New XBox 360 screens?

    wow....it's just so funny to hear the "OMG MSFT IS THE EVIL EMPRIRE" logic. It's a god damn gaming console. Why do you feel so threatened? And remember, the Xbox was MSFTs first attempt at one. No on thought they would do well because their first iteration of any new technology (as I said earlier in this thread and many many other other people have observed long before me) that MSFT's first iteration of anything tends to suck royal ass. Personally I really like the Xbox. What I've seen of the 360 makes me think it will be a much better total product.

    So I'll try to make a point: I really am glad I purchased an Xbox. I like the S-controller, and I really liked many of the games on it and would buy a game for Xbox before I would fot PS2 9 times out of 10. I think MSFT has put a huge amount of time and money in making the 360 a better system to game on....ie...the total ownership experience of the 360 should be better than the Xbox. I really like the notion of being able to purchase cheap addon content. Maybe I am biased because I work in the industry and 99% of the games I own I get for free somehow. I think they are going to hype the crap out of it, which is a bit irritating. Next week on MTV look for DJ Frodo Baggins to host the launch show the Monday before E3 (it was already taped in Los Angeles last week). Take a look at the games...judge for yourself.

    Bah...it's morning before work and I'm rambling. Anyway....for the haters out there, I hear your hate and pain. It's cool. But I really think that the 360 will get more praise than criticism from most console gamers.

    Um....yeah need to put more braincells into this thought....

    Ugh, yeah, well what ever.

    But like I said earlier, there isn't exactly nothing wrong with the consoles, and not especially the games, the game developers are completely different entity , it's the "EVIL EMPRIRE" that is the spike in my side. And it's not even just Microsoft that is the evil empire, over the years, it has become Sony in to that position with their majority marketshare and wacky decisions to go their own way just to try to drop the competition.

    But let's play a little game, I can spot that this communitys name is MAPcore, so how many of you have made maps for console games? Aside from very limited Pariah style map editing where you have very limited control over what you can actually do. My beef is that now that PC games success is measured by the size of the modding community and it increases longevity (longevity = more 'bang' for your buck), console games have become shorter and shorter over the years (yes I realise that this one is on the game developers and not the console developers side). While developing games becomes more expensive, I'm not seeing that console games drop in prices, on the contrary, publishers like EA could easily crank the prices up.

    But the funny thing is that I'm not seeing this to change in a million years, as long as consumers act as sheeps, the console makers and console game developers can do what ever they want, and then the consumers say "why these games are short and suck so much" and then rush to the stores to buy the next even shorter game with higher price tag.

    But what the hell, it's all good as long as people are happy :roll:

    Kosmo, you make some good points. To expand, the cost of making video game content, for PC or for console, is ever increasing. As hardware gets more powerful and complex, it takes more people and more time to develop higher end product worthy of the new hardware capabilities. Combine that with the marketing to get mass market attention, you have a serious problem of escalating costs with riskier potential for returns. But this is a known problem that many pundits, wags and industry people have been forecasting for a while...even a topic of mapcore threads.

    So what might alleviate this problem of "EA-izing" of gaming:

    1) Better tools. Yes, it is costly to make a more effecient and powerful level design solution (or other tools) but it sure would help. Imagine if a more powerful tool could cut the time it takes to animate a complex character and make it higher quality? And was easier to learn? That would certainly save developers a lot of headaches.

    2) Better Q/A management. Q/A is very complex now, and having an effective, efficient Q/A department can help developers increase quality while decreasing development cycles by catching and documenting bugs earlier and faster. Trust me, I've seen many a game gaffed because producers and Q/A managers didn't communicate well.

    3) Consolidation. Sorry to say it, but little publishers/developers simply won't be able to compete on cost. EA is sort of driving this, but it is innevitable. (spell check? what?) EA is centralizing shared resources for mo-cap, CG animation, sound recording, musical scoring and technology developoment. While there are many EA games we here at mapcore do not like, EA games certainly have mass market appeal as they sell sell sell. They are able to crank out mass market content cheaper and faster than the other publishers. Sure, they work the shit out of their employees (if the EA_spouce and other stories are really true) but because of their scale, they can do more with with less money than other publishers can. If you are another publisher, you've got to make similar consolidation moves just to compete on cost.

