All I know about St. Anger so far is that they've put 2 songs on the radio that sound like they *almost* put together a good album, and then stuck that almost good album up someone's ass (I'm thinkin Lars more than likely), followed by a rusty needle, and recorded it from the output of that rusty needle, in Lars' ass.
Or something like that.
I'd download the songs on the album, but every other song I try to download from the album turns out to be The Thing That Should Not Be or a song from some other band (ie NSync).
Or I could listen to 30 second clips of the songs from their website between bad interview clips.
In Europe, metal especially, may do pretty well, but I wouldn't say it's throughout Europe or even doing extremely well.
http://www.nuclearblast.de/entry.html
is the list of every chart entry for Nuclear Blast records.
The majority of chart entries are in Germany, Finland, and Sweden. There are none in the UK and only a couple in the US. Metal Blade are probably fairly similar (though they have a couple of bands that are more pop-oriented, and they are definitely owned by an RIAA label), as are many other metal labels (Earache, Roadrunner, etc).
I think the main difference may be the way radio is setup, and that may not be as big of a difference as one would expect.
That's exactly how I felt. I've been totally out-of-step with the music being pushed for the last few years. I was thinking, maybe I just got old. Then I realized, I'm just 22 right now...
I realized I was out of touch with the music industry when I was about 13, but they at least threw me a bone once in a while. Over the last 12 years those little bones have been fewer and further between. I've picked up one CD that I heard songs from on the radio in the last 3 years, whereas in the last year I've picked up about 20 CDs from bands I saw in concert, either at the concert (when the CDs were available) or after the fact in local stores. The vast majority of those 20 CDs were on independant/non-RIAA labels, and that still represents a drop in the number of CDs/month I buy (used to be ~60/year). Oh, and 2 of those bands used to be on RIAA labels, but moved to independant labels for their newest release.
I know the article mentiones Justin Timberlake, but maybe another part is that the British are not being forcefed the same shit that we Americans are.
The UK top 20 charts don't look that much different from the US top 20 charts. Whether any of us like it or not, the top 20 is where the majority of sales are made (hmm... maybe that's why they're the top 20).
They are making real music decisions, and buying real music.
I think one of the big differences is that the RIAA's numbers tend to be RIAA sales. No one in the US really keeps track of the sales of independant labels. I'm not sure how the UK system works, or where the numbers came from for that article. If there was an increase in independant sales in the US, it wouldn't show up on the normal sales figures the RIAA quotes, and it wouldn't be to their benefit to quote them anyway.
One British band whose new CD you're going to want? IRON MAIDEN.
You might have thought Iron Maiden was washed up long ago, but that's quite contrary to the truth. I've gotten my filthy hands on their new Dance of Death release a bit early, and I can say that these guys are firing on all cylinders.
We shall see, but afaik they're still on an RIAA label for US distribution, so I probably wouldn't even have known they had a new album coming out if you hadn't mentioned it.
Whereas the classic American metal band, "Metallica", put out absolute slop this year, Britain's best put out a classic. For any metalheads out there, try to find Montsegur on Maiden's new album. WOW.
Metallica's been putting out slop for years, where have you been? There are plenty of metal albums out there for people that really care about the music without worrying about whether or not Metallica or Iron Maiden are going to manage to hack one out this time around.
Point is, if the Europeans are sticking to their own music, then that might be another reason why more people buy it. Europeans know better than this Linkin Park Metallica bizkit garbage.
They're buying just as much of that garbage as Americans are, unfortunately.
The video game industry should really promote itself and it's workers better. Sure, the big companies like EA get promoted well, but the actual people never do.
If you read a good book, you might go out and look for more books by that same author, you don't really care about who published it. The same (should) go for video games, if you like a game by a certain design team/programmer you should be able to easly figure out who they are so you can seek out more of the same.
