You got it right right there. I'm the same way. I played pretty hard for about 2 months in wow, got bored, and quit. I still think it is a fantastic game, I was just done with it. The two month intrest the game generated for me was much more then most other games, and having payed 65 for the experience, i felt it was all well worth it. I have no plans to ever play again, but the game is great all the same.
This guy just was upset his addiction was gone, and decided to complain about all mmo's.
For a different experience, I suggest the author try Secondlife, though that isn't even really a game. Still massive though.
I use ultraedit's spell checker frequently when I need to check a word. Usually I don't bother to check spelling in web forms so it may be annoying for a whole paragraph as there is no underlining like in word. Still a good text editor all around though.
I'll toss out some ideas that, when trying to actually flesh out, probably fall appart very quickly, but here they are anyways.
First, the extension of genera.
Online dueling. Idea is mostly spawned from jedi outcast.
I'd like to see the dueling aspect improved upon. Take it back to a classic medieval setting. Have guys with minor sorcery powers. Things like being able to manipulate the enviroment and a few minor acrobatic moves. This way the focus is on weapons dueling, but you can make it more interesting with the sorcery to help along.
Examples to use with the sorcery would be throwing objects at an opponent to stun or do minor damage, shoving or pushing an opponent to drop their guard or make them fall over. Or jumpping higher for once, springing over an oponent, running up a wall.
I'd like there to be one hit kills similar to bushido blade. I want defense to be somewhat difficult to penatrate, but not too hard. I'd like the game to be mostly about timing and positioning then anything. Though, I do not want the pacing to be as fast as a typical fighting game. Slow it down just a bit from there to account for latency.
There would be a variety of fighters and weapons. The fighters might be premade with their weapons or, since we are dreaming here, each fighter can choose whatever weapon they want. There would be big strong characters and small fast ones and everything in between. Each character might be stronger with sorcery or more resistant to it then another. Like they might have a big strong barbarian who is resistant to magic who can shrug off attempts to knock him over or toss things in his path.
I'd like to see the ability to hack arms legs and the head, wrists, whatever, from your oponent. Not in pre defined locations but where the weapon made contact. I'd also like to see blunt hammers smashing shields and faces alike.
This is of coarse easy to say, but difficult to create. For a brief moment I thought iron phenoix might touch on this idea but it did not.
The main points of the game are, 3rd person view, momvement very similar to jedi outcast. But i'd like everybody to walk slower, run in small bursts maybe, but have it limited. Smaller arenas to reflect this, with lots of objects to move around and toss at each other.
Lethal weapons, if you take a direct axe hit to your head, you die. But if I am good enough, i'd like to take appart a foe piece by piece, hack off an arm, slash him a few times so he starts staggering, before you finally put him down.
There needs to be some way to improve the sword swinging technique beyond what jedi did. the problem with jedi was that if you wanted to slash horizontaly, you had to be moving left or right to initate it. There also wasn't much point to continuing the combo as it left you vunerable afterwards. So it needs to be refined a lot more if the focus is weapon fighting.
There should be a block button as well, and it should not be too reliant on the dirction the attack is coming to. I'd like to see a foe fall by blocking an attack behind him, leaving him open to the guy in front to swing at his expoded front killing him unless he dodges away.
Couple game modes, dueling and ffa melees. In dueling mode, winner stays. But spectators can choose to specatate, or join a little cage or something off to the side where they can just have a mini ffa while they wait their turn to duel.
Ok, other game idea, somewhat unique i guess: Dead Colonist. Basically the idea is you are colonizing some odd world. You crash land and have to fend for yourself. The world is different every game you start, things are randomized. You have to figure out how to survive, initial, feed your guys, reproduce, create tools, whatever.
The world will have an interesting ai colony of creatures on it. They will of coarse be very hostile until you figure out how to interact with them. But otherwise they will have a set patern depending on the game of what they do and when they do it.
That's what I was going to say exactly. I own all 3 consol systems. I always have my pc, but as a game is released for a consol that I want to play enough, I buy the consol and the game if I don't have it.
Now given a choice of a system to buy a game for, pc gets precidence because it can be patched, usually made to look better, has free multiplayer, and is usually moded. The next rank is the xbox because it has a hard drive and tends to move a little quicker. Next is ps2 cause it's controler is a little bit more versitile then the gcs. And lastly game cube, although I like it, the controler only really works well with games that were designed with the game cube in mind.
Amped 2 - No more pushing a direction and holding a grab.
Moto gp2 - no more incrimental throttle (though of coarse thats easily fixed with a trigger key)
But in reality these are exceptions and i think a trackball would have been a great addition to the consol joystick. The most missed would be fight night, as that is pretty much the best use of the right thumb stick i've ever seen (besides fps games).
What i'd like to see though are more buttons on mice. The most you can find are 2 extra buttons. Why not cram on more there? I can't think of a single game that uses the mouse where you wouldnt want more buttons on the mice to be able to use.
I hope someone comes up with some new design ideas for gaming and control. As it stands now we have push buttons with left hand and steer with right for the pc, and visa versa for consols. There has to be some happy middle ground where your hand can natrually rest on every input you need without having ot move it around too much.
I'm somewhat worried with this trend towards wireless controllers. Sure, I LOVE the idea of not having all the controlers I have with extension cords creating a mess in front of the tv. But I LOATH the idea of having to charge up my controller or I won't be able to play! Arg. Maybe they could have a detachable cord for those times when the batteries are dead or something.
