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Is The Best Game One You Were Never Intended To Play?
Wired has an interesting look at the sport of pushing proscribed boundaries in video games. Easter eggs in games have been around for years, but now finding surprises, intended or otherwise, is becoming a driving force behind the enjoyment of games. "In games as diverse as Fallout 3 and Mirror's Edge, players are pushing to find or create unexpected ways to break past the game horizon, and turn the designers' intentions on their heads. It's only a matter of time before someone releases a game where the best version is the one you were never intended to play. That's only to be expected, says David Michicich, CEO and creative director of Robomodo, the developers of Activision's new Tony Hawk: Ride, and a 14-year veteran game designer. 'Today's news gets old quick — we Twitter, blog, pass viral video. We thrive off the sudden excitement of the latest and most buzzworthy,' Michicich says. 'It's exciting to still feel like you can discover something new. It's stimulation, plain and simple.'"
So called "achievements" and so forth. If there is no reward (and there often isn't, other than arbitrary "microsoft points" as in fallout's case). What else does it add to the game. It strikes me as if the developers decided at the last minute "ooh! let's make these little challenges insteading of adding extra gameplay or quests".
I remember playing Goldeneye and Turok 64 with group-enforced rules to spice things up. We'd play "Hunt the Raptor" or assign the best player the worst controller. We called it the Torgo control, if that means anything to you. :)
coffee | nose > keyboard
A lot of vaudeville acts got into the movie business (The Three Stooges and The Marx Brothers among them), and they very quickly learned that a shtick that could last for years on the various circuits on the road got national exposure on film -and then they had to come up with new shticks. Games have something of the same dynamic going on with hedonistic adaptation. First the intensity goes up, but eventually the form itself changes.
See Warcraft 3 and DoTa. The DoTa mod is vastly more popular than the original game.
Unfortunately 3DRealms fucked it up
Turns out that was a dude, I thought she was just hairy.
Is that you Joshua?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
..Include "surfing" in Counter Strike (there seems to be a whole community of guys creating maps just for this purpose, check them out on Youtube) and "stunting" in the GTA series, most notable Vice City and San Andreas (there's also a pretty thrivig community, it seems).
I also remember spending hours playing Lemmings, just having fun doing crazy tunnels/bridges and totally disregarding the actual goal.
and ever ... and ever ... and ever ... and ever
... (version we weren't intended to play, I mean) .. with the hot coffee add-in for GTA?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_minigame_controversy
Surely lots of people make house rules to certain games, no? And isn't that a game "you weren't intended to play?"
My buddy and I still play the 17-year-old Super Mario Kart regularly, but the game's evolved with a ton of house rules. Some exampes:
1 - If you get a ghost, you have to either steal the opponent's current item or the very next one, but you can't just hold onto it waiting for a red shell.
2 - If you get a banana, you can yell "GAME!" and the other player has to stop. Then you position yourself, and try to hit him by throwing the banana.
3 - If you have one hit left, your opponent has all three, and you get a green shell...
This wasn't the game the designers necessarily had in mind, but it's the game we like. Ghosts are too powerful. Bananas are too boring. So we tweak the rules.
TFA mentions Easter eggs rather than house rules. Easter eggs just can't be what they were before; the internet makes it too easy to learn everything about a game. There's no way the new Zelda will have a secret room that nobody knows about for years, but ~10 years went by before I found out about the secret room in Zelda for SNES. You just can't have secrets like that in popular games anymore.
My favourite two meta games in games were speed running through Super Monkey Ball, and comparing times with my friends and the whole internet. And the other was hacking Dead or Alive Volleyball on the Xbox to change their swimsuits. But that kinda got taken down big time. Other classics for this was goldeneye and Starcraft, the level editor for which was practically an SDK.
my band is more brutal techno punk than yours
Slashdot.
And you were awesome ... unbelievably quick, but awesome.
Signed,
SlickDick ChickSpick
"Is The Best Game One You Were Never Intended To Play?" No! next question.
I was playing this at a friends and we were having more fun trying to get the quirky accomplishments than the actual game.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
There was a bug in the game that allowed you to "ski" by hitting the jump button repeatedly. Skiing let you gain a lot of momentum and using your jetpack to climb hills would let you maintain it.
