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Top 20 Gaming Lows of 2004
An anonymous reader writes "Gamepro has posted a story about the gaming lows in 2004 -- a fair roundup of all the junk that's happened this past year. Those poor smugglers..."
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13) Legislators Move to Restrict Sales of Mature Games--And Fail
Politicians raise a rhetorical maelstrom for the opulence of violence in video games, but ultimately leaves a barely discernable ripple in the industry. Targeting games such as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Manhunt, legislators from Florida and California sought to more strictly enforce sales of violent games to minors--some even suggested making it a third-degree felony for allowing minors to obtain a copy of an "M" rated game. The wealthy game industry beat out angry moms, the only change being some retailers showing a clearer indication of the ESRB's rating system.
That's not a low. There's no reason for legislation, or for having the ESRB and the retailers act as surrogate parents.
Parents should do their job -- raising a kid, teaching THEIR values, not Congress's, or some Million Mom Marchers. If that means they have to do extra work, and learn that Vice City is a piece of filth on their own, it's their job. Leave me and my kid alone.
John
Doom 3 should be the #1 gaming low of the year. What a disappointment.
I think it is a low, because while I'm not in favor of legislating morality, I think this will actually give video games a hand up. Rather than people saying "Oh how dare the video game companies make games such as this that children can play!" once this legislation is in place, no one will be able to blame the game companies anymore. It will become "How dare the parents of these children buy (insert game) for them and allow them to play it!" Which should have been that already, but isn't.
And when children blame their misdeeds on the video game, the parents will be blamed and not the industry.
"Nokia Admits Taco-Shaped Handheld Not Selling" whoopdeedoo the n gage hasnt done well since it was released.
every page had at least one thin that was politically motivated. "video games make kids fat" " Legislators Move to Restrict Sales of Mature Games--And Fail" "Video Games--The New Terrorist Device of Choice" etc. I think someone had an axe to grind
What's next? An ADDITIONAL PC required to process graphics for the main system? No wonder why I prefer console gaming!!
2)Fileplanet World of Warcraft final stress test fiasco.
Fileplanet offered a subscription-only WoW final stress test download that was by no means wait-free, as many users had to wait an excess of 24 hours to be able to download, and once they were able to download, it was a ripping-fast average rate of 3k/s.
1)Gamespy/Fileplanet still exists.
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
And yes, they have a lock on the NFL, but there are other types of football and a lot of other sports.
Personally I think that long term some of the legislative efforts are going to be much worse for the industry than the few poor judgements made by EA.
---
Opinions here too. Read at your own risk :-)
Heh... just thinking of Ultima Online could make up for a whole book of low-downs.
Everything from the release of Age of Shadows (turning UO into a item-based PVP game and trying to make it a gigantic Diablo 2 clone) to the release of 7th anniversary edition (yet another expansion-pack for UO which wasn't worth the money).
Oh, and did I mention that EA is the one holding the lashes?
In particular I don't really think I'd call the end of Acclaim a low. They were one of the worst publishers out there, they didn't seem to be good for anything except creating gaming "low points", and they were pretty much just dead weight on the industry. Red Star may be suffering as a result but overall I think I'd say the industry is better off without them; in particular I'd say that what happened to Acclaim isn't nearly as bad of a thing for gaming as the things Acclaim did this year before they died (for example what happened to Black Isle, which is at #17 on this list...)
But, I think the point of this list wasn't so much "bad things in gaming" as "embarrasing news items in gaming". And Acclaim's Infinium-like final flameout was nothing if not embarrasing.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
#21) Completing HL2 :(
Geez.. I felt that the item concerning Sierra on-line's shut down was the 'top' gaming low. From TFA:
While technically still existing for the sake of retaining the brand, Vivendi Universal shut down cut its Seattle-based staff of 350--ending a long legacy of PC gaming. One of the most respected in the 80's and into the 90's, the company created games such as Kings Quest, Quest for Glory, Red Baron, Aces of the Pacific, and Aces Over Europe (from now defunct flight sim studio Dynamix). In not-so-consoling news, Leisure Suit Larry still lives on as a series of mini-games.
