Many of the popular gaming sequels are more like updates than true sequels, only with updated technology and gameplay tweaks. And even the ones that are actual sequels benefit from not only the better graphics and computing horspower but also such things as improved interfaces.
To make a Hollywood analogy you'd have to have Star Wars made in 1908, and then again with a tweaked storyline with sound in 1932, and then in colour in 1964, and then with CGI in 1996. But still be Star Wars.
Or to put it in a way that slashdotters accept and understand:
-The program you're running that crashes Windows is made by Microsoft, Real, AOL, EA, etc: it is the program's fault.
-The program you're running that crashes Windows is made by some 17 year olds in Helsinki: it is Windows fault.
Were you one of the people who hid his eyes and ears when the HL@ sourcecode got stolen? One of the big suprises out of that is appearantly TF2 is built-in to HL2 as a multilayer mod out of the box. Or there are a bunch of references to it in the multiplayer portion of HL2 for no good reason. Your call.
Yeah but Ultima ix was also a piece of crap that was much more an EA title than a Richard Garriott/Ultima title. Same goes for the very last Wing Commander games. Are there any GOOD single-player Origin games required a three-digit processor and a 3d card? No.
Other than watching over UO and developing UO2/X what has origin done lately? I used to buy every one of their releases (as long as my system could handle it) but that was 7-10 years ago. I remember games like strike commander really pushing people's systems. And wasn't Origin the first company to go Cd-rom only for their titles? I remember that being a big deal. As far as i was concerned, Origin was the gold standard for dev houses in their era, along with Bullfrog. But I cannot think of one 3D-accelerated Origin title off of the top of my head (UO doesn't count, it started out 2d). Why are we mourning now for a dev house that hasn't put out a major release since I got a processor with three digits of mHz?
I think a big problem with beta tests, and the preception of gamers, stems from these games ability to be internally patched. Because of autopatching, the devs feel they can release a beta way too early and then add in components as the beta progresses. That doesn't sound anything like the beta state in not-mmo games. That sounds more like an alpha state to me. Beta testing in offline games is usually about finding obscure bugs the devs would never have to time to pick up on their own and play-balancing. Betas in mmo's are about server stress-testing an unfinished product, with many game features not yet activated or horribly broken. So gamers, in their first exposure to the new game, get a broken experience and terrible lag. Beta should be about gixing a syntax error in the npc for the lvl 2 quest, or fining out the quest fails if i click on the npc 11,282 times in a row; they should not be about "this early quest-specific npc is not yet activated." These games should be in a much more finished and polished state before they go beta. Instead they get sent to cd mastering requiring massive patches just to be playable on opening day. Is it corporate's fault, rathe than the devs, jor pushin out the product too quickly. probably, but its the devs who gamers deal with in game, so as long as they prtend this isnt a problem it will continue to be so.
Think about it. China is the most populous country in the world. They've got an active space program. But on star trek we get a couple of japanese and a korean. And what about India? That's 1/3 of the world population between the two of them and neither has had representation on a series about the harmonious earth of the future. Stupid Americans.
And you really think that someone from 100 years ago wouldn't have a fit if they walked into a Wal-Mart and saw all of the brightly coloured packaging? They were used to everything being packaged in a lovely shade of brown paper. And they were the first generation who had the pleasure of nationally available prepackaged merchandise. This will be a big deal for a few years and then we'll be use to it and be incapable of imagining a world without it.
Hey, at least it will play on the majority of people's computers. My windows box IS my stereo, and not being able to play such CDs I own as the new Radiohead album is a tough pill to swallow. I much prefer this method of copy protection to the old "computer are bad" approach.
You're right about ID'ing the story I was thinking about. I'm sorry if i implied that the story popping into my head was a Dick one. I wasn't sure if it were or not. I knew I'd read Paycheck when I saw the trailer, but that plot line kept coming to me for some reason. That Hogan story does fit in perfect with Dick's mindset, doesn't it?
I know I've read Dick's original short story on which this movie is based. I went through a Dick phase about a decade ago and read all of his short-story anthologies. But whenever I try to remember the details of this story I keep getting my wires crossed and all I can think of is the short story about the captured spy they keep cloning and torturing to death, while releasing one.
So what is the plot of the short story "Paycheck"?
