I needed somewhere to rant...

[LowEnergyCycle]

I used to use GameSpot as my primary source of information gathering and community discussion, but after too many infractions for speaking my mind too freely (as is, I thought, my right as a human being), I slowly began looking elsewhere for people to talk to. Like here!
Anyway, a brief return just a moment ago - to check up on some new info regarding the upcoming Transformers: The Movie game - reminded me exactly why I don't hang around that moronic site anymore, after coming across this fantastically retarded quote:

"realistic physics are nothing if they have antialiasing that bad."

Yeah... That's right. Don't buy games that have emergent physics on their bullet-point list, unless they also have rock-solid Anti-Aliasing.
If your games don't caress your eyes with glorious, enchantingly real landscapes and objects, each one lovingly blended to it's respective background with at least 16xAA, just get rid of them. They are clearly not worth your money.
Every time I see a graphical glitch of any kind in any game from now on - no matter how great the gameplay, story or sound is - I'm gonna yank out the disc and snap in two....

I'm fairly sure the people who reside around this site are intelligent enough to see right through this ridiculous comment to the naive little idiot who sits beneath. What happened to this generation of games players? Are they all this stupid? Does gameplay really take a second place to sodding graphics? Is that the only piece of the computer-game puzzle that needs completing before developers can release their product? Would this moron be happy just looking at a pretty picture for 20-30 hours?

If this is the kind of idiot who the games industry is catering for (and I fear that a large cross-section of it actually is), we can all but forget about games like Bioshock (I guess I had to keep this slightly on topic...:D).

[Hatesink]

a brief return just a moment ago - to check up on some new info regarding the upcoming Transformers: The Movie game - reminded me exactly why I don't hang around that moronic site anymore, after coming across this fantastically retarded quote:

"realistic physics are nothing if they have antialiasing that bad."When it comes to physics, I've played enough Grand Prix Legends to be immune to pretty graphics— I can understand why you're so frustrated.

This might be a good barometer:

Driving Model / Driving Physics / Driving Simulation & Player-character Viewpoint (http://www.alanwake.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1112)

Beauty before brains? Style over content?

I guess the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.

[LowEnergyCycle]

^^ That's quite a wishlist...

It just totally grinds me how people can be so ignorant really. The Playstation Generation has a lot to answer for, breeding snotty little brats who don't care about games as an advanced form of interactive entertainment, but more of a piece of eye-candy to show off to their jock friends. A brainless explosion-packed blockbuster that you can play with one hand. A multi-player-only shooter that feels more like a sport than one of them geeky computer games all the nerds play - so that's ok.

The mass-market all seem to be under the impression that bad graphics = bad game, where as anybody who actually cares about games knows this to be utter rubbish. The trouble is though, now-a-days good people like me and you are outnumbered by morons like the idiot who made the comment above. And they're the ones driving the sales, effectively telling the major publishers what should be in computer games these days:

Graphics
Multi-player
License-butchery of some nature
Easy enough to play with one hand
Utterly brainlessI strongly feel that if opinions like this don't change then games are going to become dull and generic - the only thing different between them being whatever sparkly graphics technique is The New Lens Flare this year round. And you don't even have to look very far to see evidence of it already.

[Hatesink]

That could change if the developers and the hardware manufacturers would work on keeping the audience— most people only ever play games when they're young, so the core demographic is always going to be a kid without too wide an experience of games. If the industry could keep the the consumer interested, even when they grow older, then I think it'd probably be very different.

That's one reason why games shouldn't be super-difficult, illogical, and require an insiders knowledge to get through the most basic level (they should follow the laws of physics and should not require a walkthrough), so that average people in general can pick them up and think "wow, this is good", instead of "but that's just stupid"

I'm interested in seeing what they make of both Alan Wake and Alone in the Dark: Near Death Investigation, as they seem to be catering to a broader audience (if you like Stephen King you should be able to understand the premise of Alan Wake, and AitD:NDI is structured to follow a tv-series type format (the complete game being designed to be played in 'half hour episodes')).

