I did not know that about being written to keep pace with the manga. Thanks for the info.
The thing I find most interesting about the series is that it was originally intended to finish after the Frieza Saga, which would have made the series one third as long and makes a hell of a lot more sense in retrospect.
Ikaruga on the GameCube (and Dreamcast if you swing that way) is a fantastic example of a game with a wholly two-dimensional game mechanic using three-dimensional graphics to stunning effect. As far as I can tell only the projectiles are sprites in the game - your craft and all the enemies, scenery and bosses are spectacularly animated 3D objects. And WHAT a game it is. Fluid graphics throughout, frantic, difficult... this is what I think you're talking about. And I agree that I'd like to see a lot more of this. Game designers are only slowly beginning to realise that just because we have the processing power to handle a third dimension now, doesn't mean we have to make use of it.
the majority of the US despises Anime with a passion... Anime is the lowest level of cartooning, it either uses crappy animation, or uses animation that is so far away from traditional animation that it shouldn't be considered as such
It sounds to me like you're the one reinforcing negative stereotypes. And if as you say there are only about two animes on Adult Swim, then I would suggest that the problem here is that you just haven't got to the good stuff yet. Believe me when I tell you that DBZ - which is probably one of those two - is very near the bottom of the barrel - anime is just like any other medium (movies, American cartoons) as far as highs and lows go.
And if, after that, you still hate anime, then (correct me if I'm wrong) I think there's an option somewhere in your preferences so you can make Anime stories not come up on the main page.
I think basically what the West is beginning to realise is that Japan is an entire culture which, while being easily as technologically advanced as America (and in many ways more so), is totally different from America. It's new, it's unusual, it's different, and a lot of it is stuff that Westerners have never even contemplated before, let alone seen.
Kids are insane over Dragonball Z because super-kung-fu-firing-fireballs-from-fingertips-fly ing-about-kicking-people-through-mountains genre just doesn't exist in America. Sure, it's an appalling series on many levels, but it brings something new to the table and for them, that (combined with its testosterone content) makes it worth watching.
There's a difference between a game having a deep and involving plot or subtext and justifying it - for example, the original Deus Ex - and a game which attempts to be clever and FAILS MISERABLY either directly or by being severely lacking in rather more important areas such as playability.
If Xenosaga managed to be a good game at the same time as being high-brow, then I say fair play. Having overly-long cut-scenes is a completely different thing from being pretentious.
Because videogaming is trying to grow up and get itself taken seriously, and this kind of game is taking us back to the stone age. The entire movie industry doesn't get slated because of one appallingly bad-taste movie - but the videogaming industry isn't seen like that yet.
You call unlimited, gratuitous boobies and blood "mature"? I call it immature in the extreme. A mature game is one which mature (i.e. smart, more skillful than average) gamers get the most out of. A mature game in my opinion is a game like Ikaruga: because although it has no sex or violence, you'd need to be at least fifteen years old to complete it without unlimited continues, and in addition to that, you need to be smart, fast, skillful and CONCENTRATING to get the highest scores out of it. An eight year old would just get tired of it.
Incidentally, does nobody just say "My two cents" anymore?
Ambient music sounds like a good idea, at least in the lengthy dungeon-wanderings or levelling-up or tedious bits of the many and various games which would make use of this technology - Final Fantasy, Zelda, Deus Ex perhaps, that ilk. However, I'd also like to have at least some memorable snatches of music to take away from the game - a title theme, the boss confrontations, and I've heard good things about Aeris' death theme in FFVII I think it is. A lengthy game of Tetris would be wonderful with this technology, but where would Tetris be without the Tetris theme? There is still a place for professionally composed music in games.
Most deathmatches are pretty difficult to follow, even for the players - and team-based games like CS only really make sense from the point of view of one of the players. From a spectator's point of view these games are lacking. What I'd really like to see is a mod of some sort which is DESIGNED to turn Unreal into a spectator sport, designed to be interesting and comprehensible to newcomers and veteran players alike. This would stand a better chance of bringing televised gaming to the public than current titles.
