You know, I've played Laser Ghost. The only real draw was the gimmick on the laser: You looked through a crosshair which was angled at 45 to the top of the gun. On the top of the gun was a small LED display. Everytime you shot, the LEDs flashed in a sequence that made it look like (in the reflection on the crosshair) that lasers were going from the barrel of the gun to the screen.
A neat, unemulatable gimmick. An otherwise unremarkable game.
If you really want to be technical, the letter of the law (here in the US) states that copyright violation must be demonstrated as being A) Commercially damaging to the fair market value of the property in question AND B) Not for archival, research, or educational purposes.
This basically means that regardless of what a company claims, if the game has no fair market value (IE, is not reasonably available on the commercial market), or if you are archiving, researching, or educating with video games, you're in the clear.
As soon as a writable version becomes a viable option, or mastering costs drop to affordable levels, I expect to see the NES, SNES, and Genesis "Every Game Ever in a single controller" pirate systems, rather than the current "99 virtually indistinguishable versions of 10 games, so we'll call it 999 games".
Heck, this would even make for an interesting portable Playstation format, should those ingenious HK pirates get the notion.
Of course, this brings up the matter (again) of having media too small to find, and there's not much room for a label. "See this? It's going to replace CDs soon. I'll have to buy the White Album again."
The only way I see this as being viable is if they embed it in a credit card sized card. Then, instead of going with the current postage stamp sized data block, they could do a square that takes up one end of the card, and have the unused end labeled. Pop it in a neat little jewel case type holder, and there you go.
Actually, this is starting to sound a little too much like isolinear chips...
As a matter of fact, Pelican Accessories made a legal one just two years ago, dubbed Game Station Arcade. It didn't have any of the big-name NES games, but featured most of Camerica's line of gaems, including The Adventures of Captain Comic (which looked better on the NES, but was a better game on the PC).
Several such NES versions exist, some of which are legal. Check out this page to find details of some of them.
As for the SNES... After the days of the NES system, video game property rights changed dramatically. During the age of the Atari and Intellivision, the company who owned the system owned all the games, and the developing companies retained no rights.
Nintendo revolutionized this system, which was part of why developers were so happy to make games for the NES. The downside: 90% of the games for the SNES are owned by companies other than Nintendo.
Of course, since Square and Enix merged, they've put out a TV set-top Dragon Warrior game, so it wouldn't be impossible for them to create such a device containing some of their SNES greatest hits... However, a lot of video game companies are still kind of turned off at the whole idea of using solid state memory as a permanent storage medium.
The ROMs are out there, it's just a matter of getting them leaked.
Don't you mean a matter of getting them dumped?
I recall a few years back (before CPS2 encryption was cracked) someone started posting to some Mame dev boards saying that he owned a MarbleMan cabinet. Once someone asked him how much he would want for such a thing, he quoted some absurd figure.
That didn't discourage the Mame fans, though. They started a collection to reach the mark (I think it was $10,000), and were making serious progress before he decided he wouldn't sell.
Here's the thing that gets me about it: The article you link to reads like an ISO of the game is floating around somewhere "out there." Thing is, an awful lot is known about this unreleased game for it to be completely unavailable to the public somehow.
I still remember my first exposure to the game, though: Penn and Teller on the Boston Pops, performing the song "The Typewriter" with that game instead of a typewriter.
A mediocre, luck-heavy game in which you can almost buy your way into winning (I say almost: there are some quite powerful common cards, and a winning deck can definitely be crafted entirely from commons) gets all the attention while true mind games like Ricochet Robot languish in relative obscurity, at least, here in the states.
Bear in mind, not all collectible card games suffer from "rich kid wins" syndrome. Speicifically, there was a truly strategic (and tactical) CCG which was introduced in 2001: Z-G, created by White Wolf alumni Mark Rein*Hagen (Yes, he puts an asterisk in his name) and Josh Timbrook. Sort of a free-range, tabletop version of Squaresoft's wonderful Front Mission series, which never suffered from "rich kid wins."
Sometimes, I'll mention how much I enjoy board and card games to someone, and they'll say something like "Oh, yeah, I really like Magic," or "Monopoly's my favorite."
I find this roughly analogous to discussing the virtues of classical music, and having someone say, "Oh, yeah, I really like Pop Goes the Weasel."
Apart from sports and traditional racing games, very few games carry any degree of realism beyond some very forgiving basics (gravity, mass, etc), which are inconsistantly enforced.
