Let me make this simple for you: I learned on Sesame Street that sharing is GOOD. It's going to be more difficult than you think to reprogram the inner-workings of my psyche that were molded by watching educational television as a child in the 80s.
It's important to note that there's a spectrum between linear and open-ended, and the term "non-linear" covers a wide area in between the two. While I personally enjoy the open-ended RPGs that the parent poster described, I also tend to never beat them (after spending days looking under every rock and carting every piece of trash back to a shop, I eventually get distracted by some other game). On the other hand, Linear RPGs - which covers the vast majority of Japanese console RPGs - are something that I invariably get tired of because they start to feel like watching a (bad, really long) movie except that I have to hit the A button to keep going.
There's a balance, and I really *really* enjoy the exploration aspect of good RPGs, especially when it's mixed in with the right amount of story to keep me from feeling lost on my way to the end. In contrast, I *detest* being hand-held through a sigh-seeing show while being bombarded with boring dialogue and cliche story.
I also find the "getting lost" argument a little weak when I compare open-ended RPGs to platformers and such, although I suppose you could claim the latter to be harder to get lost in due to the subdivision of content created by having levels.
I like how they try to respond to a cynical article about lack of originality in games by pointing out a bunch of cutesy Japanese titles (with the possible excpetion of the mech one).
And what's up with the Dynasty Warriors clone? "But it has more bad guys!!!111" It's good that someone broke the mold - and hey, maybe it's a fun game - but I wouldn't trumpet it as a genre-defying revolution in video games.
I guess what I'm trying to say is: Where are the gritty, realistic, 0% cute, immersive, nonlinear (within reason) sci-fi RPGs? Have any even been made in the past few years (other than KotOR of course)?
MacReady: "I know I'm human. And if you were all these things, then you'd just attack me right now, so some of you are still human. This thing doesn't want to show itself, it wants to hide inside an imitation. It'll fight if it has to, but it's vulnerable out in the open. If it takes us over, then it has no more enemies, nobody left to kill it. And then it's won."
You make some good points. I agree that cinematics and inane dialogue are overused (especially in console RPGs), but the sad fact is that they're most often used as crutches to prop up poor and/or non-innovative gameplay. The best games - the first Deus Ex for example - weave the story into the gameplay instead of pulling you out of it. Immersion is always the key to quality entertainment, whether we're talking games, movies, TV, books, etc., and with games you can't achieve it by repeatedly blocking out interactivity with the game for extended periods of time (unless you consider interaction to be hitting the A Button every 5 seconds only to be rewarded with another X lines of boring text about how some kid wants to slay YYY that killed his father but is too much of a wimp to go get a sword from the king on his ZZth birthday...)
I guess this must be talking about Japanese console games, since as a mainly PC gamer I haven't been annoyed by cutscenes/cinematics. On Japanese consoles, however, I feel that there is WAY WAY WAY too much handholding and inane dialogue (cinematic or otherwise). I think I just have a different idea of what makes a good game (e.g. pacing, timing, quality minimal dialogue, character driven story over combat sysem gimmicks, etc.) than do the Japanese and their fans.
Handholding is a different issue: I often rant to my console gaming friends about how games USED to just make early levels more forgiving and let you learn how to play by PLAYING, but for some reason game designers feel like they need to subject you to a two-hour tutorial level at the beginning to teach you how every little thing in the game works. Next to the issues in the above paragraph, I think excessive handholding has contributed the most to making me stop playing a lot of games over the past few years.
I'm sorry, but it's NOT MY PROBLEM. If the game industry can't get its act together and put some games on the shelves that are actually FUN, then I'll stick to older games that ARE.
Consumers don't owe the industry any favors, especially after years of being treated like: - criminals via abusive copy protection mechanisms and unfair return policies - sheep via releasing non-innovative games over and over again, with poor support and quality control
Also, explain this: - If the innovative games aren't out there, then how the HELL is buying the CRAP that *IS* on the shelves going to help any?
Answer: IT WON'T.
