Why would anyone want to play in the SW universe, if you're not going to be a Jedi? Lightsabers are cool, using the Force to do stuff is cool - everything else in the SW universe is generic space fantasy. Nothing wrong with any of it per se, but no more or less interesting than any one of a dozen other 'realities' you might choose for your gaming experience. If I'm being a bounty hunter, running fetchquests, then is it going to make the game any better if it's using some of the SW names for things? Doesn't it just devolve into Shadowrun-lite?
Actually, I have to admit, I'd love to see them do a Clone Wars game - either in the Genndy Tartakovsky cel-shaded style or the CGI style - both had their merits and were largely superior to the second trilogy. Just as long as I get to name my astromech droid RU12.
except maybe if you're on a James Cameron-level budget. The opening scenes of Avatar and the flight scenes in Apollo 13 are the only time I've ever seen anyone try and do zero-G realistically. One with a lot of CGI and wirework, the other by filming on a vomit comet. Don't want to do that? Then you have to say you've got some form of artificial gravity, to explain why the people are walking around, almost exactly as though they were at 1G. And artificial gravity is a real game-changer.
Don't want warp drive? Then you're stuck in one system, because space is big. Or the whole crew has to go into cryo-sleep for decades at a time to get anywhere. This latter could actually be fun in a TV series, where halfway through the first season, they celebrate the thousandth anniversary of leaving Earth, and realise that by the time they get home, entire civilisations will have risen and fallen.
Don't want aliens? Then humans and the environment are going to have to be the hostile forces. This can work - the RGB Mars trilogy does it well enough, but the books are a bit slow, and any adaptation would have to trim a lot out to get a watchable film into a couple of hours.
I remember being quite disappointed a while back - watching some astronauts working on the ISS on NASA TV. I've been a geek since I was even slightly sentient - I was 4 when Armstrong landed on the moon, and the first word I ever learned to write was 'zero' as it was the word that launched spaceships. So I was a bit peeved to find that watching real astronauts, working EVA on the real space station, was actually boring as hell after the initial 'Wow, they're on a space station!' had worn off. It was just some guys doing careful, methodical work, and being *really* careful not to drop their tools.
Loads of games have done bits of it. Just Cause 2 has a huge set of islands and total free-roaming anywhere within the map. Fuel has some insane amount of terrain (just wiki'd - 5,560 square miles!) because it does it with procedural generation. Red Faction has had destroyable terrain since the first game. Hydrophobia Prophecy modelled water physics correctly, because so much of the game involves using it to solve problems. Crysis did beautiful-looking foliage. Soldier of Fortune did hit location.
But so many games still can't be arsed to do it right, so things in the environment aren't things, they're lumps of terrain with a picture skin. Cars on which you can't shoot out the tyres. Or the windscreen. NPCs your gun won't shoot at, or won't hurt if you do. Glass that doesn't break, wood that doesn't burn, and magic invisible walls at the edge of the world. Or in the case of the Battlefield games, a magic invisible line with artillery insta-death just 5 seconds away if you dare to cross it.
Ramping up the triangle count just doesn't cut it any more. Yes, the face in the video is very clever - what happens when I shoot it? The water's lovely - does it make ripples when I walk through it, or splash when I jump up and down? The AI might well react to my presence - how will it react to a 9mm to the kneecap? Or a fire? Or a rocket going off 10 feet away? Are NPC soldiers all inhuman combat robots, totally unafraid of death, and 100% combat effective until their last hit point is gone?
Because, you know, I've played Doom. A super-shiny version of the exact same gameplay no longer appeals. I know there were restrictions on game design caused by having less memory for the game than my current CPU has cache. All the right things have been done at least once. Now could someone just please do them all together?
Take the guns away from the men and give the pills to the women. Accept the fact that it's going to take a couple of generations to stabilise, and there is no quick fix. In many places, the problems seem to be not poor soil, or lack of rain, but the fact that around harvest time, some asswipe rolls up in a jeep with a bunch of his buttboys and helps himself to whatever he fancies.
Accept the ugly truth that inter-uterine and infant malnutrition can directly and permanently affect brain growth. Unlike many other parts of the body, which seem able to recover, if sufficient food is presented later, the brain doesn't seem to recover. Entire areas have been hit by famine, whether caused by weather conditions or the janjaweed militia, and the damage is clear and permanent, and won't go away overnight no matter how much food you ship in.
With no appropriate infrastructure, a lot of aid ends up wasted, damaged, or just diverted to whichever local asswipe has the most guns. Aid needs to be specific. I saw a TED talk on the amazing water-purifier bottle - he scooped up some filthy muck, gave it a couple of pumps, and out came pure water. A truckload of those in the right place would probably do some good. I also remember hearing about a village where the thing that made the most difference to their food supply was teaching the local craftsman to make catapults. The local monkeys would help themselves to the crops and they lost around 30% of their crop each year. They gave the local boys catapults, so they could hit the monkeys with stones without getting too close. The problem cleared right up, as the monkeys learned that going anywhere near the fields got them nothing but a sharp stone at high speed.
The problems are not insurmountable, but they are huge in scope. Getting people to give a shit for extended periods of time might be the largest challenge of all.
and can probably prove it with an Etch-A-Sketch and 5 minutes of my time, but I can't take any of this stuff seriously. I listen to MP3s and they sound great to me. I listen to them on the bus, on the train, on my bike, in the city, all on standard earbuds, and it all sounds like it's supposed to.
It's just that after reading the absolute pure f**king snake-oil that some of the component manufacturers put out about their products in a vain attempt to justify charging ten grand for a pair of *wires*, as soon as anyone starts getting needlessly technical about audio, it all sounds like yet more snake-oil.
And so I end up grouping terms like lossless and FLAC and AAC with counter-spiral geometry, which is apparently why Audioquest can charge a thousand dollars a foot for a f**king power cable.
just like when it became cheap to do printing. Now the market for print covers everything from comics, to lifestyle magazines, to Booker Prize winners. Sometimes I want to sit down with a novel, sometimes I want to see what Batman's up to this month, sometimes I'll flick through an issue of Motor Boats and Yachting because that's the only mag in the dentist's waiting room.
The concept of a single, clearly- and rigidly-defined platform will always be attractive to developers. Raw horsepower will always make a difference to any game more complex than Tetris. Control systems will always be a beast to implement on something that has a touchscreen and a single button, unless the control system is implemented first, then the game built around that. It is not possible to replicate the 11 buttons, twin joysticks and a d-pad of an X-box controller on an iPhone.
