I disagree. I'm not saying it's *correct* or anything, but the ideas behind free software are incomprehensible to non-programmers, and are therefore easily lumped together with piracy.
Remember, if you can't understand it, it's bad, or otherwise wrong, somehow. And the idea that you should have rights to software for *free* sounds an awful lot like piracy to many average Joes.
You're missing the point. That quote wasn't about open source software, it was about the student's knowledge of copyright. This person was a student in an "information technology law course" and wrote a paper on "open source software licensing". A person like this claiming to know nothing about the fact that posting copyrighted works on the internet is illegal is like an accounting student claiming that he didn't know he had to file his taxes every year. If someone knows the advanced portions of copyright law, then they obviously know the basics, as well. That was what the counsel meant.
What burns me about this article is the quote: 'Counsel for the Commonwealth, Paul Roberts, SC, said Ng was well aware he was acting illegally. Not only was the site camouflaged - the web space had been let to him by a teenage boy in Perth - but Ng had co-written an essay for his information technology law course on "open source software licensing."' Not entirely sure what OS licensing has to do with music piracy."
Obviously anyone that chooses to write an essay for an information technology law course on "open source software licensing" knows at least SOMETHING about copyright. Such as, for instance, the fact that there is a such a thing as copyright law and that freely trading copyrighted material might violate it.
That quote had nothing to do with insulting your precious open source sensitivities. It was about an information technology law student obviously knowing when he's breaking copyright laws on a computer.
This game has been getting rave reviews, but so far all of the ones that I've read have left me with the same nagging question: Will there be a selectable difficulty level? After Devil May Cry, Shinobi, and recently Kingdom Hearts on Expert Mode, most action games are just getting a bit too easy for me, and that lead to my complete disinterest in Devil May Cry 2.
Has anyone seen anything about this? Perhaps a Hard Mode is unlockable after you beat the game? Or maybe the reviews didn't think that a selectable difficulty level was worth mentioning?
In the pain that is/was reloaded, Lock was really pissed that a couple ships were going out to broadcast depth.
From these scenes it seemed that there was a rather large fleet of ships, all those folks sitting in the background were crews right?
All of the ships except the Hammer, the Logos, and the Nebuchadnezzar were grouped at a single forward defense point when Smith (in Bane's body) unleashed an EMP on them a few minutes before a wave of Sentinels were supposed to arrive. The ships were just sitting there on the ground doing nothing when the Sentinels got there, so the Sentinels tore them and their crews to bits.
OK. Here is a gaping plot hole. The whole reason the humans became batteries is because the machines could not use solar energy anymore. Yet in Revolutions, you see Neo and Trinity fly over the clouds and see the sun.
So... Are the machines so infinitely stupid that they could not mount thier solar arrays on large towers?
The black cloud is actually some sort of large magnetic storm, acting like a localized barrier of EMP. When the Logos flies into it with the Sentinels still clinging to it, both the Logos and the Sentinels shut down, but the Logos survives because all of the hovercrafts have some sort of anti-EMP system that allows them to be rebooted after a brief recovery time.
Great. That says nothing. Absolutely nothing. As I say in my review [slashdot.org], the Oracle's comment is an observation, not an explanation. It's like saying that the reason a car will not work is because it will not go. He has a connection with "the source" - and?
Lest anyone think that this is a message backing the Twin Matrix theory, it isn't that either. I thought it was fairly obvious what Revolutions was trying to do: it was leaving all of these questions open. There's room in Revolutions for most of the explanations people came up with. Unfortunately so many people wanted a nice tidy ending with Neo and Trinity living happily ever after and everything "explained" that they've kind of missed it all.
I think it's a good sequel. But then I wanted something other than the usual Hollywood mindless happy endings. YMMV.
I guess it's nice to think that you've enjoyed something that is "something other than the usual Hollywood mindless happy endings", but the conversation between Neo and the Oracle really doesn't fit into that. The Oracle explained that Neo could control things outside of the Matrix because he was connected to the Source, but as you said, that explained nothing. And what had Neo learned by then to tell people who were bullshitting him with non-answers?
"You haven't answered my question."
At that point, Neo thought that the Architect and the Oracle were tag-teaming him with planned bullshit answers. Why would he suddenly lose his backbone and accept a non-answer to one of his biggest questions, all while feeling angry and betrayed? Because all you got was the usual Hollywood inconsistency. Which is the same reason why Smith didn't slit Trinity's throat in the Logos when he's never been shy about racking up a body count before that.
The N-Gage is just everyone's favourite whipping boy. Most of the people "savaging" it on the web have never even touched one.
Do they really need to, though? I mean, it even looks stupid on paper, and just about every gaming magazine that's covered it has passed that on to all of their readers. You don't really need to experience the operation of removing your phone's battery just to switch game cartridges to know that it is a ridiculous process, especially in the public areas where you would use your N-Gage. And do you really need more than two seconds at the Side Talkin' site to realize that Nokia's insulting characterization of the GBA as a kids' toy that will make adults look ridiculous and stupid in public is not only wrong, but actually an accurate description of their own product?
The N-Gage is making headlines like these because it's so easy to mock it in a way that truly reflects the reality of the product. If you have a problem with gossiping 12 year olds on internet message boards in general, then I suggest you choose a different example.
It seems to me that building a mission and having thousands of real people have a go at finishing it would be a great simulator for planning a REAL mission. But hey, that's just me.
I wasn't aware that the US military had developed the sort of instant reincarnation technology that would allow a real soldier playing out the role of [St0n3d]N00B1N4T0R(3618) to realistically enact the brilliant strategy of spawning, running up to the base, killing two guys, dying, respawning, and then repeating the strategy for thirty-odd minutes until someone runs in at the right moment and caps the enemy flag. Those boys at DARPA are amazing. I mean, what's next? Alaska's first mobile nuclear weapons deployment dinosaur? Or maybe using mid-respawn soldiers from the jungle maps as acrobatic masochist corpse-ninjas?
Nah. Knowing them, they'll just waste time turning George Bush into Dr. Octopus.
Considering this is Sony we're talking about, I can't play FFXI on my PS2 when it comes out since I don't want to buy a network adaptor (I bought my PS2 before the PS2+network adaptor package), I don't want to buy a hard drive, nor do I want to buy a headset or an extra keyboard. Seeing as both my Xbox and my PC already have a hard drive and network adaptor already plugged in and set up, upgrading my PS2 for a few games is a rip-off.
And again, if you don't want to be "forced" to buy a special peripheral for more money, then don't play the game that requires it, in this case FFXI. It's just that simple. It's not like the GBA SP headphone jack where you need a peripheral just to get the basic functionality that is offered on every single game on the system. It's just for a few games that are meant to appeal to the niche gamers that are willing to part with a larger amount of money for a single type of game. Complaining about the PS2 network adaptor is like complaining about the Steel Battalion controller for the Xbox, as if a couple of games using the Steel Battalion controller was forcing you to "upgrade your Xbox". It's ridiculous.
And of course FFXI is a ripoff. All peripheral games are ripoffs. Dance Dance Revolution, Time Crisis, Gran Turismo (if you want the "real driving experience"), Samba De Amigo, Phantasy Star Online, and Steel Battalion are all seriously overpriced games that are created for the people that want to pay more for a certain gaming experience. You're not required to play them and you're not missing out on some sort of basic functionality of your console if you ignore them.
