Loads of games have done bits of it. Just Cause 2 has a huge set of islands and total free-roaming anywhere within the map. Fuel has some insane amount of terrain (just wiki'd - 5,560 square miles!) because it does it with procedural generation. Red Faction has had destroyable terrain since the first game. Hydrophobia Prophecy modelled water physics correctly, because so much of the game involves using it to solve problems. Crysis did beautiful-looking foliage. Soldier of Fortune did hit location.

But so many games still can't be arsed to do it right, so things in the environment aren't things, they're lumps of terrain with a picture skin. Cars on which you can't shoot out the tyres. Or the windscreen. NPCs your gun won't shoot at, or won't hurt if you do. Glass that doesn't break, wood that doesn't burn, and magic invisible walls at the edge of the world. Or in the case of the Battlefield games, a magic invisible line with artillery insta-death just 5 seconds away if you dare to cross it.

Ramping up the triangle count just doesn't cut it any more. Yes, the face in the video is very clever - what happens when I shoot it? The water's lovely - does it make ripples when I walk through it, or splash when I jump up and down? The AI might well react to my presence - how will it react to a 9mm to the kneecap? Or a fire? Or a rocket going off 10 feet away? Are NPC soldiers all inhuman combat robots, totally unafraid of death, and 100% combat effective until their last hit point is gone?

Because, you know, I've played Doom. A super-shiny version of the exact same gameplay no longer appeals. I know there were restrictions on game design caused by having less memory for the game than my current CPU has cache. All the right things have been done at least once. Now could someone just please do them all together?

Take the guns away from the men and give the pills to the women. Accept the fact that it's going to take a couple of generations to stabilise, and there is no quick fix. In many places, the problems seem to be not poor soil, or lack of rain, but the fact that around harvest time, some asswipe rolls up in a jeep with a bunch of his buttboys and helps himself to whatever he fancies.

Accept the ugly truth that inter-uterine and infant malnutrition can directly and permanently affect brain growth. Unlike many other parts of the body, which seem able to recover, if sufficient food is presented later, the brain doesn't seem to recover. Entire areas have been hit by famine, whether caused by weather conditions or the janjaweed militia, and the damage is clear and permanent, and won't go away overnight no matter how much food you ship in.

With no appropriate infrastructure, a lot of aid ends up wasted, damaged, or just diverted to whichever local asswipe has the most guns. Aid needs to be specific. I saw a TED talk on the amazing water-purifier bottle - he scooped up some filthy muck, gave it a couple of pumps, and out came pure water. A truckload of those in the right place would probably do some good. I also remember hearing about a village where the thing that made the most difference to their food supply was teaching the local craftsman to make catapults. The local monkeys would help themselves to the crops and they lost around 30% of their crop each year. They gave the local boys catapults, so they could hit the monkeys with stones without getting too close. The problem cleared right up, as the monkeys learned that going anywhere near the fields got them nothing but a sharp stone at high speed.

The problems are not insurmountable, but they are huge in scope. Getting people to give a shit for extended periods of time might be the largest challenge of all.

and can probably prove it with an Etch-A-Sketch and 5 minutes of my time, but I can't take any of this stuff seriously. I listen to MP3s and they sound great to me. I listen to them on the bus, on the train, on my bike, in the city, all on standard earbuds, and it all sounds like it's supposed to.

It's just that after reading the absolute pure f**king snake-oil that some of the component manufacturers put out about their products in a vain attempt to justify charging ten grand for a pair of *wires*, as soon as anyone starts getting needlessly technical about audio, it all sounds like yet more snake-oil.

And so I end up grouping terms like lossless and FLAC and AAC with counter-spiral geometry, which is apparently why Audioquest can charge a thousand dollars a foot for a f**king power cable.

but not Barada Nikto...

http://youtu.be/Jm2MB14JTSM

just like when it became cheap to do printing. Now the market for print covers everything from comics, to lifestyle magazines, to Booker Prize winners. Sometimes I want to sit down with a novel, sometimes I want to see what Batman's up to this month, sometimes I'll flick through an issue of Motor Boats and Yachting because that's the only mag in the dentist's waiting room.

The concept of a single, clearly- and rigidly-defined platform will always be attractive to developers. Raw horsepower will always make a difference to any game more complex than Tetris. Control systems will always be a beast to implement on something that has a touchscreen and a single button, unless the control system is implemented first, then the game built around that. It is not possible to replicate the 11 buttons, twin joysticks and a d-pad of an X-box controller on an iPhone.

