I know it doesn't make logical sense on the surface, but I don't this this limitation is arbitrary.
If there were no limits based on level, you could make a handful of level 1 characters whose sole existences were just to produce. You send them the leather, cloth, herbs, metal you harvest with your main characters, and they churn out armor, potions, tailored robes.
Without forcing you to actually invest time with them in also leveling up, this would soon lead to even more of a glut of player crafted items. Most crafters have already realized that there are very few crafted items that sell well.
By forcing you to invest time in a character to level them up, while chosing a finite number of professions, it limits the supply of crafted items available to the market. Now more people are buying crafted items, instead of just grinding up their leatherworking on their level 1 alt.
I mean, if any email client is going to have sync problems, it'd be one in space. At least it mostly works.
If I was Microsoft, I'd stick that on my packaging somewhere. "Works 90% of the time, even in space!"
Have you never played on of those games that tries to do it all? I think this, more so than just the stealth in a non-stealth game, is what the author of the article is getting at.
IE, driving missions in a third person action game (Enter the Matrix).
Stealth, in a hack and slash action adventure (Wind Waker).
Platforming, in a First Person Shooter (Turok).
Some games manage to pull it off better than others. Metroid Prime's platforming was pretty good, as was Half Life's. But it's a very risky proposition. Most of the time, it feels tacked on, and out of place.
There are already a couple of games out for the DS where you have to draw a line or series of platforms to keep a character safe.
Don't get me wrong, it's neat. I'm just hoping a bunch of 'me too!'s don't pop up, because it's the gimmick that makes it cool. We don't really need a version with Mario, Kirby, and then Sam Fisher and Gorden Freeman and some random character that some other company develops.
Rocket science is considered difficult. If XMC makes Tivo look like rocket science, then XMC is significantly less difficult than TiVo. Considering TiVo is usually praised on its user friendliness, that's saying a lot.
Okay, this is a bit off topic, but I remember growing up with Wolfenstein 3D, and I once noticed a strange trend.
I shot the german soldiers all day, without any remorse. I'm not anti-german or anything. I didn't even know what a german was, who Hitler was, or what WWII was all about at the time. I just knew they were bad guys, and I was shooting them.
But then I got to the part with the attack dogs. I felt really bad about killing the dogs. At some point, I sat down and thought about my behavior, and marvelled at what kind of monster I was, feeling no remorse for shooting people in a video game, but feeling bad for having to shoot the dogs.
Is this just me?
I guess it could be justified, in that while killing bad guys, you're killing someone who's rational and had the ability to chose between being a bad guy and a good guy. They chose badly, and ended up on the wrong side of a very large gun. The dogs were just trained that way, though. They're forced to be bad, because their made that way.
Of course, getting even more philosphical, how is the dog's relationship to its trainer's training and commands any different than a common soldier's relationship to his commander, his training, and his commands.
For one, anyone curious enough after reading the story could have easily done some research to find out how to do it anyway.
Secondly, news spreading faster will guarantee a more timely fix. Blizzard has demonstrated numerous times that they'll allow bugs that hinder players to sit around for long periods of time without being addressed, while bugs that are exploitable to help players get hotfixed as quickly as possible.
Similarly, obscure exploitable bugs tend to stay around a lot longer than highly visible common knowledge exploitable bugs.
I know this is probably just anti-Microsoft/. sentiment, but you do realize if Microsoft fails, and Nintendo fails, then Sony is the monopoly in console land.
Competition is always beneficial to the consumer. I cheer on even systems I don't personally plan on buying because I personally like the benefits competition brings.
Or if you're hopelessly confused on whether or not to add an apostrophe, and the term "it is" works in your sentence, just use "it is" instead of "it's". Generally, formal written language just looks better if you eliminate the contractions.
Technically, the graphics aren't all that great. There's no fancy reflections, and bump mapping, and vertex shading.
But I agree that it's a fantistic looking game, without all those things. It's not the poly counts and resolution of textures that do it, it's the overall cohesive art design. Every area you go to looks significantly different. There is atmosphere. And while it does not look realistic, it looks believable in the sense that there is nothing to jarringly pull you out of your immersion.
