Probably Bionic Commando. Or possibly F-29 Retaliator. I never owned an Amiga myself (went from a C64 to a PC and didn't own a non-handheld console until the PS2 era), but friends had them so I got a fair bit of time on them around 1990 or so. I was pretty much green with envy of Amiga-owning friends at the time, as the graphics and sound were way beyond what the C64 or our 286 could do. The PC had Wing Commander, of course, which was better still, but going off memory we didn't get a PC capable of running that until 1991.
I'm close to platform agnostic, these days. I've a slight bias against the Wii, because the graphics tend to suck and it makes me use an uncomfortable controller (though I did mostly enjoy Mario Galaxy 2, despite some specific irritations), but beyond that... if I like the look of a game, I'll play it on PC, console, whatever. There are some genre-related platform preferences; I tend to prefer first person shooters or RTSes on the PC, while I find third person shooters and platformers more comfortable on a console. Oh, and there are certain DRM schemes (singleplayer games requiring an always-on connection) that will drive me to a console version regardless of genre. But really... getting ideological over platform just feels like a waste of time.
Besides, it's not as if indie gaming is limited to the PC. There's a substantial indie service available over Xbox Live these days, though as it's mostly full of garbage, I only really tend to look at those games which manage to break into the "proper" Live Arcade.
I've played both. Liked Defense Grid quite a lot - I did say there were exceptions to my genuine low opinion of indie games. That said, the main thing that sets Defense Grid apart from its competition (such as Savage Moon) is the stellar voice acting.
Braid, on the other hand, bored me rigid. Reasonably pretty graphics (though nothing special), but the gameplay just felt intensely "meh".
Personally, I don't welcome this news. I've given the indie gaming scene quite a few tries over the last few years, and tend to come away underwhelmed. Ok, there are a few titles I've liked. I guess Portal had indie-gaming somewhere in its DNA (even if the manner of its release, bundled with the Orange Box, was anything but indie). Limbo has an interesting style, though it's also a bit of a one-trick pony that wears thin about half-way through its (fairly short) play-time.
Ultimately, I like big-budget triple-A extravaganzas. I like high production values, cutting edge graphics and plenty of attention to detail. This isn't to say that every much-hyped big-budget game is good; in the year that saw the release of Final Fantasy XIII (and another bloody Kane & Lynch installment), this is blatantly not true. But if I look at the games I've actually pumped most time into and enjoyed the most over the last couple of years, I come up with titles like World of Warcraft (though I'm happily off that particular crack now), Forza Motorsport 3, Ratchet & Clank: Crack in Time, Uncharted 2, Crysis and God of War 3. Not exactly a list of indie titles. And despite me having given them a go, even the high-end indie titles like World of Goo and the Maw have failed to grab my interest for more than an hour or so.
I'm also generally skeptical that allowing creative types to express their "undiluted creative vision" is always a good thing. It's a gross over-simplification to say that big-budget titles need to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Ratchet & Clank: Crack in Time contains puzzles that are frankly on a par with anything I've seen in an indie game recently (the irony being that R&C's puzzles are all built around the old "push button to open door" mechanic, just infused with some fairly mind-warping twists). God of War 3 wasn't far behind. But when you get the "undiluted creative vision", what you're often (not always, I admit, but often) getting is a load of self-indulgent tripe from the creator that a competent editorial board would have cut not because they felt they needed to dumb the product down, but because it's not actually any fun to play. This isn't limited to games; for every director's cut in the movie industry that actually improves the original, there are half a dozen or so that just add unnecessary rubbish, ruining the pace of the film. Look also at what happens to books from authors who have become celebrities, once editors lose the confidence to challenge them; you get the kind of ever-expanding padding-filled tomes that characterise the later works of... say... Tom Clancy, J. K. Rowling and Stephen King.
I'm not denying that management and publishers don't occasionally demand dumbing down, but it's pretty clear that seeing the creative type as a poor, exploited victim trying to defend his flawless original concept from the nasty corporate villains is a misleading approach.
I'm trying desperately to remember (and have been since my initial post). It certainly wasn't Spy Hunter - you went in circuits around a track that was shown entirely on screen, with no scrolling involved. I do remember it getting possibly the lowest rating ever from Zzap 64. And it had some dude's name in the title (though a fictional character, I think, rather than a real-life sponsor).
Oh god, this is going to drive me crazy all night now.
Basically, the box description made it sound like a vehicle combat game. The game itself was just a very, very poor top-down racing game, with no combat elementss. You had a selection of about 3 basic tracks that you raced around against 3 AI opponents who were so slow it was pretty much impossible to lose. Think Super Off-Road without any of the fun (and with much, much worse graphics).
Oh god, I remember that. Ikari Warriors came bundled with the first PC we ever had in our household (a then-top-of-the-line 286 12mhz). CGA graphics and PC speaker sound effects in all of their glory. I took one look at it and went back to my C64. Funny, really, that PC gaming felt so far behind the curve compared to the C64 at the time. I'm trying to remember when that changed; I guess Their Finest Hour (WW2 flight sim) was probably the first PC game I played that was clearly beyond anything the C64 could do.
I never owned an Atari 2600, but I remember the same phenomenon on the C64. Box art was usually colourful and cartoony. Very few games (at least until you got to the tail end of the C64's popular life span, when you had games like the Creatures series) could come even close to living up to this. It was a good lesson at an early age that you should never take promotional material at face value.
I also remember the loading screens you'd get on the C64 while loading the game from tape (a process which would take several minutes and often fail before the end). These were generally just as "dishonest", though they were at least limited by the display resolution. In fact, worse than that, I remember one particular game where the box description actually told outright lies. It was a top-down racer (think Super Sprint) where the box text advertised weapons, oil-slicks etc, none of which were actually present in the game. I later found out that this was a semi-infamous title (in the UK at least); a sort of 1980s equivalent to Big Rigs Over the Road Racing.
Mind you, misleading box-art continued for quite a lot longer. X-Wing was a fantastic game, but I do remember being a little disappointed by the contrast between the movie-quality box art and the slightly sparse polygon graphics in game. That said, if I remember correctly, some editions of the first two Wing Commander games actually used screenshots for their front-cover art (or can somebody correct me on this - the screenshots may have been "touched up"?).
