Ooh, I like this. Dunno if there's any truth to it, but I love the idea of making the developers wallow in their own filth.;-) (I get pissed off just waiting for *shudder* my 1meg VBA/Excel project to save; takes about 6 seconds. I hate VBA/Excel, but it does get some bills paid...)
I don't know about anyone else, but Halo for PC is absolutely stunning in the load-times department. It's a cutting edge game, yet it takes no longer then two or three seconds to load any level in the game, even on my 1.1Ghz/384MB Athlon. If you've ever played Halo for Xbox, it takes way longer then that - probably 15 to 20 seconds of boring load screen. There are brief "loading" messages during the game, but no longer then Half-Life's load times.
Speaking of Half-Life, it was probably one of the first games that I saw to handle loading in an intelligent manner - everything's broken up into small chunks, so as you wander around you only see the loading message faintly for three or four seconds on a really slow computer, and on anything relatively modern half the time the game barely hitches. I hope Half-Life 2 has a similar system, or perhaps a method of streaming data as you wander around so there are no load times (although there hasn't been an FPS game that I'm aware of sporting zero load times, so maybe that's just not feasible yet).
One last example here: Nintendo games are the epitome of zero-load. I can't think of a single first/second party title I own for my Gamecube that has noticeable load times. (I have a small exception here for Metroid Prime - while *really* not that bad, I do find the small hallways you run through to be slown down while the next room loads kind of annoying, especially once you get an ability to cross the room faster and you wind up sitting there waiting for the door to the next area to open). From my understanding this is due to the proprietary disc format that Nintendo has selected; one of the advantages to a smaller disc is that you can spin it faster before the forces at work tear the disc apart, which means you can load more faster. Many of the third-party titles I've played are obnoxious in loading, however, and really makes me think that too many people don't give enough thought to load times or how best to optimize a given title for the platform it runs on.
Lastly, I think we need to think about other aspects of the game that are annoying - for example, saving. Usually a manual thing, and in some games horribly obnoxious to do, requiring much digging through menus and confirming overwriting of our previous saved game. Hello?!? Most of the time, yes, I want to overwrite the previous saved game. Is the problem avoiding overwriting your kid brother's saved game? Fine, then let me create as many profiles/saved game files as I want and have three save files inside of that - easy. If the problem is you want people to think before they erase saved games they want to archive, then perhaps there should be two or three "archive" points and one quicksave point where it doesn't confirm (along with the ability to archive the quicksave point of course.) I think alternate styles of saving beyond the standard "checkpoint" would also be a good thing (the ability in PoP to rewind time, while not exactly saving, is a good example of this). What about the corporate logos at the beginning of the game that can't be skipped? While I realize that there's almost no chance that they'll go away, what ifthe game instantly loaded your previous saved game and showed you the logos when you enter the game? (This would also mean missing out on neato main menus and title music, so maybe this wouldn't go far).
Nope, I'm positive it's the first game - I haven't played the second one. Not sure what you mean by your second line - I misremembered the dialog and as the other reply showed, the reference wasn't to a nerd but just to someone controlling his every step. He's also quite specifically mentioning Max Payne, as the reference to "time slowing to show off my moves" shows (sure, now every other game has bullet-time effects but Max Payne was the first, so it was definitely referring to itself).
Granted, it's only in that one spot, and I'd be more inclined to label it "breaking the fourth wall" then metagaming, but it would seem to be exactly what the article talks about.
I had a great laugh in Max Payne when in one of the dream sequences, a phone rings and (I believe it's Mona) says: "It's a video game, Max.". He then proceeds to rattle off all the features of Max Payne, complete with various screenshots, mentions being under complete control by some nerd, and finishes off with something along the lines of "It was the most horrifying thought I've ever had".
