre. Take Force Commander for example, look for reviews and you'll find 100 bad ones for every good one. If you ask me I like the game, but these people just see all these bad reviews and get scared to say anything else good about the game. Todays rts's are reasonably fun, however predictable ai, but have fairly good graphics. SO as I said I think critics killed this genre.
4) Space combat games are far from dead, Just the best one I can recall was tie fighter, It just had better features than its sucessor x v t. Then you can take a look at the Home World series, this is actully a spaced based rts. The usings actully pull strafing runs, and the graphics are prettry cool too...Anyway i dont care what cnet says this genre is still out there and if another decent game is made it will have high sales.
5) War games have siply become the other genres, so yeah I guess cnet actully got this one right.
Anyway my point is that the future for video games is just as bright as ever, just keep in mind people play games for fun if a game isnt fun people wont play it.
Jainith
HALFLIFE IS STILL KING
Bullocks.
you can tell the difference between 100fps and 40fps. Try doing an offhand grapple from ceiling to ceiling tossing hundreds of rockets on a 30fps machine. It's impossible, you can't see the damn ground and you only get one or two frames of visible target. At 100 you can actually see the rolling heads and gut splatter.
that whole 30-60fps thing is for FMV where the images blend into each other. You can see more than that.
And this is why I think handhelds have it.
There's only so much budget you can waste doing fancy artwork and hours of music on a Game boy colour (though Disney are trying their best). So in the end the good people spend their money on gameplay.
Aside from Perfect Dark the games I play most are Super Bomberman (a 1992 release on the SNES) and Zelda: Link's Awakening (a 1993? release on the Game boy).
The reason I said that was because the article refers to Myst as the killer RPG. Read the article before posting!!
Scorched Earth This should be moderated up to 5 it is the best Turned Based Strategy game ever period.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Since the first person shooter came of age (arguably with wolf3d, more realistically with doom), we've had several genres arrive. RTS, while marginally existent starting with Dune (1990) really didn't take off until Warcraft. While technically not an original concept, the MMORPG games are realistically a new genre as they take their MUD origins to significantly larger scales.
Arguably, team based FPS is a new genre as well, arriving on the scene significantly after the original FPS. First person "sneakers" (as somebody else coined previously) are also radically different from the original "shoot everything that moves" FPS.
While the C-Net article describes some symptoms of shifting awareness, it's probably very premature to declare any genre as dead. Flight sims, for instance, are a relatively niche product that appeal to a distinct audience. If somebody doesn't mind not selling a ton of units, then they will find an audience for a good flight sim. Further, I think that in the future you'll see a lot more cross genre games as the gaming worlds become for fleshed out. Having a FPS RPG game where you can climb into the cockpit of a helicopter to reach some objective is probably not too many years away.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
there's a form of games that they've not mentioned, which is continuously *gaining* in popularity...
... retro gaming!
It's certainly where I spend all my gaming time these days. Who needs games that require a supercomputer to process, when the gameplay is lacking. With MAME and my ROM collection, I can keep my gaming urges satisfied for years to come:-)
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
A little planning goes a long way...
I have wondered if this might be due to the technical complexity of producing a 3D game, or just the processing overhead that such games incur. I would expect genres to broaden again once the environment for programming 3D is a bit more familiar to programmers. RPGs have always liked lots of detail and that's expensive to come by in terms of 3D. These days you need a team of people to create a new game, whereas I think a lot of original 'new genre' games were created by individuals with a passion. As far as 3D shooters go, I'll have to disagree with you there. What about the Descent series? Another big genre killer, I think, would be the rush to create online games. This has sucked up more precious resources in terms of budget and technical difficulty.
I think that the gameplay still matters. I think the problem is we have a few games with outstanding gameplay - so outstanding that people play the same game for several years.
I personally have been playing Starcraft multiplayer now for over 2 years. I still play Starcraft frequently multiplayer. I haven't bought any other RTS game because everything I've demoed just doesn't compare to Starcraft. I want to buy and play a better RTS than Starcraft but there still isn't a game that can compare to Starcraft + Expansion + 8 revisions to balance the game and bugfix on version 1.0. The other advantage is that Starcraft runs on low end hardware - I have 4 machines that can play Starcraft in my house against 1 (arguably 2) that can play Q3A or most of the latest games. Consequently when I feel like playing with friends, we play Starcraft on the LAN because we can all play. We still play warcraft 2 mutliplayer too because it's easy to pick up for new players.
If anything it's multiplayer thats killing games, a single player game lasts ~1-2 months. A multiplayer game lasts 2-3 years.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
Ah, the good old days: 1993. My Mac, my modem, the intermittent Trent University modem pool, and MicroMuse, TimeMuse, OceanaMuse, EcoMuse, etc......
I actually met my wife on Micro. It was like the wild west back then, very little adherence to the purported charter of the Muse, but damn it was fun!
bun-fhuinneog agam!
Which is that nobody wants to play them any more. Supply and demand is at play here. If people still wanted flight sims companies would be developing them.
Since obviously nobody wants or plays many of these types of games, I have to ask - who cares?
---
Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
The Oddworld game for PS2 looks like it's going to be 3D. Now *that* scares me. The sidescroller is a generally forgotten idea anymore, and when you get right down to it, most of the best games were side scrollers, if they scrolled at all.
What about the graphical MUDS, like everquest (called evercrack here at work for its addictiveness.) there deffinatly gaining popularity. ultima online didn't seem to do as well as everquest. but go on e-bay and you can find players selling there everquest items FOR REAL MONEY. and with upcomeing starwars rendidtion of the game they will get even more popular.
Gentleman, you can't fight in here, this is the war room..
who sez death can't be funny....www.endlesssorrow.com
...combat and peacetime alike: Some of us prefer nth-degree realism, even if it means the sim costs upward of $40 per and it's a cast-iron unforgiving bitch to learn how to operate properly.The trade-off, though, is that the sim better be well documented and thoroughly debugged. I snuck a look at the resource page for Falcon 4.0, and from there I went to Reviews. One of the knocks on F4.0 was that the air-campaign module was buggy. A misbehaving feature-laden sim is less enjoyable than a bulletproof if relatively unsophisticated one.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Problem I have with the "Sierra Classics" is that when the game pops up and asks "What color is ... on page ...?" and the manual is in low res black and white. I don't know how many of them I've tried and had to keep running the program until I guessed right.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Some would argue that games involving stealth are in a genre of their own, and not merely first-person shooters (Thief, Deus-Ex, etc.).
Perhaps gaming will do better once the "niche" markets move to the web for distribution. I'm serious considering the development of a strategy/adventure game, written in conjunction with my family. Will I go to a big-name publisher? Hell no; I'm going to publish on the web.
The need to make a buck is what kills most innovative industries; we can see the problem in everything from car design to clothing styles. Those who start a new idea are enthusiasts, people who do X because they really love X. When X becomes successful, imitators appear, dilluting the market; innovation is seen as a threat to success; the end is mediocrity.
Gaming was once a hobby, a niche industry built by people who loved to play games. I've been gaming since before the birth of most people who will read this message; I've watched it evolve from paper-and-pencil to pixels-and-modems. The creativity is simply gone -- exemplified by Blizzard, a company that now make oodles of cash from games that clone past successes! What really makes Diablo 2 different from Diablo 1? Not much... (although we have had fun playing Diablo 2 as a family on the home LAN, mixing role-playing with the hack and slash.)
So what's good in gaming these days? Lots of stuff:
Majesty (Cyberlore Studios) is a wonderful variation on RTS. Instead of controlling your units, you influence them; it is more of an RTS than Dungeon Keeper (Majesty lets you pick the units you'll influence), and more of a sim than Age of Kings (AoK still has horrible unit AI). Majesty is a great application of artificial life to gaming...
System Shock 2 (Looking Glass Studios) The praises of this game have been sung everywhere; too bad it didn't make enough money to keep Looking Glass alive. I'm no fan of shooters -- but I do like action games with a strong story line.
Heretic 2 is also a good game, a bit more of a shooter, but with an immersive story line. And Heretic 2 is available for Linux...
Games will diverge into two broad categories: The popular commodity games designed to appeal to script kiddies and twitch gamers, and "real" immersive/innovative games designed for the people with more evolved tastes. The former will be sold in Best Buy; the latter will be available over the web.
All about me
--
I used to enjoy playing some games once in a while, and I enjoyed keeping up with the latest releases.
Then Doom, Quake, and RPG/Strategy games appeared and that was the end of my gaming years.
I play games to relax and have fun. I want to be able to play a game that will last a few minutes, and not, literally, days or weeks.
I miss the good old platform games and all those other games with simple plots and simple goals. I even wonder if many of today's high school kids have even played those types of games.
Innovation drives the gaming industry. The problem with the flight sim genre is that it's been overdone. From A10 Tankkiller to Wing Commander to (gulp) MS Flight, there's only so much you can do. Shoot, turn, shoot, loop, turn, crash into a mountain.
Today's gaming climate blurs the lines of definition between genres. Look at Half Life, Asheron's Call, BattleZone, Metal Gear Solid and Spyro the Dragon. Only games that give us more to explore and kill actually make it.
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
RPGs like Monkey Island, Kings Quest (the old ones), or interactive movie games like Braindead 13, and games a la syndicate. Boy I miss those....
True, but it used a pre-Quake engine (the one from Dark Forces), and did not support 3D cards until Lucas released a patch. Still, the ammunition factor and the way the different guns behaved made this one of the most fun FPS games ever, not to mention that it had one of the better story lines in the history of the FPS genre.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I have the pleasure of telling you about one such community. Find out more here. There are people from the UIUC air disaster research department donating flight models, there's work on X15 and hot-air balloon models being done, pilots from all over the place contributing advice (and code, in some cases), and some excellent core developers. Flightgear implements some truly amazing features (like an elliptoid world model; accurate geographical modelling of the whole world; complete simulation of all astral bodies according to date, time, geographic location; etc.) that has really impressed flight instructors all over the place. It's still in heavy development, especially the new flight model and the weather/scenery code.
Most notably, the War Games catagory. Hello? http://civilization.gamestats.com! Firaxis and Activision are duking it out to create the next generation of Civilization games.
I don't think most people would consider Civilization (the board game or computer games) to be proper wargames -- they are turn based strategy games with a military/conquest element, but that's about it. "Real" wargames (tactical/strategic simulations) don't have roman phalanxes that can destroy an offshore battleship, or planes where a single bombing run takes two years of game time.
I've been marginally interested in wargaming for about two decades, and in all of that time it's been a niche market with a very specialized audience. You really have to have an interest in military history to enjoy grognard-style wargaming. Most people I've encountered who are serious wargamers are extremely specialized in the types of games they like to play: the Boer wars, or the WWII North African Campaign, the Roman Conquest of the British isles, etc. These people want to know the armament and insignia of every division, the personality of the commanders, etc. It's really not for everybody (for my part, I'd be happiest playing maybe one or two nights a year of serious wargaming, using a game system where I can learn all of the rules in half an hour or less -- I'm not a serious grognard).
There may be an interesting parallel between wargames and flight sims here: in both cases, the target audience is much more interested in detail and realism than in mass-market playability. The difference being that as computers get better and better, building better flight sims requires more money and effort to design something that makes use of all of those resources (and it will be a LONG time - if ever - before they make a flight sim that is realistic enough for the truly hardcore). Flight sims will always be around, but they may start costing a lot more, and be harder to find through mass-market retail. The future may be better for wargaming, since you don't need millions of dollars and a whole development studio to design a wargame - the target audience mostly only cares about historical accuracy and a good AI. The latter can be tricky, but there are still lots of good wargames being put out by small, independent software companies (I've heard good things about Tac-Ops, for instance).
There ARE new genres, just not in the west! Japan has created many new genres in the mid-late 90's. Witness the social sim, like Tokimeki Memorial. Witness the Rhytm Game like Parappa, and its natural extension the dancing game, like Dance Dance Revolution. Hell, Japan has created games that are based entirely on interaction with sound. One game (I forget the name) didn't even have graphics, just a blank screen while you interacted with the sound. I'd love to see some of these genres here but the market here seems to simply prefer generic FPS's and sports games. Oh well. :-/
Hell, not a SINGLE Social Simulation has been released in the U.S. (No, Thousand Arms doesn't count. It was horrible and didn't include very deep social segments.) The Sims sorta is like that but it was more an external "ant farm" simulation rather than one that put you into the social context.
Check out Japanese games sometime. Not the ones that are popular here, check out the releases you DON'T see talked about here. You'll find some VERY interesting games.
In one sense, yes. I thought Wolfenstein 3D was an amazing game at the time. But the superiority of Doom's gameplay is fairly evident -- today, over 6 years from its original release, I still go back and play the odd game of Doom now and again. I can't say the same about Wolf3D, no matter how much I liked it at the time...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I haven't seen any new genres, including FPS. I would argue that the first FPS game ( that I played) is at least 17 years old ( Dungeons of Daggorath ). Ok, it wasn't a shooter exactly, but that was technology limiting the concept. For those who don't remember it, it was a first person perspective wireframe '3D' dungeon crawl. It was real time instead of turn based, but your movement was restricted to 'cells'.
'Space Hulk' was a fairly innovative concept, being a turn based strategy + tactical squad first person shooter in the same game! I don't know why no one followed up on it. If it'd been less buggy, it would have been a hall of famer.
Anyway, the best games are usually refinements on an initial concept rather than something brand new. Examples:
Prince of Persia - Side scrolling action game
Ultima Underworld - first person shooter / puzzle
Alone in the Dark - third person perspective game
A notable oddity is Sword of the Samurai, as a mixed genre game it ruled, but I'm not sure if any of the individual pieces were actually that excellent. I still fondly remember wandering up and down Japan insulting the ancestors of my rivals.
I'm rambling like an old fart, so I'm off to get caffiene, blessed ambrosia from the plastic teat of the goddess of commerce.
I have a bad feeling about B&W. I thought Populous III sucked. i LIKED Populous I and II, it was even more fun playing over a LAN!
I'd probably be playing II now if I could get it to work on my PC.
Later
Erik Z
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
I'd agree to that to a certain degree...heck, even top-selling "Civilization" (and all its varients and sequels) are still basically based on the old "Empire" engine, which was running perfectly well on unix and vaxen boxes before PC's were around. Civ just added the "theme" of history, and features there-of, based on the science development model in its A-H boardgame namesake.
M.U.L.E. still rocks as probably the best PC game ever, IMHO.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Besides, is 100 FPS really that much better than, say, 40 or 50?
Actually anything over about 30 fps is pretty much wasted. Unless you're very exceptional or highly attuned to these things, your eye won't notice much of a difference in performance once you get over 30 fps. Any differences in frame over that would likely be imperceptible. Every human eye is a bit different, but the general cut off is somewhere around 30 - 60 fps.
So, if you're buying some super hot vid card to get 100 fps in Quake III, you're wasting money. Buy one that'll get you 40 fps and you won't notice the difference in playing the game.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
I'm sick of hearing every one complain about how there are no new styles of game play coming out.
I agree, there haven't been any completely brand new game genres in a while. And yes, game companies keep coming out with clones of the popular games.
But guess what, this is nothing new. How many Pac-Man clones were there, and Space Invaders, that you all keep looking back at so fondly?
Yes there were great games in the past, I personally also enjoy the games I grew up playing more than new games. But lack of inovation is something that has been happening since day 2 of the computer game industry.
How many games that came out ten years ago do you hate, or don't even remeber because they weren't anything new or spectacular?
Truly Inovative games only come out every few years, and while yes it's been a while, more will eventually come out.
> Remember when the gameplay was what really mattered in games?
Yep. But now all that matters is what "features" you can pack into the boxtop description. Games are suffering from the same inappropriate feature race that almost all other software is.
Kind of like movies, that pack in the special effects and forget the things that once made great movies great. Never mind whether the fx contribute to the movie or detract from it; the trailer serves the same role as the games' boxtops. Bait the buyer; that's all that matters.
Whence all the superficiality?
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Was that a troll, or are you just ignorant?
First of all, hi-fi audio is alive and well. My B&W speakers (bought last December) would fool Yo Yo Ma into thinking another cello player was in the room that sounded just like him.
You can still buy records of every major release... you just gotta know how.
As for the whole analog-vs-digital debate - both sides spread a crapload of FUD about each other.
Most of the problems that early critics of CD's thought were built-in limitations of digital turned out to be the result of poor D/A conversion, inferior CD player components, and lossy error correction algorythms.
Today, a $350 Rotel CD player can easilly compete with the warm, full sound of the finest turntables available... even the most die-hard vinyl junkie will admit it.
That said, a simple double-blind test of "The Moscow Sessions" from Scheffield Labs can quickly demonstrate that direct-to-disk 2-track analog recording is still far superior to the state of the art in digital recording. There is no room for debate that Scheffield is the state of the art in both platforms. Doug Sax, the owner fo Sheffield Labs, probably oversaw the mastering phase of half the CD's you own, and you will never meet a bigger cheerleader for vinyl than him.
For purists, analog is still the way to go, but digital can give you Damn Good Sound for a fraction of the price of properly implemented analog.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
For example, the MUDs going graphical are a culmination of the desire to play an FPS with the depth of a MUD. Fallout is an example of wanting elements of RPG alongside RTS/turn-based (it's switchable in this game series) combat. Games like the upcoming Warcraft III are created almost solely from melting together successful/desireable design elements into a single interface, IMO.
Of course, this type of development exists all over the place, and over time, where new projects build off of the shoulders of older projects. I'm not saying that hybrid games constitute new genres necessarily, however, they are breathing life into the sections of existing genres that may have been going a bit limp on their own.
That being said, my retail game development experience lies squarely in the "yes, Publisher, I'd be glad to take my 2D scrolling platform shooter and convert it into a 3D RTS hunting game. I understand that it would sell much better, sir, in light of the popularity of Deer Hunter." sheesh.
PointlessGames.com -- Go waste some time.
MassMOG.com -- Visit the site; Use the word.
Also, the Thief series, while it's based on first person shooter-like engine, it's different enough to qualify as an original genre in my mind - the "first person sneaker", if you will. And the melding of adventure games, shooters, and putting it in the third person (a la Tomb Raider, Heretic II) is a fairly new concept as well.
--
Sure they review playability, configurability, stability, and a few other standard review items -- all important, no doubt. Yet they consistently overlook what is going to keep you coming back for more. I think it's time the developers took an objective look at what made those games of yesteryear great, and take a step back from replying on the technological developments of tomorrow for sales.
A thought just occurred to me - maybe they have no replay value because they don't want you to be too happy with any single game. The reason: Then you won't buy as many games! Think about it - if game X can keep you happily gaming for a year, you are less inclined to buy another title. Fewer bought titles at $40-$50 a pop - less money for the publishers. You might argue that having a thoroughly good time with, say, Civilization for years (as I did) will make me buy Civ II. It didn't - it had changed too much. To this date, I have never played Civ II for more than about 10 minutes at a time. I have not even considered Civ:CTP - lots of fun playing Alpha Centauri though. :-) is always a questionable approach, I do think that a lot of people are like me - buying lots of crap hoping to find a nugget of gold. And $40 for a crappy game is exactly as much money as $40 for a marvelous (sp?) one...
