A few PC gamers had similar complaints about the new Legacy of Kain game (also published by Eidos).
When I see posts like this, it reminds me of the people who absolutely freaked out about the transition from 2D to 3D gaming around ten years ago. It was the same sort of mindless "I hate new things and want games to always stay the same!" mentality.
Devil May Cry was the first game I played that used a third-person cinematic perspective, and as soon as I saw it, I loved it. It allows the designers to use so many styles and tricks that have been in films for years.
Legacy of Kain: Defiance and Ico cemented that opinion for me.
And really, I can't understand why someone who doesn't like cutscenes is playing a game that clearly has a decent chunk of storytelling to do either.
If you like the 80s videogame style so much, AC, why not just keep playing them instead? New games don't mean the old ones don't exist anymore.
Also, why does everyone keep comparing it to the Virtual Boy?
Because the Virtual Boy was also a supposedly "innovative" gaming system that wasn't really very interesting at all beyond the initial gimmick factor, and because this handheld is going to flop almost or as badly as it did.
I was going to post a comparison to the Virtual Boy if no one else had.
This seems like an incredibly gimmicky product to me, and I predict it will fail as dramatically as the Virtual Boy did.
Nintendo is *really* going to have to do better than this if they're going to continue to be viable as a hardware manufacturer - and before the Nintendo fanboys flame me, I own a Gamecube, GBA, and GBA Player.
She's got pale skin, blonde hair, and pointy facial features. The only way a Japanese person could end up looking that way is by visiting Michael Jackson's plastic surgeon.
The 'geeks' who are supposed to love this movie and provide the revenue these guys are hoping for at the box office are already slamming it from every angle they can.
I am classified as a geek, and I'm not slamming it. It looks like they're going to take the cool bits from the anime and turn it into something better.
All of the "negative" aspects you mention sound like good things to me.
26 episodes stuffed into 90 to 120 minutes (Akira anyone?)
I saw about ten episodes of Eva at a friend's party last year. Most of it could have been compressed into a smaller chunk of time because it was the sort of pseudo-intellectual circular logic "philosophy" that's too common in anime, to say nothing of the incredibly lame last episode.
No matter how great the CG is, it will never fulfill the fans expectations.
Fans who can't appreciate something different are taking things too seriously. It reminds me of some of the people into my favourite series (Legacy of Kain) who haven't liked any of the games since the original Blood Omen because they haven't been Diablo-esque RPG games.
Some changes are bad (like a lot of the new Battlestar Galactica), but there are a lot of things about Evangelion that could be improved upon.
Rei's er... Ray's hair isn't black.
It is now. Maybe she got tired of dying it the other colour.
The ages of the characters (none of whom will be of inferious Japanese decent mind you) will all be jacked up to 18 so they are american-legal-eagle jerk-off-able
I think this is more to avoid the Episode I syndrome. Watching an action film with mech pilots who are children is not believable, and would be a sure way to get this one labelled as a kids' film.
All non-robot battle nuances and themes in the film will be trodden upon, underused, and thusly underappreciated due to lack of time, budget, and the clairvoyance necessary to see that this film is a freaking boondoggle
In the original anime (at least the episodes I saw), it was the other way around. There were something like two robot battle scenes in the last ten episodes of the series.
Why? Most *anime* I've seen doesn't have very many Japanese characters. Sure, their *names* are Japanese, but that's about it.
In fact, Evangelion itself seems to have the standard mostly-caucasian cast.
I am really interested to see how this film turns out. I liked the robot designs and some of the concepts of the original anime, but watching it at a friend's party was totally tedious - especially the last episode. "Oooh! It's the same frame of animation... for two minutes! This must mean something!"
I think it would be less of a problem if American laws didn't require the high-speed airbag deployment systems that can kill or injure you if you are too short or not sitting properly or whatever.
Europeans (and the Japanese too, I think) have more reasonable systems, because their governments don't feel the need to protect the fools who have waived their interest in surviving a crash by not wearing their seatbelts.