Even today, it still goes on to some extent. Ok, the differences are probably less pronounced. Box-art still tends to save screenshots for the back cover, but this is usually clearly for stylistic reasons (in fact, the trend seems to be towards box art that is simpler and sparser than a screenshot would have been). But we still get plenty of cases of "touched up" trailers, pre-rendered cutscenes shown at conferences with the implication that they're game-play footage and so on.
Re:Ugh, so many bad memories of the Win95 launch
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Windows 95 Turns 15
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In our household it was.
Don't think I'll ever forgive him for that one.
Re:Ugh, so many bad memories of the Win95 launch
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Windows 95 Turns 15
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· Score: 1
Pedant...
It's weird, though. I moved out of the parents' place almost 15 years ago and despite only having been back for short stints since (a couple of university holidays when I couldn't find anything better and a period of about 2-3 months between finishing up my studies and finding a proper job - yeah, the market for new graduates was much kinder back then) I still call it "home" when I talk about it. This is despite having a mortgage on my own place and whatnot. I suspect if they ever moved house, I would never call their new place "home". There's just something about the place you grew up...
Ugh, so many bad memories of the Win95 launch
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Windows 95 Turns 15
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Ah... I remember the Win95 launch. I was still living at home at the time (doing my A-levels) and we only had one family PC. My Dad, who was (and remains) a huge Microsoft fanboy (he's never tried Firefox etc or any alternative OS, but believes Bill Gates has an "inspiring life story", which is apparently all that counts) got hold of a pre-release version of Win95 a couple of months before release and installed it on the PC. So absolutely nothing worked. Pretty much none of our old software (word processor, spreadsheet, games) would run under Win95, but it was made massively clear that reverting to DOS and Win3.11 was not an option. All of our objections were just "being backward and awkward" and if Win95 went from that PC, I could find somewhere else to live.
I remember the arguments, I remember my mother crying for a whole evening because she couldn't get the (nasty, old, DOS based) word processor going to do work for the university course she was doing part time, where she had an assignment due at the end of the week (my own A-level coursework had been handed in the week before, thank god). And I remember staying up all night later that week working with the "boot into DOS" stuff to actually get a decent portion of the software usable again.
I suppose the weird thing was that, with hindsight, my dad was sort-of right on one level. Once it had been out a while and once you had a library of software that actually worked with it, Windows 95 was undoubtedly an advance on where we'd been previously. It removed the need to keep a stack of boot-disks by the PC. It led to, or at least coincided with, a general push for better UIs in commonly used software. And it probably made it easier for the computer illiterate to do basic tasks (and also to break the OS in creative ways; a problem that would persist until UAC in Vista offered a partial solution). Moreover, the nasty old software we were reliant on at the time was well past its sell-by date and it was ultimately for the best that we abandoned it.
The problem, of course, was that sticking a pre-release copy of a new OS that represented a fairly radical departure from what we'd had previously onto a sole family PC that was used for the household finances, university and school work and gaming was a spectacularly bad idea, particularly when the one insisting on the new OS was arguably the one least dependant on the machine. Even a day 1 store-purchased copy would likely have been no better. There have never really been any advantages to being an early adopter when it comes to MS products. Somewhere along the line, my dad seems to have learned this. The problem I have these days is the opposite; their nasty, unpatched WinXP machine (one of my cast-offs from about 4 years ago) serves as a magnet for every form of malware imaginable and I tend to get stuck with a 2 hour phone call once every couple of months to fix the latest emergency relating to it.
I wish I could work up much interest in this announcement, but to be honest, I'm finding it hard.
What is it with everybody going for a multiplayer focus these days? I mean, sure, I've no objection to having a co-operative mode in the game (indeed it's a positive boon), but I'm getting sick to death of games where the singleplayer campaign is rendered unnecessarily hard or boring due to pandering to co-op. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is probably the most recent example (there are sections which are a nightmare on any difficulty if you're on your own), but it's just one of many.
Once upon a time, I'd have been more positive, I guess. Back when I was a student, or newly started working (and still relatively junior, at the point where I was working fairly sensible hours), myself and a bunch of friends would routinely play online co-op. But even then, it wasn't that easy, for a game that demanded a substantial number of people and a good chunk of time. I remember a theoretically 6-player co-op run we did through Baldur's Gate 2 and its expansion, where in reality, after the first session or two, we never seemed to have more than 3 or 4 people in-game at any one time (which BG2 was thankfully very good at adjusting for). We ended up running the first NWN with a 3 person party (as NWN was much less resilient if your group was missing a player) and felt like we were missing out on a lot, since you couldn't really get a properly balanced party with just 3 people. These days, after going through a MMORPG phase (which does help with the problem somewhat by increasing the pool of available players, at the expense of basically needing to devote 30+ hours a week to it to play sensibly) we just don't seem to bother. With the people I actually know and like well enough to want to play online regularly with all in the same situation as myself, working jobs with substantial degrees of responsibility and erratic hours, getting people together on any kind of schedule is just too difficult. Co-op gaming for me has basically come down to the odd Gears of War mission on a Sunday afternoon.
Maybe it's just me being a Grumpy Old Man (TM). Maybe there is a huge market out there for games where the developers have cut loads of corners and justified it by saying "but it's multiplayer focussed". Oh well, at least Bioware still seem to be on my side (now when's Dragon Age 2 out?).
I don't think it's a platform issue - if you statically compile your libraries you don't need to worry about dependencies or various distros. I think it's just a matter of mindset. Linux and most of the popular apps used on it are open source. They're free as in speech and as in beer, and that app works fine for creating applications, but it simply doesn't work for creating games. Games require many more people, and what's worse, games have to have constant new versions and new content coming out. We can work 20 years to perfect GIMP or Gnome or OpenOffice.org, but with games people need something different every few years.
I'd go further than this. While the free-as-in-beer movement often has no difficulty in attracting people who want to do clever things with software, it's always been at a substantial disadvantage in terms of getting people to do the less exciting but equally important work such as user interface and artwork. The latter is particularly relevant in terms of creating a game that's competitive with modern commercial offerings; you need a seriously large number of artists, sound technicians, animators etc. And by and large, these people expect to be paid for their work.
