Not quite. There was a modern 8-bit style game for the PC I remember playing a while back where you started out as this young man. Really the only thing you could do is travel to the right, and maybe pick up a girl to travel with you. There were also treasures that did good or bad things to you, but you could get by without them. The thing was though, through all this pointless walking right (or left), your characters started to age, their vision got worse, the music started to dwindle, and in the end both of them died. That was it. No matter how you played the game, this was always the end result. The game was called Passage if you want to try, it's interesting.
The thing with Passage though is that there was no real gameplay. No achievement. No FUN. But I don't think any would argue that it wasn't "art." And that's the kind of game TFA warns us against, instead telling us to look to Portal for inspiration on "artistic" games.
I wasn't arguing that games aren't art, I was simply trying to explain TFA's point.
I think what TFA is trying to do is warn developers about being too "artsy" in their games. If the whole point of their game is to convey a point, rather than be "fun," then he suggests that it is not a very good game. He prefers the artistic level of Portal, where it had character and depth without being completely avant-garde.
I think the whole "games-are-art" debate is silly, because art is subjective. But I think it goes on because some people feel that their hobby will be validated if it's considered an art form. I imagine in a generation or so people will wonder why the debate ever took place.
Vocational schools expand to be much more influential than they are now. Also, there should not be any "college prep" programs in a vocational school. Why study photography for two years in a vocational school if the only result is I get to test out of Photography 101? A vocational program should mean in the end, I'm out in the job market.
Old school apprenticeships should make a comeback. None of this "summer internship" crap. If I know what I want to do, and I'm willing to commit 7 years of my life studying under a master, than there should be some employers out there willing to take me under their wing. Apprenticeships aren't just for blacksmiths and butchers, many modern careers can sustain apprentices. Start 'em washing floors and have them gradually work their way up to working on mission-critical software on a deadline.
Libraries should be the primary educational facility. High school was boring and most of the time was spent studying things I didn't care about--at a very slow pace. Letting people study on their own removes these issues. Giving libraries the budget to bring in speakers and professionals from all fields can do more than silly career workshops and OCIS.
More manueverability in college majors. Some majors are so predefined it's stifling. Interested in taking Spanish next semester just to try it? Tough, this flowchart says that your 18 credits have been defined that semester, and none of them are for singing. Some of these flowcharts even define full-time classes for summer, spring, and fall, to get all that you supposedly need for the 2 or 4 year degree. No wonder people get liberal arts degrees, looking at those charts people have a huge degree of choice in what they do semester to semester.
TFA states that this new technique has only been tested on mice so far, although I truly hope that they can get this working for humans. Here's hoping that we can do effective stem cell research without the controversy.
My guess is that the toilet humor is a result of the game taking place in an 1800's Lovecraftian world, whereas most of their humor in the strip takes place in a time period where there is a video games industry. Perhaps they feel that making pointed attacks against industry shenanigans wouldn't work quite as well in a pre-videogame world. Although I suppose there could be some humor in making ye olde cartoon analogues to names like Gamestop, Activision, Jack Thompson, etc. Considering their target market is basically people who read Penny Arcade, it could work.
Chess isn't a complex game. It doesn't take long to learn all the moves. However, it is a deep game. It requires cleverness and a lot of thinking (and in some cases, a good bluff).
Conversely, fighting games don't necessarily need to be complex. To bring new blood into the genre, fighting game designers should aspire to develop a game that enforces a chess-like mentality while keeping memorization to a minimum.
The Tekken series has been pretty good with not requiring that users grasp a million concepts before they can play competently, but it's still intimidating to some because in the latest edition, some characters have 300 moves. Granted, many of these are very similar (there's probably 20 or less moves that really stand out for each character), but that's still doesn't look good, especially to a neophyte who goes in thinking fighting games are a memorization exercise.
Fighting games wouldn't be fighting games without special moves. But for this generation, let's only do a few for each character. Concentrate on making players think cunningly.
I completely agree on your point about online fighting. Nothing beats your opponent being right there next to you, with friends/audience in the background.