I've bought numerous space sims because I wanted better ones - Wing Commander and X-Wing were kinda cool, but I kept on buying new ones to see if they had "the right stuff". They didn't.
Although drawing conclusions from just one individual (especially a sick one like me
Black holes are where God divided by zero
yes!
I have been looking for a good sidescroller for years! The amiga had one -- R-type I think -- that was absolutely brilliant. The C64 had Delta I think it was. Both kicked serious butt.
More rencently, (like three years ago) I bought (one of three software packages ever purchased) battlegirl, which was totally kick ass. As soon as I get my hands on another mac, I'll dust off the zip disk it is installed on. It had a top view 360 scrolling action, with 100s of levels, and best of all, separate fire and fly controls (like Bolo for the Apple II).
Does anyone have any good 2d shooters to recommend?
Vinyl sounds better. But to get a decent turntable, needle, and the vinyl itself you're going to spend a lot of money. CDs are cheap hifi, but they don't approach the richness of an analog recording on a killer turntable.
Of course that vinyl degrades quickly, even with lots of care and a well-balanced needle. CDs are literally orders of magnitude cheaper in the long run and they do sound quite good, despite the infamous clipping of the "inaudible" frequencies.
There are still a lot of people that buy new turntables and vinyl. They spend lots of dough on the stuff... they are the same people who buy vacuum tube powered (sometimes liquid-cooled!) amplifiers for $10,000 + a pop.
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
I am waiting for WarCraft III to come out. I have heard that its supposed to be a Role Playing Strategy!?! That's a new genre for you. Anybody have anymore details?
I'm with you man, I really hate games that glorify violence against fish!
Seriously, though, while id has only ever made one game, DOOM (which was simply Wolf 3D with better graphics and multiplayer), and then made upmty-million dollars rereleasing the exact same game with better graphics for how many years now? FPS's are not all just mindless twitch-fests.
I haven't tried out Deus Ex yet, but System Shock, from way back and more recently System Shock 2 are FPS's with a rich environment, rich game mechanics, and while they do involve a fair amount of running around shooting things, they also have interesting story-lines that draw you in... characters you can take an interest in, and a great sense of immersion in an non-trivial science fiction world and satisfaction in succeeding at the game.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
"He doesn't understand or recognize or care about the issues that the literature, film, and music of the 90's speaks about, he does not care for the tone of voice it speaks in, or the palette of colors it's painted in"
No i understand it, i just think its a tacky version of earlier stuff, that covered the same themes, only with more depth and subtlety.
It's not that games aren't fun.. They are. It's not that games aren't sexy-lookin. They are. Most games that have a decent development team, and a good QA team to make sure it works properly, are good games and they are great fun.. Did you sense a "but" coming? Indeed, because here it is..
The problem as i see it is that they are fun, but only the first few times you play em. Why is that? Well, replayabilty just isn't there anymore for many new games released. I sure hope some game developers actually get to read this because with almost all of my friends and my gaming community buddies, we complain about the same thing. Lets examine some games that have made it, and others that haven't.
They say that the combat flight sim is dying. Well, i might tend to agree, and for a few reasons. Complexity is one, they have that much right, but if you get people into the genre, that's not enough, if you want to sell more games of the genre later on, you have to keep them there, and that's where replayability comes in. To see the same formation of enemy aircraft or ground vehicles in the same place at the same time every time you play the game really makes it boring. I used to be a fan of this genre, and the last game that really tickled my fancy was Gunship 2000. Simple graphics, nothing terribly complicated, but every map you played, even though there were only perhaps 5-10 maps that the game just kept selecting from seemingly at random, the location and configuration of your targets changed every time you loaded the map. That kept me playing that game for a couple years.
Something more recent? How about Quake(series), Diablo, TFC? Now many might say that its just the multiplayability of these games that made them good. Well, they're right, but probably not for the reasons they suspect. How many people do you know that sit there and play the single player QuakeII game over and over? It's not especially thrilling anymore, and not many people bother. Yet there are still thousands of people playing QuakeII multiplayer every day even after 3 years. Why? New maps come out on occaision but its not that. Its that the people you play against make the game like-new every time you join a server. Same with diablo. Diablo had an interesting concept, but it became one of the most popular games in years because different monsters, items, and indeed even the levels you played changed everytime you loaded the game. Same game, but replayability was high.
The real cause of the death of all games, not just PC games is misdirected focus in development. Most games are being directed toward making better more intense and real graphics thanks to the intense graphics competition out there. New hardware means new capabilities, but really, i don't want sexier graphics if it means after i buy the game and play it once, i don't want to play it again. Maybe the game reviewer's themselves are contributors to the apparent stagnation in innovation. Development companies do pay attention to the reviews and suggestions they make, and when was the last time you saw a category in a review for replayability. Its all about graphics, graphics, graphics. Sure they review playability, configurability, stability, and a few other standard review items -- all important, no doubt. Yet they consistently overlook what is going to keep you coming back for more. I think it's time the developers took an objective look at what made those games of yesteryear great, and take a step back from replying on the technological developments of tomorrow for sales.
Without it, the learning curve can be too steep. I'd rather spend 4 hours on my HOTAS than either fly-pause-n-read or just plain reading.
HOTAS? Please explain, all I can come up with is Hampster Of The Appropriate Sex, but it's probably not that.
WRT hardcore flight sims at least, I doubt that sales are actually shrinking that much. I suspect the problem is more that the target market for these games was very close to the early-adopter PC demographic; somewhat anal types who like the challenge of fiddling around with horribly complex systems.
So most of the potential market was tapped pretty early on; the explosion of PC use among Joe Public hasn't brought many new converts. Meanwhile, of course, dev costs are skyrocketing just like any other genre. From a publisher's POV this plummet in market share and ROI looks like an out-and-out loser.
Side note - am I the only one who's sick of people saying over and over again with a wistful sigh, "Remember when gameplay was all that mattered...?" Get real. There was never a Golden Age. Remember Sturgeon's Law, "90% of anything is crap". Most games sucked in the 80s too, it's just that we've forgotten those and remember the good ones. Designers then tried to make their games look as good as possible, it's just that back then "possible" didn't go very far. And designers now aren't just forgetting to check the "Good Gameplay" box in Microsoft GameWizard. Gameplay is HARD.
Sure, todays it 3d this and 3d that, millions of polygons, and those all important frames per second. Gameplay seems to have taken a back seat..
But wait a second.. Its always been like that..
Back in the days when I read Crash, Your Sinclair, Mean Machines and so on there were reviews fortnightly focusing on the latest 'full price' (7.99) graphical licensed blockbuster. Have people forgotten those miraculous sprites in LA Drugs Bust? The amazing no-colour-clash Spiky Harold? How about the '3D filled polygons' of Driller (featuring FreeScape!).
These games were bloody awful. Waiting for 5 minutes for the game to load off a cassette.. playing for half an hour before the damn game crashed.. and then repeating the process over. And do you remember trying to save your game?
Gameplay isn't dead. Its still out there in a few games. Theres probably about the same number of fantastic games releashed each year now as there always has been.. but we've forgotten the crap from the early days.
The main thing I miss these days is the humour. Nothing now is as funny as Your Sinclair. Shame..
http://twitter.com/onion2k
As a programmer and electrical engineer I have to disagree with your generalization. I think the problem is a sign of a systemmic problem with American computer games. Many games focus on complex and precise details, but fails to deliver good gameplay. When I come home from work I don't want to study a 200 page manual on how to get started, and then another 20 pages on how to get it configured correctly (I do that enough at work already). I want to just want to pop the game in press start and have a fun time.
The Japanese may not be the most innovative when it comes to games but they create games that are fun and enjoyable. I would prefer to play a well crafted Playstation game at 320x200 resolution that garunteed to work than a 1024x768 resolution PC game with the latest technology that lacks in gameplay.
Play Chrono Cross and you'll see what I am talking about!
I do let gameplay slide for some games like Nethack because they are extremely fun and interesting when you get into it.
Oh, man.. You're not the only one to miss space flight combat games.. I loved the Wing Commander series, and have played just about every one one like that..
I wouldn't say the genre's dead, we just got a few new ones fairly recently, Allegiance and comes to mind.. I forgot another that is mainly a single player campaign game..
Anyways.. I wouldn't say it's dead yet, I'd say it's on a hiatus for the time being. This is about the normal speed that games like these have come out. Just give it a little time.
I haven't tried Allegiance, but the last space combat sim that I got hooked on was Freespace 2.
I'm afraid Homeworld just isn't anything like it, it's much more like Tiberium Sun or something like that than X-Wing. Now, if you could pilot one of your fleet's ships..
*starts to drool as he gets flashbacks to Wingcommander Armada*
An excellent and thoughtful post, Vulgrin. Thanks.
;-).
Something I'd like to add, is the cyclical nature of the appeal of games.
The first real game platform was the Apple ][, which saw meteoric rise in popularity to play color games. After a glut the popularity waned and pundits were declaring computer gaming dead. Then came the Atari 2600, an inferior piece of hardware, but much cheaper than the $1,500 price tag of an Apple or CGI equiped PC. Another meteoric rise and decline, culminating in 9 million ET cartridges in a southern California landfill. Again, games were declared dead.
Enter the NES. Wildly popular it brought quality arcade games into the home and demonstrated, probably for the first time effectively, that people would shell out up to $60 for a game cartridge.
Since then the game market has been fairly strong, as Sony, Sega, Nintendo and PC's have rapidly evolved to present bigger and better games, finally achieving networked games (until then you played NSnipes at work
Card games and Harry Potter have siezed the imaginations where games are now failing, but there's always another generation. Probably ushered in by the likes of GarageGames and people, like me, who get bored and decide to finally put an old idea to code.
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The gaming community is always changing due to two things: gamers growing up and getting a job, or first learning how to handle a keyboard and mouse. When gamers have kids and those kids grow up, they will probably be gamers as well. And they probably won't have played Starcraft or Myst or any of the flight sims. It'll all be new to them.
I think that there are swings in the gaming community. In five to ten years, see if a new breed of gamer doesn't wonder what happened to the industry that generated all the great war sims that he found backed up on his dad's CD-R collection.
-- Dave
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
The Last great PC games I played were Star Control 2 and Myst. Both had all the elements I want, great gameplay, incredible design, infinite replay value and an incredible story. Everything since has just sucked :) Well, except for StarCraft but that was merely good, not great. I don't know what the big deal was with the Sims, I liked it up until I got promoted to the highest level and then it just got boring...
Sacrifice looked to be the most well-crafted game at E3 and a lot of fun. It's ludicrous to eulogize the RTS as "dead and buried" while praising the very fresh and playable Homeworld and eliding upcoming games that are actively reinventing the genre like Sacrifice, Black and White and Halo. Gamecenter's eulogy for the RTS convinces me only that they dislike some recent RTS games so much that they've become jaded on the subject.
Many things move in cycles, video game genres are no different. These genres will suffer for quite a few years as an influx of casual gamers causes the simpler action games to become so profitable that the more complex types suffer in development support. What will cause an eventual upswing is the paradigm shift (a bit cliche, I know) that society will experience with general acceptance of computers. Kids will grow up surrounded by computers, video games, and even parents who played those games themselves. As the technology becomes more integrated and common, and its use becomes daily routine, tolerance for complexity will increase as unfimiliarity with the medium decreases. Markets for the more "hard-core" genres will be re-created as shear size of the potential audience grows, and as platforms for video games continue to penetrate deeper into our culture. What I mean is, selling 50,000 units of a complex game today, can mean selling 200,000 units of that game to a larger potential audience tommorow, making the difference between a dud and a hit. With little to no games filling those niches in the future, the smarter game development firms will recognize the opportunity, and enthusiasts at those companies will act accordingly. So basically:
"Don't Worry, Everything Is Going To Be Okay" (tm)
I gotta disagree with you here. Though most everyone can look back on chilhood through rose colored glasses, games don't always enjoy the same status as, say ice cream or the price of a Coke ("Back in my day I could buy a Coke-- and not that 'New Coke' crap-- for only 45 cents", Grandpa says before the medication kicks in again). I don't plan on reliving my days of ET on the Atari 2600 or playing Mario Brothers (not the "Super" ones). And let's face it, when it came to arcade games, you could have heard the Sonic Boom when SF2 Hurricane Kicked the original's butt right out of the arcades.
I will give you that many game sequels have improved on the originals, and lots have even thrown the firsts of the genres right out the window. However, most of the games have stopped innovating where gameplay is concerned. Hell, I could walk straight from SF2 to DarkStalkers and never missed a beat. anything I could do in Bad Dudes I could accomplish in Final Fight (though IMHO FF is better). I wouldn't call a Ranchero better than a Ford F150 just because it came out earlier. That's ludicrous! My point is that people don't compare these games to their predecessors necessarily because they were better in their minds eye, but rather because they are just plain better.
Things are always at their peak just before
they die/vanish/crumble/dissapear.
-- mantis --
That looks very nice. Too bad about the system requirements. My point was that a product that offers increased flexibility/realism in exchange for increased complexity, perhaps should be targeted at people who have already made that flexibility/complexity choice in other aspects of life. To be explicit: try to sell complex flight sims to geek platform (e.g. Unix) users, not Windows/MacOS users.
It's just a thought. I don't claim to be a marketing genious.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You're not wrong there - the PSX Castlevania is very good. I've played + finished it several times, and I can't ever see myself selling it. Not only is the game full of depth, and fun to play - the graphics are the best true 2D ones I've seen, and the music is breathtaking.
Why must people have polygons everywhere? A well crafted 2d character can look just as good, if not better.
james
--
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
The RTS will get a new boost when Black and White, and Sacrifice come out.
:)
Shame on you, you forgot Warcraft 3
depends. in hexen ii, there was likely a way to switch to first person mode, but it would *suck*, and basically be a novelty. most games made in third-person mode are made that way for gameplay reasons, and if they provide a first person mode, it's generally not as useful. but, yeah, third-person shooter is a fairly widely used term =)
--
As I see it, there are two types of games out there-- those to make a profit, and those because the designer was having a bit of fun.
The problem is that companies are trying to get the most profit that they can. For a flight sim, they've got to get everything right, or some anal retentive bastard's going to bitch that the lever to control the landing gear's in the wrong place.
It's not so bad with fantasy games, where you can make up whatever you want, and well, that's just how it is. [which is why Halflife starts getting lame when you're on alien worlds -- it's so much cooler to see how well they got the human reactions and such]
Some games are fun in a more nostalgic way... I'll go back and play Quake once in a while, or Duke3d, when I'm in the FPS mood, but QuakeII....I don't think so. Sometimes, I'm in the mood for a good game of C&C or WarcraftII. [Although, after playing it for so much, I guess I have to admit that AOE and AOK aren't bad games, either]
You still get people working on text based muds....not for the profit, but for the fun of it. [okay, and I know a few that are just there to be fascist bastards, but that's another story] People still work on NetHack. I think I remember seeing on slashdot a while back mentioning Trade Wars. Hell, there's even a sequel to Dark Castle coming out.
Good games are still out there, even if they're not coming from the companies who can afford the multi million dollar ad campaigns.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
--Quote-- Myst's idea of interactivity involved sparse clicks followed by hours of skull scratching. And text adventure involved vast amounts of typing followed by hours of skull scratching. --Q Off-- Both of those generes involve a TON of head scratching. But the difference is that unlike in Myst (or Riven or and Myst-esque game) There is no involvement with the player. It's like you're a body strapped to a pole wandering around a extremely detailed quake 3 map at 2 frames a minute. Text games had a flavor and style to them that drew you in to the story. But this is not even the worst. What about the death of some great generes like the side scroller? You will never see another game like Super Mario 3 or (Super) Metroid or Alex Kidd or Actraiser (I really loved the action scenes, but the sim scenes were good too). Games have become more bland and will continue to do so as the technology favors the 3-d game. With every NVidia GeFarce card that people buy, they are saying to developers..."Make us Daikatana.... Make me Quake.... Make some bimbo and let me stare at her ass for hours on end." If you notice, the 3-d card is a really awsome processor, it's probably more powerful then the Pentium or Athlon you've got in your system. but it limits the creativity of the people who program for it by forcing them into the 3-d mold. Rant off Rave Off Hasta, Steve Toth
I'd dispute the suggestion that Wolfenstein 3D was truly original. Plenty of RPGs had used a first-person viewpoint while wandering round a maze before, while the gameplay wasn't really more than a gauntlet clone. Viewpoint alone does not a new genre make.
Looking across at my shelf, I'd have to suggest the inclusion of Dungeon Keeper, though. It'd seem just as original as Lemmings to me.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Outlaws was my favorite pre-true-3D shooter, and I still play that once in a while, but when Quake and the various Quake-alikes came along, Doom was off my HD, never to be seen again.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I am not a die hard gamer but have recently started playing Sieras Homeworld.
A great interface to this game and I am not sure if it is a new genre or not but I have never played or even seen a game quite like it.
There is also the sub-category of squad-leader type turn-based games, like XCOM and Jagged Alliance. I wouldn't mind seeing more of those. Jagged Alliance 2 would have been excellent if they got the artist from XCOM, and fixed all those *damn bugs* that keep the game hanged for 15 minutes while the enemy "thinks" about what he's going to do.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
It's kinda hard to feel sorry for Sierra, seeing that they responded to the low sales of adventure games with mass layoffs.
But well, I guess the ship can't sail when the captain is a retard, and throwing some crew overboard always solves the problem.
There are still successful adventure games out there. Planescape: Torment, for one. I know, it's actually an AD&D game, but the storyline is so captivating that you can't let it go.
It's got what most adventure games lack: replay value. The thing is, once you finish an adventure game, you've just got a pretty box that cost you tens of dollars. It makes you feel stupid, and noone wants to feel stupid. It also encourages piracy, which again hurts sales.
How long does it take to finish an adventure game? 10 hours? 40 hours?
How long can you enjoy a well-executed FPS? How many manhours, worldwide, are spent playing Half-Life per day?
The point is, that if you want 10 hours of creative storytelling, you just go and buy a book for less than ten dollars.
> "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American Public." - Rupert Murdoch.
Actually, H.L. Mencken said it first.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
> Baldur's Gate started the current flood of RPGs
Baloney. There were plenty of CRPG's being published immediately before BG, like the Might and Magic series, Fallout, Fallout 2 (Black Isle sure helped revive the genre, I'll give it that), Lands of Lore. BG just happened to sell well. BG is barely even a RPG (but boy howdy is its combat cooler than Diablo) since the main character basically has no identity, and the NPC's are wholly interchangeable and play no part whatsoever in the story.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Don't forget monthly fees...
:)
:P
I remember playing quite a bit on Nightmare myself. It had very good level of detail that I liked as well as atmosphere.
I usually logged onto Darkwind to do some coding and to socialize.
If Everquest shipped with a LAN version so I could set up a server for LAN parties, I'd be in heaven, otherwise I'll stick to graphical MUDs to feed my addiction.
