The GBA's backwards compatibility wasn't much of a factor at launch, since most people who bought the GBA that early already had a GBC. The PS2 was the same way, which is why Sony went ahead and redesigned the PSX into the PS1 and sold it at the same time. It's not until a system becomes cheap enough to appeal to casual gamers that backwards compatibility becomes a big advantage.
It's similar to the problem I have with cel-shaded games, especially the ridiculously cutesy Wind Waker. I can handle stuff like that with hand-drawn 2D, because even the best artist can't make a 2D drawing compare very well to real life; inaccuracies are expected. But convert a cel to 3D and the deficiencies of the style become blindingly apparent.
What's my point? I guess it's the fact that ultra-realism isn't the only way that high-tech graphics can become jarring to the eye.
One of the best things about SC3 was its voice acting. From the HAL-esque tones of ICOM to the friendly cluelessness of the Doogs to the classic timidity of the Spathi, I can't think of one voice that I'd consider bad. (Well, the Xchaggers were annoying, but that's not exactly the same thing.)
I figured it was an homage to the bad voice acting in Wolfenstein 3-D. Whether or not that game had intentionally bad voice acting is hard to say.
Anyway, it's nice to see that I'm not the only person on the planet who got the joke concerning the bad acting in RE. Every review I can think of thought it was unintentional.
I realize that you can't really fire a gun constantly; most FPSes keep you from doing so already through recoil effects. But trying to use a Morrowind-like system would cause the pauses in shooting to be much longer than the split-second time between three-round bursts, which would severely damage your suspension of disbelief. Now I could see using skill levels to determine the rate of fire or the reload time (Deus Ex does stuff like that, for example), but it would still be much more like an FPS than Morrowind is.
Half-Life is a little too far down the scale of pure twitchiness and reflexes vs. strategic thinking and planning.
OK then, Rainbow Six.
I don't see Fallout 3 having Morrowind-style FPRPG gameplay; as mentioned earlier, Fallout's weapons are too unsuited for it. Having a recharge cycle of a number of seconds per attack for a machine gun just doesn't make any sense unless the player is detached from the game (e.g. third-person view, turn-based).
I agree (not on the idea that it should be an Elder Scrolls game; fantasy FPSes don't tend to work very well), but the parent of my first post seemed to suggest that a hybrid of FPS and epic RPG wouldn't be a good thing regardless.
Especially after Brotherhood of Steel, I don't see many fans -myself included- of the series being very open to a shift to first-person like Morrowind. Especially with the sort of weapons that Fallout is based on, it'd be a very fine line between RPG and FPS.
You mean you don't like the idea of something with the gameplay of Half-Life and the expansiveness of Morrowind? I'd buy three copies of a game like that.
I have a problem with all the "gay shows" on TV now-a-days not because they have gay characters, but because of how the gay characters are portrayed as having that be their only character trait. It's like homosexuality is a gimmick that executives use in order to get higher ratings.
Anybody remember Ellen DeGeneres' old self-titled sitcom? It was actually pretty funny until Ellen came out of the closet, then every episode became centered around how gay she was. All of the humor was gone and the show got canceled pretty quickly after.
That's not an example of sexual orientation adding something to the storyline; it's an example of the author avoiding the issue of gender. Which isn't a bad idea in an interactive medium like video gaming.
American TV is filled with shallow syndicated shows that wrap up a story every 30 minutes to an hour. Japanese TV still has the "Mini Series" both in Anime and regular TV.
Of course, it helps to ignore that sort of mentality run amok, as with the interminably-long Dragon Ball Z. People who laud the superiority of serialized shows over episodic shows always seem to forget that that particular work (among others) exists. Then you have Cowboy Bebop, which manages to have a better story than most anime despite only devoting a small portion of its time to the "main" storyarc. IOW, being serialized or not has nothing to do with the story being good. It just means that the story will be longer.
Well, I guess you're not "forcing" us to agree with you, but you are making statements that basically say that "What I say is fact, you're wrong, end of story."
I said what I did because he said that he agreed with the fact that Japanese TV is no better than American TV, but then called him an asshole because of it. Why would you call someone an asshole for simply saying something that you agree with? The only reason I can come up with is that even though you agree with it, you can't bring yourself to accept it. Thus I said that he couldn't stand the truth.