I think it's good that the market is fragmenting. It won't stop the big studios making AAA-titles. It will help the indie developer with the next great idea get her game made in Flash, or on Android, or running directly in the browser. It might help stem the unearthly tide of shovelware that infests the pre-owned racks at GAME. And although, to an extent, I decry the loss of geek cred that comes with the fact that now everybody and their dog plays some sort of video games, the fact that every woman I've met lately plays Farmville does make it a useful ice-breaker...
from someone who is clearly fascinated by the possibilities of the medium, and yet despairing of the industry's reluctance to take risks.
AAA games are movie-level budgets and nobody wants to take risks with that kind of money. Indie games might try to take chances, but smaller dev-teams, and limited releases mean nobody's going to be talking about them, at least not in the amount of column-inches required for anyone to take note.
Games have been mainstream now for around 40 years, since the advent of Pong. Before that, you had hardcore geeks playing Spacewar and Advent on their PDP-10s at university but most people still thought of computer games as science fiction. During that same time-period for films, we went from George Melies' From the Earth to the Moon to Casablanca, taking in Citizen Kane, The Wizard of Oz, and Un Chien Andalou, to say nothing of the classics like Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd et al.
So where's our Casablanca? Where's our Citizen Kane? Where are the absolute, pure classics, that people want to play again and again, show to their friends as pinnacles of the genre, and that will be just as playable in 60 years time? Shadow of the Colossus? Rez? Ocarina of Time? Psychonauts? We have a few, but as long as the industry wants to keep pumping out endless retreads of Big Guns, Shiny Metal, because that's what they've been told appeals to their target demographic, we're not likely to get very many more, except by accident.
Just as soon as we get a cast-iron definition of 'obscene' or even 'offensive' that applies to everything correctly for everyone.
It's okay, I'll wait...
Because, of course, language is never going to modify itself to route round censorship. No-one has ever invented entire new sub-tongues like polari, or thieves' cant to discuss dangerous or illegal subjects in plain sight without detection.
I wish these idiots nothing but the best with their endless game of Whac-a-Mole (TM).
I have a monster PC, built specifically to run the latest games at eye-shredding resolutions. Crysis 2, 1920x1080, Ultra everything, DX11 - 80fps. FSX, 1920x1080 everything maxed, 4fps. Even when it's running like a slide-show, it looks like an 8-bit game. And when I dial everything back to playable levels, it still looks like an 8-bit game, only with more movement.. Fly low, and buildings pop in randomly around city centres, and nowhere else. Despite being in the UK, where we don't use such things, everywhere is dotted with water towers.
Pilotwings looked better on the N64 10 years ago. What is FSX doing (or not doing) that makes it run like a 3-legged dog stapled to a table?
and yet still launches in *this* state...? (ripped from Steam forum)
Issues:
No Custom settings for Video Cards
Video Cards not being detected properly by the Auto-Detector Resulting in using 0MB of Vram and using the lowest texture/gfx settings...
No Console command
No Vsync options - Results in screen tearing - Forcing Vsync causes the game to crash the drivers and game(AMD)
Unable to skip intros??? To disable the intro videos put this "+set com_skipIntroVideo 1" in the launch options of Rage Via Steam.
Mouse acceleration?
Can't use Crossfire or SLI..
Bad FoV for PC's - Short-term solution: FOV adjustment howto
(Nvidia)Enabling V-sync by forcing it in the control panel causes the game to Stutter and have lines appear:
OpenGL Issues: GL_ARB_draw_elements_base_vertex not available
Missing Files or GFX card not compatible? - List of compatible card: http://feedback.wildfiregames.com/re...ts_base_vertex this issue seems to be common with laptops and mobile video GFX processors meaning the game may not run on a mobile GFX chip(Laptops)
Bugs:
Texture Streaming is bad and slow resulting in always reloading the same textures thus causing the textures popping in effect - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7Ch6TX-Cbs&hd=1
Missing/blinking textures...
Random Crashing: when exiting the Arc, after intro video, including when trying to start a new game and loading new areas.
LoD issues(popins dispersing items)
Audio stuttering and not blending properly.
Occasional Artifacts appearing- http://img812.imageshack.us/img812/9...0322215294.jpg
Low Frame rates with occasional fps spikes
Loading saves causes videocard drivers to crash...
Game Fails to start with error code #51.
Shadows turn Green
Binding keys don't always save and remain unbound and unable to be set
No Sound? this is a common issue with creative soundcards - Possible Fix: Buy a new soundcard or try and use your onboard sound.
But for some reason, because one of the guys who worked on it did some cool stuff a few years ago, this is somehow acceptable?
The EDL can't even muster decent numbers for a march most of the time. Their last effort, the police planned for the claimed 600 marchers, and had to police only 250 EDL members, who were seriously outnumbered by the anti-fascists who'd turned up for a counter-demo.
They've already called off one march through Tower Hamlets, because they'd get slaughtered. I'm sure they'll try to find a face-saving way of pulling out of the one planned for September as well. In much the same way as the KKK might act all big and tough in downtown Podunk, but wouldn't have the nerve to march through Compton, or Harlem; the EDL have most success in places which are predominantly white and working-class.
And yes, I suppose you could call them the most significant far-right movement in the UK, but that's only been because there really haven't been any others for comparison. Nobody takes them seriously, they're not perceived as having any real influence. It offends me that they have attempted to claim the UK flag as somehow 'theirs'. They're not soldiers, and certainly not the Aryan warriors they often present themselves as being. They're shouty morons, fuelled by bad lager and stupidity.
"I'm sorry I haven't done anything original in 15 years. Please buy my latest iteration of Doom anyway. I promise you exactly the same crap I've been peddling for the last 18 years, but with 5% extra shiniez. No nasty surprises,no interesting gameplay mechanics, no unusual environments, just generic corridor shooting the way you like it. Legions of cookie-cutter mooks from the clone vats, despite the fact that doing a little randomising on the facial features would take zero effort. Locked doors won't respond to anything but the correct key no matter how much ordnance you have, and if your way is blocked by two pieces of furniture piled up, get ready to find an alternate route. All enemies are combat robots, who are 100% effective until you drain all their hit points. This mechanism made sense 20 years ago on machines with tiny RAM and limited hardware, so there's no reason to stop using it now, just because it's silly.
