Movies have become the archetypal Modern Art Form.
Games should say something about the world, like movies do! Games should have big-budgets! Designers should be treated like stars! We need an independent game industry, just like the independent cinema scene!
Horse-hockey! Well, I like the idea of independent gaming, but the rest is bull. Look at the movies that make the most money, they're *crap*. Look at the games that make the most, with some exceptions they're also mostly crap. I mean, the biggest seller last year, if memory serves, was a multi-platform Madden game. *Madden*! Yet another ANOTHER version of a game, video football, that's been remade countless times since the DAMN ATARI 2600/INTELLIVISION WARS. Madden itself got started in the Genesis era, two generations ago! How many football games are there per-gamer-capita? People are not buying these for healthy reasons. It doesn't make sense to pay $50 for the same game each year with an updated player roster and some minor additions.
Anyway, my point is that the efforts of the game community to push gaming along the Hollywood path are wrong-headed. They're copying the massivecrap, blockbuster-focused, take-no-risks Bad Hollywood instead of the smaller, more thoughtful, artistic Good Hollywood, which isn't really what we think of as "Hollywood" anymore.
The following is a list of ways that games are not like movies, and shouldn't be treated like them:
- Non-linearity. The best games are non-linear. The very best games make a mockery out of the whole concept of linearness -- how "linear" is SimCity? - Focus on algorithm over data. The movie analogue -- well, there isn't one, movies are all data. "Data" in a game means pre-made level designs, monster placements, and static setting. "Algorithm" means focus on general situations more than dealing with specific situations. How to survive the three fireball-shooting demons at the end of this hallway? That's data. How to play an effective game of chess, given the almost infinite variation in situation that can occur from the initial state of the game? That's algorithm. - Effort required. The fact remains that you can still make a game entirely in your garage, or living room or what have you. Even the equivalent independent cinema, which has had a small number of success story along those lines, required actors, and equipment, and editing tools much less available than your home PC, and film stock, and other stuff I don't even know what they are.
The emergence of the independent scene in moviedom, however, is something that would probably help us independent developers. Kevin Smith made Clerks for about $25,000, and it looked it, and then it went on to break out and get him a "real" career, but a good number of people (as shown by a Non-Scientific Slashdot Poll (tm)) still think of it as his best movie. Chris Crawford has gone on record somewhere (I don't remember where alas) as saying we needed something like that.
As for games needing to "say something about the world," well, how do movies say something about the world? If you think Independence Day was actually about humans banding together over adversity and finding a common basis then I've got a fish to slap you with. It failed on those terms because it was didactic, it was obvious, it told us what to think. Most games are like that, and most games will thus fail to say anything meaningful. Schindler's List isn't a good movie because it shows us that Nazis are bad. It's a great movie because it's about the mystery of Oscar Schindler, and it doesn't show us what happened inside his head to make him go from Nazi sympathizer to rescuer of Jews. Movies that tell you what to think are propaganda. Movies that actually teach show us something, and expect that we're smart enough to draw our own conclusions. Gaming may one day evolve a way to do this, but I don't think it'll be any time soon.
Actually, to be honest I probably like FF 6/3 better because there's no DAMN LOAD TIME BEFORE EACH OF THE THOUSANDS OF RANDOM BATTLES. That and it still felt more like a game than a movie.
UmJammerLammy, which is everything the Gamespy reviewers say it is and more. (It's also mega hard, but you can handle that, right?)
Wizardry 8, which should be near the top of the list.
Herzog Zwei, one of the best games for the Genesis, and more playable, I'd say, that Warcraft, though harder to learn.
Rocket: Robot on Wheels, simply amazing.
Ico, cool, though I'm not sure deserving of #1. There are dozens of games that should be on the list but aren't. Gaming is filled of games that could have changed the direction of the world, except.
Thumbs down concerning:
Super Mario Sunshine, not on the list, derided by almost everyone for being too similar to Mario 64. That's still better than 95% of the rest.
Few or no old-school games. M.U.L.E. is one of the best designed games of all time according to me, Chris Crawford and a lot of other people. These GameSpy guys are clued-in enough to know about Zork, but ignore almost all of computer gaming's too-brief past.
Extra-lame superimposed-directly-over-article-text ads once ina while. Seeing even one of those on a site makes it worthy of hatred in my book. For that, Gamespy can go directly to hell, do not pass 'Go.'
Now can we PLEASE stop with all the XX Blankest lists?! Or at least have more that aren't GameSpy?
Er, how? I've not played it yet (Statesboro isn't exactly a hotbed of physi-gaming activity, unless you count the local Games Workshop infestation), but everything I've seen points to a very *non* RTS-like game. I mean, there's no units or combat at all. The players have to produce buildings to win, but that's a stock play mechanic that predates RTSes I'm pretty sure.
Oh, and also the game isn't played in real time, completely unlike, say, Cheapass Games' inventive Falling.
First, "Ninja Gaiden" is actually the name of two different games produced by the same company. It was originally an arcade port (a brawler, I believe), but Tecmo created a game with the same name but mostly different content for the NES. This is not the first time this has happened: the original Rygar and Astanynax were also arcade games with little to do with their NES counterparts. (But I admit, my memory is a little fuzzy concerning these.) The arcade version of Ninja Gaiden eventually got a port for the Atari Lynx, but because of the massive installed base for the system and its pioneering use of "cinema scenes," e.g. cut scenes, most people remember the NES version now.
I'll admit to having played through both Ninja Gaiden and Ninja Gaiden 2. (The last game was 3, at which time the company announced it'd be the last game.) At the time I played them eagerly, and beat them both on a single rental. Now, I have to admit, I consider them poor imitations of Castlevania. They both have the same side-scrolling, stage-oriented, hit-candles-for-stuff, sub-weapon-based, boss-infested gameplay. Castlevania was a much slower (though just as hard) game, but at least when you took a hit you could see how it was your fault. Latching onto some of those wall things in NG really annoys me to this day.
The first Ninja Gaiden game is incredibly annoying in places, and the second isn't much easier. I think I remember them making improvements to the core game as the series progressed to try to limit the annoyance factor. But I have to say, I still regularly play the original Castlevania and Castlevania III, and have gotten to where I can beat it on one credit, but I'm not similarly taken with the NG games.
Actually, I thought Wind Waker's last fight was very cool. Nevermind that the story before and after the last fight (which is not technically part of it) is the best of all the Zeldas, it was a fight where you *had* to use the counterattack ability that you had the whole game to learn how to use. Also, at the end you had to fight Ganon with Zelda supporting you with the Light Arrows. So much more satisfying than having her stand off-stage, gasping whenever you get hit.
Also, while the difficulty against weapon-users was up a few notches over Ocarina of Time, Ganon was again the only enemy that a cautious player could concievably need to use a fairy or potion for. I was really hoping that the much rumored second quest would be an actual harder game, but alas it was not to be. Maybe in the next game....
Ocarina of Time was so easy that I decided, once, to play through the whole game with only three hearts. I only really had trouble against Ganon's final form at the end, where I ended up having to use Nayru's Love.
