If I were you, I would be looking at a wider range of options than just sysadmin type roles. To be brutally honest, on the basis of your original post, your technical qualifications don't actually sound much more impressive than my own. For me, this isn't a problem - I have a decently paid white-collar job that I like a lot in a non-technical field. However, I've seen too many friends lock themselves into an IT career path despite lacking the qualifications or experience for anything other than front-line tech-support roles, for reasons that basically boil down to "I like messing around with computers in my spare time".
There are a huge number of IT graduates around right now, at least here in the UK, and many of those I was at University with here who did Computer Science or Maths with a computing flavour (I myself did Classics) are still working in tech support roles now, earning less than £20k and desperately seeking anything that could constitute the next rung up on the ladder. Assuming the situation is similar in your area, it's unlikely you'd be able to compete effectively with these people for jobs without the benefit of a degree.
Assuming that you're still fairly young and your debts aren't *too* massive, I would seriously start looking at other career paths, where technical qualifications are likely to matter less. People tend to make a big fuss about "making sure you work in a field you love", but I tend to call BS on this. The problem with making your hobby into your job is that most people who do this just end up burning out on both.
Mediamax used to be rather good (very good, in fact) back when it was still called streamload. Unfortunately, last year, they went through a big upgrading and rebranding exercise in August that has virtually destroyed its functionality and reliability.
The old, usable interface was replaced by a hideous, slow nightmare that, frankly, didn't even look as good as the old version. Files now routinely vanish while being moved between folders, or fail to show up at all after being uploaded. The interface for hosting files for non-members to access has been crippled and passwords or IP restrictions set on such public-hosted folders frequently disappear and reset themselves. Many files uploaded before the conversion to Mediamax have vanished, or remain visible but inaccessible.
For a month or so after the "upgrade", the support staff seemed to be genuinely trying to fix things. After that, all of the customer interface points were effectively shut down and the company went into full-on spin mode. I can only come to the conclusion that the new back-end for the service is effectively unworkable, but that for whatever reason, either management or the line (or both) cannot admit this and roll back to the old technology.
I'm on the verge of backing up all my stored content to DVD until I can find another store for it and cancelling my account. I know others will be having similar thoughts. The entire thing seems to be an object lesson into how to run a successful service into the ground.
Like I say, my understanding was that even if you import remotely (ie. order via the web), you're not actually at risk yourself. The importer is at risk, but unless he gets stomped between billing you and shipping your console, you are safe. I've never heard of anybody having an incoming console, that had actually been shipped, siezed.
You will, of course, need to pay customs duty on the console. I should have made this clear before.
It's unlikely (very, very unlikely) that I would have arranged a trip to the US specifically to buy a PS3. However, my employer needed me to go for a few days, I knew I'd have some time on the last day to hit the shops and I knew that I could fit it in my hand-luggage provided I packed everything else into the hold. No, it's not an option for everybody, but anybody else who wants a PS3 and has a trip to the US coming up might want to consider it.
The point about backwards compatibility is true. However, given I had both US and UK PS2s and games for both, I was always going to need to keep one of them unless I wanted to buy two PS3s (which I very much don't).
The import statement, however, is misleading. I looked into this myself before importing, as I intended to pick up the machine myself on a trip to the States that had already been arranged, and hence would be carrying it back in my hand-luggage. I didn't much feel like being arrested. Basically, while there is a grey area regarding the *sale* of consoles across region boundaries, where Sony currently appear to have the upper hand, there is no restriction on just buying a machine in the US and then carrying it back to the UK with you. After all, it would be ridiculous if you had a situation whereby a family living in the US who decided to up stakes and relocate to the UK (the fools) would have to leave their consoles behind. Even if you import remotely, I don't think there's any risk of the machine at the border. It's the importer that gets stomped on... the machines themselves that are in transit are perfectly legal goods.
This is exactly what I, as a UK gamer, have done. My PS3 arrived a couple of weeks ago and I've got a fairly extensive comparison of it with the other two "new gen" consoles up in my journal. The tipping point for me was when I saw the UK launch price. All told, if I were to buy the PS3 package I'd wanted in the UK, it would cost me the equivalent of about $1100. I got the same thing on import from the US for a shade over $800. What's really handy is that the PS3 just has a standard PC-style power input, meaning that I can use a standard kettle power-cable, rather than needing to buy a new step-down converter. Of course, pretty much any UK TV purchased in the last 8 or so years, barring some really, really low-end portables, is perfectly happy with either PAL or NTSC.
Sony have promised before that the PS3 would be region-free for games. I'm now picking up some worrying rumbles that this might not be the case as far as the UK goes and frankly, this latest news doesn't bode well either. However, while it would be nice to be able to walk into a UK shop and just buy a game when I want one, I'm willing and able to import. Sad to say, the US still does get more games and get them earlier than the UK. Still, I'm also hearing that US machines may be getting an update to allow them to play European/Australian games. If this is indeed true, then my decision to buy a US machine really does seem to have been the right one.
The only drawback right now is that I can't sign up to the online store with a UK credit card. However, once the European region is enabled on launch-day, I understand that I'll be able to sign up for the EU store from my US console.
It's quite impressive really, how a web-comic that deliberately sets out to be juvenile and offensive so often ends up involved in a reasonably respectable way in some pretty big news stories.
I know this probably isn't the most appropriate comment, but I this whole thing really does remind me strongly of this book. In fact, the echos are bordering on being uncanny. I guess it all boils down to the question of whether somebody can just be "born bad".
The evidence both from this case (if the account here is to be believed) and my own experiences is "yes, they can". I'm not sure anybody in the political or academic estabishments really want to face up to the implications of this, though.
Children who participate in an activity that encourages fine motor controls, a steady hand, spatial awareness, the ability to assimilate new information rapidly and a requirement to perform under pressure in an actual win/lose environment (increasingly rare both in schools and in more traditional orgnised childhood pursuits) tend to increase their aptitutde for a profession that requires the same skills. At the same time, children who focus on said activity to the exclusion of all else put themselves at a big disadvantage.
Not exactly surprising, is it?
With games, as with everything else, the key message is always moderation. A 16-hours-a-day World of Warcraft addict is no more suited to be a surgeon than a steroidally enhanced jock, but just as a measure of sporting prowess can be helpful for some career paths, so the skills you learn from gaming can be of use elsewhere.
There are currently very strong signs, of which this story is one, that developers *are* hesitating to port games to the Wii. Sure, it's by no means universal and you can find counter-examples, but the simple fact is that more or less every cross-platform game scheduled for the Wii is a shovelware movie-license. These have never been made on cutting edge technology and most of them, for now, are still essentially last-gen games in every respect. Moreover, as we saw with the John Carmack story the other week, and as we are likely seeing in this case, the Wii's lack of horsepower is a key factor in this. Once the current generation is more firmly established and its standards have become the norm, even the current trickle of cross-platform titles is likely to dry up.
If the Wii doesn't have a PS2-scale installed base by this point to make it worth sinking megabucks into exclusives for it (and I'd say it has about a year from now), then it's dead in the water.
I've played Warioware. I actually found it less impressive than Rayman Raving Rabbids. Ironic that the only Wii game to have even come close to impressing me so far was a third party offering.
No game to date has really done lightsaber combat perfectly. However, there's a significant difference in terms of the instinctive expectations that go with traditional controllers (mouse+keyboard, or gamepad) and the Wii-mote.
With Jedi Knight 2, which had, to my mind, the best implementation of a lightsaber I'd seen to date, the rules were fairly simple. Primary and secondary fire for different types of stroke, combined with directional movements, to give a basic armament of lightsaber moves. Within this framework, limited though it was, I could control how my on-screen avatar fought with reasonable precision. Any reasonably well designed set of controls should become instinctive for a player fairly quickly.
With the Wii-mote, the disconnect becomes more serious. To a large extent, it looks and feels like I am holding an actual lightsaber. My instincts therefore have a specific set of expectations regarding what the outcome of each move I make will be. When in the real world, I do an overhead swing downwards, but my on-screen avatar is blocked even before the blade passes below eye-level, the disconnect is much, much more significant than when I just get blocked after pressing a key on a controller.
