I downloaded the patch another user on this board downloaded the patch.
When ever a system launch some fanboy of some other console will bitch and scream about some problem with the system. To me that's what this sounds like. Just some fan trying to create a problem. I'm sure there's a potential for a problem but rather then get in an uproar, I'd like to see a confirmed problem rather then a rumor.
Funny an article that is only a week old, that refutes only ONE response means the debate is over? Funny there's numerous criticisms and most of them are still pretty valid, again on BOTH sides of the field. The debate isn't over. For the last couple years it was pretty much confirmed that there was a moratorium on the debate.
There's a lot of bullshit on global warming from both sides of the field, Al Gore's movie has a lot of stuff in it that wouldn't be kosher except that global warming is "trendy". If you want to promote your political agenda go right ahead, but don't do it on Slashdot, no one cares or if they do they've seen it. And this movie is sure as hell not as rock solid as people make it out to be.
Sorry, hardware that changes every 3 YEARS. However you'll also be programming on 3 different platforms at times if you really get into it, and sometimes SDKs will change monthly as well as the code base.
Games degrees are seen as jokes by a lot of people, it could be given by harvard but they arn't seen as credible sources.
There's three main benefits of CS degrees.
A. You have better classes, Development life cycles is VERY underrated by undergrads. Design documentation is underrated at all, you'll hate these classes, people in any business love it because it teaches you a lot. They love the fact that you went through the harder courses, and learned more than just game design. Think game design is just programming games? hell no. It's programming hardware, hardware that changes every 3 monthes. APIs, Networking, graphics, physics, all of these are games. The actual gameplay itself is the beginners stuff.
B. You have more flexability. Get into game design and hate it? You can get into another field very easy with your degree. Can't find a job? layoffs happening? you can get into another field. Simple.
C. Pound for pound you'll learn more, get more money to start with, and be safer for a CS degree. You'll learn more technologies which is a huge benefit (you'll be suprised how often a game company will use a variety of languages) and most of the stuff a game course will teach you, you can learn yourself when you are not in class, you can take some of those classes as electives if you want, or teach yourself.
If you want to break into the industry however your degree won't matter. It's extremely good to have but you'll want to have three things, experience, intellegence (knowledge), and desire. If you have a project in classes, don't be afraid to make a game out of it, senior classes especially (design classes too). Have a side project, make a mod, make your own game. Go after companies you want to work for. Know gaming (doesn't mean you have to pay a lot, but know the differences between a ps3 and a 360, Why is a wii different? Is a PS3 the same as a 360, why? and Why not? Don't worry if you don't know it all, don't worry about making opinions, people in the industry have differing opinions and disagree, but knowing information is great.
The most important thing is desire though, if you go after a company know what games they make, their genre (don't worry if you're wrong, if they were in that genre in the past, if you've played the games and can see where they are and who they are they will enjoy that. Don't tell them the game sucked (even though they might think so) but if you know of places for improvements meantioning it won't get your head ripped off if you're kind. Actively apply to places, not just on monster but everywhere, be enthusastic, make sure they realize you want to work for them (not as a stepping stone, not as "I need a job" But "I want to be a game programmer") I can't tell you how many times a manager at my company has said "It sounded like he really didn't want to work here". A desire or a drive to join a company will be an easy deciding factor in your favor and it doesn't take much, just don't go over board (dressing in costume is frowned on, but liking the company is always good).
The degree will be one step on a path to get in the industry to a good company, which degree you take is up to you, but for safety reason the CS is better. The Game developer isn't a "we won't take you", I work with one guy from digipen and one guy from fullsail. However you NEED drive if you're going to be picked with it. If there's one thing they want to see is that you can push yourself to the next level.
Best game in the series? yes, but still stuck.
on
Final Fantasy XII Review
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· Score: 2, Interesting
My list used to be FF6, then FF4 and then other games for the final fantasy series, it's stayed like that through the last 5 iterations, however FFXII has changed that, now I don't know where it lies, it's certainly one of the best, (though FFIII is playing well too). However it's still got some pretty major flaws.
The biggest is synposis system, or basically "what the fuck was I doing"? Maybe it's that I'm older, or maybe it's that I've played Tales of series games but I expect a lot from my RPG, and the bare minimum I deserve is a system where I don't have to remember exactly what I was doing before I moved to another game. I don't have 60 hours to beat a game unless it's beyond exceptional, Tales of The Abyss wasn't (though it was close) FFXII is great, but I have other stuff to do.
It would be more text but it would be incredibly useful to implement this feature. In fact any game that takes more than 20 hours should be required to do a synopsis or at least an easy mission system so you can get caught up. I don't want to come to a game and say "ok time to kill... wait who am I against? Oh yeah Kefka's my buddy, I'll kill banon".
It's likely because I'm older and don't have time to play games from front to back, but it's more than that, it keeps the story solid and allows you to replay the story in your mind so you don't have to keep saying "I forgot what happened". The story in FFXII is one of the best but moves entirely too fast. Names are meantioned in 1-2 lines of text then dropped completely.
That's not to say this is only FFXII's fault, every game does it for the most part, but FFXII should be better than all the others. FF's series has more games than most companies have ever made, so why don't they wise up and allow the gamer who can't beat their games in one sitting to have an easier time to pick up the game again.
I'm not anti micropayments. I'm anti shitty micropayments for stuff like cheat codes, trailers, pictures and themes, stuff that should be free, which show you support X. Even stuff like Lumines shows Micropayments are easily corruptable.
