Probably not much worse, Tomb Raider: Angel Of Darkness pretty much hit bottom. Worst. Game. Ever. Unbelievable that they're wasting the cash to even TRY and follow it up.
Hopefully, whoever buys Eidos will perform a mercy killing on the TR franchise. Give Lara the shotgon blast to the head, Old Yeller style. The last game sucked (hell, the last two or three TR games sucked) and the last movie sucked (not that the first one was that great either.) The franchise is dead, move on.
Jobs is not one to talk. OS X (and Apple apps) are a mish-mash of visual styles that seem to have been picked using a dart/dartboard selection method.
The finder is brushed metal, unless you hide the sidebar and toolbar, then it's Aqua. Safari, iTunes, Quicktime & iCal are all brushed metal, but then there's Mail, System Prefs, Preview that are Aqua.
Then, you start getting into Apple's other apps, like Garageband, Final Cut, Logic, et al and there's all kinds of visual styles that are neither Brushed Metal or Aqua. Ahhh!
I used to let it bother me, especially before I had a dual G5 and Brushed Metal apps (in particular) were horribly sluggish on my G4. Now, I just shrug it off. Apple wrote their Human Interface Guidlines, so I guess they can ignore or re-write them as they see fit, whatever GUI style (and Jobs whim) they need to accomodate.:-)
What can I say? Over the year or so I've been reading the comments section on Slashdot, yesterday was the first time I saw any reference to that. *shrug*
I clicked the link, to a seven year old post on another website. I assumed you were a Mac troll using an ancient article as an example of why the Mac sucks. I don't spend terribly much time here, so I've never come across this before.
BTW, I'm not some anti-joke fanatic, I've just never seen that "joke" before.
C'mon, that post is almost SEVEN YEARS OLD. We're talking pre-OS X pre-G3 old Mac technology. Yeah, before OS X the Mac sucked hard at multithreading, but that's not the case anymore. I just transferred a 20MB file in under a second.
Hell, there was no such thing as Safari or Pages when he posted that, so they couldn't possibly grind to a halt. Way to spread FUD.
First off, check and make sure popup blocking is enabled. I only see MAYBE one popunder a week, if that (and add the offending site to my mental blacklist, never to be visited again.) Go to the Safari menu and make sure there's a check next to the "Block Pop-Up Windows" item.
Secondly, yes, Konfabulator can really bog down a system if you have too many widgets running. They eat up memory and CPU power, even sitting idle. I have seven I keep open with little peformance imapct, but that's on a Dual 2Ghz G5. If you haven't discovered it yet, Activity Monitor (in Applications/Utilities/) can be very useful in tracking down where your CPU cycles and memory are going. It even lists all the Konfab widgets seperately, though it doesn't tell you which one is which. So if there's a widget that's being a hog, it'll let you know!
I'd bet that it's a low memory issue, Apple has a tendency to shortchange the memory in their systems, especially consumer level stuff like the iBook & iMac. Running OS X on less that 512MB will bring things to a snail's pace frequently, so a simple memory upgrade might help greatly.
It's a zeitgeist.. right now most non-HD TV owners don't know what they're missing. That will change quite soon.
Or, like me, they know exactly what they're missing and find the cost of moving to HDTV still too high. Not only the extra expense of a HD television, but the extra cost of subscribing to HD channels on my cable system. For all of 16 channels of actual HD content that are available to me right now? Meh, not worth it.
Once there's more content, including a final, single standard for HD DVD's, and the price of the hardware comes down, I'll happily jump on board. But right now? I have ZERO interest in HD.
I feel the exact same way. I'll pay $60 for a game if I feel I'm going to get $60 worth of entertainment out of it.
Half-Life 2 is a perfect example, according to X-Fire I've played HL2 for a total of 67 hours! Well worth the money I paid for it, and more.
On the other hand, there's a game like Call Of Duty. I paid $50 for it back in the day, and as great as the game is, I finished the SP campaign in FIVE hours. I'm not much into online multiplayer, and I've only found it worth one re-play, so I only got 10 hours (at best) of entertainment for my money. NOT worth it.
More and more, I just wait for the games to hit the bargain bin and buy them for $20-$30 instead. As games continue to rise in price I'm sure more and more people will do they same. Enough to make a difference? Probably not.:-(
I haven't played Dungeon Keeper or Fable at all, thus the questions. I put a few hours into Black & White before I got bored and moved on.
Theme Park was just another sim game, an elaboration on the SimCity concept rather than a new idea altogether. Good game, but nothing terribly innovative, IMO. Syndicate was also good, but was variations on RPG & RTS ideas, IMO. Good games & innovative games are two different things, were talking concepts, not gameplay.
