It seems to me like the new controller is ideally suited for Zelda type games. How well all of these ideas will actually work remains to be seen though.
I should apologize a little for not being clear in my comment. Of course it's possible to do a fakey, "this motion means that" system for the game, essentially using mouse gestures to activate commands.
But beyond the initial novelty, that's not what people will want to do with the controller. To actually swordfight in a game, the game will have to have some kind of analogue between position of the controller in your hand and your character's sword on the screen. The really cool thing about the controller is that kind of thing is actually possible, and the first person to do it will probably make a mint even if his game is otherwise crap. If Zelda does it, it'll be golden. But I don't think you can just shoehorn that kind of swordfighting play into an older Zelda.
I can't see how swinging a sword using the Revolution controller can be made to work in an Ocarina of Time-style Zelda unless the game was purposely designed around the sword, which Wind Waker definitely was not.
Later Zeldas, however, could be very interesting indeed....
Given that the Japanese call Mahjongg "mahjongg", are you saying an entire race of people is wrong?
If they all call the game created long ago at Activision that involves mahjonng tiles "mahjongg", then yes I'm saying an entire race of people is wrong.
But they don't. The tiles were first used in a different game, and as far as I can tell Shanghai was where the game was created. The game was originally a computer game, and the text on the box sure as hell didn't say "Shanghai solitaire."
I don't agree with you, I don't think it's obvious that you need to be able to move and shoot at the same time. I think they made a creative decision to disallow that feature, knowing it wasn't realistic, yet they did it anyway. I think the game works a bit better because of it, since it increases the chance you can get snuck up on, and aiming all your shots also means more headshots, which also helps you out with the low ammo supplies.
That said, your attitude is interesting. You assume that the ability to move and fire at once automatically makes a game better. Why?
Er, you must have watched a different Captain N. The one that I remember watching, if someone else had it on and I was forced to observe through the thin slivers of light that made it through the fingers covering my eyes, was awful.
Not that the Super Mario Bros. cartoons were any different of course. And the Zelda cartoon was also pretty bad.
Actually, the only good video game cartoon I can remember was Earthworm Jim, which was actually quite brilliant in places.
But when you're talking about games which are based on simplified, yet ingenious, play mechanics, a good number of which I count among my favorites, your argument breaks down. There is actually a world of difference, for example, between Bust-A-Move, aka Puzzle Bobble, and Columns, far more than your dismissive statement suggests. Columns has quite a bit more in common with Tetris, but there's substantial differences even in that. But if you want to look at it broadly enough, all these games have a similar, "continual play until successive mistakes end the game" structure. I still wouldn't say they're similar enough to be functionally identical, indeed each of these games' variations on the rules are sufficent to mark them as separate games, and playing 30 minutes of Tetris would not satisfy any particular Puzzle Bobble jones I might have.
BUT, there has long been a cottage industry of shareware games, upon the foundation of which this Flash game industry has been built, that exists mostly as a series of clones of prior games. How many versions of Breakout have we seen? Unlike the differences between Puzzle Bobble and Columns, different board designs, special blocks and the addition of sporadic powerups do not mark it as a separate game. Now, how many versions of Tetris have we seen in which gameplay was not sufficently varied? Okay, how many versions of Asteroids has there been? How about Shanghai (which most places misname Mahjonng)? Sokoban? SameGame?
It's possible to make games sufficently different from each of these things that retain the same basic mechanic, but most of the developers behind them care more about the dollars they can make copying someone else's idea than the game themselves. This usually takes the form of adding powerups and different boards into it (especially with the many Breakout and Asteroids cloners). Sometimes they're not even aware of the true origin of a game, but are themselves copying a copy (see: Arkanoid). Usually the quality of their implementation betrays their real motivation, but that's beside the point. There is still an important difference here between these shareware knockoff artists and people who actually try to make something different.
I don't know. The problem with most of the Visual Pinball tables I've seen is that they're just too easy.