The primary push for advertising and promotion in the industry comes from the publishers, who put out most of the money for those things. If said publisher promotes the developer of a game rather than just the game itself, then when that developer jumps ship for some reason, they've just given free advertising to whatever company hired him. This is why the only time you see a developer's name right up front seems to be when that developer has already made a name for himself, and is releasing a new game (ie Carmack, Romero, Sid Meier, etc. (sorry if I mispelled someone's name)), sometimes for a new/different company than their previous games are associated with.
This is why so many people confuse Valve as a Sierra company, or their software as being developed by Sierra, because Sierra does the publishing and puts out most of the advertising, even though Valve is a completely independant developer.
There were some great late era NES and Super NES games, but nobody was paying attention anymore when they came out.
Those games were largely due to the fact that Nintendo was a little behind in bringing out their next-generation consoles in both cases (ie the SNES was well behind the Turbo Grafx-16 and the Genesis, the N64 was introduced shortly before the PSX really took off, though the PSX had been in the market for quite a while). When the hardware starts showing it's age because newer hardware is available, the games can sometimes turn things around.
Unfortunately, a lot of those NES and SNES games were only really possible on those consoles because of the cartridge format and the ability to embed new hardware in the cartridge (ie sound and video pre-processors were embedded in the game cartridges to give better graphics and sound to games on old consoles). This just isn't possible with the current consoles because, obviously, it's a little hard to put a usable circuit board or a chip on an optical disc with the game content.
Then that's a different situation: using content (or renders of content) that are not used in the game itself. All of the GT3 stuff I've seen is either the intro footage (which obviously is not the game engine) or shots of in-game rendering, which uses the same content (or older content in some cases, which usually looks worse) as the game itself.
Showing off models as they were rendered before putting them into the game and finding out that the game couldn't handle it, and trying to pass them off as in-game renders, is just not right.
What's the difference if it's still rendered in the game engine, though? The replay scenes in GT3 are still rendered by the game engine.
The only difference is the HUD and, in the case of GT, the interior of the cars. On racing games I have a tendency to turn off the interior view. In FPS games how much modification I do to the HUD is dependant on how it looks, but if something really bugs me I'll change it, rather than suffering with it, and seeing it beforehand isn't really going to change that.
Frankly, I see no reason to upgrade to an Xbox or PS2, because all the latest games that I've wanted (GTA3/VC) are available on the PC (which work beautifully with my Radeon 9500 Pro), and as far as the PS2 goes, the only advantage I've seen of it over my Dreamcast is that it has full scene anti-aliasing.
The Dreamcast has super sampling anti-aliasing and native support of 640x480 resolution for viewing on a PC monitor (though you need a VGA adapter, and not all games support it). That's part of why Soul Calibur 2 on the XBox/GameCube/PS2 doesn't look much better than Soul Calibur on the DreamCast to most people. Generally the 640x480 resolution doesn't support anti-aliasing because it's the image that the anti-aliasing would normally use to create the anti-aliased TV image.
I like the statement that console sales will be down 10% in 2005, which just happens to be the year that most estimates have already stated the next generation of Nintendo and MS consoles will be along (and probably the PS3 as well).
How much work does it really take to assume that this generation's consoles' sales will decrease in the year that most people assume the next generation's consoles will arrive?
I think the only way it's really a deal for anyone is if you're the type of person that plays a game maybe once or twice for a couple weeks, and then puts it down. If you only do this about 5 times and don't let the monthly fee recur on you, then it's probably worthwhile (though if you can't keep your saved game info, then it might not, depending on the kind of person you are).
Alternatively, if Valve can manage to ship 3 full games a year that are actually worth full price ($150), then you're getting a good deal by spending $10/month. Of course, waiting for Valve to release TF2 is the rough equivalent of waiting for DNF.
Personally, if HL2 is really worth paying anything for, I'd rather have a box. I don't play CS, expansions can be hit or miss, and I'm not going to gamble on TF2's release date any more.
