Yeah, try playing Warcraft 1 or 2 before playing Savage. Or read the information on their website.
Savage has one of the most rudimentary strategy systems I've seenen in a long time. You protect your main building, you build a research center for items, you make an arsonal for weapons, you make X building to get X weapon. Its not that complicated compared to more modern strategy games. You get an absolute max of 10 workers! That doesn't exactly call for 'micromanagement' either. Even after you make all the upgrades and fortify your base/expansions, theres no REAL need for a Commander. I'm saying this out of personal experience.
After everything has been researched and its just a matter of waiting for your troops to destroy the enemy base, whats left? You can grant players temporary boosts, but you only 3 types and it takes about 3 minutes to recharge. You can grant officer-ship to certain players (only to three of them though, and most commanders pick their officers at the beginning). You can give orders, but most players already know the basics of demolishing bases quickly and effectively (read : suicide attacks with demo charges with whatever weapons going crazy).
'Offensive towering', as its called in other strategy games, doesn't work since they're pitifully weak in armor. The commander cannot make ANY offensive units for his own use. Don't even think about using the workers to attack either since more experienced players chop through them like a hot knife through butter. In the end, the commander position is nothing more than a glorified observer.
"'The Report Card provides a snapshot of the interactive gaming industry with a focus on issues related to child welfare."
Child welfare? I'm sorry but child welfare usually starts with the parents doesn't it?
"in grades four through twelve"
Oh yeah, nice sample space. While you're at it, why not find out how many people between the ages 16 through 23 drink?
"The easy access that boys have [...]"
Hey hey hey! Thats sexist! Girls play video games too!
"Last year we focused attention on the top selling Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, in which gratuitous violence toward women and police is rewarded and discrimination against the Haitian community is encouraged."
Wth do you mean you get rewarded for violence against the police and the Haitian mob in GTA:VC? Last time I checked when you started shooting either of those two, they started popping holes in your ass.
"Rates of obesity among children have tripled over the past thirty years."
Yeah, and over the past thirty years the United States has enjoyed one of the largest economic booms from Reagonnomics, to Clinton's high flying success, and the dotcom boom/bust.
Other than a few parts in the books/movies the battles usually ended up sounding/looking like a sloppy mass X unit attack on the enemy position. I just can't see the LOTR series making it in the strategy genre. Action genre? Hell yeah. Adventure genre? If you can do it right. RPG genre? Maybe. Strategy genre? Doubtful. Racing genre? Over J.R.R. Tolkain's dead body.
True, but who do you think will be profitting and/or working on these projects? The top 5% of the educated who land the huge research grants, and those who work under them in a so-and-so company. Until then 95% of the rest of the 'close but not close enough' educated who seek work in that field get stuck teaching at the same schools they just graduated from writing thesises and books in hopes of gaining attention.
Why do we have to look back at the financial software jobs that went away? We have much more interesting projects to be done.
Because the Joe Average still doesn't have a bug free OS (Linux or Windows), his anti-virus program still fails to catch all 100% of them, and theres no mass market successful anti-adware program. You're asking for a trip to Mars and we're still trying to work on getting to the next town.
So long as anti-video game critics continue to use 'surveys', 'statisically data', and/or 'scientific evidence' to 'claim' that video games cause violence or the ESRB is not doing a good job, trying to disclaim the ESRB for doing this is like the pot calling the kettle black. Compared to whats been said AGAINST the ESRB, this is just a drop in the bucket.
(For those who don't know, Digimon is short for digital monster with the entire anime series taking place in the cyberworld, specifically depends on which season you're talking about.)
If someone catches another person illegal recording the movie, don't you think they'd be smart enough to know what they are doing and that they could just download the movie for free online from the same guy in about an hour after the movie ends?
Well based on the names of the games you listed, saying that its busy isn't saying much. Starcraft and Warcraft (3)? Those are strategy games, and those have generally been known to last no less than 20 minutes per game (unless one of the players REALLY sucks at stopping rushes) with longer games going over 2 hours (an unlimited resources maps + 4 vs 4 humans? Yeah...)