Heck, the loss of Space Quest alone is the saddest thing I've ever heard. Now.. those were games. Thank goodness for abandonware - even though I'm sure this Vivendi Universal company owns the rights, I'll still be downloading Space Quest games.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
That's gotta be one of the bigger stories over, well, the past two years or so: EA and Vivendi constantly 'consolidating' development studios as they eat them up and shut them down. The industry is turning into an arena of untouchable behemoths and tiny indy groups who can't hope for decent sales, but can hope to get rich by being bought out and shut down by the large corporations. That's a bigger scandal than EA's bad work policies, is their constant takeovers of mid-size developers only to drive them out of business. RIP Westwood, Origin, Acclaim, Sierra, Maxis.....
Bashing steam is so popular that it's difficult to find an article that is actually objective. Cutting out the publisher only makes sense. Most of the purchase money goes into their hands, and it seems unjustified. Most games today no longer contain pretty manuals, maps, or even jewel CD cases. The percentage valve actually makes off each retail purchase is surprisingly low. Broadband users, whose number and capabilities are always rising, are able to obtain games in a manner more conveniant by using Steam. Furthermore their games are kept up to date easily and they should theoretically be cheaper (due to a contract with VU this was not so for HL2). I'm not trying to say there haven't been difficulties in the Steam system thus far, but that's to be expected in the first years of such an ambitious idea. Support the idea of Steam.
I don't think it's a bad thing to require retailers to enforce ratings. Some already do so voluntairly (I was carded to buy Halo, much to my amusement since I was at least 5 years older than the guy selling it to me). Parents should, of course, be allowed to buy their kids any game they want. However I don't see a problem with requiring retailers to ensure that the kid themselves isn't buying the game without their parents' permission.
This is perhaps not a real problem for console games, since they are on the TV and you can watch your kids playing them, but what about handheld games? The portables are getting very powerful and realistic (I think I may have to get myself a DS), and you can't very well be hovering over your kids' shoulders all the time, it defeats the point.
So say you get your 13 year old kid a handheld, and a selection of fun games who's content you find appropriate. However, some day when he has free time, he slips over to a game shop near his school and picks up a rated M game who's content you do not find appropriate. He swaps the label for something else, and you are none to the wiser.
All this is easily prevented, as with R movies, by simply not allowing kids to buy the game. If you decide it is appropriate for your kids, you can buy it for them, while your neighbour might decide it is not appropriate for their kid and not.
I don't see any real problem, it's no more inconvienet than being carded to buy tobacco or alcohol. It helps ensure that parents are the ones who decide what is appropriate for their kids and when.
It's a nice ideal to say "Well parents should always know what their kids are doing" but that's just not how it works. You cannot watch your kids 24 hours a day. Even if you could, you wouldn't want to because an important part of development is feeling a sense of control and independence. If you are hovering over their shoulder all the time, that won't happen.
Fast food
Junk food
Violence and sex on TV
Children of slacking parents
Violence and sex in Video games
Violence and sex on the internet
advertising advertising advertising for all sorts of useless sh*t, etc.
Give a break. Or rather, give me a hand. Get the fast food out of the schools! Don't give me this 'it's your job as parents' bullshit. How about I walk around with a fucking gun and blow away your kids? It'll be your job as parents to protect them.
They forgot about Lucas Arts canceling the long awaited Sam and Max game. The original almost always gets listed as one of the best games of all time and one of the more fondly remembered games produced by Lucas Arts.
But Lucas Arts sales people canceled it because the only thing they know how to market is yet another Star Wars title.
Is Lucas Arts planning on producing any title in the near future that is not a rehash of the Star Wars franchise?
I expect "JarJar's Big Adventure" or "Jedi of Gor" and day now...
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
I feel for these people, but I can't honestly tell the difference between one mag and another. The only difference I can see is the platform they focus on... other than that they contain 90% advertising.
With that many ad's, how can they possibly lose money?
Oh wait... someone has to want to SEE the CONTENT of the magazine, to be willing to put up with the ad's
I think that the gaming magazine market may be having a "correction" that is entirely appropriate given the vacuous wasteland that is their subject matter. When all you produce are reviews, throw out the occasional spoiler, and every once and awhile interview a meaningful industry player asking stupid questions like "was coming up with the sequel to Daikatana III difficult?" it is extremely easy to see how this is happening.
I think many of these rags are the product of an industry that is so brimful of cash, that any leaky bucket of a publication was able to sop up some of the spill. Once the novelty of the magazine settled down into predictable pablum, the reader voted with their wallet, and saved the ridiculous newstand price for these mags (I mean who subscribed?) for purchasing more games that they read reviews of for free online.
