"...Hate the XBOX 360" Official Thread

I totally disagree about all shooters on the PC being clones of UT.

If you note in my article, I take game designers to task for a lack of originality in titles. I blamed this on many, many articles and industry talks I;ve read the transcripts of, that all basically agree on the same poijt: that the current huge budgets that games require are making them almost "Hollywood-like". Top-20 tiltles are rarely made any longer by 4 guys in a basement office... they take armies of coders, artists, designers, writers, skinners, mappers, marketing people, lawyers, intelectual proprerty specialists, etc. etc. etc. and with that kind of investment (think: 2-8 MILLION bucks) for a huge title, of COURSE the venture capitalists aren't generally going to want to take a chance on some experimental concept- they'll want to make something like Unreal Tournamemt 2007, a game with hundreds of thousands of loyal fans, an acive mapping and mod community and a guaranteed sales base of legions of players.

Even still, the PC market is pretty varied for "shooters"- you have action-oriented games like UT and Quake III, you have beefy, story-driven ones like Half Life 2, you have creepy ones that emulate modern horror films like F.E.A.R., you have over-the-top, arcade-y ones like Serious Sam.... the list could go on and on.

Are most of the B-grade games knock-offs of these other successful titles? Sure they are. But they are on consoles, too. Saying that "all shooters are like UT clones" is like me saying "all conole fighter games are Virtua Fighter clones" or "all exploration games are Mario 64 clones". Sure, knock-offs, by their nature, copy successful formulas, but that's not the same thing as saying that there's NO innovation (and you'll notice that I never once dinged the console world for a lack of innovation.

Hell, the Nintendo Revolution looks like it will be nothing BUT innovation and taking risks/chances.
 
I was going to comment on that one too, but I'm glad you got to it. I think the best rebuttal of that line ("They're all generic Unreal knockoffs or Half Life 2") is pointing to all of the games that have used the various 3D engines but have turned out completely different from the games that originally featured them. Look at America's Army, if I'm not mistaken it used the Half-Life engine and it's fairly original as far as shooters go (plus it's completely free and has a decent fanbase, considering that it doesn't allow modding).

A couple of other things I wanted to point out:

But think of it this way, why would Microsoft want to just hand out their dev packets to every half-baked basement developer? In all likelihood, the 360, or any other console that would do that, would be spammed by so many bad games that people would just give up because about 90% of the games would suck.

Well, that's essentially what Sony did with the PS1. Seriously, you know how many bad games there are for that thing? But the PS1 game library was so huge and so many people took a shot at it that a ton of good games were bound to come out. I mean, you're basically advocating a narrower market rather than a wider one, and I can't find any reason that would be better than the alternative. And, what I think is more important is that many of those games that weren't huge blockbusters still found an audience who loved them. A game doesn't have to sell a million units to be fun or even to be considered successful, and I think this is what Matt is getting at. We have this strange notion of "success" in the industry that favors technical accomplishments like graphics over the real accomplishments of providing entertainment and innovation. When we do that, we only encourage developers to move toward a technical model of game development, and there's a real danger in that. It's something like computer generated writing; a while back, some students wrote a program that automatically generated text and had it spit out a research paper. They brought this paper to a conference and read it, and even though it made absolutely no sense they were applauded and well-recieved. That's because the people at the conference expected a certain technical definition of what a research paper is supposed to be (specific format, specific language, etc.) and the paper met that. In a similar way, we're seeing developers phone in games that just meet the technical requirements we're used to. There's no way that can be good for the future of the industry.

Yeah. PCs are cheaper. Sure, you have to SPAM upgrades on every part, be it HD upgrades, graphics cards, sound cards, RAM and more. Why would anybody want a unit they you know...can afford.

For... what is it, the dozenth time now... this is wildly exaggerated. Nobody needs the BFG card that was linked to in order to play PC games. There would be a valid point if cards of that caliber were necessary for PC gaming, but it's simply not. There are a horde of affordable video cards that are more than up to the task.

256MB GF6600LE AGP
256MB GF6600LE PCIE
Radeon x700 256MB PCIE
Radeon 9800PRO 128MB AGP

There are also a bunch of cards in the $90-$100 range that will perform for years in the future. It's just not an issue. And sound cards? People don't upgrade sound cards unless one fails, good sound is usually onboard these days, and soundcards cost $30 anyway. RAM is fairly uncommon to upgrade when you can install 1-2 gigs right off the bat and prices are very low, and the same with hard drives. Drive space is under $1 per gig now, so you can cheaply put in a 120 gig drive and cheaply add space if needed.

