If I can't get around to playing a game, it's usually because I'm not really all that interested in it.
Metroid Fusion sat by my Gamecube Player unfinished for a long time. On the other hand, Metroid Zero Mission got finished the day I got it.
This isn't really a rant (this time at least) about the declining quality of games. It's a rant about rising expectations and the desire to play something _new_. Grand Theft Auto II was new, something that had never really been done before. Sure it was Zelda-like, but it did really neat previously-unseen things with the concept. Wind Waker's vast explorable ocean was like that, in that there was just so much space to investigate, and enough in it to keep it interesting. More interesting, to me anyway, than the dungeons.
But the great majority of games aren't created with an eye towards presenting a new experience first and setting second. Game designers that make games in the current climate don't say to themselves, "Let's make a game in which the player explores a great non-linear environment, in which key elements are randomized in each play, and players get rewarded for rapid advancement." Instead, what gets asked is more like, "Let's make a game in which you're a soldier who has to fight werewolves."
Some people might get themselves more jazzed up to work on the latter, but to make something great, you have to think like the former.
Not many theories describe the physical phenomena they claim to represent exactly, to infinite decimal points.
Wasn't Newtonian physics good enough for a long time? No doubt someday we'll get something that replaces Relativity, or more accurately, refines it to explain those small observed differences. That's not a bad thing; indeed, just as relativity opened up all kinds of new applications such as nuclear power, a more precise understanding of the universe could give us untold new power.
(Note: by "us," I mean the gigantic monied interests that will probably lock up whatever inventions they create using this new science with obnoxious patents, and other means to keep it in their pockets for as long as possible. Us as in humanity, not us as in you and me.)
Allow me to briefly commemerate this weird comment of mine, my first bona-fide voting irregularity. Some of my comments get voted up. Once in a while they get voted down. Never before has one been voted up three times (2x Insightful, 1x Interesting) and voted down twice (2x Flamebait).
I still don't get it. Neither the voting confusion nor the reason for the story. Could someone please stay their downvoting hand in order to clue me in?
This is a story? It's just another typical big company promotional speech. I mean, I love Nintendo more than the average gamer, but I still fail to see how is this news.
Why are people chortling derisively at the guy? It's just marketspeak. I hate it as much as anyone, but why single out this guy? While the "crackberry" line isn't sterling wit, no one would be paying it any attention if it weren't for that previous speech. It even makes sense when viewed in context with the rest of his talk.
How often do we get rabid fanboys shouting "I only play Nintendo/Sony/Nintendo/X-Box/Nintendo/iD/Nintendo games because they're the only people who innovate"?
Oh-ho, that stung.
But this kind of dismissive phrase isn't really accurate. Nintendo does innovate, to a much greater degree than most software companies. They are not the only innovators (I still don't regret buying my Dreamcast on release day) but Nintendo *does* innovate, a great deal, more than any other first-party, more than any other top-rank software company, and this perception bleeds out from the edges of the standard fanboy profile too much to be dismissed so easily.
That having been said, Fable looks interesting enough that I just may regret selling my X-Box. Molyneux is seriously cool, and for the record I'm one of those people who bought Black & White, and enjoyed it almost through to the end of the third level.
I'll probably figure out a way to at least try Fable out, but I'm sufficently low on dough right now that I probably won't be buying one to play it.
I agree that I don't think the Official Campaign, which I've heard people just fall over themselves raving about, is really all that great. But I'd also say that you shouldn't discount the D&D franchise.
There's still something intrinsically *cool* about the fact that, under the hood, a lot of the math in NWN is 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons, it lends the game an air of authenticity.
In analyzing the gameplay of a computer RPG, the biggest thing to keep in mind is that the numbers are all arbitrary. The same basic concepts and mechanisms have all been reimplemented dozens of times in countless games. Everything from Dungeons and Dragons to Wizardry to Might and Magic to Final Fantasy and beyond are all, on some level, reimplementations of the same thing.
But D&D has the advantage of being directly translatable to real-world players, and Neverwinter Nights was the first game, of ALL the D&D tie-in games going back to gold-box, to get the mixture of pencil-and-paper and computer RPG modes mixed right, to be a "general-purpose" D&D game. Dungeons and Dragons has had so many people think about it over the decades it's been available, had so many adventures written, monsters made, magic items created, campaign settings made, that it's very difficult to create, out of your own head, something comparable in complexity. Even if you just take 3rd edition all by itself, D&D's still an infinitely richer game environment than just about anything else out there on computer.
