I'm guessing he did this with the intention of selling the games on and profiting. It certainly can't have been for his own enjoyment.
Unless, of course, there's some strange pleasure that he gets from owning 500 used copies of Madden and 500 used copies of Black Ops (plus maybe, if he's really lucky, a single new copy of Madden as well).
Yes, true, I hadn't thought of that. Though in that case, hard disk space may well emerge as the alternative constraint.
Still, for a pirate who downloads a couple of games a month, plays through them and then discards them (you almost certainly won't be doing online play on pirated games) this is not going to prove a huge barrier.
I must say, it does feel like having an Ubisoft exec comment on the chances of Sony being successful in combating piracy feels a bit like having Sauron publish an article on Voldemort's chances of taking over the world.
He's probably right, of course. A software-only hack is very bad news indeed for Sony. It's worse news than such a hack would be for Microsoft. Why? As TFA notes, Sony probably will be able to catch and ban people with custom firmware who connect to the Playstation Network, just as MS can with users on Xbox Live. However, as an owner of both consoles (who has no strong overall preference for either), I can fairly confidently say that Xbox Live is a much more central part of the whole "360 experience" than the PSN is to the PS3. It's not that Sony haven't put a lot of time and effort into improving the PSN - it is certainly far better than it used to be - but it still feels like something that sits off to the side a bit from the PS3's main functionality, while a 360 without Xbox Live feels fundamentally incomplete.
As for a new PS3 hardware iteration to solve this - I just don't see how, short of sending some kind of self-destruct signal to every existing PS3 out there (and I don't think even Sony would go that far) they could plausibly make that one work.
If Sony has one sliver of hope left, it's that the extremely large size of many of the big-name PS3 games (and hence the time and bandwidth needed to download them), combined with the relatively high price of writable blu-ray media, will still act as something of a deterrent. Of course, lots of big-name cross-platform releases like the Call of Duty games are basically identical to the 360 versions and could probably fit on a DVD.
There have certainly been times when I have thought that a game is going too far to cushion the player from consequences. You might remember Full Spectrum Warrior, which was released for the original Xbox somewhere around the mid-point of the console's life-span. It was essentially a military training simulator designed to teach infantry tactics which had been repurposed into a game (indeed, there were cheat codes to strip out the game elements and access the simulator itself). To be honest, it was a pretty good game, once you worked out that it wasn't a normal third person shooter and started to see it as more of a puzzle game.
There was, however, one thing that always struck me as extremely strange about it. The player was in command of a small squad of soldiers and if one of those soldiers died - *BANG* - game over screen, time to go back to the last checkpoint. This always felt bizarre to me for a piece of software that was basically a training simulator. Yes, you want your students to think hard about how to avoid casualties, but as the last decade has proven, no matter how careful you think you are being in wartime, casualties are going to happen sooner or later. And in real life, there wasn't going to be a game-over screen and a return to the last checkpoint. So you had a simulator which covered small-scale infantry tactics in a fair degree of detail - until the moment your own side took a casualty. I'm sure you can see the problems inherant in that.
However, while I will agree that people coming out of universities today (I do a fair amount of graduate recruitment and get to see a lot of new entrants to the job market) tend to have a poor understanding of consequences, I don't think for a moment that video games are the primary cause of this. I'd much rather look at the school system, where the errosion of discipline in the state school sector here in the UK has been almost complete, and where even serious misdemeanours such as assaults on other pupils or teachers are generally met with only derisory sanctions. It often feels like an inevitable moment in the early days of any new graduate's career these days involves their manager having to say: "Yes, you missed the deadline. No, you can't have a few more days, as that's not my decision to make and the customer isn't feeling forgiving. Note that this will have direct consequences for the company/organisation."
The 360 has also been comprehensively broken since its early days. That said, MS does seem to be able to pick up and ban modded 360s when they connect to Xbox Live, and you could argue that Live is such a large part of the 360-package that this is a reasonably large barrier to modding for most people.
Not forgotten at all. The original exploit by Geohot was an awfully long way from producing something that was actually usable as a means of playing pirated games on the PS3. It was one of the small cracks that had appeared in the wall and as a pay-off for 5 years of effort, it was pretty poor. The nature of the attempts to break through the PS3's security barriers changed dramatically following the removal of OtherOS. I don't deny, however, that the sheer, brazen anti-consumerism that Sony manifested in yanking the OtherOS feature from all PS3s will have had a massive "red flag to a bull" effect.
A lawsuit was pretty much inevitable; Sony needs to show its shareholders that it's doing something. To be honest, I find it hard to imagine that they won't succeed in making Mr. Hotz's life very... expensive indeed. Of course, with the cat now well and truly out of the bag on PS3 security, anything they do now can't really be more than a mixture of revenge and deterrence.
The real question for Sony (and other console developers) is how they pitch the longer term response to this. With hindsight, it now appears that the long-legendary PS3 security set-up wasn't so stellar after all. Prior to Sony's removal of OtherOS, there were only tiny cracks in the wall and Sony could reasonably have expected it to last several more years. Following the removal of OtherOS, the demolition of Sony's safeguards was swift and ruthless.
One possible inference, therefore, is that Sony's decision to grant PS3 users a "walled garden" in which they could - to some extent - do what they wanted with the system was what really provided the PS3 with its 5-year immunity from piracy. The commercially-minded piracy people, and the bored teenagers who wanted to play pirated games, just weren't good enough to break a console's security (even if major flaws did exist) and the people who were good enough; they weren't interested, as they could already do what they wanted with the system.
If I were Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft, I would now be urgently investigating the possibility of incorporating a similar "walled garden" OtherOS equivalent into my next generation hardware. Yes, the numbers who might actually use it would probably be small - and yes, said users aren't worth much commercially as they probably don't buy many games, but 5 years of no piracy on the system is a pretty big payback.
