"Excuse me, but I fucking loved Assassin's Creed. One of the best gameplay ideas I've ever played!"
I was commplaining that games are trying too hard to be movie like instead of focusing on the game, assasin's creed got old really fast.
I agree assasin's creed has potential but the first game nowhere lived up to games similar to it that have been out for 10 years, how does a developer not learn from other games?
I was just saying that focusing on being cinematic at the expense of making a great game is hurting a lot of games. the are selling on glitz but the are shallow gameplay experiences once the eyecandy wears off and the meat nad bones of the gameplay (or lack thereof) begin to show the weakness of the overall game.
"No weirder than Katamari Damacy, which was a big hit recently."
But it is the EXCEPTION not the rule, in the early gaming days you would have ALL sorts of creative wacky titles, today most game companies are hugely conservative.
"Secondly, are you seriously trying to tell us that Sands of Time was good because it "wasn't trying to be a movie?" You're in opposite-land."
Not really, many of the games being released are focusing too much on non game things, so the game suffers for it. Assasins creed has this in spades. I acknowledge that gaming shares some cinematic movie-esque stuff with cinema and thats why they are VIDEO games. But games as a medium are not movies.
Take for example God of War 1 and 2, they implemented a lot of cool cinematic things but they didn't do so to the exclusion of the game itself. The dev's did not try to make a game try to be what it isn't. But many other developers are doing just that.
This is a real problem I've been noticed in the industry for a long time. It was designed to *be a game* and was fun all the way through, the movie stuff they did add was modified to fit the game, not vice versa. The God of war dev's knew to focus on the game first.
"... there is no way we're no going to start seeing see ten year gaps between generations, when it's been 5 year gaps for the last three decades."
I don't agree here, graphical horsepower of the next console or two away will push the limits of cost structure to develop a game that doesn't sell into the millions, while gaming has gone more mainstream it isn't like the movies, developers still complain about piracy on the PC when their games sell into the millions on console and PC (Call of Duty 4 dev's, I'm looking at you). Many games are totally viable if game developers would stop trying to be the movie industry, somewhere along the line companies started seeing themselves as movie-esque. I don't need my games to be realistic or have real graphics, what I've noticed as we've increased graphics the fun factor has stayed the same or has decreased in some games. I've passed over a lot of recent releases that I haven't even got around to playing because I simply wasn't that interested in these games.
I mean think of mario the game as a concept, imagine you tried to sell it today: It's a game about a plumber that runs around stomping on turtle-beings called koopa's and these things called goomba's, and there's this dragon-turtle esque thing we call koopa who's invades the mushroom kingdom.
Instead we see stuff like:
Assasions creed Mass effect Gears of war etc, etc.
All trying to be 'movie games' or 'be real'.
I think Prince of persia is one of the only games that doesn't try to take the whole movie thing to far and be a game first. The original Prince of persia: Sands of time was one of my favorite games, I thought Warrior within was ok but I didn't overall like the second and third games as much as the first.
"Bioware is a company I have a great deal of respect for, they've produce many awesome RPGs."
Bioware has mostly been a second rate game developer. Outside of baldur's gate franchise and the original Kotor, everything from them has been middlingly average at best. I never was interested in mass effect or jade empire. When they moved to making 3D games the people who were responsible for Baldurs gate 1 and 2 seemed to have lost their focus or those developers moved on.
I was originally excited about neverwinter nights but it was such and underwhelming disappointment, the sequel was also a huge disappointment. The gameplay generally too heavily focused on a single character and what was frustrating was the lack of anything to do because the game was too focused on in terms of control on a main character, if NWN had more action RPG elements it would have made for a better game, NWN couldn't decide where it belonged in the RPG spectrum and ended up being mediocre.
I will give NWN team credit for building a tool to build neat custom games within NWN that were far better then anything Bioware released. But in my opinion the whole idea of the toolset is from hindsight just too talent and money intensive, it's remarkable the did release a halfway decent toolset but it was nowhere near as easy to creat mods for NWN as they let on, it was still a "developers toolset".
Thing is as graphics have advanced pre-fabricated stuff becomes more and more of an issue of necessity or the fact that you need better tools that are easy to use for the average user.
Truth be told gaming on the PC in terms of user modification needs to undergo a significant renaissance, too much diddling around without having stuff handled for you automatically.
Even after decades, all PC games, NWN, and even newer games like Supreme commander still haven't thought thoroughly enough about making GREAT tools so users who don't have a lot of technical programming or art ability can still make cool user made stuff that people want to use.
"Now it appears that that newer GPUs are allowed to offload their computation back to the CPU again."