Are you thinking that someone will mistake it for a Nazi symbol just based on the colours, or did a white supremacist group actually use one that has a similar shape?
A lot of that came about after companies had stopped included the cool trinkets.
There were definitely some fun ones before then, though. Several people have already mentioned the Hitchhiker's Guide game, but one of my favourites was the Star Saga series (it was supposed to be a trilogy, but only the first two were produced). They were text-based multiplayer games that also included table-sized foldout maps with little coloured glass markers for your ship, and something like 1000+ pages of text in a set of booklets that accompanied the game.
Reading that much text on paper was much nicer than on-screen, and it guaranteed that while you could pirate the game, it wasn't really playable without the accessories.
Wasteland was set up similarly, but given the smaller amount of text in that game I assume it was done mostly for the anti-piracy factor in that case.
The printed maps that came with a lot of RPGs were also nice, and some were even on cloth.
Somewhere I think I still have a Skyfox "Fly the Unfriendly Skies" shirt too, but I can't remember if that came with the game or was a promotional thing from when my dad bought it.
I also have a lot of CDs, and I still keep buying them despite how easy it would be to get my music off of p2p apps.
My interest is keeping the artists employed, so that they keep producing songs I will want to hear. Whether that's by independent labels that give them a larger chunk of royalties, or big ones that give them a smaller chunk but sell huge numbers, it doesn't matter as much to me as being able to buy another Dismantled, Psyclon Nine, Cruxshadows, The Last Dance, or Evanescence CD this year or next.
I think that p2p apps are useful in the way that trading mix tapes and CDs used to be for me. They are a good way to hear content that you might not otherwise. Earlier today I used one to find the name of a dance track that was popular nine years ago on a tiny radio station here, which CDDB didn't list. Now I'm ordering a copy from England, since it was never released domestically.
p2p apps (or tape/CD trading) only become a problem when that exposure doesn't lead to actual music purchases.
The attitude of too many people reminds me of myself when I was thirteen and had just discovered high speed tape dubbing. It's the same sort of "oooh, I can get everything for free!" mentality that doesn't take the long view into account: If musicians don't make a decent living, they will stop making music and do something else instead.
When everyone has extremely high speed connections to their house, or impressive local ISP based content servers, the game will be entirely executed over the network.
I really can't see this being the case. People like to have libraries of things that belong to them, especially where the media they're collecting is rare.
A friend of mine collects obscure horror and b-movies. He has two walls of a room covered with videotapes, most of which I've never even heard of. Even if a cable company thought it would be profitable to host all of that content (which is incredibly unlikely), do you think he'd pay a monthly fee to access it instead?
I like to go back and play old videogames years down the road. I can't see that being a possibility with this kind of system either, since the hardware that it required wouldn't be supported, or maybe the game wouldn't hosted anymore because it wasn't profitable.
There are a lot of companies buying into the "thin media client" model right now, but I don't see it working as a replacement for buying physical media. I'm sure it will mean the end of rental stores, but that's something else entirely.
That is kind of a silly position. Should mountain-climbers, motorcyclists, and others whose hobbies involve higher-risk activities than using drugs also have to excuse themselves from public assistance? What about smokers and drinkers?
I don't use any drugs other than alcohol (I even gave up caffeine about six months ago). However, most of the ones that are currently illegal are safe when used in a proper environment and unpolluted with poor manufacturing ingredients and whatever the street dealer decided to cut them with.
Opiates and cocaine? They're safe enough to be used in hospitals (morphine is common, cocaine is used for certain types of surgery).
Amphetamines? The Air Force feeds them to its pilots.
Tryptamines (e.g. mushrooms, DMT)? No physical health issues at all, unless you eat so many mushrooms that your stomach bursts.
The list goes on. Certain drugs have certain risks (particularly the ones with addictive properties, as well as the dissociative hallucinogens like PCP and ketamine which are dangerous and unpredictable), but almost all of them are less harmful to the body than alcohol and tobacco.
