Borderlands

I'll admit that there's a ton of stuff out there I don't like, but the same can be said for just about everyone here. You guys buy and play these games but at the same time recognize all their flaws and talk about them here. I see threads talking about how modern games are all rail shooters and all have regenerating health and whatever, yet you guys continue to buy and play these games for hours and hours and hours, misleading video game developers into thinking they created the 'perfect game' which is sooooo far off track.

Video games are so highly and regrettably commercialized that it's way more important to create a game that will sell instead of something that's good. Keeping gamers occupied until they can come up with another game that's new that you'll all drool over the screenshots and trailers of and preorder before the game is even released. Video game companies have you by the balls. I know video game developers have the potential to create awesome games, especially since a game as perfect as doom was released 17 YEARS AGO, you'd think they'd be on top of this. As long as you keep giving their shitty games a chance they think they are going in the right direction. I refuse to buy any video game unless it's absolutely perfect. Until then, none of these video game companies are getting any of the money I work my ass off for.

You guys think you all know whats up because you've got the power in numbers on your side, but you are even worse mislead than people who try to get their religion to influence law.

40oz said:

I'll admit that there's a ton of stuff out there I don't like, but the same can be said for just about everyone here. You guys buy and play these games but at the same time recognize all their flaws and talk about them here. I see threads talking about how modern games are all rail shooters and all have regenerating health and whatever, yet you guys continue to buy and play these games for hours and hours and hours, misleading video game developers into thinking they created the 'perfect game' which is sooooo far off track.

Video games are so highly and regrettably commercialized that it's way more important to create a game that will sell instead of something that's good. Keeping gamers occupied until they can come up with another game that's new that you'll all drool over the screenshots and trailers of and preorder before the game is even released. Video game companies have you by the balls. I know video game developers have the potential to create awesome games, especially since a game as perfect as doom was released 17 YEARS AGO, you'd think they'd be on top of this. As long as you keep giving their shitty games a chance they think they are going in the right direction. I refuse to buy any video game unless it's absolutely perfect. Until then, none of these video game companies are getting any of the money I work my ass off for.

You guys think you all know whats up because you've got the power in numbers on your side, but you are even worse mislead than people who try to get their religion to influence law.

What about buying the new games exactly for the graphics and engine? I certainly know that Doom 4 and even Rage won't deliver anything fundamentally that GZDoom cannot, but I'll buy them anyway, because they'll have unsurpassable (by GZDoom) graphics and probably original tricks/gimmicks too. Also, games aren't very expensive, especially niche ones, and I don't go like a madman to buy every new game.

EDIT: for example, the first or second Rage detail showed the close-up of a fly at excruciating detail. While I presume that Id will have no imagination whatsoever in this direction, I can imagine someone else trying to make a mod for it where everything is zoomed in, you turn into a fly, you get to run through minuscule holes. Can this be done in GZDoom? (THOUGH IF FLOATING POINT EXISTS, IT WILL BE ABLE TO BE DONE IN ZDOOM AS WELL :D:D:D)

40oz said:

I refuse to buy any video game unless it's absolutely perfect. Until then, none of these video game companies are getting any of the money I work my ass off for.

You guys think you all know whats up because you've got the power in numbers on your side, but you are even worse mislead than people who try to get their religion to influence law.

Take off your tinfoil hat, take a deep breath, and try some of these newer games, they're really good and won't waste your hard-earned money.

Doom Marine said:

Take off your tinfoil hat, take a deep breath, and try some of these newer games, they're really good and won't waste your hard-earned money.
http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/6017/steamgames20110118b.png

nonono those games all suck. He can tell just by looking at the pictures that they suck. Like that one game Dirt 2. It is clearly a Halo clone that probably has regenerating health and generic weapons like assault rifles and shotguns and it's probably designed to steal your soul and turn you into a drug addict with unlockable weapons.

I have played many of those games. Half Life, Half Life 2, Call of Duty 4, Left For Dead, Battlefield Bad Company 2, Portal, Bioshock, each one of them communicate to me the same things that I described.

- They use each other's ideas so that they can entice fans of the same games to keep spending money for things they already had with their previous games. The makers of the games are getting paid for ideas that aren't theirs.

- They are nonsensically and sleep-inducingly easy so that 5 year old ADHD children don't have to use their full attention to be good at the game. Then people like me who have the mental capacity to make intelligent decisions like knowing when to save or act improvisationally are automatically rewarded with stupid perks like being bullet proof or saving for me so I don't need to use my brain to play.