TFA is slashdotted, so I can't get at it, but does anyone who read it know if the Ipod Nano 2nd gen is supported? I know there was a problem supporting it before because of some encryption mechanism, but has that been fixed or is my flac collection still useless with this Ipod?
Think of it this way--It costs $200 to get the cheapest of the current-gen consoles. Or, you could spend $170 on a video card and put it in the computer you already own, and after about the same amount of work as hooking up and configuring your console, you can play PC games. For $30 less. If you're clever and have some PC-gaming friends who upgrade every new generation, you can pick up that same card as a hand-me-down for less.
So, I'd say $170 is pretty cheap considering a $170 video card is designed for gaming. The really cheap cards are more for video decoding and Aero/Compiz, so if that's all you want then don't get a $170 card.
I surfed the web a lot to answer questions that my head developer did not know the answer to, as a replacement for reference books, and occasionally to test or troubleshoot the site we were working on. I can see programmers using it instead of hefting books, but there may be need for it elsewhere.
Gametap is a subscription service, yes, which means that if you stop subscribing your games stop working. However, they have tons of arcade games, classics, Sega console games, and even a startling amount of PC games for roughly the price of an Xbox live subscription. They try to sweeten the deal with tv shows and other extras, but you can take 'em or leave 'em. Some of the games you can buy to own.
Whether Gametap's the best or not is up to you, but it seems odd that they left it out but put Good Old Games in (nothing against GOG, but Gametap's been around a bit longer and offers more games)
My dad was a workaholic and he went "far" in his job, moving up the ranks and earning a six figure salary. How did he achieve it? He spent his nights at home writing memos and reports. He was never more than an arm's length away from a laptop with his email client up. His cell phone was ringing constantly--dinner, nights, family time, no event was so important that he had to turn off the cell phone. He would have been a hero in your eyes.
What was the result, however? He became grossly overweight, sick often, irritable, and in the end he ran off with some tart who was apparently okay with his lifestyle (or perhaps it was his money).
I'm not writing this to complain about bad fortune or whatever (I'm doing fine currently), I'm just writing this to show why I'm going to be lazy, at least according to your definition (working 40hrs a week). Like hell I'm going to work myself to death simply to enrich my employers.
In fact, I've been researching inexpensive housing and increasing living efficiency so that I can thrive when unemployed or on a low salary. I prefer living simple and happy to living large and depressed.
This is why I got excited about HD-DVD and Bluray in the first place. A season of a series on DVD takes a lot less space than the same season on VHS. I was hoping the next format would improve that so that my favorite seven-season-sagas would only take up the space of one season on DVD.
I've had this type of stuff happen before. I read one politican's wikipedia page that said that he had told a reporter to do something "anatomically impossible" to himself. I looked up the story and sure enough, the story mentioned him telling a reporter to "go fuck himself." I thought the wording in the Wikipedia entry sounded stupid, so I changed it to quote what he actually said. It was immediately reverted, and I and some others had to basically get into a small flame war with the guy who reverted it to convince him to keep the change.
Later I checked his history of changes and he seemed to be rather delete-happy. He even joked in a comment "An easy way to tell if a change is vandalism is if it's posted by an IP address rather than a user." Really?
I realize this is anecdotal, but there's a big MMO following in my major. If the people who play them aren't healthy, at least they aren't visibly fat or chubby. I don't think it's as cut-and-dry as "They're playing these sort of games because they're unhappy about their body image." Making generalizations is just as silly as badly conducting a study.
1. Find a topic discussing the technology of a recent game.
2. Ignore the fact that you are a geek, and deride said technology.
3. Justify said derision by arguing that this new technology does not make the game "more fun."
4. Ignore the fact that fun is (oftentimes) more reliant on the creativity and imagination of the game designers than the work done by rendering engine programmers and artists.
5. Hand in your geek card, because for some reason you don't think attempting to approach Pixar-quality animation using commodity hardware is totally awesome.