A less useful statistic is the simple numbers: Half-Life sold how many million copies? Number of people that play Half-Life online: ~60,000
Although the 60,000 are different people at any given time, and new people start every once in a while and old people stop every once in a while, it still can't add up to the number of people that bought the game. In fact, it'd be amazing if half the people that own a copy of Half-Life have played online.
hmm it didn't ship with my Voodoo 2. It shipped with something else I bought, either a sound card or possibly a TNT card, which I bought after I already had Half-Life. I ran HL on the Voodoo 2 cards until I got a TNT2Ultra, though, because the TNT wasn't quite good enough to replace them at 1024x768.
TF2 was supposed to come out 4 years ago, I don't see why anyone would pay a subscription hoping for it's release now.
I won't buy CS2, so it doesn't even figure into my equation for the cost of subscription vs. retail box.
So, HL2 (I might buy it) + TF2 = $100 or subscribe, and keep paying as long as I play TF2 = $120/year.
Given that I've waited since 1998 for TF2, I think I'll wait a bit longer, and maybe even wait for reviews on it, too, given that they could make quite a mess of things.
It's already been stated that the subscription gives you access to all Valve games & mods (HL1/OpFor/BlueShift/TFC/CS) as well as future games and mods (TF2/CS2/HL3?)
Most of us already have HL1 uncrippled by Steam. After all, it sold quite well, I believe I have 3 copies somewhere. I also bought OpFor, and TFC and CS are free. I could probably buy another copy of HL w/ another copy of Op4, and a copy of Blue Shift for $15.
I bought my first copy of HL because TF2 was going to be a free mod for it, and they said it might even ship in the box. That went out the door about 2 months after HL shipped. I'm not going to pay them $10/month until they manage to put together a game they said they would have out 4 years ago, just because it gives me access to a bunch of content I already have and a new game that I'm not even going to buy until it gets a handful of unbiased reviews.
I usually keep my cfg files zipped up on my ISP-provided website so I can get them whenever I need to (also because people occasionally ask for them). In theory if I needed to play on someone else's computer I could just download them, but considering the fact that I can't use a mouse to save my life (well, maybe if I swung it around and hit someone with it), I probably wouldn't bother.
in-house betas rarely find balance issues because they're too limited in scope and usually handled by people that have already played the game at some earlier point. In other words, the players already have certain expectations for the game. You need people with a fresh perspective to find balance problems in a game, and with the nature of a game like Diablo 2, it would really only take a week or so with a fairly limited public beta to find a lot of the issues they found after release.
I used to work for VU on the games side before and during the 'merger'. People went over two years alright. I can't say for sure that it happened on a first title but it definitely happened.
I'm sure it does happen quite a bit, but first titles would normally be removed from that particular developer or the developer would be reshuffled (ie the name stay the same but the people change), assuming the title isn't just canned.
When we visited one particular developer's office (nameless naturally) all they'd really achieved in two years was a 12 page promotional booklet and a pathetic amount of research. Although the reverse of the wallchart behind the pool table showed a pretty hectic tournament history...;-)
Fortunately, Valve actually had a working game, they just scrapped it and started over to rework the engine and give it more capabilities to help tell the story.
What happened to the Havas involvement in Middle Earth? What happened to Bablyon 5? What happened to WON.net? Dig around a little and you'll soon see that the list of tragedies within VU is considerable and apparently ever-growing.
I definitely know that, I was keeping pretty close tabs on a lot of things that were going on in the various development houses Sierra was publishing back in the same time frame shortly after Half-Life was released. Another big one would be the crap pulled on Dynamix (the developer of Tribes and Tribes 2).
My sympathies are with Blizzard. I know exactly what the 'VU uncertainty factor' feels like. At least whatever happens they no longer have to put up with Jean Marie Messier [expatica.com]. And I hope for their sake that they'll be sold to a group under better management.
Blizzard certainly has enough name recognition in the industry to survive something like this, it's just a question of whether or not the company that gets ahold of them will let them continue, or will buy them just for the name(s).
I didn't say they made any sense, just said that's what they said;p
The only people that really know are Valve and the company that was porting it to the Mac. Either way, Sierra only knows what Valve told them, more than likely.
