"We were surprised to peek inside SOE's customer service department, only to find a hoarde of wraiths feeding on human flesh and screaming to shut the door..."
Seriously, their customer support sucks. At least it did a little bit ago, and... well I'm still bitter.
Why would people question Gordon's missing time? They thought he was lost after the Black Mesa incident.
Riiight. So he magically disappears, the whole world is taken over by aliens, magically reappears, is now a folk hero and that just makes sense and by NOT explaining any of that in detail - Valve is telling a good story?
You could barely remember the details of the backstory. If Valve had told a real story, these details would still be fresh in your mind.
And no, I'm not talking about a character change from HL to HL2, I'm talking about characters having enough depth to be dynamic in the story itself. It's definately an improvement to HL1, but we're not talking Halo here.
"Show, don't tell" is instructive of not explaining your situation overtly, not avoiding the story entirely like Half-Life 2 does.
While HL2 had excellent immersion and set scenes, it's story was completely lacking. There's never any depth into Gordon's missing time, you get the background of the war from a stupid bulletin board, and virtually no character undergoes any kind of change.
Yes, they did great on the how - but great stories are based on the what. HL2 was all style and no substance. There's no depth to the combine, no real explanation of it's formation, no understanding of the "city" system. It's a pretty surface, but once you scratch it - there's nothing underneath.
Would anyone expect him to say anything else? Epic is shopping Unreal 3 around to licensees. So... do you think we would say something like "your production budget will go through the roof" or will he say something like "our tools are going to save you money while you make big games"?
Does this outlook not fit perfectly with your call for more scrutiny of our mental health in general?
I realize this is tre late - but to a point, yes. I wouldn't have anything against an Online Anonymous or the like, but I do have something against psychologists spouting babble about how video games alter your brain chemistry similar to crack cocaine, and then selling that to a woman who just lost her child.
I would agree - and was actually more or less the gist of the column I wrote. But even after landblasting her for it she wrote me a nice email and said she appreciated someone writing about her son in an intelligent way and not degrading him after his death.
So I don't agree with her - but I do feel sympathy for her and her loss.
I've actually exchanged some emails with Woolley for a past online column I wrote that mentioned her son. So before the normal rabid gaming reaction begins, let me state that she is a very nice and intelligent woman. She suffered a great loss and is trying to make something good out of it.
That said, I still don't agree with some of her positions. I think she's gotten some bad information from certain psychologists who poorly compare the brain chemistry of someone having a really instense experience to that of crack cocaine - which is simply sensationalist hyperbole.
As several will note, anything can be addictive. People can form a fetish relationship or obsessive fascination with almost anything - it's not a reason to start banning or regulating everything that fits on a shelf. We should be more worried about mental health in our culture on a general basis. Why is going to a therapist still such a blemish? And of course, who can afford it? Video gaming itself is just a symptom of these kinds of problems. You could try to ban gambling, but that won't really help a gambling addict.
[b]Oh..because you never had trouble with cell phone or home phone companies?[/b]
Everyone does, but nothing from the sounds of this. If your phone didn't work one random day of the week, would you keep it? Your TV? Didn't think so.
[b]To me Blizzard is actually doing pretty well in working toward customer satisfaction. All this whining is nonsensical and your arguments just don't hold a small exam.[/b]
Blizzard is doing the bare minimum. They aren't offering reduced rates, refunds or any monetary compensation. They best they are doing is offering free time that you may not even be able to access.
[b]Because it is a GAME, not a business or life-threatening *service*. It is not even a *service* as such.[/b]
Bull. Paying a monthly fee for access? That's called a *service* as such. When did a service have to be "life-threatening"? Talk about an argument that "don't hold a small exam"
[b]Honestly, this game is working great with a few post-launch glitches due to unexpected success. Have you ever lived the launch of pathetic "Ultima Online"? In constant value, it was more expensive than WOW is at that time. And my! What a load of crap it was! Funnily enough nobody seems to remember that mess.[/b]
Yes, because other MMOs have had crappy launches, let's excuse all MMOs from all their technical trouble until the end of time. Let's continue to pay companies a monthly amount to deliver betas, underestimate their hardware and generally not let us play the game we just paid for.