Animation, Movies, and Books are neither inherently superior nor inferior to each other.
That's why I was careful not to use the word "inherently." In fact, I used the word "currently."
So, I guess if Americans viewed books as "kiddie," Homer would somehow become less of a work.
Where did I say that Americans viewed animation as being for kids? I said that the majority of all groups believe that. Yes, including the Japanese. The fact that they think that their children are capable of handling more mature subject matter than Americans believe their children can handle is irrelevant.
BTW, even if everyone somehow suddenly decided to think that books were just for kids, that wouldn't make Homer less of an author. Read what I said again.
Actually, many Anime series are adapted from Manga (or even books), a medium taken far more seriously than Anime with a breadth of topics that is simply amazing.
You could say a similar thing about American comic books, yet a majority of people consider both them and manga fit only for geeks (only one step up from children in the mainstream view).
For every person who wants to see some serious or deep writing in American TV, there are a 1000 others who just want to watch something like Survivor or Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire. How may blockbuster "Blow Shit Up," movies have there been again?
I used the word "just" there for a reason. A lot of the people I know that went to Fahrenheit 9/11 also watch action movies sometimes; they just realize that action movies aren't the most intellectual form of cinema, and they can enjoy both. Not sure something similar could be said of anime fans, seeing as how much of even supposedly serious anime has plenty of fanservice in it (Neon Genesis Evangelion being the most obvious example).
Somebody hearing your opinions may think that all anime/manga are the same crap and there isn't anything, nor will there ever be anything redeeming about it.
I hope not, because I haven't said that at all. Cowboy Bebop, for example, is good because it makes fun of itself. It realizes that it's filled with cliche and fanservice and makes that part of the joke. It doesn't take itself seriously at all, unlike most of the anime I could name. Then you have Hayao Miyazaki, who has made several works that are worth watching. (Incidentally, he also once said, "I think there is a chance that the spread of Japanese animation overseas might only lead to embarrassment.")
But there are always exceptions to the rule, and right now the rule is that storytelling in anime isn't up to snuff. Before you think me biased, I would say the exact same thing about video gaming, and I'm the biggest gamer I know. And I should also point out that it's quite possible to enjoy stories even if they aren't that good. The problem most anime fans have is that they don't realize that the stories in most of their favorite animes are no better than those in the American shows they love to denounce.
We have no national distinction whatsoever, no national identity that is truly separate from any other.
You're kidding, right?
Just because our nation is an amalgamation of various cultures doesn't mean that we don't have a national identity. We celebrated that national identity a few days ago, remember?
Besides, the whole cultural denial that many anime fans put up is defined not only by love for Japan, but hate for America. It's not just "honoring the ideals of other nations," but hating (and feeling superior to) the culture of your own. That's why a lot of anime fans like to talk about how much better anime is than American animation, among other American artforms.
I based that comment on the fact that people often hold up Kana Little Sister as an example of an "interesting story," which suggests that most of these games are at least as boring. If there are much better examples to give, though, great.
I'm not saying that anime is the "be all, end all", as you both have put it. What I'm saying is that maybe you shouldn't be a complete fucking asshole and force someone to agree with your point of view.
Please feel free to point out where either of us was trying to force anyone to agree with our point of view.
As for you point to how it's inferior to literature and cinema, how can you possibly back that up?
Easily.
1. Age of the medium. Animation simply hasn't been around as long as literature or cinema. This is a pretty big disadvantage, as anime has had less time to mature. Not even cinema has been around nearly long enough to produce people like Homer or Shakespeare.
2. The view that animation is "kiddie." This concept of being for kids tends to keep people from taking it seriously, which in turn tends to keep writers from doing serious work in it. Animation is starting to overcome this view, but it'll probably be a while before it is generally accepted as a legitimate adult artform.
3. The fans. For every fan who wants to see animation grow into its potential, you have ten who just want to see pantyshots and explosions, and ten others who want to see pretentiousness disguised as depth. There's a reason why those things are known as "fanservice" in anime circles. And as long as the vast majority of fans don't care to see anything serious in animation, you're not going to see much seriousness in animation.
Those are the big reasons. It's not entirely a coincidence that video gaming has the exact same problems.
