Frozen Bubble? Tux Racer? Free Civ? Battle of Wesnoth?
There are some open source games and some are quite decent. Pretty much none of them have anything close to the production values of most commercial releases however. That doesn't mean they can't be fun though.
I was being sarcastic... but I am glad in that I succeeded in making you wonder. Although if I had unlimited funds I would totally seek out and purchase a Pippin, just to have it in a "what the hell were they thinking" section of my console collection (along with Nintendo's Virtual Boy of course). I'm not being sarcastic when I say that this excites me more than an Xbox 360 for holiday gaming goodness. (getting pretty of sick of the 360 hype - who knows maybe I'll own one someday, just don't care about this launch)
The only REAL console worth playing ever was the Apple Pippin, it just failed because the world is too stupid to appreciate Apple's mastery of all things electronic.
Well, modding and free downloads are really more of a PC thing than a console thing. The grandparent poster from Garage Games represents a company that sells "indie" games. Xbox Live gives his company a way to get these games out to console players without the need for an on the shelf console disk. A lot of smaller developers will be able to take advantage of this. I realize hardcore gamers may not care about things like Bejeweled and Bookworm, but a lot of casual gamers do.
I don't know exactly what the grandparent was referring too, but I do know that the port of the Alien Swarm mod to the source engine is supposedly going to be pay for the full version.
XBMC is for people that want a quick solution that is easy to get up and running with minimal tweaking. It's not the only option. You can run Xbox Linux and have your full Linux system available if you like. It will be interesting to see how the PS3 handles being able to run Linux without that being used as a jumping point for pirating games.
"No one is impressed by your pathetic little toy masquerading as a multimedia machine."
No, you see it's a great toy. I don't think it's THE best multimedia solution, but it's extremely cheap and XBMC is pretty solid. The real bonus is how great a game machine it is for retro gaming. So sure I get my DIVX and XVID playback but I also get NES, SNES, Genesis, Atari, Commodore 64, MAME and a bunch of other emulators. Sure you can run emus on a PC, but the interfaces are inconsistent and not designed to be easy to use while you sit on the couch. Plus you get spotty support for controllers in some PC emulators. So it may be "underpowered" but it is:
small compared to a shuttle pc capable of playing back videos encoded with a wide range of codecs able to stream video off of network shares on your LAN capable of acting as an audio jukebox able to stream internet audio able to play thousands of games from Atari to Xbox able to browse the Internet able to run Linux dirt cheap
Oh yeah and it will tell you the current weather too.
"About 40% of the gamers I know have multiple consoles."
And about 75% of people I know who would not consider themselves gamers have a PS2. These are the people that buy it and play maybe once a week or once a month. They purchase no more than 10 games over the life of the machine. In most cases they rent what they play. There are a LOT of households that have a console that are not "gamer households". Some of these have it because a kid got one for Christmas one year, some of them are 20 and 30 somethings who play a little Madden with friends once in a while instead of poker. Most of these casual players don't know about the tech, they buy a system because they heard "Sony was the best" or "Halo is awesome". They don't read gaming websites and magazines, they don't lust after future games. They are casual players and they represent a large amount of systems sold.
World of Warcraft did get stuck at the $50 mark for quite awhile. Partially I believe to demand outstripping the actual number of copies available. The first time I tried to buy it, it was sold out. It remained sold out for a few weeks during the period when Blizzard was having trouble with realm stability do to the amount of players coming on. While mainstream shops such as GameStop gouges PC and console gamers alike, other stores (especially online) will usually have the games in the $40 range even just after release. I am assuming the payout to the console makers as you noted effectively gets rid of any "leeway" in cost that could be used for a sale price.
Re:Video games, MMO's and RPG's supplanting table
on
Dungeons and Shadows
·
· Score: 1
Absolutely, the MUD world is often much closer to tabletop roleplaying than any MMOs I've played.
This is the common "art for art's sake" view which really doesn't hold much water in the real world. Was H.R. Geiger's work in Alien done for "art's sake"? It was done to create a work of entertainment which made a lot of money for a lot of people including Geiger. Yet Geiger is considered an artist and his works are considered art. A lot of art is created to express the beliefs, opinions or feelings of the artist. It doesn't exist in some mystical void solely to be appreciated. Art is made to inform and express or sometimes to just look pretty. It is created to make money, it is created to "itch a scratch" the artist has, it is created for fun or it is created to express rage, pain, love, humor and any other human emotion.
Then how come some films are considered "works of art" when they are also created to entertain? And a lot of conventional art is created to feed the artist.
Ah Expedition to the Barrier Peaks what a classic module. So much fun having the party blow themselves up accidentally trying to figure out how to use the futuristic technology. I was a big fan of Gamma World and its predecessor Metamorphosis Alpha as well.