I've seen the fight with Giygas written up in a couple of places lately, and everyone mentions the Pray command, but no one mentions my own favorite part of the fight.
The background music, as the last fight starts on this SNES game, starts out composed entirely of suitable 8-bit NES music! After about a minute of that it suddenly stops and makes way for a driving electric guitar, but at that time I kind of wished it went on.
First, let me say that I have *not read* the article mentioned in the article. I don't have enough time right now to go through that, but I do consider myself having enough time to chime in on the debate, which is essentially the old "Is GTA3 corrupting our nations youth?" argument that's been going on since the game was released.
And, let me say that I have never played GTA3! I have a Gamecube. I've never had a PS2, and I sold my X-Box as soon as I got my fill of ToeJam & Earl 3. (Very underrated game, actually, but I digress.) So naturally I'm *hopelessly* unqualified to say anything on this subject, right?
Well... of course, I would say no. I've been around enough to know that the furor over GTA3 is just another interation of the old Mortal Kombat furor, which is itself a repeat of the furor over a truly old game called Death Race 2000 (which as near as I can tell is not a movie tie-in).
What I know about GTA3 is all hearsay, but all the reputable sources of information seem to agree. That being: - Casual attitude towards killing. - Player can hire a prostitute to regain health. - After "doing it" with a prostitute, player can then kill her. (A lot of people reference to this, so it must be an important part of the game.) - Didn't you just hear what I said? Killing whores!! - Oh, and brilliant level design and gameplay, pah.
Okay, on to the point. In fact, I have had the chance to play GTA3 but I passed it up because I found the attitude behind it disturbing. "Mature" in the videogame world has its sole meaning in the MPAA's definition of Mature, which is, guns, swear words and tits. It's true that you can do a lot of things in the game world, there is a lot of player freedom, and that you don't technically have to do anything immoral, but the game's interface is biased towards doing reprehensible things. When you can collect such an extensive inventory of weapons, you can't help but feel the push towards shooting.
It's true that whenever I play an RPG with any sort of difficult moral choice, I do feel a bit of emotional weight over the decision. While I play, I lose some of the sense that it is "just a game," because playing it "right" requires so getting into the story. One of the defenses thrown up for GTA3, however, is that it's just a game. My point is, if it's any good, it's not.
And also, GTA3, while obviously not a direct cause of murders, *is* yet another example of the slow and steady push of our culture towards violence, which has difficult-to-gauge effects. You don't need to reference a hundred half-assed Lieberman-studies to see that.
I consider CT to be an unusually good choice for this kind of thing, because it's an arcade-level action game with an unusually high potential for strategy, that pushes multiple areas of the brain at once instead of just the "special move" center over and over. "Strange, this CAT scanner is showing increased activity in the roll-forward, quick punch, fierce kick region."
Of course, I've played Crazy Taxi enough that my top score is around $69,000, and have lasted 40 minutes on one quarter, so you can consider me biased. (Sorry if that sounds like boasting. It is, of course, but we all need to boast once in a while.)
I was referring to pencil and paper (a.k.a. "real") D&D.
Nethack, admittedly, has little story, and I actually like the old premise of "generic adventurer wants amulet for personal reasons" thing, the build-up given in the Guidebook, rather than all that annoying Moloch business on that page of intro text upon starting a new game.
Here's a secret about Nethack: it's really not that hard once you know what you're doing. Not that's a *lot* to learn, but it's actually a very fair game for a sufficently clued-in player. It's certainly nowhere near as hard as Rogue (which is a hair this side of impossible). But it's much harder for a Tourist than for a Barbarian or a Valkyrie. It's not so much about bragging rights as challenging yourself. (If you still want to brag, there's the extensive list of challenges in recent versions. Oy.)
Your save ideas are nice, but I really think that they should fit in with an overall design for a game than just being slotted in. I'm not against quicksaves so much as wary of the ways they can break a game. You really should be conscious that they exist when designing a game, because they can break things. Most games these days have as many features as the developers think they can ship on time, without enough concern about how they interact with each other. Sometimes changing a little thing can have a great impact.
Putting quicksaves in a game prevents the designer from doing some things. First person shooters are fairly limited games when it comes right down to it, so quicksaves don't change much. But any game that demands a certain amount of tension to be built up during a level simply can't allow the player to just arbitrarily jump to the end of it instantly.
In some games that enforce save points, even having to go back isn't really that bad. Final Fantasy VI returned te player to the previous save point upon death, but let him keep all experience and cash earned. (It made him lose items, however, which makes sense.)
But there is also a strong intuitive basis for save points, akin to not being able to rest just anywhere in a dungeon in a D&D adventure. A save point should be a "safe" location. Being able to put a bookmark in the middle of a series of tough battles breaks them up. If the player can just once get through all the hard parts of such a sequence without taking serious losses, then it's as if they don't exist! The player will then save at that point and not have to worry about going through it ever again. If those obstacles have a strong random (or not obviously deterministic) component, then this can break a level.
Let's say someone's challenged you to a little game -- if you roll a six-sided die ten times and never get a one, he'll give you a lot of money. In a computer game, the player would save after each successful roll and practically ensure an eventual win. Taken as a sequence, such an obstacle is more troublesome than if the player can bookmark after each roll.
Something in me kind of rebels against this question, actually, the assumption of "punishment." This question only makes sense if the listen intuitively accepts that all a "save" does is record the player's location and state, monster locations and states, which items are collected and the state of a few minor puzzles. In a more complex game (such as Black & White, where great portions of the game's environment is editable), you're saving and loading a lot more than just player location, and although B&W did have a quicksave feature, the idea of making a "bookmark" doesn't make as much sense. Although it is long, playing through the whole level each time makes a kind of sense.
Of course, understand that I'm a Nethack fanatic, and games which feature permanent character death appeal to me, so I'm obviously deranged.
- Importance of developing an indie games industry.
- Originality doesn't mean the same thing as Good
Each of these points is something I agree with overall, but there are problems with each of them.
* I really think people are starting to rebel against advertising. I never get excited over an ad the way the execs hope I will, and although I still see other people say "Kick Ass!" when they see something like a trailer for something like Ecks vs. Sever, I think there's reason to believe it won't last forever. And there's really no reason to believe it will, our advertising culture is only a few decades old compared to the tens of thousands of years humanity has been around. It's important for word of a game to get out in the open (you can't buy something you don't know exists), but we're living in an age in which word of mouth can overcome even the most orchestrated ad campaign, and we live in an age of loud voices. (Remember, movie execs are whining that SMS messaging is killing movie sales!)
Furthermore, not all things advertise well. Wind Waker is probably the best game this year, but I don't think anyone is going to get sold on it after ten seconds of gameplay footage. The "cartoon" bias is too strong in the minds of casual gamers. Animal Crossing had a great ad campaign, but only because they had something with which to relate it to in the minds of casual gamers (The Real World).
