Well, a lot of JRPG's certainly love putting in cultural references in their games. Even the most "generic" Final Fantasy is filled to the brim with names from Greek, Nordic, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, etc. references. The last Final Fantasy Retrospective from Gametrailers does a good job detailing some of it.

But not many games go into the trickier issue of talking about religion or philosophy beyond using cool sounding names for monsters or weaponry. Bioshock is obviously one, and the other one I've played (I'm surprised no one has mentioned it) would be Xenogears and the Xenosaga series. Hopefully Bioshock's success will spur other developers to create games which do try to make a statement/opinion these viewpoints; it's a sign of maturity for our industry that we've moved beyond a "shoot anything that moves" religion.

I'm sorry; I usually don't mind letting the other guy "get the last word" on stuff but this is a blatant mischaracterization.

- My initial post was about expectations of game length for big budget titles. You were the one who butt in and talked about innovation, and then coming back and saying "I never mentioned AAA titles".

- You've seemingly never heard of the many innovative indie and smaller titles I've listed.

- You don't understand that I don't use sarcasm at all.

- You don't understand the meaning of setting a standard and what that allows developers to build into their systems (e.g., think Steam friend overlay).

- You interpret "not sure what Japanese devels you're talking about" into "I don't know what Japanese devels are", act as if "Japanese core gaming" (whatever that means) is in decline and somehow that's an accepted universal truth, and "not really fond of console having similar games to my PC's" become "consoles giving games to PC's. Maybe it's just a language barrier, but your arrogance and ignorance rejects my usually tolerant pity

- You seem to think that clarifying or reiterating a point is a bad thing, or that by the virtue of arguing I have to disagree with all your points. And then you claim I don't read your posts.

For all this I dub thee "incoherent junior internet video game debater". It's a rank shared by many on these forums, so at least you're in good company.

I said almost all (and I'm not a platformer fan :P ). A game being so good you want to replay it, doesn't that come under "great replayability"?blue_hazy_basic

Well, it cuts both ways. If you're a platforming/action-adventure fan, a well-done game is worthy of a 2nd, 3rd look, so to the fan it would be a game of great replayability. Since you don't like the genre of course none of the games would be replayable.

In terms of length movies and games are not a great comparison. A movie is limited in length because people want to watch it in one sitting so you are forced to make cuts in order to have it an acceptable length. This does not apply to games.blue_hazy_basic

That explains why movies are 90-120 minutes long, but it doesn't explain why studios typically way overshoot scenes and then cut back in the editing room. It's like any artistic/creative piece of work: start big, trim away until you have a tight core, and that core has be refined and shined into a beacon of quality.

What happens with the kitchen sink approach in the extreme case? Meet Battlecruiser 3000AD.

I can at least fault Gamespot's glitchy system for messing up standard HTML elements, but I can only assume you're the culprit for quoting and replying to sentences one. at. a. time. Learn to summarize.

Then how did I get these game lengths and expectations last gen 2 years ago. :|

I think it was quite obvious that I was talking about last gen to know where many games are getting hard for no reason.

Well I'm not taking you seriously since you claimed that in order to make a 15 hour game you need to have SNES graphics so...Gunraidan

Yea, all the games that you've mentioned were made some 8+ years ago, while you keep on talking mythically about "the great last generation". My point was obviously that standards for games rise over time and by the same token so do game development costs and time. Don't expect the first without the latter.

Did you even read my post? I said that the average game looked at least decently different from one another. If I pulled out 8 games from 4 years ago and 8 games from today the ones from 4 years ago would contain more variety in look.Gunraidan

Alright, go ahead and pull those eight games from four years ago. I'll put in my lot from now: R&C: Tools of Destruction, Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, Simpsons: The Game, Halo 3, Bioshock, PGR4, Crysis, Beautiful Katamari. Your move.

I seriously love it when people try to talk smart but really have no idea what they're talking about. I think space would be the last issue for a PS3 game with Blu-Ray and 80GB's of hard-drives and all.

Not only that but I already stated what you said right here.

[QUOTE="Gunraidan"] It simply can't be done in that small hard-drive.Gunraidan

This pretty much confirms that you aren't even reading my post or are just desperately grasping for straws to find a support arguement. But I'm going to play you're little game to see where it takes me.