That's what attracted me to NWN. I played a little of the official campaign before I tossed it out, and got down to the "real" game, making my module Neverogue, which hasn't achieved even a hundredth of the popularity of your modules.
But I still like it, and that's what Neverwinter Nights, at the core, really is to me, and what puts it above things like Morrowind and Dungeon Siege, which each contain their own content creation tools: a system for making D&D adventures for online play. I consider the game itself to be the content creation tools. It's a lot more fun looking through all the options, deciding on what should go into the game, designing maps, creating encounters, even writing scripts, than actually playing it.
It was buggy, left out key elements of the design (like tie-breaking in favor of trailing players), had worse music, was implemented badly, had worse graphics than the old computer versions, and had many other problems.
The NES version was my introduction to the game. I liked it, the design shone through regardless of its implementation issues, but it took playing the Atari 800 version that got me *really* interested in the game.
I've beaten it, heh. I've even beaten TGL mode (all the shooter sections without the Zelda-like areas). While there's certainly some tough bosses in The Guardian Legend, the game certainly needs every one of its infinite continues, it's not as hard as ZANAC, the Zelda-free spiritual predecessor of that game by the same guys.
Oh MAN. My hat off to you sir, you're right on all points except EOS, and that's only because, shamefully, I've never heard of it before, I have no doubt it's excellent as well. I'm gonna have to look that one up.
I'd almost forgotten completely about Neuromancer. It looks exactly like a Maniac Mansion-era Lucasfilm Games game, but I don't think it's covered by the various SCUMM emulators.
Sky Kid I've always liked, a great deal, but I always figured it was one of those guilty-pleasure things. (For example, I've beaten NES Athena, which is about as guilty as you can get.) There's an arcade version of this that's even cooler.
QIX is highly original, especially the year of its (arcade) release. Perhaps the first game to really make full use of a framebuffer.
Here I am trying to avoid blabbing off about old video and computer games, trying my best not to look like a total geek, and then Slashdot goes and posts a story that there's no way in hell I can avoid replying to, practically begging me to waste half an hour talking about all the great, old, forgotten games that litter our flea markets and clog up eBay search results.
Aren't the answers to this one obvious by now? Let's get this over with as quickly as possible. I'll just hit the highlights, honest. I'll even leave out the obvious answers (Zeldas, Metroids, Marios and Sonics)
Rampart The emulated version in Midway Arcade Treasures is best if you don't have an actual arcade machine. The SNES version, while different in lots of ways, is also great, as is the PC version (available on Home of the Underdogs).
M.U.L.E. How many times have I talked my fool mouth off about this thing? It's just the best multiplayer computer game of all time, period. If you have enough mojo you can even play it, with four players, full-speed on an unmodded Dreamcast... or an Atari 800, if anyone remembers that far back.
Nethack and Rogue I'm not trying to karma-whore I swear, despite the fact that almost any Nethack-related story is sure to make Slashdot's front page. These days Nethack seems to not qualify for "forgotten" status as much as previously. But lately I've come to a new level of appreciation for Rogue, which continues to surprise me with how much fun I have playing it, after almost twenty years, despite its tremendous difficulty. I finally had my first "winner" game last week! Rogue is starting to edge out Nethack in my estimation.
Some quickies (in case you're at a flea market and want to separate the chaff from the wheat, remember folks downloading ROMs is evil and wrong. Evil and wrong! You don't want to be evil and wrong... do you?): Overlooked NES games: The Adventures of Lolo I-III, Air Fortress, Blaster Master, Bomberman II, Cobra Triangle, Goonies, The Guardian Legend, Rare's pinball emulations: High Speed and Pinbot, Life Force, R.C. Pro Am, Solar Jetman, Solomon's Key, Wizards & Warriors (the first one, not the sequels) and last, but NOT least by any means, ZANAC.
Overlooked SNES: ActRaiser, EarthBound, King Arthur's World, Kirby Superstar, Kirby's Dream Course, Spindizzy Worlds, Ogre Battle (yes, I consider it overlooked), Q*Bert 3 (awesome music, arguably better than the arcade game), and Uniracers.
Overlooked Genesis: Flicky, General Chaos, Herzog Zwei, Kid Chameleon, King's Bounty (woefully under appreciated), Junction, Starflight (the game's much more accessable on the Genesis than PC), the Thunderforce series, ToeJam & Earl (!), Todd's Adventures in Slime World (better on the Lynx with eight players, but honestly, who knows either people all with Lynxes and copies of the same game these days?), Zany Golf and Zoom (both these last ones originally for the Amiga).
