Well, I really don't have a life, so I buy pretty much everything released. I actually have a copy of Daikatana, or games like Aiken's Artefact which AFAIK sold a grand total of 800 copies. Or you know the Penny Arcade strip where Gabe ends up buying Barbie Horse Adventures because nothing else was released the whole summer? I actually went to the game shops to look for that game, after reading that strip.
At any rate, well, "bad" is a very relative thing. As I've said, it's not like a majority of games commit a majority of those mistakes. (Well, maybe except for the choices one. That's actually very common.) But still, it's often enough to see a point in such a list. Just so hopefully we can finally bury those mistakes and move on to trying new stuff, instead of rehashing the same "I know, let's remove save points" ideas.
I'm not even sure why people persist in the save game tradition. It's not like it's actually needed any more, and I can think of even Japanese console games (e.g., "Persona 2: Eternal Punishment") which do just fine with a PC-style save-anywhere scheme.
I can see how that madness got started, back in the days when it would be a point where you got a code instead of actually saving. I can even see some point later, when flash cartridges were a few k and every byte counted.
But nowadays they're not even needed any more. Any console game actually saves the map and coordinates anyway. It's just an extra check in the program, which can invariably be disabled with a cheat code, and the game still runs flawlessly.
And even as gameplay devices:
1. They don't really act as deterrents. On the contrary, they actually make me save more often. In games without save points I can go for an hour or two without saving. In games with save points I just have to save at each point, and sometimes go back a room or two to save after each event. Just because God knows when and where the next one will be.
2. It's a prop _in_ the game world for an _ooc_ (Out Of Character) action. It's something that just doesn't belong there, and as such it doesn't help with suspension of disbelief. (Yes, a lot of games did try to offer some in-character explanation of what those are, but frankly, it invariably ended up so lame and unnatural, that it was even worse than not explaining anything.)
Well, then, if "he" can be used to mean any gender, then why can't "she" be used in exactly the same way? It's just as clear, it's certainly familiar (it's one word you hear every day), and it's just as concise (one extra "s" now and then won't lengthen the whole article by any significant amount. And when you read it, it's still one syllable.)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating either of them as such, but I _do_ find it peculiar that someone would need to throw a "what's with this 'she' crap?" tantrum. Using 'she' was insulting... how?
I don't know, I'm a guy myself, but I find it anywhere between hillarious and idiotic (or most often a mixture of both) the way some guys absolutely have to defend their supremacy in some field as if their manhood depended on it. As if, god forbid, even acknowledging that women gamers exist (e.g., by using a 'she' now and then) could make their dick shrivel and fall off.
Let me rephrase that: I don't even think it's a "guy thing" as such. It's not about "guys" as such, it's about complexed insecure guys who need to put someone down just to mask their own insecurities.
And you'd thing that what with being the victims of that, nerds would know better than to do that. In practice, frankly, it's the exact opposite. When you see someone blanketly insulting whole population segments, for the most idiotic and irrelevant pretexts (e.g., that they don't use vi, or that they play on a non-PK facet in a MMO, or whatever), chances are it'll be a nerd.
To anyone falling in that category: folks, get a life. Gaming is just a passtime, no more. It doesn't make you a "man" or anything, it just makes you less bored. Noone will come and beg to carry your baby because of your clan's scores in CS or your Linux PDA or whatever.
You seem to define "deffective" as in "the CD was physically unreadable", which is just about the only thing that would be solved by giving someone another copy. What if the software itself is broken and deffective? Because that's the actual product I bought there, and the CD was just the medium it comes on.
E.g., the german version of Victoria threw a script _syntax_ error right at the start of a new campaign. Yes, you've read that right. Not a crash to desktop, not some graphics glitch, _nothing_ even remotely blamable on my hardware or drivers. A script _syntax_ error. That game couldn't work as released on _any_ hardware.
E.g., a german version again, Everquest 2 was released with a completely broken translation, which actually did impact gameplay. NPCs and items would be named completely differently in the quest text and in the actual game, making it literally impossible to do what you were told. The NPC you were told to kill simply didn't even exist in the game. (And generally, you know it's bad when even the few fans tell you to try translating it word-for-word back into English, to figure out some texts.)
E.g., Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst doesn't seem to be able to connect at all on my XP machine, although it works flawlessly on my Windows 2000 machine. (So, no, it's not a case of ports being blocked by the router or ISP.) Mind you, I needed to dig through tech support faqs even just to get it to the point it would try to connect: first it didn't even let me input my name and password. No, literally, typing anything in those input boxes was a futile exercise. The only key they accepted was basically escape to cancel it.
E.g., to take an older game, take The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall. The collision detection was so bad, that you'd fall into the void even when running on flat groud, or when teleporting back to town. I'm picking on it, instead of newer ones, because it's a clear-cut case of deffective software, and can't be blamed on drivers or hardware. It took many _months_ for Bethesda to try to fix it, and eventually they gave up and made a cheat code to teleport you back to the beginning of the map if you fell into the void.
E.g., Morrowind was shipped with a pretty nasty race condition that resulted in a crash to desktop when zoning. But as is usually the case with race conditions, on different PCs it produced wildly different results. On some you had a crash every couple of hours, but some people couldn't even leave the starting ship at all, because the game would crash when they went through the hatch. I'm not even going into the aspect that a game that crashes at all _is_ deffective, but the fact remains that some people just couldn't play it as shipped.
Etc.
So giving them a replacement CD is gonna solve... what? No, seriously.
Yeah, they were sooo trying to rip you off, by not accepting a game they couldn't run at all. Not. Geesh.
You'd be surprised how many major full-price PC or console games violate at least one of those points. Sure, if by "rampant" you mean "everyone violating most of them", it's not that bad, but violating at least one happens often enough to make me happy that someone wrote that list. I wish they could also make it mandatory reading for every wannabe game designer.
Sure, you're right in that it all sounds like common sense, and it's stuff that's been "discovered" two decades ago. Nothing new and revolutionary in any of those points.
Yet people still come up with cretinous ideas like "I know, let's make our piss-poor 2-hour-long game seem longer by disabling save and making the player have to replay the whole level, again and again, until he discovers the right solution by trial and error. That'll make it longer."
Or take decision making. We all know that gameplay is about decisions, even minor ones like whether I drop this piece here or there in Tetris, and that Sid Meier quote is anything but new. But then it's actually rampant to have games where basically you have only an illusion of choice.
E.g., RPG dialogues where you get 2 or 3 choices, but only one works, and the others just get you asked again. Sorry, that's _not_ a choice. And I don't just mean Japanese console RPG's, btw. E.g., in "Vampire, The Masquerade: Redemption" you had such choices as whether you want to save some people from a golem. But saying "no" just made you do it anyway.
E.g., choices of the kind Brian Reynolds (designer of games like Alpha Centauri) called a non-choice. If a piano falls on top of you and you have an option to jump out of the way, or stay and be squished, it's not a choice. Choices like that, where one alternative is there just as a sick joke to tell you "you should have picked the other one" are more common than you seem to think.
E.g., insults: I can think of a couple of games which give you, the player not your character, a "title" based on your score. Some being just a barely more diplomatic way of saying "wow, you really suck".
Etc. I see no point to go through all his list. Let's just say I find each and every point to be there for a reason. People still do those mistakes in major releases, not just in cell phone Minesweeper games.
Instructions: While technically any game came with a manual, I can think of several which came with piss-poor manuals, including one whose manual seemed to be made for a completely different game. It described stuff that didn't even exist in the game, or didn't work even vaguely like in the manual. I can only assume that they made the manual at a very early point, and changed their mind about half the design by the time they finished it.
