PC gaming has changed, the article recently was sort of an eye opener for me, despite lower prices and a 10 fold installbase of game pcs compared to consoles the sales numbers are 1:10 for the console compared to the PC. The reason is less DRM although despite what the article says I see recent DRM schemes to be a big problem especially for the average console audience which more likely will buy a game than the hardcore gamers.
But it really is rampant piracy, no matter if a game is just 20 dollars the piracy rate on the PC is around 90% drm or not!
While on the consoles it is 3:1 or in case of the PS3 zero!
So what does that mean, consoles are the dominant platform and the PC is an afterthought. That means graphics improvements will mostly happen at console cycles. Which also means that 1-2 years into the life span of a console a mid range pc will be sufficient enough to run everything released at maximum settings! And that is exactly what happens now. Name even one title released last year which current mid range cards cannot run at maximum settings. I cannot remember one title which does not run that way on my Radeon 4850 HD. Now this line of cards probably will be the low end by the end of next year.
Maybe we will see 2-3 games which really will push the pc forward for the next years, but gone are the days you needed a high end rig to play the latest ID, Unreal whatever!
Zork Grand Inquisitor definitely has the humor back, unfortunately ZGI and Zork Undiscovered Undergrounds (a free text adventure easter egg on the ZGI CD) were the last Zorks produced ever. After that Activision lost interest in the adventure game market!
Well if you want comic adventure games lucasarts style:
A Vampire Story Ankh 1+2 and 1.5 Runaway 1 (2 is not good but 1 is) The Westerner 1+2 Clever & Smart Simon the Sorcerer 4 then about 20 telltale episodic adventure games
Those are just the few ones I can think of there are probably many more on the mystery road there a load more, the broken sword series is still alive also there is a very well done broken sword 2.5 done by some fans (dunno if the english version already is released) memento mori
Also Jane Jensen soon will have another adventure game out: Gray Matter
Since I am not a fan of mysterie adventures I dont have a list of good games but the mysterie crime adventures outnumber the comical ones about 10:1 best check out a site like http://www.adventuregamers.com/ for more info!
I would not call the ankh series worse than the old games, neither is a vampire story, also the new sam and max games are excellent. those are the ones which follow the classical lusasarts style, there are others which are mystery alike like memento mori.
problem is that many of the newer adventure games follow the rather boring myst style (I personally could never get warm for the dracula series for instance) but there are a load of excellent games of every style.
Well Adventure games have been declared dead since 1992 (thats when I can remember the first gaming mag articles declaring them dead) the funny thing is, the genre thrives, and still is probably one of the genres still very strong in the PC world. The problem is it is outside of the scope of big publishers saleswise, no adventure game since Myst probably has sold more than one million but the sales are solid and you can preplan with sales between 30.000 - 200.000. So where does that leave the genre. Well gaming journalists still declare the genre dead, no big publisher touches them, but the genre is very dominant in the pc sektor mostly driven by small publishers with little money to spend on ads in the games mags (hence the death declaration articles) per year 20-40 adventure games come out some of them having top quality and a few being lousy.
Well pretty much any tray loading drive does well. But in Nintendos case, Nintendo never goes for new technology and most of their designs can survive even a war. They are among the last consumer companies still building really rock solid hardware. And they know why, they build their systems for kids and kids are sometimes worse than bombs when it comes to treating stuff.
As for sony, they really did an excellent job on the PS3 hardware and you can see it on the price. The console still does not sell really well and one part simply is the lack of PS2 compatibility (price cutting measure) the other one still the price.
Microsoft went the cheap route, and the usual Microsoft way, the consumer has to bath in the desaster. Well this has worked for them in the Software market really well since the early 1980s problem is the hardware market is different you cannot really patch on existing customers afterwards.
Well i have seen similar reports in the ibm deskstar fiasko. It is simply that some people are quite lucky and are hit never or rather late (quite impossible in the IBM case, because the failure rate was close to 100%, but still possible) So call yourself lucky. Also please do a lookup on the history of the xbox 360, it is well documented and there was a 10 page article about its history, that Microsoft deliberately pushed the xbox with problems down the retail channel just to be earlier than sony on the market. The problem was they did not expect the problems as big as they were, but they knew there was a shitload of unsolved problems which would have taken at least another set of months to be resolved. To the worse halfway a lot of people were dragged away from the xbox project into the Zune project leaving the rest of the team undermanned while the pressure from above seemed still to push for the early date.
That they even could pull the thing of is close to a wonder and speaks for the engineers involved which did their best and basically made a miracle possible only to get the beating now for mistakes mainly done by the management who did not have a clue but wanted to get a foothold in the next market they did not understand!
