Quility of games

[Ghostman]

Is it me or is the quility of games going down hill?? I've been playing Civ 4 and I have had nothing but crashes. The game runs out of virutal memory or video ram. This system has 1 Gb of ram, 1 Gb of swap and 128 Mb video ram. The game is only running 1024x768. It doesnt offer a whole lot of eye candy to be taxing the ram, swap and video card. The game play alone doesnt seem to be that different from Civ 3.

I've been seeing this in the "Need for Speed" series. The first one had lots of specs and info about the cars. The second one some of that was taken out, the third it was almost all stripped out. To me that was a good part of the game. See that the cars in the game are based off of real cars.

Unreal Tournament is another. More and more companies seem to be making sequels to games but not caring about the content. Nintendo seems to be real bad at this. rereleasing old nes and snes games. When they should be spending time making new games.

Companies should release old titles for download.

[Admiral]

Yup, it's just like music, the quality getting worst; performance-wise, games either unoptimized or designed/released for console first and rushed for PC after.
CD/DVD price stays the same and you get this new crappy "copy protection" software (thinkign StarForce) on top.

[TnT]

There's more competition and thus the business end pushes for faster releases. So over time you'll get more lower quality games. Games are in a strange spot because it's a fairly mature business model but games industry as a vehicle for entertainment/story telling is still young.

I just went to the new NW Games Festival (targeted towards game developers and wanna-be's like me). Chris Crawford, of Atari fame, gave the keynote (a speech he has given many times before but I haven't heard it). The main point being that what we have right now as a game is really just a small segment of the actual potential of computer entertainment and interactive stories.

The big players are making money by keeping this status quo, much like the Hollywood studios and their crappy blockbusters. If you want something different then check out indie ventures, much like for movies. Sure there aren't as many explosions and high-end effects, but maybe the game is better made because the developers have more of their heart in it.

[Mehen]

One thing I have been really impressed with is the Doom3 engine. Look at how good doom3 and quake4 look, and you can still run them on a relatively old system - especially as compared to FEAR, BF2, etc. Not only that, you can turn the settings down on the doom3 engine and it still looks really good whereas with other games it just looks horrible at 800x600 low detail.

edit: Carmack is God.

[Wombat]

Gotta really disagree on that one. The Doom 3 engine bogs down if there's more than 3 characters on the screen.

[Gurm]

I have had lots of luck with Civ4.

The big reason it's such a resource hog, actually, is that they redid the engine all open-extensible and happy slappy like that. Anytime you modify a game to run solely on XML... it's gonna become resource-hungry. Bleh.

But yes, in general games suck now.

[az]

Has anybody ever worked Master of Orion III? Worst game of all time. Such a shame

[Ghostman]

Yes, I have Master of Orion 3. Bought it shortly after it came out. played it for a few weeks. couldnt understand what I was doing and gave up. I even had the help book. it didnt help a whole lot.

[lowlifecat]

Wombat> Doom3/quake4 can scale down very well. infact you can even play those games on a parhelia! *twitch!*

the 'strogification' sequence in Q4 is just brutal. i recently (last week) replayed the game again and right after finishing it started a new game of Quake 2. Q2 doesn't seem to play to comfortably in WASD+mouse configuration... or maybe it's just me, the first time i played this game it was with keyboard only.

this weekend i played through FEAR again. not a bad game at all, plot is pretty good.

i realized today that i had a copy of Serious Sam 2 but i had never played beyond the first couple of levels. i hope to finish it by tomorrow.

Another game that i found in my collection and had to install again is Star Trek: Bridge Commander. absolutly fantastic and it's not that old. if you can find this game in a bargain bin anywhere, get it!

I've been digging through my old games and replaying because there doesn't seem to be anything interesting out there at the moment. lotsa MMOs which i really want to avoid.

another good game i've recently dug up. Tron 2.0

[Umfriend]

Red Alert, Speedball II: Brutal DeLuxe and Fighter Ace. Who needs anything more?