I'm not sure that going effectively multiplayer-only would necessarily be in the industry's best interests. Yes, there is a large and growing multiplayer market, but the singleplayer market is still, I suspect, bigger. Halo 3 sold wildly, but it had a singleplayer mode as well.
Japanese RPGs continue to be among the most profitable games around and they are, for the most part, defiantly singleplayer-only experiences. I'm currently playing through Lost Odyssey (yeah, I know, I'm behind the times here) and it's a very impressive achievement. However, I think of the development costs that must have gone into this and I just can't see too many developers wanting to take the plunge and develop something like this exclusively for the piracy-riddled PC market.
However, for an overwhelming majority of gamers (including myself), I suspect that the offerings on Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network and Wii-ware will be "good enough" in this respect.
The fact is that despite the gems scattered out there, most indie games are awful (while most mainstream commercial games are merely average-ish). Now that my job means I have less free time, I'd rather spend what gaming time I have playing decent games rather than sifting through trash to find them. Having somebody at MS (or Sony, or Nintendo) do part of the job for me by vetting what makes it onto their online services offends me less as an idea than it would have done a few years ago.
This isn't specifically a Linux gaming issue. That it should be showing up in the Linux context just shows how serious the dilemma facing the PC gaming industry has become.
Before I go any further; I am a huge fan of PC gaming. I didn't own a console until I was 22. I grew up playing PC games like the Ultima series, the X-Wing and Wing Commander games and, later, the Westwood/Blizzard RTSes. I still buy and play PC games and the games as it's clear that, until developers start making better allowances for mouse and keyboard play, some genres (particularly RTSes) will never work properly on a console.
However, PC gaming is now hurtling towards an abyss. I know people have been saying this for years. But now, for the first time, I believe them.
We have now reached the point where, when a new first or third person shooter comes out on both PC and consoles, I will always buy the console version. Why? While I don't much like console controllers for playing fpses, I can tolerate them. The resolutions on my HDTV can't compare with what my PC can put out, but they are good enough. But, more than that, I know that with a console game, I do not need to worry about falling foul of a copy protection system which either means I can't read the disk (used to happen a lot... I had to go through 3 DVD drives before I found one that could run all of my games), have to remove some of my existing software to play it (can you imagine "Hey, it seems you have Gears of War game-data on your 360's hard-disk! No Halo 3 for you then!"?) or access the net every time I want to play it.
I can't entirely blame the PC gaming industry. Piracy levels are absolutely ridiculous. Of course, anybody with half a brain knows that not every pirated copy of a game means a lost sale. But there's no denying that more than a few people who would have considered a purchase will instead be lured by the siren call of bittorrent. I know a few people who work in the industry and a lot of these developers, outside of a few big superstars, operate on the thinnest of margins. Anything they can do to prop said margin up, they will.
I don't honestly know what the solution is. Between the traditional hardware hassles and the new copy protection woes, buying a PC game is starting to feel like more trouble than it's worth. Over on the consoles, the copy-protection mechanisms are invisible to the average end-user. With Sony deciding to get rid of region protection for games, I'm actually in a position where I have no complaints whatsoever regarding the extent to which my PS3 and PSP are or are not locked down.
Of course, this isn't to say that there aren't problems on the horizon in console-land either. My big emerging gripe there regards firmware updates. All three of the systems out there insist on these on a regular basis if you want to use any online features. The 360 version isn't too painful, but the Wii version is distinctly irritating and the PS3 updates are far too frequent, take far too long to download and fail to download far too often when the servers are busy.
Too many people decide in their teens that the path to future job satisfaction must be to take one of their hobbies and make a job out of it. The inevitable result, 10-15 years later, is that they find themselves exploited, abused and burned out on both their job and their hobby.
I remember when I was 15 and deciding which A-levels I wanted to take. For non-UK readers, A-levels used to be (and in a modified form still are) taken at 17 or 18. Most students would sit between 3 and 5 of them and your grade predictions (and eventual grades) were the major factor in determining which university you got into. I was doing a fairly mixed spread of GCSEs (taken at 15-16), that left me with the option of going down either the arts or the sciences route. Being a huge gamer at the time (and involved in the fledgling Doom mod scene), there was a massive temptation to pick two Maths courses along with Physics and Chemistry, with a mind to an computer science or maths degree and a career writing games. Many of my friends did this. However, at the last moment, I got cold feet. I took Latin, Ancient Greek, English Language and English Literature instead, then went on to do a Classics degree.
Best decision I ever made.
A decade and a bit on from there, I'm earning the equivalent of just under $100,000 for a varied and enjoyable non-technical job with a good work-life balance. I come home in the evenings and, if I'm feeling stressed, I fire up a game and blast some aliens. Meanwhile, the friends I stayed in touch with who actually made it into games development are earning less than $50,000, living in some of the least desirable areas of the UK, working 60+ hour weeks and have little to no prospects of advancement, despite high-scoring degrees in maths and computer science from some of the UK's top universities. Worse still, two of them now openly confess to loathing and detesting games. Having spent their working day crawling around in the back-end of one under development, the last thing they feel like doing when they get home in the evening is loading up a different one.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very glad (for obvious, selfish reasons), that lots of clever people do want to work in games development. However, if anybody I knew or cared about, curently going through education, gave any kind of indication that they were considering a career there, I would beg and plead with them to think again.
The greatest secret I have found for career satisfaction is to keep your work and home lives separate. Certainly, you should try to find a job you enjoy; but this doesn't mean it has to be connected to an existing hobby. I've worked in some strange fields that I went into with very little previous knowledge (eg. maritime environmental regulation - although I've moved on from that now) and have found them fascinating. If you have an active mind, you should be able to find subjects that grab your interest in almost any field. Look for a career that will broaden your horizons, not confine them to what you already know and enjoy.
Re:My thoughts after a few hours with the game
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Metal Gear Solid 4 Review
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· Score: 2, Interesting
To some extent I see your point. But ultimately, I disagree.
They're not trying to create a video game in the classic 1980s sense of the word here. This is a deliberate attempt to fuse a movie and a video game. And it works, to some degree. The interactive element allows a whole emotional level that isn't available in a movie... as Snake breaks down over the course of the game, the player actually feels his pain. If games were going to be just about shooting aliens or jumping on turtles, I'd have grown out of them 10 years ago.
The problem with MGS4 isn't the concept, it's the execution. I've now finished the game. There are two main problems with it. The first is that it uses non-interactive cutscenes for some sequences that feel like they'd be a lot of fun to play. There's a good example of this right at the start. In a cutscene, Snake runs from a pair of mecha through a city, fights them hand-to-hand inside a house then loses them using his camoflage suit. Gee guys... I'd quite have liked to have played that myself.
The other problem is that the general plot just isn't quite strong enough. There are some fantastic scenes here and there, but after 4 main installments in the series and a number of side-stories, the overall feeling of this game, which tries to wrap them all up, is of an over-complicated mess.
More or less any fps (or third person shooter) that requires precision aiming. I'm including MGS4 in this, but Call of Duty 4 is possibly a better example..
Strategy games and tactics RPGs, where it's convenient to have a lot of textual information on the screen at any one time.