We're trying to make money here, not games or works of art, so please buy yet another generic FPS, if for no other reason than it's got my name on it and I did a couple of cool things 20 years ago. Admittedly, if you're old enough to remember or care who I am, you've probably got dozens of near-identical FPS games in your library anyway, but please buy this one, because at least I'm not responsible for Daikatana."
in The Warlock in Spite of Himself. If not the precise methods, then at least the ideas behind them.
"Squawking by radio had proved singularly effective, due largely to an automatic record of the squawk. The problems of records and other bureaucratic red tape had been solved by red oxide audio recording tape, with tracks a single molecule in width, and the development of data-retrieval systems so efficient that the memorization of facts became obsolete. Education thus became exclusively a training in concepts, and the success of democracy was assured."
I don't remember 200+ 11-digit numbers, I have my phone remember them for me. My intelligence is limited, but my extelligence is growing all the time. I've noticed when I deliberately take holidays in the Highlands - no wi-fi, and only enough mobile signal for emergency calls, it takes a few days to acclimatise to the concept that I can't just Google/wiki any item that comes to mind, to settle an argument, or complete a crossword puzzle, or identify a bird species.
I like the idea that I don't have to remember anything I don't really want to, because I can always look it up if I need it.
1 - yeah, quick comment was incorrect. True, it's not on-rails like Time Crisis, or HotD, but it is on rails like so many other shooters in that there is a set path, and a single objective, and you don't get to do anything else until you go do what they want you to do in the way they want you to do it. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is particularly egregious in this regard, as it gives the illusion of a huge, open world, but one step off the defined path and you're 5 seconds from insta-death.
2 - I did watch a video of the gameplay - quite a lengthy one - and it's based on that I made my comments. I saw no evidence of wounding or hit location being important. if you have a link to a video which does show this, I'll gladly watch it.
3 - I watched a 10-minute gameplay video and saw nothing innovative, challenging, or particularly imaginative. If they're going to do that, you'd think they'd put some of it in the video to make gamers go Wow. Again, if you know of a video that shows something different to every other corridor shooter aorund, please let me know.
4 - I don't know if Carmack is the designer or not, nor do I care - I used his name because he was the one being interviewed and he was the one doing the puff piece for his new game, which looks for all the world to me like every other one that he's been involved with, in whatever capacity.
5 - Really? How clever? Does it change the way the gameplay works? Will it revolutionise the industry? Because it looked pretty, yes, but so does Homefront, Aliens vs Predator, Crysis and a ton of other recent AAA FPS titles. The humans were all still clearly wedged deep into the uncanny valley, and the environments looked nice, but so what? If you can't interact with them in any meaningful way, they might as well be blank polygons for all the effect they have on how you play the game.
An on-rails shooter in a vaguely Mad-Max style world, with a colour palette of grey and brown, and a small selection of identikit, cookie-cutter mooks as enemies. They all have the same faces, the same hairstyles, the same body-armour, like they were stamped out of cardboard, and they all act in the exact same fashion. They're all combat robots, who give up only on death and are 100% combat-effective until that point. None of them will run away after being wounded, none of them will try to crawl away after being legshot, none of them will beg for mercy. Doors you're not supposed to go through will be made of impervium, and react not at all to your strongest explosives. Two oil drums piled up will provide an immovable barrier that you'll have to find an alternate route around.
So it's Doom with pretty graphics. Whoopee-fricking-skip.
Just like every other FPS that's come along in the last 20 years. I know this guy had a hand in creating the genre, but it's like he had one really excellent idea 20 years ago, and he's been milking it dry ever since. I can't fault him for that; if there's people willing to keep paying his wages to do the same thing he's always done, but with 5% more shiniez than last time, good luck to him.
It's just after all the hype about this damn game, and a development cycle only slightly shorter than DNF, I was expecting something a bit different. But why bother actually doing something different and clever, when Big Guns, Shiny Metal 17 will sell just as well for a tenth the actual effort, especially if it has Carmack's name on the box.
That's all this is. He can't need the money. He's desperately trying to pretend he has still got something to contribute to the arts.
Pioneer One tells a compelling story with essentially zero FX and a budget that wouldn't pay for nose-candy on most movie sets. Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning was rendered in the film-maker's kitchen. The Hunt for Gollum manages to produce a digital Gollum (ok, for a few seconds...) that's not too far off the best results of WETA Digital. Give Seth Green a handful of Star Wars figures and a digicam and he could probably come up with something that stayed within canon in about 20 minutes.
But George Lucas, with all his years of experience, skill, contacts and vast gobs of cash can't make a couple of seasons of a watchable TV show because the technology's not there yet? Absolute bollocks.
Technically, if you have 500 Facebook friends, then every time you update your status you are in contact with 500 people. But Dunbar's number is a measure of the fact that you are not just in contact with people, but know something about them. You'd recognise them, you'd remember their first name if you met them in the street or at work, you have some idea if they're married or single, have kids or not.
It's also a handy indicator of the efficiency of a group. A group of people smaller than Dunbar's number can be updated on the status of all the others quite quickly, probably in a single pass. More than that, and you start getting so many people who are unavailable at any given time, that you need multiple updates to make sure you've reached everybody and the amount of work needed to simply keep everyone informed rises dramatically as a result.
Graphics look amazing. Crysis on high-res looks like you could open the TV screen and pick a leaf off a tree. But the immersion factor of the gorgeous graphics breaks down when you try to play with them. When you shoot a car windscreen, and it doesn't break. Or shoot the tyres, and they don't pop. Or the gas tank and it doesn't explode.
Even sillier - shoot your AI squadmates in the head, and they just go "Ow, quit it!". Worse, you have a magic gun that won't let you pull the trigger if you're pointing it at a non-enemy. I played the opening level on Halo Reach, and was so bored when I got to the first farmer, that I just shot him in the head to shut him up so I could get on with alien-killing. Well, the gun went bang, and a blood-spatter hit the wall behind him, but he never missed a word of exposition. I shot him 10 times - the same thing happened. On the 11th shot, I just died. Up until then, my teammates hadn't seemed concerned about my actions, and they didn't actually take offence, just some mighty vengeful god struck me down until I agreed to play nice.
