(a) the _French_ Government put US soldiers lives in danger, when all they have done is attempt to stop the _US_ Government sticking them in a position where they are getting shot at, and
(b) why this means you should boycott Mandrake; its not a Government owned distro is it?
After all, if anyone is going to whinge about people's lives being put in danger it would be me (as a Brit) boycotting the US as its your President who has got British troops in the firing line (and done a rather better job of killing them than the Iraqis, while we mention it). I'm not doing so, however, as I fail to see how it would be Redhat's fault.
More seriously, a quick check on Ebay UK shows the last auction of an Alpha workstation going for a mere £200. Its not like the technology isn't already available...
"Where you have to wiggle your joystick as fast as you can."
I think you answered your own question. Waggling a joypad is just about impossible (as anyone who has tried the Dreamcast Speccy emulator can attest), waggling a mouse left and right is just daft, and no-one buys arcade sticks these days. Like VR and Text Adventures (most people just game on consoles now), the hardware it needed is dead.
"It's just that EA and Sierra can't soak us repeatedly for them anymore"
Given that the big winners last Christmas were Harry Potter (a graphic adventure) and The Two Towers (a beat em up), both from EA, I hardly think they are even 'dead' to that extent...
I'm using UK release dates, as its what I have to hand:
10. Space Shooter or "Shmups" Ikaruga. And It Fecking Rocks.
9. Puzzle Super Bust A Move 2. Admittedly just another version of Puzzle Bobble, but there you go.
8. Light Gun House Of The Dead 3. Not bad, though its no Time Crisis 2.
7. Text Adventure ok, here we'd have to cheat and see what is happening in Palm land. Its a bit difficult to sell Text Adventures when consoles don't have keyboards.
6. Maze Super Monkey Ball 2 (particularly on the complex levels) is a maze game in all but name, really
5. Virtual Reality OK, I'm stuck again, but doesn't something like Steel Battalion, with its massive controller, do effectively the same job? Silly headsets seem to have moved on to providing a real-world component to the game instead; things like Dance Mats and Maracas, and particularly the upcoming Sony Eye-Toy are doing the same thing.
4. Educational Given that Amazon.co.uk feel the need to have a whole seperate section of the shop to them, they can't be that dead. Lets choose version 15.0 (!!!) of Mavis Beacon as an example.
Also, don't underestimate the amount of history that people learn from playing something like Medieval: Total War, or a WW2 flight sim.
3. Full Motion Video Would I get hit if I mentioned that Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance came out last week?
2. Beat 'Em Up Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers is practically a Golden Axe sequel it sticks so rigidly to the formula. Kung Fu Chaos is pretty similiar as well.
1. Graphic Adventure I've never really understood just what exactly it is that makes a Graphic Adventure different from the new Resident Evil 0, other than the odd Zombie to shoot. Can anyone explain?
I played a fair bit of CS back in the day (around.6,.65 or so) but I sort of tailed off once the number of people either blatently cheating, accusing you of cheating because you got a single headshot in, or even banning you from a server after you fluked three in a row became too much. Its not that I think you cheat, but that I think some players cheat, its often difficult to tell which ones they are, and because of that even if you're not cheating the moment you do well someone will take offense.
It may be better now, and you may have found better places to play than me (only having dialup its difficult to get a good game now most CS fans are on broadband), but I just don't find the game fun any more in the way that I do with the best console titles.
Sorry if I gave the impression I thought that; I merely didn't mention the mighty M64 (still the greatest game ever released) because the 64 isn't a current system. Technically, there was a bizarre launch title on the Playstation that was a first-person platformer, though it was so uncontrollable that no-one remembers it (something about a rabbit, if memory serves). Of course, if you want to get really clever, its all just Knight Lore or Ant Attack with a fancy camera in any case.:-)
After all, I didn't mention Sonic Adventure either (which adds to the argument about the GC platform market being crowded) because I forgot it came out on anything other than DC - oops.
There are a metric tonne of great 2D games for the GBA, for a start, due to its lack of 3D hardware; that would be my first recommendation.
Elsewhere, there are the following Shooters: The mighty "Ikaruga". Tell me you have this, please. It even sees a Western release on GC soon, if you didn't get the original Japanese DC release. Shikigami No Shiro. You'd need to import, but its apparently pretty great. Mars Matrix (DC game that even made it to the US) is tough but fair
There are new sequels to R-Type and Gradius on their way to PS2 as well, along with (if we're really lucky) a western release of the new DoDonPachi sequel.
