Holy shit, can we take the rose colored glasses off please.
Please, please, go find a mid 90's pc gamer mag, and read it. I bet you will see 30 pages of "OMFG GAMEPLAY OVER GRAPHICS PLEASE"
Yes, back then, that blurry blob of a weapon icon was FUCKING SWEET GRAPHICS. Look at wing commander now. It looks like a blurry piece of shit, right? WRONG, that was JAWDROPPING AMAZING GRAPHICS when it was released. Jawdropping. No, I'm not joking.
Graphics are a part of gaming. They really are. For some generas of games, they make or BREAK it. I've picked up some older games that I missed (eg crono trigger) that were supposed to be amazing, and really couldn't play them too long. Crono was depressing to play for me because I knew that if I had played it during its time, I would have fucking loved it! Loved it! But now... snes just didnt have the memory space for gripping dialog in an rpg.
I like graphics. I like gameplay. Sometimes a game for me is bathing in a sea of graphics. I spent way too much time climbing mountains in oblivion, and I wasn't getting up on those hilltops because of game play, let me tell you.
I bought crysis so I could throw a guy into a shed and watch it collapse around him. I loved crawling around in the jungle like the predator. This was only fun, due to awesome tree graphics. I guess I could have pretended if the graphics sucked, but meh, snore.
Resident evil 4 was an awesome game. It had really really fun gameplay. But what pushed it over the top was awesome art design and graphics, on top of the gameplay.
Sure, I love indie games. Mount and blade had good enough graphics for me, gameplay is amazing. Crimsonland was sweet as hell and one of my favorite games.
Assasin's creed, loved the gameplay, but boyo did that stand out with its graphics.
Graphics are sweet. I'll take both please. So, screw this guy, devs, graphics, please. Thanks.
Interesting. My 29th bday is coming up in 2 days, and I'd say I've been gaming as long as you have.
I still love gaming and make time for it in my life. I definitely do a lot more other things (spend time with wife, friends, volleyball etc) then JUST gaming, but when I go back home my priority usually is one game or another.
The WAY i game has changed a lot though. I love all generas of games, and while some people only do RPG or action or sports, I like to do them all. I find myself cherry picking what I think is the best title from each genera as it comes out, and playing it for a bit.
It takes a lot to hold my interest for a long time though. I am very picky with what I get, as I feel like I've played it a lot. So I don't go out and play the raw amount of titles I used to, and for me to keep up playing it for months on end, it has to be something really unique or really well made.
Some examples I can think of include, say mass effect. I played it for like 2 or 3 hours, and that was only to really see the conversations. I was like a little kid in a candy store with how intuitive and smart the implementation of branching dialog was in that game. It is one of those things that when you see it, you can never go back to picking one of 5 responses, and trying to guess what kind of attitude you are taking with the conversation. Brilliant. And, that's about all I needed to see of the game. Eventually I may go back to actually play it, but really, I just wanted to see that feature.
Another example is fight night. The punch controls on that thing were brilliant and perfect for a boxing game, that I couldn't think of a better way to do it.
So, things like that really suck me in, and is sort of the addiction I am looking for in my gaming. So yeah, there definitely is blow out, but, I like gaming way too much to ever ignore it for anything else. But see, gaming is nice, it'll always be waiting for you to come back to while you do your family / friend stuff and wont get pissed at you if you ignore it for a bit. We all need something like that in our lives:)
The first thing is that now that games are so popular, the community is HUGE. You don't really see the same faces that often online gaming. A small mud, or any small online game, you see the same faces, and bump into each other more often, which creates the community you know.
EQ maintained some of that because of the forced grouping aspect. When I leveled it was like Oasis, then to the kunark area to the uh lake area (forget zone) then eventually on to dreadlands and so forth. You would go there, form a group, walk by all the camp areas and find a spot (seeing familiar faces in the camping spots) and start leveling up.
In something like wow, there are a ton of players. You don't really see the same people that often. Around 70 if you start pugging raids, you will start to see some familiar faces, but leveling up, its just random people's alts, or you are just off on your own.
I like wow for that aspect, but miss the community. I guess that is what the large guilds are for though, to create that psudo community.
I had the same sort of experience playing warcraft 2 on a small online service way back (kali), moving on to battle.net where there were a bajillion people and you never played the same guy twice unless you set it up.
I don't know. I like the variety with large populations and the freedom (more people to find), but miss the large scale community aspect of the smaller games. It might be also the form of the games are getting away from needing a community. Certainly a small MUD with a political system of some sort is going to have a way different landscape from an all instanced rpg game.
Seriously. D3 is like, action wow. Which is cool, I love wow's classes a lot. They just need to stop blowing themselves and just go ahead and say they are using WOW's talent tree style. Wow's class style, and WOW's glyph system *cough* I mean rune system.
It's cool guys, don't worry. It looks like they are tanking the "OMG BALANCE" out of the wow trees and letting us fuck shit up with the same abilities. Cool, make me more eager for the game. If I actually had friends I would probably be pissed at the lack of lan, but, still going to buy it on release, who am I kidding?
Seriously, very disappointing. You can't even get a "trainer" for yourself and max out characters and run round with your friends/family. I'm all for standard rules you'd use online, but when you are home doing the single player thing, take the reigns off, sheesh.
