Graphics engines don't really need to become any better than the UT2 / Doom 3 / Crytek/HL2 ones. With those powerful engines and top-quality artists, you can display pretty much whatever you want. I doubt things will get significantly more advanced after the 3rd Unreal engine which is being developed at the moment.
For those who didn't read the actual "article", the game's being developed by Petroplyph (http://www.petroglyphgames.com/), a new team constisting of lots of ex-Westwood (known for the Command & Conquer games) dudes.
I wish them luck, and I hope they make something good! They should be able to, given their experience.
That stuff (breakable environments) has been done before (Red Faction), and it didn't really add anything to the game, except probably a couple of months of development time.
Realistic physics in games such as Half-Life 2 are, just like realistic lighting effects and nice textures, nothing more but props. Although they may enable the developers to do some fairly special things (Half-Life 2: physics puzzles; Doom III: scary environments thanks to lighting), they do not make up the game.
Games will always have limits, constraints and rules (by definition). A first person shooter in which you could do the things you mentioned, and more, would probably suck because there are so many random things one could do. And, of course, creating a limitless game's impossible.
Raven haven't made any awesome games lately. The Jedi Knight games were good, at best (I found the level design in the games really uncreative), and Soldiers of Fortune... well, I haven't played it, but as far as I know there's better stuff to play.
Quake III rocked (and still does, in some ways) thanks to its great multiplayer deathmatch. And I believe multiplayer is what made Quake III's predecessors so popular too. Raven will need a lot of magic to create something better than Quake III and the current (and upcoming) competition (UT2K4, CS:S...).
The Quake singleplayer modes were always quite crap. Since the Jedi Knight singleplayer modes weren't that good, I doubt Quake IV will change this trend.:(
Re:Halo 2 severely overrated...
on
More GOTY Awards
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Halo and Halo 2 are the most over-rated games I've ever known. The marketing guys at Microsoft did a fantastic job, but all the developers did was create two very medicore first-person-shooters. The Halo games might be alright compared to other XBox games, but seriously, lots of PC FPS games which game out over 5 years ago are superiour!
Any professional reviewers who voted Halo 2 as game of the year ought to be fired. But, as somebody else pointed out, those reviewers were probably bribed. I hope they weren't stupid enough to honestly vote that game "game of the year".
It's been about a month since WoW got released and the average players aren't level 60.
I'm a fairly average gamer (unless I've got hollidays, I only play around 10 hours a week) and I've been playing WoW since the start of the European closed beta. At the moment I've got a level 21 and a level 39 character. I could've made a level 60 in the time, but I can't be arsed to powerlevel.
So... what games do you define as challenging, Mr. anon-troll?
Btw, once the battlegrounds are live, this game will be challenging for years.
World of Warcraft has innovation - and lots. By just looking at the surface of things, you can always say "yeah, this game's really just a different version of this other game".
The Diablo games were created by Blizzard North - not the Blizzard team which created the World of Warcraft (and all other Warcraft games, I presume).
There so wouldn't be a point of a Diablo III now (why in His name would you want to play a Diablo game instead of World of Warcraft?), so stop dreaming.;)
The next StarCraft game will be StarCraft Ghost, which will be some console game (eww). That's being developed by some 3rd team - something with "Ape" in the title, I can't remember. I don't know what Blizzard North is working on (are they working on something?).
There's only been two hacks: the speed hack, and the fishing hack. Speed hackers are tracable and they got banned. Fishing hackers (guys using macro programs to do their fishing) are also quite easily detectable.
You're "hammering" Blizzard without any evidence what-so-fuckin-ever! You're saying their security sucks. I've been playing the game for months and besides the two hacks mentioned above, I haven't seen or even heard of and significant (or even not so significant) security flaws. "compromised fully" - lol, that's just making it evident that you're a troll. If it was comprised fully, why weren't they hacked by some Sony employee like you (you must be one, why else would somebody make up so much bollocks about WoW)?
