In Michigan, we usually have the Blue Angels or the Thunderbirds fly over Traverse City during the 4th of July. I can't say they do it every year, but I know that last year, the Thunderbirds broke the sound barrier right out over Lake Michigan near shore (you could actually see the shockwave); you could feel it in your stomach. It wasn't exactly shattering windows and setting off car alarms, but it was far from subtle.
Think of standing in front of a *really* powerful subwoofer, but without any crappy booty music coming out of it.;)
"As Newsbot resides on MSNBC and is branded as such, MSNBC is considered a first among equals, meaning that if they and another top-tier source offer the same story, information, etc., MSNBC will be listed first, followed by other sources," says Elizabeth Herrera Smith, Microsoft spokeswoman.
In other news, MSNBC reports confirm the sky is blue, cancer is bad, and there's a hidden, lethal chemical in your house, just waiting to kill your children, story at 11.
I've been railing against level-based design since DAoC was in beta, and I couldn't agree more with you.
Levels were conceived for use in a Chainmail/D&D-style setting. They were a convenient yardstick for use by a couple geeks sitting at a card table in someone's basement, with a couple miniatures, a book or two, some graph paper, and a handful of D6s. Sure, levels glossed over virtually every technical aspect of character development, but they were a fair enough approximation for a game driven more by the players' creativity than anything else.
These days, we've got CPUs crunching billions of operations per second. Everything's become more precise; games calculate windage on bullets, have locational hit tables, and crunch a a dozen statistics together just to come up with the damage number that used to be decided by rolling a D6. Yet, despite details in actual combat systems, MMO designers haven't moved beyond the most unnecessarily clunky and burdensome concept in RPGs: levels.
It's disheartening, though: I spoke to a friend about the virtues of lateral character growth, such as skill-based advancement and sliding statistic scales, and the first words out of his mouth were along the lines of "you're taking out levels? What would a player do, then?" Leveling has become such a deeply-ingrained concept that it seems no one even questions its relevance anymore. What could you do without levels? You could focus more on enjoying the gameplay than making the treadmill tolerable. You could have dynamic world events, deformable terrain, real-time war fought by actual players with actual consequences... Instead, it seems all that players expect from the MMO genre is to camp progressively larger variants of bats, rats and snakes, essentially ad nauseum, in some quest to get a new piece of loot and move on to the next to repeat the process.
I had an experience like that with WoW... beta was great, for about a month, before it starts feeling like World of EverUltimaAnarchy of Camelot. They're all fundamentally the same game. The genre's hit critical mass; each new MMO is essentially cannibalizing the player base from the ones before it. But instead of taking their cues from the likes of Horizons and Shadowbane, they just keep cranking out more of the same tripe.
Meanwhile, at least I believe, there's a massive untapped audience for MMOs that want to enjoy the gameplay itself, and won't touch the current incarnation of the genre until something dramatically changes. I know I'm one of 'em, and I think players like me fall at both ends of the MMO scale -- the veterans, who simply aren't impressed with the engine upgrades for Meridian 59 these developers keep trying to pass off as new games, and the non-MMO players, who would rather play a game like Starcraft or Tribes, where their skill matters, and there's actual gameplay to be enjoyed.
But these current MMOs? They're nothing but virtual gambling for virtual prizes. I could do that with Poker on my TI-82 back in high school; the only differences are the fancy graphics, and the 'pleasure' of having thousands of people around who could just as well be replaced with bots.
Better yet, they should just get rid of cutscenes. They're a huge time and money sink in development, and are only worth watching once or twice. Do away with them, charge a couple bucks less for the game, and find a more creative and entertaining way to create the same effect.
There is no doubt that piracy of games for computers is at an all-time high. It's simply too easy for someone to find and download entire CD images of computer games.
The mindset that's so pervasive with the RIAA is the same one that's causing PC game publishers to treat their buyers like they're criminals first, and customers second. Piracy probably is at an all-time high, but so are the number of PC users.
I remember back in the days of Hero Quest and Leisure Suit Larry, no one had legitmate software. Everything was on a floppy that was copied from the friend of a friend of a friend who downloaded it off the BBS of this guy who knew from 2 states away, because the only place to buy the game was from some specialty store a two hour drive away, staffed by irritating, condescending Alpha Nerds, full of overpriced hardware, and reeking of french fries.
Now, PC games have become infinitely more accessible. Even Target carries current titles. Best Buy, Future Shop, Fry's, CompUSA, Circuit City and their ilk have large portions of their stores devoted to hawking practically any big-name software made in the last 5 years.
So, is there more priacy now? Undoubtedly. But PC games (and PC software as a whole) has matured from a tiny, largely enthusiast-driven niche market to a full-blown industry. Relative to the number of users, I'd bet 'piracy' is down from years ago.
But, the idiots publishing the games aren't gamers any more than the idiots at the RIAA are musicians. They're old, out-of-touch, and disinterested. They're not technically savvy, and think they can prevent piracy; it's like a 5 year-old thinking he can prevent all crime in the world by becoming a policeman.
They can't stop piracy. The developers know it. The consumers know it. Yet, the publishers refuse to learn. Either that, or they're genuinely stupid enough to believe it's worth pissing off thousands of legitimate, paying customers in the name of futily attempting someone from getting the game off some 0-day warez site and playing it relatively unhindered.
Atari's an instance of such a company... I had to get cracks for Neverwinter Nights, UT2k3, and Temple of Elemental Evil to get them working, despite having bouhgt retail copies of the 3 games. They'll never be seeing another penny of my money.
