### So.... standing there in the MIDDLE of the story is not immersive?
It is not immersive, at least for me, because it lacks context. Why am I there? What is my mission? etc. You never get a proper answer and you don't have any way to have an interactive conversation with any of the NPCs to figure it out either. You run from 'shoot this' to 'shoot that' and almost never does it feel like any of that has a purpose. You don't fight your way to attack the Citadel, you simply end there at some point by pure coincidence (You where stuck in a Teleporter for a week, hey, the rebels almost won in the meantime... how lucky) and you get your super-weapon that way to.
And speaking about cutscenes in HL2, what I find especially annoying is that there is a *HUGE* cut between gameplay and cutscenes. Sure, it all happens in first person and the controls don't change, but the overall gameplay is totally different. Prescripted cutscene Alyx is clever and helpful, Mr. Nobody NPC, driven by AI and member of your squad is as stupid as a brick and requires a ton of babysitting. It feels totally different and it is often way to clear what part is 'shooting action' and which is '"interactive" cutscene'. That the game is completly linear of course destroys a lot of immersion as well, the game world is always a small corridor and never a place where you can freely navigate around.
How about XCom:UFO? Sure, you still have to defeat the final boss at the end and your scientific discoveries also add a bit of linearity to it, but that aside its a mindbogglingly awesome piece of game and has no visible linearity enforcing borders. You simply have the earth and some alien invaders and its your job is to protect earth. There are no preset missions, since all missions you get are the result of your own action (i.e. shoot down alien ship -> send ground troop to investigate; you build a base, aliens attack the base, its your job to defend it, so you literally build the very level you play in).
Other example would be EF2000, a flight simulator with a dynamic campaign. It is simply you against the Russians, there are no predefined events. It is a war simulation at work, you fly mission, you can plan missions and all that stuff. If you destroy a runway, it will take time to rebuild it, you can take over enemy runways and all that stuff. At any point in the game you can fly to wherever you want and do whatever you want.
I think one of the big problems with todays games is that they are far to focused on trying to tell a 'story' and babysit the player through each event instead of creating an environment and just let it play out. I absolutely don't mind a *good* linear story, but most games really don't have anything good to tell and would be much better of to create a dynamic environment instead. And before somebody mentioned GTA, yeah, thats less linear than say a Half Life 2, but it still fails to create an environment. It is a sandbox that gets reset all the time, your actions almost never have consequences. One second you are chased down by military, the next second you are free again and back to zero stars.
What games these days miss is that little bit of "Simcity" that brings you out of the main first person action and into a mode of strategic planing. When you tell the whole game from the protagonists perspective you are *very* limited in how large the environment can be and what consequences it can have. Which is why you have multiple modes in games like XCom, EF2000 or Syndicate. You don't just clean up the enemy in some first/third person shooting action, you also have the freedom to research weapons, plan your attacks and defenses, equip your team and all that stuff. Its a thing that can be found in quite a few old classics games, but almost never in current days blockbuster and that is quite sad as I would love to have the gameplay of a Gears of War or Full Spectrum Warrior combined with XComs strategic planing.
Games these days are to much nicely painted corridors and to little worlds that want to be experienced.
### why doesn't this point get hammered into the minds of the general public when Wikipedia is one of the most used online resources?
Because that is *NOT* how people use it. A lot of people, me included, use it to find information on topics that *aren't* to be found in an encyclopedia, the small barely notable details that anything printed on paper would never included (Pokemon details, TV episode summaries, etc). Wikipedia is not printed on paper and I really don't see any good reason why it should try to limit itself to a the standards of a paper encyclopedia, when that would do nothing good, but make Wikipedia completely uninteresting for a lot of people.
### Now, the problem is, what defines notability? I believe an example I saw given on Wikipedia was "will they still matter in 50 years?".
50 years is a *long* time, if you go by that measurement you could remove a ton of stuff. I think the measurement of notability should be far simpler: Are there people interested enough in the topic to write about it and are there people interesting enough to read about it? If so then its notable enough. I mean what is the point of letting people run into a blank page? How is that better then letting them getting the information they desire? Especially when the information already was there and is now being deleted? If Wikipedia would have huge issues with storage I might see a point, but that doesn't seem to be much of a problem right now.
I see absolutely no point in deleting stuff that isn't spam or vandalism, no matter how unimportant it might look to an outsider.
