In GW that would be entirely irrational though, because the spread of player skills is vastly greater than the difference between the capabilities of alternative builds of a particular type.
This is definitely reflected in my experiences in Guild Wars, you really notice when you have one or two people in the group who know what they're doing, especially if they are healing, protecting, interrupting, calling targets, tanking, or pulling. Hell, now that I think about it, if they're doing their role effectively you really notice it. More importantly, when people work as a team and everything 'clicks' it's really satisfying to see how easy a hard mission can becomes. I guess that's the attraction of a guild but I found it can happen in a Pick-up Group.
It's actually the only MMORPG (I hope that mmogchart guy doesn't show up to tell me it's not an MMORPG) I've played and I had a pretty good experience with it, and didn't feel obligated to play it because of a subscription fee.
As I said, I agree that Guild Wars doesn't encourage this (role-discrimination), but I though the Great-Grandparent post portrayed the impression that GW solves the problems of human nature when it at best doesn't exacerbate them.
Re:How about the free software aspect?
on
Marketing Mozilla
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· Score: 1
So the logical marketing strategy is to wait 50 years...
Yeah, it doesn't sound like a new concept, it's been around before, especially spurred on by "Current Affairs" programs, tabloids newspapers, and talk radio. The fact the Koreans do it online is new, but I don't think it makes them better or worse for it, they just have a more internetified culture.
Why do developers have to reinvent a ruleset for every new title?"
I know that Bioware have suggested it was very difficult to work with the D&D license and have to go through approval processes for content. They have said they didn't feel the D&D ruleset was well suited to a CRPG, and have even gone to the extent of declining to develop NWN2 and focusing on making their own intellectual property in future games (Jade Empire, Mass Effect, Dragon Age).
A big part of it was having so many other companies involved in their work, including Hasbro (owners of WoTC), Wizards of the Coast (owners of D&D license), and having to publish through Atari (exclusive D&D license for games).
Some of this doesn't apply if you're talking about just the ruleset and not any campaign settings, but it seems relevant, and I think it's a big part of why developers often choose to make their own setting and rulesets, to avoid baggage and legal issues of using someone else's. I'm also not sure that most P&P rulesets take full advantage of computer ability, where dice rolls can be seamless and real-time is not a bad thing.
The ability to change your secondary class comes up fairly late in the game, roughly 70% of the way through the 'Roleplay'/'Story'. At least this is the case in the 'Prophecies' campaign. It is limited, however, by the fact that your character will have access to very few 'Skills' for the new secondary profession you have chosen, whereas you probably have dozens of skills for your original 'Secondary'.
However, if you know what you're trying to acheive with the new Primary/Secondary combination, it is very easy to get or purchase the only the handful of skills you want to use in your new Secondary profession.
I totally agree and I think there's nothing wrong with derivative works. GW blatantly ripped off a lot of other concepts (Alien, Starship Troopers, Tolkein) and I didn't mind this at all, they took other people's ideas and weaved it together into their own universe to make decent wargame-lite settings. I think they took other peoples stuff, made it their own and took it somewhere else, and this is very different to blatant plagiarism. It sounds like Blizzard did the same.
It's pretty horrible if they truly threatened litigation over a concept which they took, but I think cross-influence is a positive thing.
I do like the Guild Wars approach of Primary/Secondary, and the ease with which you can reconfigure your character (changing Skills, Secondary Class, and Armour with relative ease) however, I have to call you out on this:
...everyone is perfectly happy to be healed by a Ritualist or an Elementarist/Monk or a Mesmer/Monk who are running healer builds despite not being primary monks.
This is not true, some people will discriminate against people who are not the build which they consider optimal for a particular 'role' (healing in this case). Also, many people will assume that a Monk/* is a healer without asking, or sometimes even when they say they are not... so it's not always the wonderful happy place you make it out to be. That said I've joined pickup groups with Elementalist/Monk healers before who did an excellent job and I have no hesitation partying up with anyone who communicates before we go on a quest/mission.
However, these problems are not unique to Guild Wars and I strongly suspect they are insurmountable. I can't think of any way for their to be 'variety' without some builds being better than others. As long as some builds are better than others, there will be some who don't want you in their party/guild unless you have the particular class/skill/equipment/implants/spells/build that they're looking for.