Winning: I can think of a lot of games which, while technically weren't impossible to win, felt a need to throw some massive tantrum at you at some point, that was out of your control and nigh impossible to recover from.
E.g., try playing China in EU2. Everything is fun and games until the 1600's, when the game suddenly throws some scripted events at you that raise dissent sky-high and drop your stability in the basement. I mean so high that you literally can't recruit an army any more, and your tax income drops massively. Any conquests you did to that point _will_ be lost, as everyone revolts, _and_ the only way to stabilize the country into something even vaguely playable at that point is to basically move the army out of the capital and hope the rebels kill your government.
While technically it doesn't necessarily mean you've "lost", it sure feels that way.
Or take "Crusader Kings" where, since you're playing a dynasty as opposed to a country, if one of your emperors doesn't have sons your game may well be over. Literally. (Or some other unpleasantries, like finding yourself allowed to continue playing as the Baron of East Bumfuckistan, instead of the empire you've worked on building so far.)
In both cases we're talking stuff that's basically outside the player's control. E.g., in EU2 all that condensed nastiness in the 1600's is on timed scripts. It doesn't matter if you're the best emperor ever and your population loves you, it doesn't matter if your policies don't reflect the historical causes of those revolts, you _will_ have those and your work _will_ be undone as your empire crumbles before your eyes. It will happen no matter what you do, and even if you had any feedback in advance (but you don't) you couldn't prevent it.
How about the right to save and quit when I damn want to, or _need_ to. I remember one game which made me go literally for 10 (yes, TEN!) hours before it gave me a save point.
Nah, I just got the full thing. A couple of co-workers seemed to be thoroughly addicted to it ever since it was released, so I figured, wth, it can't be completely bad then.
Strangely enough;) I'm not _too_ far from the same "I'd rather undergo MMORPG withdrawal" conclusion so far. Well, ok, maybe not that extreme. It's not necessarily that it's "bad" as such. It's just that, well, comparing it to WoW, WoW seemed to do just about everything a little better.
"Couldn't the same really be said for all games? Why aren't you outside playing?"
Now I'm not going to completely aggree with him or anything, and I'm not opposed to a pet simulation as such. But still, just for pointing out the obvious, there's a difference between a dog sim and, say, a jet fighter sim or a Formula 1 sim in that aspect.
You _can_ get a dog fairly cheaply, whereas I don't think most of us could afford an F-16 or MiG-29, even if it was legal to buy one.
Plus, very few people are physically unable to have a dog. Yes, people with allergies do exist, but they're not a majority. Whereas piloting a fighter jet is something which has a lot more strict requirements.
Plus, there are a lot of situations in games which are too risky in real life. If you crash a F1 car, you may well be dead or crippled. (Even a few premier league drivers discovered that.)
Even something more mundane like trying to replicate a medieval duel (e.g., if you want to do that instead of playing WoW) with something even vaguely resembling 6 ft worth of steel blade (as opposed to a silly PVC tube wrapped in foam), even unsharpened, you might break a bone or two. Historically, european straight swords were used to break ribs even through a maille hauberk: even if it didn't penetrate, a hard hit as with an axe or mace could still cause enough damage to disable an opponent.
So there are a lot of situations where doing something in a game is anywhere between the only safe choice, and the only choice, period. Having a dog, on the other hand, just doesn't fit that bill for most people. You don't absolutely _need_ a simulation to play with a dog.
The other aspect is that simulations are but an imperfect replica of the real thing. That goes doubly for any sim that involves AI. Just above anything above the intellect of a goldfish, is just too complex for a modern computer. (And not to mention it would be a full time job for academic AI researchers and psychologists to stimulate, not of a game designer who thinks "AI == hard-coded triggers for simple scripts".)
Having pretty much grown around various pets (but especially cats, hence they're still my preference), and on summer vacations around other farm animals too, I can tell you that the real thing differs _massively_ from anything I've ever seen simulated on the screen. It has quirks, it has moods, it has a personality, etc. E.g., a real dog won't be just unconditional puppy-love, but might as well one day challenge you for leadership of the "pack" if he thinks you're doing an awful job as a pack-leader.
A pet sim can be a substitute for that just about as much as a dating sim is a substitute for having a girlfriend. I.e., not at all.
Plus, there's the whole aspect that it's a living being you physically touch, and which you know isn't hard-coded to just simulate puppy-love. You know that that's a real being reacting to your actions, good or bad, not just some script being triggered. Personally I just don't see how a script can possibly really replace that.
Again, personally I won't lose any sleep if you do use a simulation for that. But just saying I can see where a "get a real dog" recommendation would come from.
Heh. True enough, I'm planning on going back to WoW. My WoW monthly subscription was coming to an end again (it's not set to auto-renew), and I just figured I'd use the opportunity to take a break and see what other games are like too.
Kinda sad that EQ2 not only doesn't live up to WoW, but I've actually found myself preferring to play PSO Blue Burst (in all its 5-year-old-graphics glory) instead of EQ2.
"I've heard X sucks" is actually a very valid comment, and doesn't imply one stopped thinking for oneself.
At one point, you just have to acknowledge that stuff exists that you haven't personally measured. (E.g., I'm willing to bet you haven't measured the speed of life yourself, but were told what it is.) Saying "I've heard that" already says that he's making that distinction. So I don't know what else do you want from him.
You want someone to personally try everything before ever even mentioning it? Well, I hope you'll remember trying it first if you ever post in a thread about suicide, then.
You want some independent thinking? How about the fact it's
A) based on the biggest SF franchise in history (and I mean both movie franchise and games franchise. Don't think only KOTOR, think about 80 SW games released since the 70's. It's a bigger franchise not only than Warcraft, but than all Blizzard's titles put together), and
B) available for half the price of any other MMO to someone who already had an Everquest _or_ Planetside account (or for free to anyone who already subscribed to two Sony games),
and... yet it ended up in which place as number of subscribers goes? Every single SW geek waited for it like it was the second coming of Christ, and then ended up playing WoW instead.
So very independently thinking, while I won't say "it sucks", I'd say it obviously appeals to a lot less people than WoW does. In fact, it appeals to a lot less SW fans than WoW does, and WoW isn't even a SW title.
So, yes, it's entirely reasonable to expect Lucas and Sony to try to grab more of that market. Not necessarily as a KOTOR MMO, and not necessarily as a different game that competes head-on with SWG for the same players (it can just as well be an expansion pack instead), but there _is_ plenty of room for them to try to grab more players.
And if it makes any difference, I'm a guy, so I don't think that's the cause there. I don't know about shy and "too sensitive". I figure I'm anything but "too sensitive", but some people just aren't fun to play with.
E.g., the kind of control freak that just has to have everyone do something _exactly_ his way, oh yeah, that one got on my nerves quickly too. Bonus points if his way is all wrong to start with. (E.g., I've grouped with a mage who insisted that he opens the fight with a big AOE attack against a whole company of enemies, and just got mad that everyone else didn't heal him quickly enough after that.) I don't think it's really necessary to be "too sensitive" to get annoyed by that kind of person.
E.g., ending up in the wrong level bracket to group with your friends, that's actually a very common problem.
One game which I've found more tolerable in those aspects, is Planetside. I don't know if you like the genre. It's basically a MMO-FPS. But it doesn't have a lot of the more traditional MMO problems.
E.g., levels in Planetside don't work like in most MMOs. Having more levels in Planetside gives one more flexibility in what mix of equipment they can take, but nothing more. It is certainly possible to contribute your fair share to a level 20 group as a level 1 player.
E.g., "groups" (well, "squads") are a much more loose concept in Planetside. Being in a squad gives you the group chat, which is very useful for coordinating your actions. But for anything else (e.g., xp) just being in the same area/battle is more than enough.
