The reason I said the thing about it being optional like that is if you've noticed, Valve likes to enforce their new changes. Most league gamers would much rather cs be more like beta7, or atleast 1.0, but instead you're stuck dealing with the features that most hate (delay in jumping, awp to the leg not killing, pistols being practicly worthless in air, etc).
Yeah, I pretty much figured that was your point, as Valve is just as notorious on the TFC side for changing things without giving people any options to change it back. There was even a whole movement (and there may still be a small league for all I know) to create a league for pre-TF1.5 gaming (ie the servers and the clients would all be on the version previous to the netcode update which brought in the unlag feature, and a mess of other new features for TFC). There are a couple of FAQs out there on how to setup HL so that you have two concurrent versions you can switch between to accomplish this, as well.
You actually broke your halflife addiction? You should make a 12 step program so I can join-- Playing counterstrike is like being in an abusive relationship, you know you shouldnt but you keep coming back.
12 steps: 1. Move across the country 2. Make sure your computer breaks in the move 3. Make sure it takes you a month to get the cable modem up and running after you buy a new motherboard/case/CPU/RAM to fix step 2 4. Make sure the power supply that came with new case above is not powerful enough to allow you to boot up the computer with the CPU from step 3 above 5. Make sure the league you play in is playing shitty maps for the first 6 weeks after you finally resolve the issues from steps 2 through 4 above 6. Find out after 7 weeks that the place you thought you'd be living in for the next year has had the lease revoked on the grounds that the owner needs a place for a relative to live, and the lease was month-to-month, so they were being nice in giving you the option of staying another 2 months 7. Find a place at the last minute so you can move for the 2nd time in 3 months 8. Another 3 weeks to get a cable modem up and running 9. Find out the league played the best maps while you were down, and they're starting another 6 weeks of shitty maps 10. Quit 11. Move again after ~4 months in the place from step 7, this time into your girlfriend's place 12. Watch all of your time for HL disappear since you now live with your girlfriend. I also found out that the clan I was playing TFC with broke up (about 6 weeks after it happened), and don't really care to spend the time on pubs getting back up to the point where I could join a clan that I would feel comfortable with (and actually feel comfortable with the idea that they're playing me instead of someone else)
The screen tilted sideways with 0 health bug is well hidden, but i've seen it pop up in the mod Natural Selection before. A similar screentilt bug is in hltv still, if you're first person when they die you're stuck screen-tilted until you first person someone thats still alive. really annoying in the middle of watching a good lan match live.
The best part about it in TFC was that I regularly played medic, and the screen would go back to normal when the regeneration kicked in and put me back up to 2 health. If people only knew how many flags I'd stolen after being at 0 health they'd probably be pretty pissed about that little bug.
Steam is a content delivery and management system. You install Steam and then you can download games and mods and be sure they're kept up to date (the idea is for Valve and other developers to be able to self-publish their titles over the internet through Steam).
PowerPlay is/was an initiative to make online gaming work better with both hardware and software improvements from the lowliest modem to the routers and switches, down to the protocols used for online gaming (ie UDP) and the encryption methods used to keep the game data secure (mostly from proxy-based cheating).
heh, it's nice that Valve put in the option, but the simple fact is that finding a server that doesn't use it is nearly impossible, and it's required in most competition configs (though the actual value tends to be different between leagues).
People complaining about lag or unlag in game are generally just making excuses. If it's that bad, they would've left to find a better server. However, with unlag you have a situation where the player is forced to deal with an artificial component of the game for which they can not compensate. Those of us that started playing online FPS games with Quake, or even earlier, on dial-up (at a time when an LPB was someone under 400ms) learned at that time to compensate for our latency with various techniques to predict the opponent's movements and shots (basically doing the compensation in our heads that Valve is using server-side code to do now). When people complained about lag, they were told to learn to deal with it by other players, or find another server. Now the developers have taken it into their own hands to enforce lag on players that have paid to reduce it, or on players that have learned to compensate for it themselves.
Overall, the option given to players is either to allow the server to compensate for their shots and movements, or not allow the server to compensate. The players have no control over the 'shooting around walls' effect except to try to find the rare server that has turned off unlag completely, or the choice to prevent their own shots from doing it to others (which essentially means taking away something from yourself that every other player is given).
Half-life already had some of the best network code available before they added in the unlag feature, and they did this by reducing the amount of traffic to nearly a bare minimum, and implementing things similar to what is mentioned in the article about Falcon's netcode, things like retransmission and ordering of UDP packets with significantly less overhead than TCP packets (and there are options in Half-life's console commands to control how many resends you will receive (if any) and things of that nature).
Things like getting shot around corners were already standard for people with high ping anyway, and they actually happen to these people more often under the unlag code than before, but they're also the least likely to notice the change, except when it's in their favor. The people that tended to notice the change the most were those that had gotten high-speed connections to counter this problem, and the unlag code just brought it back to them.
Fortunately, though, I no longer play the game, so I don't really have to deal with it any more. I've considered going back to it a few times, but Valve's tendency to mess with what's right (the network code, and a few other issues specific to TFC, like grenade loadouts and effects, class speed, etc), and not fix what's wrong (have they killed the 'running around with your screen tilted sideways at 0 health' bug yet? That one was in HL at launch 4 years ago), not to mention not finishing and releasing a game they promised to us 4 years ago as a mod/patch/seperate game (TF2), has led me to looking for better things to spend my time on.
I can't believe I'm old enough to say this, but... I think kids today are missing out. All the video games are flashy and awesome etc... But there's something to be said for the dead-simple games like Frogger, Pac-Man, or Tapper. Cross the road, Eat all the dots, Serve drinks, repeat forever. I'm willing to bet that 90% of the kiddies who read slashdot have never tried Tapper, or at least not seriously.
I think that many people here may not have tried Tapper (because when it came out we couldn't get into bars to play it, which is why, as the article mentions, they made Root Beer Tapper), but most of us played Pac-Man, Frogger, Centipede, Missle Command, etc. if not on the arcade machines (hell, my Dentist had a free Pac-Man machine when I was a kid), then on our consoles at home (whether they were Atari or whatever). I have the Namco Museum disc for my GameCube, and play Dig-Dug, Pac-Man, and Galaga every once in a while, but for the most part I get my ass kicked, because those games are entirely about repeated plays. The more you play, the better you get at them, but most of us don't want to spend the time doing so, because it's just about how many levels and how many points you can get, and the levels don't change much.
It's certainly an impressive record, but it's a long read to really get a feel for it, and quite simply, the guy only stopped out of respect for the original record (and the people holding the event), he could've probably kept going until he passed out.
