I think this whole 10 year lifetime stuff is just empty promises anyway, they all promise it until they release their next console, then only the biggest sellers survive. Sony had the biggest seller two times in a row and of course kept those around for longer but I doubt they'd do the same for the PS3 unless it magically gets the biggest sales numbers. Of course if any of them scrambles to get to the next generation the big question would be what to add. Sure, Nintendo could catch up on the system power for cheap but they have the least incentive to end the generation. The other two could try getting a few small improvements on the graphics (will the consumers even be able to tell?) or they could try to rip off the Wii, whether they'd realize the Wii didn't sell because of its controllers or anything but because of the software and marketing (sure, a hardcore gamer doesn't care about Wii Sports and such but the vast majority of the market does).
Personally I preferred the game design of Generals over the RA or Tiberium serieses but the actual implementation had flaws. What shouldn't be forgotten is that EA was one of the first companies to actually handle the Wii properly, especially their sports division (the casual games division might not be so smart).
Business wise, creativity isn't always a good thing. What you need is not creativity, it's simply the ability to make what people really want instead of making what you want and say they should want. That doesn't necessarily mean sequels, it does mean innovation where innovation is needed but it also means no innovation where it isn't needed and, most importantly, innovating in a way that the customer actually wants. The designer is not the customer. The vocal minorities on the internet are very few customers. The problem is the silent majority and what that majority wants is usually seen only once the sales numbers are in. Artsy, super-innovative games often fail to sell. Seems the people who don't bother posting on online messageboards don't want those. Madden sells, seems the silent majority wants to experience playing their favourite sport, same goes for PES.
There's so many smaller publishers that still deal with AAA (multi-million dollar budget) games that talking about games published by smaller publishers in the same way as games without any publisher at all is silly, you'd end up comparing the equivalent of a hollywood blockbuster with a video on youtube. I'd motion to include only games without a publisher or marketing campaign as "indie".
Generally articles listing "indie" games are meant to advertise games you wouldn't hear about otherwise, not games that take the top spots on retailer shelves. Hell, what is a "faceless publishing house"? Does Valve qualify as indie? Does Half-Life 2 really need the exposure from blogs? Are there console games we should call "indie"?
SoaSE is way outside the scope of that article and it's not surprising it's not listed there.
You realize what regulations do? They enforce not only speed limits (wouldn't want some idiot to go 160km/h in a residential area), they also enforce basic vehicle safety standards. Easy example: Parts that fall off or increase the danger for other people in a crash. If your car is so crappy that your trunk cover falls off that's a definite safety hazard and can very well end up killing people. Adorning your car with spikes is a terrible idea, especially if it's done on the front (that you get arrested after killing somebody with them is little consolation to their next of kin!). There's simply too many things that can go wrong when you've got metal hunks of 1t and over moving at speeds in excess of even 30km/h. Humans are NOT naturally capable of handling these things!
This whole "laws are only about control" bullshit meme is used way too often, I have no idea what people got hit with to get such idiotic ideas. We don't live in a world of Nietzschean supermen, people don't behave on their own and to allow reasonably safe coexistence with that many humans around it's simply necessary to make laws.
Isn't "indie" mostly used for games without any publisher? A full price retail game with all the trappings that entails doesn't really look very indie to me.
Bunny Must Die is a great Metroidvania-like game. It's short of course but full of ideas and memorable awesome moments (nope, I don't speak Japanese either). Oh and there's two free games from the developer available: Magical Harvest and Jabberwock which are similar to Zelda games except with more shooting.
Generally a good source for japanese indie games is Palet if you're inclined to actually buy them.
This is about indie games, that means the more obscure kind. SoaSE is a front shelf title and I don't think I'd call it anything close to indie, at least not in the sense that needs blog posts to get exposure. You can see it in any store on display, it has the big, ugly "Games for Windows" logo on the box, Amazon even claims it's published by Midway. It really doesn't belong into this discussion (could just as well bring up Super Mario Galaxy).
There's a commercial version of Tumiki Fighters for the Wii with extensive editing tools, it includes a few of Cho's games.
I can't get Maser Mayhem to run on my PC though, it always crashes on startup (yes, I did install the XNA framework, even reinstalled it a few times attempting to make it work). Anyone have success with that?
I bought Scarlet Weather Rhapsody (10.5, the second fighting game spinoff) recently, definitely a lot of fun (at least in singleplayer, the story mode is much better than the SP modes of other fighting games since it uses megaman-esque boss battles instead of plain fights or stat-boosted regular fights).
I think he means that some ISPs treat fixed IPs as a premium service and are therefore less inclined to change to a scheme where everyone gets a static IP. It's of course possible to work around that but many large customers don't want to.
That comes mostly from improved game design rather than added CPU power. Many modern games would have been possible on older systems but back in those days people had some bad preconceptions about how to approach game design (e.g. switch puzzles *shudder*). You could have had, say, Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow on the SNES (Dawn might have been difficult) but you simply didn't. Generally try comparing modern 2d games with old ones, they often play better without actually using more system power.
