Why do people keep mentioning compasses? How hard is it to figure out which way's which?
I mean, assuming you're on a road (we're mostly talking about driving) and you know where you are on the map (if you don't, the compass won't help you anyway), do you really need a compass to figure out which way's North?
Personally, I've never had a problem with this. The only time I might find a compass useful would be if I didn't have a map and needed to make sure I was traveling more-or-less in one direction (to hit a straight, main road or something) but that's a very bizarre and specific set of circumstances (I'd have to know which direction something was from my present location, but also not have a map and not be familiar enough with the area to find my way without the compass)
Is there some awesome compass magic you can work with them that you can't do with a map alone (bearing in mind that we're talking about driving, not being dropped in the middle of the woods)?
There's a lot of flying from one objective to another or waiting for something to happen, but the dogfights were intense, especially if you had some other objective to complete in the mean time (ID those freighters, destroy that shuttle before it reaches the star destroyer, protect that corvette, etc.) and usually you did. Any time you had to fly a mission with objectives near an enemy capital ship you knew you'd be in for some rough, fast-paced action, and without most of your commands being a keystroke (or at least a two button chord) away you'd be boned.
As for pausing the game but continuing to issue commands: first of all, I've not seen that in any game of this sort, ever. Strategy games, yes (Homeworld 2, the Total War series) but flight action/sim games? Not in any of the four Lucasarts SW-themed ones, not in Tachyon: The Fringe, not even in MS Flight Sim (though maybe you could in that one and I just didn't know it). At any rate, it'd ruin the flow IMO--it's not a tactical or strategy game, it's an action game!
That said, there might be room for something like you're talking about, maybe with the ability to hop out of your fighter while the game's paused and issue commands to your squadmates or something. Kind of like Star Trek: Legacy (except I don't think you can issue commands in that while the game's paused--god I wish you could!) but it wouldn't be X-Wing/TIE Fighter. Fun, maybe (I love Rogue Squadron, for instance) but not the same.
Uh, have you played X-Wing or TIE Fighter? Unless you crank the enemy AI down about 5 notches and reduce their number by 1/2, you need instant access to a very large number of commands if you want to succeed in them. Further, the ship "cockpits" contain a whole lot of info in very little space, and I'm not sure it would work on a TV.
This isn't a game where you can pause the action, or where it goes slow enough to let you dick around in a wheel menu. You need all shields forward now. You need to target the enemy in your crosshairs now. You need to match enemy speed now, link guns, and... FIRE!--all in a space of about 2 seconds, and while simultaneously maneuvering your fighter. 5 seconds later, you'll need all shields aft, dump some banked-up laser charge to shields, target nearest enemy that's targeting my objective, arm proton torpedoes, speed to full--and again, you've got about 2 seconds to do all this, and you've got to be pointing your ship toward the new target while you're hitting those keys.
Worse, you can't possibly be looking at menus and shit while you're doing all this, because you need to have an eye on your dual radar screens, your ship status, energy levels, etc.
I recently purchased Armored Core 4 for the 360. The combat in it is maybe, maybe half as complex as Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries, another big robot game that I used to play on the PC, which is in turn less complicated than X-Wing or TIE Fighter. Armored Core 4 struggles to fit on a controller--the most painful bit is that you can't simultaneously aim and shoot, you have to aim then shoot, and since your auto-targeting goes out all the damn time it's a pretty annoying (and deadly, at least in multiplayer) compromise in controls.
So many good multiplayer maps and single-player campaigns for that game... Tower, Drazen Isle, the Ties that Bind... Hm, I may have to install it again!
People'd get so pissed in Dark Forces: Jedi Knight when you'd force pull their weapon away then lightsaber them to death before they could do anything. Like, boot-you-from-the-server pissed. WTF? Play in a non-force-powers game then, ya jerks!
Oh, I know, I'm just saying that even my set of commonly-used keys (a smallish subset of all possible commands) was far too much to fit on a console controller, let alone an iPhone.
It's not that these keys were just available, either--the more of them you knew, the better you'd play. You had to know 50+, probably, to even have a chance of beating the game. Don't know the button to target an enemy that's attacking the ship you're escorting? Probably not gonna pass that escort mission. Don't know the "match target speed" and "target enemy in crosshairs" buttons? You're gonna get pwned when you start fighting Tie Advanced. Don't have shield management down? You'll be lucky to make it 5 missions.
