Yep, it's the fault of the gamer that doesn't bother to investigate what he's buying. If people would quit rushing to be the first to cram their money into the publisher's pocket, maybe they wouldn't get ripped off so often and maybe publishers would learn that it's more important to create a good game than to generate hype.
Yeah, but for multiplayer games and especially MMO's there is an advantage to buying the game right away. You get a head start on everyone who buys the game later. If you play FPS games in leagues like OGL you want the game as soon as it comes out so you have that head start. It's even worse in MMO's because at the start of them is where everyone exploits weakness in the system to "get rich quick". An example would be in Star Wars Galaxies there was an oversight by the programmers about how much faction points a group should get for finishing a mission. Ends up it was really out of wack for a week, and a lot of people got a lot of points they shouldn't have and were walking around with storm trooper armor that would take you hundreds of hours to get after the fix.
Then the princess felled me with one quick kick to my mid-section and I could never bring myself to play it again, not even once to finish it off. Curse you Karateka.
You might want to try not running up to her. You might scare her, and she could use her ninja skills on you.
You have to wonder how she got kidnapped in the first place if she could drop someone with one kick ^_^.
This is very true, when I was very young (ie under 10 years old) I was playing games on the Atari 2600. I had over 100 Atari games before I bought my NES, and I thought most of them were good. I even played E.T. All the way through. I could regonize a good game when I was young, for example I knew pitfall was good and that I wanted to have David Crane's job when I was older but I never realized how shitty Atari pac man was. I knew the arcade version was better, but I didn't think "WOW this is really crap". I just played it.
I wish I had that line of thinking when I played Star Wars Galaxies. I wonder if gameplay in general has gotten worse, or I've just become more cynical. (probably both)
With that thought, here are some of my biggest disappointments (in no particular order):
1. Unreal Tournament 2003 : I played the original UT from the day it came out, up to the day the UT2003 demo (actually the leaked alpha) was released. I actually bought a new computer to play UT2003. I can't even tell you how disapointed I was by UT2003. The biggest reason is it seemed like Quake2003 and didn't have the feel of Unreal or Unreal Tournament. On top of that, the weapons were weaker than the ones in UT. The great thing in UT was all the weapons were useful, and most of them were top tier. Lastly, the characters seemed to be so much smaller than the original UT (no, it's not my monitor resolution either).
2. Ultima 8 , "pagan". After playing Ultima 1-5 and loving them I took some time off (ie the time between me having an Apple II and an a PC) and came back to playing computer games. The first PC based RPG I bought was "Pagan". It came on 8 disks ( I guess to match the sequel number...), and didn't run on my PC even though my PC fit the specs. After a few calls to Origin didn't help I gave up. A few days later I took it to a friends house and played on her PC. Then I realized the game sucked anyway and I wasn't missing much. It's funny how game companies can turns classics into crap after a few too many sequels.
3. Super Mario Brothers 2 - Way too easy, and too different in a craptacular way than the first one. Nintendo hit a home run with SMB3 though.
4. Wargods - From Midway, one of my favorite gaming companies came this crap. Sure, it looked really cool but trying to get off a 15 button fatality in 2 seconds was no fun. Never mind the complexity/sillyness of the combos. Ugg.
5. Mortal Kombat 3, 4, 5 - While I'm on the midway kick, Mortal Kombat has sucked for a long time now. It's downfall was trying to emulate the killer instinct dial-a-combos and putting in a run button in MK3 (which was correctly colored yellow...the CHEESE button). 4 was pretty bad, and 5 was aweful. This is a shame because 1 and 2 were both very good IMO.
6. Street Fighter Alpha 1 - chain combos..Ugg. Capcom much like Nintendo followed this up with a great game in SFA2. Maybe the mark of a good game company is to fix their own crap when they screw up a sequel.
Natural body builders don't generally look like body builders, and they rarely compete, because they simply cannot pack on the muscle with the same ease of a hormonally-enhanced body builder.
This is false, I had a friend that I have no doubt was all natural who competed as a body builder, was on ESPN 2, etc. People who say "You can't look like that without steriods/hormons/HGH/etc" are crying sour grapes.
I believe the hardgainer theory, which states that some people have a genetic make-up which does not allow them to pack on muscle quickly. These type of people typically do not respond large volumes and frequency of training. It has been estimated that 60%-95% of the population are hardgainers.
