Yeah, I said fictionalized, not fictional. They're based on real US locations, but they eschew the recognizable landmarks and instead capture the "feel" of the city/area. San Andreas is the name of the state, by the way, comprising three cities based on San Fran, LA, and Vegas.
To see how smart the fictionalization notion is, just take a look at Spider-Man 2, which uses a quasi-faithful map of New York. Trying to stay so true to the real world version creates a city that is lifeless, ugly and repetitive. I bet even people from NYC get lost in that game.
The first two GTAs in the generation featured white lead characterss, who similarly delved into drug trafficking and wanton violence. And just from my memory, the first two games featured local gangs of Italian, Asian, Cuban and African-American ethnic backgrounds. Plenty of bad guys of all different colors.
I don't see how you can cry "racist" here simply because the lead character is now black. In fact, Rockstar seems to have gone to great lengths to make this lead the most complicated and deep of any of the three games... probably just to ward off uneducated knee-jerk reactionists like yourself.
Yes, it is US-centric. Sorry that seems to make a difference to you. When I played Tomb Raider, it didn't matter to me that Lara Croft is English, had a butler, and a big countryside mansion for the training level. Nor did it bother me when Mario adventured at the Caribbean-inspired Isle Delfino. For you to relate to a game, is it absolutely required that it take place in your parent's basement? We're talking escapist video games here.
If they produced a Continental European GTA that continued their string of quality and depth, I would eagerly snap it up with no complaints. Although - and you wouldn't know this, since you get your entire GTA info from crappy, one-paragraph/. articles - the GTA games have all used heavily fictionalized cities, so I'm not sure how you would specifically identify a European location, aside from using local accents and a tourist area of 1000-year-old buildings.
This is modded Interesting? As soon as ANY console article gets published, some snot has to post his attempt to start a PC Vs Console flame war. Congratulations, you prefer PC games. Go enjoy your latest Online Deathmatch HeadShot 3000 XP game and bugger off.
If you have any genuine comments about the cost of consoles in Europe, feel free to return.
If that's the case, then it ought to be easy to predict who will win the most sales. If most GBA users go for a DS, and only PS2 users (who don't currently use a portable [portable=GBA]) go for the PSP... the math seems obvious.
I'm not sure that's Sony's actual plan there. Sony would much prefer to steal a ton of GBA users, particularly the older crowd by playing up the "adult" angle of the PSP. Sony is no doubt looking hard at Nintendo's failed connectivity experiment and recanting all their proposed "You can use your PSP in PS3 games!" marketing hoopla.
"The main thing we wanted to accomplish on this title was the genre merging of first person action with first person shooting [and some third-person play] with a whole new twist, which is live [creatures as] ammo, and the different types of strategy that would offer."
The main thing we wanted to accomplish on this title was making money, and we know that any FPS game is instant bank... and since my work was universally rejected on the Xbox and since gamers are tired of my endless moralizing, posturing and fanboyism du jour, I'm ready to appeal to whatever lowest common demoninater I can find. Currently in development, the Oddworld Kart Racer... although we have to work on creating some licensable characters that don't look like walking ballsacks first. Thanks for all the money!
Why didn't she demand a better face? Her in-game model is the usual lumpy, misshapen mess we get whenever a game has to present a real-life likeness.
Aside: Tobey Maguire is a terrible voice over artist. Stop having him recreate his role in the games.
finally a game machine that I don't mind being seen playing in public!
Please. Spare us the lines cut directly from Nokia's marketing copy. You're playing a goddamn virtual car racing video game in public where everyone else is driving real cars. You will not be respected to any greater degree than the 14 year old playing Advance Wars on his SP.
they increase their QA efforts to maintain their bug-free integrity, then the price of the console games will have to rise to cover the additional costs.
Why? New console games have been in the $40-50 for the last couple generations. The complexity level certainly went up between the PS1 era and the PS2 era, and the price did not go up. In fact, for most first-party Sony games, the price went down. (Average price being $40 rather than $50.)
I believe that console systems of the future will eventually have an online patching system.
I hope not. Once you make the gaming process unwieldy, you lose people. More specifically, you lose the casual gamers, the families, that drive sales.
but PC games push the envelope much farther than console games. Both in terms of graphics and in terms of gameplay.
I accept that PCs push graphics further and faster, but that takes us back to the evolving/non-standard hardware issue. One poster here claimed that he routinely runs new games on his older system by dragging down all the graphics sliders (and he seemed proud of it.) Where's the benefit to that if users have to purposefully downgrade the graphics?
