Right, and pre-rendered CGI movies don't make games, they only make cut scenes.
Funny how everyone gives Killzone 2 the benefit of the doubt in the gameplay department based on a shitty first game, while these guys get the "eyecandy" cold shoulder, despite 2 really good, well-playing games in a row.
Not saying you're looking at Killzone the same way, more responding to the general tone here on/.
The article said the "opening scenes" take place thousands of years before the Halo timeline. So it's obviously some kind of crazy flashback thingie explaining plot points.
But the whole point of competition is that it keeps them scrambling to offer more for less. You yourself said "the others can afford to take a hit." So I as the consumer don't end up paying more, or at the very least, I'm getting a lot for my money. Nintendo may come in with a console $50 under the others, as they did last time, but as with last time, with a much more limited feature set. That $50 is worth it to me for the other features.
What gets me angry is that Nintendo is thinking, "we can't afford to offer all those features for less because we can't take the hit that our competitors can." But what they say is, "you don't need those features at the same or similar cost, silly consumers!" And worse still, the legions of Nintendites chant "Yes, Nintendo, you are correct! I should get less for the same amount of money because of your business plan! I think what you're doing is really smart even though I get less!"
I still fail to see how Nintendo's profit making is supposed to help me. They're dropping features that their competitors are adding. They have for a while now. While that may profit them, how in the hell does it help me?
People need to remember that unless they're Nintendo shareholders, boasting about Nintendo's profitability is about as asinine a self-defeating exercise as could be imagined.
Competition, if I recall correctly, was supposed to help the consumer. WHen competitors get into a pissing match with each other, jamming features into their products at a loss to attract us consumers, we benefit by getting more for our money. When a company offers less features in the name of profitability, their bottom line may benefit, but we consumers quite simply do not.
I'm am very tired of Nintendo apologists telling everyone else that Nintendo's cost-cutting moves offer me or any other gamer any benefit at all.
but here goes nintendo telling us again that a lack of a feature is actually a benefit. HD-quality graphics will still work on normal TVs, so it's not like using them will alienate the non-HD audience. My favorite is how it will be easier on the developers, though. I'm sure all of the home-brew developers out there for PC games have found high resolutions a real hindrance. This will be a certain boon for all of the artists at game companies who will finally have reason to cheer that they can easily move the graphics they have been developing at low resolutions into games. Artists hate high resolution graphics, and game companies are always hiring extra people to upconvert low-res graphics down to TV resolutions.
Enough already! Just come out and say it! "we will do only enough to make a profit and no more!" And wait for the legions of fans to say how this profit making is in the gamer's best interest.
Also cue the "I think this is a really good idea because...." posts.
Why can't we just fine the parents of kids who do crap like this? Send them to jail? How's that for incentive to make sure your kid doesn't end up a mess? Your kid goes on a spree and kills a bunch of people, then himself, you do time.
Why are we so interested in this country in telling people they can't do something just because someone else did something wrong? Why can't we have some sort of incentive for parents not to ignore or abuse their kids? We're dealing with symptoms instead of causes, which hurts people who don't deserve to be hurt and leaves the cause alone to fester.
So wait a minute: declaring 7 new titles for a platform is somehow now perceived as dropping support for them? I don't care who you know or what platforms you've programmed for, or what your editing skills are, your original statement that developers are leaving x360 in droves is still patently false, because: 1. Midway is a publisher, not a developer 2. Midway is not withdrawing any support for x360, has in fact announced 7 new titles for the platform, and is only "faulty" in not having any launch titles for it.
The Midway announcement you are referring to is just that they will not have titles ready for X360 launch. That's a far cry from dropping support for the box. With MS already owning a sizeable portion of a growing market, with a good chance of picking up more with an early launch, no major publisher is foolish enough to drop support for 360. Just to clarify, Midway is a publisher, by the way, not a developer. Big difference.
If a developer like Factor 5 signs on for PS3 exclusivity, that to me is not a major sea change of support. That just means one small developer responsible for one major game has switched exclusivity from one system to another. They are obviously happy with an exclusivity arrangement, so there is no way you could read into their move as some sort of indictment of X360, other than that they expect PS3 to have a larger market share (and offer them more $$ on the exclusivity arrangement). I think it's pretty easy to predict that PS3 will have a larger market share than competitors, the big question is how much larger this time around as opposed to last time.