(Note, I do not have a PS3 and have never played any of the Metal Gear series of games. However, this is an interesting article about the nuts and bolts of game development. Treat it as such, not as a soapbox for your opinions on how fun or not fun particular games are.)
There's this assumption among many people that unless you play one game 8 hours a day like those darn unemployed teenagers, you will invariably suck. That's silly. Most online games of a genre share enough similarities that some skills will transfer. Sequels even moreso. You can play Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Call of Duty in almost the exact same way and do fine (assuming you learned how to play MOHAA). Scifi gladiator deathmatch games like UT, Quake, and Halo are slightly less transferable, but the ability to aim and lead a player don't change, only your general approach to movement.
Beyond that, there's even better news for you. Some games are starting to take importance away from sheer aiming ability and putting it toward teamwork. The biggest example is Team Fortress 2, where a team of all snipers is going to lose, period. Aiming ability will not help you against spies who look like your team's sniper, or automatic turrets which are nigh impossible to kill with a sniper rifle.
Of course, if competition isn't your bag, period, you can always play one of many enjoyable coop games like the Serious Sam series, Half-Life: Sven Coop, Gears of War, Timesplitters, and the upcoming Left 4 Dead. The Call of Duty game mentioned in the story will have Cooperative play, and I'd be surprised if it didn't become standard in all the sequels thereafter.
In cases where the "download" is a key to unlock content on the disc, I completely agree with you. Heck, if the game has 20 soundtrack download packs and 8 picture packs and other types of BS meant to just fatten up profits (I'm looking at you, Soul Calibur IV), I also agree with you. But on occasion, the DLC is worth buying to support the developer if:
1. DLC is done sparingly (i.e.) a game should never have more than a couple of paid downloads, and
2. The DLC is worth the purchase price. $.99 for a new car is stupid, especially if there are 10 such cars. $1.99 for a new song is stupid, ditto.
The best example I have seen so far is Project Gotham Racing 4. They have a "Free" DLC pack that includes a new car and two new game modes, one specifically requested by fans. Nice. But then there's also a $6.25 pack that includes 10 new cars and bikes and 20 new arcade challenges. That's the equivalent of a $6.25 PC expansion pack. I recommend other developers do something similar if they want goodwill from those of us that are skeptical about DLC.
If you're playing only the latest, most graphics-intensive games, than a laptop isn't the way to go. But if you find yourself spending a lot of time playing older games (not just classics, can include 2004 on if they aren't too power hungry or you can handle lower settings), it's a great idea. Especially if you go to a lot of LANs and the idea of unhooking your PC setup AGAIN starts to get annoying. Plus it's easier on your host's electricity bill.;)
Ultimately, piracy may decrease sales of a product to the point where it would not be profitable to develop for the PC. You may think you're sending the message that you don't like DRM, but all they see is that PC gaming is the domain of pirates and people who don't pay for video games, and they may just pack up and leave it behind.
If, in the extreme case that piracy of Spore and Red Alert 3 causes significant financial losses for EA, they may cut jobs back. There have been stories in recent months about game developers and publishers firing people (most notably Microsoft's closing down Ensemble studios and NCSoft's cuts). You may have "stuck it" to EA, but it's not the executives that are going to be hurting.
I'm not saying you should buy games just to make sure developers keep their jobs. I'm saying that if you want to send your message, don't buy or play the game. Instead, make lots of noise--reviews on websites, emails and letters straight to EA, blog posts, telling your friends not to buy their games, etc.
Sorry, what I was actually saying was a horrible, awful joke that implied that there was less fecal matter involved in oral penetration since, at least in most cases, there is less poop in one's mouth.
I did enjoy the cinematic feel, but they unfortunately left the "infinite waves of enemies unless I push forward myself" issue in from CoD2. It feels odd that a rank 'n' file soldier has to lead the charge.
I disagree. Often times I'll set my own price for a game, and wait for it to come down to that price. Also, when I was employed, I picked up almost every "Weekend Deal" on Steam. There were plenty of AAA titles I got for between $5-$15. For many I thought that was a fair price. (Not that they were bad, I just thought the price was reasonable).
