Actually you can die in the original Secret of Monkey Island. When Guybrush is under the water and just out of reach of all the sharp things, if you wait for 10 minutes, he turns all sorts of colours and dies. All the action buttons turn in to things related to being dead, and you can't get out of it.
Okay, so you'd never actually take 10 minutes to figure out that part, even if you tried anything. It's just a little joke because Guybrush says he can hold his breath for 10 minutes.
I completely agree with you. I suffer from arthritis and the PS2 pad causes great pain for me after about 20 mins. The gamecube controller is very comfortable and I can play gamecube games indefinitely. The xbox is similar. Sony really missed an opportunity to fix their poor controller design and the sad thing is there are a lot of fanboys who will commend them for keeping it the same.
The real statistics here are statistics.
on
We Are All Gamers
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I was surprised to see that, of the 100% of 6-10 year olds, only 48% were female when normally slightly over 50% of children are female. Suspecting bad stats, I checked out the last census:
The page talking about "Heavy Use" is really a bit lame. Once a week, more than one device? That's quite subjective. I mean, if I took heroin once a week, you wouldn't exactly call me a "heavy drug user", would you?
The quiz/puzzle games coming top makes me a little suspicious. Maybe I'm too way hardcore or something, but these games never seem very popular. I once loitered in a games shop for about a year and they hardly sold. It seems unusual to me that this genre would crush the others.
It makes me think that, considering one of the game types is "PC/INTERNET", a lot of people have noted down great quizzes like "What harry potter pairing are you?" and "What did you do during the great livejournal outage of 2004?" and "Are you a tree?" and "Are you 53% gay?" as serious hardcore gaming.
Unfortunaetly he chopped off the hair a while back. Now he is trim! The restless nights wondering what it would feel like to brush against his soft tendrils are no more;_;
>> Spend it on 5 games that will each sell 300,000 copies (at a profit of $75,000,000 each).
Your final calculation is for 25 games selling 300,000 copies each. You have multiplied by five twice. 300,000 * $50 = $15m.
25 games would certainly be worth it assuming that all 25 could be done with the same budget. The small loss in profit would be justified by the massive reduce in risk. As you said in your other reply the article isn't really clear on what the values mean and from my point of view they were just pulled out of thin air.
The reality is that there are plenty of games companies that knock off a high quantity of budget -aimed titles. I don't think they're becomming millionaires but they must be making a profit, so there is weight to the that point of the article. I just personally wouldn't say it was "serious bank" and start throwing figures around.
Article: Instead of spending $20 million to make "THE NEXT HALO!!!,... why not spend $4 million to make five solid games with interesting themes? You might not sell 8 million copies, but with budgets like that, selling 300,000 units will make you serious bank.
Episode 3, Mission 6 of Doom had a secret exit that required you to use self-damaging rocket propulsion to get to. This was released on December the 10th, 1993.
More than a decade earlier, Orchestral Game Concert was a full orchestra event of video game music. The CD of that was released on November 18, 1991. There was four more OGCs afterwards.
CROBOTS was designing an algorithm for a fighting robot. This is apparently more like teaching it. Still, it isn't new at all. There are some older games like Galapagos and Creatures which used this concept.
It's very similar to the game Bishi Bashi Special which came out in 1998 according to GameFAQs. I'm not ratting on Nintendo for ripping off Konami or anything, I think it's great that they're trying to focus on less explored ideas. If the award really was for prioritizing 'creativity', then Katamari Damacy should easily have taken it.
I went to a couple of shows at the EGF. There was an XBox Live show which was awful, and another event at the national museum called 'Go Play Games' which was also a bit awful. They had a bunch of games from the past year or so, but not really an exceptional selection by any means. The only ones that interested me where Donkey Konga which my friend owns anyway, and Outrun 2 which I'd already played (and crashed) at the XBox Live show previously. I suppose it would be interesting if you were a parent wanting to take your kid somewhere but realisticly I don't quite see the point of the whole exercise.
I don't think that it follows that more randomness means more replayability. It can just highlight the meaninglessness of playing games. Ikaruga is almost totally deterministic with just a few enemies that swap around to keep you paying attention. The whole game is about 25 minutes from start to finish, yet the serious players have spent hundreds of hours on the game. That is some serious replayability, and it gains it through being not random.
