We've had movies based on games, games based on comics, games based on movies and TV shows, movies based on TV shows, games based on books, and soundtracks for all of them (but comics of course). Everything has been intertwined for years. And only the most idiotic of individuals could possibly isolate any one of these media and consider them not to be works of art.
Chrono Trigger. Street Fighter II. Virtua Fighter. Starcraft. Metal Gear Solid. Art?
Games are some of highest forms of art in existence as they include:
- writing: storyline, plot twists, character history and back story - visual art: graphics, design, characters, creatures, environments - animated art: motion capture, cartoon animation - special effects: rag doll physics, explosions, stop motion (Max Payne), complex lighting - sound: sound effects, samples, ambient noise, environmental sounds, foley noise - music: original and licensed music, Chrono Trigger has amazing original music, Grand Theft Auto has amazing licensed music - acting: voice acting, including many AAA games having Hollywood level talent
Are games considered brilliant works of art? David? Mona Lisa? Sistine Chapel? Are they considered as exceptional art because of the difficulty of the work?
What about the difficulty in creating an original title such as Half Life? Or Starcraft? Or Chrono Trigger?
David wasn't the first statue, Mona Lisa not the first painting, Sistine Chapel not the first mural, Starcraft not the first RTS, Half Life not the first FPS, Chrono Trigger not the first RPG, but they are standouts, works of a art, and unique accomplishments. And much time, thought, and effort went into the making of all them.
Just look at the balance of Street Fighter II (which took fifteen years), or Starcraft (still being balanced every day in Korea and Blizzard HQ), or Virtua Fighter (Sega revises the arcade versions several times). Is there not an art of game balance?
Balancing Virtua Fighter, where you have a cast of 19 extremely different characters that fight in different ways, or Starcraft where three completely unique races competing on different maps with different starting locations. Is there not an art to balancing those games? If it was a science then each character would be the same, each race the same.
And level design. It's EXACTLY like set design but more imaginative as you aren't confined to real world physics. Cliff Blezinski designed some of the most amazing architecture I have ever seen. What buildings did he create? None. He made levels, amazing levels, in Unreal Tournament. Levels that are works of art. (UT1 also had an amazing soundtrack).
Directing an in game cut scene is exactly like directing a scene in a movie (except the actors don't talk back). Look at Final Fantasy X or Metal Gear Solid 4.
Creating a game soundtrack is the same as making one for a film or television show. Look at Grand Theft Auto, Chrono Trigger, Halo.
Creating the 3D models for characters in game is the same as carving a statue. The characters in Virtua Fighter 5R are extraordinary when you see them moving on an HDTV monitor at the arcade.
Writing a script or character for a game is the same as writing one for a book or comic. Solid Snake & Niko Bellic have fuller lives and stories than some of the longest running television characters.
Animating a character and his or her in game moves is the same as animating a character for an animated or 3D movie. The animations for Virtua Fighter 5R are just as impressive or better than Toy Story or Wall-E. VF5R moves at a blazing 60fps and the animations are fluid and jaw dropping.
Cinema is art, music is art, television is art, painting or photography is art, writing is art, and so are games.
The way I got Firefox on the three PCs that I use for personal and professional reasons was through an HTTP download from Mozilla's website accessed through Internet Explorer. It was easy and efficient to get Firefox this way.
To me, the sole reason that IE has existed on my PCs, was to serve as the program that allowed me to download Firefox. Once Firefox was installed I disabled IE from being able to visit any website (zero addresses are on the allowed list) so even if a program automatically boots up IE for some reason the site will be blocked as all other sites are.
I would be shocked if most people didn't obtain Firefox this way, downloading the install executable from a link using IE.
This suit makes zero sense. If you're buying a PC with a Windows OS in it, your default internet browsing option is going to be IE. The suit would make sense if MS forbid PC owners from installing Firefox but you have a choice of what browser you want as you can download Firefox. If for some reason you refuse to open IE that one time, you can get a friend to give you the install on USB or CD.
To be honest, what really spoils a game for me, is when every single publication and media outlet for video game reviews praises a game beyond belief for the most trivial of aspects but fails to mention the overarching and incredibly frustrating and ubiquitous downsides and shortcomings of a game.
Obviously spoiling plot twists, game endings, or surprise moments and easter eggs, is a major fau paux. But game reviewers rarely ever engage in writing those revelations and leave them for the reader (or player) to discover.
Video game reviews have been going on since video games have been around. The fact that one reviewer received one single complaint saying that the MTV.com writer spoiled Killzone 2 requires an entire discussion around it is a tad bit reactionary and absurd.
The real way that game reviews spoil a game for me is when they review a game for being 'perfect' or 'near perfect' but when I get my copy of said game it's filled with bugs, glitches, bad writing, plot holes, lackluster story, bad endings, overpriced DLC, archaic or intrusive or disruptive DRM, the game costs more than its worth as you can beat it in two days making renting it a better option, or that the game is all around terrible but somehow managed a score in the eightieth to ninetieth percentile (with some even scoring perfect scores.
Oddly I've yet to see a game score a perfect with the review mentioning only positives, there is always one negative. Wouldn't that negative imply a flaw hence negating the perfection that a game allegedly has?
Yes spoiling plot elements or easter eggs is a terribly thing for reviewers to do, but they've been doing far worse things in the industry for years.
I rent video games that I'm not familiar with, if I like them, I go to Amazon or Gamestop or whatever and I buy them. Sometimes I just buy the game when I know I'm going to like it, if I could pre-order Starcraft II right now I would.
