Plenty of RPGs, for example Gothic2 to name one, you can kill whoever you like in that game, but if somebody notices you while doing it, a horde of bystanders will hunt you down and not leave you much of a chance to survive, game over, you have to restart from your last save. Metal Gear to name another one, while the punishment is little (lower rank in the end screen), it encourages non-lethal actions against the enemy. In America's Army you land in jail when shooting people at the training and there are probally some more, however, the main reason why many games don't punish you, is simply because they often don't even allow such actions in the first place, bystanders will run away in time, you race on a racetrack not in the mid of the city, you fight a war against another army on a battlefield, not gang battle in mid of the city, you are only up against zombies who are already dead, civilians are unvulnurable, etc.
GTA on the other side encouraged plenty of illegal behaviour, yes, the cops you might fight in some missions might be evil and actions against them might be justified by the story, however there is no justification as far as I know in terms of story for running over dozens or hundreds of civilians, stealing their cars, killing them for money and stuff like that, it simply happens as natural cause of the gameplay and their is no way to escape that unless by refusing to play the game. Yeah, I know you can steal a Taxi or Police car, but that gives you a single boring 2min long mission, not a full 30h game, beside that, even as police you have to kill the person you are hunting.
If he made that computer, and required that his end users download a kernel.org kernel signed by Linus in order for his computer to operate, he would be in the clear, as would his end users (since they aren't copying any GPLed work, the provisions don't have to apply). This situation would make RMS slightly unhappy, since the end user isn't free to modify his computer's software, but it's perfectly legal according to the terms of the GPL v3.
How exactly would that be legal under GPLv3? GPLv3 states:
The Corresponding Source also includes any encryption or authorization keys necessary to install and/or execute modified versions from source code...
If the keys are not provided and needed to install and execute modified versions that looks like a clear violation to me.
Frankly, I think the GTA series makes a sincere attempt at showing that actions have consequences
A day in jail is not what I call "consquences" for running over 20 civilians with a car, shooting half a dozen police man and whatever (that is, if the police catches you at all), its a joke nothing more. GTA has absolutly no long term consequenzes for criminal actions, no Game Over, no nothing, your star count gets reset and everything is back to normal.
Even though the 3D games are lovely and well designed and feature expansive worlds, too often its obvious that these aren't worlds, they're carefully designed levels, sculpted hand in hand with the powerups made available.
Fully agree on that one, its one of the things that extremly dissapointed me in the 3D Metroids, while most of the 2D one weren't much better in that regart, its a lot easier to suspend disbelieve in 2D then it is in 3D. Prime always felt like Theme Park ride, not like an alien world, it lacked any substance and realism, no freedom, respawing enemies, forced level structure (no opening of that door unless you shoot with a wave beam against it...) and other annoyances.
The first Metroid on the other side was freedom in all its brutality, the player was dropped into an alien world and that was it, no map, no hand holding, no nothing, just you and a world full of non-friendly enemies. I would really wish that Nintendo would do a Metroid game in the sprit of the first one again, something that focuses on a realistic apearing alien world and challanges that can be conquered in creative ways, something that feels like really being there and less like a typical Nintendo game. Maybe something like an outerspace OperationFlashpoint, were you simply get your mission goal and thats pretty much it, how you reach that goal is fully up to you and not limited by forced level structure.
The Gamer's Quarter, issue 4 had a pretty good article on what changed from the first Metroid to the later ones.
All the mysteriy stuff asside, the main reason why Samus is a girl might be simply because Metroid is as far as I know inspired by the movie Alien and that featured a female hero as well.
What I do to solve this problem is simple, pick a few reviews were a game scored high and also read a few reviews where the same game scored pretty low. Comparing both the high reviews with the low ones gives a pretty good view of the strong and week points of a game, much better then any single reviewer could ever get.
Parents will do what they're going to do anyway, and most of the time it will be buying children these games, just like they watch rated R movies with them.
Well, good so, isn't that exactly the point? By forbidding minors to buy certain games themself, you force them to involve their parents or at least another grown up, sounds like a perfectly good reason for making ESRB mandatory. The only throuble I see with mandatory enforment of ratings is what happens with all the freeware games, do they need a rating too? Or would they be save since they are distributed via internet most of the time anyway.
