I'm beginning to suspect that Obama was actually hired by a covert conservative think tank. A vote for Obama is a vote thrown away. You might as well vote for Nader for crissake. Do you really think the country that elected George W Bush twice in a row is going to elect anything other than another white guy? Electing Obama would break a trend that goes back to the very beginning of the American Presidency and I don't see that kind of liberality anywhere on the landscape of today's American voting public. Seriously, it is inconceivable that Obama would do anything but split the liberal vote and hand the election over to those arch-conservatives that have had such a terrifyingly clear and steadfast vision for America's future. Same goes for Hillary. I used to think I would vote for any woman who ran just for the simple fact that it would be good for a change, but that bitch is crazy. If you want a radical new direction for the country you're better off electing another white guy with radical ideas than a candidate of a radically new racial/gender demographic altogether that will only scare off those moderates whose prejudices would far outweigh their own possible growing lack of confidence with the current party. Then again if you could actually mobilize the minority vote and guarantee that it actually counted in all precincts then maybe you'd have something. I'd like to see a real iconoclast get into office, though Obama seems like another slick asshole, professional politician at best and a long shot in the average American's opinion in the first place anyway.
Yea really, then what is to stop the FBI from simply compulsorily including one's attorney in every NS letter as a safeguard? What a dumb system. IANAL but maybe I should have been.
If you need both parents working to barely make ends meet, why are you paying for internet access that poisons the minds of your sweet children anyway? Seems you could save some money and your offspring's innocence by pulling the plug on satan's information superhighway in the home. Let them check their email on library computers running the filter software you're too dumb or too busy to install for the home computer. Hard to jerk it at the library anyway, I would imagine. Or you could just lighten up a bit and trust that your careful parenting can't be completely undone by pixels on a computer monitor.
Then people unlocked it on both the PS2 and XBox versions.
Why do people keep saying this? I know this thing was beaten to death but stop fucking saying this. You simply can't "unlock" Hot Coffee. That implies you can get to these parts of the game during normal execution. Like a racing game giving you new tracks or mario getting to a secret warp zone. You cannot do this at all. The only way to access this content is to physically hack into the game, something you're really not in anyway supposed to be doing, especially on a console. If you did hack the code you would then have to be able to run it off a hdd or burned disc and that is completely not allowed by any normal execution of the console. Doing so is about as easy as replacing any of the content of the game with your own offensive user-created material. How is that ever R*'s fault? I don't care if they included the entire filmography of Ron Jeremy in bink video, if the game doesn't physically play it, you shouldn't be able to access it by normal sanctioned operation and any access therein is at best a legal grey-area, on your part. What about those Disney movies that had frames of nudity (Roger Rabbit, Little Mermaid, etc)? I don't remember the government getting involved with that, and that shit was available to anyone with a good freeze-frame function on their remote, and it was marketed to kids in the first place! Hot Coffee is sensationalist bullshit and the ensuing media frenzy was unjustified. Hell don't you basically have to violate the DMCA just to access Hot Coffee anyway?
Just so this isn't totally offtopic, I have to say it bugs me that R* didn't step up and point this out with their PR. You have to violate the integrity of their product to even make it an issue, so it really shouldn't have been an issue at all. Also, here's hoping they go all out and include Hot Coffee 2.0 in a properly rated version of the next GTA. Bustin' nuts when I'm not bustin' caps. Isn't the average gamer's age ~27 yrs old. Market research should show them that there is interest and well, the AO rating is there for a fucking reason. Quit pussy-footin' around damn you.
Microsoft released 5 consumer-oriented versions of Windows and might release Vista before Duke Nukem Forever hits shelves
Just maintaining that list must be a full time job.
I despised reading throughout school. I got to the point where I thought reading itself was an outdated form of expression altogether, something surpassed by movies and TV. I figured games would eventually destroy movies/TV likewise, a kind of Highlander evolution of story-telling. It wasn't until I left school that I finally got turned on to some good authors and developed an appreciation for reading. The books in school are terribly boring. There is nothing worse than forcing someone to read (an especially more active form of input than this so-called ADHD generation is used to) something which holds no interest for them. I've loved games since my youth, but there were two books I read in school that I really loved (The Martian Chronicles and 1984), so it was possible to hold my interest if the book actually engaged me. If educators are so desperate to engage kids that they're willing to try a concept as hopeless as "educational games," instead why not let them read whatever the hell they want? Whatever mature or downright vulgar themes their twisted little teen-angst ridden minds think they crave. If I could have read Chuck Palahnuik or Gore Vidal as a kid I would have been well on my way to enjoying reading. Why not talk to those few kids that actually are reading and compile a list of books from them? Educators will only succeed in making games as boring as their book selection. Why not just let the students select the books themselves?
