Steam's been around since... what... 2004? Its DRM requirements have not gotten any more restrictive over that span. In fact, the "play offline" feature works much better and more consistently than it used to, so if anything it's become less restrictive.
Really? Whenever I'm in the US, PC games always seem to be cheaper than their console equivalents there as well.
The really interesting thing about the console license fee is what this means for the economics of the console manufacturers. Every copy of a third party game sold is basically "pure" profit for the console manufacturer. The only expenses they've put in are the (trivial) costs of providing the dev-kits early in the console cycle and some (also fairly trivial) certification costs. All of the cost and the risk rests with the third party developer.
A first-party game gives a bigger cash return on each copy sold to the console developer. This is good and if the game is a mega-success, that's fine. But it's still true that far more games lose money than make them - and all three console developers have had failures as well as successes with first party games over the last few years. By contrast, every third party game released on your platform is "free money", even if the game is a failure that the developer loses money on.
This is why Sony's gaming division made bucketloads of money on the previous console cycle, particularly in the late-cycle. It's also why despite healthy profits from strong Wii sales early in the cycle, Nintendo's finances are pretty miserable as we go into the late-cycle this time around (while the gaming divisons of MS and Sony are doing pretty well, despite struggling earlier in the cycle). A large installed base is good - but not necessarily just in its own right. It's good if you can leverage it into third party development interest and third party game sales.
The PC, meanwhile, has nobody who automatically creams off a percentage of every sale made (though there are systems that third party developers can choose of their own volition to use which will, such as Steam or Games for Windows). That's a big advantage for the platform from the third party developer's point of view. The corresponding downside - again from the developer's point of view (from the user's point of view, some of this is upside) - is that the platform also lacks a champion; somebody to promote broader interest in it and enforce and manage technical standards.
You're not actually wrong as such, but there's a bit more complexity here than your post acknowledges.
There are indeed licensing costs associated with the consoles. However, these are habitually passed directly on to the consumer. In the UK, for example, the console-manufacturer's slice on a newly released game tends to be £10. This is why a new PC game in the UK will retail for £30, while the same game, released for the consoles in the same week, will be on sale at £40.
The additional development/testing costs associated with the development of a PC version, however, tend to be borne by the developer directly.
Ubisoft has gotten itself into such a complete knicker-twist over the PC games market via its groteseque DRM efforts that it wishes to give up on the whole affair as a bad job. But, like the classic stroppy teenager, it wishes to make clear to all and sundry that it's not being sent home in disgrace, it's making its own decision, for its own reasons, to take its ball and go home.
I am not an anti-DRM fundamentalist. I'm fine with the DRM requirements imposed by the base Steam DRM package, by Xbox Live, and with the exception of a few games (like Bionic Commando), by PSN. That's not to say I am in love with the idea of DRM or even accept it as inevitable. I like the concept behind GoG - particularly of extending it to newer games - and support them where I can. But I'm not going to boycott games over DRM on the basis of an abstract principle. I'm only going to do so where the DRM inconveniences me personally. And Ubisoft's always-on DRM system is the only one (leaving aside a few small EA experiments such as C&C4) to have passed that barrier. My connection tends to blip and reset itself every couple of days - losing 20 minutes of play-time because of it is not acceptable.
And because it's so offensive, I didn't limit the boycott to not just buying the games on the PC. I skipped the games across all platforms. No Assassin's Creed for me? It's a bit of a pity, but I'll live. I mean, really, I'm not the kind of gamer it's a fantastic idea to be upsetting. I buy 30+ games per year (as you can see from the end-of-year roundups I do in my journal). The last game I pirated was the original Crimson Skies, back in 2000 (and I went on to buy that a month or two later). I always buy new, not second hand, except on the odd occasion when I hear about an old game that I "missed" at release which really appeals to me, and which I can't find new). I'm not sat there moaning about the lack of Linux ports and boycotting anything that has even a sniff of a CD-key. I want to be reasonable.
The Mettra comments appear to be based on faulty data on PC game sales. They're going only on boxed-copy sales, which have been declining on PC for a decade or more now. What isn't declining are download sales, primarily through Steam but also through a variety of other sources. Even going off simultaneous players-online stats (which will substantially under-estimate actual copies sold), the PC version of Skyrim shifted some pretty epic numbers via Steam.
It's a slight pity in this case. I Am Alive looks fairly interesting and it's pitched at a price point that tends to fare reasonably well on the PC. But can I live without it? Sure...
Besides, as we drift to the end of this console cycle, the PC is not the only platform with a piracy problem. Ok, the PS3 has always remained difficult from a piracy perspective. And the 360, while easily hackable, does carry a very high risk of getting an XBL ban. But the Wii, DS, 3DS(?) and PSP are all pretty much wide open these days (and have been for a while in some cases).
PS. This story has been carried across multiple mainstream gaming media outlets over the last few days - Kotaku, Eurogamer, IGN, 1up etc. Could we try to get a link in TFA that is to a site that won't be blocked by most common workplace filters (ie. not TorrentFreak)?
I hated Quake 3. Really loathed and despised it. Lazy game design without the artistic style of earlier id games. Enjoyed the first few hours of Doom 3, until I had all of its tricks figured out, after which it was kind of boring. But with Quake 4, Raven actually put out a decent game. The singleplayer campaign was a decent length (roughly twice the modern average, I would guess), had a tolerable (if cliched) storyline, quite a bit of atmosphere and plenty of variety. It was also (despite the fact that console ports existed) a defiantly PC-centric game, with no silly 2-weapon limits, no cover-based mechanics and lots of nice, precise combat. I actually replayed it earlier this year and it still holds up reasonably well, even if the engine looks slightly dated now.
I know that since the Ion Storm debacle, John Romero has been seriously out of fashion, but I don't really think id ever recovered from his departure. Doom and Quake had character in spades (I wasn't a massive fan of Quake, but I will grant it had a distinctive style and a lot of character). Quake 2 was reasonable, but more interesting in terms of its technology than its gameplay. Since then, id haven't released anything themselves that I would rank above "tolerable". I get the impression that without Romero's eccentricity, the company is just too technocratic to actually release fun games itself.
Dark Souls controls are awkward in two areas - the button combos needed for kick attacks/forward leap attacks and the lock-on controls. The latter have, allegedly, been fixed in a patch that released today.
And no, honestly, no, it is not button mashing. Seriously. Watch some basic gameplay videos. Each attack takes a long time - even with a fairly fast 1 handed weapon. If you launch even 1 attack more than you ought to against most of the game's enemies, they will punish you for it brutally (instant death in some cases).
And yes, there are two basic attacks, but at the push of a button you can switch between 1 and 2 handed mode - with any weapon in the game - which completely changes those attacks. You also have the aforementioned kick attacks (which do no damage but force some enemies to break their guard) and the forward leap attacks (which are very powerful and allow slower characters to close a lot of distance, but need a lot of room and leave you highly exposed to counter-attacks). And this is before you even get into the block, parry and shield bash systems. The review you've highlighted gives no indication that the reviewer has played past the game's opening sections. I suspect he gave up very early and blamed the controls (understandable - this is a very hard game - but not forgivable if you're going to publish a proper review).
I do mostly enjoy Skyward Sword (though I have cooled on it a bit since my earlier post), but having played both games, I am very, very certain that Dark Souls is better. Not just by a little, but by a lot. And in every conceivable category.
You won't see that game you want on the Wii-U. Everything you just listed - character generation, decent story, open ended play and network play - is pretty much anathema to the Nintendo philosophy.
Skyward Sword is fine and well, but really, if Zelda wants to remain relevant, they've got to go back and rethink it from first principles now. Because in its current shape, it cannot remain relevant any longer.
