i would buy this argument, except cuts are occuring in other areas as well; including congressional earmarks (the porkbelly) as well as veteran's affairs. cutting funding to veterans is not the way to be perceived as a visionary, especially in the middle of a war. I think this is more a financial reality than some sort of election year posturing.
MSNBC's take on this indicates that cuts were made across the board, including earmark projects in representative's home districts. cutting funds to your district isn't the way to win elections (#3). and cutting funds to veteran's programs in the middle of a war is definitely not the way to win sympathy (#2). which just leaves the reality of war spending draining funds for other federal programs (#1). With no new taxes to pay for the war, the cost has to come from existing programs. an unfortunate reality.
how many TVs support this feature? The allure of a console is that it's cheap (sub $100 now) and requires few peripherals. you buy a console, take it home, and it works. buying a TV that supports progressive scan to play your games defeats that purpose.
While I've gone through 3 different computers in the past 7 years, I've only had 1 television in that time frame. My TV won't stop playing the latest nintendo games, so there's no reason to upgrade it. Besides, until the whole HDTV issue gets completely ironed out (both from a hardware and a support/available channel perspective), there's no reason for me to upgrade to a new TV. I think many people are of the same mindset, which probably explains why so few people are using the digital output on their consoles. I'd imagine even the power gamers would rather spend the money to upgrade to a new computer, which would give more bang for the buck that upgrading the TV just go get better looking graphics on their console.
Heck, I'd love to run my nintendo through the s-video input on my TV, but it only has 1 jack, and the DVD is currently occupying it. (and i'm not about to start looking for s-video switch boxes, if such things even exist.)
looking through the games they have available at yahoo or atariondemand.com, there's definitely a few I wouldn't mind playing. and the price is right. $15 a month is cheaper than the cable bill, a movie for 2, the cell phone bill. plus it's far cheaper than a new game, and a bit cheaper than any of the "hot" used games available and on par or maybe 2x the price of a bargain bin game. so for the price of 2 bargain bin games, you get access to 70+ games per month. that ain't bad. sure you don't own them, but if you were really interested in the game, you probably would have bought it when it was released...
reading the forum postings in the 2nd link, it sounds like both parties with similar name are being forced to change. lots of people complaining about identical names with and without spaces being hit (e.g., fire duck & fireduck); most of the complainers seem to have been beta testers from the beginning of the xbl service. so it's understandable they'd be annoyed.
I suspect Blizzard know this already from their sales figures. Why else would they be making a 3rd person console-oriented stealth-action game, geared much more towards the Japanese market (in a way which will still appeal in the US and EU), rather than building upon their success with this supposedly legendary Korean market?
I'm not so sure about this. While it may be true that the Korean market is exaggerated, it still is a major market. Consider the languages/nations the Blizzard homepage is available in: US, Korea, UK, Germany, and France. Japan isn't there.
Also consider this press release from Blizzard: "...Blizzard Entertainment unveiled plans to utilize a local World of Warcraft(TM) team in Korea, which will grow to over 100 Korean employees in the next 12 months....".
And then there's the location of Blizzard's Battle.net servers. You've got providers in the U.S., Europe, and... Korea. So, while it's nice to downplay Korea's impact, Blizzard clearly has invested a lot into the Korean market (including sponsoring Starcraft tournaments). Which suggests that Korea is the powerhouse that people suggest, at least with respect to blizzard RTS games...
Ghost is not RTS and further delay will decay its prospect badly to the degree it has no sense to have "Starcraft" in its title.
by this logic, World of Warcraft shouldn't be called that because it's not an RTS and Half-Life 2 shouldn't be called that because it's been delayed for years. That's just silly logic.
Starcraft 2 will come when Starcraft 2 comes. I know it's a bit frustrating, but Blizzard has undergone some big personnel changes. They lost a bunch of developers several years back (the guys who jumped ship to form Arena.net); then last year they lost the entire upper eschelon at Blizzard North (including "the voice of blizzard" Bill Roper). It's nice to hope that their next title will have the same magic as their previous games, but I just don't know. Blizz, Valve and Sid Meier/Fraxis are the 3 companies who's games I keep playing years after release. would be a shame to lose one of 'em...
