For such a young medium, video games have produced some amazing art. I think Tempest was probably the first art game, although I, Robot comes a close second. I, Robot even has a doodle mode which you can 'play' instead of playing the shooter part of the game, and draw with all the game shapes. Tempest looks like a piece of abstract art in motion, as do many of its spiritual successors. Rez is less a video game, and more a piece of playable, interactive art.
I think it's the layers of interactivity that perhaps make it hard for games to be seen as art. Many people perceive art as something you experience, or something you create. I, Robot got it right all those years ago, and a few games have got it over the years - what's to stop art being something you play? If I compose a piece of music, is that art? How about if I play a tune written by someone else - still art? If I play a tune someone else wrote, on an instrument someone else built - still art? So how does playing through Rez differ materially from playing through a Mozart sonata? I didn't write the game, I didn't build the console, but completing the sequence successfully requires a good deal of practice, and a great many things to be done in precise order, with a bit of free-forming thrown in. Maybe Coltrane, rather than Mozart then...
As for emotional impact, that can come from a simple musical phrase, a sound effect, a single image. Halo's opening chords, the 'task complete' chime in a Zelda game, the radio crackle in Silent Hill.
Storytelling in video games is traditionally weak, because there is no story, or rather, you are the story, playing out your chosen path. All too often, even in games like Bioshock, the story is irrelevant, cutscenes or audio backstory merely being extra treats for killing your way through X number of monsters. Mostly, the story doesn't make any difference, except where you get one ending for being Good, and another for being Bad. You can have preset events within the game, such as the death of a main character, but I generally find these to be overly manipulative. I'd rather have my choices mean something within the game, as opposed to which 90 seconds of CGI I get as my reward at the end. This, however, represents far more work for the programmers, so is much less likely to happen.
I've been involved in paper/pencil/dice RPGs before now, in which players have come away from sessions genuinely upset and unhappy about the situations they'd ended up in, and often the compromises they'd had to make to get out of them. This was because they had months, sometimes years invested in these characters, and the players knew them well. It's difficult to get emotionally invested in a video game character in the same way, especially when the character displays no emotional range within the game (Gordon Freeman, Link, Master Chief). Having said that, my son was very upset by the ending of Panzer Dragoon Zwei, but then he was only about 9 at the time...
Because it looks like almost everything's intact, just blurred and darkened. So the patch to unblur and brighten those sequences shouldn't be a problem. So the game as sold at retail conforms to some antiquated notions of what a game should be, and the patch lets those of us who are fully functioning adults make our own choices about which version to play. Everybody happy.
I'm a male in my forties, who's raised a child to adulthood, held down a number of really shitty jobs, served in my country's armed forces, been trusted with a number of weapons and fully trained in their use. I've dealt with real death of close friends and relations, and the aftermath of same. What, exactly, do these fuckers think they're protecting me from? There are a number of things in my life that perhaps I wouldn't have minded being shielded from, but a video game is never going to make that list.
How much have they spent on this so far? So what are they going to do - issue a press statement that says "We know it sucks, the reviewers are right, it's broken and we hacked it about to get the rating down. We are aware that this level of ineptitude is unacceptable in what's supposed to be a triple-A title for our flagship console. Please don't buy this mess, we'll have it all fixed for the sequel. And next time, we'll actually hire play-testers like we're supposed to."
No, they'll punt it out there, and hope it sells enough copies to people who don't read review sites - people who'll just see it on the shelves and go "Ooh! Shiny dragons!".
Having said that, this isn't an anti-Sony diatribe. I'm sure the Cell is capable of some incredible feats of heavy lifting, once some teams of more-than-usually-talented programmers start to get to grips with it. This, however, is not one of them, and they just need to deal with it, and move on.
I've bought so much good music lately, it's kinda scary, especially when my bank statement comes in. All due to downloads. There are so many websites devoted to all kinds of genres, including stuff that didn't exist a couple of years ago. So I find a track I like, or a band I like, and then I find the fansite/wiki that lists them which says "If you like 'X', you might like 'Y' and 'Z' too", and I grab a few tracks by Y and Z and stick them on the iPod while I make up my mind.
Thing is, there are no radio shows playing the kind of music I like. I have never heard Nightwish, Therion, Finntroll or Einsturzende Neubaten on commercial radio or the BBC. Ever. Over the Net I can hear bands from anywhere in the world, and if I like it, I can support them by buying their CD. But that purchase is distributed - I'll buy one CD by a band, and it might be a year before I buy another one, even if they've got half-a-dozen CDs available. I've only got so much money, and any money I spend on bands I know I like is money that's not available for expanding my horizons. Why do I download? Because at around £15/$30 a pop, I'm unwilling to buy a CD by an artist I'm not sure of - they might be rubbish. As a result of all this audio consumption, I find my tastes vary from day to day - some days I might want Louie Armstrong, some days I want Leftfield, and some other days, only Dragonforce will do...
There's absolute truckloads of fantastic music out there - more than any unaugmented human could absorb in a lifetime of study. Even with Sturgeon's Law applied, the remaining 10% still contains uncounted thousands of hours of jazz, blues, rock, techno and dozens of other genres that were actually made by artists who gave a damn about the quality of the output.
However, I believe the problem being discussed in the article isn't "Where's the good music?" - it's "How do we get people to buy whatever cr@p we're p1mping this month, so we can afford more drugs.". Sorry, guys - can't help you there.
How many F-16s are there in the U.S.? A few thousand. How many private cars? A few million. What's the stall speed of an F-16? 140 knots, according to a quick google, or around 160mph. What's the maximum speed of one of these vehicles? Probably some way below 160 mph. An F-16 needs a huge runway to land. One of these vehicles just needs to stop.
