You speak truly. Besides being the origin of multiple genres of computer gaming (RPGs and the Roguelike subclass), the thing that always struck me about Rogue is its incredible difficulty.
Nethack only seems hard to new players. Of course the "new player" phase of Nethack is incredibly long, years really, because there's so much to learn about the game. But once you get good enough, it's not actually that hard to ascend Barbarians and Valkyries, and I have done both.
But Rogue, while a much less complex game, is hard even if you know exactly how to play. Sometimes you just don't find the items to need to survive (winning Rogue is, at its essence, about discovering and then hording means of arbitrary survival until absolutely necessary), and even if you do get the Amulet, you then have to race all the way back upstairs without running out of food.
Saving is unnecessary in Rouge because even won games tend to be over in less than thirty minutes, and most games get nowhere near winning.
My response to that is....bullshit. Games now have bigger budgets- meaning more people. They take longer to create, meaning more time. Even if graphics are 90% of that time x money formula, just 10% of the total effort that goes into most modern games is far more than what was put into the entire game 15 years ago.
But games still tend to be poorly designed these days. Game design is not something you can necessarily learn, and one great designer is worth more than ten bad ones.
Further, the industry does gamers a horrible disservice by actively stomping on new ideas before they have a chance to prove themselves.
First comparison- the Atari 2600 had the game 'Skiing' where you move a square down a white screen with occasional green blobs that you were supposed to avoid. Consoles have games like Amped and SSX. If you can't see the improved gameplay, you are blind. And of course the graphics are like 45^99th times better too.
But both Atari 2600 Skiing and more recent skiing games are both pale comparasions to the ACTUAL "game of skiing." Fact is, I'd rather play Atari 2600 Adventure, on random mode, than the Atari Skiing cartridge, SSX, or actual skiing (though this last bit depends heavily on the presence of ski bunnies).
What is a skiing game, anyway? It is just a variant of racing games, really, with added button combinations to represent tricks. The translation of a bunch of button presses and controller wiggles into an experience that the mind relates to real skiing is purely an invention of the mind. Sports games are *all* necessarily abstracted contests, it's just that SSX and 1080 are slightly less abstracted than the Atari game.
Game design at its best realizes this essential abstraction and uses it, and because of this it is entirely possible for an Atari 2600 game to be more playable than a PS2 game. And some of them, indeed, are.
While I disagree with the "certain type of person" assessment of Wind Waker, I also felt like there was a certain stylistic change in Wind Waker, unrelated to the cel shading, that was a little sour. And the battleship mini-game, which was presented out-of-engine, struck a sour note with me, it felt tacked-on.
On the other hand, I loved the non-linear world exploration aspects of the game. This is the first Zelda since the very first to have that to great degree, and, in my book, that puts it on the short-list of best Zeldas.
I wouldn't claim that *anyone* who doesn't like Wind Waker is of stunted intelligence, different strokes for different folks, etc. But many people have certain ill-concieved notions of what video games should be, notions that are being actively catered to by the majority of developers, notions that, because of this, will eventually destroy video gaming. This time, perhaps for good.
What Nintendo has created is the perfect portable RPG system.
The touch-screen interface makes an all-time inventory, map & status screen easy, and selecting an item to use is as simple as pointing to it.
Imagine, for a moment, if someone were to port a Roguelike to the system. No need to call up an inventory, press once to selecting an item, press-hold to get a list of possible alternative uses or item management functions, drag to trash to dump it.
Or, in a pen & paper-style video RPG in which you create your characters, you could draw your own character portraits.
Football games can use the map to bring up playbooks, new plays can be designed easily on the touchscreen, and the second screen can provide a alternative X's & O's view of the field as the play proceeds.
SimCity-type games would be a natural for the system.
And I think we'd all have reasons to cower in fear if Konami made a Metal Gear Solid for the system. Think: how badly did Psycho Mantis mess with gamer's heads on the PS2, simply by checking memory cards, forcing the player to swap controller ports and the rumble feature? Imagine the mind that came up with that stuff, given access to the facilities of the ludicrously feature-rich DS. Potentially cool beans, guys!
2. Going down the street to the local arcade and playing a game against someone else face-to-face where the social interaction is there and you can actually see the person
They would choose #2 every time. (Here in America, we have chosen #1, because it's less hassle then actually getting dressed and going to an arcade, hence why the industry is dying over here.)
Actually, I think the arcade industry's dying here is because most arcade games are knockoffs of a previously existing game, even more so than in the computer and console markets. Arcade games were most popular in the U.S. during the 80's, a time when people from all walks of life played video games.