... be careful about the special offers you advertise online. Groupon isn't at fault here - if anything, the complaint is that it did its job too well. If you put a sign in your window offering a special offer, you can take it down whenever you want. If you stick something out on the net, you need to be very sure that you can handle a bit of scaling around the response.
Still, full credit to the bakery for actually meeting the orders. I suspect lots of far larger retailers would have tried to weasel out of the deal they'd offered in a situation like that. And so far as I can see from TFA, nobody is talking about lawsuits.
Erm... really, no. My whole point was that in terms of gameplay and control, Skyward Sword has fallen behind the competition.
The biggest competition this year in this genre is Dark Souls. Not the only competition, but certainly the one that needs to be reflected upon. In terms of fish in the pond, Dark Souls is the huge, great genre-redefining megalodon.
And believe me, Dark Souls is not about button-mashing. Button mash and die. In fact, die anyway, whether you button mash or not. But if you don't button mash, you might eventually survive. It's an incredibly impressive melee combat system, which gives you a huge toolset and makes you think hard about how you use it. Every different weapon has its own sense of weight and even shape (different strike-zones etc). Changing from a spear to an axe, for example, makes the whole combat system feel completely different.
It is the best and most immersive melee combat system I have ever encountered. And it does not use motion controls. Skyward Sword's system uses motion control, but it is simplistic and restrictive by comparison. It's slightly better than Twilight Princess's combat system, but it is still coming down to different types of waggle (basically three of them) equating to different button presses. And you know what... at the end of the day, I'd rather just have the option of pressing a button. It's a lot more precise - and while motion control might be fun for a few minutes, if you want to keep me playing (and having fun) for multiple hours, precision matters. Imprecise controls break immersion.
Dark Souls's melee combat system isn't quite perfect (and the ranged combat system falls even further short, though my character build meant I made only occasional use of it). I've made a couple of journal posts on the game and I take issue with its system for kicks and forward jump attacks. But it's so far ahead of anything else I've seen in the third-person exploration/combat genre that I don't think it's going to be feasible for competitors to go to release for a while without thinking about how they respond to it. Skyward Sword's release timing was unfortunate in that respect - no time to adapt to it, and Nintendo tend to be a bit pig-headed about ignoring the competition anyway (which hurts them when the competition is clearly doing it better).
Agree with your point in principle. However, I don't think any of the current-gen motion controllers have proven able to make games more fun, past the initial "hey, look at this new control system" honeymoon phase. Taking them by turn:
Wii: Waggle. If it's a particularly sophisticated game, it might be able to tell the difference between "waggle up and down" and "waggle side to side". The motion tracking simply wasn't good enough, even with the Wii-mote plus addon. For the most part, the Wii-mote was relegated to working as a (bad) pointer device and as a less-than-ergonomic controller which uses "waggle" as an extra button. Even many first-party Nintendo games, including the Mario Galaxy titles, conform to that stereotype. In fact, I got really, really cross with "waggle-to-spin-jump" in those - a precision platformer needs precise controls, and "waggle" does not count.
Kinect: This is a really clever piece of technology and I'm sure there are many good uses for it. "Videogame controller", however, is not one of them. The tracking is just too inconsistent, and too prone to short-but-significant drop-outs. Kinect games basically seem to come down to "stand in front of the device flailing and shouting obscenities".
PS Move: Callibration. What's that? You just callibrated it? Do so again! Callibration is fun! And god help you if you want to have two people of very different heights (such as, say, parent and child) playing at the same time. In fairness, on the rare occasions it isn't demanding to be callibrated, this one comes closer than the others to actually working and being fun. The motion sensing in the controllers isn't much better than the Wii-mote's, but combined with the camera system, you do get fairly good responses in practice. I genuinely enjoyed playing Dead Space: Extraction using this. Better still, Killzone 3 with this was an absolute revelation; for precise aim, this is almost as good as mouse and keyboard (though it still struggles with large, rapid turns).
The problem I have with motion control is that I do require that the game I'm playing should be fun. A controller can be fun in its own right, for a short time, but once that novelty has worn off, we've found that most motion controlled games are actually a long way from fun. In some cases, that's because the motion controller is imprecise enough that it breaks the player's immersion in the game. In other cases, it's because the designers have built the game to get around this limitation and, as a result, come up with a game that is inherantly not fun.
As mentioned above, Killzone 3 comes closes to pointing out how motion control might actually fit into the future gaming landscape in terms of making games more fun. Which is a bit of a pity, because in other respects, Killzone 3 is a boring trudge through a badly told story, with hateful characters and one of the least-likeable sci-fi settings around. But so was Killzone 2, so for once, I'm not blaming the motion control.
I picked up a copy yesterday and started it last night. Verdict so far? It's ok - pretty good. Heading for a 7/10 or 8/10 kind of score.
It's difficult stepping back to Wii level graphics these days. I didn't notice the difference so much early in the console cycle, but Wii games really do look very grim indeed next to anything else around. The artwork goes some way to compensating - it's very good in places. That said, it doesn't have the really strong visual style we've seen from other games over the last few years; Ratchet & Clank, Gears of War, Dark Souls, Mirror's Edge etc have all carved out really distinctive art styles - and have done so on better hardware. Even on the Wii, Xenoblade Chronicles has had more visual impact. There's just a bit too much "generic fantasy" around Skyward Sword (which is a criticism that can be levelled at a lot of the recent Final Fantasy spin-offs from Square-Enix).
The controls are undoubtedly better than Twilight Princess. There are occasional issues with the motion sensing refusing to register an attack at all, but they're the exception rather than the norm now. That said, I know this is a point about the Wii in general, rather than this game in particular, but I remain unconvinced that motion controls really add as much immersion as they were supposed to. There's that same "lack of connection" feeling that has always undermined motion gaming, be it on the Wii, PS Move or Kinect.
To be honest, if Zelda has one really, overwhelmingly huge problem, it's called "Dark Souls". I know that stylistically, the games are worlds apart (Zelda being a bright, colourful fantasy, while Dark Souls shares its palette with the original Quake) - but they are very similar in gameplay style - the same mix of exploration, combat, back-tracking and problem solving. And in every respect, Dark Souls is infinitely superior; not just to Skyward Sword, but to pretty much everything else in the genre. It's a pity that the reviews focussed so much on the difficulty (insanely hard though it is), because there is a supremely awesome game in there as well - and one that took me 79 hours to beat. The game's melee combat sets the new standard for this genre, with a real and distinctive sense of weight and mass to every weapon. After that, a bit of Wii-mote waggling, even with the Plus enhancements, just feels a bit limp.
Sorry, the text above is more negative than intended. This is a fun game. It's not kept up with the competition, but if you haven't played the competition yet, that might not matter to you.
Ok, call me old fashioned, but why on earth would you need to have a piece of software to pick up on inappropriate behaviour from employees? Isn't this what a line manager is supposed to be for?
Now, ok, some of the behaviours mentioned in TFS might be considered inappropriate; but even these are situational. In fact, I remember one day last summer, when I was on annual leave and got a call from the office asking me to drop in urgently, because a senior manager needed some advice in a hurry on an issue that only I knew about. I was up in town already when I got the call, so I was able to get into the office in about 15 minutes. I was casually dressed (jeans and a t-shirt - it was a hot day) and when I went into the meeting, I gave a monologue. That was, after all, the whole point of me being there. But was any of that inappropriate in the circumstances? Of course not. In fact, I got credit for going into the office on what should have been a day off. But this little office-spy routine they've got going here would have flagged me up for at least two violations.
