The Matrix Revolutions, just like Reloaded, is a masterpiece in disguise and a new kind of cinema all in one: nobody can say to have completely grasped it, during a single viewing.
I think you need to watch some more cinema. Easy example of a popular film that had a similar impact: Kubrick's 2001, which came out quite a bit earlier then the Matrix series! Huge groups of people would see it multiple times, discuss it, look at the different layers, etc. Plenty of other film examples out there, too - I am rather partial to David Lynch's work, which features the exact same 'new kind of cinema' quality that you speak of. How about the film version of Ghost in the Shell, which obviously inspired much of the ideas and visuals in the Matrix series? Speaking of anime, how about other stuff like Akira, Memories, or Evangelion? How about plays, like Hamlet?! Or hey, what about the Judeo-Christian Bible!?
This 'new kind of cinema' you speak of is not even remotely new.
Eh, interesting theory, but FF isn't exactly the originator of that kind of storyline. Hell, freaking Return of the Jedi was basically the same thing (farmboy Luke becoming a commander in the Rebel Alliance, then joining forces with his enemy Darth Vader to kill the bigger threat of the Emperor). You can say many things about the FF games, but plot/setting originality is not one of them.:D
And music similarities are nothing new, either. Only so many notes and beats out there in the world, especially if you are going for an epic yet videogamey score!
So maybe you can stay happy on an intellectual level, at the loss of a little emotion.:)
They already have had at least one huge redeisgn session, though. All content from the original Quake2 version was thrown out, all art, enemies, and maps restarted. A second time doing this (with whatever engine they are using now) would not surprise me considering the time length.
I doubt that Wal-Mart is the store of choice for audiophiles, so I'm suspecting Apple's downloads are of better quality. iTunes isn't exactly the choice for audiophiles, either. Or even just people with good speakers or ears.:D Even relatively poor sounding LAME-encoded 192kbps VBR MP3s beat 128 kbps AAC files in most listening tests...
Scary thought - Perhaps some day, we'll have to thank (gasp!) Microsoft for creating something nice for us? Eeeek. Time to go hide under the bed for a while. Some of us would argue this already happened, pretty recently, with the Xbox...
Obviously many other/.ers would argue otherwise, of course.:D
I completely agree with you. Don't forget all of the weird anti-aliasing issues you have in many current PS2 games, or the N64-era textures Nintendo likes to use on their Gamecube games. Poor low-res textures in general are really making many modern games simply ugly.
AFAIK, S3TC is basically the standard texture compression on PC, too. All current 3D cards support it, and a couple years ago it was a 'bullet-point feature'. I know several PC games outright use the compression method, but I couldn't name them with 100% confidence right now, other than the original UT including a whole extra CD of S3TC textures that look rather nice.
Though the disc size limitation mentioned by other people is a good reason, how about also the fact that various Nintendo representatives keep bad-mouthing the GTA series? Silicon Knights do it all of the time in online interviews, Miyamoto has done it several times (including at big conferences), etc. Why would Rockstar help out a company that keeps trying to publicly cut it down?
News flash: a CD is also a form of DRM Uh no, it isn't. Not at all.
I can do anything I want with CD audio, assuming this 'anything' is technically possible on planet Earth. DRM is when technical restrictions are added to a format. Inherent technical limitations is not the same thing as intentional technical limitations.
And I personally could give a shit about getting a CD - I just want to buy music that: A. Is stored in a lossless format. B. Exceeds or meets the audio quality of CDs.
If it fails those two points, it better be much cheaper than a standard audio CD before I will even look at it.
And needless to say, iTunes fails all of these requirements.
And another thing: 4MB? Winamp 2 is 1MB. No, thanks. I'll stick with my winamp 2. Why don't you just follow the link and get the 655k Lite version, then?
