Fisher-Price would melt if they could see the abominations my friends made. I swear Satan was taking notes, because the... things were downright demonic.
I am currently, and personally, staking out 20 different retail chains which sell both systems. I can assure you that at all 20 locations in various states across the country there were 173 million PS3s, 2 Yillion Wiis, and absolutely no Bobs frog blasting ventcores.
By this I conclude that Durandal is winning the war. Sony and Nintendo will be buried with the epitaph "Fatum Iustum Stultorum".
Generally there's a lot of ramping up that's done prior to a launch. This means that in most cases there's a greater supply at and around the launch period than afterwards, as you've had some number of months to produce systems and related items in advance.
Additionally, most everything sells less following the holidays, as most people don't have money to buy things. Many of the purchases of the Wii are likely to be people still attempting to get little Johnny his Christmas present.
However, the true lull is in games for people who blow through them like tissue paper. They've probably got maximum scores in all five Wii Sports, could recite for you all of Midna's lines from Twilight Princess, could plot every tree on every course in Excite Bike, power their house using Elebits, and have saved and killed as many patients in Trauma Center as your nearest hospital has in its entire life.
Quite simply, until there are more games than any one human can play these people will not be satisfied.
The only Boss I can think of as debilitatingly hard is the one at the bottom of the pit of 100 trials, simply because most everyone finds out the hard way he's stronger than they're prepared for, not to mention the horrible attrition you face trying to get to him.
However, another point to make is that any RPG, including linear ones, can have slow phases where one becomes quite bored. That can kill a game.
I'll bet you that many of these people have similar lists of accomplishments.
However, the point of this article isn't to talk about how some of us bothered to grab the Scarab gun in Halo 2, or discovered Trixie in Toe Jam and Earl without a guide, or have never looked at a FAQ for a Zelda game before already getting everything (and then some). The point is to discuss the games you couldn't finish because of boredom or poor design.
We appreciate your input, but I think you have the purpose mixed up.
There's also the boss which pretty much requires the Wall spell. Good luck trying to beat it if you haven't leveled enough for it. Trying to outdamage its constant healing is a nightmare.
I'm one of those crazy gamers capable of unlocking everything in F-Zero GX, and I did. However, my greatest fear is save file corruption. Can anyone explain to me how I'm supposed to recover the work I did unlocking tracks when crap happens to my save files?
Quite simply, game companies need to catch on that any game requiring more than 5-10 hours to unlock everything useful for multiplayer need to include some method of cheating to unlock it all instantly.
I don't cheat myself, but I have friends who do. Some of these friends wouldn't even play games if they couldn't cheat, simply because it wouldn't be fun for them. That's not how I have fun, but it's how they have fun.
They'll also slap a friendly sticky grenade on your back when you aren't looking and laugh.
Cheats have a place in video games, and I honestly miss the days of the "Unlock everything" codes for Gameshark or just the game itself because it provided a failsafe for when something goes wrong. Nothing kills a game like having your savegame corrupt, and having no recourse but to resign yourself to fewer characters, levels and features (especially after it took 60 hours of play to get everything you did).
1) LoZ: WindWaker - Sailing around to pick up all those triforce pieces, it all just slowed down there and I never beat the game.
2) WarCraft III - I bought the game when it first came out, back when Demon Hunters could burn you for 300 mana, and Huntresses were the key to winning. Things changed, patches fixed imbalances, but I kept playing and had lots of fun becoming more skilled and enjoying myself. Then the first DC hack hit. What was frustrating wasn't so much that I went from a winning record to abject mediocrity so much as the complete inability to finish and sometimes even start games before I was inceremoniously DC'd. The number of times this happened after a dramatic turnaround was more than suspicious. I couldn't play it for months after that, and when I returned I felt left behind. There was no motivation to play competitively again.
3) Beyond Good and Evil - Sailing again, sort of. Once I got the power boat and could explore, I ended up getting very bored and stopped playing.
4) Goblin Commander - After getting through the campaign and defeating the fourth goblin, I simply lost interest.
