1: Make an interesting game, with or without the first game, the second one has to stand on it's own feet. Especially true if it comes out years after the original since most of the buyers will in fact be too young to have played the first game.
2: Analyze what made the first game great, think about which of those aspects are still in demand today.
3: Think about whether the sequel should be an actual sequel or if it instead should be a different games, there are many games that where quite excellent but failed miserably since they are something entirely different from the rest of the series.
Note that these point in a way contradict each other, especially 3 vs 1, and that is intentional, the point is that there is no winning recipy for any game.
Note that creating a good game isn't the same thing as creating a commercially viable game either.
Personally, I've noticed that creating a really fun game isn't what makes game popular these days, it's creating games which takes forever to finish for as little development time as possible. People refuse to replay good games which is really sad since most of my favorite games ever are defined by the fact that one run-through isn't by any definition of the word enough. The bad part is that I know people don't agree with me and prefer lame stories and lame gameplay that is built to be more repetitive than replaying the same game over and over.
At first, you think it's obvious that people who are responsible for other peoples' lives should be required to be 100% alert.
However, the problem with that is that this by necessity means that you will need more doctors to man places up, thus increasing costs (not to mention that I don't think that there are that many superflous doctors just ready to jump in). And here's the thing, in most cases, doctors do get to work reasonable hours, the times they don't get to is related to when there is a current crisis. This means that instead of saving peoples lives with a risk of doing a clumsy job the get to go home to sleep and the person dies anyway.
Not a good result if you ask me.
The one solution I can see is having a consultant doctor pool which only help out in situations of need. That does sound quite expensive however.
And, yes, while I hate to be a money-grubber when it comes to lives (regardless of species), it's a fact that people die every day due to lack of resources, therefore you need to prioritize.
There are many reasons not to believe in democracy even if you aren't a part of the privileged minority. Democracy has very few actual advantages to people living in the state barring a decreased risk of a maniac taking all control, and that can be achieved through other means.
Now, remember, that democracy doesn't mean all the sweet things that we want it to mean like freedom of speech, it doesn't mean human rights, in fact, it doesn't mean anything except that the people are in some way made responsible for the acts which the actual elite make.
That is, unless you are talking about direct democracy, something which is partially practiced in Switzerland but in no other country with an actual population greater then a thousand members.
The reason democracy works well in the western world is primarily due to the fact that we are bloody rich, in actuality, relatively benign dictatorship (kinda like chinas) would in fact produce about the same results in all probability. Remember, it's only when there is poor people going hungry that there is true social unrest, so as long as the people are fed and have decent livings, any type of government will stay in power and the people won't complain too much unless the government tries to do other things to stifle the peoples happiness (like totalarian control).
That was the silliest and most biased explanation I've seen in a long while about the four right-wing parties.
No, they don't give additional freedoms to rich folk, they lower taxes to a small extent (and actually give larger tax benefits percentually to people with low income), and that's pretty much the only difference.
Wave had a lot of cool ideas. The problem was that it was a steaming pile of junk.
Since it was a browser-bound experience which didn't even have good functionality except in Gecko and Webkit it really didn't have all that much going for it. Inefficient interface, really steep system requirements and not enough actually useful stuff to counter the disadvantages.
Also, even without allt the problems it had, it was just another form of communication without any hook to actually use it daily.
Remember, even if a service is technically superior to what it is supposed to be replacing, that alone is definitely not enough, you need something else (if I knew what apart from symptoms I'd be rich beyond imagination). Also, if a service is inferior in speed it means it's a pain to use, and, with the market slowly realizing that you need to accept that there are slow computers on it wave really didn't fit, not only should every form of communication work on a netbook, but these days it even needs to work on a bloody cell phone.
So, yeah, bloatware with few real places where it could be used to good effect doesn't gain critical mass? No big surprise.
Talk about nitpick.
Saying that you have to hack your phone to remove a program means that it can't, by design, be done.
What you are saying is akin to saying that since you can (with enough tampering) install the latest android on a windows mobile phone, then that is a great android mobile.