I rent movies, DVD & BD, and download rentals from the Playstation Network, if I like the movie, then I buy it. If I know I'm going to like the movie, Blade Runner, The Thing, I'll order it before renting it. If LoTR extended editions were on BD right now I'd have them without renting them.
I watch TV shows on my cable connection, if I like them, I might purchase the series on DVD.
But where do I rent my music? The clips on most websites (aside from the excellent DJDownload or Bleep) are only 30-60 seconds long and are in 96kbps/mono or worse quality. How am I possibly supposed to tell if a song is going to be good based on that clip?
I don't listen to music you'll hear on the radio so I can't get a preview from radio or TV. I DJ professionally (underground electronic dance music) in New York (hence Vinyl being in my nick) so being able to hear a full track before I purchase it is extremely important. But not only that, but being able to hear a file that is not compressed (such as.WAV) is also equally important. The only place to do that is piracy.
I would love it even if I could rent music that had a voice-over embedded in the middle of the track. Say you have a five minute song. Cut some parts of it or add in a voice saying "THIS SONG IS A DEMO" for a couple of segments so that DJs can't use it in a club without looking like idiots.
I probably spend $5,000 on music each year so I'm going to get burned by some bad purchases in hindsight but nothing aggravates me more than hearing a clip of a song on a digital download site, then downloading the song, and having it sound completely different, or the rest of the track sound nothing like the preview clip.
And why would you care about a dual-boot computer, which obviously has a valid XP license so you could just remove Vista?
Why would I pay for a dual boot computer with two OS on it when I would only be using one? Because I don't want to pay for both of them. I only want to use XP. I don't want to pay for Vista AND XP if I'm only using one of them.
There is no reason for me to buy the more expensive Windows 7 when it debuts than to get a computer with the cheaper, more reliable, XP.
...is that this summer when I plan on purchasing a new PC, I better have the option of having XP as the only OS on the computer. No dual boot XP/Vista, no Windows 7, just XP.
I'm not sure if it's quite -232 Celsius in my apartment but it's pretty close. They probably could have achieved 6.0GHz overclocking using an air-cooled system in my living room alone.
Is this what our government is wasting its time with? Monitoring what websites we browse even more? Is knowing what John and Jane Doe viewed on YouTube going to restore our economy or end the war? Shouldn't those be the priorities instead?
We are at war with two countries that we have no business being involved with. Our entire economy and capitalistic system is rapidly collapsing while rampant bailout spending is furthering the problems with no oversight whatsoever. Unemployment and homelessness are continually rising as are foreclosure rates. We have one of the worst education success rates and literacy rates of developed nations but we spend the most per capita of all developed countries on education. Global warming destroying our habitat and living space. Why isn't the federal government focusing 100% on those issues? Even a second of manpower wasted on monitoring YouTube usage by John Doe is a complete waste of federal resources.
I wonder how many people and lawyers and lobbyists where hired and used to make this one decision about tracking internet usage? A team of ten? Possibly fifty? How much did this one decision cost in terms of hours? How many billable hours are we talking on taxpayer burden? $500,000? $1,000,000 worth of taxpayer money?
The fact is that this is a colossal waste of public resources. The more time spent on anything but restructuring our economy and removing us from war, the closer we get to our complete collapse as a nation.
This is just a small example of how the federal government wastes its time. Congressional hearings for cheating in Major League Baseball? Check. Joe Biden and John McCain were major players in those hearings by the way. Seeing if video games can be banned from being sold if they are violent? Check. Hilary Clinton and Al & Tipper Gore have had that on their agenda for years. Instead of worrying about issues that matter our government hires teams of lawyers and technicians to track YouTube usage or investigate athletes or to stop GTA from being played.
There isn't a day where I play Metal Gear Online 2.0 or Gears of War 2 online where I do not hear someone say 'fuck' or 'shit' or 'dicklicker' using their headset or bluetooth mic or typing those same words into the in-game chat box.
Shouldn't New York State ban all multi-player games that have in-game forms of communication?
But what if they disabled communication in games? What if in Starcraft or any other RTS, the opposing player arranged his buildings to form the word 'cock' ? Shouldn't we ban Starcraft as there is the potential to communicate bad words?
What constitutes profanity? Swear words? Bad words? What is a bad word? Is taking the (fictitious) Lord's name in vain using profanity? I guess that means GOD of War is a DISGUSTING AND INAPPROPRIATE GAME!!!
These lawmakers will not stop until ALL games are banned.
When I start up my IBM ThinkPad (1.5ghz single processor, 512RAM, garbage video card) running Windows XP, it takes roughly 10-15 seconds to get to the user log-in interface from the moment the power button is pressed.
But, once you log in, you are talking two to three minutes where background applications and processes are opening, explorer is loading, and applications that launch at start are loading.
After you log in does that time count as boot time? Considering it takes me 10-15 seconds to get to the sign in screen, not that much time, but after logging in it takes well over two minutes for me to be able to actually run anything at normal capacity.
Well, that was the rationale of the first CDROM games for PC. The copy protection was the fact that one would have to pay exorbitant sums in order to duplicate CDs. It worked for a short while.