This has nothing to do with what you perceive as being 'The Truth'. This has everything to do with you forcing your perception of it on anyone who disagrees with it.
You might live a happier life if you stop assuming that everyone who disagrees with you is out to convert you.
Tool-assisted speedruns are weaker than normal ones because even though the tool-assisted ones require a lot of theory (e.g. best route to take, best method of handling various enemies and situations), the normal ones require both theory and practice. The tool-assisted speedruns replace the immense amount of skill required to play an entire game perfectly with the immense amount of patience needed to play through little parts of it over and over again until you get it right. Oh, and then there are the ones in the middle that play through large sections of the game then splice the sections together with video editing. Not sure what you'd call those.
They're still fun to watch, though, and I'm willing to bet that normal speedrunners get lots of ideas from them.
Speed runs with exploits can actually require more skill than speed runs without. Normal speed runs require you to know everything possible within the intended rules of the game, but the exploited ones require you to know everything that's possible outside of those rules as well. Certainly it's cheating to get a faster time, but that doesn't necessarily make it less skilled.
Of course, there is a line between using exploits to get a little more speed (Morimoto's use of wall- and ceiling-crawling bugs in Mega Man 2, for example) and using exploits to skip most of the game. I saw a speedrun for a Flash game that involved using the "Play" option in the Flash player a couple of times to skip just about everything. That's not very skilled.
Slashdot Mirror
The GBA's backwards compatibility wasn't much of a factor at launch, since most people who bought the GBA that early already had a GBC. The PS2 was the same way, which is why Sony went ahead and redesigned the PSX into the PS1 and sold it at the same time. It's not until a system becomes cheap enough to appeal to casual gamers that backwards compatibility becomes a big advantage.
Rob
Once somethign become too realistic but just short like 10-15% off it look unnatural and disturbing. But 2d graphics are much mroe then 10-15% off.
That's my point. 2D graphics are way off, so they don't look as weird as cel-shaded 3D.
Rob
It's similar to the problem I have with cel-shaded games, especially the ridiculously cutesy Wind Waker. I can handle stuff like that with hand-drawn 2D, because even the best artist can't make a 2D drawing compare very well to real life; inaccuracies are expected. But convert a cel to 3D and the deficiencies of the style become blindingly apparent.
What's my point? I guess it's the fact that ultra-realism isn't the only way that high-tech graphics can become jarring to the eye.
Rob
One of the best things about SC3 was its voice acting. From the HAL-esque tones of ICOM to the friendly cluelessness of the Doogs to the classic timidity of the Spathi, I can't think of one voice that I'd consider bad. (Well, the Xchaggers were annoying, but that's not exactly the same thing.)
Rob
I figured it was an homage to the bad voice acting in Wolfenstein 3-D. Whether or not that game had intentionally bad voice acting is hard to say.
Anyway, it's nice to see that I'm not the only person on the planet who got the joke concerning the bad acting in RE. Every review I can think of thought it was unintentional.
Rob
One of the Might & Magic games (#8?) was 1st person with realtime non-combat and the option of turn-based or realtime during combat.
I believe all of the M&M games after 5 did this. (I'm not sure about 9 since I haven't played it yet.)
Rob
Eddie Izzard's not gay. In fact, he makes jokes about how he's straight despite being an "executive transvestite" in his routines.
Rob (He's also not a character, of course)
I realize that you can't really fire a gun constantly; most FPSes keep you from doing so already through recoil effects. But trying to use a Morrowind-like system would cause the pauses in shooting to be much longer than the split-second time between three-round bursts, which would severely damage your suspension of disbelief. Now I could see using skill levels to determine the rate of fire or the reload time (Deus Ex does stuff like that, for example), but it would still be much more like an FPS than Morrowind is.
Rob
Half-Life is a little too far down the scale of pure twitchiness and reflexes vs. strategic thinking and planning.
OK then, Rainbow Six.
I don't see Fallout 3 having Morrowind-style FPRPG gameplay; as mentioned earlier, Fallout's weapons are too unsuited for it. Having a recharge cycle of a number of seconds per attack for a machine gun just doesn't make any sense unless the player is detached from the game (e.g. third-person view, turn-based).
