Almost, but not quite, correct. Yes, there were horrible, awful, dreadful games back in the old days, in among the gems. Yes, not every game today is a gem. However, by and large, truly awful games have ceased to exist.
Go take a look at the average reviews site. IGN is my preference, but your mileage may vary. Go look at the lower end of the scoring scale. Sure, you will find a couple of truly terrible games, with scores of 3/10 or less, where the gameplay is fundamentally broken, but these are very much the exception rather than the rule. By and large, these titles tend to cluster on the PC and the DS, with a couple on the PS2. They're exclusively from tiny budget developers, destined to go straight into bargain buckets. The exception that proves the rule here is, of course, Lair. I think the reason why there was so much shock over Lair is that it was the first AAA budgeted game in the better part of a decade to be utterly, nigh-unplayably awful.
Now, look at the rest of the "poor" games on said review site; the ones clustered around the 4-6/10 region. Compare them to the games getting similar ratings in magazines 10-20 years ago. While in the older titles, you will find unplayable game mechanics, games that could be completed in 10 minutes, games that couldn't be completed at all due to game-breaking bugs (with no chance of a patch) and many, many games which had clearly been pulled together in a few days in somebody's bedroom. By contrast, the worst that can be said of today's mediocre games is that they don't add anything new to their genre and don't do anything with particular aplomb. In most cases, they can hold their own perfectly well against the "groundbreaking" titles in that genre of just 2 or 3 years previous.
I'm not really sure it's the X-Box-isation that's the problem here. To my mind, many of the problems with Bioshock (which is still a very good game) are mirrored in one of this year's earlier releases - S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl (which from now on I'm just calling "Stalker").
Unlike Bioshock, Stalker was PC only, but when I think about the ways in which Bioshock falls short of System Shock 2, Stalker parallels it absolutely.
You highlight perhaps the biggest problem, namely the lack of any real need to select a "path" for your character. In both games, you basically just grab the best guns you can and as much ammo for them as you can, max out your upgrades (but don't worry if you make the wrong choice, you can revisit this whenever you want) and don't worry too much about shaping your character in the long run.
To my mind, the root of the problem lies in the fact that both games decided to eschew the idea of any kind of xp system, ostensibly on the grounds that xp reduces immersion. As evidence against this argument, I'd present Deus Ex. The lack of an xp system seriously reduces the incentive to explore, particularly once you know you've completed your arsenal. In Deus Ex, I did one playthrough for the plot and then went back and obsessively explored every corner of every level. In Bioshock, I just can't be bothered - I know I picked up all the guns and plasmids and frankly, by the time I reached the last boss on a second playthough, I'd be no better off than I was first time around. In Stalker, after the first 2 hours, I realised there was just no point in doing sidequests (of which there are no end), because they generally gave me no more ammo and health than I would use in completing them and didn't advance the plot at all.
Consoles have had some great games with vast amounts of depth. Simply blaming the existence of a console port for a game's limitations is a little simplistic.
I think there are two factors at play here. The first, and most obvious, is that edutainment games are overwhelmingly based on the PS (although the PSP and DS both have a growing library). Most parents like to feel that their children are at least getting some educational value out of the games they play and edutainment games are often how they decide to introduce their children to the world of IT.
The other, more complicated argument, probably revolves around pester-power. Almost all middle-class house-holds in the US/UK today contain a PC. These are generally low-end machines bought off-the-peg from a high-street store for a mix of home-office use and recreational web-browsing/e-mail. Consoles, despite having firmly entered the mainstream, remain less common, mainly because they are single-purpose machines and not everybody likes games.
When children are still in the single-digit age-range, they're generally more likely to be satisfied with the fairly basic games you can play on a low-end PC. However, as they age, they and their peers become increasingly aware of what else is available in gaming terms and more aware of what they don't have. At this point, they also get better at pestering their parents and more likely to be able to make the case for big-ticket items such as games consoles finding their way onto Christmas lists and the like.
Mind you, when I was 10-12ish, I was playing Gunship 2000, Eye of the Beholder, Microsoft Flight Simulator and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe on the PC. Frankly, I'm not sure I'd have the time or patience for the learning curve that games such as this involved today. Maybe some kids just develop... ah... sophisticated tastes early.
No, the moderator is bang on the money. The ending theme won't make much sense if you haven't played Portal. If you have, you will understand that it is far more apt for the game than any other theme could possibly have been; funny and chilling at the same time.
I'm not sure what this post is about. I'm not college-age. I haven't been for half a decade now. My gaming tastes are pretty open, for the most part. With the exception of non-driving sports games and weird Japanese hentai dating sims, I'll play more or less anything. All I want out of a game is a decent experience, be it singleplayer or multiplayer, that I can sit down with and play for more than 10 hours in total (and yes, on this metric, Halo 3 fails) without getting bored or overly frustrated. This is not a particularly "hardcore" or "softcore" aspiration. Given the price of games, it's a perfectly reasonable aim.
Right now, the Wii spectacularly fails to deliver on this score. I think I've already named the only three games that qualify; Zelda, Metroid Prime 3 and Resident Evil 4. One slightly above average game, one decent game and one excellent port of a superb but rapidly dating game. Even the PS3, with its currently dire lineup beats this. Resistance: Fall of Man remains the best console fps I've played, despite being technically bettered by Halo 3. The 360 utterly blows the Wii's lineup out of the water.
Of course, out of all the consoles, the one which has had the best 12 months up to now is... the PS2. God of War 2 (game of the year, in my opinion), Final Fantasy XII, Persona 3, many, many more. It's not about the hardware (although god knows this helps), it's about the games. And this is where the Wii is failing badly.
If you read what I typed, you'd see I don't fail to take this into account at all. This is the crux of my arguments. The Wii *is* a party console. However, the infrequency with which people will have opportunities to use it as it is intended (how often do you have friends over *and* everybody has the time and inclination to fetch out a console?) means that for most "casuals", it is horrible value for money. The trendies have jumped at it and most of them have one now, but the wider mass-market probably isn't going to follow.
The situation a year or two down the line, when the Wii is no longer a big media story, the other consoles are cheaper and the technological differences even more glaring will be much worse for Nintendo.
I know my credibility on this issue is near zero around these parts, as I've not been afraid to state all along that the Wii is over-hyped, but I agree with the fundamental tennet of this argument; many Wiis are not getting used because there is very little on them worth playing for more than about 10 minutes at a time. Looking at the "new releases" reviews on the average game-site (IGN is my personal preference, but your mileage may vary), it's easy to see that games coming out for the Wii mainly fall into 3 categories; "party" games (or extended tech demos, as I tend to think of them), rushed and nasty cross-platform ports and virtual console games (whose quality varies from the stellar to the derisory - but which many games will have been emulating for free for years).
The first category are ok on occasions when you have friends over, but are no use at all the rest of the time. A brief glance at gamerankings will show just how badly Wii ports of cross-platform games tend to fare. And virtual console games... well... great... but I don't want to spend all my time on my new console playing games that came out a decade ago.
There are a tiny number of other titles which actually have some gameplay value. Zelda is ok... slightly above average for its genre. Metroid Prime 3 is pretty good, although I still have problems with the backtrackeriffic gameplay style of Metroid games. Resident Evil 4 remains one of the only two cross platform games to actually be enhanced through being on the Wii (the other being Rayman Raving Rabbids, which falls into the "insipid party games" category anyway).
I know what people are going to say at this point; the Wii isn't for me, it's for the casual crowd. Thing is, I suspect that over time, even the average Joe will realise that, cheap though the Wii is, the limited use it eventually gets still means its horrible value for money.
Right now, Nintendo have things pretty easy. They had an unprecedented hype-machine for the launch of the console and some excellent initial sales. However, it seems to me that for those of us in the UK, the comparison to Gordon Brown's political honeymoon as Prime Minister are most appropriate; there comes a point at which people realise there's no substance there and the wheels fall off spectacularly. Happily for Nintendo, Sony continue to shoot themselves in the foot at every opportunity. They have an excellent machine out there, which, despite the high price-tag, is significantly more future-proof than any of its competitors (especially with the Blu-Ray drive, which is looking like a better and better idea). However, because they've mismanaged their relationships with developers and insisted on pushing their horribly broken and unnecessary motion-sensing controller, they've yet to attract a significantly better range of games than the Wii (although at least the PS3 has slightly more in the way of "substantial" games).
My instinct still stays that when all the dust settles, the slow-but-steady pace set by the 360, with no gimmicks, few headline-grabbing features, but an increasingly solid and well-rounded games lineup will win the day.
