They make a sequel and get nothing but complaints about stupid AI, poor performace, slow load times and so on. They complain about bad voice acting, unbelievable story and characters, lousy hud, actions not having any real impact on the story.
All problems that were the same or worse in the original game.
And the fans wonder why the publishers give up trying to make them happy and just release cheap mass market games using the IP.
Nintendo were probably resposible for a couple of very popular innovative games with Mario 64 and Zelda OOT. Sony made some innovative games as well.
Nintendo don't tend to innovate with character or style but they do innovate with gameplay and technology. Sony hardware is so popular that even quirky experimental games can be released for it.
The problem with Sega was that some of their innovative games were maybe a bit too elitist. Rez was a short game with a Trance soundrack and graphics inspired by Kandinsky. I love them for it, but what chance do they have with the average casual gamer.
I'm going to take any talk of innovation with a pinch of salt anyway. I aggree that new ideas are good, but too often the people who talk about innovation want games to change to something that I don't want.
I agree that melodies arn't as important in games as they used to be. In the arcade days the beeps and midi type music seemed to be used as more of an advertising jingle to attract you and bring you back.
RPG games often use tricks like tying melodies to characters and leveling up. It's hard to argue with that formula because it works as in the same way that it works in the Star Wars movies.
Deus Ex: Invisible War comes to mind when I think of recent games. They released the soundtrack for free on the net if you want to listen to it.
The opening theme starts with the same melody used in the original game. The rest of the music is more atmospheric but, in my opinion, surprisingly good.
In case anyone is worried about the a company other than Bioware working on it, Feargus Urquhart and Chris Avellone at Obsidian have a good reputation. To put it mildly.
Never heard of Elite, X-Com, Populous, Syndicate, Goldeneye or Donkey Kong Country? These games may not fit into your normal buying habit but you may be able to find someone who has played one of them if you look hard enough.
If you want to look for influence Populous pretty much invented a way of doing strategy that was pretty influential. Elite is a wee bit influential as a trading, space combat and general open ended game.
A lot of British games are garbage, but you could say that about anything from anywhere.
My local supermarket doesn't stock many PC games. They still have Grim Fandango for sale, alongside Starcraft and Diablo 2.
It is also one of the most critally praised games ever, and comes up regulary in fan discussusions of most loved games.
My supermarket will probably not keep Gladius on the shelves for long. It will be lucky to be remembered with a two paragraph write up on the home of the underdogs.
Looking at a popular Bittorrent site, Deus Ex 2 currently has over a thousand downloads and more than 200 seeds. That game has been out for a while as well, maybe enough for "hundreds of thousands" of downloads.
Cheap bastards probably download it, play it through five times, then complain that it sucks and doesn't offer value for money.
On the other hand..
They probably get their numbers by sticking their fingers in the air, picking a number at random then multiplying by a thousand. It's probably only bullshit PR.
I'm actually more excited to hear that the Arx Fatalis guys are using the source engine than Troika or even Valve.
I'm not a big fan of fps games, and Troika have really failed to deliver with their other games in my opinion. They can only trade under the grace of having worked on Fallout for so long.
Arx Fatalis was a diamond in the rough though. A trip into a atmospheric gameworld with some oldskool crpg details that developers seem to forget about these days. I'd like to see what they could do with more experience and a great engine.
You may be a bit harsh calling Arx Fatalis total crap. Not that it was perfect or anything.
I would recommend it to anyone who was missing old games like Ultima Underworld or Dungeon Master. I wouldn't recommend it to someone looking for something like Doom or Half-Life.
Lack of innovation in the category of shafting development teams with expensive and risky projects? I imagine that there will always be lots of innovation in that category.
Seems to me that the Japanese developers arn't going for abstract vs realism as much as stylised graphics vs realistic graphics. Japanese gameplay has almost always been abstract as far as I can tell.
Start a letter writing campaign complaining about it. Hope you come up with a clear and hard to dispute way to describe how they are breaking the rules.
SUBSTANTIATION 3.2 If there is a significant division of informed opinion about any claims made in a marketing communication they should not be portrayed as generally agreed.
HONESTY 6.1 Marketers should not exploit the credulity, lack of knowledge or inexperience of consumers.
TRUTHFULNESS 7.1 No marketing communication should mislead, or be likely to mislead, by inaccuracy, ambiguity, exaggeration, omission or otherwise.
