The problem is that such "re-imaginings" can end up losing more than they gain. The original was popular for a reason - there was a logic behind its bubbling to the top of the charts. The "re-imagining" often loses its successful features for new ones that may or may not fly - sort of a "feature russian roulette" - replacing tried-and-tested good gameplay with new, untested ideas that are often inferior.
Consider Doom's unpopular remake. The new gameplay is just dull and repetative. Compare v. Serious Sam and Painkiller, which applied classic Doom gameplay to modern technology.
I believe the phrase you're looking for is "well, they laughed at Einstein too."
To which the appropriate rebuttal is "yes, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown".
Nobody ever congratulates old-guard scientific establishments for laughing off all of the thousands of idiot theories that come their way - only for ignoring the one that actually had merit.
You couldn't see the source of shots with the sniper rifle. Face was unplayable because it was entirely just sniper-camping. So, in UT2k3, they made the sniper rifle a beam weapon so you could see where shots were coming from, and renamed it the "lightning gun". Players of course whined, because they wanted the cosmetic appeal of an old-fashioned slug-thrower instead of an energy weapon (which had been inserted for legit gameplay reasons) so in UT2k4 they reintroduced the sniper rifle. Either way, the weapons are pretty useless in the mind-bogglingly fast gameplay of UT2k3/4. The new games are far faster than classic UT, so getting headshots is only possible when the other players are not moving.
I agree. I can't help but notice that these days "innovative indie" means "It's an FPS set in WWII - but from the RUSSIAN perspective. Mindblowing, isn't it?"
All the creative stuff is happening in the Flash games right now, which are awash in a sea of suck and are only interesting if you're amused by Flash games.
SFIII was released once 2d fighters were already in decline. IIRC, it came out a little after Alpha 2. AFAIK, it was hyper-obsessed with playbalance and smooth framerates, and was mostly popular with the hardcore streetfighter fans - the normal players were disappointed with the smaller roster and non-ludicrous effects.
In the arcades, the title was just "THREE!" in giant letters, with a little sign saying "street fighter".
I hope it's 2d as well, but I disagree that there are no good 3d fighters besides SSM. PowerStone II is awesome (4 players, like SSM) and 3d. Evil Zone is very qwerky, but I love it, and it's 3d. Bushido Blade kicked ass. But yeah, the long list of Virtual Fighter and Tekken games are weak.
Hmmph. $300 Dell and a Radeon 9250. All you need. DVD burners, etc. are nice add-ons, but not necessary in a gaming box. Built-in sound is good enough, built in RAM is good enough for any game (though not usually for productivity).
Amen. All the planning needed before installing a desktop distro can paralize one into inactivity. Plus, no distro delivers quite the absolute "never ever edit a config file or open a commandline" complete GUI of Windows, or at least none that I've seen. It's not that I don't like the commandline, it's just that if I just want to do something _now_ and not script it forever, GUIs are just faster and easier ways to find your tools and learn to use them.
Then go shop on Ebay. You can get a pretty good provider-unlocked GSM phone for under $100 if you want to get a phone for contract-prices without getting a contract. I picked up an unlocked Motorola T725 worldphone for something like $60US. Not much on nifty features, but it's tri-band and gets great reception everywhere. I saw some old blackberries with Buy It Now prices of under $100.
No, it wasn't. Everyone knew that MOO3 was going to be a horribly overcomplex sociological simulation with a lite interface slapped onto it - the people who kept up with the news got exactly what they wanted, exactly what was promised (though the AI was a little odd before patching).
The real hugest disappointment ever was Star Control 3. New dev team just destroyed it. StarCon, the fourth game, was completely cancelled. Apparently they replaced the material with a bunch of Colony Wars stuff and made it into another Colony Wars game on the PS1.
Then there was Total Annihilation II, which was being made without Chris Taylor by a bunch of Koreans. That got canned, bu TA is getting a "spiritual successor" in the form of Taylor's "Supreme Commander" iirc.
Still, imho, the worst sequel ever was One Must Fall: BattleGrounds. Took the only good PC fighting game and turned it into the clunkiest, slowest behind view boxing game I've ever seen.
