I think its becoming a fairly true statement when I say that most people have at least 2 monitors, at least one of which is sitting in a closet/basement/corner unused. However, theres pretty much a 99% chance that you will never have two of the same monitors without specifically ordering them.
In your case, you're not giving a fair argument. Just by clicking the link to your Hitachi 17" flat panels and looking at the bottom would scare away most users.
The cheapest price for a Hitachi CML174SXW 17" flat panel? Roughly $450 USD. And you bought THREE of them? Even if you got a discount and rebate, thats over $1000 right there. I could build/buy a budget PC with that kind of money and maybe even get a monitor with it.
Human imagination is limited by human knowledge
on
Comic Book Physics
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Its only natural that comic book physics would be based off real life knowledge on physics. Simply because its easier.
Sure you could create a program or a chart carefully detailing what the mass and content of the planet is, and then you could find out how much gravity is created, followed by the thickness/thinness of the atmosphere, followed by the way evolution has grown on the planet (such as a world where the majority of land mass is earth rather than water), etc etc.
Or you could just reach for a high school physics book and base your comics on simple, easy to understand and apply physics. Its common to see this in everything from novels to video games. (We're playing video games that are supposed to take place in hundreds of years in the future where portable handheld rocket launchers can reload in less than 2 seconds and interstellar travel is possible, but we're still using a bread-and-butter assault rifle and grenade launcher attachment as our main weapon. Wheres the laser beam weapons? The jetpacks? The microwave guns? The robot armies? The pistol sized one shot super gun? A version of Windows which doesn't crash... ok maybe thats a little too imaginative.)
Maybe SNK should license its work out to the major producers, but do you REALLY wanna see what'll happen if Microsoft, Sony, or (god forbid) EAGames were to get their hands on the rights to develop and/or produce, say, the next King of Fighters?
One of the reasons why SNK made/makes such great games was/is because they stuck to what they knew, they made games which they knew were fun, and they didn't f**k up their gameplay formula just so the "casual gamer" could get into it. When you really think about it, "casual gamers" are not going to drop $50 for a SPRITE graphic game, with only 6 levels, no -obvious- reasons to play the game over again, with 2D scroll shooting action (Metal Slug series). "Casual gamers" haven't knew good gameplay since hardcore gamers stopped jamming it down their throats in the arcades.
The point of his work is not to make something massive like the Han Solo lego project you used as an example. The point is to show quality over the quanity of legos. The lego projects you used as an example probably take up an easy 1000 pieces, whereas the ones in this report, each of his designs (not counting the repainted lego guys/gals) probably takes up less than 200 pieces each.
Look at the pictures again. The designs he made can actually move (meaning they won't snap in half if you fail to properly distribute its weight between each of your ten fingers). MGS2 RAY's mouth actually opens like in the game, and its tail is flexible. Most of the parts (limbs mostly) are movable which is no easy task engineering-wise. Building a static object can take a few days to plan and months to put together, whereas building a non-static object can take months to simply plan and a few days to put together.
I'd even suggest the same for Metroid Prime. A 3D game tends to inherently have worse control than a sidescroller (you usually have to spend far more time playing the camera than the actors), so don't take a game based on an excellent sidescroll series and try to add a third dimension
Have you even played Metroid Prime? Theres no camera at all, you play from a 1st person view. The only time you use a 2st/3rd person view is when you're in morph ball form and thats not saying much.
I don't think you even have an idea of what you're talking about if you think the Metroid series was built on its sidescrolling aspect and then state that a game with no camera is bad because 3d cameras suck.
P.S. The Metroid series wasn't built on its sidescrolling aspect. It was built on the ability to explore a seemingly endless planet at your own will. If you knew the areas in the first game well enough by memory you could get through the entire game without dying once, with one missle tank, no energy tanks, without getting the wave beam, and under 1 hour... without a mini-map available.
