Blizzard is just pissed cause the company is not able to capitalize on these items. If they WERE, they wouldn't be complaining.
I could see this if there were some Blizzard sanctioned auction house, but there isn't. So what financial gain is there in ending these ebay auctions? Only that it is detrimental to gameplay (or so they would say). I think they are well aware of the Everquest effect, of people making a living off of selling items.
And then there's the whole Chinese mafia involvement in Lineage and the like. If I were a developer, money or no, I'd be concerned that games of my making were involved in that kind of activity. So why is Blizzard inherently evil?
. . . was not the CD-Rom aspect. Most people had picked one of those up either for Myst or for Encylopedias. Rather, what WC3 brought to gaming was the first (attempt at) a truly cinematic experience in a video game. Sure, Cinemaware had done the same thing years prior, but it was hard to call those "cinema" when the characters only had 500 pixels. WC3 was more movie than game, yet it really did create an interactive cinematic video game. Something else a lot of people don't realize is that its blue screen virtual sets predated those of Phantom Menace by several years.
Sidenote: it's odd that gaming media complained so much about FMV and bad acting, but that generally ended when developers starting using pre-redendered CGI, with acting that was equally as bad. What is about bad real people acting that is worse than bad CGI acting?
huh, well there goes my thesis but obviously doesn't make Ubisoft any less stupid. Like you say: why is Ubisoft acting like the game didn't sell? Why not do more of the same, with a few tweaks here there (ala KOTOR II)?
Obsidian is not a "relative newcomer." They've been around for over 6 years. Ok, so they changed their name, but by and large Obsidian consists of Black Isle refugees from Interplay. They've been making games nearly as long as Bioware, and have always had a very fruitful relationship with them. Bioware starts a franchise and engine, and Black Isle/Obsidian come along and do more of the same quality. I have no doubt KOTOR II will be the same way. I love how the reviews of KOTOR II keep referring to the "unproven" Obsidian. These guys made Planescape. Need I say any more?
Why should I drop $50 to play something I won't like, when the people I trust tell it's not worth $50 (for the reasons I stated)? Do I rely on other people's opinions? Am I living my life based on my peers? Are my choices dictated by others?
Ubisoft, in their rush to get the big numbers on the end of fourth quarter conference call, pushed out a number of A-rate titles in 2003 like PoP and Beyond Good & Evil in the midst of an extremely competitive season. Because these were neither well known franchises or sequels, none sold comparatively well.
So what does Ubisoft do? Instead of admitting that their mistake was not in game design but in scheduling, they push their Quebec developer to redesign the game. This time, in Warrior Within, combat is the focus, not puzzles. The Prince is no longer naive, he's pissed at, presumably, something. Nix the tasteful ethereal mid eastern fuze guitar rock, sub straight up in your face grind rock. Because that's what the mainstream wants. Jagged. Edgy. Rough. Mean. GTA.
Warrior Within is an excellent example of a company trying too hard to cater to this mythical "mainstream." But the best games are ones that pioneer game design, not play to the crowd. That's not to say that Sands of Time was the most creative thing since the invention of paper-rock-scissors, but rather that Sands didn't have focus groups dictating its design. Warrior Within obviously does, and it suffers for it. The reason for Sands' poor sales had nothing to do with gameplay, and everything to do with timing. This isn't surprising. Release something like the Sims, and instead of everyone emulating the creativity of the Sims, they emulate the gameplay.
And it's happening again. I loved Sands of Time. But from what I've read of Warrior, it's not good enough for me to spend money on it right now when there are literally half a dozen must-own titles out right now. Even with their insistence of game redesign, I still would've picked Warrior up if they'd released it more strategically. The movie industry has learned that you don't stack it your Matrix on the same weekend as Phantom Menace, even if it is a better movie. You bide your time, and release your good stuff when there's room to breathe.
If anything, the more I watch the new BSG the more I realize how crappy the first was, and I used to absolutely love the old Battlestar. That Ron Moore took a half-rate show like Battlestar Galactica and not only gave it viable meaning, but somehow managed to integrate the old into it is absolutely brilliant. It's like someone taking the eighties show A.L.F. and turning it into Apocolypse Now.
Rescuing an old franchise and making it current and thought provoking is something Paramount has been trying to do with Enterprise, and to little effect. What they need to do is pay lots of money to Moore and bring him on to revitalize the series.
Huge Firefly fan myself, and this news makes me sad. However, thanks to some "peers" of mine I've been watching the revamped Battlestar Galactica episodes and have been blown away. It's obvious that Whedon was not alone in his realist approach to science fiction. He was just one of the first of what appears to be a School of scifi reactionaries, creative TV people tired of the fantastic and generally ungrounded science fiction of Star Trek.