Of course, if I had a camera in my phone, I couldn't take it with me to work. At best I'd have to leave it in my car. So, not only would the camera render my phone useless 8 hours out of the day, but I'd have a camera that wasn't quite as useful to me as a stand-alone camera would be.
Then again, they haven't said anything about all of those little USB memory sticks yet, I'm just waiting for them to kick all of the people with those out of the building.
iirc, the Dreamcast had a proprietary-format ROM (GD-ROM, 1GB disc), but since the system could also read CD-ROM formats, that's what most developers used. Burning a GD-ROM would've required a fairly expensive burner, but since it also required extra cost on the developer's end, and multiple-CD titles worked fine, it didn't slow most pirates down a bit.
Regardless of how omniscient you would like game developers to be, they are often underestimating the ability of several thousand rabid gamers, and to what extents a player will go to in order to gain an advantage of edge. No amount of testing can simulate the hundreds of man hours of play that goes into each game week of an online game.
You're right, except for one thing: Blizzard did an extremely limited beta test for Diablo 2 which was only meant to test battle.net. They ignored gameplay and hardware issues and even ignored many of the network problems they had with the test (which was several orders of magnitude smaller than the launch, though held on far fewer servers to simulate the loads). Their first nerf was in the first patch, which came out very shortly after the game was released. It wouldn't have taken much testing for something like that to show up, though they may underestimate the level of a problem in testing. Their major gameplay problems (as is the case in many of these games) was not so much that certain things were over-powered as that certain things were underpowered, to the point of uselessness. When people ignored those things, they found ways to make them useful in limited situations, but that doesn't really fix the problem. The things that seemed overpowered were nerfed, and overall the game stagnates at certain levels. I still enjoy it occasionally, but they didn't make the best choices with it.
This article discusses Blizzard, and yet the biggest names they cite to leave Blizzard were part of Blizzard North (Diablo fame). There's several games and companies under the VU standard, including 2 or 3 MMO's. There doesn't seem to be an issue with someone buying Blizzard, there seems to be an issue with VU using them as a carrot to sell off the rest of their gaming unit.
Well, the main issue is that Blizzard doesn't even know if they're being sold off with the unit. The fact that Blizzard can make up 25% of the profits of the unit when they only shipped an expansion should make them a huge carrot for anyone looking to buy, but then most would probably just try to get Blizzard and leave the rest in the dust (or maybe one or two other pieces to get some of Sierra's publishing deals and titles, for instance). The bulk of what VU is selling is crap, but there is some incentive for a company that's willing to fire a lot of people and dissolve a couple of companies for their assets, as much as we all hate to see that sort of thing happen. As for Blizzard, anyone that's willing to break them up or sell them off has some issues, but then it's understandable when a company like VU that's focused in completely different areas doesn't understand how games can fit into their overall company.
So you bought a game console because of 2 currently released titles and you're saying the GameCube doesn't have anything?
hmmm...
Granted, I bought my PS2 because of Tekken, GT3, and Final Fantasy, but those aren't even the games I currently play on it (well, Final Fantasy 2, but I could've played that on my PS1). I probably won't be buying FFXI (MMO, no thanks), and might wait for FFX-2 and FFXII to drop in price a bit (or maybe wait for a US release of FFIII, if that's ever going to happen), because I have a lot of other games to play at the moment and FFX was not a high point for the series.
As for the GBA needed for FF:CC, I already have a GBA and GBA-SP (actually bought the GBA after the SP, but that's a twisted story, and it was cheap), and plan to buy another SP next paycheck (the black ones are coming out on the 9th and I want to have one I don't have to compete with my girlfriend over playing, I'll probably trade in the non-SP towards it). Not to mention FF:Tactics Advance coming out on the 8th.
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All I know about St. Anger so far is that they've put 2 songs on the radio that sound like they *almost* put together a good album, and then stuck that almost good album up someone's ass (I'm thinkin Lars more than likely), followed by a rusty needle, and recorded it from the output of that rusty needle, in Lars' ass.
