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You can tell how much they're against copyrights by how they steal Gamespot's layout without batting an eyelash.

The screen shots look good. I wonder if they are going to keep the bullet-time tricks in this one. In the first game it was innovative but to be honest I'm kind of tired of seeing it. Bringing a love interest into the mix isn't such a bad idea. Fans of noir know that you need a femme fatale to betray and save you. Does anyone else think the femme looks like Demi Moore though?

Indeed, have you played Dark Alliance on the PS2?, there is this level where you have to retrieve the key to the next level form a frozen guy killed by orcs on top of a mountain. Great game.

I agree, in a way, that the traditional RTS is getting old. Even Rise of Nations (latest game that I've purchased)... which is pretty cool and has some nice variations on the genre - being almost a mesh of Age of Empires 2 and Civilization - can't seem to hold my attention for very long.

I feel like the future for people who like these games hold two possibilities. Probably the traditional RTS will just get more and more realistic graphics and AI, so that you'll eventually feel like you're really spectating and adjusting a truly occurring battle.

The other possibility is a fusion of genres. There are a few games out now, and some coming out, that are taking the traditional RTS and melding it with other genres. I used to be a real strategy "purist" -- meaning I would cringe at the thought of melding my favorite genre with others -- but now as the traditional RTS is seeming a little dry of late, I'm feeling more excited about some of these gameplay evolutions.

A couple of examples are Sacrifice (beginning to combine some traditional RTS elements with an action game... link ) and the upcoming game Freedom Fighters (I think by the people who made Hitman 2... link ). Both of those are breathing new life into the genre for me.

Anyway, that's just my 2 bits...

I agree, in a way, that the traditional RTS is getting old. Even Rise of Nations (latest game that I've purchased)... which is pretty cool and has some nice variations on the genre - being almost a mesh of Age of Empires 2 and Civilization - can't seem to hold my attention for very long.

I feel like the future for people who like these games hold two possibilities. Probably the traditional RTS will just get more and more realistic graphics and AI, so that you'll eventually feel like you're really spectating and adjusting a truly occurring battle.

The other possibility is a fusion of genres. There are a few games out now, and some coming out, that are taking the traditional RTS and melding it with other genres. I used to be a real strategy "purist" -- meaning I would cringe at the thought of melding my favorite genre with others -- but now as the traditional RTS is seeming a little dry of late, I'm feeling more excited about some of these gameplay evolutions.

A couple of examples are Sacrifice (beginning to combine some traditional RTS elements with an action game... link ) and the upcoming game Freedom Fighters (I think by the people who made Hitman 2... link ). Both of those are breathing new life into the genre for me.

Anyway, that's just my 2 bits...

PS. Emulator is *NOT* a substitute for a classic arcade game.

No, but I think you're missing the point. How many working I, Robot machines do you think there are in the world? Not many. This was the first 3D arcade game ever made; it needs to be preserved. This is about history, not just video games. Eventually, with the passage of time everything stops working - it's just a matter of how long it takes. With this near-perpetual copyright we've got in this country these days it's possible that some game companies will sit on their IP, doing nothing with it, while all of the old arcade machines/cartridges/CD-ROM's rot and eventually die. With no copies of the original game available any longer, the games will be lost.

That's a worst case scenario that I don't believe will happen to most games precisely because there are so many people out there skirting the law with emulators. There are emulators for pretty much every major classic console and a good 95% or so of all arcade games. But that still leaves a small percentage of both home and arcade machines unaccounted for, and without good ROM dumps from those games, they can and will eventually be forgotten and lost to time in a way none of us ever thought mass-produced digital data could be. We always seem to just assume that anything put out there by a major corporation these days will just always be out there forever wether they still want it to be or not - that's not the case.

There need to be people out there who are actively trying to preserve at the very least the most important games in their original forms - that doesn't skirt anyone's IP, and it will keep the games available for when copyright runs out (fat chance at the rate we're going) or for when the company finally does put the IP in public domain (which doesn't happen very often, for reasons I'll get to in a sec). And I don't mean doing something like putting an old arcade cabinet in the corner and playing it; I mean buying up old machines, in as close to their original condition as possible, restoring them to like-new condition, and then keeping them that way. Right now there are only a few people doing this, and they're generally looked down upon by the gaming literati because "games were meant to be played" rather than stored for posterity. That's true, of course, but we're at the point in time when we do need the equivalent of real video game museums, in the same way we have television, radio and film museums already.