It's true that you can get a competant gaming PC for $1500, but it'd be a far cry from top-of-the-line.
RAID, high-speed SATA drives, high-performance video cards, high-performance memory, a top-end CPU with a mainboard to match, with a quality case and the PSU that'll handle it all... you're looking more at a $2000+ price tag.
Nevermind that you could easily rack up a couple thousand more going for a bleeding edge CPU and a display unit worthy of such a system....and that's self or custom-built. If you ordered that system from the likes of Dell or Alienware, you're looking at $4-5000, easy.
Well, obviously some sort of moderation is key. If you're playing 12 hours a day, or getting home from work, jumping on the PC, and completely ignoring her day in, day out, I can see her having an issue. But that's not the impression you give. If she can't tolerate you spending a few hours a day doing something you enjoy after you get home from work (for example), whether it's gaming, reading, watching TV, or any other sort of hobby, it's time to find a new SO.
It wasn't the cell shading that made Wind Waker look so kiddified. Take a look at games like Robotech Battlecry for instance. Cell shading can look damned cool. The problem was that Link was a fat little 6 year-old.
I'm tired of the issue being polarized into two camps. Not everything Nintendo does is aimed expressly at children, and that certainly doesn't disqualify them from making a great game. But on the other hand, just because people want a more adult feel to their games doesn't mean everything needs to be blood and guts. Personally, I just don't want to be insulted by the game I'm playing, I don't want to strangle someone to death with his own intestines.
And that's the problem that I had, and I'm sure many other people had with Wind Waker. It was a good game; I don't think anyone who played it would say otherwise. But I grew up on Zelda. Ever since the NES days, I had envisioned Link as a hero, a champion; something I thought of as cool. Chubby children aren't cool. Their friends that have foot-long boogers hanging from their noses are even less cool.
I'm looking forward to this Zelda. I was so disgusted with the connectivity 'features' of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and the absolutely dismal game line-up on the GBA that I traded both in and bought Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and another year's subscription to Xbox Live. This Zelda just may redeem Nintendo in my eyes, because Mario 8614: Now He's Got a Vacuum Cleaner Ha, Look How 'Innovative' We Are sure isn't going to cut it.
In all fairness, while it's true that Princess Mononoke won an academy award, comparing it to the likes of unintelligable kiddie crap like Dragon Ball, Gundam, and Inayusha that make up the bulk of anime is a bit misleading.
Not to say all anime's bad, but for every Cowboy Bebop, there's 80 shows of low-caliber tripe like Dragon Ball Z. And even at that, a lot of the anime that actually has high production values, like Neon Genesis Evangelion, fall victim to such poor writing and cliche character design that they make Hollywood look positively original in comparison.
Let me first say that I'm pretty firmly in the ATi camp, but I really want to see better competition than this.
For two generations now, ATi's tended towards smaller, sleeker, more elegant designs, while nVidia's products keep getting larger, noisier, hotter, and more power-hungry. They're tpically more expensive, to boot. Making the decision for which card to purchase right now is an absolute no-brainer.
On one hand, ATi's X800 draw little power, has superior image quality, doesn't take up multiple slots, and is really bloody fast.
Then there's nVidia's 6800 - huge, noisy, hot, crappy image quality, requires a 480-watt PSU, and is slower.
If this is how nVidia's archetecture's going to work, maybe it's time that they stopped paying to plaster their logo on every game-related item on the market, and slashed their prices so they can at least be competetive at a price point.
Yeah, I'm sure PS 3.0 games are coming down the pipe any day now, right?
I haven't seen it, but by all accounts, what ATi's managed to do with PS 2.0 in their Ruby demo makes PS 3.0's use seem rather superfluous. And we all know that within a couple months, we'll be seeing the X850 and X900, that probably will have PS 3.0 support.
If inclusion of PS 3.0 an as-of-yet unused and still far-in-the-future spec is the sole factor you're taking in to account in terms of "quality," I can see why you're let down, but have you looked at the specs? At the cards themselves? ATi's cards are physically smaller, run cooler, draw less power, have better image quality, and are faster. Yet nVidia's offerings are of higher quality because they support some spec that's probably at least a year away from wide use?
What, exactly, would be the purpose of running this card on a *nix box? To play cutting edge games like America's Army and Quake 3?
I don't mean to troll, but every time there's a post about some new bleeding edge video card, there's always someone getting modded up to +5, insightful for saying he'd buy it if it weren't due to lack of driver support, and I'm left wondering what the hell for?
The problem with the assumption that businesses will respond to basic market forces is that those assumptions tend to be made under the premise of a free market economy. And the US has a free market economy in the same sense that we have a democracy - it was what our system was modeled on, but it's not what we actually have. Just like we have a representative republic and call it a democracy, we have a semi-regulated market, and call it free.
What I'm getting at is something we all know: corporations are too large to be swayed by small market forces. They're run by overly-conservative, paranoid old codgers who will refuse to deviate from their existing business plans unless they can do so with extremely little to no risk.
So, couple the corporate conservative mindset with a desire for nothing but short-term profitability and the fact that our market is regulated enough to prevent a highly competetive environment, but not regulated enough to prevent companies from collusion and price fixing, and what do you get? They pick one business plan, stick to it, and refuse to deviate unless they have an abysmal failure of a product, like the nGage.
So while company X could sell trinkets for $10 less than they currently do and generate twice the profits, they'll never even try that so long as they can turn even the smallest profit at the current price point.
