In fairness, the number of people who actually download and run the Xbox 360 leak will be tiny compared to what the effect would have been with a PC-version leak. Getting pirated games running on a 360 involves the kind of hardware modification that is beyond the level of the average user and, in any event, makes the machine unusable on Xbox Live.
The impact of this leak will be fairly tiny in terms of lost sales. Plot spoilers etc are going to be more of a concern.
I won't be buying one on the basis of this announcement. I travel between the UK and US several times a year and I always take both my DS and my PSP with me. The great thing is that, if I decide I need a new game for the flight, I can buy one at either end of the journey. My DS and PSP games are basically an even split of US and UK games. For me, a region-locked handheld is useless.
It matters slightly less on the full-sized consoles, but even there, I've benefitted greatly from the lack of region locking on the PS3.
I've never been a Nintendo fanboy, but it does seem like almost everything they've done since the Wii came out has been an effort to see just how far they can push their hardcore fanbase before they finally snap. From the cash-in "casual-means-crap" shovelware flood they've authorised that's drowning the Wii, to the virtually unprecedented introduction of region-locking on a hand-held, they've amply demonstrated why having Nintendo in a dominant market position is a bad thing for gamers.
Hmm... the Gamasutra article struck me as a little pretentious, but maybe that's just because I actually like big orchestral scores for games. Some of my favorites include:
Wing Commander: Yeah, it was low quality midis, but at the time, it was jaw-dropping. It felt like you were playing a Star Wars movie on your PC and the soundtrack was a huge part of that. From the intro sequence, with the theme that was more than a little reminiscent of the ST:TNG theme, through to the battle music and the Kilrathi theme (also used for fun in Ultima 7), the music in the first 2 games was awesome. Who can forget the cheesy-but-classic "scramble" music that played before every mission?
Star Control 2: Each of the many alien races in the game had its own music and this played a huge part in setting the atmosphere for every encounter. The Ur-Quan and Yehat music, in particular, have stayed in my mind to this day as examples of great videogame music.
X-Wing: The Lucasarts I-Muse system which changed the soundtrack to reflect the progress of the battle was revolutionary. The audio cues from the music would directly influence your battle tactics. You knew that a few bars of the Imperial March meant that trouble was headed your way.
Pretty much anything Final Fantasy: Ok, perhaps the soundtracks haven't been universally stellar, but pretty much every Final Fantasy game has had a few tracks worthy of real notice. FF6's Overworld theme, FF7's Cosmo Canyon theme (and, of course, One Winged Angel), FF10's "To Zanarkand" and FF11's Memoria de la Stono all stand out as some of the best pieces of video game music ever.
Super Smash Brothers Brawl: The fantastic main theme, which is used appropriately throughout the story-campaign, does a great job in adding a touch of gravitas to what could otherwise be a rather lightweight story.
Remember, we're talking almost entirely about console games here. PC games have a long tradition of free downloadable post-release content (I remember waiting for my weekly Total Annihilation unit to be released) and it's never really been seen as an anti-piracy or anti-resale measure there. To be blunt, PC piracy is so wide-spread that something like this as an anti-piracy measure would feature pretty highly on the King Canute scale of futility.
Over on the consoles (where around 99% of used-games sales take place), downloadable content is still a newer phenomenon are it's clear that developers are still playing around with how to use it and what the terms and conditions could be. In addition, outside of China, piracy of games for the current generation of consoles is not really a particularly huge issue. Even back in the last generation, when everybody knew that most PS2's could be fairly easily "chipped" to run pirated games, it was too much hassle for all but a small minority of users, unlike the "download, apply crack and run" model of PC games piracy. I suspect PS2 piracy has taken off more since the console "retired", to be honest, as emulation (which allows you to achieve similar results to a chipped PS2 on a reasonably mid or high end PC, without any messing around with solder) has really taken off since then.
No, this is, as TFA says, aimed at reducing second-hand games sales. Of course, consumers should always have the right to sell on their games at will. This should go without saying. Plenty of places enshrine this in their consumer law and it makes me wonder whether these limited-install DRM systems we're seeing on the PC will stand the legal test over time. However, from the point of view of a game developer, a second-hand game sale is as bad as a pirated game, in some ways - they don't see any money from it. In fact, in some ways it's worse. Your average pirate has given no indication that he would have bought the game anyway. The average second-hand buyer has probably spent at least 75% of the retail price of the game (and in many cases more) if he has bought it in a high-street shop. In other words, this is somebody who came very close to giving the developers money.
Now, while I live in the UK, I do go over to the US around twice a year and while I'm there, I generally stock up on PC, PS2 and PS3 games (I have an imported PS3 and like to pick up the obscure Japanese PS2 RPGs that never make it to Europe). It always amazes me in US game shops how hard the staff will push me to take a used copy of a game, when I walk up to the counter with a new copy. Generally, the difference in price is no greater than $5 (in fact it's often less) and as I'll be carrying the game 4,000 miles or so before actually playing it, I will always default to buying a new copy in the absence of any other options, as it's kinda hard for me to return a game that turns out to be defective. Nevertheless, despite explaining this at the counter, I've had to listen to several minutes of cajoling on occasion. The reason why is pretty clear, the shop will make a couple of dollars on a new-game sale, but with the ridiculously low payouts it gives to the people trading in their games, it could make ten times that profit in some cases on the used game. While UK game shops have used-game sections, they aren't as huge as in the States and I've never had any pressure from the staff to buy one instead. I don't know whether it's the economics or the staff training that is different.
Additional downloadable content like this might push a few people over from buying a used copy to a new one. As I say, we're generally talking about a very small price gap here. Extra content is more likely to appeal to the fairly hardcore gamer market (I include myself in that group) and the less salubrious members of said market, who nevertheless buy a lot of games, might in some cases be tempted by that small price difference between a new and a used game. This could cause them to think again. However, I suspect that there are two possib
The big problem I have with Mario Kart is that they have surgically excised both skill and fun from the game. There are too many racers on the track at once now... too many weapons being fired off constantly on every side. Moreover, the way the game penalises players for driving well by giving players behind them super-powered weapons that are impossible to evade means that the only way to win on 100cc setting is to deliberately drive badly until the second half of the final lap.