I have been trying to do this in a limited way but I don't have an unlimited budget to do it. I have about 30 classic game consoles, all in their original boxes, some in new condition, some in as close to it as I could find them. They've all been meticulously cleaned and, when necessary, repaired. I keep them stored in their boxes and remove them to play only every once in a while. I do the same with individual cartridges. Of course, I don't keep these things in a hermetically sealed room or anything so they're still exposed to the elements, but I do what I can in my own small way.

As for the IP rights of these old games, a lot of people seem to feel they're abandonware and that they're entitled to simply take them. I will confess to being a big MAME fan myself but I also can see it from the eyes of the publishers. These games are not abandonware, as articles like this ought to tell you. And games are not only simply re-released periodically, they're also continuously updated (Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, etc.), so that IP is certainly valuable. But it would be a shame if those same IP rights were responsible for the loss of some of these classic games to history.

The GPU in a GameCube is NOT a Radeon, it is built on a proprietary chip design designed by Nintendo themself even if it is manufactured by ATI.

I think I finished that game 3 times before I even played any other RPG. It's still here on my hard drive. Such a great game. Someone else responsible for Torment has also recently left Black Isle (I cannot find the news item I read saying so), thus maybe there can be a sequel. Infogrames has the D&D license right now, and they are backing Troika's Temple of Elemental Evil. That's a good sign for something in the vein of Torment. It's too bad TORN got cancelled.

Also, I have to second the Knights of the Old Republic recommendation made by another poster. There are some similarities between the overriding stories in the two games. Also, Jennifer Hale (Fall-From-Grace) is in it! Woo!

Too bad Vhailor isn't there. Not the actor, but Vhailor.

Ravi

I meant, of course, the GCN version. The Kirby license did get removed from the game, even though it would use there Kriby's Tilt and Tumble cartdridge's motion sensor. I've not found an article about the game in about a year, but Nintendo still has a product page for it on their website. It's definetly not going to be a high profile game, but I doubt that Nintendo has canned it altogether.

You've heard about Greyhawk: Temple of Elemental Evil, right? It's supposed to be using the 3.5 edition rules very faithfully. Faithfully as in being unapologetically turn-based, the way the D&D rules are meant to work, which is something of a rarity in 2003. More at Gamespot and IGN.

Disclaimer: I work at one of the companies involved, though my work isn't related to the project.

Activision cancelled their Star Trek license by suing Viacom for not "keeping the license active enough," I wonder if White Wolf is next on their list for ending the World of Darkness before Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines ships! Or maybe they'll just end up with another dead license... heh...

If you include all licensed franchises, Golden Eye was great, the various X-Wing/Tie Fighter series games were golden. TMNT/GI Joe in the arcade as well.

To pick a nit, I'd submit there's a major difference between movie license and franchise license. Of the games you list, the only one that might be considered truly movie licensed is Golden Eye, and given the enduring popularity of the James Bond franchise, even that is stretching it.

X-Wing and Tie Fighter were emphatically not movie licensed; there isn't a Star Wars movie five years either side of the original X-Wing (maybe more, I'm being conservative). GI Joe was popular for decades. I don't recall if TMNT had any movie-specific games, but it did have a lot of non-movie specific games.

Now, this is a Star Wars movie-licensed game. It is not immune to licensing crapiness.

Actually, Star Wars does have one of the few truly movie-based games that I did not read uniformly bad things about, and that was the Pod Racer games. Still, an exception does not a trend make.

Anyways, just a little nit, but when seen this way, the movie license sucks trend holds very strongly, whereas franchise licenses sometimes work out OK. (The best Star Trek games were set in the Original Series universe, 20-25+ years after the show went off the air, for instance.)

"It's apparent from playing Knights of the Old Republic that a remarkable amount of effort, work, and talent went into this game. It's one of the only Star Wars games to truly make you feel at times as though you're a key player in and a part of this unique and beloved sci-fi setting. You'll get to do all the sorts of stuff that you've seen and enjoyed in the Star Wars movies, and you'll get to emulate any of your favorite characters' personalities and actions over the course of the game. You'll also experience a much more morally complex version of Star Wars than what you get from the movies. Along the way, you'll find a few aspects of the game that you'll wish were better, but that's mostly because the vast majority of Knights of the Old Republic is so exceptionally good. You don't need to be a fan of Star Wars or of RPGs to appreciate all the impressive qualities of this game--but if you are, all the better."