CD-ROMs really had the 'CD Key' as their main form of copy protection. No one had to pay any amount get a pirated CD if they couldn't download it. You could even purchase a CDR for pennies and burn a copy if there was no CD Key. That's hardly exorbitant amounts of money. My friend lived in Turkey for five years from 1997 to 2001, and he would send me pirated PC games on CD every other month. All of those CDs came with hacks and custom patches that disabled or overwrote the CD Key check. The bootleg CDs even had custom color artwork printed onto the CDRs. I had a pirated copy of Starcraft I used for LAN parties that had Protoss and Terran artwork and my friends asked me where I got the 'limited edition' Starcraft CD. I just laughed. I own three legit copies of the SC and Brood War bundle though.
Size was never a legitimate deterrent for piracy. If you lacked a good internet connection you could go into IRC or USENET and find someone to trade you a burned copy of a game or you could purchase a burned copy from the internet very easily. CD Keys were cracked mere hours after games were released. And CD Keys were meant to stop piracy of gaming software.
Today, you have to admit it's pretty compelling to be able to start downloading a handheld RPG that takes 30 hours to complete and have it downloaded and ready to play before you're even finished reading the review.
I never pirate games. Most movies and music I have no problem with 'pirating'. But even the $60 I spent for Metal Gear Solid 4 (and $30 on the expansion packs) has provided me with over 400 hours of solid (pun intended) entertainment.
I could understand hating the MPAA and RIAA and pirating them. But when it comes to independent movies and music I never pirate.
But for games as a hardcore gamer I will pay for everything from Virtua Fighter to Mario Kart.
People pirate X-Box 360 games, PS2 and Dreamcast games, and emulate Game Boy Advance and Super Nintendo games. From a 750kb ROM to a full 4.9 gig ISO file.
Anyone with a 'decent' broadband connection can leave a torrent or PSP program on overnights and grab any game they want relatively easily.
Size has never stopped most people from pirating games before who want to pirate.
People segmented PC games into.rar/.zip files and shared them on IRC or USENET well over a decade ago. Those games were ten times the size of a single DS game and that was then.
I purchased Golden Sun I and II for my Game Boy Advance when they came out but only opened them for the manual, the games are sitting in a box never used. I downloaded the ROMS that same week and played them off of an emulator. Full screen, my own controller, save states, etc.
Yes piracy sucks for game companies but for keeping old cartridge games alive I use ROMS always. And I own the original game at least.
For years people have been programming entire play-throughs of games using programmable inputs on emulators.
This is the same concept, you input an exact sequence of events for the controller, that will exactly complete a part of the game, or the entire game if you want. But instead of the tool-assisted-speed-run community doing it, it is the developers themselves this time.
It is very very complicated to program input commands for a game and doing a run through of an entire game is incredibly laborious. You need to now each frame, every aspect of the game, and compensate and adjust for each factor. And randomness? Some programmed inputs for games have luck manipulation in them. For example, in the Mega Man X series the boss A.I. would behave seemingly random in their attack patterns. So if you input attack commands and the boss randomly jumped over you, you would need to input direction commands to compensate for having to fire in a new direction. But once you commit to those programmed commands you have no control over how the A.I. is going to behave the next time you execute the script. But, for the MMX series, there are certain inputs if the player makes them, such as dashing twice then jumping, that make the bosses attack in the same way over and over again eliminating any randomness. But programming a single boss fight in a nearly two decade old Mega Man game for the SNES takes hours and hours of programming and testing.
It would be more logical for Nintendo to ship a DVD with a video walkthrough of the game. Or smarter, create a Nintendo YouTube channel featuring video walkthroughs of each level.
People the day Super Mario Galaxy (Wii) came out uploaded the entire game level by level and how to beat each level.
Nintendo recently hired tournament fighting game player David Sirlin to produce tutorial videos for playing Nintedo's Supure Smash Brothers Brawl game for Wii.
Watching an A.I. that is going to take hours and hours of programming beat a level in a meticulously perfect and robotic fashion isn't going to improve the gaming experience for anyone. Games already have easy, normal, and hard modes. Do we really need to dumb down Mario even more because kids can't finish them?
Video walkthroughs, especially free ones on YouTube, should be sufficient enough to help people beat part of a level. If you can't manually beat part of a game...the you can't do it at that time. Practice or give up. What happened to losing?
In some of Nintendo's top selling game you lose. Wii Sports, Mario Kart, Smash Brothers, there are is only one 1st place. I don't want to see developers WASTING time programming A.I. to help out the scrubs and novices beat games designed for challenging people.
How do we know that Nintendo won't start dumbing down games to make them beatable for even barnyard animals? Hey Timmy the cat beat Super Mario Universe just press the A.I. button...
HDTV lag has yet to be solved, meaning tons of old game consoles must be played with input delay. HDTVs are also still too expensive for many people to afford. And once you buy an HDTV, you need something that outputs in HD, digital cable, a Blu-Ray machine, a PS3, those aren't cheap either.
I still use my SDTV for gaming or watching DVDs as upscan converters or scalers look horrible on my HDTV. Because HDTV lag and upscaling are problems I am forced out of necessity to keep an SDTV around to play old video games without lag.
I would rather see HDTVs perfected than a move to 3D.
Web ads are getting killed....by my FF extensions
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How Web Advertising May Go
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't know how many different extensions and add-on installs I've added to FireFox but I know off the top of my head that the overwhelming majority of them are designed specifically to eliminate or block advertisements.
And by advertisements I am not just limiting the scope to pop-up ads, but google ads, banners, and ad sponsored links and polls.
Any image that is from an ad shows up 404, every pop-up is blocked, and any link to an ad shows up 404 including sites that redirect to advertisements.