If not all those stupidities would have happened the xbox probably would have come out a 1-2 months earlier than sony, but would have been rock solid!
Well that attitude might work out for one case. Simply pushing problems towards marketing nothing else is the risk manager strategy. But it will kill the company in the long run. Look at IBM they were king of hard disks until the Deathstar desaster, then they sold off the entire division. Look at US carmakers who nowadays fight for survival. Well on good thing about all this is, that the so called risk managers and bean counters as well are fired. Not only the guys being constantly frustrated by such things. The only company I know off which could pull this kind of thing off constantly for the last 20 years is Microsoft. I simply do not get it why, probably someone from those guys must have signed a treaty with the devil in blood.
"Is there any other company with it's perception of viability so closely linked to a single living individual?"
I don't know, I think a lot of investors would be OK with Steve Ballmer keeling over.
Well it would be wonderful, to have Ballmer doing a speech at Macworld screaming developers while sweating an ocean and in the end throwing a chair into the audience!
With the ipod it was pure luck the rest I can give them kudos. But apple entered a market which they did not even remotely understand, thes simply wanted an overpriced mp3 gadget for thei mac line. It probably took them by surprise as well that the thing even took off. It was neither the best mp3 player on the market nor the easiest one to use (I still prefer the mp3 players where you simply drag and drop the files on the folder and where you can drag them back onto your desktop)
It sort of was pure luck that the thing suddenly became a fashion statement. The rest was learning about the market they accidentally stepped into and from then on they knew what they were doing. Hence the credits on the iPhones from my side!
Ahem the mobile phone market was already big when apple entered the market all they did was to take a away a huge pile of the market. Mostly due to the garbage other phone companies let pass as decent phone operating systems. (WindowsMobile.... cough cough) As for the iMac, all it did was save Apple from the bankrupcy by finally having a machine again which actually sold.
We are talking about dr. who, so throwing away one regeneration is not that important, you always can make a plot twist to give the doctor another 100 regenerations! I never watch dr. who for coherence and logic, because I know there is none. Just have a look at how many times the daleks have been killed off entirely, yet they make it to almost every season finale:-)
Terrible does not do justice to the American version of the "The Office". Utterly and profoundly terrible as well as completely unfunny come to mind as a equally valid descriptions of the US version (based on the 3 episodes I forced myself to watch).
Actually you just described the british original as well. There are many excellent Britcoms which did not make it due to being watered down. The geniously written Coupling comes to mind, one of the best if not the best sitcom ever. But that does apply to the office. The original is also unfunny and pointless, and just replacing the actors (which is exactly what happened) does not make the show any better the show also stank in its british version!
I am not british but i love most of the british sitcoms, but the office, neither was funny nor was it interesting... The same goes for the US version which in this rare case is not watered down the entire show is pointless.
As if a genre is defined by production units, sorry you are mislead. Problem is nowadays that if a game has 100 clones it becomes a genre. But it still is not in my opinion it simply is 100 clones or copies of a game. This goes for shooters almost 10 - 15 years the entire so called genre simply was a copy of castle wolfenstein 3ds game mechanics! So basically it simply was 100 copies of castle wolfenstein 3d and that was not even the first shooter:-)
Actually as bad as shooters are they evolve. Some shooters nowadays have a decent story, even adventure game like puzzles or have become rpgish games.
But look at the sports game genred. Every year a new version of the same game with updated roosters selling millions, and the companies selling those millions dare to complain about the used games aftermarket. Sheesh!
Do yourself a favor get your pc a decent graphics card which is cheaper then you have basically everything covered. The PC versions most of the times are graphically better again nowadays and cheaper. There are almost no games which you cannot also get on the PC (except for the Nintendo Stuff and the few games Sony itself produces) Sometimes you have to wait a little bit but in the end you save a load of money because the games are on the average way cheaper for the PC!
Gamecubes biggest flaw was the refusal of Nintendo to add a DVD drive. Nowadays this does not matter anymore back then it seriously was the death of that console!
I am wondering if we are giving Apple a double standard here. I think right now the MacBook Air is the only Ultra lightweight and Thin laptop that performs as well as a Mid to upper mid level PC.
Better replace that with it performs as well as an upper to mid level pc until the thing becomes warm then the processor is powered down to reduce heat... Which appens always if you give it more load!