That bug completely changed the way the game was played and made crossing large open environments effortless. The developers never fixed the bug and instead made it a feature of Tribes 2.
Nethack. The Devs Think of Everything. The best game is the one you didn't think you were intended to play, but were. Or at least can.
Not a sentence!
Exactly what I did with trying to play Max Payne using only the baseball bat. If you roll, time your movements properly, make enemies shot each other, use some glitches and repeat parts ad nauseum you can play most levels using only melee weapons. Recorded this on its own site.
Want a game that has a totally unexpected chain of events? Want one that will cause your heart to race and your excitement to reach peak levels? Want a game that is truly hardcore and pushes you and your skills to the limit? Want a game you'll spend weeks to finish and that you will remember for the rest of your life?
Then get a game which will nuke your hard drive when you run it.
If the best version is one in which one must unlock something, find as an "easter egg", or some how activate a cheat, and it is intended to be that way, then the game is intended to play in that mode and finding how to activate the mode becomes just another part of the game.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
>>Even going all the way back to the despised Zonk days can I think of another article so utterly inane as this one.
Yeah, it's like they finally discovered the mod community after 15 years.
Kinda like how Quake 1 was moddable, and the TF guys made TF for it, then I made CustomTF from that, then some aussies made Aussie CustomTF from that, then a Portuguese guy made ProzacTF from that, and then I made a new version of CustomTF from ProzacTF, then some other guys wrote additional code from that...
They're a little behind the times, methinks.
Games that end up being described as truly great often have a sandbox quality, and some of the sand is spilling out. Super Metroid was a big one, and has spawned over a decade of "sequence breaking," catalogued over at metroid2002. One of the great fighters in recent history, Marvel vs Capcom 2, can only be described as a trainwreck as far as balance goes, and yet the open-endedness of the fighting method has allowed for years of slowly developing and improving gameplay and strategy. Games like MMOs (lets not name any names) that get patched anytime someone discovers anything, really end up excluding this player development and discovery process. At any rate, this is not really 'news' to anyone, and it certainly shouldn't be news to a game developer.
Eternal Darkness for the Gamecube tried something akin to that - no, the plot wasn't trying to recover files from a corrupt hard disk - but it did use your knowledge of Gamecube related events outwith the game to piss the hell out of you. Genius. Maybe this is a spoiler...
Astro Chicken!
I played that crap mini game for hours.
My Dog, I am old and if you played it so are you.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Now which retard mod modded that post 'offtopic'?!? That's a very apt and insightful comment IMNSHO.
We've already seen this years ago, user-edited WAD files with Doom. It's all about letting the customer start hacking on the product. Palms were never meant to be word-processing tools but inventive users started dicking around with the memo fields and eventually hacked one together. This sort of thing was not envisioned by the original engineers but are embraced by smart companies. Enthusiastic users put their own time and effort in free of charge so that they can get exactly the product or specs they want, the company caters to those interests because it makes them money. There's always the danger of satisfying the vocal yet tiny niche at the expense of the silent, broader market but that's why the executives are paid to think even though they don't too often.
When it comes to games, it's about keeping the idea fresh and interesting between releases. A year is a decade in the gaming world and tastes can change. I play games slowly and it amazes me how people are over and done with something I feel like I'm still scratching the surface on. I don't like how much they're charging for DLC but this is the sort of thing that keeps the games off the used market, keeps people playing. Someone I know who'd already played through Fallout and moved on said the DLC looked so good he might have to buy it again. Sheesh! With the cost of games these days, I treat 'em like college textbooks -- I'll be damned before I sell them back to the store for pennies on the dollar just to see them put back on the shelf, used 5% off from new price. Fuck 'em!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I didn't know. Hell, I've already got her in my ride, on the way to my place. Not all is lost though, her hairy big sister wants to get laid. Go on over, and pick up the sister - don't mind the warts and scaly skin. She's a nice girl, with a great personality.