I can't believe no one mentioned this already (I searched the comments page.)
In a graft, which is what has been done here, you stick the stem of one plant (tomato in this case) onto the root of another (tobacco in this case). If the two plants are closely related (as are tomatoes and tobacco,) the hybrid plant will grow and survive; often, chemicals (nicotine in this case) will move in the sap from the roots to the leaves (and presumably fruit.)
The reason no one mentioned this is the same reason why no one mentioned that the creation of Skittlebrau is not an actual form of brewery and fermentation, but actually just some guy throwing candy into a beer mug: We all thought it was too obvious to mention.
This is joke science, not real science. These people are playing around for the fun of it.
True the add-on system would be nice to play unique games like Boktai and Kirby Tilt and Tumble, BUT heres the kicker. Who do you think is going to pay for these extra add-on gizmos? The consumer. I donno about you but the idea of having to buy a Bluetooth adaptor, a sun sensor adaptor, or a 'tilt and tumble' adaptor doesn't make me very happy at all. And I was pissed when I had to buy a headphone adaptor for my GBA-SP.
Why is that a "kicker"? You don't HAVE to buy it, just like you don't have to buy a game like Vampire Night that requires a lightgun or a game like DDR that requires a dance pad. If you don't want to buy a special peripheral, then you don't have to buy the games that require it. It's unlikely that the peripherals for the expansion pack will be absolutely required for normal play like the headphone adaptor for the GBA SP. It'll probably be more like a light gun or a dance pad.
Since when does competitive price slashing drive whole sectors out of business? The ones that have a better business model and do things more efficiently will survive, others won't.
It's not a very complicated process:
1. Company A uses its assets from investors to sell their service below cost as a promotion (typical dot-com thinking). 2. Company B is faced with a difficult choice. They can A) Keep their prices at a reasonable level with the intention of keeping their heads above water and instead end up out of business because all of their customers ran over to Company A for a period of several months, eliminating Company B's revenue, or B) Lower their prices to a similarly unsustainable level and hope that Company A dies before they do. 3. Company A's business plan was unsustainable. They are bankrupt. 4. Company B is fucked too, because the consumers forced them to react to Company A's unsustainable business model.
Monopolies aren't the only wrench that can be thrown into a capitalist system of competitive pricing. Fools with modest war chests of investment money can screw it up just as well, but instead of creating a monopoly situation afterward, they just contribute to a downturn in the market. This is, from my understanding of it, how much of the dot-com bubble worked.
Woo! Lithium ion battery! I guess the days of having battery eating handheld systems are finally gone. But 'regional code system'? Uh oh.. 'Shock proof'? I don't think they understand the kind of stress gamers put their handhelds' through.. 'Expansion port'!? Uh oh, this means they'll end up releasing some kind of add-on(s) in the future. Maybe a mini-hard drive?
An expansion port is needed if the PSP is going to be able to compete with the unique little gizmos that Nintendo can put on GBA cartridges, like the Boktai sun sensor, the Kirby Tilt & Tumble sensor, etc., as well as any future innovation in wireless technology that requires some new piece of hardware similar to the Bluetooth expansion packs that are being added to the GBA right now. In short, it's just insurance so that Nintendo doesn't think up something ingenius and leave Sony thinking, "Dammit, I wish we could do that". Gamesharks and other third party add-ons are probably a concern, too.
I agree about the region coding thing, though. The GBA has been a great system for world travellers like ship-bound navy personnel that have been able to buy GBA games in most of the countries in the world and the lack of regional controls certainly hasn't hurt the GBA's sales or third party support. I wish that Sony would just learn that region controls are ridiculous and let people buy whatever games they want. It would also slash the margins of mod chip makers by eliminating all of their legitimate clientele that just want to import foreign games.
This person seems to be witnessing a completely different reality than myself and all those around me. We've either discovered travel between parallel dimensions or one of us is nuts.
There's another consideration here: why are such polls so common in the games biz? It's not just a marketing slant; everybody in the games industry passionately believes this nonsense. Question this dogma and you'll be regaled with anecdotes of unlikely friends and relatives who are avid game players:
Who passionately believes this? Not only are these statistics the biggest joke on every video game message board, chat room, or website I've ever visited, but if I remember correctly, even gaming magazines like EGM or TV shows like X Play have laughed them off. They're nothing but marketing propaganda and I have yet to see anyone take them to heart outside of a couple of ignorant, overzealous bloggers.
What's especially sad about this is that the solution to these problems is obvious: start making respectable games. There is absolutely no technical or design reason why games have to be so tawdry. Sure, the primary market of adolescent males much prefers the violent rebellious stuff, and the industry can continue to make billions supplying this market. But the games industry needs to learn a lesson that the movie industry and the book industry learned long ago: you gotta push the noble fringe. Every year there are dozens of high-minded movies that get funding. Most lose money, but a few break even. Hollywood is willing to fund these efforts for three reasons:
1. They support the image of cinema as an art form worthy of respect. Sure, Hollywood makes tawdry movies; moviemakers are certainly not above showing some skin to boost sales. But while there are plenty of individually sleazy movies, Hollywood's output taken as a whole is a healthily heterogeneous collection. For every Betty Bigtits there's a Mickey Mouse; Koyaanisqatsi played just down the road from Debbie Does Dallas.
See, this is where we really get into that "parallel dimension" stuff. This man appears to be from a world where games like Grand Theft Auto make up the majority of the titles available. A world where there is no Ico, Mario Sunshine, Wind Waker, Jak & Daxter, Sly Cooper, Ratchet & Clank, Sonic Adventure (and soon Sonic Heroes), Smash Bros., Crash Band--- y'know, I'm gonna stop here, because with every platformer review I've read lately complaining about the "glut of platformers" in the vein of Ratchet & Clank and Wind Waker pushing out all of the other cutesy platformers that are worthy of being played, I could go on for several paragraphs.
This author is apparently also from a world where the top ten list for American game sales isn't frequented by sports titles and platformers, but rather all of these "tawdry" games. In short, a world where BMX XXX sold more than two copies and returned copies of Enter the Matrix aren't cozying up next to E.T.: The Extraterrestrial for the Atari 2600 in a New Mexico landfill. A world where the game that GTA3 dethroned as the king of the North American sales charts for months on end was another tawdry, bloody game, rather than Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec. And, finally, a world where no one has tried out unusual, nonviolent games like Disaster Report (Zettai Zetsumei Toshi) and watched them fail miserably along with Ico, Rez, and Ikaruga, or occasionally watched them soar, like Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec, Dance Dance Revolution, or this little unknown game that's only released a couple of expansions... what was it called again? Oh yeah, "The Sims". I heard that game sold a couple of copies.
I live in a world where there are not only plenty of respectable games, but at least as many of them as the bloody games. The only place where that differs is in the media, where nightly readers/viewers were once regaled with equally innacurate depictions of the comic book and movie industries, and where the only thing that will change that is the passage of time.
Just a brief addendum for anyone that happens to be reading:
I don't count this particular article as one of the good MMOG articles. I've tried to form a reply to this article numerous times and I keep going back to it and wondering what, exactly, this individual is trying to say, because some of his paragraphs seem contradictory or ask rhetorical questions that don't have a direct rhetorical answer. In short, he's rambling like a fool and that foolishness has now been passed on to all of us at/. Games. Holding off on the next MMOG story until a literate individual's opinion can be found would be nice. Khaldun's long article about SWG is a fine example of one such opinion.