Not my idea of fun. Double Dash wasn't perfect, but it was vastly better than this.
Super Smash Brothers, on the other hand, added a fairly engaging storyline mode (which is a first for the series) and looked and sounded better than pretty much anything else on the Wii. Yes, some of the game mechanics feel a bit dated and the platforming sections occasionally feel rushed, but there is still the nucleus of a very good game in there.
And what loupgarou21 says holds perfectly true for it. It's not doing anything you couldn't do on a mouse and keyboard and if you play for more than 30 minutes at a time, it gets very uncomfortable. Plus the Metroid Prime gameplay has now been through 3 iterations with almost no changes (or significant graphical uplifts) and is now feeling very, very dated.
To date, the only first party game for the Wii I've found that I actually genuinely like is Super Smash Bros Brawl, which has decent production values and doesn't actually use the motion sensing functions of the controller. The rest seem to have ranged from the fair-to-middling (Zelda, Mario Galaxy) to the downright awful (Mario Kart Wii - probably the worst "big title" game of 2008 so far on any platform, due to some really dodgy design decisions).
Elsewhere, with a couple of notable exceptions (such as the decent ports of Okami and Resident Evil 4), the system does seem to be drowning under a tide of low-budget shovelware. I didn't pick up the Wii version myself, but from what I understand, the Wii version of Force Unleashed was even more disappointing than the 360 and PS3 versions (another good contender for biggest let-down of the year, on any of its many platforms), as it combined early-PS2 quality graphics with lightsabre mechanics that fell well short of the actual lightsabre control that people had been hoping for.
Now, I freely admit I've not been a fan of the Wii concept from the very beginning. It does, however, feel like over the last 6 months or so, even some of the Nintendo faithful have become increasingly disillusioned by Nintendo's apparent acceptance of the popular concept that "casual" games are effectively "rushed, low quality" games. The novelty of the controller has worn off now and the Wii won't be the hot, trendy main-stream ticket this coming Christmas that it was last year. Decent games are desperately needed, whether or not they make use of motion sensing.
Now, what's the article about?
Oh yes, Crystal Chronicles. Didn't like the first one on the Gamecube, thought the recent DS version was kinda fun but not Earth-shattering, can't say I'll be camping out in line to pick up the new one. I used to be (and to some degree still am) a huge Square-Enix fanboy, but I've been getting a little worried of late. Final Fantasy XIII looks great, but it's taking a hell of a long time to appear. The Kingdom Hearts series appears to be stuck in some kind of limbo of uninspiring hand-held and mobile phone games. Infinite Undiscovery on the 360 is not even close to being as good as Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey from Mistwalker. The lone bright spot among their recent releases has been Crisis Core, which was, I admit, very good indeed. Besides that, it appears that they've allowed too many side-projects and spin-off franchises to distract them from their core strengths.
As the article points out, Crysis had some really great sound. However, badly deployed sound can be an absolute killer.
Embarrassing confession time: I just replayed Doom 3, the other week. Don't ask me why, I just had these strange urges to.
On replaying it, it struck me that while the graphics are still excellent and the atmosphere is good in many ways, the sound actually acts as a negative. Why? Because sound is too definitive a cue that there are enemies nearby. If you hear a demonic snuffling, it means you are about to be ambushed. By listening to the kind of snuffling, you can tell what's about to jump out. This defuses a lot of the tension. I remember that the excellent Aliens-TC WAD for the original Doom had a fantastic alternative for this. The designers locked enemies inside small, self-contained boxes "within" the walls of the levels. The player could never encounter these, without the use of IDSPISPOPD, but he could sure as hell hear them. Removing the absolute link between monster sounds and monsters actually appearing added a huge amount of tension to the game.
I found HL2's storytelling to be profoundly inadequate. Valve's techniques just about worked for HL1, which was in many ways quite a technically primative game. However, when you have the level of realism in graphics (particularly facial features) that you see in HL2, as well as the more complicated plot, then having a mute protagonist who can run around the room bouncing while people are talking to him is an immersion killer for me. A Deus Ex style conversation interface would have worked far better. Even Doom 3's system of mixing non-interactive cutscenes with PDA text worked slightly better. I guess it's a kind of analogue to the "freaky valley" situation.
Yes, allowing partial success is a good move. You put some optional goodies for those who can do a sequence perfectly, but to the average gamer, you say "good enough, you can go to the next section".
With regard to actual difficulty, as opposed to the topics I comment on... well... having to retry a difficult sequence 20 times because it is difficult doesn't annoy me too much. The feeling of accomplishment when I beat it is worth the reward. What annoys and frustrates me is having to replay the previous 15 minutes of gameplay, or watch the preceding unskippable 3 minute cutscene again each time I do it.
I broke a Wii-mote recently, by throwing it against the wall (yeah, childish, I know, but it happens). The culprit was the Wii version of Okami and that STUPID section where you have to rejuvenate the big tree in the first village. I could just about cope with the fact that the game was incredibly temperamental in what it would accept as a "circle" drawn around each bud. What I couldn't accept was having to sit through that stupid old fart do his idiotic speech and dance before each attempt.
Nope, if you don't like having a quick-save option, the answer is... don't use it.
It's only a badly designed game that relies on trial and error so much that you *have* to use the quick-save function for every battle. However, the option should always be there. Players who don't like it can just not use it. You mention yourself that you played WC3 without allowing yourself to save on any mission. Good for you, I'm glad you found a way to enjoy the game. But don't inflict your own tastes on others, in a fashion that gives them no opportunity for a similar workaround.
The elements that make a game frustrating are often quite different from those that make a game challenging. There are a few very simple design tweaks that can be made to promote the latter at the expense of the former:
1) Make difficulty tweakable and make it a genuine skill range. Gamers these days have wildly diverging skill levels. What's challenging for one gamer is completely impossible for another. Ninja Gaiden is an illustration of how this can go wrong. For me, it was very, very hard. I know a few people however who took it back to the shop because they couldn't get past the first level. By all means, lock achievement points or other inessential goodies away on the harder difficulties. The original Baldur's Gate had the most broken difficulty system ever. Not only did reducing the difficulty level reduce the xp you earned, but if you had to load your game to retry a fight multiple times, the game would spawn even more enemies to make things harder.
