Look at Suikoden III. It does it fantastically. Instead of having super high poly count faces with textures that make them look like zombies, and eyes that stare off into space, all the people in the game have low poly count faces, and a 2D facial texture is mapped onto it, so they can quicky change the expressions on the face.
It makes a huge difference. You can see characters looking at each other. NPCs look like they're actually engaged in conversation because they make eye contact with each other. Characters look pissed on-screen and not just in the little 2D portrait that sometimes matches their expression in the lower text box.
If more people would go with this method, I think we'd have less of these types of debates.
You're probably talking about Vib Ribbon. It came out here. Not only did it bounce to music but it would auto-generate levels (one easy, one insane) based off of the audio CD you popped in.
I haven't bought anything from Japan recently, but on the PS2, the best gimmick game I've ever seen that never made it over here is Seigi no Mikata (Agent of Justice).
You play a normal guy who gets super powers. Rather, you play a guy PLAYING a normal guy who gets super powers on TV. Evrey week, you polish off a new bad guy for the episode, and after your climactic battle with him, he falls to the ground and explodes, like every bad Japanese villian ever made.
Your goal in the game is to not be cancelled. You have to keep talking to people and helping them in mini-games to increase your share of the audience. Eventually, you'll unlock super powerful finishing moves (a la "Form Blazing Sword!") and find out the secret identity of the myterious super heroine who comes in and saves you every once in a while.
There are commercials, the "stay tuned for next episode!" sequences, and the best part, fan letters.
The game also boasts the best theme song ever.
You can find FAQs for the English translations of your choices, and where you have to be to avoid missing key events. I'd have to say if you can find this for $30, you'd be getting your money's worth.
The problem is blaming the pirates isn't the real cause of the problem. There is NO reason, except coporate greed that a Japanese PS2 Disc can't play in an American PS2.
If Sony got rid of the freaking region locking, then the modchips would have far less of a leg to stand on. How many people homebrew PS2 games? A small handful.
Give the legitimate users a legitimate way out and we for the most part won't NEED a modchip. It's not freaking rocket science. But Sony wants the whole ball of wax. Supreme power over region locking, content, and piracy. Ain't EVER going to happen.
Exactly...what the heck do I need to be hearing stuff that's on the airwaves in my video game? (BTW, you KNOW you wanna hear Yanni in your video games. Right now you're thinking of how to create a USB device to Yanni-fy any game on the market.)
You'd think they'd focus on something a little more important, like, making sure the eyes of the 3D player models are tracking something that important to the moment, instead of taunting and posing after a sack...while staring off to the side like they took a couple too many hits.
Anyway, the worst offenders are when they take a group and them have them put the name of the game into the song. "I'm comin at you totally live, like I was Madden 2005!"
Those songs ALWAYS suck. 100% of the time. Or when they get rappers and tell them to rap about the sport...and they don't know crap about it, like Da Brat rapping about how she'd be the Center in NBA Live 2004. Yeah...you...against Shaq. I bet she can jump rope with one of Shaq's shoelaces.
Bottom line...since EA, Sega (Ahem..."Swingtime" anyone?) and everyone else has proven that they can't get decent music for these games...stick the network's atmoshperic music into the game, save some money, and stop dreaming the same dream Squaresoft had with PlayOnline.
Exactly. Especially when you promise that a game franchise is going to be over...you CAN'T make another one after that. (cough*Mortal Kombat*cough*)
The one thing I'm looking for out of the next Tomb Raider game is that it not come out as Tomb Raider, that it have a girl not raiding tombs, and have it be a complete break from everything Tomb Raider became.
You have to throw CDs like you throw a playing card. If you've thrown a forehand, or hammer you know the deal already. Place it in between your thumb and forefinger. Snap your wrist, and snap it back on the follow through. You can get those things going at a pretty good clip. For extra CD type fun, get an old busted hard disk and you can skip those things across pools and bodies of water like you were some kind of IT Ninja.
Please. This has more comments for a recently posted Games topic than most of the others I've seen lately.
I honestly can't believe anyone would have told the "talent" that this is their first time touching a girl. That's just a little too phenomenally stupid to believe, I'm sorry.