Fair comment. We may try to tone down the more abstract MMOG stories a bit in the future - people start asking the same questions after a while, and it blends together a little bit.:)
I don't think the MMOG stories should be toned down at all. As I've said in previous comments, MMOGs are definitely going to be commonplace in the future, but right now they're a very complex thing for developers and they're having a hard time mastering them. That makes them one of the most intriguing questions in gaming right now, much like 3D console games were when the PlayStation and the Nintendo 64 introduced them to mainstream gamers. 3D games were a very interesting problem for developers at that time, as no one had really thought of ideas like Devil May Cry's semi-static camera angles or Ocarina of Time's Z Targetting, which completely revolutionized 3D action games. MMOGs are going through the same teething process right now and I think it's interesting to see it all come together.
I also don't think that these problems were solved in MUDs. I think that idea is ridiculous. You couldn't play graphical minigames in MUDs, you didn't have even one one thousandth of the amount of players on MUDs that you do on MMOGs, and the developers of MUDs never had the option to force you to join a party because there were always at least four hundred people that weren't in a party at any given time. The size of the average MUD also made it a lot easier to deal with these so-called "griefers" that try to ruin the game, as you not only had one admin per thousand players, but usually several of them for every thousand players, because just a few hundred people made up the entire MUD's playbase, if not less than a hundred. A single admin could handle the entire griefer problem in a day on a MUD. A single admin on an MMOG is lucky if he cuts through 10% of it in a week.
The only thing we need to see less of are dumb MMOG stories like "MMOGs - Societies or Games?" or "A Call For Expandable Codpieces in MMOGs". Stories about the evolving form of MMOG gameplay are interesting, but not all MMOG stories are.
I'm ashamed to say i did not get a single one of these references... can someone explain them?
Gun shops: Gun shops serve the same purpose in survival horror games like Resident Evil that they do in zombie movies. They're your armory. Your stronghold. The place that gives you what you need to kick ass and fight back.
Windows: In survival horror games, especially Resident Evil, things have a habit of crashing through windows to attack you. Zombies, dogs, lizards-beasts, and even bosses all crash through windows large and small. It scared the crap out of people in the first couple of games, but after awhile it just became a really dumb survival horror cliche.
Sexy legs: In Silent Hill, there are several different creatures that roam around in the dark that have long, sexy female legs. Above the waist, they're never quite as pretty, and they're all homocidal, sadistic freaks that look like something out of an H.P. Lovecraft novel. Some examples include the "Bobblehead" (psychotic nurse with no face, here's a better picture) and the Four-Legged Mannequin.
Pretty Little Pack Mule: In Resident Evil Zero, there are two characters, one of which is a cute little medic named Rebecca from the local S.T.A.R.S. paramilitary force (the game's good guys). Because the other character is an escaped convict that does some pretty wicked damage with his pistol and she can hold more healing items than he can, most people eschew the the "manipulate two different characters independently at the same time" gameplay that the game wants to force on them and just use the convict as an attacker and Rebecca as a pack mule to hold healing items for him. This new gameplay that was invented by the fans has led to lots of jokes about pack mules and even some fan art of Rebecca drawn as a mule with a sack strapped to her back.
And don't be ashamed that you missed the references. The survival horror genre is nearly devoid of gameplay and I really have no tolerance for it. I've just read way too many gaming magazines over the years and I usually end up reading the survival horror reviews when I get bored.
You can't mention the maladies provided by video games without mentioning the numerous physical benefits that they provide:
1) Calluses. Nice, thick calluses provide an insulation from the various pains of daily life. With such amazing home remedies as Gran Turismo 3, Mark of the Wolves, and, for the truly hardcore, that goddamned stupid analog stick on the Nintendo 64 controller, you can develop the sort of calluses that make seamstresses and lobstermen fell inadequate and immasculated.
2) Survival. If the dead ever rise from their graves, let's face it folks, the average man is fucked six ways from Sunday. He'll be snackfood in fifty-nine minutes shy of an hour. But not you, mighty gamer. You'll know exactly what to do. If there's a gun shop, you'll loot it. If there's a window, you'll avoid it. If something looks like it has a pair of impossibly silky, sexy legs, you'll run like a scared little girl because you know exactly what's above that hideous, evil beast's waistline. And if you happen to encounter a diminutive young medic on a train bound for Hell, you'll know exactly how she can help you: by being a pretty little pack mule to hold your crap for you.
3) Puzzle solving. Yeah, okay, so Bob down at the office can build an entire IT infrastructure in under two hours and Robert's just fucking MacGuyver (which comes in handy if you need MacGuyver's phone number, I guess), but you know REAL problem solving. If someone needs to arrange some blocks, you're Johnny On The Spot. And if someone says to you, "Hey, do you know which arcane artifact of ancient power this one-of-a-kind shiny magical crystal fits into?", you'll know exactly which one it fits in: the one that's the same shape. That's just the sort of awesome problem solving knowledge and skill that you bring to the team. They might not see your value today, but after someone decides to put a new lock on the bathroom door that only unlocks when you've pressed the corresponding color-coded switch on the other side of the building, you'll really start to shine.
And finally...
4) Advanced Military Tactics. ZERG RUSH KEKEKEKEKE.
I'm glad it was included, but then again, I don't expect to rely on built in DVD players either. I once rented a HK bootleg of Azumanga Daioh and it wouldn't play in my Xbox DVD player (Probably because it lacked a DVD menu, which says something about the quality of the DVD itself, but whatever...). I've also had trouble playing other movies in my PS2 DVD player.
Just for future reference, I recently went through a problem similar to this. Neither my PS2 nor my aging DVD player would play my HK bootleg DVDs of Hikaru No Go. Buying a new $40 DVD player solved the problem right away and it works a lot better than the PS2 or the older DVD player ever did.
Why do these asinine articles from NTSC-UK keep getting posted? The last one was laughable - asking that bug testers move on to reviewing gameplay instead of "just testing bugs" at a time when they haven't been able to keep up with the bugs in big releases like Enter the Matrix, Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, GTA3, GTA: Vice City, and KOTOR. This one isn't much better.
Did it ever occur to the author of this article that the people around him aren't complete fucking morons and that they might be buying the games that they LIKE rather than what looks good on their shelf, just like his so-called "mainstream" game players are buying the games that they like instead of being mindless sheep? I've never met anyone that imports games that seems to be doing it for this nebulous cool factor that he seems to have stumbled upon. They import Super Robot Wars because they either like strategy games or just think that watching the Big O beat the Hell out of the Refined Gundam Zeta is amusing. They import Gyakuten Saiban because they wish there was still such a thing as a quality Adventure game in the US, where detective games have pretty much disappeared. They import The King of Fighters 2002 because they simply want more 2D fighting than one single game, Guilty Gear XX, can offer them.
I've also never seen any of these complaints that he claims to have heard. FFX was "too cinematic"? Whoever said that? The only complaints I've seen about FFX are: the random battles were boring because they've become static, which leaves you with two to three different groups of random enemies per dungeon instead of a dozen; the sphere system was completely broken and could make you feel like were using GameShark cheats or something if you tried to improve your characters; the game was terribly inconsistent in terms of strategy (Zombie + Life combos could kill you, but using Life on undead enemies and bosses did nothing); and the game's ultra-linear nature ruined parts of the game by leaving minigames and optional dungeons inaccessible for stretches of ten hours or so at a time. Those complaints are a far cry from "too cinematic" or "not enough hammering at the 'fire' button", which are nothing but idiotic straw man arguments. The sort of arguments that make a worthless, amateurish article.
