What is described here does not follow the general trend of games. There are more cases of games that look great with little subsistence that did well compared to the other way around. Marketing is also dependent on graphics because it is easier to market something that looks cool. It is a lot easier to market a game like FF13 that looks totally awesome versus say, pong, regardless of the actual game content.
But let's suppose people really do buy good games with poor graphics. Suppose the next Zelda just totally sucked but was perfect in every cosmetic category, and as a result it bombed. Does that mean Miyamoto should start talking to the other 100 members of his team like the graphic designer or the music composer on how to design a better Zelda game? No it just means they need someone to replace Miyamoto as the head guy and keep the guys who managed to do the cosemetic stuff perfecetly. How 'fun' the next Zelda is will almost certainly depend on what Miyamoto did. Likewise Metal Gear will depend on Kojima for all its 'fun'. Now beyond those two I don't know anyone famous enough to tie to a franchise, but you can be assure there is one such individual that is responsible for the bulk of any game's (or lack thereof) fun factor.
I don't understand why people hate great graphics. Graphics and fun are complementary and managed by totally different entities. If one failed it's not because the other is hogging all the resources. Miyamoto probably wouldn't even be very good at cranking out polygons, just like surely they do not ask the graphic designers how to make the Zelda engine. If the next Zelda game has stick figure graphics it doesn't mean that the fun factor must go up because all these guys who should be doing graphics are helping design the games (in fact that will almost certainly make the game a lot worse). If the next Zelda game had great graphics it is not because Nintendo forced Miyamoto to learn how to design computer graphics instead of doing his normal job.
If you had 1 brilliant guy who could make something really fun, he still can. Nintendo's staff is probably considerably bigger than what they had when they just started but Miyamoto is still the head guy to decide what kind of gameplay to implement. I'm sure Hideo Kojima is not held back by what the janitor or the graphic designer or the voice actor thinks of the next Metal Gear game. What makes a game 'fun' is not the result of throwing more manpower on it. History clearly shows having one guy that knows what makes a good game is a lot more useful than throwing 100 guys that do not at a game. Therefore if any game turns out to suck it is not because of a collective failure, but rather that one guy who is supposed to come up with the fun failed.
For example, a lot of the Megaman games have been criticized as nothing but a massive instant death spike-fest. Did this happen because whoever in charge of the game thought hitting a spike and die instantly is a great way to spend your time? Or did the graphic designer complained and said he spend all his time designing spikes but they're not being used enough? Or maybe the guy who did the animation for Megaman blowing up into bits complained because he wants to see his work appear more often? Or perhaps the voice actor who did Megaman's death scream thought it was so good we should hear it more often? You can almost be sure any good or bad feature occur because the most important guy on the team thought it was a good idea.
When a game sucks and has good graphics, you should be thankful that 100 other guys cranking out polygons at least didn't screw up while the one guy who was supposed to come up with the fun did. Conversely if a game is fun but has sucky graphics, all that means is the 1 important guy did his job right but the rest of the team didn't do what they're supposed to do. Nothing more.
There's a tried and true way to provoke emotions via killing people off. Assuming the characters you developed are actually any good, killing them off will most likely provoke some kind of response.
Another easy way like some described with Shadow of Colossus is that it turns out you were just going around killing babies or whatever all this time. That has been used at least as early as Terranigma where most of your effort in the game was help to revive a mad scientist who once wiped out the entire Earth. And yes it's easy to provoke some kind of emotional response when you found that you were just commiting crimes against humanity all this time without knowing it.
But more importantly, the question is did you have a choice? If the game is like 'you must kill 100 babies to get to next stage' then no I don't think it means anything. It's sad that Aeris died in FF7 but she did not have a choice. The game pretty much indicated that she must die for the story and the game to continue. There is no remote indication that there was anything you could have done to avoid her death. If you want to provoke emotions without just being cheesy, there has to be at least the illusion of choice. Terranigma, with its openness, was a game where it seems like you can delay the doomsday scenario forever if you wanted to. Sure nothing will happen but it was fun just exploring the peaceful version of the world. When you pick up the Hero Pike and the Hero Armor and accept the responsibility of being the hero, that's when your comrades start to fall one by one, ending with the death of the hero himself. The hero questions whether saving the world is really what he wanted to do if it meant the death of all his close friends. In the ending you're shown that you could have just ran away and live out your life as a normal boy if you simply didn't open the Pandora's Box at the very beginning. Although there is no actual choice for 'run away and never do anything', the game clearly shows you that could have been your choice. That's why giving that world up is meaningful.
This applies to character dying, a common way to inject emotion into a game. Unfortunately I can't think of any game where I actually have any say, or even the illusion of having a say, on the death of a character.
The problem is that as you move higher and higher stakes there are increasingly few players so it is easier and easier to get you and your friend on the same table. Assuming you and your friend are at least no worse than the average player of that level, it has to be the case that you'd win if you collude, so the only thing that holds you back is your capital. I believe the statistics say that the knowledge of 2 extra cards is basically insurmountable over the long run in poker. And in online there's nothing stopping me from calling my friend and say I got these cards, what do you got? And there's no way anyone can catch that. If you try to cheat in a real casino, people would eventually notice. But that isn't possible for online.
