Yeah. I'm a Nintendo fanboy, but GTA is something special, the way it has a great series of missions overlayed on a very real feeling world...a world that doesn't feel like it was handcrafted for the sake of playing the missions, which is something Nintendo never does. (I.e. the city seems to have its own agenda, it doesn't exist just for the player)
And saying all the games in the series are the same thing w/ just thematic changes...no way. They really are trying to make it a better, more fun universe with each iteratin. VC added motorcycles, helicopters, more cut scenes, properties. SA cranked up the size, added more planes, returned gangs to the mix, and cranked up the minigames (sometimes w/ not great results, like the odd dancing games embedded...)
The Atari had the obscure game Party Mix but I can't think of any games that were just frameworks around minigames before that. As far as I can think right now, Mario Party invented a genre, and I give it huge credit for bringing classic style gaming into a new generation, especially with its emphasis on 4 player fun.
I think, "Oracle of Bandwidth", you miss some of the point of the N64, which for me was busting open whole new worlds of social multiplayer gaming -- more so than breaking old franchises into 3D. (That said...I didn't play Legend of Zelda much back in the day, and when I went back to it *after* Z:OoT, I was amazed at how familiar the gameplay felt, the original Zelda's 2D overhead perspective was already closer to most 3D games than, say, the old Metroid or SMB was)
I have trouble seperating my development as a gamer from my history with Nintendo. I don't know why I got so into this universe of mushrooms and turtles and princesses and clouds with eyes, but I want to see where it goes. I don't have as much time as I used to, either as a solo gamer or in gathering w/ housemates etc, so I'm fussier about what games I'll start into, and even on the other consoles I stick with the big series, GTA:SA and Halo 2... (but not so much that I missed Katamari Damacy...)
One strong benefit of not creating too many all new worlds: Nintendo has less of the Simpsons "Poochie" effect, with new characters full of awesome radicalness.
I do worry about Nintendo overmilking the franchises and only introducing "Pikmin" this go round (though Mario Kart 64, Smash Bros, Mario Party, Mario Tennis were all some incredible new(ish) things on the N64...along with BattleTanx, which is about the only decent tank game on a home system since Battle Zone...) Even worse is the GBA....that system deserved more new development w/ Mario, not just a series of ports.
Oh, and just to continue my rant...looking at my N64 collection at home, BattleTanx and its sequel still stand as the only decent Tokyo-Wars like tank game for any console. (I don't know how 3D0 then dropped the ball so badly w/ ThunderTanks, but they did)
N64 was a great system though. Admittedly innovative titles were pretty sparse once you get out of Nintendo/RARE territory, but in that realm there was some great, new stuff going on: Mario 64 made a new genre, Mario Party reintroduced classic style gaming in the form of minigames, Smash Brothers is really a new type of "fighting game", one with 4 players, and where the layout of the board really matters (besides being the game that every middle schooler in the 80s doodled in his notebook)...RARE had Blast Corps , DMA had Space Station Silicon Valley.
From my biased perspective, N64 was a hotbed of innovation relative to the PSX, so don't blame Nintendo.
But some classics will always shine above all others - like Defender for example. A good game is all about fun and gameplay - and that's pretty much timeless. <streetcred>As a guy who's been around "rec.games.video.classic" since the early 1990s, and has actually written an 2600 game</streetcred> I'd say: Pac-Man, yes. Defender...eh, not so much. Defender always had a kind of "elitest" vibe that I think limits its mass appeal in the long run. They deliberately made it difficult to control, and I think that's the bad way to increase the toughness of a game.
Pac-Man though...nearly everyone can clear a board or two, and its visuals are so stylized that they barely look dated.
Still, Eugene Jarvis is frickin' brilliant. Robotron was so amazing...
11 year olds can be EXTREMELY intelligent, so long as they've not been told to shut up all their life.
S'true. Also, while I can't vouch for *every* line, many of them had the feel of "precocious 11 yr old trying to say something funny to make it into the magazine", like this gem from last year:
"Fear my pink line. You have no chance. I am the undisputed lord of virtual tennis. [Misses ball] Whoops."
Kids can have this amazing depth of arcane knowledge, like a ton of 8 year olds who get interested in dinosaurs and suddenly can spout off as experts in paleontology. Basically, young kids are learning machines, and when they mix it with a little focus, their depth of factoids is profound.