5) Time Splitters 2 - Awesome game, beat the ever-living snot out of it. Then a friend accidentally corrupted my profile, simultaneously wiping out everything I'd done. Given the huge number of hours it took to unlock everything, that was utterly heartbreaking and I've never played the game again. This is the single greatest reason for an "unlock everything" code.
6) Final Fantasy X - I got stuck at the first, whatever that sport thigy was, match. Or shortly thereafter.
7) Azure Dreams - Fun game as all else, but I keep dropping off once I actually get in range of winning it. Excellent game despite my inability to finish it.
8) Wii Sports - I can't play this alone, not after playing it with people.
9) Evil Genius - For some reason, I can never bring myself to beat this game, despite my evil machinations and plans. I devise traps, complete objectives, silence my enemies, and then stop everything and never return. Apparently the reason why out Evil Genius Overlords haven't conquered the world yet is because they get bored with our childish strategems.
10) Crystalis - There's something about RPGs which dictates I get 3/4ths of the way through and lose interest. However awesome they are.
11) GTA3 - I have too much fun running from the FBI to further the plot. In fact, my only motivation to do any missions is so that I can get people even madder at me.
12) Advance Wars: Dual Strike - It's a fun game, but a long one. I got a fair ways through, but for whatever reason interest died in doing anythign but firing up a random battle map rather than going through the story.
13) Contact - I'm an idiot, and that's all. Best RPG since earthbound and I can't even play 2 hours before I broke for WoW. Shoot me now.
That's the best I can do while at work and away from my gaming collection.
In the same way Sony tells us to wait for the games that will blow away the 360, the 360 told us to wait for games that truly made use of the system, and the DS shrugged off the 'gimmick' stigma so too should we wait before pronouncing sentence on the Wii and its remote, for or against.
For me, I like both killing zombies and waving around a remote like an idiot.
Technically, not one online Wii game has come out period.
This is much more likely due to a lack of proper infrastructure at this point rather than Nintendo intentionally barring the way. Thesuccess of the DS's online service for both first and third-party games is a good indication of that.
Personally, I don't find the AI in the Unreal Tournament games very intelligent. While upping the difficulty makes them more sharper and more accurate, they still function along the same lines and remain predictable.
I can't vouch for the other games, as I haven't played them.
It was thrown together to make a cheaper option availible and dull the impact of a $600 price tag?
Originally the $500 version wasn't going to have an HDMI connector, which would have definately relegated it to at least "half-assed". Fortunately for Sony, they were smart enough to listen to the people who were crying out against this blatant stupidity.
The end result is the $500 model is respectable, although the reason we have it may not be.
Someone working 40 hour weeks at $8 an hour makes $1280 in a month. $900 is very expensive to that person, and $8 is higher than minimum wage in a very large number of states.
It is important to remember that expensive is a relative term, applied either to other items in the same category or to the availible funds of a potential consumer. I believe the latter is more important to the adoption rate of HDTV than the former.
I disagree. There is a fundamental difference here between what Youtube does and what the sleazy advertiser is doing.
Youtube accepts videos from people, and posts them to their website which features ads.
The sleazy advertiser is taking someone else's content, adding an advertisement into the content itself without permission, and reposting it.
While both involve advertisement, Youtube doesn't claim they'll post your video to an ad-free website, and they certainly don't steal your videos off your hard drive without asking. It's a WYSIWYG situation, anyone who uses Youtube knows the webpage has ads. The sleaze, on the other hand, is presenting these videos as something they're not.
Actually, I really enjoyed Cars. The message of appreciating the journey rather than speeding through life is one we Americans could pay more attention to.
You say this and then don't refute me. I can only assume I was.
your argument would be utterly pointless since "one game in thousands" is pretty much equal to "no game at all".
By the same argument, we can claim that "no art at all" that's original or innovative is made because the only piece of good art anyone can name is the Mona Lisa. This is simply untrue.
Firstly, and I am reiterating, it is basic logic that any absolute statement is not provable by example. If I state that "All numbers are even", it doesn't matter how many even numbers I provide to support that statement, it still isn't proven. However, one odd number and the statement is obviously false. This counter-example refutes regardless of whether there's one odd number or one thousand.
