You are mistaken; there was space jump in Metroid Prime, you got it about halfway through. You got it even earlier than that in Prime 2, not 90% through.
I said there was no *proper* space jump in Metroid Prime. In the Prime games, space jump is just a double jump. In the 2D Metroids, Space Jump is more like the Screw Attack in Prime 2 & 3. You spin through the air and jump again every time you press the jump button, almost flying.
Prime 2 added the Screw Attack, which acted more like 2D Space Jump, except limited to 5 jumps and no gaining height. Interestingly, the ability for the Screw Attack to actually work as an attack was added at the last moment due to fan requests. It wasn't supposed to work as an attack at first, only as a jumping ability. You get the Screw Attack in the Ing Hive. At that point, the only things left to do in the game are collect the last Ing Hive Key, fight the Ing Hive boss, then fight the final bosses of the game. It's the last major item you get, other than the weapon you get for beating the Ing Hive boss.
Anyway, it looks like you mixed up talk of 2D style space jump for the weak space jump the 3D games ended up with.
Okay, fine, you just weren't aware of it, just like you weren't aware that previous FPSes had crappy jumping and Prime was the first good one. You must have missed the reviews too where the reviewers expressed their relief that the jumping was in fact easy and fun instead of annoying and painful like all previous experience would have led them to expect.
I guess if you read reviews at sites that consider FPS games the end all be all you might've seen that, but I'll tell you a very large number of reviews didn't bother to mention it at all.
It just seemed incredibly obvious from the beginning that Nintendo wouldn't release the game if jumping wasn't going to work well. Miyamoto had the final say on all design decisions. There's no way he would have let them get very far in the game if jumping didn't work well. Far less obvious was how many of the unique Metroid abilities could be done in a 1st person game. If they had cut the morph ball - which as I mentioned before, Retro wanted to do - I don't think it would have felt like a Metroid game and wouldn't have gone over well.
It's an adventure game with a different camera angle. If you look at it that way, it's not surprising. If you think of it as an FPS game, I guess it is.
Retro Studios showed that this wasn't necessarily the case, and the secret does in fact lie in the nature of the jumps required in the game, i.e. the level design. You should really give the Retro level designers their due, because it is only by their hard effort that you were able to have an FPS-platforming experience that feels so natural that you can't imagine it being any other way.
I certainly give them their due - I consider Metroid Prime to be the best 3D game ever made.
That's funny, because a couple of those are examples of abilities directly related to jumping and the difficulty of making it work in 3d. The space jump in particular was changed not to give you the free-roaming that it gave you in previous Metroids, but to make jumping more forgiving (since you could activate the space jump at any point during your normal jump so it was easier to use, and could correct any short-jumps that you made).
Yes, I did list proper space jump (not to mention wall jumping) and screw attack as a limits, but those are the type of things that really aren't possible at all from a first person view. Proper space jumping would be hard to do in 3D even from a third person view due to camera issues (keep in mind you'd need to be using 2 analog sticks + the jump button at the same time to do effective 2D-style space jumping). First person wall jumping would only really be possible if Samus did an instant 180 degree spin when you kicked off the wall, which would probably be rather disorienting.
I also wouldn't say that space jump was intended to make jumping more forgiving. The first Prime to have it, Prime 2, didn't let you get it until you were 90% of the way through the game. It was more of a bonus for the people who missed it. Also, it's main purpose was to jump long distances. You couldn't even get out of the room you got the space jump in unless you learned how to get the maximum jumping distance possible. There was very little margin for error in that room.
Anyway, I'm sure the developers had lots of fears and qualms developing an FPS Metroid. It's interesting to hear that they were thinking of ditching the morph ball, and denied by Miyamoto. To the extent that they could even entertain the notion of dropping morph ball, do you think they could have ditched jumping as a tool of exploration? No, and for the ones responsible for making that work, it surely wasn't the least of their worries. Something incorporated that deeply into the fundamental design sense for the game such that players aren't even aware it is there is not a little niggling detail. As evidenced by the many, many games that couldn't pull it off.
Were the developers worried about getting jumping right? Sure. As were the developers of Mario Galaxy. But Mario fans weren't worried that they wouldn't get it right.
Honestly, I saw a lot of commentary on the Metroid Prime worries. But everything was "How will you do a screw attack from a 1st person view? That view would probably make you throw up." The extent of the commentary I saw on normal jumping had to do with height issues. In the 2D games, Samus could jump ~4x her height, which would be kinda weird in first person.
Or the jump large enough that the only way you could make it was if your feet were at the very edge of the platform when you jumped.
Never found that to cause a problem in Metroid.
Are you saying you never cared in Metroid where your feet are? Because it certainly matters in some other FPS games, and it 100% matters in true platform games that are either 2-D or 3-D 3rd person. It doesn't matter in Metroid because they made it not matter...
