A muzzle-load based game would not be bad, so long as the engine for hand-to-hand weapon combat is fun. I've yet to play a first-person game in which sword fights are anything more than a confusing mess of button-mashing. Mainly because your field of vision on a computer screen is too narrow, so if somebody is standing right in front of you, you lose track of them right away. Back up to 3rd person view, and your view of yourself obstructs the view of your opponent.
Plus, there's two much variety of movement with swords to really simulate it well, compared to guns where you are simulating the point-and-shoot motion of operating a machine with the point-and-shoot motion of a controller.
If somebody can come up with a solution to these two problems, they would really open up options for the FPS genre.
I thought I made it abundantly clear that I think very highly of the DS, don't own any of the living-room Sony consoles, and consider the entire concept of the console "war" to be frivolous and silly.
If daring to say a few nice things about some of the Sony games makes me seem like a "Sony fanboy" to you, it says volumes about how skewed your own perspective is.
One of the most fun shooters I ever played was "Outlaws", specifically because some of the guns were a pain in the ass to keep loaded. Walking down the middle of the street while thumbing cartriges into my rifle, ducking behind a barn to reload my six-shooter, lighting dynamite with my cigar butt... I felt like I was living a freakin' John Wayne movie. It was pure bliss.
Unfortunately, it was also not very popular. I guess not many people share my tastes.
Seriously, I know Tolkein was great and everything, but can we get a decent non-starwars sci-fi or post-apocalypse MMOG please? Or just something without any goddamn ORCS?
City of Heroes is oodles of fun... in the sense that you can call any MMORPG "fun."
For me, the last decade has been a "dark age" for gaming. Ever since the PlayStation became the biggest brand in console gaming, games have been more and more about awesome graphics and "adult-targeted" franchises. Me, I prefer fun little games I can play with my friends in our living room.
I don't own a PS or PS2, but since picking up a PSP (mostly with the intention of watching videos on it), I've discovered a whole world of the exact sort of game you are lamenting the lack of, all within the Playstation family.
For starters, there's the Katamari series. Simple, fun, entertaining, quite addictive, and at least some of them offer a multi-player option.
The various street-car racing games are a heck of a lot of fun, too. Sure, "Mario Karts" is a cute game and a lot of fun, but the more conventional race games, where you can pick different cars based on performance and handling characteristics, based on the course and road conditions, to race against your friend's choice, offer some very interesting replay potential.
If you want to liven up a party with a console (and frankly, your parties suck if you need to turn a console on to liven them up), then you could do a whole lot worse than busting out a set of DDR pads (either for the Playstation or X-Box.) Gen-Xers are spooky-skilled masters of that game, but fire up DDR with a room full of baby boomers, and hilarity ensues.
Just because the GTA series is a big seller for the PS2 (and a remarkably fun series of games to play), doesn't mean that they are the only games out there. There's certainly nobody forcing you to grab one of the games off the "wall" of FPS options, but some of those shooters are a lot more social than you give them credit for.
1. The design of the PSP is not that bad. It would be nice to have a second analog stick on the right side, but otherwise I'm pretty happy with it.
2. We are still talking about toys here. If we were talking about NASA, all your protests about "innovative design, while stressing simplicity and ellegence over raw horsepower and numerous (but possibly, lacklusterly implemented) features" (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean... it's not like the Wii cures cancer or keeps the moon from falling. It's just another game console, except with a goofy new controller design.) would make sense, but we are talking about toys. As long as people have fun playing with them, they serve their purpose. "Philosophy" is a silly thing to even discuss.
Well over time knives get dull from use. unless I'm mistaken, this one atom could easily break off, right? Wouldn't it be instantly dull?
As long as it is only used to poke really soft, non-abrasive things, you should be good to go.
Of course, some nay-sayers might ask why you would ever need The Sharpest Object Ever Made to poke holes in chocolate pudding, but who needs that kind of negativity?
No, see... That's called "decorating", and it's a normal behavior for human females. Those plants, wall hangings, and curios are supposed to serve the purpose of making your house look like somebody other than a Spartan warrior is living there.
The alternative to having all that "crap" in your house is a divorce, after which you will probably never have to worry about a home cluttered by possessions again.
If that's true... If it really is a small fraction of your dev costs to do the logic code, why not "buy the Caddy" for that part of the game, and really dazzle customers? The impact to your bottom line would be minimal, so it would seem to just make sense.