The final Troika game "Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines" beat it to this. It was one of the very first Source engine games, releasing around the same time as HL2. While there is a steam version available, there were plenty of boxed-copies sold which do not require the game to be imported into Steam. I've no idea whether it's playable under Linux; it was so buggy that a cynic might note that it wasn't even properly playable under Windows.
I suspect this actually has a lot to do with other kinds of parents. Yes, some of them being the stereotypical "bad" parent, but also including plenty of "pushy" middle-class parents.
I think a lot of parents have problems with the idea that their kids might not actually be as bright or as successful as they themselves have been. Broadly speaking, we tend to be optimists when it comes to our children and to assume that they'll exceed our own achievements. Of course, this doesn't always happen. I'm sure we all know of cases of intelligent, successful parents with at least one child who is either stupid or so badly behaved that he or she is incapable of learning properly.
So when such a child (particularly an only-child, from my experience) starts to fall behind at school, the parents start to cast around for a reason that doesn't involve the kid not being particularly clever. A medical diagnosis is one of the best ways to achieve this, at least in terms of having some way of explaining to friends why little Johnny just came home with D grades again. ADHD is certainly one of the most common, though dyslexia gives it a good run for its money. That isn't to say that neither condition is real (because both are), but it is to say that both conditions are rarer than records indicate.
I remember when I was doing my undergraduate studies, I spent the holidays doing tech-support and admin work in a local doctors' surgery (boring, but fairly well paid as student jobs go). You may have heard of the abbreviations that used to appear on doctors' notes in the UK in the days before the data protection act; abbreviations that conveyed the kind of message that was useful to a doctor meeting the patient for the first time, but too unflattering to state outright. These were real enough and there was one of these that was used to convey "this kid is basically a bit dim, but I've made up some fictitious syndrome to satisfy the parents". I can't for the life of me remember what the abbreviation was - I want to say NSS (non-specific stupidity), but I suspect that's my memory being coloured by this book. Obviously, this was back in the days when most of the population had never used the internet; you wouldn't get away with it these days due to the proliferation of behavioural disorder related websites.
I can think of only one PC game that cannot plausibly be run on modern console hardware; Crysis. And Crysis must be coming up on 3 years old now. There's a sequel due early next year which, reading between the lines, has been "restrained" so that it can be ported to the consoles. Am I missing anything? Are there any other commercial PC games out there that a console genuinely couldn't do justice to? I mean, even Supreme Commander 2 (which is probably the most hardware demanding RTS around) has a 360 port.
As somebody who was a PC-only gamer for most of the 90s, I always used to enjoy the point, 3 years or so into the console cycle, where my PC was putting out the kind of graphics that my console-owning friends could only dream of. It's been a long time since we were in that kind of territory, though.
I know the original TF was a mod based on the Quake engine. I also know that TF2 is a million miles removed, in gameplay terms, from the original Quake.
The starting point for this discussion was "a remake of Quake 3 would be a really good idea". I disagreed on the basis that the hardcore deathmatch playstyle of Quake 3 was already out of fashion by the time the game was released (thanks in part to more sophisticated experiences such as Team Fortress and Counter-Strike) and that a re-release of Quake 3 would fail to find the kind of market to justify the investment needed in porting the game to modern technology.
I don't really think that the failure of Quake 3 to dominate the fps scene in the way the first 2 games did was down to the difficulty of modding the engine (though this may have played a very small part). Most of the big, popular fpses and third person shooters since then have not been particularly moddable (or moddable at all in the case of most of the console games). I think Quake 3 underperformed because id had fallen behind the curve on gameplay innovation and had, partly I suspect in fear of their own fanbase, retreated back into their comfort zone and put out a dated and unimaginative game.
Yep, TF2 on the PC has done pretty well. But this doesn't weaken my point. If anything, it enhances it. The relatively complicated class and objective based gameplay in TF2 is a long way from the pure-deathmatch of the Quake series.
I disagree that a full-blown remake of Quake 3 would be a good commercial proposition. Remaking the game on fresh technology would be expensive; even with the current console generation (which defines the technical limits for most games, with a few rare exceptions like Crysis) edging up towards 5 years old, development costs remain far higher than they were when Quake 3 came out. The successful bits of the industry can absorb these costs because there are far more gamers than there were a decade ago. However, I think the appeal of a Quake 3 remake to most newer games is almost non-existent.
Even at the time, despite the strong support it gets from part of the fanbase, Quake 3 perhaps had less impact as a game (as opposed to its engine, which powered umpteen other games over the next few years) than had been expected. With its multiplayer-only focus, its emphasis on the "pro-gamer" market and its lack of new ideas, it really marked the point where id lost their leadership in the fps market. It's not really age that killed the game off from the tournament scene, but rather the fact that the audience shrank relatively quickly. If age had been the factor, then Counter-Strike (which ran on technology long-since obsolete by the time of Quake 3's launch) wouldn't have outlasted it for so long. In the era of Quake and Quake 2, if you played fpses online, you basically played one of those two games or one of their mods. Quake 3 was never more than one competitor among many.
Quake 4 achieved some reasonable sales success, but the fact that it vanished almost immediately from the mainstream online scene indicates that the singleplayer campaign was probably what most people bought it for. With the current online gaming scene dominated by Modern Warfare, Gears of War and Halo 3, it's pretty clear that tastes have moved away from the "bouncy deathmatch" model of the Quake series.
Then you have a bad MP. These do exist. Not every MP takes an equal interest in constituency work. By and large, you are more likely (though not certain) to get a bad MP under the following circumstances:
- The MP has the kind of majority that would never in a billion years be overturned and they have the local party in their pocket, so there's no chance of de-selection.
- The MP is a Government Minister (in which case he or she will be working the kind of hours that make the average EA employee in crunch-time mode look like a slacker and won't be so hot on constituency correspondence).
- The MP is a single-issue "maverick" (perhaps from outside the big-three established parties).
However, my experience over the years is that most MPs genuinely try to engage with concerned constituents. If an MP acquires a reputation for being lazy, it can and will be exploited by their opponents at the next election.