The big deal is you can't sit in a room with a router and play it with your friends. The big deal is if the internet is acting up, you can't play, even if you want to just play with your brother or something whos in the next room. That's what the big deal is, and it's epic bullshit.
I agree with you 100%. Games are about immersion. I loved fight night games. Fight night 3 pissed me off. The bk guy as your corner man? This knockout brought to you by bk? Fuck you! It actually made me start hating BK. Now, under armor? Underarmor is a boxing brand, right? No problem. I can buy nike shoes and underarmor mouth guards that are actual products. Sort of immersing, isnt it?
Problem is advertising as you said only is immersing in present day games. They could prob do a future setting brand logo for themselves, that would be interesting. Or in like fallout having a destroyed billboard with current day advertisements on it would be pretty sweet.
Even with all of that, a part of me misses the fake brands you got in games that had advertising. Something funny and interesting about seeing all the parody brands to add to a world setting.
Immersion is really the problem with all advertising. It is jaring, in your face, and just totally out of place. LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME!!!!!!!
Advertising, presenting to you in a way that fits with what you are looking at, is fine. Bring on your extra revenue, just do yourself a favor, and don't degrade your product by adding it inappropriately. If you ruin your product, you ruin the whole point of having an ad there in the first place.
Agreed. We had 2 gba's and i bought a link cable to try it out. Horrible game. The gameplay was reasonably fun when you got in the game, but in the meantime, as the second player, you basically fell asleep while the lead player handled moving around and all the out side of combat stuff. Epically boring. If the game was 2 player the whole way through, I could have liked it more, but I had better things to do with my time then wait for an opportunity to play the fun part of the game.
That, and we kept getting large electric shocks while playing. Kept worrying we were going to ruin our gameboys.
Right. But this applies for everyone about everything. Angry athiests, mac users, wii owners, democrats, republicans, fps gamers, console gamers, pc gamers, nascar fans... you name it, if a person likes it, hes probably going to try to sell you on it. We just get pissed off a lot more when its religion and politics:)
I think the punishment was just right. In AC you could still aim poorly, or misjudge a distance, and end up falling down on the street having to "restart" the climbing. I think the skill was kind of how fast you could get from point a to point b based on your rout and aiming. I mean AC is the first game that you count on the character knowing that hey, I CAN jump 30 feet straight out, but this ledge is only 10 feet away so I'm going to jump there instead. I thought that was great.
AC failed by not allowing you to play the damn game on demand. I tried to bring it to a friends house to show the game, and I bored everybody to death as we tried to wait the like 30 minutes before you can be in the game running around the cities. Or even worse when I saved it at the end of the game, and I couldn't get back into the main menu to just jump into a mission so I can goof around and have fun in the sandbox.
Either way, AMAZING visuals and control system and gameplay in AC. Really pushed the genera.
There really hasn't been a new style of fighting game for a long while. To me, they all have the same weakness... learning curve + reaction time.
I've played most fighting games and wanted to like them since probably sf2. But everytime I try to play, the skill level of players is so skewed that one party was constantly not having fun. Getting your ass handed to you alll day long just isnt fun for anybody. You can't even learn moves, since you are too busy getting comboed/stunned/thrown whatever do death. All you really learn how to do is get up off the floor.
Soul caliber did a good job with some button mashing vs skilled opponent equality, but you still have a skilled opponent going in like 30 game streaks on someone who did not own the game.
The only traditional fighting game I've been able to enjoy is DOA:extreem. To win at doa, all I had to do was learn 4 "moves" to reverse my friend. I might not know the game, but I know my friends, and can figure out that they tend to lead with say medium kicks with a certain character. So very quickly I could play on equal footing with my friend who would go 50 and 1 against me in soul calibur.
But there is still a roof. You always have to learn your char, learn combos, proper ways to block, all that. You definitly hit a roof of where you can go in JUST multiplayer alone, and you really need to step back, open a FAQ, then learn and practice moves/combos on your own.
Fighting games just have a lot of technical stuff, on top of that, the time in which you have to react is so small, unless you have the dictionary of your moves, and your opponents moves, in your head, there is no time at all to formulate a game plan.
SF and SNK are particularly bad imho at the moves sets. For the first part of my life I couldn't do a dragon punch, and those SNK super combo things later on, what? Does anybody remember the accomplishment it was to do 2 360's for zangiefs special move? I mean yeah, eventually you learn it, but it sure is frustrating to not even be able to enter the commands to do a move. I know "EO" mode or whatever in some of these games is a solution, but it is still limits you how you can play the game.
I really would like to see some innovation in fighting games. I love the idea of 2 wildly inventive characters squaring off to fight. I just wish they could try to come up with some new control scheme on how to do it. Big health bar on the top. check. Guard meter, check. "I can react in.5 seconds guard/parry button" check. Super meter charge bar, check. 99 Seoncs to win, check. Possible ring out, check. Some sort of bastardized throw/guard/strike triangle, check. Built in combos, check.
They are all, the, same!
For me personally, the buishido blade series really did something unique. They had a DAMAGE model. During the fight, I could disable my opponents arm, and he would have modified animations and combos as his arm hung limp next to him. He fought slower and worse, but could still win.
There has been no advance in the fighting controls and presentation. There have been SOME great new animations for moves (not in the recycled SF world, well, sans 4 now i guess), fun and inventive characters...but they all hit each other the same way. Low, middle, high. I guess this is a nice easy thing to program and debug, but I want to see something new!
