Since the DSi is not out yet, this could also be seen as Nintendo gauging the interest of eBooks on the DS. If this does well in Britan, perhaps they'll look to do more with the DSi at/near it's launch.
Nintendo DSi is the only major handheld video game system whose games are region-locked.
Wrong; you're information is from early mistranslations of the initial announcement. All games released on the DS will not be region-locked, and that includes ones that are made after the DSi. Only downloadable content and other software made specifically for the DSi is region-locked.
Well, Nintendo has pushed the Brain Age games and "keeping your brain young", so this seems like a logical step for them. Targeting only Britan with it's initial launch (which doesn't currently have Kindle available locally) seems like an interesting way to gauge the market in areas that don't have a worldwide-known competitor.
Unless, of course, your primary or sole reason for having a DS is to play games and you don't mind supporting the people who make them. Which, if you take away the people who only have an R4 to pirate games and have them for free, should be most of the people who bought DS's anyways.
The DS hasn't been advertised anywhere outside of Japan as actually doing anything other than playing games; with the DSi coming out soonish in Japan and other parts of the world, that may change, but in the mean time, most of the world only sees it as a handheld gaming console, and nothing else.
The DS has an interesting method of input, I'll give you that. I personally don't care if you use your DS with an R4 to do different things like make it into an MP3 player, read books, surf the internet, or whatever. But most people who have a DS don't need an R4, because that's not what they want to do with it.
They will find something new, no doubt. Just a matter of how long of a gap between Wii and the new generation console.
Actually, I'm fairly certain that Nintendo will come out with a new console fairly soon (1-2 years from now), refining what they've already done and just trying to add more interesting bits to it (maybe better voice output or something). The main reason I would guess at is stopping themselves from losing so many port opportunities that exist in the 360/PS3 realm because their system can't handle anything close to what is needed.
Weaker graphics is an interesting point, but it's far from the only one.
Think of something like Dynasty Warriors: Gundam. There's no way in hell a game like that could ever get released for the Wii, because it's got way too much going on at once. All of the enemies on screen, with all their AI running, all of their attacks (shooting attacks? Better generate particles that have to check for collision every frame), all of the other random particle effects, all the enemies in level doing what they're supposed to do... all that eats up a lot of horsepower.
Since less of everything has to go on at once, you have to redesign how enemies react, how many are going to take action at once, and so forth.
Then you take into the graphics thing, about how each model needs to be made lower poly and each texture smaller, and you can't really do that in 10 seconds and have it not look like garbage.
And with all of that, it makes the tens of thousands of lines of code for the initial version unusable in the new environment in any way. Even though you'd have to rewrite it for a different platform anyways (even between PS3 and 360), a lot of the logic would end up changing because of how everything would have to be redesigned to work at a weaker scale. It's basically like taking someone else's game, then redoing it from scratch. And that costs a lot of money, for a market of gamers that is largely made out to be casual.
Having externalities in the hardware cause in-game effects is IMHO a cheese.
It's as bad as having a loading screen, just with the wall breakage going the other direction.
Game doesn't break into reality, so reality shouldn't break into game.
Then you can't be pleased. Game technology, as great as it is, just isn't powerful enough right now for most games to not have loading screens without taking a huge hit to graphics and AI. It's not like we as game devs put in loading screens to spite you, we put it in to make sure the game loads and doesn't crash on you because it doesn't know what's supposed to spawn in front of your head.
Not a concern to me, as I think that the industry will be made better if games have to spend less time in the tube.
I don't think I can agree with you. See, what constricted cash flow more likely does is scare a lot of developers that if they do innovation, there's a high chance of bombing it and not having a hope in gaining back what they spent, but if you go for low-risk, tried-and-true, you're guaranteed to get something to get you by.
That said, I am a game designer and a gamer, and I don't know any other gamer who thinks they'll be spending less on games in the near future (MMO factor aside).
I call shenanigans. The Metriod Prime series was famous for it's "no loading screens" by using doors that only opened when the next area was fully loaded, or masking it behind cut scenes.
If the Wii can do it, I hope to hell the XBox 360 and PS3 can handle it.
Not that all games with drm should get -4 stars, it should depend on what the person buying it thinks and not what everyone else thinks it should be. (ie I hate limited installs, but could care less, even for single player about online verification of the game)
If I recall correctly, Steam's versions of games don't have the other forms of DRM like SecuRom that retail versions have. If this maintains to be true, then it'll be a moot point for me and many other buyers.
The amazon-sold versions will have SecuRom though, so I can agree with 1 staring it there.