A "semi-powerful computer" is an extremely relative term these days. College kids tend to get spoiled with their campuses (usually) providing a dedicated T1 line or better for the students, not to mention colleges disproportionately only represents the upper-middle and upper classes which have more money. Don't forget, to a high school student anything more than $500 in one month is a LOT of money. (Working FULL TIME at $8/hour BEFORE taxes for one week is $640. Thats some serious cash for a HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT.)
You mean they weren't smoking before they went off to war? Next you'll be telling me that they didn't drink before they went off to war.
In term of psychological benefits for soldiers while in combat and the extremely well documented information on post tramatic syndrome affecting soldiers when they come home, I think a little nicotine won't hurt when some of these same smokers came back with lost limbs and/or lost sanity. (We've all heard stories about some soldier committing suicide after coming back from the warzone.)
"But who provides the ratings? If it's not an independent, objective group, the rating will mean little."
It is an independent, objective group. Just not a very educated one. As far as I know, EA Sports games haven't been getting 'E' rating on their games because they've been bribing the ESRB, no its because some games are simply not violent (enough) to warrant higher restriction ratings. The MPAA has been letting a number of violent acts in movies get away because the movie manages to 'hide' it by having it in the shadows or focusing the camera at someone/something else when it happens. Its relatively common practice these days in the entertainment business.
Until more independent/amature/B-rated files become more publicly acknowledged, the mainstream movie industry will continue to be saturated with PG-13 movies and relatively few R rated movies. Its simple economics, get the largest consumer audience for the largest profit. How to do that; get the coveted PG/PG-13 rating.
How do games do it? Well you can't! Because violent games sells more (on average) than non-violent games. As a company you suck up your 'morals' and make a -potentially- violent game with kick ass gameplay around it (see MGS2 where you could get through/watch the entire game with less than 30 people getting killed, including the cutscenes, compared to GTA3 where some people kill 30 people just driving across town).
From a strict moral position, yes all these violent games are insanely wrong since YOU the player are the one doing it. But in reality, this type of violence is probably nothing in the eyes of the 15 year old who used to get beat up every day in second grade by the school bully.
So long as video game opinions are largely based on a player's personal preferance, the 'best' way to decide if a game is good for you is to read multiple reviews from multiple sources. Some people like to read Gamespot reviews, while other ACTUALLY like IGN's reviews as well.
One course of action is to read "reader's reviews" that sites like Gamespot uses. But like all reader contributed things, take them with a grain of salt (or vice versa in the case I'm going to give you.)
Gamespot's official review score for the game XIII on the Xbox : 6.4 . Gamespot's reader reviews score (as of the time and date of this posting) : 42 reader scores, 8.4
My my my, thats quite a big gap isn't it? Simply put, when you see two reviews give a score with that high of a varying difference (2 out of 10 points! Jeez!) you know its time to get a third opinion.
Yeah the Half-Life mod community is pretty much the biggest one out there, but remember the game is old. Really old by gaming standards. And Half-Life 2 is coming out and stealing some of its old fanfare. You can't blaim mainstream media for skipping over a 2+ year old game thats, basicly, being run solely by player made mods now when theres so many other more attractive and more recent games.
With games becoming more and more 'mainstream' with each generation of games, I think they're doing the right thing by paying attention to current games instead of going 'old skool' and start off their article back during the days of Doom.
I donno if they plan on "dumbing" the game down but they'll most likely have to considering what you do in the game (at least the SNES version). For those who never played heres a short version of the game.
Shoot people/things.(*cough*) Pick up random items that appear. (read : steal) Don't die.
People will bitch about the game because it encourages children to steal and go on mass murdering sprees.
"the few violent games that still did exist would get all the negative attention anyway."
What do you mean? We only do have a few violent games out right now. We have,
GTA3/VC Postal 2 True Crime Streets of LA Manhunt And the already aged Soldier of Fortune 2 (the ways you could 'kill' a person's body makes it notable enough not counting the different weapons).
