Any sufficiently complex game will have quirks the designers didn't anticipate and sometimes these quirks end up as making one or more options way OP. Of course people will always flock to the most OP solution and then complain when it gets nerfed or even disabled (if it was the result of combining things that weren't supposed to work together). I'm fairly sure the goal of the designers is that most builds are viable but once you get people hardcore min/maxing it that easily breaks, especially if the combat situations don't change enough to require different skillsets for each.
I hope that won't ever be combined with the 2000 hour grind style of MMORPG. With permadeath I'd hope they'd make progression upwards faster and have more dynamic play overall.
I don't think checking if your key is valid every time you go online with the game is that uncommon, it's rarely broken and gives an incentive for buying the game over pirating it. Other games lock you out of multiplayer, Spore would lock you out of the other web features.
I'm pretty sure Half-Life 2 has higher polygon counts than Doom 3, the latter just has shaders that eat sick amounts of performance. Doom 3 uses way fewer polygons than even games that came before it, roughly 1.5k per character when Unreal 2 was already doing 3-5k.
If The Sims required a high-end graphics card it wouldn't have been nearly as successful, I guess they want to repeat that with Spore. Most people who have a casual interest in games and might want to see something like The Sims because it seems interesting have a fairly old or cheap PC.
Too bad the back compat versions are no longer sold. Well, at least you can just keep your PS2 around...
Is it just me or does the 360 seem to get the most RPGs out of the three current consoles? I don't have one but I see more stories announcing RPGs for that thing than for the PS3 and Wii combined.
I compare FF5 and FF8 (never played 7) this way: In both you'll fight Odin on a time limit. In FF5 it's 1 minute, in FF8 it's 20 minutes (granted, that's including the short dungeon he's in but you can solve it almost fully, leave and return to reset the timer).
15$ plus paid-for addon content. If that makes them money they might shift more resources into developing downloadable games with tons of "horse armor".
That's because the previous FFs were not made for consoles more powerful than the Wii (PS2 if you only count the numbered ones) and the Wii is the most powerful out of the ones they did make FFs for so far, no wonder it's not being pushed past its limit.
Because a bicycle is the only vehicle that doesn't use oil, right? Sure, electricity can be generated from oil but you can also use other, much bulkier (e.g. nuclear) or location-bound (e.g. hydroelectric) sources which aren't available if you try to carry the fuel on board.
Personal transportation is awfully inefficient and is probably the most effective place for cutbacks, that doesn't mean one would have to cut all other transportation as well. Trying to keep personal transport running full steam just gets awfully difficult if the demand keeps growing faster than the supply and spending resources on it would probably end up as a waste anyway, better to conserve those resources for when the more important sectors suffer.
There are heavier caravans, yes, but I'm not sure I'd say most. Most people go for something their car can pull so they don't need to buy another car and there's plenty that will work on a regular car. No, that caravan was not popup, just a single axle thing, neither particularly large nor small (looking through the website of the manufacturer it seems the heaviest they make is a 2000kg max weight caravan with most being at 1-1.5k). I'd guess the kind of trailer that needs a lorry to haul isn't very popular with people going on a vacation.
But only if you want to have Photoshop. The actions you lose is to download Photoshop without paying Adobe which isn't anything major and I'm sure the people who buy Photoshop don't care that other people can't get it for free.
A lightning strikes and scares the primitive men. They wonder where the lightning might come from and think some powerful creature in the skies must be throwing it. They start worshipping that creature in the hope that the lightning will spare them and smite the people they don't like instead. Over the years that faith evolves into the many religions you see today.
Ockham's Razor is about minimizing the latent factors in a theory, not the "complexity" of a theory. God is the biggest latent factor possible. A theory that has 2000 pages but does not introduce any new latent factors is still simple by this standard.
Yeah but it's not impossible for a terrorist to obtain a legal and valid ID. IDs don't change colors when their owner does crimethink, they always only show your name and face (and maybe some other stuff), none of which shows whether you have any malicious intent.
You can corrupt them though. Look at Europe, a few centuries ago we were an area of radical beliefs and lots of killing in the name of God, now we're a bunch of fatasses worshipping consumerism. You cannot talk normally with a radical but you can change the world around him until he feels stupid and gives up (or at least can't find any new radicals to recruit). Fill Iraq with McD's and you're one step closer to eliminating terrorism.
We used to pull a caravan with a simple family car (Renault Megane Scenic, diesel engine) with little trouble. There's some middle room between a Jeep and a Trabant.
I don't expect that model to take off while copyright still exists in its present form, though. It's more convenient and familiar for people to buy prepackaged units of entertainment, even though that convenience is carved from the rights of those same people.
Isn't the usual response to that that people get what they pay for and if they decide to pay for fewer rights but more certain products that's their decision?
