I agree with your comment entirely. Blizzard's only weak link is their actual graphics engine devs. Their artists (well, level designers, not character designers:-/) are good.
If WoW was built on a stronger 3D engine with higher-quality models, it would look stellar.
Well, ok, I agree with your comment if you're talking about WoW. With regards to War3, that thing looked like ass the day it came out and it looks like ass now as well.
The character models are hideously blocky, everything moves as if through water, the designs are uninspired,.. yeah that about sums it up. It came out well after games that looked tons better in every way.
I'm a big SC fan and used to play it every day in Uni but I think that throwing in a couple extra frames per animation wouldn't have made the graphics any less unobstructive to gameplay.
Bad 3D is worse than good 2D, for sure. But their 2D was nowhere near as good as it could have been. Also, while it may have taken a bit more effort to keep improved visuals as unobstructive as SC's happened to be, we've seen it done countless in other games.
I think that would go against the whole idea of "RTS" seeing as that means "real-time strategy."
But what you are talking about is a good system that works well for multi-member RPG parties in a single-player game. It was used in Baldur's Gate and BGII to great sucess.
But Blizzard's graphics teams are total rubbish!! Have you not played anything else they've made? Starcraft came out in 1998 and looked out-of-date even then, with its 3-frame sprite animations. Warcraft 3 is a visual disaster. World of Warcraft looks hilariously bad in terms of graphical fidelity. N64 Zelda games use about as many polygons per character.
They have decent artists, and great FMV devs, but holy moley their in-game graphics are always so amazingly terrible its a testament to the AAAA+ gameplay their titles offer that they are so successful!
From the looks of it, Starcraft 2's graphics can be handled by a Nintendo DS, bro. I wouldn't worry about having to wait a few years to play it.
No that's #4. But what you just did was #2:-) yes I wins!:thumbs up:
Oh wow what a worthless site
on
Microsoft FUD Watch
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Taking PR statements and criticizing them for being PR speak is #3 on the "10 dumbest ways to spend your time" list that I made a minute ago. Honestly, when I find a large company with a PR department that *doesn't* make exactly the same sort of statements Microsoft's does, I'm going to try really hard to make it back to this reality from the alternate one I somehow ended up in.
Hi we are Microsoft Watch and we spread FUD about their FUD, please FUD our FUD by FUDDING some FUD, preferably via FUD.
You know what, I WISH they use old Saturn designs for that purpose. Seriously. The crappier their long range missiles the better. T_T
If that's "the real reason," then we are *screwed*! No government that thinks it's protecting its citizens by tearing down Saturn V posters is actually protecting its citizens at all.
Then again, because there is *no good reason at all* to tear down Saturn V posters, I'm willing to believe whatever they say it is. It'll be retarded every which way.
I must agree that's not a bad list. There's a handful of titles in there that I'd want to play, for sure.
The price is still going to be an issue for a little while, though, I reckon. And I bring this up because PS3's *biggest list of exclusives* is actually... Blu-Ray movies! And this matters *until* cheaper blu-ray players start hitting the market. For now the PS3 is a bargain blu-ray player, all things considered, but disc players tend to drop in price WAY faster than consoles.
Anyway that was kinda off-topic but meh I wanted to mention it.
LittleBigPlanet is quite cool, though, especially now that it will have compootar adversaries ^_^
I fully expect Microsoft to counter this pansy-ass display of "user protection" with the PROPER way of doing it -- if someone plugs the Zune into an unauthorized computer, the Zune explodes. KABLAMO! It'll be like Blade's sword, only with less bad acting.
Anyway like a bunch of people have already said, this is probably going to anger a lot more people than it's going to make happy (as far as consumers go). I for one would rather *not* have my device have a feature like "if you hook this up to the "wrong" machine, it's forever forfeit."
Not to mention this won't act as a deterrent for thieves worth crap.
Considering the hype surrounding the PS3 and 360, it wasn't really stupid to back them or anything at the start. But the price annoucement changed everything, and they should have noticed that immediately. Instead, EA made the same mistake in judging the market that Sony did when they thought "well, PS2 dominated the market while pricier than the GCN, so at that rate people will gladly pay 2x as much for 100x the hardware." What they SHOULD have noticed is that people on the whole clearly don't care nearly as much about graphical firepower as other things, and the PS2 made that crystal clear!