I hear a lot of people talk about how game dev for HD is sooooo much more expensive, but game companies have been making PC games for decades now with way more than 1080 lines of vertical resolution, and strangely enough PC games do not cost more than 480i GameCube products.
What's the problem? Don't you just plot vectors and let the GPU do all the work?
Could it be that game companies are simply falling back on this as an excuse to sell half-baked products (like Madden 06) to a niche market (360 owners now, PS3 owners tomorrow) who are starving for good high-res content?
I bought my PSP for the combined use of gaming and watching videos on it, and it's pretty good for both.
When standing in lines, sitting in waiting rooms, or riding on planes, it's nice that I have a choice of popping in a game (i.e., Katamari, Bleach, Stand Alone Complex, or GTA), or simply kicking back and watching anime videos. (I rip them from DVD on my Mac using a program called Handbrake, then dump them into the attached 4 GB HD on the PSP.)
The DS Lite is also an impressive gadget, and it looks like some of the games for it are pretty cool, but I have not yet become bored with the PSP options, so I don't really feel compelled to buy one... for now.
What baffles me is why so many people seem to care which handheld "wins" the console "wars." We are talking about toys here, people. There are more important things in life than which faceless corporation makes more money selling toys.
Right now the Ipod is for music. The PSP does everything, but nothing good.
I don't want my iPod to do anything but play music. It's great for it.
My PSP is very fun for playing Katamari & GTA, and also plays my Doctor Who videos in wide-screen mode when I'm away from home. Nothing against the DS Lite, which a great little game box, but I'm very happy with the PSP so far.
Pardon me for not having much faith in Microsoft to come up with something that does any of those tasks better.
I believe that IBM took one look at what Jobs wanted, what he was willing to pay, and said "no thank you".
Yet Intel looked at those exact same numbers and said, "yes, please!!! Let us fly somebody out to you right away to pitch our entire next two years of plans to you."
How about a static banner or border? That way there's distracting moving images of candy colors and boobies and whatever for the regular viewers, and text you can't escape reading for the PVR crowd.
MS *hardware* has been excellent. For a long time MS was the best mouse manufacturer out there, and I'd quite happily use MS mice or keyboards, although I don't at the moment.
Almost all MS mice were re-badged HP mice.
They never "manufactured" any of the things you are giving them credit for.
But hey, they managed to stamp their names on some damn nice hardware over the years.
We are beginning to see why Apple made the jump to Intel.
It's not that they had anything that was all that much better than IBM or AMD at the time they were making their pitch to Jobs. It was the fact that their immediate future was being prepped with some impressive technology, both in terms of speed and speed-per-watt, which turned the Steve's head.
I don't know much about cars, but when I take mine in for service, I'd like the person who works on it to be an expert mechanic.
Likewise, if a relative of mine takes their PC to Geek Squad, it would be nice if the guy who looks at it knows how to diagnose simple driver problems or hardware failures.
That's one thing I like about the so-called "genius bars" in the Apple retail stores. They are not perfect and have a lot of the same problems as any other support center, (and their wait times are sometimes maddening), but since that particular support center is owned by the vendor, and the presige of the entire fucking company is on the line every time they help somebody, there's tremendous corporate pressure for those people to know what the hell they are doing and to act like professionals.
I know several people who now refuse to buy any computer other than Macs, not because they like the OS so much or because they think the hardware is anything special, but simply because they know that if there's a problem, they can get help which is actually, you know, helpful. For a non-techie, this is far beyond worth the mark-up on Apple's computers.
Swerving back on to the topic at hand, The Geek Squad is really not much worse than a lot of other tier-1 PC support centers out there. They just happen to be the most visible. The support industry is rife with people who don't even know what defrag does, let alone when it would be useful to use it.
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So? It's still a hundredfold increase over wiggling a little stick and mashing some buttons.
How, exactly, is wiggling a little controller and mashing some buttons a "hundredfold increase" over wiggling a little stick and mashing some buttons.
It's an interesting idea for a controller, but this kind of bullshit is exactly what I mean when I call it "over-hyped."
Yeah, great. Swing your arms around like a monkey to manipulate a sword, with nothing to stop your momentum when your swing is blocked on-screen.
Also, the viewing angle problem is NOT solved by Nintendo's over-hyped new controller.
A muzzle-load based game would not be bad, so long as the engine for hand-to-hand weapon combat is fun. I've yet to play a first-person game in which sword fights are anything more than a confusing mess of button-mashing. Mainly because your field of vision on a computer screen is too narrow, so if somebody is standing right in front of you, you lose track of them right away. Back up to 3rd person view, and your view of yourself obstructs the view of your opponent.