As someone who has used the 'Guild Wars' site on gamewikis I must say I think this is a great idea. For the couple months I was keen on Guild Wars it was as much fun to read randomly as wikipedia. However, I think these projects need to reach a 'critical mass' and therefore will only take off in popular games with a dedicated core community, like NWN and MMOs.
I haven't read many strategy guides lately, maybe 10 or so in total, and I definitely haven't read any in the last couple years in either a seperate book version or print Computer Game magazine feature.
I've been disillusioned to them since I read the Diablo II strategy guide and like many I had read before it seemed to be a series of common sense suggestions, and a rehashing of in-game help & manual information. More importantly, it often suggested strategies, character builds, and skill combinations that were bad. The most annoying is information which is out of date or incorrect!
At least now I can go to gamefaqs or gaming websites if I want mediocre strategies and single-player walkthroughs (I generally don't).
I find a lot more useful information and effective strategies reading the most popular fan forums for the game in question. Yes, there is bullshit in the forums and information which is wrong, but the absolutely vital thing is that people usually get called out if the provide bad information, strategies that only work on 'easy', or are easily countered. People will sometimes (best cases) give hard evidence/examples/replays/game data to back up their claims, and will comment on whether patches have changed the effectiveness of any plan.
My recommendations:
Detailed information or strategy discussion -> Forums
Walkthrough for an unenjoyable/unsolvable puzzle -> Gamefaqs
Otherwise -> Enjoy the game unassisted
It's very possible I'm out of touch with most others and get more 'into' any game I play
I've tried looking for a good place to find out about Star Wars: Battlefront II and Homeworld 2 but I haven't really found out what the most useful site for these games is.
I think it's a reasonable way to parse the sentance:
"Xen'drik (continent)" > "yet to have lore fleshed out"
"Turbine" > "able to built own world (within Xen'drik)"
"own world (within Xen'drik)" > "included Warforged"
"Warforged" > "new playable race"
I think the sentance clearly states that Xen'drik was a blank slate given to Turbine, they created their own world within this continent, and that the Warforged were part of that creation.
Now, I'm hearing this last part is untrue, so we're left with an article which is either deceptive or badly written.
Fair enough, and I read and article and agree with most of what was said. That's the main reason I thought it was a pity that you Civ 4 as an example. It made some pretty good interface innovations for the 4th game in a series.
I guess I had a slower computer at the time I played Civ 3 and felt it's 3d graphics detracted from being able to play the game and that Civ 4 didn't suffer from that issue, but I recognise it definitely does, and has probably unnecessarily steep requirements for a solid Turn Based strategy game.
Civ4 could make some significant improvements yet, but I think it has 'refocused' this kind of game and made it playable again. A reworking of some interface concepts, especially giving strategic level commands to units & workers is definitely overdue.
It's sad that we no longer see significant interface innovation like the step up from Warcraft II/Red Alert -> Total Annihilation. There's a lot of room for improvement in this area but people keep settling for a rehashed interface with maybe one 'cool new way of doing things'. So many times I play RTS2006 and it's missing great features in CompetitorRTS (2005), PopularRTS (2003), SuckyRTS-with-one-good-feature (2005) and the innovations of OverlookedRTS (2004).
So if they can't even copy obviously good ideas it may be some time before we see abstraction and complete interface redesign.
It's not that funny:-) Firstly, I think most of the pure "actions per minute" micromanagement is not really 'strategy' but the execution of the strategy. We may be better at concieving or visualising a strategy but the computer should obviously be able to enact it faster.
Do you know of any RTS where computer-controlled AI will beat an experienced human player? In most RTSes and especially in Turn Based games like Civilization the computer will get massive resource bonuses on the higher difficulty levels to keep them competitive.
The computer AI can win at chess these days, but a Computer + Human team is better than any human OR any computer independly, generally to be the case because humans are better at strategy and computers are better at tactics.
...when Civ IV has been out for months. I never bought Civ IV. Id been waiting and hoping for a more playable Civ. What finally arrived was a Civ that takes just as many clicks, but with a new animated 3D UI.
I know this has already been mentioned, and I'm not saying the game is perfect, but the primary example in the article is terrible. Civ4 has significantly reduced the number of clicks in several ways
Gameplay changes to encourage less cities. The optimal strategy in Civ 1,2,3 was building as many citites as possible.
Ability to easily select and give commands (including waypoints/command lists) to multiple units.
