Slashdot Mirror
Games We've Never Seen Before
anaesthetica writes "The Christian Science Monitor is carrying a story on new directions in game design. The article notes that big gaming companies are not pushing innovation beyond taking advantage of newer hardware. New areas of innovation are coming from education, training, and online communities." From the article: "Online games have the potential to transform entertainment into a global-community exercise, breaking down borders, cultural and language barriers, and even political prejudices...I doubt any other form of entertainment holds out that promise...We have only scratched the surface of what [interactive entertainment] can be."
3d immersive shooters have only really been around since Quake came out, for about a decade. Pretty much anything before Quake wasn't realized fully as games like Doom were missing the x/y/z components (and BSP AND lighting, for that matter).
Quake took the games industry by storm because it was the first true-3d game. Everyone had to eventually crank out their branded version of pretty much the same experience, twisted by the trends as they kept going towards the Counterstrike model of gaming.
Now we are overloaded with video game shelves filled with crap. Why?
Because nobody is inventing anything new. They are banking on what sells because the high cost of getting a new game on a shelf to begin with. This isn't the 80's when you could make two red square blocks fight a little jagged octagon shape, and bring home some big bucks doing it. You've gotta put millions into R&D and all that other jazz just to turn a profit. That's where companies like Id Software come in, who spend all their time working on the technology and only a sliver on the story anymore.
They are making it easier for games companies to get in, but you still have to come to the table with a pile of cash before you can launch anything at all. Back to LCD: Shooters.
I disagree, Doug. I have to make these choices in life -- I play games to escape life. That's what you guys have been doing WRONG this WHOLE TIME. Make a game where I can escape into a terrific story that lets me showcase myself and MY PERSONAL TALENT. I'll pay for THAT game. Not your moral ethics quandaries... they are simply boring to me.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Its not graphics and such over gameplay people. Look at FF3. That game beat all with 2d graphics. It still does. Id rather play that than over blown crap like Luigis Mansion or Mario Sunshine
"Indeed, the next generation of gaming platforms - Playstation 3, X
Box 360, and Revolution - which was the talk of this year's E3, rival
the computing power of the Pentagon"
Since when has the pentagon been a measuring stick for computing power?
Arash
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
Perhaps there'll be a game in which players need to learn a new language? Talk about replay value. That'd be awesome though.
~Ilyanep
To get message, take amount of carrier pigeons at each stage mod 2. Then decode binary.
i feel so vindicated!
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Online games have the potential to transform entertainment into a global-community exercise, breaking down borders, cultural and language barriers... ...leading to more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of the universe.
I'm still waiting for Billy Graham's Bible Blaster.
"Convert the heathens!"
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I thought Wolf3d + Dune 2 + Nethack was all we ever needed. Seems that way from all the ripoffs anyway.
The more you know, the less you understand.
I would like to see a game where you take on religious zealots.
...they started launching spy satellites in old VW bugs.
Something about them being a standard unit of weight, I believe, and thus easier to calculate lift needed.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Thats the best thing about online games: I no longer need to join the army to meet new and interesting people, and then kill them. Now I can do it from the comfort of my own living room.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I'm not sure which is more tiring, unispired games that are sequels or clones of successful titles or articles that bitch about how the game industry is stagnant and uninspired.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
...because the game I'm most looking forward to, Spore, is entirely comprised of elements of past games. Being innovative isn't everything. Sometimes, it's how you make the game.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
The problem with the large volume of sub-par games being churned out today is the budget. From TFA, millions of dollars to develop a game is no longer unreasonable.
The problem is where this money is directed. I'm pretty sure the code monkeys at EA aren't seeing much of this. Distribution/production costs I'm sure haven't changed in the past 5 years (and if they have, I would be certain that they would have decreased). Ridiculous amounts of money are being shoved at top level executives and art designers.
If the focus is shifted from game art back into development of the actual game concepts themselves, then innovation will return. Naturally that's not to discount the necessity or preference for the look of a game, but it should never come at the cost of gameplay. This is why HL2 was received quite well, but Doom III wasn't. The latter looked slick, but all in all felt like House of the Dead in a 2 metre wide corridor. The former looked gorgeous, was amazingly engaging and interesting.
Independent development and (to an extent) open source game design can assist in these areas. Honestly, a successful publishing company would trawl the net looking for innovative independent developers, snatch them up and give them a budget to produce a game. The industry has outgrown itself and needs to consolidate to remember what games are for: FUN.
all i want to know is... when can we have adventure games back?
they can't be that expensive to develop -- i don't know about you guys but I liked guybrush threepwood better in 2D.
shooting is not too good for my enemies
I think the whole "interactive media is the future of education" is totally off target. Video games and other interactive media will never surpass textual resources for quality. Furthermore most interactive media fosters ignorance because its not free software, which means you can't study it to see how it works. Are we going to have a future of learning tools whose very functioning is a secret? Give me a book any day. You can have your flash, video games, and propreitary applications.
Sun, eat your heart out.
When I first started using computers back in college, the thing that struck me the most was not the number crunching power, but its usefulness as a communications tool when coupled with the internet and the usenet groups of the time and of course email. I thought it was really cool being able to discuss anything with people down the block or on the other side of the planet. I spent a lot of time doing just that.
/. afterall), but in virtual worlds I can experiment and be more than I am in real life. That's the hook that I think will keep people coming back. Allow people to do more interesting things in virtual communities with each other (not just blowing each other up) and they'll keep coming back. What shape will these things take? I don't know, but almost anything you can do with friends is better than doing it alone with NPCs.
