people don't seem to understand how potentially dangerous this is. Consider the sheer volume of details some people (read: children) put on their myspace accounts. Parents SHOULD police this, but, all too often, they don't. The fact is that this service presents all too much possibility for children to get hurt. Consider also the single women all over who post their info online. Some of them realize that they shouldn't post that they live alone in an apartment in south-central LA, but others would very quickly post this sort of thing.
Law of Evolution at work. I think I just began hating that site a bit less. Call me troll all you want, in ancient times these people would throw rocks at bears or play with scorpions. Nowadays they electrocute themselves with toasters and post their personal data to myspace. The gene pool profits.
Considering that some people don't think it's enterprise capable... hopefuly it indeed is not. Crash. CF Crash. Crash CF Crash. Make this abomination vanish from the face of the Net!
Seems you are depressed. You may want to visit that site, MySpace.com, where you will find many other depressed people with similar problems and be able to share your misery with them.
Sir, you are under arrest for revealing top secret military information about construction of our superweapon. By power of the catch...err, PATRIOT ACT, you are under arrest and will be sent to Guantanamo to be tortu...err, intervieved.
Except there's one problem. This is like cold war, where all the superpowers have weapons of mass destruction. The moment you launch your product is like launching a massive global strike against all other countries.
Exxon has one type of eco-car. Shell has another. Yet other firms have their own. The moment they sniff death of their business, they release their mad dogs, each of the companies releasing their alternate energy car and pushing their own cars. War somewhat similar to format wars, except much more violent, because the winner takes it all and the losers don't have a "line of products" to fall back to. Investments go into many billions, the companies sacrifice all their resources and get ears deep in debts to push their products as dominant. Gas stations of one won't support power sources of the others. Politicians are involved to find "faults" in competitors. Patents getting challenged, bought for billions, violated, circumvented by ridiculous devices. Things are getting really ugly. Global Economical War. The survivor will take it all, and all the others will die, but it is not known who the survivor will be and the one starting the war will have only slight advantage over others, not granting victory.
Are you willing to risk the very existence of your company, starting such war? There are many players but only one survivor and not necessarily you.
Because "we" would have to invest $5bln in a new factory producing it, and won't see any profit from it for next 4 years until it's developed to usable form. And the investment would return itself in maybe 20 years. Our harddrive sales would drop rapidly too, even if outweighted by profit from sales of the new disks. Currently our sales of harddisks are going well now but we aren't nearly ready for such an investment.
But if a competing company bought the patent, spent $5bln on making it to work, then released it in 4 years, OUR harddrive sales would drop just the same, and would never climb back and there would be nothing to cover the losses. We must stop them from that at all cost. We will buy the patent even if we will never pursue the technology.
And if a small startup tried to buy it and pursue it on low budget, they would soon grow into a huge corporation destroying all of us, diskmakers, with their tech. We must destroy them and get hold of the patent.
New technologies that make strong, big, estabilished technologies totally redundant, are extremely dangerous weapons on the market. Starting such production would attract wrath of all the competitors immediately, and investment could be too heavy a weight to bear. Only small incremental changes that increase quality a little or decrease price a little are safe to perform. The moment you become too competitive, you become dangerous and others in your market sector will do everything to destroy you. Of course nothing a bit of cooperation and sharing wouldn't solve. But cooperation is for communists.
Re:Actually, the "Exxon is hiding the 100 mpg engi
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Bacterial DVD Holds 50TB
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Exxon has huge infrastructure of refineries, tankers, oil fields. This all would go worthless the moment they start selling these cars.
Junk all the tankers. Sell worthless oil fields. Shut down the useless refineries. Build infrastructure for the new cars. And explain to your competition that they should shift from mining oil to growing corn instead of uniting and performing a hostile takeover. Exxon might start making more money per unit sold, but their current property becomes worthless. Would you rather have $1mln in your pocket and earn $30k/year or have just debts, earning $40k/year? The new technology would kill current oil industry. An independent startup selling such cars is just as dangerous as a rogue oil company in the lobby making use of such a patent. One profits, all lose. They won't remain inactive. And even if none of the competitors stepped in, Exxon, would take years to pay back for shutting down oil operations and starting the ecological ones.
