I suspect that my post may have been poorly worded.:) To clarify: while I oppose the censorship of a game for out-of-context racism and so on, I do not by any means support Rockstar, and I do support the banning or at least censorship of gratuitously offensive works with little artistic value -- like, in this context, Manhunt.
Censorship of, say, hostile political agendas is unjustifiable in all but the most unlikely cases, but the censorship of gratuitously offensive materials is a much better idea. There is a place for that sort of thing in the world, especially if an industry or medium cannot regulate itself.
Good. It's past time that someone catch on and ban that game. Rockstar has obviously trolled the ESRB, and I wish that they'd reacted a bit more vehemently -- we're left with New Zealand banning the game while it's being sold in American Wal-Marts.
This is getting just ludicrous. So not only is Manhunt not Adults Only, there's also no appreciable outcry about it, and the Rockstar game being censored is getting censored for a quote that sounds racist out of context, as opposed to being censored for, say, sodomizing a gang member with a crowbar.
U.S. society is collectively insane. I'm not sure what variety of insanity (although I'd speculate a diagnosis of disorganized schizophrenia), but still...
This is all getting disgusting.
"The games that I don't let this 13-year-old have are the games that have sexual content," said Michael Hill, who was shopping with his wife and son at Sacramento's Downtown Plaza. "Those are what worry me, not the violent ones."
I didn't know that much of *anything* had sexual content yet. And assuming (as I hope) that he doesn't have GTA prostitutes in mind, what are these games he's thinking of and where do I buy a copy? Has this guy been importing Japanese dating sims for the express purpose of not giving them to his kids?
Not to mention that the American perspective on violence vs. sexuality is rather badly fouled up, as many other posters already remarked. Sexual behaviors -- love and physical reproduction both -- are quite thoroughly natural to humans, for obvious reasons. But any human's one strongest inborn aversion is against doing harm to another human. Even armies have never done well in overcoming all of a person's instictive aversion to doing harm or taking life, and I suspect that the totally unnatural is a bit more harmful to kids than the obscure but natural.
Someone tell these idiots that this isn't the 19th century any more, thank the Lord -- and that the US is no longer a frontier...
Well, weren't they [in the wrong]? We're not talking about now -- we're talking about WWII. Japan was allied with Germany, and together they were doing all sorts of bad things to the rest of the world. They were trying to conquer the world. Isn't that a `bad' goal? Isn't that what villians are always trying to do? Yes, the individual soldiers probably weren't `bad', but were instead just doing their duty for their country, but either way, when somebody attacks you, you fight back.
On the other hand, Britian, France, the USSR, China, France and others were considered `the Good guys'. We were defending ourselves against the aggressors, or so the history books say. I'm sure there was more to it than that, but I do tend to believe that this is generally correct.
The Japanese and Germans certainly did begin the war, and although both could be said to have been provoked, neither was justified. The Allies were thus justified in fighting them, at least to begin with.
However, there are two parts to fighting a just war: having a just reason to fight, which the Allies did, and fighting the war justly, which they did not.
Now, I realize that the calculus involved here becomes inordinately difficult extremely quickly. In the case of WWII, it was essential both that the war be fought justly and that it be won. The Axis powers had absolutely no compunctions about attacking their enemies' economies (i.e. killing civilians) with whatever means they had at their disposal, and FDR evidently decided to let himself sink to their level, since they, especially the Germans, were the first to try "strategic bombing" and the like. Of course, the value of strategic bombing had been the favorite subject of the likes of Billy Mitchell before the war, and was no more ethical then, in theory, than it was during the conflict, in practice. It should have been noticed then...
The strategic bombings in Germany wrecked the country, but were probably extremely helpful in ending the war quickly. They were morally questionable -- a case of the USA valuing the lives of its soldiers over the lives of foreign civilians, which is only too familiar from the last few years -- but in light of late-war Nazi breakthroughs like the V-2, the Mark XVIII U-boat and the Tiger and Panther tanks (to say nothing of prototypes like the Maus tank or the Amerika bomber), they might well have been necessary. (Yalta is probably a different matter, and certainly a different post.)
In Japan, it was a different story. The Japanese had not gotten as far as they did on strength of munitions, and both sides knew it. Japanese tanks were crap, their aircraft were fast but flimsy, their artillery was negligible; the one advantage they had was their unbreakable spirit and will to fight. The only way to defeat them was to break their spirit, and the U.S. knew that as well as anyone. Thus, for example, the propaganda fliers dropped over Japanese cities at the end of the war. Also, strategic bombing against Japan was hardly necessary for much of any purpose. Remember, the Japanese were going to war to secure supplies of raw materials; once their sources of oil and rubber were cut off, the United States could just as easily have sat back and waited them out.
Instead, FDR burned their major cities to the ground, which had about the same effect as Sherman's heavily publicized (and probably more sound than fury) campaign in Georgia. He or someone in the Pentagon should have realized that night fire-bombings were not likely to intimidate the Japanese in quite the right way, but it seems that they just didn't give a darn. Atomic bombs were the only weapon with enough of a "shock and awe" factor to defeat the Japanese in this way, and notice how quickly they worked...
In the end, I don't deny that the Japanese were in the wrong in the Second World War, but I claim that the United States was almost as bad in a different way. Roosevelt had no interest in minimizing civilian casualties, and
Notice that you say "playing as the bad guy." AFAICT, I think that that's what has observers (justifiably) worried is that the Japanese are depicted as the villains...
And they're right, it would be completely impossible to sell this sort of war-FPS in America in similar circumstances. Imagine an FPS or thereabouts set in the Second World War, made by Japanese, with, say, the U.S. Marine Corps as the bad guys. The developers would be burned at the stake if loyal red-blooded Republicans had to swim across the Pacific to do it.
The obvious objection is that the Japanese committed atrocities but the U.S. didn't. This is not the case, as mentioned by a few other posters already. The Japanese certainly had quite a few atrocities to their name -- Nanking comes immediately to mind, and the Phillipines after a bit of reflection -- but the U.S. was also rather bad. I'm not thinking of the internment of Japanese civilians in America (paranoid but forgivable), and American G.I.s behaved very well during the war, but the high-level policy of the Pentagon was diabolical -- blasting the whole of Germany into rubble until there was nothing left to blast, *firebombing* the major cities of Japan, and so on. Four million Japanese were burned alive in one night raid on Tokyo...