-Vel
I'd argue that the Close Combat games are essentially RTTs as well, though they've become so without being an offshoot of RTSes. CC2 and CC3 are also extremely fun games; every now and then I'll "rediscover" them and end up playing a campaign all the way through again.
for me, the biggest reason for me now playing paper based wargames was having a girlfriend, she takes up a lot of time. Ancillary reasons are the cats, even a Tiger Tank counter is powerless against a cat, and a child.
Which is why I really like Panzer General, I can fit in 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there, and finish a scenario in a week or two.
A savior to board wargames might be the the Wargame Processor, which lets you play the classic Avalon Hill (and other) games via email, and save everything on your computer. I have yet to try it out, though.
...the real world is motion-blurred.
The human eye can only detect about 30 FPS; each light sensor basically adds up all the light that hits it in 1/30th of a second and presents that as a "pixel" in that "frame" (which is why things like raster scanning monitors: your eyes' natural motion blur at work!). However, games render views as still-frames. So if you're moving fast enough that the world would be a blur, instead you get what is effectively random garbage on the screen. That is the rendering engine breaking down under conditions it was not built to handle properly; much like when you walk right up to a wall in Doom and walk sideways (ooo, look at the squares!).
Running extra frames faster than the eye can see creates a fake motion blur. The higher the frame rate, the faster things can move and still look okay. For games like Quake, the necessary speed for effective blurring tops out around 200 fps. I imagine very high speed racing games could benefit from even higher fps rates.
However, if and when rendering engines start to incorporate true motion-blurring (which nobody seems terribly inclined to bother with, since the fake blurring looks just fine, and is probably cheaper and definitely simpler to compute), 30 FPS will be just fine.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Forget not those forerunners of Battle.net
:)
My personal favorite game is Galaxy by
Russell Wallace. It has since been tweaked
to about 4-5 different flavors (the most
Darwinian by far is Blind..heh heh)
VGA Planets was (is?) also good. Diplomacy played
well over the net, though I didn't play it much.
Stomping on a computer is all well & good, but
nothing compares to outwitting a human opponent
Games seem to run the range from Reflex (all
action) to Cerebral (all thinking). Obviously,
PBEM is more suited to those cerebral leisures.
(could you argue that battle.net is just a
real-time pbem?)
I always wanted to play in an Empire game marathons...one of those updated every 5 or
10 minutes for 24 hours.
Free. Did I mention free? Some of them
are (like Galaxy).
so long,
Bollux
-"alas poor Yorick..."
Y'know, I would be almost inclined to agree and I have said almost the same thing in the past but I can't refute the evidence of my own observation.
Whilst a lot of MUDS playerbase is declining the one which I admin on has a new user count that is increasing almost on a daily basis. Of course, I'm pretty sure that that is largely because being Discworld we leech of the popularity of TPs books somewhat, but the people stay which basically leads me to believe that it's not actually that muds are dying in popularity, just that people aren't being drawn to them anymore [since most internet users these days seem to not even know what telnet is or that there is life beyond the web browser] but that once you've got the buggers hooked then the Mud genre is as popular as ever.
J
I am not a Frog. I am a Free Womble!
The amount of nostalgic distortion on this board is a bit disturbing. Many seem to suffer from the all-to-common phenomenon of distorting the memories of a past. People talk about how the game designers of old really knew how to make a game, and that modern day designers need to study human psychology.
I've got news, many of those early game designers also didn't know thing 1 about technology. They were usually the geekiest throwbacks from their graduating class.
The truth is that the new games aren't intrinsically worse than these mythical games of old, rather we have become jaded over time. Old game features no longer appeal to us because we are used to them. We know how to solve puzzle X, even if it wears a different face.
Then of course there's the graphics.
Implicit in these statements is the implication that if I were to take one of the new games back in time to 1985, the lucky gamer I gave it to would eventually stop playing and go back to his C-64. Frankly, I can't imagine that happening until the game was well played out.
We're jaded, we're the old men sitting on the porch saying "these kids don't know what a good game is!".
I for one refuse to believe that game design studios with multiple developers and multi-million dollar budgets cannot outperform a high school kid with a few hours of free time per day. These *are* good games we're seeing, some of them at any rate.
-Illserve
Aces of the Pacific (runs on a 386), Aces over Europe, they may not have been the most realistic, but they sure were fun.
For those people that want to *be* the card....
Personally, I love the idea of role-playing Veldrane of Sengir....go figure. >;)
Jovan, Chandler or even Ihsan.
-Vel
As long as there are people around, there will be games. How long have Chess, Go, and even Gambling been around for ? For over a 1,000 years, or more.
;-) Old games don't die, they just become less popular. I see the same thing in the retro-gaming scene.
It's true, a lot of games are just "the same game with nicer visuals". i.e. How far have driving games progressed? From Atari's Stunts up to the latest EA's "Need for Speed".
Now I don't see too many people playing Quake 1 CTF / ThunderWalker / Team Fortress / Mega-TF because the "majority" of gamers have moved onto newer games (which may or may not be better
What new games ARE doing are becoming cross-genre experiences. e.g.
Majesty is a nice mix of Sim, RTS, and RPG.
Dungeon Siege is a sweet mix of RPG+Action. Even Drakan is a mix to a limited extent.
Part of the problem that we dont' see more new genres, is because of sales. When "gamers" snap up 2 million copies of Diablo 2, which is a just a rehash (allthough fun game!) of Diablo 1, what incentive is there for smaller developers to create a "new" game, when sales can barely even reach 100,000.
i.e. Thief was a interesting twist and great innovative game, but that didn't help Looking Glass Studios from running out of money.
We'll continue to see new games. It's just getting harder and harder to do.
If innovation is key, as GameCenter suggests, then all genres of PC game are dying, including Action and First-Person Shooter. Diablo II is certainly nothing new... even the original Diablo had little innovation. Quake 3 is the least innovative game that Id has ever released. Yet few people would actually come out and say that Action or FPS genres are dying out. Personally, I don't think innovation is nearly as important as having good, solid gameplay... and keeping out the bugs doesn't hurt. This is mainly what has been killing genres: developers who are too interested in flash than making a game that plays well. Even if it's something we've seen before, if it's well done then people will play it.
"Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."
Half Life was good, no doubt about it. But, as was pointed out in the article this linked to, System Shock 2 had a better plot, that plot was more was more integral to the gameplay, and was generally spectacular (much more interesting, in my view, than HalfLife). But it didn't sell well at all.
I think the reason it didn't sell was because it tried to straddle the boundary between RPG and FPS. You had to develop your skills and sneak around rather than blasting everything in sight like a FPS, which probably alienated some Quake fans. And you did have some very challenging combat sequences, which probably annoyed RPG fans.
People often call the boundaries between genres artificial (in games and otherwise...think SF/Fantasy/Horror), and they are. But gamers have come to expect certain things of games that go by the terms "FPS" or "Adventure" or "RPG" or "RTS"; mixing aspects of two or more will mean they don't know--and may not like--what they're getting. So even when great, innovative games are made, like System Shock, they don't always sell. Who's to blame? Not the companies. Gamers.
As a coder on a very old text-based role playing game, I've seen this happen firsthand. There is no way that we can compete with the blood splatter of Unreal Tournament, or the graphical experience of Everquest. So instead we've tried to focus on the strengths of our dying genre.
People cannot play Everquest from work, while sitting in a programming lab, or other such locations where they find themselves with free time and a firewall that lets them telnet out. Most of our players are people who play these newer games like UT or Icewind Dale, but they don't always have access to that computer. Or people who don't have the computing power and budget to support buying the latest big name game. These people are our target audience at this point, but it is an audience that is slowly shrinking. When we used to use mobs of people in our game's various hangouts and bars, we now consider it great to see a mere dozen.
Many of us are oldschool pencil and paper role players, and chose to play on the text based online game because it allows for a greater level of role playing then EverQuest or Ultima Online. I've tried most of the MMRPG's, and found them to be either giant deathmatches or painful affairs of watching a blue bar grow while staring at a spellbook. I can stare at a spellbook screenshot if I want to get the EverQuest experience. I, for one, would rather spend my time role playing where imagination and text are your only tools.
As much as the genre is dying, there is one benefit from the other games seducing the players away. The only people left on the text based role playing games are those that really want to role play. Otherwise, they'd be booting up Quake 3.
Shameless plug: If you are looking for a great text based online role playing game, check out CyberSphere.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I can trace a direct line between the first few games I got addicted to in the early eighties and the most recent game I got hooked on.
The first was some hack/rogue/moria type game on the ZX81, the most recent was Quake.
The first person shooter really is nothing more than an evolution of the early maze adventures, and not a recent genre at all.
(text adventures)
-> 2D maze
-> 90o grid 2D maze with 3D rendering (3D monster maze)
-> same but view not stuck on a rectininear grid (Wolfenstein)
-> Introduction of height into the above (Doom)
-> Full 3D (Quake)
You've got to admit, the same story line has lasted very well.
FatPhil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I know; I've spent the last week scouring video stores and Toy r Us's looking for Super Nintendos and cartridges on a nostalgia kick. The closest I've been able to come is SNES9x, a laptop with tv/out, and a USB gamepad with fully programmable buttons. Just like playing the original. :-)
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
That can and has been said about any time in history. Most themes can be traced back to the dawn of literature. Its all in the execution. As for tackiness, depth and subtelty, those are just other ways of saying "I like this one more than that". If you don't achieve any sort of perspective and acceptance of change, your going to be a tiresome grumpy old man in a few years.
I agree with most of this. I would truly love to see a good Civil War game. There are many that exist, but even the best of them are mediochre. The thing with war games, if they're going to be realistic, is there would have to be a LOT of soldiers. Not just a few rectangles with pics of lots of soldiers mapped on to them. I mean lots of little independent soldiers. Kinda like CnC, but on a larger scale. Have you ever played CnC 2 against 7 AI opponents? It gets realllyyy slllooowwwwwww. I don't think really good war games will be possible for a few years yet, until the computers are that much faster. I want to command an army of 150,000 troops against another army with 150,000 troops. That's not gonna be possible for quite some time. Of course, many people like war games that are focused more on special fighting units/robots/vehicles/weapons of mass destruction. But even for those types of games, it just isn't possible right now to do anything truly large-scale like that.
Time is fun when you're having flies.
-Kermit the Frog
I'm sorry, the game industry (before I got sane and got out.) I worked in or near it for 10 years
Some catagory is always being pronoucned "dead". 5 years ago it was RPGs. Look at all teh activity now. Any catagory that remains unchanged people gte broed of and it 'dies". (And yes, 1P shooters are abotu due for that dsitinction.) They stay "dead" until some group bucks this preception and comes otu witha new slant on it that "magicly" re-invigorates the genre.
This is an ongoing pattern. There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new twists and thats all people really want. (The 1P shooter really isn't new, its just a new twist on the basic 2D shooter.)
That article did make an important mistake in comparing flight sims to Star Fox, then later whining about a lack of space shooters! Star Fox is not a flight sim in any way, but anyway, the article made a good point about vanishing genres. But it's much deeper than that. Not just PC games are affected by this! Go to your local arcade. The arcade industry is on a road to ruin, too. Arcades are closing down all over the country. Attendance is, in many markets, declining. Games typically take multiple tokens instead of one (as in the '80s), and there are only 3 main genres: 1. racing 2. shooting 3. tournament fighters (Perhaps an occasional sports game makes it in, too.) No more multiplayer cooperative games, no more space shooters, no more action-adventure games, etc. (Why else would Gauntlet Legends be so popular? It's got no competition!) Even pinball is disappearing. (Most of the old manufacturers like Gottlieb are long gone!) To make things worse, console gaming is equally plagued with lack of variety: when was the last time you saw sidescrolling shooters on an N64? Zelda and Mario used to be VERY different, but Ocarina of Time, subtle engine and control differences notwithstanding, is basically just Mario64 with a sword. (And equally boring. Hyrule Field is the perfect example of the vast, lifeless 3D stage design paradigm. You can almost fall asleep traversing it.) Didn't Sega already post losses in excess of $800 million for the last 2 fiscal years (in total)? The once elitist SNK seems to be disappearing from our shores after its new handheld failed. Large companies like 3D0 and EA have posted losses recently, I think. I don't mean to sound pessimistic (too late) but I'm almost worried the gaming industry has grown to big to support itself. Perhaps it's time for a repeat of the Atari crash so we can start anew?
Exile III has been ported to Linux, www.spidweb.com. Requires the latest version of GlibC if I remember correctly. I like the RPGs, and can't wait for Wizardry 8 to come out. It's supposedly in windoze only though :(. Wizardry and Might and Magic are both game series that have been around since the 80s. I remember when I used to have Wizardry for the C-64, I'd stay up half the night some times trying to get somewhere on it. The graphics are lousy by todays standards, but the game played well. I think we should start moving away from pretty graphics and get back to having games with plots instead of doom clones.
Don't call my crazy, that's what they called me back in the home!
The author of this article is a complete idiot. Myst had okay graphics but was *yawn* boring as hell. The problem is "some people" decided that now that 3D games are easier to make, that's what people want. What's wrong with 2D graphics? I don't find Sam & Max Hit the Road any less funny or fun because "It ain't 3D!" I bought a SNES a couple of months ago so I could play Super Metroid (I hated playing it on my emulator. My gamepad just doesn't feel the same.) which is an awesome game that is also 2D. I think people equate 3D with cutting-edge coolness or something just as stupid. Good games require solid gameplay and decent controls/interface. I hate Megaman because I feel the lack of control keeps killing me. Abuse (now legal abandonware) is a great side-scroller (2D of course) but has an awesome control scheme. I don't play these things because they use the "latest most powerful 3D engine" but because they're FUN.
I'd dispute the suggestion that Wolfenstein 3D was truly original. Plenty of RPGs had used a first-person viewpoint while wandering round a maze before, while the gameplay wasn't really more than a gauntlet clone.
;-)
Hmmm. Interesting point. Maybe some of the games in question weren't so much "new" as (can I say this without getting a bad taste in my mouth?) "innovative". Taking existing concepts and improving upon them.
I'd have to suggest the inclusion of Dungeon Keeper, though.
Dig Dug plus SimCity plus Dungeons and Dragons. It works both ways.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Cliff Johnson (most recently known for "The Light and the Darkness") produced several games in this genre: The Fool's Errand, At the Carnival, 3 in Three (released only for Mac, I believe) and so forth.
This genre involved nothing more than puzzle-solving; any plot involved was mere window-dressing, and easily ignored. about the only recent example of this genre is Pandora's Box, from Microsoft (a good effort). Games Magazine has released two collections of puzzles from their magazine, and labelled thm "Games Interactive." Give me ten minutes alone in a room with the dumbass who purported to develop the software.
Dreamcatcher has also produced a few in this line, but they've been gradually moving from the pure puzzle format (Jewels of the Oracle) to a more Myst-like game with their moer recent releases.
I used to be able to buy a piece of software like this about once a month; now I'm lucky if two or three titles are released a year.
--
www.kitchengeek.com -- Nosh for
jeb.
...when people are more impressed with squillions of polygons?
Its no different with music/films/books/hifi equipment. Its all shit now compared with 20 years ago (10 years ago in the case of hifi equipment), but much better marketed, and if people dont see the old good stuff, then whos going to know the difference?
I agree that the text interface was dumb. But typing the same thing over and over is just like having to click over annd over to find that one spot where they decided to put the trigger point. The interface isn't as important as pulling the character into the story. Anyone who played (and loved) a text based adventure game felt like they were a part of the story. Like they were intergral to the game. They had a soul and a purpose to existing. Kind of like when you pick up a good book. (Personally I love the R.A. Salvadore series of DnD books) Myst and the other games like it don't have a strong story. Maybe this isn't the fault of the game genere, maybe the storytellers just aren't that good.
How long has it been since something new and interesting has happenned to flight sims? The last thing to happen was the two WWII super-detailed sims. But that was some time ago. Space sims are uncompelling and make situational awarenes very difficult, not to mention, usually ignorant of physics. Gimme a Delta Squadron Star Fury in a correct Newtonian (or relativistic, where appropriate) universe, with a useful wingman, a useful squadron, and lotsa action. Sorta like Q3A team deathmatch pace, but with a goal.
you should have given StarCraft more of a chance. it was a GREAT GREAT game, which told a GREAT story. something realt-time strategies DONT do, including WarCraft II. Starcraft *WAS* revolutionary. three completely different races with totally differeny philosophies of conquest and yet STILL all 3 compete with relative balance on Blizzard's free battle.net servers. not only that, but it is easily the slickest and tightest RTS ever developed.
Internet killed the video star,
i could live a little longer in this prison
Zork was wonderful for its time, but Iif Myst killed the adventure game, it did so by raising the bar so high that few developers could surmount it. Compared to the detailed texture of Myst and (to an even greater extent) Riven, traditional adventure games seemed dull and hackneyed. Whereas in most such games, the puzzles concerned accomplishing basic tasks toward an well-defined--and generally trite--goal, in the Myst games the true puzzle was understanding the nature of the game's world. The detailed texture of the game's objects and scenery was immensely evocative and imaginative, and motivated the player to continue, and to solve the minor puzzles, just to understand what was going on. A Riven-like adventure, implemented in real-time 3D, could be immensely successful, but there are few developers with the originality and imagination to accomplish the task.
You say "guaranteed to work"? I just bought Chrono Cross yesterday, and for some reason, the game kept freezing up on me. Playstation games should not do that. Maybe my copy is corrupted, but still, I expect PSX games to run perfectly.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Granted, good flight sims are hard to come by nowadays. But not all is lost, Fly! (2K) is the best civilian sim to date and flight unlimited series was very good as well. I haven't tried the military sims lately since most of them have hardware requirements far exceeding that of my box. On the topic of new game genres, I would like to note that I've found Tactical FPS like Rouge Spear to be very refreshing union of a strategy turn based games like Xcom series and FPS like Quake. In Rouge Spear one can be killed with just one shot thus is forced to use strategy and suprise to succeed. This game has to be played to understand what I'm talking about. Missions last between 30min and 1.5hr!!!!
But the difference is that unlike in Myst (or Riven or and Myst-esque game) There is no involvement with the player
ok, first of all, what do mean by "involvement with the player"? You mentioned a head on a pole, so that makes me think actual involvement with yourself. Is that right? As in, "what am I wearing?", "You are wearing pants."? If that's all you mean, then forgive me, but that's stupid.
The fact that you were thrown into a place where you didn't interact with anyone was part of the story in Myst. There's a reason you didn't talk to anyone. The reason you didn't look at yourself, is because the designers didn't feel it was important. Personally, I agree.
I'm not saying that text adventures suck. I've enjoyed them from the days of the Atari ST. What I'm saying is, wrapping a graphical interface around the adventure is a good thing. How many times did you have to re-type a command over and over to try to figure out exactly how it should be phrased?
>Attach rake to hoe.
I don't understand what you mean.
>Tie rake and hoe together.
With what?
>the shirt
I don't understand what you mean.
>Tie hoe and rake together with shirt
The rake and the hoe are fixed.
In Myst, you didn't have to deal with this, and I think that's a definite 'good thing'(TM).
And btw, Myst came out in the 486-66 days before 3D cards were used in PC's. You seem to have gotten confused.
