All gamers diss n-cage but I believe it can be seller because it's firstly a cellphone, and only secondly a games machine.
Which would be the main reason that 'all gamers diss n-cage[sic]'.
It will be sold in cellphoneshops, not gameshops, the buyers are not gamers but "average joes".
I don't know where you live, but around here it's just now becoming common for 'average joes' to buy cell phones at all, and the vast majority of them buy a plan, and get the phone for free (they don't buy phones). The phones that are given away for free are nowhere near the n-gage in terms of market price.
Cellphonebusiness is a massive market, and I believe very different from game business. i mean the ps2 has sold what 70 million(?) units worldwide, that's a lot, but nokia can sell the same amount of ONE MODEL. The best selling model has sold about 110 million units worldwide if I recall correctly.
Nokia (and most cell phone makers, really) keeps predicting that this or that new technology will sell more phones for them, but the simple fact is that their best sales figures come from phones that cost very little, if anything, to the end user. Nokia can sell 110 million units at $0-100, but can they do 70 million at $200-300?
SO gamers, when n-cage is finally released, u might be surprised to see how that piece of junk games machine beats gba's sales. It's got nothing to do with quality, because most people who buy cellphones don't even know what a game boy is.
I know one person that buys cell phones that are even close to the price range the N-Gage is looking at. He hasn't even heard of the N-Gage. On the other hand, a GBA SP costs $100, and I'm planning on picking up a second one when the black ones are released here in the US. As for 'most people who buy cellphones dont even know what a game boy is', I don't think you understand the high end cell phone market very well. Game Boys have been around for close to 15 years now, and most people in the N-Gage's target market either had one or knew someone that had one within 5 years of the original Game Boy's release.
It's about the trying to figure out why the 26 year old guy I'm playing with still thinks that naming his avatar "BoogerSnorter Maximus" is even remotely funny.
Who knows? Some people have a childish sense of humour no matter how old they get. I know people that do this in their normal every-day lives, repeating the same tired old jokes for months, until they find something new ('thats what she said'). I have a good friend that got sick of the whole idea of coming up with character names about 2 years ago and now just names all of his characters after himself, because he sees most of the names people choose as pointless. At the end of the day, that's the character they choose to play. To take the term from the genre, that's their role, it's how they play it.
It's the lack of imagination implied in the avatars in SWG named Duke SkyClocker and Obie's Frend (both real examples).
People with no imagination come up with unimaginative names. Then again, maybe that's just the way their imagination is manifesting itself. At the same time, those two names in that particular game are forbidden by the very terms of the game (which no one reads anyway).
It's the player who shouts "Wazzup?!!?!!!?? DUDEZ!?!?!!?" for the 40th time to his friends in half an hour, and they all think it is hysterically funny, and I might have, too, when I was twelve, except that, from reading through the poor spelling and bad grammar that has assaulted you continuously, you know that these gentlemen have children who are at least thirteen.
My problem is generally that I wouldn't have found that any funnier when I was 12 than the first time I heard it when I was 24 (or was it 23? I don't really remember how old that is). Still, that's the way they choose to play the game, it's the role they play, even if it seems out of character to you.
I know, these complaints make me uptight and anal and a killjoy, and I should get a life.
I don't know about any of that, because really I don't think the players would be having any less fun if they were acting any other way, I just think that forcing someone else's ideas of how the game should be played tends to not only reduce the player base (as others have already mentioned, which a corporation will rarely do), but also limits the possibilities of the world.
But I'd rather wait for the day that I can have my avatar kick your avatars ass.:-)
That's what PvP is for, isn't it? Then again, that introduces a whole new realm of complaints...
Personally, I play games to play, not to chat, but I'm not going to bother stopping other people from paying $50 + $15/month for a glorified graphical chat room. Then again, I don't see the point in paying that anyway.
I'm all for a Heavy-RP-only MMORPG - it'd get the purists off my back for not speaking in thees and thous. But their RP utopia would almost have to cave to market pressures or be exorbitantly priced in order to stay afloat.
I think what the previous poster was saying is basically that the 'thees' and 'thous' don't really have a place in most of these games, except in the minds of those that keep insisting they be there. Just because it's a fantasy setting doesn't mean that people talk like that in that particular world. They certainly don't talk like that in most fantasy novels, either, yet it doesn't hurt the immersion of the reader.
As for the rest, perhaps, someday, the cost of building and maintaining an MMO with a solid graphics/physics engine will come down significantly and you'll see more niche-market MMO games, much like MUDs. As it stands, though, MUDs tend to have a bit more freedom in what they can do because they're in a niche market in the first place, and because text allows more expression than graphics (besides, if you can parse text for every command, you can also parse text for certain words you don't want people using, or certain words you do want people using; over time your text parser can just become more sophisticated (or over-complicated) to punish/reward people for their speech).
You may be right, but I'm not so sure. Blizzard has a pretty good reputation about delaying a game until it is truly ready to ship.
Blizzard may get the game itself into better shape than some MMO developers, but the servers will be the same old story. The release of a new game from Blizzard has routinely crippled battle.net from it's inception, and Diablo 2 only made it that much worse by hosting the games and character data in addition to the registration/login functions.