The sensation of seeing the Martian landscape with your own two eyes, the pride of making red dust angels in your spacesuit, the feeling of looking up into the sky and seeing two tiny moons instead of one large one, the awe of seeing Olympus Mons looming over the horizon, these examples are all for Mars for example but they apply for just about any planet or moon we can actually walk on.
And let's not forget having to design a new space probe every time you want to investigate anything about the Martian surface you didn't think you'd want to look at the last time a probe was sent. I'd think a reasonably intelligent scientist sent along with a variety of general-purpose tools could learn about Mars than Viking ever did. Imagine what an unreasonably-intelligent scientist could learn?
Of course adventure's an important consideration. There are precious few frontiers left, which is part of the reason so many young people play video games these days. Wanting to be an astronaut when you're six seemed a lot more fun when space was seen more about exploring new worlds than moving satellites in and out of the shuttle bay.
I'm surprised I haven't heard many people talk about the problems with our society caused by those young people with traits that two hundred years ago would be seen as admirable and necessary in certain places, who are now causing violence and resorting to recreational drug use.
The article says that Super Mario 64 is widely pointed-at as a near-perfect example of a game camera. I have to disagree.
Someone else here has already pointed to what happens when the camera decides to pan when crossing a narrow beam. Since the controls are tied to the camera, you have to match the direction you're pressing to the camera's motion so Mario doesn't end up falling to oblivion.
But I don't think that having the controls relative to the camera viewpoint is necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it's the control method closest to "fixed" camera games, back in the days before 3D engines, where there was never any confusion about what press will do what because the camera couldn't move.
I call this the "direct" method of 3D control, because if the player wants to go "up" (really forward) on the screen, he presses up on the stick, and ditto the other directions, with no mental translations or opportunities for dyslexia to get left and right mixed up.
The other, scheme for "soft" 3rd person cameras, used in the likes of Resident Evil, I liken to the old arcade game Asteroids: you have rotate left and right controls, and you have a "thrust" control. Few people remember it these days, but it took some players a bit of adjusting to get used to that.
I think both cameras have their places (though the Asteroids-like scheme is rarely used well except in vehicular games). I seem to be alone, actually, in liking Mario Sunshine's system, which devotes one entire analog stick to the camera. I'd make terrifying jumps in those infamous Void levels and maneuver the camera on the fly to keep everything in perspective, making my friends gasp in amazement (when they weren't being motion sick).
But then again I tend to get good scores in Robotron: 2084. Maneuvering dual joysticks at once seems to come natural for me. I'm probably an exception, and not the rule, in this area.
Considering it was a game revolving around a vampire - you would expect it to hit high levels on the "suck-o-meter".
A female vampire in World War II draining the enemy dry for the Allied cause... with a stupid name. It takes a really good game to overcome that handicap. It's possible, but I hope you'll forgive me if I'm not jumping at the prospect.
Seriously - it was a fun little mindless action game with well done boobie physics (why don't more games have boobie physics anyway?).
Ah, now this is NOT what makes a game good. Serious Sam as a mindless action game, and great for what it was, because if nothing else it delivered on the action. Games are not for porn: blogs are.
On that note.... breast physics are actually hard to do realistically. Check Fleshbot's recent archives for the entries on "Bird Woman" to see movies of it done well.
Um.... do you really want me to answer that? I'll write the answer backwards for the benefit of those who don't want to be spoiled: ocI!
Who knows, maybe it is good, despite the premise. I'll give it a shot and see when I get the chance (which will probably be some time from now, but we'll see). I'll be happy to eat a heaping portion of crow if I am mistaken.
I could tell the game would suck just from the title, which should probably win some sort of award for cliched, stupid usage of the letter "Y". When I read the premise the suck-o-meter shot upwards.
Now there's a movie based on that suckiness. And it's by the infamous director of The House of the Dead.
Never before has there been a movie so CERTAIN of being awful. It's of ludicrous certainty. A movie engineered solely to sell gold-plated jewelry and advertised through the medium of infomercials (see Blood Circus) would not be more certain of awfulness.
Don't you think Super Mario Bros. or even Pac-Man is original?
While I didn't mention them, yes, yes I do. Just because there may have been side-scrolling platformers before, or maze games, doesn't mean that these games themselves didn't bring the elements together in just the right way. Originality is about the synthesis of pre-existing elements into new forms.
Plus, I actually created a (slightly) Lemmings-like game for the Commodore 64 that saw print in a computer magazine, in that it was about manipulating the motions of in-game objects that were not the player, before Psygnosis released their game. That doesn't mean they ripped me off, or even knew whoever the hell I was. Independent development sometimes produces similar results.