The only way I could see this working is if the controller has a charge base you can let it sit in when you are done. But what if you forget? Oh sorry you cant game, have to charge up the batteries.
I always like how people can use the same device as you and have a completly different method for doing things.
I can not use the style of keyboard that you describe at all. I always wondered why I couldn't do it since there are more keys to use, and I would think having more keys would make me more efficent.
The problem I came to find was that my index finger and ring finger of my right hand move to just above the left and right arrows on the inverted t when moving to navigate the cursor.
From this position it is easy for me to hit left and right and use my middle finger for up and down. Further, because it sits slightly up, i can then extend my middle finger up and easily hit end or home, or use my index finger for delete (i rarely will hit insert).
When I page up and page down i just move my middle finger up all the way up and use page up for my middle finger and ring finger takes page down.
This is what is comfortable and natrual for me. With the additional keys in the set up you prefer, i find that I can not hit the left/right up down as comfortably (longer distance between up and down), cant rest my hands with as much pressure as i like, and get no addtional usage from the extra keys.
Though I am a complete spaz on a laptop keyboard, and theres a keyboard we have here that has the insert/del block of keys inverted with 2 cols and 3 rows of keys.
But in terms of people navigating like fools, it has to do with the editor and what they give you. I use ultra edit a lot and use shortcut keys to my advantage. Ctr shift left/right to higlight a word, ctr up down to scroll the screen, up down to change cursor position on the screen. All the home/end shortcut keys, to move to the end/beginning of a line, and sometimes i click with the mouse and paste with the other hand, whatever works best i the situation.
And of coarse you have vi people who just use all the keys on the keyboard.
As for the numberpad, i have always had numberlock on and find it much easier to hit then the numbers above the letter keys when typing out long sequences of numbers.
That's pretty mean. Either help him out or leave him alone. That is pretty harsh to have to live with someone who takes pleasure in distrupting their "alone time".
I agree spending money for gold while you play in the skinner box is lame.
That said, it is not cheating. Cheating would be gaining an unfair advantage over other players, like free teleports or invunerability or something like that.
Buying gold is just that, buying gold. You can join a guild and have them give you bunch of gold. You can sell a small item for a bunch of gold. Some guy could walk up to you and hand you a ton of gold because he is quitting. Or, you could pay some guy irl for the gold and he sells it to you.
Eitehr way it is not cheating because the gold isnt going to give you an advantage that other players can not earn on their own.
Most of the pc games sections at the eb's and gamespots around here have been regulated to a double sided shelf standing in the middle of the floor, with consol stuff taking up the rest of the space. Poor pc games:(
Planetside makes me sad. It could have been so much more then it was.
The potential was there. It really was. Unfortunatly they screwed the pooch on a few key issues.
Well firstly, it took me 1 gig of ram and a new pc before I could play the game at an acceptable frame rate.
But they really needed to make the game more, unique, i guess.
It gets very repetative. All of the bases are the same. There are perhaps like 5 or so base variants, repeated, over every continent. While it becomes easy to get around in the base, it pretty much feels like you are playing the same map over and over again.
They need to do more to drag fighting away from the bases. Since everything is focused on bases and towers, you spend the whole game at these same 5 locations fighting for the same pixels. It's a drag. They really need unique bases for every continent at the liest.
But they have some fun diverse terrain, and they need to drag the fighting out away from the bases to use it.
I hope someone decides to make a planetside 2, with some more thought put into it then the original. I think if they hit the mark and get things right, it would be a great game.
Perhaps they could change the pace of the game. Put some structure in. Make the game world less devoid of life. Why not have missions you sign up on with your team, protect this npc convoy from point a to b. Meanwhile, on the other faction, they sign up for assault this convoy while it moves from point a to b. Both teams know they are going to run into each other, but when and where and with what equipment?
Well, it isn't for me to decide, and i'm sure i'll live long enough for someone to pull of the mmofps properly:) Nice stab at it though ps, just not good enough.
Re:My wife is already a gamer...
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10 Gateway Games
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Lord of the rings, return of the king, on the gamecube is a pretty good co op game. If shes a lotr fan then it's a big plus too.
I think everyone else pretty much covered all the decent co op games out there. That's a pretty small list isnt it? I find that sad.
Oh, perhaps animal crossing, you guys could make characters in the same town and play when your so isn't around and leave some surprises for them.
I think the article gives a good list of games that are easy to play and get into. The article doesn't list overly complicated games like final fantasy, wow, civ, or a driving game for a reason.
The idea is to introduce people to gaming and to not turn them off to it. These games listed might work for someone who has never seen games before, and it would intrest them enough that they would take the time to learn it.
The ones in the article are games that someone who has seen gaming, but doesnt "get it" might be able to pick up and play, and enjoy the game play immediatly.
My wife doesn't really fit too many stereotypes in some categories, but in others she falls right into them. She enjoys gaming sometimes, but not too often. I game all the time.
She took to DDR right away as have about 4 or 5 of my female friends i've shown it to. It is easy to pick up and play and start doing well. For them the dancing theme appealed to them, but what sucked them in was the fact that by the second song they were doing well with the game.
My wife really likes star wars. I tried to show her rogue squadron thinking she would like it way back. She could not even use the arrow keys to steer the x wing around. She had never used the arrow keys like that before on a computer, adn the mechanics of it were difficult for her. This really turned her off to playing because the learning curve was very steep for her. I couldn't imagine the difficulty she would have at learning to move around in a game like thief.