I remember back in the days of Desert Combat when I was in early high school, getting the idea of parking mobile AA on the hillside, allowing you to get the gun pointed down farther than being level and using the AA guns against people - was great stuff, then a month or 2 later EVERYBODY was using it...
I mean, I doubt I was the first person to do it, but I'd never seen or heard of anybody else doing it before after playing it for months myself...
There was also that annoying crap on Alamein (I think?) where the Iraqis team would use a combo of the SCUD and guided SAM to blow the hell outta your airfield and vehicles
Or Bocage, with people flying the Little Bird helo up in the clouds (beyond your visibility or theirs) and minigun spray-n-praying the other base...
Mine would be Burnout Paradise for the PC. I was bored once day, so I downloaded the demo. I kept playing it so much each day, I purchased the game at my local BestBuy. I would say it is the best game I choose on impulse. It only got better when they added the motorbikes as an expansion. I'm willing to bet having fighter jets would be fun too weaving in and out of building and bridges. Criterion, are you listening?
Burnout Paradise uses the PC version of the XBOX 360 controller. I highly recommend it. It's also designed for 16:9 widescreen game play. I've got an nVidia 8800GT running at 1680x1050 resolution. The frame rate is always silky smooth and consistent.
Life is not for the lazy.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9e/Imfree.jpg ... Rise of the Triad, an all around awesome game by the way; And for those not already amongst the enlightened:
http://rott.classicgaming.gamespy.com/fun/
http://rott.classicgaming.gamespy.com/hell/
got me again......... :-(
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Is The Best Game One You Were Never Intended To Play? Duke Nukem Forever
"i lost my dignity on a slippery wiener"
A good one me and a friend came up with was to see how far we can propel a Yao Guai.
It's to do with the glitch when they jump at you, you kill them (on the head) and they fly off into the distance.
So far, the best way to do it is in hills, them jumping at you from above.
So far the best one was by him, and it went so far it went out the visible range... (via sniper rifle at that..)
Another one i have is seeing how high i can stack items in the game. (item towers)
The only winning move is not to play.
How about a nice game of chess?
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
In TFC, the soldier's "rocket jump" was an unexpected result of the force given by the rocket's explosion while jumping, and the damage wasn't enough to kill the player. This could propel them to battlements and so forth to cause hell.
Because the community loved the 'feature', VALVe included these strategies into TF2 with explanations of how to do it, and animations to support the action.
done Quick
Ha! People tend to forget that counter-strike is a mod for Half Life ! A game that notoriously sucked, in multiplayer mode...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
This is BigDick WhiteHick back from the fun.
It was rather uneventful. My ass was chapped from sandburn caused by kayaking all day yesterday. We kept stopping and starting because she wanted the blanket on, I wanted it off. Also, my bed makes a lot of noise so we had to move onto the floor where I damn near skinned my knees on the harsh shag.
Finally got the nut off after we moved back on the bed. She's in the bathroom cleaning off as I type this.
fuck rating: 7/10
tempting Eve to try anal.
It's only a matter of time before someone releases a game where the best version is the one you were never intended to play.
So, you mean as in mods like we saw for Doom, Quake, Halflife, and about a thousand other games?
Thanks for that one, Captain Obvious.
If you make easter eggs an intentional part of the game, something that players are supposed to find... well, guess what, it's not an easter egg anymore.
These kinds of things are only interesting because they weren't part of the normal gameplay. Most easter eggs are actually pretty dull if taken on their own merit (a "developer room" with NPCs standing around doing nothing? Wow, so glad I spent 500 hours trying to find this place).
Truth is that if you can really do something in a game that completely borks the intended design, that is a failure of QA and/or QC, depending on whether it wasn't found or wasn't fixed. Any number of game exploits-turned-features got their start this way, from Warcraft 2's lumber bug to the Quake rocket jump (which was a physics bug).
While these tricks have been treated as features, they basically add a non-intuitive learning requirement to play the game effectively against other people. It's this sort of thing that risks turning off a lot of players. The fighting game genre, for example, since Street Fighter 2 has bled off everyone except the devoted hardcore fighting audience, because to be good at these games really means learning not how to play according to design but how to exploit combo engines and hit detection to trap the other player. Basically a matter of who is able to get their exploit first.