My first E3, I went around and took pictures of and with the women, after that, it was kind of...oh-kay, whatever. I just tried to do more interesting things. Like pose with them while holding a tube of Mentos. (That got a great reponse.)
The past couple years what I've noticed is how truly AWFUL some of these women look. For example, the Dual Screen Twins Nintendo hired. The most butt-ugly women at show. They were not a year under 40, and they were (as part of the presentation) trying to flirt up the voice of Mario, who looked to be about 65-70. The sad thing is, I think if they came on to him, he'd actually turn them down.
A lot of women just should NOT have been wearing those outfits they were putting on. I'm not of the "fat people should be shot" mentality, but I don't think you should be getting paid to traipse around in skimpy outfits when you are more likely to make people recoil than not.
This E3, which was kind of shocking, I dicovered that more and more of the employees and the show attendees are very attractive people. The girls working the booths without shedding their clothes were more prevalent, and better looking this year than any year in the past. So it was either, get in line to take a picture with a floozy who doesn't game, or strike up a conversation with a decent, attractive girl who does.
While this article was interesting, it didn't really show any dramatic insight or anything, in fact, that only piece of information I learned from it was that there were booth babes at the Total War booth, and that some of the women there were complaining their mouths hurting. (presumably from smiling the entire day.)
I think the most important line in the article is when the non-booth babe character tells the interviewer, "These women KNOW what they're doing with their bodies." If they didn't want to be hanging around in video game costume for hours, THEN FIND A REAL JOB! Yeah, they're people, people who are taking a job that basically demands they be objectified. If everyone talked to them about the games, they wouldn't have a freaking clue for the most part, and that would mean they didn't have a JOB either. So they can deal with it.
Yeah, the publisher doesn't get paid for the games until they're actually sold. If nobody buys Driver 3, Atari's up sh*t creek. With no boat.
When you're looking for an actual number of units moved, publisher to home, that number is referred to as the "sell through". just one of the many ways lawyers and other such people have mangled the English language beyond recognition.
So, great, then they'll have this Indian comic version of Spidey, and then the one that shows up in Spidey 2, and kids are going be totally confused...
That is, until 10 seconds later, when 2 competing Bollywood studios make movies based off of the Indian version of Spidey as well.
To the comic fan, this is a big ol' WTF. To the studio execs, it's a big, "Why the Hell Not?"
Which PC games do you envision yourself having more fun playing with a stylus or chintzy control pad?
The DS stylus and touch screen doesn't excite me in ANY way. I didn't need a Palm Pilot or any kind of handheld computing device, and I never bought one.
In fact, most of the games I saw for the DS at E3 made very minimal use of the 2nd screen. Oh look, I have a menu permanently open.
What's going to make or break this handheld battle...is battery life, though. Sony made the Betamax...tapes weren't long enough to record baseball games on TV, though.
So they lost to the VHS standard made by an upstart company. (This by way of the informative airline video I had on my last trip to Japan.)
Early rumors had the PSP's battery life at a paltry 2 hours. Then Sony said, "Oh, when you play games, the battery life specs are different, it's more like 10 hours. We just meant 2 hours if you're watching a movie." To me, this sounds like Sony got caught with their pants down again, and are hastily trying to increase battery life before it ships.
Honestly, I could care less right about now. When some GAMES come out, and the whole handheld debate isn't essentially pointless, I'll start deciding which line I'm going to get into.
All three of those games were made before the movies. Those are GAME-BASED movies not MOVIE-BASED games.
If you're going to go with the crappy movie == good game, theory, reading the article would have shown you that bad movies like Toys, still made for bad video games.
More recently, Reign of Fire sucked. The Reign of Fire video game also sucked.
"1.) When characters cry, a giant stream of tears fly out."
Is this any LESS annoying in the standard American way of dealing with this? The character that cries a more realistic stream of tears, but just WON'T SHUT UP OR STOP CRYING? I think this isn't just an anime thing, you just have a problem with overly whiny characters.
"2.) Ridiculous facial expression change when they blush or say wow or say yay."
That's part of the style, if you can't get past that, you're probably not going to enjoy anime.
"3.) Animes that are part comics, action, drama, tragedy is too common."
This is different from Hollywood ANYTHING how?
"4.) Episodes are a waste of time. Half the animes can be compressed into outstanding 2 hr movies, look at Battle Angel & Ninja Scroll."
