My apologies if this seems offtopic, but I just need to point out that not all cases that appear frivolous are truly frivolous. Found via Snopes, from the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, here are the actual facts of the McDonald's coffee spill case:
While the PS2 can't quite match in the hardware department, there are still a few reasons that it does so well:
* Games exclusive to the system, especially RPGs. If you want to play certain games, like Final Fantasy X-2, you have to get the PS2.
* A very large game library. Yeah, a lot of it is crap, but there are so many more games for this system than the X-Box or GameCube. While all three systems have "Greatest Hits" series of cheaper classic games, the PS2 library of inexpensive games is also very solid.
* That library is even larger when you also consider the backwards compatibility of the system: add all the PS1 titles floating out there and you've suddenly got a much larger body of games. It may not mean much to an avid gamer who only wants the newest games, but I know a few parents who like the fact that it runs the games from the original PlayStation.
There are other reasons as well, but these are the ones that come to mind.
...the effort required to train enough people to play a new game with weird or complex rules just isn't worth it anymore.
I can relate to your problem -- there are a lot of games that you can't just sit down and play with anyone. In fact, some of those are my favorites. But there are a lot of games with fairly simple rules that you can teach almost anyone in a matter of minutes.
"Apples to Apples" and "Fluxx" come to mind as games that almost anyone can be taught and jump right in and play. They also have the advantage that, while someone can win, no one can get eliminated. Nothing puts off new gamers like being eliminated from a game they barely understand.
Games like "Settlers of Catan" or "Carcassone" are a good "next step" for people that you try to get to play board games: the strategy is a little deeper and the rules require more explanation, but they're still fun and fairly easy to get into.
And finally, you're right -- trying to find these games is a pain. However, you can get a lot of these online. The original article should lead to funagain games, one of many places online that you can purchase these games... heck, for cheaper than you can get them in a store.
The Games 100 is based on games that were released in the previous year (although I believe they take a few liberties and include some previous year's winners as well.) Fluxx has been around for a few years, and I believe it's appeared on their list at least once in the past.
They do have a "Hall of Fame" of games that have been produced for 10 years straight and that are considered classics in some way. I wouldn't be surprised if Fluxx makes it to the list on its tenth anniversary.
The Looney Labs people (creators of Fluxx) did get a game on the list: Nanofictionary, a very creative, random game of storytelling that I find "feels" a bit like Fluxx without the rules (which is interesting, since Fluxx is all about rules...)
Nanofictionary is worth checking out, as is Aquarius, another of their games. Another amusing game that may or may not still be in print is Elixir, in which players collect components to "cast spells" that alter the rules. You can even cast a spell to make someone go get drinks and snacks. Fun stuff:)
The original poster writes: "Surely it can't be that hard to code in an option that changes a color to a given shape, for those of us that're color-impaired?"
It may not be hard, but it could potentially add more time to the production of the game. Keep in mind that many games are already released without proper play-testing or bug-fixes; adding another feature which will go unnoticed and unappreciated by many users may not fit with many game companies' bottom lines.
I'm not condoning the game companies, and to be honest, I think that the lack of color-blind display options is mostly due to ignorance rather than genuine neglect. Thus, I think the appropriate resonse is for color-blind games to contact these companies, explain their concerns, and support those companies and games that do address their needs.
Another poster wrote about how he's annoyed at having to accomodate the needs of so many users. However, there are a lot of color-blind gamers out there, including a few friends of mine. If a game is unplayable for them, they won't buy it. This is true of board games as well as PC/Console games. Adding these sorts of features could result in more sales without causing any problems for other users, but until the game companies realize this, they won't add them.
One last reflection: isn't it somewhat noteworthy that most of the truly timeless gaming components -- dice, cards, and such -- rely on symbols as well as (or rather than) colors? Perhaps the history of gaming has a lesson there.
I was going to suggest this myself, but you beat me to the punch.
It should be possible to get through some of what I call the story "puzzle" stages by using this solution -- the ones where you have to destroy geostones/panels in certain order, or navigate around difficult ones.
However, the poster will have some trouble with the randomly generated "item world" levels. Some of these stages can have up to six different colors of panels, and not all of them are associated with specific effects -- if you hit the triangle button, any panels without geostones one them will just say "none." Why is this a problem? Because you have to create large combos of geostone explosions to get the best items from the bonus meter in each stage. Without being able to see what all the colors are, you won't be able to set them up for the big kaboom.
Just wanted to post two possibilities, though: one is that you can use a unit of the Scout class to shuffle the geopanels until you get a setup that you can figure out without using colors; second, you can always just look for the same types of items you'd get from the bonus meter on monsters, and steal them using a high level Rogue.
Hope this helps! Apologies to anyone who doesn't play the game, but I just wanted to assist a fellow player out there.
My favorite experience with voice samples still has to be the Playstation RPG Star Ocean 2... partially because the bad voice acting is something you *had* to experience in order to unlock the harder difficulty levels. You had to figure out ways to trigger the different voice samples during the fight sequences by having the characters fight in different combinations, try different attacks, etc. You also had the ability to play them from a big board of voice samples, which seemed to indicate that there were, oh, 1300 or so unique ones. Once you "unlocked" a certain number of them, you could play the game through again at the harder levels (and play any you'd encountered so far at will.)
Some of the best included:
* "Craude has advanced forward!" (When the main character, named *cough cough* Claude) gained a level
* "I will turn you into a behot!" (One of the characters says this before a fight. We still don't know what it means.)
* "Secret medicine!" (actually the name of one character's attacks...)
* "Don't you think I'm very tough?" (one of the mini-bosses says something like this... very unconvincingly...)