Right now gaming is an expensive hobby. While people buy CD's and DVD's for between $9-$15 (depending on how new/popular the CD is), getting a game for $30 is often a 'good deal.' One may argue that a game provides more content than either a CD or movie, and be correct 99% of the time, but not everybody plays every game through to completion. Sometimes a few hours to get a "fix" is enough, especially for busy people. Many game reviewers pan games for having 5-hour single player campaigns, but would they pan them so easily if they were also twenty dollars?
I believe that if every game was $20 (or less due to sales), people would do less research and buy more games. It would be less critical to make sure all the gaming mags give you a great review, because if the game you bought totally sucks, oh well you're only out $20, right? People would walk into their Best Buy and walk out with a stack of games, like some do with CDs or DVDs.
Will this lead to lower-budget games? For some studios, yes. If they want bigger budget games, however, they will have to come up with another revenue stream. Movies have theatres, CDs have concerts, perhaps games should come up with a similar public demoing option?
The Unreal/Unreal Tournament series of games, including UT3, don't have DRM. However, Gears of War DOES, so avoid that one.
As far as I know, Call of Duty 4 does not have any DRM. Searching "Call of Duty 4 $DRM" where $DRM equalled DRM, SecuROM, and Starforce, turned up nothing relevant.
Be warned, both of those games are basically only good for the multiplayer, so keep that in mind.
The Civilization series has strong single player, if you're into turn-based strategy, has no DRM, and really only requires a quick No-CD crack to be completely convenient. This includes every Civ I know of (2 to 4 + expansions).
Telltale games from what I've experienced has no DRM. Their Sam and Max series of adventure games, when purchased directly from Telltale's site, can be redownloaded over and over. This is no large technical feat, however, as their episodes are ~80MB a pop.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite. There was a modern 8-bit style game for the PC I remember playing a while back where you started out as this young man. Really the only thing you could do is travel to the right, and maybe pick up a girl to travel with you. There were also treasures that did good or bad things to you, but you could get by without them. The thing was though, through all this pointless walking right (or left), your characters started to age, their vision got worse, the music started to dwindle, and in the end both of them died. That was it. No matter how you played the game, this was always the end result. The game was called Passage if you want to try, it's interesting.
The thing with Passage though is that there was no real gameplay. No achievement. No FUN. But I don't think any would argue that it wasn't "art." And that's the kind of game TFA warns us against, instead telling us to look to Portal for inspiration on "artistic" games.
I wasn't arguing that games aren't art, I was simply trying to explain TFA's point.
I think what TFA is trying to do is warn developers about being too "artsy" in their games. If the whole point of their game is to convey a point, rather than be "fun," then he suggests that it is not a very good game. He prefers the artistic level of Portal, where it had character and depth without being completely avant-garde.
I think the whole "games-are-art" debate is silly, because art is subjective. But I think it goes on because some people feel that their hobby will be validated if it's considered an art form. I imagine in a generation or so people will wonder why the debate ever took place.
Any news on the new Playstation Wii?
My education wishlist:
Vocational schools expand to be much more influential than they are now. Also, there should not be any "college prep" programs in a vocational school. Why study photography for two years in a vocational school if the only result is I get to test out of Photography 101? A vocational program should mean in the end, I'm out in the job market.
Old school apprenticeships should make a comeback. None of this "summer internship" crap. If I know what I want to do, and I'm willing to commit 7 years of my life studying under a master, than there should be some employers out there willing to take me under their wing. Apprenticeships aren't just for blacksmiths and butchers, many modern careers can sustain apprentices. Start 'em washing floors and have them gradually work their way up to working on mission-critical software on a deadline.
Libraries should be the primary educational facility. High school was boring and most of the time was spent studying things I didn't care about--at a very slow pace. Letting people study on their own removes these issues. Giving libraries the budget to bring in speakers and professionals from all fields can do more than silly career workshops and OCIS.
