The pre-internet generations still don't fully grasp what they've lived through, and the post-internet generations will never know the window in human history they missed. I'm just glad they're recognizing some of the unsung heroes while those of us who've lived through it are still alive.
I don't. I am a huge privacy advocate, but I don't bother with encryption because I figure: A) the only people looking are the US government (where I live) and that's about the only entity who would be interested, and B) their spyware is probably 10x better than any encryption that's publicly available. I'd love to know if there's something guaranteed for anonymity, but otherwise it's just not worth it. The bad guys already won, and I don't care if they know that I hate them. That about sums it up.
Sorry Atari, you're not even the same entity you think you used to be. This is like me taking on the name of some deceased man, and trying to claim his property and namesake in retrospect.
Send a note with it, will you? I hate the thought of bringing up a whole planet of lifeforms just so they can bang their heads and kill one another over the confusion of where they came from and why.;)
I'm wondering if he'd take 20 hours of 'awesome' over 10? This is more of a side effect of non-compelling gameplay, not the length of the game itself. I've played a number of 50+ hour games that had me on the edge of my seat. They're rare, but it shows you can do it, if you do it correctly.
Ultimately a 10 hour game shouldn't be a bad thing if you've got enough gameplay and 'fun' in to squeeze 20+ hours out of it ('Symphony of the Night' is my best example).
At the same time, I've *not* finished a number of games, but still had a fun time playing them while I did. Developers and Publishers shouldn't be concerned if a player doesn't finish their game. They should be concerned whether or not they had fun while they played, and if they quite because of boredom (poor design) before the end.
When Win7 came out, to much praise, I sat down at home and did some thorough tests. I am a developer who uses some resource-intensive applications for 3D visualization, physics simulations and graphic design. Currently my OS of choice is XP 64-bit.
When I compared the two however, while Win 7 stood out as being superficially faster through caching everything and *appearing* to boot your OS and your applications in a split second, prolonged use of these applications under this OS just ground to a snails pace over the course of a single weekend of use on a 16GB machine. While WinXP64 didn't boot as fast or launch applications as quickly, it never crashed (Win7 crashed multiple times), performance within the applications I use was exponentially better when loading and managing large files, and the overall experience was much more robust.
Ultimately what it seemed to me was that Win7 was geared toward selling you a copy of itself in the store. 5 minutes of use will show you what appears to be an extremely fast OS that launches whole applications like they were text files. In reality it's Vista with an extremely efficient booting process and nothing more.
MS continues to push the bar though! XP used to be the worst OS you could make your machine suffer to run, but if history repeats I'm sure they'll release something so far worse in the future, after XP is deprecated and beyond maintaining, that will make me fall absolutely in *love* with the features of Win7.
What does this mean for someone like me, who lives life by my own idea of morality, which is "Do whatever you want as long as you bring no harm to another"?
I love stuff like this. I think every creative person, at one time or another in their life, has "created" something that, hours, days, or years later they find to be an existing term, name or trademark.
I feel for you brother! Teaches you to keep your truly unique creations close to your chest...
"...also take part in the CPU design of the console"
Wait... Why did Sony spend all that time, money and research on making their assumed super-scaling, awesomely powerful cell processor, if they're thinking of recreating a new CPU for their next console? Am I missing something there?
How is the frame count for animations on this? Did they up the amount as well, or did they stick to the same frame count for animations and only raise the resolution?
This is a great example of Sony as a company - take someone else's idea, brainstorm on it, and then head off in precisely the wrong direction at full-steam.
I have a great appreciation of this guy for not being a talking head, and for keeping his critical perspective for his own work and the rest of the industry. He really seems to have a great perspective on games as a whole, and sees where they're at and where they're going (and where they should be right now, which is probably what feeds his criticism of his own work). I really disliked Twilight Princess, and though Mario Galaxy was great fun for me, it was really just Mario 64 with a top-down camera most of the time.
I have never really understood region locking, and I was never able to get an answer from people on why they did it. Is it just a method of control? Forcing people to only buy their region, and to wait for release of a product in their own, (or be SOL if it never comes). That really pisses me off if so.
Can someone explain that to me if they have a better understanding of it?
This is from Nexon. They're a Korean company. I understand your point though, I just thought the article was more of an ad than anything else.
Unless you were referring to the initial price of the game client, Guild Wars does not cost money to play. It was the first US retail "MMO" release that had no subscription fee.
What would be worth reporting on these Korean MMO's (and their business model), would be which ones don't install spyware as a means of hidden income (consumer research, marketing etc). Many of the ones I've listed, and most from Korea in general, use that "Game Guardian" software which is practically a rootkit in itself.