Plus, there's two much variety of movement with swords to really simulate it well, compared to guns where you are simulating the point-and-shoot motion of operating a machine with the point-and-shoot motion of a controller.
If somebody can come up with a solution to these two problems, they would really open up options for the FPS genre.
You truly sound like a Sony fanboy.
I thought I made it abundantly clear that I think very highly of the DS, don't own any of the living-room Sony consoles, and consider the entire concept of the console "war" to be frivolous and silly.
If daring to say a few nice things about some of the Sony games makes me seem like a "Sony fanboy" to you, it says volumes about how skewed your own perspective is.
Outlaws could be an amazing lan party experience.
Holy crap. Deathmatch on a train. With shotguns.
That would put the "twitch" back in "twich shooters."
Flintlocks take too long to reload.
One of the most fun shooters I ever played was "Outlaws", specifically because some of the guns were a pain in the ass to keep loaded. Walking down the middle of the street while thumbing cartriges into my rifle, ducking behind a barn to reload my six-shooter, lighting dynamite with my cigar butt... I felt like I was living a freakin' John Wayne movie. It was pure bliss.
Unfortunately, it was also not very popular. I guess not many people share my tastes.
Seriously, I know Tolkein was great and everything, but can we get a decent non-starwars sci-fi or post-apocalypse MMOG please? Or just something without any goddamn ORCS?
City of Heroes is oodles of fun... in the sense that you can call any MMORPG "fun."
For me, the last decade has been a "dark age" for gaming. Ever since the PlayStation became the biggest brand in console gaming, games have been more and more about awesome graphics and "adult-targeted" franchises. Me, I prefer fun little games I can play with my friends in our living room.
I don't own a PS or PS2, but since picking up a PSP (mostly with the intention of watching videos on it), I've discovered a whole world of the exact sort of game you are lamenting the lack of, all within the Playstation family.
For starters, there's the Katamari series. Simple, fun, entertaining, quite addictive, and at least some of them offer a multi-player option.
The various street-car racing games are a heck of a lot of fun, too. Sure, "Mario Karts" is a cute game and a lot of fun, but the more conventional race games, where you can pick different cars based on performance and handling characteristics, based on the course and road conditions, to race against your friend's choice, offer some very interesting replay potential.
If you want to liven up a party with a console (and frankly, your parties suck if you need to turn a console on to liven them up), then you could do a whole lot worse than busting out a set of DDR pads (either for the Playstation or X-Box.) Gen-Xers are spooky-skilled masters of that game, but fire up DDR with a room full of baby boomers, and hilarity ensues.
Just because the GTA series is a big seller for the PS2 (and a remarkably fun series of games to play), doesn't mean that they are the only games out there. There's certainly nobody forcing you to grab one of the games off the "wall" of FPS options, but some of those shooters are a lot more social than you give them credit for.
Two counterpoints:
1. The design of the PSP is not that bad. It would be nice to have a second analog stick on the right side, but otherwise I'm pretty happy with it.
2. We are still talking about toys here. If we were talking about NASA, all your protests about "innovative design, while stressing simplicity and ellegence over raw horsepower and numerous (but possibly, lacklusterly implemented) features" (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean... it's not like the Wii cures cancer or keeps the moon from falling. It's just another game console, except with a goofy new controller design.) would make sense, but we are talking about toys. As long as people have fun playing with them, they serve their purpose. "Philosophy" is a silly thing to even discuss.
Don't make me RTFA just to see what TFA is about. Mention what was "controversial" about in the ad somwhere in the summary.
That's what the summaries are for, you see. To let people know whether reading the article is worth their time.
Sheesh!
Well over time knives get dull from use. unless I'm mistaken, this one atom could easily break off, right? Wouldn't it be instantly dull?
As long as it is only used to poke really soft, non-abrasive things, you should be good to go.
Of course, some nay-sayers might ask why you would ever need The Sharpest Object Ever Made to poke holes in chocolate pudding, but who needs that kind of negativity?
No, see... That's called "decorating", and it's a normal behavior for human females. Those plants, wall hangings, and curios are supposed to serve the purpose of making your house look like somebody other than a Spartan warrior is living there.
The alternative to having all that "crap" in your house is a divorce, after which you will probably never have to worry about a home cluttered by possessions again.
If that's true... If it really is a small fraction of your dev costs to do the logic code, why not "buy the Caddy" for that part of the game, and really dazzle customers? The impact to your bottom line would be minimal, so it would seem to just make sense.