I have at times worked in a central policy department in the UK civil service. Dealing with correspondence from MPs to our Minister, usually passing along letters or concerns from the MP's constituent, is a large part of the work of many junior (and mid-level) officials. In my most recent post during a Parliamentary term, the relatively small team I managed would usually have in the region of 20 such letters needing replies, with a week to turn each one around (and our policy area isn't even a particularly high profile one). For MPs, dealing with correspondence is a pretty big part of their job; representing their constituent's concerns in Parliament is what they are there to do, and is one of the ways they can show they are "in touch" with their constituency. The degree to which the MP chooses to get involved in the issue varies; sometimes the constituent's letter (or e-mail) is passed along with little more than "can I have some information so I can respond", but in other cases, the MP might request a meeting with one of the Department's ministers to discuss the issue further, or if he feels he is not getting a satisfactory answer, might raise the issue on the floor of the House of Commons. While officials draft the responses in these cases, Ministers always check them before they are issued and sometimes make edits, or ask officials to take follow-up action.
In any event, writing to your MP is the most effective recourse for a UK citizen who has a problem with the political establishment and most MPs take their duty seriously. Obviously, you are more likely to get positive engagement from your MP if you are writing about a tangible issue that wouldn't otherwise have come to light (eg. your small business is having problems with the planning system, or you believe your employer is violating health and safety law but have been ignored, or something of that ilk) than about one of the large and controversial topics (such as the Iraq war, or the bank bailouts) and MPs are always going to be less likely to get involved in a case that is clearly motivated by an ideology they don't share. But the fact remains that writing to your MP is far more effective than writing directly to a Minister (or the Prime Minister), as the latter will usually just yield a response drafted by an official that has never been near a Minister.
The problem is that in recent years, the system has been somewhat under siege by various pressure groups. These groups do direct, regular and repetitive mail-shots to MPs, with many of them even providing tools to make it easy for users of their website to join in on the action simply by filling in a form. They operate on the principle of "if we say something often and loud enough, then MPs will conclude we are important or in the majority". In reality, all they tend to do is gunk up the system with spam, as MPs struggle to identify the letters and e-mails from their own constituents, asking for help with issues where the MP might actually be of some use.
The MP in this case was wrong to have his official e-mail address taken off the Parliamentary website. That's where I'd expect that many of his constituents would start looking for his details to contact him. However, the greater fault here lies with the self-righteous pressure groups who see nothing wrong with trampling over the system by substituting volume for reasoned argument and resorting to the tactics of the spammer.
Nope, but if they're religiously playing the original Starcraft, they won't have shelled out on a high end gaming rig - no point. Better to go for a lower end PC and spend the money on peripherals that might actually help your play; such as a decent keyboard and mouse.
I know hardcore Quake 3 gamers who are still running on machines dating from 2003 or so.
Starcraft 2 has a pretty wide audience, by the standards of a PC/Mac game, and while it's certainly not a Crysis-style hardware-hog, it does have higher requirements than a lot of the usual mass-market PC games (eg. The Sims and its sequels). In addition, its prequel, which is 12 years old and was technically underwhelming by the standards of its own time (the graphically-far-superior Total Annihilation actually came out first) has a large hardcore fanbase, a lot of whom probably don't play much other than Starcraft.
So Starcraft 2 is released and is promptly installed on a lot of PCs that are not routinely used for gaming, or at least for playing games less than a decade old. A large chunk of these PCs have never run a high-end modern game before. When asked to do so, the less-than-stellar graphics cards in a good portion of them give up and fall over. No conspiracy, no fault in Starcraft 2, just a lot of crusty PCs being taken outside of their comfort zone and not faring so well.
I'm in a similar position. I own pretty much every gaming platform around, with the exception of the new revisions of the handhelds (the DSi and PSP Go), and when there's a multi-platform game I want, I generally look at a number of factors before deciding which platform I go for. But if I go for the PC (or if the game is PC-exclusive), then I want to know that I can get it on Steam.
Why?
First reason (and one that applies to other download services) - I don't need to put any CD/DVD/Blu-Ray in my machine to fire up the game. This is actually a fairly major point for me; yes, I really am that lazy. When I get home from work late in an evening and want a quick bout of gaming before bed, I do not want to have to faff about looking for discs. So 9 times out of 10, I go to Steam, or an Xbox Live Arcade / Playstation Network game.
The other reason, which is particular to Steam, is that I like the convenience of being able to manage which games I have installed, and redownload previously-uninstalled games at will with just 2 clicks.
However, there are a couple of things I would like to see Valve do to further improve the service. First of all, I would love it if they could make it easier to relocate your cache folder, or split it between multiple drives. I have 3x 500GB drives in my desktop and it irritates the hell out of me that Steam games always have to fit onto one of those drives.
Second, it would be fantastic if Valve could start to shamelessly abuse their currently dominant position to throw their weight around and lay down some laws regarding DRM to the publishers that sell over Steam. It does annoy me that many games are allowed to add DRM controls above and beyond Steam's own protection.
I don't recognise that from Crysis. Farcry, which is the spiritual predecessor to Crysis, suffered from this problem (and it only got worse later in the game - cf. the infamous volcano-level). However, while Crysis is tricky on a first playthrough, my impression was that they'd fixed a lot of the earlier problems relating to overly-deadly enemies. If you keep the suit in armour-mode when you're not in combat, you'll never be 1-hit killed by a sniper.
I don't "get" the hate for Crysis. I've played the original Crysis through three times and Warhead twice, and have always found it highly enjoyable. Many of the levels are quite open, allowing for a number of different approaches (so different playthroughs can feel radically different). The nanosuit system is slick and allows for a lot of variation in how you fight (though I suspect a lot of people never get past just using armour-mode and playing in a very traditional fps style) and the AI is reasonable enough. Ok, it's not flawless; the plot is pretty stupid (though that goes for almost all fpses), the "float around in the alien ship" section goes on for too long and the Warhead expansion is maybe a touch on the short side (though while it lasts, it does tend to emphasise the better aspects of the first game), but despite being several years old, I'd say it holds up well against more recent fpses - while still looking better than them.
I think what I like most about Crysis is that it's a PC game that actually feels like it's making use of the hardware. Don't get me wrong, I like my PS3 and 360, but it does frustrate me that almost anything I play on the PC has been limited for cross-platform compatibility with console hardware that's more than 4 years old. I remember in the latter days of old console cycles, such as the SNES/Genesis cycle, the PC was putting out the kind of gaming experiences and the kind of visuals that made console gamers' jaws drop in astonishment. Crysis is the only PC game I've seen that has come close to replicating that for the current generation.