While I say that I'm looking forward to the wii with the Virtual console, but in the end it's always companies like EA who will give us micropayments for stuff that has always been in the game (cheat codes for instance) and it's just a shame.
The biggest problem with micropayments is actually EA or anyone would BENEFIT from making an incomplete game. What if you had to pay for every car other then a Ford Focus in Need for speed. What if they don't put a Z06 in the game and instead charge 2-3 for it after the game is released. Not that it's a bad thing, I bought all the PGR cars, but that's because they weren't just removed from the game, it was a good game and it made it far better by having certain cars (z06 for instance) that either wasn't ready for the game because of time or other reasons. However at least be reasonable about it. If you want to focus on micropayments don't charge us full price for you're "engine".
However when a company like Rare releases viva pinata and on day 1 you already see a micropayment no matter what the price for simple add ons that could have been put in the game at launch, you feel like you've been played, and in fact you have.
You forgot the biggest problem, if the parts are hard to break and new, how do we know they will still work 1 year from now? The answer, they probably won't. If you thought the 360 had hardware failure, wait until Blu-ray starts dropping left and right.
The numbers are awful, but if the failure rate is as high as I expect it's going to be a sad sad day for Sony/consumers.
All three consoles appear to allow patches, none of them have said they won't allow it (I assume Nintendo isn't going to go the extent the other two are). But this is a horrible thought. Forget QA, forget everything else, we're just screwing people over because if they get a game early they are screwed, we don't even need to finish the game because we can always patch in more later? Patches should add information, not fix bugs that shouldn't have gotten out of the shop. Patches are good but not if every game needs a patch out of the box.
We also have Microtransactions from all sides. EA is selling us cheat codes over the marketplace for money, People are selling tutorials? I thought Micropayments were going to save us? Not make us feel like tools.
Then assume patches and micropayments are OK (They arn't). What happens 10 years from now, you find a unused Console start it up and put in your game, xbox live is probably not going to be serving the data so you can't get the updates? What happens if you don't have an internet connection? You can't get the fixes. So we are bending people to our will even more now? (first HD and now almost necessary internet)
All this just makes me, a gamer, feel like Next Gen is just a pile of crap that is just out there to bring the computer to a console. I applaud Nintendo but even there they are doing parts of this stuff to an extent.
The EFF isn't buying out Napster to prevent a suit. They arn't buying a company to sue someone else.
I disagree with the EFF but Cuban is a different animal all together. He's buying a company (for what ever reason) so he can sue google. If he really cared about the content then he would just donate the money for their law suit.
I would put cuban more akin to a terrorist. First he says "they are going down" then he goes and buys the company that's suing them to make sure they go down. If he was just a vigilante I have to imagine he'd sue them himself.
Read some of the other comments, it sounds like Cuban is just simply "ego", no justice.
You produce a tool X. Let's pretend it's a hammer. You sell the hammer on a street corner. I see your hamer and realize it's a stick with a rock on the end (you make crappy hammers). I go to the next lot and pick up a stick, pick up a rock and stick it together, then I go use it? Did I steal anything? Well yeah, I stole the idea. But do I have to license the idea from you?
In second life I buy an item, but the item is in the game already, I'm not taking the item out of the game, I'm just duplicating it. I'm essentially getting access to it for free. That to me sounds like just a simple robbery, and one that's even hard to prove.
If the TOS says you can't dupe that's fine, kick the guy off the server, however it's far from a DMCA problem to duplicate an object for your own personal use, especially if you're not backwards engineering anything, you're just copying it. It's like saying that if I sing britney spears song I should have to pay royalty even though I do it in my personal bathrooom, and make no money or fame off of it.
The problem isn't that they score lower. It's that they score lower for little reasons at time, and score higher for little reason the rest of the time. IGN and Gamespot both score on 4-5 scales, and then add them all together. 1up decides it on an arbitrary scale to my knowledge. That makes for a poor review in my mind. Now they might have a scale but it doesn't look correct to me.
This all would be slightly acceptable if the scores made any sense, or 1up didn't try so hard to be funny or even refer to itself in numerous reviews. Overall it makes it their articles sound like it's written by a frat boy being clever. Fine if you're in college, but not exactly the class of review I'm willing to take.
It's a bitch site. I've read 4 reviews on the site now. Not only were 3 given scores with little reasoning in the review, but all the scores are "hater" scores. They just don't like games or just don't want to review games on anything and instead trash everything at least 1 point lower than they should be.
This article is awful. They compare two consoles that shouldn't be compared. The PS3 is 600 dollars, the Wii is 250. It's like comparing a Ford GT and a Vette Z06, who gives a shit who wins if one is double the price?
Since when is the Wii's online a worse idea? news, Weather, and downloadable retro games. As well as getting new and future games built for it that are also downloadable. The Ps3 hasn't even explained half the systems it has, the systems arn't even ready until friday... or maybe later. And unlike the 360 doesn't have an actual online system (you'll log onto the Sony server, but they don't support the servers for games, so every game has to do it by themselves, that's a lot of work.)
Extra functionality, they just meantion gamecube games? I guess they don't believe you'll be able to retro game at all with every Nintendo home console system, and sega's gensis and the Turbo Grafix 16? But let's meantion blu-ray, and Ps2 and PS1 BC? Then we'll talk about the downloadable games later. Except it's a major feature of the Wii?