Personally, I've had my fill of that type of gameplay, and whenever I really need a fix of it, I just load up the handful of ports to new systems that are available and get it out of my system. I prefer games with a definitive endpoint to give a sense of accomplishment (rather than beating some long-standing record by playing for 16 hours without pausing the game, which is a great accomplishment, but wouldn't be the same as finishing the game, which cannot be done here). As he even pointed out himself, the record was more about unification (of the records) and the real record to beat is at the 5-lives point, where you have a real proof of efficiency at the game. If you flip the level counter 3 times and still have close to 80 lives, the score is just a matter of where you choose to stop, rather than where you can actually get the game. It doesn't quite hit us the way, say, maximizing the score on Donkey Kong with it's kill screen does.
Of course, it could be as much as 500ms before that person dies, too (if both players have 250ms ping). The default for maxunlag used to be higher, too, which caused some really big problems (ie imagine 400ms + your ping between the time you duck behind the corner and the time you die).
It's a good idea in theory, but in practice it tends to just irritate players that have good connections (even though it really has the worst effect on the people that have pings closest to the maxunlag).
The biggest problem with it is simply that players can't react to the information on their screens (which is behind by their ping plus that of the player they're trying to react to). So, a sniper with high ping can be facing the completely wrong direction AND the target can duck around a corner and he'll still get hit by a sniper that was facing 90-180 degrees away from the target and around 1 or 2 corners.
Plus, at least around here, Blockbuster and Hollywood video both have deals where you can rent games for $20/month, as many games as you want, as long as you want, as long as you only keep one out at a time (in other words, roughly equivalent to what they would've gotten if you rented 4 games a month anyway, but you could turn in that game that took you 2 hours to get sick of and get another one without paying more, or you could keep that game that's taking you a few more days to finish without paying late fees).
Not only that, but the XBox (and probably the PS2 with the hard drive add-on) could do downloadable game subscriptions anyway, if they could come up with the DRM to keep you from copying the game from the hard drive once you downloaded it.
I might be willing to pay $15 or $20 a month to have access to a selection of games downloadable over the internet connection (I did it with my Genesis, but that was my parents' money at the time), but not at the exclusion of being able to buy a game and have it on a DVD to play whenever I want without paying anything else (or being able to wait 6 months and picking the game up for $20).
Monolith, also, doesn't get a hell of a lot of respect, and I think that's part of it.
As do I, in fact, it's the #1 reason I haven't bought either of the current NOLF games (#2 reason: 'groovy 60s theme', #3 reason Yet Another Stealth Is Important Game; neither #2 or #3 being toned down or removed will get past #1, though).
Aside from AvP2, there hasn't been anything they've done that's gotten much spotlight.
I thought most of what they've done has gotten a pretty glaring spotlight, but that most of it didn't deserve the praise it received (and that they usually deserved most of the crap slung at them).
Blood 2 and Shogo were both underground successes (though Shogo's hellacious bugginess in the beginning was part of the reason it didn't succeed as much as it could have).
That's kindof funny, because I played a lot further into Shogo before I hit a snag than I did in Blood 2 (where I fell out of the 2nd level trying to negotiate around some crates in near total darkness). The multiplayer in both games, of course, was basically a no show, even with a good connection.
The Lithtech engine doesn't have the name recognition that the various engine iterations that id has come out with, or the Unreal engine, despite the fact that NOLF 2 is still one of the best looking, best playing, and most original PC FPSes I've ever played.
The Lithtech engine has a big 'looks like badly rendered ultra-neon-spew' recognition in my head, but that's probably because the last time I touched it with a 10-foot pole was when I bought Blood 2 with the much-hyped-fix-everything-patch included, and found that the patch failed miserably to make the game completely playable. Oh, and the fact that both Shogo and Blood 2 looked like they could've been rendered by the Quake engine with minor modifications, at a time when I had already played (and gotten bored with) Half-life. I will admit, though, that at least the games were more original than the average FPS (though Blood 2 is a sequel...).
With all the games I've collected that I haven't beaten yet, I still have it installed and play it often.
If Monolith ever produces something that proves to be only as buggy as your average FPS (instead of as buggy as Blood 2 or Shogo), and that actually appeals to me for some reason, I'll be sure to give them another chance, based on what I've heard about NOLF. I'll never spend another dime on Monolith without reading 3 months of reviews and thoroughly checking message boards for the game before buying, though.
I can't believe how many 2ed books I accumulated at $20/each over the years when my parents were giving me an allowance of $5/week. Of course, I got a handful of them for Xmas/birthdays, but it was nothing next to what I spent myself. If only I had been happy with just the core rules, but noooo I had to go off on DragonLance, and RavenLoft, and some of the extra classes (Warrior's and Thief's guides, Psionics? wtf?).
Of course, now I just stuff $50 into a game almost every time a PC or console D&D RPG comes out (not to mention the rest of the console RPGs I play).
Personally, the only way I've managed to follow it at all is by picking up the DVDs as they're released.
Personally, I like the fact that the show not only handles the idea of self-policing, but also shows that there is an extent to which the Crimson Knights still can not handle every possible circumstance (ie the fact that Tsukasa (and possibly others) can travel through the World in ways that are not supposed to be possible). That and the fact that at least one person in the hierarchy has some access to the developers and maintainers of the game that allows them to at least try to restrict players if circumstances allow (which could also be abused, but the character they give this power to in the series is generally portrayed as a very responsible person).
I'm definitely looking forward to the release of part 4 (even though I just got part 3 last nite, I also watched all of it).
The Liminality story line (which comes with the PS2 games) is also interesting, although since it takes place offline I don't find it quite as entertaining as either the game or the Sign story.
For example: the game could have a system through which the players build up a government, and that government would have the ability to setup law enforcement. Law enforcement would then be a profession that people choose to perform (as someone said in a past thread on a similar subject, like the Crimson Guard in.hack://Sign (part 3 released in the US on DVD this week, watched it last nite;p). Maybe require some sort of training to become an officer, and then have additional levels of enforcement to handle abuse of power (ie internal affairs, or simply player appeals to a legal system).
Of course, it's all subject to abuse, but then the players are the ones that setup the government in the first place, they should be the ones to choose what to do about a corrupt government, too. Of course, once a player finds their player imprisoned they'll most likely just delete that character unless there's a really strong reason for them to just turn that character over to prison life until they are released (if the character is really powerful, for instance, although in that case they may be able to break free of prison).
I know it isn't an easy matter to just do this sort of thing, but if it could be done, it'd at least be an interesting addition to the game.
