I'm not a fan of GameSpy, and that 25 Overrated Games article was incredibly poorly thought-out, however: there is a good case to be made for at least DKC and Halo being overrated.
Consider Donkey Kong Country. At the time when the next-generation, 3D consoles were coming out, it was a stunning-looking SNES game. It looked 3D! But that was the trick -- it had to have the look of 3D in order to compete with the newer games that actually were 3D. So they gave the sprites the shiny, plasticky look that people associate with 3D rendering.
If Rare had hand-drawn the sprites, does anyone doubt that it would've looked better? I mean, people are still better at drawing than computers are. Once you strip away the chrome -- or see it in a negative light, as I do -- what's left of DKC is a competent enough platformer, but not something deserving of the buzz it got.
As for Halo, it got enormous hype due to Bungie's reputation (and Microsoft's deep pockets), but it has the earmarks of a game that was rush, rush, rushed to completion in order to meet the launch deadline. I have no doubt that Halo 2 will be an excellent game, but Halo was enormously overrated. And who can blame the players for continuing to spread the buzz? You're not going to go up to your peer group and say "I just spent $350 on the newest console plus its only worthwhile game, and it's crap!"
If you think about the best selling games in recent years, practically all of them have a compelling, unique concept.
Huh? All the truly original games that I've played recently have completely tanked, sales-wise. Ico, Rez, Noone Lives Forever, you name it.
For comparison's sake, let's take a look at some data on successful games. Top sellers of 2003, according to NPD.
1. Madden 2004
2. Pokemon Ruby
3. Pokemon Sapphire
4. Need for Speed Underground
5. Wind Waker
6. Vice City
7. Mario Kart: Double Dash
8. Tony Hawk's Underground
9. Enter The Matrix
10. Medal of Honor
Of these, I know that 7 are sequels -- some to strikingly original games, I must admit -- and 1 is a (bad) movie adaptation. Anyone want to weigh in on Medal of Honor and Need for Speed? As far as I know, they're respectively Just Another WWII shooter and Just Another Racing Title.
Here's another article on the subject of Toby Gard and Lara Croft. I wonder if he would have less of a problem with the sexualization of Lara if he hadn't based the character on his sister.
The advantage of camera-relative motion is that it allows the player to instantly react to the situation and move in any direction. I have yet to play a joystick-controlled game using player-relative motion that didn't feel like I was driving a tank, regardless of the camera system. Therefore, in my opinion, player-relative motion -- with a joystick, mind you -- is an automatic lose, whereas camera-relative motion can be a win, if the camera is done well.
Unfortunately, doing a good soft third person camera is a hard problem. It's really an AI problem, trying to guess what the player wants to see. Super Mario 64 did a decent job at this though there were some glaring flaws (I would definitely consider them flaws, not attempts to make the game more challenging). Super Mario Sunshine does a considerably better job, nearly flawless throughout the game, with one mind-bogglingly-bad exception in Pinna Park.
When a mouse enters the picture, though, it's an entirely different story. You never hear complains from people playing mouse-controlled FPS games. On top of this, with a mouse, you can put the camera completely under the control of the player and not lose any playability. If you've played Splinter Cell or Thief 3 in third person mode, you know what I mean.
The Thief series and the Metal Gear Solid series both have interface additions to help with this issue: Thief has an indicator which shows you exactly how well you're illuminated, and Metal Gear Solid has a radar system which shows the locations and FOVs of nearby guards. Both interfaces work pretty well.
I have to say that I appreciate very much that this game has an ending. There are so many hours in the day, and while it's one thing to get heavily into an RPG for a week, it's quite another to get heavily into an RPG for the rest of my life.
This goes for all serial media. I loved "Watchmen," for instance, but I don't read series comic books simply because they're a constant time-sink, and I've already got enough of those in my life.
Photographs are artificial.
So are MPEG-encoded video streams. If there exists a useful distinction between artificiality and non-artificiality, that's not where it lies.
I haven't played the new Ninja Gaiden, but what Ikaruga, THPS, and Mario Kart 64 have in common is that they give you numerical feedback for your control optimization. Shigeru Miyamoto's games have never provided that sort of thing. Even the scores in SMB1 and SMB3 were half-assed measurement schemes, far too easy to optimize for.
