I agree with what you wrote, but this is not a turn-based game. The monsters move in real time and will walk up to you and kill you if you just stand still in a room. If you hammer the keys they will move in slow motion compared to you.
Oh, I stand corrected then.
Truncated wrote:
He also told me that pressing Keypad2 instead of ArrowDown is faster, since ArrowDown is an extended scancode. So one keypress can be slower than another keypress.
[...]
Also this version takes more steps than the previous movie, but is still faster because it makes one less room transition, as Ilari wrote in the submission.
This I just don't appreciate at all. It makes sense technically but feels too disconnected from TASing the game rather than TASing and optimizing the vast complexity of the combination that is DOS/x86 PC. It also doesn't help that the emulated system has no solid hardware specs to have a reference processing speed, so basically optimizations like this can't even be called taking advantage of the specific hardware traits, unlike what is most often the case with non-PC systems. At this point it would be easier for everyone if the emulator were hacked into processing all scancodes at the same rate.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
However, it's not humanly possible to play at this speed, and it's extremely obvious from watching the video, that some tools are needed.
A very confusing, if not completely misguided notion. Would you judge a chess game's speed by the wall time as well, rather than the amount of moves made by the winning player?
For discreet turn-based games that force no kind of continuous timing on any of the actions, wall time is close to completely irrelevant. When you play the game you essentially play it in frame advance, so the result is only different when recorded and played back. It's the same as speeding up the hardware to make it accept input and show output faster, or upping the framerate of a video. It might appear faster but the content is the same.
This and all other such games should only be judged on the ground of meaningful actions, i.e. turns. Wall time would only matter as the unifying frame of reference that would only be valid if all actions are processed identically throughout and between all TASes done on the same game.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
http://www.indiegogo.com/resurrect-adom-development
As some of you may know, Thomas Biskup the author of Ancient Domains of Mystery is running a crowdfunding campaign to restart the development of ADOM and fix things that were broken, underdeveloped, or unbalanced, as well as introduce some new stuff. He has a team of three people, among which an artist and a musician, and the requested total is $48,000. So far they've gathered $33,266 and there are just over two weeks left.
So, if you'd played ADOM and would like to see it improved, such as:
— getting new artifacts, corruptions, items and monsters;
— having most of the bugs and balance/scumming issues fixed;
— getting better UI features such as those in ADOM Sage;
— native builds for modern systems;
...do pledge something! (I already have!)
IGG will refund your pledge if the campaign doesn't reach the defined goal, so you're not losing anything in the unfortunate event. The game itself will remain free, as usual, in any case.
The team has already released an early version of ADOM 1.2.0 where some of the worst bugs have been fixed.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Guess you don't care as much about accurate emulation as you let on.
I'm with hero on this one. lsnes is perhaps the first emulator used on this site whose GUI made me think "I'd rather have inferior emulation, thanks". Why even suggest anybody be put through the torture of using it when Snes9x has had all the right features for years is beyond me.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Well... not exactly what I had in mind.
A "review-ish" post can contain things unrelated to the review subject, such as personal comments or questions directed at the author, or something else like that; this way users would have to construct their posts specifically to be tagged as reviews. It's not very comfortable in my opinion.
I rather meant a text input field, say, somewhere on the publication's rating page, where a user could do a write up—they could copypaste their forum posts' content there if they so wished.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
You can edit your posts. It's recommended if the content doesn't need another post, such as when you need to set off topic reply notification.
Also, I think Zero Wing has been done, and wasn't interesting at all.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
More important things than video games? Hah.. The sole reason I work/study/do anything else is so I can play more video games in the long run :P
I mean making something for the living, taking care of the family and yourself, socializing, learning new things. You know, that kind of stuff that is, well, really more important but in many cases no less fun. :P
Kyrsimys wrote:
But anyways, I actually kind of disagree on this one, a couple of hours a day (+ more on weekends) is more than enough to count as being more than a casual gamer, and most people who work normal hours can definitely squeeze that in if they want to, if they don't have kids or some other very time consuming hobby. And I'm pretty sure people who play more than, say, 12 hours a week definitely buy a lot of games.
I see the hardcore/casual dichotomy a bit differently. For me, a casual gamer is the one who doesn't care much about the result. They see games as something to relax to, as a fun and careless experience, so they're likely to get frustrated at high difficulty, having to grind sections of the game; they largely disregard the competitive aspect of the game. A hardcore gamer, on the other hand, strives to learn ins and outs of the game, is goal-oriented, prefers higher challenge and doesn't mind repetition if it means better results—be it some rare in-game items, stat boosts, higher scores or better times. They care about being better at the game even if it means actual effort, because satisfaction from the result is great enough to offset that.