I've had to deal with staff conduct issues before. It's never a pleasant experience, but if you want to do it properly, you have to be clear about the impacts that the behaviour has had. So, for example, "You were rude to colleague x in a meeting. I know that she was being difficult, but you didn't handle this well. As a result of this, we haven't agreed any of the actions that we needed to and we've put objectives a, b and c at risk. We'll also need to get somebody round to extract the traffic cone and see if we can lure the weasels back out of the ventilation ducts." Something like that.
I suppose I can see where an IT system like this does come in - as part of the "ass-covering" section of a formal disciplinary process. I can see the attraction for risk-averse employers (particularly in the public sector), where it might be considered useful to have a print-out saying "Employee Y was inappropriately dressed for meetings on the following dates..." during a tribunal process. But that's about bureaucracy and process - you only find yourself in that kind of situation once the relationship between employer and employee has actually broken down. It's not about actually improving conduct within the organisation in any meaningful way.
The DRM may be an issue for you. Some forms of DRM are an issue for me - always-online authentication for an offline campaign is where I draw the line. However, you are in a tiny minority and I am in a small minority. Sales figures suggest that most people don't care. Sad - but true.
As for other applications - yes, Windows does still have a lead here - particularly in Office (although they do seem to determined to make the UI more and more user-hostile with each new version). And yes, I was a bit disturbed that when I found myself looking into Firefox alternatives a month or so ago, IE was clearly at the head of the pack.
This. Absolutely and definitely this. And nothing will dislodge Windows from absolute dominance in the desktop market until something happens to change the fact that "computer gaming" basically means "Windows gaming".
This is why it's always surprised me that MS pushed into console gaming. People keep Windows on their home PC because they and/or their kids use it for games. Dual-booting is possible, but is more of a pain in the backside than most people are prepared to countenance. Because of this, we have a general population which knows how to use and is comfortable with Windows - but not other desktop OSes.
And because of this, businesses and public sector employers know that if they run Windows on their office desktops, they can assume that 95% of new employees will know how to do at least the basics - move files around, use Word and Powerpoint and so on. This is a huge saving in terms of staff training. This virtuous circle - which is rarely remarked upon - is, I suspect, a big part of the reason why Windows has proved basically impossible to dislodge from the desktop market over the last couple of decades. As I said before, I'm just surprised that MS don't seem to realise this themselves - if they did, I can't believe they'd jeopardise it by pushing so heavily at a competing console gaming platform (and I say this as a perfectly contended Xbox 360 owner).
Oh, and by "games", I mean proper, big budget commercial games. Call of Duty, Mass Effect, Skyrim, that kind of thing - not a bunch of low budget indie roguelikes and puzzlers - if you're pointing at the presence of those as a reason why another OS is competitive in gaming terms, then I suggest you pay reality a visit once in a while. I also mean "being able to play it on the day it's released", not "somebody will have a hack to get it working in a month or two". My view - until there's another desktop platform that can offer the above, Windows will never suffer any kind of serious challenge to its desktop dominance - and given the number of games that depend on directx, I can't see that happening any time soon.
Cloud gaming services? Maybe they'll be what tips it. But I've yet to be convinced.
X-Com rebooted as a first person shooter? Yes... erm... colour me unconvinced. And depressed. Sadly, I have a nasty suspicious feeling that the market for a genuine X-Com reboot on modern technology (as opposed to a retro-reboot by a bunch of enthusiasts on obsolete technology) wouldn't find a big enough market to justify its production costs. Which is a pity. Though as much as an X-Com or TFTD reboot, I'd actually like to see an attempt at doing X-Com Apocalypse properly. There were some really good ideas in that game - it was just that the execution was pretty poor.
I've not seen enough about the Syndicate reboot to be able to offer any kind of view. I confess that I was never really a truly massive fan of the original. I liked it, but in a kind of passive way - and then didn't like Syndicate Wars much at all.
What did break my heart recently was seeing Ace Combat turn itself into Call of Duty with planes. I mean... seriously... you call yourself Ace Combat when you don't have 27-engined flying fortress-robots spamming heart-shaped lasers at a bright-pink F-22 with an anime girl painted on its wings?
Oh, the PC version is hideous in some ways - the web-browser interface you need to use to launch even the singleplayer campaign in particular is dreadful. It can't even be accused of being consolified - the PC is very clearly the lead development platform for this game and the console versions are missing quite a bit of what is allegedly good about the PC version (such as 64 player matches, if that's the kind of thing that appeals to you).
But as somebody who played BF3 without any particular enthusiasm for it as a game, the PC version is clearly where you go to see the demonstration of the next generation of engine technology. I was very impressed with Frostbite 2. It handles large but detailed areas very well - with none of the pop-in and other issues that characterises idTech5 (even with the latest Nvidia drivers, which do help quite a bit). There's lots of fancy lighting other special effects getting thrown around without having a massive impact on performance (though my PC is possibly overkill for it). As a piece of technology, the PC version of BF3 is very interesting. It's just as a game (particularly a single player game) that it is a depressing mess. But with Unreal Engine 3 looking like it's been taken about as far as it's going to go, it's interesting to see what comes next (particularly as it seems that the current gen console hardware can't handle it in anything but its most minimalist form, as the various platform comparisons make clear).
Yeah, there are a few people like that - who everybody (with any sense) wants to keep on their good side.
The classic example is the director's PA. And believe me, the reason that's the classic example is that it holds true in 95% of organisations (a 100% made up statistic, but I bet I'm right).
If there is somebody in senior management who is a good person to talk to when things are going wrong - or when there is a big opportunity if you act fast - then being able to get access in a hurry is a good thing. And being on the PA's good side is usually the determining factor in getting that access.
He or she may earn a quarter of what you do and may have no qualifications beyond high school (though actually, a sensible director will know that they need somebody good in the role and that they need to reward accordingly) - but whether or not you make an effort (and a not-totally-transparent one) to be nice to them is often, to use a slight euphemism, "career defining".
Yeah, and good luck finding one where that holds true all the way to the top (or even any real distance into middle-management).
Seriously, it's not even politics, it's more basic than that. You spend most of your day around people and it pays - and is frankly only polite - to take an interest in their own interests. A few years ago, I worked in a sports-obsessed office. I hate sports. Loathe and despise them. But I made sure that I hid the depth of my feelings (if not the overall direction) and at least knew enough about them that I could hold a conversation during the (soccer) World Cup. Yeah, sure, I was probably the guy who "wasn't really into it"... but I wasn't the office pariah either. Compared to that - as a pretty hardcore gamer - having to buy and play through a few dumbed down shooters I would otherwise have let pass me by is a pretty small price to pay.
If you have a good rapport with your co-workers, they are more likely to help you out in a jam. And believe me, that goes for pretty much any work-place ever (private sector, public sector, small organisation, big organisation, techie, non-techie). That might mean you occasionally need to compromise your "I'm mummy's very own special little soldier and I only take an interest in what I WANT TO" principles once in a while. It's normal human interaction as much as office politics.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there are (a few - I'm not going to tar all with the same brush) people on slashdot who don't get that.
My recollection of 2 is that it was competently enough executed, but based on obsolete (by the standards of the time) technology and very heavily dependant on "cinematic" set-pieces which insta-killed you if you strayed even an inch from the approved path. It also had a very floaty and imprecise feel from the controls, which is something I've noted about other installments in the CoD series (most notably World at War and Black Ops - though very much not with CoD4). Given that it launched some time after Far Cry, Half-Life 2 and Doom 3, all of which were doing much more interesting things with the fps as a genre on the PC, I couldn't honestly think of why anybody would want to lavish praise on it.