2) Do everything you can to avoid making the player replay lengthy sequences. For the most part, this means allowing full quick-saves. I will, grudgingly, admit that there are a few types of game where quick-saves don't fit well. In these cases, regular check-points are the way to go. Even generally very easy games can become frustrating if a single silly mistake means you have to replay 10-15 minutes (or more) of stuff you've done already - perhaps several times. Rockstar games are good illustrations of how not to do this - too often, a mistake that occurs due to the somewhat craperific controls means you need to replay an entire 20 minute mission. Even Bully, which is their easiest outing by far, is prone to this. If anybody on your design team suggests that restricting the player's ability to save the game would make your title "unique" or "challenging", sack them. Note that I'm only suggesting sacking them because killing them is probably illegal.
3) Give the player at least something of a clue as to what he's supposed to do next. There's nothing worse in an fps than patrolling the same few sections of corridor for an hour because you can't see where you're supposed to go next. The AvP games were awful for this - the Alien campaigns were completely ruined by the amount of time you spent searching for some air-vent or grate you're supposed to go through. If I'm playing a 9 foot tall armour plated acid blooded killing machine, I want the option of tearing down locked doors - not hunting for a slightly differently textured great that I can mysteriously break, unlike the 99 near-identical others I passed.
4) If your game is based around "equal" struggle between two or more participants (eg. in RTSes or 1 on 1 brawlers), then make sure that AI opponents are bound by the same rules as players. One thing I absolutely hate are RTSes where I can completely cut off an AI player's resource flow and yet he can still pump out tanks faster than I can.
5) Cutscenes are great, but they should always be skippable. 'nuff said.
Disagree on your fundamental point: "no more cutscenes". Plot is a huge part of gaming for me and, to date, nobody has come up with a better system for conveying plot than non-interactive cutscenes. Some have tried (eg. Valve) but to varying degrees, they've all failed.
Agree, however, than non-skippable cutscenes, particularly before difficult sequences, need to be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Every week we have the same chorus over voice comms.
Illidan: "You are not prepared" Us: "Oh yes we are!"
Sadly, I don't think we'll be fighting him much from now on. The plan is to focus exclusively on Sunwell and aim for a Kil'Jaeden kill before WotLK hits. Unfortunately, a lot of the changes announced in this patch are liable to make that harder.
On the basis of 3 hours or so play, it's a pretty but generally uninspired 3d Diablo clone, at heart. Sure, it mixes Norse mythology with sci-fi, but that's hardly new. Just ask John Romero - I seem to remember him at least partly doing that in Daikatana (although if, like most people, you only played the demo, you won't have seen those bits). It's also really easy, the enemies seem to auto-scale (a la Oblivion), which is a feature that should be consigned to the dustbin of history, and the camera is annoying. Personally, I'd go for a 6 on 10. Maybe a 7 on the basis of the graphics.
Is this just another case of Derek Smart thinking his IQ is at least twice what it really is?
You miss my point entirely. Yes, Bioware has, in many cases (with the notable exceptions of Jade Empire and Mass Effect) taken existing universes and just developed stories within them. As I said, most of the stories they have written range from the good to the fantastic. They fit extremely well within their settings. KOTOR was the best Star Wars story we'd seen since Empire Strikes Back. However, Planescape Torment was the only game they did which took an existing setting and then went completely outside of the expected bounds with the story. The setting of PST was pretty much irrelevant - the character work and the wit and intellect of the dialogue made the game truly exceptional.
Also, presentation matters in storytelling in any medium. Even (in fact, some might say especially) in the printed word. No matter how good the story in the author's mind might be, it won't be a good story unless he can find the right words to tell it in. How often have you seen a cracking story ruined because the author doesn't have the talent to realise it properly and falls back on cliche and repetition? Even looking at Tolkein (who I have enjoyed reading immensely over the years), the strength of his story is occasionally let down by what is, in a few places, some rather leaden prose. And as for the verse... well... let's not even go there.
There have been decent game stories around for years now - going back at least as far as Ultima IV. We've also been seeing them much more frequently recently. I must confess, though, I wouldn't have ranked this guy or the games he's put out right up there at the top of the list. As others have said, the Longest Journey was great, Dreamfell was weak and Anarchy Online... oh come on, is that really the best you can do? I'm not sure about individuals, but there are plenty of developers around in the industry who can do it better.
Bioware are obviously very good at crafting stories, but I think Planescape Torment is their only real masterpiece, from a story point of view. Their other games have had stories ranging from the great to the truly excellent (KOTOR and BG2 in particular), but PST was the only one to really go beyond the category of "fantastically well-done, but nevertheless formulaic fantasy/sci-fi fare".
Square-Enix are, if anything, even better. Their heavily cutscene-based style isn't to all tastes (though it is to mine), but they've gone beyond the point of just writing good stories and to the kind of level where, when they're on form, their games have well developed structures and themes. Look at Final Fantasy IX (not my favorite installment) and note how the game has theatre scenes at the beginning, the intermission, and the end. Also note how the two little jester guys act as a chorus throughout most of the game. Again, in Final Fantasy X, there's a consistent theme of "death" running throughout the entire game. Yes, it has bright and colourful graphics and a few irritating characters (yes, Wakka, I'm looking at you), but almost every character back-story, side-quest and main plot element in the game revolves around death.
Persona 3 really impressed me from the story point of view. Not because its "go to school and save the world in your spare time" plot is new or exciting, but because it structured itself so as to do a really good job of capturing the feel and structure of a 26 episode anime series (Shakugan no Shana was the one that leaped to mind for me, but other parallels are equally valid) in the format of a game.