I've got a Kinect and have tried it in 5 different homes, with varying degrees of success. Actually, that's a little unfair; it's worked to an acceptable level in 4 of the 5, and been just about on the unacceptable side of the line in the 5th (though you could have used it if you were really determined).
The big issue seems to be room shape rather than room size. I have a small living room, but the TV looks down it length-ways, so it works fine for me. Unless you want to do 2-player (which I don't normally, at home), you don't actually need all that much room to move side to side. The really key thing is to be able to get those 6-8 feet from the TV; if you can do that and have the room to take at least one large step to the side in either direction, it's fine.
What you do need to get right is the lighting. The quality of the tracking seems to be highly dependant on the level of lighting in the room. I've found I get the best results by having an artificial light source behind me while I play; gives the thing a nice clear silhouette to watch. It also helps to have it as close to eye-level (or at least chest level) as possible. The advice to stick it below your TV is not great. I got much better results by putting it on a chest-height window-ledge next to the TV.
There is, however, still a major problem with using Kinect in many homes, which is related to the current games range rather than the hardware itself. A lot of the current games expect the player to jump - a lot. If you live in a flat or apartment, your downstairs neighbours will NOT appreciate you jumping up and down a lot. It would be really good if games could start recognising the "spring-motion" that Wii Fit recognises as a jump as an alternative. As I say, this is entirely a software issue; the hardware should be perfectly capable of allowing it.
Of course, aside from exercise software, I've yet to actually see anything come out of the Kinect - or any other motion control device - that actually helps lead to better games than a mouse and keyboard or 2-stick controller. That said, the exercise software is useful and I'll probably stick a Wii Fit vs Your Shape comparison in my journal at some point over the next few days, now I've had a few weeks to get used to Your Shape (tl;dr version - they're both good, both have strengths and weaknesses in different areas).
Upscaling's a funny old business. My (1st gen US 60gig) PS3 upscales PS2 games and does a pretty decent job of it. Certainly, on a dull afternoon, I got my TV to display Final Fantasy X running on:
a) a PS2 b) the PS3, with upscaling to 720p c) ePSXe2 via my laptop (with HDTV adapter), with upscaling to 720p
Of the three, b) looked by far the best. The worst was a), which looked very blurry and muddy on a 38 inch HDTV. Meanwhile, c) just looked odd, with a very sterile and angular look. I think the point I took from this is that upscaling techniques can vary significantly in terms of quality.
That said, I agree entirely that Blu-Ray movie footage looks noticably better than decently-upscaled DVD footage, and that there is a whole wealth of extra detail visible on the Blu-Ray. Just like how a game developed to be run in 720p, with appropriately sized textures, will look better than an upscaled standard-def game.
I've personally bought a small number of movies that I like a lot on Blu-Ray when I already own them on DVD. I bought the shiny Alien box set for the first two movies (and partly for the third, which I don't completely hate). I can't, however, see myself picking up the Star Wars set; those movies have just been abused too much over the years.
1) Doesn't tally with my experience of playing WoW. I played for 2 expansion launches in fairly hardcore (though not top-end) guilds and each time, we got a run of veteran players leaving in the run up to, and the month or so after new expansions launching. The content cycle starts to feel a bit futile after a while.
2) Absolutely agree - if anything displaces WoW, it will need to have a base UI at least as good as WoW's and will need to allow for UI customisation as well.
Indeed, sales of all three consoles are now profitable (and have been for about 2 years). The margins are still small on all three, though. Last numbers I remember seeing indicated that for the console manufacturer, one console sale was roughly equivalent to two game sales. That's not bad, but it's not fantastic either. Might be outdated, of course; you'd expect the margins on hardware sales to get larger as time goes on.
The Kinect, however, has an absolutely stonkingly huge profit margin for each unit sold. No wonder MS were treating its release as a new console launch. Even if the Kinect attach rate for games is awful, as I suspect it probably will be (unless games improve from the launch titles), MS are probably already laughing their way to the bank on that one.
Oh god, I remember that. I must have had a much higher tolerance for really bad games back then. Either that, or a much stronger affection for the Star Wars brand. I actually struggled through both Empire and Rebellion campaigns (with the latter being hideously, crushingly difficult).
They could have made a reasonable enough game out of the overworld turn-based stuff, with a small amount of simplification (indeed, Empire at War did just that, about a decade later, and was a reasonable enough game). But the real-time battle sequences? Those were so bad that it defied belief. They tried to do the whole fully 3d battlespace thing in the days before Homeworld - and they did it much worse than the Homeworld implementation. Battles were completely uncontrollable; with anything more than a couple of corvettes involved, you just had to click autoresolve and hope for the best.
That was about the same time as Force Commander, wasn't it? I wonder which of the two was worse?
Whether it's too late for the game to be successful depends on how you are defining "being successful". If you are defining it as staking out a sizeable, but still sub-WoW-sized share of the MMO market, perhaps even becoming the second-place runner, while bringing a number of players new to the genre, then Old Republic still has every chance to succeed; the key factors in whether it does so will be whether it is a good game and whether they have the infrastructure in place to manage it properly.
If, however you define success as "beating World of Warcraft, taking away a large portion of its players and leaving it languishing in the dust" then the timing is indeed wrong. Or at least, the window of opportunity is closing fast and, once closed in a month or so, will not open again for another 18 months to 2 years.