Fighting game fanatics may still run out to the arcade to plunk quarters into SoulCalibur 2 and Tekken What-#-Are-They-Now, and DDR junkies are a relatively recent addition to the arcade population, but overall, arcades in both the U.S. and Japan cater to the hardcore gamer community, which is invariably young, male, and obsessive.
It just so happens that there are more Japanese young males who are that hardcode about gaming than American, and their higher population density means arcades can make money more easily. Meanwhile arcades haven't been seen as cool in the U.S. since the early 90's; the last non-pinball arcade game I was really obsessed by was Rampart.
Not to discount your point, that's certainly part of it, but there's a bit more at work here I think.
The coolest thing about this, to me, is Metroid Zero Mission runs, because of the really inventive design of the game.
Metroid: Zero Mission is a remake of the original Metroid in many ways. Most of the important items are found in the same, or similar, places as they were before. The overall map of Zebes is similar (though there is a huge new area). They added some of the items from Super Metroid, and also a couple of extra items. So far, nothing unexpected.
But the coolest thing about game, even cooler than the extra section of the game after destroying Mother Brain (which is, indeed, really cool), is that the whole game is designed, not to forbid sequence breaking like most games, but specifically to allow them.
If you're not on the lookout for them, you probably won't even notice the special blocks that allow you to, say, get the Screw Attack with just missiles, or get Super Missiles early, or get the Varia long before you're supposed to.
The first time through, it looks exactly like Metroid games (and practically all "big world" video game adventures since then, including Zelda) have always looked: find an item, use it to overcome an obstacle, get the item on the other side of the obstacle, use it to get past the next obstacle, repeat until you win.
But once you get Power Bombs near the end of the game, you can use them to reveal secret block types, information that can be used the next time through to uncover all the ingenious ways the designers put in to do things way out of sequence, or win the game with 15% of items or less. (The game has special ending pictures for winning with 15% or less items, and another for winning in less than two hours.) But, importantly, those "super secret" passages aren't *added* to the game on replays; they're there the first time through as well, but just very hard to find without prior knowledge.
I really think this is a major advance in adventure game design, possibly the first since Metroid.
"A summer vacation that crosses the boundaries of space and time."
The premise tag is sure to make an anime/manga fan's mind reel with possibilities, and any non-fan think to himself, "How contrived." From TokyoPop's Adult Swim manga commercials with the breathless announcer:
"The school of the afterlife is about to get its first living exchange student!"
"In DNAngel," I swear that's the title, "a phantom (pause) will steal your heart! But can you love someone you can't see?"
So, if he were really interested, he'd upload a copy from the original sources.
Oh yeah, so that, instead of him spending a lot of money to make a movie that people would pay to see in an attempt to make a living and funding for his next movie, while people who can't see it can just download it, instead he should spend a good deal more money on the bandwidth to shoot DVD images out to anyone who wants it, for free, including people who would soak up bandwidth just to increase his costs.
Maybe he could seed his own torrent, but honestly, mostly its geeks (like me) who know about bittorrent so far. In any case, it's a world of difference between saying it's okay for people to give away copies of your hard-made movie, and actually giving them away. Your distributor would probably have something to say about that, in fact.
It's a rare platform game that works well in 3D. Super Mario 64 doesn't, but the Spyro games did.
I will not comment on this -- mostly because enough other people will comment on it for me. I'll just say that I really liked Mario 64....
RPG's and adventure games age better than other games
I'm not sure about this. Granted, there are classic RPGs that I'd play even today (Dragon Warrior/Quest 3, for example), but there are those that sucked as well. And they just don't have opportunity for improvement through practice that classic arcade games have.
1 hit and you're dead shooters not fun: Zanac
I'd have to disagree with this -- ZANAC is just about the best shooter I've seen.
Final Fantasy VII is the best FF overall, pay no attention to those "the older ones are better" fanboys.
I disagree with this, too. The load times seriously wreck FF7 for me, the reduced party cuts down on the strategic richness of the battle system, and it strikes me as the first game in the series where the designers started changing things for the sake of changing them (I wasn't fond of the "materia" system). But I find myself growing away from Final Fantasy games, on the whole, as time passes, and I doubt I could put up with playing through FFIII/VI today, while Dragon Warrior 3's old-school character creation system means you can have a substantively different game every time you play.
Hack n' Slash dungeon games never grow old and they have found their true audience on the consoles.
Mutter mumble mumble Nethack mutter mutter computer-only mumble....
Part of the situation is that it's a different world than in the classic arcade days. Back then video games were novel enough that players would put up with more than they would today.