No idea whatsoever. However, part of me wonders if the MMO is related. Perhaps Bioware did a serious look at the costs involved in setting up and maintaining a large-scale MMO and decided that they wouldn't be able to get the ball rolling without some serious financial backing.
Running an MMO game world with hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of players in a persistent environment, with tens of thousands at the very least per server, is very different to managing the community for something like NWN, where players do much of the hard work and hosting. Blizzard and Square-Enix both found the jump tricky in some respects (although both of them undoubtedly got there in the end).
While I don't entirely agree with your analysis of the reasons, you've just described the life-cycle of pretty much every popular MMO ever made.
Phase 1: shiny new MMO comes out, marketinggoes into overdrive, solid number of initial sales, rampant teething troubles in many cases, complaints that players are paying to beta test the game.
Phase 2: population grows solidly, as much through word of mouth now as marketing. Server issues tend to stabilise and the worst of the bugs are fixed. This is probably the most exciting phase to play through, as the distractions surrounding the launch have failed, but the limits of the game aren't yet fully known. Lord of the Rings Online is probably sitting here at the moment.
Phase 3: population stabilises, with small fluctuations on a monthly basis. The developers tend to switch from primarily chasing bugs to primarily developing new content. This is primarily done via patches at this stage, although you might get a first expansion. Players start getting heavily into the end-game and you start to see a real gap growing between casual and hardcore players. The game's population will generally hit its peak during this phase. A good MMO will often make this phase last 2-3 years (cf. Everquest, Final Fantasy XI and now World of Warcraft as probably the most successful global examples). I'd say WoW is here at the moment, although it's perhaps starting to drift towards Phase 4.
Phase 4: player numbers begin a slow but inexorable decline, as boredom sets in among some of the hardcore and newer, shinier MMOs tempt away the newcomers. At this point, the developer seeks to protect their revenues by shifting the focus from free content in patches to paid-for expansions. This can also have the effect of tempting players who left back to the game. Nevertheless, the decline in player numbers continues. The game becomes increasingly centred on the hardcore players, with most of the expansions focussing exclusively on end-game. The experience for totally new players gets progressively less friendly. I'd say Final Fantasy XI is at this stage right now.
Phase 5: the game continues with a small, hardcore player-base, essentially as a legacy title. Expansions continue to appear, produced cheaply in the hope of racking up some easy sales. "Free" additions in terms of downloadable patches become less and less frequent. By and large, only the real hardcore are still playing. Everquest and Ultima Online fall very much into this category.
Phase 6: the game is no longer profitable, so the developers pull the plug. Somebody submits a nostalgic news-post to slashdot and a dozen people comment to say how nasty the developers are for not releasing the source code.
Most MMOs tend to follow this cycle pretty closely, with the exception of the real flops, which often tend to bypass the middle phases and go straight from phase 1 to 5 or 6. The simple fact is that however successful Blizzard have been with WoW and however well they manage it, sooner or later it is going to go into decline.
What do I think the future holds for Blizzard as an MMO developer? Given how well they've done with WoW, I don't think they'll want to get out of the business. I think they've got 2 ways to go. The first is that they wait another 18 months (or maybe 2 years) and then announce World of Starcraft. The other (and to me more interesting option), would be for them to announce Warcraft 4 (another RTS with a hefty single-player plot), advance the Warcraft Universe by 50 years or so, blow up some cities (or even continents), add some new ones and then announce World of Warcraft 2.
Actually, I'd much rather have some CG or a nice FMV than an in-engine cutscene. When I'm watching rather than playing a game, I want it to look as nice as possible. Even on Gears of War and Bioshock, which are, in my opinion, the best-looking games currently available, the quality of the visuals isn't as good as what can be achieved with a proper, traditional cut-scene. As for immersion, I don't think I find anything more jarring than having supposedly emotional game-events rendered comic by close-up views of game-engine faces, with textures stretched to breaking point and two-frame lip animations.
I remember how, back more than a decade ago, when CD drives started to become more common in PCs and Sega launched the Mega CD addon for the Megadrive/Genesis, suddenly every game on the market had low-budget, badly acted FMV cutscenes. We got barely-interactive horrors such as Rebel Assault, Night Trap, Sewer Shark and Mad Dog McRee (as well as a few better offerings, such as Wing Commanders 3 and 4). Inevitably, there was a huge backlash against the use of FMV cutscenes, due to the expense of making them and the usually amateurish quality of the results. However, I personally feel that the backlash went too far; I've been glad to see FMV cutscenes starting to make a return over the last 12 months, in games such as Command & Conquer 3 (admittedly, the C&C series held onto them for longer than most, but I thought they were gone for good when Generals dropped them).
I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion around these parts, but I feel that the emphasis on so-called "innovative" controllers in the gaming market over the last 12 months or so has been a terrible thing for games in general. Lair is a particularly bad example - what could have been a servicable, perhaps even decent game crippled by a control system that is agonising at best. I had a horrible feeling that Heavenly Sword was going to be ruined by the same crap, until I found the option to turn the motion-sensing stuff off. Now, part of this is down to just how sheer bloody awful the motion sensing functions of the Sixaxis are, but Wii games are, in many ways, just as bad. Certainly, after the first two hours of Zelda, the novelty had worn off, my elbow was getting tired and I was desperate for a sensible controller. With the exception of Resident Evil 4, I've yet to play a *proper* Wii game (as opposed to one of those all-pervading tech-demo-cum-party-game atrocities) where the controller actually added to the experience, rather than being a distraction.
Fancy controllers might be ok for games which get dragged out once every couple of months when you have friends over and nothing better to do, but for those who, like myself, like to put in a substantial amount of time every week gaming, you just can't beat either a traditional two-analogue-sticks console controller or a keyboard and mouse combo. Far more precision, far less hassle and far more engagement. Right now, the best console controller on the market is the 360 controller, hands down.
Yeah, I've been facing a dilemma over which version to get. Ordinarily, like you, I prefer my fpses on the PC, because even though I can play them perfectly well on a control pad these days, keyboard and mouse still feels slightly more natural. My current machine is a 9 month old C2d 2.66ghz, 2 gigs RAM and the 1gb SLI-on-one-card 7959GX2 - fingers crossed, it should be able to play the game just fine.
That said, I always get a little nervous around games which use cutting-edge engines on the PC, just because they have a habit of being so damned unstable. If there's one game where I don't want my experience ruined by having to restart or reboot every 30 minutes due to a crash, it's this one.
Now I finally have an HDTV, the other major argument in favour of always getting the PC version - the superior resolution - has vanished. The combination of guaranteed stability, being able to play in comfort on my sofa (rather than at my desk) and having a nice big TV screen rather than a 19 inch monitor is very, very tempting.
The 360 and the PS3 are both capable of utilising standard USB mice and keyboards. I suspect that the day they start allowing these to be used in "proper" games is the day I stop buying PC fpses.
This is probably tied into highstreet store release dates and sales deals. For reasons connected with the distribution chain, most US games releases happen on either Mondays or Tuesdays, while pretty much all UK (the most important European market since Germany effectively closed its borders to many games) releases happen on Fridays.
Obviously, retailers would kick up a fuss if online vendors were selling the game in their region before they had it in their stores. For this reason, they tend to insist on contractual obligations ensuring that "online" releases don't pre-empt titles hitting their stores. Of course, given how easy the region-checks on most online sales of games are to defeat, I'm not really sure that this policy is getting them very far, with the generally technically savvy PC gaming scene.
In theory, this is correct. What it doesn't account for, though, is legislatures so utterly stupid that they sign into being laws which are identical to those which have already been established to be unconstitutional when implemented by other states. As I understand it, the drafting of the various bills that have been struck down is very similar. They're not trying anything clever to get around the constitutional objections that have been raised to the exact same law in the past. They're just doing the legislative equivalent of bashing their collective head repeatedly against a brick wall, and using the tax-payer's money to apply a bandage afterwards.
These bills have failed in enough States now that it must be 100% clear that they are never going to stand up to legal scrutiny and their passage can be nothing more than a political statement. Is there no way that the administrative cost of drafting them and the legal costs of defending them in court could be inflicted directly upon the legislators who still insist on trying to drive them through?
I'm not a particularly hardcore WoW player. I played it on and off for a month or two after launch, but back then, Final Fantasy XI was my game of choice. Since getting bored of FFXI at the start of this year, I've gone back to playing WoW at a much more casual level than I used to play FFXI, taking about 4 months to get my Draenei Paladin to 70 and only doing the occasional Karazhan raid since getting there. However, even I can see that the first expansion created a number of issues for the player base and I'm curious whether Blizzard has given any thought to addressing these.
