Not a bad idea, but treat with caution.
on
Wii Check-Up Channel
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I own Wii-Fit. I like it. With its help, I've been able to lose 8 pounds since Christmas day, on the basis of a 40 minute daily routine with it. However...
It's important to be aware of what Wii-Fit can and can't do. It's a good programme, but using it safely and effectively involves a lot of working around its limitations and doing a bit of your own research. IGN carried a good article a few months back in which a qualified fitness trainer assessed it, which is a good starting point. In short, the positives came out as:
+ The way it makes exercise more interesting and makes it easier for gamers to stick with it without getting bored.
+ The aerobics exercises in general, which are a good way to burn calories.
+ The balance games, and the general focus on balance, which won't burn many calories, but will underpin the rest of your exercise regime well.
+ Some of the muscle exercises, particularly the balance-focussed ones.
The negatives were:
- The yoga.
- Some of the muscle exercises, which are overly advanced for beginners and could well cause injury if not done properly (which the game does not adequately warn about).
- The failure to warn the player of the need for appropriate footwear, especially for the jogging exercise.
- The body tests in general - the focus on BMI is not great, as BMI is a blunt instrument which is now treated with a lot of caution, while the Wii-fit age concept is largely laughable.
- The overall lack of guidance given in the package as a whole, which gives beginners to exercise very few tips on what constitutes an effective regime.
Work around those negatives and this is still a fantastically good accessory and software package. However...
In short, I would be very cautious about any application which claimed to be able to give detailed fitness advice on the basis of your Wii-Fit body test results. Professional advice from a doctor or fitness professional will be far safer and more useful.
Sorry, but I can't consider a substantial single-player campaign, with a huge number of expensively rendered cutscenes and an actual plot (a rarity in a Nintendo game) to be "serious fluff". Moreover, while I will acknowledge that the core brawling gameplay in SSB wasn't hugely changed, they had at least avoiding making it actively worse, unlike in MK.
Fair enough on most of the disagreements, it would be a boring world if everybody was in agreement. I honestly do see your point on Red Alert 3, although I think the good still outweighs the bad. Particularly compared to the atrocity that was Red Alert 2 (probably the worst game I've ever paid money for). However...
If you want to play GTA IV on the PC, then you get what you deserve. Ever since GTA III hit, I don't think Rockstar have made it any secret that these are console games. The PC ports are afterthoughts and have never felt like anything else. The thing runs just fine on my PS3 and the controls feel just about acceptable on the Dualshock 3, which is the best you can ever hope for in a GTA game. I can't imagine that the 360 version is any different.
That said, Rockstar is, I think, in a position now where it really does need to think the gameplay over from the ground up for its next release. There are problems with the basic gameplay related to controls, mission structure and saving which have been in there since GTA III first hit and which are really, really glaring now, as many of Rockstar's competitors have evolved beyond them. Bully suffers from the same problems, but the generally more forgiving nature of that game means that they don't really detract as much from the overall experience.
Also, I'm curious as to why you found Far Cry 2 to be a "crappy console port". The only real hold-over from the consoles that I could see was the rather odd discrepancy of having both "save points" and quicksaves. Other than that, it felt like a well-tuned PC fps to me.
Well, I think there's a difference in how Nintendo has handled those two franchises this time around.
With Super Smash Bros Brawl, they've made a genuine effort to bring the game up to modern standards. They've even put in a proper story mode, with cutscenes and everything. Ok, Nintendo are still living in the 80s in some respects - the near total absence of voice acting being the most glaring example - but they've made an effort and it shows.
Mario Kart Wii, on the other hands, was a lazy update even by Nintendo's standards. The graphics felt, if anything, worse than Double Dash's and there were very few tweaks to the basic formula.
I liked the original Mario Kart, in its day, and I quite liked Double Dash (Mario Kart 64 did very little for me). For me, there were always two main assets for the Mario Kart series; first, that the cart physics and controls were among the best around and second that the tracks were good fun.
Now, the first of these advantages has been eroded hugely as the competition has caught up with (and in many cases overtaken) Nintendo's efforts. Mario Kart Wii makes the situation worse by actively penalising good driving - drivers at the front of the field almost inevitably get weapon-spammed to the back on the final straight, with nothing they can do to prevent it. The previous games always had this problem to some degree, but the sheer number of drivers on the track has aggravated the problem to breaking point in the latest version. The number of drivers has also had a negative impact on the track design. The tracks are all now stupidly wide and open, to accomodate the number of drivers. Unlike in previous games, there are very, very few sections of track that would actually be challenging to drive if you didn't have umpteen other carts spamming weapons at you.
So yes, I stand by my judgement that Mario Kart Wii is a case of a concept which was once good, but which has suffered badly over time from stagnation, and where every attempt that has been made this time around to deviate from the original concept has worsened it. They even lost the co-operative feature from Double Dash, which was something I really quite liked.
I've only played it fairly briefly (about 3 hours), but it didn't do a massive amount for me. Sure, it has some nifty stuff, but I didn't like the emphasis on just repeating a fairly small number scenarios. I didn't actively dislike the game and my expectations for it were never stellar, so I wouldn't count it as a disappointment, but... I don't know... it just felt a bit too "meh" to make it onto the list. It possibly didn't help that I played it right after the (rather more polished) Dead Space, which I think had satisfied my immediate urge to play survival-horror games.
There were a few other games like that, which I just couldn't particularly bring myself to either particularly like or dislike. Call of Duty: World at War is probably the highest profile example. I mean, I guess I should have flagged it up as a disappointment, after CoD4 (which was excellent), but given it was the CoD3 people developing it, I had a fairly strong suspicion it was going to be poor. If anything, it was very slightly better than I expected.
Well, it's been an interesting year - quite a few very good titles (with a particularly large cluster of these released in the September - November range) and also a few which turned out to be fairly huge disappointments.
Anyway, my own top 10:
10) Super Smash Bros Brawl (Wii) - a rare example of a first party Nintendo game which has decent production values and doesn't suffer from a severe lack of content. The single-player campaign is slightly let down by a few over-long platforming sections, but the brawling components are more than fun enough make up for it.
9) Siren: Blood Curse (PS3) - the only game I've seen to date to really pull off the whole "episodic gaming" thing. Blood Curse is the best entry to date in what has always been a very solid survival horror series. It's an excellent refuge for those who have been put off by the action-oriented direction that the Resident Evil franchise has taken and the continued flogging of the dead horse that the once-epic Silent Hill franchise has become ever since its 4th installment.
8) The World Ends With You (Nintendo DS) - quirky and original take on the Japanese RPG formula. The distinctive style isn't to everybody's taste (or even particularly to mine), but it did produce one of the most unique titles of the last 12 months. A huge range of customisation options (including heavily tweakable difficulty settings) further boost its appeal.
7) Lost Odyssey (Xbox 360) - hugely traditional take on the Japanese RPG formula. Superb production values and a well thought out narrative pull it above the average. A big improvement on 2007's Blue Dragon and a real sign that Square-Enix should be taking the competition from Mistwalker very, very seriously. The game's also notable for its extensive use of narrative text storytelling to flesh out the back-story.
6) Resistance 2 (PS3) - A few dubious design decisions mean that this isn't quite as good as its predecessor (the limitation on the number of weapons you can carry feels particularly restrictive in a game that's so heavily based around trying out funky weapons). However, it's still a slick and fun game, whose controls feel far more robust than those of pretty much any other console fps.
5) Far Cry 2 (PC - also Xbox 360 and PS3) - Despite a "ripped from the headlines" story that really is the ultimate in bad taste, this is a deeply impressive shooter. It takes some of the good ideas we saw in last year's STALKER: Shadows of Chernobyl and marries them with the execution needed to really pull them off.
4) Metal Gear Solid 4 (PS3) - Yeah, this is the controversial one. With the cutscenes being, at a rough estimate, roughly twice the length of the playable sections of the game, this was never going to be everybody's cup of tea. However, a complete overhaul of the combat system took the series from being one where combat was, as Penny Arcade put it, a punishment inflicted on the player for getting the stealth sections wrong to a being one of the most fun games to play as a shooter of the entire year. The fact that you can play it as a stealth-em-up just adds icing to the cake. The game's graphics and production values blow away anything else released during this year.
3) Gears of War 2 (Xbox 360) - It doesn't do anything particularly original, but it improves on the original game in almost every respect. It presents a longer campaign with better balance than the original, more varied environments and some excellent tweaks to the weapons lineup. It also features some of the most fun multiplayer modes of any game I've seen this year, with a heavy emphasis on co-op and team-based gameplay.
2) Dead Space (Xbox 360, also PC and PS3) - Half way between Gears of War and a traditional survival-horror game, this was very close to being my favorite title of the entire year. As others have noted, it's anything but original, drawing heavy inspiration from three movies in particular: Aliens, Event Horizon and the Thing. However, it still establishes its own distinctive identity and mana
I got tired of playing with children at the point where a guild I was in had to call a raid 2 hours early, because the main tank said "My stupid mum's making me do my homework".
As far as I'm concerned, I only want to spend time in MMOs with those who can pay their own way and who have a degree of freedom to decide how to organise their lives. That means adults with jobs. I'm sick of playing with children. I'll play with college-age students, but my experience is that most of them are still severely lacking in maturity and organisational skills (as I was myself at that age). Until you leave home, however, you ultimately have little to no power over your own life. You cannot demand that you always need, for example, four undisturbed hours to raid on each of Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. Now, that's not your fault. But I don't want to be stuck in a situation where 24 other people are sat around twiddling their thumbs because of it.
