Out of everything, I have to say this will be the game that drives me to finally get a 360. I'm just not a fan of multiplayer games, and I still have fond memories of trying to figure out how, long before any official word was released, one could get at the secret items in BK.

I'd love to be able to fight the various flame-type bosses with other flame weapons.

Also have some sort of level change based on what bosses have been beat and whatnot.

Unfortunately, they never really figured out what they did to make it do so well, and in turn nerfed themselves trying to repeat it constantly, with Phantasy Star Universe being their closest at properly emulating it.

MMOs on the PC can work.. it just has to be done right. In the case of PSO, I think the best way would be to have a fairly solid core game that's free to play, then add in benefits for subscribers, such as weapons and higher level caps and the like. It worked well enough, when it did work.

MMO players have their own way, and I know quite a few people who keep up their subscriptions to 3 or 4 MMOs at a time, even if they're not playing one of them for a few months at a stretch, just so they don't lose their characters and hard work.

But I'm also waiting for Mario Golf and Mario Tennis Wii. Shovelware they are not. One of the things I loved most about the N64 version of Mario Golf, was that some of the courses were simply the kind of thing you would never find in ANY other golf game. Like having a giant stone Bob-omb as a course hazard.

Means they'd be less likely to follow along, if some big name company were looking to release their next big mega-hit, but impose limitations on previews about mentioning things like "Horrible camera angles," "Unusable controls," and "game-crashing bugs at every turn" in the final product. You know, just to make it seem like it'll be a great game, when it's really just a steaming pile of puke.

Douchenozzle.

But what I do want to see for more games, is a NewGame+ option. Most games these days let you unlock stuff during the progress of the game. I'd like to be able to keep my unlocks and then choose whether to go for a harder difficulty, or start the same one over and be a god, as it were.

If you don't use a horribly inconvenient copy protection scheme, such as requiring the game disk in the tray, which causes drives to spin so very loudly and be a bother, then people won't need to crack them. gamecopyworld and the like won't host cracks for games that get around authentication measures unless it includes a no-CD. Some games that use online-only methods of authentication never see a white-hat crack, and thus don't see nearly as much piracy as other games.

By removing even the need to have the disk in the tray to play, that gets rid of the ENTIRE no-CD cracks, which is the entire white-market supplier of pirated copies of a game. No group out there who cares about its integrity, or any website who hosts no-CD cracks, will even consider hosting or working on such a crack, if the protection being used isn't an inconveniencing factor.

By doing this, they've actually cut down the amount of piracy for these 2 games by a huge amount.

Guys, I'm a pirate. I have a 100GB/month cap. I download 20 movies a month, maybe a dozen CDs, plus a bunch of TV shows, some daily, some weekly. I barely come to 80GB/month. And lots and lots of porn, can't forget that.

For the Video on Demand guys... ordering VoD through your cable provider should deliver it through a separate network, simply to keep congestion issues to a bare minimum, and it wouldn't affect your given internet plan. However, using 3rd party services like the Apple iTV or whatever it is, or slingbox, would use your monthly.

The question I really have is... just how many of you are seriously able to even come close to a 250GB/month cap, without going hog wild with piracy?

250GB/month comes up to about 300 movies a month. 2 hours per movie, that's about 29 days of straight movie watching. Trust me, you're not coming close unless you're literally trying to collect every last bit of media out there, that you'll never even look at, watch, or listen to in your entire life. Or if you live in a household with 3 or more heavy bandwidth users.

And here's something else that's worth thinking about: If a developer does NOT try to push every last bit of detail out of their work, if they actually try to apply the 80/20 rule, they could still have a very nice looking, very nice playing game, with a fraction of the effort and cost. 80% of the results come from 20% of the work. After that, you're spending the other 80% of the time trying to add polish just to make a playable experience into a tech demo and spec cruncher.

Sure, you won't have the absolutely most pretty game... but you'll also likely end up with one that has a lot fewer bugs because the codebase and resources are a lot slimmer than it would have been, without sacrificing a lot of the functionality. And over time, what you can get for that 20% of effort increases, while everyone else is busy trying to make tech demos to push the limits.

The big problem we have right now, is that everyone is busy trying to one-up and create tech demos. We don't have people actually trying to make damn good games. Meanwhile on the console front, no one really has to worry about making tech demos, because no one is around to up the hardware specs. Yet, for every company that does push the limits, there's a bit of fallout that helps everyone else who isn't trying to blaze new paths.