I confess to having not played CoD3. When even the gaming press, which has always had a fascination I've never understood with this series, decreed it as a sub-standard effort, I decided I absolutely couldn't be bothered with it.
"Playing" each game requires about 6-8 hours, in general. Enough to finish the campaign, plus a couple of hours of multiplayer. Homefront's campaign took me about 3 hours 45 minutes, according to Steam's play-time counter, which is a particular low-point (though in fairness, it was so dull that it felt longer). I listed 5 games. Add in Modern Warfare 3 to make it 6. Add in a couple more that I've probably forgotten and take it up to 8. That gives 8 games, all released in the 24 months since Modern Warfare 2 came out. Take the maximum estimate of 8 hours per game and that gives you 64 hours over 2 years. That's... not a huge amount of time (though it is a fairly large wodge of cash, I guess). Unless my maths is out, that's not much more than 35 minutes per week.
And you know what, in the murky world of office politics, taking some time and effort (and a bit of cash) to share your co-workers' interests (which is largely "casual" gaming around this office) to at least a basic extent can be a very, very good move.
The differences are largely academic. Both of these games have singleplayer campaigns and both of them singularly fail in that respect - the campaigns are both assembled from the same dull, bland collection of cliches. On that basis, I don't see how any honest review site could rate either game above 6/10, given that inevitably a lot of purchases are going to be for offline play only (particularly on the consoles, where a fairly large portion of 360s and PS3s never so much as scent an internet connection).
Yes, the multiplayer emphasis is slightly different. And yes, I will grant you that BF3 is perhaps ever so slightly less loathesome than Modern Warfare. But the fact remains that both of them conform to the same basic gameplay tricks and have similarly fundamental flaws.
Arguing about Modern Warfare vs Battlefield is, so far as I'm concerned, an epic waste of time. What we need isn't the definitive game in this genre; it's a break from the constant grind of boring modern-military shooters starring Shouty Soldierman with the same 2-or-3-weapon limits, corridor-based campaigns and designed-by-the-marketing-department feature sets.
Still, at least BF3 has a pretty engine. Maybe somebody can make a decent game with it one day.
I've played both and made a longer comment below condemning both as joy-less derivative attempts to cash in on CoD4.
But if I had to pick between them (and "neither, give me Dark Souls instead" isn't an option) then I'd go for Battlefield 3, on the basis that its PC version does at least try to push the technological boundaries a bit. As an advance in game-engine technology, if not as a game, it is quite impressive (much more so than Rage/idTech5, though I feel the Crytek 2 engine still just about leads the pack).
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was a really good game. It was unexpected, it was well-executed, it combined clean, precise shooter mechanics with a campaign plot that felt fresh and different. We'd seen some of the concepts before in the various Tom Clancy branded games, but they'd always been implemented with a kind of clinical detachment that robbed them of any real impact. The CoD4 campaign, by contrast, was a series of highly effective punches to the gut.
But it remains, in my opinion at least, the only game in the entire Call of Duty series to have ever risen above "mediocre". This is a series that has, CoD4 aside, been about dumbing down and immitation. The original Call of Duty was Medal of Honor (the old one, not the recent reboot) with dumber level design. Modern Warfare 2 was CoD4 without the freshness and the just-about-plausible plot. You get the picture.
The problem is that because CoD4 and its successors have been so successful, they've set a direction for the wider industry that has just become deeply boring. Over the last few years, I've played through MW2, Black Ops, Homefront, the Medal of Honor reboot, Battlefield 3 and god-knows-how-many-other soul-less mechanical attempts to reconstruct the CoD4 magic. I've not particularly played them because I've had a burning desire to - but because they are the games that all of my colleagues have played and if you want to be part of the "watercooler" conversation, then you've got to play them. My heart sinks as the next 6-hour-boring-corridor-and-cutscenes-campaign and easily-exploited-and-filled-with-swearing-14-year-olds-multiplayer shooter nears release. And the problem is that the undoubted massive success of Modern Warfare 3 is just going to perpetuate the trend.
I saw the queue outside the branch of Game in London's Victoria station as I headed to work yesterday and I just wanted to grab people by the scruff of the neck and shout "Why are you standing in line for this crap? Don't you know how much better stuff there is out there? Go play Dark Souls - it has a 70+ hour finely crafted campaign with stunning visual designs and some of the cleverest, most innovative and carefully thought through gameplay we've seen in years. And where were you for the Resistance 3 launch? That's even an fps - the only genre you seem to be able to cope with! But it's different, and innovative and it takes chances. Just... please... buy anything but this re-heated trash."
I didn't, of course. Maybe I'm just getting grumpy in my old age. Maybe 6 hour corridor campaigns really are the shape of things to come. Maybe what everybody really wants deep down is to spend hours in multiplayer getting insta-killed by airstrikes called in by 14 year olds swearing in German. But not me. I'm sick of that. I'm sick of the being asked which two of the same collection of over-exposed "real world" guns I want to carry. My heart flutters whenever something like Ratchet & Clank comes along, which lets me fire rockets from a chaingun which blasts out Ode to Joy at full volume for as long as I hold down the trigger. But such moments are becoming few and far between.
Please - Call of Duty and all of your imitators - just go away and die.
My recollection of high school is very different. It wasn't the smart kids who cheated. It wasn't necessarily the stupid ones either. Rather, it was the lazy ones. There does tend to be a certain correlation between the stupid ones and the lazy ones, but it's by no means absolute.
This may be an age and maturity thing. I suspect that high schoolers, for whom the consequences of their academic achievements still feel fairly remote (even if they aren't) are more likely to cheat to cover up for the fact that they couldn't be bothered taking the time to do homework or to study for an exam than for any other reason. Perhaps with undergrads/postgrads, who are generally more aware that they are approaching the point at which employers will be looking at their academic achievements, there's more of a drive to cheat purely to improve grades beyond what they'd otherwise be capable of.
But my abiding memory of cheaters from my school-days involves a bunch of the thick-and-lazy kids copying homework from whoever had bothered to make a token effort at it during lunch. I knew full well that what they turned in would be appalling and that they were copying something that would struggle to scrape a D (at best). But it would avoid the mandatory detention that my school prescribed for failing to do homework (assuming they didn't get caught out cheating, which, being a bit thick, they often did).
There were a couple of smart-but-lazies who would try something a bit more sophisticated on occasion - but they generally had the kind of behavioural problems that meant the school had gotten rid of them by the time real exams (GCSEs and A-Levels, this being the UK) came around. And yes, this was a private school with a very, very serious discipline problem and no hesistation about expulsions.
The weight attached to words depends heavily on history and context. In the UK, and a few other European nations with similar demographic histories, that word is one that has picked up a lot of baggage. It's associated with skinhead thugs smashing windows and other such unpleasantness.
Just as the "n" word I mentioned has unsavoury connotations in the US, particularly in the southern States, so too this is a word you should never use in polite company. I admit it's a bit odd... nobody has ever found... say... "Afghan" to be an obscenity. But unfortunately, it's an abbreviation that's picked up a lot of unfortunate politics and history.
"Jap" is probably offensive because, when it came into common usage during WW2, it was meant to be offensive (understandable in the context of the times). "Yank" can be offensive in some circumstances - when I hear it at a London dinner party, I often hear a deep anti-American undertone to it that genuinely nasty. But at the same time, many Americans have adopted the term themselves, which robs it of a lot of its power. We Brits have a similar relationship with the term "Limey". Australians and others use it as a term of abuse (though often in jest) - but for us, it's a nice reminder that we were smart enough to work out how to avoid scurvy at sea.