- Multiplayer is the selling point of the game (save for Portal and Bioshock, which are arguably "play once and forget" type games by themselves) so you're not paying for the game, you're paying for human interaction. The same kinda human interaction you could get from a pickup game of basketball at the park. It's equally as competitive, it's free, and it's beneficial for your health and social skills.

- High end graphics that reduce the requirement of an imagination and rule out my ability to make an interpretation of anything that can be seen or is happening. The game makes sure to do that for you.

- No flexibility in editing. Editing encourages cheating in multiplayer which makes honest gamers sad and the last thing a business wants to do is hurt their consumer's feelings. Also it gives more power to the game developer company because they can release the same game with slight modifications for exactly the same price as the original game with only a fraction of the work. Market research data proves that there are plenty people stupid enough to do that.

printz said:

What about buying the new games exactly for the graphics and engine?

Then you're looking in the wrong place. If you're in it purely for the visuals then you'd be all about Pixar movies. They're doing substantially better as far as visuals go than video games are doing.

I'd like to know how Portal has taken ideas from other games. Saying "well duh, it's a FPS" doesn't count. It's as much of a first person shooter as Deus Ex is.

And Source has a pretty deep modding community, and since like 2/3 of the games you listed were Source games, that makes your argument a little silly. Other modern games with lots of modding flexibility include the Neverwinter Nights games and Bethesda's RPGs (Oblivion, Fallout 3).

No no, lets all start posting our Steam libraries, that will change someone's mind.

40oz said:

I have played many of those games. Half Life, Half Life 2, Call of Duty 4, Left For Dead, Battlefield Bad Company 2, Portal, Bioshock, each one of them communicate to me the same things that I described.

- They use each other's ideas so that they can entice fans of the same games to keep spending money for things they already had with their previous games. The makers of the games are getting paid for ideas that aren't theirs.

- They are nonsensically and sleep-inducingly easy so that 5 year old ADHD children don't have to use their full attention to be good at the game. Then people like me who have the mental capacity to make intelligent decisions like knowing when to save or act improvisationally are automatically rewarded with stupid perks like being bullet proof or saving for me so I don't need to use my brain to play.

- Multiplayer is the selling point of the game (save for Portal and Bioshock, which are arguably "play once and forget" type games by themselves) so you're not paying for the game, you're paying for human interaction. The same kinda human interaction you could get from a pickup game of basketball at the park. It's equally as competitive, it's free, and it's beneficial for your health and social skills.

- High end graphics that reduce the requirement of an imagination and rule out my ability to make an interpretation of anything that can be seen or is happening. The game makes sure to do that for you.

- No flexibility in editing. Editing encourages cheating in multiplayer which makes honest gamers sad and the last thing a business wants to do is hurt their consumer's feelings. Also it gives more power to the game developer company because they can release the same game with slight modifications for exactly the same price as the original game with only a fraction of the work. Market research data proves that there are plenty people stupid enough to do that.



Then you're looking in the wrong place. If you're in it purely for the visuals then you'd be all about Pixar movies. They're doing substantially better as far as visuals go than video games are doing.

Another problem that bothers me is this one: hiring professional writers to write the story for a game. It seems noble at first, but it's rather rotten. Doom's story I bet wasn't written by anyone else but id, yet it's very coherent and exact. Doom 3's story WAS written by a professional, and we all know the game didn't automatically turn impressive--quite the opposite, it became story-driven. And now it looks they are going to do the same thing with Doom 4, trying another author.

40oz said:

- They use each other's ideas so that they can entice fans of the same games to keep spending money for things they already had with their previous games. The makers of the games are getting paid for ideas that aren't theirs.

EVERY SINGLE GAME EVAR has to be TOTALLY original without ANYTHING that has ever been seen before, right? :P



Okay, yes, Wolf 3D was Id's own concept, but it still had its own inspiration. You can't ask for every single game to make its own genre.

40oz said:- They are nonsensically and sleep-inducingly easy so that 5 year old ADHD children don't have to use their full attention to be good at the game. Then people like me who have the mental capacity to make intelligent decisions like knowing when to save or act improvisational are automatically rewarded with stupid perks like being bullet proof or saving for me so I don't need to use my brain to play.

