Quote from duxDo you think this method is just another incentive for people to download more instead of buy?
I wouldn't say so. Though, I can see it being one to the kind of people looking for any incentive to download instead of buy, but still want to claim the moral high-ground when they do.
I’ve heard Kyoto is nice for the ‘traditional’ Japan instead of the highly commercial, full-on bustle of the new capital. The plan was to bullet out there and back over two days, but we didn’t go for it. A friend of mine wanted me to go someplace far north (descriptive), but Tokyo contains far too much to do any of that. I’m definitely going there again next time I go on vacation so I’ll branch out to other places. And now I know what to expect I can face an event like Comiket or Reitaisai for maximum geekage. I tried not to be too touristy, walking around a yaoi shop and asking for the Harry Potter section while scaring little girls with my distinctive un-Bishonen appearance will go with me to my grave. As being hilarious.
You say lived so I assume you were around for a while and just spent 2 weeks in Tokyo? I’m also curious to when you where there, as while a lot of places had me going in and exiting as fast as possible without looking prudish - Akiba was pretty clean relative to places like Shibuya, Ikebukuro and Shinjuku. I imagine it may have cleaned itself up a bit when it became so popular. Christ, I walked through the Kabukichō district in Shinjuku on a Friday night after some poor orienteering and had to beat off fight off the gigolo’s, pimps and hookers. I must’ve been the only westerner staying in Shinjuku who wasn’t there for the STDs.
Nah, I'm not. I'm not really sure why she thought I was native either... Yeah akiba is akihabara, it's a pretty funky place and I spent far too much time in Hey! I love the way the buildings all contain unrelated shops on each floor, it's like a roulette.
I was planning on going to Kyoto, but Tokyo had so much I decided we would stick with exploring that instead and still didn't cover everything.
少し
Heh, the Japanese overload is because I just got back from 2 week vacation there and skipped around akiba with geeky glee. I'm in the process of learning and I did okay while I was over there (someone assumed I was a Tokyoite and asked for directions, woo!), but I wouldn't say yes to either of those at the moment 
Quote from TaylorDoDonPachi: Dai-Fukkatsu Arcade Board
Just got a proper super-gun for this to replace my badly build POS. I might look into a cabinet later but I don't think I can justify spending more on this right now
It’s all team size isn’t it?
Leads and a design document sets restrictions and restraints. On a small team this is a negative effect as it restricts a certain amount of development ‘freestyle’ and tweaking that makes development fun and arguably gives a product its soul. But on a larger project it stops these concepts ballooning into evil feature creep and a project that never gets finished.
Previously everyone used to do the small team/small mod with lots of gradual updates. But after Counter-Strike (which itself was developed progressively with a small team), everyone seems to be going for larger teams and the first release being amazing in quality. There must be some logic behind this jump, if someone released a new mod with a couple of classes, unfinished weapons, small map roster and known bugs would the mod-players pick them up and follow them? Or pick them up, label them unfinished and put them down for good? I think there's been a shift there, too.
Mindful fun* and mindless fun are both “fun” but subjectively people prefer one over the other. I like the mindless fun of JRPG’s, but prefer the mindful fun of SRPG's. I like shmups because you can play them both ways (survival or score), the same reason a lot of people like RTS and fighting games (comp’ stomp or competitively).
* I'll go with it, but “Mindful” means to keep something in mind. Not something that requires the mind!
Quote from SkjalgYou can't generalize it like that. There are still a lot of games that don't fall into this category and that do generate sales.
If it was that simple there would be no more strategy games, rpgs, etc...
True enough, you got the fps/rts which (if they are good enough) will fall under the competitive games genre that people play to win because thats the most fun part in the game. But there are no rts/fps games that I know about that became popular because it was so hard.
It's an action game but the revived Ninja Gaiden games rode the difficulty out for a lot of success, it was marketed basically by Tomonobu Itagaki saying the game was for the hardcore only, saying only 10% of people will finish it on hard, and that anyone who couldn’t was a “dog.” The game itself was extremely patronising and cruel – die and it asks if you want to continue, but die 3 times and it asks if you want to quit. Quitting unlocks a mercy mode where your assistant makes fun of you and you wear a big red bow.
