There are more variables than that. There's jacket, grain, tip, shrapnel...
There are actually more reasons to use the AK-47. Plenty of US military personel in Iraq use them because they are actually more reliable in the desert and are smaller then the M16 version they're using. They can carry the AK-47 in the Hummvee and can be easily serviced and like you said, a 10 year-old can use it.
Not to further beat the article writer in the ground, but it's very possible to fire off three shots in eight seconds from a bolt action rifle at a moving target. It killed President Kennedy didn't it?
If I didn't already post in the thread you'd have a +1 Informative. I knew about the B-movie spoof and how it was originally going to be a VCR type game, but didn't know the details about the controller. Consider me enlightened.
For the record, I don't think that Night Trap isn't the worst game of all time. There are others that are much more hideous. From everything I've seen and read, Night Trap held a lot of potential, but failed because of marketing, gimickry and some execution pitfalls. I'll still hold on to the idea that it was the Most Influential Bad Game. It's achieved cult status that way, and while it might not deserve all the critiques thrown at it, it's at least remembered.
Yep, another Snipers suck article. First, let me take a shot at annonymous submitter for thinking this is a great article. Everthing mentioned in the article is simply solved by game design.
Too many people with sniper rifles? Then limit the amount available. Problem solved. Oh no, they fire too quickly. Well, that's easily solved with a change to the reload variable. Problem solved. Boo hoo, they take me down with one shot. Well, duh, that's the whole purpose of a sniper rifle. This simpleton doesn't take into account that a sniper rifle round fires at a much higher velocity than a AK47 and does much, much more damage. Hey, it might not kill you, but it damn will incapacitate you which in a game is pretty much the same thing. Waaah! They have more points at the end of the game. Well, put a ratio penalty on the rifle. Sniper kill is worth 1/2, MP40 worth 1 and a knife kill worth 2 points. Problem solved!
Good grief, why not write an article about how health packs are unrealistic and how in WWII they didn't have medics running around healing and poisoning other soldiers. If this whiner has a problem with it all... then stop playing and find a game that plays by "your" rules. Gah! FiringSquad needs better editorial control rather than let this drek hit the web.
Two things in issue here: 1) NT being the catalyst for self-regulation and 2) is MK a good game?
Issue 1: During Congressional hearings in 1993, two games were singled out. Night Trap and Mortal Kombat. Only difference is that Captain Kangaroo (Bob Keeshan) came out strongly against Night Trap. I mean, it's Captain Friggin' Kangaroo testifying in Congress against the game. If that doesn't qualify for the straw breaking the camel's back... what does? Did Night Trap single-handedly push the industry to self-regulation? No, but it was one of two games that did and Night Trap directly resulted in Sega implementing their Video Game Council (VGC), the forerunner to the ESRB.
Issue 2: I've got another poster in this thread objecting that Mortal Kombat is a good game. I mean, really. Sure, it's not earth shattering great but you can't call it horrendous. It was a top arcade money maker in the early 90's, spawned lots of sequels, two movies (okay, they sucked but the soundtrack to the first movie was great) and lots of imitators. Then there was the whole Fatality finishing move concept. What's not to like about that? If Mortal Kombat is so bad, then why not submit a brand new post to the thread and make your claim and support why it's bad and see if it holds up. My guess is that you'll get people who like it and those who don't mainly basing their thoughts on their opinion that Street Fighter/Virtua Fighter/Killer Instict is better/worse/same.
I'm not forgetting. Mortal Kombat received a lot of attention during this time too, but it was a good game and thus shouldn't be considered for the topic at hand (ie list of bad games). Night Trap was a bad, bad game.
That honor has to go with Night Trap. Sure, go with the usual suspects that everyone is throwing out. Night Trap has that unusual distinction of not only being a bad game, but also for nearly forcing a Congressional law mandating ratings on video games.
Yep, it was so bad, so awful, so shocking (mainly because it featured Dana Plato of Diff'rent Strokes fame) that Joe Liebermann & Co. was about to enact legislation to prohibit depraved games from getting into kids hands. Sound familiar? In response, the video game industry came up with the ESRB rating system that you see on today's games.
You can throw out all the game suggestions you want, but only one game was so bad that it forced the industry to go to a ratings system. Top that.
Looks like the mainstream press finally got a ticket for the clue train. Music and games have been pals for quite a while. Sure at first it was novelty songs like Pac-Man fever, but it slowly escalated. Musicians have been contributing to soundtracks for PC games for over twenty years without being noticed.
The Playstation was the first console to really take advantage of the CD medium and use it for energizing music tracks. The ball really got rolling with the Playstation release of Wipeout XL. Sony also released a soundtrack CD that featured Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Oribital and several other groups. From there it's just expanded slowly into other games.
