Business is about trust. Don't employ complete morons
Let me know how that one works out for you.
I've been working here six months, three of those six months were spend fixing the place from the last two sysadmins who I wouldn't trust to find the network port. This is in a small business where screw ups are immediately apparent, the larger you get the easier it is for the incompetent to hide. Worse then that, the incompetent can hide in plain sight if they brown nose enough.
Not quite, but we are both late 20's white male Australian gamers of English decent (I haven't got the accent) with a deep seeded desire for world domination and a near absolute certainty that the would would be better if I ran it.
We'd also both ask for ransom money in British pounds when holding the American president hostage.
The GP is right. Ideas are a dime a dozen...even good ones
Do you even read posts?
The GP said "we have plenty of good ideas"
I said "these ideas aren't making it into games"
Plenty of people have pointed out that the impedance for good ideas seem to be an archaic publishing system exerting too much control over game development and I cant say I disagree. The publishing system needs to die.
And of course, Bioshock is suppose to be the spiritual sequel to SS2. I never got to play it I'm afraid as I was uninterested in purchasing a game with install limits.
Bioshock was not the spiritual successor to System Shock 2, Bioshock was System Shock 2 with the story copied, names changed and then lobotomised. Then they proceed to take the interesting aspects of the game play out (dumbed down upgrade system, no inventory system, help/log/email system neutered and run over with a 4x4). You didn't miss out on a thing, re-install SS2, I've finished that more times since BS came out then I've played BS.
I take it you've never played Tropico 1. It's the exact same game, Latin Jazz and everything. If one was asked "what are the *least* original games ever made?", one would be logically mandated to include Tropico 3. (BTW, I'm not complaining. An updated Tropico 1 is something I'd been longing for for years.)
And there in lies the problem.
A sequel to an original game is still more original then almost all AAA titles to be released.
I even find X3 Terran Conflict to be a breath of fresh air despite the fact that it is the fourth X game in the series, the simple fact is that every publisher and their dog are not copying the X series of games making it somewhat unique in today's gaming environment.
Secondly, a sequel (number increment) does not imply it is the same as the first game. Look at Supreme Commander, the first game was a wonder of large scale open world strategy. The second game was a dumbed down, scaled down copy of every other mainstream RTS in existence. This can go in reverse (sequel is better) like AVP to AVP2 but generally its a downward trend.
BTW, Tropic 3 is good, a very simplistic management sim but I dislike the game when it boils down to a graphical front end for Microsoft Excel. This is why I think Tropico 3 differs from it's peers.
To me, this is both the conceit and the problem. "I'm older, so I want something more complex".
The thing is that's not what I said, what I said is that "I'm capable of thinking, stop assuming I need the game handed to me on a platter".
Pinball requires good reflexes, a keen eye and the ability to rapidly project trajectories in your head. This is not a simple game along the lines of COD or Bioshock where you realistically would never die and never had to solve puzzles. This is what I mean by complex games don't need to be longer or harder to be more complex, if you put a "leet" halo player in front of Tetris he'll rage throw the KB in 12 seconds flat. I spent hours at a time playing that game on the NES.
I'm not suggesting games should become less complex, rather that there should be less complex games available.
Strictly speaking, I don't disagree with you. My problem is that less complex game, or as I prefer dumbed down games are not only becoming the norm and the benchmark but also the high point of gaming. This means something is going terribly wrong.
You seriously want games that will let you paint yourself into a corner?
In a word, yes. If I do things stupidly I expect the game to react negatively, if I do things smartly I expect the game to react positively (reward me). S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is again, a good example that if I did things right early in the game it would be easier later on, OTOH, the game was difficult but passable if I didn't do thing right early on (get new weapons/armour, waste ammo, ETC...). I had to plan my moves as night time was dangerous on many maps so I did missions during the day. It's not as if this this was hidden from you, the game expressly told you on several occasions (not just in the manual and tutorial either) and after that you have to be certifiably retarded not to figure it out by being out and about at night.
"Don't make mistakes OR ELSE"
You've never played HL have you.
Unfortunately not only has the always unpopular "zero mistakes" method fallen out of favour the "Dont make mistakes OR THINGS WILL BE HARDER" and "Dont make mistakes AND THE GAME WILL REWARD YOU" have also fallen out of favour.
