1) Planescape Torment - probably the best game to use a story ever created, if there is any art in gaming this game would definitely be a candidate as what kind of 'art' gaming can be.
2) Freespace series, no other space sim has put the fun elements together like this series, it's too bad it's sales numbers were so low, I would love a freespace like MMO, it would blow the doors of games like EVE: Online which bore you to death because there is no realtime action and it's all computer controlled.
3) Descent 2, probably one of the most under-rated games of all time, since this game was released before games had full IP support and was done over IPX emulation via kali. Then when Quake came out, it pretty much killed interest in this game over kali. This game had the best 3D multiplayer I have ever experienced, some of the most amazing full motion video renders and which set the 'tone' and feel for the plot, even though it wasn't original or even that deep, it was certainly iteresting for a game of this type. It was difficult to play but even with a keyboard, mouse and joystick, the challenge of mastering true 3D combat made you feel more godly then any in any other modern FPS, true 3D combat, not that panzy soldier stuck to the ground shit. I could never get tired of fighting multiplayer opponents in this game, even with the crappy graphics and fugly cube-ified corridors. It's too bad descent 3 could not recapture the magic and feel of multiplayer descent 2.
4) Fantasy General - A game that slipped entirely under the radar because hex-style strategy games were on the way out and the units/design and graphics were a bit weird (graphically). It was like panzer general but with fantasy units, this game was deep and very cool despite the awkward art and fantasy units, the still sketches and drawings for many of the units were very classy and well done, and the music was well done as well, very epic, I still have some of the songs in MP3 format on my hard drive.
... and realize not everyone like's games so much or thinks so much of them they are willing to shell ou $45-60 (or more) per game on release, no matter how good you games are! When I was a kid *I rented almost all my games*, all the games I bought were either with my own money from job as a teen or gifts from birthdays or at christmas.
Point #2) Gaming is an expensive hobby, try reducing the price of it and you'll increase your market. Don't like that? tough. Most people simply cannot justify $50-60 games when you can rent all the best games at blockbuster for $5 and finish them and be done with them. Most people play games through once then they sit on the shelves, the game industry should wake up and smell the economics of rentals.
Point #3) Expand into non-game related markets, i.e. use those fancy game engines and physics engines to use in business, architectural or educational products. Your biggest market is the non-game markets, I'm sure the military would love the kind of game-related technology some of the industries brightest workers are inventing right now for simulations, many of the game industries programmers would probably love to get to work on war simulations and 'terrorist AI' simulations, trying to predict what 'real people' or 'real soldiers' would do.
"Most of the time I'd visit friends with a Playstation, and marvel at just how long it took them to load their games - only to find lower quality graphics, with a ton of FMV cutscenes. Personally, I'll take faster load times over excess content any day."
Yeah well the other 90 million people that owned playstation one compared to N64's mere 30 million disagree'd with you. Before the N64 Nintendo had alost the entire video game market, the NES sold over 60 million units world wide, and the super nintendo was not far behind with 54 million, in ONE CONSOLE GENERATION, Nintendo went from 54 million units to less then 30 million (that's 24 million lost market share), notice how with each console generation their market size was *cut in half* because they lacked the games people wanted to play on them. Nintendo made the biggest mistake in console history by releasing the N64 without CD-ROM media when the time was ripe for it. They would be #1 or neck and neck for #1 right now if they hadn't weighted the N64 down with carts.
As for your comments on the graphics, you have to be kidding! Go play final fantasy 7 and then go back to ocarina of time and compare the real-time rendered summons and spells to *anything* on the N64.
Also where was street fighter and soul calibur on the n64? Those *big 2D arcade games* wouldn't fit on cartridges without compromising the graphics. I have the ISO's of these games and they are GIGANTIC, over 400-500 megs respectively, there is no way they could be fit on a tiny 256megabit cart, most N64 games were less then 128Megabytes, most PS one games or saturn games were filling one or more 650MB CD's. Final fantasy 7 was 3 CD-ROMS to jog your foggy memory, many playstation RPG's were multi-CDROM behemohts. It's no wonder nintendo got it's ass kicked.
