That's incorrect -- a Live Silver account does not allow you to play games online (except during certain promotional weekends, although those have been rare, as far as I can tell). As a general matter, a Live Gold account is the only way to play games online over Live.
While God of War is his recent high profile game, for some of us, Jaffe is noteworthy for having created the Twisted Metal series, of which TM2 was one of the best games for the PS1, and Twisted Metal Black was one of the first great games for the PS2.
But since he seems to have turned his back on the series, yeah -- frak him.
I'm almost 100% sure that you're right -- the press has only seen demonstrations of Assassin's Creed -- they haven't gotten actually to play the game.
I'd like a little more clarity on whether the game is a PS3-exclusive. Joystiq is reporting it will also be released on the Xbox 360 (despite the title in this link):
http://www.joystiq.com/2006/05/02/assassins-creed- ubisofts-ps3-exclusive/
(and I could swear I read some other preview also mentioning a possible PC release, too.)
Actually, playing against a team of all bots can be a good way for people of mixed skill levels to have fun in an FPS. Sometimes I'll play Star Wars Battlefront with some friends who don't play shooters all that much. If we played against each other, it wouldn't be very competitive and wouldn't be very fun. If we played against a bunch of strangers, we run the risk of playing with a bunch of morons. But in Battlefront, we can crank the AI up and all play together on the same team. Everyone feels like he's contributing, everyone has fun, and the disparate skill levels don't matter. And since it's just us and the bots, we can play whenever we want, without worrying about finding more people or whether those people will be morons or not.
To be honest with you, a number of those friends don't have much interest in playing Halo 2 on Live because we can only play aginst each other and/or with the random masses on Live, and neither is particularly satisfying. Bots would certainly have kept some of my friends far more interested in Halo 2 than they are now. I hope developers aren't deciding to ditch bots in games because "[i]t doesn't give you that thrill to defeat a AI bot."
"We have one formula with Halo: Ship it when it's ready. We did it with Halo 1. We did it with Halo 2. And we haven't disappointed the audience yet. That's Bungie's philosophy; that's the Xbox team's philosophy."
Interesting that Allard says this in the interview, especially given the rumors (perhaps now confirmed by Gates in his Time article) that Halo 3 will be released on the launch day of the PS3.
If Microsoft in fact does force Bungie to finish Halo 3 in time for the Playstation 3 launch, then yes, I think that's likely. Another reason Microsoft shouldn't tie the Halo 3 release to the PS3 launch.
I can't pretend that my and my friend's personal experience proves a general rule, but being the same boat (and most of us having all three consoles) we're looking at the new consoles this way: We play regularly on Live, so we're likely all to get the Xbox 360. The Playstation 3 is looking extremely impressive (in terms of hardware and software support), and with the Blu-Ray drive/HD support, like a good way to upgrade to that kind of equipment, so we're likely all to get that console as well. We barely spend any time playing our Gamecubes, and since time is limited, most of us are thinking that we're not going to be keeping up with Nintendo in this next generation -- I just haven't seen the games this generation (or next) to justify it.
Can anyone explain how the release of Halo 3 on the PS3 launch date will do anything to hurt Sony? Does anyone really believe that the people who line up outside stores for the launch of the PS3 are going to get inside, see Halo 3, and say "Man, the PS3 can wait, I have to get me Halo 3!" I just don't see it happening. Seems to me either people are going to get both, are they were only going to get one in the first place, and if it comes down to it, and I'm buying a PS3 on launch day, I might not want to pop an extra $50 for Halo 3 -- I'd rather spend it on games for the new system I'm buying. Not mention that there's a limited amount of media attention, and you'd have to think it likely that the launch of Sony's next console would garner more media attention than the launch of Bungie's next game.
Maybe I'm looking at this wrong, but it seems to me that Halo 3 will be walking into the PS3 launch, not the other way around.
The price drop, on the other hand, I could see that having some impact, but again, I don't think the early adopters of the PS3 are going to be dissuaded by anything Microsoft does -- they're going to buy the PS3 no matter what.
If you know of a better online gaming system for consoles, I'd love to hear about it. As it stands, I haven't seen anything better on another console. As long as Microsoft continues supporting Live, which it certainly seem to be doing with the next Xbox, and as long as a number of my friends across the country still use Live, I don't particular care if Microsoft is making money on it or if it has sold less or more consoles than anyone else.