And yet, Defender (and Stargate) are among the arcade games from that era that hold up best today. The classic-era Williams sound effects still have a certain loud, electronic charm. And the action is just blazing, to such an extent that it's good that the original Defender doesn't have "more" to it, as the game rides the line between "uncommonly challenging" and "impossible" a lot closer than most, even closer than Robotron: 2084.
Defender is a game where an unenlightened player would find it difficult to believe it's possible to break 50,000 points, but the highest scores are over ten million.
I haven't played the Defender update, but I find it difficult to believe its creators managed to revive that feeling of impossibility, combined with gameplay deep enough to reward obsessive players. It probably wouldn't stand a chance of making it through the current game development meatgrinder, and yet calling any game without it by the name "Defender" smacks of travesity.
In fact, Deadly Towers is wrongly maligned. It's confusing and far from perfect, but winnable (I've done so without aid), and not even that hard once you learn how to play. Similiarly, Athena's badness has been overhyped -- while buggy and possessing the most convoluted win requirement I've ever seen (even worse than Solomon's Key!), you can certainly find worse games.
My choices for worst, as in unplayable, not enjoyable by any means NES games: Ninja Kid and Chubby Cherub. There are others, however.
I'd say that online play has great potential. I haven't seen it played up too well yet (I hate FPS's, and Everquest is overhyped), but at least Xbox Live is a step in the right direction. It's arguably the best thing about the Xbox.
Nintendo could make some *killer* online games, enough to change the direction of the industry. Here's hoping they do just that.
I'm as much of a Nintendo fanboy as anyone, but I'll be the first admit that the company is not an absolute good. Their behavior during the NES days, bullying retailers to take competetors' products off of shelves, were downright shameful. This has the potential to go down along the same lines.
Ultimately however, software patents are plain-out *broken*. Nintendo could invent the most novel algorithm in the world tomorrow and I'd still stand against a patent for it. (In fact, if it were really novel, a patent preventing other people from reverse engineering it could cause lasting harm to the software industry. Or so I say at least.)
"John Kerry: Tax Invaders" looks really, really dumb, from a game design standpoint. What sort of argument does controlling a giant George Bush head represent? Don't tell me it has to do with making the player identify with Bush, for that to happen people will have to play it first.
The best political games are those like SimCity, which do not try to convince, but give the player a realistic sandbox. In that case, convince the player of the sandbox's realism and you have a potentially useful tool. (This is why a conservative player of SimCity I know doesn't play it, has complained about it, because it doesn't match up to his preconcieved notions about how cities work.)
No person who can be easily convinced is worth convincing (voting power notwithstanding). But invent a means by which people may convince themselves and you just might have something important on your hands.
And yes. The first Wolfenstein was a side scroller...
No, from what I can tell, it was considerably more than that. Pre-Solid Metal Gear is a closer match.
Wolf3D and RtCW innovated that by making it an FPS.
Creating the FPS is innovation. Riding that one-trick pony to the bank over and over and over again is not. Since Wolf3D, id has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary. All they do anymore is shooters.
John Carmack is still a genius nonetheless.
This may very well be, but I wish he'd apply his genius to things other than FPS's.
Which do you think would be harder to make?
Unquestionably, it's harder to design a good, original game than to implement it. Just look around the shareware game selections of any software repository -- how many times has Tetris been redone? Asteroids? Breakout? Marble Madness?
The original Wolf is a much richer game than Wolf3D, because if offers strategic choices above "twitch" gameplay.
Oops, sorry about that I missed the link. Okay, here's my reaction:
The Smoking Gun page you says nothing about number of residences owned though, so my request for information on that remains open. The page does say Moore hasn't voted in New York since October 2001. It seems evident that he's forgotten, or doesn't realize, he's on the rolls there. Moving from New York to Michigan might explain that.
The page does say that Moore's web site has a "Pledge of Democratic Allegiance," which supposedly encourages people to take other people to vote in a swing state, yet a Google search for:
site:www.michaelmoore.com "Pledge of Democratic Allegiance"
turns up no hits. Removing the quotes brings up one hit, but it's just Moore's links page.
But that *is* really bad luck with the rock traps, heh. My condolences.
I once made it to the Wizard before knowing how essential it was to have magic resistance at that stage, and died to a finger of death spell. I did ascend eventually, though.
Hmm... I've got $24M reasons, in one weekend, to almost disagree. Why almost? Because a real documentary provides real facts, not distortions, and tries to promote debate between both sides, and not serve as mere propaganda for only one side. F9/11 is many things; one-sided is absolutely one of them.