Sega 1. SMS -- not much 2. Genesis -- great seller 3. Saturn -- crash 4. DC -- well, better than Saturn
So that's a "maybe" for your theory
Atari? 1. 2600 -- best seller 2. 5200 -- nuthin' 3. 7800 -- still more nuthin' 4. Jaguar -- fuhgedabouddit
That was a peak at #1, unless you count pong systems or something. It's an interesting idea, but I think the sample size is too small and there are too many counterexamples to really generalize like that.
Also, NES was dominant in a way I don't think SNES ever was, given its late start vs. Genesis. Which goes to show you, first to market is a big thing, though Dreamcast proves it's not everything...
Yeah...actually GTA:VC had a great "pick up and play and cause mayhem" aspect that I wonder if this new game with its more expansive levels and #)#$)#$ levelling up will match...
At my EB, the guy said they were really pushing the preorders, so ANY game for the modern 3 consoles would be worth $10 credit. Given their usual policies, that's a pretty good deal. I brought 5 crapola games, some I got for less than $10, and got Halo 2 "for free".
I had an ibook briefly, but I could tell that I was going to have problems adapting to the UI (though the kicker was I bought an older model that couldn't run garageband...) I just don't like the dock...I don't like the way it mixes what I think of shortcuts and running apps, and when I'm working, I think of each window as a seperate task I might want to return to, so the dock's app-centric outlooks bugs the hell out of me. I'm not really trashing it, I guess some people find it delightful, but it really runs against the way I view the world (which admittedly might've been shaped by Win95...)
"revolutionary" UIs always seem like such a crock. So often they're all "hey, it's TASK BASED" or whatever, but the trouble is that you tend to be limited to doing what the handholding software wants you to do. Roughly speaking, WIMP is very "noun based", the revolutionary systems tend to be "verb based", and I think it's easier to roll your own verbs in a noun based system then in a verb based system...
Seriously, I can't think of a good example of a program that meets the criteria, with a BASIC implementation that runs faster than on a modern system. And the BASIC version probably has a much worse, likely well-nigh-non-existent, UI.
Now, if he thought home computers no longer having an easy accessible powerful language available RIGHT THERE our of the box, I'd grant his point. But I don't see what he's on about with that quote.
Huh. Actually, it looks like "Full Armor" is one of those "sneak in bible lessons" kind of places..."Full Armor" is probably a biblical reference to the "Full Armor of God": Ephesians 6:10-18, "Manna" is a biblical miracle food, etc. I'm not going to download anythin further to confirm that.
Most ironic, from their Company Info Page: Our beliefs? They're simple!: quality, trust, respect, integrity and the golden rule.
Okay, C# and Dotnet are almost as powerful as Delphi, but they have a huge runtime (like java) I don't know a ton about Pascal, but I do know a lot of people who were taught C then picked up Java are surprised to realize portable P-code predates the idea of JVM in terms of transportable byte code...
I think you're right in that in general the Tit for Tat of "trust but verify" is often a good strategy. My main point was evolution, like the team that made the "cheating" solution, fills niches that you don't know were available and always questions assumptions...I read about attempts to breed circuits, like a minimal number of gate oscillator...they thought they had a real champion, but what they actually had bred was a radio antenna, pulsing in frequency with their PCs RF noise! "Evolution in the lab" unfortunately often leads to surprising bittleness and dependence on lablike conditions of temperature, light, etc...you really need a lab with something approaching the variety of conditions on the earth to get evolution to do your bidding!
subset of a winning team consistently and repeatably wants to be defeated. Mother nature took care of those long ago.
Well, it's an interesting philisophical point. It depends on how you define "win" and "lose"...certainly some specices have formed partnerships with other, often larger species, and if you define "win" as something besides "just survive", they might be seen as subjugating themselves to the other creature, so that the partnership prospers, even if their life doesn't seem that swell.
In other words, nature is more complex than the Prisoner's Dilemna, and sometimes ends up finding stuff more like the "cheaters" solution.
They "cheated", and the other guy didn't, so they won big! Wasn't that the whole premise?
Well, they kind of went for a win on the "metalevel", utilizing the circumstances of the competition rather than solving the originally stated issue in an abstract way. On the one hand that's cool because evolution can work like that sometimes, but on the other hand, it really isn't answering the original question any more. (the question is "what's probably the best strategy for any given individual in Prisoner's Dilemna" and they changed the question to "how can we get some individuals to be super-players with the way this prisoner's dilemna simulator is setup"
If they can get the neworking goin...I remember thinking I would gladly have given up the original SOCOM for a decent straight port of DOOM and DOOM II...
