Posts by Taylor

Quote from FrieChamp

..what? Display of swastikas is forbidden in Germany, but there is no "Don't talk about the war!!" law.

There are a lot of German made movies about World War II and the Nazis.

Maybe an outright ban is over the top, since the only game I can think of that got completely banned was Manhunt (due to violence, not Nazism), but I could see it getting bad reception if not handed with absolute tact, and to be fair USK usually do more than cut out swastikas.

Anyway, that’s really a diversion from my main point, Americans like games about Americans. This is why it wouldn’t really work if you want to make some cash-money, not because of Germany would or wouldn’t like it – which was really something off-the-cuff I added at the end without thinking too much about it (as you may have noticed).

Sorry if this is going to kick-start a trite country argument, but it’s simply because your average American who these games are aimed at would not like playing as the Nazis and it would not sell. Hello to you, U-571.

If you were to make a game or film from the Nazi perspective it would have a lot of potential to be interesting, even if you bottled out and made it about a good Nazi that hated Hitler, was just following orders and had some kind of resolve at the end. But you guarantee yourself bad sales in America and an outright ban in Germany. Why take that risk when you can knock out another generic WW2 game?

Perfect Dark is Goldeneye with crap weapons and a lower frame rate.

Oh shi— it’s a mob with pitchforks and torches.

I have a Nokia 3210, mobile gaming potential from my mobile phone is somewhat limited. But it has been in my experience that it’s either snakes or pointless. There were people at college with stupidly advanced phones that double up as music players, video recorders and tumble dryers while being no bigger than a postage stamp, and they would spend 5 minutes linking up their amazing super games to play in the hall, then just play snakes and never do it again because it’s too much hassle. So my categories are Snakes and Not Snakes.

A more intelligent categorisation might be Turn Based games and Real Time games since being mobile sometimes restricts what games you can and can’t play at that time. Unfortunately I’ve had no first hand experience with Bluetooth’s Stalking Technology so I don’t know the extent of which they go.

I’m fine with my 3210, of course. I have a PSP and after much hassle I just imported, supposedly limited edition, of Disgaea PSP in all its Japanese glory. I welcome trees falling down in the road and delaying my journey in the mornings, as long as they don’t get any ideas and start falling on the bus.

Goldeneye, Mario Party

Heh, I owe a lot to PC Gamers DVD. And Gonnas works there. So please, more love.

I think it’s fair to say only PC Gamers give a shit about specifications and how many maps you can apply to the millions of polygons on the screen while still achieving a smooth 60fps. The Playstation 2 was ridiculously weak in power even on release, but after 4 years it's still got some life left in it.

I think any comparison between the Wii and another console is absurd. Sure, bitch about the developer support all you want, but the Wii is distinctly unlike PS3 or 360. When you think of a Wii, you see 4 people (usually all racial minorities) looking way too excited throwing shapes in their living rooms – possibly with one looking dumbfounded with a Wii-Remote sailing at high velocity towards the TV. It’s predominately multiplayer utilising the Wii-remote shtick. The other consoles are much more sensible and forlorn.

And while there’s nothing wrong with that at all (the N64 was predominately party games), I don’t see it doing better than the PS3 or 360. The big Japanese games, aside from Nintendo’s own, still seem to be coming out on Sony’s console and ultimately that’s what people are after. Sure Square-Enix will drop Chronicles and Tactics on the Wii because, well, that’s a shitload of money and mugs like me will buy one for it (even after I did this with the Game Cube), but their big franchise is sticking with the PS3. And that's what matters, or at least matters more than the texture memory.

Just finished playing Disgaea 2 as far as I will (unlocked Land of Carnage), so it's back to the old World of Warcraft.

Damn.

American version of The Office.

The grind in FF Online is really bad, and as I understand it you basically have to take your character on that treadmill multiple times. One of the reasons WoW was so successful was it reduced, or at least disguised, its leveling grind, trade skill grind and all manner of other things ending in “grind.” It did have a rather hardcore reputation grind but this was addressed in the expansion.

FF Online also only has a few classes that can solo content effectively, some just have absolutely no chance. Whereas people can, and usually do, level themselves to max by themselves in WoW, instead of needing the holy trinity (tank, healer, dps) to do anything - which adds a ton of tedium to the already tedious grind.

FF Online also lacks dungeon crawling content and most of its PvE content revolves around one of the biggest 4th wall breakers of a consistent world: respawns. You kill a thousand mobs and hope they respawn as bosses. And then quickly kill them before someone else, who are of course camping the same area, jumps on him (there are only 6 bosses that aren't instanced in WoW, so you don't get this problem – or if you do it's a big deal and leads to drama).

But the thing is while FF Online has a more hardcore leveling and training process, its end-game content isn't hardcore at all and it's relatively sedate. It seems once most people have played at max-level for a while, they start over. WoW's end-game content is epic, you're killing massive dragons, gods and elements, who are not scaled up mobs with a few stat tweaks. They take strategies and days of learning to kill. There's certainly no equivalent of the The Four Horsemen, C'Thun or even Patchwerk. If you check a FF Online data-mining site you'll just see the bosses get things like “he has these abilities and this much HP.” You certainly don't have to dance.