Agreed -- I'm very interested to see what Sony's take on online gaming is going to be with the PS3.
I'm sure that the PS3 will ultimately have the kind interesting games that made me glad I own a PS2 (ICO, Katamari Damacy, Twisted Metal Black, etc.) But most of my gaming is done over Xbox Live these days, and the first dollars I spend on a next generation console will go towards whoever has the best online gaming system. So far, it looks like Microsoft is doing everything right to build on the current generation of Live. I hope Sony is watching Live very carefully and learning something from it.
Re:...so? am I missing something?
on
Halo 2 Stats Reset
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· Score: 4, Informative
Everything you said is pretty much right. It is a big deal about nothing.
And, as I recall from Bungie's site, they revised the way rankings are calculated in part to make it quicker for people to rise up to their level. So those people who should be highly ranked aren't going to be level 1s for long -- the rebalancing is supposed to make everyone find his level more quickly than before.
As someone who until recently did all his FPS gaming on consoles, I have to say I prefer a dual-analog controller over a mouse and keyboard. Having recently built a PC that can play games like Half-Life 2 and Unreal Tournamentl 2004, I'm catching up on a backlog of PC gaming, but I find the mouse and keyboard combo to feel somewhat unnatural, and a lot less immersive, than a console-style dual analog controller (PS2 or XBox, take your pick.) I understand that the mouse and keyboard is probably faster and more accurate, especially if that's what you're used to, but even with that in mind, it just doesn't feel good to me. I spend all day working with a mouse and keyboard -- I don't want to use the same equipment to play games. Playing FPS with dual sticks just feels more immersive to me -- the increased precision of a mouse and keyboard doesn't make up for the loss of immersion.
Now, that's just my opinion, and I wouldn't claim to speak for anyone else on the matter, but all the same I wouldn't be so sure that everyone playing FPS on consoles is in a rush to get a mouse and keyboard set up.
Time Splitters Future Perfect has bots for offline play, just as the two earlier games did. But you can't use bots online. Sorry if that wasn't clear. Given how integral bots were to at least my multiplayer experience with Time Splitters 1 and 2, the online portion of Time Splitters Future Perfect feels incomplete without bots.
Bots is a great idea, and I'm surprised that more developers don't work on putting bots into their online FPSs for Xbox. I don't imagine its some technical issue with Live, as at the least, Star Wars Battlefront has dozens of bots filling out levels when you play that game over Live. But most games don't offer any kind of bot support, even games that you would expect to have that feature. Case in point, Time Splitters Future Perfect, which was just released for the Xbox yesterday, and was developed by Free Radicals, which includes a bunch of the ex-Rare guys who worked on Golden Eye and Perfect Dark. Time Splitters has always featured bots for offline multiplayer, and here they finally got the series online with Time Splitters Future Perfect. But can you use bots in games on Live? No -- it's like they crippled the Live portion of the game by leaving out one of the hallmarks of the series. As I said, given Star Wars Battlefront, I can't imagine leaving out bots is a technical issue. And given your interest in bots (and mine, and everyone I play Live with regularly) I can't imagine it's because there is no demand for bots. I know people kept asking Bungie about bots in Halo 2. So what gives? Why the general lack of support for what should be a standard FPS feature?
And don't forget that not having those freaky hardware interactions means that you don't have to worry about that kind of thing either. Having recently built a PC (in part for gaming) and reacquainted myself with drivers, patching, hardware issues and BSODs, I really appreciate how easy it is to play games on the Xbox (and other consoles.) The hardest part is getting the security sticker off the game case -- once I put it in the console, I'm good to go. My PC might be more powerful than my Xbox, but factoring in the ease of use, I generally prefer gaming on consoles.
I believe the creator of Republic of Rome described it as "for people who think Diplomacy is like Chutes and Ladders." That's an overstatement, but RoR is an excellent game. It's very complex, but extremely rewarding -- there's a great balance between having to work together when the Republic is young, and infighting and backstabbing once the Republic grows powerful. It also adapts very well to various house rules, once you get into it.