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Probably Bionic Commando. Or possibly F-29 Retaliator. I never owned an Amiga myself (went from a C64 to a PC and didn't own a non-handheld console until the PS2 era), but friends had them so I got a fair bit of time on them around 1990 or so. I was pretty much green with envy of Amiga-owning friends at the time, as the graphics and sound were way beyond what the C64 or our 286 could do. The PC had Wing Commander, of course, which was better still, but going off memory we didn't get a PC capable of running that until 1991.
I'm close to platform agnostic, these days. I've a slight bias against the Wii, because the graphics tend to suck and it makes me use an uncomfortable controller (though I did mostly enjoy Mario Galaxy 2, despite some specific irritations), but beyond that... if I like the look of a game, I'll play it on PC, console, whatever. There are some genre-related platform preferences; I tend to prefer first person shooters or RTSes on the PC, while I find third person shooters and platformers more comfortable on a console. Oh, and there are certain DRM schemes (singleplayer games requiring an always-on connection) that will drive me to a console version regardless of genre. But really... getting ideological over platform just feels like a waste of time.
Besides, it's not as if indie gaming is limited to the PC. There's a substantial indie service available over Xbox Live these days, though as it's mostly full of garbage, I only really tend to look at those games which manage to break into the "proper" Live Arcade.
I've played both. Liked Defense Grid quite a lot - I did say there were exceptions to my genuine low opinion of indie games. That said, the main thing that sets Defense Grid apart from its competition (such as Savage Moon) is the stellar voice acting.
Braid, on the other hand, bored me rigid. Reasonably pretty graphics (though nothing special), but the gameplay just felt intensely "meh".
Ok, time to make myself unpopular around here.
Personally, I don't welcome this news. I've given the indie gaming scene quite a few tries over the last few years, and tend to come away underwhelmed. Ok, there are a few titles I've liked. I guess Portal had indie-gaming somewhere in its DNA (even if the manner of its release, bundled with the Orange Box, was anything but indie). Limbo has an interesting style, though it's also a bit of a one-trick pony that wears thin about half-way through its (fairly short) play-time.
Ultimately, I like big-budget triple-A extravaganzas. I like high production values, cutting edge graphics and plenty of attention to detail. This isn't to say that every much-hyped big-budget game is good; in the year that saw the release of Final Fantasy XIII (and another bloody Kane & Lynch installment), this is blatantly not true. But if I look at the games I've actually pumped most time into and enjoyed the most over the last couple of years, I come up with titles like World of Warcraft (though I'm happily off that particular crack now), Forza Motorsport 3, Ratchet & Clank: Crack in Time, Uncharted 2, Crysis and God of War 3. Not exactly a list of indie titles. And despite me having given them a go, even the high-end indie titles like World of Goo and the Maw have failed to grab my interest for more than an hour or so.
I'm also generally skeptical that allowing creative types to express their "undiluted creative vision" is always a good thing. It's a gross over-simplification to say that big-budget titles need to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Ratchet & Clank: Crack in Time contains puzzles that are frankly on a par with anything I've seen in an indie game recently (the irony being that R&C's puzzles are all built around the old "push button to open door" mechanic, just infused with some fairly mind-warping twists). God of War 3 wasn't far behind. But when you get the "undiluted creative vision", what you're often (not always, I admit, but often) getting is a load of self-indulgent tripe from the creator that a competent editorial board would have cut not because they felt they needed to dumb the product down, but because it's not actually any fun to play. This isn't limited to games; for every director's cut in the movie industry that actually improves the original, there are half a dozen or so that just add unnecessary rubbish, ruining the pace of the film. Look also at what happens to books from authors who have become celebrities, once editors lose the confidence to challenge them; you get the kind of ever-expanding padding-filled tomes that characterise the later works of... say... Tom Clancy, J. K. Rowling and Stephen King.
I'm not denying that management and publishers don't occasionally demand dumbing down, but it's pretty clear that seeing the creative type as a poor, exploited victim trying to defend his flawless original concept from the nasty corporate villains is a misleading approach.
I'm trying desperately to remember (and have been since my initial post). It certainly wasn't Spy Hunter - you went in circuits around a track that was shown entirely on screen, with no scrolling involved. I do remember it getting possibly the lowest rating ever from Zzap 64. And it had some dude's name in the title (though a fictional character, I think, rather than a real-life sponsor).
Oh god, this is going to drive me crazy all night now.
Basically, the box description made it sound like a vehicle combat game. The game itself was just a very, very poor top-down racing game, with no combat elementss. You had a selection of about 3 basic tracks that you raced around against 3 AI opponents who were so slow it was pretty much impossible to lose. Think Super Off-Road without any of the fun (and with much, much worse graphics).
Oh god, I remember that. Ikari Warriors came bundled with the first PC we ever had in our household (a then-top-of-the-line 286 12mhz). CGA graphics and PC speaker sound effects in all of their glory. I took one look at it and went back to my C64. Funny, really, that PC gaming felt so far behind the curve compared to the C64 at the time. I'm trying to remember when that changed; I guess Their Finest Hour (WW2 flight sim) was probably the first PC game I played that was clearly beyond anything the C64 could do.
I never owned an Atari 2600, but I remember the same phenomenon on the C64. Box art was usually colourful and cartoony. Very few games (at least until you got to the tail end of the C64's popular life span, when you had games like the Creatures series) could come even close to living up to this. It was a good lesson at an early age that you should never take promotional material at face value.
I also remember the loading screens you'd get on the C64 while loading the game from tape (a process which would take several minutes and often fail before the end). These were generally just as "dishonest", though they were at least limited by the display resolution. In fact, worse than that, I remember one particular game where the box description actually told outright lies. It was a top-down racer (think Super Sprint) where the box text advertised weapons, oil-slicks etc, none of which were actually present in the game. I later found out that this was a semi-infamous title (in the UK at least); a sort of 1980s equivalent to Big Rigs Over the Road Racing.
Mind you, misleading box-art continued for quite a lot longer. X-Wing was a fantastic game, but I do remember being a little disappointed by the contrast between the movie-quality box art and the slightly sparse polygon graphics in game. That said, if I remember correctly, some editions of the first two Wing Commander games actually used screenshots for their front-cover art (or can somebody correct me on this - the screenshots may have been "touched up"?).