Even as a support character (medic, repairman, driver, etc), you can get the same xp by just going to the nearest battle and healing the people fighting. You don't have to be grouped with them. Or you can drive an AMS or ANT to where one is needed, and get the same rewards whether you're grouped with anyone or not. Or a few other options.
Again, I don't know if it's your kind of game. It's closer to FPS than to a medieval RPG, which also means pure PvP, so it's not everyone's cup of tea. But if you think you can live with that, it might be worth a try.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I was asking the same question: "why on earth would anyone want to play a Massively MULTI-PLAYER game solo? WTF is the point of playing it as a Massively SINGLE-PLAYER game?"
When the gods want to punish you, they give you what you asked for. In this case, the MMO gods made me understand. After a couple of months of doing pickup-groups in COH, I ended up with a severe case of misanthropy.
The problem in a nutshell is that functioning as a group is, more or less, like making a watch out of a bunch of cogs. They have to fit together. Throwing together some random cogs isn't always going to work that well.
Some of the random pickup groups I've been in, to borrow someone else's expression, bordered on traumatic.
Some people were just literally unable to function in a group. Some people lacked even the basic skills or clue to play the game at all. (Somehow they had gotten a character to level 50, but didn't yet figure out how tanking works or how EOE attacks work. Did they buy that level 50 character on ebay, or wtf?) And then there were those with a major attitude problem.
At some point I was actually at the point where groups were what got me killed and into XP debt, and soloing was what I had to do to actually repay that debt and eventually level-up. _Literally_.
I know, so I'm supposed to find a group I can play with, and avoid pickup groups, right? Trust me, I thought of that too.
The problem there are the levels. E.g., in COH, by the time my character was level 35, some of my online friends were level 20 (those who weren't as hardcore players as I was), but on the other hand some were already level 50. (Being a teenager on vacation and playing 16 hours a day can have that effect. Even I can't compete with that.)
And then there's another aspect: sometimes I just don't have the time to group, or none of them are online at the moment. E.g., I've been known to play some half an hour in the morning before I went to work. The problem there is that:
1. that's just not enough time to put together a group and do anything meaningful together. I can run bash a few NPCs, maybe even do a quick solo quest, but that's it.
2. it's a pretty crappy time by anyone's standards. The chances of anyone I know being online at that hour, are rather low. Heck, even for grouping with strangers it's pretty bad on games with a low-ish population. (E.g., in EQ2 last time I've grouped in the morning in the newbie area, there were exactly two people there: me and a rogue.)
So any game where you can't solo, is inherently one game I can't play at all in that time slot, or in any situation where I don't have at least half the evening available.
1. You seem to assume that everyone joined from the start, and got a full 3 years out of it. Which is just false.
I'm pretty sure it was still on the shelves at EB Games, together with its expansion pack, last weekend. In fact, I almost bought it. (But ended up getting EQ2 instead.)
I know I'd be a tad pissed off if I bought a game _and_ its expansion pack, and 5 days later someone pulls the plug on it. Not "the sky is falling" kind of pissed off, but still.
2. I don't think even the "but you got 3 years out of it" argument holds much water anyway.
The point is, in an ideal world, it should be up to me when I want to stop using something. Whether I want to still use my old screwdriver after a decade or still read Shakespeare some centuries after those plays were written, it should be up to me. I still occasionally play games, or use programs, that are a _lot_ older than 3 years. E.g., I occasionally still play Playstation games or even SNES games.
There is something that just doesn't feel right that someone can remotely pull the plug and cause something I bought to stop working. (Again, not in a "the sky is falling" kinda way, but nevertheless, just not right.)
3. One problem I've already bitched about in relation to copyright, is basically that something can be "unpublished". Effectively taken out of our common cultural heritage. I've argued that copyright was supposed to help get that stuff published, and using it to basically bury a book, a movie or even a game, is contrary to the very spirit of it.
This kind of thing is to me 10 times worse. It's not just stopping any further copies, but causing all existing copies to stop working. It is this time _really_ unpublished.
If I'll want to show my grandkids what books I've read in my youth, I can get a copy out and show it to them. But if I'll want to show them what online games we played back then, one of them just ceased being available. It just won't exist by then any more. There'll be no way to even launch it. Not in an emulator, not on an ancient PC in a museum, etc.
That's in a nutshell my biggest concern with this kind of stuff, and with DRM: it can "unpublish" stuff from our cultural heritage. And AC2 is in a sense a grim landmark: while we all knew that such stuff was theoretically possible, now we can see just that happening.
E.g., if a song was published on (unprotected) CDs and the copyright holder decides to bury it by not allowing any more copies, at least the existing CDs can be ripped. With DRM and/or such subscription based services, it can be totally wiped out. Not only there'll be no more copies, but even the existing ones can be effectively shredded into a bunch of no longer usable junk.
I'm not against companies using either subscriptions or DRM to make money. Money is why this stuff got made in the first place, plus there's nothing wrong with people being paid for their work. But we should have _some_ legal safeguards against using it to effectively erase something as if it never had existed.
The problem with some of these things isn't as much that they're sequels, but that they're not that much fun as a game.
E.g., I just started on EQ2 and I can already tell that WoW is simply a much more fun game.
So maybe it's not that sequels have a hard time, it's that the better games thrive and the worse ones die. Being a sequel to a successful game, or based on a successful franchise can only do so much. But in the end, if the actual game is lacking, it can't save you.
"If the game never ends, why would a player pull up the stakes in a game where so much time and effort is invested just to move into a newer, shinier world and start all over?"
Actually, that happens all the time. Even Sony plans around the average player sticking around for only 6 months or so. Sure, some get bored and leave before even their free month is over, and some go nuts and hang around for 8 years in UO, but the vast majority don't.
So the problem isn't that people never leave EQ1. They had more than a milion that came and left. (Although by now it's probably populated mostly with those that don't leave. They tend to accumulate.) But when they leave, they won't automatically just move to the sequel, and won't automatically stick around if the sequel isn't that much fun.
If Joe Average leaves EQ 1 today, there are a lot more games than EQ 2 competing for Joe's time and credit card. And Joe might as well end up on WoW instead, if that's the better game.
Well, you have a point, and I knew that kind of answer was coming. But here's why that willy-waving was necessary: because otherwise invariably someone comes and says one of
1. "yeah, you only prefer consoles because you probably have a shit PC. On my 9800 LE, PC games are much better than on a shitty GF2MX in an XBox."
2. "yeah, but PCs are so powerful, they can emulate consoles"
As I've said (and as you undoubtedly noticed yourself) "my PC is better than your console" flames aren't something new. It's literally just "yet another thread" where the exact same tired "but mine has more MHz" arguments are repeated verbatim. So by now I have some idea what answers to expect, because I've seen them _literally_ a hundred times before.
So basically I preempted that. That paragraph was basically supposed to say "unless you're trying to tell me you're on even more ludicrious hardware, don't you dare tell me that at some point raw hardware power becomes a replacement for gameplay. Because even on this top-end machine I can tell you first-hand that it still didn't. And no, even that configuration still doesn't emulate a PS2 or XBox."
I've actually had the honour. I had to sell my brand new up-sampling 100 Hz TV and buy a regular 50 Hz interlaced one (I'm in Europe) to be able to play lightgun games. Well, I got a Dreamcast VGA addapter first, but then I went and sold the TV too.
Ok, and here are two examples of FPS released before Carmack's Wolfenstein 3D:
1. Bethesda Softworks's The Terminator, a game released in 1990. (The Underdogs says 1991, Terminatorfiles says 1990. I seem to remember 1990.) It featured a lot more complex geometry than Wolfenstein 3D or even Doom. (E.g., people animated as polygons rather than sprites, walls that weren't just vertical, outdoors scenery, etc.) And gameplay elements that were a decade ahead of their time, such as driving a car around town and being able to run over pedestrians.