Blizzard isn't just *trying* to invent an end-game. There is an end-game (Onyxra hasn't been slain yet, has she?). And battlefields (which will really be the main thing to do in WoW) are scheduled to go live in two weeks.
Now, Mr. anon-troll, go back and play EQ2 - the obvious victor (not!) in the WoW vs. EQ2 competition. Are the EQ2 servers up again, by the way? Heard they were down for a couple of days...
Every class can solo up to the maximum level. Also, you don't get any less experience when soloing instead of grouping - in fact, soloing sometimes gives quicker experience. If you find some friends and you lot learn to effectively play together, then grouping is potentially more efficient, though.
You only need groups for instances (dungeons) and raids (obviously).
World of Warcraft simply doesn't have this problem and never will. In WoW, all items have level restrictions and all items drop from creatures of appropriate levels. In other words, you don't have creatures of level X which drop items which are only good for players of level 0.5X. If you hunt creatures and do quests of your own level, you'll get items which suit you. Items from higherlevel creatures / quests won't be usable by you.
All you people who see World of Warcraft as the same old MMORPG with a different graphics engine are bloody ignorant fools.
If you don't like MMORPGs, fair enough. But "trying them a few times" isn't really enough to be able to judge them. How many days of your life have you spent playing MMORPGs, and which ones? Have you actually played World of Warcraft?
MMORPGs have monthly fees because they'd get dull if they were static. Fees ensure that a professional team of game developers can continuously expand and improve the game. Of course, some MMORPG devs (SWG) fail in this respect and don't really add new stuff, but Blizzard know what they're doing.
Why would Blizzard waste months of their time (which the WoW subscribers are paying for) on porting WoW to Linux which will only make a few hundred people happy? Besides, they couldn't afford to give technical support for Linux, because so much s*** on Linux can go wrong and, again, hardly anybody would be using it anyway. It just wouldn't be a reasonable investment.
If you really want to use Linux to play World of Warcraft, then use Cedega, or whatever that thing's called.
World of Warcraft runs very well on older systems, so the first part of your post is totally irrelevant.
Saying WoW isn't worth the money because the first two days after launch weren't smooth is irrational. Even if Blizzard could've forseen the high demand for the game, they would've needed way more servers than (later) necessary for the thousands of newbies. Once people level up and people spread out accross the world, the game's going to be fine.
Severely lacking content? Horrible balance issues? What the hell are you talking about? World of Warcraft has shitloads of content and it's definitely isn't unbalanced. There might be some very small balance issues issues here and there, but please name me an MMORPG which launched without any. In my opinion, WoW in beta was far more balanced than most MMORPGs were months (or even years) after launch.
500,000 people signed up for the Open Beta. EverQuest, as far as I know, never had more than 450,000 subscribers. It's not a direct comparison, but I won't be surprised if World of Warcraft will beat EQ's number of subscribers by the end of the week.
MMORPGs are larger and more complex than single-player games, no argument there, but Blizzard had more than enough past experience to create an MMORPG - more than any other MMORPG developer did when they started! They already knew how to balance gameplay issues and create fun RPG systems (Diablo 1/2, Warcraft III) and they knew about networking technology (Battle.net). Diablo and Warcraft might be "small-scale" multiplayer games, but the servers running them are actually all but small-scale! Dude, Blizzard had much more relevant experience than Verant did when they created EverQuest.
I wouldn't mind paying a small fee to get to play the WoW beta for a few months. But the prices WoW accounts go for, at least on eBay, are way too high (a couple of hundred USD).