RPGs would probably work fine or even better with point and click controls (of course if properly designed for it), many only use 2-3 buttons (OK, cancel, menu) anyway.
Unless you had read about Okami or Viewtiful Joe the odds are you wouldn't pick either of them up on an impulse buy, but you can be pretty sure what the new Mario game is going to be like and the last few were good enough so why not pick it up.
Mario didn't magically get into that position, the name is recognized due to a long line of high quality games (and frequent innovation). Of course there's also marketing needed, a game doesn't sell just by being out there, something must convince people to buy it and reviews don't reach many people. Once people buy it the quality of the game acts as marketing for any sequels. Okami and Viewtiful Joe got no meaningful marketing push and therefore got ignored (also artsy games generally tend not to do well).
People ARE buying innovative games when they are done right. Recent megasellers are Nintendogs, Wii Fit, Brain Training and GTA 3, all of which are pretty innovative. Some might argue that these were obvious or not all that new but innovation doesn't mean creating something with no precedents, it's about creating something that hasn't existed in this form before. Nintendogs is a virtual pet, sure, Tamagochis did that before but they had nowhere close to the interactivity of Nintendogs. GTA 3 had freeform gameplay in a 3d city, although the previous GTA games had roughly similar gameplay the addition of 3d was a massive change and in the end no game was really like GTA3 before GTA3 came out (and I think the sales of the previous GTA games weren't anything to write home about anyway).
Lost Winds is a nice game but not that great, it has easy puzzles requiring minimal thought* and is way too short (they really should've put an "Episode One" label on it). Its major advantage is that it has some of the prettiest graphics on the WiiWare system. IMO the best game currently on WiiWare is Toki Tori, it's a puzzle game too but it actually has puzzles that require thinking rather than just using the obvious objects with each other and it has a decent length. It merely lacks the hype and graphics to get as much attention as LW gets.
*=In fact it's usually harder to figure out where you're supposed to go from the vague descriptions and lack of a map than how to solve a puzzle in front of you.
How about assigning volume and mass to each item and you have a fixed capacity of each so you can safely solve your inventory juggling with a simplex algorithm.
Well, since those are spare hammers, not hammers you wield it's not really useful for random people to carry that many, especially when they don't have a job that would make them come across so many hammers (you collect them by travelling and killing lots of stuff, most NPCs don't kill as many things as you do).
Slashdot Mirror
Ragnar Tornquist: Ace Attorney?
Sounds like the exploding Nokia phones except Nokia blamed that on counterfeit batteries.
"If it gets posted there's a car analogy of it"?
Which explains why lions are threatened...
Should've been careful what he signed then.
I think this whole 10 year lifetime stuff is just empty promises anyway, they all promise it until they release their next console, then only the biggest sellers survive. Sony had the biggest seller two times in a row and of course kept those around for longer but I doubt they'd do the same for the PS3 unless it magically gets the biggest sales numbers. Of course if any of them scrambles to get to the next generation the big question would be what to add. Sure, Nintendo could catch up on the system power for cheap but they have the least incentive to end the generation. The other two could try getting a few small improvements on the graphics (will the consumers even be able to tell?) or they could try to rip off the Wii, whether they'd realize the Wii didn't sell because of its controllers or anything but because of the software and marketing (sure, a hardcore gamer doesn't care about Wii Sports and such but the vast majority of the market does).
Personally I preferred the game design of Generals over the RA or Tiberium serieses but the actual implementation had flaws. What shouldn't be forgotten is that EA was one of the first companies to actually handle the Wii properly, especially their sports division (the casual games division might not be so smart).
Business wise, creativity isn't always a good thing. What you need is not creativity, it's simply the ability to make what people really want instead of making what you want and say they should want. That doesn't necessarily mean sequels, it does mean innovation where innovation is needed but it also means no innovation where it isn't needed and, most importantly, innovating in a way that the customer actually wants. The designer is not the customer. The vocal minorities on the internet are very few customers. The problem is the silent majority and what that majority wants is usually seen only once the sales numbers are in. Artsy, super-innovative games often fail to sell. Seems the people who don't bother posting on online messageboards don't want those. Madden sells, seems the silent majority wants to experience playing their favourite sport, same goes for PES.
Because really, the only options are fascism and anarchy, right? What kind of black and white world do you live in?
There's so many smaller publishers that still deal with AAA (multi-million dollar budget) games that talking about games published by smaller publishers in the same way as games without any publisher at all is silly, you'd end up comparing the equivalent of a hollywood blockbuster with a video on youtube. I'd motion to include only games without a publisher or marketing campaign as "indie".
Generally articles listing "indie" games are meant to advertise games you wouldn't hear about otherwise, not games that take the top spots on retailer shelves. Hell, what is a "faceless publishing house"? Does Valve qualify as indie? Does Half-Life 2 really need the exposure from blogs? Are there console games we should call "indie"?
SoaSE is way outside the scope of that article and it's not surprising it's not listed there.