But gameplay? That's another issue. When you say that console games are more linear, I don't think you're comparing PC to console, you're more likely comparing MMORPGs to platformers. There are plenty of non-linear, complicated console games. And there's much more overall variety on the console game racks than on the PC racks. I'll take variety and polish over "This Year's Prettiest Way To Score Headshots."
Here's an example that I expect most/.ers will hate: Pokemon. Those damn little GBA games have an incredibly complicated stats management system, once you total up all the possible permutations of creatures/attacks/skills/stats/items/weaknesses and apply the math of it all. There's quite a lot going on under the hood, and that's "just" a Game Boy game. I would liken that to all the skills/items etc of any PC MMORPG. The only differences being the graphics and the theming.
Are you going to argue that console systems are better because they will somehow force developers to adopt better QA practices and eliminate bugs. Very utopian... and unrealistic.
Yes, I will argue that. Because they do. Is there a groundswell opinion that "console games are usually buggy, so buyer beware"? No, there isn't. 99% of the time, they work and they work perfectly. The good console game devs know that they do not get a second chance to fix their game, so they have to get it right the first time or risk falling on their face in the marketplace.
The PC game world on the other hand, it's common thought that if you buy a game, you better start haunting websites and newsgroups for the inevitable mention of an upcoming patch. I'm not saying that patches shouldn't exist, just that the ability is completely abused and should not be seen as an amazing benefit of PC games.
I'll go Redundant here and point out that the hardware environment is responsible for a lot of this. But this Thief problem was not... it could have been found and should have been found... it was rushed, it was unchecked, it is typical.
And I don't accept a 'complexity' excuse for one second. Games will always push that envelope. That's no excuse for releasing something buggy.
I wish this would happen more often. Then maybe people would realize that the PC development process is inferior, because the release-and-patch system coupled with overly aggressive marketing pressure and non-standard/evolving hardware has sent PC games straight into the toilet.
The Xbox version is an innocent victim here, but will get screwed the hardest. Time to review the policy on accepting ports of PC games again.
If Nintendo is such an innovator, screw the two screens and innovate some games.
Innovation is in the gameplay, not always the franchise characters that populate it. Just because the word "Mario" is in the title, don't assume there's no innovation there.
Is WarioWare non-innovative simply because it features one of Mario's supporting cast members? Absolutely not!
Remember, Mario is a blank slate. There's only the barest personality and character there... he's purely a venue for great games. It's good business: a recognizable, company-owned character whose ugly mug can stare at you from a hundred pieces of box art. Nintendo owns him outright, can count on his presence to continue to sell. The day Mario stops selling games, Nintendo will move on to more lucrative properties.
I'm going to assume you're talking non-US prices. Karaoke Revolution (without headset) and DDRMAX2 are both $40. That's a perfectly fair price, and less than the $50 average. I believe the hardware bundled versions of each are $60.
Donkey Konga will hopefully be $60. Although if you'll recall, Nintendo debuted that terrible N64 Hey You Pikachu game (with controller microphone) at $80.
Having access to your personal music CDs is great, but coming up with your own step data for these songs is not so easy unless you are an expert player
They need to figure something out, because this would be terrific. Especially for people using the home game for exercise purposes and have gotten bored playing to the same stuff.
Are these true exclusives or time-based exclusives, like the original Splinter Cell? The word 'exclusive' doesn't mean much anymore if Microsoft is allowed to tout a game as exclusive when it comes out for PS2 three months later.
I also have a faith that the red Jolly Rancher will taste kinda lilke cherries. And that the sun will come up tomorrow. And that my car will work well enough to get me home from work tonight.
You're effectively diluting the word 'faith' (and 'religion', by the way). 'Faith' used to be a word that actually meant something, and you want to use it to mean anybody who has any thoughts about anything. Which, actually... I'm fine with. Go right ahead. Less word power for the christians.
And that's exactly what's wrong with the WWJD crowd. I realize that this is a severely truncated story, but changing 'demon' to 'beast' is not going to make one bit of difference to the content. The 'beasts' won't have any less teeth, cloven hooves, or pointy tales. This kid's plan was to slip the book under the radar.
It's a classic example of christians ignoring the actual content and instead getting all hung up on the most obvious of labels. If they actually held any strong beliefs on restricting their kid's exposure to that, they'd do more than pay it lip service by banning the word 'demon.' But it's easier to wholesale ban one word than pay attention to whatever dopey RPG their kid wants to play. Hell, the kid probably wanted the RPG precisely for the demons.
The kid instinctually knows this is bullshit, so he made a valiant attempt to strike the one, single word and therefore get the game rubber stamped OK.