This is different from Hollywood ANYTHING how? This is like saying Futurama should have just been a movie. Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex was an EXCELLENT series. I thought the GITS movie originally was subpar.
Reason being was that Ghost in the Shell, the movie wanted to express a single idea and took its time doing it. If you figured it out early enough, it becomes a 15 minute short. In the Standalone Complex TV Series, the episodes are 30 minutes, and there's a different idea at play in nearly every episode. It's concise, interesting, and very well done.
Sure there are anime out there that shouldn't be in this format, but that goes for just about the same percentage of US TV Programs. Don't look at anime as being ALL good or ALL bad. There's a large percentage of stuff you just don't want to waste your time on.
"5.) Random peace signs MUST go. Anime characters absolutely abuse it."
That's NOT an anime thing. That's a Japanese thing. Nearly every person my age I've taken a picture with in Japan, male or female, will do the "peace" in the picture. It's the Japanese equivalent of the "Thumbs-up" or "West-siiide".
"6.) Still frames. Artist gets lazy and you hear conversations, but you are staring at still frames."
Yeah, those aren't cool. It's something that doesn't concern you much when you're into a show, but once you've watched 6 or 7 episodes of something you start getting tired of that stuff.
Especially if the stuff's subbed. If you're hearing the language it's not such a big deal, but since you're reading, you're in "detail oriented watching mode" and as such, you realize that nothing's distracting your eyes.
"7.) Overuse of robotics and cards."
The cards are lame.
Robotics, however, are cool. Any time you think there's too much robots in anime, just remember that cool science stuff in pop culture fuels cool stuff in real life, and remember the optical cloaking tech that tech firms in Japan discovered. No optic camo prevelant in American and European TV...no optic camo prototypes made by American or European tech firms.
"8.) Ridiculous physics."
This is different from Hollywood ANYTHING how?
Watch Wing Commander.
Watch as the Kirathi start to ping for the human ship in space. PINGING IN SPACE!
I don't see these 8 things as being obstacles to enjoying what is good. Like I said, there's good anime and bad anime...any of thse 8 "showstoppers" seem like anything but in you're enjoying the plot and characters of the series. If you're not, stop watching.
What I had issues with was the article describing it as being "sexed up" where there's clearly nothing sexual about it.
Eastern Flair = Sex?
Seriously people...only government officials and people in marketing are misguided enough to try and link gong shaped progress bars, round tiles and sex.
Well...honestly the only people I can see doing this are people who aspire to be pro gamers, or people who have TOO much cash on their hands.
The new Alienware ALX systems look really, really nice. Factory overclocked, factory water cooled, and they got some new graphic array where they're having one video card render the top half of the screen abd the other render the bottom, or quadrants or what have you.
They looked great at E3...however...Paying upwards of $4,000 for a machine that's going to be outdated in 2 years ain't my style. I can see people going for it though...max convenience, and max power.
Look, compulsive gaming man. I know plenty of married gamers. By and large, the ones that are married have wives that knew what they were getting when they married the guy and accepted him for what they were.
So...if that's not the case in this relationship, you're probably not looking at something that's going the distance (going for speed....she's all alone, all alone in a time of need.) or you're just going through a rough patch.
Relationships aren't about keeping both parties invovled in a permanent state of happiness, they're about give and take. If this is a particular "thorn in her side" you'll want to reevaluate your relationship, as gaming is something that you consider to be a major part of your hobbies and interests that she'll just never accept.
However, there is the very real point to remember that your hobby is you playing a character that doesn't exist and keeping them out of imaginary danger. On the other hand you've got a live person there who is waiting on you. Especially in cases when the girl doesn't "get" video gaming, ditching her for an imaginary experience is not going to sit well with her.
My advice to you...the game isn't going anywhere man. Cut back a little. Give up a night a week that you're going to see her, and let evil have a day to romp around. Either that, or convince her that the game's only going to hold your interest for a month, but she'll hold your interest for longer. (obviously a more risky proposition.)
While the parent foster has part of it, a lot of designers and developers actually want to put together a good game based on a movie license.
Here's the problem, the developers are real fans of the movie. So, they naturally want to include all those awesome bits of the movie.