Click here for more information about hardgainers.
except only 3 billion got funded, and efforts by USAID orgs to educate about condom use- the most effective aids prevention, even in africa - are stiffled.
as for those visas, they're also happen to be a huge boon in terms of cheep highly skilled labor for big campaign contributors [microsoft.com]
news sources? Something to back up your argument please? Yes, the visa's provide cheap labor for big companies at the expense of American citizens...Is that a good thing for America or bad?
[and not some ultra-capitalist western cowboy-regime driven company who has come up with the vaccine. Thank's to the last part of Soviet, this vaccine may come to use even for the ones who need it the most (poor African and Asian countries) and not only the people who can afford it.
You couldn't possibly be talking about the same ultra-capitalist country who wants to give a 25 billion dollars to Africa while it's country is in the middle of a recession could you?
Yes, the big evil US empire that allows foreign workers to take US jobs via the H-1B and other liberal immigration/foreign labor laws, and who's pharmaceutical industry charges it's own citizens more money for prescription drugs than foreign countries. If an HIV vaccine were found in the US, the US citizens would pay the most for us.
Yes, the ultra-capitalist western cowboy-regime driven nation has it out for you.
at was the game of Outlaw. It was manufactured by Atari and mimicked arcade games of the same theme. I had to make sure there was nothing in the manual about robot gunslingers, and there isn't. It's definitely human murdering human.
There is even a ride that Atari made for Chuckie Cheese type places where you sit on a horse and have a cowboy gun (real looking..) and play outlaw. Bushnell has always talked about being against violence in video games, but the policy at atari wasn't very well enforced.
Starving to death? Where did you get these stats from. If this were the case it would be an epidemic talked about on the news 24/7. Don't fall for some propaganda being thrown out there by certain groups. See one thing I've noticed is, if you look for certain things you will find them. I'm sure if you took some time to look for how well India's economy is doing, and how their people are not starving, I'm sure you will find this.
I guess my propaganda was thrown out by an unreliable group... the CIA Silly, gullable me.
Now to answer your question about bringing those people down here, do you know how much redtape is involved in bringing someone over here? Do you have any idea about the costs of this, let alone the mention of doing so only to have that person leave for another co. the minute they get here?
That is only fair. If you pay them fair market value, would they really leave your company? The H1B is almost slavery. A company gets a worker from overseas at substandard wages, brings them over here, and if they fire him, or get rid of him he must go back to India. That doesn't seem fair to the American worker, or the Indian worker.
Remembering the dot com boom, people in Santa Clara were working for 10 different companies in one year, and the attitude of those hiring them, was "Well if he worked for some many companies, he must be that good." bullshit. Why bring someone down into a revolving door of employment when most would rather remain where they are.
An example: detailed swoard play. Strikets feightns and forms. Parry and reposts. Not automated rolling, but in such a way that anticipating a strike and intentioanlly playing a defensive stance with a parry/reposte MEANS something. So I have to think a moment, and make decisions as to how to combat the individual. If he had a huge hammer... no parry. He'd crush me. Other skills would be needed.
I agree totally. Even if it were glorified paper/rock/scissors it would be better than it is now.
I'm hoping the next big thing in game development will be cell phones. There are all these people out there with gaming devices that they carry on themselves at all times. Some of the phones ship with Java now which isn't bad for making simple games
The point of this as it relates to the article is, maybe the one to six man development team isn't dead. Maybe it is just getting started.
Re:Chapter 10: Learning Hindi or Russian
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The Career Programmer
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It's possible that corporations could offer this, but knowing the attitudes of some programmers, this would be a slap in the face, so everyone complains. If it were your money what would you do throw it away for the sake of keeping face, or moving elsewhere to make money which is what you originally set out to do? Common sense dictates (or at least should) that businesses, no matter how dirty it sounds, are for making profit.
I call bullshit. If a company has it's headquaters in the US, pays US taxes (which are lower than alot of taxes in european countries), and sells mostly to the US market they should employee US programmers. Outsourcing to a third world country where %25 of the population starve to death is not ethical. If you want programmers from India so badly fly them over here and make them citizens so at least there tax dollars are in the US.
The problem with MMORPG is that they haven't found a way to properly do PvP and integrate leveling with it. Fighting the same computer generated enemies over and over again is boring. Fighting a thinking human is much more of a challenge, and much more rewarding.
