You won't need to buy hundreds of cards, a scanner, gameboy, and link cable to fully enjoy the game (like animal crossing, or animal forest+ as it was called in Japan).
Isn't anybody else bothered by this? When I buy a game, I want it to be stand alone. No pokemon red/blue, no GCN/GBA, no cards to scan, nothing. Extra stages as downloads are fine but don't put them online just to say the game has online features like Sega did, and make sure they STAY online.
t would be nice to find programmable ROM cartriges for the 2600.
Sorry, but the Cuttle Cart has been discontinued. I'm sure there are alternatives, though.
Another interesting idea is for some small company to develop gameboy-size atari 2600 pads with most of the games built in. Could even be incorporated into cell phones, now that I would buy.
But if we could only combine current media (an 8/16 MB compactflash card could hold every version of every game ever written for this machine) you'd have something. Especially now that Sean Kelly doesn't seem to be able to offer his carts for sale any more. Sorry.
I should really have split this to 3 different posts to max the karma benefits. Oh, well. Maybe I'll get the rest in offline karma.
The '2600 has only one line of video memory (to oversimplify the architecture). This means that you have to count clock cycles exactly and do most of your work between the last pixel of one line and the first pixel of the next, or between one frame and the next.
Bottom line: This machine is harder to program than probably anything else you've ever worked on, and not necessarily in a good way.
Even if you're interested in classic gaming, wouldn't you rather spend your own clock cycles, say, porting some classic games to your favourite current architectures? If you can really use the challenge, maybe you should study the '2600, and reverse engineer them to make sure the conversion is accurate...
Right. Remember the old digital video format, what was it called, DVD? It had regional lockout and macrovision copy prevention. A huge consumer backlash ensued and nobody bought any DVDs. The studios changed their minds pretty quickly after that one, heh. I guess we really taught them a lesson there.
Dude, we need the next gameboy/PSP to have temperature and humidity sensors so the virtual weather system in the game can match real life.
Oh, and the games should sample sounds from the speaker input, then play them back later.
---
Come on! The whole point of gaming is that you're in a DIFFERENT WORLD, one completely unrelated to the normal one. Any dependencies on real-life conditions is bad. Ask any parent whose kid stayed up late to catch the pokemon who only come out at night.
Q: Lots of gamers would like to see a sequel to NiGHTS - any chance of this happening?
Yuji Naka: Our team has about 100 team members, and from that resource we have to make the Sonics and the Phantasy Star Onlines and on top of that we have to work on the brand new titles. We get a lot of requests for titles like Burning Rangers but we just don't have the resources.
Do you have the resources?
NiGHTS: into dreams is one of the funnest, happiest games ever created, between flying around in the dream realm and the angel-like AI creatures whose music depends on how well you treat them.
Unfortunately, the title is Saturn-only, and it's split between 2 releases (the rare "demo" Christmas Nights includes many features not found in the "real" release)
All I want - and I'm not alone - is a version with:
Both NiGHTS and Xmas NiGHTS in one
The bug that makes you start levels with around 117 seconds instead of 120 fixed
Thingies to collect should be the proper color for the dream energy, not all blue
Somebody - ANYBODY - other than Lisa Hart as the narrator of the xmas story ( worst voice "talent" ever).
Is this too much to ask?
Unfortunately, with the Saturn's architecture so complex, it seems nobody can reverse-engineer the two releases and combine them into something that runs on modern hardware. Sonic Team tease and tease with references in Chu Chu Rocket and Sonic Adventure 1+2, and even a downloadable GBA "time trial" level mocking NiGHTS fans, but there's still no sequel or update.
If ever there was a plate for ambitions game coders to step up to, this is it.
here do the new ideas go if we can't have games like Viewtiful Joe, Shenmue, and Jet Grind Radio?
Jet Grind Radio, after you remove the horrible spraying can follow-the-sequence mini-game, is pretty much the same old "avoid enemies, collect items" game. Sure, the graphics are dazzling, the physics engine lets you do stuff you couldn't 10 years ago, there's 2/3 kinds of things to collect (spray cans and stuff to spray, and those "graffiti souls"), moving targets (tag the enemy gang), and racing mini-games, but nothing's really _NEW_.