The controls were those games. Simplify them much at all and you better ramp the difficulty way down, because the player won't have the tools needed to win. Kind of like Mechwarrior 2/Mech2: Mercenaries--the games are about the complex controls. Take them away and you've got a different (possibly still fun, but different) game.
I'm counting on emulators. The pure DOS games are already there, and I'd bet early Win95/Win98 games are playable in VMWare or something similar (when they're not playable in the latest MS OS, that is)
The trouble with the old games is that it uses DosBox to run them. That'd be OK, except it assumes you're using the Windows version of DosBox. There might be some way to hack it to use the Linux version, but I'm not sure.
If they were to actually translate XWing and/or Tie fighter to the iPhone using the motion sensing controls, I might actualy have to jump on the bandwagon. I havent really enjoyed a flight sim since those days.
Impossible, without completely changing the game in almost every way.
I regularly used two buttons+a paddle on my joystick just for throttle control, and there were more buttons available. Shield control? Three buttons (more existed, but I mostly used three). Energy management? I don't even remember how many buttons I used. Probably 4-5 at least.
Link/unlink guns, another button. Change active weapon, another button. Change view, another button (or several, if you used the ones to glance left and right in your cockpit). Jump to hyperspace? Another button. Target selection--Jesus, I probably used 5-6 more buttons for that, and I know I didn't use all of them.
It'd be 100% impossible to translate the game to the X-Box 360 or PS3, let alone the iPhone. You might get a game called X-Wing or Tie Fighter, but it'd play more like Rogue Squadon on the N64 (which is a good game, mind you, but it's not X-Wing/Tie Fighter/X-Wing Alliance).
Which, at least for the talkies, I don't think is insulting if they did a decent job setting up whatever compatibility mode or VM they're using.
They'll probably just use DosBox like the other Dos-era Steam games do.
I'll pick these things up for $2-$5 a pop on a bargain weekend. $10 is absurd--that's what they sold for in the bargain bin a couple years after they were released. This is many more years later, and they don't have to ship physical media. $5 is about right. Jesus, it's not like they're still trying to cover development costs on these old games--I don't think it's too much to ask that they not get greedy while taking their free money.
Sorry to hear about F2. One of my favorite games of all time. If you haven't tried it, I recommend giving the Fallout 2 Restoration Project mod a whirl.
Also, if you haven't played Arcanum, you need to. Didn't discover it 'till years after Fallout 2, but it's a very similar game engine (set the battle mode to turn-based rather than real-time--which you'll pretty much have to do if you don't want to die a whole bunch--and it's basically identical) and has a great story. Set in a fantasy/steampunk world.
Careful what you wish for--a modern version would probably be released for consoles, too, and would therefor lack the deep controls that made those games what they were. Shield (and perhaps power management in general) would probably be totally gone, for one thing.
Tachyon: The Fringe is pretty freakin' good, but it's the last good one I'm aware of.
X-Wing: Alliance is good, too--it has the X-Wing/Tie Fighter feel, unlike that (IMO) crappy X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter game. Not up to the level of the original two games, but pretty good.
So we'll do the same thing everyone does with emulators for newer gaming consoles: ship the legal emulator code and let the user torrent a pack of bios images (of course the person who posts the illegal bios images will include the emulator, too, with all the files in place and ready to go)
I don't think I'm being elitist. Console games tend to be simpler than PC games (due to the controller+TV interface, if nothing else) and consoles have very different strengths from PCs. That's fine--I like both. I play PC games but I also play Mario games, Zelda games, jRPGs, party-friendly games (like fighting games), Metal Gear Solid, etc. on consoles.
However, genres that I like have had releases that, had they been PC-only, probably would have been much, much better than they were. Some of these games would never have been made without the money from the console market so it's silly to complain about those, but many probably would have been.
A simple shorthand for this phenomenon is to say that (at least some) PC games are being "dumbed down". I consider that to be unfortunate, but don't expect it to change any time soon. That's it.