The only other of his games that had the potential to be as truly ground-breaking as Populous was Powermonger, which could have been the first RTS-style game, ahead of Herzog Zwei or Civilization. But EA cut him off at the knees and released it unfinished.:-(
And, no, I didn't know there was a Populous 3! Must have been a big hit, LOL. AFAIK, Molyneux only worked on the first two, as you said.
Heh. Can't get processor speeds up fast enough? Just keep stacking more of them in there!
I can see it now, five years from now we'll STILL be waiting for the G5 to hit 3Ghz, but we'll have these nifty 24 CPU 2.5Ghz G5's and go on and on about how it's the same as having a 60Ghz processor.
It IS rellevant. Have you ever had to sit through "loading" screens just to get from one menu to the other on a PC recently (baring console ports)?
Agreed. PC gaming is moving towards zero-load gameplay. Look at the Unreal 3 Engine, one of the features they're hyping is it's predictive loading, so you NEVER see a loading screen.
Unreal 3, and games using the engine, will allow you to play the entire game, from beginning to end, without ever having to wait for anything to load for even a second (no matter how large the game world.) Once you start playing, you're playing until you're ready to stop. Not playing for a bit, then taking a break for "Loading...", then play a bit, then "Loading..."
Will this even be possible with a CD/DVD based game? Perhaps if the disc is spinning at full speed continuously from the moment you start playing, always loading. But who want to listen to that all the time? Not to mention wear-and-tear on the drive and disc.
Much as people hate Steam, I think that's more likely the direction the PC gaming industry will move in. Getting rid of physical media altogether, rather than shackling itself to it.
I don't think he even comes up with particularly innovative concepts any more, just variations on an existing idea.
All due respect to the guy, Populous is one of the greats. I shudder to think of how many hours I spent playing the original on my Atari ST back in the day. A truly original concept and a very fun game.
But since then? Not so much, really. Just looking at the three games you mentioned:
Dungeon Keeper? Isn't this really just another D&D style game, just played from the DungeonMaster's perspective? Could have been fun, but hardly innovative.
Black & White? Should have been called Populous 3. It was really just the evolution of the original Populous concept.
Fable? An RPG with moral decisions affecting the character? How different was this from the drak side/light side concept of KOTOR?
His place in history is cemented, he created one of the greates and most original games of all time (in my opinion) but a look down his resume since then doesn't wow me.
This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time.
As any PC this is likely to be running on wouldn't be "Apple-labeled" I'd guess that's probably a violation. It doesn't necessarily make CherryOS itself illegal (though Apple's legal team might think differently (no pun intended) should they want to shut this down) it would mean it's a violation of the OS X license agreement to install it under CherryOS.
I've got an Athlon XP 3000, GeForce 6800 & 512MB, my system isn't the problem. My system isn't crappy, Bloodlines is crappy. I can run Half-Life 2 with the settings almost all the way up with good framerates, Bloodlines exhibited the Soure engine's stuttering problem to a degree MUCH worse than HL2 and I got significantly slower frame rates.
And, from what I've read, Valve has made ALL updates to the engine available to licensees, so apparantly Troika/Activision simply chose not to update Bloodlines.
Further, they claim to have had the game ready months ahead of time, and had to sit around and wait for Valve to finish HL2 before they could release, yet there were still tons of examples of slopiness: mis-aligned textures, spelling errors and typos in the subtitles, overlapping polys, and other bugs. Why not FIX this stuff instead of sitting around waiting?
It was ALMOST a really good game, the game itself and it's storyline were solid, but Troika did such a shitty job putting it together that it made it eventually unplayable for me. I put up with it's crap for about 2/3 of the game before I gave up, so that says a lot.
The fact that Bloodlines won so many awards gives me a pretty good idea of how bad a year 2004 was for RPG's.
It was a buggy, sloppy mess. They took all the power of the Source engine, smeared it in poo and slowed it to a slideshow. The base gameplay and storyline were good, but not great, and overshawed by the general piss-poor construction of the game itself.
It says they are introducing the "newest iteration" of the engine, not intoducting the engine itself, so it's correct.
I'm curious to see whats been changed/added to the engine, it's incredibly impressive from what I've seen so far. Makes me want to quit learning Source and start learning the existing version of UnrealEd, so I'll be more ready to mess with the new version when it's done!
Bloodlines was sloppy and buggy. Tons of places where textures weren't lined up correctly, places where walls were embedded in walls, causing some nasty texture swapping, etc. etc. etc. Framerates were atrocious even on a GeForce 6800 with all the settings turned down all the way, and I could run HL2 with everything nearly all the way up. There were spelling errors and typos in the subtitles! They couldn't even bother with a spellchecker?
