Pure art. Almost all the game was artwork on top of a very simple on-rails shooter.
Conker's Bad Fur Day - actually moved and saddened by the ending.
I'm sure other gamers will have their own opinions about games which they consider highly artistic, but the people making this rubbish up are not gamers. They have never played a video game to that depth, never empathised with characters, or felt a strong emotion at some point in the game. Also, the artform is young - someone claiming there are no games that are art would be like someone claiming in 1915 that there were no films that were art.
But then, I think the Mona Lisa is a drab painting of an ugly heifer, so what do I know?
Me neither. It's just that after playing video games as a large part of my recreation for most of the last 30 years, I'm getting to the point where I've seen it all.
FPS, RPG, platform, sim, driving, fighting, adventure games - played it/them on everything from a plug-in TV Pong game to an Xbox and a Gamecube and a rather whizzy PC. Haven't bought an Xbox360, won't buy a PS3, might buy a Wii just because of the interesting new gameplay possibilities inherent in the control method. Haven't bought a game in ages, simply because there's so many retreads, sequels and just plain rip-offs out there. I don't want to play WW2 games, which is about all you can buy for the PC these days. WoW interests me not in the slightest - any game where you have to pay people to do the boring bits for you has missed the point so badly I'm not even letting it in the house.
The Cube had some exceptional games with good controls and clever gameplay mechanics - Eternal Darkness, Pikmin, Beyond Good and Evil, but Nintendo killed it/let it die. Hopefully they'll not do the same with the Wii.
Maybe when games get really good physics engines, so wood burns, glass breaks, water puts out fires, and I don't need the red key to open a wooden door when I've got a rocket-launcher, I'll get interested again. Had my hopes up with Black, but that was almost as p155-poor as Red Faction in what you could actually blow up.
I'm not the same person I was 10 years ago. Unfortunately, that person seems to be who the games companies are still targetting their wares at with the blinkered assumption that anybody picking up their latest game has never played a game before and will be impressed by the pretty graphics and shooty-bang-ness of it, instead of going: "Wow, indestructible scenery, idiot AI, shotgun, machine gun and sniper rifle - never seen *those* in a game before!"
Okay, I'm getting a Wii, but the 'PS3' girl in the video was so hot!
I watched it 8 times just to hear her say "my vibrating features have been disabled".
Lately I've played a wide variety of titles with plenty of innovation - Odyssey: Winds of Athena, Wik and the Fable of Souls, and the incredible Eets. Alien Hominid started life as a Flash game and transitioned to the consoles. Darwinia was made by a team of three, proving that a full-size commercial game can still be made even if you don't happen to have a mega-buck budget.
With the reported low cost of a Wii devkit, Xbox Arcade and the Wii's purported download system, there's still room for plenty of expansion and innovation at all levels of the game business. Sure, the companies with the mega-buck budgets will probably still choose to spend those budgets on well-known franchises, and will probably grind some of those franchises and companies into the ground because nobody's taking risks. I suspect that if every game company in the world went out of business tomorrow, there'd still be a bunch of people sitting coding by themselves or with a few mates because they've got an idea for a game they've just *got* to get out of their heads. Flash is the new Spectrum 48K...
RE4 was a dreadful game. A colour palette of brown, beige and grey; a handgun that's less effective than a big stick would be; an inability to pick up a big stick, despite the fact you're walking through a *forest*; a targetting system that is *less* accurate the closer you are to something; villagers that take multiple headshots to kill, and then Mr Baghead shows up, takes ten rounds to the head, a grenade to the face and ignores all the damage while killing me with one chainsaw hit.
The only horror was the sickening feeling that I'd just paid £40 for this sh1t.
The last time I experienced a genuine scare in a video game was Dungeon Master on the ST. Low on health, out of food, depleted mana, but it seemed as if everything in the vicinity was dead, so I just took my eyes off the screen for a second to make a couple of notes on the map. Suddenly,from behind the party, a shriek from one of the Pain Rats From Hell, and the remaining health of my two fighters dropped by half. In a frenzy of clicking, I raced halfway across the map, and only stopped when I ran the party into a wall, then noticed how hard my heart was pounding. Because I was totally immersed in the game, I was genuinely scared for my characters/self and reacted viscerally, rather than logically.