Yeah, this is an interesting one. I think the flow of skills between gaming and management is a two way thing, although only in fairly specific circumstances.
I don't honestly think that just playing the average platformer, rhythm game, first person shooter or beat-em-up really adds much at all to your work-place skills, beyond a bit of hand-eye co-ordination. Even playing team-based online shooters doesn't necessarily help.
However, once you move beyond simply playing the game and move more into the community side of things, you can start to pick up some seriously useful experience.
When I was looking for "proper" work after finishing up my post-grad (as opposed to the summer jobs I'd had while a student), I ended up passing the initial intellectual aptitude tests and getting through to the assessment centre stage for one of the most competitive graduate recruitment schemes in the UK (over 15,000 applicants for around 400 places, in the year I applied). I was up against people who'd done internships in national newspapers, travelled the world doing interesting things, been president of umpteen student societies and so on. By contast, my own experience was a few summers of boring (but fairly well paid) tech support/web design and administrative work, a bit of political canvassing and way too much time "wasted" on gaming. "Ok", I thought, as I got myself ready, "I'm in trouble now".
So, I cast around for other things I could talk about that I'd done. Pretty much the only really striking thing was that I was the (unpaid) head admin of a fairly large European-based Counter-Strike league. This was basically something I'd moved towards by degrees; from being a player in a team in the league who was perpetually frustrated by its organisational problems, to being a volunteer admin who refereed matches and mediated disputes to being the head admin, who recruited and managed the other admins, negotiated with sponsors for better server hardware and moved the league from a free-to-play to a subscription basis.
So in the absence of other options, I decided to take a huge risk and focus on this experience at interviews, hoping and praying that I would get an interviewer who wouldn't just dismiss it as some computer-game silliness. My heart sank when I found that my interviewer was a 60-ish guy in a suit. However... the interview went stunningly well; he asked me about the differences between managing a paid team and a team of volunteers (particularly in terms of dealing with poor performers), the difficulties in getting "customers" used to having something for free to pay for a product, the challenges in negotiating with financial backers and so on. And I was able to answer all the questions fluently. He didn't have a clue about computer gaming and admitted as much, but the management and business sides of what I'd done were perfectly relevant. I passed the centre and still have the same employer 6 years later (having moved up a few pay bands in the interim).
Of course, head admins of leagues are pretty few and far between and I think the old concept of the "unpaid volunteer head admin" has largely died out as fps gaming becomes more professionalised (a move which was already starting back then and which I've never been comfortable with). However, I think there are other aspects of gaming which can have a positive impact on your business skills - as well as some areas where a management post at work can have a beneficial impact on your gaming.
MMOs almost inevitably present the best examples, particularly if you have a raiding guild (or the non-WoW equivalent). A middling-hardcore raiding guild (which is to say, a guild which takes raiding seriously, but whose members have jobs and some vestiges of social lives) is an organisation held together by varying degrees of cameraderie, traditions and naked self interest. Much like the average work-place, in other words. You have the ambitious newcomers who want to change everything. You have the burned out old-timers who think the guild owes the
Technically right on the second point, although I understand that Polyphony is now clenched rather less tightly to the Sony bosom than it has been at the time.
Not necessarily right at all on the first point. The cost of development depends more upon the game in question than on the platform. Developing something like Crysis on the PC, where the engine is built specifically for the game and where the technology is at the absolute bleeding edge will cost more than developing a PS3 or 360 game which uses estaboished technology assets. A large chunk of the development budget for modern games goes on the "art" side and hence is unchanged whatever your platform.
PC games also require a more demanding testing and QA process, due to the number of possible hardware setups. Plus they still tend to end up needing much more in the way of post-release support, which may bring in no further income.
Interesting predictions, which are mostly plausible. As making predictions is always a fun game to play here are a few of my own, broken down by platform...
First, the PC:
* The relatively long lead time on game development will see one or two big PC releases in the back half of the year whose system spec requirements wipe away the upper limit set by Crysis. These games will turn out to be expensive flops (nobody will be buying top-end PCs) and potentially fatal for the companies responsible.
* Pretty much every PC game released will have some kind of DRM. The argument will shift from being "should games be DRMed?" to "what restrictions should the DRM impose?". Limits on the number of activation attempts will become the real split within the industry.
* Console-style controllers will gradually replace the classic mouse and keyboard combination as the preferred method for playing PC action games (oh yeah, this one's going to get me flamed, but just look at the likes of Dead Space).
* As brick-and-mortar stores give less and less shelf-space over to PC games, online distribution will become the norm. Services such as steam and direct2drive will shift their main focus from competing against traditional stores towards competing against each other. This will get ugly before the year is out (but possibly in a beneficial way for the consumer).
* As an outside chance (probably more likely for 2010), one of the major online-distribution retailers will try to impose a console-style mandatory feature set for games sold over the service, standardising control systems and adding features such as achivements.
* World of Warcraft will continue to dominate the MMO scene. Blizzard will announce a new expansion for mid-2010.
* New competitors such as the Old Republic MMO will achieve moderate success, with subscriber numbers in the hundreds of thousands, but will fail to replicate WoW's cultural impact.
* Age of Conan will close its doors in the back half of 2009.
The PS2:
* Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 will turn out to be the last real outing for the PS2. Releases for the PS2 will have almost completely dried up by Easter.
* However, PS2 hardware sales will continue at an unremarkable but steady rate throughout the year, due to families looking for very low budget gaming options during the economic crises and hardcore gamers replacing old PS2s that malfunction, due to the lack of back-compatible PS3s on the market.
The PS3:
* The PS3 will be the overall "winner" in 2009, in terms of improving its sales performance.
* The PS3's hardware advantage over its competitors will finally start to yield some rewards, with PS3 games starting to look noticable better than their 360 equivalents, as developers learn to use the hardware better.
* More PS3 previously exclusive franchises will go cross-platform. Gran Turismo is, I suspect, one to keep an eye on.
* On a related note, Square-Enix will fail to make it to market with Final Fantasy 13 on any platform, with the game's release date slipping to "somewhere in the middle of 2010". The company will face an increasing chorus of questions regarding whether it has completely lost its way.
* Playstation Home will indeed fail. However, Sony will continue to press on with selling more and more full-price titles via digital distribution. This will lead to an ugly spat with third party publishers towards the back end of 2009.
The 360:
* Microsoft will become increasingly desperate to get users to switch to models with larger hard disks, as the most common 20-gig model proves inadequate as a platform for their online strategy. The 20 gig model will be removed from sale, with the "elite" moving to its old price point.
* Microsoft's current habit of buying up as many Japanese RPG makers as they can will start to produce results. As Mistwalker establish themselves as the "new Square-Enix", Japanese gamers will reluctantly get the "adopt or miss out message" and the platform's Japane
Ironically, though, the biggest weakness of consoles (that they are "closed boxes") is also their greatest strength and, I believe the reason why this article is wide of the mark.
After all, with a console, you buy a game, you go home, you stick it in the drive and you play the game. Even with Sony's best efforts to thwart that on the PS3 by demanding firmware updates every 10 minutes, the system hasn't changed much. By contrast, two of the last 4 PC games I bought (Spore and Far Cry 2) have required me to faff around with drivers before they would run. Now, sure, I'm a reasonably advanced user by the standards of the general public (though a veritable neophyte in slashdot terms), but this is awkward and irritating.
There's also the price issue. A console will set you back a few hundred dollars, but you then don't need to replace it for 4-5 years. A gaming PC will set you back at least twice as much (and frequently more) and will generally be obsolete within two and a half years, unless you're willing to sink a lot of money into interim upgrades.
Now, even if you get around the ease-of-use issue by basically putting a console inside the PC (anybody remember the old Mega-PC, which had a Megadrive/Genesis inside a PC case?) you are still going to be in a situation where the thing is locked into a piece of hardware with a far faster obsolescence cycle.
This is before you even start to get into ergonomic issues, such as the fact that the general usage pattern is that people use PCs with a monitor at a desk, but play console games on their TV while sat on the sofa.
Ohhhh... the joys of camping Leaping Lizzy. I spent so many hours running around that small sloped patch of South Gustaberg. It got to the point where I had 18 kills and not a single drop of those stupid boots. I swore never to camp her again.
The next week, I'm running through the area on a chocobo and she spawns right in front of me. I dismount, get the pull and she drops the damned boots. The next day, I go back out there with a couple of friends and we get two more pairs.
After that, I had a run of the most incredibly flukey luck on some of the rare big-ticket drops. Emperor Hairpin on the second kill of that fly in Valkurm. Venemous Claws pretty much every time I did a KS30. Then when they switched the Peacock Charm's drop location to that BC20, I managed to get the drop on the one and only attempt I ever did on it.
Actually, Blizzard do what they can for the lower levels, to be honest. From the second half of the Burning Crusade era, they began a fairly comprehensive (and successful) programme of making the levelling grind faster and more enjoyable, particularly around the 38-45 range, which used to be absolute hell and was where lots of players, particularly the more casual ones, were giving up.
Not only has there been a reduction in the experience needed to level up, but a number of old quests have been rationalised and simplified. Some of the old group quests have been made accessible to solo players, as an acknowledgement that most of the player-base are at the level cap now. The experience and loot rewards for many of the old "levelling up" instances, such as Deadmines, Gnomeregan, Uldaman and so on, have been improved significantly, while a few tweaks have been made to reduce the difficulty of some of those instances.
