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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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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
Site's characteristically slow, and they intentionally spread out the article over three pages for the page views. Screw it, here's the text:
Nice attempt at justifying cheap-ass karma whoring, but unfortunately it didn't work because the site is neither slow nor annoying to read over several pages.
Therefore, you rightfully find yourself modded down. Enjoy...
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.
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
The entire entry on the N-Gage basically complains about features on the previous model of N-Gage, in other words, it's old news. The only thing it mentions about the new N-gage (which did come out this year) is that it is more "bearable" (a positive note) and that a certain ad campaign isn't running any more. That hardly qualifies as a low for this year in my opinion.
To complicate matters, I happen to think the N-Gage QD is quite a nifty device -- aside from being a cell phone it runs symbian software, has bluetooth (and can act as a remote control to my laptop). Also, it doesn't suffer from the drawbacks mentioned in the article (it isn't side talking, you *can* hot swap games and memory cards easily, etc).
On the gaming side of things, Sega just realeased a MMOG for the N-Gage called Pocket Kingdom which is a great game and a news maker in that it is the first true MMOG for a portable handheld. The campaign for that game has been running pretty strongly so it quite compensates for the ending of the other campaign mentioned in the article. Perhaps the author just didn't notice it since they have shifted more to online advertising than offline ads? Either way, again, the end of an particular ad campaign is hardly qualification for a "Lowest" point of the year.
~Fricka
OffLineTshirts.com
That's not a low. There's no reason for legislation, or for having the ESRB and the retailers act as surrogate parents.
The last time I went to walmart, I bought a video game that was rated M (One of those repacked Midway arcade series things... god knows why it was rated M, the whole screen consists of about 200 pixels.) Anyway, the Wal-Mart cashier carded me. I gave him a funny look and he said he had to make sure I was at least 18. Apparently Wal-Mart has decided that they are going to act as a surrogate parent to video game buyers.
His kids will just download an ISO image of the thing if he doesn't buy the CD anyway...
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.
Humm...I find it painfully interesting that the legistlatures of states would try to enforce age restrictions on "M" rated games when fifteen year olds are freely walking into violent PG-13 and R rated movies. As it turns out the Gaming Industry was praised for the standards on how they rate video games, while the MPAA washes back and forth and allows some movies which should be R to be PG-13. At least with the Gaming Industry an M rating will be given with even the hint that it should be M rated, while the movie industry will tweak with a movie to take content out to sqeek it down to PG-13. So in my mind, I would like to see legislatures take on the MPAA and tighten the ratings before they get into games. Movies reach a larger audience than games do. If Government is going to get into legislating morals and games, then they should make it so minors can't get into R rated movies, rent them or buy them. I am tired of different standards being placed on different forms of media than others. The MPAA, RIAA and the Gaming Industry ought to get togther and develop a media neutral content rating system. That way a parent can reliably compare games to movies to music to print to whatever form the diffenet medias take. And if you compare M to the MPAA ratings, it turns out that M comes out to be the equivalent of a PG-13 rating. While Adults Only (AO) is closer to the mid-range R to NC-17.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
Just send the article's author an email, with the following multiple documents attached:
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With sites like GameFaqs, spending money on a gaming magazine is a true waste. Even strategy guides are a waste with all the detailed enthousiast faqs out there for free. Plus, the free faqs are actually honest. This is no longer the days of Nintendo Power.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
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."
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.
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.
...
The way smuggler players were treated typified the entire SWG experience. SOE basically took a guaranteed hit and flushed it down the toilet by ignoring what players wanted and focusing on what marketing decided would pull in new players.
So yeah I agree that SWG as a whole was really one of the lows of 2004.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
You ALWAYS have a huge 4 inch logo for cingular on your screen and there are billboard ads everywhere. Fricken nightmare.
It was rated M because it contains two Mortal Kombat arcade titles, along with NARC. These were the games that kicked off this whole violence in games uproar -- wasn't it a Genesis copy of Mortal Kombat that Leiberman shook in the middle of Congress back in the 90's?
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Hey, I know you! You're the guy from Tom's Hardware Guide!