Well, I'm sure you realize quite well what kind of perception most Americans have of Australia thanks to Hollywood and the Discovery channel;p But yeah, even if they told people to suck the venom out, I don't think most people actually would (especially anyone that actually works in the health professions).
Otoh, I see no need for the proof you demand of some percentage of the population (50%?!) converted to violence from any cause before there is reason to believe that the cause has operated and can operate again. I think you are demanding exactly an unusual level of evidence. I'd say it is some evidence of copying when even a single person uses characteristic features like some model of violence.
50% was partially a number I pulled out of my ass, and partially based on the idea that roughly 67% of the population aged 26 and under plays at least some video games in the first place. Again, though, copying is a different area from just stating that exposure to violence leads to violent activity. In many cases copying is a simple result of someone wanting to commit violence, and taking the example of some form of entertainment (or in most copycat cases someone else's violent act(s)) for the manner in which to commit those acts. Some people go around thinking that they want to kill a particular person, and aren't sure of how they should do it, and then see an episode of some crime-drama on TV and decide that they can do it that way.
What isn't known is whether or not people performed a violent act because they were exposed to violent material. Just because they chose to copy something they saw/read/heard doesn't mean that they were not going to commit a violent act without the influence of the material.
There were examples of copycat violence using the odd characteristics of the film 'Clockwork Orange'. More recently, a popular TV soap had a dramatic episode of attempted suicide closely followed by a surge of real attempted suicides with similar features that made local hospital staff complain to the soap producers for the strain they had put on already-heavy-loaded hospital services. (IMO they were not speculating wildly without evidence about an unproven cause, they were using their common sense.)
While they may have been using common sense in figuring out that these people were imitating what they saw, the common sense ends there. People that commit suicide, especially (but also other violent crimes to some degree) are often looking for attention, or are asking for help. Doing so in a way shown by media brings the attention of the press, meaning they get more attention from their action and/or more/better help.
When book, film, TV soap, and in other examples, real violence reported on news, have all made models for temporally-linked copied violence, it sounds improbable and in need of evidence to claim that video/computer games are somehow different and will be exempt.
I'm not saying that video games are exempt, I'm saying that the evidence linking media in general to violent acts is flawed, because it is not proof that the media was the reason the acts occured. Copycat crimes are examples in which people utilize examples from media in their crimes, not examples of people committing crimes because they saw/heard/read them. Anyone that's taken basic logic or science courses (especially psychology) and understood those courses knows the difference between the two (A causes B vs. A is evidenced in some people who have committed B).
But in a given case evidence may or may not be there. If the 'Warriors of Freedom' show an independent source for their name that's believable, and there's no evidence they knew of the game of the same name, then I'd say those facts did not amount to evidence of copying from the game in that case. But if they did see the game, the similarity of names would begin to look to me like evidence supporting with at any rate some probability that they were motivated to copy and did copy in that case. How is that unreasonable?
And again, the thread was not about motivation to copy, but about causality. If they took the name from said game, then they chose the name and went with it. That still does not say that if they hadn't played the game they wouldn't have gone out and called themselves something els
Also, US First Aid courses apparently still use the "crosscut and suck out the venom" method of treating snakebites.
I'm pretty sure they don't teach that in the US (though I could be wrong, since the only first aid course I've taken was a requirement in high school), since they'd be pretty concerned about what the other person had that you might catch by getting their blood in your mouth. As far as I know (growing up in southern CA where poisonous snakes are fairly common) they teach you to use a tourniquet and to transport the person (keeping them as motionless as possible) to the nearest hospital.
Then again, at different times I've heard they teach you not to use a tourniquet any more, too, but reducing the blood flow from the wound is just a good idea when it comes to dealing with rattlesnake bites.
It's simply a statement that the game doesn't give any advantage to the player by utilizing bullet time, assuming that the player can aim in real time. Bullet time in Max Payne slows down everything, so the only advantage a player gets is more time to aim, but the player has no more time to get away from opponents, because the player can't move any faster or adjust based on stimulus that were not already there.
On the other hand, if the player has trouble keeping up with the positions of everything in the game and with aiming quickly and accurately, then the bullet time will help them.
Hence the comparison to Enter the Matrix, where everything but the player is slowed down, so the player can do more in the same time period than the computer opponents can.
Additionally, the arcade machines rarely make the company back all of the money they spent on development, so the money is mostly justified with 'well this arcade platform is easily portable to X home platform' (where X is XBox, PS2, GC, PC w/ Y graphics card). I know that both the DreamCast and XBox have had specific hardware versions for arcade cabinets to utilize, and that in the past 3dfx and others made arcade hardware as well.
Also, it should be noted that Nintendo's definitely not afraid to make games in the same series using the same characters that are completely different from their predecessors. Anyone that says Wind Waker, Metroid Prime, and Mario Sunshine are the same basic games they saw on the NES haven't even looked at these games (of course, I've heard that Wind Waker and Ocarina of Time are similar, I wouldn't know).
You're talking about a different phenomenon from nearly everyone else here. In fact, the post was a response to a post which specifically set aside copycat violence. Copycat violence is a very specific type of crime, and is much more rare than non-copycat violence.
The game Doom didn't involve making pipe bombs in your garage and then planting them around a school before unloading your guns into people (in fact, the only 'person' I remember in Doom was John Romero's head on a stick, the game was about fighting demons to save the earth from Hell's wrath). Yet people blamed Doom when a couple of teenagers (one of which was legally an adult) did just that.
Whether or not exposure to violent media is responsible for the actual violence is the question. Even studies of copycat violence can't tell you whether or not a copycat would have committed a violent act in the absence of violent media.
As for your claim of 'how often sceptics about the link between portrayals of violence and the actuality of copycat violence often shelter behind demands for unusual levels of evidence': It's not a demand for unusual levels of evidence, it's a demand for any level of actual evidence. Not 'violent people play violent games', not 'oh my friend watched Beavis & Butthead then walked around saying 'fire, fire' and lit his cat on fire'. If you're going to say that people that play violent games become violent people, then show some evidence. Don't show me that 50% of people imprisoned for violent crimes polled said they played violent video games. Show me that 50% of people that play violent video games commit a violent act. You can't even do that, because if you could, there'd be millions of people in the US alone killing each other because they played Grand Theft Auto or Doom. Fortunately, less than 1500 people were victims of homicide in the US in 2000, so either everyone really sucks at Half-life, or it doesn't translate well into reality.
Bullet time in Max Payne allowed the computer opponents to take more time to aim at you just as well as it allowed you to aim at them, which is why I chose not to use it.