Ability to easily select and give build orders to multiple cities at the same time
Of course you can micromanage every turn to squeeze every last drop out, but there are a lot of new improvements to help you avoid this if you want. I found Civ 4 to be a breeze to play compared to Civ 2, 3, and Freeciv, so I think the FA author has picked one of the worst possible examples I can think of.
(Keeping with the 'What next?' meme...) In tomorrow's news: "Quake: Why the focus on single player?" and "World of Warcraft needs more time sinks".
This works and I do really like the 'Guard' interface of TA, and how it's a versatile way of saying follow, protect, and fight with. However, if the unit you're guarding dies they will stop following. If there's any area TA could improve it's in formations and pathfinding.
Want to turn it into a game of who-can-click-faster or what?
I actually think this is absolutely true. It's pretty scary to me but I have read a lot of articles and comments from RTS players who cherish the micromanagement and want to keep RTS games about the controlling of individual units.
In reading a bit about Age of Mythology when I was playing it I noticed a lot of players saying that they hated the changes in the "Titans" expansion pack which were geared at reducing micromanagement. For example, in searching for comments like that I saw http://www.ggl.com/view_forum_topic.php?TopicId=30 4&Start=50 where one of the players says:
I haven't and won't play the Titans because of the autoqueue function... [amongst other reasons]
Autoqueue is just an infinite queue option that tells the building to keep producing units! I've seen people say that infinite queue takes the skill out of the game. So to them repeatedly returning to a building and queueing up more units is a skill. I'm not debating that it is in fact a skill, but I don't think it's fun and I think spending less time on this and more time on other parts of the game would be preferrable.
Holy crap u want the auto queue from AoT!!!!!. This was probably the WORST feature in AoT and you want it in AoE3. When I heard AoE3 was not going to have autoqueue, it was one of the happiest days of my life. I pray to God ES don't mess up and put autoque in a patch or expansion.
NO AUTOQUE!
These sort of opinions are why there is no 'infinite-queue' option in recent releases Age of Empires III and Rise of Legends. It's not that the developers don't know how to put it in because it's in Age of Mythology: Titans and Rise of Nations. If you feel that there is not enough interface improvement it may partly be that people because actually fighting against these changes!
So what are you suggesting, that because they keep failing we should just say "screw it", and not bother trying to stop them?
Hmmm... not the worst idea I've ever heard.:-)
That'd be the equivalent of reducing the fatality rate in accidents due to seatbelts and airbags, and then saying "oh, well, not that many people are dying, let's make seatbelts and airbags optional".
No, it's really not equivalent at all. However, if road fatalities went way, waaaay down (perhaps due to other car safety improvement) I'd be happy to see airbags and seatbelts made option. Also, if I didn't think airbags and sealbelts were helping, I'd back this. However, I do believe that these things are helpful.
Or saying "hey violent crime is pretty low these days, let's get rid of the police!".
To be realistic, if major crime was rare, and police could effectively handle all the cases, wouldn't it make sense to have a smaller major crime unit?
However, I'd never suggest completely disbanding the major crime squad because it seems like a bad idea to have any laws go completely unenforced, especially important stuff like murder.
Similarly, I'd never suggest a completely "hands off" approach to terrorism, I'm not suggesting a "come to our country, we won't even try to stop you bombing us" advertising campaign. We should obsolutely attempt to stop terrorist plots if possible and catch people who've committed crimes. I'm just saying the whole "lets bomb/invade countries to prevent terrorism" is a pretty shitty plan.
Unfortunately I think this is true. The future may come when we can't tell the difference between the graphics & performance of a 10 year old game vs a current game, or we can't tell that a game with the same features written in Java is running slower, but I certainly don't think it's on the horizon.
My understanding is that Atari canned the support for Neverwinter Nights and any future "Premium Modules". These were modules released through Bioware which you had to pay for (usually small-medium size modules for small-medium price). This was 'official' content and the ability for them to make a bit more money from NWN carried with it new features and content in patches.
There were no "assurances that we'd seen the last of new NWN modules" - no-one was ever suggesting that there would be no more user created modules, just that we wouldn't see any more "Premium Modules" and official content from Bioware.
This was one of the modules which was going to be a "Premium Module" but got cancelled, and they are releasing it for free, as is the case for a couple of other projects as well. I think it was pretty obvious this was going to happen when we learned that several work in progress modules were cancelled.