Even today, it still goes on to some extent. Ok, the differences are probably less pronounced. Box-art still tends to save screenshots for the back cover, but this is usually clearly for stylistic reasons (in fact, the trend seems to be towards box art that is simpler and sparser than a screenshot would have been). But we still get plenty of cases of "touched up" trailers, pre-rendered cutscenes shown at conferences with the implication that they're game-play footage and so on.
In our household it was.
Don't think I'll ever forgive him for that one.
Pedant...
It's weird, though. I moved out of the parents' place almost 15 years ago and despite only having been back for short stints since (a couple of university holidays when I couldn't find anything better and a period of about 2-3 months between finishing up my studies and finding a proper job - yeah, the market for new graduates was much kinder back then) I still call it "home" when I talk about it. This is despite having a mortgage on my own place and whatnot. I suspect if they ever moved house, I would never call their new place "home". There's just something about the place you grew up...
Ah... I remember the Win95 launch. I was still living at home at the time (doing my A-levels) and we only had one family PC. My Dad, who was (and remains) a huge Microsoft fanboy (he's never tried Firefox etc or any alternative OS, but believes Bill Gates has an "inspiring life story", which is apparently all that counts) got hold of a pre-release version of Win95 a couple of months before release and installed it on the PC. So absolutely nothing worked. Pretty much none of our old software (word processor, spreadsheet, games) would run under Win95, but it was made massively clear that reverting to DOS and Win3.11 was not an option. All of our objections were just "being backward and awkward" and if Win95 went from that PC, I could find somewhere else to live.
I remember the arguments, I remember my mother crying for a whole evening because she couldn't get the (nasty, old, DOS based) word processor going to do work for the university course she was doing part time, where she had an assignment due at the end of the week (my own A-level coursework had been handed in the week before, thank god). And I remember staying up all night later that week working with the "boot into DOS" stuff to actually get a decent portion of the software usable again.
I suppose the weird thing was that, with hindsight, my dad was sort-of right on one level. Once it had been out a while and once you had a library of software that actually worked with it, Windows 95 was undoubtedly an advance on where we'd been previously. It removed the need to keep a stack of boot-disks by the PC. It led to, or at least coincided with, a general push for better UIs in commonly used software. And it probably made it easier for the computer illiterate to do basic tasks (and also to break the OS in creative ways; a problem that would persist until UAC in Vista offered a partial solution). Moreover, the nasty old software we were reliant on at the time was well past its sell-by date and it was ultimately for the best that we abandoned it.
The problem, of course, was that sticking a pre-release copy of a new OS that represented a fairly radical departure from what we'd had previously onto a sole family PC that was used for the household finances, university and school work and gaming was a spectacularly bad idea, particularly when the one insisting on the new OS was arguably the one least dependant on the machine. Even a day 1 store-purchased copy would likely have been no better. There have never really been any advantages to being an early adopter when it comes to MS products. Somewhere along the line, my dad seems to have learned this. The problem I have these days is the opposite; their nasty, unpatched WinXP machine (one of my cast-offs from about 4 years ago) serves as a magnet for every form of malware imaginable and I tend to get stuck with a 2 hour phone call once every couple of months to fix the latest emergency relating to it.
I wish I could work up much interest in this announcement, but to be honest, I'm finding it hard.
What is it with everybody going for a multiplayer focus these days? I mean, sure, I've no objection to having a co-operative mode in the game (indeed it's a positive boon), but I'm getting sick to death of games where the singleplayer campaign is rendered unnecessarily hard or boring due to pandering to co-op. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is probably the most recent example (there are sections which are a nightmare on any difficulty if you're on your own), but it's just one of many.
Once upon a time, I'd have been more positive, I guess. Back when I was a student, or newly started working (and still relatively junior, at the point where I was working fairly sensible hours), myself and a bunch of friends would routinely play online co-op. But even then, it wasn't that easy, for a game that demanded a substantial number of people and a good chunk of time. I remember a theoretically 6-player co-op run we did through Baldur's Gate 2 and its expansion, where in reality, after the first session or two, we never seemed to have more than 3 or 4 people in-game at any one time (which BG2 was thankfully very good at adjusting for). We ended up running the first NWN with a 3 person party (as NWN was much less resilient if your group was missing a player) and felt like we were missing out on a lot, since you couldn't really get a properly balanced party with just 3 people. These days, after going through a MMORPG phase (which does help with the problem somewhat by increasing the pool of available players, at the expense of basically needing to devote 30+ hours a week to it to play sensibly) we just don't seem to bother. With the people I actually know and like well enough to want to play online regularly with all in the same situation as myself, working jobs with substantial degrees of responsibility and erratic hours, getting people together on any kind of schedule is just too difficult. Co-op gaming for me has basically come down to the odd Gears of War mission on a Sunday afternoon.
Maybe it's just me being a Grumpy Old Man (TM). Maybe there is a huge market out there for games where the developers have cut loads of corners and justified it by saying "but it's multiplayer focussed". Oh well, at least Bioware still seem to be on my side (now when's Dragon Age 2 out?).
I don't think it's a platform issue - if you statically compile your libraries you don't need to worry about dependencies or various distros. I think it's just a matter of mindset. Linux and most of the popular apps used on it are open source. They're free as in speech and as in beer, and that app works fine for creating applications, but it simply doesn't work for creating games. Games require many more people, and what's worse, games have to have constant new versions and new content coming out. We can work 20 years to perfect GIMP or Gnome or OpenOffice.org, but with games people need something different every few years.
I'd go further than this. While the free-as-in-beer movement often has no difficulty in attracting people who want to do clever things with software, it's always been at a substantial disadvantage in terms of getting people to do the less exciting but equally important work such as user interface and artwork. The latter is particularly relevant in terms of creating a game that's competitive with modern commercial offerings; you need a seriously large number of artists, sound technicians, animators etc. And by and large, these people expect to be paid for their work.
The final Troika game "Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines" beat it to this. It was one of the very first Source engine games, releasing around the same time as HL2. While there is a steam version available, there were plenty of boxed-copies sold which do not require the game to be imported into Steam. I've no idea whether it's playable under Linux; it was so buggy that a cynic might note that it wasn't even properly playable under Windows.