Or, in the later games, Rez, ICO, Katamari Damacy or Vib-Ribbon?
If they were executed with a strong feeling of their design, and they moved forward with development more out of an innate confidence in their quality rather than copying DOOM yet another time, then YES.
P.S. What is "Katamari Damacy?"
Your talk of innate creativity of the Westerners is BS, IMO.
Westerners are NOT innately more creative. But the different social structure of most western nations *is* somewhat different than the emphasis on hierarchies that prevail in Japan, and respecting authority never pioneered nobody some new gameplay.
GTA3 was good, because Rockstar was a good house.
I'm speaking on generalities here, of course, and of course there are both Japanese and Western studios that buck the trend. But a good house doesn't necessarily mean a damn thing without the spark and the drive to create new types of gameplay. id is arguably one of the best houses in the world, and what game's website was it that just appeared on the web? Ah yes, DOOM 3. All they do is FPSes! So while I greatly respect them, I haven't played much of any id game since DOOM.
Not the Westerner (which is even divided, for example the Eastern Europe area has many capable PC-game developers with different concepts from the Americans and others, I believe).
It's true that I loved Serious Sam (I'm sorry, but I'm simply not familiar with any other Eastern European games), the game certainly worked in a certain elemental Quake-Meets-Smash T.V. way. But I'm hoping that when we do see more games from those nations, that they'll bring us new types of play without feeling constrained to give us yet another version of something that's already been demonstrated to work.
TJ&E III's worked by making random landscapes, but making the randomness less threatening to the player than in the original TJ&E. In TJ&E 1, if you fell off a level you got sent to the level below it. In III, you just got put back on land with a minor health loss. Considering that III, like the original game, and Rogue and Nethack for that matter, were games of resource management where the resources you got were randomly selected, this put a bit of a hamper on gameplay by making it less essential that players had to plan well.
The other thing that TJ&E III did wrong (besides ghettoing-up the theme and diminishing the utter zaniness of the original game) was making items start out pre-known. Too many people who have tried to make Roguelike-like games (including Angband) have ignored the central role played by the useable items. The original TJ&E did it just right in my opinion, by including the mega-screwing Randomizer item, while III's Randomizers were more like minor setbacks.
Well, the other other thing III did wrong was have the misfortune to be released on a system on which gameplay is undervalued. Whoops....
Daggerfall's problem *could* be that there weren't enough interesting things that could be generated in dungeons. With out current level of random design thinking, you'd need a huge number of possible "specials" that could appear in a dungeon.
Mark my words: I predict in the future, random content will become the norm rather than the exception. People are waking up to the fact that Nethack's simple rooms and corridors, items and monsters produce a surprisingly interesting game experience. (Well, until Gehennom....) More work needs to be done, but if done *properly*, so that the levels aren't impossible, yet aren't often easy, and the dungeon layout poses real, but not unsurmountable, challenges to the player, then random generation can absolutely save a game. We just haven't seen to much, yet.
Japanese developers tend to be more willing to try weird (sometimes, really weird) things, but overall tend to be less creative than their western counterparts.
In the West however, we have a long tradition of incredibly original games (most of the arcade stuff Atari created, SimCity, Civ, Grand Theft Auto, etc.) that gets drowned by the sea of depressingly ordinary work. The industry has systematically weaned itself away from our legacy of originality (partly by punishing creativity: push away your brightest developers, and soon all you have left are the know-nothing fanboys who think Lara Croft's breast size is a design feature), so even though we *do* have many brilliant developers, many of them find it difficult to do work they'd be proud of.
To me it seems like a case of each market possessing something the other lacks, something important.
Really??? Don't keep your mouth shut buddy, give us DETAILS! Instructions! Explanations about how Nethack gets along without scratch disk space! C'mon guy, please?
Yes! I actually e-mailed the creators of ToeJam & Earl about this a few years ago and they admitted the game is heavily inspired by Rogue. (And is much more enjoyable than Diablo, in my opinion.)
Heh, it may even be able to play Nethack if you do it that way, though Nethack makes heavy use of temporary files, so it'd have to make use of a RAM disk. Also, saving your game is much more important in Nethack, since it's so much longer.
Slashdot Mirror
If I can't get around to playing a game, it's usually because I'm not really all that interested in it.
Metroid Fusion sat by my Gamecube Player unfinished for a long time. On the other hand, Metroid Zero Mission got finished the day I got it.