Now that I am married and have a newborn child my free time is segmented in fifteen minute increments. as a result I try to get a "quick Fix" where ever I can. Gamespy to me is a lifesaver, I can get in a few frags with just a few moments of free time.
I don't have the luxury of a lot of disposable time to dedicate to the learning curve of a new game, so I have a tendency to stick to what I know, in my case Quake and a handfull of real time strategy games
I'd like to add that the Mod community has added a new dimemension, extended the longevity, and ccontributed to the popularity of FPS games like quake I, II, III... It would be great if other genre of games would "open " themselves up to the same community.
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exception of handg
The only truly original computer games I can remember were Lemmings and Wolfenstein 3D (the precursor to Doom). Both were truly original (at the time). Even a game like Tombraider is basically a platform game in 3D: jump from platform to platform, collect stuff, open doors...exactly the same as all those games on my Acorn Electron 10 years ago. Except looking a lot better.
Which is obviously the problem at the moment: all games seem to focus on looks and not on gameplay.
While I don't think the PC is dead as a games platform - it does need some more imagination.
-----
Ignore reality - there's nothing you can do about it.
If there is a genre that has taken a big hit in quality, it is the sports sim. the best baseball sim ever published was Earl Weaver Baseball. Sure, it had horrible graphics, but it did a damn fine job of simulating individual games and full seasons. The stats and game play were realisitic.
Now, like every other genre, the focus is on high end graphics and killer sounds. Someone hits 100 home runs? Who cares! The player looks great doing it. Game after game after game without a single foul ball? No problem, I've great sound cranking out of my speakers.
Blah!
The mass market sucks the life out of everything. The only good game on the market is from an independent publisher/designer. Which is fine. I just keeping wishing that the big boys would spend some money on a qaulity sim engine, and not just the graphics.
The welfare of the people has always been the alibi of tyrants. - Albert Camus
I'd contend that being innovative has absoultely positively NOTHING to do with fun. Look at Trespasser. Look at Quake 3. (actually I dislike both but I'm going on majority 'opinion').
I loved War2, I loved C&C and I still love Starcraft. Being a sheep dyed in many colors isn't a bad thing as long as you still enjoy the game. I mean we play games in real life with balls all day long! Football, soccer, baseball, basketball, foosball, ping pong, etc. These are getting tiresome? No. They only get boring for people who live on quick fixes.
I suspect RTS's are more prone to 'get old' more quickly to these non-die hard players because of their repetitive nature. Instead of reveling in the intricacies of the gameplay and variety of offense and defense they merely see a battle to control resources and kill the other guy.
The Gamecenter editors are clearly playing favorites and trying to create controversy with their mentioning of the RTS and subsequent omission of FPSs. Playing 'god' editor is a pretty quick way to lose ALL respect from anyone who is a hardcore gamer at heart.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
To me, modern games just don't have the 'playability' of the old games like Pac-Man, Space Invaders even Colossal Cave.
Those games, to me, had the 'have another go' factor - you've just passed level 9 on Pac-Man, therefore you know you can do level 10 but you've got to make sure you can do it perfectly...
Colossal Cave and the ever popular Lemmings had a different playability factor - they needed the player to actually think and anticipate the results of their actions - in Doom you just blast anything that comes across and hang the consequences (okay, I'm over simplifying here, but that's the 'basics').
I've just got old of a copy of the IF (Interactive Fiction) archive and an old copy of Chuckie Egg - all free, and I've been playing them a hell of a lot more than any others games in the last 5 years.
Richy C.
--
If you think you've seen everything there is to see in gaming, you're wrong - if you haven't tried out The Typing of the Dead, that is. Sega has created possibly the weirdest game ever, a title that's so unexpected it defies logic when one tries and figure out the frame of mind of the individual at Sega of Japan who said "Hey, we'll make a typing game, and make it fun." The Typing of the Dead is the kind of game that, like Dance Dance Revolution and Beatmania makes people look on as you play, and with good reason: you're killing zombies with precise key strokes! Who wouldn't be intrigued at the prospect.
from: http://dreamcast.ign.com/reviews/13515. html
. . . . . . .
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
While I have to agree with the article on many points, I must say that IMHO RTS are really far from dying! In fact they are still one of the best selling type of games!
Sure, the gameplay is never really innovative (even if we are beggining to see a trend in bringing some roleplaying elements in RTS) but sometimes the storyline are really interesting and I must say I played starcraft for hours even in single players just to see what would happen to Kerrigan, Rainer and company.
We begin to see innovations on the gameplay too. The latest Warlord game brings some RP elements by making you choose a hero and develop it like you would develop a RPG character. Also Warcraft 3 is leaning in that direction if I am right.
I hardly think that any type of game will really die... we will just see them merge to create multi-type games.
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"
The game industry is soely made up of publishers.
Don't kid yourself. Developers are nothing in the big picture... they are worker ants, building a small subsection to a giant colony. Their ideas mean nothing. They have substandard communication skills, and even worse business sense.
However...
The publishers are the ones who inflict the public with substandard games. They put out useless crap -- buggy crap, and their advertisements make us buy buy buy!
Why do they do it?
For every one amazing game published, there are over a hundred flops.
Publishers fear failure more than they love games.
Gamers love games more than they fear failure. :)
Why do we buy?
Because they damn well told us to.
They hired a guy who looked like we want to look, dressed like we want to dress and talked like we wish we could and we crave the game of the month.
Remedy?
Developers need to take business classes to get superior games BACK ON THE GODDAMN MARKET.
Hi, I have a couple of questions for the "real gamers" out there. I got an iBook recently, and it came with Bugdom and Nanosaur by Pangea.
Nanosaur is essentially a first-person shooter. Bugdom, though, is certainly not that (at least, not on most levels). I'm not a hard-core gamer, so I'm curious as to whether Bugdom fits into any "genre", and, if so, what else might be out there like it.
Also, are there other games which, like Bugdom, are challenging for adults but still accessible to kids?
Just curious,
mike
--
Liberty uber alles.
Yup, the gameplay in, say, Diablo 2 isn't all that much different from that in Zork I: play game, have fun. At their bases, though, they all followed the template: play game, have fun.
> Almost all games on the PC fall into the categories described - most of these are clones of games which have been around for years.
...
Sounds like Television (or the Movies), it's all been done before, everything is a clone of popular series trying to cash in on the originals success, and so on.
But somehow, every once and awhile, something really good comes out, something original, or just so well made it overcomes the cliches.
There may still be some great Adventure games to come, and new genres will appear, even if they are blends of what we have seen before.
Games are like everything else, 99% is
Mark
Unless you really like Sierra's "take a wrong step and die" approach to adventures... :-)
I guess I'm just an old fart, but I have had more fun playing rogue/nethack than I did with glitzy FPS (mostly Descent). For old times sake, I ran nethack a few weeks ago and it was still fun, although at this time in my life (two small kids), I don't have too much time to play.
Go find some of the old games and give them a try. Adventure, Xork and the like were king of the hill in its day for a good reason. Most of the Infocom stuff was top notch, even if they didn't have any images. Give the older, less animated stuff a try and back off from the animations.
If you can tolerate still images in this era of animation, and what I consider to be superior game play, try A#'s King of Dragon Pass. IIRC the URL is http://www.a-sharp.com/kodp. It is especially good for a paper-and-pencil RPG like myself. Now if I only had more time to play....
- doug
Well, you can find Infocom style games, thanks to Inform.
Many people have made some really nice text ad^H^H^H^Hinteractive fiction with Inform. Most notably Curses and Jigsaw by Gramah Nelson, creator of Inform.
Being a harcore fan of Sierra classic games (LSL anybody, heh?) I would agree and mourn the genre if... Recently I happened to walk thru (play is not quite appropriate here) "The Longest Journey" on PC and "Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective" on DVD (it was available earlier on PC, but much more impressive on DVD). Those two "games" plus of course "Grim Fandango" plus a bit of leisure time encouraged me to ponder where the andenture games genre heads to. I think it will evolve into interactive multimedia fiction - with multiple plot twists, rich visual and audio experience and OF COURSE great storytellers behind the plot. I doubt it will be mass-market hit, however there will always be a narrow niche of consumers ready to pay reasonably high price for that type of entertainment (myself including). I don't expect to find any stock puzzles there (only brain dead would want to solve that Hanoi Tower for 100th time!), puzzles will migrate to mass-market finally, if not already. Only basic exploration elements - the ability to walk/wander thru the plot, direct dialogues, manupulate inventory - will remain. Just try "The Longest Journey" to see what I mean. Not that I like the fantasy, but I have to admin it is well-crafted story with great music, talented actors and nice graphics that makes me think about anything but the death of adventure. If only it had video of same quality as Sherlock Holmes DVDs and more mature content like "Grim Fandango"... But you cannot have it all... Or you can? /nelliza
Maybe the lack of innovation is because of the myopic view of the audience: Video games are still, by and large, made for 8-to-25-year-old guys. And, not surprisingly, game companies then focus on things that young guys (supposedly) like: Babes, gore, cars, science fiction, martial arts, militaria. And then you get stuck in a rut, 'cause there's only so many ways you can mine those stereotypical male interests (which, frankly, probably are only truly the interests of a small minority of guys).
I know there were plenty of failures when game co's tried to reach out to the girls' market ("Let's make an educational game about sitting around and talking about our feelings in a garden!" Seriously, that was the premise of "Secret Paths." No wonder Purple Moon went broke) but that too had a lot to so with stereotypes. OTOH, lots of male reviewers commented on the gender-inappropriateness of them enjoying a domestic-management game like the Sims, but they enjoyed it!
Think about the success of the Sims, That's due in no small part to women buying and playing the game. How many other games can you imagine your whole family playing? If the market wasn't so narrowly focused and segregated on one demographic, maybe we'd see less of the same stuff over and over again. And with more potential game players, there's a bigger market and more room for interesting and bizarre niches for everyone to discover.
Ah, the irony:
The rights to Paranoia were recently licenced by one of the more innovative (text based) commercial mud companies around...
Skotos has the info in this press release.
Also of interest is the text mud The Eternal City www.eternal-city.com, as well as others listed in the MUD-Dev FAQ
Text muds may not be the same, but they're hardly dead... and the best ones are emerging as hybrid graphical/text muds.
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
This is a good point. Racing games had faded away for a while, but now they appear to be making a comeback, mostly thanks to Atari.
Sometimes, however, genres do really die out. I certainly hope the time of Tetris and Tetris-clones is dead and buried.
Funny I was just feeling nostalgic for my old Nintendo games yesterday... emulators and ROMs aside, there's just something about kicking back in the middle of the living room floor, instead of crouched in a computer chair, that made games more fun for me. I loved Dragon Warrior I-IV, Zelda, Kirby, etc... I have Earthbound 2 on my computer now but it's just not the same... *sigh*
So whatever happened to the hokey RPGs?
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
... the FPS/RTS hybrid. A few years ago, a game appeared on the market called Battlezone. This game bore little resemblance to the arcade game of the same title, but introduced a whole new style of gaming. Like most RTS games, you created structures, built units, and waged war against the enemy, but YOU PILOTED ONE OF THE TANKS IN BATTLE. At the same time you were ordering strike forces into the enemy base, YOU were blasting away at the foe, leading units into battle, and managing resources. A lack of marketing success kept this game off the top selling lists, but it received rave reviews almost everywhere. The game spawned a sequel, Battlezone II: Combat Commander, and a set of other hybrids (Dogs of War, anyone?) I agree there are too many games that fall into the cookie-cutter groups, but new genres can develop right before your eyes.
What a shame. These developers spend huge bucks writing a complex flight sim for Windows that models reality so well, only to find that the users don't want to learn complex things. It's too easy to get shot down, they want to play Starfox.
If only they could find a market, some community that seems to take delight in learning complex systems. If only there was some computer platform that was widely used by the kind of geeky people who get off on learning how a F/A-18s threat warning system works, and are willing (even enjoy!) taking the time to build skills.
Oh well, such a group of people certainly does not exist.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Here is an opinion I expressed earlier about Myst on the Interactifiction site:
This game probably did more to damage the adventure genre than any other. It meant that people who hated adventure games could suddenly consider themselves fans of the genre, which spread the same deadly (anti-qualitative) memes that Star Wars had spread over Science Fiction. Millions of people -- people who didn't know or care what a slavering grue was! -- sat enraptured by a slideshow with polished but sterile graphics and token elements of gameplay. Meeting another fan of adventure games become a trepidatious, usually painful experience: "I love adventure games!" could now most-often be translated: "I've played Myst and Riven! What's a Zork? Isn't Scott Addams the guy who writes Dilbert?"
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
Why can games only be succesful if they are picked up by the mainstream? Turn based strategy games have been around since the Eighties at least (I didn't have a computer before then so I can't comment on exactly how long they were around).
The thing is strategy games have always been for the niche market. It doesn't matter what the mainstream think about them, since there will always be someone interested. Development costs don't need to be huge. Graphics can be simple, sound need only be a few samples. The only difficulty is the AI, and getting a well balanced set of rules that don't allow you to use a strategy based on putting all your resources into one thing.
Ehm. God games are around for quite some time. Still, boy I got high hopes for B&W :)
Beyond greedy distributors refusing to publish a game, or innovative ideas getting shot down for being too original, there is one shameful aspect of the Computer Gaming industry that needs to be recognized: the original games don't sell. Many of these games are great, overflowing with gameplay and style, yet due to a combination of lack of marketing, low shelf space, and limited distribution, they rarely reach their full potential.
I'm sure that these genres wouldn't be dying if it weren't for this atrocity. Companies like Babbages and EB need to take a look at what they sell, what they don't sell, and ask themselves if their missing some truly great games.
After this is fixed, something needs to be done about the lack of Linux games on shelves.
Incubation, anyone?
Or how about Age of Wonders?
Maybe Ultimate Race Pro?
Yeah, that was back when the internet was all smart people, when music was all original, and when kids used to respect their elders.
Whatever.
Videogames have ALWAYS had cheap, crappy games outnumbering the well-made game by 5 to 1. There were lots of cheap Pong knockoffs, and it only got worse from there.
There is a whole lot of nostalgic rambling going on in this thread, and it's all bullshit. I'm a lifetime gamer, and I honestly don't think that there has ever been a year in which the benchmark for videogame quality has not been raised. It used to be a faster curve, perhaps, but that only stands to reason. People needed a while to figger out what these computer thingies could be used for.
There are LOTS of good games being produced now -- the best games ever made.
The nature of the improvement has changed though. It's not about coming up with completely original gameplay, though this still happens. It's more of a process of refinement. Of learning over time how to improve a base genre to make it even better.
It shouldn't be surprising that there aren't as many new genres. People have been searching for, and have found fundamental game structures that WORK. "But everything is just another FPS now". Well geez, no kidding. Playing a game where you're seeing a 3D world from a first person perspective is NEVER going to go away! You're there! You're in the world! It's immersive and it's a fantastic way to transport someone into a different world. And people aren't going to get tired of guns, they're pretty fundamental to most people's notion of excitement and adventure. So games combining the two are here forever. The improvements will come incrementally, as people learn how to improve this basic formula with better technology, better design, better multiplayer collaboration, and better storytelling.
This is not a bad thing.
> I've played the Apple II version as well, but wasn't it in monochrome?
;-)
;-) I could FINALY play GumBall hehe
Not if your apple was hooked up to a TV.
(I only had my Apple hooked up to a green monitor. My uncle had his hooked up to a TV, and it was great to see *COLOR* graphics
All you Lode Runner fan, check this site out:
Lode Runner Museum !
> Every play the advanced version with all new levels? That was almost impossible.
Championship Lode Runner ?
That was dam hard, but fun.
You can find it and some emu's here:
http://www.geocitie s.com/SiliconValley/Byte/6508/apple2/emu.htm
Cheers
I play Game Boy games. They are fun. I don't care what genre the games are, because I am having fun.
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
As long as everyone is sounding off about their favorite games, I have to mention Driver. I don't know if there is a PC version but I borrowed a friends copy of this for the Playstation and I'm addicted.
The plot is kinda cheesy but the playability is what got me. There's something chathartic about speeding around a city smashing into cars while being chased by the cops.
Be careful though, it makes it that much harder to drive a real car responsibly.
I'll bet you've never written a game in your life.
- J. J. J. Julius, author of a considerable number of best-selling games
There's still great RTS games being made today. Myth, Myth II were great. I'm enjoying Dark Reign II right now, even though it is `more of the same'.
FreeSpace 2 was an awesome space sim, with a story as good as Tie Fighter (which is still one of the best games ever, don't get me wrong.)
I've heard great things about the adventure game `The Longest Day', but haven't played it -- mostly because it's not available in the US yet.
Flight sims I never cared much for, but I seem to see lots of them on the store shelves even today.
You don't know the first thing about games.
- J. J. J. Julius, author of a considerable number of best-selling games
The last good PC platformer was Prince of Persia.
I think they mean to say that all PC gaming is getting jaded - not just the in the genres they mention.
The real innovation is happening in the handheld market. Big games like Pokemon, and little ones like Mr Driller.
..who misses Journeyman Project? The 7th Guest is by far my favorite game of all time (stauf scared the shit outta me). I really miss those old games and wish that somebody would come out with something new and exciting in that area. Kings Quest, Gabrial Knight, 7th Guest, (and even) Myst were my staple games once upon a time. Lets see those days again.
"I have great faith in fools: Self confidence my friends call it." ~Edgar Allan Poe
Don't even bother telling us about games. You obviously know nothing about them.
- J. J. J. Julius, author of a considerable number of best-selling games
If you look at the last series of serious flightsims only a few were stable right out of the box. Mig Ally, Fly!, Falcon 4, the serious Janes series etc. all had their difficulties and only people *wanting* to play them very badly had the patience to wait for the endless stream of patches. If you're new to the scene, a 300+ pages manual and a highly instable simulator is hardly entertaining.
These pretty much introduced the idea of a RTS game, where combat was important, no build orders (as in WACC games) were neccessary.
That, and they had awesome plots.
The text-adventure gaming world still exists, albeit in a more fan-driven form. Take a look at http://www.ifarchive.org, or even look up "interactive fiction" on about.com or any search engine.
I think the thief games from the late looking glass software could count as a new genre... Of course the more anal among us might consider them first person shooters even though shooting to kill people only really happens when you really screw the pooch. :p
---
Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
The article's author seems to have a very narrow view of gaming - specifically, PC gaming only. Adventure games are all the rage now in console gaming. Zelda, Metal Gear Solid, etc. FPS games never were a genre on consoles, kinda like fighting games never were a genre on PCs. If the author had done better research, he would've mentioned fighting games dying out as a result of the same lack of innovation as RTS's have. As an aside, I think the console games have a lot more innovation in them than the PC games, which is odd, considering that creating PC games has a lower cost of entry for indie studios and untried concepts. I was really tickled about the attention given Thief, when I had been playing Tenchu, the 'ninja sim', for a few months already on the PSX. And I still have yet to see a PC equivalent of the Deception series.
Right on fellow console believer! I totally agree with what you said about your console games still working in the future. I have some PC games that are never going to run again because they are hardware (3DFX) dependent as well as OS dependent. But my Atari 2600 wood-effect still runs Mr Do very nicely ;-)
I haven't seen Chrono Cross yet, but my friend has promised to bring me a copy when he returns from the US next week. Fingers crossed. Can you believe that Square Europe are not even planning a release of it?