The first is the idea that Penny-Arcade identified as "green is the new purple". When Burning Crusade hit, almost all of the level 60 epics, which in many cases people had been grinding for over months (or even years) were suddenly obsolete compared to random "green" items that dropped from normal mobs in the new areas. I'd never been part of the pre-expansion end-game, but by the time I was level 62, I was actually better geared than many people who had. It seems almost inevitable that the new expansion will raise the level cap again. At the moment, I'm dipping my toe in the Burning Crusade end-game... once the date for the new expansion is confirmed, any motivation I have for doing so will evaporate, if it seems at all likely that any gear I obtain will be made irrelevant after 10 minutes in Northrend. If Blizzard intend to keep up a stream of expansions, as most MMO developers seem to, then unless they find a solution to this, most of their hardcore players will just leave, as any sense of purpose to the end-game evaporates.
Next... new races or classes. Burning Crusade added two new races, but no new classes. Frankly, new races don't really give you very much, apart from a new way to level from 1-20. The addition of new classes (WoW has always been rather short on these) would be quite helpful in terms of adding a bit of variety and dispelling the slightly stagnant feel that now hovers over the game. However, this in turn brings a few issues with it. Have Blizzard now made the combined PvP and PvE balancing issues so complicated that adding new classes would be all but impossible? Part of me suspects that they have. Moreover, the lack of a flexible job system, such as FFXI's, makes it even more irritating to level up a new class from scratch.
Burning Crusade seems to have created a whole range of rather nasty economic issues as well. As soon as it appeared, people more or less stopped running the old level 60 instances. This means that crafting recipies and ingredients that dropped only in this dungeons have become increasingly rare (just look how long you have to wait and how much you have to pay to get Enchant Weapon - Crusader on a "new" server). This is particularly problematic for people trying to level up crafts through the levels where these ingredients are key. If, following the new expansion, the availability of... for instance... the primals were to plummet, the chances for new crafters to make it to the top of their professions would be slashed dramatically. Some form of incentive for people to continue running the old instances would be very helpful.
The Germans made no secret of their plans to advance this during their turn with the rotating EU Presidency. Fortunately, this wouldn't force other member states to adopt the ridiculous German position on games, but it's still pretty bad. Last I had heard, several Governments, including the UK, were less than enthused by the idea and planned to resist it (although this may have changed).
Our best hope, really, comes from the fact that the Presidency moves on to Portugal at the start of July. So far as I know, Portugal's position on games is nothing like as screwed up as Germany's and they might not be so motivated to keep pushing to advance this.
The proposed EU constitution rejected by a number of states over the last few years was a bad joke, but there's no denying that the EU needs serious structural reform. Unfortunately, given that said reform should really limit the powers of the EU institutions rather than enhancing them, we're unlikely to see any sensible proposals emerging any time soon.
Ok, first of all, no argument on the low-quality of Wii online play. It sucks, pure and simple. However, this post raises a point that keeps coming up in irritating-fanboy posts like this one and annoying the hell out of me.
Why does it matter how many players an online fps supports? I mean, do you honestly expect reviewers to say "ok, this game has 8 player support, so only 2/5 for it. This game has 32 player support, so it can have 4/5"?
The entire "serious" online competitive fps gaming scene is based around small teams. 1v1, 2v2, 5v5 and so on. The Counter-Strike scene shifted from being 6v6 down to 5v5 because, quite frankly, the smaller matches were more fun. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Tribes 2 and the original BF1942, both of which were large team games, for a while, but ultimately they get very boring quite quickly. The reason? Simple. Getting together an organised team that large is nigh impossible. This means you either content yourself with playing once per month, when you can actually get 16+ people's schedules to align, or else you either play with a team you don't particularly know, or you just play random public games. In which case, you put up with all the tedious crap that comes with it, like half your team camping the B-17 spawn all map so they can fly it round for 2 minutes before crashing while the opposing team completely over-runs you, or shit-heads on your team who break cover so they can hump the face of an enemy corpse. No thanks.
You mention the small team sizes in Gears of War. Fine. It suits Gears perfectly. Gears is a relatively slow-moving, rather "intimate" fps, heavily based around use of cover. If you had 32 people all running around in every direction, the game would rapidly become a big ball of suck. For Gears , 4v4 is more or less exactly right (although the option of 5v5 might have been nice, just because this is fairly standard in many other games and would interfere with teams who usually play other games less).
In short, bigger does not necessarily equal better. After all, remember how much Planetside sucked?
This story becomes even more ridiculous once you've played Resistance. And I'm from Manchester, originally (although I moved out of the hell-hole to London as soon as I was old enough to get a job). I therefore feel I'm fairly well qualified to comment on this.
From the article, you would guess that Resistance is some kind of GTA game. You know, one of those where you sleep with a hooker then run her over (yes, yes, I know that this isn't how most people play GTA). If this were the case, I could possibly, just about, see where the Church was coming from here, even if I wouldn't agree with them. After all, Manchester does have a fairly serious guns and gangs problem, particularly around the Moss Side area (arguably even worse than London's from the guns point of view, although I understand things have improved somewhat in the last few years). Hell, the school I went to was about a mile from Moss Side, and while the school itself was pretty civilised, being private, you saw some pretty shocking things in the streets around it.
However, Resistance is nothing like GTA. The best description I could come up with would be a blend of a WW2 shooter and Halo. The setting is essentially alternate-world WW2, with many of the human weapons feeling relevant to the period, while the "alien" weapons are deeply Halo-inspired. Most of the game is spent playing through blasted and burned-out city-scapes. This includes the Manchester section, which pops up about 1/4 of the way through the game. For any Englishman with even an ounce of historical knowledge, the appropriate context for the game is obvious; the Blitz (yes, I know Manchester wasn't heavily hit, but I feel the point still stands). If the game is basing itself on any cultural reference points, they aren't the "cruisin' the hood, pimpin' my hoes, shootin' da pigs" cliches of modern gang life, but rather the fear of invasion and the shock of seeing familiar land-marks destroyed that characterised life in the UK's cities during WW2. So while there is still an outstanding question regarding taste, it is a question that could be levelled against every other WW2 shooter out there and a question which seems to have been conclusively answered by now with a resounding "meh".
It's disapppointing that nobody talking about this in the issue appears to have actually played the bloody game. Personally, I loved the UK setting (and very much enjoyed the game itself), particularly as some of the final missions in London see the player passing not a million miles from where I live now.
Ok, at the top end of the scale, I've got to agree with assessment the 360 controller is the best ever made. Prior to the 360's launch, I'd have pointed to the Xbox S-controller, which was well ahead of anything else in terms of shape, quality of build and buttons, weight balance and overall ergonomics. The only downside with the S-Controller was that the black and white face buttons were awkward and uncomfortable to use. The 360 controller corrects this flaw, essentially by converting those buttons into bumpers and also improves the weight balance still further. Range, reliability and ability to survive being thrown on the floor after Dead or Alive 4 drives me to my snapping point are all excellent.
The Dualshock 2 was also an excellent controller in its own way, despite being a little too small for comfort. It did a good job of doing absolutely everything a modern controller needs to with a minimum of fuss and bother. However, the pressure-sensitive function of the buttons could be extremely finnicky and was hard to use properly in games that demanded it (such as the Gran Turismo series). The Sixaxis is a big improvement in this respect, but... well... I'll come to the Sixaxis later.
Leaving the consoles aside for one moment, I'm going to get a bit retro for my final pick of "great" controllers and go back to the PC's Thrustmaster F-16. I had one of these eating up half my desk-space for many years and never found anything more fun to play flight-sims with. Sure, the customisation software was all DOS based and didn't work properly under Win 95 or later, but I still have very fond memories of this stick.
Now... the bad.
Top pick here... the Gamecube controller. Not in terms of sheer, outright awfulness - you can certainly find worse examples of that. But rather because this controller managed to be the only controller to "get it wrong" so badly in a generation where everybody else (including PC accessory manufacturers) seemed more or less able to agree on roughly how many buttons a controller should have and where they should be. One huge, stand-out flaw was the pathetic cable length, particularly unforgivable on a system so heavily geared towards party games. Shelling out extra for wireless controllers became effectively essential for anybody with a living room larger than a small cupboard. The right analogue stick wasn't even a proper stick - it was a stumped and malformed nub, which was no use whatsoever for gaming and made fpses on the cube a truly nasty proposition. The mis-shaped buttons, with the huge green blob and the tiny little kidney-beans around the edge meant that you were forever hitting A when you didn't mean to. All in all, the official Cube controller felt like a nasty, $5 third party accessory.