The textbook response to this, the one that's all over the internet right now, is: no, documentaries by their very nature contain bias. Nature documentaries invariably have a pro-environmentalist message. War documentaries tend to carry a message supporting the war, from the winners, and against it, from the losers.
Moore, at least, is up front about it, unlike many "fair and balanced" journalists. But I can't take any credit for this line of reasoning -- it's all over the web. Even so, Moore believes what he's telling is true. I believe it's true; from what I've seen, there's little in the film that a voracious blog reader hasn't already heard, and I already knew of some of it.
On the $21 million gross the movie's brought in so far, you can't use that as proof -- it didn't happen before the movie was being made. Farenheit 9/11's great success took everyone by surprise. Cannes prices are no determining factor of commercial success, after all.
As for number of homes, -- and please note I'm not talking sarcastically here, I'm attempting to make no points with this request, I mean it earnestly -- tell me your source, I am curious. The number of homes Moore owns is in no way an indicating factor of the truth or untruth of anything he says, that's a logical fallacy called "attacking the person." But I am honestly interested in the details of that statement.
I've played a fair bit of ADOM, and while there are definitely things to like about it, I don't get the sense of richness that Nethack provides. The closed-sourceness of ADOM is probably a big reason for this; with only one person supplying ideas for it, even if he *is* pretty sharp overall, there's just not that much variety to the game, and some of what there is is outright cribbed from Nethack.
Another thing about ADOM is the sense I get that it cheats. It biases item generation depending on player class, and it generates better random items on harder levels. Thus, necessarily, some of that "try to tackle the dungeon with different classes" approach is different. While Nethack includes a dungeon that's different for each class, ADOM subtlely changes the whole game.
And also, I think the inclusion of a story in a Roguelike is basically misguided. Roguelikes are made to be replayed over and over, and a story gets progressively less interesting the more times you hear it.
Furthermore, there are precious few stories in videogames that are worth anything. really. I include both Nethack's and ADOM's in this summary imperious judgement.
Those frustrated trying to learn Nethack's large library of instant-kill one-trick jokes may try Crawl, and struggle instead against its large library of instant-kill out-of-depth monsters.
Actually....
Lately I've had opportunity to do a lot of thinking, and a lot of reading, on Nethack. And I've come to the conclusion that it's not nearly as deadly as new players believe.
These are the things that kill most new players:
A monster. As in, loss of hit points from getting attacked by a monster. This is the biggie; probably 95% of deaths are due to this, and even experienced players die most often to these.
Starvation. But once you know you can eat monster corpses, and once you know about everyone's friend, the #pray command, this almost never happens. That leads us to....
Food poisoning. But again, once you know never to eat a corpse that hasn't been killed in the last, say, 20-or-so moves, this never happens.
Choking on food. Again, just never eat when full.
(Actual) poisoning. Whether from poisonous monsters, poisonous arrows, or poisoning traps (arrow, dart, spiked pits). This is the second most common cause of death, even among experienced players. Gaining poison resistance is an important early-game goal.
Paralysis from smacking a floating eyte. If you ever see a cause of death that reads "Killed by a newt, while helpless," this is why.
Monsterous insta-death. Primary among these sources is the lowly, yet potent, cockatrice. A little care goes a long way in dealing with these.
Those are the biggies, but they aren't really that many of these. No one ever dies by "an imperious order," or "fell hundreds of feet to his death," in normal play. The vast majority of deaths come from getting killed by a monster, getting poisoned by one, or by cockatrice or other monster with a method of instadeath (and there are not a large number of them).
In particular, new players are best served by being wary of soldier ants. Check it out.
But trademarks are a lot more literal than copyrights; I believe you can change a word of the original title without infringing.
I don't think anyone is being prevented from seeing the film. Conservatives and quite a few liberals (like Christopher Hitchens of Slate.com and David Brooks of the New York Times) have been scathingly critical of the film and of Michael Moore, but criticizing a thing is not the same as censoring it.
1. Many more people are liking the film than disliking. Rotton Tomatoes is giving it an 84% "Fresh" rating.
2. I didn't say they are being prevented, but that there are efforts to prevent. There *has* been at least concerted effort by a conservative organization to get the film out of theaters. Check it out.
But furthermore, I can guarentee that people are being prevented from seeing the film. I'm being prevented. I live in eastern Georgia, and the nearest theater that's showing Farenheit 9/11 is in Atlanta. Not too far away as the crow flies, but by road, several hours of traffic congestion from here.
It is true that's mostly because it's an independent film, and unless they're The Passion of the Christ those don't play in Statesboro, but no matter how wide a release it gets, it's unlikely Farenheit 9/11 will ever play in a theater within an hour's drive of here.