Perhaps the biggest boon to low level players has been the complete makeover that Blizzard gave to Dustwallow Marsh. Previously a rather sparse, unwelcoming area with little function other than as the Alliance port in Eastern Kalimdor, the zone is now the most content-dense zone in the whole of the "old world". They've added a large number of fun (and occasionally novel) quests, based conveniently around a few hubs, which replicates the "Outlands level up experience" in Azeroth and massively accelerates the 38-42 level range. In the past, the only real way through those levels was to suffer your way through Stranglethorn Vale until you were finally able to escape to the relative delights of Tanaris and Hinterlands. Having Dustwallow as an alternative is infinitely preferable.
Ultimately, though, there's very little point in Blizzard adding much more "low level" content. The simple fact is that WoW has a very short level-up curve by the standards of most MMOs. Most casual players will make it to level 80 sooner or later, where they can go and do 5 and 10 man instances, or PvP.
Obsolete instances don't get played very much. When WotLK came out, all of the (generally well designed) level 70 instances vanished from the radar. I guess the occasional group of people levelling up might hit the level 70 5-mans a couple of times. Perhaps you'll even get the occasional crowd of people at 68-71 poking their heads into Karazhan. But everything from Gruul's Lair through to Sunwell Plateau will now get nothing more than the occasional nostalgia run. If Blizzard were, say to add a couple of new level 50 instances, most players would probably run them once, get a level and a couple of drops from them and then never go there again. By contrast, new top level content will claim far more time from players.
I've put a lot of hours into WotLK since it came out and feel reasonably well qualified to comment on it.
Basically, I think it's a bit of a mixed bag. A kind of 6 on 10, work in progress sort of thing, with some nice ideas, but a few things that still need to be resolved and a few other things that desperately needed to be resolved before launch.
I'll start with the 70-80 levelling grind. After recently levelling an alt from 1-70 (after they nerfed the entire xp grind from 20+) this came as a real shock to the system. This grind is long and it is slow. Moreover, you are basically forced to do an overwhelming majority of it through solo questing. This is a stark contrast to Burning Crusade, where even before they nerfed the xp gaps, you could quite plausibly level from 60-70 in the new 5 man instances, with a single run granting a sizeable fraction of a level. In WotLK, if you do a 5 man instance for xp, you will get maybe 15% of a level at best for the first run, and then 5-7% or so for subsequent runs. With each run taking, on average, 45 minutes, this is just not a productive way to level up, compared to solo questing. It's clear that Blizzard want to force everybody to play through the story they've written for the new areas solo, grouping up only for the occasional instance or group quest. I have two problems with this. First, to be honest, the plot isn't really that great. Sure, it's kinda cool to see some of the old plot strands from WC3 crop back up, but ultimately, it's still the same old sub-Tolkien crap. As a former FFXI player, I can't help but feel that plot isn't really Blizzard's strong point, compared to Square-Enix. That said, the cutscene you get at the end of the Dragonblight quests was a pleasant surprise.
My second problem is that if I wanted to run around on my own doing solo quests, I probably wouldn't be playing World of Warcraft. After all, the same experience can be had far better in any number of offline RPGs, which are specifically tailored for solo play. My abiding memory of levelling from 70-80 is of it being a profoundly lonely experience (despite me having an active guild that was farming Kil'Jaeden before WotLK hit). Of course, this isn't to say I wasn't seeing plenty of other players. Of course I was. I was having to compete with them for every fucking pull of every fucking quest mob. Sorry for the bad language, but I can't really think of any other way to convey just how furious I got at Blizzard's complete failure to mitigate the inevitable effects of hundreds of new players on every server swarming into the start zones at once. This isn't the first time Blizzard have done this; they should know better by now.
So yes, the overall levelling experience is somewhat let down by Blizzard's ego tripping with regards to the plot and some really questionable design decisions.
Fortunately, on hitting 80, things do get better. The instances are generally good. Heroics, in particular, are a lot of fun, although as a Paladin, I'm still frustrated by how many of them like to throw damage on every member of the party at once, meaning that we Paladins still end up as the least desired healers for this stuff (though we do now perform better in raids). Blizzard have further developed the neat "roughly an hour" instance layout that they introduced in Burning Crusade for 5 mans and it works very well. The only 5-man instance I don't think has been properly thought through is the Oculus, where Blizzard tried something very different, which just didn't quite work. Can't blame them for trying, though.
The main raiding content at the moment is Naxxramas, resurrected from the original, pre-expansion game, where only the very top end players saw it. I can see why they wanted to bring it back; for the most part, it is an excellent starter instance with some fun fights. That said, it is showing its age in a few respects. Some of the wings, particularly abombination/construct wing, have some really long and annoying runs back if you have a wipe. Burning Crusade instances la
As somebody who quit FFXI after about 6 months of ToAU, but who looks back into the game intermittently, I'd second that. In fact, I'd go even further and say that FFXI as a game peaked with CoP.
In story terms, CoP was great and is about as close as you will get to the classic Final Fantasy experience. It fit in well with the story they'd built up in the original game and Zilart, while adding sigificantly to the background lore and mythos. It had well developed characters and actually drew the player-character into a significant role in the plot other than "person who does the dirty work" (although that's how it feels early on, until you get past "Three Paths" at least). Moreover the design of the CoP areas really fit in well with the plot and highlighted the "epic" nature of the storyline. Riverne was beautifully designed (and I can't help but feel that Nagrand in WoW was Blizzard's attempt to copy it). Al'Taieu was probably the most attractive area that anybody's yet put out in an MMO.
By contrast ToAU's storyline felt a bit lightweight and silly. Moreover, as you highlight, it didn't feel as though it was connected to the rest of the world. Sure, the odd character from the "old" world shows up, but I could never quite fathom what they were doing there. Moreover, the area designs were hideous. Whitegate was just a mess put together with recycled textures, and the less said about the endless tedious swamps outside it the better.
I've not really dipped into WotG much. While I bought it, it was released after I'd virtually stopped playing the game. The fact that the plot involved time-travel, however, did not seem to bode well to me.
But more than just in terms of plot and appearances, I think CoP was the high point of FFXI and the closest it ever came to having a unique selling point to set it aside from other MMOs. I liked the focus on small, level capped battles, requiring intense concentration on the part of all participants and plenty of tactical choices. I mean, make no mistake, CoP was hard, especially if you were doing it before they nerfed half the fights, and at times I was ready to throw my keyboard out the window. But it was also fun and gave an incredible sense of achievement after certain fights (Ouryu, Snoll Tzar, Airship and the final boss, in particular).
Of course, most of the player-base hated CoP, because you couldn't cheese your way through it on the basis of gear and numbers. I know plenty of end-gamers with multiple 75 jobs, who did the hardcore HNM scene, who just couldn't get past certain missions because they'd never actually worked to develop the skill at playing the game they needed. So what we got after that was an expansion with ridiculously easy missions, with some insane gear-give-aways and an end-game that became more and more biased in favour of having more and more of the "right" jobs. Sadly, because it added new jobs, which is what the crowd always clamoured for, ToAU is probably still seen as the better expansion by most players.
These days, I've switched over to WoW. I wasn't willing to tolerate the insane amounts of time it takes to get anything done in FFXI if the game isn't going to reward me with fights that challenge me and a storyline that holds my attention. I've yet to encounter anything in WoW as difficult as some of the CoP fights (and back before Wrath of the Lich King hit, we had Kil'Jaeden, the "last boss" of the previous expansion, pretty much on farm), but it does have a generally better escalation of the skill requirement in its end-game.
Actually, I was quite surprised to find that I like the game. I really, really hated Red Alert 2. If I were to list the 10 worst games I've ever paid money for, Red Alert 2 would certainly be on the list. It represented the absolute nadir of the Command & Conquer series before, to my surprise, it was rescued by EA. I honestly couldn't believe it had been put out as it was after Total Annihilation and Starcraft had turned the RTS genre on its head and C&C2 had been near-universally slated.
However, I'm most of the way through the Soviet campaign now and am enjoying Red Alert 3 quite a lot. The co-op orientation of the game is good... the AI is a little dodgy, but it's passable and an AI ally doesn't put you at an outright disadvantage in the story missions. What's far better is playing the missions co-op with a friend online. You can really tell the missions were designed around co-op play, as they're fantastically well paced; at times, you'll need to work in close conjunction with your ally towards a single goal, while at other times it makes more sense to split up and chase down different objectives simultaneously.
Yes, the pacing is aggressive, but this has always been the way with the Command & Conquer series. If I want to play a slower, more cautiously-paced RTS, I'll play Supreme Commander. To be honest, I've not found that RA3 has yet demanded the kind of all-out aggression that I needed when playing as Nod in C&C3. Certainly, my experience of playing Nod in C&C3's campaign was that if I was not launching small attacks constantly, GDI would out-produce me and grind me into the dust. I never got into the multiplayer much, so not sure if this holds true there. Red Alert 3 generally allows me a bit more time to catch my breath, at least in the Soviet campaign. Maybe the other campaigns are different.
Unfortunately, it does sound a lot like EA have designed this system to be completely open to abuse from their end. I'm not really sure that this is a good move on their part; they're going to end up with a lot of unhappy customers (some of whom will almost inevitably have been banned unfairly).