Actually, since ED2k clients usually include browser integration for ed2k links, I've seen a lot of win32 projects using ED2k for distribution instead of BT. My problem is the clients - I use Shareaza, which sucks up all my high-speed-lite bandwidth and beats my 2ghz processor into a bloody pulp when I use it, even if I'm only getting 1k/s of download. The alternative would be to use that Java-based client - but running a JVM all the time would eat half my ram.
You missed the most obvious thing: the DS is the first console with a real pointing device and a screen for each player. That means strategy games are finally feasible. I want to see all the classic RTS titles - StarCraft, Z, Total Annihilation, Metal Marines... plus, the turn-based biggies too, like Master of Magic, X-Com, and Master of Orion II.
It's different when you, the player are being insulted directly by the designer. That's just nasty.
Now, my problem is that half of those things are about annoying adventure/action games. For those of us who don't play games that are about plot and character and all that stupid window dressing, half of those don't apply. It sounds like, from his fuming, the designer shouldn't either. Ditch the wanna-be RPGs and just play some freaking Serious Sam. The plot is barely present, the motivation is minimal, the cutscenes are nothing but flyarounds of the next area. Plus, if a game is very conventional, instructions are unnecessary - Doom lacked instructions, and nodody complained.
My list is much simpler: eliminate everything that keeps me away from the gameplay. Fsck plot. Fsck loading screens - the textures didn't need to be that high-res. Fsck backtracking for ammo, health, etc. Fsck hunting for save points 'cause they're too far apart. Fsck manually hitting F9 to quicksave because there are no save points. Fsck tedious, repetative tasks.
More designers need to play Halo II's single-player campaign and notice all the details in it that remove these annoying features. The shield-regen system eliminates hunting for health. The plentiful, handy guns and small inventory means no inventory rationing and scavenger hunts. The frequent savepoints eliminate hunting for savepoints or manually bashing the quicksave key before rounding a corner. The co-op teleporting prevents losing your teammate.
It all _just works_. It's the kind of stuff that should've been in Doom 10 years ago.
There's a sticker from Unamerican.com that all game developers should remember: "DESTROY WHAT BORES YOU ON SIGHT!".
Yep. It's sad that they have to sink to reruns when there's so much good gamer content out there. Just start chucking out machinima and showing demo footage of LAN tournaments. Reruns of news shows is just retarded. At worst, do what TLC does, and show the same damn new show 30 times in one week - but don't show a news show later.
Amen. Descent could kick ass, especially now that vehicular PC games have cought on. Descent 3 was a disappointment - I found I preferred Acclaim's tacky Forsaken as a sequel.
Personally, I'd like to see them do with Descent what was done with the Quake/Unreal series - make a multiplayer-oriented title. Descent Gladiators, or something. Do the usual DM, replace CTF with Destroy Enemy Reactor, and do an Assault-style gametype based on the classic single-player maps. Maybe do a team-fortress style thing where you play as robots.
Yep. The UMD thing could've worked if a) UMD's were DVD quality, and b) the PSP came with a set of RCA jacks so you could plug it into a real video system if you wanted, so you weren't just buying a handheld version of the movie.
but it's not, so it's not working.
Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a
on
Windows 95 Turns 10
·
· Score: 1
Funny - I have never, ever heard a 'nix geek mention Apropos (have read about it before in a lengthy guide to linux). The fact that you need an obscure tool to figure out the documentation of stuff that really should be self-documenting is a bad, bad sign.
Hmmph - can you imagine how much damage a bot creating spontaneous accounts can do to the slashdot comment system? Of course, it would quickly get it's IP blocked, but still it would be an easy way to sidestep the AC karma penalty.
So yes, bots break slashdot.
Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a
on
Windows 95 Turns 10
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Hmmph. I can never understand how Linux zealots are so enamoured with cryptic command-line tools. Man pages are pretty-much opaque, and require a Man page themselves to understand. GUI materials are self-documenting - you can see what you can do with them just by looking at them. Other platforms have perfectly intelligent methods for scripting GUI objects - it's nothing inherently flawed in the paradigm.
Plus, once again, buffer overruns are a function of a particular bad implementation of programming, not OOP in general.
Personally, I think the platform I can do the best scripting in is Python. Easy, sensible help system, good tools, nice syntax, etc. But also consider things like LabView, that can make a perfectly functional programming language and GUI-and-program system just by wiring diagrams together. Apple apparently has some goregeous innovations coming in the world of user-scripting.
