beyond this, look at the PC, which since at least the mid nineties has been technologically capable of running every game ever created, which can fake any hardware quirk, and which has been used to create every game you have ever played, before those games were then translated into Stupid for the purpose of putting you on a couch instead of a desk chair. the idea of a console was always arbitrary, it was always a concept of marketing rather than a hardware reality.
In the 90s, consoles had very different hardware than PCs; much more specialized and much cheaper to produce. And although PCs are used to write the code and compile it, developers have always needed a console plugged into the PC to actually run the game. There was a big hardware reality there; PCs had a modular design with a beefy CPU, while consoles had an integrated design with a weak CPU and specialized graphics hardware.
Intel got blindsided by the huge expansion of the phone/tablet market, and ARM competitors are eating the lunch there while Intel is stuck dominating the low-growth desktop/laptop space. The whole company is now focused on scaling their stuff down to mobile power envelopes so they can have a piece of that pie. Even though they are very late to that game, I think they have a chance, since they'll have more advanced fabs than the ARM folks and since the Android app ecosystem is mostly Java-based.
What's really sad is that Qualcomm's Adreno division was bought from AMD a few years ago for peanuts (50 million I think). Now Adreno is in tons of phones. I don't know what AMD's CEO was thinking; their company might be in much better shape today if they had kept that division.
Visual Studio has the world's best debugger but I don't think anything else about it is better than competing compilers.
As for DirectX, it's still the best 3d API, but keep an eye out for OpenGL which has been quietly resurging lately. OpenGL ES 2.0 has been adopted by WebGL and all non-Microsoft smartphones, and OpenGL ES 3.0 is reasonably competitive with DirectX. Basically, OpenGL has finally ditched the albatross of industrial design nonsense that was holding it back in the past.
It isn't a problem so much as part of a minute audience. Let's say the audience is people like you, how many people like you exist? 50? 100? I'm going to take a blind guess and say it takes AT LEAST 4,000 sales to break even with a PS1 PSN download. Are there 4000 like you? By all rights I'm more of the audience than you and I haven't bought any of these. As a business decision it is baffling.
Break even? Isn't the cost of offering a download almost zero? Most likely Sony takes a cut per sale instead of charging an up-front fee.
It isn't a problem so much as part of a minute audience. Let's say the audience is people like you, how many people like you exist? 50? 100? I'm going to take a blind guess and say it takes AT LEAST 4,000 sales to break even with a PS1 PSN download. Are there 4000 like you? By all rights I'm more of the audience than you and I haven't bought any of these. As a business decision it is baffling.
Break even? Isn't the cost of offering a download almost zero? Most likely Sony takes a cut per sale instead of charging an up-front fee.
I'm including licensing, QA, submission in my magically fake business model.
You don't need any QA, as you know if you pop almost any game into a PS1 emulator nowadays it will just work perfectly. The others are purely contractual fees and if the counterparty chooses not to charge anything, then it's free.
The fundamental economic reality is that the games are already made and it costs zero to redistribute them, and a proof of that is that pirates are widely redistributing them for free. If, unlike pirates, they actually charge like 10$ for them, that's pure cash-cow profit. For that reason it's always struck me as ridiculous that official emulation libraries are so limited whereas any joe can download a bittorrent of all 6000 games ever released for a system. It's nice to see the platform holders are finally starting to realize that.
I always think about Half-Life, which had only a moderate amount of "hey I guess this looks pretty cool" hype until almost its release, when it exploded into a legitimate phenomenon. In the Web 2.0 era there's no way that could happen any more, the nanosecond press would be on every single screenshot until it came out.
You're forgetting another Valve game, Portal. I personally was extremely enthusiastic after watching the initial trailer for it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeUjVkJ7seY), but I remember general awareness of it was quite low until release when it exploded. Very likely the bundling with more in-demand games was a huge factor for that one though.
There wasn't much of a games press in the first place in the pre-PS1 era. It was much more just buy whatever based on the screenshots on the box. I'm not sure what the press's attitude was in those days, but our impression of the critical evaluation of those early games is based on more recent retrospectives rather than whatever it is magazines were saying at the time. Those retrospectives already had the benefit of hindsight and hence were more muted.
What's funny is that the gambling industry likes to euphemize itself as "gaming" (see the names of the conferences in the sidebar), but Unity can't do that as it would be really confusing.
Looks decent but it's unfortunate it will only come to an platform nobody will ever use (windows phone/tablet). I wish they'd release it for iOS and Android and be one of the few polished games for mobile devices, but nope, Halo is owned by Microsoft and they have a platform war to fight and lose, not unlike a lone Spartan desperately holding off the hordes of Covenant but fated to ultimately die.