Most people aren't investors and don't plan to be. They don't want to shoulder all the risks that development brings, especially since they aren't in a position where they can properly research what the contracted company will do with the money. The current model allows you to know what the game is like before spending money on it, if you had to contract someone to make it you'd have to spend your money years before seeing a product, you wouldn't know if the product will turn out good or bad or if it'll stay in budget (or even get finished at all). What if the developer runs out of funding? Do you want to go around and ask everyone to pay more or do you just ship it incomplete (sure, happens all the time but the pay-after market at least hurts the profits of those who do)?
Even worse, people who invest will expect to have some say over the direction it will take and when you've got a million people trying to move something into their own direction all you get is a mess.
You could just go out and start a project with up-front payment right now, let's see how far you get. There's no reason you have to wait until copyright gets changed, test your theory NOW. My guess would be that the only people likely to invest into something are the investors (as they already have the experience and mindset to do so) who expect money in return, the regular people who just want a game don't want to invest, they want to buy because they prefer to get what they see.
The iPhone is aimed at trendy young males, the DS is aimed at pretty much anyone who wants to play a game. It has the bases covered with plenty of good and successful games for kids (Nintendogs and Pokemon are big system sellers, especially the former), "serious" games for adults (mostly Brain Age but lots of other games too) and of course the franchise standbys and hardcore games for the veteran gamer. Noteworthy is that the games that sell the system are good in their own right (to beat e.g. Nintendogs you can't just make a game about pets, you must make a game that shows the most desirable traits of pets in a fashion that's believable and disbelief-suspending to the user). One big difference between the iPhone and DS is that the DS has Nintendo who would still provide a strong baseload of games even if everyone else has no faith in the system, Apple relies completely on third parties who can leave the system or just churn out crappy mass games that tarnish the image of the system. This site offers a theory on how Nintendo is succeeding with the DS and Wii and having a big impact on what games get made is instrumental to that move.
Not only that, Nintendo already took Apple's usual strength of improving UIs, the hardware Nintendo sells isn't a usability nightmare that Apple could capitalize on. Nintendo provides a cheap, reliable (including long battery life) and usable system with plenty of good to great software. Hell, they're even selling shiny white plastic now.
Slashdot Mirror
Any sufficiently complex game will have quirks the designers didn't anticipate and sometimes these quirks end up as making one or more options way OP. Of course people will always flock to the most OP solution and then complain when it gets nerfed or even disabled (if it was the result of combining things that weren't supposed to work together). I'm fairly sure the goal of the designers is that most builds are viable but once you get people hardcore min/maxing it that easily breaks, especially if the combat situations don't change enough to require different skillsets for each.
I hope that won't ever be combined with the 2000 hour grind style of MMORPG. With permadeath I'd hope they'd make progression upwards faster and have more dynamic play overall.
I don't think checking if your key is valid every time you go online with the game is that uncommon, it's rarely broken and gives an incentive for buying the game over pirating it. Other games lock you out of multiplayer, Spore would lock you out of the other web features.
I'm pretty sure Half-Life 2 has higher polygon counts than Doom 3, the latter just has shaders that eat sick amounts of performance. Doom 3 uses way fewer polygons than even games that came before it, roughly 1.5k per character when Unreal 2 was already doing 3-5k.
If The Sims required a high-end graphics card it wouldn't have been nearly as successful, I guess they want to repeat that with Spore. Most people who have a casual interest in games and might want to see something like The Sims because it seems interesting have a fairly old or cheap PC.
Too bad the back compat versions are no longer sold. Well, at least you can just keep your PS2 around...
Is it just me or does the 360 seem to get the most RPGs out of the three current consoles? I don't have one but I see more stories announcing RPGs for that thing than for the PS3 and Wii combined.
I compare FF5 and FF8 (never played 7) this way: In both you'll fight Odin on a time limit. In FF5 it's 1 minute, in FF8 it's 20 minutes (granted, that's including the short dungeon he's in but you can solve it almost fully, leave and return to reset the timer).
15$ plus paid-for addon content. If that makes them money they might shift more resources into developing downloadable games with tons of "horse armor".
That's because the previous FFs were not made for consoles more powerful than the Wii (PS2 if you only count the numbered ones) and the Wii is the most powerful out of the ones they did make FFs for so far, no wonder it's not being pushed past its limit.
the fact that FF doesn't require amazing graphics
Huh? To me it looks like the graphics are the biggest selling point of recent FFs.
Because a bicycle is the only vehicle that doesn't use oil, right? Sure, electricity can be generated from oil but you can also use other, much bulkier (e.g. nuclear) or location-bound (e.g. hydroelectric) sources which aren't available if you try to carry the fuel on board.