Just because someone recognizes that not all of the good games that were ever made came out this year doesn't make them a "fool", an "illiterate noob", nor "ridiculous", as NTSC-UK's hate-spewing, trollish author alleges. There are a lot of good games coming out now, but there are also some really respectable ones that came out in the past. Just because Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Warcraft III have been released does not mean that Final Fantasy Tactics is not worth the average gamer's time and should not be recommended. And just because Super Robot Wars, Gyakuten Saiban 3, and many, many different fighting games have not been released in the US does not mean that there is anything pretentious about them. Some gamers just have tastes that are a little unusual. Most gamers enjoy Grand Theft Auto and are able to immediately enjoy more of that type of game in the forms of Vice City, True Crime, and The Simpsons Hit and Run. Gamers who enjoy Guilty Gear have little choice but to hoard and import.
In short, stop assuming that the rantings of prepubescent forum trolls represent the actual motivations of "retro gamers, niche gamers, [and] import gamers". They're nothing but straw man arguments for you to form an asinine opinion and a lousy article around.
Sure for now the graphics look great. But then they also looked great a couple of years ago. Then new hardware came along and you went wow and promply forgot about how you thought the old games looked great.
Sure sadly an awfull lot of games seem to just use the extra power of the hardware for bigger textures and more rounded boobs. Doesn't mean you can't use it for different purposes. Like say populating a city with cars and pedesastrians for you to drive through? Notice how older games of this style didn't have civi cars? Why do think this was?
I don't think he meant that we've reached the peak of video game graphics, but rather that the next generation of consoles and possibly even the one after that aren't going to have that "HOLY SHIT THIS IS AWESOME!" factor that, say, the Super Nintendo did with you loaded up Super Mario World for the first time or the PlayStation had when you loaded up FFVII for the first time. You may see more objects, less fog, less loading time, etc. but you're not going to see something that really shocks you graphically like the games of the past have.
And to some degree, it's already true. If you played Final Fantasy X or Kingdom Hearts and then went to try out a beautiful GameCube or Xbox game for the first time, you'd probably have a "Wow, that's neat" sort of reaction, but you wouldn't have a spontaneous bowel movement or anything. Video game graphics will continue to steadily improve, but they won't feature the same sort of enormous graphical leap that you had between the NES and the SNES or the SNES and the PSX. It's the same situation that's occurring with storage. Right now, there's a little bit of a wow factor that such a large, beautiful game comes on one little GameCube disc instead of six PlayStation discs. However, as compression gets better and the available storage for games gets larger and larger (if, indeed, it needs to surpass the DVD any time soon), it's not going to be as surprising as that switch from six medium-sized discs to one miniature disc.
I posted this earlier this week during the Gaming Canon's discussion, but it is more relevant here; basically there should be a game designers canon more so than a gamers canon. If game developers do not see good gameplay for themselves, by what reference are they supposed to create it. Like painting, sculpture, one looks to the masters for inspiration. Through understanding these works, one can better understand their own work and thus be a better creator....
There SHOULD be a list of games that every developer should play so that they can not only know what the 'masters' have done, but so they can improve upon it as well.
Do you really think that the developers of Shinobi had never played Devil May Cry? Or that the developers of Tenchu or Splinter Cell had never heard of Metal Gear Solid? Or that the creators of every RPG on the planet were like, "Final what now? What's that?" Of course not. Game developers are gamers. If they make a game in a certain genre, you can be pretty sure that they've played the best games in that genre and that they know what the better games out there for every platform are. Somehow, they still manage to fuck it up. Sort of like all of those writers that have spent countless hours pouring over the "literary canon" and maybe even have a degree/doctorate in English or writing, but still produce insipid crap.
The problem is not that RPG developers have never played a Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, or Suikoden game, nor that platformer developers have never heard of Mario. The problem is that they don't learn a damn thing from any of those games. They just ignore its lessons or copy the whole thing verbatim, creating utter crap in both cases, and it's not something that any list of games can cure. It's just the nature of creative work. 90% of it is crap, 100% of that crap's developers are morons, and most of them will still get funding for their next game.
You've described exactly the opposite approach to how I enjoy games. I enjoy the basic concept of the games, not the eye-candy. If you push out cookie-cutter games all based around the same engine, as far as I'm concered you're releasing the same game over and over. I believe as much time should be spent developing new technology for games as is currently spent on eye-candy and marketing.
Perhaps if I enjoyed more than Doom in the FPS genre or any RTS game I might be into the n-th generation FPS engine or not mind that RTS game X is "just like" RTS games A-W. But I didn't so I'm not.
I think you're missing the point. With engines like the Unreal engine, you can make FPSes, RPGs, third-person action games, or just about any other type of 3D game. If you're in favor of the basic concept of games instead of the eye candy, then you're one of the ones that should be in favor of reusing engines. The only real drawback to using the same engine as everyone else is that everything starts to look vaguely similar. Textures have the same level of definition, objects have a similar number of polygons and the same level of bump mapping, etc. When you reuse an engine, you have more time to focus on the actual design and execution of the game, but the drawback is that you're not going to create the next Final Fantasy X with it. You have to really pour a lot more money into a game if you want to excel in both game design AND graphics, which includes making your own engine.
And really, even if you could only make one type of game with every engine, would that matter? Shinobi was a very different game from Devil May Cry and Kingdom Hearts was very different from both of them, but the very core of them, the engine, was just a 3D character running around in an open space killing other 3D characters. They didn't all need a different engine, even though they were very different from one another.
What the hell? Is this guy actually claiming that Enter the Matrix (which was very successful commercially) was not a bad game? What about Black and White?
There has been a long, long list of games that were steaming turds and yet sold very well at retail.
I think that he was definitely wrong, but it's important to point out that he wasn't TOO wrong. While there are definitely a few examples of bad games selling well, for the most part they aren't "commercially successful". Black and White was probably a success, but games such as Enter the Matrix and Tomb Raider weren't because bad games such as those tend to create a money pit during production. When you see a bad game that sells well, it's usually the result of many, many millions of dollars of production, marketing, delays, special features, and numerous failed "rough drafts" of the game. They're usually released for no other reason than for its developer to cut their losses and try to make back some of the huge amount of money they spent.
None of the math I've ever seen regarding Enter the Matrix has proven it to be a commercially successful game. Its developers were very upfront about how much it cost to make because they thought it would make the game seem like a really big deal. Their revenue, last I checked, has not matched that number. The entire thing was a case study in excessive, wasteful game design, and it couldn't possibly make a substantial amount of money. Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness was the same way. After that many delays, many of which I believe came with a ton of print ads advertising the game's new release date, it couldn't have been very profitable. It was one of Eidos's flagship titles for the year and it probably cost as much as two or three flagship titles. And despite its early sales, the game was only at the top of the retail and rental charts for about a month.
So yeah, he's definitely wrong because there are exceptions to the rule, but he wasn't too far off the mark.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. I'm not saying it's *correct* or anything, but the ideas behind free software are incomprehensible to non-programmers, and are therefore easily lumped together with piracy.
