Gaming Gaffes of 2003 Pinpointed? 89
jvm writes "It seems that every gaming website has a Best of 2003 feature going now, and we felt that was just too cheery for our tastes. To counter that positive energy, we've assembled Gaming Gaffes of 2003 over at Curmudgeon Gamer, a list of the most embarrassing, disheartening, and bone-headed developments in the game industry over the past year. We've tried to give everyone a little frank criticism, from Sony's PlayStation 2 Online service through the lack of a Loki successor for Linux gaming, as well as specific products like EA's The Sims Online. Did we miss any?"
SimCity 4 (Score:3, Funny)
Was the sims online really that bad? (Score:1, Flamebait)
but i did read some magazine reviews and they ASSURED me that the game was good. so I'm basing my post on that.
Re:Was the sims online really that bad? (Score:4, Interesting)
I cancelled my subscription about 4 days into my free 30 days.
Re:Was the sims online really that bad? (Score:5, Interesting)
No, the problem was that somewhere along the line they decided what people loved about the Sims wasn't the creativity the player could exercise, but it was -- ready for this? -- RAISING METERS! Yes, the real fun of the Sims is working on your 'skills', making money with meaningless treadmilling, and traditional MMORPG character building. Add on top of that a complete lack of user-created content and you've got TSO. After all, The Sims is so amazingly popular because of its micromanagement gameplay challenge, right? Not because people throw on a money cheat and then goof off with the AI and building systems, right?
If TSO had been merely a chatroom but with extensive support for folks who wanted to coordinate their couch with their drapes, it might've done better than the bastard child of Everquest they were looking to make it into.
Re:Was the sims online really that bad? (Score:2, Interesting)
All there was to do in the game was the skills system. That meant playing a guitar in game for a few hours, or even doing telemarketing. I paid 50 dollars and then 10 dollars a month to play a game where my character is a telemarketer?
That last two days I played, the only thing I could find that would even keep me the slightest bit amused was to be rando
Online Playability for Mario Kart :: Double Dash (Score:2, Informative)
The warp pipe project does try to remedy this, though it's still a far cry from what it should have been.
Re:Online Playability for Mario Kart :: Double Das (Score:4, Informative)
In fact, by E3, I beleive they had stated online was most likely not going to be there.
Re:Online Playability for Mario Kart :: Double Das (Score:2)
Re:Online Playability for Mario Kart :: Double Das (Score:1)
Re:Online Playability for Mario Kart :: Double Das (Score:3, Insightful)
Why bother spending all the time needed to make the game play well online, when only 10% of your customer base can possibly use it?
Re:Online Playability for Mario Kart :: Double Das (Score:1)
Re:Online Playability for Mario Kart :: Double Das (Score:2, Interesting)
Half-Life has long been the most popular FPS online, and has never had more than 1% of their CDKeys online at any one time, with a total that might run as high as 5% (considering 7 million sales in the US, it's a better number than it might seem, but not a large retu
Re:Online Playability for Mario Kart :: Double Das (Score:1)
maybe i'm just releasing some steam over online play not being included? because i've got a friend from college who keeps e-mailing me and talking up his mario kart game when i know that i could easily send him packing with his tail between his legs but we probably won't h
Re:Online Playability for Mario Kart :: Double Das (Score:1)
I haven't tried playing this one while drunk, but either I was always better at Super Mario Kart (SNES) when I was drunk or everyone else just got a lot worse than I did when we were drunk. Since it was basically one of the two games we always played when we got together to get smashed, I really couldn't say anything more.
That being said, I should have a review of
Re:Online Playability for Mario Kart :: Double Das (Score:2)
The people that play online are largely the same people that buy dozens of games for their systems.
Funny how, in a press release explaining SOCOM 2 shattering a sales record, the first quote out of an SCEA representative's mou
Re:Online Playability for Mario Kart :: Double Das (Score:1)
That's the attachment rate for games, though. I believe we were specifically talking about the attachment rate for the online adapter. In other words, 10% of the people that own an XBox have bought a Live subscription. Oh, and
Re:Online Playability for Mario Kart :: Double Das (Score:4, Insightful)
Be cool to see some sales figures from that 10% compared to the rest.
