Topic: Alternative Consoles (Consoles not made by the big 3)

[Pfil]

No Alice from Valkyria Chronicles, also.

[KaZudra]

PC. Huehue.

Same, HUEHUEHUE

[Lelygax]

Yeah, I think it would be something like Sega All-stars Racing, mediocre but enjoyable

I want SEGA from Genesis/Mega Drive era back

[Johnny]

I think the mobile market is already a threat to home consoles and portables. And this isn't new. Companies have learned that casual people (I wouldn't even call them gamers) give them more money than real gamers, so they develop casual junk for them and they are already paying less attention to real games.
I don't know what the future might be, but Nintendo is in trouble, and if Nintendo falls, I think the whole industry will collapse.

Well some people feel like the flood of any old person making a game for a console or even making consoles themselves isn't any good. Some people just feel consoles, games, etc should be made by large corporations and not in someone's basement. Mostly because the feeling behind that is that if everyone who made games were allowed onto all the consoles, it would be much harder to sort through all the crappy games to get to the good ones. However, call me rooting for the underdog, but I actually admire indie game creators. These are people who are gamers themselves so its even possible they may know more about what the gamers want rather than the people in the boardrooms who just throw a slew of Call of Duty and Halo clones out onto the market. It brings diversity even if a lot of the indie games aren't any good.

I'd honestly rather have someone making a game who cares about my input and how I feel than a large corporation who could care less and have their own agenda when they make games.

[Beaumont_Belmont]

Indie game creators are important. Not all indie games are great- Stugeon's Law applies just as much as indies as to AAA, but they keep supposedly dead genres going and introduce some awesome original stuff. What are we going to remember in 10 years, the nth Beige Military Shooter or something like Minecraft or The Binding of Isaac? Most AAA games are just shovelware with nice production values.

I don't think the console market is threatened as much by the "casual" mobile market as we like to think. 20 years ago the games you find in the App Store would have been arcade games instead of phone games. The only difference is that the technology is reversed, the  arcades typically had better tech than home consoles could provide, and phone tech lags behind console and PC tech. I just wish that game journalists would stop treating the two markets as the same. It's like treating the market that buys Budweiser for a party as the same that tries a new craft brew every week.

[Pfil]

Indeed. Indie games are important, though most of them aren't very good. But there's always some hidden gem. The thing is that I don't want to lose my big console games. But I was referring to things like Candy Crush saga when I said something like casual junk.

[Johnny]

Indeed. Indie games are important, though most of them aren't very good. But there's always some hidden gem. The thing is that I don't want to lose my big console games. But I was referring to things like Candy Crush saga when I said something like casual junk.

Oh yeah those games theres way too much of. "Get all the stars, items, etc and complete the levels." Like Angry Birds, Farmville, and Bejeweled clones. I hate those types of games. Why do you think I hated Ouya so much. Also I hate the fact that you also have to buy in game items in a lot of those crappy games. Ugh.

[Intersection]

Oh yeah those games theres way too much of. "Get all the stars, items, etc and complete the levels." Like Angry Birds, Farmville, and Bejeweled clones. I hate those types of games. Why do you think I hated Ouya so much. Also I hate the fact that you also have to buy in game items in a lot of those crappy games. Ugh.

Indeed.
Some of these games can offer a good, casual, if occasional distraction. I actually rather like some of the simple, unobtrusive brain-teasers you can sometimes find on mobile systems ( I'm particularly fond of Flow) -- they're very useful for passing time, and can even make for some enjoyable mental exercise.
Yet the great majority of "casual" games you'll find don't allow that; instead, most games are so charged with artificial requirements and constraints that you'll soon find yourself bending to the game's expectations, rather than the other way around. You end up preoccupying yourself unnecessarily for a simple distraction that should never have been on your mind in the first place. The game is there to fulfill your needs -- you should always be entirely free of choice as to when and how you will play it. Yet games that truly allow this are becoming increasingly rare on the market today, and I utterly resent that.
Farmville falls into yet another category of parasitic games. Like in countless other cases, it places real time limits on virtual items or events, and restricts your progression for increasingly larger time intervals. This forces you to bend to the game's own hours, rather than letting you choose your own. It's vicious cycle that eventually robs you of all enjoyment, and, in most cases, the only way to escape it is to... pay.
And no, none of them are ever free. No matter how much time you dedicate to a game, you'll always find yourself confronted, some time or another, to a paywall. You're not powerful enough; you need more time; you don't want to wait; you want to "unlock" extra content. It's always there, that shameless grab for money. And it's the reason why I've all but given up on this form of mobile entertainment. Nowadays, unless I know exactly what it is, I don't even consider a game that's devoid of a price tag. Alas! It's the sad reality of today's industry.