1) For the same reason that some people read their mail with Emacs. For a lot of people Word is their 'workspace', it is where they get their work done, which is why they continue it even non-text-processor uses (i.e. images, email, etc.). Sure, this doesn't lead to very portable results and can cause a lot of havoc down the line, but from an interface point of view it makes perfect sense. People simply don't think in terms of application boundaries and limits, so they easily end up with an inappropriate application for the job. It simply makes no sense to have one application for entering 'email text' and another for 'paper text', experienced users simply learned that an email is something different then a word document, for an inexperienced user on the other side both are virtually the same, since both display text on the screen, they might however wonder why the controls differ so much.
This is the reason why new interfaces approaches like Archy try to go away from having seperate applications and instead just having commands that work everywhere. Its really not much different then Emacs, which also happens to be at times more of a Lisp OS then a text editor.
2) Because Windows has a working Copy&Paste functionality that doesn't care so much about the format? Sure, the implementation might suck and have very negative consequences, but the idea of being able to just copy content to wherever you like to is great.
### Then I tried playing Halo 3 at a friend's house, and couldn't control my character well enough and got killed way too many times.
How about simply practicing a bit more? If other managed better, then its your lack of skill, not something that is fundamentally wrong with the controller.
Lightguns have been around for *decades*, its nice that the functionality now comes build into the core controller, but aiming at the screen is nothing new.
I completly disagree. Sure, people might be lazy, not bother to think and such, but thats not the problem, thats the way humans are, maybe not all, but a very large number of them and there is *no* chance to 'fix' that on a global scale. If you just blame the user you will never reach a good state when it comes to IT security.
Security talk is *way* to focused on rather irrelevant theoretical stuff, sure, it might be interesting when algorithm X is is now vulnerable to attack Y and Z, both of them however very unlikely in real life situations. What however gets easily missed is that 99.9% of the people don't encrypt their traffic with algorithm X in the first place, they don't encrypt at all, they send plain text and will continue to do so as long that is the default in their application and that is the problem that needs to be attacked.
I think the by far hugest problem of IT security is simply that it often has terrible usability implication. When you make the secure way hard and the insecure way easy, it is no surprise when the users go the easy root. Also computer systems are way to easy to break and violate even the simplest users expectation. Viewing an image is considered harmless, because in a well designed system it would be harmless. Not so on todays crap systems, thanks to buffer overflows and friends, clicking on an image is not so different then clicking on a exe. And such stupid issue go through all of todays systems, applications send plain text, passwords only obscure stuff, but don't encrypt it, system doesn't verify installed exes, system doesn't track tempering of files, users are forced to remember a new password for each and every webpage, etc. There are heap loads of issues that are just plain wrong on todays systems and most of them actually could be fixed without the user even noticing, but nobody seems to care about making security actually usable.
### Actually, no. What decides which ending you get is whether or not you join Bastila on at the roof of Rakatan temple.
Interesting, what was the good/evil score then for?
### Any significant decision in a game does, by definition, either increase/decrease some internal variable or set a flag, since otherwise it could not influence any future events and therefore not be significant.
The thing is that decisions shouldn't be 'good' or 'evil' and be messured on a 1D bar. If I help a group of people, the game should remember that I have helped those people and refer to it when I meat them again, not just do a 'good +1'. In KotoR a lot of stuff had basically no long term effect except changing your good/evil meter.
That said, not everything needs to have a long term effect, sometimes it is simply good to have options even so they do change nothing in the long run, it was one of the things that Fahrenheit did great. The whole story was completly linear, but you had a lot of 'micro-freedom', i.e. at one point you could hide a knife in a trashcan or just throw it to the ground, it didn't changed anything except the next scene when somebody else is searching for the knife (in both cases it was found), but it gave a great feel of interactivity, since the things you wanted to do often simply worked and there was much less of that "You can't do that"-feeling that you get in adventure games all to often, instead of focusing on puzzles the game focused on interactivity.
### and then you remember why you stopped playing in the first place, because the novelty eventually wore off
Well, yeah, that happens when you play the same game for 10 or 20 years, but it isn't the games fault and it doesn't mean that a similar new game wouldn't be as much fun as one of the old classics was 15 years ago.
And while at it, I doubt that I'd like to play many of todays games again in 10 or 20 years, since most likely they will already be superseded by a more advanced version of themselves. While on the the other side old classics often stand on their own without any game afterwards doing better what they did, they simply where unique.
Muybridge's work is still often used as reference these days, you'd guess that somebody managed to make some better pictures of running horses and stuff in the last 100 years, but nope, didn't happen.
Isn't Bioshock part of the problem instead of part of the solution? As much hype as the game has got, it is basically just System Shock all over again, just this time under water. It might still be cool and awesome, but it already was done before.