For example: after months of obsessive play on an arcade Attack From Mars table, I finally managed to reach Rule The Universe, the ultimate wizard mode that comes from doing everything else in one game, a single time. On the Visual Pinball recreation, it wasn't too long before I was able to Rule the Universe three times in one game. Other VP tables I've seen have been comparable.
Yeah, it's a shame that most video pinball games simply aren't very good.
The best video pinball attempts to simulate real-world physics without adding things that would be impossible in real life. Real pinball is cool because it's real, not because it's got goombas roaming the board you can hit with the ball. Pinball is cool because it's one table is rich enough with targets and rules that it doesn't matter that you can't go into "bonus levels" or other areas within the game.
I will say that Metroid Prime Pinball, although it does have alternate tables and the like, is fairly interesting because it's got good ball physics and most (though not all) of its video hazards at least work like actual mechanical pinball elements. But there are still some fairly lame things about it, like losing balls from hazards other than draining out.
All this said, I have to say that I'm really looking forward to Odama, almost as much as the next Zelda. Not because it simulates real pinball to any degree, but because it actually looks like it's trying something completely different with the old concepts instead of going halfway.
Back in the N64 days, a couple Nintendo websites reported that a playable simulation of the most popular pinball table of all time (and for good reason), Addams Family, was in the works. Word was that it was even spotted behind the scenes at an E3. I was very eagerly awaiting it... but for one reason or another, it never appeared.
Other than that, I don't know anything about it. Rare, back in the NES/Gameboy days, produced a small number of video adaptations of Bally/Williams pinball tables that remain among the better examples of the genre we've seen, but I haven't heard that they were behind it.
Why was it cancelled? If it's about a perceived non-viability of video pinball, then how come Nintendo and Sega keep releasing video pinball games even now? (On GBA we've seen Mario Pinball, Sonic Pinball Party and Pinball of the Dead, DS has the surprisingly well-made Metroid Prime Pinball, and of course there's the upcoming Odama for Gamecube.) And if there's any real-world pinball table that would sell in video form it would be Addams Family.
My guess is the game got tied up in rights issues, since the arcade machine was based off of a movie that was in turn based off a series of comic drawings. Among the makers of the table, the producers of the movie, and whoever owns the rights to the characters, all it needed was one person to veto the project, and I guess veto it they did.
Robot Chicken's pretty good (and Venture Bros. is awesome) but I tend to think Adult Swim's Flash shows are overrated. You can only take that kind of absurdist comedy so far, and some of them (12 Oz. Mouse) are actually painful to watch. I wonder if anyone will remember them in ten years, as there's a good chance that once the novelty's worn off, they'll go downhill fast.
But I'm pretty stoked about the prospect of Futurama returning.
I don't see anyone but the most die-hard Banjo-Kazooie fans buying an X-Box 360 just to revisit the platformer.
Yeah, I think the series actually peaked in the original Banjo-Kazooie. The later levels in Banjo-Tooie were actually too large to conceptualize well without more ways to orient the player, and adding in intra-level transport didn't help the situation much. The original BK's levels were just the right size -- it could have just used more of them, and it already had a lot.
(It could also have come through on the infamous "Stop N Swop" feature. I never quite forgave Rare for leading us on in that movie at the very end of Banjo-Kazooie.)
I'm like that too. I bought the two Might and Magic Xeen games years ago, but now my floppies are scattered around my belongings and probably half of 'em are bad now anyway, so I don't have a problem with downloading the games from elsewhere.
One of these days I'm going to have to download an ISO of Tactics Ogre, since my original copy was destroyed in the unfortunate Sitting On It incident of 1998....
Yep, to be clear about this, I made up the 5% figure. The article I replied to said just that the majority were't defective though, which in mind implies that 49.9~ could be defective and there still wouldn't be a problem.
Of course, he probably didn't mean it like that himself. I just wanted to clarify that you can have failure rates far, far away from 50% and still have major problems.