Except, from what Blizzard has indicated, SC: Ghost will be console only. So no PC/Mac versions. I don't quite understand the logic behind limiting it to consoles, but that's their perogative.
the article clearly points out the tenuous link between games and violence (and even references experts who dispute it).
The only "influence" suggested in the article that actually holds water with me is the following statement "people who have played military videogames... have some sense of how fast things can happen, and how confusing they can be." America's Army clearly demonstrates how confusing things can be when shots are fired. Beyond that, I see no evidence in this article that games influence a person politically.
As for the assertion of the media looking for scapegoats: the author, Glenn Reynolds, likes games and is suggesting their usefulness (and praises geek culture in a linked article), rather than demonizing them.
"you can get crypto by putting in your mouth food or water that has come into contact with feces (poop)"
what they're leaving out is the "or by working in a lab where a co-worker accidentally ordered viable oocysts rather than inactivated ones for his studies". Getting crypto is absolutely no fun. But it's nice to see that I've experienced 4 of the cards there (crypto, vaccines, chickenpox, and ulcer). not sure how many of the others i'm willing to try out.
I second this motion. I loved Ancient Art of War (wasn't so in love with Ancient Art of War at Sea, though). One of the first games I played with an editor that actually had me exchanging my maps with friends. Very good times.
some other old school games that I enjoyed and wouldn't mind revisiting: Lode Runner, Archon, and Lemmings (the world would be a much better place if we all had hundreds of exploding lemmings at our disposal)
from the faq: Q: On what platforms will StarCraft: Ghost be available? A: A: StarCraft: Ghost will be available on the Xbox(TM), GameCube(TM) and Playstation® 2.
unless of course that has changed as well without notice...
But this is not an obscure problem. Game being promoted as having advanced AI that really makes things difficult for the player. The AI breaks whenever you save your game, or go back to a previously entered zone. The players picked up on this bug fairly quickly after the game was released; indiciating it was not all that difficult to discover.
Compare this to a bug in Starcraft; the invulnerable drone. It took players months and months to discover that if you morphed a drone at just the right time, he'd end up with 0 hit points and could never be killed. This is incredibly obscure and the conditions leading up to it are fairly unlikely (hence, the long time after release before it was discovered).
As for the severity of the thief bug, someone incorrectly points out in this thread that it only affects expert difficult. It actually affects every difficulty level but normal (as it resets the AI to normal.) Still a playable game, but not at the difficulty you wanted.
you and your league mates take turns at the beginning of the real football season "drafting" players to fill your roster. You'll select actual players from the various positions (qb, rb, wr, etc.) and place them in your roster. Then each week, during the real football games, you get points for your team based on the player's real life performance. Depending on how the fantasy league is set up, you either have head to head competition (where you compare your weekly score with another team to decide who wins), or you just tally points all season long and the winner is the one with the most overall points. It has nothing to do with any EA sports game...
don't forget to read the rest of that sentence in the original article: "We draw every little blade of grass, because we can," said Miller, apparently unconvinced such allocation of team resources is absolutely necessary. While it doesn't go into what exactly was said, I think it's clear from the tone of this section that devoting massive amounts of energy to graphics means less energy devoted to gameplay.
" Because it's "on demand", whereas on TV you have to wait for something to come on."
actually, no you don't. I don't know how widespread it is, and what the exact requirements are, but on my digital cable I have HBO on Demand. It's "free" for HBO subscribers, and gives you access to a whole load of on demand programming. Most of the big hits HBO is showing that month, usually the current + past season of HBO's original series, all their specials, etc. I haven't used it for watching anything other than a comedy special, but it's fairly slick. Nice menu driven, downloads fairly rapidly, and you can play/pause/ff/rew just like it were a vcr/dvd. granted, it'll never be as extensive to have random movie from 3 years ago you want to watch, but it's still a nice step in the right direction. I imagine all of the big premium cable channels are going to go this way...