Or the world looks open and inviting, but you're just as much on rails as if you were playing some arcade light-gun game. Like Bad Company 2, where any deviation from the set path gets you a 5-second countdown to insta-death. Or Gears of War, where you're a grotesquely-muscled space marine who can be forced from his chosen path by three chairs piled on a table.
The thing is, many games have got bits of it right. Just Cause 2 gives you an enormous world, and near-total freedom within that world. Heavy Rain changes the gameplay based on your actions. The Witcher makes every choice have a consequence you might not like, but at least you get to make the choice. Modern hardware has the power to create incredible, immersive game experiences, but a lot of studios would rather make Big Guns, Shiny Metal 5 using a well-established engine because that's easier, cheaper, and practically guaranteed to sell to their target demographic.
Maybe the next arms race will be environment engines that come a little closer to replicating the properties of objects, so that glass always breaks, wood and cloth always burn, and you don't need the red key if you've got the rocket launcher.
In campaign mode you mostly shoot at bad guys and hide behind convenient piles of things. There is a vague story however it won't get in the way of shooting things (don't worry). A new AI system has been designed that will ensure nothing out of the ordinary or interesting happens.
In multiplayer you mostly shoot at other people online and use cover to grief people repeatedly. It promises to have different maps than the previous release as well as a system that rewards 14 year old males dual auto-shotguns with continuous fire.
Wow! Sounds amazing! So fresh, original and innovative! But wait... How did you *know* all this...? You must be psychic! Can you use your awesome powers to determine if the palette will have three colours, four, or maybe even the legendary and much-rumoured five-colour palette?
would be like watching Enterprise, and not wanting to watch original Trek because it was dated and didn't have bucket-loads of CGI for space battles.
He's good, but for the full flavour, you need some of the early stuff.
Start with 'An Unearthly Child', then 'The Daleks' - the first two stories of Hartnell. Try 'Tomb of the Cybermen' - the first existant Troughton. Watch 'War Games', then 'Spearhead from Space' to get the transition to Pertwee's doctor. Most Pertwee stuff is pretty good, but with special mention for 'Terror of the Autons'. Tom Baker had a lot of good stories, but again, special mention for 'Genesis of the Daleks', 'Pyramids of Mars', and 'The Masque of Mandragora'.
Peter Davison is a little harder to pick and choose, as they were running loosely-connected plot arcs over entire series at this point, but 'Earthshock' is a good one.
From Colin Baker, I'd pick 'Vengeance on Varos', and for Sylvester McCoy, 'Battlefield', and 'The Curse of Fenric'.
Remember, budgets were pitiful, it spent a lot of time being perceived as a children's show, and yes, they did script pacing differently back then. Sets are wobbly, some effects are woeful, and some acting isn't up to much. But underneath are stories, characters and entire mythologies that make something greater than the sum of their cardboard spaceships and bad chromakey effects.
The Daleks, the Cybermen, the Doctor himself, these will be myths and legends long after everyone's forgotten Firefly.
Simply because of the massive outpouring of shock, rage, and incessant bloody whining from people who can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality and so assume no-one else can either.
A triple-A game costs $lots, and every developer wants to maximise returns. They want words like 'fun', and 'exciting' to be used by reviewers and players describing their games. Phrases like 'screams of the wounded', and 'dragging intestines' are right out. It doesn't matter how good physics engines get, or how much memory is in a PC; when bodies are shot, they will fall to the floor inert, and no amount of further shooting will do anything other than maybe nudge them about a bit. Enemies will have hit points, and once they're gone, they're dead, but until then, they're fully functional. Nobody's ever going to crawl away with a shattered kneecap, or frantically flail for their medkit trying to staunch a spurting artery.
There will never be children in a warzone, either as refugees or inhabitants. There will never be veiled and burqa'd women with suicide vests approaching soldiers at checkpoints. There will never be entire rows of houses filled with the dead, some still frozen in place with food in their hands, killed by cyanide gas bombs. What will be presented in-game will be the illusion of war, as seen from the safety and comfort of an armchair; sanitised by the news corporations who don't show you footage of anything that might actually upset you. Oddly enough, this doesn't extend to natural disasters, where they're often ghoulishly happy to show piles of fly-blown corpses, or 'dozers shoving piles of limed and flopping meat into vast unmarked graves.
It would be perfectly possible for a developer, hell, probably even some members of the modding community, to release a game that came a good deal closer to replicating the horrors of war than anything we've seen so far. Instead, I think they'll continue releasing things that are essentially toy soldiers, because nobody wants to be pilloried in the media for what amounts to trying to tell the truth.
The latest and greatest Nvidia gfx card is a little over £420 right now. For that price, I could have a PS3 and a Wii, or a 360 and a Wii. And lets not forget, that's just for the gfx card - if I want the rest of the PC to match it, I'm looking at over £1000. I know this, as I just had a gaming rig built for my son's 18th birthday and it came to just short of £900, and that wasn't a top-of-the-range gfx card.
Since I acquired my consoles, the only things I've played on the PC are clever indie games - Defense Grid, Master of Defense, PvZ, Robot Unicorn Attack. With so much gaming goodness instantly available and always working on the consoles, the urge to replace my somewhat elderly PC rig is non-existent.
The last PC game I bought was HL2:Ep2, and the last PC disc I bought was Trackmania Sunrise. Everything else has been console-based. The PC is for email, word processing, Oovoo and Facebook, and the occasional foray into image manipulation. I don't need a screaming monster rig to do that.
Also, it annoys me when HL2 ran beautifully on my machine, and a lot of other games since then simply fail to run at all, because (presumably) they are so badly programmed. UT3 was abysmal - I could either have 8-bit graphics and 20fps, or recognisable graphics and 2 secs per frame. There's really no excuse.
At some point, my current PC will fail sufficiently to make it worth doing a complete replacement of everything that isn't the mouse, monitor and keyboard, and at that point, I will acquire something decent and play through the handful of PC exclusives that require a better machine than mine (Crysis, etc.). Until then, there are so many other excellent games on so many other systems, that there's really no need to rely on the PC for gaming.
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Why would anyone want to play in the SW universe, if you're not going to be a Jedi? Lightsabers are cool, using the Force to do stuff is cool - everything else in the SW universe is generic space fantasy. Nothing wrong with any of it per se, but no more or less interesting than any one of a dozen other 'realities' you might choose for your gaming experience. If I'm being a bounty hunter, running fetchquests, then is it going to make the game any better if it's using some of the SW names for things? Doesn't it just devolve into Shadowrun-lite?
