yes, but now we seem to be getting to the point where in most entertainment media, truely original ideas have almost no chance of getting through the bean-counters to ever be seen. It ain't just the game industry, it's movies and TV as well. The propblem is that our production values for entertainment is so high that just about any entertainment product MUST gaurentee the producers that it will make millions, because a loss isn't just "oops", it can be bankruptcy, or at least major cutbacks.
to make a long story short, the fastest way to make any form of entertainment get stale and derivitive is to make the cost of failure catastrophic.
A year ago I would have agreed with you. But with Steam finally getting some momentum under its belt, suddenly, it's been a lot easier for indie developers to find an outlet. It was a rocky start, and there were problems, but we owe a great deal to valve for taking such a big risk and fuck-starting steam's role as a content distribution system by putting their crown jewel, Half Life 2, on the line. The gamble worked, and the result is that millions of Half Life fans now also are exposed to the work of these indie developers. Think about it from a developers point of view. When millions of HL players from around the globe log in, they see their game, smack dab in the center of the Steam Storefront's main window. It's an IV directly into the pulse of their target market, and I guarentee you that getting such exposure through conventional means would be several orders of magnitude more expensive.
What happened as a result of this? The developers of Darwinia sold more copies of their game in a couple days than their run of Darwinia or Uplink in a box by itself. Now, Introvision is on solid financial ground and also has the leeway to keep creating new games such as DEFCON. This basically opened the door to other indie developers who now market and promote their games online. And because you dont have to go out to a store and buy the game itself, it's a lot easier to make impulse purchases, which is good for developers at least. Of course, some of the indie games are sucessful, some of them not, but the point stands that it is a LOT easier for indie developers to get exposure now than it was a couple years ago.
This is to say nothing of the strides that free software, with its vast array of mature and free compilers and libraries making serious programming accessable without having to fork over hundreds of dollars for Visual Studio.NET.
Digital content distribution is the way of the future. There will always be titles of all shapes and sizies being at the whims of the publishers, but now with digital content distribution, the indie developer is no longer relegated to living on the margins, scraping out a living on a small fanatical fanbase...if that.
....where everything is a hi-res shade of brown, and the boss is always a giant bug.
Compared to the 70's where everything was a dime-a-dozen maze game? Or maybe the 80's where everything was a dime-a-dozen platformer? Or the early 90's with their dime-a-dozen beat-em-ups? Or the late 90's with their and dime-a-dozen arcadey first person shooters?
Gaming...gaming never changes. You have the games that define the genre and you have a couple of other worthwhile titles and then you hve the vast amount of crap. Tell me, have you ever tried looking through a complete Atari, NES or SNES ROM collection and picking a game at random to see how it played. Trust me, it's just as much of a crapshoot back then as it is now.
I pick open source largely for one reason. It's not because of political ideaology, technical superiority, free as in beer effects or ease of use. It's because open source offers one thing that proprietry software rarely if ever puts on the table. Trust. I trust open source apps not to pull dirty trcks and leave me stranded. Anyone who buys proprietry should never be surprised to see their escort nonchalantly trotting back to town as the highwaymen close in for the kill.
Don't get me wrong, I like Open Source software. However, it's very possible to leave people in the lurch in an Open Source project, just like a proprietary project, largely due to lack of accountability. You're (usually) not paying anyone anything, so they're maintaining it for their own satisifaction or self-interest. Once that's gone, you're up shits creek unless another maintainer is found, which is usually (but not always) the case.
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. We're not sick of our old games because they fare much better than the games that are out today. Do you really expect us to play Quake 4 and Doom 3 just because it has a bigger number beside it? They have to bring something good to the table, and I don't mean good graphics. They have to play well too. As more recent games have been very dissapointing in terms of longevity, competativeness and fun, we will stick with our 'old' games. So, to add to my comrade's response . ..
No
- Doom 2 player
P.S. Our requests are not unreasonable. Warsow is a great example of a modern game that brings something new to the table, and has the potential competativeness, longevity and fun to be a nice substitute for the inadequate pile of garbage that was Quake 4.
Maybe the problem is that the gameplay behind id's games hasn't changed in any significant way. Doom was great back in the day, but as a modern game, it would be torn apart for being nothing more than a run-and-gun. Games like Half-Life 2 have done so well because of NON-combat elements, like story development and physics-based puzzles, in addition to some great action. id's games have remained focused on action, and many have found that to become stale, after all these years.
