The total numbers don't matter, they're in short supply because demand exceeds supply. Think about this, if every person in the world needed a flu vaccine, but only a billion people have been inoculated, would you still say that this isn't an issue of short supply?
Yes, there was a Xenosaga episode 3. And I was only able to make it through half of the first Xenosaga game, it wasn't the cutscenes as much as I was bored by the game and the battles. I believe I must actually like cutscenes as the Metal Gear Solid series is one of my favorites.
And I've had enough of Ivalice too, but maybe if the FF13 world is built from the groundup with multiple games in mind, it will be more intriguing... or less.
I'm a Christian, not a fundamentalist, but I don't think Christianity, or many other religions, would collapse from solid evidence of extra terrestrial life. Actually, it raises a lot more interesting questions, like did they have a Christ-like figure be born into their species? Does God have many Sons that he sends out across the universe, or are they all Jesus? When we arrive in heaven, are we going to be greeted by alien angels? If God had a hand in our creation, who is to say he didn't have a hand in other species, in other planets? I don't believe there's anything in the Bible that says we are His ONLY people. I think they're interesting questions and definitely something I ponder sometimes.
A lot of these questions were originally spawned in my mind by the Arthur C. Clarke book, Rama II. It's a good read, but read the first one first of course.
Your comparison is not very fair as all the GTA games you listed are all basically the same game engine with a different world on top of it. What Square is likely to do is the opposite, build many different game engines with the same world. Look at what they're doing with FF7, they're experimenting with different genres but keeping it in the same universe. I can understand the point you're trying to make, but the point of the GTA games is that they're different stories in different settings (at least different stories). The FF13 games will likely be different stories, same general setting, with a different feel.
Hmmm... I say go for it. If Square-Enix is going to spend millions of dollars with some of the best talent creating the universe for FFXIII, why not exploit it? We see this all the time in science fiction and fantasy, why can't it work for video games? It doesn't mean that every FFXIII game will be good, but how many times have we finished a game and thought, "wow, I really liked those characters/cities/culture/history/bad guys/etc. I would love to play another game in that universe." I would love to play another Chrono game, or another game in the world of Final Fantasy 6. Square gave us a taste of this with FFX-2, and even though the game wasn't your typical Square RPG, it sold gobs because it was a direct sequel to a much loved game.
I know that new ideas and such are grand, but sometimes I just like the old stuff. If I fall in love with the FFXIII world (and can afford a PS3), then I would love more games in that world.
That's a good point, as the E3 of old was saturated with so many non-journalists and/or bloggers. However, that would also allow game information to be spread in a lot of unique ways that won't be as readily available anymore. I guess we'll have to wait and see how it all pans out, because this event is really not the same as it was before.
Well, there are only going to be 4000 invitations sent out. From the smaller developer's point of view, there's no point in paying the high cost to get a booth, transporting yourself and everything you need for the booth, getting some game demos set up, etc. just for 4000 people who are much more interested in seeing what Nintendo, Capcom, and Konami have to offer anyway. It's a sad truth but there are better and cheaper ways to reach those kind of numbers. Last year when there were 60,000 attendees, it was probably worth it, but we're looking at less than 10% of last year's numbers in terms of booths and attendees. Sounds like just what the E3 planners wanted.
Wow, great article and definitely something I wouldn't even consider unless it discussed wake-on-lan settings as I use my computer as data storage for my media center also. I tested out my standby settings and my fans just kept going, which is a problem for me because right now my office is 9 degrees hotter than the temperature outside (80 to 71, in Minnesota!). Kind of uncomfortable. Also nice to see an article all on one page. I expect to see a regurgitation of this article soon on some ad-ridden PC site spanning 10 pages.