Churchill actually fought the war respectably (although he never got the opprotunity to do much mischief), but Roosevelt was a far cry from morally upright, and of course the Allies sold their souls at Yalta.
Has anyone here heard of this game? It's not gotten mentioned yet, despite being practically synonymous with "innovative RTS"...
GSC's definitely taking the genre in an extremely interesting direction, diametrically opposed to that of Warcraft III but just as interesting. By the last version of Cossacks proper, it was possible if not routine to field thousands of troops at a time, and be fighting more or less plausible 17th- and 18th century wars... The scale was infinitely larger than AoE or Warcraft, and allowed for much more lifelike tactics.
American Conquest added morale, defending from inside buildings, diplomacy, and such features, although messing a few things up and getting way too defensive; the forthcoming Cossacks 2 proper -- set in the Napoleanic Wars -- is really pushing the limits of RTS design in general. Roads, trade, resource distribution, pre-existing settlements, prisoners (IIRC), fatigue... It's practically a laundry list of what AoE was missing.
It's a shame that it's so obscure here in the US, so that bad clones like Rise of Nations can end up being called innovative in the American game press...
It seems like RTS development will go in two different directions in the future. Cossacks and its imitators will become more strategic, eventually converging with TBS/RTS hybrids like Lords of the Realm and Shogun. Warcraft III and its style will converge with RPGs and squad-level fighting (X-com, anyone?), putting much more emphasis on the skill of individual troops. And hopefully, both will lose the crazy peasant-pushing, and training troops in about the time it takes to kill them... (American Conquest is *great* that way. Firefights, even melees between roughly equal troops, are very realistically long and somewhat inconclusive.)
[FMV] I think we've reached agreement on this subject.
[CT and Enix] http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrono_Trigger (the 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)
I stand corrected.
[New feel to CT] 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.dqshrine.com/dq/ ), so some of the feel of Chrono Trigger is simply the melding of the teams behind the two games (2/3rds of the DQ team and a good chunk of the FF team).
I agree.
[Need to advertise?] But the question is whether or not it's any more than before. FF 7-10 ads were frequent, too. No company would go completely without advertising, especially for a Japanese game in the US.
Most of their ads were in Japan, IIRC, and I don't know that they were oriented towards attracting new players -- cf. that Coke/FF9 commercial introducing one of their characters, which was free publicity but seemed mostly to be bragging about who they can work with...
[Sequels are anethema] It might, or it might not. It's partially a reaction to the new players, who didn't come into the game with the understanding that most of us had already gained (hell, even if I hadn't been paying attention I would've figured it out half way through 7 or 8). Of course, I remember reading that they were going to do 2 spin-offs of FFX, but I don't remember whether FFX-2 was considered one of them or not.
What? Each FF is a standalone unit; they're similar to each other, but in theory, one should be able to pick up any one of them without knowledge of the others. This makes it sound like they're Wing Commander or something...
[TMAOC] Origins would also be driven by people like me, that really likes the idea of having the games mostly in their original form, on a system that should be around a while (though if PS3 doesn't support PS1 games, as I've heard it won't, then I may not be buying a PS3). Not to mention that FF2 was never released in the US before (and has an interesting take on the experience/level system, and is a longer game than FF1 as far as I can tell).
My complaint with Origins is that they are really under-using the PSX's capacity. One disk could easily have held FF1-6, Chrono Trigger, Seiken 1-3, and Romancing Saga 1-3, but instead, they released FF5 and 6 on *seperate* disks...
Regarding FF2, the least they could have done would be to make the game *playable*. I played it on an emulator, really enjoyed it, but couldn't stand the stupid slow-advancing combat system and ultimately just cheated (select-order attack-cancel the night away). The idea's a spectacular one, but advancement is way too slow, and they didn't change it at all...
Of course, why don't we go back to things like an FF game that was originally released US only because they felt the Japanese market wouldn't like it, or the Chocobo games released in Japan only, or any number of other things they've done in the past, long before the merger.
Yeah, like the Seiken Densetsu series? Or the Romancing Sagas? Square's had its lemons (especially FF Adventure), but it's had some really good out-of-main-series games as well. Enix, however, hasn't.
Enix' game sword, well, I did say they were considered for their ability to do different things with their titles, right?;p
True enough. Different things like releasing a game with Dragon Warrior II graphics in late 2003... (BTW, what's the emoticon for a smug grin?)
[FMV] I think what I was trying to point out is simply that the pre-rendered video replaced an even more mediocre method of story-telling in video games: putting up a screen or more of text and expecting the player to read all of it (usually at the game developer's choice of scrolling speed) to get the plot movement.
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.
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 definitely agree [about transition problems], but at the same time, early games using in-game-engine cinematic sequences always appeared to me to be a cheap way of doing what Blizzard and others were doing with high-quality pre-rendered sequences. Of course, iirc, Blizzard did away with this on WarCraft 3, when they finally had a fairly high quality 3d engine in their game.
IMHO, Ocarina of Time did this just as well, and that's the paradigm I was really advocating. I'm not saying that Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds did a better job of storytelling than Wing Commander, by any means.
[Enix quality] heh, Chrono Cross/Trigger were around that time, but then that was a joint effort;)
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.
[FF7] Rendered video or not, 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?
[The Merger] I think it really comes down to a combination of things: 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?
[Advertising] I'm not quite sure that's the case (that word of mouth is no longer adequate), but I guess we'll have to see when FF:CC and FF:X-2 come out. At the same time, I've seen quite a bit of advertising for at least X-2, so perhaps they have stepped up advertising a bit.
Their advertising is more or less proof that they consider it necessary to advertise, isn't it?
As for X-2, the mere idea of an FF sequel is automatically anethema to the series' really diehard fans, IME; thus, they're going to need to advertise, because word of mouth mig
Actually, looking back at most of the Final Fantasy series which was released during the SNES/NES days, they were at least trying to tell the story mostly through the game itself, but they still always had those one or two times in each game where it just broke away to a screen that had a bunch of text on it to tell the next bit of story. They added in a couple of pre-rendered cut-scenes after the fact for the PlayStation re-releases, which imo neither helped nor hindered those particular games.