Plus, putting HL2 and Bloodlines side-by-side, they barely utilised the engine. HL2 looked ten times better, the environments looked better and the characters were more realistic and believable.
It could have been a great game, it was enjoyable enough for as long as I could stand to play it, but the bugs, glitches, and general sloppiness got to me eventually and I just gave up.
I had sworn to never buy another Troika game after that, I guess that won't be a problem now.
It's funny how drastically different reactions people have to games. My experiences were almost exactly the opposite. I found Half-Life 2 to be one of the best games ever, almost certainly the best FPS ever. Far Cry on the other hand, I thought was just awful. I'd rank it as one of the worst FPS ever.
Actually, it's amazing for about the first hour. I was blown away by every aspect of the game. Then I got to the damn hoverboat thing...
Another hour later and I'm still stuck driving around this stupid hoverboat, and I'm BORED. I'm tired of driving this damn thing around, it was fun for a few minutes but now they've dragged it on and on and on and... please NO MORE DAMN HOVERBOAT!
Silly me, I thought the sequel to one of the best FPS games of all time would have been another FPS, and not a damn driving game.
This does seem more like a mercy killing that anything else, TSS has been pure fluff ever since the G4 merger. They went from segments reviewing new Linux distros, building custom PC's, and case mods to segments reviewing frozen dinners and electric razors. WTF?
They used to keep me glued to the set for 90 minutes, now I can barely stand to sit through 60.:(
Slashdot Mirror
Realistically, how much worse could Eidos get?
Probably not much worse, Tomb Raider: Angel Of Darkness pretty much hit bottom. Worst. Game. Ever. Unbelievable that they're wasting the cash to even TRY and follow it up.
Hopefully, whoever buys Eidos will perform a mercy killing on the TR franchise. Give Lara the shotgon blast to the head, Old Yeller style. The last game sucked (hell, the last two or three TR games sucked) and the last movie sucked (not that the first one was that great either.) The franchise is dead, move on.
Ditto with Belkin. I guess their cables aren't so bad, but my experiences with their shit KVMs has turned me off Belkin for good.
Jobs is not one to talk. OS X (and Apple apps) are a mish-mash of visual styles that seem to have been picked using a dart/dartboard selection method.
The finder is brushed metal, unless you hide the sidebar and toolbar, then it's Aqua. Safari, iTunes, Quicktime & iCal are all brushed metal, but then there's Mail, System Prefs, Preview that are Aqua.
Then, you start getting into Apple's other apps, like Garageband, Final Cut, Logic, et al and there's all kinds of visual styles that are neither Brushed Metal or Aqua. Ahhh!
I used to let it bother me, especially before I had a dual G5 and Brushed Metal apps (in particular) were horribly sluggish on my G4. Now, I just shrug it off. Apple wrote their Human Interface Guidlines, so I guess they can ignore or re-write them as they see fit, whatever GUI style (and Jobs whim) they need to accomodate. :-)
What can I say? Over the year or so I've been reading the comments section on Slashdot, yesterday was the first time I saw any reference to that. *shrug*
I clicked the link, to a seven year old post on another website. I assumed you were a Mac troll using an ancient article as an example of why the Mac sucks. I don't spend terribly much time here, so I've never come across this before.
BTW, I'm not some anti-joke fanatic, I've just never seen that "joke" before.
Oh, look. Someone else pointing to an blog entry that's almost seven years old, and referring to pre-OS X and even pre-G3 technology.
C'mon, that post is almost SEVEN YEARS OLD. We're talking pre-OS X pre-G3 old Mac technology. Yeah, before OS X the Mac sucked hard at multithreading, but that's not the case anymore. I just transferred a 20MB file in under a second.
Hell, there was no such thing as Safari or Pages when he posted that, so they couldn't possibly grind to a halt. Way to spread FUD.
Incindentally, Jason Kottke still uses a Mac, and seems pretty happy with them: http://www.kottke.org/order/apple
First off, check and make sure popup blocking is enabled. I only see MAYBE one popunder a week, if that (and add the offending site to my mental blacklist, never to be visited again.) Go to the Safari menu and make sure there's a check next to the "Block Pop-Up Windows" item.
Secondly, yes, Konfabulator can really bog down a system if you have too many widgets running. They eat up memory and CPU power, even sitting idle. I have seven I keep open with little peformance imapct, but that's on a Dual 2Ghz G5. If you haven't discovered it yet, Activity Monitor (in Applications/Utilities/) can be very useful in tracking down where your CPU cycles and memory are going. It even lists all the Konfab widgets seperately, though it doesn't tell you which one is which. So if there's a widget that's being a hog, it'll let you know!