And organizing enough consumers to make a noticeable dent? Good luck... that'll never happen. Even if you did, poor sales would probably be blamed on something else, and the company would learn nothing.
-"Who needs this? My Voodoo 3 runs Q3A just fine!" -"Does it have Linux support?" -"nVidia pwnz ATi!!11one!111~"
Now that that's over with...
I agree with a lot of the comments here: I really dislike nVidia's tendancy towards massive, bulky, noisy, power-hog GPUs. And while the 6800's performance is nothing short of jaw-dropping, I'll bet ATi's solution will be far more eloquent, smaller, with lower power requirements and less noise.
Either way, though, this is good for consumers -- it'll be nice to have some actual competition in the GPU arena again.
You're forgetting that to your average user "Not a single person ever says: "but it looks nothing like Windows!" - the only counter objection is that 'certain things do not work'" means things don't work the exact same way they're used doing them. The application can have the exact same functionality, but because the shortcut's not in the same place, or the name of a function has changed, it no longer "works."
Take a look at the market for football titles. It's absolutely flooded with drek. NFL Blitz, NFL Gameday, NFL Fever, NFL 2k4, and the only two good games: ESPN NFL Football and the Madden series. But even Madden seems to be heading away from being a football game and more towards a coaching or ownership sim.
It's sad that Microsoft's cutting out the XSN games because they had a great idea combining sports titles with Xbox Live (which would seem to indicate many more possibilities than simply playing online), and the console could always use some strong sports titles on Xbox Live, but as sports games go, the XSN titles just weren't good enough to compete with other companies' offerings, online or not.
Still I've gotta admit, I always got excited at the notion of what would be possible with Xbox Live sports games. Custom leagues, custom teams, drafts within the leagues... it could really break some new ground for the incredibly tired sports genre. Seems that won't be happeneing any time soon.
The PC's viability as a gaming rig, as best as I can tell, rests on two traits: superior display technology (via hi-resolution displays), and superior control in some games, via a mouse/keybaord setup.
Think about that... the PC's viability rests upon a rapidly-closing gap in display technology (see: HDTV), and $10 peripheral (and even at that, I think if half the people shrieking about the loss of control with dual analog would actually give it a fair shot, they're see that's not the case; I mean, how long did it take to get good with a kb/mouse in the first place?).
So, what we'll have in a few years are:
PCs: Pros: +Multi-function +Large back catalog of games that may or may not actually work Cons: -Hideously expensive in terms of upkeep (hardware) -Game-breaking driver and hardware-related problems -Expensive OS required in addition to expensive hardware -Notorious for buggy releases with players essentially paying money to do QA work for publishers, and devs with a "we might fix problems later" mentality.
Consoles: Pros: +Comparitively inexpensive +Works with already-ubiquitous displays +Little to no hassle to play games; consoles just work (for the most part... Ubi can't seem to get it right) +Excellent performance due to standardized hardware Cons: -Can't play games based around bleeding edge hardware.
So what's left? Online play? Xbox Live blows away anything the PC's ever seen. Give it another generation to clean up the UI and make a few other minor improvements, and online gaming via PC will feel downright archaic.
The point is, considering the cost and issues inherent in PC gaming, and the console market rather swiftly nullifying the PC's few advantages, what possible reason could there be for the continuation of the PC as a gaming platform?
I wish we could all just throw away the kneejerk arguments pro and con a particular camp.
You're right. Wind Waker isn't a cheap re-tread. Double Dash is a legitimate sequel, as is SSBM. But how about the 80-some million Pokemon games? Luigi's Mansion? The entire Mario franchise?
Admittedly, the GCN's lineup is more respectable than Nintendo's shameless whoring on the GBA, but it's still pretty bad.
It's no contest; EA and Sega are by far the biggest whores in the industry, but Nintendo's not that far behind, especially in light of the garbage it releases on the GBA.
Thanks for your comments... you're dead on about the multiplayer and connectivity functionality, too. I bought my Gamecube for Metroid Prime and SSBM. Then I beat Metroid Prime, and never touched it again. And I'm in the same boat; I'm 23, and I don't have my buddies dropping in for multiplayer anymore like I did when I was living in the dorms, so SSBM was very old, very fast.
And for the GBA connectivity? I kept my Gamecube because I was looking forward to FF:CC. As soon as they confirmed it required GBA support for multiplayer (because I was looking for a co-op game my girlfriend would enjoy playing, too), I got rid of my Gamecube.
On a slightly related note, it's funny to take a look at this thread. Almost every single Nintendo-critical post in the discussion has been modded down as troll or flamebait. Seems Slashdot's got an even bigger collection of Nintendo fanboys than I originally thought.:\
It was a tough call between modding you down as the fanboy/troll you are, or replying, but hey, work's slow right now...
They sure do, but have you seen those games? They are all the random, crappy, hollywood licensed, violence without gameplay, total crap games.
Yes, all of them are mindless, gory, and violent. Just like all of Nintendo's games are kiddie-oriented crap, right?
On the GameCube you have to compete with Nintendo to sell software and so very few developers can hold a candle.
In terms of polish, I'd agree. Nintendo games are always of excellent build quality, regardless of how poor the gameplay is. But one thing Nintendo is notorious for is making games that have virtually no replay value at all. Sure, SSBM and Double Dash can be fun when you have friends around, but games like Wind Waker and Mario Sunshine are terrible value; you'll get a few hours of gameplay out of them, and then never play it again.