### In my very humble opinion, games have gone downhill ever since they moved from 2D to 3D
I wouldn't say that they have gone down hill completly, but they very definitvly changed a lot and a lot of stuff got lost along the lines. Mario64 for example is every bit as awesome as MarioBros3 was, but even so the basic topic is very similar, it is a completly different game. And no matter how many 3D jump'n runs you produce, they *never* will give you the same experience as 2D one. Not because they are bad or to complicated, but simply because they are a completly different kind of game.
The mistake that the publishers make is to completly ignore the fact that these are different kind of games, they think the 3D jump'n run has replaced the 2D one, but it hasn't. A 3D jump'n run isn't a better 2D jump'n run, it isn't a 2D game in the first place.
In part this is in part generation thing, since all the genres you learned to love just don't exist any more. It doesn't mean the games of today are bad, but different. I would still say that games have gone downhill, but not due to quality or fun, but due to lack of originality. Back in the days of C64 and Amiga there where tons of different genres, since all the developers could try out their cool new idea without all that much risk and much less dependency on the publishers. Today on the other side the publishers dictate the whole game and unless your game is very similar to last years big blockbuster it won't even get made in the first place. While with Steam, XBoxLive, WiiWare and friends there is some hope again for smaller games, its still a long way back to the varity of genres that we had 10-20 years ago.
Publishers aside, some of the problems might actually be due to the games themselves. 20 years ago people took inspiration for games mostly from real life, since there simply wasn't a backlog of 20 years of video games, today on the other side way to many gamers and developers have spend way to much time playing games, so their inspiration for new games comes often from old games. People can no longer think outside of the box, since they have spend the last 20 years playing in that box.
### Well, unlike other forms of art, video games have a final goal.
By far most of them have, but they don't actually have to have one or at least not just one. One of the things I liked in DeusEx2 or Fahrenheit was that while they did have multiple endings, none of them was clearly 'the good one', all of them had their pros and cons. In games like KotoR on the other side you are very limited in your decisions, because you only have 'good' and 'evil' decisions, so if you try to play the nice guy, there is often just one answer that makes sense from your characters point of view, while the other feels totally out of character. Now DeusEx2 and Fahrenheit still had a huge problem, namely that the ending basically depended upon only a single decision that you make a few minutes before the credits role, so all your doing for the last 10h hasn't had any influence on the ending. KotoR did it different in that all your 'good' and 'evil' decisions accumulated and your final score was what decided. While this means that all your doing actually matters, its still rather annoying, since again, instead of playing the story, you level up a 'good/evil' meter.
One of the games that got things right was Façade, there was no good/evil meter and no proper ending, instead you simply had the story that flows and you do your stuff and it ends one way or the other, without any of the endings actually being good or bad or under your instant control. Now of course Façade 'cheated' by being a very short game, but it was still a very nice showcase on what video games could be. Another example in that direction is The Last Express, while in terms of ending it didn't do much special, the gameplay was quite extraordinary in that it didn't bother all that much with what the player did. Instead it had a game world that was alive and moving, no matter if the player did something or not and I think this is a very important aspect.
Evoking emotions is hard, but I think a step that should come before it should be creating a believable game world. Most games today still fail horribly on that aspect, not just a little bit, they don't even bother try. In many FPS games when you killed all the monsters in a room and stop moving forward *nothing* happens. The game world simply comes to a full stop, it only moves forward when the player moves, it doesn't move on its own and that is a very effective way to destroy suspension of disbelieve.
What made Shadow of the Colossus great, beside other things, was that it followed this. Of course the game world didn't move on its own there, but that was because there simply was nothing in the game world that could move. All the respawning random monsters that you know from the next Zelda game simply weren't there, it was a empty wasteland and it felt 'alive' exactly because of that.
As long as games feature worlds that are 20 feet wide and leave no freedom and monsters that all look the same and don't have a live of their own its hard to feel with the world, since it just isn't real enough, it fails on to many basic concepts.
### For example, it's been recently revealed that the wii is LITERALLY an overclocked Gamecube,
This isn't exactly news, it was already clear on launch day and presumed to be so even month before that, after all the Wiimote started out as a add-on to the Gamecube and the early Wii devkits where in fact Gamecubes with a wired Wiimote. Now of course Nintendo isn't going to tell you that they are selling you the same thing that they already sold you five years earlier, only with a few more Mhz, a new controller and a $50 higher price. Instead they simply didn't tell you anything about the technical details and simply focused on the games and social aspects. Unlike previous consoles there never was 'facts sheet' for the Wii where you could read how many polygons it can output in a second and all that stuff like that. Things where always keep very blurry on technical details, but thats really all, they never claimed that the Wii could render super hires hdr yada graphics.