I don't know if that's really true in this case. I'm not a TR fan, but Eidos seemed to give Core a *lot* of leeway to make this one. Angel of Darkness was something like two years overdue - how many developers get that much extra time to finish a game?
What seemed to be the problem as far as I could see was a combination of not abandoning the archaic control scheme of the previous games while simultaneously trying to incorporate every possible style of gameplay into AoD.
The controls are the worst. Someone needs to go back in time and assassinate whoever invented the RE-style controls (where left/right turns your character in place, and forward/back makes them walk backwards or forwards relative to their current orientation - not the camera) for the good of all humanity. I can't believe *anyone* is still using them, especially for an action/adventure title. It's okay when the cam is hard-locked behind the player's head (although this makes for a boring way of looking at the game world), but in one like TR or RE or SH where there are a variety of camera angles it's incredibly unintuitive and clunky.
To be honest, a lot of the earlier ones wouldn't sell enough to justify the manufacturing cost. Space (the Canadian sci-fi channel) showed the early episodes while I was going to school up there and the ratings were abyssmal.
I really suspect that the reason this all took place in a private suite was because the "console" wasn't powering the demonstration at all.
Inviting a couple of journalists who spell "through" "threw" to a private showing of your device doesn't exactly inspire confidence. Did the author even get a chance to play a game on this system, or was he just watching things happen and assuming it was real?
I am also *very* suspicious of the alleged content distribution model. At first, the big gimmick was supposed to be that it would have thousands of games because it could play older PC titles. Now they're saying that it somehow streams the game content to avoid installation time. I don't buy it. There are only a tiny handful of games that are coded to work like this (e.g. Soul Reaver, Metroid Prime), and I seriously doubt that many publishers are willing to dust off their old source code to make the modifications necessary to support it.
I would almost be willing to bet money that this "prototype" was at best a regular PC in a fancy case made to look like it was doing what they claimed it could, and at worst was a plastic box with a blue LED that wasn't powering the demonstration at all.
But unfortunately, the space elevator will be so obscenely expensive in terms of resources and labour to get going in the first place
The Seattle company that's researching them gave a figure of something like 10-12 billion. That is really not that pricey for the access to space it would provide.
CueCat: Privacy-intrusive, shaped like a dildo so you could go fuck yourself with it, and run by a useless bloody looney who was first against the wall when the last tech revolution ended.
Yes, but now you can buy one on eBay for $5 and have a fully functional barcode scanner by using replacement drivers.
3 months before it's 1/2 as bright, and it's dead in 3 years.
I think you misread the article. It says:
"Typical plasma TVs have a life span of 20,000 to 30,000 hours, which equates to at least two years, three months of 24/7 usage before the TV fades to half the original brightness."
So first, it lasts 2 years and 3 months (27 months), and that's with it in use all of the time. 20,000 hours is ten thousand movies worth of viewing, which isn't bad. It's still less durable than I'd be interested in buying at the current price, but it's not the throwaway toy you made it out to be.
As for CRT TVs, my last one burned up on me (literally) while I was using it, so they don't last forever either.
How does that change the original poster's idea? If you can predict it about 9 months in advance, maybe you could do something to cause it to slip a little bit three times, producing three smaller earthquakes, rather than all at once producing one large earthquake.
You are still thinking in too large of a time frame. From the geology class I learned about this in, it would seem that the pressure is detectable for maybe a few minutes before the earthquake hits.
Slashdot Mirror
A few PC gamers had similar complaints about the new Legacy of Kain game (also published by Eidos).
When I see posts like this, it reminds me of the people who absolutely freaked out about the transition from 2D to 3D gaming around ten years ago. It was the same sort of mindless "I hate new things and want games to always stay the same!" mentality.
Devil May Cry was the first game I played that used a third-person cinematic perspective, and as soon as I saw it, I loved it. It allows the designers to use so many styles and tricks that have been in films for years.
Legacy of Kain: Defiance and Ico cemented that opinion for me.