When other games come out for the cube the players compare them to the Nintendo games they have and say "screw that! it isn't worth my money or time
Because by and large, the GCN is marketed at kids. And while Nintendo does a good job of putting out games that are kid-friendly but still enjoyable for adults, have you taken a look at the rest of the tripe on that system? Barbie Horse Adventure? Billy Hatcher? Donald Duck's Goin' Quackers? Eggmania? Disney's Hide and Seek? Add that to the host of shovelware that floods every console's library, like Nightfire and the glut of Star Wars titles, and the GCN has about the same signal-to-noise ratio as any other console.
The GCN does have some good games, but a cursory look over it's library shows a lot of cross-platform garbage (along with the odd good cross-platform game), an inordinate amount of kiddie games, and a few solid Nintendo titles. That's it. And Nintendo can't even take credit for one its greatest franchises, because Retro is doing Metroid, now.
So what you get on the cube is quality before quantity. If you stop making games for the cube your only two possible reasonings can be these 1) You're stupid 2) You can't compete with Nintendo in quality.
The Gamecube has no widely-available online capabilities, and nothing that even remotely resembles an online strategy. It has neither the power and flexibility of the Xbox, nor the market penetration of the PS2. To top it off, the Gamecube's target audience is much younger, restricting the content of games (not actually, but practically). Developers are pulling out because Gamecube games don't make as much money as other consoles!
3rd parties can succeed on the cube *cough*soul calibur 2*cough*. Cube owners are just too smart to buy stupid generic movie based game number 3.
Are you done wailing on the fanboy trumpet yet? Gamecube owners are the same people shelling out $50 for Pokemon Gold-Encrusted Ruby-Enlaid Hyper X Platinum Edition 32. They're playing the 20th fucking iteration of franchises that stopped being relevant 15 years ago, and all the spin-offs associated with them.
Face it: Nintendo is the Disney of the video game industry. They have a few masterpieces, but the bulk of their efforts are put into straight-to-video quality bullshit, just whoring out their brands for a couple extra bucks. Most gamers know it, and most developers know it. The rampant fanboys are the only ones that haven't figured it out yet.
PCs will most likely continue to dominate the online arena, as well as the cutting edge in terms of graphics. Consoles still excel at what they've always excelled in: sports games, multiplayer on a local scale, and ease of use.
One thing people seem to overlook a lot is simply that the PC is losing its advantages.
For instance, HDTVs, particularly plasma, provide for a better picture than many monitors, and are capable of very high resolution.
Additionally, while the PC market currently claims dominance in FPS games, UI enhancements (such as Rainbow 6 3's aiming system) can easily render the keyboard/mouse system obsolete. Even at that, how long do you think it'll be before someone has the brains to put out a KB/mouse peripheral for a game like Halo 2?
And while the PC currently dominates online gaming, services like Xbox Live put the PC gaming experience to shame. Once those services mature a bit more, what advantage does the PC hold?
I guess what I'm saying is that the PC's strength in the gaming market rests on the shoulders of a couple cheap peripherals and a rapidly-closing gap in display technology. Given their cost and inherent problems, why would they even continue to exist?
I'm not proclaiming the death of the PC, but the days of Alienware and Voodoo PC and the like are numbered. The PC's a much better general purpose box than a gaming platform, and when consoles can eliminate most of the advantages the PC has... well, the gaming PC's continued existance would make about as much sense as the horse-drawn carriage in a world full of automobiles.
More precisely: why the hell would anyone spend all the money required for a gaming-class PC when for less, they can have a host of consoles that provide a better gaming experience and a larger library of games?
Back when I was probably 12 or 13, I was really into anime. That's when they were still making new episodes of Tank Police, and 8-man and the like; back when Sci-Fi showed Saturday morning anime. I eventually caught on to Gundam, and loved the mechs, but was rather ambivalent about the characters. Later, I felt the same way about NGE - awesome mechs, but I just wanted that whiney little fuck of a main character to die.
Back then, during the 8-bit and 16-bit era of gaming, most main characters weren't really age-specific. Sure, it might say a character's young, but they never really looked or acted that way, so I never thought much about it.
Then came the PSX era. If it wasn't the first time that games were really stratified into age groups, it was the first time I noticed it.
I remember playing games like FF7 and WildARMs and Grandia and just being completely blown away by how flagrantly immature the main characters (and most of the games) were. Some games I never even managed to finish just because it became so annoying, and I was still in the target demographic back then (I was 16 when FF7 was released). And it's always struck me as odd that I can manage suspension of belief for magic and monsters, but the idea of the same fucktards who routinely screw up my order at Taco Bell saving the Earth is just too much for me to fathom.
Flash forward to today: I'm 23. I no longer play console RPGs for the same reasons I can't stomach shows like Gundam (or almost any anime, for that matter): I'm sick to fucking death of having the main character act like a whiney, angsty pre-teen. I'm tired of watching stupid, clumsy, dysfunctional characters being put in positions of respect because they're portrayed as "cool." I'm tired of watching ham-fisted interpretations of serious issues because the devs needed to dumb it down for their target (barely literate) audience.
So, at this point in my life, I only really enjoy two styles of games: mindless hack-and-slash (like Ninja Gaiden, ROTK), and non-story-driven games. Ideally, I'd like to play an intelligent game, but every stab I've seen at intelligence in a game winds up being some pretentious mess like Xenogears that takes itself far too seriously, and about has all the intellectual complexity of the first 5 minutes of Philosophy 101 as taught by a hung-over grad student.
