I've actually gotten the "real" last gem by getting all 'A's. It changes the ending, and also lets you see the very final bit of it after the credits.
Getting all As is hard in some places, but I don't remember it being as hard as getting those damn beat-bosses-perfectly gems. I think time spent is the sole determining factor.
The mind-blowing thing is, like Blast Corps has a secret "Platinum" medal on each and every level in the game, there's is actually a secret 'S' rank beyond 'A' in Mischief Makers. No one knows if there's any unlockables for getting all, or any, 'S'es, but it seems unlikely.
Actually, adding extra quests after the second would be rather harder than you might think.
The original Zelda, if I remember correctly, came on a one megabit cartridge. That's 128k in which to squeeze 128 overworld screens and 18 dungeons.
Because of the morbidly restricted ROM size they had to resort to a large number of tricks to squeeze the large game area into memory. That explains some of the weirdness with the overworld layout, instead of being an array of tile information, each screen is actually a set of tile columns which can be mixed and matched to make each screen. And each dungeon is composed of a small number of possible rooms mixed and matched to make each maze.
However, most of the tricks used in the game are already exploited almost to their maximum effect by the end of the second quest (which is already rather cheap in places).
Of course, this hasn't stopped people from hacking up the Zelda ROMs themselves and making their own, often funky, third-plus quests available for download on the Internet for play on emulators.
Hey, I *liked* Mischief Makers. It had strong play mechanics and a great sense of style. It's true, it wasn't as hectic as your typical Treasure product....
But Treasure's made substandard games before. There was a weird isometric fantasy game for the Genesis they made that wasn't that interesting. And don't forget, they made Wario World, which is fun for a little while but gets old fast.
I want to like these, I really do. The original Legend of Zelda is still one of the greatest video games ever made.
But I already have Zelda 1 on the Gamecube, as part of the four-game collectors' disk they made available to people who bought enough other Nintendo games. (For me, they were Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga and Mario Kart Double Dash.)
As noted on the linked-to sites, Mario Bros. is available as an eCard set, as an extra in Animal Crossing and, in a graphically-upgraded version, in *five* other GBA games. Super Mario Bros. has been remade several times.
Also consider that the original ROM sizes of these games were so miniscule that the entire game, plus an NES emulator, could be quickly sent over the pipe from Animal Crossing, and fit entirely in the GBA's built-in RAM.
In short, while some of the games are really cool, $20 is too much for only ONE ancient NES game. And few of the games are worth shelling out *any* money for. If all these games were available on *one* GBA card, which given their miniscule memory footprints could have easily been done, then maybe. As it is... no.
There is only one exception. A gamer who never got to play the original Zelda might be better served getting this than playing it on the Gamecube compilation (or the secret Animal Crossing item made available with a cheat device) for one reason: it'll probably come with a full manual. Zelda is a game that needs its manual. The booklet that came with the Zelda retrospective disk gave it two scant pages! Not a smart way to introduce gamers to one of the highlights of your company's history....
I'm kind of weird when it comes to the Zelda series in that Link to the Past, while great in a way few other games are, is not among my favorites. Wind Waker, Majora's Mask, and the first two NES Zeldas are the ones I find myself playing the most at the moment.
Especially the second game, because while it offers drastically different gameplay compared to the rest of the series, it's a good, stiff challenge. The same part of my soul that loves the original NES Castlevania likes Zelda II.
You are perfectly free to consider that sad if you like. Some days I'd even agree with you.
Toeing the line and agreeing with the person who has power over you will get you a good grade, but will also destroy your chance to change his mistaken thought pattern, which would cause him to cease teaching his incorrect dogma to countless other impressionable students who deserve better.
The observance of manners are essential in any society, but they do us a disservice when they are used to propagate idiocy, as even a cursory examination of a good number of John Cleese-based Monty Python sketches will teach you.
So I say to Miss Manners: take that, bitch! And learn to speak of yourself using first-person!
I think you're right on on many of your points. I've been in one world that was basically an exceedingly impractical chat client. Oy.
One of the things that bugs me about the current crop is that they present few opportunities to change the player's states other than combat. Club Caribe had a wand that could turn another person blue. There was a nude beach special area where it was possible to accidently leave it without your clothes (which some people actually found embarassing, despite that the "clothing removal" was just a color change). There was a curse that gave you a donkey's head.
I don't see that kind of thing happening in any other world. Neither the opportunity to affect other players in playful ways, or the sense that there are areas that are "special" other than just being another few square miles to wander.
A further point: I hate the term MMORPG. People use the term to mean "Everquest, or a lot like it," and I don't like Everquest. In my book Everquest definitely falls too far on the game side of things. I think there has to be some game there, mind you. Originally the metaphor used was adventure gaming -- Habitat's interface was very, VERY similar to Maniac Mansion's, to the degree that you could easily confuse the two at a glance. (It didn't have a verb bar, however.)