Since that time, the depth of virtual worlds has only increased and holds real potential for providing the environment for new game experiences. I play games to escape reality and do fantastic things that I cannot do in real life. And being able to do those things with other real breathing people is the thing that keeps me coming back. Now I'm not the most social person in the world (hey this is
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Well technically you are right, but Doom lacked full BSP implementation -- it still had a lot of 2d "drapes".
But that was a nice try.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
when the state sees your recreation as a means of getting proper thoughts in your head.
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
I want a SimSlashdot game where you play the role of Cowboy Neal managing the /. website..
In this exciting new addition to the Sim line of games, which previously included SimCity and SimHospotal; you are challenged with the juggling act that is Slash Dot.
Blast through 24 different scenarios and try to keep the daily traffic level and number of posts by making sure the site has enough flamebait and re-posts to get the visitors streaming in.
This will, as usual, be released for the Phantom console.
Online games have the potential to transform entertainment into a global-community exercise, breaking down borders, cultural and language barriers, and even political prejudices...
Didn't they say that was what the internet was supposed to do?
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings
Jehovah's witnesses. ;-O
Its nice to think about how games can break down cultural, national and racial barriers. However, they can also amplify them.
Case in point: the popular new game Guildwars.
For reasons that might have been innocuous at the time, the designers decided to pit region against region in battles for the "Hall of Heroes". The 3 main regions are America, Korea, and Europe. Whichever region has the most wins on its side has the 'favor of the gods' and this is announced after every battle.
This decision has engendered incredible racism and nationalism. Spouting of slurs is incessant. American teams gang up on Korean teams to keep them from getting the favor of the Gods. They accuse the Koreans of cheating [belied by the fact the America is always in favor], and the Europeans of being cheese eating wimps. They fling hate like a frisbee, and they rationalize their horrible behavior because, I suppose, the Gods are on America's side.
It's an ugly sight. With the only basis being an artificial division in a made up game for the favor of made up gods.
In case anyone hasn't pointed it out, there are plenty of new and exciting concepts in gaming coming out all of the time.
It's just that the non-game-playing world doesn't notice much. Instead, they read articles by people who oveiously don't really play too many games complaining that gaming has become stale.
This isn't to say that the majority of games AREN'T stale, but there are still some new and interesting concepts in gaming coming out all of the time. You just have to be willing to try an obscure title from time to time.
Katamari Damacy and Yoshi Touch-n-Go are two recent games that stand out in my mind as really original ideas.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
PRESS THE ANY KEY
from Wikipedia.org:
The Christian Science Monitor is an international newspaper published daily, Monday through Friday. Started in 1908 by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist, the paper does not use wire services and instead relies largely on its own reporters in bureaus in eleven countries around the world. Reporters at one time were drawn largely from church members but this no longer holds true.
Despite its name, the Monitor was not established to be a religious-themed paper, nor does it directly promote the doctrine of its patron church. However, at its founder Eddy's request, a daily religious article has appeared in every issue of the Monitor. Eddy also required the inclusion of "Christian Science" in the paper's name, over initial opposition by some of her advisors who thought the religious reference might repel a secular audience.
Make a game where I can escape into a terrific story
That's what's been missing. Good stories. I liked FF-X for example, but then it got tedious. I'd like a game with more story so that I could interact with other characters. More story, less leveling up.
Like many before, I also believe that game companies aren't pushing new ideas, just rehashing the same ol' games with better graphics. I remember a PvP comic in PC Gamer where one of the characters was saying that all the great games now were already 'made' back in the 80's.
The problem is, I believe most in the gaming industry are afraid of making games based on new ideas. These games will go either two ways: Be a huge success, or (most likely) flame out. Pushing these new innovations cost lots of money, and I doubt anyone wants to lose any cash flow.
"Even in a popular war game such as 'World of Warcraft,' if you have a strong character and a newbie comes into the game, you have to take care of him and help him out," he says. "The strong character gets stronger by taking care of the weaker."
Like that really happens in online games.
How ignorant can one be? You've never read the CSM?
They can sometimes work REALLY well, Uplink is such a game. I still play that sometimes when I'm in a cyberpunk kind of mood.
New gaming concepts need to be unique, interesting and they can be complex but if they are the complexity must make sense.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Tetris was cool. Rubik's cube was cool. Lots of new games and toys come from someone who knows a fun way to learn about physical principles, which is the basic form of play, then makes a simple version of it that "just works" like the real thing, and is easy to work with. The interestingly different ("innovative") ones seem to come from people who knew about the principle being played with, but who didn't come from the community of people playing with those kinds of toys themselves. Maybe an alien will land, and someone will put their squawking about antigravity onto a CD-ROM for the next console sensation.
--
make install -not war
I can order a goddamned pizza without closing the game or picking up the phone..
think about that!
no innovation indeed!
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
KOL
"breaking down borders, cultural and language barriers, and even political prejudices.."
Because the source of this article is sooooo unprejudiced and so open minded. Someone please stop me from going on a rant here about the objective nature of the Christian Science anything.
"Online games have the potential to transform entertainment into a global-community exercise, breaking down borders, cultural and language barriers, and even political prejudices..."
Have you ever played a mmo and happened to wander upon someone from another nation playing it? I once grouped with what I assumed to be a Korean or Chineese gold farmer on WoW. It was crazy. The guy kept telling me 'I have all stones'. When I would inquire about the stones all I got was "I have all stones." Then he demanded I go to the nearest town. I do not think any barriers were tore down that day.