Perhaps with the push towards procedurally animated characters lately, I can finally roundhouse kick someone from the left and watch them fall over to the right. I would love a fighting game where I can hit them anywhere on their body, and do damage to the character model, rather then a bar across the screen. Have we gotten to the point where we can do that yet?
But really, all fighting games just feel the same. And I know each one has a different feel within the genera, but a fighting game is still a fighting game. I guess I've seen pushes in every genera for something unique, except fighting games. The last innovation in the genera I've seen is the climb from 2d to 3d. Fighting games have to catch up, where are my physics?:)
I know way past the threshold for people checking, but just posting back anyway...
No need for you to explain! Was just attempting a lame self geek mocking joke. I have ranted and analyzed in detail much sillier things then this, we all have, its part of being a geek:) I am sorry if any offense was taken at my comment! Carry on sir!
I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one. I think I'm like wrestling with some inner conflict like "IT HAS TO BE FUN" because I played the demo and was like, omfg this is sweet as hell!! But then realized that I liked seeing all the tech in action that I had read about, the way they have the doors bust open, the way soldiers will grab on to things as you drag them around with the force powers, all that.
But then I realized they were just trying to copy god of war with their gameplay. Quick time events are cool, and they gave you plenty of time to hit the button, so they weren't hard.
I had trouble with force abilities, but really that was the best scheme for it and with practice I can see that working. The targeting was horrible though, I could never seem to pick up the guy I wanted too, or actually turn the camera fast enough to the left and right to see what I wanted (might be tweakable), or just in a room full of bad guys, just couldnt target who I wanted to use the force powers on.
But ok, throwing things around got old kinda fast. I mean, you walk into a room with 10 guys right, your options are like, pick up barrel and throw it at them, or go in and cut them up. After the barrel throwing game gets old (after 10 seconds), you try to wade in and do some damage with the saber.
The combos were lack luster and boring. When you lightening up the sword the graphical effect is cool, but it just doesnt feel, hard hitting at all. Maybe that's cause at each contact the game pauses for some dramatic effect, which might work for rare special moves, but my quick hits shouldnt be contacting like that.
I'd rather see something like some trash troops where my saber hacks off body parts each cut, and then introduce "gimmic" soldiers later that can take a few hits from the saber due to some special armor or whatever bs.
But yeah, if the saber combat falls appart, you are left with picking up guys and tossing them. I don't find that interesting, or unique, and I'm actually a person that HATED the grav gun sequences in half life. Picking up and throwing things is really not that exciting, it's more like the devs patting themselves on the back they've come up with a cool new technology.
But, I guess to each their own. I know they will have some cool gimmics in the game, but, just a lot of potential lost here, much like assasin's creed:)
Either way my fav star wars game had to be jedi outcast...jedi academy was cool with what it added, but by then the multiplayer community sucked the big one, and there just weren't enough people playing it that you could find a "regular" game of it, not loaded down with a bunch of people thinking they are playing an rpg. Imagine walking around playing q3 with your gun lowered then complaining to people when you get fragged...yeah that was the jedi outcast online community.
Anyway, as to the demo here. Force power + tech behind it was really sweet. Unfortunatly, the gameplay around it kind of felt lack luster. The saber combat really feels like every action game with a sword. That isn't a bad thing, but not unique at all.
I wish to god someone would make a really great melee game. I still play busido blade 2 to get that feel for slice and dice I want. JO made a good stab (ha ha) at it, but fell a bit short of what could be done!
Either way, if I was working there, if they didn't guarantee me a continued job, in writing, I'd be sending my resume out to other companies, and pretty much half assing any work I did on halo wars. I mean, you would be insane not to, right?
I think it's pretty common around every video game discussion to get mad about graphical improvements.
I like them. I like them a lot. They are fun in of themselves. If a game looks crappy, I don't like it as much. But boring game play can be boring gameplay. I played through crysis once, it looked sweet as hell, but I never came back to it. I've played games with great gameplay and bad graphics (playing stronghold real late in the part), and didn't come back cause the graphics were sub par.
Works both way. Great game has graphics and gameplay. I want bitchen audio/visual feedback when I play a game. I want to squeeze the trigger, here a cannon shot fire out my shotgun, and make some sort of crazy noticeable impact on something. I want to swing a sword and hack some monster's arm off and watch crazy blood spray everywhere. I want princess in another castle to be smoken hot and drawn perfectly. I want my RPG companions to have crazy flare and look compeltly badass.
I want hard action in your face over the top goodness. For the most part, games deliver that. It's the reason I don't play "real life" that often. All the excitement, none of the danger:)
Agreed. I played dreamfall randomly, and then went back bought TLJ as I had somehow missed it (played all the older adventure games). I found that dreamfall was more compelling, and generated more emotions for me, then TJL. Probably because it had a lot of dated game mechanics and older style presentation. It would have had a larger impact on me if I had played it at its release time I think.
I really enjoyed Final fantasy Tactics. It had one of my favorite stories in any game, and it only got better as I replayed it as I got older. There is a remade psp version that would be easier to find of it if you were interested.
I would also put dreamfall up there because I don't think I've played too many games just like it. It was the only game I've ever gotten my wife to sit around watch every second of it. I loved the whole thing, and really do want him to finish up the story.
