Posts by Taylor

I did write up a paragraph or two about how, despite it being a little hypocritical, I can’t stand the ‘new-breed’ of chavs hanging around on street corners drinking stella and shouting “YEAH” at passers-by behind their Burberry-reinforced protective wall of friends. However! Instead of that, I’ve decided to post

Good old Godwin's law.

Finished Devil May Cry 4 on the first two difficulties, very entertaining game. It got kind of slated in some reviews for just being the same (albeit solid as a rock) mechanics again with improved graphics, which is kind of amusing in light of The Evolution of The FPS Genre thread we've got going, they’ve had the same mechanics for decades and we don’t care.

The Exceed and Devil Bringer additions are also completely awesome anyway, in fact the only thing that really annoyed me was:

Quote from My big spoiling face

Spoiler: The bosses loop and most of them three times, that's pretty poor, I would've liked for them to at least be different - even the final boss is a repeat, though he gains some more moves.

Quote from Bic-B@ll

taylor is that from a threadless shirt?

Possibly, I found it in a random thread on an imageboard.

This is a tad late in the day.

Like all the cool kids, I'm now hammering Devil May Cry 4.

It has nothing to do with pride at all. It’s the time investment needed to see if a new MMO is worth it, taking 14 days (played) to reach max level and finding out the game actually isn’t going to deliver is a lot of time wasted. That’s not pride, it’s commonsense. And entertainment is entirely subjective, the slow-pace seems satisfy millions of other people just fine.

A casual player is someone who plays 2-3 hours on some evenings and doesn’t make any commitments. You just try playing something like EQ with that attitude, where doing 5-6 hours of raid content most days is a requirement to stay in your guild and the only way to make your character better. The game doesn't end at the highest level, far from it. WoW is casual-orientated because there is never a point where the casual player can’t do nothing without making a serious time investment into the game. They can level up solo and relatively fast, and reach end-game equipment through battlegrounds. Its all at their pace and they can switch off whenever. Most MMO’s until this point did not let you do this, hence why its casual-orientated, and a giant factor to WoW’s success.

I'd rather not put myself on the same level as a thief to be honest. Also, 90% of US gamers use "DS piracy chip"... well apparently they do anyway, I personally have a hard time believing 10% of US gamers have even heard of it.

Quote

Claims software sales are lower than any other consoleELSPA has claimed that 90 per cent of all DS users in North America are playing pirated games via the notorious R4 cartridge.

John Hillier, manager of ELSPA's Intellectual Property Crime Unit, said that the R4 – a cartridge that plays hacked games downloaded onto a memory card – is harming sales for Nintendo and making it the least-profitable console on the market.

"The implications are massive. In America it's thought 90 per cent of Nintendo DS users are playing pirated games because of R4s," said Hillier, talking to The Sunday Post.

"Takings from Nintendo DS games in the US are lower than any other console and no doubt it will have a similar impact here," he said, discussing the uptake of the R4 in the UK.

The R4 is available to buy over the internet and unlike previous chips and modifications for other consoles, requires no clumsy hardware modifications.

The biggest threat that the R4 makes to the piracy problem, according to Hillier, is that it allows users the freedom to download hacked games from their PC and import them straight to the handheld.

"That's the real danger – you may think you're getting a good deal but using the R4 is risking the future of the games industry."

"Crucially, the R4 has shifted balance of power in the piracy industry to the consumer – and that is hugely worrying," he said.

GamesIndustry.biz has contacted ELSPA for clarification of the quoted statistics.

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Yeah, I only had one go at it and turned it off never to return. I don't know what it is about the game, it checks all the boxes but somehow the end result is just not what it should be.

To be more precise it’s like watching a turtle race, where the turtles are made of money at the ones not in 1st place catch on fire and explode. There’s not much to analyse about WoW to be honest, they took the MMO genre and made it simpler, faster, more casual friendly and better presented. The same model that Blizzard always use, there’s no new mechanics in there other people haven’t done before. But it doesn't matter, and this is in no way a "dig."

The only stats I know of are MMOGCHART.COM, which hasn’t updated for 2 years but, to me, looking at the data only shows Everquest declining rapidly with a new launch (Its sequel and WoW), the others follow the usual curve that Raph Koster wrote an article on. And he doesn’t mention rival products having an effect at all. There’s also my own personal experience if that has any weight to it, I’m not going to spend 2-3 months playing another game to see if I like it when I have years of work (and that's a very fitting word) pumped into WoW, I'd rather carry on blissfully ignorant to another products existance to be honest. I'm certainly not going to play two MMO's at once, at any rate.

I have a save at the final tennis match, but I seem to have no drive to finish it.

To me EVE is Microsoft Excel Online, and I’m not going to defend it as being anything else. But when I played it (through beta) I found most of the mechanics to be quite casual orientated - such as the skill system - unless you’re planning to be the most badass corporation in the universe.

But to be honest, I don’t think it really matters what the perception of the game is from a few individuals. It’s the same problem developers are going to have with World of Warcraft and why I don’t really get the suicidal developers who are throwing all this money at something they seem to assume is going to trump it. People hot for space MMO action already play EVE, but they’re not going to stop playing EVE if something better comes along, because they lose their days of effort in EVE and the single drive in all these games is progression – typically directly related to these days played.