Autosave really makes the game THAT much easier? If anything, it makes it more frustrating, but not easier. Also, before you even bring up Vita-chambers, don't forget that you can turn them off.

40oz said:- Multiplayer is the selling point of the game (save for Portal and Bioshock, which are arguably "play once and forget" type games by themselves) so you're not paying for the game, you're paying for human interaction. The same kinda human interaction you could get from a pickup game of basketball at the park. It's equally as competitive, it's free, and it's beneficial for your health and social skills.

Uhhh... okay? I generally enjoy single player gaming more, but I assure you, when I go to play online, it's not solely to interact with people. Sometimes it's fun to mess around and joke with others, but I generally like the idea of having another person under my crosshairs, as it takes more skill to outwit a person rather than a machine.

40oz said:- High end graphics that reduce the requirement of an imagination and rule out my ability to make an interpretation of anything that can be seen or is happening. The game makes sure to do that for you.

I... don't get where you're going with this. For games like Bioshock, Half Life, or any other story-centric video game, the art assets are important for world-building. I happen to enjoy going up to dead enemies and looking at them just to try and figure out how they work. And in games like CoD where you only ever fight in "real" situations the graphics are appropriate to what is being represented. I can't really even think of a modern game where it would be appropriate to be as abstract as Doom. I suppose that could be a bad thing, but really, it's not stopped me from enjoying them.

- No flexibility in editing. Editing encourages cheating in multiplayer which makes honest gamers sad and the last thing a business wants to do is hurt their consumer's feelings. Also it gives more power to the game developer company because they can release the same game with slight modifications for exactly the same price as the original game with only a fraction of the work. Market research data proves that there are plenty people stupid enough to do that.

Agreed wholeheartedly for... hmm... three of the seven you listed. The rest are fully moddable. Still, this is actually a pretty good point, and I also think that more games should be easily edited.

Id software pioneered the first person shooter genre. They have every right to create games influenced by their own work. In Borderlands' case, the developers literally picked apart everything they liked about existing games and pasted them all together into a giant mess of unoriginal concepts.

How does autosaving make the game more frustrating? It reduces the negative impact of dying. You literally just get a second chance to do what you did 30 seconds ago. The reason they do this is because having to restart the whole game with no weapons is irritating and causes children to get angry and quit the game to play something a little easier. In borderlands case you get an unreasonably powerful shield, regenerating health, and you don't even die when you lose all your health. Dont wanna piss off gamers too much!

The machine you're referring didn't just appear out of nowhere. The machine is created by a person. Aeguably you're outwitting the people that made the game by beating their shitty AI. They could potentially make the game unreasonably difficult to beat so as to test your skills that you supposedly want to do, but they don't. They let their games' players do that job. Just look at the Contra series, another old OLD game. That game features no multiplayer but is just as difficult as your typical multiplayer deathmatch game.

Story-driven games are exactly as they are described. Stories disguised as games. If you're interested in stories, you should refer to storybooks, plays, poetry, and films. Games are for interaction with a virtual force, and achieving the games' goals. Story driven video games discourage makinh interpretations or conjectures when the exact plot of the game is spoonfed tp you with clear depictions of objects and scripted events, dialogue and what not. This makes people more appreciative of video games than real life because unlike the strict plots of video games, people are forced to think and make their own interpretations of what their purpose is on earth or how they got there, when in video games, that information is delivered to you up front. Also high quality graphics take a toll on processors which usually means long loading times, which detracts from the time spent actually interacting with the game.

40oz. If you hate contemporary games THIS much and with so much zeal, why not just play old games which obviously satisfy what you, personally, look for in a game in the first place?

original? no.
fun to play with 3 friends? fuck yes. (although i haven't played it in months.)
if you haven't played borderlands with 3 friends (with headsets) then please to stfu. i'm sure that almost everyone here understands and agrees that games aren't what they used to be, so your rants are pointless wastes of your time.
--over and out

40oz said:

How does autosaving make the game more frustrating? It reduces the negative impact of dying. You literally just get a second chance to do what you did 30 seconds ago. The reason they do this is because having to restart the whole game with no weapons is irritating and causes children to get angry and quit the game to play something a little easier.

I fully agree. A reason I like Doom 1, 2 and 3 is that I get punished for playing badly. I often ragequit, and I call that healthy, because it means I won't be hooked too long in a bad posture at the computer, and do something varied instead.