The stakes of online gambling is simply too high, and it's far easy to cheat. If I simply call a friend who lives in another location and exchange information, how will you catch that? Many of the high stakes table only has 1 table so it's not hard to get on the same table. If you assume the cheaters are actually good players then it is also not necessary that you always play on the same table. Poker is a game of information, and knowing even 2 more cards compared to others give you a huge advantage.
A lot of time I have no idea what I was going to get, and if the box art looks interesting and I've at least heard of people talking about the game I'd give it a shot. However in Gamestop you can usually only see the spine of the box, and I'm less likely to pull a game out of the shelf just because it has an interesting name. Not to mention Gamestop seems to have their games sorted alphabeticlaly up to the letter G, and after that you have no idea where the rest of the games are. I'd rather go to Best Buy to buy games because at least I won't miss something that catches my interest.
I find that with the way things like ESPN are set up, it is impossible to have a hand that is not won by some awesome psychological thing. There are only four possible outcome in a given round of poker:
I was going to win, you see through it and fold I was going to win, you didn't see through it and call I wasn't going to win, you didn't see through it and fold I wasn't going to win, you see through it and call
In every one of these cases, you can always state it as if someone made a brilliant read. For example if I bluffed with nothing, and the other guy saw through it, it's because he was able to read my bluff. It is never because I was crazy to make such a bluff even if it's say all in with 10 high. Likewise if I bluffed with nothing and the other guy folds, it's always because my great playing fooled the other guy. It is never because I was crazy and merely got lucky this round. In Poker on TV, the guy who wins is always right. You never have a winner who is just plain lucky because ESPN tries to promote poker as a game of skill, and it is extremely easy to analyze every hand as if it's the result of some superior playing.
I believe computer can beat humans reliably in backgammon which has an element of randomness in it via dice rolling.
Also, just because the computer won't always win, doesn't mean it isn't better than human. Suppose I made a poker program with X-Ray visions and then played against a random guy. With my X-Ray vision I decided I have a 95% chance to win when the guy went all in, but lost due to a bad draw. Unlike Chess, no matter how good your computer is, there's always a chance you won't win.
When Deep Blue sacrificed a position it is not because it managed to think like a human. It's because it analyzed enough in the future to see that this is a strong move. In the way too many examples of 'why this is good hand if X and Y is true' there's no reason that a computer with the right design eventually be able to figure out through computation. Clearly the computer is not there yet, but then computer poker is not nearly as well-researched as say, computer chess.
Let's say I predict US has a 51% chance of winning if it invaded Canada. Does a US victory validate my model is correct? Does a US failure invalidate the model? It's not like we can just rewind time and run this experiment 100 times and see how often US actually defeated Canada.
Unless you're talking about a company that's actually owned by a console maker, there's no loyalty in the 3rd party world. If Wii has 95% of the market, Square will probably find a way to get FF13 on that instead even if it means scrapping the grahpic engine they've been working on. It's not like Square stayed exclusive to PSX out of loyalty to begin with. It's because PSX/PS2 had a huge dominating position in the market, coupled with some technical/political issues (i.e. feud with Nintendo, plus N64 was delayed so they couldn't develop for it even if they wanted to).
When N64 wasn't going anywhere, 3rd party had no problem jumping ship (but still develop for the dominant Nintendo handhelds). No reason to assume it's any different for Sony. And if PS3 really manages to take off, expect FF13 to go back to exclusively PS3 again.
We're going to try something no one has ever done before, and that's why it's going to work.
Unfortunately, that only works in the Matrix too. If something is been done to the death, it probably means it at least started out as a good idea. There's no reason to assume whatever you come up to replace it is goign to be better than a good idea.
I find myself repeating this a lot, but graphics have absolutely nothing to do with gameplay. Therefore it is not an excuse to have blame poor gameplay on good graphics, or vice versa. The skillset needed to crank out polygons has nothing in common with the skillset necessary to be a good writer, or a good game designer. If a game had great graphics but poor gameplay, it's because the guy designing the game let the team down, not because they forced all game designers to learn how to crank out polygons instead.
Likewise if you have a game with great gameplay but poor graphics, it's because the graphics guys let the team down when they could have done something better to make a good game even better. It's not because the graphics guy decided to stop what they're doing to help design a better game.
Out of all the possible temperature the world could be in, we're obviously at a temperature that is perfect and any departure from that will cause death and doom?
Let's say we determined the absolute best temperature to be at is cool Earth down by 5 degrees and we can do it. You can stil make the same argument, that people living in cold areas will be dying more due to cold-related deaths even though the rest of the world is better off. Why should you get freezed to death when you don't have to if we maintain the status quo?
Even if global warming really does improve the welfare of the world overall (unlikely), someone somewhere will of course get screwed in the process. This is true even if you can somehow shift the world's temperature to some ideal level. Unless we're already at the ideal temperature, of course, but I've never heard of anyone even making such a claim.