I signed up for it this week, to give it a trial run. Well, actually I've been using Google's Search History since its inception and I really like that. Being able to find things I searched for in the past makes my life a lot easier sometimes. I know it could potentially be a big privacy problem for me but it's something I choose to do and I know the risks. Anyways, Google Web Search, their new feature, requires the Google Web Toolbar, which I don't use on any of my computers, because I never really saw the point of it once I moved over to Firefox years ago and it had a built in search bar. I installed it at work and tried to make it as minimalistic as possible while still keeping its functionality, which I'm not sure how to exploit yet. I'll probably tinker with it this week at work and see if it's worth it for me to use. I'm guessing I will not keep it at the moment.
I had the same printer throughout college, the HP 5550. It cost me about $120 or so back in 2002. I've literally only bought two or three black cartridges for it in the last five years and have printed thousands of pages for papers, handouts, etc. Of course, I always print in "Fast Draft" mode, so the black ink is light, but it still looks great in my opinion. Oh yeah, it's also very fast when printing in Fast Draft, so there's another plus.
The best part is, the black cartridges cost $20, or at least they did last time I bought them. So I would guess I have spent less than $200 on my printer alone over the last five years, which sounds pretty darn good for all the printing I did in school. Best printer I will probably ever own.
This is interesting as earlier reports were basically calling the game a WoW clone (and from the pictures it looked like it), and there were a lot of complaints that it didn't feel right being able to walk from the Shire to Mt. Doom in under half an hour. Maybe things have really improved during the beta.
Anyways, I've been WoW-free for about a year now, and I'm enjoying my time actually playing other video games.
The first few questions were really great, we actually got to hear the real Phil Harrison in those answers as opposed to the PR/spin guy in the rest where we learned nothing new. I know we all like to rag on Sony but it's not like we're going to trap Phil in some mind-boggingly tricky question where he's forced to admit Sony's ultimate failure. He does this for a living. Anyways, decent interview and it's interesting to see how this all played out.
There's been some great reasons listed already, but the obvious one to me is that the skill of the A.I. isn't apparent in commercials and trailers and screenshots, the graphics are. Graphics are driving the industry, they always have. In my opinion, there was a time when the discrepancy between graphics and A.I. were smaller.
Consider the days of Civilization II. The graphics were decent for the day but the A.I. was generally pretty good and coupled with a good game engine (not without its faults though), the discrepancy was not that apparent.
Fast forward a few years to the console game Goldeneye. Very good graphics for its day (especially on a console) but the A.I. was starting to stagnant. There were cases where infinite baddies would flood through a door, getting mowed down continually. Of course, Goldeneye came out almost exactly a year before Half-Life, a game usually praised as having a good graphical engine (on the PC) and good A.I.
Now a few years later again, we have Half-Life 2 and FEAR and many other first person shooters which are hailed as having great A.I. But all these games still suffer. Why is that soldier jogging against the wall? Why is this character I'm supposed to be leading around getting stuck on corners and running around randomly? The developers are spending so much money on graphical engines that they expect us to be entranced immediately by the world they created, and then all of a sudden, one of the enemies (or teammates for that matter) does something extremely stupid or so abnormal, we're ripped out of this trance and forced to remember that yes, we're just playing a game.
I'm sure it's not always the developer's fault. They have a lot of pressure from all sides to make the presentation of the game great, but it's apparent that the presentation can fall flat on its face when the A.I. is brain dead. But they don't have to show the A.I. being stupid in the commercials, they can show off the graphics and the pre-rendered cutscenes.
Graphics are driving the industry and thus the industry is being driven by Nvidia, Intel, and ATI/AMD. If developers were allowed to put some of the money they used to build a state of the art graphics engine into A.I. development, I think we would be taking some great steps. Here's to no more wall-jogging Nazis.
This is a great idea as the security system could develop thresholds using data from the last n logins between logins where there's plenty of time and processor power to do so. If you wanted to really get into it, you could have it learn how you type on a Monday (when you may be recovering from the weekend) compared to a Wednesday and develop thresholds more independently. Or even the time of day, 8:00am compared to 10am compared to 1pm is even probably different. Man, if this was open source I would love this.
Because Steam has relatively unobtrusive DRM, compared to WGA which regularly accuses you of pirating Windows. But DRM is DRM, so I understand your point.