In borderlands case you get an unreasonably powerful shield, regenerating health, and you don't even die when you lose all your health. Dont wanna piss off gamers too much!

I'm not speaking about Borderlands and have never played it (sue me), but in general you can add to that list the gimmick superpower weapon that's unnecessary if you're a good enough player.

40oz said:

Just look at the Contra series, another old OLD game. That game features no multiplayer but is just as difficult as your typical multiplayer deathmatch game.

I don't think so. Contra is based on a system of rules and patterns that someone can master and recognize quickly, and it's not going to suddenly change up its formula after all this time. Predicting what an enemy squad of players is going to do in a given situation? Not going to happen.

I often wonder why anyone even mentions any non-Doom game. It always sparks a shitfest. "THIS GAME ISNT AN EXACT COPY OF DOOM! I MUST RAAAAGE AND SMITE THE HERE..OH WAIT THAT ISN'T DOOM EITHER RAAAAAAAAAAGE...WAIT RAGE ISNT DOOM AS WELL!??? *mental breakdown*"

Makes conversation a little difficult.

As for the game in question, I completed the game solo with Mordecai, and the parts designed for coop become so glaringly obvious that the areas become boredom incarnate. When that isn't the case, I had a lot of fun with his pistol skill tree, I loved the high risk high reward style of it, since Mordecai is the least durable of the characters, yet has arguably better melee than Brick, with Lethal Strike boostable to a 35% chance of doing 900% damage, with 90% extra damage for ordinary strikes. I love cutting a giant bruiser of an enemy to death with the frail sniper character, I can imagine the sheer shock when it receives 9000 damage out of nowhere from a sword..

The real fun is easily the coop, as eveyone states. I play solely with my brother (Because all my friends are level 61s and playing with people not your level is dull) and we are always bickering over chest contents and who charged off ahead getting the other killed etc. Not to mention the sheer siliness that can happen. If im in a shop, he'll position his character (Always Brick) so that his face will appear around the shop window, its always hilarious when I finally notice this random face peering out of the bottom left corner or so forth :p And lets not forget the endless fun in the vehicles...we managed to fall off T-Bone Junction and fall to the canyon below, ALIVE. Impromptu Vehicle Deathmatch with a completely red screen? Dont mind if I do.

DoomUK said:

40oz.

I certainly do. Doom is literally the only video game I play anymore. It's disappointing to know that such a great game isn't the sole inspiration of games created after it. Since video games have gone so far in a direction lead by what I assume are children younger than the ESRB ratings of these games, I feel obligated to boycott the video game industry until they man up and create games that I wanna play. That's what capitalism is about.

The Lag said:

if you haven't played borderlands with 3 friends (with headsets) then please to stfu.

Already mentioned above that human interaction isn't something that should be paid for. There are plenty of other things that you can do with three other friends that are really entertaining but still entertaining without friends as well that don't cost $30. Doom is an easy example but I find slaughterfests just as intense and adrenaline-boosting as deathmatches with real players.

Use3D said:

I don't think so.

So what? Were all human here and recognize that concern, what's stopping programmers from programming with the idea of avoiding use of predictable patterns as a base for AI? Maybe streets of rage's boss battles would be a better example. Sure they only do a few special moves but they aren't any more or less predictable than the player's abilities are, and that makes the game as entertaining as it is to play single player.

Ragnor said:

shitfest.

Me being the only one leading a contrary position doesn't automatically mean I'm screaming at everyone here. I'm willing to bet that the people here disregarding my arguments and remaining stagnant in their position in favor of the direction of modern games are simply sold on these games addictive features I described and are too attached to them to admit that they're a problem.

Or maybe they aren't diehard "old school" past-livers who think that the idea of a game having a STORY instead of just "go here do this occasional puzzle shoot things" gameplay is a bad thing. Coincidentally, all the things you listed as things where story "should stay" are the places where imagination is most necessary to enjoy(films excluded). Funny how that works out, eh?

Oh, and as for high quality graphics taking a toll: a) upgrade your PC beyond ancient (comparably speaking) specifications or b) use a console where hardware upgrades are rare if you don't want "long loading times" to "ruin" your experience. That's indicating more a lack of patience than desire for enjoyment to me.

I also think you're confusing "pioneer" with "popularize". The earliest documented first person shooters were created back in the '70s.

I refuse to buy any video game unless it's absolutely perfect.