Or something like that.
I'd download the songs on the album, but every other song I try to download from the album turns out to be The Thing That Should Not Be or a song from some other band (ie NSync).
Or I could listen to 30 second clips of the songs from their website between bad interview clips.
err I should've said has the list, apparently the frames got me or something
t s. htm
http://www.nuclearblast.de/blastcrew/blast_char
In Europe, metal especially, may do pretty well, but I wouldn't say it's throughout Europe or even doing extremely well.
http://www.nuclearblast.de/entry.html
is the list of every chart entry for Nuclear Blast records.
The majority of chart entries are in Germany, Finland, and Sweden. There are none in the UK and only a couple in the US. Metal Blade are probably fairly similar (though they have a couple of bands that are more pop-oriented, and they are definitely owned by an RIAA label), as are many other metal labels (Earache, Roadrunner, etc).
I think the main difference may be the way radio is setup, and that may not be as big of a difference as one would expect.
That's exactly how I felt. I've been totally out-of-step with the music being pushed for the last few years. I was thinking, maybe I just got old. Then I realized, I'm just 22 right now...
I realized I was out of touch with the music industry when I was about 13, but they at least threw me a bone once in a while. Over the last 12 years those little bones have been fewer and further between. I've picked up one CD that I heard songs from on the radio in the last 3 years, whereas in the last year I've picked up about 20 CDs from bands I saw in concert, either at the concert (when the CDs were available) or after the fact in local stores. The vast majority of those 20 CDs were on independant/non-RIAA labels, and that still represents a drop in the number of CDs/month I buy (used to be ~60/year). Oh, and 2 of those bands used to be on RIAA labels, but moved to independant labels for their newest release.
I know the article mentiones Justin Timberlake, but maybe another part is that the British are not being forcefed the same shit that we Americans are.
The UK top 20 charts don't look that much different from the US top 20 charts. Whether any of us like it or not, the top 20 is where the majority of sales are made (hmm... maybe that's why they're the top 20).
They are making real music decisions, and buying real music.
I think one of the big differences is that the RIAA's numbers tend to be RIAA sales. No one in the US really keeps track of the sales of independant labels. I'm not sure how the UK system works, or where the numbers came from for that article. If there was an increase in independant sales in the US, it wouldn't show up on the normal sales figures the RIAA quotes, and it wouldn't be to their benefit to quote them anyway.
One British band whose new CD you're going to want? IRON MAIDEN.
You might have thought Iron Maiden was washed up long ago, but that's quite contrary to the truth. I've gotten my filthy hands on their new Dance of Death release a bit early, and I can say that these guys are firing on all cylinders.
We shall see, but afaik they're still on an RIAA label for US distribution, so I probably wouldn't even have known they had a new album coming out if you hadn't mentioned it.
Whereas the classic American metal band, "Metallica", put out absolute slop this year, Britain's best put out a classic. For any metalheads out there, try to find Montsegur on Maiden's new album. WOW.
Metallica's been putting out slop for years, where have you been? There are plenty of metal albums out there for people that really care about the music without worrying about whether or not Metallica or Iron Maiden are going to manage to hack one out this time around.
Point is, if the Europeans are sticking to their own music, then that might be another reason why more people buy it. Europeans know better than this Linkin Park Metallica bizkit garbage.
They're buying just as much of that garbage as Americans are, unfortunately.
The video game industry should really promote itself and it's workers better. Sure, the big companies like EA get promoted well, but the actual people never do.
If you read a good book, you might go out and look for more books by that same author, you don't really care about who published it. The same (should) go for video games, if you like a game by a certain design team/programmer you should be able to easly figure out who they are so you can seek out more of the same.