I'm tired of being told today's children are a "sight and sound" generation. What about the Japanese who have even more gadgets than us? Ever played a Japanese game? They're full of text (weird squiggly text!). Hell even their arcade fighting games have a whole dramatic buildup of text firing back and forth before the brawl. How do those kids do all that reading with all the bleeping and flashing in their culture? It's a mystery.
Triple bonus points? The end? I thought the whole point of that game was to die quickly and leave vulgar rhymes on your tombstones for the other students to find.
comes from the BBC via summary from the Rotton library:
The BBC recently estimated the force of a possible Yellowstone eruption in the following colorful terms: "It will explode again with the unimaginable force of a thousand Hiroshima bombs per second... And the eruption will last for days."
I should have been an astronaut.
Jesus we're already talking about the next-next-gen? The term next-gen hasn't even cooled off yet. How much more clearly do you need to see Sam Fisher's buldging coin-purse, normal-mapped and specularly highlighted through his tight-fitting spy outfit? Games have been driven by graphics for years now but that trend is tapering off. What we need is innovation in gameplay (AI in particular and physics as well). I love ragdoll physics and was always anticipating it, now how about giving players total muscular control and completely phasing out key-framed anims altogether like euphoria is doing? How about procedurally generating not just content, but new experiences and new stories? You're not going to get that with a new version of DirectX or by adding another processor. That is time spent on R&D for software and theory. The graphics theory has been worked out for years, so when new graphics power comes out we're all to ready to throw it into use. More and prettier polygons. But how relevent is that anymore? OTOH where are we with AI? AI doesn't scale like graphics. Most companies still don't even know what to do with a multi-core processor yet. Stop releasing new consoles and make better games. People are eventually just going to get tired of the whole industry.
I remember hearing EA and Rockstar say they had already mastered the then current gen tech of PS2/Xbox. Really guys? Great then you can just churn out top-notch games! The NES had a life-span of 12 years for chrissake. If you're going to make the same damn games anyway, just stay on the console you've mastered. I could have played 5 GTA San Andreases to be honest. I could have played 5 God of Wars (though I'm not interested in paying an expensive upgrade cost to play those same old experiences in shiny "new" games). Those were games made by companies at the top of their game. Now we're stuck waiting for these assholes to figure out their new toys all over again, all the while bitching about how much it costs them to make all the friggin' content for their new games.
And when they do get their tools in order will we be getting games with new gameplay? Hell no. We'll get Halo 3, a prettier Halo 2 (the sequel jumping across console gens is particularly indicative of a stagnation in true innovation). We'll get Gears of War, something I honestly could have mistaken for an unreal3 engine tech demo. The monsters will still run around acting dumber than ants (I mean that literally, I would love to see the emergent intelligence such as that of an ant hive in a game). The players will still have the same rigid disconnect with these pretty virtual worlds that could only come from the same boring analog control system. I still haven't found a reason to buy a new system, though I'm still leaning towards the graphically weaker but considerably innovative Wii (if I could ever track one down!). I've played Halo before. Twice. I imagine the third will play much like the first two. I'd like to play it, but I'm not spending $600 for the pleasure of that retread. Console gaming is supposed to be cheaper than PC gaming. It is beginning to outpace the cost of upgrading my PC. Wtf? Microsoft or any other company that really wanted to wouldn't have to release a new console in 10 years if it decided to reach for players hearts and minds (through games not market-speak) instead of just their eyeballs (and wallets). The damn fools at MS screwed up this whole generation in the first place with the premature ejaculate that is the 360. They may be in the lead right now, but you tell me, is this iteration of the console wars nearly as exciting as any of the previous? The Genesis (hell even the SegaCD), the SNES, the N64, the Dreamcast/PS2. Those were exciting times. Sony, MS have really scewed things up with this hardware smorgasbord. Show me the games.
I understand, but take a look at some of the demo images that focus on removing artifacts from jpegs, especially the last one of the purple flower. The before image pretty much looks like a very low resolution, heavily pixelated image much like what you would see in old games. Although there is a greater deal of edge definition in jpegs and the pixelation occurs mostly in the gradients, still I wonder if some temporal considerations might help a little more in determining edges, at least in dynamic objects. Might be especially helpful in psx games where the edges are defined fairly well by the model structure itself while the face textures look terrible. I'm just wondering if this algorithm could do a better job than say the superEagle or similar filters traditionally used. Maybe I'll run a few screenshots through the program when I get home today. Another consideration is XVid video compression. It does a terrible job with dark areas of an image. Maybe one could apply this algo there.