COMPARISONS WITH IDENTIFIED COMPETITORS AND/OR THEIR PRODUCTS 18.1 Comparative claims are permitted in the interests of vigorous competition and public information. They should neither mislead nor be likely to mislead. 18.2 They should compare products meeting the same needs or intended for the same purpose. 18.3 They should objectively compare one or more material, relevant, verifiable and representative features of those products, which may include price.
No reason why you couldn't apply these rules to microsoft or intel adverts and get them pulled. They are normally more careful though.
I'm going to sound like horrible Nintendo fan saying this, but you could have bought a Gamecube instead. At least, Nintendo *try* to make games for all ages.
I don't see why you would have problems with games like Mario Sunshine, Pikmin or Super Monkey Ball.
It seems to be somewhere between the Manga and the movie in style. Looks like the movie, but more of the depth and humour of the manga is there and some of the atmosphere of the film is lost.
The story is completely new, unless there was another volume to the Manga that I missed. Not surprisingly it deals with the same sort of subjects.
There was a interview with the creator in a documentory called "Thumb Bandits". Apparrentlty, its supposed to be "pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka".
Puck is apparently a japanese word for the noise you make eating, sort of like saying Woof for a dog barking. Thats why the game was called Puck Man in japan.
Nintendo apologist for crying out loud. They are hardly the nazi party, they make games for people of all ages with the exception of surly teenagers and arrogant student/graduates.
Its typical of Nintendo, if they went online they wouldn't have an over expensive service that has limited availability.
On the other hand, AOL are of course SATAN incarnate. They are reposible for everything bad that ever happened to you, and you must use their software and servers because they are the only way to use the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Another example is Deus Ex.
They make a sequel and get nothing but complaints about stupid AI, poor performace, slow load times and so on. They complain about bad voice acting, unbelievable story and characters, lousy hud, actions not having any real impact on the story.
All problems that were the same or worse in the original game.
And the fans wonder why the publishers give up trying to make them happy and just release cheap mass market games using the IP.
Nintendo were probably resposible for a couple of very popular innovative games with Mario 64 and Zelda OOT. Sony made some innovative games as well.
Nintendo don't tend to innovate with character or style but they do innovate with gameplay and technology. Sony hardware is so popular that even quirky experimental games can be released for it.
The problem with Sega was that some of their innovative games were maybe a bit too elitist. Rez was a short game with a Trance soundrack and graphics inspired by Kandinsky. I love them for it, but what chance do they have with the average casual gamer.
I'm going to take any talk of innovation with a pinch of salt anyway. I aggree that new ideas are good, but too often the people who talk about innovation want games to change to something that I don't want.
Looks like I'm too tired to hit the right keys.
Was just going to say that applying Cinematic techniques to games can result in games that look good but play badly.
Games that
I agree that melodies arn't as important in games as they used to be. In the arcade days the beeps and midi type music seemed to be used as more of an advertising jingle to attract you and bring you back.
RPG games often use tricks like tying melodies to characters and leveling up. It's hard to argue with that formula because it works as in the same way that it works in the Star Wars movies.
Deus Ex: Invisible War comes to mind when I think of recent games. They released the soundtrack for free on the net if you want to listen to it.
The opening theme starts with the same melody used in the original game. The rest of the music is more atmospheric but, in my opinion, surprisingly good.
In case anyone is worried about the a company other than Bioware working on it, Feargus Urquhart and Chris Avellone at Obsidian have a good reputation. To put it mildly.
I don't see why anyone would have any reason to be depressed with you around.
Never heard of Elite, X-Com, Populous, Syndicate, Goldeneye or Donkey Kong Country? These games may not fit into your normal buying habit but you may be able to find someone who has played one of them if you look hard enough.
If you want to look for influence Populous pretty much invented a way of doing strategy that was pretty influential. Elite is a wee bit influential as a trading, space combat and general open ended game.
A lot of British games are garbage, but you could say that about anything from anywhere.
My local supermarket doesn't stock many PC games. They still have Grim Fandango for sale, alongside Starcraft and Diablo 2.
It is also one of the most critally praised games ever, and comes up regulary in fan discussusions of most loved games.
My supermarket will probably not keep Gladius on the shelves for long. It will be lucky to be remembered with a two paragraph write up on the home of the underdogs.
On one hand..
Looking at a popular Bittorrent site, Deus Ex 2 currently has over a thousand downloads and more than 200 seeds. That game has been out for a while as well, maybe enough for "hundreds of thousands" of downloads.