As for beating 'all the modes', as I said, I played the game for ~8 hours, which implied that I played through it once. After that, regardless of what they put in the game to make you play it again, it wasn't worth it. I'm glad I only payed $20 for it, and I don't see why some people were obsessive enough about the game to play it any longer than that.
[FMV] My own thoughts on this? Done properly, it's spectacular; but for it to work, one must both (a) do it extremely sparingly and (b) catch the reader's interest *before* the scrolling marquee of text. Case in point: Final Fantasy IV, with the scrolling text leaving Baron, with "Crossing the Bridge" in the background... Spectacular.
Of course, too many screenfuls of text, I agree, are even worse than rendered video. Morrowind is a perfect example of what not to do -- uninteresting story, no characterization or hook for the reader, and way too much text way too early.
I just started the Wind Waker a couple days ago. Definitely too much text, imo, right at the start. Animal Crossing almost had the same problem. At least, though, neither game did it in the old 'just scroll it up there' fashion, or the 'just post it all on screen at once' method of say Doom.
My own preferred technique is to just tell the story within the script, FF6-style, and not require any scrolling texts or rendered video sequences in the first place. The former are dodges about characterization, the latter, dodges about graphics.
I agree, when the game's playing style suits it (ie RTS games might have a hard time doing this, though WarCraft 3 showed it could be done for the most part).
[Enix quality] [Chrono Cross/Trigger] It was more than just Square/Enix, it was a "Grand Unified Anime" approach -- had a range of people from elsewhere, including IIRC the guy behind Dragonball Z; and amazingly, despite his presence on staff, it didn't stink.:)
IIRC, Enix wasn't involved at all. I could be wrong, of course.
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrono_Trigger (t he same info is in many other places, but I figured the first link I hit on a bad google search will do well enough (I searched for Chrono Cross instead of Chrono Trigger, oops)
The Dream Team was made up of Hironobu Sakaguchi of the Final Fantasy series, Yuiji Horii of the Dragon Warrior games, character designer Akira Toriyama of Dragon Ball Z and music composers Yasunori Mitsuda of Xenogears and Chrono Cross, and Nobuo Uematsu of the Final Fantasy series.
A quick search on Akira Toriyama (Dragon Ball/Z) also brings up the fact that he's been a character designer on the Dragon Quest/Warrior games.
[FF7] [FF7 certainly brought a lot of people to the series that had never seen an FF game before, especially since the last one most Americans saw was either the first or the fourth (depending on what consoles they had).]
What about FF6?
That one, too. Then again, I only played FF1 before I bought the PS re-releases, because I didn't have an SNES. I did at least get to see the 4th, as a friend had it.
[The Merger] [1) Square ate a big loss on the FF movie 2) In the US Square are mostly known for only the FF series, most of which were first seen in the US as re-releases for the PS console (a couple of which are a bit hard to find lately) (Kingdom Hearts and maybe Super Mario RPG being notable exceptions) 3) Enix is in a similar place, being known mostly for Dragon Quest/Warrior, and even there not being well known in the US 4) Most people agree that when Square and Enix collaborated on the Chrono games, they made a couple of the best RPGs ever. 5) The previously mentioned ability of Enix to move their characters and brand into other media]
In other words, yeah, they're desperate.:) I question point #4 -- was it Enix, or the Dragonball Z lead guy, who added that different feel to Chrono Trigger?
Probably a combination of the two, and Square's willingness to make a lot of changes (which they incorporated in the FF series) in terms of the various systems the game used (ie the battle system). As I noted, Enix also used the Dragonball Z guy in the Dragon Quest series (actually, he was one of the three creators of the series, as noted at: http://www.dqs
I played one game at Circus Circus in Las Vegas that was basically an arcade fighter jet game that had full 360 degree rotation in any direction. That was definitely worth coughing up some cash for (and I think it cost a dollar or two to play), but would've definitely taken a few runs just to get used to being strapped into the seat hanging upside down if you turned the stick that way before you could play it for longer than a minute. I don't even remember anything about the gameplay or graphics, just that if your plane was upside down, so were you, and that it was a blast for that reason alone.
Other than that, the only arcade games I've played in the last 5 years or so have been fighting games (Tekken series and Soul Blade/Calibur), shooting games (like House of the Dead), and a couple of odd tank games and racing games that involved elaborate control setups or a bunch of little race cars lined up in front of huge screens.
For the most part, though, the places that actually have these kinds of setups make their money through other means (like casinos), or appeal strongly to an older market and don't have a lot of games that I would really enjoy (like Dave & Buster's, which seems mostly geared towards sports games).
I loved in the early Dreamcast commercials when they would have a digital Jim McMahon go off about the defense getting beat by the same stupid play again and again. Definitely the halfback pass in Joe Montana 2: Sports Talk Football.
or the quarterback sneak in one of the old NES football games (made by Namco I think), though I'm sure they were tying into their own faults as much as the faults of everyone else. I just remember abusing the hell out of that play when my step-brother and I played against each other, and he never did figure out that there was nothing he could do to prevent it, that the game was just hosed. It was one of the first times I could really beat him in a sports game, because he had a better idea of what the plays actually were (in real life), whereas I had a better idea of what the game would actually do when I chose the play.
I don't know about better/worse whatever (and I wasn't the previous poster), but I do know that all 3 of the major NFL 2003 football games scored roughly the same in reviews, and I eventually chose MS' game (because it was $10 cheaper), which is obviously neither Madden nor NFL 2K3.
I'd say rent it to give it a look. One thing I've noticed is that a lot of people just stick with the 1st series they found that really satisfied them (in other words, didn't annoy them). I'm not a really big football fan, so I won't say that NFL Fever is the best football game or anything like that, or try to make comparisons, just that the overall feeling I got from the reviews is that what seperates Madden from the other 2 is Madden, and not a deficiency in the other games or anything that Madden does better.
...and I went through the rest of the game without using it once I realized it gained no advantage the first time I used it (OTOH, Enter the Matrix makes it worthwhile, but isn't really worth spending the same 8 hours (it took me to beat Max Payne) playing).
GTA:VC has both Motion Blur and Lens Flare, and both irritate me to no end. Maybe some day they'll learn that these things are mostly caused by deficincies in camera technology and stop wasting graphics chip cycles on them, or not.
Bullet Time in a football game? OK, maybe I can understand that, but wouldn't you call it something different?