Myspace is the most pointless, horribly designed site on the internet.
In other news, MySpace was designed.
Clue to all geeks everywhere:
Nobody cares that MySpace runs on code that is inelegant, nor that it results in sloppy-looking personal pages
It's a big ol' mess, but it's a big ol' mess that a lot of young folks find useful. End of story.
I hear a lot of people talk about how game dev for HD is sooooo much more expensive, but game companies have been making PC games for decades now with way more than 1080 lines of vertical resolution, and strangely enough PC games do not cost more than 480i GameCube products.
What's the problem? Don't you just plot vectors and let the GPU do all the work?
Could it be that game companies are simply falling back on this as an excuse to sell half-baked products (like Madden 06) to a niche market (360 owners now, PS3 owners tomorrow) who are starving for good high-res content?
I bought my PSP for the combined use of gaming and watching videos on it, and it's pretty good for both.
When standing in lines, sitting in waiting rooms, or riding on planes, it's nice that I have a choice of popping in a game (i.e., Katamari, Bleach, Stand Alone Complex, or GTA), or simply kicking back and watching anime videos. (I rip them from DVD on my Mac using a program called Handbrake, then dump them into the attached 4 GB HD on the PSP.)
The DS Lite is also an impressive gadget, and it looks like some of the games for it are pretty cool, but I have not yet become bored with the PSP options, so I don't really feel compelled to buy one... for now.
What baffles me is why so many people seem to care which handheld "wins" the console "wars." We are talking about toys here, people. There are more important things in life than which faceless corporation makes more money selling toys.
Right now the Ipod is for music. The PSP does everything, but nothing good.
I don't want my iPod to do anything but play music. It's great for it.
My PSP is very fun for playing Katamari & GTA, and also plays my Doctor Who videos in wide-screen mode when I'm away from home. Nothing against the DS Lite, which a great little game box, but I'm very happy with the PSP so far.
Pardon me for not having much faith in Microsoft to come up with something that does any of those tasks better.
I believe that IBM took one look at what Jobs wanted, what he was willing to pay, and said "no thank you".
Yet Intel looked at those exact same numbers and said, "yes, please!!! Let us fly somebody out to you right away to pitch our entire next two years of plans to you."
How about a static banner or border? That way there's distracting moving images of candy colors and boobies and whatever for the regular viewers, and text you can't escape reading for the PVR crowd.
Alas there's no "-1, Missed Geeky Pop-culture Reference But Replied Anyway" mod.
You would think there would be, since it comes up so often.
Reaching pretty far to squeeze in an obscure Leonard Cohen reference, aren't you?
MS *hardware* has been excellent. For a long time MS was the best mouse manufacturer out there, and I'd quite happily use MS mice or keyboards, although I don't at the moment.
Almost all MS mice were re-badged HP mice.
They never "manufactured" any of the things you are giving them credit for.
But hey, they managed to stamp their names on some damn nice hardware over the years.
We are beginning to see why Apple made the jump to Intel.
It's not that they had anything that was all that much better than IBM or AMD at the time they were making their pitch to Jobs. It was the fact that their immediate future was being prepped with some impressive technology, both in terms of speed and speed-per-watt, which turned the Steve's head.
I don't know much about cars, but when I take mine in for service, I'd like the person who works on it to be an expert mechanic.
Likewise, if a relative of mine takes their PC to Geek Squad, it would be nice if the guy who looks at it knows how to diagnose simple driver problems or hardware failures.
That's one thing I like about the so-called "genius bars" in the Apple retail stores. They are not perfect and have a lot of the same problems as any other support center, (and their wait times are sometimes maddening), but since that particular support center is owned by the vendor, and the presige of the entire fucking company is on the line every time they help somebody, there's tremendous corporate pressure for those people to know what the hell they are doing and to act like professionals.
I know several people who now refuse to buy any computer other than Macs, not because they like the OS so much or because they think the hardware is anything special, but simply because they know that if there's a problem, they can get help which is actually, you know, helpful. For a non-techie, this is far beyond worth the mark-up on Apple's computers.
Swerving back on to the topic at hand, The Geek Squad is really not much worse than a lot of other tier-1 PC support centers out there. They just happen to be the most visible. The support industry is rife with people who don't even know what defrag does, let alone when it would be useful to use it.
So, are these virtual T-Shirts created by American gamers on their payroll, or in East Asian sweatshops?