Wow, you seem really emotionally invested in this. OK, you win. I think we sort-of agree anyway.
I would like to note, just so we're clear on this, that when I said DLC I didn't mean "MODS/DOWNLOADS/PATCHES" as those things existed long before the term DLC and aren't what people usually mean by it--rather, they mean micro-content-addons and patches that must be paid for separately from the base game. I also didn't say that consoles were to blame for DLC, but listed it as a separate problem for modern gaming (IMO).
cut out the "console games are dumbing our games" crap
But... they are.
Mind you, console games are fine, but I wish more dev time were spent on true PC games. I feel that gaming as a whole is suffering a bit right now, between the shift of focus to primarily console-style games and (especially) the cancer that is DLC. In the long run it'll probably be fine, but I'd love to see what would happen with more (not all, just more) titles being aimed at the platform that brought us so many amazing, deep games.
I know it's a futile wish, but it's what thing would be like in the world in my head where we all ride unicorns that fart rainbows and shit gold. Anyway, like I said, I'm not worried about consoles killing deeper gaming long-term (hell, my recent purchase of a 360 has shown me first-hand that consoles and PCs aren't so different any more--I had to plug the fucker in to the 'net to patch it to get my sound working!)--DLC might do it, but consoles themselves won't.
IIRC, there actually was a button or three that WASN'T mapped on the PS3 controller.
How can that be? The only thing that doesn't do anything on the 360 (AFAIK) is the d-pad.
On the 360, you look with the right stick and shoot with the buttons on the face of the controller (that is, x, a, and b, while y does over-boost) which means that you're stuck with Doom 3-type frustrations when (not if) your auto-targeting gets knocked out by god-knows-what: you can aim or shoot, but not both at the same time. It becomes impossible to hit anything unless you can get it to stand in one spot and let you run right up to it.
Is it different on the PS3? I've considered moving the shoulder weapons (which are usually unguided something-or-other) and my left weapon to the shoulder (not trigger) buttons, and moving weapon switching to the two buttons those are on now, but I can't find a place to customize the control scheme.
I've only had it a day, but it seems pretty damn broken. Hope the devs saw fit to let me (try to) fix it. It's not so bad in the single player (so far) but it means that the first person to lose auto-targeting in multiplayer (which can happen very early in the fight) might as well forfeit.
Yeah, at my rate of playing through games (which is moderately quick) I think I could be satisfied playing my massive to-play back-log of console RPGs, re-playing my favorite games, and playing mods to games I like for upward of a decade before I started to really need new content.
That's not even considering the existing material in other media I'd like to get through--using movies as my sole source of entertainment, I could probably stay busy watching classics and foreign films that I haven't seen for 5+ years. Then there are books... god, I rarely even look at new books, as my list of existing ones I want to read would easily last me 15+ years (again, if that was the only form of entertainment I used--as it is, I'm not certain I'll get through the whole thing in my lifetime!)
Point is, if everyone everywhere stopped producing new media of all sorts, I'm not sure I'd even care for 25-30 years.
I recently picked up Armored Core 4 for the 360, and if I can't figure out a better way to map the buttons, I don't think I'll be playing much of it.
You've got auto-targetting (makes sense, you're in a high-tech mech thingy) but it gets knocked out all the damn time by one thing or another. You're left trying to aim and fire with the same finger (right thumb). If the the target is moving at all, you're pretty much fucked unless you get lucky. Worse, I'm not sure there's a good way to fix the problem, since the trigger buttons are very important to movement and need to be available at all times.
This would be a non-issue with a keyboard+mouse on the PC, which is where a game this complex really, really needs to be. It's got the opposite problem of the dumbed-down consolized games that end up on the PC so often recently--it's trying to be almost as complex as Mechwarrior 2 (maybe more so in it customization screens, which are also awkward with a controller) but it's just too much for the interface (360 controller) to comfortably handle.
There are literally dozens of li-ion advances working toward commercialization that can each 1.5 to 8x the density of either the anode or cathode, so regular li-ion still looks to have a lot of life in it.
Are they working on any that can retain at least half of their original capacity after a year of light use?
I dislike the huge amounts of locked content in some games, but the option to pay to unlock it seems even worse than DLC, which is already killing gaming IMO.