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The reason I said the thing about it being optional like that is if you've noticed, Valve likes to enforce their new changes. Most league gamers would much rather cs be more like beta7, or atleast 1.0, but instead you're stuck dealing with the features that most hate (delay in jumping, awp to the leg not killing, pistols being practicly worthless in air, etc).
Yeah, I pretty much figured that was your point, as Valve is just as notorious on the TFC side for changing things without giving people any options to change it back. There was even a whole movement (and there may still be a small league for all I know) to create a league for pre-TF1.5 gaming (ie the servers and the clients would all be on the version previous to the netcode update which brought in the unlag feature, and a mess of other new features for TFC). There are a couple of FAQs out there on how to setup HL so that you have two concurrent versions you can switch between to accomplish this, as well.
You actually broke your halflife addiction? You should make a 12 step program so I can join-- Playing counterstrike is like being in an abusive relationship, you know you shouldnt but you keep coming back.
12 steps:
1. Move across the country
2. Make sure your computer breaks in the move
3. Make sure it takes you a month to get the cable modem up and running after you buy a new motherboard/case/CPU/RAM to fix step 2
4. Make sure the power supply that came with new case above is not powerful enough to allow you to boot up the computer with the CPU from step 3 above
5. Make sure the league you play in is playing shitty maps for the first 6 weeks after you finally resolve the issues from steps 2 through 4 above
6. Find out after 7 weeks that the place you thought you'd be living in for the next year has had the lease revoked on the grounds that the owner needs a place for a relative to live, and the lease was month-to-month, so they were being nice in giving you the option of staying another 2 months
7. Find a place at the last minute so you can move for the 2nd time in 3 months
8. Another 3 weeks to get a cable modem up and running
9. Find out the league played the best maps while you were down, and they're starting another 6 weeks of shitty maps
10. Quit
11. Move again after ~4 months in the place from step 7, this time into your girlfriend's place
12. Watch all of your time for HL disappear since you now live with your girlfriend. I also found out that the clan I was playing TFC with broke up (about 6 weeks after it happened), and don't really care to spend the time on pubs getting back up to the point where I could join a clan that I would feel comfortable with (and actually feel comfortable with the idea that they're playing me instead of someone else)
The screen tilted sideways with 0 health bug is well hidden, but i've seen it pop up in the mod Natural Selection before. A similar screentilt bug is in hltv still, if you're first person when they die you're stuck screen-tilted until you first person someone thats still alive. really annoying in the middle of watching a good lan match live.
The best part about it in TFC was that I regularly played medic, and the screen would go back to normal when the regeneration kicked in and put me back up to 2 health. If people only knew how many flags I'd stolen after being at 0 health they'd probably be pretty pissed about that little bug.
No, it's not.
Steam is a content delivery and management system. You install Steam and then you can download games and mods and be sure they're kept up to date (the idea is for Valve and other developers to be able to self-publish their titles over the internet through Steam).
PowerPlay is/was an initiative to make online gaming work better with both hardware and software improvements from the lowliest modem to the routers and switches, down to the protocols used for online gaming (ie UDP) and the encryption methods used to keep the game data secure (mostly from proxy-based cheating).
Which is why its optional
heh, it's nice that Valve put in the option, but the simple fact is that finding a server that doesn't use it is nearly impossible, and it's required in most competition configs (though the actual value tends to be different between leagues).
People complaining about lag or unlag in game are generally just making excuses. If it's that bad, they would've left to find a better server. However, with unlag you have a situation where the player is forced to deal with an artificial component of the game for which they can not compensate. Those of us that started playing online FPS games with Quake, or even earlier, on dial-up (at a time when an LPB was someone under 400ms) learned at that time to compensate for our latency with various techniques to predict the opponent's movements and shots (basically doing the compensation in our heads that Valve is using server-side code to do now). When people complained about lag, they were told to learn to deal with it by other players, or find another server. Now the developers have taken it into their own hands to enforce lag on players that have paid to reduce it, or on players that have learned to compensate for it themselves.
Overall, the option given to players is either to allow the server to compensate for their shots and movements, or not allow the server to compensate. The players have no control over the 'shooting around walls' effect except to try to find the rare server that has turned off unlag completely, or the choice to prevent their own shots from doing it to others (which essentially means taking away something from yourself that every other player is given).
Half-life already had some of the best network code available before they added in the unlag feature, and they did this by reducing the amount of traffic to nearly a bare minimum, and implementing things similar to what is mentioned in the article about Falcon's netcode, things like retransmission and ordering of UDP packets with significantly less overhead than TCP packets (and there are options in Half-life's console commands to control how many resends you will receive (if any) and things of that nature).
Things like getting shot around corners were already standard for people with high ping anyway, and they actually happen to these people more often under the unlag code than before, but they're also the least likely to notice the change, except when it's in their favor. The people that tended to notice the change the most were those that had gotten high-speed connections to counter this problem, and the unlag code just brought it back to them.
Fortunately, though, I no longer play the game, so I don't really have to deal with it any more. I've considered going back to it a few times, but Valve's tendency to mess with what's right (the network code, and a few other issues specific to TFC, like grenade loadouts and effects, class speed, etc), and not fix what's wrong (have they killed the 'running around with your screen tilted sideways at 0 health' bug yet? That one was in HL at launch 4 years ago), not to mention not finishing and releasing a game they promised to us 4 years ago as a mod/patch/seperate game (TF2), has led me to looking for better things to spend my time on.
I can't believe I'm old enough to say this, but... I think kids today are missing out. All the video games are flashy and awesome etc... But there's something to be said for the dead-simple games like Frogger, Pac-Man, or Tapper. Cross the road, Eat all the dots, Serve drinks, repeat forever. I'm willing to bet that 90% of the kiddies who read slashdot have never tried Tapper, or at least not seriously.
I think that many people here may not have tried Tapper (because when it came out we couldn't get into bars to play it, which is why, as the article mentions, they made Root Beer Tapper), but most of us played Pac-Man, Frogger, Centipede, Missle Command, etc. if not on the arcade machines (hell, my Dentist had a free Pac-Man machine when I was a kid), then on our consoles at home (whether they were Atari or whatever). I have the Namco Museum disc for my GameCube, and play Dig-Dug, Pac-Man, and Galaga every once in a while, but for the most part I get my ass kicked, because those games are entirely about repeated plays. The more you play, the better you get at them, but most of us don't want to spend the time doing so, because it's just about how many levels and how many points you can get, and the levels don't change much.
It's certainly an impressive record, but it's a long read to really get a feel for it, and quite simply, the guy only stopped out of respect for the original record (and the people holding the event), he could've probably kept going until he passed out.