What about posting a story about the majority of Xbox 360 users that don't have any problems, instead of the (vocal) small percentage who do? Or maybe a story about the fast turnaround time of Xbox 360 tech support? (5-7 days for a brand new / fixed console, for a friend of mine)
I can honestly say that I have not had a single problem since I got my Xbox 360 on release day. (I am waiting on some games to push the hardware to its max, but that's a separate issue.)
So, until it happens to you, the problem doesn't exist?
I've heard about the scratching problem on X-Box 360s from more places than this article. If a "majority" are okay, it doesn't mean it's not a problem. If any systems are scratching disks then it's a risk. The question is, is it an *acceptable* disk? If just 5% of X-box 360s scratched disks so they became unplayable, then that's bad enough that Microsoft deserves more than just a black eye for it.
Microsoft needs to acknowledge the problem, issue a statement on it, and offer to replace any affected X-box 360s *and games* with a minimum of fuss. The systems should be under warrenty at the moment so that shouldn't be a problem right now, but what about the games affected? And what if the problem only shows up after the system is out of the warrenty period?
Didn't some rumors like this start floating around, something about failing optical drives, when the PS2 was released?
When you install a game to your hard drive, that usually takes a while. It fills up a good chunk of space, especially with some games. Then, you start playing, and just when it starts getting good, [TIME LIMIT EXCEEDED PLUNK DOWN CASH FOR MORE]. Then you have to buy it or uninstall it, which also takes a while, and unless the uninstaller is very well made can leave cruft in your registry.
At this point, the player is usually pretty pissed at the short period of the demo. So it would really help if the game cost, say, five dollars less?
The games I see here go for between $17 to $30, with most in the $20-25 range. The way I see it is, these games' prices are approaching, but are not QUITE at the point yet, where they're more compelling than commercial titles for their prices.
Honestly, I would love to be able to buy the lot of these things for $60 or even $70, then I'd be able to just download the lot of them and explore 'em at my leisure, but instead it'd probably be more like $240. Most of the games here are the sort that encourage play and exploration rather than dominating your free time for weeks, so that makes a kind of sense -- you don't buy them to experience a world, you buy them to play.
That's GOOD, I enjoy play-type games a lot more especially as commercial games slowly tune themselves into the NASCAR and Brittany Spears "wow that looks cool" wavelength that I find anathema (no, I don't AT ALL care that your character has a chain weapon called "the Daggertail"), but play is not something most people can bring themselves to shell out that kind of money for unless its fairly easy to get and extract. Which I think harms games that expect the same kind of install as Mr. Big Budget Commercial Release.
As proof of my premise, I present to you the phenomenon of the Flash game. Doesn't take forever to install, doesn't usually suck your soul out through the computer monitor, usually cheap or free, and they're becoming huge. That's what indie gaming needs, to be huge, huge enough that people don't think buying something that amounts entirely to bits with no physical media over the Internet is overpriced.
Sure, there are some games which definitely don't live up to the memories, but then there are a good number that do. I'd much rather play Rampart, Robotron 2084, ToeJam & Earl, ZANAC or the original Legend of Zelda than, say, God of War.
Slashdot Mirror
You're a special flavor of awful when your film compares unfavorably to an Underworld movie.
It seems to me like the new controller is ideally suited for Zelda type games. How well all of these ideas will actually work remains to be seen though.
I should apologize a little for not being clear in my comment. Of course it's possible to do a fakey, "this motion means that" system for the game, essentially using mouse gestures to activate commands.
But beyond the initial novelty, that's not what people will want to do with the controller. To actually swordfight in a game, the game will have to have some kind of analogue between position of the controller in your hand and your character's sword on the screen. The really cool thing about the controller is that kind of thing is actually possible, and the first person to do it will probably make a mint even if his game is otherwise crap. If Zelda does it, it'll be golden. But I don't think you can just shoehorn that kind of swordfighting play into an older Zelda.
