Re:Kill it, start over, change the timeline
on
Future Plans for SWG?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
...What amazes me is that lucas arts let sony do SWG the way they did. Now Sony, having EQ, you would think we'd have seen everquest in space, if that had been the case (something half way between EQ and EQ2 in terms of technology) it might have been quite successful, maybe not WoW successful, because that didn't have the Sony name attached (the Sony customer service reputation is of course a disaster, although the ticket system in SWG was a huge improvement). Unfortunately what they got was UO on the ground...
They got UO on the ground because their lead designer was Raph Koster. Mistake #1.
He's all about lofty overarching designs...which have trouble being translated into something programmatically feasible.
Re:And now to address the crafting itself
on
Future Plans for SWG?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
..The problem with crafting is this: over-simplifying it won't make it more attractive to those who weren't in that category, since it just replaces one boring grind with another equally boring grind. If anyone can make 10,000 swords a day by just clicking a "make sword" button, limited only by the quantity of ore on hand and the recipes, then you just replaced the old grind with a grind for ore and recipes. Hope you like it more when you run around looking for a tin vein, or when you get some equivalent of WoW's "collect 1000 heavy lether for the Thorium Brotherhood" grind for recipes. In the end, it just makes people do another boring grind in the same time, so it still won't be exciting to more players.
It can however piss off those who were into it in the first place, by breaking the economy. If the bottleneck is the ore, and making swords is easy, then ore prices go way up and sword prices go way down...
I've seen this reasoning used on the EQ2 boards that the old grind of sub-combines has been replaced by the new grind of harvesting. The thing is...you needed harvested raws for the old sub-combines as well. Making WORTs? You better have stocked up on all those roots. Making weapons or armor? You better have stocked up on the raw metal. The harvesting grind was always there. The high harvested raw prices were always there. Rare harvested items were more rare when the game launched and had absurd prices.
The only thing that has really changed is that the grind of sub-combines went away. I, for one, am glad of that. The sub-combine grind tended to grow tedious especially if you wanted to do alot of crafting. Stock up on all the raws and the fuels. Refine the materials. Take those refined materials and make several interim pieces. Now take those several interim pieces and make the final piece. Now, all I have to do is stock up on all the raws and the fuels and then make the final piece. I get alot more out of my time spent crafting.
I stopped playing it after a while...I had a lvl 20/4 character, which was pretty high, but I've always had the "Only pay for one online game at a time" philosophy, so I cancelled the subscription. Got to wanting to play it again four months later, hoping the weenies had moved on to other things, and found that (of course) my character had been deleted. That was pretty much it for me.
Sony has always had that policy. If your card lapses for an instant, your character is gone. City of Heroes still gets a month out of me here and there, because they never deleted my characters. Blizzard has a firm policy saying they'll never delete characters. To me thats the big dividing line between a company that cares about its customers and return business, and a company that just wants your money. Until sony kills that policy, I'm never subscribing to another one of their games.
Not true about SOE because I have characters from EQ that are still there and I had canceled several times with loooooong intervals (6mo-2yrs). My SO also canceled EQ2 and then resubscribed 6 mo later and still had all of their characters as well.
In fact, here is what the Sony Knowledge Base has to say about it:
EQ - "Canceling your account does NOT affect your characters immediately, only your billing information. If you cancel your subscription and then re-subscribe to EverQuest within 3 months, we guarantee that you will still have access to your game characters. Unfortunately, after that period we can no longer guarantee the validity of the characters. As we do not actively purge accounts, most characters will remain available. If you wish to reactivate your account in the future, you will need to use the same Station Name and Password that was used before canceling your subscription."
EQII - "At this time, we do not delete characters from an account that has been cancelled, but we cannot yet guarantee that a cancelled account's characters will not be deleted. However, when you do reactivate your account and find that any of your characters are not present, please send in a CS Ticket, and a GM will investigate that for a potential restoration. Please also review our policy on character deletions from our website, or refer to this link..."
Planetside - "Canceling your account does NOT affect your characters immediately, only your billing information. If you cancel your subscription and then re-subscribe to the game within 3 months, we guarantee that you will still have access to your game characters. Unfortunately, after that period we can no longer guarantee the existence of the characters. As we do not actively purge accounts, most characters will remain available. If you wish to reactivate your account in the future, you will need to use the same Station Name and Password that was used before canceling your game subscription.