If you look at where technology is right now, thanks to how tools have developed over the years, you could literally make a SNES-quality RPG over the span of 1 year, with a team of 5 or 6 people who know what they're doing, for next to no cost at all. The same kind of effort that took 2 years to make with a team of highly skilled professionals, getting paid huge amounts of money(AKA, the devs at SquareSoft). Granted, you wouldn't make the kind of money for selling the game now, that you would have back then, but it's really not that much different when you look at indy devs in a stable spec'd market.

As long as they're actually trying to make something good, it'll turn out good. If they're trying to make something great, it'll probably not go over too well, without a big budget behind it.

The PC market isn't very stable... but the games that can rake in the most profit, are also the games that have some of the smallest development budgets. Spend 30k to make a game that can be played by pretty much any machine newer than 5 years old, and that's a huge market you have to work with, and it'll probably only take a few days to make the money back once it goes on sale, if it's with a marketing partner. Spend 60 million to make a game that won't run properly on any hardware available for another 18 months, and you'll be damn lucky to ever break even.

The other point is that, a lot of the games I have always downloaded, have been games LONG past their prime. The reason for that, is I don't have the money for a huge system upgrade just to play the newest game that's on everyone's tongues. And if I do spend the cash to upgrade my system in a big way, I no longer have the cash to drop on the game I might have wanted to play. Instead, I download it. The only exception to that, was Oblivion. And that was just because I had needed a heavy upgrade on my computer anyway.

Right now, I have a Semp 3000+, with a 512MB X1600Pro AGP and 2 gigs of RAM. I bought Orange Box, and loved it. It was a top game and played -great- on my hardware. But that's not something I can do with any of these other new games coming out. I'd pay for them when they're new, if they were something I could run at more than a snail's pace. Otherwise, they'll just wind up being games I'll likely download in a few years, when I get up the cash to build a new system one step behind the latest technology, just to keep the prices down.

Another big issue, is that a lot of the games coming out these days are nothing more than tech demos and online games. In a few years, most of the online games will no longer be around in anything worth diving into for a newbie. New games will be available. Single-player games are becoming less and less frequent, because they're easier to pirate. And that means, the games I would actually enjoy spending money on are becoming less frequent in the PC realm.

Nintendo, buy them out and fucking make it real. NOW!

But for the love of everything good, don't use any of the newer clones as a baseline. Forget they even exist. They're not worth anything to anyone! I felt sorry for even downloading the damn things, they were so bad!

Sure, you can get money. By selling old equipment. But you don't get any cash just from winning fights. And only a little from actually doing story missions. And you can't just raid and take everything of value from every enemy.

You don't -need- to do anything with money in that game, but it does help out by letting you buy more powerful weapons, and even crafting your own for extra benefit. But it costs a huge amount of money to buy the lower powered gear, in order to sell it back and unlock the ability to make anything above the weakest junk in the game. Meanwhile, the items you do get from enemies dropping them automatically (which is rare), is usually enough to allow you to actually progress. As long as you're not letting your characters fall behind.

In a span of 4 months, PS3 sales have dropped by almost 90%. Even -I- hope MGS does the trick and keeps them in the game out there, at this point.

Then we'll multiply it by 3 years for salary. Even with raises, we're up to 30-35 million for a 3 year dev cycle, for a AAA-tier game, with the highest possible caliber hardware.

so, 50 million is still incredibly high, when all they really need is a warehouse and power, for their main coding office.

But, really... no games? And people are STILL going on about the whole "it's full of minigames lol!" trainwreck, the only game I have that could be considered as having a bunch of minigames in it, is Zack & Wiki. By the end of the month I'll have 15 games for the system, and that will still be the only such game. All the others could be considered as pretty damn good games, with solid bases in the real, "hardcore" game world.

Hell, I've been working on Fire Emblem for 3 weeks, and I'm only half way through. I've barely touched Battalion Wars II, because I've been too busy, and even Smash Bros has been sitting in its case, because I haven't had the time to pop it in and play it. I'm looking forward to Mario Kart Wii, I'll be picking up Okami, still need to get RE4, Bully has been reviewed pretty high, and then there's No More Heroes.

Really, where's this "There's no games, lulz!" BS coming from?

The problem with griefers, is that they do ruin the experience for others. And in doing so, generate a negative image for the game. Negative publicity spreads much faster and wider than good publicity. As such, the actions of just a few dozen griefers in an online game could ruin the experience for a few hundred, who in turn complain about it and could cost the company a few -thousand- potential customers, in addition to the originally offended customers possibly canceling their game subscription.