Seems the textbooks assume zero investment, zero value drop in related market segments, and perfectly honest competition.
wow. . . I can understand your position on Halo but TES4? Did you even play it? You're right about the graphics, but the rest of the game IMHO is neither short, sucky, nor a hack and slash. If you want to judge it on the main arc alone then you might be able to stretch that ~25 hours is short.
Heh, I was announced unofficial God of Oblivion. I played it more than I wanted... Usually totally screwing both combat (just cheaty uber spells and items) and questlines (completed them all once, only DB and main weren't a waste of time, but both were short.) I spent most time exploring, finding immense pleasure in writing reviews for the game wiki for each location explored. But that can be done only once, not per person but per game title... the wiki list is full and I haven't played the game in a week or so already. And not likely to play it too.
Sucky: The "levelled everything" makes the game easiest to finish when you are level 2. On level 40 you can forget keeping most of NPCs alive through Battle for Bruma, Kvatch and whatever. In daedric armour you die faster than in leather, because by the time you start getting daedric in random drops, enemies hit so hard you can barely survive. The way around this is to make a character with primary skills completely contradicting your role, say, pick all schools of magic then specialize in heavy armour and blunt weapons, or pick armourer, heavy armour, light armour, blunt, and such then play the character as an armourless master mage. Oh, and the journal. "I killed the 4th bear. I should locate the 5th bear, it should be somewhere near." No more thinking, just read the last line of current journal entry and it spells out what to do and how to do it. And compass. You know your hit is currently passing by Fort Nikel in direction of Skingrad. Yup, GPS tracking of assassination targets. Oh, and dumbed down spell system. And removed content (spells, weapons, skills, armour, companion share etc.) And simplified dialogue. And any usefulness of security skill replaced by a minigame. and, and...
Hack&slash, short: How much non-hack&slash content was there? What percentage of missions didn't involve killing something/someone?
1. Escape From Prison: Fight Mythic Dawn. (1h)
2. Deliver the Amulet: Travel, talk. Optional bandits. (3 min w/fast travel)
3. Find the Heir: First bandits, then daedra. (15 min w/fast travel)
4. Breaking the Siege of Kvatch: Kill Daedra. Lots of Daedra. (15 min, speedrun preferred)
5. Weynon Priory: MD again. (15 min. + fasttravel with companion glitches)
6. The Path of Dawn: First some "roleplaying", then kill MD. (30 min)
7. Dagon Shrine: Find, and infiltrate, then kill all MD. (1h)
8. Spies: Kill two spies. (15 min)
9. Blood of the Daedra: You can choose one that doesn't involve killing. Maybe killing sheep. (30 min)
10. Bruma Gate: Daedra fight, with sidekicks. (45 min)
11. Blood of the Divines: Kill Undead (1h)
12. Miscarcand: Undead. Lots of. (45 min)
13. The Defense of Bruma: Daedra. Crowds. (15 min (most of which is wasted following Martin and Jauffre walking at snail speed).
14. Great Gate: No time to kill, just run. (3 min)
15. Paradise: Daedra. Crowds. (1h)
16. Temple of the One: Daedra. (30 min)
Normal CDs are actually "damaged" by the laser during recording. Here it's about photochemical effect. Much lower power may be needed which may allow for more data but also for really fast erasing the DVDs by simply exposing them to light. More, how to return it to base state? Seems not to be rewritable. The data lasts a few years. Would there be some "refreshing process" needed?
And last but not least: Is there anyone interested in manufacturing it, or will the harddrive makers buy the patent, then bury it to prevent competition? There were quite a few such "revelations" like TESA-ROM (1TB on a roll of transparent adhesive tape) but they all vanish without trace... why?
because that's a one-liner cut-off of any discussion.
Why do you want my ID? PATRIOT ACT. Why do I have to spend night in jail? PATRIOT ACT. Why do I have to undergo full anal search? PATRIOT ACT. Why are you keeping me in Guantanamo for 4 years without right to a lawyer? PATRIOT ACT. Why did you kick my kitty and took $10 from my wallet? PATRIOT ACT.
And if you're going to question it and disagree, they will invoke the PATRIOT ACT and lock you up in Guantanamo. Under charges of anti-american activity (undermining authority of the PATRIOT ACT) which is terrorism.