More manueverability in college majors. Some majors are so predefined it's stifling. Interested in taking Spanish next semester just to try it? Tough, this flowchart says that your 18 credits have been defined that semester, and none of them are for singing. Some of these flowcharts even define full-time classes for summer, spring, and fall, to get all that you supposedly need for the 2 or 4 year degree. No wonder people get liberal arts degrees, looking at those charts people have a huge degree of choice in what they do semester to semester.
Alas, but how do I make these changes happen?
TFA states that this new technique has only been tested on mice so far, although I truly hope that they can get this working for humans. Here's hoping that we can do effective stem cell research without the controversy.
My guess is that the toilet humor is a result of the game taking place in an 1800's Lovecraftian world, whereas most of their humor in the strip takes place in a time period where there is a video games industry. Perhaps they feel that making pointed attacks against industry shenanigans wouldn't work quite as well in a pre-videogame world. Although I suppose there could be some humor in making ye olde cartoon analogues to names like Gamestop, Activision, Jack Thompson, etc. Considering their target market is basically people who read Penny Arcade, it could work.
Chess isn't a complex game. It doesn't take long to learn all the moves. However, it is a deep game. It requires cleverness and a lot of thinking (and in some cases, a good bluff).
Conversely, fighting games don't necessarily need to be complex. To bring new blood into the genre, fighting game designers should aspire to develop a game that enforces a chess-like mentality while keeping memorization to a minimum.
The Tekken series has been pretty good with not requiring that users grasp a million concepts before they can play competently, but it's still intimidating to some because in the latest edition, some characters have 300 moves. Granted, many of these are very similar (there's probably 20 or less moves that really stand out for each character), but that's still doesn't look good, especially to a neophyte who goes in thinking fighting games are a memorization exercise.
Fighting games wouldn't be fighting games without special moves. But for this generation, let's only do a few for each character. Concentrate on making players think cunningly.
I completely agree on your point about online fighting. Nothing beats your opponent being right there next to you, with friends/audience in the background.
TFA is slashdotted, so I can't get at it, but does anyone who read it know if the Ipod Nano 2nd gen is supported? I know there was a problem supporting it before because of some encryption mechanism, but has that been fixed or is my flac collection still useless with this Ipod?
Think of it this way--It costs $200 to get the cheapest of the current-gen consoles. Or, you could spend $170 on a video card and put it in the computer you already own, and after about the same amount of work as hooking up and configuring your console, you can play PC games. For $30 less. If you're clever and have some PC-gaming friends who upgrade every new generation, you can pick up that same card as a hand-me-down for less.
So, I'd say $170 is pretty cheap considering a $170 video card is designed for gaming. The really cheap cards are more for video decoding and Aero/Compiz, so if that's all you want then don't get a $170 card.
I surfed the web a lot to answer questions that my head developer did not know the answer to, as a replacement for reference books, and occasionally to test or troubleshoot the site we were working on. I can see programmers using it instead of hefting books, but there may be need for it elsewhere.
Gametap is a subscription service, yes, which means that if you stop subscribing your games stop working. However, they have tons of arcade games, classics, Sega console games, and even a startling amount of PC games for roughly the price of an Xbox live subscription. They try to sweeten the deal with tv shows and other extras, but you can take 'em or leave 'em. Some of the games you can buy to own.
Whether Gametap's the best or not is up to you, but it seems odd that they left it out but put Good Old Games in (nothing against GOG, but Gametap's been around a bit longer and offers more games)
You may be a troll, but I'll reply anyway.
My dad was a workaholic and he went "far" in his job, moving up the ranks and earning a six figure salary. How did he achieve it? He spent his nights at home writing memos and reports. He was never more than an arm's length away from a laptop with his email client up. His cell phone was ringing constantly--dinner, nights, family time, no event was so important that he had to turn off the cell phone. He would have been a hero in your eyes.
What was the result, however? He became grossly overweight, sick often, irritable, and in the end he ran off with some tart who was apparently okay with his lifestyle (or perhaps it was his money).