The end result would be depressingly predictable; with the heavy penalty that would automatically be applied on large sweeping motions, battles would almost certainly be about people holding the Wii-mote within a relatively narrow field in front of them and twitching it about in a deeply spastic manner, in the hope of compensating for the disconnect through sheer number of swings.
the gamecube was still more powerful than the PS2. It was lack of third party support that killed the cube. the wii might not have a huge graphics leap over the last gen consoles like the 360 and PS3 have, but that doesnt mean you can't get great games with awesome graphics out of it. The friggin PS2 and DS are still sellin like hotcakes! Why? awesome games.
This quote manages to both be technically correct and a spectacular example of missing the point.
It was indeed lack of third party support that killed the Cube. By the same token, it was massive third party support that secured the PS2's overwhelming victory. However, and this is the important point, there is *no* indication that this situation is likely to change during this generation. Moreover, once the novelty value and hype/astroturf that accompanied the release has vanished, the Wii's situation is arguably going to be even more precarious than the Cube's.
Right now, some of the big third party devs are making noises about wanting to support the Wii. Most of them, however, are very light on details of specific titles. Others are making it clear even now that they have no interest in doing so. Given how early in the cycle we are, this is bad. When the Cube launched, pretty much everybody was signed up to making games for it, with drop-outs happening gradually along the way.
Looking at the games actually announced for the Wii, I see a few cross-platform titles (a large proportion of which are shovelware licensed titles), a few party games, and first-party Nintendo games. The N64 and Cube demonstrated amply that the appeal of Nintendo's 1st party games is fairly narrow and as production costs increase, they will struggle to maintain their margin on these. By contrast, Sony are still sitting on exclusives with Gran Turismo and Final Fantasy, as well as preferrential relationships with the Metal Gear Solid people. Sure, right now, the PS3 is over-priced and only has 1 game worth playing, but this *will* change. By the same token, the 360 has a pretty decent selection of games already, and is, for the first time, starting to make headway in the Japanese market, both in terms of selling units over there and getting Japanese developers signed up for exclusives.
when are people going to learn that graphics aren't the end all for games
To a large extent, though, graphics *do* matter. As others have noted, it's the best looking games that top the sales charts. Just watch how the Madden games do it each year, with little justification for each new release other than better graphics than the last one.
More importantly, graphical standards get driven up all the time. I remember the first time I played the original Wing Commander, back when it was newly released. It was jaw-dropping. Look at it today and it's a pixellated mess. By the same token, look at the PS2 launch-titles, some of which were quite impressive in their day. Now that we're used to Farcry, Gears of War and Resistance: Fall of Man, they look absolutely hideous. If the Wii's technology really is as lacking as it seems to be, then by 2009 or so, it's going to be more or less finished as a contender.
You miss the point entirely. I do have a Wii (waste of £200 that it was) and the grandparent is absolutely right. What he is talking about is not the lack of force feedback, it is the lack of resistance.
Just think about what happens when you swing your lightsaber, in this theoretical game, at your opponent and he parries. On the screen, he catches your blade with his and, to all intents and purposes, it stops moving. In the living room, meanwhile, there is no such physical impediment for you to encounter. Your momentum carries through your swing, even if the Wii-mote gives you a buzz of force-feedback. The result is that you are now positioned completely differently to your on-screen avatar. Even if the game has some code to tell it what to do when this happens (which would be difficult - probably impossible - to implement to everybody's satisfaction), the illusion of being in an actual lightsaber duel is lost. With eps 4-6 style "slow" duels, this is bad enough. The moment you try to simulate an eps 1-3 style fast-moving duel this way, the whole thing becomes a soggy mess.
The PC version doesn't just have bugs, it has huge, system-crashing bugs. The kind of system crashing bugs that I've never actually seen any other game manage under xp. I've replicated these bugs myself, under common conditions, on two of my own PCs, neither of which have stability problems in any other games I've thrown at them. I don't actually know anybody from among my series of friends who actually has the PC version running stably for protracted periods.
The 360 version... just works. There may be minor bugs in there, but I've yet to actually notice one that in any way obstructed gameplay. Besides, in case you hadn't noticed, MS quietly and informally ditched the whole "no patches via Xbox Live" thing months ago. Console games these days can and do get patched. That you don't know this... implies that you are arguing more from emotion than facts.
Control-wise, I'm fairly agnostic. If you don't like console fpses, or don't have much experience with them, you may find Oblivion on the 360 frustrating at first. I've long since gotten used to console fpses, so not an issue for me. As for mods? Personally, the only mod I'd like would be one to remove the auto-level-balancing thing. But I can live without that.
My own install of the PC version of Oblivion got vaped months ago. I don't miss it. The 360 version still gets booted up sometimes.
20) Rise of Nations - yeah, ok, this seems fair enough. It's a nice concept and still a fun game to play. I may even have moved it a little higher up the list. Graphics are dated quite badly now, so a sequel wouldn't go amiss.
19) Halo - w... t... f... - sure, the Xbox version was great, even if its own sequel does comprehensively out-shine it, but the PC version always felt like a nasty hack at best.
18) Rome: Total War - reasonable pick and probably in about the right place on the list. Very solid game.
17) Unreal Tournament 2004 - this made me go "hmm" at first, but on balance, I think I could live with this here. It was definitely the best iterration of the series. I'm not quite sure how TFA manages to claim the original is better.
16) Medal of Honour Allied Assault - I guess you have to include one of the WW2 shooters and I guess this one is the obvious candidate. If this were the only one on the list, I could have been perfectly happy. Unfortunately, if you look further down...
15) Neverwinter Nights - ooooh, tricky one. On the one hand, the game as released, straight out of box, is pretty damned poor, with an original campaign that falls waaaaay short of the usual Bioware standards. The sequel is massively better in this respect. However, I will grant you that, with two solid expansions and a huge mass of mods available, NWN has grown way beyond what originally came out of the box.
14) Max Payne 2 - Can be completed in about 4-6 hours by an average player and has no replay value. No thanks.
13) Command and Conquer: Generals - Oh god no. Command and Conquer with a slight graphical facelift, but none of the production values that made the very early installments in the series great. Gameplay that was outdated compared to other RTSes even at release.
12) Guild Wars - not played it, so can't really comment.
11) Civilisation IV - frankly, the Civ games have never done it for me. However, I will grant that they do seem to push the requisite buttons for an awful lot of people, so happy to let this one stand.
10) Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos - yeah, good pick. Probably the best of the small-scale RTSes from the XP era. I'm mystified as to why the article says the controls were tricky, though. They were basically the same as any other RTS around, if not slightly better due to the decent hotkeys system.
9) Doom 3: Yep, decent pick. I know a lot of people found fault with it, but this game scared the living shit out of me (at least for the first half of the game). I'd probably have put this in the bottom end of the list, though, given the lack of variety. I actually felt Quake 4 was better, so may just have substituted that altogether.
8) F.E.A.R: again, a decent pick just on account of atmosphere. Plus the graphics were beautiful and the AI probably the best we've seen in an fps.
7) Company of Heroes: Hmm... maybe. Personally, I'd have substituted Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War for this, though. They're basically the same game underneath but, particularly with the expansions, I find Dawn of War slightly deeper. Still, there's no denying that Company of Heroes is very, very pretty.
6) Battlefield 1942: Yes, I'd probably go along with this, on the proviso that all of the sequels and expansion packs are excluded. BF2 in particular was an utter crock.
5)Knights of the Old Republic: Yes, definitely. Proof that Lucas should have let Bioware write Episodes 1-3.
4) Call of Duty: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD NO. What the fuck is it with this game? Why the hell do it and its sequels continue to attact such plaudits. An inferior, dumbed down Medal of Honour clone which brought nothing new to the genre at all. On a related note, why do all these countless WW2 fpses only feature battles from the second half of WW2 which the Allies won (oh, and Pearl Harbour). I grow tired of the "inevitable march to victory" feel of these games and feel that it actually fails to do history justice.