Too short and nothing new (seriously)...
on
Review: Crysis Warhead
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm sorry, but I cleared this game within 3 hours the first night I turned it on. Length is not my only criticism though. Not only was the game shorter over all, but the level design was much poorer than the original; not nearly as much attention to detail. The cutscenes were overly long (one being almost 45 seconds of watching a character half-off camera fiddle with something also off camera, no dialogue, uninteresting shot, completely unnecessary cutscene entirely). The cutscenes in particular screamed the desire to superficially lengthen the game, and in some sequences were so absurd, or took themselves so seriously that they just felt more like dark comedy. What hit me the hardest was the complete lack of new content. Same bosses, same enemies, a few new environment models and situations, but overall this game felt like a massive cop-out, or a sub-par addition to an ongoing episodic series, both which make it completely not worth the price of purchase. As usual the imagery was beautiful, even at its lowest settings, which ran fluidly on my machine. Very nice that they seem to have streamlined some of the engine, but overall the most disappointing game I've played this year. I felt the first Crysis was "pretty okay", and not once did this sequel match the first in ANY category, with the sole exception of performance. It may have had it kept going and introduced new ideas, content and gameplay, but just as the game was wrapping up what I felt was a great ramp up intro-sequence, the credits rolled. Seriously, wtf?
So yeah, just pass on this very disappointing pseudo-sequel. If Crytek wants to make sales, they need to do better than this, instead of just blaming things on piracy this time around.
It's about the art direction overall. Diablo was gritty and realistic. They could make the whole game black and white, but you've still got characters running around in cutscenes and combat that look like they came from Warcraft.
I know I personally also wanted contrast to Blizzards other work, because that existed before now. Blizzard has amazing artists and they're going to make an amazing looking game, but when all your franchises start looking the same, they become kind of redundant from one another. I think most Diablo fans wanted something hellish, and dark, and corrupt. Gritty and realistic. While the game will look, and most likely play, just fine, the atmosphere is what will be different due to the changes in the look. I dunno... Something like this http://www.worldart.com.au/images/kris-kuksi-sculpture-surreal-deadly-sins1.jpg
Right now the game looks like it was Disney's take on Diablo, rather than Geiger's.
This is something that's been bugging me for a while, I could care less about loot. One of the things that keeps me from playing online RPGs is that the only thing they have to offer is "more loot". Warcraft players just talk about the loot they've gotten, or will get, and I'm playing Lord of the Rings Online right now and it's much more of the same.
We absolutely have to find a better reason to play than "loot". What about the joy of playing? What about the story? Are these things no longer important to us? Do we need that kind of reward to keep us in the game? I swear, games are becoming a sick reflection of our materialistic society in some ways.
Just thought I'd chime in here to provide a voice for the alternative view: I *love* the speed which they chose to pace the game at. If you go back to Quake 1 or 2 (or even 3, though it's slower), the speed is right on that mark. Rapid, fast-paced twitch action. I can appreciate slower paced FPS titles too, but it's been a long time since we've had an FPS that got back to its roots in those terms. Seriously, when was the last time you saw an FPS at this speed? It's been years, so I was quite happy when I saw the video. FPS's are the fighting games of the PC arena... You've got your super-strategic Street Fighter Alpha, and your hyper-ridiculous-pace of the Versus series. This entry just seems to be the latter.
It's surprising, but there are pretty committed audiences to all the old online games. Not only everquest, but Turbine has an ongoing Asherons Call 1 community (they just released their 100th free content update a week or two ago), and of course there's the UO crowd still going strong.
It surprised me too when I first heard about it, but after a while it seemed logical. It's their own social network, and asking if someone still played is a lot like saying "Usenet? Do people actually still POST on there?"
As a veteran of the game industry I can tell you - you need to complete the game first. Ideas are a dime a dozen. No one will give you money for development. You need to show them the finished product and ask for them to fund the publishing of it. That's the only way you will be able to acquire money from a publisher, unless you self-publish online or through various indie-channels (XBox Live, Wii Ware, Greenhouse, etc), but of course those still require a completed product as well.
Slashdot Mirror
The pre-internet generations still don't fully grasp what they've lived through, and the post-internet generations will never know the window in human history they missed. I'm just glad they're recognizing some of the unsung heroes while those of us who've lived through it are still alive.
So don't expect much going forward. :)
I don't. I am a huge privacy advocate, but I don't bother with encryption because I figure: A) the only people looking are the US government (where I live) and that's about the only entity who would be interested, and B) their spyware is probably 10x better than any encryption that's publicly available.