If anyone has a spare key and wants to give it to a good fellow, and not some random l33t d00d, please mail me at code_e at hotmail dot com. I'll even play a Priest and be your newbie character's slave for a week, or something.:P
Actually, the majority of the WoW beta testers claim that the game's, even in its beta stage, superiour to the current competition. If I were in the beta, knew the game, and anticipated the game as much as all of them, I'd probably write you an essay about why I believe you're mistaken. Unfortunately, I'm not in the beta yet, though, so I'm afraid I can't do that.:(
Actually, that's bulls***. If I were in the beta, I most definitely wouldn't be wasting my time suring around on./ Games.:p
That HardOCP report indicates that a GF4 Ti4200 will be able to play Doom III pretty well. Not at 1600*1200, but I'm sure you'll be able to play at 800*600 or 1024*768 at medium-high settings, depending on your other system specs.
I've got a Ti4600 and I got ~30FPS at 640*480 in the first Doom III alpha. I guess I'll get around 45FPS at 1024*768 now at very good settings.
Yeah, $12.95 or whatever's bad enough, but things get even worse when U.S. publishers rip off their European customers by charging them an extra 17.5% for "tax". Sony Online Entertainment do this, and I terminated my EQ / SWG subscriptions partially due to this nonsense.
What I despise the most is when developers claim the monthly charge is for continuous development, but then they release expansion packs for ~$30-40USD every year. After-sale service should be a standard, not something you have to pay for.
Bandwidth, hardware assets, customer service. Sure, that stuff isn't free, but I bet ~$2/m would cover those costs.
SWG is still in beta-stage, if you ask me - it's still bloody unstable and full of relatively trivial game-balance issuese. If the whole SWG team were working on SWG (and not the expanion), then it would be a much better game.
You can't just push the boxed product out and then maybe do a few bug fix patches, you have to actively develop new content for it over the span of multiple years, while paying your bandwidth bill, and supporting the massive customer service department you have to have.
True to a certain extent, but to me it seems that some MMOG developers don't pay the current game enough attention. Rather, they have most of their guys work on a bloody expansion pack which people have to pay for, while they only fix some bugs and address some balance-issues every now and then.
I played Star Wars Galaxies a bit over half a year ago and I quit after my 30 free days were over. It was bloody unstable - the client crashed every couple of hours or so (without giving me any error message), and on a several occasions the server I played on crashed, resulting in about half an hour of playtime being lost each time. A few weeks ago I briefly played SWG again (with that 14 day free trial) and my client still randomly crashed a few times (and before you accuse me of having a screwed up system: it hasn't got any dodgy hardware or software, and everything's patched / up-to-date).
Those few technical problems aside, I still don't think SWG is a very good game. There just isn't enough to do in the game. It's nice that players aren't forced to spend a year (or more) leveling up like in EverQuest, but as a result things get dull (at least they did for me) after a couple of weeks / months, depending on how much you play. Back then, the only thing one could strive for was becoming a Jedi, which involved grinding through countless different professions (screw that!), who sucked anyway.
I don't think a MMOG in which players don't build up something (e.g. their skill at playing their avatar better than other players could, their avatar's powers, their avatar's equipment) - over a long period of time - can be fun. In SWG, it takes a couple of weeks to get good at playing your character (and playing a character well doesn't really take much skill and experience) and equipping your avatar with, more or less, everything he could want. What happens after that? You can hunt stuff, which gets boring after a while, or you can mess around with tradeskills (I didn't bother - it didn't really seem rewarding enough since money was way too easy to get in SWG, and there wasn't much one could do with it). Are there finally some quests which are worth doing?
In my opinion, the different professions aren't very interesting and unique, and many of the skills are utterly useless. The RPG-system in SWG is overloaded with pointless skills. At least that's the impression I've gained.
Now... the expansion. From what I've heard, the main thing the SWG expansion will add is space-travel and combat, making it not just a MMORPG but also a MMO Space Sim. How many SWG players want or care for such a feature? I don't really care as I don't play the game anymore, but if I did then I'd be bloody furious. If I want to fly around in space and shoot shit up, I'll play Freelancer, or EVE (or whatever that MMOSS is called)!
