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[Earthquake Damage]

quote:Originally posted by Kagus:
<STRONG>Personally, I'd rather play with ASCII characters than nonmoving graphic characters.  But then again, I haven't actually tried playing with the graphic sets, I've just seen pictures.</STRONG>

Clearly you aren't a fan of the Ultima series (at least I-V).  Damned shame.   :p

[Kagus]

That's right, I'm not.  I played Ultima Underworld.

[Neonivek]

The Ultima series is possibly the most messed up RPG storywise ever

To sum it up: It takes place in the past, present, AND future at the same time.

quote: Personally, I'd rather play with ASCII characters than nonmoving graphic characters. But then again, I haven't actually tried playing with the graphic sets, I've just seen pictures  

You should try it... Find a total graphic tile set (or whatever it is called). THEN you can state which one you prefer (which could still be ASCII). I can understand why Toady doesn't make one himself though. If you want a reference I know a really good total graphical replacement set (changes everything)
A) He is a programmer not a artist (well... Pixil art wise... He apperantly has other talents that would make him an artist)
B) He is constantly changing the game which would force him to change and add new art thus lengthening his production time
C) People already do it pretty well as it is
D) The game was made to be easily moddable.

[Keizo]

This article is kind of a waste of space. I really hope no game developers take these moronic commandments seriously. I stopped reading at the whiner's (*ahem*, writer's) criticism of the half-life crowbar. The crowbar is practically the principle weaponry icon of HL. It's not worth spending any more time looking at.

[Idiom]

quote:I really hope no game developers take these moronic commandments seriously.  

Can you elaborate? From the looks of it, you're denouncing the entire article, and gave up partway, just because he criticized Half Life.
It's an icon, and therefore its not worth looking at? What?

[Lyrax]

I think that it's good to start a killin' game with a decent weapon, but I disagree with the idea that a good weapon can't be found in one's own garage.  A decent weapon is one that doesn't take more than, say, three or four shots to take out your average foe.  Unless it's an automatic, in which case I think it could take up to six.

What I think game makers should do is differentiate their weapons on a greater basis than 'this one does more damage.'  The HL crowbar, for example, was awesome because it stuns guys.  This makes it useful, even against enemies that the crowbar won't put down very quickly.

[Neonivek]

Sometimes I think some people should look more to the point of what he is saying rather then the specifics.

He is refering to "No overly mundane starting weapons that in reality would otherwise be entirely ineffective".

[AlmostEverywhere]

I think I gotta agree with Keizo.  A lot of good points are made, but the article does seem to have a bit of a narrow viewpoint about what can make a game fun.

Like complaining about powerful weapons not having enogh ammo?  That's an awesome game mechanic.  In RE4 the most powerful weapon is the rocket launcher.  How much ammo is there?  Two.  Not two at a time.  There are two rockets in the entire game, and they will kill any foe up to and including the last boss.  You could deride this as under-using the rockets, but I think it's awesome.

Same sort of thing for the half-life crowbar... it's fun to have to sneak around bad guys and bash them from behind.  At least for a couple minutes.  And after a couple minutes you get a gun.  I think it's awesome.

I was also really annoyed that one part said "graphics aren't important", and another part said "when we hit things it should look cooler."  To me (and probably a lot of DF players, I imagine) the appearance of things isn't nearly as important as the gameplay.  I'd hate to think some developer actually took that Resident Evil clip seriously and spent all their time making a game where each type of attack and damage has its own unique animation, when they could be putting the same resources into making their game more fun to play.

[Keiseth]

I agree with AlmostEverywhere. Also, the crowbar is an awesome melee weapon that I continued to use constantly in Half Life 2.

[Kagus]

Eh, I wasn't that impressed with the crowbar.  It was handy for taking out headcrabs and barnacles and such in HL2, but it didn't pack enough punch to really make it useful.

Doom, on the other hand...  Now there was a game that understood melee weaponry.  Iron knuckles to get you started, and a chainsaw later on.

I say that chainsaws beat crowbars any day.    In Doom 3 you didn't have any knuckles other than your own (and they looked kinda funky, to be honest), but the chainsaw was pure concentrated rampage.  Ahhh, the blood...

And, it packed enough damage to be quite useful against melee-oriented critters.  Chew'em up and spit'em out.  Even the pinky demons couldn't stand much time with a faceful of shredding sawteeth.

[Sergius]

quote:Originally posted by Earthquake Damage:
<STRONG>

Actually, one problem inherent to roguelikes is most enemies are pretty much the same, just with different stats.  There is some variation, but most of 'em feel exactly alike.  The uniqueness of DF's NPCs is currently still more technical than apparent.  We see more variation in Fortress mode than Adventure mode, of course, since their thoughts and personalities make them all behave somewhat differently.</STRONG>

The interesting thing is that the author of that article is pointing out that having realistic faces in a game make identical enemies annoying. On older games where you can't really count how many hairs some bad guy has in his nose, this is much less important. But if everyone has the same damn photo scan of Gary Busey's ugly face then it's very grating.

[Sergius]

quote:Originally posted by Deon:
<STRONG>

LOL what a little prick wrote this article? I laughed =).
Does he mean that if you want to "get closer to touching boob" you should play Mario? Get a life, man -). I mean, it was not a very successful example/comparison   .</STRONG>

Anti-Mario bias notwithstanding, it's the perfect example. A cutesy game that you can play with your girlfriend, vs some "awesome" game that you just play and ignore her.

[Kagus]

Depends on the girl.  For instance, Asia Carrera played Unreal Tournament, and even had a custom character skin made for her.

Of course, most gamers don't have to deal with the assosciated problems of dating a pornstar.

[Darkarbiter]

Wow what a bullshit article.

"Everyone hates escort missions". NO I would love there to be more of them!!! How awesome was defending the drayman in wing commander 1? Or any other escort missions? Sure it can be done badly but well... anything can. World of warcraft would be so much better as a healer class (or any class) if there were a few more AI missions where you had to do escorts and stuff and whats wrong with travelling big distances through open enviroments? I love it and if they put effort into it (which the examples did) then it's not only great but it'd take a fair amount of time also. I don't think any of his complaints about oblivion or half life 2 are valid. Maybe the guy didn't have anything but a crowbar on him? If he's carrying around a machine gun when the combine police officers are ordered to carry around no more than one pistol than he's gonna get into trouble.

Seriously what a stupid article. I mean... fair enough you shouldn't release buggy games and similar but the rest weren't good points really.

[umiman]

I think most people are reading this article wrong. It's mostly satire. You don't tell a comedian he's committing hyperbole regardless of what his level of hilarity is. The fact is that this article manages to draw out the inner fanboy of the common internet male and if one can overreact to such a level because of it... well...

I think most of his complaints are quite valid too, ignoring the examples. Examples are just examples people. You know the saying, "you can make statistics prove anything you want?". Same goes here. Ignore the examples and focus on the primary statement. You can't deny the fact that fighting 3000000000 identical enemies is boring. You can't deny the fact that protracted periods of doing nothing is boring. You can't deny the fact that loading screens are boring. You can't deny the fact that having to repeat entire levels constantly is boring. (The only person who can deny them would be a very lame sadomasochist)

Oh sure, there might be one or two examples of the opposite here and there, but generally speaking, they shouldn't be there. They are examples of flawed game design.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say: if you dismiss the entire article as stupid because you disagree with just one or two small things... you're a fanboy. If you go out of your way to counter every single point of the article... you're a fanboy.