I can't see how swinging a sword using the Revolution controller can be made to work in an Ocarina of Time-style Zelda unless the game was purposely designed around the sword, which Wind Waker definitely was not.
Later Zeldas, however, could be very interesting indeed....
Given that the Japanese call Mahjongg "mahjongg", are you saying an entire race of people is wrong?
If they all call the game created long ago at Activision that involves mahjonng tiles "mahjongg", then yes I'm saying an entire race of people is wrong.
But they don't. The tiles were first used in a different game, and as far as I can tell Shanghai was where the game was created. The game was originally a computer game, and the text on the box sure as hell didn't say "Shanghai solitaire."
So there.
I don't agree with you, I don't think it's obvious that you need to be able to move and shoot at the same time. I think they made a creative decision to disallow that feature, knowing it wasn't realistic, yet they did it anyway. I think the game works a bit better because of it, since it increases the chance you can get snuck up on, and aiming all your shots also means more headshots, which also helps you out with the low ammo supplies.
That said, your attitude is interesting. You assume that the ability to move and fire at once automatically makes a game better. Why?
Er, you must have watched a different Captain N. The one that I remember watching, if someone else had it on and I was forced to observe through the thin slivers of light that made it through the fingers covering my eyes, was awful.
Not that the Super Mario Bros. cartoons were any different of course. And the Zelda cartoon was also pretty bad.
Actually, the only good video game cartoon I can remember was Earthworm Jim, which was actually quite brilliant in places.
But when you're talking about games which are based on simplified, yet ingenious, play mechanics, a good number of which I count among my favorites, your argument breaks down. There is actually a world of difference, for example, between Bust-A-Move, aka Puzzle Bobble, and Columns, far more than your dismissive statement suggests. Columns has quite a bit more in common with Tetris, but there's substantial differences even in that. But if you want to look at it broadly enough, all these games have a similar, "continual play until successive mistakes end the game" structure. I still wouldn't say they're similar enough to be functionally identical, indeed each of these games' variations on the rules are sufficent to mark them as separate games, and playing 30 minutes of Tetris would not satisfy any particular Puzzle Bobble jones I might have.
BUT, there has long been a cottage industry of shareware games, upon the foundation of which this Flash game industry has been built, that exists mostly as a series of clones of prior games. How many versions of Breakout have we seen? Unlike the differences between Puzzle Bobble and Columns, different board designs, special blocks and the addition of sporadic powerups do not mark it as a separate game. Now, how many versions of Tetris have we seen in which gameplay was not sufficently varied? Okay, how many versions of Asteroids has there been? How about Shanghai (which most places misname Mahjonng)? Sokoban? SameGame?
It's possible to make games sufficently different from each of these things that retain the same basic mechanic, but most of the developers behind them care more about the dollars they can make copying someone else's idea than the game themselves. This usually takes the form of adding powerups and different boards into it (especially with the many Breakout and Asteroids cloners). Sometimes they're not even aware of the true origin of a game, but are themselves copying a copy (see: Arkanoid). Usually the quality of their implementation betrays their real motivation, but that's beside the point. There is still an important difference here between these shareware knockoff artists and people who actually try to make something different.
I don't know. The problem with most of the Visual Pinball tables I've seen is that they're just too easy.
For example: after months of obsessive play on an arcade Attack From Mars table, I finally managed to reach Rule The Universe, the ultimate wizard mode that comes from doing everything else in one game, a single time. On the Visual Pinball recreation, it wasn't too long before I was able to Rule the Universe three times in one game. Other VP tables I've seen have been comparable.
Apparently, there's still demand. :)
Yeah, it's a shame that most video pinball games simply aren't very good.
The best video pinball attempts to simulate real-world physics without adding things that would be impossible in real life. Real pinball is cool because it's real, not because it's got goombas roaming the board you can hit with the ball. Pinball is cool because it's one table is rich enough with targets and rules that it doesn't matter that you can't go into "bonus levels" or other areas within the game.