This is the whole point - vehicles like this become unpoliceable if they are allowed to become commonplace. They can land anywhere, take off from anywhere, and most importantly, go anywhere. No government can afford to allow its citizens that kind of freedom, as there will always be some who will mis-use it, or are simply not ready for the responsibilities it brings.
Not because of any engineering difficulties, although I'm sure there's no shortage of those. Engineering difficulties can and will always be overcome. Someone will develop a better fuel, a lighter/stronger material, a more elegant design. The real reason these will never happen is because there is no way any government will ever let their citizens have the freedom of the 3rd dimension. The Solotrek looked very promising until an accident with a safety tether caused a crash (note, not a failure on the part of the machine!). Paranoiacs wishing to generate conspiracy theories about this incident are of course welcome to do so.
Go read Bob Shaw's 'Vertigo' for some idea of what happens to a society where personal human flight is commonplace. Borders become meaningless, passports doubly so. Criminals are going to love these things - how do you set up a roadblock in the sky? And also, no matter how carefully you build the vehicle to be safe, and easy to pilot, the human element will always be a factor.
"People who were in a hurry tended to switch off their lights to avoid detection and fly straight to where they were going, regardless of the air corridors. The chances of colliding with another illegal traveller were vanishingly small, they told themselves, but it was not only occasional salesmen late for appointments who flew wild. There were the drunks and the druggies, the antisocial, the careless, the suicidal, the thrill-seekers, the criminal - a whole spectrum of types who were unready for the responsibilities of personal flight, in whose hands a counter-gravity harness could become an instrument of death."
hands-down winner of the 'messing-with-your-head' game.
The adrenalin jolt at the very beginning where the cut-scene with the room full of zombies stops being a cut-scene, but there's nothing to tell you this. The warping graphics the more insane you became, which actually made it difficult to navigate, and just gave you a feeling that everything was wrong because perspective had shifted. The first time I saw the big fly walking around on the screen, and when I went to the TV to brush it off, it was on the *inside*...
Pissed all over the Resident Evil series from a great height in all respects, but didn't get the marketing. I don't like the REvil games much, not because they're scary, but because they're difficult for some silly reasons. Static save points, little or no ammo, guns so feeble they're practically useless, inabilty to improvise weapons and endless schlepping around on pointless fetch-quests. Fuck the gun, give me a sharpened spade, and let's see how scary these zombies are with no heads.
I remember seeing an interview with Eugene Jarvis about how the early Defender machines were so tricky that they were wiping out people's ships within a minute. Those people were going and coming back with many more quarters because they weren't going to let the game kick their ass that easily. This is exactly the sort of reaction you want to an arcade machine - put more money in. But you still have to feel you're getting something for it - the home versions of Need for Speed have drag races in which it is possible to burn out your engine on the starting line if you over-rev it. This feature has been removed in the arcade version of the drag races, as paying $1.50 for a credit which lasts all of 3 seconds was not considered to be a valid business decision.
Balancing difficulty and playability must be one of the more tricky parts of game design. How do you reward expert players, and keep them interested, while enabling novices to enjoy the game as well? I could never play Age of Empires, or any of the other management simulations where the computer can do all its resource management in a fraction of a second while I'm still trying to balance how many people should be farming or mining. On the other hand, I was pretty good at Tempest 2000 and Rez, although many people I showed these games to could see nothing but abstract neon splatter on the screen. The article doesn't seem to differentiate between the difficulty of manipulating the controls in the correct sequence and timing (i.e. Ikaruga), and the difficulty of figuring out what you're actually meant to be doing (i.e. Myst). Probably the closest it comes is its description of Sinistar, where none of the separate gameplay elements are particularly difficult in and of themselves, balancing the load between tasks and interlocking them all successfully is pretty tricky.
but with an air rifle or BB gun..177 target pellet won't kill them, hell it probably won't even break the skin, but it will sting like a son-of-a-bitch. No expensive cartridges to buy, and 500 pellets won't break the bank.
All else fails, ship out some 1/4 inch surgical rubber tubing and show the villagers how to make catapults. Better accuracy and more sting than simply throwing the stones.
I think the biggest problem in SF is how to describe a recognisable and meaningful future. If you read Charles Stross' 'Accelerando', he handles it very well - starting off in the very near future (super-computer built into glasses, robo-pets) and by the end of the book is nonchalantly chucking around concepts that would have been almost meaningless at the start of the story but make sense when built on everything you've read thus far.
On the other hand, I've tried to read some of Iain M Banks' SF and can't make head nor tail of it - the future's too far in the future, the people in the stories don't have motivations I recognise or can empathise with, the technology is so radically different that I recognise nothing, and therefore am not interested in what's going on, or what the people and AI's might be trying to do. I also tried reading some gigantic space-opera by Peter Hamilton, and got 250 pages into it before realising I still had no idea what the story was about, who any of the main characters were, and the fact that none of them had done anything interesting by that point. You can describe all the whizzy tech you like, but if the people in the story ('people' encompassing anything from AI to alien to sentient slime-mould) aren't doing anything to make you care what happens to them, then it's a crap story whether it's set in the Stone Age or the Diamond Age.
I always thought Gibson didn't write SF so much as bog-standard thrillers - break a guy out of captivity, rob a bank, but hey! it's happening in the future, so it's suddenly SF. I can no longer find one of my favourite ever SF stories - I think it was in an issue of IASFM. It's a short story about a day in the life of a future criminal, but far from being the Stainless Steel Rat, he's doing things that simply aren't illegal in our day - hunting through garbage for recyclables, and arranging fake birth permits for a childless couple are the two I recall. There's no future tech in the story at all, but the world is beautifully delineated by what are considered future crimes.
