CalmBlueOcean • Comments
-
-
- 281 Posts
- 28 Comments
- 2 Followers
-
The quest for Shadow of the Colossus' last secret
Introducing the secret seekers and their eight-year quest
-
Sid Meier's cultural victory
"If there's anything in reality that's not fun, we will change it."
Loading...hold tight!
Cleary charged with e-crime offences
First of all, to the best of my knowledge, Anonymous have never had a member caught. Real hackers don't get caught. Gobby script-kiddies who shoot their mouths off and try and piggy-back on the fame of others, on the other hand...
Secondly, I'm not sure I even buy that Lulsec are a splinter from Anonymous... Clearly's story just doesn't make sense. Anonymous don't HAVE a leadership structure to disagree with, and they don't have a concept of "membership" such that there would be any NEED to splinter from them.
Reply -16
Cliff Bleszinski hits out at Kinect hate
Or, based on this years E3 showing, plan on buying any games in 2012.
Reply +10
Forza 4 Kinect head tracking footage
This tech will be about tilting your head, not turning it.
Reply 0
F1 2011
No racing game ever properly tracks the cars when they are off-screen... it would be a ridiculous waste of resources.
Reply +1
Rock and a Hard Place
If I had to form an opinion on the industry based solely off EG comment threads, I'd be left in little doubt that the customers loathed developers with a passion. Some of you are so eager to blame devs for the problems, and never look at your own games shelf.
New ideas don't sell, because gamers, en masse, don't like new experiences. They will always put their £40 next to something they already know how to play rather than learn something new. If creativity and radical new ideas sold well, we'd all be drowning in a sea of innovative and creative new titles. The industry isn't stupid, and has access to the real sales figures, not just what people "reckon" is selling.
You get the games industry you vote for at the tills.
Reply +3
Minecraft man: "Piracy is not a theft"
He didn't invent the car analogy, so people calling him an idiot for making the comparison are, at best, being a little harsh. FACT has been using the "car theft = copyright theft" for decades, and he's absolutely right to point out that the two acts are clearly not morally equivalent.
Stealing deprives someone of property, piracy only deprives someone of the rather nebulous concept of "a potential sale". This is the point he is making and simply knee-jerking an ad-hominen attack rather than attempting to address his position just makes you look bad.
I take you would consider yourself amongst his "intellectual superiors"... so how's your massive indie game hit coming along?
Reply +1
As a developer, I'd actually prefer my game was pirated over sold pre-owned. The pirate was unlikely to ever give me his money, but the pre-owned buyer WAS happy part with cash for my game. I won't see any money from either one of them, but the latter feels a lot more like a "lost sale" than the former. Reply +2
Retrospective: Freespace 2
The mission after you finally take down the Sathanas (a feat which spans three missions in itself) and TEN MORE of the bastards turn up...genius. I genuinely couldn't imagine how the storyline was going to defeat those odds, and was astonished and delighted as I discovered that it doesn't. You spend the rest of the campaign missions overseeing a desperate evacuation process against genuinely impossible odds.
Just the most amazing narrative I've ever experienced in a game. Reply +1
UK teen arrested for Call of Duty DDOS
It's easy to call him a little shit, but there's easily a million COD players who I'd like to see get much worse treatment than just a DDoS attack.
For all we know this guy might have been the greatest net vigilante of all time, keeping sploiters and racists off COD with his uber-hacker skillz? Reply 0
Microsoft raises Kinect sales projections
I have played on Kinect.... prior to experience with it I was excited and intrigued... unfortunately half an hour with the laggy, glitchy, unresponsive sack of shit that is Kinect made me want to weep. It barely works at all, is confused by damn near everything. At one point we put a pot plant in front of it and watched it label said plant as player 2?!
Kinect reminds me of the Wii as well with one crucial difference. The Wii doesn't HAVE to do motion control, you have d-pad and buttons as and when you need them, so even if the waggle-trash winds you up, you can still make proper games for it as well... Kinect doesn't have that luxury, its far MORE casual than the Wii. Reply +3
Dead Rising 2: Case Zero
However, that just underlines what a shocking bit of game design the structure of the game is. When sizeable hordes of people are driven away from a game because they don't understand how it works, that's some pretty epic failure on the part of the designers. It's not like the multiple play-through structure is really granting the game any nice benefits, it's just acting as a barrier to entry for the many gamers who have been conditioned to follow the narrative of a game. Reply +1
Zampella: Reviewers should finish games
There's a flipside as well... plenty of games get a raft of 9s and 10s on review because, yes, the first two hours are great, but they then turn into repetitive pap afterwards. Kung Fu Panda is a great example of this. It was so heavily lauded in the reviews it's become a benchmark of sorts for making a good kids game. Unfortunately, as soon as you are past the third level cut and paste level design, under implemented mechanics and tedious pacing really start to hurt the experience.