Quake was not the first true 3D game. Descent was fully 3d 2 years before Quake.
I just assumed they were talking about this http://fullsack.com/frogs/ new network game for linux, with it's invention of the advanced mouse gesture interface and all.
The bottom line is that you have to follow the money. We are in a era when game companies are being bought, merging, and growing fast. As game companies get bigger, innovation slows. This is the same with all companies. First you come up with some great ideas, then you put those ideas out in the real world and make a huge amount of money off them. Then you refine your process and repeat until it becomes a cash cow, and only attempt to alter the process as market fluctuates. During this latter time you aren't innovating that much, just slowly evolving. This is the nature of all business.
Unfortunately as any entertainment industry grows, the market for edgy and unique games gets further and further marginalized. The populace wants more of what they had last year, only bigger and better. Why do you think the summer blockbuster movie season looks the same every year? Because this is what a majority of people want and/or what they are willing to see.
You have to start scouring the net for smaller software companies online, much like you have to visit art house cinema deep in major cities to find the truly great movies of the year. It woul be nicer if the economy was more like the pre year 2000 era when all these obnoxiously crazy ideas were out there and tons of venture capital was available to try them out, and the best ideas survived. We lost that era and now all those companies are merging with each other and not coming up with risky new ideas.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
So long as company B can make a rip off of company A's game, with slightly prettier screenshots and a gimmick that wasn't in A, and make a fortune, they'll keep doing it.
Investors are scared of innovation, they want a garanteed return on investment, and you get that with same old same old, not unproved ideas.
You can't take the sky from me...
The cretins that bless us with their "bad-ass" harleys and their four-wheeled ghetto blasters. Mutual Assault might be a good name for it.
Ok, here's finally the topic for me to post my game idea (because I'm too lazy to write it myself). I am GPLing this idea so hopefully somebody will make it.
I want a shoot-em up game in 3D, SIRDS style. Yes, those magic eye type things that you look at and your brain tricks you into seeing a 3D picture from random noise. Maybe something Zaxxonish.
So please, 31337 programmers with too much time on their hands, write this for me. I will be grateful. Otherwise, I'll have to do it one of these days - when I retire.
Thank you.
n/t
Online games have the potential to transform entertainment into a global-community exercise, breaking down borders, cultural and language barriers, and even political prejudices
Ouch, man, have you ever actually ever seen an online game going on? Breaking down prejudices is the last thing going on. What are you, some kind of mexican jew lizard?
Personally, I do not think online-playable games are the place to look for real change in video games. Online games require infrastructure-- sometimes not much, sometimes a lot. Sometimes you can cut down almost entirely on how much infrastructure you need by some clever design, such as Spore uses. But in general you're going to have additional costs for an online-play game. And the greater those costs are, the more risk-adverse the developer-- or more specifically the people funding the developer-- will become. MMORPGs in particular, since they require a fantastic amount of infrastructure, are probably the most homogenous, unsurprising, boring portion of the entire game market.
But we are seeing some interesting backlash against the whole risk-averse thing, and some really interesting things are beginning to emerge. Interestingly, most of the really interesting things right now seem to be in the budget title area. The game I probably got the most out of that I've gotten recently is this absolutely bizarre nintendo DS thing called "electroplankton". I imported this from Japan about a month ago on the assumption that it would never be released in America, only to find a couple weeks ago that... it's planned to come out in America now. But anyway. It isn't really even a game, exactly. It's just ten little generative music toys where you mess with the touchscreen and automatically generated music results. But it's fun as hell. I play with this thing for days at a time without getting bored, while if you passed me your average full-price FPS I'd spend eight hours playing through the single player campaign once and then throw it away forever, since I'd seen all there was to see (of course, I paid full price for electroplankton since I imported, but anyhow).
I don't think this kind of reaction is unique to me. I'm curious what's going to happen when people start to realize they have more fun with quick cheap katamari damacy or tetris like games, than they do with the current trendy video games that are basically high-budget interactive movies that, were we judging them by the standards of movies and not video games, would not be very good ones.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
a christian hater you are -yoda
The article did quote - approvingly - from Steve Meretsky, who developed the anti-"good American Christian morals" game, A Mind Forever Voyaging. I swear, there's so many parallel between that game and the present-day US that it freaks me out. Project for a New American Century = Plan for a Renewed National Purpose. Discuss.
I can see a lot of teenagers quit playing Halo and Halflife 2 to go play a game made by these guys...
When I play online games I receive all sorts of racial, nationalistic, and homophobic slurs despite the people not having the slightest clue about my race, nation, or sexual orientation. The borders are clearly gone!
Let's face it: the luxury of playing an innovative game will wear off quicker than the lettering on your keyboard. The nature of gaming is that the more you play it, the more the novelty of how good it is wears off and the stimulus that made it innovative are now stimulus which don't draw any larger effect than shooting a gun in an FPS.
I can understand the need for innovation, but at least for FPS games, the innovation is in the strategies you employ and the techniques you use to become good at the game.
I'd like to see more games that emphasize the need for relationship-building, not games where you can collect gold on your own and ignore all others.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
...from the breaking of cultural barriers are likely to be prevented from doing so by their government's sensoring of the internet. The question is, will we see these governments blocking content in these games? As of yet I haven't seen it. We already have games that allow people from all over the world to play together. They're called Massive Online Games. In World of Warcraft I play with people from China, Russia, etc. The language barrier is a serious problem though.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
Oh, nevermind.
