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This only gave grief

3 (6.1%)

Grakelin is not stupid

6 (12.2%)

Are you happier now?

1 (2%)

------ Haiku, the encore -----

17 (34.7%)

Disagreeing, Fine

0 (0%)

Why you make a fuzz 'bout it?

3 (6.1%)

Lets just be happy

19 (38.8%)

Total Members Voted: 48

[Soulwynd]

I don't see the problem, this thread is meant to let people rant about games. They can rant about the same thing over and over if that will make them feel better.

[Grakelin]

You can say a lot of things about me, but I've never made a thread devoted to seeing people agree with me.

I don't really care, it's a free internet, we can all post what we want (within the forum rules), but man, let's at least keep it fresh in here and have both sides of this debate actually talk about new things.

[Schilcote]

Remember: They don't make games to entertain you anymore - now they make games to get your money.

They always made games to get your money. They did (and still do) make them entertaining because that's the only way to make money in the entertainment industry.
It's the free market. Live it, learn it, love it. It's a very, very, very simple fact of economics; cutting quality for short term profit ALWAYS bites you in the ass. Short-term thinking in general bites you in the ass. For example, a company has a choice: either produce a product that is crap and sell it at a 50% profit margin, or produce a solid product at a 5% profit margin. Company A lasts about a year, Company B lasts for literally hundreds. See, the free market economy is self-regulating. If you don't pull your weight, you don't get your money. A company exists to produce goods and services which it exchanges for notes (dollar bills) of higher value in a positive-sum game. If they try to cheat the system, the system f***s them up by its very nature. Dishonest businessmen are stupid businessmen. Eventually, broke stupid businessmen.

Look at Valve. Every employee of Valve Software knows what he's doing. They PLAY games, not just make them, and they know what the consumer wants. They sell products over Steam for far less than stores because they know that they can sell more units at a lower profit per unit. They make ultra-high quality games that take years to craft because they know that people are willing to pay what the game is worth, and no more.

The TvTropes page for You Fail Economics Forever is a very interesting read. One of the most important explanations of economics is that the free market is a positive-sum game. When you trade money for goods, both parties end up with more than they started with. I'm not going to waste time explaining that here when it's already explained on TvTropes.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YouFailEconomicsForever

[Virex]

Remember though that our expectations differ from the mean. Almost nobody here is prepared to pay 50 bucks for command and conquer 5, even if it's on the same level as Tiberian sun, while on the market it could fetch a pretty high price. Hell, many of us arn't even willing to spend 50 bucks on Starcraft II, even though that's shaping up to be a pretty good game even by our standards. There's also the fact that the investment needed to develop games we would like (fully immersive world, high complexity, lots of randomness and emergent effects without getting odd results or unfun side-effects, bug-free, low price, no DLC, fully moddable, impressive AI) would probably mean the game couldn't repay it's costs and the development time would probably be far longer then allowable.

[Schilcote]

Remember though that our expectations differ from the mean. Almost nobody here is prepared to pay 50 bucks for command and conquer 5, even if it's on the same level as Tiberian sun, while on the market it could fetch a pretty high price. Hell, many of us arn't even willing to spend 50 bucks on Starcraft II, even though that's shaping up to be a pretty good game even by our standards. There's also the fact that the investment needed to develop games we would like (fully immersive world, high complexity, lots of randomness and emergent effects without getting odd results or unfun side-effects, bug-free, low price, no DLC, fully moddable, impressive AI) would probably mean the game couldn't repay it's costs and the development time would probably be far longer then allowable.

Well, it's not like DF is the ONLY game I play. DF is an artifact, something nearly supernatural. You're just not going to get that from a commercial game, and I'm fine with that. Expecting every game you play to be on par with DF is a bit like expecting every car you buy to last ten years and move like a Mustang. Also, "Impressive AI" is just a bit off if you're talking about DF .

As you may have guessed, I'm a big fan of Valve. Generally, their games involve shooting at things for a few minutes, then listening to the only clothed woman in a video game since Samus (At least until she got into the zero suit) talk about how you're pwning the Combine for a few minutes, occasionally stopping to solve a physics puzzle. And it's damn fun.

Now look at Spore. I beat up on Spore not because it's a bad game, but because it... well... It pretty much pretends to be Dwarf Fortress, at least in the advertising and magazine articles. Not to mention it's FEEFTY FREEKIN DOLLERS. It's okay. Not good, but okay. Basically, EA said "Look, you can super-duper customize crap in this world and go in a spaceship and be all sand-boxy and crap and do whatever you want!". It doesn't sound quite so impressive as I'm describing it. So I scraped together 50 "U haz wealth" notes from Uncle Sam and sent them to EA, and in return I got 30 gigabytes of boring. Now people are arranging boycotts because they were getting less than they expected, and EA has permanently lost my trust and respect. Actually, they managed to sucker me out of another 50 for Galactic Adventures too. So that's 100 dollars I paid for what boils down to something I could probably write myself. Half-Life 2, by comparison, costs about a fifth as much, and lasts a lot longer.

