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Games Entertainment

FEED on Video Games 26

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-read dept.
Marcus Hum writes "FEED magazine is running a special issue on video games. Features include an interview with Myst creator Robyn miller, an essay on video game violence by children's game designer Theresa Duncan, and a dialog with Marc Laidlaw (Half Life), Will Wright (SimCity), Matt Householder, producer on Diablo and Diablo 2 (Blizzard Software), and Josh Randall, producer on Thief (Looking Glass Studios). "
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FEED on Video Games More

FEED on Video Games

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  • Sony alone dictates what will be released. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Despite all your arguments, I am certain that some small or startup company would be happy to release a lot of Japanese games here that aren't released for the reasons you give, but the truth is that if Sony says there will be no US release, then there won't be one. Period. No one else can manufacture the proprietary playstation compatible CDs (legally).
  • Posted by OGL:

    I think Grand Theft Auto and Carmageddon are really fun games, not because they're gory, but because they were well put together and innovative. This kind of blows her whole argument up in smoke right there.

    -W.W.
  • Posted by Scott Francis[Mechaman]:

    1. Every company's marketing division flunked college. Or at least it seems like it to me.

    2. The time-and-again popular misconception that Americans won't buy anything that doesn't reflect the media and the stereotypical image. Some foreign companies are guilty of this; I remember reading a chain of messages about releasing Sakura Taisen in the States where Sega was afraid that Americans "wouldn't get" the deep Japanese culture of the game; ignoring the fact that most people will seek it out exactly for that. And then of course, there's the silent minority who dislike those kinds of games and will froth at the mouth if they are ever released commercially.
    Heck, how do you explain all those WWF games that keep coming out for the PSX?

    3. The "Stallone theory": if it worked once, do it over and over again. That's why we had the flood of lame, bloody FPSs when the PSX originally came out, because someone wanted the next Doom or Quake. Never mind that playing computer style FPSs on a console is usually an exercise in torture..with Goldeneye being an odd exception(and only in multiplayer).

    4. See number 1. Sega had a nice console with the Saturn and totally canned it by not releasing the horde of software kept in Japan, as well as refusing to make a domestic version of the RAM cart. Let's hope they learned something with the DreamCast..
  • Why emulate? Why not go out an buy one? You would need some pretty hefty hardware to emulate one. Aren't these consoles supposed to cost about $200? That's not too much, if you ask me.

    What I would find much cooler is 4 of these CPU's on a 64-bit PCI card, combined with say 256 MB RAM. Put 6 of these babies in a Sun Ultra Enterprise 450 with enough RAM and 4 CPU's to keep these boards busy. Also, the UE450 has enough PCI slots and space to add a RAID5 array. Cooling would be a problem though :(

    Might this be the most rendering power per square inch?

    Mathijs

  • E450 (Score:1)

    by shrike ( 1090 )
    The E450 has 10 slots.

    Yes, but three are 32-bit only.

    I would put one SOC+ board in though for connection to a few A5000's (20 x 9.1/18GB each). That should be fast enough.

    The E450 has enough room to house 7 disks without having to give up on PCI slots (or so I remember). Using 18 GB disks, that'd be more than 100 GB of RAID5 storagespace. More than enough to store a couple of hours worth of frames. Also, diskspeed is probably not a critcal issue. RAID5 would be pretty essential, since loosing several frames could be rather expensive.

    Also, there shouldn't be any problem with heat. The E450 is designed to accomodate 10 PCI boards both in terms of spacially and thermally.

    Yes, but I bet it's not designed to take 6 cards that each contain 4 CPU's that may be up to 50/60 degrees C. On the other hand, an E450 can take a maximum of 21 disks. 21 (7200 or 10K RPM) disks would probably generate more heat.

    Mathijs

  • They don't got internet games!! ahaah they suck!

    But they do, mister President. The PlayStation 2 does have a modem, so Internet games are bound to appear somewhere down the line.

    Btw. I wish SGI would hurry up with those CrayStations... It's supposed to be as much fun as a herd of Vaxen.

    Mathijs

  • The specs for the new playstation make my mouth water! With the Emotion chip (2x the power of an SGI) I wonder how long it will take before we can emulate a Playstation II?

  • E450 (Score:1)

    by _damnit_ ( 1143 )
    I agree it would have room. The E450 has 10 slots. I would put one SOC+ board in though for connection to a few A5000's (20 x 9.1/18GB each). That should be fast enough. Also, there shouldn't be any problem with heat. The E450 is designed to accomodate 10 PCI boards both in terms of spacially and thermally.
  • not because they have violent pictures or sexual images. I play them because they are fun. I don't understand why people think that the majority of us gamers are unable to tell the difference between fact and fantasy. I mean if 1% of the population can't handle something do we take it away from everybody. Vermifax
  • Oh, but surely the highly-realistic and impressive physics and car damage effects (in II, at least) float your boat. The fact that this is the only driving game I've ever played that seems the least bit realistic is the most addictive aspect for me. No other game maker seems to have the guts to make their games realistic, yet the realism of Carmageddon makes much better screenshots than any cheesy contrived effects you'd find elsewhere in three-dimensionally-impaired games (like all those games that are afraid to let you wreck... you either always land on your wheels or automatically recover, what's up with that?).