Out of this list of (relatively) recent games, only GTA3/VC (and maybe Manhunt but the sales reports haven't come in yet) sold really well and thats because the media virtually sold half the copies alone by giving it air time every other week. (Its been a year since VC came out and people are STILL bitching about it). Until I start seeing more developers other than Rockstar Games make more 'violent' games, I'm gonna take all these video game regulation complaints as seriously as Mr. Potato Head being the new lead character in GTA4.
I think the craziest part of this report is that somehow some jackass and a retarded jury will actually let this guy go. It'll probably be something like "the Xbox has too many FPS games and that made him a super elite military aiming sniper who woulda made his college the next Colombine."
Or worse, 'video game rage'. Followed by a 1 hour TV special, 'When Gamers Go Mad!'
Nice to see more and more companies shifting over to bittorrent for files they know will be in high demand.
But keep in mind that bittorrent is only as good as the number and speeds uploaders can give downloaders (or leechers in the case of bittorrent). Don't bother trying to use the bittorrent if you wanna download this more than 2 weeks after today.
Yeah I think they made the right choice in passing the decision up the jurisdictional ladder, BUT think about the line that comes after it.
'the DC court is the same one that previously ruled against Verizon in a similar attempt to contest the DMCA." '
Oh yeah, gee thats a real smart idea. Pass a case like this up to the same court where a similar case was tried and failed. Thats getting out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Its better logic than assuming 'if its open source, its better than Windows.'
Counter Strike (PC), and Half-Life for the most part, is still riddled with rampant cheating and gun imbalances. Counter Strike is unarguably good, but its by no means Half-Life 1.5 or Battlefield 1942 0.5 . I'm just trying to say that a game/mod thats developed and supported by unpaid people tend to be of lower quality.
Or for the would-be gamers? Obviously Sony [whatever branch here] was never targetting gamers from the beginning since it was basicly a souped up PS2. Now me being the minority (I STILL don't have a PS2) would have been interested in the PSX since I'd get all the cool swag along with a PS2. But now, whats the point?
'Apparently, the following features are being cut: HDD to DVD dubbing has been downgraded from 24x speed to 12x speed, CD-R playback will not be supported, DVD+RW playback will not be supported, MP3 file format will not be supported, TIFF and GIF file formats will not be supported, Sony's Cybershot movie format will not be supported. There will also be no antenna output, nor will it be compatible with the Playstation BB service. '
Slower DVD dubbing? Considering DVDs hold 4.7 gigs of space, that can't be good. No CD-R playback no supported? Does this mean I can't play my own re-mixed CDs? No DVD+RW playback? Two words : Bad Investment. No MP3s? Wtf? Why not take out the PS1 capability at the same time? No TIFF and GIF format? COMON! Last time I checked there were no complaints about photo privacy. No Sony Cybershot capability either? Great, one more type of Sony product I'll have to avoid in the future, assuming I still get the PSX. No antenna output and no Playstation BB service? Gee, thanks. Nice way to wrap up the list of nerfage. If the PSX was a game, this would be the equivaliant of removing the crowbar, the AI, the storyline, and the voice acting from Half-Life followed by a press release saying that the game will make "its bitch".
'who are not being funded by the RIAA or any other music industry groups'
Does this also mean that the RIAA is not funding "educational" gaming companies? What about private funding? Or investing in the parent company who was "motivated" by the RIAA?
Slashdot Mirror
All it states in the quote is that Interplay has cut the BIS team. The rest of the quote is nothing but bashing Interplay
Off topic.
Savage has one of the most rudimentary strategy systems I've seenen in a long time. You protect your main building, you build a research center for items, you make an arsonal for weapons, you make X building to get X weapon. Its not that complicated compared to more modern strategy games. You get an absolute max of 10 workers! That doesn't exactly call for 'micromanagement' either. Even after you make all the upgrades and fortify your base/expansions, theres no REAL need for a Commander. I'm saying this out of personal experience.
After everything has been researched and its just a matter of waiting for your troops to destroy the enemy base, whats left? You can grant players temporary boosts, but you only 3 types and it takes about 3 minutes to recharge. You can grant officer-ship to certain players (only to three of them though, and most commanders pick their officers at the beginning). You can give orders, but most players already know the basics of demolishing bases quickly and effectively (read : suicide attacks with demo charges with whatever weapons going crazy).