EA Big has been using the soundtrack concept for several years to it's advantage. SSX Tricky really stands out in my mind. In fact, EA Big increased their budget for the soundtrack licensing for SSX 3 at the expense of the voice acting budget! (Dang, and I liked having Billy Zane as the voice of Psymon.)
Well, mainstream press. I for one, welcome you to the present day. I trust you'll find our new soundtrack overlords accomodating.
AP - SKYWALKER RANCH, Calif.: Thanks to new DVD technology, George Lucas is hurriedly working on a new Special Director's Expanded Edition of the Star Wars saga which features 23 seconds of new footage. Lucas was quoted as saying, "The new HD-DVD format will allow me to present Star Wars as it was always meant to be seen. This now allows us to see the Midichlorians in full detail."
It's interesting that companies like Mad Catz or another third company could make something like this. Could it be that some sort of game is needed to launch a mouse in the console world? Similar to how SOCOM launched the headset for PS2 or X-Box Live; a killer game could be what's needed. That game could easily be Warcraft III or even Age of Empires (porting issues aside).
It sorta bugs that the Eye Toy can sell (argh... it's like karoke gaming) and something like a mouse hasn't happened yet.
That's slightly misleading. How much of the console CDs were taken up by huge pre-rendered cutscenes? That's just an expected feature of Final Fantasy games. Huge ten to twenty minute MPG movies. Throw in the pre-rendered backgrounds and you have three or four CDs easy. The actual engine and levels could easily fit onto one CD.
Contrast that with the PC RPG dics you listed and you'll find most of the dics are taken up with engine, content, textures and sound. The level of graphical detail and speech dwarf the console.
But you're both missing the point. Switching out discs and the number really doesn't have anything to do with RPGS. Really, neither group minds switching them out if they have to. It's not like either group is losing thousands of sales because of it. The big obstacle to RPGs on the console was the ability to save progress. Those little memory cards get sucked up by save states on really large RPG games. It's becoming more a database that needs to be maintained than just a file that lists your stats. With the addition of hard drives to the console, you can really expand what is saved from the game. It no longer limits you to simple dungeon crawls or 20 hours of gameplay.
If I only had mod points to mod this +1 Insightful. Right on the money. GUI and sales are the biggest obstacles to making RPGs accessible to consoles. Even taking a "simple" RPG like Ultima or Wizardry (which have been done) isn't easy trying to cram all the keyboard commands and information on the screen.
Taking a modern PC RPG and porting it towards a console is an undertaking. Inventory is a chore, forget spellcasting and conversation trees become impossible. Can it be done? Yeah, but not easily.
The mouse has always been a big obstacle for consoles. There are simple some games that just plain require it. Once a console gets a mouse as a standard piece of equipment then I'll be a console convert. But then again, wouldn't that make the console a computer at that point? Maybe I've been looking at this backwards.
I also think that it was the focus not on combat and leveling that made the game so different. Rather than concentrating on wacking as many monsters as possible, the focus was always on finding out your origins and the relationships you had with the people in your party. It's what a Final Fantasy game could be with out chocobos and mentioning Gaia every five minutes.
No, Rick glosses over the fact that everyone at Ensemble pretty much hated him and his management style. Ask anyone that's worked at Ensemble on the first title about Rick and they'll roll their eyes. Don't get me wrong, Rick is a good developer, but he rubs people the wrong way.
Not to mention that Ensemble Studios themselves is a development house that puts out quality rather than quantity. Eh, why bother wasting my breath when you don't even know that the game is already out...
Now, I'm twisting the original question around a little bit. I'd set up the long awaited National Video Game Museum of History. This way, I can have every video game ever made on the planet and be altruistic by sharing it with every fan at the same time. It would be Christmas 365 days a year!
I understand your frustration about Black Isle, but... what the hell are you talking about? Take Two and Interplay are two very, very different publishers. And what money are you talking about? The money that 3DRealms is putting into their own game? I'm assuming the $12 million publishing rights that Take Two paid. That kind of money doesn't go as far as it used to. That might buy you one or two titles tops, but Interplay has financial woes much larger than that.
You may not like it, but it's 3DRealms money and they can do with it however they want. The fact that they still have money to still develop this title is amazing.
It will all depend on the hiring company. A love of the game can often mask or hide bugs. When testing, you have to stay objective and stay true to the design document and the system development methodology. Liking to play games and having a passion will help keep your interest, but isn't a necessary skill.
True, you don't have to know how to write a custom database, but you'll need to know how to at least navigate through a bug tracking database of some type. You'll need to be able to be able to categorize the various bugs, the severity and the areas impacted. Depending on the position, you also might be required to perform traces and set breakpoints in the code to pinpoint the bug.