Any game which relies on creating a "cinematic" experience. Let's face it, standard definition on any screen over 30" gets distracting if you're used to PC gaming, because the resolution is so bad.
Unfortunately, knowing that it's a reference to his role in previous games doesn't make it any less grim.
Unlike many who post on slashdot, I'm no luddite when it comes to technological advances in gaming. I honestly believe that high-definition gaming can genuinely enhance the player's experience, delivering a richer emotional context and a more realistic setting. There are countless examples already of how high-definition graphics have made games better. Unfortunately, showing me in great detail how a guy has just crapped his pants is not one of those ways.
As I hinted at in my original post, I do understand the message the game is trying to convey. I don't actually agree with it (political differences), but I understand it. Despite not agreeing with it, I feel it's pretty well done and one of the more interesting parts of the game.
However, interesting or not, having over 50% of the game made up of cutscenes (and I'm not exaggerating here, this thing makes the Final Fantasy games look short on cutscenes) just grates after a while. Especially as the cutscenes are sometimes used for scenes that could easily have been interactive. The section of the opening cinematic where Snake runs away from the battle robots and eventually loses them by camoflaging himself on the upper floor of the house, for instance; no reason whatsoever they couldn't have let the player control that.
Re:My thoughts after a few hours with the game
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Metal Gear Solid 4 Review
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· Score: 2, Informative
Oh believe me, this game can get very, very camp.
Moreover, what doesn't come out in the reviews is that this game has a serious poo fixation. Within the first couple of hours of gameplay, there are two distinct major poo incidents. The first one shows you rather more than you might want to see of an enemy trooper... the second one, in particular, is just plain... freaky.
Well... I played the first 5 or so hours of this today. I'm still not sure that I know what to make of it.
I suspect that at least half of my play-time so far (possibly a little more) has been watching cutscenes. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of non-game-engine cutscenes. By and large, I find most game-endine cutscenes needlessly ugly and often badly thought through. However, I do think it's possible to have to much of a good thing. And that's definitely the case here. Between the end of Act 1 and the Start of Act 2, there are more than 30 minutes of cutscenes. Sure, the plot is interesting (more on this in a couple of paragraphs). But it'd be nice to let at least a bit of gameplay intrude.
The gameplay itself is fun. It's not actually what I would expect from a Metal Gear Solid title. In a nutshell, it feels much closer to Call of Duty 4 than to Splinter Cell. Combat is a much, much bigger part of this than in any previous installment and, happily, the combat mechanics have been tweaked to the point where they are actually damned good. You can still sneak through the game if you want, but you can also just grab the biggest gun you can and blast away (indeed, the game seems to reward this approach more). The weapons-shop system is a little immersion-breaking, but from a gameplay point of view it's highly useful and encourages experimentation with different weapon setups.
To be honest, if there's one other game that this reminds me of, it's Resident Evil 4 (which is a nice game to be compared to). The pace of the combat and the control system feel very similar. The weapons are deeply satisfying to use, in the same way as RE4's. The AI here is noticably more significant than RE4's, but I count that as a good thing.
And now... the plot. More than any other game around (barring perhaps the Final Fantasy games and Persona 3), MGS depends upon its plot. This isn't your average paint-by-numbers Tom Clancy plot, to put it mildly. To get the most out of this, you will need to have played all of the previous installments of the series. Even if you have, you might find yourself struggling to remember some of the more obscure subplots referenced here. More or less every significant character from the previous installments makes an appearance here (including several thought dead), along with a bunch of new characters.
The effectiveness of the plot varies wildly. There's a good war-story being told here. While I personally disagree profoundly with its strong anti-war message, there's no denying that it's both shocking and effective in its execution when the game focusses on this. This isn't your average George-Clooney brain-dead Bush-bashing fest. It's something both more visceral and more sophisticated. Unfortunately, the plot also suffers from being deeply silly at times, when it strays from its core war-story plot. The reintroduction of Vamp, and the introduction of these strange new robot-women-things makes for a few good shock-horror moments, but it's hard to take them seriously, in the context of what's otherwise quite a dark, bleak piece of social commentary. Ultimately, what you end up with is a story that swings wildly between the sublime and the ridiculous. At least, unlike MGS2, it hasn't gone all End of Evangelion on me... yet.
I'd find it really, really hard to put a score on this game, based on what I've seen so far. IGN love it. Penny Arcade hate it. I can actually sympathise with both points of view. Ultimately, I think it's best to treat it as a game which is both fantastic and dreadful at the same time. If you can find a state of mind where you can appreciate the truly great elements, while regarding the rest as "so bad its funny", you'll enjoy this game hugely. If you can't, you'll hate it.
Heh, I kind of understand where you're coming from there. As a fairly hardcore PvE raider (Mount Hyjal and Black Temple on Farm, starting on Sunwell), I've long since graduated past the point where I need to do PvP (for me, it was used to get some of my early epics while I was still in Karazhan and Gruul's, but not for much else).
Battlegrounds are indeed incredibly boring after a while. They also expose, in some fairly shocking ways, just how stupid some of the players are. After doing a shockingly large number of games, I noticed a few simple rules for determining who would win most games:
In Eye of the Storm, whichever team has more people going after the flag inevitably loses. I have never known a flag-running team win against one that makes a serious play for 3 of the towers. The flag exists only as a magnet for stupid people who want to lose. Therefore it's not uncommon to see up to half of each team (occasionally more) squabbling over it.
In Arathi Basin, if Horde push on for the stables early, they will lose. If Alliance push for the farm early, they will lose. Whichever team can most effectively organise its players into aiming for and holding the three most defensible points (mines, mill and the closest out of either stables or farm) will win 90% of the time. Therefore, almost every game, you see a big chain of people zerging off towards the point closest to the enemy spawn.
Back before 2.3, 95% of the games in Alterac Valley would go to whichever side had the fewest people trying to defend. Since 2.3 hit, this has, I admit, become a little more interesting. A few small but effective teams of guerrilla defenders can really turn a game around now.
Warsong Gulch is harder to predict and has somewhat more scope for individual skill. Unfortunately, it's boring and yields much less honor than the other battlegrounds.
Arena, to my mind, is even worse. The balancing decisions that Blizzard have made mean that it has become almost entirely about crowd control and interrupts. I forced myself to play up to a 1900 rating back in season 2, but just haven't been able to work up the enthusiasm to do any since then. I'm really hoping that Blizzard use the next expansion to tweak the balance so that all classes can actually make effective use of a wider range of spells and abilities in arena.
I just find PvE play fundamentally more fun and rewarding. With a decent guild, you can make reasonably rapid progression through the raid instances, especially now that all of the attunement quests have been removed. As you go, you get to see new zones and actually feel like you're interacting with the Warcraft lore. The feeling I got after my first Illidan kill was just something that no PvP experience could replicate.
It's been almost a decade now, so I guess I can finally own up to it. I love a good trainwreck, so Daikatana made it onto my "must buy" list.
To be honest, it wasn't a desperately bad game. The demo, which was (quite sensibly) as much as most people played, highlighted a couple of bad levels from the worst of the four episodes. Ironically, I hear that this is the episode that Romero had the most direct personal input to. At times, it really was beyond parody. "NEED MORE FROGS!" "WE NEED LAME HEALING FRUIT!".