Yes, I think for many Palms are glorified organizers, with some game playing / photo displaying / lite document viewing thrown in.
On the other hand...they are VERY good organizers. I have 7 years worth of data with me in a very very small package, backed up in a few places. I think that alone is worth the price of admission...a nice UI to addresses, a datebook, TODOs, and misc-menus are something that many cellphones don't do that well.
Funny though how after Atari got divied up between both Midway and Infogrames (the latter which also took the name as theirs and is now ATARI proper) there is all of a sudden the emergence of most if not all classic Atari Games in the works as a port to PS2/3 and Xbox.
As a 2600 developer I feel pretty confident in saying this is a bad example: the new products are emulators that play ROMs which can be dumped off of physical cartridges, no source code of any sort required.
There are a few instances of preserved 2600 source code that have made it into the hobbyists hands, but it's unusual, and everyone's best guess is very little survived. In fact I know one guy, Dennis Debro, who annotates decompilations of Atari ROMs as a geeky brainteser hobby.
Making the emulator to run the games is a different story...there is some documentation surviving from the old days, the infamous "Stella Guide", as well as use of some well-understood and some custom chips, but still, the whole thing is pretty different than how you'd want most modern things to work.
I was a pretty early adopter of laptops...for most of college I used this ancient 286ish thing from Tandy/Radioshack, no hard drive but w/ a decent wired in text editor...eventually (95 or so) I sprung for a cheap b/w 486 so I could run win3.1 and use paintbrush for diagrams, embedded in my "MS write" notes.
Yeah, I was going to say, the X-prize seems to have done a tremendous job at generating movement in this area. Of course every team works tighter to the exact details of winning than we'd like...I mean don't we wish it was just one step away from true reusable space flight in deeper orbit? But still I'd say its been a succesful push in the right directions..
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. I'm a Nintendo fanboy, but GTA is something special, the way it has a great series of missions overlayed on a very real feeling world...a world that doesn't feel like it was handcrafted for the sake of playing the missions, which is something Nintendo never does. (I.e. the city seems to have its own agenda, it doesn't exist just for the player)
And saying all the games in the series are the same thing w/ just thematic changes...no way. They really are trying to make it a better, more fun universe with each iteratin. VC added motorcycles, helicopters, more cut scenes, properties. SA cranked up the size, added more planes, returned gangs to the mix, and cranked up the minigames (sometimes w/ not great results, like the odd dancing games embedded...)
What party games were there before Mario Party?
The Atari had the obscure game Party Mix but I can't think of any games that were just frameworks around minigames before that. As far as I can think right now, Mario Party invented a genre, and I give it huge credit for bringing classic style gaming into a new generation, especially with its emphasis on 4 player fun.
I think, "Oracle of Bandwidth", you miss some of the point of the N64, which for me was busting open whole new worlds of social multiplayer gaming -- more so than breaking old franchises into 3D. (That said...I didn't play Legend of Zelda much back in the day, and when I went back to it *after* Z:OoT, I was amazed at how familiar the gameplay felt, the original Zelda's 2D overhead perspective was already closer to most 3D games than, say, the old Metroid or SMB was)
I have trouble seperating my development as a gamer from my history with Nintendo. I don't know why I got so into this universe of mushrooms and turtles and princesses and clouds with eyes, but I want to see where it goes. I don't have as much time as I used to, either as a solo gamer or in gathering w/ housemates etc, so I'm fussier about what games I'll start into, and even on the other consoles I stick with the big series, GTA:SA and Halo 2... (but not so much that I missed Katamari Damacy...)
One strong benefit of not creating too many all new worlds: Nintendo has less of the Simpsons "Poochie" effect, with new characters full of awesome radicalness.
I do worry about Nintendo overmilking the franchises and only introducing "Pikmin" this go round (though Mario Kart 64, Smash Bros, Mario Party, Mario Tennis were all some incredible new(ish) things on the N64...along with BattleTanx, which is about the only decent tank game on a home system since Battle Zone...) Even worse is the GBA....that system deserved more new development w/ Mario, not just a series of ports.