I think of far more RPGs or at least RPGish games that have weak or nonexistent stories that turn out to be good games than RPGs with weak or nonexistent gameplay but a strong story and it turned out to be good. The entire Diablo and Grandia franchise basically exists only for the gameplay. The story, if one exists, is merely an excuse for the gameplay to exist. Gameplay always trumps story. There's a reason why you've never heard of anyone getting an award for writing the plot of a video game, while game designers are recognized for their contribution. Let's assume Miyamoto and Miyamoto alone is responsible for Nintendo's brilliant gameplay. If they throw him out and used that money to hire the best writer in the world, would the next Zelda game be better? No, it'd almost certainly be worse. Gameplay always trumps story, even in a RPG.
At any rate, it's stupid to say 'focus graphics over story'. There is almost certainly only one guy writing a story, as writing is not a task that you gain anything for throwing more people at it. Certainly the most recognized examples of writing are written by just 1 person. It's not like your head story writer for FF or anything else is going to be told by his superiors: "We need you to stop writing and help cranking out polygons even though you may not have any idea what that even involves." Graphics and story do not interact in any negative way. It is absurd that the quality of the story should change just because there's 1 or 1000 guys working on the graphics. Do you propose Square to pull their 1000 guys on graphics and have these guys help writing the plot for the next FF? That will almost certainly produce a worse plot, not a better one.
The article mentions Diablo sold over 200K. There's like 2 or 3 dating sims that sold more than 100K. Consider Diablo probably sell well over 2 million outside of Japan, that'd be equivalent of having a dating sim sell 1 million here if the markets are at all comparable. Clearly they are not. Also a niche market where you can occasionally sell 100K is still better than 0, which is the size of the market for domestic dating sim in the USA (none exists, you can always import though).
By the time you can get shield piercing phasers the enemy should have Hard Shields if they kept up with you. Plasma Cannon is the only practical 'hit all 4 shield arc' weapon unless you consider fusion beam or laser as a valid weapon (they won't even penetrate a high class shield at all). Plasma Torpedoes can be made into enveloping but that requires future techs, and even then the damage isn't really that great when you consider Lightning Shield still works on torpedoes.
Plasma Cannons are the undisputed king of damage for the space they require. Their only drawback is the double disspation penalty, but this is easily negated with tractor beams. In theory you could keep your distance and have the Plasma Cannons miss, but in practical terms it is too easy to close in to point blank range and fire away with Plasma Cannons, easier still if you actually use tractor beams.
But of course, if you want to talk cheap, Plasma Cannon is not the cheapiest tactics in the game. Ion Pulse Cannons probably takes the prize, as all the damage goes directly to structural so it only takes about 100 points of damage to blow out the engine of a Doom Star and have it self destruct. Class X shields + Hard Shields can sometimes stop the Ion Pulse Cannons due to its low damage range, but you shouldn't need the highest shielding technology to negate a low end weapon. It is also capable of the Continuous + Autofire combo like the Phasers.
Japan is hostile to foreign games to begin with. For example you don't actually hear World of Warcraft talking about how they do in Japan even though they seem to own the rest of the world, because Japanese prefer FF11 over that. But even if that's not the case, there's no reason to assume one culture has to like the games from another culture. It is probably safe to say that the USA will never be into dating sims line the way Japanese are. This doesn't inherently say anything about the quality of the said games, but merely a reflection of the culture.
The game feels incomplete because in a game that is supposed to be about taking back the reigns of history and put it in the hands of man, you spend your time almost exclusively fighting 10 species of Malboros or cats. In a game that supposed to focus on politics and struggle between men, the main hero's party somehow manages to stay out of it completely and become some kind of pest exterminators instead.
We have FF7 going for a long time not because Square planned on it. Like it or not it is the most visible and well known FF that ever existed so eventually they figured out you could make a game that mentions Sephiroth might be in it and sell a respectable amount. I have heard of people who went out and got Kingdom Hearts: Final Mix because they added another scene with Sephiroth in it. Nothing wrong with taking advantage of a mega-popular game that somehow kept people coming back.
But it is foolish to assume a game that is still being developed will have a following comparable to arguably one of the most loyal game following that ever existed. FF7 is definitely the most visible PSX RPG, arguably most visible in the entire PSX era, possibly most visible ever. Now the Zelda franchise beats FF7, but that's a franchise. It's stupid to assume your next game is also going to be the most visible game ever (whether FF13 or FF7 is actually that great is actually not important). It is fine to think big, but they're basically counting chickens before they even hatch. Xenosaga originally was supposed to be a 6 part game. The game flopped and they cut it off at 3. All the great planning in the world won't mean anything if the game isn't what the public wants.
But ultimately that's just a fancy way of losing. The computer does not need to 'learn' how to counter your moves because it already knows how to. When I play Street Fighter against someone with better reflexes I don't call them a cheater just because they have better reflexes. Almost everything Shin Akuma does is solid fundamental fighting game stuff. You should always dragon punch when someone is airborne. We just can't do it 100% correct like Shin Akuma does.
I saw a Street Fighter 3 movie where a guy parried a 10 hit Super Arts, and that guy is considered one of the best fighting game players. A computer can easily replicate the same feat, and now it's cheating? Would it be fair for computer to use this after X hours of gameplay to pretend it's been learning something it always know how to do?