Though it is an excellent example, I don't believe Biometal was developed in the West in any way other than music. The game was created using the SNES incarnation of the Japanese 'shooter maker' (whose bizarre title escapes me at the moment). Was included as an example game, IIRC. The US release simply stripped out the editor and changed the music.
As an aside, Biometal 2 was released for the Sega Saturn with that system's incarnation of the shooter maker. Haven't gotten a chance to play it yet, but someday...
How can you talk about licensed soundtracks and not mention Jet Set Radio? Sure, some of it was done by the very cool people at Sega's Wavemaster, but most of it was licensed. I can't think of a better licensed soundtrack, with the exception of the awe-inspiring Vice City soundtrack (also not mentioned, bizarrely).
Jet Set Radio Future also featured some amazing licensed music ("I love love you" is classic, as is "Birthday Cake" and "I'm not a Model"), admittedly marred by a pretty boring game design and some horrid remixes/mutilations and original tunes by the Latch Brothers/Beastie Boys.
I don't understand how someone could determine MMORPG stability during a brief convention. How many players were involved? Surely not the tens of thousands that would be on a real server. And how often do you only find bugs in something (especially slow progression games like MMORPGs) after several hours of play? Making claims about the game's lack of bugginess after such limited experience seems crazy.
Sorry to let facts get in the way of your conspiracy theories, but here goes...:)
Also, investors generally don't have bottomless pockets filled with cash. How long can they pour money into a game development team before they start demanding results? Two years? Three years? Five years? Being an independent developer, 3DRealms can take as long as it wants.:D They have enough cash to go for another five years, easily, even without releasing DN spinoffs. They made $20 million alone, IIRC, licensing the Max Payne character recently... They actually advertise how they are allowed to take their pretty time in their Want Ads. Pretty nice perk if you ask me, considering how crazy most game development is with crunch periods!
In the meantime, 3D Realms has released a slew of other DN games, when they should have been working on DNF. Since DN3D, 3DRealms hasn't worked on any non-DNF games other than in an advisory role, which hardly kills their ability to work on DNF. And the cash lets them keep taking their time.
Here's my prediction: 3D Realms will continue to be evasive on the subject, and will continue to release DN games... and when one comes along that they feel is worthy of the honor, they will rechristen it as Duke Nukem Forever. But only after they've almost completely exhausted the hype surrounding DNF. Nah, DNF will be the first game 3DRealms actually develops and releases since Shadow Warrior. I expect we will see it in the next year (potentially using the Source engine, though it is a long shot). A media blackout isn't a bad thing, especially with all the fanboy ranting about 3DRealms 'wasting their time'.:D
Ignoring the fact that anything other than perhaps the purest mythical anarcho-capitalism (which would probably still have something like money, a human design) is a human designed economy in some way, when did socialism start getting called 'liberalism'? And who exactly currently calls it this? I have never heard this before in my life. Is it a non-USA thing? Or (as I suspect) just a new right-wing propoganda meme?
(And the problem with the argument that abusive employers suffer in the end, etc. is that it doesn't guarantee their destruction, only a potential penalty. As long as they can financially compensate in other areas, say as a monopoly, they can continue to take this penalty forever. But it is a moot point, since anarcho-capitalism doesn't exist, so every country has labor laws of some kind of another.)
So your real, unstated complaint is that Nintendo isn't trying to buy them, right?:D
And other than Super Monkey Ball (which makes me super motion sick, but I know how other people love it), you are unfortunately getting most of their worst games and/or poorly done ports of older games... Other than Samba de Amigo and Chu Chu Rocket (which were both years ago, what the hell has happened to Sonic Team???:/
That would be my guess as well. Won't know until people get the cartridges back, but I can't imagine them literally replacing the hardware.
And yes, original Zelda used a battery. One of first (if not the first) catridge game to do so. Probably the only real advantage to catridges that is taken advantage of anymore (the ability to add custom CPUs, a la original NES and occasionally SNES, just isn't taken advantage of anymore).