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You speak truly. Besides being the origin of multiple genres of computer gaming (RPGs and the Roguelike subclass), the thing that always struck me about Rogue is its incredible difficulty.
Nethack only seems hard to new players. Of course the "new player" phase of Nethack is incredibly long, years really, because there's so much to learn about the game. But once you get good enough, it's not actually that hard to ascend Barbarians and Valkyries, and I have done both.
But Rogue, while a much less complex game, is hard even if you know exactly how to play. Sometimes you just don't find the items to need to survive (winning Rogue is, at its essence, about discovering and then hording means of arbitrary survival until absolutely necessary), and even if you do get the Amulet, you then have to race all the way back upstairs without running out of food.
Saving is unnecessary in Rouge because even won games tend to be over in less than thirty minutes, and most games get nowhere near winning.
My response to that is....bullshit. Games now have bigger budgets- meaning more people. They take longer to create, meaning more time. Even if graphics are 90% of that time x money formula, just 10% of the total effort that goes into most modern games is far more than what was put into the entire game 15 years ago.
But games still tend to be poorly designed these days. Game design is not something you can necessarily learn, and one great designer is worth more than ten bad ones.
Further, the industry does gamers a horrible disservice by actively stomping on new ideas before they have a chance to prove themselves.
First comparison- the Atari 2600 had the game 'Skiing' where you move a square down a white screen with occasional green blobs that you were supposed to avoid. Consoles have games like Amped and SSX. If you can't see the improved gameplay, you are blind. And of course the graphics are like 45^99th times better too.
But both Atari 2600 Skiing and more recent skiing games are both pale comparasions to the ACTUAL "game of skiing." Fact is, I'd rather play Atari 2600 Adventure, on random mode, than the Atari Skiing cartridge, SSX, or actual skiing (though this last bit depends heavily on the presence of ski bunnies).
What is a skiing game, anyway? It is just a variant of racing games, really, with added button combinations to represent tricks. The translation of a bunch of button presses and controller wiggles into an experience that the mind relates to real skiing is purely an invention of the mind. Sports games are *all* necessarily abstracted contests, it's just that SSX and 1080 are slightly less abstracted than the Atari game.
Game design at its best realizes this essential abstraction and uses it, and because of this it is entirely possible for an Atari 2600 game to be more playable than a PS2 game. And some of them, indeed, are.
While I disagree with the "certain type of person" assessment of Wind Waker, I also felt like there was a certain stylistic change in Wind Waker, unrelated to the cel shading, that was a little sour. And the battleship mini-game, which was presented out-of-engine, struck a sour note with me, it felt tacked-on.
On the other hand, I loved the non-linear world exploration aspects of the game. This is the first Zelda since the very first to have that to great degree, and, in my book, that puts it on the short-list of best Zeldas.
I wouldn't claim that *anyone* who doesn't like Wind Waker is of stunted intelligence, different strokes for different folks, etc. But many people have certain ill-concieved notions of what video games should be, notions that are being actively catered to by the majority of developers, notions that, because of this, will eventually destroy video gaming. This time, perhaps for good.
What Nintendo has created is the perfect portable RPG system.
The touch-screen interface makes an all-time inventory, map & status screen easy, and selecting an item to use is as simple as pointing to it.
Imagine, for a moment, if someone were to port a Roguelike to the system. No need to call up an inventory, press once to selecting an item, press-hold to get a list of possible alternative uses or item management functions, drag to trash to dump it.
Or, in a pen & paper-style video RPG in which you create your characters, you could draw your own character portraits.
Football games can use the map to bring up playbooks, new plays can be designed easily on the touchscreen, and the second screen can provide a alternative X's & O's view of the field as the play proceeds.
SimCity-type games would be a natural for the system.
And I think we'd all have reasons to cower in fear if Konami made a Metal Gear Solid for the system. Think: how badly did Psycho Mantis mess with gamer's heads on the PS2, simply by checking memory cards, forcing the player to swap controller ports and the rumble feature? Imagine the mind that came up with that stuff, given access to the facilities of the ludicrously feature-rich DS. Potentially cool beans, guys!
2. Going down the street to the local arcade and playing a game against someone else face-to-face where the social interaction is there and you can actually see the person
They would choose #2 every time. (Here in America, we have chosen #1, because it's less hassle then actually getting dressed and going to an arcade, hence why the industry is dying over here.)
