It's more annoying when you can skip the dev's logo but can't skip the distributer logo. Meaning the original company got it right, but then the distributers slapped on their own unskippable logo.
Example is FF7 for PC. You can skip the Square logo, but can't skip the Eidos logo before it (you can prematurely skip it tho).
1. Agreed, tho some people like the genre of interactive movies.
2. Seems like bugs only.
3. Most fighting games from the latest era come with the full move list built in the game. Examples include Guilty Gear and Soul Calibur.
4. Isn't bushido blade a 1v1 fighting game? afaik, when you hit someone, you do see them go limp, so that's a sort of feedback.
5. For the games in your examples, the motivation is generally "the goal the player assigns themselves". The article refered more to "go find the amulet! no you don't need any reason to do that!"
6. Again, there are many people who don't like too many decisions, myself included. Which is why I don't like strat games too much. Almost every game tho gives you desicions, usually in the form of "attack now" "jump now and attack later", skill based, not tactically/strategically based. The various DDRs don't have choise tho, you need to move according to the arrows.
7. Argh I hate this. That's one of the reasons I seriously hated Sierra's quests. Every time I finished a quest game, I thought if there's a place to get stuck in (and not die immedietly). If there were none, the game scored better for me (includes Lucas Arts games, other than the original Maniac Mansion). If there were some, but obvious ones, then ok. If there were on the level of KQ's then gah it sucks.
8. Indeed. Cutscenes are fun for the first time, maybe the second. After 10 times, going through a 10 min cutscene just before the hardest battle, it gets frustrating. The ability to skip a cutscene you already saw should be present (tho not too delicate so you won't skip a cutscene you have not seen yet).
9. Giving the ability to save all the time will cause people to save all the time. This, from my experience, reduces the fun. The game should have save points and auto save points in reasonable places but they MUST allow the player to save&quit whenever they want to. If you're allowed to save&quit whenever you want, then there's no problem of needing to quit the game "now". Also, if done like with nethack, you can only load that save once, making it akin to "stand-by". In portables such as the DS, just closing the screens will suspend the game and re-opening it will resume the game from that exact spot.
10. Agreed. But many games already have a difference between "normal saves", "quick saves" and "auto saves".
11. On the other hand, many console fighting games allow reconfiguring of the controllers, for example Guilty Gear and Soul Calibur. On the PC, configurable keys are standard. (except maybe some indie japanese games, but they all have the same controls anyways, zxc and shift)
12. If it's done with good taste, bring it on! The various "ranks" and snide comments when approriate make it fun. If a character in an RPG is specifically annoying, that's on purpose and it's there to make you hate that char, that's also good. But I hate it when I can see the game designers insult me, by violating many of the above guidelines, when the game crashes continuously, when things don't work even when I do exactly what they say, just because I haven't triggered something which was never mentioned.
The best solution is the nethack solution. You can quit & save whenever you want, but you can only load it once. i.e, it's not save per se but rather stand-by.
At least for parts where you usually don't have any save spots, it will solve the problem. For the save points, it can be allowed to save and load how many times you'd like, as expected from a save point.
Moreover, following the "Birthday Paradox", if you have N songs and the selection is completely random, then in a list of sqrt(N), there's a 50% chance a song will appear twice. For 4000 songs, that's around 64~ songs. So if your player chooses tracks completely randomly then 50% of the times you'll listen to 64 songs, you'll hear the same song twice from those 64.
Even if your player doesn't play the same song twice, if you have 8000 songs from 4000 artists, 2 songs per artist, then you get a similar calculation.
Seriously. I have talked with MANY people. Only one of them never copies games and always buys them. A handful of others have a console so they bought some games (and then a modchip). One that usually copies games but also buys a reasonable amount, for games they like. Also there are not a small number of people I know who bought Warcraft3 and HalfLife2, but only after finishing the single player aspect and getting annoyed from hacked bnet servers (for WC3). In my whole life, I bought only one game (and it was waaaay too short, fun tho), but I'm seriously considering buying HL2 (haven't pirated it, but I feel it's worth the money, especially for multiplayer, considering the time I spent online with HL1). Also i'm considering getting a DS but will most likely get a decent flashcard when one is available.
