Non-innovative games tend to sell decently because publishers are more inclined to market something they assume has a proven track record. After all, non-innovative stuff tends to be a repeat of something that was at some point innovative and which became successful.
That having been said, how successful a game becomes really depends on marketing more than originality. Well-marketed, innovative titles do very well sometimes. People have already mentioned Wario Ware, Nintendogs, Shadow of the Colossus, etc. Okami might have flopped *in Japan* but gimme a friggin break the game is so chock-full of Japanese culture and mythology that were I a native of Japan I wouldn't even consider it all that original. And yes Capcom was like "omg Okami doing poorly in Japan we are going to close Clover Studios" before it even made its way to the US. If they had capitalized on its critical success in the US more then sales here could have easily made up for disappointing sales in Japan.
As for Bioshock, well considering the hype it's generated already, as long as it's marketed on TV (Gears of War was *heavily* marketed in every way which is why it sold 3 million units) it will probably do quite well. And if it really is as innovative as the devs make it out to be, then that will be a well-deserved slap in Inaba's (Okami producer) face.
Re:For great justice...
on
Game Writing
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I wholeheartedly agree. The quality of game storylines and dialogue is currently a couple of notches below that of DC/Marvel monthly comics, which is quite pathetic. Even the generally-agreed-upon-being-great story and dialogue of Baldur's Gate 2, when compared to more traditional forms of literature, simply isn't very good.
Games do have issues to deal with that make things hard for writers -- pacing, interactivity, multiple plot progressions, etc. But I do think that when there are *professionals* in the field, the end product should not be as consistently poor as game stories happen to be.
I'm far from a good writer, and I try to not judge work I'm not technically qualified to, but with something like video game writing it's just too easy to do because it's just that bad.
Anyway this is kinda ranty at the moment. With regards to the book being reviewed, I think it's hardly a useful item as far as us gamers are concerned. Not because it's not written for us, but because it doesn't teach game writers what it ought to -- how to have people read over your crap to make sure it's logical, how to ask people to say your dialogue out loud so you realize it sounds hilariously lame, how to notice when people see your "surprise ending" coming a mile away, and how to tell when the reason they don't is because it flies in the face of any sort of common sense. Game writers need to *improve* over where they currently are. The last thing they need is a "this is how it's done nowadays so make sure you know it inside-and-out" book.
Bateman, the book's main author, has the following amazingly written and designed games to his credit: Discworld Noir, Ghost Master and, Bratz: Rock Angels. Whoopee this guy is definitely top tier when it comes to literary masters of our time. Bratz is my fav franchise ever because the stories are just so cool...
I really appreciate an article like this because as a gamer I have always wondered what sort of "process" the storyline in a game goes through. And a lot of what the author says is enlightening and insightful. However, one thing bothers me -- I haven't been happy with, well, nearly any of the storylines she has written! Gears of War was short and sweet, with some good dialogue, but the story was insanely weak. And Guild Wars (every chapter) is an utter disaster in terms of story and dialogue. Sure, I love these games, but I would be lying if I said I enjoyed their storylines.
So, I was hoping she would go more in-depth when talking about where she draws her ideas from, who thinks of the "major" premises and plot points (mostly the lead designers? how much input does she have as a writer rather than designer?), and how much freedom she gets in terms of dialogue. I want to know who I should be blaming when the stories and/or dialogue in games are trash, and who I should be praising when they're stellar.
I'd also be curious to see how the dynamic between designers/writers differs in, say, Japan (with regards to story/dialogue-heavy JRPGs like Final Fantasy for instance).
Well... up is definitely not the only place to go. There's always just going bye-bye. Sony makes money as a corporation, but I'm not sure about SCE always pulling its weight, so if it does ever hit what Sony's execs consider to be rock bottom, up might not at all be where it ends up going. Likely they would abandon Playstation as a "mostly" game console and try to push it more as some uber media player of mass destruction.
A big point of mine was that without developers, you *can't* go up. If you've sold too few consoles for developers to invest in games for it, how will new units get sold? It's a vicious cycle. No good games to sell => no consoles sold => no games developed => no good games to sell =...