Yes, in the Metroid Prime games I've never really cared where my feet were. Sure, sometimes when jumping across a broken bridge with jagged edges on both sides I'd miss the first time when I would've had no problem with it if I could've do it in third person, but those are the only cases its really an issue. And of course in a 3rd person view game you care where your feet are, because that's the only way you can judge where you character is.
Okay... Then call it "not bad" level design. Because I'd certainly agree that jumping puzzles ala Turoc and most other FPS games that have them (thankfully few due to being generally reviled) are bad level design. Retro designed the levels in Metroid so that the jumping was not annoying given the camera angle. Call it "good", call it "not bad", I call it "fairly unique in all of 1st person shooter-dom and a breath of fresh air".
As I said in the beginning, I very rarely play FPS games, so I don't know what the norm is. All I know is Metroid handles it the way I would expect it to be handled. If you design a game like Turok, I just consider that to be a badly made game.
That's why everyone was terrified when Metroid Prime was announced and heard it was a 1st person shooter with jumping, and relieved when the jumping despite all expectations was not annoying.
The jumping wasn't what caused the horror. Metroid games are about exploration with some shooting thrown in (the opposite of most first person games), and a lot of abilities that are hard to imagine fitting in a first person game. As is, Prime 1 had to scrap the screw attack, drastically limit the space jump, and remove the speed booster entirely. I don't have a link, but the producer of Prime 1 recently did an interview about the development process. He revealed that they were wanting to leave the morph ball out because it was extremely difficult to get working well. It only made it in because Miyamoto said to them "You get the morph ball perfect, or we'll find someone else to make the game." Jumping was the least of people's worries.
makes me think you're confusing Z-lock with the whole concept of Z-targeting. Z-lock in OoT is when you don't have to hold the Z button to stay Z-targeted. Turning off Z-lock doesn't mean giving up Z-targeting altogether.
Oh... I never knew there was an option to change that. Wish I knew that ~10 years ago:) I thought he was against Z-targeting and couldn't understand it. He was comparing it to the lock-on option in Prime 3, so it seemed a reasonable assumption.
No, the hate for jumping in FPS games is that you can't see what the hell you are doing -- you can either see where you are jumping to, or where your feet are, but not both, so one way or another you always feel as though you are jumping blind.
I've never cared to see where my feet are. I don't see that being an issue unless the level designer made the platforms way too small.
Metroid gets around this through good level design.
Good level design makes everything better, bad level design makes everything worse. You wouldn't say sniper rifles are a terrible idea in FPS games just because you played a game that only gave them to you in levels with any good sniping positions.
The analog motion control, though nice, really has nothing to do with it.
It has a huge thing to do with it. It makes it far easier to control the distance of your jump or correct it in mid-air.
Its not just level design, Metroid also automatically looks down a bit while you jump, which helps orientation
I used to think that helped, but Prime 3 doesn't do that (at least not with the controls set to advanced sensitivity), and I didn't find jumping any harder in that game. Prime 3 had its share of precision jumping - for example, freezing the fuel gel spouts usually resulted in a pretty small area that you could land on.
in addition it has very 'sticky' edges, so even if you miss a jump by a bit, you still make it to the other side safely, because you 'stick' to the edge and can make it up.
I don't know what you're referring to here.
All that said, even with all this I still consider jumps in FPSs to be pretty annoying, not only are they harder, because you can see less, they are also simply less fun, because you need a body to do the real fun jumps (i.e. screw attack, Mario-like triple jump, ledge-grabs, etc.).
I'll mostly agree with that. If you took a pure shooter, I could see how you could prefer not having jumps. In a typical Metroid game, the jumping is more important than the shooting.
The hate for platforming is mostly that the platform has to be below your viewpoint for you to stand on it instead of seeing it in your view and having a character that lands on it.
I've never found that to be an issue. If I can see the target before I jump, it's not hard to do. Even if you can't see that well, as long as you've got analog controls you can fine tune well enough in the air to compensate as long as you were close.
Metroid Prime worked in part because the platforms simply had a unified distance so you just had to run and jump to make it, no depth perception necessary.
But the platforms don't have a uniform distance. The beginning of Prime 1 kept the jumps simple, but they got progressively harder throughout the game. Jumping between moving platforms isn't uncommon on the GameCube games, although I don't remember offhand if that was in the Wii one. The only thing they did was made it so that you didn't have to jump onto very small platforms too often, but Prime 3 did more of that.
1) A keyboard is strictly digital buttons. It's no where near as precise as an analog stick for movement.
2) Ease of access. You have plenty of keys, but a giant grid of keys isn't nearly as easy to use as something you wrap your hand around that has buttons placed so that they can be easily reached without confusion. Keyboard keys require more force and press down further than controller buttons, making them not as fast to hit. When you're trying to use 26 keys with one hand, it's easy for your hand to get lost on the keyboard, requiring you to either look down or take the time to reorient yourself.