Sure, some games do realm or faction based PvP, but if you could level in a PvP free for all leveling wouldn't be quite as boring. Of course, everyone is afraid of "griefers" but this fear is driving away the mass market appeal of MMORPG.
We should be happy that they are at least patching it. On a side note, I wonder if the next aimbot/wallhack will come with a built in "attack server/buffer overflow" feature. YEY!
Women don't play games because it's seen as boring, dorky, geeky etc. Just like using a computer was 15-20 years ago. I suspect this will change, since every girl now has a gaming system of some type in her house (ie a PC) and most of them carry one on them at all times (a cell phone). Also, console/pc games are a lot more mainstream than they were 10-15 years ago.
I think this bias will change with time, and a lot of the younger girls now will grow up playing games, where as women around my age (mid-late 20's) are hopeless if they don't play already.:)
It takes a long time to implment the correct security model to make sure that all old aimbots and wallhacks will be compatable with the new half life. Lay off the developers.
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Wow, so are scientist going to figure out how to use the force soon?
Yeah, but for multiplayer games and especially MMO's there is an advantage to buying the game right away. You get a head start on everyone who buys the game later. If you play FPS games in leagues like OGL you want the game as soon as it comes out so you have that head start. It's even worse in MMO's because at the start of them is where everyone exploits weakness in the system to "get rich quick". An example would be in Star Wars Galaxies there was an oversight by the programmers about how much faction points a group should get for finishing a mission. Ends up it was really out of wack for a week, and a lot of people got a lot of points they shouldn't have and were walking around with storm trooper armor that would take you hundreds of hours to get after the fix.
You might want to try not running up to her. You might scare her, and she could use her ninja skills on you.
You have to wonder how she got kidnapped in the first place if she could drop someone with one kick ^_^.
This is very true, when I was very young (ie under 10 years old) I was playing games on the Atari 2600. I had over 100 Atari games before I bought my NES, and I thought most of them were good. I even played E.T. All the way through. I could regonize a good game when I was young, for example I knew pitfall was good and that I wanted to have David Crane's job when I was older but I never realized how shitty Atari pac man was. I knew the arcade version was better, but I didn't think "WOW this is really crap". I just played it.
I wish I had that line of thinking when I played Star Wars Galaxies. I wonder if gameplay in general has gotten worse, or I've just become more cynical. (probably both)
With that thought, here are some of my biggest disappointments (in no particular order):
1. Unreal Tournament 2003 : I played the original UT from the day it came out, up to the day the UT2003 demo (actually the leaked alpha) was released. I actually bought a new computer to play UT2003. I can't even tell you how disapointed I was by UT2003. The biggest reason is it seemed like Quake2003 and didn't have the feel of Unreal or Unreal Tournament. On top of that, the weapons were weaker than the ones in UT. The great thing in UT was all the weapons were useful, and most of them were top tier. Lastly, the characters seemed to be so much smaller than the original UT (no, it's not my monitor resolution either).
2. Ultima 8 , "pagan". After playing Ultima 1-5 and loving them I took some time off (ie the time between me having an Apple II and an a PC) and came back to playing computer games. The first PC based RPG I bought was "Pagan". It came on 8 disks ( I guess to match the sequel number...), and didn't run on my PC even though my PC fit the specs. After a few calls to Origin didn't help I gave up. A few days later I took it to a friends house and played on her PC. Then I realized the game sucked anyway and I wasn't missing much. It's funny how game companies can turns classics into crap after a few too many sequels.
3. Super Mario Brothers 2 - Way too easy, and too different in a craptacular way than the first one. Nintendo hit a home run with SMB3 though.
4. Wargods - From Midway, one of my favorite gaming companies came this crap. Sure, it looked really cool but trying to get off a 15 button fatality in 2 seconds was no fun. Never mind the complexity/sillyness of the combos. Ugg.
5. Mortal Kombat 3, 4, 5 - While I'm on the midway kick, Mortal Kombat has sucked for a long time now. It's downfall was trying to emulate the killer instinct dial-a-combos and putting in a run button in MK3 (which was correctly colored yellow...the CHEESE button). 4 was pretty bad, and 5 was aweful. This is a shame because 1 and 2 were both very good IMO.
6. Street Fighter Alpha 1 - chain combos..Ugg. Capcom much like Nintendo followed this up with a great game in SFA2. Maybe the mark of a good game company is to fix their own crap when they screw up a sequel.