Interesting that you bring up Aki. I have a silk screened wall hanging of the same image that a friend picked up at E3 several years ago. My feeling about the Final Fantasy movie was that the characters were amazingly life like, *until* they started talking. The animators didn't have a good grasp on (and probably didn't have the technology to model) realistic facial movements They didn't convey a great deal of emotion. No light in their eyes, or any of the other subtle facial clues we look for when talking to someone. Beautiful when rendered static, but wrong and a bit creepy when in action.
I wonder if WETA tried to re-model Gollum as a human how realistic it would be. The technology has clearly advanced to the point where they can pick up many of those subtle clues, but since it was still non-human, I wonder how much of that is our projection of emotion into it.
it doesn't hurt that the studio puts out high quality games. looking up the titles they have listed on their website at gamerankings, you'll see that all of them are rated >50%, with several very high individual reviews. So releasing high quality games, either original content or based on a movie tie-in, isn't something that's all that surprising. This might just be an example of a good company getting chosen to design the game, and just implementing what they know is good game design...
"Then maybe people would realize that the PC development process is inferior"
I don't think the PC development process is inferior, per se; rather some developers don't give QA the full attention it needs. A number of studios release products which have far fewer bugs than your typical PC game. Take Blizzard for example. Yes, their games have bugs, but unless you've got some seriously weird hardware, chances are the average player will never encounter a game impacting bug playing the retail version.
But things aren't all rosy on the console side either. The most recent console game I'm playing, Harvest Moon, It's a Wonderful Life, is full of problems. Even ignoring the numerous, obvious translation errors, I've had farm animals just disappear on me. I know they are there somewhere, as they're still listed in my ledger, but I can't find 'em. Game stopping bug? no. But a bug none-the-less. Obviously, the game needed more time in QA.
having played thief 1 and 2, i think it would be fairly obvious to notice whether a guard blindly walks past an open door, or looks in to see why its open (which is supposed to be the behavior at harder AI levels). It seems that in just the testing of the AI, this should have been an obvious flaw.
I'm well aware that QA on such a game must be a daunting task, but this is not a bug like Starcraft's immortal drones which you could only produce under extreme conditions (and which took the players months to uncover). The orignal discoverer of the error provided a simple test: find an enemy and save the game. Let the enemy hit you and watch how much damage you take. Reload your save game, and let him hit you again. Different amount of damage done. Easy proof of a bug and doesn't require any sort of extreme conditions to achieve. Bottom line is something like that should have been found.
Anyone that has ever played Thief, unless they were looking for a serious challenge (and had 4 hours to kill), has probably saved their game from time to time. This isn't an obscure bug that occurs only when you're in the pantry holding the knife and looking at your feet. Anytime you save the game during a mission, and then re-load that save game, enemy AI gets reset to normal. That's major and something that should have been found during QA. There's little excuse for having a save that doesn't save the state of the game.
I think this point is reasonable, if you approach it from the proper POV. From my limited experience with Zelda (starting at Ocarina onward, with GBA Link to Past thrown in), it doesn't seem that jumping is all that important in terms of gameplay (IIRC, there hasn't been a jump button in any of the Zelda games that I've played). Yes, one jumps by running off the ledge, but one doesn't actively control the jump in the same way as in a Mario or Metroid game. So the fact that jumping games scare him doesn't really matter as that skillset isn't a part of Zelda. As it is, Zelda games have been much more oriented on problem solving rather than arcade reflexes (with the exception of the boss battles, most combat is ridiculously easy).
seeing as how he was the director for Majora's Mask and was a designer for Ocarina of Time; and was chosen specifically by Miyamoto for these jobs, i don't think there's much to fear.
but that's an interesting point to raise. i wonder how many of the developers working on any of the 3D castle wolfenstein games were required to many through the old top down version? or whether the Duke Nuke'em team had to play the side scroller? Fact is, games and technology evolve and adhering to the original is not always good or possible (did any of the 3D wolfensteins ever involve stealing guard uniforms to travel incognito?)
Eventually the plan is to have an actual moving vehicle with realistic physics, as the most recent SITREP indicates (midway down the page, near the graphic).