Now, the fact is that Katamari Damancy is the common example everyone is familiar with, but it is hardly alone. Viewtiful Joe was successful and very original. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Animal Crossing, Dead Rising, God of War, Shadow of the Collosus, and many more can be thrown onto the list of original titles that were also very successful. There are titles spanning all systems, home and handheld, that are successful without being retreads.
Arcades are actually alive and well in Japan, it's just the US that tanked. Sega has an arcade all to themselves in Sapporo, and probably in most other major cities. I can't say I did a thorough survey while I was there, but it was really easy to find them.
Which actually was quite a big innovation, not because it takes a programmer five minutes to implement, but because it changes how you play these games quite a bit, i.e. taking cover becomes far more important. The rechargeable health bars also meant we could get finally rid of the stupid health packs. Not every innovation has to be Katamari-style to be meaningful. That said a game needs of course a little bit more then just a rechargable health bar to become interesting.
Maybe I'm weird, but the recharging health bars bothered me far more than health packs.
In Halo it made sense. You had a shield which recharged if you weren't getting hit. Some of your enemies did as well. It was a part of the setting, the history, and the game that was tight-knit and awesome.
Then I played Rogue Agent. As far as I could tell, there was no intelligent reason as to why I, a normal human being, should be able to hide behind a wall and suddenly my vitals shoot up to normal. It didn't make sense, and then it made less sense when the same thing started happening in WW2 games.
I had a strong reaction against the change. Maybe it was because they were just copying Halo, and maybe it was because it made even less sense in reality than health packs, but ultimately I walked away from those games extremely disappointed. Intereting game mechanics have a place in video games. Stil, when they destroy the sense of reality a game is going for, or even simply jive with the rest of the game, it kills the game for me.
No matter how many games you can cite that fall in line with the statement "Innovative, Original Games Have No Chance", you only need one counter-example to disprove it. In this case, that example is Katamary Damancy. Unless you add a "Most" to qualify instead of the implied "All", it's simply a fallacious statement. If you do add the "Most", it becomes a largely unhelpful generalization.
If you look at games in general, the number of blockbusters is very small original or otherwise. For every Madden there are other football games that don't make it. Any title not bearing a familiar brand has to fight against the preexisting giants.
Simply, the statement should be "Most Games Have No Chance".
StarCraft: high terrain serves only to create choke points and barriers to units. It is completely ignored for anything but restricting movement.
You're misinformed.
In the abstract sense, terrain also provided barriers to vision. A group of marines running by some cliffs might be pummeled by a photon cannon. Barring an airborne unit scouting the cliff for them, they would only be able to see the photon cannon as it fired, reducing the amount of time they could fight back. This had practical implications for siege tanks, whose slow rate of fire took great advantage of this.
However, the more direct counter to your assertion that in Starcraft terrain was little more than pathing relates to height. Units atop said cliff had an innate advantage over below them in that they could completely avoid the damage. Units attack from below a cliff at units atop one only have 70% accuracy.
This miss chance also applies to units hiding behind trees, and was part of the basis for the famous Snipers custom map.
StarCraft: Every shot fired hits its target, even when a moving target changes direction as a slow-moving projectile approaches.
Aside from the accuracy example listed above, the exception to this rule comes in the form of siege tanks, reavers, and lurkers. It is possible, though not frequent, for a unit to move out of the range of the attack before the damage occurs.
StarCraft: Units either move or they fight. Not both.
There is also an exception to this. The Protoss' carrier was capable of moving and fighting. It only needed to remain still to deploy its drones.
I'm not attempting to refute your argument that StarCraft, while being the most well-known, popular, and balanced RTS of its era, was not as innovative as TA. I just felt compelled to correct your facts before some religious follower of the Cult of Craft came along and reamed you for it.
Actually, hunting around to find keys/buttons is something games like WoW are designed to minimize.
The very nature of the game is such that as you progress with your character the user-interface and the placement of all the icons/key-bindings evolves with you. Anyone else who sits down in front of Yendolf the Finger-Waggler will be baffled at the setup, and will hunt around for buttons. However, assuming you play good ol' Yenny the majority of the time, you'll pretty instinctually find what you're looking for.
