I have to agree. Reading this article makes me want to dig my NES out of the closet and load up a game of Maniac Mansion. MM is the only Adventure game that I really got into as the problems presented had solutions that were't that far fetched, unlike some of the stuff in the Police quest games. Plus, the sense of humor (the Edsel spaceship in the garage) was clevor and the ability to use multiple characters to complete the story in multiple ways made the game have huge replay value. I usually hate sequels with a passion, but I would welcome a Maniac Mansion Sequel.
Once again, they made 2 distinct games and a
bunch of derivative clones based on those two platforms. As far as their track record goes, lets do a comparison to another company..Chevrolet for example. In 1975 I'm sure there were quite a few investors/designers/fans claiming that the Chevette would be nothing short than the greatest car ever built, considering chevy's long line of great cars (Bel-Air, Impala, Corvette, Camaro, Chevelle etc..). Every company puts out lemons, and I'm saying this is going to be Blizzard's lemon. The MMOG realm is an entirely different beast from making traditional multiplayer games.
Just look at the SWG Dev team, probably the most expierenced MMOG Dev team ever assembled and they still had numerous problems and a delayed release date of over 7 months. This project has been/will be an uphill battle all the way for Blizzard.
Yes, you do. Blizzard has made two games, Diablo and Warcraft. Diablo II was a redo of Diablo and Starcraft was a redo of Warcraft. They got lucky twice and have made a fortune reselling those golden eggs as expansions and sequals. I wouldn't get all teary eyed with anticipation for this game as MMOGs are a completely different beast and their online endeavours *cough*bnet*cough* are less than stellar IMHO. Plus, comparing a game that noone has seen outside of scripted E3 demos to current-I-Can-Go-To-EB-And-Buy-It-Today is not only unfair, but stupid.
I agree to an extent. Lord British was Ultima, for better or worse. It was his brain child and the lore was deep enough to rival Tolkien when you look at Ultima I-IX and Ultima Online. He was also a "ecentric" in that he favored the path less taken in game design. Ultima Online was a huge gamble and up until launch they had no idea if anyone would actually want to play the game or if they would cough up $10 a month to play in this little social experiment. Luckily for Garriott, most of his gambles came up big for him.
That said, I don't think this new Ultima needs him to be a good game as long as the designers continue the path that the Garriott team left off on. Unfortunately, I don't think this game will be any good at all, as every online foray that EA has done to date (The Sims Online, Motor City Online, Eath and Beyond, Majestic *snicker*, am I forgetting any) has been uninspired at best and just plain bad to most. That doesn't mean this new one will positively suck..but the track record isn't good and I'd bet a dollar on another industry bellyflop of a game.
Dead?
Hardly.
Warthog's main beef is that it isn't everquest. And he's an idiot. Many, many of us do not want everquest. We do not want ph4t l3wt drops off mobs. We don't want to camp Crushbone for weeks till we can ding so we can go camp crocs in Oasis until we ding again. Everquest was designed as a game, SWG was designed as a world. I'm sick and tired of seeing all the little pellet chasers that Everquest brought to the genre trying to turn every game into the next everquest.
The fact I can log in, play at my leisure and log out whenever I feel like it and not feel guilty about "only putting 6 hours in today" is great. I can play one or two hours a day and still make progress with some of my online friends. SWG was made for people who have outside lives and are more socially adapt than a paperclip. I like it that way...Don't turn it into another Everquest pandering to the catasses who play 70 hours a week.
You want Everquest? Go play Everquest and stop trying to turn every other game into a Everquest clone.
DAOC recently contracted their 2 Free-For-All PVP servers to just one server and most considered it a good thing.
As for land owners, AC2 does not have a housing system for the players, so combining server populations will only result in seeing new faces. AC1, Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot are the only current US-centric(some korean MMOGs may have housing..but there are probably close to a hundred of them now so I've stopped following that scene) MMOGs that currently have housing. UO has been around so long that it is probably going to be the first game to have to handle server contraction at some point in the future. But this is more than likely another 5-10 years in the future..the current playerbase has shown an astounding resilance to company incompetance with regards to OSI/EA and anything short of a EA executive driving to each subscribers house and pissing on their lawn is not going to convince these poor hopeless bastards to leave that corpse of a game.