Yes, it's better than in FFX. That said, it's still not perfect by any means. Vaan and Ashe's voices could be better, which, given they're the main characters, is a bit irritating. They're nothing like as bad as the Tidus or Wakka voices in FFX though. Balthier's voice is great and adds a lot to the character. I'd honestly take the English voice over the Japanese voice any day in that case.
The other point to note is that the vast majority of the voices in FFXII are British. Some people seem to find that annoying, but as a Brit myself, I think it's pretty cool.
Hmm... ok. My top 5 games of the year, followed by the 3 biggest disappointments (not necessarily the worst games, just the ones that didn't live up to my expectations).
Best:
5th) Gears of War (360): I don't think there's much else I can add to what's been said elsewhere about this. It doesn't do anything that hasn't been done before, but by god it does it well. The ultimate example of an old concept polished to perfection. Let down ever so slightly by its length, but the whole experience is just so visceral that I don't really care.
4th) Company of Heroes (PC): The game that made me buy a new PC. It may be a system killer in terms of the specs it needs, but it's worth it. Incredible detail in the graphics and physics and, most importantly, they're actually used in a way that enhances the gameplay. I'll be hoping to see fully destructible landscapes in more games next year. The only downside? It rehashes those same old Normandy battles that we see in every other WW2 games. How about giving us some different battles in future, maybe even some from the first half of the war? So far, only the Blitzkrieg games have really had the balls to do that.
3rd) Final Fantasy XII (PS2): I'd expected to hate this, given all the negative publicity about the gambit system before its release, but the game turned out just fine. A darker, more mature plot, graphics that put most next-gen titles to shame and one of the best combat systems yet. My only complaint was that the difficulty curve necessitated a lot of grinding for levels and gil.
2nd) Neverwinter Nights 2 (PC): Only here on the basis of the 1.03 patch, without which the game is nigh-on unplayable. Finally, a decent successor to Baldur's Gate 2. Should get better over time, as more 3rd party modules start appearing. It'd be really nice if we could get an expansion with epic levels in 2007.
1st) Kingdom Hearts 2 (PC): For some reason, the critics didn't go for this game, but I was blown away by it. I honestly can't find anything to fault this game on. The difficulty curve is much fairer than in the original game, the plot has some unexpectedly dark twists, the voice acting is much improved and the graphics are stunning.
And now the most disappointing games:
3rd) Wii Sports (Wii): Not, I feel, the best title to bundle with the Wii. Once the novelty of the controller wears off, you realise pretty quickly that these games are essentially just brute-force and timing (baseball, boxing and tennis) or an exercise in not letting your hand wobble (bowling and golf). I've not actually played a Wii game yet that's really convinced me of the controller's merits.
2nd) Prey (PC): After all the hype and all the years of development, Prey turned out to be nothing more than a straightforward fps with lacklustre combat and a few gravity tricks. I'm still not quite sure how they managed to strain every single element of fun out of a tried and tested formula so effortlessly. Boring weapons, identikit enemies, endlessly repeated rooms and a plot that advanced at a glacial pace didn't help, though. If Gears of War is an illustration of how to reheat an old formula well, Prey is an example of what not to do.
1st) Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cereberus (PS2): OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE SQUARE! What were you thinking? You can do better than this. I don't quite know what I expected from this foray into the action genre, but it wasn't a bland third person shooter with a ho hum plot, twitchy controls and graphics that expose every single limitation of the PS2. It's hard to believe that this came from the same developer as FF12 and KH2. Must do better.
A couple of years ago, I did a little work around the periphery of the publishing industry. At no point was I even close to anybody who was close to anybody who was involved with any of the Harry Potter books. However, a few of the things that were common knowledge then seem particularly relevant now.
What J.K. Rowling is increasingly suffering from is Celebrity Author Syndrome. This, simply put, is a state in which no editor has both the guts and the backing from above to stand up to the author in question and insist upon necessary changes. In some cases, this goes hand in hand with the author being a self-important prick, but that's absolutely *not* an essential pre-requisite (and I have absolutely *no* idea what JKR is like to work with).
Let me explain...
The vast majority of manuscripts that are submitted to publishers by first-time authors are seriously long. They contain repetition of scenes, subplots that are never developed, page after page of background exposition on characters and vast amounts of unnecessary description and digression. Reading the average freshly-submitted manuscript is a pretty depressing alternative; by the time you've waded through all the padding, you can hardly remember anything about the plot and the characters. Now, of course, most manuscripts submitted to publishers go straight in the bin. Occasionally, however, one will be considered interesting enough to pick up. What happens in this case (with some variation across the industry, but the model remains more or less the same) is that some money might change hands and the publisher might indicate to the author that they could conceivably be convinced to publish the book, provided the author work with a designated editor to strip the work down to something fit for public consumption.
This process is often pretty gruelling for the first-time author. They've suddenly got an editor, who they likely see as a pen-pushing bureaucrat and spawn of the devil, demanding that they cut out whole chunks of words that the author has sweated blood over. Emotionally, this is surprisingly difficult. However, most first-time authors who have made it this far have a strong incentive to comply with changes demanded by their editor and will comply. After all, the editor's say-so can kill the book. The publisher looses relatively little from killing the project, while for the author, this could mean months or years of work going to waste. Ultimately, it is very rare that a book is not improved beyond recognition by this process.
However, this dynamic changes massively with a celebrity author (as in, a celebrity who is famous for writing, not a celebrity who has decided to write a book). The publisher suddenly has a lot more to loose if the relationship goes sour. Whatever contractual obligations the author might be under, they know that they'll always have a market for their words elsewhere in the future. If the author is a prick, they can therefore change editors at will and refuse to make changes as they see fit.
However, even if the author is the nicest, most compliant person in the world, the editor is still going to be under a lot of stress. They know, and the people who pay them know, that this author has been lucrative in the past. The editor knows that his future job security almost certainly depends to a large degree on him managing this author right. There is therefore an enormous temptation to just sit back and assume that the author knows best (even though the wisest authors might realise themselves that this isn't the case).
We saw the results of this with the 5th and 6th Harry Potter books (and to a lesser extent, the 4th). The 5th book in particular had a stupidly high number of redundant scenes, most of which could have been excised at will. The bizarre, only-half-realised political commentary surrounding Dolores Umbridge ended up eating a significant chunk of the book without adding anything significant to it. The character could (and in an earlier book, would) have been ha
In terms of the AI, what I really found hard was coming to NWN2 after playing Final Fantasy 12. The general standard of NWN2's AI is shocking. While there are some AI customisation options, most of them don't seem to do much and I found it virtually impossible to set mages to any kind of sensible casting regime. NWN2 desperately needs some kind of equivalent to FF12's Gambit system.
How the hell did you complete this game in 14 hours? At the 14 hour point, I was only coming to the end of chapter 1 (of 3) and I'm fairly sure I missed a good amount of optional stuff. This is a huge game and my first-playthrough completion time was about 52 hours. That's more or less exactly the same as the time I put into Final Fantasy 12 and that had a lot more grinding for xp, as opposed to actually doing fun and interesting quests.
There are many grounds you can criticise NWN2 on, but I don't see how length can possibly be one fo them. $60 for a 50+ hour game (with serious replay value) doesn't strike me as bad value.
I have such mixed feelings on this game. However, I think I'm now tending over towards the positive end of the spectrum.
If I was reviewing this today, I'd probably rate it at an 8.5/10, or even a 9/10. Had I reviewed it a week or so ago, before the 1.03 patch, I'd have rated it a 6/10 at best. I cannot emphasise enough how much the latest patch has improved the game. The camera is usable now, the worst of the plot-breaking bugs have been fixed and the addition of anti-aliasing has improved the graphics significantly. I'm not saying that all of the issues have been addressed - not by a long stretch - but this now resembles a playable game (a late-beta, maybe) as opposed to the hideous pre-alpha mess that it is out of box.