2. Corporation. A FPS much like Wolfenstein, and actually a little more complex, released in 1991.
By comparison Carmack's first FPS (Wolfenstein 3D) was released in 1992.
Both weren't textured, but they were otherwise FPS all right. They weren't even the only ones or the first one. The genre existed all right. Carmack only made it pretty.
"I thought he did invent the FPS, but he never says so because he's so modest."
No. There were FPS games before, they just weren't textured. So basically all that Carmack did wasn't to invent a genre, but to figure out how to do real-time texturing.
Carmack may well be a genius, but as a programmer, not as a game designer. I can of course respect a good programmer, but let's keep it realistic anyway.
Yes, I've bitched myself about controls that work only because you already know them, and because you know a lot of other stuff already.
But just for fairness sake, I must say exceptions do exist.
"Give your wife/girlfriend the choice to use a GB/GBA/NES or a Dualshock 2/Xbox/GC controller and she will go with the one that is less intimidating every time unless she is a gamer too."
I actually one-upped that experiment by getting my grandma once to try Sierra's Emperor: Rise Of The Middle Kingdom. We're old woman which not only isn't a gamer, but is completely computer-illiterate. She doesn't own a computer, and never used one for anything.
You know what? She was actually doing a lot better than I expected. She did get confused between left and right mouse buttons, mostly because she didn't even hold the thing right. (Ok, Apple users can feel vindicated.) But we're talking someone who had never held a mouse before, so I'd say it's excusable. But still, she soon was placing farms and building roads like a pro. Well, better than I expected anyway.
Getting old mom to play Tropico was also a painless exercise. One go through the tutorial and... well, let's put it like this: according to dad, he hasn't seen warm food in the next two months;)
On the other hand, trying to get her hooked on a MMO just proved your point about too complex controls. Between moving in 3D, having to wrestle the camera, and use a bunch of different attacks and buffs, it was painful even for me to look at.
The Sims, on the other hand, was also no problem, although she didn't like the game anyway.
Consoles, on the other hand, I find to be less of a problem, actually. A modern controller might be "intimidating", but there are enough games where you don't have to use all 12 buttons. At any rate, I haven't had any problems getting both my parents hooked on Mario 64, at a time where neither had any experience with gamepads.
(Tangent: I wish someone made game designers try their usability just that way. Forget demographic studies on 16 year old hard-core gamers. Get an 80 year old grandma who's never played before, and see if you can teach _her_ your clever controls.)
So basically I'm guessing that it's simply a case of which games you've tried, rather than all new games being crap, and all old games being gold. Some games have good controls, some games have bad controls, and yes, a lot of them have controls that work only if you've spent the last 20 years getting used to them. Admittedly, the first category is also the smallest, but they do exist.
As for having a heart, soul and vision, that's IMHO a completely different topic. A game can have a great interface and still be a clone, or a game can be original and have a vision and still have a pure nightmare interface. But I've already ranted too much, so I'll skip that discussion.
The point was more like that someone with that kind of a system still occasionally plays Playstation and Dreamcast games, and occasionally even emulated SNES games. A game can be good even if it was written for a 7 MHz console, that's all.
I do however also play PC games, hence keeping that PC upgraded.
And yet those lousy $200 often kept me entertained better and longer than the many thousand I've dumped into keeping my PC bleeding edge. My current graphics card alone, it's a 7800 GTX, would pay for two consoles.
Yet on consoles I've not only found at least as many games worth playing, but also:
1. Games are actually tested and work. I don't have to wait for a month to download a patch, I don't get game bugs blamed on my hardware or drivers, etc. (True story: Victoria 2, German version, threw a script _syntax_ error right at the start of the main campaign. As released, it couldn't work on _any_ hardware.)
2. There are no hardware drivers to update, ever. I don't have to care if ATI's detonators 5.8 work better or worse with my game than the 5.7, or which version of NVidia's detonators screwed up which settings, or if I need a patch for the Creative drivers, etc. Again, games just work as is.
3. The game is optimized for that hardware. Read some console game reviews sites. Some need to mention if a game ever drops to 30 fps instead of a clean 60 fps. No upgrade race ever needed, no watching the game crawl on hardware that matches the _recommended_ configuration, and no getting insulted by clueless fanboys if you dare complain about it.
So, hey, if someone's giving me all that "for a lousy $200", kudos to them. Just the peace of mind that I can take any game home, pop it in, and watch it run flawlessly right _now_ (as opposed to maybe next month, if they don't screw up again in the patch)... personally I'd say that's worth every single cent in those $200 and more.
Well, gee, yet another thread along the lines of "but gaming platform X is better than platform Y, because its hardware is better".
Hello? Aren't we missing something? Like, you know, the _games_? Because it seems to me like that's the only reason to own a gaming rig in the first place: to play the games.
Until you can tell me that you're playing directly with the shader pipelines, instead of with a game that uses those... sorry, I'll concentrate on what games I can play on it, instead of the bogus "mine has more MHz than yours" willy-waving.
Want to know why I bought a console, "my PC has more MHz" willy-waving be damned? Well, for the games. Games such as:
- Gran Turismo, which was a better racing game than any racing game that ran on a PC
- Fighting games, which pretty much _disappeared_ on the PC after Mortal Kombat
- Jade Empire and Fable alone were worth the price of an XBox, and more
- Japanese RPGs, including not just Square ones, but also some very original ones like Valkyrie Profile and Persona 2: Eternal Punishment. Those two alone would make the price of a Playstation worth every cent I've paid for it
- Lightgun games. Yeah, the PC has keyboard and mouse. Wake me up when I can plug a lighgun in and play a House Of The Dead or Time Crisis game the way it was meant to be played.
Etc.
In a nutshell, it's all about the games. If a platform has games I want to play, I'll go buy that platform and play those games. It's that simple.
I don't care which has the higher MHz or bogus benchmark scores. I don't play 3DMark, I play _games_.
I have a top end Athlon 64 4000+, 2 GB RAM, a 7800 GTX, and a WD Raptor in my current PC, but trust me, looking at 3DMark still gets old after one 10 minute run. I'll play a game instead to keep myself entertained.
Yes, lemming. Those ads did pay for a part of the movie you watch, or for a part of your city's funds. (Which otherwise would have had to come out of your taxes.) The road you drive your car to work, surprise, might have been paved with money earned out of selling ad space.
Somewhere there was a negotiated contract. A _bilateral_ affair. A sale-purchase affair. _That_ is what makes it different from spam, and that is why we tolerate them.
Product placement in a movie, yes, was a negotiated affair and they paid a part of making that movie. It wasn't just someone sneaking cans of Coke or replacing the shoes with Nikes until one got on camera. They actually negotiated that placement and paid for it.
Ads on billboards, again, someone paid something to the city for that. Nike or whatever didn't just drop by and start hammering their own billboards all over the place. They negotiated space on those billboards and paid for it.
If you can can't tell the difference between "unsolicited" and "sale", then you have a problem.
That's why we tolerate them, lemming. Because they pay for something in return. If billboards just got put there as unilaterally as spam happens, yes, we'd vote a law against those too.
No, it doesn't have to 100% pay for all seats, eliminate world hunger, and remove DRM, or whatever. You're arguing... what? That if something's not 100% altruistic and perfect (e.g., yeah, it paid for a part of the movie, but it didn't also remove DRM and make all tickets free), then there's no difference between that and something that's 100% plunder and annoyance? Geesh.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I really don't have a life, so I buy pretty much everything released. I actually have a copy of Daikatana, or games like Aiken's Artefact which AFAIK sold a grand total of 800 copies. Or you know the Penny Arcade strip where Gabe ends up buying Barbie Horse Adventures because nothing else was released the whole summer? I actually went to the game shops to look for that game, after reading that strip.
