Columns Blame Nintendo!

if you include casual gaming most gamers are female therfore sex in games should be target at them and not the sweaty basment dewlers of sterotyping yore. Suprisingly this means hot chicks... that are marginaly less hot than the player so they feel good about themselves. Therfore the ps3 with it's eye is ideal as it can assess the hotness of the player and then edit the main female characters to be slightly less hot. Women are tipicaly very shallow and like to be the best looking person in a room.

 

That statement makes no sense. WOW was a run away success because blizzard discovered the secret to creating an addictive MMORPG. The reason it's lasted this long is testament to the great design. "It's disgusting that they've sat back and raked in so much from a single title"? Wake up pal, developers are in this "game" to make money believe it or not. Nobody has forced the cash into the Blizzard coffers, people have "voted" with their wallets" and they deserve every bit of success due to clever marketing and game design. As for Blizzard losing their "finger on the pulse" of the gaming industry, I'm not sure how you've come to that conclusion but pretty much every title I've bought from Blizzard has been a big success for them. They own some of the biggest franchises in the game industry, Starcraft, Diablo and world of warcraft. Blizzard are one of the few developers who know how to make games for gamers.

 

Sierra/Vivendi is long separated from Valve, now EA publish the physical media (e.g. Orange Box boxes and dvd.)

I like the PS3 although it lacks in the games department, and I think the sixaxis is not really usable : in motorstorm for example it's awful, maybe only in Flow. That's a cool game. Maybe the best on the PS3 so far !

 

It's interesting that nobody is targeting the folks in the media industries trying to have games made for what essentially amounts to blatant advertising and IP milking.

A lot of the games that get produced for the gamer crowd are games ideas that are sold by media companies and released before a major movie release for no other reason than to milk the movie's IP. Star Wars Episode 3, Happy Feet, and practically every Disney release for the past few years (!) come to mind. Most movie-based games aren't worth playing and unsurprisingly, most game-based movies aren't worth watching. The whole movie and game industry marriage is to blame for a lot of woes in both industries, though I think it hurts the game industry much more. They'd be better off ending that relationship and allowing both mediums to focus on their own industries.

Meanwhile, while all the big IPs are choking up the time and profits of teams of big name publishers/developers, the innovation comes from the game-oriented studios such as Irrational/2K, Bioware/Pandemic, Blizzard, etc. Then there's folks like those at id, Valve, Epic Megagames, etc scoring their own contracts on the side for engine licensing while making their own games. So what if they take their time making games? Their games are good enough that I'll only start to be bored of their current iteration by the time the next one comes out.

Perhaps these "individual" (or non-subsidized as of yet...) companies are doing just fine, but the bigger companies are struggling. Well. the fault really lies on the upper management of the gaming companies for taking up such idiotic contracts in the first place because they're obviously not making any money on them in the short or long run. They're more concerned about up-front contracts and paying the bills now more than quality. Sure, the potential earnings and initial payoff might be worthwhile, but in the end they wind up alienating their collective fanbases... an action that has pretty much come back to bite them in the ass. Good for them! I'll continue to support my chosen developers with my dollars regardless of platform.

God save the telefrag.

 

are you serious?

But, like Joe said w/ the Wii, it's all in how Nintendo marketed the console and fully utilized their in-house games w/ it and tbh I think MS did a good job w/ the 360 and Sony is still slowly filling the hole they dug w/ theirs.....

Why should Microsoft or Sony "change" or 'fix' something that isn't broken? I can sure as hell tell you I wouldn't want to play 99.9% of 360/PS3 games like I do on the Wii, now maybe a wireless gun on FPS's would be neat, but idk how that would work. I also still like having a realistic wheel for driving and stuff like that, and I think SIXAXIS will be a great addition to a lot of the new games (looking around corners, jumping, etc. w/o hitting any buttons); anyways you get my drift.

Nintendo on the other hand had a basic/elementary console back w/ Gamecube and they knew that with the 360/PS3 offering loads upon loads of new tech, yet pretty much owning the casual gaming market that they could (and should) take the next step and go with a wireless motion-sensing controller that would seperate their console from the rest by offering something different.