Then why are there more innovative games coming out for the DS then ever before? Not only that but I can think of tons and tons of types of games that have never been done before off the top of my head.Gunraidan

Innovative? The DS has more games in sheer numbers than anything else, and for every Trauma Center there's a few dozen dictionary and "learn English" games published. And for all your whining about XBLA, most of the DS casual library are just as simple and are possible as Flash games as well. Gee, talk about a double standard.

Oh so now we're talking about new "genres"? I thought we were talking about innovative games. I didn't know that a game had to be an entirely new genre in order to be innovative. I mean most of the games I listed didn't even invent entirely new genres. Fair enough Trauma Center for the DS, Zack and Wiki for the Wii, and Electroplankton for the DS.

he 80's. LOL, I'm talking about a few years ago when the PS2, GC, and Xbox were out and we're talking about the 80's.Gunraidan

It's called "expanding on a concept", try to keep up. The point was simply that innovation is highest initially, then drops as development continues. What's the highest level of innovation? A new genre, and when were they created? Back in the 90's when concepts have not been explored. As time goes on there will be less chances for innovation because there's less space to innovate in. There will of course continue to be innovative games, just not at the same clip as before; you also have stuff like Flow, Little Big Planet, and Spore this generation too, and those games you listed...are of this generation.

Not only did you lecture me on something I already actually told you, but you put that last comment there for next to no reason. You said that devs. aren't taking risks anymore and play it safe with the popular genres. So what does that have to do with game lenghts especially if the popular genres were up to this year at the least 15 hours long?Gunraidan

Do you have trouble keeping more than one argument in your head? There are two separate points here.

First is that making money requires selling games, and the best way to sell games is to make impressive graphics and put out great production values (quirky and innovative games can also sell well, but the best sellers are always big production blockbusters).

Second is that big production games are getting more expensive and since complexity rises exponentially, game length is suffering because it's costing so much money and time getting the basic parts down, not to mention the time it takes to learn and work with a new piece of technology (we're only in the 2nd year, so most big budget games released started before the console itself was released). A gameplay level rendered on a PS2 requires more work to run on PS3-levels: more geometry, more textures, more effects, and those things take time.

And the thread that ties these two points together? Your whining.

You honestly think that those games only costs $300,000 to make? :|Gunraidan

An indie project? They can cost nothing to make, only the time of the developers, and three developers for a year making games like Wargames, at $100k at person, is very reasonable.

Seriously are you even reading my posts our just skimming through them since I said something bad about gaming and just putting meaningless replys? I never once said I expected to get innovative games at all at a regular aspect. All I stated as to see a fair share amount of them with so far only seeing hardly any this gen.Gunraidan

What is a "fair amount", and how is it a fair comparison when you're cherry picking the best from next generation's 7+ years when two of the three next gen. consoles have been around for only a year?

Do you have any idea how long things like that have been on the PC?

Not only have PC's have had this for over a decade but also STEAM has had this since STEAM started.

That's the only true thing you said.

That isn't true, I've seen things like that done before XBL.Gunraidan

Then what are they? I have not seen anything on the PC that resembles a standard server browser and friends list across a variety of games like that of Steam now. You have cobbled pieces here and there (XFire), but nothing which game developers signed up en masse. Let me know what this magical pre-Steam system is, and I'll gladly concede the point.

Guess what? That changes nothing with what I said about the lack of innovative and creative games.

More of these words you put in my mouth. When did I ever state that I wanted multi-million dollar innovative epics? Never.Gunraidan

Then why talk about consoles there's a perfectly good indie gaming development community on the PC? With the cost of publishing and royalty fees on consoles of course most companies would rather play it safe. I mentioned some good games on Steam and XBLA, but you gloss over them offhandedly. Have you even heard of them?

What does that have to do with anything? Hell I stated that I don't want my console games on the PC's right here.

[QUOTE="Gunraidan"]I'm sorry but I'm not really fond of console having similar games to my PC's,Gunraidan

It was the first line too. So yet again you didn't even really read what I just said.