The less ads the better the internet experience is. I am not sympathetic at all to advertising and spam-marketing companies when there revenue falls.
I have Time Warner Digital Cable, have had it for years, as Time Warner has a true monopoly on nearly all of the areas in Central and Upstate New York that I've lived in. My NYC apartment as well has Time Warner Digital Cable as well as getting a phone line and internet package was a cheap deal at the time and still is.
But have I turned on my cable boxes in the last two years? Not really. Everything I watch is downloaded or streamed on my PC. Instead of watching Major League Baseball, I use MLB's official MLB.TV video and radio streaming service. Episodes of LOST, South Park, Robot Chicken? Torrents usually. Some of them pirated, some I pay extra for. Either way it's still the same programming but different media.
Time Warner could literally blackout 99.9% of the channels (with Digital Cable I get over 500 channels of pure crap) and it wouldn't affect my TV viewing habits because I've made a complete transition to viewing media on my PC (or using VGA out to my HDTV) rather than from a cable box.
Even with HBO On-Demand that I pay for I still prefer to download episodes of shows or movies from the internet and just run them off my Laptop or my PS3's hard drive and onto my HDTV.
When is cable going to switch to à la carte programming and not forcing hundreds of wasted bandwidth and channels on the consumer?
What sense does it make to offer me 1000 channels, that's 1000 x 24 hours of programming a day...who has the time to watch that? Melchior? The Nu?
Give me à la carte or give me death. I'll pay for my cable as 'stealing' HBO without paying for it is not cool in my book, but the box remains unplugged so far in 2009.
The fact that you have to repair your guns and worry about how much you were carrying added to the immersion.
If you twice invest in the trade caravans at Canterbury Commons the caravans will have a repair skill of 70-75% which is higher than I've had my repair skill. Even then, there are enough skill books and bobble heads, that you can max out every skill at 100 well before you reach level 20. Repairing items wasn't immersive, it was tedious, and monotonous. It's not realistic that someone magically invests in a 'repair stat' and they can someone repair items ranging from Powered Armor Clothing and Plasma Rifles to ancient Swords and Combat Shotguns and Rifles. How does one repair a Chinese Officer Sword without a blacksmith tool set or a heat and forge?
I loved that the only equipment you got was from dead bodies and most of it was in poor condition until you fixed it.
That's not true at all. The best items don't come from dead characters, they come from side quests, or random encounters. Here's some of them for example:
- Ledoux's Hockey Mask (+25 Action Points!!) from an unmarked quest relating to Nuka-Cola - T-51b Power Armor, from side quest "You Gotta' Shoot 'Em In The Head!" - A3-21's Plasma Rifle, from the Repiclant of Rivey City sidequest - Shiskebab, built from a schematic, from misc. parts
I liked that you couldn't hoard every weapon you found and had to make difficult choices on what to keep or throw away because it was too heavy
Again your argument lacks any consistency. So the game was immersive because you could carry only a limited weight's worth of weapons and armor? But what about ammo? Ammo has no weight in the game (unless you play with the PC MOD that assigns weight to all items). Mini-nukes, missiles, large numbers of bullets, fusion cells, rails, BBs.......none of them have weight in the game. That makes no sense and is very inconsistent with the theme of survival in the game. Weapons have assigned weight value to them, but ammunition does not. Carrying 1 bullet versus 40,000 bullets affects your character in the exact same way. Makes no sense whatsoever.
I especially like the side missions, as the game is about exploration and immersion.
But not one mission encourages exploration at all. Every quest, side or main, marks the exact location on your PIP-BOY local and world map. And even if you have not discovered a location or any locations around it, your PIP-BOY manages to chart a PERFECT route through every tunnel and wasteland territory with no explanation of its mysterious psychic computer abilities. How does you PIP-BOY know the EXACT route from Megaton to Galaxy New Radio when you've never stepped foot outside of Vault101 or Megaton...?
The world was alive, and it's all those things you disliked that made it so.
No. The world was DEAD. Nothing is random in Fallout 3. No matter how many times you play through the game the same quests are there, characters never leave their programmed paths, and there is very little variety from play through to play through. Megaton is the same every time to start the game no matter what. It is up to the main character to change every aspect of the entire world. Why doesn't a random group of raiders burn down Oasis? Why don't the Enclave get the G.E.C.K. themselves before you do? We know TESLA armor survives radiation greatly, and Col. Autumn has advanced RAD-X to survive radiation poisoning. He could have retrieved the Garden Kit at any time.....how come Mr. Crowley doesn't just get the keys to Ft. Constantine himself? Dukov and Dave hand over their keys for next to nothing...and Strayer isn't even alive so his son gives up the keys. The game forces the 'lone wanderer' to make the difference in every town and village unrealistically. Why didn't the ENCLAVE destroy Megaton easily? They have an army of Death Claws for god's sake. Why don't raiders ever
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We've had movies based on games, games based on comics, games based on movies and TV shows, movies based on TV shows, games based on books, and soundtracks for all of them (but comics of course). Everything has been intertwined for years. And only the most idiotic of individuals could possibly isolate any one of these media and consider them not to be works of art.
Chrono Trigger. Street Fighter II. Virtua Fighter. Starcraft. Metal Gear Solid. Art?