    Now....on a slightly different tanget, and perhaps a bit back on topic, is the industry really in that bad of a place? Since last summer here are the highlights of the games I've played (and which platforms I played them on) and my personal opinion about them:

    Half Life 2 on PC not as good as the first relative to its time, but I loved it.

    Mercenaries on Xbox and PS2 So far this is my console game of the year for 2005. Despite the bugs and the texture / fogging issues, I friggin loved this game and played it twice through. Still play it a little each week.

    Resident Evil 4 on GameCube I bought this for my cousin when he moved to LA. One of the best horror games ever...and I don't play horror games. It rocked.

    Brothers in Arms on PC/Xbox It really did innovate and I applaud Gearbox and Ubisoft. I admit there were things that weren't to my liking, but overall it delivered a new kind of shooting game that evolved the "puzzle" type strategy first seen in Full Spectrum Warrior.

    Prince of Persia: Warrior Within on Xbox it is more of an upgrade from Sands of Time, but man am I enjoying it. I just got a oopy last week and am really hooked. Another one for Ubi.

    Splinter Cell 3 on Xbox/PC Again, way to go Ubi for having the 2nd game exceed the first and the 3rd exceed the second. Hats off. Ubi=publisher of the year imo.

    So despite the crappiness of late, there is some hope that good games are still coming out. Maybe it's not a world of gaming goodness, but I can't say I've gone a while without a game I've been psyched to play.

    Izuno you speak powerful words indeed.

    I have had time to think some things out since I have never loved anything as much as I love game industry, don't take me wrong, I'm pretty much self educated when it comes to game development, but schools are having pretty hard time keeping up with the pace

    One problem I see with game development is that compared to other industries like movie industry is that if movie industry worked the same way game industry does, many many movies would have not been done, in movie industry there are alot of individuals that are hired for projects because they are suited well to the task like a director who has done several adventure movies or war movies can do hell of a better job than someone who has done comedies, well in some cases atleast. In game development, you have your core team with the key players already hired like game designers and lead artists and lead programmers, only extra hands are brough in to work with projects too big for the inhouse staff to handle.

    Second thing, in movie industry there are alot of smaller companies that are specialized to certain thing and do that faster, easier, cheaper and have their own developed tools for the task (answer to question number one I guess) without costing extra to a game developer, I mean what develper would make Unread Edit style tool if they are making one FPS and then going back to RTS games?

    Now music business is somewhat similar to game development in terms of team, the same musicans make a record and record company produces and publishes it (in majority of the cases) this works if they made same games with similar content all the time, so no need to hire extra developers rise, but then again, they wouldn't be succesful with that.

    Now what this all adds up, is we need more companies specialized to certain areas of game development and those individuals (designers seem to be these individuals these days, look at American McGee) and cinematics are usually made outside. But think of this, we have a designer making a game design, now he could be part of a developer or independent, after he finishes the design (demo part is still bit tricky since these days no publisher is going to lift a finger without a demo) they continue to bring in other companies specialised to certain areas of game development such as graphics, AI, dynamic content, cinematic and what not. Think about how much it would speed up the process and make things cheaper if a developer wouldn't need to hire 20 artists to do those high polygon props and normal maps, instead they hire a outside studio to do that, and they just might have the tools and expertice to do it even better than you could do it.

    What I'm saying here is that game development as it is has prettymuch come to an end, we are still using some stone age development cycles and patterns that are not cost effective, these "methods" to do games are invented back when first games were made. The industry needs to move on, but instead we are just running in circles and wondering why we see our own tracks.

    I don't really get this "games are getting shorter" statement that people always seem to come back to. I recall that most games of the 16-bit era (including the Amiga 500 or greater) such as Streets of Rage, Sonic the Hedgehog, Golden Axe, Another World and so on could be completed in a few hours or play.

    If we move onto the 32-bit era I'd say games got a bit of a boost in length, with games like Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil 1/2/3, Mario 64, Tomb Raider 1/2/3, etc... normally taking the best part of a day of solid gaming to complete, and others like FFVII/VIII/IX, Front Mission, Grandia, etc... taking at least 20 hours or more.