I think it's a pretty fair way to describe different approaches to playing games—and I by no means insist that somebody who plays some game casually wouldn't play another seriously. It's all good fun either way. But I do posit that you have to spend your game time damn thoughtfully and efficiently to achieve decent results in 12 hours a week. From my experience of playing shmups you need some 30 to 100+ hours of practice with the game depending on its difficulty and your experience with similar games. 12 hours will carry you through... 2/3 of the game, maybe.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
I don't think DarkKobold's point was about whether kids have enough money for games, but rather about whether it actually is kids and not grown-ups who buy these games. This is a valid point, considering that at least in the US the average game player is 30 years old and has been playing games for 12 years and the average age of the most frequent game purchaser is 35 (source). Children, or even teenagers, haven't been the main target audience of console games for a while now, and "will the parents buy it?" isn't as important a question nowadays as "will a technologically oriented young man in his twenties buy it?". From my own experience I'd say this is true especially for the aforementioned sports games; they are bought almost exclusively by young men who grew up with the first editions of the NHL and FIFA games. Teenagers seem to be way more interested in whatever's trendy (for example GTA 3 a few years back, Skyrim and Call of Duty games now).
The average age thing needs to be taken with a grain of salt—realistically it's about as telling as the average body temperature across the hospital. It represents the average age of everybody who plays anything regardless of the kind of games they play, what platforms they use, how often they play, how many games they purchase or how much they spend on their games.
Most of the bored office workers in developed countries play some simple little games when boss isn't looking—this has been the case since the 90s. My parents have played Minesweeper on my PC for nearly a decade. Technically that alone makes them eligible for ESA's statistics... well, would be if they were living in the US. But it doesn't exactly make them an "audience" for video games, let alone console games—something that requires a specialized controller and a user interface completely disconnected from routine actions such as browsing the internet. They don't actively explore the market, don't spend money on games, and generally play very few different titles—for instance, I've never seen my mom play anything beside Minesweeper. Based on my and my friends' experience, when an adult plays a console game, in pretty much all cases it either means they've been playing video games since at least their teen age, or they're playing them on a system bought for their kids—in which case they usually do it with their kids. My dad played Battle City and some SNES soccer game with me some 17 years ago. (Damn, has it really been that long?!) He had fun with them but wouldn't touch my consoles otherwise. It makes about as much sense to consider him a console gamer as it is to consider somebody who drinks a pint of beer at parties a few times a year an alcoholic.
ESA also makes a distinction between the average age of a game player and the average age of a game buyer. Let's look at the history:
Through 2007/2008: players at 35, buyers at 40.
Through 2009: players at 35, buyers at 39.
Through 2010: players at 37, buyers at 41. It's the year Angry Birds was released in, so the peak at around 40 is not particularly surprising.
Through 2011: players at 30, buyers at 35.
The buyer age fluctuates around the point where a person would be expected to parent a teenager. I don't think it ever went below 30 at any given time in videogame history, but it would be interesting to see the statistics for gamer age from, say, early 2000s. The ESA's site doesn't seem to have tracked it back then, if it even existed in the first place.
Another fact from the ESA: "parents are present when games are purchased or rented 90 percent of the time". 90%. Honestly, I don't see a single reason why a self-supporting person of age would invite a parent to a game-buying session or, better yet, send them off to buy the games.
Finally, let's face it, it's mostly kids and the unemployed who have enough time to devote to functionally complex video games without having to sacrifice more important things. Casual games, on the other hand, can be played everywhere, at any time, by everybody, on virtually any device with a screen and a couple buttons (Game & Watch, anyone?). They can be enjoyed by everybody who doesn't seek depth in their games, or just want something quick to pass time with. It's one of the two main reasons why Ouya is going to be a success. (The second is that casual games cost less than 5$ each.)
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Uh, how about the fact that they've done this for 8 generations of consoles?
Most of these eight generations have had substantial improvements over each other, and not all of them started off at above 300$ by far, even when corrected for inflation. Not all of them happened to be released during the periods of economic recession, either. Here are the US numbers from 2010 released just recently, but you should know from the virtue of living in that country that things didn't considerably change for the better in the last two years. The dollar has never been as fragile in what, decades?
Considering the ungodly bills an average American households pays off—as most of them carry mortgage, credit card debt, and car-related expenses all at the same time—this doesn't leave a lot of freedom to throw away hundreds of dollars liberally. It's not really hard to pinpoint that the decision to buy a new gaming system typically becomes progressively harder to take as their amount in the household grows, even more so if it's as expensive as new systems are at launch.