...your opponent? When did people develop such thin skins.
...breaking down borders, cultural and language barriers, and even political prejudices.
The same things have been said about internet chat. At last we invented a medium that ignored age, sex, and location yet all we can seem to do with it is ask for age, sex, and location.
Personally, I don't want innovation in the game itself. And I am very happy to see innovation in the technology. Games are heading in exactly the right direction. Towards an ever better representation of reality. The big thing over the next year will be vastly better physics, skin that looks more like skin, cloth that acts like cloth, grass that looks like grass. This trend will keep going in waves, better physics, then better AI, always better graphics, better sound, better this, better that. At the current pace, the full immersion virtually reality games that I really want to see may just arrive in another 30 years or so. To me, there is no more exciting and interesting game design than the one that seeks to come as close to reality as possible, using no plot whatsoever, but instead, simulating a full Earth-sized world where I can go find whatever plot I desire in the relative safety of VR.
"Eddy also required the inclusion of "Christian Science" in the paper's name, over initial opposition by some of her advisors who thought the religious reference might repel a secular audience."
Obviously it works judging by how many times this is brought up.
Just ask Codemasters.
It's very risky to come out with a game that breaks the mold, but every once in awhile some upstart crack team of developers comes out with a game that doesn't quite fit into any of the pre-defined Genres, and becomes very popular.
Case in point - Operation Flashpoint
Flashpoint took away three solid years of my life, and nothing has been able to even come close to matching up with it since its release.
Now Codemasters, the company who distributed Operation Flashpoint has become impatient with the developers of Operation Flashpoint, so they have decided to hire their own developers to write the sequel - Operation Flashpoint 2. Since Codemasters' contract gave them the rights to the Operation Flashpoint name, BIS, the original developers of Operation Flashpoint have been forced to change the name of the sequel they are working on and find another distributor.
The original Operation Flashpoint actually took four years to develop and was continually patched and updated for another three years after its release.
Codemasters is sure to develop their sequel in a quarter of the time, which will inevitably lead a sequel that is complete and utter rubbish - probably just another battlefield 1942 rip-off.
Many will end up buying Operation Flashpoint 2 without realizing that the game isn't made by the same people that made the first one. The core Operation Flashpoint fan base has already made their views know on the itnernet - they won't be buying Codemaster's sequel.
Armed Assault it is!
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Most people are like me: buy a few games a year and that is it. When I get a game I expect it to be good because I'm stuck with it. (Returning a game is hard after you open it, not to mention the hassle of a special trip back to the store)
I cannot afford a copy of every game made this year. Even if I could I do not have enough free time to play them. So I buy games that I can trust because earlier versions have been good. I wouldn't mind an innovative game, but I don't like all types of games, and I don't want to make a mistake.
Since when has the pentagon been a measuring stick for computing power?
Shall.
We Play.
A Game?
I'm sick of hearing everybody say that innovation is dead and nobody is trying to innovate, for two reasons:
1. Inventing is hard. Admitedly I can only speak from personal experience based on a budget of pocket lint, hardware rivaled by 2600s, and a social life outdone by hermits.
2. There's a lot of innovation happening out there if you stop reading glossies at the 7-11 and playing multinational-controlled consoles. This is the same reason I'm tired of hearing "pc gaming is dead" FUD. Plenty of independent shareware developers are quietly pushing the boundaries and pcs are one of the only places they're allowed free reign.
Multinationals have been keeping a stranglehold on the tech specs and apis for their hardware since day one and I've been struggling to figure out why. My best guess so far is because they don't believe they would benefit if they gave up a little control. There is no evidence to prove this belief but, imho, when you're a mega corporation the mere shadow of risk is enough to send you screaming in the other direction.
If you want to see a lot of innovation check out a 48 hour game making contest, or find an indie developer's website and start hunting through the affiliates. Tucked away in those dark, mossy corners of the web are some really cool things with no eyes that wriggle and glisten.
1 a camera that can be reset so you can see (for third person views) 2 games where there are two ways to do everything (meaning two copies of every key item and two paths to get from point A to Point B)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Last I checked you could unnerve your opponent by actually saying things relevant to the game; I mean what ever happened to actually being good at a game? I always thought skill was more respectable and in a game genuinely more intimidating than a bigoted mindset. But I suppose some morons just have to compensate for something... ;)
What, like Duke Nukem Forever?
>> Quake was not the first true 3D game. Descent was fully 3d 2 years before Quake.
And Battlezone beats 'em both by, what, a decade?
It is a 3D 1st person POV shooter, after all, but the camera is constrained to only rotate around the vertical axis (yaw).
The virtual girlfriend is high-maintenance. She needs to be called frequently, expects her text messages to be answered, and wants to be bought gifts, for real money. Otherwise she gets annoyed.
I find it highly entertaining when I choose the darkside options.
Mira: Back off, wormhead, this bounty's mine. Don't do something you might regret. There's soldiers all over this place.
HK-47: Interjection: Yes, it would be unfortunate if the casual display of weapons were to escalate into a city-wide firefight, resulting in scores of meatbag casualties.
I never said I hated christians!
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Personally, I never download a demo until the CSM gives it four crosses or better.
They have regular articles on neuroscience, robotics, and the singularity.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
But maybe they have a point, maybe if we pray hard enough, God will stop crappy games from being released.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
I don't care if something is "Innovative". I care if it's good. Two examples: Serious Sam and Morrowind. Was either remotely innovative? SS was a self-parody of shoot-em-ups. Morrowind was innovative only in the expanse of the game- there was nothing there that hadn't been done a dozen times before.