As soon as these magazines lost the ability to hide behind the "We're in start-up mode and just building our readership" excuse, they dried up and blew away.
Please learn from your mistakes Gaming mag industry... please surprise me with the originality of your content, the accuracy of your acumen, the ... FUCK IT, JUST COMP ME A SUBSCRIP.
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
I hope you included a clickable ad banner, with a warm friendly 'Fuck You' graphic, at the top of each page of the email message.
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
It's just a cheap way of getting 3x the ad revenue from a single article. The article here wasn't even that bad.
Video card reviews tend to be much worse. They make the charts unreadably small, slap 20 words of text with each chart and make the review 15 pages long with several hundred kb of advertising on each page.
This guy sounds like he was putting his own personal "lows" into this, rather than looking at it more objectively.
Smugglers in SWG a low?
EQ2 dead? OK, EQ2 might not be everyone's favorite, but ripping on EQ2 while praising WoW is just fanboy talk.
It is wrong of me to gloat, but I am thrilled that EQ2 looks to be a dud - maybe ignoring and insulting your customers really isn't a good move. It really looked to many SWG players as though their game was being ignored for the sake of the "next big thing". SWG had a great number of innovations, excellent ideas and a setting that guaranteed them fans, but for some reason development seemed to flail around and never focused on the bug fixes or polishing that are essential to long term success.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
In my opinion this is the lowest the Gaming Industry has sunk to.
A game in which you re-enact the killing of JFK for yourself? And have the option of shooting civilians?
While other games may have assassination and killing people, but usually there is some decent end you achieve. This, on the other hand, is pure garbage, the game that legislators will be looking to when trying to 'tone-down' video games.
...
However, that's their right. You can fight to change that, but at this point so long as your parents provide for your welfare and don't abuse you, they have the right to control your life in pretty much any way they wish.
Also, for many parents, there's a happy medium between total restriction and no restriction. As an example one of my coworkers, who is the father of two boys around 12 years old, asked about UT 2004. He was thinking of getting it for his kids, but wanted to check it out first. I let him borrow my copy and he tried it. He decided that it was acceptable, but with the parental controls engaged turning down the gore level. GTA, on the other hand, he finds unacceptable (though fun).
However the shooters are a new thing for them, he didn't used to let his kids play them, he just feels they've grown up enough that it's ok now. In a couple years, he'll allow for more gore and probably most M rated games.
But that's a decision for him to make, and restricting the sale of M games helps. An M rating doesn't mean he won't let his kids play it, it means he needs to evaluate it first, then make a decision. A T rating means that it's probably fine as is since it limits the amount of violence and such allowed.
You can't fix stupid parents, but the ratings can help responsible parents do their job easier.
The idea that "it takes a village to raise a child" may have worked when the village consisted of 100 people of the same moral/religious background as the parents, but in today's mix of cultures, religions, and values, it doesn't work all that well. These days, parents actually have to take responsibility for their children, instead of expecting the village/state to. Who is to say that your opinions of what is appropriate for a child to see/play/read will be the same as your next-door neighbor's, let alone the entire country's? Then why should the state be able to dictate what your child is allowed to see/play/read? What the ratings system teaches people is that it's impossible for the government to a) rate all media by the same scale, and b) that it's impossible, outside of a police state, to enforce all of the restrictions.
Interview with the Vampire was rated R in theatres, but the book is available to everyone of every age in most bookstores, for less than the cost of seeing the movie in theatres, most of the time. People argue that some media is more graphic than others, but just watch Quills (rated R), go read Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings (available to anyone who wants to pay $25.50 for a trade paperback), and then tell me which is more graphic. There is a reason that despite the prevalence of video games and movies, some print is still censored in some countries and schools. For crying out loud, the Harry Potter movies are rated PG, which allows children to go see it in theatres without parental supervision, but reading the book at school can result in the book being confiscated, or even the child being suspended.
It's time to stop blaming the ratings system and the media itself for peoples' actions, and start taking personal responsibility. If you don't want your children doing/watching/reading something, you have to pay attention. Granted, it's impossible to do this 24/7, but didn't knowing that your parents would find out eventually and understanding that there would be consequences influence your behaviour as a child? The government, by its very nature, will never be consistent. If you want your children to turn out in a way that you approve, then it's time for parents to be.