P.S. If anyone reading is working on something like that and are looking to hire....
My apologies, I was referring to NES Ninja Gaiden -- NOT the X-box game, which I haven't played.
A lot of people have complained about the new game's difficulty, but I don't know how similar it is to the original. I'm just hoping it's not real similar.
Ninja Gaiden: the one I haven't played. I agree with the previous post, the designer seems like a real jerk. This is a man who needs hormone supression therapy - his testosterone levels seems to be through the roof. DOA Extreme Volleyball is proof enough of this fact to me. The thing that the people complaining about "difficulty whiners," who are whining themselves in my opinion, forget is that if you fork over the cash for a game you expect to get some enjoyment out of it. The old-style painful, are-you-man-enough-for-me kinds of games are, parodoxically, usually only really enjoyed by kids who have long afternoons and summer vacations to beat their heads against this kind of thing. It's no fun to pay 50 bucks for something if you'll never see the end of level one.
Viewtiful Joe: In Kids Mode, the game actually isn't that hard, but the bosses do require being clued-in to the skills necessary to succeed in boss fights (discover the pattern, look for a weakness, exploit, exploit, exploit). The harder modes are there if the player wants to go for them; I've completed V-Rated so far. But my point is, you can play the whole game in Kids Mode, you won't feel like you haven't gotten your money's worth if you do so, and it's enough of a joy just to play around with that even if you don't beat it, you can have a good time. In short, Viewtiful Joe can afford to be hard, because it has a legitimate easy mode, and it's fun to play even if you don't care about winning.
F-Zero GX: This one's just insane. I can kind of understand that, given its need to its relationship to F-Zero AX, but really -- who besides ultimate game geeks are even going to finish this? But it does have easy modes, though you get paltry unlockables for beating them.
What matters here is, does the gamer feel like he's gotten his money's worth, even if he never finishes the game? I've seen many, many kids, and adults too, with games like Grand Theft Auto 3 who will never, honestly, finish them. Even games considered "easy," like Wind Waker, are often abandoned long before the ending (which is a shame for WW because the ending's awesome).
I would go so far to claim that at least half of all purchased copies of video games these days go unbeaten even once during their initial ownership period (before being sold, traded or given to someone else), and that number *could* be much higher, maybe 90% or more.
I played a lot of those old NES games. I've beaten Castlevania without continuing. Gone through Mario 2 -the whole game, no warping- without losing a life. I've been to the secret levels in Mario Lost Levels you can only get to if you don't warp. I've finished Zelda (first quest at least) with a wooden sword and no ring, and almost finished the second that way, too. I've beaten Golgo 13, Rygar in 3 hours starting from first picking up the game, Metroid without maps fast enough to get the legendary "bikini" ending, and over 300 hundred other games.
Mario Sunshine's void levels are my favorite parts of that game. I've beaten bloody Athena, for crying out loud.
Main argument:
So please understand than when I say that Ninja Gaiden is too damn hard, that I know what I'm talking about. It's not that I didn't finish both of the NJ games I played (1 and 2), it's that I didn't enjoy the experience. Back then I played video games fairly obsessively. I would not have the patience for a Ninja Gaiden today, because I have better respect for the limits of my free time.
The original Castlevania is a game that's very similar to NES Ninja Gaiden in many ways, but better in most respects. NJ's primary contributions to the genre are cinema scenes (which were either nonexistant or very rare beforehand) and wall-jumping, which was very frustrating to deal with.
It's not that games aren't easier these days than they were -- they are. But they're also in 3D, which is an intrinsically more difficult environment to operate in. And if video games, good ones, are ever going to truly break into the mainstream, we've got to pay greater attention to balanced difficulty.
In point of fact, I'd *LIKE* to see a good Hitchhiker's movie. And they may very well be capable of putting one together.
But it is possible for one element of a work to be poisoned by another. A bad videogame reflects poorly upon the movie on which it's based, while a good movie adaptation increases respect for the original book -- look at The Wizard of Oz, the original wasn't bad, but the movie was great.
I'm not so much complaining about the movie here as about movie advertising and merchandising efforts, and despite what you say, those well-funded influences on the culture can indeed ruin works, if not for me then for millions of people who have not been previously aware of the original. That's what determines how the property will be remembered in the long run, and that's what presents the opporunity for greatest harm to Adams' work.
Social-only worlds, I believe, can be made to work. I spent roughly four years on the event staff of one. But attracting that initial audience is the hard part, and then satisfying their expectations seems to be difficult as well. These tasks are arguably more difficult now because of the success of Everquest and other "game" worlds -- people, in general, are attracted to the theme beyond the world itself.