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Steam's been around since... what... 2004? Its DRM requirements have not gotten any more restrictive over that span. In fact, the "play offline" feature works much better and more consistently than it used to, so if anything it's become less restrictive.
Really? Whenever I'm in the US, PC games always seem to be cheaper than their console equivalents there as well.
The really interesting thing about the console license fee is what this means for the economics of the console manufacturers. Every copy of a third party game sold is basically "pure" profit for the console manufacturer. The only expenses they've put in are the (trivial) costs of providing the dev-kits early in the console cycle and some (also fairly trivial) certification costs. All of the cost and the risk rests with the third party developer.
A first-party game gives a bigger cash return on each copy sold to the console developer. This is good and if the game is a mega-success, that's fine. But it's still true that far more games lose money than make them - and all three console developers have had failures as well as successes with first party games over the last few years. By contrast, every third party game released on your platform is "free money", even if the game is a failure that the developer loses money on.
This is why Sony's gaming division made bucketloads of money on the previous console cycle, particularly in the late-cycle. It's also why despite healthy profits from strong Wii sales early in the cycle, Nintendo's finances are pretty miserable as we go into the late-cycle this time around (while the gaming divisons of MS and Sony are doing pretty well, despite struggling earlier in the cycle). A large installed base is good - but not necessarily just in its own right. It's good if you can leverage it into third party development interest and third party game sales.
The PC, meanwhile, has nobody who automatically creams off a percentage of every sale made (though there are systems that third party developers can choose of their own volition to use which will, such as Steam or Games for Windows). That's a big advantage for the platform from the third party developer's point of view. The corresponding downside - again from the developer's point of view (from the user's point of view, some of this is upside) - is that the platform also lacks a champion; somebody to promote broader interest in it and enforce and manage technical standards.
You're not actually wrong as such, but there's a bit more complexity here than your post acknowledges.
There are indeed licensing costs associated with the consoles. However, these are habitually passed directly on to the consumer. In the UK, for example, the console-manufacturer's slice on a newly released game tends to be £10. This is why a new PC game in the UK will retail for £30, while the same game, released for the consoles in the same week, will be on sale at £40.
The additional development/testing costs associated with the development of a PC version, however, tend to be borne by the developer directly.
Ubisoft has gotten itself into such a complete knicker-twist over the PC games market via its groteseque DRM efforts that it wishes to give up on the whole affair as a bad job. But, like the classic stroppy teenager, it wishes to make clear to all and sundry that it's not being sent home in disgrace, it's making its own decision, for its own reasons, to take its ball and go home.
I am not an anti-DRM fundamentalist. I'm fine with the DRM requirements imposed by the base Steam DRM package, by Xbox Live, and with the exception of a few games (like Bionic Commando), by PSN. That's not to say I am in love with the idea of DRM or even accept it as inevitable. I like the concept behind GoG - particularly of extending it to newer games - and support them where I can. But I'm not going to boycott games over DRM on the basis of an abstract principle. I'm only going to do so where the DRM inconveniences me personally. And Ubisoft's always-on DRM system is the only one (leaving aside a few small EA experiments such as C&C4) to have passed that barrier. My connection tends to blip and reset itself every couple of days - losing 20 minutes of play-time because of it is not acceptable.
And because it's so offensive, I didn't limit the boycott to not just buying the games on the PC. I skipped the games across all platforms. No Assassin's Creed for me? It's a bit of a pity, but I'll live. I mean, really, I'm not the kind of gamer it's a fantastic idea to be upsetting. I buy 30+ games per year (as you can see from the end-of-year roundups I do in my journal). The last game I pirated was the original Crimson Skies, back in 2000 (and I went on to buy that a month or two later). I always buy new, not second hand, except on the odd occasion when I hear about an old game that I "missed" at release which really appeals to me, and which I can't find new). I'm not sat there moaning about the lack of Linux ports and boycotting anything that has even a sniff of a CD-key. I want to be reasonable.
The Mettra comments appear to be based on faulty data on PC game sales. They're going only on boxed-copy sales, which have been declining on PC for a decade or more now. What isn't declining are download sales, primarily through Steam but also through a variety of other sources. Even going off simultaneous players-online stats (which will substantially under-estimate actual copies sold), the PC version of Skyrim shifted some pretty epic numbers via Steam.
It's a slight pity in this case. I Am Alive looks fairly interesting and it's pitched at a price point that tends to fare reasonably well on the PC. But can I live without it? Sure...
Besides, as we drift to the end of this console cycle, the PC is not the only platform with a piracy problem. Ok, the PS3 has always remained difficult from a piracy perspective. And the 360, while easily hackable, does carry a very high risk of getting an XBL ban. But the Wii, DS, 3DS(?) and PSP are all pretty much wide open these days (and have been for a while in some cases).
PS. This story has been carried across multiple mainstream gaming media outlets over the last few days - Kotaku, Eurogamer, IGN, 1up etc. Could we try to get a link in TFA that is to a site that won't be blocked by most common workplace filters (ie. not TorrentFreak)?
Actually... yes.
I hated Quake 3. Really loathed and despised it. Lazy game design without the artistic style of earlier id games. Enjoyed the first few hours of Doom 3, until I had all of its tricks figured out, after which it was kind of boring. But with Quake 4, Raven actually put out a decent game. The singleplayer campaign was a decent length (roughly twice the modern average, I would guess), had a tolerable (if cliched) storyline, quite a bit of atmosphere and plenty of variety. It was also (despite the fact that console ports existed) a defiantly PC-centric game, with no silly 2-weapon limits, no cover-based mechanics and lots of nice, precise combat. I actually replayed it earlier this year and it still holds up reasonably well, even if the engine looks slightly dated now.
I know that since the Ion Storm debacle, John Romero has been seriously out of fashion, but I don't really think id ever recovered from his departure. Doom and Quake had character in spades (I wasn't a massive fan of Quake, but I will grant it had a distinctive style and a lot of character). Quake 2 was reasonable, but more interesting in terms of its technology than its gameplay. Since then, id haven't released anything themselves that I would rank above "tolerable". I get the impression that without Romero's eccentricity, the company is just too technocratic to actually release fun games itself.
Dark Souls controls are awkward in two areas - the button combos needed for kick attacks/forward leap attacks and the lock-on controls. The latter have, allegedly, been fixed in a patch that released today.
And no, honestly, no, it is not button mashing. Seriously. Watch some basic gameplay videos. Each attack takes a long time - even with a fairly fast 1 handed weapon. If you launch even 1 attack more than you ought to against most of the game's enemies, they will punish you for it brutally (instant death in some cases).
And yes, there are two basic attacks, but at the push of a button you can switch between 1 and 2 handed mode - with any weapon in the game - which completely changes those attacks. You also have the aforementioned kick attacks (which do no damage but force some enemies to break their guard) and the forward leap attacks (which are very powerful and allow slower characters to close a lot of distance, but need a lot of room and leave you highly exposed to counter-attacks). And this is before you even get into the block, parry and shield bash systems. The review you've highlighted gives no indication that the reviewer has played past the game's opening sections. I suspect he gave up very early and blamed the controls (understandable - this is a very hard game - but not forgivable if you're going to publish a proper review).
I do mostly enjoy Skyward Sword (though I have cooled on it a bit since my earlier post), but having played both games, I am very, very certain that Dark Souls is better. Not just by a little, but by a lot. And in every conceivable category.
You won't see that game you want on the Wii-U. Everything you just listed - character generation, decent story, open ended play and network play - is pretty much anathema to the Nintendo philosophy.
Skyward Sword is fine and well, but really, if Zelda wants to remain relevant, they've got to go back and rethink it from first principles now. Because in its current shape, it cannot remain relevant any longer.
