Spoiler http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4&feature=player_embedded ^We are entering a new age in video games. They're no longer textures slapped onto the ground to make it look like the ground, with a few blades of grass. Dirt isn't just a picture now; It's 'actual' dirt in videogames.
This is fake. Notch said so. The "proof" that they have is that their island is made up of things that are exactly the same, and thus each thing only needs to load once and then loads instantly for each other time.
I've seen this before and I personally support the project, that said the project could easily go tits up and be bull. It's entirely possible this could easily work. Fair enough I doubt it would be on this generation of consoles and a select few high grade PCs that even then might struggle. Until I see the final result i'm not giving any opinion apart from hope. And no offence to Notch becaause I do love his creation of Minecraft, but how the **** can he talk about the resolution of video games? He's only made a single game that is made out of 16 bit images.
Minecraft actually uses pretty high grade graphics. It's the art style that makes it seem to be low quality. Here's his full post about it. And okay, he didn't say fake, he said scam. http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8423008802/but-notch-its-not-a-scam
Sure, make it much more time confusing and much more expensive to create games, raise the bar even higher. It doesn't matter that small time developers will become non-existant and that all innovation will stop excisting, those are just some minor drawbacks!
Much as I agree with you, small-time development is far from dead. Quite a few popular series, RPGs in particular, have migrated to hand-held consoles; it's basically like having a SNES, N64, or Playstation in your pocket. Not to mention indie development is bigger than ever in the 2000's; the consumer has control of tech that made his favorite games from way back when.
I hate handhelds personally though, I guess that's more of a personal thing, but I just feel silly since I don't bring it with me out of the house, so I'm really just using it as a much let comfortable home console with worse sound xD though I guess I could always bring it to the bathroom Yeah, indie development is much bigger now, but those games just don't seem to be popular at all among most people, even though they're really the only games with real innovation and unique gameplay experiences, usually anyway. It just irks me a bit.
Well that's a shame, because that's where the good games are going. Anybody with a brilliant idea and not enough scratch to make EA happy can make a hand-held game instead. Even people with the cash are making the switch! First off, indie/small-time developers are plenty popular. Dishwasher: Dead Samurai saw enough popularity to get a sequel, Cave Story finally made it to Wiiware last year (and 3DS this year, reinforcing the hand-held aesthetic), etc. If you're expecting the popularity level of Madden, then you're asking the games to suck. People like things that suck. That is, they like bland, repetitive, simple experiences hammered into their brain over and over because they can't live without routine. Why do you care what's popular, anyway? Make what's good what's popular by paying attention to it and showing it support. That's how it works.
I'm just going to ignore everything you said and say that Minecraft has over 10 million registrered users. I'm not in the mood to discuss anything right now.