One way this could be made to work is to offer a "fake" theme, a fantasy world that's actually a social world under the surface. Do it right and most people won't even notice, then keep them playing long enough to get hooked on the depth of your design, and they'll never consider going back to plain hack and slash.
here's junk UK TV -- in fact, they produce rock bottom TV by the ton
Tell me about it! I have two friends who are almost obsessed with Coupling, and it strikes me as this incredibly shallow, sniping program with a bunch of good-looking jerks who communicate entirely by means of obvious joke setups and punchlines. "Rear iris" indeed, who really talks like that?
Because everyone, or everyone interesting at least, is on fringe of some sub-culture.
Just because the majority of people carry some opinion doesn't mean that opinion is correct. Often times it is, but not all the time.
Anyway, I know a literature professor who travels to England to examine Tolkien's own notes. He loves the movies. But my former roommate, who is a lot less scholarly but has read them obsessively, thinks Jackson did a hatchet job.
Some of us like to enjoy the creative visions of others as well.
I can understand that. But in our culture, movies carry ten times the cultural weight that books carry. If a book and a movie made from that book are both equivilently popular, relative to the size of their audiences, then the culture will tend to remember the movie to the exclusion of the book.
This is why, when a movie is made from a book, the book suddenly gets back into print, almost always with cover graphics that match the movie. They even did this with The Lord of the Rings.
Many people get a thrill from watching a well-constructed 2-minute trailer for a good movie, just as some of us like to watch a well-constructed 2-hour "trailer" of a good book.
I'm not one of the people who particularly enjoys movie trailers. Many times they give away story secrets, they often miss the whole point of the movie they're promoting, and I get tired of seeing giant CGI letters get set aflame, become lit with the sound of a knife sharpening, have a sun rise behind them, or vibrate towards the viewer in lewd fashion.
In any case, trailer is not to movie as movie is to book. Not that it's wrong that a movie should inspire anyone to read the work upon which it is based, but that I can't help but think reading a book after the movie must be a different experience than reading the book first.
But then again, I can imagine there being some books that are so confusing that I imagine that seeing the visual Cliff Notes version could be helpful.
That someone along the line, someone important to the process, will mess it up terribly. The whole movie can get made perfectly and it can still get messed up -- we're talking about Disney here, they can always decide the editors did a horrible job and re-edit it, which could be murder to a Hitchhiker's movie.
And here's another thing I'm worried about:
Consider, for a moment, that everyone involved with this could be perfect and the movie could still disappoint. This is not a situation where they can take any old crap out of the script pile, raise its attributes by equipping it with a director and actors, and plop it out onto the screen.
This movie is going to require real directoral skill to work, but he can't get too fancy with the material or he'll incur the wrath of geeks everywhere.
And the last thing I'm worried about:
A Hitchhiker's movie has been bouncing around Hollywood for a long time. Adams has been dead for what, two or three years now? When did the project get uncorked and start moving towards production? It wasn't long after the critical fatality.
The thing that may have held up the movie for so long is Adams himself, refusing to accept the various flavors of Hollywood taint that infect so many productions. Of course, the success of the Lord Of The Rings movies has changed things a little bit....
My god, that's the new thing that really worries me:
A Hitchhiker's Movie is in production because Hollywood has concluded there's money to be made in movie adaptations of books beloved by geeks.
Do you really think the US government is doing "the wrong things". What exactly do you think they are doing in secret that is so bad for the general population of the US?
Oy. All you have to do is take a look at the kinds of things the CIA was doing during the Cold War, from testing LSD on unwitting human subjects to assassinating foregin leaders.
I agree, there's probably no aliens, and that's what I was talking about concerning Area 51. No one except a spy would care to spill the beans about a new aircraft (well, except maybe aerospace geeks), but if it were something like aliens, it'd get *out*.
It's the line between, the sorts of things that are big, but not *too* big, that I wonder about. And Bush *has* greatly curtailed the amount of information released to the public during his administration, including pushing back the publication of Reagan's papers, and when you do something like that, it's almost the right of people to ask themselves, "What could *be* in those papers that's so blasted important?"
Of course there are an unlimited number of things that are true that we don't know. But no one complains about the Zargnoids who continually steal electricity from my power lines and result in me being overcharged for electricity every month.
More plainly, there's such an abundance of things we don't know that a mere strongly-worded assertion about any one of them can set off the kooks, and the increasingly kook-friendly media. (Mumble mumble Fox mumble.)
I don't believe government employees are not any more fanatical about keeping secrets than ordinary employees, though on some levels they are much more indoctrinated. But still, the thing about Area 51 rumors that have always bugged me is the number of people who would have to be "in" on it, and not talk. And in these days of near-instant communication, it gets a lot harder to prevent leaks.
But the thing that bugs me about Area 51 the most is that the culture of secrecy that some sectors of the government enjoy makes possible a rich environment for spurious stories to flourish. Much worse, to me, than the stories is the secrecy itself, especially since it's alegedly *our* government that's so tightlipped about so much, and Bush and company have made it a lot worse.