Assuming equivalent levels of progress, then maybe another 20 years...
Quite possible, the thing is just being able to render one scenerio in a almost photo realistic fashion, doesn't mean that you are able to render everything in photo realistic fashion. Doing some rendering of one human in-door is a different beast then rendering an army of thousands of soldiers in a gigantic landscape, doing the first one in a "close to Final Fantasy look" should be quite doable in this generation, doing the second might easily take another console generation or two. There are of course other issues, like something that looks photorealistic from a meter away, might not look all that realistic if you move really really close and fixing that might again need a lot of time and additional CPU power, since it requires switching from photo textures to procedural stuff. So yeah, in the end, getting really really close to reality might take 20 years, but in limited normal gameplay (ie. normal distance from objects, instead of poking the nose into the wall) situation I expect almost photorealism quite a bit earlier.
Half-Life 2 is the "problem", not the "solution", there is nothing in Half-Life 2 that behaves remotly realistic. It might be closer to real physic behaviour then a MarioBros, but really not that much, weight, speed and other parameters for example are still totally wrong and gravity gun doesn't really help to make the scene any more believable. Destructive environments are also almost non existant and stuff life that. The physics in Half-Life 2 make some interesting new gameplay, but add little to nothing to the realism. As a worst case scenario just look at some speed runs of Half-Life 2 and try to replicate that movement in reality, just won't work, humans simply don't move that way.
why do people keep saying that games are near photrealistic?
Because we are pretty close to photorealism, just look at
this (GT on PS2) or that (Crysis). Its not quite photorealism, but already pretty close and those are games either already out or to come out in a few month, a late PS3 game or XBox360 game might look quite a bit better, not even mentioning what PS4 or XBox720 will be capable of. However this is just photorealism, as in non-moving images, where the realism falls apart is soon as you add motion into the mix. The reason that Oblivion didn't really look as good as it was supposed to wasn't the rendering, but the character animation and unrealistic physic engine, you don't want stuff to slide on the ground and enemy just falling to ground with a generic die animation, completly ignoring the sword hit you have them, things just don't work like that in real life. Neither does a car get a scratch in the paint when you drive it with 200mph against a wall. In many first person shooters the player doesn't even use his arms to climb a ladder. Its all stuff like that were even the most realistic graphics fall completly apart. Now I don't know if those physics and animation problems will be solve to a reasonable degree in this console generation or in the next, but in terms of pure rendering photo realism is really quite close and Final Fantasy movie quality rendering is something I definitvly expect in this console generation.
That said there are of course also effects that are not do able in realtime and probally won't for quite a while, like caustics for example, however since most of them can be faked, aproximated or simply avoided it will probally make little difference to the realism of realtime rendering.
Metal Gear Solid just looks freakin awesome on the PS3 that it almost made me cry when I saw the demo videos.
Wouldn't worry to much about Metal Gear Solid, if PS3 tanks we will see ports of it to other consoles very quickly and even if it doesn't, ports to other consoles are still quite likly. MetalGear2 already has an XBox version and MetalGear1 a Gamecube one, so MetalGear4 on XBox360 or Wii isn't that far of a stretch.
Then the camera sucks. That's not a problem of 3D, it's a problem with a specific game.
The fundamental problem is that you can't represent a 3D image on a 2D screen without loss of information. If you have a gap infront of you and a block further away it is impossible in a 3D game to tell exactly how far away it is, the only way to get the distance is by guessing. Simple example, how far do you guess are those blocks away from each other. Aproximatly 2 block sizes you might guess? Close, but totally wrong, lets enable shadows and look from it from another perspective. Woops, its actually a smaller block on the left and in the air, not an equally sized infront of the player. Now, this is an artificial example, but such situations happen all the time in 3D games, restrictive level design (don't just change platform sizes without giving clear hints, limit jumping puzzles to a streight line whereever possible, etc.) and a player controlled camera can help a bit, but it can't make the problem go away. Same is true for enemies, if you have an enemy infront of you the camera might be able to give a clear view, but if you have one behind you, one infront, one on your left and one on your right, the camera has a problem. Often you will also have plenty of level geometry inbetween you and the camera. Again there are solutions which will lessen the problem, but you can't make it go away completly. In 2D on the other side its very simply, the most complicated thing you might ever need is to zoom out, but beside from that everything is always in crystal clear view, no obscuring, no perspectivic problems, nothing, every distance can be messured down to the exact pixel count, in 3D that is simply not possible with a camera that stays attached to the player.