'Offensive towering', as its called in other strategy games, doesn't work since they're pitifully weak in armor. The commander cannot make ANY offensive units for his own use. Don't even think about using the workers to attack either since more experienced players chop through them like a hot knife through butter. In the end, the commander position is nothing more than a glorified observer.
Child welfare? I'm sorry but child welfare usually starts with the parents doesn't it?
"in grades four through twelve"
Oh yeah, nice sample space. While you're at it, why not find out how many people between the ages 16 through 23 drink?
"The easy access that boys have [...]"
Hey hey hey! Thats sexist! Girls play video games too!
"Last year we focused attention on the top selling Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, in which gratuitous violence toward women and police is rewarded and discrimination against the Haitian community is encouraged."
Wth do you mean you get rewarded for violence against the police and the Haitian mob in GTA:VC? Last time I checked when you started shooting either of those two, they started popping holes in your ass.
"Rates of obesity among children have tripled over the past thirty years."
Yeah, and over the past thirty years the United States has enjoyed one of the largest economic booms from Reagonnomics, to Clinton's high flying success, and the dotcom boom/bust.
Other than a few parts in the books/movies the battles usually ended up sounding/looking like a sloppy mass X unit attack on the enemy position. I just can't see the LOTR series making it in the strategy genre. Action genre? Hell yeah. Adventure genre? If you can do it right. RPG genre? Maybe. Strategy genre? Doubtful. Racing genre? Over J.R.R. Tolkain's dead body.
Why do we have to look back at the financial software jobs that went away? We have much more interesting projects to be done.
Because the Joe Average still doesn't have a bug free OS (Linux or Windows), his anti-virus program still fails to catch all 100% of them, and theres no mass market successful anti-adware program. You're asking for a trip to Mars and we're still trying to work on getting to the next town.
So long as anti-video game critics continue to use 'surveys', 'statisically data', and/or 'scientific evidence' to 'claim' that video games cause violence or the ESRB is not doing a good job, trying to disclaim the ESRB for doing this is like the pot calling the kettle black. Compared to whats been said AGAINST the ESRB, this is just a drop in the bucket.
(For those who don't know, Digimon is short for digital monster with the entire anime series taking place in the cyberworld, specifically depends on which season you're talking about.)
If someone catches another person illegal recording the movie, don't you think they'd be smart enough to know what they are doing and that they could just download the movie for free online from the same guy in about an hour after the movie ends?
A "semi-powerful computer" is an extremely relative term these days. College kids tend to get spoiled with their campuses (usually) providing a dedicated T1 line or better for the students, not to mention colleges disproportionately only represents the upper-middle and upper classes which have more money. Don't forget, to a high school student anything more than $500 in one month is a LOT of money. (Working FULL TIME at $8/hour BEFORE taxes for one week is $640. Thats some serious cash for a HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT.)
In term of psychological benefits for soldiers while in combat and the extremely well documented information on post tramatic syndrome affecting soldiers when they come home, I think a little nicotine won't hurt when some of these same smokers came back with lost limbs and/or lost sanity. (We've all heard stories about some soldier committing suicide after coming back from the warzone.)
It is an independent, objective group. Just not a very educated one. As far as I know, EA Sports games haven't been getting 'E' rating on their games because they've been bribing the ESRB, no its because some games are simply not violent (enough) to warrant higher restriction ratings. The MPAA has been letting a number of violent acts in movies get away because the movie manages to 'hide' it by having it in the shadows or focusing the camera at someone/something else when it happens. Its relatively common practice these days in the entertainment business.
Until more independent/amature/B-rated files become more publicly acknowledged, the mainstream movie industry will continue to be saturated with PG-13 movies and relatively few R rated movies. Its simple economics, get the largest consumer audience for the largest profit. How to do that; get the coveted PG/PG-13 rating.
How do games do it? Well you can't! Because violent games sells more (on average) than non-violent games. As a company you suck up your 'morals' and make a -potentially- violent game with kick ass gameplay around it (see MGS2 where you could get through/watch the entire game with less than 30 people getting killed, including the cutscenes, compared to GTA3 where some people kill 30 people just driving across town).