Shameless plug: I wrote a chapter for Secrets of the Game Business that covers quality assurance in game development which also includes a basic form for submitting bugs found in a game.
You'd think that, but you'll just get a dead-end low paying testing job. If you ever want to move up in a game company, you need to understand testing methodologies, understand and be able to write design documentation, write test scripts, be able to use and write custom databases, etc. Being a game tester isn't all fun and games. You need to be able to do more than just rack up a high score and do fancy rocket jumps.
Trust me, the guy at MIT would currently get picked over you. Make sure that you're well-rounded to ensure you being hired.
Funny, but your title was also the title of my review at www.videogamestumpers.com only I used "craptacular".
Oh, and the results were fixed in the sense that SpikeTV, with the exception of the internet polls, chose the winners. Funny how the winners all fit with their programming theme of manly things.
No, don't let SpikeTV off the hook. This was their idea, run by their people. Their editorial staff also chose the winners, showing that they really don't have a clue as to what a video game really is. This isn't just some network flunkie putting this out... no, it's the friggin' President of SpikeTV producing this. That show had me gouging my eyes out with a spoon.
Next you'll be telling me Wolfenstein 3D wasn't the first FPS...:p
It wasn't. As far as our research goes, that honor goes to Red Baron from the late 70's. But your point is well taken. Rarely do the innovators in gaming do blockbuster sales. Rather it's the imitators who improve upon the original design who get the most attention. From there it just snowballs.
My local IGDA chapter here in Dallas is collecting games to send to soldiers in Iraq. So either my efforts are making soldiers better killers (a good thing) and making sick kids dangerous (a bad thing); or I'm making the soldiers more docile (bad) and making sick kids feel better (good).
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There are actually more reasons to use the AK-47. Plenty of US military personel in Iraq use them because they are actually more reliable in the desert and are smaller then the M16 version they're using. They can carry the AK-47 in the Hummvee and can be easily serviced and like you said, a 10 year-old can use it.
Not to further beat the article writer in the ground, but it's very possible to fire off three shots in eight seconds from a bolt action rifle at a moving target. It killed President Kennedy didn't it?
For the record, I don't think that Night Trap isn't the worst game of all time. There are others that are much more hideous. From everything I've seen and read, Night Trap held a lot of potential, but failed because of marketing, gimickry and some execution pitfalls. I'll still hold on to the idea that it was the Most Influential Bad Game. It's achieved cult status that way, and while it might not deserve all the critiques thrown at it, it's at least remembered.
Too many people with sniper rifles? Then limit the amount available. Problem solved. Oh no, they fire too quickly. Well, that's easily solved with a change to the reload variable. Problem solved. Boo hoo, they take me down with one shot. Well, duh, that's the whole purpose of a sniper rifle. This simpleton doesn't take into account that a sniper rifle round fires at a much higher velocity than a AK47 and does much, much more damage. Hey, it might not kill you, but it damn will incapacitate you which in a game is pretty much the same thing. Waaah! They have more points at the end of the game. Well, put a ratio penalty on the rifle. Sniper kill is worth 1/2, MP40 worth 1 and a knife kill worth 2 points. Problem solved!
Good grief, why not write an article about how health packs are unrealistic and how in WWII they didn't have medics running around healing and poisoning other soldiers. If this whiner has a problem with it all... then stop playing and find a game that plays by "your" rules. Gah! FiringSquad needs better editorial control rather than let this drek hit the web.
Hard to tell which game did the most damage to Atari: Pac-Man or E.T.
Issue 1: During Congressional hearings in 1993, two games were singled out. Night Trap and Mortal Kombat. Only difference is that Captain Kangaroo (Bob Keeshan) came out strongly against Night Trap. I mean, it's Captain Friggin' Kangaroo testifying in Congress against the game. If that doesn't qualify for the straw breaking the camel's back... what does? Did Night Trap single-handedly push the industry to self-regulation? No, but it was one of two games that did and Night Trap directly resulted in Sega implementing their Video Game Council (VGC), the forerunner to the ESRB.
Issue 2: I've got another poster in this thread objecting that Mortal Kombat is a good game. I mean, really. Sure, it's not earth shattering great but you can't call it horrendous. It was a top arcade money maker in the early 90's, spawned lots of sequels, two movies (okay, they sucked but the soundtrack to the first movie was great) and lots of imitators. Then there was the whole Fatality finishing move concept. What's not to like about that? If Mortal Kombat is so bad, then why not submit a brand new post to the thread and make your claim and support why it's bad and see if it holds up. My guess is that you'll get people who like it and those who don't mainly basing their thoughts on their opinion that Street Fighter/Virtua Fighter/Killer Instict is better/worse/same.