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Why do people keep mentioning compasses? How hard is it to figure out which way's which?
I mean, assuming you're on a road (we're mostly talking about driving) and you know where you are on the map (if you don't, the compass won't help you anyway), do you really need a compass to figure out which way's North?
Personally, I've never had a problem with this. The only time I might find a compass useful would be if I didn't have a map and needed to make sure I was traveling more-or-less in one direction (to hit a straight, main road or something) but that's a very bizarre and specific set of circumstances (I'd have to know which direction something was from my present location, but also not have a map and not be familiar enough with the area to find my way without the compass)
Is there some awesome compass magic you can work with them that you can't do with a map alone (bearing in mind that we're talking about driving, not being dropped in the middle of the woods)?
There's a lot of flying from one objective to another or waiting for something to happen, but the dogfights were intense, especially if you had some other objective to complete in the mean time (ID those freighters, destroy that shuttle before it reaches the star destroyer, protect that corvette, etc.) and usually you did. Any time you had to fly a mission with objectives near an enemy capital ship you knew you'd be in for some rough, fast-paced action, and without most of your commands being a keystroke (or at least a two button chord) away you'd be boned.
As for pausing the game but continuing to issue commands: first of all, I've not seen that in any game of this sort, ever. Strategy games, yes (Homeworld 2, the Total War series) but flight action/sim games? Not in any of the four Lucasarts SW-themed ones, not in Tachyon: The Fringe, not even in MS Flight Sim (though maybe you could in that one and I just didn't know it). At any rate, it'd ruin the flow IMO--it's not a tactical or strategy game, it's an action game!
That said, there might be room for something like you're talking about, maybe with the ability to hop out of your fighter while the game's paused and issue commands to your squadmates or something. Kind of like Star Trek: Legacy (except I don't think you can issue commands in that while the game's paused--god I wish you could!) but it wouldn't be X-Wing/TIE Fighter. Fun, maybe (I love Rogue Squadron, for instance) but not the same.
Uh, have you played X-Wing or TIE Fighter? Unless you crank the enemy AI down about 5 notches and reduce their number by 1/2, you need instant access to a very large number of commands if you want to succeed in them. Further, the ship "cockpits" contain a whole lot of info in very little space, and I'm not sure it would work on a TV.
This isn't a game where you can pause the action, or where it goes slow enough to let you dick around in a wheel menu. You need all shields forward now. You need to target the enemy in your crosshairs now. You need to match enemy speed now, link guns, and... FIRE!--all in a space of about 2 seconds, and while simultaneously maneuvering your fighter. 5 seconds later, you'll need all shields aft, dump some banked-up laser charge to shields, target nearest enemy that's targeting my objective, arm proton torpedoes, speed to full--and again, you've got about 2 seconds to do all this, and you've got to be pointing your ship toward the new target while you're hitting those keys.
Worse, you can't possibly be looking at menus and shit while you're doing all this, because you need to have an eye on your dual radar screens, your ship status, energy levels, etc.
I recently purchased Armored Core 4 for the 360. The combat in it is maybe, maybe half as complex as Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries, another big robot game that I used to play on the PC, which is in turn less complicated than X-Wing or TIE Fighter. Armored Core 4 struggles to fit on a controller--the most painful bit is that you can't simultaneously aim and shoot, you have to aim then shoot, and since your auto-targeting goes out all the damn time it's a pretty annoying (and deadly, at least in multiplayer) compromise in controls.
So many good multiplayer maps and single-player campaigns for that game... Tower, Drazen Isle, the Ties that Bind... Hm, I may have to install it again!
Didn't start with Jedi Outcast.
People'd get so pissed in Dark Forces: Jedi Knight when you'd force pull their weapon away then lightsaber them to death before they could do anything. Like, boot-you-from-the-server pissed. WTF? Play in a non-force-powers game then, ya jerks!
Oh, I know, I'm just saying that even my set of commonly-used keys (a smallish subset of all possible commands) was far too much to fit on a console controller, let alone an iPhone.
