Let's see, if memory serves Saruman has a substantial role to play at the very end of Return of the King, but there's also some unfinished business with him at the end of The Two Towers which would have been pushed into the third movie, which is more central to the plot I guess since it helps focus Sauron's attention on the wrong hobbit.
So: 1. Before edits: 7 minutes of Saruman. 2. After edits: No Saruman at all.
I'm guessing that either way we're not going to get the Scouring of the Shire, which is one of my favorite parts of the trilogy, seeing as it takes place after Sauron's actual defeat and as we all know, the end of the movie must take place as soon as possible after the death of the bad guy.
And what about the appendices?? Please tell me that they're leaving all those wonderful goodies about the Red Book and the line of Aragorn and Galadrial's implied dwarf fetish!
Yeah, I was thumbing through a book with an interview with Ed Logg in it (or I think it was him), and he said that spinning the wheel was what *made* the game. We played it a little. Thanks for the follow up by the way, I was purposely not dwelling on much concerning each actual game, my post was long enough as it was.
Defender: *EXTREMELY* cool, but very, very hard. Can you believe people have gotten over 10 million points on this game? I can't break 50k, and I know what I'm doing dammit!
Gauntlet: There are no words for how cool this is. Unless you count the pretty-cool (yet misguided) home versions of Gauntlet Legends and Dark Legacy, this is the first home version of "real" Gauntlet since the Genesis. Why are home versions of G:L and G:DL misguided? BECAUSE THEY LEFT OUT TIMED HEALTH LOSS! That broke the design in so many ways, and slowed down their pace tremendously.
Joust: Extremely cool, though not the first emulated commercial version. (The Dreamcast has the best, I think.) Excellent learning curve, I can get past ten waves without much difficulty, and is less frantic than, oh, Defender or Robotron.
Paperboy: A nifty game, but there have been many home versions. I've never had the chance to go up against the arcade version.
Rampage: One of the biggest draws on the disc, this is a game I never really got into. Three-player play, however, you can't fault that.
Marble Madness: Very hard, but very cool. This is one of my favorite arcade games of all time, but these days I feel like I'm in the minority here. Maybe it's because I spent so many hours on the Commodore 64(!) port.
Robotron: 2084: The coolest game on the disc! Hard but fair. This is probably the most classic arcade game in existence. Dual joystick controls will make this almost the same experience as in the arcade, for the first time at home.
Smash TV: This is basically a reprise of Robotron with much better graphics, power-ups and two-player co-op play. This makes it very cool. But the game lost a little of the purity of the original design. Also, collecting keys is kinda annoying. There is a lesser-known sequel to this, Total Carnage, with much more varied gameplay that was heavily influenced by the first Gulf War. Maybe for the sequel, though it may strike some as horrendously politically-incorrect.
Joust 2: The little-known sequel to Joust, this is probably the first time most gamers will see it outside of MAME. Not bad, but I like the original much better.
Bubbles: A severely underrated Williams game, I got well-acquainted with it on the Dreamcast compilation. I'd say it's impossible to play this one indefinitely, but what do I know, I've never finished eight waves of Defender.
RoadBlasters: I know very little about this, except that it was originally made by Atari.
Stargate (aka Defender II): Defender's more complicated cousin, an upgrade in almost every respect. I'm actually better at this than Defender, because the player has an extra weapon (Inviso), and because with more enemies the player can earn more points, which means more extra lives. I've finished ten waves of this before, but never fifteen, again, very cool but very hard.
Moon Patrol: Memorize the patterns and you can play forever. Very cool music and sound effects, and they say there's no sound on the moon (check Overclocked Remix for a great take on it). This is actually an Irem game, I believe, that Williams licensed.
Blaster: I know absolutely nothing about this?!
Rampart: THE best multiplayer arcade game, hands down, in my opinion. Three players trying to kill each other in this wonderful action-strategy-puzzle-war game is an unequaled experience. If Atari kept putting out games like Rampart maybe they'd still be around. I dearly love this game, and I personally rank it above Robotron, but I've already ranted about it on Slashdot enough times already, I think. Fun fact: This is the *TENTH* home version of Rampart, and every single ever-lovin' one of them, it seems, has had slightly different rules. Especially the freaky Japan-only Konami port for the Famicom, yowza.
Sinistar: Another game I can't play well for the life of me, but still enjoy. Like rubber Asteroids with a malevolent planet cha
Yea, you speak truly. (I think I mentioned that, though.)
I also think it's likely that the games included are limited in some other way as well. But the full versions aren't very expensive anyway. It'll be interesting to see if new N64 software ends up getting made for the iQue.