The only advantage a keyboard provides is that it has a lot of buttons, which just isn't necessary for the vast majority of games.
I guess we'll have to just agree to disagree; I find that the shooting in Metroid, once you get used to it, becomes second nature, and it's a lot more satisfying for me to add that extra level of interactivity in the game. I certainly don't feel it takes away from the adventure aspect, just adds another layer to it with a little patience.
I played about 1/3 of Corruption with Z-Lock off, then turned it on for the rest. I could handle it fine, but it just felt like work. I've never been a fan of precision aiming - I played just about every major FPS up to Quake 1, then basically completely stopped after that, as I just don't find aiming in 3D fun.
As far as OoT is concerned, to me and every other Zelda fan I know, the Z-lock inhibits advanced gameplay by creating an extra mechanical action while targeting; with it on you have to hit the button three times to change targets. It's good for beginners because it helps them stay on a target until it's defeated, however when you need to quickly switch between targets or position the camera during combat, it is extremely prohibitive.
Oh, I'll definitely agree with you that the z lock is a pain in a crowded room, but a sword fight against an enemy with a shield is just a huge pain in the ass without using z lock. Switching between the sword and arrows mid fight without z lock is going to be a pain.
On a different note, another reason I think the Metroid controls trump at least other FPSs on consoles is the simple fact that you can aim while doing other actions.
You're right on that. That's why I was glad they've had targetting in the 3 Prime games, and cringed any time there was a rumor of Prime 2 having dual analog controls... you need access to way too many buttons in the Prime games for dual analog to work.
then it occurred to me that you can't jump, duck and aim all at once in any FPS on a console, and they're simply designed from the ground up to work around this.
You've planted a very strange image in my head now. Maybe that's typical in modern FPS games, but to someone who doesn't play them, damn that sounds weird.
Sorry if I sounded like a jerk before, the GP just got me (a Nintendo fanboi) a little fired up by bashing Metroid.
I know how you feel. As a huge Metroid fan who doesn't like FPS games, I'm rather tired of the FPS fanboys bashing on the Metroid Prime games because they're not Halo...
I strenuously reject this statement. The wiimote + nunchuk are on par for some things but a magnitude worse for responsiveness. there is a notable lag between action of the mote and action on screen. partly due to the wi fi partly due to the slowness of the motion sensors. Given a choice I'd go KB+mouse 100% of the time. Metroid 3, Zelda, Rayman et al have not shown any promise that the wiimote will be better then kb + mouse. Wiimote+chuk is better then dual sticks of course. The wiimote and chuk only beats the keyboard and mouse in catagory: more intuitive to learn. Other then that WASD+mouse has it beat in every way.
Have you actually played Metroid? The aiming is done via the IR sensor, not the motion. There is no lag. Any issues I've noticed with the parts that are motion controlled have been due to my tendency to go through motions faster than Samus does the corresponding actions. If I match my timing to the animations, it works perfectly. If you're having lag issues, I'd recommend checking if you've got a large number of wifi hotspots flooding your 2.4GHz spectrum or something like that. There shouldn't be issues.
And no, WASD can never compete with an analog stick. Besides the general awkwardness of WASD, they're just digital buttons. It's just not possible to do precise movement with them. That's the reason for all the hate of jumping in FPS games.
First off, who the hell plays that game with Z-lock on?
People playing the game for the adventure, not the shooting. You know, the stuff Metroid games are known for.
It's like playing OoT with Z-Lock on; sure if you've never played a video game before it can be helpful, but it's more satisfying to actually become skilled at something like that
I'm assuming you mean Ocarina of Time here... why would you not use Z-Lock? It's just a different set of controls that work a lot better in certain situations. Not using it is just rather arbitrarily limiting your options to add challenge - not really any different than playing the game and refusing the collect optional items.
On the default "n00b setting", yes it does this. On "Advanced" the Z button locks the camera on a specific target, but gives you free range shooting ability anywhere. This is the way it should be played.
Advanced sensitivity + Z lock for me. It's an adventure game, not a shooter. Why make disposing of the wildlife time consuming when the terrain is your real enemy?
I haven't played any pure FPS games on the Wii, only Metroid, but you're not really pointing at what you want to shoot. It works essentially like a mouse - just tilt the controller a little and the view & crosshair moves in the appropriate direction. You really shouldn't even know what the Wiimote is pointing at.
but was Metroid Prime 3 on the Wii really as good as a mouse-and-keyboard PC FPS?
Metroid Prime 3 hit a weird spot. The first two Prime games certainly featured first person shooting, but didn't play anything like an FPS game. They played like an adventure game with a different camera angle. Prime 3 moved much closer to the FPS realm. If you're an FPS fan, you'll probably like the beginning and end of the game and tolerate the middle. If you're a Metroid fan, you'll probably feel the reverse.