Personally, I've had my fill of that type of gameplay, and whenever I really need a fix of it, I just load up the handful of ports to new systems that are available and get it out of my system. I prefer games with a definitive endpoint to give a sense of accomplishment (rather than beating some long-standing record by playing for 16 hours without pausing the game, which is a great accomplishment, but wouldn't be the same as finishing the game, which cannot be done here). As he even pointed out himself, the record was more about unification (of the records) and the real record to beat is at the 5-lives point, where you have a real proof of efficiency at the game. If you flip the level counter 3 times and still have close to 80 lives, the score is just a matter of where you choose to stop, rather than where you can actually get the game. It doesn't quite hit us the way, say, maximizing the score on Donkey Kong with it's kill screen does.
Of course, it could be as much as 500ms before that person dies, too (if both players have 250ms ping). The default for maxunlag used to be higher, too, which caused some really big problems (ie imagine 400ms + your ping between the time you duck behind the corner and the time you die).
It's a good idea in theory, but in practice it tends to just irritate players that have good connections (even though it really has the worst effect on the people that have pings closest to the maxunlag).
The biggest problem with it is simply that players can't react to the information on their screens (which is behind by their ping plus that of the player they're trying to react to). So, a sniper with high ping can be facing the completely wrong direction AND the target can duck around a corner and he'll still get hit by a sniper that was facing 90-180 degrees away from the target and around 1 or 2 corners.
Plus, at least around here, Blockbuster and Hollywood video both have deals where you can rent games for $20/month, as many games as you want, as long as you want, as long as you only keep one out at a time (in other words, roughly equivalent to what they would've gotten if you rented 4 games a month anyway, but you could turn in that game that took you 2 hours to get sick of and get another one without paying more, or you could keep that game that's taking you a few more days to finish without paying late fees).
Not only that, but the XBox (and probably the PS2 with the hard drive add-on) could do downloadable game subscriptions anyway, if they could come up with the DRM to keep you from copying the game from the hard drive once you downloaded it.
I might be willing to pay $15 or $20 a month to have access to a selection of games downloadable over the internet connection (I did it with my Genesis, but that was my parents' money at the time), but not at the exclusion of being able to buy a game and have it on a DVD to play whenever I want without paying anything else (or being able to wait 6 months and picking the game up for $20).
Monolith, also, doesn't get a hell of a lot of respect, and I think that's part of it.
As do I, in fact, it's the #1 reason I haven't bought either of the current NOLF games (#2 reason: 'groovy 60s theme', #3 reason Yet Another Stealth Is Important Game; neither #2 or #3 being toned down or removed will get past #1, though).
Aside from AvP2, there hasn't been anything they've done that's gotten much spotlight.
I thought most of what they've done has gotten a pretty glaring spotlight, but that most of it didn't deserve the praise it received (and that they usually deserved most of the crap slung at them).
Blood 2 and Shogo were both underground successes (though Shogo's hellacious bugginess in the beginning was part of the reason it didn't succeed as much as it could have).
That's kindof funny, because I played a lot further into Shogo before I hit a snag than I did in Blood 2 (where I fell out of the 2nd level trying to negotiate around some crates in near total darkness). The multiplayer in both games, of course, was basically a no show, even with a good connection.
The Lithtech engine doesn't have the name recognition that the various engine iterations that id has come out with, or the Unreal engine, despite the fact that NOLF 2 is still one of the best looking, best playing, and most original PC FPSes I've ever played.
The Lithtech engine has a big 'looks like badly rendered ultra-neon-spew' recognition in my head, but that's probably because the last time I touched it with a 10-foot pole was when I bought Blood 2 with the much-hyped-fix-everything-patch included, and found that the patch failed miserably to make the game completely playable. Oh, and the fact that both Shogo and Blood 2 looked like they could've been rendered by the Quake engine with minor modifications, at a time when I had already played (and gotten bored with) Half-life. I will admit, though, that at least the games were more original than the average FPS (though Blood 2 is a sequel...).
With all the games I've collected that I haven't beaten yet, I still have it installed and play it often.
If Monolith ever produces something that proves to be only as buggy as your average FPS (instead of as buggy as Blood 2 or Shogo), and that actually appeals to me for some reason, I'll be sure to give them another chance, based on what I've heard about NOLF. I'll never spend another dime on Monolith without reading 3 months of reviews and thoroughly checking message boards for the game before buying, though.
I can't believe how many 2ed books I accumulated at $20/each over the years when my parents were giving me an allowance of $5/week. Of course, I got a handful of them for Xmas/birthdays, but it was nothing next to what I spent myself. If only I had been happy with just the core rules, but noooo I had to go off on DragonLance, and RavenLoft, and some of the extra classes (Warrior's and Thief's guides, Psionics? wtf?).
Of course, now I just stuff $50 into a game almost every time a PC or console D&D RPG comes out (not to mention the rest of the console RPGs I play).
Personally, the only way I've managed to follow it at all is by picking up the DVDs as they're released.
Personally, I like the fact that the show not only handles the idea of self-policing, but also shows that there is an extent to which the Crimson Knights still can not handle every possible circumstance (ie the fact that Tsukasa (and possibly others) can travel through the World in ways that are not supposed to be possible). That and the fact that at least one person in the hierarchy has some access to the developers and maintainers of the game that allows them to at least try to restrict players if circumstances allow (which could also be abused, but the character they give this power to in the series is generally portrayed as a very responsible person).
I'm definitely looking forward to the release of part 4 (even though I just got part 3 last nite, I also watched all of it).
The Liminality story line (which comes with the PS2 games) is also interesting, although since it takes place offline I don't find it quite as entertaining as either the game or the Sign story.
oops, good job to me for not reading further down to remind myself it's the Crimson Knights, not the Crimson Guard
Why not just build it into the game?
.hack://Sign (part 3 released in the US on DVD this week, watched it last nite ;p). Maybe require some sort of training to become an officer, and then have additional levels of enforcement to handle abuse of power (ie internal affairs, or simply player appeals to a legal system).
For example:
the game could have a system through which the players build up a government, and that government would have the ability to setup law enforcement. Law enforcement would then be a profession that people choose to perform (as someone said in a past thread on a similar subject, like the Crimson Guard in
Of course, it's all subject to abuse, but then the players are the ones that setup the government in the first place, they should be the ones to choose what to do about a corrupt government, too. Of course, once a player finds their player imprisoned they'll most likely just delete that character unless there's a really strong reason for them to just turn that character over to prison life until they are released (if the character is really powerful, for instance, although in that case they may be able to break free of prison).
