Bowlercoaster
Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.
Final Fantasy X
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
The Disappointment Engine
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
Object-Oriented Debate
There are two major schools of thought about how you should write software. Here's what they are and why people argue about it.
Civilization VI
I'm a very casual fan of the series, but I gave Civilization VI a look to see what was up with this nuclear war simulator.
“MadLibs with Samuel L. Jackson” has to be the greatest mental image I’ve had all year.
Oh, and the article’s pretty insightful, too.
God bless you, Shamus. We need more people with this attitude.
F*ck Abercrombie. F*ck Nike. F*ck Apple. F*ck everyone who wears someone else’s name on their chest or car, like some sort of brand or mark of ownership.
(Sorry if I offend anyone, but that just struck a nerve.)
It sometimes seems like the amount of insight someone has into how people work is inversely proportional to how much actual influence they have on the industry, either as a whole or within a specific company.
I sometimes wonder if it’s going to take another Videogame Crash to knock some sense into the industry (or if this would even work) …
Well we have digital distribution now so we probalby won’t see 10 million copies of Episode 3 dumped to landfill…
OR WILL WE?
I approve of the sentiment of the article though. I was pondering picking up one of the consoles a while back and I eventually gave up because most mornings I don’t know what I want to play! So I’m not about to spend some of my moneys on a gadget that I don’t know that I’ll ever use.
I have to say, I don’t entirely agree with you on exclusives. Making a game work properly on multiple systems with differing specs and control systems takes extra time which could have been spent making the game better. Or they decide not to do it properly so that somebody ends up with a sub-standard port. I know I would be ecstatic to hear that the next Elderscrolls game/Bioshock 2/Fallout Game/anything else will be a PC exclusive so we don’t have to worry about some horrible menu system just so that xbox players don’t have to get a mouse.
I like this one a lot, Shamus.
Personally I bought a PS3 because the Wiimote sucks, and so does Microsoft (I don’t like their behaviour in the market, so I’m boycotting MS products).
When it comes to cute games for the PS3, I’ve never thought about it. I do own Little Big Planet. I also own PixelJunk monsters, a game than can be bought in the playstation store online. And I’m sure there are more cute games for buying there too???
Just a comment about your last sentence:Age doesnt matter here.I watched a show about influence of game on children,and there were loads of 5,6 year olds playing GTA4,halo,and similar.
This is one of the reasons I’ve been a PC gamer since the mid-late 80s.
The range of available games is (still) quite staggering, and more than makes up for the lack of certain console only titles.
Mind you, I’m an RPG, adventure and strategy game player, so it’s no suprise I favour the PC.
I don’t really know how you could break that sort of deadlock between the consoles, but perhaps the motion controls the others are bringing out will change things. It should mean more casual, family friendly gaming available on all systems.
Of course that will still leave Nintendo needing to put up more extreme titles.
On the one hand, I agree with you on hating exclusives. I don’t want to have to buy fifty different consoles to play all of the games that interest me, which is why I’ve stayed out of the modern console world entirely so far.
On the other hand, let’s face it, the only difference between the consoles is the games, pretty much. The hardware’s all pretty much the same, and while things like the Wiimote are innovative, there’s no particular reason that the PS and XBox couldn’t do something similar for their consoles. So branding/exclusives is the only way they can convince you to buy their console over the competition’s.
Furthermore… for those folks who already know what type of gamer they are, said branding is actually very helpful. It means you can buy a console knowing that most of the games over its lifetime are likely to be ones you like, as opposed to it being a crapshoot.
I guess it kind of boils down to… I’d definitely personally just rather have “universal consoles” that can play any game. But as long as consoles are going to stay as only able to play a certain subset of games, it actually does make a lot of sense for each console’s subset to be strongly themed/branded.
House of the Dead: Overkill is a game available on the Wii that is also chock full of blood, guts and obscenities shouted by a woefully stereotypical black man.
It is also lots of fun.