To cite a particular example, I would say that FF7 suffered immensely from its use of rendered video instead of in-game cinematics. The video looked very different from the game itself, more so in the PC than the PSX version, and took up so much disk space that they weren't even able to implement reviving Aeris.:)
More importantly, IMHO, is the process of transition; rendered videos produce a sort of shock as the game moves from relatively crude to much higher-quality video, and there is always thus a considerable difference. I like cinematic scenes as much as the next guy, but I'd say that the most effective and least harmful to immersion method to use them is that of Ocarina of Time, not the rendered approach.
The first argument I ever had over FMV was caused by the fact that FMV referred to film of actual actors, such as the Command & Conquer and Wing Commander series, and I think we can all agree that all but the best implementations of that sucked, and even the best ones did not help the games they were in.
Absolutely.
[Enix]
[Quality] I really couldn't comment, the only Enix stuff I've played was the early Dragon Warrior games (in other words, Dragon Quest). I've seen a couple of other Enix games that were released in the US on the PlayStation, but I haven't picked any of them up, yet.
I've not played too much beyond those either, but after that kind of start I find it hard to believe that they ever recovered. When Square was producing the "Golden Age" Final Fantasies (4-6), what was Enix making? Illusion of Gaea, IIRC...
[Anime graphics] The whole industry does things like that, though. For instance, look at cell shaded graphics. I think eventually the industry will learn how to use this well, but for now I stay away from most cell-shaded titles because it just seems to be the new overdone, overhyped, mechanic of the day.
Personally, I'm impressed greatly by the promise of cel-shading (Sleeping Beauty animation quality in a game? In the next 5 years? Wow!) but yeah, numerous companies have this tendency to sell based on graphics/technology...
IIRC Square didn't do this until FF7 came along, and they finally got their precioussss rendered video.
[The Merger] Would that be the time the Genesis was #1 or the time the SNES was #1? Either way, I think Sega would've been better off merging with Nintendo before they released the Saturn than they are today, but that's the benefit of hindsite.
Either way.
Then again, if Sega had gone from the Genesis to being solely a developer, they'd probably be even better off, but everyone would've thought they were crazy.
This is why I say that it was completely out of character for Square to merge with its biggest competitor, and why something must be seriously wrong at one or both companies. Historical competitors don't cooperate unless they're desperate. (Mr. Churchill? Mr. Stalin? Do you have anything to say concerning this?)
As for Square, again I don't really understand why they think they need to compete on the same scale as the large western publishers, when Square is known more as a development house than a publisher (whereas EA, Activision, and Atari are known as publishers, since only EA has a really well known set of in-house-developed titles).
Advertising. If Final Fantasy has taken a really serious hit to its reputation lately,
Anyone else having doubts about the collective sanity of a certain supposedly large and powerful company?
Someone, please, for the sake of the last of my childhood memories, tell me that this is a hoax! First Lucas rapes the Star Wars franchise, then Link's head mushrooms to Charlie Brown proportions, now this! How will I ever play Chrono Trigger with a straight face again, after Square releases a gimmicky controller?
Oh, wait a second, it's Dragon Quest. Just "Clueless-R-Us" Enix at its usual antics again.
Now if only Square hadn't gotten so desperate as to merge with them...
I wouldn't call the violence in Wolfenstein 3d gratuitious because that was the whole point of the game (and most other fps'): pure violence. If you're going to be looking for quality story in any action movie/game you're going to come away disappointed.
'Cept Halo.:D
Of course, the 'mess they made' resulted in the highest sales Square has ever seen in the US, not only for FF7, but also for 8, 9, 10; they expect 11, 10-2, and 12 to do so as well (though obviously 11 should have a drop in sales associated with the fact that it's online-only).
If Square is doing so well, why did they need Fund Q money so badly? For that matter, why in Heck did they merge with Enix, at terms disadvantageous to themselves? (IIRC, 1 share of Squaresoft to.79 shares of Enix.)
[Full-Motion Video] Yet it's what most games had, especially the best-of-breed games at the time.
Doesn't mean it's not bad design. Really bad design.:)
[Enix] Enix, of course, being the company for which Japan legislated that their top series can not be released except on weekends and holidays. Not to mention that Square and Enix worked together on Chrono Trigger, which you already mentioned as one of their better early titles. When two Japanese companies see a chance to become a $500M/year company, what else do you expect? Number 7 in the industry, no longer consequential? That's just funny.
Enix still produces Legendarily Bad Games... Kind of like Bond movies, I guess.
#7 in the industry or not, they sure aren't acting complacent or self-confident. Did you hear the announcement that the latest Dragon Quest would have a larger base of appeal, e.g. places outside of the United States and Japanese mental institutions:), by virtue of having anime-like graphics? Crazy...
As for mergers, following that logic, Nintendo and Sega should have merged around the time of the Genesis. What I'm arguing is that while it might make good business sense, the merger ran counter to a few substantial egos at Squaresoft, and wasn't the sort of thing they'd do readily.
This Gamasutra article (no membership needed to view) supports me just in incidental remarks, saying that Square and Enix ran into some pretty stiff competition.
Some psychologists believe it's healthy to take out aggression in other activities, even simulations (though it may be laughable to call GTA3 a simulation). Others believe that pretending to be violent leads to violence. Which psychologists you believe tends to be more of a personal and political choice than a real observation weighing the arguments against each other.
I would be with the second camp, and I take it you're with the first. We may want to leave it at that...
(Emacs stinks! VI forever!:))
[Action movies] I haven't seen Gone With the Wind, but wasn't Ben-Hur one of those movies where someone died on-screen during production, and they left the footage in there? (the answer is yes) Generally a pretty violent film about a pretty violent portion of world history.
However, all of this (except the guy getting killed in the chariot race, which was unintentional...) was in there for the sake of the story, and relatively subdued. Like I said, "[H]ow much action-movie violence is there in... Ben-Hur"? The film's quite violent, but the violence is to tell an incredibly powerful story, not as an end in itself. Contrast with, say, The Running Man or way too many other Schwartzenneger films.
Shakespeare tends towards 'mature' themes, including violence and rather odd sexual pairings, but people tend to interpret it as less because they don't get the imagery so well from his prose (and most interpret Shakespeare from plays and movies rather than his actual words).
I don't like how he plays up the sexual stuff for laughs either, but it seems to be a constant of Western civilization that sufficiently off-the-wall sexual themes are the most effective of anything at producing (uncomfortable) laughter...