The system requirements for this game are *harsh*. I've actually had 2 systems to run this on, as I upgraded my PC shortly after buying the game. Before going any further, I should emphasise that I believe "acceptable performance" for an RPG such as this to mean "40 fps or higher". This is, by many standards, a rather forgiving measure.
The first system I ran NWN2 on was a P4 3.4, with 1 gig of RAM and a Radeon x800 Pro. Not exactly a cutting edge system, but certainly a solid enough machine. Performance in 1024x768 full-detail was appalling. Below 10 fps, even in small areas. Only by reducing the detail and view-distance to well below the mid-point could I get acceptable performance.
My new PC is a Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66 ghz, with 2 gigs of RAM and a Gefore 7950 GX2. This manages acceptable performance in 1280x968 full detail the vast majority of the time, but does dip below 40 fps in some of the larger areas when there's a lot going on. In other words, this game is actually *heavier* on the system than Company of Heroes.
However, what you have to bear in mind is that Company of Heroes looks truly spectacular, while NWN2 looks... well... not all that much better than NWN1. If you look closely, you can see where the slowdown is coming from. Some of the models have a ridiculous number of polys. Unfortunately, little has been done from the actual visual design perspective to make them look particularly good, with the effect that they still look angular and stilted, with little realism in their movements.
In terms of environments, things vary dramatically. Some of the outdoor areas do look pretty good, particularly in the game's final chapter. However, all areas, particularly indoor areas, suffer from the same problem as areas in NWN1; as they're all crafted using generic tilesets from the toolset, they're all essentially just the same few graphics repeated over and over. This isn't always obvious outdoors, but it's a bit disappointing when the game's final few dungeons are exactly the same as the first dungeon, just with different lighting. Many of the tilesets aren't even especially pretty. Spell effects are ok and have moved on a bit from NWN1, but they're nothing to write home about. After seeing the explosion effects in Company of Heroes and... well... pretty much anything in Gears of War, this is all a bit flat.
Fortunately, the sound is much better. While the sound effects are largely recycled from NWN1, they are more or less adequate. They're supported by a really great sound-track and voice-acting that ranges from the inoffensive to the truly stellar.
Now, the gameplay...
This is where things start getting a bit more positive. The initial release was crippled by numerous UI frustrations and a near-unusable camera. However, the 1.03 patch massively improves things here, allowing the player to focus on the actual game.
Character generation is excellent, with a huge range of customisation options. More classes and races are available than in any previous installment and your choices at this point will have major consequences later. It would have been nice to have more control over how your other party members develop as they level up, for example in giving them prestige classes, but this is a fairly minor gripe.
No, the OP is right. Quickenings soon become a recipe for suicide in most serious battles, because they completely drain your mp. While the damage they put out is enough to end a boss-fight early on in the game, by the time you get into the final 3rd, even a "full" Quickening chain won't take that much off a boss's hp. And then you find yourself stood there with no mp, blinking foolishly.
Look, sorry, I love my 360, think MS are probably actually now heading to win this round of the console wars and all that stuff...
But...
This article is bullshit.
Seriously, the backwards compatibility on the 360 was disappointing at launch, but we were promised it would improve. Since then, it has barely improved and many of the old A-list X-Box titles are still missing from the compatibility list. Hell, there are still major releases coming out for the X-Box which aren't compatible with the 360. Given we're now 6 months after launch, this is taking on the tone of a bad joke. The very few updates to the compatibility list that have appeared have been extremely short and have mostly been for C-list titles.
Burnout 3 (which I much prefer to Revenge), MechAssault 2, Chronicles of Riddick, Panzer Dragoon Orta and Star Wars Republic Commando aren't "forgotten" titles. They're titles which, as recently as 12 months ago in some cases, were being promoted as major, front-line titles. They're games I still get the urge to play on a regular basis. Hell, they're good. Many of these are among the later wave of X-Box titles which did so much to reclaim its credibility as a platform for games other than Halo. To still have these unplayable on the 360 is a farce.
Ok, random thoughts on each of the articles referenced by TFA:
The Columbine game: this is one of those times when, even as a fairly straightforward, no compromises, advocate of free-speech, I wish I didn't find myself on the same side as some of these nutcases. Yes, yes, it's their right to say it and yes, I'll defend it. I seriously wish I didn't have to, though. I feel the same way about Rockstar sometimes. Their games rock in terms of the core gameplay (even if they have started recycling of late), they've reinvented several genres several times and if they want to make a game in which you dig up and rape the corpses of the grandmothers of assorted members of congress, then it is their right to do so. But for god's sake, guys, could you not grow up a little? Would make all of our lives so much easier and not make me feel... well... soiled, whenever I have to defend video-games against the latest loud-mouthed office bore.
On games resulting in poor literacy: this article's slightly better than the snippets in both the summary and TFA. I've worked (briefly) in a school and there's no denying that standards of literacy are hideous today. Is the growth of the games industry a factor? Possibly. There's certainly an extra level of distraction that has resulted from the easy availability of games. However, I think this is missing the point a bit. The primary responsibility for ensuring a child's literacy is split between parents and schools and there are too many cases where both of these fail. I strongly suspect that many of the teachers complaining about videog games are themselves part of the problem. If they would stop chasing after the latest politically correct, culturally sensitive educational paradigm and start actually teaching kids how to write - including incentivising failure and penalising failure - then they might find that school-leavers would suddenly be able to string two words together in print again.
And the Louisiana thing: Oh for god's sake, have these people nothing better to do? They know the law is unconstitutional and will, after much time, effort and expense, be struck down. Is there not a case for prosecution here, on the grounds of misappropriation of public funds?
As a long-term, semi-hardcore FFXI player, I've had mixed feelings about the 360 launch. On the one hand, it's been great that we've had an influx of new players again. It really keeps the game lively, keeps the lower-end economy working properly and staves off the inevitable decline that's going to hit every MMORPG some day.
On the other hand, I can't help but feel that Square-Enix have wasted a big opportunity here. Don't get me wrong - I vastly prefer FFXI to World of Warcraft, and the fact that almost everybody who left FFXI for WoW ended up coming back seems to indicate that a lot of other people feel the same way - but WoW taught everybody some important lessons about MMORPGs that you just can't afford to ignore these days, particularly in terms of inducting new players. The simple, depressing fact is that getting started in FFXI as a new player now is no easier than it was when the game first launched. Which is to say, it's bloody hard. If anything, it's even harder now, as much of the game is becoming geared towards end-game content and prices on newbie gear are much higher than they used to be. The 360 release was an opportunity for S-E to address this; to revamp the hideously outdated quest-log, to put in some easily-identified, tightly structured quests to break newbies into the game and teach them the basics of playing while also getting their low level gear for free and, in short, to make the game FUN to play with a character below level 50, which is something that's always been lacking.
Don't get me wrong, my opinion is that in terms of end-game content, FFXI stomps everything else around. There's challenge, variety and a whole lot of other stuff that's absent from other MMORPG end-games, particularly WoW, and, to cap it all, this is geared for everything from 3 man groups through to 64 man alliances, unlike the WoW focus on ever bigger groups at the top levels. However, if I were just getting started on the 360 version now, I seriously doubt I'd stick with the game long enough to see that.
Also, I know I'm in the minority here, but I personally think that the Treasures of Aht Urhgan expansion *stinks*. It's had an easy ride from the player-base, because it added 3 new jobs, which is what people always shout for in expansions. However, I don't see any of these jobs as adding anything new or exciting to what was on offer before. Frankly, the chances that more than about 0.01% of the player-base had actually experienced everything that the existing 15 jobs had to offer are pretty miniscule. So we get landed with 3 new jobs which suddenly everybody and their dog are playing as and which break the game-balance quite nicely. We also get some of the ugliest zones ever seen in the game. The zones for the previous expansion, Chains of Promathia, were breath-taking visually. It's a bit disappointing to go from that, to wading around in a swamp with blatant copy-pasting of tiles, which is all that ToAU seems to be. Besieged and Assault (new game-modes) have also completely failed to live up to their potential.