I'm not writing this to complain about bad fortune or whatever (I'm doing fine currently), I'm just writing this to show why I'm going to be lazy, at least according to your definition (working 40hrs a week). Like hell I'm going to work myself to death simply to enrich my employers.
In fact, I've been researching inexpensive housing and increasing living efficiency so that I can thrive when unemployed or on a low salary. I prefer living simple and happy to living large and depressed.
THIS.
This is why I got excited about HD-DVD and Bluray in the first place. A season of a series on DVD takes a lot less space than the same season on VHS. I was hoping the next format would improve that so that my favorite seven-season-sagas would only take up the space of one season on DVD.
I've had this type of stuff happen before. I read one politican's wikipedia page that said that he had told a reporter to do something "anatomically impossible" to himself. I looked up the story and sure enough, the story mentioned him telling a reporter to "go fuck himself." I thought the wording in the Wikipedia entry sounded stupid, so I changed it to quote what he actually said. It was immediately reverted, and I and some others had to basically get into a small flame war with the guy who reverted it to convince him to keep the change.
Later I checked his history of changes and he seemed to be rather delete-happy. He even joked in a comment "An easy way to tell if a change is vandalism is if it's posted by an IP address rather than a user." Really?
I realize this is anecdotal, but there's a big MMO following in my major. If the people who play them aren't healthy, at least they aren't visibly fat or chubby. I don't think it's as cut-and-dry as "They're playing these sort of games because they're unhappy about their body image." Making generalizations is just as silly as badly conducting a study.
Recipe for +5 Insightful:
1. Find a topic discussing the technology of a recent game.
2. Ignore the fact that you are a geek, and deride said technology.
3. Justify said derision by arguing that this new technology does not make the game "more fun."
4. Ignore the fact that fun is (oftentimes) more reliant on the creativity and imagination of the game designers than the work done by rendering engine programmers and artists.
5. Hand in your geek card, because for some reason you don't think attempting to approach Pixar-quality animation using commodity hardware is totally awesome.
(Note, I do not have a PS3 and have never played any of the Metal Gear series of games. However, this is an interesting article about the nuts and bolts of game development. Treat it as such, not as a soapbox for your opinions on how fun or not fun particular games are.)
There's this assumption among many people that unless you play one game 8 hours a day like those darn unemployed teenagers, you will invariably suck. That's silly. Most online games of a genre share enough similarities that some skills will transfer. Sequels even moreso. You can play Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Call of Duty in almost the exact same way and do fine (assuming you learned how to play MOHAA). Scifi gladiator deathmatch games like UT, Quake, and Halo are slightly less transferable, but the ability to aim and lead a player don't change, only your general approach to movement.
Beyond that, there's even better news for you. Some games are starting to take importance away from sheer aiming ability and putting it toward teamwork. The biggest example is Team Fortress 2, where a team of all snipers is going to lose, period. Aiming ability will not help you against spies who look like your team's sniper, or automatic turrets which are nigh impossible to kill with a sniper rifle.
Of course, if competition isn't your bag, period, you can always play one of many enjoyable coop games like the Serious Sam series, Half-Life: Sven Coop, Gears of War, Timesplitters, and the upcoming Left 4 Dead. The Call of Duty game mentioned in the story will have Cooperative play, and I'd be surprised if it didn't become standard in all the sequels thereafter.
In cases where the "download" is a key to unlock content on the disc, I completely agree with you. Heck, if the game has 20 soundtrack download packs and 8 picture packs and other types of BS meant to just fatten up profits (I'm looking at you, Soul Calibur IV), I also agree with you. But on occasion, the DLC is worth buying to support the developer if:
1. DLC is done sparingly (i.e.) a game should never have more than a couple of paid downloads, and
2. The DLC is worth the purchase price. $.99 for a new car is stupid, especially if there are 10 such cars. $1.99 for a new song is stupid, ditto.