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i would buy this argument, except cuts are occuring in other areas as well; including congressional earmarks (the porkbelly) as well as veteran's affairs. cutting funding to veterans is not the way to be perceived as a visionary, especially in the middle of a war. I think this is more a financial reality than some sort of election year posturing.
MSNBC's take on this indicates that cuts were made across the board, including earmark projects in representative's home districts. cutting funds to your district isn't the way to win elections (#3). and cutting funds to veteran's programs in the middle of a war is definitely not the way to win sympathy (#2). which just leaves the reality of war spending draining funds for other federal programs (#1). With no new taxes to pay for the war, the cost has to come from existing programs. an unfortunate reality.
how many TVs support this feature? The allure of a console is that it's cheap (sub $100 now) and requires few peripherals. you buy a console, take it home, and it works. buying a TV that supports progressive scan to play your games defeats that purpose.
While I've gone through 3 different computers in the past 7 years, I've only had 1 television in that time frame. My TV won't stop playing the latest nintendo games, so there's no reason to upgrade it. Besides, until the whole HDTV issue gets completely ironed out (both from a hardware and a support/available channel perspective), there's no reason for me to upgrade to a new TV. I think many people are of the same mindset, which probably explains why so few people are using the digital output on their consoles. I'd imagine even the power gamers would rather spend the money to upgrade to a new computer, which would give more bang for the buck that upgrading the TV just go get better looking graphics on their console.
Heck, I'd love to run my nintendo through the s-video input on my TV, but it only has 1 jack, and the DVD is currently occupying it. (and i'm not about to start looking for s-video switch boxes, if such things even exist.)
looking through the games they have available at yahoo or atariondemand.com, there's definitely a few I wouldn't mind playing. and the price is right. $15 a month is cheaper than the cable bill, a movie for 2, the cell phone bill. plus it's far cheaper than a new game, and a bit cheaper than any of the "hot" used games available and on par or maybe 2x the price of a bargain bin game. so for the price of 2 bargain bin games, you get access to 70+ games per month. that ain't bad. sure you don't own them, but if you were really interested in the game, you probably would have bought it when it was released...
reading the forum postings in the 2nd link, it sounds like both parties with similar name are being forced to change. lots of people complaining about identical names with and without spaces being hit (e.g., fire duck & fireduck); most of the complainers seem to have been beta testers from the beginning of the xbl service. so it's understandable they'd be annoyed.
I suspect Blizzard know this already from their sales figures. Why else would they be making a 3rd person console-oriented stealth-action game, geared much more towards the Japanese market (in a way which will still appeal in the US and EU), rather than building upon their success with this supposedly legendary Korean market?
I'm not so sure about this. While it may be true that the Korean market is exaggerated, it still is a major market. Consider the languages/nations the Blizzard homepage is available in: US, Korea, UK, Germany, and France. Japan isn't there.
Also consider this press release from Blizzard: "...Blizzard Entertainment unveiled plans to utilize a local World of Warcraft(TM) team in Korea, which will grow to over 100 Korean employees in the next 12 months....".
And then there's the location of Blizzard's Battle.net servers. You've got providers in the U.S., Europe, and... Korea. So, while it's nice to downplay Korea's impact, Blizzard clearly has invested a lot into the Korean market (including sponsoring Starcraft tournaments). Which suggests that Korea is the powerhouse that people suggest, at least with respect to blizzard RTS games...
any article about firefox that doesn't mention adblock and the best filters to use is seriously lacking.
Ghost is not RTS and further delay will decay its prospect badly to the degree it has no sense to have "Starcraft" in its title.
by this logic, World of Warcraft shouldn't be called that because it's not an RTS and Half-Life 2 shouldn't be called that because it's been delayed for years. That's just silly logic.
Starcraft 2 will come when Starcraft 2 comes. I know it's a bit frustrating, but Blizzard has undergone some big personnel changes. They lost a bunch of developers several years back (the guys who jumped ship to form Arena.net); then last year they lost the entire upper eschelon at Blizzard North (including "the voice of blizzard" Bill Roper). It's nice to hope that their next title will have the same magic as their previous games, but I just don't know. Blizz, Valve and Sid Meier/Fraxis are the 3 companies who's games I keep playing years after release. would be a shame to lose one of 'em...
