vimes

I don't know... only once was I in a community where you had this kind of vassal relationship between some elder members and younger ones. I got tired of it after a year or so, realizing that the only conversations I was entering were the one that only involved the few seemingly rationale people of the community. Overall, I'm just not the kind of guy to ask people to back up their argument if it's pretty obvious they are just listening to the wisdom of the many or copycating someone else. I don't pretend i never wanted to be with the coolest kid on the block and that it isn't enjoyable to share opinions with a acknowledge member, but I've grown to like just making my point, listening to others', asking for clarification/details or answering to criticisms or question directly targeting my statements. So, I don't have a lot of experience of the situation you describe... why don't you just flee this kind of people like I have ?

5000 = $62.50 , right? Man, I would hate to be a 360 gamer not owning PS2.

I'm not sure the comparison is going to stand but isn't all the former thumbs staff members starting a blog a bit like a Pinata dying in Viva Pinata and other creatures festing on Corpse Candy to sustain their own life ? It' like cool, but also, not.

I was going to say " Why is daddy going away?" When the result of googling this phrase disturbed me a lot : I mean, what are the odds ?

Not necessarily : a guy created an effect for Ogre3D that automatically creates the illusion of the interiors of buildings depending on the number of floors and rooms per floor they contain. There is a tech demo available and it's looking great. He should come up with a whole street in the upcoming days/weeks. Oh, and apparently the gain in performance compared to real 3D floors/rooms should be great.

Hell, this was in San Andreas, wasn't it ?

I don't understand this... why would you want to create a real city when you can create something better, enhanced or totally different than reality thanks to the technology ?

By great visual, you mean the lighting and the colors, right ? Because the directing part with all the slow mo -fast mo, the rest of the aesthetic felt just like complete shit to me.

And ElMuerte, Id' like to have this kind of gameplay too, but that wouldn't be a GTA, would it ? I ranted about it in the past, I would definitely like to see a GTA/Mafia clone with an overarching storyline that set itself in time. What I mean is that the world wouldn't stay idle between two missions and you could choose to get involve in the story happening or not, but you would see the side effecs on the environment and use that for your own purpose.

Maybe, you're going to tell me I'm wishing GTA IV would be something the GTA series is definitely not but here is why I liked this teaser : 1 - It's really well put together in the cinematic sense.It's smart, subtle and has a great soundtrack. It's like the teaser of AI but for a game. 2 - Is it me or does it seems that the GTa series is moving from grotesque/clichéd storyline to more subtle one ? I really didn't like any of the storyline of the previous installments, but the fact that the main character seems to be seeking a life out of crime is a good start to get a storyline that isn't a rip off of gangster's movie. D'you think it might impact the gameplay? Another question to English natives, are you sure the guy is Russian? The accent reminded me more of a middle-east guy than a Moscow guy but I could be wrong. There is only one thing disappointing though, no huge rural area as the ones from San Andreas appears in this, but this is just a teaser after all.

Any teenagers likes to think he/she is mature while most adults don't care about it or shift representation by saying they are 'serious'. So, 'mature' labels the mental representation of the world of adulthood by teenagers not the reality of mature contents.

Well, Drawn to be Alive isn't a mod like any other to begin with : the three guys who made it come from SupInfoGame, a french high-profile undergraduate gaming school, for which they did this project. I saw the developers in Paris back in October '07 and they said they used UE was to create a advanced proof of concept for a project they intended to go commercial if successful. In fact, Drawn to be Alive is fully playable since last year. They kept its access 'restricted' because they got a huge positive response at last Game Festival in Paris from UbiSoft people and other professional, so I guess they saw the opportunity to make it a full fledged project.

Sometimes, reviewers make me want to kill them

Apparently it is true Source : Kotaku

It's a frustrating game : the cars react exactly like crappy model cars from my childhood. And that's what any politician would tell you...!

Meh, I'm about 7 today, but yesterday, it was more of a 3. 'Guess, I'm a lunatic gamer...eyh, I should use that appelation for a website:shifty: Anyway, I'm excited about two things currently : trying to make Yake work and finding the time to play Yoshi's Island on the DS while the friend who forgot it at my place still wonders where it is. Also, I found HL² for 16€ and I'm still pondering if I should buy it now or wait for the huge pack that will be realease late 2008...and play all the shitty games I got from the 1€ fair at the mall fair (Revolt and Kingpin... plus 4 shitty movies including the very terrible Young Guns - I just LOVE 1 € fair, you always got what you paid for.) It's been so long since I enjoyed an FPS, I'm thinking the awaking HL² mod community might be the answer.

Looking on a rom website, Nights into Dreams is 65megs.

Meh, there's always the one on the side of the DS, plus it works for any game!

Phoenix Wright 2 kept my attention as a gamer for two weeks but despite that I only enjoyed it to a certain extent. In fact, I disagree with Aussie Ben in that I don't think I will go through it ever again : the game is far too rigid, far too linear for it to be re-playable under a 10-20 year notice. There is nothing, NOTHING that you can overlook the first time around. The writer didn't even bother writing custom lines for characters that are presented objects they don't relate to... and seeing how few characters and how few objects there are, it really struck me as laziness. The dialogs are captivating but the few times I had to do a sequence twice I realized how painful it is for them to be completely non-interactive.