Then again, on the other side, there's stuff like Diablo, Phantasy Star Online or Minesweeper where the random spin is pretty much the saviour of the game.
Another issue with random whatever (evel, monster placement, etc...) generation is that, most of the time, it sucks. No care or human ingenuity is used. For example, F-Zero X's random track generator creates tracks that aren't half as good as the 24 built in ones. All the randomly generated Doom level I've played from various programs can't even compare to maps which are made by anyone who knows roughly what they are doing. Again there are counter examples, like the levels in Worms which were randomly generated.
I think it all boils down with how the game needs the player to deal with possibilities. If there's something which needs to be unknown, or some unknown factor, what better way to set it up than have it picked out randomly?
I'm only trying to point out that it's a double edged sword, as the article seemed very pro-random. The dungeons in Daggerfall were just completely uninteresting, yet the author suggests this is down to a poor random generation algorithm? I don't think so, the dungeons were generally well constructed from a technical point of view. They were boring because it is just boring to wander randomly around a dungeon full of random, meaningless corridors and templated rooms, looking for a random item placed randomly somewhere in the dungeon, so you can get the item back to the random villager who gave you the random quest to do this. It just sort of hits home that maybe you're really wasting your time?
As it has passed the legal mess to get shown at this film convention, then I hope that bodes well for some sort of wider release (perhaps in some non-profit form?) Otherwise I don't think I'll ever get a chance to see it, being over in the UK.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually you can die in the original Secret of Monkey Island. When Guybrush is under the water and just out of reach of all the sharp things, if you wait for 10 minutes, he turns all sorts of colours and dies. All the action buttons turn in to things related to being dead, and you can't get out of it.
Okay, so you'd never actually take 10 minutes to figure out that part, even if you tried anything. It's just a little joke because Guybrush says he can hold his breath for 10 minutes.
I completely agree with you. I suffer from arthritis and the PS2 pad causes great pain for me after about 20 mins. The gamecube controller is very comfortable and I can play gamecube games indefinitely. The xbox is similar. Sony really missed an opportunity to fix their poor controller design and the sad thing is there are a lot of fanboys who will commend them for keeping it the same.
The most that I know of is four players simulataneous in Giga-Wing 2.
Well, Indiana Jones beat a tank, and he's pretty tough. And on this basis, I feel Bruce Lee could probably beat Indiana Jones.
So the question becomes: Is this sort of thing transitive?
wtf I made his game last month.
http://www.ikaruga.co.uk/bodythumper/
the end
I was surprised to see that, of the 100% of 6-10 year olds, only 48% were female when normally slightly over 50% of children are female. Suspecting bad stats, I checked out the last census:
p ages/UK.asp
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/pyramids/
The figures are by no means unreasonable.
The page talking about "Heavy Use" is really a bit lame. Once a week, more than one device? That's quite subjective. I mean, if I took heroin once a week, you wouldn't exactly call me a "heavy drug user", would you?
The quiz/puzzle games coming top makes me a little suspicious. Maybe I'm too way hardcore or something, but these games never seem very popular. I once loitered in a games shop for about a year and they hardly sold. It seems unusual to me that this genre would crush the others.
It makes me think that, considering one of the game types is "PC/INTERNET", a lot of people have noted down great quizzes like "What harry potter pairing are you?" and "What did you do during the great livejournal outage of 2004?" and "Are you a tree?" and "Are you 53% gay?" as serious hardcore gaming.
I don't know why I wrote any of this.
what isn't iterative about while(!isfrozen(hell)) DNF->development++;??????
"I'm not as dumb as I look." -Jack Thompson
Well, at least he admits that he looks dumb.
Lol you're wrong. Correlation not statement.
I'm sure there's a slight difference between what you believe and what they believe. Can't put my finger on it, though.
Unfortunaetly he chopped off the hair a while back. Now he is trim! The restless nights wondering what it would feel like to brush against his soft tendrils are no more ;_;
>> Spend it on 5 games that will each sell 300,000 copies (at a profit of $75,000,000 each).
Your final calculation is for 25 games selling 300,000 copies each. You have multiplied by five twice. 300,000 * $50 = $15m.