So I almost want to wish the conspiracy mongers well on their propaganda efforts -- anything that causes the public to distrust that air of secrecy, and the actions of spooky secret people supposedly in their interest, for there is no force on Earth so horrifying as that of people willing to do wrong things for what they think are right reasons, things like that that work towards increasing that distrust are somewhat positive in my book.
Wasn't Will Wright speaking at that conference? Miyamoto's cool, granted, but some of the other designers are just as brilliant, if not so popular. Does 1up have transcripts of their discussions?
I agree completely that we need more zany, cool games.
Unfortunately, many of those games do head out towards obscurity earlier, because they don't tend to get the masses of players that things like (ugh) Street Fighter 2 get. Solar Jetman, developed by Rare as a sequel to some of their classic old computer games and published by Tradewest, is one of the best games for the NES. Nintendo Power ran at least two large articles on it, there some memorable ads for the game, and yet the game still didn't do that well in sales.
The fact is, you can create a *great* game and still languish in obscurity, unless you luck out and catch the eye of certain loud-mouthed gamers. While some awful games sell over a million simply because they take no chances and have a valuable license.
Not that I approve of this state of affairs, mind you. Far from it, in fact. This is why, if you are in any way enlightened as a gamer, you should take voice-projecting lessons. Speak up! Blab your head off!
I signed up for the beta, though I didn't get chosen, largely because I've interacted with one of the people working there, Jeremy Hunter, back when he worked on WorldsAway.
Actually, I'm not even sure of that name, back in WA his character name was Vaserius and I've never met the man in person.
WorldsAway (now called something different I haven't even bothered to keep track of) had some of the same problems as There. What was originally pitched to be something along the lines of Habitat/Club Caribe never evolved beyond the "gabbing on a street corner" model.
I remember the first wave of managers trying to steer the world away from that, but it never really happened. Now they've been through at least three sets since then, and things have gone way downhill.
These are all "social" virtual worlds, as opposed to "gaming" worlds like Everquest and Ultima Online. Social worlds seek to follow the Snow Crash virtual reality route, but like Sims Online, have so far proven to be spectacular failures in the market place.
I think the reasons largely boil down to this:
No social game world has yet presented a sufficently compelling environment.
I'm not talking about raw size of the world or the physics model or the quality of graphics or the existance of monsters to slay. But that the world, itself, largely boils down to just a lot of space to wander around.
From what I understand of There, it was just a big area you could roam. You could obtain vehicles with which to explore (which, to some degree, cost real-world cash -- I like to refer to that as strike one), and they had a physics engine, but even so... why explore when over There is just another flavor of right Here?
Another way to look at this is that social worlds don't have enough "game" in them. And to me, "game" worlds don't have enough "social" in them.
I hate to bring up Nethack again (it's been on my mind a lot lately), but really, for a social world to work it's going to have to present at least the complexity in its environment that Nethack, at its best, is capable of exhibiting. That, in a multiplayer setting, just might work. If they had the advertising budget and the huge amount of art resources to pull it off.
It's a shame, because while I love the idea of virtual worlds, I have very little interest in level-treadmilling.
Also, when I was in WorldsAway I found it to be an incredible time sink, even when there wasn't much to do. I racked my brain to try to come up with things to do in that limited environment, and even came up with some rather nifty concepts if I say so myself - a Halloween vampire event that spread in a "viral" manner, where people got to dress up and roleplay, but only if they had been "invited" to participate in a public RP scene by someone already participating, and another long-running structure where a bunch of us dressed spare characters up as "tribespeople," roleplaying an (admittedly simplistic) indiginous culture to the world, complete with a co-conspirator-written translator program to give us an obfuscated language. Those two were the standouts.
When I finally just stopped going, I was working on a magic system that also relied completely on roleplaying, along with a Slashdot-esque moderation system to balance out abuses between participants. You can do an awful lot with social engineering if you have a little client program sitting on participants' computers, but I haven't seen anyone else really moving in that direction.
Ah well, enough braggart old fogey stories for now. Just trying to show what's possible, even within a highly-limited reality, with enough effort. Unfortunately, all the effort it took from my end almost dropped me out of college....
Allow me to clarify this, what's dumb about it is that it's a software patent. There are some people who have a zero-tolerance policy for that kind of thing, especially since the length of time it takes a patent to expire in the U.S. poses serious problems for software development. Also, software patents encourage a game in which only monied interests can play, which excludes the majority of open source tinkerers.
Slashdot Mirror
I've actually gotten the "real" last gem by getting all 'A's. It changes the ending, and also lets you see the very final bit of it after the credits.
Getting all As is hard in some places, but I don't remember it being as hard as getting those damn beat-bosses-perfectly gems. I think time spent is the sole determining factor.