The Stone Age didn't end due to a lack of stones

Go to GameSpot then. The review talks more about the roughs spots of the gaming. It's still an excellent review, but they talk more about some issues with the storyline (not revealing spoilers) and things such as the frame rate issue.

The degree of hand-holding by the brand owner varies, in some cases a developer is allowed to run and get quite creative with a character-based license (like the earlier mentioned Goldeneye with James Bond) while in the case of Enter the Matrix the game was apparently co-directed by the Wachowski brothers themselves. And truly, it is a fitting story in the Matrix universe.

One of the major differences in games vs. movies is the ownership of the experience; games try to give you some illusion of free will to allow you feel like it is you choosing to fight the bad guys and you on the screen kicking ass.

Enter the Matrix was built to tell the Wachowski story, and while an interesting one in the multi-threaded Matrix universe (like the great Animatrix shorts) and tied to the rest of the legacy, it does not leave many open-ended choices to the player. While not the basis for very deep or varied gameplay, this ironically fits with the Matrix universe and the question of free will in human life. You are ultimately on rails, and you will either ride to the finish, or you will perish along the way. That has not stopped the game from selling more than 2.5 million copies, which means they must have done something right.

Chris Crawford and many others have debated the depth of the story tree and mechanisms to create interesting and playable content inside multi-threaded story trees. I have yet to find a massively multiplayer game that was able to carry a coherent story (except about the story of the player himself exploiting a strange world full of rats and squirrels to get "exp" and "eq") and have grown too jaded to enjoy pseudo-random generator worlds like Morrowind. However, I find a lot of pleasure in visiting the grandfathers of 16- and 32-bit roleplaying, Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, with a dozen or more possible endings each.

An ideal game gives you a strong illusion of ownership over the evolution and direction of the story while filling all the possible branches of gameplay with interesting content. Spector's Deus Ex 2 is very ambitious in this aspect, and everyone is hoping it turns out as good or better as the first one. However, like The Sims have shown you can also create enjoyable environments with no story at all besides the one you create in your head. Even the Sim-speak is an abstraction that allows you to fill in your own words.

Interestingly for those of us in the business of making games, the financial details of Larry Wachowski's involvement in The Matrix are detailed on The Smoking Gun archives because of his divorce battle with his ex-wife. Fair? I don't know, but educational to the rest of us. Life is a game too, the ultimate license property... :-)

Jouni

The degree of hand-holding by the brand owner varies, in some cases a developer is allowed to run and get quite creative with a character-based license (like the earlier mentioned Goldeneye with James Bond) while in the case of Enter the Matrix the game was apparently co-directed by the Wachowski brothers themselves. And truly, it is a fitting story in the Matrix universe.

One of the major differences in games vs. movies is the ownership of the experience; games try to give you some illusion of free will to allow you feel like it is you choosing to fight the bad guys and you on the screen kicking ass.

Enter the Matrix was built to tell the Wachowski story, and while an interesting one in the multi-threaded Matrix universe (like the great Animatrix shorts) and tied to the rest of the legacy, it does not leave many open-ended choices to the player. While not the basis for very deep or varied gameplay, this ironically fits with the Matrix universe and the question of free will in human life. You are ultimately on rails, and you will either ride to the finish, or you will perish along the way. That has not stopped the game from selling more than 2.5 million copies, which means they must have done something right.

Chris Crawford and many others have debated the depth of the story tree and mechanisms to create interesting and playable content inside multi-threaded story trees. I have yet to find a massively multiplayer game that was able to carry a coherent story (except about the story of the player himself exploiting a strange world full of rats and squirrels to get "exp" and "eq") and have grown too jaded to enjoy pseudo-random generator worlds like Morrowind. However, I find a lot of pleasure in visiting the grandfathers of 16- and 32-bit roleplaying, Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, with a dozen or more possible endings each.

An ideal game gives you a strong illusion of ownership over the evolution and direction of the story while filling all the possible branches of gameplay with interesting content. Spector's Deus Ex 2 is very ambitious in this aspect, and everyone is hoping it turns out as good or better as the first one. However, like The Sims have shown you can also create enjoyable environments with no story at all besides the one you create in your head. Even the Sim-speak is an abstraction that allows you to fill in your own words.