Bookwise, I tried to like wheel of time, and my reading cycle went from excited, to bored through the middle, about to throw the god damn thing in the trash, to hitting the last 2 chapters and being ooh fun! I hit the mid section of like book 8 or 9 and then realized that I was sick of being jerked around and hated how he wrote and was just reading for the compulsion to realize where the hell the book was going, and put it down. There comes a time you have to like, have more plot and less characters, less angry pmsing women characters. Though not for me, it is a pretty unique form of storytelling, I think any reader should just read some of them for what it is, though in my own opinion it wasn't till around book 3 or 4 that he knew he'd could write as many fucking books as he wanted, and the first few attempt to be complete stories in themselves. Cliffhanger hell and plot drag didn't start happening until later on.
I would recommend George RR Martin's song of ice and fire. The first 3 books are some of the best pieces of writing I've seen in my entire life. Many of my friends who are not big readers picked it up at my glowing recommendations and were equally as hooked on it. Book 4 was a giant kick in the nads though. Waited years for it, read it, realized i didn't like it, and didn't understand, as the first 3 were currently carrying my babies. Hopefully he can save it with book 5.
Wont ever understand how dling tv shows is "bad" esp when you already pay for the cable/sat company for the programming and just didn't happen to record it. What do you do when a friend tells you about a tv series and its 2 seasons in already? Sure, I could have taped them, and watched them over and over, and this is ok. But if I didn't know about it ahead of time and didn't tape it at the time of air, it is now a bad thing? Seems silly to me.
Seriously. I enjoyed both diablos. I never felt "scared" or that I was in the pits of hell. I think the people who had played this had never played a dungeon delving style game before? It's funny but until they announced diablo 3, I never knew there was some magical DARK AND EVIL atmosphere that the game had. It flew right over my head. I was more into clicking on things and killing them in fast numbers, watching cool death animations and watching my character get more and more badass.
I love the art style of the game. The motions and colors are vibrant and CLEAR and I can see everything that is happening on the screen. Moreover, there is an artist's touch and polish to the game I don't really see in many other games out there. The "realistic gritty" stuff usually suffers from uncanny valley syndrome, the hard, sharp, precise "cgi" edges wreck it, and make it look like every game out there. The more 'comic' lines in just the right spots to create the illusion of more detail in your mind, do a MUCH better job of creating a "fun" atmosphere to be in.
Seriously, I bet when you play it, its going to be fun, and you wont even realize why it is fun, and then will fall in love with the graphics all over. Personally I love the direction, and hope nobody changes the look and feel of it due to their ranting and/or petitions.
Crazily enough, you can just NOT look at the map if it is the experience you want. Turn off the mini map with an interface mod, never bring up the main map, and viola, you can hand map the game all you want. Just because something is there, doesn't mean you have to use it, if that is not the gaming experience you want.
One of my friends started playing wow recently, refuses to use things like quest helpper that tell him where things are, and chose to level up playing that way "in the dark" so he got the benafit of discovering things on his own.
There is NO reason you can't play the games like you did back in the day.
Me, when I played eq i downloaded and printed every EQ atlas map the guy could draw.(BTW quite a talented mapper, didn't know his maps were still around, thanks for the trip down memory lane to orignal poster).
That's the way I wanted to play. Choices are good.
I think people think too much with their 5 senses when thinking about alien life forms. What's to say there isn't a whole world existing in the same space as us, and we just cant perceive it.
But step back from that philosophical stuff, and imagine that why would there be another species similar humans? I think people think aliens, they think human with different features with similar concepts of life, death, morals, social "revealing" ( would they even understand what that is? ) rather then something so foreign, we couldn't even begin to understand it, nor its motivations, if it has those?
Sci fi is fun because we graft human behavior on something different, and its fun for us to say ooh look they are just like us. But in the end it is just the human ego projection our emotions on something else.
I watched wall-e the other day. I was amazed at how well pixar could make a box with eyes utterly human. Our minds see patterns, shapes, and behavior in the right spot, and we fill in the blanks with the emotions. This is the same thing people do with the idea of "aliens". I think it is limiting, egotistical, and utterly human. We just need to remember to keep open minds about what we see, or "alien" life, because in reality it just seems like we are looking for life "similar" enough to what we know, to call it life.
For any geeks out there, orson-scott card's ender books (the later ones) deal with this a bit, as they try to discover whether a virus is actually a species, and wiping out a really smart virus is in fact genocide.
Just interesting stuff, but we have to remember to stop grafting our humanism on top of alien things we do not understand.
I'll just add my kudos to mount and blade. Extremely fun game play, very actively developed, new versions seem to come out quite frequently. I quiet easily opened my wallet after trying the demo and have not been upset.
The best part of mount and blade is you can ride around on a horse and lance people. I haven't really seen this kind of gameplay anywhere, and its pretty freaken amazing. On top of this there you can train up and maintain an army that will ride with you and you can give orders to. So you really get that "on the ground general" feel from playing. Graphics are very tolerable, and the horse animations are great.
There are lots of youtube videos up of gameplay, so just search for mount and blade and you can get a pretty good feel of the gameplay from that.
Slashdot Mirror
Holy shit, can we take the rose colored glasses off please.