But as said, its one thing to not be upfront with rather unimportant implementation details and a completly different thing to sell customers broken hardware and doing little or nothing to fix the problems in a timely manner. Has any of the few resulting lawsuits actually reached anything so far?
And while we are at it, the whole XBox360 trouble also shows quite clearly a complete failure of the gaming press. Why don't they focus more on this issue? Ask the hard question in interviews and find out what is really going on? Its not just the hardware defects, but also things like the different DVD drives in XBox360, some presumably very loud, other do ok. Why do I have to collect those info myself on random blogs? Isn't that what the gaming press should be for?
None of them sounds like a 30% failure rate, it just happens that the consequences of failure where far more devastating then a RRoD which required the recall. Microsoft has a 30% failure rate and *hasn't* issued a recall, so all those XBox360s are still out their waiting to fail, with a little lack, they'll do it in the warranty period.
### They are businesses. Telling us bullshit is what they do best.
Telling random marketing bullshit is one thing and I agree, all of them are guilty of that. However what Microsoft did with the XBox360 wasn't just random marketing bullshit, it was knowingly sending customers boxes which where broken by design. Not just once, since this isn't just the RRoD issue, they did the same thing with the disc scratching issue. They denied it for half a year and only after some dutch game magazine did some testing, they did actually agree that there might be a problem. Of course they still haven't done anything to actually replace the broken DVD and if they actually fixed it once and for all, who knows?
The hardware design of the XBox360 is simply a complete cluster fuck. Its one thing to fuck up, its a very different thing to still after *TWO YEARS* not being able to deliver consoles that actually work as they originally should.
All that said, I do think the XBox360 is a great device, the games offering is great and it really looks like a device I would love to buy, but with its track record of failures I just can't justify to waste 350.
### The wii right now lacks two important things: a hard drive/large memory storage and DVD playback.
DVD playback is a software issue and could be easily fixed. Adding usb-storage via software would also fix any storage problems. One issue that likely needs a newer revision is lack of SDHC support, SD cards are getting very cheap these days, but without SDHC support the Wii is restricted to only 2GB cards. Also there is lack of support for using SD cards equally to the internal storage, which makes it only good for backup, but not real use.
### It's not "guessing" at all, it's the logical conclusion to draw from the fact that the chips had detached from the motherboard due to overheating and weaker solder.
Yeah, but how then did it take Microsoft way over a year to figure that one out and (maybe) fix it? Nobody knows the failure rate of currently released XBox360s and plenty of those that Microsoft had 'repaired' after they broke, broke again a while later.
### If you're waiting on Microsoft to admit they did something wrong to believe they did something wrong, then you'll be waiting a long time.
When Microsoft would want to sell a few more boxes they better start to be honest to the user. I am just a little sick of them telling us bullshit over and over again. Any word on when they will fix the DVD scratching issue that has been their for now almost two years (sorry, but blaming the user is *not* the right thing to do when a pair of rubber pads could fix it)?
I am still waiting for an official announcement on what the problems exactly were, how they fixed them and when they fixed them. At the moment its all third-party guessing as to what Microsoft is up to.
I have played both of Half Life and Half Life 2 and while they have a tiny bit of story, its really for most part a joke. You never learn much if anything about the whole backstory, never learn anything about the G-Man, HL2 doesn't even have a proper ending and there are way to many other holes. Its for most part a set of events that drives you from one horde of aliens to the next and gives you more cannon fodder, but it really does little else. Heck, for by far most part of the game you don't even follow anything even close to a proper mission, instead just ran from point A to B because your transporter malfunctioned and just while the rebellion starts out your are stuck in a teleporter and miss it all. Its kind of like there is a story, but whenever the interesting stuff happens you suddenly aren't around to see it.
What Half Life 2 has is an interesting way to tell a story, the story it tells has however way to many plot holes to be satisfying and the shooting part is way to disconnected from the story to make a fulfilling experience (i.e. its way to clear when you have a 'interactive' cutscene and when you are running and shooting, with only a tiny few exceptions).
### HTML, your role as a presentation-agnostic information medium has come to an end.
Come to an end? Was HTML actually *ever* presentation agnostic? Sure, it should have been, but was that actually ever a case for any webpage or browser for that matter? Every webpage that has more then a bit of and
in it always depends heavily on the device and with CSS things seems to have gotten even worse, since now something as simply as a large font setting will wreak havoc to the layout and lead to a lot of overlapping and thus unreadable text.
The lack of presentation-agnostic really isn't anything new, but has been there for well over a decade.