I'd love to know if there's something guaranteed for anonymity, but otherwise it's just not worth it. The bad guys already won, and I don't care if they know that I hate them. That about sums it up.
Sorry Atari, you're not even the same entity you think you used to be. This is like me taking on the name of some deceased man, and trying to claim his property and namesake in retrospect.
Send a note with it, will you? I hate the thought of bringing up a whole planet of lifeforms just so they can bang their heads and kill one another over the confusion of where they came from and why. ;)
I'm wondering if he'd take 20 hours of 'awesome' over 10? This is more of a side effect of non-compelling gameplay, not the length of the game itself. I've played a number of 50+ hour games that had me on the edge of my seat. They're rare, but it shows you can do it, if you do it correctly.
Ultimately a 10 hour game shouldn't be a bad thing if you've got enough gameplay and 'fun' in to squeeze 20+ hours out of it ('Symphony of the Night' is my best example).
At the same time, I've *not* finished a number of games, but still had a fun time playing them while I did. Developers and Publishers shouldn't be concerned if a player doesn't finish their game. They should be concerned whether or not they had fun while they played, and if they quite because of boredom (poor design) before the end.
When Win7 came out, to much praise, I sat down at home and did some thorough tests. I am a developer who uses some resource-intensive applications for 3D visualization, physics simulations and graphic design. Currently my OS of choice is XP 64-bit.
When I compared the two however, while Win 7 stood out as being superficially faster through caching everything and *appearing* to boot your OS and your applications in a split second, prolonged use of these applications under this OS just ground to a snails pace over the course of a single weekend of use on a 16GB machine.
While WinXP64 didn't boot as fast or launch applications as quickly, it never crashed (Win7 crashed multiple times), performance within the applications I use was exponentially better when loading and managing large files, and the overall experience was much more robust.
Ultimately what it seemed to me was that Win7 was geared toward selling you a copy of itself in the store. 5 minutes of use will show you what appears to be an extremely fast OS that launches whole applications like they were text files. In reality it's Vista with an extremely efficient booting process and nothing more.
MS continues to push the bar though! XP used to be the worst OS you could make your machine suffer to run, but if history repeats I'm sure they'll release something so far worse in the future, after XP is deprecated and beyond maintaining, that will make me fall absolutely in *love* with the features of Win7.
What does this mean for someone like me, who lives life by my own idea of morality, which is "Do whatever you want as long as you bring no harm to another"?
Maybe they're interpreting "harm" differently.
I love stuff like this. I think every creative person, at one time or another in their life, has "created" something that, hours, days, or years later they find to be an existing term, name or trademark.
I feel for you brother! Teaches you to keep your truly unique creations close to your chest...
"...also take part in the CPU design of the console"
Wait... Why did Sony spend all that time, money and research on making their assumed super-scaling, awesomely powerful cell processor, if they're thinking of recreating a new CPU for their next console? Am I missing something there?
"If you were waiting for the One Game to do justice to Tolkien's universe... well, keep waiting."
Or play lotro (www.lotro.com)!
How is the frame count for animations on this? Did they up the amount as well, or did they stick to the same frame count for animations and only raise the resolution?
This is a great example of Sony as a company - take someone else's idea, brainstorm on it, and then head off in precisely the wrong direction at full-steam.
I have a great appreciation of this guy for not being a talking head, and for keeping his critical perspective for his own work and the rest of the industry. He really seems to have a great perspective on games as a whole, and sees where they're at and where they're going (and where they should be right now, which is probably what feeds his criticism of his own work).
I really disliked Twilight Princess, and though Mario Galaxy was great fun for me, it was really just Mario 64 with a top-down camera most of the time.
I have never really understood region locking, and I was never able to get an answer from people on why they did it. Is it just a method of control? Forcing people to only buy their region, and to wait for release of a product in their own, (or be SOL if it never comes). That really pisses me off if so.
Can someone explain that to me if they have a better understanding of it?
This is from Nexon. They're a Korean company. I understand your point though, I just thought the article was more of an ad than anything else.
Unless you were referring to the initial price of the game client, Guild Wars does not cost money to play. It was the first US retail "MMO" release that had no subscription fee.
What would be worth reporting on these Korean MMO's (and their business model), would be which ones don't install spyware as a means of hidden income (consumer research, marketing etc). Many of the ones I've listed, and most from Korea in general, use that "Game Guardian" software which is practically a rootkit in itself.
Nice. This article forgets that there are tons of free-to-play MMO's already available in the US.
Knight Online
Fly For Fun
Granado Espada
And lets not forget our own domestic free-to-plays, such as Guild Wars, Minions of Mirth, Graal Online and the like.