- How will buying the CRAP that IS on the shelves going to encourage publishers to market games that aren't CRAP?
My question is where did this idea come from? Is it in an HTML standard somewhere? If not, they shouldn't have bothered putting it in IMHO. How can I tell my friends that Firefox aims to be more standards compliant if the Mozilla team is putting in proprietary HTML features?
I can't belive that both/. and Eurogamer fell for this! It's obviously a bogus article POSTED BY A GOLD SELLER to get hits on his site.
The idea that people are using English typing skill tests is ludicrous. Anyone who has played an online game (such as many of the people who have posted comments here already) will tell you that the average level of writing skill on such games is abysmal.
I'm a life-long computer and video game nerd with a BSCS and one year of work experience as a software engineer. I learned to program BASIC as a kid in the mid 80s by typing in programs from books and magazines, then by messing with the code to see what it did, then by making my own little games and utilities.
A computer nerd friend with whom I was living last year (who had been building, configuring, and maintining his own computers and doing his own case mods as a main hobby for several years) was just starting to get into programming by way of a community college programming class. After coaching him for a couple weeks it finally clicked with him how a CPU works, processing one instruction at a time and operating on the current contents of memory with no knowledge of what came before or what comes next (well, except maybe in modern processors but that's beyond the scope of a basic discussion). There is no magic or artificial intelligence built into the CPU - it's mostly just a simple workhorse that can follow a specific set of directions to move bits from one bucket to another and perform elementary math operations and logic evaluations.
It was pretty cool seeing this dawn on my friend, as if I had whisked him behind the curtain where only computer programmers are allowed to hang out. I think if more people realized this, they wouldn't be as intimidated by computers because they'd know how true it is when we say "computers are stupid - they can only do what you tell them to".
The summary for this article is misleading. It's really more of a history of *modern* controllers as they pertain to the controllers for the Nintendo Revolution.
I was disappointed when I realized this and skipped reading the article, as I would have if I had been properly informed as to its content.
Well they'll just have to make the ship big enough to build a city inside for all of the islanders to live on while they fight their way back to Earth, of course!
(I don't think anyone else got the Robotech reference...)
Can anyone tell me why the ISP was awarded four times the amount to which it was entitled? I actually looked at both the Inquirer article and the one it linked to and couldn't see any explanation.
280 million X $10 = $2.8 billion (the amount to which the ISP was entitled)
$2.8 billion X 4 = $11.2 billion (the mount awarded)
I'm neutral on this issue. I didn't mind the idea that some pets are better than others, as it makes pet taming that much more interesting and useful. On the other hand, it again gives those with no life an advantage over casual players.
Also, to whomever it was that mentioned that unequal pets would cause everyone to have the same pet: It's just as bad when the choice is arbitrary. In Guild Wars there is almost no difference between pets, and as a result 95% of Rangers have the cat pet that you are forced to tame as part of an early Ranger quest.
A couple years ago my former roommate purchased an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB AGP AiW for an XP Pro box he was assembling. We had problems with it from the get-go: - First, the TV software for the AiW somehow muted the line in of the sound card while it was running no matter what we tried. We ended up working around it by running the sound outputs from the AiW tuner directly to his speakers (via a switchbox I think, so that he could switch back to using them for normal computer stuff) - I tried talking to their support people on the phone about the issue, and the guy treated me like an idiot for not being able to get things working. For the record, I'm an embedded software engineer with a BSCS, and a life-long computer and video game geek who has been building his own computers from parts since my 120MHz 486. - More recently (I'd say around a year ago), he was getting lag and stuttering when playing XBox/PS2/Gamecube games on the tuner. We reinstalled the latest drivers and supporting software to no avail. Eventually we found DScaler, which turned out to be a much better option (although it was harder to configure). - As the parent poster mentioned, the card is quickly aging. Even if it weren't for the AGP-to-PCIe transition combined with the fact that my former roommate has two PCs (one for gaming, one for media and other projects), he would toss out what was originally a rather expensive card on his next upgrade.