I know it isn't an easy matter to just do this sort of thing, but if it could be done, it'd at least be an interesting addition to the game.
Well, I'm sure you realize quite well what kind of perception most Americans have of Australia thanks to Hollywood and the Discovery channel ;p But yeah, even if they told people to suck the venom out, I don't think most people actually would (especially anyone that actually works in the health professions).
err that should be reducing the blood flow from the wound towards the heart...
Otoh, I see no need for the proof you demand of some percentage of the population (50%?!) converted to violence from any cause before there is reason to believe that the cause has operated and can operate again. I think you are demanding exactly an unusual level of evidence. I'd say it is some evidence of copying when even a single person uses characteristic features like some model of violence.
50% was partially a number I pulled out of my ass, and partially based on the idea that roughly 67% of the population aged 26 and under plays at least some video games in the first place. Again, though, copying is a different area from just stating that exposure to violence leads to violent activity. In many cases copying is a simple result of someone wanting to commit violence, and taking the example of some form of entertainment (or in most copycat cases someone else's violent act(s)) for the manner in which to commit those acts. Some people go around thinking that they want to kill a particular person, and aren't sure of how they should do it, and then see an episode of some crime-drama on TV and decide that they can do it that way.
What isn't known is whether or not people performed a violent act because they were exposed to violent material. Just because they chose to copy something they saw/read/heard doesn't mean that they were not going to commit a violent act without the influence of the material.
There were examples of copycat violence using the odd characteristics of the film 'Clockwork Orange'. More recently, a popular TV soap had a dramatic episode of attempted suicide closely followed by a surge of real attempted suicides with similar features that made local hospital staff complain to the soap producers for the strain they had put on already-heavy-loaded hospital services. (IMO they were not speculating wildly without evidence about an unproven cause, they were using their common sense.)
While they may have been using common sense in figuring out that these people were imitating what they saw, the common sense ends there. People that commit suicide, especially (but also other violent crimes to some degree) are often looking for attention, or are asking for help. Doing so in a way shown by media brings the attention of the press, meaning they get more attention from their action and/or more/better help.
When book, film, TV soap, and in other examples, real violence reported on news, have all made models for temporally-linked copied violence, it sounds improbable and in need of evidence to claim that video/computer games are somehow different and will be exempt.
I'm not saying that video games are exempt, I'm saying that the evidence linking media in general to violent acts is flawed, because it is not proof that the media was the reason the acts occured. Copycat crimes are examples in which people utilize examples from media in their crimes, not examples of people committing crimes because they saw/heard/read them. Anyone that's taken basic logic or science courses (especially psychology) and understood those courses knows the difference between the two (A causes B vs. A is evidenced in some people who have committed B).
But in a given case evidence may or may not be there. If the 'Warriors of Freedom' show an independent source for their name that's believable, and there's no evidence they knew of the game of the same name, then I'd say those facts did not amount to evidence of copying from the game in that case. But if they did see the game, the similarity of names would begin to look to me like evidence supporting with at any rate some probability that they were motivated to copy and did copy in that case. How is that unreasonable?
And again, the thread was not about motivation to copy, but about causality. If they took the name from said game, then they chose the name and went with it. That still does not say that if they hadn't played the game they wouldn't have gone out and called themselves something els
Also, US First Aid courses apparently still use the "crosscut and suck out the venom" method of treating snakebites.
I'm pretty sure they don't teach that in the US (though I could be wrong, since the only first aid course I've taken was a requirement in high school), since they'd be pretty concerned about what the other person had that you might catch by getting their blood in your mouth. As far as I know (growing up in southern CA where poisonous snakes are fairly common) they teach you to use a tourniquet and to transport the person (keeping them as motionless as possible) to the nearest hospital.
Then again, at different times I've heard they teach you not to use a tourniquet any more, too, but reducing the blood flow from the wound is just a good idea when it comes to dealing with rattlesnake bites.
It's simply a statement that the game doesn't give any advantage to the player by utilizing bullet time, assuming that the player can aim in real time. Bullet time in Max Payne slows down everything, so the only advantage a player gets is more time to aim, but the player has no more time to get away from opponents, because the player can't move any faster or adjust based on stimulus that were not already there.
On the other hand, if the player has trouble keeping up with the positions of everything in the game and with aiming quickly and accurately, then the bullet time will help them.
Hence the comparison to Enter the Matrix, where everything but the player is slowed down, so the player can do more in the same time period than the computer opponents can.
Additionally, the arcade machines rarely make the company back all of the money they spent on development, so the money is mostly justified with 'well this arcade platform is easily portable to X home platform' (where X is XBox, PS2, GC, PC w/ Y graphics card). I know that both the DreamCast and XBox have had specific hardware versions for arcade cabinets to utilize, and that in the past 3dfx and others made arcade hardware as well.
Also, it should be noted that Nintendo's definitely not afraid to make games in the same series using the same characters that are completely different from their predecessors. Anyone that says Wind Waker, Metroid Prime, and Mario Sunshine are the same basic games they saw on the NES haven't even looked at these games (of course, I've heard that Wind Waker and Ocarina of Time are similar, I wouldn't know).
You're talking about a different phenomenon from nearly everyone else here. In fact, the post was a response to a post which specifically set aside copycat violence. Copycat violence is a very specific type of crime, and is much more rare than non-copycat violence.
The game Doom didn't involve making pipe bombs in your garage and then planting them around a school before unloading your guns into people (in fact, the only 'person' I remember in Doom was John Romero's head on a stick, the game was about fighting demons to save the earth from Hell's wrath). Yet people blamed Doom when a couple of teenagers (one of which was legally an adult) did just that.
Whether or not exposure to violent media is responsible for the actual violence is the question. Even studies of copycat violence can't tell you whether or not a copycat would have committed a violent act in the absence of violent media.
As for your claim of 'how often sceptics about the link between portrayals of violence and the actuality of copycat violence often shelter behind demands for unusual levels of evidence':
It's not a demand for unusual levels of evidence, it's a demand for any level of actual evidence. Not 'violent people play violent games', not 'oh my friend watched Beavis & Butthead then walked around saying 'fire, fire' and lit his cat on fire'. If you're going to say that people that play violent games become violent people, then show some evidence. Don't show me that 50% of people imprisoned for violent crimes polled said they played violent video games. Show me that 50% of people that play violent video games commit a violent act. You can't even do that, because if you could, there'd be millions of people in the US alone killing each other because they played Grand Theft Auto or Doom. Fortunately, less than 1500 people were victims of homicide in the US in 2000, so either everyone really sucks at Half-life, or it doesn't translate well into reality.