As for violence, what I was arguing was not that, say
As long as rating systems are enforced, why should you or anyone else care what kind of games other adults play.
I agree. I wouldn't care particularly much... if the ESRB could just produce a decent rating system, and anyone at all cared about it. It's a sad day when the official ratings board of the ISDA itself can't devise a system to equal a bunch of berserker fundamentalists, and can't enforce its age recommendations as well as even the movie industry...
Violence has been part of human entertainment since our earliest times. The Illiad and the Bible would definitely get rated M if they were videogames (AO for some parts of the Bible even!).
Re. the Bible -- Got to love that immoral author.:)
I was complaining, not so much about the presence of any violence in a work, as about the presence of gratuitious violence, e.g. not necessary to the thrust of the story, gamplay, etc. I wouldn't complain about, say, The Godfather, but would about The Phantom Menace, because the immense amount of fairly gruesome violence in the former added to the story, while the larger-scale but more "kid-friendly" violence of the latter took away from it. Essentially, what I'm questioning is the literary good sense of the developers of games like Wolfenstein 3d or whatever.
They want to maintain a certain image, which is great in theory, but tough on sales.
It's also helpful when Lieberman and the Vice Squad start making the rounds of game companies...
This attitude of superiority has cost them the friendship of Sony and Square, two mistakes that they have been paying for ever since.
Just a nitpick here, but it seems to me that Square, not Nintendo, suffered after deserting to Sony. Their late Super Nintendo games (FF6, Chrono Trigger, RS3, SD3) were extremely good, but in retrospect after seeing the mess they made of FF7, FF Tactics, and subsequent games, it seems that this was *because* they were being censored up the wazoo and weren't able to do the FMVs that their lead FF designer (Hironobu Sakagami, IIRC) wanted so desperately.
Pre-rendered video is now recognized pretty widely [Item #6] as bad design and an impediment to storytelling and immersion. This was the issue that Square jumped ship over...
They got what they wanted: no censorship and all the FMV they could possibly want. Result: Angsty foul-mouthed adolescent protagonists, unplayable games (FF10), and a merger with *shudder* Enix. They're a sinking ship, and no longer consequential. More importantly, they made themselves that way.
It's nice sometimes to be an adventurer and save princesses, but sometimes people do want to rob cars and kill prostitutes. Without giving the gamer a choice of that kind of game on your system, you are hampering your business.
This is a good point, although IMHO anyone who wants to rob cars and kill prostitutes, even in a game, should get his head examined, and see whether his insurance would cover moral-compass-replacement surgery. Some activities are so depraved that even pretending to engage in them is very questionable.
Anyone who disagrees with that will surely be interested in the new game by Rockstar Studios, First-Degree Murder: Jihad, in which the player takes on the role of an al-Qaida guerilla in the United States in a variety of missions, culminating in participating in the destruction of the World Trade Center and the ushering in of a glorious new age of faith and godliness...
Much more upbeat tone than their previous releases, isn't it? And for the chronically humor-deprived, no, this game isn't going to be released, it's a hypothetical example. Here's the obligatory smiley.:) And just in case, have another.:)
On a different subject -- a common one in this discussion, but not mentioned by Acts of Attrition -- I would say that a common misconception in America is that for a game to appeal to adults, it has to have "adult themes," e.g. liberal amounts of excessive violence, blood, and gore. (Our adolescent culture won't stand for sexual themes, of course.) This theory is nonsense; how much blood and gore, how much action-movie violence, is there in Gone With the Wind, say, or Ben-Hur, or the other memorable films of the Golden Age, or most of Shakespeare?
Grand Theft Auto, Bond movies, Terminator 3, and so on are adolescent in their appeal, not mature. One can appeal to adults more effectively without "adult content," whether sexual or violent, beyond what might be needed in the story. In the end, it's more effective to censor one's own work if one wants to appeal to mature adults...
Just as long as one doesn't cripple himself with Wind Waker-style animation.
Recall that under current US law, 1. A work made for hire is the property of the individual paying for the work, and 2. A corporation has the rights of a person...
IOW, you're saying that a corporation should be able to hold on to the works of its employees for an arbitrary amount of time. I, for one, am fond of this new proposal not least because it would allow one who created a work for hire to eventually get some access to the work himself.
It's not likely to happen in the near future, but a return to such policies is probably inevitable. The US, with both of our major parties on the payroll of groups like Disney Corp., will probably be the last country to return to more progressive laws on copyright, with the EU likelier to take the first step.
It would certainly be a good thing for entertainment. ANH would be in the public domain in three years, were this law in effect. All the works of Disney would likewise be long out of copyright, and as another poster has already mentioned, so would most classic rock. A large public domain has a very positive effect on the creation of literature -- remember Shakespeare?
From "Pac-man" to "The Legend of Zelda"? "The Legend of Zelda" was for the 8-bit NES -- not all that much of an improvement compared to more recent systems. While I agree with the article's author that it's at least equal to GTA3, I question whether it's worthy of the term "quantum leap"...
Seriously, this guy knows as much about games and programming as EA does about, well, games and programming... All game companies out there right now, and EA in particular, need to stop hiring special effects people and get some real game designers -- i.e. on a level with Miyamoto.
They're out there, I don't doubt; without some real improvements, PC gaming will die entirely and be replaced with consoles, which can do the junk sports games and FPSes currently popular much better than a PC.
Let's see all this new technology actually improve the gaming experience... I say we go back to 80286's and DOS, or maybe the Apple II; they at least had innovative, entertaining games.:)
"Games still lack one element of the Hollywood lure: glamour. Unlike famous actors, video games stars like Lara Croft and Tony Hawk do not get $10 million signing fees. And because they don't drink and date, they never make the gossip columns of Hello magazine." You _know_ they're working on this...
What about Shogun TW? Same company, but original... this one's just a _Lords of the Realm II_ clone.
I already knew about morale, military maneuvers, etc. before playing Shogun, but that was the first game I ever played which really tried to emulate them. Flank attacks out of forests, double envelopments, charging cavalry down a hill, even just psyching out the enemy's conscripts, all worked just like in the history books... That game did a great job.
