SpiderMonkey

I thought they struck the right tone. GameLife have become as big as they are because people laugh at them. The whole "they are big because they are authentic and real and sincere" high horse that some of those posters are riding on is pretty retarded. Given that, I thought the interviewer did a pretty decent job of being suitably respectful while also acknowledging that people would watch because they wanted to see them say some dumb things. He could've pushed it in much more of a "say something funny, go on, say something, anything" direction, but he didn't.

Haha, I love how this thread has graduated from insulting their mental capacity to now insulting their family too.

I haven't read that particular Al Ries book, but what I have read was very easy to read.

I remember the posts you're talking about and they were pretty good but tbh, if you've ever read any marketing books by Al Ries, you've already read those posts. He even lists the books on his sidebar. (Not to say that what he said wasn't worth saying. If there's one area he has any credibility and authority in, it's marketing, as Max Payne and Prey prove.) Indeed, agreed.

I dunno that he's ever what I'd call trolling or retarded. I think it's just that his credibility is so low after failing to get DNF out of the door for nearly 10 years, that if he wasn't being controversial, no one would pay him any attention. On this topic, I'd always seen him as similar to Mark Rein. These guys are very used to reskinning and rereleasing the same straightforward game - lots of shooting and lots of explosions. They are the ultimate same-gameplay+better-graphics developers. It's what they like to play, so it's to be expected that they are cynical and disinterested. It's what they have built their businesses on doing, so it's to be expected that they will be the ones wielding the FUD. "Reasoned"? Are you referring to what Scott Miller said? Because that's just a one sentence gossipy FUD comment at the end of a much longer post. I'm not saying he's not right, but defining that as "reasoned" just sounds like "reasoned = what I wanted to hear".

I doubt it, personally. I think Sony, like EA, understands and have demonstrated that you don't necessarily need hardcore gamers on your side for your products to be a success. They are still the most effective at reaching the mysterious "mainstream" and it'll take evidence of that changing to convince me that they are really in trouble.

I prefer it to the $ -> £ tax that was in place before the creation of the Euro, though. (And that consolevania video is some funny shit.)

Probably the most impressive video I've seen from this E3.

I'll grant you that one, "meaningful" was a dumb word to use. I think the size of screen definitely changes the type of immersion you can achieve though.

I didn't say 3D just plain didn't work. I meant 3D didn't work in the getting-really-immersed kinda way. You only need to put something like Castlevania next to something like the Splinter Cell to see how much more fine detail you can get out of the screen when you put 2D up on it. The screen language is suited to different things, in the same way that TV is suited to different things from what you'd put on a cinema screen.

The way I see it, Nintendo will have Nintendo games and Nintendo games will be worth the price of entry. As for the other two consoles, it really seems totally 50:50 now as to which will become the publishers' preferred system. I bought a Gamecube this gen around and got to see how depressing it is when everyone abandons a platform, so I'd rather wait and see which one ends up on top before putting down the much bigger amount of money. I still got my money's worth from my Gamecube, but if I dropped $600 on a PS3 and then it flopped, I'd be pretty gutted.

What is up with the game having no reviews out for it? http://www.gamerankings.com/htmlpages2/929060.asp Sure I can understand that it's E3 week and every worthy games journalist is in Los Angeles, but the game has been gold for a fortnight, right? Are the PC sites uninterested in covering it right this week, or are Ritual uninterested in having it reviewed this week?

You could get into it? I tried a year ago and couldn't manage it. The rough edges on the pre-Doom/Quake interface and the ultra-lowres bitmap characters were too much for me to really stick with it. Gave it my best shot and played for several hours, but then when I stopped I never started again.

I find the Japan quote at the end of that article pretty interesting too: Impressively honest to admit what really might be true - that they simply have no idea what Japanese gamers want. And if they are meant to be turning profitable next year, they can't afford to just keep throwing money at the problem.

I think the screens on a handheld are just too small to do 3D in any meaningful and immersive manner, for a lot of game genres. The ones that do work (e.g. Metroid Prime Hunters) are notable for how action-oriented/cut-down-in-depth they are compared to their home console siblings. I totally missed Yoshi's Island though. What's the big deal?

