That's singleplayer, in multiplayer the new trend is to make you spawn with the weapons you choose but forcing you to unlock them through a lengthy leveling process first.
Yeah but with significantly more complex movement and maps. Modern singleplayer FPS maps are a linear path from load zone A to load zone B, Descent heavily utilized its 3D space to make maps you needed a (relatively hard to read) map to navigate.
More importantly sometimes precision is not desired. Look at all the crazy abstractions golf and bowling games came up with before the Wii in order to simulate the difficulty of getting an accurate shot done. We see nonsensical results when games try to pass a difficult action (like certain sword moves) off as trivial and just demand gesture activation under the assumption that you can do that at any time. I think to make full use of motion controls we have to ditch many of our current gaming conventions because actions shouldn't be only perfect or not done at all, motions are analog so the actions performed with them should have an analog behaviour too (e.g. the motions in Wii Sports do react to how you swing the remote, you can cause lobs or drops in Tennis, you can throw at different speeds in baseball,...). Analog inputs are less precise for digital actions but they allow analog actions that digital inputs would not be capable of.
However unpopular FPSes like Section 8 and Global Agenda (notably both involving jetpacks and thus highly mobile targets at times) don't for some reason.
Wait, they're shooting missiles at people and only one in three dead people is a civilian? I'd call that a pretty good rate considering those missiles have the potential to kill dozens of civilians each.
Anyway, death from far away isn't exactly a new concept. Artillery operators don't see their targets face to face, they get coordinates radioed in and fire shells on them. The difference is that artillery is less accurate and to kill one dude you'd probably level a whole city block. Still less collateral damage than carpet bombing though.
They get treated like the locals that are considered part of the enemy forces. I don't see a need to give them special treatment just because they were born outside of the country. Generally if you value not being blown up it's not a good idea to move into a country that has a large problem with armed forces that disguise themselves as civilians.
To be fair if he has a line of fire on US soldiers then I'd hope those soldiers fire back and kill him with bullets rather than requesting an air strike.
We're talking about military gear, they aren't going to get a court order for every set of coordinates they hand to the artillery team. When the military needs an enemy dead they'll use what they can, if they have some kind of precision weapon they'll take out the target with a minimum of collateral damage, if they don't then at some point they're going to fall back to carpet bombing. This isn't law enforcement, this is war. There's no judges deciding whether a target is really a terrorist, there's only the soldier and his gun deciding on the battlefield who needs to get shot and who doesn't. Air strikes (and that's really all a drone attack is) are based on recon data, not police investigations.
Using drones on domestic targets is already against the law and you'll notice that the areas in question are stuff like Afghanistan and Iraq. They won't be shooting at protesters in the US anytime soon and in Iraq they could just as well drop an artillery shell on those same protesters if that's what they wanted.
Yeah, I should probably do that too, the only reason I even wear the wrist strap is because it's really annoying when it flaps around while you use the controller.
When people clone an existing game they rarely create art, they usually just take what they can and clone the rest. That's not really a creative endeavor.
And that's if you don't have an old PC to reuse the drives, case, etc from. My last upgrade was 300€ and that brought a 5+ year old PC up to current level, playing almost all games (the one exception is Shattered Horizon but that's expected from a game made by the people who made 3D Mark) at full detail with a perfect framerate.
I can get a social aspect for free by going on IRC, I don't need a crappy level treadmill attached to the chat. When I want to play a game I'll play one that's fun to play rather than one that's a chore but lets me talk with other people (so does work!).
Games get platform independent, can run on your PC, your Mac, your TV or even your iPhone.
Nah, that thing can barely control games when they're made for it, throwing a PC game at it will be plain unplayable due to the interface. Speaking of interface, what do we do if Sony and MS following Nintendo on the motion controls concept will lead to PC games using motion controls too? Can't just stream a new controller to the user.
