Posts by Bl1tz

  • Why Games Will Never Be Culturally Relevant

    Quote from m8nkey

    Aren't his pre-requisites somewhat hipocritical? Sure it's pretty easy to read a book, provided you've spent years in educational intitutions and are literate. Games are far more culturally relavant and accessible than literature, any clown can mash some buttons and move a joystick or mouse with little to no training.Not that it really matters how people classify it, for some reason it makes me angry when people suggest games aren't a valid artform :ssj:

    That's the point -- games are seen as silly things where people mash buttons and shoot spaceships. There's nothing culturally relevant about that, whereas people consider Oscar nominated movies to be relevant.

    Also the author of the post isn't saying *he* thinks games are irrelevant, he simply makes a bet that the general public will never embrace poignant games in the same way people embrace Oscar nominated movies or Pulitzer Prize winning books.

  • game devs you really hate!

    Quote from zaphod

    does it matter at all that Valve is still the only company out there that seems to care at all about supporting the mod and user content community? What other company out there is supporting much of anything besides the ability to make a few deathmatch maps if that? ( maybe microsoft counts now w/ XNA & creators club? )The assertion that Valve "buys up" mod teams and community talent becuase they are lazy just makes my jaw drop. How many opportunities have been provided for becuase of Valve's embracing modding? How many people on these forums right now are only working in the industry becuase of resources and opportunities that were provided by Valve? I know that I am one, and I could name you quite a few others right off the top of my head. Buying up talent? Valve is one of the only companies out there that makes it a policy to embrace and lift up the self-motivated modders and developers and give them a chance to do it for a living if they choose. How is that bad for ANYBODY? Fucking bastards found some talented students and gave them the chance to make a great game called portal, boy we can see how THAT turned out. It would have been much better if they had all gotten hired by random studios and put on work detail churning out the same rehashed shit that has been flowing like oil from the ground instead of being given the chance to construct their own personal vision of a game.

    I exempted Portal in my condemnation of Orange Box. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great they give the modding community a chance to get noticed on a higher level, but considering the amount of talent at Valve right now, it's disappointing that there hasn't been that "big new game" to show off that talent. It manifests itself in incremental updates which is ok I guess because they're consistently polished but Valve could do something greater.

  • Why Games Will Never Be Culturally Relevant

    So I'm sure those of you that read Kotaku, Rockpapershotgun, etc. have seen the "Wager" article by Steve Gaynor. For those of you who haven't, basically he argues that there are two main reasons why video games will never be taken seriously as an artform the same way TV, movies and books are.

    He states that the barrier of entry is too high -- games and consoles are usually fairly complex and involved, even casual ones. They have rulesets and often they have their own internal logic which may not be immediately apparent to people not familiar with video gaming's conventions and quirks. You can very easily read a book, watch a movie or watch a TV show and therefore their message and desired impact are more easily digested. Their message is direct and unmolested by graphic symbolism or outside input.

    I tend to agree with those reasons as stated in the article, but I think that in gaming in its own insular world is actually relevant and has respected publications and critics. (Although in light of the Gerstmann/Gamespot thing, one has to wonder...)

    I don't know if it's because I've been a gamer for so long and that I work in the industry, but it's not unusual for me to have normal conversations about games, vintage gaming, game characters or things that happened in games. Maybe the "average" person doesn't have these conversations as often, if ever, but I think that in 10 or 20 years, we'll look at people who *aren't* familiar with a lot gaming lore and think they're a bit strange or deprived.

  • game devs you really hate!

    Quote from Hourences

    Quake modding doesnt mean much anymore.

    You are *so* banned from terrafusion

    Even though this thread was just a thinly veiled platform for hessi's rant, I agree with his angry, sexy self. I also agree with those who chimed in to say that Valve has dropped the ball on putting out stable versions of Hammer and the other tools for about the last 2-3 years. Every few months I think "it'd be really fun to do some Source editing again" and I go get the latest version of the tools and make sure everything is ok and I have all the right command line switches set only to be disappointed every single time by a woefully broken toolset.