At any rate, well, "bad" is a very relative thing. As I've said, it's not like a majority of games commit a majority of those mistakes. (Well, maybe except for the choices one. That's actually very common.) But still, it's often enough to see a point in such a list. Just so hopefully we can finally bury those mistakes and move on to trying new stuff, instead of rehashing the same "I know, let's remove save points" ideas.
I'm not even sure why people persist in the save game tradition. It's not like it's actually needed any more, and I can think of even Japanese console games (e.g., "Persona 2: Eternal Punishment") which do just fine with a PC-style save-anywhere scheme.
I can see how that madness got started, back in the days when it would be a point where you got a code instead of actually saving. I can even see some point later, when flash cartridges were a few k and every byte counted.
But nowadays they're not even needed any more. Any console game actually saves the map and coordinates anyway. It's just an extra check in the program, which can invariably be disabled with a cheat code, and the game still runs flawlessly.
And even as gameplay devices:
1. They don't really act as deterrents. On the contrary, they actually make me save more often. In games without save points I can go for an hour or two without saving. In games with save points I just have to save at each point, and sometimes go back a room or two to save after each event. Just because God knows when and where the next one will be.
2. It's a prop _in_ the game world for an _ooc_ (Out Of Character) action. It's something that just doesn't belong there, and as such it doesn't help with suspension of disbelief. (Yes, a lot of games did try to offer some in-character explanation of what those are, but frankly, it invariably ended up so lame and unnatural, that it was even worse than not explaining anything.)
So why do designers insist on having those?
True, I could live with that. Quite happily, in fact.
Well, then, if "he" can be used to mean any gender, then why can't "she" be used in exactly the same way? It's just as clear, it's certainly familiar (it's one word you hear every day), and it's just as concise (one extra "s" now and then won't lengthen the whole article by any significant amount. And when you read it, it's still one syllable.)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating either of them as such, but I _do_ find it peculiar that someone would need to throw a "what's with this 'she' crap?" tantrum. Using 'she' was insulting... how?
I don't know, I'm a guy myself, but I find it anywhere between hillarious and idiotic (or most often a mixture of both) the way some guys absolutely have to defend their supremacy in some field as if their manhood depended on it. As if, god forbid, even acknowledging that women gamers exist (e.g., by using a 'she' now and then) could make their dick shrivel and fall off.
Let me rephrase that: I don't even think it's a "guy thing" as such. It's not about "guys" as such, it's about complexed insecure guys who need to put someone down just to mask their own insecurities.
And you'd thing that what with being the victims of that, nerds would know better than to do that. In practice, frankly, it's the exact opposite. When you see someone blanketly insulting whole population segments, for the most idiotic and irrelevant pretexts (e.g., that they don't use vi, or that they play on a non-PK facet in a MMO, or whatever), chances are it'll be a nerd.
To anyone falling in that category: folks, get a life. Gaming is just a passtime, no more. It doesn't make you a "man" or anything, it just makes you less bored. Noone will come and beg to carry your baby because of your clan's scores in CS or your Linux PDA or whatever.
You seem to define "deffective" as in "the CD was physically unreadable", which is just about the only thing that would be solved by giving someone another copy. What if the software itself is broken and deffective? Because that's the actual product I bought there, and the CD was just the medium it comes on.
E.g., the german version of Victoria threw a script _syntax_ error right at the start of a new campaign. Yes, you've read that right. Not a crash to desktop, not some graphics glitch, _nothing_ even remotely blamable on my hardware or drivers. A script _syntax_ error. That game couldn't work as released on _any_ hardware.
E.g., a german version again, Everquest 2 was released with a completely broken translation, which actually did impact gameplay. NPCs and items would be named completely differently in the quest text and in the actual game, making it literally impossible to do what you were told. The NPC you were told to kill simply didn't even exist in the game. (And generally, you know it's bad when even the few fans tell you to try translating it word-for-word back into English, to figure out some texts.)
E.g., Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst doesn't seem to be able to connect at all on my XP machine, although it works flawlessly on my Windows 2000 machine. (So, no, it's not a case of ports being blocked by the router or ISP.) Mind you, I needed to dig through tech support faqs even just to get it to the point it would try to connect: first it didn't even let me input my name and password. No, literally, typing anything in those input boxes was a futile exercise. The only key they accepted was basically escape to cancel it.
E.g., to take an older game, take The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall. The collision detection was so bad, that you'd fall into the void even when running on flat groud, or when teleporting back to town. I'm picking on it, instead of newer ones, because it's a clear-cut case of deffective software, and can't be blamed on drivers or hardware. It took many _months_ for Bethesda to try to fix it, and eventually they gave up and made a cheat code to teleport you back to the beginning of the map if you fell into the void.
E.g., Morrowind was shipped with a pretty nasty race condition that resulted in a crash to desktop when zoning. But as is usually the case with race conditions, on different PCs it produced wildly different results. On some you had a crash every couple of hours, but some people couldn't even leave the starting ship at all, because the game would crash when they went through the hatch. I'm not even going into the aspect that a game that crashes at all _is_ deffective, but the fact remains that some people just couldn't play it as shipped.
Etc.
So giving them a replacement CD is gonna solve... what? No, seriously.
Yeah, they were sooo trying to rip you off, by not accepting a game they couldn't run at all. Not. Geesh.
You'd be surprised how many major full-price PC or console games violate at least one of those points. Sure, if by "rampant" you mean "everyone violating most of them", it's not that bad, but violating at least one happens often enough to make me happy that someone wrote that list. I wish they could also make it mandatory reading for every wannabe game designer.
Sure, you're right in that it all sounds like common sense, and it's stuff that's been "discovered" two decades ago. Nothing new and revolutionary in any of those points.
Yet people still come up with cretinous ideas like "I know, let's make our piss-poor 2-hour-long game seem longer by disabling save and making the player have to replay the whole level, again and again, until he discovers the right solution by trial and error. That'll make it longer."
Or take decision making. We all know that gameplay is about decisions, even minor ones like whether I drop this piece here or there in Tetris, and that Sid Meier quote is anything but new. But then it's actually rampant to have games where basically you have only an illusion of choice.
E.g., RPG dialogues where you get 2 or 3 choices, but only one works, and the others just get you asked again. Sorry, that's _not_ a choice. And I don't just mean Japanese console RPG's, btw. E.g., in "Vampire, The Masquerade: Redemption" you had such choices as whether you want to save some people from a golem. But saying "no" just made you do it anyway.
E.g., choices of the kind Brian Reynolds (designer of games like Alpha Centauri) called a non-choice. If a piano falls on top of you and you have an option to jump out of the way, or stay and be squished, it's not a choice. Choices like that, where one alternative is there just as a sick joke to tell you "you should have picked the other one" are more common than you seem to think.
E.g., insults: I can think of a couple of games which give you, the player not your character, a "title" based on your score. Some being just a barely more diplomatic way of saying "wow, you really suck".
Etc. I see no point to go through all his list. Let's just say I find each and every point to be there for a reason. People still do those mistakes in major releases, not just in cell phone Minesweeper games.
Instructions: While technically any game came with a manual, I can think of several which came with piss-poor manuals, including one whose manual seemed to be made for a completely different game. It described stuff that didn't even exist in the game, or didn't work even vaguely like in the manual. I can only assume that they made the manual at a very early point, and changed their mind about half the design by the time they finished it.