And then of course they conviently ignore the 360 so the ps3 wins everything. Except for the fact, why would I buy a PS3 if I had a 360? All those games and features they claim the PS3 have, is trumped by stuff the
Bottom line is I'm wondering what sony had to pay for that article because it's incredibly biased, and by ignoring the 360 it just become mindless rantings. Of course that requires use to believe 1up has cred, which after reading the site for an hour not many people should believe.
Lamest? I'd have to say the virtual boy and Saturn were pretty cool.
There was many failings with it but in theory they were one of the coolest ideas. A virtual Reality helmet? A Cd based system. Of course no one would ever want a optial disc for a System like the saturn would they?
What's the opposite of "lame" in this article? Cool? Are we going to say the PSX or PS2 is cool then? Is the Xbox cool or just fat? It's true the 360 oozes coolness, and the wii looks hot, but I really don't think those are the top 10 "lamest" consoles, at least not with out the 5600, and the Sega CD missing on that list. How about the ancient consoles, there's some truely crap fests back then.
My point was that they should have tempted us then, and then been quiet. Same with the E3 before it.
Both E3s showed that people didn't care about the PS3, and were interested in the Wii (why do you think we got motion control?) so they got paranoid and just started over hyping the system.
Sony brags "our PS3 will be 100 percent backwards compatible because we are including a PS2 emotion chip in there". Oops. guess not.
Sony brags "we'll have more than enough systems at launch". HA! if you believed that one I got a bridge to sell.
Sony brags "Our system is best" are we going to listen?
The problem with Sony is no one would care if you only could player 1200 out of 1400 games. However Sony can't stop hyping their system to the point where they promise so much that of course they are going to screw up. They now claim PS3 Killzone is beating expectations? That sounds great right? Until you realize the Ps2 was going to have no FMVs, everything was going to be real time rendered.
What's killing sony right now is not production problems or system problems, or delays. It's that they can't keep their fucking mouths shut. And that swear is necessary because it's so obvious why the media is hating them. People know when they are being lied to or forced to make a hype piece about something that doesn't deserve it.
If Sony kept low key til September it would really have helped them by wheting our appetites at E3, and letting us simmer. However since March we have not had a week with out one story about their system, and I'm sure that's why we're getting a bunch of bad press for them. Because we keep finding out they are bullshitting the media and bullshitting the people who buy their system.
Nintendo on the other hand kept quiet, did a couple announcements and arn't hyping the system, they just meantion good news "oh by the way, the Virtual console? It's also going to do Genisis games" and we are happy. They don't try to over hype the people, and they are acting like they are telling us breaking news so it sounds like "hey I just learned this". These deals probably were made before the original announcements but they are playing with the media just right, keeping the media interested, but not overselling their position.
Sony should lose just for the amount of hype they put out. Last time this level of hype was in the air Daikatana was coming out. And the parellels might not end there. I guess we'll see if "Sony will make us it's bitch"?
Am I the only one who hasn't heard about this?
on
The Zune Cometh
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· Score: 1
Well yeah, I heard about it on Slashdot, but we're nerds. Outside of this, I've seen the Ps3 creepy baby ad, I've seen information about the Wii. I've YET to see anything about the Zune, the date of the Zune, or why I should want one?
Microsoft has really dropped the ball on this one. A tech with out an idea what their product is? Well I'm very sure I know what an Ipod is (haven't got one, but I could tell you everything about it). If I haven't heard of it, then who has really?
Maybe the advertising is coming, but if this is the extent of it (stories on slashdot) they better not have paid more then a couple hundred for it.
I could shit in a box and probably sell 1,000 units. 5,000 if I called it a console (aka the phantom).
Selling out at launch isn't hard. It's even easier if you only ship a fraction of what the competition is selling. Which is betterin the Wii selling out over 400,000 units in japan (which is almost definate) or the Ps3 selling out 100,000 units?
The PS3 sounds exactly like the Ps2. And everyone knows it. If you had problems with the PS2, expect more from the ps3.
Even worse people jumped on board the ps2 for two reasons. A. It was the only system worth buying, (Sorry dream cast) the only system with a great legacy. B. It had GTA. C. It played your PS2 games and only costed 300 dollars.
Sony can pretend this is all good because it's the same, but Ps2's early launch saved them. PSX not really having competition for CD based systems saved them. However the 360 has an HD-DVD player now. Gamers won't care about blu-ray games unless they can see a real difference (they can't) Blu-ray might win, but the Ps3 is in a bad place.
Most of the points they made are scary because they are so bad for the system even while 1up is making it sound good. No one wants to buy a PS2... at least not for 600 bucks. People want to buy a PS3, they want a new system, and as much as tilt control sounds interesting, Nintendo has that for 250 and games completely built around it. And as much as better graphics sounds good, Microsoft has that for 300 or 400 (400 if you're smart). What exactly am I getting for 600 bucks? A cell processor that won't even reach full potential for 4 generations? A hyped machine? A paper weight with out an online network?
The 360 has the best position currently, and even in japan people are looking forward to blue dragon (more than zelda? How did Microsoft do that one?)
At least it doesn't work right, or well like that.
Play Just cause and Oblivion. Which one uses Procedural generation.
Answer: both of them. Just causes uses it for almost everything, it has 300 square miles of land, that while it's all procedurally generated, they did NOTHING with. The ground looks like crap on the 360, the gameplay is about the same all over the place, and the buildings are.. well sparse and dull.