Sure: "And where, in premiere racing titles like 'Forza Motorsport' and 'Gran[] Turismo,' licensing deals with automakers ensure that no real damage modeling will ever dirty up their precious automobiles, 'Burnout' uses generic cars that steadily fall to pieces as you race."
Well, thats not exactly a source, just some guy writing a review repeating this urban legend, which I have seen a lot, but I have yet to see some first hand interview with a developer or even better automaker detailing what exactly is allowed and what isn't. There have been racing games in the past with both destructable vehicles and licensed cars, so I simply doubt that claim.
Blame trademark and copyright owners. Superstar drivers' racing teams ask too much money for licensing the drivers' names and likenesses.
Its not about the names, I don't care if I can drive M. Schuhmacher or S. Muhmacher, even so of course the former would be preferable over an obviously obscured name. What I care about is authenticity of the situation, if I drive against a wall, the car should be badly damaged and the driver be injured, I want to see a red flag, an ambulance, a crane getting the vehicle off the track, etc., if I win a race I want a champagne shower, not just cutscene, but gameplay, if I push the gas to early I want to get disqualified and stuff like that.
The thing that bothers me with todays games is that they lack interactivty, I don't want to my gas-pedal to be locked till the green light occurses, I don't want to being forced to replay a track because I didn't came in first, I don't want the race to stop instantly when I am across the finish line. I want to play the race from start to finish, with almost everything inbetween, if that means being able to walk around the pit lane if I have a few five minutes, giving interviews to the press and driving the car myself into the pitlane and not being autopiloted so be it.
Now somebody might intervene that there is no challange in walking around the pit lane, yes thats true, but thats exactly the point. Todays games are all about predefined challange and winning and not about *playing*, there is no 'win' in playing with LEGO, so why should computer games be so obsessed with winning, where is the play? I had tons of fun with games like F/A 18 Interceptor, EF2000, Falcon4 or Indy500, not because I won, but because was able to played with them, flying around trying to lang on an aircraft carrier the wrong way around, lading a plane with engine off, lading a heavily damaged plane, trying to crash as many cars in one go as possible and whatever comes to mind can be *extremly* fun, because its stuff you do because you want to, not because the game forces you to do it.
The automakers license the car logos and designs to the game publishers on the condition that the cars are drawn with less damage than they would have in real life,
Does anybody have a source for this claim? I hear that a lot, but half the time its probally an outright lie because the programmers simply were to lazy to implement a proper damage model or any damage model at all.
Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Dig Dug, Mario Brothers, Pengo, Bump-n-Jump... All fantastic games which are still fun to play today.
Are they? I am not so sure about that, might be just me 'cause I grew up with the C64 and NES and so got used to "deeper" games early on, but none of the games you listed there would hold me for longer then 5 or 10 minutes. I mean Pac-Man has three ghost, a lot of dots to eat and exactly one level, after 5mins (well, a few seconds actually) I have seen it all. DonkeyKong isn't much better either, 5 levels if I remember correctly, in a few minutes you should be through to them all, Mario Brother again one level, but with changing enemies, not exactly exciting. Now I am not saying that the gameplay of those games is bad, it isn't, but on the content side they are really extremly thin, very few levels, very few enemies and endless gameplay without a real start or end, since everything looks the same anyway, the only thing that ever changes is your highscore and about highscores I have never cared.
But if you went back and played it today, chances are you wouldn't bother playing past the second level.