Steam tells you want to do
Play games
when you can do it
When you're logged in with your games fully updated which is done automatically from servers faster than waiting lets say, in-line at fileplanet or searching for a mirror on google or filemirrors.
how you can do it
You can play offline if you save your login info in your pc. Otherwise, configure it as you want like HL1 (before Steam) via user-specific configs or use whatever tool to launch games. It's not any different.
and can pull the plug for ANY reason
That's right. If you hack and are caught, you're banned. If you're cd-key is spreaded among people, then your account is banned. Otherwise, its one account to have as long as Steam is online.
What if Valve gets bought out by Sony, for example, and Sony decides to crack down on MP3 and Divx files?
Valve made two games until now. Half-Life and Half-Life 2. That and several mods that they bought the rights or ported such as Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat. They are on top of their game and the last thing they'd do is let this company be acquired by a giant. Won't happend unless Valve screws up somewhere.
What if Valve decides to charge a monthly access to Steam?
Do you have a chain around your neck saying that you are owned by them? If they somehow decide that fees should be payed to use Steam for whatever reason, people aren't stupid, they will leave and so would I.
What if Valve goes out of business or its servers get shut down?
Steam servers going offline is the only thing that worries me. Without those servers, our copies would be useless but I guess a company that wouldn't want to lose loyal fans would release some kind of patch so we could play even at that worst possible scenario.
What if Steam makes mistakes and people who validly paid for the game gets screwed out of ALL of their Valve games?! Does Valve really think it has created the first perfect system in all of humanity
It could happend. If that happends, then nothing's stopping you from taking action against them. You have rights as a consumer and federal laws say so from Canada, US, UK, Germany, and many others. (Correct me if I'm wrong)
It's far from a perfect system but until now, it's doing the job that it's suppose to do. A lot of europeen customers got screwed because their dvd drive couldn't read their media. Valve ignored for a long time (I was going nuts too) but they eventually gave in and now theres no cd-check. They don't completely ignore us.
With Steam buyers of Half-Life 2 have given up any resale rights. They have given up any right to play the game off line. And despite the fact that the game is validated every time you play it, you're still stuck using the CD when you play.
Ignorant. Read my last statement. Valve did remove the cd-check. The file "Source Shared Securom.gcf" is no longer downloaded by Steam.
And where is the advantage to the user?! If Steam eliminated all piracy of Half-Life 2, why isn't it cheaper?!
I don't understand that logic. So if a product can be pirated, then it has to be more expensif? Damn dude! Lets Raise the price of Windows up to $5000 USD!
That's it that's all.
I wonder if game makers go through cycles where they are so overwhelmed with new technology that they can't make a non-linear game to save their lives. There was a whole series of RPGs for the playstation that were mind-numbingly linear, then they got better, then Final Fantasy X came out (linear again). Is there a trend where the "ground breaking" games are more hype than substance, because of the new technical challenges?
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
I'm surprised to see what a burden it is for some people to actually have to pull out their ID to show it to a cashier before purchasing an M rated game.
Listen, I work video game retail and my company requires that myself and all of my employees verify that a purchaser is 17 years or older before buying an M rated game. In many cases, it's certainly not necessary, but if you're carding one person, you should probably, as a rule, card everyone. I've seen 16 year olds who look like they're 29 and 29 year olds who look like they're 16.
"But I have a full beard!" Congratulations - I knew this girl in middle school who was rocking some chin hair for awhile. All of the kids used to send her to get pork rinds, Hustler and cigarettes from the local Exxon. Now I'm an overweight, porn addicted chain smoker.
If someone asks to see your ID and you're insulted or inconvenienced, talk to your doctor about changing your meds. We're not playing surrogate parent, we're just trying to enforce the ESRBs ratings here. I have had some of my employees NOT card teenagers when purchasing an M rated game and there have been instances where the parent came back wondering why we sold them Mortal Theft Autohunt: Streets of LA. This isn't a particularly good situation to be in for a company (or a store manager who has to calm an irate parent), so it's a good practice to have.
And trust me, I for one think that there are indeed many children not "of age" who are "mature" enough to play Manhunt or Halo 2. But it's not my job to decide that and there's certainly no harm in erring on the side of caution. Hell, you're going into your wallet anyhow; your ID is already right there, man!