Is it asking too much to hope that this investigation was spurred by the rapidly growing trend of releasing buggy, barely playble software and some underhanded agreements with many retail chains to not accept returns on unopened software? I know I'm not the only one with a dozen or so $50 drink coasters for games that just plain didn't work*cough*Enter the Matrix*cough*
But seeing as its just the SEC, it probably has to do with some funny bean counting in the Accounting Department and we can continue to expect boxed fecal matter we have become acustomed to.
wow, you gave the Beta game a whole three hours and you've already informed an opinion of the game, and a "Interesting" opinion on top of that. Well doesn't that make you the definitive resource for this game.
DirectTV also dials out to tell DirectTV what Pay Per View channels you watched...I believe the service agreement requires you to keep a phone line attached to the unit even after initial setup.
Umps and their strike zone is not the major complaint most people have with umps. A good ump is a consistant ump with a consistent strike zone. Ball players don't mind an ump that has a high strike zone. The players learn this and adjust their game to this. The problem comes when these umps call one pitch a ball one inning and the same pitch is a strike the next inning.
I see a much greater use of this machine to track umpires consitancy ratings than their actual strike calling ability.
You've hit the nail on the head there..corporate greed has killed the Arcade scene. I was in a Jillian's (Its a arcade/Bar here in the Baltimore/DC area) the other day and decided to play one of the new super high tech racing games with their ultra realistic physics and big screen tv in front of you. I hopped in and saw how many points it took and it came to $3 (this is another grievence I have with these kinds of places, you have to buy cards and load them with points so when you are at the machine it doesn't seem like the game costs as much as it does..1500 points is much less intimidating than 16 quarters). There were a bunch of other people racing and it was pretty damn fun. It was a fun 3 lap race and was finished in about 2 minutes. I ended up winning and was ready to rematch when I found out that you get absolutely nothing for winning and in order to defend your title you have to pay another $3 for 2 minutes of fun. It was way to expensive and I went back to the bar with my buddies after that and haven't hit the machines since.
What happened to the old days where the winner gets his next game free and the next challenger stepped up to fight/race you? There used to be lines out the door at this one arcade when I was a kid trying to beat this one guy in Mortal Kombat and he was just wiping the floor with these people..and they still kept ponying up the quarters trying to beat him. It was fun. Oh well..I have online gaming and IRC now so I guess that will have to do for my social gaming fix.
So...You want to take the fast paced action oriented style of the Matrix combat and turn it into Turn based combata a la Final Fantasy? I'm sorry sir, I will have to disagree. It just wouldn't be true to the franchise to have a menu pop up where you select Defense>Dodge Bullets and then sit back and watch the pretty animation over, and over, and over, and over again.
But its a moot point anyways, as a another poser has already pointed out that Neo is really the only one that can dodge bullets other than Agents and I think there is absolutely zero chance of playing either in the game. Which brings up another interesting point...is each server going to have 4000 or so people running around in cool black leather beating people up at will (which is totaly incosistent with the current Matrix movies) or are we going to have to play bus drivers and tax accountants like the rest of the normal stiffs still stuck in the Matrix?
when you start thinking about what this game will have after you get past the "OMG, MATRIX ONLINE!11!!ROOFLES!11!" it raises some serious questions on if this game is going to be good, or just another licensed crap game to get wads of money from unsuspecting fans of the license.
You got an excellent ponit there, I do spend a lot of time with one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse..enough so that I've actually gotten rather good at being over to slide the left hand over and do some nominal typing with the left hand on the right home row.
Even more so with the standard WASD and Mouse games.
What I'd like to see is a keyboard where half with a mouse built into the right half where you phsically move the entire key set as if it was a mouse. Therefore I can move the mouse as much as I needed and be able still type just as fast.
I wouldn't pay $695 for it though, maybe $150~$200 tops.