Now days the current thought of game design is "Don't worry about anything, PAT, PAT, you wont have to think, take risks or overcome challenges". There is no real reward in doing things that are easy.
and you have to reload a save... or start over if you don't have an appropriate save to return to?
You're not even 15 yet are you? Any experienced gamer learns to make historical saves. After 20 years I have an innate sense of where is a good place to make a historical save.
I do not want the entire game handed to me on a platter, there's just no fun in that.
I think what they're trying to get at is to remove all the rubbish that doesn't need to be in the game, and to a certain extent I agree.
Nope,
Whilst I agree with your point, their point is to dumb down the game to the lowest common denominator. They aren't talking about game length or flight simulators that take up 102 keys on the Keyboard, they are talking about average games and how a small subset of the audience does not have the brain power or attention span to comprehend semi complex ideas.
A lot of my favourite games have been made fairly recently and are short but sweet, the two that stick out in my head being Braid and Portal.
As I said in my OP, complex does not mean longer or harder. I've never played braid but portal is complex, it requires some puzzle solving and gets you brain thinking about other ideas like: how did this happen?, Where am I?, who are these people? and who wrote all this stuff on the walls. That game completely captures your imagination and has plenty to find if you explore.
More Portal and less Halo/COD clones is exactly what I'm talking about. Portal easily had more content in it then Modern Warfare 1 and 2 put together, the simple fact that I've replayed it is indicative of this.
Now I've known people who have thrown down Portal in a fit of rage because it was "too hard" and they wanted to play a "real game", so they went back to button mashing in COD and yelling cockslap into their headsets. This should not be considered the height of the audience's intelligence. I dont mind the odd shootem up, in fact I quite enjoy the odd session of Bad Company online but it is by no means the benchmark for gaming.
The solution that they have is that the first tap reads as a hover, and the second tap reads as a click
No,
Tap and hold counts as hover, tap counts as click. Android has implemented this system from the start and is is quite easy to use. Amongst Android users it's known as "tap and hold" or the "long click" and is often used in lieu of a second mouse button (Android really is a phone sized computer, so it requires a "Windows XP" level of literacy to operate).
Is this level of sophistication beyond the Iphone?
But really, anyone who still claims the war on Flash is anything else then Apple maintaining dictatorial control over what runs on their Iphone is beyond deluded.
Then realize that you'll sell a tenth the copies, or even less, than if you'd focused all your efforts of polishing one game path to perfection. You know why? Because games are entertainment. That's it. They're to relax to rather than to live by. The later group hasn't been the main game buying demographic for a long time now.
First, Polish != good. The Modern Warfare games were shined to an inch of their lives and complete crap because they were stereotypical and over simplified. There was not challenge in playing Modern Warfare.
Secondly, this is the Hollywood paradox, crap movies sell so lets make more crap movies. This is only true when Hollywood is an enforced monopoly. Fortunately games wont suffer the Hollywood problem for very much longer because Eastern Europe is positively kicking our arse. The many of the best games I can name of recent times were made in the Ukraine (S.T.A.L.K.E.R.) and Bulgaria (Tropico 3).
Now try making such a game.
This old chestnut, frankly the old "why don't you do it" though terminating cloche is tired and ineffective.
It is a poor justification for accepting inferior quality when you know that things can be made at a much greater quality if they were simply allowed to. It's like saying Silence of the Lambs should have been a slasher flick because it would have been guaranteed to earn more money at the time.
Games don't need to be dumber, the average age of a gamer is over 25, we aren't morons so stop treating us like them.
I like a bit of complexity and puzzle solving in my game, I absolutely hate the hand holding and linear corridors of recent games.
Complex does not mean harder or longer it means that it is meant to provide a player with a challenge and after that challenge was defeated a feeling of accomplishment
Anything that could force the player to make hard decisions or challenge them slightly has been removed. Like an inventory system where you had limited space, so you actually have to make difficult choices about what to carry (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. did this to some extent). Near unlimited ammo and and regenerating health have become the Deus Ex Machina of gaming, killing decent game design. At no point do you have to take it easy and plan your moves due to low health, in HL1 if you wasted your rockets you'd find the game difficult if not impossible at some points. Now days, even in HL2 there is an infinite "box-o-rockets" where you engage anything that needs them.
Now that's just for game-play, now let me get started on story.