What I want to see is someone modding this game so that you can play it as a multiplayer capture the flag. It'd be like the games of capture the flag that you'd play as kids, but at an excessively larger scale.
I'll probably get the game irregardless, but that would definitely increase replayability.
On the contrary, I would have suggested Civilization 4 as a decent game to try. If you turn off the ability to war and also turn off barbarians, the game still remains fairly competitive, but you also can play cooperative and make alliances with other human players/NPC leaders. It becomes a game of pure exploration, espionage, and cultural expansion.
You make a good point on why games focus more on violence, but not everyone is into that. Civ is very good at allowing you to tailor your game as such.
And the editor? It doesn't even friggin work in Windows half the time.
That's nothing new, as the editor from UT2004 wasn't any different. And despite that, the editor is still better than many that is used by professional game development studios, crashes and all. Why do you think so many companies license it?
It also does things simply better! Take creating a business card, MS Word doesn't even come with a template for that job!
That would be because Microsoft Publisher (a different piece of software in the Office suite) has built in template options for that, which are very useful and work quite well.
In fact, all Word can do for you is make the raw text of books or what have you, it's absolutely pathetic for displaying things in a pretty manner. Publisher, however, is targeted at making pretty things (be they business cards, birthday cards, fliers, and so forth).
Just promise not to make a website with Publisher, otherwise web designers will find you and assassinate you in your sleep. The code output is awful, to the point where Dreamweaver even has a function named along the lines of "clean up word code".
The first thing I thought of in regards to the EA quote was those ITT Tech and other TV commercials who advertise making games after 2 years. That's bullshit, in my humble opinion.
Well, unfortunately, your humble opinion is incorrect. I graduated out of the Art Institute as a Game Designer (a year-and-a-half program, but I took an extra quarter) and got a job just over 3 months after I graduated.
In addition, out of the 30ish people that graduated with me, I know of at least 5 people who also already have jobs, some even landed at the portfolio show our school hosted at the end of their schooling.
The important thing to keep in mind is that I've had the opportunity of going to a incredibly good school for this. My school taught me what I need to know, a bit of the other disciplines so I better understood my place in a team, but also had classes that emulated being in the industry where I'm actually make a game with people of other disciplines.
In short, it's not impossible, but it's all about having a good school. I've seen a lot of positive posts about Full Sail, which sounds very similar to the Art Institute that I went to. Anyone interested in entering the games industry should look for schools that teach you what you need, in a relatively short amount of time, and also that they have some classes where you're in a team and making a game with people of other disciplines.
If you're taking about the programming aspect, yes. In fact, I'd go as far to say that that is a very good list of traits wanted by a programmer in the games industry.
Design-wise or Art-wise, however, is a completely different ball game.
Actually, as a game design graduate (and currently in industry), I really wish I had better learning of some of the crazy shit Word and Excel can do for you, especially Excel. Excel basically lets you balance a game without playing it, which is incredibly useful in early stages of game development when you don't have a workable build.
When your hard drive fails, you'll spend days re-downloading content (if you're lucky). If not, you'll be branded as a thief and have to spend hours arguing on the phone with Indian tech support for the right to re-download stuff you already paid for.
I don't believe you. I've had numerous stories from friends who have had issues with their console, but a quick civil call to a rep of their respective company (in the cases I know of, Nintendo and Microsoft) and they have a console heading their way. The reps are all based at appropriate locations (in the Nintendo case I can confirm he spoke to Nintendo of Canada, which is in the same province), the console replacements arrive in a timely manner. And I've never heard of it taking days to redownload everything.
Then I suggest finding a bunch of like-minded people and bitching very loudly to the developers. We're* not going to know if it's worth the man hours to create a feature like that if you don't tell us, 'cause most people are happy to just unlock all cheat and choose from there.
*I say this as a game developer in general, not one from Harmonix/Red Octane.
If you don't like some of the tracks, then just use an unlock all cheat and play whatever you want. That's why games have methods of doing this; if you don't want to appreciate all of the content in the game the way the developers envisioned, you can. For everyone else, this is a huge opportunity to appreciate new music with your friends.
It depends on what you're looking for in it. Personally, I'd like the opportunity to rearrange some of my favourite Mario, Mega Man, Zelda, and other tunes, while possibly trying to make some of my own small songs (though I'm no real musician). All of that really doesn't require more that what I'm getting.
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Since the DSi is not out yet, this could also be seen as Nintendo gauging the interest of eBooks on the DS. If this does well in Britan, perhaps they'll look to do more with the DSi at/near it's launch.
Nintendo DSi is the only major handheld video game system whose games are region-locked.
