Thursday Next

If we're going to talk about whether the cost of graphics cards is rising or falling, shouldn't we be comparing the price of the best performance then to the price of the best performance now? (also, shouldn't we be doing so in another thread?) I get that you can achieve great results for less money, but that was always the case with PC gaming. It's the same with many things. You start at the bottom and as you improve performance the cost of improving by the same amount again increases exponentially. If a card is twice as powerful but costs only 25% more, then on the face of it cards are indeed getting cheaper, but if you need the best, most expensive card to run the most recent games on max settings and the most expensive cards are the same (equivalent) price as they used to be, then really nothing has changed. You maybe be getting more GB's for your dollar, but you still have to pay max dollars for max settings. (Edit: Yeah, pretty much what Yante said, went for a coffee and didn't see his update).

Fair enough, perhaps the Ebert/RT example is not strictly comparing apples to apples, but since movie reviews tend not to attribute a number it's tough to find a truly analogous comparison. Let's put the movie thing to one side and accept that games are somewhat unique in that reviewers attempt to provide an objective numerical score to what is a more and more subjective entertainment medium. I think that in the 80's-90's games were much better able to be objectively judged as the mechanics were being worked out and the graphical and audio fidelity was coming on in leaps and bounds increasing immersion with every game. I'd also like to point out that I don't live or die by review scores. They just happen to be a good indicator of general consensus. As for arguing over seemingly small differences like 9.7 and 8, it's unfair to place all the blame on "extreme fanboys". As an industry game reviewers have pretty much established that ratings go from 7-10. So on that scale, and excuse the crude illustration: 7---------8|---------9-------|--10 8 to 9.7 is a pretty huge difference and if you feel invested in a product you may well feel justified in defending something that you care about.

Sony are already moving along the path of cloud saving and auto-patching. They're both a little clunky, largely because they were added in after the fact, but it gives me a good deal of hope that Sony are thinking in this direction and that the next console will have more of these features "baked in" so to speak. I think the Vita will be interesting just to see what lessons Sony have learned with regard to online community (cross game chat), and cloud storage, I reckon it will give us a lot of clues as to where Sony are headed in the future.

I'm sorry, I thought this was about gamers giving a damn about the final score when film critics don't. I was lead to believe this because you wrote the words "giving a damned about the final score" and so I posted a link about Ebert clearly giving a damn about the final score to illustrate an incidence of a film critic giving a damn about the final score. It should have been obvious to me that when you said "giving a damned about the final score" you actually meant "bickering about details surrounding how one should score a game" even though you didn't say that.

I agree, it probably is a little soon to go all the way into cloud gaming. I certainly think that there's a good case for building the PS4 with cloud gaming in mind. Given the low cost requirements for a cloud gaming device, the PS4 could well start out as a traditional physical media console and as the market changes it could become a cloud device. I would not, in that scenario be surprised to see a PS4 slim akin to the PSP Go in the next, say, 10 years.

Robert Ebert is still commenting on the score. That it was a score of 1 or 0 (Rotten or Fresh) is not the point. The point is that movie reviewers are no more immune to the lure of numbers than gamers. Robert was criticising the score Thor had. He didn't say "I can't believe the film had so many positive reviews." He said "Here is a film that is scoring 79% on Rotten Tomatoes. For what?" He criticised a number of critics for giving the film an arbitrary score of (>0.5) and believed it should have been lower (<0.5). This is very much Ebert giving a damn about the final score.

You can now change your Origin ID: http://www.origin.com/uk/change-id You're welcome.

Here is noted film critic Robert Ebert complaining that Thor has a Rotten Tomato score of 79%. http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/05/_i_didnt_attend_the.html. That's the last time you heard of someone in the movies criticising the score that someone else gave a film. The number is important because it let's you gauge stuff at a glance. If something is rated 10% or lower, then I won't waste my time on it. If its 90%+ then I feel pretty confident that I could jump in without having to do loads of research. It also helps to aggregate scores so that you can easily see what the general consensus on a product is.

There's every chance that a PS4 will be something akin to an Onlive / Gaikai type device. Which would render all this talk of graphics cards somewhat moot.

Well, I just assume that they occupy a tiny minority of our fan-base. Otherwise I think I'd be tempted to just give up and open a vein.