I admit I don't use Twitter, but I recognize that broadcasting brief, one-way messages is useful to some people.
However, I'm sick of seeing Twitter referenced as a major milestone in communication. What influence did Twitter have on the latest Tony Hawk game? It's impact on the way people play video games is negligible at best. If Twitter went away tomorrow Facebook and MySpace would fill the void without a single enhancement: "Playing Tony Hawk 49, found a door I can open on the Tokyo level." What would be lost without Twitter, other than the verb "twit"?
I loved finding things and exploring worlds like in a lot of Nintendo 64 games. Banjo Kazooie, Mario 64, Jet force Gemini, Zelda.
Companies think that people don't like to do the hard core exploring anymore, example would be Banjo Kazooie nuts and bolts, the developers outright in the game said that gamers are to soft now days.
Everything has to be right in front of new gamers (NO BACKTRACKING!). The platform adventure genre is dead, but people still love it, and I miss it dearly.
The original NWN on AOL was intended to be a multi-player cooperative RPG. Players were not allowed to attack each other. However, players discovered that they could still cast spells at one another, including damage spells. This allowed pvp to exist in the form of spell warfare. NWN pvp was one of the best social gaming experiences ever. It was turn-based combat, so its slow pace allowed chat, taunts and tactics, stuff more substantive than the "gay" of xbox live, to flow while fighting.
I welcome our new 99% overlords.
Combat for Atari 2600 had a warp effect in the tank vs. tank games. Start the game, turn your tank around and begin driving at the screen edge. Keep moving toward it full force while also firing the gun. Eventually you will warp out and come back somewhere else on the screen, sometimes to good effect and sometimes you blow up when you come out.
It worked very well. It works in the emulators too.
But when I think of games I was never meant to play at all, I think of ThrillKill for Playstation. This was a tag-team fighting game so bloody and violent, it was pulled just as it was about to ship. There's plenty of stuff on the net about what happened to that game. But the bottom line is that dev copies were immediately leaked onto the net and anyone who wanted it could get it and play the game thanks to an insider.
Awesome game.
Sig for hire.
In Descent II, there's a level towards the end with a very large room just past the start room, with a door directly across from the door to the start room, and lots of crossbarred windows to rooms all over the level that require keys for the ship to reach, but which missiles can fly between. If you start the level with a full load of guided missiles, and you get really, really good, you can take out more than half the bots in the level without even moving from the start spot. I probably got more replay value out of my saved game at the beginning of that level than the rest of the game combined.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Lots of games like this. I'd play X-Com with a hacked save game giving me 2 billion dollars... but limit myself to never hiring any replacement soldiers. Very difficult game. Or edit two soldiers to have ungodly stats, and playing the whole game with ONLY THEM.
Civ 3 was literally made for creating such games. I created a "space colonists marooned on a hostile planet" scenario where you started with all techs, but only had one city and could build no more. Surrounding you were hostile civs bent on destroying you. Victory was limited to finishing the "colonize Alpha Centauri" ship. Fairly difficult game, and not at all like the "regular" version.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
And I don't remember what game it was. One of those multi-player driving simulators at Dave&Busters back in 1995......If you crashed into the building at the base of the gorilla at 230+mph, then the gorilla would dance. Incedentally, this building was at the end of a fairly long straight that ended in a 90-degree right turn.... and if you were really good, you could lap the course faster by crashing at 230+, rather than braking for the corner... ah, the good old days of drinking and driving simulators.....
That is one of the reasons i stick with PC gaming, the mods give you so much more replay than you ever get with a console. Take Freelancer for instance. While the original game was fun, with the Freelancer Mod manager loaded full of cool mods it is like I have a dozen new games to go with the original. Hell of a good deal for the $35 I paid for it at Gamestop awhile back. This game was released in 2003 and there are STILL new mods coming out for it. To me that is value for my gaming dollar.