Oh, and please quit with the made up connections to developers, and the implication that none of us have the inside info that you do. It's insulting to "our" intelligence. Everything you are saying is based on misread news headlines, flavored with your own personal view of "how things are".
Developers are jumping ship on the xbox? Factor 5 was paid for an exclusivity arrangement. That's not "jumping ship". Other than that, there have been no such announcements. You're dreaming.
Also, I fail to see how requiring HD and 4xAA on hardware that is designed to do it with little impact is "not going to help the state of gaming". Or how "no slowdown" is such a horrible restriction. Or any similar restrictions that Sony might try to enforce. Setting the bar for certain features higher is a good thing, right? Or will this somehow interfere with "innovative" gaming?
I think people are dreaming when they predict how well the Revolution will do. It will continue to sell to Nintendo zealots but as time goes by, the expanding market will be more and more new gamers who don't give a shit about games someone played 20 years ago. They'll just see which console gets the most media, the most third party titles, and the most press, and that will be a two-horse race. For better or worse.
You rock, dude. Seriously. Hard.
Which console again, tiger? Hold on a second, let me get that Windows buttplug out of my ass, then I can listen better.
Then you should be familiar with all of the tweaks and balance changes and cheat fixes that Blizzard has been shipping for years, right? Any game with a huge online community will inevitably have exploits and cheats exposed by people. These are, as I said, inevitable. No amount of testing will expose every possibility for cheating. It's not skimping on QA, or cheapness that causes this, but the fact that these things will always occur in any system of moderate complexity.
If you take a look at the downloads Bungie has made available, they compare very closely to those that Blizzard has made available. They're fixes to expoits (sword flying, modem reset), balance tweaks (bumping up grenade damage), etc. Not bug fixes. The alternative is to let the game remain unplayable due to these problems. I think before jumping on the "xbox is a patchfest" bandwagon, you should take a hard look at what has actually happened and seriously consider the alternatives. People bitching about Halo 2's patchability are just having a knee jerk reaction.
Girls probably like you because you're so hard core a game player. They probably sit with you and make fun of the rich kid console owners with gamepads up their butts.
Should I care whether Nintendo makes money on it and Sony loses? No, I shouldn't. Who cares about the fiscal responsibility of the company? We're talking about things from a consumer's perspective. If a company jams a bunch of things (that I might actually use, I might add) and it loses them money, that's my gain. The more stuff they put in there, the better off I am. If they cut features out, it may save them money, and they may make more money per unit sold, but that really kind of hurts me, doesn't it?
Unless you're holding stock in any of these companies, please drop the "company x makes money on their products and company y doesn't" shit. That doesn't have one damn bit to do with what I should buy. A smart consumer will buy the product they like the most, with the most features. Anything else is just you trying to justify your misplaced love for a company that really doesn't care 2 shits about you.
I agree with your second point, but I'd also add that it is pretty hard to get PCs to play games more than 6 years old. Even non-DOS games have a lot of problems, especially those games that only work on Win95. And I still miss some of my DOS games (though I suppose a lot of the more worthwhile ones have win-friendly ports, like quake).
I've still got an Atari 2600, a nintendo, genesis, dreamcast, etc., and none of them have ever had to be "maintained" (expect maybe blowing dust out of the nintendo). I really don't know what this guy was on about, either.
It's not an xbox game. It is on PC as well. The demo has been out for a while. I believe it's also on PS2.
Oh, and instead of $200 for a limited console, you can pay $300 for a video card and your other upgrades. I just don't understand "consoles have to be purchased and maintained for years to come". What maintenance are you talking about? You mean, like swapping out cards, adding memory, and the like? Oh, that's right, consoles don't require that at all. In fact, last I heard, that was one of their big value propositions.
Somehow, the idea that consoles involve forking over too much money and maintenance during their lifetime doesn't ring true at all, and less so when you say that in comparison to PCs.