Bullet time in Max Payne allowed the computer opponents to take more time to aim at you just as well as it allowed you to aim at them, which is why I chose not to use it.
As for beating 'all the modes', as I said, I played the game for ~8 hours, which implied that I played through it once. After that, regardless of what they put in the game to make you play it again, it wasn't worth it. I'm glad I only payed $20 for it, and I don't see why some people were obsessive enough about the game to play it any longer than that.
[FMV]
:)
:) I question point #4 -- was it Enix, or the Dragonball Z lead guy, who added that different feel to Chrono Trigger?
My own thoughts on this? Done properly, it's spectacular; but for it to work, one must both (a) do it extremely sparingly and (b) catch the reader's interest *before* the scrolling marquee of text. Case in point: Final Fantasy IV, with the scrolling text leaving Baron, with "Crossing the Bridge" in the background... Spectacular.
Of course, too many screenfuls of text, I agree, are even worse than rendered video. Morrowind is a perfect example of what not to do -- uninteresting story, no characterization or hook for the reader, and way too much text way too early.
I just started the Wind Waker a couple days ago. Definitely too much text, imo, right at the start. Animal Crossing almost had the same problem. At least, though, neither game did it in the old 'just scroll it up there' fashion, or the 'just post it all on screen at once' method of say Doom.
My own preferred technique is to just tell the story within the script, FF6-style, and not require any scrolling texts or rendered video sequences in the first place. The former are dodges about characterization, the latter, dodges about graphics.
I agree, when the game's playing style suits it (ie RTS games might have a hard time doing this, though WarCraft 3 showed it could be done for the most part).
[Enix quality]
[Chrono Cross/Trigger]
It was more than just Square/Enix, it was a "Grand Unified Anime" approach -- had a range of people from elsewhere, including IIRC the guy behind Dragonball Z; and amazingly, despite his presence on staff, it didn't stink.
IIRC, Enix wasn't involved at all. I could be wrong, of course.
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrono_Trigger
(t he same info is in many other places, but I figured the first link I hit on a bad google search will do well enough (I searched for Chrono Cross instead of Chrono Trigger, oops)
The Dream Team was made up of Hironobu Sakaguchi of the Final Fantasy series, Yuiji Horii of the Dragon Warrior games, character designer Akira Toriyama of Dragon Ball Z and music composers Yasunori Mitsuda of Xenogears and Chrono Cross, and Nobuo Uematsu of the Final Fantasy series.
A quick search on Akira Toriyama (Dragon Ball/Z) also brings up the fact that he's been a character designer on the Dragon Quest/Warrior games.
[FF7]
[FF7 certainly brought a lot of people to the series that had never seen an FF game before, especially since the last one most Americans saw was either the first or the fourth (depending on what consoles they had).]
What about FF6?
That one, too. Then again, I only played FF1 before I bought the PS re-releases, because I didn't have an SNES. I did at least get to see the 4th, as a friend had it.
[The Merger]
[1) Square ate a big loss on the FF movie
2) In the US Square are mostly known for only the FF series, most of which were first seen in the US as re-releases for the PS console (a couple of which are a bit hard to find lately) (Kingdom Hearts and maybe Super Mario RPG being notable exceptions)
3) Enix is in a similar place, being known mostly for Dragon Quest/Warrior, and even there not being well known in the US
4) Most people agree that when Square and Enix collaborated on the Chrono games, they made a couple of the best RPGs ever.
5) The previously mentioned ability of Enix to move their characters and brand into other media]
In other words, yeah, they're desperate.
Probably a combination of the two, and Square's willingness to make a lot of changes (which they incorporated in the FF series) in terms of the various systems the game used (ie the battle system). As I noted, Enix also used the Dragonball Z guy in the Dragon Quest series (actually, he was one of the three creators of the series, as noted at: http://www.dqs
I played one game at Circus Circus in Las Vegas that was basically an arcade fighter jet game that had full 360 degree rotation in any direction. That was definitely worth coughing up some cash for (and I think it cost a dollar or two to play), but would've definitely taken a few runs just to get used to being strapped into the seat hanging upside down if you turned the stick that way before you could play it for longer than a minute. I don't even remember anything about the gameplay or graphics, just that if your plane was upside down, so were you, and that it was a blast for that reason alone.
Other than that, the only arcade games I've played in the last 5 years or so have been fighting games (Tekken series and Soul Blade/Calibur), shooting games (like House of the Dead), and a couple of odd tank games and racing games that involved elaborate control setups or a bunch of little race cars lined up in front of huge screens.
For the most part, though, the places that actually have these kinds of setups make their money through other means (like casinos), or appeal strongly to an older market and don't have a lot of games that I would really enjoy (like Dave & Buster's, which seems mostly geared towards sports games).
I loved in the early Dreamcast commercials when they would have a digital Jim McMahon go off about the defense getting beat by the same stupid play again and again. Definitely the halfback pass in Joe Montana 2: Sports Talk Football.
or the quarterback sneak in one of the old NES football games (made by Namco I think), though I'm sure they were tying into their own faults as much as the faults of everyone else. I just remember abusing the hell out of that play when my step-brother and I played against each other, and he never did figure out that there was nothing he could do to prevent it, that the game was just hosed. It was one of the first times I could really beat him in a sports game, because he had a better idea of what the plays actually were (in real life), whereas I had a better idea of what the game would actually do when I chose the play.
I don't know about better/worse whatever (and I wasn't the previous poster), but I do know that all 3 of the major NFL 2003 football games scored roughly the same in reviews, and I eventually chose MS' game (because it was $10 cheaper), which is obviously neither Madden nor NFL 2K3.
I'd say rent it to give it a look. One thing I've noticed is that a lot of people just stick with the 1st series they found that really satisfied them (in other words, didn't annoy them). I'm not a really big football fan, so I won't say that NFL Fever is the best football game or anything like that, or try to make comparisons, just that the overall feeling I got from the reviews is that what seperates Madden from the other 2 is Madden, and not a deficiency in the other games or anything that Madden does better.
...and I went through the rest of the game without using it once I realized it gained no advantage the first time I used it (OTOH, Enter the Matrix makes it worthwhile, but isn't really worth spending the same 8 hours (it took me to beat Max Payne) playing).
GTA:VC has both Motion Blur and Lens Flare, and both irritate me to no end. Maybe some day they'll learn that these things are mostly caused by deficincies in camera technology and stop wasting graphics chip cycles on them, or not.
Bullet Time in a football game? OK, maybe I can understand that, but wouldn't you call it something different?