Once you got about halfway through the first episode, you got out of the hideous green swamps and started fighting proper enemies. The second and third episodes actually verged on "slightly better than mediocre" at times, with the melee combat (one of the game's original selling points, largely gutted by the time of release) being much better integrated. Overall, the game was seriously lacking compared with the big A-list fps titles around at the time, but was actually still better than most of the rubbish on the market at the time. Even the AI seemed to get marginally less annoying as the game went on.
I think there were two main factors that did for the game; the first was that its tortured development had created expectations that the final (ironically rushed) product could never live up to. The second was the (in)famous somethingawful review of the demo, which meant that anybody walking into a shop and actually buying the game was in for a world of embarrassment. I know that for me, it was an experience of toe-curlingly intense humiliation not matched until I decided to buy Dead or Alive: Xtreme Be... oh... wait... it's a few years yet until I can admit to that one.
I'm not convinced that a change of leadership here is a bad thing. Too often, the Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive (including Xtreme) games feel like they've been designed by somebody who really, really hates the average gamer and wants them to suffer. On one level, I understand and appreciate his emphasis on artistic integrity... on the other hand, it drives me crazy whenever I play one of his games.
I'd agree with that assessment in some ways. The atmosphere, for the first few hours, was stunning. They lost it a bit later on, because they never really seemed to understand that varying the pace is a key part of building atmosphere. Some of the people posting on here have already mentioned the Alien movies. If you look at the second movie, which is the closest comparator for Doom 3, the actual action sequences are fairly short. In Doom 3, once the first shot had been fired, it was non-stop shooting through to the end of the game. A real pity.
While they were flawed in many (oh so many) ways, the two PC Aliens vs Predator games kind of understood this. They did, at least, both have no enemies at all in the first mission of their marine campaigns. The second game even had some quiet spells later on, which was very effective. I know there are allegedly a couple of Alien games under development by Sega at the moment... I just hope they've got a decent writer on board.
As for the actual gameplay in Doom 3... it wasn't really that bad. Sure, it was a run-and-gun fps, but it was by no means a bad one. I played Area 51: Blacksite recently (unwanted present I couldn't quite be bothered to return) and all I could think, all the way through that, was "this is like Doom 3 but not as good". I think people just had absurdly high hopes for it.
I'm not really convinced Valve pulled it off better. Half-Life 2 was a monumental let-down for me. Leaving aside how the AI seemed to have regressed and none of the weapons *felt* right, the atmosphere of the game was just too pretentious. The silent protagonist thing just seemed to really jar, in a game where so many NPCs have "conversations" with the main character.
To my mind, the real winner of that fps generation was Farcry, with Quake 4 (which came a bit later) in second place.
Ok, lots of comments attacking this post from the 4ed side of things... now for one from the WoW side.
No more, well I'm a fighter but specialize in damage... Arms Warrior. Fury Warrior. Not every WoW Warrior goes protection. I knew plenty of Warriors (WoW's fighter-equivalent) who specialised in damage.
WoW gives each class three different specs to choose from. In some cases (for example, mages), this is just three different flavours of damage dealer (so some specs are better vs other players, while others are better in raids). In others, it allows for more significant specialisation. For example, Paladins can choose to be healers, tanks, or even (fairly poor) damage dealers.
Might want to actually learn a little about WoW before you use it as your generic comparator for "RPG systems I don't like".
To be honest, the current end-game isn't bad. They've got enough avenues in there to suit most degrees of committment to the game and general temperaments, even if some of these are more developed than others.
For the casual players, there are the five-man instances - first the regular versions and then, when you've got your gear from those, the heroics. Heroics are an interesting twist; they aren't, as I was expecting, just tuned-up versions of the regular instances. In many cases, despite the superficial similarities, they need very different tactics. There's also a nice progression here; a group in all blues wouldn't have too many problems with Botanica or Black Morass, while even full-epic groups can find Durnholde Keep or Arcatraz tricky.
Battlegrounds are a popular way of killing time for the casual PvPers. Even if you have awful gear and suck at them, you will still get your rewards - it'll just take a bit longer. The relative ease with which you can get your PvP rewards, combined with the low time input required, has led to them being branded "welfare epics". Of course, they don't really stand up against the high-end raiding or arena epics, but I know plenty of casuals who are content with this. Over time, the lower end arena drops get pushed down into Battleground rewards anyway.
The hardcore PvPers have Arena, which really is a cut-throat environment (and is the only form of PvP in the game where getting killed is any more than a momentary annoyance). Ironically, it doesn't actually take particularly long each week - the main challenge here is putting in the time to get the gear so you can participate effectively. The top end season 3 arena gear is almost on a par with the top-end raiding epics, although with the new personal rating requirements for some pieces, it isn't necessarily easy to get.
Finally, you have raiding, which is the favorite hardcore PvE end-game activity. This is where, to my mind, Blizzard have really made strides since the Burning Crusade hit. Rather than having a 40 man raid as the entry-level point, a la Molten Core, Karazhan was a nice, relatively easy 10 man raid, which many non-hardcore guilds were able to switch to quite quickly at level 70. With the addition of Zul'Aman in the 2.3 patch, you can more or less work your way through about 2/3rds of the end-game gear progression without ever setting foot in a 25-man raid. For the genuinely hardcore who do push into the 25 man raiding scene, there's a definite progression tree with 6 different instances to work through. The difference from most of the pre-expansion end-game is dramatic and impressive.
In short, Blizzard have delivered as reasonable an end-game experience as could reasonably be expected and continue to add new content at a decent pace. At the same time, they've refined the experience for lower level players and those levelling up alts, with the new Dustwallow Marsh quests and the dramatic reduction of the amount of xp needed to level up (you can level 1-60 in WoW now faster than you can in the fully-offline Final Fantasy XII). Of course, things are far from perfect, and I can see a few dark clouds on the horizon.
The most significant of these is that, as a former Final Fantasy XI player (where the level cap never went above 75), I must confess to being a bit worried by Blizzard's intention to slam the level cap up with 10 with every new expansion. What this essentially means is that any end-game gear you acquired before the expansion hit is immediately obsolete. Green is suddenly the new Purple. Effectively, this amounts to a complete end-game reboot every 12-18 months. While beneficial in some respects (shaking up the scene, letting newcomers get a foot on the ladder), in the long term it is just going to drive people away and kill the end-game scene for a few months before an expansion hits.
No no no. See, when you really need to worry is when you find the military in collusion with shower curtain manufacturers. That never ends well (even if there is cake).
Yeah, part of me wonders if it wouldn't be worth them taking the Forza 2 engine and using it to build a rather less hardcore game, focussed more around the high-end racing side of things and with a bit more attention to the front-end (which is admittedly nasty and can feel a bit spreadsheet-line on occasion). Of course, I'd stick to playing the more hardcore version, but as you say, different people want different things - although decent graphics and physics are pretty much a universal plus point.
