Just look at Metroid, Mario, Metal Gear, Castlevania (SotN and gameboy), Zelda, Prince of Persia, Final Fantasy... Fans and newcomers alike hated the more recent installments, right? Right?
No, it's not hard to involve the themes, maybe part of the storyline, and the major gameplay elements from the original game into an entirely new engine. But it does make a convenient scapegoat if you're a developer whose games are failing or a pundit firing off the first story idea that came to his mind.
Actually, I would. I like short, pick-up-and-play puzzle-based games. (I like RPGs mostly, but they're less use for a quick burst of gaming, and puzzlers fill that niche). This is exactly what Portal looks like, and hence something I would want on its own.
I hear ya there, but I think Portal is honestly the tech demo and we're going to see a more complete version coming out later. What I'm actually thinking more about in terms of the puzzle aspect is user-created puzzles. If the portal gun is fun and modding it isn't too terrible, we might start to see a stream of innovative maps and mods for it. That's when it'll really be worth owning a finished version.
I would like to see them sell TFC and Portal separately for like $6 a piece or something, that would work out nicely for people like us that aren't too terribly interested in Episode 2. But I bet they're relying on people interested in playing Episode 2 in supporting the other two mods, and not the other way around.
Oh yeah, if you want to be competitive with other guys that spend money, you gotta be really lucky or dropping lots of dough -- that's their entire business model. But the grandparent poster was talking about literally printing out his own cards on paper, so I doubt he was concerned with playing against other big collectors:P
Portal is three hours of single-player gameplay, you probably wouldn't want it as a standalone game. They use steam to track things like how many people bought it, how many people downloaded it, and how many people actually finished it. If it does well, I'd expect it to get fully fleshed out into a longer single-player game and also several multiplayer components.
Why didn't everyone do that? It took me an afternoon and I saved a hundred(?) dollars.
Part of the fun is the randomness of the cards that you have available to you and how you use them to build the deck, at least it was for me. You can drop $15 (just looked it up) to get a pack with two intro decks (just to have a base) and a booster pack. When it starts to get old you can drop a couple more bucks on a booster pack or shuffle with your friends. As long as you don't start obsessively buying them it's not too expensive of a hobby.
I had a lot of fun with Magic with just my small circle of friends. I can't have spent more than $50 total on it for the three or four years we played it back in middle school and the beginning of high school. So I don't have the perspective of you guys, but once in a while I go back to my hometown and someone will suggest a game of Magic just for shits and giggles. I don't enjoy it at all anymore though, the people that kept up with it have cards with crazy effects that just walk all over my rusty old deck, and there's so many of these effects and rules that every time someone pulls a card I have to spend a minute reading over what it does.
I dunno, I guess that's what keeps them in business, but it's annoying when there's that sorta mudflation. I think it'd still be a fun time with a small group of friends, though, as long as none of you are too worried about buying up cards and building the uber deck.
User-created portals with one of the first games to have a pretty good physics engine. It's not the abstract idea of portal, it's the possibilities that this implementation opens up.
A BS in math won't get you a "math job" (except as a schoolteacher), but it can certainly help you get lots of jobs that have an element of math in them.
Actually, you can get into the NSA straight off undergrad. They have pretty extensive in-house training (or subsidized extra education) as far as I understand for any specialty you end up working, so they're mainly worried that you're bright and you have the fundamentals down. They even have a semester-on, semester-off undergrad intern program that sounds pretty neat if you're really interested in it.
I'm sure it's not trivial and the PhD probably helps a lot, but the option's there.
Actually, come to think of it, this guy I know at Yale said that stock firms on Wall Street were recruiting their majors straight out of undergrad for pretty sick pay. He might have just been blowing ivy league smoke up my ass, but I tend to believe him.