My attitude is, when the tide rises all boats are raised, so sooner or later the next great game is going to come along and be better than everything else before it (hopefully BioShock, Fable 2 Alan Wake, Alone in the Dark Near Death Investigation, RE5, maybe even Mass Effect and Assassins Creed will be what we're waiting for). I guess the trick is to be able to identify the games worth playing— for me, that's the type of title that hasn't forgotten that there are intelligent adults out there who want to enjoy games.

[Da Bubs]

"realistic physics are nothing if they have antialiasing that bad."

believe it or not that doesnt even come close to the stupidist thing I have ever heard, At least I can see the logic behind it, but then again I grew up just outside a small midwestern town. There are few varities of dumb that suppass small midwestern town jock dumb.

The trouble is though, now-a-days good people like me and you are outnumbered by morons like the idiot who made the comment above. And they're the ones driving the sales, effectively telling the major publishers what should be in computer games these days:


Unfortunatly I think that has always been the case, for proof see snake oil, the dark ages, and anyone school, place,person or thing that banned, or attempted to ban Slaughterhouse 5 or censor anything because of its nature.

There are going to be bad games out there, we are just going to have to get used to avoiding them. Lets not lie to ourselves thought, Graphics are important, just not as important gameplay. Would any of us have played half-life 2 if it looked like it was made out of legos? probably not.

Oh, thanks for giving us a place to rant.

[Adabiviak]

For me, game enjoyment encompasses everything about the game - gameplay, novel ideas, interesting artwork, storyline, graphics, sound, etc. Some people have their preferences set differently, but I enjoy a game in which any of these is particularly strong, and the more of these elements the game does well, the better it is. Some people can get hung up on one thing though, as a make-or-break feature of a game. They're funny like that.

[LowEnergyCycle]

There are going to be bad games out there, we are just going to have to get used to avoiding them. Lets not lie to ourselves thought, Graphics are important, just not as important gameplay. Would any of us have played half-life 2 if it looked like it was made out of legos? probably not.
It just feels sometimes that you have to sift through 1000 mediocre shooters, identical-clone sports sims (the rules haven't changed for any sport for as long as I've been alive!), and crappy licensed platformers before you even catch a glimpse of a shiny innovative adventure epic these days. I just spent the better part of an hour in Game and Gamestation (UK retailers for all you foreign types) just sifting through the chaff of rubbish only to find exactly 1 game that even slightly took my fancy: Condemned - a sodding FPS with bells, whistles and gimmicks.

I can't understand why there aren't 1000 variants of System Shock. Why are there scant few action RPGs? Why are adventure games practically dead?

In short: what the hell is wrong with people? If you applied HDR Lighting to a bump-mapped dog****, they would buy it. Providing it exploded.

Oh, thanks for giving us a place to rant.
Let it out guys. Let it aaaaaaall out. Come on now. Big deep breaths: peach in, green out... peach in, green out...:) I feel better already!

:D See?

For me, game enjoyment encompasses everything about the game - gameplay, novel ideas, interesting artwork, storyline, graphics, sound, etc. Some people have their preferences set differently, but I enjoy a game in which any of these is particularly strong, and the more of these elements the game does well, the better it is. Some people can get hung up on one thing though, as a make-or-break feature of a game. They're funny like that.
Exact-a-mondo brother. The best games, I find, are those that become more than the sum of their component parts. At the end of the day, all the tangible assets like graphics, sound, text etc. have to gel together to form something not-so-tangible: Greatness.
But this Greatness isn't necessarily completely dependent on all of those assets being up to scratch. I still enjoy the original System Shock to this day, and the graphics are appalling by modern standards.
Put that in front of Johnny Jock though... well... I think you can guess what his reaction would be.

[D'Sparil]

Johnny Jock: WTF?! Where's my Halo?