SOE completely blew it with SWG, in my opinion. But I don't really care now, as World of WarCraft isn't all too far away from being done, and I believe Blizzard has far more skill at - and a superiour understanding of - making great games than SOE does. All the previews of WoW I've read stated that the game (which is currently still in beta-phase) is already the best MMORPG on the market. Too bad I've still got to wait a couple of weeks until the European beta finally starts.
Same here. I never liked EverQuest expansions, especially because they came out far too frequently, in my opinion, and they were overpriced for the stuff they added.
By continuously adding more for powergamers to do, this game turned into just one long level-grind.
I've been "clean" for a bit over two years now.:)
If you think more creativity and artistic skill was required for games "back in the days", then I'm forced to believe that you don't have a clue about modern computer and video games. The amount of excellent artwork in games like WarCraft III, Max Payne 2, Quake 3 Arena, Call of Duty or whatever still make me sit back in awe infront of my monitor every time I play those games, even though I've seen it all often before. If you think that pixel graphics are so elite and that modern 3D graphics are evil, maybe try out some of the cool GameBoy Advance games, like Advance Wars 2 - maybe that'll change your mind about modern games.
Sure, computer and video games today are a serious business and involve muchos ca$h. So what? Do you seriously believe that the games made by some hobby coder in a couple of months are always superiour to the games developed by 30+ programmers, concept artists, level designers, sound guys etc.?
99% of the games on the market are crap. Only very very very few are really great. Maybe that's the point you were trying to make, and I'd agree with that. Well, maybe this has become more extreme these days, but I'm sure "the good old days" had loads of crappy games as well. But, imho at least, the best-of-the-best games continuously improve.
Because it's fucking easier to play with two hands. It's as simple as that.
Why the hell would I want to use just one hand for gaming? It would make things extremely fiddily and difficult (in most cases).
If you only have one hand, well, sorry, but as there aren't enough one handed people around, don't expect either input devices or games to change in your favour.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I agree too. Gameplay > Graphics.
/HL2 ones. With those powerful engines and top-quality artists, you can display pretty much whatever you want. I doubt things will get significantly more advanced after the 3rd Unreal engine which is being developed at the moment.
Graphics engines don't really need to become any better than the UT2 / Doom 3 / Crytek
For those who didn't read the actual "article", the game's being developed by Petroplyph (http://www.petroglyphgames.com/), a new team constisting of lots of ex-Westwood (known for the Command & Conquer games) dudes.
I wish them luck, and I hope they make something good! They should be able to, given their experience.
That stuff (breakable environments) has been done before (Red Faction), and it didn't really add anything to the game, except probably a couple of months of development time.
Realistic physics in games such as Half-Life 2 are, just like realistic lighting effects and nice textures, nothing more but props. Although they may enable the developers to do some fairly special things (Half-Life 2: physics puzzles; Doom III: scary environments thanks to lighting), they do not make up the game.
Games will always have limits, constraints and rules (by definition). A first person shooter in which you could do the things you mentioned, and more, would probably suck because there are so many random things one could do. And, of course, creating a limitless game's impossible.
Raven haven't made any awesome games lately. The Jedi Knight games were good, at best (I found the level design in the games really uncreative), and Soldiers of Fortune... well, I haven't played it, but as far as I know there's better stuff to play.
:(
Quake III rocked (and still does, in some ways) thanks to its great multiplayer deathmatch. And I believe multiplayer is what made Quake III's predecessors so popular too. Raven will need a lot of magic to create something better than Quake III and the current (and upcoming) competition (UT2K4, CS:S...).
The Quake singleplayer modes were always quite crap. Since the Jedi Knight singleplayer modes weren't that good, I doubt Quake IV will change this trend.
Halo and Halo 2 are the most over-rated games I've ever known. The marketing guys at Microsoft did a fantastic job, but all the developers did was create two very medicore first-person-shooters. The Halo games might be alright compared to other XBox games, but seriously, lots of PC FPS games which game out over 5 years ago are superiour!