This isn't really a rant (this time at least) about the declining quality of games. It's a rant about rising expectations and the desire to play something _new_. Grand Theft Auto II was new, something that had never really been done before. Sure it was Zelda-like, but it did really neat previously-unseen things with the concept. Wind Waker's vast explorable ocean was like that, in that there was just so much space to investigate, and enough in it to keep it interesting. More interesting, to me anyway, than the dungeons.
But the great majority of games aren't created with an eye towards presenting a new experience first and setting second. Game designers that make games in the current climate don't say to themselves, "Let's make a game in which the player explores a great non-linear environment, in which key elements are randomized in each play, and players get rewarded for rapid advancement." Instead, what gets asked is more like, "Let's make a game in which you're a soldier who has to fight werewolves."
Some people might get themselves more jazzed up to work on the latter, but to make something great, you have to think like the former.
Not many theories describe the physical phenomena they claim to represent exactly, to infinite decimal points.
Wasn't Newtonian physics good enough for a long time? No doubt someday we'll get something that replaces Relativity, or more accurately, refines it to explain those small observed differences. That's not a bad thing; indeed, just as relativity opened up all kinds of new applications such as nuclear power, a more precise understanding of the universe could give us untold new power.
(Note: by "us," I mean the gigantic monied interests that will probably lock up whatever inventions they create using this new science with obnoxious patents, and other means to keep it in their pockets for as long as possible. Us as in humanity, not us as in you and me.)
Allow me to briefly commemerate this weird comment of mine, my first bona-fide voting irregularity. Some of my comments get voted up. Once in a while they get voted down. Never before has one been voted up three times (2x Insightful, 1x Interesting) and voted down twice (2x Flamebait).
I still don't get it. Neither the voting confusion nor the reason for the story. Could someone please stay their downvoting hand in order to clue me in?
This is a story? It's just another typical big company promotional speech. I mean, I love Nintendo more than the average gamer, but I still fail to see how is this news.
Why are people chortling derisively at the guy? It's just marketspeak. I hate it as much as anyone, but why single out this guy? While the "crackberry" line isn't sterling wit, no one would be paying it any attention if it weren't for that previous speech. It even makes sense when viewed in context with the rest of his talk.
I guess I just don't get it.
How often do we get rabid fanboys shouting "I only play Nintendo/Sony/Nintendo/X-Box/Nintendo/iD/Nintendo games because they're the only people who innovate"?
Oh-ho, that stung.
But this kind of dismissive phrase isn't really accurate. Nintendo does innovate, to a much greater degree than most software companies. They are not the only innovators (I still don't regret buying my Dreamcast on release day) but Nintendo *does* innovate, a great deal, more than any other first-party, more than any other top-rank software company, and this perception bleeds out from the edges of the standard fanboy profile too much to be dismissed so easily.
That having been said, Fable looks interesting enough that I just may regret selling my X-Box. Molyneux is seriously cool, and for the record I'm one of those people who bought Black & White, and enjoyed it almost through to the end of the third level.
I'll probably figure out a way to at least try Fable out, but I'm sufficently low on dough right now that I probably won't be buying one to play it.
I agree that I don't think the Official Campaign, which I've heard people just fall over themselves raving about, is really all that great. But I'd also say that you shouldn't discount the D&D franchise.
There's still something intrinsically *cool* about the fact that, under the hood, a lot of the math in NWN is 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons, it lends the game an air of authenticity.
In analyzing the gameplay of a computer RPG, the biggest thing to keep in mind is that the numbers are all arbitrary. The same basic concepts and mechanisms have all been reimplemented dozens of times in countless games. Everything from Dungeons and Dragons to Wizardry to Might and Magic to Final Fantasy and beyond are all, on some level, reimplementations of the same thing.
But D&D has the advantage of being directly translatable to real-world players, and Neverwinter Nights was the first game, of ALL the D&D tie-in games going back to gold-box, to get the mixture of pencil-and-paper and computer RPG modes mixed right, to be a "general-purpose" D&D game. Dungeons and Dragons has had so many people think about it over the decades it's been available, had so many adventures written, monsters made, magic items created, campaign settings made, that it's very difficult to create, out of your own head, something comparable in complexity. Even if you just take 3rd edition all by itself, D&D's still an infinitely richer game environment than just about anything else out there on computer.
That's what attracted me to NWN. I played a little of the official campaign before I tossed it out, and got down to the "real" game, making my module Neverogue, which hasn't achieved even a hundredth of the popularity of your modules.