The second game has got universal acclaim for being ‘hardcore’ and you’ll see internet kids talking about how great they are for completing it it is for its difficulty level. This has transcended the fact Ninja Gaiden 2 was a terrible game that entirely reused assets from the first and Sigma, had no graphical upgrade from the generation leap and the infamous ‘difficulty’ was only hard if you include terrible level design, bad enemy design and cheap fake difficulty.
Making a boss kill you in 3 hits, making it ambiguous what can be blocked and what can’t, and having a camera more likely to look up Ryu’s shiny behind and at a flat badly textured wall instead of the things trying to kill you is difficult for the wrong reasons. There’s a giant boss who attacks as soon as the cinematic ends, if he chooses a certain attack you’ll be instant killed even if you are psychic and dodge at the end of the sequence. There’s a nonsensical giant fire armadillo in the arctic that will explode and instant-kill you if you’re close to it when it dies. That’s not hard, that’s stupid, but people are easily suckered in by the marketing and “hardcore only” claim.
But in a closed beta everyone else will bitch the uber-guilds had an unfair advantage!
It does remove some of the excitement of the new encounters though; I do see where you’re coming from completely. It was a shame seeing all TBC bosses drop so fast and so many going down as the PTR goes up, in legacy Molten Core was only being explored by a tiny amount of guilds and encounters like The Four Horseman* completely halted progress for months – you got a tiny trickle of information and it was much more exciting.
Unfortunately this stems from other things as well – guilds have got very good, raids have got much easier to organise, and the poor class design has hamstrung encounter design to gear-checks and gimmicks.
* Though this was many due to the “Oh, Blizzard actually don’t want a balanced raid composition. Bye bye, Warlocks, let’s fill this puppy with overpowered, pampered Warriors.”
Hm? He never said turn-based combat wasn't fun. He said older style RPG's were turn-based and implied they were better. The average punter prefers real-time because it's more accessible (less options, more feedback).
So what if some uber-nerds clear the content in PTR? The point of the test period is to make sure it works, is balanced correctly and to give them a period where these things can be changed, if Blizzard did massive changes to bosses/loot/abilities after they have gone live there would be an outrage, especially since most MMO players seem to think that making skills weaker or enemies harder during balancing is a giant taboo.
MMO's are one of the genres where beta's and test servers are essential. BWL was added without a PTR and the encounters were terribly buggy on release, WoW classes are still a random bag of tits in WotLK and I hate to think what it would be like without extensive testing if that is what we have after a year of development and 4-5 months of beta.
I've been busy, here's all the geeky stuff as nobody cares about my new hat, etc.
DoDonPachi: Dai-Fukkatsu Arcade Board
Marisa Garage Kit
Heavy Fucker and The Kingdom of Slytherin*
The Art of Laputa
Guilty Gear 2 - Overture Material Collection
Subterranian Animism
Cave In - Perfect Pitch Black
Ibara
Gradius V
ThunderForce VI
Ketsui DS
Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind Vol 1-6
* Weird present for someone, not gay enough imo.
Depends what you're into I guess, not on your list is
KimokawaE!
[*:2z2ba7me]...
Peter is not saying games used to be more accessible, he's saying they have to become more accessible to please today’s market and make the cash-money.
There are just certain traits games of old had that would completely kill a game for the punter of today, such as the much harder skill requirements. Today the prospect of re-doing part of a game again is a major turn off and most challenges can be completed simply with a bit of attrition.
That said I think the “dumbing down” can be handled much better. People are removing depth instead of hiding it or making it more accessible and it has been tackled 'correctly' in a few places.
Devil May Cry 4 is still labelled as a hardcore game but it is the most accessible in the series despite being the most feature-complete. If you put the game on easy it’s actually easy instead of just being easy relative to the normal difficulty and alienating anyone not skilled enough. You can put the game on Automatic and it does combo’s for you, if you fail a stage 3 times it will handicap all the monsters, you keep any spirits/orbs you’ve collected so you can power up from failed attempts.