Except there's no "PC" of the console world. If you want a console you always consider options and always consider nintendo as one of many. There's always competition, and the market in in such a flux that it's really hard to keep any "brand loyalty". Not like in PCs where no matter what you choose in means of hardware, it's still a PC. PCs aren't going to go anytime soon and there's no crisis in the PC world. Apple is not going to grab most of the market in the near future and PC is not going to leave anytime soon. Meantime, 360 was mostly bought by idiots (sorry, I'm a mod on Oblivion forum. You can tell by first sentence if the poster has PC or 360), PS3 is going to be an overpriced flop and there's no other competition.
The question is: Did the game sell xboxes or did xboxes sell the game? I don't deny it's a good game. But is it the best FPS you played ever? Didn't you play better ones on PC? Halo wasn't revolutionary, but still was one of quite a few. But best from the xbox ones, and as result very hyped by xbox fanboys who have no idea about games outside xbox, it gathered more credit than it deserved. It's a 9/10 game, not 11/10 one. It didn't change the world of gaming overall, but opened the world of FPS to consoles. This greatly increased the interest of publishers in consoles. And they began catering to average console user, instead of average PC user. Result: Games like TES4 Oblivion. Short, sucky hack&slash with candy graphics. About 1/4 of TES3: Morrowind size, half its features, but a really joystick-friendly menu and levelled loot/enemy keeping the enemies "challenging" during the whole gameplay.
You missed out one word in my comment: "NEW". Same old sucky games will keep being released and same idiots will keep buying them, while players who look for something better will be left out in the cold.
Being based on history, the, um, stages of the game, will also be based on battles which took--actually took place in ancient Japan.
So here's this giant enemy crab, and you...attack its weak point for massive damage.
Ammo for weapons in Ravenholm was pretty scarce, so I used the gravity gun as much as sensible.
But if ammo was less scarce (or just top limits of ammo capacity were higher, so that you could carry every piece of ammo you find, or at least all the smaller ones - aaargh, magnum, crossbow!) would you keep using it? It was the game artificially forcing you to use a sucky weapons to conserve ammo for better ones. Admit it: Grav gun as a weapon usually sucks. Quite a few puzzles were cool, and effects of the grav gun in combat were interesting enough to encourage using it, but it was NOT a revolution as a weapon. HL2 didn't make a better shooter thanks to it. It was a good game thanks to quite interesting puzzles, great mood, decent storyline and good fast-paced combat. Ability to throw a toilet at a zombie was sure interesting and quite legendary but it didn't contribute to HL2 being a good game much.
Everyone thinks everyone else is an idiot. FPS games are meant for people that like FPS games. I wanted to think that until I started playing Oblivion. A sequel in the famous series of Elder Scrolls saga. RPG games are no longer meant for people who like RPG games. Oblivion is a hack&slash, dumbed down that it doesn't appeal to people who like the immersion, intellectual challenge and story of a RPG anymore, while being a great toy for kids who would love Diablo style RPG-alike hack&slash games. I must admit Half-Life series makes a great story and the fight, struggle in part 1 was matching the storyline quite tightly. But in part 2 the storyline, scenario, events are very weakly tied to the combat part. It has good storytelling and good shooter game, but these are completely separate. You could pass the whole game without understanding a single thing that happened in the "dialogue" parts, and no matter how you played, the storyline wouldn't change. Meaning: dumbed down so you can't screw up the story part through the FPS part.
And this trend lasts: Games have their "plotlines", sometimes they have "puzzles" but there's no way to impact the plotline significantly otherwise than by dying. You follow a scenario. Linearity or narrow branching. You screw up by running all out of rockets before a boss fight, or missing an essential weapon pickup point. You don't screw up by telling a sidekick to follow you and as result leave too small base crew to defend, or by taking the turn to a town overriden by enemy instead of following relatively clean coast.
Imagine this in HL2: No events that force you to go to Ravenholm happen if you shot down a scanner that follows you in a fair distance, instead a completely separate plotline starts, putting you in the lab coat for a while and changing quite a few events. Later you must pick your road along the coast, find maps, backtrace your steps from dead ends and at places have to turn back simply due to vastly overwhelming enemy power. Or you find a way to activate one of the boats and go there by sea instead. Or raid a citadel and take one of the "benefactors" as a hostage, forcing the Combine to release Eli.
