alanschu

More like a Sim Life or something. It's interesting because the game engine interpolates how a creature would move. The game starts out very focused, with you being a simple creature trying to survive...and once you "lay an egg" or something, you can evolve your creature. Eventually you can evolve them to the state of sentience, and all the design and animation is not done by a team of artists, but buy the game design itself. Eventually you'll enter a more "civ" like nature of the game, and it seems that once the game is "done" you can always zoom out a bit more. For instance, you start just in the water, but then you zoom out and include land. Then you start to create a culture with diplomacy and military and whatnot where you zoom out continent/planet wise. And once you've accomplished "enough," you can zoom out to the solar system, and colonize other planets and whatnot. Finally, you can zoom out to the galaxy view, and use your technology in a SETI radio wave style to find other intelligent life in the galaxy. Providing you have interstellar travel, you can then go and travel to them. Will Wright's demo did this, and it showed him having a blobular UFO type design (of his own custom design) heading to the new planet. He freaked them out and they fired at him, and he showed off a "War of the World" type scene where his technology was too powerful and he blasted the distant civilization with death beams as missiles bounced off of it. The Sim City reference was more in the way the game "plays" so to speak. Describing Sim City doesn't exactly make it sound like a fun game (You just manage a city), and I think Spore is the same way (although I think Spore sounds like a lot of fun to play). It's something you might enjoy along the lines of unit customization. You can customize your species just the way you want it, and how they progress. I believe his sentient species was a three legged creature of some sort.

I'd suspect someone somewhere probably felt the custom units either lacked flavour or was too cumbersome Boo...

I honestly don't think games have become shorter. I can beat pretty much all of my Nintendo games in one sitting. Heck, I can beat a lot of them in under an hour. My SNES games aren't much longer either. And I just played Ultima VII: The Black Gate, and it took me about 10-15 hours to beat. I don't think games like Baldur's Gate were ever the norm. Those Gold Box games didn't seem particularly long either.

I know how you got to hang out with Barrett at the Golden Saucer, no need to tell me. I found the dialogue to be much less romantic. Which I would expect, given societies ways on overreacting anything, they would have had a field day if there was any homosexuality in FF7.

I was thinking more in terms of the movement types (horses, chariots, vehicles, etc), but even then you could still do it I guess.

The enthusiasm of that guy in your picture is contagious!!! I'm all geeked up!

I'm looking forward to Farenheit/Indigo Prophecy, but I don't really care much for the editting that is going to be done for the US release (apparently sex = bad), plus the UK release will be DVD, and I prefer DVDs over CDs. So how and where would I go about importing the UK DVD version if I were to decide to import? What sort of wait times can I expect too? I also live in Canada, not that I think that would make much difference. Thanks!

It was interesting that you didn't get time extensions for checkpoints, but for damage caused

You were a big fan of the atmosphere of SMAC weren't you? Having said that...I wonder why they don't go with custom units anymore. I wonder if there was an AI balance issue that I didn't notice. Also, it could be perhaps that the units that should be in a game like Civ don't lend themselves as well to the customize option as well as SMAC. The chassis and whatnot was pretty much the same for all units of a particular type, with the weapon and the armor being different. It probably would make less sense to have something like that [specifically like that] in Civ 4. However, I think it would be neat if you could customize say you're cavalry once you can get Cavalry. And have a variety of Cavalry units and whatnot. And when you discover tanks, you can customize your tanks and so on.

What would it take? :D The Social Engineering was one of my favourite parts of SMAC, so I'm looking forward to seeing it again. I'm still adopting a wait-and-see policy however.

Woo, finally a farking sticky!!! :D

I believe so. I didn't care for Rise of Nations that much (not my kind of RTS), so I haven't been following Rise of Legends very much. It's quite a spin away from the original Rise of Nations however. And Reynolds does seem to have quite the Midas touch when it comes to games he makes (Rise of Nations did what it set out to do very well....I'm just not its target audience). Looking forward to Civ 4 from Sid and Co. I like how they went with Alpha Centauri's Social Engineering style for its governments, allowing for more mixing and matching. The focus on a fun atmosphere will be appreciated after Civ 3.