I'm really hoping English is not your first language; it's been a while since I've encountered someone so arrogant yet lacking in comprehension, especially when quoting himself. You said, "not really fond of console having similar games to my PC's", which means that consoles *have* games which used to be on the PC (true, look at the FPS's and the attempts at RTS's). Now you said "I don't want my console games on the PC", which means you don't want games formerly on consoles to be on the PC. Make up your mind or at least make your statements clear.

Not originally.

How can PC's still them if they've always had them.

The ones that use to be good but now suck or aren't just making games at all.

And I don't know what "Japanese core gaming" is or how it's "crumbling".Gunraidan

Overemphasis on originality and understatement on quality, refinement and standardization, gotcha.

Okay this is just hysteria. So I state that I am frustrated with gaming consoles getting more expensive, and to argue it you state that PC's are getting more expensive too. So you pretty much changed my complaint from just console being too expensives but also consoles and PC's so you further support my claim that gaming is more expensive.

Seriously do you even know what I'm talking about?Gunraidan

No, because you apparently don't know what you're talking about because you cannot type up a coherent post. You've been deriding consoles as more expensive, that PC's have "original ideas", and I made the connection that you're a grumpy "hermit" who laments the days of yesteryear when Sierra's great friend and matchmaking system took no one by storm. If I'm wrong in my assessment, then perhaps you need to state your position better.

I am being somewhat harsh, but almost all the games I've ever really enjoyed have been either open ended (games like say civ), had multiplayer, been long (RPG's), sports games (most fun with mates tho) or had great replayability.

If I was to finish a game in a day I'd feel ripped off (except when I was in the UK and you could take em straight back to Game for a refund!)blue_hazy_basic

Eh, some of the best PC games have been ~12 hours long: Prince of Persia and Half Life come to mind. You're discounting a lot of great story/level-driven games by that account. Sometimes the game is so good you don't mind going through it again.

People need to realize that quantity is not quality most of the time and that just padding hours onto a game doesn't make it better. Stranglehold, for example, had multiplayer, but it didn't really add anything to the game despite "unlimited replayability". Movie studios typically shoot 4-5 hours worth of footage for a 90 minute movie, with a lot of those hours edited out in favor of keeping the story coherent and moving; the same happens in games in that levels and features are sometimes cut in order to preserve the general theme/story/motif of the game, and this is not a bad thing.

The short answer is "yes, you can only see what the monitor can display, and the monitor can display a new image usually 60 times a second".

Pushing extra frames from the GPU to the monitor will actually result in image tearing, because the speed that the GPU is drawing does not correspond to the speed that the monitor draws its pixels.

For example, consider a monitor at 60 Hz (60 frames a second), and a GPU that can output 90 FPS for a particular scene.

At 1/60th of a second, your monitor has drawn one frame and is waiting for frame 2. Your GPU has already drawn 1 1/2 frames at this point. Your monitor, trying to display the 2nd frame, will use what the GPU already has of the 2nd frame.

At 3/120th's of a second (e.g., half of 1/60th's of a second past the first frame), the GPU has finished the 2nd frame and is now working on the 3rd frame. The monitor, only caring about what the GPU is sending it, will start displaying the rest of its second frame (it's still on its second up until 2/60th's of a second) using the GPU's 3rd frame.

Hence on frame 2, your monitor gets half its frame from frame 2 GPU and half from frame 3 GPU. If you're moving quickly, the screen "tears" because the two images are different.

The way to solve this? Vertical sync allows the monitor to ask the GPU for a frame, so frames are always in sync, eliminating the tearing, but locking your frame rate at the refresh rate of the monitor.

Triple buffering also does the trick at the expense of GPU memory; it keeps track of multiple buffers and renders them in the background so you always get a full frame from a fully-rendered buffer instead of half-of-each.

Unrealistic? I just expect to get what I've always gotten.Gunraidan

Which does not hold up over time, unless your expectations are SNES-era graphics for a cheap $70 pre-inflation-adjustment.

