See, you and I just see the phrase "Game of Show" differently.
You think the word "Game" means "Playable game" whereas I think the word "Show" means "E3".
That's "E3, place to showcase upcoming stuff" ie, movie trailers for games, effectively.
If you're saying that the average person reads "Game of Show" as equivalent to a review (ie, an Oscar) then you're dead right, and it's deceptive.
I think anyone who knows what E3 is, realises that it's "Game of the SHOW" and thereby the fact that it's the one that made the best showing, at the show, under the conditions said show exists, is implicit.
You choose to believe that definition is a flat out case of lying to the public. I don't think the public are as stupid as you like to think they are. We differ in our read of the phrase. All good.
Well, if that was your point, I don't really disagree.
Or I wouldn't, if E3 were a "complete games get reviewed by the public" show. Which it's not and has never been.
It's all about hyping things up. Now, your point on "Game of show" is well taken. If they were reviewing complete games, or anything similar, then I'd agree with you.
But they're not. Best Game of Show isn't for "best finished game" it's for "game with most potential" (these being pre-release and all) or "Game most likely to blow us away when it hits shelves" - and on all those counts, HL2 wins.
You can call me a liar if you like, but only if you choose to utterly miss the entire point of E3.
The game companies that go to a bunch of effort to cater for the "public" are foolish.
If ten thousand people play a demo and get a flier, that's still only one tenth the exposure you get from showing it to a single guy from PC Gamer.
The reason everyone is looked after is because anyone who comes by may be media. Media are the important ones. "Public" matter so very little, except in terms of the buzz they can generate.
Now, your original point was "if it's not there for the general public, it shouldn't count" - guess what. Half Life 2, biggest buzz EVER. Kinda kicks your theory in the arse, don't it?
We don't care who see's the game from the general public. We care about the media, and the buyers. And while *you* may be lucky to spot more than a handfull of buyers, the reason for that is that they're all getting private showings, off the floor.
Just because there are members of the public there, doesn't mean the show is for them. I would think the "E3 is a trade event, and not open to the general public" rider on all of their rego forms would pretty much clear that up, yes?
Not until Half-Life, which included a bit of a story, and Deus-Ex were FPS's actually innovative. No, Unreal was just the same as all the others at the time.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Ultima Underworld. Which was released in 1992 - that would be the same year as Wolf3D and a year before Doom, in case you're interested. So yes, the FPS arena has been filled with innovation since it first became a fully fledged genre of it's own.
Sure, there's lots of crap - but that's true of any genre. Your generalisations about the US and UK are just plain ignorant as well - I can name a slew of innovative US games, along with a decent collection of innovative Japanese, British, German, French, Australian titles - and more.
You may be a large purchaser of games, but you evidently know nothing about their history or what's been going on. Look into Looking Glass as a starting point.
Er, Homeworld was developed by Relic Entertainment and *published* by Sierra - who are a Vivendi subsidiary. In general terms, this means that Homeworld (not Homeworlds) is pretty irrelevant to the development going on at Black Label Games.
Which isn't to say it's a good or bad thing, just to say it's not as if it's the same development team.
And yes, Sierra were absolute sods when it came to allowing you to screw your game up early on and then requiring you to retrace your steps much later.
Thus the Sierra "save game every ten minutes and never, ever, overwrite your saves" play policy.
Then again, Infocom weren't much better - especially HHGTTG, which was the worst offender *ever* in this regard.
Check out Warheads and Moonbase Commander (a quick bit of google searching will find you links that I'm too lazy to provide).
Moonbase Commander is SE'ish - but topdown and with a sort of base building element to it.
Warheads *is* Scorched Earth, but played on planets with gravity (so you can swing a projectile such that it slingshots around a planet and whacks your opponent).
Both have online multiplayer. Both are windows game with pretty low system req's
"Microsoft and news network CNN said they were hit by a hoax Monday after a faked Web page erroneously reported the software giant had agreed to buy the video game operations of French conglomerate Vivendi Universal."
What does this mean? It means that Microsoft has *not* bought out Vivendi.
It does not mean that they are not currently in disucssion to do so. There's been a lot of rumours from a lot of sources - and no-one would deny that MS is one of the front runners in contention to buy Vivendi.