There's no doubt Wiimote+Nunchuck beats the keyboard part of mouse+keyboard. Precision moving and jumping is far easier with an analog stick than with a keyboard. If like me you rarely play FPS games, the Wiimote is easier to use than a mouse. But my gut feeling is over time, the mouse would be slightly easier to be precise with as it's on a flat surface rather than being held in the air.
Of course, I play for the adventure, not the shooting, so I just left lock-on turned on, which means for the most part you only had to aim at bosses. If you found a good sitting position where you could rest the Wiimote on your knee and aim from there, you might be able to beat a mouse in precision.
Depends on what you mean by "popular." In terms of pure numbers, the iPod itself wasn't all that popular for nearly three years after the first one was released.
Yup. I wouldn't say MP3 players were popular until well after the iPod was released.
In terms of sales expectations, however, MP3 players have been commercially successful since the first one was released in 1998.
Commercially successful does not necessarily mean something is popular. Just means they found a good market niche and hit it well.
In fact, the second MP3 player, the Diamond Rio PMP300, was considered a smash hit and even spurred the RIAA into suing the company over piracy concerns.
The RIAA has also sued senior citizens that don't own computers over piracy concerns.
BS I had to wait 4 months in the late 90's for my Rio 500 which was ordered in December.
That simply means they didn't make enough of them. They could've made 100 of them and had demand for 200. Would mean a long wait to get one, but wouldn't mean there was much demand.
A 128 MB player is going to hold maybe 2 CDs at 128 kbps. When they first came out, they cost several times what a high end portable CD player cost. That's a big difference. If you carry a bag with you to work or are a student with a backpack, the size of a CD player isn't a big deal.
You do know that credit card companies charge a minimum fee for each transaction, right? Microsoft can't let people do micropayments of $1 with a credit card because the credit card companies will turn around and charge Microsoft MORE than $1 to cover that transaction.
The fees would be more like 30-40 cents. When I did a credit card processing system a few years ago, it was either.25 or.35 cents per transaction, plus ~2.5% of the transaction total. We also used Verisign's gateway, which meant naother 10 cents per transaction. I'm sure Microsoft created their own gateway and doesn't need the middleman providing that service.
Nintendo does the exact same thing with Wii Points, except you can't purchase those through your console, which allows a greater freedom for input when purchasing online, though I'm sure there's a minimum.
Huh? The Wii Shop Channel lets you buy points in amounts of $10, $20, or $40. Or you can buy cards with points at retail stores. How else are you buying points?
I wouldn't say MP3 players were a proven concept when the iPod came out. They existed, but they weren't at all popular. Even among technology geeks they were a "that's cool, but not worth the money" kinda thing. Most MP3 players back then were similar to what you'd get now for $20, but cost ~$200.
Longer functions should be divided up into "paragraphs" with comments stating what's about to happen and how the current state contributes to the overall goal of the function. If your functions have extremely clean divisions of functionality, consider breaking them up into smaller private functions unless you're concerned with every last ounce of performance and can't afford the 10-20 cpu cycles necessary to do a function call (or declare the methods as inline).
I followed that approach on a game I was working on once. The main processing function had lots of small little sections, things like "loop over objects of type X and update them" followed by "loop over objects of type Y and update them". At first each of the sections was pretty small, so I didn't think it was worth breaking them into separate functions.
Eventually the main processing function grew rather large, so I decided to break the different segments of it into their own functions. Performance actually went up noticeably when I did that. I think the compiler just had an easier time optimizing the smaller blocks of code.
It moves his motive from self-defense to murder. If you can't see that being a difference I can't help you.
No it doesn't. It's self defense either way. Greedo is sitting there telling Han that he's going to kill him. Han certainly didn't seem to be surprised to be hearing it. If anything, letting Greedo get the first shot just means Han is stupid.
In total, why fight a file format war when lock-in is based on features, not format? MS wins the office because it crams 80% of bloat into its Office products (along with the 20% of true usability), not because people "cant get away from doc,xls and ppt".
MS got into this position by file format lock-in. Office 97 got really pushed onto the market and practically just appeared everywhere. From there, the file format lock-in kept it going. Everything else faded away quickly while Office kept going tacking on more features. 10 years later, sure, MS has the feature war won. But that's just what happens when you go 10 years with your only competitor being the previous versions of your software.
Don't be misguided by the other reply - altho LOI levels lack the depth and mystery of 2D Castlevania incarnations, it was excellent for a first attempt at bringing the Castlevania feel into 3D.
It was actually the 3rd attempt. There were 2 3D Castlevania games on the N64.
I don't really understand why we're still using synthesized stuff when we have the capability for using proper recordings.
For starters, it's easier to do a smooth transition between songs when working with midi.
Sometimes people compose things that are really hard to play on real instruments.
Synthesized music is usually drastically smaller than recorded music. If you're constantly streaming game data off the disc, then it can buy you a lot to reduce how many things you're streaming off the disc (remember, seek time is a big killer).