I've said it before; you can build a gaming PC for $700. Since we all have a PC already and use it for other things, the price premium to have a gaming PC is something like $400 every 3-4 years. And... how much was that XBox 360 again? How is console gaming drastically cheaper?

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And fan-made content is an overrated concept.

Care to explain?

Yeah. Used games. They suck, because everyone can afford every game new.

That was kind of Matt's point. The Hollywood-style revolving door of blockbuster games is killing the used game market. Used games are a good thing -- this is what Matt was saying -- and the huge costs of developing and producing a game -- in the case of the 360, part of those costs comes from Microsoft's licensing and marketing strategies -- results in games that are gobbled up and then cast off by the millions, flooding the used market and making it unprofitable for retailers. If retailers aren't truning a profit on a part of their business model, guess what? They dump it. They have shareholders to please.

Now, many of these points aren't unique to the 360. They apply to the industry as a whole, including the PC market. In fact, those of us in the "gaming journalism" industry are also partially culpable because we help set the standards that publishers and developers are expected to meet. These points are being brought up at the 360 launch because that console exemplifies and typifies the nature of these problems. It's a popular, current example that one can point to and say "hey look, these are the poblems we're facing." It's not just supposed to be an attack to rile up the fanboys (though that's one way to start a dialogue).

So seriously, chill. If you have an issue, explain it, don't just shoot off with sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks.
 
It's a different time for games now, BC. Deficient games are simply less acceptable on the current consoles because of the simple fact that games are constantly getting better. I don't care what anyone says, because outside of 1998 going to 1999, every year has reared better and better games.

For fan-made content. I've been getting more and more into PC gaming lately (by that, I mean I can actually play games on the $2500 laptop my college forced me to buy....TWENTY FIVE HUNDRED!!!!), and as I type this, I'm installing Half Life Anthology. Anyway, the only cool thing I've even HEARD of, that is really great outside of the game was the DOOM 3 Hello Kitty flashlight (yes, it is cool). There simply isn't really all that much great stuff that compares to the actual game.

Tech costs? Still a problem for anyone who hasn't bought a computer recently. To take my house's desktop to even barely meet the minimum requirements for Final Fantasy XI (which just isn't that impressive), I'd have to do about 200 in upgrades, in various areas. Now, what would I do if I wanted Half Life 2 on it? That's right. I'd buy the Xbox version. Yeah, sure, I've got a bad computer, but it isn't like I'm the only one.

As for used games, do you really think the companies like EB and Gamestop would keep doing it if it was unprofitable? I mean come on. They sell it for 50 bucks, it gets traded back for probably 17-20 bucks store credit, then resold for 45 when it comes to new games. If the companies weren't making money off it, they would've stopped aeons ago. And it isn't as if the 360 will be any different from the current gen in terms of people buying a game, beating it, and trading it back in within the week they bought it.

And FPSs? I've played many of them over the times, going way way back to Wolfenstein and Quake. And yeah, sure, there are select games that really stand out as notables within their genre, FPSs included, and bring some great things to the table. Outside these select games, everything else just feels generic.

And BC, don't mistake anything I say for having emotions behind it. I was just being blunt, and I like to say sucks. In fact, one of my favorite moments in The Simpsons was that time when Homer was talking to Moe about bowling.
 
spudlyff8fan said:
It's a different time for games now, BC. Deficient games are simply less acceptable on the current consoles because of the simple fact that games are constantly getting better. I don't care what anyone says, because outside of 1998 going to 1999, every year has reared better and better games.
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I'm not sure what you mean by "different time for games". What's different about it? To be honest, I don't see many differences from other console launches, going all the way back to the SNES/Genesis 16-bit era. In fact, the only difference I see, and this builds off of the move from the 32/64-bit consoles to 128-bit, is that we're not seeing any huge leaps in what games can actually do. When we went from the NES to the SNES, games were simply able to do a lot more because the system was capable of so much more. The move from 16- to 32-bit brought true, working 3-D gaming and with that a host of new concepts that could be realized which were never possible before. But the move up to the DC/PS2/GC/XBox didn't really have a similar jump, and the move to the 360/PS3/Rev doesn't seem like it will either. We're just polishing up the same games we've been playing for the last, what has it been, almost ten years?

But going even further, what do you mean by "better"? Better in what way? Who defines better and how is it measured? What if what you consider better isn't the same as someone else, or even if your better is someone else's worse? These are important questions, especially for those of us reviewing and rating games. Put simply, how do you account for taste?

