"It's possible Vista may be entering that twilight zone of indifferent consumerism"
XP entered that "twilight zone".
Almost no one bought XP when it came out (compared to the other OS microsoft sold). People gradually switched to XP when they replaced their old computers with newer ones that came pre-installed with XP.
Even now, people don't upgrade their PC every two years like in the mid-90s. People now wait for 4 or 5 years, some even more.
- Subscribe to a game? no thanks... - almost 0 immersion factor (talking about the weather in California in the middle of a fight with orcs does not make a game immersive). - Half the conversations are about trading x for y. - Every single person in the universe is an adventurer. - People online are mostly jerks. Not a single MMO game has not suffered from this to my knowledge. Anonymity insures that you can get away with almost anything. - The game itself requires hundreds of hours of time to invest and is plagued by endless repetitive tasks.
I much prefer ANY other kind of games than WoW or Everquest games.
Microsoft already has a system where you buy video games online with no game discs on the xbox 360. It's called the XBox Live Arcade.
It already provide solutions for all your concerns.
Your downloaded content is flagged with your gamertag on the server. You can re-download it at no charge if you delete it from your harddrive or if you are using a different 360 with the same gamertag. Therefore if your 360's hard drive is completely kaput, you can buy a new one and re-download the content if you re-enter you gamertag to your console.
You can also copy your xbox live arcade games to a memory card and bring them to a friend's house. As long as you play those games with your gamertag, you'll have full access to it. Once you leave your friend's house, your friend will have access to the demo version (unless you let him use your gamertag account).
Basically, the downloaded content is linked to a virtual identity you can input anywhere and not to a physical machine.
Irrelevant. His comments are made concerning a game that was released all over the world.
Wether it's the U.S. that's blind to foreign book forms, or Australia, or Europe or Paraguay is beside the point.
Ignorance of a product when talking about it like a supposed "informed" person is.
(Most in Europe wouldn't know much about the "comic" form either i'm pretty sure. They know more about their own format and way of doing things).
Concerning the XIII video game, since the most recognized reviewers and magazines come from the U.S. and that they ALL mention at some point in their preview/review sections that the XIII book is not well-known (using their own terminology) doesn't help. This simple fact has affected the review scores in numerous instances. For example, imagine a game based on SpiderMan. The game would be really dull for someone who doesn't know the character and is a reviewer. He would lower the score of his review accordingly. "A guy in red and blue thights who conjure up webs from nowhere and battle ridiculous villains disguised in Rhino and Vulture costumes isn't a 'good story': it's 'kid's stuff' trying to pass as mature". XIII was the same. If you don't know the source material, you can't appreciate characters such as the Manticore, or the appearance of Jones and Carrington as essentials. You care less about the characters and less about a story if you don't know them.
^^^ sorry, the quote you missed wasn't "ONE of the..." but "among the...", which is basically the same meaning (i.e. not THE biggest, but AMONG the biggests:)
Live Arcade is on the original XBox as well, it just wasn't as successful for the original XBox
- Can't be compared because a necessary disc purchase was necessary. It didn't come "in-the-box" like the 360.
MarketPlace still needs to prove itself a bit more than items you would be able to get for free on the PC version using mods.
- You only have Oblivion and their official mods in mind. Trailers, demos, themes, gamer pics, free mods exist too (cars for Ridge Racer, expansion maps for Ghost Recon, coop online upgrade for Kameo) and a lot more...
The achievements are similar to the rankings in games like Halo 2, although it is nice to have a more integrated apporach to it.
- Here you mix "leaderboards" with "achievements" which are two separate things.
I wasn't aware of the USB storage device connectivity, but that's a nice to have feature (although it's not really about the games as much...).
- The PS3 is nothing but those kind of gimmicks. So you either count them for all consoles or for none. Your pick.
The original XBox could play pictures and movies (there was a media center kit you could get for it).
- Not the point. You can plug a camera in the USB port and view your picture directly. You can connect to your windows PC and browse movie clips and pictures and audio files. I was NOT talking about DVD playback that the old XBOX had.
The iPod connectivity has nothing to do with games, but I suppose it's a nice to have feature (although I, personally could care less about it).
- See above about USB connectivity. Same answer applies:)
The auto-update of games is definitely nice, but really the game should be created correctly the first time and not issue out patches, what do you do if you have the version without a harddrive?)
Calling the marketplace and Live Arcade the "biggest financial success of the gaming industry for the last 10 years" is the biggest hyperbole I've heard in the last 10 years.