The primary push for advertising and promotion in the industry comes from the publishers, who put out most of the money for those things. If said publisher promotes the developer of a game rather than just the game itself, then when that developer jumps ship for some reason, they've just given free advertising to whatever company hired him. This is why the only time you see a developer's name right up front seems to be when that developer has already made a name for himself, and is releasing a new game (ie Carmack, Romero, Sid Meier, etc. (sorry if I mispelled someone's name)), sometimes for a new/different company than their previous games are associated with.
This is why so many people confuse Valve as a Sierra company, or their software as being developed by Sierra, because Sierra does the publishing and puts out most of the advertising, even though Valve is a completely independant developer.
There were some great late era NES and Super NES games, but nobody was paying attention anymore when they came out.
Those games were largely due to the fact that Nintendo was a little behind in bringing out their next-generation consoles in both cases (ie the SNES was well behind the Turbo Grafx-16 and the Genesis, the N64 was introduced shortly before the PSX really took off, though the PSX had been in the market for quite a while). When the hardware starts showing it's age because newer hardware is available, the games can sometimes turn things around.
Unfortunately, a lot of those NES and SNES games were only really possible on those consoles because of the cartridge format and the ability to embed new hardware in the cartridge (ie sound and video pre-processors were embedded in the game cartridges to give better graphics and sound to games on old consoles). This just isn't possible with the current consoles because, obviously, it's a little hard to put a usable circuit board or a chip on an optical disc with the game content.
Then that's a different situation: using content (or renders of content) that are not used in the game itself. All of the GT3 stuff I've seen is either the intro footage (which obviously is not the game engine) or shots of in-game rendering, which uses the same content (or older content in some cases, which usually looks worse) as the game itself.
Showing off models as they were rendered before putting them into the game and finding out that the game couldn't handle it, and trying to pass them off as in-game renders, is just not right.
What's the difference if it's still rendered in the game engine, though? The replay scenes in GT3 are still rendered by the game engine.
The only difference is the HUD and, in the case of GT, the interior of the cars. On racing games I have a tendency to turn off the interior view. In FPS games how much modification I do to the HUD is dependant on how it looks, but if something really bugs me I'll change it, rather than suffering with it, and seeing it beforehand isn't really going to change that.
Frankly, I see no reason to upgrade to an Xbox or PS2, because all the latest games that I've wanted (GTA3/VC) are available on the PC (which work beautifully with my Radeon 9500 Pro), and as far as the PS2 goes, the only advantage I've seen of it over my Dreamcast is that it has full scene anti-aliasing.
The Dreamcast has super sampling anti-aliasing and native support of 640x480 resolution for viewing on a PC monitor (though you need a VGA adapter, and not all games support it). That's part of why Soul Calibur 2 on the XBox/GameCube/PS2 doesn't look much better than Soul Calibur on the DreamCast to most people. Generally the 640x480 resolution doesn't support anti-aliasing because it's the image that the anti-aliasing would normally use to create the anti-aliased TV image.
I like the statement that console sales will be down 10% in 2005, which just happens to be the year that most estimates have already stated the next generation of Nintendo and MS consoles will be along (and probably the PS3 as well).
How much work does it really take to assume that this generation's consoles' sales will decrease in the year that most people assume the next generation's consoles will arrive?
As in the US, but at the very least the recent anniversary information has informed a number of people about the Famicom.
In any case, it doesn't take long to find out what Famicom means, as someone else pointed out, a google search brings it right up.
I think the only way it's really a deal for anyone is if you're the type of person that plays a game maybe once or twice for a couple weeks, and then puts it down. If you only do this about 5 times and don't let the monthly fee recur on you, then it's probably worthwhile (though if you can't keep your saved game info, then it might not, depending on the kind of person you are).
Alternatively, if Valve can manage to ship 3 full games a year that are actually worth full price ($150), then you're getting a good deal by spending $10/month. Of course, waiting for Valve to release TF2 is the rough equivalent of waiting for DNF.
Personally, if HL2 is really worth paying anything for, I'd rather have a box. I don't play CS, expansions can be hit or miss, and I'm not going to gamble on TF2's release date any more.