Re:Online Playability for Mario Kart :: Double Das (Score:2)
Everyone I know who has Xbox Live (myself included) purchase all of the A-list Live titles within a week or two of when they are released. Just to keep up with the Joneses. Looking through my collection, I purchased a total of 6 games pre-Live (the first 8 months after I got my Xbox), and 12 games once I got Live (about 6 months ago). Because those games are the ones I am interested in.
Some people wanto to sit at home and play Kirby's Air Ride for 9 months straight. I'd rather
Icculus? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Icculus? (Score:1)
The dig against LGP is a little bizzare though, since the whole point of publishing good small titles is so they don't go all Loki on us. Honestly, I think they're playing it smart with that (business) strategy.
Well, I might be a bit biased, I pretty much cherish my copy of Majesty. I can't belive how fun that game can be sometimes.
PS2 Online Play (Score:4, Interesting)
With all that being said, and coming from a PC gaming background, the lack of a service like XBox Live to sign into but rather a game to game solution to the situation hasn't really bothered me. I won't say it is unnessecary hand-holding but it is something I don't think I need to pay for. Now, what I would like is more online enabled games for the PS2 (and the Gamecube already!) but if there were going to be individual charges for games (that didn't have persistent worlds where there was a lot of overhead - PSO, Everquest), I would move to XBox Live. I'd rather pay a flat fee and get all the sports, fighting, and racing games I can play then pay for individual sports, fighting, and racing games.
Assuming I have misspoken somewhere in this long-winded rant and you have found my mistake where I said X but Y was correct, you may take my apologies and realize that I meant to say Y. (I just don't feel like playing the nit-picking game today, which is what happens on Slashdot a lot.)
Re:PS2 Online Play (Score:1)
Biggest... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Biggest... (Score:1)
I could be an optimist and say 'it's amazing that it hadn't happened before' or 'I'm amazed this doesn't happen more often', but I'm a pessimist, so I really can't.
Re:Biggest... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Biggest... (Score:2)
Re:Biggest... (Score:2)
where are they now? (Score:5, Funny)
Holy crap! It's Ferguson from Clarissa Explains it All!
Oh, and the fact that EA Sports Rugby 2003 is actually an order of magnitude worse of a game than their 2001 edition deserves mention I think.
Rare's Xbox Debut? (Score:5, Interesting)
Perfect Dark Zero? Don't make me laugh. PDZ isn't going to happen. There is no evidence that it's even in production - the character models that were floating around a year ago prove zilch. I'd be very surprised to see it this side of 2006 or the next hardware generation, whichever is later. (It never ceases to amaze me, the number of people who bought a GameCube for PDZ despite the fact that it had never even been announced... and the number of those people who then bought an Xbox for precisely the same reason...)
Re:Rare's Xbox Debut? (Score:1)
LOL.. what's the point in buying the console before the game is out anyway?? Hell, if you wait it'll probably be cheaper by then anyway!
VGAs (Score:5, Informative)
I'll let SpikeTV off the hook, because I love MXC.
Re:VGAs (Score:4, Insightful)
VGAs were craptastic (Score:2)
Re:VGAs were craptastic (Score:2)
Oh, and the results were fixed in the sense that SpikeTV, with the exception of the internet polls, chose the winners. Funny how the winners all fit with their programming theme of manly things.
Re:VGAs (Score:1)
Re:VGAs (Score:2)
The show really needed nominees, and the lame repeated theme of disparaging the audience due to a stereotypical lack of sex life was way overplayed.
Re:VGAs (Score:2, Interesting)
Can't get that channel here (judging from the comments it appears to be a good thing), but I looked at the web page. Yeah, plenty of weird nominations.
I was completely amazed by the nominees (and winner) for the best music category. I definitely prefer games with original soundtracks as opposed to recycling Whatever's Playing on Radio at the time. Music is such an unrecognized area of the games in general, and preferring games that don't even have an original soundtrack is bad.
And "best performance by h
Re:VGAs (Score:2)
Re:VGAs (Score:2)
Although I still stand by my statement that there's a special place in gaming hell for Albie, forced to play Postal 2 and Night Trap for all eternity.
Re:VGAs (Score:2)
coughStar Trekcough
Although I must say I'm ready to vote for Captain Tenille for president next year...
the VGAs were trash (Score:2, Informative)
Everyone who was saddened by the VGAs should relay their opinions [spiketv.com] to the network. The five of us who care can make a difference!