Also, if you don't care what anyone says, why bother joining the discussion?

spudlyff8fan said:
For fan-made content. I've been getting more and more into PC gaming lately (by that, I mean I can actually play games on the $2500 laptop my college forced me to buy....TWENTY FIVE HUNDRED!!!!), and as I type this, I'm installing Half Life Anthology. Anyway, the only cool thing I've even HEARD of, that is really great outside of the game was the DOOM 3 Hello Kitty flashlight (yes, it is cool). There simply isn't really all that much great stuff that compares to the actual game.
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So you're looking for fan-made content that's better than the entire original game itself? Asking too much, are we? Usually, mods add to the original game and extend its lifespan. Look at how many maps are available for online FPS's. There are some awesome fan-made maps -- and some of the players who made map mods have been hired on by the game companies to design maps for later versions! If that doesn't speak quality, I don't know what does. But you're not going to be able to download something for free that blows away the original game, at least not in most cases. Morrowind is an excellent example in this case; have you seen what's out there for that game? There's everything from simply new gear to new dungeons, quests, and towns to add-ons that imrpove the game's graphics. How many console games can you name that had better graphics three years after release, in the same game for no cost?

I think the 360 might actually be able to change things here, but it's up to Microsoft. We already know that things like skins will be downloadable. If MS allows for fan-made content it would close a significant gap between the 360 and PC's.

spudlyff8fan said:
Tech costs? Still a problem for anyone who hasn't bought a computer recently. To take my house's desktop to even barely meet the minimum requirements for Final Fantasy XI (which just isn't that impressive), I'd have to do about 200 in upgrades, in various areas. Now, what would I do if I wanted Half Life 2 on it? That's right. I'd buy the Xbox version. Yeah, sure, I've got a bad computer, but it isn't like I'm the only one.
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Okay, so you're trying to play PC games on a laptop you're using for schoolwork and you're complaining about tech costs and claiming that all PC gaming is expensive? That's like going to an Infiniti dealer, seeing that an M55 costs $50,000, and saying that all Japanese cars are too expensive. Just because in your situation you find PC gaming to be expensive doesn't mean that in all situations it is. Do you want the specs for the $700 gaming PC? I mean, it's like you're ignoring the fact that it's possible to build an affordable gaming PC at all, and you keep pulling out these $300 video cards that nobody needs and using faulty examples like your school laptop.

As for used games, do you really think the companies like EB and Gamestop would keep doing it if it was unprofitable? I mean come on. They sell it for 50 bucks, it gets traded back for probably 17-20 bucks store credit, then resold for 45 when it comes to new games. If the companies weren't making money off it, they would've stopped aeons ago.

Did you read the article? Matt said that EB is discontinuing it's policy of accepting used games for exactly that reason. It's not as simple as buying the games and turning them around. They have to sit on that inventory until it's sold. They have to catalog all of that inventory. They have to spend money taking in all of that inventory. That adds up to a lot of money. And how much inventory do you think they're going to be getting with people dumping their current systems in favor of the new ones? It's not a question of if they're going to stop, it's when.

spudlyff8fan said:
And BC, don't mistake anything I say for having emotions behind it. I was just being blunt, and I like to say sucks. In fact, one of my favorite moments in The Simpsons was that time when Homer was talking to Moe about bowling.
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You completely missed my point. Matt never used the word "suck" or anything similar, because he wasn't saying the 360 sucks. He was saying that he hates it and why. You turned that around into "why PC gaming sucks". There's a huge difference between saying that you hate something and that something sucks. One is a subjective statement and one is objective. I wasn't talking about emotions at all.

I think, primarily, if you respond to anything here I'd be interested to hear why you think gaming today is "different" somehow than it has been in the recent past. It sounds interesting.
 
BCampbell said:
\But going even further, what do you mean by "better"? Better in what way? Who defines better and how is it measured? What if what you consider better isn't the same as someone else, or even if your better is someone else's worse? These are important questions, especially for those of us reviewing and rating games. Put simply, how do you account for taste?
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Better is a self-explanatory word. Simply put, we get more great games.


Morrowind is an excellent example in this case; have you seen what's out there for that game? There's everything from simply new gear to new dungeons, quests, and towns to add-ons that imrpove the game's graphics. How many console games can you name that had better graphics three years after release, in the same game for no cost?
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Honestly, I haven't looked into Morrowind at all, mainly because I don't own it on the PC. But even so, it isn't as if the game is lacking without fan makes.