However, I'm not actually 100% opposed to the idea that people who behave like idiots on the forums should face consequences. As others have noted, somebody who is a foul-mouthed idiot on the forums is liable to be at least as bad, if not worse, in-game.
A far better solution would have been to offer two tiers of servers for the game. You'd have "regulated" servers, which are free to play on (we're not talking about subscription-model games here, although I guess third party server-owners could still charge their own fees), but which would require a valid EA account in good standing. You'd then have "open" servers, which are likewise free to play on, but have no authentication required beyond a valid CD key. On connecting to an open server via the game's UI, you'd be given a quick warning/annoyance message indicating that the server you were connecting to would not be bound by EA's code of conduct or whatever.
I know that in 100% of cases, I would choose to play on the regulated servers, while those who suffer from a bit of a potty-mouth, or buy a second hand copy of the game from somebody who does, would still be able to play online, just not with me.
Agreed. I wouldn't go so far as to say I was excited about the game, but it was certainly one I'd been keeping an eye on. After all, the people working on it had quite a track record and it sounded like they had some interesting fiction lined up for the game. Plus, as a Londoner, I love it when my city makes an appearance in games and I was interested to see what they'd do with it.
Within 10 minutes of loading up the game, I was reeling from just how bad it was. Certainly, the intro was great - on a par with anything we've seen come out of Blizzard - and it seemed to promise a decent experience. But the game itself felt so half-hearted and amateurish that I honestly couldn't believe it had been released in this day and age.
The engine felt just hideous, with clipping bugs running rampant. Combat was as dull as ditchwater. NPCs were all created from a few generic templates. Their portraits and voices seemed to have been randomly selected. In most cases, the few stock voice-snippets had absolutely no relation to what an NPC was supposed to be saying (and most of the voices sounded like they'd been recorded by somebody who couldn't even find the UK on a map). The "storyline" behind the missions, such as it was, was loose and disjointed. There was no apparent effort being made to tie together what happened in the game with the darker material seen in the pre-release materials and the intro; rather, it was just a procession of deranged people with silly voices. The game also suffered from numerous technical problems, including crashes and inexplicable slowdowns in sparse areas on a PC that can run Crysis perfectly well.
The locations in the game bore only the very slightest passing resemblance to London. The heavy randomisation used in level design meant that areas that should be immediately recognisable to anybody who's spent a couple of days in London as a tourist were warped beyond all recognition. Even Resistance: Fall of Man, which depicted an alternate world version of a 1940s London in its later missions, did a better job of portraying the city than this.
There were a few small positives. The class selection was quite nice and, had the game been capable of keeping my interest, I can see I would have had fun tweaking characters. The designs of the enemies were pretty decent, although they suffered from being over-used and from AI which basically just had them all run at the player in a straight line.
But overall, the impression I took from the game was of a huge, massive waste of potential. I know that they developers have since said they never really had a clear idea for what the game should be. In my opinion, they should have ditched any pretence of being a "massive" online game. The game would have worked best as a relatively linear action-RPG, focussed on single-player and small-group multiplayer co-op. They should have spent more time on level design and made more out of one of their unique selling points; the London setting. Any randomisation of areas should have been strictly confined to underground areas and sewers. To be honest, I got the impression that nobody involved in developing the game had even visited the city it was set in. Even spending some time online looking at photos would have helped them develop a far more atmospheric game. Getting in some people who know how to actually write plot and dialogue would also have helped. The story concept was awesome, but the execution was woeful.
I've not read them myself, but I have heard from others that the Hellgate novels are actually "not half bad" as video-game conversions go (I know this isn't saying much). It therefore beggars belief that they managed to give us a game with less narrative impact than the original Doom.
The console battle is a long game, though, so this isn't the best estimation. Besides which, it's almost impossible to know who's made the most money after games-revenues are taken into account - they're pretty coy about this. If anything, the momentum is with Microsoft at the moment. When the Xbox launched, the idea that they'd ever be level-pegging with Sony on market penetration was pretty laughable. Besides, we're only half-way through this round (if that), and the most interesting (and profitable) half is still to come. And this is where games sales will be key.
Bah, this is what I get for making posts first thing in the morning.
Last sentence of the first paragraph should read:
"In fact, looking at the September through December releases, I can't see a single game coming out on the Wii that most gamers (as in, the people who are likely to buy games beyond what comes with their initial bundle) are likely to get out of bed for."
And the first sentence of the last paragraph should read:
"Of course, this isn't to deny that Nintendo has done better than during the last cycle, when a late spurt by the Xbox pushed it into 3rd place globally."
They have a similar units-sold lead to that which Sony established last cycle with the PS2. However, while Sony's lead in console sales was matched by a roughly equivalent lead in game sales (which is where the real profit is in this industry), Nintendo is actually significantly behind its competitors in this field this time around. So the huge installed base isn't actually equating into a "win" per se. A wii that is bought by a non-gamer, used for a month and then sits forgotten in a cupboard (which is, like it or not, not an uncommon occurance) is a one-off shot of cash for Nintendo, but that's not how you win the console-wars, as it doesn't really do much to attract developers to your system and does less to secure you a long-term profit stream. It's already clear that the predictions that most developers would focus on making their AAA titles for the Wii was false. A quick look at the (impressive) list of big releases this holiday season shows that simultaneous 360/PS3 releases (sometimes with a PC version thrown in) is the most common model. In fact, looking at the September through December releases, I can't see a single game that most gamers (as in, the people who are likely to buy games beyond what comes with their initial bundle) are likely to get out of bed for.
Basically, with the PS3 making some steps in catching up with the 360's initial lead, unless Nintendo can sort out its long-standing (3 console generations now) problem of not actually having enough games worth playing on its non-handheld systems, the most likely outcome of this round of the console wars is a rough 3-way tie. Unless it can convince the non-gamers who picked up the console when it was the "hot, trendy new thing" to go out and start buying some games, Nintendo may find the second half of this cycle to be very lean years. By contrast, MS and Sony will continue to benefit from the slow but steady turnover of the home-TVs market into HDTV.
Of course, this isn't to deny that Nintendo has done better than during the last cycle, when a late spurt by the 360 pushed it into 3rd place globally. It does, however, demonstrate that despite a hugely successful launch for their new hardware and controller (where the mainstream media seemed to fall over itself to generate Nintendo's hype for it), the same structural weaknesses that hindered the N64 and Gamecube still remain.
Stand-alone download installers for WoW patches are indeed available, albeit not always easily so. Certainly, Fileplanet makes them available, but with heavy priority for subscribers. That said, there's often a bit of a wait for the stand-alone downloads to appear, particularly for the non-US versions.
The best piece of advice that I can give about getting WoW patches is to not use the Blizzard torrent client to get it. Let the update start using the default client, then cancel it immediately. You can then grab the.torrent file from a temporary directory within your WoW folder and feed it to a "proper" bittorrent client, which has actual connection configuration options. The default client likes to max out my upstream (and can't be disuaded from doing so easily), with the result that my connection become near-unusable and my downstream speed suffers horribly. By using a proper client and capping the upstream 10k/sec below maximum (which still allows for a decent upload speed and maintains my status as a good citizen), I was able to achieve almost 10 times the download speed I was getting from the official client (going from 60k/sec to 550k/sec), while also keeping my connection vaguely usable for other things.
On an unrelated note, Blizzard are absolutely horrible at rolling out patches. I used to be a hardcore Final Fantasy XI player and since then I've had short bursts in Lord of the Rings Online. FFXI patch-day bugs would be things like "some obscure fight in the Den of Rancor which nobody's done for weeks now has a bit of a pathing-bug, which we'll fix overnight". LotRO patch day was a bit bumpier, but that's understandable given it was a new game at the time and even then, stuff was fixed quite quickly. Any major patch from Blizzard effectively means at least a week (sometimes more) of seriously disrupted play, through server instability and massively disruptive bugs. The most recent patch has resulted in innumerable server crashes and restarts, severe intermittent latency issues throughout the evenings, disconnects when zoning in and out of instances, and a number of graphical bugs affecting machines with SLI graphics cards (albeit bugs with workarounds). The previous patch (2.4) effectively made Heroic instances unplayable for a week, along with the usual latency and disconnection problems. All of this is despite Blizzard having one of the longest and most public testing cycles in the industry for new patches, via the PTR (test realm).
Oh don't worry, if you move beyond the films, there is plenty of suck in the post-original-trilogy era. I'm not quite sure why I actually read so much of it - I suspect a period at work where I had regular plane journeys every week contributed, as brain-dead trash books can pass a flight pretty well.
But if you look at any kind of list of Star Wars novels set after the films, you can chalk up pretty much anything by Kevin J. Anderson as "borderline unreadable tripe" (and to be honest, his Star Wars stuff is less toxic than his Dune stuff). The New Jedi Order stuff is also incredibly patchy - there are a few decent enough efforts in there, but also some of the worst fiction I've ever read, particularly in the first half of the series. Timothy Zahn's novels are probably the best, particularly the old Heir to the Empire trilogy, but they depart pretty wildly from the "feel" of the movies.
The closest I've seen any other Star Was product come to emulating the feel of the original trilogy is the original KoTOR. I remember playing it and thinking that Lucas should have let Bioware develop the prequel movies.
Highly unlikely, given it's an MMO. The genre tends not to need much in the way of copy-protection, due to the whole "you need a paid-for account, created using a valid CD key to play" thing.
I can't, off the top of my head, even think of any MMOs that require you to have the disk in the drive to play.
