A french report indicates he's "considering" it, but wow, that would have to be one ambitious kickstarter. The first two games had insane budgets, and considering just how detailed the world of Shenmu is (it has to use the FREE system to satisfy fans, and that means almost everything you see needs to be interactible, from drawers to random plates on a shelf), I wonder if they'll be able to go for a lower budget with a new one...
How are those "low" sales? What were their projections exactly? A skajillion sales?
Million seller means you win at game business. Full stop. Stick a gold star on that sucker and sell it as a "player's choice", pat yourself on the back and get the deluxe car wash, you earned it, earner.
If that is considered "poor sales", sorry Squeenix, we can't help you. Your games are selling as well as you can reasonably expect, so clearly if you are losing money, you're handling project funding poorly. I dunno, maybe your vendors are ripping you off, but you have to get your house in order so that 3 million games sold means you actually profited.
Edit: All of the below was me being far too uncritical in my assessment of this idea. The guy triggered all the right "buzz words" that made me think it was scientific, but without the backing of actual science. Those photos played a big part in tricking me here. My original post follows and is provided as a historical note to learn from.
----------
TED talks these days run all over the place. Sometimes they are evidence based thought provoking discussions, and sometimes they might as well be telling me how to penetrate the crystal spheres holding the fixed stars in place. There's also the recently exposed rampant sexism at issue here, and at other venues.
That said, this TED talk is incredible. This man discusses a complete revolution in thoughts about "desertification" of land. Livestock for 10000 years had been damaging land. However, removing livestock ALSO damaged the land, very confusing. Fire burning ALSO damages the land and releases tons of CO2. They were stuck, but as it turns out, going BACK to livestock actually fixed the problem. Now, it is more complicated than that. What he did was use massive herds of livestock but in a completely different way than has been done in the past. He used a complicated algorithm to specifically time how livestock is moved, where it is moved, and synchronize it with other livestock migrations and known patterns of wildlife migration and where plants will be grown. When THAT is done, moving as would happen in nature, the land is revitalized in some frankly SHOCKING turnarounds in a very short period of time.
This is a man who, in pursuing the elimination of livestock, suggested a plan to kill 40000 elephants. It failed miserably, but this seems to be helping to undo that damage.
An amazing talk, but I will say this. I am always wary of simple "one fix for everything" solutions. The effects are documented, he's got solid evidence, but it is a little hard to swallow that this one method will actually be powerful enough to reverse the entire industrial revolution without implementing it on a wider scale.
To be safe, we should still be pursuing other methods and switching to batteries (batteries which, ultimately, need to get their power from something other than fossil fuel power plants or they won't be saving us any CO2 emissions). However, this was a VERY powerful demonstration, so I support it. It also has one stunning advantage, that of saying, "hey, it is actually okay for 3rd world countries to feed themselves with livestock, so long as they do so in such a way as to ultimately green up the land and lock up far more CO2 in grass than the livestock emit themselves". Since it's doing THAT, 3rd world countries are far more likely to actually want to implement it.
Along with the Quantic demo, this is a tech demo with a narrative compelling enough to deserve its own game. This whole set piece alone moved me more than Final Fantasy XIII. For one thing, the characters, at least in this glimpse, seem to actually be characters, well rounded people with emotions other than the highly stereotyped dolls littering the last Final Fantasy. Yes, I get it, Lightning is "a hardcore go it alone fighter". Could you perhaps have her do something OTHER than that to remind us she's human? Cloud dressed like a girl to get out of a sticky situation. Squall had a lot of inner monologs rounding out his personality. What's Lightning got?
So as to the engine itself, if this is next gen, sign me up. This looks amazing. I love all the little details I'm seeing here, like the liquid inside the soda bottle double refracting the light in a realistic way. Those eyes... Eyes are certainly taking a big turn in realism. Seen the Hobbit? Gollum's new eyes were pretty realistic, but blown up and stuck on that emaciated body made them look terrifying and creepy.
The new FOX engine looks to be coming along well. Sweat dripping down those doctor's faces, it all comes together very nicely. Konami is claiming this will be on current gen hardware. Right, I expect that it won't look as good as this PC tech demo though.
The game itself seems to star Big Boss. They've filled in just about every bit of space they have to tell Big Boss's story from Naked Snake through to his forming of Outer Heaven. I suspect this actually takes place after Metal Gear 1, the first one, maybe before he goes on to form Zanzibar Land. The people saying he needs to live are probably those he was able to convince to join his cause in Outer Heaven.
This one is getting a lot of attention. Some of it for all the wrong reasons. Anyway, as with the Agni demo above, this one demonstrates an interesting game world that a lot of people want to see actually made. I see a lot of allegory to women's rights in this story, and it could be very well done in that regard.