The point I'm trying to make is that with the 'original' gaming audience aging, games with more mature themes (or at least less immature characters) are going to become more important. The problem is that to developers, mature means gore. And that's the problem with mature games; many players, myself included, just don't want to be insulted by the game we're playing, we're not looking to strangle someone to death with his own intestines.
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In Michigan, we usually have the Blue Angels or the Thunderbirds fly over Traverse City during the 4th of July. I can't say they do it every year, but I know that last year, the Thunderbirds broke the sound barrier right out over Lake Michigan near shore (you could actually see the shockwave); you could feel it in your stomach. It wasn't exactly shattering windows and setting off car alarms, but it was far from subtle.
;)
Think of standing in front of a *really* powerful subwoofer, but without any crappy booty music coming out of it.
In other news, MSNBC reports confirm the sky is blue, cancer is bad, and there's a hidden, lethal chemical in your house, just waiting to kill your children, story at 11.
Can't afford to pay for Windows? You can pick up a copy of XP Home for $70. I've seen OEM licenses as low as $55.
If you can afford the games and the hardware to run 'em on, you'd have to be pretty petty to make an issue out of another $70.
I've been railing against level-based design since DAoC was in beta, and I couldn't agree more with you.
Levels were conceived for use in a Chainmail/D&D-style setting. They were a convenient yardstick for use by a couple geeks sitting at a card table in someone's basement, with a couple miniatures, a book or two, some graph paper, and a handful of D6s. Sure, levels glossed over virtually every technical aspect of character development, but they were a fair enough approximation for a game driven more by the players' creativity than anything else.
These days, we've got CPUs crunching billions of operations per second. Everything's become more precise; games calculate windage on bullets, have locational hit tables, and crunch a a dozen statistics together just to come up with the damage number that used to be decided by rolling a D6. Yet, despite details in actual combat systems, MMO designers haven't moved beyond the most unnecessarily clunky and burdensome concept in RPGs: levels.
It's disheartening, though: I spoke to a friend about the virtues of lateral character growth, such as skill-based advancement and sliding statistic scales, and the first words out of his mouth were along the lines of "you're taking out levels? What would a player do, then?" Leveling has become such a deeply-ingrained concept that it seems no one even questions its relevance anymore. What could you do without levels? You could focus more on enjoying the gameplay than making the treadmill tolerable. You could have dynamic world events, deformable terrain, real-time war fought by actual players with actual consequences... Instead, it seems all that players expect from the MMO genre is to camp progressively larger variants of bats, rats and snakes, essentially ad nauseum, in some quest to get a new piece of loot and move on to the next to repeat the process.
I had an experience like that with WoW... beta was great, for about a month, before it starts feeling like World of EverUltimaAnarchy of Camelot. They're all fundamentally the same game. The genre's hit critical mass; each new MMO is essentially cannibalizing the player base from the ones before it. But instead of taking their cues from the likes of Horizons and Shadowbane, they just keep cranking out more of the same tripe.
Meanwhile, at least I believe, there's a massive untapped audience for MMOs that want to enjoy the gameplay itself, and won't touch the current incarnation of the genre until something dramatically changes. I know I'm one of 'em, and I think players like me fall at both ends of the MMO scale -- the veterans, who simply aren't impressed with the engine upgrades for Meridian 59 these developers keep trying to pass off as new games, and the non-MMO players, who would rather play a game like Starcraft or Tribes, where their skill matters, and there's actual gameplay to be enjoyed.
But these current MMOs? They're nothing but virtual gambling for virtual prizes. I could do that with Poker on my TI-82 back in high school; the only differences are the fancy graphics, and the 'pleasure' of having thousands of people around who could just as well be replaced with bots.
Better yet, they should just get rid of cutscenes. They're a huge time and money sink in development, and are only worth watching once or twice. Do away with them, charge a couple bucks less for the game, and find a more creative and entertaining way to create the same effect.
The mindset that's so pervasive with the RIAA is the same one that's causing PC game publishers to treat their buyers like they're criminals first, and customers second. Piracy probably is at an all-time high, but so are the number of PC users.
I remember back in the days of Hero Quest and Leisure Suit Larry, no one had legitmate software. Everything was on a floppy that was copied from the friend of a friend of a friend who downloaded it off the BBS of this guy who knew from 2 states away, because the only place to buy the game was from some specialty store a two hour drive away, staffed by irritating, condescending Alpha Nerds, full of overpriced hardware, and reeking of french fries.
Now, PC games have become infinitely more accessible. Even Target carries current titles. Best Buy, Future Shop, Fry's, CompUSA, Circuit City and their ilk have large portions of their stores devoted to hawking practically any big-name software made in the last 5 years.
So, is there more priacy now? Undoubtedly. But PC games (and PC software as a whole) has matured from a tiny, largely enthusiast-driven niche market to a full-blown industry. Relative to the number of users, I'd bet 'piracy' is down from years ago.
But, the idiots publishing the games aren't gamers any more than the idiots at the RIAA are musicians. They're old, out-of-touch, and disinterested. They're not technically savvy, and think they can prevent piracy; it's like a 5 year-old thinking he can prevent all crime in the world by becoming a policeman.
They can't stop piracy. The developers know it. The consumers know it. Yet, the publishers refuse to learn. Either that, or they're genuinely stupid enough to believe it's worth pissing off thousands of legitimate, paying customers in the name of futily attempting someone from getting the game off some 0-day warez site and playing it relatively unhindered.