Someone above mentioned that the algo is embarrassingly parallel. Could it be implemented in realtime as a filter for emulators of older game consoles? I would be interested in seeing what this thing could do with a sonic or mario game, though I dunno how much color depth plays into it. Could maybe make psx or n64 games look less shitty. Might look even better than high-level emulation.
Hard-wiring or conditioning? Doesn't the fact that someone needs to be told this is a sinful action -- and carries with it a grave consequence from a boogieman force with an all-seeing eye possessing greater awareness than that of one's mere mortal neighbors -- suggest that human behavior in large societies has traditionally required a level of impulse control. You don't tell your dog why it's bad to make on the carpet. You just rub his nose in it and make sure he knows who is in charge and that the authority is displeased with his actions. Religion seems similar to me. Any reasonable person with scruples would know that wife-stealing is a bad idea in terms of building a stable society without needing all the baggage of dogmatic finger-waving to point that out. Don't we eventually reach a point where we can acknowledge the existence of such desires and impulses and rely on simple education and proper reasoning and decision-making to discourage the majority of such behaviors. It's not like Moses really put an end to adultery with that one, he just sensationalized it even more by making God take sides.
Is there a word for the belief in an apathetic deity, a supreme being that cares nothing for any specific part of creation (like man)? It wouldn't be apatheist, though it does have a nice ring to it. Deiapatheist? Deus Ignorus?
I've heard bits from the "magic mushrooms to conciousness" theory before, but never really elaborated upon. Does this happen to come from that Terrance McKenna book? "Food of the Gods" I think it's called. I've always meant to read it. I've heard that the selection came more from the hallucinogens causing a heightened sense of visual awareness, thereby making the user a better hunter/forager. But this is more interesting. Where is a good starting point for the ideas in your post?
It was initially an incentive for me as well (still haven't had 600 bucks just lying around unused, but here's hoping). I sold my ps2 a while back for an xbox (mistake), and missed a bunch of cool sony ps2 titles I've been meaning to go back to with the ps3. WTF is going on with new system launches anyway? There was a time not long ago when you didn't release a new system without a solid set of launch titles -- to, you know, give the consumer an actual reason to purchase your silly machine. Super Mario Brothers made me a gamer -- launch title. Pilot Wings was one of the best games ever released on SNES -- launch title! Now new machines rest on brand name and mere promises of future software. That's stupid, you wouldn't have bought into dvd-players without great dvd titles already available would you? This has been pissing me off more and more lately. I still haven't got a next-gen system because there are no killer apps yet for any of them! The nominally innovative, mostly derivative Gears of War would be a B-list title if the 360 had anything truly worth mentioning (wtf are they doing launching this system without a finished Halo). The ps2 lineup is a joke (in that I can't even think of anything exciting for it atm or even on the horizon, can you?). Wii's best title seems to be that Zelda Twilight Princess game (a port of a gamecube title!).
In fact, now that I think about it, my rational wrt next-gen seems to be this: I'd like a Wii because it's affordable and the games I can imagine with that controller really excite me, and I'd like a ps3 (if I ever have the discretionary income on hand) because Sony, like Nintendo, has proven to be a great first-party developer in the past with the ps2. I'll eventually get a 360 because MS has juked sony into really fucking themselves up and john-q's limited attention span has caused a hemhorraging installed base of 360s (with no real merit on current software IMHO) and developers will have to make money somewhere, so they'll support the great satan of MS (c'mon, do you really want MS to have this much control over the game industry with the doomsday twins of 360 and vista dx10?). See how this is all speculation and has nothing to do with the software which is actually extant in each system's respective lineup? That's fucking sad.
If this is what we can expect from system launches, backwards compatibility is more important than it has ever been in the past. The overlap of last-minute, high-quality "last-gen" titles being developed a little past the lifespan of their target machine can ease the incredible dearth of next-gen launch titles. If they keep screwing the launches people are going to start losing interest in this bloated industry (I've been a hardcore gamer for years, and I'm actually starting to grow out of it, gasp!). Didn't the video game crash of the 80's happen when the software started to tank? See a pattern here?
ps. I should have realized things were rotten in this industry when E3 became more about the titties and less about the software. Yes I know there were always titties, but there were great games at some point as well.