Incorrect. I can say with a great deal of certainty that there have been very few games like Quake and the classic Doom series in recent years. Run and gun is not stale at all, just as long as it's done right. Being story driven does not necissarily make a game better, and being run and gun does not necissarily make a game worse. I still play Doom all the time, but whats more, I've introduced Doom to other relatively new gamers, and once they get past the graphics they have a lot of fun with it too.
In my opinion, John Romero and John Carmack made a great team. Romero had the nuts ideas and awesome level designs, and Carmack had the engine and the smarts and the work ethic. Without Carmack, Romero didin't have the tech or the reigns to keep him on target with Daikatana. Without Romero, Carmack and the rest of ID couldn't figure out how to make a fun FPS.
You were the lucky one. Yum came broken out-of-the-box on my Fedora Core installation, and it seemed like pretty much everything on the system that dealt with installing or removing programs took FOREVER to do.
Granted, I'm a Debian user, but since Ubuntu's uses debian's package management, I'd wager a guess that it's a great deal better than the state of FC's package management.
It's very simple, really. They actually give two shits about the game that they're putting out. Thing is, they also have the smarts to be able to make their game accessable. I guess being in the right place at the right time in the RTS market helped too, if Warcraft 2 had never happened, Blizzard probably would have never existed.
And it shows. Some longtime Blizzard members left to form ArenaNet, and to be honest, they're even MORE responsive to their fans than Blizzard, though I suppose this is probably due to the design and smaller scale of Guild Wars compared to something World of Warcraft. But you know your fanbase loves you when they send you a gift basket as congratulations for finishing an expansion they hadn't even played yet.
Just don't expect to keep your job with your current employer. Which then begs the question of why the fuck you continue to work for him in the first place.
I just never got the idea that Halo PC had a big impact.
Halo PC never had a huge impact because of two reasons. First, Gearbox did the port. It was terrible and had astronimic system requirements, and was not mod-friendly at all. With the Halo 2 PC port in Bungie's hands, I have a great deal more faith that Halo 2 PC will be much much better. However, the other factor is how late it came out.
Reguardless, although it didn't have much of an impact, it still had one. There are still people playing Halo PC online, both the demo, full game and more mod-friendly Custom Edition, despite such crippling deficiancies. So, the question then begs, why do they continue to play it? Perhaps you're not giving it enough credit, or never really paid that much attention to it. It deserves another look, especially the multiplayer.
You haven't been here in a while, have you. We're supporting Microsoft these days, at least when it comes to the console wars, and Sony's the bad guy for wanting to charge $599 for a console mnd being arrogant assholes to boot.
FreeBSD was a great deal easier for me to install than Gentoo...at least Gentoo through a command line stage3 install. I'd rank it up there with Slackware in terms of easienss to install, not the easiest, but nowhere near as frustrating as some people make it out to be.
Nonsense. While Quake and Q3CPMA will always reign supreme in terms of most forms of adversial combat, such as 1on1 and Clan Arena, I honestly can't think of a game that impliments better 'objective' gameplay than Halo 2. Including CounterStrike, considering Halo 2 has far more objective variety. After seeing CTF on most 'professional' FPS's devolve into "Who can cap the flag the fastest?" speedrapes, Halo 2's slow and deliberate movmeent is a breath of fresh air, and in my opinion is far more suited for it, because, you know, you actually have to WORK to get the flag. Yes, it slightly skews the trinity of Movement, Tactics and Accuracy towards Tactics, but the game itself benefits greatly from not turning into a speedcapping session.
The slow speed also adresses the lack of mouse and keyboard. With the slowness of Halos gameplay, you don't NEED a mouse and keybord to be be able to hit the broad side of a barn, the play mechanics work around it. Who cares if you can't spin a complete 180 in a few mileseconds, it doesn't matter because nobody else can either. Granted, having more accuracy in ANY game helps, even slow ones (see: CounterStrike), but like I said, it's not that big of a handicap.
This is false. The problem is that they turn these events into a media circus, and focus more on the musical guests and uninformed opinions of big media celebraties than playing the actual game.