Um, any multiplayer online game is going to need patches. Unless you're in development for 10 years, there's no way you can anticipate every cheat or exploit. The fact that patches are possible is actually a good thing. If they were patching the single player game, I'd be worried. But for multiplayer balancing, it's a VERY good thing. Hell, Blizzard is still patching Starcraft, and it's not because they didn't test it properly. So long as xbox games hold the same philosophy (which they have, so calm the f down), everything's peachy.
It's called "can't really play 3 consoles at once, can we?"
Can't anyone write anymore?
on
Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Am I the only one infuriated by the shitty writing in this article? I love lines like:
"The future of DVD is still unclear, but what is certain is that a replacement is already needed and looked upon."
"Although at the beginning of the decade, the DVD seemed like a major discovery, it shortly proved itself unable to solve some of the most important problems that lead to its very creation."
"In brief, the movies offered on such a support...."
"The big award for the winning format has so many zeros as even the companies used to astronomic figures would get dizzy with the taste of unlimited success."
It's off just enough to annoy, and as you get through a few paragraphs, the annoyance builds and builds until you want to forcibly lead the author back to a book on English usage. I feel like I'm reading the back of a Japanese shampoo bottle.
Yes, the good people at Nintendo were thinking of your best interests when they decided to forego online gaming. Right now, they're in their workshop, hand-crafting everything for your enjoyment. They don't think about profit at all, unlike those bad people at Sony and Microsoft. They're in this for the sheer artistry of it all, and to make you (personally) great games.
Excuse me now, I'm going to go look at Nintendo's real history (Pokemon, outrageous 3rd party licensing deals, etc.) and barf at the idea that "they aren't going after the largest market share". The only reason they're not after the largest market share is because at this point, there's no way they could get it.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, and pre-rendered CGI movies don't make games, they only make cut scenes.
/.
Funny how everyone gives Killzone 2 the benefit of the doubt in the gameplay department based on a shitty first game, while these guys get the "eyecandy" cold shoulder, despite 2 really good, well-playing games in a row.
Not saying you're looking at Killzone the same way, more responding to the general tone here on
The first RTS game on Sega was Herzog Zwei, not Dune II, wasn't it?
I know, I caught that as soon as I posted. And felt kind of silly.
FYI: english speakers don't use "or" like German's use "oder".
The article said the "opening scenes" take place thousands of years before the Halo timeline. So it's obviously some kind of crazy flashback thingie explaining plot points.
That is, of course, if any of this is true.
But the whole point of competition is that it keeps them scrambling to offer more for less. You yourself said "the others can afford to take a hit." So I as the consumer don't end up paying more, or at the very least, I'm getting a lot for my money. Nintendo may come in with a console $50 under the others, as they did last time, but as with last time, with a much more limited feature set. That $50 is worth it to me for the other features.
What gets me angry is that Nintendo is thinking, "we can't afford to offer all those features for less because we can't take the hit that our competitors can." But what they say is, "you don't need those features at the same or similar cost, silly consumers!" And worse still, the legions of Nintendites chant "Yes, Nintendo, you are correct! I should get less for the same amount of money because of your business plan! I think what you're doing is really smart even though I get less!"
I still fail to see how Nintendo's profit making is supposed to help me. They're dropping features that their competitors are adding. They have for a while now. While that may profit them, how in the hell does it help me?
People need to remember that unless they're Nintendo shareholders, boasting about Nintendo's profitability is about as asinine a self-defeating exercise as could be imagined.
Competition, if I recall correctly, was supposed to help the consumer. WHen competitors get into a pissing match with each other, jamming features into their products at a loss to attract us consumers, we benefit by getting more for our money. When a company offers less features in the name of profitability, their bottom line may benefit, but we consumers quite simply do not.
I'm am very tired of Nintendo apologists telling everyone else that Nintendo's cost-cutting moves offer me or any other gamer any benefit at all.
but here goes nintendo telling us again that a lack of a feature is actually a benefit. HD-quality graphics will still work on normal TVs, so it's not like using them will alienate the non-HD audience. My favorite is how it will be easier on the developers, though. I'm sure all of the home-brew developers out there for PC games have found high resolutions a real hindrance. This will be a certain boon for all of the artists at game companies who will finally have reason to cheer that they can easily move the graphics they have been developing at low resolutions into games. Artists hate high resolution graphics, and game companies are always hiring extra people to upconvert low-res graphics down to TV resolutions.