Standard UK price for new PC and console games has been £40 for a while now. Even before the dollar went above 2 to the pound that was the thick end of $80. Except DS games - they're usually £30.
So I tend to haunt the 4 for £20 Xbox rack in the local Gamestation. Just picked up Oddworld:Stranger's Wrath, The Suffering: Ties That Bind, Jade Empire and Alien Hominid, which should keep me going for months. By the time I run out of quality Xbox titles, the new hardware should have gone through a few revisions and a price drop or two, there should be a decent selection of 2nd-hand titles available at around 50% of the original price, and I can start the cycle all over again.
On the other hand - $80 or no, I'm having Metroid Prime 3 on day of release...
They can't look past the horsepower of the CPU, or the polygon numbers, and seem to think that if something isn't the biggest and the baddest, then its not worth having.
So many Wii games are about gameplay; sweet, simple, pick up and have fun gameplay. The controls are innovative and the Mii concept is pure genius. How cool is it to play a game where you, yes you, are the character on-screen? I had a quick flick through my Mii roster - more than half of them are female, from friends and relatives who've come round and asked to have a go. First thing I do, to get them used to the controls, is have them build themselves a Mii. 10 minutes later, they've become accustomed to the controls, they have an avatar that they'll recognise instantly and they can get into the games because the Wii Sports controls are very straight-forward. So far, everybody who's had a go has left intending to acquire a Wii in the near future, or as soon as they could find one for sale.
For decades, the games industry has been talking about increasing their audience by making games that would appeal to females. Unfortunately, their attempts to do this seemed to involve ponies, and standard controls, not realising that those self-same controls were often the problem. Now, due to the Mii and the Wiimote, loads more people are trying their hand at gaming - people who've never shown the slightest interest in a computer or console before. Actually, I think that might be a large part of the problem - when the mundanes start getting into something that geeks had seen as uniquely their own for a long time, maybe it loses some of its geek chic, and is disparaged by the 'hardcore' as a result.
There's always the possibility, even in the touchiest of riot situations, that an American soldier, looking down his rifle sights at an American civilian, might decide that the order to fire on his own countrymen is one he'd be better off not obeying. Tianenmen Square applies.
These things? Controlled by someone miles away, just pushing a button? Someone who knows they're never going to be held accountable for obeying the order? They'll only need to be used once, and that will be the end to any public form of protest against the government ever again. Oh, you might be allowed 'Free Speech Zones' sited nowhere near any public event, and allowed to vent your spleen on your blog, as long as you don't actually say anything nasty about the President.
The Predators aren't the only drones in your country's immediate future.
"We've captured things like muzzle flashes, reloads, and how a weapon feels and reacts in your hand. We want it to be as realistic as possible."
Everything except for actual damage, presumably. Show me a level where someone gets shot in the foot and limps for the rest of the level, and I'll be impressed. How about head-shots that actually kill or incapacitate an enemy?
I'm also pig-sick of 'futuristic' shooters where the available weaponry for 90% of the game is a pistol, a shotgun and an assault rifle. Where's the gauss-rifles, the beam weapons, the wire-guns, the imagination?
But hey, why bother, when you can churn out another corridor run'n'gun game, but with more polygons. 'Cause that makes everything better, right?
But hey, that's ok - we really don't mind paying well over the odds for exactly the same machine, only crappier because it does emulation in software, not hardware. I mean, it's not like there's some vast global communication network which allows us to see what's happening in other countries and make comparisons. The UK price is still £425, or $850. A cut to the same price as the $US price would mean a drop to £250, at which price I'd have one. Until then, Sony can collectively and severally, smooch ma bahookie.
Paying more for less, for no good reason - no wonder Sony are an industry giant.
I thought the whole point of the Board of Film Classification (note last word) was to classify films - denoting which category they belonged in. They can't actually ban it, as far as I'm aware, they can merely deny it a certificate. For films, that meant that they couldn't be shown at a standard cinema, but were okay to show in private clubs. Don't know how that's meant to work with games. Maybe it means they can't be sold in shops, so we'll all have to buy it direct from Rockstar, with a note on the packaging saying that it remains unclassified.
Their rulings are not binding, or legally enforceable. Their own website points out:
"To this day the Board's decisions can be over-ruled by local authorities."
So if my city council say the local shops can sell Manhunt 2 (and I live in Edinburgh, where Rockstar North are based), then I don't see what the problem will be.
Bob Shaw had an interesting take on the surveillance society back in 1972.
Basically, a scientist creates 'slow glass' - glass through which light passes much more slowly than regular glass. Many of the inter-connected short stories are about specific applications - a detective waits for the image to come through on a piece of 5-year glass to prove that the man who'd been executed for murder was the right one; a murderer uses a piece of slow glass in his car windscreen to make it appear another man is driving his truck.
The end of the book is the scientist who created slow glass (Retardite TM) realising that the governments of the world are using it for espionage and worse, dusting the entire world with microscopic crystals that will capture images of everything, everywhere.
"From now on, came the silent scream inside his head, anybody, any agency, with the right equipment can find out anything about ANYBODY! This planet is one huge unblinking eye watching everything that moves on its surface. We're all encased in glass, asphyxiating, like bugs dropped into a entomologist's killing bottle."
But less than a page from this realisation comes a short epilogue which contains this sentence:
"In later decades, men were to come to accept the universal presence of Retardite eyes, and they learned to live without subterfuge or shame as they had done in a distant past when it was known that the eyes of God could see everywhere."
Maybe universal surveillance is a good thing, as long as it's genuinely universal. Maybe if the politicians and lawmen knew they were being watched 24/7 along with everyone else, they'd have to behave properly as well.
