Last night, Neeraj and Borst both came over ... we just chilled and talked about various things. It was rather interesting.

Now, Neeraj and Borst are the two smartest CS people I know, so when they talk about CS stuff, it lifts up my "level of game." Har har.


Anyways, some random topics I/we touched upon:
1.) Why are all the big game companies dropping so much money into FPS instead of other genres? Borst and Neeraj both said that there is active development going along, but you just don't hear about it. I'm more pessimistic in that route; developing a game takes a lot of money and overhead and there are almost no big companies doing any real development for gaming.

In general, gaming has gone down the shithole. Back when I was growing up, games were truly innovative and interesting. Just looking back at the old systems .. Contra on NES, most of the games on SNES, the Gameboy ... but now there's this PS2/XBox/Gamecube crap. Granted, the quality of graphics has gone up, but I just don't see the innovation that there used to be in the development of nice games.

Following the movie industry's standard, most gaming companies are more likely to drop money in the development of a sequel than taking a risk with a new game. And of course, companies not traditionally in the business of doing FPS (Blizzard) are starting to move away from their fanbases ...

I'm a huge RTS fan. I love any type of strategy game. Although I appreciate and like graphics, I would much rather have an awesome gameplay game over graphics. Many games are simply addicting cause of their gameplay - I remember I installed a Wall Street emulator for my 486; all it was ... was text. But it was still an amazing game that had me hooked.

I lived and breathed Warcraft II and Starcraft for many years before escaping the addiction. One of my favorite games to install and play is Panzer General ... I also loved Gazillionaire and economic domination games.

To me, the beauty of a well-made strategy game will be the endless methods of winning a game. Of course, the end result of a well-made strategy game is to win, but the ability of the gaming team to create multiple methods of winning in a multiplayer setting is the ultimate trademark of a great strategy game. To that end, Command and Conquer: Red Alert failed miserably. They can't be blamed for the failure in the multiplayer - multiplayer gaming was just getting started.

But in CnC: RA multiplayer mode, you basically had to get 4 tanks as fast as you could. Once you rushed their base and knocked out their command center, the game was over. Every single game I played was like this. Basically it came down to who was about to manage their base better in the first two minutes of the game.

Brood War alleviated a lot of these problems; there became multiple ways of winning with many different strategies. But as a game that's close to 5 years (?) old, it's starting to show it's age. I've mastered almost every type of strategy for BroodWar, and it's still very limited. The scope of the game - in that you can only battle each other on maps for no real gains - became it's limiting factor.

Of course, the advent of War3 was exciting for many - what direction would Blizzard take us after suceeding so well with Starcraft? But they ultimately dissappointed tons of people with their move towards a RPG-based game; they tried to mold Diablo into the Warcraft world and it failed miserably. The game became obsessed with microcontrol of heroes; doing anything else would mean your death.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are the Sim games (which I do label under strategy) like SimCity 2000. The problem with this game was that there were too loose regulations. There was no sense of satisfaction in doing anything - it was too loose a game with no final victory conditions.

I'd like to see a game with more set parameters ... where the system itself is a friend and your enemy and reeks of both computer AI and human intelligence. The gaming world would be complex with all sorts of interactions and different methods of playing, but not without clearly defining it. Ultimately a RTS should have almost all players startt off the same, but allow them to develop different distinct personalites.

I guess it's a molding of the EverQuest worlds with RTS. Never have a world that sleeps, but give the players set parameters to follow with a clear objective; however you grant them the ability to do whatever they want in the world (well, not anything, but allow them to be successful doing different things that the system doesn't explicity tell them to do).

2.) Software
Neeraj and Alex were complaining about the move to centralize everything - we all remember the days when you installed a program, it was installed in a folder and it could simply be deleted. But then came along Win95 with its crappy "Add/Remove programs" and programs started installing DLLs and all sorts of crap all over your computer.

There does need to be a move away from this; there is a certain joy to simply being able to run ONE executable anywhere without worrying about 'installing it.' For instance, I need putty.exe (a ssh client) when I'm on the road because the putty site tends to be slow. I've uploaded it to my UNC account, and whenever I need to access my servers from a computer terminal at school, I simply load up the exe, it downloads to the temp folder, and I'm SSHed in. It's beautiful.

I would really like it if I could do this with other programs (like Crimson Editor or some sort of Notepad on steroids program) so I could do on-the-fly scripting. Alas. When will we move away from all this crappy integration? Unlike tacos, integration of the OS with the programs is not something I like too much.

3.) User Registration
I really don't like it when people enter BS information into forms. True, it may lead to spam, but a lot of people gathering information aren't doing it to spam you. Especially me, I need legitimate data so I can help grow Tabulas and Audiomatch ... it really hurts when people input bullshit e-mails and user information. So the next time you want to input your throwaway e-mail into one of my websites, please think again. :D

I promise I won't sell it to spammers. Hehe.