I really like the Onimusha series. Each game (there are four of them for the PS2) is pretty unique in its own right but deep down they're very fun hack and slash action games. You can probably pick up all four for about 60 bucks now which is pretty good.
Just read your blog, congratulations on getting a refund! I have a question though, in one of your earier blog posts (A new computer), you describe trying to boot with various Windows and Linux discs. Did you ever have any luck getting this to work? Can you describe the process on how you did it? Thanks.
I'm impressed with Slovenia and Finland at over 40% penetration. Though they're relatively small countries population wise, the Firefox teams have really made a substantial impact there. These successes are what it really takes for people to notice Firefox in the mainstream. 40% probably puts them near the share Internet Explorer has locally which is definitely a great step. The article also shows Australia at 25% which is awesome. Great numbers all around, keep up the great work.
Maybe because most people can deal with pain and ugliness in a non-violent way? Whether it's through art or religion or the internet or just breaking down and crying. But days like today remind us that not everyone is the same, and not everyone can deal with pain. To me, this person is an anomaly, and I agree with you that hopefully we can keep it that way.
I'm less than two weeks away from taking the Java 5 certification exam, and Generics are definitely the most difficult new concept for me to get my head wrapped around. Granted I haven't studied it nearly enough yet and haven't done any large scale projects in 1.5 (we use 1.4.2 at work), so hopefully I'll be well prepared by the time next Friday rolls around. I use the Sierra, Bates SCJP book to study and it supposedly has everything I need to know about Generics for the exam, but is it everything I need to know for the "real world"? Maybe I'll check this book out, but after the exam. Don't want to get confused with real applications of generics.:)
The simple answer is yes, or maybe it's no. It really depends on if you choose to wear those rose-colored glasses or not.
For the yes crowd, we tend to remember great games from our youth. We remember growing up on franchises (before the term franchise meant ingame ad deals and a yearly roster update) that grew with us. We tend to remember the first time we played a video game, whether it was Pong or Tetris or Super Mario Bros. or Street Fighter 2. We look back at those experiences as good and positive.
For the no crowd, we tend to remember the utter crap we had to go through. Whether it was dying in Ninja Gaiden or Contra for the thousandth time and throwing the controller at our little sister, or just wasting 15 weeks allowance on an absolute piece of crap. Those moments can linger with us and we don't soon forget.
Personally, I tend to drift between the two. I can recognize how gaming has changed over the last 20 years because I've been paying attention. I am continually making mental notes about games and the industry and I have the (un?)fortunate aspect of my brain that acts like a database of this knowledge and stores it forever (I can remember quicker the day Ocarina of Time came out in the US than the day I was married). I did a lot of research as a child, reading Nintendo Power and Game Players, etc. so I wasn't exposed to many "very bad games", though I did own a few, so thus, I generally have a wave of nostalgia flow over me when I think of playing Super Mario Bros. 3 for the first time or when I received a Super Nintendo for my birthday.
But I am still playing games. And I am still doing my research generally before I play them. I have a wide range of interests so I play everything nowadays from Pokemon to GTA to Civ 4 to Okami. And I tend to enjoy them all for what they're worth. I don't waste my time with bad games because I don't have a lot of time to waste. Much like when I was a child and I didn't have the money to waste. So many people here complain about stories in games nowadays, that's great, that's your opinion. But stop playing mainstream crap and branch out a little. Chances are your favorite story-based game as a child was a niche product when it was first released and there were plenty of crappy plot driven games when we were younger too.
Anyways, I'm starting to digress, but my main point is that I feel bad for people who can clearly say "yes" or "no" to the original question. If you say "yes" I feel bad because there IS a lot of great stuff out there and if you need help finding it, I can help. And if you say "no" I feel bad because there WAS a lot of great stuff out there and if you need help finding it, I can help.
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The total numbers don't matter, they're in short supply because demand exceeds supply. Think about this, if every person in the world needed a flu vaccine, but only a billion people have been inoculated, would you still say that this isn't an issue of short supply?