Actually, I think the arcade industry's dying here is because most arcade games are knockoffs of a previously existing game, even more so than in the computer and console markets. Arcade games were most popular in the U.S. during the 80's, a time when people from all walks of life played video games.
Fighting game fanatics may still run out to the arcade to plunk quarters into SoulCalibur 2 and Tekken What-#-Are-They-Now, and DDR junkies are a relatively recent addition to the arcade population, but overall, arcades in both the U.S. and Japan cater to the hardcore gamer community, which is invariably young, male, and obsessive.
It just so happens that there are more Japanese young males who are that hardcode about gaming than American, and their higher population density means arcades can make money more easily. Meanwhile arcades haven't been seen as cool in the U.S. since the early 90's; the last non-pinball arcade game I was really obsessed by was Rampart.
Not to discount your point, that's certainly part of it, but there's a bit more at work here I think.
The coolest thing about this, to me, is Metroid Zero Mission runs, because of the really inventive design of the game.
Metroid: Zero Mission is a remake of the original Metroid in many ways. Most of the important items are found in the same, or similar, places as they were before. The overall map of Zebes is similar (though there is a huge new area). They added some of the items from Super Metroid, and also a couple of extra items. So far, nothing unexpected.
But the coolest thing about game, even cooler than the extra section of the game after destroying Mother Brain (which is, indeed, really cool), is that the whole game is designed, not to forbid sequence breaking like most games, but specifically to allow them.
If you're not on the lookout for them, you probably won't even notice the special blocks that allow you to, say, get the Screw Attack with just missiles, or get Super Missiles early, or get the Varia long before you're supposed to.
The first time through, it looks exactly like Metroid games (and practically all "big world" video game adventures since then, including Zelda) have always looked: find an item, use it to overcome an obstacle, get the item on the other side of the obstacle, use it to get past the next obstacle, repeat until you win.
But once you get Power Bombs near the end of the game, you can use them to reveal secret block types, information that can be used the next time through to uncover all the ingenious ways the designers put in to do things way out of sequence, or win the game with 15% of items or less. (The game has special ending pictures for winning with 15% or less items, and another for winning in less than two hours.) But, importantly, those "super secret" passages aren't *added* to the game on replays; they're there the first time through as well, but just very hard to find without prior knowledge.
I really think this is a major advance in adventure game design, possibly the first since Metroid.
"A summer vacation that crosses the boundaries of space and time."
The premise tag is sure to make an anime/manga fan's mind reel with possibilities, and any non-fan think to himself, "How contrived." From TokyoPop's Adult Swim manga commercials with the breathless announcer:
"The school of the afterlife is about to get its first living exchange student!"
"In DNAngel," I swear that's the title, "a phantom (pause) will steal your heart! But can you love someone you can't see?"
"Princess Ai. An angel doomed... to love!"
Bleah. Wake me when its Bebop.
So, if he were really interested, he'd upload a copy from the original sources.
Oh yeah, so that, instead of him spending a lot of money to make a movie that people would pay to see in an attempt to make a living and funding for his next movie, while people who can't see it can just download it, instead he should spend a good deal more money on the bandwidth to shoot DVD images out to anyone who wants it, for free, including people who would soak up bandwidth just to increase his costs.
Maybe he could seed his own torrent, but honestly, mostly its geeks (like me) who know about bittorrent so far. In any case, it's a world of difference between saying it's okay for people to give away copies of your hard-made movie, and actually giving them away. Your distributor would probably have something to say about that, in fact.
It's a rare platform game that works well in 3D. Super Mario 64 doesn't, but the Spyro games did.
I will not comment on this -- mostly because enough other people will comment on it for me. I'll just say that I really liked Mario 64....
RPG's and adventure games age better than other games
I'm not sure about this. Granted, there are classic RPGs that I'd play even today (Dragon Warrior/Quest 3, for example), but there are those that sucked as well. And they just don't have opportunity for improvement through practice that classic arcade games have.
1 hit and you're dead shooters not fun: Zanac
I'd have to disagree with this -- ZANAC is just about the best shooter I've seen.
Final Fantasy VII is the best FF overall, pay no attention to those "the older ones are better" fanboys.
I disagree with this, too. The load times seriously wreck FF7 for me, the reduced party cuts down on the strategic richness of the battle system, and it strikes me as the first game in the series where the designers started changing things for the sake of changing them (I wasn't fond of the "materia" system). But I find myself growing away from Final Fantasy games, on the whole, as time passes, and I doubt I could put up with playing through FFIII/VI today, while Dragon Warrior 3's old-school character creation system means you can have a substantively different game every time you play.
Hack n' Slash dungeon games never grow old and they have found their true audience on the consoles.