Games are some of highest forms of art in existence as they include:
- writing: storyline, plot twists, character history and back story
- visual art: graphics, design, characters, creatures, environments
- animated art: motion capture, cartoon animation
- special effects: rag doll physics, explosions, stop motion (Max Payne), complex lighting
- sound: sound effects, samples, ambient noise, environmental sounds, foley noise
- music: original and licensed music, Chrono Trigger has amazing original music, Grand Theft Auto has amazing licensed music
- acting: voice acting, including many AAA games having Hollywood level talent
Are games considered brilliant works of art? David? Mona Lisa? Sistine Chapel? Are they considered as exceptional art because of the difficulty of the work?
What about the difficulty in creating an original title such as Half Life? Or Starcraft? Or Chrono Trigger?
David wasn't the first statue, Mona Lisa not the first painting, Sistine Chapel not the first mural, Starcraft not the first RTS, Half Life not the first FPS, Chrono Trigger not the first RPG, but they are standouts, works of a art, and unique accomplishments. And much time, thought, and effort went into the making of all them.
Just look at the balance of Street Fighter II (which took fifteen years), or Starcraft (still being balanced every day in Korea and Blizzard HQ), or Virtua Fighter (Sega revises the arcade versions several times). Is there not an art of game balance?
Balancing Virtua Fighter, where you have a cast of 19 extremely different characters that fight in different ways, or Starcraft where three completely unique races competing on different maps with different starting locations. Is there not an art to balancing those games? If it was a science then each character would be the same, each race the same.
And level design. It's EXACTLY like set design but more imaginative as you aren't confined to real world physics. Cliff Blezinski designed some of the most amazing architecture I have ever seen. What buildings did he create? None. He made levels, amazing levels, in Unreal Tournament. Levels that are works of art. (UT1 also had an amazing soundtrack).
Directing an in game cut scene is exactly like directing a scene in a movie (except the actors don't talk back). Look at Final Fantasy X or Metal Gear Solid 4.
Creating a game soundtrack is the same as making one for a film or television show. Look at Grand Theft Auto, Chrono Trigger, Halo.
Creating the 3D models for characters in game is the same as carving a statue. The characters in Virtua Fighter 5R are extraordinary when you see them moving on an HDTV monitor at the arcade.
Writing a script or character for a game is the same as writing one for a book or comic. Solid Snake & Niko Bellic have fuller lives and stories than some of the longest running television characters.
Animating a character and his or her in game moves is the same as animating a character for an animated or 3D movie. The animations for Virtua Fighter 5R are just as impressive or better than Toy Story or Wall-E. VF5R moves at a blazing 60fps and the animations are fluid and jaw dropping.
Cinema is art, music is art, television is art, painting or photography is art, writing is art, and so are games.
The way I got Firefox on the three PCs that I use for personal and professional reasons was through an HTTP download from Mozilla's website accessed through Internet Explorer. It was easy and efficient to get Firefox this way.
To me, the sole reason that IE has existed on my PCs, was to serve as the program that allowed me to download Firefox. Once Firefox was installed I disabled IE from being able to visit any website (zero addresses are on the allowed list) so even if a program automatically boots up IE for some reason the site will be blocked as all other sites are.
I would be shocked if most people didn't obtain Firefox this way, downloading the install executable from a link using IE.
This suit makes zero sense. If you're buying a PC with a Windows OS in it, your default internet browsing option is going to be IE. The suit would make sense if MS forbid PC owners from installing Firefox but you have a choice of what browser you want as you can download Firefox. If for some reason you refuse to open IE that one time, you can get a friend to give you the install on USB or CD.
To be honest, what really spoils a game for me, is when every single publication and media outlet for video game reviews praises a game beyond belief for the most trivial of aspects but fails to mention the overarching and incredibly frustrating and ubiquitous downsides and shortcomings of a game.
Obviously spoiling plot twists, game endings, or surprise moments and easter eggs, is a major fau paux. But game reviewers rarely ever engage in writing those revelations and leave them for the reader (or player) to discover.
Video game reviews have been going on since video games have been around. The fact that one reviewer received one single complaint saying that the MTV.com writer spoiled Killzone 2 requires an entire discussion around it is a tad bit reactionary and absurd.
The real way that game reviews spoil a game for me is when they review a game for being 'perfect' or 'near perfect' but when I get my copy of said game it's filled with bugs, glitches, bad writing, plot holes, lackluster story, bad endings, overpriced DLC, archaic or intrusive or disruptive DRM, the game costs more than its worth as you can beat it in two days making renting it a better option, or that the game is all around terrible but somehow managed a score in the eightieth to ninetieth percentile (with some even scoring perfect scores.
Oddly I've yet to see a game score a perfect with the review mentioning only positives, there is always one negative. Wouldn't that negative imply a flaw hence negating the perfection that a game allegedly has?
Yes spoiling plot elements or easter eggs is a terribly thing for reviewers to do, but they've been doing far worse things in the industry for years.
...and I will be buying none of them.
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/game-reviews/jack-thompson-gta.php?page=1
For those who missed it the first time around, here is Jack Thompson's review of GTAIV, as courtesy of SomethingAwful.
Obviously not the real JT
I rent video games that I'm not familiar with, if I like them, I go to Amazon or Gamestop or whatever and I buy them. Sometimes I just buy the game when I know I'm going to like it, if I could pre-order Starcraft II right now I would.
I rent movies, DVD & BD, and download rentals from the Playstation Network, if I like the movie, then I buy it. If I know I'm going to like the movie, Blade Runner, The Thing, I'll order it before renting it. If LoTR extended editions were on BD right now I'd have them without renting them.
I watch TV shows on my cable connection, if I like them, I might purchase the series on DVD.