It is more of a problem that the mechanics for the two games are literally identical. This would be more like if the original Sonic the Hedgehog featured him collecting coins (often hidden in blocks), smashing bricks above him by punching them, a slow walking pace with a faster run if you held down a button, and every fourth zone was a castle filled with flame traps...
Road Rage really takes copying a game's mechanics to a ridiculous extreme. It doesn't even add anything to the game style other than the Simpsons license (which considering the 'quality' of lately, isn't really an improvement), and does actually miss out on some of the elements that made Crazy Taxi so much fun (like the huge areas you were driving in).
Crazy Taxi likewise had other areas to drive in (if we are talking about version 3, a NY and a San Fran style city in addition to Vegas) and cars to unlock as well. I can't decide how I feel about this case, but Road Rage is definitely a ripoff of Crazy Taxi - anyone who had played any of the previous Crazy Taxi games would realize it instantly upon play. The mechanics are not different in any substantive way whatsoever.
(And for the record, the Simpsons version is worse. Crazy Taxi has bigger levels and tighter controls, both of which make a huge difference.)
Since it was a big license game put out by a pretty huge and unfriendly company (EA), I think Sega is probably in the right in this one. This isn't some small innovative developer getting picked on by a big rival company - closer to the opposite, actually.
Give the Total War series a shot - features truly gigantic battles that are extremely tactical (all features morale, which I think is missing from too many games - you can turn it off though). I prefer Shogun to Medieval, as Medieval's turn-based strategy component just requires too much micro-management. Both of them have perfectly excellent skirmish and scenario modes though. Might want to check out the vids for Rome: Total War, too, as it looks utterly amazing.
Another game to check out would be the Sid Meier Civil War series. Some nice large-scale battles in that, and a pretty nice interface for all of it.
Though the Total War series does a good job with group management, I have to agree with you on the usual 10 group limit being a big problem. Part of it has to do with the still too high levels of micromanagement needed in most RTS games (ex: in C&C: Generals Zero Hour I have 8 special bombers - each of them really need their own hotkey, but that leaves little room for conventional forces!). But I think something like using maybe the majority of the letter keys for groups would help, perhaps keeping all of the hotkeys in one keyboard row. Better GUI design would help, too - the bombers in Generals should have their own icon to the sides of the screen, for example.
I have to agree with Sparr0. I can't think of one major innovation that Warcraft 3 introduced. I think it is more likely that you just haven't played many other recent pre-WarcraftIII RTS games, which is certainly okay!
I agree with your basic point, but to some extent you are just wrong. Stealth and locational damage are in the game, just a little differently handled. And stuff like 'braindead' AI (more of a fact that the AI level really needed is extraordinary, and they don't achieve it) and unrealistic physics were problems in the original Deus Ex too - and both of which are improved, I might add. Sluggish play I actually didn't notice (and I am a stickler about this), so I suspect configuration options might really help for this, especially turning off the mouse lag - and this is simply is a normal PC problem nowadays. (Ex: 2 out of 4 PCs in my house cannot run C&C Generals - the two highest performance machines, incidentally. No other known games crash or freeze them, but Generals does. Drivers are obviously an issue, but general hardware reliability is down for PC components across the board.)
The game length certainly does bug me (15 hours seems a bit on the high side actually), but again, this is a problem with games nowadays. Using Generals as an example, each side has less missions than what they did in similar RTS games like RA2 and Starcraft. Content just takes much longer to create nowadays.
I am not taking issue with the fact that the game isn't necessarily up the standards of the original, or that some curious design decisions are made (alternate ammo types was always fun, and the series needs a stealth meter of some kind a la Thief). Or hell, even that some people simply won't find it fun. But many of the people slamming this game as some kind of anti-Deus Ex are just being ridiculous, and need to be called on it.
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The Matrix Revolutions, just like Reloaded, is a masterpiece in disguise and a new kind of cinema all in one: nobody can say to have completely grasped it, during a single viewing.