EA had the luxury of changing teams while Sony had to figure out how to stick with theirs, and so far the haven't been able to do so.
Really though, suppose you don't have any images of two chicks riding a wookiee in a gladiator outfit. And say you know there's one out there. Well, I'll tell you, Alex Ross has a much better chance of finding that image with his mad drawing skillz. Of course, once he completes his "query," he's made himself the image he was looking for. So I guess it's kind of pointless. I forget where I was going with this anyway.
Yeah, what kind of queries are you going to use? Gonna buy a tablet so you can make crude drawings and then browse to them on a page and click "search" to find stuff that matches your drawings?
Man, I don't know about you, but I gotta work on my drawing skills...
On that note, female models interested in expanding their nude modeling portfolios please email me.
Since Vista requires the kind of hardware it does to run *well*, since games are looking better and better every year with Gamebryo, UE3, and so forth, and since the tech industry as a whole still appreciates faster workstations, more memory, etc., there's more than enough of a demand for increasing hardware performance. I don't see that demand going away any time soon.
Honestly, email and web browsing never required much past computers from, say, 1995. Is everyone using 12-year-old computers? No.
I'd say FPS stories are written in the following manner: 1) various generic plot devices are written on a couple of hundred Post-It notes 2) post it-notes are stapled to a bulletin board in a random arrangement 3) fifteen darts are thrown at the bulletin board 4) ??? 5) emergency all-nighter to write some crap based on 15 of those Post-Its
Honestly, even the "okay" stories in most games are, at best, not complete rubbish. It's just that, as with comic book stories, our standards are rock-bottom low.
It's always had split-screen co-op and it's immensely fun with a good friend. My brother and I have had some of our best gaming moments in Halo/Halo 2 co-op.
Online co-op could be just as good as long as you play with a friend rather than some whiny kid. Would you invite said whiny kid over for a round of DOA4, after all? ^_^
There are *numerous* games my brother and I have played over the years that are so bad they're hilarious. "Awesomely bad," I believe is the term.
Sure, games can't hope to achieve the level of greatness in this regard that films like Commando and Showdown in Little Tokyo or American Ninja 4: The Annihilation have reached, but there's definitely some gems that stood out over the years.
Exhibit 1: Captain America and the Avengers for SNES This game has some of the most horrible dialogue and "voices" I've ever had to endure, but it's so bad it's memorable. The combat, and some boss fights (Juggernaut for example), is an atrocity because of the poor collision detection and lazy animations. And, it's impossible to beat. But hey you get to play as Captain America and Iron Man!!! But really this game crossed from "bad" to "awesome" when I showed it to a friend, touting it as "one of the worst games I own." That day, it glitched like never again -- all the normal enemies had 10x the hit points they usually do, and all the bosses had only 1 hit point. But just as the 3rd boss arrived, "chopping" a tree down with his arm-scythe even though it was just a sprite temporarily hovering over a tree stump and the trunk/stump were different colors, the game froze:-(
Exhibit 2: Rise of the Robots for SNES AMAZING graphics, AMAZING music. And the sort of gameplay that you can make jokes about to this day. It's a fighting game, but Player 1 can only use 1 character! This lame cyborg who has awesome moves like "punch," "crouch and punch," "kick," and "jump kick." I swear the Turtles from TMNT III: The Manhattan Project (awesome game) had more moves. Player 2, on the other hand, could use any of the "evil" robots from the single-player mode. They also had like 5 moves, but at least they looked cool and.. there was more than one of them. Player 1 *could* use any of those robots, but only if one entered a cheat code. Yes you had to cheat to use more than 1 character in a fighting game!! That game was awesome... we'd have matches where we'd say "ok you can only use 2 moves this time to fight" and so we'd use jump-kicks and crouch-kicks only or something. Oh yes, and the final boss had a move that took off 1/2 your life, and a move that recovered 100% of.. "her" health.
Exhibit 3: Amagon for NES Nobody has actually beaten this game except for a friend of mine and I on emulator. It is right up there with The Adventures of Bayou Billy when it comes to ATROCIOUS game design. There's a million cheap deaths, the lamest enemies (and main character) I have EVER seen in a game by a huge margin, and typos in level descriptions because nobody has gotten to most of those levels anyway. The music is pure arse, and the ending? You get a big black cock in your hand. Or is it the handle of a ship steering wheel... hard to tell with the way they cropped the image. Given the rest of the game, it's probably a cock.