What they did: 1: Offer an explanation of their perception of the issues which have come out of this, backed up by statistics. 2: Concluded that it's blown out of proportion. 3: Offered to give stuff away for free to appease everyone who's had problems without requiring any sort of proof that they do have problems, and to let people get their money back if they still weren't satisfied.
If any other company had acted this way (analysing the problem, giving out the information and giving a fix or refund to the ones who aren't happy), most people would be impressed. When apple does it, it's suspicious.
Heck, I'm suspicious as well and I dislike the iPhone, still, this does seem to have been blown out of proportion. Let's see what happens over the next months.
All the people who pre-ordered where investors, anything else is in fact a lie.
I believe for the second batch they will probably raise prices by a bit and automate some parts of the process which they did manually on the first run.
I long for mine and hope I get it before my trip to london in july.
It may be called manure, but cow-shit is in quite high demand as it is. This is kinda like saying we could burn the cows themselves instead of eating them (not that I do, vegan and all).
I have no idea why you think that Opera has no GUI options. One of the reasons I do use it is because it's the only browser that does allow me to configure pretty much all aspects of the gui.
Actually, SC2 is way closer to it's predecessor than any previously released blizzard title has been.
D3 is the same.
Yes, they have focused on trying to replicate the same experience which made SC great, just as they are doing with D3.
SC2 has focused on correcting the things which where wrong with starcraft, things such as hard to find appropriate matches online, speeding up the start of the game and, well, the rest is primarily that they increased focus on giving more map control and harass options.
Most of the real changes (meaning, not graphics) could've been a new expansion to SC instead of an entirely new game.
I do love that you can select pretty much as many units as you want though, really helps mitigate that the game is more complex these days.
Blizzard has always supported apple.
It has never, ever supported linux, not even a little.
I think it is safe to assume this will be true for the coming years as well.
Particulary since it's easy enough to dual boot into windows.
Dungeons and dragons online already does this. All XP and rewards you get are based around how you as a group finish the instance (you do get penalties and bonuses depending on how many times you die though, and if you left the dungeon), you always run around with a group and no other characters are visible outside of the cities and all characters in the cities interact with you as if you are on of the few heroes helping it.
No collecting wolves tails there, you help people from level 1 and forward with actual questing which feels like it's helping someone.
Otoh, the game started breaking at around level 8 or so when I played it, especially due to haven essentially eternal gold and quite simply too large monsters which made claustrophobic dungeons pretty much impossible.
HoN is a game which refused to change the game to something new and instead decided that every single decision made by the creators of DotA was sacred.
Does things like last-hitting your own minions an not scaling casters in any meaningful way with money really improve the game? Heck, they don't even let ranged heroes get life-steal. The most annoying thing is that getting killed still makes you not only be denied experience, give the opponent team money and experience and increased lane control and increased ganking opportunities, it also makes you lose money.
HoN and DotA on high levels means standing around behind your opponents reach and shooting your own minions, games just drag on and on since no one dares make a move or they will lose what little cash they have scrambled together.
League of Legends, while not linux or even mac compatible at present (might never be linux friendly) and has an awful client actually award teamplay with things like protecting a more dangerous team mate then yourself and dying will win the game as much as the person dealing the damage and you won't get punished for it. Also, it has an interesting metagame which some state is unfair since you get bonuses outside of the game, but let me tell you, actually being able to build almost any hero almost any way and still be effective thanks to runes and masteries is great fun.
From my point of view, I don't think that piracy is in fact the issue.
The main problem with allowing linux is the fact that a lot of people buy this set of hardware as a set of hardware and not as a gaming console.
This means that Sony will not only be making less money then if the sold it as a gaming console, but they actually lose money since they are selling the console itself at a loss.
They should be selling more expensive versions with linux enabled though, upping the price by a couple of hundred dollars would still make them a very cheap source of cool hardware.
Disabling it in all-ready sold products is just a bastard move though.
Roguelike games are turn-based.
Diablo was the first Real-time implementation of it.