Here's the story line for the next Gears of Duty game.
You are a red meat easting, muscle bound, flag waving all American hero (even if you've got a foreign accent but I'll get to that bit later) needless to say, you are 100% good and pure. Your enemy are the evil Nazi, zombie terrorists who want to blow up the White House with a dirty bomb (sound familiar) so they are unambiguously evil in every fashion. You will fight through a mixture of the standard tile sets (urban, jungle snow, desert) which are quite linear (any illusion of openness is optical) whilst never running out of ammo or health until you get to an unimpressive anti-climax where someone hands you a gun and you kill the ultimate Hitler Zombie Alien with one shot in a cinematic perspective. Further more, simply adding a foreign accent to this archetype does not instantly make them foreign. I cringe when I hear the British soldiers in COD as they are just Yanks with cockney accents. I'm sorry but this just doesn't cut it and why I'm glad they've never tried to use Australian characters (Bioshock again, Australia Day is 26/01 (DD/MM) not 01/26 (MM/DD) no Aussie would ever write dates in a yank format)
Personally I'm sick of it. It's like the publishers don't want me to see anything that could accidentally kick my brain into gear. I remember System Shock 2, you had a love-hate thing with Shodan, the ideas of the many were seductive, you could associate with the logs of the dead crew (Bioshock was a really, really poor copy of SS2's story with the intrigue taken out). Deus Ex where you weren't sure who was on who's side. I've been waiting 10 years for another game that could get my attention and imagination so completely as DX and SS2.
So yes, give me complexity, a deep involving story and some actual challenging game play. Also ramping up the enemies hit points to make things harder is cheap (Bioshock), design better AI.
Standard Disclaimer: this is for PC games and consoles pretending to be PC's. Casual games are a different kettle of fish all together.
The console and PC gaming market is at the point where it takes $20 million and up to do an "A" title.
Sins of a Solar Empire was made on less then 1 Million USD. It sold like an "A" title, over a million copies.
With Steam and Impulse you are no longer beholden to big publishers.
For Console gaming that may be true, but at least 10% goes directly to the console manufacturer.
It is entirely reasonable for a small PC game to be made on a budget of less then $250,000. For a really small game less then $25,000. By small I mean modest graphics, effects, ETC... not necessarily length or complexity. One good voice actor for 20 minutes of dialogue is superior to 5 hours of half arsed voice acting and fake accents. If you have to lower your budget, lower the scale not the quality, perhaps try episodic gaming although that's been hit and miss.
Who would have thought Farmville would be a success? Farmville?
Remember Dope Wars from the late 90's, same principal except they are micro-charging for it rather then a free distribution. Many small games are incredibly addictive.
Agreed. I'm in the industry, and everyone I've ever spoken to has agreed completely that we have all the ideas we will ever need
Yet all we get are generic first person shooters. COD, Halo, Gears of War, Killzone. All the same. None of these ideas seem to be getting anywhere.
I can honestly say the most original game I've played YTD is Tropico 3 and that's only because it's the first game I've played with a Latin jazz soundtrack. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripryat is up there but kind of samey being the third S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in as many years, but it was nice to see GSC get out one incredibly polished S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game.
If the ideas are there then the implementation is horribly, horribly flawed. I'm not really looking forward to Halo:Reach and the inevitable successor Halo:Around or the next COD/Modern Warfare game. Can I at least have an original story with some decent in-depth game play mechanic, like Deus Ex or System Shock 2. Those games forced me to make choices I could do differently each time I replayed, now days COD leads me through a linear corridor, gives me all the weapons and ammo I could want and then tells me which one to use. Worse yet I always seem to be fighting Nazi's or Terrorists, can you invent some enemy that is not so stereotypical. Maybe even go as far to make the hero/villain lines blurred enough that I question what I am doing and why?
I'm going to go off on a bit of a rant, the really important bit was above but...