A few nights ago, a "Masters Cup" for Challenge Promode Arena, where the match was set up through GTV and a streaming shoutcast server, so for all intents and purposes it was like watching TV...and if I had relied on the announcer to switch the view for me then it WOULD have been like watching the match on TV. The announcer was knowledgable (except when he accidently called the plasma rifle the "Hyperblaster", but whatever), the game itself was fun to watch, and I defeniatly would have tuned in to watch the match on TV had it been on TV.
I beleive it IS possible to do it right, it's just that media outlets haven't hit it yet. And to be honest, I don't even know if they will even bother trying.
There is a difference between supporting your corperations network of Dell PC's and supporting Joe Sixpack's Dell PC. The support for corperations is really nice. The support for consumer level hardware is off somewhere in India waiting to take you through a three hour diagnosis phase just to tell you what you probably already knew in the first place.
I would recomend Dells to any corperation who wants to pay for it, but if you're going around recomending PC brands to some guy you know who needs it to surf the web and check his email, support your local mom and pop PC shop.
That's the layman's perception. Of course, the rest of us enjoyed the occational round of Halo while playing Jet Set Radio Future, Panzer Dragoon Orta, having a few friends over for a few games of Deathrow, enjoying some Street Fighter 3 online, and feeling smug that we usually got the best versions of the corssplatform games.
What I loved about the Xbox was that while it had it's share of high profile releases, it had so many forgotten gems just waiting to be discovered. And aside from the Xbox Live Arcade, it seems those gems are lacking so far in the 360 generation. Hopefully there will be something worth playing by the time the 360 is down to $199 too. Meanwhile, I'll keep my Xbox beside my Nintendo DS and PC.
Sorry, man, but art is for hippies and science is for god-hating athiests, neither of which can be considered TRUE AMERICANS (TM). Therefore, the wishes of those two groups is irrelivent. The group you need to be listening to are the 12-20 year olds who watch MTV like good little children and buy $20 CD's of their favorite artists (of the week) that have wonderful listening-experience enhancing Digital Rights Management on it.
I've had very few problems with SecuROM and Safedisc. I think about the worst either of them forced me to do was unisntall either an old version Daemon Tools some outdated CD burning software, and that was only for one game: Doom 3.
Imagine a huge IRC channel from a few years back. Translate that into an environemt where you have a 3D avatar and can create things. The second part seems great in theory, the only problem is mixing it with the first. Not to mention that Linden Labs seems to move at a glacially slow pace at implementing new features, barring attacks on the grid (which have happened before).
If you can find some intelligent people to hang out with, it can be a blast. You just have to steer clear of the billions of shopping malls, insane subcultures, and men potraying themselves women and whoring themselves out for linden dollars, which is harder than it sounds, because they're EVERYWHERE.
Though I liked what it was trying to do, I hated Morrowind. On the other hand, I got Oblivion a few days ago and love it. Trust me, lack of engagement by Morrowind isn't uncommon, but Obvlivion totally compltetely makes up for it. All you give up is Levetation, Mark, Recall and the ability to twink your charactor to make things too easy (if you do twink your charactor to hell, the enemies will scale up with you and things get very very tough)
The OP said "extra cost", implying that you already paid once for Windows XP. What definition of 'free' they're using is irrlivant. If I already have Windows XP, I get the extra software for free, if I don't have Windows XP, then I don't NEED it. What exactly is your point?
Slashdot Mirror
yes, but now we seem to be getting to the point where in most entertainment media, truely original ideas have almost no chance of getting through the bean-counters to ever be seen. It ain't just the game industry, it's movies and TV as well. The propblem is that our production values for entertainment is so high that just about any entertainment product MUST gaurentee the producers that it will make millions, because a loss isn't just "oops", it can be bankruptcy, or at least major cutbacks.
.NET.
to make a long story short, the fastest way to make any form of entertainment get stale and derivitive is to make the cost of failure catastrophic.
A year ago I would have agreed with you. But with Steam finally getting some momentum under its belt, suddenly, it's been a lot easier for indie developers to find an outlet. It was a rocky start, and there were problems, but we owe a great deal to valve for taking such a big risk and fuck-starting steam's role as a content distribution system by putting their crown jewel, Half Life 2, on the line. The gamble worked, and the result is that millions of Half Life fans now also are exposed to the work of these indie developers. Think about it from a developers point of view. When millions of HL players from around the globe log in, they see their game, smack dab in the center of the Steam Storefront's main window. It's an IV directly into the pulse of their target market, and I guarentee you that getting such exposure through conventional means would be several orders of magnitude more expensive.