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You are mistaken; there was space jump in Metroid Prime, you got it about halfway through. You got it even earlier than that in Prime 2, not 90% through.
I said there was no *proper* space jump in Metroid Prime. In the Prime games, space jump is just a double jump. In the 2D Metroids, Space Jump is more like the Screw Attack in Prime 2 & 3. You spin through the air and jump again every time you press the jump button, almost flying.
Prime 2 added the Screw Attack, which acted more like 2D Space Jump, except limited to 5 jumps and no gaining height. Interestingly, the ability for the Screw Attack to actually work as an attack was added at the last moment due to fan requests. It wasn't supposed to work as an attack at first, only as a jumping ability. You get the Screw Attack in the Ing Hive. At that point, the only things left to do in the game are collect the last Ing Hive Key, fight the Ing Hive boss, then fight the final bosses of the game. It's the last major item you get, other than the weapon you get for beating the Ing Hive boss.
Anyway, it looks like you mixed up talk of 2D style space jump for the weak space jump the 3D games ended up with.
Okay, fine, you just weren't aware of it, just like you weren't aware that previous FPSes had crappy jumping and Prime was the first good one. You must have missed the reviews too where the reviewers expressed their relief that the jumping was in fact easy and fun instead of annoying and painful like all previous experience would have led them to expect.
I guess if you read reviews at sites that consider FPS games the end all be all you might've seen that, but I'll tell you a very large number of reviews didn't bother to mention it at all.
It just seemed incredibly obvious from the beginning that Nintendo wouldn't release the game if jumping wasn't going to work well. Miyamoto had the final say on all design decisions. There's no way he would have let them get very far in the game if jumping didn't work well. Far less obvious was how many of the unique Metroid abilities could be done in a 1st person game. If they had cut the morph ball - which as I mentioned before, Retro wanted to do - I don't think it would have felt like a Metroid game and wouldn't have gone over well.
It's an adventure game with a different camera angle. If you look at it that way, it's not surprising. If you think of it as an FPS game, I guess it is.
Retro Studios showed that this wasn't necessarily the case, and the secret does in fact lie in the nature of the jumps required in the game, i.e. the level design. You should really give the Retro level designers their due, because it is only by their hard effort that you were able to have an FPS-platforming experience that feels so natural that you can't imagine it being any other way.
I certainly give them their due - I consider Metroid Prime to be the best 3D game ever made.
That's funny, because a couple of those are examples of abilities directly related to jumping and the difficulty of making it work in 3d. The space jump in particular was changed not to give you the free-roaming that it gave you in previous Metroids, but to make jumping more forgiving (since you could activate the space jump at any point during your normal jump so it was easier to use, and could correct any short-jumps that you made).
Yes, I did list proper space jump (not to mention wall jumping) and screw attack as a limits, but those are the type of things that really aren't possible at all from a first person view. Proper space jumping would be hard to do in 3D even from a third person view due to camera issues (keep in mind you'd need to be using 2 analog sticks + the jump button at the same time to do effective 2D-style space jumping). First person wall jumping would only really be possible if Samus did an instant 180 degree spin when you kicked off the wall, which would probably be rather disorienting.
I also wouldn't say that space jump was intended to make jumping more forgiving. The first Prime to have it, Prime 2, didn't let you get it until you were 90% of the way through the game. It was more of a bonus for the people who missed it. Also, it's main purpose was to jump long distances. You couldn't even get out of the room you got the space jump in unless you learned how to get the maximum jumping distance possible. There was very little margin for error in that room.
Anyway, I'm sure the developers had lots of fears and qualms developing an FPS Metroid. It's interesting to hear that they were thinking of ditching the morph ball, and denied by Miyamoto. To the extent that they could even entertain the notion of dropping morph ball, do you think they could have ditched jumping as a tool of exploration? No, and for the ones responsible for making that work, it surely wasn't the least of their worries. Something incorporated that deeply into the fundamental design sense for the game such that players aren't even aware it is there is not a little niggling detail. As evidenced by the many, many games that couldn't pull it off.
Were the developers worried about getting jumping right? Sure. As were the developers of Mario Galaxy. But Mario fans weren't worried that they wouldn't get it right.
Honestly, I saw a lot of commentary on the Metroid Prime worries. But everything was "How will you do a screw attack from a 1st person view? That view would probably make you throw up." The extent of the commentary I saw on normal jumping had to do with height issues. In the 2D games, Samus could jump ~4x her height, which would be kinda weird in first person.
Or the jump large enough that the only way you could make it was if your feet were at the very edge of the platform when you jumped.
Never found that to cause a problem in Metroid.
Are you saying you never cared in Metroid where your feet are? Because it certainly matters in some other FPS games, and it 100% matters in true platform games that are either 2-D or 3-D 3rd person. It doesn't matter in Metroid because they made it not matter...