In case anyone was wondering about lower-tier schools, I'm going into a math PhD at a middleish school (still a big research school and some really interesting applied stuff, but not one of the top ranked ones) and the standard package is $22,200 annually (mind that it's only really nine months) plus tuition. There's graduate loans aplenty with pretty low APRs that you can put off paying (barring maybe interest) until you get out. Plus your undergraduate loans will, as a rule, defer until graduation as well.
You're not living the high life of course, especially if your school is in the middle of a city, but it's not a bad deal.
Seems to me that manual counting of votes would be vastly more secure as it would take a huge conspiracy to affect the result either way.
Counting a hundered million votes is hard, counting a thousand votes in a hundered thousand locations is easy.
Ah, but the way the electoral college works you don't need to influence even a majority of the votes, just a majority of the votes in several key locations. With both major parties dancing around the center, all it takes is a tip on a swing state or two for the fulcrum shift.
This just in: women send women real-world stuff. And scariest of all, sometimes men send men real-world stuff too. Though I think there's an amendment on the table to get rid of that little unsightly blemish in America at least. God knows what those liberal flip-flopping hipsters over in Europe are doing, probably sending stuff all over with nary a thought of the gender of the person they're sending it to.
You wonder how these people function in reality if they're that insecure in a video game. Put out an article like this anywhere and you're guaranteed to get 50 defensive responses about how they prefer staring at a woman's ass and sometimes they get free stuff. Of course, this also raises a question about the journalistic merit of the article, given that it basically just parroted the standard message board line. Their source is an about.com poll for christ's sake.
HOLY SHIT! Men and women play female avatars to win! This is revolutionary.
I've seen enough sultry, big-breasted vampires/catgirls/emo-tragics with whips in MMOs to know whether it's a guy or a girl behind the character, most of the time they're whoring for something. Pity, cyber, attention, in-game currency, items, spots on teams... there's always a crowd of young, sex-starved males looking to give them all of the above because there's a cute girl avatar that'll talk to them about boobies.
What will all the smallfry gaming sites do with their $200 yearly ad revenue besides subsidize a party weekend at E3? Where will we get entertaining drama if we don't have all their editors sharing a hotel room? WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO PICS 344 THROUGH 500 OF THE NEXT GTA?! Oh, the humanity!
Sorta, but if there's 10x as much gold, you can usually make money off doing things a player with two years in the game and a bunch of upper level characters wouldn't want to do. Everquest did a good job of this by requiring low-level mob drops in a bunch of crafting recipes and as spell reagents. They were just inconvenient enough that a level 60 wouldn't want to go out and farm themselves, but plentiful enough that as a newb you could make decent money off them.
And especially in today's quest-based games like WoW and EQ2, I'm a bit surprised plat farmers make money at all. Even with two maxed out characters in EQ2, when I ran up alts, I didn't bother twinking them out at all. It's just not worth the money when you can quest items and blow through levels ridiculously fast while you're doing it.
Yeah, I've seen a lot of "tutorials" out there for FPS and usually it's just a clan guy crapping out pages and pages of text on elementary game functions. Oh, and a couple quotes from the Art of War sprinkled in for good measure, in case you want to wax philosophical while you're planting the bomb.
There are some useful items like basic tactics and positioning, wonky things that are particular to the game physics engine, scripts, etc, but mostly you can pick those up from a couple days of play and visiting a few websites.
Well, he's working under the assumption that they're in the western markets, where you need to spend 40ish USD to buy a license to play the game, on top of the $15 a month.
Of course, they get a free month with that, so it's sorta like $30 considering they were probably into one of their paid months. But then again, intelligent plat farmers wouldn't be using western accounts anyway, as they're more expensive per USD, so it's sorta a moot point.
Well, poach WoW did, but it also attracted an unholy amount of new players all with 14.99 in hand.
Kinda-sorta. The asian market gives you much less per customer and keeps track of them in a different way. It's hard to compare with the metrics available to us. They're certainly not all paying 14.99 monthly.