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If I were you, I would be looking at a wider range of options than just sysadmin type roles. To be brutally honest, on the basis of your original post, your technical qualifications don't actually sound much more impressive than my own. For me, this isn't a problem - I have a decently paid white-collar job that I like a lot in a non-technical field. However, I've seen too many friends lock themselves into an IT career path despite lacking the qualifications or experience for anything other than front-line tech-support roles, for reasons that basically boil down to "I like messing around with computers in my spare time".
There are a huge number of IT graduates around right now, at least here in the UK, and many of those I was at University with here who did Computer Science or Maths with a computing flavour (I myself did Classics) are still working in tech support roles now, earning less than £20k and desperately seeking anything that could constitute the next rung up on the ladder. Assuming the situation is similar in your area, it's unlikely you'd be able to compete effectively with these people for jobs without the benefit of a degree.
Assuming that you're still fairly young and your debts aren't *too* massive, I would seriously start looking at other career paths, where technical qualifications are likely to matter less. People tend to make a big fuss about "making sure you work in a field you love", but I tend to call BS on this. The problem with making your hobby into your job is that most people who do this just end up burning out on both.
Mediamax used to be rather good (very good, in fact) back when it was still called streamload. Unfortunately, last year, they went through a big upgrading and rebranding exercise in August that has virtually destroyed its functionality and reliability.
The old, usable interface was replaced by a hideous, slow nightmare that, frankly, didn't even look as good as the old version. Files now routinely vanish while being moved between folders, or fail to show up at all after being uploaded. The interface for hosting files for non-members to access has been crippled and passwords or IP restrictions set on such public-hosted folders frequently disappear and reset themselves. Many files uploaded before the conversion to Mediamax have vanished, or remain visible but inaccessible.
For a month or so after the "upgrade", the support staff seemed to be genuinely trying to fix things. After that, all of the customer interface points were effectively shut down and the company went into full-on spin mode. I can only come to the conclusion that the new back-end for the service is effectively unworkable, but that for whatever reason, either management or the line (or both) cannot admit this and roll back to the old technology.
I'm on the verge of backing up all my stored content to DVD until I can find another store for it and cancelling my account. I know others will be having similar thoughts. The entire thing seems to be an object lesson into how to run a successful service into the ground.
Like I say, my understanding was that even if you import remotely (ie. order via the web), you're not actually at risk yourself. The importer is at risk, but unless he gets stomped between billing you and shipping your console, you are safe. I've never heard of anybody having an incoming console, that had actually been shipped, siezed.
You will, of course, need to pay customs duty on the console. I should have made this clear before.
It's unlikely (very, very unlikely) that I would have arranged a trip to the US specifically to buy a PS3. However, my employer needed me to go for a few days, I knew I'd have some time on the last day to hit the shops and I knew that I could fit it in my hand-luggage provided I packed everything else into the hold. No, it's not an option for everybody, but anybody else who wants a PS3 and has a trip to the US coming up might want to consider it.
The point about backwards compatibility is true. However, given I had both US and UK PS2s and games for both, I was always going to need to keep one of them unless I wanted to buy two PS3s (which I very much don't).
The import statement, however, is misleading. I looked into this myself before importing, as I intended to pick up the machine myself on a trip to the States that had already been arranged, and hence would be carrying it back in my hand-luggage. I didn't much feel like being arrested. Basically, while there is a grey area regarding the *sale* of consoles across region boundaries, where Sony currently appear to have the upper hand, there is no restriction on just buying a machine in the US and then carrying it back to the UK with you. After all, it would be ridiculous if you had a situation whereby a family living in the US who decided to up stakes and relocate to the UK (the fools) would have to leave their consoles behind. Even if you import remotely, I don't think there's any risk of the machine at the border. It's the importer that gets stomped on... the machines themselves that are in transit are perfectly legal goods.
This is exactly what I, as a UK gamer, have done. My PS3 arrived a couple of weeks ago and I've got a fairly extensive comparison of it with the other two "new gen" consoles up in my journal. The tipping point for me was when I saw the UK launch price. All told, if I were to buy the PS3 package I'd wanted in the UK, it would cost me the equivalent of about $1100. I got the same thing on import from the US for a shade over $800. What's really handy is that the PS3 just has a standard PC-style power input, meaning that I can use a standard kettle power-cable, rather than needing to buy a new step-down converter. Of course, pretty much any UK TV purchased in the last 8 or so years, barring some really, really low-end portables, is perfectly happy with either PAL or NTSC.
Sony have promised before that the PS3 would be region-free for games. I'm now picking up some worrying rumbles that this might not be the case as far as the UK goes and frankly, this latest news doesn't bode well either. However, while it would be nice to be able to walk into a UK shop and just buy a game when I want one, I'm willing and able to import. Sad to say, the US still does get more games and get them earlier than the UK. Still, I'm also hearing that US machines may be getting an update to allow them to play European/Australian games. If this is indeed true, then my decision to buy a US machine really does seem to have been the right one.
The only drawback right now is that I can't sign up to the online store with a UK credit card. However, once the European region is enabled on launch-day, I understand that I'll be able to sign up for the EU store from my US console.
My word.
It's quite impressive really, how a web-comic that deliberately sets out to be juvenile and offensive so often ends up involved in a reasonably respectable way in some pretty big news stories.
I know this probably isn't the most appropriate comment, but I this whole thing really does remind me strongly of this book. In fact, the echos are bordering on being uncanny. I guess it all boils down to the question of whether somebody can just be "born bad".
The evidence both from this case (if the account here is to be believed) and my own experiences is "yes, they can". I'm not sure anybody in the political or academic estabishments really want to face up to the implications of this, though.
Children who participate in an activity that encourages fine motor controls, a steady hand, spatial awareness, the ability to assimilate new information rapidly and a requirement to perform under pressure in an actual win/lose environment (increasingly rare both in schools and in more traditional orgnised childhood pursuits) tend to increase their aptitutde for a profession that requires the same skills. At the same time, children who focus on said activity to the exclusion of all else put themselves at a big disadvantage.
Not exactly surprising, is it?
With games, as with everything else, the key message is always moderation. A 16-hours-a-day World of Warcraft addict is no more suited to be a surgeon than a steroidally enhanced jock, but just as a measure of sporting prowess can be helpful for some career paths, so the skills you learn from gaming can be of use elsewhere.
No, the grandparent AC is right.
There are currently very strong signs, of which this story is one, that developers *are* hesitating to port games to the Wii. Sure, it's by no means universal and you can find counter-examples, but the simple fact is that more or less every cross-platform game scheduled for the Wii is a shovelware movie-license. These have never been made on cutting edge technology and most of them, for now, are still essentially last-gen games in every respect. Moreover, as we saw with the John Carmack story the other week, and as we are likely seeing in this case, the Wii's lack of horsepower is a key factor in this. Once the current generation is more firmly established and its standards have become the norm, even the current trickle of cross-platform titles is likely to dry up.
If the Wii doesn't have a PS2-scale installed base by this point to make it worth sinking megabucks into exclusives for it (and I'd say it has about a year from now), then it's dead in the water.
I've played Warioware. I actually found it less impressive than Rayman Raving Rabbids. Ironic that the only Wii game to have even come close to impressing me so far was a third party offering.
No game to date has really done lightsaber combat perfectly. However, there's a significant difference in terms of the instinctive expectations that go with traditional controllers (mouse+keyboard, or gamepad) and the Wii-mote.
With Jedi Knight 2, which had, to my mind, the best implementation of a lightsaber I'd seen to date, the rules were fairly simple. Primary and secondary fire for different types of stroke, combined with directional movements, to give a basic armament of lightsaber moves. Within this framework, limited though it was, I could control how my on-screen avatar fought with reasonable precision. Any reasonably well designed set of controls should become instinctive for a player fairly quickly.