Slashdot Mirror
### So.... standing there in the MIDDLE of the story is not immersive?
It is not immersive, at least for me, because it lacks context. Why am I there? What is my mission? etc. You never get a proper answer and you don't have any way to have an interactive conversation with any of the NPCs to figure it out either. You run from 'shoot this' to 'shoot that' and almost never does it feel like any of that has a purpose. You don't fight your way to attack the Citadel, you simply end there at some point by pure coincidence (You where stuck in a Teleporter for a week, hey, the rebels almost won in the meantime... how lucky) and you get your super-weapon that way to.
And speaking about cutscenes in HL2, what I find especially annoying is that there is a *HUGE* cut between gameplay and cutscenes. Sure, it all happens in first person and the controls don't change, but the overall gameplay is totally different. Prescripted cutscene Alyx is clever and helpful, Mr. Nobody NPC, driven by AI and member of your squad is as stupid as a brick and requires a ton of babysitting. It feels totally different and it is often way to clear what part is 'shooting action' and which is '"interactive" cutscene'. That the game is completly linear of course destroys a lot of immersion as well, the game world is always a small corridor and never a place where you can freely navigate around.
How about XCom:UFO? Sure, you still have to defeat the final boss at the end and your scientific discoveries also add a bit of linearity to it, but that aside its a mindbogglingly awesome piece of game and has no visible linearity enforcing borders. You simply have the earth and some alien invaders and its your job is to protect earth. There are no preset missions, since all missions you get are the result of your own action (i.e. shoot down alien ship -> send ground troop to investigate; you build a base, aliens attack the base, its your job to defend it, so you literally build the very level you play in).
Other example would be EF2000, a flight simulator with a dynamic campaign. It is simply you against the Russians, there are no predefined events. It is a war simulation at work, you fly mission, you can plan missions and all that stuff. If you destroy a runway, it will take time to rebuild it, you can take over enemy runways and all that stuff. At any point in the game you can fly to wherever you want and do whatever you want.
I think one of the big problems with todays games is that they are far to focused on trying to tell a 'story' and babysit the player through each event instead of creating an environment and just let it play out. I absolutely don't mind a *good* linear story, but most games really don't have anything good to tell and would be much better of to create a dynamic environment instead. And before somebody mentioned GTA, yeah, thats less linear than say a Half Life 2, but it still fails to create an environment. It is a sandbox that gets reset all the time, your actions almost never have consequences. One second you are chased down by military, the next second you are free again and back to zero stars.
What games these days miss is that little bit of "Simcity" that brings you out of the main first person action and into a mode of strategic planing. When you tell the whole game from the protagonists perspective you are *very* limited in how large the environment can be and what consequences it can have. Which is why you have multiple modes in games like XCom, EF2000 or Syndicate. You don't just clean up the enemy in some first/third person shooting action, you also have the freedom to research weapons, plan your attacks and defenses, equip your team and all that stuff. Its a thing that can be found in quite a few old classics games, but almost never in current days blockbuster and that is quite sad as I would love to have the gameplay of a Gears of War or Full Spectrum Warrior combined with XComs strategic planing.
Games these days are to much nicely painted corridors and to little worlds that want to be experienced.
### why doesn't this point get hammered into the minds of the general public when Wikipedia is one of the most used online resources?
Because that is *NOT* how people use it. A lot of people, me included, use it to find information on topics that *aren't* to be found in an encyclopedia, the small barely notable details that anything printed on paper would never included (Pokemon details, TV episode summaries, etc). Wikipedia is not printed on paper and I really don't see any good reason why it should try to limit itself to a the standards of a paper encyclopedia, when that would do nothing good, but make Wikipedia completely uninteresting for a lot of people.
### Now, the problem is, what defines notability? I believe an example I saw given on Wikipedia was "will they still matter in 50 years?".
50 years is a *long* time, if you go by that measurement you could remove a ton of stuff. I think the measurement of notability should be far simpler: Are there people interested enough in the topic to write about it and are there people interesting enough to read about it? If so then its notable enough. I mean what is the point of letting people run into a blank page? How is that better then letting them getting the information they desire? Especially when the information already was there and is now being deleted? If Wikipedia would have huge issues with storage I might see a point, but that doesn't seem to be much of a problem right now.
I see absolutely no point in deleting stuff that isn't spam or vandalism, no matter how unimportant it might look to an outsider.
1) For the same reason that some people read their mail with Emacs. For a lot of people Word is their 'workspace', it is where they get their work done, which is why they continue it even non-text-processor uses (i.e. images, email, etc.). Sure, this doesn't lead to very portable results and can cause a lot of havoc down the line, but from an interface point of view it makes perfect sense. People simply don't think in terms of application boundaries and limits, so they easily end up with an inappropriate application for the job. It simply makes no sense to have one application for entering 'email text' and another for 'paper text', experienced users simply learned that an email is something different then a word document, for an inexperienced user on the other side both are virtually the same, since both display text on the screen, they might however wonder why the controls differ so much.