Please keep in mind that we do not guarantee that characters deleted by the system or by the user will be restored."
Now, it sounds like you just got unlucky being past the 3 mo and in a situation where the Planetside servers might have had a wipe of some kind, but SOE's policy is by no means what you describe. And for the record COH recently had a release of character names that hadn't been played in, I believe, a 6 mo period.
I personally would like to see a standard, simple format for EULA's like credit card companies do with rate disclosures.
I wouldn't use credit cards as a good standard for disclosure. There was an episode of Frontline on PBS called "Secret History of the Credit Card" (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cre dit/) and they pointed out the really fine print on those credit cards brochures - things like "a clause that allows the company to change your interest rate (APR) at any time, for any reason, as long as they give you 15 days' notice".
I think credit card disclosures are just as bad as EULA agreements and that there are more than a few companies that don't want you reading either.
I've found that Netflix "throttles" my rentals after a period when I rent too many movies for them to make a profit. They will delay shipments and change the wait status on your queue to absurd amounts of time. I'm led to believe that this practice will become even more common with the new price drop. This is, of course, against their terms of service, but it's extremely difficult to prove - the USPS bears much of the blame. Couple this with the nonexistant customer service, and the frequent movie renter is definitely at a disadvantage.
I'm just curious - what is the period of time that you are talking about? My SO and I get Netflix movies like mad (we've got over 160+ movies in our Queue) and add more weekly. We always get a turnaround of 1 day between mailing off the watched DVD and getting the new one. It does help that there is a distribution center in Austin, but we've yet to see this "throttling" occur and have been watching absurb amounts of movies since Oct. 04 through Netflix. Now, the films that are in our Queue are mostly older films, documentaries, T V shows, etc - but we do add new releases now and then and still don't have any issues with receiving them.
Faulty logic - Relic is a developer. THQ is a publisher. Whereas, Ubisoft *is* a publisher. There is no need for a publisher, like EA, to buy stock in another publisher (who is their direct competition for market share) unless they planned on taking them over and then taking them down. EA just wants the Splinter Cell and Prince of Persia IPs most likely.
Re:"Widely popular"
on
Farscape is Back
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· Score: 5, Informative
If it was widely popular, why does it have to be resurrected?
Because its cancellation was all about money and ownership of the show, not its popularity. (Kinda like the original Battlestar Galatica).
SciFi Channel (owned by USA networks) did not own the rights to the show as it was made by the Jim Henson company (who is owned by a German conglomerate whose name escapes me now). When the USA network changed leadership, they wanted shows that they made and produced to be shown so that all the monies from said show would go to them. Since this was not the case with Henson-owned Farscape, and the fact that the show was not cheap to make, USA (and SciFi) opted out of the 5th season. So now, all you get is USA network made crap programming on the SciFi channel as if the entire USA Network itself wasn't bad enough;).
Babylon 5 at least got to tell its whole story (or at the least the story that J. Michael wanted to tell.)
Farscape was not allowed to do this and it makes me a happy scaper that they might actually be allowed to wrap up the main story arc.
The $50 you are paying has the price of the first month calculated in so technically its not a "free" month since you did pay for the box.
If you look at it that way you are only paying $35-$40 for the game client, reference materials (maps, instruction manuals, cd, and bright shiny box for you shelf.
I read the lawsuit and some of their ideas of similarity are similar throughout all vampire and werewolf mythos.
For example:
WW Werewolfs get hurt by silver, Underworlds werewolves get hurt by silver. (Common werewolf mythos, not unique to WoD AT ALL)
WW Vampires have strength of 10 men, Underworlds vampires have strength of 10 men. (Common Vampire mythos, Vampires are stronger than us - well DUH!, again not unique to WoD AT ALL)
and etc, etc. These types of comparisons go on and on which made the reading of the lawsuit laughable.
And just for the record, I've heard of WW and the WoD (read some of the books, played the Video game hehe) and I didn't think that this movie was set in the WoD. I just thought - "Ooooh, cool. A Romeo and Juliet take with Vampires and Werewolves."
Sony doesn't appear to believe in the existence of anything but Microsoft Windows and the PS2 in regards to producing games.
It could potentially hurt their bottom line to produce anything but a Windows or PS2 version of SWG or EQ.