I think the 360 might actually be able to change things here, but it's up to Microsoft. We already know that things like skins will be downloadable. If MS allows for fan-made content it would close a significant gap between the 360 and PC's.
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Again, it's cool, but it isn't like much of it will really compare to the stuff made by pros.

Okay, so you're trying to play PC games on a laptop you're using for schoolwork and you're complaining about tech costs and claiming that all PC gaming is expensive?
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You make it sound like I WANTED to blow all that money on it. If I had the choice, I'd get a sucky $100 if the college didn't FORCE me to get it.

Just because in your situation you find PC gaming to be expensive doesn't mean that in all situations it is. Do you want the specs for the $700 gaming PC? I mean, it's like you're ignoring the fact that it's possible to build an affordable gaming PC at all, and you keep pulling out these $300 video cards that nobody needs and using faulty examples like your school laptop.
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I, as one of the majority of college students, do NOT have the money to blow on frequent computer upgrades, and maybe you have money, but I don't and it isn't as if I'm the only one who avoids PC gaming because of the simple fact you DO have to throw money at it frequently.

Did you read the article? Matt said that EB is discontinuing it's policy of accepting used games for exactly that reason.
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Didn't you know that they stopped because there are hundreds of EBs shutting down because of the Gamestop-EB merger? They aren't accepting used games because they're trying to minimize wasted inventory. They weren't losing money on it.


I wasn't talking about emotions at all.
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So seriously, chill.
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And I think gaming is different now than it was 3, 4, 5, or 10 years ago. mainly because expectations have raised on games, now that there are websites and magazines to check on it. People don't have to just guess and check based on boxart and hearsay like they did, therefore for companies to really put out a blockbuster game, they can't just half-ass it like they could earlier.
 
wanna a sucker? I've got one in the waaaaaaaaaaaa bulance. It'll take all your emotions and shit to the waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa spital.

kidding...I'm kidding
 
You have now entered the twilight Zone.....Buckle your seatbelt for safety.....And u 2, do we need to start a debate forum!!......J/k, you guys both have valid points......But "the voices" tell me otherwise.....hahahaha
 
spudlyff8fan said:
And I think gaming is different now than it was 3, 4, 5, or 10 years ago. mainly because expectations have raised on games, now that there are websites and magazines to check on it. People don't have to just guess and check based on boxart and hearsay like they did, therefore for companies to really put out a blockbuster game, they can't just half-ass it like they could earlier.
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I think that BC made a grea point earlier when he said that gaming journalists like us are actually part of the problem.

I read somewhere that game studios are atarting to be held accountable for the review scores that sites like MyGamer give them... publishers apparantly pay higher royalties to developers that get Metacritic combined s scores of over 75%... I have no idea whether or not this is actually true, but I do keep hearing it.

As to the quoted comment above, if you think that developers can't "get away with releasing half-assed games anymore" then you've not been reading our site reviews. I know that in the PC world, I see PLENTY of half-baked games (see: Alpha Black Zero... Ryl: path of the Emperor... etc.)

Even 10 years ago, top-end game developers sweated blood to get quality product out the door. But for every one of these kinds of developrs (id, Blizzard, Bethesda) there are a dozen 2nd-string knockoff devs that just copy the current fad. What you're talking about applieds to the PC and console worlds equally.

I also gotta say that I think BC hit the nail on the head when he said that this seems to be becoming an attack on why "PC gaming sucks". My peference is for PC games.... that's why I edit the PC area of this site. And yes, some of my Xbox 360 comments can be extended to the entirety of console development vs. PC. And no, I didn't pay him $5 to make that point. :lilo:
 
What's your point? You keep changing it. Your point before was that devs can't get away with making crappy games (at least I thought), so I refuted it. I personally don't think that PC games are any different in the slightest in this regard as consoles- all systems have their good games (10%-20%) and the "also ran" crap (the other 80%). This has been a truism since the days of the Atari 2600 and Intellivision.

Plus, as far as sales go, you gotta remember that a knock-off game that only cost $30,000 to develop in Croatia only needs to sell a very few units to break even and get profitable than, say, a Half Life 2 with its multimillion-dollar budget has to move. Every shoestring developer hopes to have a dark-horse hit like, say Serious Sam- a title that cost almost nothing to produce but which sells millions of copies... its lottery mentality.
 
No. My point for the crappy games is that crappy games just don't sell well anymore. You get the RYLs and you get the Tomb Raiders and they just don't sell because they suck, and people know it. Now look back to the days of the Atari or the NES or the Genesis. There were hordes of crappy games, and could easily sell pretty well.