Why do games, especially FPS's and most RPG's need to fit into the standard character moulds so religiously. In every game, even ones where I can be evil like Fallout 3 I always seem to be the hero. If not the hero then the anti-hero. There's no ambiguous moral choices, it's too black and white. Then again with the enemies, they always have to be nameless, faceless certain evil like Nazi's, Zombie's and Terrorists. Why cant I encounter say, a personal letter from one of the guards I've dispatched back to his wife and kids. Especially with the Vietnam games, designers had a great opportunity to use the infamous VietCong/North Vietnamese propaganda and do some really abstract war games al a Apocolypse Now rather then the tired old red meat eating, flag waving, built like a brick shitter, Rambo style all American war hero. Even the British ones in COD are so bloody American that I can't stomach them (so I'm kind of glad we Australians have not really been depicted, they'd never get the Aussie at war right) I'm sorry but you cant put a cockney accent on a yank and call it a pom.
System Shock 2 was good, it made me both hate and associate with Shodan, be seduced by the aims of the Many, absolutely brilliant storytelling. Deus Ex made you question everything, right and wrong, good and evil, is it possible to be neutral, what would most people give to play that game again for the first time. I know not every game can be an impressive work of art like Deus Ex and System Shock 2 but I've been waiting 10 years since the last one. In that time we've had massive sequel factories produced and overhyped (Halo, Battlefield, COD).
This is why adblock has become indispensable. I cant take the risk that a content owner has slipped material that violates my AUP into a web page via an ad. Not that I'm saying/. does this, all I get are ads for Rackspace and IBM.
Mate, if anyone else at work can see your PC, have adblock installed, especially if you visit not strictly work related sites like/.
Oh, don't get me started on annoying ultra-paranoid email administrators and their obsession with blocking every goddamn file type known to man.
Oh, don't get me started on annoying know it all users and their constant petty attempts to use a system for a purpose it wasn't designed for instead of using the system we designed for that purpose.
User: I cant email. Why is the server broken Admin: Server is fine, what are you trying to email. User I only want to send this video file to 40 people. Admin How big is it. Limit is 7 MB. User What???? User Thats a ridiculous limit, I want 50 MB. Admin If everyone sends 50 MB files does that the email server will collapse into a pile of molten lead and steel. User I don't care, I want my 50 MB.
This is typically followed by various rants and threats before I transfer them to the hold music. No one seems to understand that Email is meant for short text messages, even adding images in was a kluge. If you want to send files, especially to a client why aren't you using a god damned FTP, HTTPS or DMS system. If you don't have one, you need to make a business case for one. IT is here to make sure the entire company runs, not to cater to your petty whims.
The BOFH, used to be the Kind and Friendly Operator of Candy and Flowers before he had to deal with end users.
Perhaps, allowing the government to spend billions of our dollars is not, after all, a better idea, than to simply return it to us (the taxpayers)?
Where it goes straight to China, after you buy a cheap TV, computer or iAnything.
I'm sorry if this doesn't make any sense to you, I come from one of those insane nations where the government invests in projects that help the state run (roads, rails, power lines, gas pipelines) and even pay future dividends (fibre networks, schools, helping small business (not necessarily in monetary terms, I can get help in the form of managerial, marketing or legal advice for a small business)).
If anything else your government should be putting money back into its enormous debt, rather then giving tax breaks to people who spent the last 8 years not paying enough to cover government expenditure (or attempting to stop it, I said it 8 years ago and am still right today, wars are expensive).
That it became self-aware does not mean that it wasn't designed to be intelligent. It was designed to be intelligent. It was designed to make decisions and think for itself.
I said I was being pedantic, I never claimed it made sense.
If terminator was realistic, all humans would have died in the radioactive fallout and there's be no need for Terminators.
That's what the Martians want us to think. Next they're going to try and contaminate our precious bodily fluids.
What makes you think we want your fluids monkey. We have already abducted the one designated Paris Hilton and have sequenced the DNA of half your race.
Our heroine has snuck into the villains office and starts to hack into the computer to find evidence of the crime. After using the password on the post it note stuck to the monitor, copied the folder market "PRIVATE Evil world domination plan" and "pr0n" off the desktop to the flash left in the PC. Re-arranged all the icon's into a penis shape and left.
There fixed that for you.
If you want realistic computer scenes in movies, I demand realistic computer users in movies
However, the computers weren't just "left long enough" in either movie. In Terminator, SkyNet was an AI designed by the military to have intelligence.
To be pedantic, Skynet was not made self aware, skynet became self aware on its own. To quote:
Terminator: The system originally went online on August 4th 1997. Human decisions were removed from strategic defence. Skynet began to learn at a geometric rate. It originally became self-aware at 2:14 am Eastern Time on August 29th, 1997.