Ah, who am I kidding... I'll just play Viewtiful Joe instead, the game that I think should have won best a
Re:the VGAs were trash (Score:2, Funny)
Hmmm...if only there were some sort of sport...where strippers....injured themselves....and others!
Hmmm....
Star Wars Galaxies (Score:5, Interesting)
One very fundamental mistake was how they dealt with making people a Jedi. They proported let people be whatever profession they wanted, and that everyone had a chance to become a Jedi. However, those are mutually exclusive. It turns out that in order to become a Jedi, unless you got really really lucky, you had to drop whatever profession you had been working on, and start doing something completely different. Not only that, but once you became a master at that new profession, you had to drop that one two, and master other professions.
That's not choice...that's letting the random number generator choose how you're going to play the game.
A better alternative would have been to have completely seperate profession points that you had to spend in completely different professions beyond the "basic" set. You'd still be able to be a bounty hunter, architect, or whatever, but secretly be working on being a Jedi.
Anyway, since people have found this out a couple of months ago, there are already 100 Jedi running around the servers. I expect that to go way up during the next few months, unless they (the SWG team) step in to slow things down.
I didn't want this to be like Everquest, but you'd think these guys would have taken the hint and look at what game mechanics made EQ popular, and try and enhance THOSE, rather than doing what they did: taking a stab in the dark with a lightsaber, and completely missing.
Re:Star Wars Galaxies (Score:1)
Re:Star Wars Galaxies (Score:2)
I mean, you don't have to become a Jedi, or even try to, thats still your choice.
Re:Star Wars Galaxies (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Star Wars Galaxies (Score:2)
SWG takes a lot of flak from ex-EQ players. It's not EQ in space. You have to get over the number obsession that is needed for EQ, and play it for the universe. Plus it's more of a beginners MMORPG. It doesn't stand playing for more than around 3-4 hours a day constantly like EQ does, since they only thing to attract hardcore gamers is the poorly implemented Jedi class. That said, it's a very good game before you reach that saturation point. With it's planned e
This has got to be the most embarrassing gaffe (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:This has got to be the most embarrassing gaffe (Score:2)
"The stolen source and data were released to the public, and subsequently almost nothing has been heard from Valve, except a couple of updates on the hack itself and a soft whimpering sound."
I'm not sure WHY I find that line so funny, I just do.
Originality vacuum filled with money (Score:4, Insightful)
But it does suck!
Diablo II LOD patch 1.10 (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a quick summary as to why my level 50 barbarian that used to take on Diablo in Nightmare (without even using a health potion) is now routinely being killed by uniques in act III.
- The skills balance that worked best for my gameplay style are now worthless. Whatever rebalancing they did totally undervalued the skills that I chose to develop.
- My unique armor sets are now less useful than the regular dropped armor that I see after the patch.
- Items are now so much more expensive to repair. I have to fill my inventory with magic/expensive items to sell just so I can afford to go back to town for a "repair all". It also seems that all of my items' durabilities have been cut at least in half.
That's not all, but that's a pretty good start to making the game less enjoyable for me. I haven't read any other complaints like this in the few forums that I visited, so maybe it's just me. Anyone else unhappy with 1.10?
Re:Diablo II LOD patch 1.10 (Score:1)
Yes it made the game harder.
Yes it changed many things.
I dont think this was a surprise. But then, I'm on the expansion ladder, so maybe I'm bias as well. Turns out one can succeed with an elemental druid now.
Re:Diablo II LOD patch 1.10 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Diablo II LOD patch 1.10 (Score:2)
Re:Diablo II LOD patch 1.10 (Score:2)
Wait, I *love* to be blunt. Welcome to online gaming!
How about X2: The Threat? (Score:4, Interesting)
An even bigger problem was letting this game out the door with some major bugs - namely Logitech joysticks and gamepads don't work with X2!! (Like the Wingman Force 3D and Wingman Rumblepad) Doh! Apparently they went and actually bought some of these joysticks to test when they heard about these problems, but damn if it didn't put a damper on the fun of many eager space jockeys! Should be a patch soon.
Also in X2 there's many basic functions that can't be remapped!
