Looking two headlines down I see PS3 production will also start in 2005. It's no secret that 2005 is the pencilled in date for the next generation of hardware. Who will want an obsolete console and overpriced PVR/DVD-R then? Certainly not me.
The point is, in much of their offline content, you're just looking at playing against AI, that bugbear of the sequels press release. People are so blase about 'improved AI' being stamped on games that the only realistic alternative is to use real people. I don't speak from experience but rather from reading stories here, that most MMORPGs have fundamental flaws, and the genre is very much still in its infancy. Unfortunately due to the cost model involved, you really don't get that many chances to do it right.
I don't think you've quite understood the point. People pay for Gamespy, you might not but many do. Imagine if Gamespy was properly integrated into the software so that all your records and skill levels could be matched up so that you always get online quickly, into a reasonably matched game. It enhances the quality of your online experience.
The fee is more like $3 a month too. It just comes down to how much you think your time is worth. Personally I'll pay the tiny fee in order to save the time it takes to find a decent server. YMMV.
Given the amount of money that Microsoft have deemed fit to hemorrhage just to get a moderate stake in this market, I can't see how some upstart company expects to do anything.
Their software delivery route is a method that another of the players, Nintendo, don't see fit to even seriously bother with as an accessory. It's certainly a massive restriction, especially coupled with the various caps and sliding bandwidth charges that are starting to be introduced as takeup improves.
You can't commoditize the PC gaming market, that goes against the basic principles and the reasons for its existence in the first place.
I can't see a good time for them to release this product. The upcoming holiday season is already very full from promises of the PSP, DS and various AAA franchises and sequels from all the major players. There is simply no room for a fourth player.
I'm not sure how much having a standardised platform will affect PC titles either. Will this kit be good enough for new titles such as Half Life 2 and Doom 3? Will it lead to a depression in complex graphics encoding? Will it kill FMV interludes, texture qualities?
Exactly. They're basically the same game. They haven't done anything new, they may as well not have bothered. Mario Kart doesn't use the broadband adapter for anything except adding more players on a LAN. Certainly nothing innovative.
Same old missed-the-point argument. The Xbox never intended to make money. They don't need to, Nintendo do.
Microsoft are using the Xbox to get a foothold in the market, they fully expected the loss. They now have a very considerable chunk of the market which they didn't have before. Considering the type of market, their gain is considerable: publishers. They now have easily more third party developers than Nintendo, and probably rival Sony. You can bet their new console will not suffer from a shortage of titles in its initial first few months on the market, when the real money and market share gains are made.
Add to this that they've got 15+ million hardware sales which might otherwise have gone on hardware and software from Nintendo and Sony, that's a hell of a lot of word of mouth and brand loyalty lined up for the next machine. I'm not speaking as a Microsoft fanboy, but rather a fearing Nintendo fan. The drought of titles on the Gamecube is almost of PC-proportions currently. If the whole of Europe turned round and decided not to buy the next Nintendo machine I'd have trouble arguing with them, given the way we're treated. Then Nintendo would only have the US market. Going head to head against Microsoft with the release of their next machine could really hurt them, given the 3rd party army that MS can now call upon. It's hard to ignore just how big Sony's catalogue for the PS2 currently is, translate that to launch titles: come next-gen time, if Microsoft have 30 release titles to Nintendo's 8, Nintendo are going to lose, quality notwithstanding. Sure, they can retreat to Japan and build from there, but the whole thing is just playing out to be another Dreamcast.
Why don't they innovate new gameplay styles in online multiplayer games then?
It seems like a blank canvas to me. Sure the PC has its FPS and MMORPGs but compared to Nintendos catalogue of genres it produces and innovates within regularly they look very specialised.
"Umm... ethernet adapters for systems might add about $2 or $5 to the system. Not $100."
That's the component cost. There's still development of the system, APIs, services to make use of this port, etc etc etc. It doesn't take many of these to add up before you start having to push a console into a higher price.
But the part exists, and the APIs exist, the ability is there and they're just not using it!
Even if an ethernet port was included with the Game Cube, what makes you think it would be adopted any better than the Super Scope or the Mouse or any of that jazz? Not even Sony's been able to enjoy more than a small success with it. Adding the port just for the fun of it wouldn't do any good in Nintendo's next system. Few are willing to pay per-month fees for an on-line service, and there's really no practical way to host your own games for other people to play like you can in the PC world.
You don't pay a subscription to use the online adapter in the PS2, but you do for the Xbox and Microsoft have made a small success of it. On the PS2 games I've played, you host the game yourself, and merely advertise via Gamespy, which is all built in.
Sony will have at least two major online franchises up and running in time for the holiday season, namely Killzone and Gran Turismo. Microsoft will have Doom 3, Half-Life 2 and Halo. Nintendo currently seem to have nothing.
Nintendo themselves have bought Gamespy APIs but I believe they're limited to getting Mario Kart functioning on a LAN. Using warppipe you can even host your own games on your gamecube, communicating via IM clients. It really wouldn't be difficult to put this functionality into the games themselves.