As for nVidia cards, my first 3D accelerator was a 16MB AGP nVidia Riva TNT (yes, the first TNT). I bought it because I could read through the hype and see that 3dfx had reached its azimuth and was no longer innovating, plus of course the TNT already had much better OpenGL support (Direct3D wasn't quite as good at first though).
Now, however, I'm starting to get a bad taste in my mouth about nVidia over the last few years: - product placements on game boxes and intro movies. They seem to be succumbing to the pitfall of relying on heavy marketing instead of product innovation and competitive pricing (i.e. they are more concerned about the pitch than the product) - silently (at first) putting in application-specific driver optimizations for benchmarking software - seems to still regularly leak betas to keep customers from screaming for more frequent driver releases (a tradition that was already in place by the time I had acquired my second 3D card, a Geforce2MX)
That said, I'm considering giving them another chance with my next system as I love their nForce2 motherboards and have had a few frustrating experiences with ATI.
I've been enjoying HD quality graphics resolutions in PC games for years now. Low-def video is one of the many reasons I have avoided TV-based game consoles (other reasons include non-upgradability, poor controllers for many types of games, harsher platform life-cycle, etc.). I've always wondered what the point is of having a console as powerful as a desktop but only running the graphics output at 320x240 or so (yes, they say 640x480 but look up the NTSC or PAL specs and you'll see that the standard TV is closer to 320x240 regardless of what the hardware in the console is doing)
Slashdot Mirror
MMORPGs don't count! Nice try though.
Dear RIAA,
Let me make this simple for you: I learned on Sesame Street that sharing is GOOD. It's going to be more difficult than you think to reprogram the inner-workings of my psyche that were molded by watching educational television as a child in the 80s.
Sincerely,
Me
Gah, I should have put in a disclaimer... I'm actually mainly a PC gamer myself and was trying to be sarcastic. Oh well :)
It's important to note that there's a spectrum between linear and open-ended, and the term "non-linear" covers a wide area in between the two. While I personally enjoy the open-ended RPGs that the parent poster described, I also tend to never beat them (after spending days looking under every rock and carting every piece of trash back to a shop, I eventually get distracted by some other game). On the other hand, Linear RPGs - which covers the vast majority of Japanese console RPGs - are something that I invariably get tired of because they start to feel like watching a (bad, really long) movie except that I have to hit the A button to keep going.
There's a balance, and I really *really* enjoy the exploration aspect of good RPGs, especially when it's mixed in with the right amount of story to keep me from feeling lost on my way to the end. In contrast, I *detest* being hand-held through a sigh-seeing show while being bombarded with boring dialogue and cliche story.
I also find the "getting lost" argument a little weak when I compare open-ended RPGs to platformers and such, although I suppose you could claim the latter to be harder to get lost in due to the subdivision of content created by having levels.
The PC games market is dead, remember? Well, except for MMORPGs...
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/05/27
I like how they try to respond to a cynical article about lack of originality in games by pointing out a bunch of cutesy Japanese titles (with the possible excpetion of the mech one).
And what's up with the Dynasty Warriors clone? "But it has more bad guys!!!111" It's good that someone broke the mold - and hey, maybe it's a fun game - but I wouldn't trumpet it as a genre-defying revolution in video games.
I guess what I'm trying to say is: Where are the gritty, realistic, 0% cute, immersive, nonlinear (within reason) sci-fi RPGs? Have any even been made in the past few years (other than KotOR of course)?
This is what happens when Netcraft doesn't confirm it in time... When are these guys going to get sent to prison and/or go bankrupt?
Heheh one of my favorite movies :) http://imdb.com/title/tt0084787/
/.
MacReady: "I know I'm human. And if you were all these things, then you'd just attack me right now, so some of you are still human. This thing doesn't want to show itself, it wants to hide inside an imitation. It'll fight if it has to, but it's vulnerable out in the open. If it takes us over, then it has no more enemies, nobody left to kill it. And then it's won."