Winning: I can think of a lot of games which, while technically weren't impossible to win, felt a need to throw some massive tantrum at you at some point, that was out of your control and nigh impossible to recover from.
E.g., try playing China in EU2. Everything is fun and games until the 1600's, when the game suddenly throws some scripted events at you that raise dissent sky-high and drop your stability in the basement. I mean so high that you literally can't recruit an army any more, and your tax income drops massively. Any conquests you did to that point _will_ be lost, as everyone revolts, _and_ the only way to stabilize the country into something even vaguely playable at that point is to basically move the army out of the capital and hope the rebels kill your government.
While technically it doesn't necessarily mean you've "lost", it sure feels that way.
Or take "Crusader Kings" where, since you're playing a dynasty as opposed to a country, if one of your emperors doesn't have sons your game may well be over. Literally. (Or some other unpleasantries, like finding yourself allowed to continue playing as the Baron of East Bumfuckistan, instead of the empire you've worked on building so far.)
In both cases we're talking stuff that's basically outside the player's control. E.g., in EU2 all that condensed nastiness in the 1600's is on timed scripts. It doesn't matter if you're the best emperor ever and your population loves you, it doesn't matter if your policies don't reflect the historical causes of those revolts, you _will_ have those and your work _will_ be undone as your empire crumbles before your eyes. It will happen no matter what you do, and even if you had any feedback in advance (but you don't) you couldn't prevent it.
How about the right to save and quit when I damn want to, or _need_ to. I remember one game which made me go literally for 10 (yes, TEN!) hours before it gave me a save point.
Nah, I just got the full thing. A couple of co-workers seemed to be thoroughly addicted to it ever since it was released, so I figured, wth, it can't be completely bad then.
;) I'm not _too_ far from the same "I'd rather undergo MMORPG withdrawal" conclusion so far. Well, ok, maybe not that extreme. It's not necessarily that it's "bad" as such. It's just that, well, comparing it to WoW, WoW seemed to do just about everything a little better.
Strangely enough
"Couldn't the same really be said for all games? Why aren't you outside playing?"
Now I'm not going to completely aggree with him or anything, and I'm not opposed to a pet simulation as such. But still, just for pointing out the obvious, there's a difference between a dog sim and, say, a jet fighter sim or a Formula 1 sim in that aspect.
You _can_ get a dog fairly cheaply, whereas I don't think most of us could afford an F-16 or MiG-29, even if it was legal to buy one.
Plus, very few people are physically unable to have a dog. Yes, people with allergies do exist, but they're not a majority. Whereas piloting a fighter jet is something which has a lot more strict requirements.
Plus, there are a lot of situations in games which are too risky in real life. If you crash a F1 car, you may well be dead or crippled. (Even a few premier league drivers discovered that.)
Even something more mundane like trying to replicate a medieval duel (e.g., if you want to do that instead of playing WoW) with something even vaguely resembling 6 ft worth of steel blade (as opposed to a silly PVC tube wrapped in foam), even unsharpened, you might break a bone or two. Historically, european straight swords were used to break ribs even through a maille hauberk: even if it didn't penetrate, a hard hit as with an axe or mace could still cause enough damage to disable an opponent.
So there are a lot of situations where doing something in a game is anywhere between the only safe choice, and the only choice, period. Having a dog, on the other hand, just doesn't fit that bill for most people. You don't absolutely _need_ a simulation to play with a dog.
The other aspect is that simulations are but an imperfect replica of the real thing. That goes doubly for any sim that involves AI. Just above anything above the intellect of a goldfish, is just too complex for a modern computer. (And not to mention it would be a full time job for academic AI researchers and psychologists to stimulate, not of a game designer who thinks "AI == hard-coded triggers for simple scripts".)
Having pretty much grown around various pets (but especially cats, hence they're still my preference), and on summer vacations around other farm animals too, I can tell you that the real thing differs _massively_ from anything I've ever seen simulated on the screen. It has quirks, it has moods, it has a personality, etc. E.g., a real dog won't be just unconditional puppy-love, but might as well one day challenge you for leadership of the "pack" if he thinks you're doing an awful job as a pack-leader.
A pet sim can be a substitute for that just about as much as a dating sim is a substitute for having a girlfriend. I.e., not at all.
Plus, there's the whole aspect that it's a living being you physically touch, and which you know isn't hard-coded to just simulate puppy-love. You know that that's a real being reacting to your actions, good or bad, not just some script being triggered. Personally I just don't see how a script can possibly really replace that.
Again, personally I won't lose any sleep if you do use a simulation for that. But just saying I can see where a "get a real dog" recommendation would come from.
"You have my deepest condolences.
Signed,
- Avid WoW gamer"
Heh. True enough, I'm planning on going back to WoW. My WoW monthly subscription was coming to an end again (it's not set to auto-renew), and I just figured I'd use the opportunity to take a break and see what other games are like too.
Kinda sad that EQ2 not only doesn't live up to WoW, but I've actually found myself preferring to play PSO Blue Burst (in all its 5-year-old-graphics glory) instead of EQ2.
"I've heard X sucks" is actually a very valid comment, and doesn't imply one stopped thinking for oneself.
At one point, you just have to acknowledge that stuff exists that you haven't personally measured. (E.g., I'm willing to bet you haven't measured the speed of life yourself, but were told what it is.) Saying "I've heard that" already says that he's making that distinction. So I don't know what else do you want from him.
You want someone to personally try everything before ever even mentioning it? Well, I hope you'll remember trying it first if you ever post in a thread about suicide, then.
You want some independent thinking? How about the fact it's
A) based on the biggest SF franchise in history (and I mean both movie franchise and games franchise. Don't think only KOTOR, think about 80 SW games released since the 70's. It's a bigger franchise not only than Warcraft, but than all Blizzard's titles put together), and
B) available for half the price of any other MMO to someone who already had an Everquest _or_ Planetside account (or for free to anyone who already subscribed to two Sony games),
and... yet it ended up in which place as number of subscribers goes? Every single SW geek waited for it like it was the second coming of Christ, and then ended up playing WoW instead.
So very independently thinking, while I won't say "it sucks", I'd say it obviously appeals to a lot less people than WoW does. In fact, it appeals to a lot less SW fans than WoW does, and WoW isn't even a SW title.
So, yes, it's entirely reasonable to expect Lucas and Sony to try to grab more of that market. Not necessarily as a KOTOR MMO, and not necessarily as a different game that competes head-on with SWG for the same players (it can just as well be an expansion pack instead), but there _is_ plenty of room for them to try to grab more players.
And if it makes any difference, I'm a guy, so I don't think that's the cause there. I don't know about shy and "too sensitive". I figure I'm anything but "too sensitive", but some people just aren't fun to play with.
E.g., the kind of control freak that just has to have everyone do something _exactly_ his way, oh yeah, that one got on my nerves quickly too. Bonus points if his way is all wrong to start with. (E.g., I've grouped with a mage who insisted that he opens the fight with a big AOE attack against a whole company of enemies, and just got mad that everyone else didn't heal him quickly enough after that.) I don't think it's really necessary to be "too sensitive" to get annoyed by that kind of person.
E.g., ending up in the wrong level bracket to group with your friends, that's actually a very common problem.
One game which I've found more tolerable in those aspects, is Planetside. I don't know if you like the genre. It's basically a MMO-FPS. But it doesn't have a lot of the more traditional MMO problems.
E.g., levels in Planetside don't work like in most MMOs. Having more levels in Planetside gives one more flexibility in what mix of equipment they can take, but nothing more. It is certainly possible to contribute your fair share to a level 20 group as a level 1 player.
E.g., "groups" (well, "squads") are a much more loose concept in Planetside. Being in a squad gives you the group chat, which is very useful for coordinating your actions. But for anything else (e.g., xp) just being in the same area/battle is more than enough.