This is really going to make them some bucks for Planetside when it is released in a week. They are going to have trouble getting a lot of people to $13/month for a FPS that is basically Tribes 2 on steroids. With this pricing plan they will get more people buying boxes of PS and upping their subscriptions so they can play Planetside everyone once in a while to do some good fragging. It will also make people more willing to give EQ2 a shot if the subscription is already included in their account. SOE is going to make a boat load of money with this.
I agree. I bought my PS2 about a year ago from EB and they gave me a free 1 year subscription to their Game Informer mag (which, btw, is little more than an over glorified advertisment in case anyone cares) and in this issue were screenshots and a quick little blurb of this game. It really got my attention and I started regretting my choice of the PS2 over the Xbox. But now that speakeasy.net is running their "sign up and get a free xbox" promotion again and this game still isn't released I take it as a sign that yes, it is indeed time to bite the bullet and get an xbox to see what all the hype over Xbox live is all about.
The only reservations I have with this is will there be a second subscription fee on top of the current $50/yr subscription fee for xbox live or is this included as a XBL hook. If it is included with the xbox live service then it would be a good deal. If they tack on another $13/month(the current going rate of PC MMOGS) then it may not be such a great bargain and it better be DAMN good to justify itself and compete with my monthly MMOG allowance that Shadowbane is currently fulfilling.
Oh well, it can't flop worse then Everquest Online Adventures for the Playstation 2.
Hmm...please check your facts before you start spouting off misinformation. If EQ:OA was such a disaster then why would they already be making an expansion already?
I wouldn't normally go off topic like this, but the parent post is nothing more than a troll to slam Everquest and hype up WOW..nothing to do with the EQ RTS. And personally, after playing the Pocket PC version of Everquest, am looking forward to seeing Lords of Everquest.
Slashdot Mirror
Star Wars Galaxies allows you to auction stuff off on the Bazaar to the highest bidder.
I have to agree. Reading this article makes me want to dig my NES out of the closet and load up a game of Maniac Mansion. MM is the only Adventure game that I really got into as the problems presented had solutions that were't that far fetched, unlike some of the stuff in the Police quest games. Plus, the sense of humor (the Edsel spaceship in the garage) was clevor and the ability to use multiple characters to complete the story in multiple ways made the game have huge replay value. I usually hate sequels with a passion, but I would welcome a Maniac Mansion Sequel.
Once again, they made 2 distinct games and a bunch of derivative clones based on those two platforms. As far as their track record goes, lets do a comparison to another company..Chevrolet for example. In 1975 I'm sure there were quite a few investors/designers/fans claiming that the Chevette would be nothing short than the greatest car ever built, considering chevy's long line of great cars (Bel-Air, Impala, Corvette, Camaro, Chevelle etc..). Every company puts out lemons, and I'm saying this is going to be Blizzard's lemon. The MMOG realm is an entirely different beast from making traditional multiplayer games.
Just look at the SWG Dev team, probably the most expierenced MMOG Dev team ever assembled and they still had numerous problems and a delayed release date of over 7 months. This project has been/will be an uphill battle all the way for Blizzard.
Need I say more
Yes, you do. Blizzard has made two games, Diablo and Warcraft. Diablo II was a redo of Diablo and Starcraft was a redo of Warcraft. They got lucky twice and have made a fortune reselling those golden eggs as expansions and sequals. I wouldn't get all teary eyed with anticipation for this game as MMOGs are a completely different beast and their online endeavours *cough*bnet*cough* are less than stellar IMHO. Plus, comparing a game that noone has seen outside of scripted E3 demos to current-I-Can-Go-To-EB-And-Buy-It-Today is not only unfair, but stupid.
I agree to an extent. Lord British was Ultima, for better or worse. It was his brain child and the lore was deep enough to rival Tolkien when you look at Ultima I-IX and Ultima Online. He was also a "ecentric" in that he favored the path less taken in game design. Ultima Online was a huge gamble and up until launch they had no idea if anyone would actually want to play the game or if they would cough up $10 a month to play in this little social experiment. Luckily for Garriott, most of his gambles came up big for him.