It's not that these keys were just available, either--the more of them you knew, the better you'd play. You had to know 50+, probably, to even have a chance of beating the game. Don't know the button to target an enemy that's attacking the ship you're escorting? Probably not gonna pass that escort mission. Don't know the "match target speed" and "target enemy in crosshairs" buttons? You're gonna get pwned when you start fighting Tie Advanced. Don't have shield management down? You'll be lucky to make it 5 missions.
The controls were those games. Simplify them much at all and you better ramp the difficulty way down, because the player won't have the tools needed to win. Kind of like Mechwarrior 2/Mech2: Mercenaries--the games are about the complex controls. Take them away and you've got a different (possibly still fun, but different) game.
I'm counting on emulators. The pure DOS games are already there, and I'd bet early Win95/Win98 games are playable in VMWare or something similar (when they're not playable in the latest MS OS, that is)
The trouble with the old games is that it uses DosBox to run them. That'd be OK, except it assumes you're using the Windows version of DosBox. There might be some way to hack it to use the Linux version, but I'm not sure.
Impossible, without completely changing the game in almost every way.
I regularly used two buttons+a paddle on my joystick just for throttle control, and there were more buttons available. Shield control? Three buttons (more existed, but I mostly used three). Energy management? I don't even remember how many buttons I used. Probably 4-5 at least.
Link/unlink guns, another button. Change active weapon, another button. Change view, another button (or several, if you used the ones to glance left and right in your cockpit). Jump to hyperspace? Another button. Target selection--Jesus, I probably used 5-6 more buttons for that, and I know I didn't use all of them.
It'd be 100% impossible to translate the game to the X-Box 360 or PS3, let alone the iPhone. You might get a game called X-Wing or Tie Fighter, but it'd play more like Rogue Squadon on the N64 (which is a good game, mind you, but it's not X-Wing/Tie Fighter/X-Wing Alliance).
They'll probably just use DosBox like the other Dos-era Steam games do.
I'll pick these things up for $2-$5 a pop on a bargain weekend. $10 is absurd--that's what they sold for in the bargain bin a couple years after they were released. This is many more years later, and they don't have to ship physical media. $5 is about right. Jesus, it's not like they're still trying to cover development costs on these old games--I don't think it's too much to ask that they not get greedy while taking their free money.
Steam just uses DosBox, which works great.
Sorry to hear about F2. One of my favorite games of all time. If you haven't tried it, I recommend giving the Fallout 2 Restoration Project mod a whirl.
Also, if you haven't played Arcanum, you need to. Didn't discover it 'till years after Fallout 2, but it's a very similar game engine (set the battle mode to turn-based rather than real-time--which you'll pretty much have to do if you don't want to die a whole bunch--and it's basically identical) and has a great story. Set in a fantasy/steampunk world.
Careful what you wish for--a modern version would probably be released for consoles, too, and would therefor lack the deep controls that made those games what they were. Shield (and perhaps power management in general) would probably be totally gone, for one thing.
Tachyon: The Fringe is pretty freakin' good, but it's the last good one I'm aware of.
X-Wing: Alliance is good, too--it has the X-Wing/Tie Fighter feel, unlike that (IMO) crappy X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter game. Not up to the level of the original two games, but pretty good.
This sucker's a portable smart screen big enough for two people to view comfortably.
If you can't think of a dozen awesome uses for this, you must consume very little media (or lots of it, but all alone)
So we'll do the same thing everyone does with emulators for newer gaming consoles: ship the legal emulator code and let the user torrent a pack of bios images (of course the person who posts the illegal bios images will include the emulator, too, with all the files in place and ready to go)
I don't think I'm being elitist. Console games tend to be simpler than PC games (due to the controller+TV interface, if nothing else) and consoles have very different strengths from PCs. That's fine--I like both. I play PC games but I also play Mario games, Zelda games, jRPGs, party-friendly games (like fighting games), Metal Gear Solid, etc. on consoles.
However, genres that I like have had releases that, had they been PC-only, probably would have been much, much better than they were. Some of these games would never have been made without the money from the console market so it's silly to complain about those, but many probably would have been.
A simple shorthand for this phenomenon is to say that (at least some) PC games are being "dumbed down". I consider that to be unfortunate, but don't expect it to change any time soon. That's it.
Wow, you seem really emotionally invested in this. OK, you win. I think we sort-of agree anyway.