At this point I think Star Wars (in a marketable form) can't be an MMO because the simple truth is that everyone (or nearly) wants to be a Jedi, Star Wars is about Jedi and Jedi have abilities greater that average people.
I've heard it before, mostly from disgruntled devs, and I think it's a copout. Battlefront, Republic Commando, Bounty Hunter. Rogue Squadron. TIE Fighter. The X-Wing series.
There's a lot of people that love Star Wars for the Jedi. There's also a lot of people that love it for the space battles, the smuggling, the bounty hunting, all that kinda stuff, and they're not necessarily distinct from the people that are Jedi-happy. It's possible to make a good MMO with just the elements of the latter that will appeal to everyone that enjoys Star Wars and even some others that are just looking for a sci-fi or space western, but SWG went and make Jedi the end-game because they didn't have enough content.
Seriously. I started reading the article and it's half common sense, half complicated language. Nothing as bad as, say, the wanking competition that is postmodernist critique, but it's getting there. I wonder how long before we start hearing about the metagamer and interaction between the gamer and the game to shape reality.
When I was young and stupid, the endings of Illusion of Gaia and Link's Awakening both got me choked up. In my early 20s, I haven't cried at anything in a good long while, but the rare game like Shadow of the Colossus can still resonate with me on the same level as a sad part of a movie or book.
I thought the saddest part of Colossus was the part of the ending when you're given control. I waited there for minutes or whatever it took for the entire grip meter to run out on the staircase.
If he can get a better return on his investment than the loans cost, and didn't misrepresent his financial situation, then that's just good business.
I'm not an expert on student loans, but most of them that I've encountered stipulate that you're using them on something at least tangentially related to current or past educational expenses. They're not going to catch you (unless they pay very close attention to your financial statements), but it is sort of wrong to be using zero-interest federal education aid money to invest just on interest. This guy's already getting most of his way paid through college... I dunno.
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Just look at Metroid, Mario, Metal Gear, Castlevania (SotN and gameboy), Zelda, Prince of Persia, Final Fantasy... Fans and newcomers alike hated the more recent installments, right? Right?
No, it's not hard to involve the themes, maybe part of the storyline, and the major gameplay elements from the original game into an entirely new engine. But it does make a convenient scapegoat if you're a developer whose games are failing or a pundit firing off the first story idea that came to his mind.
Actually, I would. I like short, pick-up-and-play puzzle-based games. (I like RPGs mostly, but they're less use for a quick burst of gaming, and puzzlers fill that niche). This is exactly what Portal looks like, and hence something I would want on its own.
I hear ya there, but I think Portal is honestly the tech demo and we're going to see a more complete version coming out later. What I'm actually thinking more about in terms of the puzzle aspect is user-created puzzles. If the portal gun is fun and modding it isn't too terrible, we might start to see a stream of innovative maps and mods for it. That's when it'll really be worth owning a finished version.
I would like to see them sell TFC and Portal separately for like $6 a piece or something, that would work out nicely for people like us that aren't too terribly interested in Episode 2. But I bet they're relying on people interested in playing Episode 2 in supporting the other two mods, and not the other way around.
Oh yeah, if you want to be competitive with other guys that spend money, you gotta be really lucky or dropping lots of dough -- that's their entire business model. But the grandparent poster was talking about literally printing out his own cards on paper, so I doubt he was concerned with playing against other big collectors :P
Portal is three hours of single-player gameplay, you probably wouldn't want it as a standalone game. They use steam to track things like how many people bought it, how many people downloaded it, and how many people actually finished it. If it does well, I'd expect it to get fully fleshed out into a longer single-player game and also several multiplayer components.
Why didn't everyone do that? It took me an afternoon and I saved a hundred(?) dollars.
Part of the fun is the randomness of the cards that you have available to you and how you use them to build the deck, at least it was for me. You can drop $15 (just looked it up) to get a pack with two intro decks (just to have a base) and a booster pack. When it starts to get old you can drop a couple more bucks on a booster pack or shuffle with your friends. As long as you don't start obsessively buying them it's not too expensive of a hobby.