I will say that Metroid Prime Pinball, although it does have alternate tables and the like, is fairly interesting because it's got good ball physics and most (though not all) of its video hazards at least work like actual mechanical pinball elements. But there are still some fairly lame things about it, like losing balls from hazards other than draining out.
All this said, I have to say that I'm really looking forward to Odama, almost as much as the next Zelda. Not because it simulates real pinball to any degree, but because it actually looks like it's trying something completely different with the old concepts instead of going halfway.
Back in the N64 days, a couple Nintendo websites reported that a playable simulation of the most popular pinball table of all time (and for good reason), Addams Family, was in the works. Word was that it was even spotted behind the scenes at an E3. I was very eagerly awaiting it... but for one reason or another, it never appeared.
Other than that, I don't know anything about it. Rare, back in the NES/Gameboy days, produced a small number of video adaptations of Bally/Williams pinball tables that remain among the better examples of the genre we've seen, but I haven't heard that they were behind it.
Why was it cancelled? If it's about a perceived non-viability of video pinball, then how come Nintendo and Sega keep releasing video pinball games even now? (On GBA we've seen Mario Pinball, Sonic Pinball Party and Pinball of the Dead, DS has the surprisingly well-made Metroid Prime Pinball, and of course there's the upcoming Odama for Gamecube.) And if there's any real-world pinball table that would sell in video form it would be Addams Family.
My guess is the game got tied up in rights issues, since the arcade machine was based off of a movie that was in turn based off a series of comic drawings. Among the makers of the table, the producers of the movie, and whoever owns the rights to the characters, all it needed was one person to veto the project, and I guess veto it they did.
Robot Chicken's pretty good (and Venture Bros. is awesome) but I tend to think Adult Swim's Flash shows are overrated. You can only take that kind of absurdist comedy so far, and some of them (12 Oz. Mouse) are actually painful to watch. I wonder if anyone will remember them in ten years, as there's a good chance that once the novelty's worn off, they'll go downhill fast.
But I'm pretty stoked about the prospect of Futurama returning.
It's always had high ratings!
Ah, but that's why I said "think." It's indeed possible the game's better than I think it'll be. I'll give it a shot sometime.
One mistake in the manual: the robots themselves were the Robotrons. You're just a human with mutant blasting powers.
I looked at a screenshot of the game. I read a description of the game.
I think I like the name more than I think I'll like the game.
Try Robotron 4096.
God, I love that name.
I don't see anyone but the most die-hard Banjo-Kazooie fans buying an X-Box 360 just to revisit the platformer.
Yeah, I think the series actually peaked in the original Banjo-Kazooie. The later levels in Banjo-Tooie were actually too large to conceptualize well without more ways to orient the player, and adding in intra-level transport didn't help the situation much. The original BK's levels were just the right size -- it could have just used more of them, and it already had a lot.
(It could also have come through on the infamous "Stop N Swop" feature. I never quite forgave Rare for leading us on in that movie at the very end of Banjo-Kazooie.)
I'm like that too. I bought the two Might and Magic Xeen games years ago, but now my floppies are scattered around my belongings and probably half of 'em are bad now anyway, so I don't have a problem with downloading the games from elsewhere.
One of these days I'm going to have to download an ISO of Tactics Ogre, since my original copy was destroyed in the unfortunate Sitting On It incident of 1998....
Yep, to be clear about this, I made up the 5% figure. The article I replied to said just that the majority were't defective though, which in mind implies that 49.9~ could be defective and there still wouldn't be a problem.
Of course, he probably didn't mean it like that himself. I just wanted to clarify that you can have failure rates far, far away from 50% and still have major problems.
In these days everyone is looking for any reason to bash the giant.
There certainly are good reasons to bash Microsoft.
What about posting a story about the majority of Xbox 360 users that don't have any problems, instead of the (vocal) small percentage who do? Or maybe a story about the fast turnaround time of Xbox 360 tech support? (5-7 days for a brand new / fixed console, for a friend of mine)
I can honestly say that I have not had a single problem since I got my Xbox 360 on release day. (I am waiting on some games to push the hardware to its max, but that's a separate issue.)