Yes, there was a Xenosaga episode 3. And I was only able to make it through half of the first Xenosaga game, it wasn't the cutscenes as much as I was bored by the game and the battles. I believe I must actually like cutscenes as the Metal Gear Solid series is one of my favorites.
And I've had enough of Ivalice too, but maybe if the FF13 world is built from the groundup with multiple games in mind, it will be more intriguing... or less.
I'm a Christian, not a fundamentalist, but I don't think Christianity, or many other religions, would collapse from solid evidence of extra terrestrial life. Actually, it raises a lot more interesting questions, like did they have a Christ-like figure be born into their species? Does God have many Sons that he sends out across the universe, or are they all Jesus? When we arrive in heaven, are we going to be greeted by alien angels? If God had a hand in our creation, who is to say he didn't have a hand in other species, in other planets? I don't believe there's anything in the Bible that says we are His ONLY people. I think they're interesting questions and definitely something I ponder sometimes.
A lot of these questions were originally spawned in my mind by the Arthur C. Clarke book, Rama II. It's a good read, but read the first one first of course.
And right now my Guide describes it as only "Harmless"! Let's go!
Your comparison is not very fair as all the GTA games you listed are all basically the same game engine with a different world on top of it. What Square is likely to do is the opposite, build many different game engines with the same world. Look at what they're doing with FF7, they're experimenting with different genres but keeping it in the same universe. I can understand the point you're trying to make, but the point of the GTA games is that they're different stories in different settings (at least different stories). The FF13 games will likely be different stories, same general setting, with a different feel.
Of course, I may be wrong.
Hmmm... I say go for it. If Square-Enix is going to spend millions of dollars with some of the best talent creating the universe for FFXIII, why not exploit it? We see this all the time in science fiction and fantasy, why can't it work for video games? It doesn't mean that every FFXIII game will be good, but how many times have we finished a game and thought, "wow, I really liked those characters/cities/culture/history/bad guys/etc. I would love to play another game in that universe." I would love to play another Chrono game, or another game in the world of Final Fantasy 6. Square gave us a taste of this with FFX-2, and even though the game wasn't your typical Square RPG, it sold gobs because it was a direct sequel to a much loved game.
I know that new ideas and such are grand, but sometimes I just like the old stuff. If I fall in love with the FFXIII world (and can afford a PS3), then I would love more games in that world.
That's a good point, as the E3 of old was saturated with so many non-journalists and/or bloggers. However, that would also allow game information to be spread in a lot of unique ways that won't be as readily available anymore. I guess we'll have to wait and see how it all pans out, because this event is really not the same as it was before.
Well, there are only going to be 4000 invitations sent out. From the smaller developer's point of view, there's no point in paying the high cost to get a booth, transporting yourself and everything you need for the booth, getting some game demos set up, etc. just for 4000 people who are much more interested in seeing what Nintendo, Capcom, and Konami have to offer anyway. It's a sad truth but there are better and cheaper ways to reach those kind of numbers. Last year when there were 60,000 attendees, it was probably worth it, but we're looking at less than 10% of last year's numbers in terms of booths and attendees. Sounds like just what the E3 planners wanted.
Wow, great article and definitely something I wouldn't even consider unless it discussed wake-on-lan settings as I use my computer as data storage for my media center also. I tested out my standby settings and my fans just kept going, which is a problem for me because right now my office is 9 degrees hotter than the temperature outside (80 to 71, in Minnesota!). Kind of uncomfortable. Also nice to see an article all on one page. I expect to see a regurgitation of this article soon on some ad-ridden PC site spanning 10 pages.