For platformers, you're pretty stuck to GBA or Retro titles, however.
"Is the GameCube really that abysmal that it can't handle a platform game?"
Probably more like "Does the XBox not have anything to compete with our new platformer?"
The GameCube has Sunshine, and Wario (plus rumours of Mario 128) on its way. The PS2 has Jak 'n' Daxter (considered by some to be better than Sunshine, even). The XBox has Blinx. I know where I'd release my platform title...
"When was the last time you were using a controller for xbox online and were accused of using an aimbot? Never? Hmmm.... wonder why that is."
err, because the lack of aimbots has meant that you can concentrate on playing games rather than worrying that every person achieving a kill might be cheating? I know I stopped playing CS when it became impossible to have any fun due to all the cheating people; consoles have got me gaming again.
While I understand your desire to stick with K+M configs for playing first-person games, I also found that I'm got pretty sick of just these, and nothing beats a stick for fighting games, shooting games, platformers, analogue control for driving games etc. Its the right tool for the right job that counts.
4) Someone will call the Gamecube a 'kiddie' machine, despite this having nothing to do with the topic
5) Someone else will take great offense and start listing titles with T or M ratings
6) Someone will counter with poor US Gamecube sales
6) Someone else will reply that Microsoft aren't selling many XBoxes in Japan
When Sony start to see a slowdown in PS2 sales and a competitor actually coming even close to them, they might think about releasing PS3, but not much sooner. Apart from anything, the PS2 is such an arse to code its only in the last year that 3rd parties have started to get the hang of it.
"And two years from now, the RIAA charges everyone that's been using Napster/Kazaa/Morpheus/Gnutella/Etc for all the music they've "bought"."
Its an amusing idea, certainly, but to be serious for a second, Napser/clones never had a thing saying "you'll be charged x for these downloads" that people hacked (or at least thought they hacked) past.
This would be more like finding a glitch in (for example) Amazon.com where it appears your card isn't getting charged when you buy stuff, exploiting it and then finding out at the end of the month that they have been doing so after all.
"You're suggesting that gamers have brand loyalty."
Oh boy yes. Hell hath no fury like a Nintendo fan towards an XBox, or vice versa, for a start.
"Remember State of Emergency?"
I do, and I also remember that it was merely released by Rockstar, not written by the legendary DMA Design, or Rockstar North as they are now known, since they got themselves trapped into just doing GTA sequels rather than the likes of Lemmings or Blood Money.
Besides, until the bad word got out State Of Emergency drummed up one hell of a lot of preorders from gullible people who saw the Rockstar logo and assumed it would be as good as GTA3.
It really depends on who you look at, I suppose. Sony are absolutely raking it in right now, and EA are doing as well as ever. Anything indie or even vaguely quirky is running at a loss though, much to the detriment of the quality of games - right now the games industry is making the music and film ones look like an absolute eden for smaller artists.
Quoth the author "Maybe the gaming industry isn't as healthy as I thought".
I take it that the recent collapse of Rage (of Rocky, Lamborghini, GoGo Beckham etc.) and Curly Monsters (Quantum Redshift) and the merger of Sega with Sammy, all in the last month or two passed them by, then?
As several of us pointed out when this "Special Edition" was originally announced, the actual film itself (you know, the bit that you're supposedly interested in) was just going to be yet another copy of the original disc.
I'd really like to think that the real reason this has been postponed is because that disc is crap. Sure, its got lots of features, and was pretty darn impressive when it was originally released, but if you go look at it now and compare it to a top quality transfer from the last year or so you'll see it looks and sounds terrible. Artifacting everywhere in the dark areas and a 5.1 mix that has been compromised in order to ensure that it sounds ok in stereo.
Frankly, you can stuff your "Keanu is just a great actor to work with" extras up your arse Warner, I just want the film to look and sound as close to the way it does in the cinema as it can. Ruining the transfer to add boring extras is really annoying.
Curious. I take it she's heard about this game from the news, and believed every word of it, then.
I didn't have any problem explaining to my wife why I'd bought the game, but then as I've managed to clock up upwards of 30 hours on GTA3 without once feeling the need to use the "pick up hooker" feature that I wasn't even aware of until the media told me about it, I think its less of an issue.
The evil stuff you can get up to in the game is just that. You CAN get up to it; you aren't generally forced to. Yes, you can kill women in the game. Thats because you can kill people in the game, and coding an explicit "don't kill these ones, they are nice people" routine would be a flaw in the game world.