Granted, the original was extremely cool, and the new characters may not match up with the original Justin/Feena/Sue triad, and Tia was, admittedly, a little strange in there. Grandia's story was cool because it was like, the twelve-year-old and his friends go forth and conquer the world. (I still can't help but chuckle when I think of eight-year-old rah-rah Sue casting a battlefield-clearing spell, didn't she have *Earthquake*?!) But I think the game stands on its own, and I thought the ending in G2 was exactly right. And battles loaded much faster than in the PS game; I find that when I decide which RPGs I like, those with quick load times tend to get ranked far above those with horrible ones (which is why I couldn't get myself to play past half of FF VII). I've played right up until the end of Grandia but I lost interest right before the last areas (oddly, when the story lost its giddy pointlessness), while I've played through Grandia 2 twice. It's shorter, but I think that fits the game.
Those are actually rather generous time limits. I could beat both games within those time limits, though I've had the advantage of excessive play of both games. But a dedicated player who wasn't interested in finding secrets could possibly get through Zelda 64 in ten hours with a printout from GameFAQs in hand.
The time-limit system may work out well, or it may not work at all. I know if I was only the last boss away from beating a game when the machine conked out I'd be reluctant to buy it just to beat Ganon/Bowser.
This sounds like a hardcore version of a store demo's auto-reset feature. I wonder if game play time is saved on the flash cart?
Actually I liked Grandia 2's spell building better, Grandia 1's meant using many spells that you'd typically never use, merely in the name of boosting their power and opening up better spells. G2 basically uncoupled characters and spells, making them completely modular, but there was still a bit of strategy there since character attacks were still inate, and a character couldn't do more than one thing when his turn came up. Opportunity costs, you see.
You could set auto-battle on, maybe, I never did. And yes there wasn't much challenge there until the end, but most RPGs are like that, honestly. It was still fun to try to complete battles without taking damage, which the game acknowledged with special music. No other reward for it, but with proper planning lots of battles could be won without taking a hit, and with battle being relatively entertaining it helped to liven up the monotony I've come to associate with RPGs: chat everyone up, fight a hell of a lot, find some stuff, beat a boss, lather, rinse, repeat.
Voice acting is always a matter of opinion, but Grandia 2's I thought was at least on a par with 1's.
Grandia 2 isn't a be-all and end-all, but I'd rather play it than whatever-is this year's flavor of Final Fantasy.
Yes, Soul Calibur, I second that! Damn it, I forgot it in my own post. There's probably two or three other cool games I forgot as well. Bomberman Online was cool (though too slow for *real* Bomberman I thought). The Sonic Adventure games were cool, though they're both out and expanded for the GC now. I've got perfectly emulated Digital Eclipse compilations of both Williams and Atari arcade games which are both nifty, as well as the Sega Smash Pack with several Genesis gamee, including Golden Axe, and also Virtua Cop 2, that's gotta be worth something.
Almost forgot! The Typing of the Dead! The coolest typing tutor ever, and an excellent parody of Sega's own The House of the Dead 2! And Jet Grind Radio, which is cooler in my opinion than the X-Box sequel. And they had the best home version of Gauntlet Legends I'd say, the closest to the arcade version (though still no timed health loss). And Skies of Arcadia (though the GC version is arguably better on all fronts).
Chu Chu Rocket! You really need other people to play it with, but find them and you have a game that can almost challenge the mighty Bomberman for multiplayer mayhem. I hear the network play was very laggy but playable, but since all the Dreamcast online servers are now dead this is a dead feature now. But the four-players-on-one-system mode is a masterpiece. (There is a GBA version of this game, and a small 1p version is a secret in Billy Hatcher.)
Grandia 2. Some people mentioned it on the site already, but yeah, they're right, this is a severely underrated game. Some of the best writing and voice acting you'll hear in a RPG. Not too challenging (unless you count the secret extra dungeon late in the game, which has some hard foes in it), but the brilliant combat system created for the first game really comes to shine here. And the trademark loveable, personality-filled Game Arts characters are the icing on the cake. (There are also PS2 and PC versions of this game.)
Crazy Taxi & Crazy Taxi 2. The first game is available for all three current consoles now, but the sequel was never released for anything besides the Dreamcast. This is the game I spent the most time on on my Dreamcast, and for a while there I was in the running for, what was it again, 8th place in the Twin Galaxies record books when they were running a high score contest, with a score of over $69,000. (I never sent in my tape, though.) These are among the best designed games for any system. I thought that CT3 (X-Box) didn't have enough additions over the second game, though it was nice being able to explore new places in the original arcade city. (CT1: also available for PC, GC, X-Box and PS2, CT2: DC exclusive.)
Seaman. Yeah, it was funky, and kind of boring after a while, but it was truly fresh and different, and for a little while actually caused us to forget we were playing a game as we talked to a little Japanese-headed fish/frog guy with a microphone plugged into the controller. Ten times cooler than Nintendo's Hey You Pikachu!, which is the only other game of this type I can name. (DC exclusive)
Space Channel 5. The hippest videogame of all time. It doesn't look like it at first, but it is.