Atari's an instance of such a company... I had to get cracks for Neverwinter Nights, UT2k3, and Temple of Elemental Evil to get them working, despite having bouhgt retail copies of the 3 games. They'll never be seeing another penny of my money.
It's true that you can get a competant gaming PC for $1500, but it'd be a far cry from top-of-the-line.
...and that's self or custom-built. If you ordered that system from the likes of Dell or Alienware, you're looking at $4-5000, easy.
RAID, high-speed SATA drives, high-performance video cards, high-performance memory, a top-end CPU with a mainboard to match, with a quality case and the PSU that'll handle it all... you're looking more at a $2000+ price tag.
Nevermind that you could easily rack up a couple thousand more going for a bleeding edge CPU and a display unit worthy of such a system.
Well, obviously some sort of moderation is key. If you're playing 12 hours a day, or getting home from work, jumping on the PC, and completely ignoring her day in, day out, I can see her having an issue. But that's not the impression you give. If she can't tolerate you spending a few hours a day doing something you enjoy after you get home from work (for example), whether it's gaming, reading, watching TV, or any other sort of hobby, it's time to find a new SO.
It wasn't the cell shading that made Wind Waker look so kiddified. Take a look at games like Robotech Battlecry for instance. Cell shading can look damned cool. The problem was that Link was a fat little 6 year-old.
I'm tired of the issue being polarized into two camps. Not everything Nintendo does is aimed expressly at children, and that certainly doesn't disqualify them from making a great game. But on the other hand, just because people want a more adult feel to their games doesn't mean everything needs to be blood and guts. Personally, I just don't want to be insulted by the game I'm playing, I don't want to strangle someone to death with his own intestines.
And that's the problem that I had, and I'm sure many other people had with Wind Waker. It was a good game; I don't think anyone who played it would say otherwise. But I grew up on Zelda. Ever since the NES days, I had envisioned Link as a hero, a champion; something I thought of as cool. Chubby children aren't cool. Their friends that have foot-long boogers hanging from their noses are even less cool.
I'm looking forward to this Zelda. I was so disgusted with the connectivity 'features' of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and the absolutely dismal game line-up on the GBA that I traded both in and bought Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and another year's subscription to Xbox Live. This Zelda just may redeem Nintendo in my eyes, because Mario 8614: Now He's Got a Vacuum Cleaner Ha, Look How 'Innovative' We Are sure isn't going to cut it.
In all fairness, while it's true that Princess Mononoke won an academy award, comparing it to the likes of unintelligable kiddie crap like Dragon Ball, Gundam, and Inayusha that make up the bulk of anime is a bit misleading.
Not to say all anime's bad, but for every Cowboy Bebop, there's 80 shows of low-caliber tripe like Dragon Ball Z. And even at that, a lot of the anime that actually has high production values, like Neon Genesis Evangelion, fall victim to such poor writing and cliche character design that they make Hollywood look positively original in comparison.
Let me first say that I'm pretty firmly in the ATi camp, but I really want to see better competition than this.
For two generations now, ATi's tended towards smaller, sleeker, more elegant designs, while nVidia's products keep getting larger, noisier, hotter, and more power-hungry. They're tpically more expensive, to boot. Making the decision for which card to purchase right now is an absolute no-brainer.
On one hand, ATi's X800 draw little power, has superior image quality, doesn't take up multiple slots, and is really bloody fast.
Then there's nVidia's 6800 - huge, noisy, hot, crappy image quality, requires a 480-watt PSU, and is slower.
If this is how nVidia's archetecture's going to work, maybe it's time that they stopped paying to plaster their logo on every game-related item on the market, and slashed their prices so they can at least be competetive at a price point.
Yeah, I'm sure PS 3.0 games are coming down the pipe any day now, right?
I haven't seen it, but by all accounts, what ATi's managed to do with PS 2.0 in their Ruby demo makes PS 3.0's use seem rather superfluous. And we all know that within a couple months, we'll be seeing the X850 and X900, that probably will have PS 3.0 support.
If inclusion of PS 3.0 an as-of-yet unused and still far-in-the-future spec is the sole factor you're taking in to account in terms of "quality," I can see why you're let down, but have you looked at the specs? At the cards themselves? ATi's cards are physically smaller, run cooler, draw less power, have better image quality, and are faster. Yet nVidia's offerings are of higher quality because they support some spec that's probably at least a year away from wide use?
What, exactly, would be the purpose of running this card on a *nix box? To play cutting edge games like America's Army and Quake 3?
I don't mean to troll, but every time there's a post about some new bleeding edge video card, there's always someone getting modded up to +5, insightful for saying he'd buy it if it weren't due to lack of driver support, and I'm left wondering what the hell for?
Or more likely (in the short term), .zip, .rar, and other compression methods gain in popularity.
The problem with the assumption that businesses will respond to basic market forces is that those assumptions tend to be made under the premise of a free market economy. And the US has a free market economy in the same sense that we have a democracy - it was what our system was modeled on, but it's not what we actually have. Just like we have a representative republic and call it a democracy, we have a semi-regulated market, and call it free.
What I'm getting at is something we all know: corporations are too large to be swayed by small market forces. They're run by overly-conservative, paranoid old codgers who will refuse to deviate from their existing business plans unless they can do so with extremely little to no risk.