But, no, Diablo isn't roguelike, even if it evolved from it and it's obvious that they had played lots of those games.
So, diablo-like is fully acceptable.
Also, games never pop out of a vacuum, they always borrow from other games.
It's your own duty to perform in class, not your professors. If someone can't focus enough in class with a laptop, they have made a poor choice on implement to help them study, but it doesn't mean that everyone should be punished for those actions.
Heck, it takes less effort to me to type then it does to write with pencil, I hardly ever use a pen but I type a whole lot, making it way easier for me to do it while doing other things. I've carried on normal conversations while I chatted with people on the internet, no-one of them seemed to notice any lack of attention on my part. With a pencil, I definitely can't talk, I can't look away and errors are annoying to correct.
The phone on your wrist is a decent idea which is severely flawed for several reasons. 1: Extreme lack of space for all that needs to go in it. 2: Lack of space to dial numbers. 3: Kinda annoying to charge, especially due to the fact that it will need to happen often.
About avatar annoyed me, they somehow said that there where CGI in it that where so good that you couldn't tell it was CGI.
Which isn't true at all if you ask me, all creatures and many plants looked as flawed as most CGI things generally do, heck, the uniform colors where actually worse than what I've seen in several animations earlier (for instance, the raven in the WCIII intro).
Also, I'll never get why games should look real, I prefer them to look stylistic, that's more interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
1: Make an interesting game, with or without the first game, the second one has to stand on it's own feet.
Especially true if it comes out years after the original since most of the buyers will in fact be too young to have played the first game.
2: Analyze what made the first game great, think about which of those aspects are still in demand today.
3: Think about whether the sequel should be an actual sequel or if it instead should be a different games, there are many games that where quite excellent but failed miserably since they are something entirely different from the rest of the series.
Note that these point in a way contradict each other, especially 3 vs 1, and that is intentional, the point is that there is no winning recipy for any game.
Note that creating a good game isn't the same thing as creating a commercially viable game either.
Personally, I've noticed that creating a really fun game isn't what makes game popular these days, it's creating games which takes forever to finish for as little development time as possible.
People refuse to replay good games which is really sad since most of my favorite games ever are defined by the fact that one run-through isn't by any definition of the word enough.
The bad part is that I know people don't agree with me and prefer lame stories and lame gameplay that is built to be more repetitive than replaying the same game over and over.
At first, you think it's obvious that people who are responsible for other peoples' lives should be required to be 100% alert.
However, the problem with that is that this by necessity means that you will need more doctors to man places up, thus increasing costs (not to mention that I don't think that there are that many superflous doctors just ready to jump in).
And here's the thing, in most cases, doctors do get to work reasonable hours, the times they don't get to is related to when there is a current crisis.
This means that instead of saving peoples lives with a risk of doing a clumsy job the get to go home to sleep and the person dies anyway.
Not a good result if you ask me.
The one solution I can see is having a consultant doctor pool which only help out in situations of need.
That does sound quite expensive however.
And, yes, while I hate to be a money-grubber when it comes to lives (regardless of species), it's a fact that people die every day due to lack of resources, therefore you need to prioritize.
So then you would like to pay for the free services you use instead?
You know, people need money to survive.
There are many reasons not to believe in democracy even if you aren't a part of the privileged minority.
Democracy has very few actual advantages to people living in the state barring a decreased risk of a maniac taking all control, and that can be achieved through other means.
Now, remember, that democracy doesn't mean all the sweet things that we want it to mean like freedom of speech, it doesn't mean human rights, in fact, it doesn't mean anything except that the people are in some way made responsible for the acts which the actual elite make.
That is, unless you are talking about direct democracy, something which is partially practiced in Switzerland but in no other country with an actual population greater then a thousand members.
The reason democracy works well in the western world is primarily due to the fact that we are bloody rich, in actuality, relatively benign dictatorship (kinda like chinas) would in fact produce about the same results in all probability.