While I appreciate a well-tuned scoring scheme that I can measure my improvement by, numbers are never what Miyamoto's games have been about. The reward of becoming really good at a Mario or Zelda game is that of your friends sitting on the couch behind you saying "holy shit, that was awesome."
Math aside, the Matrix game sucked, and I don't think I'll ever buy any more Matrix games.
Exactly! And the method makes perfect sense, because it's being used to determine the royalty rate for future games.
... until I moved into a second-floor apartment. So don't do that.
Also don't get the hard pads; my RedOctane Metal lasted about three months, just long enough for the warranty to expire.
Seriously. I'm really at a loss to why Valve blamed the delays on the code theft. Valve didn't actually lose anything -- even if the cracker had trashed their code repository, they could've just grabbed the code from Kazaa.
A 40 year old in the game industry is a very rare sight indeed. This is supposedly because people burn out on the 80 hour weeks during crunch time, which I certainly believe is common, but I have to wonder whether the industry is also biased against hiring older people.
If you write clear and simple code the compiler or interpreter does all the other work. It will automatically remove unused code and simplify complex segments. So long as your code is not unnecessarily convoluted often the machine optimizations are better than the human brain optimizations.
A compiler can do low-level optimization, but it can't figure out a better algorithm for you, and the simplest, least convoluted algorithm is usually not the fastest.
All the assembly language fiddling in the world -- by the optimizer or by hand -- will give you maybe a 2x performance over C, 10x over perl, but a better algorithm will often increase performance by many orders of magnitude.
Take care of your media. Had a friend who left a CD on the windowsill and forgot about it. Many months later, you could see right through it. Nice corrosion.
I had a CD-R that became unreadable after being left in direct sunlight for one afternoon. A cheapo brand, I'll admit.
I've been working with the Torque engine for a while, and my assessment is that it's very solid where it counts (assuming you want to make a tribes-like game), but surprisingly flimsy in areas like extensibility and documentation.
I imagine it's par for the course in the game industry, where code is written to be abandoned within a few years.
It doesn't "expose" some fatal flaw in the OS, nor is it some newly discovered exploit. All it is was an application that displayed a dialog box. Mac OS applications (with the exception of Cocoa applications) have always been able to have:
a.) any icon, and
b.) any name
So essentially you're saying that the ability for an application to masquerade as a document is a deep-rooted, system-wide flaw rather than something fixable in the mp3 player?
Slashdot Mirror
If only that were true. Just look at Donkey Kong Country!
Consider Donkey Kong Country. At the time when the next-generation, 3D consoles were coming out, it was a stunning-looking SNES game. It looked 3D! But that was the trick -- it had to have the look of 3D in order to compete with the newer games that actually were 3D. So they gave the sprites the shiny, plasticky look that people associate with 3D rendering.
If Rare had hand-drawn the sprites, does anyone doubt that it would've looked better? I mean, people are still better at drawing than computers are. Once you strip away the chrome -- or see it in a negative light, as I do -- what's left of DKC is a competent enough platformer, but not something deserving of the buzz it got.
As for Halo, it got enormous hype due to Bungie's reputation (and Microsoft's deep pockets), but it has the earmarks of a game that was rush, rush, rushed to completion in order to meet the launch deadline. I have no doubt that Halo 2 will be an excellent game, but Halo was enormously overrated. And who can blame the players for continuing to spread the buzz? You're not going to go up to your peer group and say "I just spent $350 on the newest console plus its only worthwhile game, and it's crap!"
Huh? All the truly original games that I've played recently have completely tanked, sales-wise. Ico, Rez, Noone Lives Forever, you name it.
For comparison's sake, let's take a look at some data on successful games. Top sellers of 2003, according to NPD.
1. Madden 2004
2. Pokemon Ruby
3. Pokemon Sapphire
4. Need for Speed Underground
5. Wind Waker
6. Vice City
7. Mario Kart: Double Dash
8. Tony Hawk's Underground
9. Enter The Matrix
10. Medal of Honor
Of these, I know that 7 are sequels -- some to strikingly original games, I must admit -- and 1 is a (bad) movie adaptation. Anyone want to weigh in on Medal of Honor and Need for Speed? As far as I know, they're respectively Just Another WWII shooter and Just Another Racing Title.