This is more an artifact of programmers not knowing how to utilize extra cores of modern processors then it is really "offloading", it's more like taking full advantage of the CPU, GPU cards and drivers have always shared the load between CPU and GPU, the fact of the matter is with many core CPU's many programmers haven't learned to utilize them effectively.
Times have changed, 3rd parties are all about multiplatforming now.
Everything the 360 is getting notice the PS3 has also has, the same could be said for the Wii if it was not underpowered. Heck, even Streetfighter is made for all platforms (even the PC) excluding the underpowered Wii.
"Underpowered? Other then for cut scenes/graphics the games really don't *need* the extra power. With the Wii not doing HD it really doesn't need any extra power. What the Wii doesn't have is buttons, if you use the motion controls it ends up not working like all the other consoles, if you don't use the motion controls you get angry reviewers saying how it doesn't use "the full potential" of the Wii. Final Fantasy XIII is meant for hardcore "
I'm sorry but I disagree, if you look at the history of video games at all. Sony playstation captured the entirety of the SNES game development community within a single generation because Nintendo decided to stick with cartridge based media while Sony opted for the cheaper CD with huge storage. Playstation games tended to be better then most of what Nintendo had during that entire generation.
If Wii had more powerful hardware no company worth their salt would not go for the extra money, you're not seeing the logic of 3rd party companies is to maximize profits. The cost benefit analysis on multiplatforming to an underpowered Wii doesn't make sense given the Wii's lack of horsepower.
If Wii was competitive with the PS3 and 360 in terms of horsepower we'd see a lot more cross platform games, simply because of the money to be made from the large installed base.
If it was you who was getting killed, would you say chasing social justice is a 'fools errand'? All I have to say is, thank god for fools, else we would still all be slaves.
... nintendo really needs 3rd party games badly. The fact they went with underpowered hardware really killed 3rd party companies ability to port their games to the system. Which means: No final fantasy 13, no Street fighter 4, No soul calibur 4, etc, etc....
Everytime nintendo learns from it's mistakes, it makes another one. It's also a shame that they fucked up starfox series so badly with Starfox Assault and Starfox adventures (was: Dinosaur planet)
I heard the starfox developer got in a tiff with Miyamoto on the direction of the starfox franchise and they went their seperate ways... shame, it appears that Miyamoto thinks he's gods gift, and he outrights ignores the fan's of the games themselves. Pretty awful in my opinion.
It's cool that Nintendo seems to be getting on the ball with Metroid, I hope Team Ninja's metroid is awesome, looks good from the trailers... I wish that they would farm out Zelda to team that does 3D combat well, I wonder what the god of war team could come up with working with Nintendo's own team.
... the problem with news in the age of the internet, is that people want all their news in ONE PLACE. This is why sites like digg, reddit and slashdot flourish posting links to other sites stories. People do not want to have to visit many sites for their news, they would rather have a 2-10 news sites the visit, any more then that and it gets tedious for the end user.
No what is rewarded is well articulated posts, that are easy to read, are not too lengthly or use obtuse language. Most mods forgive posts with spelling/grammar errors, and/or missing words if the core is well enough articulated, of which I am thankful. I'm not going to pretend slashdot is without bias, but the moderation system works better then all other news sites as far as I know and almost all news sites have gone to including comments on their websites because they know it attracts readership and repeat returns to engage in discussion.
News comments like slashdot are constrained by a posters time, not everyone has time to post a longwinded complicated justification of x to make a small point on a comment on a news article few will have the time to read.
Let's not also forget mods have bias's, slashdot disproportionately attracts a lot of americans and hence anything critical of captialism or american ideas is usually quickly slapped down.
"Isn't life wonderful when we just let the government do things?:"
Just because the government makes mistakes does not mean the free market doesn't, there's plenty of mistakes both of them make and I wish the anti-government types would realize just how many free market failurs there out out there.
Nothing is perfect, the idea that there is some ideal perfect system or ideology is bullshit.
"Are you saying that's not a huge difference? People killing/enslaving other people versus people leaving other people alone leaving it to God to sort them out?"
There has never been a truly non violent religion historically, and I am certain that you are ignorant of much of christian history, and the evolution of christianity itself.
Christianity only seems "cleaner" because you live in an age where modern christians aren't as barbaric as their ancestors, take off the rose colored glasses and read some writings christians wrote about american natives and or blacks and you will soon start to see how ugly these people were.
"Note that EVERY major religion EXCEPT Christianity actively encourages the subjugation or extermination of non-believers in one form or another"
This is incorrect, christianity merely delays the subjugation and annihilation of unbelievers until judgment day, and even then the old testament was used to subjugate and annihilate peoples, you really need to brush up on your christian history and read what christian historians wrote, they were some really nasty mofo's by today's standards.