Games (and marketing, which admittedly Sony is good at) are what sells consoles. If there are no killer exclusive titles out there to sell the console, there probably won't be many out there ever, since there would be no return on investment to produce them.
We'll see where SCE goes two years from now. But I maintain that they will need to indeed "hang on" to some developers as exclusive ones in the meantime so they even have somewhere to go in the first place.
Granted SCE does have Ratched & Clank, Jak & Dakster, and Sly Coooper. N64-era Rare game wanna-bes, but they do sell.
Okay, now I'm confused, haha. If the Wii and 360 are winning the console war, then why *isn't* Sony going to bleed developers to them? Do you mean they're not bleeding developers to them now so they won't in the future? Because, well, I remember reading about Sony losing exclusivity of Devil May Cry 4 as well as Virtua Fighter 5. There may be other [big] titles I haven't heard of. So... am I somehow being inconsistent in my thinking?
What you described is *exactly my point.* One "hangs on" to developers, as I put it, by essentially promising them a return on investment (i.e. making money, just as you said). If there aren't enough PS3s on the market to guarantee a decent ROI, then developers will move -- like the wind, no less -- to Xbox and Wii:-P
My "half a million" number actually refers to the number of copies of a game that a publisher needs to sell to break even. I stated that Sony would need far more than that amount of consoles out there for this number to be realistic. (Since when has 100% of those who own a particular console bought a certain game for it?)
As far as devs/publishers are concerned, it's *who* goes multiplatform that's important. Exclusive games by no-names, or even good but small companies, aren't nearly as big a deal as if, say, Final Fantasy XIII goes multiplatform (by which I mean PS3/Xbox; I know FFXIII is already planned to appear in various incarnations on multiple not-directly-competitive systems).
But if Sony still has a couple of years to go before they get enough consoles out there, how will they hold on to developers and in particular exclusive titles? If a publisher can't count on selling half a million copies of an exclusive PS3 title to break even (games are costly to produce these days) by virtue of there not being enough PS3s out there to begin with (and you need far more than half a million PS3s of course), then that publisher will sign deals with Microsoft and Nintendo as well if not instead.
On top of that, with the money Sony is losing per console right now, they will have to sell a lot of games per console sold in order to break even. PS2 might be keeping SCE afloat, but I don't really see PS3 keeping a PS4 afloat at all considering how drastically the course of things would need to change.
Dead or Alive: Code Chronos has been a "mystery title" from Team Ninja for some time now. I'm not sure anyone knows what genre of game it even is, despite it having been announced years ago at this point.
Itagaki likes to concentrate on one project at a time, and I believe now that he's done wasting his time on DOAX2 he's working on Ninja Gaiden 2 for the Xbox 360. Code Chronos is supposed to follow, but what is it??
There's also the mystery of what Nintendo's next Wii-centric Zelda title will be like, but knowing Nintendo that's six years away and will probably be released concurrently on the Wii and on the, idk, Biiver or whatever they're going to call their next console.
And all this time all I thought Canada was good for was giving us Steve Nash. But Nash *and* that copy of The Transporter that I watched to make sure it's not worth paying $ for, well wow what else can one want?
Oh man the Turok games were soooo buggy but that's part of what made them so great:-P Turok: Dinosaur Hunter is responsible for one of my favorite bugs ever: as I beat the game by killing the last boss with the Chronoscepter (yet another wicked cool weapon BTW), the ending cinematic glitched, causing Turok's left leg to be broken. Yes, totally broken (as if Batman gave him a kick right in the knee, bending it the opposite way 90 degrees). And it stayed that way throughout the whole cutscene! So as Turok ran through a corridor out of wherever he was running out of to avoid this huge explosion chasing him down his left leg was just flailing about at the knee, never touching the ground. It was hilarious.
An aside... #1 glitch ever: Goldeneye -- Jungle mission -- I managed to get Natalya killed by a grenade launcher (a cool looking death as she was thrown towards where Bond was running but lay where she landed, dead) *during* the ending cutscene, getting credit for mission completion as Bond, ever the remorseless bastard, fixed his cufflinks on his way up the elevator.
