"The Grudge" was essentially outsourced, the studio spent $9 million on the cast, flew them to Japan, and a Japanese director and crew shot the film for $1 million (a big budget by Japanese standards). I'm surprised that hasn't happened more often.
I wonder if this new 3d technology can actually do anything for people like me?
I've heard of a sony executive speculating about "head-tracking" 3d displays, where you would put on a pair of 3d glasses and look at, say, a cube on the screen. If you moved your head to the left a computer would detect that and change the display so that you could see the left side of the cube. Something like that should look give a good 3d effect even to someone with one eye.
Correlation, not causation. If video games could so drastically affect behavior, where are all the Pac-Man addicts who should be running around eating everything in sight?
"Computer games don't affect kids. I mean if Pacman affected our generation as kids, we'd all run around in a darkened room munching pills and listening to repetitive music."/old raver joke
I agree, another good example is the Nintendo DS, which is selling well despite a weak set of launch titles. Like I know people who have told me what a neat system it is, but that it's too bad there aren't any great games for it yet.
I remember an interview with a guy at sony where he admitted that early on the PS1 didn't have better games than the Saturn, it had better marketing. Personally I didn't buy a PS1 until FFVII came out, and the PS2 didn't interest me until I saw Metal Gear Solid 2, but a lot of people buy stuff by the brand.
Midway is experimenting with lower prices, they lowered the upcoming game NARC from $50 to $20 recently, they're predicting they'll make it up on volume. Lower prices doesn't mean less profit, the success of ESPN recently and Katamari Damacy may be evidence of this.
I remember reading there was similar debate in the industry about DVD pricing, some studios (Disney? Fox?) thought DVDs should be cost far more than the current $20 because movies budgets were increasing. Instead the low price for DVDs turned out to be a real boon for the industry.
This sounds like hype to me...how can you render on the fly as well as movies which use huge render-farms to come up with a static video?
I thought Doom 3 looked as good as some animated movies. Part of how it's pulled off is spending hours rendering the lighting for everything before it's put in the game. Disadvantage is that more stuff is static and you can't destroy, say, every wall in the game. Also Doom 3 has little quirks like monsters don't cast shadows on one another, if too many lights fall on the same surface things slow down, shadows don't fall on things like round pipes very well, and characters that look high-polygon have silhouettes that look low poly.
Looks great though.
What would it take to create an engine that allow the destruction of the entire environment. Sure it's nice to toss toilets at a wall, but I'd like to see the wall collapse after 20 hits.
I read an interview with John Carmack where he commented on entirely destructable environments. He said you could do that now but you couldn't use current lighting systems, so graphics would look very dated.
I've been reading reviews of the new game Mercenaries, everything is suppossed to be destructable there but I haven't played it myself. And Katamari Damacy has whole towns where you can pick up every object, not a lot of "physics" though.
Re:Not hard to figure out why LoTR is #1.
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3. Four audio commentary tracks, something that has never been done before (to my knowledge).
Fight Club DVD comes to mind, it was #7 on the list.
And what about the episode right before the finale, where those two women were hissing away at each other...PLEASE...it sounded more like a high-school tiff (they even TALKED like high-school girls). I'd NEVER expect something like this from a professional.
Don't blame them, it's probably the fault of the writers and producers on the show, who crave "conflict".
The author shows a complete misunderstanding of how businesses maintain corporate identity and branding when he launches into such brilliant ideas as suggesting Donkey Konga would have been better served with brand new characters instead of recycling Donkey Kong. Because we all know how the PS2's Taiko Drum Master is burning up the charts (another drum peripheral game, nearly identical to Konga, also developed by Namco) because people are just begging for new drum games featuring all new IP. Come on.
I think the article might have a point about Nintendo overdoing some of it's brands, this post from Game Matters puts it more succinctly than the article.
About brand extension, the dilution is generally a long-term effect and not a short-term one. Releasing, say, a party game as "Mario Party" boosts its sales because of its link to the popular brand, but it dilutes the whole brand in the long term.
Mario, as a brand, has definitely lost strength lately. Each new Mario game used to be a huge release by Nintendo, but now it's much weaker. Super Mario Sunshine is a good example of this since it sold much less than expected. Mario used to be Nintendo's big brand, but now it's Zelda because they diluted it beyond recognition. I used to know what a "Mario game" was, but today it could be anything and that reduces my interest. That's not to say that Mario, as a brand, is worthless -- but it's certainly not what it used to be.