... It's not that user created content is bad, it's that user created content for an MMO has to be vetted by the developers themselves. Letting users create content with no filter for an MMO is stupid.
For single player games it's fine since each person chooses what the download and what they want to play.
Also making user created content that does not let users change rules of the game or build their own missions would have done a lot to preven this.
User created content is FINE as long as you limit it to things like character customization, aesthetics, art, etc. Things that really don't effect the core game.
"To say that capitalism isn't solving the news problem is intellectually dishonest, at best. Wikileaks is, in and of itself, great evidence to the contrary."
You twisted my words, taking my words out of context completely. It was obvious I was talking about the mainstream media that is a FOR PROFIT enterprise and who has to answer to special interests.
Government is just another word for MAGNATES OF THE PRIVATE SECTOR. They fund the governments, governments don't get money out of thin air, they get it from the owners of the most private capital. All of obama's staff are from the private sector.
How capitalists can't see other captialists own hands in support of government is beyond stupid. Governments and private sector are two sides of the same coin with a revolving door between both, only idealogues clueless of history would blame 'government' instead of private men from the private sector who are in government. The american government is owned by private sector actors, you'd have to be blind to believe otherwise.
So it is the PRIVATE man of capital which is to blame here, captailism allows men to acquire such enormous wealth in the first place and allows them to abuse it willy nilly.
Except memory and memory bandwidth is not keeping up to move every function to the cpu, we'll see "co processors" like GPU's, etc, for a LONG time to come.
Slashdot Mirror
"Excuse me, but I fucking loved Assassin's Creed. One of the best gameplay ideas I've ever played!"
I was commplaining that games are trying too hard to be movie like instead of focusing on the game, assasin's creed got old really fast.
I agree assasin's creed has potential but the first game nowhere lived up to games similar to it that have been out for 10 years, how does a developer not learn from other games?
I was just saying that focusing on being cinematic at the expense of making a great game is hurting a lot of games. the are selling on glitz but the are shallow gameplay experiences once the eyecandy wears off and the meat nad bones of the gameplay (or lack thereof) begin to show the weakness of the overall game.
"No weirder than Katamari Damacy, which was a big hit recently."
But it is the EXCEPTION not the rule, in the early gaming days you would have ALL sorts of creative wacky titles, today most game companies are hugely conservative.
"Secondly, are you seriously trying to tell us that Sands of Time was good because it "wasn't trying to be a movie?" You're in opposite-land."
Not really, many of the games being released are focusing too much on non game things, so the game suffers for it. Assasins creed has this in spades. I acknowledge that gaming shares some cinematic movie-esque stuff with cinema and thats why they are VIDEO games. But games as a medium are not movies.
Take for example God of War 1 and 2, they implemented a lot of cool cinematic things but they didn't do so to the exclusion of the game itself. The dev's did not try to make a game try to be what it isn't. But many other developers are doing just that.
This is a real problem I've been noticed in the industry for a long time. It was designed to *be a game* and was fun all the way through, the movie stuff they did add was modified to fit the game, not vice versa. The God of war dev's knew to focus on the game first.
Sorry I mean the FIRST game in the sands of time trilogy my bad.
"... there is no way we're no going to start seeing see ten year gaps between generations, when it's been 5 year gaps for the last three decades."
I don't agree here, graphical horsepower of the next console or two away will push the limits of cost structure to develop a game that doesn't sell into the millions, while gaming has gone more mainstream it isn't like the movies, developers still complain about piracy on the PC when their games sell into the millions on console and PC (Call of Duty 4 dev's, I'm looking at you). Many games are totally viable if game developers would stop trying to be the movie industry, somewhere along the line companies started seeing themselves as movie-esque. I don't need my games to be realistic or have real graphics, what I've noticed as we've increased graphics the fun factor has stayed the same or has decreased in some games. I've passed over a lot of recent releases that I haven't even got around to playing because I simply wasn't that interested in these games.
I mean think of mario the game as a concept, imagine you tried to sell it today: It's a game about a plumber that runs around stomping on turtle-beings called koopa's and these things called goomba's, and there's this dragon-turtle esque thing we call koopa who's invades the mushroom kingdom.
Instead we see stuff like:
Assasions creed
Mass effect
Gears of war
etc, etc.
All trying to be 'movie games' or 'be real'.
I think Prince of persia is one of the only games that doesn't try to take the whole movie thing to far and be a game first. The original Prince of persia: Sands of time was one of my favorite games, I thought Warrior within was ok but I didn't overall like the second and third games as much as the first.