The mind-blowing thing is, like Blast Corps has a secret "Platinum" medal on each and every level in the game, there's is actually a secret 'S' rank beyond 'A' in Mischief Makers. No one knows if there's any unlockables for getting all, or any, 'S'es, but it seems unlikely.
Actually, adding extra quests after the second would be rather harder than you might think.
The original Zelda, if I remember correctly, came on a one megabit cartridge. That's 128k in which to squeeze 128 overworld screens and 18 dungeons.
Because of the morbidly restricted ROM size they had to resort to a large number of tricks to squeeze the large game area into memory. That explains some of the weirdness with the overworld layout, instead of being an array of tile information, each screen is actually a set of tile columns which can be mixed and matched to make each screen. And each dungeon is composed of a small number of possible rooms mixed and matched to make each maze.
However, most of the tricks used in the game are already exploited almost to their maximum effect by the end of the second quest (which is already rather cheap in places).
Of course, this hasn't stopped people from hacking up the Zelda ROMs themselves and making their own, often funky, third-plus quests available for download on the Internet for play on emulators.
Hey, I *liked* Mischief Makers. It had strong play mechanics and a great sense of style. It's true, it wasn't as hectic as your typical Treasure product....
But Treasure's made substandard games before. There was a weird isometric fantasy game for the Genesis they made that wasn't that interesting. And don't forget, they made Wario World, which is fun for a little while but gets old fast.
Heh, has it ever occured to you that I might be both a collector *and* a fanboy?
Of course no one's making me buy it. But if they had put a little more effort into it, I might consider it.
(sigh)
I want to like these, I really do. The original Legend of Zelda is still one of the greatest video games ever made.
But I already have Zelda 1 on the Gamecube, as part of the four-game collectors' disk they made available to people who bought enough other Nintendo games. (For me, they were Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga and Mario Kart Double Dash.)
As noted on the linked-to sites, Mario Bros. is available as an eCard set, as an extra in Animal Crossing and, in a graphically-upgraded version, in *five* other GBA games. Super Mario Bros. has been remade several times.
Also consider that the original ROM sizes of these games were so miniscule that the entire game, plus an NES emulator, could be quickly sent over the pipe from Animal Crossing, and fit entirely in the GBA's built-in RAM.
In short, while some of the games are really cool, $20 is too much for only ONE ancient NES game. And few of the games are worth shelling out *any* money for. If all these games were available on *one* GBA card, which given their miniscule memory footprints could have easily been done, then maybe. As it is... no.
There is only one exception. A gamer who never got to play the original Zelda might be better served getting this than playing it on the Gamecube compilation (or the secret Animal Crossing item made available with a cheat device) for one reason: it'll probably come with a full manual. Zelda is a game that needs its manual. The booklet that came with the Zelda retrospective disk gave it two scant pages! Not a smart way to introduce gamers to one of the highlights of your company's history....
I'm kind of weird when it comes to the Zelda series in that Link to the Past, while great in a way few other games are, is not among my favorites. Wind Waker, Majora's Mask, and the first two NES Zeldas are the ones I find myself playing the most at the moment.
Especially the second game, because while it offers drastically different gameplay compared to the rest of the series, it's a good, stiff challenge. The same part of my soul that loves the original NES Castlevania likes Zelda II.
You are perfectly free to consider that sad if you like. Some days I'd even agree with you.
Toeing the line and agreeing with the person who has power over you will get you a good grade, but will also destroy your chance to change his mistaken thought pattern, which would cause him to cease teaching his incorrect dogma to countless other impressionable students who deserve better.
The observance of manners are essential in any society, but they do us a disservice when they are used to propagate idiocy, as even a cursory examination of a good number of John Cleese-based Monty Python sketches will teach you.
So I say to Miss Manners: take that, bitch! And learn to speak of yourself using first-person!
Hmm... I'm a Nintendo fanboy to the core, but... ...but I like the idea of smaller developers being able to create commercial games.
However, I'm still cheering for the DS for now. It just strikes me as a cooler idea.
I think you're right on on many of your points. I've been in one world that was basically an exceedingly impractical chat client. Oy.
One of the things that bugs me about the current crop is that they present few opportunities to change the player's states other than combat. Club Caribe had a wand that could turn another person blue. There was a nude beach special area where it was possible to accidently leave it without your clothes (which some people actually found embarassing, despite that the "clothing removal" was just a color change). There was a curse that gave you a donkey's head.
I don't see that kind of thing happening in any other world. Neither the opportunity to affect other players in playful ways, or the sense that there are areas that are "special" other than just being another few square miles to wander.
A further point: I hate the term MMORPG. People use the term to mean "Everquest, or a lot like it," and I don't like Everquest. In my book Everquest definitely falls too far on the game side of things. I think there has to be some game there, mind you. Originally the metaphor used was adventure gaming -- Habitat's interface was very, VERY similar to Maniac Mansion's, to the degree that you could easily confuse the two at a glance. (It didn't have a verb bar, however.)