Cheap bastards probably download it, play it through five times, then complain that it sucks and doesn't offer value for money.
On the other hand..
They probably get their numbers by sticking their fingers in the air, picking a number at random then multiplying by a thousand. It's probably only bullshit PR.
I'm actually more excited to hear that the Arx Fatalis guys are using the source engine than Troika or even Valve.
I'm not a big fan of fps games, and Troika have really failed to deliver with their other games in my opinion. They can only trade under the grace of having worked on Fallout for so long.
Arx Fatalis was a diamond in the rough though. A trip into a atmospheric gameworld with some oldskool crpg details that developers seem to forget about these days. I'd like to see what they could do with more experience and a great engine.
You may be a bit harsh calling Arx Fatalis total crap. Not that it was perfect or anything.
I would recommend it to anyone who was missing old games like Ultima Underworld or Dungeon Master. I wouldn't recommend it to someone looking for something like Doom or Half-Life.
Lack of innovation in the category of shafting development teams with expensive and risky projects? I imagine that there will always be lots of innovation in that category.
Seems to me that the Japanese developers arn't going for abstract vs realism as much as stylised graphics vs realistic graphics. Japanese gameplay has almost always been abstract as far as I can tell.
UNITY!
Probably likely to contain Trance Music, Hypnotic Music Visualisations, Shoot 'Em Up gameplay and Fluffy Sheep.
Only a minority of people in the UK would be nostalgic for the Atari 2600 and 8bit Nintendo as they wern't as popular over here.
We also had our own games for the Spectrum, BBC and C64. Later on we had our own games for the Atari ST and Amiga.
These days we mostly get the same games as you. Games that are mostly targeted at the American markets...
Start a letter writing campaign complaining about it. Hope you come up with a clear and hard to dispute way to describe how they are breaking the rules.
Loadsaluck.
http://www.asa.org.uk/
SUBSTANTIATION
3.2 If there is a significant division of informed opinion about any claims made in a marketing communication they should not be portrayed as generally agreed.
HONESTY
6.1 Marketers should not exploit the credulity, lack of knowledge or inexperience of consumers.
TRUTHFULNESS
7.1 No marketing communication should mislead, or be likely to mislead, by inaccuracy, ambiguity, exaggeration, omission or otherwise.
COMPARISONS WITH IDENTIFIED COMPETITORS AND/OR THEIR PRODUCTS
18.1 Comparative claims are permitted in the interests of vigorous competition and public information. They should neither mislead nor be likely to mislead.
18.2 They should compare products meeting the same needs or intended for the same purpose.
18.3 They should objectively compare one or more material, relevant, verifiable and representative features of those products, which may include price.
No reason why you couldn't apply these rules to microsoft or intel adverts and get them pulled. They are normally more careful though.
I'm going to sound like horrible Nintendo fan saying this, but you could have bought a Gamecube instead. At least, Nintendo *try* to make games for all ages.
I don't see why you would have problems with games like Mario Sunshine, Pikmin or Super Monkey Ball.
It seems to be somewhere between the Manga and the movie in style. Looks like the movie, but more of the depth and humour of the manga is there and some of the atmosphere of the film is lost.
The story is completely new, unless there was another volume to the Manga that I missed. Not surprisingly it deals with the same sort of subjects.
Definately.
Here is an outline for a fairly typical UK tv advertisement.
Man does something stupid.
Woman uses consumer product that highlights stupidity of men.
Men are stupid, consume more.
This game sounds very much like Atic Atak.
Maybe if they are making new sequels to their old games, they will finally get round to making Mire Mare!
Socialist?
Capitalism covers both hiring people to grow the company and sacking people to reduce costs.
There was a interview with the creator in a documentory called "Thumb Bandits". Apparrentlty, its supposed to be "pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka pucka".
Puck is apparently a japanese word for the noise you make eating, sort of like saying Woof for a dog barking. Thats why the game was called Puck Man in japan.
Nintendo apologist for crying out loud. They are hardly the nazi party, they make games for people of all ages with the exception of surly teenagers and arrogant student/graduates.
Its typical of Nintendo, if they went online they wouldn't have an over expensive service that has limited availability.
On the other hand, AOL are of course SATAN incarnate. They are reposible for everything bad that ever happened to you, and you must use their software and servers because they are the only way to use the internet.