Actually I still have those things installed problem is that if you push the machine towards heavy load which happens if you do development no fan control can help the machine becomes hot. But fan control programs can at least help to keep the problem at bay. The entire macbook air design is an excellent idea but broken by design, probably if I had the choice nowadays I would opt for the macbook instead, which is the better air than the air:-)
In my case it was, i am constantly on the road due to being in a consulting business, and dragging around something more heavy is a major pain. Add to that the OSX is pure unix, and the formfactor of the air is close to being rugged, and you get the perfect roadwarrior machine. Not everyone who has to travel a lot is a salesman, I am sort of a wandering developer:-)
Actually I liked Dreamfall, and I think a lot of people liked it. Sure they went away from the classical point and click adventure, but Dreamfall was an excellent game. And now that it has been ported over and over to various platforms I think it has sold a lot of boxes.
The biggest issue in its initial release was that the original game had such a broken copy protection that many players had to revert to the warezed version to even be able to play it. After that we saw funcom complaining that everyone was pirating the game (well the pirated one was the only version even playable for many people) A friend of mine had this issue, he still has his copy lying around somewhere but played and finished the version he got from the net, because the original refused to run!
But Funcom seems to be a company which constantly shoots itself into the foot, they constantly try to get a hold on the MMRPG sector and constantly burn money that way, while they basically treat their biggest franchise TLJ like an unwanted stepchild! Nobody really probably would care for the other Funcom games to bite the dust, but TLJ is probably what everyone is in sorrow about!
DonÂt get me wrong die macbook air has so many things done right, but I get the feeling that it was released prematurely. I am not sure how it is with the current ones. But I have one of the first generation, and you cannot run more than 10 minutes on 60% processor load after then the speed drops significantly due to excessive heat.
Which means since I mostly use ot for development I reach this stage after a few hours of work. I called apple about this, and the support seemed to be rather dumb regarding this issue! Searching on the net revealed that others have the same problem. I assume this is a broken by design issue, since the heathing itself might be a problem in this formfactor.
Well maybe this problem is resolved with the current generation but seeing that they now have another problem with the otherwise excellent display.
Well to sum it up, if they aluminium macbooks would have been out back then I would have opted for a macbook instead of the air, but for now I live witht it and a handful of hacks installed to make the heating/venting issues more bearable!
Slashdot Mirror
PC gaming has changed, the article recently was sort of an eye opener for me, despite lower prices and a 10 fold installbase of game pcs compared to consoles the sales numbers are 1:10 for the console compared to the PC. The reason is less DRM although despite what the article says I see recent DRM schemes to be a big problem especially for the average console audience which more likely will buy a game than the hardcore gamers.
But it really is rampant piracy, no matter if a game is just 20 dollars the piracy rate on the PC is around 90% drm or not!
While on the consoles it is 3:1 or in case of the PS3 zero!
So what does that mean, consoles are the dominant platform and the PC is an afterthought. That means graphics improvements will mostly happen at console cycles. Which also means that 1-2 years into the life span of a console a mid range pc will be sufficient enough to run everything released at maximum settings! And that is exactly what happens now. Name even one title released last year which current mid range cards cannot run at maximum settings. I cannot remember one title which does not run that way on my Radeon 4850 HD. Now this line of cards probably will be the low end by the end of next year.
Maybe we will see 2-3 games which really will push the pc forward for the next years, but gone are the days you needed a high end rig to play the latest ID, Unreal whatever!
Zork Grand Inquisitor definitely has the humor back, unfortunately ZGI and Zork Undiscovered Undergrounds (a free text adventure easter egg on the ZGI CD) were the last Zorks produced ever.
After that Activision lost interest in the adventure game market!
Well if you want comic adventure games lucasarts style:
A Vampire Story
Ankh 1+2 and 1.5
Runaway 1 (2 is not good but 1 is)
The Westerner 1+2
Clever & Smart
Simon the Sorcerer 4
then about 20 telltale episodic adventure games
Those are just the few ones I can think of there are probably many more
on the mystery road there a load more, the broken sword series is still alive
also there is a very well done broken sword 2.5 done by some fans (dunno if the english version already is released)
memento mori
Also Jane Jensen soon will have another adventure game out:
Gray Matter
Since I am not a fan of mysterie adventures I dont have a list of good games but the mysterie crime adventures outnumber the comical ones about 10:1 best check out a site like http://www.adventuregamers.com/ for more info!
I would not call the ankh series worse than the old games, neither is a vampire story, also the new sam and max games are excellent. those are the ones which follow the classical lusasarts style, there are others which are mystery alike like memento mori.
problem is that many of the newer adventure games follow the rather boring myst style (I personally could never get warm for the dracula series for instance) but there are a load of excellent games of every style.