Jardinains is the answer to your every hope of breakout like enjoyment. Trust me, it blows DX-Ball out of the water. After all, how many gnomes are there in DX-Ball? Go, check it out and tell me it's not the best 'arkanoidesque' game you've played.
See, he wasn't actually making "another cheap apple crack" - he was stating the case. He's right, too. He doesn't try to say "Macs 0wnz y0ur PC biznatch!" he's just pointing out that the port is, like many mac->pc ports, pretty crappy.
Hey, if you don't want to sound like a snobby purist, you might want to try avoiding phrases like
"That being said, I may see this movie, and, if it is true to Tolkien's beliefs and tone, I may see it fit to like it."
Which make you sound like a... well, the phrase I was going to use was much less polite than snobby purist, lets say.
I just love how many people are willing to condemn the works of others sight unseen. I was hoping at least one comment here would have come from someone who'd watched the trailer and given it some thought. Apparently not. Guess I'll have to go see before I pass judgement.
Well, given that he said "older generation hardware" that pretty much means that carts are a given.
However, all the old Nintendo hardware could be pirated - it's just more expensive and time consuming than it would be with any disc based medium. Also, almost all the common methods of piracy required special hardware.
Honestly, I think Nintendos largest concern is that releasing the GameCube there would result in massive piracy of the special mini-dvd format dics and the release of them to the rest of the world. Nintendo would hate nothing more than a stream of copied media coming out when they've worked so hard (and so far largely successfully) to keep GameCube piracy down.
Nintendo are the one company (at least that springs to mind) that can completely legitimately claim that it still gets use out of its ROMs.
Now, whether or not you think "abandonware" is a valid concept, you have to agree that if the software is still doing the rounds then it's not "keeping old software from dying" it's "piracy". Now, where you stand on piracy is a different matter, but the FACT of the matter is that Nintendo use thier old ROM's.
Recent examples include the E-Reader for the GBA that lets you play old games and the various unlockable ROMs in Animal Crossing.
Why, by the way, do you think Nintendo would want to shutdown ROM piracy just for the hell of it? Why do you think they would spend the money to deploy SNES's into China *just* to crackdown on ROM piracy?
Nintendo cracks down on ROM piracy because they plan to use the IP as they see fit (bonuses for other games, deploying old hardware into new regions) and because they therefore view it as piracy, pure and simple.
You don't get some god-given right to copy software just because it's a few years old. You might like to, but that's not the way it is. If you wanna pirate, that's your call - but don't call it anything else.
This is not a critique of MrBrown, by the by, just an expansion of the points he brought up.
You're not the only one saying this - so I ask you, where does Google say that PageRank is an unbiased service? I'm genuinely curious - they don't have to disclose if they don't want to and they don't appear to the untrained eye to make any claims that are fraudulent - where's the problem?
"Jono Craig: One expected response from Google is that people should be careful what they pay for. They don't always get what they expect. That Google prefer algorithms to fight 'spam' but are happy to investigate claims of abuse manually if they need to. To me this would imply some form of intervention; both through public advice and possibly through filters or penalties to sites such as www.pradnetwork.com & www.searchking.com
Robert Massa: To me, it only illustrates the reason Google has become as successful as it has. They run a good search engine at least in part because they care enough to investigate. I'm not asking for or expecting any special consideration. "
So, he WAS all in favour of google doing what they like. Until it turned out to be something he didn't like. Uh huh.
Speaking your mind? What the forums are for? God, no!
Well, okay, yes.
My point is - does it matter to you if he writes further non-free work and makes some money out of it? This book is free - and that's what you were promised. At no point did he say "Everything I do for the rest of my life will be free, even if it turns out I'm taking a massive hit on potential profits for my future livelyhood as an author."
Don't condemn people for the (actually quite reasonable) steps they may or may not take in the future when they're doing the right thing now. More than the right thing, in fact - blazing a trail for others to do the right thing.
It's like saying "Well, yes Linus developed Linux, but one day he might work for Microsoft - that sucks! Steer clear of Linux!"