Unfortunately, what typically ends up happening is one or more of the cool moments in the movie don't end up using the same type of engine. So you have a first person shooter, and then all of a sudden...you're driving...with the same engine.
So the games start out hamstrung, having to pull things from the movie license and yet have a shorter development cycle than most games. You have to get the game out while the movie's still fresh in the public's mind.
But, you don't want another Waterworld, or Reign of Fire...so you typically don't have game companies rushing out to pick up a license unless it's a hugely marketed motion picture.
You start seeing ads for those like 6 months ahead of time, meaning they were probably shooting like 9 months before that. Assume game companies start work with half the time of movie shoot, and you have basically a window of a year to pump out a game.
This is why the licensees usually borrow an engine slap some new textures on to it and ship it out the door.
It seems like the only real way to win is to create a game off of a film that had some staying power, but make the game 3-5 years after the fact so you can make it something really solid. Otherwise, you're seriously just asking for crap.
Here's the deal. I actually considered getting one when they were first announced. Not for gaming, but because they were making a cell phone that would go international.
Then I found out it didn't work in Japan, or most of Asia, so it became useless to me as a cell phone.
On the gaming end of things, when you insult the owners of 99% of the portables by saying their handheld of choice is "for 13 year olds" and "embarassing to pull out in public" you go from "upstart with potential", to "pointy haired boss with no clue" rather quickly.
The controls on the thing suck, and the fact that they're trying to keep it a tiny cell phone, without making it a flip phone means that they don't a good game from a hole in the ground. Currently, there isn't a way to play a video game that is as uncomfortable as playing one on an NGage. The QD tried to rectify this but still failed.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at Suikoden III. It does it fantastically. Instead of having super high poly count faces with textures that make them look like zombies, and eyes that stare off into space, all the people in the game have low poly count faces, and a 2D facial texture is mapped onto it, so they can quicky change the expressions on the face.
It makes a huge difference. You can see characters looking at each other. NPCs look like they're actually engaged in conversation because they make eye contact with each other. Characters look pissed on-screen and not just in the little 2D portrait that sometimes matches their expression in the lower text box.
If more people would go with this method, I think we'd have less of these types of debates.
You're probably talking about Vib Ribbon. It came out here. Not only did it bounce to music but it would auto-generate levels (one easy, one insane) based off of the audio CD you popped in.
I haven't bought anything from Japan recently, but on the PS2, the best gimmick game I've ever seen that never made it over here is Seigi no Mikata (Agent of Justice).
You play a normal guy who gets super powers. Rather, you play a guy PLAYING a normal guy who gets super powers on TV. Evrey week, you polish off a new bad guy for the episode, and after your climactic battle with him, he falls to the ground and explodes, like every bad Japanese villian ever made.
Your goal in the game is to not be cancelled. You have to keep talking to people and helping them in mini-games to increase your share of the audience. Eventually, you'll unlock super powerful finishing moves (a la "Form Blazing Sword!") and find out the secret identity of the myterious super heroine who comes in and saves you every once in a while.
There are commercials, the "stay tuned for next episode!" sequences, and the best part, fan letters.
The game also boasts the best theme song ever.
You can find FAQs for the English translations of your choices, and where you have to be to avoid missing key events. I'd have to say if you can find this for $30, you'd be getting your money's worth.
The problem is blaming the pirates isn't the real cause of the problem. There is NO reason, except coporate greed that a Japanese PS2 Disc can't play in an American PS2.
If Sony got rid of the freaking region locking, then the modchips would have far less of a leg to stand on. How many people homebrew PS2 games? A small handful.
Give the legitimate users a legitimate way out and we for the most part won't NEED a modchip. It's not freaking rocket science. But Sony wants the whole ball of wax. Supreme power over region locking, content, and piracy. Ain't EVER going to happen.
Exactly...what the heck do I need to be hearing stuff that's on the airwaves in my video game? (BTW, you KNOW you wanna hear Yanni in your video games. Right now you're thinking of how to create a USB device to Yanni-fy any game on the market.)
You'd think they'd focus on something a little more important, like, making sure the eyes of the 3D player models are tracking something that important to the moment, instead of taunting and posing after a sack...while staring off to the side like they took a couple too many hits.
Anyway, the worst offenders are when they take a group and them have them put the name of the game into the song. "I'm comin at you totally live, like I was Madden 2005!"
