I bought Eternal Darkness when it came out. I figured if Nintendo liked what they saw so much that they invested heavily in the company, it's got to be a good game.
As a story, Eternal Darkness is great. As a game, it's terrible. Almost every puzzle is about as difficult as a game of Rock/Paper/Scissor where you opponent draws first. It's all matching red, green, and blue. Sometimes it's match the same color, sometimes it's match the color that defeats that color. Combat isn't very hard; just attack the head of everything. Once you get the life recovery spell the challenge is gone completely.
The 100% linear gameplay kills it though. The game is barely playable once through; unfortunately you need to play through 3 times to get the full ending.
There are some people that play a game solely for the story. I'm sure they'd love a game like that. But for most people, the deciding factor on whether to buy a game or to play someone else's copy is how replayable the game is. A game isn't worth $50 if you're only going to play it once. (Side note: ignore RPGs, lots of people only intend to play them once. But outside Japan, people who like RPGs are greatly in the minority)
If you make a linear game and intend on the story to sell it, then you better make the gameplay really damn good.
I'm convinced Zelda: Wind Waker didn't sell as well as expected due to the strong story. The story required the order you major events to be fixed. Even when the gameplay didn't. Towards the end of the game, it really feels like the PHB came in at the end of development and said "No, non-linearity bad!" and made the order of stuff at the end get fixed for no other reason. I know about 4-5 people that would've bought GameCubes and Zelda until they saw how linear the game was.
Full install of Moz for Windows, according to Mozilla.org, is 11.9 MB. Firebird for Windows, also according to Mozilla.org, is 6.0 MB. So, that's about 50% smaller. Especially if you're on dial-up, that *is* MUCH smaller!:)
Comparing a full install of Mozilla to a full install of Firebird is stupid. Either strip all the extra stuff out of Mozilla (which will reduce the size by several megabytes at least), or compare Firebird + Thunderbird combined at a minimum.
When Firebird and Thunderbird only require one copy of the Gecko runtime (which makes up the vast majority of the space they take up), then I'll consider them. But for now, using both leads to higher memory and disk space requirements. Considering the goal of the two projects is to great lean products, it defeats the point of using them.
To each their own, and that's the whole motto of Firebird.
No, that's the motto of the Mozilla suite. Firebird is smaller because they're removing stuff, and making what's there less flexible.
with a good set of default preferences
Good defaults would be like Netscape 7.1 - have the tab bar always showing. Most people would never discover tabs on their own if its hidden. When I've upgraded Netscape for people to a release with tabs, they seem to be "yeah whatever" when I explain tabs. But since the default is for the tab bar to be on, they end up trying them, and soon can't live without the feature.
Mozilla is meant as a reference implementation of a standards-compliant browser. At least they are trying to help the situation.
That was true back when AOL was funding Mozilla development. Mozilla would be the reference implementation, and Netscape and others would be the end user versions. But there is no more Netscape. Mozilla is now directly aimed at end users.
Quest for Glory is an old series made by Sierra. Consider it a cross of King's Quest and an RPG.
You have 3 character classes to pick from: Fighter, Magic User, and Thief. In the later games you can also be a Paladin, however, you have to earn that right in the earlier games first.
Your character has 20-30 abilities. Strength, intelligence, dodge, parry, vitality, magic, lock picking, climbing, and various others. At the start of the game, your character is assigned points to each attribute based on his class. You are also given some points to assign however you like. If you want, you can even do something like give a fighter skills in magic, although that would take up a large portion of your free points.
As you play the game, your skills improve by doing activities that correspond to them. i.e. the only way to improve your climbing skill is by climbing stuff. Things like your strength will go up as you fight. Your magic skill goes up as you cast spells. Individual spells had a skill level too.
Admittedly, climbing and throwing usually were rather tedious skills to improve. But the rest really weren't. They'd improve as you went through the game normally. It was a nice touch how the first time you tried doing something you'd suck at it and have to try several times, but by the end of the game you'd be good at it.
Another great touch is when you beat a game, you could export your character and use it in the next game with the same skills. Generally, if you made even a little effort to improve your skills, you'd end up with a better character than you would get if you started the next game from scratch. If you did put some effort into improvement, you'd have a really kick ass character for the next game.
As to the effect of the classes... a lot of puzzles would have different solutions depending on your character type. Some differed only slightly, while others had a rather significant change. Each character type also had their own unique subquests. They're very good games, and highly replayable.
Well, for the most part engines aren't very interesting.