I suspect this actually has a lot to do with other kinds of parents. Yes, some of them being the stereotypical "bad" parent, but also including plenty of "pushy" middle-class parents.
I think a lot of parents have problems with the idea that their kids might not actually be as bright or as successful as they themselves have been. Broadly speaking, we tend to be optimists when it comes to our children and to assume that they'll exceed our own achievements. Of course, this doesn't always happen. I'm sure we all know of cases of intelligent, successful parents with at least one child who is either stupid or so badly behaved that he or she is incapable of learning properly.
So when such a child (particularly an only-child, from my experience) starts to fall behind at school, the parents start to cast around for a reason that doesn't involve the kid not being particularly clever. A medical diagnosis is one of the best ways to achieve this, at least in terms of having some way of explaining to friends why little Johnny just came home with D grades again. ADHD is certainly one of the most common, though dyslexia gives it a good run for its money. That isn't to say that neither condition is real (because both are), but it is to say that both conditions are rarer than records indicate.
I remember when I was doing my undergraduate studies, I spent the holidays doing tech-support and admin work in a local doctors' surgery (boring, but fairly well paid as student jobs go). You may have heard of the abbreviations that used to appear on doctors' notes in the UK in the days before the data protection act; abbreviations that conveyed the kind of message that was useful to a doctor meeting the patient for the first time, but too unflattering to state outright. These were real enough and there was one of these that was used to convey "this kid is basically a bit dim, but I've made up some fictitious syndrome to satisfy the parents". I can't for the life of me remember what the abbreviation was - I want to say NSS (non-specific stupidity), but I suspect that's my memory being coloured by this book. Obviously, this was back in the days when most of the population had never used the internet; you wouldn't get away with it these days due to the proliferation of behavioural disorder related websites.
This is correct.
I can think of only one PC game that cannot plausibly be run on modern console hardware; Crysis. And Crysis must be coming up on 3 years old now. There's a sequel due early next year which, reading between the lines, has been "restrained" so that it can be ported to the consoles. Am I missing anything? Are there any other commercial PC games out there that a console genuinely couldn't do justice to? I mean, even Supreme Commander 2 (which is probably the most hardware demanding RTS around) has a 360 port.
As somebody who was a PC-only gamer for most of the 90s, I always used to enjoy the point, 3 years or so into the console cycle, where my PC was putting out the kind of graphics that my console-owning friends could only dream of. It's been a long time since we were in that kind of territory, though.
I know the original TF was a mod based on the Quake engine. I also know that TF2 is a million miles removed, in gameplay terms, from the original Quake.
The starting point for this discussion was "a remake of Quake 3 would be a really good idea". I disagreed on the basis that the hardcore deathmatch playstyle of Quake 3 was already out of fashion by the time the game was released (thanks in part to more sophisticated experiences such as Team Fortress and Counter-Strike) and that a re-release of Quake 3 would fail to find the kind of market to justify the investment needed in porting the game to modern technology.
I don't really think that the failure of Quake 3 to dominate the fps scene in the way the first 2 games did was down to the difficulty of modding the engine (though this may have played a very small part). Most of the big, popular fpses and third person shooters since then have not been particularly moddable (or moddable at all in the case of most of the console games). I think Quake 3 underperformed because id had fallen behind the curve on gameplay innovation and had, partly I suspect in fear of their own fanbase, retreated back into their comfort zone and put out a dated and unimaginative game.
Yep, TF2 on the PC has done pretty well. But this doesn't weaken my point. If anything, it enhances it. The relatively complicated class and objective based gameplay in TF2 is a long way from the pure-deathmatch of the Quake series.
I disagree that a full-blown remake of Quake 3 would be a good commercial proposition. Remaking the game on fresh technology would be expensive; even with the current console generation (which defines the technical limits for most games, with a few rare exceptions like Crysis) edging up towards 5 years old, development costs remain far higher than they were when Quake 3 came out. The successful bits of the industry can absorb these costs because there are far more gamers than there were a decade ago. However, I think the appeal of a Quake 3 remake to most newer games is almost non-existent.
Even at the time, despite the strong support it gets from part of the fanbase, Quake 3 perhaps had less impact as a game (as opposed to its engine, which powered umpteen other games over the next few years) than had been expected. With its multiplayer-only focus, its emphasis on the "pro-gamer" market and its lack of new ideas, it really marked the point where id lost their leadership in the fps market. It's not really age that killed the game off from the tournament scene, but rather the fact that the audience shrank relatively quickly. If age had been the factor, then Counter-Strike (which ran on technology long-since obsolete by the time of Quake 3's launch) wouldn't have outlasted it for so long. In the era of Quake and Quake 2, if you played fpses online, you basically played one of those two games or one of their mods. Quake 3 was never more than one competitor among many.
Quake 4 achieved some reasonable sales success, but the fact that it vanished almost immediately from the mainstream online scene indicates that the singleplayer campaign was probably what most people bought it for. With the current online gaming scene dominated by Modern Warfare, Gears of War and Halo 3, it's pretty clear that tastes have moved away from the "bouncy deathmatch" model of the Quake series.
Then you have a bad MP. These do exist. Not every MP takes an equal interest in constituency work. By and large, you are more likely (though not certain) to get a bad MP under the following circumstances:
- The MP has the kind of majority that would never in a billion years be overturned and they have the local party in their pocket, so there's no chance of de-selection.
- The MP is a Government Minister (in which case he or she will be working the kind of hours that make the average EA employee in crunch-time mode look like a slacker and won't be so hot on constituency correspondence).
- The MP is a single-issue "maverick" (perhaps from outside the big-three established parties).
However, my experience over the years is that most MPs genuinely try to engage with concerned constituents. If an MP acquires a reputation for being lazy, it can and will be exploited by their opponents at the next election.
