Half-Life Fallout: The Soapbox - Half-Life Fallout

I agree with Gui on the GTA 4 thing, i think the whole "Drive here get mission, enter building kill/follow someone, repeat" has just worn thin, and because of the wanted system and maybe the realism i felt that rampages just werent as fun a previous GTAs. (Its still a good game but nowhere near the 10's it was getting)

As for other games on the list:
Bioshock i thought was fantastic, different (if you havnt played system shock i guess) and just fun. The story was pretty interesting too (For a video game)


The others i havnt played, i want to get condemned 2 when its cheap though.

It's pretty much as simple as... Developers aren't being as creative as they once were for the power of each console. They are just trying to one up the last iteration, which works, but they are trying it too rapidly with too many small iterations.

GTA3 was revolutionary because it was a HUGE step from GTA2. Mario 64 was revolutionary because it was a HUGE step from Super Mario World. Half-Life was revolutionary because it was a HUGE step from other fps games at the time. That kind of revolutionary step has virtually disappeared with everything being refined every year. Developers need to stop thinking bandwagon and start thinking fresh. Genres of games have remained relatively unchanged since 2000 in almost every sense except for improved graphics and physics.

It's time to put this new technology to the test and come up with something innovative and revolutionary for it's time. We can't make a dimensional leap again (2d to 3d) seeing how we actually live in three dimensions. So what else can we do? Well, there are a lot of routes and none of them come with any guarantee.

Nintendo is going with a new controller which... doesn't work as well as a regular controller. I would be much more impressed if they worked on a new control scheme through the next generation until they finally came out with a system like... A camera that could read your body movements and gloves that could read your hand/finger movements to control and interact within the game.

The other route is simply pushing raw tech to make graphics better... which imo is starting to drift away. We need to use raw tech to make game interactivity better. We seem to have hit a plateau in how much of the game world we can actually interact with and change. Dynamic is key here, but as you go further in time, improvements are that much more challenging.

I don't have a clear cut answer, and I'm sure nobody else does either, but I can say that I do agree with you. Games are very mediocre now a days. The generational "leap" has been decreasing since the ps2 generation. I do believe though... that the next generation of gaming is where we will take another massive step forward (snes ---> n64) and see a lot of truly amazing titles for their age. In what step that direction is, again, I don't know. Luckily I will still be alive to see it (hopefully).

Meh, standards must be lowering in the day and age of quick patches.

I dunno, I find enjoyment in many games, even if they are mediocre I'll find something fun in them (Minority Report was the first game that I played with awesome ragdoll, and I loved it even though it blew chunks.)

I'm looking forward to Battlefield:BC, blow crap up and then some!!

Yeah, I find enjoyment in almost all the games I play today. But I haven't gotten that euphoric "Oh My God! Holy *******!" feeling I got the first time I played Zelda: Ocarina Of Time and Half-Life.

If you took a survey on the entire population, you'd find that only 2% have an IQ of mensa quality. When games were starting off, joining a game company required you were extremely intelligent otherwise you would be useless in the company, it was basically a bunch of extremely smart people collaborating. Now the game industry has tools to make life easier, so they hire average intelligence people, who obviously will make average games and do average work. It's not that they want to, its just that they aren't smart enough to see the bigger picture.

I'll give you an example:

Back when I was in college, I went to an art school in vancouver. There was 20 of us learning to be animators. Of those 20, within the first week we realized who was going to be an animator and who was not. How many do you think showed real potential? 3. So there was 3 of us producing high quality animation and 17 producing average or sometimes just bad animation. Bare in mind, every single one of us was accepted into the college and everyone of us were skilled in art.

So in a real life situation, you may get 20 games coming out but only 3 will be any good.

Another example was that of those 17 bad animators, all of them shared the exact same problem. They liked cliches, and they worked their arses off to achieve them. To them, a cliche was a sign of proffesionalism. They thought by showing the class that they could copy say walt disney, that they had figured out what animation was about. But it was not the case, animation was never about copying other people, it was about learning the fundamentals of life, physics, motion, body language, talking etc, so you could make any performance you wanted, but even after a year of me and the other 2 animators bashing that idea into their thick skulls, they continued to produce the same cliche crap over and over and over.

Moral of this story, the majority of the world is born with mediocre minds and the games being produced are a reflection of that.

That's an extremely good point I never thought about. Although, it seems like even the teams with mensa quality programmers and designers are lacking that certain something.

Look at ID for example. John Carmack is pretty well known as a programming genious, and the original ID titles were a reflection of the team's high standards. Now look at the most recent ID titles. Not so much a flop, but definitely moving towards mediocrity.

Once the team's great idea has been realized, they tend to get really stuck in it. Their later titles never (or rarely) live up to the amazement that was brought by the first.

I find it funny Luigi how out of all the games you bought the ones that made you go '******* yes' are in my opinion the worst of the lot.

So games don't suck. They suck in your opinion. I on the other hand haven't bought a bazillion games as of late, and am perfectly happy with my limited selection.