NesterDC/DreamSNES/GNUBoy/other emulators. Yeah, they're free and quasi-legal when played with ROMs, but these babies can pack new life into your DC. http://www.dcemulation.com/ for more information. Of special note is the Atari 800 emulator, which can emulate M.U.L.E., possibly the best designed game of all time and a formidable multiplayer game, flawlessly and with the exact same four-controller-port configuration the original computer had. NesterDC emulates almost all NES games perfectly, and on your TV screen. That is too cool for words.
Man-oh-Manos, I've been looking for Bangai-O for years now. I saw it for sale for less than ten bucks on discount at a local Walmart, had never heard of it so I passed, then heard it was made by Treasure (!), ran back to the store and it was *gone*.
I'm still kicking myself for missing out on it. Ouch! There, see?
Well I have to disagree with this GameFAQs user review, the voice acting in Eternal Darkness was top notch, I can't imaging how it could be improved. It's very difficult to prove points like this in a message board, though.
Sequels are not necessarily blatantly commercial. (And I would reject that I consider Gladiator to be an art movie, I mean, puh-leeze.)
What is a sequel? If it's exactly the same as the old game then yes, there's no originality there at all. But, excepting the recent GBA adaptions old SNES games (which isn't too original, yeah, but there's other things out for the system too like Advance Wars, which may not be original in Japan but is original as hell here), Nintendo at the very least seriously messes with their formulas when they make new games.
To consider my point, let's look at what might be the most problematic, to my claim, recent Gamecube title, Super Mario Sunshine:
When people refer to Mario Sunshine as being too much like Mario 64... well, there's a lot of that that's undeniable, certainly, in the play style. But there's a lot that's different too, and I don't just mean the water pack. While there's still the star/shine collection objective, the levels themselves have a much better feel of being a real place that the objectives just happen to take place in, than being designed solely with the objectives in mind. A 3D platformer (a stock one at least) is basically about travel and combat, and there is a lot of that, but I think the water pack does a good job as a further variation on the theme.
On the other hand, original games for other systems tend to look more like sequels than Nintendo's sequels. FPS shooters, for example, I've always seen them as being almost identical. Maybe I have a blind spot, but I just don't see what Halo *has*. I'll admit, I played a metric assload of Goldeneye, but that was because it was the only good shooter for my system, it's really not all that different from what we saw in DOOM years earlier.
Offensiveness, inoffensiveness... these are terms that are not usefully applied to the game industry at this time. The Satanic Verses got Salman Rushdie on a death list. Now that was offensive. Good offensive! There is nothing like that in computer or video gaming. There is only shallow offensiveness, there merely to shock, or titilate, or provide fodder for Leiberman to fuel his presidential bid. The world will not be better for BMX XXX being on store shelves, and there is a Nintendo version of that, dammit. That is what is meant by lowest common denominator. Appealing to the baseness of human kind that is all too often exhalted these days, as opposed to the sense of wonder that is commonly buried.
And Nintendo does make new franchises, which is the entire point of Pikmin I believe, which wasn't a big seller in the States at least but I played so much that I eventually got my score down to nine days. And Eternal Darkness, which has one of the best stories in gaming today. But they are, indeed, only one company. I agree, they should do more new things. But coming up with something truly new is one of the hardest things a human being can attempt, and even geniuses cannot do it every day. I'd put Nintendo's record up against any three other companies (so long as you don't include Sega, or Atari Games before they got devoured).
Made In Wario (known here as Wario Ware) was incredibly original and cool. But the Gamecube sequel doesn't have the same focus, it's more about multiplayer gaming, which by itself is a major change.
I think at the core here is the fundemental nature of originality, which is this:
There is no completely new thing in existence. All there is is the combination of previous ideas in new ways. What matters is the pool of ideas you are willing to draw from, the ways you're willing to put them together, and the will to see it done. This is what I see Nintendo doing right.
And dammit if I didn't write another rah-rah Nintendo rant. Someone shoot me.
I've played a lot of Animal Crossing, and it has excellent writing. Go to GameFAQs (www.gamefaqs.com), search for Animal Crossing FAQs, and find the Mr. Resetti script. There is some damn funny stuff in there you get if you dare to turn off the game without saving....
Oh brother. Even Sony releases more artistic games than Microsoft. There's only I can think of that made artistic choices as opposed to marketing ones: ToeJam & Earl III (highly underrated and very unsuccessful) and Shenmue II (less underrated but also unsuccessful). Sony's got Ico, Mister Mosquito (which is a cool concept), Mad Maestro, PaRappa 2 and, if you go back to the PS1, UmJammer Lammy (which is mind-blowing), and that's just off the top of my head.
Nintendo, dammit, most things they do first-party are artistic. Wind Waker is the prime example. They've even been artistic where it hurt them (I wish they put a little more effort into Yoshi Story's gameplay than its graphics, which rocked).