Even as a support character (medic, repairman, driver, etc), you can get the same xp by just going to the nearest battle and healing the people fighting. You don't have to be grouped with them. Or you can drive an AMS or ANT to where one is needed, and get the same rewards whether you're grouped with anyone or not. Or a few other options.
Again, I don't know if it's your kind of game. It's closer to FPS than to a medieval RPG, which also means pure PvP, so it's not everyone's cup of tea. But if you think you can live with that, it might be worth a try.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I was asking the same question: "why on earth would anyone want to play a Massively MULTI-PLAYER game solo? WTF is the point of playing it as a Massively SINGLE-PLAYER game?"
When the gods want to punish you, they give you what you asked for. In this case, the MMO gods made me understand. After a couple of months of doing pickup-groups in COH, I ended up with a severe case of misanthropy.
The problem in a nutshell is that functioning as a group is, more or less, like making a watch out of a bunch of cogs. They have to fit together. Throwing together some random cogs isn't always going to work that well.
Some of the random pickup groups I've been in, to borrow someone else's expression, bordered on traumatic.
Some people were just literally unable to function in a group. Some people lacked even the basic skills or clue to play the game at all. (Somehow they had gotten a character to level 50, but didn't yet figure out how tanking works or how EOE attacks work. Did they buy that level 50 character on ebay, or wtf?) And then there were those with a major attitude problem.
At some point I was actually at the point where groups were what got me killed and into XP debt, and soloing was what I had to do to actually repay that debt and eventually level-up. _Literally_.
I know, so I'm supposed to find a group I can play with, and avoid pickup groups, right? Trust me, I thought of that too.
The problem there are the levels. E.g., in COH, by the time my character was level 35, some of my online friends were level 20 (those who weren't as hardcore players as I was), but on the other hand some were already level 50. (Being a teenager on vacation and playing 16 hours a day can have that effect. Even I can't compete with that.)
And then there's another aspect: sometimes I just don't have the time to group, or none of them are online at the moment. E.g., I've been known to play some half an hour in the morning before I went to work. The problem there is that:
1. that's just not enough time to put together a group and do anything meaningful together. I can run bash a few NPCs, maybe even do a quick solo quest, but that's it.
2. it's a pretty crappy time by anyone's standards. The chances of anyone I know being online at that hour, are rather low. Heck, even for grouping with strangers it's pretty bad on games with a low-ish population. (E.g., in EQ2 last time I've grouped in the morning in the newbie area, there were exactly two people there: me and a rogue.)
So any game where you can't solo, is inherently one game I can't play at all in that time slot, or in any situation where I don't have at least half the evening available.
1. You seem to assume that everyone joined from the start, and got a full 3 years out of it. Which is just false.
I'm pretty sure it was still on the shelves at EB Games, together with its expansion pack, last weekend. In fact, I almost bought it. (But ended up getting EQ2 instead.)
I know I'd be a tad pissed off if I bought a game _and_ its expansion pack, and 5 days later someone pulls the plug on it. Not "the sky is falling" kind of pissed off, but still.
2. I don't think even the "but you got 3 years out of it" argument holds much water anyway.
The point is, in an ideal world, it should be up to me when I want to stop using something. Whether I want to still use my old screwdriver after a decade or still read Shakespeare some centuries after those plays were written, it should be up to me. I still occasionally play games, or use programs, that are a _lot_ older than 3 years. E.g., I occasionally still play Playstation games or even SNES games.
There is something that just doesn't feel right that someone can remotely pull the plug and cause something I bought to stop working. (Again, not in a "the sky is falling" kinda way, but nevertheless, just not right.)
3. One problem I've already bitched about in relation to copyright, is basically that something can be "unpublished". Effectively taken out of our common cultural heritage. I've argued that copyright was supposed to help get that stuff published, and using it to basically bury a book, a movie or even a game, is contrary to the very spirit of it.
This kind of thing is to me 10 times worse. It's not just stopping any further copies, but causing all existing copies to stop working. It is this time _really_ unpublished.
If I'll want to show my grandkids what books I've read in my youth, I can get a copy out and show it to them. But if I'll want to show them what online games we played back then, one of them just ceased being available. It just won't exist by then any more. There'll be no way to even launch it. Not in an emulator, not on an ancient PC in a museum, etc.
That's in a nutshell my biggest concern with this kind of stuff, and with DRM: it can "unpublish" stuff from our cultural heritage. And AC2 is in a sense a grim landmark: while we all knew that such stuff was theoretically possible, now we can see just that happening.
E.g., if a song was published on (unprotected) CDs and the copyright holder decides to bury it by not allowing any more copies, at least the existing CDs can be ripped. With DRM and/or such subscription based services, it can be totally wiped out. Not only there'll be no more copies, but even the existing ones can be effectively shredded into a bunch of no longer usable junk.
I'm not against companies using either subscriptions or DRM to make money. Money is why this stuff got made in the first place, plus there's nothing wrong with people being paid for their work. But we should have _some_ legal safeguards against using it to effectively erase something as if it never had existed.
The problem with some of these things isn't as much that they're sequels, but that they're not that much fun as a game.
E.g., I just started on EQ2 and I can already tell that WoW is simply a much more fun game.
So maybe it's not that sequels have a hard time, it's that the better games thrive and the worse ones die. Being a sequel to a successful game, or based on a successful franchise can only do so much. But in the end, if the actual game is lacking, it can't save you.
"If the game never ends, why would a player pull up the stakes in a game where so much time and effort is invested just to move into a newer, shinier world and start all over?"
Actually, that happens all the time. Even Sony plans around the average player sticking around for only 6 months or so. Sure, some get bored and leave before even their free month is over, and some go nuts and hang around for 8 years in UO, but the vast majority don't.
So the problem isn't that people never leave EQ1. They had more than a milion that came and left. (Although by now it's probably populated mostly with those that don't leave. They tend to accumulate.) But when they leave, they won't automatically just move to the sequel, and won't automatically stick around if the sequel isn't that much fun.
If Joe Average leaves EQ 1 today, there are a lot more games than EQ 2 competing for Joe's time and credit card. And Joe might as well end up on WoW instead, if that's the better game.
Well, you have a point, and I knew that kind of answer was coming. But here's why that willy-waving was necessary: because otherwise invariably someone comes and says one of
1. "yeah, you only prefer consoles because you probably have a shit PC. On my 9800 LE, PC games are much better than on a shitty GF2MX in an XBox."
2. "yeah, but PCs are so powerful, they can emulate consoles"
As I've said (and as you undoubtedly noticed yourself) "my PC is better than your console" flames aren't something new. It's literally just "yet another thread" where the exact same tired "but mine has more MHz" arguments are repeated verbatim. So by now I have some idea what answers to expect, because I've seen them _literally_ a hundred times before.
So basically I preempted that. That paragraph was basically supposed to say "unless you're trying to tell me you're on even more ludicrious hardware, don't you dare tell me that at some point raw hardware power becomes a replacement for gameplay. Because even on this top-end machine I can tell you first-hand that it still didn't. And no, even that configuration still doesn't emulate a PS2 or XBox."
Heh. That brings such memories...
I've actually had the honour. I had to sell my brand new up-sampling 100 Hz TV and buy a regular 50 Hz interlaced one (I'm in Europe) to be able to play lightgun games. Well, I got a Dreamcast VGA addapter first, but then I went and sold the TV too.