So the games listed here, like the sims and animal crossing, are easy to play. You can't really do wrong in either of them, and having your sims die can be a somewhat funny experience. Perhaps after playing animal crossing the person would be familiar with a video game and how it works, as well as the mechanics of using the game cube controler.
From here, the person could very easily bridge the gap into another gaming. And as the article states, that is what makes those games gateway games. Games for people who just don't understand gaming, or can not perform the mechanics of using the game controler, but have some intrest in learning.
Granted though, the article uses the "for woman" tag to draw in its intended audience, men who want the women in their lives to play video games with them. But this article can easily be applied to any non gamer who has an intrest in getting started.
It took me a while to figure out why I found that movie so funny and all my friends were laughing their asses off while we watched it, but I drew the same conclusions as you, we all were kids at some point during the 80's and it was our life.
But the movie is hit or miss. If you find yourself laughing the second he pulls out a trapper keeper standing there in his goofy outfit, you'll love the whole movie. But if by the time hes chucking the action figure out the bus window passes you buy and you havent laughed yet, you ought to just shut the movie off.
Interestingly according to the director commentary, lots of those great moments were actual events he had heard stories about, from the farmer shooting the cow at the wrong moment to the "i like your shoulders, they're real big".
So it definatly is like, an elementary/middle school kid of the 80's in a high schoolers body.
I've always had a sore spot with gamestop from when they were babbages. Or maybe they bought babbages, who knows. All I know is at one point there opened up a computer store and it was amazing, it was the only one in the area.
After about 5 or 6 years an EB finally opened its doors across the way. Everything in EB was 10 dollars cheaper. I guess it was the standard. Instantly all Babbages prices dropped 10 bucks and they had a price matching plan where if you saw something in EB cheaper you could walk over and tell them and get it matched down.
Still made me sorta hate babbages for marking everything up when they had the monopoly on the area.
Hey buisness is buisness, I get it, but I still check EB first everytime.
As a side note, I have noticed that in the EB's i've been going to the pc game section has pretty much shrunk down to a shelf or two while the consols take over the store. Sorta makes me sad. But the areas I've been to are definatly the types where they are going to get a lot of used game traffic for consols and there really arent many "pc gaming" types in the area.
Muds always have the inovative features and solutions to problems. I like hearing about them whenever people post about them.
Although the amulet concept is really cool, it is easily circumvented by an outside messenger program to your buddies.
But I guess they could still set you up and camp your amulet waiting for your friends to come by and heal you.
It actually sounds really cool. I wish graphic mmos would start taking lessons from the muds.
(I just can't play muds, i get too engrosed trying to keep up with the text and get too wrapped up in the game for my own good. With the graphics I can still vaguely follow the game and talk to someone at the same time so it works).
I think this is what I find annoying about the permadeath designs i've seen. The strategies and skill people talk about are generally overly causious. I mean to say a strategy is to disconnect from the game, stinks. It means the game isn't designed well for the punishments.
For permadeath to work the game has to be designed from the ground up to take it into account.
But the issue isn't really permadeath. There are plenty of ways, as mentioned above, to make it work without punishing the player. But then we would be right back to square one.
The people who want permadeath, don't really need their characters to die. They just want to risk EVERYTHING. They want the rush of knowing that 178 hours of gameplay depends on whether or not they live through this next encounter.
That's what they want, extreem risk at every corner. For all the suggestions "making it work" you are defeating the purpose of it by just making it an inconvience. Why have it there at all if the player isn't sweating bullets everytime 10 imps rush out at them?
Personally I prefer games that offfer you greater rewards the better you play it, rather then extreem penalties. But that is just me. Some people like to live on the edge.
Why don't you just exchange email addresses and organize your group that way? Why do you need a website like that if you have already met and established a group?
I was worried for a bit about this, then I moved to standard mode and woah boy. I actually think going from light to standard is too much of a difficulty increase!
Before on beginner and light I could play for an hour or two before I needed to stop. I just started doing standard songs and I'm pretty much sweaty and out of breath after 5 songs. (Never been in good shape).
On the beginner setting they give you a beat inbetween every step unless you are repeating the same arrow. This givs you time to step to the arrow then step to the middle. Once you learn to keep your feet on the pad its pretty boring and you are barely moving (you've cut down half the movements).
On light you have to keep your feet on the arrows or you wont be able to keep up, but there still isnt anything too hard.
When you get to standard, they throw all the half notes in there. There are like 2x the amount of arrows there used to be. You HAVE to keep your movement down or you just aren't going to be able to hit the arrows.
I kind of havent been playing as much since the light is a little boring for me but with the standard i can't play the game long enough to learn how to do the steps right. It's sort of a junky inbetween, but i still make an effort to pull it out though and give the songs i like a try on standard.
But yeah the game has been great. I sit on my ass all day at work, adn about the only active thing I do is 6 man volleyball once a week. There isn't much running involved in that. The only time i find myself working hard is when i'm middle and it's a long point.
So the ddr pad gets my heart rate up more then once a week, and on top of it has made me a better dancer. I was at a wedding recently and people were giving me complaments on my dancing. I'd been to other weddings with the same people before and they havent mentioned anything in the past about my sad attempts to move around, so i'm going to go out on a limb and accept the complaments.
So of coarse the game is good, it's a great way to be active while having fun. Not a lot of exercises that you can do on your own are like that.
I know you disliked the game(s) because it was supposed to be something else. I guess people over hype it about final fantasy sometimes so you might think it was supposed to be a ground breaking rpg with freedom similar to an elder scrolls game.