I think you need to watch some more cinema. Easy example of a popular film that had a similar impact: Kubrick's 2001, which came out quite a bit earlier then the Matrix series! Huge groups of people would see it multiple times, discuss it, look at the different layers, etc. Plenty of other film examples out there, too - I am rather partial to David Lynch's work, which features the exact same 'new kind of cinema' quality that you speak of. How about the film version of Ghost in the Shell, which obviously inspired much of the ideas and visuals in the Matrix series? Speaking of anime, how about other stuff like Akira, Memories, or Evangelion? How about plays, like Hamlet?! Or hey, what about the Judeo-Christian Bible!?
This 'new kind of cinema' you speak of is not even remotely new.
Eh, interesting theory, but FF isn't exactly the originator of that kind of storyline. Hell, freaking Return of the Jedi was basically the same thing (farmboy Luke becoming a commander in the Rebel Alliance, then joining forces with his enemy Darth Vader to kill the bigger threat of the Emperor). You can say many things about the FF games, but plot/setting originality is not one of them. :D
:)
And music similarities are nothing new, either. Only so many notes and beats out there in the world, especially if you are going for an epic yet videogamey score!
So maybe you can stay happy on an intellectual level, at the loss of a little emotion.
They already have had at least one huge redeisgn session, though. All content from the original Quake2 version was thrown out, all art, enemies, and maps restarted. A second time doing this (with whatever engine they are using now) would not surprise me considering the time length.
I doubt that Wal-Mart is the store of choice for audiophiles, so I'm suspecting Apple's downloads are of better quality. :D Even relatively poor sounding LAME-encoded 192kbps VBR MP3s beat 128 kbps AAC files in most listening tests...
iTunes isn't exactly the choice for audiophiles, either. Or even just people with good speakers or ears.
None of what you quoted from the parent post is untrue.
Even if 'incorrect downloads' a day is as high as 1 billion, the parent post's point still stands perfectly well enough.
Scary thought - Perhaps some day, we'll have to thank (gasp!) Microsoft for creating something nice for us? Eeeek. Time to go hide under the bed for a while.
/.ers would argue otherwise, of course. :D
Some of us would argue this already happened, pretty recently, with the Xbox...
Obviously many other
I completely agree with you. Don't forget all of the weird anti-aliasing issues you have in many current PS2 games, or the N64-era textures Nintendo likes to use on their Gamecube games. Poor low-res textures in general are really making many modern games simply ugly.
AFAIK, S3TC is basically the standard texture compression on PC, too. All current 3D cards support it, and a couple years ago it was a 'bullet-point feature'. I know several PC games outright use the compression method, but I couldn't name them with 100% confidence right now, other than the original UT including a whole extra CD of S3TC textures that look rather nice.
Though the disc size limitation mentioned by other people is a good reason, how about also the fact that various Nintendo representatives keep bad-mouthing the GTA series? Silicon Knights do it all of the time in online interviews, Miyamoto has done it several times (including at big conferences), etc. Why would Rockstar help out a company that keeps trying to publicly cut it down?
News flash: a CD is also a form of DRM
Uh no, it isn't. Not at all.
I can do anything I want with CD audio, assuming this 'anything' is technically possible on planet Earth. DRM is when technical restrictions are added to a format. Inherent technical limitations is not the same thing as intentional technical limitations.
And I personally could give a shit about getting a CD - I just want to buy music that:
A. Is stored in a lossless format.
B. Exceeds or meets the audio quality of CDs.
If it fails those two points, it better be much cheaper than a standard audio CD before I will even look at it.
And needless to say, iTunes fails all of these requirements.
And another thing: 4MB?
Winamp 2 is 1MB. No, thanks. I'll stick with my winamp 2.
Why don't you just follow the link and get the 655k Lite version, then?