The quote in the article of "a real fireball would leave a smoke trail" reminds me of someone I knew who used to argue that centaurs didn't have arms, and pegasuses (pegasuai?) only had two sets of legs. He argued that since both were clearly mammals, they couldn't have 6 limbs. For a while, he toyed with applying the concept to angels, but then decided that they might not be mammals at all.
The point being, people don't want realism. If it was realistic, you'd never be able to hit anything with your gun, at least, not aiming with a controller. Gravity would act on your bullets, and your crosshair would be off. You wouldn't be able to jump nearly as much or as high in fighting games. Your character would have an endurance meter, and your movements would gradually get weaker and less dramatic looking.
People want something which looks convincing. While most people realize that a person can't really run up and down walls as though gravity was a petty suggestion, if they see it in a game, they want it to look believable, which is to say, consistent with the movement and style of the rest of the game.
At any rate, the article doesn't really address games which don't even relate to the real world, like Pac-Man, Tetris, or Qix.
Sometime in the last six months, Popular Science did an article on a robotics hobbyist whose quest was to create an android head which mimicked the movement and form of a human head completely.
Over the course of the article, they discussed something called the "Uncanny Chasm." This chasm was what happened at a point just shy of total realism, at which things look jarring, unnatural, and disturbing.
This is part of what's happening with games right now. We've reached the cusp of the Uncanny Chasm. Some have marched headlong off into the pit: I can't count the number of sports games I've looked at and thought "Wow, that looks totally incredib... Woah, that looked completely wrong."
SquareEnix and Konami have pushed further towards the far edge of the Chasm, but only in cutscenes. The primary reason is, once the character is under the player's control, it is virtually impossible to keep up the convincing level of motion and still have the player be able to control more than just a modern-day Dragon's Lair.
This is a little skewed, actually. Most of the games which involved saving a princess either didn't involve the various actions involved in being kind to the royalty in question (Saving the princess in Super Mario Bros, for instance, was something that simply happened once the game was finished: You didn't give her flowers or compliments, open doors for her, listen to her complain, etc), or weren't popular. Besides, from what I observed, such games also promoted a misogynistic attitude. Most of the people I knew who played Super Mario Bros. did quite a bit of theorizing on the sexual exploits which followed the end of the game. I can further deduce that this is not entirely isolated to my area or circle of acquaintances owing to the sheer number of pornographic "hacks" which exist for the game.
On the other hand, a lot of RPGs involve the actual process of wooing a woman. Observe the behavior of a Lunar or Final Fantasy fan towards women.
The process you were just using is generally referred to as a "straw man argument". And shouldn't/.ers be insulted at the insinuation?
So we've got the technology to make a hyper-realistic looking FPS version of Tron, but we can't have a modern version of Space Paranoids, the game Flynn programmed? I mean, just look at the original movie, for goodness sake. We've got better graphics than that now.
While I suspect the device will ooze "cool," I'm more and more perplexed by the dual screen thingy. Really, there's nothing you can do with two screens that you couldn't do just as good (if not better) with a bigger screen.
On the other hand, the sheer geek factor of hacking this thing and creating homebrew programs which run on individual screens seems keen. Could be the first multitasking handheld gaming device. I imagine a SNES emulator in one window and a Genesis emulator in the other. Do a side-by-side comparison of titles released on both systems! Play a movie while you play a game! Do something while you do something else!
Did you, George start a war to (at least in part) supply oil contract for your buddies?
-sigh-
Not to get horribly off-topic or anything, but would someone please explain to me this: If we went to war over oil, why the devil didn't we invade Venezuela? It's a whole heckuva lot closer, and we wouldn't have had to pay rent to Turkey.
There is, actually. Check out the "Hip Pocket Games" link on the right hand side.
Alternatively, if you're buying several games at once, you might want to give Funagain a try, since they discount everything. You have to buy multiple games to show any savings, largely because of shipping costs.
Only one of the other posts isn't completely offtopic.
Anywho, if you're still hankering for heaping helping of free boardgames, Invisible City Press, home of Zombie Rancher, has plenty. If that's not enough for you, you can always print up a Piecepack or two.
If you're willing to spend a little money, James Ernest makes an unpleasantly large number of really pleasant games, most of which sell for less than $10.00. In fact, one of the best sells for $5.00, while my current favorite comes in at a paltry $7.50, with all the heavy-duty fun of your averageGermangame.