I didn't rate Valve's storytelling in Half-Life 2 or its expansion - I just can't buy into the mute Gordon Freeman as a protagonist in that setting. Portal, however, had an absolutely fantastic minimalist story, told through some really clever techniques.
Finally, after a really, really dodgy start with Blue Dragon, I was really impressed with the level of the storytelling in Lost Odyssey. I'm not talking about the main plot here, which is a fairly standard steampunk affair (with heavy inspiration from Final Fantasy VIII). Rather, I'm talking about the dreams you unlocked throughout the game. These were nothing more than animated text, on a lightly illustrated background, with a couple of minimalist sound-effects, yet they did a fantastic job at bringing the game world alive and building up Kaim's character far more effectively than any traditional device would have.
Wing Commander was for me at least as much about the story as about the space combat. If I wanted a really decent tactical space-flight simulator, I'd play X-Wing, TIE-Fighter, or, later on, X-Wing Alliance (XvT left me cold). Wing Commander was about cheesy, fast-paced combat and a stupidly melodramatic, but nevertheless enjoyable, story. The final "battle" in Wing Commander 4 (which isn't a battle at all, but a debate), ranks for me as one of the finest moments in gaming history. The Freespace games never engrossed me - they didn't have the rich universe of the Wing Commander games, or the tactical depth of the Star Wars ones.
I really hope that they've got some good lore behind Dark Horizon. I used to love this genre and it'd be nice to see it rise from the ashes. If that is to happen, then we need some games where the artistic elements have been given as much attention as the flashy graphics and the physics.
Hmm... I see your point, but you're being a little harsh on people in general, I think.
I grew up in a little town in the North West of the UK called Hyde. This town is known for being where the UK's most prolific serial killer on record went about his business; Dr. Harold Shipman. I remember how people in Hyde reacted when the story broke, and how this changed as it developed.
In some ways, the parallels with this case are strong. Sure, there are differences - while he committed suicide before he could be tried for more than a handful of them, the best estimates (from medical and judicial professionals, not the gutter press) are that Shipman killed hundreds (I've seen numbers from 200-400 throughout his career quoted), while Reiser just killed one. However, I think the similarities outweigh that.
Both were highly respected within their respective communities. Both were, in some ways, slightly odd, but certainly not to the extent you'd consider them dangerous. Both, thought themselves smart enough to talk their way out of any situation, including a well-evidenced murder rap. Both, ultimately, found out that they weren't.
Shipman was always popular around Hyde, particularly with his elderly patients (who formed the bulk of his victims). I did some summer work, before the story broke, at another General Practice in the area while I was a student and there was always a steady drip-drip-drip of patients leaving the books of the practice where I worked to move over to Shipman's. He was renowned for a good bed-side manner and his patients liked the fact that his surgery was a one-man-band; they could be sure that they'd always see the same doctor when they needed to, whereas at a larger practice, they might end up seeing somebody they didn't know so well.
The first public rumblings came when it was revealed that a non-local woman had complained to the police, after she'd been cut out of her recently and suddenly deceased (Hyde resident) mother's will in favour of Shipman. The reaction of both the local press (albeit by inference) and public was pretty much unanimous. "The mother was very old and had just died of natural causes - she hadn't been fantastically well for some time, after all. She'd been living on her own in Hyde for years, not seeing much of her daughter. It perhaps wasn't surprising that she'd decided to leave her money to her well-liked GP, who she would have seen a lot of in her later years, rather than to a daughter who she felt had abandoned her. The accusations were just a spiteful attempt to get the will overturned."
This lasted several months. However, as time went on, it became clear that the police were actually taking this very, very seriously. More and more bodies were exhumed. There was talk of strong evidence that the will in question was a clumsy forgery. More and more local residents came forward to say "Actually, my Mum died quite suddenly, now that I think about it, and the last person she saw was Shipman". Then it came out that a GP at another local practice had actually informed the police of her concerns about the number of deaths among Shipman's patients over a year earlier and had been ignored. By the time the trial started, there were few in Hyde who believed that Shipman was innocent.
Can you blame people for this? Not really. The man was, to use a rather hackneyed but nevertheless fitting phrase, a pillar of the community. People base their beliefs on the evidence they have available to them and in the early days this was very thin. The narrative of the spiteful attempt to overturn the will fit with the general public mood quite well, and understandably so - there was growing concern at the time throughout the country (and there still is today), that litigation was making it impossible for medical practitioners to do their jobs safely. When the available evidence changed, people's views changed. At a guess, I'd say an overwhelming majority of the locals went through this path, self included.
How can this be impossible to detect? I remember that when I submitted my MA dissertation (a 50,000 word piece about Roman military history), I had a three hour viva on it, where two senior members of the faculty and an external examiner asked me a huge range of questions about not only the subject matter itself, but the processes I'd gone through in researching and writing my dissertation. I know for sure that if I hadn't written the thing myself, there was no way I could have made it through that. Even my significantly more modest undergraduate dissertation (a snip at just 10,000 words) was subject to a 45 minute viva, before a similar panel. Again, if I'd paid somebody else to write it, I'd have stumbled within the first five minutes.
It seems here that "impossible to detect" actually means "impossible to detect without using tried and tested methods that are just too tiresome and/or expensive to use". Admittedly, viva scrutiny isn't possible for every single assignment, but I really would hope that any institution worth its salt would be subjecting final year dissertations to this level of probing. Maybe this doesn't apply in IT courses? I'd find that very surprising, but maybe somebody else with more relevant experience could shed some light.
I suppose Steam is starting to move in this direction on the PC. I logged into it for the first time in 6 months the other night and was pleasantly surprised at how much the list of games available had grown.
That said, while I don't follow such things closely, I believe steam's copy protection has been broken for quite some time.
Slashdot Mirror
In fairness, the number of people who actually download and run the Xbox 360 leak will be tiny compared to what the effect would have been with a PC-version leak. Getting pirated games running on a 360 involves the kind of hardware modification that is beyond the level of the average user and, in any event, makes the machine unusable on Xbox Live.
The impact of this leak will be fairly tiny in terms of lost sales. Plot spoilers etc are going to be more of a concern.
