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Gaming Gaffes of 2003 Pinpointed?
jvm writes "It seems that every gaming website has a Best of 2003 feature going now, and we felt that was just too cheery for our tastes. To counter that positive energy, we've assembled Gaming Gaffes of 2003 over at Curmudgeon Gamer, a list of the most embarrassing, disheartening, and bone-headed developments in the game industry over the past year. We've tried to give everyone a little frank criticism, from Sony's PlayStation 2 Online service through the lack of a Loki successor for Linux gaming, as well as specific products like EA's The Sims Online. Did we miss any?"
The bone-headed decision by EA to release SimCity4 before it was ready. Only with the newly released Rush Hour 'expansion' is the game remotely playable. And enough with the gimmicks like 'U-Drive-it'. It was fun for about 2 minutes.
CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
It seems to me that icculus is the Loki successor. IMHO Mr. Gordon is doing a pretty good job in that regard.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
With all that being said, and coming from a PC gaming background, the lack of a service like XBox Live to sign into but rather a game to game solution to the situation hasn't really bothered me. I won't say it is unnessecary hand-holding but it is something I don't think I need to pay for. Now, what I would like is more online enabled games for the PS2 (and the Gamecube already!) but if there were going to be individual charges for games (that didn't have persistent worlds where there was a lot of overhead - PSO, Everquest), I would move to XBox Live. I'd rather pay a flat fee and get all the sports, fighting, and racing games I can play then pay for individual sports, fighting, and racing games.
Assuming I have misspoken somewhere in this long-winded rant and you have found my mistake where I said X but Y was correct, you may take my apologies and realize that I meant to say Y. (I just don't feel like playing the nit-picking game today, which is what happens on Slashdot a lot.)
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
IMHO this is the most embarrassing, disheartening, and bone-headed developments in the game industry over the past year: "one of the participants went to his car, got a gun, and pointed it at the head of a staff member"
Is it a boat?
Holy crap! It's Ferguson from Clarissa Explains it All!
Oh, and the fact that EA Sports Rugby 2003 is actually an order of magnitude worse of a game than their 2001 edition deserves mention I think.
This is hardly news to those of us who are paying attention: Rare (point #8 in the article) has been going down the tubes for far longer than one might imagine. Check out their back catalogue: They've made five (count them) games in the last three years, and only Conker's Bad Fur Day was any cop. That was long before the Microsoft sale.
Perfect Dark Zero? Don't make me laugh. PDZ isn't going to happen. There is no evidence that it's even in production - the character models that were floating around a year ago prove zilch. I'd be very surprised to see it this side of 2006 or the next hardware generation, whichever is later. (It never ceases to amaze me, the number of people who bought a GameCube for PDZ despite the fact that it had never even been announced... and the number of those people who then bought an Xbox for precisely the same reason...)
qntm.org
It was that bad. It was basically a chat room with Sims. You would sit there endlessly working on skills that had no relevence to the game and chatting. That is it, nothing more.
I cancelled my subscription about 4 days into my free 30 days.
roche
Bah Humbug!
The Video Game Awards were a great idea, but turned out to be the biggest pile of marketing trash I've ever fast forwarded through.
I'll let SpikeTV off the hook, because I love MXC.
Star Wars Galaxies was a big gaff. They released the product very shortly after the beta and didn't fix a host of problems, the main one being the economy.
One very fundamental mistake was how they dealt with making people a Jedi. They proported let people be whatever profession they wanted, and that everyone had a chance to become a Jedi. However, those are mutually exclusive. It turns out that in order to become a Jedi, unless you got really really lucky, you had to drop whatever profession you had been working on, and start doing something completely different. Not only that, but once you became a master at that new profession, you had to drop that one two, and master other professions.
That's not choice...that's letting the random number generator choose how you're going to play the game.
A better alternative would have been to have completely seperate profession points that you had to spend in completely different professions beyond the "basic" set. You'd still be able to be a bounty hunter, architect, or whatever, but secretly be working on being a Jedi.
Anyway, since people have found this out a couple of months ago, there are already 100 Jedi running around the servers. I expect that to go way up during the next few months, unless they (the SWG team) step in to slow things down.
I didn't want this to be like Everquest, but you'd think these guys would have taken the hint and look at what game mechanics made EQ popular, and try and enhance THOSE, rather than doing what they did: taking a stab in the dark with a lightsaber, and completely missing.
The problem with TSO wasn't so much that it was a chatroom. The idea of a chatroom with the extensive home decorating and customization abilities The Sims has is appealing; carving your own little personal niche in the game world, to your liking and tastes and having friends over to hang out and party is cool. Add in a few interactive minigames and some easy user content systems and you're done...