When US West became overcrowded because the Asian server(s) went down, Blizzard took action and added more servers in Asia. Unfortunately, it didn't change anything for US West, because all of the Korean players that had been playing on US West didn't want to leave their characters behind, and Blizzard had not supplied any way for them to transfer those characters. Will they have the same types of problems when WoW hits? Who knows for sure until it hits, but even if I were planning on buying WoW, I would wait until at least the first week is over and judge how the servers handled the load.
Beyond that, there're the little things, like bugs in both StarCraft and Diablo 2 when they shipped after much delay that prevented people from continuing with the games until they were patched (or in the case of Diablo 2, if they started over and then didn't duplicate the circumstances that caused the bug). Not to mention the play-balance issues. If WoW gets to 1.03 (assuming a 1.0 release) without an overhaul of some play-balance issue that a large number of people exploited, then I'll be surprised.
I don't think people see it as a problem is a good game gets a good rating, regardless of it's marketing (although people might have a problem with the 'Sleeper Hits' never being 'Game of the Year Candidates' (ie great games never getting huge recognition because they didn't get the overhype-budget). The problem is that horrid games can get good or mediocre reviews if enough money is thrown at marketing.
People say they read reviews because they want to find out if a game is good. What they really mean, though, is that they want to find out if they're going to waste their money on a steaming turd. Any game that ranks from mediocre to good can be a good game worth your money if it happens to be a game that catches your interest when you play it, but if a game is bug-ridden, poorly designed, or just outright horrible, the marketing can save the reviews, but the people that buy it are going to be pissed.
For example, Back In The Day, I played Bard's Tale quite a bit. The mechanics of the game were far, far simpler than what I'd built up in my head as far as theories of what might be happening. I remember having the distinct impression that the more you used the same weapon, the better you got with that weapon; if you 'traded up' to a better one of a different type, you'd have to balance the improvement against the loss you'd take until you got experienced with it.
I'm sure that you can find many things to discuss about a particular game without being mislead or making an assumption on a more sophisticated view of the game (hey, it's an assumption I can understand, but one that would only be true in a very small number of games). In Diablo 2 specifically, there's a little number called block percentage (or something similar), and there's always been some debate over whether the block percentage of a shield or the defense of that shield is more important. The kicker, though, is that the only place the block percentage is ever mentioned is on items/skills that increase it, you never know what your base is.
I was, of course, utterly wrong. But I didn't find that out until after long, colorful, and interesting discussions with friends who also played. If the designer had laid out all the rules and tables up front, I'd have missed out on the interaction with other players. This is even more true now in the age of fan boards and players' sites.
While I appreciate your enjoyment of discussion with other players, I'm sure that many were wishing that either you would realize your mistake or the designers would've made this clear. There is always plenty to discuss about RPGs (especially) without discussing whether or not certain play mechanics even exist, and their effect on your characters.
the article lacks the details of how great nintendo became because of famicom and how the famicom reinvented the game marketplace forever. Atari crashed the industry, Nintendo brought it back, Sega dented the industry, Sony dominated the industry and Microsoft is making the industry better (more competition is better).
Actually, if you continue reading the series of articles, you get to that point. However, the Famicom really didn't do those things, because Atari didn't crash the industry in Japan. The NES did those things, because it was released in America and had to deal with these factors in the American market (and had some specific hardware to address that, such as the chip that prevented unlicensed games from playing, which didn't exist in the Famicom). The article on the US NES hardware does address this to some degree, though obviously doesn't go into the Sony and Microsoft portions because it's about the Famicom/NES, not the Super Famicom/SNES, N64, or GameCube.
wether nintendo ever becomes the titan again will be questionable, now only if gamespy did an article about celebrating Nintendo creations. I always hope Nintendo will be remembered for their devotion to creating exceptional games, and creative applicaitons to games that no one ever pieced together (Zelda, the original Mario, evolution of Mario: raccoon mario!, Metroid)... just my thoughts
Umm, the second half of the series is about the games, including Mario, Zelda, Metroid, etc.
I remember my father used to blow in the 2600 cartridges when I told him the thing wasn't working, so I guess I picked it up from him. Of course, after years of blowing in the 2600 and NES cartridges, I learned that you really shouldn't do that, due to the moisture that ends up on the cartridge.
Bleh, anyway, at least the Atari still worked long after the NES need all kinds of weird tricks to load a cartridge (careful alignment of the cartridge so that it was in the console as little as possible while still being able to go down seemed to work best).
I don't have a colour screen on my cell phone, but it takes far less of the battery to play games than it does to make a phone call. Of course, I only play games on it when I'm on my smoke breaks. If I'm going somewhere besides work and I think I might be spending some time waiting I bring my GBA SP. There's certainly no need for my phone to have anything more than it's cheap Othello clone, either.
Well, DII might not tell you absolutely everything, but spells/skills are definitely far more documented/easy to understand than in D&D.