Well, I did bother to play it for the first time ever a few month ago and had plenty of fun with it. After I was through with Castlevania1 I continued with Castlevania3 and yet again had plenty of fun with it. There was absolutly no nostalgia involved, since I never happen to play those games before, I only ever played Castlevania Adventures on Gameboy and hated that pretty much back then (just way to slow). Similar things have happened with Metroid and plenty of other games. Those old games are still good to this day. Only real exceptions are games that were all about GFX, which often simply can't stand the test of time, especially 3d gfx of yesterday can sometimes look incredible ugly today, but thats a different story.
The thing one has to remember is that you can't get the experience of the past days back exactly the way it was. You won't talk with your friends for weeks and month about an up coming NES game, you won't talk about puzzles and impossible to fight bosses, secrets and stuff, since cheats and walkthroughs are easily available today, every question you might have about a game is solved in a minute of googling, while in the old days some questions could stay mistery for years or decades. Instead if you today play a game released 10-20 years ago its just you and the game, no media buzz, no friends playing through the same game at the same time, etc. If you can accept that the experience of consuming a old game today will be different then it was back in the day due to all the surrounding factors, you however will still get a very good experience, not a 20h gameplay one, since most old games can be finished in an hour or two, but still a very satisfing one.
That said, I have nothing against todays games, there are quite a lot that I love (Katamary, SotC, PoP:Sands of Time, Tomb Raider Legend, Dreamfall,...), however I am still quite a bit angry at the game industry, not because it delivers bad games (well, sometimes it does), but because it doesn't deliver the games I would have hoped for. Where is my current day X-Wing-like game or Strike Commander? Better graphics, more realism and simply overall improved? Not available, instead of that the "soft" flight-sim genre has died out almost completly, we are stuck with some arcadey shoot'em ups (all most all not even featuring a cockpit perspective) and Microsoft Flightsimulator, everything inbetween simply faded away. Same with games like MechWarrior. The adventure genre also disappear, it didn't really die out completly, but what game in the last year is up to the quality of what LucasArts released back in the day? And heck, where have my videos with real actors gone? I know, sometimes a CGI character can do a better job, but I still miss Wing Commander and friends. Last not least there are also many concept that never really have been realized, in old flightsims or racing games you very often had a lot of surrounding 'simulated', if you ejected over enemy territory you got caputured, if you crashed hard into a wall you got brought into a hospital by an ambulance and stuff, all this was just a static picture with little or no gameplay relvance, but it gave those games personality which is often completly lacking in todays games. In flight games you can't even eject, neither start or land manually today and in racing games you end up driving a nobody, have often no remotly real damage model (200mph against brick wall != scratch in the paint) and there simply isn't any surrounding simulated at all.
I don't know, maybe its just me, but I do miss Origin, Bullfrog, Micropose and the LucasArts of the old days, a lot. Their games where awesome and provided an experince which little of today comes close to, not so much because todays games are worse, but simply because they are quite different.
That's why I don't use Cedega. I've already paid for the games, and if I have to spend MORE money to play them
Sad thing is that native ports don't help here much either, basically all native ports so far, except those very few that shiped with Linux binary on Windows game CD (how many games are that two or three?), have come out month or years after the windows release, so at the time when you can actually buy game like X2 for Linux it cost you 50EUR, while the Windows version is at the same time already available for as low as 5EUR. Linux gaming still has a long way to go before it actually gets attrative, at the moment its really in 'life-support' stage, games are there, but expensive and late, good for some people with only Linux, but everybody which has a chance to dual boot, will do just that.
This is absoultely the worst idea. Better to write your favorite company and tell them to use some open and standard technologies (e.g., OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL, etc.).
You know, games happen to be on the bleeding edge quite often, portable code on the other side is seldomly bleeding edge and lacks support for essential new stuff (how long did it took to get render-to-texture in OpenGL compared to DirectX?). No big deal if you don't care about latest and greatest, game companies and plenty of gamers however do. So the choice isn't "DirectX" vs "OpenGL", but "DirectX" vs "DirectX and OpenGL", since they don't want to cripple a Windows version just because there might also be a Linux and Mac one. In turn this would simply mean additional work for porting games, which simply wouldn't make them enough money to bother about it, which is why they simply don't do it.