To put this in a bit of context:
I have at times worked in a central policy department in the UK civil service. Dealing with correspondence from MPs to our Minister, usually passing along letters or concerns from the MP's constituent, is a large part of the work of many junior (and mid-level) officials. In my most recent post during a Parliamentary term, the relatively small team I managed would usually have in the region of 20 such letters needing replies, with a week to turn each one around (and our policy area isn't even a particularly high profile one). For MPs, dealing with correspondence is a pretty big part of their job; representing their constituent's concerns in Parliament is what they are there to do, and is one of the ways they can show they are "in touch" with their constituency. The degree to which the MP chooses to get involved in the issue varies; sometimes the constituent's letter (or e-mail) is passed along with little more than "can I have some information so I can respond", but in other cases, the MP might request a meeting with one of the Department's ministers to discuss the issue further, or if he feels he is not getting a satisfactory answer, might raise the issue on the floor of the House of Commons. While officials draft the responses in these cases, Ministers always check them before they are issued and sometimes make edits, or ask officials to take follow-up action.
In any event, writing to your MP is the most effective recourse for a UK citizen who has a problem with the political establishment and most MPs take their duty seriously. Obviously, you are more likely to get positive engagement from your MP if you are writing about a tangible issue that wouldn't otherwise have come to light (eg. your small business is having problems with the planning system, or you believe your employer is violating health and safety law but have been ignored, or something of that ilk) than about one of the large and controversial topics (such as the Iraq war, or the bank bailouts) and MPs are always going to be less likely to get involved in a case that is clearly motivated by an ideology they don't share. But the fact remains that writing to your MP is far more effective than writing directly to a Minister (or the Prime Minister), as the latter will usually just yield a response drafted by an official that has never been near a Minister.
The problem is that in recent years, the system has been somewhat under siege by various pressure groups. These groups do direct, regular and repetitive mail-shots to MPs, with many of them even providing tools to make it easy for users of their website to join in on the action simply by filling in a form. They operate on the principle of "if we say something often and loud enough, then MPs will conclude we are important or in the majority". In reality, all they tend to do is gunk up the system with spam, as MPs struggle to identify the letters and e-mails from their own constituents, asking for help with issues where the MP might actually be of some use.
The MP in this case was wrong to have his official e-mail address taken off the Parliamentary website. That's where I'd expect that many of his constituents would start looking for his details to contact him. However, the greater fault here lies with the self-righteous pressure groups who see nothing wrong with trampling over the system by substituting volume for reasoned argument and resorting to the tactics of the spammer.
Nope, but if they're religiously playing the original Starcraft, they won't have shelled out on a high end gaming rig - no point. Better to go for a lower end PC and spend the money on peripherals that might actually help your play; such as a decent keyboard and mouse.
I know hardcore Quake 3 gamers who are still running on machines dating from 2003 or so.
Or a more developed version of the same argument:
Starcraft 2 has a pretty wide audience, by the standards of a PC/Mac game, and while it's certainly not a Crysis-style hardware-hog, it does have higher requirements than a lot of the usual mass-market PC games (eg. The Sims and its sequels). In addition, its prequel, which is 12 years old and was technically underwhelming by the standards of its own time (the graphically-far-superior Total Annihilation actually came out first) has a large hardcore fanbase, a lot of whom probably don't play much other than Starcraft.
So Starcraft 2 is released and is promptly installed on a lot of PCs that are not routinely used for gaming, or at least for playing games less than a decade old. A large chunk of these PCs have never run a high-end modern game before. When asked to do so, the less-than-stellar graphics cards in a good portion of them give up and fall over. No conspiracy, no fault in Starcraft 2, just a lot of crusty PCs being taken outside of their comfort zone and not faring so well.
I'm in a similar position. I own pretty much every gaming platform around, with the exception of the new revisions of the handhelds (the DSi and PSP Go), and when there's a multi-platform game I want, I generally look at a number of factors before deciding which platform I go for. But if I go for the PC (or if the game is PC-exclusive), then I want to know that I can get it on Steam.
Why?
First reason (and one that applies to other download services) - I don't need to put any CD/DVD/Blu-Ray in my machine to fire up the game. This is actually a fairly major point for me; yes, I really am that lazy. When I get home from work late in an evening and want a quick bout of gaming before bed, I do not want to have to faff about looking for discs. So 9 times out of 10, I go to Steam, or an Xbox Live Arcade / Playstation Network game.
The other reason, which is particular to Steam, is that I like the convenience of being able to manage which games I have installed, and redownload previously-uninstalled games at will with just 2 clicks.
However, there are a couple of things I would like to see Valve do to further improve the service. First of all, I would love it if they could make it easier to relocate your cache folder, or split it between multiple drives. I have 3x 500GB drives in my desktop and it irritates the hell out of me that Steam games always have to fit onto one of those drives.
Second, it would be fantastic if Valve could start to shamelessly abuse their currently dominant position to throw their weight around and lay down some laws regarding DRM to the publishers that sell over Steam. It does annoy me that many games are allowed to add DRM controls above and beyond Steam's own protection.
I don't recognise that from Crysis. Farcry, which is the spiritual predecessor to Crysis, suffered from this problem (and it only got worse later in the game - cf. the infamous volcano-level). However, while Crysis is tricky on a first playthrough, my impression was that they'd fixed a lot of the earlier problems relating to overly-deadly enemies. If you keep the suit in armour-mode when you're not in combat, you'll never be 1-hit killed by a sniper.
I don't "get" the hate for Crysis. I've played the original Crysis through three times and Warhead twice, and have always found it highly enjoyable. Many of the levels are quite open, allowing for a number of different approaches (so different playthroughs can feel radically different). The nanosuit system is slick and allows for a lot of variation in how you fight (though I suspect a lot of people never get past just using armour-mode and playing in a very traditional fps style) and the AI is reasonable enough. Ok, it's not flawless; the plot is pretty stupid (though that goes for almost all fpses), the "float around in the alien ship" section goes on for too long and the Warhead expansion is maybe a touch on the short side (though while it lasts, it does tend to emphasise the better aspects of the first game), but despite being several years old, I'd say it holds up well against more recent fpses - while still looking better than them.
I think what I like most about Crysis is that it's a PC game that actually feels like it's making use of the hardware. Don't get me wrong, I like my PS3 and 360, but it does frustrate me that almost anything I play on the PC has been limited for cross-platform compatibility with console hardware that's more than 4 years old. I remember in the latter days of old console cycles, such as the SNES/Genesis cycle, the PC was putting out the kind of gaming experiences and the kind of visuals that made console gamers' jaws drop in astonishment. Crysis is the only PC game I've seen that has come close to replicating that for the current generation.