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[McDoomhammer]

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[ June 09, 2008: Message edited by: McDoomhammer ]

[McDoomhammer]

...

G'nngtzAAAAAGH.  It crashes.  Every time I try to board the 747.   AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA*selfdestruct"

Worse, judging by the error message, it's GameTap's fault.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH.

And now, even the quote button is against me.  DAMN YOU, TECHNOLOGY.

[ June 09, 2008: Message edited by: McDoomhammer ]

[Cthulhu]

I just finished the Hong Kong segment of the game today.  It hasn't crashed once for me.

[McDoomhammer]

Well, that's not encouraging.  I'm kind of hoping that it might be some Gametap problem which will fix itself if I come back later, but I'm not holding my breath.

[Tylui]

Cthulhu, on a completely unrelated subject...  I think I love you.  Go figure.

[Cthulhu]

lol wut

[Wooty]

I can just tell this 'gametap' is going to be eeeevil. They've won though, I can't resist the lull of decade old games nobody buys anymore.

[Cthulhu]

It's not evil at all.  It's not full of Spyware, they have legal licenses from the creators of the games they host, they love babies and puppies, and they help old ladies across the street.  If your friend gives you a cookie, do you think they must've poisoned it?  Accept their ^gener_osity without assuming it's a cunning plan.

[Wooty]

Heh, its a lot better than I expected. No obscene amounts of flashy crap on their 'game vault', no toolbars and icons and flashy things every time you log in, and a pretty decent download speed. Downloading X2 right now.

[McDoomhammer]

Since it does have the first Thief game for free at the moment... "Join us, join ussssss, Join us NOW!"

I poked around the Gametap forums and found someone with the same issue as me.  A re-download fixed it.  I still have the same issues as before, but the game-breaking one is gone.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

I think we can look at this logically and see where everyone's mistrust lies.

1: It all starts with the owner of the game property. This is a company that will probably be willing to just let its old game sit in the vault unsold and unused rather than give it away for free.

Exception: some games are released as a PR ploy, whether to improve company image in general or to promote a sequel.

So the original game company MUST be gaining something from this.

2: Gametap is a company. It's probably not directly owned by a game publisher since there's such a great variety of games on there. Gametap has to make money, since it's not going to do this for free and it has to pay its employees and/or investors.

Gametap MUST be gaining something from this.

3: As the player, you sign up and watch a short ad every time you play. There seems to be no additional cost for you playing. Of course, you have to have an open Internet conenction, presumably so they can change the opening ad when they sell the space to someone else.

You are not spending money on this. But Gametap does get to sell ad space on your game experience, which it passes along to the IP holder.


The question becomes, is the ad revenue enough to cover Gametap's costs? You're downloading a large game, plus they have to maintain the system that updates and serves you the ads.

Something tells me this ad revenue alone is not enough to cover all of Gametap's costs, plus a reasonable profit, plus the significant amount of money the IP holder will want to serve the game.

It's entirely possible that Gametap expects to give away a lot of copies of a few good games, to get you to pay for the service and download a ton of other games. But we all know how free stuff on the Internet works: people will take what you give for free and leave, expecting to find all their other needs fulfilled for free elsewhere.

My prediction is this: A. Gametap is getting something else out of you. Is it data mining? Or B. Gametap is on an experiment which will backfire once they realize how many people take the free stuff compared to how many are signing up.

Just my 2 copper pieces.

(BTW I loved DX but DX2 sucked so hard it hurt after I finished it. Many reasons. Too painful.)

[Maggarg - Eater of chicke]

I don't know why, but I've become disillusioned from most games and companies, generally sticking to stuff like DF.
I sometimes buy the odd soldout game or collection, but the last time I bought a game that counted as current gen (when I bought it) was probably when I got Oblivion.
Which failed to be as fun as Morrowind, where the only thing I really hated was the lousy combat based on rolls of a mathematical imaginary dice, and a really horrible bug that made my PC bluescreen when I jumped. Worse, it struck without warning. I might jump for days and be fine, but load it up the next day, and as I merrily skip off the siltstrider platform I get a hrrrible grinding sound and the good ol' BSOD appears.

[McDoomhammer]

I think we can look at this logically and see where everyone's mistrust lies.