And while console gamers scream "PC Gaming is expensive!" it really isn't unless you get into that whole epeen "must be able to get 60 FPS on high everything on Crysis!" BS. I just built myself a new AMD dual core, and since I already had XP X64 I picked up awhile back with shipping and all the box cost a whole $281. I will play on the built in 3100 for a week until I can pick up a $100 card, which will probably last me a couple of years before needing replacing. The P4 3.6GHz box it replaced has had maybe $500 spent on it over the last 6 years counting building it and my oldest is playing Left 4 Dead on it right now, thanks to a $50 X1650 Pro GPU upgrade. So for me PC gaming is the way to go. The mods give me so much more for my gaming dollar than anything I have seen with the consoles.
I mean where else can you still get new gaming experiences for a game you paid a whole $35 for that came out in 2003?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The two communities for Speedrunning, speeddemosarchive.com and tasvideos.org, are constantly looking for such 'glitches' which speed up completion of the game.
New glitches are being found in old games all the time. One prime example is the Door of Time skip for Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time. You are able to skip the entire child section of the game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1wlIAVon-c
A Chrono Trigger run that uses save corruption to complete the entire game from scratch in 20 minutes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU4vlzEdBpI
People have come up with many interesting ways to play that game. I'm not talking about mods even, but things to do in the vanilla game that makes things either more of a challenge, or gives you new ways to tackle obstacles:
* Attach a grenade (doesn't matter which type) low enough for you to jump on, attach another grenade above it and jump onto that, then crouch and remove the first grenade since your arms are just long enough to do so. Then attach a new grenade, jump, remove the previous one, and repeat to get anywhere you require. Sounds laborious but can be used to scale walls very quickly with practice.
* Play entirely non-lethal, or as non-lethal as the game mechanics will allow. This might seem impossible because there's a certain point in the game where you need to escape from UNATCO, but the exit door's key is only obtained after killing a certain augmented agent. The game does not and was not intended to have a non-lethal means of dealing with this problem, but some creative players found an exploit that would forcibly open the door with her still alive (hint - involves gas grenades)
* Play entirely with stealth. NEVER get into a confrontation, avoid everyone. If someone has to die, do so with a silenced weapon and with no-one around. Hide the body.
* Play weaponless, with the exception of a crowbar or knife for breaking boxes but never for combat. Use your wits, skills and other items in your inventory to solve problems.
* Play without using medpacks, health bots or the regeneration augmentation. Use only food and drinks to heal yourself, which includes the drunken booze effect as a "punishment" for getting shot up.
* Play without augmentations (not even with the build-in light). Spend skill points on environmental skills to use ballistic/camo armor longer, use flares and flare darts for light, etc.
And of course
* Play as an asshole who pisses everyone off, and kills everyone that the game will allow.
All good fun. :)
Interestingly these self-made modes and challenges are now not all that uncommon in retail releases. With games awarding prizes for things like only using one weapon all game or the Don't come second mode was in a Rayman game my friend had.
Now that, my friends, is hard core.
Duke Nukem Forever
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i-n21K6Ufw
Myself and a few friends used to play on the big open Battlefield 2 maps (was one with a river and a few bridges to crash into too), jeep racing from one corner of the map to the other with helicopters chasing them both. We'd have one guy driving and one guy with a rocket launcher in each, trying to take out the other jeep and choppers. Epic fun! :-D
A Settlers sub-game classic
One of the best surprises I have seen in a game is the shot em up section of Turrican 2.
Aside from being one of the best platformers ever suddenly you are playing an amazing r-type style game that was one of the quickest ever.
I forget which edition, probably just the first one as this was eons ago, but on the free play maps, if you could angle it just right you could hop up on top of the edge of the map. From there if you avoided getting booted back, you could get some pretty good speed up and hit one of the bumps and really go sailing, a pretty decent jump on its own, but pretty epic when the cliff drop-off height was factored in.
You could get some pretty nasty combos and such via that method and it was fun just getting up there. That's kind of my approach to a lot of games though, sandbox style exploration of areas they might not want you to get to. Edge of the map stuff and what not. If I can see where they didn't texture a clip brush, I win!
While browsing over the config file of Icewind Dale one day, I found myself surprised to find a flag called 'Nightmare=0', so needless to say, I found myself intrigued with a little voice in my head egging me to 'Do eeeeeeet!' So naturally, I set the flag to 1, and start a new game. Even with all my characters having the game's best weapons and maxed levels, I found the very first gang of goblins to be more than a match for me, to say nothing of everything else after that. One of the most challenging runs I've ever done!