A computer can micro-manage its resources in a strategy game within a second, whereas it might take me ages trawling through menus and sub-menus to find out just why production isn't at capacity. The computer is drawing my character on screen and responding to my inputs on the joypad/keyboard - it *knows* where I am in an FPS or action game. Truly realistic, learning, intelligent AI probably wouldn't be fun to play a lot of games against, because it would be better than you, or at least have faster reactions and virtually instant access to information.
My pet hate is the 'AI' in a lot of driving games, which consists of a rubber band attached to the back of your car. Did you just drive the best lap of your life ever and shave 3 seconds off the lap time? Well, what a coincidence, so did all the CPU drivers; what are the odds, eh?
Making you feel like you're succeeding against all the odds is one really clever part of games programming. Making that success still feel like a game, rather than work, is another. I don't believe these have as much to do with AI as they do with careful design, good controls, proper cameras, and plentiful save points. Miss any or all of those out, and 'AI' won't make it a good game.
When I was the age my son is now, video games barely existed in the mainstream. I was 15 in 1980, and there really wasn't anything overtly violent in any of the games around then - one blob of pixels shot another blob of pixels, and that was it. The first unpleasantly and graphically violent game I remember was Splatterhouse in the arcade in 1988, by which time I was 23.
When my son was very young he didn't like Doom, it scared him so much that I had to not play it until he'd gone to bed. He's still not big on FPSs, unless we're playing two-player co-operative. When he saved up recently and bought a second-hand PS2, it came with GTA3 and Vice City double pack. As these are 18s, I was a bit dubious, but as he'd bought them with his own money I wasn't going to take them off him so I just kept an eye on what he was playing. Result - he's played Transformers through twice, scarcely touched the GTAs and mostly concentrates on Jak and Daxter at the moment. So he still finds shooting giant robots more entertaining than shooting people.
I'm only really going to become concerned when he comes home smelling of woodsmoke, because then I'll know he's doing what I did at that age, and that's setting fire to things. Far more dangerous than any video game ever invented.
No, I might not be able to copy a Ferrari, but if I'm working on my 1965 BSA, or my 1948 Panther, and I need a part that hasn't been manufactured during my lifetime, it would be nice to download the appropriate schematic from the owner's club and print the part I need, rather than having to take the broken bits to one of the few light engineering workshops that still do small jobs and say "Can I have one of these, only not broken." and hope they get it right.
Or print the three missing locknuts from the DIY bookcase I just bought, rather than disassemble the whole thing, schlep it back to the shop and replace the entire item (often only to discover that that whole batch was missing three locknuts...).
As for the Ferrari dealer, if my Ferrari does break down, it would mean that they would be able to print me the relevant parts (as they would have the IP codes to be allowed to print Ferrari bits), rather than wait three weeks for them to be shipped over from Italy.
There will be companies with bigger and better machines out there, but the home machines will turn up, and they'll get better, and there'll be a point where we almost forget that things weren't always this way. The technological singularity is upon us - this is just another manifestation.
"The film Serenity makes clear that all the planets and moons are in one large system, and production documents related to the film indicate that there is no faster-than-light travel in this universe."
Sorry, but the celestial mechanics is all messed up. There's a set orbit around a sun where a planet can receive enough energy to survive - too far in, you boil; too far out, you freeze. Are all the planets and moons in this system within this set orbit? Basic premise doesn't work, which means that no matter how interesting the characters are or are not, I can't take any of it seriously.
If humankind had the multi-generational starships that allowed them to reach this system from Earth, where are they now? Did they just drop off a few million humans and a handful of technology and bail out again? And they found no other alien life on these planets? I'm not expecting the usual men-in-suits, or the Curse of the Funky Foreheads, but no microbes, spores or bacteria, just sterile rock, everywhere they went?
The thing is, if he'd just made a damn Western, and made Serenity a steamboat, it might have been a good show. Trying to do it as science fiction just threw up several dozen gaping plot holes that nobody on his production team had the balls to point out to him.
In what seems to have been a conscious attempt to not have any references to Star Trek, or B5, Joss Whedon threw out so many of the common SF trappings that he envisioned a future that makes no sense. No FTL drive, so they're stuck in one solar system, where all the planets somehow still get enough light and heat to make them liveable. No robots, despite the fact that here in C21, we're making pretty fair advances in that department - ditto no A.I. Serenity itself appears to be able to navigate the spaceways with less computing power than my house. Some people have got city-sized spaceships, others are slaves mining mud. They've got anti-gravity, and nobody seems to have worked out what that means, for transport, and technology in general.
Maybe if he'd been given a chance, he'd have explained some of the huge inconsistencies in future episodes, but I doubt it. He wanted to do a Western in space, so he did so, and simply closed his eyes to all the things about the concept that made no logical sense.
The FTL originals fit onto a single-sided floppy disk, so they'll fit onto a DS cart. Put the movement controls and inventory on the touch screen and let a whole new generation experience the only game that's ever caused me genuine fright (low health, dark room, concentrating on mapping and several Pain Rats sneaked up on me and just squeaked...)
No automap - it would ruin some of the puzzles. Carrying around a pad of graph paper might be a bit awkward, but there should be room on the cart for you to draw your own maps on the touch screen and save them.
That'll be two systems I can ignore this pile of crap on. Colour palette of brown and grey; weapons that take an entire magazine to kill anything; gameplay that consists of running from cover to cover, sticking your gun muzzle out of cover and spraying bullets in the hope of hitting something at random.
Did nobody else notice these tiny defects or was it just me?