I demand: 1) Continuity. Stop splitting the game into levels, blocks, areas, missions, quests, whatever. Make the game flow. (HL made this reasonably with plotline, but gameplay was awfully chopped) 2) Non-linearity, wide alternative arcs, significant decisions. (none of recent games has that, AFAIK.) 3) Make strictly gameplay events count in the storyline. (don't separate the above "decision making" from normal gameplay, don't create apparent crossroads but say, if you hurry up, outcome will be different than if you don't. If you kill more enemies on your way, a friendly base will have easier time and be able to stand the attack.) 4) Make things happen independently of player activity (non-player-triggered events.) Say, enemy units move according to specific orders and will appear in certain areas or not, and the player may have no way to impact it. Not that everything happens exactly when you show up there. These event
In other news, every new significant steam power based invention was created by 1900 and the patent office moved on to new technologies. Corrected.
Later on the old technology has been recycled and improved on to use as a part of modern machinery (steam turbines in nuclear power plants for example), but no more revolutionary steam-based inventions were made. People moved on to gasoline, electricity, electronics. Steam technology still has its small niche but it's a margin.
Re:Already losing interest.
on
Romero's New Gig
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· Score: 2, Insightful
For this you will have to wait a few years longer. Shooters are not quite dead but in a crisis. There is a lot to do in them yet, but the hardware isn't nearly up to it yet.
Gravity gun wasn't really a weapon. I mean, how often were you using it as a weapon when you had a choice? Even in Ravenholm which was designed with gravity gun in mind, a shotgun was much better. Gravity gun was a great tool that allowed for lots of fun in the game, but usage as a weapon was just its minor perk. Bullet time is another non-weapon perk, a combat support element played into ground in recent years. Multiple vehicles are okay in multiplayer, but in single player they are not only old (Amiga - Armourgeddon?), they also suck without decent competitive enemy AI (or natural I in case of multiplayer...)
For now there are still a few perks that are to be added and explored but won't make a good game, then a break of 2-3 years till really good games can be made again. Fully destructable environment, actual smart, good AI both on sidekick and enemy side, locational damage that causes related effects, stealth-based combat that makes sense, massive active environments that don't limit your gameplay area, actual mass-scale warfare operations, these things are yet to come, but not anytime soon.
In the meantime there's a lot of long-overdue "genres" that were neglected because they weren't really possible on the old hardware, but are possible now. Assume most of the above combat elements but with dynamism needed in combat removed. Fully destructable environment that may take up to 3 minutes to precalc the effects of the destruction. Good decision-making non-realtime AI. Stealth-based non-combat operations. Mass scale non-military operations. Many of these things were tried but failed because they appeared before their times. Now they have a good chance of success.
The basic problem with the gaming industry is that it caters to idiots. Games are getting dumbed down to be playable and understandable by the most stupid of players and as result lose their charm, they stop appealing to more intelligent players. Perks and tricks are being added but they are still the same old games.
Goddamnit that's some limited imagination. So there are two genres: Combat and Puzzle. And nothing else. What about strategy that aims at avoiding conflict? Simulators? Good old-fashioned non-combat arcades? Role-playing that leave combat as last resort instead of filler for 90% of content? Stealth games that prohibit fight (Thief, difficulty: hard)? "natural disaster" environment adventures? A game of espionage, if you draw your gun, you're screwed? And puzzles aren't that bad either. A good puzzle-based survival horror where your weapons are practically useless against the enemy. Or a detective game, where you draw your gun to arrest the suspect, and preferably end the game without firing a single bullet? A negotiator game, where the puzzle is a psychological pressure game? Disarming bombs and figuring out their locations, fighting undercover terrorists you never see?
Halo is a good example of a game that took FPS and threw in a few new elements -- vehicle combat is one example -- and rejuvenated it to great success.
Not really. Halo was a medicore FPS but the only semi-decent one on xbox. If you have a platform/console userbase of several hundreds thousands of users and release only one reasonably good game of given genre, it must be a commercial success. Assuming every third user of XBox wants to play some FPS, for every third xbox a copy of Halo will be sold. Simply because there's nothing better available and xbox marketing machine made a good work of selling the console. PC has a much wider choice of FPSes and some of them much better than halo, but since you can choose from several decent titles, no single game displays such spectacular success. Outside of Counter-strike maybe.