While I agree to some extent (a lot of spells in D&D were very poorly documented, at least when I played the game some 14 years ago), a lot of the documentation for DII spells/skills comes from online (website, not in-game) material and info directly from players, as you don't really get a good description from the game interface, and trial & error can lead to wasting some very much needed skill points.
As for everyone playing classes in the same way - well, I'm not a DII expert, but I do think that there are a few different specialisations each class can go for and be effective at it. Maybe this isn't as developed as in Dark Age of Camelot (some classes have up to 3 totally different specialisation paths they can choose) or in Star Wars Galaxies (where you basically choose your own skills), but still, it's available to an extent.
I haven't played in quite a while, so the means of building a successful character may be different now. I will say that the expansion classes seemed much more refined in this sense than the original classes, though the expansion classes seemed to peak a bit earlier in terms of effectiveness. I think the one thing Diablo II did fairly well (although it's debatable to some extent) was combine the skill system and spell system into a single system, and expand the skill system a great deal. Even if it doesn't completely make sense from a p'n'p player's perspective, it makes for a much more streamlined gameplay experience (and since many skills available to spell-based classes are not very important in a Diablo-style game, it makes the lack of real spellcaster skills almost a non-issue). My basic issue with Blizzard in this sense (and it comes up in MMORPGs as well) is that they included a number of skills/spells in the game that were basically useless, and then later (with the patch that came around the time of the expansion most notably) came up with ways to make use of those skills (which no one was putting skill points into). Of course, I may be biased because I pretty much trashed 3 mid-level characters (it would've taken longer to add in the skills than to build a new character from scratch with those skills in mind).
I think Blizzard have learned a lot about RPG systems, and I'm pretty confident that World of WarCraft will have the best RPG system ever seen in a computer game.
I'm not really worried about WoW, probably because I have no plans to buy or play it (not really anything to do with Diablo 2 or WarCraft 3 or any other Blizzard title, just MMO in general and the pay to play + $50 up front model). I've bought 3 MMO games (UO, EQ, PlanetSide) to date, and never played one of them long enough to start paying for them (at least with the first two I didn't pay $50 up front either, closer to $20-35).
Considering, though, that it was my family's computer and they regularly ran Windows on it (3.x that is), it was easier to just boot it from floppy when I wanted to play Doom than to try to get the system to play nicely with everyone else's crap.
Yeah, considering that Valve has screwed users of both cards at one point or another, with one update that messed up the player textures on nVidia cards (some percentage of the time) which they blamed on nVidia's drivers for about a year and a half, and another update which completely did not work on ATI cards, and needed a patch for the patch.
Not to mention how many changes they had to make to the game to keep ATI users from cheating, even inadvertently, since the cards really liked rendering the walls invisible.
The best multiplayer mapmakers, however, design their maps the same way the single player maps are designed, with careful planning and knowledge of how the game will be played. You do what you can to keep the player from seeing too much of the map at once (kills framerates on lower-end computers, especially once all of the players are in there), and to keep the flow moving through certain areas.
Usually the SP game can take much more advantage of the computer's capabilities in terms of level design, while the multiplayer game will bring the computer to it's knees with even the most simple maps (go play sq1 for TFC with a half dozen people).
What you really need is not so much a good PC as good knowledge of your PC's limitations and the game's options for getting the most out of it. Once you tune the network settings and limit the framerate appropriately, it takes a lot to bring even a mediocre computer to it's knees.
Did Valve hype Half-Life 1 this much I can't remember?
I'm not sure if it was Valve that hyped it so much, or that it just had so much hype, but HL was extremely hyped up. It was on magazine covers something like 2 years before it came out. There were videos displaying the 'cool never-before seen' special effects straight out of old platform games (ie sliding on water and/or ice, breaking through floors, etc). We saw about 1/4 of the scripted sequences before the game even came out, and watched the whole game get scrapped for an engine rewrite.
On the other hand, this is exactly the reason why Valve denied that Half-Life 2 was even being done until now. That, and maybe the fact that they've been promising us Team Fortress 2 for 4 or 5 years and will deliver HL2 first.
Anyone else thing Half-Life is the best game of all time(monkey island comes close)?
I don't even think HL is the best FPS game ever, let alone best game of all time, but most people don't seem to agree with me;)
To be honest, I don't know many games which achieve this. I can only think of Diablo II (which is only half-way there - some stats/skills in DII are still a little useless [although the upcoming patch will probably improve on this])
IMO, Diablo 2 fails more in not showing you all of the stats that are actually used by the game, and how each item effects them. As far as the skills go, well, that's more of a design issue, and I really dislike the fact that Blizzard changed the game to make some of their useless skills neccessary, rather than making the skills more useful.
No, I don't think it's good when everyone's playing a certain class the same way when the way the game is played is based so highly on what skills you pick, but if they had beta tested out to lvl 30 or so they would've been able to balance some of those things before the game launched.
The upper limit of the number of Xenosaga games was determined around the time the designers decided to make a prequel series to Xenogears, at ~6.
The number of Nietzsche titles is around 2-3 times that (there was a time when I would know the number, but that time is not now, and I'm not at home to check my bookshelf).