Then I suppose you regret buying Doom then? The saying "nothing's perfect" comes into play here. Certainly you can't consider something "perfect" if it required multiple patches to fix bugs, contained misaligned textures, and had a number of poorly designed vanilla maps.
Obviously it appears you were able to look past those errors in Doom's case. Why can't you look past the errors of newer games? Try opening your damned mind for once; maybe you'd actually like something then. It's a pretty damn sad case when you make me look like the guy who likes everything.

I feel obligated to boycott the video game industry until they man up and create games that I wanna play. That's what capitalism is about.

Sounds more like you're just being a self centered jackass.
I DON'T CARE WHAT EVERYONE ELSE WANTS ITS ABOUT WHAT I WAAAAAANT!!!

In borderlands case you get an unreasonably powerful shield, regenerating health, and you don't even die when you lose all your health. Dont wanna piss off gamers too much!

Here we go again, babbling and whining when you have no idea what you're talking about. No you don't get an unreasonably powerful shield. Newer and higher level shields may provide more protection but there's usually a catch to it as well. Some shields provide better protection but take longer to regenerate, while others provide less protection while at the same time taking less time to recharge. Oh and enemies with electric weapons can take down your shields in 1-2 shots. Oh and no you don't get regenerating health unless you've picked up a shield that provides you with it.

Oh and you're partially wrong about not dying when you lose all your health, at least not immediately anyway. You go down, a timer starts counting down, and if you don't kill an enemy or your teammate doesn't pick you up by the time said counter reaches zero, you do die. There are still things that will kill you immediately though, such as getting run over by a vehicle, falling off a cliff, or wandering out of the map.

oh and one other thing

Already mentioned above that human interaction isn't something that should be paid for. There are plenty of other things that you can do with three other friends that are really entertaining but still entertaining without friends as well that don't cost $30.

By this logic, the only games we should be playing is tag, and it pretty much cancels out that shit you said about basket ball. If you wanna play baseball, you gotta buy a bat and ball, plus baseball gloves. If you wanna play basketball, you gotta buy a basket ball and if you don't have one available, a hoop too. Most games aren't free. Oh and I didn't pay $30 bucks for the game. Maybe you should learn to buy used games or wait for sales. Also who says you're just paying for social interaction?

40oz said:

Id software pioneered the first person shooter genre. They have every right to create games influenced by their own work. In Borderlands' case, the developers literally picked apart everything they liked about existing games and pasted them all together into a giant mess of unoriginal concepts.

As stated by Xeros612 above me, FPS games have been around for a lot longer than Wolf3D. And even if they did pioneer the genre and create the very first FPS, why should this stop someone else from making something similar? As I said before, you seriously cannot expect EVERY single game out there to completely revolutionize everything and make a new genre. That'd be like saying every single band/music artist had to make a new set of instruments using entirely new ways of producing sound, and THEN also create an entirely original genre of music without taking any inspiration from anyone else. Sounds fairly unrealistic, no?

40oz said:

How does autosaving make the game more frustrating? It reduces the negative impact of dying. You literally just get a second chance to do what you did 30 seconds ago. The reason they do this is because having to restart the whole game with no weapons is irritating and causes children to get angry and quit the game to play something a little easier.

[/b]

I don't agree with that at all. I'm also frustrated with Autosave frequently, but for the exact opposite reason. I like to be able to stop playing at any time, and if a game -only- has autosave, then I can lose up to ten minutes of effort because of some random occurrence outside the game world. (Likewise, it's not fun to have to repeat a bunch of sequences because of something sudden. That's not difficulty, that's tedium.) But if a game has both normal saves and autosaves, I have never even noticed a difference in my saving habits. I barely ever use the autosave option when it is there.

Or do you mean that games should have no saving at all? (Which would be ridiculous, but your reasoning against autosaves suggests that you support this.)

40oz said:

The machine you're referring didn't just appear out of nowhere. The machine is created by a person. Arguably you're outwitting the people that made the game by beating their shitty AI. They could potentially make the game unreasonably difficult to beat so as to test your skills that you supposedly want to do, but they don't. They let their games' players do that job. Just look at the Contra series, another old OLD game. That game features no multiplayer but is just as difficult as your typical multiplayer deathmatch game.