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For such a young medium, video games have produced some amazing art. I think Tempest was probably the first art game, although I, Robot comes a close second. I, Robot even has a doodle mode which you can 'play' instead of playing the shooter part of the game, and draw with all the game shapes. Tempest looks like a piece of abstract art in motion, as do many of its spiritual successors. Rez is less a video game, and more a piece of playable, interactive art.
I think it's the layers of interactivity that perhaps make it hard for games to be seen as art. Many people perceive art as something you experience, or something you create. I, Robot got it right all those years ago, and a few games have got it over the years - what's to stop art being something you play? If I compose a piece of music, is that art? How about if I play a tune written by someone else - still art? If I play a tune someone else wrote, on an instrument someone else built - still art? So how does playing through Rez differ materially from playing through a Mozart sonata? I didn't write the game, I didn't build the console, but completing the sequence successfully requires a good deal of practice, and a great many things to be done in precise order, with a bit of free-forming thrown in. Maybe Coltrane, rather than Mozart then...
As for emotional impact, that can come from a simple musical phrase, a sound effect, a single image. Halo's opening chords, the 'task complete' chime in a Zelda game, the radio crackle in Silent Hill.
Storytelling in video games is traditionally weak, because there is no story, or rather, you are the story, playing out your chosen path. All too often, even in games like Bioshock, the story is irrelevant, cutscenes or audio backstory merely being extra treats for killing your way through X number of monsters. Mostly, the story doesn't make any difference, except where you get one ending for being Good, and another for being Bad. You can have preset events within the game, such as the death of a main character, but I generally find these to be overly manipulative. I'd rather have my choices mean something within the game, as opposed to which 90 seconds of CGI I get as my reward at the end. This, however, represents far more work for the programmers, so is much less likely to happen.
I've been involved in paper/pencil/dice RPGs before now, in which players have come away from sessions genuinely upset and unhappy about the situations they'd ended up in, and often the compromises they'd had to make to get out of them. This was because they had months, sometimes years invested in these characters, and the players knew them well. It's difficult to get emotionally invested in a video game character in the same way, especially when the character displays no emotional range within the game (Gordon Freeman, Link, Master Chief). Having said that, my son was very upset by the ending of Panzer Dragoon Zwei, but then he was only about 9 at the time...
Because it looks like almost everything's intact, just blurred and darkened. So the patch to unblur and brighten those sequences shouldn't be a problem. So the game as sold at retail conforms to some antiquated notions of what a game should be, and the patch lets those of us who are fully functioning adults make our own choices about which version to play. Everybody happy. I'm a male in my forties, who's raised a child to adulthood, held down a number of really shitty jobs, served in my country's armed forces, been trusted with a number of weapons and fully trained in their use. I've dealt with real death of close friends and relations, and the aftermath of same. What, exactly, do these fuckers think they're protecting me from? There are a number of things in my life that perhaps I wouldn't have minded being shielded from, but a video game is never going to make that list.
How much have they spent on this so far? So what are they going to do - issue a press statement that says "We know it sucks, the reviewers are right, it's broken and we hacked it about to get the rating down. We are aware that this level of ineptitude is unacceptable in what's supposed to be a triple-A title for our flagship console. Please don't buy this mess, we'll have it all fixed for the sequel. And next time, we'll actually hire play-testers like we're supposed to."
No, they'll punt it out there, and hope it sells enough copies to people who don't read review sites - people who'll just see it on the shelves and go "Ooh! Shiny dragons!".
Having said that, this isn't an anti-Sony diatribe. I'm sure the Cell is capable of some incredible feats of heavy lifting, once some teams of more-than-usually-talented programmers start to get to grips with it. This, however, is not one of them, and they just need to deal with it, and move on.
I've bought so much good music lately, it's kinda scary, especially when my bank statement comes in. All due to downloads. There are so many websites devoted to all kinds of genres, including stuff that didn't exist a couple of years ago. So I find a track I like, or a band I like, and then I find the fansite/wiki that lists them which says "If you like 'X', you might like 'Y' and 'Z' too", and I grab a few tracks by Y and Z and stick them on the iPod while I make up my mind.
Thing is, there are no radio shows playing the kind of music I like. I have never heard Nightwish, Therion, Finntroll or Einsturzende Neubaten on commercial radio or the BBC. Ever. Over the Net I can hear bands from anywhere in the world, and if I like it, I can support them by buying their CD. But that purchase is distributed - I'll buy one CD by a band, and it might be a year before I buy another one, even if they've got half-a-dozen CDs available. I've only got so much money, and any money I spend on bands I know I like is money that's not available for expanding my horizons. Why do I download? Because at around £15/$30 a pop, I'm unwilling to buy a CD by an artist I'm not sure of - they might be rubbish. As a result of all this audio consumption, I find my tastes vary from day to day - some days I might want Louie Armstrong, some days I want Leftfield, and some other days, only Dragonforce will do...
There's absolute truckloads of fantastic music out there - more than any unaugmented human could absorb in a lifetime of study. Even with Sturgeon's Law applied, the remaining 10% still contains uncounted thousands of hours of jazz, blues, rock, techno and dozens of other genres that were actually made by artists who gave a damn about the quality of the output.
However, I believe the problem being discussed in the article isn't "Where's the good music?" - it's "How do we get people to buy whatever cr@p we're p1mping this month, so we can afford more drugs.". Sorry, guys - can't help you there.
How many F-16s are there in the U.S.? A few thousand. How many private cars? A few million. What's the stall speed of an F-16? 140 knots, according to a quick google, or around 160mph. What's the maximum speed of one of these vehicles? Probably some way below 160 mph. An F-16 needs a huge runway to land. One of these vehicles just needs to stop.