If you're still playing a game from 2003, you're probably not buying many new games are you? If lots of people do what you do, doesn't that mean that they won't have a lot of money to develop new games? And don't you get bored playing the same game for years on end? Sure I still play an even older game, the PSone port of Diablo now and then, but it's not my primary game.
I have a hypothesis that the modding community sprung up in part due to the lackluster release schedule of PC developers and high school/college kids without money for new games.
PC Devs (1998): Here's our new game. enjoy
PC Gamers (1998): Thanks.
PC Gamers (1998): We're done, when's the sequel coming out.
PC Devs: (1998): Soon.
PC Gamers: (1998): Okay.
PC Gamers (1999): When's that sequel coming out?
PC Devs: (1999): Soon.
PC Gamers (1999) It's been a year.
PC Devs (1999): It takes time.
PC Gamers (2000): When's the sequel coming out?
PC Devs (2000): Soon, but we decided to rewrite the engine from the ground up instead of tweaking and improving the original so it's going to be a while longer.
PC Gamers (2000): Ooookaaaay.
Modders (2000): We figured out their data formats and have created our Dethstryke mod.
PC Gamers (2000): That's interesting, looks like fun.
PC Devs (2000): We won't sue you and maybe it'll keep the gamers off our backs.
PC Gamers (2001): When's that sequel coming out?
PC Devs (2001): Soon.
PC Gamers (2001): You do know that in the console world the game would have had a sequel by now.
PC Devs (2001): Yes, but we're PC devs only, we don't work that way, our teams are smaller.
PC Gamers (2001): But you got your start doing console dev and your game is getting an enhanced port to the PS2!
PC Devs (2001): Shhh, don't tell anyone.
PC Gamers (2002): When's the sequel coming out?
PC Devs (2002) Well it takes time and we decided to switch to a new engine again.
PC Gamers (2002): But it's going to take even longer now!
Modders (2002): Oh yeah, we figured out how to use the enhanced PS2 textures in our Dethstryke mod.
PC Gamers (2002): That's cool, back to Dethstryke.
PC Gamers (2003): When's the sequel coming out?
PC Devs (2003): Well it was this year, but our beta code got stolen so we're re-writing multiplayer.
PC Gamers (2003): You guys are incompetent.
PC Devs (2003) We know, but you love our game and are still playing a mod of it.
PC Gamers (2003): We wouldn't be if the sequel came out when it was supposed to...three years ago.
PC Devs (2004): Yay our sequel is out.
PC Gamers (2004) Finally!.....Hey where's the promised extra stuff.
PC Devs (2004) We ran out of time, but it's coming in an addon pack.
PC Gamers (2004): Ran out of time? You had six years!
PC Devs (2004): Suck it up, you're addicts needing a new fix. By the way, Xbox port is next year.
PC Gamers (2005) The Xbox port kinda sucks, and where's the additional stuff you promised.
PC Devs (2005) Soon, we hope.
PC Gamers (2005): Here we go again.
PC Devs (2005) You love us.
PC Gamers (2005): Some of us are still playing Dethstryke and haven't bought the new game.
PC Devs (2007): We are pleased to announce the simultaneous release of our Gamma box on Windows, Xbox 360 and PS3.
PC Gamers (2007) Whaaat? You mean they're getting that promised stuff we should have got in 2004 at the same time we are?
PC Devs (2007): Yes. The PS3 version was done by an external team though, they forgot to put mouse support in. What's with those crazy PS3 owners wanting to use mice WITH their dual shocks?
PC Gamers (2007): We suppose that gives them analog movement AND analog aiming. By the way, why should we purchase the PC version if there's minimal differences between the three?
PC Devs (2007): Mods! And mouse aiming.
PC Gamers (2007): But you just said that it's physically possible to support mice and we know that the Xbox 360 and PS3 have download services that could offer mods and map packs.