* You know, I've read personal idol Chris Crawford talk about the importance of developing an independent channel for games distribution, too. That would help things, but if an independent games industry ever did get off the ground, you can bet that the "mainstream" industry would get even worse. (Yes, that is possible.) And ultimately, the situation would stablize around the place the movie industry is now, a few big-budget crap works that can be seen anywhere in the country on thousands of screens, and lots of really good movies that show only on a few screens in large cities. I live in a small town. I'm not too happy about the idea that I might have to go to Atlanta to pick up a new Mario. And most casual gamers won't even know they exist, just like my friend Derrek doesn't know anything about independent movies.
* Originality doesn't mean the same thing as good. True. But less often than you'd think. I'd rather play a bad game (once) that takes risks and tries to innovate than even a very good FPS, fighter, or sports game, or a merely good RPG. I realize that's a slightly idiosyncratic view, but I think it is held, slowly, more and more often these days.
I think what the industry really needs right now is another mid-80's style, hardcore shakeout. It may be that only hardcore gamers care abour originality, but increasingly, more and more gamers are hardcore, due to sheer number of games played. Activision used to make wonderful games... when the Atari 2600 was king! When EA remembered that their name stood for Electronic Arts they published things that were worth playing. How is Acclaim even surviving?
I'm not saying that tomorrow there will be a groundswell and suddenly everything will be sunshine and roses, but that eventually, maybe in a decade or so, something will break.
From Wired 11.01 (some irrelevant portions excised, check the article itself for more):
"He is not helping things," says Seamus Blackley... He speaks for many game designers raised on Miyamoto's innovations - developers who admire the master's work but are desperate for something new.
"At this point," Blackley continues, "Miyamoto is making games for his fans. Granted, there are millions of them, and it's smart business, but most are kids. He's not opening up adult audiences. He's reinforcing stereotypes about games, not pushing them to a place where they can become something different and truly awesome."
What especially frustrates Blackley is the sense that Miyamoto could take gaming to the next level: "There isn't anyone on the planet better at lasering into the lizard brain, that eye-attached-to-your-hand-attached-to-your-brain thing that makes it impossible to stop playing. GTA3 is good, but it's not revolutionary. What Miyamoto could bring to a game like that would be incredible."
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Ah, so developers should be original, so long as it isn't percieved as kiddy in some way. It doesn't work to say "Be original, but only in the way I say." Originality doesn't work that way. And it so happens that the most original things get made by starting from the abstract and then paring them down to the concrete, rather than starting from reality and then trying to devise a play mechanic (which is by nature abstract) from that. And abstract things tend look kiddy when presented in an easy-to-understand format, which it must be in order for a new player to grasp them.
It's this same state in the industry that's producing both things that Blackley is complaining about here: game designers tend to be hard-core gamers, which do not tend to be very original because they don't know much besides videogaming and the attendant arts (action movies, comic books, paper RPGs, trash fiction). So, you get a lot of games based off of those arts. People like Miyamoto get their ideas for games from spheres outside of the "traditional" areas. The idea for Pikmin came from working in his garden.
No idea comes from nowhere! The industry won't change until either the current developers start getting interested in more things (unlikely, as most of them are reinforced by the other hard-code gamer staff members on their teams) or new designers come in with a wider array of interests. (And people will probably deride their games the same way Blackley derided Miyamoto.)
I now abdicate my post as the All-Seeing Know-It-All.
A: The GBA is "a wasteland for creativity" because most of its games are sequels.
B: To clarify the argument, "sequels" here is defined to mean any game in which has a character from a previously-existing game. (Wario in WarioWare, Inc.)
C: Thus, WarioWare is not original, regardless of its considerable originality and the fact that it has almost nothing to do with the "historical" Wario besides using the character. Also, the following games were also not original when released: Mario Bros.(Mario originated in Donkey Kong), the NES versions of Super Mario Bros. or Super Mario Bros. 2, Yoshi's Island for the SNES, Super Mario 64, Zelda: Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time or Majora's Mask (with its 3-day system) for the N64, or Luigi's Mansion, Metroid Prime, or *Animal Crossing* (all those Mario items and NES games!) for the Gamecube.
D: On the other hand, Spyro and Vexx *are* original.
E: Bleah!
The experiment is baised against companies that use stock characters and franchises, regardless of how originally they are used. In other words, it could not possibly be any more biased against Nintendo, which often does very original games but uses their franchise characters to attract an initial user base. You can bet that if other companies had even a fifth the character portfolio that Nintendo does, they'd be abusing them left and right.
If you define "originality" by an arbitrary standard in order to make the argument better, then you're going to get weird results. Originality, by its very nature, is difficult to pin down.
(Now that I've roundly dissed the article... I do have to say, I visit your site semi-often. In general, pretty cool.)
Sidestepping entirely the practical, if technically illegal, path of playing those superior (yes they *are* superior) old games using MAME....
1. We're still seeing compilations of older games sold commercially as a kind of shovelware. In a couple of months there will be Midway Arcade Classics, which will include an unprecedented number of emulated classics, including some that have never been sold before outside of an arcade. This includes the godly design of Rampart, ever-popular Marble Madness, unequaled twitch masterpiece Robotron 2084, Joust and the very rare (in the arcades) Joust 2, and there's an equal number of other classics in the mix. Easily twice as good as Namco's compilations, which I'd say are a little overrated.
2. If you like the style and play values of the older games but bemoan their absence from the modern marketplace, *make* one! They're harder to make than you'd think, because the thing about the old games is that they often created their play mechanics from whole cloth instead of copying fifteen other games, but it's still doable. That's the path I and a friend of mine are following.
No mention whatsoever of COMPILE! Those hep cats made ZANAC, The Guardian Legend, Gun-Nac, Power Strike, Power Strike 2, Blazing Lasers, MUSHA, Space Megaforce (named something else in Japan), ZANAC x ZANAC and others!
I think they've been bought out recently, and they've been making mostly Puyo Puyo lately, but still...!
Actually, I'm not aware of much Sony propaganda towards Nintendo. I'll admit I'm not exactly an industry insider, but I keep my eyes open, and I've not seem them say much about it. The propaganda, I would say, comes from the fanboys themselves, most of whom are teenage boys desperately trying to not seem like babies in front of their friends. It's peer pressure working on a massive scale, and it's also one of the big reasons we have such a sad motion picture industry in the States. That, and many developers (many of whom are only barely out of the teenage-fanboy classification themselves) are antagonistic towards the appearance of Nintendo's products. There was a story in Wired not long ago that presented the viewed of a few notable developers, many of whom basically said, why can't their wonderful games look like they're made for adults?
I have two answers to that. One, the industry's view of "adult" gaming runs towards a shallow, MPAA rating board measure of maturity. If it has gore and naked women and a kick-ass attitude it must by for adults. Maturity misnamed, basically. This approach has given us countless travesties of design, and I would say that it'll all come to an end once the public gets wise to it, except that the motion picture industry has made it abundantly clear that many people are perfectly happy being stupid.