But both were fun. Thinking back, the last "innovative" games I really enjoyed were Thief and System Shock 2, and I'd be happy to play an SS3 or another Thief not crippled by XBox compatibility.
As far as online play transforming everything, I don't really want to play a game that requires a lot of interaction with other people around the globe- I've got two young kids, a wife, a job and a house to take care of. Every online game I've seen seems to assume that you have none of those and that you'll just spend 60+ hours a week in your guild.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
For all the people out their claiming that gameplay beats graphics anyday, I highly recommend checking out the Geneforge series. I recently played the demo for the first one, and I loved it. I'm going to Fry's soon so I can pick it up, provided they have it. Anyhow, I spent about 8 hours playing it on Saturday, with no intention of doing that whatsoever. I woke, turned it on thinking I would play for an hour or two, and realized that over eight hours had passed and I hadn't eaten anything since I woke up. I haven't had that sort of gaming experience in many years.
So to recap, if you like RPGs, and you prefer a great story and gameplay then check out this series. The graphics are reminescent of early 90's stuff. You can download demos of the series which cover about a quarter of the game.
Nice Marmot
Does anyone remember "Evolution" on the Apple II? I'm talking like 1982.
;)
This looks like pretty much the same thing. With some better graphics
Especially since it's proven that everybody learns differently. Some people garner more from hands-on interactive activities than they ever could from simply reading a book.
We need games with better stories, more interesting and complex characters; games that keep you up at night wrestling with whether you made the right ethical or moral choices," says Doug Lowenstein, president of the Entertainment Software Association (ESA).
I know I lay awake at night felling terrible, thinking maybe i shouldnt have made that head shot.
Or was it right I dragged that guy from his car and carjacked it,then ran over that hooker.
Now we are supposed to have a moral dilema over a video game.
what ever happened to actually being good at a game?
If a kick skews off the side of your foot, your opponent will remind you what a bad player you are, but if you do something good he'll tell you how good your mother was.
Even while the politically correct lobby tries to restrict what can be said, mostly it's just a tactic to distract and quite often it backfires.
Playing started as a rehersal for living and has inflated into an easy escape from living. But what hasn't?
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
"Because nobody is inventing anything new."
If you really feel this way, you should check out the new game Psychonauts. Easily the most creative computer game I've played in the last ten years.
Addictive game and utterly bizarre. Various missions involve finding a milkman, destroying a city of fish, playing Risk with Napolean and floating through a pinball disco. Game of the Year easily.
3d immersive shooters have only really been around since Quake came out, for about a decade. Pretty much anything before Quake wasn't realized fully as games like Doom were missing the x/y/z.
That's an implementation detail of the engine. From a gamer's perspective Wolfenstein and Doom were 3D shooters. They were quite groundbreaking and immersive in their day on that old hardware. The true 3D nature of later games was an incremental improvement.
Correct me if I am wrong but most, if not all, on-line games are populated by users who log on with nicknames or anonymously. In other words, unless you were to do some serious analysis work, you probably have no idea of the skin colour, race or location of other people in the same game as you.
I get the impression that 99.9% of the human population just "gets on with it" irrelevant of skin colour and it's the politicians and publicity-seeking quangos like the Christian Science Monitor that feel the need to create racial barriers.
In a kind of related subject, on a UK radio phone in show last week, a topic was discussed concerning one of the UK National Health Service Trusts (= hospitals) that is making a decision to remove the left bibles from the cabinets next to patient beds due to the risks of inciting racial tension from non-Christian, specifically Muslim, patients. Most of the callers to the show were Muslims, all of them said that they have no problems with bibles next to bedsides, in fact most of them said they respect the bible as a "holy book". A few even commented that it's the politicians themselves trying to stir up racial tensions because they themselves have no problem with this.
I suggest the Christian Science Monitor would be better employed looking at the lack of morals and social responsibility amongst a great proportion of people in today's society rather than poking it's fat Christian nose into matters it has no knowledge about.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
World of PornCraft.
G-Force music visualization
People who need Ten Commandments when the rest of us can cover them all with "Be nice to everyone else".
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
They are simply idiot, I doubt they know what fucking is ;).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
If you never make any choices, good or bad, _how_ are you going to showcase your and your character's talents?
E.g., let's take a situation from an old game, Fallout 2, which I liked precisely because in any situation there were at least 2-3 fundamentally different ways to solve it. So you're at the Navarro base, and you can go in with the guns blazing and hope you can take out the heavy plasma turrets before they kill you. Or you can get yourself recruited there, do everything on the sly, noone's any wiser, and get a power armour and weapon too. Or sneak in through the back door, and use stealth. Or various other ways and combinations thereof. (E.g., sneak through the back door, but then kill everyone anyway, using the elevators for hit and run tactics against the turrets.)
I.e., that's a choice you have to make, and it's precisely that kind of choice that lets you play a _role_. Do you want to be a minigun-wielding power-armour-wearing killer, or a diplomat, or a spy, or whatever else? Who do you want to side with? Who or what do you fight, and who or what do you support? Etc.
Once you take those choices out, it all becomes... the shallow FPS we've been flooded with.
