I have actually played Morrowind on both Xbox and PC.
Each method has it's merits, the Xbox controller seems a little more intuitive, easier to use, Keyboard and mouse is more flexible and turning/aiming with a mouse IS easier.
Plus if you have a good PC, the graphics are SO much better.

I'm suprised that no-one has mentioned the new Live subscription method already.

The current Live service is far superior to the model used by Sony and the new two-tier method and intergration into games and the OS means that online gaming on consoles should really start to take off more than before and add to that the possability of creating custom items for sale/free ala PC games and a whole new world opens to those that would normally not think twice about messing around with content creation tools.

I honestly think that Live is the only positive thing about XBox....it's a shame that a certain other huge gaming company (or two) can't take a note. Streamlining, it's a beautiful thing.

I haven't played video games since around 1996.. I miss my Sega..

okay, I can see you're not even worth arguing with.
I'm just gonna say two words that prove you wrong on the "no classic or wildly popular titles" argument: SOUL CALIBUR.

enjoy your new school crap.

Okay, so, here's my thing. I'm interested in getting into the game design field, and I see a slight problem with all of these new games. It's all the same thing, repeated over and over. There's nothing really new about all these new games. Same genres, different backgrounds. I'm interested to see what Nintendo (even though I'm not really a fan. I'm a PS Boy) has up their sleeves with the Revolution.

I'm wondering if I'm the only one here that feels this way. When was the last time something really innovative and completely new came out? What needs to change? What do us gamers want to see come out from our games? We're dishing out enough cash, shouldn't we get something mind-blowing for it?

I mean, whoop-dee-do for new graphics. ooOOoo, anti-alising and light effects. Who cares unless the game can perform for months and years to come.
Alright, that's my rant. But seriously, what do you gamers want to see?

Yes. This is the thing: you can go for new and radical ideas, but it might not work and could cost you millions of dollars. Or you could go for incremental changes to an established game design, which comes closer to a guarantee that you're going to get a return. I mean, sure, sometimes you get a game that breaks all the rules and becomes a huge seller (The Sims). And sometimes you have a seemingly proven game in a proven genre that tanks (The Sims Online). And when you're working for a publisher, they're going to assign you a type of game to make, usually. So it's not like you just get to make whatever you want, the way it was when a tiny group of people could make a game in a matter of months.

Apart from that, it's hard to know exactly what we gamers want. Truthfully, I don't even know. You ask me to list what bugs me about current games, sure, I can tell you that. A whole cadre of things, unoriginality being a major one. But it's harder to tell people exactly what you're not seeing.

The thing that I'd like to see people build on is the idea of personalizing games. One game that tried to do this and didn't really succeed all that well was Black and White. I respected it for trying, but the fact of the matter was that the game just wasn't any bloody fun. But anyway. Black and White is a God game; you rule people, perform miracles to impress them and make them worship you. Your sort of link to the world is a giant creature - one of what eventually could be a fairly large number of animals, although the three base ones were cow, tiger and orangatan. Your creature was literally your pet. You could train it to perform miracles, you could train it to destroy your enemies, you could train it to do nothing but sleep and eat its own feces. If left on its own, it would just futz around, eating people, crapping on your town and generally doing whatever it liked.

There's a multitude of reasons it didn't work as a game, some of them stemming from poor implementation and some of them being that this whole sentient being on your computer thing worked better in theory than it did in practice. But the thing that it was trying to do was make the game and the world your own. If you were an evil god, your world would frequently be rainy, your citadel would change in appearance, and depending on how you treated it, your creature would change too, as well as taking on scars from battles. So, instead of having a plot-based game, you have more of a sandbox that you get to make your own. In theory. I really think that that's the direction games need to be pushed in. Not that having a plot is absolutely a bad thing, but in order to really capitalize on the medium, I feel that the player making a tangible difference in the game world beyond minor superficial differences, and allowing the gamer the freedom to do things that you, the designer, hadn't thought of are the future.

I know that's not a game model, but that's what I want to see from games.

They are, by the way, making a sequel to Black and White that seems to be doing a lot to fix what was wrong with the first game. Or that's the idea, anyway.

Yeah, Microsoft has a big plan for micropayments. I sure can't wait till developers start purposely leaving stuff out to charge for it later.

There's only so many things you can do, and now that we have finally reached competant 3d technology are most of the final borders smashed-now it's a matter of scale.