Slashdot Mirror
I own Wii-Fit. I like it. With its help, I've been able to lose 8 pounds since Christmas day, on the basis of a 40 minute daily routine with it. However...
It's important to be aware of what Wii-Fit can and can't do. It's a good programme, but using it safely and effectively involves a lot of working around its limitations and doing a bit of your own research. IGN carried a good article a few months back in which a qualified fitness trainer assessed it, which is a good starting point. In short, the positives came out as:
+ The way it makes exercise more interesting and makes it easier for gamers to stick with it without getting bored.
+ The aerobics exercises in general, which are a good way to burn calories.
+ The balance games, and the general focus on balance, which won't burn many calories, but will underpin the rest of your exercise regime well.
+ Some of the muscle exercises, particularly the balance-focussed ones.
The negatives were:
- The yoga.
- Some of the muscle exercises, which are overly advanced for beginners and could well cause injury if not done properly (which the game does not adequately warn about).
- The failure to warn the player of the need for appropriate footwear, especially for the jogging exercise.
- The body tests in general - the focus on BMI is not great, as BMI is a blunt instrument which is now treated with a lot of caution, while the Wii-fit age concept is largely laughable.
- The overall lack of guidance given in the package as a whole, which gives beginners to exercise very few tips on what constitutes an effective regime.
Work around those negatives and this is still a fantastically good accessory and software package. However...
In short, I would be very cautious about any application which claimed to be able to give detailed fitness advice on the basis of your Wii-Fit body test results. Professional advice from a doctor or fitness professional will be far safer and more useful.
Sorry, but I can't consider a substantial single-player campaign, with a huge number of expensively rendered cutscenes and an actual plot (a rarity in a Nintendo game) to be "serious fluff". Moreover, while I will acknowledge that the core brawling gameplay in SSB wasn't hugely changed, they had at least avoiding making it actively worse, unlike in MK.
Fair enough on most of the disagreements, it would be a boring world if everybody was in agreement. I honestly do see your point on Red Alert 3, although I think the good still outweighs the bad. Particularly compared to the atrocity that was Red Alert 2 (probably the worst game I've ever paid money for). However...
If you want to play GTA IV on the PC, then you get what you deserve. Ever since GTA III hit, I don't think Rockstar have made it any secret that these are console games. The PC ports are afterthoughts and have never felt like anything else. The thing runs just fine on my PS3 and the controls feel just about acceptable on the Dualshock 3, which is the best you can ever hope for in a GTA game. I can't imagine that the 360 version is any different.
That said, Rockstar is, I think, in a position now where it really does need to think the gameplay over from the ground up for its next release. There are problems with the basic gameplay related to controls, mission structure and saving which have been in there since GTA III first hit and which are really, really glaring now, as many of Rockstar's competitors have evolved beyond them. Bully suffers from the same problems, but the generally more forgiving nature of that game means that they don't really detract as much from the overall experience.
Also, I'm curious as to why you found Far Cry 2 to be a "crappy console port". The only real hold-over from the consoles that I could see was the rather odd discrepancy of having both "save points" and quicksaves. Other than that, it felt like a well-tuned PC fps to me.
Well, I think there's a difference in how Nintendo has handled those two franchises this time around.
With Super Smash Bros Brawl, they've made a genuine effort to bring the game up to modern standards. They've even put in a proper story mode, with cutscenes and everything. Ok, Nintendo are still living in the 80s in some respects - the near total absence of voice acting being the most glaring example - but they've made an effort and it shows.
Mario Kart Wii, on the other hands, was a lazy update even by Nintendo's standards. The graphics felt, if anything, worse than Double Dash's and there were very few tweaks to the basic formula.
I liked the original Mario Kart, in its day, and I quite liked Double Dash (Mario Kart 64 did very little for me). For me, there were always two main assets for the Mario Kart series; first, that the cart physics and controls were among the best around and second that the tracks were good fun.
Now, the first of these advantages has been eroded hugely as the competition has caught up with (and in many cases overtaken) Nintendo's efforts. Mario Kart Wii makes the situation worse by actively penalising good driving - drivers at the front of the field almost inevitably get weapon-spammed to the back on the final straight, with nothing they can do to prevent it. The previous games always had this problem to some degree, but the sheer number of drivers on the track has aggravated the problem to breaking point in the latest version. The number of drivers has also had a negative impact on the track design. The tracks are all now stupidly wide and open, to accomodate the number of drivers. Unlike in previous games, there are very, very few sections of track that would actually be challenging to drive if you didn't have umpteen other carts spamming weapons at you.
So yes, I stand by my judgement that Mario Kart Wii is a case of a concept which was once good, but which has suffered badly over time from stagnation, and where every attempt that has been made this time around to deviate from the original concept has worsened it. They even lost the co-operative feature from Double Dash, which was something I really quite liked.
I've only played it fairly briefly (about 3 hours), but it didn't do a massive amount for me. Sure, it has some nifty stuff, but I didn't like the emphasis on just repeating a fairly small number scenarios. I didn't actively dislike the game and my expectations for it were never stellar, so I wouldn't count it as a disappointment, but... I don't know... it just felt a bit too "meh" to make it onto the list. It possibly didn't help that I played it right after the (rather more polished) Dead Space, which I think had satisfied my immediate urge to play survival-horror games.
There were a few other games like that, which I just couldn't particularly bring myself to either particularly like or dislike. Call of Duty: World at War is probably the highest profile example. I mean, I guess I should have flagged it up as a disappointment, after CoD4 (which was excellent), but given it was the CoD3 people developing it, I had a fairly strong suspicion it was going to be poor. If anything, it was very slightly better than I expected.
Well, it's been an interesting year - quite a few very good titles (with a particularly large cluster of these released in the September - November range) and also a few which turned out to be fairly huge disappointments.
Anyway, my own top 10:
10) Super Smash Bros Brawl (Wii) - a rare example of a first party Nintendo game which has decent production values and doesn't suffer from a severe lack of content. The single-player campaign is slightly let down by a few over-long platforming sections, but the brawling components are more than fun enough make up for it.
9) Siren: Blood Curse (PS3) - the only game I've seen to date to really pull off the whole "episodic gaming" thing. Blood Curse is the best entry to date in what has always been a very solid survival horror series. It's an excellent refuge for those who have been put off by the action-oriented direction that the Resident Evil franchise has taken and the continued flogging of the dead horse that the once-epic Silent Hill franchise has become ever since its 4th installment.
8) The World Ends With You (Nintendo DS) - quirky and original take on the Japanese RPG formula. The distinctive style isn't to everybody's taste (or even particularly to mine), but it did produce one of the most unique titles of the last 12 months. A huge range of customisation options (including heavily tweakable difficulty settings) further boost its appeal.
7) Lost Odyssey (Xbox 360) - hugely traditional take on the Japanese RPG formula. Superb production values and a well thought out narrative pull it above the average. A big improvement on 2007's Blue Dragon and a real sign that Square-Enix should be taking the competition from Mistwalker very, very seriously. The game's also notable for its extensive use of narrative text storytelling to flesh out the back-story.
6) Resistance 2 (PS3) - A few dubious design decisions mean that this isn't quite as good as its predecessor (the limitation on the number of weapons you can carry feels particularly restrictive in a game that's so heavily based around trying out funky weapons). However, it's still a slick and fun game, whose controls feel far more robust than those of pretty much any other console fps.
5) Far Cry 2 (PC - also Xbox 360 and PS3) - Despite a "ripped from the headlines" story that really is the ultimate in bad taste, this is a deeply impressive shooter. It takes some of the good ideas we saw in last year's STALKER: Shadows of Chernobyl and marries them with the execution needed to really pull them off.
4) Metal Gear Solid 4 (PS3) - Yeah, this is the controversial one. With the cutscenes being, at a rough estimate, roughly twice the length of the playable sections of the game, this was never going to be everybody's cup of tea. However, a complete overhaul of the combat system took the series from being one where combat was, as Penny Arcade put it, a punishment inflicted on the player for getting the stealth sections wrong to a being one of the most fun games to play as a shooter of the entire year. The fact that you can play it as a stealth-em-up just adds icing to the cake. The game's graphics and production values blow away anything else released during this year.
3) Gears of War 2 (Xbox 360) - It doesn't do anything particularly original, but it improves on the original game in almost every respect. It presents a longer campaign with better balance than the original, more varied environments and some excellent tweaks to the weapons lineup. It also features some of the most fun multiplayer modes of any game I've seen this year, with a heavy emphasis on co-op and team-based gameplay.
2) Dead Space (Xbox 360, also PC and PS3) - Half way between Gears of War and a traditional survival-horror game, this was very close to being my favorite title of the entire year. As others have noted, it's anything but original, drawing heavy inspiration from three movies in particular: Aliens, Event Horizon and the Thing. However, it still establishes its own distinctive identity and mana
I got tired of playing with children at the point where a guild I was in had to call a raid 2 hours early, because the main tank said "My stupid mum's making me do my homework".
As far as I'm concerned, I only want to spend time in MMOs with those who can pay their own way and who have a degree of freedom to decide how to organise their lives. That means adults with jobs. I'm sick of playing with children. I'll play with college-age students, but my experience is that most of them are still severely lacking in maturity and organisational skills (as I was myself at that age). Until you leave home, however, you ultimately have little to no power over your own life. You cannot demand that you always need, for example, four undisturbed hours to raid on each of Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. Now, that's not your fault. But I don't want to be stuck in a situation where 24 other people are sat around twiddling their thumbs because of it.