I saw the reverse when I played the game. My long-range characters (especially those wielding the bow) advanced more quickly than my melee characters. Of course, this might be simply because I tend to reign in the characters a bit to keep them from wandering away from the core of the group, and used the melee characters mostly as a defensive force for the center. The long-range characters would usually get at least a hit on every enemy in the area, while the melee characters only really got experience from those that lived long enough to get close, and then only on those that were closest to them.
They were selling 4 games per unit before any free games were given away with the consoles. If they're selling 5 now and they're counting the 2 games (as 2 games), then their attach rate has actually dropped.
What I'd like to see (though it's not likely to happen), is Microsoft and Sony following Nintendo's lead in offering quality wireless controllers at a decent price. Hell, the only wireless controller I've seen in stores for the XBox is a logitech controller that costs more than 2x what my Wavebird cost. I now have 3 wavebirds and 2 cable extensions for my PS2 (luckily the XBox cables are actually long enough to reach the couch).
The XBox gets lumped under 'Home and Entertainment' which made $483 million this quarter ($2.748 billion for the year). Where the XBox fits in that, though, is anyone's guess (and isn't it nice to see an article linked from Yahoo that simply quotes a tiny amount of the microsoft release that's available on MS' site).
While they may have used some aspects of PowerPlay, the basic ideas are completely different. PowerPlay was meant to speed up internet connections and make them more reliable, as well as increasing the security of network code (reducing hacking and cheating in games) while preserving bandwidth.
Steam, on the other hand, is about content delivery. While being able to download updates in a fairly dynamic fashion can help with the security aspect (by allowing patches to go out more quickly and by forcing users to update), it doesn't really do what PowerPlay was intended to.
Halo has been bundled with xbox's in Australia since about 3-6 months after launch.
In the US, I have never seen an XBox bundled with Halo unless I ordered it online (and it costs roughly the same as buying an XBox and buying Halo seperately). My XBox came with Sega GT 2002 and Jet Grind, which is a pretty standard bundle.
Utter rubbish. The NES only got bundled with Mario and Duck Hunt years after release.
3 years after release (when the NES hit $100), SMB was bundled (at that price point). SMB/Duck Hunt was a bundle at a slightly higher price point. SMB had actually been bundled for a while before that, but I'm not exactly sure how long. The only person I know that had an NES near release (1984) got it with that damned robot thing.
Mario Allstars ended up being available as a bundle with SNES, but Allstars wasn't anywhere near a launch title.
SNES was bundled with Super Mario World near/at release, but that has nothing to do with SMB's sales (though SMW's sales are extremely high as well, in fact, higher than any other mario game besides SMB1).
Super Mario Bros. 3 is the best-selling game of all time never bundled with a console at 17.28 million sales (3.3 million less than SMW and less than half of SMB1).
Then what about the strong success of the Zelda series? Or Final Fantasy?
My gf plays Zelda quite a bit, but can't stand FF, but maybe it's just the fact that I've been playing FF1 + 2, rather than some of the newer ones.
She would probably play Tekken or Soul Calibur, but she can't stand playing against me (probably because I can't stand the excessive use of the 'kick in the foot' manuever, or the 'mash buttons and hope it does something' method, and therefore instantly kick the shit out of the offending character 75% of the time).
She wants a copy of the original GameBoy Tetris, because she doesn't like Tetris Worlds (I don't know why for sure, but think it has something to do with the annoying cube).
She plays Pokemon (Gold and Ruby) obsessively. Seriously I can only get my GBA SP if I grab it before she realizes it might be useful wherever we're going. As long as it's not dark out she's perfectly happy with the GBA (non-SP), though (but I still have to grab the SP before she thinks about it).
The real problem is that she won't even bother trying a game most of the time. It has to be entirely her decision to try it or she won't touch it. I don't even know why/how/when she picked up Zelda, but it's so bad that she won't even play my copy of it, because her game is saved on her brother's cart.
Actually, getting her to play on anything but a gameboy is pretty hard anyway.
heh, before VAC came out, one of my CD keys (I have 3 for various reasons, primarily because Sierra gives free games to message board moderators, or at least they used to) was banned with no explanation. I think it might be because it was being used by someone else (I'm guessing a CD key generator got it right), and I eventually went into the registry and changed my key (to one of my other keys) because it was in use so often during clan matches and practices. Anyway, I reinstalled HL and accidentally used said key, only to find myself banned from the auth servers.
We used Punkbuster pretty heavily in TFC (I even ran a league for a while that used it from the start of the league's (short) life). Unfortunately, it had it's share of problems, but false positives were not high in my experience. We finally had to get rid of it when PB's developers stopped updating it for HL and it became very evident that it was easily hacked/bypassed by anyone that wanted to cheat.
If I had to pick an ideal time to get out, it would've been the first time I took a break from the game, when CE stopped playing TFC (and moved to CS for a while). The game was much better then, before the netcode update, the rampant cheating, and the general whining about how the game should or should not be played (god forbid I shoot incoming offense; I can understand 'play nice' rules in pub games, and even uphold and support them, but in matches?).
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All gamers diss n-cage but I believe it can be seller because it's firstly a cellphone, and only secondly a games machine.