Re:Video games, MMO's and RPG's supplanting table
on
Dungeons and Shadows
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't really consider MMOs (or single player RPGs) to be exactly a replacement for tabletop gaming. I also no longer have the time or circle of friends to play D&D (forget the play sessions, a good DM has to spend a lot of time on prep). When I used to play pen and paper RPGs the focus was on the roleplaying and story less so on the mechanics. An MMO is heavily mechanical and rigid - there is no DM to bend the rules. I know a lot of people like to play on role playing servers but it just feels silly to me, the game structure is too obvious for me to want to play pretend. "Milady, please come forth and take the head of Van Cleef, after you I will take his head as well seeing as he appears to have one for everyone in the group." I like MMOs and they are a social form of gaming but they are pretty far removed from D&D.
I agree that the phrase "cutting a break" was stupid and incorrect. I don't think MS is trying to push 3rd party developers out, honestly I hope more of them publish at the $50. I mean the funny thing is I can buy the PC version of Call of Duty 2 for $35 on sale ($40 regular) yet the 360 one will be at least $50. About the only way I can find dicounted console games is if they are used - yet PC games supposedly sell way less copies.
I'd say 75% of the TV viewing in my house is done on computers. We have 3 computers an Xbox media center and 2 TV sets. The main set has a Tivo on it. The wife likes to transfer programs over to her PC to watch. I watch a lot of stuff on the Xbox which is next to my computer. The kids watch stuff on both the computers and the main TV. I know it's not exactly common but I wouldn't be surprised if this situation happens in a number of households. Also some people have computers hooked up to their TVs and could use that for viewing this type of content.
MS does not force the pricing on third party Xbox releases. They give a suggested retail price, but if a developer wants to offer a game for $.50 they can. And yes it is competitive pricing, and who does that benefit? The consumers. Hopefully we'll see some third parties follow suit. Hell, the GameStop near me is probably going to tack another $5 on the MSRP of these games anyway.
I have no idea about Dell's consumer system, if they are anything like the consumer systems Compaq and HP have sold they are probably full of weird frankenstein hardware that doesn't work quite right. Dell's business systems (even the low end ones) work quite well and are reliable. I have had may two motherboard failures over the past 6 years dealing with 150 or so Dell computers. Half the problem I have seen with consumer units in general is due to bad drivers and crappy bundled software. That and the lack of memory shipped on the low end systems (256MB shared with video in most cases).
"Playing Quake 4, the biggest difference I found was that I really felt that I was part of a team of marines. I had allies, not just enemies. This is the same trait that made Halo good."
I think Call of Duty 2 does it better than Quake 4. Your team actively calls out spotted enemy or commands on what to do next. Both games are heavily scripted, but I enjoyed COD 2 more.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey man - Frozen Bubble AND> Tux Racer are real time!
Notable... hmmm... nevermind.
Frozen Bubble? Tux Racer? Free Civ? Battle of Wesnoth?
There are some open source games and some are quite decent. Pretty much none of them have anything close to the production values of most commercial releases however.
That doesn't mean they can't be fun though.
I was being sarcastic... but I am glad in that I succeeded in making you wonder.
Although if I had unlimited funds I would totally seek out and purchase a Pippin, just to have it in a "what the hell were they thinking" section of my console collection (along with Nintendo's Virtual Boy of course).
I'm not being sarcastic when I say that this excites me more than an Xbox 360 for holiday gaming goodness.
(getting pretty of sick of the 360 hype - who knows maybe I'll own one someday, just don't care about this launch)
The only REAL console worth playing ever was the Apple Pippin, it just failed because the world is too stupid to appreciate Apple's mastery of all things electronic.
Well, modding and free downloads are really more of a PC thing than a console thing. The grandparent poster from Garage Games represents a company that sells "indie" games. Xbox Live gives his company a way to get these games out to console players without the need for an on the shelf console disk. A lot of smaller developers will be able to take advantage of this. I realize hardcore gamers may not care about things like Bejeweled and Bookworm, but a lot of casual gamers do.
I don't know exactly what the grandparent was referring too, but I do know that the port of the Alien Swarm mod to the source engine is supposedly going to be pay for the full version.
Fuck all of them, I want a Phantom console.
"The Video in the XBox 360 is based on ATI technologies we won't see in PC Video cards until at least the second Quarter of next year."
And will not be surpassed until the end of next year. Woo!
XBMC is for people that want a quick solution that is easy to get up and running with minimal tweaking.
It's not the only option.
You can run Xbox Linux and have your full Linux system available if you like.
It will be interesting to see how the PS3 handles being able to run Linux without that being used as a jumping point for pirating games.
"No one is impressed by your pathetic little toy masquerading as a multimedia machine."
No, you see it's a great toy. I don't think it's THE best multimedia solution, but it's extremely cheap and XBMC is pretty solid. The real bonus is how great a game machine it is for retro gaming. So sure I get my DIVX and XVID playback but I also get NES, SNES, Genesis, Atari, Commodore 64, MAME and a bunch of other emulators. Sure you can run emus on a PC, but the interfaces are inconsistent and not designed to be easy to use while you sit on the couch. Plus you get spotty support for controllers in some PC emulators.
So it may be "underpowered" but it is:
small compared to a shuttle pc
capable of playing back videos encoded with a wide range of codecs
able to stream video off of network shares on your LAN
capable of acting as an audio jukebox
able to stream internet audio
able to play thousands of games from Atari to Xbox
able to browse the Internet
able to run Linux
dirt cheap
Oh yeah and it will tell you the current weather too.