This is the whole point - vehicles like this become unpoliceable if they are allowed to become commonplace. They can land anywhere, take off from anywhere, and most importantly, go anywhere. No government can afford to allow its citizens that kind of freedom, as there will always be some who will mis-use it, or are simply not ready for the responsibilities it brings.
Not because of any engineering difficulties, although I'm sure there's no shortage of those. Engineering difficulties can and will always be overcome. Someone will develop a better fuel, a lighter/stronger material, a more elegant design. The real reason these will never happen is because there is no way any government will ever let their citizens have the freedom of the 3rd dimension. The Solotrek looked very promising until an accident with a safety tether caused a crash (note, not a failure on the part of the machine!). Paranoiacs wishing to generate conspiracy theories about this incident are of course welcome to do so.
Go read Bob Shaw's 'Vertigo' for some idea of what happens to a society where personal human flight is commonplace. Borders become meaningless, passports doubly so. Criminals are going to love these things - how do you set up a roadblock in the sky? And also, no matter how carefully you build the vehicle to be safe, and easy to pilot, the human element will always be a factor.
"People who were in a hurry tended to switch off their lights to avoid detection and fly straight to where they were going, regardless of the air corridors. The chances of colliding with another illegal traveller were vanishingly small, they told themselves, but it was not only occasional salesmen late for appointments who flew wild. There were the drunks and the druggies, the antisocial, the careless, the suicidal, the thrill-seekers, the criminal - a whole spectrum of types who were unready for the responsibilities of personal flight, in whose hands a counter-gravity harness could become an instrument of death."
hands-down winner of the 'messing-with-your-head' game.
The adrenalin jolt at the very beginning where the cut-scene with the room full of zombies stops being a cut-scene, but there's nothing to tell you this. The warping graphics the more insane you became, which actually made it difficult to navigate, and just gave you a feeling that everything was wrong because perspective had shifted. The first time I saw the big fly walking around on the screen, and when I went to the TV to brush it off, it was on the *inside*...
Pissed all over the Resident Evil series from a great height in all respects, but didn't get the marketing. I don't like the REvil games much, not because they're scary, but because they're difficult for some silly reasons. Static save points, little or no ammo, guns so feeble they're practically useless, inabilty to improvise weapons and endless schlepping around on pointless fetch-quests. Fuck the gun, give me a sharpened spade, and let's see how scary these zombies are with no heads.
I remember seeing an interview with Eugene Jarvis about how the early Defender machines were so tricky that they were wiping out people's ships within a minute. Those people were going and coming back with many more quarters because they weren't going to let the game kick their ass that easily. This is exactly the sort of reaction you want to an arcade machine - put more money in. But you still have to feel you're getting something for it - the home versions of Need for Speed have drag races in which it is possible to burn out your engine on the starting line if you over-rev it. This feature has been removed in the arcade version of the drag races, as paying $1.50 for a credit which lasts all of 3 seconds was not considered to be a valid business decision.
Balancing difficulty and playability must be one of the more tricky parts of game design. How do you reward expert players, and keep them interested, while enabling novices to enjoy the game as well? I could never play Age of Empires, or any of the other management simulations where the computer can do all its resource management in a fraction of a second while I'm still trying to balance how many people should be farming or mining. On the other hand, I was pretty good at Tempest 2000 and Rez, although many people I showed these games to could see nothing but abstract neon splatter on the screen. The article doesn't seem to differentiate between the difficulty of manipulating the controls in the correct sequence and timing (i.e. Ikaruga), and the difficulty of figuring out what you're actually meant to be doing (i.e. Myst). Probably the closest it comes is its description of Sinistar, where none of the separate gameplay elements are particularly difficult in and of themselves, balancing the load between tasks and interlocking them all successfully is pretty tricky.
but with an air rifle or BB gun. .177 target pellet won't kill them, hell it probably won't even break the skin, but it will sting like a son-of-a-bitch. No expensive cartridges to buy, and 500 pellets won't break the bank.
All else fails, ship out some 1/4 inch surgical rubber tubing and show the villagers how to make catapults. Better accuracy and more sting than simply throwing the stones.
I think the biggest problem in SF is how to describe a recognisable and meaningful future. If you read Charles Stross' 'Accelerando', he handles it very well - starting off in the very near future (super-computer built into glasses, robo-pets) and by the end of the book is nonchalantly chucking around concepts that would have been almost meaningless at the start of the story but make sense when built on everything you've read thus far.
On the other hand, I've tried to read some of Iain M Banks' SF and can't make head nor tail of it - the future's too far in the future, the people in the stories don't have motivations I recognise or can empathise with, the technology is so radically different that I recognise nothing, and therefore am not interested in what's going on, or what the people and AI's might be trying to do. I also tried reading some gigantic space-opera by Peter Hamilton, and got 250 pages into it before realising I still had no idea what the story was about, who any of the main characters were, and the fact that none of them had done anything interesting by that point. You can describe all the whizzy tech you like, but if the people in the story ('people' encompassing anything from AI to alien to sentient slime-mould) aren't doing anything to make you care what happens to them, then it's a crap story whether it's set in the Stone Age or the Diamond Age.
I always thought Gibson didn't write SF so much as bog-standard thrillers - break a guy out of captivity, rob a bank, but hey! it's happening in the future, so it's suddenly SF. I can no longer find one of my favourite ever SF stories - I think it was in an issue of IASFM. It's a short story about a day in the life of a future criminal, but far from being the Stainless Steel Rat, he's doing things that simply aren't illegal in our day - hunting through garbage for recyclables, and arranging fake birth permits for a childless couple are the two I recall. There's no future tech in the story at all, but the world is beautifully delineated by what are considered future crimes.
to release Manhunt 2 as a mod for UT3...?