Though it is an excellent example, I don't believe Biometal was developed in the West in any way other than music. The game was created using the SNES incarnation of the Japanese 'shooter maker' (whose bizarre title escapes me at the moment). Was included as an example game, IIRC. The US release simply stripped out the editor and changed the music.
As an aside, Biometal 2 was released for the Sega Saturn with that system's incarnation of the shooter maker. Haven't gotten a chance to play it yet, but someday...
How can you talk about licensed soundtracks and not mention Jet Set Radio? Sure, some of it was done by the very cool people at Sega's Wavemaster, but most of it was licensed. I can't think of a better licensed soundtrack, with the exception of the awe-inspiring Vice City soundtrack (also not mentioned, bizarrely).
Jet Set Radio Future also featured some amazing licensed music ("I love love you" is classic, as is "Birthday Cake" and "I'm not a Model"), admittedly marred by a pretty boring game design and some horrid remixes/mutilations and original tunes by the Latch Brothers/Beastie Boys.
I don't understand how someone could determine MMORPG stability during a brief convention. How many players were involved? Surely not the tens of thousands that would be on a real server. And how often do you only find bugs in something (especially slow progression games like MMORPGs) after several hours of play? Making claims about the game's lack of bugginess after such limited experience seems crazy.
Sorry to let facts get in the way of your conspiracy theories, but here goes... :)
:D They have enough cash to go for another five years, easily, even without releasing DN spinoffs. They made $20 million alone, IIRC, licensing the Max Payne character recently... They actually advertise how they are allowed to take their pretty time in their Want Ads. Pretty nice perk if you ask me, considering how crazy most game development is with crunch periods!
:D
Also, investors generally don't have bottomless pockets filled with cash. How long can they pour money into a game development team before they start demanding results? Two years? Three years? Five years?
Being an independent developer, 3DRealms can take as long as it wants.
In the meantime, 3D Realms has released a slew of other DN games, when they should have been working on DNF.
Since DN3D, 3DRealms hasn't worked on any non-DNF games other than in an advisory role, which hardly kills their ability to work on DNF. And the cash lets them keep taking their time.
Here's my prediction: 3D Realms will continue to be evasive on the subject, and will continue to release DN games... and when one comes along that they feel is worthy of the honor, they will rechristen it as Duke Nukem Forever. But only after they've almost completely exhausted the hype surrounding DNF.
Nah, DNF will be the first game 3DRealms actually develops and releases since Shadow Warrior. I expect we will see it in the next year (potentially using the Source engine, though it is a long shot). A media blackout isn't a bad thing, especially with all the fanboy ranting about 3DRealms 'wasting their time'.
Ignoring the fact that anything other than perhaps the purest mythical anarcho-capitalism (which would probably still have something like money, a human design) is a human designed economy in some way, when did socialism start getting called 'liberalism'? And who exactly currently calls it this? I have never heard this before in my life. Is it a non-USA thing? Or (as I suspect) just a new right-wing propoganda meme?
(And the problem with the argument that abusive employers suffer in the end, etc. is that it doesn't guarantee their destruction, only a potential penalty. As long as they can financially compensate in other areas, say as a monopoly, they can continue to take this penalty forever. But it is a moot point, since anarcho-capitalism doesn't exist, so every country has labor laws of some kind of another.)
Pretty sure it still applies, as the new version of Outrun is the same way. (Also by AM2, also with Ferraris IIRC.)
So your real, unstated complaint is that Nintendo isn't trying to buy them, right? :D
:/
And other than Super Monkey Ball (which makes me super motion sick, but I know how other people love it), you are unfortunately getting most of their worst games and/or poorly done ports of older games... Other than Samba de Amigo and Chu Chu Rocket (which were both years ago, what the hell has happened to Sonic Team???
That would be my guess as well. Won't know until people get the cartridges back, but I can't imagine them literally replacing the hardware.
And yes, original Zelda used a battery. One of first (if not the first) catridge game to do so. Probably the only real advantage to catridges that is taken advantage of anymore (the ability to add custom CPUs, a la original NES and occasionally SNES, just isn't taken advantage of anymore).