So yes, those games are so bad they're funny, and when I think of them I don't think "omg worst experience ever" I think "hahahhahaha." And that somewhat redeems them.
Of course, I'm also not sure what that "13% complete" means and whether anyone should care. What if they said it was 75% done? Would that mean anything? I suppose, given what that last 25% has turned into for many games, that it would not.
It depends on who you talk to. I haven't played the game myself but opinions on FFX were generally split whereas opinions on FFXII are almost invariably positive. FFVII is considered the best FF on the Playstation systems (I think 'best FF' is still a title held by FFVI if you ask most folks who have played them all), but I think a large part of why that is, is that it was just about the only high-profile AA title on the Playstation, making everyone who just got into gaming at that point a huge fan. In that way it received the same "overrating" that Halo enjoyed as it brought in a large number of new players who did not have any solid standards by which to judge games. Both are great titles, but I don't know if they're the godsend that some treated them as. But, I've not played FFVII myself either.
Oh right, I forgot about FFX... well, the PS2 was too expensive back then and from what I heard FFX just wasn't good enough to buy a whole console for. FFXII in my view was, so I'm hoping the same will be true of FFXIII. Though a big reason I liked FFXII was Gideon Emery's Balthier. Also the musical score kinda hit home with me for some reason.
Considering it took FFXII five years to be released, and that it has only been out since Oct 31 in the US, I would have been VERY surprised were I to hear that FFXIII was anywhere near completion.
But, I guess that will continue a pattern: I got my PS2 when FFXII came out, I guess I'll get my PS3 when FFXIII hits shelves.
Anyway this is a good thing; I would expect FFXIII to be a very polished title; rushing it out would be a bad idea. FFXII re-established the series as one that sets standards, with its great reviews from everyone. FFXIII needs to continue that tradition, if anything for Sony's sake.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with your comment entirely. Blizzard's only weak link is their actual graphics engine devs. Their artists (well, level designers, not character designers :-/) are good.
If WoW was built on a stronger 3D engine with higher-quality models, it would look stellar.
Well, ok, I agree with your comment if you're talking about WoW. With regards to War3, that thing looked like ass the day it came out and it looks like ass now as well.
The character models are hideously blocky, everything moves as if through water, the designs are uninspired, .. yeah that about sums it up. It came out well after games that looked tons better in every way.
I'm a big SC fan and used to play it every day in Uni but I think that throwing in a couple extra frames per animation wouldn't have made the graphics any less unobstructive to gameplay.
Bad 3D is worse than good 2D, for sure. But their 2D was nowhere near as good as it could have been. Also, while it may have taken a bit more effort to keep improved visuals as unobstructive as SC's happened to be, we've seen it done countless in other games.
I think that would go against the whole idea of "RTS" seeing as that means "real-time strategy."
But what you are talking about is a good system that works well for multi-member RPG parties in a single-player game. It was used in Baldur's Gate and BGII to great sucess.
But Blizzard's graphics teams are total rubbish!! Have you not played anything else they've made? Starcraft came out in 1998 and looked out-of-date even then, with its 3-frame sprite animations. Warcraft 3 is a visual disaster. World of Warcraft looks hilariously bad in terms of graphical fidelity. N64 Zelda games use about as many polygons per character.
They have decent artists, and great FMV devs, but holy moley their in-game graphics are always so amazingly terrible its a testament to the AAAA+ gameplay their titles offer that they are so successful!
From the looks of it, Starcraft 2's graphics can be handled by a Nintendo DS, bro. I wouldn't worry about having to wait a few years to play it.
No no, #1 is engage in that same discussion and LOSE. Gotta be.
No that's #4. But what you just did was #2 :-) yes I wins! :thumbs up:
Taking PR statements and criticizing them for being PR speak is #3 on the "10 dumbest ways to spend your time" list that I made a minute ago. Honestly, when I find a large company with a PR department that *doesn't* make exactly the same sort of statements Microsoft's does, I'm going to try really hard to make it back to this reality from the alternate one I somehow ended up in.
Hi we are Microsoft Watch and we spread FUD about their FUD, please FUD our FUD by FUDDING some FUD, preferably via FUD.