The second answer is that Nintendo's happy, carefree attitude towards gaming is an encouragement for creativity. All games are, at their hearts, abstract exercises that attempt to relate in some way to the player's experience. This communication is absolutely essential. If a game doesn't relate at all it's incomprehensible. However, most games these days go too far in this direction. Most "mature" games attack the same old themes over and over again: the military, alien invasion, vampires, superheroes, that kind of thing. Most developers these days start with the concept and try to build a game around it. It may sound like there's a lot of variety there but there's really not, and anyway they've all been visited so many times that without genius game design, you just aren't going to come up with something new.
Nintendo, on the other hand, always seems to start with the design first, and then tries to build a concept around it. Mario Sunshine is obviously a collection of tasks built around a water gun. Wind Waker is build around the idea of Zelda-style exploration on an ocean instead of a typical overworld. Nintendo's developers (and let's be fair here - Miyamoto may be a genius, but he does very little actual design work these days, he's mostly a supervisor and mentor now, it's time for Nintendo's other directors to take a bow), they're much closer to the abstract soul of gaming. That's why just about everything they produce is incredibly enjoyable for anyone with an open mind. Even their missteps (like the way-too-short Wario World), are about ten times more fun than almost anything for the X-Box. (Well, except for ToeJam & Earl III.)
I have played *EVERY* home version of Rampart ever produced. They are:
* NES (surprisingly good, though the sound could be better) * Famicom (second NES-hardware version, by Konami, Japan only!, strange version without ships. In one whole difficulty level your "castle" is freakin' Little Red Riding Hood!) * Gameboy (Also strange in that Japanese way. No ships. You choose a character at the start and fire your cannons at knights and "siege towers.") * Gameboy Color (different version) (Reasonably good port, but is the only Gameboy game I know of that doesn't play perfectly well on a Gameboy Advance -- it messes up the extensive digitized sound effects.) * SNES (The only game on this list that could be considered to have improved the arcade version in any way. **Music is almost perfect.** Even so, while the basic game is the same the many little nuances that make Rampart so tricky are different. Very good and fun, very polished, but seems like a different game at times. I'd still rather play the arcade.) * Genesis (Good graphics and that's about it. I only played it once and it didn't impress me.) * Game Gear (Avoid.) * PC (Closest to the arcade. Only home version with a three-player mode. Has a couple of the enhancements in the SNES version.) * Lynx (Reasonably decent port.)
That's NINE PORTS, more, I'm pretty sure, than even Marble Madness. It deserves every one of them, but each port adds and subtracts little things from the game. The arcade game was so exquisitely balanced that if you change even one thing you make the game almost different. The NES version, for example, has fire craters that stick around much longer than they should, often making castles impossible to recapture in later levels. The SNES version has no level select, never more than one ship ever moves at a time, and has a rather strict turn limit. The Famicom version changed a great deal. And the Sega ports just aren't worth it.
Only the PC version was close enough to the arcade gameplay to be acceptable, and unless you have three mice it's tough to get an acceptable multiplayer game going.
In short: if this is an emulation of the arcade version of Rampart then yes, this is worth full-price just for that. No one since has done multiplayer puzzle/strategy/combat goodness as well as Rampart. Add in Marble Madness, Gauntlet, KLAX, Smash T.V., Toobin', the little-known Joust II, and oh-my-double-god *Robotron*.... Note that many of these "Midway" titles are actually arcade games from Atari's later period, when they made games that were just as incredibly good as the previous couple of generations, but were increasingly overlooked by the core arcade demographic (teenage boys) in favor of Yet Another Japanese Fighting Game, may they all burn in 2600-E.T. Hell. In an alternate universe not too far removed from our own Nintendo never captured the 8-bit console market and we're all still playing Atari games.
Shame they had to call Stargate "Defender II," by the way. The arcade game was called *Stargate*, and deserves the name infinitely more than any brain-dead movie or slightly-good television show released since.
Atari's passing is a real blow to the industry, even if they haven't made too many games lately.
For starters, Atari was the first successful arcade game company. For a little while, if you talked about videogames you meant Atari.
Second, throughout their entire lifespan, Atari produced original games. They always tried new things. They always looked for something different to do. Of all the other companies in the industry, there are precious few who can claim that. Nintendo certainly does it. Some of Sega's splinter development teams do it. Blizzard does it by copying lesser-known games (like Dune II and Rogue). Maxis does it once in a while when they aren't releasing The Sims add-on packs. Who doesn't do it? Namco, Capcom, Square, EA, Microsoft, and Infogrammes (including their "Atari" devision).
By the way: a previous comment stated that Defender, Stargate/Defender II., Joust, Robotron, Rampage, Tapper and Sinistar were Midway games. They are, but they are not Atari games.
Here are the most noteworthy Atari arcade releases, to my mind: Pong Asteroids (and Asteroids Deluxe) Missile Command Centipede (and Milipede) Tempest (tied with William's Robotron: 2084 for the title of Twitchiest Game) Star Wars (still the best of all the many Star Wars videogames!) Crystal Castles Marble Madness I, Robot (the very first 3D polygonal game) Hard Drivin' (the first successful 3D polygonal game) (also Race Drivin') S.T.U.N. Runner 720 Degrees Gauntlet (the game that invented the idea of joining in any time, and an incredible amount of fun) (and Gauntlet II) Toobin' KLAX Tetris (arcade) Rampart (the best-designed game ever made) San Franscisco Rush (which is actually like a high-tech update of Hard Drivin') Gauntlet Legends (pioneering with characters that persist between games) (and Gauntlet: Dark Legacy)
So, unlike what a previous correspondent said, Atari was not a one-hit wonder.
What most of these games have in common is the creation of an entirely new kind of game. They didn't produce endless strings of one-on-one fighting games like some companies I could name. It's true that a few games were released that didn't measure up to these (California Speed stands out in my mind), but no other game company has this track record of innovation, not even Nintendo (and hey, I love Nintendo).
In the early days of the arcade game industry there were few precedents, so you couldn't mindlessly ape someone else. Atari stood out then. But even in their later years, they still tried new, nutty things. That era gave us Rampart, which, I'm not kidding, is an amazing design and should be studied, in an era when side-scrolling things like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were the rage. They were just about the only reason for thinking person to enter arcades for a while.
To think that Ed Logg may have been escorted off the premises by police! Man, that just makes my blood boil.
Hmmm. The question, as I understand it, seems to be asking "What could Microsoft possibly do to respond to Open Source software?" My answer is: nothing. There is really very little, that I can see anyway, that Microsoft can do that would not be Utterly Evil. An anti-Unix ad campaign is about the best I can come up with - and lo, here's one now. Ad campaigns are intended to sway popular opinion for whoever pays for them, but at least that's ordinary corporate evil, and not the real Machiavellian Microsoft evil with which we are all acquainted. (Microvellian?)
On the other hand, who says Microsoft has to "respond" to Unix at all? Why can't any company ever be satisfied with not owning the world? Isn't it true that, ff it weren't Microsoft, it'd be someone else? Someone, please correct me, restore my faith!
Slashdot Mirror
Movies have become the archetypal Modern Art Form.