Assuming you're a fairly old gamer (over the age of 13), chances are you've played games back when storylines were kept in the manuals, the readmes, or to short unhelpful messages in games to act as a breather. Now from this perspective, sure modern games have tons of potential for having storyline to overtake gameplay (everyone bitched about MGS2's storyline being too dense despite's the game graphical and gameplay advances at the time). Vice versa gameplay could overtake storyline (GTA3's and GTA:VC's storyline was really just filler, "You're a former crook who got betrayed before and you just escaped. Do whatever you want to do." Not exactly a Fallout storyline there.)
But both of my points note something important. The gamer has to be able to step back and look at a game from this perspective to understand what the designer is trying to do with the plot. A large feat considering some gamers consider The Matrix and Half-Life to be original storylines (they're not, they've been done many times.)
Now as a producer for a company whos out to make money, what are you gonna do? Sacrifice a couple million dollars, piss off the 'casual gamer' base, risk getting bad reviews, and bad press in exchange for a few words along the lines of "Well the game did a good job at trying something new but..."
Or...
Sacrifice whatever storyline or tradition a game/name/franchise, stick with a bread-and-butter gameplay, and the same ol crap that people seem to buy every year in exchange for a few million dollars?
In the end, yes there is a very small field in gaming which could be formed based on studing game storylines. However, games which fall into this catagory are few and far between (pretty much an easy 50% of anyone's gaming library fails to land in this catagory, with a 100% rate of sports games).
Look in catagory 15. Microsoft's Zoo Tycoon vs... no one else. Winner by default! (Ugh thats wrong on so many different levels)
From the about infomation page : Interactive Achievement Award recipients are determined by a vote of qualified Academy members.
In otherwords games are chosen and voted for based on the amount of money the judges were bribed with. Now from the Board of Directors information page:
Gordon Bellamy, Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences (the guy running this whole thing) He has played key business and product development roles at Electronic Arts, where he was named the company's Rookie of the Year for his work on the best-selling Madden Football franchise, THQ, and Activision subsidiary Z-Axis.
(sarcasm)OMFG! He had a "Rookie of the Year" award on working on Madden! Thats such a hard game/genre to improve on! Give this man a million dollars!(/sarcasm)
1. Actually there are a lot of game ideas that would work with two screens (Action/RPGs, turn-based strategy games, adventure games, etc). The only reason why it seems like two screens wouldn't work is because no one has ever taken the time to think it out (how many people even use dual computer monitors let alone use two TVs for console gaming).
2. Programming for the multiprocessors would actually be pretty interesting. Just because it hasn't been done doesn't mean it can't.
3. Better hardware and/or better screen does not always equal success. (Game Gear? Neo Geo Pocket Color?)
4. Even with the twin hardware, chances are it'll be priced around $200. Saying that it'll be priced at $300 is really ignorant of Nintendo's history. Nintendo has been in the gaming business for over 10 years, they're not stupid enough to have a HANDHELD be priced at anything over $200 no matter what hardware is inside.
Playstation (like all systems) in the beginning was weak. Poor graphics, lack of great 1st or 3rd party developers (name one besides from Square that made a good 1st generation PS1 game), and insanely annoying and long load times. Sony managed to sell it thanks to great marketing, the large sizes of CDs, and the innovative (at the time) use of FMVs.
The day Nintendo retires its franchises (Metroid, Mario, F-Zero, Donkey Kong, etc) is the day the gaming industry and gamers all over will greve over the loss. Considering the amount of experimentation and innovation Nintendo incorporates into their games; compared to Sony's 3rd party developers (nearly every sports, racing, FPS, and RPG game), Nintendo is a frikin think tank.
I bailed FFIX (great content, poor user interface).
I think you ment to say FFXI (FF11) since FFIX (FF9) was a singleplayer game only and was for the PS1.
Also, I don't think you made a fair judgement on FFXI. Don't forget the game is/was designed for PS2 gaming, so having too many seperate menus wouldn't be an option without turning the PS2 into a very rigid PC.