The new BSG begins airing "officially" in January. What it lacks in wit and humor ala Firefly, it makes up for with amazing drama that rivals anything on ER or West Wing. I would not be surprised if it comes up for Emmy, and not just for special effects. Watch it to quell the pain of Firefly withdrawl, and you mind yourself nearly forgetting about Serenity. Nearly.
"It is a movie, of course, but it also presents a very unrealistic picture of archaeology. There are only so many Nazis left in the world to reclaim stolen artifacts from. Doing so takes years of training and delivering papers at conferences. Even established archaelogists rarely use a whip. Archaelogists spend far more time annoying businesses for building on grave sites than they do wearing a fedora. Also, Jones never sucks up to mentors or leaders in the field. How did he ever get a tenure track position at a leading university as the movie portrays without sniffing academic ass?
The image of Indiana Jones has gravely hurt the field of archaeology, and whether it will ever fully recover remains to be seen."
Oh yes, the Year of the PC Game came from PC Gamer at the beginning of the year, but all three of the US print PC game mags generally said the same thing. Of course, when both games were slated for last year, they said the same thing in January of 2003.
My brother just spent $50 and 6 hours of downloading to get HL2 from Steam, and it doesn't even load. It's broken. The tech support line isn't open, and messages on the forums say wait time is upwards 30 minutes. I haven't opened my copy of Halo 2 yet, but when I put it in on Wednesday when school's off it will work the second I turn the xbox on. End rant.
You haven't been playing the right console games. With regards to the PC, where is the experimentation we see in console games like Katamari Damacy, REZ, Ico, Panzer Dragoon Orta - I could go on. Bejewled? Age of Empires? Doom 3? I'll give you the Sims, but that's all I can think of. "Graphics, speed, etc" do not a good game make.
Well, it's a conservative year. Look at console's fare, and the biggest games of the year are more of the same: Halo 2, KOTOR2, GTA:SA, Sims 2, the list goes on. However, where I think the console seems to always edge out the PC are titles like oddball Katamari Damacy, whose gaming purity you will never see the likes of on a PC. Ninja Gaiden takes something old and makes it very new - nothing revolutionary, but the combat system is just damn good. Something like Gish comes close on the PC, but Gish feels like a console game that's lost its way and ended up on the PC. Nothing new has happened on the PC since The Sims, sadly. Even the upcoming Pirates! is essentially, well, Pirates!. Whine.
Earlier this year I read in several PC gaming mags about how 2004 was Year of the PC Game; about how Half Life 2 and Doom 3 would set the record straight and reclaim the crown of video gaming from the consoles. Doom 3 was fun, but didn't change the world, and Half Life 2 fully proves why the PC will remain a niche market. One person's comment here on this story tells people to quit whining about the problem because all they have to change their hardware around. That kind of comment - that it's a matter-of-fact that you have to spend hours monkeyassing with your PC to get a game to work - should deeply worry stalwarts of the PC industry.
Even with fairly rampant Xbox piracy, Microsoft's anti-piracy strategy with Halo 2 was transparent to nearly all xbox owners who legitimately bought the game. Yet, not only are all of HL2's users penalized for the piracy, but obviously the game was rushed through testing. Now, to be fair, testing a PC game is far more work than testing a console. But when that so-called mainstream gamer goes to pick up Half Life 2, they don't give a rip if someone else is pirating or if Valve didn't have the time or resources to check if their game worked. To them, the only thing that matters is that their game takes hours to work, and when it does it does so half-assed.
Console makers (Nintendo, MS, Sony) keep the publishers in check with quality issues like these. For the PC, there's no one entity at stake if PC games take 5 hours of work to run properly. But Valve is hurting not only themselves but the entire PC gaming industry by releasing games that require anti-piracy measures like Steam and then ultimately don't work.
Swapping 5 disks and jumping through lame copy protection hoops is just like old times. Really brings back the memories of unsuccessfully trying to read small print off of a codewheel, or getting one floppy that is bad. Ahhhhh......memories.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hi. Consumer? Remember that $19.99 price undercut? Yeah. F*** you."
Consumer in September 2006, Madden release day: "Oh ok, I'll bend over."
Translation from EASpeak (TM):
"Hi. Sega? Remember that $19.99 price undercut? Yeah. F*** you."
EA could actually BUY out the NHL for exclusive rights! The sport would exist only to sell video games. What a future.
Blizzard is just pissed cause the company is not able to capitalize on these items. If they WERE, they wouldn't be complaining.