From a strict moral position, yes all these violent games are insanely wrong since YOU the player are the one doing it. But in reality, this type of violence is probably nothing in the eyes of the 15 year old who used to get beat up every day in second grade by the school bully.
One course of action is to read "reader's reviews" that sites like Gamespot uses. But like all reader contributed things, take them with a grain of salt (or vice versa in the case I'm going to give you.)
Gamespot's official review score for the game XIII on the Xbox : 6.4 . Gamespot's reader reviews score (as of the time and date of this posting) : 42 reader scores, 8.4
My my my, thats quite a big gap isn't it? Simply put, when you see two reviews give a score with that high of a varying difference (2 out of 10 points! Jeez!) you know its time to get a third opinion.
With games becoming more and more 'mainstream' with each generation of games, I think they're doing the right thing by paying attention to current games instead of going 'old skool' and start off their article back during the days of Doom.
Shoot people/things.(*cough*) Pick up random items that appear. (read : steal) Don't die.
People will bitch about the game because it encourages children to steal and go on mass murdering sprees.
You mean there are Xbox owners who don't already own a copy of Halo?!
What do you mean? We only do have a few violent games out right now. We have,
GTA3/VC
Postal 2
True Crime Streets of LA
Manhunt
And the already aged Soldier of Fortune 2 (the ways you could 'kill' a person's body makes it notable enough not counting the different weapons).
Out of this list of (relatively) recent games, only GTA3/VC (and maybe Manhunt but the sales reports haven't come in yet) sold really well and thats because the media virtually sold half the copies alone by giving it air time every other week. (Its been a year since VC came out and people are STILL bitching about it). Until I start seeing more developers other than Rockstar Games make more 'violent' games, I'm gonna take all these video game regulation complaints as seriously as Mr. Potato Head being the new lead character in GTA4.
What about movie pirates?
Or worse, 'video game rage'. Followed by a 1 hour TV special, 'When Gamers Go Mad!'
You mean they aren't already?
But keep in mind that bittorrent is only as good as the number and speeds uploaders can give downloaders (or leechers in the case of bittorrent). Don't bother trying to use the bittorrent if you wanna download this more than 2 weeks after today.
'the DC court is the same one that previously ruled against Verizon in a similar attempt to contest the DMCA." '
Oh yeah, gee thats a real smart idea. Pass a case like this up to the same court where a similar case was tried and failed. Thats getting out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Counter Strike (PC), and Half-Life for the most part, is still riddled with rampant cheating and gun imbalances. Counter Strike is unarguably good, but its by no means Half-Life 1.5 or Battlefield 1942 0.5 . I'm just trying to say that a game/mod thats developed and supported by unpaid people tend to be of lower quality.
'Apparently, the following features are being cut: HDD to DVD dubbing has been downgraded from 24x speed to 12x speed, CD-R playback will not be supported, DVD+RW playback will not be supported, MP3 file format will not be supported, TIFF and GIF file formats will not be supported, Sony's Cybershot movie format will not be supported. There will also be no antenna output, nor will it be compatible with the Playstation BB service. '
Slower DVD dubbing? Considering DVDs hold 4.7 gigs of space, that can't be good. No CD-R playback no supported? Does this mean I can't play my own re-mixed CDs? No DVD+RW playback? Two words : Bad Investment. No MP3s? Wtf? Why not take out the PS1 capability at the same time? No TIFF and GIF format? COMON! Last time I checked there were no complaints about photo privacy. No Sony Cybershot capability either? Great, one more type of Sony product I'll have to avoid in the future, assuming I still get the PSX. No antenna output and no Playstation BB service? Gee, thanks. Nice way to wrap up the list of nerfage. If the PSX was a game, this would be the equivaliant of removing the crowbar, the AI, the storyline, and the voice acting from Half-Life followed by a press release saying that the game will make "its bitch".
Does this also mean that the RIAA is not funding "educational" gaming companies? What about private funding? Or investing in the parent company who was "motivated" by the RIAA?