That said, I don't think this new Ultima needs him to be a good game as long as the designers continue the path that the Garriott team left off on. Unfortunately, I don't think this game will be any good at all, as every online foray that EA has done to date (The Sims Online, Motor City Online, Eath and Beyond, Majestic *snicker*, am I forgetting any) has been uninspired at best and just plain bad to most. That doesn't mean this new one will positively suck..but the track record isn't good and I'd bet a dollar on another industry bellyflop of a game.
Dead? Hardly. Warthog's main beef is that it isn't everquest. And he's an idiot. Many, many of us do not want everquest. We do not want ph4t l3wt drops off mobs. We don't want to camp Crushbone for weeks till we can ding so we can go camp crocs in Oasis until we ding again. Everquest was designed as a game, SWG was designed as a world. I'm sick and tired of seeing all the little pellet chasers that Everquest brought to the genre trying to turn every game into the next everquest. The fact I can log in, play at my leisure and log out whenever I feel like it and not feel guilty about "only putting 6 hours in today" is great. I can play one or two hours a day and still make progress with some of my online friends. SWG was made for people who have outside lives and are more socially adapt than a paperclip. I like it that way...Don't turn it into another Everquest pandering to the catasses who play 70 hours a week.
You want Everquest? Go play Everquest and stop trying to turn every other game into a Everquest clone.
DAOC recently contracted their 2 Free-For-All PVP servers to just one server and most considered it a good thing.
As for land owners, AC2 does not have a housing system for the players, so combining server populations will only result in seeing new faces. AC1, Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot are the only current US-centric(some korean MMOGs may have housing..but there are probably close to a hundred of them now so I've stopped following that scene) MMOGs that currently have housing. UO has been around so long that it is probably going to be the first game to have to handle server contraction at some point in the future. But this is more than likely another 5-10 years in the future..the current playerbase has shown an astounding resilance to company incompetance with regards to OSI/EA and anything short of a EA executive driving to each subscribers house and pissing on their lawn is not going to convince these poor hopeless bastards to leave that corpse of a game.
Is it asking too much to hope that this investigation was spurred by the rapidly growing trend of releasing buggy, barely playble software and some underhanded agreements with many retail chains to not accept returns on unopened software? I know I'm not the only one with a dozen or so $50 drink coasters for games that just plain didn't work*cough*Enter the Matrix*cough*
But seeing as its just the SEC, it probably has to do with some funny bean counting in the Accounting Department and we can continue to expect boxed fecal matter we have become acustomed to.
Deus Ex style combat. Player skill driven piloting and combat with stat modifiers and the such. In case you were interested.
wow, you gave the Beta game a whole three hours and you've already informed an opinion of the game, and a "Interesting" opinion on top of that. Well doesn't that make you the definitive resource for this game.
showing my lack of geekness here, but what is this whole did or didn't shoot first thing referring too?
But don't the English already have off for Independence day????
DirectTV also dials out to tell DirectTV what Pay Per View channels you watched...I believe the service agreement requires you to keep a phone line attached to the unit even after initial setup.
Umps and their strike zone is not the major complaint most people have with umps. A good ump is a consistant ump with a consistent strike zone. Ball players don't mind an ump that has a high strike zone. The players learn this and adjust their game to this. The problem comes when these umps call one pitch a ball one inning and the same pitch is a strike the next inning.
I see a much greater use of this machine to track umpires consitancy ratings than their actual strike calling ability.
IBM will win simply because they will have the resources to stick this out for the long haul.
It's sad really that this is the reason they will will, not because they are in the right or anything...
You've hit the nail on the head there..corporate greed has killed the Arcade scene. I was in a Jillian's (Its a arcade/Bar here in the Baltimore/DC area) the other day and decided to play one of the new super high tech racing games with their ultra realistic physics and big screen tv in front of you. I hopped in and saw how many points it took and it came to $3 (this is another grievence I have with these kinds of places, you have to buy cards and load them with points so when you are at the machine it doesn't seem like the game costs as much as it does..1500 points is much less intimidating than 16 quarters). There were a bunch of other people racing and it was pretty damn fun. It was a fun 3 lap race and was finished in about 2 minutes. I ended up winning and was ready to rematch when I found out that you get absolutely nothing for winning and in order to defend your title you have to pay another $3 for 2 minutes of fun. It was way to expensive and I went back to the bar with my buddies after that and haven't hit the machines since.