I'd like to see a movie based on the development of this product. According to the article, they are experimenting on a number of company employees, which means a Takara employee's journal could easily read like a crash course in the Twilight Zone.
Then again, the employees already live in Japan, home of used panty vending machines. For the curious, the cost is supposedly 1000 per pair.
I now await a slew of replies from pseudo-clever/.ers saying "That's it, I'm moving to Japan!" or equivalent phrases.
Ford is with Zaphod during the meeting with Zarniwoop (albeit very drunk at the time).
Arthur is with the surviving Lintilla, describing the 13-mile tall statue of himself. The cup starts to fall, and the sky starts sliding sideways. The narrator states that this is as a result of Zarniwoop deactivating the artificial universe.
The real question is how Lintilla got to be there.
Sorry, it just seems that the article makes the assertion that this "will" happen without mentioning "why" or "how." The market trends he describes would only apply to the PC market anyway, and no one rents PC games.
Furthermore, he makes assertions that are out-and-out wrong: Both EBGames and Gamestop sell used copies of Warcraft III, Half-Life, etc in their physical stores. The only place they don't sell these titles is online, mainly because the condition of used PC games varies so much: Console games are accepted in trade only if they have their packaging and documentation (usually). PC games are often accepted in just a jewel case. So while a store may have 12 used copies of Used PC Game of the Moment, 5 will just have the disc, 3 will have the documentation, 3 will just be in the box with no documentation, and 1 will be complete.
His whole argument is based around the idea that it will take just one bestselling game "like Half-Life 2" to be sold this way to make it the future. Well, Half-Life 2 isn't out yet, so it's not bestselling. Furthermore, if it's only available in a format where I don't own it when I buy it, I won't have it. At least, not legally.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't Pelican Accessories make one of these a few years ago?
I could have sworn it was virtually identical to the product in queston...
You know, I've played Laser Ghost. The only real draw was the gimmick on the laser: You looked through a crosshair which was angled at 45 to the top of the gun. On the top of the gun was a small LED display. Everytime you shot, the LEDs flashed in a sequence that made it look like (in the reflection on the crosshair) that lasers were going from the barrel of the gun to the screen.
A neat, unemulatable gimmick. An otherwise unremarkable game.
If you really want to be technical, the letter of the law (here in the US) states that copyright violation must be demonstrated as being A) Commercially damaging to the fair market value of the property in question AND B) Not for archival, research, or educational purposes.
This basically means that regardless of what a company claims, if the game has no fair market value (IE, is not reasonably available on the commercial market), or if you are archiving, researching, or educating with video games, you're in the clear.
As soon as a writable version becomes a viable option, or mastering costs drop to affordable levels, I expect to see the NES, SNES, and Genesis "Every Game Ever in a single controller" pirate systems, rather than the current "99 virtually indistinguishable versions of 10 games, so we'll call it 999 games".
Heck, this would even make for an interesting portable Playstation format, should those ingenious HK pirates get the notion.
Of course, this brings up the matter (again) of having media too small to find, and there's not much room for a label. "See this? It's going to replace CDs soon. I'll have to buy the White Album again."
The only way I see this as being viable is if they embed it in a credit card sized card. Then, instead of going with the current postage stamp sized data block, they could do a square that takes up one end of the card, and have the unused end labeled. Pop it in a neat little jewel case type holder, and there you go.
Actually, this is starting to sound a little too much like isolinear chips...
As a matter of fact, Pelican Accessories made a legal one just two years ago, dubbed Game Station Arcade. It didn't have any of the big-name NES games, but featured most of Camerica's line of gaems, including The Adventures of Captain Comic (which looked better on the NES, but was a better game on the PC).
Several such NES versions exist, some of which are legal. Check out this page to find details of some of them.
As for the SNES... After the days of the NES system, video game property rights changed dramatically. During the age of the Atari and Intellivision, the company who owned the system owned all the games, and the developing companies retained no rights.
Nintendo revolutionized this system, which was part of why developers were so happy to make games for the NES. The downside: 90% of the games for the SNES are owned by companies other than Nintendo.
Of course, since Square and Enix merged, they've put out a TV set-top Dragon Warrior game, so it wouldn't be impossible for them to create such a device containing some of their SNES greatest hits... However, a lot of video game companies are still kind of turned off at the whole idea of using solid state memory as a permanent storage medium.
