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I believe he was referring to the town in Ultima III, which he really could lay claim to.

Also, couldn't you visit the moon in Ultima II? My memory of that is hazy. I know Ronald McDonald was in it at some point.

And before Spore there was EVO EVO, which was also about intelligent design but was much more accurate as far as the tradeoffs of the features the player chose to evolve.

It had the added bonus of Gaia being a hot naked chick.

Oh so thats where he got the design!

As a tabletop RPG - shadowrun was one of the games that I will always have a fondness in my heart for. The rules were cryptic, battles took forever, but that didn't seem to make a difference. The world was described so clearly with so many things that were logically futuristic it didn't seem like were you playing a fantasy sci-fi game - you were just role playing in the future.

Neither was I willing to purchase just to play a game that would probably ruin my memory of the weekends rolling dice.

McCracken must have been ON crack, because that would be the exact polar opposite of reality. C64 screenshots were the ones shown on game boxes for years. Why? They were the best ones. Always. There was a BRIEF period when the Atari ST was the standard, and of course our friend the Amiga, but the Apple II? The Atari 800? I think not. Don't take my word for it. Compare for yourself: Ultima III screenshots

I'm sure other, better examples, could be found, but I'm supposed to be working and stuff.

For what its worth, I miss my souped-up Commodore 128. I had JiffyDOS installed, a 1571 5 1/4 drive, and the rare 3 1/2 1581, which, with JiffyDOS, was a relative speed-demon. I took my SSI Goldbox games, which had no copy protection, and consolidated them onto 1-2 3 1/2 disks as opposed to 6-8 sides of a 5 1/4 disk. Good times.

If disk swapping was your thing, Knights of Legend is right up your alley. I think just checking your inventory took something like 3 swaps on a 2-drive system.

Noooo... Why do they insist on ripping out the heart of Japanese games?

Noooo... Why do they insist on ripping out the heart of Japanese games?

Noooo... Why do they insist on ripping out the heart of Japanese games?

Real Men (TM) play Zelda without using the sword at all.

It was 2 am and I was running through the end of RCR, and at one point you run down this loooong hallway. I started to nod off as my character was running, but when I got to the end of the hallway, I saw Tex and I actually threw my controller in the air from fear. Luckily he gives a speech before the fight so I was able to recover, but I've never forgotten the shear terror those big pixelated eyes did to me.

The most commonly cited evolution game (at least among the Spore forum regulars) is clearly E.V.O. - Search For Eden, a little-known but much-loved SNES classic.

While you do bring up several good points, it seems to me that the differences are mostly due to marketing demographics, and not really advantages of one medium or the other.

Depth - Most books' plots can also be summarized fairly quickly. Games don't necessarily have to have a simple plot, look at Chrono Trigger/Cross.

Vocabulary - This could be easily remedied, and I suspect that the reason games aren't on par with books in this area is because the games are targeted at a younger audience (or at least accessible to younger people).

Grammer/Spelling - Well, just install a spell checker in your browser if you want message boards to help your spelling. Also, in 2004 I probably wrote 150,000 to 200,000 words on message boards. My writing also seems to have improved during this time as well, despite the fact I wasn't doing any other significant writing during this time.

Visualization/Imagination - Well, books may help you with this, but I think that strategy and problem-solving abilities are more useful in daily life.

Hey, I liked King's Bounty.

Especially amusing was when the cartridge would heat up and start hosing the quantities of critters defending the keeps. Just a bit frightening heading into a castle and seeing that it's now defended by approximately "1KK" peasants.

That's true, but it's also the city from the original Bard's Tale.

Before anyone starts getting litigious, they should recall that there's prior art.

Crossing the current popularity of Homestar Runner with the retro-gaming craze on a dead but fairly ubiquitous console.

And perhaps best of all, game mechanic-wise it appears to be based on the early Ultimas. As others have observed, the only potential problem is if they only release a hardware (cartridge) version. If they also distribute a ROM version that will work on emulators, they'll be wildly successful.

I loved that game!

Hmm...might even have to break out my apple //e emulator and see if I still have the binaries, so I can toss it in the collection with Autoduel, Captain Goodnight and Miner 2049er.

[yeah, yeah, I'm off topic...that's why I didn't use my karma bonus... hey, just be thankful I didn't mention Oregon Trail... hmm..that reminds me... I need Choplifter, too.]

I bet the MPAA will sue American Standard next, because clearly their products are too content-agnostic and are not doing their best to feed the MPAA's cash cow. Actually, the point is more valid than it seems, considering the parallels in what's coming out of the movie industry these days and what's being flushed down American Standard's products.