Yes, in the Metroid Prime games I've never really cared where my feet were. Sure, sometimes when jumping across a broken bridge with jagged edges on both sides I'd miss the first time when I would've had no problem with it if I could've do it in third person, but those are the only cases its really an issue. And of course in a 3rd person view game you care where your feet are, because that's the only way you can judge where you character is.
Okay... Then call it "not bad" level design. Because I'd certainly agree that jumping puzzles ala Turoc and most other FPS games that have them (thankfully few due to being generally reviled) are bad level design. Retro designed the levels in Metroid so that the jumping was not annoying given the camera angle. Call it "good", call it "not bad", I call it "fairly unique in all of 1st person shooter-dom and a breath of fresh air".
As I said in the beginning, I very rarely play FPS games, so I don't know what the norm is. All I know is Metroid handles it the way I would expect it to be handled. If you design a game like Turok, I just consider that to be a badly made game.
That's why everyone was terrified when Metroid Prime was announced and heard it was a 1st person shooter with jumping, and relieved when the jumping despite all expectations was not annoying.
The jumping wasn't what caused the horror. Metroid games are about exploration with some shooting thrown in (the opposite of most first person games), and a lot of abilities that are hard to imagine fitting in a first person game. As is, Prime 1 had to scrap the screw attack, drastically limit the space jump, and remove the speed booster entirely. I don't have a link, but the producer of Prime 1 recently did an interview about the development process. He revealed that they were wanting to leave the morph ball out because it was extremely difficult to get working well. It only made it in because Miyamoto said to them "You get the morph ball perfect, or we'll find someone else to make the game." Jumping was the least of people's worries.
makes me think you're confusing Z-lock with the whole concept of Z-targeting. Z-lock in OoT is when you don't have to hold the Z button to stay Z-targeted. Turning off Z-lock doesn't mean giving up Z-targeting altogether.
:) I thought he was against Z-targeting and couldn't understand it. He was comparing it to the lock-on option in Prime 3, so it seemed a reasonable assumption.
Oh... I never knew there was an option to change that. Wish I knew that ~10 years ago
No, the hate for jumping in FPS games is that you can't see what the hell you are doing -- you can either see where you are jumping to, or where your feet are, but not both, so one way or another you always feel as though you are jumping blind.
I've never cared to see where my feet are. I don't see that being an issue unless the level designer made the platforms way too small.
Metroid gets around this through good level design.
Good level design makes everything better, bad level design makes everything worse. You wouldn't say sniper rifles are a terrible idea in FPS games just because you played a game that only gave them to you in levels with any good sniping positions.
The analog motion control, though nice, really has nothing to do with it.
It has a huge thing to do with it. It makes it far easier to control the distance of your jump or correct it in mid-air.
Its not just level design, Metroid also automatically looks down a bit while you jump, which helps orientation
I used to think that helped, but Prime 3 doesn't do that (at least not with the controls set to advanced sensitivity), and I didn't find jumping any harder in that game. Prime 3 had its share of precision jumping - for example, freezing the fuel gel spouts usually resulted in a pretty small area that you could land on.
in addition it has very 'sticky' edges, so even if you miss a jump by a bit, you still make it to the other side safely, because you 'stick' to the edge and can make it up.
I don't know what you're referring to here.
All that said, even with all this I still consider jumps in FPSs to be pretty annoying, not only are they harder, because you can see less, they are also simply less fun, because you need a body to do the real fun jumps (i.e. screw attack, Mario-like triple jump, ledge-grabs, etc.).
I'll mostly agree with that. If you took a pure shooter, I could see how you could prefer not having jumps. In a typical Metroid game, the jumping is more important than the shooting.
The hate for platforming is mostly that the platform has to be below your viewpoint for you to stand on it instead of seeing it in your view and having a character that lands on it.
I've never found that to be an issue. If I can see the target before I jump, it's not hard to do. Even if you can't see that well, as long as you've got analog controls you can fine tune well enough in the air to compensate as long as you were close.
Metroid Prime worked in part because the platforms simply had a unified distance so you just had to run and jump to make it, no depth perception necessary.
But the platforms don't have a uniform distance. The beginning of Prime 1 kept the jumps simple, but they got progressively harder throughout the game. Jumping between moving platforms isn't uncommon on the GameCube games, although I don't remember offhand if that was in the Wii one. The only thing they did was made it so that you didn't have to jump onto very small platforms too often, but Prime 3 did more of that.
Two issues:
1) A keyboard is strictly digital buttons. It's no where near as precise as an analog stick for movement.
2) Ease of access. You have plenty of keys, but a giant grid of keys isn't nearly as easy to use as something you wrap your hand around that has buttons placed so that they can be easily reached without confusion. Keyboard keys require more force and press down further than controller buttons, making them not as fast to hit. When you're trying to use 26 keys with one hand, it's easy for your hand to get lost on the keyboard, requiring you to either look down or take the time to reorient yourself.
The only advantage a keyboard provides is that it has a lot of buttons, which just isn't necessary for the vast majority of games.