Costikiyan's list is presented as a way to expand the minds of up-and-coming designers. I've played probably 80% of the list, and heard of another 10%, and while I don't agree with some of it, and think that some awesome games were left out (R-A-M-P-A-R-T-! Oh, and Costikiyan's own Paranoia.), I think the idea is sound.
Computer and video game development are way too insular. People get to be designers who've played little more than the lead shooters on the market. Everyone considers the "golden age" of gaming to be whatever they grew up with. (Thanx to whoever it was here on Slashdot I first heard that from -- I owe ya one.) He's saying that designers really need to take a much wider view of what's out there. With that, I agree completely.
The person who said that you don't need to look outside your genre is, I'm sorry to say, completely wrong. If you never look outside your genre you can never transcend it. Gunstar Heroes, perhaps the best side-scrolling Contra-style shooter, has an entire level implemented as a board game! All genres relate to each other, just as all things relate to each other.
Hey, that's really cool. It looks kind of like old issues of JoyStik, one of the *coolest* old videogame magazines, a bit hard to read sometimes but always stylish. Why don't any recent magazines look that good? (I realize that my definition of "good," by the way, is somewhat subjective.)
There has Will Harvey, the kid who created Music Construction Set way back when, also a C64 computer port of Marble Madness, and Zany Golf and The Immortal for the Amiga, on board. It's nice to see him finally get a new project.
Also there is a guy I've talked to, not in person but online, Jeffery Hunter (I think that was the name), who was once working on WorldsAway, which was an earlier attempt at this kind of virtual world thing.
There itself seems to be inspired (though vastly changed) by the Habitat line of virtual worlds, of which WorldsAway was one. I was rather involved with WorldsAway once upon a time, and they even had a article in Wired magazine once upon a time, but word is that management was clueless and forced out the good guys, of whom Hunter was one. So at least I know it's in good hands.
Hunter was cool. I ran some fairly gonzo events in WorldsAway once upon a time, I mean really weird stuff, blow your freakin' mind stuff, and he helped a little from his seat On-High. I took it for granted back then but now I see that most management would rather not try that kind of oddness. There must be something cool happening there. (Pun not intended.)
Anyway, There. I signed up for the beta but never got the disk in the mail, and didn't hear from them for the longest time. Now they send me e-mail every couple of weeks begging me to buy their program thingies. I'm sorry, but a purchase fee, a subscription fee, *and* people can spend real-world money for in-world advantages?
I'm sure there are people out there who can afford all that but currently I'm not one of them. Also, when I was in WorldsAway I discovered it to be an immense time sink. I don't think I'm ready for that kind of commitment to a non-human-female kind of thing at the mo'.
That makes me just burn up inside wondering what the Holy Cow things were. If it made him say that, and it's so important that national security would be compromised... there must be some bad, yet cool, mojo buried in those files.
I think a good way to make guesses as to the nature of the classified things is to take a good look at the guy and see if he seems to be considering defecting to a little-known island nation, check if he buys an excess of ginseng, visits the Valley of the Shmoo, etc. If he found something really, really disturbing, interesting, incredible, etc., it'd be bound to show up somewhere in his life.
Especially check if he seems to be going insane. (I like to refer to that as the "Lovecraft Test.")
In Gauntlet Legends' defense, the home ports are basically just the arcade game shoehorned into a home setting with minimal gameplay differences, except with the removal of timed health loss. That was a bad decision, because the arcade game was more than just a mindless monster slaughter, you needed to find ways to complete levels quickly to minimize your cash expenditure. You could stand in one place and level up, but this was offset by the fact that monster generation rates would increase as time passed, eventually overwhelming the player, and because it couldn't be done forever on one credit.
They removed the health timer (and didn't even provide a way to turn it back on) in every single home version of both Gauntlet Legends and Dark Legacy, six in all. I seem to be the only person in the world who thinks that was a bad decision, but I'm convinced it was.
When it was released, it was greviously underrated -- it didn't sell well. Now it's true that many people who know about it know about its greatness, but most of them are game design wonks like me. There are lots of old games that deserve more than they've gotten. And M.U.L.E. deserves more than the rest of them. But yeah, perhaps I should have chosen a better example.
There are several M.U.L.E. remakes. Some are commercial, some are freeware. There's a prototype of an unfinished official sequel, "Son of MULE," that never made it to production, I've heard, because of Dani Bunten's reluctance to add anything to the game that even slightly smacked of violence. While I greatly miss the chance to play a new version of the game by the original (now deceased) developer, I respect her decision to not bow to EA's pressure.
And to think that Electronic Arts used to be *so cool*....
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see, if memory serves Saruman has a substantial role to play at the very end of Return of the King, but there's also some unfinished business with him at the end of The Two Towers which would have been pushed into the third movie, which is more central to the plot I guess since it helps focus Sauron's attention on the wrong hobbit.