### maybe it's frustration with too hard puzzles, maybe other reasons...
At least in europe adventure games never really died out, especially today the genre is quite alive an well (Dreamfall, BrokenSword, BlackMirror, TonyThough, MomentOfSilence, Runaway, The Westener, etc.), it doesn't get the media buzz like a HalfLife2, but there are plenty of good games around to buy. The thing that however changed was LucasArts, they happend to push out one awesome game out after the other on a yearly basis, most of them still legendary to this day and that simply is no longer the case. After LucasArts stopped producing adventure games there simply didn't came any other developer that reached its quantity or quality. The games that are around are still good, but far to seldomly they reach the greatness of LucasArts and even if they do (like I would say Longest Journey did), they miss a good amount of the crazy humor of the LucasArts games, most adventure games these days have a far more serious tone then back then.
I don't consider the pointer-function of the Wii controller that important, adventure games like Grim, Dreamfall or BrokenSword3 already play great with a controller, so there is little need to go back to point&click control, as long as games are created with a controller in mind, control isn't an issue and never really was.
However, the Wii controler goes bejoint just being a mouse-like pointer, the Wiimote is basically a 3D-mouse and that opens the door for a whole new way to do adventure games. Imagine an adventure game where you don't click "open door", but where you yourself step infront of the door, touch the door nob and push the door open, all with full 3d controls and feedback via rumble and sound, like the Wiimote offers. Penumbra (freeware PC game) did something like that by only using the mouse and TraceMemory on the DS also had some puzzles based on direct 'touching' of objects and even so when those changes might seem tiny from the outside they give a much greater feel for the game, since stuff doesn't just happen automatically, but the player itself is the one manipulating the world.
The actors will play along for a while, but their performances will lose authority because audiences will feel their performances were "enhanced" with computer aid.
No idea how the general movie going public feels about it, but for me the actor is pretty damn unimportant to a movie, its the action, story and the characters in the movie that matters. The actor simply happens to be the person that plays the character, but I don't really care about him any more then I do care about the person that does the lighting or camera work. The reason why I might visit a movie with a specifc actor isn't because I want to see that actor give a good performance, but because I know that that actor happens to mostly play in specific kinds of movies, ie. if I liked one Schwarzenegger action move, there is a reasonable chance that I might like the next one as well. So I don't really care if there was digital tampering or not, what I care about is that the movie as a whole works and as long as the tampering actually improves the movie and doesn't look awefully fake, then I don't have a problem with it, quite the oposite.
There are of course movements that want to get away from any tampering in movies, like Dogma95, but I don't expect them to ever play a larger role in the mainstream movies.
Well, yes, you are right there are not "no games" under Linux, the throuble is there are only very few games under Linux. All the games you list are multiple years old, sometimes even a decade, and half of them happens to be done by id which is one of the very few Linux friendly game companies around. And the rest of the games kind of got more or less crippeled on its way (NWN came out half a year late, no editor, some throuble with videos, etc. when I remember correctly).
So in the end, yes, there are games on Linux, however in five years you get as much new releases under Linux as you see in the Windows world in a week or two, which really brings the state of Linux games very close to "no games". The sad thing is that it hasn't really gotten any better, five years ago we where stuck with a few first person shooters, today we still are, just with a few updated ones.
I have a little and simple rsync-backup script that does basically the same: runs every day,
What Microsoft has here, assuming that it is implemented well, doesn't need to 'run' to backup stuff, its implemented at the filesystem level and instead of backuping it simply doesn't overwrite old stuff, so you end up having *full* versioning of all your writes, not just every 1h, every 24h or every week, eveything you ever writen gets a versioned copy and be it just one second apart.
Simple. Elegant. Transparent.
And perfectly useless for work done in the last 24h...
Don't get me wrong I have an rsync job running here as well, but what Microsoft has here is both much more reliable as well as faster and more space saving (thanks to only needing to save changed blocks, not whole files).
Nobody is *forcing* you to accept products with DRM. Nobody is *forcing* you to buy a Tivo.