PC Devs (2007): Suck it
Actually I think it is more like this-
PC Game Devs (2003)- here is our new game. It is awesome and you love it. We have released modding tools to give us an idea of which way you want the series to go and...wait a minute, there is a knock at the door
Large Game Corp(2003)- Hi, we are a large gaming corp. We would like to give you a truckload of money for your company. (PC Game Devs)-Sweet! Here is the paperwork! Large Game Corp(2003) Thanks-now you are all fired. We are only gonna keep Chuck and the guy that does the costume design. Oh, and a sequel for the PC? Not gonna happen. MSFT just paid us a BIG fat Check to make it into an Xbox game. Of course you and I know that it will suck on Xbox, but the check still cleared so who cares.
For examples see Freelancer, the Mechwarrior series, pretty much any game that was good and then the company was bought and turned to shit. Pretty much anything EA and Blizzardvision and MSFT has bought. If you look closer at the modding community a lot of the very active game mods are for games such as those mentioned above that were popular that should have gotten a sequel, but the company was bought out by a bunch of PHBs that decided to "maximize their IP profit potential" or whatever buzzword bingo was popular that week and totally boned the fans. After all, they are still moving box sets of Mechwarrior 4, and the last one came out nearly SIX years ago! But it was bought out by MSFT, who only really gives a fart about the Xbox and that series just won't work on the console.
So while I agree that some modding makes up for piss poor developers, a lot of times the game company gets bought out by someone who promptly kills the fanbase. Like when MSFT found Mechwarrior didn't work on the console and promptly shit canned it. Just look at how many great game companies have been bought out and subsequently destroyed by EA, Activision, and MSFT. If you planted a headstone for every game company and game that these three bozos killed you would have a garden of stone that makes Arlington look like an empty field. I would be MORE than happy to shell out $50+ for Freelancer 2 and Mechwarrior 5 on the PC. But do you honestly think we will ever see them? So mods allow fans like me to allow a continuing story when the game companies get eaten by PHBs. Most of us gamers that play mods would be more than happy to buy sequels to the games we are playing mods for, but the companies simply no longer exist. The modders simply allow us to continue enjoying a game that some PHB has decded "doesn't fit in with our corporate synergy" or whatever buzzword bingo is in this week.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
These were all genuine ADV.COM Easter eggs from Back In The Day. Very rare. Thanks to Mike Goetz, Dave Pratt, and others.
"From the darkness nearby comes the sound of shuffling feet. As you turn towards the sound, a nine-foot cyclops ambles into the light of your lamp. The cyclops is dressed in a three-piece suit of worsted wool, and is wearing a black silk top-hat and cowboy boots and is carrying an ebony walking-stick. It catches sight of you and stops, seeming frozen in its tracks, with its bloodshot eye bulging in amazement and its fang-filled jaw drooping with shock. After staring at you in incredulous disbelief for a few moments, it reaches into the pocket of its vest and pulls out a small plastic bag filled with a leafy green substance, and examines it carefully. "It must be worth eighty pazools an ounce after all" mumbles the cyclops, who casts one final look at you, shudders, and staggers away out of sight."
"From somewhere nearby come the sounds of sliding, stumbling feet. As you turn towards them, the beam of your lamp falls upon a tall, shambling figure approaching you out of the darkness. Standing no more than five feet tall, it cannot possibly weigh more than fifty pounds including the shroud and bandages in which it is wrapped; a musty reek like the scent of old, dead earth seeps from it and fills the air. As you cower back in disgust and horror, the figure halts, examines you through eyes resembling wet pebbles, and whispers "Peace, man!" in a voice like wind rustling through dead trees. It then turns and shambles away into the darkness."
"From somewhere nearby, there suddenly comes a sound of something mechanical in motion. As you turn towards it, an incredible figure rolls into the light of your lamp. It stands about five feet high on a wheeled metal pedestal, and has a globular light-filled head, accordion-pleated metal arms, and a cylindrical body the size of an oil drum with a plastic panel on the front. It rolls past without taking any notice of you, all the while waving its arms, flashing a light behind its front panel and bellowing "WARNING! WARNING! DANGER!" at the top of its not inconsiderable voice. It rolls on out of sight, and moments later there is an immense flash of light and a tremendous blast of sparks and smoke. When the air clears, you find that no trace remains of the strange apparition."
