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[Rowanas]

Electronic Arts sucks.

I'm five pages late for this, but here goes..

HOW DARE YOU!

Electronic Arts used to be gods wielding the inscrutable powers of 64 bit gaming. The Sega Megadrive games they created are the very foundation upon which my childhood rests. They are like the father I always wanted (my dad's not bad but he's no M.U.L.E. ). Populous, Archon, Bard's Tale, the list of precious goods they have produced goes on and on. Only when they shifted corporate image and became EA games did they start to suck.

Rant over.

[Danjen]

Electronic Arts sucks.

I'm five pages late for this, but here goes..

HOW DARE YOU!

Electronic Arts used to be gods wielding the inscrutable powers of 64 bit gaming. The Sega Megadrive games they created are the very foundation upon which my childhood rests. They are like the father I always wanted (my dad's not bad but he's no M.U.L.E. ). Populous, Archon, Bard's Tale, the list of precious goods they have produced goes on and on. Only when they shifted corporate image and became EA games did they start to suck.

Rant over.

Key word: used to.

[silhouette]

Yeah they used to be good.
Now theyre just bastards who buy out other companys and make crappy remakes of the games they sell... serriously whats the diffence between any of their sports games, especially ones like maddan 2008 and maddan 2009.

[Shades]

serriously whats the diffence between any of their sports games, especially ones like maddan 2008 and maddan 2009.

The clue is in what you wrote, clearly they have changed a number.

I find telling people they probably wouldn't like it because the it's not easy to play and there are much in the way of graphics works very well. People like to prove they aren't shallow and once they actually get into it they end up liking it.

[Safe-Keeper]

Despite the best efforts of the "EA sucks" bandwagon, I don't find EA to be that bad. I reached this verdict mostly based on the fact that they gave me Mirror's Edge.

[Shades]

Despite the best efforts of the "EA sucks" bandwagon, I don't find EA to be that bad. I reached this verdict mostly based on the fact that they gave me Mirror's Edge.

I wasn't a big fan of mirror's edge, I didn't feel the smoothness of moving around the world to be as cleanly done as other games, for example the prince of persia ones. Considering that was the main point of the game I count that against it pretty harshly.

Of course it's not a bad game either I'm just not a fan of it

Most games are terrible. EA release of a lot of games, most games EA release are terrible. I'm not sure they are worse than the average publisher though.

[Grimlocke]

I wont claim to be knowing a lot about EAs games, but what I can say that EA isnt a company that tries to put much effort in its games beyond the point where it would generate the most profit.

Like nearly all companies do. Its just work for them after all.

[Azgog]

Come to think of it, I've heard DF compared to the Matrix; an absurdly detailed virtual world, but to the untrained eye it just looks like a bunch of random symbols.

Isn't it actually the inverse?

To the untrained eye, the Matrix is an absurdly detailed virtual world, but to the Chosen One it just looks like a bunch of random symbols.

I think he's referring to the operator's monitors in the Zionese ships. It's just a bunch of numbers running down on a screen but all of the ship's crew seem to be able to see Morpheus and Neo fighting it out with kung-fu on a dojo. It actually is pretty comparable to DF; players can see epic sieges with body parts and insane amounts of blood flying around, while an outsider would just see a couple of g's moving towards smiley faces and then bumping off and turning red.

[*Poster*]

EA aren't any better or worse than anyone else is.

Anyway, when it comes to DF I mainly just get people to read Boatmurdered. Explaining what it actually is is a challenge. But right now I have an easy way to emphasize the brilliance, if not the genre or gameplay - when I go into a game store today and look on the shelves, all I can think is how I wish the next version of DF was out and how superior it will be to almost anything that I could buy.

[Nivim]

 This thread has taught me a lot about how to bring players into the fold. I think I'm probably going to use most of the points here, but each to their own target. The matrix example would probably work on people who do a lot of high-graphics games, it would get them in gear to use their imagination.

[dAGNARUS]

I got my 4 graphic whore fratboy friends to play DF, with a tileset though, but oh well, so do I.
At first when I tried explaining it they were sceptic (I mean, come on, , but after 2 weeks they were talking about thermonuclear catsplosions, so I guess they aren't graphic whores after all.

[lurker]

I'm five pages late for this, but here goes..

HOW DARE YOU!

Electronic Arts used to be gods wielding the inscrutable powers of 64 bit gaming. The Sega Megadrive games they created are the very foundation upon which my childhood rests. They are like the father I always wanted (my dad's not bad but he's no M.U.L.E. ). Populous, Archon, Bard's Tale, the list of precious goods they have produced goes on and on. Only when they shifted corporate image and became EA games did they start to suck.

Rant over.

The thing is, EA didn't write most of those games, they published them - Populous was Bullfrog, Bard's tale was Infrogames, etc. etc.  You can easily identify 'EA developed' games because they are, almost without exception, unremittingly lacking in character, dire and dull, e.g. the [SPORTNAME] [YEAR] formula. EA is a monolithic soulless corporate brothel, and I say that having a number of friends who have worked for them (I think one still does).  They are good at what they do, which is buying in existing talent and distributing it effectively, but creative they are not.

On topic, I would have to refer to nethack/rogue, little computer people (the sims on 8-bits before the sims, did I mention that EA never invented anything new?), tolkien (not so much because of the setting, more because of the sheer scope of ambition - think The Silmarillion not the Lord of the Rings), and lovecraft (because of the insanity).

But really, DF is unlike anything else, and boatmurdered is probably the best introduction out there.

P.S Hi (long time lurker, first time poster).  Sorry for the mild necropost.

[slink]

Not to mention that after EA bought out those little companies, the most creative people bailed out and formed their own new little creative companies.  Bullfrog's went to Muckyfoot, for example.

It was the techi-ness of DF that appealed to me at first.  It was a real, live, engineering simulation, taking place on real, live simulated geology!    It took me almost year to realize that there was essentially a story-generator included, but to be fair I wasn't playing it for most of that year. 

I think probably what makes it so appealing to so many people is that you can play it for whatever rewards you want.  If vanilla doesn't support your style very well, then someone's mod will, and if no one's mod does then you can write your own mod without having to buy a fancy art program or a special compiler.

[PsyberianHusky]

The closest thing to DF I can think of is probably something even less people have heard of, and that is a German game by the name of clonk.
http://www.clonk.de/
older versions are free
The mining and materiel management are very akin to each other.

The problem is I can't say its like clonk because noone has heard of that either.

um yea, also when someone says "GamerChick" a red flag goes off in my head just like a "Gamer Guy" in my mind is someone who sits around getting angry about halo, I know I am probably being over judgmental but for some reason I am just weary of that term

[sproingie]

Bard's tale was Infrogames

You mean Interplay.  Infogrames bought what was left of Atari and donned their name.

EA is for the most part merely a publisher, and they know talent when they see it.  Anyway, they've reportedly changed their tune since 2007, split into independent operating companies, and pledged to let their studios work more autonomously.  Then again they also put up Maxis as a flagship studio, which I've always seen as a company with a good idea a decade (they milked SimCity to death, they're doing it with the Sims, and Spore was an overhyped dud).  They also bashed together Bioware and Mythic, though at least they made the right decision of giving Mythic to Bioware instead of the other way around.

A distant acquaintance of mine worked for Ubisoft, who said it was great up til the day they fired you and the rest of the studio once a project was complete.  The game industry overall is just not the most stable place to work.