Of course, you might have trouble finding a copy, as it's been out of print for a while and the few copies that pop up on Ebay tend to go for quite a bit.
Or, since Microsoft will print a zillion copies of Halo 3 and the PS3 is (knowing Sony) likely to be in short supply, gamers will get the PS3 first, and then calmly, at their leisure, get Halo 3. If this is true, it sounds like a recipe for rushing Bungie (by, in effect, letting Sony set the release date) and getting another game without an ending, or worse.
You won't have to wait long -- two upcoming Xbox shooters will feature mapmakers: Timesplitters Future Perfect and Pariah. The former looks to have a much expanded version of the mapmaker found in Timesplitters 2 (i.e., tile-based), and will allow you to share maps over Live (apparently through EA's servers) and play user created maps on Live. I assume there are some size contraints, but hopefully Free Radicals will take full advantage of the Xbox hard drive and let you store as many user created maps as you can. Pariah is, I think, by people who worked on Unreal, and from the little I've seen, the map maker works more like a PC map maker (although I think it might only let you modify the pre-existing multiplayer maps, not create your own from scratch.) I believe it, too, lets you play user created maps on Live.
In any event, both seem like they'll be worthwhile additions to console shooters, and I hope developers continue putting such features in console games (and, of course, that MS designs the next Xbox to allow these features.)
Except for caching to reduce load times (e.g., Ninja Gaiden) and DLC for Live games, providing new levels long after a game was released (e.g., various Tom Clancy Live games). The map maker feature on the upcoming Time Splitters Future Perfect, which will allow users to create maps and share them over Live, will also presumably make use of the hard drive to allow Xbox users a lot more save space then the PS2 version will offer. So, all that and Blinx.
And you can only imagine, if this is all true, that developers will probably end up ignoring the hard drive. Especially given this quote from the article:
"The report tallies with claims from developers working on the system, who have told GamesIndustry.biz in the past that Microsoft has disclosed that there will be a mass storage device, but that they should not rely on its presence for their games."
Seems like a large step backwards.
Actually I've seen several copies in a local EB for $9.99. I picked it up at that price, and it's definitely worth it, especially with the mods available at various websites. Also, the newest patch of the game (1.2?) adds a "Danger Room" feature, so you can easily play around with your own super heroes on several game levels against some customizable AI superheroes. The campaign itself may be short, but the super hero creation system is extremely robust -- it alone is worth the price of admission.
Where is Loom among the adventure games? That's the real travesty.
And I'm not sure why Symphony of the Night handily beating all comers makes you want to move to the woods. One, I think it's generally acknowledged that SOTN is the most popular Castlevania (at least, there's still a pretty involved community devoted to exploring the game, finding new areas, items, glitches, etc.) Two, have you played SOTN recently? It's better in some many ways by so many levels than Simon's Quest (the 2d best Castlevania) that it's not even close. Obviously that's just my opinion, but I think that of my various opinions that's one that's closer to objective truth than many of the others. Not to detract from Simon's Quest, but SOTN just does so much more -- I always think of SOTN being like a Super Metroid (SNES) treatment of the earlier Castlevanias. Metroid (NES) is a great game, and certainly has its place, but Super Metroid (SNES) just expanded on its predecessor in all the right ways. SOTN is the same kind of expansion of earlier Castlevanias.
His father told a newspaper: "This just proves that DVT can affect even the fittest and healthiest of children."
Somehow I doubt that a kid who can, and does, put in 10 hours straight playing videogames is the "fittest and healthiest of children." My guess is that the 10-hours type of kid is something less than fit and healthy.
Slashdot Mirror
That's incorrect -- a Live Silver account does not allow you to play games online (except during certain promotional weekends, although those have been rare, as far as I can tell). As a general matter, a Live Gold account is the only way to play games online over Live.
While God of War is his recent high profile game, for some of us, Jaffe is noteworthy for having created the Twisted Metal series, of which TM2 was one of the best games for the PS1, and Twisted Metal Black was one of the first great games for the PS2.
But since he seems to have turned his back on the series, yeah -- frak him.