I won't be buying one on the basis of this announcement. I travel between the UK and US several times a year and I always take both my DS and my PSP with me. The great thing is that, if I decide I need a new game for the flight, I can buy one at either end of the journey. My DS and PSP games are basically an even split of US and UK games. For me, a region-locked handheld is useless.
It matters slightly less on the full-sized consoles, but even there, I've benefitted greatly from the lack of region locking on the PS3.
I've never been a Nintendo fanboy, but it does seem like almost everything they've done since the Wii came out has been an effort to see just how far they can push their hardcore fanbase before they finally snap. From the cash-in "casual-means-crap" shovelware flood they've authorised that's drowning the Wii, to the virtually unprecedented introduction of region-locking on a hand-held, they've amply demonstrated why having Nintendo in a dominant market position is a bad thing for gamers.
Hmm... the Gamasutra article struck me as a little pretentious, but maybe that's just because I actually like big orchestral scores for games. Some of my favorites include:
Wing Commander: Yeah, it was low quality midis, but at the time, it was jaw-dropping. It felt like you were playing a Star Wars movie on your PC and the soundtrack was a huge part of that. From the intro sequence, with the theme that was more than a little reminiscent of the ST:TNG theme, through to the battle music and the Kilrathi theme (also used for fun in Ultima 7), the music in the first 2 games was awesome. Who can forget the cheesy-but-classic "scramble" music that played before every mission?
Star Control 2: Each of the many alien races in the game had its own music and this played a huge part in setting the atmosphere for every encounter. The Ur-Quan and Yehat music, in particular, have stayed in my mind to this day as examples of great videogame music.
X-Wing: The Lucasarts I-Muse system which changed the soundtrack to reflect the progress of the battle was revolutionary. The audio cues from the music would directly influence your battle tactics. You knew that a few bars of the Imperial March meant that trouble was headed your way.
Pretty much anything Final Fantasy: Ok, perhaps the soundtracks haven't been universally stellar, but pretty much every Final Fantasy game has had a few tracks worthy of real notice. FF6's Overworld theme, FF7's Cosmo Canyon theme (and, of course, One Winged Angel), FF10's "To Zanarkand" and FF11's Memoria de la Stono all stand out as some of the best pieces of video game music ever.
Super Smash Brothers Brawl: The fantastic main theme, which is used appropriately throughout the story-campaign, does a great job in adding a touch of gravitas to what could otherwise be a rather lightweight story.
Oh yeah, true.
I hate Gamestation and try to pretend it doesn't exist. Happily, I'm well served for Game stores both near home and work.
Remember, we're talking almost entirely about console games here. PC games have a long tradition of free downloadable post-release content (I remember waiting for my weekly Total Annihilation unit to be released) and it's never really been seen as an anti-piracy or anti-resale measure there. To be blunt, PC piracy is so wide-spread that something like this as an anti-piracy measure would feature pretty highly on the King Canute scale of futility.
Over on the consoles (where around 99% of used-games sales take place), downloadable content is still a newer phenomenon are it's clear that developers are still playing around with how to use it and what the terms and conditions could be. In addition, outside of China, piracy of games for the current generation of consoles is not really a particularly huge issue. Even back in the last generation, when everybody knew that most PS2's could be fairly easily "chipped" to run pirated games, it was too much hassle for all but a small minority of users, unlike the "download, apply crack and run" model of PC games piracy. I suspect PS2 piracy has taken off more since the console "retired", to be honest, as emulation (which allows you to achieve similar results to a chipped PS2 on a reasonably mid or high end PC, without any messing around with solder) has really taken off since then.
No, this is, as TFA says, aimed at reducing second-hand games sales. Of course, consumers should always have the right to sell on their games at will. This should go without saying. Plenty of places enshrine this in their consumer law and it makes me wonder whether these limited-install DRM systems we're seeing on the PC will stand the legal test over time. However, from the point of view of a game developer, a second-hand game sale is as bad as a pirated game, in some ways - they don't see any money from it. In fact, in some ways it's worse. Your average pirate has given no indication that he would have bought the game anyway. The average second-hand buyer has probably spent at least 75% of the retail price of the game (and in many cases more) if he has bought it in a high-street shop. In other words, this is somebody who came very close to giving the developers money.
Now, while I live in the UK, I do go over to the US around twice a year and while I'm there, I generally stock up on PC, PS2 and PS3 games (I have an imported PS3 and like to pick up the obscure Japanese PS2 RPGs that never make it to Europe). It always amazes me in US game shops how hard the staff will push me to take a used copy of a game, when I walk up to the counter with a new copy. Generally, the difference in price is no greater than $5 (in fact it's often less) and as I'll be carrying the game 4,000 miles or so before actually playing it, I will always default to buying a new copy in the absence of any other options, as it's kinda hard for me to return a game that turns out to be defective. Nevertheless, despite explaining this at the counter, I've had to listen to several minutes of cajoling on occasion. The reason why is pretty clear, the shop will make a couple of dollars on a new-game sale, but with the ridiculously low payouts it gives to the people trading in their games, it could make ten times that profit in some cases on the used game. While UK game shops have used-game sections, they aren't as huge as in the States and I've never had any pressure from the staff to buy one instead. I don't know whether it's the economics or the staff training that is different.
Additional downloadable content like this might push a few people over from buying a used copy to a new one. As I say, we're generally talking about a very small price gap here. Extra content is more likely to appeal to the fairly hardcore gamer market (I include myself in that group) and the less salubrious members of said market, who nevertheless buy a lot of games, might in some cases be tempted by that small price difference between a new and a used game. This could cause them to think again. However, I suspect that there are two possib
The big problem I have with Mario Kart is that they have surgically excised both skill and fun from the game. There are too many racers on the track at once now... too many weapons being fired off constantly on every side. Moreover, the way the game penalises players for driving well by giving players behind them super-powered weapons that are impossible to evade means that the only way to win on 100cc setting is to deliberately drive badly until the second half of the final lap.
Not my idea of fun. Double Dash wasn't perfect, but it was vastly better than this.