I've seen the odd glitch on a mission myself, actually. First was a Vigilante mission where the criminals were inside a building, and the second was on the "blow up the drug factory" one where the first time I tried it I had problems getting into the factory as the two cars in front were getting held up by pedestrians in the way.
Original 1 disc 2 disc set with Revisited This new one
However, it sounds like disc 1 is going to still be the same! Personally I couln't give two hoots about the new extras that just sound like spoiler-filled trailers for the new things. I just want a new transfer that doesn't look and sound quite as poor as the over-compressed artifact filled and otherwise inferior to the (rather rare) laserdisc release. For the love of all things cool, please could they fix this at last?
Err, I'm fairly sure you're wrong about Men In Black. Firstly, all versions were released on the same date, so its not like double-dipping in this case. Secondly, ignoring the presence of seperate Pan and Scan releases (which don't really count as I wouldn't give them the time of day), there were only three
I specifically remember it because I was annoyed that if I wanted the DTS track I had to miss out on half the bonus features. Now that might count as a double-dip ripoff, indeed.
I understand you're annoyed about the Alien set, but for what its worth,
1) The old releases have been out a few years now.
2) They really have cleaned them up a fair bit further, apparently, and transfer technology has moved on quite a lot as well.
3) Aliens will apparently have the theatrical cut this time, thank God. Even just this alone would make it worth it for me, as I hate the extended version; it really ruins the pace for me.
4) Alien3 should (hopefully - its not confirmed for certain) have the extra workprint scenes inserted to present the 'fan cut' everyone has been clamouring at Fox for the last x years to release.
5) DTS tracks all round, and a proper 5.1 sound mix for Alien from the 70mm version, rather than the hacked into 5.1 release on the current disc.
Finally, its sounding like some of the extras in your set (most notably the Goldsmith score on Alien) may not make it on due to the space taken by the new transfers, so it may be worth keeping both if you're a big fan.
Slashdot Mirror
"Maybe we should support an Icelandic distro... Icelanders haven't invaded anyone recently..."
Cod War, by friend, Cod War.
Yes, I know, offtopic...
I'd really just love to know how
(a) the _French_ Government put US soldiers lives in danger, when all they have done is attempt to stop the _US_ Government sticking them in a position where they are getting shot at, and
(b) why this means you should boycott Mandrake; its not a Government owned distro is it?
After all, if anyone is going to whinge about people's lives being put in danger it would be me (as a Brit) boycotting the US as its your President who has got British troops in the firing line (and done a rather better job of killing them than the Iraqis, while we mention it). I'm not doing so, however, as I fail to see how it would be Redhat's fault.
(insert reference to Mario 64 here)
More seriously, a quick check on Ebay UK shows the last auction of an Alpha workstation going for a mere £200. Its not like the technology isn't already available...
"Where you have to wiggle your joystick as fast as you can."
I think you answered your own question. Waggling a joypad is just about impossible (as anyone who has tried the Dreamcast Speccy emulator can attest), waggling a mouse left and right is just daft, and no-one buys arcade sticks these days. Like VR and Text Adventures (most people just game on consoles now), the hardware it needed is dead.
"It's just that EA and Sierra can't soak us repeatedly for them anymore"
Given that the big winners last Christmas were Harry Potter (a graphic adventure) and The Two Towers (a beat em up), both from EA, I hardly think they are even 'dead' to that extent...
I'm using UK release dates, as its what I have to hand:
10. Space Shooter or "Shmups"
Ikaruga. And It Fecking Rocks.
9. Puzzle
Super Bust A Move 2. Admittedly just another version of Puzzle Bobble, but there you go.
8. Light Gun
House Of The Dead 3. Not bad, though its no Time Crisis 2.
7. Text Adventure
ok, here we'd have to cheat and see what is happening in Palm land. Its a bit difficult to sell Text Adventures when consoles don't have keyboards.
6. Maze
Super Monkey Ball 2 (particularly on the complex levels) is a maze game in all but name, really
5. Virtual Reality
OK, I'm stuck again, but doesn't something like Steel Battalion, with its massive controller, do effectively the same job? Silly headsets seem to have moved on to providing a real-world component to the game instead; things like Dance Mats and Maracas, and particularly the upcoming Sony Eye-Toy are doing the same thing.
4. Educational
Given that Amazon.co.uk feel the need to have a whole seperate section of the shop to them, they can't be that dead. Lets choose version 15.0 (!!!) of Mavis Beacon as an example.
Also, don't underestimate the amount of history that people learn from playing something like Medieval: Total War, or a WW2 flight sim.