I signed up for it this week, to give it a trial run. Well, actually I've been using Google's Search History since its inception and I really like that. Being able to find things I searched for in the past makes my life a lot easier sometimes. I know it could potentially be a big privacy problem for me but it's something I choose to do and I know the risks. Anyways, Google Web Search, their new feature, requires the Google Web Toolbar, which I don't use on any of my computers, because I never really saw the point of it once I moved over to Firefox years ago and it had a built in search bar. I installed it at work and tried to make it as minimalistic as possible while still keeping its functionality, which I'm not sure how to exploit yet. I'll probably tinker with it this week at work and see if it's worth it for me to use. I'm guessing I will not keep it at the moment.
I had the same printer throughout college, the HP 5550. It cost me about $120 or so back in 2002. I've literally only bought two or three black cartridges for it in the last five years and have printed thousands of pages for papers, handouts, etc. Of course, I always print in "Fast Draft" mode, so the black ink is light, but it still looks great in my opinion. Oh yeah, it's also very fast when printing in Fast Draft, so there's another plus.
The best part is, the black cartridges cost $20, or at least they did last time I bought them. So I would guess I have spent less than $200 on my printer alone over the last five years, which sounds pretty darn good for all the printing I did in school. Best printer I will probably ever own.
This is interesting as earlier reports were basically calling the game a WoW clone (and from the pictures it looked like it), and there were a lot of complaints that it didn't feel right being able to walk from the Shire to Mt. Doom in under half an hour. Maybe things have really improved during the beta.
Anyways, I've been WoW-free for about a year now, and I'm enjoying my time actually playing other video games.
Another reason to ban dihydrogen monoxide once and for all.
The first few questions were really great, we actually got to hear the real Phil Harrison in those answers as opposed to the PR/spin guy in the rest where we learned nothing new. I know we all like to rag on Sony but it's not like we're going to trap Phil in some mind-boggingly tricky question where he's forced to admit Sony's ultimate failure. He does this for a living. Anyways, decent interview and it's interesting to see how this all played out.
There's been some great reasons listed already, but the obvious one to me is that the skill of the A.I. isn't apparent in commercials and trailers and screenshots, the graphics are. Graphics are driving the industry, they always have. In my opinion, there was a time when the discrepancy between graphics and A.I. were smaller.
Consider the days of Civilization II. The graphics were decent for the day but the A.I. was generally pretty good and coupled with a good game engine (not without its faults though), the discrepancy was not that apparent.
Fast forward a few years to the console game Goldeneye. Very good graphics for its day (especially on a console) but the A.I. was starting to stagnant. There were cases where infinite baddies would flood through a door, getting mowed down continually. Of course, Goldeneye came out almost exactly a year before Half-Life, a game usually praised as having a good graphical engine (on the PC) and good A.I.
Now a few years later again, we have Half-Life 2 and FEAR and many other first person shooters which are hailed as having great A.I. But all these games still suffer. Why is that soldier jogging against the wall? Why is this character I'm supposed to be leading around getting stuck on corners and running around randomly? The developers are spending so much money on graphical engines that they expect us to be entranced immediately by the world they created, and then all of a sudden, one of the enemies (or teammates for that matter) does something extremely stupid or so abnormal, we're ripped out of this trance and forced to remember that yes, we're just playing a game.
I'm sure it's not always the developer's fault. They have a lot of pressure from all sides to make the presentation of the game great, but it's apparent that the presentation can fall flat on its face when the A.I. is brain dead. But they don't have to show the A.I. being stupid in the commercials, they can show off the graphics and the pre-rendered cutscenes.
Graphics are driving the industry and thus the industry is being driven by Nvidia, Intel, and ATI/AMD. If developers were allowed to put some of the money they used to build a state of the art graphics engine into A.I. development, I think we would be taking some great steps. Here's to no more wall-jogging Nazis.
I've heard outsourced devs called a lot worse.
This is a great idea as the security system could develop thresholds using data from the last n logins between logins where there's plenty of time and processor power to do so. If you wanted to really get into it, you could have it learn how you type on a Monday (when you may be recovering from the weekend) compared to a Wednesday and develop thresholds more independently. Or even the time of day, 8:00am compared to 10am compared to 1pm is even probably different. Man, if this was open source I would love this.