Standard UK price for new PC and console games has been £40 for a while now. Even before the dollar went above 2 to the pound that was the thick end of $80. Except DS games - they're usually £30.
So I tend to haunt the 4 for £20 Xbox rack in the local Gamestation. Just picked up Oddworld:Stranger's Wrath, The Suffering: Ties That Bind, Jade Empire and Alien Hominid, which should keep me going for months. By the time I run out of quality Xbox titles, the new hardware should have gone through a few revisions and a price drop or two, there should be a decent selection of 2nd-hand titles available at around 50% of the original price, and I can start the cycle all over again.
On the other hand - $80 or no, I'm having Metroid Prime 3 on day of release...
They can't look past the horsepower of the CPU, or the polygon numbers, and seem to think that if something isn't the biggest and the baddest, then its not worth having.
So many Wii games are about gameplay; sweet, simple, pick up and have fun gameplay. The controls are innovative and the Mii concept is pure genius. How cool is it to play a game where you, yes you, are the character on-screen? I had a quick flick through my Mii roster - more than half of them are female, from friends and relatives who've come round and asked to have a go. First thing I do, to get them used to the controls, is have them build themselves a Mii. 10 minutes later, they've become accustomed to the controls, they have an avatar that they'll recognise instantly and they can get into the games because the Wii Sports controls are very straight-forward. So far, everybody who's had a go has left intending to acquire a Wii in the near future, or as soon as they could find one for sale.
For decades, the games industry has been talking about increasing their audience by making games that would appeal to females. Unfortunately, their attempts to do this seemed to involve ponies, and standard controls, not realising that those self-same controls were often the problem. Now, due to the Mii and the Wiimote, loads more people are trying their hand at gaming - people who've never shown the slightest interest in a computer or console before. Actually, I think that might be a large part of the problem - when the mundanes start getting into something that geeks had seen as uniquely their own for a long time, maybe it loses some of its geek chic, and is disparaged by the 'hardcore' as a result.
of taking America back by force.
There's always the possibility, even in the touchiest of riot situations, that an American soldier, looking down his rifle sights at an American civilian, might decide that the order to fire on his own countrymen is one he'd be better off not obeying. Tianenmen Square applies.
These things? Controlled by someone miles away, just pushing a button? Someone who knows they're never going to be held accountable for obeying the order? They'll only need to be used once, and that will be the end to any public form of protest against the government ever again. Oh, you might be allowed 'Free Speech Zones' sited nowhere near any public event, and allowed to vent your spleen on your blog, as long as you don't actually say anything nasty about the President.
The Predators aren't the only drones in your country's immediate future.
"We've captured things like muzzle flashes, reloads, and how a weapon feels and reacts in your hand. We want it to be as realistic as possible."
Everything except for actual damage, presumably. Show me a level where someone gets shot in the foot and limps for the rest of the level, and I'll be impressed. How about head-shots that actually kill or incapacitate an enemy?
I'm also pig-sick of 'futuristic' shooters where the available weaponry for 90% of the game is a pistol, a shotgun and an assault rifle. Where's the gauss-rifles, the beam weapons, the wire-guns, the imagination?
But hey, why bother, when you can churn out another corridor run'n'gun game, but with more polygons. 'Cause that makes everything better, right?
But hey, that's ok - we really don't mind paying well over the odds for exactly the same machine, only crappier because it does emulation in software, not hardware. I mean, it's not like there's some vast global communication network which allows us to see what's happening in other countries and make comparisons. The UK price is still £425, or $850. A cut to the same price as the $US price would mean a drop to £250, at which price I'd have one. Until then, Sony can collectively and severally, smooch ma bahookie.
Paying more for less, for no good reason - no wonder Sony are an industry giant.
I thought the whole point of the Board of Film Classification (note last word) was to classify films - denoting which category they belonged in. They can't actually ban it, as far as I'm aware, they can merely deny it a certificate. For films, that meant that they couldn't be shown at a standard cinema, but were okay to show in private clubs. Don't know how that's meant to work with games. Maybe it means they can't be sold in shops, so we'll all have to buy it direct from Rockstar, with a note on the packaging saying that it remains unclassified.
Their rulings are not binding, or legally enforceable. Their own website points out:
"To this day the Board's decisions can be over-ruled by local authorities."
So if my city council say the local shops can sell Manhunt 2 (and I live in Edinburgh, where Rockstar North are based), then I don't see what the problem will be.
Bob Shaw had an interesting take on the surveillance society back in 1972.
Basically, a scientist creates 'slow glass' - glass through which light passes much more slowly than regular glass. Many of the inter-connected short stories are about specific applications - a detective waits for the image to come through on a piece of 5-year glass to prove that the man who'd been executed for murder was the right one; a murderer uses a piece of slow glass in his car windscreen to make it appear another man is driving his truck.
The end of the book is the scientist who created slow glass (Retardite TM) realising that the governments of the world are using it for espionage and worse, dusting the entire world with microscopic crystals that will capture images of everything, everywhere.
"From now on, came the silent scream inside his head, anybody, any agency, with the right equipment can find out anything about ANYBODY! This planet is one huge unblinking eye watching everything that moves on its surface. We're all encased in glass, asphyxiating, like bugs dropped into a entomologist's killing bottle."
But less than a page from this realisation comes a short epilogue which contains this sentence:
"In later decades, men were to come to accept the universal presence of Retardite eyes, and they learned to live without subterfuge or shame as they had done in a distant past when it was known that the eyes of God could see everywhere."