Oblivion has 16 miles of land. Oblivion doesn't use it for everything. However every tree is done with procedural generation and it looks good because trees arn't important. Have an important tree? You can toss it in there too along side procedurally generated trees.
The secret is to use Procedural generation in moderation, and to have a back bone of the game that works well with procedural generation. This technology isn't a new technology, it's just the new buzz word. However it isn't needed and hardly worth using most of the time unless in special cases (speed tree for instance).
The biggest problems with Procedural generation is it's "heavy" it takes up a decent (not large but hardly inconsequencial) amount of CPU time, and for the most part it produces lackluster items on large scale. It is all based off math, and for it too look good you need something with a very specific formula. For something to look unique you need a randomize or multiple formulas. This is hardly a beginner theory, and hardly something that every game company should devote resources too.
With expensive CPU operations, we can come back to "but we have 6 threads". And we do. But each thread isn't 3 gighertz, it's 1.5 gigs or less (forget the actual number). Walk into a new area it has to procedurally generate the area, which means a load time. It can be done on the fly but now that's a new complication that could go wrong. We already are throwing one or two processors to GPU functionality in many engines, another one should go to physics. another one to gameplay, one to interface, and then anything else special you want to do. With Procedural generation you're talking about a bigger bottleneck in the processor, lower DMA times, but the simple fact it won't save the day.
The bottom line is this. Procedural generation works, but needs a lot of work to look good, and even more work to work well. As such it should be used sparingly, though middleware like speedtree. Full scale games based solely on it are still a bad idea (such as Just cause).
How many jokes have you personally made about the Ps3. If you say 0 you're either a saint or a sony fan boy. And there's no saints in the console wars. Unless we're discussing saint's row (company plug).
Honestly though Harrison and Sony has been ridiculed up and down the street, if they said "oh it'll be available tommorow" we'd laugh at them, if they say Next christmas we'd laugh at them. They finally are wising up that manybe they shouldn't promise the moon every time they speak.
On the other hand it's too late, almost all the damage has been done, and now not confirming that the PS3 will be available even by March 2007 makes me think there will be a couple if not a lot of 360s sold this holiday.
Programmers who rework the game (assuming no censoring, you still have to make the words fit the screen, adding room as Japanese and english just take up completely different sizes, not to meantion a variety of other problems just from the change)
Technical artists (or regular artists) if you are going to censor stuff.
The original company. There's many companies who have to buy the rights to a game to make it in america (mastiff, working design atlus). Don't think they will take a cut of profits. They want more than you know.
Paying a translator isn't a huge problem. It's actually something you can get away cheaply. Company I am working at got a Japanese translation for our game (along with all the normal suspects) and we're still debating "should we sell it there". The big problem is if you're going to sell your game somewhere and it flops you're buying back a bunch of "worthless" copies.
Wow. so fans are hacking a rom to translate it into english. That didn't happen with FF2 and FF3, FF5, Dragon Warrior 5 and 6.... oh wait it did for all of them and many more rpgs on the SNES.
This isn't a new trend and it's not something that appears to be frowned upon as long as the groups drop it if there was a real port. It's similar to Anime and the reason why anime grew to such heights in america. I wouldn't have known about Full Moon Wo Sagashite if it wasn't for a fansub of that. I've read manga translations where the authors contacted the translators and thanked them.
Is it moral/ethical/legal? That's up to someone else to decide however it's accepted in many places.
I sure as hell didn't. This election was far more important in so many other ways that game laws were ignored. I don't know many people who think that this election had more than three or four reasons to vote. And they were all about the presidency.
The good news is Lieberman is being treated like a leper by most democrats, however Clinton getting control of the senate (almost assured if the democrats control the senate) will make this more likely.
I think this is one of those elections where no one is going to be happy. Least of all the Democrats, because now there's one question on their plates "We promised X, how are we going to do it?". They have 2 years to prove they know how to lead, and that's definatly not going to be enough time. I heard so many boasts about everything, from getting us out of Iraq, to restoring the country, homeland security, FEMA, yet I never heard a single plan that would work in anything other than the short term or feel good ways. Expect Video games to be one of the last things on the democrats minds right now.
I recently got a 360 about 6 monthes ago. FFXII came out last month. The only thing I can say about FFXII's graphics is "this is last gen". It really does push the FFXII to a limit, but there's better graphics. By which I mean less jaggies, better looking, or more fluid. It's true FFXII is impressive in it's graphics, but it still suffers from FMV lag. If you watch the FMV and then jump back into the game the game's graphics look poor. FFX had slightly better ways of dealing with this.
Overall FFXII is visually impressive but coming out when it did it's showing just how weak the PS2 is to the next gen systems, and totally invalidating Sony's claim that it could have lasted 10 years. It could only have lasted that if people didn't care about graphics and they do. Early Gamecube games looked on par with some of FFXII's graphics and even first gen 360 games easily smoked it.
That all being said FFXII is an incredible game, and that's coming from a guy who really hasn't liked a Final Fantasy game since FFVI. It breathes new life into the game while retaining the same style setting it always had. If it wasn't for Gears of War, FFXII would be the only thing I'm playing. Both Gears of war and Final Fantasy XII are worthy of all the praise they have gotten as one is the final "great" game. And Gears is one of the first of the new generation.
Slashdot Mirror
I downloaded the patch another user on this board downloaded the patch.