Also high on the list... the PSP's analogue stick. Gums up with dust far too easily and is not pleasant to use even after cleaning. The rest of the PSP interface is fine and many games avoid using the little stick, but this is definitely something for Sony to tackle in the next revision.
And now the "why weren't they includeds"
Basically, because while allegedly revolutionary (although the results of this "revolution" remain to be seen), the Wii-mote at best represents a very early and unpolished attempt at a new type of controller. Accuracy is questionable at best, especially during rapid movements. Less understandable, and harder to forgive, is the positioning of the buttons. If you want to use more than 2 buttons, then you are going to get sore fingers. Using the Wii-Mote for anything other than a "wave the wand around manically" game for any protracted period is deeply uncomfortable and cramps up my hand like nothing else I've ever tried. The 360 controller is a massively polished traditional product - as good as it's going to get for regular controllers for the forseeable future. That the Wii-mote fails to measure up is perhaps inevitable given how novel it is, but it still doesn't mean that it's as good as the 360 controller.
Ok, I really quite liked NWN2, once I'd applied the 1.03 patch to fix the most vicious of the bugs and interface problems. The engine wasn't the greatest, but the writing and general feel of the game was excellent. So, a few things I'd like from an expansion:
- More customisability for non-PC party members. It kinda sucked just being stuck without any flexibility in their class-level choices and meant that you couldn't really experiment with different prestige classes in the main campaign unless you actually did multiple playthroughs.
- More tilesets. NWN2 suffered from the same problem as NWN1 here... it relied on the same few tilesets to make up the vast majority of its locations. I say to hell with the toolkit for once - give us some decent looking unique locations in the main campaign. This added a lot of atmosphere in BG2 and it needs to be done again.
- Better rounded party interactions. Don't get me wrong, I liked the fact that NWN2 brought back a lot of the kind of dialogue we remembered from BG2 and missed from NWN1, but it didn't go far enough. Most of the dialogue trees in the game seemed to be focussed on just a few of the characters. Other characters never really got developed much at all.
- More "political" sections to the plot. Combat's fun, but so's politicking your way through the cities.
- Continue to throw in the planar elements from the plot of the main campaign. I enjoyed these a lot. The Forgotten Realms setting on its own can get a little stale. Mixing in elements of the Planescape world in NWN2 added a lot to it, in my experience, and this could be expanded further.
- Give us a proper ending this time. Oh come on, were you even trying last time?
- Epic levels? I can take 'em or leave 'em. It would be nice if they were there, I guess, but don't go building an entire expansion around them.
There was a time - back when I was actively playing a MMORPG (Final Fantasy XI) that I would have agreed with the idea that MMORPGs are addictive. However, my experiences over the last year or so have made me far less certain.
I started playing FFXI in November 03, importing a copy from the US when it launched there. For the first couple of months, it was just a curiousity... something I logged into once in a while and ran around a bit. Then somebody else I knew in real life started playing. And then another. The amount of time I was putting into the game increased considerably, to the point where it was taking up well over 50% of my non-work time (I have what's essentially a 9-5 office-based job). I was going out less, particularly at the weekends, playing other games less and watching fewer movies (never complain about MMORPG monthly fees - you wouldn't believe how much money they save you). About the only other past-time that didn't suffer was reading.
I got heavily into the game. I did the whole end-game thing, with all the grief and drama that went with it. I slogged through the Chains of Promathia expansion, which was exhausting, frustrating, and infuriating, but also responsible for some of the biggest adrenelin rushes I've ever had from gaming.
At this point, if the addiction analogy were really true, the next stage of the story should write itself; losing contact with real life friends and family, locking myself away in a darkened room, losing my job, dying alone in poverty etc. Except... it didn't. Some time last summer, I noticed that I just didn't quite care about the game as much as I had in the past. Logging in felt more like a chore, the game itself rarely did much for me and I was losing interest in the community. Over the next few months, my play time dwindled rapidly. By Christmas, I was only logging in for a couple of hours a week for scheduled Limbus runs. By February, even that had stopped.
There was no dramatic intervention. No moment when I realised I needed to go cold-turkey. In fact, I never did go cold turkey. I've still got the game installed and still pay $15 a month for my account. I just don't log into it, because I can't be bothered. It's not that I've moved onto another MMORPG. I have a WoW account, which I do log into occasionally, but I just don't find that game fun enough to grip me for long periods. Rather, I've more or less gone back to using my free time to do the things I did before FFXI came along. I'm not alone in this... the real life friends who got into FFXI shortly after I did followed a similar trajectory.
Now, compare that to how a genuine addiction works. I've known lots of smokers. I've also known a guy who started smoking cannabis at 15 and who was dead of a heroin overdose at 23. I've never known a smoker just give up the habit because they found cigarettes just didn't do much for them any more. From what I've seen (and I've never smoked), giving up smoking is painful (emotionally and perhaps even physically) and requires a good chunk of will-power. When drug users find that their current drug of choice doesn't do much for them any more, the response seems to be to move onto something harder.
MMORPGs have the effect on people they do for a number of reasons - interesting game worlds, clear goals of the kind that people lack in their real lives (this one is important), the ability to act out fantasies, a sense of worth from standing in a virtual community and so on. However, I can no longer believe that genuine addiction is one of the factors at work in most cases.
Hmm... it's not entirely without value to check a rough draft. The simple and sad fact is that with standards in high schools and universities having slipped as far as they have, an increasing number of students don't actually have a firm idea of what plagiarism actually constitutes, the harm it does and the consequences it can bring.
It's much better to pick up accidental or unwitting plagiarism at any early stage than when the final paper is submitted. Pick it up early enough and often a quiet (or not so quiet, if you want to go for shock value) word with the student in question can fix the problem, educate the student and avoid any severe consequences. By contrast, plagiarism in a final, submitted paper is always (rightly) going to bring extremely harsh sanctions.
If the system were working properly, it would be capable of excluding a student's own earlier work from the check.
I've actually had in-game spams from characters with names like "Xfxfqqfx" and the like, advertising those very things. Received two of these within the last two weeks, and I'm only a fairly irregular player.
I really, really hate the abuse of the word "hacked" in this context.
I remember back when I was doing the whole oper thing on a well-known IRC network. Every day, we'd get hundreds (sometimes thousands) of complaints from people complaining that their account with the network services had been "hacked". In every single case I ever encountered, it transpired that the individual in question had just fallen for an extremely simplistic con designed to get them to reveal their password. There's no element of "hacking" about it - it's just the exploitation of gullibility, stupidity, and the belief that it's possible to get something for nothing.
I don't play WoW very much (although I do have a semi-active account I log into occasionally, but until the end of last year (when I more or less went cold-turkey), I was a pretty hardcore Final Fantasy XI player. "Hacked" accounts were a perennial topic in FFXI and, once again, it was inevitably the account owner's incompetence that led to the account being lost or vandalised. I'd say that the cases I heard of could be broken down into three broad areas:
1) Keyloggers and malicious software - probably the closest to actual "hacking", these still relied on user greed and stupidity to steal accounts. Essentially, many of the third party programmes available for FFXI (all of which are banned under the TOS) actually contained keyloggers and the like which stole people's account passwords and reported them back to the author. Most of the malicious software in question would masquerade as cheats (eg. movement speed cheats), so frankly, people who lost their accounts this way got what they deserved.
2) Social engineering/phishing attacks - slightly less common - probably the rarest of the three categories - but by no means unknown. The old familiar tricks all applied here: masquerading on forums as admins, offering powerlevelling or gil to people who signed up on sites using their Playonline passwords, the usual rubbish. I dare say a couple of people were stung by this purely on the basis of being naive, but again, most of the people who fell for this did so out of greed.
3) Shared account passwords - in no way does this resemble "hacking". However, it was by far the most common means by which people would lose their accounts (or have them vandalised). I remember being in a linkshell once where a number of the senior members shared account passwords (although happily, I always opted out). When one of the leaders went bad, he did quite a bit of damage with the logins he had. In these cases, my sympathy was again limited - if you share your account password with somebody you just know online, you're asking for trouble. However, there were a few genuinely unfortunate cases, where people would have their accounts trashed after a real-life relationship with another player (often a girlfriend or boyfriend) went bad.
So in short, assuming the situation with WoW is anything like the one with FFXI and Blizzard don't actually have horribly insecure servers, nobody in WoW is actually getting their account "hacked".