AAC is not proprietary. It is an open standard. iTunes and the iPod aren't the only players that can play AAC - any number of MPEG4 compatible players can play it (e.g. VLC, MPlayer, WinAmp with a plugin, etc.) Just because Apple happens to be the one major hardware vendor that has MP3 players capable of playing AAC doesn't make it any less of a standard. Heck, by those standards, Ogg is a proprietary format, since it's only played by what, two or three players that are out there instead of every music-playing device under the sun? Now, it does have licensing issues, but then again so does MP3.
This is waaaay different from the X-Box executable format - a truly proprietary format that truly only one vendor uses. I don't see Microsoft offering to open up the X-Box executable file formats for a fee any time soon...
So? Somebody could easily take an Ogg file, wrap it in DRM and do whatever the hell they want with it. This is exactly what Apple did with AAC and FairPlay: took a standard and wrapped it in DRM. As good as Ogg Vorbis is or isn't, you can't deny that AAC isn't a standard that can be implemented by anybody with the specs.
Now, AAC does have licensing issues that Ogg doesn't, but that's besides the point - licensing or no licensing, you can't say that AAC isn't a standard.
No, I agree with you on that point - I've never been an especially creative person, and I certainly don't think that naming my computers that is original or anything. But, y'know, I started doing this when I was around 10-11 (probably just read the Hobbit, not LoTR - the LoTR character names only came in after I read the trilogy) - so give me a f'n break, man.;-)
Some of the more surreal cutscenes I have found (along with a story line that makes almost no sense) are in Sega's Super Monkey Ball 2. Excellent gameplay, but the cutscenes in Story Mode involve a baby monkey (son of two of the other monkeys) sent back in time to help defeat Dr. Badboon, who is a mad scientist hell-bent on... marrying the one female monkey in the game. And apparently in order for anything to happen in the game the monkeys have to dance around singing magical Happy Fun songs (Magical Spell is Ei-Ei-Poo!). These have to be seen to be believed. (There may be some footage of the cut-scenes here if anybody's interested, although I haven't checked it out.)
If there are any other games with *more* bizarre cutscenes that run on the current generation of consoles, I'd like to hear it.
They really should have included the VR training disc (included in the PC version of MGS, a separate purchase for the PSX version). That's basically some insane number of different levels one can play through... it's just huge. If you like the gameplay, but hate the story, that would be a really strong option. Unfortunately it sounds like it's not included, which is a big bummer (I think it would've gotten much higher ratings if it had included the VR Training)
I don't know about anybody else, but I found that article to be extremely poorly written. First off, there didn't really seem to be much information contained with the article - just some fanboy going "OMG! It's THAT GUY'S OFFICE!". Secondly, there are several points in the article where there's a paragraph repeated twice and worded differently, which confused the hell out of me until I figured out what was going on.
On the good side, I had no idea that Rare was as large as they are - they have their own cafe and motion capture studio, and that many programmers? I had always pictured them as a much smaller studio, although I suppose they've been around for long enough that they've probably outgrown that long ago.
The last thing is whether or not Rare still retains it's magic. IIRC several of the programmers from Rare left and made Free Radical and games like TimeSplitters 2 (which was critically acclaimed), so a few people think that Rare's next batch of games (now that they're owned by MS) will suck. I guess we'll see, won't we...
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Ooh, I like this. Dunno if there's any truth to it, but I love the idea of making the developers wallow in their own filth. ;-) (I get pissed off just waiting for *shudder* my 1meg VBA/Excel project to save; takes about 6 seconds. I hate VBA/Excel, but it does get some bills paid...)
I don't know about anyone else, but Halo for PC is absolutely stunning in the load-times department. It's a cutting edge game, yet it takes no longer then two or three seconds to load any level in the game, even on my 1.1Ghz/384MB Athlon. If you've ever played Halo for Xbox, it takes way longer then that - probably 15 to 20 seconds of boring load screen. There are brief "loading" messages during the game, but no longer then Half-Life's load times.