This was mentioned in a computers in modern society course I splept through in college. Something about the government shutting off funding to the patent office and telling it to fund itself. I believe this happened fairly recently, as in almost coincident with the widespread practice of patenting software. What timing...
As yet another Canadian, I myself would also like to express my pride in this beautiful country. I however, am an American, so fuck you guys and your adorable dislike of government jackbootery. It's moot anyway. Remember, we're coming for you when we run out of paper.
1 - Eliminate mindless key searching. This includes door switches, members-only jackets, and any other mcguffin the lack of which prevents progress through some point in the game. If you can't find a more interesting way of prolonging the time spent in a level than backtracking to acquire some silly object, your level design probably sucks. Half-Life always did this well. The game felt bigger as you never saw the same place for too long. Backtracking is so gameplay fatiguing it almost stands as an argument for linearity. Halo's maps probably wouldn't have felt so monotonous and symmetrical if you didn't have to plod back through them in reverse fighting the same dumb enemies, which wouldn't have been so bad if it wasn't the Flood you were fighting (I found the other enemies in Halo pretty fun to fight), which brings me to point 2...
2 - If you AI is going to be dumb, at least don't make it numb as well. Build some reaction into your enemy's damage taken. If I pump a shotgun shell into any part of the enemy's body at close range, and they don't register a reaction, they should be completely indestructible. They are giving me the indication that they feel none of my damage and really I should be turning and running. Watch a zombie movie. While they feel no pain they will at least shudder when pummeled with a significant bit of force. If they can take a lot of damage, their advance should at least be hinderable. Remember Goldeneye? It was a little over the top, but you could create a veritable dance competition with a group of enemies wiggling about in response to your gunshots. The delay, while not killing your enemy, could at least buy you some time to form a new strategy. OTOH, Halo's Flood are no fun to attack. They feel more like switches that take x amount of button presses to turn off. The enemies in Doom3 felt similar, and I stopped playing after the first level. Bullets are supposed to hurt, and pain should always be visible. I've always wanted rag-doll to be a part of the killing experience as well as the death sequence. Knock your enemies on their ass even if they aren't dead. A grenade should knock you down too. Getting up should be part of the experience. What's more immersive than reacting to the forces in one's environment? None of the characters should feel like concrete pillars, which leads me to point 3.
3 - This was mentioned above and I agree, I'd like to see some more realistic camera movement in games. I only played a little Killzone for the ps2 (ps2 controller is terrible for fps IMHO), but I do recall the fantastic camera work. Reloading/running, it really felt like the camera was in somebody's helmet. This kind of stuff is more of the moving away from a static upright statuesque posture in an fps. It is more immersive. Gears of War, which I haven't actually played (and isn't really an fps), looks to do this pretty well.
As for ammo use as someone mentioned above, I think it's handled pretty well in games. If it's a decent game it seems the rule of thumb is to use it when you get it. If you're handed a rocket launcher, you're probably about to encounter something that demands having rockets shot at it. I find I've always got enough ammo to get the job done and actually like running low on it every now and then. Keeps up the tension. When the ammo balance is screwed up, the game is usually pretty crap in other areas as well anyway.
I think TFA is too philosophical. Those are silly over-reaching concepts that really should be applied to gameplay design in general, and lacking too much in any of them is going to hurt the fun of any game anyway. My list is short, but more directed at fps games in particular. And can we stop comparing multiplayer games in this discussion. They are a completely different beast. Apples and oranges. You usually don't require AI in multiplayer, there's plenty of user intelligence (or lack thereof!) already, although more interesting bots (with completely different design considerations from single player games) would be something
I was actually just thinking about cut scenes this morning. Cut scenes used to be a reward for gamers back in the day. They were pre-rendered and much prettier than the shit graphics of the game you were playing. I remember the cut scenes for the first dark forces game as being pretty damn cool. Nowadays the in-game graphics trump the cut-scenes of yesteryear and we're all so used to pixar (which still hasn't made a cgi movie with balls.. wtf?) that pretty graphics just don't mean as much anymore. I find myself skipping cut scenes even for new games I've not played through before. They are just boring. Worse yet, as they lack the old wow factor of cool graphics, they now only serve to illustrate how poor most of the story elements of the game actually are. I can usually forgive story, but not when its all that is happening on screen as is the case in a static cut-scene. The best games let you move around, or at least look around while in a cut-scene.