- Read: "ONE of the..." you ommited that from the quote i think.
I'm not saying the 360 isn't good, I'm just saying that it really is the closest thing to a "2.0" the game industry has seen in awhile (the GameBoy Color would be the other big contender, but that's probably more a version 1.2 or 1.5).
- And that's my point. You omitted to look at the new features on the xbox and/or view them as simple things that were already available when none of them were on the original XBOX. Possible exception for XBOX Live arcade available on the XBOX, with a disc and not from the get-go, which IS the big difference between the two and the reason of the success of the current version.
- There are other software elements not listed, such as the guide button that provide dashboard access from within a game. Since i beleive you are talking about the 360 from what you heard and not from actually seeing and playing around with it, it's easy to pass aside the innovations it has because they are simply not listed in the hardware specs, unlike the other 2 consoles.
I didn't mean "popularity" as absolute more than a category (at least in my mind)
TinTin, Asterix, Lucky Luke, Spirou and Fantasio, Gaston, Yoko Tsuno, etc. (the wave of well known books that trace their origin back to the 70s and before).
Among the series that debuted in the 80s, XIII is among the most well-known.
An analogy would be like comparing SpiderMan to "The Punisher". The Punisher is a very well-known comic book, but nowhere near anything like SpiderMan.
Also, there are no XIII "comic" version to my knowledge. It's "graphic novel" size and it's not available in the U.S., hence this article's "obscure" claim about the XIII universe.
The author assumed that because XIII is not known in the U.S. that's it's an "obscure" title that no one knows which is definitely NOT the case for the videogame's market which was the world.
"You have Microsoft with what amounts to the XBox 2.0. It does everything the XBox does and better, but doesn't add much else on top of it."
This is a somewhat uninformed comment.
The software improved by a lot: - MarketPlace - Achievements - Live Arcade - USB storage device connectivity - Picture and movie playback - iPod connectivity - Games auto-updates (i.e. patches. I much prefer a corrected game to a bugged one that can't be fixed)
The marketplace and Live Arcade are among the biggest financial success of the gaming industry for the last 10 years. That's GOT to count for something. The achievements are very addicting and for tons of people add replay value to their game (must-get-that-last-achievement syndrome as i call it).
Actually, he's right and his comments are far from lame.
There are three "main" existing ways of creating a story driven with text that is aided by drawings.
A) There's the way that originated in america: The "comic" version. The comic version is small publication that is sold in the way that magazines are sold. A periodical release. Usually contains publicity and the paper size is usually small. Small number of pages (if you exclude publicity). Sometimes a "collection" of comics can be re-published as "trade-paperbacks" in a larger volume.
B) There's the way it originated in Europe: The "graphic novel" version. The graphic novel version is longer than a "comic". Their release is irregular (usually once every year or two for a major series). The number of pages is often "around" 40 and the size of the pages themselves are bigger.
C) There's the way it originated in Japan: The "manga". Usually black and white, very small sized, but with a number of pages that is often over a hundred.
NOW, you can use any terminology you want, but these three ways of doing things are there. Comics exist in Europe, Bigger "graphic novels" also exist in North America. Mangas now exist everywhere, but they are often cut in "comic" size for the american market. Likewise, comics are often presented only in their trade-paperbacks form in Europe.
TinTin, Asterix and XIII are all originaly made the European way. Big graphic novels. SpiderMan, X-Men, BatMan are all originaly made the North American way, small comic publications. Ranma, Sailor Moon, are all originaly made the Japanese way, small books with tons of pages.
Now about XIII... XIII is a MAJOR series of "European-type" graphic novels. Just because it hasn't been released or is wide-known in the U.S. doesn't mean it's "obscure". XIII is big in Europe. It's scenarist, Jean Van Hamme, has done some of the most well-known European graphic novel series that i would rank right after TinTin and Asterix in popularity.
Saying that XIII is "obscure" is to put a blind-fold over your eyes and refusing to see that there are people living outside your own country that are doing thing you don't know of.
I don't live in Europe, i live in Quebec, Canada. Due to the fact of the bilingual situation here, we get the best of the three ways (European, American and Japanese [we get both english and french translations of those]). In our market, European graphic novels actually is making it as big as the American way, if not even bigger. The french versions of american comic books (in their trade-paperback forms as they don't exist in "comic form") are NOT those that sell the most. European graphic novels like XIII sell a lot more.
In the months before and after E3, there's hardly anything released anymore.
It just takes too much time on everybody in the market that they have to stop and work on their E3 presentation / demo / trailers in double overtime to get their things done.