    And no, I've never even felt the slightest urge to run someone over in my real car. And I don't expect my car to go from 0-120 MPH in 1 second like in most racing games. It's odd that so many people denounce today's obsession with the detached viewing of violence, as if it's against human nature and bad for us somehow. What about all those gladiators thousands of years ago? What about Lovecraft or Poe? They must've been way ahead of their time. The idea that the advent of television and video games have caused the general degradation of society is hilarious. I think they're trying to hide from the real causes. How devastating for the media would it be if the media blamed itself? I wonder who the scapegoat was 20 years ago, or 50 years ago, or centuries ago.

    logan

  • The violence article says that these violent games, including Carmageddon, contain no innovations in gameplay. "Their gameplay, essentially gunning down/driving over anything that moves, is no great invention either."
    I beg to differ. I think Carmageddon is successful not merely because of the violence, but because of its gameplay. Even without the violence, I'd still enjoy its incredibly detailed physics model and demolition derby aspects. On the other hand, a game where all you do is click on a guy and watch him die or something would hold no entertainment value for me.

    The claim that "cleverness has nothing to do with their success" is quite simply patently false.
    The article assumes that these are the only violent games out there, when in reality there are TONS of violent games out there, but only the popular ones.. i.e. the ones with good gameplay, are well-known enough to be often mentioned!
  • I think one interesting thing to think about is what will happen when photorealistic VR violence comes about. Will we have fun playing Postal when it's indistinguishable from reality? Will THAT be unhealthy or will we still be able to distinguish reality and fiction?
  • >>This kind of blows her whole argument up in smoke right there.
    I hope you noticed that she is NOT against videogame violence. In part two, she discusses how central violence in fiction is to kids and so forth.

    In fact, this is actually the first time I've seen a PRO game violence article that uses an argument other than "it makes people feel good".
  • Yeh, i dig that.

    Except dealing with these things is important to note that our 3D accelerations will be beating this pussy little consoles down into the dirt just like the Voodoo2's did (who gives a fuck about TNT, no linux support, no buy.). Mabye not V3, i gotta admit it doesn't sound that incredible (i hate dithering) but it is damn fast, you gotta give it that. But anyway
    They don't got internet games!! ahaah they suck!
    =)
  • >Why emulate? Why not go out an buy one? You would need some pretty hefty hardware to emulate one.

    Emulation satifies the deep-deep down, gnawing doubts that I just can't seem to get rid of any other way. I sit in front of my new Linux/Intel machine, which can crunch numbers about a zillion times as fast as my old Commodore 64, and think, "Yeah, but ... am I really happier?" Then I realize that because of emulators, anything the C64 could do, I can do now. In a window, while
    emulating a Gameboy on the side.

    Emulation is reassuring. It makes us feel comfortably superior to where we were ten years ago, and, as a bonus, to the console crowd, too. This is not a matter for rational discussion (as in, "yeah, but you're using a $1000 machine to simulate $50 one"); we're dealing with primal urges here.
  • Interesting ... one of the articles [feedmag.com] says Myst creator Robyn Miller has started a CGI film production company, "Land of Point". The article has a URL [landofpoint.com] to the company's site ... but the server (running IIS 4.0) returns HTTP Error 403 - Forbidden. Afraid of the Slashdot effect?

    (Remember a song, "Me and my Arrow", used many years ago in a car commercial? It was from a film called "The Point," which takes place in the Land of Point.

  • Myst wasn't even a game, for Christ's sake! What the hell is he doing talking about games? The people in the dialog, yeah, sure. But if I were putting together a videogame issue, the "talk about your next project" feature would be Sid Meier. No one else.

  • What's the story with it? What the problem preventing them from releasing it?
  • Exactly. Game fans can easily distinguish between a good game with gore and a bad game with gore. These anti-violence people can't tell the difference at all. They see blood and think that's all there is.
  • There's also the fact that some software companies from Japan are very stereotypical of the American Gamer. The majority of American Gamers like Quake and Mortal Kombat, so they don't bring RPG's over to the States. AND, if they DO bring those games to the states, they dummy them down.

    For example, I'll take Squaresoft. They released Final Fantasy IV in Japan for the Super Famicom, and then released it the States as Final Fantasy II, but it was dummied down. They THEN released it again in Japan as "Final Fantasy IV - Easy Version", and they all laughed at the stupid Americans. There was also the game "Final Fantasy Mystic Quest" that was released in Japan as "Final Fantasy USA" and received even more laughs.

    Squaresoft also initially did not plan on releasing the Final Fantasy Anthology, but finally buckled in to American demand. Unfortunately, they promised Japanese gamers that the Americans would not get this collection, so in order to keep their word they took away the aforementioned Final Fantasy IV out of the American pack, and left in Final Fantasy V (never released in the US) and Final Fantasy VI (released as Final Fantasy III).

    So, basically, what's ruining American gamers is that studies show that people like Quake more than thinking RPG's, and I have seen it as well. People wonder why I like games like the FF series, because there's not enough "blowing crap up". They always tell me "if you want a story, read a book or watch a movie!"

    This is why RPG's were not really introduced until the major FF7 boom of several years ago - nobody expected American gamers to like the story based games. And this FEED article talks about the games that are just running around and beating the crap out of things, so I think that this hits the nail right on the head.

    If more companies took chances (yeah, fat chance) then they'd probably be pleasantly surprised.
  • Last I checked, Postal wasn't fun...

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