In local non-chain game store the other week trading in ancient PS1 and games - female assistant rather disinterestedly asked me if I wanted to pre-order a PS3. No thanks, I say, I'm getting a Wii. You'd have thought I'd plugged her into the mains! Wasn't it cool, had I seen the E3 videos, wouldn't a lightsaber game totally rock, didn't the new Zelda look amazing? Chatted for a while, then went downstairs and browsed the pre-owned Xbox titles. G.b.t.c asked me if I was interested in upgrading to a 360. No thanks, nothing there I want, I'm waiting for the Wii. Bzzzt! Had I seen the E3 videos, had I seen Miyamoto conducting the orchestra, had I seen the drumming game? The staff in there are gamer geeks one and all, and none of them give two hoots about the PS3.
In GAME today, chatting to the manager - he says that he's starting to get lists of pre-orders for software for PS3, and he thinks he's going to get stuck with a lot of unsold stock, especially among the many, many sequelae. As in Ridge Racer 6, Tekken 5 and Tony Hawk's 8. He said he thought they'd end up having to do bundles very early on just to shift some of these games. Apparently most of the pre-orders are from parents whose kids want the PS3 for Xmas. People who are buying their own machines are mostly going for the 360 now, or waiting for the Wii.
Maybe the bow in Thief fired sucker-tipped arrows like the ones you can buy in toy stores. Maybe it fired marshmallow arrows. Certainly not real ones. Arrows are large, heavy and strike with enough force to penetrate plate armour. Except the ones in Thief, which did nothing but annoy people. Hint - if it doesn't incapacitate or kill, it's not a weapon.
It's called telepresence and it's commercially available now. Okay, it's not exactly C3P0 - more a webcam/monitor/speakers/microphone combo on a remote-controlled barstool, but it allows you to 'be' wherever that 'robot' goes and speak to the people at its location and hear what they have to say.
Try:
http://www.robodynamics.com/
and search for MILO under products
Slashdot Mirror
Pure art. Almost all the game was artwork on top of a very simple on-rails shooter.
Conker's Bad Fur Day - actually moved and saddened by the ending.
I'm sure other gamers will have their own opinions about games which they consider highly artistic, but the people making this rubbish up are not gamers. They have never played a video game to that depth, never empathised with characters, or felt a strong emotion at some point in the game. Also, the artform is young - someone claiming there are no games that are art would be like someone claiming in 1915 that there were no films that were art.
But then, I think the Mona Lisa is a drab painting of an ugly heifer, so what do I know?
Me neither. It's just that after playing video games as a large part of my recreation for most of the last 30 years, I'm getting to the point where I've seen it all. FPS, RPG, platform, sim, driving, fighting, adventure games - played it/them on everything from a plug-in TV Pong game to an Xbox and a Gamecube and a rather whizzy PC. Haven't bought an Xbox360, won't buy a PS3, might buy a Wii just because of the interesting new gameplay possibilities inherent in the control method. Haven't bought a game in ages, simply because there's so many retreads, sequels and just plain rip-offs out there. I don't want to play WW2 games, which is about all you can buy for the PC these days. WoW interests me not in the slightest - any game where you have to pay people to do the boring bits for you has missed the point so badly I'm not even letting it in the house. The Cube had some exceptional games with good controls and clever gameplay mechanics - Eternal Darkness, Pikmin, Beyond Good and Evil, but Nintendo killed it/let it die. Hopefully they'll not do the same with the Wii. Maybe when games get really good physics engines, so wood burns, glass breaks, water puts out fires, and I don't need the red key to open a wooden door when I've got a rocket-launcher, I'll get interested again. Had my hopes up with Black, but that was almost as p155-poor as Red Faction in what you could actually blow up. I'm not the same person I was 10 years ago. Unfortunately, that person seems to be who the games companies are still targetting their wares at with the blinkered assumption that anybody picking up their latest game has never played a game before and will be impressed by the pretty graphics and shooty-bang-ness of it, instead of going: "Wow, indestructible scenery, idiot AI, shotgun, machine gun and sniper rifle - never seen *those* in a game before!"