Then after/during E3, they get a small vacation before resuming normal operations (which is understandable).
I'd go to say it's near two months of time taken from the entire industry from preparation to the end of vacation time which could be spend on game development rather than fancy trailers and demos that are gonna be almost nothing like the final product.
However, for the biggest titles, E3 is one heck of an hype machine. It jumpstarted the expectations of millions of fan that are pre-ordering before they even saw the cover of the game's box.
Some games actually changes stats according to your gender.
Some online fighting games offer vastly different move sets for female characters (ex.: DOA).
Some RPGs provide less in certain stats and more in others for female characters than males (ex.: Phantasy Star Online, more in agility and more in magic for hunter characters as an example).
People tend to be more "polite" towards female character. That is until they figure-out the girl is a man, then the opposite comes.
Anyway, with the fact that more and more online games require a microphone for chat (PCs are lagging behind consoles on that element), males trying to pass as girls will get rarer and rarer.
Re:All new 3D Shooters are missing one thing...
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Prey Review
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· Score: 1
"No pioneering in either of them, just natural progression."
That was kindof my point, but totally the reverse.
I think Half-Life was responsible for a "natural" progression in some elements (storytelling techniques mainly).
But it was responsible for "regression" in regards to level linearity. Level linearity still plagues FPS such as Prey even today.
Re:All new 3D Shooters are missing one thing...
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Prey Review
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· Score: 1
It's because most are corridor shooters and would play badly in coop. 2 characters in the same corridor would keep firing on each other.
I actually blame the original Half-Life for creating the corridor shooter. The genre of FPS where when you enter a corridor with 10 doors closed, you already knew that 9 of them were gonna be closed and "unopenable". Shooter BEFORE Half-Life were more fun. It's "innovations" that it brought (friendly AIs and digitized speech) were a natural evolution that came late to FPS. Any other company would have come with the same things a few months after Half-Life's release. It's "praised" storyline never got to me. In the beginning it's good, then at about 1/4 of the game in, it's a storyline wasteland until the very end of the game. Lack of level innovation plagued it: grey corridors, occasional brown/yellow desert and pink/purple alien dimension at the end. That was it. The original Unreal had more storyline and different environments to it and came before Half-Life. Granted it was told with text "datapads" you found here and there, but it's story was continuous.
So as i said, i blame Half-Life for the "stagnation" of most modern FPS. FPS now only replicates the original Half-Life formula and never try to actually improve on it. Prey tried, but they truned-up as mere gimmicks rather than true innovations.
Some of more recent games that had coop were Halo and Halo 2, which may be one of the big reason they are popular.
It's NORMAL that they are losing money at this stage. No one should ever find a loss of money as a sign of failure this early on.
The 360s are sold at a loss. A bit of the money paid for the 360 is actually paid by Microsoft.
So for every 360 sold, MS lose a bit of money. That and the fact that a system launch cost money. The R&D has cost money.
So is NORMAL that their xbox division is losing money this year. They expect to make money back through Live and game sales. So let's wait until we have more games and that people have time to buy more than a couple of games before saying that "OMG, 360 is in trouble".
The PS3 is already in the red since it cost Sony tons of money and it didn't sell even ONE console. Should we all say Sony is in trouble since the PS3 doesn't provide ANY revenue and is putting Sony in the red? Argument looks dumb, but it's the same as this number of 360 sold VS loss of profits "analysis".
There are other "genres" than what you describe. They just mostly arn't shown on TVs.
You'd never have anything remotely close to drama, horror, psychological, love, heck even XXX sex movies...
Perfect Blue, Tokyo GodFathers, Serial Experiments Lain, Grave of the Fireflies, Ghost in the Shell, Wings of Honneamise, BoogiePop Phantom are all example of different genres that you'd never see produced in North America.
"The PC gaming industries record on quality assurance is abyssmal."
I'd say it's not only on PC, but on every platform since videogames exist.
The games of today are more complex than before, thus they have more bugs than before.
But one musn't forget that even in those "simpler" games days, bugs were still there and QA clearly absent. At those times, a "bug" was usually called a "feature".
Anybody remembers that you could walk through certain walls in Super Mario Bros (the original), for example? Magazines even gave tips on how to do the trick almost even saying that walking through walls was planned by the developpers.
Ikari Warriors could spawn your dead character in a dead-end alley where you could not go back because the screen ended there.
But QA and games are a different topic than MMOs and the "hurt" they do on the gaming industry, so i'll shut-up now:)
No actually, what you have said doesn't contradict what i said.