Actually, it was just announced this week that Sony/Verant now has a EQ Mac client for sale. Check out this link here. Better late than never, I guess.
...why would they still charge $50.00 for the software?
Well in this case, Sony/Verant gets all the box sale money and Lucasarts will get all the subscription money.
So Sony/Verant I think could give a rats ass about how the game actually is as long as the hype is enough to get the box off the shelves and into people's homes. Its in their best interest to get the game out the door, no matter what sorry state its in.
Lucasarts will be stuck trying to figure out how to get the people to enjoy the mess they just installed on their computers, so that they can get the subscription money flowing. Not that I feel sorry for them....after Episode 1 & 2. I'll only start if Episode 3 is any good;)
On a general note answering that question, the box money is used to pay for expenses already incurred in making the game. The subscription is used to pay for expenses incurred while running it - Customer Service, new Dev, QA, Servers, etc.
Re:Just another one that didn't do it for EA
on
Sim-Dud?
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· Score: 1
UO is the exception, but then again, EA bought Origin after UO was in production.
From Jones Telecommunication and Multimedia Encyclopedia: "In 1992, it acquired Origin Systems Inc, a publisher of fantasy and action simulation games for CD-ROM, including Ultima and Wing Commander."
UO came out in 1997, so most if not all of the development and production, was done under the ownership of EA.
IMO, Linux needs games in order to "make it" in the mass market. It already has the good O/S, it has the word processing software, it has GUIs if you want them - the only thing it doesn't have is a good games library.
Once you get developers either making games specifically for Linux or devs porting other O/S games to Linux, then Linux will be ready to take down the MS behemoth. After all, once it has games, you wouldn't need a different O/S for anything and you could then use your Windows discs as really cool frisbees:)
Just leaving your "mark" still shows that site itself isn't secure and most, if not all, potential customers wouldn't want to give their credit card information to a site that isn't secure.
I remember the first Christmas that had mass online shopping available - they asked people at malls and other brick and mortar stores why they wouldn't shop online and the number one reason was the fear of their Credit Card numbers or bank information getting stolen.
I thought the same thing until I read "equipped with backseat entertainment systems" in the article. This makes it a little better imo.
On the same note, many cities are writing or looking into writing legislation making cel phone usage in cars illegal unless you are using a hands free set. Austin is one of those cities.
For those who want to keep trying to Save Farscape, here are some things you should know:
The new "season" (SciFi's words, even though its still Season 4) starts this Friday, Jan. 10th.
The time has changed AGAIN. It is now being shown at 8PM EST/PST and 7PM CST
I do believe that SciFi changed Farscape's scheduled viewing hour for the second time this season to further cut down on viewership so the suits could point to even lower Nielsen Ratings as a reason for cancellation.
So, for these next 11 Fridays, tune into SciFi channel for 1 hour, Support 'Scape, and then tune in to another station.:)
Didn't AOL buy Time Warner?? Shouldn't they be dictating what is going on?
AOL did buy Time Warner, but they helped "pay" for it in AOL stock options...which then proceeded to tank. This did not sit well with the Time Warner people, losing their millions, so they begin clearing the AOL house. I think Steve Case is one of, if not THE, only major original AOL person left and that's because the AOL brand is synonymous with him.
One of my co-workers downloaded the trailer this morning and everyone ('cept me) gathered around his computer to watch. The next thing I heard was screams of laughter and exclamations of disbelief. As the T3 trailer ended, another of my co-workers said, "That was sad. The trailer for Bad Boys 2 was soo much better!!"
Re:Does EA produce their own stuff?
on
EA As The Next Disney
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It's not just EA, they really are the 'Disney' of the gaming world, buying up anyone and everyone who comes along.
Actually, EA doesn't buy up anyone and everyone. They had the chance to purchase Take Two Interactive (GTA series) and declined the offer.
Quite frankly I didn't see a game there that looked worth playing.
Phantasy Star is a great rpg series by Sega. Phantasy Star 2, 3, and 4 were made for the Genesis (PS3 had you play characters and their children over three generations; PS4 was the largest game cartridge (96megs?) of its time and quite expensive when it came out - $99.99 anyone?). Phantasy Star Online was made for the Dreamcast. Phantasy Star Online 2 is out now for the Gamecube, and I think its also coming for the PS2 and Xbox as well. It was Sega's "answer" to the Final Fantasy Series and I always found it to be more entralling than the FFs.