Ultimately, all "new" ideas can be compared to something else:most people rave about Katamari Damacy (sp?) being incredibly original, but you know....I seem to remember a game called Monkey Ball, where you rolled around and picked things up. Repetition in design has been a "problem" for decades now, it's part of what killed Atari; it's a matter of innovating those features now and tweaking the scales.

Wow. So you can pull ONE title out, and it's really just another (damn well made) fighting game? Well, I'm beaten. Obviously, Dreamcast wasn't just another flash in the pan pre-PS2 rush. Who can forget the classic Soul Calibur, that name just JUMPS when you think of Dreamcast. I certainly didn't think of the sequel, either, which sold considerably better than the obvious classic original.

"new school crap"-yep, innovation is bad, we should all be happy to play fighters over and over again.

Funny thing about that comment, too; that's what most people had to say about Dreamcast and other "next gen" systems of the time. The "school" of the technology really doesn't change it's qualities. Say, I think there's a "new school" Soul Calibur game out.

Sorry, the Dreamcast was a beefed up N64 with a disc drive and few good games. It got by on a marketing blitz, and you see what happened to it once an actual "next gen" console was released and had games. Yes, god forbid you should have a game machine that can do other things, let's stick around in the stone age. For a system to run on DVDs or CDs and expect them NOT to support popular uses of that format is COMPLETELY SENSIBLE.

don't forget jetset radio, crazy taxi and a whole bunch of other games that started on dreamcast and ended up being ported to xbox.
half the games on xbox that are worth playing are dreamcast ports.

and dreamcast is hardly forgotten, there's a whole group of people that consider the dreamcast to be the best of the of the newer generation of consoles and certainly a lot of popular games and franchises for the ps2 and xbox originally hail from the dreamcast.

not to mention that the dreamcast is one of the only "dead" consoles that still managed to produce and sell games months if not years after it's demise simply because it was a good console that died on due to the corperate side instead of the gamers side, there was certainly interest from the gamers themselfs.

sega let it die, the gamers simply had no choice but to follow suit.

And those of us that love the backwards compatibility idea get the same shit:why not just keep the old system? Because I don't want a dozen electronics and connections to keep track of and make space for. If ONE spot can serve as multiple game systems, DVD player, CD player, whoknowswhatelse player, all the better-so long as it works.

Again, nothing classic that people buy an system exclusively for, and Dreamcast/XBox....both "me too!" products. They have some good games, but keeping with this example....what will the XBox be remembered for? Umm.....Halo? A generic scifi shooter that survived on a marketing blitz as well?

[uote]not to mention that the dreamcast is one of the only "dead" consoles that still managed to produce and sell games months if not years after it's demisep

I was managing a gaming store at the time the PS2 hit and through the end of 2002, at my store and others in the city there were almost NO Dreamcast sales by the end of 2001. Months, I'd say, what kept it alive are Dreamcast purists like that fellow who thinks that new=bad (unless it's old, in which case being "new" wasn't bad in it's time period).

The PS1 is probably the only system that still has games being sold-I think the last PS1 game MADE was last year, so it's got to hold the title for longest production/sale. Final Fantasy 7 for example still sells plenty of copies a year.

So.....corporations forced people to stop buying Dreamcasts and N64's for PS2s and Box preorders? If there was interest from gamers, the money to keep going would have been there. Again going from memory of my work experience, after the PS2 launch the only people buying Dreamcasts were collectors looking to fill out, or people that simply decided "Eh, I guess I'll get a Dreamcast instead then. My friend says it's better." Why? "Oh, it just is."

Gamers let Sega die buy not buying their stuff anymore because the Dreamcast simply didn't have killer apps or the graphic horsepower, nor did it have any of those horrible multiple functions like playing DVDs. What the Dreamcast had going for it was online play, but again-just a gimmick. Online play with a dialup modem? Toss that in the "feature we need to say we have" pile. Online gaming on dialup speed was long since dead by 1999.

Don't get me wrong-I owned a Dreamcast and a few games, but there's nothing about it that makes it stand out, other than it's historical bookmark:a noble last ditch effort by a hype reliant company that had long since been beaten in the console wars. I'd say that's a better footnote than "could have been huge, but felt that CDROMs wouldn't be a good idea".

Thank you for saying exactly what I wanted to say.

[Edited on May 17, 2005 by Akira]