Interestingly enough, I just checked out Arstechnica and saw the following headline: Stress-reducing games. Could this be a new genre of beneficial games?
Ch Products (who makes just about the BEST analogue joystick in existence.) is coming out with a line of top-end USB joysticks in the next 4-6 months. They won't be cheap though.
:)
I've been using CH joysticks for the last 10 years and have had the least problems with floating and calibration with them, compared to all others. They're well nigh indestructable too, my original CH Flightstick (2-button w/throttle) is 10 years old and logged thousands of hours in the air/space/ocean etc. and *still* works perfectly....
Pardon the plug, but I *really* like CH joysticks, they rock!
--o You're just jealous cause the voices talk to me and not to you! o--
I don't think that MUDs are getting less popular, but just getting diluted by the number that exist now. They're definitely declining in quality I think. I first started on a BBS Circle (without any other players), then when I got internet access, did original Diku, Alexmud, before moving back to Circlemuds. I've encountered some first-rate MUDs which were every bit as good as some commercial games; MUME and Thunderdome spring to mind, but the vast majority tend to be barely modified, if at all, and dull. Even some of the larger/more unique ones like Realms of Despair couldn't really hold my interest (though I've been on and off that one for around 6 years now, mostly to socialize; I stopped playing the game part after a month). The problem most of them seem to share is that the creators have no sense of what atmosphere and storyline means. Even the best MUD can't hold a candle to Infocom imho.
--
alright this is the first time I have posted anything here, and I hope it is appropriate. I have a new idea for a game, but lack the resources and free time to develope it. But it is a cool idea and it has been mulling around in my head for quite some years. It would be based on a minatures table top role-playing game, turn-based game play, random terrain and such. Well, email me for details, donde@sco.com
Actually, I prefer Doom 2 to Quake's system anyways. Doom is more inertial, (you slide around more), doom marines run faster, the weapons are weaker so fights can last, the turning rate is limited so getting behind your opponent can be a serious advantage, and there's vertical autoaiming so people who aren't used to the mouse can still survive without having to get fried trying to aim up+down (though I use the mouse anyways). And yes, Doom does have its weaknesses, such as the "searching for hidden" spacebar-clicking crap. But overall, I prefer the fighting-style of Doom to the later games. The weapon-spread is a little weak (shotgun and pistol are useless, BFG is ridiculous), but that can be fixed with a good deHacked patch (for example, my patch makes a auto-shotgun out of the weak, normal shotgun, a weapon that sucks all of your bullets in one shot out of the minigun, and an uzi out of the pistol).
With the new openGL versions, Doom's eyecandy is pretty good. Sure, the levels are low-poly orhtogonal messes, and the monsters are all sprites (though I kinda prefer sprites sometimes) but the smoke-trailed glowing rocket is just as cool looking as the ones in UT, more even when you see it in the context of Doom.
Back in the old days of the Apple ][, Atari, and C64 there were all sorts of wild and wonderful games. It really was one of those Darwinian radical rapid mutation times, because I saw, played, and otherwise fiddled inside of thousands of games. Some were too wierd to describe and couldn't really fit into a genre, but genres were being evolved. So that brings us to now. The game industry is mature. Before, anyone could spend a summer writing a cool game. But now your need 5 to 10 man years and 1 to 5 million dollars to make an A title. It is economics that is killing the game market; that and a loss of will of people to make games (shareware, freeware) for a variety of reasons. I think some of it has to do with "can't win, don't play" or "just plain out of ideas 'cause its all been done before." The reality is that there is LOTS of good stuff out there for the old computers. Ideas that could be brought forward. The phoenix of gaming - re-write and modernize your favorite 8-bite game for FUN. Make it web-savvy and multi-player. I know I have a box full of "game designs". Some tres froid. But the complexity matches the maturity of industry, and I haven't started anything 'cause I haven't won the lottery yet (though I am riding the current wave making money for others). It doesn't have to be an A title. It needs to be fun. And OpenSource can be good too. I know in 1988 I tried to write a game as open source where I was b.d. The design that came forth was really good, and I met some cool people, but there was so much space between people, and reliablity of moving forward was not there, that really games aren't so good for OpenSource (because they are really hard to manage, especially for free.) I've rambled enough. (Dan Gorlin, Eric Ball, Nasir Gebelli - you guys are my heroes.)
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
Well the question isn't successful vs. unsuccessful, it's good vs. bad. I know plenty of extremely successful muds that I think are just plain bad. If you look at the way MUD design has changed in the last 7 years, it isn't exactly impressive. The games are basically the same, with mostly cosmetic code changes. The older MUDs at least had the novelty value, which has worn off by now.
--
OK, I understand now.
I think the problem with Myst is that it gets lumped into the "adventure game" genre when it's a bit skewed from the norm.
When I played Myst originally, I was drawn into it. I felt like I was part of the game, from the very first room. I thought the story was very compelling, and it made me want to read each of the books.
Now, why we each have a different view, I'm not sure. Maybe the writers have one type of brain, and you have another, so that the things they found interesting you yawn to. But judging by the success of Myst, I know there are many many people who agree with me.
telnet igormud.org 1701
siri
The first person shooter is taking over, yes. But variation on the FPS leaves us with RPG-FPS like UlitmaIX, and Everquest, Adventure-FPS like Deus Ex (if you haven't played Deus Ex yet, you are REALLY missing out), and the Thief series (sigh...too bad Looking Glass is gone). The first person perspective is starting to be the fad, but other genres are adapting to it.
Lets not forget that RPG hasn't died (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, etc...).
The RTS will get a new boost when Black and White, and Sacrifice come out.
-- "Almost everyone is an idiot. If you think I'm exaggerating, then you're one of them."
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
What about first-person role playing (like Deus Ex) and more importantly, massively-multiplayer like Ultima Online and Everquest (my favorite addiction right now)? No new genres since first-person was created (with DOOM years ago?)
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
It's actually a pity that I'm already involved in a good Open Source project or I'd be very tempted to see out just such a project. Perhaps when this one's done...
Amen to the text adventure... I remeber the weeks I would spend on the Adventure (brand and name) game on my TI99/4A I then got hooked on the Infocom games on my C=64. I miss the games that make the user visualize in his/her mind what is going on. Make the user map out the adventure, take notes, etc... I would pay money for a challenging game like that. It would be something I could do with friends/my wife etc... This 3D overendowed gaming world we live in now leaves nothing to the imagination!
The great days of Sierra's Space and Kings and Hero quests had some great games, and you don't see anything like those coming out today. I think the games seem less sexy and exciting to people who don't remember the gameplay from before - there's few explosions, and the action is mostly in the mind. It takes time to get some sort of payoff from the game... unlike most games today which offer almost instant gratification as soon as you start.
Course, the travisty of the last 2 KQ games couldn't have helped the genre (one mouse command? ONE?)... poor poor Sierra.
dinosaur comics
You're right, you don't need 100 FPS if you have a 85 Hz monitor !!!
Every games company seems to be trying to stuff in 3d into their games at the expense of playability.
When I load up pacman or asteroids (2 examples of incredibly addictive but non-visually stunning games) so I really want to fly around a 3d scene rotating and using mouselook with 15 keys bound to control my player?.
Games like Quake3 are more suited to a FPP viewpoint but the games deveopers have to realise that some are not. Personally I found Mario 64 visually better than the older mario games but at the expense of the playability. Cameras swinging around you as you go near walls make it difficult to know which way you are actually moving.
This is why emulators are so popular with ppl. There simply isnt some game genres available today like there was over 5 years ago. Sure we all like great grapihcs and sound but only if they contribute positively to the game. Give me pacman with hi resolution graphics and 3d sound effects and I'll play it. Give me the same game with a 3d engine pasted on top that needs a Geforce 2 GTS and I'll get annoyed with it after 10 minutes.
I actually enjoy those wonderful side scrolling adventure games. I know that the genre was rather tired out in the 80's, but there have been some rather awesome resurrections of it (see Neverhood series). Earthworm Jim is a great game. Another genre I've missed is the overhead shooter (I'm looking down on a plane that's being forced forward and shoot everything in sight; simple mind-numbing game). Now, don't get me wrong. I love StarCraft-style games. I've been hooked on Total Annihilation for what seems like years. But some simple self-competitive gaming is somewhat lacking these days. *dusts off old 486 and loads up Megaman*- --
---------------------------------------
the amazing bc
latin/funk flugelhorn & trumpet
webnaut, music junkie, sysadmin from hell
the amazing bc
just another guy doing IT
webnaut, music junkie, holes-in-head
With very few exceptions, RTS games are set on a distant planet or postapocalyptic Earth where humans fight for a few scant minerals or against would-be alien overlords. Talk about beating a dead horse until its rib cage collapses; where's the originality, the unique spin? It just isn't there. And though some games, such as Ground Control, follow the lead of games like Myth in terms of how resources are handled, most are simply derivatives of the collect-resources-and-build-factories gameplay model. Borrrring.
***
We tend to remember the creative spins on games a way back when, and we are nostalgic... yet there have been certain innovations that become standards. Rocket Launchers. Health. Ammo.
Standards are useful to predict market trends; they may not brim with creativity, as a side effect.
Publishers who lost their shirts in the coin-slot game biz in the 70's & 80's will all agree that market trends hold importance for anyone who is fronting cash.
All of a sudden, with the advent of floppy disks, the non-commercial games were easily copied and public access was born! The Jump Man's were all very creative because anyone with the patience to learn the language could produce, and with zero overhead and zero publisher BS.
Retro user games didn't get bogged down in today's market. They were mostly created out of some guy's basement and made zero profit.
Reminisce back to the day when games were fun and computers had about as much power as 1/62.5 of today's calculators. (I saw a pocket organizer with a meg memory last week at Wal-Mart, and my TI-994A had 16K).
Many a great adventure game was cranked out on that old TI, when I was about 11 years old.
Has the word 'retro' suddenly become synonymous to the word 'creative'?
Heaven's to Betsy, Irene, what a dreadful idea!
Whenever I play I seem to play the same game all the time now. The only game for me is Counter-Strike. It's the most advanced mod I've ever played, has the most realistic weapons, and has the best modes of play. It doesn't matter to me if no good games come out for other genres as long as there's a good following for my favorite FPS.
By the way, go back and play Super Mario 2. That's a freakin' game!
I don't want to name names in case they get Slashdotted, :-( ): Outerspace. Either enter the mud immediately, or have a look at the mud's webpage.
Weehoo, In that case I'll promote the mud I play on a bit (we're running short on mortals atm
You're absolutely right. I still play MORIA occasionally, for cryin' out loud. (I was so psyched when I got an 8-bit screen so the walls could be ASCIIfied solid instead of | or - )
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Terminus yet. There's a scifi sim that looks really good AND has non-twitch gameplay elements in it. Real 3D space maneuvering is probably too difficult for the casual gamers though.
There's a genre for almost everything. FPS, RTS, RPG, board games, classics, simulations, humor. I'd be surprised to see a new one. Then again, that's the game company's hopes, right? As for me, I'm a die-hard Quaker, and I always go back to my roots (DOOM). If you say RPG to me, the first thing that pops up in my mind is "Rocket Propelled Grenade."
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Well, the vocabulary can sometimes be a problem, but a lot of that is a matter of how well the games are programmed.
Personally, I'd consider the difference between text adventures and graphic adventures to be the difference between a novel and a movie. The movie is appealing to a wider audience, and can bring things to life, but you can still get more involved, and use your imagination more, and responses to actions are cheap, costing coding in a line of text, rather then requiring $$ for an animation for, say, what happens when you try to set a house on fire, which usually doesn't get spent, instead just not allowing you to try it, or, in some cases spewing forth "you can't do that" or some such...
--Arcum
Every time I see a mention of "games" I get excited and think it's an article about games. No such luck. It almost always turns out to be an article about COMPUTER games, which are mainly of the "twitch and bitch" variety.
I want to see some discussion of games like board games, card games, classic games of strategy and tactics like chess, or go. Games for which the rules can be learned in a short amount of time and mastery requires effort. Compare this to most computer games, which have extremely steep initial learning curves that devolve into one uninteresting template for play for everyone. Which takes more skill, to win at Quake against a variety of opponents or to win at Go against a variety of opponents? Which game really offers greater variety, more possibilities of play?
Of course, those games don't interest the public any more. They're not splashy enough, with too little noise and a lack of das blinken-lights that users so love. The games require thought, an unthinkable proposition in the current era. Much easier to click madly and then winge about how the lag killed us, or the machine wasn't accepting our commands, or missing key strokes.
Heresy, I know.
Earthworm Jim rocked. Super Metroid rocked. Megaman X rocked. (The first time through) What we need is a really well done 2D platformer. I've logged well over a hundred hours perfecting Super Metroid skillz, and it pays off in the end. I can get the Spazer before the Grappling Beam, and do various other things well before I'm supposed to, but why? because I've spent time increasing skills. I like that in a game. Another game like that was NiGHTS, for the Saturn. It was a slow-paced, open-ended game where ability didn't matter, practice and skill building did. It was over a bit too fast, and was kinda easy, and somewhat cheesy, but, if they ever make a sequel (and I think they are, for Dreamcast), I'll snap 'er up. Games with loads of (simple) complexity are a blast.
Another oldish hit was Virtual On for the Saturn, a port of an arcade game. It had amazingly simple gameplay, but each of the 'roids (Mech type thingies) were different enough, with weaknesses and such varied abilities that for six parties with my friends and I, I'd bring my Saturn, and we'd play, transfixed for hours. Why? Because someone would get good with a certain 'roid and strategy, stay in for fifteen minutes, then someone would figure out a strategy to counteract it.
Super Metroid was such a hit for me because once you were good, you could actually go about doing things in a completely different pattern. I'm still at about an 89% completion rate.
Bleh. That's it. I'm gonna make a kickass 2D platformer, and buy a Dreamcast. TTYL,
-=Canar=-
This demonstrates well the utter bias of Slashdot towards PC games. Have people here never heard of Playstation or N64? Of beat-em-ups and platform games? Do they not realize that console games outsell PC games 10 to 1, or that the games industry (the *console* games industry, that is) is bigger than the movie industry?
I guess not; Slashdot has never been huge on reality checks.
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
Life sims/virtual pets. Starting with the Tamagotchi, only getting interesting with Creatures, and now The Sims. It's not a huge, or hugely popular genre, but it's new, and it's still with us.
Rock on. I really liked the first Zelda for the Super Nintendo. It was a game where I could lounge in front of the TV for a day playing this game and truly be caught up in the action. I have yet to find ANY pc games that match this playability and enthrallment that I found with Zelda.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Sig it.
[rant] Myst was a substandard puzzle game. It was not an "adventure", nor was it challenging. It involved putting slight twists on old puzzles in much the same way as 11th Hour and Shivers did. However, anyone who has played Myst through that I have talked to has had one major gripe about it. The ending. I mean, there wasn't one. "Oh, good job, go wander around for a while." My buddy wandered around that map for 3 days waiting for something else to happen. Where's the payoff? The credits? Something to say, Hey, you're done, turn me off? [/rant]
Whew, that's better. I need some more caffeine. You want a hard game? Play Sierra's Manhunter series. They're way out of print but boy, were they tough.
"Property is theft, therefore theft must be property, right?"
It meant that people who hated adventure games could suddenly consider themselves fans of the genre
What genre? Typing commands at a terminal until a program told you that you won? Don't get me wrong, I've always loved text adventures, but why have such a purist attitude? These people found a game that they like and you can't denounce them fast enough.
Maybe you shouldn't take yourself so seriously. The people you talk about aren't under you. You aren't greater than they are. Get over your little phase and come back when you can have fun. Then maybe you'll get it.
After all, it's just a game.
Okay, I can see the argument for the death of RTSs. I don't agree with it, as they, along with traditional turn-based strategy (board and electronic) games, are at the top of my list. But what about a new genre? The FPS, contrary to the impression that may be given by the /. story, is NOT to be mistaken with a new genre; Wolfenstein 3d, anyone? But what would "The Sims" qualify as? Is it still just a 'sim' genre game, or is it some odd take on role-playing? Or could it be considered...new?
> I think gaming is dead because the publishers are killing it. Game publishers are notorious for "sticking" with safe concepts and ultimately flogging them to death.
The publishers of movies, music, and books also suffer from the Same-old Unimaginative Crap Syndrome (SUCS) to a greater or lesser degree, and for the same reason.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Adventure games are not dying. I picked up Deus Ex a few weeks ago, and System Shock 2 last week. Both are excellent games, with the kinds of eye candy to draw people into the genre but enough story and plot to keep people interested. Of course, these are also only two games in the past year that I've seen jump out, and many people call them a first person RPG. However, these two games have redeemed my faith in the adventure genre.
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
Tomoshi asks for a good mud and is suddenly pounced upon by hundreds of hideous creatures who slap him in the face with urls.
Try outerspace, at mud.stack.nl:3333, or have a look at the webpage first.
In fact, I'll take this fine opportunity to pimp it. The webpage:
Blood Dusk
or connect directly:
mud.dusk.org 7000
More developers need to follow Relic's lead and create RTS games that defy easy description"
Two good examples that do - mechcommander and homeworld. Mechcommander worked by ignoring the base building section, and homeworld's proper 3d implmentation does add a lot. Plus homeworld has a sequel out, and mc2 is on the cards (which could be very nice if they put all they're promising).
I'd say rts is far from dead....
It's absolutely amazing how these FPS's have evolved.
Yesterday I was running an old copy of Shadow Warrior whose graphics I remember thinking of as 'pretty good' when the game came out. The thing is, I ran this right after playing Unreal Tournament. The graphics have evolved a lot, to say the least.
THis leaves me thinking about a time when Unreal Tournament graphics will be considered out of date. The 3-D engine in that game is truly remarkable and the people figures come pretty close to life-like (especially the faces, which Quake has problems with).
I don't think this genre will gie anytime soon. The graphics become more and more real, and as they do so, the game becomes more and more of a stress reliever!
Besides this, even when a genre 'dies', it really doesn't. There's always at least one good title of that genre around. Always...
This is quite an interesting article, and while I, a hard-core flight simmer can see the point of the writer, however, I think it is too corporate oriented.
Another article appeared yesterday on combatsim.com that looks at it from the simmer's perspective. Steve MacGregor writes about the computer gaming industry having "moved out of the age of bedroom programmers, and into the age of multi-national companies" and the pros and cons of this paradigm shift. On the plus side, this means that they have the budget available to create such productions. But on the down side, it seems the latest crop of games show that they "seem to be designed and developed by faceless marketing divisions who are soley interested in moving product."
Mr. MacGregor gave a number of examples of games which, when he bought them, were either obviously incomplete (e.g. the reference manual talks about features that are obviously not in the game), or the system requirements were determined by some marketing droid whose sole motivation is the bottom line. (In his example, he bought a game which said minimum requirements were a PII/266, 64MB RAM, 4MB 3D vidcard, recommended was a PII/350, 64MB RAM, 16MB 3D vidcard. His machine is a K6-2/533, 64MB, 32MB Riva TNT2, and even with all of the graphics options at minimum, he can't get above 10 FPS.)