3. Full Motion Video
Would I get hit if I mentioned that Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance came out last week?
2. Beat 'Em Up
Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers is practically a Golden Axe sequel it sticks so rigidly to the formula. Kung Fu Chaos is pretty similiar as well.
1. Graphic Adventure
I've never really understood just what exactly it is that makes a Graphic Adventure different from the new Resident Evil 0, other than the odd Zombie to shoot. Can anyone explain?
I played a fair bit of CS back in the day (around .6, .65 or so) but I sort of tailed off once the number of people either blatently cheating, accusing you of cheating because you got a single headshot in, or even banning you from a server after you fluked three in a row became too much. Its not that I think you cheat, but that I think some players cheat, its often difficult to tell which ones they are, and because of that even if you're not cheating the moment you do well someone will take offense.
It may be better now, and you may have found better places to play than me (only having dialup its difficult to get a good game now most CS fans are on broadband), but I just don't find the game fun any more in the way that I do with the best console titles.
Sorry if I gave the impression I thought that; I merely didn't mention the mighty M64 (still the greatest game ever released) because the 64 isn't a current system. Technically, there was a bizarre launch title on the Playstation that was a first-person platformer, though it was so uncontrollable that no-one remembers it (something about a rabbit, if memory serves). Of course, if you want to get really clever, its all just Knight Lore or Ant Attack with a fancy camera in any case. :-)
After all, I didn't mention Sonic Adventure either (which adds to the argument about the GC platform market being crowded) because I forgot it came out on anything other than DC - oops.
There are a metric tonne of great 2D games for the GBA, for a start, due to its lack of 3D hardware; that would be my first recommendation.
Elsewhere, there are the following Shooters:
The mighty "Ikaruga". Tell me you have this, please. It even sees a Western release on GC soon, if you didn't get the original Japanese DC release.
Shikigami No Shiro. You'd need to import, but its apparently pretty great.
Mars Matrix (DC game that even made it to the US) is tough but fair
There are new sequels to R-Type and Gradius on their way to PS2 as well, along with (if we're really lucky) a western release of the new DoDonPachi sequel.
For platformers, you're pretty stuck to GBA or Retro titles, however.
"Is the GameCube really that abysmal that it can't handle a platform game?"
Probably more like "Does the XBox not have anything to compete with our new platformer?"
The GameCube has Sunshine, and Wario (plus rumours of Mario 128) on its way. The PS2 has Jak 'n' Daxter (considered by some to be better than Sunshine, even). The XBox has Blinx. I know where I'd release my platform title...
oops - I seem to have lost my own text. Anyway, that now makes us two who have forgotten to finish our Duke Nukem gags.
"Can you imagine if something had been announced in March of 2000? Would you still care about it now?"
"When was the last time you were using a controller for xbox online and were accused of using an aimbot? Never? Hmmm.... wonder why that is."
err, because the lack of aimbots has meant that you can concentrate on playing games rather than worrying that every person achieving a kill might be cheating? I know I stopped playing CS when it became impossible to have any fun due to all the cheating people; consoles have got me gaming again.
While I understand your desire to stick with K+M configs for playing first-person games, I also found that I'm got pretty sick of just these, and nothing beats a stick for fighting games, shooting games, platformers, analogue control for driving games etc. Its the right tool for the right job that counts.
you forgot
4) Someone will call the Gamecube a 'kiddie' machine, despite this having nothing to do with the topic
5) Someone else will take great offense and start listing titles with T or M ratings
6) Someone will counter with poor US Gamecube sales
6) Someone else will reply that Microsoft aren't selling many XBoxes in Japan
When Sony start to see a slowdown in PS2 sales and a competitor actually coming even close to them, they might think about releasing PS3, but not much sooner. Apart from anything, the PS2 is such an arse to code its only in the last year that 3rd parties have started to get the hang of it.
"And two years from now, the RIAA charges everyone that's been using Napster/Kazaa/Morpheus/Gnutella/Etc for all the music they've "bought"."
Its an amusing idea, certainly, but to be serious for a second, Napser/clones never had a thing saying "you'll be charged x for these downloads" that people hacked (or at least thought they hacked) past.
This would be more like finding a glitch in (for example) Amazon.com where it appears your card isn't getting charged when you buy stuff, exploiting it and then finding out at the end of the month that they have been doing so after all.
"You're suggesting that gamers have brand loyalty."
Oh boy yes. Hell hath no fury like a Nintendo fan towards an XBox, or vice versa, for a start.