I know you're not a gamer, but try to hunt down a copy of Shogun. You'll probably like it more than Medieval.:)
FWIW, I wanted a Shogun sequel in the same time period, but in Europe. Imagine a Gustavus Adolphus campaign like those in Shogun, or the Thirty Years' War fought with a Shogun-like engine, only in Germany...
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that my post may have been poorly worded. :) To clarify: while I oppose the censorship of a game for out-of-context racism and so on, I do not by any means support Rockstar, and I do support the banning or at least censorship of gratuitously offensive works with little artistic value -- like, in this context, Manhunt.
Censorship of, say, hostile political agendas is unjustifiable in all but the most unlikely cases, but the censorship of gratuitously offensive materials is a much better idea. There is a place for that sort of thing in the world, especially if an industry or medium cannot regulate itself.
Good. It's past time that someone catch on and ban that game. Rockstar has obviously trolled the ESRB, and I wish that they'd reacted a bit more vehemently -- we're left with New Zealand banning the game while it's being sold in American Wal-Marts.
*sigh*
This is getting just ludicrous. So not only is Manhunt not Adults Only, there's also no appreciable outcry about it, and the Rockstar game being censored is getting censored for a quote that sounds racist out of context, as opposed to being censored for, say, sodomizing a gang member with a crowbar. U.S. society is collectively insane. I'm not sure what variety of insanity (although I'd speculate a diagnosis of disorganized schizophrenia), but still... This is all getting disgusting.
Dang, you had a good childhood. :)
I didn't know that much of *anything* had sexual content yet. And assuming (as I hope) that he doesn't have GTA prostitutes in mind, what are these games he's thinking of and where do I buy a copy? Has this guy been importing Japanese dating sims for the express purpose of not giving them to his kids?
Not to mention that the American perspective on violence vs. sexuality is rather badly fouled up, as many other posters already remarked. Sexual behaviors -- love and physical reproduction both -- are quite thoroughly natural to humans, for obvious reasons. But any human's one strongest inborn aversion is against doing harm to another human. Even armies have never done well in overcoming all of a person's instictive aversion to doing harm or taking life, and I suspect that the totally unnatural is a bit more harmful to kids than the obscure but natural.
Someone tell these idiots that this isn't the 19th century any more, thank the Lord -- and that the US is no longer a frontier...
The Japanese and Germans certainly did begin the war, and although both could be said to have been provoked, neither was justified. The Allies were thus justified in fighting them, at least to begin with.
However, there are two parts to fighting a just war: having a just reason to fight, which the Allies did, and fighting the war justly, which they did not.
Now, I realize that the calculus involved here becomes inordinately difficult extremely quickly. In the case of WWII, it was essential both that the war be fought justly and that it be won. The Axis powers had absolutely no compunctions about attacking their enemies' economies (i.e. killing civilians) with whatever means they had at their disposal, and FDR evidently decided to let himself sink to their level, since they, especially the Germans, were the first to try "strategic bombing" and the like. Of course, the value of strategic bombing had been the favorite subject of the likes of Billy Mitchell before the war, and was no more ethical then, in theory, than it was during the conflict, in practice. It should have been noticed then...
The strategic bombings in Germany wrecked the country, but were probably extremely helpful in ending the war quickly. They were morally questionable -- a case of the USA valuing the lives of its soldiers over the lives of foreign civilians, which is only too familiar from the last few years -- but in light of late-war Nazi breakthroughs like the V-2, the Mark XVIII U-boat and the Tiger and Panther tanks (to say nothing of prototypes like the Maus tank or the Amerika bomber), they might well have been necessary. (Yalta is probably a different matter, and certainly a different post.)
In Japan, it was a different story. The Japanese had not gotten as far as they did on strength of munitions, and both sides knew it. Japanese tanks were crap, their aircraft were fast but flimsy, their artillery was negligible; the one advantage they had was their unbreakable spirit and will to fight. The only way to defeat them was to break their spirit, and the U.S. knew that as well as anyone. Thus, for example, the propaganda fliers dropped over Japanese cities at the end of the war. Also, strategic bombing against Japan was hardly necessary for much of any purpose. Remember, the Japanese were going to war to secure supplies of raw materials; once their sources of oil and rubber were cut off, the United States could just as easily have sat back and waited them out.
Instead, FDR burned their major cities to the ground, which had about the same effect as Sherman's heavily publicized (and probably more sound than fury) campaign in Georgia. He or someone in the Pentagon should have realized that night fire-bombings were not likely to intimidate the Japanese in quite the right way, but it seems that they just didn't give a darn. Atomic bombs were the only weapon with enough of a "shock and awe" factor to defeat the Japanese in this way, and notice how quickly they worked...
In the end, I don't deny that the Japanese were in the wrong in the Second World War, but I claim that the United States was almost as bad in a different way. Roosevelt had no interest in minimizing civilian casualties, and
Notice that you say "playing as the bad guy." AFAICT, I think that that's what has observers (justifiably) worried is that the Japanese are depicted as the villains...
And they're right, it would be completely impossible to sell this sort of war-FPS in America in similar circumstances. Imagine an FPS or thereabouts set in the Second World War, made by Japanese, with, say, the U.S. Marine Corps as the bad guys. The developers would be burned at the stake if loyal red-blooded Republicans had to swim across the Pacific to do it.
The obvious objection is that the Japanese committed atrocities but the U.S. didn't. This is not the case, as mentioned by a few other posters already. The Japanese certainly had quite a few atrocities to their name -- Nanking comes immediately to mind, and the Phillipines after a bit of reflection -- but the U.S. was also rather bad. I'm not thinking of the internment of Japanese civilians in America (paranoid but forgivable), and American G.I.s behaved very well during the war, but the high-level policy of the Pentagon was diabolical -- blasting the whole of Germany into rubble until there was nothing left to blast, *firebombing* the major cities of Japan, and so on. Four million Japanese were burned alive in one night raid on Tokyo...
Churchill actually fought the war respectably (although he never got the opprotunity to do much mischief), but Roosevelt was a far cry from morally upright, and of course the Allies sold their souls at Yalta.