I'm just surprised that we can actually unite as a community and agree that real world violence is a bad thing.
The ROMs are out there, it's just a matter of getting them leaked.
Don't you mean a matter of getting them dumped?
I recall a few years back (before CPS2 encryption was cracked) someone started posting to some Mame dev boards saying that he owned a MarbleMan cabinet. Once someone asked him how much he would want for such a thing, he quoted some absurd figure.
That didn't discourage the Mame fans, though. They started a collection to reach the mark (I think it was $10,000), and were making serious progress before he decided he wouldn't sell.
Here's the thing that gets me about it: The article you link to reads like an ISO of the game is floating around somewhere "out there." Thing is, an awful lot is known about this unreleased game for it to be completely unavailable to the public somehow.
I still remember my first exposure to the game, though: Penn and Teller on the Boston Pops, performing the song "The Typewriter" with that game instead of a typewriter.
A mediocre, luck-heavy game in which you can almost buy your way into winning (I say almost: there are some quite powerful common cards, and a winning deck can definitely be crafted entirely from commons) gets all the attention while true mind games like Ricochet Robot languish in relative obscurity, at least, here in the states.
Bear in mind, not all collectible card games suffer from "rich kid wins" syndrome. Speicifically, there was a truly strategic (and tactical) CCG which was introduced in 2001: Z-G, created by White Wolf alumni Mark Rein*Hagen (Yes, he puts an asterisk in his name) and Josh Timbrook. Sort of a free-range, tabletop version of Squaresoft's wonderful Front Mission series, which never suffered from "rich kid wins."
Sometimes, I'll mention how much I enjoy board and card games to someone, and they'll say something like "Oh, yeah, I really like Magic," or "Monopoly's my favorite."
I find this roughly analogous to discussing the virtues of classical music, and having someone say, "Oh, yeah, I really like Pop Goes the Weasel."
A satisfying solution for all those people who already talk to the screen!
"Don't go in there! Don't go in there!"
"Hmm... I don't think I'll go in there right now."
Then again, think of all the people who insult the on-screen character whenever they're doing badly.
"Stupid @$%* Mario!"
"Oh, yeah? Let's-a see you do any better, wise-a-guy!"
Apart from sports and traditional racing games, very few games carry any degree of realism beyond some very forgiving basics (gravity, mass, etc), which are inconsistantly enforced.
The quote in the article of "a real fireball would leave a smoke trail" reminds me of someone I knew who used to argue that centaurs didn't have arms, and pegasuses (pegasuai?) only had two sets of legs. He argued that since both were clearly mammals, they couldn't have 6 limbs. For a while, he toyed with applying the concept to angels, but then decided that they might not be mammals at all.
The point being, people don't want realism. If it was realistic, you'd never be able to hit anything with your gun, at least, not aiming with a controller. Gravity would act on your bullets, and your crosshair would be off. You wouldn't be able to jump nearly as much or as high in fighting games. Your character would have an endurance meter, and your movements would gradually get weaker and less dramatic looking.
People want something which looks convincing. While most people realize that a person can't really run up and down walls as though gravity was a petty suggestion, if they see it in a game, they want it to look believable, which is to say, consistent with the movement and style of the rest of the game.
At any rate, the article doesn't really address games which don't even relate to the real world, like Pac-Man, Tetris, or Qix.
Sometime in the last six months, Popular Science did an article on a robotics hobbyist whose quest was to create an android head which mimicked the movement and form of a human head completely.
Over the course of the article, they discussed something called the "Uncanny Chasm." This chasm was what happened at a point just shy of total realism, at which things look jarring, unnatural, and disturbing.
This is part of what's happening with games right now. We've reached the cusp of the Uncanny Chasm. Some have marched headlong off into the pit: I can't count the number of sports games I've looked at and thought "Wow, that looks totally incredib... Woah, that looked completely wrong."
SquareEnix and Konami have pushed further towards the far edge of the Chasm, but only in cutscenes. The primary reason is, once the character is under the player's control, it is virtually impossible to keep up the convincing level of motion and still have the player be able to control more than just a modern-day Dragon's Lair.
What about the portable version of the Phillips CD-I system?
Now that's obscure.