It's a matter of convenience. Games _usually_ get here 2-3 months after other places (exceptions are really big titles) and require going to a store, getting corrupted media ("copy protection") and paying relatively high prices. My older brother makes a hefty salary, yet he never buys any software or music. He sometimes buys DVDs to play on his home theater setup.
I seriously don't know what the game stores are living from. Probably console games.
Indeed. It's usually the parents paying for the broadband internet service, the burner and media. Though it's usually the children who pay the high price of sitting for hours looking for the best sources to download the game or just the price of waiting for it to download.
How about the thumb strap thing? On the PC I use the right hand for the mouse, but I write using my left so a stylus can suck in the wrong hand. I'd rather use the D-Pad and a non-stylus controller than the inverted setup. Any luck with that?
The touchscreen support in DoS does seem gimmicky tho. Surely Konami will try to use it to the best, but when it's not one of the core gameplay elements (and it most likely won't), it's a gimmick. A probably fun gimmick but still a gimmick.
Games like Kirby's Canvas Curse or Metroid Prime Hunters which use the touchscreen+stylus exclusively show it can be indeed a core gameplay element and not a fun added on feature.
Me and a friend of mine (who recently bought a DS) thought about a game idea which is a 2D platformer (Castlevania style) but the magic is done exclusively with the touchscreen and "rune magic" as you refer to it. One of my favorite game types is 2D with "mouse" aiming like the old game "Abuse" (recommended!! partially available free) where the movement is done with the arrows (d-pad) but aiming and shooting is done with the mouse. So you could draw runes or scribbled shortcuts to perform magic, directly on your target, using the stylus+touchscreen. Or a simple click on an enemy will perform a normal attack, a line will perform a slash attack and a snake like broken line will shoot a lightning bolt.
Is it bad that it's a gimmick? The analog stick and trigger buttons were gimmicks. They worked.
The touchscreen and dualscreen are gimmicks. They work.
The second screen is extremely helpful in certain games (where you'd otherwise switch between game screens all the time) for status screens, maps, "accessories".
The touchscreen is pretty much adding the closest to mouse input as currently avaialable. Think about all those little (and fun) flash games that use the mouse. It's now possible easily. Think about those RPGs and others where you had to use the d-pad to move between targets and waste time. Now it's just point and click. Think about first person shooters! Metroid Prime Hunters was reported to have excellent control using the touchscreen, very similar to the mouse input on the PC.
kutabare: (exp) (X) (vulg) fuck you!, shove it!, go to hell!, drop dead! from the verb kutabaru: (v5r) (col) to die, to be exhausted, (P)
zakenayo: (exp) (X) (vulg) fuck you!, "don't fuck around", "don't be a screw off" (I think) street-speak from the verb fuzakeru: (v1) to romp, to gambol, to frolic, to joke, to make fun of, to flirt in impolite negative form + exclamation
It's considered rather vulgar, so don't use it if your own honor is important to you.
Aye. Nintendo are known for making unbreakable hardware. I've read (I think here on/.) about someone who threw his GC WaveBird through two rooms into a kitchen closet and it only got a bit scratched and was still working, two rooms away. While he just banged his PS2 controller onto the sofa and a visible crack appeared.
The PSP screen surely looks like it's gonna get very scratched unless you put it in some sort of case, while the DS screens are already clam-shelled.
Also I've heard of people having their UMD drive already failing on them.
I'm no Nintendo fanboy, I seriously like the library of the PS1 & PS2, but portables are the one thing Nintendo are unbeatable on. I'm seriously considering buying DS even tho I'm low on cash and know using the stylus will be hard (i'm a lefty).
