Hmm, I do believe Populous placed it's accents a bit differently...
At any rate Black & White was a lot more pacifistic.

The industry has slowly been evolving and essentially as we can see, if a game sells why not churn out a sequel to reap the profits, just look at the revival at the grand theft auto series and how well it's been doing. Pretty much everything nowadays in regards to the industry is profit based, companies don't take chances like they did in the 90's, creativity has essentially been squashed to the ground, with the idea of relying on the old ideas, with some tweaks here and there.

With the next generation of consoles I forsee, rising costs both in the development process, selling of the product, and everything else, with the reliance on improved graphics which seems to be a key issue with the console developers,

I have to agree that it's a total bust on PC's that you have to buy them every 2-3 years, the games - russian, english...etc. You may never know what language is the game you've bought until you install it... It's frigin' crazy... :not_ok: On the other hand I dislike consoles so I'm stuck on PC's, so whateva...

B&W 2 won't be though, which should mean it gets boring less quickly, which is nice.

The Picard, when you said "gaming is the largest entertainment industry" did you mean "fastest growing"? Surely TV and film (and publishing, I imagine) are much bigger than gaming even now? I'd put myself in your "well-educated intelligent people" category and I enjoy a bit of fast-paced FPS or some hacking and slashing every once in a while, and I thought HL2 was excellent, although perhaps not as innovative as the first one was (remember how dull FPSs were before HL?) - though I certainly tend to get more longevity out of strategy and adventure type games like Civilization (about which you're absolutely correct), Total Annihilation or Monkey Island.

I think it's a bit too easy to bash the sequel trend - people make money that way, it's the market. If people actually went out and bought the innovative and exciting games like MDK, Battlezone, Sacrifice, Darwinia, Republic: The Revolution (although to be fair that one wasn't as good as it should've been) and so on then more of them would be made - as pointed out before, the cost of making a game is so huge that you can't afford to do it unless the publisher think they're going to make money on it.

Populous was a different game of course but the overall theme was the same and that is the point. Black & White was not a wholely origional game idea. But it was significantly better then populous which is my whole argument.

Last year the gaming industry grossed more money then any other entertainment industry so yes, it is trully the biggest and not just the fastest growing.

Generalizations are never a complete fit (as said I like Doom3 and I too considder myself to be well educated).

My point about the Starship Troopers issue was that movies as well as compter games cannot be brain-dead. They don't have brains. Only the people who make them and, and this is my point, the people who watch/play them.

It's totally legitimate not to like Starship Troopers, as is liking it. However, I think missing the whole parody element of ST and calling it just a braindead action flick with stupid characters shows a certain passiveness (=braindeadness) on the side of the consumer. (You cannot like the parody, or hate the movie in spite of it, but you can hardly deny that it's there.)

And this passiveness (braindeadness) is exactly what is the basis of the success of nice-graphic FPS's with no plot versus intelligent games with a good story. A lot of people are only looking on the fast, easily accessible action elements and don't appreciate more subtle elements.

People who criticise Starship Troopers because the brain bug is "an idiotic 'boss' that is just some huge flabby bug" are exactly those people who criticise an FPS because the boss doesn't look cool/good enough. And that's why the author of the article quoted above disqualifies himself in my opinion: he is exactly one of the braindead people he himself criticises.

It's like criticising Monkey Island because you fight with puns instead of swords. Or like criticising Serious Sam because the levels are flooded with monsters. It's completely missing the humour of it. D'uh.

we all would put oursevles there :D , and not just beacuse it pleases us, but because it's true, those of us who really are here for the games they palyed back in the day, belong to the group by defention (with posible exceptions, which prove the rule), those who are here for the ABW (sad to say I'm one of them) have to be intlegent enough to fool themselves into believing the games are great (which some of them are, granted you can overcome their lack of flashy graphics).
Now If one stupid kid with a GPA below 3, and no alowance (who frequents this site) will answer me (and give me some sort of proof he is one), I'll... ah, what the heck, I'll mail him all my unscratched game disks at my own expense (even if he lives in the USA).
Now,about starship troopers: The movie was your average action, it just hapens to be a known crapy movie. I don't think any of you will tell me why it was worse than "the predator", which again is a known good movie. I believe this originated from the people who read the book, and were heavily dessapointed, but guess what? it's not based of the book. yup, it's based of secondary secondary product- the graphic novel series, which are sort of the misssing link- with the philosophy set in the first issues, it concerns much more the history of this war (and the of course the battles). the movie goes one step further and remove certain key elemnts- like competely abolishing all the philosophy and removing the ultra-super-powered armour. I read the book after the movie, and was able to wach it unbiased, it's an ok movie, it has your hero story, and your love story, and those news-flashes were a nice touch in my opinion.

1- The only word in gaming bussines is sell, sell and sell, no matter the quality.
2- In 1985-1990 codies were just normal people, working in dad´s garage. They had the same thinking about games as kids who would buy them. Lots of addiction, and quality.
3- In 2005 codies are full time workers, each game is just one more project to achieve.
4- Games are more oriented to consoles. I agree.
5- I don´t think games industry is crashing down, just lacking new ideas.
6- Our pockets are crasing down with higher prices with new software realize.
7- Lack of quality is not understable: with each new game a BIG team is behind. Producers, drawers, coders, designers, beta-testers.... Just as a example the first Ultima was written in BASIC by just ONE people.
8- The world is not the same as in 1990. And this applies to gaming industry too.

wow, this is an interesting topic, someone should write a book about this, then the many people will get the idea of about how games are goin down nowadays. I am a fan of those good oldies of the 80's and early 90's which has brought me to ask, why not have the major companies just make a collection of those games in one, like sonic mega collection or zelda collector's edition, think about how many happy people there would be in the world then :ok: .

Yeah that would be the most logical solution, but then how would those companies make the potential profits by slowly by surely releasing the games over time to the people and thus gain more profits that way rather than the easy way (Nintendo comes to mind)