25 games would certainly be worth it assuming that all 25 could be done with the same budget. The small loss in profit would be justified by the massive reduce in risk. As you said in your other reply the article isn't really clear on what the values mean and from my point of view they were just pulled out of thin air.
The reality is that there are plenty of games companies that knock off a high quantity of budget -aimed titles. I don't think they're becomming millionaires but they must be making a profit, so there is weight to the that point of the article. I just personally wouldn't say it was "serious bank" and start throwing figures around.
1,500,000 units is for all 5 games. The final profits for all five would be $71m vs $380m.
Article: Instead of spending $20 million to make "THE NEXT HALO!!!,... why not spend $4 million to make five solid games with interesting themes? You might not sell 8 million copies, but with budgets like that, selling 300,000 units will make you serious bank.
5 * 300,000 = 1,500,000.
1 * 8,000,000 = 8,000,000.
8,000,000 > 1,500,000.
It's a musical about them, not starring them.
Episode 3, Mission 6 of Doom had a secret exit that required you to use self-damaging rocket propulsion to get to. This was released on December the 10th, 1993.
No.
More than a decade earlier, Orchestral Game Concert was a full orchestra event of video game music. The CD of that was released on November 18, 1991. There was four more OGCs afterwards.
CROBOTS was designing an algorithm for a fighting robot. This is apparently more like teaching it. Still, it isn't new at all. There are some older games like Galapagos and Creatures which used this concept.
What, like "filetype:torrent" ?
But in space, nobody can hear you...
No, 18 by 18 squares, the game is played on the vertices which is 19 by 19. There's a centre vertex, see?
It's very similar to the game Bishi Bashi Special which came out in 1998 according to GameFAQs. I'm not ratting on Nintendo for ripping off Konami or anything, I think it's great that they're trying to focus on less explored ideas. If the award really was for prioritizing 'creativity', then Katamari Damacy should easily have taken it.
I went to a couple of shows at the EGF. There was an XBox Live show which was awful, and another event at the national museum called 'Go Play Games' which was also a bit awful. They had a bunch of games from the past year or so, but not really an exceptional selection by any means. The only ones that interested me where Donkey Konga which my friend owns anyway, and Outrun 2 which I'd already played (and crashed) at the XBox Live show previously. I suppose it would be interesting if you were a parent wanting to take your kid somewhere but realisticly I don't quite see the point of the whole exercise.
I don't think that it follows that more randomness means more replayability. It can just highlight the meaninglessness of playing games. Ikaruga is almost totally deterministic with just a few enemies that swap around to keep you paying attention. The whole game is about 25 minutes from start to finish, yet the serious players have spent hundreds of hours on the game. That is some serious replayability, and it gains it through being not random.
Then again, on the other side, there's stuff like Diablo, Phantasy Star Online or Minesweeper where the random spin is pretty much the saviour of the game.
Another issue with random whatever (evel, monster placement, etc...) generation is that, most of the time, it sucks. No care or human ingenuity is used. For example, F-Zero X's random track generator creates tracks that aren't half as good as the 24 built in ones. All the randomly generated Doom level I've played from various programs can't even compare to maps which are made by anyone who knows roughly what they are doing. Again there are counter examples, like the levels in Worms which were randomly generated.
I think it all boils down with how the game needs the player to deal with possibilities. If there's something which needs to be unknown, or some unknown factor, what better way to set it up than have it picked out randomly?
I'm only trying to point out that it's a double edged sword, as the article seemed very pro-random. The dungeons in Daggerfall were just completely uninteresting, yet the author suggests this is down to a poor random generation algorithm? I don't think so, the dungeons were generally well constructed from a technical point of view. They were boring because it is just boring to wander randomly around a dungeon full of random, meaningless corridors and templated rooms, looking for a random item placed randomly somewhere in the dungeon, so you can get the item back to the random villager who gave you the random quest to do this. It just sort of hits home that maybe you're really wasting your time?
that they saved a lot of money by doing that.
As it has passed the legal mess to get shown at this film convention, then I hope that bodes well for some sort of wider release (perhaps in some non-profit form?) Otherwise I don't think I'll ever get a chance to see it, being over in the UK.