With the Wii-mote, the disconnect becomes more serious. To a large extent, it looks and feels like I am holding an actual lightsaber. My instincts therefore have a specific set of expectations regarding what the outcome of each move I make will be. When in the real world, I do an overhead swing downwards, but my on-screen avatar is blocked even before the blade passes below eye-level, the disconnect is much, much more significant than when I just get blocked after pressing a key on a controller.
The end result would be depressingly predictable; with the heavy penalty that would automatically be applied on large sweeping motions, battles would almost certainly be about people holding the Wii-mote within a relatively narrow field in front of them and twitching it about in a deeply spastic manner, in the hope of compensating for the disconnect through sheer number of swings.
This quote manages to both be technically correct and a spectacular example of missing the point.
It was indeed lack of third party support that killed the Cube. By the same token, it was massive third party support that secured the PS2's overwhelming victory. However, and this is the important point, there is *no* indication that this situation is likely to change during this generation. Moreover, once the novelty value and hype/astroturf that accompanied the release has vanished, the Wii's situation is arguably going to be even more precarious than the Cube's.
Right now, some of the big third party devs are making noises about wanting to support the Wii. Most of them, however, are very light on details of specific titles. Others are making it clear even now that they have no interest in doing so. Given how early in the cycle we are, this is bad. When the Cube launched, pretty much everybody was signed up to making games for it, with drop-outs happening gradually along the way.
Looking at the games actually announced for the Wii, I see a few cross-platform titles (a large proportion of which are shovelware licensed titles), a few party games, and first-party Nintendo games. The N64 and Cube demonstrated amply that the appeal of Nintendo's 1st party games is fairly narrow and as production costs increase, they will struggle to maintain their margin on these. By contrast, Sony are still sitting on exclusives with Gran Turismo and Final Fantasy, as well as preferrential relationships with the Metal Gear Solid people. Sure, right now, the PS3 is over-priced and only has 1 game worth playing, but this *will* change. By the same token, the 360 has a pretty decent selection of games already, and is, for the first time, starting to make headway in the Japanese market, both in terms of selling units over there and getting Japanese developers signed up for exclusives.
when are people going to learn that graphics aren't the end all for games
To a large extent, though, graphics *do* matter. As others have noted, it's the best looking games that top the sales charts. Just watch how the Madden games do it each year, with little justification for each new release other than better graphics than the last one.
More importantly, graphical standards get driven up all the time. I remember the first time I played the original Wing Commander, back when it was newly released. It was jaw-dropping. Look at it today and it's a pixellated mess. By the same token, look at the PS2 launch-titles, some of which were quite impressive in their day. Now that we're used to Farcry, Gears of War and Resistance: Fall of Man, they look absolutely hideous. If the Wii's technology really is as lacking as it seems to be, then by 2009 or so, it's going to be more or less finished as a contender.
You miss the point entirely. I do have a Wii (waste of £200 that it was) and the grandparent is absolutely right. What he is talking about is not the lack of force feedback, it is the lack of resistance.
Just think about what happens when you swing your lightsaber, in this theoretical game, at your opponent and he parries. On the screen, he catches your blade with his and, to all intents and purposes, it stops moving. In the living room, meanwhile, there is no such physical impediment for you to encounter. Your momentum carries through your swing, even if the Wii-mote gives you a buzz of force-feedback. The result is that you are now positioned completely differently to your on-screen avatar. Even if the game has some code to tell it what to do when this happens (which would be difficult - probably impossible - to implement to everybody's satisfaction), the illusion of being in an actual lightsaber duel is lost. With eps 4-6 style "slow" duels, this is bad enough. The moment you try to simulate an eps 1-3 style fast-moving duel this way, the whole thing becomes a soggy mess.
The PC version doesn't just have bugs, it has huge, system-crashing bugs. The kind of system crashing bugs that I've never actually seen any other game manage under xp. I've replicated these bugs myself, under common conditions, on two of my own PCs, neither of which have stability problems in any other games I've thrown at them. I don't actually know anybody from among my series of friends who actually has the PC version running stably for protracted periods.
The 360 version... just works. There may be minor bugs in there, but I've yet to actually notice one that in any way obstructed gameplay. Besides, in case you hadn't noticed, MS quietly and informally ditched the whole "no patches via Xbox Live" thing months ago. Console games these days can and do get patched. That you don't know this... implies that you are arguing more from emotion than facts.
Control-wise, I'm fairly agnostic. If you don't like console fpses, or don't have much experience with them, you may find Oblivion on the 360 frustrating at first. I've long since gotten used to console fpses, so not an issue for me. As for mods? Personally, the only mod I'd like would be one to remove the auto-level-balancing thing. But I can live without that.
My own install of the PC version of Oblivion got vaped months ago. I don't miss it. The 360 version still gets booted up sometimes.
Hmm... thoughts on each of these in turn:
20) Rise of Nations - yeah, ok, this seems fair enough. It's a nice concept and still a fun game to play. I may even have moved it a little higher up the list. Graphics are dated quite badly now, so a sequel wouldn't go amiss.
19) Halo - w... t... f... - sure, the Xbox version was great, even if its own sequel does comprehensively out-shine it, but the PC version always felt like a nasty hack at best.
18) Rome: Total War - reasonable pick and probably in about the right place on the list. Very solid game.
17) Unreal Tournament 2004 - this made me go "hmm" at first, but on balance, I think I could live with this here. It was definitely the best iterration of the series. I'm not quite sure how TFA manages to claim the original is better.
16) Medal of Honour Allied Assault - I guess you have to include one of the WW2 shooters and I guess this one is the obvious candidate. If this were the only one on the list, I could have been perfectly happy. Unfortunately, if you look further down...
15) Neverwinter Nights - ooooh, tricky one. On the one hand, the game as released, straight out of box, is pretty damned poor, with an original campaign that falls waaaaay short of the usual Bioware standards. The sequel is massively better in this respect. However, I will grant you that, with two solid expansions and a huge mass of mods available, NWN has grown way beyond what originally came out of the box.
14) Max Payne 2 - Can be completed in about 4-6 hours by an average player and has no replay value. No thanks.
13) Command and Conquer: Generals - Oh god no. Command and Conquer with a slight graphical facelift, but none of the production values that made the very early installments in the series great. Gameplay that was outdated compared to other RTSes even at release.
12) Guild Wars - not played it, so can't really comment.
11) Civilisation IV - frankly, the Civ games have never done it for me. However, I will grant that they do seem to push the requisite buttons for an awful lot of people, so happy to let this one stand.
10) Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos - yeah, good pick. Probably the best of the small-scale RTSes from the XP era. I'm mystified as to why the article says the controls were tricky, though. They were basically the same as any other RTS around, if not slightly better due to the decent hotkeys system.
9) Doom 3: Yep, decent pick. I know a lot of people found fault with it, but this game scared the living shit out of me (at least for the first half of the game). I'd probably have put this in the bottom end of the list, though, given the lack of variety. I actually felt Quake 4 was better, so may just have substituted that altogether.
8) F.E.A.R: again, a decent pick just on account of atmosphere. Plus the graphics were beautiful and the AI probably the best we've seen in an fps.
7) Company of Heroes: Hmm... maybe. Personally, I'd have substituted Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War for this, though. They're basically the same game underneath but, particularly with the expansions, I find Dawn of War slightly deeper. Still, there's no denying that Company of Heroes is very, very pretty.
6) Battlefield 1942: Yes, I'd probably go along with this, on the proviso that all of the sequels and expansion packs are excluded. BF2 in particular was an utter crock.
5)Knights of the Old Republic: Yes, definitely. Proof that Lucas should have let Bioware write Episodes 1-3.
4) Call of Duty: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD NO. What the fuck is it with this game? Why the hell do it and its sequels continue to attact such plaudits. An inferior, dumbed down Medal of Honour clone which brought nothing new to the genre at all. On a related note, why do all these countless WW2 fpses only feature battles from the second half of WW2 which the Allies won (oh, and Pearl Harbour). I grow tired of the "inevitable march to victory" feel of these games and feel that it actually fails to do history justice.