The IT industry is used to be boutique pricing, but is rapidly dropping towards commodity.
What do you mean by "dropping towards"?. It's already there when I can buy a 15" laptop for A$800. A$1300 gets you a 13" i5, Geforece 310, 4 GB RAM and 500 GB 7.2K RPM hard disk.
I can only name one, possibly two companies that still price their laptops like they are not commodities (HINT: one's a fruit, the other like root kits)
Just to clarify my post a bit...
Only in actual niche markets like high end graphics cards are prices still quite high. The low end graphics cards are easily available under A$100, high end cards easily get above A$600. Same with laptops, if I get a workstation laptop or ruggardised laptop I can expect to pay significantly more then a more mainstream laptop. This is a symptom of niche markets, not the IT industry in general, so high end graphics cards will remain expensive.
However when a company charges me almost twice what I pay other manufacturers for the same commodity hardware, that's just taking the piss.
The IT industry is used to be boutique pricing, but is rapidly dropping towards commodity.
What do you mean by "dropping towards"?.
It's already there when I can buy a 15" laptop for A$800. A$1300 gets you a 13" i5, Geforece 310, 4 GB RAM and 500 GB 7.2K RPM hard disk.
I can only name one, possibly two companies that still price their laptops like they are not commodities (HINT: one's a fruit, the other like root kits)
Slashdot Mirror
Let me know how that one works out for you.
I've been working here six months, three of those six months were spend fixing the place from the last two sysadmins who I wouldn't trust to find the network port. This is in a small business where screw ups are immediately apparent, the larger you get the easier it is for the incompetent to hide. Worse then that, the incompetent can hide in plain sight if they brown nose enough.
Not quite, but we are both late 20's white male Australian gamers of English decent (I haven't got the accent) with a deep seeded desire for world domination and a near absolute certainty that the would would be better if I ran it.
We'd also both ask for ransom money in British pounds when holding the American president hostage.
Do you even read posts?
The GP said "we have plenty of good ideas"
I said "these ideas aren't making it into games"
Plenty of people have pointed out that the impedance for good ideas seem to be an archaic publishing system exerting too much control over game development and I cant say I disagree. The publishing system needs to die.
Bioshock was not the spiritual successor to System Shock 2, Bioshock was System Shock 2 with the story copied, names changed and then lobotomised. Then they proceed to take the interesting aspects of the game play out (dumbed down upgrade system, no inventory system, help/log/email system neutered and run over with a 4x4). You didn't miss out on a thing, re-install SS2, I've finished that more times since BS came out then I've played BS.
And there in lies the problem.
A sequel to an original game is still more original then almost all AAA titles to be released.
I even find X3 Terran Conflict to be a breath of fresh air despite the fact that it is the fourth X game in the series, the simple fact is that every publisher and their dog are not copying the X series of games making it somewhat unique in today's gaming environment.
Secondly, a sequel (number increment) does not imply it is the same as the first game. Look at Supreme Commander, the first game was a wonder of large scale open world strategy. The second game was a dumbed down, scaled down copy of every other mainstream RTS in existence. This can go in reverse (sequel is better) like AVP to AVP2 but generally its a downward trend.
BTW, Tropic 3 is good, a very simplistic management sim but I dislike the game when it boils down to a graphical front end for Microsoft Excel. This is why I think Tropico 3 differs from it's peers.
The thing is that's not what I said, what I said is that "I'm capable of thinking, stop assuming I need the game handed to me on a platter".
Pinball requires good reflexes, a keen eye and the ability to rapidly project trajectories in your head. This is not a simple game along the lines of COD or Bioshock where you realistically would never die and never had to solve puzzles. This is what I mean by complex games don't need to be longer or harder to be more complex, if you put a "leet" halo player in front of Tetris he'll rage throw the KB in 12 seconds flat. I spent hours at a time playing that game on the NES.
Strictly speaking, I don't disagree with you. My problem is that less complex game, or as I prefer dumbed down games are not only becoming the norm and the benchmark but also the high point of gaming. This means something is going terribly wrong.