Shenmue's basically an adventure, with atmoshphere to rival a movie (especially audio-wise) and a lot of stuff to do (arcade games inside the game - by the same developer!, forklift races, stuff to collect, Virtua Fighter - like fighting game, and 'press button quickly' reflex tests).
In both these cases, the games offer little innovation, but what's there is a lot of tried and tested content, with superb attention to detail. These games are not new, they're just well-crafted.
That's not to say they aren't worth your money or your time, but if you want innovation, you won't find it there. Perhaps you should be looking at either PC or GBA games, where the barrier of entry is still low enough to let a new idea in a little more frequently.
P.S. I'm probably supposed to say something about the gamecube's Animal Crossing, but I haven't played it.
eople need to get some perspective on this issue - Yes, there was a problem, but it's fixed. Trend's product base is very stable, very fast and very effective. One small problem like this is just that: small !
Agreed, it is a small problem - but it's a very funny one.
Most of us don't have that much going for us in our lives, especially after the bubble burst - can we just have some fun with this please?
It's not like they lied about what was there, did they? Maybe I'm wrong on that part. But if someone wants to go to a pay system vs free, that's their choice.
The game packaging and advertising promised online play and never mentioned either a fee or an expiration date.
Remember when they increased their prices from $0 to $9.95 a month?
The plan was 1. Sell games promising online play 2. Let people play for free for a while 3. Not make enough money 4. Start charging monthly fee 5. 95% of players don't pay 6. Other 5% don't pay as soon as they figure there's nobody left to play with 7. No need to support the servers any more 8. Profit!
If that's not asking for a class action lawsuit, I don't know what is.
Perhaps there should be a global whitelist set up, where a user signs up, and must verify their mail address, then the mail address is MD5 hashed and stored in a database.
That's how the global opt-out list should be handled - the only information it can give you is whether an address is included or not.
Plus, I think we're supposed to use SHA instead of MD5, for various cryptanalytical reasons beyond the scope of this discussion.
You know, I work for [ MPAA | RIAA | spamming operation | other unpopular industry ] and I'm worried about people becoming violent towards me and my coworkers. Perhaps we should lobby congress to prohibit any video game depicting violence towards people in my industry?
Now, once we do this, we can branch to other forms of media.
Then, we can outlaw the depiction of non-violent resistance.
This is really horrid. If I were American, I'd start writing little free cop-shooting games (browser, windows, whatever) and keep distributing them as a token of protest until the law is repealed. There's nothing there about free cop-shooting games, right?
It's nice to be able to see the episodes without the censoring we get on Sky and the BBC over here...
What censoring? I know shows from Europe are censored when they're shown in the states, and that since there are more commercials here, the euro versions of some american shows are actually longer sometimes. I never knew shows were also censored the other way around. What's missing on Sky/BBC?
I remember somebody mentioning a short scene from Babylon 5 that was missing in the UK (the Narn ambassador drawing blood from his hand, each drop symbolizing the Narn dead in the wars). Cutting this scene made no sense at all.
Any lawyers in the house? Is this type of "explanation" normal in a lawsuit? Or even necessary?
You know, his honor might not be a GTA fan. In fact, he may not even own a PS1, let alone a PS2.
If you'd like a ruling based on the technological merits, you'd better let people explain them.
Not to mention that some parents (I know this scenario is hard to imagine, but stay with me on this) may buy consoles for their kids; these people may have no idea what they do (some of them may have professional and/or personal lives) but they need to understand the issues before becoming part of this class action lawsuit.
Slashdot Mirror
Revolution X.
The only redeeming feature of this game was the moral dilemma : given the choice, would you save the members of Aerosmith?
You won't need to buy hundreds of cards, a scanner, gameboy, and link cable to fully enjoy the game (like animal crossing, or animal forest+ as it was called in Japan).
Isn't anybody else bothered by this? When I buy a game, I want it to be stand alone. No pokemon red/blue, no GCN/GBA, no cards to scan, nothing. Extra stages as downloads are fine but don't put them online just to say the game has online features like Sega did, and make sure they STAY online.