Games should say something about the world, like movies do! Games should have big-budgets! Designers should be treated like stars! We need an independent game industry, just like the independent cinema scene!
Horse-hockey! Well, I like the idea of independent gaming, but the rest is bull. Look at the movies that make the most money, they're *crap*. Look at the games that make the most, with some exceptions they're also mostly crap. I mean, the biggest seller last year, if memory serves, was a multi-platform Madden game. *Madden*! Yet another ANOTHER version of a game, video football, that's been remade countless times since the DAMN ATARI 2600/INTELLIVISION WARS. Madden itself got started in the Genesis era, two generations ago! How many football games are there per-gamer-capita? People are not buying these for healthy reasons. It doesn't make sense to pay $50 for the same game each year with an updated player roster and some minor additions.
Anyway, my point is that the efforts of the game community to push gaming along the Hollywood path are wrong-headed. They're copying the massivecrap, blockbuster-focused, take-no-risks Bad Hollywood instead of the smaller, more thoughtful, artistic Good Hollywood, which isn't really what we think of as "Hollywood" anymore.
The following is a list of ways that games are not like movies, and shouldn't be treated like them:
- Non-linearity. The best games are non-linear. The very best games make a mockery out of the whole concept of linearness -- how "linear" is SimCity?
- Focus on algorithm over data. The movie analogue -- well, there isn't one, movies are all data. "Data" in a game means pre-made level designs, monster placements, and static setting. "Algorithm" means focus on general situations more than dealing with specific situations. How to survive the three fireball-shooting demons at the end of this hallway? That's data. How to play an effective game of chess, given the almost infinite variation in situation that can occur from the initial state of the game? That's algorithm.
- Effort required. The fact remains that you can still make a game entirely in your garage, or living room or what have you. Even the equivalent independent cinema, which has had a small number of success story along those lines, required actors, and equipment, and editing tools much less available than your home PC, and film stock, and other stuff I don't even know what they are.
The emergence of the independent scene in moviedom, however, is something that would probably help us independent developers. Kevin Smith made Clerks for about $25,000, and it looked it, and then it went on to break out and get him a "real" career, but a good number of people (as shown by a Non-Scientific Slashdot Poll (tm)) still think of it as his best movie. Chris Crawford has gone on record somewhere (I don't remember where alas) as saying we needed something like that.
As for games needing to "say something about the world," well, how do movies say something about the world? If you think Independence Day was actually about humans banding together over adversity and finding a common basis then I've got a fish to slap you with. It failed on those terms because it was didactic, it was obvious, it told us what to think. Most games are like that, and most games will thus fail to say anything meaningful. Schindler's List isn't a good movie because it shows us that Nazis are bad. It's a great movie because it's about the mystery of Oscar Schindler, and it doesn't show us what happened inside his head to make him go from Nazi sympathizer to rescuer of Jews. Movies that tell you what to think are propaganda. Movies that actually teach show us something, and expect that we're smart enough to draw our own conclusions. Gaming may one day evolve a way to do this, but I don't think it'll be any time soon.
Actually, to be honest I probably like FF 6/3 better because there's no DAMN LOAD TIME BEFORE EACH OF THE THOUSANDS OF RANDOM BATTLES. That and it still felt more like a game than a movie.
UmJammerLammy, which is everything the Gamespy reviewers say it is and more. (It's also mega hard, but you can handle that, right?)
Wizardry 8, which should be near the top of the list.
Herzog Zwei, one of the best games for the Genesis, and more playable, I'd say, that Warcraft, though harder to learn.
Rocket: Robot on Wheels, simply amazing.
Ico, cool, though I'm not sure deserving of #1. There are dozens of games that should be on the list but aren't. Gaming is filled of games that could have changed the direction of the world, except.
Thumbs down concerning:
Super Mario Sunshine, not on the list, derided by almost everyone for being too similar to Mario 64. That's still better than 95% of the rest.
Few or no old-school games. M.U.L.E. is one of the best designed games of all time according to me, Chris Crawford and a lot of other people. These GameSpy guys are clued-in enough to know about Zork, but ignore almost all of computer gaming's too-brief past.
Extra-lame superimposed-directly-over-article-text ads once ina while. Seeing even one of those on a site makes it worthy of hatred in my book. For that, Gamespy can go directly to hell, do not pass 'Go.'
Now can we PLEASE stop with all the XX Blankest lists?! Or at least have more that aren't GameSpy?
Er, how? I've not played it yet (Statesboro isn't exactly a hotbed of physi-gaming activity, unless you count the local Games Workshop infestation), but everything I've seen points to a very *non* RTS-like game. I mean, there's no units or combat at all. The players have to produce buildings to win, but that's a stock play mechanic that predates RTSes I'm pretty sure.
Oh, and also the game isn't played in real time, completely unlike, say, Cheapass Games' inventive Falling.
First, "Ninja Gaiden" is actually the name of two different games produced by the same company. It was originally an arcade port (a brawler, I believe), but Tecmo created a game with the same name but mostly different content for the NES. This is not the first time this has happened: the original Rygar and Astanynax were also arcade games with little to do with their NES counterparts. (But I admit, my memory is a little fuzzy concerning these.) The arcade version of Ninja Gaiden eventually got a port for the Atari Lynx, but because of the massive installed base for the system and its pioneering use of "cinema scenes," e.g. cut scenes, most people remember the NES version now.
I'll admit to having played through both Ninja Gaiden and Ninja Gaiden 2. (The last game was 3, at which time the company announced it'd be the last game.) At the time I played them eagerly, and beat them both on a single rental. Now, I have to admit, I consider them poor imitations of Castlevania. They both have the same side-scrolling, stage-oriented, hit-candles-for-stuff, sub-weapon-based, boss-infested gameplay. Castlevania was a much slower (though just as hard) game, but at least when you took a hit you could see how it was your fault. Latching onto some of those wall things in NG really annoys me to this day.
The first Ninja Gaiden game is incredibly annoying in places, and the second isn't much easier. I think I remember them making improvements to the core game as the series progressed to try to limit the annoyance factor. But I have to say, I still regularly play the original Castlevania and Castlevania III, and have gotten to where I can beat it on one credit, but I'm not similarly taken with the NG games.
Actually, I thought Wind Waker's last fight was very cool. Nevermind that the story before and after the last fight (which is not technically part of it) is the best of all the Zeldas, it was a fight where you *had* to use the counterattack ability that you had the whole game to learn how to use. Also, at the end you had to fight Ganon with Zelda supporting you with the Light Arrows. So much more satisfying than having her stand off-stage, gasping whenever you get hit.
Also, while the difficulty against weapon-users was up a few notches over Ocarina of Time, Ganon was again the only enemy that a cautious player could concievably need to use a fairy or potion for. I was really hoping that the much rumored second quest would be an actual harder game, but alas it was not to be. Maybe in the next game....
Ocarina of Time was so easy that I decided, once, to play through the whole game with only three hearts. I only really had trouble against Ganon's final form at the end, where I ended up having to use Nayru's Love.