None the less, I don't think it is a problem that the game was on rails. I enjoy a good story. The story could come across in a movie (completly on rails, zero ineractivity), a book (zero ineractivity, and i cant even imagine what the characters are thinking becuase its told to me, but most vivid because i can create the world and characters in my head) or a video game.
I enjoyed a lot of the old sierra and lucas arts adventure games. They were very straight forward and didn't even offere the small amount of flexability in final fantasy games once you open up the "explore the world" stage of one of the games.
I am a fan of rpg games that create a wide range of characters and give them a personality for me to disocver. Final fantasy usually does this, as well as proving a fun story arc with a few plot twists to keep me intersted.
So maybe you do prefer having main characters that never speak, where the character is only as deep as you make them in your head. I like this style of game a lot too, but they are few and far between and hard to create.
But at the same time I also enjoy being fed interesting characters and interesting situations.
As an aside, I wonder if converting books to video games would yield some great rpg games ala final fantasy. Putting a great fantasy/sci fi series of books in a rpg game in the final fantasy style keeping it mostly on rails, would do a great job bringing the book to life. More so then a movie which is limited in time. A video game usually can have around 40 to 60 hours of narration time, and can defiantly capture a book more so then a movie.
If they didn't own it, they could go to the public information, information you and everybody has access too, and notice these trends.
I don't turn on collection because I worry about performance slowdown. I feel really guilty when I use thott though and know I'm not giving anything back to what it is giving me. I think thottbot is great because the community built it, and the community has access to it.
What you are getting mad at is like a company going to a library and making money off the information it finds there.
Also, spyware is called spyware because it gathers information from you without you knowing it is doing it, you know, like a spy. When you turn on the thottbot plugin (disabled by default btw), you know you are collecting data and sending it to the website, contributing to the wonderful community database that it is.
Not only that, but all the great drops come from instances and are bind on pick up. Guilds and public groups reguarly farm these instances over and over and over again. There are nonstop raids on these places. It's not stopping one single player from experienceing the content and these dungeons have to offer.
Because of this, the whole concept of a farmer being on 24 hours a day camping a single location and choking the item from being avaialbe to the public is non existant. There is nowhere in the game a farmer can do this, nowhere.
So what can they do, farm gold places? The most effecient way to do that is to control the auction house and run casinos (roll 1 to 100, get 580, double money, get 980+ tripple). People spam that all the time (which i hate). That is really the only effecient way to get cash.
So start getting mad at things like lootlink and auctioneer which will help someone control the AH. Start getting mad at player run casions (which blizzard has no problem with people running them. Even though the chars are named things like JoesCasino and MonneyBaggz, and spam chat, all the time, two things explicitly against blizz's tos and naming policies).
Thottbot's not giving any company some secret knowledge about the game and it's drops. If you want to know, go to thott and see what they can see.
Cosmos is only three addons, cosmos, cosmos schedule, and sea. That's it. You can turn the rest off by using the add on's button present in your character selection screen.
I use it for the self cast, 2nd bar, pop bar, map notes (sending map notes to other users, awesome), quest minion, monitor stats, mail help, better key binding, and a few others. I turn off everything else I am not using.
At the same time there is a very nice patching utility that will keep cosmos up to date. The cosmos authors are also doing a very speedy job at getting their interface back up to date for the new patch, as well as reguarly working on the cosmos programs. I can get all of these updates without going to 10 different websites to check for updates.
I fail to see how cosmos is bloat. The program itself is very tiny compared to the other random stuff I have floating around my hard drive that is doing nothing. You can disable everything you arent useing.
Cosmos is very nice, it is a well maintained package of mods that are all tested to work together, and easily distributed. It is a great option for people who want the basic ui enhancments you can find out there, without having to search around forums and websites.
I don't know why people hate it so much. This is probably because it is so popular. It is popular because it is easy, and does almost everything else those other mods do. It is perfect for people who want to play wow, and not spend three hours setting up flexbar buttons.
I'm actually glad to hear a well financed company is running thottbot. I don't know what I would do if it ever went down.
I agree 100%. I think gran turismo would be one of the ultimate racing games ever if it could include damage modeling so you could not play bumpper cars around corners.
Still, if you have a friend who is into racing games, the head to head can lead to some very great races and replays, given you can both stay on the track and race, and agree to avoid trying to hit each other.
Gran turmismo just feels right when you steer the cars. There really is no other way to explain it except, right. It's probably not realistic, but I don't drive at a race track so I would never know the difference. I just know that in a gt car I feel like i'm really driving that car.
Also, if you are a car lover, it is perfect for you. I wasn't really that much of a car lover until i picked up gt2. I was able to find my mom's subaru legacy station wagon and race it in the game. That was simply awesome to supe up my mom's station wagon and race it and watch it hammer past cars in the replays.
Driving is perfect, almost any car you could own on your own, ability to mod it, and great race tracks. All it needs now is damage.
seriously. On the mage forum I see posts like, I want my spells to be dripping with pixels and look kewl! I want to summon gods and throw down big as spells, that would be so cool!!
Blizzard had done a great job balancing this game as far as I am concerened. That warrior post was fantastic by the dev, and should assure warriors about the changes they are working on, as well as how so much more thorough the devs are at analizing the data. Not to mention most warriors have no knoweldge of other classes, and have NO CLUE about how their changes will effect the game as a whole. I trust blizzard to do the balancing right, not a bunch of whiny people who havent even reached level 60 yet to fully understand their class.
Slashdot Mirror
How about we all forget about labeling others and just participate in activities that we enjoy?