I think the following statement from his article sums the situation up nicely:
"Some recent games seem to have been produced solely based on how much revenue they can generate, and have ignored completely the need to give the customer value for his money. This isn't how it is supposed to be. If I buy a microwave oven, or a radio, or a car, or any other item, I have every right to expect that it will perform as advertised. If it doesn't, I get my money back. If I buy a computer game and it doesn't perform as advertised on the box, I am often left to hope that unpaid but talented individuals will assist me via the Internet. It seems that we gamers are getting a poor deal here, and I believe it is time to take a stand."
I understand that computer games is an industry, and that they want to make profits. But why should quality suffer?
--Storm
What genre? Typing commands at a terminal until a program told you that you won?
If, as you say, you have always loved adventure games, then you know that there is much more to adventure games than your dismissive description. As for it being a genre, there is really no argument here, as a genre is merely a category of artistic or literary composition which is characterized by a particular style (to paraphrase from the dictionary).
The people you talk about aren't under you.
Did I say that they were? I didn't even infer that they were. What I did say, however (though perhaps implicitly), and I still maintain, is that their zealotry confused for all late-comers the distinctions between two entirely different genres: the point-and-click puzzle slideshow, and the wholly more atmospheric and interactive adventure game.
Whether you agree with or not is another matter.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
Zork was wonderful for its time, but Iif Myst killed the adventure game, it did so by raising the bar so high that few developers could surmount it.
It is fascinating how much opinions can differ. I consider Myst such a shallow and sterile game that it almost chills me that anyone can claim that it "rais[ed] the bar."
The detailed texture of the game's objects and scenery was immensely evocative and imaginative...
Again, wow. Banal and _unimaginative_ are adjectives that I might apply to Myst, but "evocative and imaginative?" I guess we have two mindsets here: I have never seen a film, no matter how excellent, which could even BEGIN to compare to a moderately entertaining book. And I love both films and books. But my mind's eye paints a more appealing picture than any cinematographer or director ever could.
Just my opinion, of course.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
I think the genres will rotate eventually. I think right now the gaming hardware is at a point that you will start to see hybred games. Eg FPS/warcraft/flight combat, or FPS/Adventure/RPG.
I would like to see a de-cetralllized system of game serverlists for games like quake and unreal. (maybe use irc but the 'users' would be links)
Maybe even a 'generic game engine' that could be modified on-the-fly depending on what site you hit (like a web link or 'modifiers' for the UT literate)
Don't forget the advantages of cable/dsl connections. You will NEED one!
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
It's sad to see this genre go away... I worked on "The Return To Zork" and others (Pyramid of Peril anyone?).
... I pretty much left the game biz. in '94 so I missed the blow up of this genre.
It was some of the best combo. of story in interactivity we've ever seen.
Personal Favorite: The Secret Of Monkey Island (the original).
Well
The Civilization series is not an example of War games, they are Turn Based Strategy games. War games are a subset of these games and of RTS too, they only focus on War. An example would be Sid Meier's Gettysburg and Antitem.
Third-person shooters have only come out in the past few years, after FPS. My friends and I call them "Chasers", because of how the camera behaves when following the main character.
On the PC, examples are Tomb Raider and Indiana Jones. On the consoles, these are the biggest selling games of the past 5 years, and are now staple of the industry: Sonic, Crash, Mario, Zelda, the list goes on and on.
What's really stopped me from MU*ing is that the places I used to go became horribly lagged, and then many of them died due to circumstances ostensibly beyond their control.
I used to play on AmberMUSH. Had a lot of fun. Wasted a lot of time there. Then the lag became oppressive and I stopped going. Last time I checked in on it (which, admittedly, was years ago) it was still painful.
Then there was BtechMUSE, which was a whole lot of fun. Doing Battletech on text hex maps and keeping track of your heading, speed, and who's in your field of fire was an exercise in strategy and brainpower, like piloting a submarine. It was pure exultation when you managed to pull a Death From Above on a mech and take it out. I even had a really slick character because I joined a house early on. Then, again, the lag went psycho and I gave up on it.
Finally, there was FurryFUCK^H^H^H^HMUCK, which was a really slick place to while away the hours, with a full (if difficult to navigate) world. Furry was always kind of lagged, but it was the kind of place where that didn't matter so much. Then it started dropping me, and getting slow to boot, and the communities changed and people I knew stopped going, and suddenly it wasn't as fun any more. So I stopped going there, too.
Now I fulfill my chatting desires with Irc, I mostly play UnrealTournament and the occasional game of CounterStrike. I stay away from the text-based places because what happened to all the places I used to go. I have a bad taste in my mouth about it.
Hopefully, we'll see a resurgence of pencil-and-paper gaming. I've been playing a little Warhammer 40k here and there. I get plenty of online community time between Irc and /. and don't really need to make a commitment to a MU*. I certainly hope that they stay around for a long, long while for those people who still get flushed over killing the troll with the nasty knife, though.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Don't forget Myth - I don't know how anyone could say that is not original. (Its closest might be the Ancient Art of War, by Broderbund, of which it is certainly partially derivative, but by no means a copy)
Remember when the gameplay was what really mattered in games? Remember walking through dungeons, which pretty much lacked animation? It was the gameplay that mattered. Nowadays, companies try to make their product as graphically impressive as possible and compromise gameplay. Another problem is development time - since the companies focus so much on graphical content, their development time is vastly increased, and by the time the product ships, it is no longer graphically pleasing [cuz technology has moved on] and the gameplay is unsatisfactory. All this does is make for horrible games.
Many gamers out there still enjoy non graphical MUDs, since all that matters is the quest and the emotional involvement in a created world. Graphical MUD type games are the thing of the future, and games in general are completely becoming online based. The new era of gaming includes other real people, and this all started with the emotional involvement in games that was created by Doom. I'll never forget those first times I got to chase my friends around and kill them...hehehe...you know what I mean.
So lets move gaming technology forward not simply in graphical content, but game companies need to do more psychological studies on what gamers need and what they desire in their gaming environments. This is where the true advances can take place.
-=MeMpHiStO=-The FPS came along because the technology warranted it, before DOOM and Wolfenstein (and what ever clone you want to dig up) we were confined to 2D settings for our games, when 3D Technology eventually evolved, it inspired the FPS. Now, we are still riding that wave, waiting for the next big thing in gaming. No we don't want another vibrating joystick, or pretty T&L rendering, we want something new. 5D (counting time as the 4th) games anyone?
I can see it now...
"The object of Hyper cube, is to take the dissasembled hyper cube, and then re-assemble it before the evil aliens take over your homeplanet and kill your family!"
But remember, Quake is here to stay. =)
-Fred
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American Public." - H.L. Mencken
There are people out there fighting the good fight. Its difficult, and the odds are against you, but truly different and original games are being made right now.
(Shameless plug alert) Take a look at Sacrifice
Oxryly
Good luck to you! I played Mr. Do on the MAME program and it is 10 times more addictive then some of the latest games on the PC.
You've got to admit that the gameplay in something like Quake III Arena (single player, even) is a whole lot better than from Doom. The run-around-and-bash-the-spacebar-looking-for-secre ts aspect of Doom, Doom II and Quake was never very appealing. The bots in Quake III are a much more challenging kill than 10,000 screetching demons.
Also, games like Civ:CTP && Diablo II blow the old turn-based strategy games like the original Civ/Master of Orion/Master of Magic away. Well, ok, not Master of Orion... That game rocks. =) Anyways, that's only about 7-10 years ago. 20 years ago, Nobody even had PCs. And except for rouge-likes and wumpus, what computer games were there that people could play?
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
X4 is for PC, and it was originally developed for the playstation (x3 was for snes) so its got spectacular graphics, deep plotline, and really good gameplay. You can play Zero through the whole game too, not just intermittently like in x3.
Did these guys actually look at the sales figures for Starcraft? It was in the top 10 continously for *two* years for crying out loud! Saying its in trouble is a stretch to say the least.
Of course then you have crap like Tiberian Sun, but saying the whole genre is dying is rediculous, unless it happened very recently. Starcraft should prove just how popular it can be among the people who find FPS games boring.
Gamecenter seems to want insane amounts of innovation, but thats not how things work. The best way to do it is to add a few new things, but to stick with what works to make a fun game. Its more important that the game be fun and playable then cutting edge.
(besides, by the standard of innovation, the FPS genre is more then dead, fancier graphics are not innovation)
Most of the other ones seem to actually be in trouble, but I'm not worried about RTS games. Well, I *am* worried about Warcraft 3 sucking, but thats more of a problem with Blizzard lately (Diablo 2 is nowhere near as good as it should be, and with the constant change in directions Warcraft 3 is taking, I'm not even sure if they know what they're making anymore).
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
They're part of the same real world they're reacting to, and thus not quantised either.
The real world is quantized (hmm... how did that go? [something] mechanics. It'll come to me...). The human nervous system is quantized (not globally synchronized to a fixed clock, but definitely quantized). Neurons fire or don't fire. The light-sensing mechanisms of the eye are connected to neurons, which they cause to fire or not fire periodically. There are definite limits to the speed of transmission and firing rate of neurons, whether they've been measured 100% accurately or not.
there aren't any pixels,
Rods and cones. 'nuff said.
Running extra frames doesn't really create any sort of motion blur unless you specifically render that motion blur
If you consider motion blur to be a psychological effect rather than a mechanism, it creates motion blur. It should have been clear to the most minimally adequate mind that I meant this from my opening statement, "the real world is motion-blurred".
The bottom line is that 30FPS isn't just fine.
Go ahead. Tell me you can distinguish individual frames of a TV signal. 30 FPS is fine as long as you make your camera (or rendering engine) act enough like a human eye.
The whole purpose of improving rendering engines is to recreate the quality of a competently recorded video display of a real-life scene. To counter a claim that a certain method is sufficient for this with the argument that the purpose is insufficient for the purpose is submoronic.
I hate people who play with semantics and insist on taking the literal meanings of expressions and then attacking this straw man when the language is inadequate for literal discussion.
Arguing that explaining the theory used to justify the FPS rate of recorded video is a mistake because, despite the fact that it has yielded useful results, it may yet be proven false by some new test in the future, goes beyond pomposity... but I can't think of a word low enough for someone who utterly rejects the description of a practical model because it's not Certain Eternal Truth ("skeptic" doesn't have the bite it should, having long since swallowed its opposite meaning).
Why didn't you just save yourself some time and reply with "knowing nothing, we can know nothing"?
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I wish somebody made a more revised version of C-robots, with cool graphics, more features, more functions, and maybe even online arenas, with massive spectator events! This would be the ultimate battle of the geeks. I do realize I could just try building bots for Quake, but it's just not the same.
I read the RTS analysis, and skimmed 1/2 the posts, and was surprised to not see the comments I'm about to make :)
The basic argument of the article, which you reiterate, is, "most of these are clones of games which have been around for years."
If recycling ideas lead to the death of a genre, then the entire entertainment industry should be radically different than it is now. The past 50 years alone in the U.S. show that cloning ideas is the way to *make profits*, not die out.
Another aspect to consider: those of you who have been gaming for years (decades) and are tired of same-old same-old may very well give up gaming. But it doesn't matter, because there is a whole new generation of young-in's who have never seen these ideas/concepts before, and to whom they are fresh and innovative. And they will buy these games.
It's the same for movies. I'm tired of "Arnie" flicks. I go now for more 'intelligent' movies. I'm also about 30, and have been watching action movies for 15 yrs (at least). But there's a whole new group of teens & college students that are not yet tired of mindless action flicks.
And so the trend continues.
-----
http://movies.shoutingman.com
ShoutingMan.com
...it really is......but there are untapped opportunities for originality in puzzles.
The Lemmings series was a true hit, IMHO the best computer game ever, with very innovative use of the mouse as a then relatively new input device for a mass market computer (it was an Amiga game; Mac's were business machines then, and PC's ran DOS). Why hasn't there been some more stuff like that?
Does anyone else remember the following British 8-bit puzzles....
Xor (BBC, Spectrum) - pure turn based cellular puzzle with devilishly hard problems. The icons were chickens, fish, dollies, etc.
Sentinel (Spectrum) - use a point to point move sequence sneak up a mountain avoiding the gaze of a slowly rotating automaton. The pieces were pine trees.
Imogen (BBC) - cute monochrome (done for the resolution) semi-realtime puzzle, though very restrictive, with some sick jokes. Character was a wizard who could turn into a monkey, dog and bird.
Pooyan (Spectrum) - realtime tower climbing platform puzzle with a twist - the tower was a cylinder, with corridors.
Life sims aren't new. They began with Alter Ego and Little Computer People on the Commodore 64. Will Wright even acknowledged Little Computer People as a major influence for the Sims.
Oh wow. No original ideas... Big freakin whoop. Everyone looks for original ideas in games and it's a load of shit. When I load up a game, I'm looking for something to entertain me. Not amaze me with its originality. I for one, enjoy thinking games. That's why I enjoyed Lemmings. I didn't load up the game and go "Wow! Is this original!" I played it because I liked it. Wolfenstein on the other hand, didn't appeal to me, even though it was original. And from back then (when Lemmings and Wolf3D came out) to today, my taste in games still hasn't changed much. I still like games that require me to think - mainly adventure and puzzle games and I still dislike action games and FPSs. Bottom line, originality is overrated. Good games are good games - no matter how original.
And on the whole "PC is a dead gaming platform thing." The average person is a moron. They like to push 4 buttons and scroll around with thier little analog pad. That's why PC gaming is dying. As the article stated, games went from complicated adventure games to dumbed down FPS games. The next logical step in dumbing down games is moving on to the console so they have less of a choice of buttons to push and less games that require thinking.
The whole difference can be explained by comparing console RPGs with computer RPGs. In a console RPG like Final Fantasy, story overtakes gameplay. There's practically no thinking involved - you just guide your character to the next town where a brand new full motion video awaits, whereas in a CRPG, you take on the role of the character. You have to mess around with stats so that the character becomes your character. No 2 characters are the same, the story is a lot less linear, and follows how you want to play the game. There's too much thinking involved for "the average person." That's my 2 cents about this topic.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
One of the things that pisses me off the most is the time it takes to cast a simple spell in many newer RPGs. I was watching my friend play FF8 the other night, and it was just plain horrible (the spells). Note to all game developers: we do most of the casting in battles, where we want to see action. That's right, ACTION, not five-minute CG sequences. Stuff like that will only alienate a bunch of customers (I'm one) and hurt the genre.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
Personally, I find pretty much every FPS I've played to be rather boring. I sure hope that everything else doesn't die off..
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
I've noticed that the PC game industry really lacks creativity in many ways. This causes a kind of cycle.
Very often, new games are copies of successful, groundbreaking, original games, and some particualar types of games become a "safe" choice to produce. Game devlopers and publishers want to make money; taking risk doesn't guarantee you profit. For instance, Diablo has many copycats. Baldur's Gate started the current flood of RPGs. Doom made first person shooters popular. X-Wing did the same for space flight sims.
I read in a recent interview with John Carmack that the concept of first person games was as an enhancement of existing top-down games at the time. Diablo is similar in many ways to old games like Rogue. I don't think any gaming genre is really dead... it may be unpopular for a few years, but eventually someone will think: "Remember _________? That was a fun game! Let's remake it, only make it better!"
Then, if the game's a hit, it starts the cycle all over again.
The bulk of what people want is fancy graphics, violence and cool sounds. I love to sit back and play the old games that every one thinks suck because they're mostly text based. Of course, with the advent of high speed processors, some of them are impossible to play now.
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
i'm sorry, but the game mags are:
1) terribly myopic
2) stupid
3) looking to bump up readership
when they proclaim a genre is dead - the computer game biz moves in cycles that last years - look at ww2 flight sims. back in the day of the 80286 there were tons of them out there, lucasarts had their finest hour, secret weapons of the luftwaffe, plus there was aces over europe or somesuch, don't remember the name, maybe someone can recall. but then, there were no flight sims about ww2 out there for YEARS. during that time, everyone said "henny penny! henny penny! flight simgs are dead!" then, a year ago christmas, we had like three of them on the shelves. since then, nothing. but b17 is coming, and there are probably more i just don't recall.
just note which genres they say are dead and watch them for three years.
Yes, my first reply was pompous (I freely admitted that), but I did manage to avoid an outright ad hominem response. You didn't, but I'll reply anyway.
Yes, neurons fire or don't fire. How they get into that state depends on a whole lot more voodoo, depending on the stimuli feeding into them (neurotransmitters and their reuse, or photons, for this argument we really don't care). There are certainly limits to the speed with which an axon can transmit such a response, but since we're talking about a continuously developed perception that really doesn't matter much here (it would matter if we were talking about a minimal perceptible signal, but that kinda thing only happens in psych experiments). Any such limit is lost in the processing noise as your moving picture is built and rebuilt.
Rods and cones aren't pixels any more than CPU registers are (though I deplore the whole analogy). Visual perception - especially time-based scene perception such as you're describing - takes place throughout the eye and brain, and it isn't swayed by what happens in one rod or cone. The digital computer model of perceptual and cognitive processing went out of style in the late seventies, and for good reason.
Motion blur isn't a psychological effect. It's a filmic effect, and you've assumed that you can argue from what a camera does that you understand something about what the mind does. You can perhaps make a useful abstract model that way, but you've extrapolated from it too far. So says this minimally adequate mind. Likewise, a camera acts like a human eye as far as the retina / film / CCD / whatever, but that's as far as it goes. Knowing that tells you nothing about the bizarre equipment that interprets all that information in the visual cortex and beyond, and you cannot pronounce on what it does or doesn't require without knowing that.
You already know that recorded video actually varies at 60fps, so that can be left alone. More importantly, 24fps film and 30fps/60 fieldps recordings *aren't* sufficient for a lot of people. I know people who don't go to movie theatres precisely because a 24fps quantised image pisses them off. I also know people who get a headache from watching TV, though I suspect many more than that are bothered and never make the connection. For me (and presumably you) it works fine, but for them it doesn't. So clearly Eternal Truth isn't what I'm looking for here - but the Pragmatic Truth you were aiming for with "just fine" really had the same ring. The point isn't that some new test may "disprove" something, it's that *no test* is sufficient to make such pronouncements, because all such tests are more an expression of the current state of cleverness in testing than the thing they seek to test.
That said, I am sufficiently pragmatic to avoid "we can know nothing". But I tend to aim a hell of a lot higher to avoid our own ignorance, especially where digital media are concerned.
Shoulda just had another oatmeal stout.
-- Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. ~ Robert Doisneau
--Ty
(When was the last time one of those was published? Donkey Kong Country 2?)
Ye olde nintendo had dozens of 'em. Hundreds. Several sucked. But some of those are still fun!
3d killed the side-scrolling adventure; One-dimensional worlds just aren't fun any more for some folks. Gimme another old-school style mario any day.
The problem is cash flow. Games are so unprofitable nowadays, and people seem to be want BMW's more than ever, so publishers are super-conservative.