But where do I rent my music? The clips on most websites (aside from the excellent DJDownload or Bleep) are only 30-60 seconds long and are in 96kbps/mono or worse quality. How am I possibly supposed to tell if a song is going to be good based on that clip?
I don't listen to music you'll hear on the radio so I can't get a preview from radio or TV. I DJ professionally (underground electronic dance music) in New York (hence Vinyl being in my nick) so being able to hear a full track before I purchase it is extremely important. But not only that, but being able to hear a file that is not compressed (such as .WAV) is also equally important. The only place to do that is piracy.
I would love it even if I could rent music that had a voice-over embedded in the middle of the track. Say you have a five minute song. Cut some parts of it or add in a voice saying "THIS SONG IS A DEMO" for a couple of segments so that DJs can't use it in a club without looking like idiots.
I probably spend $5,000 on music each year so I'm going to get burned by some bad purchases in hindsight but nothing aggravates me more than hearing a clip of a song on a digital download site, then downloading the song, and having it sound completely different, or the rest of the track sound nothing like the preview clip.
And why would you care about a dual-boot computer, which obviously has a valid XP license so you could just remove Vista?
Why would I pay for a dual boot computer with two OS on it when I would only be using one? Because I don't want to pay for both of them. I only want to use XP. I don't want to pay for Vista AND XP if I'm only using one of them.
There is no reason for me to buy the more expensive Windows 7 when it debuts than to get a computer with the cheaper, more reliable, XP.
...is that this summer when I plan on purchasing a new PC, I better have the option of having XP as the only OS on the computer. No dual boot XP/Vista, no Windows 7, just XP.
I'm not sure if it's quite -232 Celsius in my apartment but it's pretty close. They probably could have achieved 6.0GHz overclocking using an air-cooled system in my living room alone.
The RIAA already said that people are buying the DVDs only to pirate them. Don't you see, more sales = more piracy.
If pirates couldn't buy the DVDs they couldn't pirate them or upload them to YouTube.
Stop all sales of DVDs. Stop production of DVDs. Stop breathing!!
Is this what our government is wasting its time with? Monitoring what websites we browse even more? Is knowing what John and Jane Doe viewed on YouTube going to restore our economy or end the war? Shouldn't those be the priorities instead?
We are at war with two countries that we have no business being involved with. Our entire economy and capitalistic system is rapidly collapsing while rampant bailout spending is furthering the problems with no oversight whatsoever. Unemployment and homelessness are continually rising as are foreclosure rates. We have one of the worst education success rates and literacy rates of developed nations but we spend the most per capita of all developed countries on education. Global warming destroying our habitat and living space. Why isn't the federal government focusing 100% on those issues? Even a second of manpower wasted on monitoring YouTube usage by John Doe is a complete waste of federal resources.
I wonder how many people and lawyers and lobbyists where hired and used to make this one decision about tracking internet usage? A team of ten? Possibly fifty? How much did this one decision cost in terms of hours? How many billable hours are we talking on taxpayer burden? $500,000? $1,000,000 worth of taxpayer money?
The fact is that this is a colossal waste of public resources. The more time spent on anything but restructuring our economy and removing us from war, the closer we get to our complete collapse as a nation.
This is just a small example of how the federal government wastes its time. Congressional hearings for cheating in Major League Baseball? Check. Joe Biden and John McCain were major players in those hearings by the way. Seeing if video games can be banned from being sold if they are violent? Check. Hilary Clinton and Al & Tipper Gore have had that on their agenda for years. Instead of worrying about issues that matter our government hires teams of lawyers and technicians to track YouTube usage or investigate athletes or to stop GTA from being played.
Battlestar Galactica is one of those series that I'm sure I would enjoy if I watched it as rapidly as possible. Commercial free and at my own leisure.
Watching LOST is painful due to the seemingly infinite periods of time between seasons. Guess what I'll be doing tonight...
But hopefully BSG can have a cheap DVD or BD bundle for the entire series for people who enjoy sci-fi but didn't follow the series across its run.
How do we know this was the real President of the company and that it wasn't some actor hired to do a fake apology?
Positives:
- Lord of the Rings license
Negatives:
- every other aspect of the game
Total Score: 5/10 based on the immense strength of the license.
There isn't a day where I play Metal Gear Online 2.0 or Gears of War 2 online where I do not hear someone say 'fuck' or 'shit' or 'dicklicker' using their headset or bluetooth mic or typing those same words into the in-game chat box.
Shouldn't New York State ban all multi-player games that have in-game forms of communication?
But what if they disabled communication in games? What if in Starcraft or any other RTS, the opposing player arranged his buildings to form the word 'cock' ? Shouldn't we ban Starcraft as there is the potential to communicate bad words?
What constitutes profanity? Swear words? Bad words? What is a bad word? Is taking the (fictitious) Lord's name in vain using profanity? I guess that means GOD of War is a DISGUSTING AND INAPPROPRIATE GAME!!!
These lawmakers will not stop until ALL games are banned.
What exactly is the definition of boot?
When I start up my IBM ThinkPad (1.5ghz single processor, 512RAM, garbage video card) running Windows XP, it takes roughly 10-15 seconds to get to the user log-in interface from the moment the power button is pressed.
But, once you log in, you are talking two to three minutes where background applications and processes are opening, explorer is loading, and applications that launch at start are loading.
After you log in does that time count as boot time? Considering it takes me 10-15 seconds to get to the sign in screen, not that much time, but after logging in it takes well over two minutes for me to be able to actually run anything at normal capacity.