I find myself taking a strange attitude this year. I'm interested to see what is announced, but not particularly interested in hearing any details about anything. For some reason, rather than doing what I'd normally do (gorge myself on trailers, screenshots and write-ups), I'm happy just to know what titles are coming down the pipe and then see what reviews they get closer to the time. So I guess to answer your question, I'm just going to Gamespot and skimming down the list, then checking out here and the Shacknews forums to see if anyone is raving about anything I might have skipped over. Joystiq's "our writers are paid per post" style leaves me with a love/hate relationship with the site. Sometimes they dig up some really interesting niche stories; a lot of the time their writers just pump out utter dross so they can hit their quota.

I think it comes down to the way that any time you make something, for a linear increase in quality, an exponential increase in time you put in is required. Making something is never desperately hard. Getting something up to a standard that you wouldn't be embarrassed to put your name to is what takes all the time.

You (accidentally?) point out (what I consider) one of the great tensions of AI. It takes time to act intelligently, so for AI to seem intelligent you want them to be alive for a fair while. But the longer an AI lives for, the slower the pace of the experience. How long is long enough to be intelligent but yet also keep the pace of the game high? Different games successfully find different balance points - Timesplitters does very well with simple enemies that die incredibly quickly; FarCry's enemies are tough buggers and that gives them the longetivity to do some intelligent things.

The first two times you guys posted about this, I thought you were just being unnecessarily nasty, so I just avoided it (I assumed it was just a bunch of kids, like that Red Alert 2 intro remake that circulated). Now that it seems to have made it to number 3, I finally got around to watching it and shit, spaff, I totally see what you mean. This stuff is utterly compelling viewing.

I saw that rumour the other day and found it pretty interesting too. But then I tried to imagine myself successfully controlling three different movement controls at once - revmote, nunchaku movement and analog stick - as well as then remembering to press other buttons to do the in-game actions and ... well, all I could picture was myself flailing in a confused and overwhelmed manner. It seems like the kind of thing that would push the controller from being intuitive to being immensely complex. I could easily see the nunchaku movement detection being used for something more simple though. E.g. in Zelda smacking an enemy with your shield, between sword slashes.

Depends whether you strictly follow the prescribed layout, or just distill out some of the architectural themes and riff on those for your layout. A large chunk of the Route Kanal chapter in HL2 is set in sewers of a moderately similar design. I prefer my FPS locations to be plausible places, so I'm a big fan of using real world locations.

I certainly agree with you that the author doesn't really have any valid points (at least not any that he presented any strength of argument for). But what he did achieve with his disjointed rambling was to create a decent Rorschach pattern, so I'm just finding it interesting to see and respond to what other people find in his article.

I think the scope of suggestion that the author was referring to wasn't "what is happening 100 miles from here", but rather "what might be happening just round the corner". Hence how he puts the HL1 Barney, and his "wow isn't this place big" comments, on a pedestal. Within that context, I think the author's gut feeling was that the suggested detail HL2 provided was merely "go a few blocks down and you'll just find more civilians being brutalised". In Black Mesa/HL1, there was always the potential that you'd stumble across another clandestine test lab, harbouring another gauss cannon or other exciting secret. Contrasting the two, more anonymous people living or dying miserably might seem mundane, especially if you are the kind of guy used to fetishising sci-fi and electronics. To boil the author's point down to its base minimum, he just preferred Black Mesa to City 17?

Technically HL: Source never labelled itself as a remake, so to say "higher quality remake" is a rather pointless statement. I have a lot of admiration for the scope of Black Mesa's ambition and the quality of the content they have created so far, but at the moment my expectations are broken into 3 parts: 40% failure to finish (a team of almost 40 people working successfully over the internet for the 3 years required is unprecedented, afaik), 40% failure to capture a lot of the nuance present in Valve's version (everything from pacing to more subtle things like colour theory - why are the rocks in one of Thrik's screenshots orange when the originals were purple?), 20% success. Suspending my pessimism, I'm sure what they end up releasing will be cool, but I doubt it will be Half-Life and I think it'll be a long wait yet.

I think the thing was, he seemed to try and compare the games the same way he is obviously used to comparing video cards. He plucked some numbers out of thin air ("I give HL1 60%; I give HL2 80%"), then set about trying to explain where those numbers might have come from, as if they were the results of some objective testing like a graphics card benchmark or something. Seemed quite a bizarre way round of doing it, to me.