:) ) -- you gotta choose whether you're going to waste that time gaming or Slashdotting.
Some publishers are more clueful than others, but your average game-deaf VC doesn't want art -- he wants a nice, safe game design that has cleavage, blood, and guns, in varying order. Oh, and the art should be anime-influenced (as if that was ever a question!)
Of course, maybe the Internet is killing single-player gaming? I mean, you can only have so much screen time per day (even if it's 16-20 hours
I would disagree with the entire article. There is innovation occurring at a fantastic rate in the PC Gaming industry -- you just have to look for it. I mean, you can count the really great PC games in the last ten years on your fingers. Its always been like this, but since there is a lot more money involved now, the wait between the games seems much longer.
I like Diablo II sometimes, and I like Combat Mission sometimes -- it depends on my mood. I would like to see a lot more innovation rather than putting out games that are guaranteed to make money because they are basically identical to a previous game with a few twists, and that is happening.
Specifically, I would disagree entirely with the death of the War Game genre. The meteoric rise of Combat Mission makes this out for the lie it is. CM has a huge and rapidly growing fan base -- they've sold so many games they were out of stock a couple weeks ago. It just goes to show that it depends entirely on the gameplay, and not flashy graphics. Let's play!
Knowing that tells you nothing about the bizarre equipment that interprets all that information in the visual cortex and beyond, and you cannot pronounce on what it does or doesn't require without knowing that.
Once again, you are arguing "we don't know anything" as a general counterargument to anything I say. You propose no alternate model and offer no useful information. It's pathetic.
it isn't swayed by what happens in one rod or cone
Gee, then I guess we can take out all the rods and cones, and you'll still be able to see just fine. Since the information is filtered and processed, I guess we can just ignore what gets gathered.
The actual function of the rods and cones is essential to this issue. The information they provide is the limit of visual data gathered. The brain can throw a lot of it away, but it can't conjure more information from somewhere. The maximum firing rate of the light-detecting cells and their number set absolute maximum limits of temporal and pixel resolution.
Motion blur isn't a psychological effect.
Again, semantics. You baselessly assert a different meaning to my words than the one I have clearly explained I intended, and then use the words you thus put in my mouth to attack my arguments. If you want to argue about proper usage, keep it seperate. Otherwise, just try to maintain a consistent semantic standard throughout the discussion, so some meaning might be extracted from it.
I know people who don't go to movie theatres precisely because a 24fps quantised image pisses them off.
Yes, there are rare people for whom 30 fps is insufficient (I am one of those for whom 24 fps is insufficient and annoying; the moment any action starts I see distinct blurred frames). There are also people who have seizures when exposed to flickering lights and other people who don't see at all. They are called "freaks" and left out of general discussions.
My explanation was a good enough analogy to explain why motion-blurred 30 fps is adequate for most people. Just as it is when they watch TV (I don't hear anybody complaining that TV frame rates are too low). The same explanation would apply to explain why 40 fps is adequate for 99.9% or why 60 fps is adequate for 99.9999%.
The problem of needing a higher monitor refresh rate is entirely distinct and non-psychological.
Incidentally, I'm not making ad hominem attacks, moron. I'm using arguments to support personal insults, not the other way around. If I said, "You, being a moron, are wrong" that would be an ad hominem attack, but I've said "You, being wrong, are a moron."
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
perhaps not new but I do think there are some genre that are coming to the forfront. online ongoing games. I forget the name of the game, but where every person in teh game is an actual ongoing developing charactor. The Sims also is a new genre of game. I think it would be fun to do a real world, ala sims, ala complete netplay game. I alos have to plug my new favorite game.
Shogun Total War www.totalwar.com . I nice combination of explicit war stratagy, combined with resource managment.
ofcourse there will always be the classics, ( I think) for me nothing beats sitting back and playing a few rounds of donkey kong on mame. I'm not sure if it's the nastalgia or that the game was really that good. but I love it.
On one hand, large envolving games, Ultima Online & EverQuest, take too much time and are a burden on the gamers that don't want become that deeply engrossed in the game. I knew a few guys that would take turns playing the same Ultima character around the clock. They did it just so they could advance the character quickly. I doubt the masses would purchase a game that required that level of commitment. This is where the adventure and the flight simulators reside.
On the other hand, games that are quick to learn and master cannot hold the interest of some gamers for more than a week. They become bored with it. They beat it and then...that's pretty much it. They don't want to pay $50 for a game that won't see them through the week. Again, the masses would probably play a copy their friends gave them because they were bored with it instead of buy it themselves. Here you can find the space combat games and the real-time strategy games.
The sucessful games are the ones that find the middle grounds. Blizzard did fine jobs with Diablo and WarCraft/StarCraft games. They tried to keep things relatively simple, but allowed for a little of the deeper game play. IOW, you could take the game to the level that you are comfortable with. But even so, I felt that Diablo was not complex enough while at the same time some friends felt it took too long to play.
Can both kinds of gamers be pleased with the same game? I believe it is possible. Games could be made that are very simple and quick to play in the small scale while at the same time can be very complex on a large scale. For example, a virtual world where people interact with it in different ways all at the same time. One person would be in FPS mode where they run around a la Quake style blasting things, another person could be runing a SimCity like game where they are building a city all the while the quake dude is running around in it. Someone else could be flying a jet over the city in their flight simulator perspective. While all of this is going on, someone has an overhead realtime strategy view where they build things in certain places and try to influence the others to take certain actions. Battles could involve all participants. The gamer in the flight simulator could drop a smart bomb on the quake guy. Then a gamer in a tank/mech could shoot down the jet. The gamer in the real-time mode could tell the others where the tank/mech was so they could blast it. Of course, this game would be MASSIVE. At least the server would be. The more CPU's the better. Definately an internet game. It would probably cost so much to make that you could never expect to gain a profit from selling it. Oh well...
If you haven't seen it already (or if it hasn't been posted here) check out GarageGames.com They are a group, founded by many Dynamix game designers, who are looking to cultivate the untapped masses of Independant Game Studios. Being an "indy" myself, I'm very pleased to see this.
.sig is a Porsche.
I don't think gaming is dead because the people aren't buying, I think gaming is dead because the publishers are killing it. Game publishers are notorious for "sticking" with safe concepts and ultimately flogging them to death. As a result they don't give many game shops a chance with genre-creating games, thus stagnating the market and making people tired of playing "just another Doom Clone on graphics crack."
Think about it. Would "The Sims" have been published if Will Wright hadn't already had a name for himself? (and the money and contacts to make it happen?) No. His ideas would have been discarded because they don't contain the words "Frag" or "300 giga-polygons a nanosecond".
This is a real threat to the gaming industry, and a hotly debated topic in the development circles. Hopefully with GarageGames and their ilk, we'll start seeing a lot more new concepts, some good, some bad, from the teeming masses of under appreciated indy studios.
My other
Vulgrin the MAD
I sig, therefore I am.
The first person shooter is taking over, yes. But variation on the FPS leaves us with RPG-FPS like UlitmaIX, and Everquest, Adventure-FPS like Deus Ex (if you haven't played Deus Ex yet, you are REALLY missing out)
Agreed - when I first looked at this game I thought 'another FPS'. But I load up the demo (both levels) to have a quick burn and quickly discover that this is a pretty well thought out game. The graphic technology may not include all the whizzy shaders of quake 3, but the mere existence of a plot and various hinted-at sub-plots is unusual in a game today. And even better, Loki Games is almost certainly working on a port of 'Deus Ex' for Linux - it was spotted at LinuxWorld in their booth on a Linux machine. Keep eyes peeled for announcements and don't buy that Windows version!
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
The eds and writers at Gamecenter.com aren't exactly the greatest source for true gaming information. The purist and hardcore gamers get their information from sites dedicated to their favorite type of gaming, even to the point of shunning the psuedo-targetted gaming sites like the GameSpy network (www.planetquake.com, www.planetunreal.com, etc).
The future of the gaming industry is my forte. Hell, it'll be my thesis when I hit the point where I want a doctorate. And believe me when I say that the biggest cause of any genre of game "dying off", as they put it, is due to corporate and VC pressure to stick to things that they know work. Gaming companies are less likely to go out on a limb and innovate in their games. The few that do don't end up with the funding for the mainstream marketting thats needed to compete with the big publishes. Its alot like the music industry right now - except no Napster.
Gaming is becomming more and more about making profits than it is about making games. Companies are producing things that are very much clones of things that sold well. Instead of trying to recreate a good engine, and possibly comming up with new interesting innovations, the companies opt to simply license the engine and make minor upgrades to it. Look at all the various commercial games (not player-made mods) that came out on the Quake2 engine. It was pathetic in my opinion. The only game using the Q2 engine which caught my attention was KingPin: Life of Crime, and still that was only a so-so game. It was only different in that it offered much more of a story than the others.
Its the large publishers like Interplay and Sierra who are just drowning the game market with these 2-bit titles based on other games. And its these clones that are tiring players out, and confusing them. Titles that are truly different from the pack get hidden behind the clones. FPS games like Rainbow Six and its sequel Rogue Spear that were very much different from the fragfests of Quake didn't get noticed. But games like Soldier of Fortune take the spotlight because they're using the hottest latest (licensed) engine, when all they're really doing is adding some new graphics and more blood and making the genre a little more stale.
What game design teams really need to do is stop producing clones of other peoples' work, and start working on their own innovations and interesting games. Licensing of engines is fine, when done to a degree and when signifigant changes to the original game are made. Quality games are becomming more and more difficult to find due to the flood of clones. Not all licensed engines turn into junk games, but the amount of them coming out is making it very difficult for gamers to choose which ones to own and which to ignore. If an avid RPG gamer who enjoyed Baldur's Gate decides she wants to play more of those games, does she purchase IceWind Dale or Planescape: Torment, or the Tales of Sword Coast? In my opinion, Planescape: Torment blows the others away, even the original Baldurs Gate. But reviewers can't tell you if you'll like a game or not, or if you'll like it better than another game (and this is only made worse by reviewers who sell out to game companies or to generate clicks).
More and more games are going online. As an AI designer I can understand this. Its very difficult to write an AI which gets close to simulating a real opponent without using too much cpu power. Also, online games provide the sense of community and friendly rivalry that is lacking in singleplayer games. But the online world still suffers from the same problems that the singleplayer world suffers from. Funding is not provided to game companies with a radically different idea.
The original NeverWinter Nights was a superb game. It had a large base of absolutely fanatical players. AOL made one of their biggest mistakes by shutting it down. With modern network technology the original NWN could become 10x's what it was limited to on AOL. But no game company now would be willing to do that, because it isn't "safe" for them to do so. The companies see that there aren't enough clones of the original NWN around to make it a surefire sale. Its ironic that NWN, something alot of people who've played it consider pivitol, was only created due to alot of GoldBox clones.. In other words, it takes a saturation of clones in order for a game to become worth of support by a publisher. But its the saturation of clones that confuses gamers and makes them bored of the genre.
More power to the Garage Developers. More power to Forgotten World, Shattered Galaxy, and all design teams that can create thier ideas from scratch.
I wonder, what about 'massively multiplayer' games? Of course, MUDs and the like have been around for quite some time, but it seems that the graphical kind (like ultima online) are pretty new. Also on a personal note, my good friend and roommate recently brought his original Nintendo up to our apartment and I started playing Final Fantasy (no bloody VIII, no bloody VII . . . ) and was having a blast, devoting almost all of my cart gaming time to it. A few days later, our house was broken into and all of our shiny new consoles were taken, including a playstation, our Nintendo 64, and (this hurt the most) our new Dreamcast with all my Soul Calibur records with it. But luckily, the robbers didn't touch the old Nintendo sitting in my room. As a side note, what kind of party should I be using? I had a fighter and one of each sort of mage (black, red, white) but that didn't seem to be getting too powerful in the later levels.
Back off, man. I'm a scientist.
Rareware's BlastCorps area.
IGN64 Review.
I think this deserves its own genre, how about the Third Person Demolish or be Nuked genre (TPDN)?
And that music is really a bit too addictive. Well, "Time to get movin'"!
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
I think it's pretty funny when I annoy someone enough to go around moderating down all of my old posts in dead threads.
It's happened a few times before. I wonder how my congenial personality inspires such hatred...
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Text based MUDS are on the decline.
There are more of them now, MANY more potential players, all having faster network access, and yet the number of players per mud have dropped.
There used to be a catagory or role-playing games where you bought a rule book, a suplement or 2 and played. Then, along came the collectable cards gaming idea. Yes, you can still find and play the rule book games, but new 'gamers' are playing PokeMon not Paranoia.
And, well, face it. After you (or your program) has typed in backstab orge 10+ times, you have mastered that particular skill and can move on.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
"If people still wanted flight sims companies would be developing them."
This is false so many ways it's not even funny. To pick one off the top of my head: For low amounts of demand, there may be no supply. What if there were only 1000 people in the world that wanted a flight sim? A software company wouldn't survive on that for long. But a good portion of that 1000 people are probably here on Slashdot. So "who cares"? Slashdot readers.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Welcome to ADVENTURE!! Would you like instructions?
>y
Somewhere nearby is Colossal Cave, where others have found fortunes in
treasure and gold, though it is rumored that some who enter are never
seen again. Magic is said to work in the cave. I will be your eyes
and hands. Direct me with natural English commands. I should warn
you that I look at only the first six letters of each word. Also you
should enter "Northeast" as "NE" to distinguish it from "North".
(Should you get stuck, type "HELP" or "?" for some general hints.)
Good Luck!
- - - -
You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.
Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and
down a gully.
>_
JOIN !LINK CLUB!
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
... gameplay.
Think about WHY you continue to play certain games. It's because of the game mechanics and game play, not the pretty polygons. Here at the office, we have 14 game systems, and the most played is the Atari 2600. Nothing gets us riled up better than a few rounds of Activision's BOXING. That game is amazing! The simple game play with rewarding and adrenaline-pumping control is simply superb. If I had to list games that are truly epic and genre defining, they would all be for the Atari or early arcade. These days people think rail-games like "Resident Evil" are good just because the look pretty, but who cares if the game just isn't there?
It's a choice of cinematics over games. Every publishers wants a "story" for some reason now in their games. Nobody cares about making a game. By that I mean a play mechanic that is progressively more difficult built upon a simple theme, like Centipede or Space Invaders.
I'd rather play Laser Blast for hours than stare at the gratuitous use of polygons on today's current "games". There are still some great games these days, though. "Crazy Taxi" on the Dreamcast is wonderful because of the game play, for example. The art _is_ beautiful, but that's not all the game relies on.
Go to a publisher with a great game idea and the first two questions they'll ask are "Where's the story?" and "Where's the girl?".
-Mike
--- witty signature
My French is a little bit rusty, but shouldn't it be "n'est pas" instead of "ne pas?" Otherwise, your sentence wouldn't have a verb, right?
Some games have taken a rather unoriginal genre basis and turned into a great game, System Shock 2 and Deus Ex are a thinking mans Doom. SS2 is one of those few games that really frightens you, you hesitate to open doors for fear of what might be on the other side. Dungeon Keeper was a excellent take on RTS, I mean a Dungeon Simulation, only from the people at Bullfrog. Another quite interesting game i've been playing lately is MindRover, a very addicting game that makes you think, alot. Half-Life showed what could be accomplished with a FPS if done correctly, and all the modifications that are based on it make it a delightful game to play (mmmm... Counterstrike). Team Fortress 2 will rock the socks off of everyone, it'll be a great game (hopefully, but the boys at Valve have yet to let us down). There's also some pretty interesting games out on the horizon, like Black and White and Halo (provided Microsoft doesn't give us the shaft).
Flight Sims and War Games might be dying off now, but they've always had a dedicated fan base. People who like to blow things up from a Falcon will continue to do so, and companies that don't cash in on this are losing money.
---
--
Insert Witty Sig Here
Think, think what you could do with a Megaman game on a PC! Megaman X3 was pretty decent, but then they came out with 7 (or was it 8) oriented to the kids. Some fancy sound, but most importantly, gameplay. Even 1-on-1 fighting games, as dead as THAT genre is... people often forget that all this 3d accel hardware is just fancy 2d effects and polygons. Think, some motion blurs on a few 99-hit combos, or a few alpha transparencies.
Want a reason why every game manufacturer is going for pretty polygons? Castlevania: Symphony of the Night wasn't as big as it should have been because people passed it over because it was 2D and "2D games are old" (yes, every gamer that deserves the title wants to pummel these people). Although I never had the cash to plunk down to buy it, I did play it with my cousin on his PSX and it has the chance to be the last truely great 2D game. Even RPGs have gone 3D, and they're the ones who need it the least!
Last time I fired up a Final Fantasy game was FF5, I've been playing FF5 a lot more (30 hours on the current game) than I ever did FF8 (3 hours total). Why? FF8 is a light show, FF5 is a game.
From the people I've talked to many want a new Metroid, however most say that if the new Metroid is 3D they won't even bother to look at the box. Too many game manufacturers are ruining perfectly good series by turning them into light shows and not concentrating on game play... and they're making money because of it.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
One game that I think was very original (to the best of my knowledge) was Dr. Robotnicks Mean Bean Machine. Try it out on sega genesis or emulation if you have to (don't flame me about emulation please.) Was it derivitative of Tetris, Dr. Mario, and alot of other games like it? Sure. Is it still a great and original game? you bet. When stuff like this happens, games of certain genre won't die, they will just get more advanced and take advantage of the current technology. Dr. Robotnicks Mean Bean Machine is completely made for being multiplayer and is not as repetative at most of the games from which it came. It is simple yet is set up so that their is practically no end to the skill you could reach. You set up chain reactions of events and the bigger the better, but it is hard to plan reactions, especially fast enough to make them happen with what you get. You have to readjust your current strategy to whatever obstacles your opponent throws at you etc. It is one of my favorite games but I don't hear alot about it. I think it proves that even though a genre can get done again and again there is always something cool that can be done with it. Also try out Wetris for N64 another great game that illustrates the same point.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
I just had to establish that my penis is larger than yours (that's length and girth, mind you).
;_; )
Isn't that what all this was about? You don't really care about frame rates, do you?
I reserve words like "submoronic" for festive occasions, like when someone starts a flamewar with a long, pompous, patronizing "correction" (especially on a dead or near-dead thread).
(BTW, I don't moderate: when a thread interests me, I post. Also, I rather expected that I'd pissed someone else off with my rampage on a near-dead thread. Every time I go off like that, usually a half-dozen other posts of mine go down at random. Like I said, I find it amusing. I don't care about karma, I just post whatever I feel like - on topic, off topic, flames, trolls, pissing contests, stupid jokes, made-up figures, oddball theories, anything - and I've still mysteriously got karma coming out the wazoo.)
Hey, you're the bastard that moderated down my "this idea should work for more than music" aren't you? Now that's just rude. That's the most on-topic, relevant post I've ever written, on a subject that I've given years of consideration to, and you, with your perceptions colored by our recent exchange of flames, moderate it down long after the thread is dead.
Bad form! Psuedointellectual flame war rule #1 is "Flaming only! No backstabbing."
The "overrated" and "underrated" moderation choices are stupid. If you can't come up with a better reason than "overrated", you shouldn't bother moderating someone down.