Enough already! Just come out and say it! "we will do only enough to make a profit and no more!" And wait for the legions of fans to say how this profit making is in the gamer's best interest.
Also cue the "I think this is a really good idea because...." posts.
Why can't we just fine the parents of kids who do crap like this? Send them to jail? How's that for incentive to make sure your kid doesn't end up a mess? Your kid goes on a spree and kills a bunch of people, then himself, you do time.
Why are we so interested in this country in telling people they can't do something just because someone else did something wrong? Why can't we have some sort of incentive for parents not to ignore or abuse their kids? We're dealing with symptoms instead of causes, which hurts people who don't deserve to be hurt and leaves the cause alone to fester.
[rambling rant over]
So wait a minute: declaring 7 new titles for a platform is somehow now perceived as dropping support for them? I don't care who you know or what platforms you've programmed for, or what your editing skills are, your original statement that developers are leaving x360 in droves is still patently false, because:
1. Midway is a publisher, not a developer
2. Midway is not withdrawing any support for x360, has in fact announced 7 new titles for the platform, and is only "faulty" in not having any launch titles for it.
Umm, apparently you're not keeping up well (and not very good at spelling, either):
5 07.html
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/05/26/news_6126
The Midway announcement you are referring to is just that they will not have titles ready for X360 launch. That's a far cry from dropping support for the box. With MS already owning a sizeable portion of a growing market, with a good chance of picking up more with an early launch, no major publisher is foolish enough to drop support for 360. Just to clarify, Midway is a publisher, by the way, not a developer. Big difference.
If a developer like Factor 5 signs on for PS3 exclusivity, that to me is not a major sea change of support. That just means one small developer responsible for one major game has switched exclusivity from one system to another. They are obviously happy with an exclusivity arrangement, so there is no way you could read into their move as some sort of indictment of X360, other than that they expect PS3 to have a larger market share (and offer them more $$ on the exclusivity arrangement). I think it's pretty easy to predict that PS3 will have a larger market share than competitors, the big question is how much larger this time around as opposed to last time.
Oh, and please quit with the made up connections to developers, and the implication that none of us have the inside info that you do. It's insulting to "our" intelligence. Everything you are saying is based on misread news headlines, flavored with your own personal view of "how things are".
Developers are jumping ship on the xbox? Factor 5 was paid for an exclusivity arrangement. That's not "jumping ship". Other than that, there have been no such announcements. You're dreaming.
Also, I fail to see how requiring HD and 4xAA on hardware that is designed to do it with little impact is "not going to help the state of gaming". Or how "no slowdown" is such a horrible restriction. Or any similar restrictions that Sony might try to enforce. Setting the bar for certain features higher is a good thing, right? Or will this somehow interfere with "innovative" gaming?
I think people are dreaming when they predict how well the Revolution will do. It will continue to sell to Nintendo zealots but as time goes by, the expanding market will be more and more new gamers who don't give a shit about games someone played 20 years ago. They'll just see which console gets the most media, the most third party titles, and the most press, and that will be a two-horse race. For better or worse.
You rock, dude. Seriously. Hard. Which console again, tiger? Hold on a second, let me get that Windows buttplug out of my ass, then I can listen better.
What console were these "console developer houses" developing for, where they received their "experience writing concurrent game engines"?
Then you should be familiar with all of the tweaks and balance changes and cheat fixes that Blizzard has been shipping for years, right? Any game with a huge online community will inevitably have exploits and cheats exposed by people. These are, as I said, inevitable. No amount of testing will expose every possibility for cheating. It's not skimping on QA, or cheapness that causes this, but the fact that these things will always occur in any system of moderate complexity.
If you take a look at the downloads Bungie has made available, they compare very closely to those that Blizzard has made available. They're fixes to expoits (sword flying, modem reset), balance tweaks (bumping up grenade damage), etc. Not bug fixes. The alternative is to let the game remain unplayable due to these problems. I think before jumping on the "xbox is a patchfest" bandwagon, you should take a hard look at what has actually happened and seriously consider the alternatives. People bitching about Halo 2's patchability are just having a knee jerk reaction.