    Valve needs to understand that the very basis of their current success came from a time when there almost no updating of the tools. Because of that, Hammer ran solid as a rock and people cranked out maps and mods like I crank out a [CENSORED] in your [CENSORED] like a chimney sweep.

    I also agree with JohnC's assertion that Valve really doesn't do much anymore. GabeN seems more interested in buying up all the talented teams and individuals to work at Valve, yet they don't seem to be doing anything other than rehashing the same old shit. I was actually really disappointed with the Orange Box save for Portal and the Peggle demo. HL2 Ep2 was buggy as shit, poorly balanced, and not really all that compelling. TF2 is a letdown in that it's simply TFC with all the cool shit taken out. Valve really hasn't done a good, proper "game" in the epic, old school sense of the word since Half-Life 2 and judging by the way they've talked about episodic content and their displeasure with 2-3 year dev cycles, it doesn't sound like anything great will be coming down the pipe any time soon. (I hope I'm wrong though!!)

    unpopular opinion>

    Getting back on topic...while it's true that the majority of level editing tools are prone to crashes and other weirdness, especially when dealing with larger levels, I make it a point to criticize Valve because out of DoomEdit/Radiant, Sandbox, UnrealEd, and Hammer, Hammer is the only one that consistently has core functionality broken. That blows my mind because Hammer is the only one of those that actually gets updated more than once or twice, if at all.

  • Mapcore Trojan

    I'm getting a "Trojan.Webkit!html blocked" in Norton every time I load any page on the forums Dunno if it's a false positive or what but it's only happening when I browse mapcore and no other sites so I'm guessing maybe the server downtime was a (successful??) hack attempt?

    (Sorry I cross posted this in another forum before I checked here

  • Welcome to the New Forums!!

    I'm getting a "Trojan.Webkit!html blocked" in Norton every time I load any page on the forums Dunno if it's a false positive or what but it's only happening when I browse mapcore and no other sites so I'm guessing maybe the server downtime was a (successful??) hack attempt? In any case be careful browsing make sure you got all your internets cemented up~ and behind a flame retardant wall of some sort with your ports being inspected thouroughly by the INS.

  • Activision + Blizzard = divide by zero

    I don't see much good coming of this. Activision is probably the most shameless in terms of wanting its devs to crank out the same franchised shit year after year. You know they won't want Blizzard to do anything other than something with the name Starcraft, Warcraft or Diablo for the next 10 years.

  • Will Wright: Games are not stories

    It'd be nice to see a transcript of the speech instead of gamesindustry cherrypicking what they thought was important, but of what they did single out I don't think it's anything so interesting or controversial...seems like a sort of obvious statement. I don't think he's saying games *shouldn't* have stories, just that they didn't evolve from TV and movies.

  • Project Top Secret!

    The people who are participating in this are the absolute bottom barrel of mod /indie development. The ones who post in the Mod Recruitment thread like

    "OK I'm starting a mod and it's great because I have the best idea for a game and everyone knows a great idea is the most important thing. So far it's just me, but we have positions open for:

    "

    Seriously...how can people be so dumb. 52,000 people designing one game!?!? HOW CAN IT GO WRONG!?!?

  • Original Game: 1944 D-Day : Environment & Texture Artist

    Seems like some pretty lofty goals. Good luck with that. I will never understand why an independent team, free from the constraints of publishers or hype would bother doing a WWII game. It seems like exactly the sort of game you'd want to avoid making as an independent team simply because

    a) So many mod teams have done it so well already (Red Orchestra, DoD, etc.) that it would have to be really polished to stand out

    b) It's going to be difficult to find talented people who want to spend their hours modeling the exact dimensions of Normandy as opposed to, you know, doing something somewhat original as to attract talented people who would join simply for the sake of working on something new and exciting.