You realize what regulations do? They enforce not only speed limits (wouldn't want some idiot to go 160km/h in a residential area), they also enforce basic vehicle safety standards. Easy example: Parts that fall off or increase the danger for other people in a crash. If your car is so crappy that your trunk cover falls off that's a definite safety hazard and can very well end up killing people. Adorning your car with spikes is a terrible idea, especially if it's done on the front (that you get arrested after killing somebody with them is little consolation to their next of kin!). There's simply too many things that can go wrong when you've got metal hunks of 1t and over moving at speeds in excess of even 30km/h. Humans are NOT naturally capable of handling these things!
This whole "laws are only about control" bullshit meme is used way too often, I have no idea what people got hit with to get such idiotic ideas. We don't live in a world of Nietzschean supermen, people don't behave on their own and to allow reasonably safe coexistence with that many humans around it's simply necessary to make laws.
Isn't "indie" mostly used for games without any publisher? A full price retail game with all the trappings that entails doesn't really look very indie to me.
Bunny Must Die is a great Metroidvania-like game. It's short of course but full of ideas and memorable awesome moments (nope, I don't speak Japanese either). Oh and there's two free games from the developer available: Magical Harvest and Jabberwock which are similar to Zelda games except with more shooting.
Generally a good source for japanese indie games is Palet if you're inclined to actually buy them.
This is about indie games, that means the more obscure kind. SoaSE is a front shelf title and I don't think I'd call it anything close to indie, at least not in the sense that needs blog posts to get exposure. You can see it in any store on display, it has the big, ugly "Games for Windows" logo on the box, Amazon even claims it's published by Midway. It really doesn't belong into this discussion (could just as well bring up Super Mario Galaxy).
There's a commercial version of Tumiki Fighters for the Wii with extensive editing tools, it includes a few of Cho's games.
I can't get Maser Mayhem to run on my PC though, it always crashes on startup (yes, I did install the XNA framework, even reinstalled it a few times attempting to make it work). Anyone have success with that?
I bought Scarlet Weather Rhapsody (10.5, the second fighting game spinoff) recently, definitely a lot of fun (at least in singleplayer, the story mode is much better than the SP modes of other fighting games since it uses megaman-esque boss battles instead of plain fights or stat-boosted regular fights).
I think he means that some ISPs treat fixed IPs as a premium service and are therefore less inclined to change to a scheme where everyone gets a static IP. It's of course possible to work around that but many large customers don't want to.
That comes mostly from improved game design rather than added CPU power. Many modern games would have been possible on older systems but back in those days people had some bad preconceptions about how to approach game design (e.g. switch puzzles *shudder*). You could have had, say, Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow on the SNES (Dawn might have been difficult) but you simply didn't. Generally try comparing modern 2d games with old ones, they often play better without actually using more system power.
RPGs would probably work fine or even better with point and click controls (of course if properly designed for it), many only use 2-3 buttons (OK, cancel, menu) anyway.
It only shows that there is a percieved problem, not necessarily a real one.
Unless you had read about Okami or Viewtiful Joe the odds are you wouldn't pick either of them up on an impulse buy, but you can be pretty sure what the new Mario game is going to be like and the last few were good enough so why not pick it up.
Mario didn't magically get into that position, the name is recognized due to a long line of high quality games (and frequent innovation). Of course there's also marketing needed, a game doesn't sell just by being out there, something must convince people to buy it and reviews don't reach many people. Once people buy it the quality of the game acts as marketing for any sequels. Okami and Viewtiful Joe got no meaningful marketing push and therefore got ignored (also artsy games generally tend not to do well).
People ARE buying innovative games when they are done right. Recent megasellers are Nintendogs, Wii Fit, Brain Training and GTA 3, all of which are pretty innovative. Some might argue that these were obvious or not all that new but innovation doesn't mean creating something with no precedents, it's about creating something that hasn't existed in this form before. Nintendogs is a virtual pet, sure, Tamagochis did that before but they had nowhere close to the interactivity of Nintendogs. GTA 3 had freeform gameplay in a 3d city, although the previous GTA games had roughly similar gameplay the addition of 3d was a massive change and in the end no game was really like GTA3 before GTA3 came out (and I think the sales of the previous GTA games weren't anything to write home about anyway).
Lost Winds is a nice game but not that great, it has easy puzzles requiring minimal thought* and is way too short (they really should've put an "Episode One" label on it). Its major advantage is that it has some of the prettiest graphics on the WiiWare system. IMO the best game currently on WiiWare is Toki Tori, it's a puzzle game too but it actually has puzzles that require thinking rather than just using the obvious objects with each other and it has a decent length. It merely lacks the hype and graphics to get as much attention as LW gets.
*=In fact it's usually harder to figure out where you're supposed to go from the vague descriptions and lack of a map than how to solve a puzzle in front of you.
At very least Necromancers were HEAVY on the leeching.
How about assigning volume and mass to each item and you have a fixed capacity of each so you can safely solve your inventory juggling with a simplex algorithm.
Well, since those are spare hammers, not hammers you wield it's not really useful for random people to carry that many, especially when they don't have a job that would make them come across so many hammers (you collect them by travelling and killing lots of stuff, most NPCs don't kill as many things as you do).