It only stands to get better for future games, as the common x86 codebase under a smart workflow should mean easier/faster turnaround times for ports, if not flat out simultaneous releases. No more Indie budget crippling fees to patch a game, no more pitching to a publisher. Less time/money needed for multiple versions. Regular devs working on next gen right now are already saying they are having trouble with continuing to call it "porting". Is this crazy or what?!
This isn't really because of the convergence on x86. Modern codebases have very little assembly language in them so targeting multiple instruction sets has never been a major problem. The more important factors are: essentially same CPU (similar number of cores, cache, performance-per-core), essentially same GPU (same shader/etc support even if throughput is different), same amount of RAM.
But the sums raised on Kickstarter aren't enough to fully fund projects in some cases. The rest is paid out of personal savings and hoped to be made up in sales. It's up to the developer to set the target funding level depending on how comfortable they are with that.
I sort of want to make a list of my favourite arcade titles that aren't widely available due to specialized hardware (Point Blank) or never having been ported (Osman, Planet Harriers).
they don't lend themselves to being remembered otherwise.
Magical Truck Adventure!!!!!
I swear that one would be legendary if it had been made in more than the tiniest quantities. You play by pumping a hand cart in sync with the other player and the train track goes through dinosaurs, Jetsons future and so on. I encountered it at the CAX expo and it was really the highlight of the whole expo. .
Kinda weird that they limited their "get the game for $20" tier, especially since $15 seems to be the standard "get the game" tier. Guess I'll wait and pick it up for $15 on steam. :|
"Your name and likeness as the game's evil corporate CEO" is a pretty great Kickstarter reward, well done having sold it at 8000$.
I hope this remake has better game balance than the original -- I hope they won't too slavishly imitate its mechanics as in retrospect they were pretty broken. There's a lot of tactical RTSes that came out since then they could take inspiration from as well. A well-balanced modernized Syndicate would be great since the series never quite reached its full potential.
Respawn says a lot of intersting tech things about Titanfall. Including how the current state of the Source Engine renderer isn't nearly as fast as people seem to think it is. Apparently they spent a lot of time working on making it usable.
It just depends on the workload. I'm sure Valve did a bunch of optimization for the kind of scenes that Portal 2 has, with the consoles available back then. Seems natural that adapting it for outdoor firefights on 8-core consoles would be quite some work. I wonder how much of the same work Valve's engineers have done in parallel since they sold a copy of the engine to Respawn (that partly depends on whether HL3 is actually in development or not, which it clearly wasn't in the Portal 2 days).
Meanwhile, Puyo Puyo 20th Anniversary for DS IS translated and it has online play!
...I've never won a single match online.
I hear you my brother, I too love Puyo Puyo and am saddened that my skills are pretty much garbage. Like I get a small amount of mileage from understanding the Fever system well, but still couldn't reliably set up a more than 4-chain if my life depended on it (which it does).
I need real-time chaining like in Tetris Attack or Starsweep to save me from my inability to plan anything in advance
ike, just something ineffable screams to me "WayForward Lite"
i will only accept this answer because the belt scroller genre is pretty dead genre that nobody knows how to do right anymore. i think the most recent one i played was Phantom Breaker Battlegrounds (it's actually pretty good!) and before that was the brilliant Double Dragon Advance and Astro Boy Omega Factor and then after that it's a bit of a walk to reliving all those great brawlers on MAME.
like shmups, the brawler is a lost art, a genre only enjoyed and remembered by old men who knew the real value of a quarter. there really isn't a name i would immediately trust in the genre today aside from maybe Vanillaware.
Dunno, maybe I've missed the best examples of the genre but it seems to me old brawlers were all pretty flawed too? There's a fundamental problem of quirky animations and hitboxes to the entire genre, and it hasn't turned that into an art like versus fighters have. They all have really generous HP bars because generally there's no reliable way to avoid taking hits. I don't see the genre as being in the same category as shmups, they're more of an artwork and narrative delivery vehicle rather than games that take gameplay balance seriously.
But from your post it's not clear what exactly you like about brawlers, maybe you could clarify.
Part of the reason this is good is that neither Microsoft nor Apple are interesting in tuning latency the way that games-folks are willing to do, and it's a bummer having to build on top of a platform that has, say, guaranteed audio latency (windows) or guaranteed video latency (windows and os x). Assuming SteamOS is at least as open as Android, cool for the linux ecosystem and cool for media consumers and developers as a whole.