Reminds me of my fellow posters here on
You make some good points. I agree that cinematics and inane dialogue are overused (especially in console RPGs), but the sad fact is that they're most often used as crutches to prop up poor and/or non-innovative gameplay. The best games - the first Deus Ex for example - weave the story into the gameplay instead of pulling you out of it. Immersion is always the key to quality entertainment, whether we're talking games, movies, TV, books, etc., and with games you can't achieve it by repeatedly blocking out interactivity with the game for extended periods of time (unless you consider interaction to be hitting the A Button every 5 seconds only to be rewarded with another X lines of boring text about how some kid wants to slay YYY that killed his father but is too much of a wimp to go get a sword from the king on his ZZth birthday...)
I guess this must be talking about Japanese console games, since as a mainly PC gamer I haven't been annoyed by cutscenes/cinematics. On Japanese consoles, however, I feel that there is WAY WAY WAY too much handholding and inane dialogue (cinematic or otherwise). I think I just have a different idea of what makes a good game (e.g. pacing, timing, quality minimal dialogue, character driven story over combat sysem gimmicks, etc.) than do the Japanese and their fans.
Handholding is a different issue:
I often rant to my console gaming friends about how games USED to just make early levels more forgiving and let you learn how to play by PLAYING, but for some reason game designers feel like they need to subject you to a two-hour tutorial level at the beginning to teach you how every little thing in the game works. Next to the issues in the above paragraph, I think excessive handholding has contributed the most to making me stop playing a lot of games over the past few years.
I'm sorry, but it's NOT MY PROBLEM. If the game industry can't get its act together and put some games on the shelves that are actually FUN, then I'll stick to older games that ARE.
Consumers don't owe the industry any favors, especially after years of being treated like:
- criminals via abusive copy protection mechanisms and unfair return policies
- sheep via releasing non-innovative games over and over again, with poor support and quality control
Also, explain this:
- If the innovative games aren't out there, then how the HELL is buying the CRAP that *IS* on the shelves going to help any?
Answer: IT WON'T.
- How will buying the CRAP that IS on the shelves going to encourage publishers to market games that aren't CRAP?
Answer: IT WON'T.
Pennies are made mostly out of zinc these days.
My question is where did this idea come from? Is it in an HTML standard somewhere? If not, they shouldn't have bothered putting it in IMHO. How can I tell my friends that Firefox aims to be more standards compliant if the Mozilla team is putting in proprietary HTML features?
I can't belive that both /. and Eurogamer fell for this! It's obviously a bogus article POSTED BY A GOLD SELLER to get hits on his site.
The idea that people are using English typing skill tests is ludicrous. Anyone who has played an online game (such as many of the people who have posted comments here already) will tell you that the average level of writing skill on such games is abysmal.
I'm a life-long computer and video game nerd with a BSCS and one year of work experience as a software engineer. I learned to program BASIC as a kid in the mid 80s by typing in programs from books and magazines, then by messing with the code to see what it did, then by making my own little games and utilities.
A computer nerd friend with whom I was living last year (who had been building, configuring, and maintining his own computers and doing his own case mods as a main hobby for several years) was just starting to get into programming by way of a community college programming class. After coaching him for a couple weeks it finally clicked with him how a CPU works, processing one instruction at a time and operating on the current contents of memory with no knowledge of what came before or what comes next (well, except maybe in modern processors but that's beyond the scope of a basic discussion). There is no magic or artificial intelligence built into the CPU - it's mostly just a simple workhorse that can follow a specific set of directions to move bits from one bucket to another and perform elementary math operations and logic evaluations.
It was pretty cool seeing this dawn on my friend, as if I had whisked him behind the curtain where only computer programmers are allowed to hang out. I think if more people realized this, they wouldn't be as intimidated by computers because they'd know how true it is when we say "computers are stupid - they can only do what you tell them to".
So the bad guys in The Matrix were actually pissed off trees? I think you're confusing it with Lord of the Rings ;)
Nice, they've invented OILIX from Metal Gear 2 (MSX, not PS2)!