You don't get it, I *WANT* to buy a Tivo (or gameconsole, or DVD player, or whatever), it is however impossible to buy those without some sort of DRM attached, since there aren't similar DRM free devices in the market. The only choice is to not buy them, that however invalidates my choice to buy a device with their capabilities in the first place. Now of course GPLv3 won't stop those devices, but it will at least make sure that no GPLv3 code ends up on those devices.
Slashdot Mirror
Plenty of RPGs, for example Gothic2 to name one, you can kill whoever you like in that game, but if somebody notices you while doing it, a horde of bystanders will hunt you down and not leave you much of a chance to survive, game over, you have to restart from your last save. Metal Gear to name another one, while the punishment is little (lower rank in the end screen), it encourages non-lethal actions against the enemy. In America's Army you land in jail when shooting people at the training and there are probally some more, however, the main reason why many games don't punish you, is simply because they often don't even allow such actions in the first place, bystanders will run away in time, you race on a racetrack not in the mid of the city, you fight a war against another army on a battlefield, not gang battle in mid of the city, you are only up against zombies who are already dead, civilians are unvulnurable, etc.
GTA on the other side encouraged plenty of illegal behaviour, yes, the cops you might fight in some missions might be evil and actions against them might be justified by the story, however there is no justification as far as I know in terms of story for running over dozens or hundreds of civilians, stealing their cars, killing them for money and stuff like that, it simply happens as natural cause of the gameplay and their is no way to escape that unless by refusing to play the game. Yeah, I know you can steal a Taxi or Police car, but that gives you a single boring 2min long mission, not a full 30h game, beside that, even as police you have to kill the person you are hunting.
How exactly would that be legal under GPLv3? GPLv3 states:
If the keys are not provided and needed to install and execute modified versions that looks like a clear violation to me.
Fully agree on that one, its one of the things that extremly dissapointed me in the 3D Metroids, while most of the 2D one weren't much better in that regart, its a lot easier to suspend disbelieve in 2D then it is in 3D. Prime always felt like Theme Park ride, not like an alien world, it lacked any substance and realism, no freedom, respawing enemies, forced level structure (no opening of that door unless you shoot with a wave beam against it...) and other annoyances.
The first Metroid on the other side was freedom in all its brutality, the player was dropped into an alien world and that was it, no map, no hand holding, no nothing, just you and a world full of non-friendly enemies. I would really wish that Nintendo would do a Metroid game in the sprit of the first one again, something that focuses on a realistic apearing alien world and challanges that can be conquered in creative ways, something that feels like really being there and less like a typical Nintendo game. Maybe something like an outerspace OperationFlashpoint, were you simply get your mission goal and thats pretty much it, how you reach that goal is fully up to you and not limited by forced level structure.
The Gamer's Quarter, issue 4 had a pretty good article on what changed from the first Metroid to the later ones.
What I do to solve this problem is simple, pick a few reviews were a game scored high and also read a few reviews where the same game scored pretty low. Comparing both the high reviews with the low ones gives a pretty good view of the strong and week points of a game, much better then any single reviewer could ever get.
Because we are pretty close to photorealism, just look at this (GT on PS2) or that (Crysis). Its not quite photorealism, but already pretty close and those are games either already out or to come out in a few month, a late PS3 game or XBox360 game might look quite a bit better, not even mentioning what PS4 or XBox720 will be capable of. However this is just photorealism, as in non-moving images, where the realism falls apart is soon as you add motion into the mix. The reason that Oblivion didn't really look as good as it was supposed to wasn't the rendering, but the character animation and unrealistic physic engine, you don't want stuff to slide on the ground and enemy just falling to ground with a generic die animation, completly ignoring the sword hit you have them, things just don't work like that in real life. Neither does a car get a scratch in the paint when you drive it with 200mph against a wall. In many first person shooters the player doesn't even use his arms to climb a ladder. Its all stuff like that were even the most realistic graphics fall completly apart. Now I don't know if those physics and animation problems will be solve to a reasonable degree in this console generation or in the next, but in terms of pure rendering photo realism is really quite close and Final Fantasy movie quality rendering is something I definitvly expect in this console generation.