So:
1. Before edits: 7 minutes of Saruman.
2. After edits: No Saruman at all.
I'm guessing that either way we're not going to get the Scouring of the Shire, which is one of my favorite parts of the trilogy, seeing as it takes place after Sauron's actual defeat and as we all know, the end of the movie must take place as soon as possible after the death of the bad guy.
And what about the appendices?? Please tell me that they're leaving all those wonderful goodies about the Red Book and the line of Aragorn and Galadrial's implied dwarf fetish!
Yeah, I was thumbing through a book with an interview with Ed Logg in it (or I think it was him), and he said that spinning the wheel was what *made* the game. We played it a little. Thanks for the follow up by the way, I was purposely not dwelling on much concerning each actual game, my post was long enough as it was.
Spy Hunter: Cool, but I consider it overrated.
Defender: *EXTREMELY* cool, but very, very hard. Can you believe people have gotten over 10 million points on this game? I can't break 50k, and I know what I'm doing dammit!
Gauntlet: There are no words for how cool this is. Unless you count the pretty-cool (yet misguided) home versions of Gauntlet Legends and Dark Legacy, this is the first home version of "real" Gauntlet since the Genesis. Why are home versions of G:L and G:DL misguided? BECAUSE THEY LEFT OUT TIMED HEALTH LOSS! That broke the design in so many ways, and slowed down their pace tremendously.
Joust: Extremely cool, though not the first emulated commercial version. (The Dreamcast has the best, I think.) Excellent learning curve, I can get past ten waves without much difficulty, and is less frantic than, oh, Defender or Robotron.
Paperboy: A nifty game, but there have been many home versions. I've never had the chance to go up against the arcade version.
Rampage: One of the biggest draws on the disc, this is a game I never really got into. Three-player play, however, you can't fault that.
Marble Madness: Very hard, but very cool. This is one of my favorite arcade games of all time, but these days I feel like I'm in the minority here. Maybe it's because I spent so many hours on the Commodore 64(!) port.
Robotron: 2084: The coolest game on the disc! Hard but fair. This is probably the most classic arcade game in existence. Dual joystick controls will make this almost the same experience as in the arcade, for the first time at home.
Smash TV: This is basically a reprise of Robotron with much better graphics, power-ups and two-player co-op play. This makes it very cool. But the game lost a little of the purity of the original design. Also, collecting keys is kinda annoying. There is a lesser-known sequel to this,
Total Carnage, with much more varied gameplay that was heavily influenced by the first Gulf War. Maybe for the sequel, though it may strike some as horrendously politically-incorrect.
Joust 2: The little-known sequel to Joust, this is probably the first time most gamers will see it outside of MAME. Not bad, but I like the original much better.
Bubbles: A severely underrated Williams game, I got well-acquainted with it on the Dreamcast compilation. I'd say it's impossible to play this one indefinitely, but what do I know, I've never finished eight waves of Defender.
RoadBlasters: I know very little about this, except that it was originally made by Atari.
Stargate (aka Defender II): Defender's more complicated cousin, an upgrade in almost every respect. I'm actually better at this than Defender, because the player has an extra weapon (Inviso), and because with more enemies the player can earn more points, which means more extra lives. I've finished ten waves of this before, but never fifteen, again, very cool but very hard.
Moon Patrol: Memorize the patterns and you can play forever. Very cool music and sound effects, and they say there's no sound on the moon (check Overclocked Remix for a great take on it). This is actually an Irem game, I believe, that Williams licensed.
Blaster: I know absolutely nothing about this?!
Rampart: THE best multiplayer arcade game, hands down, in my opinion. Three players trying to kill each other in this wonderful action-strategy-puzzle-war game is an unequaled experience. If Atari kept putting out games like Rampart maybe they'd still be around. I dearly love this game, and I personally rank it above Robotron, but I've already ranted about it on Slashdot enough times already, I think. Fun fact: This is the *TENTH* home version of Rampart, and every single ever-lovin' one of them, it seems, has had slightly different rules. Especially the freaky Japan-only Konami port for the Famicom, yowza.
Sinistar: Another game I can't play well for the life of me, but still enjoy. Like rubber Asteroids with a malevolent planet cha
It's not easy, but it's possible to use analog sticks to give the same kind of fine-degree control of trackballs.
Gauntlet II: I guess they've got to give people at least *one* reason to buy a sequel?
Yea, you speak truly. (I think I mentioned that, though.)
I also think it's likely that the games included are limited in some other way as well. But the full versions aren't very expensive anyway. It'll be interesting to see if new N64 software ends up getting made for the iQue.
Granted, the original was extremely cool, and the new characters may not match up with the original Justin/Feena/Sue triad, and Tia was, admittedly, a little strange in there. Grandia's story was cool because it was like, the twelve-year-old and his friends go forth and conquer the world. (I still can't help but chuckle when I think of eight-year-old rah-rah Sue casting a battlefield-clearing spell, didn't she have *Earthquake*?!) But I think the game stands on its own, and I thought the ending in G2 was exactly right. And battles loaded much faster than in the PS game; I find that when I decide which RPGs I like, those with quick load times tend to get ranked far above those with horrible ones (which is why I couldn't get myself to play past half of FF VII). I've played right up until the end of Grandia but I lost interest right before the last areas (oddly, when the story lost its giddy pointlessness), while I've played through Grandia 2 twice. It's shorter, but I think that fits the game.