Some of the software we have now is too stubborn to let you enter anything else than a 5-digit zip code.
Somebody will have to convert all these fields to normal strings...
(though I do hope whatever system is chosen won't make use of both "0" and "O", or both "1" and "l" - let's 1earn something from 0ur mistakes).
The original runs just fine under several C64 emulators.
P.S. I heard this on NPR yesterday, so it couldn't have been today.
It's OK if the ghosts flicker. That's what ghosts do, you know.
Maybe now somebody will come up with a decent version of pacman.
Too late.
t would be nice to find programmable ROM cartriges for the 2600.
Sorry, but the Cuttle Cart has been discontinued. I'm sure there are alternatives, though.
Another interesting idea is for some small company to develop gameboy-size atari 2600 pads with most of the games built in. Could even be incorporated into cell phones, now that I would buy.
Go ahead.
But if we could only combine current media (an 8/16 MB compactflash card could hold every version of every game ever written for this machine) you'd have something. Especially now that Sean Kelly doesn't seem to be able to offer his carts for sale any more. Sorry.
I should really have split this to 3 different posts to max the karma benefits. Oh, well. Maybe I'll get the rest in offline karma.
The '2600 has only one line of video memory (to oversimplify the architecture). This means that you have to count clock cycles exactly and do most of your work between the last pixel of one line and the first pixel of the next, or between one frame and the next.
Bottom line: This machine is harder to program than probably anything else you've ever worked on, and not necessarily in a good way.
Even if you're interested in classic gaming, wouldn't you rather spend your own clock cycles, say, porting some classic games to your favourite current architectures? If you can really use the challenge, maybe you should study the '2600, and reverse engineer them to make sure the conversion is accurate...
Fair use not available? We will not buy!
Right. Remember the old digital video format, what was it called, DVD? It had regional lockout and macrovision copy prevention. A huge consumer backlash ensued and nobody bought any DVDs. The studios changed their minds pretty quickly after that one, heh. I guess we really taught them a lesson there.
Dude, we need the next gameboy/PSP to have temperature and humidity sensors so the virtual weather system in the game can match real life.
Oh, and the games should sample sounds from the speaker input, then play them back later.
---
Come on! The whole point of gaming is that you're in a DIFFERENT WORLD, one completely unrelated to the normal one. Any dependencies on real-life conditions is bad. Ask any parent whose kid stayed up late to catch the pokemon who only come out at night.
Yuji Naka: Our team has about 100 team members, and from that resource we have to make the Sonics and the Phantasy Star Onlines and on top of that we have to work on the brand new titles. We get a lot of requests for titles like Burning Rangers but we just don't have the resources.
Do you have the resources?
NiGHTS: into dreams is one of the funnest, happiest games ever created, between flying around in the dream realm and the angel-like AI creatures whose music depends on how well you treat them.
Unfortunately, the title is Saturn-only, and it's split between 2 releases (the rare "demo" Christmas Nights includes many features not found in the "real" release)
All I want - and I'm not alone - is a version with:
Is this too much to ask?
Unfortunately, with the Saturn's architecture so complex, it seems nobody can reverse-engineer the two releases and combine them into something that runs on modern hardware. Sonic Team tease and tease with references in Chu Chu Rocket and Sonic Adventure 1+2, and even a downloadable GBA "time trial" level mocking NiGHTS fans, but there's still no sequel or update.
If ever there was a plate for ambitions game coders to step up to, this is it.
here do the new ideas go if we can't have games like Viewtiful Joe, Shenmue, and Jet Grind Radio?
Jet Grind Radio, after you remove the horrible spraying can follow-the-sequence mini-game, is pretty much the same old "avoid enemies, collect items" game. Sure, the graphics are dazzling, the physics engine lets you do stuff you couldn't 10 years ago, there's 2/3 kinds of things to collect (spray cans and stuff to spray, and those "graffiti souls"), moving targets (tag the enemy gang), and racing mini-games, but nothing's really _NEW_.