Actually most stores only make it seem like you're getting a discount by preordering when in reality you're not.
First and most obvious is the "down payment" which is usually $5 and gets discounted when you pay the full price when the game is released, not a discount since you end up paying a full $40/50 at the end either way. Second they will try to throw in a free item (EBGames gave you a free GBA-to-GC connector if you pre-ordered FF:Crystal Chronicals), neat and in some cases helpful, but for singleplayer gamers thats just a useless plug since the GBA-to-GC aspect is only for the multiplayer; thats one extra plug you don't need laying around. Third the trade-in method. If you trade in X games you get Y game for free when its released (very common since they rip you off when they sell/buy used games). This is a fairly obvious and self-explanatory point.
Thats right, I am suggesting that people are overlooking unsupported games. Thats because unsupported games constitute the majority of games out there. Did Quake 3 ship with anti-cheat software? Did Jedi Knight 2? What about No One Lives Forever 2? Return to Castle Wolfenstein (Not Enemy Territory)? Did Half-Life?
And to answer the question which YOU posed, "Is there anything holding back support for those games?". My answer is: Yes there is something holding back support for those (presumably future) games. Its called financial gain and loss. Do you REALLY think that the makers of Punkbuster would let Valve use their anti-cheat program with Half-Life 2 without paying them? Enemy Territory, sure fine its a free game and it'd give them free advertisement. But Half-Life 2? Now you're dealing with the big boys who burn thousands of dollars everyday they sit on their golden egg.
Having less MMORPGs on the market would mean the consumer base would be focused in fewer games. Theoritically this means companies would be more inclined to make less buggy software and improve the game overall.
In a perfect world that is. While this is true in the long run, you won't see these results any time soon.
After reading everyone else's comments, I noted that most of the "successes" anti-cheat programs have attained are largely in the FPS genre and centered around only a few games (namely BF1942, Enemy Territory, Half-Life+mods, and SOF2).
However, I think both the previously made comments and the news report itself is asking a different question for a different topic. Read the title again.
Do Anti-Cheat Systems For Online Games Work?
Note the fact that it merely states 'Online Games', yet everyone here is talking about FPS games. Well what about games like Warcraft 3? Theres currently no Punkbuster support for it (although Blizzard is doing a fairly good job at monitoring and banning cheaters). Theres no (effective 1st party) support for anti-cheating programs for Half-Life and its mods (Punkbuster and Cheating Death don't count).
What I'm trying to say is that this generation of anti-cheat systems is nothing more than a "warm-up" for next-gen games such as Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 (and maybe UT2k4 we'll have to see how its accepted though since its shipping on SIX CDs). We know pretty much anyone who considers themselves a gamer will pick up either HL2, Doom 3 or both so the chances of cheats being written is obviously high. When HL2 comes out (since its being released first), expect to see a complete change in the way anti-cheat systems are implemented in games.
Oh, and to answer the question: Yes, they do work. For now.
Its to be expected that people only want to talk to him about Tetris. When a developer makes a really, really good game, most people like to talk about him in a good way. In this case its Tetris. In other cases, like in John Carmack's, they most likely will talk about the original Doom. Not the Quake series because the Quake series didn't have as much as an impact as Doom. Simple at that.
IMO, the vehicles are "fine" but they aren't balanced out too well. The AVRiL (an anti-vehicle missle launcher for foot soldiers) is SUPPOSED to stay locked onto an enemy if you keep your crosshairs on it, but we all know within a few weeks every flyer is gonna be a Red Baron and using it on ground vehicles is useless since the rocket has a tendancy to skim too low (read : hit the ground).
There are anti-vehicle turrets that shoot dual lasers, cool. But they don't do any splash damage, have a relatively long fire delay (for gameplay this fast), and is impossible to use against foot soldiers. Not only that, the Tank (I can't remember the name) can destroy a laser turret in just ONE shot, so if the enemy team manages to get tanks on both flanks of your base, you might as well forfeit because enemy vehicles are gonna be running you over in your own base.