Those songs ALWAYS suck. 100% of the time. Or when they get rappers and tell them to rap about the sport...and they don't know crap about it, like Da Brat rapping about how she'd be the Center in NBA Live 2004. Yeah...you...against Shaq. I bet she can jump rope with one of Shaq's shoelaces.
Bottom line...since EA, Sega (Ahem..."Swingtime" anyone?) and everyone else has proven that they can't get decent music for these games...stick the network's atmoshperic music into the game, save some money, and stop dreaming the same dream Squaresoft had with PlayOnline.
Exactly. Especially when you promise that a game franchise is going to be over...you CAN'T make another one after that. (cough*Mortal Kombat*cough*)
The one thing I'm looking for out of the next Tomb Raider game is that it not come out as Tomb Raider, that it have a girl not raiding tombs, and have it be a complete break from everything Tomb Raider became.
No, I go paintballing, and people are always wiping themselves down, despite me seeing the ball explode dead in their chest.
Other than that you have the standard, "That was there from last round." and "I just leaned up against a wall that had paint on it."
The trick to this is, play against people you know and you know they aren't cheaters.
Parent post is...um...spot off?
You have to throw CDs like you throw a playing card. If you've thrown a forehand, or hammer you know the deal already. Place it in between your thumb and forefinger. Snap your wrist, and snap it back on the follow through. You can get those things going at a pretty good clip. For extra CD type fun, get an old busted hard disk and you can skip those things across pools and bodies of water like you were some kind of IT Ninja.
We didn't have that rule either. If someone's aiming for your leg all the time, jump.
What are you talking about? Everyone HATES snipers with the wallhack.
Please. This has more comments for a recently posted Games topic than most of the others I've seen lately.
I honestly can't believe anyone would have told the "talent" that this is their first time touching a girl. That's just a little too phenomenally stupid to believe, I'm sorry.
My first E3, I went around and took pictures of and with the women, after that, it was kind of...oh-kay, whatever. I just tried to do more interesting things. Like pose with them while holding a tube of Mentos. (That got a great reponse.)
The past couple years what I've noticed is how truly AWFUL some of these women look. For example, the Dual Screen Twins Nintendo hired. The most butt-ugly women at show. They were not a year under 40, and they were (as part of the presentation) trying to flirt up the voice of Mario, who looked to be about 65-70. The sad thing is, I think if they came on to him, he'd actually turn them down.
A lot of women just should NOT have been wearing those outfits they were putting on. I'm not of the "fat people should be shot" mentality, but I don't think you should be getting paid to traipse around in skimpy outfits when you are more likely to make people recoil than not.
This E3, which was kind of shocking, I dicovered that more and more of the employees and the show attendees are very attractive people. The girls working the booths without shedding their clothes were more prevalent, and better looking this year than any year in the past. So it was either, get in line to take a picture with a floozy who doesn't game, or strike up a conversation with a decent, attractive girl who does.
While this article was interesting, it didn't really show any dramatic insight or anything, in fact, that only piece of information I learned from it was that there were booth babes at the Total War booth, and that some of the women there were complaining their mouths hurting. (presumably from smiling the entire day.)
I think the most important line in the article is when the non-booth babe character tells the interviewer, "These women KNOW what they're doing with their bodies." If they didn't want to be hanging around in video game costume for hours, THEN FIND A REAL JOB! Yeah, they're people, people who are taking a job that basically demands they be objectified. If everyone talked to them about the games, they wouldn't have a freaking clue for the most part, and that would mean they didn't have a JOB either. So they can deal with it.
Yeah, the publisher doesn't get paid for the games until they're actually sold. If nobody buys Driver 3, Atari's up sh*t creek. With no boat.
When you're looking for an actual number of units moved, publisher to home, that number is referred to as the "sell through". just one of the many ways lawyers and other such people have mangled the English language beyond recognition.
So, great, then they'll have this Indian comic version of Spidey, and then the one that shows up in Spidey 2, and kids are going be totally confused...
That is, until 10 seconds later, when 2 competing Bollywood studios make movies based off of the Indian version of Spidey as well.
To the comic fan, this is a big ol' WTF. To the studio execs, it's a big, "Why the Hell Not?"