"Bioware is a company I have a great deal of respect for, they've produce many awesome RPGs."
Bioware has mostly been a second rate game developer. Outside of baldur's gate franchise and the original Kotor, everything from them has been middlingly average at best. I never was interested in mass effect or jade empire. When they moved to making 3D games the people who were responsible for Baldurs gate 1 and 2 seemed to have lost their focus or those developers moved on.
I was originally excited about neverwinter nights but it was such and underwhelming disappointment, the sequel was also a huge disappointment. The gameplay generally too heavily focused on a single character and what was frustrating was the lack of anything to do because the game was too focused on in terms of control on a main character, if NWN had more action RPG elements it would have made for a better game, NWN couldn't decide where it belonged in the RPG spectrum and ended up being mediocre.
I will give NWN team credit for building a tool to build neat custom games within NWN that were far better then anything Bioware released. But in my opinion the whole idea of the toolset is from hindsight just too talent and money intensive, it's remarkable the did release a halfway decent toolset but it was nowhere near as easy to creat mods for NWN as they let on, it was still a "developers toolset".
Thing is as graphics have advanced pre-fabricated stuff becomes more and more of an issue of necessity or the fact that you need better tools that are easy to use for the average user.
Truth be told gaming on the PC in terms of user modification needs to undergo a significant renaissance, too much diddling around without having stuff handled for you automatically.
Even after decades, all PC games, NWN, and even newer games like Supreme commander still haven't thought thoroughly enough about making GREAT tools so users who don't have a lot of technical programming or art ability can still make cool user made stuff that people want to use.
"The RIAA. Make an item once, and every single time it changes hands, media - whatever - make a buck on it."
This is just another word for private taxation, or private tyranny. By eliminating your customers right to own anything.
"Now it appears that that newer GPUs are allowed to offload their computation back to the CPU again."
This is more an artifact of programmers not knowing how to utilize extra cores of modern processors then it is really "offloading", it's more like taking full advantage of the CPU, GPU cards and drivers have always shared the load between CPU and GPU, the fact of the matter is with many core CPU's many programmers haven't learned to utilize them effectively.
Wrong: See starfox adventures, and Starfox Assault, both examples of utter shite.
Times have changed, 3rd parties are all about multiplatforming now.
Everything the 360 is getting notice the PS3 has also has, the same could be said for the Wii if it was not underpowered. Heck, even Streetfighter is made for all platforms (even the PC) excluding the underpowered Wii.
"Underpowered? Other then for cut scenes/graphics the games really don't *need* the extra power. With the Wii not doing HD it really doesn't need any extra power. What the Wii doesn't have is buttons, if you use the motion controls it ends up not working like all the other consoles, if you don't use the motion controls you get angry reviewers saying how it doesn't use "the full potential" of the Wii. Final Fantasy XIII is meant for hardcore "
I'm sorry but I disagree, if you look at the history of video games at all. Sony playstation captured the entirety of the SNES game development community within a single generation because Nintendo decided to stick with cartridge based media while Sony opted for the cheaper CD with huge storage. Playstation games tended to be better then most of what Nintendo had during that entire generation.
If Wii had more powerful hardware no company worth their salt would not go for the extra money, you're not seeing the logic of 3rd party companies is to maximize profits. The cost benefit analysis on multiplatforming to an underpowered Wii doesn't make sense given the Wii's lack of horsepower.
If Wii was competitive with the PS3 and 360 in terms of horsepower we'd see a lot more cross platform games, simply because of the money to be made from the large installed base.
"The longer I live, the more I realize that the quest for societal justice is a fool's errand."
Blacks were once slaves.
Businesses use to work people insane numbers of hours as well as child labour.
Their once was no universal healthcare.
Their once was no union. See: history of companies abusing workers, killing them outright, many corporations are still doing it
http://www.corporatecampaign.org/killer-coke/crimes-isidro.htm
If it was you who was getting killed, would you say chasing social justice is a 'fools errand'? All I have to say is, thank god for fools, else we would still all be slaves.
... nintendo really needs 3rd party games badly. The fact they went with underpowered hardware really killed 3rd party companies ability to port their games to the system. Which means: No final fantasy 13, no Street fighter 4, No soul calibur 4, etc, etc....
Everytime nintendo learns from it's mistakes, it makes another one. It's also a shame that they fucked up starfox series so badly with Starfox Assault and Starfox adventures (was: Dinosaur planet)
I heard the starfox developer got in a tiff with Miyamoto on the direction of the starfox franchise and they went their seperate ways... shame, it appears that Miyamoto thinks he's gods gift, and he outrights ignores the fan's of the games themselves. Pretty awful in my opinion.