Slashdot Mirror
Almost, but not quite, correct. Yes, there were horrible, awful, dreadful games back in the old days, in among the gems. Yes, not every game today is a gem. However, by and large, truly awful games have ceased to exist.
Go take a look at the average reviews site. IGN is my preference, but your mileage may vary. Go look at the lower end of the scoring scale. Sure, you will find a couple of truly terrible games, with scores of 3/10 or less, where the gameplay is fundamentally broken, but these are very much the exception rather than the rule. By and large, these titles tend to cluster on the PC and the DS, with a couple on the PS2. They're exclusively from tiny budget developers, destined to go straight into bargain buckets. The exception that proves the rule here is, of course, Lair. I think the reason why there was so much shock over Lair is that it was the first AAA budgeted game in the better part of a decade to be utterly, nigh-unplayably awful.
Now, look at the rest of the "poor" games on said review site; the ones clustered around the 4-6/10 region. Compare them to the games getting similar ratings in magazines 10-20 years ago. While in the older titles, you will find unplayable game mechanics, games that could be completed in 10 minutes, games that couldn't be completed at all due to game-breaking bugs (with no chance of a patch) and many, many games which had clearly been pulled together in a few days in somebody's bedroom. By contrast, the worst that can be said of today's mediocre games is that they don't add anything new to their genre and don't do anything with particular aplomb. In most cases, they can hold their own perfectly well against the "groundbreaking" titles in that genre of just 2 or 3 years previous.
I'm not really sure it's the X-Box-isation that's the problem here. To my mind, many of the problems with Bioshock (which is still a very good game) are mirrored in one of this year's earlier releases - S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl (which from now on I'm just calling "Stalker").
Unlike Bioshock, Stalker was PC only, but when I think about the ways in which Bioshock falls short of System Shock 2, Stalker parallels it absolutely.
You highlight perhaps the biggest problem, namely the lack of any real need to select a "path" for your character. In both games, you basically just grab the best guns you can and as much ammo for them as you can, max out your upgrades (but don't worry if you make the wrong choice, you can revisit this whenever you want) and don't worry too much about shaping your character in the long run.
To my mind, the root of the problem lies in the fact that both games decided to eschew the idea of any kind of xp system, ostensibly on the grounds that xp reduces immersion. As evidence against this argument, I'd present Deus Ex. The lack of an xp system seriously reduces the incentive to explore, particularly once you know you've completed your arsenal. In Deus Ex, I did one playthrough for the plot and then went back and obsessively explored every corner of every level. In Bioshock, I just can't be bothered - I know I picked up all the guns and plasmids and frankly, by the time I reached the last boss on a second playthough, I'd be no better off than I was first time around. In Stalker, after the first 2 hours, I realised there was just no point in doing sidequests (of which there are no end), because they generally gave me no more ammo and health than I would use in completing them and didn't advance the plot at all.
Consoles have had some great games with vast amounts of depth. Simply blaming the existence of a console port for a game's limitations is a little simplistic.
I think there are two factors at play here. The first, and most obvious, is that edutainment games are overwhelmingly based on the PS (although the PSP and DS both have a growing library). Most parents like to feel that their children are at least getting some educational value out of the games they play and edutainment games are often how they decide to introduce their children to the world of IT.
The other, more complicated argument, probably revolves around pester-power. Almost all middle-class house-holds in the US/UK today contain a PC. These are generally low-end machines bought off-the-peg from a high-street store for a mix of home-office use and recreational web-browsing/e-mail. Consoles, despite having firmly entered the mainstream, remain less common, mainly because they are single-purpose machines and not everybody likes games.
When children are still in the single-digit age-range, they're generally more likely to be satisfied with the fairly basic games you can play on a low-end PC. However, as they age, they and their peers become increasingly aware of what else is available in gaming terms and more aware of what they don't have. At this point, they also get better at pestering their parents and more likely to be able to make the case for big-ticket items such as games consoles finding their way onto Christmas lists and the like.
Mind you, when I was 10-12ish, I was playing Gunship 2000, Eye of the Beholder, Microsoft Flight Simulator and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe on the PC. Frankly, I'm not sure I'd have the time or patience for the learning curve that games such as this involved today. Maybe some kids just develop... ah... sophisticated tastes early.
No, the moderator is bang on the money. The ending theme won't make much sense if you haven't played Portal. If you have, you will understand that it is far more apt for the game than any other theme could possibly have been; funny and chilling at the same time.
You what?
I'm not sure what this post is about. I'm not college-age. I haven't been for half a decade now. My gaming tastes are pretty open, for the most part. With the exception of non-driving sports games and weird Japanese hentai dating sims, I'll play more or less anything. All I want out of a game is a decent experience, be it singleplayer or multiplayer, that I can sit down with and play for more than 10 hours in total (and yes, on this metric, Halo 3 fails) without getting bored or overly frustrated. This is not a particularly "hardcore" or "softcore" aspiration. Given the price of games, it's a perfectly reasonable aim.
Right now, the Wii spectacularly fails to deliver on this score. I think I've already named the only three games that qualify; Zelda, Metroid Prime 3 and Resident Evil 4. One slightly above average game, one decent game and one excellent port of a superb but rapidly dating game. Even the PS3, with its currently dire lineup beats this. Resistance: Fall of Man remains the best console fps I've played, despite being technically bettered by Halo 3. The 360 utterly blows the Wii's lineup out of the water.
Of course, out of all the consoles, the one which has had the best 12 months up to now is... the PS2. God of War 2 (game of the year, in my opinion), Final Fantasy XII, Persona 3, many, many more. It's not about the hardware (although god knows this helps), it's about the games. And this is where the Wii is failing badly.
If you read what I typed, you'd see I don't fail to take this into account at all. This is the crux of my arguments. The Wii *is* a party console. However, the infrequency with which people will have opportunities to use it as it is intended (how often do you have friends over *and* everybody has the time and inclination to fetch out a console?) means that for most "casuals", it is horrible value for money. The trendies have jumped at it and most of them have one now, but the wider mass-market probably isn't going to follow.
The situation a year or two down the line, when the Wii is no longer a big media story, the other consoles are cheaper and the technological differences even more glaring will be much worse for Nintendo.
I know my credibility on this issue is near zero around these parts, as I've not been afraid to state all along that the Wii is over-hyped, but I agree with the fundamental tennet of this argument; many Wiis are not getting used because there is very little on them worth playing for more than about 10 minutes at a time. Looking at the "new releases" reviews on the average game-site (IGN is my personal preference, but your mileage may vary), it's easy to see that games coming out for the Wii mainly fall into 3 categories; "party" games (or extended tech demos, as I tend to think of them), rushed and nasty cross-platform ports and virtual console games (whose quality varies from the stellar to the derisory - but which many games will have been emulating for free for years).
The first category are ok on occasions when you have friends over, but are no use at all the rest of the time. A brief glance at gamerankings will show just how badly Wii ports of cross-platform games tend to fare. And virtual console games... well... great... but I don't want to spend all my time on my new console playing games that came out a decade ago.
There are a tiny number of other titles which actually have some gameplay value. Zelda is ok... slightly above average for its genre. Metroid Prime 3 is pretty good, although I still have problems with the backtrackeriffic gameplay style of Metroid games. Resident Evil 4 remains one of the only two cross platform games to actually be enhanced through being on the Wii (the other being Rayman Raving Rabbids, which falls into the "insipid party games" category anyway).
I know what people are going to say at this point; the Wii isn't for me, it's for the casual crowd. Thing is, I suspect that over time, even the average Joe will realise that, cheap though the Wii is, the limited use it eventually gets still means its horrible value for money.
Right now, Nintendo have things pretty easy. They had an unprecedented hype-machine for the launch of the console and some excellent initial sales. However, it seems to me that for those of us in the UK, the comparison to Gordon Brown's political honeymoon as Prime Minister are most appropriate; there comes a point at which people realise there's no substance there and the wheels fall off spectacularly. Happily for Nintendo, Sony continue to shoot themselves in the foot at every opportunity. They have an excellent machine out there, which, despite the high price-tag, is significantly more future-proof than any of its competitors (especially with the Blu-Ray drive, which is looking like a better and better idea). However, because they've mismanaged their relationships with developers and insisted on pushing their horribly broken and unnecessary motion-sensing controller, they've yet to attract a significantly better range of games than the Wii (although at least the PS3 has slightly more in the way of "substantial" games).
My instinct still stays that when all the dust settles, the slow-but-steady pace set by the 360, with no gimmicks, few headline-grabbing features, but an increasingly solid and well-rounded games lineup will win the day.