So, couple the corporate conservative mindset with a desire for nothing but short-term profitability and the fact that our market is regulated enough to prevent a highly competetive environment, but not regulated enough to prevent companies from collusion and price fixing, and what do you get? They pick one business plan, stick to it, and refuse to deviate unless they have an abysmal failure of a product, like the nGage.
So while company X could sell trinkets for $10 less than they currently do and generate twice the profits, they'll never even try that so long as they can turn even the smallest profit at the current price point.
And organizing enough consumers to make a noticeable dent? Good luck... that'll never happen. Even if you did, poor sales would probably be blamed on something else, and the company would learn nothing.
Let's get this out of the way:
-"Who needs this? My Voodoo 3 runs Q3A just fine!"
-"Does it have Linux support?"
-"nVidia pwnz ATi!!11one!111~"
Now that that's over with...
I agree with a lot of the comments here: I really dislike nVidia's tendancy towards massive, bulky, noisy, power-hog GPUs. And while the 6800's performance is nothing short of jaw-dropping, I'll bet ATi's solution will be far more eloquent, smaller, with lower power requirements and less noise.
Either way, though, this is good for consumers -- it'll be nice to have some actual competition in the GPU arena again.
You're forgetting that to your average user "Not a single person ever says: "but it looks nothing like Windows!" - the only counter objection is that 'certain things do not work'" means things don't work the exact same way they're used doing them. The application can have the exact same functionality, but because the shortcut's not in the same place, or the name of a function has changed, it no longer "works."
Take a look at the market for football titles. It's absolutely flooded with drek. NFL Blitz, NFL Gameday, NFL Fever, NFL 2k4, and the only two good games: ESPN NFL Football and the Madden series. But even Madden seems to be heading away from being a football game and more towards a coaching or ownership sim.
It's sad that Microsoft's cutting out the XSN games because they had a great idea combining sports titles with Xbox Live (which would seem to indicate many more possibilities than simply playing online), and the console could always use some strong sports titles on Xbox Live, but as sports games go, the XSN titles just weren't good enough to compete with other companies' offerings, online or not.
Still I've gotta admit, I always got excited at the notion of what would be possible with Xbox Live sports games. Custom leagues, custom teams, drafts within the leagues... it could really break some new ground for the incredibly tired sports genre. Seems that won't be happeneing any time soon.
...PC games are on their way out.
The PC's viability as a gaming rig, as best as I can tell, rests on two traits: superior display technology (via hi-resolution displays), and superior control in some games, via a mouse/keybaord setup.
Think about that... the PC's viability rests upon a rapidly-closing gap in display technology (see: HDTV), and $10 peripheral (and even at that, I think if half the people shrieking about the loss of control with dual analog would actually give it a fair shot, they're see that's not the case; I mean, how long did it take to get good with a kb/mouse in the first place?).
So, what we'll have in a few years are:
PCs:
Pros:
+Multi-function
+Large back catalog of games that may or may not actually work
Cons:
-Hideously expensive in terms of upkeep (hardware)
-Game-breaking driver and hardware-related problems
-Expensive OS required in addition to expensive hardware
-Notorious for buggy releases with players essentially paying money to do QA work for publishers, and devs with a "we might fix problems later" mentality.
Consoles:
Pros:
+Comparitively inexpensive
+Works with already-ubiquitous displays
+Little to no hassle to play games; consoles just work (for the most part... Ubi can't seem to get it right)
+Excellent performance due to standardized hardware
Cons:
-Can't play games based around bleeding edge hardware.
So what's left? Online play? Xbox Live blows away anything the PC's ever seen. Give it another generation to clean up the UI and make a few other minor improvements, and online gaming via PC will feel downright archaic.
The point is, considering the cost and issues inherent in PC gaming, and the console market rather swiftly nullifying the PC's few advantages, what possible reason could there be for the continuation of the PC as a gaming platform?
You're right. Wind Waker isn't a cheap re-tread. Double Dash is a legitimate sequel, as is SSBM. But how about the 80-some million Pokemon games? Luigi's Mansion? The entire Mario franchise?
Admittedly, the GCN's lineup is more respectable than Nintendo's shameless whoring on the GBA, but it's still pretty bad.
It's no contest; EA and Sega are by far the biggest whores in the industry, but Nintendo's not that far behind, especially in light of the garbage it releases on the GBA.
Thanks for your comments... you're dead on about the multiplayer and connectivity functionality, too. I bought my Gamecube for Metroid Prime and SSBM. Then I beat Metroid Prime, and never touched it again. And I'm in the same boat; I'm 23, and I don't have my buddies dropping in for multiplayer anymore like I did when I was living in the dorms, so SSBM was very old, very fast.
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And for the GBA connectivity? I kept my Gamecube because I was looking forward to FF:CC. As soon as they confirmed it required GBA support for multiplayer (because I was looking for a co-op game my girlfriend would enjoy playing, too), I got rid of my Gamecube.
On a slightly related note, it's funny to take a look at this thread. Almost every single Nintendo-critical post in the discussion has been modded down as troll or flamebait. Seems Slashdot's got an even bigger collection of Nintendo fanboys than I originally thought.
Yes, all of them are mindless, gory, and violent. Just like all of Nintendo's games are kiddie-oriented crap, right?
In terms of polish, I'd agree. Nintendo games are always of excellent build quality, regardless of how poor the gameplay is. But one thing Nintendo is notorious for is making games that have virtually no replay value at all. Sure, SSBM and Double Dash can be fun when you have friends around, but games like Wind Waker and Mario Sunshine are terrible value; you'll get a few hours of gameplay out of them, and then never play it again.