I guess we'll have to just agree to disagree; I find that the shooting in Metroid, once you get used to it, becomes second nature, and it's a lot more satisfying for me to add that extra level of interactivity in the game. I certainly don't feel it takes away from the adventure aspect, just adds another layer to it with a little patience.
I played about 1/3 of Corruption with Z-Lock off, then turned it on for the rest. I could handle it fine, but it just felt like work. I've never been a fan of precision aiming - I played just about every major FPS up to Quake 1, then basically completely stopped after that, as I just don't find aiming in 3D fun.
As far as OoT is concerned, to me and every other Zelda fan I know, the Z-lock inhibits advanced gameplay by creating an extra mechanical action while targeting; with it on you have to hit the button three times to change targets. It's good for beginners because it helps them stay on a target until it's defeated, however when you need to quickly switch between targets or position the camera during combat, it is extremely prohibitive.
Oh, I'll definitely agree with you that the z lock is a pain in a crowded room, but a sword fight against an enemy with a shield is just a huge pain in the ass without using z lock. Switching between the sword and arrows mid fight without z lock is going to be a pain.
On a different note, another reason I think the Metroid controls trump at least other FPSs on consoles is the simple fact that you can aim while doing other actions.
You're right on that. That's why I was glad they've had targetting in the 3 Prime games, and cringed any time there was a rumor of Prime 2 having dual analog controls... you need access to way too many buttons in the Prime games for dual analog to work.
then it occurred to me that you can't jump, duck and aim all at once in any FPS on a console, and they're simply designed from the ground up to work around this.
You've planted a very strange image in my head now. Maybe that's typical in modern FPS games, but to someone who doesn't play them, damn that sounds weird.
Sorry if I sounded like a jerk before, the GP just got me (a Nintendo fanboi) a little fired up by bashing Metroid.
I know how you feel. As a huge Metroid fan who doesn't like FPS games, I'm rather tired of the FPS fanboys bashing on the Metroid Prime games because they're not Halo...
I strenuously reject this statement. The wiimote + nunchuk are on par for some things but a magnitude worse for responsiveness. there is a notable lag between action of the mote and action on screen. partly due to the wi fi partly due to the slowness of the motion sensors. Given a choice I'd go KB+mouse 100% of the time. Metroid 3, Zelda, Rayman et al have not shown any promise that the wiimote will be better then kb + mouse. Wiimote+chuk is better then dual sticks of course. The wiimote and chuk only beats the keyboard and mouse in catagory: more intuitive to learn. Other then that WASD+mouse has it beat in every way.
Have you actually played Metroid? The aiming is done via the IR sensor, not the motion. There is no lag. Any issues I've noticed with the parts that are motion controlled have been due to my tendency to go through motions faster than Samus does the corresponding actions. If I match my timing to the animations, it works perfectly. If you're having lag issues, I'd recommend checking if you've got a large number of wifi hotspots flooding your 2.4GHz spectrum or something like that. There shouldn't be issues.
And no, WASD can never compete with an analog stick. Besides the general awkwardness of WASD, they're just digital buttons. It's just not possible to do precise movement with them. That's the reason for all the hate of jumping in FPS games.
First off, who the hell plays that game with Z-lock on?
People playing the game for the adventure, not the shooting. You know, the stuff Metroid games are known for.
It's like playing OoT with Z-Lock on; sure if you've never played a video game before it can be helpful, but it's more satisfying to actually become skilled at something like that
I'm assuming you mean Ocarina of Time here... why would you not use Z-Lock? It's just a different set of controls that work a lot better in certain situations. Not using it is just rather arbitrarily limiting your options to add challenge - not really any different than playing the game and refusing the collect optional items.
The mouse part is fine, only reasonable if you're playing at a desk. And the keyboard part sucks.
On the default "n00b setting", yes it does this. On "Advanced" the Z button locks the camera on a specific target, but gives you free range shooting ability anywhere. This is the way it should be played.
Advanced sensitivity + Z lock for me. It's an adventure game, not a shooter. Why make disposing of the wildlife time consuming when the terrain is your real enemy?
I haven't played any pure FPS games on the Wii, only Metroid, but you're not really pointing at what you want to shoot. It works essentially like a mouse - just tilt the controller a little and the view & crosshair moves in the appropriate direction. You really shouldn't even know what the Wiimote is pointing at.
but was Metroid Prime 3 on the Wii really as good as a mouse-and-keyboard PC FPS?
Metroid Prime 3 hit a weird spot. The first two Prime games certainly featured first person shooting, but didn't play anything like an FPS game. They played like an adventure game with a different camera angle. Prime 3 moved much closer to the FPS realm. If you're an FPS fan, you'll probably like the beginning and end of the game and tolerate the middle. If you're a Metroid fan, you'll probably feel the reverse.