Let's say 3 game companies release 1 game per year. One focuses on an MMO, the other on an FPS and the last one on an action game.
The buyer has 150$ of budget to play. (small, very basic, example) Here's the choices: 1) buy the action game from company A and the action game from company B (75$ goes to each companies). 2) buy the MMO (150$ to the same company).
I don't disagree that play-time IS a factor. I said so... One ALSO has to take into account that some people have a budget and that if that budget is exceeded and is bored of his games, he can always go to something else than "gaming".
The number of hours spend "gaming" has increased due to MMOs. People don't necessarily spend less on games (though not always). They spend less time playing altogether.
I beleive there's a balance to be had between the cost of the game and the time spend. There are 2 factors to the equation.
"With manufacturing already ahead of schedule"
huh... The PS3 is ALREADY late. It was supposed to launch last spring!
Even with the November release, with the amount of PS3 produced per month (200 000), they won't meet their expected amount of PS3s.
Even if they had 3 millions ready, there's going to be a shortage.
Combine that with a world-wide launch. I can already say that the launch WON'T be ANYTHING but smooth.
In another note:
I'm also pretty sure some law-firm is already analyzing suing Sony for defects on the PS3. The paper and the study is already done, they just have to fill the blanks with the name of the defective part.
Mark my words, two weeks after the launch, Sony is gonna get sued for a high rate of defects in their PS3.
I agree completely, on every aspect, the parent post.
You can also add that WoW, or other MMO, requires much more money than any other game in the market. The basic cost + the monthly fees.
It's simply less money to spend on other games made by other companies. All that money goes into the same company. Meaning future releases in gaming will require bigger and bigger companies to be able to rival those kind of assets.
More money required = less "risk", less "innovation", less number of "games", "higher price" and more monthly fees...
We lose in the end.
So the lesser the number of WoW players, the better games we'll have.
TFA basically says something i was scared of the first time i heard of the original EverQuest and it's "monthly fees" and MMO and popularity a few years back...
There's a reason why some people are anime fanatics.
- In North America, anything animated = kids stuff (people still havn't figured out that you can have a mature story made in animation). - In North America, anything animated needs stand-alone episodes, not an ongoing series.
Like TFA says... people in North America are attracted to fun stuff regardless of it's origin. Anime is more diverse and engaging than anything produced in North America. Hence you can attract more people to it.
Games are completely different, as North American games have even more diversity and style than japanese games.
"A console (PS2) that is still outselling the 360"
ok, so... Lot's of people mention that like it matters in the market but really it's a statistics that doesn't say anything.
People prefer to buy a 150$ old generation console compared to a 400$ new generation one. What's so surprising? Average Joe prefers the lower price that's all.
If the same reasoning is applied to PS3 and the 360/Wii, then the sales for the next gen will be: Wii > 360 > PS3.
By the same reasoning, the PS2 will also outsell the PS3 for a long time. So will the PS3 flop because the old model sells better?
I call that reasoning irrelevant in the new gen market (i hate "next" gen since it's already out and just awaiting the competition [360, PSP, DS]).
Above this page, below the article resume is the section called "related articles"
Article #3 in that list is titled: Microsoft Buys Lionhead Studios.
Fable 2 on Wii or GameCube? Yes you are right to doubt it.
It could happen tough... i'd not bet anything above a penny on it, but it could happen.
This 'problem' started in the mid-90s
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Problems at the W3C
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· Score: 2, Interesting
As a developper, i never knew what to aim for when designing web pages. Even in the mid-90s so this is nothing new.
I develop my pages for Netscape or for IE or for what the W3C says it SHOULD be.
Result: I developped for IE first, then made it work for Netscape and never bothered with the W3C. Clients and people don't need code that works as "standard" when no one is able to correctly view the results of that "standard".
IE had some proprietary elements working. I remember however that the W3C had no "standards" for those functions. The standards came later and the W3C said that the way Microsoft implemented those features was "wrong". As Microsoft, do you really want to re-code your thing because someone came with a standard too late? Same thing with Netscape and it's DHTML vision of "layers". The W3C standard came too late and Netscape's "layers" were deprecated. Developper's work going to waste as they have to re-invent the wheel.
When a company sees a customer need and fulfill it, why do the W3C need to analyze that need afterwards and come up with a totally different version of what's already available instead of expanding on it? It just waste the browsers developpers time and the web designers time so much that nobody cares about the standards anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
"It's possible Vista may be entering that twilight zone of indifferent consumerism"
XP entered that "twilight zone".