I hope the multiplayer aspect will also work well, for both consoles! Hopefully it'll work seamlessly thru open hotspots.
About the analog stick, imho stylus+touchscreen > analog. For 3D first/third person shooters, the stylus+touchscreen is the closest to mouse input currently available on portables. Maybe for places where you need exact control on your speed an analog stick would be better but I believe a different approach could fix that too.
Specifically "gamers" should love the touch screen. FFS, it allows "gamers" to play first person shooters on the closest to mouse input currently possible on the portable market. Every and I mean every single PC gamer who plays FPSs knows that mouse+keyboard is vastly superior and comfy than keyboard only. The stylus+touchscreen gives you just that, free analog input where the rotation speed is defined by the user's input and not constant.
And that's even ignoring your correct points and the obvious convenience for strategy and puzzle games.
Where I live I can say quite surely that over 95% of the people use ICQ and the rest use MSN. My list has over 500 people and I only have like 3 people on AIM, all others are on ICQ. None on Yahoo and none on MSN.
But that's not really a surprise since I live in Israel, where the ICQ network was originally developed by Mirabilis.
It's all about the first critical mass. If your friends use ICQ, you will too. In the USA, AOL pushed AIM really deep, while other networks were relatively small. It got to a critical mass. If your friends all use AIM, you will too.
Obviously I don't use any "official" clients. I use MirandaIM for all the networks, and it's very lightweight (W32 only tho).
A google IM won't work if they push ads. People are already used to chatting with no ads. They won't move, especially if their friends aren't there too.
If they have some transparent multinetwork, web based client, it might work tho.
Wow that's a lot. I have kept logs since the day I first registered to ICQ (or maybe from a year later, due to a crash I think). I'm talking about logs since 1999, with over 500 ppl on my list, and the whole profile, including logs is hardly 30mb (I am using Miranda IM, with ICQ I remember it was over 70mb tho)
Really fun looking at old conversations, seeing how much me and them changed. Remembering old friends and some *ahem* interesting conversations.
Agreed. Also, in games like Postal2, the game devs specifically said the city populace will have all kinds of people, including the minorities so that it will resemble the real world status so no one specifically will be offended. So what does the media say? That the game is racist as it allows you to kill members of the minority groups. To that the game devs responded that you can kill whoever you want. The game is only "racist" if YOU are racist and kill only specific minorities.
And you know what? If the game had ONLY caucasians, then it would be racist as it doesn't recognize the minorities as part of the society.
Same thing in GTA. The villians are from all the groups, same for your allies.
The point is that it is still a large portion of the games.
Anyways, apparantly where I live, they don't use the ESRB system, but rather the PEGI system. I've been to a game store today, and all the games I've seen with an ESRB rating of M were sold here as "18+", including GTA and Doom3.
My point still stands that it is stupid that games rated M (i.e 17+) are still "for kids" while AO (i.e 18+) are for adults.
One year doesn't make such a difference. Just combine the two into one 18+ rating. I want to see Walmart not selling any of these considering that a large portion if not most of the games sold today are M.
And no, it won't make the game companies try to make a game into T instead of the new M/AO because that will require a complete change of the game.
It is coming, in a sort of way. Its codename is the Nintendo Revolution. The Phantom promised a huge downloadable library, then using some sort of emulation to play them. The Nintendo console is planned to do just that, but only with titles previously released on Nintendo systems, first party games and probably many third party games aswell. I hope they'll succeed in this, and also include GBA games.
Slashdot Mirror
Why think so dark and cold.
How about a more positive approach... Think maybe about the BLUE SKY and call it something like BlueNet?
*ahem*
It's more annoying when you can skip the dev's logo but can't skip the distributer logo. Meaning the original company got it right, but then the distributers slapped on their own unskippable logo.
Example is FF7 for PC. You can skip the Square logo, but can't skip the Eidos logo before it (you can prematurely skip it tho).