So I'm not saying this won't be a good game, but I wouldn't expect any kind of exodus even if it does deliver. Hence why I don’t think it will be “dethroned.” And as for why I think that, particularly about World of Warcraft (to use Sentura’s example), is players pledging loyalty because of their money and time investment. It's also worth noting World of Warcrafts player-base is almost entirely players new to the genre, not people from other MMO's who have been converted.

The bulk of players from other games were from Everquest, which had held the top spot by a huge margin for over 8 years and I can easily see WoW doing the same (seriously). And this snowball effect was a rather unique case, due to Fires of Heavens actions when SOE were not playing nice (there must be something on the internet you can find about them, their threat and Blizzard hiring certain people).

I can think of no example off hand, where a MMO has come out and everyone has gone "oh look, that's better" and instantly closed an account with 2,400 hours worth of play on it. People obviously aren’t going to be playing games like WoW forever, but they have a long shelf life and need to decline in popularity first - we all know WoW just hit 10million subscribers, that isn't a decline! And I don’t believe launching a new title when a game of that size is in its prime is going to dislodge its player base. At all.

Trying to dethrone Eve is just as futile as trying to dethrone WoW.

Ouch, there goes another rib!

[Blocked Image: http://alexandertaylor.net/stuff/desktop2_t.jpg]

Have you got the second edition? If you play it on gold it just checkpoints whenever it can instead of requiring orbs, makes things a lot less frustrating.

Incidentally I played the Devil May Cry 4 demo today; it's on Xbox Live everywhere and the Japanese Playstation Store (this version is in complete English with Western Controls). Sony seems determined to make the European Playstation Store as crap as possible so it’s not going to be up there for another week, but you can make a fake account to download the Japanese one (but if anything bad happens because of this, I didn't make you do it!)

Not really one for this thread though, totally awesome from start to finish. It’s probably the most concentrated form of sheer awesome known to man. Digging Nero’s Motorbike Sword and Magic Hand setup. That’s right, you heard.

Very cool D3adlode, I like the effort that's gone into it.

Actually I was thinking about this today when I was going through my game collection (c'mon DMC4 demo, download already!). I know you've played Silent Hill (duh), Resident Evil, etc but if you’ve not seen it then Clock Tower 3 might be good for some inspiration. Of course this is just a suggestion, but it seems like it has ideal mechanics for a modification, because it's really good at making the most out of a small number of areas; some of the "levels" are only a few scenes long despite also being a good hour in length on first play-through.

Basically you play as a little girl and are pursued by some big Nemesis style monster that you can’t attack back, but you can hide around the place until is passes by and/or stops pursuit – you also have to keep your avatar calm, or she'll scream and run out of cover and be harder to control (she'll become less panicked while out of combat, this just means you have to hide well, even if you're good at dodging the enemy). In normal survival horror style, you have to go around the different rooms/streets getting items and solving puzzles, and meanwhile the monster is walking around too. Of course then it's full of bad boss fights, cheesey cutscenes and silly magic effects.

Anyway, of course you don't want to make your avatar a little girl, but the whole hiding/exploration thing reduces the content to game-time ratio. At least I think that's what my point was... ah well.

Quote from Zaphod

The only reason that a game that doesn't sell a million units is considered a failure is because of the bloated development costs, marketing, etc that has evolved to such a ridiculous point in order to make a profit on a game that took 30 million dollars to make. There are plenty of games that sell much less that are considered a big success because they took a fraction of the resources to develop.

This is correct, but I've no idea what this was counterpoint to in my post...

(Edit: Oh I see, Indy stuff doesn't need a publisher and can do what it wants. Well I kinda addressed that below.)

It's strange you bring up particular genre as the reason you have labelled the PC is the most innovative platform, when - for me - it's the PC's lack of genres that make me put that label on the consoles in the first place. I worry when you claim there are few non-mainstream console games, and I'm still not sure what you mean by, "It just doesn't make sense for console manufacturers to devote any space on their system for games that aren't going to sell a certain number of units," or how this rule somehow changes when referring to a PC manufacturer.

I think you want to big-up the PC because it has independent developers who are the source of all awesome and not afraid to try out new things, which is true and as an avid fan of this stuff, I'm behind that 100%. But your actual arguements aren't convincing me, I certainly own more games I would consider innovative or cult on my PS2 than on my PC.

Quote from Skjalg

3. I know I'll loose the disk in a week, and will have to pirate it some day later anyways. I know this might sound stupid and the opinion differs from a lot of you neat freaks, but I'm a total mess and every other week even my total number of socks are odd numbers. (it varies).

I found this funny, because I read it as "you NEET freaks." Which was most ironic.

I doubt the figures would change much if you could click a button online and cause a game to instantly appear on your hard drive, with no activation riddles and a hardcopy charioted to your door. While it makes things easier for the legitimate customers, I think the number of them who would defect at the prospect of leaving the house is quite small. I'd wager the vast, vast majority of piracy is done by jobless teenagers - it doesn't matter how good your distribution methods are, they'd crawl through fire to get it for nothing.

But if you want your game to sell it’s going to have to be published, and PC publishers are just as restrictive as their console counterparts (except maybe Nintendo). Where exactly is this slew of innovative games carrying the torch for the PC? I admit the potential is there, but the mainstream is still the same FPS stamped out with improved foliage.

Also, you said the PC is the platform for “games that don't fit into the blockbuster console mold.” Pretty valid conclusion to draw from that, I think?