Actually, I have to admit, I'd love to see them do a Clone Wars game - either in the Genndy Tartakovsky cel-shaded style or the CGI style - both had their merits and were largely superior to the second trilogy. Just as long as I get to name my astromech droid RU12.
except maybe if you're on a James Cameron-level budget. The opening scenes of Avatar and the flight scenes in Apollo 13 are the only time I've ever seen anyone try and do zero-G realistically. One with a lot of CGI and wirework, the other by filming on a vomit comet. Don't want to do that? Then you have to say you've got some form of artificial gravity, to explain why the people are walking around, almost exactly as though they were at 1G. And artificial gravity is a real game-changer.
Don't want warp drive? Then you're stuck in one system, because space is big. Or the whole crew has to go into cryo-sleep for decades at a time to get anywhere. This latter could actually be fun in a TV series, where halfway through the first season, they celebrate the thousandth anniversary of leaving Earth, and realise that by the time they get home, entire civilisations will have risen and fallen.
Don't want aliens? Then humans and the environment are going to have to be the hostile forces. This can work - the RGB Mars trilogy does it well enough, but the books are a bit slow, and any adaptation would have to trim a lot out to get a watchable film into a couple of hours.
I remember being quite disappointed a while back - watching some astronauts working on the ISS on NASA TV. I've been a geek since I was even slightly sentient - I was 4 when Armstrong landed on the moon, and the first word I ever learned to write was 'zero' as it was the word that launched spaceships. So I was a bit peeved to find that watching real astronauts, working EVA on the real space station, was actually boring as hell after the initial 'Wow, they're on a space station!' had worn off. It was just some guys doing careful, methodical work, and being *really* careful not to drop their tools.
Loads of games have done bits of it. Just Cause 2 has a huge set of islands and total free-roaming anywhere within the map. Fuel has some insane amount of terrain (just wiki'd - 5,560 square miles!) because it does it with procedural generation. Red Faction has had destroyable terrain since the first game. Hydrophobia Prophecy modelled water physics correctly, because so much of the game involves using it to solve problems. Crysis did beautiful-looking foliage. Soldier of Fortune did hit location.
But so many games still can't be arsed to do it right, so things in the environment aren't things, they're lumps of terrain with a picture skin. Cars on which you can't shoot out the tyres. Or the windscreen. NPCs your gun won't shoot at, or won't hurt if you do. Glass that doesn't break, wood that doesn't burn, and magic invisible walls at the edge of the world. Or in the case of the Battlefield games, a magic invisible line with artillery insta-death just 5 seconds away if you dare to cross it.
Ramping up the triangle count just doesn't cut it any more. Yes, the face in the video is very clever - what happens when I shoot it? The water's lovely - does it make ripples when I walk through it, or splash when I jump up and down? The AI might well react to my presence - how will it react to a 9mm to the kneecap? Or a fire? Or a rocket going off 10 feet away? Are NPC soldiers all inhuman combat robots, totally unafraid of death, and 100% combat effective until their last hit point is gone?
Because, you know, I've played Doom. A super-shiny version of the exact same gameplay no longer appeals. I know there were restrictions on game design caused by having less memory for the game than my current CPU has cache. All the right things have been done at least once. Now could someone just please do them all together?
Take the guns away from the men and give the pills to the women. Accept the fact that it's going to take a couple of generations to stabilise, and there is no quick fix. In many places, the problems seem to be not poor soil, or lack of rain, but the fact that around harvest time, some asswipe rolls up in a jeep with a bunch of his buttboys and helps himself to whatever he fancies.
Accept the ugly truth that inter-uterine and infant malnutrition can directly and permanently affect brain growth. Unlike many other parts of the body, which seem able to recover, if sufficient food is presented later, the brain doesn't seem to recover. Entire areas have been hit by famine, whether caused by weather conditions or the janjaweed militia, and the damage is clear and permanent, and won't go away overnight no matter how much food you ship in.
With no appropriate infrastructure, a lot of aid ends up wasted, damaged, or just diverted to whichever local asswipe has the most guns. Aid needs to be specific. I saw a TED talk on the amazing water-purifier bottle - he scooped up some filthy muck, gave it a couple of pumps, and out came pure water. A truckload of those in the right place would probably do some good. I also remember hearing about a village where the thing that made the most difference to their food supply was teaching the local craftsman to make catapults. The local monkeys would help themselves to the crops and they lost around 30% of their crop each year. They gave the local boys catapults, so they could hit the monkeys with stones without getting too close. The problem cleared right up, as the monkeys learned that going anywhere near the fields got them nothing but a sharp stone at high speed.
The problems are not insurmountable, but they are huge in scope. Getting people to give a shit for extended periods of time might be the largest challenge of all.
and can probably prove it with an Etch-A-Sketch and 5 minutes of my time, but I can't take any of this stuff seriously. I listen to MP3s and they sound great to me. I listen to them on the bus, on the train, on my bike, in the city, all on standard earbuds, and it all sounds like it's supposed to.
It's just that after reading the absolute pure f**king snake-oil that some of the component manufacturers put out about their products in a vain attempt to justify charging ten grand for a pair of *wires*, as soon as anyone starts getting needlessly technical about audio, it all sounds like yet more snake-oil.
And so I end up grouping terms like lossless and FLAC and AAC with counter-spiral geometry, which is apparently why Audioquest can charge a thousand dollars a foot for a f**king power cable.
but not Barada Nikto...
http://youtu.be/Jm2MB14JTSM
just like when it became cheap to do printing. Now the market for print covers everything from comics, to lifestyle magazines, to Booker Prize winners. Sometimes I want to sit down with a novel, sometimes I want to see what Batman's up to this month, sometimes I'll flick through an issue of Motor Boats and Yachting because that's the only mag in the dentist's waiting room.
The concept of a single, clearly- and rigidly-defined platform will always be attractive to developers. Raw horsepower will always make a difference to any game more complex than Tetris. Control systems will always be a beast to implement on something that has a touchscreen and a single button, unless the control system is implemented first, then the game built around that. It is not possible to replicate the 11 buttons, twin joysticks and a d-pad of an X-box controller on an iPhone.
