Guitar Hero and Rock Band are vastly different from Dance Central. My guess is strumming or drumming along to a track is much more preferable to a likely out-of-shape hardcore gamer than is copying an on-screen avatar's dance moves without any tactile feedback whatsoever. I still seriously doubt you'll see hardcore gamers picking this up. Maybe the casual crowd will take a liking to it, but as I already said before, that crowd has a Wii and I doubt they'll be shelling out $300 or whatever it is for a 360 and Kinect.

You are dealing with people that mostly wouldn't remember what an "ion" is. When you say "smashing iron", they think of banging two iron bars together.

Those are the kind of people we don't want coming to Slashdot anymore.

Yes, since millions of self-proclaimed "hardcore" gamers with an XBox are going to be frothing at the mouth for Dance Central. Give me a fucking break. I bet the thing flops because developers will almost exclusively target the casual audience, which the Wii already has under lock, and the casual audience by definition isn't going to care to replace their casual gaming system with another. Don't get me wrong, I think the technology is interesting (albeit without tactile feedback), but it's clear they are trying to copy-cat Nintendo's motion-gaming success.

Spectator mode helps a lot. Generally just start with one thing (i.e. try not to die) and then move your way up. Once you feel comfortable with the controls and weapons, start spectating the players that are handing your ass to you. Try to figure out what things they are doing that give them an edge over you and then practice doing those things on your own. I don't know if the game you're talking about has spectator mode, but Quake II had it and it was incredibly useful. Also, creativity pays off pretty well in these kinds of games if you can trap people or something similar.

When the graphics and characters are less realistic you don't expect the same level of human.. ness.

I have to disagree. Even a book, which has no graphics, can make you feel attached to its characters. The trick is capturing the character's essence with words and reflecting that in the graphics. I always feel that a character is more real when the story is well written, not because she may have big hooters or cool-looking equipment.

Nobody ever slapped kids around when I was in marching band. We got yelled at and directors threw shit around, sometimes they made us run if we hadn't been practicing or whatever, but nobody was ever physically injured. Thanks for assuming people were being physically hurt, though. Anyway, all I was saying with my previous post is that parents shouldn't freak out when their kid gets disciplined. Almost every kid needs a good spanking every now and then. Or in the case of teenagers, maybe a few laps around the school.

Fuck off, you worthless tool. You should do prison time for being such a fucking idiot. I'm sick of dumb motherfuckers like you spouting off with your "don't hit my kid!" trash. Sometimes the only way a kid will listen is after s/he's discovered there are consequences to being a little shit and those consequences, depending on the offense, involve pain. You seem to think all the parents that physically discipline their children are out there seriously injuring them, which is retarded (most of them get spanked or some variation of that). I would much rather have parents that are willing to physically discipline their children when it's called for as opposed to lazy parents who just let their kids do what they want. With the former, you get a generation of people who are intelligent, well-adjusted, and respectful of others; with the latter, you end up with a generation full of the spoiled, stupid, annoying, snot-nosed brats that the "don't hit my kid!" crowd raises. YUCK!

The first year I was in high school, our marching band was a national competitor and nationally recognized primarily because our band director was a hardass and discipline was of the utmost importance; we won the state competition that year and came in second place in nationals. Unfortunately, he was retiring soon. The next year was a transition year and he spent the season handing the reins over to the assistant director. The assistant director wasn't a hardass and did not value discipline. During my 4 years there, I watched the program go from a prestigious organization to a complete fucking joke. During my senior year, as a section leader, I was most disgusted because the new director refused to discipline the incoming freshman and instead catered to them and pampered their asses. The marching band program there has since gone downhill and they are lucky to even make it to the national competition. Very sad.

School employees are afraid to discipline students, even when they absolutely deserve it, because of IGNORANT, RETARDED ASSHOLES like you who might fly off the handle and start suing everybody in sight. Discipline is a valuable skill and your kids need to learn it. You are doing a disservice to your children by not disciplining them and a disservice to society because those children will be shitty people when they grow up. If you love your kids, I hope you love them enough to discipline them. Won't you think of the children?

I think the main issue is that most developers focus more on making an attractive game as opposed to something groundbreaking. It seems to me they don't have faith that their game ideas will be able to sell on their own, so they gussy them up... or maybe it's because they know people will buy the pretty-looking game. Either way, I won't say that there are no good games these days, but I do believe we have been in a bit of a drought.