And really, I can't understand why someone who doesn't like cutscenes is playing a game that clearly has a decent chunk of storytelling to do either.
If you like the 80s videogame style so much, AC, why not just keep playing them instead? New games don't mean the old ones don't exist anymore.
Also, why does everyone keep comparing it to the Virtual Boy?
Because the Virtual Boy was also a supposedly "innovative" gaming system that wasn't really very interesting at all beyond the initial gimmick factor, and because this handheld is going to flop almost or as badly as it did.
I was going to post a comparison to the Virtual Boy if no one else had.
This seems like an incredibly gimmicky product to me, and I predict it will fail as dramatically as the Virtual Boy did.
Nintendo is *really* going to have to do better than this if they're going to continue to be viable as a hardware manufacturer - and before the Nintendo fanboys flame me, I own a Gamecube, GBA, and GBA Player.
If you want to avoid Flamebait mods next time, be sure to use his proper title of Imperator Mundi Dubyus Maximo.
That was pretty much my point.
She's got pale skin, blonde hair, and pointy facial features. The only way a Japanese person could end up looking that way is by visiting Michael Jackson's plastic surgeon.
There is no way that this lady is supposed to be Japanese.
Maybe in some crazy alternate universe where Japanese people are indistinguishable from Europeans, but not this one.
The 'geeks' who are supposed to love this movie and provide the revenue these guys are hoping for at the box office are already slamming it from every angle they can.
I am classified as a geek, and I'm not slamming it. It looks like they're going to take the cool bits from the anime and turn it into something better.
All of the "negative" aspects you mention sound like good things to me.
26 episodes stuffed into 90 to 120 minutes (Akira anyone?)
I saw about ten episodes of Eva at a friend's party last year. Most of it could have been compressed into a smaller chunk of time because it was the sort of pseudo-intellectual circular logic "philosophy" that's too common in anime, to say nothing of the incredibly lame last episode.
No matter how great the CG is, it will never fulfill the fans expectations.
Fans who can't appreciate something different are taking things too seriously. It reminds me of some of the people into my favourite series (Legacy of Kain) who haven't liked any of the games since the original Blood Omen because they haven't been Diablo-esque RPG games.
Some changes are bad (like a lot of the new Battlestar Galactica), but there are a lot of things about Evangelion that could be improved upon.
Rei's er... Ray's hair isn't black.
It is now. Maybe she got tired of dying it the other colour.
The ages of the characters (none of whom will be of inferious Japanese decent mind you) will all be jacked up to 18 so they are american-legal-eagle jerk-off-able
I think this is more to avoid the Episode I syndrome. Watching an action film with mech pilots who are children is not believable, and would be a sure way to get this one labelled as a kids' film.
All non-robot battle nuances and themes in the film will be trodden upon, underused, and thusly underappreciated due to lack of time, budget, and the clairvoyance necessary to see that this film is a freaking boondoggle
In the original anime (at least the episodes I saw), it was the other way around. There were something like two robot battle scenes in the last ten episodes of the series.
This seems like wishful thinking on the part of fans of the original anime to me.
The film character concept art I've seen has always had either the character's name or the actor/actresses' name displayed prominently.
I would be incredibly surprised if the characters *didn't* get more English-sounding names for the film.
If so... I already hate it.
Why? Most *anime* I've seen doesn't have very many Japanese characters. Sure, their *names* are Japanese, but that's about it.
In fact, Evangelion itself seems to have the standard mostly-caucasian cast.
I am really interested to see how this film turns out. I liked the robot designs and some of the concepts of the original anime, but watching it at a friend's party was totally tedious - especially the last episode. "Oooh! It's the same frame of animation... for two minutes! This must mean something!"
I think it would be less of a problem if American laws didn't require the high-speed airbag deployment systems that can kill or injure you if you are too short or not sitting properly or whatever.
Europeans (and the Japanese too, I think) have more reasonable systems, because their governments don't feel the need to protect the fools who have waived their interest in surviving a crash by not wearing their seatbelts.