Slashdot Mirror
They are taking over OUR Internet!
because of stupid monkeys doing the recruitment?
Law of Evolution at work. I think I just began hating that site a bit less.
Call me troll all you want, in ancient times these people would throw rocks at bears or play with scorpions. Nowadays they electrocute themselves with toasters and post their personal data to myspace. The gene pool profits.
And I have my own crack.
Wrong. This is news for nerds indeed. DIRE NEWS!
Considering that some people don't think it's enterprise capable... hopefuly it indeed is not.
Crash. CF Crash. Crash CF Crash.
Make this abomination vanish from the face of the Net!
Seems you are depressed. You may want to visit that site, MySpace.com, where you will find many other depressed people with similar problems and be able to share your misery with them.
place it in damp terrain?
Sir, you are under arrest for revealing top secret military information about construction of our superweapon. By power of the catch...err, PATRIOT ACT, you are under arrest and will be sent to Guantanamo to be tortu...err, intervieved.
Except there's one problem. This is like cold war, where all the superpowers have weapons of mass destruction. The moment you launch your product is like launching a massive global strike against all other countries.
Exxon has one type of eco-car. Shell has another. Yet other firms have their own. The moment they sniff death of their business, they release their mad dogs, each of the companies releasing their alternate energy car and pushing their own cars. War somewhat similar to format wars, except much more violent, because the winner takes it all and the losers don't have a "line of products" to fall back to. Investments go into many billions, the companies sacrifice all their resources and get ears deep in debts to push their products as dominant. Gas stations of one won't support power sources of the others. Politicians are involved to find "faults" in competitors. Patents getting challenged, bought for billions, violated, circumvented by ridiculous devices. Things are getting really ugly. Global Economical War. The survivor will take it all, and all the others will die, but it is not known who the survivor will be and the one starting the war will have only slight advantage over others, not granting victory.
Are you willing to risk the very existence of your company, starting such war? There are many players but only one survivor and not necessarily you.
Because "we" would have to invest $5bln in a new factory producing it, and won't see any profit from it for next 4 years until it's developed to usable form. And the investment would return itself in maybe 20 years. Our harddrive sales would drop rapidly too, even if outweighted by profit from sales of the new disks. Currently our sales of harddisks are going well now but we aren't nearly ready for such an investment.
But if a competing company bought the patent, spent $5bln on making it to work, then released it in 4 years, OUR harddrive sales would drop just the same, and would never climb back and there would be nothing to cover the losses. We must stop them from that at all cost. We will buy the patent even if we will never pursue the technology.
And if a small startup tried to buy it and pursue it on low budget, they would soon grow into a huge corporation destroying all of us, diskmakers, with their tech. We must destroy them and get hold of the patent.
New technologies that make strong, big, estabilished technologies totally redundant, are extremely dangerous weapons on the market. Starting such production would attract wrath of all the competitors immediately, and investment could be too heavy a weight to bear. Only small incremental changes that increase quality a little or decrease price a little are safe to perform. The moment you become too competitive, you become dangerous and others in your market sector will do everything to destroy you.
Of course nothing a bit of cooperation and sharing wouldn't solve. But cooperation is for communists.
Exxon has huge infrastructure of refineries, tankers, oil fields. This all would go worthless the moment they start selling these cars.
Junk all the tankers. Sell worthless oil fields. Shut down the useless refineries. Build infrastructure for the new cars. And explain to your competition that they should shift from mining oil to growing corn instead of uniting and performing a hostile takeover. Exxon might start making more money per unit sold, but their current property becomes worthless. Would you rather have $1mln in your pocket and earn $30k/year or have just debts, earning $40k/year?
The new technology would kill current oil industry. An independent startup selling such cars is just as dangerous as a rogue oil company in the lobby making use of such a patent. One profits, all lose. They won't remain inactive. And even if none of the competitors stepped in, Exxon, would take years to pay back for shutting down oil operations and starting the ecological ones.
Seems the textbooks assume zero investment, zero value drop in related market segments, and perfectly honest competition.
wow. . . I can understand your position on Halo but TES4? Did you even play it? You're right about the graphics, but the rest of the game IMHO is neither short, sucky, nor a hack and slash. If you want to judge it on the main arc alone then you might be able to stretch that ~25 hours is short.