I guess ultimately it's really just a matter of perception. The best AI would be the one that can best convince the human player that it really is playing with the same rules as we do, and that it has the same reflexes as we do, even though clearly it does not. As long as superior reflexes can overpower strategy, which is true in many types of games, the computer doesn't even need to learn anything if its goal is merely to beat the human player.
Just what is a 'believable' reaction in most games? If you take a fighting game, where the computer and I start off with character of roughly equal strength (ignore bosses), it would be believable to have the AI act slightly below the average human (after all I, an average human, am expected to win eventually) on the normal level of gameplay. It'd be believable that the AI acts slightly above human on the hard settings. This works for FPS where you and the enemy are of equal strength too.
But let's say you're in some kind of standard one against the world FPS, what is a believable reaction on the AI? If they reacted even barely intelligently, the player would be dead because the average player is not a super gamer able to overcome odds of 10X or even 100X of his firepower. The AI must act in a way that, despite having 10X or 100X the firepower of the player, still allows them to be defeated by the average player. This means it must act in a very stupid way.
The worse the odds of player versus computer, the dumber the computer necessarily has to become for there to even be a chance for the player winning. Like I mentioned elsewhere, in a MMORPG the computer AI is necessarily dumber than even random, because if the computer just randomly attacks whoever, as they do in a typical RPG, you'd never be able to win due to the sheer power disparity. Indeed the computer AI is usually maximized on stupidity in a MMORPG by focusing on the hardest guy to kill. MMORPG features some of the crazinest power disparity between player and the computer, and it is not surprising that the MMORPG AI basically actively tries to lose to the player, because otherwise no one could ever win.
The general problem, then, is that there are far more games that feature you against insurmountable odds as opposed to games that give you 50/50 odds, so AI necessarily has to be dumb in general. It'd actually be pretty cool, I think, if you have a game where you as the player have a raw power advantage, but the computer is allowed to do really clever things to try to beat you.
So instead of detecting that you did the D DF F + punch combination for a fireball, what do you propose the computer to do? Detect the frame rate animation? Again there's no reason why a computer can't tell on the first frame that you're about to do a fireball and counter appropriately. Do you give the computer 5 frames before it can determine what move you just used? 10? 50? Some really good players in fighting games can react with a few frames of whatever move you choose to do. Are those players cheating? No, we say those guys have great reflexes. So why is the computer cheating if it is quite capable of discerning what move you're about to do in the first frame?
Again when you say some computer can 'learn' from what you do you're just saying it's a fancier way of losing. A human player deduces that someone is about to do a fireball by a combination of visual and audio cues. In the computer case, even without knowing your input, it can certainly discern what move is used in fewer frames than a player can. There is no need for the computer to 'learn' when it is quite capable of countering your moves as it sees them due to its incredible reflexes.
If a computer is supposed to 'learn', it should be able to execute any combo of arbitrary difficulty that has ever been used by its opponents, since there is obviously no way the computer will screw up its timing. How exciting would it be to play a fighting game and get hit by the best combos in the game every time without fail? And yet how is that any different from you trying to learn someone else's combo? Unless you're one of the top fighting games players, we all learn our moves and combos by watching/copying someone better than us. But in the human case it's intelligence because it takes a while to copy something effectively, but in the case of computer it's cheating because they can do it correctly on first try?
That model is inherently impossible in a MMORPG. If you look at your standard fantasy lore, usually you'd expect 1 'hero' to defeat tens if not hundreds of 'minion' characters, which is why the evil boss has an army of those to try to slow/wear down his opposition. Further the evil boss, while powerful, is not insurmountable powerful compared to the heroes so that's why he might not be attacking with just himself + his army at the same time because it's possible to just take him out first while ignoring his mostly ineffective army of minions. This is how we get our model of 'fight everything and then fight the boss' as per your standard RPG.
But when you go to MMORPG, where if five minions wised up and decided to charge together, they can wipe out an army of heroes, this paradigm obviously falls apart. But due to the time requirements of MMORPG, it is not really possible to have the normal RPG power ratio because otherwise it'd be too easy to get to the boss. As long as MMORPG continues to stay with the scheme where even a minion of the bad guy needs an army to defeat, the AI must always be incredibly stupid for there to even be a chance that the player might triumph. If you look at a standard RPG, any enemy usually attacks a character completely at random, which isn't exactly smart. Yet this is infinitely smarter than any enemy in a MMORPG, who is inclined to attack the person who is least likely to die due to the aggro list concept.
MMORPG AI has to be massively stupid. I know all the MMORPG talks about how much progress their AI has, but the fact is if you're a nearly omnipotent being with thousands years of expeirence plus an army of inexplicably powerful minions, it takes a lot of skills to actually lose to X ragtag adventurers. Just ask yourself, if you're controlling the guys you're fighting against in a MMORPG, would you possibly lose to your own party? The answer, hopefully, is no. But then this has to be the case because the opposition is usually has at least 10 times the raw firepower/stats compared to the player side, so if they actually had any brain, no player would ever win.
When people say AI, they really don't mean something that can beat them, because that's easy. They really want something that pretends it's doing something before ultimately losing. MMORPG fits this exactly.