WoW's great strength is also its great weakness - and is the only plausible route to defeating it before Blizzard retire it in favour of a successor. The strength is WoW's cyclical nature. Expansions come out roughly every 2 years and completely reset the game more the vast majority of players. Gear becomes obsolete, old dungeons are retired, some aspects of the game change on a fundamental level. This keeps things fresh for players and, combined with the periodic roll-out of further content via free patches, provides an incentive to continue playing. And if everybody you know is continuing to play, then you yourself feel compelled to continue (even if you aren't enjoying the game much any more). This was WoW's great strength; it achieved a certain kind of watercooler-momentum, that saw people draw into the game by their real life friends and family. You're not going to break that easily.
But every two years or so, there is a window where, I think, WoW's aura of invincibility is briefly dispelled. The final month of one expansion and the first month of a new one is, in many ways, a fairly grim time to play WoW. Before the new expansion hits, you will be bored to death of all of the current content, and many in-game activities will feel pointless because all of the rewards will be obsolete soon anyway. For the first month or two of the new expansion, there isn't all that much content to be working on and a lot of the hardcore players are cheesed off at having to start over from scratch again.
So if another developer, with a relatively polished release product, a rudimentary end-game already present, an interface as good as or better than WoW's and, preferably, a decent existing IP to base the game world on could launch in that window, then the might - just might - have a shot at derrailing the WoW juggernaut and triggering the kind of mass-defection that would cut WoW's player-base by a half or more. However, the window that the launch of Cataclysm created is rapidly closing, and it looks like Old Republic has missed it. So if you are defining success as "WoW beater", then yes, I suspect it is already too late for Old Republic to succeed.
Disagree. While sequels in movie world (with a few rare exceptions) almost never live up to the original, the gaming world is littered with sequels that have surpassed the original.
The original X-Wing back on the PC in the early 1990s was great, but TIE fighter smoothed off a lot of the rough edges and ended up the better game. Baldur's Gate 2 was a better game than the original because it took away some of the excessively sadistic design elements, gave a more content-rich game world and massively improved the balance of the magic system. Yes, Gran Turismo 5 may have been a disappointment, but if you go back to the series's roots, Gran Turismo 2 was a huge step up from the original. More recently, the Forza Motorsport series has improved beyond recognition with each sequel, going from an original which was a poor man's Gran Turismo 4, to a third installment that blows Gran Turismo 5 out of the water in most respects. The Fable series has evolved from a bad joke of an original into a pretty passable and unusual RPG. There are many more examples I could point at here.
If anything, I think the exact opposite of what you said is usually true. Original games, based on a fresh IP, often seem to get pushed out the door because "upper management" (whatever you mean by that) don't want to put too much time and resource into a project that's seen as a risk. Once a game has been successful, allowing more time to polish the sequel is often a more attractive commercial proposition. Sure you'll always find exceptions, but I think this generally holds true.
Hmm... so comments are finally allowed on this article? I wonder what happened there...
I can think of two possible reasons why Black Ops might have been the most pirated game. The first is boring and uncontroversial; it was a huge selling game. I'm not sure whether it was the biggest selling game of 2010, but it was certainly near the top of the table. So if you make the broad assumption that games which people are interested in are more likely to be both bought and pirated, there's no surprise that a huge selling game would also be heavily pirated.
However, I wonder if there isn't another factor at play. I bought the PC version of Black Ops and, as a gamer who pretty much only plays singleplayer these days, I can honestly say it was a waste of my money. Not quite as bad as Medal of Honor, whose four hour campaign manages the impressive feat of feeling both insultingly short and also padded and boring, but still over very quickly. Now, a lot of people like their multiplayer; but at the same time, I know I'm a long way from alone in not wanting to spend my leisure time being sworn at in German by 14 year old cheaters/glitchers (which seems to be what happens whenever I do give online play a chance these days in anything that doesn't require a subscription). I have no wish to condone piracy (whatever the faults in the industry's response, it's ultimately the pirates who are the ones screwing over legitimate gamers), but I can at least follow the logic of those who decided that the Call of Duty series (whose success, with the exception of the 4th installment, I have never understood) has a history of giving the singleplayer gamer a few short but visually impressive set-pieces and not much else - therefore why spend money on the latest. Sure, you might want to see those set-pieces, but given that they're over in less time than the average movie (and are mostly just variants on the same thing), it's hard to justify forking out the higher than usual price tag for them.
The real answer, of course, is just not to play the stupid game; hopefully, I'll have the sense to do this with the next installment.
Fortunately, it seems that split-screen co-op is confirmed for Resistance 3.
I do get the feeling that despite some of the flashy set-pieces, Resistance 2 was a real mis-step for the series. Not only did they lose split-screen co-op, they also forced players into an "only carry two weapons at a time" system, a la Gears of War and Call of Duty. The original Resistance was a genuinely interesting console fps, with some real unique selling points. Resistance 2, while pretty, basically felt like a generic "me too" corridor-shooter.
Happily, the developers do seem to have realised this and it sounds like Resistance 3 is going to re-incorporate some of the better elements from the original. I did a journal post on this the other week.
Oh, god, I remember the Commander Keen games. I was a purely PC gamer back in the early 90s; the parents wouldn't have a console in the house at the time. To be honest, I don't remember the original Commander Keen being particularly great. It was one of those EGA platformers with very sparse graphics that seemed to be everywhere on the PC at the time. I think of it like the original Duke Nukem platformers; games which are remembered not in their own right, but for what they went on to spawn.
What did blow me away, however, was Keen 4 (Secret of the Oracle), which came out a year later. This was a huge leap forwards in terms of graphics and sound. The sad thing is that I can still hum some of the pieces of background music from that game. The gameplay was also much improved, with Keen's movement feeling much more natural, and some really great level design. It actually gave PC gamers of the time a game that they could pretend was almost as good as the likes of Super Mario World and Sonic the Hedgehog. I don't think I saw a better platformer on the PC until Jazz Jackrabbit, which I'm fairly sure was a few years later.