I did have two gripes with Forza 2 actually. The first was the number and variety of tracks. I've not done a count, but I'm fairly sure that it doesn't actually have as many tracks as GT4, which was itself pretty light in this respect. Given the length of the career mode, this is a fairly major gripe. A friend of a friend of a friend of a friend who might possibly know somebody who shared a room with somebody who knew the cousin of somebody who was remotely involved in the game tells me that the major factor here was storage space on the DVD (tracks apparently eat lots of this). Frankly, I don't see much of a way around this, besides going multi-DVD (harder for a driving game than for a linear RPG like Blue Dragon), or jumping over to the PS3 with its Blu-Ray drive.
The other gripe I have is the relative lack of low-end cars, particularly the slightly older ones. This may sound an odd gripe, but I do have a point here. We're both agreed, I think, that GT4 left quite a bit to be desired. However, I took it and my PS2 with me when I went to visit the parents at Christmas, two years ago. We had about a dozen people from my dad's side of the family over on boxing-day, almost all of whom had driven. After a while, we switched the PS2 on and without exception, every single one of the cars they had driven there in was represented in the game (even if there were slight variations in the year/model). This led to one of the most amusing (and ridiculously over-competative) bouts of gaming/oneupmanship I've ever witnessed, as people suddenly got to find out who had the fastest car in a way that they'd never quite dared on the road. Forza 2 has a fairly limited selection of "family" cars and while expanding this probably isn't a priority for the developers, a better range is something I'd love to see from the sequel.
Interesting post, and if I had mod points, I would mod you up even though I don't agree with some of what you've written. However, I don't, so I'll do a reply instead.
On Super Smash Brothers... well... I can't claim to have be bouncing off the walls in anticipation of this game. That said, it highlights the biggest weakness of the Wii and, ultimately, the reason why I think its momentum is now going to ebb away.
The games just aren't there.
Nintendo are doing their usual trick of putting out one or two of their big franchise games per year, while nothing else of value (besides the Resident Evil titles) comes out for their console. The franchise games appeal to some people, send a small minority into paroxysms of joy, but leave a lot of others neutral or even decidedly bored. Meanwhile, the 360 continues to get all the interesting stuff and even the PS3 is (at last) starting to pick up a bit. Nintendo had a good start with the Wii, largely on the base of novely, hype and disaffection with the other two console developers; however, I think people are now starting to wake up to the fact that nothing's really changed since the dismal failure of the Gamecube.
On lack of availability... it was never that bad here in the UK until about 2 months before Christmas 07. Certainly, I had no problems picking one a year ago today - not long after launch - and I've seen them in the shops solidly since then. More evidence, if this were needed, that the Christmas shortage might not be entirely a product of demand.
On 3v3 hoops... yes. I played this for about an hour over at a friend's place. To be honest, I can't say I had particularly high hopes for it anyway, but it was pretty bad.
Don't play Guild Wars, so won't comment on that one.
I'm less worried about the EA/Bioware thing than some people seem to be. Yes, EA are the "big bad" and yes, they do have a habit of pumping out boring annually-revised sports games. However, I've noticed real signs of change from them over the last year or so; Command & Conquer 3 was frankly better than anything that Westwood ever did with the license and Crysis was very solid indeed. Maybe it's starting to sink in that poor games don't sell as well. I admit that this *could* be bad news for Bioware, but I'd take a more "wait and see" approach for the moment.
As for Forza 2... well... that was one of my favorite games of the year, arguably for some of the reasons you don't like it. I've always been a big fan of the more realistic sort of console racing game - particularly the Gran Turismo series - and Forza 2 blew everything else in the area out of the water, as far as I was concerned. The physics and AI are certainly better than anything I've seen elsewhere. I've tried my hand at driving on circuits or dirt a few times now - just about enough to realise how much I suck at it - and you can feel that Forza 2 is much, much closer to the real thing than Gran Turismo 4.
As for the career mode - I liked this a lot. You can actually jump into some of the higher end cars straight away in arcade mode. However, the benefit of starting out in basic road cars and working your way up in career mode is that this is actually a good way to develop your driving skill. The slower cars are generally more forgiving, meaning that you can try to take more challenging lines in them without necessarily spinning off and losing the race. Moreover, when you do get something wrong in one of the low end cars and find yourself choking on dust, it's much easier to tell *why* you went wrong than it is in something that's putting out over 500bhp. In career mode, by the time you can afford a car that's a significant advance on your current one, chances are that you are now ready to make better use of it.
As for the music, the ability to add custom sound-tracks is one of my favorite things about the 360. Rather than being stuck with the same few tracks over and over, as I was in Gran Turismo 4, I can set up my own custom play-list from my collection and tweak it as I want for each session. As far as I'm concerned, this is the *perfect* way to do music for driving games.
The Sixaxis is every bit as guilty as the Wii-mote, although the Sixaxis can at least function as a servicable dualshock-clone when needed.
I mention Lair in my original post... I still don't think Lair would have been any good if it had featured an option for "normal" controls, but it would certainly have been dragged back from the brink of the pit of utter awfulness into which it managed to fall so spectacularly. My big hope for the Sixaxis is that most developers will start either ignoring the motion-sensing, or else relegating it to strictly optional use for enabling specific bits of minor functionality within games (ie. how Resistance: Fall of Man and Heavenly Sword use it).
If I've paid £40 for a game, I'm going to try to get my money's worth out of it. I've played enough games that start off quite slow or irritating and then pick up massively after a while (eg. Kingdom Hearts, Deus Ex) that I don't just drop things if they don't grab me immediately. Of course, most of the time, persevering with a game like this leads not to hidden treasure, but to frustration and annoyance. When a game makes me want to throw my controller through the screen, then yes, I start to hate it.
I suspect you may be putting a little too much weight on the word "hate" here.
This sums up my own feelings on Mario Galaxy pretty well. Mario 64 was a great game in its time and there's no denying that it was the game that provded that 3d platforming could work just as well as the traditional 2d version. However, it's aged a lot since then and other entries in the genre have surpassed it. I haven't played the new Ratchet & Clank yet, but even the previous installment in that series was a better game than Mario 64 in almost every respect - understandable given the age of the older title.
This is why, after all the 9.7/10 reviews and the massive hype here on slashdot, I was disappointed to find that the new Mario was basically just a re-skinned Mario 64 with, if anything, fewer neat things to do. It's by no means bad - some of the level design is arguably better than Mario 64 and it is still at core quite a fun platformer - but I'd have difficulty rating it as more than a 6 or 7 out of 10.
If you look at the games I list as "disappointing" in my original post, you'll see that, with the exception of.hack//G.U., the games there are actually pretty good (Supreme Commander and Blue Dragon were very good). They just failed to live up to my own expectations, whether these were based on word of mouth or hype and reviews.
The Wii is hardly the only example of a silly gimmick controller around at the moment. From the Donkey Konga bongoes through to the Rock Band multi-peripheral exploitation, silly controllers tagged onto bad games have become far too common of late.
I hate this tendancy, I think it's bad for gaming and bad for gamers (who get ripped off for low-quality peripherals used for just a handful of games that may be worth playing) and I hope that it ultimately results in financial ruin for those involved (yes, including Nintendo).