This is the reason why new interfaces approaches like Archy try to go away from having seperate applications and instead just having commands that work everywhere. Its really not much different then Emacs, which also happens to be at times more of a Lisp OS then a text editor.
2) Because Windows has a working Copy&Paste functionality that doesn't care so much about the format? Sure, the implementation might suck and have very negative consequences, but the idea of being able to just copy content to wherever you like to is great.
### Then I tried playing Halo 3 at a friend's house, and couldn't control my character well enough and got killed way too many times.
How about simply practicing a bit more? If other managed better, then its your lack of skill, not something that is fundamentally wrong with the controller.
It is added realism, a real gun doesn't automatically stay in place either.
Lightguns have been around for *decades*, its nice that the functionality now comes build into the core controller, but aiming at the screen is nothing new.
I completly disagree. Sure, people might be lazy, not bother to think and such, but thats not the problem, thats the way humans are, maybe not all, but a very large number of them and there is *no* chance to 'fix' that on a global scale. If you just blame the user you will never reach a good state when it comes to IT security.
Security talk is *way* to focused on rather irrelevant theoretical stuff, sure, it might be interesting when algorithm X is is now vulnerable to attack Y and Z, both of them however very unlikely in real life situations. What however gets easily missed is that 99.9% of the people don't encrypt their traffic with algorithm X in the first place, they don't encrypt at all, they send plain text and will continue to do so as long that is the default in their application and that is the problem that needs to be attacked.
I think the by far hugest problem of IT security is simply that it often has terrible usability implication. When you make the secure way hard and the insecure way easy, it is no surprise when the users go the easy root. Also computer systems are way to easy to break and violate even the simplest users expectation. Viewing an image is considered harmless, because in a well designed system it would be harmless. Not so on todays crap systems, thanks to buffer overflows and friends, clicking on an image is not so different then clicking on a exe. And such stupid issue go through all of todays systems, applications send plain text, passwords only obscure stuff, but don't encrypt it, system doesn't verify installed exes, system doesn't track tempering of files, users are forced to remember a new password for each and every webpage, etc. There are heap loads of issues that are just plain wrong on todays systems and most of them actually could be fixed without the user even noticing, but nobody seems to care about making security actually usable.
### Actually, no. What decides which ending you get is whether or not you join Bastila on at the roof of Rakatan temple.
Interesting, what was the good/evil score then for?
### Any significant decision in a game does, by definition, either increase/decrease some internal variable or set a flag, since otherwise it could not influence any future events and therefore not be significant.
The thing is that decisions shouldn't be 'good' or 'evil' and be messured on a 1D bar. If I help a group of people, the game should remember that I have helped those people and refer to it when I meat them again, not just do a 'good +1'. In KotoR a lot of stuff had basically no long term effect except changing your good/evil meter.
That said, not everything needs to have a long term effect, sometimes it is simply good to have options even so they do change nothing in the long run, it was one of the things that Fahrenheit did great. The whole story was completly linear, but you had a lot of 'micro-freedom', i.e. at one point you could hide a knife in a trashcan or just throw it to the ground, it didn't changed anything except the next scene when somebody else is searching for the knife (in both cases it was found), but it gave a great feel of interactivity, since the things you wanted to do often simply worked and there was much less of that "You can't do that"-feeling that you get in adventure games all to often, instead of focusing on puzzles the game focused on interactivity.
### and then you remember why you stopped playing in the first place, because the novelty eventually wore off
Well, yeah, that happens when you play the same game for 10 or 20 years, but it isn't the games fault and it doesn't mean that a similar new game wouldn't be as much fun as one of the old classics was 15 years ago.
And while at it, I doubt that I'd like to play many of todays games again in 10 or 20 years, since most likely they will already be superseded by a more advanced version of themselves. While on the the other side old classics often stand on their own without any game afterwards doing better what they did, they simply where unique.
Muybridge's work is still often used as reference these days, you'd guess that somebody managed to make some better pictures of running horses and stuff in the last 100 years, but nope, didn't happen.
Isn't Bioshock part of the problem instead of part of the solution? As much hype as the game has got, it is basically just System Shock all over again, just this time under water. It might still be cool and awesome, but it already was done before.