However, this does not signify a change of position from Bioware or Atari about the Premium Modules, and it's not an official release from Bioware. It's just another example of stellar quality free content from NWN.
More buttons doesn't have to mean it's automatically more complex. You can have a more intuitive interface and some people seem to be suggesting that the DS games are 'simpler'
I think there are joysticks out there which are more difficult to use than a keyboard with 104+ keys... part of that is that we're familiar with the keyboard, but an equally important part is that many of the keys have letters and numbers on them, things which we use outside of gaming. I'm not saying it has happened yet, but things like microphone, stylus, and motion detecting, definitely have the potential to make things even simpler than even D-pad, A, B.
Wait, are you saying "the real world" = TV?
As someone who has never seen G4 this comes across as absurd. I would probably watch gaming TV but most of the time I'd rather be playing games. There are a lot more people 'in the real word' playing games than there are people watching games on TV.
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Each and every gamer is a beautiful and unique snowflake.
This is definitely reflected in my experiences in Guild Wars, you really notice when you have one or two people in the group who know what they're doing, especially if they are healing, protecting, interrupting, calling targets, tanking, or pulling. Hell, now that I think about it, if they're doing their role effectively you really notice it. More importantly, when people work as a team and everything 'clicks' it's really satisfying to see how easy a hard mission can becomes. I guess that's the attraction of a guild but I found it can happen in a Pick-up Group.
It's actually the only MMORPG (I hope that mmogchart guy doesn't show up to tell me it's not an MMORPG) I've played and I had a pretty good experience with it, and didn't feel obligated to play it because of a subscription fee.
As I said, I agree that Guild Wars doesn't encourage this (role-discrimination), but I though the Great-Grandparent post portrayed the impression that GW solves the problems of human nature when it at best doesn't exacerbate them.
So the logical marketing strategy is to wait 50 years...
Yeah, it doesn't sound like a new concept, it's been around before, especially spurred on by "Current Affairs" programs, tabloids newspapers, and talk radio. The fact the Koreans do it online is new, but I don't think it makes them better or worse for it, they just have a more internetified culture.
I know that Bioware have suggested it was very difficult to work with the D&D license and have to go through approval processes for content. They have said they didn't feel the D&D ruleset was well suited to a CRPG, and have even gone to the extent of declining to develop NWN2 and focusing on making their own intellectual property in future games (Jade Empire, Mass Effect, Dragon Age).
A big part of it was having so many other companies involved in their work, including Hasbro (owners of WoTC), Wizards of the Coast (owners of D&D license), and having to publish through Atari (exclusive D&D license for games).
Some of this doesn't apply if you're talking about just the ruleset and not any campaign settings, but it seems relevant, and I think it's a big part of why developers often choose to make their own setting and rulesets, to avoid baggage and legal issues of using someone else's. I'm also not sure that most P&P rulesets take full advantage of computer ability, where dice rolls can be seamless and real-time is not a bad thing.
The ability to change your secondary class comes up fairly late in the game, roughly 70% of the way through the 'Roleplay'/'Story'. At least this is the case in the 'Prophecies' campaign. It is limited, however, by the fact that your character will have access to very few 'Skills' for the new secondary profession you have chosen, whereas you probably have dozens of skills for your original 'Secondary'.
However, if you know what you're trying to acheive with the new Primary/Secondary combination, it is very easy to get or purchase the only the handful of skills you want to use in your new Secondary profession.
I totally agree and I think there's nothing wrong with derivative works. GW blatantly ripped off a lot of other concepts (Alien, Starship Troopers, Tolkein) and I didn't mind this at all, they took other people's ideas and weaved it together into their own universe to make decent wargame-lite settings. I think they took other peoples stuff, made it their own and took it somewhere else, and this is very different to blatant plagiarism. It sounds like Blizzard did the same.
It's pretty horrible if they truly threatened litigation over a concept which they took, but I think cross-influence is a positive thing.
This is not true, some people will discriminate against people who are not the build which they consider optimal for a particular 'role' (healing in this case). Also, many people will assume that a Monk/* is a healer without asking, or sometimes even when they say they are not... so it's not always the wonderful happy place you make it out to be. That said I've joined pickup groups with Elementalist/Monk healers before who did an excellent job and I have no hesitation partying up with anyone who communicates before we go on a quest/mission.