I was the same way, I enjoyed Q2 online, Didn't like Q3 very much at all.
This is false, I had a friend that I have no doubt was all natural who competed as a body builder, was on ESPN 2, etc. People who say "You can't look like that without steriods/hormons/HGH/etc" are crying sour grapes.
I believe the hardgainer theory, which states that some people have a genetic make-up which does not allow them to pack on muscle quickly. These type of people typically do not respond large volumes and frequency of training. It has been estimated that 60%-95% of the population are hardgainers. Click here for more information about hardgainers.
hahaha you didn't know the chainsaw code for gta3!
If Bionor Immuno really does find a vaccine for HIV it will be the first Virus Bill slowed down rather than helped spread.
[and not some ultra-capitalist western cowboy-regime driven company who has come up with the vaccine. Thank's to the last part of Soviet, this vaccine may come to use even for the ones who need it the most (poor African and Asian countries) and not only the people who can afford it.
You couldn't possibly be talking about the same ultra-capitalist country who wants to give a 25 billion dollars to Africa while it's country is in the middle of a recession could you?
Yes, the big evil US empire that allows foreign workers to take US jobs via the H-1B and other liberal immigration/foreign labor laws, and who's pharmaceutical industry charges it's own citizens more money for prescription drugs than foreign countries. If an HIV vaccine were found in the US, the US citizens would pay the most for us.
Yes, the ultra-capitalist western cowboy-regime driven nation has it out for you.
but it sure would be fun if it was! Hmm, carebear meet mr chainsaw...
There is even a ride that Atari made for Chuckie Cheese type places where you sit on a horse and have a cowboy gun (real looking..) and play outlaw. Bushnell has always talked about being against violence in video games, but the policy at atari wasn't very well enforced.
I'll take a living hell of PK-everywhere over the living hell of being in the disneyland that is SWG any day.
I guess my propaganda was thrown out by an unreliable group... the CIA Silly, gullable me.
That is only fair. If you pay them fair market value, would they really leave your company? The H1B is almost slavery. A company gets a worker from overseas at substandard wages, brings them over here, and if they fire him, or get rid of him he must go back to India. That doesn't seem fair to the American worker, or the Indian worker.
Huh? What? I don't quite see your point here.
I'm hoping the next big thing in game development will be cell phones. There are all these people out there with gaming devices that they carry on themselves at all times. Some of the phones ship with Java now which isn't bad for making simple games
The point of this as it relates to the article is, maybe the one to six man development team isn't dead. Maybe it is just getting started.
I call bullshit. If a company has it's headquaters in the US, pays US taxes (which are lower than alot of taxes in european countries), and sells mostly to the US market they should employee US programmers. Outsourcing to a third world country where %25 of the population starve to death is not ethical. If you want programmers from India so badly fly them over here and make them citizens so at least there tax dollars are in the US.
The problem with MMORPG is that they haven't found a way to properly do PvP and integrate leveling with it. Fighting the same computer generated enemies over and over again is boring. Fighting a thinking human is much more of a challenge, and much more rewarding.
Sure, some games do realm or faction based PvP, but if you could level in a PvP free for all leveling wouldn't be quite as boring. Of course, everyone is afraid of "griefers" but this fear is driving away the mass market appeal of MMORPG.
Darkfall looks like it will be interesting....
Oh really? I thought Ragnarok was Korean for "Cleartext Password"
You can subtract 1 from Star wars galaxies. I canceled my membership after the first month. I refuse to play a beta with showstoping bugs.
Maybe I'll check them out in 6 months if they improve things.
Hah, never mind the ones that clans write for themselves, I have a publically available CS bot that no hack detection can pick up right now.
We should be happy that they are at least patching it. On a side note, I wonder if the next aimbot/wallhack will come with a built in "attack server/buffer overflow" feature. YEY!
Women don't play games because it's seen as boring, dorky, geeky etc. Just like using a computer was 15-20 years ago. I suspect this will change, since every girl now has a gaming system of some type in her house (ie a PC) and most of them carry one on them at all times (a cell phone). Also, console/pc games are a lot more mainstream than they were 10-15 years ago. I think this bias will change with time, and a lot of the younger girls now will grow up playing games, where as women around my age (mid-late 20's) are hopeless if they don't play already. :)
It takes a long time to implment the correct security model to make sure that all old aimbots and wallhacks will be compatable with the new half life. Lay off the developers.