Because Steam has relatively unobtrusive DRM, compared to WGA which regularly accuses you of pirating Windows. But DRM is DRM, so I understand your point.
I really like the Onimusha series. Each game (there are four of them for the PS2) is pretty unique in its own right but deep down they're very fun hack and slash action games. You can probably pick up all four for about 60 bucks now which is pretty good.
Just read your blog, congratulations on getting a refund! I have a question though, in one of your earier blog posts (A new computer), you describe trying to boot with various Windows and Linux discs. Did you ever have any luck getting this to work? Can you describe the process on how you did it? Thanks.
I'm impressed with Slovenia and Finland at over 40% penetration. Though they're relatively small countries population wise, the Firefox teams have really made a substantial impact there. These successes are what it really takes for people to notice Firefox in the mainstream. 40% probably puts them near the share Internet Explorer has locally which is definitely a great step. The article also shows Australia at 25% which is awesome. Great numbers all around, keep up the great work.
Ah yes, the "American way". Where tragedies like this occur on a weekly basis.
Maybe because most people can deal with pain and ugliness in a non-violent way? Whether it's through art or religion or the internet or just breaking down and crying. But days like today remind us that not everyone is the same, and not everyone can deal with pain. To me, this person is an anomaly, and I agree with you that hopefully we can keep it that way.
I'm less than two weeks away from taking the Java 5 certification exam, and Generics are definitely the most difficult new concept for me to get my head wrapped around. Granted I haven't studied it nearly enough yet and haven't done any large scale projects in 1.5 (we use 1.4.2 at work), so hopefully I'll be well prepared by the time next Friday rolls around. I use the Sierra, Bates SCJP book to study and it supposedly has everything I need to know about Generics for the exam, but is it everything I need to know for the "real world"? Maybe I'll check this book out, but after the exam. Don't want to get confused with real applications of generics. :)
The simple answer is yes, or maybe it's no. It really depends on if you choose to wear those rose-colored glasses or not.
For the yes crowd, we tend to remember great games from our youth. We remember growing up on franchises (before the term franchise meant ingame ad deals and a yearly roster update) that grew with us. We tend to remember the first time we played a video game, whether it was Pong or Tetris or Super Mario Bros. or Street Fighter 2. We look back at those experiences as good and positive.
For the no crowd, we tend to remember the utter crap we had to go through. Whether it was dying in Ninja Gaiden or Contra for the thousandth time and throwing the controller at our little sister, or just wasting 15 weeks allowance on an absolute piece of crap. Those moments can linger with us and we don't soon forget.
Personally, I tend to drift between the two. I can recognize how gaming has changed over the last 20 years because I've been paying attention. I am continually making mental notes about games and the industry and I have the (un?)fortunate aspect of my brain that acts like a database of this knowledge and stores it forever (I can remember quicker the day Ocarina of Time came out in the US than the day I was married). I did a lot of research as a child, reading Nintendo Power and Game Players, etc. so I wasn't exposed to many "very bad games", though I did own a few, so thus, I generally have a wave of nostalgia flow over me when I think of playing Super Mario Bros. 3 for the first time or when I received a Super Nintendo for my birthday.
But I am still playing games. And I am still doing my research generally before I play them. I have a wide range of interests so I play everything nowadays from Pokemon to GTA to Civ 4 to Okami. And I tend to enjoy them all for what they're worth. I don't waste my time with bad games because I don't have a lot of time to waste. Much like when I was a child and I didn't have the money to waste. So many people here complain about stories in games nowadays, that's great, that's your opinion. But stop playing mainstream crap and branch out a little. Chances are your favorite story-based game as a child was a niche product when it was first released and there were plenty of crappy plot driven games when we were younger too.
Anyways, I'm starting to digress, but my main point is that I feel bad for people who can clearly say "yes" or "no" to the original question. If you say "yes" I feel bad because there IS a lot of great stuff out there and if you need help finding it, I can help. And if you say "no" I feel bad because there WAS a lot of great stuff out there and if you need help finding it, I can help.