However, these problems are not unique to Guild Wars and I strongly suspect they are insurmountable. I can't think of any way for their to be 'variety' without some builds being better than others. As long as some builds are better than others, there will be some who don't want you in their party/guild unless you have the particular class/skill/equipment/implants/spells/build that they're looking for.
As someone who has used the 'Guild Wars' site on gamewikis I must say I think this is a great idea. For the couple months I was keen on Guild Wars it was as much fun to read randomly as wikipedia. However, I think these projects need to reach a 'critical mass' and therefore will only take off in popular games with a dedicated core community, like NWN and MMOs.
I haven't read many strategy guides lately, maybe 10 or so in total, and I definitely haven't read any in the last couple years in either a seperate book version or print Computer Game magazine feature.
I've been disillusioned to them since I read the Diablo II strategy guide and like many I had read before it seemed to be a series of common sense suggestions, and a rehashing of in-game help & manual information. More importantly, it often suggested strategies, character builds, and skill combinations that were bad. The most annoying is information which is out of date or incorrect!
At least now I can go to gamefaqs or gaming websites if I want mediocre strategies and single-player walkthroughs (I generally don't).
I find a lot more useful information and effective strategies reading the most popular fan forums for the game in question. Yes, there is bullshit in the forums and information which is wrong, but the absolutely vital thing is that people usually get called out if the provide bad information, strategies that only work on 'easy', or are easily countered. People will sometimes (best cases) give hard evidence/examples/replays/game data to back up their claims, and will comment on whether patches have changed the effectiveness of any plan.
My recommendations:It's very possible I'm out of touch with most others and get more 'into' any game I play
Games I've played recently & best website I could find discussing them:
Civ 4 at Apolyton and Fanatics
Rise of Legends also Game Replays is a pretty popular site for Rise of Legends and other popular RTSes I don't play (C&C, AoE III, Act of War, Battle for Middle Earth).
Rise of Nations
Guild Wars
NWN Official Forums and NWVault
Ground Control II Official Forums
Age of Mythology
Diablo II
I've tried looking for a good place to find out about Star Wars: Battlefront II and Homeworld 2 but I haven't really found out what the most useful site for these games is.
I think the sentance clearly states that Xen'drik was a blank slate given to Turbine, they created their own world within this continent, and that the Warforged were part of that creation.
Now, I'm hearing this last part is untrue, so we're left with an article which is either deceptive or badly written.
"Fair enough, and I read and article and...."
Woah, I need to lay off the ands!
Fair enough, and I read and article and agree with most of what was said. That's the main reason I thought it was a pity that you Civ 4 as an example. It made some pretty good interface innovations for the 4th game in a series.
I guess I had a slower computer at the time I played Civ 3 and felt it's 3d graphics detracted from being able to play the game and that Civ 4 didn't suffer from that issue, but I recognise it definitely does, and has probably unnecessarily steep requirements for a solid Turn Based strategy game.
Civ4 could make some significant improvements yet, but I think it has 'refocused' this kind of game and made it playable again. A reworking of some interface concepts, especially giving strategic level commands to units & workers is definitely overdue.
It's sad that we no longer see significant interface innovation like the step up from Warcraft II/Red Alert -> Total Annihilation. There's a lot of room for improvement in this area but people keep settling for a rehashed interface with maybe one 'cool new way of doing things'. So many times I play RTS2006 and it's missing great features in CompetitorRTS (2005), PopularRTS (2003), SuckyRTS-with-one-good-feature (2005) and the innovations of OverlookedRTS (2004).
So if they can't even copy obviously good ideas it may be some time before we see abstraction and complete interface redesign.
It's not that funny :-) Firstly, I think most of the pure "actions per minute" micromanagement is not really 'strategy' but the execution of the strategy. We may be better at concieving or visualising a strategy but the computer should obviously be able to enact it faster.
Do you know of any RTS where computer-controlled AI will beat an experienced human player? In most RTSes and especially in Turn Based games like Civilization the computer will get massive resource bonuses on the higher difficulty levels to keep them competitive.
The computer AI can win at chess these days, but a Computer + Human team is better than any human OR any computer independly, generally to be the case because humans are better at strategy and computers are better at tactics.
Maybe the Unabomber?