Hardcore players think this is lame; but they don’t use it and there’s another 5 difficulty settings for them to bang their heads against. There is nothing wrong with this change at all, you’re opening the game up but not taking anything away – as a contrast when DMC3 was released in the EU/US they removed Easy difficulty and bumped them all up one (So Normal was the JP Hard, etc), a completely needless hardcore catering change that was such a disaster with the other players it warranted a ‘Special Edition’ release whose predominant change was reverting the difficulty settings and allowing you to continue.
Some games are also losing features that were needlessly hardcore; an example is from the Diablo 3 thread where they removed manual stat allocation. This did not really have a major effect on the game in a grand scale and while it did allow some [utterly worthless] gimmick builds for [hardcore] players [on their 10th character], its indirect function was to confuse and annoy newbies. If you’re a Mage and you want to pump Intelligence then the game might as well do it for you. We’ve seen similar features die out before and while they always had an accompanying whine the games were better: rolling my stats 5-thousand times before making a character in a MUD offered no fun, for example.
Quote from KoKo5oVaRSeriously .. the great thing about mods is that you don't have any constrains so you can be as creative as you want, especially considering that you do it for yourself. I'm not sure at all, because i was young and i changed a lot since then, but i remember that in 1998 - 2004, when modding was great, people had a lot more original concepts than what the modding community of nowadays is doing (with the exception of some gems of course). What do you think guys, do the old modding community was more creative, or is it basically the same thing ? because i actually can't answer to this question myself
Well, even compared to the generic clones, nobody played the quirky mods.
People are also looking at mods different now than they did back then. Creators see mods as a passage into the industry, they want to work on the Next Big Thing. Gamers see mods as products that rival commerical games in quality.
You’re right, it’s not.
The thing is though you are a hardcore gamer, hardcore gamers are a fickle bunch who are hard to please and will happily bite the hand that feeds them. Their games are very expensive to create, will hurt you severely if they bomb and have lower profits. Why develop for this group of people when there is a much larger new market to tap into with causal-orientated games instead?
The Wii and DS are popular because they are perfect for these markets, and while PC, 360 and PS3 owners war over which of the newest first person shooters starring space marines is going to make any money, these Nintendo platforms are selling more than all of them. The hardcore games that do exist are doing the following:
And this clearly has problems. Hell, read any thread here about a sequel and you’ll learn how useless developers are and how eager people are to assume they’ll screw up... and mapcore is a pretty civilised and well-versed place. And they demand the latest research and technology, a Wii is pathetic in terms of power but if you release a PS3 game with jagged polygons in it and a site like Gamersyde, Gamespot, IGN or the folks on Youtube - customers - will all say how terrible the game, as a package, will be as a result.
Also, please stop trying to coin phrases like "consolised," people aren't dumbing down for consoles they're dumbing down and turning to consoles.
It depends on the game, a lot of "beta" periods are just a marketing phase to get people talking about the game and allow people to have a demo play. Certainly his comment does not apply to genres like the PC MMO's and RTS titles or Console/Arcade Fighters where beta periods will bring a lot of important balancing, playstyle and exploit feedback very fast.
I'm sure you would've loved it if people said "So? I've got better things to do than care about them or you" when Zeitguyz died.
Quote from FrieChampI'd say this applies to rumors which often turn out to be untrue but all this article was was a link to a post written by an EA community manager, so the source seemed to be credible. Turned out he and kotaku were wrong plus everybody else picking up on this. Still if you can't trust Kotaku, WHO ELSE could you still trust? Hm???
Kotaku never confirm anything before throwing it on their website, being first has more priority than being right. A few sites have made stuff up before just to see if they post it (they do) like the 360 name-change.
Quote from TaylorExternal Content www.youtube.comContent embedded from external sources will not be displayed without your consent.Through the activation of external content, you agree that personal data may be transferred to third party platforms. We have provided more information on this in our privacy policy.
Can pre-order this now, so I have. There's a LE.
Ony my grapevine I heard Pandemic were only slightly affected.
Quote from FrieChampOn the subject of not being able to play your games anymore if you get banned from the EA forums: apparently this is all a huuuge misunderstanding and completely untrue:http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/55656
EA really needs to get their moderators under control. How about starting in that department for layoffs?
Though on the other hand, people need to start putting a bit of doubt into articles they read on Kotaku.