Remember, it's only when there is poor people going hungry that there is true social unrest, so as long as the people are fed and have decent livings, any type of government will stay in power and the people won't complain too much unless the government tries to do other things to stifle the peoples happiness (like totalarian control).
That was the silliest and most biased explanation I've seen in a long while about the four right-wing parties.
No, they don't give additional freedoms to rich folk, they lower taxes to a small extent (and actually give larger tax benefits percentually to people with low income), and that's pretty much the only difference.
ADHD is very real, the only thing is that the symptoms can occur even if you don't actually have it.
Wave had a lot of cool ideas.
The problem was that it was a steaming pile of junk.
Since it was a browser-bound experience which didn't even have good functionality except in Gecko and Webkit it really didn't have all that much going for it.
Inefficient interface, really steep system requirements and not enough actually useful stuff to counter the disadvantages.
Also, even without allt the problems it had, it was just another form of communication without any hook to actually use it daily.
Remember, even if a service is technically superior to what it is supposed to be replacing, that alone is definitely not enough, you need something else (if I knew what apart from symptoms I'd be rich beyond imagination).
Also, if a service is inferior in speed it means it's a pain to use, and, with the market slowly realizing that you need to accept that there are slow computers on it wave really didn't fit, not only should every form of communication work on a netbook, but these days it even needs to work on a bloody cell phone.
So, yeah, bloatware with few real places where it could be used to good effect doesn't gain critical mass?
No big surprise.
Talk about nitpick. Saying that you have to hack your phone to remove a program means that it can't, by design, be done. What you are saying is akin to saying that since you can (with enough tampering) install the latest android on a windows mobile phone, then that is a great android mobile.
What they did:
1: Offer an explanation of their perception of the issues which have come out of this, backed up by statistics.
2: Concluded that it's blown out of proportion.
3: Offered to give stuff away for free to appease everyone who's had problems without requiring any sort of proof that they do have problems, and to let people get their money back if they still weren't satisfied.
If any other company had acted this way (analysing the problem, giving out the information and giving a fix or refund to the ones who aren't happy), most people would be impressed.
When apple does it, it's suspicious.
Heck, I'm suspicious as well and I dislike the iPhone, still, this does seem to have been blown out of proportion.
Let's see what happens over the next months.
In many other sci-fi series, the idea of living structure has been used already.
The idea is not entirely without merit, however, it does bring a lot of problems as well.
Lexx is probably the coolest example, but Farscape did it very well too.
Heck, even stargate atlantis did it decently.
No, you haven't.
You've played games with a 3d world locked in by a 2d interface.
Doom would be 2,3d, quake would be 2,6d and now, finally, comes 2,9d.
Full 3D will also require multiple screens or bent screens.
All the people who pre-ordered where investors, anything else is in fact a lie. I believe for the second batch they will probably raise prices by a bit and automate some parts of the process which they did manually on the first run. I long for mine and hope I get it before my trip to london in july.
It may be called manure, but cow-shit is in quite high demand as it is.
This is kinda like saying we could burn the cows themselves instead of eating them (not that I do, vegan and all).
So, cow-shit=manure=fertilizer.
Burning it up is idiotic in comparison.
I have no idea why you think that Opera has no GUI options.
One of the reasons I do use it is because it's the only browser that does allow me to configure pretty much all aspects of the gui.
Actually, SC2 is way closer to it's predecessor than any previously released blizzard title has been.
D3 is the same.
Yes, they have focused on trying to replicate the same experience which made SC great, just as they are doing with D3.
SC2 has focused on correcting the things which where wrong with starcraft, things such as hard to find appropriate matches online, speeding up the start of the game and, well, the rest is primarily that they increased focus on giving more map control and harass options.
Most of the real changes (meaning, not graphics) could've been a new expansion to SC instead of an entirely new game.
I do love that you can select pretty much as many units as you want though, really helps mitigate that the game is more complex these days.
Blizzard has always supported apple. It has never, ever supported linux, not even a little. I think it is safe to assume this will be true for the coming years as well. Particulary since it's easy enough to dual boot into windows.