The only argument that is valid is per game development cost, but I can't even see this either. PSO is online enabled. Splinter Cell and Rainbow Six were specifically denied this capability by Nintendo, but they were simply ports so it wouldn't have cost that much. To me, the underlying signs point to Nintendo denying the Gamecube this capability in order to make it a major selling point of the Revolution. They're talking about it too much for it to not be a key part of the new system and they don't want to steal their own thunder.
My friends and I are approaching 30 too, and with the inevitible changes in job locations, family, and other real life elements, we rarely get to meet up like we did a few years back. I still yearn to play against them though.
It's perfectly possible to set up private games on PS2 or Xbox online games, so there wouldn't be any uninvited folk there.
Just having the option would be nice. We play PS2 online stuff together mostly now.
If Nintendo are such masters of innovation where the hell is their eyetoy, online stuff, voice stuff. They're getting left behind because they themselves can't churn titles out quick enough to cover the gaps left by the disappearing third party developers.
I see you mentioned a bunch of single player titles there. Back in the SNES and even N64 days Nintendo used to rule the roost for multiplayer titles. Mario Kart, Goldeneye, Wave Race, Super Tennis, Bomberman, I could go on and on. There's much less now, and of what there is, many aren't as fun as they used to be. I find it ironic that now they have the hardware to make the single player game more immersive, they're starting to forget what made them great in the first place.
Yeah, incredibly it takes about 5 minutes to get used to. Or 10 if you have to unlearn mouse skills.
Even my girlfriend can do it. Halo comes into its own on co-op.
I have a small Minidisc player, it's a bit wider than the iPod, same thickness, but of course shorter.
All irrelevant because they're both easily small enough anyway. I prefer the iPod, but I take the MD player out where I wouldn't want to take the iPod, due to the value of it.
No there isn't. Multiply that by how a Mac generally ships with a half decent OpenGL graphics card vs. the mess that Linux OpenGL is in, and you've got a market that just isn't worth bothering with.
With so many Linux users moaning about how they have to use closed source graphics card drivers that they get for free, what kind of company that wants to stay in business would ever think about producing software that they expect these same folk to pay for? If you believe there's any market for games on Linux then you're delusional. Mac users have a history and reputation for putting their money where their mouth is. Linux users put their code there instead. WineX is the only real way you'll see a broad selection of games running on Linux for years to come.
or a negative one that would equate to the bugfix/patch crazy world of the PC gaming world?
Never let it be said that Slashdot isn't just as capable of FUD.
Microsoft have stated and re-stated, and it is no secret, that games are not to be patched once released. This is new content for the next stage of the Tournament. This game is Live! enabled for exactly this reason. The bulk of this release is new models and weapons, and harder AI. It could even be argued that they saw fit to make the camera a bit better because the AI is harder. Either way, this is not a bugfix, but a feature pack (and a bloody good one at that). It most certainly is not a 'bugfix/patch' release.
This is not a bugfix, as there was nothing 'buggy' with the camera, it was just unwieldy. Many many people have completed this tough game, with this 'buggy' camera.
People always moan about cameras in games. Tecmo tried to force a certain type of behaviour, but people didn't like it. A computer bug is an error, flaw, mistake or fault in a computer program which prevents it from working correctly. This game works correctly. Now it will work even better.
Slashdot Mirror
Looking two headlines down I see PS3 production will also start in 2005. It's no secret that 2005 is the pencilled in date for the next generation of hardware. Who will want an obsolete console and overpriced PVR/DVD-R then? Certainly not me.
Something wrong with the big distros?
The point is, in much of their offline content, you're just looking at playing against AI, that bugbear of the sequels press release. People are so blase about 'improved AI' being stamped on games that the only realistic alternative is to use real people. I don't speak from experience but rather from reading stories here, that most MMORPGs have fundamental flaws, and the genre is very much still in its infancy. Unfortunately due to the cost model involved, you really don't get that many chances to do it right.
The fee is more like $3 a month too. It just comes down to how much you think your time is worth. Personally I'll pay the tiny fee in order to save the time it takes to find a decent server. YMMV.
Err... nice vitriol there. I much prefer Live to PC online gaming. Flogged my PC because of it too.
Their software delivery route is a method that another of the players, Nintendo, don't see fit to even seriously bother with as an accessory. It's certainly a massive restriction, especially coupled with the various caps and sliding bandwidth charges that are starting to be introduced as takeup improves.
You can't commoditize the PC gaming market, that goes against the basic principles and the reasons for its existence in the first place.
I can't see a good time for them to release this product. The upcoming holiday season is already very full from promises of the PSP, DS and various AAA franchises and sequels from all the major players. There is simply no room for a fourth player.
I'm not sure how much having a standardised platform will affect PC titles either. Will this kit be good enough for new titles such as Half Life 2 and Doom 3? Will it lead to a depression in complex graphics encoding? Will it kill FMV interludes, texture qualities?
Exactly. They're basically the same game. They haven't done anything new, they may as well not have bothered. Mario Kart doesn't use the broadband adapter for anything except adding more players on a LAN. Certainly nothing innovative.