Which would be the main reason that 'all gamers diss n-cage[sic]'.
It will be sold in cellphoneshops, not gameshops, the buyers are not gamers but "average joes".
I don't know where you live, but around here it's just now becoming common for 'average joes' to buy cell phones at all, and the vast majority of them buy a plan, and get the phone for free (they don't buy phones). The phones that are given away for free are nowhere near the n-gage in terms of market price.
Cellphonebusiness is a massive market, and I believe very different from game business. i mean the ps2 has sold what 70 million(?) units worldwide, that's a lot, but nokia can sell the same amount of ONE MODEL. The best selling model has sold about 110 million units worldwide if I recall correctly.
Nokia (and most cell phone makers, really) keeps predicting that this or that new technology will sell more phones for them, but the simple fact is that their best sales figures come from phones that cost very little, if anything, to the end user. Nokia can sell 110 million units at $0-100, but can they do 70 million at $200-300?
SO gamers, when n-cage is finally released, u might be surprised to see how that piece of junk games machine beats gba's sales. It's got nothing to do with quality, because most people who buy cellphones don't even know what a game boy is.
I know one person that buys cell phones that are even close to the price range the N-Gage is looking at. He hasn't even heard of the N-Gage. On the other hand, a GBA SP costs $100, and I'm planning on picking up a second one when the black ones are released here in the US. As for 'most people who buy cellphones dont even know what a game boy is', I don't think you understand the high end cell phone market very well. Game Boys have been around for close to 15 years now, and most people in the N-Gage's target market either had one or knew someone that had one within 5 years of the original Game Boy's release.
Such a wonderful person to quote,
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
It's about the trying to figure out why the 26 year old guy I'm playing with still thinks that naming his avatar "BoogerSnorter Maximus" is even remotely funny.
:-)
Who knows? Some people have a childish sense of humour no matter how old they get. I know people that do this in their normal every-day lives, repeating the same tired old jokes for months, until they find something new ('thats what she said'). I have a good friend that got sick of the whole idea of coming up with character names about 2 years ago and now just names all of his characters after himself, because he sees most of the names people choose as pointless. At the end of the day, that's the character they choose to play. To take the term from the genre, that's their role, it's how they play it.
It's the lack of imagination implied in the avatars in SWG named Duke SkyClocker and Obie's Frend (both real examples).
People with no imagination come up with unimaginative names. Then again, maybe that's just the way their imagination is manifesting itself. At the same time, those two names in that particular game are forbidden by the very terms of the game (which no one reads anyway).
It's the player who shouts "Wazzup?!!?!!!?? DUDEZ!?!?!!?" for the 40th time to his friends in half an hour, and they all think it is hysterically funny, and I might have, too, when I was twelve, except that, from reading through the poor spelling and bad grammar that has assaulted you continuously, you know that these gentlemen have children who are at least thirteen.
My problem is generally that I wouldn't have found that any funnier when I was 12 than the first time I heard it when I was 24 (or was it 23? I don't really remember how old that is). Still, that's the way they choose to play the game, it's the role they play, even if it seems out of character to you.
I know, these complaints make me uptight and anal and a killjoy, and I should get a life.
I don't know about any of that, because really I don't think the players would be having any less fun if they were acting any other way, I just think that forcing someone else's ideas of how the game should be played tends to not only reduce the player base (as others have already mentioned, which a corporation will rarely do), but also limits the possibilities of the world.
But I'd rather wait for the day that I can have my avatar kick your avatars ass.
That's what PvP is for, isn't it? Then again, that introduces a whole new realm of complaints...
Personally, I play games to play, not to chat, but I'm not going to bother stopping other people from paying $50 + $15/month for a glorified graphical chat room. Then again, I don't see the point in paying that anyway.
I'm all for a Heavy-RP-only MMORPG - it'd get the purists off my back for not speaking in thees and thous. But their RP utopia would almost have to cave to market pressures or be exorbitantly priced in order to stay afloat.
I think what the previous poster was saying is basically that the 'thees' and 'thous' don't really have a place in most of these games, except in the minds of those that keep insisting they be there. Just because it's a fantasy setting doesn't mean that people talk like that in that particular world. They certainly don't talk like that in most fantasy novels, either, yet it doesn't hurt the immersion of the reader.
As for the rest, perhaps, someday, the cost of building and maintaining an MMO with a solid graphics/physics engine will come down significantly and you'll see more niche-market MMO games, much like MUDs. As it stands, though, MUDs tend to have a bit more freedom in what they can do because they're in a niche market in the first place, and because text allows more expression than graphics (besides, if you can parse text for every command, you can also parse text for certain words you don't want people using, or certain words you do want people using; over time your text parser can just become more sophisticated (or over-complicated) to punish/reward people for their speech).
You may be right, but I'm not so sure. Blizzard has a pretty good reputation about delaying a game until it is truly ready to ship.
Blizzard may get the game itself into better shape than some MMO developers, but the servers will be the same old story. The release of a new game from Blizzard has routinely crippled battle.net from it's inception, and Diablo 2 only made it that much worse by hosting the games and character data in addition to the registration/login functions.