I think it's good that the market is fragmenting. It won't stop the big studios making AAA-titles. It will help the indie developer with the next great idea get her game made in Flash, or on Android, or running directly in the browser. It might help stem the unearthly tide of shovelware that infests the pre-owned racks at GAME. And although, to an extent, I decry the loss of geek cred that comes with the fact that now everybody and their dog plays some sort of video games, the fact that every woman I've met lately plays Farmville does make it a useful ice-breaker...

http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_liew3uMF7G1qbmgeto1_500.jpg

or

http://cf.sketchfu.com/i/72185.png

The images are from the Clive Barker story - In the Hills, the Cities. This more like what you had in mind?

from someone who is clearly fascinated by the possibilities of the medium, and yet despairing of the industry's reluctance to take risks.

AAA games are movie-level budgets and nobody wants to take risks with that kind of money. Indie games might try to take chances, but smaller dev-teams, and limited releases mean nobody's going to be talking about them, at least not in the amount of column-inches required for anyone to take note.

Games have been mainstream now for around 40 years, since the advent of Pong. Before that, you had hardcore geeks playing Spacewar and Advent on their PDP-10s at university but most people still thought of computer games as science fiction. During that same time-period for films, we went from George Melies' From the Earth to the Moon to Casablanca, taking in Citizen Kane, The Wizard of Oz, and Un Chien Andalou, to say nothing of the classics like Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd et al.

So where's our Casablanca? Where's our Citizen Kane? Where are the absolute, pure classics, that people want to play again and again, show to their friends as pinnacles of the genre, and that will be just as playable in 60 years time? Shadow of the Colossus? Rez? Ocarina of Time? Psychonauts? We have a few, but as long as the industry wants to keep pumping out endless retreads of Big Guns, Shiny Metal, because that's what they've been told appeals to their target demographic, we're not likely to get very many more, except by accident.

Just as soon as we get a cast-iron definition of 'obscene' or even 'offensive' that applies to everything correctly for everyone.

It's okay, I'll wait...

Because, of course, language is never going to modify itself to route round censorship. No-one has ever invented entire new sub-tongues like polari, or thieves' cant to discuss dangerous or illegal subjects in plain sight without detection.

I wish these idiots nothing but the best with their endless game of Whac-a-Mole (TM).

I have a monster PC, built specifically to run the latest games at eye-shredding resolutions. Crysis 2, 1920x1080, Ultra everything, DX11 - 80fps. FSX, 1920x1080 everything maxed, 4fps. Even when it's running like a slide-show, it looks like an 8-bit game. And when I dial everything back to playable levels, it still looks like an 8-bit game, only with more movement.. Fly low, and buildings pop in randomly around city centres, and nowhere else. Despite being in the UK, where we don't use such things, everywhere is dotted with water towers.

Pilotwings looked better on the N64 10 years ago. What is FSX doing (or not doing) that makes it run like a 3-legged dog stapled to a table?

and yet still launches in *this* state...? (ripped from Steam forum)

Issues: No Custom settings for Video Cards
Video Cards not being detected properly by the Auto-Detector Resulting in using 0MB of Vram and using the lowest texture/gfx settings...
No Console command
No Vsync options - Results in screen tearing - Forcing Vsync causes the game to crash the drivers and game(AMD)
Unable to skip intros??? To disable the intro videos put this "+set com_skipIntroVideo 1" in the launch options of Rage Via Steam.
Mouse acceleration?
Can't use Crossfire or SLI..
Bad FoV for PC's - Short-term solution: FOV adjustment howto
(Nvidia)Enabling V-sync by forcing it in the control panel causes the game to Stutter and have lines appear:
OpenGL Issues: GL_ARB_draw_elements_base_vertex not available
Missing Files or GFX card not compatible? - List of compatible card: http://feedback.wildfiregames.com/re...ts_base_vertex this issue seems to be common with laptops and mobile video GFX processors meaning the game may not run on a mobile GFX chip(Laptops)


Bugs:
Texture Streaming is bad and slow resulting in always reloading the same textures thus causing the textures popping in effect - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7Ch6TX-Cbs&hd=1
Missing/blinking textures...
Random Crashing: when exiting the Arc, after intro video, including when trying to start a new game and loading new areas.
LoD issues(popins dispersing items)
Audio stuttering and not blending properly.
Occasional Artifacts appearing- http://img812.imageshack.us/img812/9...0322215294.jpg
Low Frame rates with occasional fps spikes
Loading saves causes videocard drivers to crash...
Game Fails to start with error code #51.
Shadows turn Green
Binding keys don't always save and remain unbound and unable to be set
No Sound? this is a common issue with creative soundcards - Possible Fix: Buy a new soundcard or try and use your onboard sound.


But for some reason, because one of the guys who worked on it did some cool stuff a few years ago, this is somehow acceptable?