You know what, I WISH they use old Saturn designs for that purpose. Seriously. The crappier their long range missiles the better. T_T
If that's "the real reason," then we are *screwed*! No government that thinks it's protecting its citizens by tearing down Saturn V posters is actually protecting its citizens at all.
Then again, because there is *no good reason at all* to tear down Saturn V posters, I'm willing to believe whatever they say it is. It'll be retarded every which way.
I must agree that's not a bad list. There's a handful of titles in there that I'd want to play, for sure.
The price is still going to be an issue for a little while, though, I reckon. And I bring this up because PS3's *biggest list of exclusives* is actually... Blu-Ray movies! And this matters *until* cheaper blu-ray players start hitting the market. For now the PS3 is a bargain blu-ray player, all things considered, but disc players tend to drop in price WAY faster than consoles.
Anyway that was kinda off-topic but meh I wanted to mention it.
LittleBigPlanet is quite cool, though, especially now that it will have compootar adversaries ^_^
I fully expect Microsoft to counter this pansy-ass display of "user protection" with the PROPER way of doing it -- if someone plugs the Zune into an unauthorized computer, the Zune explodes. KABLAMO! It'll be like Blade's sword, only with less bad acting.
Anyway like a bunch of people have already said, this is probably going to anger a lot more people than it's going to make happy (as far as consumers go). I for one would rather *not* have my device have a feature like "if you hook this up to the "wrong" machine, it's forever forfeit."
Not to mention this won't act as a deterrent for thieves worth crap.
Nope it's an easy karma buffer :-P
Considering the hype surrounding the PS3 and 360, it wasn't really stupid to back them or anything at the start. But the price annoucement changed everything, and they should have noticed that immediately. Instead, EA made the same mistake in judging the market that Sony did when they thought "well, PS2 dominated the market while pricier than the GCN, so at that rate people will gladly pay 2x as much for 100x the hardware." What they SHOULD have noticed is that people on the whole clearly don't care nearly as much about graphical firepower as other things, and the PS2 made that crystal clear!
EA had the luxury of changing teams while Sony had to figure out how to stick with theirs, and so far the haven't been able to do so.
Yah I was just joking around.
Really though, suppose you don't have any images of two chicks riding a wookiee in a gladiator outfit. And say you know there's one out there. Well, I'll tell you, Alex Ross has a much better chance of finding that image with his mad drawing skillz. Of course, once he completes his "query," he's made himself the image he was looking for. So I guess it's kind of pointless. I forget where I was going with this anyway.
Yeah, what kind of queries are you going to use? Gonna buy a tablet so you can make crude drawings and then browse to them on a page and click "search" to find stuff that matches your drawings?
Man, I don't know about you, but I gotta work on my drawing skills...
On that note, female models interested in expanding their nude modeling portfolios please email me.
Since Vista requires the kind of hardware it does to run *well*, since games are looking better and better every year with Gamebryo, UE3, and so forth, and since the tech industry as a whole still appreciates faster workstations, more memory, etc., there's more than enough of a demand for increasing hardware performance. I don't see that demand going away any time soon.
Honestly, email and web browsing never required much past computers from, say, 1995. Is everyone using 12-year-old computers? No.
I'd say FPS stories are written in the following manner:
1) various generic plot devices are written on a couple of hundred Post-It notes
2) post it-notes are stapled to a bulletin board in a random arrangement
3) fifteen darts are thrown at the bulletin board
4) ???
5) emergency all-nighter to write some crap based on 15 of those Post-Its
Honestly, even the "okay" stories in most games are, at best, not complete rubbish. It's just that, as with comic book stories, our standards are rock-bottom low.
Bah I should've said "female micronian" but oh well, I am a rubbish Zentraedi.
"this game will make you perfectly at home if you have ever had the fortune to hear Minmei sing"
We're not ALL peace-loving pansies who feel funny every time some miniature Asian girl sings, you insensitive clod!
Sincerely,
Khyron
It's always had split-screen co-op and it's immensely fun with a good friend. My brother and I have had some of our best gaming moments in Halo/Halo 2 co-op.
Online co-op could be just as good as long as you play with a friend rather than some whiny kid. Would you invite said whiny kid over for a round of DOA4, after all? ^_^
There are *numerous* games my brother and I have played over the years that are so bad they're hilarious. "Awesomely bad," I believe is the term.