Shenmue's basically an adventure, with atmoshphere to rival a movie (especially audio-wise) and a lot of stuff to do (arcade games inside the game - by the same developer!, forklift races, stuff to collect, Virtua Fighter - like fighting game, and 'press button quickly' reflex tests).
In both these cases, the games offer little innovation, but what's there is a lot of tried and tested content, with superb attention to detail. These games are not new, they're just well-crafted.
That's not to say they aren't worth your money or your time, but if you want innovation, you won't find it there. Perhaps you should be looking at either PC or GBA games, where the barrier of entry is still low enough to let a new idea in a little more frequently.
P.S. I'm probably supposed to say something about the gamecube's Animal Crossing, but I haven't played it.
P2P clients with auto-download-recommendations ( a la TiVo) become popular.
Most users of software of this type will user their entire bandwidth, making the flat-fee ISP business model a lot less attractive.
Remember Rampage
Enjoy.
eople need to get some perspective on this issue - Yes, there was a problem, but it's fixed. Trend's product base is very stable, very fast and very effective. One small problem like this is just that: small !
Agreed, it is a small problem - but it's a very funny one.
Most of us don't have that much going for us in our lives, especially after the bubble burst - can we just have some fun with this please?
Daikatana: Redemption.
It's not like they lied about what was there, did they? Maybe I'm wrong on that part. But if someone wants to go to a pay system vs free, that's their choice.
The game packaging and advertising promised online play and never mentioned either a fee or an expiration date.
Remember when they increased their prices from $0 to $9.95 a month?
The plan was
1. Sell games promising online play
2. Let people play for free for a while
3. Not make enough money
4. Start charging monthly fee
5. 95% of players don't pay
6. Other 5% don't pay as soon as they figure there's nobody left to play with
7. No need to support the servers any more
8. Profit!
If that's not asking for a class action lawsuit, I don't know what is.
Perhaps there should be a global whitelist set up, where a user signs up, and must verify their mail address, then the mail address is MD5 hashed and stored in a database.
That's how the global opt-out list should be handled - the only information it can give you is whether an address is included or not.
Plus, I think we're supposed to use SHA instead of MD5, for various cryptanalytical reasons beyond the scope of this discussion.
like civil forfeiture will only be used against those evil drug dealers. Sure, sounds like a great idea. Where do I sign up?
You know, I work for [ MPAA | RIAA | spamming operation | other unpopular industry ] and I'm worried about people becoming violent towards me and my coworkers. Perhaps we should lobby congress to prohibit any video game depicting violence towards people in my industry?
Now, once we do this, we can branch to other forms of media.
Then, we can outlaw the depiction of non-violent resistance.
This is really horrid. If I were American, I'd start writing little free cop-shooting games (browser, windows, whatever) and keep distributing them as a token of protest until the law is repealed. There's nothing there about free cop-shooting games, right?
The endings (where the fights normally are) would become a rapid succession of cuts. Perhaps that's what the poster had in mind?
Now I see the pattern.
In europe, adults believe kids should not be exposed to violence.
In the states, adults believe kids should not be exposed to sexuality.
It's nice to be able to see the episodes without the censoring we get on Sky and the BBC over here...
What censoring? I know shows from Europe are censored when they're shown in the states, and that since there are more commercials here, the euro versions of some american shows are actually longer sometimes. I never knew shows were also censored the other way around. What's missing on Sky/BBC?
I remember somebody mentioning a short scene from Babylon 5 that was missing in the UK (the Narn ambassador drawing blood from his hand, each drop symbolizing the Narn dead in the wars). Cutting this scene made no sense at all.
Any lawyers in the house? Is this type of "explanation" normal in a lawsuit? Or even necessary?
You know, his honor might not be a GTA fan. In fact, he may not even own a PS1, let alone a PS2.
If you'd like a ruling based on the technological merits, you'd better let people explain them.
Not to mention that some parents (I know this scenario is hard to imagine, but stay with me on this) may buy consoles for their kids; these people may have no idea what they do (some of them may have professional and/or personal lives) but they need to understand the issues before becoming part of this class action lawsuit.