Re:why would i buy?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Well, at least this book has been distributed under the Creative Commons licence, which means it's never coming out of the public domain (well, the specific public domain in which it exists, anyhow). This sort of licence (and the opensource licences that Redhat et al operate under) are great for ensuring exactly what you fear doesn't occur - ie, free things becoming non-free due to greed after success.
And yes, I knew you were trolling. You just happened to also be talking out your arse, so I brought you up on it.
As you say, every person in every game company has ideas. It's not ideas that make the game, it's development time and playtesting. The 99% perspiration that supports the 1% inspiration.
The game development industry at the moment *does* suffer from an unwillingness to innovate at the moment - mostly this is a problem with publishers. Hollywood is in the same position at the moment, but this doesn't stop good creative work coming out on a regular basis.
90% of everything is crap. The game industry is just like everything else in this regard.
Thanks for the kudos for Freedom Force, btw (I was a designer and writer on it).
I've already mentioned this point somewhere else, but you're wrong wrong wrong.
The movie industry is much larger than the games industry, despite the fact that games make more per year than films make at the box office.
This is because the movie industry makes most of it's money from DVD's, licensing, TV rights and foreign box office takings. Adding up to a substantially larger industry than games.
I know this is a redundant comment, so feel free to mod it as such. I just don't feel that slashdot should be the home of FUD propogation, as you seem so keen to do.
And yes, I know that's nothing but a wistful dream...
"The video game industry as a whole is already larger then the movie industry, and has been for several years. No one seems to care, though."
Ah, no.
This is a common piece of disinformation that seems to have propogated through the entire world.
Repeat after me -
Games make more money than Movies make in US BOX OFFICE TAKINGS.
Movies make most (80%?) of their money from TV rights, DVD's, Videos and merchandising.
The Movie INDUSTRY is bigger than the games INDUSTRY and will be for at least the next 5-10 years. Don't be confused - the movie industry is a media (and financial) giant.
They're not. Read the article - it points out that they are collecting taxes from sites hosted within Spain and those hosted externally by people RESIDING in Spain.
Slashdot Mirror
See, you and I just see the phrase "Game of Show" differently.
You think the word "Game" means "Playable game" whereas I think the word "Show" means "E3".
That's "E3, place to showcase upcoming stuff" ie, movie trailers for games, effectively.
If you're saying that the average person reads "Game of Show" as equivalent to a review (ie, an Oscar) then you're dead right, and it's deceptive.
I think anyone who knows what E3 is, realises that it's "Game of the SHOW" and thereby the fact that it's the one that made the best showing, at the show, under the conditions said show exists, is implicit.
You choose to believe that definition is a flat out case of lying to the public. I don't think the public are as stupid as you like to think they are. We differ in our read of the phrase. All good.
Well, if that was your point, I don't really disagree.
Or I wouldn't, if E3 were a "complete games get reviewed by the public" show. Which it's not and has never been.
It's all about hyping things up. Now, your point on "Game of show" is well taken. If they were reviewing complete games, or anything similar, then I'd agree with you.
But they're not. Best Game of Show isn't for "best finished game" it's for "game with most potential" (these being pre-release and all) or "Game most likely to blow us away when it hits shelves" - and on all those counts, HL2 wins.
You can call me a liar if you like, but only if you choose to utterly miss the entire point of E3.
The game companies that go to a bunch of effort to cater for the "public" are foolish.
If ten thousand people play a demo and get a flier, that's still only one tenth the exposure you get from showing it to a single guy from PC Gamer.
The reason everyone is looked after is because anyone who comes by may be media. Media are the important ones. "Public" matter so very little, except in terms of the buzz they can generate.
Now, your original point was "if it's not there for the general public, it shouldn't count" - guess what. Half Life 2, biggest buzz EVER. Kinda kicks your theory in the arse, don't it?
Really? I'm high?
Interesting.
We don't care who see's the game from the general public. We care about the media, and the buyers. And while *you* may be lucky to spot more than a handfull of buyers, the reason for that is that they're all getting private showings, off the floor.
Just because there are members of the public there, doesn't mean the show is for them. I would think the "E3 is a trade event, and not open to the general public" rider on all of their rego forms would pretty much clear that up, yes?
"If the general public can't play something,"
It's not a show for the general public, and never has been.