#2 glitch: Captain America and the Avengers for SNES -- I wanted to show a friend of mine how crappy this game was so we started it up, only to discover that suddenly all the random enemies had 20x the HP they usually do and all the bosses had 1 hit. How the heck did this glitch even happen? By the way this didn't make the game any easier or harder, although the usually-one-hit-kill enemies in the flying level gave us a lot of grief. Anyway, the game froze once we took on the third boss (the one right past the big Sentinel) because nothing can handle what may be the worst rendition of a tree being cut apart by a sawblade ever, in the history of mankind. I guess this will only make sense to those who've played the game, but whatevs.
I haven't read the article ("games" blocked:-P) but if they didn't mention the Turok series then they've overlooked one of the biggest losses to gamers in history. (If they mentioned Turok then sweet.)
Turok: Dinosaur Hunter and Turok 2: Seeds of Evil for N64 set new standards for console FPS games in terms of both graphics and weapon design. In my opinion, Turok 2 is yet to be outdone by any FPS as far as hardcore weapon lineups are concerned. Sure there is the occasional gem like HL2's gravity gun, but nothing has had as many great hurting machines as the Turok games.
Those first two games rocked. Great levels, awesome bosses. Turok 2 even had a half-decent multiplayer.
I don't know what went wrong after that, but the games just underdelivered in every way possible. There was Turok: Rage Wars which was the dumbest thing ever because when you have Perfect Dark (or Goldeneye) on your console, like heck you're gonna care about a multiplayer-combat-oriented Turok game. Whoopee. And it just went downhill from there.
They're trying to resurrect this franchise nowadays, so we'll see what happens. But my expectations at this point are quite low.
Well since what troubles ill people (and keeps them from coming into work and/or being productive) are indeed these physical symptoms, then suppressing them is exactly what many are looking for. If as you suggest it takes the body an extra couple of days to fight off the infection "in the background," so to speak, that's not really a big deal to almost anyone as long as nothing worse comes of it.
It's not the "illusion" that one's healthy, but the *feeling* that [makes one believe] one is healthy that's important much of the time.
Haha cheers for that distinction; if I had paused to think about it I might have thought of it, but it's still so much better to have it explained succinctly and with wit.:-)
There have been probiotic yogurts for sale in Europe (or at least in the UK) for quite some time now. I lived there 2005-2006 and ate this stuff daily (yogurt tastes better there on average anyway).
If you ask me, the US has a long way to go before reaching the standards in terms of taste and healthiness (is that a word?) that grocery food has set in the UK, Belgium, Netherlands, etc.
Well, given that Bloodmoon was one of my favorite expansions for any game ever, I do have high hopes for this one. Hopefully it will incorporate some of the improvements mods have made, such as the auto-leveling rubbish. I'm assuming this place will be cold as well (yay for being a Nord) but I'm also hoping it will have just a tad more variety in terms of landscape than Cyrodiil did. I mean, good golly, a land mass so big but so homogenous... that's a big part of why Morrowind is liked more by so many.
I like how the announcement also takes a stab at PS3 and Blu-ray's read time problems:-) The criticism just never stops. Though I guess that's what happens when you strap a jet engine onto an elephant and call it a sports car.
Billions of dollars spent on paranoid, non-deterrent rubbish such as this is just stupid. This money can be used to give our Americans fighting overseas better equipment, or heck it can be used to help families in need. There are countless ways to use such funds more wisely, and to greater benefit. The fact that our government has this kind of money to literally just toss about aimlessly, and continues to do so, really bothers me.
Well, for one you have to look at the people giving out the ratings, and see what their relative standards are. A game that scores a 9/10 on PSP might only warrant a 7/10 on the DS if compared to some game that isn't available for PSP (for instance).
Also, there are only so many good developers out there. Far fewer than there are poor developers.
