Whats The Next Big Thing?

[Jockstar]

Ok we have had Half Life 2 ,GTA San Andreas .Both excellent games. IMHO. So what do you think is the next big thing for the PC? I've heard that F.E.A.R. is gonna be cool. Any suggestions guys? I need to play something new. Been redoing some games or for example. GTA i'm going round doing the extra stuff. So what are your suggestions for the next big game?

[Ice Maiden]

I'd say Resident Evil 5

[hughden]

Civilisation 4 is on the way if you like that sort of thing.

[Bikkel]

Battlefield 2!

If youre into first person shooters that is. If you are a Railroad Tycoon type forget it.

The sologame is a kind of joke.

The real killer app is the intenet play, endless fragfests, knee deep in the dead.

Need to have ADSL though.

Edited August 25, 2005 by Bikkel

[bartender100]

Here is the upcoming release's for Sept,nothing exciting as far as I can see.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/

As you say FEAR loooks interesting

[Jockstar]

Does anyone know when FEAR will be out? I also heard of a game called Stalker. Anyone else heard of this?

[bartender100]

Just saw on tv,there is a new one from Rockstar coming out called Bully,its already causing a stink because of its content

[Ice Maiden]

Sad news about S.T.A.L.K.E.R., as its not going to be seen this year. Apparently, the engine and all the other technicall gubbins has been done and dusted, but it still lacks one minor detail: A plot So, it'll be mosying on along somethime in '06 - enough time for me to do another upgrade (That being said, although S.T.A.L.K.E.R. looks very nice with its dynalmic weather 'n' poo, it totally doesn't appeal to me - looks too random, but perhaps thats something to do with the lack of plot).

[Ice Maiden]

What about Counter Strike?

[dantilley]

There's a game being developed now that will change the face of gaming for ever, no exaggeration. If it lives up to expectations it could well be the best game ever. It's called Spore, by the same guy that made The Sims and various other games.

Official site is http://spore.ea.com/

If you have a decent internet connection and an hour to spare, you can watch this conference about it: http://www.pqhp.com/cmp/gdctv/ - it's the 10th link down on the page, titled 'Will Wright discusses his new game creation called "Spore"'.

[hughden]

Do you play Battlefield 2 on the Thai servers? If not, how is the ping rate?

[Shivek]

I think the next big games would be HL2: Aftermath, FEAR, APB, Unreal Tournament 2007, and STALKER. Along with some of the next-gen console games.

[Thomas_Merton]

You don't get much bigger than this:

This is an article taken from the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, written by Shahar Smooha.

War Games

SILICON VALLEY, Cal. - Officially, Asaf (Asi) Burak is an inseparable part of "the family." His picture, superimposed on a photo of a figure dressed in a 1940s gangster outfit, hangs alongside the pictures of his new "siblings" at the entrance to the third floor at the headquarters of Electronic Arts (EA), the largest developer and distributor of computer games in the world. At the beginning of the summer, Burak agreed to maintain the Sicilian code of silence required of anyone who joins "the family."

"The family" is the name of the EA team that is currently turning the series of "Godfather" films into a best-selling computer game. Since taking the oath, Burak has been deeply involved in the intrigues of the Italian Mafia. The crime atmosphere is evident in every corner of the development studio, which takes up most of the area of the huge floor.

The walls and cluttered desks are decorated with items representing all the familiar Mafia cliches: from frightening portraits of tough Mafioso, to concept illustrations of gloomy Italian restaurants with red-and-white checked tablecloths, and small models of old Fords and Tommygun submachine guns.

Even when they take a time-out from work, EA tries very hard to ensure that Burak and the approximately 200 members of his family won't want to go home. Among the huge buildings that house thousands of programmers, artists, sound engineers and designers, are expansive lawns with shady corners in which to rest. The tennis and volleyball courts, the fitness room and the swimming pool are at the disposal of anyone who wants to take advantage of them at any given moment. The huge cafeteria serves every kind of food anyone could want; one can also find arcade machines that work without coins are everywhere. The computerized playground atmosphere is played up with huge portraits of game heroes that stare out at passersby from the walls.

Like the computerized figures in The Sims - EA's series of dating, urban-planning, homemaking and other games, millions of which have been sold around the world - everyone here does what is expected of them. The employees work hard, rest occasionally, play a little and go back to work. Mainly, they don't leave the confines of the company compound.