[Lelygax]

I think that we can call these games as "social games". Indie games are cool, but social games rarely are good. If EA at least tried to be smart, they would do a game like The Sims 2 for facebook instead of this half-assed The Sims. It could be like The Sims Online, imagine how cool it would be to actually see your friends and chat with them in your virtual house.

[Pfil]

That's asking too much from EA, one of the shallowest companies ever.

And I did enjoy things like Defend Your Castle and Pop in WiiWare, they were funny games with very little to offer, but you just kept playing.

But those low budget games with over thinking and over worked stuff don't fulfill their role of quick fun, neither are they great games like they try to be, or good retro games for that matter.

They are just... that. IDK how to call them. That's why I said casual junk.

[Lelygax]

I will leave it here and run since it can be a bomb (!)
http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/

[Beaumont_Belmont]

I don't know about calling EA shallow. They're a business. And a big one. Just like Nintendo, they're about what will give them the biggest bottom line. Nintendo swells their bottom line by pandering to their fanboys, EA swells theirs by catering to the Battlefield and Madden markets. *shrugs* Guess I don't see a difference.

[Lelygax]

Difference is that EA did this:

DRM: So you really isnt the owner of your disk, they should choose in how many computers you can have it. If at least it was for digital games I could "try" to understand.

Origin: I only see people telling bad things about it, please if someone here had a good experience with it let me know, so I can remove this bad impression of Origin.

Offline games that need to stay online: Sim City, why they would want you to always be online to play Sim City? People have proven that its possible to fully play it offline if you hack the game, so it obviously is a enhanced DRM thing, even more intrusive.

Also this, maybe the worse and discovered it by acident now:

Accusations of spying[edit source | editbeta]

Origin's end-user license agreement (EULA) gives EA permission to collect information about users' computers regardless of its relation to the Origin program itself, including "application usage (including but not limited to successful installation and/or removal), software, software usage and peripheral hardware."[28] Initially, the EULA also contained a passage permitting EA to more explicitly monitor activity as well as to edit or remove material at their discretion.[29] However, this section was removed following an outcry over privacy implications. That outcry was fueled in part by pictures and video captured by several German gamers which showed Origin accessing tax programs and other unrelated software,[30] as well as a report by the news magazine Der Spiegel investigating the allegations.[31][32] In response to the controversy, EA issued a statement claiming they "do not have access to information such as pictures, documents or personal data, which have nothing to do with the execution of the Origin program on the system of the player, neither will they be collected by us."[33] EA also added a sentence to the EULA stating that they would not "use spyware or install spyware on users' machines," though users must still consent to allowing EA to collect information about their computers.[34]


Apart from all that, their fanboys doesnt help EA anymore simply because they've lost a lot of their fanbase because of these bad things. Any company in right mind wont will abandon their fans, since they are the people that gives them money. Look at Capcom, they neglected fans for so long that now they are almost going bankrupt, atleast Monter Hunter 4 is saving them for a vrief time with it high sells.

[Beaumont_Belmont]

Origin is pretty much a middle-of-the-road digital distribution system. It doesn't have Steam's sales, community, or fun, but it also doesn't totally ruin your experience like GFWL or uPlay. The DRM thing has been going on for a while- first with SecuROM and later with other ones. I have mixed feelings on EA. Sometimes they do some heinous crap- they've run several companies and franchises I loved into the ground.

But at the same time, they do a lot of the same stuff other companies do, but get much more heat for it. As far as Nintendo is concerned, I think they're holding onto their core fanbase- but they're not bringing anyone new in. The same people that bought the last Pokemon are gonna buy the new one, and new people aren't all that interested.

[Lelygax]

Well, lets see if that PokemonAmi thing attracts tamagotchi fans xD

I've discovered today that Desura has been sold to the same company that did Second Life, a week ago. Its a good or a bad thing? You already can see the name of he company if you scrool down the page.