When ever a system launch some fanboy of some other console will bitch and scream about some problem with the system. To me that's what this sounds like. Just some fan trying to create a problem. I'm sure there's a potential for a problem but rather then get in an uproar, I'd like to see a confirmed problem rather then a rumor.
Funny an article that is only a week old, that refutes only ONE response means the debate is over? Funny there's numerous criticisms and most of them are still pretty valid, again on BOTH sides of the field. The debate isn't over. For the last couple years it was pretty much confirmed that there was a moratorium on the debate.
There's a lot of bullshit on global warming from both sides of the field, Al Gore's movie has a lot of stuff in it that wouldn't be kosher except that global warming is "trendy". If you want to promote your political agenda go right ahead, but don't do it on Slashdot, no one cares or if they do they've seen it. And this movie is sure as hell not as rock solid as people make it out to be.
Sorry, hardware that changes every 3 YEARS. However you'll also be programming on 3 different platforms at times if you really get into it, and sometimes SDKs will change monthly as well as the code base.
Games degrees are seen as jokes by a lot of people, it could be given by harvard but they arn't seen as credible sources.
There's three main benefits of CS degrees.
A. You have better classes, Development life cycles is VERY underrated by undergrads. Design documentation is underrated at all, you'll hate these classes, people in any business love it because it teaches you a lot. They love the fact that you went through the harder courses, and learned more than just game design. Think game design is just programming games? hell no. It's programming hardware, hardware that changes every 3 monthes. APIs, Networking, graphics, physics, all of these are games. The actual gameplay itself is the beginners stuff.
B. You have more flexability. Get into game design and hate it? You can get into another field very easy with your degree. Can't find a job? layoffs happening? you can get into another field. Simple.
C. Pound for pound you'll learn more, get more money to start with, and be safer for a CS degree. You'll learn more technologies which is a huge benefit (you'll be suprised how often a game company will use a variety of languages) and most of the stuff a game course will teach you, you can learn yourself when you are not in class, you can take some of those classes as electives if you want, or teach yourself.
If you want to break into the industry however your degree won't matter. It's extremely good to have but you'll want to have three things, experience, intellegence (knowledge), and desire. If you have a project in classes, don't be afraid to make a game out of it, senior classes especially (design classes too). Have a side project, make a mod, make your own game. Go after companies you want to work for. Know gaming (doesn't mean you have to pay a lot, but know the differences between a ps3 and a 360, Why is a wii different? Is a PS3 the same as a 360, why? and Why not? Don't worry if you don't know it all, don't worry about making opinions, people in the industry have differing opinions and disagree, but knowing information is great.
The most important thing is desire though, if you go after a company know what games they make, their genre (don't worry if you're wrong, if they were in that genre in the past, if you've played the games and can see where they are and who they are they will enjoy that. Don't tell them the game sucked (even though they might think so) but if you know of places for improvements meantioning it won't get your head ripped off if you're kind. Actively apply to places, not just on monster but everywhere, be enthusastic, make sure they realize you want to work for them (not as a stepping stone, not as "I need a job" But "I want to be a game programmer") I can't tell you how many times a manager at my company has said "It sounded like he really didn't want to work here". A desire or a drive to join a company will be an easy deciding factor in your favor and it doesn't take much, just don't go over board (dressing in costume is frowned on, but liking the company is always good).
The degree will be one step on a path to get in the industry to a good company, which degree you take is up to you, but for safety reason the CS is better. The Game developer isn't a "we won't take you", I work with one guy from digipen and one guy from fullsail. However you NEED drive if you're going to be picked with it. If there's one thing they want to see is that you can push yourself to the next level.
My list used to be FF6, then FF4 and then other games for the final fantasy series, it's stayed like that through the last 5 iterations, however FFXII has changed that, now I don't know where it lies, it's certainly one of the best, (though FFIII is playing well too). However it's still got some pretty major flaws.
The biggest is synposis system, or basically "what the fuck was I doing"? Maybe it's that I'm older, or maybe it's that I've played Tales of series games but I expect a lot from my RPG, and the bare minimum I deserve is a system where I don't have to remember exactly what I was doing before I moved to another game. I don't have 60 hours to beat a game unless it's beyond exceptional, Tales of The Abyss wasn't (though it was close) FFXII is great, but I have other stuff to do.
It would be more text but it would be incredibly useful to implement this feature. In fact any game that takes more than 20 hours should be required to do a synopsis or at least an easy mission system so you can get caught up. I don't want to come to a game and say "ok time to kill... wait who am I against? Oh yeah Kefka's my buddy, I'll kill banon".
It's likely because I'm older and don't have time to play games from front to back, but it's more than that, it keeps the story solid and allows you to replay the story in your mind so you don't have to keep saying "I forgot what happened". The story in FFXII is one of the best but moves entirely too fast. Names are meantioned in 1-2 lines of text then dropped completely.
That's not to say this is only FFXII's fault, every game does it for the most part, but FFXII should be better than all the others. FF's series has more games than most companies have ever made, so why don't they wise up and allow the gamer who can't beat their games in one sitting to have an easier time to pick up the game again.
I'm not anti micropayments. I'm anti shitty micropayments for stuff like cheat codes, trailers, pictures and themes, stuff that should be free, which show you support X. Even stuff like Lumines shows Micropayments are easily corruptable.