But meanwhile most Unix nuts are still convinced that Bash is the be-all and end-all, despite having utterly bizarre gotchas (like the recent story where someone described how having a file called -r can result in rm * having the very unexpected sideeffect of deleting recursively).
Learning to do a new task in a pure-text environment is like trying to learn how to spell a word with a dictionary - you can't look it up until you know how to spell it. Likewise, you have no idea what tool you use for a task until you already know what that tool does, and then you have to read confusing documentation of how to use it. Meanwhile, a nice GUI lets you figure it all out just from checking out the widgets.
Unfortunately, just because _one_ company decides to leave it's GUIs without any coherent standard for scripted GUI access, all most other guis make this same omission.
All I know is that the win2k "find" screen makes 10x more sense than the grep command.
AvP the comic book features (IIRC) the space Marines joining forces with red Aliens to fight the black Aliens. I can't remember how the Predators fit in.
You're confused, that's Aliens: Genocide. And they didn't join forces with the red aliens - they nuked them from orbit, allowing the black aliens to overrun the red aliens and leaving the black alien hive open for the marines to attack.
AvsP is a much better comic. No marines at all - similar to the plot of the movie, the Preds hunt aliens as a rite-of-passage hunting sport. However, in the comic, they do it on wild, pastoral worlds. The story took place on a planet called Ryushi, and what happened was an alien queen egg accidentally slipped through the screening process on the Predator breeding ship. This queen ended up infecting a herd of Rynth (farm animals) on Ryushi. Ryushi had a small human colony on it, so the alien hive ended up smack in the middle of it. The predators come, start slaughtering humans and aliens alike until their leader (seperated from his hunting party) figures out that the problem is out of hand and teams up with the humans to wipe out the aliens.
Much better comic than the "temple under the antarctic" story.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that such "re-imaginings" can end up losing more than they gain. The original was popular for a reason - there was a logic behind its bubbling to the top of the charts. The "re-imagining" often loses its successful features for new ones that may or may not fly - sort of a "feature russian roulette" - replacing tried-and-tested good gameplay with new, untested ideas that are often inferior.
Consider Doom's unpopular remake. The new gameplay is just dull and repetative. Compare v. Serious Sam and Painkiller, which applied classic Doom gameplay to modern technology.
I also disliked Ocarina of Time. Mostly because it didn't really cater to gamers like me who don't like wasting time.
Running across an empty field is not fun. Trying to figure out where my next goal is is not fun. Games are not work.
I just went back to Mario 64 where, if I didn't like a mission I could just go try a different one. Plus, there were less endless fields to cross.
I believe the phrase you're looking for is "well, they laughed at Einstein too."
To which the appropriate rebuttal is "yes, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown".
Nobody ever congratulates old-guard scientific establishments for laughing off all of the thousands of idiot theories that come their way - only for ignoring the one that actually had merit.
You couldn't see the source of shots with the sniper rifle. Face was unplayable because it was entirely just sniper-camping. So, in UT2k3, they made the sniper rifle a beam weapon so you could see where shots were coming from, and renamed it the "lightning gun". Players of course whined, because they wanted the cosmetic appeal of an old-fashioned slug-thrower instead of an energy weapon (which had been inserted for legit gameplay reasons) so in UT2k4 they reintroduced the sniper rifle. Either way, the weapons are pretty useless in the mind-bogglingly fast gameplay of UT2k3/4. The new games are far faster than classic UT, so getting headshots is only possible when the other players are not moving.
I agree. I can't help but notice that these days "innovative indie" means "It's an FPS set in WWII - but from the RUSSIAN perspective. Mindblowing, isn't it?"
All the creative stuff is happening in the Flash games right now, which are awash in a sea of suck and are only interesting if you're amused by Flash games.
SFIII was released once 2d fighters were already in decline. IIRC, it came out a little after Alpha 2. AFAIK, it was hyper-obsessed with playbalance and smooth framerates, and was mostly popular with the hardcore streetfighter fans - the normal players were disappointed with the smaller roster and non-ludicrous effects.
In the arcades, the title was just "THREE!" in giant letters, with a little sign saying "street fighter".