1: It all starts with the owner of the game property. This is a company that will probably be willing to just let its old game sit in the vault unsold and unused rather than give it away for free.

Exception: some games are released as a PR ploy, whether to improve company image in general or to promote a sequel.

So the original game company MUST be gaining something from this.

2: Gametap is a company. It's probably not directly owned by a game publisher since there's such a great variety of games on there. Gametap has to make money, since it's not going to do this for free and it has to pay its employees and/or investors.

Gametap MUST be gaining something from this.

3: As the player, you sign up and watch a short ad every time you play. There seems to be no additional cost for you playing. Of course, you have to have an open Internet conenction, presumably so they can change the opening ad when they sell the space to someone else.

You are not spending money on this. But Gametap does get to sell ad space on your game experience, which it passes along to the IP holder.


The question becomes, is the ad revenue enough to cover Gametap's costs? You're downloading a large game, plus they have to maintain the system that updates and serves you the ads.

Something tells me this ad revenue alone is not enough to cover all of Gametap's costs, plus a reasonable profit, plus the significant amount of money the IP holder will want to serve the game.

It's entirely possible that Gametap expects to give away a lot of copies of a few good games, to get you to pay for the service and download a ton of other games. But we all know how free stuff on the Internet works: people will take what you give for free and leave, expecting to find all their other needs fulfilled for free elsewhere.

My prediction is this: A. Gametap is getting something else out of you. Is it data mining? Or B. Gametap is on an experiment which will backfire once they realize how many people take the free stuff compared to how many are signing up.

Just my 2 copper pieces.

(BTW I loved DX but DX2 sucked so hard it hurt after I finished it. Many reasons. Too painful.)

I feel you about DX2.

Your reasoning is sound, but does omit that Gametap is primarily a subscription service.  Anyone can download and play a modest selection of about 100 games taken from just about every era of PC and arcade history which I understand are changed from time to time, with a single ad before starting the game.  However, for a monthly fee, they take away the ads and give you access to lots, lots, lots more games.

So the question becomes, "Does this support itself?"  There is certainly a case for their not being evil, though.  Especially since the free service, there as a taster to tempt you to sign up, does provide quite a selection with no other restrictions and is very reasonable about the amount of advertising it subjects you to.

[Ioric Kittencuddler]

I already own DX: GOTY.

Also, yeah, DX2 Sucked, though there was one thing that was better which was that knocking people unconscious instead of killing them actually made a difference sometimes unlike the original.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

OK so DX 1 started on an island. The game modeled the entire island as one level.

DX2 had the same island, covered in ice limiting the play area. They split it up into 4-5 different load sections, and each one was smaller than the original. The large building on the middle of the island was destroyed and its footprint empty in DX2. All the play areas were very small. I'm talking 50 feet by 50 feet on average, with 2-3 floors of height, but most buildings / spaces were just blocked off.

---

DX 2 didn't bother using different types of ammo. All guns used nanites to generate ammunition when you fired the gun. This blows. I'm not a child. Don't treat me like one.

The previous game had fire extinguishers, rocket launchers with multiple ammunition types, mines of all types, grenades, different types of shotgun, etc. So DX2 actually went backwards in equipment selection.

DX1 had like 10+ cybernetic slots, and 2 choices per slot. DX2 had about 5 slots with two choices per slot. And few if any were new ideas.

---

DX 2 had a running subplot of side quests for these two competing corporations. At the end of the game you find out that they're both owned by the same company, invalidating your efforts to support one over the other.

DX 1 had a TON of side plots and little side things to do. Some weren't even all that important.

---

The last level of the game is where you make all the important decisions in the game. You can see all three or so endings starting over from your save at the beginning of the final level. This means all your efforts in the previous levels were pointless. Zero replay value.

---

Minimal effort put into believable secret areas. Remember wolfenstein 3D? Pretty much like that.
Also, the voice acting was no better than DX1. The visuals were better I guess, and there were ragdoll physics. Bad AI though. Ah, there were mirrors occasionally in DX2. Woo.

---

Simply put, DX2 was a far worse game, except in one category: graphics. Yet I assume if they had made the play areas that small with DX1 the difference would be much smaller.

TL;DR: DX2 sucks for a lot of reasons.

EDIT: Added spoiler box.