Personal transportation is awfully inefficient and is probably the most effective place for cutbacks, that doesn't mean one would have to cut all other transportation as well. Trying to keep personal transport running full steam just gets awfully difficult if the demand keeps growing faster than the supply and spending resources on it would probably end up as a waste anyway, better to conserve those resources for when the more important sectors suffer.
Just use more explosives so it takes the whole police office with it.
There are heavier caravans, yes, but I'm not sure I'd say most. Most people go for something their car can pull so they don't need to buy another car and there's plenty that will work on a regular car. No, that caravan was not popup, just a single axle thing, neither particularly large nor small (looking through the website of the manufacturer it seems the heaviest they make is a 2000kg max weight caravan with most being at 1-1.5k). I'd guess the kind of trailer that needs a lorry to haul isn't very popular with people going on a vacation.
But only if you want to have Photoshop. The actions you lose is to download Photoshop without paying Adobe which isn't anything major and I'm sure the people who buy Photoshop don't care that other people can't get it for free.
A lightning strikes and scares the primitive men. They wonder where the lightning might come from and think some powerful creature in the skies must be throwing it. They start worshipping that creature in the hope that the lightning will spare them and smite the people they don't like instead. Over the years that faith evolves into the many religions you see today.
Ockham's Razor is about minimizing the latent factors in a theory, not the "complexity" of a theory. God is the biggest latent factor possible. A theory that has 2000 pages but does not introduce any new latent factors is still simple by this standard.
Yeah but it's not impossible for a terrorist to obtain a legal and valid ID. IDs don't change colors when their owner does crimethink, they always only show your name and face (and maybe some other stuff), none of which shows whether you have any malicious intent.
You can corrupt them though. Look at Europe, a few centuries ago we were an area of radical beliefs and lots of killing in the name of God, now we're a bunch of fatasses worshipping consumerism. You cannot talk normally with a radical but you can change the world around him until he feels stupid and gives up (or at least can't find any new radicals to recruit). Fill Iraq with McD's and you're one step closer to eliminating terrorism.
the same as a ricer tries to make his car look fast with big mufflers, gratuitous spoilers, and R-Type stickers.
:P
Attaching the Force Pod to the front bumper does help in heavy traffic though
We used to pull a caravan with a simple family car (Renault Megane Scenic, diesel engine) with little trouble. There's some middle room between a Jeep and a Trabant.
I don't expect that model to take off while copyright still exists in its present form, though. It's more convenient and familiar for people to buy prepackaged units of entertainment, even though that convenience is carved from the rights of those same people.
Isn't the usual response to that that people get what they pay for and if they decide to pay for fewer rights but more certain products that's their decision?
Most people aren't investors and don't plan to be. They don't want to shoulder all the risks that development brings, especially since they aren't in a position where they can properly research what the contracted company will do with the money. The current model allows you to know what the game is like before spending money on it, if you had to contract someone to make it you'd have to spend your money years before seeing a product, you wouldn't know if the product will turn out good or bad or if it'll stay in budget (or even get finished at all). What if the developer runs out of funding? Do you want to go around and ask everyone to pay more or do you just ship it incomplete (sure, happens all the time but the pay-after market at least hurts the profits of those who do)?
Even worse, people who invest will expect to have some say over the direction it will take and when you've got a million people trying to move something into their own direction all you get is a mess.
You could just go out and start a project with up-front payment right now, let's see how far you get. There's no reason you have to wait until copyright gets changed, test your theory NOW. My guess would be that the only people likely to invest into something are the investors (as they already have the experience and mindset to do so) who expect money in return, the regular people who just want a game don't want to invest, they want to buy because they prefer to get what they see.
The iPhone is aimed at trendy young males, the DS is aimed at pretty much anyone who wants to play a game. It has the bases covered with plenty of good and successful games for kids (Nintendogs and Pokemon are big system sellers, especially the former), "serious" games for adults (mostly Brain Age but lots of other games too) and of course the franchise standbys and hardcore games for the veteran gamer. Noteworthy is that the games that sell the system are good in their own right (to beat e.g. Nintendogs you can't just make a game about pets, you must make a game that shows the most desirable traits of pets in a fashion that's believable and disbelief-suspending to the user). One big difference between the iPhone and DS is that the DS has Nintendo who would still provide a strong baseload of games even if everyone else has no faith in the system, Apple relies completely on third parties who can leave the system or just churn out crappy mass games that tarnish the image of the system. This site offers a theory on how Nintendo is succeeding with the DS and Wii and having a big impact on what games get made is instrumental to that move.
Not only that, Nintendo already took Apple's usual strength of improving UIs, the hardware Nintendo sells isn't a usability nightmare that Apple could capitalize on. Nintendo provides a cheap, reliable (including long battery life) and usable system with plenty of good to great software. Hell, they're even selling shiny white plastic now.
No, its biggest competitor is the Wii which is currently eating a lot of gaming money worldwide.
They ship with it.