Oh, and just to continue my rant...looking at my N64 collection at home, BattleTanx and its sequel still stand as the only decent Tokyo-Wars like tank game for any console. (I don't know how 3D0 then dropped the ball so badly w/ ThunderTanks, but they did)
N64 was a great system though. Admittedly innovative titles were pretty sparse once you get out of Nintendo/RARE territory, but in that realm there was some great, new stuff going on: Mario 64 made a new genre, Mario Party reintroduced classic style gaming in the form of minigames, Smash Brothers is really a new type of "fighting game", one with 4 players, and where the layout of the board really matters (besides being the game that every middle schooler in the 80s doodled in his notebook)...RARE had Blast Corps , DMA had Space Station Silicon Valley.
From my biased perspective, N64 was a hotbed of innovation relative to the PSX, so don't blame Nintendo.
But some classics will always shine above all others - like Defender for example. A good game is all about fun and gameplay - and that's pretty much timeless.
<streetcred>As a guy who's been around "rec.games.video.classic" since the early 1990s, and has actually written an 2600 game</streetcred> I'd say: Pac-Man, yes. Defender...eh, not so much. Defender always had a kind of "elitest" vibe that I think limits its mass appeal in the long run. They deliberately made it difficult to control, and I think that's the bad way to increase the toughness of a game.
Pac-Man though...nearly everyone can clear a board or two, and its visuals are so stylized that they barely look dated.
Still, Eugene Jarvis is frickin' brilliant. Robotron was so amazing...
11 year olds can be EXTREMELY intelligent, so long as they've not been told to shut up all their life.
S'true. Also, while I can't vouch for *every* line, many of them had the feel of "precocious 11 yr old trying to say something funny to make it into the magazine", like this gem from last year:
"Fear my pink line. You have no chance. I am the undisputed lord of virtual tennis. [Misses ball] Whoops."
Kids can have this amazing depth of arcane knowledge, like a ton of 8 year olds who get interested in dinosaurs and suddenly can spout off as experts in paleontology. Basically, young kids are learning machines, and when they mix it with a little focus, their depth of factoids is profound.
It's a bad writeup when you have to follow the link (assuming you don't already know) to realize that Cryptic = City of Heroes, a MMORPG.
(Yes, I know this assumes the reader knows what an MMORPG etc is, but still...)
Sega
1. SMS -- not much
2. Genesis -- great seller
3. Saturn -- crash
4. DC -- well, better than Saturn
So that's a "maybe" for your theory
Atari?
1. 2600 -- best seller
2. 5200 -- nuthin'
3. 7800 -- still more nuthin'
4. Jaguar -- fuhgedabouddit
That was a peak at #1, unless you count pong systems or something. It's an interesting idea, but I think the sample size is too small and there are too many counterexamples to really generalize like that.
Also, NES was dominant in a way I don't think SNES ever was, given its late start vs. Genesis. Which goes to show you, first to market is a big thing, though Dreamcast proves it's not everything...
Yeah...actually GTA:VC had a great "pick up and play and cause mayhem" aspect that I wonder if this new game with its more expansive levels and #)#$)#$ levelling up will match...
At my EB, the guy said they were really pushing the preorders, so ANY game for the modern 3 consoles would be worth $10 credit. Given their usual policies, that's a pretty good deal. I brought 5 crapola games, some I got for less than $10, and got Halo 2 "for free".
Something like that...though a lot of biztypes use Excel for WAY too much stuff...if I see one more data dictionary written up in that damn thing...
I had an ibook briefly, but I could tell that I was going to have problems adapting to the UI (though the kicker was I bought an older model that couldn't run garageband...) I just don't like the dock...I don't like the way it mixes what I think of shortcuts and running apps, and when I'm working, I think of each window as a seperate task I might want to return to, so the dock's app-centric outlooks bugs the hell out of me. I'm not really trashing it, I guess some people find it delightful, but it really runs against the way I view the world (which admittedly might've been shaped by Win95...)
"revolutionary" UIs always seem like such a crock. So often they're all "hey, it's TASK BASED" or whatever, but the trouble is that you tend to be limited to doing what the handholding software wants you to do. Roughly speaking, WIMP is very "noun based", the revolutionary systems tend to be "verb based", and I think it's easier to roll your own verbs in a noun based system then in a verb based system...
Seriously, I can't think of a good example of a program that meets the criteria, with a BASIC implementation that runs faster than on a modern system. And the BASIC version probably has a much worse, likely well-nigh-non-existent, UI.
Now, if he thought home computers no longer having an easy accessible powerful language available RIGHT THERE our of the box, I'd grant his point. But I don't see what he's on about with that quote.