For that matter, Nintendo is doing the same thing with Zelda by putting Link everywhere (Soul Calibur 2, etc.) -- it's another brand that's going to lost strength. I guess they'll continue this trend by creating a Metroid Party or something...
But new franchises? I could only think of one that wasn't tied to a film: Namco's "Katamari Damacy."
This is an often repeated point and generally agreed point about the prevelence of sequels, but he left out some major games such as Fable and Farcry... and even though it was tied to a movie franchise, Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay was a very original take on the FPS genre. But yeah it's probably like 80-90 percent of games selling are sequels.
This has a faster processor, bigger disk and more RAM than a standard PC from three years ago; what applications have turned up since then that require more than this?
DIVX video is pretty processor dependant and some newer videos are pretty much unwatchable on older machines. But there are a lot of people out there that are happy with slower machines, that's why the average price of a new pc has been declining.
ESPN 2k5 sold about 800k in July alone, which was almost twice what 2k4 sold during it's entire run. We won't know for certain how many units 2k5 will sell till next year but some people are guessing based on the sales so far that they'll end up selling 3 million. So I guess it's safe to assume whatever revenue the lost per unit they will more than made up for in volume.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the Raymond Chandler adaptation Lady in the Lake from 1947 and I think Thomas in Love from 2000 are the only major films to be shot entirely in first-person.
Neat technique, surprised it hasn't been done more often.
Are HL2's maps really that huge though? Like on the outdoor maps you'll hit a loading screen pretty quickly, and the maps look larger than they really are because of a "3d skybox", a low polygon model that's enlarged to 16 times (or something) and placed around the map. All those hills and buildings around in the distance look great but you can't actually reach them.
I would say physics simulation is the "current big thing". I'm guessing Garriot is talking about stuff like Havok physics, which games use to control how objects react when they're bumped into or shot or whatever. Half-Life 2 uses this a lot.
Like before the big thing would be to make, say, a vase in a video game that was photo-realistic, reflected light the right way. Now the big deal is to have a vase that will roll around the floor realistically and will shatter into pieces when shot or dropped.
My Steam experience was quite positive, I'd use it again to buy software if the situation arises.
Positive steam experience too. I was quite excited sitting at the computer waiting for 12 midnight PST. Midnight passed and ten minutes or so later I was playing HL2 for the first time just like thousands of people all over the world.
Vivendi must be furious about the hassle people are having installing the boxed version. Everytime someone decides to forego buying the boxed version they lose money to Valve. Wouldn't surprise me if Valve made the boxed version difficult to install on purpose.
Gamefaqs did a poll last week before and there was more interest in MGS3 and Metroid Prime 2 than Half-Life 2. Of course polling fans on gamefaqs isn't exactly scientific it did surprise me.
The PC market is a niche market though, and all the problems with Steam could end up turning even more people off of PC gaming.
It's one thing if EA specifically told employees the kind of hours they'd be working, but it sounds like they didn't, which is basically exploitation to me. Sorry, they sound guilty and this sounds like a good thing.
Yeah if EA can't afford to pay overtime they should just offer less money to begin with. As long as things go to schedule EA wouldn't be paying out any more than they would normally, and employees should get a break if crunch time goes from an expected few months to a year or two ("Hey everyone, we're switching engines").
As a game fan I'd get pissed off if a talented development team disolved cause they were worked twice the hours they expected and everyone got burnt out.
The similarities aren't a coincidence, Doom was originally going to be a game based on the Aliens license, but then id decided to use hellspawn instead of aliens so they could keep creative control.
In the console market, the PS2 was able to gain a huge advantage by being first out.
On the other hand, the Dreamcast came out before the PS2 and was doing okay at first till the PS2 came out. And the SNES was successful despite the Genesis having a big head start. In consoles being first isn't a guarantee of success. Still, I think the DS is looking good.
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"The Grudge" was essentially outsourced, the studio spent $9 million on the cast, flew them to Japan, and a Japanese director and crew shot the film for $1 million (a big budget by Japanese standards). I'm surprised that hasn't happened more often.
I've heard of a sony executive speculating about "head-tracking" 3d displays, where you would put on a pair of 3d glasses and look at, say, a cube on the screen. If you moved your head to the left a computer would detect that and change the display so that you could see the left side of the cube. Something like that should look give a good 3d effect even to someone with one eye.
Actually I think Happy 'Even Day' (celebrating 02-02-2000) was much dumber, but yeah.