The visuals are once again very nice. I mean some of the edges need a bit of work, but the facial expression is incredible.
Unreal 4... Well it does look amazing. Demonstrating "the 4 elements" is a good way to show off the tech. The mountain vista in particular was very stunning. However, the general "look" of an Unreal game is something they need to find a way to fix. Unreal Engine games start all looking like each other once everyone is using the engine, and this one still has that "look" to it, if more detailed. Bioshock Infinite managed to experiment in ways that make the game look very different than the standard Unreal engine game, but when you look closer, you start to notice the Unreality of it all. If they can create tools to easily change whole art styles and lighting parameters so any two games looking similar can only be attributed to laziness, then Epic can fix that issue. As it stands, whatever you may think of Epic's games, they are making an absolute killing on licensing their engine alone.
This is the latest Unity tech demo. This is the engine the new Torment game will be using, so I'm glad to see that it seems very capable. It can do cartoonish style too, which is great. The demo itself was also funny, which helps. It had a Pixar feel to it.
This is a demo of the new Frostbite engine, and also Battlefield 4. The engine itself looks amazing. The running theme of most of these new engines seems to be "how fluids interact with objects, especially faces, and how faces show emotion". Battlefield 4 itself? Well, I can be a sucker for self sacrifice, but at the same time, these are nameless soldiers fighting for reasons that don't really make any sense. Aside from their interaction in the car, I really didn't care much about them. The only one that actually had a personality was the "chew off its own leg to survive" guy. The game itself, these days, is a by the numbers affair.
This isn't really a tech demo, just the opening FMV for the "rebooted" FFXIV MMO. I'd be shocked if this MMO was any different than the others, even after the "reboot", but wow, what a story this FMV tells. Yes Squeenix, you know how to do incredible FMVs.
It seems Humble Bundle is starting to step up their big bundle schedule. I just got an e-mail about two bundles at once. One is an android bundle with a few notable titles, namely The Room (You're tearing me APART!). Metal Slug 3 is nice and all, but NOT on the Android. While I was very surprised about how competent some touch only controls have gotten in games like Dead Space Mobile, I really wish this Android bundle had been like the last one and offered PC versions of all these games, at least all the ones that have SEEN PC versions anyway. I seem to recall a PC version of the Metal Slug games some time ago when that game "rental" service for PC was still a thing (I forget what it was called). All in all though, worth a few dollars to me.
The next one is another THQ bundle. I could take or leave the Red Faction stuff here. I really never much cared about that series. However, it includes BOTH Darksiders games. Just getting Darksiders 2 for around $7 makes it more than worth it, which is basically why I bought it, as I already got the first Darksiders with the first THQ bundle. Now that Humble Bundle gives individual Steam keys for each separate game in the bundle instead of one for the whole group, I have an extra code for Darksiders 1 to give out now.
Ready? What do you call it when a game is changed by the developers so it is harmed (by dedicated fan reckoning) in order to have a wider "mass market" appeal?
I know that some here aren't fans of the Penny Arcade comic (and today's offering seems like a case lesson in exactly why, I really don't get it).
That said, Penny Arcade Report http://penny-arcade.com/report/ is some of the best game news reporting I've seen in a loooong time.
I've been abandoning one "gaming news" site after another as, one by one, they all lose all sense of journalistic integrity. IGN has long since been in the gutter, and sites like 1Up have followed them. I tried Joystiq and Kotaku for a while, but both of those are pretty poor these days. Until now, I've basically been limited to a few out of the way fan forums and Arstechnica's gaming news if I wanted something resembling actual journalism.
It seems that sites like Kotaku and such have been letting go of their talented journalists as they have "restructured to actualize modern commerce paradigms" (ie, sell out). Penny Arcade picked them up and set them to work on some the best news reporting I've seen in gaming.
![[Image: sm2-cg1finv3finoxkx2.jpg]](http://www.abload.de/img/sm2-cg1finv3finoxkx2.jpg)
![[Image: sqsewers-cg1endy5kqq.jpg]](http://www.abload.de/img/sqsewers-cg1endy5kqq.jpg)
![[Image: tavern-finaleendeojq5.jpg]](http://www.abload.de/img/tavern-finaleendeojq5.jpg)
![[Image: thief_vore_2w0jt2.jpg]](http://www.abload.de/img/thief_vore_2w0jt2.jpg)
![[Image: thief_vore_40rk4k.jpg]](http://www.abload.de/img/thief_vore_40rk4k.jpg)
![[Image: thief_vore_5jckm1.jpg]](http://www.abload.de/img/thief_vore_5jckm1.jpg)
![[Image: thief_vore_86zjfo.jpg]](http://www.abload.de/img/thief_vore_86zjfo.jpg)
![[Image: squeenixsales.jpg]](http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/4793/squeenixsales.jpg)