I hope it's 2d as well, but I disagree that there are no good 3d fighters besides SSM. PowerStone II is awesome (4 players, like SSM) and 3d. Evil Zone is very qwerky, but I love it, and it's 3d. Bushido Blade kicked ass. But yeah, the long list of Virtual Fighter and Tekken games are weak.
Hmmph. $300 Dell and a Radeon 9250. All you need. DVD burners, etc. are nice add-ons, but not necessary in a gaming box. Built-in sound is good enough, built in RAM is good enough for any game (though not usually for productivity).
You think that will stop them?
bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah!
Amen. All the planning needed before installing a desktop distro can paralize one into inactivity. Plus, no distro delivers quite the absolute "never ever edit a config file or open a commandline" complete GUI of Windows, or at least none that I've seen. It's not that I don't like the commandline, it's just that if I just want to do something _now_ and not script it forever, GUIs are just faster and easier ways to find your tools and learn to use them.
Then go shop on Ebay. You can get a pretty good provider-unlocked GSM phone for under $100 if you want to get a phone for contract-prices without getting a contract. I picked up an unlocked Motorola T725 worldphone for something like $60US. Not much on nifty features, but it's tri-band and gets great reception everywhere. I saw some old blackberries with Buy It Now prices of under $100.
No, it wasn't. Everyone knew that MOO3 was going to be a horribly overcomplex sociological simulation with a lite interface slapped onto it - the people who kept up with the news got exactly what they wanted, exactly what was promised (though the AI was a little odd before patching).
The real hugest disappointment ever was Star Control 3. New dev team just destroyed it. StarCon, the fourth game, was completely cancelled. Apparently they replaced the material with a bunch of Colony Wars stuff and made it into another Colony Wars game on the PS1.
Then there was Total Annihilation II, which was being made without Chris Taylor by a bunch of Koreans. That got canned, bu TA is getting a "spiritual successor" in the form of Taylor's "Supreme Commander" iirc.
Still, imho, the worst sequel ever was One Must Fall: BattleGrounds. Took the only good PC fighting game and turned it into the clunkiest, slowest behind view boxing game I've ever seen.
Actually, since ED2k clients usually include browser integration for ed2k links, I've seen a lot of win32 projects using ED2k for distribution instead of BT. My problem is the clients - I use Shareaza, which sucks up all my high-speed-lite bandwidth and beats my 2ghz processor into a bloody pulp when I use it, even if I'm only getting 1k/s of download. The alternative would be to use that Java-based client - but running a JVM all the time would eat half my ram.
You missed the most obvious thing: the DS is the first console with a real pointing device and a screen for each player. That means strategy games are finally feasible. I want to see all the classic RTS titles - StarCraft, Z, Total Annihilation, Metal Marines... plus, the turn-based biggies too, like Master of Magic, X-Com, and Master of Orion II.
It's different when you, the player are being insulted directly by the designer. That's just nasty.
Now, my problem is that half of those things are about annoying adventure/action games. For those of us who don't play games that are about plot and character and all that stupid window dressing, half of those don't apply. It sounds like, from his fuming, the designer shouldn't either. Ditch the wanna-be RPGs and just play some freaking Serious Sam. The plot is barely present, the motivation is minimal, the cutscenes are nothing but flyarounds of the next area. Plus, if a game is very conventional, instructions are unnecessary - Doom lacked instructions, and nodody complained.
My list is much simpler: eliminate everything that keeps me away from the gameplay. Fsck plot. Fsck loading screens - the textures didn't need to be that high-res. Fsck backtracking for ammo, health, etc. Fsck hunting for save points 'cause they're too far apart. Fsck manually hitting F9 to quicksave because there are no save points. Fsck tedious, repetative tasks.
More designers need to play Halo II's single-player campaign and notice all the details in it that remove these annoying features. The shield-regen system eliminates hunting for health. The plentiful, handy guns and small inventory means no inventory rationing and scavenger hunts. The frequent savepoints eliminate hunting for savepoints or manually bashing the quicksave key before rounding a corner. The co-op teleporting prevents losing your teammate.
It all _just works_. It's the kind of stuff that should've been in Doom 10 years ago.
There's a sticker from Unamerican.com that all game developers should remember: "DESTROY WHAT BORES YOU ON SIGHT!".
Yep. It's sad that they have to sink to reruns when there's so much good gamer content out there. Just start chucking out machinima and showing demo footage of LAN tournaments. Reruns of news shows is just retarded. At worst, do what TLC does, and show the same damn new show 30 times in one week - but don't show a news show later.