This may be a unique problem for me, but like you said, people should play it for themselves and form their own opinions. Just don't expect a Tribes, Battlefield 1942, or Halo type gameplay.
And for SP, Goldeneye cranked up what the concept of mission based FPS was for the entire genre - mixing story, mission based goals and difficulty levels in new ways (and in some ways - rarely done since).
Well thats not a fair statement at all. Goldeneye was based off the movie so they pretty much had the groundwork laid out for them (characters, plot, environments, some of the weapons, gadgets etc). This was probably the first opportunity a game developer had the opportunity (a real one, unlike Atari's E.T. and far better then many of the Star Wars games) to use an existing movie license.
Mixing story was a cinch and mission based goals were either straight from the movie or outright silly (hack into the enemy's computer from on top of a dam? I'm going inside the enemy base in the next level, why not do it there? And what was with all those document hunting objectives?). Difficulty levels were the same as they were done in the past; stronger enemies, take more damage, and a little bit more "find/destroy X item". Hardly groundbreaking especially considering the poor AI of Natalia who only becomes useful when you cheat and give her the Cougar Magnum to defend herself with (and shoot unseenen enemies through bushes).
Simply put, theres too many things that can go wrong. Heres a quick runthrough:
1. Gameplay gets boring/too dragged out (.hack series notably) 2. Game would be WAY too short (imagine a game like Max Payne 2 cut up in chapters) 3. Some gamers don't buy games immediately when they are released and some are nearly impossible to find after a period of time. 4. Companies would go evil on us, by making insanely long, dragged out, overdone, just milking the series additions to a game *cough*TheSims*cough*. 5. Its easier to own just one DVD of a whole game than to freak out that you lost part X of Y.
I'm all for developers/producers making a couple extra million from advertising. Good them I say, long live capitalism.
What I'm not for is the fact that this means jack squat for consumers. If EA gets an extra $10 million from Nike, what do I get? The same game, by a rushed developer, with a bunch of extra advertisement... for the same $50 USD.
Companies like EA isn't going to lower the cost of their games because of this. They're not going to give the dev team an extra month to work out the bugs and balance it out some more. No, they're going to pocket the money from Nike, take my money, and pocket that too.
While the GCN (for the most part) solved the weaknesses it suffered with the N64, the PS2 is a shoddy, crappy ass upgrade from the PS1. The thing that saves the PS2 is by developers coding either very, very, very good game engines (Final Fantasy and the Medal of Honor series) or very, very, very bad game engines (DBZ:Budokai, pretty much ever first-gen game of the system, EyeToy).
Could we have some upgrades? Anti-aliasing? Hardware specs that the Dreamcast outdoes? No decrease (and in some cases longer) in load times? Only 2 controller ports built-in?
Indeed, but this isn't limited to just recent times. Back in the 80's and early 90's, back when games were shipped in bundles of 3.5" floppy disks (I have one game spanning 13 disks), my brother would get copied games from his friends. Full version of Doom, Wing Commander 1, 2 along with the expansions (there were two for each), a whole plethora of Sierra games (remember Sierra?), and more Leisure Suit Larry games than I can remember.
In our minds, keeping an extra copy it was fair game. If you lost disk X out of Y for whatever game, you were pretty much screwed and you couldn't bring it back to the local computer store for a refund (assuming you even had a local computer store). As for piracy, well considering how new PC were at the time you can understand why most people would be reluctant to send money to some company (or some geek programming in his garage) they've never heard of, in a state/country they probably have never visited, for a game that might not even run on your computer. Not to mention the sheer amount of confusion over where to get information on game led to the small groups of people simply making copies for one another and (pretty much) giving them away. I can honestly tell you that if each game I "pirated" back then cost $50 USD, I would be guilty of "pirating" at least $1000 USD of software.