But my personal take on it is that in fact, the DS does have more good games than the PSP. I mean, if the PSP has a library to match Mario Kart DS, New Super Mario Bros, Animal Crossing DS, the two Castlevania titles, Wario Ware, Nintendogs, and Metroid Prime Hunters, then I have made a big mistake not getting a PSP ^_^
What is with the constant scapegoating of video games in Germany? Folks connected to a murder being Final Fantasy fans is about as relevant as their being, I don't know, Nestea Cool fans or something. You would really have to be flat-out disingenuous and have some alternate agenda in order to make a connection between Final Fantasy VII and a homicide (unless it was with a big big sword, or one of those sweet guns Vincent has... mmm triple barrel goodness...).
As for pushing for EU-wide standards for violence in games, well unless the EU is all one big monolithic culture, those standards will not reflect the views of enough people IMO. But then again I'm not even a supporter of ESRB ratings in the US. Or movie ratings for that matter.
Well, with the price point set so high in Europe, I know that the exchange rate will help Sony and keep it from losing quite so much money per PS3. However, it may be way too high in general from a consumer's perspective (after all, average spending power in the EU is altogether lower than in the US due to salaries being lower). So I'm not too optimistic about the number of units they'll actually be able to *sell* at that price. Far fewer than Wii's, that much I'm certain about.
500 is such a low number that it's clear all the government wants to do is keep tabs on bloggers. Lobbyists are required to file reports of their activities quarterly. Other laws regarding lobbying are mostly to do with spending money on a politician (not really relevant here, since bloggers *aren't actually lobbyists* and so they probably don't do that anyway).
Also, politicians are banned from becoming lobbyists for 2 years. That means that politicians wouldn't be able to keep political blogs (since I assume their readership would be > 500) for two years after leaving office. How is that a good thing?
While lobbying reform from earlier in 2006 was mostly a good thing, it also emphasized that being a lobbyist was worse than not being one from a number of perspectives. What the proposition aims to do is effectively restrict the freedom of political bloggers. Some might indeed be in need of some restricting, especially if their viewpoints clash with mine:cough: but really it's just too sweeping of a suggestion.
I think the DS also has a more extensive library of games. This almost guarantees that there will be more poorly designed/developed games available for it than for the PSP.
It's the same as with the PS2 -- that console has *a lot* of games out for it, so it's much easier (and funnier) to put together a "worst PS2 games" list than a "worst Gamecube games" list or whatever.
Nah, nuclear blasts don't do anything it's all leftist propaganda. I mean, if a nuclear device detonated on a warship it might hiccup and need to "take it easy" for a bit, but within a half hour it would go right back to firing... T_T
What really deserves another go is Jet Force Gemini (Rare-developed 3rd person shooter for N64). The game was insanely well designed, with a soundtrack that rivals some of the best ever. Sadly no-one played it and it dropped to $20 within a couple of months of release. And even then no-one played it!
Anyone who has played it would agree that it was an amazing title, just very poorly marketed. I would love to see a good developer (Rare? maybe...) take a stab at a sequel. And they should bring back the same guy to do the music.
I took my brother, cousin, and even grandmother to a Play! A Videogame Symphony concert in Toronto. It was good fun, and the performances were solid (though admission was horribly overpriced). The pieces were of course all orchestral arrangements of the originals, since low-quality midi music just isn't worth paying $100 to listen to.
And naturally, while most of the audience already loves gaming, the concerts aim to create more exposure for games and their music. Game music has gotten to the level where it can be appreciated as a standalone medium, and it can therefore be used to attract new fans. Those that attend the concert at the very least become familiar with the big game titles such as Elder Scrolls, Final Fantasy and Legend of Zelda (and if they've been living under a rock for 20 years, Super Mario).
As for "spreading gamer culture," well, the concerts are indeed a testament to games becoming overall more "refined" when it comes to being viewed as an art form. Games are art, that much can't be argued, but it is much easier to defend them as *good* art when they have elements in them that even those unfamiliar with gaming would consider good. Of these elements, music is a major one. Visually impressive scenes are of course another, and that's why game concerts try to incorporate some into the performance (big screens hang over the stage that show cutscenes).
I for one was hoping Play! would add Final Fantasy XII's "opening movie" piece to their program and just play it in-sync with the actual cutscene as it's shown. From my experience that 6-min bit manages to get basically anyone at least intrigued and willing to give modern games a bit more respect from an artistic viewpoint.