No idea whatsoever. However, part of me wonders if the MMO is related. Perhaps Bioware did a serious look at the costs involved in setting up and maintaining a large-scale MMO and decided that they wouldn't be able to get the ball rolling without some serious financial backing.
Running an MMO game world with hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of players in a persistent environment, with tens of thousands at the very least per server, is very different to managing the community for something like NWN, where players do much of the hard work and hosting. Blizzard and Square-Enix both found the jump tricky in some respects (although both of them undoubtedly got there in the end).
While I don't entirely agree with your analysis of the reasons, you've just described the life-cycle of pretty much every popular MMO ever made.
Phase 1: shiny new MMO comes out, marketinggoes into overdrive, solid number of initial sales, rampant teething troubles in many cases, complaints that players are paying to beta test the game.
Phase 2: population grows solidly, as much through word of mouth now as marketing. Server issues tend to stabilise and the worst of the bugs are fixed. This is probably the most exciting phase to play through, as the distractions surrounding the launch have failed, but the limits of the game aren't yet fully known. Lord of the Rings Online is probably sitting here at the moment.
Phase 3: population stabilises, with small fluctuations on a monthly basis. The developers tend to switch from primarily chasing bugs to primarily developing new content. This is primarily done via patches at this stage, although you might get a first expansion. Players start getting heavily into the end-game and you start to see a real gap growing between casual and hardcore players. The game's population will generally hit its peak during this phase. A good MMO will often make this phase last 2-3 years (cf. Everquest, Final Fantasy XI and now World of Warcraft as probably the most successful global examples). I'd say WoW is here at the moment, although it's perhaps starting to drift towards Phase 4.
Phase 4: player numbers begin a slow but inexorable decline, as boredom sets in among some of the hardcore and newer, shinier MMOs tempt away the newcomers. At this point, the developer seeks to protect their revenues by shifting the focus from free content in patches to paid-for expansions. This can also have the effect of tempting players who left back to the game. Nevertheless, the decline in player numbers continues. The game becomes increasingly centred on the hardcore players, with most of the expansions focussing exclusively on end-game. The experience for totally new players gets progressively less friendly. I'd say Final Fantasy XI is at this stage right now.
Phase 5: the game continues with a small, hardcore player-base, essentially as a legacy title. Expansions continue to appear, produced cheaply in the hope of racking up some easy sales. "Free" additions in terms of downloadable patches become less and less frequent. By and large, only the real hardcore are still playing. Everquest and Ultima Online fall very much into this category.
Phase 6: the game is no longer profitable, so the developers pull the plug. Somebody submits a nostalgic news-post to slashdot and a dozen people comment to say how nasty the developers are for not releasing the source code.
Most MMOs tend to follow this cycle pretty closely, with the exception of the real flops, which often tend to bypass the middle phases and go straight from phase 1 to 5 or 6. The simple fact is that however successful Blizzard have been with WoW and however well they manage it, sooner or later it is going to go into decline.
What do I think the future holds for Blizzard as an MMO developer? Given how well they've done with WoW, I don't think they'll want to get out of the business. I think they've got 2 ways to go. The first is that they wait another 18 months (or maybe 2 years) and then announce World of Starcraft. The other (and to me more interesting option), would be for them to announce Warcraft 4 (another RTS with a hefty single-player plot), advance the Warcraft Universe by 50 years or so, blow up some cities (or even continents), add some new ones and then announce World of Warcraft 2.
Actually, I'd much rather have some CG or a nice FMV than an in-engine cutscene. When I'm watching rather than playing a game, I want it to look as nice as possible. Even on Gears of War and Bioshock, which are, in my opinion, the best-looking games currently available, the quality of the visuals isn't as good as what can be achieved with a proper, traditional cut-scene. As for immersion, I don't think I find anything more jarring than having supposedly emotional game-events rendered comic by close-up views of game-engine faces, with textures stretched to breaking point and two-frame lip animations.
I remember how, back more than a decade ago, when CD drives started to become more common in PCs and Sega launched the Mega CD addon for the Megadrive/Genesis, suddenly every game on the market had low-budget, badly acted FMV cutscenes. We got barely-interactive horrors such as Rebel Assault, Night Trap, Sewer Shark and Mad Dog McRee (as well as a few better offerings, such as Wing Commanders 3 and 4). Inevitably, there was a huge backlash against the use of FMV cutscenes, due to the expense of making them and the usually amateurish quality of the results. However, I personally feel that the backlash went too far; I've been glad to see FMV cutscenes starting to make a return over the last 12 months, in games such as Command & Conquer 3 (admittedly, the C&C series held onto them for longer than most, but I thought they were gone for good when Generals dropped them).
I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion around these parts, but I feel that the emphasis on so-called "innovative" controllers in the gaming market over the last 12 months or so has been a terrible thing for games in general. Lair is a particularly bad example - what could have been a servicable, perhaps even decent game crippled by a control system that is agonising at best. I had a horrible feeling that Heavenly Sword was going to be ruined by the same crap, until I found the option to turn the motion-sensing stuff off. Now, part of this is down to just how sheer bloody awful the motion sensing functions of the Sixaxis are, but Wii games are, in many ways, just as bad. Certainly, after the first two hours of Zelda, the novelty had worn off, my elbow was getting tired and I was desperate for a sensible controller. With the exception of Resident Evil 4, I've yet to play a *proper* Wii game (as opposed to one of those all-pervading tech-demo-cum-party-game atrocities) where the controller actually added to the experience, rather than being a distraction.
Fancy controllers might be ok for games which get dragged out once every couple of months when you have friends over and nothing better to do, but for those who, like myself, like to put in a substantial amount of time every week gaming, you just can't beat either a traditional two-analogue-sticks console controller or a keyboard and mouse combo. Far more precision, far less hassle and far more engagement. Right now, the best console controller on the market is the 360 controller, hands down.
Yeah, I've been facing a dilemma over which version to get. Ordinarily, like you, I prefer my fpses on the PC, because even though I can play them perfectly well on a control pad these days, keyboard and mouse still feels slightly more natural. My current machine is a 9 month old C2d 2.66ghz, 2 gigs RAM and the 1gb SLI-on-one-card 7959GX2 - fingers crossed, it should be able to play the game just fine.
That said, I always get a little nervous around games which use cutting-edge engines on the PC, just because they have a habit of being so damned unstable. If there's one game where I don't want my experience ruined by having to restart or reboot every 30 minutes due to a crash, it's this one.
Now I finally have an HDTV, the other major argument in favour of always getting the PC version - the superior resolution - has vanished. The combination of guaranteed stability, being able to play in comfort on my sofa (rather than at my desk) and having a nice big TV screen rather than a 19 inch monitor is very, very tempting.
The 360 and the PS3 are both capable of utilising standard USB mice and keyboards. I suspect that the day they start allowing these to be used in "proper" games is the day I stop buying PC fpses.
This is probably tied into highstreet store release dates and sales deals. For reasons connected with the distribution chain, most US games releases happen on either Mondays or Tuesdays, while pretty much all UK (the most important European market since Germany effectively closed its borders to many games) releases happen on Fridays.
Obviously, retailers would kick up a fuss if online vendors were selling the game in their region before they had it in their stores. For this reason, they tend to insist on contractual obligations ensuring that "online" releases don't pre-empt titles hitting their stores. Of course, given how easy the region-checks on most online sales of games are to defeat, I'm not really sure that this policy is getting them very far, with the generally technically savvy PC gaming scene.
In theory, this is correct. What it doesn't account for, though, is legislatures so utterly stupid that they sign into being laws which are identical to those which have already been established to be unconstitutional when implemented by other states. As I understand it, the drafting of the various bills that have been struck down is very similar. They're not trying anything clever to get around the constitutional objections that have been raised to the exact same law in the past. They're just doing the legislative equivalent of bashing their collective head repeatedly against a brick wall, and using the tax-payer's money to apply a bandage afterwards.
These bills have failed in enough States now that it must be 100% clear that they are never going to stand up to legal scrutiny and their passage can be nothing more than a political statement. Is there no way that the administrative cost of drafting them and the legal costs of defending them in court could be inflicted directly upon the legislators who still insist on trying to drive them through?
I'm not a particularly hardcore WoW player. I played it on and off for a month or two after launch, but back then, Final Fantasy XI was my game of choice. Since getting bored of FFXI at the start of this year, I've gone back to playing WoW at a much more casual level than I used to play FFXI, taking about 4 months to get my Draenei Paladin to 70 and only doing the occasional Karazhan raid since getting there. However, even I can see that the first expansion created a number of issues for the player base and I'm curious whether Blizzard has given any thought to addressing these.