This game is still really cool looking so far though - it's like Elite - but you can have more than one ship, run your own factories, and even control sectors. You can have capital ships, all fully modelled in 3D - including separate views for various turrets (which you can control and slave to any of three monitors).
This is what makes the stupid bugs and problems so bad - the fact that the underlying game just looks sooooo amazing...but I nearly quit in disgust in the first 30 minutes or so (actually it was a training mission that brought me back - when I had to switch views - discovering a rear mounted, controllable turret view). You can set commands for all your ships and their turrets etc.
One gaff overdone. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this is only a perceived problem, not an actual problem. Why? Because there were plenty of original games out this year, games like Magic Pengel: The Quest for Colour. However, because they weren't sequels to popular games, they weren't hyped up as sequels. That's why most people didn't know about them.
Last year, was there a big, "GET READY for JAX and DAXTER" hype? No, because it was an original game, and most people just didn't know. This year, Jak 2 was Jak 2 and hyped as such. The new, original releases this year (I-Ninja, Metal Arms) aren't hyped up at all the same way, so it's pretty easy to think they're not being hyped when you're just being inundated with advertising that's relying on sequel strength alone.
Re:One gaff overdone. (Score:1)
Next Generation Media (Score:2)
The same thing is happening to the video game world. Big companies (EA, MS, SquareEnix, etc.) are merging and
Re:Next Generation Media (Score:1)
Re:Next Generation Media (Score:2)
Re:Next Generation Media (Score:1)
You just have to go listen somewhere else. These things _are_ being talked about.
game situation might be much worse (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, console games anyway, but that's the risk you take when buying into a corporate funded content delivery tool.
I haven't been a pc gamer in a long time because of the steep price of (re)entry, but thinking about it, if the worst case scenario of game homoginization take
The Real Valve Gaffe (Score:3, Insightful)
The real problems were:
1) Steam-- buggy rollout and ongoing problems, neverending promises of CS 1.6 till it arrived with bugs, and how the heck are you really going to manage all those HL2 downloads???
2) Condition Zero-- 4 (is it 5) dev studios couldn't bring out a decent game based on the most popular online franchise. A captive market opportunity squandered. As I now understand it, it has some bots for CS (uh where's the content?).
2003-- bound to show just how far a developer can lose its fanbase.
Re:The Real Valve Gaffe (Score:2)
Well, developers disenfranchising their player-base seems to be becoming a regular thing lately. Look at Deus Ex 2. They pretty much tossed most of the things that made the first one fun and interesting out the window and created something that fans of the first game mostly hate. It's like a completely different game, and not in a good way either. And this from one of the most (formerly) respected developers around too.
Re:The Real Valve Gaffe (Score:1)
Linux Gaming, an idea to get more games... (Score:2)
1.get some tallented programmers who want to work on a port of
and 2.approach the makers of said game.
Basicly, the deal would go like this:
We (the programmers doing the port) aggree to:
A.Assign all copyrights in our efforts over to the maker of the game
B.Sign Non-Disclosure-Aggreements and not publish any source, binaries, data, information or whatever without getting it cleared by the maker of the game
C.Port the game (and, once
Re:Linux Gaming, an idea to get more games... (Score:1)
Why would programmers volunteer their (derivitive) code to be copyrighted by other people without compensation ($$$)
NDA's only work with existing business relationships.
What could be done is the companies publish the formats for their game resources (media, scripts, etc). So that only the engine needs to be rewritten by GPL projects without a lot of reverse engineering.
GPL vers
Re:Linux Gaming, an idea to get more games... (Score:2)
Re:Linux Gaming, an idea to get more games... (Score:1)
Tomb Raider AOD Wrecked my World (Score:1)
You can't turn or run quickly, no side stepping, clipping-clipping-clipping problems, krazy kamera, awful voice acting that makes Hollywood 'B' movies seem professional. Bugs galore.
And you thought Halo PC was a porker...
Re:Tomb Raider AOD Wrecked my World (Score:1)
It was so bad that everybody must be blocking it. (Score:2, Interesting)
Why Master Of Orion 3 of course. God, I want my money back, and the month of my time I spent on the Quicksilver forums. A game that was both Unbelievably Hard to play, yet with such an idiotic AI that it was easy to win by doing nothing. They actually attempted to make a game that could play itself, that you oversaw which decisio
And in the "status quo" dept... (Score:2)