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Non-innovative games tend to sell decently because publishers are more inclined to market something they assume has a proven track record. After all, non-innovative stuff tends to be a repeat of something that was at some point innovative and which became successful.
That having been said, how successful a game becomes really depends on marketing more than originality. Well-marketed, innovative titles do very well sometimes. People have already mentioned Wario Ware, Nintendogs, Shadow of the Colossus, etc. Okami might have flopped *in Japan* but gimme a friggin break the game is so chock-full of Japanese culture and mythology that were I a native of Japan I wouldn't even consider it all that original. And yes Capcom was like "omg Okami doing poorly in Japan we are going to close Clover Studios" before it even made its way to the US. If they had capitalized on its critical success in the US more then sales here could have easily made up for disappointing sales in Japan.
As for Bioshock, well considering the hype it's generated already, as long as it's marketed on TV (Gears of War was *heavily* marketed in every way which is why it sold 3 million units) it will probably do quite well. And if it really is as innovative as the devs make it out to be, then that will be a well-deserved slap in Inaba's (Okami producer) face.
I wholeheartedly agree. The quality of game storylines and dialogue is currently a couple of notches below that of DC/Marvel monthly comics, which is quite pathetic. Even the generally-agreed-upon-being-great story and dialogue of Baldur's Gate 2, when compared to more traditional forms of literature, simply isn't very good.
Games do have issues to deal with that make things hard for writers -- pacing, interactivity, multiple plot progressions, etc. But I do think that when there are *professionals* in the field, the end product should not be as consistently poor as game stories happen to be.
I'm far from a good writer, and I try to not judge work I'm not technically qualified to, but with something like video game writing it's just too easy to do because it's just that bad.
Anyway this is kinda ranty at the moment. With regards to the book being reviewed, I think it's hardly a useful item as far as us gamers are concerned. Not because it's not written for us, but because it doesn't teach game writers what it ought to -- how to have people read over your crap to make sure it's logical, how to ask people to say your dialogue out loud so you realize it sounds hilariously lame, how to notice when people see your "surprise ending" coming a mile away, and how to tell when the reason they don't is because it flies in the face of any sort of common sense. Game writers need to *improve* over where they currently are. The last thing they need is a "this is how it's done nowadays so make sure you know it inside-and-out" book.
Bateman, the book's main author, has the following amazingly written and designed games to his credit: Discworld Noir, Ghost Master and, Bratz: Rock Angels. Whoopee this guy is definitely top tier when it comes to literary masters of our time. Bratz is my fav franchise ever because the stories are just so cool...
I really appreciate an article like this because as a gamer I have always wondered what sort of "process" the storyline in a game goes through. And a lot of what the author says is enlightening and insightful. However, one thing bothers me -- I haven't been happy with, well, nearly any of the storylines she has written! Gears of War was short and sweet, with some good dialogue, but the story was insanely weak. And Guild Wars (every chapter) is an utter disaster in terms of story and dialogue. Sure, I love these games, but I would be lying if I said I enjoyed their storylines. So, I was hoping she would go more in-depth when talking about where she draws her ideas from, who thinks of the "major" premises and plot points (mostly the lead designers? how much input does she have as a writer rather than designer?), and how much freedom she gets in terms of dialogue. I want to know who I should be blaming when the stories and/or dialogue in games are trash, and who I should be praising when they're stellar. I'd also be curious to see how the dynamic between designers/writers differs in, say, Japan (with regards to story/dialogue-heavy JRPGs like Final Fantasy for instance).
Well... up is definitely not the only place to go. There's always just going bye-bye. Sony makes money as a corporation, but I'm not sure about SCE always pulling its weight, so if it does ever hit what Sony's execs consider to be rock bottom, up might not at all be where it ends up going. Likely they would abandon Playstation as a "mostly" game console and try to push it more as some uber media player of mass destruction.
...
A big point of mine was that without developers, you *can't* go up. If you've sold too few consoles for developers to invest in games for it, how will new units get sold? It's a vicious cycle. No good games to sell => no consoles sold => no games developed => no good games to sell =
Games (and marketing, which admittedly Sony is good at) are what sells consoles. If there are no killer exclusive titles out there to sell the console, there probably won't be many out there ever, since there would be no return on investment to produce them.