I'm almost 100% sure that you're right -- the press has only seen demonstrations of Assassin's Creed -- they haven't gotten actually to play the game. I'd like a little more clarity on whether the game is a PS3-exclusive. Joystiq is reporting it will also be released on the Xbox 360 (despite the title in this link): http://www.joystiq.com/2006/05/02/assassins-creed- ubisofts-ps3-exclusive/
(and I could swear I read some other preview also mentioning a possible PC release, too.)
To be honest with you, a number of those friends don't have much interest in playing Halo 2 on Live because we can only play aginst each other and/or with the random masses on Live, and neither is particularly satisfying. Bots would certainly have kept some of my friends far more interested in Halo 2 than they are now. I hope developers aren't deciding to ditch bots in games because "[i]t doesn't give you that thrill to defeat a AI bot."
But more to the point, where are you paying $7 for a movie ticket? I want in on that action.
Interesting that Allard says this in the interview, especially given the rumors (perhaps now confirmed by Gates in his Time article) that Halo 3 will be released on the launch day of the PS3.
If Microsoft in fact does force Bungie to finish Halo 3 in time for the Playstation 3 launch, then yes, I think that's likely. Another reason Microsoft shouldn't tie the Halo 3 release to the PS3 launch.
Maybe I'm looking at this wrong, but it seems to me that Halo 3 will be walking into the PS3 launch, not the other way around.
The price drop, on the other hand, I could see that having some impact, but again, I don't think the early adopters of the PS3 are going to be dissuaded by anything Microsoft does -- they're going to buy the PS3 no matter what.
If you know of a better online gaming system for consoles, I'd love to hear about it. As it stands, I haven't seen anything better on another console. As long as Microsoft continues supporting Live, which it certainly seem to be doing with the next Xbox, and as long as a number of my friends across the country still use Live, I don't particular care if Microsoft is making money on it or if it has sold less or more consoles than anyone else.
I'm sure that the PS3 will ultimately have the kind interesting games that made me glad I own a PS2 (ICO, Katamari Damacy, Twisted Metal Black, etc.) But most of my gaming is done over Xbox Live these days, and the first dollars I spend on a next generation console will go towards whoever has the best online gaming system. So far, it looks like Microsoft is doing everything right to build on the current generation of Live. I hope Sony is watching Live very carefully and learning something from it.
And, as I recall from Bungie's site, they revised the way rankings are calculated in part to make it quicker for people to rise up to their level. So those people who should be highly ranked aren't going to be level 1s for long -- the rebalancing is supposed to make everyone find his level more quickly than before.
It's $5.99 for a pack of 2 maps (Sanctuary and Turf). That's $5.99 for both, not $5.99 for each.
Now, that's just my opinion, and I wouldn't claim to speak for anyone else on the matter, but all the same I wouldn't be so sure that everyone playing FPS on consoles is in a rush to get a mouse and keyboard set up.
Time Splitters Future Perfect has bots for offline play, just as the two earlier games did. But you can't use bots online. Sorry if that wasn't clear. Given how integral bots were to at least my multiplayer experience with Time Splitters 1 and 2, the online portion of Time Splitters Future Perfect feels incomplete without bots.
Bots is a great idea, and I'm surprised that more developers don't work on putting bots into their online FPSs for Xbox. I don't imagine its some technical issue with Live, as at the least, Star Wars Battlefront has dozens of bots filling out levels when you play that game over Live. But most games don't offer any kind of bot support, even games that you would expect to have that feature. Case in point, Time Splitters Future Perfect, which was just released for the Xbox yesterday, and was developed by Free Radicals, which includes a bunch of the ex-Rare guys who worked on Golden Eye and Perfect Dark. Time Splitters has always featured bots for offline multiplayer, and here they finally got the series online with Time Splitters Future Perfect. But can you use bots in games on Live? No -- it's like they crippled the Live portion of the game by leaving out one of the hallmarks of the series. As I said, given Star Wars Battlefront, I can't imagine leaving out bots is a technical issue. And given your interest in bots (and mine, and everyone I play Live with regularly) I can't imagine it's because there is no demand for bots. I know people kept asking Bungie about bots in Halo 2. So what gives? Why the general lack of support for what should be a standard FPS feature?