It may look like a disorganized mess, but at least it's one that your wife won't organize for you when you aren't looking.
Slashdot Mirror
Fisher-Price would melt if they could see the abominations my friends made. I swear Satan was taking notes, because the... things were downright demonic.
And they played golf! MY EYES! OH GOD MY EYES!
I disagree.
I am currently, and personally, staking out 20 different retail chains which sell both systems. I can assure you that at all 20 locations in various states across the country there were 173 million PS3s, 2 Yillion Wiis, and absolutely no Bobs frog blasting ventcores.
By this I conclude that Durandal is winning the war. Sony and Nintendo will be buried with the epitaph "Fatum Iustum Stultorum".
Generally there's a lot of ramping up that's done prior to a launch. This means that in most cases there's a greater supply at and around the launch period than afterwards, as you've had some number of months to produce systems and related items in advance.
Additionally, most everything sells less following the holidays, as most people don't have money to buy things. Many of the purchases of the Wii are likely to be people still attempting to get little Johnny his Christmas present.
However, the true lull is in games for people who blow through them like tissue paper. They've probably got maximum scores in all five Wii Sports, could recite for you all of Midna's lines from Twilight Princess, could plot every tree on every course in Excite Bike, power their house using Elebits, and have saved and killed as many patients in Trauma Center as your nearest hospital has in its entire life.
Quite simply, until there are more games than any one human can play these people will not be satisfied.
The only Boss I can think of as debilitatingly hard is the one at the bottom of the pit of 100 trials, simply because most everyone finds out the hard way he's stronger than they're prepared for, not to mention the horrible attrition you face trying to get to him.
However, another point to make is that any RPG, including linear ones, can have slow phases where one becomes quite bored. That can kill a game.
I'll bet you that many of these people have similar lists of accomplishments.
However, the point of this article isn't to talk about how some of us bothered to grab the Scarab gun in Halo 2, or discovered Trixie in Toe Jam and Earl without a guide, or have never looked at a FAQ for a Zelda game before already getting everything (and then some). The point is to discuss the games you couldn't finish because of boredom or poor design.
We appreciate your input, but I think you have the purpose mixed up.
There's also the boss which pretty much requires the Wall spell. Good luck trying to beat it if you haven't leveled enough for it. Trying to outdamage its constant healing is a nightmare.
Agreed.
I'm one of those crazy gamers capable of unlocking everything in F-Zero GX, and I did. However, my greatest fear is save file corruption. Can anyone explain to me how I'm supposed to recover the work I did unlocking tracks when crap happens to my save files?
Quite simply, game companies need to catch on that any game requiring more than 5-10 hours to unlock everything useful for multiplayer need to include some method of cheating to unlock it all instantly.
I completely disagree.
I don't cheat myself, but I have friends who do. Some of these friends wouldn't even play games if they couldn't cheat, simply because it wouldn't be fun for them. That's not how I have fun, but it's how they have fun.
They'll also slap a friendly sticky grenade on your back when you aren't looking and laugh.
Cheats have a place in video games, and I honestly miss the days of the "Unlock everything" codes for Gameshark or just the game itself because it provided a failsafe for when something goes wrong. Nothing kills a game like having your savegame corrupt, and having no recourse but to resign yourself to fewer characters, levels and features (especially after it took 60 hours of play to get everything you did).
1) LoZ: WindWaker - Sailing around to pick up all those triforce pieces, it all just slowed down there and I never beat the game.
2) WarCraft III - I bought the game when it first came out, back when Demon Hunters could burn you for 300 mana, and Huntresses were the key to winning. Things changed, patches fixed imbalances, but I kept playing and had lots of fun becoming more skilled and enjoying myself. Then the first DC hack hit. What was frustrating wasn't so much that I went from a winning record to abject mediocrity so much as the complete inability to finish and sometimes even start games before I was inceremoniously DC'd. The number of times this happened after a dramatic turnaround was more than suspicious. I couldn't play it for months after that, and when I returned I felt left behind. There was no motivation to play competitively again.
