phillosmaster

what are you saying protofunk? Videogames are a medium. Just like books are a medium. A message can be portrayed through a work of fiction with the intent of educating the reader, viewer, player. What are parables if not an attempt to trick the audience into learning something through an entertaining tale? Fiction is fiction regardless of whether it's presented as a game, movie, comic, book, painting, play, spoken word. Fiction is just as meaningful as any acedemic work. Not all fiction trys to teach, but in the very least it tries to move the audience. It tries to elicit emotions. Is that not the aim of art? Why do we bother holding onto the great works of fiction if they are just garbage to entertain us. You come off as pretentious? What are you arguing?

Reviews and Critiques serve two different purposes. Try to keep that in mind when you comment. He's not trying to influence your purchase of the game. He's saying we need find ways to validate the artistic merit of these games if we are going to continue to make the assertion that games are art, or that games have the potential to be art.

I think he's on the right track, but his posted critiques need work. I do believe there is artistic meaning in some games. Certainly it would be easier to do a plot analysis of an RPG like Xenogears to illustrate this concept. More meat to work with. I believe Katamari has artistic merit, but it's much harder to express in the article he's trying to write.

Sony and MS's strategy is a risking one.

If Sega hadn't sold the Dreamcast at such a large loss, I wonder if they would still be around. I know, I don't know all the details and there were many factors that contributed to Sega's hardware demise, but one of the big things I recall them reporting was the huge loss they took in hardware sales. The losses were not recouped as soon as they had hoped.

What if the PS3 is released and is easy as hell to hack, and the majority of the software gets pirated? What if the PS3 software line-up just sucks after release? Either way the software does not meet the estimated sales numbers to recoup the hardware loss. Nintendo will be shielded from this since they are actually in the green from their hardware sales.

There is a better hypothetical to pose in my opinion. Is Sony and MS's strategy wise? Does it leave them to vunerable? Why should selling hardware at a loss be the norm?

"The other 2 have more expensive ingredients and can be eaten in different ways and are sold at a loss."

I love this line. My brain is in overdrive thinking about all the different ways I could eat a candy bar, other than pushing it into my mouth. Perhaps, snorting the candy bar up my nose is a better way to eat it. I wonder what that would be like.

Best news ever.

I really wish region encoding would just disappear. Why throw up invisible roadblocks for legitimate consumers.

Maybe that's already happening. I thought I remembered hearing somewhere that the PS3 was also going to be region free. Can anyone confirm that, or was I just dreaming? If Sony wasn't supporting region encoding that would certainly spell region encoding's demise.

31. CannedPasta, that's the best thing I've heard all day. About 1/3 my DS library is imported from Japan. Nintendo is making all kinds of steps in the right direction.

Anyone who says this is just a Gamecube in a tuxedo honestly are not looking at the big picture. The final product as a whole. The Wii channels and Wiimote alone put it on an entirely different level than the Gamecube. It's a console build around an entirely different ideology.

If you aren't excited about this then you aren't the target audience. I doubt any arguement I could make would sway your opinion. It's impossible to please all the people all of the time.

The first thing that came to my mind when reading this was the Saga series. I believe this was incorporated in the Romancing Saga games and the first Saga Frontier. It, of course, was not the first series to implement this, but I recall it being on of my largest complaints. I love the Saga series, and I like games that scale difficulty because you are constantly being challenged.

There is nothing lamer than being forced to backtrack in an RPG through some low level area, and being forced to button mash through pointless 1 sided battles. Why would that level 1 gelatinous cube attack my level 20 warrior. Does he have a death wish? I can almost feel my pixelated avatar roll his eyes.

In these Saga games the scale seemed too steep though. It is actually recommended that you level up only when necessary in these game. If you attempt to power level in these Saga games then you will make the boss fights almost impossible, and all random encounters become a desperate fight for your life. I guess it's all about finding balance.

Also I guess it's a question of intent. I agree with #20 to an extent. Is the game intended to be immersive? Is it suppose to emulate reality? Then scaling difficulty might distract from that goal. If I'm a level 20 warrior then that gelatinous cube should fear me and run away...or at least try and gang up on me with about 20 of his friends. If the cubes gang up on me then the number of encounters should be decreased in the area accordingly considering they are now traveling in packs rather than operating independantly.

If scaling of difficulty is desired in an immersive game like Oblivion than the scaling needs to be explained properly. The cube's stats shouldn't be boosted proportionally to my stat growth, unless these cubes have been training in anticipation of my return. Perhaps changed the cube's model to add little bandanas and tonfas. I also should not have to fight gangs of cubes at the same rate as I did a single cube unless their was some sort of boom in the cube population since I've been there. Perhaps replace the cubes at some point in the game with a more fearsome enemy, but make it relavent to the story. For example, the area has been invaded by some other foreign monster, like Dragon Turtles, who have since killed off all the cubes for sport. A game can be immersive/realistic and scale difficulty. The two are not mutually exclusive.

32. AirIntake

I ran HL2 EP1 with much lower specs and it ran beautifully. Much better looking than anything I've played on the consoles lately and that's including the 360. I think you have some other issues not related to your hardware specs if you couldn't get it to work right. Also were you installing it through Steam? 3 hours? You know you could have just driven down to BestBuy, bought it and installed in less time. Again, my anti electronic distribution for large scale games like this comes to light.

5. Really? I would argue just the opposite. I find that the console controller is too limiting. I like the keboard/mouse setup the best out of any offering. A mouse feels more natural than any analog stick I've used and the keyboard has tons of buttons to use.

Most of the time PC games give you the option to map your own keys. This ability to hotkey tons of actions allows a level of refinement to the PC game's on screen menus and interfaces. This also allows the developer the freedom to implement that many more inputs into their game. When an equivalent gaming experience is ported over to a console, you often have to either dumb down the user inputs or force the user to traverse clunky menus to execute the same action that was a simple button push on the PC. This is why if given a choice, I would rather game on the PC. Some genres are just serviced better by the PC setup. Genres like Simulations (Mechwarrior, flight sims), RTS games, and FPS games just feel better with full mouse/keyboard support IMO.

As for the price issue, you don't need to spend a fortune. If you buy last years graphics card you can usually play brand new PC games on moderate settings which is usually good enough. I never pay more than 200 bucks for a graphics card and I maybe purchase one once ever 2-3 years. Everything else should be upgraded as normal maintenance to your PC and I don't consider these purchases to be gaming specific. If you are going to be a PC gamer than learning how to upgrade your own machine is the way to go.

Posting Tim's resume is equivalent to posting a list of my all time favorite games. Everything that guy does is gold.

I agree with #1 though. Since "adventure game" is now a dirty word, I doubt we'll see an adventure game from this union. I will admit that I would be totally stoked if they did make an adventure game.