Well Adventure games have been declared dead since 1992 (thats when I can remember the first gaming mag articles declaring them dead) the funny thing is, the genre thrives, and still is probably one of the genres still very strong in the PC world. The problem is it is outside of the scope of big publishers saleswise, no adventure game since Myst probably has sold more than one million but the sales are solid and you can preplan with sales between 30.000 - 200.000. So where does that leave the genre. Well gaming journalists still declare the genre dead, no big publisher touches them, but the genre is very dominant in the pc sektor mostly driven by small publishers with little money to spend on ads in the games mags (hence the death declaration articles) per year 20-40 adventure games come out some of them having top quality and a few being lousy.
Hopefully it will have the same impact on Microsoft like all this stuff did on General Motors...
Well pretty much any tray loading drive does well.
But in Nintendos case, Nintendo never goes for new technology and most of their designs can survive even a war. They are among the last consumer companies still building really rock solid hardware. And they know why, they build their systems for kids and kids are sometimes worse than bombs when it comes to treating stuff.
As for sony, they really did an excellent job on the PS3 hardware and you can see it on the price. The console still does not sell really well and one part simply is the lack of PS2 compatibility (price cutting measure) the other one still the price.
Microsoft went the cheap route, and the usual Microsoft way, the consumer has to bath in the desaster. Well this has worked for them in the Software market really well since the early 1980s problem is the hardware market is different you cannot really patch on existing customers afterwards.
Live in an old house like me where if kids are running around while you're playing (Common during the holidays) and you can scratch it. .
If that happens the last thing I would be worried about would be my console... probably the kids health and life goes first ;-)
Well i have seen similar reports in the ibm deskstar fiasko. It is simply that some people are quite lucky and are hit never or rather late (quite impossible in the IBM case, because the failure rate was close to 100%, but still possible)
So call yourself lucky. Also please do a lookup on the history of the xbox 360, it is well documented and there was a 10 page article about its history, that Microsoft deliberately pushed the xbox with problems down the retail channel just to be earlier than sony on the market. The problem was they did not expect the problems as big as they were, but they knew there was a shitload of unsolved problems which would have taken at least another set of months to be resolved. To the worse halfway a lot of people were dragged away from the xbox project into the Zune project leaving the rest of the team undermanned while the pressure from above seemed still to push for the early date.
That they even could pull the thing of is close to a wonder and speaks for the engineers involved which did their best and basically made a miracle possible only to get the beating now for mistakes mainly done by the management who did not have a clue but wanted to get a foothold in the next market they did not understand!
If not all those stupidities would have happened the xbox probably would have come out a 1-2 months earlier than sony, but would have been rock solid!
Well that attitude might work out for one case. Simply pushing problems towards marketing nothing else is the risk manager strategy. But it will kill the company in the long run. Look at IBM they were king of hard disks until the Deathstar desaster, then they sold off the entire division. Look at US carmakers who nowadays fight for survival.
Well on good thing about all this is, that the so called risk managers and bean counters as well are fired. Not only the guys being constantly frustrated by such things.
The only company I know off which could pull this kind of thing off constantly for the last 20 years is Microsoft. I simply do not get it why, probably someone from those guys must have signed a treaty with the devil in blood.
"Is there any other company with it's perception of viability so closely linked to a single living individual?"
I don't know, I think a lot of investors would be OK with Steve Ballmer keeling over.
Well it would be wonderful, to have Ballmer doing a speech at Macworld screaming developers while sweating an ocean and in the end throwing a chair into the audience!
With the ipod it was pure luck the rest I can give them kudos. But apple entered a market which they did not even remotely understand, thes simply wanted an overpriced mp3 gadget for thei mac line. It probably took them by surprise as well that the thing even took off. It was neither the best mp3 player on the market nor the easiest one to use (I still prefer the mp3 players where you simply drag and drop the files on the folder and where you can drag them back onto your desktop)
It sort of was pure luck that the thing suddenly became a fashion statement. The rest was learning about the market they accidentally stepped into and from then on they knew what they were doing. Hence the credits on the iPhones from my side!
Ahem the mobile phone market was already big when apple entered the market all they did was to take a away a huge pile of the market. .... cough cough)
Mostly due to the garbage other phone companies let pass as decent phone operating systems. (WindowsMobile
As for the iMac, all it did was save Apple from the bankrupcy by finally having a machine again which actually sold.
We are talking about dr. who, so throwing away one regeneration is not that important, you always can make a plot twist to give the doctor another 100 regenerations! I never watch dr. who for coherence and logic, because I know there is none. :-)
Just have a look at how many times the daleks have been killed off entirely, yet they make it to almost every season finale
The American "The Office" is terrible?