Interestingly for those of us in the business of making games, the financial details of Larry Wachowski's involvement in The Matrix are detailed on The Smoking Gun archives because of his divorce battle with his ex-wife. Fair? I don't know, but educational to the rest of us. Life is a game too, the ultimate license property... :-)

Jouni

And also to the PS2, according to this.

You do realise that Fallout and Postal were released on the same day, right? Silly old troll...

Postal Review

Fallout review

You do realise that Fallout and Postal were released on the same day, right? Silly old troll...

Postal Review

Fallout review

Anyone read the next article? I had to cringe every time the word "steal" came up. Hey, dork, it's "copy". Apparently some people haven't mastered the fundamental physics of real life--you can't own information...sorry! And that's something the players can never change.

Considering how badly Microsoft treated their Japanese Xbox employees, maybe part of this decision was the Japanese government wanting to part ways with MS?

Yes. They've already started on it. I believe they are trying to introduce aging in The Sims 2. Here's a link to Gamespot's coverage.

"And, as a fallback plan, they make products people want."

No, They don't. They buy them and resell them, abusing their large amounts of money to do whatever they please.
Microsoft Internet Explorer? Try spyglass (Part of MOSAIC).
MS-DOS? Seattle computer
many many more examples here (including hotmail, webtv, many others.)

Even their best selling game, Halo, was originaly advertised as a macintosh exclusive. I wonder what changed their mind..

And I really, really wanted to like this one.

Jouni

Basically he says they made the decision to leave as a result of very recent events. If I understand it correctly it has to do with them not having enough influence over the direction of the company. The group have not decided exactly what they want to do, but want to continue working together in a new company. They are not bound by any non-comptetion agreements or similar.

I guess Roper's immediate comments regarding his departure validate many of the anti-Vivendi theories floating around.

Whatever happened to the space shooter genre? I would like to see more.

I'm glad to see Gradius is still alive and now R-Type.

Ikaruga is also a great scrolling space shooter. It was originally on Dreamcast and is now being released for GameCube.

I would love to see a modern remake of Defender.

Whatever happened to the space shooter genre? I would like to see more.

I'm glad to see Gradius is still alive and now R-Type.

Ikaruga is also a great scrolling space shooter. It was originally on Dreamcast and is now being released for GameCube.

I would love to see a modern remake of Defender.

There was an Xbox version planned (and PS2 in fact..) they had the logos on their site for a few years.

Here's an article on the hold from gamespot.

Acclaim has to be licensed, and Nintendo may just be a little bitter.

Nintendo? Bitter? Never.

The neatest thing about the characters in PS:Torment was that they reacted in a plausible way, given their strange situations and surroundings. Everyone has a motivation, and it's not always what you think. Take the character Morte, who I mentioned above. While he seems to be nothing more than rather cliched comic relief in the beginning, his character gains a significant amount of depth.

And of course, who can forget Minsc from Baldur's Gate, and his miniature giant space hamster Boo? "Go for the eyes, Boo! Go for the eyes!"

Gamespot also wrote an article about "Liberty City Has No Place in Japan" a while back.

Screenshots here. I have been looking for a decent console FPS for awhile now ... this one looks promising. For me it really all depends on the controls!

George Broussard is about to make you his bitch!

Suck it down!

;-P

would be Initial D Special Stage
It's real fun and addicting (and a quar^H^H^H^H dollar eater) in the arcade and hope it gets translated well to the ps2.

detail

overview

A href is for you!

-Zipwow

detail

overview

A href is for you!

-Zipwow

is here.

I made the mistake of reading the interview before looking at the screenshots. After reading, I had the 'Oh great, sounds like trumped up Luigi's Mansion...' opinion, but one look at this floored me. I can totally see this game being a great one.

"Mariiioooo????"

A commercial branch of BT could be packaged up nicely as a spyware free alternative to things like kontiki which companys like gamespot.com use to send large files to non paying users but avoiding the bandwidth costs.

The only thing they could possibly beat Sony at is graphics, utilizing the power of the GC and Xbox, giving the PS2 version the backseat. However, even with the PS2's lack of power, it's hard to beat THIS.