Perfect escapism from which it is impossible to flee.

A different breed

But Asi Burak is different than the others at EA. This is not only because of his foreign accent or his age - 34 (which makes him one of the older people there) - but because of the fact that he doesn't stop thinking about home for a moment. Not about his small rented apartment near the company headquarters where he has been an intern since the beginning of the summer as part of a master's degree program, but about his home in Israel. But he isn't hallucinating about hot bowls of hummus, or friends and family across the ocean either: He is keeping track of statements made by Israeli cabinet ministers and senior officials in the Palestinian Authority, carefully examining the reactions of both official and terrorist bodies to the actions and declarations of the other side, and scrutinizing any sign of an increase or decrease in the confidence of the Israeli or Palestinian publics with respect to what some still call "the peace process."

The reason for Burak's obsession with the intrigues of Middle Eastern politics is PeaceMaker - a computerized strategy game that he and several of his fellow students in the master's degree program in computer games at Pennsylvania's Carnegie Mellon University, have developed over the past year. Unlike other games that have dealt with the Israeli-Arab conflict [see box], in PeaceMaker, the players enter the shoes of politicians rather than generals. Victory in PeaceMaker, as opposed to other computer games, is not achieved through quick deployment of forces, destruction of enemy units or control of territories, but by reaching an understanding with the other party to the conflict.

A beta version of the game was displayed in March at the prestigious Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. In May it attracted a lot of attention when its creators showed it at E3 - the largest games exhibition in the world in Los Angeles. However, the greatest compliment they received was when Will Wright - creator of The Sims series and the unchallenged star of the industry - became enthusiastic about the project and gave a few useful tips to Burak. Today, at the same time as he is working to complete PeaceMaker, which will be distributed free of charge as an educational project (apparently through organizations promoting cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians), Burak is in touch with Israeli venture capital funds discussing future projects.

Burak is not the typical game developer. From the time he was drafted into the Israeli army in the late 1980s and up until two years ago, he didn't play on the computer at all, and in effect missed the meteoric progress that in the last decade turned the computerized entertainment industry into a leading cultural and technological force.

`Serious' entertainment

After his discharge as a captain in a prestigious Military Intelligence unit in the Israel Defense Forces and completion of a degree in design at the Bezalel School of Art and Design in Jerusalem, Asi Burak became an art director in the Tel Aviv branch of the international Saatchi & Saatchi advertising agency. Thereafter, he served as the head designer and vice president of a start-up company, during the period of the high-tech bubble.

Burak had always been interested in "serious" entertainment, but felt he wasn't expressing his creative potential. "What always interested me was to come to a certain medium and to be one of those who does its quality content," he says. "In television today it's HBO [Home Box Office], and in the advertising market there are the ads that win at the Cannes Festival, and in cinema there are plenty of examples. But I felt that I wanted to do something new, something with which I was not familiar."

Why computer games, of all things?

Burak: "Computer games are actually the next medium, because in visual terms they are approaching cinema in giant steps. However, the huge advantage of computer games is the interactivity. This medium brings you into the experience in a way that doesn't exist in any other medium. On the other hand, in terms of the possibilities of this field, although there are many people involved who have accumulated a great deal of experience, this is still a virgin medium in which it's possible to do things that haven't been done at all up to now. They still haven't scratched the surface of the potential of what can be done with computer games, and that's what excited me."

Burak understood that in spite of his business experience, there is no real possibility today of becoming a part of the game industry as a total outsider, and he made a courageous decision to start all over and to study the field about which he knew almost nothing, from the ground up.

"I really wanted to be accepted to the MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] media laboratory in Boston, but while I was considering the possibility, by surfing on the Internet I discovered the Technology Entertainment Center - the first academic program in the world that trains game developers. After quite a number of inquiries, I went to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, saw the place in action, and although I understood that they would all be children there compared to me, everything looked amazing. What is unique about this program is that it is very practical. During the two years of study, we are divided into small teams composed of a producer, a designer, a programmer, a sound man and an animator, and we simply create games of all kinds and improve them."