Almost no one bought XP when it came out (compared to the other OS microsoft sold). People gradually switched to XP when they replaced their old computers with newer ones that came pre-installed with XP.
Even now, people don't upgrade their PC every two years like in the mid-90s. People now wait for 4 or 5 years, some even more.
WoW as the future of gaming?
Oh boy i hope that it's not the case.
- Subscribe to a game? no thanks...
- almost 0 immersion factor (talking about the weather in California in the middle of a fight with orcs does not make a game immersive).
- Half the conversations are about trading x for y.
- Every single person in the universe is an adventurer.
- People online are mostly jerks. Not a single MMO game has not suffered from this to my knowledge. Anonymity insures that you can get away with almost anything.
- The game itself requires hundreds of hours of time to invest and is plagued by endless repetitive tasks.
I much prefer ANY other kind of games than WoW or Everquest games.
Your fears are not justified.
Microsoft already has a system where you buy video games online with no game discs on the xbox 360. It's called the XBox Live Arcade.
It already provide solutions for all your concerns.
Your downloaded content is flagged with your gamertag on the server. You can re-download it at no charge if you delete it from your harddrive or if you are using a different 360 with the same gamertag. Therefore if your 360's hard drive is completely kaput, you can buy a new one and re-download the content if you re-enter you gamertag to your console.
You can also copy your xbox live arcade games to a memory card and bring them to a friend's house. As long as you play those games with your gamertag, you'll have full access to it. Once you leave your friend's house, your friend will have access to the demo version (unless you let him use your gamertag account).
Basically, the downloaded content is linked to a virtual identity you can input anywhere and not to a physical machine.
Irrelevant. His comments are made concerning a game that was released all over the world.
Wether it's the U.S. that's blind to foreign book forms, or Australia, or Europe or Paraguay is beside the point.
Ignorance of a product when talking about it like a supposed "informed" person is.
(Most in Europe wouldn't know much about the "comic" form either i'm pretty sure. They know more about their own format and way of doing things).
Concerning the XIII video game, since the most recognized reviewers and magazines come from the U.S. and that they ALL mention at some point in their preview/review sections that the XIII book is not well-known (using their own terminology) doesn't help. This simple fact has affected the review scores in numerous instances.
For example, imagine a game based on SpiderMan. The game would be really dull for someone who doesn't know the character and is a reviewer. He would lower the score of his review accordingly. "A guy in red and blue thights who conjure up webs from nowhere and battle ridiculous villains disguised in Rhino and Vulture costumes isn't a 'good story': it's 'kid's stuff' trying to pass as mature".
XIII was the same. If you don't know the source material, you can't appreciate characters such as the Manticore, or the appearance of Jones and Carrington as essentials. You care less about the characters and less about a story if you don't know them.
^^^ sorry, the quote you missed wasn't "ONE of the..." but "among the...", which is basically the same meaning (i.e. not THE biggest, but AMONG the biggests :)
Live Arcade is on the original XBox as well, it just wasn't as successful for the original XBox
:)
- Can't be compared because a necessary disc purchase was necessary. It didn't come "in-the-box" like the 360.
MarketPlace still needs to prove itself a bit more than items you would be able to get for free on the PC version using mods.
- You only have Oblivion and their official mods in mind. Trailers, demos, themes, gamer pics, free mods exist too (cars for Ridge Racer, expansion maps for Ghost Recon, coop online upgrade for Kameo) and a lot more...
The achievements are similar to the rankings in games like Halo 2, although it is nice to have a more integrated apporach to it.
- Here you mix "leaderboards" with "achievements" which are two separate things.
I wasn't aware of the USB storage device connectivity, but that's a nice to have feature (although it's not really about the games as much...).
- The PS3 is nothing but those kind of gimmicks. So you either count them for all consoles or for none. Your pick.
The original XBox could play pictures and movies (there was a media center kit you could get for it).
- Not the point. You can plug a camera in the USB port and view your picture directly. You can connect to your windows PC and browse movie clips and pictures and audio files. I was NOT talking about DVD playback that the old XBOX had.
The iPod connectivity has nothing to do with games, but I suppose it's a nice to have feature (although I, personally could care less about it).
- See above about USB connectivity. Same answer applies
The auto-update of games is definitely nice, but really the game should be created correctly the first time and not issue out patches, what do you do if you have the version without a harddrive?)
Calling the marketplace and Live Arcade the "biggest financial success of the gaming industry for the last 10 years" is the biggest hyperbole I've heard in the last 10 years.