We'll see where SCE goes two years from now. But I maintain that they will need to indeed "hang on" to some developers as exclusive ones in the meantime so they even have somewhere to go in the first place.
Granted SCE does have Ratched & Clank, Jak & Dakster, and Sly Coooper. N64-era Rare game wanna-bes, but they do sell.
Okay, now I'm confused, haha. If the Wii and 360 are winning the console war, then why *isn't* Sony going to bleed developers to them? Do you mean they're not bleeding developers to them now so they won't in the future? Because, well, I remember reading about Sony losing exclusivity of Devil May Cry 4 as well as Virtua Fighter 5. There may be other [big] titles I haven't heard of. So... am I somehow being inconsistent in my thinking?
What you described is *exactly my point.* One "hangs on" to developers, as I put it, by essentially promising them a return on investment (i.e. making money, just as you said). If there aren't enough PS3s on the market to guarantee a decent ROI, then developers will move -- like the wind, no less -- to Xbox and Wii :-P
My "half a million" number actually refers to the number of copies of a game that a publisher needs to sell to break even. I stated that Sony would need far more than that amount of consoles out there for this number to be realistic. (Since when has 100% of those who own a particular console bought a certain game for it?)
As far as devs/publishers are concerned, it's *who* goes multiplatform that's important. Exclusive games by no-names, or even good but small companies, aren't nearly as big a deal as if, say, Final Fantasy XIII goes multiplatform (by which I mean PS3/Xbox; I know FFXIII is already planned to appear in various incarnations on multiple not-directly-competitive systems).
But if Sony still has a couple of years to go before they get enough consoles out there, how will they hold on to developers and in particular exclusive titles? If a publisher can't count on selling half a million copies of an exclusive PS3 title to break even (games are costly to produce these days) by virtue of there not being enough PS3s out there to begin with (and you need far more than half a million PS3s of course), then that publisher will sign deals with Microsoft and Nintendo as well if not instead.
On top of that, with the money Sony is losing per console right now, they will have to sell a lot of games per console sold in order to break even. PS2 might be keeping SCE afloat, but I don't really see PS3 keeping a PS4 afloat at all considering how drastically the course of things would need to change.
Dead or Alive: Code Chronos has been a "mystery title" from Team Ninja for some time now. I'm not sure anyone knows what genre of game it even is, despite it having been announced years ago at this point.
Itagaki likes to concentrate on one project at a time, and I believe now that he's done wasting his time on DOAX2 he's working on Ninja Gaiden 2 for the Xbox 360. Code Chronos is supposed to follow, but what is it??
There's also the mystery of what Nintendo's next Wii-centric Zelda title will be like, but knowing Nintendo that's six years away and will probably be released concurrently on the Wii and on the, idk, Biiver or whatever they're going to call their next console.
And all this time all I thought Canada was good for was giving us Steve Nash. But Nash *and* that copy of The Transporter that I watched to make sure it's not worth paying $ for, well wow what else can one want?
Oh man the Turok games were soooo buggy but that's part of what made them so great :-P Turok: Dinosaur Hunter is responsible for one of my favorite bugs ever: as I beat the game by killing the last boss with the Chronoscepter (yet another wicked cool weapon BTW), the ending cinematic glitched, causing Turok's left leg to be broken. Yes, totally broken (as if Batman gave him a kick right in the knee, bending it the opposite way 90 degrees). And it stayed that way throughout the whole cutscene! So as Turok ran through a corridor out of wherever he was running out of to avoid this huge explosion chasing him down his left leg was just flailing about at the knee, never touching the ground. It was hilarious.
An aside...
#1 glitch ever: Goldeneye -- Jungle mission -- I managed to get Natalya killed by a grenade launcher (a cool looking death as she was thrown towards where Bond was running but lay where she landed, dead) *during* the ending cutscene, getting credit for mission completion as Bond, ever the remorseless bastard, fixed his cufflinks on his way up the elevator.
