There's just a trend to declare a game as "intended to be hard" and then turn up the difficulty to insane levels. People think that's bringing back the good old times from the NES days but those old games weren't really THAT hard. Compare Contra 4 to the original Contra, it's much, MUCH harder.
For what definition of "progress"? Physically progrssing the game or just the feeling that you've come closer to the solution (e.g. figured out a part of the boss's pattern and can now avoid it)? To me it's frustrating when I don't feel like I can improve, when I can't tell what went wrong and needs to be done better next time.
It seems you can't get a team together unless your design document just says "popular game X but BETTER". If you want innovation you pretty much have to look at one man efforts.
But you probably have them anyway even if you call them different names (UFO catcher = that game where you try to grab an object from the pile using a finicky grabbing crane, sticker booths = photo booths with the option to add stupid overlays over the photo before printing it).
The peacock displays the superiority of its genes by showing how much energy it can afford to waste on mating, a hen that goes for smaller cocks would often acquire inferior genetic material that was less capable of gathering energy.
"explaining them" means finding a model that describes and predicts their behaviour (e.g. the formulas for gravity). ID doesn't even attempt that, it does try to make claims about the underlying mechanics though.
Better in whose eyes? Many if not all other MMORPGs try to be more hardcore, focussing more on competition and teamwork and such. WoW got into its position precisely by realizing that the people who are decked out in top tier equipment at max level and discuss the relative balances of the classes in PvP are only a tiny fraction of the total number of people and that while they probably enjoy facing harsh penalties on death and danger everywhere the rest doesn't. WoW was better for those who don't want to turn the game into a science or job in order to get anywhere. The mistake gaming publications and such often make when proclaiming an MMO to be better is that they view it with the eyes of the hardcore which values entirely different qualities than the rest of the playerbase. Hell, I've heard schoolgirls talk about their WoW characters and their guild. These aren't even players who go to Halo or Counterstrike when they stop playing WoW, they go back to The Sims or Bejeweled and what else PopCap made. The audience that made WoW big is the audience that the gaming press only considers clueless plebs. No wonder that designs fail that try to "enlighten" the plebs.
For me, I play games for the (and I know this will be a shocker) gameplay, not the storyline, so there isn't really much you can spoil in a review unless the knowledge you're granting me would change how I'd play the game.
There's still a lot that can be spoiled like puzzle solutions or surprising twists during some battles. Or maybe outcomes that depend on the choices you make in the early or mid game like telling you that if you trade your starting peashooter for a machinegun you can't get the peashooter upgraded to the BFG in the late game (I didn't regret going with the machinegun, it was like a second jetpack and helped me navigate many difficult parts).
See that "if" there? That's the problem. Most of us don't have time to master games.
But you do have the time to complete a 20-40 hour epic? Contra is like half an hour long from start to finish. Yeah, okay, it's one of the harder games so what about Sonic The Hedgehog? About 30 minutes long too and doesn't take nearly as many tries to get to the end. If you have the time to complete a long story driven game you should have the time to master Sonic enough to beat it.
There's a massive pleasure in overcoming an obstacle by using your own abilities. Most modern games simply pound the obstacle until it's flat enough to drive a Formula 1 car over, i.e. that it's so easy anyone can beat it, see the cliffhanger the game ends with and line up to buy the sequel. It's certainly entertaining in the sense that watching a movie is entertaining but watching storylines isn't really what got us into gaming in first place (while the universal laws of the internet make it a foolish thing to say that there's not going to be any Pong fan fiction I'd go out on a limb and say that most people didn't imagine that their white line was starring in a Hollywood movie).
Speaking of Hollywood movies, many games want to be one of those now which manifests in both convoluted plots and action hero main characters who perform awesome stunts. The problem with awesome stunts is that the game doesn't really have the means to let the player make his own awesomeness (nor would he do so since the average player will just stab things in the face until their heads explode) so it mostly boils down to predesigned animations, whether it's just some fancy dancy attacks the character pulls off while all you do is mash the attack button or cutscenes that depict your character as doing awesome while you have no part in it (or maybe the occassional "push X to not die" quicktime events). Of course an awesome stunt is cool the first time you see it but wears thin very quickly so repeating any of these sequences kills the fun and we can't have that. Solution? Never make the player repeat them, usually by making it almost impossible to die. As that sentiment grows the awesomeness in the game comes more and more from the game itself rather than the player in front of it, making it more a show of the greatness of the developer than the player. Maybe it's a preference thing but I prefer to think that I'm awesome for making the things on the screen happen over just watching the developer explain in every detail why he's so much better than I am.