Microsoft are using the Xbox to get a foothold in the market, they fully expected the loss. They now have a very considerable chunk of the market which they didn't have before. Considering the type of market, their gain is considerable: publishers. They now have easily more third party developers than Nintendo, and probably rival Sony. You can bet their new console will not suffer from a shortage of titles in its initial first few months on the market, when the real money and market share gains are made.
Add to this that they've got 15+ million hardware sales which might otherwise have gone on hardware and software from Nintendo and Sony, that's a hell of a lot of word of mouth and brand loyalty lined up for the next machine. I'm not speaking as a Microsoft fanboy, but rather a fearing Nintendo fan. The drought of titles on the Gamecube is almost of PC-proportions currently. If the whole of Europe turned round and decided not to buy the next Nintendo machine I'd have trouble arguing with them, given the way we're treated. Then Nintendo would only have the US market. Going head to head against Microsoft with the release of their next machine could really hurt them, given the 3rd party army that MS can now call upon. It's hard to ignore just how big Sony's catalogue for the PS2 currently is, translate that to launch titles: come next-gen time, if Microsoft have 30 release titles to Nintendo's 8, Nintendo are going to lose, quality notwithstanding. Sure, they can retreat to Japan and build from there, but the whole thing is just playing out to be another Dreamcast.
Yeah, with the utter lack of online titles, to Netcraft the Gamecube already looks dead!
It seems like a blank canvas to me. Sure the PC has its FPS and MMORPGs but compared to Nintendos catalogue of genres it produces and innovates within regularly they look very specialised.
Sony will have at least two major online franchises up and running in time for the holiday season, namely Killzone and Gran Turismo. Microsoft will have Doom 3, Half-Life 2 and Halo. Nintendo currently seem to have nothing.
Nintendo themselves have bought Gamespy APIs but I believe they're limited to getting Mario Kart functioning on a LAN. Using warppipe you can even host your own games on your gamecube, communicating via IM clients. It really wouldn't be difficult to put this functionality into the games themselves.
The only argument that is valid is per game development cost, but I can't even see this either. PSO is online enabled. Splinter Cell and Rainbow Six were specifically denied this capability by Nintendo, but they were simply ports so it wouldn't have cost that much. To me, the underlying signs point to Nintendo denying the Gamecube this capability in order to make it a major selling point of the Revolution. They're talking about it too much for it to not be a key part of the new system and they don't want to steal their own thunder.
It's perfectly possible to set up private games on PS2 or Xbox online games, so there wouldn't be any uninvited folk there.
Just having the option would be nice. We play PS2 online stuff together mostly now.
If Nintendo are such masters of innovation where the hell is their eyetoy, online stuff, voice stuff. They're getting left behind because they themselves can't churn titles out quick enough to cover the gaps left by the disappearing third party developers.
I see you mentioned a bunch of single player titles there. Back in the SNES and even N64 days Nintendo used to rule the roost for multiplayer titles. Mario Kart, Goldeneye, Wave Race, Super Tennis, Bomberman, I could go on and on. There's much less now, and of what there is, many aren't as fun as they used to be. I find it ironic that now they have the hardware to make the single player game more immersive, they're starting to forget what made them great in the first place.
Yeah, incredibly it takes about 5 minutes to get used to. Or 10 if you have to unlearn mouse skills. Even my girlfriend can do it. Halo comes into its own on co-op.
All irrelevant because they're both easily small enough anyway. I prefer the iPod, but I take the MD player out where I wouldn't want to take the iPod, due to the value of it.
I'll be playing it on my Xbox, thanks. No need for Windows with a Mac+Consoles. *8D~
No there isn't. Multiply that by how a Mac generally ships with a half decent OpenGL graphics card vs. the mess that Linux OpenGL is in, and you've got a market that just isn't worth bothering with.
There were many more when Loki were in business. Linux gaming grew, blew up, and is now stagnant, only coming out to play every 6 months at best.
With so many Linux users moaning about how they have to use closed source graphics card drivers that they get for free, what kind of company that wants to stay in business would ever think about producing software that they expect these same folk to pay for? If you believe there's any market for games on Linux then you're delusional. Mac users have a history and reputation for putting their money where their mouth is. Linux users put their code there instead. WineX is the only real way you'll see a broad selection of games running on Linux for years to come.
The only thing dead is the brains of the morons who are buying Windows machines instead ;-)
You're trolling right? Opera is still 12 months behind IE!
Microsoft have stated and re-stated, and it is no secret, that games are not to be patched once released. This is new content for the next stage of the Tournament. This game is Live! enabled for exactly this reason. The bulk of this release is new models and weapons, and harder AI. It could even be argued that they saw fit to make the camera a bit better because the AI is harder. Either way, this is not a bugfix, but a feature pack (and a bloody good one at that). It most certainly is not a 'bugfix/patch' release.
People always moan about cameras in games. Tecmo tried to force a certain type of behaviour, but people didn't like it. A computer bug is an error, flaw, mistake or fault in a computer program which prevents it from working correctly. This game works correctly. Now it will work even better.
Tecmo != Microsoft.