http://pong.hku.nl/~wim/bugman.htm

This is interesting... most games are played against either computer AI or human opponents. Animal opponents opens up a whole new set of possiblities. 

Cheers. 

sure man :-) take your time. shouldn't have "poked" you. ;-) 

[deleted spam] 

http://pulsar.quaddicted.com/misc/pics/quakebook.jpg 

spam alert! :( 

A book like that would be cool. If you could find someone who did custom bindings, it'd be nice to have the Quakonomicon! Featuring woodcut-style illustrations and text like "FEAR YE THE SHAMBLERE, FOR ROCKETSE NE'ER WORK TOO WELLE UPON HIM"... 

i would buy the shit out of that 

heh, a good idea. That book was made for a game, there was an information about game monsters in that book, so I desided to draw a quake simbol on it =) (because monsters=quake)

maybe I'll make a proper quake book soon. 

http://www.speeds.quaddicted.com/aom_logo.jpg 

nt 

cars so fast you'll barely be able to catch up with your ever growing phallus

http://www.jesselawrence.com/images/ArsMoriendi_logo_prestige.png 

I thought that article was pretty fucking stupid. He's complaining about getting a lot of value out of a game?

No, he is not. He is complaining about the fact that developers and publishers are focusing on their most vocal part of the demographic, people who have the opportunity and the desire to invest 40+ hours in a video game.

And, huh, he's right.

The number of anticipated play-hours has become another part of the benchmark in the evaluation of games in the pages of magazines and internet discussion forums. Just like graphics has always been, and physics and AI are slowly becoming. And no wonder, that's what happens when you are able to track the evolution of games. And God bless, because it's a good thing.

I want my games to look good. I believe that for the money I invest, the game should reach a satisfactory standard of graphics. It's part of the experience. However, there's a pitfall here. Hardcoreists have equated good with photorealistic. ICO and Shadow... is some of the best looking games you can find, but it's nowhere the near cutting edge code of Sweeney and Carmack. Same thing with Half-life 2. The goodness is in a cohesive and apparent artistic direction, not in the number of million polygons treated with eight shader passes. We all know this, by the way, this is familiar litania.

Back to the matter at hand. ICO is a ten hour game, without checking the savefiles I'd say I spent maybe 12 on Shadow... HL2 took slightly longer, maybe 20 hours or so. Very few games that seat the just one more try-factor in the telling of a story or unfolding of a plot manages to keep people playing for upwards of 40 hours. And by people, I am talking about human beings that have obligations other than to themselves. Fathers and mothers, working professionals, students with even the least detectable trace of ambition...

HL2 manages that by being a fun game. The story is just icing and mortar. You could replace the story of city 17 with something completely different, and the game would still work. Sure, valve does a great job of keeping most people interested in the story because, hey! it's a well written affair.

When you've played just the one game of Defcon, you've seen everything you're going to see, I'll venture to say. These are the rules, this is the spatial representation, here are the tools at your disposal, etc etc. This doesn't make it any less of a game than any big-ass jRPG. Hell, ten years down the proverbial line - some of us are still enjoying quake.

And while I sometimes enjoy and desire long games, it's only when it's being handed to me by the creme de la creme of game development - the Uedas, the Miyamoto's and the Valve's of the business. Because they know how to pull it off. With every Tom, Dick, and Bill in the industry insisting on their games sporting 20 hours of single player campaign content, you inevitably end up with alot of insipid fluff. They would do themselves, and their audience, a service if they said to themselves and their teams "Ten hours is a pleasant and manageable goal, but if we only get to eight hours of good, clean fun - that's fine too."

The benchmark of value should not be how long it takes to play through, if it is - we're in trouble. The industry must stop pandering to the teenage boy demographic and get with the god damn program - the rest of us also wants to have fun, and we're willing to pay for that fun. 

Oh, if any of you got fed up with that and stopped reading half-way through - that just proves my point! 

It was a good post. 

It was a great post. 

ICO is a ten hour game
You misspelled 'two'. 

I'm glad someone else is arguing this so i don't have to. 

With every Tom, Dick, and Bill in the industry insisting on their games sporting 20 hours of single player campaign content, you inevitably end up with alot of insipid fluff. They would do themselves, and their audience, a service if they said to themselves and their teams "Ten hours is a pleasant and manageable goal, but if we only get to eight hours of good, clean fun - that's fine too."

Wrath, no game studio on earth is gonna say "You know, guys, we're not as good as Valve, why don't we just make a five hour thing and call it good?" 

A really nice 8-12 hour romp. Not too long, maybe slightly short.

Max Payne 2 - 3 hours of kind-of-okay gameplay and crappy melodramatic tripe (but with SLO MO!!)

I heard those games were okay.

BTW - I don't actually know what the argument is, so I'm not on anybody's side. 

Right, instead they say "You know, guys, we're not as good as Valve, why don't we take our five hours of solid designs and add another 15 hours of repetitious bullshit so that we can boast we have 20 hours of gameplay!" 

Are you talking about Halo? 

If metlslime is talking about Halo (1 or 2), I really think he is too harsh... Visually both versions are quite good, and even if it they are very linear, I had fun playing in coop mode... Not so bad in fact...
And the concept to have only one weapon avalaible instead of the "big" arsenal is quite realistic.. as well for ennemy weapons use! Note that this concept is also used Call Of Duty 2 which is IMHO one of the best immersive game I played since Doom3... (and I still play... ggrrr... not yet finished in veteran mode... :D...) 

And the concept to have only one weapon avalaible

please read :

And the concept to have only two weapon avalaible

sorry for this.. 

Wrath, no game studio on earth is gonna say "You know, guys, we're not as good as Valve, why don't we just make a five hour thing and call it good?"
Lunaran, you think I don't know that? And as far as I'm concerned, them not saying that is why most game studios are never going to get a shot at becoming as good as valve.

I know that most studios are little more than indentured servants to their publisher. And I know it's alot easier to rant on some message board in the ass-ward parts of the internet, than it is to run a studio with integrity and pro-active strategies. But that's a dumb reason not to point out where they go wrong.

But quite frankly, most game studios turn out five hours of uninspired but solid design stretched to 20 hours, just like metl said. And I don't have the patience or time to play through 20 hours of that, and neither does most gamers.

If instead they had released their five hours and lowered the price to �15 or �20 I'd probably buy it. Hell, even fabled valve is taking this route