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What is described here does not follow the general trend of games. There are more cases of games that look great with little subsistence that did well compared to the other way around. Marketing is also dependent on graphics because it is easier to market something that looks cool. It is a lot easier to market a game like FF13 that looks totally awesome versus say, pong, regardless of the actual game content.
But let's suppose people really do buy good games with poor graphics. Suppose the next Zelda just totally sucked but was perfect in every cosmetic category, and as a result it bombed. Does that mean Miyamoto should start talking to the other 100 members of his team like the graphic designer or the music composer on how to design a better Zelda game? No it just means they need someone to replace Miyamoto as the head guy and keep the guys who managed to do the cosemetic stuff perfecetly. How 'fun' the next Zelda is will almost certainly depend on what Miyamoto did. Likewise Metal Gear will depend on Kojima for all its 'fun'. Now beyond those two I don't know anyone famous enough to tie to a franchise, but you can be assure there is one such individual that is responsible for the bulk of any game's (or lack thereof) fun factor.
I don't understand why people hate great graphics. Graphics and fun are complementary and managed by totally different entities. If one failed it's not because the other is hogging all the resources. Miyamoto probably wouldn't even be very good at cranking out polygons, just like surely they do not ask the graphic designers how to make the Zelda engine. If the next Zelda game has stick figure graphics it doesn't mean that the fun factor must go up because all these guys who should be doing graphics are helping design the games (in fact that will almost certainly make the game a lot worse). If the next Zelda game had great graphics it is not because Nintendo forced Miyamoto to learn how to design computer graphics instead of doing his normal job.
If you had 1 brilliant guy who could make something really fun, he still can. Nintendo's staff is probably considerably bigger than what they had when they just started but Miyamoto is still the head guy to decide what kind of gameplay to implement. I'm sure Hideo Kojima is not held back by what the janitor or the graphic designer or the voice actor thinks of the next Metal Gear game. What makes a game 'fun' is not the result of throwing more manpower on it. History clearly shows having one guy that knows what makes a good game is a lot more useful than throwing 100 guys that do not at a game. Therefore if any game turns out to suck it is not because of a collective failure, but rather that one guy who is supposed to come up with the fun failed.
For example, a lot of the Megaman games have been criticized as nothing but a massive instant death spike-fest. Did this happen because whoever in charge of the game thought hitting a spike and die instantly is a great way to spend your time? Or did the graphic designer complained and said he spend all his time designing spikes but they're not being used enough? Or maybe the guy who did the animation for Megaman blowing up into bits complained because he wants to see his work appear more often? Or perhaps the voice actor who did Megaman's death scream thought it was so good we should hear it more often? You can almost be sure any good or bad feature occur because the most important guy on the team thought it was a good idea.
When a game sucks and has good graphics, you should be thankful that 100 other guys cranking out polygons at least didn't screw up while the one guy who was supposed to come up with the fun did. Conversely if a game is fun but has sucky graphics, all that means is the 1 important guy did his job right but the rest of the team didn't do what they're supposed to do. Nothing more.
There's a tried and true way to provoke emotions via killing people off. Assuming the characters you developed are actually any good, killing them off will most likely provoke some kind of response.
Another easy way like some described with Shadow of Colossus is that it turns out you were just going around killing babies or whatever all this time. That has been used at least as early as Terranigma where most of your effort in the game was help to revive a mad scientist who once wiped out the entire Earth. And yes it's easy to provoke some kind of emotional response when you found that you were just commiting crimes against humanity all this time without knowing it.
But more importantly, the question is did you have a choice? If the game is like 'you must kill 100 babies to get to next stage' then no I don't think it means anything. It's sad that Aeris died in FF7 but she did not have a choice. The game pretty much indicated that she must die for the story and the game to continue. There is no remote indication that there was anything you could have done to avoid her death. If you want to provoke emotions without just being cheesy, there has to be at least the illusion of choice. Terranigma, with its openness, was a game where it seems like you can delay the doomsday scenario forever if you wanted to. Sure nothing will happen but it was fun just exploring the peaceful version of the world. When you pick up the Hero Pike and the Hero Armor and accept the responsibility of being the hero, that's when your comrades start to fall one by one, ending with the death of the hero himself. The hero questions whether saving the world is really what he wanted to do if it meant the death of all his close friends. In the ending you're shown that you could have just ran away and live out your life as a normal boy if you simply didn't open the Pandora's Box at the very beginning. Although there is no actual choice for 'run away and never do anything', the game clearly shows you that could have been your choice. That's why giving that world up is meaningful.
This applies to character dying, a common way to inject emotion into a game. Unfortunately I can't think of any game where I actually have any say, or even the illusion of having a say, on the death of a character.
The problem is that as you move higher and higher stakes there are increasingly few players so it is easier and easier to get you and your friend on the same table. Assuming you and your friend are at least no worse than the average player of that level, it has to be the case that you'd win if you collude, so the only thing that holds you back is your capital. I believe the statistics say that the knowledge of 2 extra cards is basically insurmountable over the long run in poker. And in online there's nothing stopping me from calling my friend and say I got these cards, what do you got? And there's no way anyone can catch that. If you try to cheat in a real casino, people would eventually notice. But that isn't possible for online.