You play a game to interact with an environment. There should always be a very good reason to take away control from the player.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm beginning to suspect that Obama was actually hired by a covert conservative think tank. A vote for Obama is a vote thrown away. You might as well vote for Nader for crissake. Do you really think the country that elected George W Bush twice in a row is going to elect anything other than another white guy? Electing Obama would break a trend that goes back to the very beginning of the American Presidency and I don't see that kind of liberality anywhere on the landscape of today's American voting public. Seriously, it is inconceivable that Obama would do anything but split the liberal vote and hand the election over to those arch-conservatives that have had such a terrifyingly clear and steadfast vision for America's future. Same goes for Hillary. I used to think I would vote for any woman who ran just for the simple fact that it would be good for a change, but that bitch is crazy. If you want a radical new direction for the country you're better off electing another white guy with radical ideas than a candidate of a radically new racial/gender demographic altogether that will only scare off those moderates whose prejudices would far outweigh their own possible growing lack of confidence with the current party. Then again if you could actually mobilize the minority vote and guarantee that it actually counted in all precincts then maybe you'd have something. I'd like to see a real iconoclast get into office, though Obama seems like another slick asshole, professional politician at best and a long shot in the average American's opinion in the first place anyway.
"Now I want you to go into that bag and find my rights."
"Which rights are those?
"There the ones that say, 'Bad Mother Fucker.'"
Yea really, then what is to stop the FBI from simply compulsorily including one's attorney in every NS letter as a safeguard? What a dumb system. IANAL but maybe I should have been.
If you need both parents working to barely make ends meet, why are you paying for internet access that poisons the minds of your sweet children anyway? Seems you could save some money and your offspring's innocence by pulling the plug on satan's information superhighway in the home. Let them check their email on library computers running the filter software you're too dumb or too busy to install for the home computer. Hard to jerk it at the library anyway, I would imagine. Or you could just lighten up a bit and trust that your careful parenting can't be completely undone by pixels on a computer monitor.
Why do people keep saying this? I know this thing was beaten to death but stop fucking saying this. You simply can't "unlock" Hot Coffee. That implies you can get to these parts of the game during normal execution. Like a racing game giving you new tracks or mario getting to a secret warp zone. You cannot do this at all. The only way to access this content is to physically hack into the game, something you're really not in anyway supposed to be doing, especially on a console. If you did hack the code you would then have to be able to run it off a hdd or burned disc and that is completely not allowed by any normal execution of the console. Doing so is about as easy as replacing any of the content of the game with your own offensive user-created material. How is that ever R*'s fault? I don't care if they included the entire filmography of Ron Jeremy in bink video, if the game doesn't physically play it, you shouldn't be able to access it by normal sanctioned operation and any access therein is at best a legal grey-area, on your part. What about those Disney movies that had frames of nudity (Roger Rabbit, Little Mermaid, etc)? I don't remember the government getting involved with that, and that shit was available to anyone with a good freeze-frame function on their remote, and it was marketed to kids in the first place! Hot Coffee is sensationalist bullshit and the ensuing media frenzy was unjustified. Hell don't you basically have to violate the DMCA just to access Hot Coffee anyway?
Just so this isn't totally offtopic, I have to say it bugs me that R* didn't step up and point this out with their PR. You have to violate the integrity of their product to even make it an issue, so it really shouldn't have been an issue at all. Also, here's hoping they go all out and include Hot Coffee 2.0 in a properly rated version of the next GTA. Bustin' nuts when I'm not bustin' caps. Isn't the average gamer's age ~27 yrs old. Market research should show them that there is interest and well, the AO rating is there for a fucking reason. Quit pussy-footin' around damn you.
Just maintaining that list must be a full time job.
I despised reading throughout school. I got to the point where I thought reading itself was an outdated form of expression altogether, something surpassed by movies and TV. I figured games would eventually destroy movies/TV likewise, a kind of Highlander evolution of story-telling. It wasn't until I left school that I finally got turned on to some good authors and developed an appreciation for reading. The books in school are terribly boring. There is nothing worse than forcing someone to read (an especially more active form of input than this so-called ADHD generation is used to) something which holds no interest for them. I've loved games since my youth, but there were two books I read in school that I really loved (The Martian Chronicles and 1984), so it was possible to hold my interest if the book actually engaged me. If educators are so desperate to engage kids that they're willing to try a concept as hopeless as "educational games," instead why not let them read whatever the hell they want? Whatever mature or downright vulgar themes their twisted little teen-angst ridden minds think they crave. If I could have read Chuck Palahnuik or Gore Vidal as a kid I would have been well on my way to enjoying reading. Why not talk to those few kids that actually are reading and compile a list of books from them? Educators will only succeed in making games as boring as their book selection. Why not just let the students select the books themselves?