While I say that I'm looking forward to the wii with the Virtual console, but in the end it's always companies like EA who will give us micropayments for stuff that has always been in the game (cheat codes for instance) and it's just a shame.
The biggest problem with micropayments is actually EA or anyone would BENEFIT from making an incomplete game. What if you had to pay for every car other then a Ford Focus in Need for speed. What if they don't put a Z06 in the game and instead charge 2-3 for it after the game is released. Not that it's a bad thing, I bought all the PGR cars, but that's because they weren't just removed from the game, it was a good game and it made it far better by having certain cars (z06 for instance) that either wasn't ready for the game because of time or other reasons. However at least be reasonable about it. If you want to focus on micropayments don't charge us full price for you're "engine".
However when a company like Rare releases viva pinata and on day 1 you already see a micropayment no matter what the price for simple add ons that could have been put in the game at launch, you feel like you've been played, and in fact you have.
You forgot the biggest problem, if the parts are hard to break and new, how do we know they will still work 1 year from now? The answer, they probably won't. If you thought the 360 had hardware failure, wait until Blu-ray starts dropping left and right.
The numbers are awful, but if the failure rate is as high as I expect it's going to be a sad sad day for Sony/consumers.
All three consoles appear to allow patches, none of them have said they won't allow it (I assume Nintendo isn't going to go the extent the other two are). But this is a horrible thought. Forget QA, forget everything else, we're just screwing people over because if they get a game early they are screwed, we don't even need to finish the game because we can always patch in more later? Patches should add information, not fix bugs that shouldn't have gotten out of the shop. Patches are good but not if every game needs a patch out of the box.
We also have Microtransactions from all sides. EA is selling us cheat codes over the marketplace for money, People are selling tutorials? I thought Micropayments were going to save us? Not make us feel like tools.
Then assume patches and micropayments are OK (They arn't). What happens 10 years from now, you find a unused Console start it up and put in your game, xbox live is probably not going to be serving the data so you can't get the updates? What happens if you don't have an internet connection? You can't get the fixes. So we are bending people to our will even more now? (first HD and now almost necessary internet)
All this just makes me, a gamer, feel like Next Gen is just a pile of crap that is just out there to bring the computer to a console. I applaud Nintendo but even there they are doing parts of this stuff to an extent.
The EFF isn't buying out Napster to prevent a suit. They arn't buying a company to sue someone else.
I disagree with the EFF but Cuban is a different animal all together. He's buying a company (for what ever reason) so he can sue google. If he really cared about the content then he would just donate the money for their law suit.
I would put cuban more akin to a terrorist. First he says "they are going down" then he goes and buys the company that's suing them to make sure they go down. If he was just a vigilante I have to imagine he'd sue them himself.
Read some of the other comments, it sounds like Cuban is just simply "ego", no justice.
You produce a tool X. Let's pretend it's a hammer. You sell the hammer on a street corner. I see your hamer and realize it's a stick with a rock on the end (you make crappy hammers). I go to the next lot and pick up a stick, pick up a rock and stick it together, then I go use it? Did I steal anything? Well yeah, I stole the idea. But do I have to license the idea from you?
In second life I buy an item, but the item is in the game already, I'm not taking the item out of the game, I'm just duplicating it. I'm essentially getting access to it for free. That to me sounds like just a simple robbery, and one that's even hard to prove.
If the TOS says you can't dupe that's fine, kick the guy off the server, however it's far from a DMCA problem to duplicate an object for your own personal use, especially if you're not backwards engineering anything, you're just copying it. It's like saying that if I sing britney spears song I should have to pay royalty even though I do it in my personal bathrooom, and make no money or fame off of it.
The problem isn't that they score lower. It's that they score lower for little reasons at time, and score higher for little reason the rest of the time. IGN and Gamespot both score on 4-5 scales, and then add them all together. 1up decides it on an arbitrary scale to my knowledge. That makes for a poor review in my mind. Now they might have a scale but it doesn't look correct to me.
This all would be slightly acceptable if the scores made any sense, or 1up didn't try so hard to be funny or even refer to itself in numerous reviews. Overall it makes it their articles sound like it's written by a frat boy being clever. Fine if you're in college, but not exactly the class of review I'm willing to take.
It's a bitch site. I've read 4 reviews on the site now. Not only were 3 given scores with little reasoning in the review, but all the scores are "hater" scores. They just don't like games or just don't want to review games on anything and instead trash everything at least 1 point lower than they should be.
This article is awful. They compare two consoles that shouldn't be compared. The PS3 is 600 dollars, the Wii is 250. It's like comparing a Ford GT and a Vette Z06, who gives a shit who wins if one is double the price?
Since when is the Wii's online a worse idea? news, Weather, and downloadable retro games. As well as getting new and future games built for it that are also downloadable. The Ps3 hasn't even explained half the systems it has, the systems arn't even ready until friday... or maybe later. And unlike the 360 doesn't have an actual online system (you'll log onto the Sony server, but they don't support the servers for games, so every game has to do it by themselves, that's a lot of work.)
Extra functionality, they just meantion gamecube games? I guess they don't believe you'll be able to retro game at all with every Nintendo home console system, and sega's gensis and the Turbo Grafix 16? But let's meantion blu-ray, and Ps2 and PS1 BC? Then we'll talk about the downloadable games later. Except it's a major feature of the Wii?