1. Agreed, tho some people like the genre of interactive movies.
2. Seems like bugs only.
3. Most fighting games from the latest era come with the full move list built in the game. Examples include Guilty Gear and Soul Calibur.
4. Isn't bushido blade a 1v1 fighting game? afaik, when you hit someone, you do see them go limp, so that's a sort of feedback.
5. For the games in your examples, the motivation is generally "the goal the player assigns themselves". The article refered more to "go find the amulet! no you don't need any reason to do that!"
6. Again, there are many people who don't like too many decisions, myself included. Which is why I don't like strat games too much. Almost every game tho gives you desicions, usually in the form of "attack now" "jump now and attack later", skill based, not tactically/strategically based. The various DDRs don't have choise tho, you need to move according to the arrows.
7. Argh I hate this. That's one of the reasons I seriously hated Sierra's quests. Every time I finished a quest game, I thought if there's a place to get stuck in (and not die immedietly). If there were none, the game scored better for me (includes Lucas Arts games, other than the original Maniac Mansion). If there were some, but obvious ones, then ok. If there were on the level of KQ's then gah it sucks.
8. Indeed. Cutscenes are fun for the first time, maybe the second. After 10 times, going through a 10 min cutscene just before the hardest battle, it gets frustrating. The ability to skip a cutscene you already saw should be present (tho not too delicate so you won't skip a cutscene you have not seen yet).
9. Giving the ability to save all the time will cause people to save all the time. This, from my experience, reduces the fun. The game should have save points and auto save points in reasonable places but they MUST allow the player to save&quit whenever they want to. If you're allowed to save&quit whenever you want, then there's no problem of needing to quit the game "now". Also, if done like with nethack, you can only load that save once, making it akin to "stand-by". In portables such as the DS, just closing the screens will suspend the game and re-opening it will resume the game from that exact spot.
10. Agreed. But many games already have a difference between "normal saves", "quick saves" and "auto saves".
11. On the other hand, many console fighting games allow reconfiguring of the controllers, for example Guilty Gear and Soul Calibur. On the PC, configurable keys are standard. (except maybe some indie japanese games, but they all have the same controls anyways, zxc and shift)
12. If it's done with good taste, bring it on! The various "ranks" and snide comments when approriate make it fun. If a character in an RPG is specifically annoying, that's on purpose and it's there to make you hate that char, that's also good. But I hate it when I can see the game designers insult me, by violating many of the above guidelines, when the game crashes continuously, when things don't work even when I do exactly what they say, just because I haven't triggered something which was never mentioned.
The best solution is the nethack solution. You can quit & save whenever you want, but you can only load it once. i.e, it's not save per se but rather stand-by.
At least for parts where you usually don't have any save spots, it will solve the problem. For the save points, it can be allowed to save and load how many times you'd like, as expected from a save point.
Moreover, following the "Birthday Paradox", if you have N songs and the selection is completely random, then in a list of sqrt(N), there's a 50% chance a song will appear twice.
For 4000 songs, that's around 64~ songs. So if your player chooses tracks completely randomly then 50% of the times you'll listen to 64 songs, you'll hear the same song twice from those 64.
Even if your player doesn't play the same song twice, if you have 8000 songs from 4000 artists, 2 songs per artist, then you get a similar calculation.
Seriously.
I have talked with MANY people. Only one of them never copies games and always buys them. A handful of others have a console so they bought some games (and then a modchip). One that usually copies games but also buys a reasonable amount, for games they like. Also there are not a small number of people I know who bought Warcraft3 and HalfLife2, but only after finishing the single player aspect and getting annoyed from hacked bnet servers (for WC3).
In my whole life, I bought only one game (and it was waaaay too short, fun tho), but I'm seriously considering buying HL2 (haven't pirated it, but I feel it's worth the money, especially for multiplayer, considering the time I spent online with HL1). Also i'm considering getting a DS but will most likely get a decent flashcard when one is available.