I'd bet that it's a low memory issue, Apple has a tendency to shortchange the memory in their systems, especially consumer level stuff like the iBook & iMac. Running OS X on less that 512MB will bring things to a snail's pace frequently, so a simple memory upgrade might help greatly.
It's a zeitgeist.. right now most non-HD TV owners don't know what they're missing. That will change quite soon.
Or, like me, they know exactly what they're missing and find the cost of moving to HDTV still too high. Not only the extra expense of a HD television, but the extra cost of subscribing to HD channels on my cable system. For all of 16 channels of actual HD content that are available to me right now? Meh, not worth it.
Once there's more content, including a final, single standard for HD DVD's, and the price of the hardware comes down, I'll happily jump on board. But right now? I have ZERO interest in HD.
I feel the exact same way. I'll pay $60 for a game if I feel I'm going to get $60 worth of entertainment out of it.
Half-Life 2 is a perfect example, according to X-Fire I've played HL2 for a total of 67 hours! Well worth the money I paid for it, and more.
On the other hand, there's a game like Call Of Duty. I paid $50 for it back in the day, and as great as the game is, I finished the SP campaign in FIVE hours. I'm not much into online multiplayer, and I've only found it worth one re-play, so I only got 10 hours (at best) of entertainment for my money. NOT worth it.
More and more, I just wait for the games to hit the bargain bin and buy them for $20-$30 instead. As games continue to rise in price I'm sure more and more people will do they same. Enough to make a difference? Probably not. :-(
[Steve Jobs'] perspective is that you launch a product on Sunday and sell it on Monday,
They left off the last step. It should be: Launch a product on Sunday, sell it on Monday, actually ship it to the customer two months later.
I love my Mac, but c'mon, pratically every new Apple product launch is accompanied by a long waiting list for said product immediately afterwards.
Calling him a web designer is a stretch. From looking through the other sites he did, they're all filled with shitty Dreamweaver and ImageReady code.
"Note: It's a joke, not a flame. I'm a Mac user."
This seems to be more and more common, and I know that some people are lying just to avoid modding-downs.
Well, I can't speak for anybody else, but I just posted this from Safari, running under 10.3.8 on a Dual 2Ghz G5. So I'm one of the honest ones. :-)
I haven't played Dungeon Keeper or Fable at all, thus the questions. I put a few hours into Black & White before I got bored and moved on.
Theme Park was just another sim game, an elaboration on the SimCity concept rather than a new idea altogether. Good game, but nothing terribly innovative, IMO. Syndicate was also good, but was variations on RPG & RTS ideas, IMO. Good games & innovative games are two different things, were talking concepts, not gameplay.
The only other of his games that had the potential to be as truly ground-breaking as Populous was Powermonger, which could have been the first RTS-style game, ahead of Herzog Zwei or Civilization. But EA cut him off at the knees and released it unfinished. :-(
And, no, I didn't know there was a Populous 3! Must have been a big hit, LOL. AFAIK, Molyneux only worked on the first two, as you said.
Heh. Can't get processor speeds up fast enough? Just keep stacking more of them in there!
I can see it now, five years from now we'll STILL be waiting for the G5 to hit 3Ghz, but we'll have these nifty 24 CPU 2.5Ghz G5's and go on and on about how it's the same as having a 60Ghz processor.
Note: It's a joke, not a flame. I'm a Mac user.
It IS rellevant. Have you ever had to sit through "loading" screens just to get from one menu to the other on a PC recently (baring console ports)?
Agreed. PC gaming is moving towards zero-load gameplay. Look at the Unreal 3 Engine, one of the features they're hyping is it's predictive loading, so you NEVER see a loading screen.
Unreal 3, and games using the engine, will allow you to play the entire game, from beginning to end, without ever having to wait for anything to load for even a second (no matter how large the game world.) Once you start playing, you're playing until you're ready to stop. Not playing for a bit, then taking a break for "Loading...", then play a bit, then "Loading..."
Will this even be possible with a CD/DVD based game? Perhaps if the disc is spinning at full speed continuously from the moment you start playing, always loading. But who want to listen to that all the time? Not to mention wear-and-tear on the drive and disc.
Much as people hate Steam, I think that's more likely the direction the PC gaming industry will move in. Getting rid of physical media altogether, rather than shackling itself to it.
I don't think he even comes up with particularly innovative concepts any more, just variations on an existing idea.