I'm not forgetting. Mortal Kombat received a lot of attention during this time too, but it was a good game and thus shouldn't be considered for the topic at hand (ie list of bad games). Night Trap was a bad, bad game.
Yep, it was so bad, so awful, so shocking (mainly because it featured Dana Plato of Diff'rent Strokes fame) that Joe Liebermann & Co. was about to enact legislation to prohibit depraved games from getting into kids hands. Sound familiar? In response, the video game industry came up with the ESRB rating system that you see on today's games.
You can throw out all the game suggestions you want, but only one game was so bad that it forced the industry to go to a ratings system. Top that.
The Playstation was the first console to really take advantage of the CD medium and use it for energizing music tracks. The ball really got rolling with the Playstation release of Wipeout XL. Sony also released a soundtrack CD that featured Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Oribital and several other groups. From there it's just expanded slowly into other games.
EA Big has been using the soundtrack concept for several years to it's advantage. SSX Tricky really stands out in my mind. In fact, EA Big increased their budget for the soundtrack licensing for SSX 3 at the expense of the voice acting budget! (Dang, and I liked having Billy Zane as the voice of Psymon.)
Well, mainstream press. I for one, welcome you to the present day. I trust you'll find our new soundtrack overlords accomodating.
It sorta bugs that the Eye Toy can sell (argh... it's like karoke gaming) and something like a mouse hasn't happened yet.
Contrast that with the PC RPG dics you listed and you'll find most of the dics are taken up with engine, content, textures and sound. The level of graphical detail and speech dwarf the console.
But you're both missing the point. Switching out discs and the number really doesn't have anything to do with RPGS. Really, neither group minds switching them out if they have to. It's not like either group is losing thousands of sales because of it. The big obstacle to RPGs on the console was the ability to save progress. Those little memory cards get sucked up by save states on really large RPG games. It's becoming more a database that needs to be maintained than just a file that lists your stats. With the addition of hard drives to the console, you can really expand what is saved from the game. It no longer limits you to simple dungeon crawls or 20 hours of gameplay.
Taking a modern PC RPG and porting it towards a console is an undertaking. Inventory is a chore, forget spellcasting and conversation trees become impossible. Can it be done? Yeah, but not easily.
The mouse has always been a big obstacle for consoles. There are simple some games that just plain require it. Once a console gets a mouse as a standard piece of equipment then I'll be a console convert. But then again, wouldn't that make the console a computer at that point? Maybe I've been looking at this backwards.
I also think that it was the focus not on combat and leveling that made the game so different. Rather than concentrating on wacking as many monsters as possible, the focus was always on finding out your origins and the relationships you had with the people in your party. It's what a Final Fantasy game could be with out chocobos and mentioning Gaia every five minutes.
Not to mention that Ensemble Studios themselves is a development house that puts out quality rather than quantity. Eh, why bother wasting my breath when you don't even know that the game is already out...
Now, I'm twisting the original question around a little bit. I'd set up the long awaited National Video Game Museum of History. This way, I can have every video game ever made on the planet and be altruistic by sharing it with every fan at the same time. It would be Christmas 365 days a year!
You may not like it, but it's 3DRealms money and they can do with it however they want. The fact that they still have money to still develop this title is amazing.
True, you don't have to know how to write a custom database, but you'll need to know how to at least navigate through a bug tracking database of some type. You'll need to be able to be able to categorize the various bugs, the severity and the areas impacted. Depending on the position, you also might be required to perform traces and set breakpoints in the code to pinpoint the bug.
Shameless plug: I wrote a chapter for Secrets of the Game Business that covers quality assurance in game development which also includes a basic form for submitting bugs found in a game.
Trust me, the guy at MIT would currently get picked over you. Make sure that you're well-rounded to ensure you being hired.
It's the new M-Gage! Brought to you by the same people who gave you the Fedsel car, New Doke cola and the 4DO game console.
Although I still stand by my statement that there's a special place in gaming hell for Albie, forced to play Postal 2 and Night Trap for all eternity.
Oh, and the results were fixed in the sense that SpikeTV, with the exception of the internet polls, chose the winners. Funny how the winners all fit with their programming theme of manly things.
No, don't let SpikeTV off the hook. This was their idea, run by their people. Their editorial staff also chose the winners, showing that they really don't have a clue as to what a video game really is. This isn't just some network flunkie putting this out... no, it's the friggin' President of SpikeTV producing this. That show had me gouging my eyes out with a spoon.
It wasn't. As far as our research goes, that honor goes to Red Baron from the late 70's. But your point is well taken. Rarely do the innovators in gaming do blockbuster sales. Rather it's the imitators who improve upon the original design who get the most attention. From there it just snowballs.
Oooh, my head is so confused!
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