But I still like it, and that's what Neverwinter Nights, at the core, really is to me, and what puts it above things like Morrowind and Dungeon Siege, which each contain their own content creation tools: a system for making D&D adventures for online play. I consider the game itself to be the content creation tools. It's a lot more fun looking through all the options, deciding on what should go into the game, designing maps, creating encounters, even writing scripts, than actually playing it.
What the NES version lacked was quality.
It was buggy, left out key elements of the design (like tie-breaking in favor of trailing players), had worse music, was implemented badly, had worse graphics than the old computer versions, and had many other problems.
The NES version was my introduction to the game. I liked it, the design shone through regardless of its implementation issues, but it took playing the Atari 800 version that got me *really* interested in the game.
I've beaten it, heh. I've even beaten TGL mode (all the shooter sections without the Zelda-like areas). While there's certainly some tough bosses in The Guardian Legend, the game certainly needs every one of its infinite continues, it's not as hard as ZANAC, the Zelda-free spiritual predecessor of that game by the same guys.
*blink*
Oh MAN. My hat off to you sir, you're right on all points except EOS, and that's only because, shamefully, I've never heard of it before, I have no doubt it's excellent as well. I'm gonna have to look that one up.
I'd almost forgotten completely about Neuromancer. It looks exactly like a Maniac Mansion-era Lucasfilm Games game, but I don't think it's covered by the various SCUMM emulators.
Sky Kid I've always liked, a great deal, but I always figured it was one of those guilty-pleasure things. (For example, I've beaten NES Athena, which is about as guilty as you can get.) There's an arcade version of this that's even cooler.
QIX is highly original, especially the year of its (arcade) release. Perhaps the first game to really make full use of a framebuffer.
Here I am trying to avoid blabbing off about old video and computer games, trying my best not to look like a total geek, and then Slashdot goes and posts a story that there's no way in hell I can avoid replying to, practically begging me to waste half an hour talking about all the great, old, forgotten games that litter our flea markets and clog up eBay search results.
Aren't the answers to this one obvious by now? Let's get this over with as quickly as possible. I'll just hit the highlights, honest. I'll even leave out the obvious answers (Zeldas, Metroids, Marios and Sonics)
Rampart
The emulated version in Midway Arcade Treasures is best if you don't have an actual arcade machine. The SNES version, while different in lots of ways, is also great, as is the PC version (available on Home of the Underdogs).
M.U.L.E.
How many times have I talked my fool mouth off about this thing? It's just the best multiplayer computer game of all time, period. If you have enough mojo you can even play it, with four players, full-speed on an unmodded Dreamcast... or an Atari 800, if anyone remembers that far back.
Nethack and Rogue
I'm not trying to karma-whore I swear, despite the fact that almost any Nethack-related story is sure to make Slashdot's front page. These days Nethack seems to not qualify for "forgotten" status as much as previously. But lately I've come to a new level of appreciation for Rogue, which continues to surprise me with how much fun I have playing it, after almost twenty years, despite its tremendous difficulty. I finally had my first "winner" game last week! Rogue is starting to edge out Nethack in my estimation.
Some quickies (in case you're at a flea market and want to separate the chaff from the wheat, remember folks downloading ROMs is evil and wrong. Evil and wrong! You don't want to be evil and wrong... do you?):
Overlooked NES games: The Adventures of Lolo I-III, Air Fortress, Blaster Master, Bomberman II, Cobra Triangle, Goonies, The Guardian Legend, Rare's pinball emulations: High Speed and Pinbot, Life Force, R.C. Pro Am, Solar Jetman, Solomon's Key, Wizards & Warriors (the first one, not the sequels) and last, but NOT least by any means, ZANAC.
Overlooked SNES: ActRaiser, EarthBound, King Arthur's World, Kirby Superstar, Kirby's Dream Course, Spindizzy Worlds, Ogre Battle (yes, I consider it overlooked), Q*Bert 3 (awesome music, arguably better than the arcade game), and Uniracers.
Overlooked Genesis: Flicky, General Chaos, Herzog Zwei, Kid Chameleon, King's Bounty (woefully under appreciated), Junction, Starflight (the game's much more accessable on the Genesis than PC), the Thunderforce series, ToeJam & Earl (!), Todd's Adventures in Slime World (better on the Lynx with eight players, but honestly, who knows either people all with Lynxes and copies of the same game these days?), Zany Golf and Zoom (both these last ones originally for the Amiga).
The sensation of seeing the Martian landscape with your own two eyes, the pride of making red dust angels in your spacesuit, the feeling of looking up into the sky and seeing two tiny moons instead of one large one, the awe of seeing Olympus Mons looming over the horizon, these examples are all for Mars for example but they apply for just about any planet or moon we can actually walk on.