I know this has already been mentioned, and I'm not saying the game is perfect, but the primary example in the article is terrible. Civ4 has significantly reduced the number of clicks in several ways
Of course you can micromanage every turn to squeeze every last drop out, but there are a lot of new improvements to help you avoid this if you want. I found Civ 4 to be a breeze to play compared to Civ 2, 3, and Freeciv, so I think the FA author has picked one of the worst possible examples I can think of.
(Keeping with the 'What next?' meme...) In tomorrow's news: "Quake: Why the focus on single player?" and "World of Warcraft needs more time sinks".
This works and I do really like the 'Guard' interface of TA, and how it's a versatile way of saying follow, protect, and fight with. However, if the unit you're guarding dies they will stop following. If there's any area TA could improve it's in formations and pathfinding.
I actually think this is absolutely true. It's pretty scary to me but I have read a lot of articles and comments from RTS players who cherish the micromanagement and want to keep RTS games about the controlling of individual units.
In reading a bit about Age of Mythology when I was playing it I noticed a lot of players saying that they hated the changes in the "Titans" expansion pack which were geared at reducing micromanagement. For example, in searching for comments like that I saw http://www.ggl.com/view_forum_topic.php?TopicId=30 4&Start=50 where one of the players says:
Autoqueue is just an infinite queue option that tells the building to keep producing units! I've seen people say that infinite queue takes the skill out of the game. So to them repeatedly returning to a building and queueing up more units is a skill. I'm not debating that it is in fact a skill, but I don't think it's fun and I think spending less time on this and more time on other parts of the game would be preferrable.
From http://aoe3.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/forums/display .cgi?action=ct&f=1,26176,0,10
These sort of opinions are why there is no 'infinite-queue' option in recent releases Age of Empires III and Rise of Legends. It's not that the developers don't know how to put it in because it's in Age of Mythology: Titans and Rise of Nations. If you feel that there is not enough interface improvement it may partly be that people because actually fighting against these changes!
To be realistic, if major crime was rare, and police could effectively handle all the cases, wouldn't it make sense to have a smaller major crime unit?
However, I'd never suggest completely disbanding the major crime squad because it seems like a bad idea to have any laws go completely unenforced, especially important stuff like murder.
Similarly, I'd never suggest a completely "hands off" approach to terrorism, I'm not suggesting a "come to our country, we won't even try to stop you bombing us" advertising campaign. We should obsolutely attempt to stop terrorist plots if possible and catch people who've committed crimes. I'm just saying the whole "lets bomb/invade countries to prevent terrorism" is a pretty shitty plan.
Unfortunately I think this is true. The future may come when we can't tell the difference between the graphics & performance of a 10 year old game vs a current game, or we can't tell that a game with the same features written in Java is running slower, but I certainly don't think it's on the horizon.
My understanding is that Atari canned the support for Neverwinter Nights and any future "Premium Modules". These were modules released through Bioware which you had to pay for (usually small-medium size modules for small-medium price). This was 'official' content and the ability for them to make a bit more money from NWN carried with it new features and content in patches.
There were no "assurances that we'd seen the last of new NWN modules" - no-one was ever suggesting that there would be no more user created modules, just that we wouldn't see any more "Premium Modules" and official content from Bioware.
This was one of the modules which was going to be a "Premium Module" but got cancelled, and they are releasing it for free, as is the case for a couple of other projects as well. I think it was pretty obvious this was going to happen when we learned that several work in progress modules were cancelled.
However, this does not signify a change of position from Bioware or Atari about the Premium Modules, and it's not an official release from Bioware. It's just another example of stellar quality free content from NWN.
Maybe if Blizzard ever make a Starcraft remake they'll have to make it backwards-compatible with the original game.
More buttons doesn't have to mean it's automatically more complex. You can have a more intuitive interface and some people seem to be suggesting that the DS games are 'simpler' I think there are joysticks out there which are more difficult to use than a keyboard with 104+ keys... part of that is that we're familiar with the keyboard, but an equally important part is that many of the keys have letters and numbers on them, things which we use outside of gaming. I'm not saying it has happened yet, but things like microphone, stylus, and motion detecting, definitely have the potential to make things even simpler than even D-pad, A, B.
...and to think you nailed bodacious but tripped up on excellent!
Wait, are you saying "the real world" = TV? As someone who has never seen G4 this comes across as absurd. I would probably watch gaming TV but most of the time I'd rather be playing games. There are a lot more people 'in the real word' playing games than there are people watching games on TV.