"Remember State of Emergency?"
I do, and I also remember that it was merely released by Rockstar, not written by the legendary DMA Design, or Rockstar North as they are now known, since they got themselves trapped into just doing GTA sequels rather than the likes of Lemmings or Blood Money.
Besides, until the bad word got out State Of Emergency drummed up one hell of a lot of preorders from gullible people who saw the Rockstar logo and assumed it would be as good as GTA3.
It really depends on who you look at, I suppose. Sony are absolutely raking it in right now, and EA are doing as well as ever. Anything indie or even vaguely quirky is running at a loss though, much to the detriment of the quality of games - right now the games industry is making the music and film ones look like an absolute eden for smaller artists.
Nice article, by the way.
Quoth the author "Maybe the gaming industry isn't as healthy as I thought".
I take it that the recent collapse of Rage (of Rocky, Lamborghini, GoGo Beckham etc.) and Curly Monsters (Quantum Redshift) and the merger of Sega with Sammy, all in the last month or two passed them by, then?
As several of us pointed out when this "Special Edition" was originally announced, the actual film itself (you know, the bit that you're supposedly interested in) was just going to be yet another copy of the original disc.
I'd really like to think that the real reason this has been postponed is because that disc is crap. Sure, its got lots of features, and was pretty darn impressive when it was originally released, but if you go look at it now and compare it to a top quality transfer from the last year or so you'll see it looks and sounds terrible. Artifacting everywhere in the dark areas and a 5.1 mix that has been compromised in order to ensure that it sounds ok in stereo.
Frankly, you can stuff your "Keanu is just a great actor to work with" extras up your arse Warner, I just want the film to look and sound as close to the way it does in the cinema as it can. Ruining the transfer to add boring extras is really annoying.
Coolness - its the first step blurbflies. When reality falls apart and Dominoes start doing our heads in, I'll know who to blame.
Curious. I take it she's heard about this game from the news, and believed every word of it, then.
I didn't have any problem explaining to my wife why I'd bought the game, but then as I've managed to clock up upwards of 30 hours on GTA3 without once feeling the need to use the "pick up hooker" feature that I wasn't even aware of until the media told me about it, I think its less of an issue.
The evil stuff you can get up to in the game is just that. You CAN get up to it; you aren't generally forced to. Yes, you can kill women in the game. Thats because you can kill people in the game, and coding an explicit "don't kill these ones, they are nice people" routine would be a flaw in the game world.
I've seen the odd glitch on a mission myself, actually. First was a Vigilante mission where the criminals were inside a building, and the second was on the "blow up the drug factory" one where the first time I tried it I had problems getting into the factory as the two cars in front were getting held up by pedestrians in the way.
Its nothing major, though.
I count this as the third release:
Original 1 disc
2 disc set with Revisited
This new one
However, it sounds like disc 1 is going to still be the same! Personally I couln't give two hoots about the new extras that just sound like spoiler-filled trailers for the new things. I just want a new transfer that doesn't look and sound quite as poor as the over-compressed artifact filled and otherwise inferior to the (rather rare) laserdisc release. For the love of all things cool, please could they fix this at last?
Err, I'm fairly sure you're wrong about Men In Black. Firstly, all versions were released on the same date, so its not like double-dipping in this case. Secondly, ignoring the presence of seperate Pan and Scan releases (which don't really count as I wouldn't give them the time of day), there were only three
1 disc DD 5.1
1 disc DTS 5.1
2 disc DD 5.1 loaded with extras.
I specifically remember it because I was annoyed that if I wanted the DTS track I had to miss out on half the bonus features. Now that might count as a double-dip ripoff, indeed.
I understand you're annoyed about the Alien set, but for what its worth,
1) The old releases have been out a few years now.
2) They really have cleaned them up a fair bit further, apparently, and transfer technology has moved on quite a lot as well.
3) Aliens will apparently have the theatrical cut this time, thank God. Even just this alone would make it worth it for me, as I hate the extended version; it really ruins the pace for me.
4) Alien3 should (hopefully - its not confirmed for certain) have the extra workprint scenes inserted to present the 'fan cut' everyone has been clamouring at Fox for the last x years to release.
5) DTS tracks all round, and a proper 5.1 sound mix for Alien from the 70mm version, rather than the hacked into 5.1 release on the current disc.
Finally, its sounding like some of the extras in your set (most notably the Goldsmith score on Alien) may not make it on due to the space taken by the new transfers, so it may be worth keeping both if you're a big fan.