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More Products From the Sequel Factory
Both the New York Times and Electronic Gaming Monthly have commented recently on the ongoing trend of sequel production in gaming. The NYT specifically cites EA's recent trends regarding endless rehashing of titles, while EGM talks more broadly about the role of sequels in the industry. While most reviewers lament the current state of the sequel factory, those within the industry rely on new versions of old titles for their bread and butter. From the EGM article: "Let's assume the publisher's position that sequels are a necessary evil, and the blockbuster videogame industry we have today cannot exist without sequels to support its often great financial burdens for research and development, marketing, distribution, etc. So, what are sequels doing for the gamer who's not interested in keeping up with the sequel treadmill?"
... Recent trends??? EA has been putting the same crappy sequel year after year to their games. In my opnion single handledly the most un-innovative game company out there!
Soul calibur rules!
But I agree, the gaming industry is overwhelmingly weak right now. AFAIConcerned, nothing worth the $200+ console price tag has come out in a long, long time. I still sit around playing old RPGs 99% of the time (and 1% downloading new PC games that I never end up playing for more than an hour cause they suck), waiting for the next Final Fantasy to come out. Even looking at reviews of games for the past TWO YEARS I find little that actually interests me. Whatever happened to the good ol' RPGs? All that comes out anymore are craptastic action-RPGs that offer barely a hint of the complexity of the older, classic titles.
Apologies for the OT post, but did you try changing "ForceOldVoxelAlgoritm=0" to "ForceOldVoxelAlgoritm=1" in your .ini file? It works okay for my AMD.
The reason that that is the case, is that the state of the art in games progresses at a much faster rate than the state of the art in movies. You could even remake a game within three years after its original release, and it would be a quite different game, and probably of much higher quality.
Basically, there are two reasons why game sequels may suck: (1) when the creators think they can "improve" the original concept (e.g., the simplification of Deus Ex 2, the MOO3 overhaul); and (2) when a publisher gives the developers not enough time to develop a real sequel, because it has to go to market quickly (e.g., Knights of the Old Republic 2 without a proper endgame).
However, if a sequel is just like the original game, except with better graphics, better AI, and better sound, it may give players the same good playing experience but modernized. And there is no reason why its quality has to be lower than the quality of the original game.
Oh gosh, I remember Pinball Construction Set. I used to have hours and hours of fun with that on my 4.7MHz IBM PC/XT, with 12" CGA display and internal PC speaker, building pinball tables and playing them.
That was software that was truly ahead of its time. Sad to think of how EA has evolved into a company now that is one step behind the times, and PROUD of that.
(An interesting side note about PCS -- it did not run from DOS. You booted directly from the floppy disk, which contained its own micro-OS that handled all the underlying BIOS calls).