Please, please, go find a mid 90's pc gamer mag, and read it. I bet you will see 30 pages of "OMFG GAMEPLAY OVER GRAPHICS PLEASE"
Yes, back then, that blurry blob of a weapon icon was FUCKING SWEET GRAPHICS. Look at wing commander now. It looks like a blurry piece of shit, right? WRONG, that was JAWDROPPING AMAZING GRAPHICS when it was released. Jawdropping. No, I'm not joking.
Graphics are a part of gaming. They really are. For some generas of games, they make or BREAK it. I've picked up some older games that I missed (eg crono trigger) that were supposed to be amazing, and really couldn't play them too long. Crono was depressing to play for me because I knew that if I had played it during its time, I would have fucking loved it! Loved it! But now... snes just didnt have the memory space for gripping dialog in an rpg.
I like graphics. I like gameplay. Sometimes a game for me is bathing in a sea of graphics. I spent way too much time climbing mountains in oblivion, and I wasn't getting up on those hilltops because of game play, let me tell you.
I bought crysis so I could throw a guy into a shed and watch it collapse around him. I loved crawling around in the jungle like the predator. This was only fun, due to awesome tree graphics. I guess I could have pretended if the graphics sucked, but meh, snore.
Resident evil 4 was an awesome game. It had really really fun gameplay. But what pushed it over the top was awesome art design and graphics, on top of the gameplay.
Sure, I love indie games. Mount and blade had good enough graphics for me, gameplay is amazing. Crimsonland was sweet as hell and one of my favorite games.
Assasin's creed, loved the gameplay, but boyo did that stand out with its graphics.
Graphics are sweet. I'll take both please. So, screw this guy, devs, graphics, please. Thanks.
Interesting. My 29th bday is coming up in 2 days, and I'd say I've been gaming as long as you have.
I still love gaming and make time for it in my life. I definitely do a lot more other things (spend time with wife, friends, volleyball etc) then JUST gaming, but when I go back home my priority usually is one game or another.
The WAY i game has changed a lot though. I love all generas of games, and while some people only do RPG or action or sports, I like to do them all. I find myself cherry picking what I think is the best title from each genera as it comes out, and playing it for a bit.
It takes a lot to hold my interest for a long time though. I am very picky with what I get, as I feel like I've played it a lot. So I don't go out and play the raw amount of titles I used to, and for me to keep up playing it for months on end, it has to be something really unique or really well made.
Some examples I can think of include, say mass effect. I played it for like 2 or 3 hours, and that was only to really see the conversations. I was like a little kid in a candy store with how intuitive and smart the implementation of branching dialog was in that game. It is one of those things that when you see it, you can never go back to picking one of 5 responses, and trying to guess what kind of attitude you are taking with the conversation. Brilliant. And, that's about all I needed to see of the game. Eventually I may go back to actually play it, but really, I just wanted to see that feature.
Another example is fight night. The punch controls on that thing were brilliant and perfect for a boxing game, that I couldn't think of a better way to do it.
So, things like that really suck me in, and is sort of the addiction I am looking for in my gaming. So yeah, there definitely is blow out, but, I like gaming way too much to ever ignore it for anything else. But see, gaming is nice, it'll always be waiting for you to come back to while you do your family / friend stuff and wont get pissed at you if you ignore it for a bit. We all need something like that in our lives :)
Community is a double edged sword.
The first thing is that now that games are so popular, the community is HUGE. You don't really see the same faces that often online gaming. A small mud, or any small online game, you see the same faces, and bump into each other more often, which creates the community you know.
EQ maintained some of that because of the forced grouping aspect. When I leveled it was like Oasis, then to the kunark area to the uh lake area (forget zone) then eventually on to dreadlands and so forth. You would go there, form a group, walk by all the camp areas and find a spot (seeing familiar faces in the camping spots) and start leveling up.
In something like wow, there are a ton of players. You don't really see the same people that often. Around 70 if you start pugging raids, you will start to see some familiar faces, but leveling up, its just random people's alts, or you are just off on your own.
I like wow for that aspect, but miss the community. I guess that is what the large guilds are for though, to create that psudo community.
I had the same sort of experience playing warcraft 2 on a small online service way back (kali), moving on to battle.net where there were a bajillion people and you never played the same guy twice unless you set it up.
I don't know. I like the variety with large populations and the freedom (more people to find), but miss the large scale community aspect of the smaller games. It might be also the form of the games are getting away from needing a community. Certainly a small MUD with a political system of some sort is going to have a way different landscape from an all instanced rpg game.
Seriously. D3 is like, action wow. Which is cool, I love wow's classes a lot. They just need to stop blowing themselves and just go ahead and say they are using WOW's talent tree style. Wow's class style, and WOW's glyph system *cough* I mean rune system.
It's cool guys, don't worry. It looks like they are tanking the "OMG BALANCE" out of the wow trees and letting us fuck shit up with the same abilities. Cool, make me more eager for the game. If I actually had friends I would probably be pissed at the lack of lan, but, still going to buy it on release, who am I kidding?
Seriously, very disappointing. You can't even get a "trainer" for yourself and max out characters and run round with your friends/family. I'm all for standard rules you'd use online, but when you are home doing the single player thing, take the reigns off, sheesh.
The big deal is you can't sit in a room with a router and play it with your friends. The big deal is if the internet is acting up, you can't play, even if you want to just play with your brother or something whos in the next room. That's what the big deal is, and it's epic bullshit.