The summary for this article is misleading. It's really more of a history of *modern* controllers as they pertain to the controllers for the Nintendo Revolution.
I was disappointed when I realized this and skipped reading the article, as I would have if I had been properly informed as to its content.
I didn't know Macross was a ripoff of Gilligan's Island...
Well they'll just have to make the ship big enough to build a city inside for all of the islanders to live on while they fight their way back to Earth, of course!
(I don't think anyone else got the Robotech reference...)
Can anyone tell me why the ISP was awarded four times the amount to which it was entitled? I actually looked at both the Inquirer article and the one it linked to and couldn't see any explanation.
280 million X $10 = $2.8 billion (the amount to which the ISP was entitled)
$2.8 billion X 4 = $11.2 billion (the mount awarded)
Where did you get this info on pets supposedly being nerfed in 1.9? I don't see it anywhere in the detailed patch notes at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com.nyud.net:8090/patch notes/test-realm-patchnotes.html
I'm neutral on this issue. I didn't mind the idea that some pets are better than others, as it makes pet taming that much more interesting and useful. On the other hand, it again gives those with no life an advantage over casual players.
Also, to whomever it was that mentioned that unequal pets would cause everyone to have the same pet: It's just as bad when the choice is arbitrary. In Guild Wars there is almost no difference between pets, and as a result 95% of Rangers have the cat pet that you are forced to tame as part of an early Ranger quest.
A couple years ago my former roommate purchased an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB AGP AiW for an XP Pro box he was assembling. We had problems with it from the get-go:
- First, the TV software for the AiW somehow muted the line in of the sound card while it was running no matter what we tried. We ended up working around it by running the sound outputs from the AiW tuner directly to his speakers (via a switchbox I think, so that he could switch back to using them for normal computer stuff)
- I tried talking to their support people on the phone about the issue, and the guy treated me like an idiot for not being able to get things working. For the record, I'm an embedded software engineer with a BSCS, and a life-long computer and video game geek who has been building his own computers from parts since my 120MHz 486.
- More recently (I'd say around a year ago), he was getting lag and stuttering when playing XBox/PS2/Gamecube games on the tuner. We reinstalled the latest drivers and supporting software to no avail. Eventually we found DScaler, which turned out to be a much better option (although it was harder to configure).
- As the parent poster mentioned, the card is quickly aging. Even if it weren't for the AGP-to-PCIe transition combined with the fact that my former roommate has two PCs (one for gaming, one for media and other projects), he would toss out what was originally a rather expensive card on his next upgrade.
As for nVidia cards, my first 3D accelerator was a 16MB AGP nVidia Riva TNT (yes, the first TNT). I bought it because I could read through the hype and see that 3dfx had reached its azimuth and was no longer innovating, plus of course the TNT already had much better OpenGL support (Direct3D wasn't quite as good at first though).
Now, however, I'm starting to get a bad taste in my mouth about nVidia over the last few years:
- product placements on game boxes and intro movies. They seem to be succumbing to the pitfall of relying on heavy marketing instead of product innovation and competitive pricing (i.e. they are more concerned about the pitch than the product)
- silently (at first) putting in application-specific driver optimizations for benchmarking software
- seems to still regularly leak betas to keep customers from screaming for more frequent driver releases (a tradition that was already in place by the time I had acquired my second 3D card, a Geforce2MX)
That said, I'm considering giving them another chance with my next system as I love their nForce2 motherboards and have had a few frustrating experiences with ATI.
I've been enjoying HD quality graphics resolutions in PC games for years now. Low-def video is one of the many reasons I have avoided TV-based game consoles (other reasons include non-upgradability, poor controllers for many types of games, harsher platform life-cycle, etc.). I've always wondered what the point is of having a console as powerful as a desktop but only running the graphics output at 320x240 or so (yes, they say 640x480 but look up the NTSC or PAL specs and you'll see that the standard TV is closer to 320x240 regardless of what the hardware in the console is doing)