In a word, yes. If I do things stupidly I expect the game to react negatively, if I do things smartly I expect the game to react positively (reward me). S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is again, a good example that if I did things right early in the game it would be easier later on, OTOH, the game was difficult but passable if I didn't do thing right early on (get new weapons/armour, waste ammo, ETC...). I had to plan my moves as night time was dangerous on many maps so I did missions during the day. It's not as if this this was hidden from you, the game expressly told you on several occasions (not just in the manual and tutorial either) and after that you have to be certifiably retarded not to figure it out by being out and about at night.
You've never played HL have you.
Unfortunately not only has the always unpopular "zero mistakes" method fallen out of favour the "Dont make mistakes OR THINGS WILL BE HARDER" and "Dont make mistakes AND THE GAME WILL REWARD YOU" have also fallen out of favour.
Now days the current thought of game design is "Don't worry about anything, PAT, PAT, you wont have to think, take risks or overcome challenges". There is no real reward in doing things that are easy.
You're not even 15 yet are you? Any experienced gamer learns to make historical saves. After 20 years I have an innate sense of where is a good place to make a historical save.
I do not want the entire game handed to me on a platter, there's just no fun in that.
Nope,
Whilst I agree with your point, their point is to dumb down the game to the lowest common denominator. They aren't talking about game length or flight simulators that take up 102 keys on the Keyboard, they are talking about average games and how a small subset of the audience does not have the brain power or attention span to comprehend semi complex ideas.
As I said in my OP, complex does not mean longer or harder. I've never played braid but portal is complex, it requires some puzzle solving and gets you brain thinking about other ideas like: how did this happen?, Where am I?, who are these people? and who wrote all this stuff on the walls. That game completely captures your imagination and has plenty to find if you explore.
More Portal and less Halo/COD clones is exactly what I'm talking about. Portal easily had more content in it then Modern Warfare 1 and 2 put together, the simple fact that I've replayed it is indicative of this.
Now I've known people who have thrown down Portal in a fit of rage because it was "too hard" and they wanted to play a "real game", so they went back to button mashing in COD and yelling cockslap into their headsets. This should not be considered the height of the audience's intelligence. I dont mind the odd shootem up, in fact I quite enjoy the odd session of Bad Company online but it is by no means the benchmark for gaming.
No,
Tap and hold counts as hover, tap counts as click. Android has implemented this system from the start and is is quite easy to use. Amongst Android users it's known as "tap and hold" or the "long click" and is often used in lieu of a second mouse button (Android really is a phone sized computer, so it requires a "Windows XP" level of literacy to operate).
Is this level of sophistication beyond the Iphone?
But really, anyone who still claims the war on Flash is anything else then Apple maintaining dictatorial control over what runs on their Iphone is beyond deluded.
First, Polish != good. The Modern Warfare games were shined to an inch of their lives and complete crap because they were stereotypical and over simplified. There was not challenge in playing Modern Warfare.
Secondly, this is the Hollywood paradox, crap movies sell so lets make more crap movies. This is only true when Hollywood is an enforced monopoly. Fortunately games wont suffer the Hollywood problem for very much longer because Eastern Europe is positively kicking our arse. The many of the best games I can name of recent times were made in the Ukraine (S.T.A.L.K.E.R.) and Bulgaria (Tropico 3).
This old chestnut, frankly the old "why don't you do it" though terminating cloche is tired and ineffective.
It is a poor justification for accepting inferior quality when you know that things can be made at a much greater quality if they were simply allowed to. It's like saying Silence of the Lambs should have been a slasher flick because it would have been guaranteed to earn more money at the time.
I do not want less complex games.
Games don't need to be dumber, the average age of a gamer is over 25, we aren't morons so stop treating us like them.
I like a bit of complexity and puzzle solving in my game, I absolutely hate the hand holding and linear corridors of recent games.
Complex does not mean harder or longer it means that it is meant to provide a player with a challenge and after that challenge was defeated a feeling of accomplishment
Anything that could force the player to make hard decisions or challenge them slightly has been removed. Like an inventory system where you had limited space, so you actually have to make difficult choices about what to carry (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. did this to some extent). Near unlimited ammo and and regenerating health have become the Deus Ex Machina of gaming, killing decent game design. At no point do you have to take it easy and plan your moves due to low health, in HL1 if you wasted your rockets you'd find the game difficult if not impossible at some points. Now days, even in HL2 there is an infinite "box-o-rockets" where you engage anything that needs them. Now that's just for game-play, now let me get started on story.