E.g., if the _only_ choice there were "go in, kill everyone", then that role has already been determined for you. You're not playing _your_ role any more, you're playing what the game designer already decided for you: a fighter. You're not showcasing _your_ character's skills (e.g., smooth-talking someone instead of killing them), you're trying to match the skill/equipment combo that the designers had in mind. ("And for this mission you absolutely need the crossbow and silenced pistol.")
Ditto for moral or ethics situations. If you don't have a choice like "do I help these guys, shrug and walk away, or kill them and take their money?", then essentially you can't showcase what _you_ would do there. You can't actually showcase an altruistic character or conversely a bad no-nonsense mofo. You're really playing the game designer's ethics, not _yours_.
I'm thinking what you really meant there was more like "don't f***ng preach" rather than "don't make me choose." Or at least that's _my_ gripe with some games, anyway. Having multiple options is good. Having someone else's morals and/or beliefs shoved down my throat, isn't.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Why do people treat it like it's a "Gameplay or Graphics" choice? Because that's the budget choice that publishers make every day, that's why.
Every extra polygon in models costs man-hours, which means dollars. Every new quest scripted into the game, or every fork in the plot if you want non-linear games, or every alternate way to solve a quest, that's dollars too. Every week spent tweaking the gameplay or balance, now that's _big_ bucks.
And it all ads up. You can't have everything.
Yes, it would be nice to live in a fantasy wonderland where developpers are given enough time and budget to make everything just right and perfect: the best possible graphics (including someone modelling all the chunks and the interiors of the buildings you want to blow holes in), _and_ the perfectly tuned gameplay, _and_ plenty of interesting and unique quests. Quite a nice fantasy, I'll admit. But in the Real World it won't happen.
In the Real World, whatever you do will be a compromise. To put extra money in X, you have to give less budget to Y. To hire an extra scripter for the quests, you give up one artist for the graphics. Or more often viceversa.
Even inside one such category it's a compromise. You could make your game as vast and full of quests like Morrowind, but on the flip side they'll be all generic fed-ex quests and all NPCs will say the same deliberately generic one-size-fits-all lines. Or you could make every quest unique and each area unique like the Tribunal expansion pack to Morrowind, but then it will be a _lot_ smaller. Or have something in between like Bloodmoon. As I've said, it's all a compromise.
But back to the "Graphics vs Gameplay" choice, that _is_ the story of the last decade straight.
What do you think was _really_ the reason why FPS exploded, while a _growing_ market like adventure games was dropped by Sierra and the rest? Yes, more people were buying adventure games than ever, yet that genre skirted with extinction. You know why? Because of that budget choice. Licensing a 3D engine, slapping together a bunch of graphics for it, and calling it a game was cheap. Scripting a complex adventure game was more expensive _and_ didn't leave you enough budget for flashy graphics to flood the screenshot sites with.
Gameplay is even more so. Coming up with something even vaguely original _and_ tweaking the gameplay and controls to be just right, is something that takes lots of testing, lots of tweaking, which all means lots of money. Licensing a 3D engine, and just putting new skins on the monsters and weapons of whatever game sold well last year, meant you had to invest exactly 0$ in gameplay. So everyone and their grandma took that route.
So there you go: _that_ is what and why some of us are ranting about. Because the "gameplay or graphics" is a choice that's very very real, and which is in fact why for a while the market was flooded with pure crap and clones.
Yes, it's gradually getting better, and in the meantime more publishers increased the budgets to sorta cover all bases, at least half-arsedly. But it's still a compromise, and still a choice they have to make: how much goes to gameplay, and how much goes to graphics.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I think the really first one was "Wolfenstein 3D", not to mix with "Wolfenstein" which came out recently.
Then there was something called "Spears of Destiny", which was quite similar to Wolfenstein.
At around the same time, something very different, but also in 3D came out, called "Ultima Underworld".
I think it was around one to two years after that when Doom came out. Then there was Doom II I think, after that there was Quake I.
To me, video games suffer from the same aspect as porn does: It's cheap, unbelievable, smudgy and dull.
Don't get me wrong: There's nothing bad about porn and video games, it's just that they never reach the quality of good books or interesting films.
Just like there's no porn flick with good actors you'll never see a shooter with a good storyline.
I don't know the reasons for this but we somehow have to accept that the majority of consumers just want it this way.
Oh please :)
Wolfenstein was early, and most importantly POPULAR! But it was hardly first. Just check Id-games homepage and even they have 3d games before wolfenstein. Not to mention games that has already been mentioned earlier in this thread.
Kotodama: The Power of Words:
http://www.kotodamagame.com/
This game from Carnegie Mellon University teaches Japanese and is made in Python using the Panda3D engine.
I miss the good old adventure games like:
Indiana Jones: and the fate of Atlantis
- Simon the Sorcerer I and II
- Sam & Max
- Monkey Island
Also like platform scrollers like:
- Sonic the Hedgehog
- Jack Jazz Rabbit
- Duke Nukem II (Not a 3D game)
I think would like to see classic games redesined with high-quality 2D graphics such as:
- Tetris
- Bubble Bubble
- Pac Man
- Arcanoid
- Asteroids
"We need games with better stories, more interesting and complex characters; games that keep you up at night wrestling with whether you made the right ethical or moral choices," says Doug Lowenstein, president of the Entertainment Software Association (ESA)."
who the hell wants to play a video game that's going to make you worry and fret over moral and ethical choices? why would i want to play "the abortion game" or some crap like that? HOW ABOUT I PLAY SUPER MARIO BROS AND JUMP ON A BUNCH OF GOOMBAS???