That said there are of course also effects that are not do able in realtime and probally won't for quite a while, like caustics for example, however since most of them can be faked, aproximated or simply avoided it will probally make little difference to the realism of realtime rendering.
Its not about the names, I don't care if I can drive M. Schuhmacher or S. Muhmacher, even so of course the former would be preferable over an obviously obscured name. What I care about is authenticity of the situation, if I drive against a wall, the car should be badly damaged and the driver be injured, I want to see a red flag, an ambulance, a crane getting the vehicle off the track, etc., if I win a race I want a champagne shower, not just cutscene, but gameplay, if I push the gas to early I want to get disqualified and stuff like that.
The thing that bothers me with todays games is that they lack interactivty, I don't want to my gas-pedal to be locked till the green light occurses, I don't want to being forced to replay a track because I didn't came in first, I don't want the race to stop instantly when I am across the finish line. I want to play the race from start to finish, with almost everything inbetween, if that means being able to walk around the pit lane if I have a few five minutes, giving interviews to the press and driving the car myself into the pitlane and not being autopiloted so be it.
Now somebody might intervene that there is no challange in walking around the pit lane, yes thats true, but thats exactly the point. Todays games are all about predefined challange and winning and not about *playing*, there is no 'win' in playing with LEGO, so why should computer games be so obsessed with winning, where is the play? I had tons of fun with games like F/A 18 Interceptor, EF2000, Falcon4 or Indy500, not because I won, but because was able to played with them, flying around trying to lang on an aircraft carrier the wrong way around, lading a plane with engine off, lading a heavily damaged plane, trying to crash as many cars in one go as possible and whatever comes to mind can be *extremly* fun, because its stuff you do because you want to, not because the game forces you to do it.
Does anybody have a source for this claim? I hear that a lot, but half the time its probally an outright lie because the programmers simply were to lazy to implement a proper damage model or any damage model at all.### I'd just like to point out for you all the previous prices for Sony consoles: PS2 release -> $600
h istory
You might be thinking about an imported PS2 or live in some kind of parallel universe, but official PS1 and PS2 prices weren't even close to $600:
US$299.99 (October 26, 2000, Launch Price)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2#Price_
Launch price in the American market: US$ 299.00
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation
Well, I did bother to play it for the first time ever a few month ago and had plenty of fun with it. After I was through with Castlevania1 I continued with Castlevania3 and yet again had plenty of fun with it. There was absolutly no nostalgia involved, since I never happen to play those games before, I only ever played Castlevania Adventures on Gameboy and hated that pretty much back then (just way to slow). Similar things have happened with Metroid and plenty of other games. Those old games are still good to this day. Only real exceptions are games that were all about GFX, which often simply can't stand the test of time, especially 3d gfx of yesterday can sometimes look incredible ugly today, but thats a different story.
The thing one has to remember is that you can't get the experience of the past days back exactly the way it was. You won't talk with your friends for weeks and month about an up coming NES game, you won't talk about puzzles and impossible to fight bosses, secrets and stuff, since cheats and walkthroughs are easily available today, every question you might have about a game is solved in a minute of googling, while in the old days some questions could stay mistery for years or decades. Instead if you today play a game released 10-20 years ago its just you and the game, no media buzz, no friends playing through the same game at the same time, etc. If you can accept that the experience of consuming a old game today will be different then it was back in the day due to all the surrounding factors, you however will still get a very good experience, not a 20h gameplay one, since most old games can be finished in an hour or two, but still a very satisfing one.