Here's the story line for the next Gears of Duty game.
You are a red meat easting, muscle bound, flag waving all American hero (even if you've got a foreign accent but I'll get to that bit later) needless to say, you are 100% good and pure. Your enemy are the evil Nazi, zombie terrorists who want to blow up the White House with a dirty bomb (sound familiar) so they are unambiguously evil in every fashion. You will fight through a mixture of the standard tile sets (urban, jungle snow, desert) which are quite linear (any illusion of openness is optical) whilst never running out of ammo or health until you get to an unimpressive anti-climax where someone hands you a gun and you kill the ultimate Hitler Zombie Alien with one shot in a cinematic perspective. Further more, simply adding a foreign accent to this archetype does not instantly make them foreign. I cringe when I hear the British soldiers in COD as they are just Yanks with cockney accents. I'm sorry but this just doesn't cut it and why I'm glad they've never tried to use Australian characters (Bioshock again, Australia Day is 26/01 (DD/MM) not 01/26 (MM/DD) no Aussie would ever write dates in a yank format)
Personally I'm sick of it. It's like the publishers don't want me to see anything that could accidentally kick my brain into gear. I remember System Shock 2, you had a love-hate thing with Shodan, the ideas of the many were seductive, you could associate with the logs of the dead crew (Bioshock was a really, really poor copy of SS2's story with the intrigue taken out). Deus Ex where you weren't sure who was on who's side. I've been waiting 10 years for another game that could get my attention and imagination so completely as DX and SS2.
So yes, give me complexity, a deep involving story and some actual challenging game play. Also ramping up the enemies hit points to make things harder is cheap (Bioshock), design better AI.
Standard Disclaimer: this is for PC games and consoles pretending to be PC's. Casual games are a different kettle of fish all together.
Sins of a Solar Empire was made on less then 1 Million USD. It sold like an "A" title, over a million copies.
With Steam and Impulse you are no longer beholden to big publishers.
For Console gaming that may be true, but at least 10% goes directly to the console manufacturer.
It is entirely reasonable for a small PC game to be made on a budget of less then $250,000. For a really small game less then $25,000. By small I mean modest graphics, effects, ETC... not necessarily length or complexity. One good voice actor for 20 minutes of dialogue is superior to 5 hours of half arsed voice acting and fake accents. If you have to lower your budget, lower the scale not the quality, perhaps try episodic gaming although that's been hit and miss.
Remember Dope Wars from the late 90's, same principal except they are micro-charging for it rather then a free distribution. Many small games are incredibly addictive.
Yet all we get are generic first person shooters. COD, Halo, Gears of War, Killzone. All the same. None of these ideas seem to be getting anywhere.
I can honestly say the most original game I've played YTD is Tropico 3 and that's only because it's the first game I've played with a Latin jazz soundtrack. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripryat is up there but kind of samey being the third S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in as many years, but it was nice to see GSC get out one incredibly polished S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game.
If the ideas are there then the implementation is horribly, horribly flawed. I'm not really looking forward to Halo:Reach and the inevitable successor Halo:Around or the next COD/Modern Warfare game. Can I at least have an original story with some decent in-depth game play mechanic, like Deus Ex or System Shock 2. Those games forced me to make choices I could do differently each time I replayed, now days COD leads me through a linear corridor, gives me all the weapons and ammo I could want and then tells me which one to use. Worse yet I always seem to be fighting Nazi's or Terrorists, can you invent some enemy that is not so stereotypical. Maybe even go as far to make the hero/villain lines blurred enough that I question what I am doing and why?
I'm going to go off on a bit of a rant, the really important bit was above but...
Why do games, especially FPS's and most RPG's need to fit into the standard character moulds so religiously. In every game, even ones where I can be evil like Fallout 3 I always seem to be the hero. If not the hero then the anti-hero. There's no ambiguous moral choices, it's too black and white. Then again with the enemies, they always have to be nameless, faceless certain evil like Nazi's, Zombie's and Terrorists. Why cant I encounter say, a personal letter from one of the guards I've dispatched back to his wife and kids. Especially with the Vietnam games, designers had a great opportunity to use the infamous VietCong/North Vietnamese propaganda and do some really abstract war games al a Apocolypse Now rather then the tired old red meat eating, flag waving, built like a brick shitter, Rambo style all American war hero. Even the British ones in COD are so bloody American that I can't stomach them (so I'm kind of glad we Australians have not really been depicted, they'd never get the Aussie at war right) I'm sorry but you cant put a cockney accent on a yank and call it a pom.