Mutter mumble mumble Nethack mutter mutter computer-only mumble....
Part of the situation is that it's a different world than in the classic arcade days. Back then video games were novel enough that players would put up with more than they would today.
And yet, Defender (and Stargate) are among the arcade games from that era that hold up best today. The classic-era Williams sound effects still have a certain loud, electronic charm. And the action is just blazing, to such an extent that it's good that the original Defender doesn't have "more" to it, as the game rides the line between "uncommonly challenging" and "impossible" a lot closer than most, even closer than Robotron: 2084.
Defender is a game where an unenlightened player would find it difficult to believe it's possible to break 50,000 points, but the highest scores are over ten million.
I haven't played the Defender update, but I find it difficult to believe its creators managed to revive that feeling of impossibility, combined with gameplay deep enough to reward obsessive players. It probably wouldn't stand a chance of making it through the current game development meatgrinder, and yet calling any game without it by the name "Defender" smacks of travesity.
In fact, Deadly Towers is wrongly maligned. It's confusing and far from perfect, but winnable (I've done so without aid), and not even that hard once you learn how to play. Similiarly, Athena's badness has been overhyped -- while buggy and possessing the most convoluted win requirement I've ever seen (even worse than Solomon's Key!), you can certainly find worse games.
My choices for worst, as in unplayable, not enjoyable by any means NES games: Ninja Kid and Chubby Cherub. There are others, however.
I'd say that online play has great potential. I haven't seen it played up too well yet (I hate FPS's, and Everquest is overhyped), but at least Xbox Live is a step in the right direction. It's arguably the best thing about the Xbox.
Nintendo could make some *killer* online games, enough to change the direction of the industry. Here's hoping they do just that.
Heh heh, good point!
Let me amend: I wish he'd apply his *game design* genius to something other than FPS's.
Hear hear!
I'm as much of a Nintendo fanboy as anyone, but I'll be the first admit that the company is not an absolute good. Their behavior during the NES days, bullying retailers to take competetors' products off of shelves, were downright shameful. This has the potential to go down along the same lines.
Ultimately however, software patents are plain-out *broken*. Nintendo could invent the most novel algorithm in the world tomorrow and I'd still stand against a patent for it. (In fact, if it were really novel, a patent preventing other people from reverse engineering it could cause lasting harm to the software industry. Or so I say at least.)
They're up-front, but surpassingly lame.
"John Kerry: Tax Invaders" looks really, really dumb, from a game design standpoint. What sort of argument does controlling a giant George Bush head represent? Don't tell me it has to do with making the player identify with Bush, for that to happen people will have to play it first.
The best political games are those like SimCity, which do not try to convince, but give the player a realistic sandbox. In that case, convince the player of the sandbox's realism and you have a potentially useful tool. (This is why a conservative player of SimCity I know doesn't play it, has complained about it, because it doesn't match up to his preconcieved notions about how cities work.)
No person who can be easily convinced is worth convincing (voting power notwithstanding). But invent a means by which people may convince themselves and you just might have something important on your hands.
And yes. The first Wolfenstein was a side scroller...
No, from what I can tell, it was considerably more than that. Pre-Solid Metal Gear is a closer match.
Wolf3D and RtCW innovated that by making it an FPS.
Creating the FPS is innovation. Riding that one-trick pony to the bank over and over and over again is not. Since Wolf3D, id has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary. All they do anymore is shooters.
John Carmack is still a genius nonetheless.
This may very well be, but I wish he'd apply his genius to things other than FPS's.
Which do you think would be harder to make?
Unquestionably, it's harder to design a good, original game than to implement it. Just look around the shareware game selections of any software repository -- how many times has Tetris been redone? Asteroids? Breakout? Marble Madness?
The original Wolf is a much richer game than Wolf3D, because if offers strategic choices above "twitch" gameplay.
- John H.
Dan/Dani Bunten made them both.
M.U.L.E. has no PC version however.
- John H.
Oops, sorry about that I missed the link. Okay, here's my reaction:
The Smoking Gun page you says nothing about number of residences owned though, so my request for information on that remains open. The page does say Moore hasn't voted in New York since October 2001. It seems evident that he's forgotten, or doesn't realize, he's on the rolls there. Moving from New York to Michigan might explain that.
The page does say that Moore's web site has a "Pledge of Democratic Allegiance," which supposedly encourages people to take other people to vote in a swing state, yet a Google search for:
site:www.michaelmoore.com "Pledge of Democratic Allegiance"
turns up no hits. Removing the quotes brings up one hit, but it's just Moore's links page.