Super Smash Brothers, on the other hand, added a fairly engaging storyline mode (which is a first for the series) and looked and sounded better than pretty much anything else on the Wii. Yes, some of the game mechanics feel a bit dated and the platforming sections occasionally feel rushed, but there is still the nucleus of a very good game in there.
But I have.
And what loupgarou21 says holds perfectly true for it. It's not doing anything you couldn't do on a mouse and keyboard and if you play for more than 30 minutes at a time, it gets very uncomfortable. Plus the Metroid Prime gameplay has now been through 3 iterations with almost no changes (or significant graphical uplifts) and is now feeling very, very dated.
To date, the only first party game for the Wii I've found that I actually genuinely like is Super Smash Bros Brawl, which has decent production values and doesn't actually use the motion sensing functions of the controller. The rest seem to have ranged from the fair-to-middling (Zelda, Mario Galaxy) to the downright awful (Mario Kart Wii - probably the worst "big title" game of 2008 so far on any platform, due to some really dodgy design decisions).
Elsewhere, with a couple of notable exceptions (such as the decent ports of Okami and Resident Evil 4), the system does seem to be drowning under a tide of low-budget shovelware. I didn't pick up the Wii version myself, but from what I understand, the Wii version of Force Unleashed was even more disappointing than the 360 and PS3 versions (another good contender for biggest let-down of the year, on any of its many platforms), as it combined early-PS2 quality graphics with lightsabre mechanics that fell well short of the actual lightsabre control that people had been hoping for.
Now, I freely admit I've not been a fan of the Wii concept from the very beginning. It does, however, feel like over the last 6 months or so, even some of the Nintendo faithful have become increasingly disillusioned by Nintendo's apparent acceptance of the popular concept that "casual" games are effectively "rushed, low quality" games. The novelty of the controller has worn off now and the Wii won't be the hot, trendy main-stream ticket this coming Christmas that it was last year. Decent games are desperately needed, whether or not they make use of motion sensing.
Now, what's the article about?
Oh yes, Crystal Chronicles. Didn't like the first one on the Gamecube, thought the recent DS version was kinda fun but not Earth-shattering, can't say I'll be camping out in line to pick up the new one. I used to be (and to some degree still am) a huge Square-Enix fanboy, but I've been getting a little worried of late. Final Fantasy XIII looks great, but it's taking a hell of a long time to appear. The Kingdom Hearts series appears to be stuck in some kind of limbo of uninspiring hand-held and mobile phone games. Infinite Undiscovery on the 360 is not even close to being as good as Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey from Mistwalker. The lone bright spot among their recent releases has been Crisis Core, which was, I admit, very good indeed. Besides that, it appears that they've allowed too many side-projects and spin-off franchises to distract them from their core strengths.
I used to play Final Fantasy XI.
You wouldn't believe how many white-haired Elvaan with names like "Sefiroth", "Sephirouth" and "Sephirothe" there were running around on each server.
Nope, perfectly playable under xp/DX9. You just can't get some of the fancy graphics effects.
Given the dilemma posed by Vista's epic crappiness and a few shiny water effects, I think I'll stick with xp.
As the article points out, Crysis had some really great sound. However, badly deployed sound can be an absolute killer.
Embarrassing confession time: I just replayed Doom 3, the other week. Don't ask me why, I just had these strange urges to.
On replaying it, it struck me that while the graphics are still excellent and the atmosphere is good in many ways, the sound actually acts as a negative. Why? Because sound is too definitive a cue that there are enemies nearby. If you hear a demonic snuffling, it means you are about to be ambushed. By listening to the kind of snuffling, you can tell what's about to jump out. This defuses a lot of the tension. I remember that the excellent Aliens-TC WAD for the original Doom had a fantastic alternative for this. The designers locked enemies inside small, self-contained boxes "within" the walls of the levels. The player could never encounter these, without the use of IDSPISPOPD, but he could sure as hell hear them. Removing the absolute link between monster sounds and monsters actually appearing added a huge amount of tension to the game.
I found HL2's storytelling to be profoundly inadequate. Valve's techniques just about worked for HL1, which was in many ways quite a technically primative game. However, when you have the level of realism in graphics (particularly facial features) that you see in HL2, as well as the more complicated plot, then having a mute protagonist who can run around the room bouncing while people are talking to him is an immersion killer for me. A Deus Ex style conversation interface would have worked far better. Even Doom 3's system of mixing non-interactive cutscenes with PDA text worked slightly better. I guess it's a kind of analogue to the "freaky valley" situation.
Actually, yes, those are fun. Though they're not "interactive" in the same sense that HL2's are.
I'd forgotten about those.
Yes, allowing partial success is a good move. You put some optional goodies for those who can do a sequence perfectly, but to the average gamer, you say "good enough, you can go to the next section".
With regard to actual difficulty, as opposed to the topics I comment on... well... having to retry a difficult sequence 20 times because it is difficult doesn't annoy me too much. The feeling of accomplishment when I beat it is worth the reward. What annoys and frustrates me is having to replay the previous 15 minutes of gameplay, or watch the preceding unskippable 3 minute cutscene again each time I do it.
I broke a Wii-mote recently, by throwing it against the wall (yeah, childish, I know, but it happens). The culprit was the Wii version of Okami and that STUPID section where you have to rejuvenate the big tree in the first village. I could just about cope with the fact that the game was incredibly temperamental in what it would accept as a "circle" drawn around each bud. What I couldn't accept was having to sit through that stupid old fart do his idiotic speech and dance before each attempt.
Nope, if you don't like having a quick-save option, the answer is... don't use it.
It's only a badly designed game that relies on trial and error so much that you *have* to use the quick-save function for every battle. However, the option should always be there. Players who don't like it can just not use it. You mention yourself that you played WC3 without allowing yourself to save on any mission. Good for you, I'm glad you found a way to enjoy the game. But don't inflict your own tastes on others, in a fashion that gives them no opportunity for a similar workaround.