### In my very humble opinion, games have gone downhill ever since they moved from 2D to 3D
I wouldn't say that they have gone down hill completly, but they very definitvly changed a lot and a lot of stuff got lost along the lines. Mario64 for example is every bit as awesome as MarioBros3 was, but even so the basic topic is very similar, it is a completly different game. And no matter how many 3D jump'n runs you produce, they *never* will give you the same experience as 2D one. Not because they are bad or to complicated, but simply because they are a completly different kind of game.
The mistake that the publishers make is to completly ignore the fact that these are different kind of games, they think the 3D jump'n run has replaced the 2D one, but it hasn't. A 3D jump'n run isn't a better 2D jump'n run, it isn't a 2D game in the first place.
In part this is in part generation thing, since all the genres you learned to love just don't exist any more. It doesn't mean the games of today are bad, but different. I would still say that games have gone downhill, but not due to quality or fun, but due to lack of originality. Back in the days of C64 and Amiga there where tons of different genres, since all the developers could try out their cool new idea without all that much risk and much less dependency on the publishers. Today on the other side the publishers dictate the whole game and unless your game is very similar to last years big blockbuster it won't even get made in the first place. While with Steam, XBoxLive, WiiWare and friends there is some hope again for smaller games, its still a long way back to the varity of genres that we had 10-20 years ago.
Publishers aside, some of the problems might actually be due to the games themselves. 20 years ago people took inspiration for games mostly from real life, since there simply wasn't a backlog of 20 years of video games, today on the other side way to many gamers and developers have spend way to much time playing games, so their inspiration for new games comes often from old games. People can no longer think outside of the box, since they have spend the last 20 years playing in that box.
### Well, unlike other forms of art, video games have a final goal.
By far most of them have, but they don't actually have to have one or at least not just one. One of the things I liked in DeusEx2 or Fahrenheit was that while they did have multiple endings, none of them was clearly 'the good one', all of them had their pros and cons. In games like KotoR on the other side you are very limited in your decisions, because you only have 'good' and 'evil' decisions, so if you try to play the nice guy, there is often just one answer that makes sense from your characters point of view, while the other feels totally out of character. Now DeusEx2 and Fahrenheit still had a huge problem, namely that the ending basically depended upon only a single decision that you make a few minutes before the credits role, so all your doing for the last 10h hasn't had any influence on the ending. KotoR did it different in that all your 'good' and 'evil' decisions accumulated and your final score was what decided. While this means that all your doing actually matters, its still rather annoying, since again, instead of playing the story, you level up a 'good/evil' meter.
One of the games that got things right was Façade, there was no good/evil meter and no proper ending, instead you simply had the story that flows and you do your stuff and it ends one way or the other, without any of the endings actually being good or bad or under your instant control. Now of course Façade 'cheated' by being a very short game, but it was still a very nice showcase on what video games could be. Another example in that direction is The Last Express, while in terms of ending it didn't do much special, the gameplay was quite extraordinary in that it didn't bother all that much with what the player did. Instead it had a game world that was alive and moving, no matter if the player did something or not and I think this is a very important aspect.
Evoking emotions is hard, but I think a step that should come before it should be creating a believable game world. Most games today still fail horribly on that aspect, not just a little bit, they don't even bother try. In many FPS games when you killed all the monsters in a room and stop moving forward *nothing* happens. The game world simply comes to a full stop, it only moves forward when the player moves, it doesn't move on its own and that is a very effective way to destroy suspension of disbelieve.
What made Shadow of the Colossus great, beside other things, was that it followed this. Of course the game world didn't move on its own there, but that was because there simply was nothing in the game world that could move. All the respawning random monsters that you know from the next Zelda game simply weren't there, it was a empty wasteland and it felt 'alive' exactly because of that.
As long as games feature worlds that are 20 feet wide and leave no freedom and monsters that all look the same and don't have a live of their own its hard to feel with the world, since it just isn't real enough, it fails on to many basic concepts.
### For example, it's been recently revealed that the wii is LITERALLY an overclocked Gamecube,
This isn't exactly news, it was already clear on launch day and presumed to be so even month before that, after all the Wiimote started out as a add-on to the Gamecube and the early Wii devkits where in fact Gamecubes with a wired Wiimote. Now of course Nintendo isn't going to tell you that they are selling you the same thing that they already sold you five years earlier, only with a few more Mhz, a new controller and a $50 higher price. Instead they simply didn't tell you anything about the technical details and simply focused on the games and social aspects. Unlike previous consoles there never was 'facts sheet' for the Wii where you could read how many polygons it can output in a second and all that stuff like that. Things where always keep very blurry on technical details, but thats really all, they never claimed that the Wii could render super hires hdr yada graphics.