Dungeons and dragons online already does this.
All XP and rewards you get are based around how you as a group finish the instance (you do get penalties and bonuses depending on how many times you die though, and if you left the dungeon), you always run around with a group and no other characters are visible outside of the cities and all characters in the cities interact with you as if you are on of the few heroes helping it.
No collecting wolves tails there, you help people from level 1 and forward with actual questing which feels like it's helping someone.
Otoh, the game started breaking at around level 8 or so when I played it, especially due to haven essentially eternal gold and quite simply too large monsters which made claustrophobic dungeons pretty much impossible.
It's really easy since the phone company logs everything you do.
Also, your phone logs it.
Well, barring texting and not sending it of course, that would fall beneath the radar.
HoN is a game which refused to change the game to something new and instead decided that every single decision made by the creators of DotA was sacred.
Does things like last-hitting your own minions an not scaling casters in any meaningful way with money really improve the game?
Heck, they don't even let ranged heroes get life-steal.
The most annoying thing is that getting killed still makes you not only be denied experience, give the opponent team money and experience and increased lane control and increased ganking opportunities, it also makes you lose money.
HoN and DotA on high levels means standing around behind your opponents reach and shooting your own minions, games just drag on and on since no one dares make a move or they will lose what little cash they have scrambled together.
League of Legends, while not linux or even mac compatible at present (might never be linux friendly) and has an awful client actually award teamplay with things like protecting a more dangerous team mate then yourself and dying will win the game as much as the person dealing the damage and you won't get punished for it.
Also, it has an interesting metagame which some state is unfair since you get bonuses outside of the game, but let me tell you, actually being able to build almost any hero almost any way and still be effective thanks to runes and masteries is great fun.
From my point of view, I don't think that piracy is in fact the issue.
The main problem with allowing linux is the fact that a lot of people buy this set of hardware as a set of hardware and not as a gaming console.
This means that Sony will not only be making less money then if the sold it as a gaming console, but they actually lose money since they are selling the console itself at a loss.
They should be selling more expensive versions with linux enabled though, upping the price by a couple of hundred dollars would still make them a very cheap source of cool hardware.
Disabling it in all-ready sold products is just a bastard move though.
Roguelike games are turn-based. Diablo was the first Real-time implementation of it. But, no, Diablo isn't roguelike, even if it evolved from it and it's obvious that they had played lots of those games. So, diablo-like is fully acceptable. Also, games never pop out of a vacuum, they always borrow from other games.
It's your own duty to perform in class, not your professors.
If someone can't focus enough in class with a laptop, they have made a poor choice on implement to help them study, but it doesn't mean that everyone should be punished for those actions.
Heck, it takes less effort to me to type then it does to write with pencil, I hardly ever use a pen but I type a whole lot, making it way easier for me to do it while doing other things.
I've carried on normal conversations while I chatted with people on the internet, no-one of them seemed to notice any lack of attention on my part.
With a pencil, I definitely can't talk, I can't look away and errors are annoying to correct.
99 dollars to run a machine for 2000+ dollars isn't that much.
200 dollars to run a machine which costs 200 dollars is a bit more.
Still, I'm not saying windows is overly expensive, just that you aren't taking the whole picture into account.
The phone on your wrist is a decent idea which is severely flawed for several reasons.
1: Extreme lack of space for all that needs to go in it.
2: Lack of space to dial numbers.
3: Kinda annoying to charge, especially due to the fact that it will need to happen often.
Also, I fail to see how this is newsworthy, dealextreme.com offers several watch phones.
For instance: http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.13058
Also, the link isn't only slashdotted, the page is even suspended for using to much bandwidth.
About avatar annoyed me, they somehow said that there where CGI in it that where so good that you couldn't tell it was CGI. Which isn't true at all if you ask me, all creatures and many plants looked as flawed as most CGI things generally do, heck, the uniform colors where actually worse than what I've seen in several animations earlier (for instance, the raven in the WCIII intro). Also, I'll never get why games should look real, I prefer them to look stylistic, that's more interesting.