And then of course they conviently ignore the 360 so the ps3 wins everything. Except for the fact, why would I buy a PS3 if I had a 360? All those games and features they claim the PS3 have, is trumped by stuff the
Bottom line is I'm wondering what sony had to pay for that article because it's incredibly biased, and by ignoring the 360 it just become mindless rantings. Of course that requires use to believe 1up has cred, which after reading the site for an hour not many people should believe.
Lamest? I'd have to say the virtual boy and Saturn were pretty cool.
There was many failings with it but in theory they were one of the coolest ideas. A virtual Reality helmet? A Cd based system. Of course no one would ever want a optial disc for a System like the saturn would they?
What's the opposite of "lame" in this article? Cool? Are we going to say the PSX or PS2 is cool then? Is the Xbox cool or just fat? It's true the 360 oozes coolness, and the wii looks hot, but I really don't think those are the top 10 "lamest" consoles, at least not with out the 5600, and the Sega CD missing on that list. How about the ancient consoles, there's some truely crap fests back then.
My point was that they should have tempted us then, and then been quiet. Same with the E3 before it.
Both E3s showed that people didn't care about the PS3, and were interested in the Wii (why do you think we got motion control?) so they got paranoid and just started over hyping the system.
Sony brags "our PS3 will be 100 percent backwards compatible because we are including a PS2 emotion chip in there". Oops. guess not.
Sony brags "we'll have more than enough systems at launch". HA! if you believed that one I got a bridge to sell.
Sony brags "Our system is best" are we going to listen?
The problem with Sony is no one would care if you only could player 1200 out of 1400 games. However Sony can't stop hyping their system to the point where they promise so much that of course they are going to screw up. They now claim PS3 Killzone is beating expectations? That sounds great right? Until you realize the Ps2 was going to have no FMVs, everything was going to be real time rendered.
What's killing sony right now is not production problems or system problems, or delays. It's that they can't keep their fucking mouths shut. And that swear is necessary because it's so obvious why the media is hating them. People know when they are being lied to or forced to make a hype piece about something that doesn't deserve it.
If Sony kept low key til September it would really have helped them by wheting our appetites at E3, and letting us simmer. However since March we have not had a week with out one story about their system, and I'm sure that's why we're getting a bunch of bad press for them. Because we keep finding out they are bullshitting the media and bullshitting the people who buy their system.
Nintendo on the other hand kept quiet, did a couple announcements and arn't hyping the system, they just meantion good news "oh by the way, the Virtual console? It's also going to do Genisis games" and we are happy. They don't try to over hype the people, and they are acting like they are telling us breaking news so it sounds like "hey I just learned this". These deals probably were made before the original announcements but they are playing with the media just right, keeping the media interested, but not overselling their position.
Sony should lose just for the amount of hype they put out. Last time this level of hype was in the air Daikatana was coming out. And the parellels might not end there. I guess we'll see if "Sony will make us it's bitch"?
Well yeah, I heard about it on Slashdot, but we're nerds. Outside of this, I've seen the Ps3 creepy baby ad, I've seen information about the Wii. I've YET to see anything about the Zune, the date of the Zune, or why I should want one?
Microsoft has really dropped the ball on this one. A tech with out an idea what their product is? Well I'm very sure I know what an Ipod is (haven't got one, but I could tell you everything about it). If I haven't heard of it, then who has really?
Maybe the advertising is coming, but if this is the extent of it (stories on slashdot) they better not have paid more then a couple hundred for it.
I could shit in a box and probably sell 1,000 units. 5,000 if I called it a console (aka the phantom).
Selling out at launch isn't hard. It's even easier if you only ship a fraction of what the competition is selling. Which is betterin the Wii selling out over 400,000 units in japan (which is almost definate) or the Ps3 selling out 100,000 units?
I just have one question? Why is this news?
The PS3 sounds exactly like the Ps2. And everyone knows it. If you had problems with the PS2, expect more from the ps3.
Even worse people jumped on board the ps2 for two reasons. A. It was the only system worth buying, (Sorry dream cast) the only system with a great legacy. B. It had GTA. C. It played your PS2 games and only costed 300 dollars.
Sony can pretend this is all good because it's the same, but Ps2's early launch saved them. PSX not really having competition for CD based systems saved them. However the 360 has an HD-DVD player now. Gamers won't care about blu-ray games unless they can see a real difference (they can't) Blu-ray might win, but the Ps3 is in a bad place.
Most of the points they made are scary because they are so bad for the system even while 1up is making it sound good. No one wants to buy a PS2... at least not for 600 bucks. People want to buy a PS3, they want a new system, and as much as tilt control sounds interesting, Nintendo has that for 250 and games completely built around it. And as much as better graphics sounds good, Microsoft has that for 300 or 400 (400 if you're smart). What exactly am I getting for 600 bucks? A cell processor that won't even reach full potential for 4 generations? A hyped machine? A paper weight with out an online network?
The 360 has the best position currently, and even in japan people are looking forward to blue dragon (more than zelda? How did Microsoft do that one?)
At least it doesn't work right, or well like that.
Play Just cause and Oblivion. Which one uses Procedural generation.
Answer: both of them. Just causes uses it for almost everything, it has 300 square miles of land, that while it's all procedurally generated, they did NOTHING with. The ground looks like crap on the 360, the gameplay is about the same all over the place, and the buildings are.. well sparse and dull.
Oblivion has 16 miles of land. Oblivion doesn't use it for everything. However every tree is done with procedural generation and it looks good because trees arn't important. Have an important tree? You can toss it in there too along side procedurally generated trees.