Girls probably like you because you're so hard core a game player. They probably sit with you and make fun of the rich kid console owners with gamepads up their butts.
Get over yourself, please.
Should I care whether Nintendo makes money on it and Sony loses? No, I shouldn't. Who cares about the fiscal responsibility of the company? We're talking about things from a consumer's perspective. If a company jams a bunch of things (that I might actually use, I might add) and it loses them money, that's my gain. The more stuff they put in there, the better off I am. If they cut features out, it may save them money, and they may make more money per unit sold, but that really kind of hurts me, doesn't it?
Unless you're holding stock in any of these companies, please drop the "company x makes money on their products and company y doesn't" shit. That doesn't have one damn bit to do with what I should buy. A smart consumer will buy the product they like the most, with the most features. Anything else is just you trying to justify your misplaced love for a company that really doesn't care 2 shits about you.
I agree with your second point, but I'd also add that it is pretty hard to get PCs to play games more than 6 years old. Even non-DOS games have a lot of problems, especially those games that only work on Win95. And I still miss some of my DOS games (though I suppose a lot of the more worthwhile ones have win-friendly ports, like quake).
I've still got an Atari 2600, a nintendo, genesis, dreamcast, etc., and none of them have ever had to be "maintained" (expect maybe blowing dust out of the nintendo). I really don't know what this guy was on about, either.
It's not an xbox game. It is on PC as well. The demo has been out for a while. I believe it's also on PS2.
Oh, and instead of $200 for a limited console, you can pay $300 for a video card and your other upgrades. I just don't understand "consoles have to be purchased and maintained for years to come". What maintenance are you talking about? You mean, like swapping out cards, adding memory, and the like? Oh, that's right, consoles don't require that at all. In fact, last I heard, that was one of their big value propositions.
Somehow, the idea that consoles involve forking over too much money and maintenance during their lifetime doesn't ring true at all, and less so when you say that in comparison to PCs.
Um, any multiplayer online game is going to need patches. Unless you're in development for 10 years, there's no way you can anticipate every cheat or exploit. The fact that patches are possible is actually a good thing. If they were patching the single player game, I'd be worried. But for multiplayer balancing, it's a VERY good thing. Hell, Blizzard is still patching Starcraft, and it's not because they didn't test it properly. So long as xbox games hold the same philosophy (which they have, so calm the f down), everything's peachy.
Let us not forget my personal favorite, Bird in Hand PA.
Also, let us not disrespect King of Prussia, home to the formerly largest mall in the world.
It's called "can't really play 3 consoles at once, can we?"
Am I the only one infuriated by the shitty writing in this article? I love lines like:
"The future of DVD is still unclear, but what is certain is that a replacement is already needed and looked upon."
"Although at the beginning of the decade, the DVD seemed like a major discovery, it shortly proved itself unable to solve some of the most important problems that lead to its very creation."
"In brief, the movies offered on such a support...."
"The big award for the winning format has so many zeros as even the companies used to astronomic figures would get dizzy with the taste of unlimited success."
It's off just enough to annoy, and as you get through a few paragraphs, the annoyance builds and builds until you want to forcibly lead the author back to a book on English usage. I feel like I'm reading the back of a Japanese shampoo bottle.
"Mr Sparkle is very disrespectful to dirt"
I suppose you don't mind the compressed textures and audio that GC ports of multiplatform games suffer from? Due to disc capacity and all.
Yes, the good people at Nintendo were thinking of your best interests when they decided to forego online gaming. Right now, they're in their workshop, hand-crafting everything for your enjoyment. They don't think about profit at all, unlike those bad people at Sony and Microsoft. They're in this for the sheer artistry of it all, and to make you (personally) great games.
Excuse me now, I'm going to go look at Nintendo's real history (Pokemon, outrageous 3rd party licensing deals, etc.) and barf at the idea that "they aren't going after the largest market share". The only reason they're not after the largest market share is because at this point, there's no way they could get it.