Those are actually rather generous time limits. I could beat both games within those time limits, though I've had the advantage of excessive play of both games. But a dedicated player who wasn't interested in finding secrets could possibly get through Zelda 64 in ten hours with a printout from GameFAQs in hand.
The time-limit system may work out well, or it may not work at all. I know if I was only the last boss away from beating a game when the machine conked out I'd be reluctant to buy it just to beat Ganon/Bowser.
This sounds like a hardcore version of a store demo's auto-reset feature. I wonder if game play time is saved on the flash cart?
I didn't know about the Atari ST port, but I'm inclined not to count it because, well, because I'm a bastard, really.
Really, looking at this strikes me as super-cool. Does it even sound the same as the DC version?
Actually I liked Grandia 2's spell building better, Grandia 1's meant using many spells that you'd typically never use, merely in the name of boosting their power and opening up better spells. G2 basically uncoupled characters and spells, making them completely modular, but there was still a bit of strategy there since character attacks were still inate, and a character couldn't do more than one thing when his turn came up. Opportunity costs, you see.
You could set auto-battle on, maybe, I never did. And yes there wasn't much challenge there until the end, but most RPGs are like that, honestly. It was still fun to try to complete battles without taking damage, which the game acknowledged with special music. No other reward for it, but with proper planning lots of battles could be won without taking a hit, and with battle being relatively entertaining it helped to liven up the monotony I've come to associate with RPGs: chat everyone up, fight a hell of a lot, find some stuff, beat a boss, lather, rinse, repeat.
Voice acting is always a matter of opinion, but Grandia 2's I thought was at least on a par with 1's.
Grandia 2 isn't a be-all and end-all, but I'd rather play it than whatever-is this year's flavor of Final Fantasy.
Yes, Soul Calibur, I second that! Damn it, I forgot it in my own post. There's probably two or three other cool games I forgot as well. Bomberman Online was cool (though too slow for *real* Bomberman I thought). The Sonic Adventure games were cool, though they're both out and expanded for the GC now. I've got perfectly emulated Digital Eclipse compilations of both Williams and Atari arcade games which are both nifty, as well as the Sega Smash Pack with several Genesis gamee, including Golden Axe, and also Virtua Cop 2, that's gotta be worth something.
Almost forgot! The Typing of the Dead! The coolest typing tutor ever, and an excellent parody of Sega's own The House of the Dead 2! And Jet Grind Radio, which is cooler in my opinion than the X-Box sequel. And they had the best home version of Gauntlet Legends I'd say, the closest to the arcade version (though still no timed health loss). And Skies of Arcadia (though the GC version is arguably better on all fronts).
Chu Chu Rocket! You really need other people to play it with, but find them and you have a game that can almost challenge the mighty Bomberman for multiplayer mayhem. I hear the network play was very laggy but playable, but since all the Dreamcast online servers are now dead this is a dead feature now. But the four-players-on-one-system mode is a masterpiece. (There is a GBA version of this game, and a small 1p version is a secret in Billy Hatcher.)
Grandia 2. Some people mentioned it on the site already, but yeah, they're right, this is a severely underrated game. Some of the best writing and voice acting you'll hear in a RPG. Not too challenging (unless you count the secret extra dungeon late in the game, which has some hard foes in it), but the brilliant combat system created for the first game really comes to shine here. And the trademark loveable, personality-filled Game Arts characters are the icing on the cake. (There are also PS2 and PC versions of this game.)
Crazy Taxi & Crazy Taxi 2. The first game is available for all three current consoles now, but the sequel was never released for anything besides the Dreamcast. This is the game I spent the most time on on my Dreamcast, and for a while there I was in the running for, what was it again, 8th place in the Twin Galaxies record books when they were running a high score contest, with a score of over $69,000. (I never sent in my tape, though.) These are among the best designed games for any system. I thought that CT3 (X-Box) didn't have enough additions over the second game, though it was nice being able to explore new places in the original arcade city. (CT1: also available for PC, GC, X-Box and PS2, CT2: DC exclusive.)
Seaman. Yeah, it was funky, and kind of boring after a while, but it was truly fresh and different, and for a little while actually caused us to forget we were playing a game as we talked to a little Japanese-headed fish/frog guy with a microphone plugged into the controller. Ten times cooler than Nintendo's Hey You Pikachu!, which is the only other game of this type I can name. (DC exclusive)
Space Channel 5. The hippest videogame of all time. It doesn't look like it at first, but it is.