seriously, you can find what games are lacking by looking at the old school classics, and some of the more inventive nintendo games (not really counting mario party 25, etc) and some of the low budget titles that occasionally take the spotlight (katamari damacy). games today are TOO SERIOUS. they aren't fun because they aren't rediculously unrealistic and they try to be too hardcore and gritty. as realistic as a gangster laden ghetto in new york would be, wouldn't you rather be rolling a ball of cars and various other objects or be in an immersive alternate reality (like myst), or maybe just be stomping on goombas?
that's really the problem. so many gamers today can't really get around the harcore games that are coming out today. they want realism and they want gritty hardcore crap that makes you "cool" when you play them. so they would pick up a game like, well, need for speed underground 2. so you play it and act all cool by being like a stret racer. but wouldn't a racing game be better if, instead of using realism which makes every racing game the same experience, why not make a rediculous world with gigantic, intricite tracks where your cars move at 500mph and they can perform acrobatic leaps from one track to another and fire plasma rifles at each other?
frankly, i hate it when games bring in moral issues. like when i play KOTOR. it forces me to make a bunch of liberal-ass decisions in order to complete the game on the light side. i have to say crap like "maybe you shouldn't be harming one another with your descrimination" instead of kicking people's ass with lightsabers
Guildwars doesnt have servers like other games, thats why its possible to pit europe vs america vs korea. Everyone is in the same gigantic world.
real life games played with cell phones and such. Like a 24-7 game of 'assassains.'
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Also, 3D graphics are considered better than 2D. When you pick 3D graphics, you get a few advantages, such as:
3D looks more real and familiar. You have another dimension, which can be both good and bad (see 3D jumping puzzles). You can have objects varying a lot in size, like a 20 meter scout swooping by a 3km cruiser, but it's harder to show scale because of the perspective.
With 2D however, you get a lot of gameplay advantages, such as destructable terrain, easy-to-read distances, scales and relations. Immidiately recognizeable characters (only seen from one angle). 2D physicas are much easier to code/process. The brain also goes through a lot of trouble 'unwrapping' or unskewing things because it prefers flat 2D.
I think many designers fall into the trap of wanting to define their everything as much as possible. They want their characters to be 'real', and for that they need 3D. In the end they're only another 'blip' you shoot though.
Just imagine what would happen if you combined ExciteBike, Blaster Master, Bionic Commando, and Scorched Tanks. You're speeding downhill, blow a piece of rock out of the way, jump off a ledge, fly through the air, fire a grappler into the cave roof, swing like Tarzan, disconnect and fall in an arc towards a cliff, and as you land the suspension nearly breaks, making the undercarriage grind against the cliff generating some neat sparks and a SFX stolen from Stunt Car Racer. You jump out with Jason and plant a turret and some sensor arrays a'la Tribes.
The Chair Corp. comic(*00-12)
It's easy to return games, even opened - you just have to know the secret:
First return the opened game, and complain that the disk was bad or whatever - they'll give you a brand new copy in the box, with the shrinkwrap still on
Then return that the next day (or to another store), and they'll give you your money back 'cause the shrinkwrap is still on!
When playing D&D, some like to beat a bunch of orcs around the ears and take their stuff, (which in itself provides a series of lessons). Others are cognizant of the fact that D&D allows a group of players to project themselves into a simulated reality and learn different kinds of lessons in social dynamics without the fear of getting killed for real. A lot of personal growth can take place, (usually, without the players intending it), during a good roll playing session. In my opinion, these are the most exciting and satisfying games, the ones I remember most fondly.
-FL
It's not the gameplay or graphics, it's the experience.
As I said the best ideas survived, implying that the not so great ones did not survive. That's the nature of business The difference between now and pre 2000 is that the amount of venture capital available specifically for internet business ideas was obscene, but the percentage of businesses that succeeded vs the number failed was no different, there were just lots more ideas launched. Hence the number of failures AND successes went up. However, the more ideas that succeeded, the better for consumers.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
what he meant by Quake being 3d is that you had 3d rendered objects, and you could be above or below something...wolfenstein was all on one level surface (no above/below) and you could not get "behind" a character in 3d (it always faced you, not looking 3d)
A lot of people on the right that I know consider the CSM to be one of the most unbiased papers out there. These are guys on the right, mind you, not my commie pinko liberal friends I like to spend my time with. :)
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
It's funny to me how many people have that attitude and can only play games if they're the "good guy." I've always been the exact opposite (and, no, I'm not some evil bastard in real life or some latent serial killer).
When I play a game like KOTOR, I like being the bad guy. Because the bad guy has a freedom that we, as decent people, don't have in real life.
So I loved playing KOTOR as darkside, and even felt frustrated when it wouldn't let me make the really dark choices (like not letting me join the Sith instead of the Jedi).
It lead to a lot of funny moments in the game, of the "Oh, I am such a bastard" variety (like when I used to force to trick the Tatooine widow into giving me her husband's hunt trophy--you should have heard Bastila's reaction).
I always chose the "bad guy" option in a game, if it's available. To me, playing the good guy is boring, conventional, and constraining. But I guess we're all just wired differently.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's Every Video Game You've Ever Played, from Ace-of-Spades.
I came across an article a couple of days back that Kiddies who play video Games are helped by it contradictory what Oldies think. All the stratergy planning and ligthening speed prove to be extremely helpful for a developing game...
"Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man's?"--Friedrich Nietzsche
Well, isn't isometric views 3D? If you can jump in a game seen from such an angle, then you have a third dimension, and that's what gave you trouble, no?. Isometric graphics is sort of like flat projection 3D, so sizes doesn't change, but you still have the x,y,z mechanics for movement.