I've seen the fight with Giygas written up in a couple of places lately, and everyone mentions the Pray command, but no one mentions my own favorite part of the fight.
The background music, as the last fight starts on this SNES game, starts out composed entirely of suitable 8-bit NES music! After about a minute of that it suddenly stops and makes way for a driving electric guitar, but at that time I kind of wished it went on.
First, let me say that I have *not read* the article mentioned in the article. I don't have enough time right now to go through that, but I do consider myself having enough time to chime in on the debate, which is essentially the old "Is GTA3 corrupting our nations youth?" argument that's been going on since the game was released.
And, let me say that I have never played GTA3! I have a Gamecube. I've never had a PS2, and I sold my X-Box as soon as I got my fill of ToeJam & Earl 3. (Very underrated game, actually, but I digress.) So naturally I'm *hopelessly* unqualified to say anything on this subject, right?
Well... of course, I would say no. I've been around enough to know that the furor over GTA3 is just another interation of the old Mortal Kombat furor, which is itself a repeat of the furor over a truly old game called Death Race 2000 (which as near as I can tell is not a movie tie-in).
What I know about GTA3 is all hearsay, but all the reputable sources of information seem to agree. That being:
- Casual attitude towards killing.
- Player can hire a prostitute to regain health.
- After "doing it" with a prostitute, player can then kill her. (A lot of people reference to this, so it must be an important part of the game.)
- Didn't you just hear what I said? Killing whores!!
- Oh, and brilliant level design and gameplay, pah.
Okay, on to the point. In fact, I have had the chance to play GTA3 but I passed it up because I found the attitude behind it disturbing. "Mature" in the videogame world has its sole meaning in the MPAA's definition of Mature, which is, guns, swear words and tits. It's true that you can do a lot of things in the game world, there is a lot of player freedom, and that you don't technically have to do anything immoral, but the game's interface is biased towards doing reprehensible things. When you can collect such an extensive inventory of weapons, you can't help but feel the push towards shooting.
It's true that whenever I play an RPG with any sort of difficult moral choice, I do feel a bit of emotional weight over the decision. While I play, I lose some of the sense that it is "just a game," because playing it "right" requires so getting into the story. One of the defenses thrown up for GTA3, however, is that it's just a game. My point is, if it's any good, it's not.
And also, GTA3, while obviously not a direct cause of murders, *is* yet another example of the slow and steady push of our culture towards violence, which has difficult-to-gauge effects. You don't need to reference a hundred half-assed Lieberman-studies to see that.
I consider CT to be an unusually good choice for this kind of thing, because it's an arcade-level action game with an unusually high potential for strategy, that pushes multiple areas of the brain at once instead of just the "special move" center over and over. "Strange, this CAT scanner is showing increased activity in the roll-forward, quick punch, fierce kick region."
Of course, I've played Crazy Taxi enough that my top score is around $69,000, and have lasted 40 minutes on one quarter, so you can consider me biased. (Sorry if that sounds like boasting. It is, of course, but we all need to boast once in a while.)
I was referring to pencil and paper (a.k.a. "real") D&D.
Nethack, admittedly, has little story, and I actually like the old premise of "generic adventurer wants amulet for personal reasons" thing, the build-up given in the Guidebook, rather than all that annoying Moloch business on that page of intro text upon starting a new game.
Here's a secret about Nethack: it's really not that hard once you know what you're doing. Not that's a *lot* to learn, but it's actually a very fair game for a sufficently clued-in player. It's certainly nowhere near as hard as Rogue (which is a hair this side of impossible). But it's much harder for a Tourist than for a Barbarian or a Valkyrie. It's not so much about bragging rights as challenging yourself. (If you still want to brag, there's the extensive list of challenges in recent versions. Oy.)
Your save ideas are nice, but I really think that they should fit in with an overall design for a game than just being slotted in. I'm not against quicksaves so much as wary of the ways they can break a game. You really should be conscious that they exist when designing a game, because they can break things. Most games these days have as many features as the developers think they can ship on time, without enough concern about how they interact with each other. Sometimes changing a little thing can have a great impact.
Putting quicksaves in a game prevents the designer from doing some things. First person shooters are fairly limited games when it comes right down to it, so quicksaves don't change much. But any game that demands a certain amount of tension to be built up during a level simply can't allow the player to just arbitrarily jump to the end of it instantly.
In some games that enforce save points, even having to go back isn't really that bad. Final Fantasy VI returned te player to the previous save point upon death, but let him keep all experience and cash earned. (It made him lose items, however, which makes sense.)
But there is also a strong intuitive basis for save points, akin to not being able to rest just anywhere in a dungeon in a D&D adventure. A save point should be a "safe" location. Being able to put a bookmark in the middle of a series of tough battles breaks them up. If the player can just once get through all the hard parts of such a sequence without taking serious losses, then it's as if they don't exist! The player will then save at that point and not have to worry about going through it ever again. If those obstacles have a strong random (or not obviously deterministic) component, then this can break a level.
Let's say someone's challenged you to a little game -- if you roll a six-sided die ten times and never get a one, he'll give you a lot of money. In a computer game, the player would save after each successful roll and practically ensure an eventual win. Taken as a sequence, such an obstacle is more troublesome than if the player can bookmark after each roll.
Something in me kind of rebels against this question, actually, the assumption of "punishment." This question only makes sense if the listen intuitively accepts that all a "save" does is record the player's location and state, monster locations and states, which items are collected and the state of a few minor puzzles. In a more complex game (such as Black & White, where great portions of the game's environment is editable), you're saving and loading a lot more than just player location, and although B&W did have a quicksave feature, the idea of making a "bookmark" doesn't make as much sense. Although it is long, playing through the whole level each time makes a kind of sense.
Of course, understand that I'm a Nethack fanatic, and games which feature permanent character death appeal to me, so I'm obviously deranged.
The consensus so far seems to be:
- Advertising!
- Importance of developing an indie games industry.
- Originality doesn't mean the same thing as Good
Each of these points is something I agree with overall, but there are problems with each of them.
* I really think people are starting to rebel against advertising. I never get excited over an ad the way the execs hope I will, and although I still see other people say "Kick Ass!" when they see something like a trailer for something like Ecks vs. Sever, I think there's reason to believe it won't last forever. And there's really no reason to believe it will, our advertising culture is only a few decades old compared to the tens of thousands of years humanity has been around. It's important for word of a game to get out in the open (you can't buy something you don't know exists), but we're living in an age in which word of mouth can overcome even the most orchestrated ad campaign, and we live in an age of loud voices. (Remember, movie execs are whining that SMS messaging is killing movie sales!)
Furthermore, not all things advertise well. Wind Waker is probably the best game this year, but I don't think anyone is going to get sold on it after ten seconds of gameplay footage. The "cartoon" bias is too strong in the minds of casual gamers. Animal Crossing had a great ad campaign, but only because they had something with which to relate it to in the minds of casual gamers (The Real World).