Wrong; you're information is from early mistranslations of the initial announcement. All games released on the DS will not be region-locked, and that includes ones that are made after the DSi. Only downloadable content and other software made specifically for the DSi is region-locked.
Well, Nintendo has pushed the Brain Age games and "keeping your brain young", so this seems like a logical step for them. Targeting only Britan with it's initial launch (which doesn't currently have Kindle available locally) seems like an interesting way to gauge the market in areas that don't have a worldwide-known competitor.
If you own a DS, you NEED to own a R4.
Unless, of course, your primary or sole reason for having a DS is to play games and you don't mind supporting the people who make them. Which, if you take away the people who only have an R4 to pirate games and have them for free, should be most of the people who bought DS's anyways.
The DS hasn't been advertised anywhere outside of Japan as actually doing anything other than playing games; with the DSi coming out soonish in Japan and other parts of the world, that may change, but in the mean time, most of the world only sees it as a handheld gaming console, and nothing else.
The DS has an interesting method of input, I'll give you that. I personally don't care if you use your DS with an R4 to do different things like make it into an MP3 player, read books, surf the internet, or whatever. But most people who have a DS don't need an R4, because that's not what they want to do with it.
And strangely, I still don't know anyone that uses Second Life.
And for that matter, I'm fairly certain there's a lot of people I know that don't even know what Second Life is.
They will find something new, no doubt. Just a matter of how long of a gap between Wii and the new generation console.
Actually, I'm fairly certain that Nintendo will come out with a new console fairly soon (1-2 years from now), refining what they've already done and just trying to add more interesting bits to it (maybe better voice output or something). The main reason I would guess at is stopping themselves from losing so many port opportunities that exist in the 360/PS3 realm because their system can't handle anything close to what is needed.
Weaker graphics is an interesting point, but it's far from the only one.
Think of something like Dynasty Warriors: Gundam. There's no way in hell a game like that could ever get released for the Wii, because it's got way too much going on at once. All of the enemies on screen, with all their AI running, all of their attacks (shooting attacks? Better generate particles that have to check for collision every frame), all of the other random particle effects, all the enemies in level doing what they're supposed to do... all that eats up a lot of horsepower.
Since less of everything has to go on at once, you have to redesign how enemies react, how many are going to take action at once, and so forth.
Then you take into the graphics thing, about how each model needs to be made lower poly and each texture smaller, and you can't really do that in 10 seconds and have it not look like garbage.
And with all of that, it makes the tens of thousands of lines of code for the initial version unusable in the new environment in any way. Even though you'd have to rewrite it for a different platform anyways (even between PS3 and 360), a lot of the logic would end up changing because of how everything would have to be redesigned to work at a weaker scale. It's basically like taking someone else's game, then redoing it from scratch. And that costs a lot of money, for a market of gamers that is largely made out to be casual.
Having externalities in the hardware cause in-game effects is IMHO a cheese.
It's as bad as having a loading screen, just with the wall breakage going the other direction.
Game doesn't break into reality, so reality shouldn't break into game.
Then you can't be pleased. Game technology, as great as it is, just isn't powerful enough right now for most games to not have loading screens without taking a huge hit to graphics and AI. It's not like we as game devs put in loading screens to spite you, we put it in to make sure the game loads and doesn't crash on you because it doesn't know what's supposed to spawn in front of your head.
Not a concern to me, as I think that the industry will be made better if games have to spend less time in the tube.
I don't think I can agree with you. See, what constricted cash flow more likely does is scare a lot of developers that if they do innovation, there's a high chance of bombing it and not having a hope in gaining back what they spent, but if you go for low-risk, tried-and-true, you're guaranteed to get something to get you by.
That said, I am a game designer and a gamer, and I don't know any other gamer who thinks they'll be spending less on games in the near future (MMO factor aside).
I call shenanigans. The Metriod Prime series was famous for it's "no loading screens" by using doors that only opened when the next area was fully loaded, or masking it behind cut scenes.
If the Wii can do it, I hope to hell the XBox 360 and PS3 can handle it.
But not 13 consecutive hours, since Athene was banned at level 79 for - as far as I can tell - playing the game too well.
What happened?
Not that all games with drm should get -4 stars, it should depend on what the person buying it thinks and not what everyone else thinks it should be. (ie I hate limited installs, but could care less, even for single player about online verification of the game)
If I recall correctly, Steam's versions of games don't have the other forms of DRM like SecuRom that retail versions have. If this maintains to be true, then it'll be a moot point for me and many other buyers.
The amazon-sold versions will have SecuRom though, so I can agree with 1 staring it there.