The elements that make a game frustrating are often quite different from those that make a game challenging. There are a few very simple design tweaks that can be made to promote the latter at the expense of the former:
1) Make difficulty tweakable and make it a genuine skill range. Gamers these days have wildly diverging skill levels. What's challenging for one gamer is completely impossible for another. Ninja Gaiden is an illustration of how this can go wrong. For me, it was very, very hard. I know a few people however who took it back to the shop because they couldn't get past the first level. By all means, lock achievement points or other inessential goodies away on the harder difficulties. The original Baldur's Gate had the most broken difficulty system ever. Not only did reducing the difficulty level reduce the xp you earned, but if you had to load your game to retry a fight multiple times, the game would spawn even more enemies to make things harder.
2) Do everything you can to avoid making the player replay lengthy sequences. For the most part, this means allowing full quick-saves. I will, grudgingly, admit that there are a few types of game where quick-saves don't fit well. In these cases, regular check-points are the way to go. Even generally very easy games can become frustrating if a single silly mistake means you have to replay 10-15 minutes (or more) of stuff you've done already - perhaps several times. Rockstar games are good illustrations of how not to do this - too often, a mistake that occurs due to the somewhat craperific controls means you need to replay an entire 20 minute mission. Even Bully, which is their easiest outing by far, is prone to this. If anybody on your design team suggests that restricting the player's ability to save the game would make your title "unique" or "challenging", sack them. Note that I'm only suggesting sacking them because killing them is probably illegal.
3) Give the player at least something of a clue as to what he's supposed to do next. There's nothing worse in an fps than patrolling the same few sections of corridor for an hour because you can't see where you're supposed to go next. The AvP games were awful for this - the Alien campaigns were completely ruined by the amount of time you spent searching for some air-vent or grate you're supposed to go through. If I'm playing a 9 foot tall armour plated acid blooded killing machine, I want the option of tearing down locked doors - not hunting for a slightly differently textured great that I can mysteriously break, unlike the 99 near-identical others I passed.
4) If your game is based around "equal" struggle between two or more participants (eg. in RTSes or 1 on 1 brawlers), then make sure that AI opponents are bound by the same rules as players. One thing I absolutely hate are RTSes where I can completely cut off an AI player's resource flow and yet he can still pump out tanks faster than I can.
5) Cutscenes are great, but they should always be skippable. 'nuff said.
Disagree on your fundamental point: "no more cutscenes". Plot is a huge part of gaming for me and, to date, nobody has come up with a better system for conveying plot than non-interactive cutscenes. Some have tried (eg. Valve) but to varying degrees, they've all failed.
Agree, however, than non-skippable cutscenes, particularly before difficult sequences, need to be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Every week we have the same chorus over voice comms.
Illidan: "You are not prepared"
Us: "Oh yes we are!"
Sadly, I don't think we'll be fighting him much from now on. The plan is to focus exclusively on Sunwell and aim for a Kil'Jaeden kill before WotLK hits. Unfortunately, a lot of the changes announced in this patch are liable to make that harder.
Yes, your way forward would be great. One of the first 3rd party mobs for Oblivion removed the autoscaling. Just a pity I bought the 360 version, eh?
On the basis of 3 hours or so play, it's a pretty but generally uninspired 3d Diablo clone, at heart. Sure, it mixes Norse mythology with sci-fi, but that's hardly new. Just ask John Romero - I seem to remember him at least partly doing that in Daikatana (although if, like most people, you only played the demo, you won't have seen those bits). It's also really easy, the enemies seem to auto-scale (a la Oblivion), which is a feature that should be consigned to the dustbin of history, and the camera is annoying. Personally, I'd go for a 6 on 10. Maybe a 7 on the basis of the graphics.
Is this just another case of Derek Smart thinking his IQ is at least twice what it really is?
You miss my point entirely. Yes, Bioware has, in many cases (with the notable exceptions of Jade Empire and Mass Effect) taken existing universes and just developed stories within them. As I said, most of the stories they have written range from the good to the fantastic. They fit extremely well within their settings. KOTOR was the best Star Wars story we'd seen since Empire Strikes Back. However, Planescape Torment was the only game they did which took an existing setting and then went completely outside of the expected bounds with the story. The setting of PST was pretty much irrelevant - the character work and the wit and intellect of the dialogue made the game truly exceptional.
Also, presentation matters in storytelling in any medium. Even (in fact, some might say especially) in the printed word. No matter how good the story in the author's mind might be, it won't be a good story unless he can find the right words to tell it in. How often have you seen a cracking story ruined because the author doesn't have the talent to realise it properly and falls back on cliche and repetition? Even looking at Tolkein (who I have enjoyed reading immensely over the years), the strength of his story is occasionally let down by what is, in a few places, some rather leaden prose. And as for the verse... well... let's not even go there.
There have been decent game stories around for years now - going back at least as far as Ultima IV. We've also been seeing them much more frequently recently. I must confess, though, I wouldn't have ranked this guy or the games he's put out right up there at the top of the list. As others have said, the Longest Journey was great, Dreamfell was weak and Anarchy Online... oh come on, is that really the best you can do? I'm not sure about individuals, but there are plenty of developers around in the industry who can do it better.
Bioware are obviously very good at crafting stories, but I think Planescape Torment is their only real masterpiece, from a story point of view. Their other games have had stories ranging from the great to the truly excellent (KOTOR and BG2 in particular), but PST was the only one to really go beyond the category of "fantastically well-done, but nevertheless formulaic fantasy/sci-fi fare".
Square-Enix are, if anything, even better. Their heavily cutscene-based style isn't to all tastes (though it is to mine), but they've gone beyond the point of just writing good stories and to the kind of level where, when they're on form, their games have well developed structures and themes. Look at Final Fantasy IX (not my favorite installment) and note how the game has theatre scenes at the beginning, the intermission, and the end. Also note how the two little jester guys act as a chorus throughout most of the game. Again, in Final Fantasy X, there's a consistent theme of "death" running throughout the entire game. Yes, it has bright and colourful graphics and a few irritating characters (yes, Wakka, I'm looking at you), but almost every character back-story, side-quest and main plot element in the game revolves around death.