3) Beyond Good and Evil - Sailing again, sort of. Once I got the power boat and could explore, I ended up getting very bored and stopped playing.
4) Goblin Commander - After getting through the campaign and defeating the fourth goblin, I simply lost interest.
5) Time Splitters 2 - Awesome game, beat the ever-living snot out of it. Then a friend accidentally corrupted my profile, simultaneously wiping out everything I'd done. Given the huge number of hours it took to unlock everything, that was utterly heartbreaking and I've never played the game again. This is the single greatest reason for an "unlock everything" code.
6) Final Fantasy X - I got stuck at the first, whatever that sport thigy was, match. Or shortly thereafter.
7) Azure Dreams - Fun game as all else, but I keep dropping off once I actually get in range of winning it. Excellent game despite my inability to finish it.
8) Wii Sports - I can't play this alone, not after playing it with people.
9) Evil Genius - For some reason, I can never bring myself to beat this game, despite my evil machinations and plans. I devise traps, complete objectives, silence my enemies, and then stop everything and never return. Apparently the reason why out Evil Genius Overlords haven't conquered the world yet is because they get bored with our childish strategems.
10) Crystalis - There's something about RPGs which dictates I get 3/4ths of the way through and lose interest. However awesome they are.
11) GTA3 - I have too much fun running from the FBI to further the plot. In fact, my only motivation to do any missions is so that I can get people even madder at me.
12) Advance Wars: Dual Strike - It's a fun game, but a long one. I got a fair ways through, but for whatever reason interest died in doing anythign but firing up a random battle map rather than going through the story.
13) Contact - I'm an idiot, and that's all. Best RPG since earthbound and I can't even play 2 hours before I broke for WoW. Shoot me now.
That's the best I can do while at work and away from my gaming collection.
In the same way Sony tells us to wait for the games that will blow away the 360, the 360 told us to wait for games that truly made use of the system, and the DS shrugged off the 'gimmick' stigma so too should we wait before pronouncing sentence on the Wii and its remote, for or against.
For me, I like both killing zombies and waving around a remote like an idiot.
Technically, not one online Wii game has come out period.
This is much more likely due to a lack of proper infrastructure at this point rather than Nintendo intentionally barring the way. Thesuccess of the DS's online service for both first and third-party games is a good indication of that.
Personally, I don't find the AI in the Unreal Tournament games very intelligent. While upping the difficulty makes them more sharper and more accurate, they still function along the same lines and remain predictable.
I can't vouch for the other games, as I haven't played them.
It was thrown together to make a cheaper option availible and dull the impact of a $600 price tag?
Originally the $500 version wasn't going to have an HDMI connector, which would have definately relegated it to at least "half-assed". Fortunately for Sony, they were smart enough to listen to the people who were crying out against this blatant stupidity.
The end result is the $500 model is respectable, although the reason we have it may not be.
Someone working 40 hour weeks at $8 an hour makes $1280 in a month. $900 is very expensive to that person, and $8 is higher than minimum wage in a very large number of states.
It is important to remember that expensive is a relative term, applied either to other items in the same category or to the availible funds of a potential consumer. I believe the latter is more important to the adoption rate of HDTV than the former.
I disagree. There is a fundamental difference here between what Youtube does and what the sleazy advertiser is doing.
Youtube accepts videos from people, and posts them to their website which features ads.
The sleazy advertiser is taking someone else's content, adding an advertisement into the content itself without permission, and reposting it.
While both involve advertisement, Youtube doesn't claim they'll post your video to an ad-free website, and they certainly don't steal your videos off your hard drive without asking. It's a WYSIWYG situation, anyone who uses Youtube knows the webpage has ads. The sleaze, on the other hand, is presenting these videos as something they're not.
The parent may or may not have managed to be funny, but they obviously weren't trolling.
Actually, I really enjoyed Cars. The message of appreciating the journey rather than speeding through life is one we Americans could pay more attention to.