So, until it happens to you, the problem doesn't exist?
I've heard about the scratching problem on X-Box 360s from more places than this article. If a "majority" are okay, it doesn't mean it's not a problem. If any systems are scratching disks then it's a risk. The question is, is it an *acceptable* disk? If just 5% of X-box 360s scratched disks so they became unplayable, then that's bad enough that Microsoft deserves more than just a black eye for it.
Microsoft needs to acknowledge the problem, issue a statement on it, and offer to replace any affected X-box 360s *and games* with a minimum of fuss. The systems should be under warrenty at the moment so that shouldn't be a problem right now, but what about the games affected? And what if the problem only shows up after the system is out of the warrenty period?
Didn't some rumors like this start floating around, something about failing optical drives, when the PS2 was released?
Okay, here's the thing.
When you install a game to your hard drive, that usually takes a while. It fills up a good chunk of space, especially with some games. Then, you start playing, and just when it starts getting good, [TIME LIMIT EXCEEDED PLUNK DOWN CASH FOR MORE]. Then you have to buy it or uninstall it, which also takes a while, and unless the uninstaller is very well made can leave cruft in your registry.
At this point, the player is usually pretty pissed at the short period of the demo. So it would really help if the game cost, say, five dollars less?
The games I see here go for between $17 to $30, with most in the $20-25 range. The way I see it is, these games' prices are approaching, but are not QUITE at the point yet, where they're more compelling than commercial titles for their prices.
Honestly, I would love to be able to buy the lot of these things for $60 or even $70, then I'd be able to just download the lot of them and explore 'em at my leisure, but instead it'd probably be more like $240. Most of the games here are the sort that encourage play and exploration rather than dominating your free time for weeks, so that makes a kind of sense -- you don't buy them to experience a world, you buy them to play.
That's GOOD, I enjoy play-type games a lot more especially as commercial games slowly tune themselves into the NASCAR and Brittany Spears "wow that looks cool" wavelength that I find anathema (no, I don't AT ALL care that your character has a chain weapon called "the Daggertail"), but play is not something most people can bring themselves to shell out that kind of money for unless its fairly easy to get and extract. Which I think harms games that expect the same kind of install as Mr. Big Budget Commercial Release.
As proof of my premise, I present to you the phenomenon of the Flash game. Doesn't take forever to install, doesn't usually suck your soul out through the computer monitor, usually cheap or free, and they're becoming huge. That's what indie gaming needs, to be huge, huge enough that people don't think buying something that amounts entirely to bits with no physical media over the Internet is overpriced.
An' that's my show-and-tell report for today.
(Greeting cries of the American Nerd.)
Angband? Angband Angband! angangangBAND Angband Angband! (beats chest)
Nethack! NETHACKHACK Nethack! NetHACK! (makes threatening gesture with found stick)
Angband! Angband! (slinks off into woods)
NetnetHACKnet. Nethack. (sits in clearing, preens, looks in vain for females)
(another approaches) Er... Diablo?
(Nethack becomes enraged, Angband returns from woods, and the two team up to rip the third to deserving shreds)
Oh for the love of...!
Don't you think your reaction was a *little* overstated? Calling his comment zealotry hardly seems called for concerning the tone of his post....
Oh, and for the record, last year's prominent placer Hamster Ball Gold is more or less a ripoff of Super Monkey Ball.
Nope, I'm sorry but you are not exactly correct.
Sure, there are some games which definitely don't live up to the memories, but then there are a good number that do. I'd much rather play Rampart, Robotron 2084, ToeJam & Earl, ZANAC or the original Legend of Zelda than, say, God of War.
Wow. The "bandwidth exceeded" message identifies the host's web services.
Talk about reverse advertising! I don't think I'd go with a place that folded so readily!