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A Gamer's Manifesto
Krimszon writes "The top 20 things you always knew were wrong about games, but were afraid to talk about, since you thought that was just the way is was."
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(Good) AI and graphics require huge amounts processing power. The fact is that good graphics attract gamers more than good AI. Look at E3 2005. The demos were all about graphics and how realistic they were.
Games use finite-state machines for AI simply because the range or variety of moves in each game is limited. And for each move or state, there is a logical reaction, not unlike rock-paper-scissors. It's hard to move forward on intelligence without expanding the variety of plays. Black and White worked because the range of abilities was far greater than any FPS.
However, for people like myself that prefer strategy and thinking over gfx, we still have the time-tested games of chess, go and sudoku.
The AI in OF isn't what I would call genious. Rather, it "cheats". I've experienced sneaking through the woods wearing nothing but black. Then lay down and try to snipe someone from 300 feet away. If I miss, he turns and shoots me with a goddamnt AK47 in pitch black without knowing where the shot came from.
OF is a great game, but as you say, gets boring real quick.
the bulk of the gaming community is NOT teens, its young men, 18-30.
If you never finished Half Life, you don't understand the complaint: after finishing a bunch of levels of the "Greatest FPS Ever" you get to a level that is merely a jumping puzzle where you have to jump from one thing to another. You'd swear you were transported to a Mario game. Half-Life 2 doesn't have that flaw. There is a tiny jumping part, but it is trivially easy, unlike HL 1, which was surprisingly hard.
No, really. I want to know which company patented the loading-screen game.
Last I heard, Namco owns loading screen games on the PSP. Not sure about in general though, but it's a good guess. Here's a quote from Game Developer magazine, interviewing EA's Dave McCarthy:
BS: Do you forsee anything like minigames during the loading screens?
DM: Minigames during loading screens is actually patented by Namco, so they're doing it!