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The Future of PC Gaming
Warrior-GS writes "GameSpy has two new articles up talking about the Future of PC Gaming. The first talks about the The Future of PC Game Engines, talking to Tim Sweeney, Chris Taylor, Stuart Moulder and others about everything from physics to lighting to AI. The second is an interview with Peter Molyneux about his areas of expertise and what lies ahead. The series will continue next month with a look at the Future of User Created Games and an interview with Warren Spector on PC Gaming's future."
Get yourself a Gameboy Advanced. The Castlevania games, the Mario games, the zelda games, and the upcoming Metroid: Fusion! This is truely one of the best systems on the market right now, portable or not.
yes! I was feeling nostalgic lately, so I got some Nintendo ROMS and old abandoned DOS games. The old Sierra series were good, perhaps better than some new games, and they weren't even 3d.
Look this dude up. He's always posting bullshit stories about ex-wives, and he always rakes in the mod points. The last one was that his wife left him because he chose Windows over Linux/BSD.
On a somewhat related note, check this out. Super Mario World with editing! Yay!
Definitely..
Over the last 6 months or so, my friends and I have been randomly revisiting old games. We just bought a bunch of used NES and SNES games at a nearby store. We even were able to beat Ghosts 'n Goblins, a game I had not played for 16 years (and was impossible back then).
Other games we have been playing lately, instead of modern games:
Kid Icarus
Contra 3
Street Fighter 2010 (sleeper NES game from capcom, it is NOT a fighting game)
Ninja Gaiden
Castlevania 1 & 3
Crystalis (best NES game, IMO)
Megaman 1-6
The Gaurdian Legend
Ultima: Quest of the Avatar (this one goes nearly forever)
Super Mario all-stars
Bionic Commando
There are a lot of good old games, you just have to know what to look for. In my case, I had played all of these games in the past, so I remembered what was good. And contrary to what others may say about old games, I found these totally enjoyable in the present.
For modern 2D, I recommend Marvel vs Capcom 2, an amazingly well-done 2D fighting game by capcom, such that it is still popular even after being around for nearly 3 years (and still has a tournament scene).
Bionic Commando is hands-down one of the best side-scrollers ever.
If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten. -George Carlin
http://www.the-underdogs.org/ is a great web site that hosts hundreds of the games of yester-year. So go ahead and get the timeless classics like the original Civilization, Pizza Tycoon, Defender of the Crown, Populous, Lords of the Realm, Ultima, System Shock, Eye of the Beholder, Master of Magic, X-Com...to name just a few :)
"The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it." - G.B. Shaw
Pirates! was for the computer, and there was also the buggy Pirates! Gold, and the fan-made pirates 2.
You ever played Oni? Easily one of the best 3rd person action games out there. The camera was fixed behind the character - it didn't randomly swing out on you. It also had a nice touch or realism - you could only carry one gun at a time (the manual actually said something like 'how many guns do you think YOU could carry and still run around beating people up? One, if you're lucky. That's reality. Deal with it :P) and ammo wasn't easy to come by.
:)
Pick it up, give it a shot. It's old enough at this point to cost you ten bucks or less.
Triv
This article is about the future of tech journalism. Notice the byline at the end? "This article is the editorial opnion of gamespy network. Sponsored by the Intel Pentium 4"
Obviously, it was a well written and insightful article. And it was about all the reasons that new games will need bigger and faster processors. And Intel paid Gamespy to write it. Interesting, not wrong.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
In many ways, yes, 3d is easier to code. In a 2d game you've limited it, to the point of needing to throw out your old artwork, to a single viewpoint. In a 3d game it costs a bit more to make models instead of 2d spites, but it means you've got a ton of flexibility.
In a casual game of Everquest you might very well find that the isometric view is nicer. But nothing beats 1st person for immersion. Imagine wandering through a beatifully rendered forest, watching beams of light play through a light mist as the trees sway gently in the wind. You'll *never* get that in 2d games, Myst had awesome art but you couldn't look at any arbitrary thing. Once you've made your 3d world you can put a camera anywhere.
Scenery is also easier in 3d, at least from a designer's point of view. Once you do a set of textures, and detail textures, for a tree for instance, and modelled a single one, you can permute it in a variety of ways and all of a sudden you've got a forest of unique trees. Not a seperate model file for each, or a collection of views from every angle, but one master and a few numbers describing the differences. Gamers don't need to see the exact same tree often enough to recognize it, or to have a bloated game from having twenty different models/spite collections for every simple thing.
And then when you want, you project grid/hex lines on the ground, lock the camera at an overhead position, and you've got your 2d game.
The reason 3d looks bad now is that models are fairly low polygon count. The models in Final Fantasy (the movie) were over half a million faces each, with a HUGE skin file. Models in Quake are 500-1000 faces with a small JPG for a skin. Maps are similarly low-detail. When the computational barriers are broken we'll see some tremendous looking games. Hopefully at some point it'll become ubiquitous enough that games will stop trying to sell the effects and concentrate on the gameplay again. (Hollywood is stuck in the same rut.)
Warren Spector is a very smart man, with many fine accomplishments to his credit. I'm looking forward to his next projects quite eagerly.
That said, his involvement with the first Ultima Underworld game was quite small (Origin's liaison with Looking Glass), and his involvement with Thief, while not actually nil, was extremely close to it. He had no involvement with Thief 2 at all. And, of course, there were a lot of other people who helped make all these projects happen.
Warren's job includes talking to the press, so his name gets out there a lot, but if you actually pay attention to what he *says*, he's always trying to spread the credit around, because he *knows* that he tends to get way more than he deserves. Warren is indeed a true game innovator. But singling him out in this way is both misleading, and an insult to the dozens of other brilliant people who contributed to those games.
Warren is certainly due a lot of credit. But you do him (and other readers) a disservice if you try and give him so much more credit than he is due.
{This is an edited version of a post I've made before -- and doubtless will again.)
BTW, almost all of those games can be played for free at a site that slashdot reviewed not very long ago--www.consoleclassix.com