#2 glitch: Captain America and the Avengers for SNES -- I wanted to show a friend of mine how crappy this game was so we started it up, only to discover that suddenly all the random enemies had 20x the HP they usually do and all the bosses had 1 hit. How the heck did this glitch even happen? By the way this didn't make the game any easier or harder, although the usually-one-hit-kill enemies in the flying level gave us a lot of grief. Anyway, the game froze once we took on the third boss (the one right past the big Sentinel) because nothing can handle what may be the worst rendition of a tree being cut apart by a sawblade ever, in the history of mankind. I guess this will only make sense to those who've played the game, but whatevs.
I haven't read the article ("games" blocked :-P) but if they didn't mention the Turok series then they've overlooked one of the biggest losses to gamers in history. (If they mentioned Turok then sweet.)
Turok: Dinosaur Hunter and Turok 2: Seeds of Evil for N64 set new standards for console FPS games in terms of both graphics and weapon design. In my opinion, Turok 2 is yet to be outdone by any FPS as far as hardcore weapon lineups are concerned. Sure there is the occasional gem like HL2's gravity gun, but nothing has had as many great hurting machines as the Turok games.
Those first two games rocked. Great levels, awesome bosses. Turok 2 even had a half-decent multiplayer.
I don't know what went wrong after that, but the games just underdelivered in every way possible. There was Turok: Rage Wars which was the dumbest thing ever because when you have Perfect Dark (or Goldeneye) on your console, like heck you're gonna care about a multiplayer-combat-oriented Turok game. Whoopee. And it just went downhill from there.
They're trying to resurrect this franchise nowadays, so we'll see what happens. But my expectations at this point are quite low.
Well since what troubles ill people (and keeps them from coming into work and/or being productive) are indeed these physical symptoms, then suppressing them is exactly what many are looking for. If as you suggest it takes the body an extra couple of days to fight off the infection "in the background," so to speak, that's not really a big deal to almost anyone as long as nothing worse comes of it.
It's not the "illusion" that one's healthy, but the *feeling* that [makes one believe] one is healthy that's important much of the time.
Haha cheers for that distinction; if I had paused to think about it I might have thought of it, but it's still so much better to have it explained succinctly and with wit. :-)
There have been probiotic yogurts for sale in Europe (or at least in the UK) for quite some time now. I lived there 2005-2006 and ate this stuff daily (yogurt tastes better there on average anyway).
If you ask me, the US has a long way to go before reaching the standards in terms of taste and healthiness (is that a word?) that grocery food has set in the UK, Belgium, Netherlands, etc.
Well, given that Bloodmoon was one of my favorite expansions for any game ever, I do have high hopes for this one. Hopefully it will incorporate some of the improvements mods have made, such as the auto-leveling rubbish. I'm assuming this place will be cold as well (yay for being a Nord) but I'm also hoping it will have just a tad more variety in terms of landscape than Cyrodiil did. I mean, good golly, a land mass so big but so homogenous... that's a big part of why Morrowind is liked more by so many. I like how the announcement also takes a stab at PS3 and Blu-ray's read time problems :-) The criticism just never stops. Though I guess that's what happens when you strap a jet engine onto an elephant and call it a sports car.
Billions of dollars spent on paranoid, non-deterrent rubbish such as this is just stupid. This money can be used to give our Americans fighting overseas better equipment, or heck it can be used to help families in need. There are countless ways to use such funds more wisely, and to greater benefit. The fact that our government has this kind of money to literally just toss about aimlessly, and continues to do so, really bothers me.
Well, for one you have to look at the people giving out the ratings, and see what their relative standards are. A game that scores a 9/10 on PSP might only warrant a 7/10 on the DS if compared to some game that isn't available for PSP (for instance).
Also, there are only so many good developers out there. Far fewer than there are poor developers.