3) E
It's called "the joy of a slashdot subscription". Lets you see new stories coming and get your post ready :)
Yes, it's better than in FFX. That said, it's still not perfect by any means. Vaan and Ashe's voices could be better, which, given they're the main characters, is a bit irritating. They're nothing like as bad as the Tidus or Wakka voices in FFX though. Balthier's voice is great and adds a lot to the character. I'd honestly take the English voice over the Japanese voice any day in that case.
The other point to note is that the vast majority of the voices in FFXII are British. Some people seem to find that annoying, but as a Brit myself, I think it's pretty cool.
Obviously, KH2 is for the PS2, not the PC. Damned typos.
Hmm... ok. My top 5 games of the year, followed by the 3 biggest disappointments (not necessarily the worst games, just the ones that didn't live up to my expectations).
Best:
5th) Gears of War (360): I don't think there's much else I can add to what's been said elsewhere about this. It doesn't do anything that hasn't been done before, but by god it does it well. The ultimate example of an old concept polished to perfection. Let down ever so slightly by its length, but the whole experience is just so visceral that I don't really care.
4th) Company of Heroes (PC): The game that made me buy a new PC. It may be a system killer in terms of the specs it needs, but it's worth it. Incredible detail in the graphics and physics and, most importantly, they're actually used in a way that enhances the gameplay. I'll be hoping to see fully destructible landscapes in more games next year. The only downside? It rehashes those same old Normandy battles that we see in every other WW2 games. How about giving us some different battles in future, maybe even some from the first half of the war? So far, only the Blitzkrieg games have really had the balls to do that.
3rd) Final Fantasy XII (PS2): I'd expected to hate this, given all the negative publicity about the gambit system before its release, but the game turned out just fine. A darker, more mature plot, graphics that put most next-gen titles to shame and one of the best combat systems yet. My only complaint was that the difficulty curve necessitated a lot of grinding for levels and gil.
2nd) Neverwinter Nights 2 (PC): Only here on the basis of the 1.03 patch, without which the game is nigh-on unplayable. Finally, a decent successor to Baldur's Gate 2. Should get better over time, as more 3rd party modules start appearing. It'd be really nice if we could get an expansion with epic levels in 2007.
1st) Kingdom Hearts 2 (PC): For some reason, the critics didn't go for this game, but I was blown away by it. I honestly can't find anything to fault this game on. The difficulty curve is much fairer than in the original game, the plot has some unexpectedly dark twists, the voice acting is much improved and the graphics are stunning.
And now the most disappointing games:
3rd) Wii Sports (Wii): Not, I feel, the best title to bundle with the Wii. Once the novelty of the controller wears off, you realise pretty quickly that these games are essentially just brute-force and timing (baseball, boxing and tennis) or an exercise in not letting your hand wobble (bowling and golf). I've not actually played a Wii game yet that's really convinced me of the controller's merits.
2nd) Prey (PC): After all the hype and all the years of development, Prey turned out to be nothing more than a straightforward fps with lacklustre combat and a few gravity tricks. I'm still not quite sure how they managed to strain every single element of fun out of a tried and tested formula so effortlessly. Boring weapons, identikit enemies, endlessly repeated rooms and a plot that advanced at a glacial pace didn't help, though. If Gears of War is an illustration of how to reheat an old formula well, Prey is an example of what not to do.
1st) Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cereberus (PS2): OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE SQUARE! What were you thinking? You can do better than this. I don't quite know what I expected from this foray into the action genre, but it wasn't a bland third person shooter with a ho hum plot, twitchy controls and graphics that expose every single limitation of the PS2. It's hard to believe that this came from the same developer as FF12 and KH2. Must do better.
Amen to that.
A couple of years ago, I did a little work around the periphery of the publishing industry. At no point was I even close to anybody who was close to anybody who was involved with any of the Harry Potter books. However, a few of the things that were common knowledge then seem particularly relevant now.
What J.K. Rowling is increasingly suffering from is Celebrity Author Syndrome. This, simply put, is a state in which no editor has both the guts and the backing from above to stand up to the author in question and insist upon necessary changes. In some cases, this goes hand in hand with the author being a self-important prick, but that's absolutely *not* an essential pre-requisite (and I have absolutely *no* idea what JKR is like to work with).
Let me explain...
The vast majority of manuscripts that are submitted to publishers by first-time authors are seriously long. They contain repetition of scenes, subplots that are never developed, page after page of background exposition on characters and vast amounts of unnecessary description and digression. Reading the average freshly-submitted manuscript is a pretty depressing alternative; by the time you've waded through all the padding, you can hardly remember anything about the plot and the characters. Now, of course, most manuscripts submitted to publishers go straight in the bin. Occasionally, however, one will be considered interesting enough to pick up. What happens in this case (with some variation across the industry, but the model remains more or less the same) is that some money might change hands and the publisher might indicate to the author that they could conceivably be convinced to publish the book, provided the author work with a designated editor to strip the work down to something fit for public consumption.
This process is often pretty gruelling for the first-time author. They've suddenly got an editor, who they likely see as a pen-pushing bureaucrat and spawn of the devil, demanding that they cut out whole chunks of words that the author has sweated blood over. Emotionally, this is surprisingly difficult. However, most first-time authors who have made it this far have a strong incentive to comply with changes demanded by their editor and will comply. After all, the editor's say-so can kill the book. The publisher looses relatively little from killing the project, while for the author, this could mean months or years of work going to waste. Ultimately, it is very rare that a book is not improved beyond recognition by this process.
However, this dynamic changes massively with a celebrity author (as in, a celebrity who is famous for writing, not a celebrity who has decided to write a book). The publisher suddenly has a lot more to loose if the relationship goes sour. Whatever contractual obligations the author might be under, they know that they'll always have a market for their words elsewhere in the future. If the author is a prick, they can therefore change editors at will and refuse to make changes as they see fit.
However, even if the author is the nicest, most compliant person in the world, the editor is still going to be under a lot of stress. They know, and the people who pay them know, that this author has been lucrative in the past. The editor knows that his future job security almost certainly depends to a large degree on him managing this author right. There is therefore an enormous temptation to just sit back and assume that the author knows best (even though the wisest authors might realise themselves that this isn't the case).
We saw the results of this with the 5th and 6th Harry Potter books (and to a lesser extent, the 4th). The 5th book in particular had a stupidly high number of redundant scenes, most of which could have been excised at will. The bizarre, only-half-realised political commentary surrounding Dolores Umbridge ended up eating a significant chunk of the book without adding anything significant to it. The character could (and in an earlier book, would) have been ha
In terms of the AI, what I really found hard was coming to NWN2 after playing Final Fantasy 12. The general standard of NWN2's AI is shocking. While there are some AI customisation options, most of them don't seem to do much and I found it virtually impossible to set mages to any kind of sensible casting regime. NWN2 desperately needs some kind of equivalent to FF12's Gambit system.
How the hell did you complete this game in 14 hours? At the 14 hour point, I was only coming to the end of chapter 1 (of 3) and I'm fairly sure I missed a good amount of optional stuff. This is a huge game and my first-playthrough completion time was about 52 hours. That's more or less exactly the same as the time I put into Final Fantasy 12 and that had a lot more grinding for xp, as opposed to actually doing fun and interesting quests.
There are many grounds you can criticise NWN2 on, but I don't see how length can possibly be one fo them. $60 for a 50+ hour game (with serious replay value) doesn't strike me as bad value.
I have such mixed feelings on this game. However, I think I'm now tending over towards the positive end of the spectrum.
If I was reviewing this today, I'd probably rate it at an 8.5/10, or even a 9/10. Had I reviewed it a week or so ago, before the 1.03 patch, I'd have rated it a 6/10 at best. I cannot emphasise enough how much the latest patch has improved the game. The camera is usable now, the worst of the plot-breaking bugs have been fixed and the addition of anti-aliasing has improved the graphics significantly. I'm not saying that all of the issues have been addressed - not by a long stretch - but this now resembles a playable game (a late-beta, maybe) as opposed to the hideous pre-alpha mess that it is out of box.