I think it's good that the market is fragmenting. It won't stop the big studios making AAA-titles. It will help the indie developer with the next great idea get her game made in Flash, or on Android, or running directly in the browser. It might help stem the unearthly tide of shovelware that infests the pre-owned racks at GAME. And although, to an extent, I decry the loss of geek cred that comes with the fact that now everybody and their dog plays some sort of video games, the fact that every woman I've met lately plays Farmville does make it a useful ice-breaker...
http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_liew3uMF7G1qbmgeto1_500.jpg
or
http://cf.sketchfu.com/i/72185.png
The images are from the Clive Barker story - In the Hills, the Cities. This more like what you had in mind?
from someone who is clearly fascinated by the possibilities of the medium, and yet despairing of the industry's reluctance to take risks.
AAA games are movie-level budgets and nobody wants to take risks with that kind of money. Indie games might try to take chances, but smaller dev-teams, and limited releases mean nobody's going to be talking about them, at least not in the amount of column-inches required for anyone to take note.
Games have been mainstream now for around 40 years, since the advent of Pong. Before that, you had hardcore geeks playing Spacewar and Advent on their PDP-10s at university but most people still thought of computer games as science fiction. During that same time-period for films, we went from George Melies' From the Earth to the Moon to Casablanca, taking in Citizen Kane, The Wizard of Oz, and Un Chien Andalou, to say nothing of the classics like Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd et al.
So where's our Casablanca? Where's our Citizen Kane? Where are the absolute, pure classics, that people want to play again and again, show to their friends as pinnacles of the genre, and that will be just as playable in 60 years time? Shadow of the Colossus? Rez? Ocarina of Time? Psychonauts? We have a few, but as long as the industry wants to keep pumping out endless retreads of Big Guns, Shiny Metal, because that's what they've been told appeals to their target demographic, we're not likely to get very many more, except by accident.
Just as soon as we get a cast-iron definition of 'obscene' or even 'offensive' that applies to everything correctly for everyone.
It's okay, I'll wait...
Because, of course, language is never going to modify itself to route round censorship. No-one has ever invented entire new sub-tongues like polari, or thieves' cant to discuss dangerous or illegal subjects in plain sight without detection.
I wish these idiots nothing but the best with their endless game of Whac-a-Mole (TM).
I have a monster PC, built specifically to run the latest games at eye-shredding resolutions. Crysis 2, 1920x1080, Ultra everything, DX11 - 80fps. FSX, 1920x1080 everything maxed, 4fps. Even when it's running like a slide-show, it looks like an 8-bit game. And when I dial everything back to playable levels, it still looks like an 8-bit game, only with more movement.. Fly low, and buildings pop in randomly around city centres, and nowhere else. Despite being in the UK, where we don't use such things, everywhere is dotted with water towers.
Pilotwings looked better on the N64 10 years ago. What is FSX doing (or not doing) that makes it run like a 3-legged dog stapled to a table?
and yet still launches in *this* state...? (ripped from Steam forum)
Issues: No Custom settings for Video Cards
Video Cards not being detected properly by the Auto-Detector Resulting in using 0MB of Vram and using the lowest texture/gfx settings...
No Console command
No Vsync options - Results in screen tearing - Forcing Vsync causes the game to crash the drivers and game(AMD)
Unable to skip intros??? To disable the intro videos put this "+set com_skipIntroVideo 1" in the launch options of Rage Via Steam.
Mouse acceleration?
Can't use Crossfire or SLI..
Bad FoV for PC's - Short-term solution: FOV adjustment howto
(Nvidia)Enabling V-sync by forcing it in the control panel causes the game to Stutter and have lines appear:
OpenGL Issues: GL_ARB_draw_elements_base_vertex not available
Missing Files or GFX card not compatible? - List of compatible card: http://feedback.wildfiregames.com/re...ts_base_vertex this issue seems to be common with laptops and mobile video GFX processors meaning the game may not run on a mobile GFX chip(Laptops)
Bugs:
Texture Streaming is bad and slow resulting in always reloading the same textures thus causing the textures popping in effect - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7Ch6TX-Cbs&hd=1
Missing/blinking textures...
Random Crashing: when exiting the Arc, after intro video, including when trying to start a new game and loading new areas.
LoD issues(popins dispersing items)
Audio stuttering and not blending properly.
Occasional Artifacts appearing- http://img812.imageshack.us/img812/9...0322215294.jpg
Low Frame rates with occasional fps spikes
Loading saves causes videocard drivers to crash...
Game Fails to start with error code #51.
Shadows turn Green
Binding keys don't always save and remain unbound and unable to be set
No Sound? this is a common issue with creative soundcards - Possible Fix: Buy a new soundcard or try and use your onboard sound.
But for some reason, because one of the guys who worked on it did some cool stuff a few years ago, this is somehow acceptable?
and get over yourself. Nobody gives a shit about the contents of your old hard drives. Nobody.
They have successfully attracted all sorts: skin heads, disenfranchised youths, football hooligans, etc. and are stepping up the game by attacking mosques and planning marches through areas with large numbers of non-whites in an obvious attempt at provoking violence.
The EDL can't even muster decent numbers for a march most of the time. Their last effort, the police planned for the claimed 600 marchers, and had to police only 250 EDL members, who were seriously outnumbered by the anti-fascists who'd turned up for a counter-demo.
They've already called off one march through Tower Hamlets, because they'd get slaughtered. I'm sure they'll try to find a face-saving way of pulling out of the one planned for September as well. In much the same way as the KKK might act all big and tough in downtown Podunk, but wouldn't have the nerve to march through Compton, or Harlem; the EDL have most success in places which are predominantly white and working-class.
And yes, I suppose you could call them the most significant far-right movement in the UK, but that's only been because there really haven't been any others for comparison. Nobody takes them seriously, they're not perceived as having any real influence. It offends me that they have attempted to claim the UK flag as somehow 'theirs'. They're not soldiers, and certainly not the Aryan warriors they often present themselves as being. They're shouty morons, fuelled by bad lager and stupidity.