Slashdot Mirror
My apologies if this seems offtopic, but I just need to point out that not all cases that appear frivolous are truly frivolous. Found via Snopes, from the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, here are the actual facts of the McDonald's coffee spill case:
Facts Sheet: McDonald's Scalding Coffee Case
While the PS2 can't quite match in the hardware department, there are still a few reasons that it does so well:
* Games exclusive to the system, especially RPGs. If you want to play certain games, like Final Fantasy X-2, you have to get the PS2.
* A very large game library. Yeah, a lot of it is crap, but there are so many more games for this system than the X-Box or GameCube. While all three systems have "Greatest Hits" series of cheaper classic games, the PS2 library of inexpensive games is also very solid.
* That library is even larger when you also consider the backwards compatibility of the system: add all the PS1 titles floating out there and you've suddenly got a much larger body of games. It may not mean much to an avid gamer who only wants the newest games, but I know a few parents who like the fact that it runs the games from the original PlayStation.
There are other reasons as well, but these are the ones that come to mind.
...the effort required to train enough people to play a new game with weird or complex rules just isn't worth it anymore.
I can relate to your problem -- there are a lot of games that you can't just sit down and play with anyone. In fact, some of those are my favorites. But there are a lot of games with fairly simple rules that you can teach almost anyone in a matter of minutes.
"Apples to Apples" and "Fluxx" come to mind as games that almost anyone can be taught and jump right in and play. They also have the advantage that, while someone can win, no one can get eliminated. Nothing puts off new gamers like being eliminated from a game they barely understand.
Games like "Settlers of Catan" or "Carcassone" are a good "next step" for people that you try to get to play board games: the strategy is a little deeper and the rules require more explanation, but they're still fun and fairly easy to get into.
And finally, you're right -- trying to find these games is a pain. However, you can get a lot of these online. The original article should lead to funagain games, one of many places online that you can purchase these games... heck, for cheaper than you can get them in a store.
The Games 100 is based on games that were released in the previous year (although I believe they take a few liberties and include some previous year's winners as well.) Fluxx has been around for a few years, and I believe it's appeared on their list at least once in the past. They do have a "Hall of Fame" of games that have been produced for 10 years straight and that are considered classics in some way. I wouldn't be surprised if Fluxx makes it to the list on its tenth anniversary. The Looney Labs people (creators of Fluxx) did get a game on the list: Nanofictionary, a very creative, random game of storytelling that I find "feels" a bit like Fluxx without the rules (which is interesting, since Fluxx is all about rules...) Nanofictionary is worth checking out, as is Aquarius, another of their games. Another amusing game that may or may not still be in print is Elixir, in which players collect components to "cast spells" that alter the rules. You can even cast a spell to make someone go get drinks and snacks. Fun stuff :)
The original poster writes: "Surely it can't be that hard to code in an option that changes a color to a given shape, for those of us that're color-impaired?"
It may not be hard, but it could potentially add more time to the production of the game. Keep in mind that many games are already released without proper play-testing or bug-fixes; adding another feature which will go unnoticed and unappreciated by many users may not fit with many game companies' bottom lines.
I'm not condoning the game companies, and to be honest, I think that the lack of color-blind display options is mostly due to ignorance rather than genuine neglect. Thus, I think the appropriate resonse is for color-blind games to contact these companies, explain their concerns, and support those companies and games that do address their needs.
Another poster wrote about how he's annoyed at having to accomodate the needs of so many users. However, there are a lot of color-blind gamers out there, including a few friends of mine. If a game is unplayable for them, they won't buy it. This is true of board games as well as PC/Console games. Adding these sorts of features could result in more sales without causing any problems for other users, but until the game companies realize this, they won't add them.
One last reflection: isn't it somewhat noteworthy that most of the truly timeless gaming components -- dice, cards, and such -- rely on symbols as well as (or rather than) colors? Perhaps the history of gaming has a lesson there.
I was going to suggest this myself, but you beat me to the punch.
It should be possible to get through some of what I call the story "puzzle" stages by using this solution -- the ones where you have to destroy geostones/panels in certain order, or navigate around difficult ones.
However, the poster will have some trouble with the randomly generated "item world" levels. Some of these stages can have up to six different colors of panels, and not all of them are associated with specific effects -- if you hit the triangle button, any panels without geostones one them will just say "none." Why is this a problem? Because you have to create large combos of geostone explosions to get the best items from the bonus meter in each stage. Without being able to see what all the colors are, you won't be able to set them up for the big kaboom. Just wanted to post two possibilities, though: one is that you can use a unit of the Scout class to shuffle the geopanels until you get a setup that you can figure out without using colors; second, you can always just look for the same types of items you'd get from the bonus meter on monsters, and steal them using a high level Rogue. Hope this helps! Apologies to anyone who doesn't play the game, but I just wanted to assist a fellow player out there.
My favorite experience with voice samples still has to be the Playstation RPG Star Ocean 2... partially because the bad voice acting is something you *had* to experience in order to unlock the harder difficulty levels. You had to figure out ways to trigger the different voice samples during the fight sequences by having the characters fight in different combinations, try different attacks, etc. You also had the ability to play them from a big board of voice samples, which seemed to indicate that there were, oh, 1300 or so unique ones. Once you "unlocked" a certain number of them, you could play the game through again at the harder levels (and play any you'd encountered so far at will.) Some of the best included:
* "Craude has advanced forward!" (When the main character, named *cough cough* Claude) gained a level
* "I will turn you into a behot!" (One of the characters says this before a fight. We still don't know what it means.)
* "Secret medicine!" (actually the name of one character's attacks...)
* "Don't you think I'm very tough?" (one of the mini-bosses says something like this... very unconvincingly...)