Firstly, and I am reiterating, it is basic logic that any absolute statement is not provable by example. If I state that "All numbers are even", it doesn't matter how many even numbers I provide to support that statement, it still isn't proven. However, one odd number and the statement is obviously false. This counter-example refutes regardless of whether there's one odd number or one thousand.
Now, the fact is that Katamari Damancy is the common example everyone is familiar with, but it is hardly alone. Viewtiful Joe was successful and very original. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Animal Crossing, Dead Rising, God of War, Shadow of the Collosus, and many more can be thrown onto the list of original titles that were also very successful. There are titles spanning all systems, home and handheld, that are successful without being retreads.
Katamari Damancy is merely the poster-child.
Arcades are actually alive and well in Japan, it's just the US that tanked. Sega has an arcade all to themselves in Sapporo, and probably in most other major cities. I can't say I did a thorough survey while I was there, but it was really easy to find them.
In Halo it made sense. You had a shield which recharged if you weren't getting hit. Some of your enemies did as well. It was a part of the setting, the history, and the game that was tight-knit and awesome.
Then I played Rogue Agent. As far as I could tell, there was no intelligent reason as to why I, a normal human being, should be able to hide behind a wall and suddenly my vitals shoot up to normal. It didn't make sense, and then it made less sense when the same thing started happening in WW2 games.
I had a strong reaction against the change. Maybe it was because they were just copying Halo, and maybe it was because it made even less sense in reality than health packs, but ultimately I walked away from those games extremely disappointed. Intereting game mechanics have a place in video games. Stil, when they destroy the sense of reality a game is going for, or even simply jive with the rest of the game, it kills the game for me.
The GP is dead on, it's basic logic.
No matter how many games you can cite that fall in line with the statement "Innovative, Original Games Have No Chance", you only need one counter-example to disprove it. In this case, that example is Katamary Damancy. Unless you add a "Most" to qualify instead of the implied "All", it's simply a fallacious statement. If you do add the "Most", it becomes a largely unhelpful generalization.
If you look at games in general, the number of blockbusters is very small original or otherwise. For every Madden there are other football games that don't make it. Any title not bearing a familiar brand has to fight against the preexisting giants.
Simply, the statement should be "Most Games Have No Chance".
My question: Is Okami really all that innovative and new if it's just a well-made Zelda in a different setting?
Surely there is more to the game than "unbranded Zelda".
In the abstract sense, terrain also provided barriers to vision. A group of marines running by some cliffs might be pummeled by a photon cannon. Barring an airborne unit scouting the cliff for them, they would only be able to see the photon cannon as it fired, reducing the amount of time they could fight back. This had practical implications for siege tanks, whose slow rate of fire took great advantage of this.
However, the more direct counter to your assertion that in Starcraft terrain was little more than pathing relates to height. Units atop said cliff had an innate advantage over below them in that they could completely avoid the damage. Units attack from below a cliff at units atop one only have 70% accuracy.
This miss chance also applies to units hiding behind trees, and was part of the basis for the famous Snipers custom map. Aside from the accuracy example listed above, the exception to this rule comes in the form of siege tanks, reavers, and lurkers. It is possible, though not frequent, for a unit to move out of the range of the attack before the damage occurs. There is also an exception to this. The Protoss' carrier was capable of moving and fighting. It only needed to remain still to deploy its drones.
I'm not attempting to refute your argument that StarCraft, while being the most well-known, popular, and balanced RTS of its era, was not as innovative as TA. I just felt compelled to correct your facts before some religious follower of the Cult of Craft came along and reamed you for it.
It's an interesting article, but I have to question why this wasn't brought up in 2004 when it was written.
Actually, hunting around to find keys/buttons is something games like WoW are designed to minimize.
The very nature of the game is such that as you progress with your character the user-interface and the placement of all the icons/key-bindings evolves with you. Anyone else who sits down in front of Yendolf the Finger-Waggler will be baffled at the setup, and will hunt around for buttons. However, assuming you play good ol' Yenny the majority of the time, you'll pretty instinctually find what you're looking for.
It may look like a disorganized mess, but at least it's one that your wife won't organize for you when you aren't looking.