What happened as a result of this? The developers of Darwinia sold more copies of their game in a couple days than their run of Darwinia or Uplink in a box by itself. Now, Introvision is on solid financial ground and also has the leeway to keep creating new games such as DEFCON. This basically opened the door to other indie developers who now market and promote their games online. And because you dont have to go out to a store and buy the game itself, it's a lot easier to make impulse purchases, which is good for developers at least. Of course, some of the indie games are sucessful, some of them not, but the point stands that it is a LOT easier for indie developers to get exposure now than it was a couple years ago.
This is to say nothing of the strides that free software, with its vast array of mature and free compilers and libraries making serious programming accessable without having to fork over hundreds of dollars for Visual Studio
Digital content distribution is the way of the future. There will always be titles of all shapes and sizies being at the whims of the publishers, but now with digital content distribution, the indie developer is no longer relegated to living on the margins, scraping out a living on a small fanatical fanbase...if that.
Compared to the 70's where everything was a dime-a-dozen maze game? Or maybe the 80's where everything was a dime-a-dozen platformer? Or the early 90's with their dime-a-dozen beat-em-ups? Or the late 90's with their and dime-a-dozen arcadey first person shooters?
Gaming...gaming never changes. You have the games that define the genre and you have a couple of other worthwhile titles and then you hve the vast amount of crap. Tell me, have you ever tried looking through a complete Atari, NES or SNES ROM collection and picking a game at random to see how it played. Trust me, it's just as much of a crapshoot back then as it is now.
I pick open source largely for one reason. It's not because of political ideaology, technical superiority, free as in beer effects or ease of use. It's because open source offers one thing that proprietry software rarely if ever puts on the table. Trust. I trust open source apps not to pull dirty trcks and leave me stranded. Anyone who buys proprietry should never be surprised to see their escort nonchalantly trotting back to town as the highwaymen close in for the kill.
Don't get me wrong, I like Open Source software. However, it's very possible to leave people in the lurch in an Open Source project, just like a proprietary project, largely due to lack of accountability. You're (usually) not paying anyone anything, so they're maintaining it for their own satisifaction or self-interest. Once that's gone, you're up shits creek unless another maintainer is found, which is usually (but not always) the case.
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. We're not sick of our old games because they fare much better than the games that are out today. Do you really expect us to play Quake 4 and Doom 3 just because it has a bigger number beside it? They have to bring something good to the table, and I don't mean good graphics. They have to play well too. As more recent games have been very dissapointing in terms of longevity, competativeness and fun, we will stick with our 'old' games. So, to add to my comrade's response . . .
No
- Doom 2 player
P.S. Our requests are not unreasonable. Warsow is a great example of a modern game that brings something new to the table, and has the potential competativeness, longevity and fun to be a nice substitute for the inadequate pile of garbage that was Quake 4.
Incorrect. I can say with a great deal of certainty that there have been very few games like Quake and the classic Doom series in recent years. Run and gun is not stale at all, just as long as it's done right. Being story driven does not necissarily make a game better, and being run and gun does not necissarily make a game worse. I still play Doom all the time, but whats more, I've introduced Doom to other relatively new gamers, and once they get past the graphics they have a lot of fun with it too.
In my opinion, John Romero and John Carmack made a great team. Romero had the nuts ideas and awesome level designs, and Carmack had the engine and the smarts and the work ethic. Without Carmack, Romero didin't have the tech or the reigns to keep him on target with Daikatana. Without Romero, Carmack and the rest of ID couldn't figure out how to make a fun FPS.
Granted, I'm a Debian user, but since Ubuntu's uses debian's package management, I'd wager a guess that it's a great deal better than the state of FC's package management.
Or fuck, even a workable documentation of the ntfs filesystem so I don't have to put up with fat32 to store my music.
And it shows. Some longtime Blizzard members left to form ArenaNet, and to be honest, they're even MORE responsive to their fans than Blizzard, though I suppose this is probably due to the design and smaller scale of Guild Wars compared to something World of Warcraft. But you know your fanbase loves you when they send you a gift basket as congratulations for finishing an expansion they hadn't even played yet.
Just don't expect to keep your job with your current employer. Which then begs the question of why the fuck you continue to work for him in the first place.