Windmill farms are regarded as many to be ugly so people don't want them around their houses.
They'd prefer six gigantic cooling towers, a huge pile of coal and a big pipe full of waste chemicals, all laid on a tasteful bed of concrete? Wind farming is the best-looking system of electricity generation in the world.
If I recall correctly, they measured time with respect to UTC on Earth, completely ignoring local time.
If I recall correctly, in 3001, Jupiter had been detonated as a star, pretty much banishing day and night and completely messing up any notion of time zones on Earth, which helped speed the universal use of UTC.
This is hardly news to those of us who are paying attention: Rare (point #8 in the article) has been going down the tubes for far longer than one might imagine. Check out their back catalogue: They've made five (count them) games in the last three years, and only Conker's Bad Fur Day was any cop. That was long before the Microsoft sale.
Perfect Dark Zero? Don't make me laugh. PDZ isn't going to happen. There is no evidence that it's even in production - the character models that were floating around a year ago prove zilch. I'd be very surprised to see it this side of 2006 or the next hardware generation, whichever is later. (It never ceases to amaze me, the number of people who bought a GameCube for PDZ despite the fact that it had never even been announced... and the number of those people who then bought an Xbox for precisely the same reason...)
I don't know about anybody else, but after over two years, I'm done mourning.
Now before you mod me down, hear me out. I still wish it had never happened. I'm still unhappy that 2,000 people died unnecessarily. But I'm finished with being unable to look at anything resembling two towers, complaining about any movie which shows the WTC in the skyline of New York. I was finished a long time ago. I'm mature, I can tell the difference between bad taste and geographical accuracy.
Slashdot Mirror
In all seriousness, if Christopher Byron thinks that GTA: Vice City is worse than child molestation, then clearly he was never molested as a child.
I did not know that about being written to keep pace with the manga. Thanks for the info.
The thing I find most interesting about the series is that it was originally intended to finish after the Frieza Saga, which would have made the series one third as long and makes a hell of a lot more sense in retrospect.
Ikaruga on the GameCube (and Dreamcast if you swing that way) is a fantastic example of a game with a wholly two-dimensional game mechanic using three-dimensional graphics to stunning effect. As far as I can tell only the projectiles are sprites in the game - your craft and all the enemies, scenery and bosses are spectacularly animated 3D objects. And WHAT a game it is. Fluid graphics throughout, frantic, difficult... this is what I think you're talking about. And I agree that I'd like to see a lot more of this. Game designers are only slowly beginning to realise that just because we have the processing power to handle a third dimension now, doesn't mean we have to make use of it.
It sounds to me like you're the one reinforcing negative stereotypes. And if as you say there are only about two animes on Adult Swim, then I would suggest that the problem here is that you just haven't got to the good stuff yet. Believe me when I tell you that DBZ - which is probably one of those two - is very near the bottom of the barrel - anime is just like any other medium (movies, American cartoons) as far as highs and lows go.
And if, after that, you still hate anime, then (correct me if I'm wrong) I think there's an option somewhere in your preferences so you can make Anime stories not come up on the main page.
I think basically what the West is beginning to realise is that Japan is an entire culture which, while being easily as technologically advanced as America (and in many ways more so), is totally different from America. It's new, it's unusual, it's different, and a lot of it is stuff that Westerners have never even contemplated before, let alone seen.
Kids are insane over Dragonball Z because super-kung-fu-firing-fireballs-from-fingertips-fly ing-about-kicking-people-through-mountains genre just doesn't exist in America. Sure, it's an appalling series on many levels, but it brings something new to the table and for them, that (combined with its testosterone content) makes it worth watching.
There's a difference between a game having a deep and involving plot or subtext and justifying it - for example, the original Deus Ex - and a game which attempts to be clever and FAILS MISERABLY either directly or by being severely lacking in rather more important areas such as playability.