For the PC, most people just licence either the latest engine from Carmack (who was mentioned), or the latest from Epic. The HL2 engine will probably make it into that list too when it finally comes out.
For the PS2, most companies just make an engine and stick with it as much as possible. Look at Capcom's games - most of them are based off the Resident Evil core.
On the Xbox and GC, who knows? No one ever really talks about it.
Really, people only really care about the engine if it's more important than the game itself. Quake 3 was on ok game, but it's engine was the important thing. It made a lot of money for id, and was used for a lot of good games. Doom 3 probably won't be a bad game, but it'll probably be remembered far more for its graphics than its gameplay. Think about it... we don't really know much about the game other than that it looks really good.
If this was written a few years ago, I could see including the Stamper Brothers of Rare. Bur first off, Rare's quality has greatly gone down hill over the past few years. More importantly, they want to get out of the business soon. That's why they sold all their stock of the company to Microsoft a year ago.
And how can you include all the big people at Nintendo except for Miyamoto?
Speaking of designers... anyone know what happened to Lori and Cori Cole from Sierra? They made some great games, but the Yosemite division got shut down a few years ago.
Raid 1 is the BEST for 2 drives, however you want the 2 drives either from different batches OR different manufacturers.
Different batches, possibly. Different manufacturer's, no. A 300 GB drive from manufacturer A and a 300 GB drive from manufacturer B usually aren't exactly the same size. Which means you'll have complications when mirroring.
Next month Nintendo has Mario Kart with LAN play coming out. Considering Mario Kart 64 was huge in college dorms, a LAN enabled version should sell pretty well.
Let's say Netscape had patented HTML. (Just play along, ignore the fact that they didn't invent it)
A 3 year patent would have done absolutely nothing to help them. It took MS that long to make a decent version of IE anyway.
Or look at the time between when Windows CE was first announced and when it actually came out. Several companies got killed off despite having better products, simply because MS said they would have something out "real soon now".
My solution? Cut the time on software/business patents to 3 years. Plenty of time to build a lead based on a valid new idea - very little opportunity to "pre-patent" an obvious idea to extort with later.
3 years would be completely useless in the software world. That's currently roughly the amount of time it takes MS to catch up to someone else's idea and use it themselves anyway. The patent would be completely useless.
"From the available artwork, it looks like this disc will be included as a pack in with new GameCubes..." (emphasis mine)
IGN doesn't know crap about it other than the fact that new art has been released to the retailers. Everything else about how the game will be available is pure speculation on their part. Period.
Did you actually look at the picture? The picture included a GameCube box that had a sticker on it that said it included the Zelda disc. That sticker is where the contents of the disc are listed.
Their network got hacked. Badly. The code that got leaked was something like 23 megs compressed. And supposedly it's not even the complete code.
They have to verify the code to make sure nothing got inserted into it by whoever compromise their network. That'll take a while.
They also have to evaluate the code that got leaked, and see if that requires changing anything. They don't want their copy protection cracked, and they also don't want lots of cheats to be out as soon as the game is released.
Also, keep in mind that before this happened, they were hoping to have it out before the holidays, but totally confident they could do it. Add in a slight delay, and that makes a January release. The beginning of the year is terrible for game sales, as everyone spent all their game money on the big holiday releases. So businesswise, April is a much better release date than January or February. So releasing then will give more time to fix bugs and also result in better sales. Oh, and it'll give more time for current graphics cards to drop in price, resulting in more people being able to play the game.
Second: I don't think software patents are inherently bad. If they really were only granted to new ideas that aren't obvious, then it would be great. Perhaps the time the patent is valid for might need to be adjusted, perhaps not, but that's a seperate issue.
Now, for this case. Remember how Microsoft got where there are: by repeatedly breaking the law and not getting punished for it. If someone can use the law to strike a significant blow against Microsoft, then I'm all for it.
I'm more than willing spend a little time modifying web pages if that's the side effects of hurting Microsoft. MS has already caused me far more harm than that.
Check the announcements when the head of HAL resigned. They mentioned that HAL was working on a 3D Kirby game to be released next year. It might've even been mentioned back at E3, because I remember hearing about it a while ago.
the gamecube has dropped its price to 1/2 its real price and ITS NOT being produced anymore
It was a temporary stop in production. The same press conference that announced the price drop also announced that production was starting again soon.
This campaign ad is not for upcoming gamecube games, actually there are no plans for big gamecube games next year
You mentioned Metal Gear and Metroid. There's also:
Star Fox Armada (or Star Fox 2, or whatever they call it) Zelda (another cell shaded game) Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles 3D Kirby game Pikmin 2 Resident Evil 4 Wario Ware Mario 128 (working title)
Slashdot Mirror
Phantasy Star Online for Dreamcast, GameCube, and Xbox all download code updates from the server when you connect.