System Shock 2 was good, it made me both hate and associate with Shodan, be seduced by the aims of the Many, absolutely brilliant storytelling. Deus Ex made you question everything, right and wrong, good and evil, is it possible to be neutral, what would most people give to play that game again for the first time. I know not every game can be an impressive work of art like Deus Ex and System Shock 2 but I've been waiting 10 years since the last one. In that time we've had massive sequel factories produced and overhyped (Halo, Battlefield, COD).
This is why adblock has become indispensable. I cant take the risk that a content owner has slipped material that violates my AUP into a web page via an ad. Not that I'm saying /. does this, all I get are ads for Rackspace and IBM.
/.
Mate, if anyone else at work can see your PC, have adblock installed, especially if you visit not strictly work related sites like
Oh, don't get me started on annoying know it all users and their constant petty attempts to use a system for a purpose it wasn't designed for instead of using the system we designed for that purpose.
User: I cant email. Why is the server broken
Admin: Server is fine, what are you trying to email.
User I only want to send this video file to 40 people.
Admin How big is it. Limit is 7 MB.
User What????
User Thats a ridiculous limit, I want 50 MB.
Admin If everyone sends 50 MB files does that the email server will collapse into a pile of molten lead and steel.
User I don't care, I want my 50 MB.
This is typically followed by various rants and threats before I transfer them to the hold music. No one seems to understand that Email is meant for short text messages, even adding images in was a kluge. If you want to send files, especially to a client why aren't you using a god damned FTP, HTTPS or DMS system. If you don't have one, you need to make a business case for one. IT is here to make sure the entire company runs, not to cater to your petty whims.
The BOFH, used to be the Kind and Friendly Operator of Candy and Flowers before he had to deal with end users.
The Megagram, otherwise known as the metric ton.
So it really should be written as 6 tons.
That's what she said.
At least when were were trying to do erotic star wars cosplay.
Where it goes straight to China, after you buy a cheap TV, computer or iAnything.
I'm sorry if this doesn't make any sense to you, I come from one of those insane nations where the government invests in projects that help the state run (roads, rails, power lines, gas pipelines) and even pay future dividends (fibre networks, schools, helping small business (not necessarily in monetary terms, I can get help in the form of managerial, marketing or legal advice for a small business)).
If anything else your government should be putting money back into its enormous debt, rather then giving tax breaks to people who spent the last 8 years not paying enough to cover government expenditure (or attempting to stop it, I said it 8 years ago and am still right today, wars are expensive).
Presumably the "???" part is where apathetic 18 yr olds find money and don't spend it on booze and drugs.
I said I was being pedantic, I never claimed it made sense.
If terminator was realistic, all humans would have died in the radioactive fallout and there's be no need for Terminators.
What makes you think we want your fluids monkey. We have already abducted the one designated Paris Hilton and have sequenced the DNA of half your race.
There fixed that for you.
If you want realistic computer scenes in movies, I demand realistic computer users in movies
To be pedantic, Skynet was not made self aware, skynet became self aware on its own. To quote:
Terminator: The system originally went online on August 4th 1997. Human decisions were removed from strategic defence. Skynet began to learn at a geometric rate. It originally became self-aware at 2:14 am Eastern Time on August 29th, 1997.
Just to clarify my post a bit...
Only in actual niche markets like high end graphics cards are prices still quite high. The low end graphics cards are easily available under A$100, high end cards easily get above A$600. Same with laptops, if I get a workstation laptop or ruggardised laptop I can expect to pay significantly more then a more mainstream laptop. This is a symptom of niche markets, not the IT industry in general, so high end graphics cards will remain expensive.
However when a company charges me almost twice what I pay other manufacturers for the same commodity hardware, that's just taking the piss.
What do you mean by "dropping towards"?. It's already there when I can buy a 15" laptop for A$800. A$1300 gets you a 13" i5, Geforece 310, 4 GB RAM and 500 GB 7.2K RPM hard disk.
I can only name one, possibly two companies that still price their laptops like they are not commodities (HINT: one's a fruit, the other like root kits)