I've yet to see a Machinima that didn't look like the cutscene from a game. I'm not talking about the render quality or the models and textures. I'm talking about shoddy camera work, nonexistant acting, and most importantly: crappy sci-fi shoot-em-up plotting. Most of these follow the same plot as Quake II or Unreal. "Aliens are running around on a distant planet full of gunmetal grey buildings in the future. Now one person with a bfg will fight them off." Yuck! It makes David Weber books seem high-brow. I'm not expecting for anybody to become the next Hitchcock or even Mamet using CG in their rec room, but could somebody try making something other than the intro movie for Quake IV? Other than the Reds vs Blues stuff, all of these guys are making their own models and textures anyways. Half-Life mod makers have used new models and textures to make worlds revolving around special forces, world war ii, the old west, and even the american revolution. Why then do 99% of machinima films have to ape the subject content of the game they're using as a render engine? I'd love to see a well done machinima western, or a period war film. But not another Unreal III cutscene wannabe!
I just read this book and was very dissapointed with it. For a book that wieghed in a 1000 pages, it left tonnes of hanging plot threads and unanswered questions. There are some very cool parts, some very funny parts, and some great geeky exotica. But on whole it was not a good book.
A bunch of recomendations from a bookseller
on
A Good Summer Read?
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· Score: 1
I work in a bookstore in Ontario. Here are some ideas that may or may not be standard geek reads, but are damn good books. I've included amazon links for all of them, even though amazon is the devil from the eyes of indy bookstores like mine.
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson - Gibson said that once the world got weird enough he'd set a novel in the present. This book is set in the present. Good stuff.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel - A boy is shipwrecked and trapped in a escape boat with a tiger and some other animals being shipped to a zoo. I know, it sounds odd, but is easily one of the best books i've ever read.
Diaspora by Greg Egan - Not his newest, but one my favourites from the new master of hard (and I mean HARD) sci-fi. In the 30th century, man is spilt into three races. Most fleshers are gone, but human mind uploaded into robot bodies or massive burried mainframes are heading to the stars and beyond.
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
- So, so MUCH better than the movie they made from it: Simon Birch. One of the only books that could make me laugh out loud. Two boys grow up in new england. One of them happens to have stunted growth and a messiah complex.
This sounds like a terrible idea. NGE wasn't as good as all the fanboys told me it was. It's convoluted, bizzare, and has no chance at atracting a main-steam audience without alienating its core audience of ubergeeks.
You also have to factor in the fact that ADV is a distributor, not a production company, so the best they'll be able to do is straight-to-video quality work. I'm serious about my post title. Given the source material, and ADV being the production company, I cannot see this movie being anything more than Guyver 2K4 starring Jake Lloyd instead of Mark Hamil.
As a Canadian, I had always tried to stick with ATI video cards. I knew they weren't the best, but their pricing would reflect this and I could still get a decent card for my money. But when my budget had room to upgrade my Radeon 7500, the 9700 had just come out and I couldn't afford it. So I got a very good deal on a GeForce4 Ti4400, and happily put my very first NVidia card into my computer. It is a very good card. Too bad I can't say the same for anything that NVidia has produced since. Unless their upcoming processor is both the bee's knees and comes out on time, my pre-Christmas upgrade (because we all know that Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 are going to need bad-assed new cards) is going to be made by ATI.
Thinking this through, I think linux is actually less likely to ever to see games than even the mac. I know a lot of people who run linux, but most of them either have a dual-boot machine or a seperate windows box. So you an subtract all ofthose people from the linux user base wen counting it to attract developers. They'll get the game when it comes out on windows if they want it. And if you are a big enough gamer to throw down $50 every time a new game comes out you want, you don't just have a linux box. The people who burned their bridges (and windows cds) and have gone 100% linux aren't hardcore gamers. They can't be. There's not much for them to play. You're much more likely to find a household with just a mac in it and no windows machine than you are to find a household with with just linux and no windows at all. So it's another catch-22 for linux and gaming. The gamers who also want linux set up sual-boots and buy the games anyways, why waste money developing a linux version of your game for somebody who already bought it and finished playing it six months previously?
I love getting my gaming news from slashdot. My favourite part is when nearly half of the comments are along the lines of "I don't think they're going to release this game on BeOS, so therefore I hate it and want nothing to do with it!" I feel like every one of these posts is off-topic. You don't see people commenting on movie news lamenting the fact that new movies don't come out on Betamax. What makes gaming magically different. Would people prefer a topic distinction between Windows gaming and anything else so they don't have to sully their eyes looking at news about products coming out on a Microsoft OS? Face it folks. Until linux gets a much bigger userbase, games developers will focus on Windows. So games news will be about Windows 9 times out of 10. If the topic is gaming and linux, then go right ahead and have your say. But being negative in a post about an upcoming Windows game due to the fact that it's a windows game is verging on trollish.
Slashdot Mirror
By "many" you mean 1 right? Because MP Tom Wappel was the only liberal to vote with the conservatives on this.
The burning question: was it a Pizzly Bear or a Grolar Bear?