I have also heard nothing but great things about Radiant Silvergun. Never got the chance to try it out myself since I didn't have "connections" in Japan like many of those people on a BBS I frequented.
Slashdot Mirror
...What amazes me is that lucas arts let sony do SWG the way they did. Now Sony, having EQ, you would think we'd have seen everquest in space, if that had been the case (something half way between EQ and EQ2 in terms of technology) it might have been quite successful, maybe not WoW successful, because that didn't have the Sony name attached (the Sony customer service reputation is of course a disaster, although the ticket system in SWG was a huge improvement). Unfortunately what they got was UO on the ground...
They got UO on the ground because their lead designer was Raph Koster. Mistake #1.
He's all about lofty overarching designs...which have trouble being translated into something programmatically feasible.
..The problem with crafting is this: over-simplifying it won't make it more attractive to those who weren't in that category, since it just replaces one boring grind with another equally boring grind. If anyone can make 10,000 swords a day by just clicking a "make sword" button, limited only by the quantity of ore on hand and the recipes, then you just replaced the old grind with a grind for ore and recipes. Hope you like it more when you run around looking for a tin vein, or when you get some equivalent of WoW's "collect 1000 heavy lether for the Thorium Brotherhood" grind for recipes. In the end, it just makes people do another boring grind in the same time, so it still won't be exciting to more players.
It can however piss off those who were into it in the first place, by breaking the economy. If the bottleneck is the ore, and making swords is easy, then ore prices go way up and sword prices go way down...
I've seen this reasoning used on the EQ2 boards that the old grind of sub-combines has been replaced by the new grind of harvesting. The thing is...you needed harvested raws for the old sub-combines as well. Making WORTs? You better have stocked up on all those roots. Making weapons or armor? You better have stocked up on the raw metal. The harvesting grind was always there. The high harvested raw prices were always there. Rare harvested items were more rare when the game launched and had absurd prices.
The only thing that has really changed is that the grind of sub-combines went away. I, for one, am glad of that. The sub-combine grind tended to grow tedious especially if you wanted to do alot of crafting. Stock up on all the raws and the fuels. Refine the materials. Take those refined materials and make several interim pieces. Now take those several interim pieces and make the final piece. Now, all I have to do is stock up on all the raws and the fuels and then make the final piece. I get alot more out of my time spent crafting.
I stopped playing it after a while...I had a lvl 20/4 character, which was pretty high, but I've always had the "Only pay for one online game at a time" philosophy, so I cancelled the subscription. Got to wanting to play it again four months later, hoping the weenies had moved on to other things, and found that (of course) my character had been deleted. That was pretty much it for me.
Sony has always had that policy. If your card lapses for an instant, your character is gone. City of Heroes still gets a month out of me here and there, because they never deleted my characters. Blizzard has a firm policy saying they'll never delete characters. To me thats the big dividing line between a company that cares about its customers and return business, and a company that just wants your money. Until sony kills that policy, I'm never subscribing to another one of their games.
Not true about SOE because I have characters from EQ that are still there and I had canceled several times with loooooong intervals (6mo-2yrs). My SO also canceled EQ2 and then resubscribed 6 mo later and still had all of their characters as well.
In fact, here is what the Sony Knowledge Base has to say about it:
EQ - "Canceling your account does NOT affect your characters immediately, only your billing information. If you cancel your subscription and then re-subscribe to EverQuest within 3 months, we guarantee that you will still have access to your game characters. Unfortunately, after that period we can no longer guarantee the validity of the characters. As we do not actively purge accounts, most characters will remain available. If you wish to reactivate your account in the future, you will need to use the same Station Name and Password that was used before canceling your subscription."
EQII - "At this time, we do not delete characters from an account that has been cancelled, but we cannot yet guarantee that a cancelled account's characters will not be deleted. However, when you do reactivate your account and find that any of your characters are not present, please send in a CS Ticket, and a GM will investigate that for a potential restoration. Please also review our policy on character deletions from our website, or refer to this link..."
Planetside - "Canceling your account does NOT affect your characters immediately, only your billing information. If you cancel your subscription and then re-subscribe to the game within 3 months, we guarantee that you will still have access to your game characters. Unfortunately, after that period we can no longer guarantee the existence of the characters. As we do not actively purge accounts, most characters will remain available. If you wish to reactivate your account in the future, you will need to use the same Station Name and Password that was used before canceling your game subscription. Please keep in mind that we do not guarantee that characters deleted by the system or by the user will be restored."