I'm buying PC games at an infinite ratio I'm finding that despite there being less games, they're tending to be better quality games IMO. I think it's what PC developers have to do now. As for Brian Reynolds, I'd imagine he's working on his sequel to Rise of Nations, Rise of Legends

My dual normal sabers will still r0x0r your normal/short saber combo :darque:

I always made the noise by going: "Whooooo....brrrrrrr"

I don't think the game meant for it to be a date. I think it was more a guys night out

A smaller and smaller number. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> True, but as it stands its still the most viable platform for genres like FPS, RTS, as well as God games like Simcity, Spore, Civilization/Alpha Centauri. Also, the new consoles coming out are going to be both expensive to develop on for smaller developers, and more complicated. I see the PC recieving the bulk of the attention from smaller developers. I can't see games like the Total War franchise, as well as a deeper RPG like Baldur's Gate or [hopefully] Dragon's Age, or a customizable game like NWN doing as well on a console than on the PC. I'll be the first PC gamer to admit that things are on the decline quantity-wise for the PC. But even still, companies like Midway (which historically have been console only) have moved into the PC market despite the shrinking marketplace. Same goes for Namco. THQ has also ramped up development. PC Gamer had an interesting inerview with THQ, Namco, and Midway as to why they've ramped up production. Steve Allison of Midway comments that "The PC has a great economic model. We don't pay any first-party hardware fees. There are some games that will always be huge sellers on PC and not make sense for console. Why shouldn't we try to create and/or publish these?". Also, I noticed that PC games did quite well at the last E3 for the non-platform specific awards. Best of Show: Spore Best Original Game: Spore Best Hardware/Peripherel: PS3 Best Action Game: F.E.A.R. Best Action/Adventure Game: Twighlight Princess Best Fighting Game: Soul Calibur 3 Best RPG: Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Best Racing Game: Burnout Revenge Best Sim: Spore Best Sports Game: Madden NFL 06 Best Strategy Game: Company of Heroes [ohboyohboyohboy :D :D] Best Puzzle/Trivia/Parlor Game: We Love Katamari Best Online Multiplayer: BF2 Special Commendation for Graphics: Killzone Bolded games are PC games. Italicized ones are PC games that also are coming out on a console. Underlined games are the game I'm most looking forward to Ignoring the "Best PC Game, Best PS game" etc. categories, PC games were tops in 8/14 categories. Although admittedly the italicized games were the ones that I know are also coming out for console. I was surprised by the PC platform's performance, given they didn't have the usual suspects (ala Doom 3 and Half-Life 2) to go with anymore. And it also includes nothing being shown from Bioware, as well as no STALKER: Shadows of Chernobyl. I'll admit though, I am biased. And the genres where PC did poor in the nominations are genres that I don't care for (like Fighting games). I'm looking forward to the upcoming year as a PC gamer

The game development process would still need to do extra coding for compatibility testing and whatnot, at which point you might as well just release that PC game because that's what you have now. While easy to port, I think the architectual differences between the XBOX 360 and PC limit simply enabling the XBOX 360 games to run on the PC.

Yeah..Yeah...Dude looks like a laaaadaaay! :cool:

I think that the installed base alone will ensure that some games still get made for PC.

I disagree with the game "sucking." I think it will be like Sim City. A game that really, when you read up about it or explain it to someone, sounds like it is a stupid game, but has that hook and is just plain fun to play.

Your keyboard actually registers incorrect keystrokes? Ouch. I've never seen that happen before.

They could show you 100% of the game and it wouldn't matter. It's a game like SimCity or whatever, where watching someone else progress through the game doesn't really spoil anything. Besides, I doubt that 50 minutes would be 1/10th of the game anyways. Have you actually read up on Spore at all?

Then PCs will just be made with the Cell inside of them.

Activision is a publisher (although I think they may have in house studios too). They're the type of place that Obsidian would go to release their game. If I'm not mistaken, I think Project New Jersey's publisher is Activision, just like Lucasarts was KOTOR2's publisher.