No, the problem was that somewhere along the line they decided what people loved about the Sims wasn't the creativity the player could exercise, but it was -- ready for this? -- RAISING METERS! Yes, the real fun of the Sims is working on your 'skills', making money with meaningless treadmilling, and traditional MMORPG character building. Add on top of that a complete lack of user-created content and you've got TSO. After all, The Sims is so amazingly popular because of its micromanagement gameplay challenge, right? Not because people throw on a money cheat and then goof off with the AI and building systems, right?
If TSO had been merely a chatroom but with extensive support for folks who wanted to coordinate their couch with their drapes, it might've done better than the bastard child of Everquest they were looking to make it into.
In fact, by E3, I beleive they had stated online was most likely not going to be there.
I guess you can't really blame the makers of games for the originality vacuum, if those games MAKE MONEY!! Just look at #10 for the reason that there's not more original games - game shops are closing, and the ones that have been bought by EA or whoever, is going to put out titles that make money. We've seen this with movies and now that games are getting bigger and bigger and more and more money is being spent, this should not come as a surprise. Makers will take less chances, and bank on proven titles.
But it does suck!
Because those 10% are your hardcore gamers spending a butt load of money on games each year(month). They also tend to pass the word along to others about such and such game.
Be cool to see some sales figures from that 10% compared to the rest.
-- taking over the world, we are.
I'm sure that no one will agree with me, but I hate HATE the 1.10 patch. I'm not a hardcore gamer; I fire up DII LOD about once a week for a little mind-numbing hack-n-slash with Conan the Barbarian. I understand that they wanted to make the game more challanging, but I feel like I'm playing with a level 10 character; it was too much of a jump for me.
Here's a quick summary as to why my level 50 barbarian that used to take on Diablo in Nightmare (without even using a health potion) is now routinely being killed by uniques in act III.
- The skills balance that worked best for my gameplay style are now worthless. Whatever rebalancing they did totally undervalued the skills that I chose to develop.
- My unique armor sets are now less useful than the regular dropped armor that I see after the patch.
- Items are now so much more expensive to repair. I have to fill my inventory with magic/expensive items to sell just so I can afford to go back to town for a "repair all". It also seems that all of my items' durabilities have been cut at least in half.
That's not all, but that's a pretty good start to making the game less enjoyable for me. I haven't read any other complaints like this in the few forums that I visited, so maybe it's just me. Anyone else unhappy with 1.10?
What about X2: The Threat (from Egosoft)? The first main problem - the only place you could get it on release day was from gogamer - it didn't seem like anyone else had it for like two weeks.
An even bigger problem was letting this game out the door with some major bugs - namely Logitech joysticks and gamepads don't work with X2!! (Like the Wingman Force 3D and Wingman Rumblepad) Doh! Apparently they went and actually bought some of these joysticks to test when they heard about these problems, but damn if it didn't put a damper on the fun of many eager space jockeys! Should be a patch soon.
Also in X2 there's many basic functions that can't be remapped!
This game is still really cool looking so far though - it's like Elite - but you can have more than one ship, run your own factories, and even control sectors. You can have capital ships, all fully modelled in 3D - including separate views for various turrets (which you can control and slave to any of three monitors).
This is what makes the stupid bugs and problems so bad - the fact that the underlying game just looks sooooo amazing...but I nearly quit in disgust in the first 30 minutes or so (actually it was a training mission that brought me back - when I had to switch views - discovering a rear mounted, controllable turret view). You can set commands for all your ships and their turrets etc.
And that'-s #11, "The Originality Vacuum"
I think this is only a perceived problem, not an actual problem. Why? Because there were plenty of original games out this year, games like Magic Pengel: The Quest for Colour. However, because they weren't sequels to popular games, they weren't hyped up as sequels. That's why most people didn't know about them.
Last year, was there a big, "GET READY for JAX and DAXTER" hype? No, because it was an original game, and most people just didn't know. This year, Jak 2 was Jak 2 and hyped as such. The new, original releases this year (I-Ninja, Metal Arms) aren't hyped up at all the same way, so it's pretty easy to think they're not being hyped when you're just being inundated with advertising that's relying on sequel strength alone.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
It isn't HL2-- yeah the hack was bad but the setup was so anticipated from E3 that it kind of balances out.
The real problems were:
1) Steam-- buggy rollout and ongoing problems, neverending promises of CS 1.6 till it arrived with bugs, and how the heck are you really going to manage all those HL2 downloads???
2) Condition Zero-- 4 (is it 5) dev studios couldn't bring out a decent game based on the most popular online franchise. A captive market opportunity squandered. As I now understand it, it has some bots for CS (uh where's the content?).
2003-- bound to show just how far a developer can lose its fanbase.