Any professional reviewers who voted Halo 2 as game of the year ought to be fired. But, as somebody else pointed out, those reviewers were probably bribed. I hope they weren't stupid enough to honestly vote that game "game of the year".
It's been about a month since WoW got released and the average players aren't level 60.
I'm a fairly average gamer (unless I've got hollidays, I only play around 10 hours a week) and I've been playing WoW since the start of the European closed beta. At the moment I've got a level 21 and a level 39 character. I could've made a level 60 in the time, but I can't be arsed to powerlevel.
So... what games do you define as challenging, Mr. anon-troll?
Btw, once the battlegrounds are live, this game will be challenging for years.
World of Warcraft has innovation - and lots. By just looking at the surface of things, you can always say "yeah, this game's really just a different version of this other game".
The Diablo games were created by Blizzard North - not the Blizzard team which created the World of Warcraft (and all other Warcraft games, I presume).
;)
There so wouldn't be a point of a Diablo III now (why in His name would you want to play a Diablo game instead of World of Warcraft?), so stop dreaming.
The next StarCraft game will be StarCraft Ghost, which will be some console game (eww). That's being developed by some 3rd team - something with "Ape" in the title, I can't remember. I don't know what Blizzard North is working on (are they working on something?).
What are you talking about??
There's only been two hacks: the speed hack, and the fishing hack. Speed hackers are tracable and they got banned. Fishing hackers (guys using macro programs to do their fishing) are also quite easily detectable.
You're "hammering" Blizzard without any evidence what-so-fuckin-ever! You're saying their security sucks. I've been playing the game for months and besides the two hacks mentioned above, I haven't seen or even heard of and significant (or even not so significant) security flaws. "compromised fully" - lol, that's just making it evident that you're a troll. If it was comprised fully, why weren't they hacked by some Sony employee like you (you must be one, why else would somebody make up so much bollocks about WoW)?
Blizzard isn't just *trying* to invent an end-game. There is an end-game (Onyxra hasn't been slain yet, has she?). And battlefields (which will really be the main thing to do in WoW) are scheduled to go live in two weeks.
Now, Mr. anon-troll, go back and play EQ2 - the obvious victor (not!) in the WoW vs. EQ2 competition. Are the EQ2 servers up again, by the way? Heard they were down for a couple of days...
Every class can solo up to the maximum level. Also, you don't get any less experience when soloing instead of grouping - in fact, soloing sometimes gives quicker experience. If you find some friends and you lot learn to effectively play together, then grouping is potentially more efficient, though.
You only need groups for instances (dungeons) and raids (obviously).
World of Warcraft simply doesn't have this problem and never will. In WoW, all items have level restrictions and all items drop from creatures of appropriate levels. In other words, you don't have creatures of level X which drop items which are only good for players of level 0.5X. If you hunt creatures and do quests of your own level, you'll get items which suit you. Items from higherlevel creatures / quests won't be usable by you.
All you people who see World of Warcraft as the same old MMORPG with a different graphics engine are bloody ignorant fools.
If you don't like MMORPGs, fair enough. But "trying them a few times" isn't really enough to be able to judge them. How many days of your life have you spent playing MMORPGs, and which ones? Have you actually played World of Warcraft?
MMORPGs have monthly fees because they'd get dull if they were static. Fees ensure that a professional team of game developers can continuously expand and improve the game. Of course, some MMORPG devs (SWG) fail in this respect and don't really add new stuff, but Blizzard know what they're doing.
Why would Blizzard waste months of their time (which the WoW subscribers are paying for) on porting WoW to Linux which will only make a few hundred people happy? Besides, they couldn't afford to give technical support for Linux, because so much s*** on Linux can go wrong and, again, hardly anybody would be using it anyway. It just wouldn't be a reasonable investment.
If you really want to use Linux to play World of Warcraft, then use Cedega, or whatever that thing's called.