The stakes of online gambling is simply too high, and it's far easy to cheat. If I simply call a friend who lives in another location and exchange information, how will you catch that? Many of the high stakes table only has 1 table so it's not hard to get on the same table. If you assume the cheaters are actually good players then it is also not necessary that you always play on the same table. Poker is a game of information, and knowing even 2 more cards compared to others give you a huge advantage.
A lot of time I have no idea what I was going to get, and if the box art looks interesting and I've at least heard of people talking about the game I'd give it a shot. However in Gamestop you can usually only see the spine of the box, and I'm less likely to pull a game out of the shelf just because it has an interesting name. Not to mention Gamestop seems to have their games sorted alphabeticlaly up to the letter G, and after that you have no idea where the rest of the games are. I'd rather go to Best Buy to buy games because at least I won't miss something that catches my interest.
I find that with the way things like ESPN are set up, it is impossible to have a hand that is not won by some awesome psychological thing. There are only four possible outcome in a given round of poker:
I was going to win, you see through it and fold
I was going to win, you didn't see through it and call
I wasn't going to win, you didn't see through it and fold
I wasn't going to win, you see through it and call
In every one of these cases, you can always state it as if someone made a brilliant read. For example if I bluffed with nothing, and the other guy saw through it, it's because he was able to read my bluff. It is never because I was crazy to make such a bluff even if it's say all in with 10 high. Likewise if I bluffed with nothing and the other guy folds, it's always because my great playing fooled the other guy. It is never because I was crazy and merely got lucky this round. In Poker on TV, the guy who wins is always right. You never have a winner who is just plain lucky because ESPN tries to promote poker as a game of skill, and it is extremely easy to analyze every hand as if it's the result of some superior playing.
I believe computer can beat humans reliably in backgammon which has an element of randomness in it via dice rolling.
Also, just because the computer won't always win, doesn't mean it isn't better than human. Suppose I made a poker program with X-Ray visions and then played against a random guy. With my X-Ray vision I decided I have a 95% chance to win when the guy went all in, but lost due to a bad draw. Unlike Chess, no matter how good your computer is, there's always a chance you won't win.
When Deep Blue sacrificed a position it is not because it managed to think like a human. It's because it analyzed enough in the future to see that this is a strong move. In the way too many examples of 'why this is good hand if X and Y is true' there's no reason that a computer with the right design eventually be able to figure out through computation. Clearly the computer is not there yet, but then computer poker is not nearly as well-researched as say, computer chess.
I'm almost positive that the amount of hours played in World of Warcraft would easily blow away any console games.
The next most played console game in terms of hours would almost certainly be some kind of Pokemon game.
Let's say I predict US has a 51% chance of winning if it invaded Canada. Does a US victory validate my model is correct? Does a US failure invalidate the model? It's not like we can just rewind time and run this experiment 100 times and see how often US actually defeated Canada.
Unless you're talking about a company that's actually owned by a console maker, there's no loyalty in the 3rd party world. If Wii has 95% of the market, Square will probably find a way to get FF13 on that instead even if it means scrapping the grahpic engine they've been working on. It's not like Square stayed exclusive to PSX out of loyalty to begin with. It's because PSX/PS2 had a huge dominating position in the market, coupled with some technical/political issues (i.e. feud with Nintendo, plus N64 was delayed so they couldn't develop for it even if they wanted to).
When N64 wasn't going anywhere, 3rd party had no problem jumping ship (but still develop for the dominant Nintendo handhelds). No reason to assume it's any different for Sony. And if PS3 really manages to take off, expect FF13 to go back to exclusively PS3 again.
We're going to try something no one has ever done before, and that's why it's going to work.
Unfortunately, that only works in the Matrix too. If something is been done to the death, it probably means it at least started out as a good idea. There's no reason to assume whatever you come up to replace it is goign to be better than a good idea.
I find myself repeating this a lot, but graphics have absolutely nothing to do with gameplay. Therefore it is not an excuse to have blame poor gameplay on good graphics, or vice versa. The skillset needed to crank out polygons has nothing in common with the skillset necessary to be a good writer, or a good game designer. If a game had great graphics but poor gameplay, it's because the guy designing the game let the team down, not because they forced all game designers to learn how to crank out polygons instead.
Likewise if you have a game with great gameplay but poor graphics, it's because the graphics guys let the team down when they could have done something better to make a good game even better. It's not because the graphics guy decided to stop what they're doing to help design a better game.
Out of all the possible temperature the world could be in, we're obviously at a temperature that is perfect and any departure from that will cause death and doom?
Let's say we determined the absolute best temperature to be at is cool Earth down by 5 degrees and we can do it. You can stil make the same argument, that people living in cold areas will be dying more due to cold-related deaths even though the rest of the world is better off. Why should you get freezed to death when you don't have to if we maintain the status quo?
Even if global warming really does improve the welfare of the world overall (unlikely), someone somewhere will of course get screwed in the process. This is true even if you can somehow shift the world's temperature to some ideal level. Unless we're already at the ideal temperature, of course, but I've never heard of anyone even making such a claim.