That's because he's not pretending that Jack and The Rainmaker are revolutionary flicks, and while saying that Megalopolis is a very important project to him, he's not affirming it's going to turn your brain and your emotion inside out.

But Psychonauts doesn't try to be a platformer like Super Mario Sunshine ... the only link Schafer drew to an existing game is Zelda. Staying on Psychonauts, I would say that the way it used several elements of gameplay, culture and art is an innovation in itself. And that would lead me to say that innovation can take a lot of different forms... which might make the whole concept of innovation to be misunderstood, as Marek said. Apart from that, I'm not quite sure I understood the rest of Marek's post : : 'Just make the game. Don't try to plan everything ahead.' Is that supposed to be about games in general or just Erkki's project ?

As much as I like listening to Molyneux, I understand how he can be infuriating for some people. I understand it because I'm not sure I would stand the same kind of attitude from a filmmaker. Let's take as example Francis Ford Coppola, a cinematographer that more or less matches Molyneux' profile in the current movie industry : the guy made genius movies 30 years ago, changed the way blockbusters were made, put the directors in power at the studios, made Kurozawa known in the western world ... but has delivered so-so movies ever since. All these years, he has been talking about a special project called Megalopolis, a very big movie that he wishes to create under the perfect condition, working on it alone in the meantime. Now, let's imagine that Coppola - over these last two decades - had been talking extensively about Megalopolis, saying it would be the best movie ever made, a movie that would revolutionize the art form in terms of visuals but also in terms of acting and storytelling ... Let's continue up the path of conjectures and say he'd shown the audience some rehearsal tapes, some temporary SFX shots, some important bits of the story, some artworks and excerpts from the movie that would prove him right. Then let's imagine the movie takes years to get made and, in the process, part of the cast grows tired and leave the project. Same for the sfx team. Same for the screenwriters crew. Now, finally, the movie is released and most of the cast has been replaced by so-so actors, the special sfx are good but not striking and the story turn out to be less compelling as it was. It's not a bad film per se, but it's very far from what the guy was promising. I would hold quite a grudge toward the man for screwing such a good idea and lying about a movie that never existed in the first place. And then, the guy would come up, criticize the rest of the industry , start a new project while pledging that this time, it'd turn out perfect... but it never does. Not fully, at least. Well, that is what some people following Molyneux' inteventions might have felt about his 4 most recent projects.

Looking back at 2004 and 2005, 4 big FPS titles were released whose publishers/developers offered engine licensing : Doom III (DIII Engine), HL²(Source Engine), Unreal Tournament 2004(UE 2.5) and Far Cry(CryEngine). What sounded cool at the time was that all these engines were covering different technical areas and shipped with a bunch free tools, so I figured (like most people I suspect) that we would see an explosion of mods and games licensing these engines to focus on the gameplay [which could, as they pretended at the time, bleed outside the FPS genre] Now, we know that never happened but the huge letdown was unexpected. As always, 95% of moding projects never saw the light of the day, UE went pretty dead after the result of 'Make Something Unreal', HL² modding community has only been delivering since a few weeks ago and Far Cry as well as Doom III never had any proper mods project to begin with. As for licensing, it never happened for Far Cry and Doom III whose engines were only used for internal projects or sister-companies' projects(Quake IV for instance). HL² would be in the same case if it wasn't for Dark messiah and a few mods promoted to stand alone versions; with the difference that the Source Engine based games are offering subtle difference of gameplay inside the FPS genre : The Ship, They Hunger, Portal... The real winner of the lot is unsurprisingly UE2 - that was upgraded to 2.5 in 2004 and 2X in 2005 - which managed to get a freakin' lot of clients and surely covers the costs due to extra-dev to make their engine something another company could understand. But what about Crytek, Valve and ID : of course the sale of the games made this cost virtually invisible, but one would wander if the gain from licensing really turned to profit at a point or not...And it's not like they guarantee commercial success for the studio which bought them : nearly all UE games are sequels of sequels and most of their audience are people coming back for it, not people convinced by the use of the engine itself. What's even more troubling is that developers stopped spending time on tech research :how many resorted to tweaking and spending an awful lot of time understanding the way the engine works. Is that the fault of the providers or the end-developers ? Frankly, apart from the bad reputation of the Source Engine, I don't have a clue... But anyway, we gamers don't really care about that, it's dev studio internal mess. What's important are the quality of games. So... were there any benefit in that respect for the gamers? In truth it's alarming : there is nothing that proves that game engine licensing induces better games. When you look at the games with the Unreal Engine, the average quality is very average not to say quite low. And I'm not talking about innovation in gameplay, I'm just talking about overall quality. The point is... what's the point of licensing? Licensing engine has still to prove being profitable to the providers, that it's really useful to developers and that it helps creating better games. And thus, even so their tool suit and their engine look amazing, I wonder what might make Crytek sell their CryEngine2 while CryEngine despite its enormous quality was an utter failure most of the big production will take the UE3 safe bet small prod will turn to cheap engine such as Torque or Ogre3D-based engine. Really, I still dream of an industry in which a few Cryteks, Epics and Ids would focus on tech solutions while the most of the rest would push the envelope in terms of gameplay ... but it's more and more difficult to imagine it's going to happen.

Just something totally out of topic : is it common in the US or UK for people to reference directors, designers and artists they never met by their first name ?

Yeah, that's my point, so why bother creating an engine when there are so many good ones out there and when it's not economically sensible ?