World of Warcraft runs very well on older systems, so the first part of your post is totally irrelevant. Saying WoW isn't worth the money because the first two days after launch weren't smooth is irrational. Even if Blizzard could've forseen the high demand for the game, they would've needed way more servers than (later) necessary for the thousands of newbies. Once people level up and people spread out accross the world, the game's going to be fine.
Severely lacking content? Horrible balance issues? What the hell are you talking about? World of Warcraft has shitloads of content and it's definitely isn't unbalanced. There might be some very small balance issues issues here and there, but please name me an MMORPG which launched without any. In my opinion, WoW in beta was far more balanced than most MMORPGs were months (or even years) after launch.
500,000 people signed up for the Open Beta. EverQuest, as far as I know, never had more than 450,000 subscribers. It's not a direct comparison, but I won't be surprised if World of Warcraft will beat EQ's number of subscribers by the end of the week.
MMORPGs are larger and more complex than single-player games, no argument there, but Blizzard had more than enough past experience to create an MMORPG - more than any other MMORPG developer did when they started! They already knew how to balance gameplay issues and create fun RPG systems (Diablo 1/2, Warcraft III) and they knew about networking technology (Battle.net). Diablo and Warcraft might be "small-scale" multiplayer games, but the servers running them are actually all but small-scale! Dude, Blizzard had much more relevant experience than Verant did when they created EverQuest.
I wouldn't mind paying a small fee to get to play the WoW beta for a few months. But the prices WoW accounts go for, at least on eBay, are way too high (a couple of hundred USD).
:P
If anyone has a spare key and wants to give it to a good fellow, and not some random l33t d00d, please mail me at code_e at hotmail dot com. I'll even play a Priest and be your newbie character's slave for a week, or something.
Actually, the majority of the WoW beta testers claim that the game's, even in its beta stage, superiour to the current competition. If I were in the beta, knew the game, and anticipated the game as much as all of them, I'd probably write you an essay about why I believe you're mistaken. Unfortunately, I'm not in the beta yet, though, so I'm afraid I can't do that. :(
./ Games. :p
Actually, that's bulls***. If I were in the beta, I most definitely wouldn't be wasting my time suring around on
That HardOCP report indicates that a GF4 Ti4200 will be able to play Doom III pretty well. Not at 1600*1200, but I'm sure you'll be able to play at 800*600 or 1024*768 at medium-high settings, depending on your other system specs.
I've got a Ti4600 and I got ~30FPS at 640*480 in the first Doom III alpha. I guess I'll get around 45FPS at 1024*768 now at very good settings.
Yeah, $12.95 or whatever's bad enough, but things get even worse when U.S. publishers rip off their European customers by charging them an extra 17.5% for "tax". Sony Online Entertainment do this, and I terminated my EQ / SWG subscriptions partially due to this nonsense.
What I despise the most is when developers claim the monthly charge is for continuous development, but then they release expansion packs for ~$30-40USD every year. After-sale service should be a standard, not something you have to pay for.
Bandwidth, hardware assets, customer service. Sure, that stuff isn't free, but I bet ~$2/m would cover those costs.
SWG is still in beta-stage, if you ask me - it's still bloody unstable and full of relatively trivial game-balance issuese. If the whole SWG team were working on SWG (and not the expanion), then it would be a much better game.
You can't just push the boxed product out and then maybe do a few bug fix patches, you have to actively develop new content for it over the span of multiple years, while paying your bandwidth bill, and supporting the massive customer service department you have to have. True to a certain extent, but to me it seems that some MMOG developers don't pay the current game enough attention. Rather, they have most of their guys work on a bloody expansion pack which people have to pay for, while they only fix some bugs and address some balance-issues every now and then.