P.S. If anyone reading is working on something like that and are looking to hire....
My apologies, I was referring to NES Ninja Gaiden -- NOT the X-box game, which I haven't played.
A lot of people have complained about the new game's difficulty, but I don't know how similar it is to the original. I'm just hoping it's not real similar.
I've played two out of three of those games, so:
Ninja Gaiden: the one I haven't played. I agree with the previous post, the designer seems like a real jerk. This is a man who needs hormone supression therapy - his testosterone levels seems to be through the roof. DOA Extreme Volleyball is proof enough of this fact to me. The thing that the people complaining about "difficulty whiners," who are whining themselves in my opinion, forget is that if you fork over the cash for a game you expect to get some enjoyment out of it. The old-style painful, are-you-man-enough-for-me kinds of games are, parodoxically, usually only really enjoyed by kids who have long afternoons and summer vacations to beat their heads against this kind of thing. It's no fun to pay 50 bucks for something if you'll never see the end of level one.
Viewtiful Joe: In Kids Mode, the game actually isn't that hard, but the bosses do require being clued-in to the skills necessary to succeed in boss fights (discover the pattern, look for a weakness, exploit, exploit, exploit). The harder modes are there if the player wants to go for them; I've completed V-Rated so far. But my point is, you can play the whole game in Kids Mode, you won't feel like you haven't gotten your money's worth if you do so, and it's enough of a joy just to play around with that even if you don't beat it, you can have a good time. In short, Viewtiful Joe can afford to be hard, because it has a legitimate easy mode, and it's fun to play even if you don't care about winning.
F-Zero GX: This one's just insane. I can kind of understand that, given its need to its relationship to F-Zero AX, but really -- who besides ultimate game geeks are even going to finish this? But it does have easy modes, though you get paltry unlockables for beating them.
What matters here is, does the gamer feel like he's gotten his money's worth, even if he never finishes the game? I've seen many, many kids, and adults too, with games like Grand Theft Auto 3 who will never, honestly, finish them. Even games considered "easy," like Wind Waker, are often abandoned long before the ending (which is a shame for WW because the ending's awesome).
I would go so far to claim that at least half of all purchased copies of video games these days go unbeaten even once during their initial ownership period (before being sold, traded or given to someone else), and that number *could* be much higher, maybe 90% or more.
Credential establishment:
I played a lot of those old NES games. I've beaten Castlevania without continuing. Gone through Mario 2 -the whole game, no warping- without losing a life. I've been to the secret levels in Mario Lost Levels you can only get to if you don't warp. I've finished Zelda (first quest at least) with a wooden sword and no ring, and almost finished the second that way, too. I've beaten Golgo 13, Rygar in 3 hours starting from first picking up the game, Metroid without maps fast enough to get the legendary "bikini" ending, and over 300 hundred other games.
Mario Sunshine's void levels are my favorite parts of that game. I've beaten bloody Athena, for crying out loud.
Main argument:
So please understand than when I say that Ninja Gaiden is too damn hard, that I know what I'm talking about. It's not that I didn't finish both of the NJ games I played (1 and 2), it's that I didn't enjoy the experience. Back then I played video games fairly obsessively. I would not have the patience for a Ninja Gaiden today, because I have better respect for the limits of my free time.
The original Castlevania is a game that's very similar to NES Ninja Gaiden in many ways, but better in most respects. NJ's primary contributions to the genre are cinema scenes (which were either nonexistant or very rare beforehand) and wall-jumping, which was very frustrating to deal with.
It's not that games aren't easier these days than they were -- they are. But they're also in 3D, which is an intrinsically more difficult environment to operate in. And if video games, good ones, are ever going to truly break into the mainstream, we've got to pay greater attention to balanced difficulty.
Diatribe: complete!
For the love of....
In point of fact, I'd *LIKE* to see a good Hitchhiker's movie. And they may very well be capable of putting one together.
But it is possible for one element of a work to be poisoned by another. A bad videogame reflects poorly upon the movie on which it's based, while a good movie adaptation increases respect for the original book -- look at The Wizard of Oz, the original wasn't bad, but the movie was great.
I'm not so much complaining about the movie here as about movie advertising and merchandising efforts, and despite what you say, those well-funded influences on the culture can indeed ruin works, if not for me then for millions of people who have not been previously aware of the original. That's what determines how the property will be remembered in the long run, and that's what presents the opporunity for greatest harm to Adams' work.
I've been thinking a bit about this lately....
Social-only worlds, I believe, can be made to work. I spent roughly four years on the event staff of one. But attracting that initial audience is the hard part, and then satisfying their expectations seems to be difficult as well. These tasks are arguably more difficult now because of the success of Everquest and other "game" worlds -- people, in general, are attracted to the theme beyond the world itself.