If you go back to my earlier post and follow the link, there's an interesting site showing the various facts and figures of MMORPG's available right now. FF Online really isn't that well, especially compared to the behemoth (*g*) of WoW.

My old concussion maps for Team Fortress Classic. Could be considered bland.

Date on my site says 2002-2003 but I'm sure they're older and I just made crap up to space them out.

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Old HL Rally map. It's got bumps and stuff, date says 2004 but again I'm not sure.

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And my masterwork from 2004 that's impossible to make good in screenshots.

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I love the Final Fantasy games but I was completely put-off by Final Fantasy 11. Mainly because as a feature you couldn't actually pick a server with your friends, you must level and get a world pass and then you can switch over to ---oh wait, they're all higher level than you now, whoops! That and it's very Everquesty with an emphasis on catass and monster variation being mainly palette swaps and making things larger.

That, and the grind is worse than a perfect weapon in Disgaea 2.

Though calling it a competitor of World of Warcraft is stretching the meaning somewhat.

On the other Final Fantasy games, I haven't played twelve yet because I'm an idiot. I own a US PS2, so God knows why I decided to wait another 6 months to play it. I actually liked 10, people complain it's linear and just a story... err, that's Final Fantasy. The problem is it's linearity is much, much more obvious when there's no world map and you never revisit anything until you hit the additional content (and if you have the EU version, "additional content" means going back to Besaid and being raped by a Dark Aeon in 1 move).

I can't wait until they get hold of blu-ray and make their ultimate game: 40 hours of cutscene without having to rely on battles to extend the game time.

If it didn't have post history, from when I was a hip trolling moran that makes me cringe, I'd say.

I got the Internet on my PSP!

...

I'll get my coat.

Monkey Island, Alien Breed, Dizzy, Cannon Fodder, Lemmings, Top Hat Willy (little Shareware ditty, absolutely lovely), there was loads. Loved my little A1230.

I also vote yes for Wordpress, I had it on my site and it was very sexy. Though since I never updated more than once in 5 months I took it down and went back to my older design.

I also vote a thousand, million, trillon nays for PHP Nuke! Legendary Senator Venus lets out a pink aura! Especially for a personal site because you don't even fill up half it's sections and the moment you hit a PHP Nuke website, you know you're on one.

Egad, you use forty addons? That's clutter in itself! But I agree with your point, I've only ever had one addon that used Ace, and that required BigWigs too (BigWigs -> Thaddius) - I was concious how much crap I just installed for one boss.

But I try to be quite lax on the mods, I used to have twenty, thirty, maybe a thousands addons, and when patches came out I'd just sit in front of my computer and scream. With 2.0.1. I just gave my folder an enema and use only DoTimer and Autobar.

But that's veering more than slightly off-topic. Blizzard themselves have a couple of tutorials and two installers to get what you need out of the MPQ's without the War3 extracter. WoW Wiki was mentioned and has every function typed up in some shape or form (it's a wiki, after all). Other than that, there's other peoples addons.

Note that 2.0.1 completely destroyed a few things. To stop addons like Decursive, supposedly so we can have more interesting dispels rather than "DISPEL EVERYONE IN 5 SECONDS OR WE ALL DIE" (though all I've seen in TBC is AoE-debuffs). Changes like this have disabled a few functions (noted on WoW Wiki) and limited access to just the 'offical' bars. On the flipside, the new macro stuff is quite cool too, you might be able to do what you want to do with that. I did, God bless you /castsequence.

Edit: "a few lot of things"? Really, Taylor?

Nice, good luck.

I used to have the old 40gb Brick iPods, but that broke and I sold its husk to a friend of mine for £50. Then I got a 30gb Video iPod, but to this day I haven't watched a single video on it, it was never an intention, they just don’t see the older models anymore. However, I have an hour bus journey everyday and so this topic is relevant to my interests.

There seems to be a lot of not-so-subtle "lawl iPods" in this thread. I don't know what I'd do without my iPod, except not listen to music and worry why my replacement isn't here yet. I've also taken a liking to iTunes even though I hated it at first, mainly because it sorts everything without any hassle at all so I can replicate my collection at home and work -- and I can use it to transfer between home and work as well. It's all very convenient.

This is pointing out the obvious, but what I really like about Multiverse is that if third parties and what are essentially modification teams get into it we can see some really interesting and new MMO games. Developing a MMO is really serious business, so people aren’t prepared to take risks with it: WoW, DoaC, EQ, EQ2, Ultima Online, FFXI, Ragnarok Online, Lineage, Lineage 2, et al. I don’t deny there are some unique ones and even some MMOFPS’s, but that’s what the majority is about.

If Multiverse delivers we can see some experimental MMO’s and I’m all for that. If I’m reading this right even if it’s a total flop, the worst case scenario they'll lose the money they used to produce it and there's plenty of incentive for them to develop on the platform because there is money to be made.