Remember, if you can't understand it, it's bad, or otherwise wrong, somehow. And the idea that you should have rights to software for *free* sounds an awful lot like piracy to many average Joes.
You're missing the point. That quote wasn't about open source software, it was about the student's knowledge of copyright. This person was a student in an "information technology law course" and wrote a paper on "open source software licensing". A person like this claiming to know nothing about the fact that posting copyrighted works on the internet is illegal is like an accounting student claiming that he didn't know he had to file his taxes every year. If someone knows the advanced portions of copyright law, then they obviously know the basics, as well. That was what the counsel meant.
What burns me about this article is the quote: 'Counsel for the Commonwealth, Paul Roberts, SC, said Ng was well aware he was acting illegally. Not only was the site camouflaged - the web space had been let to him by a teenage boy in Perth - but Ng had co-written an essay for his information technology law course on "open source software licensing."' Not entirely sure what OS licensing has to do with music piracy."
Obviously anyone that chooses to write an essay for an information technology law course on "open source software licensing" knows at least SOMETHING about copyright. Such as, for instance, the fact that there is a such a thing as copyright law and that freely trading copyrighted material might violate it.
That quote had nothing to do with insulting your precious open source sensitivities. It was about an information technology law student obviously knowing when he's breaking copyright laws on a computer.
This game has been getting rave reviews, but so far all of the ones that I've read have left me with the same nagging question: Will there be a selectable difficulty level? After Devil May Cry, Shinobi, and recently Kingdom Hearts on Expert Mode, most action games are just getting a bit too easy for me, and that lead to my complete disinterest in Devil May Cry 2.
Has anyone seen anything about this? Perhaps a Hard Mode is unlockable after you beat the game? Or maybe the reviews didn't think that a selectable difficulty level was worth mentioning?
Where are all the ships in Revolutions?
In the pain that is/was reloaded, Lock was really pissed that a couple ships were going out to broadcast depth.
From these scenes it seemed that there was a rather large fleet of ships, all those folks sitting in the background were crews right?
All of the ships except the Hammer, the Logos, and the Nebuchadnezzar were grouped at a single forward defense point when Smith (in Bane's body) unleashed an EMP on them a few minutes before a wave of Sentinels were supposed to arrive. The ships were just sitting there on the ground doing nothing when the Sentinels got there, so the Sentinels tore them and their crews to bits.
OK. Here is a gaping plot hole. The whole reason the humans became batteries is because the machines could not use solar energy anymore. Yet in Revolutions, you see Neo and Trinity fly over the clouds and see the sun.
So... Are the machines so infinitely stupid that they could not mount thier solar arrays on large towers?
The black cloud is actually some sort of large magnetic storm, acting like a localized barrier of EMP. When the Logos flies into it with the Sentinels still clinging to it, both the Logos and the Sentinels shut down, but the Logos survives because all of the hovercrafts have some sort of anti-EMP system that allows them to be rebooted after a brief recovery time.
Great. That says nothing. Absolutely nothing. As I say in my review [slashdot.org], the Oracle's comment is an observation, not an explanation. It's like saying that the reason a car will not work is because it will not go. He has a connection with "the source" - and?
Lest anyone think that this is a message backing the Twin Matrix theory, it isn't that either. I thought it was fairly obvious what Revolutions was trying to do: it was leaving all of these questions open. There's room in Revolutions for most of the explanations people came up with. Unfortunately so many people wanted a nice tidy ending with Neo and Trinity living happily ever after and everything "explained" that they've kind of missed it all.
I think it's a good sequel. But then I wanted something other than the usual Hollywood mindless happy endings. YMMV.
I guess it's nice to think that you've enjoyed something that is "something other than the usual Hollywood mindless happy endings", but the conversation between Neo and the Oracle really doesn't fit into that. The Oracle explained that Neo could control things outside of the Matrix because he was connected to the Source, but as you said, that explained nothing. And what had Neo learned by then to tell people who were bullshitting him with non-answers?
"You haven't answered my question."
At that point, Neo thought that the Architect and the Oracle were tag-teaming him with planned bullshit answers. Why would he suddenly lose his backbone and accept a non-answer to one of his biggest questions, all while feeling angry and betrayed? Because all you got was the usual Hollywood inconsistency. Which is the same reason why Smith didn't slit Trinity's throat in the Logos when he's never been shy about racking up a body count before that.
The N-Gage is just everyone's favourite whipping boy. Most of the people "savaging" it on the web have never even touched one.
Do they really need to, though? I mean, it even looks stupid on paper, and just about every gaming magazine that's covered it has passed that on to all of their readers. You don't really need to experience the operation of removing your phone's battery just to switch game cartridges to know that it is a ridiculous process, especially in the public areas where you would use your N-Gage. And do you really need more than two seconds at the Side Talkin' site to realize that Nokia's insulting characterization of the GBA as a kids' toy that will make adults look ridiculous and stupid in public is not only wrong, but actually an accurate description of their own product?
The N-Gage is making headlines like these because it's so easy to mock it in a way that truly reflects the reality of the product. If you have a problem with gossiping 12 year olds on internet message boards in general, then I suggest you choose a different example.
It seems to me that building a mission and having thousands of real people have a go at finishing it would be a great simulator for planning a REAL mission. But hey, that's just me.
I wasn't aware that the US military had developed the sort of instant reincarnation technology that would allow a real soldier playing out the role of [St0n3d]N00B1N4T0R(3618) to realistically enact the brilliant strategy of spawning, running up to the base, killing two guys, dying, respawning, and then repeating the strategy for thirty-odd minutes until someone runs in at the right moment and caps the enemy flag. Those boys at DARPA are amazing. I mean, what's next? Alaska's first mobile nuclear weapons deployment dinosaur? Or maybe using mid-respawn soldiers from the jungle maps as acrobatic masochist corpse-ninjas?
Nah. Knowing them, they'll just waste time turning George Bush into Dr. Octopus.
Considering this is Sony we're talking about, I can't play FFXI on my PS2 when it comes out since I don't want to buy a network adaptor (I bought my PS2 before the PS2+network adaptor package), I don't want to buy a hard drive, nor do I want to buy a headset or an extra keyboard. Seeing as both my Xbox and my PC already have a hard drive and network adaptor already plugged in and set up, upgrading my PS2 for a few games is a rip-off.
And again, if you don't want to be "forced" to buy a special peripheral for more money, then don't play the game that requires it, in this case FFXI. It's just that simple. It's not like the GBA SP headphone jack where you need a peripheral just to get the basic functionality that is offered on every single game on the system. It's just for a few games that are meant to appeal to the niche gamers that are willing to part with a larger amount of money for a single type of game. Complaining about the PS2 network adaptor is like complaining about the Steel Battalion controller for the Xbox, as if a couple of games using the Steel Battalion controller was forcing you to "upgrade your Xbox". It's ridiculous.
And of course FFXI is a ripoff. All peripheral games are ripoffs. Dance Dance Revolution, Time Crisis, Gran Turismo (if you want the "real driving experience"), Samba De Amigo, Phantasy Star Online, and Steel Battalion are all seriously overpriced games that are created for the people that want to pay more for a certain gaming experience. You're not required to play them and you're not missing out on some sort of basic functionality of your console if you ignore them.