Rob
I agree (not on the idea that it should be an Elder Scrolls game; fantasy FPSes don't tend to work very well), but the parent of my first post seemed to suggest that a hybrid of FPS and epic RPG wouldn't be a good thing regardless.
Rob
Especially after Brotherhood of Steel, I don't see many fans -myself included- of the series being very open to a shift to first-person like Morrowind. Especially with the sort of weapons that Fallout is based on, it'd be a very fine line between RPG and FPS.
You mean you don't like the idea of something with the gameplay of Half-Life and the expansiveness of Morrowind? I'd buy three copies of a game like that.
Rob
I'd have rather seen Obsidian Entertainment pick it up, but Bethesda should do a good job with it.
Rob
I have a problem with all the "gay shows" on TV now-a-days not because they have gay characters, but because of how the gay characters are portrayed as having that be their only character trait. It's like homosexuality is a gimmick that executives use in order to get higher ratings.
Anybody remember Ellen DeGeneres' old self-titled sitcom? It was actually pretty funny until Ellen came out of the closet, then every episode became centered around how gay she was. All of the humor was gone and the show got canceled pretty quickly after.
Rob
That's not an example of sexual orientation adding something to the storyline; it's an example of the author avoiding the issue of gender. Which isn't a bad idea in an interactive medium like video gaming.
Rob
American TV is filled with shallow syndicated shows that wrap up a story every 30 minutes to an hour. Japanese TV still has the "Mini Series" both in Anime and regular TV.
Of course, it helps to ignore that sort of mentality run amok, as with the interminably-long Dragon Ball Z. People who laud the superiority of serialized shows over episodic shows always seem to forget that that particular work (among others) exists. Then you have Cowboy Bebop, which manages to have a better story than most anime despite only devoting a small portion of its time to the "main" storyarc. IOW, being serialized or not has nothing to do with the story being good. It just means that the story will be longer.
Rob
The industry has a congenital hatred towards 2D games, despite the fact that a good 2D romp like metal slug has no counterpart in the 3D world.
Besides Serious Sam, the new Ninja Gaiden, most of the Dynasty Warriors series, etc., etc.
Rob
Well, I guess you're not "forcing" us to agree with you, but you are making statements that basically say that "What I say is fact, you're wrong, end of story."
I said what I did because he said that he agreed with the fact that Japanese TV is no better than American TV, but then called him an asshole because of it. Why would you call someone an asshole for simply saying something that you agree with? The only reason I can come up with is that even though you agree with it, you can't bring yourself to accept it. Thus I said that he couldn't stand the truth.
Animation, Movies, and Books are neither inherently superior nor inferior to each other.
That's why I was careful not to use the word "inherently." In fact, I used the word "currently."
So, I guess if Americans viewed books as "kiddie," Homer would somehow become less of a work.
Where did I say that Americans viewed animation as being for kids? I said that the majority of all groups believe that. Yes, including the Japanese. The fact that they think that their children are capable of handling more mature subject matter than Americans believe their children can handle is irrelevant.
BTW, even if everyone somehow suddenly decided to think that books were just for kids, that wouldn't make Homer less of an author. Read what I said again.
Actually, many Anime series are adapted from Manga (or even books), a medium taken far more seriously than Anime with a breadth of topics that is simply amazing.
You could say a similar thing about American comic books, yet a majority of people consider both them and manga fit only for geeks (only one step up from children in the mainstream view).
For every person who wants to see some serious or deep writing in American TV, there are a 1000 others who just want to watch something like Survivor or Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire. How may blockbuster "Blow Shit Up," movies have there been again?
I used the word "just" there for a reason. A lot of the people I know that went to Fahrenheit 9/11 also watch action movies sometimes; they just realize that action movies aren't the most intellectual form of cinema, and they can enjoy both. Not sure something similar could be said of anime fans, seeing as how much of even supposedly serious anime has plenty of fanservice in it (Neon Genesis Evangelion being the most obvious example).
Somebody hearing your opinions may think that all anime/manga are the same crap and there isn't anything, nor will there ever be anything redeeming about it.