... be careful about the special offers you advertise online. Groupon isn't at fault here - if anything, the complaint is that it did its job too well. If you put a sign in your window offering a special offer, you can take it down whenever you want. If you stick something out on the net, you need to be very sure that you can handle a bit of scaling around the response.
Still, full credit to the bakery for actually meeting the orders. I suspect lots of far larger retailers would have tried to weasel out of the deal they'd offered in a situation like that. And so far as I can see from TFA, nobody is talking about lawsuits.
Erm... really, no. My whole point was that in terms of gameplay and control, Skyward Sword has fallen behind the competition.
The biggest competition this year in this genre is Dark Souls. Not the only competition, but certainly the one that needs to be reflected upon. In terms of fish in the pond, Dark Souls is the huge, great genre-redefining megalodon.
And believe me, Dark Souls is not about button-mashing. Button mash and die. In fact, die anyway, whether you button mash or not. But if you don't button mash, you might eventually survive. It's an incredibly impressive melee combat system, which gives you a huge toolset and makes you think hard about how you use it. Every different weapon has its own sense of weight and even shape (different strike-zones etc). Changing from a spear to an axe, for example, makes the whole combat system feel completely different.
It is the best and most immersive melee combat system I have ever encountered. And it does not use motion controls. Skyward Sword's system uses motion control, but it is simplistic and restrictive by comparison. It's slightly better than Twilight Princess's combat system, but it is still coming down to different types of waggle (basically three of them) equating to different button presses. And you know what... at the end of the day, I'd rather just have the option of pressing a button. It's a lot more precise - and while motion control might be fun for a few minutes, if you want to keep me playing (and having fun) for multiple hours, precision matters. Imprecise controls break immersion.
Dark Souls's melee combat system isn't quite perfect (and the ranged combat system falls even further short, though my character build meant I made only occasional use of it). I've made a couple of journal posts on the game and I take issue with its system for kicks and forward jump attacks. But it's so far ahead of anything else I've seen in the third-person exploration/combat genre that I don't think it's going to be feasible for competitors to go to release for a while without thinking about how they respond to it. Skyward Sword's release timing was unfortunate in that respect - no time to adapt to it, and Nintendo tend to be a bit pig-headed about ignoring the competition anyway (which hurts them when the competition is clearly doing it better).
Agree with your point in principle. However, I don't think any of the current-gen motion controllers have proven able to make games more fun, past the initial "hey, look at this new control system" honeymoon phase. Taking them by turn:
Wii: Waggle. If it's a particularly sophisticated game, it might be able to tell the difference between "waggle up and down" and "waggle side to side". The motion tracking simply wasn't good enough, even with the Wii-mote plus addon. For the most part, the Wii-mote was relegated to working as a (bad) pointer device and as a less-than-ergonomic controller which uses "waggle" as an extra button. Even many first-party Nintendo games, including the Mario Galaxy titles, conform to that stereotype. In fact, I got really, really cross with "waggle-to-spin-jump" in those - a precision platformer needs precise controls, and "waggle" does not count.
Kinect: This is a really clever piece of technology and I'm sure there are many good uses for it. "Videogame controller", however, is not one of them. The tracking is just too inconsistent, and too prone to short-but-significant drop-outs. Kinect games basically seem to come down to "stand in front of the device flailing and shouting obscenities".
PS Move: Callibration. What's that? You just callibrated it? Do so again! Callibration is fun! And god help you if you want to have two people of very different heights (such as, say, parent and child) playing at the same time. In fairness, on the rare occasions it isn't demanding to be callibrated, this one comes closer than the others to actually working and being fun. The motion sensing in the controllers isn't much better than the Wii-mote's, but combined with the camera system, you do get fairly good responses in practice. I genuinely enjoyed playing Dead Space: Extraction using this. Better still, Killzone 3 with this was an absolute revelation; for precise aim, this is almost as good as mouse and keyboard (though it still struggles with large, rapid turns).
The problem I have with motion control is that I do require that the game I'm playing should be fun. A controller can be fun in its own right, for a short time, but once that novelty has worn off, we've found that most motion controlled games are actually a long way from fun. In some cases, that's because the motion controller is imprecise enough that it breaks the player's immersion in the game. In other cases, it's because the designers have built the game to get around this limitation and, as a result, come up with a game that is inherantly not fun.
As mentioned above, Killzone 3 comes closes to pointing out how motion control might actually fit into the future gaming landscape in terms of making games more fun. Which is a bit of a pity, because in other respects, Killzone 3 is a boring trudge through a badly told story, with hateful characters and one of the least-likeable sci-fi settings around. But so was Killzone 2, so for once, I'm not blaming the motion control.
I picked up a copy yesterday and started it last night. Verdict so far? It's ok - pretty good. Heading for a 7/10 or 8/10 kind of score.
It's difficult stepping back to Wii level graphics these days. I didn't notice the difference so much early in the console cycle, but Wii games really do look very grim indeed next to anything else around. The artwork goes some way to compensating - it's very good in places. That said, it doesn't have the really strong visual style we've seen from other games over the last few years; Ratchet & Clank, Gears of War, Dark Souls, Mirror's Edge etc have all carved out really distinctive art styles - and have done so on better hardware. Even on the Wii, Xenoblade Chronicles has had more visual impact. There's just a bit too much "generic fantasy" around Skyward Sword (which is a criticism that can be levelled at a lot of the recent Final Fantasy spin-offs from Square-Enix).
The controls are undoubtedly better than Twilight Princess. There are occasional issues with the motion sensing refusing to register an attack at all, but they're the exception rather than the norm now. That said, I know this is a point about the Wii in general, rather than this game in particular, but I remain unconvinced that motion controls really add as much immersion as they were supposed to. There's that same "lack of connection" feeling that has always undermined motion gaming, be it on the Wii, PS Move or Kinect.
To be honest, if Zelda has one really, overwhelmingly huge problem, it's called "Dark Souls". I know that stylistically, the games are worlds apart (Zelda being a bright, colourful fantasy, while Dark Souls shares its palette with the original Quake) - but they are very similar in gameplay style - the same mix of exploration, combat, back-tracking and problem solving. And in every respect, Dark Souls is infinitely superior; not just to Skyward Sword, but to pretty much everything else in the genre. It's a pity that the reviews focussed so much on the difficulty (insanely hard though it is), because there is a supremely awesome game in there as well - and one that took me 79 hours to beat. The game's melee combat sets the new standard for this genre, with a real and distinctive sense of weight and mass to every weapon. After that, a bit of Wii-mote waggling, even with the Plus enhancements, just feels a bit limp.
Sorry, the text above is more negative than intended. This is a fun game. It's not kept up with the competition, but if you haven't played the competition yet, that might not matter to you.
Ok, call me old fashioned, but why on earth would you need to have a piece of software to pick up on inappropriate behaviour from employees? Isn't this what a line manager is supposed to be for?
Now, ok, some of the behaviours mentioned in TFS might be considered inappropriate; but even these are situational. In fact, I remember one day last summer, when I was on annual leave and got a call from the office asking me to drop in urgently, because a senior manager needed some advice in a hurry on an issue that only I knew about. I was up in town already when I got the call, so I was able to get into the office in about 15 minutes. I was casually dressed (jeans and a t-shirt - it was a hot day) and when I went into the meeting, I gave a monologue. That was, after all, the whole point of me being there. But was any of that inappropriate in the circumstances? Of course not. In fact, I got credit for going into the office on what should have been a day off. But this little office-spy routine they've got going here would have flagged me up for at least two violations.