Actually, isn't the Keen series available on Steam these days? I must pick that up this evening. Take a look at the episodes from the "full" version that I never saw in my youth.
Final Fantasy XII and Kingdom Hearts 2 were both 2006 releases and both were, in my opinion, among the best games Square(-Enix) has ever put out. FFXII wasn't universally popular, but to me, it was the FF series at its best; different to its predecessors, willing to innovate and capable of hiding surprising depth behind an initially shallow exterior. KH2 (which there's a fairly recent post on in my journal) was, for me at least, probably the best game of the PS2 generation, with graphics and gameplay that were well ahead of the curve for the time. Of course, you may well argue that most of the development on these took place before the Enix merger. In fact, you'd probably be right. But Square(-Enix) has put out decent games within the last 5 years.
Right, it's been more than 2 weeks since I last logged in. I guess I should take a look at the new UI. There's a lot more basis to the "anecdote" than one IM; such as the large quantities of typos in the original Japanese version that looked like they'd been a rushed translation from Chinese.
And the world-wide servers thing for FFXI was a worthwhile experiment, but ultimately, experience has proven the WoW-style regional model to be superior. I remember the huge disadvantage that Western players had trying to pull HNMs in FFXI, because of their latency. Even if they want to have multi-region servers, they should split the locations of their servers to remove the systematic bias. After all, Blizzard are a US company but they didn't just stick all of their servers in the US.
The game in its current state is barely playable. Even if you stick with it past the gruesome interface and crippling performance issues, you're going to run head-on into over-complicated and badly explained class and tradeskill mechanics, boring combat and a serious lack of anything to actually do. Oh, and with all of the servers concentrated in Japan, Western gamers can expect fairly heavy lag even at the best of times.
There have been a number of updates since the game launched, but for the most part, these have been window dressing. There is, apparently, an update to the UI incoming, which is something, but even if this patch ushers in a new era in UI-perfection, it will still leave many serious flaws in the game that would need to be fixed before this could even reach the stage of being a low-quality, content-light WoW clone. Believe me, that's a stage that FFXIV can only dream of right now.
Anecdotally, the problem seems to be that Square-Enix resorted to that tried and tested technique for delivering high-quality, cutting-edge software. They drew up a loose, under-defined spec and pushed it at a Chinese outsourcing house. Given the spotless track record of this technique elsewhere, you can imagine their shock on getting back a shoddy, under-developed, non-cohesive game that even Square-Enix themselves didn't understand properly. It's a good thing for gamers that they just decided to push it out the door and hope for the best.
Sarcasm aside, heads do indeed need to roll over FFXIV. Going for the lead developers is a start, but they need to go much higher. They need to go for whoever decided that they could do a modern MMO with the budget, development time and support resources they wanted to make available. They also need to go for whoever decided that Square-Enix should become a kind of Japanese EA, grinding out a constant succession of low-to-middling quality handheld titles, which seem to be locked into a cycle of commercially diminishing returns. As little as 5 years ago, Square-Enix were a great company putting out great games. It pains me to see what they've become.
And as for FFXIV, as it stands, it is dead in the water. A few fiddling-at-the-margins patches and a PS3 version won't save it. I would say that unless they want to flush good money down the drain after bad, they have two options. First, they could pull the plug now and forget the game ever happened. Second, they could close the game down on an interim basis and push it back into closed development for at least a year. Re-release the game when it's actually in a competitive state, ensuring, of course, that those who bought it first time around get a free-pass for the rerelease.
No, I think he meant an actual hard-coded skill. As in, those with more experience of the game actually get a more powerful character. So to use a sporting analogy, it would be like saying that more experienced soccer teams would be given a smaller goal to defend when playing against novice opponents. I'm not saying I agree with GP's point (persistent-experience is a major hook these days), but it isn't as ridiculous as you make it sound.
Agreed. In my case, it's more that my online gaming phase, which lasted from the age of about 18 through to 28 or so, was a passing fad. Competitive online gaming has its moments, but a lot of the time it's like wallowing in a cess-pit of foul mouthed teenagers, griefers and cheaters. Then most of the games which focus more upon co-operation rather than competition (by which I mostly mean MMOs) turn into life-consuming grind-fests. These days, what I want from a game is pretty much the same as what I want for a book or movie; I want to be entertained, engaged and to be told a decent story. Now, there's an expectation that a game will last a bit longer than a movie (though it doesn't 100% have to; the special editions of any of the LOTR movies are longer than Vanquish, but still enjoyed Vanquish) and it if wants to keep me entertained, then the gameplay needs to be decent. I'll compromise on the story; I'm perfectly happy to play a Forza 3 style game, if the gameplay is good enough. But I'm quite happy with the idea that something has a finite span and will come to an end.
Part of this might be to do with the fact that I have enough disposable income to buy a good few games these days. Back when I was a student, multiplayer was good value. My original £35 on Half-Life lasted years, due to Team Fortress Classic and Counter-Strike. In terms of cost-per-hour, it probably ended up as the cheapest entertainment product I ever bought. But cheapest does not mean best.
I suspect that it's cost here driving this latest (idiotic) EA statement. Multiplayer is just so much easier and cheaper, from their point of view; no need to employ writers, you can get away with a fraction of the work on level design and, best of all, you can pretty much force people to pay for not-really-optional extra content (or lose the ability to play with their friends, who do have it). Fortunately, there are lots of talented people out there making singleplayer games, so I suspect that offline gaming is far from dead.
You know, judging by the nickname he chose and the general air of machismo he tries to project, I can't help but feel he's trying to compensate for something.
At a guess, he possibly never managed to unlock the real life version of "hot coffee".
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing he did this with the intention of selling the games on and profiting. It certainly can't have been for his own enjoyment.