Terrible does not do justice to the American version of the "The Office". Utterly and profoundly terrible as well as completely unfunny come to mind as a equally valid descriptions of the US version (based on the 3 episodes I forced myself to watch).
Actually you just described the british original as well. There are many excellent Britcoms which did not make it due to being watered down. The geniously written Coupling comes to mind, one of the best if not the best sitcom ever. But that does apply to the office. The original is also unfunny and pointless, and just replacing the actors (which is exactly what happened) does not make the show any better the show also stank in its british version!
I am not british but i love most of the british sitcoms, but the office, neither was funny nor was it interesting...
The same goes for the US version which in this rare case is not watered down the entire show is pointless.
As if a genre is defined by production units, sorry you are mislead. :-)
Problem is nowadays that if a game has 100 clones it becomes a genre. But it still is not in my opinion it simply is 100 clones or copies of a game.
This goes for shooters almost 10 - 15 years the entire so called genre simply was a copy of castle wolfenstein 3ds game mechanics!
So basically it simply was 100 copies of castle wolfenstein 3d and that was not even the first shooter
Actually as bad as shooters are they evolve. Some shooters nowadays have a decent story, even adventure game like puzzles or have become rpgish games.
But look at the sports game genred. Every year a new version of the same game with updated roosters selling millions, and the companies selling those millions dare to complain about the used games aftermarket. Sheesh!
Do yourself a favor get your pc a decent graphics card which is cheaper then you have basically everything covered. The PC versions most of the times are graphically better again nowadays and cheaper. There are almost no games which you cannot also get on the PC (except for the Nintendo Stuff and the few games Sony itself produces)
Sometimes you have to wait a little bit but in the end you save a load of money because the games are on the average way cheaper for the PC!
Gamecubes biggest flaw was the refusal of Nintendo to add a DVD drive. Nowadays this does not matter anymore back then it seriously was the death of that console!
I am wondering if we are giving Apple a double standard here. I think right now the MacBook Air is the only Ultra lightweight and Thin laptop that performs as well as a Mid to upper mid level PC.
Better replace that with it performs as well as an upper to mid level pc until the thing becomes warm then the processor is powered down to reduce heat...
Which appens always if you give it more load!
Actually I still have those things installed problem is that if you push the machine towards heavy load which happens if you do development no fan control can help the machine becomes hot. But fan control programs can at least help to keep the problem at bay. :-)
The entire macbook air design is an excellent idea but broken by design, probably if I had the choice nowadays I would opt for the macbook instead, which is the better air than the air
In my case it was, i am constantly on the road due to being in a consulting business, and dragging around something more heavy is a major pain. Add to that the OSX is pure unix, and the formfactor of the air is close to being rugged, and you get the perfect roadwarrior machine. Not everyone who has to travel a lot is a salesman, I am sort of a wandering developer :-)
Actually I liked Dreamfall, and I think a lot of people liked it. Sure they went away from the classical point and click adventure, but Dreamfall was an excellent game. And now that it has been ported over and over to various platforms I think it has sold a lot of boxes.
The biggest issue in its initial release was that the original game had such a broken copy protection that many players had to revert to the warezed version to even be able to play it. After that we saw funcom complaining that everyone was pirating the game (well the pirated one was the only version even playable for many people)
A friend of mine had this issue, he still has his copy lying around somewhere but played and finished the version he got from the net, because the original refused to run!
But Funcom seems to be a company which constantly shoots itself into the foot, they constantly try to get a hold on the MMRPG sector and constantly burn money that way, while they basically treat their biggest franchise TLJ like an unwanted stepchild!
Nobody really probably would care for the other Funcom games to bite the dust, but TLJ is probably what everyone is in sorrow about!
DonÂt get me wrong die macbook air has so many things done right, but I get the feeling that it was released prematurely. I am not sure how it is with the current ones.
But I have one of the first generation, and you cannot run more than 10 minutes on 60% processor load after then the speed drops significantly due to excessive heat.
Which means since I mostly use ot for development I reach this stage after a few hours of work.
I called apple about this, and the support seemed to be rather dumb regarding this issue! Searching on the net revealed that others have the same problem. I assume this is a broken by design issue, since the heathing itself might be a problem in this formfactor.
Well maybe this problem is resolved with the current generation but seeing that they now have another problem with the otherwise excellent display.
Well to sum it up, if they aluminium macbooks would have been out back then I would have opted for a macbook instead of the air, but for now I live witht it and a handful of hacks installed to make the heating/venting issues more bearable!