Kind of like how Joe said the Eye is an old idea, I guess this would make the Wii-mote old tech as well, right? /sarcasm

 

"Discovered", past tense, being the emphasis here. See below:

I arrived at this conclusion following a WoW discussion thread in which most proponents (or former proponents) of WoW thought the Burning Crusade expansion was ass on a plate (paraphrased, obviously). General satisfaction with WoW was overwhelming; with the first exp. pack, moderate; with the latest, luke-warm. This trend led me to the conclusion that they are losing sight of what pleases gamers.

Short version: granted, they found a winning formula, but they seem incapable of refreshing it lately.

Also, I take it as a mark against the company that the social climate of their games generates people as rude and affrontational as you. Then again, this may be a consequence of humans all being mouthy idiots, rather than Blizzard's success at managing an online game.

 

I'm losing track of who's being sarcastic and who's being over-serious; was this a straight-faced suggestion?

 

theoretically, i dont see why its a bad idea, however, i think its probably impossible, atleast for the time being

hell, theres already a game like this .... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Girl_2

 

This sort of viewpoint would get you a job at Sony/Microsoft and it's why they will never acheive anything revolutionary in the same way as the Wii. Everything the 360 and PS3 have done has been incremental on previous incarnations and is essentially within the same paradigm of gaming as the previous incarnations. The Wii has gone to a completely different way of playing and that's why it's innovative - because it doesn't build upon previous ideas, it completely restarts them.

 

The Wii is not as new or innovative as people think in terms of its technology, only in how it is marketted.

 

Well for that matter no consumer good is ever innovative, simply because by the time someone actually creates a consumer good, chances are selection of other people have already tried it as specialist product, and before that hundreds will have played around with it in a scientific setting. Hell, I'm struggling to think of a single technology that by the time it makes it to mainstream isn't old hat in specialist circles. For consumer goods such as the Wii, the innovation is in the delivery or the technologies, the monetisation of the invention is the innovation behind the product.

So yeah, in other words, you're right.

 

Told you.

 

The trouble is an oversaturated market, with the end product being FAR to over-priced. They blame it on the torrent scene but the prices are as they are because they can get away with it.

I for one have never downloaded anything and I always buy but the trouble is when I do go into the shops the shelves are lined with vast quantities of obscure nonsence and follow-ups. I mean a great percentage must just be money laundering fronts as they seem to pose no real reason to gaming what-so-ever?
But then someone must buy it all otherwise there wouldn`t be soooooo much crap on the shelves and the developers would be forced to create some interesting progressive pieces of game art?

 

I don't wanna sound like an ass but a new controller isn't really innovation. They need new games to go with it, so far all of their big games have had exactly the same gameplay, just with a new controller(MP3, Zelda), they could've just became PC developers and acheived the same effect.

Also I think the innovation bandwagon is getting out of hand, I will admit that I still like playing old genres, and I don't want to play most of them with the wiimote. Also, the whole gameplay over graphics argument is pathetic. Theres no reason to choose one or the other, games can have both (imagine that). It is possible to innovate a game within an already existing genre, and with the same controller, I don't see why people make the argument that the wii is automatically more innovative than the 360 or ps3.

 

All good things come to an end, that's the nature of games. The burning crusade is just highlighting the point that WOW has probably run it's course. Have you seen the trailer for Starcraft II yet? It's looking very promising.

I can't help if you have a sensitive nature. As for your last statement, that really doesn't justify a response.

 

New expansion pack for WoW due next year sometime. Take you all the way to lvl 80 if you want
.

 

I personally find online games (aka multi-player) to be the games that give the most replay value. Each time you play it, it's still the same thing you do but you keep playing it frequently because you interact with other people and can share the joy.

I love VALVe's single-player games but I'm only playing them through maybe one or two times then I'm on to experimenting with the game in entirely new ways (like searching for exploits and other oddities). After that it's pretty much back to waiting for the next game to come around.

And I totally agree with the comment regarding graphics vs. gameplay. It's true that you can do both which Half-Life 2 clearly demonstrated. That was also one of the first games (as I'm concerned) to take physics (a third factor) seriously too. A game can look good, be fun to play (gameplay) but still doesn't feel real if the physics are missing. Of course physics can be seen as just another gimmick but then again what does it matter if it's fun?

Movies and games should clearly divorce. I hate games made purely for marketing purposes. It sucks. When it comes to movies based on games I disagree that they always suck. At least you have Resident Evil which is entertaining although just a stupid action flick with zombies. But don't say you expected more from it given the back story it is based on. In this particular case I enjoy the movies, but dislike the games.