Now, it sounds like you just got unlucky being past the 3 mo and in a situation where the Planetside servers might have had a wipe of some kind, but SOE's policy is by no means what you describe. And for the record COH recently had a release of character names that hadn't been played in, I believe, a 6 mo period.
Wow! This seems kind of sudden especially since I've seen their commercials splashed all over various cable channels recently.
I personally would like to see a standard, simple format for EULA's like credit card companies do with rate disclosures.
e dit/) and they pointed out the really fine print on those credit cards brochures - things like "a clause that allows the company to change your interest rate (APR) at any time, for any reason, as long as they give you 15 days' notice".
I wouldn't use credit cards as a good standard for disclosure. There was an episode of Frontline on PBS called "Secret History of the Credit Card" (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cr
I think credit card disclosures are just as bad as EULA agreements and that there are more than a few companies that don't want you reading either.
I've found that Netflix "throttles" my rentals after a period when I rent too many movies for them to make a profit. They will delay shipments and change the wait status on your queue to absurd amounts of time. I'm led to believe that this practice will become even more common with the new price drop. This is, of course, against their terms of service, but it's extremely difficult to prove - the USPS bears much of the blame. Couple this with the nonexistant customer service, and the frequent movie renter is definitely at a disadvantage.
I'm just curious - what is the period of time that you are talking about? My SO and I get Netflix movies like mad (we've got over 160+ movies in our Queue) and add more weekly. We always get a turnaround of 1 day between mailing off the watched DVD and getting the new one. It does help that there is a distribution center in Austin, but we've yet to see this "throttling" occur and have been watching absurb amounts of movies since Oct. 04 through Netflix. Now, the films that are in our Queue are mostly older films, documentaries, T V shows, etc - but we do add new releases now and then and still don't have any issues with receiving them.
Faulty logic - Relic is a developer. THQ is a publisher. Whereas, Ubisoft *is* a publisher. There is no need for a publisher, like EA, to buy stock in another publisher (who is their direct competition for market share) unless they planned on taking them over and then taking them down. EA just wants the Splinter Cell and Prince of Persia IPs most likely.
If it was widely popular, why does it have to be resurrected?
;).
Because its cancellation was all about money and ownership of the show, not its popularity. (Kinda like the original Battlestar Galatica).
SciFi Channel (owned by USA networks) did not own the rights to the show as it was made by the Jim Henson company (who is owned by a German conglomerate whose name escapes me now). When the USA network changed leadership, they wanted shows that they made and produced to be shown so that all the monies from said show would go to them. Since this was not the case with Henson-owned Farscape, and the fact that the show was not cheap to make, USA (and SciFi) opted out of the 5th season. So now, all you get is USA network made crap programming on the SciFi channel as if the entire USA Network itself wasn't bad enough
Babylon 5 at least got to tell its whole story (or at the least the story that J. Michael wanted to tell.)
Farscape was not allowed to do this and it makes me a happy scaper that they might actually be allowed to wrap up the main story arc.
The $50 you are paying has the price of the first month calculated in so technically its not a "free" month since you did pay for the box.
If you look at it that way you are only paying $35-$40 for the game client, reference materials (maps, instruction manuals, cd, and bright shiny box for you shelf.
I read the lawsuit and some of their ideas of similarity are similar throughout all vampire and werewolf mythos.
For example:
WW Werewolfs get hurt by silver, Underworlds werewolves get hurt by silver. (Common werewolf mythos, not unique to WoD AT ALL)
WW Vampires have strength of 10 men, Underworlds vampires have strength of 10 men. (Common Vampire mythos, Vampires are stronger than us - well DUH!, again not unique to WoD AT ALL)
and etc, etc. These types of comparisons go on and on which made the reading of the lawsuit laughable.
And just for the record, I've heard of WW and the WoD (read some of the books, played the Video game hehe) and I didn't think that this movie was set in the WoD. I just thought - "Ooooh, cool. A Romeo and Juliet take with Vampires and Werewolves."
Actually, it was just announced this week that Sony/Verant now has a EQ Mac client for sale. Check out this link here. Better late than never, I guess.