I think one of the major downfalls of TA was its graphics. Yes, while modern gamers may be awe-struck by lens flares, rag-doll physics, and near-Hollywood special effects; the idea of simple blocky 3D graphics being the rage at one time is quite true. Games like Mechwarrior 2 with its 3D environments and units were considered state-of-the-art at one time (compared to modern graphics, Mechwarrior 2 models and textures coulda been done by a college student half drunk during Spring break, yes they were THAT blocky. Buildings were literally just boxes and shoulder mounted cannons were jaggy cylinders.)
In hindsight (I reinstalled TA just this week), graphically TA has not aged well (although the gameplay is still awesome). In a high resolution, units are hard to distinish from one another, the terrain is pretty but the color of most the units is a drab gray. Compare this to Command and Conquer or Close Combat, C&C having very clear, unique units and Close Combat having a slower gameplay pace and a more individual unit system, TA was ahead of its time. A little too far ahead of its time, as it had to sacrifice detail in exchange for 3D graphics.
Quake3, CounterStrike and all MMORPGs that I have recently played work FINE on my network.
Presuming your network is a LAN setup, the problem with the lag stems from the way the multiplayer netcode is built. I don't have a link to any exact article stating this but, supposedly all the data in a multiplayer game is transferred to the server so it can be double-checked to make client-side cheating programs ineffective. With this said, I'm guessing you play Halo PC on a non-dedicated server. Try playing the game with a dedicated server and it shouldn't be so bad. I've played 4v4 CTF games online (Blood Gulch of course) and experienced almost no lag (on my side at least).
For a LAN game, unless you have a seriously kickass computer, it is HIGHLY recommended that you NEVER use a non-dedicated server for any game less than a year old. At least, thats my rule of thumb when I host LAN parties.
I think major companies need to stop looking at China as "the untapped gold mine of the world" or something along those lines unless they sit down and seriously think about what they're going to do. The PS2 gets used mostly in Hong Kong because something like 99.9% of them are bootlegged, pre-mod chipped, and cost less than half the official one is, plus chances are they'll give you like 2 free games of your choice.
Modded Xbox means no Xbox Live so that means they pretty much alienate their entire audience, not to mention doesn't even phase their target audience since no one wants to pay extra for an official system which won't even play their bootlegged games. I've been to Hong Kong, and in terms of U.S. dollars, video games are CHEAP. A bootleg copy of Final Fantasy 9 went for roughly $20 USD the same month it came out while a legal copy went for $50 in the U.S. This applies for PC games as well. (I went there the same time of Diablo 2's launch date, imagine my surprise when I found they were selling copies for roughly $10 USD right next to a computer running the game as a display.)
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In your case, you're not giving a fair argument. Just by clicking the link to your Hitachi 17" flat panels and looking at the bottom would scare away most users.
The cheapest price for a Hitachi CML174SXW 17" flat panel? Roughly $450 USD. And you bought THREE of them? Even if you got a discount and rebate, thats over $1000 right there. I could build/buy a budget PC with that kind of money and maybe even get a monitor with it.
Sure you could create a program or a chart carefully detailing what the mass and content of the planet is, and then you could find out how much gravity is created, followed by the thickness/thinness of the atmosphere, followed by the way evolution has grown on the planet (such as a world where the majority of land mass is earth rather than water), etc etc.
Or you could just reach for a high school physics book and base your comics on simple, easy to understand and apply physics. Its common to see this in everything from novels to video games. (We're playing video games that are supposed to take place in hundreds of years in the future where portable handheld rocket launchers can reload in less than 2 seconds and interstellar travel is possible, but we're still using a bread-and-butter assault rifle and grenade launcher attachment as our main weapon. Wheres the laser beam weapons? The jetpacks? The microwave guns? The robot armies? The pistol sized one shot super gun? A version of Windows which doesn't crash... ok maybe thats a little too imaginative.)
