Quote:Original post by Telastyn
Not this crap again...
Thank you for your constructive response.
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Have you played Puzzle Pirates? Katamari? Drawffort? Starscape? DDR? the Wii? (a half dozen other games I'm forgetting?)
Spore is not innovative because it's being bankrolled by the worst of the 'soulless fatcats'?
Sounds like you're plugging games
you think are innovative, and fuck anyone else who dares disagree with you. So much for healthy discussion.
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What exactly do you think is innovative?
To be perfectly honest, I don't actually know anymore. Given that any concept of innovation has been shat on by the endless onslaught of mediocre, half-baked clone games flooding the market these days it's kind of hard to tell. The Wii itself may be an innovative concept, but if you're going to fill its library with broken Gamecube ports from Nintendo and embarrassingly bad third-party offerings, seemingly shoved onto the system to justify its existence, then the whole point of the thing is lost. Sure the non-gamers love it, but do they know any different? If it suits them, fine, so be it. But remember they are far from representative of the whole market.
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Personally, I'm thrilled at the generally increasing production values (GTA4 and Team Fortress for example are exceptionally well polished) caused by developers emulating Blizzard's success.
I wouldn't call GTA IV that well polished. Although it is very good, you can't ignore the fact that it's got framerate problems, severe pop-in issues, half the time it's too damn dark to see anything, the graphic meshes are a bit dodgy (run into a door at the right speed and Niko's head clips through it, same with the ladder on a swimming pool) the friends system isn't exactly perfect (there's one very notable glitch regarding this which I found on YouTube, but I won't post it here because it's a spoiler), the soundtrack is poor, the multiplayer is laggy and causes occasional lockups on the loading screens, the achievements are dodgy (I've correctly filled the criteria for Rolled Over and Chain Reaction n times now and never been able to unlock either... the forum posters at Xbox.com don't know what's wrong either and say they too have had problems)... ...
High production value doesn't always mean better polished games, look at Haze also, or most of the other recent stuff that's come out unfinished and relied on Xbox Live/PSN updating to make it playable. I also fail to see where Blizzard comes into this.
Another example is Unreal Tournament III. Hyped, hyped, hyped, sexy screenshots. Demo was shite, a warning of things to come. A large portion of the UT community hate it and feel ripped off and cheated by Epic, and I read on the Epic Forums once that there were something like 70 people playing UT3 online at peak times. 70? That's pathetic, that's about a quarter of my sixth year at school. UT2K4 had thousands and thousands and thousands, and I'm told it still does although I can't guarantee that being accurate.
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A welcome change to the dogfights of smaller dev houses a few years ago where the publishers would skimp on QA/finishing.
A welcome change would be to
actually go back to those days. Back to the days of Westwood so C&C would actually be kinda good, back to the days of Internet-incapable consoles so that console games ship in tip-top condition instead of a buggy, broken joke (and you say that they skimped on QA/finishing back then), back to the days of being able to ask for help on a game without being told you suck and getting called a noob, back to the days where games were games and not just a showcase for the SuperDuper HDR Multi-Threaded Graphics Physics <insert a few more industry buzzwords here> Jesus Engine Thingmajig that runs at 0.000001FPS on any system costing less than £10m (said engine is just a ruse to try and force gamers to fork out on the latest nVidia 100000EpicGTX with 512GB RAM and 109283274389748973298Ghz clock... which still doesn't properly support DX10.1 because the driver dev team are lazy. This card will be as obsolete as the Victorians within three months, and that card will support DX10.1 and the old model will be unsupported. Both models will be the size of Buckingham Palace and will be somewhat challenging to fit in your standard PC case.).
I got my first console (original Playstation) for Christmas 1996, and my brother got an N64 for Christmas 98. I still remember the magical and awesome feelings I had playing those consoles, they had proper games with great gameplay and were real good fun. I still get nostalgic now, I've got an urge to dig out the N64 and play Perfect Dark and Episode One Racer, now those are *real* games. I can only imagine the feeling kids got in the 80s when the NES first shipped, or even earlier than that with the Atari et al. Games were games and damn fine games they were too.
I never felt the same about the PS2, somehow, nor do I feel the same now about the 360 unfortunately. Part of me thinks I'm growing out of gaming and need a better hobby (which is true, all that time spent gaming has caused me untold damage), I just get bored so easily with modern games it's unreal.
I still think the industry is growing, but it's growing like a tumour; it's not a healthy growth and needs to be monitored carefully. More of the same doesn't always mean good.