When US West became overcrowded because the Asian server(s) went down, Blizzard took action and added more servers in Asia. Unfortunately, it didn't change anything for US West, because all of the Korean players that had been playing on US West didn't want to leave their characters behind, and Blizzard had not supplied any way for them to transfer those characters. Will they have the same types of problems when WoW hits? Who knows for sure until it hits, but even if I were planning on buying WoW, I would wait until at least the first week is over and judge how the servers handled the load.
Beyond that, there're the little things, like bugs in both StarCraft and Diablo 2 when they shipped after much delay that prevented people from continuing with the games until they were patched (or in the case of Diablo 2, if they started over and then didn't duplicate the circumstances that caused the bug). Not to mention the play-balance issues. If WoW gets to 1.03 (assuming a 1.0 release) without an overhaul of some play-balance issue that a large number of people exploited, then I'll be surprised.
I don't think people see it as a problem is a good game gets a good rating, regardless of it's marketing (although people might have a problem with the 'Sleeper Hits' never being 'Game of the Year Candidates' (ie great games never getting huge recognition because they didn't get the overhype-budget). The problem is that horrid games can get good or mediocre reviews if enough money is thrown at marketing.
People say they read reviews because they want to find out if a game is good. What they really mean, though, is that they want to find out if they're going to waste their money on a steaming turd. Any game that ranks from mediocre to good can be a good game worth your money if it happens to be a game that catches your interest when you play it, but if a game is bug-ridden, poorly designed, or just outright horrible, the marketing can save the reviews, but the people that buy it are going to be pissed.
For example, Back In The Day, I played Bard's Tale quite a bit. The mechanics of the game were far, far simpler than what I'd built up in my head as far as theories of what might be happening. I remember having the distinct impression that the more you used the same weapon, the better you got with that weapon; if you 'traded up' to a better one of a different type, you'd have to balance the improvement against the loss you'd take until you got experienced with it.
I'm sure that you can find many things to discuss about a particular game without being mislead or making an assumption on a more sophisticated view of the game (hey, it's an assumption I can understand, but one that would only be true in a very small number of games). In Diablo 2 specifically, there's a little number called block percentage (or something similar), and there's always been some debate over whether the block percentage of a shield or the defense of that shield is more important. The kicker, though, is that the only place the block percentage is ever mentioned is on items/skills that increase it, you never know what your base is.
I was, of course, utterly wrong. But I didn't find that out until after long, colorful, and interesting discussions with friends who also played. If the designer had laid out all the rules and tables up front, I'd have missed out on the interaction with other players. This is even more true now in the age of fan boards and players' sites.
While I appreciate your enjoyment of discussion with other players, I'm sure that many were wishing that either you would realize your mistake or the designers would've made this clear. There is always plenty to discuss about RPGs (especially) without discussing whether or not certain play mechanics even exist, and their effect on your characters.
the article lacks the details of how great nintendo became because of famicom and how the famicom reinvented the game marketplace forever. Atari crashed the industry, Nintendo brought it back, Sega dented the industry, Sony dominated the industry and Microsoft is making the industry better (more competition is better).
... just my thoughts
Actually, if you continue reading the series of articles, you get to that point. However, the Famicom really didn't do those things, because Atari didn't crash the industry in Japan. The NES did those things, because it was released in America and had to deal with these factors in the American market (and had some specific hardware to address that, such as the chip that prevented unlicensed games from playing, which didn't exist in the Famicom). The article on the US NES hardware does address this to some degree, though obviously doesn't go into the Sony and Microsoft portions because it's about the Famicom/NES, not the Super Famicom/SNES, N64, or GameCube.
wether nintendo ever becomes the titan again will be questionable, now only if gamespy did an article about celebrating Nintendo creations. I always hope Nintendo will be remembered for their devotion to creating exceptional games, and creative applicaitons to games that no one ever pieced together (Zelda, the original Mario, evolution of Mario: raccoon mario!, Metroid)
Umm, the second half of the series is about the games, including Mario, Zelda, Metroid, etc.
I remember my father used to blow in the 2600 cartridges when I told him the thing wasn't working, so I guess I picked it up from him. Of course, after years of blowing in the 2600 and NES cartridges, I learned that you really shouldn't do that, due to the moisture that ends up on the cartridge.
Bleh, anyway, at least the Atari still worked long after the NES need all kinds of weird tricks to load a cartridge (careful alignment of the cartridge so that it was in the console as little as possible while still being able to go down seemed to work best).
I don't have a colour screen on my cell phone, but it takes far less of the battery to play games than it does to make a phone call. Of course, I only play games on it when I'm on my smoke breaks. If I'm going somewhere besides work and I think I might be spending some time waiting I bring my GBA SP. There's certainly no need for my phone to have anything more than it's cheap Othello clone, either.
Well, DII might not tell you absolutely everything, but spells/skills are definitely far more documented/easy to understand than in D&D.