Similarly, Janet Jackson's tit is the Most Offensive Media Ever and America must be cleansed... while the Jesus Chainsaw Massacre racks up $300 million at the box office. The content only matters when the groupthink says it does.
Card games like MtG refer to metagaming as the act of tuning your deck (etc) between actual games. As in, you try to anticipate what your opponent has in his deck, so you alter yours to combat that. This has been a common term since Magic started.
That sounds much cooler than defining it as "games that break the fourth wall," especially given some of the lame examples we've seen here.
In addition to having more accurate information, there's also more specific information in many FAQs.
I must say, that's a good point. You can find FAQs about the numerical damage level of every possible Pokemon combination, but you're not going to get that info out of Nintendo for any price.
It's all relative, I suppose. Choice A has benefits and Choice B has benefits!
Hooray, a resolution with a minimum of Slashdot posturing and insults. We don't fail it, good friends... we win it.
Slashdot Mirror
To see how smart the fictionalization notion is, just take a look at Spider-Man 2, which uses a quasi-faithful map of New York. Trying to stay so true to the real world version creates a city that is lifeless, ugly and repetitive. I bet even people from NYC get lost in that game.
I don't see how you can cry "racist" here simply because the lead character is now black. In fact, Rockstar seems to have gone to great lengths to make this lead the most complicated and deep of any of the three games... probably just to ward off uneducated knee-jerk reactionists like yourself.
Yes, it is US-centric. Sorry that seems to make a difference to you. When I played Tomb Raider, it didn't matter to me that Lara Croft is English, had a butler, and a big countryside mansion for the training level. Nor did it bother me when Mario adventured at the Caribbean-inspired Isle Delfino. For you to relate to a game, is it absolutely required that it take place in your parent's basement? We're talking escapist video games here.
If they produced a Continental European GTA that continued their string of quality and depth, I would eagerly snap it up with no complaints. Although - and you wouldn't know this, since you get your entire GTA info from crappy, one-paragraph /. articles - the GTA games have all used heavily fictionalized cities, so I'm not sure how you would specifically identify a European location, aside from using local accents and a tourist area of 1000-year-old buildings.
If you have any genuine comments about the cost of consoles in Europe, feel free to return.
I'm not sure that's Sony's actual plan there. Sony would much prefer to steal a ton of GBA users, particularly the older crowd by playing up the "adult" angle of the PSP. Sony is no doubt looking hard at Nintendo's failed connectivity experiment and recanting all their proposed "You can use your PSP in PS3 games!" marketing hoopla.
And, yeah, Animal Crossing Online. Absofuckinglutely.
2. Yes.
Sorry you were modded down, but there's no prize for proper grammar from editors around here.
The main thing we wanted to accomplish on this title was making money, and we know that any FPS game is instant bank... and since my work was universally rejected on the Xbox and since gamers are tired of my endless moralizing, posturing and fanboyism du jour, I'm ready to appeal to whatever lowest common demoninater I can find. Currently in development, the Oddworld Kart Racer... although we have to work on creating some licensable characters that don't look like walking ballsacks first. Thanks for all the money!
Why didn't she demand a better face? Her in-game model is the usual lumpy, misshapen mess we get whenever a game has to present a real-life likeness. Aside: Tobey Maguire is a terrible voice over artist. Stop having him recreate his role in the games.
Please. Spare us the lines cut directly from Nokia's marketing copy. You're playing a goddamn virtual car racing video game in public where everyone else is driving real cars. You will not be respected to any greater degree than the 14 year old playing Advance Wars on his SP.
Why? New console games have been in the $40-50 for the last couple generations. The complexity level certainly went up between the PS1 era and the PS2 era, and the price did not go up. In fact, for most first-party Sony games, the price went down. (Average price being $40 rather than $50.)
I believe that console systems of the future will eventually have an online patching system.
I hope not. Once you make the gaming process unwieldy, you lose people. More specifically, you lose the casual gamers, the families, that drive sales.
but PC games push the envelope much farther than console games. Both in terms of graphics and in terms of gameplay.
I accept that PCs push graphics further and faster, but that takes us back to the evolving/non-standard hardware issue. One poster here claimed that he routinely runs new games on his older system by dragging down all the graphics sliders (and he seemed proud of it.) Where's the benefit to that if users have to purposefully downgrade the graphics?
But gameplay? That's another issue. When you say that console games are more linear, I don't think you're comparing PC to console, you're more likely comparing MMORPGs to platformers. There are plenty of non-linear, complicated console games. And there's much more overall variety on the console game racks than on the PC racks. I'll take variety and polish over "This Year's Prettiest Way To Score Headshots."