Maybe universal surveillance is a good thing, as long as it's genuinely universal. Maybe if the politicians and lawmen knew they were being watched 24/7 along with everyone else, they'd have to behave properly as well.
A computer can micro-manage its resources in a strategy game within a second, whereas it might take me ages trawling through menus and sub-menus to find out just why production isn't at capacity. The computer is drawing my character on screen and responding to my inputs on the joypad/keyboard - it *knows* where I am in an FPS or action game. Truly realistic, learning, intelligent AI probably wouldn't be fun to play a lot of games against, because it would be better than you, or at least have faster reactions and virtually instant access to information.
My pet hate is the 'AI' in a lot of driving games, which consists of a rubber band attached to the back of your car. Did you just drive the best lap of your life ever and shave 3 seconds off the lap time? Well, what a coincidence, so did all the CPU drivers; what are the odds, eh?
Making you feel like you're succeeding against all the odds is one really clever part of games programming. Making that success still feel like a game, rather than work, is another. I don't believe these have as much to do with AI as they do with careful design, good controls, proper cameras, and plentiful save points. Miss any or all of those out, and 'AI' won't make it a good game.
When I was the age my son is now, video games barely existed in the mainstream. I was 15 in 1980, and there really wasn't anything overtly violent in any of the games around then - one blob of pixels shot another blob of pixels, and that was it. The first unpleasantly and graphically violent game I remember was Splatterhouse in the arcade in 1988, by which time I was 23.
When my son was very young he didn't like Doom, it scared him so much that I had to not play it until he'd gone to bed. He's still not big on FPSs, unless we're playing two-player co-operative. When he saved up recently and bought a second-hand PS2, it came with GTA3 and Vice City double pack. As these are 18s, I was a bit dubious, but as he'd bought them with his own money I wasn't going to take them off him so I just kept an eye on what he was playing. Result - he's played Transformers through twice, scarcely touched the GTAs and mostly concentrates on Jak and Daxter at the moment. So he still finds shooting giant robots more entertaining than shooting people.
I'm only really going to become concerned when he comes home smelling of woodsmoke, because then I'll know he's doing what I did at that age, and that's setting fire to things. Far more dangerous than any video game ever invented.
No, I might not be able to copy a Ferrari, but if I'm working on my 1965 BSA, or my 1948 Panther, and I need a part that hasn't been manufactured during my lifetime, it would be nice to download the appropriate schematic from the owner's club and print the part I need, rather than having to take the broken bits to one of the few light engineering workshops that still do small jobs and say "Can I have one of these, only not broken." and hope they get it right.
Or print the three missing locknuts from the DIY bookcase I just bought, rather than disassemble the whole thing, schlep it back to the shop and replace the entire item (often only to discover that that whole batch was missing three locknuts...).
As for the Ferrari dealer, if my Ferrari does break down, it would mean that they would be able to print me the relevant parts (as they would have the IP codes to be allowed to print Ferrari bits), rather than wait three weeks for them to be shipped over from Italy.
There will be companies with bigger and better machines out there, but the home machines will turn up, and they'll get better, and there'll be a point where we almost forget that things weren't always this way. The technological singularity is upon us - this is just another manifestation.
From the wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_(TV_series)
"The film Serenity makes clear that all the planets and moons are in one large system, and production documents related to the film indicate that there is no faster-than-light travel in this universe."
Sorry, but the celestial mechanics is all messed up. There's a set orbit around a sun where a planet can receive enough energy to survive - too far in, you boil; too far out, you freeze. Are all the planets and moons in this system within this set orbit? Basic premise doesn't work, which means that no matter how interesting the characters are or are not, I can't take any of it seriously.
If humankind had the multi-generational starships that allowed them to reach this system from Earth, where are they now? Did they just drop off a few million humans and a handful of technology and bail out again? And they found no other alien life on these planets? I'm not expecting the usual men-in-suits, or the Curse of the Funky Foreheads, but no microbes, spores or bacteria, just sterile rock, everywhere they went?
The thing is, if he'd just made a damn Western, and made Serenity a steamboat, it might have been a good show. Trying to do it as science fiction just threw up several dozen gaping plot holes that nobody on his production team had the balls to point out to him.
In what seems to have been a conscious attempt to not have any references to Star Trek, or B5, Joss Whedon threw out so many of the common SF trappings that he envisioned a future that makes no sense. No FTL drive, so they're stuck in one solar system, where all the planets somehow still get enough light and heat to make them liveable. No robots, despite the fact that here in C21, we're making pretty fair advances in that department - ditto no A.I. Serenity itself appears to be able to navigate the spaceways with less computing power than my house. Some people have got city-sized spaceships, others are slaves mining mud. They've got anti-gravity, and nobody seems to have worked out what that means, for transport, and technology in general. Maybe if he'd been given a chance, he'd have explained some of the huge inconsistencies in future episodes, but I doubt it. He wanted to do a Western in space, so he did so, and simply closed his eyes to all the things about the concept that made no logical sense.
The FTL originals fit onto a single-sided floppy disk, so they'll fit onto a DS cart. Put the movement controls and inventory on the touch screen and let a whole new generation experience the only game that's ever caused me genuine fright (low health, dark room, concentrating on mapping and several Pain Rats sneaked up on me and just squeaked...) No automap - it would ruin some of the puzzles. Carrying around a pad of graph paper might be a bit awkward, but there should be room on the cart for you to draw your own maps on the touch screen and save them.
That'll be two systems I can ignore this pile of crap on. Colour palette of brown and grey; weapons that take an entire magazine to kill anything; gameplay that consists of running from cover to cover, sticking your gun muzzle out of cover and spraying bullets in the hope of hitting something at random. Did nobody else notice these tiny defects or was it just me?