I'm tired of being told today's children are a "sight and sound" generation. What about the Japanese who have even more gadgets than us? Ever played a Japanese game? They're full of text (weird squiggly text!). Hell even their arcade fighting games have a whole dramatic buildup of text firing back and forth before the brawl. How do those kids do all that reading with all the bleeping and flashing in their culture? It's a mystery.
I was just going to say that! In my day we played 10-yard fight! :)
Triple bonus points? The end? I thought the whole point of that game was to die quickly and leave vulgar rhymes on your tombstones for the other students to find.
The BBC recently estimated the force of a possible Yellowstone eruption in the following colorful terms: "It will explode again with the unimaginable force of a thousand Hiroshima bombs per second... And the eruption will last for days."
I should have been an astronaut.
Jesus we're already talking about the next-next-gen? The term next-gen hasn't even cooled off yet. How much more clearly do you need to see Sam Fisher's buldging coin-purse, normal-mapped and specularly highlighted through his tight-fitting spy outfit? Games have been driven by graphics for years now but that trend is tapering off. What we need is innovation in gameplay (AI in particular and physics as well). I love ragdoll physics and was always anticipating it, now how about giving players total muscular control and completely phasing out key-framed anims altogether like euphoria is doing? How about procedurally generating not just content, but new experiences and new stories? You're not going to get that with a new version of DirectX or by adding another processor. That is time spent on R&D for software and theory. The graphics theory has been worked out for years, so when new graphics power comes out we're all to ready to throw it into use. More and prettier polygons. But how relevent is that anymore? OTOH where are we with AI? AI doesn't scale like graphics. Most companies still don't even know what to do with a multi-core processor yet. Stop releasing new consoles and make better games. People are eventually just going to get tired of the whole industry.
I remember hearing EA and Rockstar say they had already mastered the then current gen tech of PS2/Xbox. Really guys? Great then you can just churn out top-notch games! The NES had a life-span of 12 years for chrissake. If you're going to make the same damn games anyway, just stay on the console you've mastered. I could have played 5 GTA San Andreases to be honest. I could have played 5 God of Wars (though I'm not interested in paying an expensive upgrade cost to play those same old experiences in shiny "new" games). Those were games made by companies at the top of their game. Now we're stuck waiting for these assholes to figure out their new toys all over again, all the while bitching about how much it costs them to make all the friggin' content for their new games.
And when they do get their tools in order will we be getting games with new gameplay? Hell no. We'll get Halo 3, a prettier Halo 2 (the sequel jumping across console gens is particularly indicative of a stagnation in true innovation). We'll get Gears of War, something I honestly could have mistaken for an unreal3 engine tech demo. The monsters will still run around acting dumber than ants (I mean that literally, I would love to see the emergent intelligence such as that of an ant hive in a game). The players will still have the same rigid disconnect with these pretty virtual worlds that could only come from the same boring analog control system. I still haven't found a reason to buy a new system, though I'm still leaning towards the graphically weaker but considerably innovative Wii (if I could ever track one down!). I've played Halo before. Twice. I imagine the third will play much like the first two. I'd like to play it, but I'm not spending $600 for the pleasure of that retread. Console gaming is supposed to be cheaper than PC gaming. It is beginning to outpace the cost of upgrading my PC. Wtf? Microsoft or any other company that really wanted to wouldn't have to release a new console in 10 years if it decided to reach for players hearts and minds (through games not market-speak) instead of just their eyeballs (and wallets). The damn fools at MS screwed up this whole generation in the first place with the premature ejaculate that is the 360. They may be in the lead right now, but you tell me, is this iteration of the console wars nearly as exciting as any of the previous? The Genesis (hell even the SegaCD), the SNES, the N64, the Dreamcast/PS2. Those were exciting times. Sony, MS have really scewed things up with this hardware smorgasbord. Show me the games.
the killer asteroids cannot find the funding to track you!
Any reason to launch Ben Affleck into space is a good reason...
I understand, but take a look at some of the demo images that focus on removing artifacts from jpegs, especially the last one of the purple flower. The before image pretty much looks like a very low resolution, heavily pixelated image much like what you would see in old games. Although there is a greater deal of edge definition in jpegs and the pixelation occurs mostly in the gradients, still I wonder if some temporal considerations might help a little more in determining edges, at least in dynamic objects. Might be especially helpful in psx games where the edges are defined fairly well by the model structure itself while the face textures look terrible. I'm just wondering if this algorithm could do a better job than say the superEagle or similar filters traditionally used. Maybe I'll run a few screenshots through the program when I get home today. Another consideration is XVid video compression. It does a terrible job with dark areas of an image. Maybe one could apply this algo there.