What the hell? How many people ranted for pages because Doom 3 was too dark? Hey guess what... it had this nifty feature where you could play it whenever you wanted and not pay id anything extra for that privilege! Pretty neat, huh.
I'm so tired of the MMO apologists. Because you guys are willing to sit back and subsidize crap like this, I'll probably never play one of these game. I'll never trust them to actually try and make one work, because with audience like that they'll never have to.
Their initial release was just a complete joke. It didn't attract phone users, it didn't attract gamers. They flubbed the product design so badly, that by the time they got around to fixing people stopped being interesting.
Because it seems like NCSoft really tried to go their own route and not tread on anyone's IP. But because a few hundred kiddies aren't imaginative to go much past "yellow suit, claws, bad attitude" - Marvel gets in a huff.
Like this is any different from people who spend three hours having inane conversations about what their child ate yesterday.
When you spend a lot of time with something, it's easy to become quasi-obsessed with it. I had an old roomie that declared all kitten talk banned after we got a cat once.
But thanks to the fervent puritanicaly paranioa which is American culture, they'll point to this as proof that when I get done playing Doom, I'm thinking about killing my neighbor. Or when I finish GTA, I won't be happy until I jack a car. Or any other "people are to weak to discern reality" theories that seem so oddly hard to dispel.
Apparently in all of my years of psych classes, they forgot to mention that we're all psychotic. Would have made a good excuse for failing that quiz...
We get a Mario 64 port. OK, decent - but like 99% of the world has played it.
Ping Pals, a chat program for a platform with a free chat program.
Sprung - a dating sim.
Feel the Magic - a dating sim on acid.
Now a MIDI composer?
OK sure, Ridge Racer, Spidey 2 and Madden at least round things out - but about half of the titles for DS right now are odd enough to make Sega shake their head.
More like rumor and inneundo. Re-hash some analyst's emails. There's no info here about profitability, for one thing. Sure, Nintendo's numbers might not be as large as Microsoft's - but they aren't losing a bundle per unit either.
People have been saying the sky is falling for Nintendo for like, a decade. In return, Nintendo hasn't gotten tired of laughing all the way to the bank.
SOE sucked so badly at delivering it that it's just not a good game. It was horrifically buggy when it launched (my game would crash about 5 times in an hour before I would just stop at times... and then there were the times I would spawn as a wall). SOE's customer service is probably the worst on the planet. (post all your log files, do all our work for you, wait days for any kind of response - I never got help from any at SOE except for getting a refund).
Then, when they start to stabilize it - they start to change the gameplay.
Basically, they had a decent idea, made a beta of it and boxed it. Now that players have fled the scenes in droves, SOE isn't willing to stick up a fight.
My suggestion - don't give SOE any more money on this drek. They don't deserve it. Yes, an MMOFPS could work. Go play some Battlefield until someone figures out how to make one.
I mean, this is an excellent piece on understanding how a client/server model works in an FPS game over the internet. But he's describing an authoritative server with client side lag prediction. You've been seeing this kind of stuff since like Quake II in one form or another, it's just that it's gotten better prediction over time.
Don't get me wrong - he clearly knows his stuff, and knows it well enough to explain it detail using plain words - no easy task. When my girlfriend once asked me why one of my mods wasn't working, I told her that network replication was a bit like trying to get two men in a completely dark room to solve a jigsaw puzzle. I'd say he's putting it more eloquently than I could.
1) Doom was only fast in parts. Several parts were slow and creepy as well. Sure, it was more frantic overall, but not like night and day. If you take some of the dark/oddly lit sections of Doom and expanded it, slap on an awesome graphics engine, you pretty much have Doom 3.