Now let's calculate how much they have to oversell their capacities so they can afford all that upgrading themselves. After all they can't sell you something that costs them more than you and I'm fairly certain upgrading once every 4 years isn't going to cut it if you're trying to sell your service as not needing upgrades.
Instead of you having to upgrade your computer every few years, and having to live with a sub-par gaming machine towards the end of its effective life cycle, onlive's servers will be continually upgraded to keep up with the games.
We'll see about that, they might end up with some beancounter figuring out that the cost-benefit ratio of continuous upgrading is too high so you might see upgrades too infrequently. They'll need some serious hardware to run high end games for thousands of users and upgrades will be costly.
But one of the biggest things is that since all the gaming code runs at the server end, this will almost eliminate cheating.
Only among terminal gamers, I don't expect many terminal-only games so any regular computer gamers can still cheat.
Depends, Steam tends to have some awesome deals (I got the Orange Box for 10€). I don't buy full price stuff on Steam (except for indie titles that cost little either way) but you can often get stuff way cheaper on there.
As a popular anti-industry blogger puts it, behind every used sale is a customer who no longer values the game higher than the bit of change Gamestop will pay for it. A customer who still likes the game won't sell it to Gamestop, thus the number of used copies on their shelves is going to be low and as long as the rate of people who like the game enough to keep it is high enough there's going to be a shortage of used copies, forcing most people to buy new.
The obvious solution is to make a game that the customer likes so much he wants to keep playing it, the MBA approach to that appears to be penalizing used buyers and doling out DLC bit by bit to stretch the customer's interest as much as possible.
Used sales are only an issue for your game's long term sales if the game's value falls too fast. Look at Mario Kart, that's still selling at full price new and still making it into the top 10 sales charts.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not really clear what you want out of a game but something completely different from those listed games would be Metroid Prime.
That's singleplayer, in multiplayer the new trend is to make you spawn with the weapons you choose but forcing you to unlock them through a lengthy leveling process first.
Yeah but with significantly more complex movement and maps. Modern singleplayer FPS maps are a linear path from load zone A to load zone B, Descent heavily utilized its 3D space to make maps you needed a (relatively hard to read) map to navigate.
You can try making those accountants explain their requirements to an Indian developer.
When running at full speed, my reaction time + input lag was greater than the amount of time it took a spike or robot to cross the screen and hit me
For me that's true even with zero lag.
More importantly sometimes precision is not desired. Look at all the crazy abstractions golf and bowling games came up with before the Wii in order to simulate the difficulty of getting an accurate shot done. We see nonsensical results when games try to pass a difficult action (like certain sword moves) off as trivial and just demand gesture activation under the assumption that you can do that at any time. I think to make full use of motion controls we have to ditch many of our current gaming conventions because actions shouldn't be only perfect or not done at all, motions are analog so the actions performed with them should have an analog behaviour too (e.g. the motions in Wii Sports do react to how you swing the remote, you can cause lobs or drops in Tennis, you can throw at different speeds in baseball, ...). Analog inputs are less precise for digital actions but they allow analog actions that digital inputs would not be capable of.
However unpopular FPSes like Section 8 and Global Agenda (notably both involving jetpacks and thus highly mobile targets at times) don't for some reason.
Wait, they're shooting missiles at people and only one in three dead people is a civilian? I'd call that a pretty good rate considering those missiles have the potential to kill dozens of civilians each.
Anyway, death from far away isn't exactly a new concept. Artillery operators don't see their targets face to face, they get coordinates radioed in and fire shells on them. The difference is that artillery is less accurate and to kill one dude you'd probably level a whole city block. Still less collateral damage than carpet bombing though.
They get treated like the locals that are considered part of the enemy forces. I don't see a need to give them special treatment just because they were born outside of the country. Generally if you value not being blown up it's not a good idea to move into a country that has a large problem with armed forces that disguise themselves as civilians.
So soldiers of enemy nations are not enemy combatants? What are they then, enemy peace lovers?