I had a lot of fun with Magic with just my small circle of friends. I can't have spent more than $50 total on it for the three or four years we played it back in middle school and the beginning of high school. So I don't have the perspective of you guys, but once in a while I go back to my hometown and someone will suggest a game of Magic just for shits and giggles. I don't enjoy it at all anymore though, the people that kept up with it have cards with crazy effects that just walk all over my rusty old deck, and there's so many of these effects and rules that every time someone pulls a card I have to spend a minute reading over what it does.
I dunno, I guess that's what keeps them in business, but it's annoying when there's that sorta mudflation. I think it'd still be a fun time with a small group of friends, though, as long as none of you are too worried about buying up cards and building the uber deck.
User-created portals with one of the first games to have a pretty good physics engine. It's not the abstract idea of portal, it's the possibilities that this implementation opens up.
A BS in math won't get you a "math job" (except as a schoolteacher), but it can certainly help you get lots of jobs that have an element of math in them.
Actually, you can get into the NSA straight off undergrad. They have pretty extensive in-house training (or subsidized extra education) as far as I understand for any specialty you end up working, so they're mainly worried that you're bright and you have the fundamentals down. They even have a semester-on, semester-off undergrad intern program that sounds pretty neat if you're really interested in it.
I'm sure it's not trivial and the PhD probably helps a lot, but the option's there.
Actually, come to think of it, this guy I know at Yale said that stock firms on Wall Street were recruiting their majors straight out of undergrad for pretty sick pay. He might have just been blowing ivy league smoke up my ass, but I tend to believe him.
In case anyone was wondering about lower-tier schools, I'm going into a math PhD at a middleish school (still a big research school and some really interesting applied stuff, but not one of the top ranked ones) and the standard package is $22,200 annually (mind that it's only really nine months) plus tuition. There's graduate loans aplenty with pretty low APRs that you can put off paying (barring maybe interest) until you get out. Plus your undergraduate loans will, as a rule, defer until graduation as well.
You're not living the high life of course, especially if your school is in the middle of a city, but it's not a bad deal.
Seems to me that manual counting of votes would be vastly more secure as it would take a huge conspiracy to affect the result either way.
Counting a hundered million votes is hard, counting a thousand votes in a hundered thousand locations is easy.
Ah, but the way the electoral college works you don't need to influence even a majority of the votes, just a majority of the votes in several key locations. With both major parties dancing around the center, all it takes is a tip on a swing state or two for the fulcrum shift.
This just in: women send women real-world stuff. And scariest of all, sometimes men send men real-world stuff too. Though I think there's an amendment on the table to get rid of that little unsightly blemish in America at least. God knows what those liberal flip-flopping hipsters over in Europe are doing, probably sending stuff all over with nary a thought of the gender of the person they're sending it to.
You wonder how these people function in reality if they're that insecure in a video game. Put out an article like this anywhere and you're guaranteed to get 50 defensive responses about how they prefer staring at a woman's ass and sometimes they get free stuff. Of course, this also raises a question about the journalistic merit of the article, given that it basically just parroted the standard message board line. Their source is an about.com poll for christ's sake.
Ostensibly, that's why it's also true in the game :P
HOLY SHIT! Men and women play female avatars to win! This is revolutionary.
I've seen enough sultry, big-breasted vampires/catgirls/emo-tragics with whips in MMOs to know whether it's a guy or a girl behind the character, most of the time they're whoring for something. Pity, cyber, attention, in-game currency, items, spots on teams... there's always a crowd of young, sex-starved males looking to give them all of the above because there's a cute girl avatar that'll talk to them about boobies.
What will all the smallfry gaming sites do with their $200 yearly ad revenue besides subsidize a party weekend at E3? Where will we get entertaining drama if we don't have all their editors sharing a hotel room? WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO PICS 344 THROUGH 500 OF THE NEXT GTA?! Oh, the humanity!