EDIT: Maybe my opinion is biased since I don't play every game released (ie. you have cast a wider net, and therefore have a more knowledgeable opinion). But with my cheap ways, it also means I've only played the cream of the crop, or at the very least the games that interest me the most. So when all is said and done, I haven't over reached, or spent money on things that were only mediocre, or been really even disappointed at all.

Of course you're going to get crap when you're buying up most games released. Every game doesn't appeal to every player, and while I guess you could argue that most of the games you've picked up are from the top echelon of gaming, you've certainly purchased a lot. Were you really that surprised when not all of them hit the mark for you?

I have enjoyed recently, ME, GTAIV, R6V2, BioShock. I've played some crappy games sure, CoD4, Crysis, etc. but I didn't pay upwards of $60 for them, and so how can I really express disappointment? At least, not on the scale that you are.

In summation, go discerning tastes!

vertthrasher, on Jun 20 2008, 02:15 PM, said:

John Carmack was never known for making great games, he was always considered a genius programmer and game engine designer, and even today he has never produced any engine that wasn't un-*******-believeable

Doom 3 engine was revolutionary for its time
and Tech 5 is holy F%&@!

There are only a handful of games that are superB but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy the "mediocre games" like Stranglehold and Crackdown. Though obviously not as much as something (recent) like MGS4, CoD4, Gears and Sigma.

The most recent games I bought/played were...

1) STALKER
2) Orange Box
3) Crysis
4) COD 4
5) Bioshock

1) I loved stalker and it was one of the first fps games I've played in a while that I considered borderline revolutionary. It's definitely a step in the right direction. I played it with the Oblivion Lost 2.0 mod btw.

2) I was pleasantly surprised with orange box. I thought episode 2 would be rehashed crap from episode 1 with a new environment, but I was definitely wrong. Episode 2 brought new story elements, new enemies, and a very solid experience. Portal is unique, interesting, and fun. TF2 is a fantastic and extremely polished piece of work.

3) Crysis had more ups and downs than...... Well I can't think of anything that had more ups and downs. During some parts I was thinking "OH MY GOD!! EPIC!!!" And other parts I was thinking "meh... they could have done a lot better". It lost it's sense of scale and being able to attack a situation from multiple routes like far cry did. It was too linear for being the next iteration of jungle combat.

4) COD4 I haven't played the singleplayer yet, but the multiplayer is standard fare COD. I get bored with it relatively quickly but it's nice to have around when I have 30 minutes to spare. Not very impressed.

5) I haven't tried BioShock yet. I'm waiting until I have a lot of time to waste.

I have been "pleased" with all the games I have played, but not completely blown away. STALKER was definitely the closest thing to being blown away though.

Lyndon, on Jun 20 2008, 10:21 AM, said:

Yeah I guess in that sense you are definitely right. But I would assume that the rest of ID's talents must complement his work to some degree if they worked together to make the games they have made. They (the developers) might not be phenomenal, but they have to be above average. Doom 3 could have been such an amazing game, but it just screwed little things up (imo). I can't wait for Rage and Doom 4. ID Tech 5 is definitely mind-blowing.

HauptmanKalt, on Jun 20 2008, 08:49 AM, said:

This is why you shouldn't play great games that started on the PC on a console. It's gonna have shite controls without a mouse. period.

Cake21, on Jun 20 2008, 02:42 PM, said:

That's funny, I never had any problems with Hitman Blood Money on the 360. CoD4 works almost magically on it (X360) by the way.

So does:
Bioshock
The Darkness
GRAW 1 & 2
Oblivion
Rainbow Six Vegas
NFS: MW
Mass Effect
Condemned

VN1X, on Jun 20 2008, 02:44 PM, said:

yea, but COD4 works because of the autoaim. It's easy to change that stuff over from PC to console with FPSs only because of autoaim. You have something like hitman, where the controls are a little more advanced and some ppl will just hate the game because they think the controls "suck" if they try to play it on a console.

EDIT . . . almost all of the games you listed below your post are FPS's. And only work on a console because of autoaim. Otherwise, no one would touch them on a console, cuz the controls would be "too hard"

SUPER EDIT . . . need for speed? lol. I wouldn't even play that on a PC

Cake21, on Jun 20 2008, 02:47 PM, said:

For your information Most Wanted was actually pretty good.

Anyway you can turn auto aim off and especially something like CoD4 will still have the most responsive controls I have seen to date on a console.

I don't want to get into a PC vs Console discussion (because I love both) but just because something is ported over to consoles doesn't mean it'll automatically suck in terms of controls. Regardless of auto aim being added.

VN1X, on Jun 20 2008, 02:53 PM, said:

Aye, me neither. I never said that they would suck on the consoles. Just that if FPS's on consoles didn't have autoaim, a lot of ppl wouldn't like em cuz they would be too hard

And my original post about the hitman game was saying that it's unfair for him to hate the game because of "control" problems since they were originally made for the PC.

EDIT . . . lol, I played one of the first need for speed's back in the day on PC and it was terrible. It felt like it belonged in an arcade.