Except, from what Blizzard has indicated, SC: Ghost will be console only. So no PC/Mac versions. I don't quite understand the logic behind limiting it to consoles, but that's their perogative.
the article clearly points out the tenuous link between games and violence (and even references experts who dispute it).
... have some sense of how fast things can happen, and how confusing they can be." America's Army clearly demonstrates how confusing things can be when shots are fired. Beyond that, I see no evidence in this article that games influence a person politically.
The only "influence" suggested in the article that actually holds water with me is the following statement "people who have played military videogames
As for the assertion of the media looking for scapegoats: the author, Glenn Reynolds, likes games and is suggesting their usefulness (and praises geek culture in a linked article), rather than demonizing them.
"you can get crypto by putting in your mouth food or water that has come into contact with feces (poop)"
what they're leaving out is the "or by working in a lab where a co-worker accidentally ordered viable oocysts rather than inactivated ones for his studies". Getting crypto is absolutely no fun. But it's nice to see that I've experienced 4 of the cards there (crypto, vaccines, chickenpox, and ulcer). not sure how many of the others i'm willing to try out.
I second this motion. I loved Ancient Art of War (wasn't so in love with Ancient Art of War at Sea, though). One of the first games I played with an editor that actually had me exchanging my maps with friends. Very good times.
some other old school games that I enjoyed and wouldn't mind revisiting: Lode Runner, Archon, and Lemmings (the world would be a much better place if we all had hundreds of exploding lemmings at our disposal)
from the faq:
Q: On what platforms will StarCraft: Ghost be available?
A: A: StarCraft: Ghost will be available on the Xbox(TM), GameCube(TM) and Playstation® 2.
unless of course that has changed as well without notice...
But this is not an obscure problem. Game being promoted as having advanced AI that really makes things difficult for the player. The AI breaks whenever you save your game, or go back to a previously entered zone. The players picked up on this bug fairly quickly after the game was released; indiciating it was not all that difficult to discover.
Compare this to a bug in Starcraft; the invulnerable drone. It took players months and months to discover that if you morphed a drone at just the right time, he'd end up with 0 hit points and could never be killed. This is incredibly obscure and the conditions leading up to it are fairly unlikely (hence, the long time after release before it was discovered).
As for the severity of the thief bug, someone incorrectly points out in this thread that it only affects expert difficult. It actually affects every difficulty level but normal (as it resets the AI to normal.) Still a playable game, but not at the difficulty you wanted.
you and your league mates take turns at the beginning of the real football season "drafting" players to fill your roster. You'll select actual players from the various positions (qb, rb, wr, etc.) and place them in your roster. Then each week, during the real football games, you get points for your team based on the player's real life performance. Depending on how the fantasy league is set up, you either have head to head competition (where you compare your weekly score with another team to decide who wins), or you just tally points all season long and the winner is the one with the most overall points. It has nothing to do with any EA sports game...
don't forget to read the rest of that sentence in the original article: "We draw every little blade of grass, because we can," said Miller, apparently unconvinced such allocation of team resources is absolutely necessary. While it doesn't go into what exactly was said, I think it's clear from the tone of this section that devoting massive amounts of energy to graphics means less energy devoted to gameplay.
" Because it's "on demand", whereas on TV you have to wait for something to come on."
actually, no you don't. I don't know how widespread it is, and what the exact requirements are, but on my digital cable I have HBO on Demand. It's "free" for HBO subscribers, and gives you access to a whole load of on demand programming. Most of the big hits HBO is showing that month, usually the current + past season of HBO's original series, all their specials, etc. I haven't used it for watching anything other than a comedy special, but it's fairly slick. Nice menu driven, downloads fairly rapidly, and you can play/pause/ff/rew just like it were a vcr/dvd. granted, it'll never be as extensive to have random movie from 3 years ago you want to watch, but it's still a nice step in the right direction. I imagine all of the big premium cable channels are going to go this way...