I think of far more RPGs or at least RPGish games that have weak or nonexistent stories that turn out to be good games than RPGs with weak or nonexistent gameplay but a strong story and it turned out to be good. The entire Diablo and Grandia franchise basically exists only for the gameplay. The story, if one exists, is merely an excuse for the gameplay to exist. Gameplay always trumps story. There's a reason why you've never heard of anyone getting an award for writing the plot of a video game, while game designers are recognized for their contribution. Let's assume Miyamoto and Miyamoto alone is responsible for Nintendo's brilliant gameplay. If they throw him out and used that money to hire the best writer in the world, would the next Zelda game be better? No, it'd almost certainly be worse. Gameplay always trumps story, even in a RPG.
At any rate, it's stupid to say 'focus graphics over story'. There is almost certainly only one guy writing a story, as writing is not a task that you gain anything for throwing more people at it. Certainly the most recognized examples of writing are written by just 1 person. It's not like your head story writer for FF or anything else is going to be told by his superiors: "We need you to stop writing and help cranking out polygons even though you may not have any idea what that even involves." Graphics and story do not interact in any negative way. It is absurd that the quality of the story should change just because there's 1 or 1000 guys working on the graphics. Do you propose Square to pull their 1000 guys on graphics and have these guys help writing the plot for the next FF? That will almost certainly produce a worse plot, not a better one.
The article mentions Diablo sold over 200K. There's like 2 or 3 dating sims that sold more than 100K. Consider Diablo probably sell well over 2 million outside of Japan, that'd be equivalent of having a dating sim sell 1 million here if the markets are at all comparable. Clearly they are not. Also a niche market where you can occasionally sell 100K is still better than 0, which is the size of the market for domestic dating sim in the USA (none exists, you can always import though).
By the time you can get shield piercing phasers the enemy should have Hard Shields if they kept up with you. Plasma Cannon is the only practical 'hit all 4 shield arc' weapon unless you consider fusion beam or laser as a valid weapon (they won't even penetrate a high class shield at all). Plasma Torpedoes can be made into enveloping but that requires future techs, and even then the damage isn't really that great when you consider Lightning Shield still works on torpedoes.
Plasma Cannons are the undisputed king of damage for the space they require. Their only drawback is the double disspation penalty, but this is easily negated with tractor beams. In theory you could keep your distance and have the Plasma Cannons miss, but in practical terms it is too easy to close in to point blank range and fire away with Plasma Cannons, easier still if you actually use tractor beams.
But of course, if you want to talk cheap, Plasma Cannon is not the cheapiest tactics in the game. Ion Pulse Cannons probably takes the prize, as all the damage goes directly to structural so it only takes about 100 points of damage to blow out the engine of a Doom Star and have it self destruct. Class X shields + Hard Shields can sometimes stop the Ion Pulse Cannons due to its low damage range, but you shouldn't need the highest shielding technology to negate a low end weapon. It is also capable of the Continuous + Autofire combo like the Phasers.
Japan is hostile to foreign games to begin with. For example you don't actually hear World of Warcraft talking about how they do in Japan even though they seem to own the rest of the world, because Japanese prefer FF11 over that. But even if that's not the case, there's no reason to assume one culture has to like the games from another culture. It is probably safe to say that the USA will never be into dating sims line the way Japanese are. This doesn't inherently say anything about the quality of the said games, but merely a reflection of the culture.
The game feels incomplete because in a game that is supposed to be about taking back the reigns of history and put it in the hands of man, you spend your time almost exclusively fighting 10 species of Malboros or cats. In a game that supposed to focus on politics and struggle between men, the main hero's party somehow manages to stay out of it completely and become some kind of pest exterminators instead.
We have FF7 going for a long time not because Square planned on it. Like it or not it is the most visible and well known FF that ever existed so eventually they figured out you could make a game that mentions Sephiroth might be in it and sell a respectable amount. I have heard of people who went out and got Kingdom Hearts: Final Mix because they added another scene with Sephiroth in it. Nothing wrong with taking advantage of a mega-popular game that somehow kept people coming back.
But it is foolish to assume a game that is still being developed will have a following comparable to arguably one of the most loyal game following that ever existed. FF7 is definitely the most visible PSX RPG, arguably most visible in the entire PSX era, possibly most visible ever. Now the Zelda franchise beats FF7, but that's a franchise. It's stupid to assume your next game is also going to be the most visible game ever (whether FF13 or FF7 is actually that great is actually not important). It is fine to think big, but they're basically counting chickens before they even hatch. Xenosaga originally was supposed to be a 6 part game. The game flopped and they cut it off at 3. All the great planning in the world won't mean anything if the game isn't what the public wants.
But ultimately that's just a fancy way of losing. The computer does not need to 'learn' how to counter your moves because it already knows how to. When I play Street Fighter against someone with better reflexes I don't call them a cheater just because they have better reflexes. Almost everything Shin Akuma does is solid fundamental fighting game stuff. You should always dragon punch when someone is airborne. We just can't do it 100% correct like Shin Akuma does.
I saw a Street Fighter 3 movie where a guy parried a 10 hit Super Arts, and that guy is considered one of the best fighting game players. A computer can easily replicate the same feat, and now it's cheating? Would it be fair for computer to use this after X hours of gameplay to pretend it's been learning something it always know how to do?