DarkKobold wrote:
Oh yes they are. Both the gaming populace and manufacturing capabilities have been on the steady rise in the last 20 years, thanks to overall increase in population, the remains of the earlier generations of gamers, and considerably better penetration of new markets. Selling a 10 million units now compared to selling 10 million units in early 90s is a difference worthy of an order of magnitude, and the secondary market is as strong as ever these days, with easy availability of searching and trading used wares via the internet.
But let's take a look anyway.
PS3:
— started off at rather outrageous 599$ without options to decrease the price;
— was the cheapest Blu-ray player for several years;
— has been compromised several times;
— has had notable hardware problems (YLOD);
— was sold at a loss for at least the first four years of its life cycle;
— sold barely above 1/3 the units of its predecessor, which hasn't had new games released for it in five years or so.
Xbox 360:
— has had catastrophic hardware problems throughout most of its life cycle;
— is doing exceedingly poorly in some of the largest gaming populace regions (Japan).
Both systems have rather astonishingly poor libraries of exclusive retail games. Both systems are still being fully supported, updated, and have new input paradigms released mid-cycle, which in olden days would have warranted a new console entirely. Both systems have done more than enough to undermine the trust of paying populace: having your CC information compromised is hardly something you would want to deal with again. Neither is taking the system for a post-warranty period replacement. There are people on other forums I visit that have had their X360s die on them thrice. I'm surprised mine is still working, but then again I've only started using it in 2010.
Vita can so far be safely considered a flop: 1.5 million units in half a year is nothing for a handheld. Only Nintendo is still going strong, in part due to never selling its systems at a loss and due to having a vast pack of exclusive franchises that always sell reasonably well no matter how bad they are (Mario, Zelda, Metroid, etc.).
DarkKobold wrote:
By the way, what proof do you have for this assertion? I'd expect some better argument from you than this.
This wasn't even dubious to begin with, but since you insist...
1. The minimum age for legal work in the USA is 14. Work-hours are limited for kids under the age of 16. [1] A foot paper route is expected to pay between 50$ and 200$. [2] Not all of these money are expected to go towards consoles and games.
2. Laws in most states mandate school attendance at least until graduation or age 16. [3]
3. Gaming consoles cost 200–600$ and new retail games go for 40–80$ (collectors' editions go higher, but we don't take that into account). Both are more expensive at the start of their respective life cycles.
4. If you study and work enough to not leave yourself much time to play, you can't be considered the core audience.
I trust you to put two and two together.
DarkKobold wrote:
We aren't living in the world of "Childern of Men." Kids are growing up, and asking for consoles for birthdays, christmases, etc. For every kid getting off his parent's money, there is another being born on to it.
It doesn't really contradict anything I've said. It doesn't change the facts either. Also, read that article I've linked to earlier.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
To be fair, NES and its generation hasn't been as extensively upgraded as X360/PS3: new software features, extensible hardware, drastic changes in input devices (Kinect and whatever Sony's thing's name is) to name some. The NES's performance has been pushed to its limits within a few years, while the X360 and PS3 games still can't use their host systems efficiently.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
The ridiculously huge areas are one of the known and most-exploited ways to extend playing time in recent years. An expensive game sells better if you can't complete it in an evening or two, even if the only thing that prevents you is running back and forth over functionally empty landscape.
It's why I've grown to prefer shmups, roguelikes, and games like Tetris. There's no pointless padding, it's all meaningful action all the way through.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
I don't even understand who you're referring to, is it the AAA title developers? If so, sure they can. In fact they do exactly that with graphics, sound design and other things of secondary value rather than coming up with something original and interesting. Because graphics sell, being clever doesn't. In fact, the most recent game I remember that had its priorities right despite (lol) the relatively high production values is Portal; Portal 2 and Deus Ex: HR would qualify if they weren't themselves riding on the ideas and setting of their predecessors. In multiplayer games gameplay matters even more; I'd even say it's all that really matters—colorful graphics just distract from action, music is either unneeded or better played through an audio player in background, and the entire fun is in pacing, controls, and interaction with the in-game environment. And it's disturbing how few developers get that right these days, instead time and time again opting to concentrate on graphics, cookie-cutter plots nobody cares about, and forgettable music.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Do you really think some artist who has to make 16 cars in 2 weeks will want to add everything detailed like the underside, the glove compartment, The wiring below the dashboard and steering wheel, detail under the seat. All with custom textures and personal designs
These people have to work smart not just hard. They won't waste time on trivial stuff that might not even be seen. Not to mention everything they'll make will be low poly or simple shapes. They'll repeat or fake if they can.