Well, that was the rationale of the first CDROM games for PC. The copy protection was the fact that one would have to pay exorbitant sums in order to duplicate CDs. It worked for a short while.
CD-ROMs really had the 'CD Key' as their main form of copy protection. No one had to pay any amount get a pirated CD if they couldn't download it. You could even purchase a CDR for pennies and burn a copy if there was no CD Key. That's hardly exorbitant amounts of money. My friend lived in Turkey for five years from 1997 to 2001, and he would send me pirated PC games on CD every other month. All of those CDs came with hacks and custom patches that disabled or overwrote the CD Key check. The bootleg CDs even had custom color artwork printed onto the CDRs. I had a pirated copy of Starcraft I used for LAN parties that had Protoss and Terran artwork and my friends asked me where I got the 'limited edition' Starcraft CD. I just laughed. I own three legit copies of the SC and Brood War bundle though.
Size was never a legitimate deterrent for piracy. If you lacked a good internet connection you could go into IRC or USENET and find someone to trade you a burned copy of a game or you could purchase a burned copy from the internet very easily. CD Keys were cracked mere hours after games were released. And CD Keys were meant to stop piracy of gaming software.
Today, you have to admit it's pretty compelling to be able to start downloading a handheld RPG that takes 30 hours to complete and have it downloaded and ready to play before you're even finished reading the review.
I never pirate games. Most movies and music I have no problem with 'pirating'. But even the $60 I spent for Metal Gear Solid 4 (and $30 on the expansion packs) has provided me with over 400 hours of solid (pun intended) entertainment.
I could understand hating the MPAA and RIAA and pirating them. But when it comes to independent movies and music I never pirate.
But for games as a hardcore gamer I will pay for everything from Virtua Fighter to Mario Kart.
I love how this is tagged with 'hahahahaha' 'riaasucks' and 'bastards'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Content
Down with all of these cartels.
People pirate X-Box 360 games, PS2 and Dreamcast games, and emulate Game Boy Advance and Super Nintendo games. From a 750kb ROM to a full 4.9 gig ISO file.
Anyone with a 'decent' broadband connection can leave a torrent or PSP program on overnights and grab any game they want relatively easily.
Size has never stopped most people from pirating games before who want to pirate.
People segmented PC games into .rar/.zip files and shared them on IRC or USENET well over a decade ago. Those games were ten times the size of a single DS game and that was then.
I purchased Golden Sun I and II for my Game Boy Advance when they came out but only opened them for the manual, the games are sitting in a box never used. I downloaded the ROMS that same week and played them off of an emulator. Full screen, my own controller, save states, etc.
Yes piracy sucks for game companies but for keeping old cartridge games alive I use ROMS always. And I own the original game at least.
For years people have been programming entire play-throughs of games using programmable inputs on emulators.
This is the same concept, you input an exact sequence of events for the controller, that will exactly complete a part of the game, or the entire game if you want. But instead of the tool-assisted-speed-run community doing it, it is the developers themselves this time.
It is very very complicated to program input commands for a game and doing a run through of an entire game is incredibly laborious. You need to now each frame, every aspect of the game, and compensate and adjust for each factor. And randomness? Some programmed inputs for games have luck manipulation in them. For example, in the Mega Man X series the boss A.I. would behave seemingly random in their attack patterns. So if you input attack commands and the boss randomly jumped over you, you would need to input direction commands to compensate for having to fire in a new direction. But once you commit to those programmed commands you have no control over how the A.I. is going to behave the next time you execute the script. But, for the MMX series, there are certain inputs if the player makes them, such as dashing twice then jumping, that make the bosses attack in the same way over and over again eliminating any randomness. But programming a single boss fight in a nearly two decade old Mega Man game for the SNES takes hours and hours of programming and testing.
It would be more logical for Nintendo to ship a DVD with a video walkthrough of the game. Or smarter, create a Nintendo YouTube channel featuring video walkthroughs of each level.
People the day Super Mario Galaxy (Wii) came out uploaded the entire game level by level and how to beat each level.
Nintendo recently hired tournament fighting game player David Sirlin to produce tutorial videos for playing Nintedo's Supure Smash Brothers Brawl game for Wii.
Watching an A.I. that is going to take hours and hours of programming beat a level in a meticulously perfect and robotic fashion isn't going to improve the gaming experience for anyone. Games already have easy, normal, and hard modes. Do we really need to dumb down Mario even more because kids can't finish them?
Video walkthroughs, especially free ones on YouTube, should be sufficient enough to help people beat part of a level. If you can't manually beat part of a game...the you can't do it at that time. Practice or give up. What happened to losing?
In some of Nintendo's top selling game you lose. Wii Sports, Mario Kart, Smash Brothers, there are is only one 1st place. I don't want to see developers WASTING time programming A.I. to help out the scrubs and novices beat games designed for challenging people.
How do we know that Nintendo won't start dumbing down games to make them beatable for even barnyard animals? Hey Timmy the cat beat Super Mario Universe just press the A.I. button...
Do we really need to move on from HDTV already?
HDTV lag has yet to be solved, meaning tons of old game consoles must be played with input delay. HDTVs are also still too expensive for many people to afford. And once you buy an HDTV, you need something that outputs in HD, digital cable, a Blu-Ray machine, a PS3, those aren't cheap either.
I still use my SDTV for gaming or watching DVDs as upscan converters or scalers look horrible on my HDTV. Because HDTV lag and upscaling are problems I am forced out of necessity to keep an SDTV around to play old video games without lag.