[/b]

If every game was as twitch-reaction-pattern based as Contra, ESPECIALLY 3d games, I would play far fewer. It's all well and good for a 2d platformer shoot-em-up to have that sort of difficulty, but I cannot think of a way to implement that on a 3d plane, where gauging distance and position is artificially harder due to the lack of actual depth.

Also, I think you misunderstood me. I don't play multiplayer just for super-hard difficulty. I just play to avoid being stuck in a game of simon-says with AI.

40oz said:

Story-driven games...{snip}

Perhaps some people enjoy being part of the action in a story that isn't "pretend that there's a story behind killing all these random enemies?" While not really part of the FPS genre, Mass Effect is a good example of this. The story, world(s), and characters are top-notch, and something you wouldn't see in any other medium. Not, at least, in a way that is so appealing.

Though, I will venture and say that being able to make more powerful choices and really decide who the character is could help out a lot, but that's irrelevant. The point is, stories add a distinct interest in a game's world, and, while horrible gameplay is still inexcusable, I am just as motivated by wanting to further the plot as I am by wanting to have more gameplay.

Membrain said:

Though, I will venture and say that being able to make more powerful choices and really decide who the character is could help out a lot, but that's irrelevant. The point is, stories add a distinct interest in a game's world, and, while horrible gameplay is still inexcusable, I am just as motivated by wanting to further the plot as I am by wanting to have more gameplay.

inb4 "you are addicted to story lines"

40oz said:

So what? Were all human here and recognize that concern, what's stopping programmers from programming with the idea of avoiding use of predictable patterns as a base for AI?

Okay, thanks for making my point? I guess nothing is preventing them from making believable AI, but until then, a human opponent is going to infinitely better. So, saying Contra is just as hard as Quake Live is still ridiculous.

Craigs said:

inb4 "you are addicted to story lines"

C'mon, man! I just need one more! I swear, I'll go clean after. Just one more!

40oz, I find your argument about difficulty puzzling. Doom 1 and 2 are easy on anything under Nightmare, and Nightmare is a ridiculous jump in difficulty that isn't even balanced. For example, fast sergeants grow in power a lot more than imps do. Honestly, would you dislike Doom if it didn't have Nightmare mode?

Try looking at every one of your arguments of why modern games suck (what modern games are missing), imagine Doom was missing any one of those things, and think of whether you would still like Doom if it missed any one of them. I'm curious what you would think.

Also, I would disagree with you regarding Doom's graphics. Doom had very advanced graphics for its day. It required a lot less imagination than something like Nethack. They just happened to age a lot better than many other games of the time. A common mistake is to judge graphics on technical instead of artistic merit, which is like judging a painting based on the quality of the paint. Artistically, Doom's graphics were better than Quake's, and are still better than some Korean free-to-play Counter Strike clones.


Also, do you like Minecraft?

Xeros612 said:

Funny how that works out, eh?

Uh no. Not at all. Using your imagination stimulates your brain. I see no purpose in exchanging my money for computer parts to do the imagining that I can already do with my own brain. Especially since high quality graphics have nothing to do with my interaction with the game. As long as objects have some semblance to what they are supposed to be, enough to lead me to believe what it is I'm supposed to think it is, then the game has good enough graphics to play with. That said, doom's graphics could be a tad TOO good for me, but I still have no waiting time to load the game so it doesn't interfere with my ability to play it.

Xeros612 said:

errors

Because those errors did not affect the quality of the game. Essentially the structure of the gameplay was already there (The player's speed, the strength of the weapons, dodging projectiles, etc.) despite the misaligned textures and other junk that supposedly required patches (with the exception of maybe missing keys that could have made the maps unplayable). The game was still fully functional as it is. The problems I'm referring to in modern games that you just defined as "errors" were intentional because thats what the game developers think will sell. Unfortunately for me, they're right.

Craigs said:

self centered jackass.

I could argue that what you want is mediocre quality video games. Consumers have the right to choose so you're being a self-centered asshole by expecting that I just pretend to enjoy all the shitty quality games you like so we can get along. Fuck that.

Craigs said:

By this logic,

Okay I'll give you points for that. Basketball hoops however are often provided for free at community parks. Basketballs aren't nearly as difficult to obtain as say upgrading your PC is, in both money and maintenance. But your logic suggests that just because these games are there, they should be bought and played, regardless of whether they are good.

Membrain said:

unrealistic, no?