Someone above mentioned that the algo is embarrassingly parallel. Could it be implemented in realtime as a filter for emulators of older game consoles? I would be interested in seeing what this thing could do with a sonic or mario game, though I dunno how much color depth plays into it. Could maybe make psx or n64 games look less shitty. Might look even better than high-level emulation.
Hard-wiring or conditioning? Doesn't the fact that someone needs to be told this is a sinful action -- and carries with it a grave consequence from a boogieman force with an all-seeing eye possessing greater awareness than that of one's mere mortal neighbors -- suggest that human behavior in large societies has traditionally required a level of impulse control. You don't tell your dog why it's bad to make on the carpet. You just rub his nose in it and make sure he knows who is in charge and that the authority is displeased with his actions. Religion seems similar to me. Any reasonable person with scruples would know that wife-stealing is a bad idea in terms of building a stable society without needing all the baggage of dogmatic finger-waving to point that out. Don't we eventually reach a point where we can acknowledge the existence of such desires and impulses and rely on simple education and proper reasoning and decision-making to discourage the majority of such behaviors. It's not like Moses really put an end to adultery with that one, he just sensationalized it even more by making God take sides.
Is there a word for the belief in an apathetic deity, a supreme being that cares nothing for any specific part of creation (like man)? It wouldn't be apatheist, though it does have a nice ring to it. Deiapatheist? Deus Ignorus?
It was flavor aid. If you're going to invoke a catty, catchall catchphrase, the least you could do is get the history right
I've heard bits from the "magic mushrooms to conciousness" theory before, but never really elaborated upon. Does this happen to come from that Terrance McKenna book? "Food of the Gods" I think it's called. I've always meant to read it. I've heard that the selection came more from the hallucinogens causing a heightened sense of visual awareness, thereby making the user a better hunter/forager. But this is more interesting. Where is a good starting point for the ideas in your post?
It was initially an incentive for me as well (still haven't had 600 bucks just lying around unused, but here's hoping). I sold my ps2 a while back for an xbox (mistake), and missed a bunch of cool sony ps2 titles I've been meaning to go back to with the ps3. WTF is going on with new system launches anyway? There was a time not long ago when you didn't release a new system without a solid set of launch titles -- to, you know, give the consumer an actual reason to purchase your silly machine. Super Mario Brothers made me a gamer -- launch title. Pilot Wings was one of the best games ever released on SNES -- launch title! Now new machines rest on brand name and mere promises of future software. That's stupid, you wouldn't have bought into dvd-players without great dvd titles already available would you? This has been pissing me off more and more lately. I still haven't got a next-gen system because there are no killer apps yet for any of them! The nominally innovative, mostly derivative Gears of War would be a B-list title if the 360 had anything truly worth mentioning (wtf are they doing launching this system without a finished Halo). The ps2 lineup is a joke (in that I can't even think of anything exciting for it atm or even on the horizon, can you?). Wii's best title seems to be that Zelda Twilight Princess game (a port of a gamecube title!).
In fact, now that I think about it, my rational wrt next-gen seems to be this: I'd like a Wii because it's affordable and the games I can imagine with that controller really excite me, and I'd like a ps3 (if I ever have the discretionary income on hand) because Sony, like Nintendo, has proven to be a great first-party developer in the past with the ps2. I'll eventually get a 360 because MS has juked sony into really fucking themselves up and john-q's limited attention span has caused a hemhorraging installed base of 360s (with no real merit on current software IMHO) and developers will have to make money somewhere, so they'll support the great satan of MS (c'mon, do you really want MS to have this much control over the game industry with the doomsday twins of 360 and vista dx10?). See how this is all speculation and has nothing to do with the software which is actually extant in each system's respective lineup? That's fucking sad.
If this is what we can expect from system launches, backwards compatibility is more important than it has ever been in the past. The overlap of last-minute, high-quality "last-gen" titles being developed a little past the lifespan of their target machine can ease the incredible dearth of next-gen launch titles. If they keep screwing the launches people are going to start losing interest in this bloated industry (I've been a hardcore gamer for years, and I'm actually starting to grow out of it, gasp!). Didn't the video game crash of the 80's happen when the software started to tank? See a pattern here?
ps. I should have realized things were rotten in this industry when E3 became more about the titties and less about the software. Yes I know there were always titties, but there were great games at some point as well.