But my personal take on it is that in fact, the DS does have more good games than the PSP. I mean, if the PSP has a library to match Mario Kart DS, New Super Mario Bros, Animal Crossing DS, the two Castlevania titles, Wario Ware, Nintendogs, and Metroid Prime Hunters, then I have made a big mistake not getting a PSP ^_^
What is with the constant scapegoating of video games in Germany? Folks connected to a murder being Final Fantasy fans is about as relevant as their being, I don't know, Nestea Cool fans or something. You would really have to be flat-out disingenuous and have some alternate agenda in order to make a connection between Final Fantasy VII and a homicide (unless it was with a big big sword, or one of those sweet guns Vincent has... mmm triple barrel goodness...). As for pushing for EU-wide standards for violence in games, well unless the EU is all one big monolithic culture, those standards will not reflect the views of enough people IMO. But then again I'm not even a supporter of ESRB ratings in the US. Or movie ratings for that matter.
Well, with the price point set so high in Europe, I know that the exchange rate will help Sony and keep it from losing quite so much money per PS3. However, it may be way too high in general from a consumer's perspective (after all, average spending power in the EU is altogether lower than in the US due to salaries being lower). So I'm not too optimistic about the number of units they'll actually be able to *sell* at that price. Far fewer than Wii's, that much I'm certain about.
500 is such a low number that it's clear all the government wants to do is keep tabs on bloggers. Lobbyists are required to file reports of their activities quarterly. Other laws regarding lobbying are mostly to do with spending money on a politician (not really relevant here, since bloggers *aren't actually lobbyists* and so they probably don't do that anyway). Also, politicians are banned from becoming lobbyists for 2 years. That means that politicians wouldn't be able to keep political blogs (since I assume their readership would be > 500) for two years after leaving office. How is that a good thing? While lobbying reform from earlier in 2006 was mostly a good thing, it also emphasized that being a lobbyist was worse than not being one from a number of perspectives. What the proposition aims to do is effectively restrict the freedom of political bloggers. Some might indeed be in need of some restricting, especially if their viewpoints clash with mine :cough: but really it's just too sweeping of a suggestion.
I think the DS also has a more extensive library of games. This almost guarantees that there will be more poorly designed/developed games available for it than for the PSP. It's the same as with the PS2 -- that console has *a lot* of games out for it, so it's much easier (and funnier) to put together a "worst PS2 games" list than a "worst Gamecube games" list or whatever.
Nah, nuclear blasts don't do anything it's all leftist propaganda. I mean, if a nuclear device detonated on a warship it might hiccup and need to "take it easy" for a bit, but within a half hour it would go right back to firing... T_T
What really deserves another go is Jet Force Gemini (Rare-developed 3rd person shooter for N64). The game was insanely well designed, with a soundtrack that rivals some of the best ever. Sadly no-one played it and it dropped to $20 within a couple of months of release. And even then no-one played it!
Anyone who has played it would agree that it was an amazing title, just very poorly marketed. I would love to see a good developer (Rare? maybe...) take a stab at a sequel. And they should bring back the same guy to do the music.
I took my brother, cousin, and even grandmother to a Play! A Videogame Symphony concert in Toronto. It was good fun, and the performances were solid (though admission was horribly overpriced). The pieces were of course all orchestral arrangements of the originals, since low-quality midi music just isn't worth paying $100 to listen to.
And naturally, while most of the audience already loves gaming, the concerts aim to create more exposure for games and their music. Game music has gotten to the level where it can be appreciated as a standalone medium, and it can therefore be used to attract new fans. Those that attend the concert at the very least become familiar with the big game titles such as Elder Scrolls, Final Fantasy and Legend of Zelda (and if they've been living under a rock for 20 years, Super Mario).
As for "spreading gamer culture," well, the concerts are indeed a testament to games becoming overall more "refined" when it comes to being viewed as an art form. Games are art, that much can't be argued, but it is much easier to defend them as *good* art when they have elements in them that even those unfamiliar with gaming would consider good. Of these elements, music is a major one. Visually impressive scenes are of course another, and that's why game concerts try to incorporate some into the performance (big screens hang over the stage that show cutscenes).
I for one was hoping Play! would add Final Fantasy XII's "opening movie" piece to their program and just play it in-sync with the actual cutscene as it's shown. From my experience that 6-min bit manages to get basically anyone at least intrigued and willing to give modern games a bit more respect from an artistic viewpoint.