I agree with you 100%. Games are about immersion. I loved fight night games. Fight night 3 pissed me off. The bk guy as your corner man? This knockout brought to you by bk? Fuck you! It actually made me start hating BK. Now, under armor? Underarmor is a boxing brand, right? No problem. I can buy nike shoes and underarmor mouth guards that are actual products. Sort of immersing, isnt it?
Problem is advertising as you said only is immersing in present day games. They could prob do a future setting brand logo for themselves, that would be interesting. Or in like fallout having a destroyed billboard with current day advertisements on it would be pretty sweet.
Even with all of that, a part of me misses the fake brands you got in games that had advertising. Something funny and interesting about seeing all the parody brands to add to a world setting.
Immersion is really the problem with all advertising. It is jaring, in your face, and just totally out of place. LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME!!!!!!!
Advertising, presenting to you in a way that fits with what you are looking at, is fine. Bring on your extra revenue, just do yourself a favor, and don't degrade your product by adding it inappropriately. If you ruin your product, you ruin the whole point of having an ad there in the first place.
Agreed. We had 2 gba's and i bought a link cable to try it out. Horrible game. The gameplay was reasonably fun when you got in the game, but in the meantime, as the second player, you basically fell asleep while the lead player handled moving around and all the out side of combat stuff. Epically boring. If the game was 2 player the whole way through, I could have liked it more, but I had better things to do with my time then wait for an opportunity to play the fun part of the game.
That, and we kept getting large electric shocks while playing. Kept worrying we were going to ruin our gameboys.
Right. But this applies for everyone about everything. Angry athiests, mac users, wii owners, democrats, republicans, fps gamers, console gamers, pc gamers, nascar fans... you name it, if a person likes it, hes probably going to try to sell you on it. We just get pissed off a lot more when its religion and politics :)
The Catholic church today has come a long way since then.
But you still feel guilty, don't you sinner?
I think the punishment was just right. In AC you could still aim poorly, or misjudge a distance, and end up falling down on the street having to "restart" the climbing. I think the skill was kind of how fast you could get from point a to point b based on your rout and aiming. I mean AC is the first game that you count on the character knowing that hey, I CAN jump 30 feet straight out, but this ledge is only 10 feet away so I'm going to jump there instead. I thought that was great.
AC failed by not allowing you to play the damn game on demand. I tried to bring it to a friends house to show the game, and I bored everybody to death as we tried to wait the like 30 minutes before you can be in the game running around the cities. Or even worse when I saved it at the end of the game, and I couldn't get back into the main menu to just jump into a mission so I can goof around and have fun in the sandbox.
Either way, AMAZING visuals and control system and gameplay in AC. Really pushed the genera.
There really hasn't been a new style of fighting game for a long while. To me, they all have the same weakness... learning curve + reaction time.
I've played most fighting games and wanted to like them since probably sf2. But everytime I try to play, the skill level of players is so skewed that one party was constantly not having fun. Getting your ass handed to you alll day long just isnt fun for anybody. You can't even learn moves, since you are too busy getting comboed/stunned/thrown whatever do death. All you really learn how to do is get up off the floor.
Soul caliber did a good job with some button mashing vs skilled opponent equality, but you still have a skilled opponent going in like 30 game streaks on someone who did not own the game.
The only traditional fighting game I've been able to enjoy is DOA:extreem. To win at doa, all I had to do was learn 4 "moves" to reverse my friend. I might not know the game, but I know my friends, and can figure out that they tend to lead with say medium kicks with a certain character. So very quickly I could play on equal footing with my friend who would go 50 and 1 against me in soul calibur.
But there is still a roof. You always have to learn your char, learn combos, proper ways to block, all that. You definitly hit a roof of where you can go in JUST multiplayer alone, and you really need to step back, open a FAQ, then learn and practice moves/combos on your own.
Fighting games just have a lot of technical stuff, on top of that, the time in which you have to react is so small, unless you have the dictionary of your moves, and your opponents moves, in your head, there is no time at all to formulate a game plan.
SF and SNK are particularly bad imho at the moves sets. For the first part of my life I couldn't do a dragon punch, and those SNK super combo things later on, what? Does anybody remember the accomplishment it was to do 2 360's for zangiefs special move? I mean yeah, eventually you learn it, but it sure is frustrating to not even be able to enter the commands to do a move. I know "EO" mode or whatever in some of these games is a solution, but it is still limits you how you can play the game.
I really would like to see some innovation in fighting games. I love the idea of 2 wildly inventive characters squaring off to fight. I just wish they could try to come up with some new control scheme on how to do it. Big health bar on the top. check. Guard meter, check. "I can react in .5 seconds guard/parry button" check. Super meter charge bar, check. 99 Seoncs to win, check. Possible ring out, check. Some sort of bastardized throw/guard/strike triangle, check. Built in combos, check.
They are all, the, same!
For me personally, the buishido blade series really did something unique. They had a DAMAGE model. During the fight, I could disable my opponents arm, and he would have modified animations and combos as his arm hung limp next to him. He fought slower and worse, but could still win.
There has been no advance in the fighting controls and presentation. There have been SOME great new animations for moves (not in the recycled SF world, well, sans 4 now i guess), fun and inventive characters...but they all hit each other the same way. Low, middle, high. I guess this is a nice easy thing to program and debug, but I want to see something new!