And let's not forget having to design a new space probe every time you want to investigate anything about the Martian surface you didn't think you'd want to look at the last time a probe was sent. I'd think a reasonably intelligent scientist sent along with a variety of general-purpose tools could learn about Mars than Viking ever did. Imagine what an unreasonably-intelligent scientist could learn?
Of course adventure's an important consideration. There are precious few frontiers left, which is part of the reason so many young people play video games these days. Wanting to be an astronaut when you're six seemed a lot more fun when space was seen more about exploring new worlds than moving satellites in and out of the shuttle bay.
I'm surprised I haven't heard many people talk about the problems with our society caused by those young people with traits that two hundred years ago would be seen as admirable and necessary in certain places, who are now causing violence and resorting to recreational drug use.
The article says that Super Mario 64 is widely pointed-at as a near-perfect example of a game camera. I have to disagree.
Someone else here has already pointed to what happens when the camera decides to pan when crossing a narrow beam. Since the controls are tied to the camera, you have to match the direction you're pressing to the camera's motion so Mario doesn't end up falling to oblivion.
But I don't think that having the controls relative to the camera viewpoint is necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it's the control method closest to "fixed" camera games, back in the days before 3D engines, where there was never any confusion about what press will do what because the camera couldn't move.
I call this the "direct" method of 3D control, because if the player wants to go "up" (really forward) on the screen, he presses up on the stick, and ditto the other directions, with no mental translations or opportunities for dyslexia to get left and right mixed up.
The other, scheme for "soft" 3rd person cameras, used in the likes of Resident Evil, I liken to the old arcade game Asteroids: you have rotate left and right controls, and you have a "thrust" control. Few people remember it these days, but it took some players a bit of adjusting to get used to that.
I think both cameras have their places (though the Asteroids-like scheme is rarely used well except in vehicular games). I seem to be alone, actually, in liking Mario Sunshine's system, which devotes one entire analog stick to the camera. I'd make terrifying jumps in those infamous Void levels and maneuver the camera on the fly to keep everything in perspective, making my friends gasp in amazement (when they weren't being motion sick).
But then again I tend to get good scores in Robotron: 2084. Maneuvering dual joysticks at once seems to come natural for me. I'm probably an exception, and not the rule, in this area.
The designer of the Playboy game is the creator of Wizardry.
I wouldn't have even considered buying it ordinarily, but this is a top-flight designer we're talking about here. I just might get it now.
But only for the articles!
Considering it was a game revolving around a vampire - you would expect it to hit high levels on the "suck-o-meter".
A female vampire in World War II draining the enemy dry for the Allied cause... with a stupid name. It takes a really good game to overcome that handicap. It's possible, but I hope you'll forgive me if I'm not jumping at the prospect.
Seriously - it was a fun little mindless action game with well done boobie physics (why don't more games have boobie physics anyway?).
Ah, now this is NOT what makes a game good. Serious Sam as a mindless action game, and great for what it was, because if nothing else it delivered on the action. Games are not for porn: blogs are.
On that note.... breast physics are actually hard to do realistically. Check Fleshbot's recent archives for the entries on "Bird Woman" to see movies of it done well.
Sure, it's no Ico, but what is?
Um.... do you really want me to answer that? I'll write the answer backwards for the benefit of those who don't want to be spoiled: ocI!
Who knows, maybe it is good, despite the premise. I'll give it a shot and see when I get the chance (which will probably be some time from now, but we'll see). I'll be happy to eat a heaping portion of crow if I am mistaken.
A Bloodrayne movie!
I could tell the game would suck just from the title, which should probably win some sort of award for cliched, stupid usage of the letter "Y". When I read the premise the suck-o-meter shot upwards.
Now there's a movie based on that suckiness. And it's by the infamous director of The House of the Dead.
Never before has there been a movie so CERTAIN of being awful. It's of ludicrous certainty. A movie engineered solely to sell gold-plated jewelry and advertised through the medium of infomercials (see Blood Circus) would not be more certain of awfulness.
This is almost terrifying.
For example, a game about a guy who has gotten bitten by a radioactive spider and thus gained superpowers.
Um, so the idea is, Mary Jane was bitten by a radioactive moo-cow?
Ah, kind of like a dynamic Marble Madness/Monkey Ball, where the physics changes as the ball grows? Sounds potentially cool....
Don't you think Super Mario Bros. or even Pac-Man is original?
While I didn't mention them, yes, yes I do. Just because there may have been side-scrolling platformers before, or maze games, doesn't mean that these games themselves didn't bring the elements together in just the right way. Originality is about the synthesis of pre-existing elements into new forms.