Unless, of course, there's some strange pleasure that he gets from owning 500 used copies of Madden and 500 used copies of Black Ops (plus maybe, if he's really lucky, a single new copy of Madden as well).
Yes, true, I hadn't thought of that. Though in that case, hard disk space may well emerge as the alternative constraint.
Still, for a pirate who downloads a couple of games a month, plays through them and then discards them (you almost certainly won't be doing online play on pirated games) this is not going to prove a huge barrier.
I must say, it does feel like having an Ubisoft exec comment on the chances of Sony being successful in combating piracy feels a bit like having Sauron publish an article on Voldemort's chances of taking over the world.
He's probably right, of course. A software-only hack is very bad news indeed for Sony. It's worse news than such a hack would be for Microsoft. Why? As TFA notes, Sony probably will be able to catch and ban people with custom firmware who connect to the Playstation Network, just as MS can with users on Xbox Live. However, as an owner of both consoles (who has no strong overall preference for either), I can fairly confidently say that Xbox Live is a much more central part of the whole "360 experience" than the PSN is to the PS3. It's not that Sony haven't put a lot of time and effort into improving the PSN - it is certainly far better than it used to be - but it still feels like something that sits off to the side a bit from the PS3's main functionality, while a 360 without Xbox Live feels fundamentally incomplete.
As for a new PS3 hardware iteration to solve this - I just don't see how, short of sending some kind of self-destruct signal to every existing PS3 out there (and I don't think even Sony would go that far) they could plausibly make that one work.
If Sony has one sliver of hope left, it's that the extremely large size of many of the big-name PS3 games (and hence the time and bandwidth needed to download them), combined with the relatively high price of writable blu-ray media, will still act as something of a deterrent. Of course, lots of big-name cross-platform releases like the Call of Duty games are basically identical to the 360 versions and could probably fit on a DVD.
I... partly agree. But only partly.
There have certainly been times when I have thought that a game is going too far to cushion the player from consequences. You might remember Full Spectrum Warrior, which was released for the original Xbox somewhere around the mid-point of the console's life-span. It was essentially a military training simulator designed to teach infantry tactics which had been repurposed into a game (indeed, there were cheat codes to strip out the game elements and access the simulator itself). To be honest, it was a pretty good game, once you worked out that it wasn't a normal third person shooter and started to see it as more of a puzzle game.
There was, however, one thing that always struck me as extremely strange about it. The player was in command of a small squad of soldiers and if one of those soldiers died - *BANG* - game over screen, time to go back to the last checkpoint. This always felt bizarre to me for a piece of software that was basically a training simulator. Yes, you want your students to think hard about how to avoid casualties, but as the last decade has proven, no matter how careful you think you are being in wartime, casualties are going to happen sooner or later. And in real life, there wasn't going to be a game-over screen and a return to the last checkpoint. So you had a simulator which covered small-scale infantry tactics in a fair degree of detail - until the moment your own side took a casualty. I'm sure you can see the problems inherant in that.
However, while I will agree that people coming out of universities today (I do a fair amount of graduate recruitment and get to see a lot of new entrants to the job market) tend to have a poor understanding of consequences, I don't think for a moment that video games are the primary cause of this. I'd much rather look at the school system, where the errosion of discipline in the state school sector here in the UK has been almost complete, and where even serious misdemeanours such as assaults on other pupils or teachers are generally met with only derisory sanctions. It often feels like an inevitable moment in the early days of any new graduate's career these days involves their manager having to say: "Yes, you missed the deadline. No, you can't have a few more days, as that's not my decision to make and the customer isn't feeling forgiving. Note that this will have direct consequences for the company/organisation."
The 360 has also been comprehensively broken since its early days. That said, MS does seem to be able to pick up and ban modded 360s when they connect to Xbox Live, and you could argue that Live is such a large part of the 360-package that this is a reasonably large barrier to modding for most people.
Not forgotten at all. The original exploit by Geohot was an awfully long way from producing something that was actually usable as a means of playing pirated games on the PS3. It was one of the small cracks that had appeared in the wall and as a pay-off for 5 years of effort, it was pretty poor. The nature of the attempts to break through the PS3's security barriers changed dramatically following the removal of OtherOS. I don't deny, however, that the sheer, brazen anti-consumerism that Sony manifested in yanking the OtherOS feature from all PS3s will have had a massive "red flag to a bull" effect.
A lawsuit was pretty much inevitable; Sony needs to show its shareholders that it's doing something. To be honest, I find it hard to imagine that they won't succeed in making Mr. Hotz's life very... expensive indeed. Of course, with the cat now well and truly out of the bag on PS3 security, anything they do now can't really be more than a mixture of revenge and deterrence.
The real question for Sony (and other console developers) is how they pitch the longer term response to this. With hindsight, it now appears that the long-legendary PS3 security set-up wasn't so stellar after all. Prior to Sony's removal of OtherOS, there were only tiny cracks in the wall and Sony could reasonably have expected it to last several more years. Following the removal of OtherOS, the demolition of Sony's safeguards was swift and ruthless.
One possible inference, therefore, is that Sony's decision to grant PS3 users a "walled garden" in which they could - to some extent - do what they wanted with the system was what really provided the PS3 with its 5-year immunity from piracy. The commercially-minded piracy people, and the bored teenagers who wanted to play pirated games, just weren't good enough to break a console's security (even if major flaws did exist) and the people who were good enough; they weren't interested, as they could already do what they wanted with the system.
If I were Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft, I would now be urgently investigating the possibility of incorporating a similar "walled garden" OtherOS equivalent into my next generation hardware. Yes, the numbers who might actually use it would probably be small - and yes, said users aren't worth much commercially as they probably don't buy many games, but 5 years of no piracy on the system is a pretty big payback.