Are you thinking that someone will mistake it for a Nazi symbol just based on the colours, or did a white supremacist group actually use one that has a similar shape?
A lot of that came about after companies had stopped included the cool trinkets.
There were definitely some fun ones before then, though. Several people have already mentioned the Hitchhiker's Guide game, but one of my favourites was the Star Saga series (it was supposed to be a trilogy, but only the first two were produced). They were text-based multiplayer games that also included table-sized foldout maps with little coloured glass markers for your ship, and something like 1000+ pages of text in a set of booklets that accompanied the game.
Reading that much text on paper was much nicer than on-screen, and it guaranteed that while you could pirate the game, it wasn't really playable without the accessories.
Wasteland was set up similarly, but given the smaller amount of text in that game I assume it was done mostly for the anti-piracy factor in that case.
The printed maps that came with a lot of RPGs were also nice, and some were even on cloth.
Somewhere I think I still have a Skyfox "Fly the Unfriendly Skies" shirt too, but I can't remember if that came with the game or was a promotional thing from when my dad bought it.
I also have a lot of CDs, and I still keep buying them despite how easy it would be to get my music off of p2p apps.
My interest is keeping the artists employed, so that they keep producing songs I will want to hear. Whether that's by independent labels that give them a larger chunk of royalties, or big ones that give them a smaller chunk but sell huge numbers, it doesn't matter as much to me as being able to buy another Dismantled, Psyclon Nine, Cruxshadows, The Last Dance, or Evanescence CD this year or next.
I think that p2p apps are useful in the way that trading mix tapes and CDs used to be for me. They are a good way to hear content that you might not otherwise. Earlier today I used one to find the name of a dance track that was popular nine years ago on a tiny radio station here, which CDDB didn't list. Now I'm ordering a copy from England, since it was never released domestically.
p2p apps (or tape/CD trading) only become a problem when that exposure doesn't lead to actual music purchases.
The attitude of too many people reminds me of myself when I was thirteen and had just discovered high speed tape dubbing. It's the same sort of "oooh, I can get everything for free!" mentality that doesn't take the long view into account: If musicians don't make a decent living, they will stop making music and do something else instead.
This is how the carbon ring structure of benzene was theorized as well.
I usually get my ideas right before I go to sleep instead.
could this replace studying in some way shape or form.
"Sleep learning" was a popular fad several decades ago. My mom told me about it when I was a kid in the 80s.
My understanding is that it's too unreliable to be used as a tool for most people.
When everyone has extremely high speed connections to their house, or impressive local ISP based content servers, the game will be entirely executed over the network.
I really can't see this being the case. People like to have libraries of things that belong to them, especially where the media they're collecting is rare.
A friend of mine collects obscure horror and b-movies. He has two walls of a room covered with videotapes, most of which I've never even heard of. Even if a cable company thought it would be profitable to host all of that content (which is incredibly unlikely), do you think he'd pay a monthly fee to access it instead?
I like to go back and play old videogames years down the road. I can't see that being a possibility with this kind of system either, since the hardware that it required wouldn't be supported, or maybe the game wouldn't hosted anymore because it wasn't profitable.
There are a lot of companies buying into the "thin media client" model right now, but I don't see it working as a replacement for buying physical media. I'm sure it will mean the end of rental stores, but that's something else entirely.
That is kind of a silly position. Should mountain-climbers, motorcyclists, and others whose hobbies involve higher-risk activities than using drugs also have to excuse themselves from public assistance? What about smokers and drinkers?
I don't use any drugs other than alcohol (I even gave up caffeine about six months ago). However, most of the ones that are currently illegal are safe when used in a proper environment and unpolluted with poor manufacturing ingredients and whatever the street dealer decided to cut them with.
Opiates and cocaine? They're safe enough to be used in hospitals (morphine is common, cocaine is used for certain types of surgery).
Amphetamines? The Air Force feeds them to its pilots.