The system requirements for this game are *harsh*. I've actually had 2 systems to run this on, as I upgraded my PC shortly after buying the game. Before going any further, I should emphasise that I believe "acceptable performance" for an RPG such as this to mean "40 fps or higher". This is, by many standards, a rather forgiving measure.
The first system I ran NWN2 on was a P4 3.4, with 1 gig of RAM and a Radeon x800 Pro. Not exactly a cutting edge system, but certainly a solid enough machine. Performance in 1024x768 full-detail was appalling. Below 10 fps, even in small areas. Only by reducing the detail and view-distance to well below the mid-point could I get acceptable performance.
My new PC is a Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66 ghz, with 2 gigs of RAM and a Gefore 7950 GX2. This manages acceptable performance in 1280x968 full detail the vast majority of the time, but does dip below 40 fps in some of the larger areas when there's a lot going on. In other words, this game is actually *heavier* on the system than Company of Heroes.
However, what you have to bear in mind is that Company of Heroes looks truly spectacular, while NWN2 looks... well... not all that much better than NWN1. If you look closely, you can see where the slowdown is coming from. Some of the models have a ridiculous number of polys. Unfortunately, little has been done from the actual visual design perspective to make them look particularly good, with the effect that they still look angular and stilted, with little realism in their movements.
In terms of environments, things vary dramatically. Some of the outdoor areas do look pretty good, particularly in the game's final chapter. However, all areas, particularly indoor areas, suffer from the same problem as areas in NWN1; as they're all crafted using generic tilesets from the toolset, they're all essentially just the same few graphics repeated over and over. This isn't always obvious outdoors, but it's a bit disappointing when the game's final few dungeons are exactly the same as the first dungeon, just with different lighting. Many of the tilesets aren't even especially pretty. Spell effects are ok and have moved on a bit from NWN1, but they're nothing to write home about. After seeing the explosion effects in Company of Heroes and... well... pretty much anything in Gears of War, this is all a bit flat.
Fortunately, the sound is much better. While the sound effects are largely recycled from NWN1, they are more or less adequate. They're supported by a really great sound-track and voice-acting that ranges from the inoffensive to the truly stellar.
Now, the gameplay...
This is where things start getting a bit more positive. The initial release was crippled by numerous UI frustrations and a near-unusable camera. However, the 1.03 patch massively improves things here, allowing the player to focus on the actual game.
Character generation is excellent, with a huge range of customisation options. More classes and races are available than in any previous installment and your choices at this point will have major consequences later. It would have been nice to have more control over how your other party members develop as they level up, for example in giving them prestige classes, but this is a fairly minor gripe.
The return to
No, the OP is right. Quickenings soon become a recipe for suicide in most serious battles, because they completely drain your mp. While the damage they put out is enough to end a boss-fight early on in the game, by the time you get into the final 3rd, even a "full" Quickening chain won't take that much off a boss's hp. And then you find yourself stood there with no mp, blinking foolishly.
Look, sorry, I love my 360, think MS are probably actually now heading to win this round of the console wars and all that stuff...
But...
This article is bullshit.
Seriously, the backwards compatibility on the 360 was disappointing at launch, but we were promised it would improve. Since then, it has barely improved and many of the old A-list X-Box titles are still missing from the compatibility list. Hell, there are still major releases coming out for the X-Box which aren't compatible with the 360. Given we're now 6 months after launch, this is taking on the tone of a bad joke. The very few updates to the compatibility list that have appeared have been extremely short and have mostly been for C-list titles.
Burnout 3 (which I much prefer to Revenge), MechAssault 2, Chronicles of Riddick, Panzer Dragoon Orta and Star Wars Republic Commando aren't "forgotten" titles. They're titles which, as recently as 12 months ago in some cases, were being promoted as major, front-line titles. They're games I still get the urge to play on a regular basis. Hell, they're good. Many of these are among the later wave of X-Box titles which did so much to reclaim its credibility as a platform for games other than Halo. To still have these unplayable on the 360 is a farce.
Ok, random thoughts on each of the articles referenced by TFA:
The Columbine game: this is one of those times when, even as a fairly straightforward, no compromises, advocate of free-speech, I wish I didn't find myself on the same side as some of these nutcases. Yes, yes, it's their right to say it and yes, I'll defend it. I seriously wish I didn't have to, though. I feel the same way about Rockstar sometimes. Their games rock in terms of the core gameplay (even if they have started recycling of late), they've reinvented several genres several times and if they want to make a game in which you dig up and rape the corpses of the grandmothers of assorted members of congress, then it is their right to do so. But for god's sake, guys, could you not grow up a little? Would make all of our lives so much easier and not make me feel... well... soiled, whenever I have to defend video-games against the latest loud-mouthed office bore.
On games resulting in poor literacy: this article's slightly better than the snippets in both the summary and TFA. I've worked (briefly) in a school and there's no denying that standards of literacy are hideous today. Is the growth of the games industry a factor? Possibly. There's certainly an extra level of distraction that has resulted from the easy availability of games. However, I think this is missing the point a bit. The primary responsibility for ensuring a child's literacy is split between parents and schools and there are too many cases where both of these fail. I strongly suspect that many of the teachers complaining about videog games are themselves part of the problem. If they would stop chasing after the latest politically correct, culturally sensitive educational paradigm and start actually teaching kids how to write - including incentivising failure and penalising failure - then they might find that school-leavers would suddenly be able to string two words together in print again.
And the Louisiana thing: Oh for god's sake, have these people nothing better to do? They know the law is unconstitutional and will, after much time, effort and expense, be struck down. Is there not a case for prosecution here, on the grounds of misappropriation of public funds?
As a long-term, semi-hardcore FFXI player, I've had mixed feelings about the 360 launch. On the one hand, it's been great that we've had an influx of new players again. It really keeps the game lively, keeps the lower-end economy working properly and staves off the inevitable decline that's going to hit every MMORPG some day.
On the other hand, I can't help but feel that Square-Enix have wasted a big opportunity here. Don't get me wrong - I vastly prefer FFXI to World of Warcraft, and the fact that almost everybody who left FFXI for WoW ended up coming back seems to indicate that a lot of other people feel the same way - but WoW taught everybody some important lessons about MMORPGs that you just can't afford to ignore these days, particularly in terms of inducting new players. The simple, depressing fact is that getting started in FFXI as a new player now is no easier than it was when the game first launched. Which is to say, it's bloody hard. If anything, it's even harder now, as much of the game is becoming geared towards end-game content and prices on newbie gear are much higher than they used to be. The 360 release was an opportunity for S-E to address this; to revamp the hideously outdated quest-log, to put in some easily-identified, tightly structured quests to break newbies into the game and teach them the basics of playing while also getting their low level gear for free and, in short, to make the game FUN to play with a character below level 50, which is something that's always been lacking.
Don't get me wrong, my opinion is that in terms of end-game content, FFXI stomps everything else around. There's challenge, variety and a whole lot of other stuff that's absent from other MMORPG end-games, particularly WoW, and, to cap it all, this is geared for everything from 3 man groups through to 64 man alliances, unlike the WoW focus on ever bigger groups at the top levels. However, if I were just getting started on the 360 version now, I seriously doubt I'd stick with the game long enough to see that.
Also, I know I'm in the minority here, but I personally think that the Treasures of Aht Urhgan expansion *stinks*. It's had an easy ride from the player-base, because it added 3 new jobs, which is what people always shout for in expansions. However, I don't see any of these jobs as adding anything new or exciting to what was on offer before. Frankly, the chances that more than about 0.01% of the player-base had actually experienced everything that the existing 15 jobs had to offer are pretty miniscule. So we get landed with 3 new jobs which suddenly everybody and their dog are playing as and which break the game-balance quite nicely. We also get some of the ugliest zones ever seen in the game. The zones for the previous expansion, Chains of Promathia, were breath-taking visually. It's a bit disappointing to go from that, to wading around in a swamp with blatant copy-pasting of tiles, which is all that ToAU seems to be. Besieged and Assault (new game-modes) have also completely failed to live up to their potential.