- Read: "ONE of the..." you ommited that from the quote i think.
I'm not saying the 360 isn't good, I'm just saying that it really is the closest thing to a "2.0" the game industry has seen in awhile (the GameBoy Color would be the other big contender, but that's probably more a version 1.2 or 1.5).
- And that's my point. You omitted to look at the new features on the xbox and/or view them as simple things that were already available when none of them were on the original XBOX. Possible exception for XBOX Live arcade available on the XBOX, with a disc and not from the get-go, which IS the big difference between the two and the reason of the success of the current version.
- There are other software elements not listed, such as the guide button that provide dashboard access from within a game. Since i beleive you are talking about the 360 from what you heard and not from actually seeing and playing around with it, it's easy to pass aside the innovations it has because they are simply not listed in the hardware specs, unlike the other 2 consoles.
I didn't mean "popularity" as absolute more than a category (at least in my mind)
TinTin, Asterix, Lucky Luke, Spirou and Fantasio, Gaston, Yoko Tsuno, etc. (the wave of well known books that trace their origin back to the 70s and before).
Among the series that debuted in the 80s, XIII is among the most well-known.
An analogy would be like comparing SpiderMan to "The Punisher". The Punisher is a very well-known comic book, but nowhere near anything like SpiderMan.
Also, there are no XIII "comic" version to my knowledge. It's "graphic novel" size and it's not available in the U.S., hence this article's "obscure" claim about the XIII universe.
The author assumed that because XIII is not known in the U.S. that's it's an "obscure" title that no one knows which is definitely NOT the case for the videogame's market which was the world.
"You have Microsoft with what amounts to the XBox 2.0. It does everything the XBox does and better, but doesn't add much else on top of it."
This is a somewhat uninformed comment.
The software improved by a lot:
- MarketPlace
- Achievements
- Live Arcade
- USB storage device connectivity
- Picture and movie playback
- iPod connectivity
- Games auto-updates (i.e. patches. I much prefer a corrected game to a bugged one that can't be fixed)
The marketplace and Live Arcade are among the biggest financial success of the gaming industry for the last 10 years. That's GOT to count for something. The achievements are very addicting and for tons of people add replay value to their game (must-get-that-last-achievement syndrome as i call it).
Actually, he's right and his comments are far from lame.
There are three "main" existing ways of creating a story driven with text that is aided by drawings.
A) There's the way that originated in america: The "comic" version.
The comic version is small publication that is sold in the way that magazines are sold. A periodical release. Usually contains publicity and the paper size is usually small. Small number of pages (if you exclude publicity). Sometimes a "collection" of comics can be re-published as "trade-paperbacks" in a larger volume.
B) There's the way it originated in Europe: The "graphic novel" version.
The graphic novel version is longer than a "comic". Their release is irregular (usually once every year or two for a major series). The number of pages is often "around" 40 and the size of the pages themselves are bigger.
C) There's the way it originated in Japan: The "manga".
Usually black and white, very small sized, but with a number of pages that is often over a hundred.
NOW, you can use any terminology you want, but these three ways of doing things are there. Comics exist in Europe, Bigger "graphic novels" also exist in North America. Mangas now exist everywhere, but they are often cut in "comic" size for the american market. Likewise, comics are often presented only in their trade-paperbacks form in Europe.
TinTin, Asterix and XIII are all originaly made the European way. Big graphic novels.
SpiderMan, X-Men, BatMan are all originaly made the North American way, small comic publications.
Ranma, Sailor Moon, are all originaly made the Japanese way, small books with tons of pages.
Now about XIII...
XIII is a MAJOR series of "European-type" graphic novels. Just because it hasn't been released or is wide-known in the U.S. doesn't mean it's "obscure".
XIII is big in Europe. It's scenarist, Jean Van Hamme, has done some of the most well-known European graphic novel series that i would rank right after TinTin and Asterix in popularity.
Saying that XIII is "obscure" is to put a blind-fold over your eyes and refusing to see that there are people living outside your own country that are doing thing you don't know of.
I don't live in Europe, i live in Quebec, Canada. Due to the fact of the bilingual situation here, we get the best of the three ways (European, American and Japanese [we get both english and french translations of those]).
In our market, European graphic novels actually is making it as big as the American way, if not even bigger.
The french versions of american comic books (in their trade-paperback forms as they don't exist in "comic form") are NOT those that sell the most. European graphic novels like XIII sell a lot more.
In the months before and after E3, there's hardly anything released anymore.