Well in this case, Sony/Verant gets all the box sale money and Lucasarts will get all the subscription money.
So Sony/Verant I think could give a rats ass about how the game actually is as long as the hype is enough to get the box off the shelves and into people's homes. Its in their best interest to get the game out the door, no matter what sorry state its in.
Lucasarts will be stuck trying to figure out how to get the people to enjoy the mess they just installed on their computers, so that they can get the subscription money flowing. Not that I feel sorry for them....after Episode 1 & 2. I'll only start if Episode 3 is any good ;)
On a general note answering that question, the box money is used to pay for expenses already incurred in making the game. The subscription is used to pay for expenses incurred while running it - Customer Service, new Dev, QA, Servers, etc.
UO is the exception, but then again, EA bought Origin after UO was in production.
From Jones Telecommunication and Multimedia Encyclopedia: "In 1992, it acquired Origin Systems Inc, a publisher of fantasy and action simulation games for CD-ROM, including Ultima and Wing Commander."
UO came out in 1997, so most if not all of the development and production, was done under the ownership of EA.
IMO, Linux needs games in order to "make it" in the mass market. It already has the good O/S, it has the word processing software, it has GUIs if you want them - the only thing it doesn't have is a good games library.
Once you get developers either making games specifically for Linux or devs porting other O/S games to Linux, then Linux will be ready to take down the MS behemoth. After all, once it has games, you wouldn't need a different O/S for anything and you could then use your Windows discs as really cool frisbees :)
Just leaving your "mark" still shows that site itself isn't secure and most, if not all, potential customers wouldn't want to give their credit card information to a site that isn't secure.
I remember the first Christmas that had mass online shopping available - they asked people at malls and other brick and mortar stores why they wouldn't shop online and the number one reason was the fear of their Credit Card numbers or bank information getting stolen.
You can't lie in court either.
Actually, you can lie in court but if they catch you at it you're charged with Perjury.
I thought the same thing until I read "equipped with backseat entertainment systems" in the article. This makes it a little better imo.
On the same note, many cities are writing or looking into writing legislation making cel phone usage in cars illegal unless you are using a hands free set. Austin is one of those cities.
Isn't WiFi supposed to be the "mobile" internet access?
And also the ghost Obi-Wan (translucent plastic)
I believe this was a later giveaway coinciding with the the re-vamp/re-release of the classic figures around 1997.
For those who want to keep trying to Save Farscape, here are some things you should know:
I do believe that SciFi changed Farscape's scheduled viewing hour for the second time this season to further cut down on viewership so the suits could point to even lower Nielsen Ratings as a reason for cancellation.
So, for these next 11 Fridays, tune into SciFi channel for 1 hour, Support 'Scape, and then tune in to another station. :)
Didn't AOL buy Time Warner?? Shouldn't they be dictating what is going on?
AOL did buy Time Warner, but they helped "pay" for it in AOL stock options...which then proceeded to tank. This did not sit well with the Time Warner people, losing their millions, so they begin clearing the AOL house. I think Steve Case is one of, if not THE, only major original AOL person left and that's because the AOL brand is synonymous with him.
One of my co-workers downloaded the trailer this morning and everyone ('cept me) gathered around his computer to watch. The next thing I heard was screams of laughter and exclamations of disbelief. As the T3 trailer ended, another of my co-workers said, "That was sad. The trailer for Bad Boys 2 was soo much better!!"
It's not just EA, they really are the 'Disney' of the gaming world, buying up anyone and everyone who comes along.
Actually, EA doesn't buy up anyone and everyone. They had the chance to purchase Take Two Interactive (GTA series) and declined the offer.
Quite frankly I didn't see a game there that looked worth playing.
Phantasy Star is a great rpg series by Sega. Phantasy Star 2, 3, and 4 were made for the Genesis (PS3 had you play characters and their children over three generations; PS4 was the largest game cartridge (96megs?) of its time and quite expensive when it came out - $99.99 anyone?). Phantasy Star Online was made for the Dreamcast. Phantasy Star Online 2 is out now for the Gamecube, and I think its also coming for the PS2 and Xbox as well. It was Sega's "answer" to the Final Fantasy Series and I always found it to be more entralling than the FFs.
I have also heard nothing but great things about Radiant Silvergun. Never got the chance to try it out myself since I didn't have "connections" in Japan like many of those people on a BBS I frequented.