While I agree to some extent (a lot of spells in D&D were very poorly documented, at least when I played the game some 14 years ago), a lot of the documentation for DII spells/skills comes from online (website, not in-game) material and info directly from players, as you don't really get a good description from the game interface, and trial & error can lead to wasting some very much needed skill points.
As for everyone playing classes in the same way - well, I'm not a DII expert, but I do think that there are a few different specialisations each class can go for and be effective at it. Maybe this isn't as developed as in Dark Age of Camelot (some classes have up to 3 totally different specialisation paths they can choose) or in Star Wars Galaxies (where you basically choose your own skills), but still, it's available to an extent.
I haven't played in quite a while, so the means of building a successful character may be different now. I will say that the expansion classes seemed much more refined in this sense than the original classes, though the expansion classes seemed to peak a bit earlier in terms of effectiveness. I think the one thing Diablo II did fairly well (although it's debatable to some extent) was combine the skill system and spell system into a single system, and expand the skill system a great deal. Even if it doesn't completely make sense from a p'n'p player's perspective, it makes for a much more streamlined gameplay experience (and since many skills available to spell-based classes are not very important in a Diablo-style game, it makes the lack of real spellcaster skills almost a non-issue). My basic issue with Blizzard in this sense (and it comes up in MMORPGs as well) is that they included a number of skills/spells in the game that were basically useless, and then later (with the patch that came around the time of the expansion most notably) came up with ways to make use of those skills (which no one was putting skill points into). Of course, I may be biased because I pretty much trashed 3 mid-level characters (it would've taken longer to add in the skills than to build a new character from scratch with those skills in mind).
I think Blizzard have learned a lot about RPG systems, and I'm pretty confident that World of WarCraft will have the best RPG system ever seen in a computer game.
I'm not really worried about WoW, probably because I have no plans to buy or play it (not really anything to do with Diablo 2 or WarCraft 3 or any other Blizzard title, just MMO in general and the pay to play + $50 up front model). I've bought 3 MMO games (UO, EQ, PlanetSide) to date, and never played one of them long enough to start paying for them (at least with the first two I didn't pay $50 up front either, closer to $20-35).
Considering, though, that it was my family's computer and they regularly ran Windows on it (3.x that is), it was easier to just boot it from floppy when I wanted to play Doom than to try to get the system to play nicely with everyone else's crap.
Yeah, considering that Valve has screwed users of both cards at one point or another, with one update that messed up the player textures on nVidia cards (some percentage of the time) which they blamed on nVidia's drivers for about a year and a half, and another update which completely did not work on ATI cards, and needed a patch for the patch.
Not to mention how many changes they had to make to the game to keep ATI users from cheating, even inadvertently, since the cards really liked rendering the walls invisible.
The best multiplayer mapmakers, however, design their maps the same way the single player maps are designed, with careful planning and knowledge of how the game will be played. You do what you can to keep the player from seeing too much of the map at once (kills framerates on lower-end computers, especially once all of the players are in there), and to keep the flow moving through certain areas.
Usually the SP game can take much more advantage of the computer's capabilities in terms of level design, while the multiplayer game will bring the computer to it's knees with even the most simple maps (go play sq1 for TFC with a half dozen people).
What you really need is not so much a good PC as good knowledge of your PC's limitations and the game's options for getting the most out of it. Once you tune the network settings and limit the framerate appropriately, it takes a lot to bring even a mediocre computer to it's knees.
Did Valve hype Half-Life 1 this much I can't remember?
;)
I'm not sure if it was Valve that hyped it so much, or that it just had so much hype, but HL was extremely hyped up. It was on magazine covers something like 2 years before it came out. There were videos displaying the 'cool never-before seen' special effects straight out of old platform games (ie sliding on water and/or ice, breaking through floors, etc). We saw about 1/4 of the scripted sequences before the game even came out, and watched the whole game get scrapped for an engine rewrite.
On the other hand, this is exactly the reason why Valve denied that Half-Life 2 was even being done until now. That, and maybe the fact that they've been promising us Team Fortress 2 for 4 or 5 years and will deliver HL2 first.
Anyone else thing Half-Life is the best game of all time(monkey island comes close)?
I don't even think HL is the best FPS game ever, let alone best game of all time, but most people don't seem to agree with me
To be honest, I don't know many games which achieve this. I can only think of Diablo II (which is only half-way there - some stats/skills in DII are still a little useless [although the upcoming patch will probably improve on this])
IMO, Diablo 2 fails more in not showing you all of the stats that are actually used by the game, and how each item effects them. As far as the skills go, well, that's more of a design issue, and I really dislike the fact that Blizzard changed the game to make some of their useless skills neccessary, rather than making the skills more useful.
No, I don't think it's good when everyone's playing a certain class the same way when the way the game is played is based so highly on what skills you pick, but if they had beta tested out to lvl 30 or so they would've been able to balance some of those things before the game launched.
The upper limit of the number of Xenosaga games was determined around the time the designers decided to make a prequel series to Xenogears, at ~6.
The number of Nietzsche titles is around 2-3 times that (there was a time when I would know the number, but that time is not now, and I'm not at home to check my bookshelf).