Here's a great resource for all of these- http://www.gameogre.com/
I'm sorry, but I cleared this game within 3 hours the first night I turned it on. Length is not my only criticism though.
Not only was the game shorter over all, but the level design was much poorer than the original; not nearly as much attention to detail. The cutscenes were overly long (one being almost 45 seconds of watching a character half-off camera fiddle with something also off camera, no dialogue, uninteresting shot, completely unnecessary cutscene entirely). The cutscenes in particular screamed the desire to superficially lengthen the game, and in some sequences were so absurd, or took themselves so seriously that they just felt more like dark comedy.
What hit me the hardest was the complete lack of new content. Same bosses, same enemies, a few new environment models and situations, but overall this game felt like a massive cop-out, or a sub-par addition to an ongoing episodic series, both which make it completely not worth the price of purchase.
As usual the imagery was beautiful, even at its lowest settings, which ran fluidly on my machine. Very nice that they seem to have streamlined some of the engine, but overall the most disappointing game I've played this year. I felt the first Crysis was "pretty okay", and not once did this sequel match the first in ANY category, with the sole exception of performance.
It may have had it kept going and introduced new ideas, content and gameplay, but just as the game was wrapping up what I felt was a great ramp up intro-sequence, the credits rolled. Seriously, wtf?
So yeah, just pass on this very disappointing pseudo-sequel. If Crytek wants to make sales, they need to do better than this, instead of just blaming things on piracy this time around.
Well, I'm rather certain the spoon came first, right? So calling a fork a spin off isn't too far from the truth...
It's about the art direction overall. Diablo was gritty and realistic. They could make the whole game black and white, but you've still got characters running around in cutscenes and combat that look like they came from Warcraft.
This http://www.diii.net/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=871&size=big&cat=563 and this http://www.diii.net/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=703&cat=565 are much more in the style of Warcraft, which aside from the bright and happy palette is the primary reason a lot of folks were surprised when D3 was unveiled.
I know I personally also wanted contrast to Blizzards other work, because that existed before now. Blizzard has amazing artists and they're going to make an amazing looking game, but when all your franchises start looking the same, they become kind of redundant from one another. I think most Diablo fans wanted something hellish, and dark, and corrupt. Gritty and realistic. While the game will look, and most likely play, just fine, the atmosphere is what will be different due to the changes in the look.
I dunno... Something like this http://www.worldart.com.au/images/kris-kuksi-sculpture-surreal-deadly-sins1.jpg
Right now the game looks like it was Disney's take on Diablo, rather than Geiger's.
This is something that's been bugging me for a while, I could care less about loot. One of the things that keeps me from playing online RPGs is that the only thing they have to offer is "more loot". Warcraft players just talk about the loot they've gotten, or will get, and I'm playing Lord of the Rings Online right now and it's much more of the same.
We absolutely have to find a better reason to play than "loot". What about the joy of playing? What about the story? Are these things no longer important to us? Do we need that kind of reward to keep us in the game? I swear, games are becoming a sick reflection of our materialistic society in some ways.
Just thought I'd chime in here to provide a voice for the alternative view: I *love* the speed which they chose to pace the game at. If you go back to Quake 1 or 2 (or even 3, though it's slower), the speed is right on that mark. Rapid, fast-paced twitch action. I can appreciate slower paced FPS titles too, but it's been a long time since we've had an FPS that got back to its roots in those terms. Seriously, when was the last time you saw an FPS at this speed? It's been years, so I was quite happy when I saw the video. FPS's are the fighting games of the PC arena... You've got your super-strategic Street Fighter Alpha, and your hyper-ridiculous-pace of the Versus series. This entry just seems to be the latter.
It's surprising, but there are pretty committed audiences to all the old online games. Not only everquest, but Turbine has an ongoing Asherons Call 1 community (they just released their 100th free content update a week or two ago), and of course there's the UO crowd still going strong.
It surprised me too when I first heard about it, but after a while it seemed logical. It's their own social network, and asking if someone still played is a lot like saying "Usenet? Do people actually still POST on there?"
Of course the earth is flat.
Also, the internet is a myth.
As a veteran of the game industry I can tell you - you need to complete the game first. Ideas are a dime a dozen. No one will give you money for development. You need to show them the finished product and ask for them to fund the publishing of it. That's the only way you will be able to acquire money from a publisher, unless you self-publish online or through various indie-channels (XBox Live, Wii Ware, Greenhouse, etc), but of course those still require a completed product as well.
Worlds most expensive toy... I would love to fire a few protons down CERNs tubes...