"In the old days"? I wasn't aware that 3 years ago was the "old days" were the average game was 15 hours or more. As for the "repitition" thing, that is complete BS I don't remember any repititon when playing Deus Ex, Resident Evil 4, and the countless other games that managed to break the 15 hour mark. Actually games are more repititive now relying more so on intense difficulty.Gunraidan

Intense difficulty? If anything games on gotten easier over time because the difficulty curve has gone down to cater to more casuals coming into the industry. "Intense difficulty" would be most of the old school "memorize boss patterns" gameplay where hundreds of hours can easily be invested in trying to overcome a hail of bullets, not to speak of the repetition.

And how many others? I'm talking about the average game here. Last generation every game was at the least unique and didn't rely on crap such as shaing and bloom to lookGunraidan

Come on, do you expect me to take you seriously? There were standouts, sure - Okami, Wind Waker, Shadow of the Colosseus - and they also happen to be great games, but they also happened to come out after console maturity and it takes time for producers to experiment with different ideas. No, companies should spend millions early in a console's life in making something which may work or may completely fail. Wait, Sony already has, in Eye of Judgement.

I'm sick of people saying XBLA. What has that thing done for creative full games? All I see are some pick up and play games that probably could've been done in flash. Where are my new innovative full games such as Deus Ex, GrimGrimoire, and Vampires Bloodlines? It simply can't be done in that small hard-drive.Gunraidan

Yea, because those games take up gigs and gigs of hard drive space, huh?

If you're looking for gaming innovation, less what - you're going to be seeing less and less because ideas have been used. When was the last time we saw a new genre invented in gaming? I'm tempted to say "MMORPG" in '96 or so with Ultima Online, but go back to the '80's and you got new genres practically every year: RTS, FPS, flight simulation, turn-based strategy, "god" games, etc. Innovation obviously tapers off over time, and nowadays if a studio does invest in a new innovative idea (e.g., Portal), the smart thing is to spend a lot of time on it to make sure players would like it, only to have people like yourself complain about the length.

Then don't go into these huge productions in the first place. If stepping into the next-generation means sacrificing the quality and quanity of good games then I'm all against it (which I have been from the start.Gunraidan

Yea, unfortunately you alone cannot finance the $300,000 "innovative" project, although you're free to learn how to program and become an indie developer if you're full of these great ideas. It's not like great innovative games are completely absent - you have gems like Wargames and Darwinia on the PC - just that they're not going to get huge budgets with regularity like you expect.

What? STEAM is based on something similar Sierra did, it had nothing to do with XBL at all. Not only that but there have been similar services to STEAM before it came out, STEAM is just the most popular. And online was standard on PC's for YEARS.Gunraidan

Not the distribution of HL2/CS:S, which was what it started as; I'm talking about all the new downloadable games they have now, plus the new friends and community features they've recently added, in addition to things like achievements in Portal and TF2. Those came from XBL, as do standardized online (the PC standard was "every game does its own thing").

Which is completely 100% retarded, why the hell would I want games to get shorter, less varietied, and worse just because I can see some AA shaders and extra pixels added to the texture? No offense but everything you said I long knew. I don't give a damn what the excuses are for this BS whatever is causing it HAS to stop.Gunraidan

Why? Because a 1080p bump-mapped HDR-rendered screenshot creates hype a lot more than a dry description of "you get to build nukes in cities to launch against other countries and watch numbers pop up!" Like I said, it's not like you don't have alternatives, just that the biggest games out there aren't going to mess with a successful formula, and that's true of any industry and any business. Hello Madden.

And as for Bigger and Better, what's bigger and better about it? Bigger? No the games are far shorter. Better? LMAO what with watered down gameplay and stricly following the same formulas we've been doing for years but only being worse then many games that game out from yesteryears? Oh yes bigger and better indeed.Gunraidan

Guess what? The games which you mention - Grim Grimmore, Deus Ex - were pretty much cult classics which did not have widespread appeal. The "big" games are as you'd expect: the Warcrafts, the Sims (and its super-innovative expansion packs, all 15 of them), and the Half-lifes.