In that case, I apologise for my unwarranted snarkiness. It's been widely publicised that EA operates a "City State" methodology with reagard to its studios: http://www.develop-online.net/news/37438/Gibeau-City-state-studios-saved-EA. Some studios tend to toe the EA line more. Bright Light and Visceral being good examples. Others, DICE and Criterion in particular are far more independent (sometimes they're a law unto themselves). Each studio has an in-house marketing team who, shall we say "set the tone" for marketing campaigns. That is to say that local marketing teams are able to do their own thing (with approval from the studio) but they won't send out conflicting messages. If they are told "This campaign is about destruction" that's what they run with. The marketing bigwigs in EA DICE decided on the, "aggressive" tone of this campaign. Despite the reservations of the boots on the ground marketing guys, Legal and some other camps. A lot of people within EA and DICE felt that we would have been better off with a bit more self assured swagger and a bit less little-brother syndrome. I think the nature of the marketing has slowly shifted over time to be more focussed on "This is BF3 look at how great it is." rather than "This is BF3, look at how much better than MW3 it is." I still wince whenever I see an "Answer the Call" or "Go Beyond the Call" tagline. It feels insulting to our customers' intelligence. You'll have to excuse me for being a little vague, but, you know, confidentiality and all that...

You're right. You probably know better. EA were behind all the marketing you hated. EA DICE did all the marketing you liked.

Ooooh, check this out btw:

I agree with GOH. Reviewers should be free to mark as they wish. If only so that I can spot the ones that mark down games for stupid things like this.

Actually, EA spend a great deal of time trying to direct DICE away from the anti-CoD marketing.

On a more positive note... PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN! Especially when EA are pulling totally piss poor PR moves.

Lets take an example Alpha test: "Credits" are present. This test is passed if there is a button on the menu that says "Credits" that then goes to a placeholder "Lorem Ipsum" text document. The functionality is present, it is just not working correctly. Alpha Pass, Beta Fail. So, if the term "Alpha" does not mean Feature/Content Complete, and "Beta" does not mean "No unknown issues". What exactly do they mean? Because whenever I hear the terms used by QA that is exactly what they are referring to. Like I said before Jonny, October 20th doesn't stop being October 20th just because one is always running late. The definition remains the same even if the interpretation changes. And yes, I know, no game is ever bug free, the Alpha, Beta, Final milestones are idealised goals.

I think we're using "meaning" in different ways. The definitions of Alpha, Beta and so forth are the same across the industry. I'm painfully aware that they are often not strictly adhered to. Regardless of what some studios do, if someone says that software is "in Alpha" then the assumption should be that it is not content locked or particularly stable. If it is Beta, then the assumption should be that it is feature complete, but buggy. If Valve say content is releasing on 20th October, then we should assume that they mean the same 20th October as the rest of us, i.e. Tomorrow, even though we all know that Valve time means that it could be sometime next year. The meaning of 20th October doesn't change just because Valve don't stick to it. Also, note that a placeholder means that the content is present, it's just not working properly, placeholders are perfectly acceptable when declaring Alpha complete.

Across multiple companies, I'd go so far as to say across the industry, the terms mean pretty much the same thing. As previously stated, MS, Sony, EA and SEGA all use the terms as I described above.

Also the same for EU. http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2011/10/19/playstation-vita-launches-from-22-february-2012/

As industry terminology: Pre-Alpha: Early code. Not all features implemented. Alpha: Content lock. No new features should be added. Start looking for and fixing bugs. Beta: All issues have been found. Fix the outstanding issues and any bugs that arise from those fixes. Final: Game has no unknown / unaddressed issues. It's pretty much set in stone, Sega, Sony, Microsoft, EA they all mean the same thing when they say the above. Of course sometimes games do get features added after being declared Alpha, but the terminology is standard industry wide.

"Ganon/Ganondorf has been the one near-constant character. It's always been the same guy, while it's been different Zeldas and Links." It's not clear what you mean when you say he's "near" constant. Of course, you would already know that if you weren't actually being a massive two-page dick about it. Y'know what, you're clearly quite invested in LoZ having a continuity, I'm not, so I'm just gonna bow out of this thread and keep playing them as stand-alone titles (barring obviously linked titles like OoT and MM).

Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome is a terrible, terrible movie. I am going to pretend that I think you were joking.

So if the Zeldas are different and the Links are different can I assume the Ganon's are different too? If so what's the point of the continuity? What's continuous about it? Why isn't it called the Legends of Zeldas? The different Zelda's, different Links make this seem more like a group of unconnected stories rather than a single continuous arc. The only difference between Zelda and FF is that FF changes the world and the principal characters while keeping the moogles, chocobos and what not, while LoZ keeps pretty much the entire cast from one iteration to the next. A lot of the connections seem to be retcons in my opinion and any continuity feels really crowbarred in.

I agree with Yant for the most part. There's a couple of Zelda's that clearly run back to back, OoT and MM being a pertty good example, but generally I view them like Final Fantasy games. There's some key carry overs but they are mostly separate stories. Or the same story told in different ways; namely that the hero Link saves the Princess Zelda from some calamity that threatens to engulf the world. Doesn't Zelda not know who Link is pretty much every time they meet? Is she some sort of super aloof Marie Antoinette, who can't tell one peasant from another? Or is she supposed to be like River Song and keeps meeting Link before she met him?