And don't forget that not having those freaky hardware interactions means that you don't have to worry about that kind of thing either. Having recently built a PC (in part for gaming) and reacquainted myself with drivers, patching, hardware issues and BSODs, I really appreciate how easy it is to play games on the Xbox (and other consoles.) The hardest part is getting the security sticker off the game case -- once I put it in the console, I'm good to go. My PC might be more powerful than my Xbox, but factoring in the ease of use, I generally prefer gaming on consoles.
I believe the creator of Republic of Rome described it as "for people who think Diplomacy is like Chutes and Ladders." That's an overstatement, but RoR is an excellent game. It's very complex, but extremely rewarding -- there's a great balance between having to work together when the Republic is young, and infighting and backstabbing once the Republic grows powerful. It also adapts very well to various house rules, once you get into it. Of course, you might have trouble finding a copy, as it's been out of print for a while and the few copies that pop up on Ebay tend to go for quite a bit.
Or, since Microsoft will print a zillion copies of Halo 3 and the PS3 is (knowing Sony) likely to be in short supply, gamers will get the PS3 first, and then calmly, at their leisure, get Halo 3. If this is true, it sounds like a recipe for rushing Bungie (by, in effect, letting Sony set the release date) and getting another game without an ending, or worse.
You won't have to wait long -- two upcoming Xbox shooters will feature mapmakers: Timesplitters Future Perfect and Pariah. The former looks to have a much expanded version of the mapmaker found in Timesplitters 2 (i.e., tile-based), and will allow you to share maps over Live (apparently through EA's servers) and play user created maps on Live. I assume there are some size contraints, but hopefully Free Radicals will take full advantage of the Xbox hard drive and let you store as many user created maps as you can. Pariah is, I think, by people who worked on Unreal, and from the little I've seen, the map maker works more like a PC map maker (although I think it might only let you modify the pre-existing multiplayer maps, not create your own from scratch.) I believe it, too, lets you play user created maps on Live. In any event, both seem like they'll be worthwhile additions to console shooters, and I hope developers continue putting such features in console games (and, of course, that MS designs the next Xbox to allow these features.)
Except for caching to reduce load times (e.g., Ninja Gaiden) and DLC for Live games, providing new levels long after a game was released (e.g., various Tom Clancy Live games). The map maker feature on the upcoming Time Splitters Future Perfect, which will allow users to create maps and share them over Live, will also presumably make use of the hard drive to allow Xbox users a lot more save space then the PS2 version will offer. So, all that and Blinx.
And you can only imagine, if this is all true, that developers will probably end up ignoring the hard drive. Especially given this quote from the article: "The report tallies with claims from developers working on the system, who have told GamesIndustry.biz in the past that Microsoft has disclosed that there will be a mass storage device, but that they should not rely on its presence for their games." Seems like a large step backwards.
Actually I've seen several copies in a local EB for $9.99. I picked it up at that price, and it's definitely worth it, especially with the mods available at various websites. Also, the newest patch of the game (1.2?) adds a "Danger Room" feature, so you can easily play around with your own super heroes on several game levels against some customizable AI superheroes. The campaign itself may be short, but the super hero creation system is extremely robust -- it alone is worth the price of admission.
And I'm not sure why Symphony of the Night handily beating all comers makes you want to move to the woods. One, I think it's generally acknowledged that SOTN is the most popular Castlevania (at least, there's still a pretty involved community devoted to exploring the game, finding new areas, items, glitches, etc.) Two, have you played SOTN recently? It's better in some many ways by so many levels than Simon's Quest (the 2d best Castlevania) that it's not even close. Obviously that's just my opinion, but I think that of my various opinions that's one that's closer to objective truth than many of the others. Not to detract from Simon's Quest, but SOTN just does so much more -- I always think of SOTN being like a Super Metroid (SNES) treatment of the earlier Castlevanias. Metroid (NES) is a great game, and certainly has its place, but Super Metroid (SNES) just expanded on its predecessor in all the right ways. SOTN is the same kind of expansion of earlier Castlevanias.
His father told a newspaper: "This just proves that DVT can affect even the fittest and healthiest of children."
Somehow I doubt that a kid who can, and does, put in 10 hours straight playing videogames is the "fittest and healthiest of children." My guess is that the 10-hours type of kid is something less than fit and healthy.