The secret is to use Procedural generation in moderation, and to have a back bone of the game that works well with procedural generation. This technology isn't a new technology, it's just the new buzz word. However it isn't needed and hardly worth using most of the time unless in special cases (speed tree for instance).
The biggest problems with Procedural generation is it's "heavy" it takes up a decent (not large but hardly inconsequencial) amount of CPU time, and for the most part it produces lackluster items on large scale. It is all based off math, and for it too look good you need something with a very specific formula. For something to look unique you need a randomize or multiple formulas. This is hardly a beginner theory, and hardly something that every game company should devote resources too.
With expensive CPU operations, we can come back to "but we have 6 threads". And we do. But each thread isn't 3 gighertz, it's 1.5 gigs or less (forget the actual number). Walk into a new area it has to procedurally generate the area, which means a load time. It can be done on the fly but now that's a new complication that could go wrong. We already are throwing one or two processors to GPU functionality in many engines, another one should go to physics. another one to gameplay, one to interface, and then anything else special you want to do. With Procedural generation you're talking about a bigger bottleneck in the processor, lower DMA times, but the simple fact it won't save the day.
The bottom line is this. Procedural generation works, but needs a lot of work to look good, and even more work to work well. As such it should be used sparingly, though middleware like speedtree. Full scale games based solely on it are still a bad idea (such as Just cause).
How many jokes have you personally made about the Ps3. If you say 0 you're either a saint or a sony fan boy. And there's no saints in the console wars. Unless we're discussing saint's row (company plug).
Honestly though Harrison and Sony has been ridiculed up and down the street, if they said "oh it'll be available tommorow" we'd laugh at them, if they say Next christmas we'd laugh at them. They finally are wising up that manybe they shouldn't promise the moon every time they speak.
On the other hand it's too late, almost all the damage has been done, and now not confirming that the PS3 will be available even by March 2007 makes me think there will be a couple if not a lot of 360s sold this holiday.
You also forgotten the
Programmers who rework the game (assuming no censoring, you still have to make the words fit the screen, adding room as Japanese and english just take up completely different sizes, not to meantion a variety of other problems just from the change)
Technical artists (or regular artists) if you are going to censor stuff.
The original company. There's many companies who have to buy the rights to a game to make it in america (mastiff, working design atlus). Don't think they will take a cut of profits. They want more than you know.
Paying a translator isn't a huge problem. It's actually something you can get away cheaply. Company I am working at got a Japanese translation for our game (along with all the normal suspects) and we're still debating "should we sell it there". The big problem is if you're going to sell your game somewhere and it flops you're buying back a bunch of "worthless" copies.
Wow. so fans are hacking a rom to translate it into english. That didn't happen with FF2 and FF3, FF5, Dragon Warrior 5 and 6.... oh wait it did for all of them and many more rpgs on the SNES.
This isn't a new trend and it's not something that appears to be frowned upon as long as the groups drop it if there was a real port. It's similar to Anime and the reason why anime grew to such heights in america. I wouldn't have known about Full Moon Wo Sagashite if it wasn't for a fansub of that. I've read manga translations where the authors contacted the translators and thanked them.
Is it moral/ethical/legal? That's up to someone else to decide however it's accepted in many places.
Americans didn't care about game laws.
I sure as hell didn't. This election was far more important in so many other ways that game laws were ignored. I don't know many people who think that this election had more than three or four reasons to vote. And they were all about the presidency.
The good news is Lieberman is being treated like a leper by most democrats, however Clinton getting control of the senate (almost assured if the democrats control the senate) will make this more likely.
I think this is one of those elections where no one is going to be happy. Least of all the Democrats, because now there's one question on their plates "We promised X, how are we going to do it?". They have 2 years to prove they know how to lead, and that's definatly not going to be enough time. I heard so many boasts about everything, from getting us out of Iraq, to restoring the country, homeland security, FEMA, yet I never heard a single plan that would work in anything other than the short term or feel good ways. Expect Video games to be one of the last things on the democrats minds right now.
At least this isn't a mission critical system or anything otherwise there will be talks of how stupid slash dot is to hire the lowest bidder.
At least it's proof that not everyone is perfect. Except George Lucas, even though he made Howard the duck... or maybe no one is perfect.
I recently got a 360 about 6 monthes ago. FFXII came out last month. The only thing I can say about FFXII's graphics is "this is last gen". It really does push the FFXII to a limit, but there's better graphics. By which I mean less jaggies, better looking, or more fluid. It's true FFXII is impressive in it's graphics, but it still suffers from FMV lag. If you watch the FMV and then jump back into the game the game's graphics look poor. FFX had slightly better ways of dealing with this.
Overall FFXII is visually impressive but coming out when it did it's showing just how weak the PS2 is to the next gen systems, and totally invalidating Sony's claim that it could have lasted 10 years. It could only have lasted that if people didn't care about graphics and they do. Early Gamecube games looked on par with some of FFXII's graphics and even first gen 360 games easily smoked it.
That all being said FFXII is an incredible game, and that's coming from a guy who really hasn't liked a Final Fantasy game since FFVI. It breathes new life into the game while retaining the same style setting it always had. If it wasn't for Gears of War, FFXII would be the only thing I'm playing. Both Gears of war and Final Fantasy XII are worthy of all the praise they have gotten as one is the final "great" game. And Gears is one of the first of the new generation.