It is more of a problem that the mechanics for the two games are literally identical. This would be more like if the original Sonic the Hedgehog featured him collecting coins (often hidden in blocks), smashing bricks above him by punching them, a slow walking pace with a faster run if you held down a button, and every fourth zone was a castle filled with flame traps...
Road Rage really takes copying a game's mechanics to a ridiculous extreme. It doesn't even add anything to the game style other than the Simpsons license (which considering the 'quality' of lately, isn't really an improvement), and does actually miss out on some of the elements that made Crazy Taxi so much fun (like the huge areas you were driving in).
Crazy Taxi likewise had other areas to drive in (if we are talking about version 3, a NY and a San Fran style city in addition to Vegas) and cars to unlock as well. I can't decide how I feel about this case, but Road Rage is definitely a ripoff of Crazy Taxi - anyone who had played any of the previous Crazy Taxi games would realize it instantly upon play. The mechanics are not different in any substantive way whatsoever.
(And for the record, the Simpsons version is worse. Crazy Taxi has bigger levels and tighter controls, both of which make a huge difference.)
Since it was a big license game put out by a pretty huge and unfriendly company (EA), I think Sega is probably in the right in this one. This isn't some small innovative developer getting picked on by a big rival company - closer to the opposite, actually.
Give the Total War series a shot - features truly gigantic battles that are extremely tactical (all features morale, which I think is missing from too many games - you can turn it off though). I prefer Shogun to Medieval, as Medieval's turn-based strategy component just requires too much micro-management. Both of them have perfectly excellent skirmish and scenario modes though. Might want to check out the vids for Rome: Total War, too, as it looks utterly amazing.
Another game to check out would be the Sid Meier Civil War series. Some nice large-scale battles in that, and a pretty nice interface for all of it.
Though the Total War series does a good job with group management, I have to agree with you on the usual 10 group limit being a big problem. Part of it has to do with the still too high levels of micromanagement needed in most RTS games (ex: in C&C: Generals Zero Hour I have 8 special bombers - each of them really need their own hotkey, but that leaves little room for conventional forces!). But I think something like using maybe the majority of the letter keys for groups would help, perhaps keeping all of the hotkeys in one keyboard row. Better GUI design would help, too - the bombers in Generals should have their own icon to the sides of the screen, for example.
I have to agree with Sparr0. I can't think of one major innovation that Warcraft 3 introduced. I think it is more likely that you just haven't played many other recent pre-WarcraftIII RTS games, which is certainly okay!
I agree with your basic point, but to some extent you are just wrong. Stealth and locational damage are in the game, just a little differently handled. And stuff like 'braindead' AI (more of a fact that the AI level really needed is extraordinary, and they don't achieve it) and unrealistic physics were problems in the original Deus Ex too - and both of which are improved, I might add. Sluggish play I actually didn't notice (and I am a stickler about this), so I suspect configuration options might really help for this, especially turning off the mouse lag - and this is simply is a normal PC problem nowadays. (Ex: 2 out of 4 PCs in my house cannot run C&C Generals - the two highest performance machines, incidentally. No other known games crash or freeze them, but Generals does. Drivers are obviously an issue, but general hardware reliability is down for PC components across the board.)
The game length certainly does bug me (15 hours seems a bit on the high side actually), but again, this is a problem with games nowadays. Using Generals as an example, each side has less missions than what they did in similar RTS games like RA2 and Starcraft. Content just takes much longer to create nowadays.
I am not taking issue with the fact that the game isn't necessarily up the standards of the original, or that some curious design decisions are made (alternate ammo types was always fun, and the series needs a stealth meter of some kind a la Thief). Or hell, even that some people simply won't find it fun. But many of the people slamming this game as some kind of anti-Deus Ex are just being ridiculous, and need to be called on it.