One of the reasons why SNK made/makes such great games was/is because they stuck to what they knew, they made games which they knew were fun, and they didn't f**k up their gameplay formula just so the "casual gamer" could get into it. When you really think about it, "casual gamers" are not going to drop $50 for a SPRITE graphic game, with only 6 levels, no -obvious- reasons to play the game over again, with 2D scroll shooting action (Metal Slug series). "Casual gamers" haven't knew good gameplay since hardcore gamers stopped jamming it down their throats in the arcades.
...The Sims play YOU!
Look at the pictures again. The designs he made can actually move (meaning they won't snap in half if you fail to properly distribute its weight between each of your ten fingers). MGS2 RAY's mouth actually opens like in the game, and its tail is flexible. Most of the parts (limbs mostly) are movable which is no easy task engineering-wise. Building a static object can take a few days to plan and months to put together, whereas building a non-static object can take months to simply plan and a few days to put together.
Have you even played Metroid Prime? Theres no camera at all, you play from a 1st person view. The only time you use a 2st/3rd person view is when you're in morph ball form and thats not saying much.
I don't think you even have an idea of what you're talking about if you think the Metroid series was built on its sidescrolling aspect and then state that a game with no camera is bad because 3d cameras suck.
P.S. The Metroid series wasn't built on its sidescrolling aspect. It was built on the ability to explore a seemingly endless planet at your own will. If you knew the areas in the first game well enough by memory you could get through the entire game without dying once, with one missle tank, no energy tanks, without getting the wave beam, and under 1 hour... without a mini-map available.
But both of my points note something important. The gamer has to be able to step back and look at a game from this perspective to understand what the designer is trying to do with the plot. A large feat considering some gamers consider The Matrix and Half-Life to be original storylines (they're not, they've been done many times.)
Now as a producer for a company whos out to make money, what are you gonna do?
Sacrifice a couple million dollars, piss off the 'casual gamer' base, risk getting bad reviews, and bad press in exchange for a few words along the lines of "Well the game did a good job at trying something new but..."
Or...
Sacrifice whatever storyline or tradition a game/name/franchise, stick with a bread-and-butter gameplay, and the same ol crap that people seem to buy every year in exchange for a few million dollars?
In the end, yes there is a very small field in gaming which could be formed based on studing game storylines. However, games which fall into this catagory are few and far between (pretty much an easy 50% of anyone's gaming library fails to land in this catagory, with a 100% rate of sports games).
From the about infomation page : Interactive Achievement Award recipients are determined by a vote of qualified Academy members.
In otherwords games are chosen and voted for based on the amount of money the judges were bribed with. Now from the Board of Directors information page:
Gordon Bellamy, Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences (the guy running this whole thing)
He has played key business and product development roles at Electronic Arts, where he was named the company's Rookie of the Year for his work on the best-selling Madden Football franchise, THQ, and Activision subsidiary Z-Axis.
(sarcasm)OMFG! He had a "Rookie of the Year" award on working on Madden! Thats such a hard game/genre to improve on! Give this man a million dollars!(/sarcasm)
2. Programming for the multiprocessors would actually be pretty interesting. Just because it hasn't been done doesn't mean it can't.
3. Better hardware and/or better screen does not always equal success. (Game Gear? Neo Geo Pocket Color?)
4. Even with the twin hardware, chances are it'll be priced around $200. Saying that it'll be priced at $300 is really ignorant of Nintendo's history. Nintendo has been in the gaming business for over 10 years, they're not stupid enough to have a HANDHELD be priced at anything over $200 no matter what hardware is inside.
Playstation (like all systems) in the beginning was weak. Poor graphics, lack of great 1st or 3rd party developers (name one besides from Square that made a good 1st generation PS1 game), and insanely annoying and long load times. Sony managed to sell it thanks to great marketing, the large sizes of CDs, and the innovative (at the time) use of FMVs.