Speaking of Half-Life, it was probably one of the first games that I saw to handle loading in an intelligent manner - everything's broken up into small chunks, so as you wander around you only see the loading message faintly for three or four seconds on a really slow computer, and on anything relatively modern half the time the game barely hitches. I hope Half-Life 2 has a similar system, or perhaps a method of streaming data as you wander around so there are no load times (although there hasn't been an FPS game that I'm aware of sporting zero load times, so maybe that's just not feasible yet).
One last example here: Nintendo games are the epitome of zero-load. I can't think of a single first/second party title I own for my Gamecube that has noticeable load times. (I have a small exception here for Metroid Prime - while *really* not that bad, I do find the small hallways you run through to be slown down while the next room loads kind of annoying, especially once you get an ability to cross the room faster and you wind up sitting there waiting for the door to the next area to open). From my understanding this is due to the proprietary disc format that Nintendo has selected; one of the advantages to a smaller disc is that you can spin it faster before the forces at work tear the disc apart, which means you can load more faster. Many of the third-party titles I've played are obnoxious in loading, however, and really makes me think that too many people don't give enough thought to load times or how best to optimize a given title for the platform it runs on.
Lastly, I think we need to think about other aspects of the game that are annoying - for example, saving. Usually a manual thing, and in some games horribly obnoxious to do, requiring much digging through menus and confirming overwriting of our previous saved game. Hello?!? Most of the time, yes, I want to overwrite the previous saved game. Is the problem avoiding overwriting your kid brother's saved game? Fine, then let me create as many profiles/saved game files as I want and have three save files inside of that - easy. If the problem is you want people to think before they erase saved games they want to archive, then perhaps there should be two or three "archive" points and one quicksave point where it doesn't confirm (along with the ability to archive the quicksave point of course.) I think alternate styles of saving beyond the standard "checkpoint" would also be a good thing (the ability in PoP to rewind time, while not exactly saving, is a good example of this). What about the corporate logos at the beginning of the game that can't be skipped? While I realize that there's almost no chance that they'll go away, what ifthe game instantly loaded your previous saved game and showed you the logos when you enter the game? (This would also mean missing out on neato main menus and title music, so maybe this wouldn't go far).
Ah yes. Thanks for the laugh. :-)
Mmm, now I have an urge to play Max Payne...
Nope, I'm positive it's the first game - I haven't played the second one. Not sure what you mean by your second line - I misremembered the dialog and as the other reply showed, the reference wasn't to a nerd but just to someone controlling his every step. He's also quite specifically mentioning Max Payne, as the reference to "time slowing to show off my moves" shows (sure, now every other game has bullet-time effects but Max Payne was the first, so it was definitely referring to itself).
Granted, it's only in that one spot, and I'd be more inclined to label it "breaking the fourth wall" then metagaming, but it would seem to be exactly what the article talks about.
I had a great laugh in Max Payne when in one of the dream sequences, a phone rings and (I believe it's Mona) says: "It's a video game, Max.". He then proceeds to rattle off all the features of Max Payne, complete with various screenshots, mentions being under complete control by some nerd, and finishes off with something along the lines of "It was the most horrifying thought I've ever had".
I really got a big kick out of that.
Originally, Sega was a whole bunch of teams working together under the Sega name.
I think at some point they all split up, and now all the different teams are individual companies, although often still branded as Sega games.
I don't know the details here... anyone know? Bueller? Anyone?
Quick note:
:-)
Now, it does have licensing issues, but then again so does MP3.
It means AAC.
Shoulda previewed.
AAC is not proprietary. It is an open standard. iTunes and the iPod aren't the only players that can play AAC - any number of MPEG4 compatible players can play it (e.g. VLC, MPlayer, WinAmp with a plugin, etc.) Just because Apple happens to be the one major hardware vendor that has MP3 players capable of playing AAC doesn't make it any less of a standard. Heck, by those standards, Ogg is a proprietary format, since it's only played by what, two or three players that are out there instead of every music-playing device under the sun? Now, it does have licensing issues, but then again so does MP3.
This is waaaay different from the X-Box executable format - a truly proprietary format that truly only one vendor uses. I don't see Microsoft offering to open up the X-Box executable file formats for a fee any time soon...