Because by and large, the GCN is marketed at kids. And while Nintendo does a good job of putting out games that are kid-friendly but still enjoyable for adults, have you taken a look at the rest of the tripe on that system? Barbie Horse Adventure? Billy Hatcher? Donald Duck's Goin' Quackers? Eggmania? Disney's Hide and Seek? Add that to the host of shovelware that floods every console's library, like Nightfire and the glut of Star Wars titles, and the GCN has about the same signal-to-noise ratio as any other console.
The GCN does have some good games, but a cursory look over it's library shows a lot of cross-platform garbage (along with the odd good cross-platform game), an inordinate amount of kiddie games, and a few solid Nintendo titles. That's it. And Nintendo can't even take credit for one its greatest franchises, because Retro is doing Metroid, now.
The Gamecube has no widely-available online capabilities, and nothing that even remotely resembles an online strategy. It has neither the power and flexibility of the Xbox, nor the market penetration of the PS2. To top it off, the Gamecube's target audience is much younger, restricting the content of games (not actually, but practically). Developers are pulling out because Gamecube games don't make as much money as other consoles!
Are you done wailing on the fanboy trumpet yet? Gamecube owners are the same people shelling out $50 for Pokemon Gold-Encrusted Ruby-Enlaid Hyper X Platinum Edition 32. They're playing the 20th fucking iteration of franchises that stopped being relevant 15 years ago, and all the spin-offs associated with them.
Face it: Nintendo is the Disney of the video game industry. They have a few masterpieces, but the bulk of their efforts are put into straight-to-video quality bullshit, just whoring out their brands for a couple extra bucks. Most gamers know it, and most developers know it. The rampant fanboys are the only ones that haven't figured it out yet.
Isn't this the same article that was linked from the main page a few days back?
The forum seems different, but the text is the same.
One thing people seem to overlook a lot is simply that the PC is losing its advantages.
For instance, HDTVs, particularly plasma, provide for a better picture than many monitors, and are capable of very high resolution.
Additionally, while the PC market currently claims dominance in FPS games, UI enhancements (such as Rainbow 6 3's aiming system) can easily render the keyboard/mouse system obsolete. Even at that, how long do you think it'll be before someone has the brains to put out a KB/mouse peripheral for a game like Halo 2?
And while the PC currently dominates online gaming, services like Xbox Live put the PC gaming experience to shame. Once those services mature a bit more, what advantage does the PC hold?
I guess what I'm saying is that the PC's strength in the gaming market rests on the shoulders of a couple cheap peripherals and a rapidly-closing gap in display technology. Given their cost and inherent problems, why would they even continue to exist?
I'm not proclaiming the death of the PC, but the days of Alienware and Voodoo PC and the like are numbered. The PC's a much better general purpose box than a gaming platform, and when consoles can eliminate most of the advantages the PC has... well, the gaming PC's continued existance would make about as much sense as the horse-drawn carriage in a world full of automobiles.
More precisely: why the hell would anyone spend all the money required for a gaming-class PC when for less, they can have a host of consoles that provide a better gaming experience and a larger library of games?
Here's a lot of anecdotal evidence:
Back when I was probably 12 or 13, I was really into anime. That's when they were still making new episodes of Tank Police, and 8-man and the like; back when Sci-Fi showed Saturday morning anime. I eventually caught on to Gundam, and loved the mechs, but was rather ambivalent about the characters. Later, I felt the same way about NGE - awesome mechs, but I just wanted that whiney little fuck of a main character to die.
Back then, during the 8-bit and 16-bit era of gaming, most main characters weren't really age-specific. Sure, it might say a character's young, but they never really looked or acted that way, so I never thought much about it.
Then came the PSX era. If it wasn't the first time that games were really stratified into age groups, it was the first time I noticed it.
I remember playing games like FF7 and WildARMs and Grandia and just being completely blown away by how flagrantly immature the main characters (and most of the games) were. Some games I never even managed to finish just because it became so annoying, and I was still in the target demographic back then (I was 16 when FF7 was released). And it's always struck me as odd that I can manage suspension of belief for magic and monsters, but the idea of the same fucktards who routinely screw up my order at Taco Bell saving the Earth is just too much for me to fathom.
Flash forward to today: I'm 23. I no longer play console RPGs for the same reasons I can't stomach shows like Gundam (or almost any anime, for that matter): I'm sick to fucking death of having the main character act like a whiney, angsty pre-teen. I'm tired of watching stupid, clumsy, dysfunctional characters being put in positions of respect because they're portrayed as "cool." I'm tired of watching ham-fisted interpretations of serious issues because the devs needed to dumb it down for their target (barely literate) audience.
So, at this point in my life, I only really enjoy two styles of games: mindless hack-and-slash (like Ninja Gaiden, ROTK), and non-story-driven games. Ideally, I'd like to play an intelligent game, but every stab I've seen at intelligence in a game winds up being some pretentious mess like Xenogears that takes itself far too seriously, and about has all the intellectual complexity of the first 5 minutes of Philosophy 101 as taught by a hung-over grad student.
The point I'm trying to make is that with the 'original' gaming audience aging, games with more mature themes (or at least less immature characters) are going to become more important. The problem is that to developers, mature means gore. And that's the problem with mature games; many players, myself included, just don't want to be insulted by the game we're playing, we're not looking to strangle someone to death with his own intestines.