God of War 2, on the other hand, draws you right into the action using nothing more sophisticated than the dual-shock 2. You alternate between precise combos for the take-down moves, the carefully controlled mashing of buttons in normal combat and the all-out mashing involved in just opening chests and draws, you actually start to *feel* Kratos's rage. That's clever... and it needs nothing more than the controller that comes bundled with the system.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure that going effectively multiplayer-only would necessarily be in the industry's best interests. Yes, there is a large and growing multiplayer market, but the singleplayer market is still, I suspect, bigger. Halo 3 sold wildly, but it had a singleplayer mode as well.
Japanese RPGs continue to be among the most profitable games around and they are, for the most part, defiantly singleplayer-only experiences. I'm currently playing through Lost Odyssey (yeah, I know, I'm behind the times here) and it's a very impressive achievement. However, I think of the development costs that must have gone into this and I just can't see too many developers wanting to take the plunge and develop something like this exclusively for the piracy-riddled PC market.
True.
However, for an overwhelming majority of gamers (including myself), I suspect that the offerings on Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network and Wii-ware will be "good enough" in this respect.
The fact is that despite the gems scattered out there, most indie games are awful (while most mainstream commercial games are merely average-ish). Now that my job means I have less free time, I'd rather spend what gaming time I have playing decent games rather than sifting through trash to find them. Having somebody at MS (or Sony, or Nintendo) do part of the job for me by vetting what makes it onto their online services offends me less as an idea than it would have done a few years ago.
This isn't specifically a Linux gaming issue. That it should be showing up in the Linux context just shows how serious the dilemma facing the PC gaming industry has become.
Before I go any further; I am a huge fan of PC gaming. I didn't own a console until I was 22. I grew up playing PC games like the Ultima series, the X-Wing and Wing Commander games and, later, the Westwood/Blizzard RTSes. I still buy and play PC games and the games as it's clear that, until developers start making better allowances for mouse and keyboard play, some genres (particularly RTSes) will never work properly on a console.
However, PC gaming is now hurtling towards an abyss. I know people have been saying this for years. But now, for the first time, I believe them.
We have now reached the point where, when a new first or third person shooter comes out on both PC and consoles, I will always buy the console version. Why? While I don't much like console controllers for playing fpses, I can tolerate them. The resolutions on my HDTV can't compare with what my PC can put out, but they are good enough. But, more than that, I know that with a console game, I do not need to worry about falling foul of a copy protection system which either means I can't read the disk (used to happen a lot... I had to go through 3 DVD drives before I found one that could run all of my games), have to remove some of my existing software to play it (can you imagine "Hey, it seems you have Gears of War game-data on your 360's hard-disk! No Halo 3 for you then!"?) or access the net every time I want to play it.
I can't entirely blame the PC gaming industry. Piracy levels are absolutely ridiculous. Of course, anybody with half a brain knows that not every pirated copy of a game means a lost sale. But there's no denying that more than a few people who would have considered a purchase will instead be lured by the siren call of bittorrent. I know a few people who work in the industry and a lot of these developers, outside of a few big superstars, operate on the thinnest of margins. Anything they can do to prop said margin up, they will.
I don't honestly know what the solution is. Between the traditional hardware hassles and the new copy protection woes, buying a PC game is starting to feel like more trouble than it's worth. Over on the consoles, the copy-protection mechanisms are invisible to the average end-user. With Sony deciding to get rid of region protection for games, I'm actually in a position where I have no complaints whatsoever regarding the extent to which my PS3 and PSP are or are not locked down.
Of course, this isn't to say that there aren't problems on the horizon in console-land either. My big emerging gripe there regards firmware updates. All three of the systems out there insist on these on a regular basis if you want to use any online features. The 360 version isn't too painful, but the Wii version is distinctly irritating and the PS3 updates are far too frequent, take far too long to download and fail to download far too often when the servers are busy.
Exactly...
Too many people decide in their teens that the path to future job satisfaction must be to take one of their hobbies and make a job out of it. The inevitable result, 10-15 years later, is that they find themselves exploited, abused and burned out on both their job and their hobby.
I remember when I was 15 and deciding which A-levels I wanted to take. For non-UK readers, A-levels used to be (and in a modified form still are) taken at 17 or 18. Most students would sit between 3 and 5 of them and your grade predictions (and eventual grades) were the major factor in determining which university you got into. I was doing a fairly mixed spread of GCSEs (taken at 15-16), that left me with the option of going down either the arts or the sciences route. Being a huge gamer at the time (and involved in the fledgling Doom mod scene), there was a massive temptation to pick two Maths courses along with Physics and Chemistry, with a mind to an computer science or maths degree and a career writing games. Many of my friends did this. However, at the last moment, I got cold feet. I took Latin, Ancient Greek, English Language and English Literature instead, then went on to do a Classics degree.
Best decision I ever made.
A decade and a bit on from there, I'm earning the equivalent of just under $100,000 for a varied and enjoyable non-technical job with a good work-life balance. I come home in the evenings and, if I'm feeling stressed, I fire up a game and blast some aliens. Meanwhile, the friends I stayed in touch with who actually made it into games development are earning less than $50,000, living in some of the least desirable areas of the UK, working 60+ hour weeks and have little to no prospects of advancement, despite high-scoring degrees in maths and computer science from some of the UK's top universities. Worse still, two of them now openly confess to loathing and detesting games. Having spent their working day crawling around in the back-end of one under development, the last thing they feel like doing when they get home in the evening is loading up a different one.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very glad (for obvious, selfish reasons), that lots of clever people do want to work in games development. However, if anybody I knew or cared about, curently going through education, gave any kind of indication that they were considering a career there, I would beg and plead with them to think again.
The greatest secret I have found for career satisfaction is to keep your work and home lives separate. Certainly, you should try to find a job you enjoy; but this doesn't mean it has to be connected to an existing hobby. I've worked in some strange fields that I went into with very little previous knowledge (eg. maritime environmental regulation - although I've moved on from that now) and have found them fascinating. If you have an active mind, you should be able to find subjects that grab your interest in almost any field. Look for a career that will broaden your horizons, not confine them to what you already know and enjoy.
To some extent I see your point. But ultimately, I disagree.
They're not trying to create a video game in the classic 1980s sense of the word here. This is a deliberate attempt to fuse a movie and a video game. And it works, to some degree. The interactive element allows a whole emotional level that isn't available in a movie... as Snake breaks down over the course of the game, the player actually feels his pain. If games were going to be just about shooting aliens or jumping on turtles, I'd have grown out of them 10 years ago.
The problem with MGS4 isn't the concept, it's the execution. I've now finished the game. There are two main problems with it. The first is that it uses non-interactive cutscenes for some sequences that feel like they'd be a lot of fun to play. There's a good example of this right at the start. In a cutscene, Snake runs from a pair of mecha through a city, fights them hand-to-hand inside a house then loses them using his camoflage suit. Gee guys... I'd quite have liked to have played that myself.
The other problem is that the general plot just isn't quite strong enough. There are some fantastic scenes here and there, but after 4 main installments in the series and a number of side-stories, the overall feeling of this game, which tries to wrap them all up, is of an over-complicated mess.
More or less any fps (or third person shooter) that requires precision aiming. I'm including MGS4 in this, but Call of Duty 4 is possibly a better example..
Strategy games and tactics RPGs, where it's convenient to have a lot of textual information on the screen at any one time.