You do realize that this will never happen, right? :-)
So? Somebody could easily take an Ogg file, wrap it in DRM and do whatever the hell they want with it. This is exactly what Apple did with AAC and FairPlay: took a standard and wrapped it in DRM. As good as Ogg Vorbis is or isn't, you can't deny that AAC isn't a standard that can be implemented by anybody with the specs.
Now, AAC does have licensing issues that Ogg doesn't, but that's besides the point - licensing or no licensing, you can't say that AAC isn't a standard.
No, I agree with you on that point - I've never been an especially creative person, and I certainly don't think that naming my computers that is original or anything. But, y'know, I started doing this when I was around 10-11 (probably just read the Hobbit, not LoTR - the LoTR character names only came in after I read the trilogy) - so give me a f'n break, man. ;-)
I've called my Windows box Saruman.
Of course, I'll be upgrading in a week or two, which means I'll have to re-christen it Sauron or something more evil.
But many of my computers have had names from LoTR. I guess that kinda marks me as a geek, doesn't it?
Yeah, but if you have to set the font size up to one bajillion points what good is your high-res screen? ;-)
Some of the more surreal cutscenes I have found (along with a story line that makes almost no sense) are in Sega's Super Monkey Ball 2. Excellent gameplay, but the cutscenes in Story Mode involve a baby monkey (son of two of the other monkeys) sent back in time to help defeat Dr. Badboon, who is a mad scientist hell-bent on... marrying the one female monkey in the game. And apparently in order for anything to happen in the game the monkeys have to dance around singing magical Happy Fun songs (Magical Spell is Ei-Ei-Poo!). These have to be seen to be believed. (There may be some footage of the cut-scenes here if anybody's interested, although I haven't checked it out.)
If there are any other games with *more* bizarre cutscenes that run on the current generation of consoles, I'd like to hear it.
remember Warcraft III needs local admin rights on windows, so it could theoretically read your whole harddisk and registry
So does every other game in existence that has copy protection on the CD.
BlueTeeth?
Well, at least it's not blue balls...
What's next? I'm going to get a free song with a Happy Meal?
Actually, there is a rumor floating around that McDonald's may give away 1 billion songs at some undetermined point in the future.
They really should have included the VR training disc (included in the PC version of MGS, a separate purchase for the PSX version). That's basically some insane number of different levels one can play through... it's just huge. If you like the gameplay, but hate the story, that would be a really strong option. Unfortunately it sounds like it's not included, which is a big bummer (I think it would've gotten much higher ratings if it had included the VR Training)
I don't know about anybody else, but I found that article to be extremely poorly written. First off, there didn't really seem to be much information contained with the article - just some fanboy going "OMG! It's THAT GUY'S OFFICE!". Secondly, there are several points in the article where there's a paragraph repeated twice and worded differently, which confused the hell out of me until I figured out what was going on.
On the good side, I had no idea that Rare was as large as they are - they have their own cafe and motion capture studio, and that many programmers? I had always pictured them as a much smaller studio, although I suppose they've been around for long enough that they've probably outgrown that long ago.
The last thing is whether or not Rare still retains it's magic. IIRC several of the programmers from Rare left and made Free Radical and games like TimeSplitters 2 (which was critically acclaimed), so a few people think that Rare's next batch of games (now that they're owned by MS) will suck. I guess we'll see, won't we...
You know, I'd want to download this, but I'm absolutely terrified that the MPAA would start collecting IPs and sue me.
Guess I'll wait until May... *sigh*
Better be careful, we don't like patents 'round these parts. ;-)
some of us don't have the luxury of changing a distro as often as we change our shorts
What about changing our shorts as often as we switch distros?
That's from almost two years ago, and none of the few failures mention the word "run" or "jog". Sorry, please play again. :P
Geez, didn't realize so many people *liked* the catalogs... ;)
;-)
It was supposed to be funny. Laugh.
Isn't that all those catalogs are good for?