This was mentioned in a computers in modern society course I splept through in college. Something about the government shutting off funding to the patent office and telling it to fund itself. I believe this happened fairly recently, as in almost coincident with the widespread practice of patenting software. What timing...
As yet another Canadian, I myself would also like to express my pride in this beautiful country. I however, am an American, so fuck you guys and your adorable dislike of government jackbootery. It's moot anyway. Remember, we're coming for you when we run out of paper.
1 - Eliminate mindless key searching. This includes door switches, members-only jackets, and any other mcguffin the lack of which prevents progress through some point in the game. If you can't find a more interesting way of prolonging the time spent in a level than backtracking to acquire some silly object, your level design probably sucks. Half-Life always did this well. The game felt bigger as you never saw the same place for too long. Backtracking is so gameplay fatiguing it almost stands as an argument for linearity. Halo's maps probably wouldn't have felt so monotonous and symmetrical if you didn't have to plod back through them in reverse fighting the same dumb enemies, which wouldn't have been so bad if it wasn't the Flood you were fighting (I found the other enemies in Halo pretty fun to fight), which brings me to point 2...
2 - If you AI is going to be dumb, at least don't make it numb as well. Build some reaction into your enemy's damage taken. If I pump a shotgun shell into any part of the enemy's body at close range, and they don't register a reaction, they should be completely indestructible. They are giving me the indication that they feel none of my damage and really I should be turning and running. Watch a zombie movie. While they feel no pain they will at least shudder when pummeled with a significant bit of force. If they can take a lot of damage, their advance should at least be hinderable. Remember Goldeneye? It was a little over the top, but you could create a veritable dance competition with a group of enemies wiggling about in response to your gunshots. The delay, while not killing your enemy, could at least buy you some time to form a new strategy. OTOH, Halo's Flood are no fun to attack. They feel more like switches that take x amount of button presses to turn off. The enemies in Doom3 felt similar, and I stopped playing after the first level. Bullets are supposed to hurt, and pain should always be visible. I've always wanted rag-doll to be a part of the killing experience as well as the death sequence. Knock your enemies on their ass even if they aren't dead. A grenade should knock you down too. Getting up should be part of the experience. What's more immersive than reacting to the forces in one's environment? None of the characters should feel like concrete pillars, which leads me to point 3.
3 - This was mentioned above and I agree, I'd like to see some more realistic camera movement in games. I only played a little Killzone for the ps2 (ps2 controller is terrible for fps IMHO), but I do recall the fantastic camera work. Reloading/running, it really felt like the camera was in somebody's helmet. This kind of stuff is more of the moving away from a static upright statuesque posture in an fps. It is more immersive. Gears of War, which I haven't actually played (and isn't really an fps), looks to do this pretty well.
As for ammo use as someone mentioned above, I think it's handled pretty well in games. If it's a decent game it seems the rule of thumb is to use it when you get it. If you're handed a rocket launcher, you're probably about to encounter something that demands having rockets shot at it. I find I've always got enough ammo to get the job done and actually like running low on it every now and then. Keeps up the tension. When the ammo balance is screwed up, the game is usually pretty crap in other areas as well anyway.
I think TFA is too philosophical. Those are silly over-reaching concepts that really should be applied to gameplay design in general, and lacking too much in any of them is going to hurt the fun of any game anyway. My list is short, but more directed at fps games in particular. And can we stop comparing multiplayer games in this discussion. They are a completely different beast. Apples and oranges. You usually don't require AI in multiplayer, there's plenty of user intelligence (or lack thereof!) already, although more interesting bots (with completely different design considerations from single player games) would be something
They are in fact sold separately are they not?
I was actually just thinking about cut scenes this morning. Cut scenes used to be a reward for gamers back in the day. They were pre-rendered and much prettier than the shit graphics of the game you were playing. I remember the cut scenes for the first dark forces game as being pretty damn cool. Nowadays the in-game graphics trump the cut-scenes of yesteryear and we're all so used to pixar (which still hasn't made a cgi movie with balls.. wtf?) that pretty graphics just don't mean as much anymore. I find myself skipping cut scenes even for new games I've not played through before. They are just boring. Worse yet, as they lack the old wow factor of cool graphics, they now only serve to illustrate how poor most of the story elements of the game actually are. I can usually forgive story, but not when its all that is happening on screen as is the case in a static cut-scene. The best games let you move around, or at least look around while in a cut-scene. You play a game to interact with an environment. There should always be a very good reason to take away control from the player.