Heh, I was announced unofficial God of Oblivion. I played it more than I wanted... Usually totally screwing both combat (just cheaty uber spells and items) and questlines (completed them all once, only DB and main weren't a waste of time, but both were short.) I spent most time exploring, finding immense pleasure in writing reviews for the game wiki for each location explored. But that can be done only once, not per person but per game title... the wiki list is full and I haven't played the game in a week or so already. And not likely to play it too.
Sucky:
The "levelled everything" makes the game easiest to finish when you are level 2. On level 40 you can forget keeping most of NPCs alive through Battle for Bruma, Kvatch and whatever. In daedric armour you die faster than in leather, because by the time you start getting daedric in random drops, enemies hit so hard you can barely survive. The way around this is to make a character with primary skills completely contradicting your role, say, pick all schools of magic then specialize in heavy armour and blunt weapons, or pick armourer, heavy armour, light armour, blunt, and such then play the character as an armourless master mage. Oh, and the journal. "I killed the 4th bear. I should locate the 5th bear, it should be somewhere near." No more thinking, just read the last line of current journal entry and it spells out what to do and how to do it. And compass. You know your hit is currently passing by Fort Nikel in direction of Skingrad. Yup, GPS tracking of assassination targets. Oh, and dumbed down spell system. And removed content (spells, weapons, skills, armour, companion share etc.) And simplified dialogue. And any usefulness of security skill replaced by a minigame. and, and...
Hack&slash, short:
How much non-hack&slash content was there?
What percentage of missions didn't involve killing something/someone?
1. Escape From Prison: Fight Mythic Dawn. (1h)
2. Deliver the Amulet: Travel, talk. Optional bandits. (3 min w/fast travel)
3. Find the Heir: First bandits, then daedra. (15 min w/fast travel)
4. Breaking the Siege of Kvatch: Kill Daedra. Lots of Daedra. (15 min, speedrun preferred)
5. Weynon Priory: MD again. (15 min. + fasttravel with companion glitches)
6. The Path of Dawn: First some "roleplaying", then kill MD. (30 min)
7. Dagon Shrine: Find, and infiltrate, then kill all MD. (1h)
8. Spies: Kill two spies. (15 min)
9. Blood of the Daedra: You can choose one that doesn't involve killing. Maybe killing sheep. (30 min)
10. Bruma Gate: Daedra fight, with sidekicks. (45 min)
11. Blood of the Divines: Kill Undead (1h)
12. Miscarcand: Undead. Lots of. (45 min)
13. The Defense of Bruma: Daedra. Crowds. (15 min (most of which is wasted following Martin and Jauffre walking at snail speed).
14. Great Gate: No time to kill, just run. (3 min)
15. Paradise: Daedra. Crowds. (1h)
16. Temple of the One: Daedra. (30 min)
About 8h.
Of cou
Now I wonder what caveats are there to overcome.
Normal CDs are actually "damaged" by the laser during recording. Here it's about photochemical effect. Much lower power may be needed which may allow for more data but also for really fast erasing the DVDs by simply exposing them to light. More, how to return it to base state? Seems not to be rewritable. The data lasts a few years. Would there be some "refreshing process" needed?
And last but not least: Is there anyone interested in manufacturing it, or will the harddrive makers buy the patent, then bury it to prevent competition?
There were quite a few such "revelations" like TESA-ROM (1TB on a roll of transparent adhesive tape) but they all vanish without trace... why?
Considering its size, weight, power consumption, I'd say it's the anti-antlion model.
...but how good is it at repelling the antlions?
because that's a one-liner cut-off of any discussion.
Why do you want my ID? PATRIOT ACT.
Why do I have to spend night in jail? PATRIOT ACT.
Why do I have to undergo full anal search? PATRIOT ACT.
Why are you keeping me in Guantanamo for 4 years without right to a lawyer? PATRIOT ACT.
Why did you kick my kitty and took $10 from my wallet? PATRIOT ACT.
And if you're going to question it and disagree, they will invoke the PATRIOT ACT and lock you up in Guantanamo. Under charges of anti-american activity (undermining authority of the PATRIOT ACT) which is terrorism.
Except there's no "PC" of the console world.