I hope not, because I haven't said that at all. Cowboy Bebop, for example, is good because it makes fun of itself. It realizes that it's filled with cliche and fanservice and makes that part of the joke. It doesn't take itself seriously at all, unlike most of the anime I could name. Then you have Hayao Miyazaki, who has made several works that are worth watching. (Incidentally, he also once said, "I think there is a chance that the spread of Japanese animation overseas might only lead to embarrassment.")
But there are always exceptions to the rule, and right now the rule is that storytelling in anime isn't up to snuff. Before you think me biased, I would say the exact same thing about video gaming, and I'm the biggest gamer I know. And I should also point out that it's quite possible to enjoy stories even if they aren't that good. The problem most anime fans have is that they don't realize that the stories in most of their favorite animes are no better than those in the American shows they love to denounce.
Rob
Come on, I'm sure you can shave a few seconds off of that.
Rob
We have no national distinction whatsoever, no national identity that is truly separate from any other.
You're kidding, right?
Just because our nation is an amalgamation of various cultures doesn't mean that we don't have a national identity. We celebrated that national identity a few days ago, remember?
Besides, the whole cultural denial that many anime fans put up is defined not only by love for Japan, but hate for America. It's not just "honoring the ideals of other nations," but hating (and feeling superior to) the culture of your own. That's why a lot of anime fans like to talk about how much better anime is than American animation, among other American artforms.
Rob
I based that comment on the fact that people often hold up Kana Little Sister as an example of an "interesting story," which suggests that most of these games are at least as boring. If there are much better examples to give, though, great.
Rob
I'm not saying that anime is the "be all, end all", as you both have put it. What I'm saying is that maybe you shouldn't be a complete fucking asshole and force someone to agree with your point of view.
Please feel free to point out where either of us was trying to force anyone to agree with our point of view.
As for you point to how it's inferior to literature and cinema, how can you possibly back that up?
Easily.
1. Age of the medium. Animation simply hasn't been around as long as literature or cinema. This is a pretty big disadvantage, as anime has had less time to mature. Not even cinema has been around nearly long enough to produce people like Homer or Shakespeare.
2. The view that animation is "kiddie." This concept of being for kids tends to keep people from taking it seriously, which in turn tends to keep writers from doing serious work in it. Animation is starting to overcome this view, but it'll probably be a while before it is generally accepted as a legitimate adult artform.
3. The fans. For every fan who wants to see animation grow into its potential, you have ten who just want to see pantyshots and explosions, and ten others who want to see pretentiousness disguised as depth. There's a reason why those things are known as "fanservice" in anime circles. And as long as the vast majority of fans don't care to see anything serious in animation, you're not going to see much seriousness in animation.
Those are the big reasons. It's not entirely a coincidence that video gaming has the exact same problems.
This has nothing to do with what you perceive as being 'The Truth'. This has everything to do with you forcing your perception of it on anyone who disagrees with it.
You might live a happier life if you stop assuming that everyone who disagrees with you is out to convert you.
Rob
I think it's a design flaw in Flash, period. But I'm not certain about that.
Not sure how that's at all relevant to my point, besides.
Rob
Tool-assisted speedruns are weaker than normal ones because even though the tool-assisted ones require a lot of theory (e.g. best route to take, best method of handling various enemies and situations), the normal ones require both theory and practice. The tool-assisted speedruns replace the immense amount of skill required to play an entire game perfectly with the immense amount of patience needed to play through little parts of it over and over again until you get it right. Oh, and then there are the ones in the middle that play through large sections of the game then splice the sections together with video editing. Not sure what you'd call those.
They're still fun to watch, though, and I'm willing to bet that normal speedrunners get lots of ideas from them.
Rob
Speed runs with exploits can actually require more skill than speed runs without. Normal speed runs require you to know everything possible within the intended rules of the game, but the exploited ones require you to know everything that's possible outside of those rules as well. Certainly it's cheating to get a faster time, but that doesn't necessarily make it less skilled.
Of course, there is a line between using exploits to get a little more speed (Morimoto's use of wall- and ceiling-crawling bugs in Mega Man 2, for example) and using exploits to skip most of the game. I saw a speedrun for a Flash game that involved using the "Play" option in the Flash player a couple of times to skip just about everything. That's not very skilled.
Rob
I think furries are more likely to cause that. Those suits are really hot.
Rob (In a thermal sense, of course)