It's even more unrealistic if I give up. I'm not gonna drop all my arguments and pretend to like games that are bad. That's not how I roll. And I'm not sure the music reference you're making is correct. Because I'd like games to be more like the extreme difficulty of Doom, so what I'm suggesting is a more fierce version of an already existing genre of music, kinda like the genre of music I listen to: grindcore. Even though it's pretty much unlistened to by most of the general public, it still exists. The games that are on the market today are akin to alternative rock that also has rap lyrics and jazz saxophones and bits and pieces from other genres of music so that every single person that hears it can get their own little piece of satisfaction. I want games that are more exclusive.

Membrain said:

I would play far fewer.

So what? What I want to play doesn't have to be what you want to play.

Use3D said:

saying Contra is just as hard as Quake Live is still ridiculous.

Whatever. The potential to create games with computer based AI that's more difficult to fight than humans is still there and not being utilized.

ITT: Nerds get mad

40oz said:

Whatever. The potential to create games with computer based AI that's more difficult to fight than humans is still there and not being utilized.

What about computer chess? What is super moderator's opinion on this? Is it true that you can make a chess computer player so powerful no champion can best it? And that there already is a released software doing that?

Nomad said:

ITT: Nerds get mad

If you really want to see nerds get mad, just look at 4chan's /tg/.

40oz said:

It's even more unrealistic if I give up. I'm not gonna drop all my arguments and pretend to like games that are bad. That's not how I roll. And I'm not sure the music reference you're making is correct. Because I'd like games to be more like the extreme difficulty of Doom, so what I'm suggesting is a more fierce version of an already existing genre of music, kinda like the genre of music I listen to: grindcore. Even though it's pretty much unlistened to by most of the general public, it still exists. The games that are on the market today are akin to alternative rock that also has rap lyrics and jazz saxophones and bits and pieces from other genres of music so that every single person that hears it can get their own little piece of satisfaction. I want games that are more exclusive.

Okay, good point. But the games you are attacking, and by and large, the people you are attacking, may not want that kind of music. Personally, I enjoy variety. I don't believe that every game should be every single thing I'm looking for, because most of the things I want aren't compatible with one another.

I understand where you're coming from. You want a style of gameplay that isn't often offered to the public, and you wish everyone wanted that kind of gameplay. That's fine, but you're knocking everyone else and telling them that what they like is "bad," and use reasoning that just doesn't fly. What you're saying is that every single game released should cater only to you, and to no one else.

Also, I've never really noticed how extreme the difficulty is in Doom. It can be hard, sure, but there are other games out there that are even more difficult, in both the same ways, and others.

40oz said:

So what? What I want to play doesn't have to be what you want to play.

But that's not the point I was trying to make. My point is that the sort of difficulty you propose is not even actual difficulty. Bullet-hell shooters are only more difficult in 3d games because you can't as easily gauge where each projectile is. Contra-style gameplay just does not translate to game with a z-axis. The closest you can come to that is Doom on UV with -fast, and half the time, wads don't even become too much harder with those settings. Maybe slaughter maps, but again, that's a niche even among us Doomers.

40oz said:

The potential to create games with computer based AI that's more difficult to fight than humans is still there and not being utilized.

I suppose it's going to depend on the complexity of the game, but I know you don't have the programming experience to make this claim. Programing an AI to function even close to human-like in a game like Bad Company 2 would take months, if not years to perfect. Using cover, appropriate weapons for the situation, working with your team, suddenly changing up classes and tactics or just going Rambo, the complexity is overwhelming, and that's just deathmatch, not to mention the heavy team-centric modes like Conquest. We've all played against bots, they're practically retarded and these games have deadlines that have to be met. Making god-like AI isn't suddenly going to make a bad game fun, but it will make a fun game bad. Play Mortal Kombat 2/3 on hardest difficulty and see how long it takes before you're crying in frustration.

You also mention the 'extreme' difficulty of Doom. Yes, Doom can be pretty damn hard (despite having the most basic AI), but imagine if all the monsters were controlled by human players. Uh oh, suddenly they're not just walking at you like a bunch of mindless idiots, they're plotting against your ass and working together. Now that's extreme difficulty.

But yeah, if they really DO have the ability to make competent AI in these games and simply aren't well, that'd be shitty.

printz said:

What about computer chess? What is super moderator's opinion on this? Is it true that you can make a chess computer player so powerful no champion can best it? And that there already is a released software doing that?

a game of chess isn't exactly the same as an actual battle.