The day Nintendo retires its franchises (Metroid, Mario, F-Zero, Donkey Kong, etc) is the day the gaming industry and gamers all over will greve over the loss. Considering the amount of experimentation and innovation Nintendo incorporates into their games; compared to Sony's 3rd party developers (nearly every sports, racing, FPS, and RPG game), Nintendo is a frikin think tank.
I think you ment to say FFXI (FF11) since FFIX (FF9) was a singleplayer game only and was for the PS1.
Also, I don't think you made a fair judgement on FFXI. Don't forget the game is/was designed for PS2 gaming, so having too many seperate menus wouldn't be an option without turning the PS2 into a very rigid PC.
First and most obvious is the "down payment" which is usually $5 and gets discounted when you pay the full price when the game is released, not a discount since you end up paying a full $40/50 at the end either way.
Second they will try to throw in a free item (EBGames gave you a free GBA-to-GC connector if you pre-ordered FF:Crystal Chronicals), neat and in some cases helpful, but for singleplayer gamers thats just a useless plug since the GBA-to-GC aspect is only for the multiplayer; thats one extra plug you don't need laying around.
Third the trade-in method. If you trade in X games you get Y game for free when its released (very common since they rip you off when they sell/buy used games). This is a fairly obvious and self-explanatory point.
Will I begin to see Linux & Mac clans forming solely to fight it out with Windows clans?
And to answer the question which YOU posed, "Is there anything holding back support for those games?". My answer is: Yes there is something holding back support for those (presumably future) games. Its called financial gain and loss. Do you REALLY think that the makers of Punkbuster would let Valve use their anti-cheat program with Half-Life 2 without paying them? Enemy Territory, sure fine its a free game and it'd give them free advertisement. But Half-Life 2? Now you're dealing with the big boys who burn thousands of dollars everyday they sit on their golden egg.
In a perfect world that is. While this is true in the long run, you won't see these results any time soon.
However, I think both the previously made comments and the news report itself is asking a different question for a different topic. Read the title again.
Do Anti-Cheat Systems For Online Games Work?
Note the fact that it merely states 'Online Games', yet everyone here is talking about FPS games. Well what about games like Warcraft 3? Theres currently no Punkbuster support for it (although Blizzard is doing a fairly good job at monitoring and banning cheaters). Theres no (effective 1st party) support for anti-cheating programs for Half-Life and its mods (Punkbuster and Cheating Death don't count).
What I'm trying to say is that this generation of anti-cheat systems is nothing more than a "warm-up" for next-gen games such as Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 (and maybe UT2k4 we'll have to see how its accepted though since its shipping on SIX CDs). We know pretty much anyone who considers themselves a gamer will pick up either HL2, Doom 3 or both so the chances of cheats being written is obviously high. When HL2 comes out (since its being released first), expect to see a complete change in the way anti-cheat systems are implemented in games.
Oh, and to answer the question: Yes, they do work. For now.
Its to be expected that people only want to talk to him about Tetris. When a developer makes a really, really good game, most people like to talk about him in a good way. In this case its Tetris. In other cases, like in John Carmack's, they most likely will talk about the original Doom. Not the Quake series because the Quake series didn't have as much as an impact as Doom. Simple at that.
There are anti-vehicle turrets that shoot dual lasers, cool. But they don't do any splash damage, have a relatively long fire delay (for gameplay this fast), and is impossible to use against foot soldiers. Not only that, the Tank (I can't remember the name) can destroy a laser turret in just ONE shot, so if the enemy team manages to get tanks on both flanks of your base, you might as well forfeit because enemy vehicles are gonna be running you over in your own base.
This may be a unique problem for me, but like you said, people should play it for themselves and form their own opinions. Just don't expect a Tribes, Battlefield 1942, or Halo type gameplay.
Well thats not a fair statement at all. Goldeneye was based off the movie so they pretty much had the groundwork laid out for them (characters, plot, environments, some of the weapons, gadgets etc). This was probably the first opportunity a game developer had the opportunity (a real one, unlike Atari's E.T. and far better then many of the Star Wars games) to use an existing movie license.