The guiding principles of the program at Carnegie Mellon, which since its inception in 1999 has been arousing a great deal of interest in game development studios, are practical and interdisciplinary. All the students are required to take courses during the first semester in a wide variety of fields in order to familiarize themselves with the various elements that go into creating a game, so they will understand the complexity of every stage of the joint creative effort. Among other things, the students are required to take a theater course, in which they learn how to tell a story and how to create drama, and participate in a workshop for constructing virtual worlds - a new world every two weeks.

Striking out alone

During the second semester, after some practical experience, the first-year students have to decide if they are interested in joining an existing project being created by second-year students - or if they want to propose a new project of their own. "I very much wanted to do something of my own as long as I was in school and enjoying quite a lot of creative freedom, and was not subject to the financial constraints of the industry," Burak recalls.

"I decided that if I was already proposing a project of my own, I would try to do something with which I'm familiar. As opposed to the Americans, whose entire lives have been easy, we come from a place where there is genuine conflict. Our entire lives are insanity. I said to myself that if in the future I want to do serious games, I can take the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and make a game out of it."

Burak was convinced that he had an amazing idea, but not everyone was as enthusiastic. "I felt that such a game provides an answer to the main criticism directed at the industry, which is always described as superficial and violent. I was convinced that a game like this could prove that computer games can be fun and educational, and have very serious and realistic content, without being violent," he says. "Maybe a little like documentary cinema.

"Israelis with whom I spoke at that stage of my idea, which [among other things] dealt with the simulation of what happens at an IDF checkpoint in the territories, told me to try to forget about Israel a little and to stay away from politics. In the department, they told me the idea could be nice, but that it was impractical to implement in one semester and with a team of four people. Once I understood that for a simulation of this kind you need a great deal of time, because there need to be insane levels of animation - without which people will not believe what is happening on the screen - we understood that we had to go in a totally different direction."

After some brainstorming sessions with the other three members of Burak's team, and with their program advisers, it was decided that they would invent a strategy game for one player, based on taking turns (like chess, for example), and played from the point of view of the prime minister of Israel and the head of the PA. As opposed to the vast majority of strategy games, the final goal of PeaceMaker is to reach a peace agreement between the sides, during the limited tenure of the leader whom the player chooses to be.

"When we constructed the game," says Burak, "we asked ourselves what the conflict is in a game that simulates striving for peace. And we realized that if you look at an Israeli prime minister like [Yitzhak] Rabin or like [Ariel] Sharon today, the greatest conflict from their point of view is how to make overtures to the other side without broadcasting weakness to their public. What complicates things even further is that in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the violence increases just when there is progress in the contacts between the sides."

Advance scripts

In terms of its artistic design, PeaceMaker broadcasts diplomatic restraint. On the computer screen ,maps of Israel and the territories appear, with icons that represent various interest groups beneath them.

They are all represented: the governments of Israel and the PA, the United States, the UN and Egypt, as well as the most extreme groups in both communities - Hamas and the settlers. The two sides have at their disposal military tools such as targeted assassinations and roadblocks, or the option of giving free rein to the terrorists; political tools such as telephone conversations, speeches, meetings or leaks to the media; and strategic tools such as support for Palestinian education or health care, the addition or removal of settlements, construction of a separation fence, and so on.

When the game begins, scripts written in advance are presented to the player, who has to make decisions on his own and bear the consequences.

A typical scenario in the beta version of the program, for example, involves dealing with a letter from the Israeli defense minister, who recommends a military operation to destroy the arms-smuggling tunnels in Rafah, even before the disengagement plan is carried out. In the event that the player decides to embark on the operation suggested by the minister, he will receive a phone call in protest from the head of the PA. In response he then has to decide whether to ignore the protest, to continue the military operation while placating the Palestinians by removing roadblocks in another sector, or to intensify the military pressure, in the hope that it will convince the Palestinians to take security measures of their own, which will be to Israel's benefit.

Throughout this time, indexes of satisfaction of various sectors in Israeli or Palestinian society appear on the bottom of the screen.

As in the real situation in the Middle East, the player in PeaceMaker will not have a great deal of time for his decision-making process. At any given moment, a new event can appear on the screen - like a suicide attack, or shooting by a soldier who has run amok and kills Palestinian children. The player will have to calm the chaos that breaks out at that moment.

The two main challenges that faced Burak and the members of his team were on the one hand, enabling people to enjoy virtual participation in one of the least enjoyable conflicts in the world today, and on the other hand, presenting that conflict in a balanced manner that would allow the game to serve as an educational instrument rather than appearing to be a propaganda tool in the eyes of the target audiences.