You got it right right there. I'm the same way. I played pretty hard for about 2 months in wow, got bored, and quit. I still think it is a fantastic game, I was just done with it. The two month intrest the game generated for me was much more then most other games, and having payed 65 for the experience, i felt it was all well worth it. I have no plans to ever play again, but the game is great all the same.
This guy just was upset his addiction was gone, and decided to complain about all mmo's.
For a different experience, I suggest the author try Secondlife, though that isn't even really a game. Still massive though.
I use ultraedit's spell checker frequently when I need to check a word. Usually I don't bother to check spelling in web forms so it may be annoying for a whole paragraph as there is no underlining like in word. Still a good text editor all around though.
I'll toss out some ideas that, when trying to actually flesh out, probably fall appart very quickly, but here they are anyways.
First, the extension of genera.
Online dueling. Idea is mostly spawned from jedi outcast.
I'd like to see the dueling aspect improved upon. Take it back to a classic medieval setting. Have guys with minor sorcery powers. Things like being able to manipulate the enviroment and a few minor acrobatic moves. This way the focus is on weapons dueling, but you can make it more interesting with the sorcery to help along.
Examples to use with the sorcery would be throwing objects at an opponent to stun or do minor damage, shoving or pushing an opponent to drop their guard or make them fall over. Or jumpping higher for once, springing over an oponent, running up a wall.
I'd like there to be one hit kills similar to bushido blade. I want defense to be somewhat difficult to penatrate, but not too hard. I'd like the game to be mostly about timing and positioning then anything. Though, I do not want the pacing to be as fast as a typical fighting game. Slow it down just a bit from there to account for latency.
There would be a variety of fighters and weapons. The fighters might be premade with their weapons or, since we are dreaming here, each fighter can choose whatever weapon they want. There would be big strong characters and small fast ones and everything in between. Each character might be stronger with sorcery or more resistant to it then another. Like they might have a big strong barbarian who is resistant to magic who can shrug off attempts to knock him over or toss things in his path.
I'd like to see the ability to hack arms legs and the head, wrists, whatever, from your oponent. Not in pre defined locations but where the weapon made contact. I'd also like to see blunt hammers smashing shields and faces alike.
This is of coarse easy to say, but difficult to create. For a brief moment I thought iron phenoix might touch on this idea but it did not.
The main points of the game are, 3rd person view, momvement very similar to jedi outcast. But i'd like everybody to walk slower, run in small bursts maybe, but have it limited. Smaller arenas to reflect this, with lots of objects to move around and toss at each other.
Lethal weapons, if you take a direct axe hit to your head, you die. But if I am good enough, i'd like to take appart a foe piece by piece, hack off an arm, slash him a few times so he starts staggering, before you finally put him down.
There needs to be some way to improve the sword swinging technique beyond what jedi did. the problem with jedi was that if you wanted to slash horizontaly, you had to be moving left or right to initate it. There also wasn't much point to continuing the combo as it left you vunerable afterwards. So it needs to be refined a lot more if the focus is weapon fighting.
There should be a block button as well, and it should not be too reliant on the dirction the attack is coming to. I'd like to see a foe fall by blocking an attack behind him, leaving him open to the guy in front to swing at his expoded front killing him unless he dodges away.
Couple game modes, dueling and ffa melees. In dueling mode, winner stays. But spectators can choose to specatate, or join a little cage or something off to the side where they can just have a mini ffa while they wait their turn to duel.
Ok, other game idea, somewhat unique i guess:
Dead Colonist.
Basically the idea is you are colonizing some odd world. You crash land and have to fend for yourself. The world is different every game you start, things are randomized. You have to figure out how to survive, initial, feed your guys, reproduce, create tools, whatever.
The world will have an interesting ai colony of creatures on it. They will of coarse be very hostile until you figure out how to interact with them. But otherwise they will have a set patern depending on the game of what they do and when they do it.
That's what I was going to say exactly. I own all 3 consol systems. I always have my pc, but as a game is released for a consol that I want to play enough, I buy the consol and the game if I don't have it.
Now given a choice of a system to buy a game for, pc gets precidence because it can be patched, usually made to look better, has free multiplayer, and is usually moded. The next rank is the xbox because it has a hard drive and tends to move a little quicker. Next is ps2 cause it's controler is a little bit more versitile then the gcs. And lastly game cube, although I like it, the controler only really works well with games that were designed with the game cube in mind.
Fight night 2 - No more total control punching.
Amped 2 - No more pushing a direction and holding a grab.
Moto gp2 - no more incrimental throttle (though of coarse thats easily fixed with a trigger key)
But in reality these are exceptions and i think a trackball would have been a great addition to the consol joystick. The most missed would be fight night, as that is pretty much the best use of the right thumb stick i've ever seen (besides fps games).
What i'd like to see though are more buttons on mice. The most you can find are 2 extra buttons. Why not cram on more there? I can't think of a single game that uses the mouse where you wouldnt want more buttons on the mice to be able to use.
I hope someone comes up with some new design ideas for gaming and control. As it stands now we have push buttons with left hand and steer with right for the pc, and visa versa for consols. There has to be some happy middle ground where your hand can natrually rest on every input you need without having ot move it around too much.
I'm somewhat worried with this trend towards wireless controllers. Sure, I LOVE the idea of not having all the controlers I have with extension cords creating a mess in front of the tv. But I LOATH the idea of having to charge up my controller or I won't be able to play! Arg. Maybe they could have a detachable cord for those times when the batteries are dead or something.