This is a little skewed, actually. Most of the games which involved saving a princess either didn't involve the various actions involved in being kind to the royalty in question (Saving the princess in Super Mario Bros, for instance, was something that simply happened once the game was finished: You didn't give her flowers or compliments, open doors for her, listen to her complain, etc), or weren't popular. Besides, from what I observed, such games also promoted a misogynistic attitude. Most of the people I knew who played Super Mario Bros. did quite a bit of theorizing on the sexual exploits which followed the end of the game. I can further deduce that this is not entirely isolated to my area or circle of acquaintances owing to the sheer number of pornographic "hacks" which exist for the game.
/.ers be insulted at the insinuation?
On the other hand, a lot of RPGs involve the actual process of wooing a woman. Observe the behavior of a Lunar or Final Fantasy fan towards women.
The process you were just using is generally referred to as a "straw man argument". And shouldn't
So we've got the technology to make a hyper-realistic looking FPS version of Tron, but we can't have a modern version of Space Paranoids, the game Flynn programmed? I mean, just look at the original movie, for goodness sake. We've got better graphics than that now.
While I suspect the device will ooze "cool," I'm more and more perplexed by the dual screen thingy. Really, there's nothing you can do with two screens that you couldn't do just as good (if not better) with a bigger screen.
On the other hand, the sheer geek factor of hacking this thing and creating homebrew programs which run on individual screens seems keen. Could be the first multitasking handheld gaming device. I imagine a SNES emulator in one window and a Genesis emulator in the other. Do a side-by-side comparison of titles released on both systems! Play a movie while you play a game! Do something while you do something else!
Or you could just walk and chew gum.
Don't these companies realize that no matter what handheld they release, they won't be able to compete with Nintendo... oh, wait.
I just hope this thing doesn't turn out to be another Virtual Boy.
Did you, George start a war to (at least in part) supply oil contract for your buddies?
-sigh-
Not to get horribly off-topic or anything, but would someone please explain to me this: If we went to war over oil, why the devil didn't we invade Venezuela? It's a whole heckuva lot closer, and we wouldn't have had to pay rent to Turkey.
There is, actually. Check out the "Hip Pocket Games" link on the right hand side.
Alternatively, if you're buying several games at once, you might want to give Funagain a try, since they discount everything. You have to buy multiple games to show any savings, largely because of shipping costs.
Only one of the other posts isn't completely offtopic.
Anywho, if you're still hankering for heaping helping of free boardgames, Invisible City Press, home of Zombie Rancher, has plenty. If that's not enough for you, you can always print up a Piecepack or two.
If you're willing to spend a little money, James Ernest makes an unpleasantly large number of really pleasant games, most of which sell for less than $10.00. In fact, one of the best sells for $5.00, while my current favorite comes in at a paltry $7.50, with all the heavy-duty fun of your average German game.
The slashdot leftist majority still feels guilt? I thought it went out of style.
I'd like to see a movie based on the development of this product. According to the article, they are experimenting on a number of company employees, which means a Takara employee's journal could easily read like a crash course in the Twilight Zone.
/.ers saying "That's it, I'm moving to Japan!" or equivalent phrases.
Then again, the employees already live in Japan, home of used panty vending machines. For the curious, the cost is supposedly 1000 per pair.
I now await a slew of replies from pseudo-clever
Summarizing here:
Ford is with Zaphod during the meeting with Zarniwoop (albeit very drunk at the time).
Arthur is with the surviving Lintilla, describing the 13-mile tall statue of himself. The cup starts to fall, and the sky starts sliding sideways. The narrator states that this is as a result of Zarniwoop deactivating the artificial universe.
The real question is how Lintilla got to be there.
Sorry, it just seems that the article makes the assertion that this "will" happen without mentioning "why" or "how." The market trends he describes would only apply to the PC market anyway, and no one rents PC games.
Furthermore, he makes assertions that are out-and-out wrong: Both EBGames and Gamestop sell used copies of Warcraft III, Half-Life, etc in their physical stores. The only place they don't sell these titles is online, mainly because the condition of used PC games varies so much: Console games are accepted in trade only if they have their packaging and documentation (usually). PC games are often accepted in just a jewel case. So while a store may have 12 used copies of Used PC Game of the Moment, 5 will just have the disc, 3 will have the documentation, 3 will just be in the box with no documentation, and 1 will be complete.
His whole argument is based around the idea that it will take just one bestselling game "like Half-Life 2" to be sold this way to make it the future. Well, Half-Life 2 isn't out yet, so it's not bestselling. Furthermore, if it's only available in a format where I don't own it when I buy it, I won't have it. At least, not legally.