A less useful statistic is the simple numbers:
Half-Life sold how many million copies?
Number of people that play Half-Life online: ~60,000
Although the 60,000 are different people at any given time, and new people start every once in a while and old people stop every once in a while, it still can't add up to the number of people that bought the game. In fact, it'd be amazing if half the people that own a copy of Half-Life have played online.
hmm it didn't ship with my Voodoo 2. It shipped with something else I bought, either a sound card or possibly a TNT card, which I bought after I already had Half-Life. I ran HL on the Voodoo 2 cards until I got a TNT2Ultra, though, because the TNT wasn't quite good enough to replace them at 1024x768.
TF2 was supposed to come out 4 years ago, I don't see why anyone would pay a subscription hoping for it's release now.
I won't buy CS2, so it doesn't even figure into my equation for the cost of subscription vs. retail box.
So, HL2 (I might buy it) + TF2 = $100 or
subscribe, and keep paying as long as I play TF2 =
$120/year.
Given that I've waited since 1998 for TF2, I think I'll wait a bit longer, and maybe even wait for reviews on it, too, given that they could make quite a mess of things.
It's already been stated that the subscription gives you access to all Valve games & mods (HL1/OpFor/BlueShift/TFC/CS) as well as future games and mods (TF2/CS2/HL3?)
Most of us already have HL1 uncrippled by Steam. After all, it sold quite well, I believe I have 3 copies somewhere. I also bought OpFor, and TFC and CS are free. I could probably buy another copy of HL w/ another copy of Op4, and a copy of Blue Shift for $15.
I bought my first copy of HL because TF2 was going to be a free mod for it, and they said it might even ship in the box. That went out the door about 2 months after HL shipped. I'm not going to pay them $10/month until they manage to put together a game they said they would have out 4 years ago, just because it gives me access to a bunch of content I already have and a new game that I'm not even going to buy until it gets a handful of unbiased reviews.
I usually keep my cfg files zipped up on my ISP-provided website so I can get them whenever I need to (also because people occasionally ask for them). In theory if I needed to play on someone else's computer I could just download them, but considering the fact that I can't use a mouse to save my life (well, maybe if I swung it around and hit someone with it), I probably wouldn't bother.
in-house betas rarely find balance issues because they're too limited in scope and usually handled by people that have already played the game at some earlier point. In other words, the players already have certain expectations for the game. You need people with a fresh perspective to find balance problems in a game, and with the nature of a game like Diablo 2, it would really only take a week or so with a fairly limited public beta to find a lot of the issues they found after release.
I used to work for VU on the games side before and during the 'merger'. People went over two years alright. I can't say for sure that it happened on a first title but it definitely happened.
;-)
I'm sure it does happen quite a bit, but first titles would normally be removed from that particular developer or the developer would be reshuffled (ie the name stay the same but the people change), assuming the title isn't just canned.
When we visited one particular developer's office (nameless naturally) all they'd really achieved in two years was a 12 page promotional booklet and a pathetic amount of research. Although the reverse of the wallchart behind the pool table showed a pretty hectic tournament history...
Fortunately, Valve actually had a working game, they just scrapped it and started over to rework the engine and give it more capabilities to help tell the story.
What happened to the Havas involvement in Middle Earth? What happened to Bablyon 5? What happened to WON.net? Dig around a little and you'll soon see that the list of tragedies within VU is considerable and apparently ever-growing.
I definitely know that, I was keeping pretty close tabs on a lot of things that were going on in the various development houses Sierra was publishing back in the same time frame shortly after Half-Life was released. Another big one would be the crap pulled on Dynamix (the developer of Tribes and Tribes 2).
My sympathies are with Blizzard. I know exactly what the 'VU uncertainty factor' feels like. At least whatever happens they no longer have to put up with Jean Marie Messier [expatica.com]. And I hope for their sake that they'll be sold to a group under better management.
Blizzard certainly has enough name recognition in the industry to survive something like this, it's just a question of whether or not the company that gets ahold of them will let them continue, or will buy them just for the name(s).