Yeah, this is an interesting one. I think the flow of skills between gaming and management is a two way thing, although only in fairly specific circumstances.
I don't honestly think that just playing the average platformer, rhythm game, first person shooter or beat-em-up really adds much at all to your work-place skills, beyond a bit of hand-eye co-ordination. Even playing team-based online shooters doesn't necessarily help.
However, once you move beyond simply playing the game and move more into the community side of things, you can start to pick up some seriously useful experience.
When I was looking for "proper" work after finishing up my post-grad (as opposed to the summer jobs I'd had while a student), I ended up passing the initial intellectual aptitude tests and getting through to the assessment centre stage for one of the most competitive graduate recruitment schemes in the UK (over 15,000 applicants for around 400 places, in the year I applied). I was up against people who'd done internships in national newspapers, travelled the world doing interesting things, been president of umpteen student societies and so on. By contast, my own experience was a few summers of boring (but fairly well paid) tech support/web design and administrative work, a bit of political canvassing and way too much time "wasted" on gaming. "Ok", I thought, as I got myself ready, "I'm in trouble now".
So, I cast around for other things I could talk about that I'd done. Pretty much the only really striking thing was that I was the (unpaid) head admin of a fairly large European-based Counter-Strike league. This was basically something I'd moved towards by degrees; from being a player in a team in the league who was perpetually frustrated by its organisational problems, to being a volunteer admin who refereed matches and mediated disputes to being the head admin, who recruited and managed the other admins, negotiated with sponsors for better server hardware and moved the league from a free-to-play to a subscription basis.
So in the absence of other options, I decided to take a huge risk and focus on this experience at interviews, hoping and praying that I would get an interviewer who wouldn't just dismiss it as some computer-game silliness. My heart sank when I found that my interviewer was a 60-ish guy in a suit. However... the interview went stunningly well; he asked me about the differences between managing a paid team and a team of volunteers (particularly in terms of dealing with poor performers), the difficulties in getting "customers" used to having something for free to pay for a product, the challenges in negotiating with financial backers and so on. And I was able to answer all the questions fluently. He didn't have a clue about computer gaming and admitted as much, but the management and business sides of what I'd done were perfectly relevant. I passed the centre and still have the same employer 6 years later (having moved up a few pay bands in the interim).
Of course, head admins of leagues are pretty few and far between and I think the old concept of the "unpaid volunteer head admin" has largely died out as fps gaming becomes more professionalised (a move which was already starting back then and which I've never been comfortable with). However, I think there are other aspects of gaming which can have a positive impact on your business skills - as well as some areas where a management post at work can have a beneficial impact on your gaming.
MMOs almost inevitably present the best examples, particularly if you have a raiding guild (or the non-WoW equivalent). A middling-hardcore raiding guild (which is to say, a guild which takes raiding seriously, but whose members have jobs and some vestiges of social lives) is an organisation held together by varying degrees of cameraderie, traditions and naked self interest. Much like the average work-place, in other words. You have the ambitious newcomers who want to change everything. You have the burned out old-timers who think the guild owes the
Technically right on the second point, although I understand that Polyphony is now clenched rather less tightly to the Sony bosom than it has been at the time.
Not necessarily right at all on the first point. The cost of development depends more upon the game in question than on the platform. Developing something like Crysis on the PC, where the engine is built specifically for the game and where the technology is at the absolute bleeding edge will cost more than developing a PS3 or 360 game which uses estaboished technology assets. A large chunk of the development budget for modern games goes on the "art" side and hence is unchanged whatever your platform.
PC games also require a more demanding testing and QA process, due to the number of possible hardware setups. Plus they still tend to end up needing much more in the way of post-release support, which may bring in no further income.
Interesting predictions, which are mostly plausible. As making predictions is always a fun game to play here are a few of my own, broken down by platform...
First, the PC:
* The relatively long lead time on game development will see one or two big PC releases in the back half of the year whose system spec requirements wipe away the upper limit set by Crysis. These games will turn out to be expensive flops (nobody will be buying top-end PCs) and potentially fatal for the companies responsible.
* Pretty much every PC game released will have some kind of DRM. The argument will shift from being "should games be DRMed?" to "what restrictions should the DRM impose?". Limits on the number of activation attempts will become the real split within the industry.
* Console-style controllers will gradually replace the classic mouse and keyboard combination as the preferred method for playing PC action games (oh yeah, this one's going to get me flamed, but just look at the likes of Dead Space).
* As brick-and-mortar stores give less and less shelf-space over to PC games, online distribution will become the norm. Services such as steam and direct2drive will shift their main focus from competing against traditional stores towards competing against each other. This will get ugly before the year is out (but possibly in a beneficial way for the consumer).
* As an outside chance (probably more likely for 2010), one of the major online-distribution retailers will try to impose a console-style mandatory feature set for games sold over the service, standardising control systems and adding features such as achivements.
* World of Warcraft will continue to dominate the MMO scene. Blizzard will announce a new expansion for mid-2010.
* New competitors such as the Old Republic MMO will achieve moderate success, with subscriber numbers in the hundreds of thousands, but will fail to replicate WoW's cultural impact.
* Age of Conan will close its doors in the back half of 2009.
The PS2:
* Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 will turn out to be the last real outing for the PS2. Releases for the PS2 will have almost completely dried up by Easter.
* However, PS2 hardware sales will continue at an unremarkable but steady rate throughout the year, due to families looking for very low budget gaming options during the economic crises and hardcore gamers replacing old PS2s that malfunction, due to the lack of back-compatible PS3s on the market.
The PS3:
* The PS3 will be the overall "winner" in 2009, in terms of improving its sales performance.
* The PS3's hardware advantage over its competitors will finally start to yield some rewards, with PS3 games starting to look noticable better than their 360 equivalents, as developers learn to use the hardware better.
* More PS3 previously exclusive franchises will go cross-platform. Gran Turismo is, I suspect, one to keep an eye on.
* On a related note, Square-Enix will fail to make it to market with Final Fantasy 13 on any platform, with the game's release date slipping to "somewhere in the middle of 2010". The company will face an increasing chorus of questions regarding whether it has completely lost its way.
* Playstation Home will indeed fail. However, Sony will continue to press on with selling more and more full-price titles via digital distribution. This will lead to an ugly spat with third party publishers towards the back end of 2009.
The 360:
* Microsoft will become increasingly desperate to get users to switch to models with larger hard disks, as the most common 20-gig model proves inadequate as a platform for their online strategy. The 20 gig model will be removed from sale, with the "elite" moving to its old price point.
* Microsoft's current habit of buying up as many Japanese RPG makers as they can will start to produce results. As Mistwalker establish themselves as the "new Square-Enix", Japanese gamers will reluctantly get the "adopt or miss out message" and the platform's Japane
Ironically, though, the biggest weakness of consoles (that they are "closed boxes") is also their greatest strength and, I believe the reason why this article is wide of the mark.
After all, with a console, you buy a game, you go home, you stick it in the drive and you play the game. Even with Sony's best efforts to thwart that on the PS3 by demanding firmware updates every 10 minutes, the system hasn't changed much. By contrast, two of the last 4 PC games I bought (Spore and Far Cry 2) have required me to faff around with drivers before they would run. Now, sure, I'm a reasonably advanced user by the standards of the general public (though a veritable neophyte in slashdot terms), but this is awkward and irritating.
There's also the price issue. A console will set you back a few hundred dollars, but you then don't need to replace it for 4-5 years. A gaming PC will set you back at least twice as much (and frequently more) and will generally be obsolete within two and a half years, unless you're willing to sink a lot of money into interim upgrades.
Now, even if you get around the ease-of-use issue by basically putting a console inside the PC (anybody remember the old Mega-PC, which had a Megadrive/Genesis inside a PC case?) you are still going to be in a situation where the thing is locked into a piece of hardware with a far faster obsolescence cycle.
This is before you even start to get into ergonomic issues, such as the fact that the general usage pattern is that people use PCs with a monitor at a desk, but play console games on their TV while sat on the sofa.
Ohhhh... the joys of camping Leaping Lizzy. I spent so many hours running around that small sloped patch of South Gustaberg. It got to the point where I had 18 kills and not a single drop of those stupid boots. I swore never to camp her again.
The next week, I'm running through the area on a chocobo and she spawns right in front of me. I dismount, get the pull and she drops the damned boots. The next day, I go back out there with a couple of friends and we get two more pairs.
After that, I had a run of the most incredibly flukey luck on some of the rare big-ticket drops. Emperor Hairpin on the second kill of that fly in Valkurm. Venemous Claws pretty much every time I did a KS30. Then when they switched the Peacock Charm's drop location to that BC20, I managed to get the drop on the one and only attempt I ever did on it.
Yeah, I bet you really hate me now.
Actually, Blizzard do what they can for the lower levels, to be honest. From the second half of the Burning Crusade era, they began a fairly comprehensive (and successful) programme of making the levelling grind faster and more enjoyable, particularly around the 38-45 range, which used to be absolute hell and was where lots of players, particularly the more casual ones, were giving up.
Not only has there been a reduction in the experience needed to level up, but a number of old quests have been rationalised and simplified. Some of the old group quests have been made accessible to solo players, as an acknowledgement that most of the player-base are at the level cap now. The experience and loot rewards for many of the old "levelling up" instances, such as Deadmines, Gnomeregan, Uldaman and so on, have been improved significantly, while a few tweaks have been made to reduce the difficulty of some of those instances.