If Xenosaga managed to be a good game at the same time as being high-brow, then I say fair play. Having overly-long cut-scenes is a completely different thing from being pretentious.
Because videogaming is trying to grow up and get itself taken seriously, and this kind of game is taking us back to the stone age. The entire movie industry doesn't get slated because of one appallingly bad-taste movie - but the videogaming industry isn't seen like that yet.
You call unlimited, gratuitous boobies and blood "mature"? I call it immature in the extreme. A mature game is one which mature (i.e. smart, more skillful than average) gamers get the most out of. A mature game in my opinion is a game like Ikaruga: because although it has no sex or violence, you'd need to be at least fifteen years old to complete it without unlimited continues, and in addition to that, you need to be smart, fast, skillful and CONCENTRATING to get the highest scores out of it. An eight year old would just get tired of it.
Incidentally, does nobody just say "My two cents" anymore?
Ambient music sounds like a good idea, at least in the lengthy dungeon-wanderings or levelling-up or tedious bits of the many and various games which would make use of this technology - Final Fantasy, Zelda, Deus Ex perhaps, that ilk. However, I'd also like to have at least some memorable snatches of music to take away from the game - a title theme, the boss confrontations, and I've heard good things about Aeris' death theme in FFVII I think it is. A lengthy game of Tetris would be wonderful with this technology, but where would Tetris be without the Tetris theme? There is still a place for professionally composed music in games.
Most deathmatches are pretty difficult to follow, even for the players - and team-based games like CS only really make sense from the point of view of one of the players. From a spectator's point of view these games are lacking. What I'd really like to see is a mod of some sort which is DESIGNED to turn Unreal into a spectator sport, designed to be interesting and comprehensible to newcomers and veteran players alike. This would stand a better chance of bringing televised gaming to the public than current titles.
See sig.
Windmill farms are regarded as many to be ugly so people don't want them around their houses.
They'd prefer six gigantic cooling towers, a huge pile of coal and a big pipe full of waste chemicals, all laid on a tasteful bed of concrete? Wind farming is the best-looking system of electricity generation in the world.Personally, I'm waiting for "The Naked Ladies" and "America's Shiniest Objects" as promised by The Onion.
Why don't we combine this new idea of distributed computing with a P2P network?
You mean share our music with the aliens?
What's next, slashdotting a bunch of pigeons?
Way ahead of ya, buddy
If I recall correctly, they measured time with respect to UTC on Earth, completely ignoring local time.
If I recall correctly, in 3001, Jupiter had been detonated as a star, pretty much banishing day and night and completely messing up any notion of time zones on Earth, which helped speed the universal use of UTC.
Great, an extra 40 minutes in bed every day!
Parent was copied verbatim from this node, which includes some interesting follow-ups...
Mmm, I dunno. What's their airspeed velocity?
If the worst comes to the worst, we can always Slashdot the monolith.
This is hardly news to those of us who are paying attention: Rare (point #8 in the article) has been going down the tubes for far longer than one might imagine. Check out their back catalogue: They've made five (count them) games in the last three years, and only Conker's Bad Fur Day was any cop. That was long before the Microsoft sale.
Perfect Dark Zero? Don't make me laugh. PDZ isn't going to happen. There is no evidence that it's even in production - the character models that were floating around a year ago prove zilch. I'd be very surprised to see it this side of 2006 or the next hardware generation, whichever is later. (It never ceases to amaze me, the number of people who bought a GameCube for PDZ despite the fact that it had never even been announced... and the number of those people who then bought an Xbox for precisely the same reason...)
I don't know about anybody else, but after over two years, I'm done mourning.
Now before you mod me down, hear me out. I still wish it had never happened. I'm still unhappy that 2,000 people died unnecessarily. But I'm finished with being unable to look at anything resembling two towers, complaining about any movie which shows the WTC in the skyline of New York. I was finished a long time ago. I'm mature, I can tell the difference between bad taste and geographical accuracy.
So what? This sort of behaviour is common in the States
That doesn't make it right.