Perhaps with the push towards procedurally animated characters lately, I can finally roundhouse kick someone from the left and watch them fall over to the right. I would love a fighting game where I can hit them anywhere on their body, and do damage to the character model, rather then a bar across the screen. Have we gotten to the point where we can do that yet?
But really, all fighting games just feel the same. And I know each one has a different feel within the genera, but a fighting game is still a fighting game. I guess I've seen pushes in every genera for something unique, except fighting games. The last innovation in the genera I've seen is the climb from 2d to 3d. Fighting games have to catch up, where are my physics? :)
I know way past the threshold for people checking, but just posting back anyway...
No need for you to explain! Was just attempting a lame self geek mocking joke. I have ranted and analyzed in detail much sillier things then this, we all have, its part of being a geek :) I am sorry if any offense was taken at my comment! Carry on sir!
I find it disturbing that anybody would make a point of trying to figure out how yoda talks...
I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one. I think I'm like wrestling with some inner conflict like "IT HAS TO BE FUN" because I played the demo and was like, omfg this is sweet as hell!! But then realized that I liked seeing all the tech in action that I had read about, the way they have the doors bust open, the way soldiers will grab on to things as you drag them around with the force powers, all that.
But then I realized they were just trying to copy god of war with their gameplay. Quick time events are cool, and they gave you plenty of time to hit the button, so they weren't hard.
I had trouble with force abilities, but really that was the best scheme for it and with practice I can see that working. The targeting was horrible though, I could never seem to pick up the guy I wanted too, or actually turn the camera fast enough to the left and right to see what I wanted (might be tweakable), or just in a room full of bad guys, just couldnt target who I wanted to use the force powers on.
But ok, throwing things around got old kinda fast. I mean, you walk into a room with 10 guys right, your options are like, pick up barrel and throw it at them, or go in and cut them up. After the barrel throwing game gets old (after 10 seconds), you try to wade in and do some damage with the saber.
The combos were lack luster and boring. When you lightening up the sword the graphical effect is cool, but it just doesnt feel, hard hitting at all. Maybe that's cause at each contact the game pauses for some dramatic effect, which might work for rare special moves, but my quick hits shouldnt be contacting like that.
I'd rather see something like some trash troops where my saber hacks off body parts each cut, and then introduce "gimmic" soldiers later that can take a few hits from the saber due to some special armor or whatever bs.
But yeah, if the saber combat falls appart, you are left with picking up guys and tossing them. I don't find that interesting, or unique, and I'm actually a person that HATED the grav gun sequences in half life. Picking up and throwing things is really not that exciting, it's more like the devs patting themselves on the back they've come up with a cool new technology.
But, I guess to each their own. I know they will have some cool gimmics in the game, but, just a lot of potential lost here, much like assasin's creed :)
I don't think it was that long ago.
Either way my fav star wars game had to be jedi outcast...jedi academy was cool with what it added, but by then the multiplayer community sucked the big one, and there just weren't enough people playing it that you could find a "regular" game of it, not loaded down with a bunch of people thinking they are playing an rpg. Imagine walking around playing q3 with your gun lowered then complaining to people when you get fragged...yeah that was the jedi outcast online community.
Anyway, as to the demo here. Force power + tech behind it was really sweet. Unfortunatly, the gameplay around it kind of felt lack luster. The saber combat really feels like every action game with a sword. That isn't a bad thing, but not unique at all.
I wish to god someone would make a really great melee game. I still play busido blade 2 to get that feel for slice and dice I want. JO made a good stab (ha ha) at it, but fell a bit short of what could be done!
Either way, if I was working there, if they didn't guarantee me a continued job, in writing, I'd be sending my resume out to other companies, and pretty much half assing any work I did on halo wars. I mean, you would be insane not to, right?
I think it's pretty common around every video game discussion to get mad about graphical improvements.
I like them. I like them a lot. They are fun in of themselves. If a game looks crappy, I don't like it as much. But boring game play can be boring gameplay. I played through crysis once, it looked sweet as hell, but I never came back to it. I've played games with great gameplay and bad graphics (playing stronghold real late in the part), and didn't come back cause the graphics were sub par.
Works both way. Great game has graphics and gameplay. I want bitchen audio/visual feedback when I play a game. I want to squeeze the trigger, here a cannon shot fire out my shotgun, and make some sort of crazy noticeable impact on something. I want to swing a sword and hack some monster's arm off and watch crazy blood spray everywhere. I want princess in another castle to be smoken hot and drawn perfectly. I want my RPG companions to have crazy flare and look compeltly badass.
I want hard action in your face over the top goodness. For the most part, games deliver that. It's the reason I don't play "real life" that often. All the excitement, none of the danger :)
Agreed. I played dreamfall randomly, and then went back bought TLJ as I had somehow missed it (played all the older adventure games). I found that dreamfall was more compelling, and generated more emotions for me, then TJL. Probably because it had a lot of dated game mechanics and older style presentation. It would have had a larger impact on me if I had played it at its release time I think.
I really enjoyed Final fantasy Tactics. It had one of my favorite stories in any game, and it only got better as I replayed it as I got older. There is a remade psp version that would be easier to find of it if you were interested.
