Paul....
Yeah, that\'s because SEGA is stoopid??!!!
No.. this comment comment above is stoopid.
Betting their last card on a risky endeavour such as ShenMue shows the management have no brains basically(or balls too big for their own good!!). I\'m pretty sure if Square has bet their last game on a similar game as Shenmue(instead of FF) then, there qould be no more square today. For those who doesn\'t know FF was Square last bet and they were prepared to fold after releasing FF but it turn out to be a mega success and brings Square to where it is today.
Sega didn\'t bet their last card - by FAR - on Shenmue. Yeah, it cost 20 million to make... big deal. The whole reason Sega went out of the market is not because the Dreamcast was failing.. it\'s because they didn\'t have enough money to make a successor console. In case you don\'t know, it doesn\'t cost millions to fund a console.. it costs BILLIONS. Microsoft spent 4 billion ALONE just on advertising. Shenmue\'s pricetag was a drop in the bucket compaired to the finacial requirements Sega needed to meet in order to continue on in the hardware market. Instead of playing the DC out and going from there, Sega decided to cut their losses and start development for 3 consoles which still had a ton of potential left. Had they waited, they would have been in even worse financial shape to continue on... and the competition would be much stiffer from their fellow 3rd party game developers. Also, Final Fantasy hit a system which was hugely popular at the time and had a massive userbase. The original Final Fantasy wasn\'t a smash hit either, but a moderate success which conviced Square\'s shareholders that the company WAS profitable. Their success grew from there. Sega still faced the problem that noone was buying their console. Even a "Final Fantays Killer" wouldn\'t have made a difference. Sure you hear the success stories.. but didn\'t you know that there\'ve been a litteral TON of great gaming gems that fell to the wayside over the years because they didn\'t happen to be on the system which was in the public\'s eye at the time? Sorry man, but 1 game never had a chance to save Sega.. expecially when you consider the sheer number of AAA games available for the system which got passed up for lesser counterparts on a different system.
Your vision of the parser is very interesting, but it seems like it would require AI the level of Data of Star Trek fame to execute it.
No, actually you\'d be surprised. With todays computers it\'d actually be fairly simple to execute once a basic engine was written. The way it worked was that developers actually had to write all the different combinations of ways to describe an action into the game engine for each specific event. Later on, they modified the engine to take out common words. I.E. Say you would type "Open the Door". The engine would recognise the word "the" and drop it because it\'s commonly used in grammar. What you\'d be left with is "Open Door" Which the engine recognises. However, if you mispelled "The", then it wouldn\'t be able to match your typ0 with the word "The" to be dropped and wouldn\'t understand your command. With the tools available today, I don\'t see ANY reason why a game engine couldn\'t be written which incorperates real-time spell check (already available in word processors), grammar checks (already available in word processors), and word string matching (already available in the form of Internet search engines).
In the end, I still think a picture is worth a thousand words. I don\'t see we\'ll ever get back to the text adventure of yonder years.
I\'m not sure what you\'re talking about. Text Adventures (The Genre) will almost certainly never be back in popularity because of their lack of graphics. Text (as in Parser to a graphics driven game) as a means to manipulate the game enviroment will never be back either. I simply said it had the potential to be the powerful and robust available.. but I also made note to say that it wasn\'t practical. Gamers these days simply won\'t sit down and type their way through a game. It\'s too archaic of a system to have any practical use in todays gaming market depsite it\'s potential. I COULD, however, see voice recognision technology coupled with controller input to bring a resurgance in this type of interface.. but that\'s a ways off until voice recognision software improves drastically.