The 2002 Top Sellers:
1. Vice City
2. Metroid Prime
3. WWE: Shut Your Mouth
4. Tony Hawk 4
5. Yu-Gi-Oh! Eternal
6. Madden 2003
7. Splinter Cell
8. Lord of the Rings
9. Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance
10. Metroid Fusion
Six sequels, one movie adaptation, one original game (Splinter Cell) and again, two I'm unsure of, Yu-Gi-Oh and "Shut Your Mouth."
I'm not seeing a compelling case here for practically every top-selling game having a compelling and unique concept; I'm seeing the opposite.
If there were no collisions, the hash function would a one-to-one operation, and thus be reversible.
If you hadn't been in such a rush to find someone to insult, you might've realized that this was the original poster's whole point.
Here's another article on the subject of Toby Gard and Lara Croft. I wonder if he would have less of a problem with the sexualization of Lara if he hadn't based the character on his sister.
The funny thing is that he looks exactly like Kevin Cloud, one of the two primary artists. Check out his interview segments in the G4/TechTV spot.
You are correct. Shifting the burden from a resource that can't handle a load to a resource that can is a big part of optimization
Unfortunately, doing a good soft third person camera is a hard problem. It's really an AI problem, trying to guess what the player wants to see. Super Mario 64 did a decent job at this though there were some glaring flaws (I would definitely consider them flaws, not attempts to make the game more challenging). Super Mario Sunshine does a considerably better job, nearly flawless throughout the game, with one mind-bogglingly-bad exception in Pinna Park.
When a mouse enters the picture, though, it's an entirely different story. You never hear complains from people playing mouse-controlled FPS games. On top of this, with a mouse, you can put the camera completely under the control of the player and not lose any playability. If you've played Splinter Cell or Thief 3 in third person mode, you know what I mean.
The Thief series and the Metal Gear Solid series both have interface additions to help with this issue: Thief has an indicator which shows you exactly how well you're illuminated, and Metal Gear Solid has a radar system which shows the locations and FOVs of nearby guards. Both interfaces work pretty well.
This goes for all serial media. I loved "Watchmen," for instance, but I don't read series comic books simply because they're a constant time-sink, and I've already got enough of those in my life.
"Watch out, I smell an oncoming truck!"
Photographs are artificial. So are MPEG-encoded video streams. If there exists a useful distinction between artificiality and non-artificiality, that's not where it lies.
(which closes the window, in Windows)
While I appreciate a well-tuned scoring scheme that I can measure my improvement by, numbers are never what Miyamoto's games have been about. The reward of becoming really good at a Mario or Zelda game is that of your friends sitting on the couch behind you saying "holy shit, that was awesome."
Math aside, the Matrix game sucked, and I don't think I'll ever buy any more Matrix games. Exactly! And the method makes perfect sense, because it's being used to determine the royalty rate for future games.
... until I moved into a second-floor apartment. So don't do that. Also don't get the hard pads; my RedOctane Metal lasted about three months, just long enough for the warranty to expire.
I wonder if he's going to spell REFERRER correctly this time.
Seriously. I'm really at a loss to why Valve blamed the delays on the code theft. Valve didn't actually lose anything -- even if the cracker had trashed their code repository, they could've just grabbed the code from Kazaa.
A 40 year old in the game industry is a very rare sight indeed. This is supposedly because people burn out on the 80 hour weeks during crunch time, which I certainly believe is common, but I have to wonder whether the industry is also biased against hiring older people.
A compiler can do low-level optimization, but it can't figure out a better algorithm for you, and the simplest, least convoluted algorithm is usually not the fastest.
All the assembly language fiddling in the world -- by the optimizer or by hand -- will give you maybe a 2x performance over C, 10x over perl, but a better algorithm will often increase performance by many orders of magnitude.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd love to see a game based on the Passion of Christ property. Play as Christ or the Romans!
I had a CD-R that became unreadable after being left in direct sunlight for one afternoon. A cheapo brand, I'll admit.
I imagine it's par for the course in the game industry, where code is written to be abandoned within a few years.
a.) any icon, and
b.) any name
So essentially you're saying that the ability for an application to masquerade as a document is a deep-rooted, system-wide flaw rather than something fixable in the mp3 player?
That's comforting to know.
But how in hell can you read their hieroglyphs? Emulators won't help that.