Depends on how you read the score. If you read it as the percentage of the time that felt fun then a perfect score for a game with flaws is certainly possible.
You can tell that a rock will fall to the ground without really knowing how gravity works, there's been a long time in which it wasn't known how exactly gravity works (and hell, we're still not entirely sure) but people still managed to utilize gravity in their daily lives. It's entirely possible to determine the outcome of something without understanding the exact mechanics.
Also noone ever suggested to stop all oil drilling and burning, just to try reducing the output. Quite a few countries are managing that without wrecking their economy. There are many ways to reduce the output that don't hurt the economy much but obviously cost a bit of money to do (e.g. installing smoke scrubbers to reduce the pollution outputted by a factory) so without any pressure they're not going to be done. Reckless behaviour like China is showing certainly is cheaper to do but it does fuck a lot of stuff up.
Probably the cheapest way to get that CO2 out of the atmosphere would be to grow trees, chop them down and then store their carbon somewhere (mighrt be necessary to extract the non-carbon substances to fertilize the soil again if you do that too much). Or, as Terry Pratchett (I think) put it, get a library.
The problem is of course that arable land is valuable and its owners would rather grow crops there which get eaten and thus turned into CO2 again.
It may be a good time to point out that the Earth has often been much warmer, with much more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and those are generally correlated to times of bountiful organic life.
Which did not include humans. Sure, life will always exist, life will adapt and everything but the part of life we're worried about, namely Homo Sapiens and its necessary food sources and other symbiotes require a certain biosphere.
Oh, wow, ten whopping megabytes! I recently bought a game from the bargain bin and had to download (the game has online multiplayer, obviously that doesn't work without patches) over two gigabytes of patches that came with a patcher that took longer to run than the patches to download. And it wasn't an MMORPG.
Governments and other big organizations come in two forms actually: Evil and Redshirt Army. Because the player doesn't feel important if the good guys can win without him.
Slashdot Mirror
Rule 6: "If violence wasn't your last resort you failed to resort to enough of it."
There's just a trend to declare a game as "intended to be hard" and then turn up the difficulty to insane levels. People think that's bringing back the good old times from the NES days but those old games weren't really THAT hard. Compare Contra 4 to the original Contra, it's much, MUCH harder.
For what definition of "progress"? Physically progrssing the game or just the feeling that you've come closer to the solution (e.g. figured out a part of the boss's pattern and can now avoid it)? To me it's frustrating when I don't feel like I can improve, when I can't tell what went wrong and needs to be done better next time.
It seems you can't get a team together unless your design document just says "popular game X but BETTER". If you want innovation you pretty much have to look at one man efforts.
So that's what girls buy My Little Pony games for?
Arms race, eh? Steal the keys to the gun locker and see if he can top that.
Perhaps this will signal a return to past form?
You know how often people already thought that?
But you probably have them anyway even if you call them different names (UFO catcher = that game where you try to grab an object from the pile using a finicky grabbing crane, sticker booths = photo booths with the option to add stupid overlays over the photo before printing it).
The peacock displays the superiority of its genes by showing how much energy it can afford to waste on mating, a hen that goes for smaller cocks would often acquire inferior genetic material that was less capable of gathering energy.
"explaining them" means finding a model that describes and predicts their behaviour (e.g. the formulas for gravity). ID doesn't even attempt that, it does try to make claims about the underlying mechanics though.
Better in whose eyes? Many if not all other MMORPGs try to be more hardcore, focussing more on competition and teamwork and such. WoW got into its position precisely by realizing that the people who are decked out in top tier equipment at max level and discuss the relative balances of the classes in PvP are only a tiny fraction of the total number of people and that while they probably enjoy facing harsh penalties on death and danger everywhere the rest doesn't. WoW was better for those who don't want to turn the game into a science or job in order to get anywhere. The mistake gaming publications and such often make when proclaiming an MMO to be better is that they view it with the eyes of the hardcore which values entirely different qualities than the rest of the playerbase. Hell, I've heard schoolgirls talk about their WoW characters and their guild. These aren't even players who go to Halo or Counterstrike when they stop playing WoW, they go back to The Sims or Bejeweled and what else PopCap made. The audience that made WoW big is the audience that the gaming press only considers clueless plebs. No wonder that designs fail that try to "enlighten" the plebs.
Unless the fees are $1.50 a month you should probably add a zero to your revenue figures.
So you've never read Kant or Hegel then?