The only way I could see this working is if the controller has a charge base you can let it sit in when you are done. But what if you forget? Oh sorry you cant game, have to charge up the batteries.
Annoying, to say the liest.
I always like how people can use the same device as you and have a completly different method for doing things.
I can not use the style of keyboard that you describe at all. I always wondered why I couldn't do it since there are more keys to use, and I would think having more keys would make me more efficent.
The problem I came to find was that my index finger and ring finger of my right hand move to just above the left and right arrows on the inverted t when moving to navigate the cursor.
From this position it is easy for me to hit left and right and use my middle finger for up and down. Further, because it sits slightly up, i can then extend my middle finger up and easily hit end or home, or use my index finger for delete (i rarely will hit insert).
When I page up and page down i just move my middle finger up all the way up and use page up for my middle finger and ring finger takes page down.
This is what is comfortable and natrual for me. With the additional keys in the set up you prefer, i find that I can not hit the left/right up down as comfortably (longer distance between up and down), cant rest my hands with as much pressure as i like, and get no addtional usage from the extra keys.
Though I am a complete spaz on a laptop keyboard, and theres a keyboard we have here that has the insert/del block of keys inverted with 2 cols and 3 rows of keys.
But in terms of people navigating like fools, it has to do with the editor and what they give you. I use ultra edit a lot and use shortcut keys to my advantage. Ctr shift left/right to higlight a word, ctr up down to scroll the screen, up down to change cursor position on the screen. All the home/end shortcut keys, to move to the end/beginning of a line, and sometimes i click with the mouse and paste with the other hand, whatever works best i the situation.
And of coarse you have vi people who just use all the keys on the keyboard.
As for the numberpad, i have always had numberlock on and find it much easier to hit then the numbers above the letter keys when typing out long sequences of numbers.
That's pretty mean. Either help him out or leave him alone. That is pretty harsh to have to live with someone who takes pleasure in distrupting their "alone time".
I agree spending money for gold while you play in the skinner box is lame.
That said, it is not cheating. Cheating would be gaining an unfair advantage over other players, like free teleports or invunerability or something like that.
Buying gold is just that, buying gold. You can join a guild and have them give you bunch of gold. You can sell a small item for a bunch of gold. Some guy could walk up to you and hand you a ton of gold because he is quitting. Or, you could pay some guy irl for the gold and he sells it to you.
Eitehr way it is not cheating because the gold isnt going to give you an advantage that other players can not earn on their own.
That said it is still silly to do such.
Most of the pc games sections at the eb's and gamespots around here have been regulated to a double sided shelf standing in the middle of the floor, with consol stuff taking up the rest of the space. Poor pc games :(
Planetside makes me sad. It could have been so much more then it was.
:) Nice stab at it though ps, just not good enough.
The potential was there. It really was. Unfortunatly they screwed the pooch on a few key issues.
Well firstly, it took me 1 gig of ram and a new pc before I could play the game at an acceptable frame rate.
But they really needed to make the game more, unique, i guess.
It gets very repetative. All of the bases are the same. There are perhaps like 5 or so base variants, repeated, over every continent. While it becomes easy to get around in the base, it pretty much feels like you are playing the same map over and over again.
They need to do more to drag fighting away from the bases. Since everything is focused on bases and towers, you spend the whole game at these same 5 locations fighting for the same pixels. It's a drag. They really need unique bases for every continent at the liest.
But they have some fun diverse terrain, and they need to drag the fighting out away from the bases to use it.
I hope someone decides to make a planetside 2, with some more thought put into it then the original. I think if they hit the mark and get things right, it would be a great game.
Perhaps they could change the pace of the game. Put some structure in. Make the game world less devoid of life. Why not have missions you sign up on with your team, protect this npc convoy from point a to b. Meanwhile, on the other faction, they sign up for assault this convoy while it moves from point a to b. Both teams know they are going to run into each other, but when and where and with what equipment?
Well, it isn't for me to decide, and i'm sure i'll live long enough for someone to pull of the mmofps properly
Lord of the rings, return of the king, on the gamecube is a pretty good co op game. If shes a lotr fan then it's a big plus too.
I think everyone else pretty much covered all the decent co op games out there. That's a pretty small list isnt it? I find that sad.
Oh, perhaps animal crossing, you guys could make characters in the same town and play when your so isn't around and leave some surprises for them.
I think the article gives a good list of games that are easy to play and get into. The article doesn't list overly complicated games like final fantasy, wow, civ, or a driving game for a reason.
The idea is to introduce people to gaming and to not turn them off to it. These games listed might work for someone who has never seen games before, and it would intrest them enough that they would take the time to learn it.
The ones in the article are games that someone who has seen gaming, but doesnt "get it" might be able to pick up and play, and enjoy the game play immediatly.
My wife doesn't really fit too many stereotypes in some categories, but in others she falls right into them. She enjoys gaming sometimes, but not too often. I game all the time.
She took to DDR right away as have about 4 or 5 of my female friends i've shown it to. It is easy to pick up and play and start doing well. For them the dancing theme appealed to them, but what sucked them in was the fact that by the second song they were doing well with the game.
My wife really likes star wars. I tried to show her rogue squadron thinking she would like it way back. She could not even use the arrow keys to steer the x wing around. She had never used the arrow keys like that before on a computer, adn the mechanics of it were difficult for her. This really turned her off to playing because the learning curve was very steep for her. I couldn't imagine the difficulty she would have at learning to move around in a game like thief.