:-(
.. "her" health.
Sure, games can't hope to achieve the level of greatness in this regard that films like Commando and Showdown in Little Tokyo or American Ninja 4: The Annihilation have reached, but there's definitely some gems that stood out over the years.
Exhibit 1: Captain America and the Avengers for SNES
This game has some of the most horrible dialogue and "voices" I've ever had to endure, but it's so bad it's memorable. The combat, and some boss fights (Juggernaut for example), is an atrocity because of the poor collision detection and lazy animations. And, it's impossible to beat. But hey you get to play as Captain America and Iron Man!!!
But really this game crossed from "bad" to "awesome" when I showed it to a friend, touting it as "one of the worst games I own." That day, it glitched like never again -- all the normal enemies had 10x the hit points they usually do, and all the bosses had only 1 hit point. But just as the 3rd boss arrived, "chopping" a tree down with his arm-scythe even though it was just a sprite temporarily hovering over a tree stump and the trunk/stump were different colors, the game froze
Exhibit 2: Rise of the Robots for SNES
AMAZING graphics, AMAZING music. And the sort of gameplay that you can make jokes about to this day. It's a fighting game, but Player 1 can only use 1 character! This lame cyborg who has awesome moves like "punch," "crouch and punch," "kick," and "jump kick." I swear the Turtles from TMNT III: The Manhattan Project (awesome game) had more moves. Player 2, on the other hand, could use any of the "evil" robots from the single-player mode. They also had like 5 moves, but at least they looked cool and.. there was more than one of them. Player 1 *could* use any of those robots, but only if one entered a cheat code. Yes you had to cheat to use more than 1 character in a fighting game!! That game was awesome... we'd have matches where we'd say "ok you can only use 2 moves this time to fight" and so we'd use jump-kicks and crouch-kicks only or something. Oh yes, and the final boss had a move that took off 1/2 your life, and a move that recovered 100% of
Exhibit 3: Amagon for NES
Nobody has actually beaten this game except for a friend of mine and I on emulator. It is right up there with The Adventures of Bayou Billy when it comes to ATROCIOUS game design. There's a million cheap deaths, the lamest enemies (and main character) I have EVER seen in a game by a huge margin, and typos in level descriptions because nobody has gotten to most of those levels anyway. The music is pure arse, and the ending? You get a big black cock in your hand. Or is it the handle of a ship steering wheel... hard to tell with the way they cropped the image. Given the rest of the game, it's probably a cock.
So yes, those games are so bad they're funny, and when I think of them I don't think "omg worst experience ever" I think "hahahhahaha." And that somewhat redeems them.
You make a good point.
Of course, I'm also not sure what that "13% complete" means and whether anyone should care. What if they said it was 75% done? Would that mean anything? I suppose, given what that last 25% has turned into for many games, that it would not.
It depends on who you talk to. I haven't played the game myself but opinions on FFX were generally split whereas opinions on FFXII are almost invariably positive. FFVII is considered the best FF on the Playstation systems (I think 'best FF' is still a title held by FFVI if you ask most folks who have played them all), but I think a large part of why that is, is that it was just about the only high-profile AA title on the Playstation, making everyone who just got into gaming at that point a huge fan. In that way it received the same "overrating" that Halo enjoyed as it brought in a large number of new players who did not have any solid standards by which to judge games. Both are great titles, but I don't know if they're the godsend that some treated them as. But, I've not played FFVII myself either.
Oh right, I forgot about FFX... well, the PS2 was too expensive back then and from what I heard FFX just wasn't good enough to buy a whole console for. FFXII in my view was, so I'm hoping the same will be true of FFXIII. Though a big reason I liked FFXII was Gideon Emery's Balthier. Also the musical score kinda hit home with me for some reason.
Considering it took FFXII five years to be released, and that it has only been out since Oct 31 in the US, I would have been VERY surprised were I to hear that FFXIII was anywhere near completion.
But, I guess that will continue a pattern: I got my PS2 when FFXII came out, I guess I'll get my PS3 when FFXIII hits shelves.
Anyway this is a good thing; I would expect FFXIII to be a very polished title; rushing it out would be a bad idea. FFXII re-established the series as one that sets standards, with its great reviews from everyone. FFXIII needs to continue that tradition, if anything for Sony's sake.