Back in the good ol' days of Dreamcast, there was this great little game known as PSO. At first, it was great. Everyone had fun, all the games were open, and people just wanted to play and hang out. Eventually, the game was cracked and people were using a Gameshark to cheat and grief, leading to eventual codes that could totally wipe out a player's character and format their memory card. This lead to many people quitting because they didn't want to risk it, and many others simply playing in locked games so that they wouldn't have to worry about someone just hopping in without warning and getting rid of not only their character data, but their save files from all their other games.

Shortly after the first wave of Gameshark griefers started swarming the servers, the popularity of the game crashed. It's not just that the game was getting old, it's that people were afraid of losing possibly -thousands- of hours of work, across many games they've paid good money to buy and play.

Time is money. Hundreds or thousands of hours of playtime across many games, could be worth more than the actual purchase price of the games themselves. I, personally, had over 2000 hours in PSO, and eventually just stopped playing because the community had died so far, it was impossible to just find another game to play in, without having to deal with a smacktard griefer.

And this kind of thing applies to pretty much every game out there. Sure, on PC it's pretty hard to find a grief that would delete data on the other person's machine, but that doesn't stop them from trying to find a way to ruin possibly hundreds of hours of gameplay.

And this is especially true in more community-style games, like Second Life. A lot of people use it more as a place for conversation. Another type of chat, where they can try to express their creativity in a way other than pure text and cheap emoticons. To have griefers just come by and start disrupting everything that's going on, could have... well, serious consequences. SL has seen a steadily increasing amount of corporate establishment, as well as government implementation. How do you think it reflects on an industry that's trying to convince people that it's not all about idiots, retards and troublemakers, when a few of those very type of people come in and crash what should be a positive experience?

Guess what, griefers? The internet -is- serious business. Don't believe me, then go talk to Google, Microsoft, the MPAA/RIAA, Interpol, China, Afghanistan, the non-Mainstream news media, every musician and actor out there, as well as every last game development company in the world.

I'd suggest you stop and think about your actions, but that hasn't stopped you from griefing even once. I'd suggest you use your ever-so-productive powers and actually try to create an environment, such as an MMO or community game, where griefing is expected and scored upon, but your lack of maturity would prevent such a task from ever seeing the lack of day.

Griefers take their shit far more seriously than any of the people they disrupt. So, everyone who knows an online griefer should make a point to disrupt their real life. Call up their boss and suggest they deal in midget/dog porn, or that they're selling off trade secrets to the competition, or even just plant evidence and call the police on them. Really, it's no different. It's all for the lulz, y'know?

Developed and published by Rockstar, available this summer! Rated AO!

Gone are the days when I'd sit and play a single game, working tirelessly to get absolute completion. Time Stalkers/Climax Landers for Dreamcast? First time I rented it, I wound up with a -month- in late fees. When I went back to play it some more from the start, just last year, I gave up after about 15 hours.

In my childhood, I'd play, pass, and almost always complete with 100%, any game I got my hands on for a weekend. Hundreds of games over the span of 5 years, fell to my nerdcore skillz. Now, I'll play a game until I'm satisfied with it, then look at something else. Ones I buy, I tend to spend more time on, but even those don't always get finished. I have 4 games in my Gamecube collection I haven't even bothered trying to finish. I even bought Zelda: Wind Waker over ebay a good 8 months ago, and have only cracked it open to make sure it actually works.

Portal? I've turned that one on to just sit and play through it while waiting for a download to finish, and enjoyed it.

But most games these days are just too drawn out. I guess my old metric of $1/hr of playtime is no longer valid, since I'm actually paying to buy more games, than I used to.

Unfortunately, too many games are focusing a little -too- much on the competitive multi-player aspect, which is something I'm not too fond of. Makes me miss the days (and weeks, and months) I spent with PSO on the Dreamcast. Over 2000 hours, and not once was it competitive. I enjoyed it, because I liked being able to just play through it in a fairly quick time, and hopefully find something nice to toss on one of my characters.

Then again, I no longer spend 8-9 hours trying to utterly dominate a map in RTS games, either. Back in the days of Starcraft, I'd own every resource on every possible map, before finishing it. Now, I just try to do "well enough" to dominate, without being absolute.

I've yet to get a single infection, in -years- of BT work. But, it doesn't really matter. I just went for a premium usenet account. 10mbit, no need to upload. :)