A lot of people say that games today are better than they were in the past. In some regards, yes, they have improved. However, the things that improved aren't necessarily essential to the game, but just make it easier for the player to enjoy them. You have the same basic game, but with a few extra features and some bells and whistles. Boring!

I think part of what made games so good in the NES/SNES days were the facts that it was still a new medium and the technology wasn't that powerful. Because of that, developers had to know that their game ideas were good enough to sell on their own merit. In addition, because of the technological constraints, they needed to be more creative in everything they did. They still tried to mislead the consumer with box art, especially in the Atari days, but I believe that just goes to show how much they cared about appearances even back then.

Having said all that, I must ask... how can you honestly say what you did about Final Fantasy 4? That game was the perfect evolutionary leap in the Final Fantasy time-line. It was the best possible result of working from what came before it. The music is superb, the gameplay is superb, the graphics at the time were superb (and still look great), the characters had the right amount of depth, and the story worked very well. Every now and then I pick up one of my old SNES RPGs (Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, FF4, FF6, SMRPG, Zelda: LttP, just to name a few.) and start a new turn just because they're such good games. I admit it's different experiencing those games through the lens of an adult instead of a child, especially having already played through them as a child, but they are the classics for a good reason -- they're amazing games. Hell, I still load up Duke Nukem 3D every once in awhile. Or maybe Blood, that game is fucking badass. Shadow Warrior is pretty good too. I was pretty partial to the Quake series, especially Quake II... I loved me some RailWarz!

Anyway, yes, there were a lot of bad games back then, too, but that's to be expected. The difference is that there were a lot more gems back then. Even the mediocre games were fun enough to play through once!

That "many, but not most" part really eludes you, doesn't it?

Too stupid; didn't read.

Groundbreaking products? Game-changing technologies? The iPod is an mp3 player, iTunes is a media player, the iPhone is crap with apps, and the iPad is an over-sized joke (replacement for a laptop? please.). The fact that the author dismisses Google's mapping software as an "incremental innovation" is fucking hilarious. Google's mapping software is far more impressive than all four of those Apple products combined.

Anyone who is stupid enough to spend their valuable time crafting something like this for someone they've never met, without guarantee of payment, deserves to both waste their time and not be paid. Unfortunately, spec work hurts everyone involved. The client usually ends up getting something that really just isn't right, the designer usually doesn't get a job or any follow-up work, and by doing spec work, the value of that industry's services is diminished because new clients think they can just throw their criteria out there and get free results.

http://www.no-spec.com/ is a great resource that addresses the topic in detail from many different angles.

I'm pretty sure that's what most of them are doing now. Things certainly are nothing like they were in the 8-, 16-, and even 32-bit days; back then, it was a little hard to find a truly shitty game and even the mediocre games were worth at least one play-through. Nowadays, they are so focused on fighting these different wars ("piracy", second-hand market, etc.), making games look good, and turning an easy profit that I actually think they forgot what goes into making a good game. There are still some truly great games here and there, but overall the bar has been lowered.

Personally, I don't think people really started pirating until after getting burned too many times by greedy publishers looking to milk their cash cows. So, instead of being smart and going back to making games that are actually worth paying money for, they waste all this money on stupid shit. As a result, people are a lot more careful with their money when considering purchasing a game and a lot of them don't see a problem with trying before buying, even if it is technically illegal, because they no longer have good reason to trust these publishers..

Long story short... MAKE BETTER GAMES!

Backwards compatibility would be nice in this case because of the fucking "disc read error" problem that plagued the original PS2. Nobody wants to have to replace a console because it was poorly manufactured and no longer works. I mean, every older console I have (besides the PS2) still works. People in this situation are basically left with a few options; buy a PS2 Slim, buy a gimped PS3 that actually is compatible with some PS2 games (which you hopefully own), or buy one of the decked-out PS3s and forget about your PS2 games. Personally, I've been against buying a new PS2 slim or PS3 because I don't want to support Sony and all the foul-smelling fecal matter they've excreted into the market the past few years. When Sony starts making a good, affordable product again, I might change my view on the matter. Until then... so long, PS2 games!

I'm pretty sure he means he's not going to pay a second company to let him use their online service, since he's already paying for internet access to begin with. Honestly, high-speed internet should just be assumed by this point.

Considering he said he OWNS "a gaming PC, an NES, SNES, Genesis, Sega CD, Sega Saturn, Playstation, Playstation 2, GameCube, Wii, GBA, DS, and PSP", it's pretty safe to say he's not interested in emulating games for those consoles. I'd wager he's probably going to try E-Bay for those older titles that he missed.