Why'd we make that assumption? Seems like it's a problem in the east, too, if the Japanese government is launching an investigation into it.
Sorta, but if there's 10x as much gold, you can usually make money off doing things a player with two years in the game and a bunch of upper level characters wouldn't want to do. Everquest did a good job of this by requiring low-level mob drops in a bunch of crafting recipes and as spell reagents. They were just inconvenient enough that a level 60 wouldn't want to go out and farm themselves, but plentiful enough that as a newb you could make decent money off them.
And especially in today's quest-based games like WoW and EQ2, I'm a bit surprised plat farmers make money at all. Even with two maxed out characters in EQ2, when I ran up alts, I didn't bother twinking them out at all. It's just not worth the money when you can quest items and blow through levels ridiculously fast while you're doing it.
Yeah, I've seen a lot of "tutorials" out there for FPS and usually it's just a clan guy crapping out pages and pages of text on elementary game functions. Oh, and a couple quotes from the Art of War sprinkled in for good measure, in case you want to wax philosophical while you're planting the bomb.
There are some useful items like basic tactics and positioning, wonky things that are particular to the game physics engine, scripts, etc, but mostly you can pick those up from a couple days of play and visiting a few websites.
Well, he's working under the assumption that they're in the western markets, where you need to spend 40ish USD to buy a license to play the game, on top of the $15 a month.
Of course, they get a free month with that, so it's sorta like $30 considering they were probably into one of their paid months. But then again, intelligent plat farmers wouldn't be using western accounts anyway, as they're more expensive per USD, so it's sorta a moot point.
Well, poach WoW did, but it also attracted an unholy amount of new players all with 14.99 in hand.
Kinda-sorta. The asian market gives you much less per customer and keeps track of them in a different way. It's hard to compare with the metrics available to us. They're certainly not all paying 14.99 monthly.
At this point I think Star Wars (in a marketable form) can't be an MMO because the simple truth is that everyone (or nearly) wants to be a Jedi, Star Wars is about Jedi and Jedi have abilities greater that average people.
I've heard it before, mostly from disgruntled devs, and I think it's a copout. Battlefront, Republic Commando, Bounty Hunter. Rogue Squadron. TIE Fighter. The X-Wing series.
There's a lot of people that love Star Wars for the Jedi. There's also a lot of people that love it for the space battles, the smuggling, the bounty hunting, all that kinda stuff, and they're not necessarily distinct from the people that are Jedi-happy. It's possible to make a good MMO with just the elements of the latter that will appeal to everyone that enjoys Star Wars and even some others that are just looking for a sci-fi or space western, but SWG went and make Jedi the end-game because they didn't have enough content.
Seriously. I started reading the article and it's half common sense, half complicated language. Nothing as bad as, say, the wanking competition that is postmodernist critique, but it's getting there. I wonder how long before we start hearing about the metagamer and interaction between the gamer and the game to shape reality.
When I was young and stupid, the endings of Illusion of Gaia and Link's Awakening both got me choked up. In my early 20s, I haven't cried at anything in a good long while, but the rare game like Shadow of the Colossus can still resonate with me on the same level as a sad part of a movie or book.
I thought the saddest part of Colossus was the part of the ending when you're given control. I waited there for minutes or whatever it took for the entire grip meter to run out on the staircase.
I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure FFXI has nothing to do with Sony :P
If he can get a better return on his investment than the loans cost, and didn't misrepresent his financial situation, then that's just good business.
I'm not an expert on student loans, but most of them that I've encountered stipulate that you're using them on something at least tangentially related to current or past educational expenses. They're not going to catch you (unless they pay very close attention to your financial statements), but it is sort of wrong to be using zero-interest federal education aid money to invest just on interest. This guy's already getting most of his way paid through college... I dunno.