To be fair if he has a line of fire on US soldiers then I'd hope those soldiers fire back and kill him with bullets rather than requesting an air strike.
They're running around in a war zone, you can't exactly send police after them. If they join the ranks of the enemy they're targets.
We're talking about military gear, they aren't going to get a court order for every set of coordinates they hand to the artillery team. When the military needs an enemy dead they'll use what they can, if they have some kind of precision weapon they'll take out the target with a minimum of collateral damage, if they don't then at some point they're going to fall back to carpet bombing. This isn't law enforcement, this is war. There's no judges deciding whether a target is really a terrorist, there's only the soldier and his gun deciding on the battlefield who needs to get shot and who doesn't. Air strikes (and that's really all a drone attack is) are based on recon data, not police investigations.
Using drones on domestic targets is already against the law and you'll notice that the areas in question are stuff like Afghanistan and Iraq. They won't be shooting at protesters in the US anytime soon and in Iraq they could just as well drop an artillery shell on those same protesters if that's what they wanted.
If you keep that up I'll be forced to point out that your shaft only has one ball.
Yeah, I should probably do that too, the only reason I even wear the wrist strap is because it's really annoying when it flaps around while you use the controller.
When people clone an existing game they rarely create art, they usually just take what they can and clone the rest. That's not really a creative endeavor.
Also don't reuse any designs, whether level or character (or whatever else populates that particular gameworld).
And that's if you don't have an old PC to reuse the drives, case, etc from. My last upgrade was 300€ and that brought a 5+ year old PC up to current level, playing almost all games (the one exception is Shattered Horizon but that's expected from a game made by the people who made 3D Mark) at full detail with a perfect framerate.
I can get a social aspect for free by going on IRC, I don't need a crappy level treadmill attached to the chat. When I want to play a game I'll play one that's fun to play rather than one that's a chore but lets me talk with other people (so does work!).
You're assuming that those 15$ will include games.
Games get platform independent, can run on your PC, your Mac, your TV or even your iPhone.
Nah, that thing can barely control games when they're made for it, throwing a PC game at it will be plain unplayable due to the interface. Speaking of interface, what do we do if Sony and MS following Nintendo on the motion controls concept will lead to PC games using motion controls too? Can't just stream a new controller to the user.
Now let's calculate how much they have to oversell their capacities so they can afford all that upgrading themselves. After all they can't sell you something that costs them more than you and I'm fairly certain upgrading once every 4 years isn't going to cut it if you're trying to sell your service as not needing upgrades.
Instead of you having to upgrade your computer every few years, and having to live with a sub-par gaming machine towards the end of its effective life cycle, onlive's servers will be continually upgraded to keep up with the games.
We'll see about that, they might end up with some beancounter figuring out that the cost-benefit ratio of continuous upgrading is too high so you might see upgrades too infrequently. They'll need some serious hardware to run high end games for thousands of users and upgrades will be costly.
But one of the biggest things is that since all the gaming code runs at the server end, this will almost eliminate cheating.
Only among terminal gamers, I don't expect many terminal-only games so any regular computer gamers can still cheat.
Depends, Steam tends to have some awesome deals (I got the Orange Box for 10€). I don't buy full price stuff on Steam (except for indie titles that cost little either way) but you can often get stuff way cheaper on there.
As a popular anti-industry blogger puts it, behind every used sale is a customer who no longer values the game higher than the bit of change Gamestop will pay for it. A customer who still likes the game won't sell it to Gamestop, thus the number of used copies on their shelves is going to be low and as long as the rate of people who like the game enough to keep it is high enough there's going to be a shortage of used copies, forcing most people to buy new.
The obvious solution is to make a game that the customer likes so much he wants to keep playing it, the MBA approach to that appears to be penalizing used buyers and doling out DLC bit by bit to stretch the customer's interest as much as possible.
Used sales are only an issue for your game's long term sales if the game's value falls too fast. Look at Mario Kart, that's still selling at full price new and still making it into the top 10 sales charts.