A graft is not a genetic change
I can't believe no one mentioned this already (I searched the comments page.)
In a graft, which is what has been done here, you stick the stem of one plant (tomato in this case) onto the root of another (tobacco in this case). If the two plants are closely related (as are tomatoes and tobacco,) the hybrid plant will grow and survive; often, chemicals (nicotine in this case) will move in the sap from the roots to the leaves (and presumably fruit.)
The reason no one mentioned this is the same reason why no one mentioned that the creation of Skittlebrau is not an actual form of brewery and fermentation, but actually just some guy throwing candy into a beer mug: We all thought it was too obvious to mention.
This is joke science, not real science. These people are playing around for the fun of it.
True the add-on system would be nice to play unique games like Boktai and Kirby Tilt and Tumble, BUT heres the kicker. Who do you think is going to pay for these extra add-on gizmos? The consumer. I donno about you but the idea of having to buy a Bluetooth adaptor, a sun sensor adaptor, or a 'tilt and tumble' adaptor doesn't make me very happy at all. And I was pissed when I had to buy a headphone adaptor for my GBA-SP.
Why is that a "kicker"? You don't HAVE to buy it, just like you don't have to buy a game like Vampire Night that requires a lightgun or a game like DDR that requires a dance pad. If you don't want to buy a special peripheral, then you don't have to buy the games that require it. It's unlikely that the peripherals for the expansion pack will be absolutely required for normal play like the headphone adaptor for the GBA SP. It'll probably be more like a light gun or a dance pad.
Since when does competitive price slashing drive whole sectors out of business? The ones that have a better business model and do things more efficiently will survive, others won't.
It's not a very complicated process:
1. Company A uses its assets from investors to sell their service below cost as a promotion (typical dot-com thinking).
2. Company B is faced with a difficult choice. They can A) Keep their prices at a reasonable level with the intention of keeping their heads above water and instead end up out of business because all of their customers ran over to Company A for a period of several months, eliminating Company B's revenue, or B) Lower their prices to a similarly unsustainable level and hope that Company A dies before they do.
3. Company A's business plan was unsustainable. They are bankrupt.
4. Company B is fucked too, because the consumers forced them to react to Company A's unsustainable business model.
Monopolies aren't the only wrench that can be thrown into a capitalist system of competitive pricing. Fools with modest war chests of investment money can screw it up just as well, but instead of creating a monopoly situation afterward, they just contribute to a downturn in the market. This is, from my understanding of it, how much of the dot-com bubble worked.
Woo! Lithium ion battery! I guess the days of having battery eating handheld systems are finally gone. But 'regional code system'? Uh oh.. 'Shock proof'? I don't think they understand the kind of stress gamers put their handhelds' through.. 'Expansion port'!? Uh oh, this means they'll end up releasing some kind of add-on(s) in the future. Maybe a mini-hard drive?
An expansion port is needed if the PSP is going to be able to compete with the unique little gizmos that Nintendo can put on GBA cartridges, like the Boktai sun sensor, the Kirby Tilt & Tumble sensor, etc., as well as any future innovation in wireless technology that requires some new piece of hardware similar to the Bluetooth expansion packs that are being added to the GBA right now. In short, it's just insurance so that Nintendo doesn't think up something ingenius and leave Sony thinking, "Dammit, I wish we could do that". Gamesharks and other third party add-ons are probably a concern, too.
I agree about the region coding thing, though. The GBA has been a great system for world travellers like ship-bound navy personnel that have been able to buy GBA games in most of the countries in the world and the lack of regional controls certainly hasn't hurt the GBA's sales or third party support. I wish that Sony would just learn that region controls are ridiculous and let people buy whatever games they want. It would also slash the margins of mod chip makers by eliminating all of their legitimate clientele that just want to import foreign games.
This person seems to be witnessing a completely different reality than myself and all those around me. We've either discovered travel between parallel dimensions or one of us is nuts.
There's another consideration here: why are such polls so common in the games biz? It's not just a marketing slant; everybody in the games industry passionately believes this nonsense. Question this dogma and you'll be regaled with anecdotes of unlikely friends and relatives who are avid game players:
Who passionately believes this? Not only are these statistics the biggest joke on every video game message board, chat room, or website I've ever visited, but if I remember correctly, even gaming magazines like EGM or TV shows like X Play have laughed them off. They're nothing but marketing propaganda and I have yet to see anyone take them to heart outside of a couple of ignorant, overzealous bloggers.
What's especially sad about this is that the solution to these problems is obvious: start making respectable games. There is absolutely no technical or design reason why games have to be so tawdry. Sure, the primary market of adolescent males much prefers the violent rebellious stuff, and the industry can continue to make billions supplying this market. But the games industry needs to learn a lesson that the movie industry and the book industry learned long ago: you gotta push the noble fringe. Every year there are dozens of high-minded movies that get funding. Most lose money, but a few break even. Hollywood is willing to fund these efforts for three reasons:
1. They support the image of cinema as an art form worthy of respect. Sure, Hollywood makes tawdry movies; moviemakers are certainly not above showing some skin to boost sales. But while there are plenty of individually sleazy movies, Hollywood's output taken as a whole is a healthily heterogeneous collection. For every Betty Bigtits there's a Mickey Mouse; Koyaanisqatsi played just down the road from Debbie Does Dallas.
See, this is where we really get into that "parallel dimension" stuff. This man appears to be from a world where games like Grand Theft Auto make up the majority of the titles available. A world where there is no Ico, Mario Sunshine, Wind Waker, Jak & Daxter, Sly Cooper, Ratchet & Clank, Sonic Adventure (and soon Sonic Heroes), Smash Bros., Crash Band--- y'know, I'm gonna stop here, because with every platformer review I've read lately complaining about the "glut of platformers" in the vein of Ratchet & Clank and Wind Waker pushing out all of the other cutesy platformers that are worthy of being played, I could go on for several paragraphs.
This author is apparently also from a world where the top ten list for American game sales isn't frequented by sports titles and platformers, but rather all of these "tawdry" games. In short, a world where BMX XXX sold more than two copies and returned copies of Enter the Matrix aren't cozying up next to E.T.: The Extraterrestrial for the Atari 2600 in a New Mexico landfill. A world where the game that GTA3 dethroned as the king of the North American sales charts for months on end was another tawdry, bloody game, rather than Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec. And, finally, a world where no one has tried out unusual, nonviolent games like Disaster Report (Zettai Zetsumei Toshi) and watched them fail miserably along with Ico, Rez, and Ikaruga, or occasionally watched them soar, like Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec, Dance Dance Revolution, or this little unknown game that's only released a couple of expansions... what was it called again? Oh yeah, "The Sims". I heard that game sold a couple of copies.
I live in a world where there are not only plenty of respectable games, but at least as many of them as the bloody games. The only place where that differs is in the media, where nightly readers/viewers were once regaled with equally innacurate depictions of the comic book and movie industries, and where the only thing that will change that is the passage of time.
Just a brief addendum for anyone that happens to be reading:
/. Games. Holding off on the next MMOG story until a literate individual's opinion can be found would be nice. Khaldun's long article about SWG is a fine example of one such opinion.