That said, I have nothing against todays games, there are quite a lot that I love (Katamary, SotC, PoP:Sands of Time, Tomb Raider Legend, Dreamfall, ...), however I am still quite a bit angry at the game industry, not because it delivers bad games (well, sometimes it does), but because it doesn't deliver the games I would have hoped for. Where is my current day X-Wing-like game or Strike Commander? Better graphics, more realism and simply overall improved? Not available, instead of that the "soft" flight-sim genre has died out almost completly, we are stuck with some arcadey shoot'em ups (all most all not even featuring a cockpit perspective) and Microsoft Flightsimulator, everything inbetween simply faded away. Same with games like MechWarrior. The adventure genre also disappear, it didn't really die out completly, but what game in the last year is up to the quality of what LucasArts released back in the day? And heck, where have my videos with real actors gone? I know, sometimes a CGI character can do a better job, but I still miss Wing Commander and friends. Last not least there are also many concept that never really have been realized, in old flightsims or racing games you very often had a lot of surrounding 'simulated', if you ejected over enemy territory you got caputured, if you crashed hard into a wall you got brought into a hospital by an ambulance and stuff, all this was just a static picture with little or no gameplay relvance, but it gave those games personality which is often completly lacking in todays games. In flight games you can't even eject, neither start or land manually today and in racing games you end up driving a nobody, have often no remotly real damage model (200mph against brick wall != scratch in the paint) and there simply isn't any surrounding simulated at all.
I don't know, maybe its just me, but I do miss Origin, Bullfrog, Micropose and the LucasArts of the old days, a lot. Their games where awesome and provided an experince which little of today comes close to, not so much because todays games are worse, but simply because they are quite different.
### maybe it's frustration with too hard puzzles, maybe other reasons...
At least in europe adventure games never really died out, especially today the genre is quite alive an well (Dreamfall, BrokenSword, BlackMirror, TonyThough, MomentOfSilence, Runaway, The Westener, etc.), it doesn't get the media buzz like a HalfLife2, but there are plenty of good games around to buy. The thing that however changed was LucasArts, they happend to push out one awesome game out after the other on a yearly basis, most of them still legendary to this day and that simply is no longer the case. After LucasArts stopped producing adventure games there simply didn't came any other developer that reached its quantity or quality. The games that are around are still good, but far to seldomly they reach the greatness of LucasArts and even if they do (like I would say Longest Journey did), they miss a good amount of the crazy humor of the LucasArts games, most adventure games these days have a far more serious tone then back then.
I don't consider the pointer-function of the Wii controller that important, adventure games like Grim, Dreamfall or BrokenSword3 already play great with a controller, so there is little need to go back to point&click control, as long as games are created with a controller in mind, control isn't an issue and never really was.
However, the Wii controler goes bejoint just being a mouse-like pointer, the Wiimote is basically a 3D-mouse and that opens the door for a whole new way to do adventure games. Imagine an adventure game where you don't click "open door", but where you yourself step infront of the door, touch the door nob and push the door open, all with full 3d controls and feedback via rumble and sound, like the Wiimote offers. Penumbra (freeware PC game) did something like that by only using the mouse and TraceMemory on the DS also had some puzzles based on direct 'touching' of objects and even so when those changes might seem tiny from the outside they give a much greater feel for the game, since stuff doesn't just happen automatically, but the player itself is the one manipulating the world.
No idea how the general movie going public feels about it, but for me the actor is pretty damn unimportant to a movie, its the action, story and the characters in the movie that matters. The actor simply happens to be the person that plays the character, but I don't really care about him any more then I do care about the person that does the lighting or camera work. The reason why I might visit a movie with a specifc actor isn't because I want to see that actor give a good performance, but because I know that that actor happens to mostly play in specific kinds of movies, ie. if I liked one Schwarzenegger action move, there is a reasonable chance that I might like the next one as well. So I don't really care if there was digital tampering or not, what I care about is that the movie as a whole works and as long as the tampering actually improves the movie and doesn't look awefully fake, then I don't have a problem with it, quite the oposite.
There are of course movements that want to get away from any tampering in movies, like Dogma95, but I don't expect them to ever play a larger role in the mainstream movies.
So in the end, yes, there are games on Linux, however in five years you get as much new releases under Linux as you see in the Windows world in a week or two, which really brings the state of Linux games very close to "no games". The sad thing is that it hasn't really gotten any better, five years ago we where stuck with a few first person shooters, today we still are, just with a few updated ones.
Don't get me wrong I have an rsync job running here as well, but what Microsoft has here is both much more reliable as well as faster and more space saving (thanks to only needing to save changed blocks, not whole files).