The first is the idea that Penny-Arcade identified as "green is the new purple". When Burning Crusade hit, almost all of the level 60 epics, which in many cases people had been grinding for over months (or even years) were suddenly obsolete compared to random "green" items that dropped from normal mobs in the new areas. I'd never been part of the pre-expansion end-game, but by the time I was level 62, I was actually better geared than many people who had. It seems almost inevitable that the new expansion will raise the level cap again. At the moment, I'm dipping my toe in the Burning Crusade end-game... once the date for the new expansion is confirmed, any motivation I have for doing so will evaporate, if it seems at all likely that any gear I obtain will be made irrelevant after 10 minutes in Northrend. If Blizzard intend to keep up a stream of expansions, as most MMO developers seem to, then unless they find a solution to this, most of their hardcore players will just leave, as any sense of purpose to the end-game evaporates.
Next... new races or classes. Burning Crusade added two new races, but no new classes. Frankly, new races don't really give you very much, apart from a new way to level from 1-20. The addition of new classes (WoW has always been rather short on these) would be quite helpful in terms of adding a bit of variety and dispelling the slightly stagnant feel that now hovers over the game. However, this in turn brings a few issues with it. Have Blizzard now made the combined PvP and PvE balancing issues so complicated that adding new classes would be all but impossible? Part of me suspects that they have. Moreover, the lack of a flexible job system, such as FFXI's, makes it even more irritating to level up a new class from scratch.
Burning Crusade seems to have created a whole range of rather nasty economic issues as well. As soon as it appeared, people more or less stopped running the old level 60 instances. This means that crafting recipies and ingredients that dropped only in this dungeons have become increasingly rare (just look how long you have to wait and how much you have to pay to get Enchant Weapon - Crusader on a "new" server). This is particularly problematic for people trying to level up crafts through the levels where these ingredients are key. If, following the new expansion, the availability of... for instance... the primals were to plummet, the chances for new crafters to make it to the top of their professions would be slashed dramatically. Some form of incentive for people to continue running the old instances would be very helpful.
The Germans made no secret of their plans to advance this during their turn with the rotating EU Presidency. Fortunately, this wouldn't force other member states to adopt the ridiculous German position on games, but it's still pretty bad. Last I had heard, several Governments, including the UK, were less than enthused by the idea and planned to resist it (although this may have changed).
Our best hope, really, comes from the fact that the Presidency moves on to Portugal at the start of July. So far as I know, Portugal's position on games is nothing like as screwed up as Germany's and they might not be so motivated to keep pushing to advance this.
The proposed EU constitution rejected by a number of states over the last few years was a bad joke, but there's no denying that the EU needs serious structural reform. Unfortunately, given that said reform should really limit the powers of the EU institutions rather than enhancing them, we're unlikely to see any sensible proposals emerging any time soon.
Ok, first of all, no argument on the low-quality of Wii online play. It sucks, pure and simple. However, this post raises a point that keeps coming up in irritating-fanboy posts like this one and annoying the hell out of me.
Why does it matter how many players an online fps supports? I mean, do you honestly expect reviewers to say "ok, this game has 8 player support, so only 2/5 for it. This game has 32 player support, so it can have 4/5"?
The entire "serious" online competitive fps gaming scene is based around small teams. 1v1, 2v2, 5v5 and so on. The Counter-Strike scene shifted from being 6v6 down to 5v5 because, quite frankly, the smaller matches were more fun. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Tribes 2 and the original BF1942, both of which were large team games, for a while, but ultimately they get very boring quite quickly. The reason? Simple. Getting together an organised team that large is nigh impossible. This means you either content yourself with playing once per month, when you can actually get 16+ people's schedules to align, or else you either play with a team you don't particularly know, or you just play random public games. In which case, you put up with all the tedious crap that comes with it, like half your team camping the B-17 spawn all map so they can fly it round for 2 minutes before crashing while the opposing team completely over-runs you, or shit-heads on your team who break cover so they can hump the face of an enemy corpse. No thanks.
You mention the small team sizes in Gears of War. Fine. It suits Gears perfectly. Gears is a relatively slow-moving, rather "intimate" fps, heavily based around use of cover. If you had 32 people all running around in every direction, the game would rapidly become a big ball of suck. For Gears , 4v4 is more or less exactly right (although the option of 5v5 might have been nice, just because this is fairly standard in many other games and would interfere with teams who usually play other games less).
In short, bigger does not necessarily equal better. After all, remember how much Planetside sucked?
This story becomes even more ridiculous once you've played Resistance. And I'm from Manchester, originally (although I moved out of the hell-hole to London as soon as I was old enough to get a job). I therefore feel I'm fairly well qualified to comment on this.
From the article, you would guess that Resistance is some kind of GTA game. You know, one of those where you sleep with a hooker then run her over (yes, yes, I know that this isn't how most people play GTA). If this were the case, I could possibly, just about, see where the Church was coming from here, even if I wouldn't agree with them. After all, Manchester does have a fairly serious guns and gangs problem, particularly around the Moss Side area (arguably even worse than London's from the guns point of view, although I understand things have improved somewhat in the last few years). Hell, the school I went to was about a mile from Moss Side, and while the school itself was pretty civilised, being private, you saw some pretty shocking things in the streets around it.
However, Resistance is nothing like GTA. The best description I could come up with would be a blend of a WW2 shooter and Halo. The setting is essentially alternate-world WW2, with many of the human weapons feeling relevant to the period, while the "alien" weapons are deeply Halo-inspired. Most of the game is spent playing through blasted and burned-out city-scapes. This includes the Manchester section, which pops up about 1/4 of the way through the game. For any Englishman with even an ounce of historical knowledge, the appropriate context for the game is obvious; the Blitz (yes, I know Manchester wasn't heavily hit, but I feel the point still stands). If the game is basing itself on any cultural reference points, they aren't the "cruisin' the hood, pimpin' my hoes, shootin' da pigs" cliches of modern gang life, but rather the fear of invasion and the shock of seeing familiar land-marks destroyed that characterised life in the UK's cities during WW2. So while there is still an outstanding question regarding taste, it is a question that could be levelled against every other WW2 shooter out there and a question which seems to have been conclusively answered by now with a resounding "meh".
It's disapppointing that nobody talking about this in the issue appears to have actually played the bloody game. Personally, I loved the UK setting (and very much enjoyed the game itself), particularly as some of the final missions in London see the player passing not a million miles from where I live now.
Ok, at the top end of the scale, I've got to agree with assessment the 360 controller is the best ever made. Prior to the 360's launch, I'd have pointed to the Xbox S-controller, which was well ahead of anything else in terms of shape, quality of build and buttons, weight balance and overall ergonomics. The only downside with the S-Controller was that the black and white face buttons were awkward and uncomfortable to use. The 360 controller corrects this flaw, essentially by converting those buttons into bumpers and also improves the weight balance still further. Range, reliability and ability to survive being thrown on the floor after Dead or Alive 4 drives me to my snapping point are all excellent.
The Dualshock 2 was also an excellent controller in its own way, despite being a little too small for comfort. It did a good job of doing absolutely everything a modern controller needs to with a minimum of fuss and bother. However, the pressure-sensitive function of the buttons could be extremely finnicky and was hard to use properly in games that demanded it (such as the Gran Turismo series). The Sixaxis is a big improvement in this respect, but... well... I'll come to the Sixaxis later.
Leaving the consoles aside for one moment, I'm going to get a bit retro for my final pick of "great" controllers and go back to the PC's Thrustmaster F-16. I had one of these eating up half my desk-space for many years and never found anything more fun to play flight-sims with. Sure, the customisation software was all DOS based and didn't work properly under Win 95 or later, but I still have very fond memories of this stick.
Now... the bad.
Top pick here... the Gamecube controller. Not in terms of sheer, outright awfulness - you can certainly find worse examples of that. But rather because this controller managed to be the only controller to "get it wrong" so badly in a generation where everybody else (including PC accessory manufacturers) seemed more or less able to agree on roughly how many buttons a controller should have and where they should be. One huge, stand-out flaw was the pathetic cable length, particularly unforgivable on a system so heavily geared towards party games. Shelling out extra for wireless controllers became effectively essential for anybody with a living room larger than a small cupboard. The right analogue stick wasn't even a proper stick - it was a stumped and malformed nub, which was no use whatsoever for gaming and made fpses on the cube a truly nasty proposition. The mis-shaped buttons, with the huge green blob and the tiny little kidney-beans around the edge meant that you were forever hitting A when you didn't mean to. All in all, the official Cube controller felt like a nasty, $5 third party accessory.