I don't count this particular article as one of the good MMOG articles. I've tried to form a reply to this article numerous times and I keep going back to it and wondering what, exactly, this individual is trying to say, because some of his paragraphs seem contradictory or ask rhetorical questions that don't have a direct rhetorical answer. In short, he's rambling like a fool and that foolishness has now been passed on to all of us at
Fair comment. We may try to tone down the more abstract MMOG stories a bit in the future - people start asking the same questions after a while, and it blends together a little bit. :)
I don't think the MMOG stories should be toned down at all. As I've said in previous comments, MMOGs are definitely going to be commonplace in the future, but right now they're a very complex thing for developers and they're having a hard time mastering them. That makes them one of the most intriguing questions in gaming right now, much like 3D console games were when the PlayStation and the Nintendo 64 introduced them to mainstream gamers. 3D games were a very interesting problem for developers at that time, as no one had really thought of ideas like Devil May Cry's semi-static camera angles or Ocarina of Time's Z Targetting, which completely revolutionized 3D action games. MMOGs are going through the same teething process right now and I think it's interesting to see it all come together.
I also don't think that these problems were solved in MUDs. I think that idea is ridiculous. You couldn't play graphical minigames in MUDs, you didn't have even one one thousandth of the amount of players on MUDs that you do on MMOGs, and the developers of MUDs never had the option to force you to join a party because there were always at least four hundred people that weren't in a party at any given time. The size of the average MUD also made it a lot easier to deal with these so-called "griefers" that try to ruin the game, as you not only had one admin per thousand players, but usually several of them for every thousand players, because just a few hundred people made up the entire MUD's playbase, if not less than a hundred. A single admin could handle the entire griefer problem in a day on a MUD. A single admin on an MMOG is lucky if he cuts through 10% of it in a week.
The only thing we need to see less of are dumb MMOG stories like "MMOGs - Societies or Games?" or "A Call For Expandable Codpieces in MMOGs". Stories about the evolving form of MMOG gameplay are interesting, but not all MMOG stories are.
I'm ashamed to say i did not get a single one of these references... can someone explain them?
Gun shops: Gun shops serve the same purpose in survival horror games like Resident Evil that they do in zombie movies. They're your armory. Your stronghold. The place that gives you what you need to kick ass and fight back.
Windows: In survival horror games, especially Resident Evil, things have a habit of crashing through windows to attack you. Zombies, dogs, lizards-beasts, and even bosses all crash through windows large and small. It scared the crap out of people in the first couple of games, but after awhile it just became a really dumb survival horror cliche.
Sexy legs: In Silent Hill, there are several different creatures that roam around in the dark that have long, sexy female legs. Above the waist, they're never quite as pretty, and they're all homocidal, sadistic freaks that look like something out of an H.P. Lovecraft novel. Some examples include the "Bobblehead" (psychotic nurse with no face, here's a better picture) and the Four-Legged Mannequin.
Pretty Little Pack Mule: In Resident Evil Zero, there are two characters, one of which is a cute little medic named Rebecca from the local S.T.A.R.S. paramilitary force (the game's good guys). Because the other character is an escaped convict that does some pretty wicked damage with his pistol and she can hold more healing items than he can, most people eschew the the "manipulate two different characters independently at the same time" gameplay that the game wants to force on them and just use the convict as an attacker and Rebecca as a pack mule to hold healing items for him. This new gameplay that was invented by the fans has led to lots of jokes about pack mules and even some fan art of Rebecca drawn as a mule with a sack strapped to her back.
And don't be ashamed that you missed the references. The survival horror genre is nearly devoid of gameplay and I really have no tolerance for it. I've just read way too many gaming magazines over the years and I usually end up reading the survival horror reviews when I get bored.
You can't mention the maladies provided by video games without mentioning the numerous physical benefits that they provide:
1) Calluses. Nice, thick calluses provide an insulation from the various pains of daily life. With such amazing home remedies as Gran Turismo 3, Mark of the Wolves, and, for the truly hardcore, that goddamned stupid analog stick on the Nintendo 64 controller, you can develop the sort of calluses that make seamstresses and lobstermen fell inadequate and immasculated.
2) Survival. If the dead ever rise from their graves, let's face it folks, the average man is fucked six ways from Sunday. He'll be snackfood in fifty-nine minutes shy of an hour. But not you, mighty gamer. You'll know exactly what to do. If there's a gun shop, you'll loot it. If there's a window, you'll avoid it. If something looks like it has a pair of impossibly silky, sexy legs, you'll run like a scared little girl because you know exactly what's above that hideous, evil beast's waistline. And if you happen to encounter a diminutive young medic on a train bound for Hell, you'll know exactly how she can help you: by being a pretty little pack mule to hold your crap for you.
3) Puzzle solving. Yeah, okay, so Bob down at the office can build an entire IT infrastructure in under two hours and Robert's just fucking MacGuyver (which comes in handy if you need MacGuyver's phone number, I guess), but you know REAL problem solving. If someone needs to arrange some blocks, you're Johnny On The Spot. And if someone says to you, "Hey, do you know which arcane artifact of ancient power this one-of-a-kind shiny magical crystal fits into?", you'll know exactly which one it fits in: the one that's the same shape. That's just the sort of awesome problem solving knowledge and skill that you bring to the team. They might not see your value today, but after someone decides to put a new lock on the bathroom door that only unlocks when you've pressed the corresponding color-coded switch on the other side of the building, you'll really start to shine.
And finally...
4) Advanced Military Tactics. ZERG RUSH KEKEKEKEKE.
I'm glad it was included, but then again, I don't expect to rely on built in DVD players either. I once rented a HK bootleg of Azumanga Daioh and it wouldn't play in my Xbox DVD player (Probably because it lacked a DVD menu, which says something about the quality of the DVD itself, but whatever...). I've also had trouble playing other movies in my PS2 DVD player.
Just for future reference, I recently went through a problem similar to this. Neither my PS2 nor my aging DVD player would play my HK bootleg DVDs of Hikaru No Go. Buying a new $40 DVD player solved the problem right away and it works a lot better than the PS2 or the older DVD player ever did.
Have we forgotten about the most enriching form of entertainment of all - the book?
Yes.
Why do these asinine articles from NTSC-UK keep getting posted? The last one was laughable - asking that bug testers move on to reviewing gameplay instead of "just testing bugs" at a time when they haven't been able to keep up with the bugs in big releases like Enter the Matrix, Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, GTA3, GTA: Vice City, and KOTOR. This one isn't much better.
Did it ever occur to the author of this article that the people around him aren't complete fucking morons and that they might be buying the games that they LIKE rather than what looks good on their shelf, just like his so-called "mainstream" game players are buying the games that they like instead of being mindless sheep? I've never met anyone that imports games that seems to be doing it for this nebulous cool factor that he seems to have stumbled upon. They import Super Robot Wars because they either like strategy games or just think that watching the Big O beat the Hell out of the Refined Gundam Zeta is amusing. They import Gyakuten Saiban because they wish there was still such a thing as a quality Adventure game in the US, where detective games have pretty much disappeared. They import The King of Fighters 2002 because they simply want more 2D fighting than one single game, Guilty Gear XX, can offer them.