I've had to deal with staff conduct issues before. It's never a pleasant experience, but if you want to do it properly, you have to be clear about the impacts that the behaviour has had. So, for example, "You were rude to colleague x in a meeting. I know that she was being difficult, but you didn't handle this well. As a result of this, we haven't agreed any of the actions that we needed to and we've put objectives a, b and c at risk. We'll also need to get somebody round to extract the traffic cone and see if we can lure the weasels back out of the ventilation ducts." Something like that.
I suppose I can see where an IT system like this does come in - as part of the "ass-covering" section of a formal disciplinary process. I can see the attraction for risk-averse employers (particularly in the public sector), where it might be considered useful to have a print-out saying "Employee Y was inappropriately dressed for meetings on the following dates..." during a tribunal process. But that's about bureaucracy and process - you only find yourself in that kind of situation once the relationship between employer and employee has actually broken down. It's not about actually improving conduct within the organisation in any meaningful way.
The DRM may be an issue for you. Some forms of DRM are an issue for me - always-online authentication for an offline campaign is where I draw the line. However, you are in a tiny minority and I am in a small minority. Sales figures suggest that most people don't care. Sad - but true.
As for other applications - yes, Windows does still have a lead here - particularly in Office (although they do seem to determined to make the UI more and more user-hostile with each new version). And yes, I was a bit disturbed that when I found myself looking into Firefox alternatives a month or so ago, IE was clearly at the head of the pack.
Yes, but your user-name says an awful lot about how you are not particularly representitive of the general population here.
This. Absolutely and definitely this. And nothing will dislodge Windows from absolute dominance in the desktop market until something happens to change the fact that "computer gaming" basically means "Windows gaming".
This is why it's always surprised me that MS pushed into console gaming. People keep Windows on their home PC because they and/or their kids use it for games. Dual-booting is possible, but is more of a pain in the backside than most people are prepared to countenance. Because of this, we have a general population which knows how to use and is comfortable with Windows - but not other desktop OSes.
And because of this, businesses and public sector employers know that if they run Windows on their office desktops, they can assume that 95% of new employees will know how to do at least the basics - move files around, use Word and Powerpoint and so on. This is a huge saving in terms of staff training. This virtuous circle - which is rarely remarked upon - is, I suspect, a big part of the reason why Windows has proved basically impossible to dislodge from the desktop market over the last couple of decades. As I said before, I'm just surprised that MS don't seem to realise this themselves - if they did, I can't believe they'd jeopardise it by pushing so heavily at a competing console gaming platform (and I say this as a perfectly contended Xbox 360 owner).
Oh, and by "games", I mean proper, big budget commercial games. Call of Duty, Mass Effect, Skyrim, that kind of thing - not a bunch of low budget indie roguelikes and puzzlers - if you're pointing at the presence of those as a reason why another OS is competitive in gaming terms, then I suggest you pay reality a visit once in a while. I also mean "being able to play it on the day it's released", not "somebody will have a hack to get it working in a month or two". My view - until there's another desktop platform that can offer the above, Windows will never suffer any kind of serious challenge to its desktop dominance - and given the number of games that depend on directx, I can't see that happening any time soon.
Cloud gaming services? Maybe they'll be what tips it. But I've yet to be convinced.
X-Com rebooted as a first person shooter? Yes... erm... colour me unconvinced. And depressed. Sadly, I have a nasty suspicious feeling that the market for a genuine X-Com reboot on modern technology (as opposed to a retro-reboot by a bunch of enthusiasts on obsolete technology) wouldn't find a big enough market to justify its production costs. Which is a pity. Though as much as an X-Com or TFTD reboot, I'd actually like to see an attempt at doing X-Com Apocalypse properly. There were some really good ideas in that game - it was just that the execution was pretty poor.
I've not seen enough about the Syndicate reboot to be able to offer any kind of view. I confess that I was never really a truly massive fan of the original. I liked it, but in a kind of passive way - and then didn't like Syndicate Wars much at all.
What did break my heart recently was seeing Ace Combat turn itself into Call of Duty with planes. I mean... seriously... you call yourself Ace Combat when you don't have 27-engined flying fortress-robots spamming heart-shaped lasers at a bright-pink F-22 with an anime girl painted on its wings?
Oh, the PC version is hideous in some ways - the web-browser interface you need to use to launch even the singleplayer campaign in particular is dreadful. It can't even be accused of being consolified - the PC is very clearly the lead development platform for this game and the console versions are missing quite a bit of what is allegedly good about the PC version (such as 64 player matches, if that's the kind of thing that appeals to you).
But as somebody who played BF3 without any particular enthusiasm for it as a game, the PC version is clearly where you go to see the demonstration of the next generation of engine technology. I was very impressed with Frostbite 2. It handles large but detailed areas very well - with none of the pop-in and other issues that characterises idTech5 (even with the latest Nvidia drivers, which do help quite a bit). There's lots of fancy lighting other special effects getting thrown around without having a massive impact on performance (though my PC is possibly overkill for it). As a piece of technology, the PC version of BF3 is very interesting. It's just as a game (particularly a single player game) that it is a depressing mess. But with Unreal Engine 3 looking like it's been taken about as far as it's going to go, it's interesting to see what comes next (particularly as it seems that the current gen console hardware can't handle it in anything but its most minimalist form, as the various platform comparisons make clear).
Yeah, there are a few people like that - who everybody (with any sense) wants to keep on their good side.
The classic example is the director's PA. And believe me, the reason that's the classic example is that it holds true in 95% of organisations (a 100% made up statistic, but I bet I'm right).
If there is somebody in senior management who is a good person to talk to when things are going wrong - or when there is a big opportunity if you act fast - then being able to get access in a hurry is a good thing. And being on the PA's good side is usually the determining factor in getting that access.
He or she may earn a quarter of what you do and may have no qualifications beyond high school (though actually, a sensible director will know that they need somebody good in the role and that they need to reward accordingly) - but whether or not you make an effort (and a not-totally-transparent one) to be nice to them is often, to use a slight euphemism, "career defining".
Yeah, and good luck finding one where that holds true all the way to the top (or even any real distance into middle-management).
Seriously, it's not even politics, it's more basic than that. You spend most of your day around people and it pays - and is frankly only polite - to take an interest in their own interests. A few years ago, I worked in a sports-obsessed office. I hate sports. Loathe and despise them. But I made sure that I hid the depth of my feelings (if not the overall direction) and at least knew enough about them that I could hold a conversation during the (soccer) World Cup. Yeah, sure, I was probably the guy who "wasn't really into it"... but I wasn't the office pariah either. Compared to that - as a pretty hardcore gamer - having to buy and play through a few dumbed down shooters I would otherwise have let pass me by is a pretty small price to pay.
If you have a good rapport with your co-workers, they are more likely to help you out in a jam. And believe me, that goes for pretty much any work-place ever (private sector, public sector, small organisation, big organisation, techie, non-techie). That might mean you occasionally need to compromise your "I'm mummy's very own special little soldier and I only take an interest in what I WANT TO" principles once in a while. It's normal human interaction as much as office politics.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there are (a few - I'm not going to tar all with the same brush) people on slashdot who don't get that.
My recollection of 2 is that it was competently enough executed, but based on obsolete (by the standards of the time) technology and very heavily dependant on "cinematic" set-pieces which insta-killed you if you strayed even an inch from the approved path. It also had a very floaty and imprecise feel from the controls, which is something I've noted about other installments in the CoD series (most notably World at War and Black Ops - though very much not with CoD4). Given that it launched some time after Far Cry, Half-Life 2 and Doom 3, all of which were doing much more interesting things with the fps as a genre on the PC, I couldn't honestly think of why anybody would want to lavish praise on it.