Many of the popular gaming sequels are more like updates than true sequels, only with updated technology and gameplay tweaks. And even the ones that are actual sequels benefit from not only the better graphics and computing horspower but also such things as improved interfaces. To make a Hollywood analogy you'd have to have Star Wars made in 1908, and then again with a tweaked storyline with sound in 1932, and then in colour in 1964, and then with CGI in 1996. But still be Star Wars.
Or to put it in a way that slashdotters accept and understand:
-The program you're running that crashes Windows is made by Microsoft, Real, AOL, EA, etc: it is the program's fault.
-The program you're running that crashes Windows is made by some 17 year olds in Helsinki: it is Windows fault.
Were you one of the people who hid his eyes and ears when the HL@ sourcecode got stolen? One of the big suprises out of that is appearantly TF2 is built-in to HL2 as a multilayer mod out of the box. Or there are a bunch of references to it in the multiplayer portion of HL2 for no good reason. Your call.
Yeah but Ultima ix was also a piece of crap that was much more an EA title than a Richard Garriott/Ultima title. Same goes for the very last Wing Commander games. Are there any GOOD single-player Origin games required a three-digit processor and a 3d card? No.
Other than watching over UO and developing UO2/X what has origin done lately? I used to buy every one of their releases (as long as my system could handle it) but that was 7-10 years ago. I remember games like strike commander really pushing people's systems. And wasn't Origin the first company to go Cd-rom only for their titles? I remember that being a big deal. As far as i was concerned, Origin was the gold standard for dev houses in their era, along with Bullfrog. But I cannot think of one 3D-accelerated Origin title off of the top of my head (UO doesn't count, it started out 2d). Why are we mourning now for a dev house that hasn't put out a major release since I got a processor with three digits of mHz?
I think a big problem with beta tests, and the preception of gamers, stems from these games ability to be internally patched. Because of autopatching, the devs feel they can release a beta way too early and then add in components as the beta progresses. That doesn't sound anything like the beta state in not-mmo games. That sounds more like an alpha state to me. Beta testing in offline games is usually about finding obscure bugs the devs would never have to time to pick up on their own and play-balancing. Betas in mmo's are about server stress-testing an unfinished product, with many game features not yet activated or horribly broken. So gamers, in their first exposure to the new game, get a broken experience and terrible lag. Beta should be about gixing a syntax error in the npc for the lvl 2 quest, or fining out the quest fails if i click on the npc 11,282 times in a row; they should not be about "this early quest-specific npc is not yet activated." These games should be in a much more finished and polished state before they go beta. Instead they get sent to cd mastering requiring massive patches just to be playable on opening day. Is it corporate's fault, rathe than the devs, jor pushin out the product too quickly. probably, but its the devs who gamers deal with in game, so as long as they prtend this isnt a problem it will continue to be so.
Yeah, but his character wasn't. He played a Korean.
Think about it. China is the most populous country in the world. They've got an active space program. But on star trek we get a couple of japanese and a korean. And what about India? That's 1/3 of the world population between the two of them and neither has had representation on a series about the harmonious earth of the future. Stupid Americans.
And you really think that someone from 100 years ago wouldn't have a fit if they walked into a Wal-Mart and saw all of the brightly coloured packaging? They were used to everything being packaged in a lovely shade of brown paper. And they were the first generation who had the pleasure of nationally available prepackaged merchandise. This will be a big deal for a few years and then we'll be use to it and be incapable of imagining a world without it.
future=different
get used to it
Hey, at least it will play on the majority of people's computers. My windows box IS my stereo, and not being able to play such CDs I own as the new Radiohead album is a tough pill to swallow. I much prefer this method of copy protection to the old "computer are bad" approach.
You're right about ID'ing the story I was thinking about. I'm sorry if i implied that the story popping into my head was a Dick one. I wasn't sure if it were or not. I knew I'd read Paycheck when I saw the trailer, but that plot line kept coming to me for some reason. That Hogan story does fit in perfect with Dick's mindset, doesn't it?
I know I've read Dick's original short story on which this movie is based. I went through a Dick phase about a decade ago and read all of his short-story anthologies. But whenever I try to remember the details of this story I keep getting my wires crossed and all I can think of is the short story about the captured spy they keep cloning and torturing to death, while releasing one.
So what is the plot of the short story "Paycheck"?
Um, wrong Chris Taylor. This is the one that worked on Fallout, not the one that did Dungeon Siege.