What I want to see is someone modding this game so that you can play it as a multiplayer capture the flag. It'd be like the games of capture the flag that you'd play as kids, but at an excessively larger scale.
I'll probably get the game irregardless, but that would definitely increase replayability.
It's OK. It's the internet. You're not supposed to catch other people's sarcasm.
so many acronyms you won't know WTF anyone is talking about even when you RTFA.
That's... slightly ironic of you to say.
On the contrary, I would have suggested Civilization 4 as a decent game to try. If you turn off the ability to war and also turn off barbarians, the game still remains fairly competitive, but you also can play cooperative and make alliances with other human players/NPC leaders. It becomes a game of pure exploration, espionage, and cultural expansion.
You make a good point on why games focus more on violence, but not everyone is into that. Civ is very good at allowing you to tailor your game as such.
And the editor? It doesn't even friggin work in Windows half the time.
That's nothing new, as the editor from UT2004 wasn't any different. And despite that, the editor is still better than many that is used by professional game development studios, crashes and all. Why do you think so many companies license it?
It also does things simply better! Take creating a business card, MS Word doesn't even come with a template for that job!
That would be because Microsoft Publisher (a different piece of software in the Office suite) has built in template options for that, which are very useful and work quite well.
In fact, all Word can do for you is make the raw text of books or what have you, it's absolutely pathetic for displaying things in a pretty manner. Publisher, however, is targeted at making pretty things (be they business cards, birthday cards, fliers, and so forth).
Just promise not to make a website with Publisher, otherwise web designers will find you and assassinate you in your sleep. The code output is awful, to the point where Dreamweaver even has a function named along the lines of "clean up word code".
The first thing I thought of in regards to the EA quote was those ITT Tech and other TV commercials who advertise making games after 2 years. That's bullshit, in my humble opinion.
Well, unfortunately, your humble opinion is incorrect. I graduated out of the Art Institute as a Game Designer (a year-and-a-half program, but I took an extra quarter) and got a job just over 3 months after I graduated.
In addition, out of the 30ish people that graduated with me, I know of at least 5 people who also already have jobs, some even landed at the portfolio show our school hosted at the end of their schooling.
The important thing to keep in mind is that I've had the opportunity of going to a incredibly good school for this. My school taught me what I need to know, a bit of the other disciplines so I better understood my place in a team, but also had classes that emulated being in the industry where I'm actually make a game with people of other disciplines.
In short, it's not impossible, but it's all about having a good school. I've seen a lot of positive posts about Full Sail, which sounds very similar to the Art Institute that I went to. Anyone interested in entering the games industry should look for schools that teach you what you need, in a relatively short amount of time, and also that they have some classes where you're in a team and making a game with people of other disciplines.
If you're taking about the programming aspect, yes. In fact, I'd go as far to say that that is a very good list of traits wanted by a programmer in the games industry.
Design-wise or Art-wise, however, is a completely different ball game.
Actually, as a game design graduate (and currently in industry), I really wish I had better learning of some of the crazy shit Word and Excel can do for you, especially Excel. Excel basically lets you balance a game without playing it, which is incredibly useful in early stages of game development when you don't have a workable build.
When your hard drive fails, you'll spend days re-downloading content (if you're lucky). If not, you'll be branded as a thief and have to spend hours arguing on the phone with Indian tech support for the right to re-download stuff you already paid for.
I don't believe you. I've had numerous stories from friends who have had issues with their console, but a quick civil call to a rep of their respective company (in the cases I know of, Nintendo and Microsoft) and they have a console heading their way. The reps are all based at appropriate locations (in the Nintendo case I can confirm he spoke to Nintendo of Canada, which is in the same province), the console replacements arrive in a timely manner. And I've never heard of it taking days to redownload everything.
Then I suggest finding a bunch of like-minded people and bitching very loudly to the developers. We're* not going to know if it's worth the man hours to create a feature like that if you don't tell us, 'cause most people are happy to just unlock all cheat and choose from there.
*I say this as a game developer in general, not one from Harmonix/Red Octane.
If you don't like some of the tracks, then just use an unlock all cheat and play whatever you want. That's why games have methods of doing this; if you don't want to appreciate all of the content in the game the way the developers envisioned, you can. For everyone else, this is a huge opportunity to appreciate new music with your friends.
It depends on what you're looking for in it. Personally, I'd like the opportunity to rearrange some of my favourite Mario, Mega Man, Zelda, and other tunes, while possibly trying to make some of my own small songs (though I'm no real musician). All of that really doesn't require more that what I'm getting.