I've also never seen any of these complaints that he claims to have heard. FFX was "too cinematic"? Whoever said that? The only complaints I've seen about FFX are: the random battles were boring because they've become static, which leaves you with two to three different groups of random enemies per dungeon instead of a dozen; the sphere system was completely broken and could make you feel like were using GameShark cheats or something if you tried to improve your characters; the game was terribly inconsistent in terms of strategy (Zombie + Life combos could kill you, but using Life on undead enemies and bosses did nothing); and the game's ultra-linear nature ruined parts of the game by leaving minigames and optional dungeons inaccessible for stretches of ten hours or so at a time. Those complaints are a far cry from "too cinematic" or "not enough hammering at the 'fire' button", which are nothing but idiotic straw man arguments. The sort of arguments that make a worthless, amateurish article.
Just because someone recognizes that not all of the good games that were ever made came out this year doesn't make them a "fool", an "illiterate noob", nor "ridiculous", as NTSC-UK's hate-spewing, trollish author alleges. There are a lot of good games coming out now, but there are also some really respectable ones that came out in the past. Just because Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Warcraft III have been released does not mean that Final Fantasy Tactics is not worth the average gamer's time and should not be recommended. And just because Super Robot Wars, Gyakuten Saiban 3, and many, many different fighting games have not been released in the US does not mean that there is anything pretentious about them. Some gamers just have tastes that are a little unusual. Most gamers enjoy Grand Theft Auto and are able to immediately enjoy more of that type of game in the forms of Vice City, True Crime, and The Simpsons Hit and Run. Gamers who enjoy Guilty Gear have little choice but to hoard and import.
In short, stop assuming that the rantings of prepubescent forum trolls represent the actual motivations of "retro gamers, niche gamers, [and] import gamers". They're nothing but straw man arguments for you to form an asinine opinion and a lousy article around.
Sure for now the graphics look great. But then they also looked great a couple of years ago. Then new hardware came along and you went wow and promply forgot about how you thought the old games looked great.
Sure sadly an awfull lot of games seem to just use the extra power of the hardware for bigger textures and more rounded boobs. Doesn't mean you can't use it for different purposes. Like say populating a city with cars and pedesastrians for you to drive through? Notice how older games of this style didn't have civi cars? Why do think this was?
I don't think he meant that we've reached the peak of video game graphics, but rather that the next generation of consoles and possibly even the one after that aren't going to have that "HOLY SHIT THIS IS AWESOME!" factor that, say, the Super Nintendo did with you loaded up Super Mario World for the first time or the PlayStation had when you loaded up FFVII for the first time. You may see more objects, less fog, less loading time, etc. but you're not going to see something that really shocks you graphically like the games of the past have.
And to some degree, it's already true. If you played Final Fantasy X or Kingdom Hearts and then went to try out a beautiful GameCube or Xbox game for the first time, you'd probably have a "Wow, that's neat" sort of reaction, but you wouldn't have a spontaneous bowel movement or anything. Video game graphics will continue to steadily improve, but they won't feature the same sort of enormous graphical leap that you had between the NES and the SNES or the SNES and the PSX. It's the same situation that's occurring with storage. Right now, there's a little bit of a wow factor that such a large, beautiful game comes on one little GameCube disc instead of six PlayStation discs. However, as compression gets better and the available storage for games gets larger and larger (if, indeed, it needs to surpass the DVD any time soon), it's not going to be as surprising as that switch from six medium-sized discs to one miniature disc.
I posted this earlier this week during the Gaming Canon's discussion, but it is more relevant here; basically there should be a game designers canon more so than a gamers canon. If game developers do not see good gameplay for themselves, by what reference are they supposed to create it. Like painting, sculpture, one looks to the masters for inspiration. Through understanding these works, one can better understand their own work and thus be a better creator. ...
There SHOULD be a list of games that every developer should play so that they can not only know what the 'masters' have done, but so they can improve upon it as well.
Do you really think that the developers of Shinobi had never played Devil May Cry? Or that the developers of Tenchu or Splinter Cell had never heard of Metal Gear Solid? Or that the creators of every RPG on the planet were like, "Final what now? What's that?" Of course not. Game developers are gamers. If they make a game in a certain genre, you can be pretty sure that they've played the best games in that genre and that they know what the better games out there for every platform are. Somehow, they still manage to fuck it up. Sort of like all of those writers that have spent countless hours pouring over the "literary canon" and maybe even have a degree/doctorate in English or writing, but still produce insipid crap.
The problem is not that RPG developers have never played a Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, or Suikoden game, nor that platformer developers have never heard of Mario. The problem is that they don't learn a damn thing from any of those games. They just ignore its lessons or copy the whole thing verbatim, creating utter crap in both cases, and it's not something that any list of games can cure. It's just the nature of creative work. 90% of it is crap, 100% of that crap's developers are morons, and most of them will still get funding for their next game.
You've described exactly the opposite approach to how I enjoy games. I enjoy the basic concept of the games, not the eye-candy. If you push out cookie-cutter games all based around the same engine, as far as I'm concered you're releasing the same game over and over. I believe as much time should be spent developing new technology for games as is currently spent on eye-candy and marketing.
Perhaps if I enjoyed more than Doom in the FPS genre or any RTS game I might be into the n-th generation FPS engine or not mind that RTS game X is "just like" RTS games A-W. But I didn't so I'm not.
I think you're missing the point. With engines like the Unreal engine, you can make FPSes, RPGs, third-person action games, or just about any other type of 3D game. If you're in favor of the basic concept of games instead of the eye candy, then you're one of the ones that should be in favor of reusing engines. The only real drawback to using the same engine as everyone else is that everything starts to look vaguely similar. Textures have the same level of definition, objects have a similar number of polygons and the same level of bump mapping, etc. When you reuse an engine, you have more time to focus on the actual design and execution of the game, but the drawback is that you're not going to create the next Final Fantasy X with it. You have to really pour a lot more money into a game if you want to excel in both game design AND graphics, which includes making your own engine.
And really, even if you could only make one type of game with every engine, would that matter? Shinobi was a very different game from Devil May Cry and Kingdom Hearts was very different from both of them, but the very core of them, the engine, was just a 3D character running around in an open space killing other 3D characters. They didn't all need a different engine, even though they were very different from one another.
What the hell? Is this guy actually claiming that Enter the Matrix (which was very successful commercially) was not a bad game? What about Black and White?
There has been a long, long list of games that were steaming turds and yet sold very well at retail.
I think that he was definitely wrong, but it's important to point out that he wasn't TOO wrong. While there are definitely a few examples of bad games selling well, for the most part they aren't "commercially successful". Black and White was probably a success, but games such as Enter the Matrix and Tomb Raider weren't because bad games such as those tend to create a money pit during production. When you see a bad game that sells well, it's usually the result of many, many millions of dollars of production, marketing, delays, special features, and numerous failed "rough drafts" of the game. They're usually released for no other reason than for its developer to cut their losses and try to make back some of the huge amount of money they spent.
None of the math I've ever seen regarding Enter the Matrix has proven it to be a commercially successful game. Its developers were very upfront about how much it cost to make because they thought it would make the game seem like a really big deal. Their revenue, last I checked, has not matched that number. The entire thing was a case study in excessive, wasteful game design, and it couldn't possibly make a substantial amount of money. Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness was the same way. After that many delays, many of which I believe came with a ton of print ads advertising the game's new release date, it couldn't have been very profitable. It was one of Eidos's flagship titles for the year and it probably cost as much as two or three flagship titles. And despite its early sales, the game was only at the top of the retail and rental charts for about a month.
So yeah, he's definitely wrong because there are exceptions to the rule, but he wasn't too far off the mark.