There's no doubt Wiimote+Nunchuck beats the keyboard part of mouse+keyboard. Precision moving and jumping is far easier with an analog stick than with a keyboard. If like me you rarely play FPS games, the Wiimote is easier to use than a mouse. But my gut feeling is over time, the mouse would be slightly easier to be precise with as it's on a flat surface rather than being held in the air.
Of course, I play for the adventure, not the shooting, so I just left lock-on turned on, which means for the most part you only had to aim at bosses. If you found a good sitting position where you could rest the Wiimote on your knee and aim from there, you might be able to beat a mouse in precision.
Depends on what you mean by "popular." In terms of pure numbers, the iPod itself wasn't all that popular for nearly three years after the first one was released.
Yup. I wouldn't say MP3 players were popular until well after the iPod was released.
In terms of sales expectations, however, MP3 players have been commercially successful since the first one was released in 1998.
Commercially successful does not necessarily mean something is popular. Just means they found a good market niche and hit it well.
In fact, the second MP3 player, the Diamond Rio PMP300, was considered a smash hit and even spurred the RIAA into suing the company over piracy concerns.
The RIAA has also sued senior citizens that don't own computers over piracy concerns.
BS I had to wait 4 months in the late 90's for my Rio 500 which was ordered in December.
That simply means they didn't make enough of them. They could've made 100 of them and had demand for 200. Would mean a long wait to get one, but wouldn't mean there was much demand.
A 128 MB player is going to hold maybe 2 CDs at 128 kbps. When they first came out, they cost several times what a high end portable CD player cost. That's a big difference. If you carry a bag with you to work or are a student with a backpack, the size of a CD player isn't a big deal.
You do know that credit card companies charge a minimum fee for each transaction, right? Microsoft can't let people do micropayments of $1 with a credit card because the credit card companies will turn around and charge Microsoft MORE than $1 to cover that transaction.
.25 or .35 cents per transaction, plus ~2.5% of the transaction total. We also used Verisign's gateway, which meant naother 10 cents per transaction. I'm sure Microsoft created their own gateway and doesn't need the middleman providing that service.
The fees would be more like 30-40 cents. When I did a credit card processing system a few years ago, it was either
Nintendo does the exact same thing with Wii Points, except you can't purchase those through your console, which allows a greater freedom for input when purchasing online, though I'm sure there's a minimum.
Huh? The Wii Shop Channel lets you buy points in amounts of $10, $20, or $40. Or you can buy cards with points at retail stores. How else are you buying points?
I wouldn't say MP3 players were a proven concept when the iPod came out. They existed, but they weren't at all popular. Even among technology geeks they were a "that's cool, but not worth the money" kinda thing. Most MP3 players back then were similar to what you'd get now for $20, but cost ~$200.
Longer functions should be divided up into "paragraphs" with comments stating what's about to happen and how the current state contributes to the overall goal of the function. If your functions have extremely clean divisions of functionality, consider breaking them up into smaller private functions unless you're concerned with every last ounce of performance and can't afford the 10-20 cpu cycles necessary to do a function call (or declare the methods as inline).
I followed that approach on a game I was working on once. The main processing function had lots of small little sections, things like "loop over objects of type X and update them" followed by "loop over objects of type Y and update them". At first each of the sections was pretty small, so I didn't think it was worth breaking them into separate functions.
Eventually the main processing function grew rather large, so I decided to break the different segments of it into their own functions. Performance actually went up noticeably when I did that. I think the compiler just had an easier time optimizing the smaller blocks of code.
It moves his motive from self-defense to murder. If you can't see that being a difference I can't help you.
No it doesn't. It's self defense either way. Greedo is sitting there telling Han that he's going to kill him. Han certainly didn't seem to be surprised to be hearing it. If anything, letting Greedo get the first shot just means Han is stupid.
In total, why fight a file format war when lock-in is based on features, not format? MS wins the office because it crams 80% of bloat into its Office products (along with the 20% of true usability), not because people "cant get away from doc,xls and ppt".
MS got into this position by file format lock-in. Office 97 got really pushed onto the market and practically just appeared everywhere. From there, the file format lock-in kept it going. Everything else faded away quickly while Office kept going tacking on more features. 10 years later, sure, MS has the feature war won. But that's just what happens when you go 10 years with your only competitor being the previous versions of your software.
Don't be misguided by the other reply - altho LOI levels lack the depth and mystery of 2D Castlevania incarnations, it was excellent for a first attempt at bringing the Castlevania feel into 3D.
It was actually the 3rd attempt. There were 2 3D Castlevania games on the N64.
I don't really understand why we're still using synthesized stuff when we have the capability for using proper recordings.
For starters, it's easier to do a smooth transition between songs when working with midi.
Sometimes people compose things that are really hard to play on real instruments.
Synthesized music is usually drastically smaller than recorded music. If you're constantly streaming game data off the disc, then it can buy you a lot to reduce how many things you're streaming off the disc (remember, seek time is a big killer).