While I'm not arguing with you that Blizzard's games are more evolutionary than revolutionary, I don't understand how to be a killer app, it requires someone to go out and buy new hardware.
You're saying that games that are a boatload of fun to play, addictive, revolutionary, and polished, can't scale to support older PCs?
If my university hadn't used SSN's as individual identification numbers, I would have never learned it. At least I got something out of the pricey education.
Some people like it, some do not. It's the same reason some people brave the elements in the dead of winter to go to a football game. It adds to the experience when you're surrounded by thousands of screaming fans.
Similarly, at a theater, if you're a big Star Wars nerd (like I am), the goosebumps you get when the opening story crawls across to the familiar Star Wars theme, accompanied by the cheers of many other nerds such as yourself, make the inconviences worth it.
The restrictions on this have been eased significantly with the Xbox 360, the firm's spokespeople explained, and players will log into PlayOnline in order to play FFXI, not the Live service."
One of the great things about the Xbox's online strategy is its uniform. I can be playing Game A, and if a buddy logs on to Game B, he can join my game, or invite me over to his game.
If they start a precedent where logging into Live isn't necessary for online play, then online could quickly decentralize and lose one of its best features.
I like the flexibility, but to me, a better solution would be to integrate Playonline with Live Aware features.
For what it's worth, I agree with your sentiment. While being able to play the old Nintendo games on my newer systes was a fun novelty at first, it's gotten to the point where I want something NEW. I still have my old systems, so if I really want to play Super Mario Bros again, I'll hook it up and play it.
Its not that I dislike Nintendo, in fact, quite the opposite. I just feel somewhat cheated that they waste their time on porting old games to new systems, instead of developing new games. I know, ports are quicker, and all, but...
For what it's worth, that's not how it works. Sony isn't manufactuering the goods for sale. Much like eBay doesn't actually manufactuer anything, it's just there to serve as the facilitator for two seperate parties conducting a transaction.
Now, I know you can argue that they do manufactuer the items, as its their game, but it's not like some make it sound. You don't give them $5, and they load up an uber sword and send it to you. A player finds uber sword in the game, lists it for auction, you buy it, they send it to you.
On one hand, I agree that paladins are a little more passive in their combat abilities. But this isn't a bad thing, I think it's a great design. Certain classes are by their very nature less active in combat.
Whereas you have rogues who are a more twitch based class, paladins and warriors are less twitch based. It's there so if you don't like a certain playstyle, you have others to choose from.
I do think Blizzard should have been explicit in explaining these differences exist, and what the "twitch rating" is for each class so people can make a more informed decision, but still, you get most of your spells by level 20, so it should be obvious fairly early.
What you're not taking into account is luck, and the experience the losing team will build by losing.
Here's a quick example. I was jumped on a PvP server in the wilds by two players, both of whom were slightly higher in level than me.
I used my poly spell to take one guy out of the picture for a small time, used a variety of skills to kill the other person, and then focused on and killed the second guy. It was relatively easy for me, despite being surprised, outnumbered, and overmatched in level.
Things would been very different if the other people had done just a few things differently. Both players had abilities to interrupt my spells, but did not use them. One of the players had the ability to get out of the spell I used to pin him down, but didn't use it. Etc. Just a little bit of learning, and they would have beaten me soundly.
Sure, there's a learning curve to using your skills in this game, but it plateaus. If it takes a month to learn how to use your skills effectively, there's not a lot gained by having played the game 6 months, in terms of skill. Granted, the 6 month player will know some more nuances, but it's like 99% best skill use vs 95%, rather than 99% vs 30%.
Yeah, that one was great!
Basically, there's a mob in a high end dungeon that curses a random player. When that curse's timer expires, it does a huge amount of damage to everyone near that person.
What happened was a player's pet got the curse. Because you can dismiss the pet, and have the timer stop its countdown, the person had enough time to get to the auction house, call his pet out, let the timer expire, and BOOM!
Even if you don't want a PSP, why would you want it to burn in flames? Competition can only bring good things to we end users. Do you really want a monopoly?