(yeah, the 50 point barrier is down, karma is unfrozen, and mine has tragically fallen to 190; unshed tears blur my vision
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
A NTSC TV signal provides two fields each displayed at 30 fps and interlaced. When horizontal lines of high contrast are next to each other (such as a single white line on a black background) this is perceived as flicker.
Now consider whats happening: the phosphers along that line are bright then gradually go dark until the electron beam swings back to light them up again. If 30 fps were enough, the eye wouldn't notice this and we wouldn't perceive flickering. Yet the average person does.
Try a simple experiment: change the refresh rate of your display until you notice no flicker. For me, this is at about 75 hertz.
For reference, flourescent lights flash at 120 hertz an even this bothers some people.
My perfect game would
be a combination of.
Leasure suite larry
+
Need for speed high stakes
+
quake
+
grand theft auto
+
Sims
a game with a huge roaming maps where all objects in the game can be manipultated, and all charactors have a unique AI, also be able ot roam in first person like quake, drive like high stakes, I want to be able to drive to an airport and take a plane to Nicoragwa and play shootem up for a while ( online people) then come back and play family ( the SIMS) hmmm this is sounding like total recall. I dont' want a new game I want a new
LIFE !!!!
and thats what we would call it life. Come on down folks, create your own alter ego and live (play) the game of life like youve never played before...
shoot !
I' by that for a dollar
I remember spending hours upon hours at the arcade playing games like Street Fighter 2, MK and Killer Instinct. They were/are extremely fun in my opinion. It used to be that you'd wait in line to play and then when you did.. you either proved your self and stayed at the front of the line or you had to shortly rejoin the back of the line.
Ah.. Good times... At least on KI.. I was usually at the front of the line.
Casual gamers killed adventure gaming, and Myst made them do it.
OK, their argument is that text adventures are somehow more immersive (I guess?) than Myst was. Umm, where do these guys get off? I know there are some people who don't like Myst and Riven, but how in the world did it make users kill adventure games?
Myst's idea of interactivity involved sparse clicks followed by hours of skull scratching.
And text adventure involved vast amounts of typing followed by hours of skull scratching.
Maybe they should go back to the drawing board for this article, and fire the present author before starting again.
Basically, Myst took the adventure game and wrapped it up in a pretty cool environment. I for one think that environment was very immersive. I mean, compare it to any other games from that time period. And after all, the puzzles in Myst were no different from any others anywhere, they just happened to be done in very pretty graphics.
I think if adventure gaming was killed just because Myst was so pretty, that must mean there are just a bunch of really lazy adventure game designers. I mean, Myst sparked at least three books, and there's still a webring on D'ni sites that actually get updated. Now that's an adventure game.
I would have to agree with most of this assessment. But, I think that the blame can be placed squarely on the Video/Sound/CPU manufacturers. After all, if games were just fun to play and didn't include the latest whiz-bang features, then how would they sell their products? I think developers are getting swamped by trying to create games which utilize these new features and not spending enough time making games which are fun to play.
:) )
.02c
TheJet
That is one of the reasons why I was actually pleased with Blizzards Diablo II release. Yes, it was late, yes it has problems, but YES IT'S D@MN ADDICTING!! They didn't worry about making the latest-greatest-fancy-schmancy-graphics. But look what happened, the first thing you heard from everyone (after "f'n Battle.Net") was one of:
"These graphics blow!"
"Why is this at 640x480?"
"How come I can't connect to Battle.Net?" (OK, I had to throw that one in
My point is that gamers are _never_ satisfied, and I think this is largely due to the fact that 3dfx/nVidia just convinced them to buy their latest vid-card, and they want to get their money's worth.
As someone who wants to break into this industry, I just hope that there are some good companies left when I get there. It seems like the good companies are dying faster than they can be created (***lamenting LGs death***). People aren't interested in good games, they want pretty ones.
My
The "Top 10" Reasons to procrastinate:
The "Top 10" Reasons to procrastinate:
10.
First, I think adventure gaming may be dying, but it may also be in a partial reboirth in the genre of Roguelikes. First among these is Rogue, but it also includes biggies like Nethack (which has a greater adventure element to it), Moria, *band, Adom, and many, many more (the Roguelike News is an excellent Roguelike source). They are simple, usually free, and with variant-friendly games like Angband, just about anyone with knowledge of C can write one.
;-)
Just my plug for my favorite genre, one which is certainly notdying out.
Second thought: It bugs that people think a genre is dying out because a new, unique specimen of it has not recently been released. I still play Battlehawks 1942 and Secret Wepaons of the Luftwhaffe(sp?) every once in a while...and i'm always up for some original TIE Fighter. I think a genre's survival is based on how much people want tto play it, not the amount of release's in it. Of course, the two are linked.
And that's all. BTW, anyone remmber an RTS called Walls of Rome? I play that a lot, too.
-J
Karma: T-rexcellent.
The original that is (UFO Defense, i believe). That game really did it's own thing. Combined a lot of elements from a bunch of different genres to come up with something new that was more than the sum of its parts. Highly addictive and scary as hell when you're playing it at 3am with all the lights out. I dunno if X-COM should count as its own individual genre, though. Same thing with The Sims. How does a game become a genre? If there's just one, it's "original" but once a bunch of rip-off games are made, it becomes the progenitor of it's own phylum?
-a
When it comes to new genres, I'd have to say that Tribes is the beginning of a new style of 1st person shooter. In previous games like Quake, Halflife, etc... there really wasn't a strong amount of strategy involved. Then came Tribes. This was a game that required strategy to suceed. You have to spend hours figuring out the best spots for turrets. Hours on defensive strategy and hours on finding the fastest and best paths to enemy flags. Sure it was still CTF, but you couldn't just leave 2 guys back to guard the flag and take the rest of your team out to get the enemy flag. You need to have a plan.
:)
To me, that seems to bring a whole new demension to the 1st person shooter. We no longer can play online games without Roger Wilco. We need to communicate to every member what is going on at all times. With Tribes2 on the way, we will find that teamwork is even more important. Then there is the promise of Halo. If you haven't seen the game, go to this site. Graphically, it is the most impressive game I have ever seen. (Good enough reason to buy the Nvida GTS Ultra
http://halo.bungie.org
I suggest watching the E3 trailer. Keep in mind that the trailer was done completely in-game using the Halo engine.
Turn based strategy games (mostly war games, although there are other kinds) have been around for literally thousands of years. However, the historical wargaming period started to fall off with the advent of computers appearing in the average person's home. For an interesting take on this, read some of James F. Dunnigan's work on the subject (also a good designer).
Back off, man. I'm a scientist.
I have a new Thunderbird, a TNT2 and a Voodoo2, and suddenly Deus Ex runs a lot faster than my old PII-400. If people realized that by the time games come out that take full advantage of their graphics something is now 10^40 times faster, they wouldn't always get the NEWEST and BEST they'd get something that works, works well, but doesn't require a small loan to buy. Besides, is 100 FPS really that much better than, say, 40 or 50?
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
Er ... because Slashdot doesn't recognize the console industry, perhaps? Go fuck yourself, AC wimp.
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
Darkwind! Man, I killed a lot of time there over the past 7 years or whatever it's been. I enjoyed MUDs but I'm glad I've weaned myself from them. Of course, being married now has had an affect, I'm sure...
Constitutionally Correct
People feel that a genre is dead when one can't make any money off of it, I disagree. I feel that a genre is dead when nothing new comes out for it.
OT: I'm trying to modify a MUD engine for use with a Doom or Quake client. Actually I'll be using Doom or Quake (modified to have MUD like qualities) as a server and have a slim version for a client. If anybody could give me any pointers on doing this? Mail anything to Meenky.
So, how is the cause of that "effect" working out anyway?
>;)
I figure the wedding gift I got should have covered all the bases.
-Vel
No, it's "Simon".
--
The gravitational constant of protein has changed. - Turbine
If PC gamers find their market stifled they should go get a console (and I don't mean wait until December 2001 for a vapour-console). There is a very wide variety of games for PlayStation and N64, and Sega have some really exciting new and original games coming out for Dreamcast - you just _have_ to see Jet Set Radio! And they'll save a vast amount of money over upgrading their PC every six months mainly to benefit their games, too. Seriously, I am amazed that anyone would buy a graphics card that cost more than a complete (console) system.
Also there is a strong Linux contingent here, and for them consoles truly shine too. Once I got my first console, well dammit, no more excuse for keeping a dual-boot system. Sure beats trying to work out how to get your new mega-GPU working with DRI/Utah/Mesa...
Many games today are just a bunch of eye-candy or they get to be too drawn out and convoluted, or both. Many game genres ARE dying because they either don't have enough substance or they require too much time and resources. When I play a game, I play it to get away from the real world for a little while and relax. Lately it seems all the games that have hit the market (i.e. EverQuest and Diablo) were made for the opposite reason-- I should go back to the real world to escape and relax from playing a game!
Now I can't even play a console without being forced into an uninteresting world that, if I put down for a few days, I could completely forget where I was and therefore need to start all over again (or else buy the strategy guide). Case in point-- FF8. I was hooked on FF1 (and still play it), enjoyed FF2 (though the plot was a little too strict), loved FF3 (because the characters were a lot more interesting and gameplay was a bit more innovative), and then FF7 came out ("Doh! Well even Squaresoft misses every now and then.") A sheer glimmer of hope drove me to buy FF8, where I find that the most fun in the game is that card game! If I ever pick that piece of crap back up (and I haven't beaten it yet) it will be purely for the card game!
I feel that the biggest downfall of most games is the attention to detail. Companies aren't seeing the forest because the trees keep getting in the way. There should be a return to the basics of gaming. There should be more fun and less seriousness (I want to laugh, dammit). More freedom to screw around with the basic plot and less stringent storylines. I'm tired of the game trying to lead me by the nose to the next step. I want to have a game for the escapism again. But most importantly, I want be able to accomplish beating the game in my leisure time in less than a month!
This probably isn't all I wanted to say, but it's beginning to get a little long and at least I got this much off my chest.
Noone seems to like space combat except me. They might lump it with flight sims, but they're really different. Fly! isn't half as exciting as TIE Fighter. I still play that, even though I've gone throught the entire set of campaigns something like 10 times. I haven't seen many space combat games recently. Where have they gone? The only ones I see right now are Parsec(which is a free project yet to be finished) and Terminus(which is commercial). Are there others like me, or am I the only one who wants more space sims?
--
Seeing is believing; You wouldn't have seen it if you didn't believe it.
The fact that war games or flight sims, or whatever, aren't doing well now is no indication of the death of the genere. They'll die down for a few years but then someone will pull themselves away from Quake VI, fire up Steel Panthers and realize how great a game that is, and how refreshingly different it is, and the genere will pick up once again.
Recently, I installed X-COM that came on a PCGamer CD and I've been playing it regularily, alongside with Deus Ex and Counter-Strike. It's making me miss detailed turn-based squad-level combat games. Maybe someone should make one?
Mad Dog, one of the 4,500 owners of Mig Alley, and proud of it.
----------
Even as you read this, your pants are strangling your loins! Aaa!
No games, ever, will compare with the Sierra games of the 80s and early 90s. I've never spent so much time with games- console, PC, or otheriwse, as I have with King's Quests, Police Quests, Quest for Glory/Hero's Quests.
Ah, the fond memories of old Sierra games. I remember- 1986? 87?- Police Quest I in CGA, desperately trying to test the drunk driver ('test drunk'? no, 'test sober'? yes!).
Even Leisure Suit Larry... I remember sneaking on the old 8086 trying to answer those questions you had to get by in order to play.
Nothing has, and nothing most likely will, compete with those games: the engrossing, fun story lines, the wit, and the overall enjoyment they gave me is unparallaed.
Okay, I'm getting too nostalgic. I think I'll go home tonight and beat Space Quest or Colonel's Bequest.
Hell, I originally beat Colonel's Bequest having to play it in all in black&white (It was EGA color only and I was way t00 k3wl to leave my CGA roots).
Ah, wither Sierra?
jack's bicycle is music to my ears
My favorite types of MUDs were (are) the Tiny's (TinyMUD, TinyMUCK, and TinyMUSH), where you were more involved in socializing and building than you were killing monsters and boosting stats. Of course, most of the Tiny's are used for roleplay, which are still human-moderated for the most part rather than the Diku or LpMUD-style games.
It would be fun to see that sort of game/community make the leap into the Everquest-type technology. If you got a simple sort of building interface (say, like a virtual Lego set) a simple scripting language, and maybe a way to tie into other Internet technologies (be able to pull up a web page within the virtual environment). I think you'd start to see something an awful lot like the "cyberspace" that cyberpunk authors of the 80's envisioned.
I've looked at some of the open source 3D engines out there... some do seemed aimed at this sort of environment, but it looks like no one has put thepieces together.
First off, I'd like to address the repeated sentiment that "games aren't what they used to be." I disagree. I think that people aren't paying attention to the power of nostalgia in the judgements of quality we make. The old games weren't necessarily "better" in terms of gameplay than anything we have today. Nostalgia is a tricky thing that candy coats those things we reveled in our youth because we hadn't yet become jaded gamers. We didn't have the exposure to games to judge them the way we do today. When you look at a game today, you think "that's just like Prince of Persia" or "dude, that's Pacman in 3-D." You can say that because you've been playing games forever. And of course the first games you play are going to be really cool because you are young, excitable, and uninformed. I'm not knocking these games, I've got the same nostalgia that everyone else has, I just think too many people make generalizations like "they don't make games like they used to" without understanding all the prejudices involved in that statement. I go to DigiPen Institute of Technology where we make video games as a course requirement, and I hear this all the time. "Games these days suck, why aren't they l33t like mario?" Well, if you'd never played any games in your life, you might think they were l33t. Ask an 8 year old what's hip, because no offense, but it seems we may be getting a bit old and cynical. Also, a little fun fact, PacMan was originally called PuckMan, but they ditched the title fearing ruffians at arcades would make a few artistic alterations to the title (hint: change the "P").
Hear! Hear!
I've played, off and on, the same MUD for 10 years. Don't anyone ever try to tell you that text muds can't be addicting. There are a number of other players and immortals who have been around for almost as long.
I've contributed quite a bit of code, the one thing which keeps a MUD fresh and exciting. I don't think I'd care much for 3D MUDS, as I've played a few 3D games and can say that they're not everyone's cup of tea. Imagination fills in the gap between text and visual.
Possibly one decline in MUDS is fewer servers available to run them on. I recall one actually running on the back DNS of a large bank. I bet the directors would have dumped core if they ever found that out.
MUDS are highly appealing to international players, as well, we have a number of russian, german and spanish players, among others. Just because commercial games don't make it is no reason to assume something free is dying as well. Administration is the key. Many MUDS have had corrupt or uncaring admins, which drive players away. In the case of Ultima Online, my nephew gave up because people kept killing his character and he couldn't get anywhere. Another problem, seriously, is balance. What goes around needs to come around.
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Police Quest, Space Quest, King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Quest for Camelot, etc., etc. Sure they had EGA and VGA graphics, but they rocked! What true geek amongst us doesn't get watery eyes thinking about those games?
I see the Police Quest, King's Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry collection packs at Sierra's store, but what about Space Quest, and all the others? I'll probably buy all these up (it would be awesome if they actually came with original manuals, but they probably just come with some lame PDF these days). I guess that's why we have "AbandonWare". These games should be in American history books some day.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
A note on the web page, Cataclysm is an expansion to Homeworld. Happy hunting.
Back off, man. I'm a scientist.
There used to be a catagory or role-playing games where you bought a rule book, a suplement or 2 and played. Then, along came the collectable cards gaming idea. Yes, you can still find and play the rule book games, but new 'gamers' are playing PokeMon not Paranoia.
????
Okay, I admit that the card playing games have a wider audience than RPGs, but why would WOTG bother doing a AD&D 3rd edition if it was a dying genre?
--
Greetings New User! Be sure to replace this text with a
Clear, Dark Skies
There is a new Monkey Island on the way. So, not all hope is lost. I always liked LucasArts adventure games more than Sierra's. I found them more fun. I'll take a Maniac Mansion or Monkey Island over Larry or a [King,Space,Police,Hero] Quest any day.
A new genre was born late '97 with PaRappa The Rapper (Released Nov '97) and continues with recent releases like Space Channel 5 for the Dreamcast.
The title for this genre is still up in the air (some try to classify it as adventure or sim), but really, this is an altogether new genre.
Anybody remember that old TV show with Richard Dean Anderson? Wouldn't it be cool to have a game where the hero gets out of sticky situations without having to resort to the full auto Uzi?
Nah, it would never sell
Flight sims have been 'done', and extended into space. War games have been based in both the past, present, and future. Adventure games have pretty much exhausted the plot lines available. Companies like Sega have moved away from the reality of people, and to that of animals (like dolphins), but that's now been 'done'. The latest genre, first-person, was successful because it added a level of realism to gameplay - but now we're stuck. Where do we go from a style that is as immersive as it possibly can be?
It seems as if we've come up against a brick wall - our view on the world doesn't allow for any more genres - which is why we need to start moving away from trying to model the 'real world'.
Half Life, for example, had 'Zen' - and almost everyone I know who has played it was shocked when they entered it. Why? Because it is so different from what we expect in computer games. When you cannot predict what is going to happen, the game becomes more interesting - and Half Life plunged you directly into the unknown. Whereas Q3A, Quake, etc start you off in a 'foreign situation', Half Life went from a 'realistic' scenario, to one that was completely unexpected and unexplained.
I think there are still lots of genres waiting to be discovered, but I think game creators need to move away from scenarios that simulate reality, and instead try to find something completely absurd that breaks the mould.
MikeJ
Mikesroom.org
I know the core geek audience dislikes 'em but the sports genre chugs along at a decent clip every year, helped by better graphics and also the great detail allowed by web updates. Viva Madden!
--
Chaosnetwork
OliverWillis.Com
An Operative with an Agenda
There are more of them now, MANY more potential players, all having faster network access, and yet the number of players per mud have dropped.
Well, I code on a MUD, so I feel I should stick up for the Old School. :) There may be many more MUDs now, but most of them suck. Some k1dd13 downloads a mud base, manages to get it compiled and running, and suddenly he is 1337 with his own MUD. Except that there's 1000 copies of the same game running elsewhere.
The MUDs that have been around for a while and have a good theme are doing OK. I don't want to name names in case they get Slashdotted, but the MUD I play on has a 24-hour average of about 120-125 players, peaking at over 200, and there a some MUDS that get a lot more.
Also, a good MUD is not a static thing that you can 'master' and then move on. New areas are always being added, new commands, new quests, new guilds, etc. We have had people playing for 6+ years. Yes, they have very high skill levels and can kill just about everything, but they still play because there is almost always something to look forward to.
Another reason they stay is for the social aspect that you don't get on other games. I have more friends thanks to the MUD than I ever would have otherwise, and I have met a lot of them in real life.
Another nice feature is the fact that you don't have to shell out $30-50 to be able to play a MUD. :)
So, I don't think MUDs will die soon. Oh sure, they might get pushed into some little corner of the Net, but that's where they were anyway. :)