"I'm sorry I haven't done anything original in 15 years. Please buy my latest iteration of Doom anyway. I promise you exactly the same crap I've been peddling for the last 18 years, but with 5% extra shiniez. No nasty surprises,no interesting gameplay mechanics, no unusual environments, just generic corridor shooting the way you like it. Legions of cookie-cutter mooks from the clone vats, despite the fact that doing a little randomising on the facial features would take zero effort. Locked doors won't respond to anything but the correct key no matter how much ordnance you have, and if your way is blocked by two pieces of furniture piled up, get ready to find an alternate route. All enemies are combat robots, who are 100% effective until you drain all their hit points. This mechanism made sense 20 years ago on machines with tiny RAM and limited hardware, so there's no reason to stop using it now, just because it's silly.
We're trying to make money here, not games or works of art, so please buy yet another generic FPS, if for no other reason than it's got my name on it and I did a couple of cool things 20 years ago. Admittedly, if you're old enough to remember or care who I am, you've probably got dozens of near-identical FPS games in your library anyway, but please buy this one, because at least I'm not responsible for Daikatana."
in The Warlock in Spite of Himself. If not the precise methods, then at least the ideas behind them.
"Squawking by radio had proved singularly effective, due largely to an automatic record of the squawk. The problems of records and other bureaucratic red tape had been solved by red oxide audio recording tape, with tracks a single molecule in width, and the development of data-retrieval systems so efficient that the memorization of facts became obsolete. Education thus became exclusively a training in concepts, and the success of democracy was assured."
I don't remember 200+ 11-digit numbers, I have my phone remember them for me. My intelligence is limited, but my extelligence is growing all the time. I've noticed when I deliberately take holidays in the Highlands - no wi-fi, and only enough mobile signal for emergency calls, it takes a few days to acclimatise to the concept that I can't just Google/wiki any item that comes to mind, to settle an argument, or complete a crossword puzzle, or identify a bird species.
I like the idea that I don't have to remember anything I don't really want to, because I can always look it up if I need it.
1 - yeah, quick comment was incorrect. True, it's not on-rails like Time Crisis, or HotD, but it is on rails like so many other shooters in that there is a set path, and a single objective, and you don't get to do anything else until you go do what they want you to do in the way they want you to do it. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is particularly egregious in this regard, as it gives the illusion of a huge, open world, but one step off the defined path and you're 5 seconds from insta-death.
2 - I did watch a video of the gameplay - quite a lengthy one - and it's based on that I made my comments. I saw no evidence of wounding or hit location being important. if you have a link to a video which does show this, I'll gladly watch it.
3 - I watched a 10-minute gameplay video and saw nothing innovative, challenging, or particularly imaginative. If they're going to do that, you'd think they'd put some of it in the video to make gamers go Wow. Again, if you know of a video that shows something different to every other corridor shooter aorund, please let me know.
4 - I don't know if Carmack is the designer or not, nor do I care - I used his name because he was the one being interviewed and he was the one doing the puff piece for his new game, which looks for all the world to me like every other one that he's been involved with, in whatever capacity.
5 - Really? How clever? Does it change the way the gameplay works? Will it revolutionise the industry? Because it looked pretty, yes, but so does Homefront, Aliens vs Predator, Crysis and a ton of other recent AAA FPS titles. The humans were all still clearly wedged deep into the uncanny valley, and the environments looked nice, but so what? If you can't interact with them in any meaningful way, they might as well be blank polygons for all the effect they have on how you play the game.
An on-rails shooter in a vaguely Mad-Max style world, with a colour palette of grey and brown, and a small selection of identikit, cookie-cutter mooks as enemies. They all have the same faces, the same hairstyles, the same body-armour, like they were stamped out of cardboard, and they all act in the exact same fashion. They're all combat robots, who give up only on death and are 100% combat-effective until that point. None of them will run away after being wounded, none of them will try to crawl away after being legshot, none of them will beg for mercy. Doors you're not supposed to go through will be made of impervium, and react not at all to your strongest explosives. Two oil drums piled up will provide an immovable barrier that you'll have to find an alternate route around.
So it's Doom with pretty graphics. Whoopee-fricking-skip.
Just like every other FPS that's come along in the last 20 years. I know this guy had a hand in creating the genre, but it's like he had one really excellent idea 20 years ago, and he's been milking it dry ever since. I can't fault him for that; if there's people willing to keep paying his wages to do the same thing he's always done, but with 5% more shiniez than last time, good luck to him.
It's just after all the hype about this damn game, and a development cycle only slightly shorter than DNF, I was expecting something a bit different. But why bother actually doing something different and clever, when Big Guns, Shiny Metal 17 will sell just as well for a tenth the actual effort, especially if it has Carmack's name on the box.
That's all this is. He can't need the money. He's desperately trying to pretend he has still got something to contribute to the arts.
Pioneer One tells a compelling story with essentially zero FX and a budget that wouldn't pay for nose-candy on most movie sets. Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning was rendered in the film-maker's kitchen. The Hunt for Gollum manages to produce a digital Gollum (ok, for a few seconds...) that's not too far off the best results of WETA Digital. Give Seth Green a handful of Star Wars figures and a digicam and he could probably come up with something that stayed within canon in about 20 minutes.
But George Lucas, with all his years of experience, skill, contacts and vast gobs of cash can't make a couple of seasons of a watchable TV show because the technology's not there yet? Absolute bollocks.
Technically, if you have 500 Facebook friends, then every time you update your status you are in contact with 500 people. But Dunbar's number is a measure of the fact that you are not just in contact with people, but know something about them. You'd recognise them, you'd remember their first name if you met them in the street or at work, you have some idea if they're married or single, have kids or not.
It's also a handy indicator of the efficiency of a group. A group of people smaller than Dunbar's number can be updated on the status of all the others quite quickly, probably in a single pass. More than that, and you start getting so many people who are unavailable at any given time, that you need multiple updates to make sure you've reached everybody and the amount of work needed to simply keep everyone informed rises dramatically as a result.
Graphics look amazing. Crysis on high-res looks like you could open the TV screen and pick a leaf off a tree. But the immersion factor of the gorgeous graphics breaks down when you try to play with them. When you shoot a car windscreen, and it doesn't break. Or shoot the tyres, and they don't pop. Or the gas tank and it doesn't explode.
Even sillier - shoot your AI squadmates in the head, and they just go "Ow, quit it!". Worse, you have a magic gun that won't let you pull the trigger if you're pointing it at a non-enemy. I played the opening level on Halo Reach, and was so bored when I got to the first farmer, that I just shot him in the head to shut him up so I could get on with alien-killing. Well, the gun went bang, and a blood-spatter hit the wall behind him, but he never missed a word of exposition. I shot him 10 times - the same thing happened. On the 11th shot, I just died. Up until then, my teammates hadn't seemed concerned about my actions, and they didn't actually take offence, just some mighty vengeful god struck me down until I agreed to play nice.