It's a matter of convenience. Games _usually_ get here 2-3 months after other places (exceptions are really big titles) and require going to a store, getting corrupted media ("copy protection") and paying relatively high prices.
My older brother makes a hefty salary, yet he never buys any software or music. He sometimes buys DVDs to play on his home theater setup.
I seriously don't know what the game stores are living from. Probably console games.
Indeed.
It's usually the parents paying for the broadband internet service, the burner and media. Though it's usually the children who pay the high price of sitting for hours looking for the best sources to download the game or just the price of waiting for it to download.
How about the thumb strap thing? On the PC I use the right hand for the mouse, but I write using my left so a stylus can suck in the wrong hand.
I'd rather use the D-Pad and a non-stylus controller than the inverted setup.
Any luck with that?
Considering you posted this comment in the wrong thread, wrong article even, makes it rather ironic, don't you think?
The touchscreen support in DoS does seem gimmicky tho. Surely Konami will try to use it to the best, but when it's not one of the core gameplay elements (and it most likely won't), it's a gimmick. A probably fun gimmick but still a gimmick.
Games like Kirby's Canvas Curse or Metroid Prime Hunters which use the touchscreen+stylus exclusively show it can be indeed a core gameplay element and not a fun added on feature.
Me and a friend of mine (who recently bought a DS) thought about a game idea which is a 2D platformer (Castlevania style) but the magic is done exclusively with the touchscreen and "rune magic" as you refer to it.
One of my favorite game types is 2D with "mouse" aiming like the old game "Abuse" (recommended!! partially available free) where the movement is done with the arrows (d-pad) but aiming and shooting is done with the mouse.
So you could draw runes or scribbled shortcuts to perform magic, directly on your target, using the stylus+touchscreen. Or a simple click on an enemy will perform a normal attack, a line will perform a slash attack and a snake like broken line will shoot a lightning bolt.
Is it bad that it's a gimmick?
The analog stick and trigger buttons were gimmicks. They worked.
The touchscreen and dualscreen are gimmicks. They work.
The second screen is extremely helpful in certain games (where you'd otherwise switch between game screens all the time) for status screens, maps, "accessories".
The touchscreen is pretty much adding the closest to mouse input as currently avaialable.
Think about all those little (and fun) flash games that use the mouse. It's now possible easily.
Think about those RPGs and others where you had to use the d-pad to move between targets and waste time. Now it's just point and click.
Think about first person shooters! Metroid Prime Hunters was reported to have excellent control using the touchscreen, very similar to the mouse input on the PC.
Finally, what is Japanese for "go fuck yourself?"
kutabare: (exp) (X) (vulg) fuck you!, shove it!, go to hell!, drop dead!
from the verb kutabaru: (v5r) (col) to die, to be exhausted, (P)
zakenayo: (exp) (X) (vulg) fuck you!, "don't fuck around", "don't be a screw off"
(I think) street-speak from the verb fuzakeru: (v1) to romp, to gambol, to frolic, to joke, to make fun of, to flirt
in impolite negative form + exclamation
It's considered rather vulgar, so don't use it if your own honor is important to you.
Aye. /.) about someone who threw his GC WaveBird through two rooms into a kitchen closet and it only got a bit scratched and was still working, two rooms away. While he just banged his PS2 controller onto the sofa and a visible crack appeared.
Nintendo are known for making unbreakable hardware. I've read (I think here on
The PSP screen surely looks like it's gonna get very scratched unless you put it in some sort of case, while the DS screens are already clam-shelled.
Also I've heard of people having their UMD drive already failing on them.
I'm no Nintendo fanboy, I seriously like the library of the PS1 & PS2, but portables are the one thing Nintendo are unbeatable on. I'm seriously considering buying DS even tho I'm low on cash and know using the stylus will be hard (i'm a lefty).