Mixing story was a cinch and mission based goals were either straight from the movie or outright silly (hack into the enemy's computer from on top of a dam? I'm going inside the enemy base in the next level, why not do it there? And what was with all those document hunting objectives?). Difficulty levels were the same as they were done in the past; stronger enemies, take more damage, and a little bit more "find/destroy X item". Hardly groundbreaking especially considering the poor AI of Natalia who only becomes useful when you cheat and give her the Cougar Magnum to defend herself with (and shoot unseenen enemies through bushes).
1. Gameplay gets boring/too dragged out (.hack series notably)
2. Game would be WAY too short (imagine a game like Max Payne 2 cut up in chapters)
3. Some gamers don't buy games immediately when they are released and some are nearly impossible to find after a period of time.
4. Companies would go evil on us, by making insanely long, dragged out, overdone, just milking the series additions to a game *cough*TheSims*cough*.
5. Its easier to own just one DVD of a whole game than to freak out that you lost part X of Y.
What I'm not for is the fact that this means jack squat for consumers. If EA gets an extra $10 million from Nike, what do I get? The same game, by a rushed developer, with a bunch of extra advertisement... for the same $50 USD.
Companies like EA isn't going to lower the cost of their games because of this. They're not going to give the dev team an extra month to work out the bugs and balance it out some more. No, they're going to pocket the money from Nike, take my money, and pocket that too.
Could we have some upgrades? Anti-aliasing? Hardware specs that the Dreamcast outdoes? No decrease (and in some cases longer) in load times? Only 2 controller ports built-in?
In our minds, keeping an extra copy it was fair game. If you lost disk X out of Y for whatever game, you were pretty much screwed and you couldn't bring it back to the local computer store for a refund (assuming you even had a local computer store). As for piracy, well considering how new PC were at the time you can understand why most people would be reluctant to send money to some company (or some geek programming in his garage) they've never heard of, in a state/country they probably have never visited, for a game that might not even run on your computer. Not to mention the sheer amount of confusion over where to get information on game led to the small groups of people simply making copies for one another and (pretty much) giving them away. I can honestly tell you that if each game I "pirated" back then cost $50 USD, I would be guilty of "pirating" at least $1000 USD of software.
In hindsight (I reinstalled TA just this week), graphically TA has not aged well (although the gameplay is still awesome). In a high resolution, units are hard to distinish from one another, the terrain is pretty but the color of most the units is a drab gray. Compare this to Command and Conquer or Close Combat, C&C having very clear, unique units and Close Combat having a slower gameplay pace and a more individual unit system, TA was ahead of its time. A little too far ahead of its time, as it had to sacrifice detail in exchange for 3D graphics.
Presuming your network is a LAN setup, the problem with the lag stems from the way the multiplayer netcode is built. I don't have a link to any exact article stating this but, supposedly all the data in a multiplayer game is transferred to the server so it can be double-checked to make client-side cheating programs ineffective. With this said, I'm guessing you play Halo PC on a non-dedicated server. Try playing the game with a dedicated server and it shouldn't be so bad. I've played 4v4 CTF games online (Blood Gulch of course) and experienced almost no lag (on my side at least).
For a LAN game, unless you have a seriously kickass computer, it is HIGHLY recommended that you NEVER use a non-dedicated server for any game less than a year old. At least, thats my rule of thumb when I host LAN parties.
Modded Xbox means no Xbox Live so that means they pretty much alienate their entire audience, not to mention doesn't even phase their target audience since no one wants to pay extra for an official system which won't even play their bootlegged games. I've been to Hong Kong, and in terms of U.S. dollars, video games are CHEAP. A bootleg copy of Final Fantasy 9 went for roughly $20 USD the same month it came out while a legal copy went for $50 in the U.S. This applies for PC games as well. (I went there the same time of Diablo 2's launch date, imagine my surprise when I found they were selling copies for roughly $10 USD right next to a computer running the game as a display.)