Was it a tame horse?
But that *is* really bad luck with the rock traps, heh. My condolences.
I once made it to the Wizard before knowing how essential it was to have magic resistance at that stage, and died to a finger of death spell. I did ascend eventually, though.
Hmm ... I've got $24M reasons, in one weekend, to almost disagree. Why almost? Because a real documentary provides real facts, not distortions, and tries to promote debate between both sides, and not serve as mere propaganda for only one side. F9/11 is many things; one-sided is absolutely one of them.
The textbook response to this, the one that's all over the internet right now, is: no, documentaries by their very nature contain bias. Nature documentaries invariably have a pro-environmentalist message. War documentaries tend to carry a message supporting the war, from the winners, and against it, from the losers.
Moore, at least, is up front about it, unlike many "fair and balanced" journalists. But I can't take any credit for this line of reasoning -- it's all over the web. Even so, Moore believes what he's telling is true. I believe it's true; from what I've seen, there's little in the film that a voracious blog reader hasn't already heard, and I already knew of some of it.
On the $21 million gross the movie's brought in so far, you can't use that as proof -- it didn't happen before the movie was being made. Farenheit 9/11's great success took everyone by surprise. Cannes prices are no determining factor of commercial success, after all.
As for number of homes, -- and please note I'm not talking sarcastically here, I'm attempting to make no points with this request, I mean it earnestly -- tell me your source, I am curious. The number of homes Moore owns is in no way an indicating factor of the truth or untruth of anything he says, that's a logical fallacy called "attacking the person." But I am honestly interested in the details of that statement.
I've played a fair bit of ADOM, and while there are definitely things to like about it, I don't get the sense of richness that Nethack provides. The closed-sourceness of ADOM is probably a big reason for this; with only one person supplying ideas for it, even if he *is* pretty sharp overall, there's just not that much variety to the game, and some of what there is is outright cribbed from Nethack.
Another thing about ADOM is the sense I get that it cheats. It biases item generation depending on player class, and it generates better random items on harder levels. Thus, necessarily, some of that "try to tackle the dungeon with different classes" approach is different. While Nethack includes a dungeon that's different for each class, ADOM subtlely changes the whole game.
And also, I think the inclusion of a story in a Roguelike is basically misguided. Roguelikes are made to be replayed over and over, and a story gets progressively less interesting the more times you hear it.
Furthermore, there are precious few stories in videogames that are worth anything. really. I include both Nethack's and ADOM's in this summary imperious judgement.
Actually....
Lately I've had opportunity to do a lot of thinking, and a lot of reading, on Nethack. And I've come to the conclusion that it's not nearly as deadly as new players believe.
These are the things that kill most new players:
Those are the biggies, but they aren't really that many of these. No one ever dies by "an imperious order," or "fell hundreds of feet to his death," in normal play. The vast majority of deaths come from getting killed by a monster, getting poisoned by one, or by cockatrice or other monster with a method of instadeath (and there are not a large number of them).
In particular, new players are best served by being wary of soldier ants. Check it out.
But trademarks are a lot more literal than copyrights; I believe you can change a word of the original title without infringing.
I don't think anyone is being prevented from seeing the film. Conservatives and quite a few liberals (like Christopher Hitchens of Slate.com and David Brooks of the New York Times) have been scathingly critical of the film and of Michael Moore, but criticizing a thing is not the same as censoring it.
1. Many more people are liking the film than disliking. Rotton Tomatoes is giving it an 84% "Fresh" rating.
2. I didn't say they are being prevented, but that there are efforts to prevent. There *has* been at least concerted effort by a conservative organization to get the film out of theaters. Check it out.
But furthermore, I can guarentee that people are being prevented from seeing the film. I'm being prevented. I live in eastern Georgia, and the nearest theater that's showing Farenheit 9/11 is in Atlanta. Not too far away as the crow flies, but by road, several hours of traffic congestion from here.
It is true that's mostly because it's an independent film, and unless they're The Passion of the Christ those don't play in Statesboro, but no matter how wide a release it gets, it's unlikely Farenheit 9/11 will ever play in a theater within an hour's drive of here.
Yes, it's time for the mandatory Slashdot mentioning of Nethack, brought to you courtesy of ThinkGeek and Invisible Lallapalooza....
Nethack is an example of a game that rides its complexity to greatness. It makes it hard to learn, but once you learn it, it's wonderful.
Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about it lately....
Ah, as I said I wasn't really clear on the rights involved. I think I remember reading that Disney had distribution rights.
But you're right, if Disney actually owned it then it'd be less likely the film would be in distribution now.