Also high on the list... the PSP's analogue stick. Gums up with dust far too easily and is not pleasant to use even after cleaning. The rest of the PSP interface is fine and many games avoid using the little stick, but this is definitely something for Sony to tackle in the next revision.
And now the "why weren't they includeds"
Basically, because while allegedly revolutionary (although the results of this "revolution" remain to be seen), the Wii-mote at best represents a very early and unpolished attempt at a new type of controller. Accuracy is questionable at best, especially during rapid movements. Less understandable, and harder to forgive, is the positioning of the buttons. If you want to use more than 2 buttons, then you are going to get sore fingers. Using the Wii-Mote for anything other than a "wave the wand around manically" game for any protracted period is deeply uncomfortable and cramps up my hand like nothing else I've ever tried. The 360 controller is a massively polished traditional product - as good as it's going to get for regular controllers for the forseeable future. That the Wii-mote fails to measure up is perhaps inevitable given how novel it is, but it still doesn't mean that it's as good as the 360 controller.
And the Sixaxis? Well..
Ok, I really quite liked NWN2, once I'd applied the 1.03 patch to fix the most vicious of the bugs and interface problems. The engine wasn't the greatest, but the writing and general feel of the game was excellent. So, a few things I'd like from an expansion:
- More customisability for non-PC party members. It kinda sucked just being stuck without any flexibility in their class-level choices and meant that you couldn't really experiment with different prestige classes in the main campaign unless you actually did multiple playthroughs.
- More tilesets. NWN2 suffered from the same problem as NWN1 here... it relied on the same few tilesets to make up the vast majority of its locations. I say to hell with the toolkit for once - give us some decent looking unique locations in the main campaign. This added a lot of atmosphere in BG2 and it needs to be done again.
- Better rounded party interactions. Don't get me wrong, I liked the fact that NWN2 brought back a lot of the kind of dialogue we remembered from BG2 and missed from NWN1, but it didn't go far enough. Most of the dialogue trees in the game seemed to be focussed on just a few of the characters. Other characters never really got developed much at all.
- More "political" sections to the plot. Combat's fun, but so's politicking your way through the cities.
- Continue to throw in the planar elements from the plot of the main campaign. I enjoyed these a lot. The Forgotten Realms setting on its own can get a little stale. Mixing in elements of the Planescape world in NWN2 added a lot to it, in my experience, and this could be expanded further.
- Give us a proper ending this time. Oh come on, were you even trying last time?
- Epic levels? I can take 'em or leave 'em. It would be nice if they were there, I guess, but don't go building an entire expansion around them.
Ok, I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but...
There was a time - back when I was actively playing a MMORPG (Final Fantasy XI) that I would have agreed with the idea that MMORPGs are addictive. However, my experiences over the last year or so have made me far less certain.
I started playing FFXI in November 03, importing a copy from the US when it launched there. For the first couple of months, it was just a curiousity... something I logged into once in a while and ran around a bit. Then somebody else I knew in real life started playing. And then another. The amount of time I was putting into the game increased considerably, to the point where it was taking up well over 50% of my non-work time (I have what's essentially a 9-5 office-based job). I was going out less, particularly at the weekends, playing other games less and watching fewer movies (never complain about MMORPG monthly fees - you wouldn't believe how much money they save you). About the only other past-time that didn't suffer was reading.
I got heavily into the game. I did the whole end-game thing, with all the grief and drama that went with it. I slogged through the Chains of Promathia expansion, which was exhausting, frustrating, and infuriating, but also responsible for some of the biggest adrenelin rushes I've ever had from gaming.
At this point, if the addiction analogy were really true, the next stage of the story should write itself; losing contact with real life friends and family, locking myself away in a darkened room, losing my job, dying alone in poverty etc. Except... it didn't. Some time last summer, I noticed that I just didn't quite care about the game as much as I had in the past. Logging in felt more like a chore, the game itself rarely did much for me and I was losing interest in the community. Over the next few months, my play time dwindled rapidly. By Christmas, I was only logging in for a couple of hours a week for scheduled Limbus runs. By February, even that had stopped.
There was no dramatic intervention. No moment when I realised I needed to go cold-turkey. In fact, I never did go cold turkey. I've still got the game installed and still pay $15 a month for my account. I just don't log into it, because I can't be bothered. It's not that I've moved onto another MMORPG. I have a WoW account, which I do log into occasionally, but I just don't find that game fun enough to grip me for long periods. Rather, I've more or less gone back to using my free time to do the things I did before FFXI came along. I'm not alone in this... the real life friends who got into FFXI shortly after I did followed a similar trajectory.
Now, compare that to how a genuine addiction works. I've known lots of smokers. I've also known a guy who started smoking cannabis at 15 and who was dead of a heroin overdose at 23. I've never known a smoker just give up the habit because they found cigarettes just didn't do much for them any more. From what I've seen (and I've never smoked), giving up smoking is painful (emotionally and perhaps even physically) and requires a good chunk of will-power. When drug users find that their current drug of choice doesn't do much for them any more, the response seems to be to move onto something harder.
MMORPGs have the effect on people they do for a number of reasons - interesting game worlds, clear goals of the kind that people lack in their real lives (this one is important), the ability to act out fantasies, a sense of worth from standing in a virtual community and so on. However, I can no longer believe that genuine addiction is one of the factors at work in most cases.
Hmm... it's not entirely without value to check a rough draft. The simple and sad fact is that with standards in high schools and universities having slipped as far as they have, an increasing number of students don't actually have a firm idea of what plagiarism actually constitutes, the harm it does and the consequences it can bring.
It's much better to pick up accidental or unwitting plagiarism at any early stage than when the final paper is submitted. Pick it up early enough and often a quiet (or not so quiet, if you want to go for shock value) word with the student in question can fix the problem, educate the student and avoid any severe consequences. By contrast, plagiarism in a final, submitted paper is always (rightly) going to bring extremely harsh sanctions.
If the system were working properly, it would be capable of excluding a student's own earlier work from the check.
You say this as a joke...
I've actually had in-game spams from characters with names like "Xfxfqqfx" and the like, advertising those very things. Received two of these within the last two weeks, and I'm only a fairly irregular player.
I really, really hate the abuse of the word "hacked" in this context.
I remember back when I was doing the whole oper thing on a well-known IRC network. Every day, we'd get hundreds (sometimes thousands) of complaints from people complaining that their account with the network services had been "hacked". In every single case I ever encountered, it transpired that the individual in question had just fallen for an extremely simplistic con designed to get them to reveal their password. There's no element of "hacking" about it - it's just the exploitation of gullibility, stupidity, and the belief that it's possible to get something for nothing.
I don't play WoW very much (although I do have a semi-active account I log into occasionally, but until the end of last year (when I more or less went cold-turkey), I was a pretty hardcore Final Fantasy XI player. "Hacked" accounts were a perennial topic in FFXI and, once again, it was inevitably the account owner's incompetence that led to the account being lost or vandalised. I'd say that the cases I heard of could be broken down into three broad areas:
1) Keyloggers and malicious software - probably the closest to actual "hacking", these still relied on user greed and stupidity to steal accounts. Essentially, many of the third party programmes available for FFXI (all of which are banned under the TOS) actually contained keyloggers and the like which stole people's account passwords and reported them back to the author. Most of the malicious software in question would masquerade as cheats (eg. movement speed cheats), so frankly, people who lost their accounts this way got what they deserved.
2) Social engineering/phishing attacks - slightly less common - probably the rarest of the three categories - but by no means unknown. The old familiar tricks all applied here: masquerading on forums as admins, offering powerlevelling or gil to people who signed up on sites using their Playonline passwords, the usual rubbish. I dare say a couple of people were stung by this purely on the basis of being naive, but again, most of the people who fell for this did so out of greed.
3) Shared account passwords - in no way does this resemble "hacking". However, it was by far the most common means by which people would lose their accounts (or have them vandalised). I remember being in a linkshell once where a number of the senior members shared account passwords (although happily, I always opted out). When one of the leaders went bad, he did quite a bit of damage with the logins he had. In these cases, my sympathy was again limited - if you share your account password with somebody you just know online, you're asking for trouble. However, there were a few genuinely unfortunate cases, where people would have their accounts trashed after a real-life relationship with another player (often a girlfriend or boyfriend) went bad.
So in short, assuming the situation with WoW is anything like the one with FFXI and Blizzard don't actually have horribly insecure servers, nobody in WoW is actually getting their account "hacked".