"As an Israeli," Burak explains, "it was very important to me that the game be balanced. For that purpose, I made contact with Palestinians with whom I had never had contact before, and tried to enlist their help in the project."

He found two female Palestinian students from the university, explained to them the basic idea of the game, and turned them into consultants.

"They had very interesting comments, which helped me a lot. Neither was at all pleased with the way in which, according to them, the American media cover the conflict. They told me, for example, to leave out a term like `terror infrastructure,' which is an Israeli concept that has somehow infiltrated the American news networks. In the end, by the way, both of them played the game until the end - and won."

In addition to the two students, the game was also played by two focus groups composed of Jewish and Muslim youths in Pittsburgh. Burak says that the feedback he got from the two groups led to the addition of a great deal of information to the game. The members of the PeaceMaker development team noticed that people play the game extremely slowly, as though real lives depended on their decisions. "My great fears about the focus groups, that they would tell us we were biased or superficial or imprecise, were not realized. Although there were several Muslims who at first said that it was not practical in their opinion to make a computer game about a subject like the conflict, in the end, even some of them sat and played."

Now the aim of Burak and his colleagues is to translate the game into Hebrew and Arabic, and to try to distribute it in schools on both sides.

"Although so far they have never proved themselves commercially, I'm a great believer in serious games," he notes. "It's clear to me that during one hour of play, a child can receive more information from a game like this than he will get from 10 hours of passive reading. The bottom line is that commercially, the only serious games that have succeeded in making a profit were combat-training games for the U.S. Armed Forces."

Intifada games

The first computer game to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was called Intifada, and it was developed by an Israeli named Michael Medved in 1989, at the height of the first Palestinian uprising. The idea in this primitive game was to patrol the streets of a Palestinian village (only from right to left or vice versa), and to fire at Palestinian rioters who burst out from the sides of the screen and approached the image of the player. Between one bloody patrol and the next, slogans appeared on the screen such as: "In the course of your mission against the rioters, you operated contrary to your instructions.

Your terrible performance was recorded by foreign television crews, and caused the fall of the government."

The responses to this not-exactly- humanitarian game came from the Arab side only during the second intifada. First, in 2001, a small and unimpressive game called The Stone Throwers appeared; it was in effect very similar to Intifada, with a few minor differences. After it came a rather sickening game in which the player had to blow up a suicide bomber in as large a concentration of civilians as possible, and to receive points according to the number of wounded and dead. And in 2003, the game Under Ash came out with great fanfare: It was supposed to present serious competition to the best computer action games in the industry.

In this game, created by Syrians and based on a three-dimensional graphic engine, the player assumes the identity of a Palestinian refugee whose family has been killed by the Israeli army, and whose honor has been trampled. The player receives tasks such as infiltrating a settlement, killing Israeli soldiers on the Temple Mount, and taking over IDF bases full of Golani Brigade soldiers. The production values are not especially high, and the game did not manage to become a commercial success in the Arab world, but it was widely covered in the international media. A demo version of the second game in the series, UnderSiege, can be downloaded at:

http://www.underash.net/en_download.htm.

Two games that are more serious and come from the mainstream of the game industry, are Divided Ground: Middle East Conflict, and (in Hebrew) Blue

Star: The Israel Air Force, which was developed in Tel Aviv by the Israeli Pixel company. Divided Ground is a strategy game based on taking turns, in which players act as IDF commanders or generals in Arab armies, who fight the enemy of their choice on historical battle sites such as Latrun in 1948, the Rafah Salient in 1967 or the Chinese Farm in 1973. When the game came out in mid-2001, critics considered it mediocre. In Israel it was almost ignored.

Blue Star, on the other hand, became a local best-seller immediately after it arrived in the stores at the end of 1998. The game - which simulates a military flight - enables armchair pilots to fly generations of air force planes and reenact various historic battles, high above virtual Earth.

[Shivek]

I'm too lazy to read that long article. Is there a summarized article?

[Jockstar]

I'm too lazy to read that long article. Is there a summarized article?

Same.

[Thomas_Merton]

I'm too lazy to read that long article. Is there a summarized article?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Same.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Don't bother then.

Nobody's forcing you.