What happened to the old days where the winner gets his next game free and the next challenger stepped up to fight/race you? There used to be lines out the door at this one arcade when I was a kid trying to beat this one guy in Mortal Kombat and he was just wiping the floor with these people..and they still kept ponying up the quarters trying to beat him. It was fun. Oh well..I have online gaming and IRC now so I guess that will have to do for my social gaming fix.
fresh from working on Enter the Matrix.
:)
We won't hold that against him.
So...You want to take the fast paced action oriented style of the Matrix combat and turn it into Turn based combata a la Final Fantasy? I'm sorry sir, I will have to disagree. It just wouldn't be true to the franchise to have a menu pop up where you select Defense>Dodge Bullets and then sit back and watch the pretty animation over, and over, and over, and over again.
But its a moot point anyways, as a another poser has already pointed out that Neo is really the only one that can dodge bullets other than Agents and I think there is absolutely zero chance of playing either in the game. Which brings up another interesting point...is each server going to have 4000 or so people running around in cool black leather beating people up at will (which is totaly incosistent with the current Matrix movies) or are we going to have to play bus drivers and tax accountants like the rest of the normal stiffs still stuck in the Matrix?
when you start thinking about what this game will have after you get past the "OMG, MATRIX ONLINE!11!!ROOFLES!11!" it raises some serious questions on if this game is going to be good, or just another licensed crap game to get wads of money from unsuspecting fans of the license.
You got an excellent ponit there, I do spend a lot of time with one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse..enough so that I've actually gotten rather good at being over to slide the left hand over and do some nominal typing with the left hand on the right home row.
Even more so with the standard WASD and Mouse games.
What I'd like to see is a keyboard where half with a mouse built into the right half where you phsically move the entire key set as if it was a mouse. Therefore I can move the mouse as much as I needed and be able still type just as fast.
I wouldn't pay $695 for it though, maybe $150~$200 tops.
The 120gig Harddrive is nice. Anyone know if this is the size for the HD they announced this year at E3 for existing PS2s?
As long as it is optimized for 3dfx cards.
This is really going to make them some bucks for Planetside when it is released in a week. They are going to have trouble getting a lot of people to $13/month for a FPS that is basically Tribes 2 on steroids. With this pricing plan they will get more people buying boxes of PS and upping their subscriptions so they can play Planetside everyone once in a while to do some good fragging. It will also make people more willing to give EQ2 a shot if the subscription is already included in their account. SOE is going to make a boat load of money with this.
20 percent cowbell
only 20%?
We need more Cowbell!
I agree. I bought my PS2 about a year ago from EB and they gave me a free 1 year subscription to their Game Informer mag (which, btw, is little more than an over glorified advertisment in case anyone cares) and in this issue were screenshots and a quick little blurb of this game. It really got my attention and I started regretting my choice of the PS2 over the Xbox. But now that speakeasy.net is running their "sign up and get a free xbox" promotion again and this game still isn't released I take it as a sign that yes, it is indeed time to bite the bullet and get an xbox to see what all the hype over Xbox live is all about.
The only reservations I have with this is will there be a second subscription fee on top of the current $50/yr subscription fee for xbox live or is this included as a XBL hook. If it is included with the xbox live service then it would be a good deal. If they tack on another $13/month(the current going rate of PC MMOGS) then it may not be such a great bargain and it better be DAMN good to justify itself and compete with my monthly MMOG allowance that Shadowbane is currently fulfilling.
Oh well, it can't flop worse then Everquest Online Adventures for the Playstation 2.
Hmm...please check your facts before you start spouting off misinformation. If EQ:OA was such a disaster then why would they already be making an expansion already?
I wouldn't normally go off topic like this, but the parent post is nothing more than a troll to slam Everquest and hype up WOW..nothing to do with the EQ RTS. And personally, after playing the Pocket PC version of Everquest, am looking forward to seeing Lords of Everquest.