Any game which relies on creating a "cinematic" experience. Let's face it, standard definition on any screen over 30" gets distracting if you're used to PC gaming, because the resolution is so bad.
Unfortunately, knowing that it's a reference to his role in previous games doesn't make it any less grim.
Unlike many who post on slashdot, I'm no luddite when it comes to technological advances in gaming. I honestly believe that high-definition gaming can genuinely enhance the player's experience, delivering a richer emotional context and a more realistic setting. There are countless examples already of how high-definition graphics have made games better. Unfortunately, showing me in great detail how a guy has just crapped his pants is not one of those ways.
Too much info, k pls thx.
As I hinted at in my original post, I do understand the message the game is trying to convey. I don't actually agree with it (political differences), but I understand it. Despite not agreeing with it, I feel it's pretty well done and one of the more interesting parts of the game.
However, interesting or not, having over 50% of the game made up of cutscenes (and I'm not exaggerating here, this thing makes the Final Fantasy games look short on cutscenes) just grates after a while. Especially as the cutscenes are sometimes used for scenes that could easily have been interactive. The section of the opening cinematic where Snake runs away from the battle robots and eventually loses them by camoflaging himself on the upper floor of the house, for instance; no reason whatsoever they couldn't have let the player control that.
Oh believe me, this game can get very, very camp.
Moreover, what doesn't come out in the reviews is that this game has a serious poo fixation. Within the first couple of hours of gameplay, there are two distinct major poo incidents. The first one shows you rather more than you might want to see of an enemy trooper... the second one, in particular, is just plain... freaky.
Well... I played the first 5 or so hours of this today. I'm still not sure that I know what to make of it.
I suspect that at least half of my play-time so far (possibly a little more) has been watching cutscenes. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of non-game-engine cutscenes. By and large, I find most game-endine cutscenes needlessly ugly and often badly thought through. However, I do think it's possible to have to much of a good thing. And that's definitely the case here. Between the end of Act 1 and the Start of Act 2, there are more than 30 minutes of cutscenes. Sure, the plot is interesting (more on this in a couple of paragraphs). But it'd be nice to let at least a bit of gameplay intrude.
The gameplay itself is fun. It's not actually what I would expect from a Metal Gear Solid title. In a nutshell, it feels much closer to Call of Duty 4 than to Splinter Cell. Combat is a much, much bigger part of this than in any previous installment and, happily, the combat mechanics have been tweaked to the point where they are actually damned good. You can still sneak through the game if you want, but you can also just grab the biggest gun you can and blast away (indeed, the game seems to reward this approach more). The weapons-shop system is a little immersion-breaking, but from a gameplay point of view it's highly useful and encourages experimentation with different weapon setups.
To be honest, if there's one other game that this reminds me of, it's Resident Evil 4 (which is a nice game to be compared to). The pace of the combat and the control system feel very similar. The weapons are deeply satisfying to use, in the same way as RE4's. The AI here is noticably more significant than RE4's, but I count that as a good thing.
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And now... the plot. More than any other game around (barring perhaps the Final Fantasy games and Persona 3), MGS depends upon its plot. This isn't your average paint-by-numbers Tom Clancy plot, to put it mildly. To get the most out of this, you will need to have played all of the previous installments of the series. Even if you have, you might find yourself struggling to remember some of the more obscure subplots referenced here. More or less every significant character from the previous installments makes an appearance here (including several thought dead), along with a bunch of new characters.
The effectiveness of the plot varies wildly. There's a good war-story being told here. While I personally disagree profoundly with its strong anti-war message, there's no denying that it's both shocking and effective in its execution when the game focusses on this. This isn't your average George-Clooney brain-dead Bush-bashing fest. It's something both more visceral and more sophisticated. Unfortunately, the plot also suffers from being deeply silly at times, when it strays from its core war-story plot. The reintroduction of Vamp, and the introduction of these strange new robot-women-things makes for a few good shock-horror moments, but it's hard to take them seriously, in the context of what's otherwise quite a dark, bleak piece of social commentary. Ultimately, what you end up with is a story that swings wildly between the sublime and the ridiculous. At least, unlike MGS2, it hasn't gone all End of Evangelion on me... yet.
I'd find it really, really hard to put a score on this game, based on what I've seen so far. IGN love it. Penny Arcade hate it. I can actually sympathise with both points of view. Ultimately, I think it's best to treat it as a game which is both fantastic and dreadful at the same time. If you can find a state of mind where you can appreciate the truly great elements, while regarding the rest as "so bad its funny", you'll enjoy this game hugely. If you can't, you'll hate it.
Heh, I kind of understand where you're coming from there. As a fairly hardcore PvE raider (Mount Hyjal and Black Temple on Farm, starting on Sunwell), I've long since graduated past the point where I need to do PvP (for me, it was used to get some of my early epics while I was still in Karazhan and Gruul's, but not for much else).
Battlegrounds are indeed incredibly boring after a while. They also expose, in some fairly shocking ways, just how stupid some of the players are. After doing a shockingly large number of games, I noticed a few simple rules for determining who would win most games:
In Eye of the Storm, whichever team has more people going after the flag inevitably loses. I have never known a flag-running team win against one that makes a serious play for 3 of the towers. The flag exists only as a magnet for stupid people who want to lose. Therefore it's not uncommon to see up to half of each team (occasionally more) squabbling over it.
In Arathi Basin, if Horde push on for the stables early, they will lose. If Alliance push for the farm early, they will lose. Whichever team can most effectively organise its players into aiming for and holding the three most defensible points (mines, mill and the closest out of either stables or farm) will win 90% of the time. Therefore, almost every game, you see a big chain of people zerging off towards the point closest to the enemy spawn.
Back before 2.3, 95% of the games in Alterac Valley would go to whichever side had the fewest people trying to defend. Since 2.3 hit, this has, I admit, become a little more interesting. A few small but effective teams of guerrilla defenders can really turn a game around now.
Warsong Gulch is harder to predict and has somewhat more scope for individual skill. Unfortunately, it's boring and yields much less honor than the other battlegrounds.
Arena, to my mind, is even worse. The balancing decisions that Blizzard have made mean that it has become almost entirely about crowd control and interrupts. I forced myself to play up to a 1900 rating back in season 2, but just haven't been able to work up the enthusiasm to do any since then. I'm really hoping that Blizzard use the next expansion to tweak the balance so that all classes can actually make effective use of a wider range of spells and abilities in arena.
I just find PvE play fundamentally more fun and rewarding. With a decent guild, you can make reasonably rapid progression through the raid instances, especially now that all of the attunement quests have been removed. As you go, you get to see new zones and actually feel like you're interacting with the Warcraft lore. The feeling I got after my first Illidan kill was just something that no PvP experience could replicate.
That was me!
It's been almost a decade now, so I guess I can finally own up to it. I love a good trainwreck, so Daikatana made it onto my "must buy" list.
To be honest, it wasn't a desperately bad game. The demo, which was (quite sensibly) as much as most people played, highlighted a couple of bad levels from the worst of the four episodes. Ironically, I hear that this is the episode that Romero had the most direct personal input to. At times, it really was beyond parody. "NEED MORE FROGS!" "WE NEED LAME HEALING FRUIT!".