The best example I have seen so far is Project Gotham Racing 4. They have a "Free" DLC pack that includes a new car and two new game modes, one specifically requested by fans. Nice. But then there's also a $6.25 pack that includes 10 new cars and bikes and 20 new arcade challenges. That's the equivalent of a $6.25 PC expansion pack. I recommend other developers do something similar if they want goodwill from those of us that are skeptical about DLC.
If you're playing only the latest, most graphics-intensive games, than a laptop isn't the way to go. But if you find yourself spending a lot of time playing older games (not just classics, can include 2004 on if they aren't too power hungry or you can handle lower settings), it's a great idea. Especially if you go to a lot of LANs and the idea of unhooking your PC setup AGAIN starts to get annoying. Plus it's easier on your host's electricity bill. ;)
Ultimately, piracy may decrease sales of a product to the point where it would not be profitable to develop for the PC. You may think you're sending the message that you don't like DRM, but all they see is that PC gaming is the domain of pirates and people who don't pay for video games, and they may just pack up and leave it behind.
If, in the extreme case that piracy of Spore and Red Alert 3 causes significant financial losses for EA, they may cut jobs back. There have been stories in recent months about game developers and publishers firing people (most notably Microsoft's closing down Ensemble studios and NCSoft's cuts). You may have "stuck it" to EA, but it's not the executives that are going to be hurting.
I'm not saying you should buy games just to make sure developers keep their jobs. I'm saying that if you want to send your message, don't buy or play the game. Instead, make lots of noise--reviews on websites, emails and letters straight to EA, blog posts, telling your friends not to buy their games, etc.
Sorry, what I was actually saying was a horrible, awful joke that implied that there was less fecal matter involved in oral penetration since, at least in most cases, there is less poop in one's mouth.
I disagree. The compromise is infinity times less shitty once he removes the requirement of anal violation.
I did enjoy the cinematic feel, but they unfortunately left the "infinite waves of enemies unless I push forward myself" issue in from CoD2. It feels odd that a rank 'n' file soldier has to lead the charge.
I disagree. Often times I'll set my own price for a game, and wait for it to come down to that price. Also, when I was employed, I picked up almost every "Weekend Deal" on Steam. There were plenty of AAA titles I got for between $5-$15. For many I thought that was a fair price. (Not that they were bad, I just thought the price was reasonable).
Right now gaming is an expensive hobby. While people buy CD's and DVD's for between $9-$15 (depending on how new/popular the CD is), getting a game for $30 is often a 'good deal.' One may argue that a game provides more content than either a CD or movie, and be correct 99% of the time, but not everybody plays every game through to completion. Sometimes a few hours to get a "fix" is enough, especially for busy people. Many game reviewers pan games for having 5-hour single player campaigns, but would they pan them so easily if they were also twenty dollars?
I believe that if every game was $20 (or less due to sales), people would do less research and buy more games. It would be less critical to make sure all the gaming mags give you a great review, because if the game you bought totally sucks, oh well you're only out $20, right? People would walk into their Best Buy and walk out with a stack of games, like some do with CDs or DVDs.
Will this lead to lower-budget games? For some studios, yes. If they want bigger budget games, however, they will have to come up with another revenue stream. Movies have theatres, CDs have concerts, perhaps games should come up with a similar public demoing option?
The Unreal/Unreal Tournament series of games, including UT3, don't have DRM. However, Gears of War DOES, so avoid that one.
As far as I know, Call of Duty 4 does not have any DRM. Searching "Call of Duty 4 $DRM" where $DRM equalled DRM, SecuROM, and Starforce, turned up nothing relevant.
Be warned, both of those games are basically only good for the multiplayer, so keep that in mind.
The Civilization series has strong single player, if you're into turn-based strategy, has no DRM, and really only requires a quick No-CD crack to be completely convenient. This includes every Civ I know of (2 to 4 + expansions).
Telltale games from what I've experienced has no DRM. Their Sam and Max series of adventure games, when purchased directly from Telltale's site, can be redownloaded over and over. This is no large technical feat, however, as their episodes are ~80MB a pop.