"With a sudden gust of air, a large cave bat flutters into view, flies around your head several times, squeaks with disgust, and flutters on out of sight."
"From somewhere in the distance, there comes a musical swirl of light, elvish laughter and the sounds of merriment."
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
The best parts of Everquest were the fighting styles that the creators didn't think of
Bards twisting 3 songs together
Fear kiting
Charm fighting
Root & Rot
Drunken Races in Kelethin
My friends and I figured out the server command for unlimited ammo in COD4 so we could play with lots of C4. That led to the discovery of the fully automatic RPG and grenade launcher. Grenade launcher wars were awesome.
Well the Mechwarrior 2 PSone game is pretty fun, as long as you have the big dual analog joystick (it's almost impossible to play well without it)and USB gives more control options these days. So they could add more simulation elements.
But what I really want on my PS3, is a version of the turn-based tabletop game with internet play. MechCommander is real time, but it should look something like that, graphically. Java based Megamek is close to what I want, and I can play it on the PS3 under Linux, but it's not "official"
Another reason why the MechWarrior franchise may have gone down the tubes is the Battletech franchise and milieu going down to the tubes. Really, who wants to play post Fed-Com Civil War, the Dark Age stuff fucked everything up, which means playing from 2750 to 3075 or so.
Oni was a great game, though it has descended into obscurity now, and was never really finished because Bungie was bought up by M$. The real fun however was the way the cheat codes messed with the game and each other. You could transform into any character, make your enemies fight each other, etc, and all had unexpected consequences. (Swapping characters rapidly allowed machine-gun speed punching, characters would run off in the middle of cut-scenes to fight each other off camera). Also, with many games, it is fun to play with 4 people, where each person gets a small subset of the controls.
But in both Freelancer and Mechwarrior there was so many places you could have gone! In Freelancer you could have gone back and done the rise of the different nations, with the whole "wild west" early years and the rise of the pirate guilds and the smugglers. Or you could have gone forward and had a race to snatch the Nomad tech and incorporate it into the different nations, with some nations bring the pirates on as Privateers and some trying to deal with the problems legit.
With Mechwarrior you could have gone back and done the rise of the mechs, the fall of the Star League and the rise of the different houses and Merc Clans. If you wanted to go forward you could follow the events immediately after Mech 4, and followed what Steiner did after being defeated on Kentares. While I haven't followed the tabletop so I don't know what they may have done to the story, the fans just want more Freelancer and Mech. And as I have shown here, it really doesn't take much imagination at all when you have a rich universe like Freelancer and Mechwarrior. But there have been so many games ruined by PHBs, just off the top of my head Deus Ex after the fall of Ion Storm comes to mind. And as I said the three major players, MSFT, Activison, and EA, have littered the landscape with franchises that were making money but some PHB decided it "It doesn't fit with our current synergy" or whatever buzzword bingo they use today.
That is why I am grateful for modders. They take a game like Mechwarrior or Freelancer and not only put out high res packs that allow the games to look and feel fresh, they add so much content that it is like getting multiple games for free. And if game companies didn't have their heads up their collective asses the mods would be a GREAT way to repackage those games and gauge the possibility of a sequel being profitable. I know there would be plenty like me who would happily buy a Mechwarrior or Freelancer box set with the high res and all current mods included, with an easy to use mod switcher(like FMM for Freelancer) to make switching between modes seamless. And if they released it with an announcement that if enough boxes sold we would get a new game I would be first in line. But sadly, like many great games of the past, the mods look like the only way these games will live on. So for all the fans out there, I personally thank the modders of Freelancer and Mechwarrior. Thanks for keeping our beloved games alive.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
get patched as bugs --
>>That is one of the reasons i stick with PC gaming, the mods give you so much more replay than you ever get with a console.
Yeah. The fact that the top mods are often head and shoulders better than the original game helps as well. =)
Like I said, I'm still playing Quake 1, and have a library of older games (Baldur's Gate 2, Diablo 2) that I've been itching to play again after reading about some of the mods for them.