I didn't say they made any sense, just said that's what they said ;p
The only people that really know are Valve and the company that was porting it to the Mac. Either way, Sierra only knows what Valve told them, more than likely.
Of course, if I had a camera in my phone, I couldn't take it with me to work. At best I'd have to leave it in my car. So, not only would the camera render my phone useless 8 hours out of the day, but I'd have a camera that wasn't quite as useful to me as a stand-alone camera would be.
Then again, they haven't said anything about all of those little USB memory sticks yet, I'm just waiting for them to kick all of the people with those out of the building.
iirc, the Dreamcast had a proprietary-format ROM (GD-ROM, 1GB disc), but since the system could also read CD-ROM formats, that's what most developers used. Burning a GD-ROM would've required a fairly expensive burner, but since it also required extra cost on the developer's end, and multiple-CD titles worked fine, it didn't slow most pirates down a bit.
Regardless of how omniscient you would like game developers to be, they are often underestimating the ability of several thousand rabid gamers, and to what extents a player will go to in order to gain an advantage of edge. No amount of testing can simulate the hundreds of man hours of play that goes into each game week of an online game.
You're right, except for one thing: Blizzard did an extremely limited beta test for Diablo 2 which was only meant to test battle.net. They ignored gameplay and hardware issues and even ignored many of the network problems they had with the test (which was several orders of magnitude smaller than the launch, though held on far fewer servers to simulate the loads). Their first nerf was in the first patch, which came out very shortly after the game was released. It wouldn't have taken much testing for something like that to show up, though they may underestimate the level of a problem in testing. Their major gameplay problems (as is the case in many of these games) was not so much that certain things were over-powered as that certain things were underpowered, to the point of uselessness. When people ignored those things, they found ways to make them useful in limited situations, but that doesn't really fix the problem. The things that seemed overpowered were nerfed, and overall the game stagnates at certain levels. I still enjoy it occasionally, but they didn't make the best choices with it.
This article discusses Blizzard, and yet the biggest names they cite to leave Blizzard were part of Blizzard North (Diablo fame). There's several games and companies under the VU standard, including 2 or 3 MMO's. There doesn't seem to be an issue with someone buying Blizzard, there seems to be an issue with VU using them as a carrot to sell off the rest of their gaming unit.
Well, the main issue is that Blizzard doesn't even know if they're being sold off with the unit. The fact that Blizzard can make up 25% of the profits of the unit when they only shipped an expansion should make them a huge carrot for anyone looking to buy, but then most would probably just try to get Blizzard and leave the rest in the dust (or maybe one or two other pieces to get some of Sierra's publishing deals and titles, for instance). The bulk of what VU is selling is crap, but there is some incentive for a company that's willing to fire a lot of people and dissolve a couple of companies for their assets, as much as we all hate to see that sort of thing happen. As for Blizzard, anyone that's willing to break them up or sell them off has some issues, but then it's understandable when a company like VU that's focused in completely different areas doesn't understand how games can fit into their overall company.
So you bought a game console because of 2 currently released titles and you're saying the GameCube doesn't have anything?
hmmm...
Granted, I bought my PS2 because of Tekken, GT3, and Final Fantasy, but those aren't even the games I currently play on it (well, Final Fantasy 2, but I could've played that on my PS1). I probably won't be buying FFXI (MMO, no thanks), and might wait for FFX-2 and FFXII to drop in price a bit (or maybe wait for a US release of FFIII, if that's ever going to happen), because I have a lot of other games to play at the moment and FFX was not a high point for the series.
As for the GBA needed for FF:CC, I already have a GBA and GBA-SP (actually bought the GBA after the SP, but that's a twisted story, and it was cheap), and plan to buy another SP next paycheck (the black ones are coming out on the 9th and I want to have one I don't have to compete with my girlfriend over playing, I'll probably trade in the non-SP towards it). Not to mention FF:Tactics Advance coming out on the 8th.