Interesting that you bring up Aki. I have a silk screened wall hanging of the same image that a friend picked up at E3 several years ago. My feeling about the Final Fantasy movie was that the characters were amazingly life like, *until* they started talking. The animators didn't have a good grasp on (and probably didn't have the technology to model) realistic facial movements They didn't convey a great deal of emotion. No light in their eyes, or any of the other subtle facial clues we look for when talking to someone. Beautiful when rendered static, but wrong and a bit creepy when in action.
I wonder if WETA tried to re-model Gollum as a human how realistic it would be. The technology has clearly advanced to the point where they can pick up many of those subtle clues, but since it was still non-human, I wonder how much of that is our projection of emotion into it.
it doesn't hurt that the studio puts out high quality games. looking up the titles they have listed on their website at gamerankings, you'll see that all of them are rated >50%, with several very high individual reviews. So releasing high quality games, either original content or based on a movie tie-in, isn't something that's all that surprising. This might just be an example of a good company getting chosen to design the game, and just implementing what they know is good game design...
"Then maybe people would realize that the PC development process is inferior"
I don't think the PC development process is inferior, per se; rather some developers don't give QA the full attention it needs. A number of studios release products which have far fewer bugs than your typical PC game. Take Blizzard for example. Yes, their games have bugs, but unless you've got some seriously weird hardware, chances are the average player will never encounter a game impacting bug playing the retail version.
But things aren't all rosy on the console side either. The most recent console game I'm playing, Harvest Moon, It's a Wonderful Life, is full of problems. Even ignoring the numerous, obvious translation errors, I've had farm animals just disappear on me. I know they are there somewhere, as they're still listed in my ledger, but I can't find 'em. Game stopping bug? no. But a bug none-the-less. Obviously, the game needed more time in QA.
having played thief 1 and 2, i think it would be fairly obvious to notice whether a guard blindly walks past an open door, or looks in to see why its open (which is supposed to be the behavior at harder AI levels). It seems that in just the testing of the AI, this should have been an obvious flaw.
I'm well aware that QA on such a game must be a daunting task, but this is not a bug like Starcraft's immortal drones which you could only produce under extreme conditions (and which took the players months to uncover). The orignal discoverer of the error provided a simple test: find an enemy and save the game. Let the enemy hit you and watch how much damage you take. Reload your save game, and let him hit you again. Different amount of damage done. Easy proof of a bug and doesn't require any sort of extreme conditions to achieve. Bottom line is something like that should have been found.
"The nature of this one is pretty obscure."
Anyone that has ever played Thief, unless they were looking for a serious challenge (and had 4 hours to kill), has probably saved their game from time to time. This isn't an obscure bug that occurs only when you're in the pantry holding the knife and looking at your feet. Anytime you save the game during a mission, and then re-load that save game, enemy AI gets reset to normal. That's major and something that should have been found during QA. There's little excuse for having a save that doesn't save the state of the game.
"he's spooked by games that require jumping"
I think this point is reasonable, if you approach it from the proper POV. From my limited experience with Zelda (starting at Ocarina onward, with GBA Link to Past thrown in), it doesn't seem that jumping is all that important in terms of gameplay (IIRC, there hasn't been a jump button in any of the Zelda games that I've played). Yes, one jumps by running off the ledge, but one doesn't actively control the jump in the same way as in a Mario or Metroid game. So the fact that jumping games scare him doesn't really matter as that skillset isn't a part of Zelda. As it is, Zelda games have been much more oriented on problem solving rather than arcade reflexes (with the exception of the boss battles, most combat is ridiculously easy).
seeing as how he was the director for Majora's Mask and was a designer for Ocarina of Time; and was chosen specifically by Miyamoto for these jobs, i don't think there's much to fear.
but that's an interesting point to raise. i wonder how many of the developers working on any of the 3D castle wolfenstein games were required to many through the old top down version? or whether the Duke Nuke'em team had to play the side scroller? Fact is, games and technology evolve and adhering to the original is not always good or possible (did any of the 3D wolfensteins ever involve stealing guard uniforms to travel incognito?)
Eventually the plan is to have an actual moving vehicle with realistic physics, as the most recent SITREP indicates (midway down the page, near the graphic).