So the games listed here, like the sims and animal crossing, are easy to play. You can't really do wrong in either of them, and having your sims die can be a somewhat funny experience. Perhaps after playing animal crossing the person would be familiar with a video game and how it works, as well as the mechanics of using the game cube controler.
From here, the person could very easily bridge the gap into another gaming. And as the article states, that is what makes those games gateway games. Games for people who just don't understand gaming, or can not perform the mechanics of using the game controler, but have some intrest in learning.
Granted though, the article uses the "for woman" tag to draw in its intended audience, men who want the women in their lives to play video games with them. But this article can easily be applied to any non gamer who has an intrest in getting started.
It took me a while to figure out why I found that movie so funny and all my friends were laughing their asses off while we watched it, but I drew the same conclusions as you, we all were kids at some point during the 80's and it was our life.
But the movie is hit or miss. If you find yourself laughing the second he pulls out a trapper keeper standing there in his goofy outfit, you'll love the whole movie. But if by the time hes chucking the action figure out the bus window passes you buy and you havent laughed yet, you ought to just shut the movie off.
Interestingly according to the director commentary, lots of those great moments were actual events he had heard stories about, from the farmer shooting the cow at the wrong moment to the "i like your shoulders, they're real big".
So it definatly is like, an elementary/middle school kid of the 80's in a high schoolers body.
I've always had a sore spot with gamestop from when they were babbages. Or maybe they bought babbages, who knows. All I know is at one point there opened up a computer store and it was amazing, it was the only one in the area.
After about 5 or 6 years an EB finally opened its doors across the way. Everything in EB was 10 dollars cheaper. I guess it was the standard. Instantly all Babbages prices dropped 10 bucks and they had a price matching plan where if you saw something in EB cheaper you could walk over and tell them and get it matched down.
Still made me sorta hate babbages for marking everything up when they had the monopoly on the area.
Hey buisness is buisness, I get it, but I still check EB first everytime.
As a side note, I have noticed that in the EB's i've been going to the pc game section has pretty much shrunk down to a shelf or two while the consols take over the store. Sorta makes me sad. But the areas I've been to are definatly the types where they are going to get a lot of used game traffic for consols and there really arent many "pc gaming" types in the area.
Muds always have the inovative features and solutions to problems. I like hearing about them whenever people post about them.
Although the amulet concept is really cool, it is easily circumvented by an outside messenger program to your buddies.
But I guess they could still set you up and camp your amulet waiting for your friends to come by and heal you.
It actually sounds really cool. I wish graphic mmos would start taking lessons from the muds.
(I just can't play muds, i get too engrosed trying to keep up with the text and get too wrapped up in the game for my own good. With the graphics I can still vaguely follow the game and talk to someone at the same time so it works).
I think this is what I find annoying about the permadeath designs i've seen. The strategies and skill people talk about are generally overly causious. I mean to say a strategy is to disconnect from the game, stinks. It means the game isn't designed well for the punishments.
For permadeath to work the game has to be designed from the ground up to take it into account.
But the issue isn't really permadeath. There are plenty of ways, as mentioned above, to make it work without punishing the player. But then we would be right back to square one.
The people who want permadeath, don't really need their characters to die. They just want to risk EVERYTHING. They want the rush of knowing that 178 hours of gameplay depends on whether or not they live through this next encounter.
That's what they want, extreem risk at every corner. For all the suggestions "making it work" you are defeating the purpose of it by just making it an inconvience. Why have it there at all if the player isn't sweating bullets everytime 10 imps rush out at them?
Personally I prefer games that offfer you greater rewards the better you play it, rather then extreem penalties. But that is just me. Some people like to live on the edge.
Why don't you just exchange email addresses and organize your group that way? Why do you need a website like that if you have already met and established a group?
I was worried for a bit about this, then I moved to standard mode and woah boy. I actually think going from light to standard is too much of a difficulty increase!
Before on beginner and light I could play for an hour or two before I needed to stop. I just started doing standard songs and I'm pretty much sweaty and out of breath after 5 songs. (Never been in good shape).
On the beginner setting they give you a beat inbetween every step unless you are repeating the same arrow. This givs you time to step to the arrow then step to the middle. Once you learn to keep your feet on the pad its pretty boring and you are barely moving (you've cut down half the movements).
On light you have to keep your feet on the arrows or you wont be able to keep up, but there still isnt anything too hard.
When you get to standard, they throw all the half notes in there. There are like 2x the amount of arrows there used to be. You HAVE to keep your movement down or you just aren't going to be able to hit the arrows.
I kind of havent been playing as much since the light is a little boring for me but with the standard i can't play the game long enough to learn how to do the steps right. It's sort of a junky inbetween, but i still make an effort to pull it out though and give the songs i like a try on standard.
But yeah the game has been great. I sit on my ass all day at work, adn about the only active thing I do is 6 man volleyball once a week. There isn't much running involved in that. The only time i find myself working hard is when i'm middle and it's a long point.
So the ddr pad gets my heart rate up more then once a week, and on top of it has made me a better dancer. I was at a wedding recently and people were giving me complaments on my dancing. I'd been to other weddings with the same people before and they havent mentioned anything in the past about my sad attempts to move around, so i'm going to go out on a limb and accept the complaments.
So of coarse the game is good, it's a great way to be active while having fun. Not a lot of exercises that you can do on your own are like that.
I know you disliked the game(s) because it was supposed to be something else. I guess people over hype it about final fantasy sometimes so you might think it was supposed to be a ground breaking rpg with freedom similar to an elder scrolls game.