If you want a console you always consider options and always consider nintendo as one of many. There's always competition, and the market in in such a flux that it's really hard to keep any "brand loyalty". Not like in PCs where no matter what you choose in means of hardware, it's still a PC. PCs aren't going to go anytime soon and there's no crisis in the PC world. Apple is not going to grab most of the market in the near future and PC is not going to leave anytime soon. Meantime, 360 was mostly bought by idiots (sorry, I'm a mod on Oblivion forum. You can tell by first sentence if the poster has PC or 360), PS3 is going to be an overpriced flop and there's no other competition.
The question is: Did the game sell xboxes or did xboxes sell the game?
I don't deny it's a good game. But is it the best FPS you played ever? Didn't you play better ones on PC? Halo wasn't revolutionary, but still was one of quite a few. But best from the xbox ones, and as result very hyped by xbox fanboys who have no idea about games outside xbox, it gathered more credit than it deserved. It's a 9/10 game, not 11/10 one. It didn't change the world of gaming overall, but opened the world of FPS to consoles. This greatly increased the interest of publishers in consoles. And they began catering to average console user, instead of average PC user. Result: Games like TES4 Oblivion. Short, sucky hack&slash with candy graphics. About 1/4 of TES3: Morrowind size, half its features, but a really joystick-friendly menu and levelled loot/enemy keeping the enemies "challenging" during the whole gameplay.
You missed out one word in my comment: "NEW".
Same old sucky games will keep being released and same idiots will keep buying them, while players who look for something better will be left out in the cold.
Being based on history, the, um, stages of the game, will also be based on battles which took--actually took place in ancient Japan.
So here's this giant enemy crab, and you...attack its weak point for massive damage.
Yes. There are people who will love this game.
Ammo for weapons in Ravenholm was pretty scarce, so I used the gravity gun as much as sensible.
But if ammo was less scarce (or just top limits of ammo capacity were higher, so that you could carry every piece of ammo you find, or at least all the smaller ones - aaargh, magnum, crossbow!) would you keep using it? It was the game artificially forcing you to use a sucky weapons to conserve ammo for better ones. Admit it: Grav gun as a weapon usually sucks. Quite a few puzzles were cool, and effects of the grav gun in combat were interesting enough to encourage using it, but it was NOT a revolution as a weapon. HL2 didn't make a better shooter thanks to it. It was a good game thanks to quite interesting puzzles, great mood, decent storyline and good fast-paced combat. Ability to throw a toilet at a zombie was sure interesting and quite legendary but it didn't contribute to HL2 being a good game much.
Everyone thinks everyone else is an idiot. FPS games are meant for people that like FPS games.
I wanted to think that until I started playing Oblivion. A sequel in the famous series of Elder Scrolls saga. RPG games are no longer meant for people who like RPG games. Oblivion is a hack&slash, dumbed down that it doesn't appeal to people who like the immersion, intellectual challenge and story of a RPG anymore, while being a great toy for kids who would love Diablo style RPG-alike hack&slash games. I must admit Half-Life series makes a great story and the fight, struggle in part 1 was matching the storyline quite tightly. But in part 2 the storyline, scenario, events are very weakly tied to the combat part. It has good storytelling and good shooter game, but these are completely separate. You could pass the whole game without understanding a single thing that happened in the "dialogue" parts, and no matter how you played, the storyline wouldn't change. Meaning: dumbed down so you can't screw up the story part through the FPS part.
And this trend lasts: Games have their "plotlines", sometimes they have "puzzles" but there's no way to impact the plotline significantly otherwise than by dying. You follow a scenario. Linearity or narrow branching. You screw up by running all out of rockets before a boss fight, or missing an essential weapon pickup point. You don't screw up by telling a sidekick to follow you and as result leave too small base crew to defend, or by taking the turn to a town overriden by enemy instead of following relatively clean coast.
Imagine this in HL2: No events that force you to go to Ravenholm happen if you shot down a scanner that follows you in a fair distance, instead a completely separate plotline starts, putting you in the lab coat for a while and changing quite a few events. Later you must pick your road along the coast, find maps, backtrace your steps from dead ends and at places have to turn back simply due to vastly overwhelming enemy power. Or you find a way to activate one of the boats and go there by sea instead. Or raid a citadel and take one of the "benefactors" as a hostage, forcing the Combine to release Eli.