I guess ultimately it's really just a matter of perception. The best AI would be the one that can best convince the human player that it really is playing with the same rules as we do, and that it has the same reflexes as we do, even though clearly it does not. As long as superior reflexes can overpower strategy, which is true in many types of games, the computer doesn't even need to learn anything if its goal is merely to beat the human player.
Just what is a 'believable' reaction in most games? If you take a fighting game, where the computer and I start off with character of roughly equal strength (ignore bosses), it would be believable to have the AI act slightly below the average human (after all I, an average human, am expected to win eventually) on the normal level of gameplay. It'd be believable that the AI acts slightly above human on the hard settings. This works for FPS where you and the enemy are of equal strength too.
But let's say you're in some kind of standard one against the world FPS, what is a believable reaction on the AI? If they reacted even barely intelligently, the player would be dead because the average player is not a super gamer able to overcome odds of 10X or even 100X of his firepower. The AI must act in a way that, despite having 10X or 100X the firepower of the player, still allows them to be defeated by the average player. This means it must act in a very stupid way.
The worse the odds of player versus computer, the dumber the computer necessarily has to become for there to even be a chance for the player winning. Like I mentioned elsewhere, in a MMORPG the computer AI is necessarily dumber than even random, because if the computer just randomly attacks whoever, as they do in a typical RPG, you'd never be able to win due to the sheer power disparity. Indeed the computer AI is usually maximized on stupidity in a MMORPG by focusing on the hardest guy to kill. MMORPG features some of the crazinest power disparity between player and the computer, and it is not surprising that the MMORPG AI basically actively tries to lose to the player, because otherwise no one could ever win.
The general problem, then, is that there are far more games that feature you against insurmountable odds as opposed to games that give you 50/50 odds, so AI necessarily has to be dumb in general. It'd actually be pretty cool, I think, if you have a game where you as the player have a raw power advantage, but the computer is allowed to do really clever things to try to beat you.
So instead of detecting that you did the D DF F + punch combination for a fireball, what do you propose the computer to do? Detect the frame rate animation? Again there's no reason why a computer can't tell on the first frame that you're about to do a fireball and counter appropriately. Do you give the computer 5 frames before it can determine what move you just used? 10? 50? Some really good players in fighting games can react with a few frames of whatever move you choose to do. Are those players cheating? No, we say those guys have great reflexes. So why is the computer cheating if it is quite capable of discerning what move you're about to do in the first frame?
Again when you say some computer can 'learn' from what you do you're just saying it's a fancier way of losing. A human player deduces that someone is about to do a fireball by a combination of visual and audio cues. In the computer case, even without knowing your input, it can certainly discern what move is used in fewer frames than a player can. There is no need for the computer to 'learn' when it is quite capable of countering your moves as it sees them due to its incredible reflexes.
If a computer is supposed to 'learn', it should be able to execute any combo of arbitrary difficulty that has ever been used by its opponents, since there is obviously no way the computer will screw up its timing. How exciting would it be to play a fighting game and get hit by the best combos in the game every time without fail? And yet how is that any different from you trying to learn someone else's combo? Unless you're one of the top fighting games players, we all learn our moves and combos by watching/copying someone better than us. But in the human case it's intelligence because it takes a while to copy something effectively, but in the case of computer it's cheating because they can do it correctly on first try?
That model is inherently impossible in a MMORPG. If you look at your standard fantasy lore, usually you'd expect 1 'hero' to defeat tens if not hundreds of 'minion' characters, which is why the evil boss has an army of those to try to slow/wear down his opposition. Further the evil boss, while powerful, is not insurmountable powerful compared to the heroes so that's why he might not be attacking with just himself + his army at the same time because it's possible to just take him out first while ignoring his mostly ineffective army of minions. This is how we get our model of 'fight everything and then fight the boss' as per your standard RPG.
But when you go to MMORPG, where if five minions wised up and decided to charge together, they can wipe out an army of heroes, this paradigm obviously falls apart. But due to the time requirements of MMORPG, it is not really possible to have the normal RPG power ratio because otherwise it'd be too easy to get to the boss. As long as MMORPG continues to stay with the scheme where even a minion of the bad guy needs an army to defeat, the AI must always be incredibly stupid for there to even be a chance that the player might triumph. If you look at a standard RPG, any enemy usually attacks a character completely at random, which isn't exactly smart. Yet this is infinitely smarter than any enemy in a MMORPG, who is inclined to attack the person who is least likely to die due to the aggro list concept.
MMORPG AI has to be massively stupid. I know all the MMORPG talks about how much progress their AI has, but the fact is if you're a nearly omnipotent being with thousands years of expeirence plus an army of inexplicably powerful minions, it takes a lot of skills to actually lose to X ragtag adventurers. Just ask yourself, if you're controlling the guys you're fighting against in a MMORPG, would you possibly lose to your own party? The answer, hopefully, is no. But then this has to be the case because the opposition is usually has at least 10 times the raw firepower/stats compared to the player side, so if they actually had any brain, no player would ever win.
When people say AI, they really don't mean something that can beat them, because that's easy. They really want something that pretends it's doing something before ultimately losing. MMORPG fits this exactly.