* You know, I've read personal idol Chris Crawford talk about the importance of developing an independent channel for games distribution, too. That would help things, but if an independent games industry ever did get off the ground, you can bet that the "mainstream" industry would get even worse. (Yes, that is possible.) And ultimately, the situation would stablize around the place the movie industry is now, a few big-budget crap works that can be seen anywhere in the country on thousands of screens, and lots of really good movies that show only on a few screens in large cities. I live in a small town. I'm not too happy about the idea that I might have to go to Atlanta to pick up a new Mario. And most casual gamers won't even know they exist, just like my friend Derrek doesn't know anything about independent movies.
* Originality doesn't mean the same thing as good. True. But less often than you'd think. I'd rather play a bad game (once) that takes risks and tries to innovate than even a very good FPS, fighter, or sports game, or a merely good RPG. I realize that's a slightly idiosyncratic view, but I think it is held, slowly, more and more often these days.
I think what the industry really needs right now is another mid-80's style, hardcore shakeout. It may be that only hardcore gamers care abour originality, but increasingly, more and more gamers are hardcore, due to sheer number of games played. Activision used to make wonderful games... when the Atari 2600 was king! When EA remembered that their name stood for Electronic Arts they published things that were worth playing. How is Acclaim even surviving?
I'm not saying that tomorrow there will be a groundswell and suddenly everything will be sunshine and roses, but that eventually, maybe in a decade or so, something will break.
From Wired 11.01 (some irrelevant portions excised, check the article itself for more):
"He is not helping things," says Seamus Blackley... He speaks for many game designers raised on Miyamoto's innovations - developers who admire the master's work but are desperate for something new.
"At this point," Blackley continues, "Miyamoto is making games for his fans. Granted, there are millions of them, and it's smart business, but most are kids. He's not opening up adult audiences. He's reinforcing stereotypes about games, not pushing them to a place where they can become something different and truly awesome."
What especially frustrates Blackley is the sense that Miyamoto could take gaming to the next level: "There isn't anyone on the planet better at lasering into the lizard brain, that eye-attached-to-your-hand-attached-to-your-brain thing that makes it impossible to stop playing. GTA3 is good, but it's not revolutionary. What Miyamoto could bring to a game like that would be incredible."
-----
Ah, so developers should be original, so long as it isn't percieved as kiddy in some way. It doesn't work to say "Be original, but only in the way I say." Originality doesn't work that way. And it so happens that the most original things get made by starting from the abstract and then paring them down to the concrete, rather than starting from reality and then trying to devise a play mechanic (which is by nature abstract) from that. And abstract things tend look kiddy when presented in an easy-to-understand format, which it must be in order for a new player to grasp them.
It's this same state in the industry that's producing both things that Blackley is complaining about here: game designers tend to be hard-core gamers, which do not tend to be very original because they don't know much besides videogaming and the attendant arts (action movies, comic books, paper RPGs, trash fiction). So, you get a lot of games based off of those arts. People like Miyamoto get their ideas for games from spheres outside of the "traditional" areas. The idea for Pikmin came from working in his garden.
No idea comes from nowhere! The industry won't change until either the current developers start getting interested in more things (unlikely, as most of them are reinforced by the other hard-code gamer staff members on their teams) or new designers come in with a wider array of interests. (And people will probably deride their games the same way Blackley derided Miyamoto.)
I now abdicate my post as the All-Seeing Know-It-All.
A: The GBA is "a wasteland for creativity" because most of its games are sequels.
B: To clarify the argument, "sequels" here is defined to mean any game in which has a character from a previously-existing game. (Wario in WarioWare, Inc.)
C: Thus, WarioWare is not original, regardless of its considerable originality and the fact that it has almost nothing to do with the "historical" Wario besides using the character. Also, the following games were also not original when released: Mario Bros.(Mario originated in Donkey Kong), the NES versions of Super Mario Bros. or Super Mario Bros. 2, Yoshi's Island for the SNES, Super Mario 64, Zelda: Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time or Majora's Mask (with its 3-day system) for the N64, or Luigi's Mansion, Metroid Prime, or *Animal Crossing* (all those Mario items and NES games!) for the Gamecube.
D: On the other hand, Spyro and Vexx *are* original.
E: Bleah!
The experiment is baised against companies that use stock characters and franchises, regardless of how originally they are used. In other words, it could not possibly be any more biased against Nintendo, which often does very original games but uses their franchise characters to attract an initial user base. You can bet that if other companies had even a fifth the character portfolio that Nintendo does, they'd be abusing them left and right.
If you define "originality" by an arbitrary standard in order to make the argument better, then you're going to get weird results. Originality, by its very nature, is difficult to pin down.
(Now that I've roundly dissed the article... I do have to say, I visit your site semi-often. In general, pretty cool.)
Sidestepping entirely the practical, if technically illegal, path of playing those superior (yes they *are* superior) old games using MAME....
1. We're still seeing compilations of older games sold commercially as a kind of shovelware. In a couple of months there will be Midway Arcade Classics, which will include an unprecedented number of emulated classics, including some that have never been sold before outside of an arcade. This includes the godly design of Rampart, ever-popular Marble Madness, unequaled twitch masterpiece Robotron 2084, Joust and the very rare (in the arcades) Joust 2, and there's an equal number of other classics in the mix. Easily twice as good as Namco's compilations, which I'd say are a little overrated.
2. If you like the style and play values of the older games but bemoan their absence from the modern marketplace, *make* one! They're harder to make than you'd think, because the thing about the old games is that they often created their play mechanics from whole cloth instead of copying fifteen other games, but it's still doable. That's the path I and a friend of mine are following.
No mention whatsoever of COMPILE! Those hep cats made ZANAC, The Guardian Legend, Gun-Nac, Power Strike, Power Strike 2, Blazing Lasers, MUSHA, Space Megaforce (named something else in Japan), ZANAC x ZANAC and others!
I think they've been bought out recently, and they've been making mostly Puyo Puyo lately, but still...!
Actually, I'm not aware of much Sony propaganda towards Nintendo. I'll admit I'm not exactly an industry insider, but I keep my eyes open, and I've not seem them say much about it. The propaganda, I would say, comes from the fanboys themselves, most of whom are teenage boys desperately trying to not seem like babies in front of their friends. It's peer pressure working on a massive scale, and it's also one of the big reasons we have such a sad motion picture industry in the States. That, and many developers (many of whom are only barely out of the teenage-fanboy classification themselves) are antagonistic towards the appearance of Nintendo's products. There was a story in Wired not long ago that presented the viewed of a few notable developers, many of whom basically said, why can't their wonderful games look like they're made for adults?
I have two answers to that. One, the industry's view of "adult" gaming runs towards a shallow, MPAA rating board measure of maturity. If it has gore and naked women and a kick-ass attitude it must by for adults. Maturity misnamed, basically. This approach has given us countless travesties of design, and I would say that it'll all come to an end once the public gets wise to it, except that the motion picture industry has made it abundantly clear that many people are perfectly happy being stupid.