Once you got about halfway through the first episode, you got out of the hideous green swamps and started fighting proper enemies. The second and third episodes actually verged on "slightly better than mediocre" at times, with the melee combat (one of the game's original selling points, largely gutted by the time of release) being much better integrated. Overall, the game was seriously lacking compared with the big A-list fps titles around at the time, but was actually still better than most of the rubbish on the market at the time. Even the AI seemed to get marginally less annoying as the game went on.
I think there were two main factors that did for the game; the first was that its tortured development had created expectations that the final (ironically rushed) product could never live up to. The second was the (in)famous somethingawful review of the demo, which meant that anybody walking into a shop and actually buying the game was in for a world of embarrassment. I know that for me, it was an experience of toe-curlingly intense humiliation not matched until I decided to buy Dead or Alive: Xtreme Be... oh... wait... it's a few years yet until I can admit to that one.
I'm not convinced that a change of leadership here is a bad thing. Too often, the Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive (including Xtreme) games feel like they've been designed by somebody who really, really hates the average gamer and wants them to suffer. On one level, I understand and appreciate his emphasis on artistic integrity... on the other hand, it drives me crazy whenever I play one of his games.
I'd agree with that assessment in some ways. The atmosphere, for the first few hours, was stunning. They lost it a bit later on, because they never really seemed to understand that varying the pace is a key part of building atmosphere. Some of the people posting on here have already mentioned the Alien movies. If you look at the second movie, which is the closest comparator for Doom 3, the actual action sequences are fairly short. In Doom 3, once the first shot had been fired, it was non-stop shooting through to the end of the game. A real pity.
While they were flawed in many (oh so many) ways, the two PC Aliens vs Predator games kind of understood this. They did, at least, both have no enemies at all in the first mission of their marine campaigns. The second game even had some quiet spells later on, which was very effective. I know there are allegedly a couple of Alien games under development by Sega at the moment... I just hope they've got a decent writer on board.
As for the actual gameplay in Doom 3... it wasn't really that bad. Sure, it was a run-and-gun fps, but it was by no means a bad one. I played Area 51: Blacksite recently (unwanted present I couldn't quite be bothered to return) and all I could think, all the way through that, was "this is like Doom 3 but not as good". I think people just had absurdly high hopes for it.
I'm not really convinced Valve pulled it off better. Half-Life 2 was a monumental let-down for me. Leaving aside how the AI seemed to have regressed and none of the weapons *felt* right, the atmosphere of the game was just too pretentious. The silent protagonist thing just seemed to really jar, in a game where so many NPCs have "conversations" with the main character.
To my mind, the real winner of that fps generation was Farcry, with Quake 4 (which came a bit later) in second place.
WoW gives each class three different specs to choose from. In some cases (for example, mages), this is just three different flavours of damage dealer (so some specs are better vs other players, while others are better in raids). In others, it allows for more significant specialisation. For example, Paladins can choose to be healers, tanks, or even (fairly poor) damage dealers.
Might want to actually learn a little about WoW before you use it as your generic comparator for "RPG systems I don't like".
To be honest, the current end-game isn't bad. They've got enough avenues in there to suit most degrees of committment to the game and general temperaments, even if some of these are more developed than others.
For the casual players, there are the five-man instances - first the regular versions and then, when you've got your gear from those, the heroics. Heroics are an interesting twist; they aren't, as I was expecting, just tuned-up versions of the regular instances. In many cases, despite the superficial similarities, they need very different tactics. There's also a nice progression here; a group in all blues wouldn't have too many problems with Botanica or Black Morass, while even full-epic groups can find Durnholde Keep or Arcatraz tricky.
Battlegrounds are a popular way of killing time for the casual PvPers. Even if you have awful gear and suck at them, you will still get your rewards - it'll just take a bit longer. The relative ease with which you can get your PvP rewards, combined with the low time input required, has led to them being branded "welfare epics". Of course, they don't really stand up against the high-end raiding or arena epics, but I know plenty of casuals who are content with this. Over time, the lower end arena drops get pushed down into Battleground rewards anyway.
The hardcore PvPers have Arena, which really is a cut-throat environment (and is the only form of PvP in the game where getting killed is any more than a momentary annoyance). Ironically, it doesn't actually take particularly long each week - the main challenge here is putting in the time to get the gear so you can participate effectively. The top end season 3 arena gear is almost on a par with the top-end raiding epics, although with the new personal rating requirements for some pieces, it isn't necessarily easy to get.
Finally, you have raiding, which is the favorite hardcore PvE end-game activity. This is where, to my mind, Blizzard have really made strides since the Burning Crusade hit. Rather than having a 40 man raid as the entry-level point, a la Molten Core, Karazhan was a nice, relatively easy 10 man raid, which many non-hardcore guilds were able to switch to quite quickly at level 70. With the addition of Zul'Aman in the 2.3 patch, you can more or less work your way through about 2/3rds of the end-game gear progression without ever setting foot in a 25-man raid. For the genuinely hardcore who do push into the 25 man raiding scene, there's a definite progression tree with 6 different instances to work through. The difference from most of the pre-expansion end-game is dramatic and impressive.
In short, Blizzard have delivered as reasonable an end-game experience as could reasonably be expected and continue to add new content at a decent pace. At the same time, they've refined the experience for lower level players and those levelling up alts, with the new Dustwallow Marsh quests and the dramatic reduction of the amount of xp needed to level up (you can level 1-60 in WoW now faster than you can in the fully-offline Final Fantasy XII). Of course, things are far from perfect, and I can see a few dark clouds on the horizon.
The most significant of these is that, as a former Final Fantasy XI player (where the level cap never went above 75), I must confess to being a bit worried by Blizzard's intention to slam the level cap up with 10 with every new expansion. What this essentially means is that any end-game gear you acquired before the expansion hit is immediately obsolete. Green is suddenly the new Purple. Effectively, this amounts to a complete end-game reboot every 12-18 months. While beneficial in some respects (shaking up the scene, letting newcomers get a foot on the ladder), in the long term it is just going to drive people away and kill the end-game scene for a few months before an expansion hits.
No no no. See, when you really need to worry is when you find the military in collusion with shower curtain manufacturers. That never ends well (even if there is cake).
Yeah, part of me wonders if it wouldn't be worth them taking the Forza 2 engine and using it to build a rather less hardcore game, focussed more around the high-end racing side of things and with a bit more attention to the front-end (which is admittedly nasty and can feel a bit spreadsheet-line on occasion). Of course, I'd stick to playing the more hardcore version, but as you say, different people want different things - although decent graphics and physics are pretty much a universal plus point.
I did have two gripes with Forza 2 actually. The first was the number and variety of tracks. I've not done a count, but I'm fairly sure that it doesn't actually have as many tracks as GT4, which was itself pretty light in this respect. Given the length of the career mode, this is a fairly major gripe. A friend of a friend of a friend of a friend who might possibly know somebody who shared a room with somebody who knew the cousin of somebody who was remotely involved in the game tells me that the major factor here was storage space on the DVD (tracks apparently eat lots of this). Frankly, I don't see much of a way around this, besides going multi-DVD (harder for a driving game than for a linear RPG like Blue Dragon), or jumping over to the PS3 with its Blu-Ray drive.