Amen. Descent could kick ass, especially now that vehicular PC games have cought on. Descent 3 was a disappointment - I found I preferred Acclaim's tacky Forsaken as a sequel.
Personally, I'd like to see them do with Descent what was done with the Quake/Unreal series - make a multiplayer-oriented title. Descent Gladiators, or something. Do the usual DM, replace CTF with Destroy Enemy Reactor, and do an Assault-style gametype based on the classic single-player maps. Maybe do a team-fortress style thing where you play as robots.
Not to mention Lucas Arts' short list of non-Star-Wars action games.
Metal Warriors. Good god, we need a new Metal Warriors. Best. Patformer. EVAR!.
And ball blazer. Ball Blazer Champions was a fantastic PS1 game marred by laggy controls.
Yep. The UMD thing could've worked if
a) UMD's were DVD quality, and
b) the PSP came with a set of RCA jacks so you could plug it into a real video system if you wanted, so you weren't just buying a handheld version of the movie.
but it's not, so it's not working.
Funny - I have never, ever heard a 'nix geek mention Apropos (have read about it before in a lengthy guide to linux). The fact that you need an obscure tool to figure out the documentation of stuff that really should be self-documenting is a bad, bad sign.
Hmmph - can you imagine how much damage a bot creating spontaneous accounts can do to the slashdot comment system? Of course, it would quickly get it's IP blocked, but still it would be an easy way to sidestep the AC karma penalty.
So yes, bots break slashdot.
Hmmph. I can never understand how Linux zealots are so enamoured with cryptic command-line tools. Man pages are pretty-much opaque, and require a Man page themselves to understand. GUI materials are self-documenting - you can see what you can do with them just by looking at them. Other platforms have perfectly intelligent methods for scripting GUI objects - it's nothing inherently flawed in the paradigm.
Plus, once again, buffer overruns are a function of a particular bad implementation of programming, not OOP in general.
Personally, I think the platform I can do the best scripting in is Python. Easy, sensible help system, good tools, nice syntax, etc. But also consider things like LabView, that can make a perfectly functional programming language and GUI-and-program system just by wiring diagrams together. Apple apparently has some goregeous innovations coming in the world of user-scripting.
But meanwhile most Unix nuts are still convinced that Bash is the be-all and end-all, despite having utterly bizarre gotchas (like the recent story where someone described how having a file called -r can result in rm * having the very unexpected sideeffect of deleting recursively).
Learning to do a new task in a pure-text environment is like trying to learn how to spell a word with a dictionary - you can't look it up until you know how to spell it. Likewise, you have no idea what tool you use for a task until you already know what that tool does, and then you have to read confusing documentation of how to use it. Meanwhile, a nice GUI lets you figure it all out just from checking out the widgets.
Unfortunately, just because _one_ company decides to leave it's GUIs without any coherent standard for scripted GUI access, all most other guis make this same omission.
All I know is that the win2k "find" screen makes 10x more sense than the grep command.
You're quite right. I use vulgarity in this case _specifically_ to make sure you remember it. And because I have an infantile sense of humour.
Sweet zombie jesus, that kicks ass. The only thing better would be StarCraft on it.
AvP the comic book features (IIRC) the space Marines joining forces with red Aliens to fight the black Aliens. I can't remember how the Predators fit in.
You're confused, that's Aliens: Genocide. And they didn't join forces with the red aliens - they nuked them from orbit, allowing the black aliens to overrun the red aliens and leaving the black alien hive open for the marines to attack.
AvsP is a much better comic. No marines at all - similar to the plot of the movie, the Preds hunt aliens as a rite-of-passage hunting sport. However, in the comic, they do it on wild, pastoral worlds. The story took place on a planet called Ryushi, and what happened was an alien queen egg accidentally slipped through the screening process on the Predator breeding ship. This queen ended up infecting a herd of Rynth (farm animals) on Ryushi. Ryushi had a small human colony on it, so the alien hive ended up smack in the middle of it. The predators come, start slaughtering humans and aliens alike until their leader (seperated from his hunting party) figures out that the problem is out of hand and teams up with the humans to wipe out the aliens.
Much better comic than the "temple under the antarctic" story.