"Computer games don't affect kids. I mean if Pacman affected our generation as kids, we'd all run around in a darkened room munching pills and listening to repetitive music." /old raver joke
I remember an interview with a guy at sony where he admitted that early on the PS1 didn't have better games than the Saturn, it had better marketing. Personally I didn't buy a PS1 until FFVII came out, and the PS2 didn't interest me until I saw Metal Gear Solid 2, but a lot of people buy stuff by the brand.
I remember reading there was similar debate in the industry about DVD pricing, some studios (Disney? Fox?) thought DVDs should be cost far more than the current $20 because movies budgets were increasing. Instead the low price for DVDs turned out to be a real boon for the industry.
I thought Doom 3 looked as good as some animated movies. Part of how it's pulled off is spending hours rendering the lighting for everything before it's put in the game. Disadvantage is that more stuff is static and you can't destroy, say, every wall in the game. Also Doom 3 has little quirks like monsters don't cast shadows on one another, if too many lights fall on the same surface things slow down, shadows don't fall on things like round pipes very well, and characters that look high-polygon have silhouettes that look low poly. Looks great though.
I read an interview with John Carmack where he commented on entirely destructable environments. He said you could do that now but you couldn't use current lighting systems, so graphics would look very dated.
I've been reading reviews of the new game Mercenaries, everything is suppossed to be destructable there but I haven't played it myself. And Katamari Damacy has whole towns where you can pick up every object, not a lot of "physics" though.
Fight Club DVD comes to mind, it was #7 on the list.
Don't blame them, it's probably the fault of the writers and producers on the show, who crave "conflict".
I think the article might have a point about Nintendo overdoing some of it's brands, this post from Game Matters puts it more succinctly than the article.
Overall I'd say the U.S., but more specifically...
Games: U.S. (Halo 2, San Andreas, EA's stuff)
Hardware: Japan (PS2, Gameboy)
MMORPGs: South Korea (Lineage)
This is an often repeated point and generally agreed point about the prevelence of sequels, but he left out some major games such as Fable and Farcry... and even though it was tied to a movie franchise, Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay was a very original take on the FPS genre. But yeah it's probably like 80-90 percent of games selling are sequels.
DIVX video is pretty processor dependant and some newer videos are pretty much unwatchable on older machines. But there are a lot of people out there that are happy with slower machines, that's why the average price of a new pc has been declining.
See also Analyst calls ESPN pricing 'brilliant'. So I guess the lower price really worked out for them.
Neat technique, surprised it hasn't been done more often.
Hey, you try getting a game out on time with a bunch of inexperienced, underpaid programmers working 80 hour weeks.
Are HL2's maps really that huge though? Like on the outdoor maps you'll hit a loading screen pretty quickly, and the maps look larger than they really are because of a "3d skybox", a low polygon model that's enlarged to 16 times (or something) and placed around the map. All those hills and buildings around in the distance look great but you can't actually reach them.
Like before the big thing would be to make, say, a vase in a video game that was photo-realistic, reflected light the right way. Now the big deal is to have a vase that will roll around the floor realistically and will shatter into pieces when shot or dropped.
Positive steam experience too. I was quite excited sitting at the computer waiting for 12 midnight PST. Midnight passed and ten minutes or so later I was playing HL2 for the first time just like thousands of people all over the world.
Vivendi must be furious about the hassle people are having installing the boxed version. Everytime someone decides to forego buying the boxed version they lose money to Valve. Wouldn't surprise me if Valve made the boxed version difficult to install on purpose.
The PC market is a niche market though, and all the problems with Steam could end up turning even more people off of PC gaming.
Yeah if EA can't afford to pay overtime they should just offer less money to begin with. As long as things go to schedule EA wouldn't be paying out any more than they would normally, and employees should get a break if crunch time goes from an expected few months to a year or two ("Hey everyone, we're switching engines").
As a game fan I'd get pissed off if a talented development team disolved cause they were worked twice the hours they expected and everyone got burnt out.
Jeesh, no wonder so many games are buggy and late... shouldn't relying on inexperienced overworked programmers ultimatley be counterproductive?
The similarities aren't a coincidence, Doom was originally going to be a game based on the Aliens license, but then id decided to use hellspawn instead of aliens so they could keep creative control.
On the other hand, the Dreamcast came out before the PS2 and was doing okay at first till the PS2 came out. And the SNES was successful despite the Genesis having a big head start. In consoles being first isn't a guarantee of success. Still, I think the DS is looking good.