Now that reviews and such are readily available for games, people will know whether or not to buy them. This isn't a PC vs Console issue.
 
Ok I think in order to makeeveryone shut the hell up we need to do a article on a budget gaming PC. Cause obviously noone knows how affordable a gaming pc is. If a person can spend the money on a Xbox 360 and a PS3 they can get them a decient gaming PC that can pump out the same graphics as those two consoles can.

For example the Dell E510. It starts out at 599 before tax and and a 24 doller shipping charge. You upgrade the memory to 512 and put a PCI express Radeon X300 128mb Video Card in it it makes it 689.

So a Pentium Processor with HT 3.0 ghz with 512 memory 80 gb Harddrive, and a Radeon X300 video card for 689, sounds pretty cheap to me.
 
Hank, I think that a budget PC article would be a good idea actually... It's something that I've been contemplating. I was going to part one out on NewEgg, but I actually like your idea better since by using a Dell PC, it shows how you can get a good value without "having the technical know-how to hassle with building a PC from parts" (which I think would be a valid arguement form the console side of the house- after all, the technical know-how for getting a console up and running is literally 'plug in the cables and go').
 
I've parted out sub-$700 gaming PC's on newegg. The advantage to building the system from scrath is that you cna build in more and more affordable upgradability. For example, overspeccing your motherboard slightly might only cost you $30-$40, but it can help keep the system current for an extra two or three years.

A while back I was thinking of sending out emails to all of the hardware manufacturers I could find, then building the cheapest PC's possible with whatever components I got. That way you can actually run benchmarks on them and see just how well the perform.

Anyway, sort of on topic:
Now that reviews and such are readily available for games, people will know whether or not to buy them.

Is that really what we're trying to do here? Tell people whether or not they should buy a game? Or are we trying to give our readers enough information to let them decide on their own? I'm not conceited enough to assume that I know what's best for everyone else out there, or that my opinion of a game must be the right one, but if anyone else wants to be that narcessistic, be my guest.

As an example, Front Mission 4 has a GameRankings average of 76. To most people, that's a "don't buy" or at least a rental (the issue of inflated rankings, where 7/10 is "average", is another issue). But I loved that game, it was one of the most interesting and fun games I've played in recent memory. Yet I realize that not everyone else will love it, because it has a specific blend of game aspects that makes it appealing to a specific group of people.

Our job should not to be to label a game with a number that tells people they should or should not buy it. Our job should be to analyze each game we come across and tell our readers what's there and how well it's done, in both a subjective and objective way. I actually don't like the way we rate games and determine that some are "better" than others (and, by the way, "better" is far from self-explanitaory, sa it's a comparative word that in teh frist place requires one or more subjects for comparison and in the second requires some reasoning as to the nature of these subjects that makes one or more "better" than others). I would be happy if we had no ratings at all, but rather simply wrote reviews and let the reader decide. Unfortunately, that takes a lot more work and honesty from reviewers.
 
BCampbell said:
Is that really what we're trying to do here? Tell people whether or not they should buy a game? Or are we trying to give our readers enough information to let them decide on their own? I'm not conceited enough to assume that I know what's best for everyone else out there, or that my opinion of a game must be the right one, but if anyone else wants to be that narcessistic, be my guest.

As an example, Front Mission 4 has a GameRankings average of 76. To most people, that's a "don't buy" or at least a rental (the issue of inflated rankings, where 7/10 is "average", is another issue). But I loved that game, it was one of the most interesting and fun games I've played in recent memory. Yet I realize that not everyone else will love it, because it has a specific blend of game aspects that makes it appealing to a specific group of people.

Our job should not to be to label a game with a number that tells people they should or should not buy it. Our job should be to analyze each game we come across and tell our readers what's there and how well it's done, in both a subjective and objective way. I actually don't like the way we rate games and determine that some are "better" than others (and, by the way, "better" is far from self-explanitaory, sa it's a comparative word that in teh frist place requires one or more subjects for comparison and in the second requires some reasoning as to the nature of these subjects that makes one or more "better" than others). I would be happy if we had no ratings at all, but rather simply wrote reviews and let the reader decide. Unfortunately, that takes a lot more work and honesty from reviewers.
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Wow. That isn't at all what I said. That quote doesn't even really say it. If everyone says a game sucks, they probably won't get it unless they have a pre-set reason for it.
 
I usually get those "suck" games....Just to piss people off and tell them i'm thoroughly enjoying it......hahaha.....Piss them off, that's what i say!!....hahaha
 
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