I've got a Kinect and have tried it in 5 different homes, with varying degrees of success. Actually, that's a little unfair; it's worked to an acceptable level in 4 of the 5, and been just about on the unacceptable side of the line in the 5th (though you could have used it if you were really determined).
The big issue seems to be room shape rather than room size. I have a small living room, but the TV looks down it length-ways, so it works fine for me. Unless you want to do 2-player (which I don't normally, at home), you don't actually need all that much room to move side to side. The really key thing is to be able to get those 6-8 feet from the TV; if you can do that and have the room to take at least one large step to the side in either direction, it's fine.
What you do need to get right is the lighting. The quality of the tracking seems to be highly dependant on the level of lighting in the room. I've found I get the best results by having an artificial light source behind me while I play; gives the thing a nice clear silhouette to watch. It also helps to have it as close to eye-level (or at least chest level) as possible. The advice to stick it below your TV is not great. I got much better results by putting it on a chest-height window-ledge next to the TV.
There is, however, still a major problem with using Kinect in many homes, which is related to the current games range rather than the hardware itself. A lot of the current games expect the player to jump - a lot. If you live in a flat or apartment, your downstairs neighbours will NOT appreciate you jumping up and down a lot. It would be really good if games could start recognising the "spring-motion" that Wii Fit recognises as a jump as an alternative. As I say, this is entirely a software issue; the hardware should be perfectly capable of allowing it.
Of course, aside from exercise software, I've yet to actually see anything come out of the Kinect - or any other motion control device - that actually helps lead to better games than a mouse and keyboard or 2-stick controller. That said, the exercise software is useful and I'll probably stick a Wii Fit vs Your Shape comparison in my journal at some point over the next few days, now I've had a few weeks to get used to Your Shape (tl;dr version - they're both good, both have strengths and weaknesses in different areas).
Upscaling's a funny old business. My (1st gen US 60gig) PS3 upscales PS2 games and does a pretty decent job of it. Certainly, on a dull afternoon, I got my TV to display Final Fantasy X running on:
a) a PS2
b) the PS3, with upscaling to 720p
c) ePSXe2 via my laptop (with HDTV adapter), with upscaling to 720p
Of the three, b) looked by far the best. The worst was a), which looked very blurry and muddy on a 38 inch HDTV. Meanwhile, c) just looked odd, with a very sterile and angular look. I think the point I took from this is that upscaling techniques can vary significantly in terms of quality.
That said, I agree entirely that Blu-Ray movie footage looks noticably better than decently-upscaled DVD footage, and that there is a whole wealth of extra detail visible on the Blu-Ray. Just like how a game developed to be run in 720p, with appropriately sized textures, will look better than an upscaled standard-def game.
I've personally bought a small number of movies that I like a lot on Blu-Ray when I already own them on DVD. I bought the shiny Alien box set for the first two movies (and partly for the third, which I don't completely hate). I can't, however, see myself picking up the Star Wars set; those movies have just been abused too much over the years.
1) Doesn't tally with my experience of playing WoW. I played for 2 expansion launches in fairly hardcore (though not top-end) guilds and each time, we got a run of veteran players leaving in the run up to, and the month or so after new expansions launching. The content cycle starts to feel a bit futile after a while. 2) Absolutely agree - if anything displaces WoW, it will need to have a base UI at least as good as WoW's and will need to allow for UI customisation as well.
Indeed, sales of all three consoles are now profitable (and have been for about 2 years). The margins are still small on all three, though. Last numbers I remember seeing indicated that for the console manufacturer, one console sale was roughly equivalent to two game sales. That's not bad, but it's not fantastic either. Might be outdated, of course; you'd expect the margins on hardware sales to get larger as time goes on.
The Kinect, however, has an absolutely stonkingly huge profit margin for each unit sold. No wonder MS were treating its release as a new console launch. Even if the Kinect attach rate for games is awful, as I suspect it probably will be (unless games improve from the launch titles), MS are probably already laughing their way to the bank on that one.
Oh god, I remember that. I must have had a much higher tolerance for really bad games back then. Either that, or a much stronger affection for the Star Wars brand. I actually struggled through both Empire and Rebellion campaigns (with the latter being hideously, crushingly difficult).
They could have made a reasonable enough game out of the overworld turn-based stuff, with a small amount of simplification (indeed, Empire at War did just that, about a decade later, and was a reasonable enough game). But the real-time battle sequences? Those were so bad that it defied belief. They tried to do the whole fully 3d battlespace thing in the days before Homeworld - and they did it much worse than the Homeworld implementation. Battles were completely uncontrollable; with anything more than a couple of corvettes involved, you just had to click autoresolve and hope for the best.
That was about the same time as Force Commander, wasn't it? I wonder which of the two was worse?
Whether it's too late for the game to be successful depends on how you are defining "being successful". If you are defining it as staking out a sizeable, but still sub-WoW-sized share of the MMO market, perhaps even becoming the second-place runner, while bringing a number of players new to the genre, then Old Republic still has every chance to succeed; the key factors in whether it does so will be whether it is a good game and whether they have the infrastructure in place to manage it properly.
If, however you define success as "beating World of Warcraft, taking away a large portion of its players and leaving it languishing in the dust" then the timing is indeed wrong. Or at least, the window of opportunity is closing fast and, once closed in a month or so, will not open again for another 18 months to 2 years.
WoW's great strength is also its great weakness - and is the only plausible route to defeating it before Blizzard retire it in favour of a successor. The strength is WoW's cyclical nature. Expansions come out roughly every 2 years and completely reset the game more the vast majority of players. Gear becomes obsolete, old dungeons are retired, some aspects of the game change on a fundamental level. This keeps things fresh for players and, combined with the periodic roll-out of further content via free patches, provides an incentive to continue playing. And if everybody you know is continuing to play, then you yourself feel compelled to continue (even if you aren't enjoying the game much any more). This was WoW's great strength; it achieved a certain kind of watercooler-momentum, that saw people draw into the game by their real life friends and family. You're not going to break that easily.