I played Star Wars Galaxies a bit over half a year ago and I quit after my 30 free days were over. It was bloody unstable - the client crashed every couple of hours or so (without giving me any error message), and on a several occasions the server I played on crashed, resulting in about half an hour of playtime being lost each time. A few weeks ago I briefly played SWG again (with that 14 day free trial) and my client still randomly crashed a few times (and before you accuse me of having a screwed up system: it hasn't got any dodgy hardware or software, and everything's patched / up-to-date).
Those few technical problems aside, I still don't think SWG is a very good game. There just isn't enough to do in the game. It's nice that players aren't forced to spend a year (or more) leveling up like in EverQuest, but as a result things get dull (at least they did for me) after a couple of weeks / months, depending on how much you play. Back then, the only thing one could strive for was becoming a Jedi, which involved grinding through countless different professions (screw that!), who sucked anyway.
I don't think a MMOG in which players don't build up something (e.g. their skill at playing their avatar better than other players could, their avatar's powers, their avatar's equipment) - over a long period of time - can be fun. In SWG, it takes a couple of weeks to get good at playing your character (and playing a character well doesn't really take much skill and experience) and equipping your avatar with, more or less, everything he could want. What happens after that? You can hunt stuff, which gets boring after a while, or you can mess around with tradeskills (I didn't bother - it didn't really seem rewarding enough since money was way too easy to get in SWG, and there wasn't much one could do with it). Are there finally some quests which are worth doing?
In my opinion, the different professions aren't very interesting and unique, and many of the skills are utterly useless. The RPG-system in SWG is overloaded with pointless skills. At least that's the impression I've gained.
Now... the expansion. From what I've heard, the main thing the SWG expansion will add is space-travel and combat, making it not just a MMORPG but also a MMO Space Sim. How many SWG players want or care for such a feature? I don't really care as I don't play the game anymore, but if I did then I'd be bloody furious. If I want to fly around in space and shoot shit up, I'll play Freelancer, or EVE (or whatever that MMOSS is called)!
SOE completely blew it with SWG, in my opinion. But I don't really care now, as World of WarCraft isn't all too far away from being done, and I believe Blizzard has far more skill at - and a superiour understanding of - making great games than SOE does. All the previews of WoW I've read stated that the game (which is currently still in beta-phase) is already the best MMORPG on the market. Too bad I've still got to wait a couple of weeks until the European beta finally starts.
Same here. I never liked EverQuest expansions, especially because they came out far too frequently, in my opinion, and they were overpriced for the stuff they added. By continuously adding more for powergamers to do, this game turned into just one long level-grind. I've been "clean" for a bit over two years now. :)
If you think more creativity and artistic skill was required for games "back in the days", then I'm forced to believe that you don't have a clue about modern computer and video games. The amount of excellent artwork in games like WarCraft III, Max Payne 2, Quake 3 Arena, Call of Duty or whatever still make me sit back in awe infront of my monitor every time I play those games, even though I've seen it all often before. If you think that pixel graphics are so elite and that modern 3D graphics are evil, maybe try out some of the cool GameBoy Advance games, like Advance Wars 2 - maybe that'll change your mind about modern games.
Sure, computer and video games today are a serious business and involve muchos ca$h. So what? Do you seriously believe that the games made by some hobby coder in a couple of months are always superiour to the games developed by 30+ programmers, concept artists, level designers, sound guys etc.?
99% of the games on the market are crap. Only very very very few are really great. Maybe that's the point you were trying to make, and I'd agree with that. Well, maybe this has become more extreme these days, but I'm sure "the good old days" had loads of crappy games as well. But, imho at least, the best-of-the-best games continuously improve.
Because it's fucking easier to play with two hands. It's as simple as that. Why the hell would I want to use just one hand for gaming? It would make things extremely fiddily and difficult (in most cases). If you only have one hand, well, sorry, but as there aren't enough one handed people around, don't expect either input devices or games to change in your favour.
Playing Battlefield 1942's alright, but playing Battlefield Vietnam won't be? How's that? Are Americans the only people you care about?