But as said, its one thing to not be upfront with rather unimportant implementation details and a completly different thing to sell customers broken hardware and doing little or nothing to fix the problems in a timely manner. Has any of the few resulting lawsuits actually reached anything so far?
And while we are at it, the whole XBox360 trouble also shows quite clearly a complete failure of the gaming press. Why don't they focus more on this issue? Ask the hard question in interviews and find out what is really going on? Its not just the hardware defects, but also things like the different DVD drives in XBox360, some presumably very loud, other do ok. Why do I have to collect those info myself on random blogs? Isn't that what the gaming press should be for?
None of them sounds like a 30% failure rate, it just happens that the consequences of failure where far more devastating then a RRoD which required the recall. Microsoft has a 30% failure rate and *hasn't* issued a recall, so all those XBox360s are still out their waiting to fail, with a little lack, they'll do it in the warranty period.
30% failure rate != 100% failure rate, but that seems to hard for some people to understand...
Which other company has ever managed to produce a 30% failure rate?
### They are businesses. Telling us bullshit is what they do best.
Telling random marketing bullshit is one thing and I agree, all of them are guilty of that. However what Microsoft did with the XBox360 wasn't just random marketing bullshit, it was knowingly sending customers boxes which where broken by design. Not just once, since this isn't just the RRoD issue, they did the same thing with the disc scratching issue. They denied it for half a year and only after some dutch game magazine did some testing, they did actually agree that there might be a problem. Of course they still haven't done anything to actually replace the broken DVD and if they actually fixed it once and for all, who knows?
The hardware design of the XBox360 is simply a complete cluster fuck. Its one thing to fuck up, its a very different thing to still after *TWO YEARS* not being able to deliver consoles that actually work as they originally should.
All that said, I do think the XBox360 is a great device, the games offering is great and it really looks like a device I would love to buy, but with its track record of failures I just can't justify to waste 350.
### The wii right now lacks two important things: a hard drive/large memory storage and DVD playback.
DVD playback is a software issue and could be easily fixed. Adding usb-storage via software would also fix any storage problems. One issue that likely needs a newer revision is lack of SDHC support, SD cards are getting very cheap these days, but without SDHC support the Wii is restricted to only 2GB cards. Also there is lack of support for using SD cards equally to the internal storage, which makes it only good for backup, but not real use.
### It's not "guessing" at all, it's the logical conclusion to draw from the fact that the chips had detached from the motherboard due to overheating and weaker solder.
Yeah, but how then did it take Microsoft way over a year to figure that one out and (maybe) fix it? Nobody knows the failure rate of currently released XBox360s and plenty of those that Microsoft had 'repaired' after they broke, broke again a while later.
### If you're waiting on Microsoft to admit they did something wrong to believe they did something wrong, then you'll be waiting a long time.
When Microsoft would want to sell a few more boxes they better start to be honest to the user. I am just a little sick of them telling us bullshit over and over again. Any word on when they will fix the DVD scratching issue that has been their for now almost two years (sorry, but blaming the user is *not* the right thing to do when a pair of rubber pads could fix it)?
### Microsoft has already done this.
I am still waiting for an official announcement on what the problems exactly were, how they fixed them and when they fixed them. At the moment its all third-party guessing as to what Microsoft is up to.
I have played both of Half Life and Half Life 2 and while they have a tiny bit of story, its really for most part a joke. You never learn much if anything about the whole backstory, never learn anything about the G-Man, HL2 doesn't even have a proper ending and there are way to many other holes. Its for most part a set of events that drives you from one horde of aliens to the next and gives you more cannon fodder, but it really does little else. Heck, for by far most part of the game you don't even follow anything even close to a proper mission, instead just ran from point A to B because your transporter malfunctioned and just while the rebellion starts out your are stuck in a teleporter and miss it all. Its kind of like there is a story, but whenever the interesting stuff happens you suddenly aren't around to see it.
What Half Life 2 has is an interesting way to tell a story, the story it tells has however way to many plot holes to be satisfying and the shooting part is way to disconnected from the story to make a fulfilling experience (i.e. its way to clear when you have a 'interactive' cutscene and when you are running and shooting, with only a tiny few exceptions).
Come to an end? Was HTML actually *ever* presentation agnostic? Sure, it should have been, but was that actually ever a case for any webpage or browser for that matter? Every webpage that has more then a bit of and
in it always depends heavily on the device and with CSS things seems to have gotten even worse, since now something as simply as a large font setting will wreak havoc to the layout and lead to a lot of overlapping and thus unreadable text.
The lack of presentation-agnostic really isn't anything new, but has been there for well over a decade.