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John Romero Back In The Game
Gamespot reports that John Romero, the well known former id software designer, has opened his own development studio for the first time in several years. From the article: "Romero and Midway parted ways after just two years. He had been hired, along with former Ion Storm colleague Tom Hall, in October, 2003. His departure in July of this year was amicable on the surface, but chatter among industry wags suggested the Midway brass weren't entirely impressed with the work Romero and his team produced. At the time of his departure, Romero and Hall were working on the still-unreleased action role-playing game Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows."
I'm thinking maybe he spent too much time shampooing and combing his lustrous mane rather than coding. Then again Commander Keen *did* own.
I used to think Linux was cool -- then I turned 14.
There was a time I thought Romero was interesting: before I actually learned anything about him and just knew he was part of ID. Talk about letting a little success go to your head... he's like a warning label for the entire concept of ego overtaking your rational thought processes.
Sig under construction since 1998.
Is there any way to moderate the developer mentioned in a story "Overrated"?
Am I the only one who thinks "Commander Keen: 3D" would make a good comeback title?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Gamespot had a great article about the development of Daikatana, and pretty much resumes why the game ended being as bad as it was. Great read.
Gauntlet, above all other action RPGish hack-and-slash things, deserves a great update. While Romero may or may not have been capable of it, I don't know if Midway can be trusted to do what's best for the series. Remember, they released the awesome Midway Arcade Treasures with a phoned-in interface and multiple sound bugs, waking up to the public's interest in it only when it *actually sold*.
What follows is, in my not-so-humble opinion, what the Gauntlet series needs to remain interesting and relevant in its next incarnation.
* Get rid of some of the sameness that filled the later areas of Legends and Dark Legacy. Hack slash hack slash hack slash. Despite the variety in environment, most of the areas were simply differently-shaped tubes through which the players flowed.
* Get the hell rid of the lame collection quests from the home versions of those two games; one in the whole game (runestones) is enough. It's Gauntlet, not Banjo-Kazooie! All home versions of the game other than the Dreamcast one ruined the bonus rounds by having them grant only character unlock credits unstead of gold.
* Put back in all the great gimmicks and concepts from Gauntlet II, with some additional clever multiplayer concepts. (GII was the game that gave us the IT Monster.) I've got some ideas for this, give me a call! (The author of this comment then waits by phone anxiously for several months, then walks away, sad, dejected, but wiser.)
* Deepen the character development with some hard choices, but don't make it too complicated. This is Gauntlet, not Morrowind. At the same time, it's not Final Fantasy either, so there's no need to putz about with weapon and armor inventories or attempts to put in a "real" story. Gauntlet needs to be kept pure; it's still possible for a hack-and-slash game to do well, if it focuses on what hack-and-slash does best: quick thinking, on-the-fly strategizing, and action action action.
* Keep the monster count up, and put back in strategic ways of taking out generators early. The key skills of classic Gauntlet players are the ability to shoot generators just as they come on screen (before they have a chance to produce bullet-soaking enemies), and the quick scouting trip to take out generators before they can produce too much. Both of these tactics are possible in L and GL, but not as useful. Aiming is harder because of the 3D nature of the game (even with auto-aim), and
* And most importantly, LEAVE IN TIMED HEALTH LOSS! The fact that, at home, there was no penalty for waiting around waiting for your turbo meter to fill, directly harmed the game. Notice: ALL the (real) home versions of the original Gauntlet and Gauntlet II have timed health loss, while all the home versions of Legends and Dark Legacy had no such thing.
It's easy to forget these days just how groundbreaking the original Gauntlets were, and they're still fondly remembered by many people. And damn it, they're still fun to play now, even the home versions of the arcade updates. Midway is sitting on a gold mine here if they can avoid dropping the ball. (Chances of Midway dropping the ball, especially now that original creator Ed Logg is no longer with them: 85%.)
There were three things wring with Daikatana that earned it the reputation it has today.
First off, you know how they poke fun at Duke Nukem Forever? Well before Duke, there was Daikatana.
Next, the game was incredibly hyped. Everybody had high hopes for all the whiz-bang new features that it was going to have, and how great it was going to look. It only underdelivered slightly, but there was much too much hype for it to ever live up to, which was compounded by the last point:
It was so late that it was behind the times both technologically and game concept wise by the time it finally hit the shelves. It looked and played like Hexen, except it came out two years after that in the middle of the first GPU boom.
Daikatana wasn't a bad game, as much as it was trying to do stuff far ahead of it's time, and then over hyped it to the point where it had to reinvent everything about the genre, or it would get blasted by everyone. This is what Duke Nukem Forever is going to be up against. DNF could be a great game if it comes out. DNF could be very fun and compelling, but it's going to get blasted by reviewers because it took so long to make, and should be absolutely flawless for the amount of time it took to make.
Back to Daikatana. The biggest problem was the Bot characters. The AI for them was completely stupid, and suffered many problems.
1) They suffered from "Natalia Syndrome" and would tend to run off on their own and get killed (which was bad, since you'd die when they did.)
2) They also had friendly fire on the bots, so when they would lag behind you and they saw something move, they would almost always shoot you in the back.
3) You never could "leave your buddy superfly" or Keiko when it came to the next part of the stage. This was just a pain. especially when half of the time they couldn't navigate the complex world.
Nowadays, you see much more complex AI work seamlessly with the player, and in many cases, you see what Daikatana was trying to do in more modern games (HL2 and the freedom fighter squads you can control is a good example), although still not as extreme to the point that one person dies and it's game over time.
Graphically, it's wasn't so bad. It looked ok, but it was no Half Life or Quake II, which came out around the same time or earlier. It however took a bold move and did all of the cut scenes as real time rendered scenes; something that You really didn't see much at that time, but see almost all the time today.
Storyline, wasn't bad. It could have been better, especially in the naming dept.
gameplay bucked a lot of the FPS norms. Weapons were interesting, especially the Daikatana, which leveled and got more powerful as you killed stuff with it. Kinda like the soulcube in doom III but more complex. You actually got levels and could apply them to attributes like speed, vitality, ETC.
Price was the best thing about this game. I think I paid $0.99 for the thing. It was definitely worth that price.
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Sweet, Jokes about Duke Nukem Forever are getting old, and look here comes Romero to be the butt of our jokes again!
Here's the gameplay. Start will a god-awful cutscene that is way too long. Then get killed by mosquitoes and frogs a few times. No, I'm not kidding, you have to shoot frogs and mosquitoes that are so poorly textured that you'll mistake them for the background. If you miss a frog, it will touch you and you'll explode (Why? No Idea.) Then you take the CD out of your computer, nail it to a wall, and rock back-and-forth with your eyes closed until they stop bleeding.
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
Romero and Hall came out with Storm Over Gift 3, an unbelievably primitive and generally crappy RTS, and followed it with Daikatana, an unbelievably primitive and generally crappy FPS.
Spector's Ion Storm studio came out with Deus Ex.
Ion Storm was a company where the company logo meant either shit or sugar, but you had to look for which studio had produced the game.