Nintendo doesn't understand the value of technology and hasn't for a while now, notice lots of games that could come on one DVD 4.3 GB or 8.5 GB dual layer dvd took two or more 1.5GB gamecube discs, this is a MAJOR hassle for multiplatform games or big RPG's like final fantasy that take up the entire 8.5 GByte DVD.
Funny I thought corruption was a problem everywhere, especially in the most wealthy countries that happen to attack other countries because of their fear of the growing economic power of China and india. Did you know that there's a growing movement in vermont to secede from the U.S. because of the corruption?
... had to be Nintendo with there Nintendo 64. I was so looking forward to Nintendo dominating the next gen during the SNES era, as it was such a golden age of video gaming for me during the SNES era. But then Nintendo shot themselves in the foot by alienating devs and making a cartridge only based system. I hated having to defect to the playstation but you just couldn't make games like FF7 for the N64 because of the dumbass choice to go with cartridge storage. That is the system that totally killed Nintendo's video game image completely and made them into a "kiddy company" or "Nintendo is for kids", what BS, before that Nintendo was for gamers of all stripes, for both the NES and the SNES, it had mortal kombat, street fighter 2, etc.
Which took all their major 3rd party franchises off their system completely because making all those cool arcade games available on home consoles took way more space available then could be done on a cart. I always imagine just how amazing ocarina of time or majora's mask *could have been* if only they had given the Nintendo 64 CD-ROM storage.
Instead we got sony and they killed Nintendo completely as all the developers of all the best games abandoned ship for the Playstation 1.
To this day I wonder how many oldschool games would still be alive and profiting if it wasn't for the prejudice against anything other then 3D games.
Ryo-ohki when you need one? Who wouldn't want a cute little pet that turns into a space ship when flung into the air?
(Bonus points if you can guess the reference)
Video games, MMO's and RPG's supplanting table top
on
Dungeons and Shadows
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think MMO's are replacing most table top games, I don't think table top games will ever die but, people want to experience and see and feel "real" things, instead of just imagining them.
Just look at the kinds of PC games and video games being released, we don't want overcomplex table top games, we want simple fun, easy to get into games because of the massive constraints now on our time.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Planescape Torment - probably the best game to use a story ever created, if there is any art in gaming this game would definitely be a candidate as what kind of 'art' gaming can be.
2) Freespace series, no other space sim has put the fun elements together like this series, it's too bad it's sales numbers were so low, I would love a freespace like MMO, it would blow the doors of games like EVE: Online which bore you to death because there is no realtime action and it's all computer controlled.
3) Descent 2, probably one of the most under-rated games of all time, since this game was released before games had full IP support and was done over IPX emulation via kali. Then when Quake came out, it pretty much killed interest in this game over kali. This game had the best 3D multiplayer I have ever experienced, some of the most amazing full motion video renders and which set the 'tone' and feel for the plot, even though it wasn't original or even that deep, it was certainly iteresting for a game of this type. It was difficult to play but even with a keyboard, mouse and joystick, the challenge of mastering true 3D combat made you feel more godly then any in any other modern FPS, true 3D combat, not that panzy soldier stuck to the ground shit. I could never get tired of fighting multiplayer opponents in this game, even with the crappy graphics and fugly cube-ified corridors. It's too bad descent 3 could not recapture the magic and feel of multiplayer descent 2.
4) Fantasy General - A game that slipped entirely under the radar because hex-style strategy games were on the way out and the units/design and graphics were a bit weird (graphically). It was like panzer general but with fantasy units, this game was deep and very cool despite the awkward art and fantasy units, the still sketches and drawings for many of the units were very classy and well done, and the music was well done as well, very epic, I still have some of the songs in MP3 format on my hard drive.
... and realize not everyone like's games so much or thinks so much of them they are willing to shell ou $45-60 (or more) per game on release, no matter how good you games are! When I was a kid *I rented almost all my games*, all the games I bought were either with my own money from job as a teen or gifts from birthdays or at christmas.
Point #2) Gaming is an expensive hobby, try reducing the price of it and you'll increase your market. Don't like that? tough. Most people simply cannot justify $50-60 games when you can rent all the best games at blockbuster for $5 and finish them and be done with them. Most people play games through once then they sit on the shelves, the game industry should wake up and smell the economics of rentals.