But every two years or so, there is a window where, I think, WoW's aura of invincibility is briefly dispelled. The final month of one expansion and the first month of a new one is, in many ways, a fairly grim time to play WoW. Before the new expansion hits, you will be bored to death of all of the current content, and many in-game activities will feel pointless because all of the rewards will be obsolete soon anyway. For the first month or two of the new expansion, there isn't all that much content to be working on and a lot of the hardcore players are cheesed off at having to start over from scratch again.
So if another developer, with a relatively polished release product, a rudimentary end-game already present, an interface as good as or better than WoW's and, preferably, a decent existing IP to base the game world on could launch in that window, then the might - just might - have a shot at derrailing the WoW juggernaut and triggering the kind of mass-defection that would cut WoW's player-base by a half or more. However, the window that the launch of Cataclysm created is rapidly closing, and it looks like Old Republic has missed it. So if you are defining success as "WoW beater", then yes, I suspect it is already too late for Old Republic to succeed.
Disagree. While sequels in movie world (with a few rare exceptions) almost never live up to the original, the gaming world is littered with sequels that have surpassed the original.
The original X-Wing back on the PC in the early 1990s was great, but TIE fighter smoothed off a lot of the rough edges and ended up the better game. Baldur's Gate 2 was a better game than the original because it took away some of the excessively sadistic design elements, gave a more content-rich game world and massively improved the balance of the magic system. Yes, Gran Turismo 5 may have been a disappointment, but if you go back to the series's roots, Gran Turismo 2 was a huge step up from the original. More recently, the Forza Motorsport series has improved beyond recognition with each sequel, going from an original which was a poor man's Gran Turismo 4, to a third installment that blows Gran Turismo 5 out of the water in most respects. The Fable series has evolved from a bad joke of an original into a pretty passable and unusual RPG. There are many more examples I could point at here.
If anything, I think the exact opposite of what you said is usually true. Original games, based on a fresh IP, often seem to get pushed out the door because "upper management" (whatever you mean by that) don't want to put too much time and resource into a project that's seen as a risk. Once a game has been successful, allowing more time to polish the sequel is often a more attractive commercial proposition. Sure you'll always find exceptions, but I think this generally holds true.
Hmm... so comments are finally allowed on this article? I wonder what happened there...
I can think of two possible reasons why Black Ops might have been the most pirated game. The first is boring and uncontroversial; it was a huge selling game. I'm not sure whether it was the biggest selling game of 2010, but it was certainly near the top of the table. So if you make the broad assumption that games which people are interested in are more likely to be both bought and pirated, there's no surprise that a huge selling game would also be heavily pirated.
However, I wonder if there isn't another factor at play. I bought the PC version of Black Ops and, as a gamer who pretty much only plays singleplayer these days, I can honestly say it was a waste of my money. Not quite as bad as Medal of Honor, whose four hour campaign manages the impressive feat of feeling both insultingly short and also padded and boring, but still over very quickly. Now, a lot of people like their multiplayer; but at the same time, I know I'm a long way from alone in not wanting to spend my leisure time being sworn at in German by 14 year old cheaters/glitchers (which seems to be what happens whenever I do give online play a chance these days in anything that doesn't require a subscription). I have no wish to condone piracy (whatever the faults in the industry's response, it's ultimately the pirates who are the ones screwing over legitimate gamers), but I can at least follow the logic of those who decided that the Call of Duty series (whose success, with the exception of the 4th installment, I have never understood) has a history of giving the singleplayer gamer a few short but visually impressive set-pieces and not much else - therefore why spend money on the latest. Sure, you might want to see those set-pieces, but given that they're over in less time than the average movie (and are mostly just variants on the same thing), it's hard to justify forking out the higher than usual price tag for them.
The real answer, of course, is just not to play the stupid game; hopefully, I'll have the sense to do this with the next installment.
Fortunately, it seems that split-screen co-op is confirmed for Resistance 3.
I do get the feeling that despite some of the flashy set-pieces, Resistance 2 was a real mis-step for the series. Not only did they lose split-screen co-op, they also forced players into an "only carry two weapons at a time" system, a la Gears of War and Call of Duty. The original Resistance was a genuinely interesting console fps, with some real unique selling points. Resistance 2, while pretty, basically felt like a generic "me too" corridor-shooter.
Happily, the developers do seem to have realised this and it sounds like Resistance 3 is going to re-incorporate some of the better elements from the original. I did a journal post on this the other week.
I've paid Amazon for 20-plus year old movies and books before. Why should buying a 20 year old game from Steam be any different?
Oh, god, I remember the Commander Keen games. I was a purely PC gamer back in the early 90s; the parents wouldn't have a console in the house at the time. To be honest, I don't remember the original Commander Keen being particularly great. It was one of those EGA platformers with very sparse graphics that seemed to be everywhere on the PC at the time. I think of it like the original Duke Nukem platformers; games which are remembered not in their own right, but for what they went on to spawn.
What did blow me away, however, was Keen 4 (Secret of the Oracle), which came out a year later. This was a huge leap forwards in terms of graphics and sound. The sad thing is that I can still hum some of the pieces of background music from that game. The gameplay was also much improved, with Keen's movement feeling much more natural, and some really great level design. It actually gave PC gamers of the time a game that they could pretend was almost as good as the likes of Super Mario World and Sonic the Hedgehog. I don't think I saw a better platformer on the PC until Jazz Jackrabbit, which I'm fairly sure was a few years later.