I saw the reverse when I played the game. My long-range characters (especially those wielding the bow) advanced more quickly than my melee characters. Of course, this might be simply because I tend to reign in the characters a bit to keep them from wandering away from the core of the group, and used the melee characters mostly as a defensive force for the center. The long-range characters would usually get at least a hit on every enemy in the area, while the melee characters only really got experience from those that lived long enough to get close, and then only on those that were closest to them.
They were selling 4 games per unit before any free games were given away with the consoles. If they're selling 5 now and they're counting the 2 games (as 2 games), then their attach rate has actually dropped.
What I'd like to see (though it's not likely to happen), is Microsoft and Sony following Nintendo's lead in offering quality wireless controllers at a decent price. Hell, the only wireless controller I've seen in stores for the XBox is a logitech controller that costs more than 2x what my Wavebird cost. I now have 3 wavebirds and 2 cable extensions for my PS2 (luckily the XBox cables are actually long enough to reach the couch).
The XBox gets lumped under 'Home and Entertainment' which made $483 million this quarter ($2.748 billion for the year). Where the XBox fits in that, though, is anyone's guess (and isn't it nice to see an article linked from Yahoo that simply quotes a tiny amount of the microsoft release that's available on MS' site).
Yeah, but we needed a boot disk to run Doom on a 4MB machine anyway.
While they may have used some aspects of PowerPlay, the basic ideas are completely different. PowerPlay was meant to speed up internet connections and make them more reliable, as well as increasing the security of network code (reducing hacking and cheating in games) while preserving bandwidth.
Steam, on the other hand, is about content delivery. While being able to download updates in a fairly dynamic fashion can help with the security aspect (by allowing patches to go out more quickly and by forcing users to update), it doesn't really do what PowerPlay was intended to.
Halo has been bundled with xbox's in Australia since about 3-6 months after launch.
In the US, I have never seen an XBox bundled with Halo unless I ordered it online (and it costs roughly the same as buying an XBox and buying Halo seperately). My XBox came with Sega GT 2002 and Jet Grind, which is a pretty standard bundle.
Utter rubbish. The NES only got bundled with Mario and Duck Hunt years after release.
3 years after release (when the NES hit $100), SMB was bundled (at that price point). SMB/Duck Hunt was a bundle at a slightly higher price point. SMB had actually been bundled for a while before that, but I'm not exactly sure how long. The only person I know that had an NES near release (1984) got it with that damned robot thing.
Mario Allstars ended up being available as a bundle with SNES, but Allstars wasn't anywhere near a launch title.
SNES was bundled with Super Mario World near/at release, but that has nothing to do with SMB's sales (though SMW's sales are extremely high as well, in fact, higher than any other mario game besides SMB1).
Super Mario Bros. 3 is the best-selling game of all time never bundled with a console at 17.28 million sales (3.3 million less than SMW and less than half of SMB1).
Then what about the strong success of the Zelda series? Or Final Fantasy?
My gf plays Zelda quite a bit, but can't stand FF, but maybe it's just the fact that I've been playing FF1 + 2, rather than some of the newer ones.
She would probably play Tekken or Soul Calibur, but she can't stand playing against me (probably because I can't stand the excessive use of the 'kick in the foot' manuever, or the 'mash buttons and hope it does something' method, and therefore instantly kick the shit out of the offending character 75% of the time).
She wants a copy of the original GameBoy Tetris, because she doesn't like Tetris Worlds (I don't know why for sure, but think it has something to do with the annoying cube).
She plays Pokemon (Gold and Ruby) obsessively. Seriously I can only get my GBA SP if I grab it before she realizes it might be useful wherever we're going. As long as it's not dark out she's perfectly happy with the GBA (non-SP), though (but I still have to grab the SP before she thinks about it).
The real problem is that she won't even bother trying a game most of the time. It has to be entirely her decision to try it or she won't touch it. I don't even know why/how/when she picked up Zelda, but it's so bad that she won't even play my copy of it, because her game is saved on her brother's cart.
Actually, getting her to play on anything but a gameboy is pretty hard anyway.
heh, before VAC came out, one of my CD keys (I have 3 for various reasons, primarily because Sierra gives free games to message board moderators, or at least they used to) was banned with no explanation. I think it might be because it was being used by someone else (I'm guessing a CD key generator got it right), and I eventually went into the registry and changed my key (to one of my other keys) because it was in use so often during clan matches and practices. Anyway, I reinstalled HL and accidentally used said key, only to find myself banned from the auth servers.
We used Punkbuster pretty heavily in TFC (I even ran a league for a while that used it from the start of the league's (short) life). Unfortunately, it had it's share of problems, but false positives were not high in my experience. We finally had to get rid of it when PB's developers stopped updating it for HL and it became very evident that it was easily hacked/bypassed by anyone that wanted to cheat.
If I had to pick an ideal time to get out, it would've been the first time I took a break from the game, when CE stopped playing TFC (and moved to CS for a while). The game was much better then, before the netcode update, the rampant cheating, and the general whining about how the game should or should not be played (god forbid I shoot incoming offense; I can understand 'play nice' rules in pub games, and even uphold and support them, but in matches?).