8) Nokia Admits Taco-Shaped Handheld Not Selling
No shit, who would want a handheld shaped like an overweight computer geek who runs a website with a stupid name?
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.
Half-Life 2 Cookie Edition.
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
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.
Good.
There's a reason that theatrical releases don't get as much parental grief as they could: they're perceived as making strides to police themselves. Video games have to give the same vibe, or we're going to have more legislation every year.
This isn't just about freedom, but about maturation on the industry. Despite the fact that's it's a multi-billion dollar business, it still has a stigma that should accompany something much smaller and seedier. Industry-enforced policing tells people that it really is an industry.
So if it means that a 12-year-old has to have daddy buy "Kill Mail Murder Destroy Deluxe 5" for him, it's a tradeoff I can accept.
"You're never ready, just less unprepared."
EQ2 dead? OK, EQ2 might not be everyone's favorite, but ripping on EQ2 while praising WoW is just fanboy talk.
I don't think it's fan boy talk at all, I think to suggest that it is, is in itself much closer to 'fanboy talk' of the EQ2 variety. EQ2 has been widley fairly reguarded as a flop because people have full knowledged of how SOE run their titles and after SWG in particular customers were very shy of them.
In a building full of developers and IT workers from 20-35 only one has taken up EQ2 to my knowledge. People have never the less intentionally avoided EQ2 because they are fully aware of what to expect from an SOE title and by and large it's not something people equate with 'fun' (or competant mangement, witness SWG, PS). As we are a European office we don't have WoW here yet (a few weeks to go), but all the MMO players here are itching to play it again after having had such a great time in the open (and closed) beta.
Sony On Line grind-a-thons simply have little appeal in the wider market; as the take up of the more traditional gaming experience found in WoW has shown, which is unique centered around allowing players to solo any quest if they wish, not worry to much about money or skill and just concentrate on fun things like exporing, gaining new abilities (at a fairly rapid pace I might add) and learning about the game world. As a consequense of course it fails the hardcore players somewhat (due to the relative ease of levelling and the aquisition of items), though the genuine diversity of classes and races should provide a significant amount of longevity. The vast majority of people prefer games to be fun-centric with many rewards and the oppertunity to explore new environments, they don't want to play some crazy 3D fantasy equivolent of a hardcore Japanese shoot-em-up.
Of course some people find hardcore games provide 'a different form of entertainment', other people find them an exercise in frustration (I fall into the latter and get quite pissed off if a game is not entertaining or if I'm frustaded by an inadequte design). While the division is much smaller in the PA reading community (for example), the majority of gamers - both dedicated and casual - are in the same camp as me to a large extent.
I don't think this is an indication that people want easier games, indeed I don't think that has anything to do with it, though I mention this as it's often cited. The truth is people just want better games that don't fall back of doing repetative tasks (or illogical puzzles, or pixel perfect jumping puzzles, or big reverse-engineering puzzles where you try to workout how the game mechanics are implimented in order to get the most out of the game, rather than concentrating on just playing it in an abstract manner) as a way of demonstrating your commitment or ability.
I have a friend who plays L2, _a lot_. He has a Jedi in SWG. He really likes to level, to challange the game mechanics and 'beat' the game. In each an every game he evaluates it and uses all his reasources to reverse engineer the game mechanics to work out what weapon used on what monters at what level will allow you to level fastest or produce the most 'wins' in PvP, down to the (what can be surprisingly complex) math routines underneath. I think that L2 caters to players like him brilliantly and is a testament to NC Soft (as is CoH I would add, which caters to a totally differnt segment of players). That L2 has have very little take off in the west is hardly surprising though, it's just no the sort of experience most people are looking for in an entertainment title.
The same is true of EQ2. The wider world is simply much more impressed with WoW, no surprise it was Penny Arcade's game of the year. As comptent a follow up as it is and as good as it's parts are, I think EQ2 is a contender for anyone's game of the year as the crucial gratifying gameplay factor just isn't there.
We'll have a better idea by the spring/summer about how the EQ2 style of MMO is going to do agains
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!