    The current era seems at least on par, and in many cases exceeds the previous one. Resident Evil:CV and the even longer Resident Evil 4 are both longer than their 32-bit counterparts, and in the case of ResEvil 4 this is managed while at the same time reducing the amount of time you are stuck in the same environments. New FF games are still lengthy and seem to offer more side quests and replayability than before (even if they can't quite match some of the previous games in terms of story/characters). Without having played it, Zelda:WW seemed to be plenty long enough and have lots of periphery things to do when I watched my flatmate go through it. Shadow Hearts 1/2, KOTOR, Grandia 2 - all relatively modern RPG's with plenty of content. And show me an old racing game with anything like the amount of content/replayability as Gran Turismo 4, Forza, or Burnout 3. Completing any of those in a day would be one hell of a feat, whereas with Lotus Turbo Challenge, Outrun, Ridge Racer, Road Rash (well, some of its sequels are quite long) and other less modern efforts its to be expected.

    Games like Republic Commando, Halo 2, Fable, Beyond Good and Evil, and so on have recieved bad press for being short, and while those comments have merit (eg. with BG&E the game seemed to have the scope to be far longer), are they REALLY that short as they are claimed to be? Isn't 10 hours still significantly more than the vast majority of 16 bit games took?

    I'm gonna simplify the math FAR too much here.

    But who bitches when they spend 20 bucks for a 2 hour movie? That's why special features on dvd's came about. To entice the consumer into giving up his money for 2 hours of something he's probably already seen is tough. So you tack on another hour of behind the scenes junk and hope he cares.

    50 dollars for ten hours really isn't that far off. But for the consumer who doesn't believe in that he can always just rent it. I don't think anyone is really allowed to complain about something being too short after they've paid for it. Especially in the case of a game like Halo 2 where there is a massive mp portion that is impossible to quantify into a chronological value (I stated that weird... you can't say how much the mp is worth because you can't really associate a time with it.)

    Quote from Bic-B@ll

    for you cool people who got ot see it, is it true that the white and black buttons were moved to secondary triggers?

    It's true, padre.

    Quote from mikezilla

    I don't think anyone is really allowed to complain about something being too short after they've paid for it.

    I'm imagining that you didn't mean that to be literal what you just said, it's just weird to say something like that. It's like saying "sorry about the buggy game, I know you can't play it through, but you are out of luck we are not going to patch the game, because you just bought it", I know, it sounds really weird.

    Comparing movies and videogames are valid to certain point, BUT, people often search completely different things from these two formats. I'm not going to analyze this, because we are talking about two completely separate formats with very little to do with another, or are you saying that books are the best format of entertainment because they are long?

    ReNo

    I know the 8-bit and 16-bit games were very short, especially in comparison when the other is a platformer (sonic the hedgehog) and other is a adventure/action game (metalgear solid), and it's not about old school games people are drawing their lust for long games, it's the jump from old school games to current games. They played platformers that ranged from 2 hours of play and then few years later they play a game that takes 10 hours to complete, now again few hours later, we should be playing games that take even longer to complete or have so much content that going through it all is taking atleast 20-30 hours to complete (like GTA:SA and they are becoming longer and longer). Fable takes around 15-20 hours to complete and some people say that is a shot game, it's not short when compared to a game like HL2 that you can easily beat in 5 hours or so, it's comparing Fable to the 100% complete GTA.

    So as you can see it's pointless to compare modern games to 8/16-bit era.

    I can appreciate a lust for long games, of course its nice if your £40 or whatever gets you 30+ hours of high quality game time. What I can't understand is the "games are getting shorter" argument. Getting shorter from what? When? They are certainly longer than old school games for the most part, and I don't think there is any clear cut drop in average length from the 32-bit era. What set of games do they take the benchmark length from?

    Surprised there hasn't been any talk about the Xbox 360 news yet. I've only just started digging but here is a link to a video from the Xbox team about the 360. Kinda cheesy in places (the guy who says "your own gamer score, awww yeah!" reminds me, painfully, of one of my flatmates ) and pretty much exclusively already known info, but worth watching for more shots of the system I guess.

    http://downloads.game.net/game.net/movi ... ony_hi.zip

    Yeah I saw it last night and it was horrible.

    HEY I AM ELIJAH WOOD AND WE PRESENT YOU THE NEW GENERATION OF GAAAAMIIIIING!!! BUT FIRST OF ALL HERES THE KILLERS!!!!!

    <5 minutes of boredom>

    OK HERE WE WILL SHOW YOU THE XBOX 360 FOR 5 SECONDS

    <10 minutes of commercials afterwards>

    OK BYE THATS IT EVERYONE IM ELIJAH WOOD AND I LIKE COMPUTAR GAMES!!!11ekkeekekeke

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