Dude...only the PURPLE tentacles are evil. Green Tentacle is a friend of Mankind.
And you KNOW Richard Nixon's head on the robot body is storming in right behind him.
That's not it. A couple weeks earlier, they had released a similar game...but you were running a curry shop instead.
Which PC games do you envision yourself having more fun playing with a stylus or chintzy control pad?
The DS stylus and touch screen doesn't excite me in ANY way. I didn't need a Palm Pilot or any kind of handheld computing device, and I never bought one.
In fact, most of the games I saw for the DS at E3 made very minimal use of the 2nd screen. Oh look, I have a menu permanently open.
What's going to make or break this handheld battle...is battery life, though. Sony made the Betamax...tapes weren't long enough to record baseball games on TV, though.
So they lost to the VHS standard made by an upstart company. (This by way of the informative airline video I had on my last trip to Japan.)
Early rumors had the PSP's battery life at a paltry 2 hours. Then Sony said, "Oh, when you play games, the battery life specs are different, it's more like 10 hours. We just meant 2 hours if you're watching a movie." To me, this sounds like Sony got caught with their pants down again, and are hastily trying to increase battery life before it ships.
Honestly, I could care less right about now. When some GAMES come out, and the whole handheld debate isn't essentially pointless, I'll start deciding which line I'm going to get into.
All three of those games were made before the movies. Those are GAME-BASED movies not MOVIE-BASED games.
If you're going to go with the crappy movie == good game, theory, reading the article would have shown you that bad movies like Toys, still made for bad video games.
More recently, Reign of Fire sucked. The Reign of Fire video game also sucked.
"1.) When characters cry, a giant stream of tears fly out."
Is this any LESS annoying in the standard American way of dealing with this? The character that cries a more realistic stream of tears, but just WON'T SHUT UP OR STOP CRYING? I think this isn't just an anime thing, you just have a problem with overly whiny characters.
"2.) Ridiculous facial expression change when they blush or say wow or say yay."
That's part of the style, if you can't get past that, you're probably not going to enjoy anime.
"3.) Animes that are part comics, action, drama, tragedy is too common."
This is different from Hollywood ANYTHING how?
"4.) Episodes are a waste of time. Half the animes can be compressed into outstanding 2 hr movies, look at Battle Angel & Ninja Scroll."
This is different from Hollywood ANYTHING how? This is like saying Futurama should have just been a movie. Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex was an EXCELLENT series. I thought the GITS movie originally was subpar.
Reason being was that Ghost in the Shell, the movie wanted to express a single idea and took its time doing it. If you figured it out early enough, it becomes a 15 minute short. In the Standalone Complex TV Series, the episodes are 30 minutes, and there's a different idea at play in nearly every episode. It's concise, interesting, and very well done.
Sure there are anime out there that shouldn't be in this format, but that goes for just about the same percentage of US TV Programs. Don't look at anime as being ALL good or ALL bad. There's a large percentage of stuff you just don't want to waste your time on.
"5.) Random peace signs MUST go. Anime characters absolutely abuse it."
That's NOT an anime thing. That's a Japanese thing. Nearly every person my age I've taken a picture with in Japan, male or female, will do the "peace" in the picture. It's the Japanese equivalent of the "Thumbs-up" or "West-siiide".
"6.) Still frames. Artist gets lazy and you hear conversations, but you are staring at still frames."
Yeah, those aren't cool. It's something that doesn't concern you much when you're into a show, but once you've watched 6 or 7 episodes of something you start getting tired of that stuff.
Especially if the stuff's subbed. If you're hearing the language it's not such a big deal, but since you're reading, you're in "detail oriented watching mode" and as such, you realize that nothing's distracting your eyes.
"7.) Overuse of robotics and cards."
The cards are lame.
Robotics, however, are cool. Any time you think there's too much robots in anime, just remember that cool science stuff in pop culture fuels cool stuff in real life, and remember the optical cloaking tech that tech firms in Japan discovered. No optic camo prevelant in American and European TV...no optic camo prototypes made by American or European tech firms.
"8.) Ridiculous physics."
This is different from Hollywood ANYTHING how?
Watch Wing Commander.
Watch as the Kirathi start to ping for the human ship in space. PINGING IN SPACE!