Ok, and here are two examples of FPS released before Carmack's Wolfenstein 3D:
1. Bethesda Softworks's The Terminator, a game released in 1990. (The Underdogs says 1991, Terminatorfiles says 1990. I seem to remember 1990.) It featured a lot more complex geometry than Wolfenstein 3D or even Doom. (E.g., people animated as polygons rather than sprites, walls that weren't just vertical, outdoors scenery, etc.) And gameplay elements that were a decade ahead of their time, such as driving a car around town and being able to run over pedestrians.
2. Corporation. A FPS much like Wolfenstein, and actually a little more complex, released in 1991.
By comparison Carmack's first FPS (Wolfenstein 3D) was released in 1992.
Both weren't textured, but they were otherwise FPS all right. They weren't even the only ones or the first one. The genre existed all right. Carmack only made it pretty.
"I thought he did invent the FPS, but he never says so because he's so modest."
No. There were FPS games before, they just weren't textured. So basically all that Carmack did wasn't to invent a genre, but to figure out how to do real-time texturing.
Carmack may well be a genius, but as a programmer, not as a game designer. I can of course respect a good programmer, but let's keep it realistic anyway.
Yes, I've bitched myself about controls that work only because you already know them, and because you know a lot of other stuff already.
;)
But just for fairness sake, I must say exceptions do exist.
"Give your wife/girlfriend the choice to use a GB/GBA/NES or a Dualshock 2/Xbox/GC controller and she will go with the one that is less intimidating every time unless she is a gamer too."
I actually one-upped that experiment by getting my grandma once to try Sierra's Emperor: Rise Of The Middle Kingdom. We're old woman which not only isn't a gamer, but is completely computer-illiterate. She doesn't own a computer, and never used one for anything.
You know what? She was actually doing a lot better than I expected. She did get confused between left and right mouse buttons, mostly because she didn't even hold the thing right. (Ok, Apple users can feel vindicated.) But we're talking someone who had never held a mouse before, so I'd say it's excusable. But still, she soon was placing farms and building roads like a pro. Well, better than I expected anyway.
Getting old mom to play Tropico was also a painless exercise. One go through the tutorial and... well, let's put it like this: according to dad, he hasn't seen warm food in the next two months
On the other hand, trying to get her hooked on a MMO just proved your point about too complex controls. Between moving in 3D, having to wrestle the camera, and use a bunch of different attacks and buffs, it was painful even for me to look at.
The Sims, on the other hand, was also no problem, although she didn't like the game anyway.
Consoles, on the other hand, I find to be less of a problem, actually. A modern controller might be "intimidating", but there are enough games where you don't have to use all 12 buttons. At any rate, I haven't had any problems getting both my parents hooked on Mario 64, at a time where neither had any experience with gamepads.
(Tangent: I wish someone made game designers try their usability just that way. Forget demographic studies on 16 year old hard-core gamers. Get an 80 year old grandma who's never played before, and see if you can teach _her_ your clever controls.)
So basically I'm guessing that it's simply a case of which games you've tried, rather than all new games being crap, and all old games being gold. Some games have good controls, some games have bad controls, and yes, a lot of them have controls that work only if you've spent the last 20 years getting used to them. Admittedly, the first category is also the smallest, but they do exist.
As for having a heart, soul and vision, that's IMHO a completely different topic. A game can have a great interface and still be a clone, or a game can be original and have a vision and still have a pure nightmare interface. But I've already ranted too much, so I'll skip that discussion.
The point was more like that someone with that kind of a system still occasionally plays Playstation and Dreamcast games, and occasionally even emulated SNES games. A game can be good even if it was written for a 7 MHz console, that's all.
I do however also play PC games, hence keeping that PC upgraded.
And yet those lousy $200 often kept me entertained better and longer than the many thousand I've dumped into keeping my PC bleeding edge. My current graphics card alone, it's a 7800 GTX, would pay for two consoles.
Yet on consoles I've not only found at least as many games worth playing, but also:
1. Games are actually tested and work. I don't have to wait for a month to download a patch, I don't get game bugs blamed on my hardware or drivers, etc. (True story: Victoria 2, German version, threw a script _syntax_ error right at the start of the main campaign. As released, it couldn't work on _any_ hardware.)
2. There are no hardware drivers to update, ever. I don't have to care if ATI's detonators 5.8 work better or worse with my game than the 5.7, or which version of NVidia's detonators screwed up which settings, or if I need a patch for the Creative drivers, etc. Again, games just work as is.
3. The game is optimized for that hardware. Read some console game reviews sites. Some need to mention if a game ever drops to 30 fps instead of a clean 60 fps. No upgrade race ever needed, no watching the game crawl on hardware that matches the _recommended_ configuration, and no getting insulted by clueless fanboys if you dare complain about it.
So, hey, if someone's giving me all that "for a lousy $200", kudos to them. Just the peace of mind that I can take any game home, pop it in, and watch it run flawlessly right _now_ (as opposed to maybe next month, if they don't screw up again in the patch)... personally I'd say that's worth every single cent in those $200 and more.
Well, gee, yet another thread along the lines of "but gaming platform X is better than platform Y, because its hardware is better".
Hello? Aren't we missing something? Like, you know, the _games_? Because it seems to me like that's the only reason to own a gaming rig in the first place: to play the games.
Until you can tell me that you're playing directly with the shader pipelines, instead of with a game that uses those... sorry, I'll concentrate on what games I can play on it, instead of the bogus "mine has more MHz than yours" willy-waving.
Want to know why I bought a console, "my PC has more MHz" willy-waving be damned? Well, for the games. Games such as:
- Gran Turismo, which was a better racing game than any racing game that ran on a PC
- Fighting games, which pretty much _disappeared_ on the PC after Mortal Kombat
- Jade Empire and Fable alone were worth the price of an XBox, and more
- Japanese RPGs, including not just Square ones, but also some very original ones like Valkyrie Profile and Persona 2: Eternal Punishment. Those two alone would make the price of a Playstation worth every cent I've paid for it
- Lightgun games. Yeah, the PC has keyboard and mouse. Wake me up when I can plug a lighgun in and play a House Of The Dead or Time Crisis game the way it was meant to be played.
Etc.
In a nutshell, it's all about the games. If a platform has games I want to play, I'll go buy that platform and play those games. It's that simple.
I don't care which has the higher MHz or bogus benchmark scores. I don't play 3DMark, I play _games_.
I have a top end Athlon 64 4000+, 2 GB RAM, a 7800 GTX, and a WD Raptor in my current PC, but trust me, looking at 3DMark still gets old after one 10 minute run. I'll play a game instead to keep myself entertained.
Yes, lemming. Those ads did pay for a part of the movie you watch, or for a part of your city's funds. (Which otherwise would have had to come out of your taxes.) The road you drive your car to work, surprise, might have been paved with money earned out of selling ad space.
Somewhere there was a negotiated contract. A _bilateral_ affair. A sale-purchase affair. _That_ is what makes it different from spam, and that is why we tolerate them.
Product placement in a movie, yes, was a negotiated affair and they paid a part of making that movie. It wasn't just someone sneaking cans of Coke or replacing the shoes with Nikes until one got on camera. They actually negotiated that placement and paid for it.
Ads on billboards, again, someone paid something to the city for that. Nike or whatever didn't just drop by and start hammering their own billboards all over the place. They negotiated space on those billboards and paid for it.
If you can can't tell the difference between "unsolicited" and "sale", then you have a problem.
That's why we tolerate them, lemming. Because they pay for something in return. If billboards just got put there as unilaterally as spam happens, yes, we'd vote a law against those too.
No, it doesn't have to 100% pay for all seats, eliminate world hunger, and remove DRM, or whatever. You're arguing... what? That if something's not 100% altruistic and perfect (e.g., yeah, it paid for a part of the movie, but it didn't also remove DRM and make all tickets free), then there's no difference between that and something that's 100% plunder and annoyance? Geesh.