Has anyone here heard of this game? It's not gotten mentioned yet, despite being practically synonymous with "innovative RTS"... GSC's definitely taking the genre in an extremely interesting direction, diametrically opposed to that of Warcraft III but just as interesting. By the last version of Cossacks proper, it was possible if not routine to field thousands of troops at a time, and be fighting more or less plausible 17th- and 18th century wars... The scale was infinitely larger than AoE or Warcraft, and allowed for much more lifelike tactics. American Conquest added morale, defending from inside buildings, diplomacy, and such features, although messing a few things up and getting way too defensive; the forthcoming Cossacks 2 proper -- set in the Napoleanic Wars -- is really pushing the limits of RTS design in general. Roads, trade, resource distribution, pre-existing settlements, prisoners (IIRC), fatigue... It's practically a laundry list of what AoE was missing. It's a shame that it's so obscure here in the US, so that bad clones like Rise of Nations can end up being called innovative in the American game press... It seems like RTS development will go in two different directions in the future. Cossacks and its imitators will become more strategic, eventually converging with TBS/RTS hybrids like Lords of the Realm and Shogun. Warcraft III and its style will converge with RPGs and squad-level fighting (X-com, anyone?), putting much more emphasis on the skill of individual troops. And hopefully, both will lose the crazy peasant-pushing, and training troops in about the time it takes to kill them... (American Conquest is *great* that way. Firefights, even melees between roughly equal troops, are very realistically long and somewhat inconclusive.)
In this respect, I love the Biblical spell side-effects. Plagues of frogs? Are they actively Baptist bating?
[FMV]
;p
I think we've reached agreement on this subject.
[CT and Enix]
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrono_Trigger
(the 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)
I stand corrected.
[New feel to CT]
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.dqshrine.com/dq/ ), so some of the feel of Chrono Trigger is simply the melding of the teams behind the two games (2/3rds of the DQ team and a good chunk of the FF team).
I agree.
[Need to advertise?]
But the question is whether or not it's any more than before. FF 7-10 ads were frequent, too. No company would go completely without advertising, especially for a Japanese game in the US.
Most of their ads were in Japan, IIRC, and I don't know that they were oriented towards attracting new players -- cf. that Coke/FF9 commercial introducing one of their characters, which was free publicity but seemed mostly to be bragging about who they can work with...
[Sequels are anethema]
It might, or it might not. It's partially a reaction to the new players, who didn't come into the game with the understanding that most of us had already gained (hell, even if I hadn't been paying attention I would've figured it out half way through 7 or 8). Of course, I remember reading that they were going to do 2 spin-offs of FFX, but I don't remember whether FFX-2 was considered one of them or not.
What? Each FF is a standalone unit; they're similar to each other, but in theory, one should be able to pick up any one of them without knowledge of the others. This makes it sound like they're Wing Commander or something...
[TMAOC]
Origins would also be driven by people like me, that really likes the idea of having the games mostly in their original form, on a system that should be around a while (though if PS3 doesn't support PS1 games, as I've heard it won't, then I may not be buying a PS3). Not to mention that FF2 was never released in the US before (and has an interesting take on the experience/level system, and is a longer game than FF1 as far as I can tell).
My complaint with Origins is that they are really under-using the PSX's capacity. One disk could easily have held FF1-6, Chrono Trigger, Seiken 1-3, and Romancing Saga 1-3, but instead, they released FF5 and 6 on *seperate* disks...
Regarding FF2, the least they could have done would be to make the game *playable*. I played it on an emulator, really enjoyed it, but couldn't stand the stupid slow-advancing combat system and ultimately just cheated (select-order attack-cancel the night away). The idea's a spectacular one, but advancement is way too slow, and they didn't change it at all...
Of course, why don't we go back to things like an FF game that was originally released US only because they felt the Japanese market wouldn't like it, or the Chocobo games released in Japan only, or any number of other things they've done in the past, long before the merger.
Yeah, like the Seiken Densetsu series? Or the Romancing Sagas? Square's had its lemons (especially FF Adventure), but it's had some really good out-of-main-series games as well. Enix, however, hasn't.
Enix' game sword, well, I did say they were considered for their ability to do different things with their titles, right?
True enough. Different things like releasing a game with Dragon Warrior II graphics in late 2003... (BTW, what's the emoticon for a smug grin?)
[GTA: Smash up cars for not-guilty]
[FMV]
;)
:)
:) I question point #4 -- was it Enix, or the Dragonball Z lead guy, who added that different feel to Chrono Trigger?
I think what I was trying to point out is simply that the pre-rendered video replaced an even more mediocre method of story-telling in video games: putting up a screen or more of text and expecting the player to read all of it (usually at the game developer's choice of scrolling speed) to get the plot movement.
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.
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 definitely agree [about transition problems], but at the same time, early games using in-game-engine cinematic sequences always appeared to me to be a cheap way of doing what Blizzard and others were doing with high-quality pre-rendered sequences. Of course, iirc, Blizzard did away with this on WarCraft 3, when they finally had a fairly high quality 3d engine in their game.
IMHO, Ocarina of Time did this just as well, and that's the paradigm I was really advocating. I'm not saying that Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds did a better job of storytelling than Wing Commander, by any means.
[Enix quality]
heh, Chrono Cross/Trigger were around that time, but then that was a joint effort
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.
[FF7]
Rendered video or not, 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?
[The Merger]
I think it really comes down to a combination of things:
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.
[Advertising]
I'm not quite sure that's the case (that word of mouth is no longer adequate), but I guess we'll have to see when FF:CC and FF:X-2 come out. At the same time, I've seen quite a bit of advertising for at least X-2, so perhaps they have stepped up advertising a bit.
Their advertising is more or less proof that they consider it necessary to advertise, isn't it?
As for X-2, the mere idea of an FF sequel is automatically anethema to the series' really diehard fans, IME; thus, they're going to need to advertise, because word of mouth mig
[Full-Motion Video]
:)
Actually, looking back at most of the Final Fantasy series which was released during the SNES/NES days, they were at least trying to tell the story mostly through the game itself, but they still always had those one or two times in each game where it just broke away to a screen that had a bunch of text on it to tell the next bit of story. They added in a couple of pre-rendered cut-scenes after the fact for the PlayStation re-releases, which imo neither helped nor hindered those particular games.
To cite a particular example, I would say that FF7 suffered immensely from its use of rendered video instead of in-game cinematics. The video looked very different from the game itself, more so in the PC than the PSX version, and took up so much disk space that they weren't even able to implement reviving Aeris.