I'm sure its hard on reviewers, I'm sure deadlines are too tight and they can't possibly complete every game they are assigned, but then that's surely quite a big problem with games journalism in general, isn't it? It's not unreasonable for developers, who work some brutal hours to vicious deadlines themselves, to want their end result to be judged based on its entirety rather than just the first impressions. Especially when you consider the damage that a poor review can do to their financial returns on that work. Reply 0
The finger of blame could be pointed in three different directions, admittedly, but inside the industry at the moment your studio's average metacritic rating is EVERYTHING. I can't count the number of projects my employers have lost at the last hurdle because a publisher's marketing department went to metacritic and decided our average score was too low.
Bear in mind that metacritic scores are ALREADY an average, so we are talking about an average of an average there... It's insane, but the upshot of all this is that ONE bad review can significantly damage the future of a studio. Is it any wonder that devs get bitter and twisted about reviewers when their one "subjective opinion" can put them out of the industry for good? Reply +2
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Dare I believe this game will be good? Just seeing the name "Tracer Tong" again gave me a massive nerdgasm... please please please be good! Reply +3
Blur
SOLD Reply +2
Dead to Rights: Retribution
For example the enemies quite blatantly and deliberately shoot to miss you if you are engaged in hand to hand combat with another enemy. Bit odd that the review claims the opposite. Reply +7
Splinter Cell: Conviction
You can't do the entire game undetected, but you can do the vast majority of it and even in the last level I was sneaking around and snapping necks quite happily. Reply +2
Football Manager for iPhone tomorrow
If you HALVE the price of your game, the sales need to MORE THAN DOUBLE as a result for it to be anything other than a huge mistake....does a £4.50 price tag for Iphone FootMan double the sales? I'd be astonished if it did. Reply 0
PrimeSense: Beyond Natal
Naturally this will be the dev's fault Reply 0
F1 2010's career mode detailed
I love Moto GP, and I have enjoyed the recent Moto GP games, but however interesting you find the racing, doing a 16 race season, with the constant qualify - race - next track - qualify - race - next track sequence, gets really REALLY boring after a while. You do need to put something in there to break up the monotony.
Games like Forza or GT or whatever do it with the car tuning to an extent, and I guess thats kind of available to F1 and GP games but other racing games never put you into full length racing seasons. Every four races you can jump into a radically different type of car and change the experience enough for yourself that you don't get bored.
So, tentatively I am in favour of those off-track distractions... balancing your media profile, picking fights with Hamilton and co, getting into a feud with your team mate... could be a nice break in the pace Reply 0
Rockstar denies San Diego accusations
I know what I'd rather slog my guts out to make, and no one lies to you when you join the games industry and says its gonna be easy or at all pleasant. Making games is hell most of the time, and then some IGN twat calls you lazy because you didn't manage to make MW2 in the nine months your team of twenty had to make your game, and you go home and cry yourself to sleep.
It's still better than a proper job :) Reply -3
Games of 2009: FIFA 10
1) It is the WORST piece of animation that has ever been shipped in a game. Jerky, wooden, unnatural, no sense of momentum or weight to the motions... its truly dreadful
2) It is, without exception, the sole preserve of chavs, sploiters or the other subhuman breeds of scum who infest Xbox Live like a cancer. As a result I strongly urge that under no circumstances should you ever EVER do the baby, unless you are celebrating another shot from the halfway line goal, or a "block the goalkeepers kick out of his hands ha ha ha" goal, or the one where you do a long throw against the crossbar, or the goal direct from a corner...
Wow there's a lot of glitch goals in FIFA 10.... Reply -3
New Borderlands DLC detailed
They are doing exactly what you want developers to do. Responding quickly to player requests. Reply -1
Borderlands
Reap the benefits of 5 years of posting negative whiney crap on this site :P Reply +3