I'm sorry but I'm not really fond of console having similar games to my PC's, emulate my PC's but be inferior in everyway, have small developers flatout die, have Japaense core gaming crumble, have expensive consoles (please don't use that inflation BS I've done my research), and have games I can beat in 2 sittings.Gunraidan

Yea, I can tell that you don't like consoles, but most of your points don't make sense. Some of the best and most unique PC games aren't done on consoles b/c they do not have the market: hardware war and flight sims, for example. We're seeing a convergence in PC and consoles because it's gotten too complex and costly to maintain two separate systems of gaming when they're similar to begin with, and it's not like it's simply consoles "stealing" PC ideas (e.g., the aforementioned Steam features). Not sure what Japanese devels you're talking about, but I'll say that console developers in general have much more visibility than PC devels so perhaps you know of it only because consoles get covered more. And I don't know what "Japanese core gaming" is or how it's "crumbling".

As for consoles getting more expensive, you know that PC's are also getting more expensive, right? The top-end GPU used to be $300 with a corresponding top-end CPU at $300-$400, and now you're looking at $600 8800 GTX's with $1000 quad core CPU's, even more if you're trying to SLi that beast. High performance parts are going to continually get more expensive while less powerful parts (Motherboard, RAM) are going to remain the same price points, that's a given.

Holy thread explosion.

Yet the most graphically advanced games have always been on PC and PC games have never cost more then $50. I don't want to here the exuses that devs are bringing its there problem to deal with not the consumers. I shouldn't have to pay for their problems and issues.Blackbond

You shouldn't, but neither should you be a completely ignorant consumer who pouts because he refuses to understand the workings of the industry.

Game prices are bound by market demand, like most other things. If you haven't noticed, PC games don't sell very much, and after the initial burst of activity they compete mainly on price, so while people are still willing to pay $60 for Gears of War now, they're not willing to pay $50 for World in Conflict despite its, what, 2 months on the shelves? Are you going to say that companies shouldn't set prices at what people are willing to pay?

I see Retro had a hell of a time putting together a single player 20 hour adventure for the Wii. Man they must be gods or something.Blackbond

Yea, and the Wii happens to not have the production costs of next-gen systems. It took some two years for the 9 students hired by Valve to come out with a 2-hour game of Portal; if you listen to the commentary you'll discover that a lot of time was spent on tweaking the designs, getting the levels right, adding character, etc. They actively cut out levels out of the main game because they didn't pass play testing, and God of War did the same with some of its unpolished levels despite its sub-10 hour adventurous romp.

It really does not take much to add artifical length to any game. Obvious are the "backtrack and grab x items" scheme in games like Bioshock, less obvious are the "scatter x collectibles across the world and let you fight through it" a la Oblivion and Diablo. Games where people remark "they're throwing new stuff at you just as you get used to the old mechanic" are along the lines of God of War and R&C where the standard is 10-12 hours.

[QUOTE="Gunraidan"]

Seriously I'm sick of this socalled "Next-Gen BS".

Welcome to the next-generation.

Where games are half as long as they used to be.

Where games have horrible artstylles with just massive amounts of bloom and shaders.

Where there is little to no variety.

Where the Japanese developers just flatout suck ass.

Where gimmicks glaour.

Where features that have been on the PC for 10 years are suddenly the main selling attraction in technology (online, HD).

The next generation of gaming is now.

Blackbond

Preach it brother!

Geez, people have ridiculously unrealistic expectations.

• You want games to be long, even though "in the old days" a lot of the length came from mere repetition and giving you super-difficult tasks. FFVII stretched from 30 hours to 80+ hours easy if you wanted to fight the super bosses.
• Great art styles do exist (e.g., Team Fortress 2, The Simpsons Game), it takes a lot more effort to construct a complete game w/ a full environment that's expected of today's games than it is to render a bunch of 2D sprites in a new way.
• Most of the new gameplay styles and innovation is on platforms w/ cheaper development costs (e.g., Nintendo DS) or in the form of XBLA downloads, cheaper games. People want these huge productions ("EPIC"), but they also want companies to risk everything on ideas which may or may not work; "gimmicks" are the industry's new way of testing these ideas.
• PC's have a lot of stuff which are now just on consoles, but consoles do an excellent job of making everything standard and expanding the market. You can sit on your throne of superiority with your singular mic trying to tell your team a sniper's camped at spawn, but I'd much prefer having the entire team (try to) communicate. Steam's unified interface came because of XBL's success.