In response to your other point, I don't think that an emulating appearing is telling at all. It's just illustrating the fact that people do stuff because it can be done. It plays original GB games, of which there is very little demand for. But it's a good place to start, as the older systems are less difficult to emulate. The guy might have made a picture viewer, or a movie player, but those are already included with the system.
I think the PSP is doing pretty darned well in terms of library, especially compared to the DS. The DS has a few neat original games, and several other ports, and kiddie oriented games.
The PSP meanwhile has a pretty good variety already. Puzzle games, action games, racing games, hack n' slash RPG, sports, etc.
I don't want to get into a debate as to which is better. I have both, and like both, but the PSP has gotten far more attention from me as far as my personal tastes go due to its library.
Well, when you discover that a particular piece of the press was bought, then you stop subscribing to that magazine, stop visiting that website, etc. If enough people do this, you end up hurting the parent company in terms of lost subscriptions, lost circulations of the mag which hurts advertising income, lost ads viewed on a webpage, etc.
Personally I use reviews for a guideline. I've played plenty of games rated 6/10 that I loved, and plenty rated 9/10 that I hated. After noticing some trends, I find certain places have opinions more in line with my own, and I weight those guidelines more strongly.
No, but in a way, it encourages people to buy gold for RL money. How else can they afford these inflated in game prices, when the price is beyond what they accrue during normal gameplay?
Okay, it's already been said that the survey results are suspect due to its associate with Macrovision, a company that sells copyright protection.
So I'll ask... what's the percentage of pirated games that are "protected" with Macrovision? Or phrased differently, how many games protected by Macrovision were never cracked and pirated?
There's some results I bet they wouldn't want to publish!
Good points. I think another issue is that when staying exactly to the same scenes as the movies, is the issue that you've already seen it, what's the motivation to actually doing it?
While on paper, it might sound cool to act out the adventures of heroX in a movie, the driving force behind games a lot of times is finding out what happens next, what's behind that door, etc.
If seeing the movie means I know it all, I'm going to get bored quite quickly.
As much bad press as it got, I think the Matrix game had the right idea in that sense. It was terribly flawed beyond repair in other ways, but by taking two characters from the movies who had little part in the movie, and using the game to explain their backstory, what they were doing while the movie was going on, and having them occassionally intersect at key elements was a very cool way to do it.
You get the bonus of being in the matrix world, you get the bonus of participating in pivotal moments from the movie, but you also get the bonus of seeing and doing new things. It's a synergetic effect that is quite cool. I hate that the rest of the game sucked, though.
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I know it doesn't make logical sense on the surface, but I don't this this limitation is arbitrary. If there were no limits based on level, you could make a handful of level 1 characters whose sole existences were just to produce. You send them the leather, cloth, herbs, metal you harvest with your main characters, and they churn out armor, potions, tailored robes. Without forcing you to actually invest time with them in also leveling up, this would soon lead to even more of a glut of player crafted items. Most crafters have already realized that there are very few crafted items that sell well. By forcing you to invest time in a character to level them up, while chosing a finite number of professions, it limits the supply of crafted items available to the market. Now more people are buying crafted items, instead of just grinding up their leatherworking on their level 1 alt.
I mean, if any email client is going to have sync problems, it'd be one in space. At least it mostly works. If I was Microsoft, I'd stick that on my packaging somewhere. "Works 90% of the time, even in space!"
IE, driving missions in a third person action game (Enter the Matrix).
Stealth, in a hack and slash action adventure (Wind Waker).
Platforming, in a First Person Shooter (Turok).
Some games manage to pull it off better than others. Metroid Prime's platforming was pretty good, as was Half Life's. But it's a very risky proposition. Most of the time, it feels tacked on, and out of place.
Don't get me wrong, it's neat. I'm just hoping a bunch of 'me too!'s don't pop up, because it's the gimmick that makes it cool. We don't really need a version with Mario, Kirby, and then Sam Fisher and Gorden Freeman and some random character that some other company develops.
Rocket science is considered difficult. If XMC makes Tivo look like rocket science, then XMC is significantly less difficult than TiVo. Considering TiVo is usually praised on its user friendliness, that's saying a lot.
I shot the german soldiers all day, without any remorse. I'm not anti-german or anything. I didn't even know what a german was, who Hitler was, or what WWII was all about at the time. I just knew they were bad guys, and I was shooting them.