Huh. Actually, it looks like "Full Armor" is one of those "sneak in bible lessons" kind of places..."Full Armor" is probably a biblical reference to the "Full Armor of God": Ephesians 6:10-18, "Manna" is a biblical miracle food, etc. I'm not going to download anythin further to confirm that.
Most ironic, from their Company Info Page:
Our beliefs? They're simple!: quality, trust, respect, integrity and the golden rule.
I'd say they're about 0 for 5 there.
Okay, C# and Dotnet are almost as powerful as Delphi, but they have a huge runtime (like java)
I don't know a ton about Pascal, but I do know a lot of people who were taught C then picked up Java are surprised to realize portable P-code predates the idea of JVM in terms of transportable byte code...
I think you're right in that in general the Tit for Tat of "trust but verify" is often a good strategy. My main point was evolution, like the team that made the "cheating" solution, fills niches that you don't know were available and always questions assumptions...I read about attempts to breed circuits, like a minimal number of gate oscillator...they thought they had a real champion, but what they actually had bred was a radio antenna, pulsing in frequency with their PCs RF noise! "Evolution in the lab" unfortunately often leads to surprising bittleness and dependence on lablike conditions of temperature, light, etc...you really need a lab with something approaching the variety of conditions on the earth to get evolution to do your bidding!
subset of a winning team consistently and repeatably wants to be defeated. Mother nature took care of those long ago.
Well, it's an interesting philisophical point. It depends on how you define "win" and "lose"...certainly some specices have formed partnerships with other, often larger species, and if you define "win" as something besides "just survive", they might be seen as subjugating themselves to the other creature, so that the partnership prospers, even if their life doesn't seem that swell.
In other words, nature is more complex than the Prisoner's Dilemna, and sometimes ends up finding stuff more like the "cheaters" solution.
They "cheated", and the other guy didn't, so they won big! Wasn't that the whole premise?
Well, they kind of went for a win on the "metalevel", utilizing the circumstances of the competition rather than solving the originally stated issue in an abstract way. On the one hand that's cool because evolution can work like that sometimes, but on the other hand, it really isn't answering the original question any more. (the question is "what's probably the best strategy for any given individual in Prisoner's Dilemna" and they changed the question to "how can we get some individuals to be super-players with the way this prisoner's dilemna simulator is setup"
If they can get the neworking goin...I remember thinking I would gladly have given up the original SOCOM for a decent straight port of DOOM and DOOM II...
Well, I did say "many cellphones"
the UI looks nice and all.
Is it a touchscreen? What do you use for text input?
Yes, I think for many Palms are glorified organizers, with some game playing / photo displaying / lite document viewing thrown in.
On the other hand...they are VERY good organizers. I have 7 years worth of data with me in a very very small package, backed up in a few places. I think that alone is worth the price of admission...a nice UI to addresses, a datebook, TODOs, and misc-menus are something that many cellphones don't do that well.
Funny though how after Atari got divied up between both Midway and Infogrames (the latter which also took the name as theirs and is now ATARI proper) there is all of a sudden the emergence of most if not all classic Atari Games in the works as a port to PS2/3 and Xbox.
As a 2600 developer I feel pretty confident in saying this is a bad example: the new products are emulators that play ROMs which can be dumped off of physical cartridges, no source code of any sort required.
There are a few instances of preserved 2600 source code that have made it into the hobbyists hands, but it's unusual, and everyone's best guess is very little survived. In fact I know one guy, Dennis Debro, who annotates decompilations of Atari ROMs as a geeky brainteser hobby.
Making the emulator to run the games is a different story...there is some documentation surviving from the old days, the infamous "Stella Guide", as well as use of some well-understood and some custom chips, but still, the whole thing is pretty different than how you'd want most modern things to work.
I was a pretty early adopter of laptops...for most of college I used this ancient 286ish thing from Tandy/Radioshack, no hard drive but w/ a decent wired in text editor...eventually (95 or so) I sprung for a cheap b/w 486 so I could run win3.1 and use paintbrush for diagrams, embedded in my "MS write" notes.
Yeah, I was going to say, the X-prize seems to have done a tremendous job at generating movement in this area. Of course every team works tighter to the exact details of winning than we'd like...I mean don't we wish it was just one step away from true reusable space flight in deeper orbit? But still I'd say its been a succesful push in the right directions..