Persona 3 really impressed me from the story point of view. Not because its "go to school and save the world in your spare time" plot is new or exciting, but because it structured itself so as to do a really good job of capturing the feel and structure of a 26 episode anime series (Shakugan no Shana was the one that leaped to mind for me, but other parallels are equally valid) in the format of a game.
I didn't rate Valve's storytelling in Half-Life 2 or its expansion - I just can't buy into the mute Gordon Freeman as a protagonist in that setting. Portal, however, had an absolutely fantastic minimalist story, told through some really clever techniques.
Finally, after a really, really dodgy start with Blue Dragon, I was really impressed with the level of the storytelling in Lost Odyssey. I'm not talking about the main plot here, which is a fairly standard steampunk affair (with heavy inspiration from Final Fantasy VIII). Rather, I'm talking about the dreams you unlocked throughout the game. These were nothing more than animated text, on a lightly illustrated background, with a couple of minimalist sound-effects, yet they did a fantastic job at bringing the game world alive and building up Kaim's character far more effectively than any traditional device would have.
Wing Commander was for me at least as much about the story as about the space combat. If I wanted a really decent tactical space-flight simulator, I'd play X-Wing, TIE-Fighter, or, later on, X-Wing Alliance (XvT left me cold). Wing Commander was about cheesy, fast-paced combat and a stupidly melodramatic, but nevertheless enjoyable, story. The final "battle" in Wing Commander 4 (which isn't a battle at all, but a debate), ranks for me as one of the finest moments in gaming history. The Freespace games never engrossed me - they didn't have the rich universe of the Wing Commander games, or the tactical depth of the Star Wars ones.
I really hope that they've got some good lore behind Dark Horizon. I used to love this genre and it'd be nice to see it rise from the ashes. If that is to happen, then we need some games where the artistic elements have been given as much attention as the flashy graphics and the physics.
Hmm... I see your point, but you're being a little harsh on people in general, I think.
I grew up in a little town in the North West of the UK called Hyde. This town is known for being where the UK's most prolific serial killer on record went about his business; Dr. Harold Shipman. I remember how people in Hyde reacted when the story broke, and how this changed as it developed.
In some ways, the parallels with this case are strong. Sure, there are differences - while he committed suicide before he could be tried for more than a handful of them, the best estimates (from medical and judicial professionals, not the gutter press) are that Shipman killed hundreds (I've seen numbers from 200-400 throughout his career quoted), while Reiser just killed one. However, I think the similarities outweigh that.
Both were highly respected within their respective communities. Both were, in some ways, slightly odd, but certainly not to the extent you'd consider them dangerous. Both, thought themselves smart enough to talk their way out of any situation, including a well-evidenced murder rap. Both, ultimately, found out that they weren't.
Shipman was always popular around Hyde, particularly with his elderly patients (who formed the bulk of his victims). I did some summer work, before the story broke, at another General Practice in the area while I was a student and there was always a steady drip-drip-drip of patients leaving the books of the practice where I worked to move over to Shipman's. He was renowned for a good bed-side manner and his patients liked the fact that his surgery was a one-man-band; they could be sure that they'd always see the same doctor when they needed to, whereas at a larger practice, they might end up seeing somebody they didn't know so well.
The first public rumblings came when it was revealed that a non-local woman had complained to the police, after she'd been cut out of her recently and suddenly deceased (Hyde resident) mother's will in favour of Shipman. The reaction of both the local press (albeit by inference) and public was pretty much unanimous. "The mother was very old and had just died of natural causes - she hadn't been fantastically well for some time, after all. She'd been living on her own in Hyde for years, not seeing much of her daughter. It perhaps wasn't surprising that she'd decided to leave her money to her well-liked GP, who she would have seen a lot of in her later years, rather than to a daughter who she felt had abandoned her. The accusations were just a spiteful attempt to get the will overturned."
This lasted several months. However, as time went on, it became clear that the police were actually taking this very, very seriously. More and more bodies were exhumed. There was talk of strong evidence that the will in question was a clumsy forgery. More and more local residents came forward to say "Actually, my Mum died quite suddenly, now that I think about it, and the last person she saw was Shipman". Then it came out that a GP at another local practice had actually informed the police of her concerns about the number of deaths among Shipman's patients over a year earlier and had been ignored. By the time the trial started, there were few in Hyde who believed that Shipman was innocent.
Can you blame people for this? Not really. The man was, to use a rather hackneyed but nevertheless fitting phrase, a pillar of the community. People base their beliefs on the evidence they have available to them and in the early days this was very thin. The narrative of the spiteful attempt to overturn the will fit with the general public mood quite well, and understandably so - there was growing concern at the time throughout the country (and there still is today), that litigation was making it impossible for medical practitioners to do their jobs safely. When the available evidence changed, people's views changed. At a guess, I'd say an overwhelming majority of the locals went through this path, self included.
There were, it is true, a tiny minority who did
How can this be impossible to detect? I remember that when I submitted my MA dissertation (a 50,000 word piece about Roman military history), I had a three hour viva on it, where two senior members of the faculty and an external examiner asked me a huge range of questions about not only the subject matter itself, but the processes I'd gone through in researching and writing my dissertation. I know for sure that if I hadn't written the thing myself, there was no way I could have made it through that. Even my significantly more modest undergraduate dissertation (a snip at just 10,000 words) was subject to a 45 minute viva, before a similar panel. Again, if I'd paid somebody else to write it, I'd have stumbled within the first five minutes.
It seems here that "impossible to detect" actually means "impossible to detect without using tried and tested methods that are just too tiresome and/or expensive to use". Admittedly, viva scrutiny isn't possible for every single assignment, but I really would hope that any institution worth its salt would be subjecting final year dissertations to this level of probing. Maybe this doesn't apply in IT courses? I'd find that very surprising, but maybe somebody else with more relevant experience could shed some light.
I suppose Steam is starting to move in this direction on the PC. I logged into it for the first time in 6 months the other night and was pleasantly surprised at how much the list of games available had grown.
That said, while I don't follow such things closely, I believe steam's copy protection has been broken for quite some time.