I'm sure they would love to let their hair down and get crazy with their work, but they do have a quota to meet.
Your point being?..
I'd also like to add that sales don't always represent the revenue. The budgets on modern console games are often so high they take hundreds of thousands of copies to pay off, which is most often not the case with 1-2$ AppStore stuff. It doesn't help that the high budget console games are all retail releases, which means additional expenses on physical media manufacturing, logistics, and paying retailers their share. Steam, AppStore and other digital distribution models allow to bypass all of this, potentially increasing the profit margins, closing the door on the secondary market, and making it possible to have bargain sales at any time you need without running out of items to sell. Sony and Microsoft would love to enforce digital distribution because of that, obviously, but retailers won't go for that. They can't be forced either because the consoles themselves are distributed that way.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
The majority of gamers you're alluding to—the ones playing the same crap over and over—are also the ones who buy games on their parents' money. Now how exactly do you think they're going to convince parents they need another gaming system? Think of at least one solid thing beside "it has the game I want".
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
I'm not so sure the situation is that clear. (This kind of thing is not, in fact, nothing new. For instance, when Microsoft first announced their Xbox console, many people predicted that it would mean the downfall of PC/Windows as a gaming platform, as all the gaming development would move to the cheaper, stabler and piracy-free Microsoft console. This didn't happen and PC gaming has been alive and well to this day.)
The thing with PC/Windows (more PC than Windows, even) is that it's not going away regardless of its game library. Virtually everybody has them and will use them anyway. A console without games is a glorified DVD player.
Warp wrote:
Handheld multimedia/gaming platforms have certainly raised to be a serious competitor to traditional consoles. However, they occupy a slightly different niche, and they have their limitations.
Their limitations are gradually going away. 3DS, Vita and modern tablets can show convincing imagery at this point; the consoles have passable controllers built in, while the tablets have external controllers as well as the built-in touchpad/accelerometer/camera/etc. All of them connect to other units wirelessly and generally have everything home consoles do, except smaller. Nintendo's WiiU is the exact point of convergence between a home console and a handheld.
Warp wrote:
A touchscreen is good for many things, but really bad at others. It will never supplant controllers.
Believe it or not, I think the same about gamepad vs. keyboard+mouse for first and third person action games. (I believe, you, too, are on the keyboard side.) Yet it stuck because most gamers, even hardcore (arguably) ones, don't care about that. By hardcore I mean goal-oriented players who learn the game and play it competitively.
Warp wrote:
The major problem is that they can't easily be multiplayer. While a group of friends could ostensibly play around an iPad, it's just not the same thing as them sitting on a sofa playing a party game in a normal console in front of a huge-ass TV, each player with their own controller. (And the iPad was the most capable handheld that could ostensibly be used for multiplayer games. Just forget about it with the ridiculously small smartphones.)
Technically, there's nothing preventing multiplayer there. A lot of people have iOS and Android devices nowadays—it's only a matter of interconnecting them, which isn't hard at all. You don't have to use one iPad—you can use any number of iPads, and each player will even have their own screen others can't see!
Warp wrote:
Also, for example on the Xbox 360 side, quite surprisingly, studies have shown that over 50% of the total time spent using the console, on average, is not for playing games, but for watching multimedia (mainly movies).
Yes, and you can do it on your existing console. That's the thing: the current generation completely fulfills its role as media players for every distribution model present on the market, from Blu-ray to YouTube.
Warp wrote:
There's also a quite funny phenomenon with Apple's AppStore in particular: The vast majority of apps/games are priced in the 1-2 dollar range. Almost nobody will buy a game for 50+ dollars. How many big game companies are ready to sell their games at 1 dollar apiece, when there's a market where they can sell them at 50+? (There's nothing stopping them from selling the games at 50+ dollars at the AppStore. It's just that almost nobody will buy them when they can buy 50 other games for the same money.)
Yes, exactly. That's why the Ouya will trump big-budget publishers into the ground. These days the AAA titles aren't much more fun and don't receive much more play than dirt-cheap titles like Tiny Wings or Angry Birds. And for the price of one AAA title you can buy more fun time—fun that is always with you, instantly accessible, easy to learn and not plagued with ridiculous playtime padding. At the same time, the expensive titles can't be sold cheaper for two reasons: 1) design studios will run out of business, 2) retailers hold publishers by the balls, so they need their share of the pie and presence of retail boxes that cost a lot to produce and distribute.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
The Ouya is the ultimate casual console. Nothing bad about that, of course—I just hope it'll accumulate all the cheap transient titles keeping the remaining platforms relatively clean. :P
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