2) Doom 3 wasn't survival horror.
3) Doom 3 was also only slow in parts.
4) Much of Doom 3's level design was lifted from the original Doom concepts. Many reviews even complained about it.
If Carmack hadn't basically said, repeatedly, precisely what it was going to be. He said it was going to be Doom Redux, we got Doom Redux.
Personally I thought Doom Redux was pretty good, although it's the last monster closet I ever want to see. I agree largely with the System Shock 1.5 critique. I had a lot of nostalgic fun playing Doom gameplay, but now I want to see something more credible.
I was really, really into ILB for a quite some time. Back when the story was a real puzzler, it was a lot of fun in a sort of new media meets Agatha Christie kinda way.
Once the Axons went hot, that all changed. The few puzzles that remained were complicated for a single person, but for the ARG community they were solved before most people knew they existed. There wasn't much left to the game except people who had the time/inclination/gas money to go answer pay phones.
Eventually live conversations were introduced, but by that time I had lost all interest. I pretty much knew it was just a spectator sport at this point.
That said, the production values and the writing are top notch. Viewed as one part performance art and one part radio play, ILB is pretty fascinating. It's only as an interactive game did it come up short in the end. I do recommend it, and it got me interested in ARGs overall - but I'm not ILB is really an ARG in the end.
Slashdot Mirror
"We were surprised to peek inside SOE's customer service department, only to find a hoarde of wraiths feeding on human flesh and screaming to shut the door..."
... well I'm still bitter.
Seriously, their customer support sucks. At least it did a little bit ago, and
Why would people question Gordon's missing time? They thought he was lost after the Black Mesa incident.
Riiight. So he magically disappears, the whole world is taken over by aliens, magically reappears, is now a folk hero and that just makes sense and by NOT explaining any of that in detail - Valve is telling a good story?
You could barely remember the details of the backstory. If Valve had told a real story, these details would still be fresh in your mind.
And no, I'm not talking about a character change from HL to HL2, I'm talking about characters having enough depth to be dynamic in the story itself. It's definately an improvement to HL1, but we're not talking Halo here.
"Show, don't tell" is instructive of not explaining your situation overtly, not avoiding the story entirely like Half-Life 2 does.
While HL2 had excellent immersion and set scenes, it's story was completely lacking. There's never any depth into Gordon's missing time, you get the background of the war from a stupid bulletin board, and virtually no character undergoes any kind of change.
Yes, they did great on the how - but great stories are based on the what. HL2 was all style and no substance. There's no depth to the combine, no real explanation of it's formation, no understanding of the "city" system. It's a pretty surface, but once you scratch it - there's nothing underneath.
But I've rambled on this before...
Would anyone expect him to say anything else? Epic is shopping Unreal 3 around to licensees. So ... do you think we would say something like "your production budget will go through the roof" or will he say something like "our tools are going to save you money while you make big games"?
Does this outlook not fit perfectly with your call for more scrutiny of our mental health in general?
I realize this is tre late - but to a point, yes. I wouldn't have anything against an Online Anonymous or the like, but I do have something against psychologists spouting babble about how video games alter your brain chemistry similar to crack cocaine, and then selling that to a woman who just lost her child.
Why would go about trying to make a digital photo display box into a game console?
Just go buy a Zodiac:
http://www.tapwave.com
It's based on the PalmOS, so you don't need a hacked SDK from some odd site to make games for it. You can just, you know, make games for it.
I would agree - and was actually more or less the gist of the column I wrote. But even after landblasting her for it she wrote me a nice email and said she appreciated someone writing about her son in an intelligent way and not degrading him after his death.
So I don't agree with her - but I do feel sympathy for her and her loss.
I've actually exchanged some emails with Woolley for a past online column I wrote that mentioned her son. So before the normal rabid gaming reaction begins, let me state that she is a very nice and intelligent woman. She suffered a great loss and is trying to make something good out of it.