NesterDC/DreamSNES/GNUBoy/other emulators. Yeah, they're free and quasi-legal when played with ROMs, but these babies can pack new life into your DC. http://www.dcemulation.com/ for more information. Of special note is the Atari 800 emulator, which can emulate M.U.L.E., possibly the best designed game of all time and a formidable multiplayer game, flawlessly and with the exact same four-controller-port configuration the original computer had. NesterDC emulates almost all NES games perfectly, and on your TV screen. That is too cool for words.
Man-oh-Manos, I've been looking for Bangai-O for years now. I saw it for sale for less than ten bucks on discount at a local Walmart, had never heard of it so I passed, then heard it was made by Treasure (!), ran back to the store and it was *gone*.
I'm still kicking myself for missing out on it. Ouch! There, see?
Well I have to disagree with this GameFAQs user review, the voice acting in Eternal Darkness was top notch, I can't imaging how it could be improved. It's very difficult to prove points like this in a message board, though.
Sequels are not necessarily blatantly commercial. (And I would reject that I consider Gladiator to be an art movie, I mean, puh-leeze.)
What is a sequel? If it's exactly the same as the old game then yes, there's no originality there at all. But, excepting the recent GBA adaptions old SNES games (which isn't too original, yeah, but there's other things out for the system too like Advance Wars, which may not be original in Japan but is original as hell here), Nintendo at the very least seriously messes with their formulas when they make new games.
To consider my point, let's look at what might be the most problematic, to my claim, recent Gamecube title, Super Mario Sunshine:
When people refer to Mario Sunshine as being too much like Mario 64... well, there's a lot of that that's undeniable, certainly, in the play style. But there's a lot that's different too, and I don't just mean the water pack. While there's still the star/shine collection objective, the levels themselves have a much better feel of being a real place that the objectives just happen to take place in, than being designed solely with the objectives in mind. A 3D platformer (a stock one at least) is basically about travel and combat, and there is a lot of that, but I think the water pack does a good job as a further variation on the theme.
On the other hand, original games for other systems tend to look more like sequels than Nintendo's sequels. FPS shooters, for example, I've always seen them as being almost identical. Maybe I have a blind spot, but I just don't see what Halo *has*. I'll admit, I played a metric assload of Goldeneye, but that was because it was the only good shooter for my system, it's really not all that different from what we saw in DOOM years earlier.
Offensiveness, inoffensiveness... these are terms that are not usefully applied to the game industry at this time. The Satanic Verses got Salman Rushdie on a death list. Now that was offensive. Good offensive! There is nothing like that in computer or video gaming. There is only shallow offensiveness, there merely to shock, or titilate, or provide fodder for Leiberman to fuel his presidential bid. The world will not be better for BMX XXX being on store shelves, and there is a Nintendo version of that, dammit. That is what is meant by lowest common denominator. Appealing to the baseness of human kind that is all too often exhalted these days, as opposed to the sense of wonder that is commonly buried.
And Nintendo does make new franchises, which is the entire point of Pikmin I believe, which wasn't a big seller in the States at least but I played so much that I eventually got my score down to nine days. And Eternal Darkness, which has one of the best stories in gaming today. But they are, indeed, only one company. I agree, they should do more new things. But coming up with something truly new is one of the hardest things a human being can attempt, and even geniuses cannot do it every day. I'd put Nintendo's record up against any three other companies (so long as you don't include Sega, or Atari Games before they got devoured).
Made In Wario (known here as Wario Ware) was incredibly original and cool. But the Gamecube sequel doesn't have the same focus, it's more about multiplayer gaming, which by itself is a major change.
I think at the core here is the fundemental nature of originality, which is this:
There is no completely new thing in existence. All there is is the combination of previous ideas in new ways. What matters is the pool of ideas you are willing to draw from, the ways you're willing to put them together, and the will to see it done. This is what I see Nintendo doing right.
And dammit if I didn't write another rah-rah Nintendo rant. Someone shoot me.
Here's a question: If the voice acting in Eternal Darkness is bad, then what game do you consider to have good voice acting?
I've played a lot of Animal Crossing, and it has excellent writing. Go to GameFAQs (www.gamefaqs.com), search for Animal Crossing FAQs, and find the Mr. Resetti script. There is some damn funny stuff in there you get if you dare to turn off the game without saving....
THE LIGHT'S SO BRIGHT IT HURTS MY BRAIN!
Oh brother. Even Sony releases more artistic games than Microsoft. There's only I can think of that made artistic choices as opposed to marketing ones: ToeJam & Earl III (highly underrated and very unsuccessful) and Shenmue II (less underrated but also unsuccessful). Sony's got Ico, Mister Mosquito (which is a cool concept), Mad Maestro, PaRappa 2 and, if you go back to the PS1, UmJammer Lammy (which is mind-blowing), and that's just off the top of my head.