It just takes too much time on everybody in the market that they have to stop and work on their E3 presentation / demo / trailers in double overtime to get their things done.
Then after/during E3, they get a small vacation before resuming normal operations (which is understandable).
I'd go to say it's near two months of time taken from the entire industry from preparation to the end of vacation time which could be spend on game development rather than fancy trailers and demos that are gonna be almost nothing like the final product.
However, for the biggest titles, E3 is one heck of an hype machine. It jumpstarted the expectations of millions of fan that are pre-ordering before they even saw the cover of the game's box.
Some games actually changes stats according to your gender.
Some online fighting games offer vastly different move sets for female characters (ex.: DOA).
Some RPGs provide less in certain stats and more in others for female characters than males (ex.: Phantasy Star Online, more in agility and more in magic for hunter characters as an example).
People tend to be more "polite" towards female character. That is until they figure-out the girl is a man, then the opposite comes.
Anyway, with the fact that more and more online games require a microphone for chat (PCs are lagging behind consoles on that element), males trying to pass as girls will get rarer and rarer.
"No pioneering in either of them, just natural progression."
That was kindof my point, but totally the reverse.
I think Half-Life was responsible for a "natural" progression in some elements (storytelling techniques mainly).
But it was responsible for "regression" in regards to level linearity. Level linearity still plagues FPS such as Prey even today.
It's because most are corridor shooters and would play badly in coop. 2 characters in the same corridor would keep firing on each other.
I actually blame the original Half-Life for creating the corridor shooter. The genre of FPS where when you enter a corridor with 10 doors closed, you already knew that 9 of them were gonna be closed and "unopenable". Shooter BEFORE Half-Life were more fun. It's "innovations" that it brought (friendly AIs and digitized speech) were a natural evolution that came late to FPS. Any other company would have come with the same things a few months after Half-Life's release.
It's "praised" storyline never got to me. In the beginning it's good, then at about 1/4 of the game in, it's a storyline wasteland until the very end of the game.
Lack of level innovation plagued it: grey corridors, occasional brown/yellow desert and pink/purple alien dimension at the end. That was it.
The original Unreal had more storyline and different environments to it and came before Half-Life. Granted it was told with text "datapads" you found here and there, but it's story was continuous.
So as i said, i blame Half-Life for the "stagnation" of most modern FPS. FPS now only replicates the original Half-Life formula and never try to actually improve on it. Prey tried, but they truned-up as mere gimmicks rather than true innovations.
Some of more recent games that had coop were Halo and Halo 2, which may be one of the big reason they are popular.
It's NORMAL that they are losing money at this stage. No one should ever find a loss of money as a sign of failure this early on.
The 360s are sold at a loss. A bit of the money paid for the 360 is actually paid by Microsoft.
So for every 360 sold, MS lose a bit of money. That and the fact that a system launch cost money. The R&D has cost money.
So is NORMAL that their xbox division is losing money this year. They expect to make money back through Live and game sales. So let's wait until we have more games and that people have time to buy more than a couple of games before saying that "OMG, 360 is in trouble".
The PS3 is already in the red since it cost Sony tons of money and it didn't sell even ONE console. Should we all say Sony is in trouble since the PS3 doesn't provide ANY revenue and is putting Sony in the red?
Argument looks dumb, but it's the same as this number of 360 sold VS loss of profits "analysis".
There are other "genres" than what you describe. They just mostly arn't shown on TVs.
You'd never have anything remotely close to drama, horror, psychological, love, heck even XXX sex movies...
Perfect Blue, Tokyo GodFathers, Serial Experiments Lain, Grave of the Fireflies, Ghost in the Shell, Wings of Honneamise, BoogiePop Phantom are all example of different genres that you'd never see produced in North America.
"The PC gaming industries record on quality assurance is abyssmal."
:)
I'd say it's not only on PC, but on every platform since videogames exist.
The games of today are more complex than before, thus they have more bugs than before.
But one musn't forget that even in those "simpler" games days, bugs were still there and QA clearly absent. At those times, a "bug" was usually called a "feature".
Anybody remembers that you could walk through certain walls in Super Mario Bros (the original), for example? Magazines even gave tips on how to do the trick almost even saying that walking through walls was planned by the developpers.
Ikari Warriors could spawn your dead character in a dead-end alley where you could not go back because the screen ended there.
But QA and games are a different topic than MMOs and the "hurt" they do on the gaming industry, so i'll shut-up now
No actually, what you have said doesn't contradict what i said.
Let's say 3 game companies release 1 game per year. One focuses on an MMO, the other on an FPS and the last one on an action game.