More importantly, IMHO, is the process of transition; rendered videos produce a sort of shock as the game moves from relatively crude to much higher-quality video, and there is always thus a considerable difference. I like cinematic scenes as much as the next guy, but I'd say that the most effective and least harmful to immersion method to use them is that of Ocarina of Time, not the rendered approach.
The first argument I ever had over FMV was caused by the fact that FMV referred to film of actual actors, such as the Command & Conquer and Wing Commander series, and I think we can all agree that all but the best implementations of that sucked, and even the best ones did not help the games they were in.
Absolutely.
[Enix]
[Quality]
I really couldn't comment, the only Enix stuff I've played was the early Dragon Warrior games (in other words, Dragon Quest). I've seen a couple of other Enix games that were released in the US on the PlayStation, but I haven't picked any of them up, yet.
I've not played too much beyond those either, but after that kind of start I find it hard to believe that they ever recovered. When Square was producing the "Golden Age" Final Fantasies (4-6), what was Enix making? Illusion of Gaea, IIRC...
[Anime graphics]
The whole industry does things like that, though. For instance, look at cell shaded graphics. I think eventually the industry will learn how to use this well, but for now I stay away from most cell-shaded titles because it just seems to be the new overdone, overhyped, mechanic of the day.
Personally, I'm impressed greatly by the promise of cel-shading (Sleeping Beauty animation quality in a game? In the next 5 years? Wow!) but yeah, numerous companies have this tendency to sell based on graphics/technology...
IIRC Square didn't do this until FF7 came along, and they finally got their precioussss rendered video.
[The Merger]
Would that be the time the Genesis was #1 or the time the SNES was #1? Either way, I think Sega would've been better off merging with Nintendo before they released the Saturn than they are today, but that's the benefit of hindsite.
Either way.
Then again, if Sega had gone from the Genesis to being solely a developer, they'd probably be even better off, but everyone would've thought they were crazy.
This is why I say that it was completely out of character for Square to merge with its biggest competitor, and why something must be seriously wrong at one or both companies. Historical competitors don't cooperate unless they're desperate. (Mr. Churchill? Mr. Stalin? Do you have anything to say concerning this?)
As for Square, again I don't really understand why they think they need to compete on the same scale as the large western publishers, when Square is known more as a development house than a publisher (whereas EA, Activision, and Atari are known as publishers, since only EA has a really well known set of in-house-developed titles).
Advertising. If Final Fantasy has taken a really serious hit to its reputation lately,
Anyone else having doubts about the collective sanity of a certain supposedly large and powerful company?
Someone, please, for the sake of the last of my childhood memories, tell me that this is a hoax! First Lucas rapes the Star Wars franchise, then Link's head mushrooms to Charlie Brown proportions, now this! How will I ever play Chrono Trigger with a straight face again, after Square releases a gimmicky controller?
Oh, wait a second, it's Dragon Quest. Just "Clueless-R-Us" Enix at its usual antics again.
Now if only Square hadn't gotten so desperate as to merge with them...
I wouldn't call the violence in Wolfenstein 3d gratuitious because that was the whole point of the game (and most other fps'): pure violence. If you're going to be looking for quality story in any action movie/game you're going to come away disappointed. 'Cept Halo. :D
Of course, the 'mess they made' resulted in the highest sales Square has ever seen in the US, not only for FF7, but also for 8, 9, 10; they expect 11, 10-2, and 12 to do so as well (though obviously 11 should have a drop in sales associated with the fact that it's online-only).
.79 shares of Enix.)
:)
:), by virtue of having anime-like graphics? Crazy...
:))
... Ben-Hur"? The film's quite violent, but the violence is to tell an incredibly powerful story, not as an end in itself. Contrast with, say, The Running Man or way too many other Schwartzenneger films.
If Square is doing so well, why did they need Fund Q money so badly? For that matter, why in Heck did they merge with Enix, at terms disadvantageous to themselves? (IIRC, 1 share of Squaresoft to
[Full-Motion Video]
Yet it's what most games had, especially the best-of-breed games at the time.
Doesn't mean it's not bad design. Really bad design.
[Enix]
Enix, of course, being the company for which Japan legislated that their top series can not be released except on weekends and holidays. Not to mention that Square and Enix worked together on Chrono Trigger, which you already mentioned as one of their better early titles. When two Japanese companies see a chance to become a $500M/year company, what else do you expect? Number 7 in the industry, no longer consequential? That's just funny.
Enix still produces Legendarily Bad Games... Kind of like Bond movies, I guess.
#7 in the industry or not, they sure aren't acting complacent or self-confident. Did you hear the announcement that the latest Dragon Quest would have a larger base of appeal, e.g. places outside of the United States and Japanese mental institutions
As for mergers, following that logic, Nintendo and Sega should have merged around the time of the Genesis. What I'm arguing is that while it might make good business sense, the merger ran counter to a few substantial egos at Squaresoft, and wasn't the sort of thing they'd do readily.
This Gamasutra article (no membership needed to view) supports me just in incidental remarks, saying that Square and Enix ran into some pretty stiff competition.
Some psychologists believe it's healthy to take out aggression in other activities, even simulations (though it may be laughable to call GTA3 a simulation). Others believe that pretending to be violent leads to violence. Which psychologists you believe tends to be more of a personal and political choice than a real observation weighing the arguments against each other.
I would be with the second camp, and I take it you're with the first. We may want to leave it at that...
(Emacs stinks! VI forever!
[Action movies]
I haven't seen Gone With the Wind, but wasn't Ben-Hur one of those movies where someone died on-screen during production, and they left the footage in there? (the answer is yes) Generally a pretty violent film about a pretty violent portion of world history.
However, all of this (except the guy getting killed in the chariot race, which was unintentional...) was in there for the sake of the story, and relatively subdued. Like I said, "[H]ow much action-movie violence is there in
Shakespeare tends towards 'mature' themes, including violence and rather odd sexual pairings, but people tend to interpret it as less because they don't get the imagery so well from his prose (and most interpret Shakespeare from plays and movies rather than his actual words).
I don't like how he plays up the sexual stuff for laughs either, but it seems to be a constant of Western civilization that sufficiently off-the-wall sexual themes are the most effective of anything at producing (uncomfortable) laughter...
As for violence, what I was arguing was not that, say
As long as rating systems are enforced, why should you or anyone else care what kind of games other adults play.