The PS2 is still really impressive when games are done right on it...

...what kind of in-game effect urination will produce? :D

Hopefully not something along the lines of Postal 2. There's just something wrong with a game that allows (encourages!) you to urinate on things (kill an old lady, then urinate on her!).

Indeed.

well it makes sense. If you check the review on
gamespot Where the reviewer gave it a 5.7 and the readers gave it a 8.1
Sounds like something fishy is going on here.
Thx for the tip Senjutsu :)

controversial? huh?

I'm confused, because a patch is released for a game and there is very little press about the game, that makes it controversial? the game was released right during the heart of E3, most websites more than likely had their hands full with E3.

reviews are now plentiful now that E3 is over, you can find just a few of them here, here and here.

Mike

Sorry, I forgot to address the "screenshots don't really mean much these days" issue. ;)

What I meant was since most games coming out now have fantastic graphics, the "gee-whiz" factor is getting a little tired, y'know?

Unreal II, for example, has AWESOME graphics, but it's just the same run-and-gun game that've been around since the Doom days. Not that I dislike running around and shooting the crap outta monsters, but a little innovation goes a long way.

Since when have was lousy graphics been a hall mark of a good game?

Sorry, perhaps I mis-phrased that: I meant that you don't NEED good graphics for a great game. Look at NetHack. Sure, it's been around for a while, but the graphics haven't been improved, 'cause they're not really needed. They work fine the way they are. Sure, they're ugly, but the underlying game holds up well enough to do without snazzy effects.

How many recent Good Titles with Bad Graphics can you think of?

This is, of course a VERY subjective list:

Master of Orion 3

Civilization III or any of the Civ series, for that matter

Uplink

Well, the list can go on, but my point is that some games can stand up to having not-so-stellar graphics, providing the gameplay is good enough. And, while I agree with your point, re: interaction between the player and the game, I believe that, so long as the story/game itself is compelling, this effect can be achieved without any 3D or alpha-blending or gratuitous lens flares or real-time lighting or ...

Bear in mind, too, that this is a game created by TWO people. Many 'homebrewed' games lack the resources to make outstanding graphics.

Since when have was lousy graphics been a hall mark of a good game?

Sorry, perhaps I mis-phrased that: I meant that you don't NEED good graphics for a great game. Look at NetHack. Sure, it's been around for a while, but the graphics haven't been improved, 'cause they're not really needed. They work fine the way they are. Sure, they're ugly, but the underlying game holds up well enough to do without snazzy effects.

How many recent Good Titles with Bad Graphics can you think of?

This is, of course a VERY subjective list:

Master of Orion 3

Civilization III or any of the Civ series, for that matter

Uplink

Well, the list can go on, but my point is that some games can stand up to having not-so-stellar graphics, providing the gameplay is good enough. And, while I agree with your point, re: interaction between the player and the game, I believe that, so long as the story/game itself is compelling, this effect can be achieved without any 3D or alpha-blending or gratuitous lens flares or real-time lighting or ...

Bear in mind, too, that this is a game created by TWO people. Many 'homebrewed' games lack the resources to make outstanding graphics.

Since when have was lousy graphics been a hall mark of a good game?

Sorry, perhaps I mis-phrased that: I meant that you don't NEED good graphics for a great game. Look at NetHack. Sure, it's been around for a while, but the graphics haven't been improved, 'cause they're not really needed. They work fine the way they are. Sure, they're ugly, but the underlying game holds up well enough to do without snazzy effects.

How many recent Good Titles with Bad Graphics can you think of?

This is, of course a VERY subjective list:

Master of Orion 3

Civilization III or any of the Civ series, for that matter

Uplink

Well, the list can go on, but my point is that some games can stand up to having not-so-stellar graphics, providing the gameplay is good enough. And, while I agree with your point, re: interaction between the player and the game, I believe that, so long as the story/game itself is compelling, this effect can be achieved without any 3D or alpha-blending or gratuitous lens flares or real-time lighting or ...

Bear in mind, too, that this is a game created by TWO people. Many 'homebrewed' games lack the resources to make outstanding graphics.

Starcraft Ghost's producer left a little while back to go work on another game: Goblin Commander.

You've got to wonder what else is going on behind the scenes. Who else has also left Blizzard? And why would they do that?