Tryptamines (e.g. mushrooms, DMT)? No physical health issues at all, unless you eat so many mushrooms that your stomach bursts.
The list goes on. Certain drugs have certain risks (particularly the ones with addictive properties, as well as the dissociative hallucinogens like PCP and ketamine which are dangerous and unpredictable), but almost all of them are less harmful to the body than alcohol and tobacco.
I don't know if that's really true in this case. I'm not a TR fan, but Eidos seemed to give Core a *lot* of leeway to make this one. Angel of Darkness was something like two years overdue - how many developers get that much extra time to finish a game?
What seemed to be the problem as far as I could see was a combination of not abandoning the archaic control scheme of the previous games while simultaneously trying to incorporate every possible style of gameplay into AoD.
The controls are the worst. Someone needs to go back in time and assassinate whoever invented the RE-style controls (where left/right turns your character in place, and forward/back makes them walk backwards or forwards relative to their current orientation - not the camera) for the good of all humanity. I can't believe *anyone* is still using them, especially for an action/adventure title. It's okay when the cam is hard-locked behind the player's head (although this makes for a boring way of looking at the game world), but in one like TR or RE or SH where there are a variety of camera angles it's incredibly unintuitive and clunky.
Dr. Who had 26 seasons.
That's an awful lot of boxed sets =).
To be honest, a lot of the earlier ones wouldn't sell enough to justify the manufacturing cost. Space (the Canadian sci-fi channel) showed the early episodes while I was going to school up there and the ratings were abyssmal.
to make fake bills with GWB's face on it ?
Just wait a few years and you'll be able to get the real thing. I hear it's next on the list after getting Emperor Reagan on the dime.
I really suspect that the reason this all took place in a private suite was because the "console" wasn't powering the demonstration at all.
Inviting a couple of journalists who spell "through" "threw" to a private showing of your device doesn't exactly inspire confidence. Did the author even get a chance to play a game on this system, or was he just watching things happen and assuming it was real?
I am also *very* suspicious of the alleged content distribution model. At first, the big gimmick was supposed to be that it would have thousands of games because it could play older PC titles. Now they're saying that it somehow streams the game content to avoid installation time. I don't buy it. There are only a tiny handful of games that are coded to work like this (e.g. Soul Reaver, Metroid Prime), and I seriously doubt that many publishers are willing to dust off their old source code to make the modifications necessary to support it.
I would almost be willing to bet money that this "prototype" was at best a regular PC in a fancy case made to look like it was doing what they claimed it could, and at worst was a plastic box with a blue LED that wasn't powering the demonstration at all.
But unfortunately, the space elevator will be so obscenely expensive in terms of resources and labour to get going in the first place
The Seattle company that's researching them gave a figure of something like 10-12 billion. That is really not that pricey for the access to space it would provide.
CueCat: Privacy-intrusive, shaped like a dildo so you could go fuck yourself with it, and run by a useless bloody looney who was first against the wall when the last tech revolution ended.
Yes, but now you can buy one on eBay for $5 and have a fully functional barcode scanner by using replacement drivers.
3 months before it's 1/2 as bright, and it's dead in 3 years.
I think you misread the article. It says:
"Typical plasma TVs have a life span of 20,000 to 30,000 hours, which equates to at least two years, three months of 24/7 usage before the TV fades to half the original brightness."
So first, it lasts 2 years and 3 months (27 months), and that's with it in use all of the time. 20,000 hours is ten thousand movies worth of viewing, which isn't bad. It's still less durable than I'd be interested in buying at the current price, but it's not the throwaway toy you made it out to be.
As for CRT TVs, my last one burned up on me (literally) while I was using it, so they don't last forever either.
How does that change the original poster's idea? If you can predict it about 9 months in advance, maybe you could do something to cause it to slip a little bit three times, producing three smaller earthquakes, rather than all at once producing one large earthquake.
You are still thinking in too large of a time frame. From the geology class I learned about this in, it would seem that the pressure is detectable for maybe a few minutes before the earthquake hits.