I demand:
1) Continuity. Stop splitting the game into levels, blocks, areas, missions, quests, whatever. Make the game flow. (HL made this reasonably with plotline, but gameplay was awfully chopped)
2) Non-linearity, wide alternative arcs, significant decisions. (none of recent games has that, AFAIK.)
3) Make strictly gameplay events count in the storyline. (don't separate the above "decision making" from normal gameplay, don't create apparent crossroads but say, if you hurry up, outcome will be different than if you don't. If you kill more enemies on your way, a friendly base will have easier time and be able to stand the attack.)
4) Make things happen independently of player activity (non-player-triggered events.) Say, enemy units move according to specific orders and will appear in certain areas or not, and the player may have no way to impact it. Not that everything happens exactly when you show up there. These event
In other news, every new significant steam power based invention was created by 1900 and the patent office moved on to new technologies.
Corrected.
Later on the old technology has been recycled and improved on to use as a part of modern machinery (steam turbines in nuclear power plants for example), but no more revolutionary steam-based inventions were made. People moved on to gasoline, electricity, electronics. Steam technology still has its small niche but it's a margin.
For this you will have to wait a few years longer. Shooters are not quite dead but in a crisis. There is a lot to do in them yet, but the hardware isn't nearly up to it yet.
Gravity gun wasn't really a weapon. I mean, how often were you using it as a weapon when you had a choice? Even in Ravenholm which was designed with gravity gun in mind, a shotgun was much better. Gravity gun was a great tool that allowed for lots of fun in the game, but usage as a weapon was just its minor perk. Bullet time is another non-weapon perk, a combat support element played into ground in recent years. Multiple vehicles are okay in multiplayer, but in single player they are not only old (Amiga - Armourgeddon?), they also suck without decent competitive enemy AI (or natural I in case of multiplayer...)
For now there are still a few perks that are to be added and explored but won't make a good game, then a break of 2-3 years till really good games can be made again. Fully destructable environment, actual smart, good AI both on sidekick and enemy side, locational damage that causes related effects, stealth-based combat that makes sense, massive active environments that don't limit your gameplay area, actual mass-scale warfare operations, these things are yet to come, but not anytime soon.
In the meantime there's a lot of long-overdue "genres" that were neglected because they weren't really possible on the old hardware, but are possible now. Assume most of the above combat elements but with dynamism needed in combat removed. Fully destructable environment that may take up to 3 minutes to precalc the effects of the destruction. Good decision-making non-realtime AI. Stealth-based non-combat operations. Mass scale non-military operations. Many of these things were tried but failed because they appeared before their times. Now they have a good chance of success.
The basic problem with the gaming industry is that it caters to idiots. Games are getting dumbed down to be playable and understandable by the most stupid of players and as result lose their charm, they stop appealing to more intelligent players. Perks and tricks are being added but they are still the same old games.
Goddamnit that's some limited imagination.
So there are two genres: Combat and Puzzle. And nothing else.
What about strategy that aims at avoiding conflict? Simulators? Good old-fashioned non-combat arcades? Role-playing that leave combat as last resort instead of filler for 90% of content? Stealth games that prohibit fight (Thief, difficulty: hard)? "natural disaster" environment adventures? A game of espionage, if you draw your gun, you're screwed?
And puzzles aren't that bad either. A good puzzle-based survival horror where your weapons are practically useless against the enemy. Or a detective game, where you draw your gun to arrest the suspect, and preferably end the game without firing a single bullet? A negotiator game, where the puzzle is a psychological pressure game? Disarming bombs and figuring out their locations, fighting undercover terrorists you never see?
Halo is a good example of a game that took FPS and threw in a few new elements -- vehicle combat is one example -- and rejuvenated it to great success.
Not really. Halo was a medicore FPS but the only semi-decent one on xbox. If you have a platform/console userbase of several hundreds thousands of users and release only one reasonably good game of given genre, it must be a commercial success. Assuming every third user of XBox wants to play some FPS, for every third xbox a copy of Halo will be sold. Simply because there's nothing better available and xbox marketing machine made a good work of selling the console.
PC has a much wider choice of FPSes and some of them much better than halo, but since you can choose from several decent titles, no single game displays such spectacular success.
Outside of Counter-strike maybe.