But then I got to the part with the attack dogs. I felt really bad about killing the dogs. At some point, I sat down and thought about my behavior, and marvelled at what kind of monster I was, feeling no remorse for shooting people in a video game, but feeling bad for having to shoot the dogs.
Is this just me?
I guess it could be justified, in that while killing bad guys, you're killing someone who's rational and had the ability to chose between being a bad guy and a good guy. They chose badly, and ended up on the wrong side of a very large gun. The dogs were just trained that way, though. They're forced to be bad, because their made that way.
Of course, getting even more philosphical, how is the dog's relationship to its trainer's training and commands any different than a common soldier's relationship to his commander, his training, and his commands.
Secondly, news spreading faster will guarantee a more timely fix. Blizzard has demonstrated numerous times that they'll allow bugs that hinder players to sit around for long periods of time without being addressed, while bugs that are exploitable to help players get hotfixed as quickly as possible.
Similarly, obscure exploitable bugs tend to stay around a lot longer than highly visible common knowledge exploitable bugs.
Competition is always beneficial to the consumer. I cheer on even systems I don't personally plan on buying because I personally like the benefits competition brings.
Or if you're hopelessly confused on whether or not to add an apostrophe, and the term "it is" works in your sentence, just use "it is" instead of "it's". Generally, formal written language just looks better if you eliminate the contractions.
Technically, the graphics aren't all that great. There's no fancy reflections, and bump mapping, and vertex shading. But I agree that it's a fantistic looking game, without all those things. It's not the poly counts and resolution of textures that do it, it's the overall cohesive art design. Every area you go to looks significantly different. There is atmosphere. And while it does not look realistic, it looks believable in the sense that there is nothing to jarringly pull you out of your immersion.
While I'm not arguing with you that Blizzard's games are more evolutionary than revolutionary, I don't understand how to be a killer app, it requires someone to go out and buy new hardware.
You're saying that games that are a boatload of fun to play, addictive, revolutionary, and polished, can't scale to support older PCs?
If my university hadn't used SSN's as individual identification numbers, I would have never learned it. At least I got something out of the pricey education.
Some people like it, some do not. It's the same reason some people brave the elements in the dead of winter to go to a football game. It adds to the experience when you're surrounded by thousands of screaming fans. Similarly, at a theater, if you're a big Star Wars nerd (like I am), the goosebumps you get when the opening story crawls across to the familiar Star Wars theme, accompanied by the cheers of many other nerds such as yourself, make the inconviences worth it.
One of the great things about the Xbox's online strategy is its uniform. I can be playing Game A, and if a buddy logs on to Game B, he can join my game, or invite me over to his game.
If they start a precedent where logging into Live isn't necessary for online play, then online could quickly decentralize and lose one of its best features.
I like the flexibility, but to me, a better solution would be to integrate Playonline with Live Aware features.
For what it's worth, I agree with your sentiment. While being able to play the old Nintendo games on my newer systes was a fun novelty at first, it's gotten to the point where I want something NEW. I still have my old systems, so if I really want to play Super Mario Bros again, I'll hook it up and play it. Its not that I dislike Nintendo, in fact, quite the opposite. I just feel somewhat cheated that they waste their time on porting old games to new systems, instead of developing new games. I know, ports are quicker, and all, but...
For what it's worth, that's not how it works. Sony isn't manufactuering the goods for sale. Much like eBay doesn't actually manufactuer anything, it's just there to serve as the facilitator for two seperate parties conducting a transaction.
Now, I know you can argue that they do manufactuer the items, as its their game, but it's not like some make it sound. You don't give them $5, and they load up an uber sword and send it to you. A player finds uber sword in the game, lists it for auction, you buy it, they send it to you.
On one hand, I agree that paladins are a little more passive in their combat abilities. But this isn't a bad thing, I think it's a great design. Certain classes are by their very nature less active in combat. Whereas you have rogues who are a more twitch based class, paladins and warriors are less twitch based. It's there so if you don't like a certain playstyle, you have others to choose from. I do think Blizzard should have been explicit in explaining these differences exist, and what the "twitch rating" is for each class so people can make a more informed decision, but still, you get most of your spells by level 20, so it should be obvious fairly early.