I don't see these 8 things as being obstacles to enjoying what is good. Like I said, there's good anime and bad anime...any of thse 8 "showstoppers" seem like anything but in you're enjoying the plot and characters of the series. If you're not, stop watching.
What I had issues with was the article describing it as being "sexed up" where there's clearly nothing sexual about it.
Eastern Flair = Sex?
Seriously people...only government officials and people in marketing are misguided enough to try and link gong shaped progress bars, round tiles and sex.
Don't you realize that this is all part of MICROSOFT'S BIG PLAN?
What'd Steve Ballmer say like last freaking month?
"It's my goal that you can't go anywhere on the internet without seeing a Microsoft logo."
Slashdot.org: Check.
Linux Today: Check.
Way to go team.
Well...honestly the only people I can see doing this are people who aspire to be pro gamers, or people who have TOO much cash on their hands.
The new Alienware ALX systems look really, really nice. Factory overclocked, factory water cooled, and they got some new graphic array where they're having one video card render the top half of the screen abd the other render the bottom, or quadrants or what have you.
They looked great at E3...however...Paying upwards of $4,000 for a machine that's going to be outdated in 2 years ain't my style. I can see people going for it though...max convenience, and max power.
Look, compulsive gaming man. I know plenty of married gamers. By and large, the ones that are married have wives that knew what they were getting when they married the guy and accepted him for what they were.
So...if that's not the case in this relationship, you're probably not looking at something that's going the distance (going for speed....she's all alone, all alone in a time of need.) or you're just going through a rough patch.
Relationships aren't about keeping both parties invovled in a permanent state of happiness, they're about give and take. If this is a particular "thorn in her side" you'll want to reevaluate your relationship, as gaming is something that you consider to be a major part of your hobbies and interests that she'll just never accept.
However, there is the very real point to remember that your hobby is you playing a character that doesn't exist and keeping them out of imaginary danger. On the other hand you've got a live person there who is waiting on you. Especially in cases when the girl doesn't "get" video gaming, ditching her for an imaginary experience is not going to sit well with her.
My advice to you...the game isn't going anywhere man. Cut back a little. Give up a night a week that you're going to see her, and let evil have a day to romp around. Either that, or convince her that the game's only going to hold your interest for a month, but she'll hold your interest for longer. (obviously a more risky proposition.)
While the parent foster has part of it, a lot of designers and developers actually want to put together a good game based on a movie license.
Here's the problem, the developers are real fans of the movie. So, they naturally want to include all those awesome bits of the movie.
Unfortunately, what typically ends up happening is one or more of the cool moments in the movie don't end up using the same type of engine. So you have a first person shooter, and then all of a sudden...you're driving...with the same engine.
So the games start out hamstrung, having to pull things from the movie license and yet have a shorter development cycle than most games. You have to get the game out while the movie's still fresh in the public's mind.
But, you don't want another Waterworld, or Reign of Fire...so you typically don't have game companies rushing out to pick up a license unless it's a hugely marketed motion picture.
You start seeing ads for those like 6 months ahead of time, meaning they were probably shooting like 9 months before that. Assume game companies start work with half the time of movie shoot, and you have basically a window of a year to pump out a game.
This is why the licensees usually borrow an engine slap some new textures on to it and ship it out the door.
It seems like the only real way to win is to create a game off of a film that had some staying power, but make the game 3-5 years after the fact so you can make it something really solid. Otherwise, you're seriously just asking for crap.
Here's the deal. I actually considered getting one when they were first announced. Not for gaming, but because they were making a cell phone that would go international.
Then I found out it didn't work in Japan, or most of Asia, so it became useless to me as a cell phone.
On the gaming end of things, when you insult the owners of 99% of the portables by saying their handheld of choice is "for 13 year olds" and "embarassing to pull out in public" you go from "upstart with potential", to "pointy haired boss with no clue" rather quickly.
The controls on the thing suck, and the fact that they're trying to keep it a tiny cell phone, without making it a flip phone means that they don't a good game from a hole in the ground. Currently, there isn't a way to play a video game that is as uncomfortable as playing one on an NGage. The QD tried to rectify this but still failed.
That's why people hate this thing.
They were showing a movie of Xenosaga: Ep 2, right next to the booth that was displaying Tekken 5.