Actually, isn't the Keen series available on Steam these days? I must pick that up this evening. Take a look at the episodes from the "full" version that I never saw in my youth.
I see what you're getting at, but...
Final Fantasy XII and Kingdom Hearts 2 were both 2006 releases and both were, in my opinion, among the best games Square(-Enix) has ever put out. FFXII wasn't universally popular, but to me, it was the FF series at its best; different to its predecessors, willing to innovate and capable of hiding surprising depth behind an initially shallow exterior. KH2 (which there's a fairly recent post on in my journal) was, for me at least, probably the best game of the PS2 generation, with graphics and gameplay that were well ahead of the curve for the time. Of course, you may well argue that most of the development on these took place before the Enix merger. In fact, you'd probably be right. But Square(-Enix) has put out decent games within the last 5 years.
Crisis Core was good as well, now I think back.
Right, it's been more than 2 weeks since I last logged in. I guess I should take a look at the new UI. There's a lot more basis to the "anecdote" than one IM; such as the large quantities of typos in the original Japanese version that looked like they'd been a rushed translation from Chinese.
And the world-wide servers thing for FFXI was a worthwhile experiment, but ultimately, experience has proven the WoW-style regional model to be superior. I remember the huge disadvantage that Western players had trying to pull HNMs in FFXI, because of their latency. Even if they want to have multi-region servers, they should split the locations of their servers to remove the systematic bias. After all, Blizzard are a US company but they didn't just stick all of their servers in the US.
The game in its current state is barely playable. Even if you stick with it past the gruesome interface and crippling performance issues, you're going to run head-on into over-complicated and badly explained class and tradeskill mechanics, boring combat and a serious lack of anything to actually do. Oh, and with all of the servers concentrated in Japan, Western gamers can expect fairly heavy lag even at the best of times.
There have been a number of updates since the game launched, but for the most part, these have been window dressing. There is, apparently, an update to the UI incoming, which is something, but even if this patch ushers in a new era in UI-perfection, it will still leave many serious flaws in the game that would need to be fixed before this could even reach the stage of being a low-quality, content-light WoW clone. Believe me, that's a stage that FFXIV can only dream of right now.
Anecdotally, the problem seems to be that Square-Enix resorted to that tried and tested technique for delivering high-quality, cutting-edge software. They drew up a loose, under-defined spec and pushed it at a Chinese outsourcing house. Given the spotless track record of this technique elsewhere, you can imagine their shock on getting back a shoddy, under-developed, non-cohesive game that even Square-Enix themselves didn't understand properly. It's a good thing for gamers that they just decided to push it out the door and hope for the best.
Sarcasm aside, heads do indeed need to roll over FFXIV. Going for the lead developers is a start, but they need to go much higher. They need to go for whoever decided that they could do a modern MMO with the budget, development time and support resources they wanted to make available. They also need to go for whoever decided that Square-Enix should become a kind of Japanese EA, grinding out a constant succession of low-to-middling quality handheld titles, which seem to be locked into a cycle of commercially diminishing returns. As little as 5 years ago, Square-Enix were a great company putting out great games. It pains me to see what they've become.
And as for FFXIV, as it stands, it is dead in the water. A few fiddling-at-the-margins patches and a PS3 version won't save it. I would say that unless they want to flush good money down the drain after bad, they have two options. First, they could pull the plug now and forget the game ever happened. Second, they could close the game down on an interim basis and push it back into closed development for at least a year. Re-release the game when it's actually in a competitive state, ensuring, of course, that those who bought it first time around get a free-pass for the rerelease.
Compared to the length of time I've been playing single-player, yeah, that's a passing fad.
No, I think he meant an actual hard-coded skill. As in, those with more experience of the game actually get a more powerful character. So to use a sporting analogy, it would be like saying that more experienced soccer teams would be given a smaller goal to defend when playing against novice opponents. I'm not saying I agree with GP's point (persistent-experience is a major hook these days), but it isn't as ridiculous as you make it sound.
Agreed. In my case, it's more that my online gaming phase, which lasted from the age of about 18 through to 28 or so, was a passing fad. Competitive online gaming has its moments, but a lot of the time it's like wallowing in a cess-pit of foul mouthed teenagers, griefers and cheaters. Then most of the games which focus more upon co-operation rather than competition (by which I mostly mean MMOs) turn into life-consuming grind-fests. These days, what I want from a game is pretty much the same as what I want for a book or movie; I want to be entertained, engaged and to be told a decent story. Now, there's an expectation that a game will last a bit longer than a movie (though it doesn't 100% have to; the special editions of any of the LOTR movies are longer than Vanquish, but still enjoyed Vanquish) and it if wants to keep me entertained, then the gameplay needs to be decent. I'll compromise on the story; I'm perfectly happy to play a Forza 3 style game, if the gameplay is good enough. But I'm quite happy with the idea that something has a finite span and will come to an end.
Part of this might be to do with the fact that I have enough disposable income to buy a good few games these days. Back when I was a student, multiplayer was good value. My original £35 on Half-Life lasted years, due to Team Fortress Classic and Counter-Strike. In terms of cost-per-hour, it probably ended up as the cheapest entertainment product I ever bought. But cheapest does not mean best.
I suspect that it's cost here driving this latest (idiotic) EA statement. Multiplayer is just so much easier and cheaper, from their point of view; no need to employ writers, you can get away with a fraction of the work on level design and, best of all, you can pretty much force people to pay for not-really-optional extra content (or lose the ability to play with their friends, who do have it). Fortunately, there are lots of talented people out there making singleplayer games, so I suspect that offline gaming is far from dead.
You know, judging by the nickname he chose and the general air of machismo he tries to project, I can't help but feel he's trying to compensate for something.
At a guess, he possibly never managed to unlock the real life version of "hot coffee".