I would rather see HDTVs perfected than a move to 3D.
I don't know how many different extensions and add-on installs I've added to FireFox but I know off the top of my head that the overwhelming majority of them are designed specifically to eliminate or block advertisements.
And by advertisements I am not just limiting the scope to pop-up ads, but google ads, banners, and ad sponsored links and polls.
Any image that is from an ad shows up 404, every pop-up is blocked, and any link to an ad shows up 404 including sites that redirect to advertisements.
The less ads the better the internet experience is. I am not sympathetic at all to advertising and spam-marketing companies when there revenue falls.
This sounds like Battlebots...except with the fighting...or fun.
They need to build robots that spin and lift etc. and duel them out.
I have Time Warner Digital Cable, have had it for years, as Time Warner has a true monopoly on nearly all of the areas in Central and Upstate New York that I've lived in. My NYC apartment as well has Time Warner Digital Cable as well as getting a phone line and internet package was a cheap deal at the time and still is.
But have I turned on my cable boxes in the last two years? Not really. Everything I watch is downloaded or streamed on my PC. Instead of watching Major League Baseball, I use MLB's official MLB.TV video and radio streaming service. Episodes of LOST, South Park, Robot Chicken? Torrents usually. Some of them pirated, some I pay extra for. Either way it's still the same programming but different media.
Time Warner could literally blackout 99.9% of the channels (with Digital Cable I get over 500 channels of pure crap) and it wouldn't affect my TV viewing habits because I've made a complete transition to viewing media on my PC (or using VGA out to my HDTV) rather than from a cable box.
Even with HBO On-Demand that I pay for I still prefer to download episodes of shows or movies from the internet and just run them off my Laptop or my PS3's hard drive and onto my HDTV.
When is cable going to switch to à la carte programming and not forcing hundreds of wasted bandwidth and channels on the consumer?
What sense does it make to offer me 1000 channels, that's 1000 x 24 hours of programming a day...who has the time to watch that? Melchior? The Nu?
Give me à la carte or give me death. I'll pay for my cable as 'stealing' HBO without paying for it is not cool in my book, but the box remains unplugged so far in 2009.
The fact that you have to repair your guns and worry about how much you were carrying added to the immersion.
If you twice invest in the trade caravans at Canterbury Commons the caravans will have a repair skill of 70-75% which is higher than I've had my repair skill. Even then, there are enough skill books and bobble heads, that you can max out every skill at 100 well before you reach level 20. Repairing items wasn't immersive, it was tedious, and monotonous. It's not realistic that someone magically invests in a 'repair stat' and they can someone repair items ranging from Powered Armor Clothing and Plasma Rifles to ancient Swords and Combat Shotguns and Rifles. How does one repair a Chinese Officer Sword without a blacksmith tool set or a heat and forge?
I loved that the only equipment you got was from dead bodies and most of it was in poor condition until you fixed it.
That's not true at all. The best items don't come from dead characters, they come from side quests, or random encounters. Here's some of them for example:
- Ledoux's Hockey Mask (+25 Action Points!!) from an unmarked quest relating to Nuka-Cola
- T-51b Power Armor, from side quest "You Gotta' Shoot 'Em In The Head!"
- A3-21's Plasma Rifle, from the Repiclant of Rivey City sidequest
- Shiskebab, built from a schematic, from misc. parts
I liked that you couldn't hoard every weapon you found and had to make difficult choices on what to keep or throw away because it was too heavy
Again your argument lacks any consistency. So the game was immersive because you could carry only a limited weight's worth of weapons and armor? But what about ammo? Ammo has no weight in the game (unless you play with the PC MOD that assigns weight to all items). Mini-nukes, missiles, large numbers of bullets, fusion cells, rails, BBs.......none of them have weight in the game. That makes no sense and is very inconsistent with the theme of survival in the game. Weapons have assigned weight value to them, but ammunition does not. Carrying 1 bullet versus 40,000 bullets affects your character in the exact same way. Makes no sense whatsoever.
I especially like the side missions, as the game is about exploration and immersion.
But not one mission encourages exploration at all. Every quest, side or main, marks the exact location on your PIP-BOY local and world map. And even if you have not discovered a location or any locations around it, your PIP-BOY manages to chart a PERFECT route through every tunnel and wasteland territory with no explanation of its mysterious psychic computer abilities. How does you PIP-BOY know the EXACT route from Megaton to Galaxy New Radio when you've never stepped foot outside of Vault101 or Megaton...?
The world was alive, and it's all those things you disliked that made it so.
No. The world was DEAD. Nothing is random in Fallout 3. No matter how many times you play through the game the same quests are there, characters never leave their programmed paths, and there is very little variety from play through to play through. Megaton is the same every time to start the game no matter what. It is up to the main character to change every aspect of the entire world. Why doesn't a random group of raiders burn down Oasis? Why don't the Enclave get the G.E.C.K. themselves before you do? We know TESLA armor survives radiation greatly, and Col. Autumn has advanced RAD-X to survive radiation poisoning. He could have retrieved the Garden Kit at any time.....how come Mr. Crowley doesn't just get the keys to Ft. Constantine himself? Dukov and Dave hand over their keys for next to nothing...and Strayer isn't even alive so his son gives up the keys. The game forces the 'lone wanderer' to make the difference in every town and village unrealistically. Why didn't the ENCLAVE destroy Megaton easily? They have an army of Death Claws for god's sake. Why don't raiders ever