What you're not taking into account is luck, and the experience the losing team will build by losing. Here's a quick example. I was jumped on a PvP server in the wilds by two players, both of whom were slightly higher in level than me. I used my poly spell to take one guy out of the picture for a small time, used a variety of skills to kill the other person, and then focused on and killed the second guy. It was relatively easy for me, despite being surprised, outnumbered, and overmatched in level. Things would been very different if the other people had done just a few things differently. Both players had abilities to interrupt my spells, but did not use them. One of the players had the ability to get out of the spell I used to pin him down, but didn't use it. Etc. Just a little bit of learning, and they would have beaten me soundly. Sure, there's a learning curve to using your skills in this game, but it plateaus. If it takes a month to learn how to use your skills effectively, there's not a lot gained by having played the game 6 months, in terms of skill. Granted, the 6 month player will know some more nuances, but it's like 99% best skill use vs 95%, rather than 99% vs 30%.
Yeah, that one was great! Basically, there's a mob in a high end dungeon that curses a random player. When that curse's timer expires, it does a huge amount of damage to everyone near that person. What happened was a player's pet got the curse. Because you can dismiss the pet, and have the timer stop its countdown, the person had enough time to get to the auction house, call his pet out, let the timer expire, and BOOM!
Even if you don't want a PSP, why would you want it to burn in flames? Competition can only bring good things to we end users. Do you really want a monopoly?
In response to your other point, I don't think that an emulating appearing is telling at all. It's just illustrating the fact that people do stuff because it can be done. It plays original GB games, of which there is very little demand for. But it's a good place to start, as the older systems are less difficult to emulate. The guy might have made a picture viewer, or a movie player, but those are already included with the system.
I think the PSP is doing pretty darned well in terms of library, especially compared to the DS. The DS has a few neat original games, and several other ports, and kiddie oriented games.
The PSP meanwhile has a pretty good variety already. Puzzle games, action games, racing games, hack n' slash RPG, sports, etc.
I don't want to get into a debate as to which is better. I have both, and like both, but the PSP has gotten far more attention from me as far as my personal tastes go due to its library.
They went on to make Karaoke games that were more popular. Neat technology, but I want the next Amplitude/Frequency. :(
Well, when you discover that a particular piece of the press was bought, then you stop subscribing to that magazine, stop visiting that website, etc. If enough people do this, you end up hurting the parent company in terms of lost subscriptions, lost circulations of the mag which hurts advertising income, lost ads viewed on a webpage, etc. Personally I use reviews for a guideline. I've played plenty of games rated 6/10 that I loved, and plenty rated 9/10 that I hated. After noticing some trends, I find certain places have opinions more in line with my own, and I weight those guidelines more strongly.
No, but in a way, it encourages people to buy gold for RL money. How else can they afford these inflated in game prices, when the price is beyond what they accrue during normal gameplay?
Okay, it's already been said that the survey results are suspect due to its associate with Macrovision, a company that sells copyright protection.
So I'll ask... what's the percentage of pirated games that are "protected" with Macrovision? Or phrased differently, how many games protected by Macrovision were never cracked and pirated?
There's some results I bet they wouldn't want to publish!
Good points. I think another issue is that when staying exactly to the same scenes as the movies, is the issue that you've already seen it, what's the motivation to actually doing it?
While on paper, it might sound cool to act out the adventures of heroX in a movie, the driving force behind games a lot of times is finding out what happens next, what's behind that door, etc.
If seeing the movie means I know it all, I'm going to get bored quite quickly.
As much bad press as it got, I think the Matrix game had the right idea in that sense. It was terribly flawed beyond repair in other ways, but by taking two characters from the movies who had little part in the movie, and using the game to explain their backstory, what they were doing while the movie was going on, and having them occassionally intersect at key elements was a very cool way to do it.
You get the bonus of being in the matrix world, you get the bonus of participating in pivotal moments from the movie, but you also get the bonus of seeing and doing new things. It's a synergetic effect that is quite cool. I hate that the rest of the game sucked, though.