It's a show for journalists and buyers - and I don't think any of them failed to see HL2.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Ultima Underworld. Which was released in 1992 - that would be the same year as Wolf3D and a year before Doom, in case you're interested. So yes, the FPS arena has been filled with innovation since it first became a fully fledged genre of it's own.
Sure, there's lots of crap - but that's true of any genre. Your generalisations about the US and UK are just plain ignorant as well - I can name a slew of innovative US games, along with a decent collection of innovative Japanese, British, German, French, Australian titles - and more.
You may be a large purchaser of games, but you evidently know nothing about their history or what's been going on. Look into Looking Glass as a starting point.
Er, Homeworld was developed by Relic Entertainment and *published* by Sierra - who are a Vivendi subsidiary. In general terms, this means that Homeworld (not Homeworlds) is pretty irrelevant to the development going on at Black Label Games.
Which isn't to say it's a good or bad thing, just to say it's not as if it's the same development team.
Unicorn, I think.
And yes, Sierra were absolute sods when it came to allowing you to screw your game up early on and then requiring you to retrace your steps much later.
Thus the Sierra "save game every ten minutes and never, ever, overwrite your saves" play policy.
Then again, Infocom weren't much better - especially HHGTTG, which was the worst offender *ever* in this regard.
Check out Warheads and Moonbase Commander (a quick bit of google searching will find you links that I'm too lazy to provide).
Moonbase Commander is SE'ish - but topdown and with a sort of base building element to it.
Warheads *is* Scorched Earth, but played on planets with gravity (so you can swing a projectile such that it slingshots around a planet and whacks your opponent).
Both have online multiplayer. Both are windows game with pretty low system req's
"Microsoft and news network CNN said they were hit by a hoax Monday after a faked Web page erroneously reported the software giant had agreed to buy the video game operations of French conglomerate Vivendi Universal."
What does this mean? It means that Microsoft has *not* bought out Vivendi.
It does not mean that they are not currently in disucssion to do so. There's been a lot of rumours from a lot of sources - and no-one would deny that MS is one of the front runners in contention to buy Vivendi.
So it's far from off the cards yet.
Jardinains is the answer to your every hope of breakout like enjoyment. Trust me, it blows DX-Ball out of the water. After all, how many gnomes are there in DX-Ball? Go, check it out and tell me it's not the best 'arkanoidesque' game you've played.
See, he wasn't actually making "another cheap apple crack" - he was stating the case. He's right, too. He doesn't try to say "Macs 0wnz y0ur PC biznatch!" he's just pointing out that the port is, like many mac->pc ports, pretty crappy.
And you respond by making a dig. Well done you.
Hey, if you don't want to sound like a snobby purist, you might want to try avoiding phrases like
... well, the phrase I was going to use was much less polite than snobby purist, lets say.
"That being said, I may see this movie, and, if it is true to Tolkien's beliefs and tone, I may see it fit to like it."
Which make you sound like a
I just love how many people are willing to condemn the works of others sight unseen. I was hoping at least one comment here would have come from someone who'd watched the trailer and given it some thought. Apparently not. Guess I'll have to go see before I pass judgement.
Well, given that he said "older generation hardware" that pretty much means that carts are a given.
However, all the old Nintendo hardware could be pirated - it's just more expensive and time consuming than it would be with any disc based medium. Also, almost all the common methods of piracy required special hardware.
Honestly, I think Nintendos largest concern is that releasing the GameCube there would result in massive piracy of the special mini-dvd format dics and the release of them to the rest of the world. Nintendo would hate nothing more than a stream of copied media coming out when they've worked so hard (and so far largely successfully) to keep GameCube piracy down.
Nintendo are the one company (at least that springs to mind) that can completely legitimately claim that it still gets use out of its ROMs.
Now, whether or not you think "abandonware" is a valid concept, you have to agree that if the software is still doing the rounds then it's not "keeping old software from dying" it's "piracy". Now, where you stand on piracy is a different matter, but the FACT of the matter is that Nintendo use thier old ROM's.
Recent examples include the E-Reader for the GBA that lets you play old games and the various unlockable ROMs in Animal Crossing.
Why, by the way, do you think Nintendo would want to shutdown ROM piracy just for the hell of it? Why do you think they would spend the money to deploy SNES's into China *just* to crackdown on ROM piracy?