:)
I agree. I wouldn't care particularly much... if the ESRB could just produce a decent rating system, and anyone at all cared about it. It's a sad day when the official ratings board of the ISDA itself can't devise a system to equal a bunch of berserker fundamentalists, and can't enforce its age recommendations as well as even the movie industry...
Violence has been part of human entertainment since our earliest times. The Illiad and the Bible would definitely get rated M if they were videogames (AO for some parts of the Bible even!).
Re. the Bible -- Got to love that immoral author.
I was complaining, not so much about the presence of any violence in a work, as about the presence of gratuitious violence, e.g. not necessary to the thrust of the story, gamplay, etc. I wouldn't complain about, say, The Godfather, but would about The Phantom Menace, because the immense amount of fairly gruesome violence in the former added to the story, while the larger-scale but more "kid-friendly" violence of the latter took away from it. Essentially, what I'm questioning is the literary good sense of the developers of games like Wolfenstein 3d or whatever.
They want to maintain a certain image, which is great in theory, but tough on sales.
:) And just in case, have another. :)
It's also helpful when Lieberman and the Vice Squad start making the rounds of game companies...
This attitude of superiority has cost them the friendship of Sony and Square, two mistakes that they have been paying for ever since.
Just a nitpick here, but it seems to me that Square, not Nintendo, suffered after deserting to Sony. Their late Super Nintendo games (FF6, Chrono Trigger, RS3, SD3) were extremely good, but in retrospect after seeing the mess they made of FF7, FF Tactics, and subsequent games, it seems that this was *because* they were being censored up the wazoo and weren't able to do the FMVs that their lead FF designer (Hironobu Sakagami, IIRC) wanted so desperately.
Pre-rendered video is now recognized pretty widely [Item #6] as bad design and an impediment to storytelling and immersion. This was the issue that Square jumped ship over...
They got what they wanted: no censorship and all the FMV they could possibly want. Result: Angsty foul-mouthed adolescent protagonists, unplayable games (FF10), and a merger with *shudder* Enix. They're a sinking ship, and no longer consequential. More importantly, they made themselves that way.
It's nice sometimes to be an adventurer and save princesses, but sometimes people do want to rob cars and kill prostitutes. Without giving the gamer a choice of that kind of game on your system, you are hampering your business.
This is a good point, although IMHO anyone who wants to rob cars and kill prostitutes, even in a game, should get his head examined, and see whether his insurance would cover moral-compass-replacement surgery. Some activities are so depraved that even pretending to engage in them is very questionable.
Anyone who disagrees with that will surely be interested in the new game by Rockstar Studios, First-Degree Murder: Jihad, in which the player takes on the role of an al-Qaida guerilla in the United States in a variety of missions, culminating in participating in the destruction of the World Trade Center and the ushering in of a glorious new age of faith and godliness...
Much more upbeat tone than their previous releases, isn't it? And for the chronically humor-deprived, no, this game isn't going to be released, it's a hypothetical example. Here's the obligatory smiley.
On a different subject -- a common one in this discussion, but not mentioned by Acts of Attrition -- I would say that a common misconception in America is that for a game to appeal to adults, it has to have "adult themes," e.g. liberal amounts of excessive violence, blood, and gore. (Our adolescent culture won't stand for sexual themes, of course.) This theory is nonsense; how much blood and gore, how much action-movie violence, is there in Gone With the Wind, say, or Ben-Hur, or the other memorable films of the Golden Age, or most of Shakespeare?
Grand Theft Auto, Bond movies, Terminator 3, and so on are adolescent in their appeal, not mature. One can appeal to adults more effectively without "adult content," whether sexual or violent, beyond what might be needed in the story. In the end, it's more effective to censor one's own work if one wants to appeal to mature adults...
Just as long as one doesn't cripple himself with Wind Waker-style animation.
Recall that under current US law,
1. A work made for hire is the property of the individual paying for the work, and
2. A corporation has the rights of a person...
IOW, you're saying that a corporation should be able to hold on to the works of its employees for an arbitrary amount of time. I, for one, am fond of this new proposal not least because it would allow one who created a work for hire to eventually get some access to the work himself.
It's not likely to happen in the near future, but a return to such policies is probably inevitable. The US, with both of our major parties on the payroll of groups like Disney Corp., will probably be the last country to return to more progressive laws on copyright, with the EU likelier to take the first step.
It would certainly be a good thing for entertainment. ANH would be in the public domain in three years, were this law in effect. All the works of Disney would likewise be long out of copyright, and as another poster has already mentioned, so would most classic rock. A large public domain has a very positive effect on the creation of literature -- remember Shakespeare?
From "Pac-man" to "The Legend of Zelda"? "The Legend of Zelda" was for the 8-bit NES -- not all that much of an improvement compared to more recent systems. While I agree with the article's author that it's at least equal to GTA3, I question whether it's worthy of the term "quantum leap"...
:)
Seriously, this guy knows as much about games and programming as EA does about, well, games and programming... All game companies out there right now, and EA in particular, need to stop hiring special effects people and get some real game designers -- i.e. on a level with Miyamoto.
They're out there, I don't doubt; without some real improvements, PC gaming will die entirely and be replaced with consoles, which can do the junk sports games and FPSes currently popular much better than a PC.
Let's see all this new technology actually improve the gaming experience... I say we go back to 80286's and DOS, or maybe the Apple II; they at least had innovative, entertaining games.
"Games still lack one element of the Hollywood lure: glamour. Unlike famous actors, video games stars like Lara Croft and Tony Hawk do not get $10 million signing fees. And because they don't drink and date, they never make the gossip columns of Hello magazine." You _know_ they're working on this...
What about Shogun TW? Same company, but original... this one's just a _Lords of the Realm II_ clone.
:)
I already knew about morale, military maneuvers, etc. before playing Shogun, but that was the first game I ever played which really tried to emulate them. Flank attacks out of forests, double envelopments, charging cavalry down a hill, even just psyching out the enemy's conscripts, all worked just like in the history books... That game did a great job.
I know you're not a gamer, but try to hunt down a copy of Shogun. You'll probably like it more than Medieval.
FWIW, I wanted a Shogun sequel in the same time period, but in Europe. Imagine a Gustavus Adolphus campaign like those in Shogun, or the Thirty Years' War fought with a Shogun-like engine, only in Germany...