Nintendo, dammit, most things they do first-party are artistic. Wind Waker is the prime example. They've even been artistic where it hurt them (I wish they put a little more effort into Yoshi Story's gameplay than its graphics, which rocked).
Actually, I remember reading once that one of the Nintendo inventor types really admired the Eyetoy. And I think I heard Miyamoto say he liked Ico.
Costikiyan's list is presented as a way to expand the minds of up-and-coming designers. I've played probably 80% of the list, and heard of another 10%, and while I don't agree with some of it, and think that some awesome games were left out (R-A-M-P-A-R-T-! Oh, and Costikiyan's own Paranoia.), I think the idea is sound.
Computer and video game development are way too insular. People get to be designers who've played little more than the lead shooters on the market. Everyone considers the "golden age" of gaming to be whatever they grew up with. (Thanx to whoever it was here on Slashdot I first heard that from -- I owe ya one.) He's saying that designers really need to take a much wider view of what's out there. With that, I agree completely.
The person who said that you don't need to look outside your genre is, I'm sorry to say, completely wrong. If you never look outside your genre you can never transcend it. Gunstar Heroes, perhaps the best side-scrolling Contra-style shooter, has an entire level implemented as a board game! All genres relate to each other, just as all things relate to each other.
Hey, that's really cool. It looks kind of like old issues of JoyStik, one of the *coolest* old videogame magazines, a bit hard to read sometimes but always stylish. Why don't any recent magazines look that good? (I realize that my definition of "good," by the way, is somewhat subjective.)
JoyStik Covers
Issue Scans
There has Will Harvey, the kid who created Music Construction Set way back when, also a C64 computer port of Marble Madness, and Zany Golf and The Immortal for the Amiga, on board. It's nice to see him finally get a new project.
Also there is a guy I've talked to, not in person but online, Jeffery Hunter (I think that was the name), who was once working on WorldsAway, which was an earlier attempt at this kind of virtual world thing.
There itself seems to be inspired (though vastly changed) by the Habitat line of virtual worlds, of which WorldsAway was one. I was rather involved with WorldsAway once upon a time, and they even had a article in Wired magazine once upon a time, but word is that management was clueless and forced out the good guys, of whom Hunter was one. So at least I know it's in good hands.
Hunter was cool. I ran some fairly gonzo events in WorldsAway once upon a time, I mean really weird stuff, blow your freakin' mind stuff, and he helped a little from his seat On-High. I took it for granted back then but now I see that most management would rather not try that kind of oddness. There must be something cool happening there. (Pun not intended.)
Anyway, There. I signed up for the beta but never got the disk in the mail, and didn't hear from them for the longest time. Now they send me e-mail every couple of weeks begging me to buy their program thingies. I'm sorry, but a purchase fee, a subscription fee, *and* people can spend real-world money for in-world advantages?
I'm sure there are people out there who can afford all that but currently I'm not one of them. Also, when I was in WorldsAway I discovered it to be an immense time sink. I don't think I'm ready for that kind of commitment to a non-human-female kind of thing at the mo'.
That makes me just burn up inside wondering what the Holy Cow things were. If it made him say that, and it's so important that national security would be compromised... there must be some bad, yet cool, mojo buried in those files.
I think a good way to make guesses as to the nature of the classified things is to take a good look at the guy and see if he seems to be considering defecting to a little-known island nation, check if he buys an excess of ginseng, visits the Valley of the Shmoo, etc. If he found something really, really disturbing, interesting, incredible, etc., it'd be bound to show up somewhere in his life.
Especially check if he seems to be going insane. (I like to refer to that as the "Lovecraft Test.")
In Gauntlet Legends' defense, the home ports are basically just the arcade game shoehorned into a home setting with minimal gameplay differences, except with the removal of timed health loss. That was a bad decision, because the arcade game was more than just a mindless monster slaughter, you needed to find ways to complete levels quickly to minimize your cash expenditure. You could stand in one place and level up, but this was offset by the fact that monster generation rates would increase as time passed, eventually overwhelming the player, and because it couldn't be done forever on one credit.
They removed the health timer (and didn't even provide a way to turn it back on) in every single home version of both Gauntlet Legends and Dark Legacy, six in all. I seem to be the only person in the world who thinks that was a bad decision, but I'm convinced it was.
When it was released, it was greviously underrated -- it didn't sell well. Now it's true that many people who know about it know about its greatness, but most of them are game design wonks like me. There are lots of old games that deserve more than they've gotten. And M.U.L.E. deserves more than the rest of them. But yeah, perhaps I should have chosen a better example.
There are several M.U.L.E. remakes. Some are commercial, some are freeware. There's a prototype of an unfinished official sequel, "Son of MULE," that never made it to production, I've heard, because of Dani Bunten's reluctance to add anything to the game that even slightly smacked of violence. While I greatly miss the chance to play a new version of the game by the original (now deceased) developer, I respect her decision to not bow to EA's pressure.
And to think that Electronic Arts used to be *so cool*....