It's cool that Nintendo seems to be getting on the ball with Metroid, I hope Team Ninja's metroid is awesome, looks good from the trailers... I wish that they would farm out Zelda to team that does 3D combat well, I wonder what the god of war team could come up with working with Nintendo's own team.
... getting back to the real economy? Many financial products don't add anything to the real economy at all.
... the problem with news in the age of the internet, is that people want all their news in ONE PLACE. This is why sites like digg, reddit and slashdot flourish posting links to other sites stories. People do not want to have to visit many sites for their news, they would rather have a 2-10 news sites the visit, any more then that and it gets tedious for the end user.
... games are just cheap entertainment for most people. They are nothing more unless the game is REALLY well made and that is INCREASINGLY rare today.
" It is mostly style that is rewarded here."
No what is rewarded is well articulated posts, that are easy to read, are not too lengthly or use obtuse language. Most mods forgive posts with spelling/grammar errors, and/or missing words if the core is well enough articulated, of which I am thankful. I'm not going to pretend slashdot is without bias, but the moderation system works better then all other news sites as far as I know and almost all news sites have gone to including comments on their websites because they know it attracts readership and repeat returns to engage in discussion.
News comments like slashdot are constrained by a posters time, not everyone has time to post a longwinded complicated justification of x to make a small point on a comment on a news article few will have the time to read.
Let's not also forget mods have bias's, slashdot disproportionately attracts a lot of americans and hence anything critical of captialism or american ideas is usually quickly slapped down.
Mediaplayer classic is leagues beyond VLC.
"Isn't life wonderful when we just let the government do things? :"
Just because the government makes mistakes does not mean the free market doesn't, there's plenty of mistakes both of them make and I wish the anti-government types would realize just how many free market failurs there out out there.
Nothing is perfect, the idea that there is some ideal perfect system or ideology is bullshit.
"Are you saying that's not a huge difference? People killing/enslaving other people versus people leaving other people alone leaving it to God to sort them out?"
There has never been a truly non violent religion historically, and I am certain that you are ignorant of much of christian history, and the evolution of christianity itself.
Christianity only seems "cleaner" because you live in an age where modern christians aren't as barbaric as their ancestors, take off the rose colored glasses and read some writings christians wrote about american natives and or blacks and you will soon start to see how ugly these people were.
"Note that EVERY major religion EXCEPT Christianity actively encourages the subjugation or extermination of non-believers in one form or another"
This is incorrect, christianity merely delays the subjugation and annihilation of unbelievers until judgment day, and even then the old testament was used to subjugate and annihilate peoples, you really need to brush up on your christian history and read what christian historians wrote, they were some really nasty mofo's by today's standards.
I would hate to have the BIOS as the OS especially if I could not replace it.
... It's not that user created content is bad, it's that user created content for an MMO has to be vetted by the developers themselves. Letting users create content with no filter for an MMO is stupid.
For single player games it's fine since each person chooses what the download and what they want to play.
Also making user created content that does not let users change rules of the game or build their own missions would have done a lot to preven this.
User created content is FINE as long as you limit it to things like character customization, aesthetics, art, etc. Things that really don't effect the core game.
"To say that capitalism isn't solving the news problem is intellectually dishonest, at best. Wikileaks is, in and of itself, great evidence to the contrary."
You twisted my words, taking my words out of context completely. It was obvious I was talking about the mainstream media that is a FOR PROFIT enterprise and who has to answer to special interests.
Government is just another word for MAGNATES OF THE PRIVATE SECTOR. They fund the governments, governments don't get money out of thin air, they get it from the owners of the most private capital. All of obama's staff are from the private sector.
How capitalists can't see other captialists own hands in support of government is beyond stupid. Governments and private sector are two sides of the same coin with a revolving door between both, only idealogues clueless of history would blame 'government' instead of private men from the private sector who are in government. The american government is owned by private sector actors, you'd have to be blind to believe otherwise.
So it is the PRIVATE man of capital which is to blame here, captailism allows men to acquire such enormous wealth in the first place and allows them to abuse it willy nilly.
"obsolete, moving the work back to the CPU."
Except memory and memory bandwidth is not keeping up to move every function to the cpu, we'll see "co processors" like GPU's, etc, for a LONG time to come.
"So I call Bullshit- the only reason a high powered GPU is necessary is because game programmers have become LAZY."
The 7th guest was pre scripted and pre-rendered, you didn't have *any* freedom the 7th guest was entirely on rails not a fair comparison at all.