That said, I still don't agree with some of her positions. I think she's gotten some bad information from certain psychologists who poorly compare the brain chemistry of someone having a really instense experience to that of crack cocaine - which is simply sensationalist hyperbole.
As several will note, anything can be addictive. People can form a fetish relationship or obsessive fascination with almost anything - it's not a reason to start banning or regulating everything that fits on a shelf. We should be more worried about mental health in our culture on a general basis. Why is going to a therapist still such a blemish? And of course, who can afford it? Video gaming itself is just a symptom of these kinds of problems. You could try to ban gambling, but that won't really help a gambling addict.
Exactly what I thought.
I mean, it's a common myth - so I merely shrug when I hear it from a gamer. But from someone trying to divine the nuances of two of the top engines?
actually the total prizes is over one mill, but it sounds better for marketing.
And yes, the winners are responsible for declaring their wins on the taxes.
[b]Oh..because you never had trouble with cell phone or home phone companies?[/b]
... it had this nifty feature where you could play it whenever you wanted and not pay id anything extra for that privilege! Pretty neat, huh.
Everyone does, but nothing from the sounds of this. If your phone didn't work one random day of the week, would you keep it? Your TV? Didn't think so.
[b]To me Blizzard is actually doing pretty well in working toward customer satisfaction. All this whining is nonsensical and your arguments just don't hold a small exam.[/b]
Blizzard is doing the bare minimum. They aren't offering reduced rates, refunds or any monetary compensation. They best they are doing is offering free time that you may not even be able to access.
[b]Because it is a GAME, not a business or life-threatening *service*. It is not even a *service* as such.[/b]
Bull. Paying a monthly fee for access? That's called a *service* as such. When did a service have to be "life-threatening"? Talk about an argument that "don't hold a small exam"
[b]Honestly, this game is working great with a few post-launch glitches due to unexpected success. Have you ever lived the launch of pathetic "Ultima Online"? In constant value, it was more expensive than WOW is at that time. And my! What a load of crap it was! Funnily enough nobody seems to remember that mess.[/b]
Yes, because other MMOs have had crappy launches, let's excuse all MMOs from all their technical trouble until the end of time. Let's continue to pay companies a monthly amount to deliver betas, underestimate their hardware and generally not let us play the game we just paid for.
What the hell? How many people ranted for pages because Doom 3 was too dark? Hey guess what
I'm so tired of the MMO apologists. Because you guys are willing to sit back and subsidize crap like this, I'll probably never play one of these game. I'll never trust them to actually try and make one work, because with audience like that they'll never have to.
Their initial release was just a complete joke. It didn't attract phone users, it didn't attract gamers. They flubbed the product design so badly, that by the time they got around to fixing people stopped being interesting.
Dying? It was dead before it started.
Because it seems like NCSoft really tried to go their own route and not tread on anyone's IP. But because a few hundred kiddies aren't imaginative to go much past "yellow suit, claws, bad attitude" - Marvel gets in a huff.
It took me a few seconds to realize it. The ads help.
I'd mod you up I had any points. But I don't. /.'s level of quality is simply laughable sometimes.
Like this is any different from people who spend three hours having inane conversations about what their child ate yesterday.
When you spend a lot of time with something, it's easy to become quasi-obsessed with it. I had an old roomie that declared all kitten talk banned after we got a cat once.
But thanks to the fervent puritanicaly paranioa which is American culture, they'll point to this as proof that when I get done playing Doom, I'm thinking about killing my neighbor. Or when I finish GTA, I won't be happy until I jack a car. Or any other "people are to weak to discern reality" theories that seem so oddly hard to dispel.
Apparently in all of my years of psych classes, they forgot to mention that we're all psychotic. Would have made a good excuse for failing that quiz...
We get a Mario 64 port. OK, decent - but like 99% of the world has played it.