Okay, I'm getting a Wii, but the 'PS3' girl in the video was so hot! I watched it 8 times just to hear her say "my vibrating features have been disabled".
Lately I've played a wide variety of titles with plenty of innovation - Odyssey: Winds of Athena, Wik and the Fable of Souls, and the incredible Eets. Alien Hominid started life as a Flash game and transitioned to the consoles. Darwinia was made by a team of three, proving that a full-size commercial game can still be made even if you don't happen to have a mega-buck budget. With the reported low cost of a Wii devkit, Xbox Arcade and the Wii's purported download system, there's still room for plenty of expansion and innovation at all levels of the game business. Sure, the companies with the mega-buck budgets will probably still choose to spend those budgets on well-known franchises, and will probably grind some of those franchises and companies into the ground because nobody's taking risks. I suspect that if every game company in the world went out of business tomorrow, there'd still be a bunch of people sitting coding by themselves or with a few mates because they've got an idea for a game they've just *got* to get out of their heads. Flash is the new Spectrum 48K...
RE4 was a dreadful game. A colour palette of brown, beige and grey; a handgun that's less effective than a big stick would be; an inability to pick up a big stick, despite the fact you're walking through a *forest*; a targetting system that is *less* accurate the closer you are to something; villagers that take multiple headshots to kill, and then Mr Baghead shows up, takes ten rounds to the head, a grenade to the face and ignores all the damage while killing me with one chainsaw hit.
The only horror was the sickening feeling that I'd just paid £40 for this sh1t.
The last time I experienced a genuine scare in a video game was Dungeon Master on the ST. Low on health, out of food, depleted mana, but it seemed as if everything in the vicinity was dead, so I just took my eyes off the screen for a second to make a couple of notes on the map. Suddenly,from behind the party, a shriek from one of the Pain Rats From Hell, and the remaining health of my two fighters dropped by half. In a frenzy of clicking, I raced halfway across the map, and only stopped when I ran the party into a wall, then noticed how hard my heart was pounding. Because I was totally immersed in the game, I was genuinely scared for my characters/self and reacted viscerally, rather than logically.
In local non-chain game store the other week trading in ancient PS1 and games - female assistant rather disinterestedly asked me if I wanted to pre-order a PS3. No thanks, I say, I'm getting a Wii. You'd have thought I'd plugged her into the mains! Wasn't it cool, had I seen the E3 videos, wouldn't a lightsaber game totally rock, didn't the new Zelda look amazing? Chatted for a while, then went downstairs and browsed the pre-owned Xbox titles. G.b.t.c asked me if I was interested in upgrading to a 360. No thanks, nothing there I want, I'm waiting for the Wii. Bzzzt! Had I seen the E3 videos, had I seen Miyamoto conducting the orchestra, had I seen the drumming game? The staff in there are gamer geeks one and all, and none of them give two hoots about the PS3.
In GAME today, chatting to the manager - he says that he's starting to get lists of pre-orders for software for PS3, and he thinks he's going to get stuck with a lot of unsold stock, especially among the many, many sequelae. As in Ridge Racer 6, Tekken 5 and Tony Hawk's 8. He said he thought they'd end up having to do bundles very early on just to shift some of these games. Apparently most of the pre-orders are from parents whose kids want the PS3 for Xmas. People who are buying their own machines are mostly going for the 360 now, or waiting for the Wii.
Maybe the bow in Thief fired sucker-tipped arrows like the ones you can buy in toy stores. Maybe it fired marshmallow arrows. Certainly not real ones. Arrows are large, heavy and strike with enough force to penetrate plate armour. Except the ones in Thief, which did nothing but annoy people. Hint - if it doesn't incapacitate or kill, it's not a weapon.
It's called telepresence and it's commercially available now. Okay, it's not exactly C3P0 - more a webcam/monitor/speakers/microphone combo on a remote-controlled barstool, but it allows you to 'be' wherever that 'robot' goes and speak to the people at its location and hear what they have to say. Try: http://www.robodynamics.com/ and search for MILO under products