Perhaps the biggest boon to low level players has been the complete makeover that Blizzard gave to Dustwallow Marsh. Previously a rather sparse, unwelcoming area with little function other than as the Alliance port in Eastern Kalimdor, the zone is now the most content-dense zone in the whole of the "old world". They've added a large number of fun (and occasionally novel) quests, based conveniently around a few hubs, which replicates the "Outlands level up experience" in Azeroth and massively accelerates the 38-42 level range. In the past, the only real way through those levels was to suffer your way through Stranglethorn Vale until you were finally able to escape to the relative delights of Tanaris and Hinterlands. Having Dustwallow as an alternative is infinitely preferable.
Ultimately, though, there's very little point in Blizzard adding much more "low level" content. The simple fact is that WoW has a very short level-up curve by the standards of most MMOs. Most casual players will make it to level 80 sooner or later, where they can go and do 5 and 10 man instances, or PvP.
Obsolete instances don't get played very much. When WotLK came out, all of the (generally well designed) level 70 instances vanished from the radar. I guess the occasional group of people levelling up might hit the level 70 5-mans a couple of times. Perhaps you'll even get the occasional crowd of people at 68-71 poking their heads into Karazhan. But everything from Gruul's Lair through to Sunwell Plateau will now get nothing more than the occasional nostalgia run. If Blizzard were, say to add a couple of new level 50 instances, most players would probably run them once, get a level and a couple of drops from them and then never go there again. By contrast, new top level content will claim far more time from players.
I've put a lot of hours into WotLK since it came out and feel reasonably well qualified to comment on it.
Basically, I think it's a bit of a mixed bag. A kind of 6 on 10, work in progress sort of thing, with some nice ideas, but a few things that still need to be resolved and a few other things that desperately needed to be resolved before launch.
I'll start with the 70-80 levelling grind. After recently levelling an alt from 1-70 (after they nerfed the entire xp grind from 20+) this came as a real shock to the system. This grind is long and it is slow. Moreover, you are basically forced to do an overwhelming majority of it through solo questing. This is a stark contrast to Burning Crusade, where even before they nerfed the xp gaps, you could quite plausibly level from 60-70 in the new 5 man instances, with a single run granting a sizeable fraction of a level. In WotLK, if you do a 5 man instance for xp, you will get maybe 15% of a level at best for the first run, and then 5-7% or so for subsequent runs. With each run taking, on average, 45 minutes, this is just not a productive way to level up, compared to solo questing. It's clear that Blizzard want to force everybody to play through the story they've written for the new areas solo, grouping up only for the occasional instance or group quest. I have two problems with this. First, to be honest, the plot isn't really that great. Sure, it's kinda cool to see some of the old plot strands from WC3 crop back up, but ultimately, it's still the same old sub-Tolkien crap. As a former FFXI player, I can't help but feel that plot isn't really Blizzard's strong point, compared to Square-Enix. That said, the cutscene you get at the end of the Dragonblight quests was a pleasant surprise.
My second problem is that if I wanted to run around on my own doing solo quests, I probably wouldn't be playing World of Warcraft. After all, the same experience can be had far better in any number of offline RPGs, which are specifically tailored for solo play. My abiding memory of levelling from 70-80 is of it being a profoundly lonely experience (despite me having an active guild that was farming Kil'Jaeden before WotLK hit). Of course, this isn't to say I wasn't seeing plenty of other players. Of course I was. I was having to compete with them for every fucking pull of every fucking quest mob. Sorry for the bad language, but I can't really think of any other way to convey just how furious I got at Blizzard's complete failure to mitigate the inevitable effects of hundreds of new players on every server swarming into the start zones at once. This isn't the first time Blizzard have done this; they should know better by now.
So yes, the overall levelling experience is somewhat let down by Blizzard's ego tripping with regards to the plot and some really questionable design decisions.
Fortunately, on hitting 80, things do get better. The instances are generally good. Heroics, in particular, are a lot of fun, although as a Paladin, I'm still frustrated by how many of them like to throw damage on every member of the party at once, meaning that we Paladins still end up as the least desired healers for this stuff (though we do now perform better in raids). Blizzard have further developed the neat "roughly an hour" instance layout that they introduced in Burning Crusade for 5 mans and it works very well. The only 5-man instance I don't think has been properly thought through is the Oculus, where Blizzard tried something very different, which just didn't quite work. Can't blame them for trying, though.
The main raiding content at the moment is Naxxramas, resurrected from the original, pre-expansion game, where only the very top end players saw it. I can see why they wanted to bring it back; for the most part, it is an excellent starter instance with some fun fights. That said, it is showing its age in a few respects. Some of the wings, particularly abombination/construct wing, have some really long and annoying runs back if you have a wipe. Burning Crusade instances la
As somebody who quit FFXI after about 6 months of ToAU, but who looks back into the game intermittently, I'd second that. In fact, I'd go even further and say that FFXI as a game peaked with CoP.
In story terms, CoP was great and is about as close as you will get to the classic Final Fantasy experience. It fit in well with the story they'd built up in the original game and Zilart, while adding sigificantly to the background lore and mythos. It had well developed characters and actually drew the player-character into a significant role in the plot other than "person who does the dirty work" (although that's how it feels early on, until you get past "Three Paths" at least). Moreover the design of the CoP areas really fit in well with the plot and highlighted the "epic" nature of the storyline. Riverne was beautifully designed (and I can't help but feel that Nagrand in WoW was Blizzard's attempt to copy it). Al'Taieu was probably the most attractive area that anybody's yet put out in an MMO.
By contrast ToAU's storyline felt a bit lightweight and silly. Moreover, as you highlight, it didn't feel as though it was connected to the rest of the world. Sure, the odd character from the "old" world shows up, but I could never quite fathom what they were doing there. Moreover, the area designs were hideous. Whitegate was just a mess put together with recycled textures, and the less said about the endless tedious swamps outside it the better.
I've not really dipped into WotG much. While I bought it, it was released after I'd virtually stopped playing the game. The fact that the plot involved time-travel, however, did not seem to bode well to me.
But more than just in terms of plot and appearances, I think CoP was the high point of FFXI and the closest it ever came to having a unique selling point to set it aside from other MMOs. I liked the focus on small, level capped battles, requiring intense concentration on the part of all participants and plenty of tactical choices. I mean, make no mistake, CoP was hard, especially if you were doing it before they nerfed half the fights, and at times I was ready to throw my keyboard out the window. But it was also fun and gave an incredible sense of achievement after certain fights (Ouryu, Snoll Tzar, Airship and the final boss, in particular).
Of course, most of the player-base hated CoP, because you couldn't cheese your way through it on the basis of gear and numbers. I know plenty of end-gamers with multiple 75 jobs, who did the hardcore HNM scene, who just couldn't get past certain missions because they'd never actually worked to develop the skill at playing the game they needed. So what we got after that was an expansion with ridiculously easy missions, with some insane gear-give-aways and an end-game that became more and more biased in favour of having more and more of the "right" jobs. Sadly, because it added new jobs, which is what the crowd always clamoured for, ToAU is probably still seen as the better expansion by most players.
These days, I've switched over to WoW. I wasn't willing to tolerate the insane amounts of time it takes to get anything done in FFXI if the game isn't going to reward me with fights that challenge me and a storyline that holds my attention. I've yet to encounter anything in WoW as difficult as some of the CoP fights (and back before Wrath of the Lich King hit, we had Kil'Jaeden, the "last boss" of the previous expansion, pretty much on farm), but it does have a generally better escalation of the skill requirement in its end-game.
Actually, I was quite surprised to find that I like the game. I really, really hated Red Alert 2. If I were to list the 10 worst games I've ever paid money for, Red Alert 2 would certainly be on the list. It represented the absolute nadir of the Command & Conquer series before, to my surprise, it was rescued by EA. I honestly couldn't believe it had been put out as it was after Total Annihilation and Starcraft had turned the RTS genre on its head and C&C2 had been near-universally slated.
However, I'm most of the way through the Soviet campaign now and am enjoying Red Alert 3 quite a lot. The co-op orientation of the game is good... the AI is a little dodgy, but it's passable and an AI ally doesn't put you at an outright disadvantage in the story missions. What's far better is playing the missions co-op with a friend online. You can really tell the missions were designed around co-op play, as they're fantastically well paced; at times, you'll need to work in close conjunction with your ally towards a single goal, while at other times it makes more sense to split up and chase down different objectives simultaneously.
Yes, the pacing is aggressive, but this has always been the way with the Command & Conquer series. If I want to play a slower, more cautiously-paced RTS, I'll play Supreme Commander. To be honest, I've not found that RA3 has yet demanded the kind of all-out aggression that I needed when playing as Nod in C&C3. Certainly, my experience of playing Nod in C&C3's campaign was that if I was not launching small attacks constantly, GDI would out-produce me and grind me into the dust. I never got into the multiplayer much, so not sure if this holds true there. Red Alert 3 generally allows me a bit more time to catch my breath, at least in the Soviet campaign. Maybe the other campaigns are different.
Unfortunately, it does sound a lot like EA have designed this system to be completely open to abuse from their end. I'm not really sure that this is a good move on their part; they're going to end up with a lot of unhappy customers (some of whom will almost inevitably have been banned unfairly).