The buyer has 150$ of budget to play. (small, very basic, example)
Here's the choices:
1) buy the action game from company A and the action game from company B (75$ goes to each companies).
2) buy the MMO (150$ to the same company).
I don't disagree that play-time IS a factor. I said so... One ALSO has to take into account that some people have a budget and that if that budget is exceeded and is bored of his games, he can always go to something else than "gaming".
The number of hours spend "gaming" has increased due to MMOs. People don't necessarily spend less on games (though not always). They spend less time playing altogether.
I beleive there's a balance to be had between
the cost of the game and the time spend. There are 2 factors to the equation.
"With manufacturing already ahead of schedule" huh... The PS3 is ALREADY late. It was supposed to launch last spring! Even with the November release, with the amount of PS3 produced per month (200 000), they won't meet their expected amount of PS3s. Even if they had 3 millions ready, there's going to be a shortage. Combine that with a world-wide launch. I can already say that the launch WON'T be ANYTHING but smooth. In another note: I'm also pretty sure some law-firm is already analyzing suing Sony for defects on the PS3. The paper and the study is already done, they just have to fill the blanks with the name of the defective part. Mark my words, two weeks after the launch, Sony is gonna get sued for a high rate of defects in their PS3.
I agree completely, on every aspect, the parent post.
You can also add that WoW, or other MMO, requires much more money than any other game in the market. The basic cost + the monthly fees.
It's simply less money to spend on other games made by other companies. All that money goes into the same company. Meaning future releases in gaming will require bigger and bigger companies to be able to rival those kind of assets.
More money required = less "risk", less "innovation", less number of "games", "higher price" and more monthly fees...
We lose in the end.
So the lesser the number of WoW players, the better games we'll have.
TFA basically says something i was scared of the first time i heard of the original EverQuest and it's "monthly fees" and MMO and popularity a few years back...
But "horizontal size" can be adjusted :p
Look at the movie "Boob Raider"...
There's a reason why some people are anime fanatics.
- In North America, anything animated = kids stuff (people still havn't figured out that you can have a mature story made in animation).
- In North America, anything animated needs stand-alone episodes, not an ongoing series.
Like TFA says... people in North America are attracted to fun stuff regardless of it's origin. Anime is more diverse and engaging than anything produced in North America. Hence you can attract more people to it.
Games are completely different, as North American games have even more diversity and style than japanese games.
"A console (PS2) that is still outselling the 360"
ok, so... Lot's of people mention that like it matters in the market but really it's a statistics that doesn't say anything.
People prefer to buy a 150$ old generation console compared to a 400$ new generation one. What's so surprising? Average Joe prefers the lower price that's all.
If the same reasoning is applied to PS3 and the 360/Wii, then the sales for the next gen will be:
Wii > 360 > PS3.
By the same reasoning, the PS2 will also outsell the PS3 for a long time. So will the PS3 flop because the old model sells better?
I call that reasoning irrelevant in the new gen market (i hate "next" gen since it's already out and just awaiting the competition [360, PSP, DS]).
Above this page, below the article resume is the section called "related articles"
Article #3 in that list is titled:
Microsoft Buys Lionhead Studios.
Fable 2 on Wii or GameCube? Yes you are right to doubt it.
It could happen tough... i'd not bet anything above a penny on it, but it could happen.
As a developper, i never knew what to aim for when designing web pages. Even in the mid-90s so this is nothing new.
I develop my pages for Netscape or for IE or for what the W3C says it SHOULD be.
Result: I developped for IE first, then made it work for Netscape and never bothered with the W3C.
Clients and people don't need code that works as "standard" when no one is able to correctly view the results of that "standard".
IE had some proprietary elements working. I remember however that the W3C had no "standards" for those functions. The standards came later and the W3C said that the way Microsoft implemented those features was "wrong". As Microsoft, do you really want to re-code your thing because someone came with a standard too late?
Same thing with Netscape and it's DHTML vision of "layers". The W3C standard came too late and Netscape's "layers" were deprecated. Developper's work going to waste as they have to re-invent the wheel.
When a company sees a customer need and fulfill it, why do the W3C need to analyze that need afterwards and come up with a totally different version of what's already available instead of expanding on it? It just waste the browsers developpers time and the web designers time so much that nobody cares about the standards anymore.
I'm 100% sure that you forgot FF8 for PC and FF11 for 360.
As for Tactics 2... it's on the gameboy advanced.
Might add the Chocobo racing game too.
Like i said, even the biggest fans of the series can't count them all.