I could see this if there were some Blizzard sanctioned auction house, but there isn't. So what financial gain is there in ending these ebay auctions? Only that it is detrimental to gameplay (or so they would say). I think they are well aware of the Everquest effect, of people making a living off of selling items.
And then there's the whole Chinese mafia involvement in Lineage and the like. If I were a developer, money or no, I'd be concerned that games of my making were involved in that kind of activity. So why is Blizzard inherently evil?
The guide to your perfect website design.
Don't use flash for text.
. . . was not the CD-Rom aspect. Most people had picked one of those up either for Myst or for Encylopedias. Rather, what WC3 brought to gaming was the first (attempt at) a truly cinematic experience in a video game. Sure, Cinemaware had done the same thing years prior, but it was hard to call those "cinema" when the characters only had 500 pixels. WC3 was more movie than game, yet it really did create an interactive cinematic video game. Something else a lot of people don't realize is that its blue screen virtual sets predated those of Phantom Menace by several years.
Sidenote: it's odd that gaming media complained so much about FMV and bad acting, but that generally ended when developers starting using pre-redendered CGI, with acting that was equally as bad. What is about bad real people acting that is worse than bad CGI acting?
"Some sites offer digitized broadcasts of 'The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,' computer games like "Star Trek: Klingon Academy . . ."
Well I'll be damned. Bittorent has apparently done something Microprose couldn't do: distribute Star Trek: Klingon Academy.
They couldn't give that game away free.
huh, well there goes my thesis but obviously doesn't make Ubisoft any less stupid. Like you say: why is Ubisoft acting like the game didn't sell? Why not do more of the same, with a few tweaks here there (ala KOTOR II)?
Lowering the price worked really well, or it didn't work at all. Huh.
Obsidian is not a "relative newcomer." They've been around for over 6 years. Ok, so they changed their name, but by and large Obsidian consists of Black Isle refugees from Interplay. They've been making games nearly as long as Bioware, and have always had a very fruitful relationship with them. Bioware starts a franchise and engine, and Black Isle/Obsidian come along and do more of the same quality. I have no doubt KOTOR II will be the same way. I love how the reviews of KOTOR II keep referring to the "unproven" Obsidian. These guys made Planescape. Need I say any more?
Why should I drop $50 to play something I won't like, when the people I trust tell it's not worth $50 (for the reasons I stated)? Do I rely on other people's opinions? Am I living my life based on my peers? Are my choices dictated by others?
Sure, but at least I admit it. Shrug.
Ubisoft, in their rush to get the big numbers on the end of fourth quarter conference call, pushed out a number of A-rate titles in 2003 like PoP and Beyond Good & Evil in the midst of an extremely competitive season. Because these were neither well known franchises or sequels, none sold comparatively well.
So what does Ubisoft do? Instead of admitting that their mistake was not in game design but in scheduling, they push their Quebec developer to redesign the game. This time, in Warrior Within, combat is the focus, not puzzles. The Prince is no longer naive, he's pissed at, presumably, something. Nix the tasteful ethereal mid eastern fuze guitar rock, sub straight up in your face grind rock. Because that's what the mainstream wants. Jagged. Edgy. Rough. Mean. GTA.
Warrior Within is an excellent example of a company trying too hard to cater to this mythical "mainstream." But the best games are ones that pioneer game design, not play to the crowd. That's not to say that Sands of Time was the most creative thing since the invention of paper-rock-scissors, but rather that Sands didn't have focus groups dictating its design. Warrior Within obviously does, and it suffers for it. The reason for Sands' poor sales had nothing to do with gameplay, and everything to do with timing. This isn't surprising. Release something like the Sims, and instead of everyone emulating the creativity of the Sims, they emulate the gameplay.
And it's happening again. I loved Sands of Time. But from what I've read of Warrior, it's not good enough for me to spend money on it right now when there are literally half a dozen must-own titles out right now. Even with their insistence of game redesign, I still would've picked Warrior up if they'd released it more strategically. The movie industry has learned that you don't stack it your Matrix on the same weekend as Phantom Menace, even if it is a better movie. You bide your time, and release your good stuff when there's room to breathe.
Remember the good ole days of calling the Sierra BBS in California, when long distance was like $10 a minute?
. . . is that the lame IT guys at my school might finally replace the Netscape 6.x on all the machines with something a little closer to Firefox.
If anything, the more I watch the new BSG the more I realize how crappy the first was, and I used to absolutely love the old Battlestar. That Ron Moore took a half-rate show like Battlestar Galactica and not only gave it viable meaning, but somehow managed to integrate the old into it is absolutely brilliant. It's like someone taking the eighties show A.L.F. and turning it into Apocolypse Now.