The other gripe I have is the relative lack of low-end cars, particularly the slightly older ones. This may sound an odd gripe, but I do have a point here. We're both agreed, I think, that GT4 left quite a bit to be desired. However, I took it and my PS2 with me when I went to visit the parents at Christmas, two years ago. We had about a dozen people from my dad's side of the family over on boxing-day, almost all of whom had driven. After a while, we switched the PS2 on and without exception, every single one of the cars they had driven there in was represented in the game (even if there were slight variations in the year/model). This led to one of the most amusing (and ridiculously over-competative) bouts of gaming/oneupmanship I've ever witnessed, as people suddenly got to find out who had the fastest car in a way that they'd never quite dared on the road. Forza 2 has a fairly limited selection of "family" cars and while expanding this probably isn't a priority for the developers, a better range is something I'd love to see from the sequel.
Interesting post, and if I had mod points, I would mod you up even though I don't agree with some of what you've written. However, I don't, so I'll do a reply instead.
On Super Smash Brothers... well... I can't claim to have be bouncing off the walls in anticipation of this game. That said, it highlights the biggest weakness of the Wii and, ultimately, the reason why I think its momentum is now going to ebb away.
The games just aren't there.
Nintendo are doing their usual trick of putting out one or two of their big franchise games per year, while nothing else of value (besides the Resident Evil titles) comes out for their console. The franchise games appeal to some people, send a small minority into paroxysms of joy, but leave a lot of others neutral or even decidedly bored. Meanwhile, the 360 continues to get all the interesting stuff and even the PS3 is (at last) starting to pick up a bit. Nintendo had a good start with the Wii, largely on the base of novely, hype and disaffection with the other two console developers; however, I think people are now starting to wake up to the fact that nothing's really changed since the dismal failure of the Gamecube.
On lack of availability... it was never that bad here in the UK until about 2 months before Christmas 07. Certainly, I had no problems picking one a year ago today - not long after launch - and I've seen them in the shops solidly since then. More evidence, if this were needed, that the Christmas shortage might not be entirely a product of demand.
On 3v3 hoops... yes. I played this for about an hour over at a friend's place. To be honest, I can't say I had particularly high hopes for it anyway, but it was pretty bad.
Don't play Guild Wars, so won't comment on that one.
I'm less worried about the EA/Bioware thing than some people seem to be. Yes, EA are the "big bad" and yes, they do have a habit of pumping out boring annually-revised sports games. However, I've noticed real signs of change from them over the last year or so; Command & Conquer 3 was frankly better than anything that Westwood ever did with the license and Crysis was very solid indeed. Maybe it's starting to sink in that poor games don't sell as well. I admit that this *could* be bad news for Bioware, but I'd take a more "wait and see" approach for the moment.
As for Forza 2... well... that was one of my favorite games of the year, arguably for some of the reasons you don't like it. I've always been a big fan of the more realistic sort of console racing game - particularly the Gran Turismo series - and Forza 2 blew everything else in the area out of the water, as far as I was concerned. The physics and AI are certainly better than anything I've seen elsewhere. I've tried my hand at driving on circuits or dirt a few times now - just about enough to realise how much I suck at it - and you can feel that Forza 2 is much, much closer to the real thing than Gran Turismo 4.
As for the career mode - I liked this a lot. You can actually jump into some of the higher end cars straight away in arcade mode. However, the benefit of starting out in basic road cars and working your way up in career mode is that this is actually a good way to develop your driving skill. The slower cars are generally more forgiving, meaning that you can try to take more challenging lines in them without necessarily spinning off and losing the race. Moreover, when you do get something wrong in one of the low end cars and find yourself choking on dust, it's much easier to tell *why* you went wrong than it is in something that's putting out over 500bhp. In career mode, by the time you can afford a car that's a significant advance on your current one, chances are that you are now ready to make better use of it.
As for the music, the ability to add custom sound-tracks is one of my favorite things about the 360. Rather than being stuck with the same few tracks over and over, as I was in Gran Turismo 4, I can set up my own custom play-list from my collection and tweak it as I want for each session. As far as I'm concerned, this is the *perfect* way to do music for driving games.
Read around 40 books last year, ranging from trashy pulp sci-fi through to serious non-fiction (just finishing off "Nemesis" by Max Hastings).
But don't let that stop you trolling.
The Sixaxis is every bit as guilty as the Wii-mote, although the Sixaxis can at least function as a servicable dualshock-clone when needed.
I mention Lair in my original post... I still don't think Lair would have been any good if it had featured an option for "normal" controls, but it would certainly have been dragged back from the brink of the pit of utter awfulness into which it managed to fall so spectacularly. My big hope for the Sixaxis is that most developers will start either ignoring the motion-sensing, or else relegating it to strictly optional use for enabling specific bits of minor functionality within games (ie. how Resistance: Fall of Man and Heavenly Sword use it).
If I've paid £40 for a game, I'm going to try to get my money's worth out of it. I've played enough games that start off quite slow or irritating and then pick up massively after a while (eg. Kingdom Hearts, Deus Ex) that I don't just drop things if they don't grab me immediately. Of course, most of the time, persevering with a game like this leads not to hidden treasure, but to frustration and annoyance. When a game makes me want to throw my controller through the screen, then yes, I start to hate it.
I suspect you may be putting a little too much weight on the word "hate" here.
This sums up my own feelings on Mario Galaxy pretty well. Mario 64 was a great game in its time and there's no denying that it was the game that provded that 3d platforming could work just as well as the traditional 2d version. However, it's aged a lot since then and other entries in the genre have surpassed it. I haven't played the new Ratchet & Clank yet, but even the previous installment in that series was a better game than Mario 64 in almost every respect - understandable given the age of the older title.
.hack//G.U., the games there are actually pretty good (Supreme Commander and Blue Dragon were very good). They just failed to live up to my own expectations, whether these were based on word of mouth or hype and reviews.
This is why, after all the 9.7/10 reviews and the massive hype here on slashdot, I was disappointed to find that the new Mario was basically just a re-skinned Mario 64 with, if anything, fewer neat things to do. It's by no means bad - some of the level design is arguably better than Mario 64 and it is still at core quite a fun platformer - but I'd have difficulty rating it as more than a 6 or 7 out of 10.
If you look at the games I list as "disappointing" in my original post, you'll see that, with the exception of
The Wii is hardly the only example of a silly gimmick controller around at the moment. From the Donkey Konga bongoes through to the Rock Band multi-peripheral exploitation, silly controllers tagged onto bad games have become far too common of late.
I hate this tendancy, I think it's bad for gaming and bad for gamers (who get ripped off for low-quality peripherals used for just a handful of games that may be worth playing) and I hope that it ultimately results in financial ruin for those involved (yes, including Nintendo).
God of War 2, on the other hand, draws you right into the action using nothing more sophisticated than the dual-shock 2. You alternate between precise combos for the take-down moves, the carefully controlled mashing of buttons in normal combat and the all-out mashing involved in just opening chests and draws, you actually start to *feel* Kratos's rage. That's clever... and it needs nothing more than the controller that comes bundled with the system.
Me? Civil Servant, full-time 9-6 job, plus I go out 1... maybe 2 nights a week. I just tend to finish games fairly quickly and then move along.