I would also put dreamfall up there because I don't think I've played too many games just like it. It was the only game I've ever gotten my wife to sit around watch every second of it. I loved the whole thing, and really do want him to finish up the story.
Bookwise, I tried to like wheel of time, and my reading cycle went from excited, to bored through the middle, about to throw the god damn thing in the trash, to hitting the last 2 chapters and being ooh fun! I hit the mid section of like book 8 or 9 and then realized that I was sick of being jerked around and hated how he wrote and was just reading for the compulsion to realize where the hell the book was going, and put it down. There comes a time you have to like, have more plot and less characters, less angry pmsing women characters. Though not for me, it is a pretty unique form of storytelling, I think any reader should just read some of them for what it is, though in my own opinion it wasn't till around book 3 or 4 that he knew he'd could write as many fucking books as he wanted, and the first few attempt to be complete stories in themselves. Cliffhanger hell and plot drag didn't start happening until later on.
I would recommend George RR Martin's song of ice and fire. The first 3 books are some of the best pieces of writing I've seen in my entire life. Many of my friends who are not big readers picked it up at my glowing recommendations and were equally as hooked on it. Book 4 was a giant kick in the nads though. Waited years for it, read it, realized i didn't like it, and didn't understand, as the first 3 were currently carrying my babies. Hopefully he can save it with book 5.
Wont ever understand how dling tv shows is "bad" esp when you already pay for the cable/sat company for the programming and just didn't happen to record it. What do you do when a friend tells you about a tv series and its 2 seasons in already? Sure, I could have taped them, and watched them over and over, and this is ok. But if I didn't know about it ahead of time and didn't tape it at the time of air, it is now a bad thing? Seems silly to me.
Seriously. I enjoyed both diablos. I never felt "scared" or that I was in the pits of hell. I think the people who had played this had never played a dungeon delving style game before? It's funny but until they announced diablo 3, I never knew there was some magical DARK AND EVIL atmosphere that the game had. It flew right over my head. I was more into clicking on things and killing them in fast numbers, watching cool death animations and watching my character get more and more badass.
I love the art style of the game. The motions and colors are vibrant and CLEAR and I can see everything that is happening on the screen. Moreover, there is an artist's touch and polish to the game I don't really see in many other games out there. The "realistic gritty" stuff usually suffers from uncanny valley syndrome, the hard, sharp, precise "cgi" edges wreck it, and make it look like every game out there. The more 'comic' lines in just the right spots to create the illusion of more detail in your mind, do a MUCH better job of creating a "fun" atmosphere to be in.
Seriously, I bet when you play it, its going to be fun, and you wont even realize why it is fun, and then will fall in love with the graphics all over. Personally I love the direction, and hope nobody changes the look and feel of it due to their ranting and/or petitions.
Crazily enough, you can just NOT look at the map if it is the experience you want. Turn off the mini map with an interface mod, never bring up the main map, and viola, you can hand map the game all you want. Just because something is there, doesn't mean you have to use it, if that is not the gaming experience you want.
One of my friends started playing wow recently, refuses to use things like quest helpper that tell him where things are, and chose to level up playing that way "in the dark" so he got the benafit of discovering things on his own.
There is NO reason you can't play the games like you did back in the day.
Me, when I played eq i downloaded and printed every EQ atlas map the guy could draw.(BTW quite a talented mapper, didn't know his maps were still around, thanks for the trip down memory lane to orignal poster).
That's the way I wanted to play. Choices are good.
I think people think too much with their 5 senses when thinking about alien life forms. What's to say there isn't a whole world existing in the same space as us, and we just cant perceive it.
But step back from that philosophical stuff, and imagine that why would there be another species similar humans? I think people think aliens, they think human with different features with similar concepts of life, death, morals, social "revealing" ( would they even understand what that is? ) rather then something so foreign, we couldn't even begin to understand it, nor its motivations, if it has those?
Sci fi is fun because we graft human behavior on something different, and its fun for us to say ooh look they are just like us. But in the end it is just the human ego projection our emotions on something else.
I watched wall-e the other day. I was amazed at how well pixar could make a box with eyes utterly human. Our minds see patterns, shapes, and behavior in the right spot, and we fill in the blanks with the emotions. This is the same thing people do with the idea of "aliens". I think it is limiting, egotistical, and utterly human. We just need to remember to keep open minds about what we see, or "alien" life, because in reality it just seems like we are looking for life "similar" enough to what we know, to call it life.
For any geeks out there, orson-scott card's ender books (the later ones) deal with this a bit, as they try to discover whether a virus is actually a species, and wiping out a really smart virus is in fact genocide.
Just interesting stuff, but we have to remember to stop grafting our humanism on top of alien things we do not understand.
I'll just add my kudos to mount and blade. Extremely fun game play, very actively developed, new versions seem to come out quite frequently. I quiet easily opened my wallet after trying the demo and have not been upset.
The best part of mount and blade is you can ride around on a horse and lance people. I haven't really seen this kind of gameplay anywhere, and its pretty freaken amazing. On top of this there you can train up and maintain an army that will ride with you and you can give orders to. So you really get that "on the ground general" feel from playing. Graphics are very tolerable, and the horse animations are great.
There are lots of youtube videos up of gameplay, so just search for mount and blade and you can get a pretty good feel of the gameplay from that.