Here's an example that I expect most /.ers will hate: Pokemon. Those damn little GBA games have an incredibly complicated stats management system, once you total up all the possible permutations of creatures/attacks/skills/stats/items/weaknesses and apply the math of it all. There's quite a lot going on under the hood, and that's "just" a Game Boy game. I would liken that to all the skills/items etc of any PC MMORPG. The only differences being the graphics and the theming.
Yes, I will argue that. Because they do. Is there a groundswell opinion that "console games are usually buggy, so buyer beware"? No, there isn't. 99% of the time, they work and they work perfectly. The good console game devs know that they do not get a second chance to fix their game, so they have to get it right the first time or risk falling on their face in the marketplace.
The PC game world on the other hand, it's common thought that if you buy a game, you better start haunting websites and newsgroups for the inevitable mention of an upcoming patch. I'm not saying that patches shouldn't exist, just that the ability is completely abused and should not be seen as an amazing benefit of PC games.
I'll go Redundant here and point out that the hardware environment is responsible for a lot of this. But this Thief problem was not... it could have been found and should have been found... it was rushed, it was unchecked, it is typical.
And I don't accept a 'complexity' excuse for one second. Games will always push that envelope. That's no excuse for releasing something buggy.
I wish this would happen more often. Then maybe people would realize that the PC development process is inferior, because the release-and-patch system coupled with overly aggressive marketing pressure and non-standard/evolving hardware has sent PC games straight into the toilet. The Xbox version is an innocent victim here, but will get screwed the hardest. Time to review the policy on accepting ports of PC games again.
Translation: better for the genres I prefer.
Which is fine. But would you play Mario Sunshine or Wind Waker and think "Boy, I wish I could control this with a mouse and arrow keys"?
What's the range? "Suck" to "Suckier"?
Innovation is in the gameplay, not always the franchise characters that populate it. Just because the word "Mario" is in the title, don't assume there's no innovation there.
Is WarioWare non-innovative simply because it features one of Mario's supporting cast members? Absolutely not!
Remember, Mario is a blank slate. There's only the barest personality and character there... he's purely a venue for great games. It's good business: a recognizable, company-owned character whose ugly mug can stare at you from a hundred pieces of box art. Nintendo owns him outright, can count on his presence to continue to sell. The day Mario stops selling games, Nintendo will move on to more lucrative properties.
Silence follows.
Whoop, price announced. $50 including the controller. Extra bongo controllers for $30. So there you go.
Donkey Konga will hopefully be $60. Although if you'll recall, Nintendo debuted that terrible N64 Hey You Pikachu game (with controller microphone) at $80.
They need to figure something out, because this would be terrific. Especially for people using the home game for exercise purposes and have gotten bored playing to the same stuff.
I am up for the challenge, Konami.
Are these true exclusives or time-based exclusives, like the original Splinter Cell? The word 'exclusive' doesn't mean much anymore if Microsoft is allowed to tout a game as exclusive when it comes out for PS2 three months later.
You're effectively diluting the word 'faith' (and 'religion', by the way). 'Faith' used to be a word that actually meant something, and you want to use it to mean anybody who has any thoughts about anything. Which, actually... I'm fine with. Go right ahead. Less word power for the christians.
It's a classic example of christians ignoring the actual content and instead getting all hung up on the most obvious of labels. If they actually held any strong beliefs on restricting their kid's exposure to that, they'd do more than pay it lip service by banning the word 'demon.' But it's easier to wholesale ban one word than pay attention to whatever dopey RPG their kid wants to play. Hell, the kid probably wanted the RPG precisely for the demons.
The kid instinctually knows this is bullshit, so he made a valiant attempt to strike the one, single word and therefore get the game rubber stamped OK.
Similarly, Janet Jackson's tit is the Most Offensive Media Ever and America must be cleansed... while the Jesus Chainsaw Massacre racks up $300 million at the box office. The content only matters when the groupthink says it does.
Oh, to keep on-topic... These games will blow.
Does it require a leap of faith to believe that there is no flying purple people eater? Or the Tooth Fairy?
No, common sense and the sum real-life experiences of the entire world will tell you that neither exist. Same with "god", sorry to tell you.
This 'atheism is a faith too!' argument has cropped up lately as a pathetic meanns for christians to counter atheism. Doesn't work.
That sounds much cooler than defining it as "games that break the fourth wall," especially given some of the lame examples we've seen here.
I must say, that's a good point. You can find FAQs about the numerical damage level of every possible Pokemon combination, but you're not going to get that info out of Nintendo for any price.
It's all relative, I suppose. Choice A has benefits and Choice B has benefits!
Hooray, a resolution with a minimum of Slashdot posturing and insults. We don't fail it, good friends... we win it.