I hope the multiplayer aspect will also work well, for both consoles! Hopefully it'll work seamlessly thru open hotspots.
About the analog stick, imho stylus+touchscreen > analog. For 3D first/third person shooters, the stylus+touchscreen is the closest to mouse input currently available on portables. Maybe for places where you need exact control on your speed an analog stick would be better but I believe a different approach could fix that too.
Specifically "gamers" should love the touch screen. FFS, it allows "gamers" to play first person shooters on the closest to mouse input currently possible on the portable market.
Every and I mean every single PC gamer who plays FPSs knows that mouse+keyboard is vastly superior and comfy than keyboard only.
The stylus+touchscreen gives you just that, free analog input where the rotation speed is defined by the user's input and not constant.
And that's even ignoring your correct points and the obvious convenience for strategy and puzzle games.
Too bad it was EXTREMELY short. Only 6 levels?
I finished it the day I bought it, twice.
Great game tho, except for being far too short.
Where I live I can say quite surely that over 95% of the people use ICQ and the rest use MSN. My list has over 500 people and I only have like 3 people on AIM, all others are on ICQ. None on Yahoo and none on MSN.
But that's not really a surprise since I live in Israel, where the ICQ network was originally developed by Mirabilis.
It's all about the first critical mass. If your friends use ICQ, you will too. In the USA, AOL pushed AIM really deep, while other networks were relatively small. It got to a critical mass. If your friends all use AIM, you will too.
Obviously I don't use any "official" clients. I use MirandaIM for all the networks, and it's very lightweight (W32 only tho).
A google IM won't work if they push ads. People are already used to chatting with no ads. They won't move, especially if their friends aren't there too.
If they have some transparent multinetwork, web based client, it might work tho.
Wow that's a lot.
I have kept logs since the day I first registered to ICQ (or maybe from a year later, due to a crash I think). I'm talking about logs since 1999, with over 500 ppl on my list, and the whole profile, including logs is hardly 30mb (I am using Miranda IM, with ICQ I remember it was over 70mb tho)
Really fun looking at old conversations, seeing how much me and them changed. Remembering old friends and some *ahem* interesting conversations.
Hey, if the editors allow themselves to do it, why can't the readers? ;)
Not this specific story, but you know what I mean....
4chan is serious business.
Agreed.
Also, in games like Postal2, the game devs specifically said the city populace will have all kinds of people, including the minorities so that it will resemble the real world status so no one specifically will be offended.
So what does the media say? That the game is racist as it allows you to kill members of the minority groups.
To that the game devs responded that you can kill whoever you want. The game is only "racist" if YOU are racist and kill only specific minorities.
And you know what? If the game had ONLY caucasians, then it would be racist as it doesn't recognize the minorities as part of the society.
Same thing in GTA. The villians are from all the groups, same for your allies.
The point is that it is still a large portion of the games.
Anyways, apparantly where I live, they don't use the ESRB system, but rather the PEGI system. I've been to a game store today, and all the games I've seen with an ESRB rating of M were sold here as "18+", including GTA and Doom3.
My point still stands that it is stupid that games rated M (i.e 17+) are still "for kids" while AO (i.e 18+) are for adults.
Current state:
M - For 17+
AO - For 18+
One year doesn't make such a difference. Just combine the two into one 18+ rating. I want to see Walmart not selling any of these considering that a large portion if not most of the games sold today are M.
And no, it won't make the game companies try to make a game into T instead of the new M/AO because that will require a complete change of the game.
Indeed it's brilliant!
It is coming, in a sort of way. Its codename is the Nintendo Revolution.
The Phantom promised a huge downloadable library, then using some sort of emulation to play them. The Nintendo console is planned to do just that, but only with titles previously released on Nintendo systems, first party games and probably many third party games aswell.
I hope they'll succeed in this, and also include GBA games.
Unfortunatly, I just lost my mod points.
I agree with everything said.
MOD PARENT UP!