Point #3) Expand into non-game related markets, i.e. use those fancy game engines and physics engines to use in business, architectural or educational products. Your biggest market is the non-game markets, I'm sure the military would love the kind of game-related technology some of the industries brightest workers are inventing right now for simulations, many of the game industries programmers would probably love to get to work on war simulations and 'terrorist AI' simulations, trying to predict what 'real people' or 'real soldiers' would do.
"Most of the time I'd visit friends with a Playstation, and marvel at just how long it took them to load their games - only to find lower quality graphics, with a ton of FMV cutscenes. Personally, I'll take faster load times over excess content any day."
Yeah well the other 90 million people that owned playstation one compared to N64's mere 30 million disagree'd with you. Before the N64 Nintendo had alost the entire video game market, the NES sold over 60 million units world wide, and the super nintendo was not far behind with 54 million, in ONE CONSOLE GENERATION, Nintendo went from 54 million units to less then 30 million (that's 24 million lost market share), notice how with each console generation their market size was *cut in half* because they lacked the games people wanted to play on them. Nintendo made the biggest mistake in console history by releasing the N64 without CD-ROM media when the time was ripe for it. They would be #1 or neck and neck for #1 right now if they hadn't weighted the N64 down with carts.
As for your comments on the graphics, you have to be kidding! Go play final fantasy 7 and then go back to ocarina of time and compare the real-time rendered summons and spells to *anything* on the N64.
Also where was street fighter and soul calibur on the n64? Those *big 2D arcade games* wouldn't fit on cartridges without compromising the graphics. I have the ISO's of these games and they are GIGANTIC, over 400-500 megs respectively, there is no way they could be fit on a tiny 256megabit cart, most N64 games were less then 128Megabytes, most PS one games or saturn games were filling one or more 650MB CD's. Final fantasy 7 was 3 CD-ROMS to jog your foggy memory, many playstation RPG's were multi-CDROM behemohts. It's no wonder nintendo got it's ass kicked.
Nintendo doesn't understand the value of technology and hasn't for a while now, notice lots of games that could come on one DVD 4.3 GB or 8.5 GB dual layer dvd took two or more 1.5GB gamecube discs, this is a MAJOR hassle for multiplatform games or big RPG's like final fantasy that take up the entire 8.5 GByte DVD.
Funny I thought corruption was a problem everywhere, especially in the most wealthy countries that happen to attack other countries because of their fear of the growing economic power of China and india. Did you know that there's a growing movement in vermont to secede from the U.S. because of the corruption?
... had to be Nintendo with there Nintendo 64. I was so looking forward to Nintendo dominating the next gen during the SNES era, as it was such a golden age of video gaming for me during the SNES era. But then Nintendo shot themselves in the foot by alienating devs and making a cartridge only based system. I hated having to defect to the playstation but you just couldn't make games like FF7 for the N64 because of the dumbass choice to go with cartridge storage. That is the system that totally killed Nintendo's video game image completely and made them into a "kiddy company" or "Nintendo is for kids", what BS, before that Nintendo was for gamers of all stripes, for both the NES and the SNES, it had mortal kombat, street fighter 2, etc.
Which took all their major 3rd party franchises off their system completely because making all those cool arcade games available on home consoles took way more space available then could be done on a cart. I always imagine just how amazing ocarina of time or majora's mask *could have been* if only they had given the Nintendo 64 CD-ROM storage.
Instead we got sony and they killed Nintendo completely as all the developers of all the best games abandoned ship for the Playstation 1.
To this day I wonder how many oldschool games would still be alive and profiting if it wasn't for the prejudice against anything other then 3D games.
Ryo-ohki when you need one? Who wouldn't want a cute little pet that turns into a space ship when flung into the air?
(Bonus points if you can guess the reference)
I think MMO's are replacing most table top games, I don't think table top games will ever die but, people want to experience and see and feel "real" things, instead of just imagining them.
Just look at the kinds of PC games and video games being released, we don't want overcomplex table top games, we want simple fun, easy to get into games because of the massive constraints now on our time.