However, I'm not actually 100% opposed to the idea that people who behave like idiots on the forums should face consequences. As others have noted, somebody who is a foul-mouthed idiot on the forums is liable to be at least as bad, if not worse, in-game.
A far better solution would have been to offer two tiers of servers for the game. You'd have "regulated" servers, which are free to play on (we're not talking about subscription-model games here, although I guess third party server-owners could still charge their own fees), but which would require a valid EA account in good standing. You'd then have "open" servers, which are likewise free to play on, but have no authentication required beyond a valid CD key. On connecting to an open server via the game's UI, you'd be given a quick warning/annoyance message indicating that the server you were connecting to would not be bound by EA's code of conduct or whatever.
I know that in 100% of cases, I would choose to play on the regulated servers, while those who suffer from a bit of a potty-mouth, or buy a second hand copy of the game from somebody who does, would still be able to play online, just not with me.
Agreed. I wouldn't go so far as to say I was excited about the game, but it was certainly one I'd been keeping an eye on. After all, the people working on it had quite a track record and it sounded like they had some interesting fiction lined up for the game. Plus, as a Londoner, I love it when my city makes an appearance in games and I was interested to see what they'd do with it.
Within 10 minutes of loading up the game, I was reeling from just how bad it was. Certainly, the intro was great - on a par with anything we've seen come out of Blizzard - and it seemed to promise a decent experience. But the game itself felt so half-hearted and amateurish that I honestly couldn't believe it had been released in this day and age.
The engine felt just hideous, with clipping bugs running rampant. Combat was as dull as ditchwater. NPCs were all created from a few generic templates. Their portraits and voices seemed to have been randomly selected. In most cases, the few stock voice-snippets had absolutely no relation to what an NPC was supposed to be saying (and most of the voices sounded like they'd been recorded by somebody who couldn't even find the UK on a map). The "storyline" behind the missions, such as it was, was loose and disjointed. There was no apparent effort being made to tie together what happened in the game with the darker material seen in the pre-release materials and the intro; rather, it was just a procession of deranged people with silly voices. The game also suffered from numerous technical problems, including crashes and inexplicable slowdowns in sparse areas on a PC that can run Crysis perfectly well.
The locations in the game bore only the very slightest passing resemblance to London. The heavy randomisation used in level design meant that areas that should be immediately recognisable to anybody who's spent a couple of days in London as a tourist were warped beyond all recognition. Even Resistance: Fall of Man, which depicted an alternate world version of a 1940s London in its later missions, did a better job of portraying the city than this.
There were a few small positives. The class selection was quite nice and, had the game been capable of keeping my interest, I can see I would have had fun tweaking characters. The designs of the enemies were pretty decent, although they suffered from being over-used and from AI which basically just had them all run at the player in a straight line.
But overall, the impression I took from the game was of a huge, massive waste of potential. I know that they developers have since said they never really had a clear idea for what the game should be. In my opinion, they should have ditched any pretence of being a "massive" online game. The game would have worked best as a relatively linear action-RPG, focussed on single-player and small-group multiplayer co-op. They should have spent more time on level design and made more out of one of their unique selling points; the London setting. Any randomisation of areas should have been strictly confined to underground areas and sewers. To be honest, I got the impression that nobody involved in developing the game had even visited the city it was set in. Even spending some time online looking at photos would have helped them develop a far more atmospheric game. Getting in some people who know how to actually write plot and dialogue would also have helped. The story concept was awesome, but the execution was woeful.
I've not read them myself, but I have heard from others that the Hellgate novels are actually "not half bad" as video-game conversions go (I know this isn't saying much). It therefore beggars belief that they managed to give us a game with less narrative impact than the original Doom.
The console battle is a long game, though, so this isn't the best estimation. Besides which, it's almost impossible to know who's made the most money after games-revenues are taken into account - they're pretty coy about this. If anything, the momentum is with Microsoft at the moment. When the Xbox launched, the idea that they'd ever be level-pegging with Sony on market penetration was pretty laughable. Besides, we're only half-way through this round (if that), and the most interesting (and profitable) half is still to come. And this is where games sales will be key.
Bah, this is what I get for making posts first thing in the morning.
Last sentence of the first paragraph should read:
"In fact, looking at the September through December releases, I can't see a single game coming out on the Wii that most gamers (as in, the people who are likely to buy games beyond what comes with their initial bundle) are likely to get out of bed for."
And the first sentence of the last paragraph should read:
"Of course, this isn't to deny that Nintendo has done better than during the last cycle, when a late spurt by the Xbox pushed it into 3rd place globally."
Yes and no.
They have a similar units-sold lead to that which Sony established last cycle with the PS2. However, while Sony's lead in console sales was matched by a roughly equivalent lead in game sales (which is where the real profit is in this industry), Nintendo is actually significantly behind its competitors in this field this time around. So the huge installed base isn't actually equating into a "win" per se. A wii that is bought by a non-gamer, used for a month and then sits forgotten in a cupboard (which is, like it or not, not an uncommon occurance) is a one-off shot of cash for Nintendo, but that's not how you win the console-wars, as it doesn't really do much to attract developers to your system and does less to secure you a long-term profit stream. It's already clear that the predictions that most developers would focus on making their AAA titles for the Wii was false. A quick look at the (impressive) list of big releases this holiday season shows that simultaneous 360/PS3 releases (sometimes with a PC version thrown in) is the most common model. In fact, looking at the September through December releases, I can't see a single game that most gamers (as in, the people who are likely to buy games beyond what comes with their initial bundle) are likely to get out of bed for.
Basically, with the PS3 making some steps in catching up with the 360's initial lead, unless Nintendo can sort out its long-standing (3 console generations now) problem of not actually having enough games worth playing on its non-handheld systems, the most likely outcome of this round of the console wars is a rough 3-way tie. Unless it can convince the non-gamers who picked up the console when it was the "hot, trendy new thing" to go out and start buying some games, Nintendo may find the second half of this cycle to be very lean years. By contrast, MS and Sony will continue to benefit from the slow but steady turnover of the home-TVs market into HDTV.
Of course, this isn't to deny that Nintendo has done better than during the last cycle, when a late spurt by the 360 pushed it into 3rd place globally. It does, however, demonstrate that despite a hugely successful launch for their new hardware and controller (where the mainstream media seemed to fall over itself to generate Nintendo's hype for it), the same structural weaknesses that hindered the N64 and Gamecube still remain.
Stand-alone download installers for WoW patches are indeed available, albeit not always easily so. Certainly, Fileplanet makes them available, but with heavy priority for subscribers. That said, there's often a bit of a wait for the stand-alone downloads to appear, particularly for the non-US versions.
The best piece of advice that I can give about getting WoW patches is to not use the Blizzard torrent client to get it. Let the update start using the default client, then cancel it immediately. You can then grab the .torrent file from a temporary directory within your WoW folder and feed it to a "proper" bittorrent client, which has actual connection configuration options. The default client likes to max out my upstream (and can't be disuaded from doing so easily), with the result that my connection become near-unusable and my downstream speed suffers horribly. By using a proper client and capping the upstream 10k/sec below maximum (which still allows for a decent upload speed and maintains my status as a good citizen), I was able to achieve almost 10 times the download speed I was getting from the official client (going from 60k/sec to 550k/sec), while also keeping my connection vaguely usable for other things.
On an unrelated note, Blizzard are absolutely horrible at rolling out patches. I used to be a hardcore Final Fantasy XI player and since then I've had short bursts in Lord of the Rings Online. FFXI patch-day bugs would be things like "some obscure fight in the Den of Rancor which nobody's done for weeks now has a bit of a pathing-bug, which we'll fix overnight". LotRO patch day was a bit bumpier, but that's understandable given it was a new game at the time and even then, stuff was fixed quite quickly. Any major patch from Blizzard effectively means at least a week (sometimes more) of seriously disrupted play, through server instability and massively disruptive bugs. The most recent patch has resulted in innumerable server crashes and restarts, severe intermittent latency issues throughout the evenings, disconnects when zoning in and out of instances, and a number of graphical bugs affecting machines with SLI graphics cards (albeit bugs with workarounds). The previous patch (2.4) effectively made Heroic instances unplayable for a week, along with the usual latency and disconnection problems. All of this is despite Blizzard having one of the longest and most public testing cycles in the industry for new patches, via the PTR (test realm).
Oh don't worry, if you move beyond the films, there is plenty of suck in the post-original-trilogy era. I'm not quite sure why I actually read so much of it - I suspect a period at work where I had regular plane journeys every week contributed, as brain-dead trash books can pass a flight pretty well.
But if you look at any kind of list of Star Wars novels set after the films, you can chalk up pretty much anything by Kevin J. Anderson as "borderline unreadable tripe" (and to be honest, his Star Wars stuff is less toxic than his Dune stuff). The New Jedi Order stuff is also incredibly patchy - there are a few decent enough efforts in there, but also some of the worst fiction I've ever read, particularly in the first half of the series. Timothy Zahn's novels are probably the best, particularly the old Heir to the Empire trilogy, but they depart pretty wildly from the "feel" of the movies.
The closest I've seen any other Star Was product come to emulating the feel of the original trilogy is the original KoTOR. I remember playing it and thinking that Lucas should have let Bioware develop the prequel movies.
Highly unlikely, given it's an MMO. The genre tends not to need much in the way of copy-protection, due to the whole "you need a paid-for account, created using a valid CD key to play" thing.
I can't, off the top of my head, even think of any MMOs that require you to have the disk in the drive to play.