Halo PC never had a huge impact because of two reasons. First, Gearbox did the port. It was terrible and had astronimic system requirements, and was not mod-friendly at all. With the Halo 2 PC port in Bungie's hands, I have a great deal more faith that Halo 2 PC will be much much better. However, the other factor is how late it came out.
Reguardless, although it didn't have much of an impact, it still had one. There are still people playing Halo PC online, both the demo, full game and more mod-friendly Custom Edition, despite such crippling deficiancies. So, the question then begs, why do they continue to play it? Perhaps you're not giving it enough credit, or never really paid that much attention to it. It deserves another look, especially the multiplayer.
You haven't been here in a while, have you. We're supporting Microsoft these days, at least when it comes to the console wars, and Sony's the bad guy for wanting to charge $599 for a console mnd being arrogant assholes to boot.
FreeBSD was a great deal easier for me to install than Gentoo...at least Gentoo through a command line stage3 install. I'd rank it up there with Slackware in terms of easienss to install, not the easiest, but nowhere near as frustrating as some people make it out to be.
The slow speed also adresses the lack of mouse and keyboard. With the slowness of Halos gameplay, you don't NEED a mouse and keybord to be be able to hit the broad side of a barn, the play mechanics work around it. Who cares if you can't spin a complete 180 in a few mileseconds, it doesn't matter because nobody else can either. Granted, having more accuracy in ANY game helps, even slow ones (see: CounterStrike), but like I said, it's not that big of a handicap.
A few nights ago, a "Masters Cup" for Challenge Promode Arena, where the match was set up through GTV and a streaming shoutcast server, so for all intents and purposes it was like watching TV...and if I had relied on the announcer to switch the view for me then it WOULD have been like watching the match on TV. The announcer was knowledgable (except when he accidently called the plasma rifle the "Hyperblaster", but whatever), the game itself was fun to watch, and I defeniatly would have tuned in to watch the match on TV had it been on TV.
I beleive it IS possible to do it right, it's just that media outlets haven't hit it yet. And to be honest, I don't even know if they will even bother trying.
I would recomend Dells to any corperation who wants to pay for it, but if you're going around recomending PC brands to some guy you know who needs it to surf the web and check his email, support your local mom and pop PC shop.
What I loved about the Xbox was that while it had it's share of high profile releases, it had so many forgotten gems just waiting to be discovered. And aside from the Xbox Live Arcade, it seems those gems are lacking so far in the 360 generation. Hopefully there will be something worth playing by the time the 360 is down to $199 too. Meanwhile, I'll keep my Xbox beside my Nintendo DS and PC.
Sorry, man, but art is for hippies and science is for god-hating athiests, neither of which can be considered TRUE AMERICANS (TM). Therefore, the wishes of those two groups is irrelivent. The group you need to be listening to are the 12-20 year olds who watch MTV like good little children and buy $20 CD's of their favorite artists (of the week) that have wonderful listening-experience enhancing Digital Rights Management on it.
I've had very few problems with SecuROM and Safedisc. I think about the worst either of them forced me to do was unisntall either an old version Daemon Tools some outdated CD burning software, and that was only for one game: Doom 3.
Seriously. When was the last time Real has been the least bit relevant?
...which was reserved for the people who could actually figure it out. No comparison.
This isn't a case of Q&A being terrible, this is a case of Oblivion being really really big, and not possibly having the time to test EVERYTHING.
I see this as good news. Ratings issues aside, this should be proof that yes, the industry CAN police itself, like the movie industry.
If you can find some intelligent people to hang out with, it can be a blast. You just have to steer clear of the billions of shopping malls, insane subcultures, and men potraying themselves women and whoring themselves out for linden dollars, which is harder than it sounds, because they're EVERYWHERE.
Though I liked what it was trying to do, I hated Morrowind. On the other hand, I got Oblivion a few days ago and love it. Trust me, lack of engagement by Morrowind isn't uncommon, but Obvlivion totally compltetely makes up for it. All you give up is Levetation, Mark, Recall and the ability to twink your charactor to make things too easy (if you do twink your charactor to hell, the enemies will scale up with you and things get very very tough)
The OP said "extra cost", implying that you already paid once for Windows XP. What definition of 'free' they're using is irrlivant. If I already have Windows XP, I get the extra software for free, if I don't have Windows XP, then I don't NEED it. What exactly is your point?