I confess to having not played CoD3. When even the gaming press, which has always had a fascination I've never understood with this series, decreed it as a sub-standard effort, I decided I absolutely couldn't be bothered with it.
"Playing" each game requires about 6-8 hours, in general. Enough to finish the campaign, plus a couple of hours of multiplayer. Homefront's campaign took me about 3 hours 45 minutes, according to Steam's play-time counter, which is a particular low-point (though in fairness, it was so dull that it felt longer). I listed 5 games. Add in Modern Warfare 3 to make it 6. Add in a couple more that I've probably forgotten and take it up to 8. That gives 8 games, all released in the 24 months since Modern Warfare 2 came out. Take the maximum estimate of 8 hours per game and that gives you 64 hours over 2 years. That's... not a huge amount of time (though it is a fairly large wodge of cash, I guess). Unless my maths is out, that's not much more than 35 minutes per week.
And you know what, in the murky world of office politics, taking some time and effort (and a bit of cash) to share your co-workers' interests (which is largely "casual" gaming around this office) to at least a basic extent can be a very, very good move.
The differences are largely academic. Both of these games have singleplayer campaigns and both of them singularly fail in that respect - the campaigns are both assembled from the same dull, bland collection of cliches. On that basis, I don't see how any honest review site could rate either game above 6/10, given that inevitably a lot of purchases are going to be for offline play only (particularly on the consoles, where a fairly large portion of 360s and PS3s never so much as scent an internet connection).
Yes, the multiplayer emphasis is slightly different. And yes, I will grant you that BF3 is perhaps ever so slightly less loathesome than Modern Warfare. But the fact remains that both of them conform to the same basic gameplay tricks and have similarly fundamental flaws.
Arguing about Modern Warfare vs Battlefield is, so far as I'm concerned, an epic waste of time. What we need isn't the definitive game in this genre; it's a break from the constant grind of boring modern-military shooters starring Shouty Soldierman with the same 2-or-3-weapon limits, corridor-based campaigns and designed-by-the-marketing-department feature sets.
Still, at least BF3 has a pretty engine. Maybe somebody can make a decent game with it one day.
I've played both and made a longer comment below condemning both as joy-less derivative attempts to cash in on CoD4.
But if I had to pick between them (and "neither, give me Dark Souls instead" isn't an option) then I'd go for Battlefield 3, on the basis that its PC version does at least try to push the technological boundaries a bit. As an advance in game-engine technology, if not as a game, it is quite impressive (much more so than Rage/idTech5, though I feel the Crytek 2 engine still just about leads the pack).
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was a really good game. It was unexpected, it was well-executed, it combined clean, precise shooter mechanics with a campaign plot that felt fresh and different. We'd seen some of the concepts before in the various Tom Clancy branded games, but they'd always been implemented with a kind of clinical detachment that robbed them of any real impact. The CoD4 campaign, by contrast, was a series of highly effective punches to the gut.
But it remains, in my opinion at least, the only game in the entire Call of Duty series to have ever risen above "mediocre". This is a series that has, CoD4 aside, been about dumbing down and immitation. The original Call of Duty was Medal of Honor (the old one, not the recent reboot) with dumber level design. Modern Warfare 2 was CoD4 without the freshness and the just-about-plausible plot. You get the picture.
The problem is that because CoD4 and its successors have been so successful, they've set a direction for the wider industry that has just become deeply boring. Over the last few years, I've played through MW2, Black Ops, Homefront, the Medal of Honor reboot, Battlefield 3 and god-knows-how-many-other soul-less mechanical attempts to reconstruct the CoD4 magic. I've not particularly played them because I've had a burning desire to - but because they are the games that all of my colleagues have played and if you want to be part of the "watercooler" conversation, then you've got to play them. My heart sinks as the next 6-hour-boring-corridor-and-cutscenes-campaign and easily-exploited-and-filled-with-swearing-14-year-olds-multiplayer shooter nears release. And the problem is that the undoubted massive success of Modern Warfare 3 is just going to perpetuate the trend.
I saw the queue outside the branch of Game in London's Victoria station as I headed to work yesterday and I just wanted to grab people by the scruff of the neck and shout "Why are you standing in line for this crap? Don't you know how much better stuff there is out there? Go play Dark Souls - it has a 70+ hour finely crafted campaign with stunning visual designs and some of the cleverest, most innovative and carefully thought through gameplay we've seen in years. And where were you for the Resistance 3 launch? That's even an fps - the only genre you seem to be able to cope with! But it's different, and innovative and it takes chances. Just... please... buy anything but this re-heated trash."
I didn't, of course. Maybe I'm just getting grumpy in my old age. Maybe 6 hour corridor campaigns really are the shape of things to come. Maybe what everybody really wants deep down is to spend hours in multiplayer getting insta-killed by airstrikes called in by 14 year olds swearing in German. But not me. I'm sick of that. I'm sick of the being asked which two of the same collection of over-exposed "real world" guns I want to carry. My heart flutters whenever something like Ratchet & Clank comes along, which lets me fire rockets from a chaingun which blasts out Ode to Joy at full volume for as long as I hold down the trigger. But such moments are becoming few and far between.
Please - Call of Duty and all of your imitators - just go away and die.
My recollection of high school is very different. It wasn't the smart kids who cheated. It wasn't necessarily the stupid ones either. Rather, it was the lazy ones. There does tend to be a certain correlation between the stupid ones and the lazy ones, but it's by no means absolute.
This may be an age and maturity thing. I suspect that high schoolers, for whom the consequences of their academic achievements still feel fairly remote (even if they aren't) are more likely to cheat to cover up for the fact that they couldn't be bothered taking the time to do homework or to study for an exam than for any other reason. Perhaps with undergrads/postgrads, who are generally more aware that they are approaching the point at which employers will be looking at their academic achievements, there's more of a drive to cheat purely to improve grades beyond what they'd otherwise be capable of.
But my abiding memory of cheaters from my school-days involves a bunch of the thick-and-lazy kids copying homework from whoever had bothered to make a token effort at it during lunch. I knew full well that what they turned in would be appalling and that they were copying something that would struggle to scrape a D (at best). But it would avoid the mandatory detention that my school prescribed for failing to do homework (assuming they didn't get caught out cheating, which, being a bit thick, they often did).
There were a couple of smart-but-lazies who would try something a bit more sophisticated on occasion - but they generally had the kind of behavioural problems that meant the school had gotten rid of them by the time real exams (GCSEs and A-Levels, this being the UK) came around. And yes, this was a private school with a very, very serious discipline problem and no hesistation about expulsions.
The weight attached to words depends heavily on history and context. In the UK, and a few other European nations with similar demographic histories, that word is one that has picked up a lot of baggage. It's associated with skinhead thugs smashing windows and other such unpleasantness.
Just as the "n" word I mentioned has unsavoury connotations in the US, particularly in the southern States, so too this is a word you should never use in polite company. I admit it's a bit odd... nobody has ever found... say... "Afghan" to be an obscenity. But unfortunately, it's an abbreviation that's picked up a lot of unfortunate politics and history.
"Jap" is probably offensive because, when it came into common usage during WW2, it was meant to be offensive (understandable in the context of the times). "Yank" can be offensive in some circumstances - when I hear it at a London dinner party, I often hear a deep anti-American undertone to it that genuinely nasty. But at the same time, many Americans have adopted the term themselves, which robs it of a lot of its power. We Brits have a similar relationship with the term "Limey". Australians and others use it as a term of abuse (though often in jest) - but for us, it's a nice reminder that we were smart enough to work out how to avoid scurvy at sea.
As I say, history and context are everything.