Ping Pals, a chat program for a platform with a free chat program.
Sprung - a dating sim.
Feel the Magic - a dating sim on acid.
Now a MIDI composer?
OK sure, Ridge Racer, Spidey 2 and Madden at least round things out - but about half of the titles for DS right now are odd enough to make Sega shake their head.
More like rumor and inneundo. Re-hash some analyst's emails. There's no info here about profitability, for one thing. Sure, Nintendo's numbers might not be as large as Microsoft's - but they aren't losing a bundle per unit either.
People have been saying the sky is falling for Nintendo for like, a decade. In return, Nintendo hasn't gotten tired of laughing all the way to the bank.
Planetside is, in it's heart, a good idea.
... and then there were the times I would spawn as a wall). SOE's customer service is probably the worst on the planet. (post all your log files, do all our work for you, wait days for any kind of response - I never got help from any at SOE except for getting a refund).
SOE sucked so badly at delivering it that it's just not a good game. It was horrifically buggy when it launched (my game would crash about 5 times in an hour before I would just stop at times
Then, when they start to stabilize it - they start to change the gameplay.
Basically, they had a decent idea, made a beta of it and boxed it. Now that players have fled the scenes in droves, SOE isn't willing to stick up a fight.
My suggestion - don't give SOE any more money on this drek. They don't deserve it. Yes, an MMOFPS could work. Go play some Battlefield until someone figures out how to make one.
But the press release for Untold Legends never says it's an MMO. It says it's made by SOE, which has made MMO games.
It describes it merely as multiplayer, not massively so.
I mean, this is an excellent piece on understanding how a client/server model works in an FPS game over the internet. But he's describing an authoritative server with client side lag prediction. You've been seeing this kind of stuff since like Quake II in one form or another, it's just that it's gotten better prediction over time.
Don't get me wrong - he clearly knows his stuff, and knows it well enough to explain it detail using plain words - no easy task. When my girlfriend once asked me why one of my mods wasn't working, I told her that network replication was a bit like trying to get two men in a completely dark room to solve a jigsaw puzzle. I'd say he's putting it more eloquently than I could.
An ARG I think needs puzzles. Otherwise it's an ARS (Alternate Reality Story). If not puzzles, some kind of game content.
I don't think an ARS is such a bad thing, I think ILB was a very good ARS.
1) Doom was only fast in parts. Several parts were slow and creepy as well. Sure, it was more frantic overall, but not like night and day. If you take some of the dark/oddly lit sections of Doom and expanded it, slap on an awesome graphics engine, you pretty much have Doom 3.
2) Doom 3 wasn't survival horror.
3) Doom 3 was also only slow in parts.
4) Much of Doom 3's level design was lifted from the original Doom concepts. Many reviews even complained about it.
If Carmack hadn't basically said, repeatedly, precisely what it was going to be. He said it was going to be Doom Redux, we got Doom Redux.
Personally I thought Doom Redux was pretty good, although it's the last monster closet I ever want to see. I agree largely with the System Shock 1.5 critique. I had a lot of nostalgic fun playing Doom gameplay, but now I want to see something more credible.
I was really, really into ILB for a quite some time. Back when the story was a real puzzler, it was a lot of fun in a sort of new media meets Agatha Christie kinda way.
Once the Axons went hot, that all changed. The few puzzles that remained were complicated for a single person, but for the ARG community they were solved before most people knew they existed. There wasn't much left to the game except people who had the time/inclination/gas money to go answer pay phones.
Eventually live conversations were introduced, but by that time I had lost all interest. I pretty much knew it was just a spectator sport at this point.
That said, the production values and the writing are top notch. Viewed as one part performance art and one part radio play, ILB is pretty fascinating. It's only as an interactive game did it come up short in the end. I do recommend it, and it got me interested in ARGs overall - but I'm not ILB is really an ARG in the end.