The second answer is that Nintendo's happy, carefree attitude towards gaming is an encouragement for creativity. All games are, at their hearts, abstract exercises that attempt to relate in some way to the player's experience. This communication is absolutely essential. If a game doesn't relate at all it's incomprehensible. However, most games these days go too far in this direction. Most "mature" games attack the same old themes over and over again: the military, alien invasion, vampires, superheroes, that kind of thing. Most developers these days start with the concept and try to build a game around it. It may sound like there's a lot of variety there but there's really not, and anyway they've all been visited so many times that without genius game design, you just aren't going to come up with something new.
Nintendo, on the other hand, always seems to start with the design first, and then tries to build a concept around it. Mario Sunshine is obviously a collection of tasks built around a water gun. Wind Waker is build around the idea of Zelda-style exploration on an ocean instead of a typical overworld. Nintendo's developers (and let's be fair here - Miyamoto may be a genius, but he does very little actual design work these days, he's mostly a supervisor and mentor now, it's time for Nintendo's other directors to take a bow), they're much closer to the abstract soul of gaming. That's why just about everything they produce is incredibly enjoyable for anyone with an open mind. Even their missteps (like the way-too-short Wario World), are about ten times more fun than almost anything for the X-Box. (Well, except for ToeJam & Earl III.)
Oh my god.
I have played *EVERY* home version of Rampart ever produced. They are:
* NES (surprisingly good, though the sound could be better)
* Famicom (second NES-hardware version, by Konami, Japan only!, strange version without ships. In one whole difficulty level your "castle" is freakin' Little Red Riding Hood!)
* Gameboy (Also strange in that Japanese way. No ships. You choose a character at the start and fire your cannons at knights and "siege towers.")
* Gameboy Color (different version) (Reasonably good port, but is the only Gameboy game I know of that doesn't play perfectly well on a Gameboy Advance -- it messes up the extensive digitized sound effects.)
* SNES (The only game on this list that could be considered to have improved the arcade version in any way. **Music is almost perfect.** Even so, while the basic game is the same the many little nuances that make Rampart so tricky are different. Very good and fun, very polished, but seems like a different game at times. I'd still rather play the arcade.)
* Genesis (Good graphics and that's about it. I only played it once and it didn't impress me.)
* Game Gear (Avoid.)
* PC (Closest to the arcade. Only home version with a three-player mode. Has a couple of the enhancements in the SNES version.)
* Lynx (Reasonably decent port.)
That's NINE PORTS, more, I'm pretty sure, than even Marble Madness. It deserves every one of them, but each port adds and subtracts little things from the game. The arcade game was so exquisitely balanced that if you change even one thing you make the game almost different. The NES version, for example, has fire craters that stick around much longer than they should, often making castles impossible to recapture in later levels. The SNES version has no level select, never more than one ship ever moves at a time, and has a rather strict turn limit. The Famicom version changed a great deal. And the Sega ports just aren't worth it.
Only the PC version was close enough to the arcade gameplay to be acceptable, and unless you have three mice it's tough to get an acceptable multiplayer game going.
In short: if this is an emulation of the arcade version of Rampart then yes, this is worth full-price just for that. No one since has done multiplayer puzzle/strategy/combat goodness as well as Rampart. Add in Marble Madness, Gauntlet, KLAX, Smash T.V., Toobin', the little-known Joust II, and oh-my-double-god *Robotron*.... Note that many of these "Midway" titles are actually arcade games from Atari's later period, when they made games that were just as incredibly good as the previous couple of generations, but were increasingly overlooked by the core arcade demographic (teenage boys) in favor of Yet Another Japanese Fighting Game, may they all burn in 2600-E.T. Hell. In an alternate universe not too far removed from our own Nintendo never captured the 8-bit console market and we're all still playing Atari games.
Shame they had to call Stargate "Defender II," by the way. The arcade game was called *Stargate*, and deserves the name infinitely more than any brain-dead movie or slightly-good television show released since.
Atari's passing is a real blow to the industry, even if they haven't made too many games lately.
For starters, Atari was the first successful arcade game company. For a little while, if you talked about videogames you meant Atari.
Second, throughout their entire lifespan, Atari produced original games. They always tried new things. They always looked for something different to do. Of all the other companies in the industry, there are precious few who can claim that. Nintendo certainly does it. Some of Sega's splinter development teams do it. Blizzard does it by copying lesser-known games (like Dune II and Rogue). Maxis does it once in a while when they aren't releasing The Sims add-on packs. Who doesn't do it? Namco, Capcom, Square, EA, Microsoft, and Infogrammes (including their "Atari" devision).
By the way: a previous comment stated that Defender, Stargate/Defender II., Joust, Robotron, Rampage, Tapper and Sinistar were Midway games. They are, but they are not Atari games.
Here are the most noteworthy Atari arcade releases, to my mind:
Pong
Asteroids (and Asteroids Deluxe)
Missile Command
Centipede (and Milipede)
Tempest (tied with William's Robotron: 2084 for the title of Twitchiest Game)
Star Wars (still the best of all the many Star Wars videogames!)
Crystal Castles
Marble Madness
I, Robot (the very first 3D polygonal game)
Hard Drivin' (the first successful 3D polygonal game) (also Race Drivin')
S.T.U.N. Runner
720 Degrees
Gauntlet (the game that invented the idea of joining in any time, and an incredible amount of fun) (and Gauntlet II)
Toobin'
KLAX
Tetris (arcade)
Rampart (the best-designed game ever made)
San Franscisco Rush (which is actually like a high-tech update of Hard Drivin')
Gauntlet Legends (pioneering with characters that persist between games) (and Gauntlet: Dark Legacy)
So, unlike what a previous correspondent said, Atari was not a one-hit wonder.
What most of these games have in common is the creation of an entirely new kind of game. They didn't produce endless strings of one-on-one fighting games like some companies I could name. It's true that a few games were released that didn't measure up to these (California Speed stands out in my mind), but no other game company has this track record of innovation, not even Nintendo (and hey, I love Nintendo).
In the early days of the arcade game industry there were few precedents, so you couldn't mindlessly ape someone else. Atari stood out then. But even in their later years, they still tried new, nutty things. That era gave us Rampart, which, I'm not kidding, is an amazing design and should be studied, in an era when side-scrolling things like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were the rage. They were just about the only reason for thinking person to enter arcades for a while.
To think that Ed Logg may have been escorted off the premises by police! Man, that just makes my blood boil.
Hmmm. The question, as I understand it, seems to be asking "What could Microsoft possibly do to respond to Open Source software?" My answer is: nothing. There is really very little, that I can see anyway, that Microsoft can do that would not be Utterly Evil. An anti-Unix ad campaign is about the best I can come up with - and lo, here's one now. Ad campaigns are intended to sway popular opinion for whoever pays for them, but at least that's ordinary corporate evil, and not the real Machiavellian Microsoft evil with which we are all acquainted. (Microvellian?)
On the other hand, who says Microsoft has to "respond" to Unix at all? Why can't any company ever be satisfied with not owning the world? Isn't it true that, ff it weren't Microsoft, it'd be someone else? Someone, please correct me, restore my faith!