The Fallout characters where probably rendered from 3D models like in BG or Diablo. That often makes the figures a bit less 'iconic' and more blury. Since they can spin around there's more frames to recognize aswell. If we move to real 3D, you have lighting, angle, animation and distance to 'decypher' before you can recognize a character. With 2D you just have Animation (most angles are flipped). There's just no way you're going to confuse a Gomba and a Koopa in SMB 1, or a Octorock and Moblin in Zelda 1.
I'm fine with 3D, I really like Elite, Quake and Tribes to mention a few, but 2D is hardly being explored AT ALL on consoles or PC. There's a few handheld attempts, but the processing power of those systems are limited.
320*240 (or 256) rocks! It's a pity the DS uses 256*192 and the GBA 240*160 (correct me if I'm wrong). That's a tad low unfortunately.
The Chair Corp. comic(*00-12)
Excuse me?
From what I have seen, weak characters are; shunned, teased because of their low level, ganked constantly by players insanely more powerful than they are, challenged to duels by players insanely more power than they are, and constantly abandoned on the battlefield in the middle of a raid. Level 60's spend most of their time trying to entertain or impress lower levels.
Trying to "take care" of a weaker character (ie, power-level a newbie) is a complete waste of time for the Level 60, and will only benefit them if that "weaker character" happens to be their alternate account (or someone they know in real life that can assist them in future instances/quests.)
It has the most in depth coverge of news and affairs of other nations bar none. The only serious competitor is The Economist which is a periodical. CSM has less bias than any other US publication unless you feel that any coverage of news outside of the US of A is inherently leftist or socialist.
Read it and decide for yourself.
many otakus are already doing this!
I was thinking about what would make a cool MMORPG over the weekend. Starship Troopers. But dump the name for licencing reasons, not to mention the baggage that comes with a prewritten story. There can be soldiers on planets fighting each other face to face, space battles between the organic alien creatures and human battlefleets. Each side could have various levels of officers played by players who give other players orders, organized as two basic official guilds, maybe with a couple of staff members working with each side. The generals are basically running the chess game portion of the world. Then, there could be an R&D portion of the games. The humans develop new weapons by researching technology, which allows new weapons physics (moving from traditional guns to plasma), better power production, faster spacecraft, stronger armor, and decreasing the weight of older technologies to let the foot solders carry more, or reduce the size of the gun by being able to using smaller parts, which allows the soldier to move quicker. On the other side, aliens use genetic research to enhance the creatures they put in the field. Now to do something this strategic, some servers might run only at certain times of the day (6-8), so that people that only want to play an hour or two can play, and don't feel like they are missing time they should be in the game.
I don't have a DS yet, but there are some adventure-esque titles out for it.
Another - this (along with Polarium) is why I want a DS
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - lawyer sim / adventure
Sprung - dating sim / adventure
I'm not sure how much adventure is mixed with the sim, but I think the first 2 look interesting.
e2 | LJ
C.O.s with hats like the GenerMills logo guy would walk by like shooting gallery ducks for the blood thirsty baptists the mow 'em down with cornacopia of weapons
Installation: To play Middle East, you will need to register online at www.goarmy.com or by phone at 1-800-USA-ARMY. While you're signing up, why not watch some videos?
Tutorial: All in-game. Just follow instructions and you'll be fine.
Monthly Fee: None. You get paid to play! Based on rank. Bonuses for exceptional skill.
Gameplay Tips: When an insurgent pops up, make sure to shoot him. Be careful not to shoot the woman with the groceries, the kid with the ball, or the police officer. Telling apart civilians from insurgents can be complicated and difficult, so make sure you have a quiet place where you can sort them out.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
Wolf3d was not truly 3D, but only felt like 3d.. well, sorta. The same is true for Wolf3d II (Spear of Destiny) which was just a map/model/weapons update for the Wolf3d engine. Remember there was no up/down? No stairs, only the elevator at the end of the level that just switched maps? Actually, if you look at the map files for Wolf3d and SOD, (and ROTT if you remember that one!) its just a topview bitmap, no Y-space.
The next iD big-title was Doom (and subsequently Doom II based on the same engine again), but it was much closer to true 3D.. However, it was only a hack of 3D as you couldn't look up/down and couldn't have space above a space.. Imagine a long hallway, then on another elevation a hallway couldn't CROSS the first hallway; this was routine in Descent as well as Quake. I don't recall Ultima Underworld so well, but i suspect it may have been like Doom?
The moral of the story is that its all digital trickery; Why do we call a game "3D" even when we know we're looking at a flat monitor screen? Games presently, at least FPS, do a great job of presenting 3D space, but its no different from watching a movie... and we don't call those 3D (unless its a gimmick). Aside from the technical features I say that wolf3d is just as '3d' as any present FPS; just with your head in a brace and dead guys seem to always be oriented on the floor in the same direction. How passé.
Hardware-accelerated physics is in the works.
Wolfenstein 3d, Spear of Destiny, Rott(yes it was great) , Duke3d - these were known as 2.5d engines.
As you point out - these were 2d maps extruded out on the Y-axis - and filled in with wall textures.
Duke3d had a trick that allowed you to simulate a table (ie : an "above" and a "below")with sprites. and it could even handle "above" and "below" rooms - though that was pretty tricky.
However i remember Descent was full-3d - the ships were 3d models. I'm fairly sure the maps were too.