I would like to note, just so we're clear on this, that when I said DLC I didn't mean "MODS/DOWNLOADS/PATCHES" as those things existed long before the term DLC and aren't what people usually mean by it--rather, they mean micro-content-addons and patches that must be paid for separately from the base game. I also didn't say that consoles were to blame for DLC, but listed it as a separate problem for modern gaming (IMO).
X-Wing/Tie Fighter/X-Wing Alliance for the win!
Also the Mechwarrior series.
But... they are.
Mind you, console games are fine, but I wish more dev time were spent on true PC games. I feel that gaming as a whole is suffering a bit right now, between the shift of focus to primarily console-style games and (especially) the cancer that is DLC. In the long run it'll probably be fine, but I'd love to see what would happen with more (not all, just more) titles being aimed at the platform that brought us so many amazing, deep games.
I know it's a futile wish, but it's what thing would be like in the world in my head where we all ride unicorns that fart rainbows and shit gold. Anyway, like I said, I'm not worried about consoles killing deeper gaming long-term (hell, my recent purchase of a 360 has shown me first-hand that consoles and PCs aren't so different any more--I had to plug the fucker in to the 'net to patch it to get my sound working!)--DLC might do it, but consoles themselves won't.
How can that be? The only thing that doesn't do anything on the 360 (AFAIK) is the d-pad.
On the 360, you look with the right stick and shoot with the buttons on the face of the controller (that is, x, a, and b, while y does over-boost) which means that you're stuck with Doom 3-type frustrations when (not if) your auto-targeting gets knocked out by god-knows-what: you can aim or shoot, but not both at the same time. It becomes impossible to hit anything unless you can get it to stand in one spot and let you run right up to it.
Is it different on the PS3? I've considered moving the shoulder weapons (which are usually unguided something-or-other) and my left weapon to the shoulder (not trigger) buttons, and moving weapon switching to the two buttons those are on now, but I can't find a place to customize the control scheme.
I've only had it a day, but it seems pretty damn broken. Hope the devs saw fit to let me (try to) fix it. It's not so bad in the single player (so far) but it means that the first person to lose auto-targeting in multiplayer (which can happen very early in the fight) might as well forfeit.
Yeah, at my rate of playing through games (which is moderately quick) I think I could be satisfied playing my massive to-play back-log of console RPGs, re-playing my favorite games, and playing mods to games I like for upward of a decade before I started to really need new content.
That's not even considering the existing material in other media I'd like to get through--using movies as my sole source of entertainment, I could probably stay busy watching classics and foreign films that I haven't seen for 5+ years. Then there are books... god, I rarely even look at new books, as my list of existing ones I want to read would easily last me 15+ years (again, if that was the only form of entertainment I used--as it is, I'm not certain I'll get through the whole thing in my lifetime!)
Point is, if everyone everywhere stopped producing new media of all sorts, I'm not sure I'd even care for 25-30 years.
Yeah, I tagged the story "keyboardandmouse"
I recently picked up Armored Core 4 for the 360, and if I can't figure out a better way to map the buttons, I don't think I'll be playing much of it.
You've got auto-targetting (makes sense, you're in a high-tech mech thingy) but it gets knocked out all the damn time by one thing or another. You're left trying to aim and fire with the same finger (right thumb). If the the target is moving at all, you're pretty much fucked unless you get lucky. Worse, I'm not sure there's a good way to fix the problem, since the trigger buttons are very important to movement and need to be available at all times.
This would be a non-issue with a keyboard+mouse on the PC, which is where a game this complex really, really needs to be. It's got the opposite problem of the dumbed-down consolized games that end up on the PC so often recently--it's trying to be almost as complex as Mechwarrior 2 (maybe more so in it customization screens, which are also awkward with a controller) but it's just too much for the interface (360 controller) to comfortably handle.
Are they working on any that can retain at least half of their original capacity after a year of light use?
Fucking laptop batteries. Grr...
I'm still waiting for the carbon nanotube capacitors that were supposed to replace batteries.
God, that sounds... horrible.
I dislike the huge amounts of locked content in some games, but the option to pay to unlock it seems even worse than DLC, which is already killing gaming IMO.