Rescuing an old franchise and making it current and thought provoking is something Paramount has been trying to do with Enterprise, and to little effect. What they need to do is pay lots of money to Moore and bring him on to revitalize the series.
Whoops.
"It has officially been eleven minutes since the last Half Life 2 story..."
Huge Firefly fan myself, and this news makes me sad. However, thanks to some "peers" of mine I've been watching the revamped Battlestar Galactica episodes and have been blown away. It's obvious that Whedon was not alone in his realist approach to science fiction. He was just one of the first of what appears to be a School of scifi reactionaries, creative TV people tired of the fantastic and generally ungrounded science fiction of Star Trek.
The new BSG begins airing "officially" in January. What it lacks in wit and humor ala Firefly, it makes up for with amazing drama that rivals anything on ER or West Wing. I would not be surprised if it comes up for Emmy, and not just for special effects. Watch it to quell the pain of Firefly withdrawl, and you mind yourself nearly forgetting about Serenity. Nearly.
"It is a movie, of course, but it also presents a very unrealistic picture of archaeology. There are only so many Nazis left in the world to reclaim stolen artifacts from. Doing so takes years of training and delivering papers at conferences. Even established archaelogists rarely use a whip. Archaelogists spend far more time annoying businesses for building on grave sites than they do wearing a fedora. Also, Jones never sucks up to mentors or leaders in the field. How did he ever get a tenure track position at a leading university as the movie portrays without sniffing academic ass?
The image of Indiana Jones has gravely hurt the field of archaeology, and whether it will ever fully recover remains to be seen."
If the patch is distributed by Steam, legit users will need the torrent as well!
Oh yes, the Year of the PC Game came from PC Gamer at the beginning of the year, but all three of the US print PC game mags generally said the same thing. Of course, when both games were slated for last year, they said the same thing in January of 2003.
My brother just spent $50 and 6 hours of downloading to get HL2 from Steam, and it doesn't even load. It's broken. The tech support line isn't open, and messages on the forums say wait time is upwards 30 minutes. I haven't opened my copy of Halo 2 yet, but when I put it in on Wednesday when school's off it will work the second I turn the xbox on. End rant.
EA makes you work for long hours with little pay!
Oh, wait.
You haven't been playing the right console games. With regards to the PC, where is the experimentation we see in console games like Katamari Damacy, REZ, Ico, Panzer Dragoon Orta - I could go on. Bejewled? Age of Empires? Doom 3? I'll give you the Sims, but that's all I can think of. "Graphics, speed, etc" do not a good game make.
Well, it's a conservative year. Look at console's fare, and the biggest games of the year are more of the same: Halo 2, KOTOR2, GTA:SA, Sims 2, the list goes on. However, where I think the console seems to always edge out the PC are titles like oddball Katamari Damacy, whose gaming purity you will never see the likes of on a PC. Ninja Gaiden takes something old and makes it very new - nothing revolutionary, but the combat system is just damn good. Something like Gish comes close on the PC, but Gish feels like a console game that's lost its way and ended up on the PC. Nothing new has happened on the PC since The Sims, sadly. Even the upcoming Pirates! is essentially, well, Pirates!. Whine.
Earlier this year I read in several PC gaming mags about how 2004 was Year of the PC Game; about how Half Life 2 and Doom 3 would set the record straight and reclaim the crown of video gaming from the consoles. Doom 3 was fun, but didn't change the world, and Half Life 2 fully proves why the PC will remain a niche market. One person's comment here on this story tells people to quit whining about the problem because all they have to change their hardware around. That kind of comment - that it's a matter-of-fact that you have to spend hours monkeyassing with your PC to get a game to work - should deeply worry stalwarts of the PC industry.
Even with fairly rampant Xbox piracy, Microsoft's anti-piracy strategy with Halo 2 was transparent to nearly all xbox owners who legitimately bought the game. Yet, not only are all of HL2's users penalized for the piracy, but obviously the game was rushed through testing. Now, to be fair, testing a PC game is far more work than testing a console. But when that so-called mainstream gamer goes to pick up Half Life 2, they don't give a rip if someone else is pirating or if Valve didn't have the time or resources to check if their game worked. To them, the only thing that matters is that their game takes hours to work, and when it does it does so half-assed.
Console makers (Nintendo, MS, Sony) keep the publishers in check with quality issues like these. For the PC, there's no one entity at stake if PC games take 5 hours of work to run properly. But Valve is hurting not only themselves but the entire PC gaming industry by releasing games that require anti-piracy measures like Steam and then ultimately don't work.
Swapping 5 disks and jumping through lame copy protection hoops is just like old times. Really brings back the memories of unsuccessfully trying to read small print off of a codewheel, or getting one floppy that is bad. Ahhhhh......memories.