One way this could be made to work is to offer a "fake" theme, a fantasy world that's actually a social world under the surface. Do it right and most people won't even notice, then keep them playing long enough to get hooked on the depth of your design, and they'll never consider going back to plain hack and slash.
here's junk UK TV -- in fact, they produce rock bottom TV by the ton
Tell me about it! I have two friends who are almost obsessed with Coupling, and it strikes me as this incredibly shallow, sniping program with a bunch of good-looking jerks who communicate entirely by means of obvious joke setups and punchlines. "Rear iris" indeed, who really talks like that?
Less is more. He gets it.
Unless you're talking about wine....
Who cares about the fringe people anyway?
Because everyone, or everyone interesting at least, is on fringe of some sub-culture.
Just because the majority of people carry some opinion doesn't mean that opinion is correct. Often times it is, but not all the time.
Anyway, I know a literature professor who travels to England to examine Tolkien's own notes. He loves the movies. But my former roommate, who is a lot less scholarly but has read them obsessively, thinks Jackson did a hatchet job.
I can see where both of them are right, actually.
Some of us like to enjoy the creative visions of others as well.
I can understand that. But in our culture, movies carry ten times the cultural weight that books carry. If a book and a movie made from that book are both equivilently popular, relative to the size of their audiences, then the culture will tend to remember the movie to the exclusion of the book.
This is why, when a movie is made from a book, the book suddenly gets back into print, almost always with cover graphics that match the movie. They even did this with The Lord of the Rings.
Many people get a thrill from watching a well-constructed 2-minute trailer for a good movie, just as some of us like to watch a well-constructed 2-hour "trailer" of a good book.
I'm not one of the people who particularly enjoys movie trailers. Many times they give away story secrets, they often miss the whole point of the movie they're promoting, and I get tired of seeing giant CGI letters get set aflame, become lit with the sound of a knife sharpening, have a sun rise behind them, or vibrate towards the viewer in lewd fashion.
In any case, trailer is not to movie as movie is to book. Not that it's wrong that a movie should inspire anyone to read the work upon which it is based, but that I can't help but think reading a book after the movie must be a different experience than reading the book first.
But then again, I can imagine there being some books that are so confusing that I imagine that seeing the visual Cliff Notes version could be helpful.
Here's one thing I'm worried about:
That someone along the line, someone important to the process, will mess it up terribly. The whole movie can get made perfectly and it can still get messed up -- we're talking about Disney here, they can always decide the editors did a horrible job and re-edit it, which could be murder to a Hitchhiker's movie.
And here's another thing I'm worried about:
Consider, for a moment, that everyone involved with this could be perfect and the movie could still disappoint. This is not a situation where they can take any old crap out of the script pile, raise its attributes by equipping it with a director and actors, and plop it out onto the screen.
This movie is going to require real directoral skill to work, but he can't get too fancy with the material or he'll incur the wrath of geeks everywhere.
And the last thing I'm worried about:
A Hitchhiker's movie has been bouncing around Hollywood for a long time. Adams has been dead for what, two or three years now? When did the project get uncorked and start moving towards production? It wasn't long after the critical fatality.
The thing that may have held up the movie for so long is Adams himself, refusing to accept the various flavors of Hollywood taint that infect so many productions. Of course, the success of the Lord Of The Rings movies has changed things a little bit....
My god, that's the new thing that really worries me:
A Hitchhiker's Movie is in production because Hollywood has concluded there's money to be made in movie adaptations of books beloved by geeks.
O'Reilly is sitting on a gold mine.
Do you really think the US government is doing "the wrong things". What exactly do you think they are doing in secret that is so bad for the general population of the US?
Oy. All you have to do is take a look at the kinds of things the CIA was doing during the Cold War, from testing LSD on unwitting human subjects to assassinating foregin leaders.
I agree, there's probably no aliens, and that's what I was talking about concerning Area 51. No one except a spy would care to spill the beans about a new aircraft (well, except maybe aerospace geeks), but if it were something like aliens, it'd get *out*.
It's the line between, the sorts of things that are big, but not *too* big, that I wonder about. And Bush *has* greatly curtailed the amount of information released to the public during his administration, including pushing back the publication of Reagan's papers, and when you do something like that, it's almost the right of people to ask themselves, "What could *be* in those papers that's so blasted important?"
Of course there are an unlimited number of things that are true that we don't know. But no one complains about the Zargnoids who continually steal electricity from my power lines and result in me being overcharged for electricity every month.
More plainly, there's such an abundance of things we don't know that a mere strongly-worded assertion about any one of them can set off the kooks, and the increasingly kook-friendly media. (Mumble mumble Fox mumble.)
I don't believe government employees are not any more fanatical about keeping secrets than ordinary employees, though on some levels they are much more indoctrinated. But still, the thing about Area 51 rumors that have always bugged me is the number of people who would have to be "in" on it, and not talk. And in these days of near-instant communication, it gets a lot harder to prevent leaks.