Or the world looks open and inviting, but you're just as much on rails as if you were playing some arcade light-gun game. Like Bad Company 2, where any deviation from the set path gets you a 5-second countdown to insta-death. Or Gears of War, where you're a grotesquely-muscled space marine who can be forced from his chosen path by three chairs piled on a table.
The thing is, many games have got bits of it right. Just Cause 2 gives you an enormous world, and near-total freedom within that world. Heavy Rain changes the gameplay based on your actions. The Witcher makes every choice have a consequence you might not like, but at least you get to make the choice. Modern hardware has the power to create incredible, immersive game experiences, but a lot of studios would rather make Big Guns, Shiny Metal 5 using a well-established engine because that's easier, cheaper, and practically guaranteed to sell to their target demographic.
Maybe the next arms race will be environment engines that come a little closer to replicating the properties of objects, so that glass always breaks, wood and cloth always burn, and you don't need the red key if you've got the rocket launcher.
In campaign mode you mostly shoot at bad guys and hide behind convenient piles of things. There is a vague story however it won't get in the way of shooting things (don't worry). A new AI system has been designed that will ensure nothing out of the ordinary or interesting happens.
In multiplayer you mostly shoot at other people online and use cover to grief people repeatedly. It promises to have different maps than the previous release as well as a system that rewards 14 year old males dual auto-shotguns with continuous fire.
Wow! Sounds amazing! So fresh, original and innovative! But wait... How did you *know* all this...? You must be psychic! Can you use your awesome powers to determine if the palette will have three colours, four, or maybe even the legendary and much-rumoured five-colour palette?
would be like watching Enterprise, and not wanting to watch original Trek because it was dated and didn't have bucket-loads of CGI for space battles.
He's good, but for the full flavour, you need some of the early stuff.
Start with 'An Unearthly Child', then 'The Daleks' - the first two stories of Hartnell. Try 'Tomb of the Cybermen' - the first existant Troughton. Watch 'War Games', then 'Spearhead from Space' to get the transition to Pertwee's doctor. Most Pertwee stuff is pretty good, but with special mention for 'Terror of the Autons'. Tom Baker had a lot of good stories, but again, special mention for 'Genesis of the Daleks', 'Pyramids of Mars', and 'The Masque of Mandragora'.
Peter Davison is a little harder to pick and choose, as they were running loosely-connected plot arcs over entire series at this point, but 'Earthshock' is a good one.
From Colin Baker, I'd pick 'Vengeance on Varos', and for Sylvester McCoy, 'Battlefield', and 'The Curse of Fenric'.
Remember, budgets were pitiful, it spent a lot of time being perceived as a children's show, and yes, they did script pacing differently back then. Sets are wobbly, some effects are woeful, and some acting isn't up to much. But underneath are stories, characters and entire mythologies that make something greater than the sum of their cardboard spaceships and bad chromakey effects.
The Daleks, the Cybermen, the Doctor himself, these will be myths and legends long after everyone's forgotten Firefly.
Simply because of the massive outpouring of shock, rage, and incessant bloody whining from people who can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality and so assume no-one else can either.
A triple-A game costs $lots, and every developer wants to maximise returns. They want words like 'fun', and 'exciting' to be used by reviewers and players describing their games. Phrases like 'screams of the wounded', and 'dragging intestines' are right out. It doesn't matter how good physics engines get, or how much memory is in a PC; when bodies are shot, they will fall to the floor inert, and no amount of further shooting will do anything other than maybe nudge them about a bit. Enemies will have hit points, and once they're gone, they're dead, but until then, they're fully functional. Nobody's ever going to crawl away with a shattered kneecap, or frantically flail for their medkit trying to staunch a spurting artery.
There will never be children in a warzone, either as refugees or inhabitants. There will never be veiled and burqa'd women with suicide vests approaching soldiers at checkpoints. There will never be entire rows of houses filled with the dead, some still frozen in place with food in their hands, killed by cyanide gas bombs. What will be presented in-game will be the illusion of war, as seen from the safety and comfort of an armchair; sanitised by the news corporations who don't show you footage of anything that might actually upset you. Oddly enough, this doesn't extend to natural disasters, where they're often ghoulishly happy to show piles of fly-blown corpses, or 'dozers shoving piles of limed and flopping meat into vast unmarked graves.
It would be perfectly possible for a developer, hell, probably even some members of the modding community, to release a game that came a good deal closer to replicating the horrors of war than anything we've seen so far. Instead, I think they'll continue releasing things that are essentially toy soldiers, because nobody wants to be pilloried in the media for what amounts to trying to tell the truth.
The latest and greatest Nvidia gfx card is a little over £420 right now. For that price, I could have a PS3 and a Wii, or a 360 and a Wii. And lets not forget, that's just for the gfx card - if I want the rest of the PC to match it, I'm looking at over £1000. I know this, as I just had a gaming rig built for my son's 18th birthday and it came to just short of £900, and that wasn't a top-of-the-range gfx card.
Since I acquired my consoles, the only things I've played on the PC are clever indie games - Defense Grid, Master of Defense, PvZ, Robot Unicorn Attack. With so much gaming goodness instantly available and always working on the consoles, the urge to replace my somewhat elderly PC rig is non-existent.
The last PC game I bought was HL2:Ep2, and the last PC disc I bought was Trackmania Sunrise. Everything else has been console-based. The PC is for email, word processing, Oovoo and Facebook, and the occasional foray into image manipulation. I don't need a screaming monster rig to do that.
Also, it annoys me when HL2 ran beautifully on my machine, and a lot of other games since then simply fail to run at all, because (presumably) they are so badly programmed. UT3 was abysmal - I could either have 8-bit graphics and 20fps, or recognisable graphics and 2 secs per frame. There's really no excuse.
At some point, my current PC will fail sufficiently to make it worth doing a complete replacement of everything that isn't the mouse, monitor and keyboard, and at that point, I will acquire something decent and play through the handful of PC exclusives that require a better machine than mine (Crysis, etc.). Until then, there are so many other excellent games on so many other systems, that there's really no need to rely on the PC for gaming.