With a 20GB hard drive it will make one crappy excuse for a DVR.
Uh, he's talking about an original modded Xbox NOT an Xbox 360. The Xbox is Intel based.
"About 40% of the gamers I know have multiple consoles."
And about 75% of people I know who would not consider themselves gamers have a PS2. These are the people that buy it and play maybe once a week or once a month. They purchase no more than 10 games over the life of the machine. In most cases they rent what they play.
There are a LOT of households that have a console that are not "gamer households". Some of these have it because a kid got one for Christmas one year, some of them are 20 and 30 somethings who play a little Madden with friends once in a while instead of poker.
Most of these casual players don't know about the tech, they buy a system because they heard "Sony was the best" or "Halo is awesome". They don't read gaming websites and magazines, they don't lust after future games. They are casual players and they represent a large amount of systems sold.
World of Warcraft did get stuck at the $50 mark for quite awhile. Partially I believe to demand outstripping the actual number of copies available. The first time I tried to buy it, it was sold out. It remained sold out for a few weeks during the period when Blizzard was having trouble with realm stability do to the amount of players coming on.
While mainstream shops such as GameStop gouges PC and console gamers alike, other stores (especially online) will usually have the games in the $40 range even just after release.
I am assuming the payout to the console makers as you noted effectively gets rid of any "leeway" in cost that could be used for a sale price.
Absolutely, the MUD world is often much closer to tabletop roleplaying than any MMOs I've played.
This is the common "art for art's sake" view which really doesn't hold much water in the real world. Was H.R. Geiger's work in Alien done for "art's sake"? It was done to create a work of entertainment which made a lot of money for a lot of people including Geiger. Yet Geiger is considered an artist and his works are considered art.
A lot of art is created to express the beliefs, opinions or feelings of the artist. It doesn't exist in some mystical void solely to be appreciated. Art is made to inform and express or sometimes to just look pretty. It is created to make money, it is created to "itch a scratch" the artist has, it is created for fun or it is created to express rage, pain, love, humor and any other human emotion.
Then how come some films are considered "works of art" when they are also created to entertain?
And a lot of conventional art is created to feed the artist.
Ah Expedition to the Barrier Peaks what a classic module. So much fun having the party blow themselves up accidentally trying to figure out how to use the futuristic technology.
I was a big fan of Gamma World and its predecessor Metamorphosis Alpha as well.
I don't really consider MMOs (or single player RPGs) to be exactly a replacement for tabletop gaming. I also no longer have the time or circle of friends to play D&D (forget the play sessions, a good DM has to spend a lot of time on prep). When I used to play pen and paper RPGs the focus was on the roleplaying and story less so on the mechanics. An MMO is heavily mechanical and rigid - there is no DM to bend the rules. I know a lot of people like to play on role playing servers but it just feels silly to me, the game structure is too obvious for me to want to play pretend. "Milady, please come forth and take the head of Van Cleef, after you I will take his head as well seeing as he appears to have one for everyone in the group."
I like MMOs and they are a social form of gaming but they are pretty far removed from D&D.
I agree that the phrase "cutting a break" was stupid and incorrect.
I don't think MS is trying to push 3rd party developers out, honestly I hope more of them publish at the $50. I mean the funny thing is I can buy the PC version of Call of Duty 2 for $35 on sale ($40 regular) yet the 360 one will be at least $50. About the only way I can find dicounted console games is if they are used - yet PC games supposedly sell way less copies.
I'd say 75% of the TV viewing in my house is done on computers. We have 3 computers an Xbox media center and 2 TV sets. The main set has a Tivo on it. The wife likes to transfer programs over to her PC to watch. I watch a lot of stuff on the Xbox which is next to my computer. The kids watch stuff on both the computers and the main TV.
I know it's not exactly common but I wouldn't be surprised if this situation happens in a number of households. Also some people have computers hooked up to their TVs and could use that for viewing this type of content.
"saturated with penetration"
Is that the same as having every hole filled?
MS does not force the pricing on third party Xbox releases. They give a suggested retail price, but if a developer wants to offer a game for $.50 they can.
And yes it is competitive pricing, and who does that benefit? The consumers. Hopefully we'll see some third parties follow suit. Hell, the GameStop near me is probably going to tack another $5 on the MSRP of these games anyway.
I have no idea about Dell's consumer system, if they are anything like the consumer systems Compaq and HP have sold they are probably full of weird frankenstein hardware that doesn't work quite right. Dell's business systems (even the low end ones) work quite well and are reliable. I have had may two motherboard failures over the past 6 years dealing with 150 or so Dell computers.
Half the problem I have seen with consumer units in general is due to bad drivers and crappy bundled software. That and the lack of memory shipped on the low end systems (256MB shared with video in most cases).
"Playing Quake 4, the biggest difference I found was that I really felt that I was part of a team of marines. I had allies, not just enemies. This is the same trait that made Halo good."
I think Call of Duty 2 does it better than Quake 4. Your team actively calls out spotted enemy or commands on what to do next. Both games are heavily scripted, but I enjoyed COD 2 more.