In my experience, the best PC games are the free ones. For one thing, the only thing you waste if you end up with a bad game is a few minutes of your time. Also, the designers of free games a1. are gamers themselves (see my post before this one) and 2. don't care about getting the product out the door by a certain date. Valve, knowing this, opened up the Source SDK and made HL2's value technically infinite.

Anyway, what is my point. I don't know. I think I'll just shut up now.

Oh, and also, I like DLC. Valve-style DLC that is. Charging customers twice for the same product is a good way to piss them off and loose them (though I think Blizzard's gig with the decorational items you can buy in WOW is a good idea, since it's nothing more than a status symbol).

[Grakelin]

I beat up on Spore because it's a bad game. And yet, the money I spent on it prevents me from wiping it from my computer.

I like Mount and Blade, though, even though it set me back $34 Canadian.

[Schilcote]

Actually, I think if they hadn't tried to make it look like what it wasn't, it would've been a pretty solid title.

[Grakelin]

It doesn't hold water on its own. The only good stage is the Cell Stage. The Creature Stage was horrible, took too long, and was extremely repetitive (also, way too hard, considering there's no actual strategy, other than building your dude properly) The Tribal Stage was laden with bugs, many of them game-ending. Civilization Stage was alright, but still a yawnfest. Space Stage could have been great if they hadn't made the same mistake as the Creature Stage and stacked unspeakable odds against you and refused to let you recruit more than 3 or 4 allies (each of which causes you to lose relation when they die.

I can't even go back and play it casually.

[Schilcote]

I never found it very hard... Rather, I found it too easy.

My general opinion is that any game that could be played beginning to end by a simple bot and end up looking almost the same as a human player is pretty damn boring. Cell is an okay thing, and I'm sure it'd make a good flash game, Creature is basically "click the mission objectives", Tribe is basically... "click the mission objectives" and Space is basically... get missions and click their objectives.

[Draco18s]

Actually, they managed to sucker me out of another 50 for Galactic Adventures too.

At least you learned your lesson the second time.

[Schilcote]

I am a scientist though...

Anyway, how are you supposed to identify a trend with a single point of data? You need AT LEAST two, and you have to assume that the trend is perfectly linear...

[eerr]

Emergent and consistent patterns?

I mean, at the very least you can just wait for someone else to buy it, before you get it yourself.

Also, I went on the website and read documents, I literally found documentation that spore wasn't going to be as grand as people thought it would be.

(I knew the jig was up from all the stuff stuffed inside spore.)

[Soulwynd]

You can say a lot of things about me, but I've never made a thread devoted to seeing people agree with me.

Such a sweet way of distorting what I stated and being an ass again. Let me explicitly state that this thread is meant to let people rant about games whether they agree with me or not. They can rant about the same thing over and over, be it something I don't care about or something against my own rant, if that will make them feel better.

Look at Valve. Every employee of Valve Software knows what he's doing. They PLAY games, not just make them, and they know what the consumer wants.

They do? Unless they use some hidden accounts or private setup, all TF2 developer stats are crap. It's like they don't even bother touching it. I also don't want any more HL or L4D games, I hope they know I want that and move to something better, like Portal 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc. And ultra-high quality boring games? Such a cute fanboy. =p




Spore.... Man, I regret pre-ordering it so much. Slightly more than I regret buying HL2 crap. I mean, I can see how Spore can be entertaining for little kids and how the creature editor was pretty much the only good bit of it, but so much disappointment due to that early demo.

[Draco18s]

Look at Valve. Every employee of Valve Software knows what he's doing. They PLAY games, not just make them, and they know what the consumer wants.

They do? Unless they use some hidden accounts or private setup, all TF2 developer stats are crap. It's like they don't even bother touching it. I also don't want any more HL or L4D games, I hope they know I want that and move to something better, like Portal 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc. And ultra-high quality boring games? Such a cute fanboy. =p

Oh they have other accounts.

Though I did play a game of Left 4 Dead 2 with Chet Faliszek the other week.  Specifically a custom campaign on versus, due to a graphical glitch (Chet was fortunate enough to be one of the two people effected and hopefully they'll be able to fix the problem).

But yeah, they have several accounts, specifically for playing steam games on the steam cloud without anyone knowing.  As well as playing things that aren't out yet!

[nenjin]

Mmmm, the hate is strong here.

Anyways, going to agree on Valve. They walk on water to their fan bois from TF2 and other titles...but in the last three years, TF2 aside, Valve has done nothing but show they're now big dawgs who play by big dawg rules. I.e. they'll make an entire game just to get a licensing deal with EA; they'll promise the sky and deliver mud when it works for them; they'll rehash and re-release titles and they'll sell you operatic movie experiences instead of fully fleshed out games.

Bitter? No. WISER? I hope.