Plus, I actually created a (slightly) Lemmings-like game for the Commodore 64 that saw print in a computer magazine, in that it was about manipulating the motions of in-game objects that were not the player, before Psygnosis released their game. That doesn't mean they ripped me off, or even knew whoever the hell I was. Independent development sometimes produces similar results.
Or, in the later games, Rez, ICO, Katamari Damacy or Vib-Ribbon?
If they were executed with a strong feeling of their design, and they moved forward with development more out of an innate confidence in their quality rather than copying DOOM yet another time, then YES.
P.S. What is "Katamari Damacy?"
Your talk of innate creativity of the Westerners is BS, IMO.
Westerners are NOT innately more creative. But the different social structure of most western nations *is* somewhat different than the emphasis on hierarchies that prevail in Japan, and respecting authority never pioneered nobody some new gameplay.
GTA3 was good, because Rockstar was a good house.
I'm speaking on generalities here, of course, and of course there are both Japanese and Western studios that buck the trend. But a good house doesn't necessarily mean a damn thing without the spark and the drive to create new types of gameplay. id is arguably one of the best houses in the world, and what game's website was it that just appeared on the web? Ah yes, DOOM 3. All they do is FPSes! So while I greatly respect them, I haven't played much of any id game since DOOM.
Not the Westerner (which is even divided, for example the Eastern Europe area has many capable PC-game developers with different concepts from the Americans and others, I believe).
It's true that I loved Serious Sam (I'm sorry, but I'm simply not familiar with any other Eastern European games), the game certainly worked in a certain elemental Quake-Meets-Smash T.V. way. But I'm hoping that when we do see more games from those nations, that they'll bring us new types of play without feeling constrained to give us yet another version of something that's already been demonstrated to work.
TJ&E III's worked by making random landscapes, but making the randomness less threatening to the player than in the original TJ&E. In TJ&E 1, if you fell off a level you got sent to the level below it. In III, you just got put back on land with a minor health loss. Considering that III, like the original game, and Rogue and Nethack for that matter, were games of resource management where the resources you got were randomly selected, this put a bit of a hamper on gameplay by making it less essential that players had to plan well.
The other thing that TJ&E III did wrong (besides ghettoing-up the theme and diminishing the utter zaniness of the original game) was making items start out pre-known. Too many people who have tried to make Roguelike-like games (including Angband) have ignored the central role played by the useable items. The original TJ&E did it just right in my opinion, by including the mega-screwing Randomizer item, while III's Randomizers were more like minor setbacks.
Well, the other other thing III did wrong was have the misfortune to be released on a system on which gameplay is undervalued. Whoops....
Daggerfall's problem *could* be that there weren't enough interesting things that could be generated in dungeons. With out current level of random design thinking, you'd need a huge number of possible "specials" that could appear in a dungeon.
Mark my words: I predict in the future, random content will become the norm rather than the exception. People are waking up to the fact that Nethack's simple rooms and corridors, items and monsters produce a surprisingly interesting game experience. (Well, until Gehennom....) More work needs to be done, but if done *properly*, so that the levels aren't impossible, yet aren't often easy, and the dungeon layout poses real, but not unsurmountable, challenges to the player, then random generation can absolutely save a game. We just haven't seen to much, yet.
Japanese developers tend to be more willing to try weird (sometimes, really weird) things, but overall tend to be less creative than their western counterparts.
In the West however, we have a long tradition of incredibly original games (most of the arcade stuff Atari created, SimCity, Civ, Grand Theft Auto, etc.) that gets drowned by the sea of depressingly ordinary work. The industry has systematically weaned itself away from our legacy of originality (partly by punishing creativity: push away your brightest developers, and soon all you have left are the know-nothing fanboys who think Lara Croft's breast size is a design feature), so even though we *do* have many brilliant developers, many of them find it difficult to do work they'd be proud of.
To me it seems like a case of each market possessing something the other lacks, something important.
Really??? Don't keep your mouth shut buddy, give us DETAILS! Instructions! Explanations about how Nethack gets along without scratch disk space! C'mon guy, please?
Yes! I actually e-mailed the creators of ToeJam & Earl about this a few years ago and they admitted the game is heavily inspired by Rogue. (And is much more enjoyable than Diablo, in my opinion.)
Less overhead, fool!
Heh, it may even be able to play Nethack if you do it that way, though Nethack makes heavy use of temporary files, so it'd have to make use of a RAM disk. Also, saving your game is much more important in Nethack, since it's so much longer.