But the thing that bugs me about Area 51 the most is that the culture of secrecy that some sectors of the government enjoy makes possible a rich environment for spurious stories to flourish. Much worse, to me, than the stories is the secrecy itself, especially since it's alegedly *our* government that's so tightlipped about so much, and Bush and company have made it a lot worse.
So I almost want to wish the conspiracy mongers well on their propaganda efforts -- anything that causes the public to distrust that air of secrecy, and the actions of spooky secret people supposedly in their interest, for there is no force on Earth so horrifying as that of people willing to do wrong things for what they think are right reasons, things like that that work towards increasing that distrust are somewhat positive in my book.
Wasn't Will Wright speaking at that conference? Miyamoto's cool, granted, but some of the other designers are just as brilliant, if not so popular. Does 1up have transcripts of their discussions?
I agree completely that we need more zany, cool games.
Unfortunately, many of those games do head out towards obscurity earlier, because they don't tend to get the masses of players that things like (ugh) Street Fighter 2 get. Solar Jetman, developed by Rare as a sequel to some of their classic old computer games and published by Tradewest, is one of the best games for the NES. Nintendo Power ran at least two large articles on it, there some memorable ads for the game, and yet the game still didn't do that well in sales.
The fact is, you can create a *great* game and still languish in obscurity, unless you luck out and catch the eye of certain loud-mouthed gamers. While some awful games sell over a million simply because they take no chances and have a valuable license.
Not that I approve of this state of affairs, mind you. Far from it, in fact. This is why, if you are in any way enlightened as a gamer, you should take voice-projecting lessons. Speak up! Blab your head off!
I signed up for the beta, though I didn't get chosen, largely because I've interacted with one of the people working there, Jeremy Hunter, back when he worked on WorldsAway.
Actually, I'm not even sure of that name, back in WA his character name was Vaserius and I've never met the man in person.
WorldsAway (now called something different I haven't even bothered to keep track of) had some of the same problems as There. What was originally pitched to be something along the lines of Habitat/Club Caribe never evolved beyond the "gabbing on a street corner" model.
I remember the first wave of managers trying to steer the world away from that, but it never really happened. Now they've been through at least three sets since then, and things have gone way downhill.
These are all "social" virtual worlds, as opposed to "gaming" worlds like Everquest and Ultima Online. Social worlds seek to follow the Snow Crash virtual reality route, but like Sims Online, have so far proven to be spectacular failures in the market place.
I think the reasons largely boil down to this:
No social game world has yet presented a sufficently compelling environment.
I'm not talking about raw size of the world or the physics model or the quality of graphics or the existance of monsters to slay. But that the world, itself, largely boils down to just a lot of space to wander around.
From what I understand of There, it was just a big area you could roam. You could obtain vehicles with which to explore (which, to some degree, cost real-world cash -- I like to refer to that as strike one), and they had a physics engine, but even so... why explore when over There is just another flavor of right Here?
Another way to look at this is that social worlds don't have enough "game" in them. And to me, "game" worlds don't have enough "social" in them.
I hate to bring up Nethack again (it's been on my mind a lot lately), but really, for a social world to work it's going to have to present at least the complexity in its environment that Nethack, at its best, is capable of exhibiting. That, in a multiplayer setting, just might work. If they had the advertising budget and the huge amount of art resources to pull it off.
It's a shame, because while I love the idea of virtual worlds, I have very little interest in level-treadmilling.
Also, when I was in WorldsAway I found it to be an incredible time sink, even when there wasn't much to do. I racked my brain to try to come up with things to do in that limited environment, and even came up with some rather nifty concepts if I say so myself - a Halloween vampire event that spread in a "viral" manner, where people got to dress up and roleplay, but only if they had been "invited" to participate in a public RP scene by someone already participating, and another long-running structure where a bunch of us dressed spare characters up as "tribespeople," roleplaying an (admittedly simplistic) indiginous culture to the world, complete with a co-conspirator-written translator program to give us an obfuscated language. Those two were the standouts.
When I finally just stopped going, I was working on a magic system that also relied completely on roleplaying, along with a Slashdot-esque moderation system to balance out abuses between participants. You can do an awful lot with social engineering if you have a little client program sitting on participants' computers, but I haven't seen anyone else really moving in that direction.
Ah well, enough braggart old fogey stories for now. Just trying to show what's possible, even within a highly-limited reality, with enough effort. Unfortunately, all the effort it took from my end almost dropped me out of college....
I'm sorry, what's dumb about this patent?
Allow me to clarify this, what's dumb about it is that it's a software patent. There are some people who have a zero-tolerance policy for that kind of thing, especially since the length of time it takes a patent to expire in the U.S. poses serious problems for software development. Also, software patents encourage a game in which only monied interests can play, which excludes the majority of open source tinkerers.