Nintendo cracks down on ROM piracy because they plan to use the IP as they see fit (bonuses for other games, deploying old hardware into new regions) and because they therefore view it as piracy, pure and simple.
You don't get some god-given right to copy software just because it's a few years old. You might like to, but that's not the way it is. If you wanna pirate, that's your call - but don't call it anything else.
This is not a critique of MrBrown, by the by, just an expansion of the points he brought up.
You're not the only one saying this - so I ask you, where does Google say that PageRank is an unbiased service? I'm genuinely curious - they don't have to disclose if they don't want to and they don't appear to the untrained eye to make any claims that are fraudulent - where's the problem?
"Jono Craig: One expected response from Google is that people should be careful what they pay for. They don't always get what they expect. That Google prefer algorithms to fight 'spam' but are happy to investigate claims of abuse manually if they need to. To me this would imply some form of intervention; both through public advice and possibly through filters or penalties to sites such as www.pradnetwork.com & www.searchking.com
Robert Massa: To me, it only illustrates the reason Google has become as successful as it has. They run a good search engine at least in part because they care enough to investigate. I'm not asking for or expecting any special consideration. "
So, he WAS all in favour of google doing what they like. Until it turned out to be something he didn't like. Uh huh.
Speaking your mind? What the forums are for? God, no!
Well, okay, yes.
My point is - does it matter to you if he writes further non-free work and makes some money out of it? This book is free - and that's what you were promised. At no point did he say "Everything I do for the rest of my life will be free, even if it turns out I'm taking a massive hit on potential profits for my future livelyhood as an author."
Don't condemn people for the (actually quite reasonable) steps they may or may not take in the future when they're doing the right thing now. More than the right thing, in fact - blazing a trail for others to do the right thing.
It's like saying "Well, yes Linus developed Linux, but one day he might work for Microsoft - that sucks! Steer clear of Linux!"
Well, at least this book has been distributed under the Creative Commons licence, which means it's never coming out of the public domain (well, the specific public domain in which it exists, anyhow). This sort of licence (and the opensource licences that Redhat et al operate under) are great for ensuring exactly what you fear doesn't occur - ie, free things becoming non-free due to greed after success.
And yes, I knew you were trolling. You just happened to also be talking out your arse, so I brought you up on it.
Because you don't know they'll do that until after the fact, obviously.
Or are you trying to say that you suspect Cory will do something similar? If so, you're not thinking this through very well.
Here here.
As you say, every person in every game company has ideas. It's not ideas that make the game, it's development time and playtesting. The 99% perspiration that supports the 1% inspiration.
The game development industry at the moment *does* suffer from an unwillingness to innovate at the moment - mostly this is a problem with publishers. Hollywood is in the same position at the moment, but this doesn't stop good creative work coming out on a regular basis.
90% of everything is crap. The game industry is just like everything else in this regard.
Thanks for the kudos for Freedom Force, btw (I was a designer and writer on it).
Profit on the sales goes to the game industry, licensing fees go to the movie industry. Easy.
I've already mentioned this point somewhere else, but you're wrong wrong wrong.
The movie industry is much larger than the games industry, despite the fact that games make more per year than films make at the box office.
This is because the movie industry makes most of it's money from DVD's, licensing, TV rights and foreign box office takings. Adding up to a substantially larger industry than games.
I know this is a redundant comment, so feel free to mod it as such. I just don't feel that slashdot should be the home of FUD propogation, as you seem so keen to do.
And yes, I know that's nothing but a wistful dream...
"The video game industry as a whole is already larger then the movie industry, and has been for several years. No one seems to care, though."
Ah, no.
This is a common piece of disinformation that seems to have propogated through the entire world.
Repeat after me -
Games make more money than Movies make in US BOX OFFICE TAKINGS.
Movies make most (80%?) of their money from TV rights, DVD's, Videos and merchandising.
The Movie INDUSTRY is bigger than the games INDUSTRY and will be for at least the next 5-10 years. Don't be confused - the movie industry is a media (and financial) giant.
They're not. Read the article - it points out that they are collecting taxes from sites hosted within Spain and those hosted externally by people RESIDING in Spain.
They may be silly, but they're not that silly.