I've yet to see a Machinima that didn't look like the cutscene from a game. I'm not talking about the render quality or the models and textures. I'm talking about shoddy camera work, nonexistant acting, and most importantly: crappy sci-fi shoot-em-up plotting. Most of these follow the same plot as Quake II or Unreal. "Aliens are running around on a distant planet full of gunmetal grey buildings in the future. Now one person with a bfg will fight them off." Yuck! It makes David Weber books seem high-brow. I'm not expecting for anybody to become the next Hitchcock or even Mamet using CG in their rec room, but could somebody try making something other than the intro movie for Quake IV? Other than the Reds vs Blues stuff, all of these guys are making their own models and textures anyways. Half-Life mod makers have used new models and textures to make worlds revolving around special forces, world war ii, the old west, and even the american revolution. Why then do 99% of machinima films have to ape the subject content of the game they're using as a render engine? I'd love to see a well done machinima western, or a period war film. But not another Unreal III cutscene wannabe!
I just read this book and was very dissapointed with it. For a book that wieghed in a 1000 pages, it left tonnes of hanging plot threads and unanswered questions. There are some very cool parts, some very funny parts, and some great geeky exotica. But on whole it was not a good book.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon - A great novel set in and around the birth of the comics industry. Oh, and it won a Pulitzer.
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson - Gibson said that once the world got weird enough he'd set a novel in the present. This book is set in the present. Good stuff.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel - A boy is shipwrecked and trapped in a escape boat with a tiger and some other animals being shipped to a zoo. I know, it sounds odd, but is easily one of the best books i've ever read.
Diaspora by Greg Egan - Not his newest, but one my favourites from the new master of hard (and I mean HARD) sci-fi. In the 30th century, man is spilt into three races. Most fleshers are gone, but human mind uploaded into robot bodies or massive burried mainframes are heading to the stars and beyond.
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving - So, so MUCH better than the movie they made from it: Simon Birch. One of the only books that could make me laugh out loud. Two boys grow up in new england. One of them happens to have stunted growth and a messiah complex.
This sounds like a terrible idea. NGE wasn't as good as all the fanboys told me it was. It's convoluted, bizzare, and has no chance at atracting a main-steam audience without alienating its core audience of ubergeeks. You also have to factor in the fact that ADV is a distributor, not a production company, so the best they'll be able to do is straight-to-video quality work. I'm serious about my post title. Given the source material, and ADV being the production company, I cannot see this movie being anything more than Guyver 2K4 starring Jake Lloyd instead of Mark Hamil.
As a Canadian, I had always tried to stick with ATI video cards. I knew they weren't the best, but their pricing would reflect this and I could still get a decent card for my money. But when my budget had room to upgrade my Radeon 7500, the 9700 had just come out and I couldn't afford it. So I got a very good deal on a GeForce4 Ti4400, and happily put my very first NVidia card into my computer. It is a very good card. Too bad I can't say the same for anything that NVidia has produced since. Unless their upcoming processor is both the bee's knees and comes out on time, my pre-Christmas upgrade (because we all know that Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 are going to need bad-assed new cards) is going to be made by ATI.
andy46477 is my personal hero!
Thinking this through, I think linux is actually less likely to ever to see games than even the mac. I know a lot of people who run linux, but most of them either have a dual-boot machine or a seperate windows box. So you an subtract all ofthose people from the linux user base wen counting it to attract developers. They'll get the game when it comes out on windows if they want it. And if you are a big enough gamer to throw down $50 every time a new game comes out you want, you don't just have a linux box. The people who burned their bridges (and windows cds) and have gone 100% linux aren't hardcore gamers. They can't be. There's not much for them to play. You're much more likely to find a household with just a mac in it and no windows machine than you are to find a household with with just linux and no windows at all. So it's another catch-22 for linux and gaming. The gamers who also want linux set up sual-boots and buy the games anyways, why waste money developing a linux version of your game for somebody who already bought it and finished playing it six months previously?
I love getting my gaming news from slashdot. My favourite part is when nearly half of the comments are along the lines of "I don't think they're going to release this game on BeOS, so therefore I hate it and want nothing to do with it!" I feel like every one of these posts is off-topic. You don't see people commenting on movie news lamenting the fact that new movies don't come out on Betamax. What makes gaming magically different. Would people prefer a topic distinction between Windows gaming and anything else so they don't have to sully their eyes looking at news about products coming out on a Microsoft OS? Face it folks. Until linux gets a much bigger userbase, games developers will focus on Windows. So games news will be about Windows 9 times out of 10. If the topic is gaming and linux, then go right ahead and have your say. But being negative in a post about an upcoming Windows game due to the fact that it's a windows game is verging on trollish.
/.'ed after 2 comments. Direct connect to the brainstem needs more bandwidth than this!
Wired had an article on this very subject a few months ago. Read it here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.02/sony.html