And latency is particularly important for VR goggles. (!)
on the same week that Valve is pushing for openness for all and sunshine and flowers, AMD and DICE have announced a new low-level graphics API exclusively for AMD cards
it's like it's 1998 again
If they're resorting to this it means DirectX and OpenGL have been getting lazy and need a good kick in the pants. I predict the outcome of it is that DirectX and OpenGL improve quickly in reaction to the new competition and Mantle eventually becomes irrelevant. Hopefully it's for the best in other words.
yeah, OpenGL is pretty decent these days. the main issue is that the open-source Mesa stack (which Intel currently pumps a lot of dev resources into) only supports up to DX9 equivalent commands, and while the proprietary AMD/nVidia drivers (the former of which is still kind of spotty and the latter of which involves some hacks) support OpenGL 4.x (DX10/11), no games will actually target 4.x commands for lack of widespread support, and it seems like this is going to have to change for the next generation of console ports.
if nVidia and/or AMD get serious and start putting their devs on the Mesa stack like Intel rather than "releasing" "documentation" to facilitate the development of dramatically and slightly inferior open-source drivers, respectively, then it really won't take long to make up the difference. the mere existence of an open-source implementation which categorically does not work as well as the proprietary alternative is exasperating because certain people will stubbornly ship the former by default, and certain other people will never know about the latter.
Nobody cares about Linux distributions in the GNU sense and that is not changing. But many of the emerging non-Microsoft-controlled operating systems are based on Linux+OpenGL: Android, SteamOS and ChromeOS. The work done for these platforms should eventually trickle down to better OpenGL on Linux and Windows as well.
my totally baseless prediction is that it'll be like a 360 controller but with a trackball instead of a right stick.
If putting a trackball on a game controller was a good idea somebody would've done it by now, trackballs have existed for decades. It must've been repeatedly prototyped and found to suck.
I predict it will have a touchpad surface similar to the PS4 controller's.
Not sure why you say that. Large companies have research divisions that prototype all kinds of things, they won't release something like a controller without lots of experimentation.
Not that weird if they care a lot about mouse-cursor games like Dota 2. A trackpad beats any previous console controller for those.
The middle screen also allows unlimited additional controls for those games out there that use more than 10 keyboard keys. It looks primarily designed to solve the problem of porting KBM games to me.
I'm still not clear on exactly how your input on the right trackpad converts to FPS turning though. Do you swipe repeatedly from one end to the other like you would on a laptop trackpad? Or is it Halo controls where you hold still at a certain point to turn at a certain rate? Either way it sounds a bit crappy, unless it's precise enough that they can do the first approach with a high enough turning speed you don't have to lift your finger all the time.
Last edited by Broco on Fri Sep 27, 2013 6:38 pm; edited 1 time in total
In a novel twist, touching the screen on the controller will bring up an overlay on the monitor showing what is happening on the touchscreen, so players won't have to divide their attention between two displays.
Hah, this makes the Wii U already look like a relic.
The tactile marks and haptic feedback might make it a big improvement over a laptop trackpad. Or not. We'll have to see when they start shipping. I'm also skeptical that this can work well for FPSes but I also find it hard to believe Valve would throw that particular genre under the bus, so I'm reserving judgment for now.
Watch Dogs delayed by 6 months, official Ubisoft quote is priceless:
Quote:
"We know a lot of you are probably wondering 'why now?' We struggled with whether we would delay the game. But from the beginning, we have adopted the attitude that we will not compromise on quality. As we got closer to release, as all the pieces of the puzzle were falling into place in our last push before completion, it became clear to us that we needed to take the extra time to polish and fine tune every detail so we can deliver a truly memorable and exceptional experience.
(Honestly though good on them that they're not releasing a jury-rigged pre-alpha-quality mess.)
My sense is that CoD has peaked and sales will probably decline from now on, but that doesn't mean there won't be a bazillion more sequels (much like The Simpsons, a formerly megapopular series can have a long afterlife as a merely popular one).
I don't agree with the theory that Guitar Hero died because they made too many, I think it was just a fad to begin with and the genre was destined to suddenly die no matter what they did. Meanwhile military shootmans is an evergreen genre so it's more about how fresh it feels compared to the competition.
I doubt the performance problems are really Quake 3 engine's fault, it's more that all the senior engine programmers left to Respawn. There isn't any "core" of id tech 3 that's impossible to modify so it probably bears a rather distant resemblance to it at this point. It's like a robot that had all its parts replaced many times over and only a couple of screws here and there remain from the original version, is it really the same robot?
As for Tony Hawk, I think skateboarding is somewhat faddish as well, it was really mainstream a decade ago and is back to being a niche subculture today.
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