All due respect to the guy, Populous is one of the greats. I shudder to think of how many hours I spent playing the original on my Atari ST back in the day. A truly original concept and a very fun game.
But since then? Not so much, really. Just looking at the three games you mentioned:
Dungeon Keeper? Isn't this really just another D&D style game, just played from the DungeonMaster's perspective? Could have been fun, but hardly innovative.
Black & White? Should have been called Populous 3. It was really just the evolution of the original Populous concept.
Fable? An RPG with moral decisions affecting the character? How different was this from the drak side/light side concept of KOTOR?
His place in history is cemented, he created one of the greates and most original games of all time (in my opinion) but a look down his resume since then doesn't wow me.
Actually, it might. From the OS X license agreement:
As any PC this is likely to be running on wouldn't be "Apple-labeled" I'd guess that's probably a violation. It doesn't necessarily make CherryOS itself illegal (though Apple's legal team might think differently (no pun intended) should they want to shut this down) it would mean it's a violation of the OS X license agreement to install it under CherryOS.
I've got an Athlon XP 3000, GeForce 6800 & 512MB, my system isn't the problem. My system isn't crappy, Bloodlines is crappy. I can run Half-Life 2 with the settings almost all the way up with good framerates, Bloodlines exhibited the Soure engine's stuttering problem to a degree MUCH worse than HL2 and I got significantly slower frame rates.
And, from what I've read, Valve has made ALL updates to the engine available to licensees, so apparantly Troika/Activision simply chose not to update Bloodlines.
Further, they claim to have had the game ready months ahead of time, and had to sit around and wait for Valve to finish HL2 before they could release, yet there were still tons of examples of slopiness: mis-aligned textures, spelling errors and typos in the subtitles, overlapping polys, and other bugs. Why not FIX this stuff instead of sitting around waiting?
It was ALMOST a really good game, the game itself and it's storyline were solid, but Troika did such a shitty job putting it together that it made it eventually unplayable for me. I put up with it's crap for about 2/3 of the game before I gave up, so that says a lot.
Glad you enjoyed it though!
The fact that Bloodlines won so many awards gives me a pretty good idea of how bad a year 2004 was for RPG's.
It was a buggy, sloppy mess. They took all the power of the Source engine, smeared it in poo and slowed it to a slideshow. The base gameplay and storyline were good, but not great, and overshawed by the general piss-poor construction of the game itself.
And that's the best we could do last year? Meh.
It says they are introducing the "newest iteration" of the engine, not intoducting the engine itself, so it's correct.
I'm curious to see whats been changed/added to the engine, it's incredibly impressive from what I've seen so far. Makes me want to quit learning Source and start learning the existing version of UnrealEd, so I'll be more ready to mess with the new version when it's done!
I'll have to disagree heavily on this one
Bloodlines was sloppy and buggy. Tons of places where textures weren't lined up correctly, places where walls were embedded in walls, causing some nasty texture swapping, etc. etc. etc. Framerates were atrocious even on a GeForce 6800 with all the settings turned down all the way, and I could run HL2 with everything nearly all the way up. There were spelling errors and typos in the subtitles! They couldn't even bother with a spellchecker?
Plus, putting HL2 and Bloodlines side-by-side, they barely utilised the engine. HL2 looked ten times better, the environments looked better and the characters were more realistic and believable.
It could have been a great game, it was enjoyable enough for as long as I could stand to play it, but the bugs, glitches, and general sloppiness got to me eventually and I just gave up.
I had sworn to never buy another Troika game after that, I guess that won't be a problem now.
It's funny how drastically different reactions people have to games. My experiences were almost exactly the opposite. I found Half-Life 2 to be one of the best games ever, almost certainly the best FPS ever. Far Cry on the other hand, I thought was just awful. I'd rank it as one of the worst FPS ever.
Different strokes for different folks, eh? :-)
Actually, I think that's a Genesis song...
Actually, it's amazing for about the first hour. I was blown away by every aspect of the game. Then I got to the damn hoverboat thing...
Another hour later and I'm still stuck driving around this stupid hoverboat, and I'm BORED. I'm tired of driving this damn thing around, it was fun for a few minutes but now they've dragged it on and on and on and... please NO MORE DAMN HOVERBOAT!
Silly me, I thought the sequel to one of the best FPS games of all time would have been another FPS, and not a damn driving game.
This does seem more like a mercy killing that anything else, TSS has been pure fluff ever since the G4 merger. They went from segments reviewing new Linux distros, building custom PC's, and case mods to segments reviewing frozen dinners and electric razors. WTF?
They used to keep me glued to the set for 90 minutes, now I can barely stand to sit through 60. :(