For me, I play games for the (and I know this will be a shocker) gameplay, not the storyline, so there isn't really much you can spoil in a review unless the knowledge you're granting me would change how I'd play the game.
There's still a lot that can be spoiled like puzzle solutions or surprising twists during some battles. Or maybe outcomes that depend on the choices you make in the early or mid game like telling you that if you trade your starting peashooter for a machinegun you can't get the peashooter upgraded to the BFG in the late game (I didn't regret going with the machinegun, it was like a second jetpack and helped me navigate many difficult parts).
See that "if" there? That's the problem. Most of us don't have time to master games.
But you do have the time to complete a 20-40 hour epic? Contra is like half an hour long from start to finish. Yeah, okay, it's one of the harder games so what about Sonic The Hedgehog? About 30 minutes long too and doesn't take nearly as many tries to get to the end. If you have the time to complete a long story driven game you should have the time to master Sonic enough to beat it.
There's a massive pleasure in overcoming an obstacle by using your own abilities. Most modern games simply pound the obstacle until it's flat enough to drive a Formula 1 car over, i.e. that it's so easy anyone can beat it, see the cliffhanger the game ends with and line up to buy the sequel. It's certainly entertaining in the sense that watching a movie is entertaining but watching storylines isn't really what got us into gaming in first place (while the universal laws of the internet make it a foolish thing to say that there's not going to be any Pong fan fiction I'd go out on a limb and say that most people didn't imagine that their white line was starring in a Hollywood movie).
Speaking of Hollywood movies, many games want to be one of those now which manifests in both convoluted plots and action hero main characters who perform awesome stunts. The problem with awesome stunts is that the game doesn't really have the means to let the player make his own awesomeness (nor would he do so since the average player will just stab things in the face until their heads explode) so it mostly boils down to predesigned animations, whether it's just some fancy dancy attacks the character pulls off while all you do is mash the attack button or cutscenes that depict your character as doing awesome while you have no part in it (or maybe the occassional "push X to not die" quicktime events). Of course an awesome stunt is cool the first time you see it but wears thin very quickly so repeating any of these sequences kills the fun and we can't have that. Solution? Never make the player repeat them, usually by making it almost impossible to die. As that sentiment grows the awesomeness in the game comes more and more from the game itself rather than the player in front of it, making it more a show of the greatness of the developer than the player. Maybe it's a preference thing but I prefer to think that I'm awesome for making the things on the screen happen over just watching the developer explain in every detail why he's so much better than I am.
Depends on how you read the score. If you read it as the percentage of the time that felt fun then a perfect score for a game with flaws is certainly possible.
You can tell that a rock will fall to the ground without really knowing how gravity works, there's been a long time in which it wasn't known how exactly gravity works (and hell, we're still not entirely sure) but people still managed to utilize gravity in their daily lives. It's entirely possible to determine the outcome of something without understanding the exact mechanics.
Also noone ever suggested to stop all oil drilling and burning, just to try reducing the output. Quite a few countries are managing that without wrecking their economy. There are many ways to reduce the output that don't hurt the economy much but obviously cost a bit of money to do (e.g. installing smoke scrubbers to reduce the pollution outputted by a factory) so without any pressure they're not going to be done. Reckless behaviour like China is showing certainly is cheaper to do but it does fuck a lot of stuff up.
Is it likely that the world's deposits of nuclear fuel could support a worldwide switch to nuclear? I've seen claims that it wouldn't last very long.
Weather is short term, climate is long term, the two shouldn't be confused.
Probably the cheapest way to get that CO2 out of the atmosphere would be to grow trees, chop them down and then store their carbon somewhere (mighrt be necessary to extract the non-carbon substances to fertilize the soil again if you do that too much). Or, as Terry Pratchett (I think) put it, get a library.
The problem is of course that arable land is valuable and its owners would rather grow crops there which get eaten and thus turned into CO2 again.
It may be a good time to point out that the Earth has often been much warmer, with much more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and those are generally correlated to times of bountiful organic life.
Which did not include humans. Sure, life will always exist, life will adapt and everything but the part of life we're worried about, namely Homo Sapiens and its necessary food sources and other symbiotes require a certain biosphere.
Oh, wow, ten whopping megabytes! I recently bought a game from the bargain bin and had to download (the game has online multiplayer, obviously that doesn't work without patches) over two gigabytes of patches that came with a patcher that took longer to run than the patches to download. And it wasn't an MMORPG.
Seriously, having no ending to "leave room for a sequel" is the new black.
Governments and other big organizations come in two forms actually: Evil and Redshirt Army. Because the player doesn't feel important if the good guys can win without him.