None the less, I don't think it is a problem that the game was on rails. I enjoy a good story. The story could come across in a movie (completly on rails, zero ineractivity), a book (zero ineractivity, and i cant even imagine what the characters are thinking becuase its told to me, but most vivid because i can create the world and characters in my head) or a video game.
I enjoyed a lot of the old sierra and lucas arts adventure games. They were very straight forward and didn't even offere the small amount of flexability in final fantasy games once you open up the "explore the world" stage of one of the games.
I am a fan of rpg games that create a wide range of characters and give them a personality for me to disocver. Final fantasy usually does this, as well as proving a fun story arc with a few plot twists to keep me intersted.
So maybe you do prefer having main characters that never speak, where the character is only as deep as you make them in your head. I like this style of game a lot too, but they are few and far between and hard to create.
But at the same time I also enjoy being fed interesting characters and interesting situations.
As an aside, I wonder if converting books to video games would yield some great rpg games ala final fantasy. Putting a great fantasy/sci fi series of books in a rpg game in the final fantasy style keeping it mostly on rails, would do a great job bringing the book to life. More so then a movie which is limited in time. A video game usually can have around 40 to 60 hours of narration time, and can defiantly capture a book more so then a movie.
If they didn't own it, they could go to the public information, information you and everybody has access too, and notice these trends.
I don't turn on collection because I worry about performance slowdown. I feel really guilty when I use thott though and know I'm not giving anything back to what it is giving me. I think thottbot is great because the community built it, and the community has access to it.
What you are getting mad at is like a company going to a library and making money off the information it finds there.
Also, spyware is called spyware because it gathers information from you without you knowing it is doing it, you know, like a spy. When you turn on the thottbot plugin (disabled by default btw), you know you are collecting data and sending it to the website, contributing to the wonderful community database that it is.
Not only that, but all the great drops come from instances and are bind on pick up. Guilds and public groups reguarly farm these instances over and over and over again. There are nonstop raids on these places. It's not stopping one single player from experienceing the content and these dungeons have to offer.
Because of this, the whole concept of a farmer being on 24 hours a day camping a single location and choking the item from being avaialbe to the public is non existant. There is nowhere in the game a farmer can do this, nowhere.
So what can they do, farm gold places? The most effecient way to do that is to control the auction house and run casinos (roll 1 to 100, get 580, double money, get 980+ tripple). People spam that all the time (which i hate). That is really the only effecient way to get cash.
So start getting mad at things like lootlink and auctioneer which will help someone control the AH. Start getting mad at player run casions (which blizzard has no problem with people running them. Even though the chars are named things like JoesCasino and MonneyBaggz, and spam chat, all the time, two things explicitly against blizz's tos and naming policies).
Thottbot's not giving any company some secret knowledge about the game and it's drops. If you want to know, go to thott and see what they can see.
Cosmos is only three addons, cosmos, cosmos schedule, and sea. That's it. You can turn the rest off by using the add on's button present in your character selection screen.
I use it for the self cast, 2nd bar, pop bar, map notes (sending map notes to other users, awesome), quest minion, monitor stats, mail help, better key binding, and a few others. I turn off everything else I am not using.
At the same time there is a very nice patching utility that will keep cosmos up to date. The cosmos authors are also doing a very speedy job at getting their interface back up to date for the new patch, as well as reguarly working on the cosmos programs. I can get all of these updates without going to 10 different websites to check for updates.
I fail to see how cosmos is bloat. The program itself is very tiny compared to the other random stuff I have floating around my hard drive that is doing nothing. You can disable everything you arent useing.
Cosmos is very nice, it is a well maintained package of mods that are all tested to work together, and easily distributed. It is a great option for people who want the basic ui enhancments you can find out there, without having to search around forums and websites.
I don't know why people hate it so much. This is probably because it is so popular. It is popular because it is easy, and does almost everything else those other mods do. It is perfect for people who want to play wow, and not spend three hours setting up flexbar buttons.
I'm actually glad to hear a well financed company is running thottbot. I don't know what I would do if it ever went down.
I agree 100%. I think gran turismo would be one of the ultimate racing games ever if it could include damage modeling so you could not play bumpper cars around corners.
Still, if you have a friend who is into racing games, the head to head can lead to some very great races and replays, given you can both stay on the track and race, and agree to avoid trying to hit each other.
Gran turmismo just feels right when you steer the cars. There really is no other way to explain it except, right. It's probably not realistic, but I don't drive at a race track so I would never know the difference. I just know that in a gt car I feel like i'm really driving that car.
Also, if you are a car lover, it is perfect for you. I wasn't really that much of a car lover until i picked up gt2. I was able to find my mom's subaru legacy station wagon and race it in the game. That was simply awesome to supe up my mom's station wagon and race it and watch it hammer past cars in the replays.
Driving is perfect, almost any car you could own on your own, ability to mod it, and great race tracks. All it needs now is damage.
seriously. On the mage forum I see posts like, I want my spells to be dripping with pixels and look kewl! I want to summon gods and throw down big as spells, that would be so cool!!
Blizzard had done a great job balancing this game as far as I am concerened. That warrior post was fantastic by the dev, and should assure warriors about the changes they are working on, as well as how so much more thorough the devs are at analizing the data. Not to mention most warriors have no knoweldge of other classes, and have NO CLUE about how their changes will effect the game as a whole. I trust blizzard to do the balancing right, not a bunch of whiny people who havent even reached level 60 yet to fully understand their class.