Of course, each version has gotten hacked rather easily, and that's how people run arbitrary code on the GameCube.
I bought Eternal Darkness when it came out. I figured if Nintendo liked what they saw so much that they invested heavily in the company, it's got to be a good game.
As a story, Eternal Darkness is great. As a game, it's terrible. Almost every puzzle is about as difficult as a game of Rock/Paper/Scissor where you opponent draws first. It's all matching red, green, and blue. Sometimes it's match the same color, sometimes it's match the color that defeats that color. Combat isn't very hard; just attack the head of everything. Once you get the life recovery spell the challenge is gone completely.
The 100% linear gameplay kills it though. The game is barely playable once through; unfortunately you need to play through 3 times to get the full ending.
There are some people that play a game solely for the story. I'm sure they'd love a game like that. But for most people, the deciding factor on whether to buy a game or to play someone else's copy is how replayable the game is. A game isn't worth $50 if you're only going to play it once. (Side note: ignore RPGs, lots of people only intend to play them once. But outside Japan, people who like RPGs are greatly in the minority)
If you make a linear game and intend on the story to sell it, then you better make the gameplay really damn good.
I'm convinced Zelda: Wind Waker didn't sell as well as expected due to the strong story. The story required the order you major events to be fixed. Even when the gameplay didn't. Towards the end of the game, it really feels like the PHB came in at the end of development and said "No, non-linearity bad!" and made the order of stuff at the end get fixed for no other reason. I know about 4-5 people that would've bought GameCubes and Zelda until they saw how linear the game was.
Full install of Moz for Windows, according to Mozilla.org, is 11.9 MB. Firebird for Windows, also according to Mozilla.org, is 6.0 MB. So, that's about 50% smaller. Especially if you're on dial-up, that *is* MUCH smaller! :)
Comparing a full install of Mozilla to a full install of Firebird is stupid. Either strip all the extra stuff out of Mozilla (which will reduce the size by several megabytes at least), or compare Firebird + Thunderbird combined at a minimum.
When Firebird and Thunderbird only require one copy of the Gecko runtime (which makes up the vast majority of the space they take up), then I'll consider them. But for now, using both leads to higher memory and disk space requirements. Considering the goal of the two projects is to great lean products, it defeats the point of using them.
To each their own, and that's the whole motto of Firebird.
No, that's the motto of the Mozilla suite. Firebird is smaller because they're removing stuff, and making what's there less flexible.
with a good set of default preferences
Good defaults would be like Netscape 7.1 - have the tab bar always showing. Most people would never discover tabs on their own if its hidden. When I've upgraded Netscape for people to a release with tabs, they seem to be "yeah whatever" when I explain tabs. But since the default is for the tab bar to be on, they end up trying them, and soon can't live without the feature.
Mozilla is meant as a reference implementation of a standards-compliant browser. At least they are trying to help the situation.
That was true back when AOL was funding Mozilla development. Mozilla would be the reference implementation, and Netscape and others would be the end user versions. But there is no more Netscape. Mozilla is now directly aimed at end users.
Quest for Glory is an old series made by Sierra. Consider it a cross of King's Quest and an RPG.
You have 3 character classes to pick from: Fighter, Magic User, and Thief. In the later games you can also be a Paladin, however, you have to earn that right in the earlier games first.
Your character has 20-30 abilities. Strength, intelligence, dodge, parry, vitality, magic, lock picking, climbing, and various others. At the start of the game, your character is assigned points to each attribute based on his class. You are also given some points to assign however you like. If you want, you can even do something like give a fighter skills in magic, although that would take up a large portion of your free points.
As you play the game, your skills improve by doing activities that correspond to them. i.e. the only way to improve your climbing skill is by climbing stuff. Things like your strength will go up as you fight. Your magic skill goes up as you cast spells. Individual spells had a skill level too.
Admittedly, climbing and throwing usually were rather tedious skills to improve. But the rest really weren't. They'd improve as you went through the game normally. It was a nice touch how the first time you tried doing something you'd suck at it and have to try several times, but by the end of the game you'd be good at it.
Another great touch is when you beat a game, you could export your character and use it in the next game with the same skills. Generally, if you made even a little effort to improve your skills, you'd end up with a better character than you would get if you started the next game from scratch. If you did put some effort into improvement, you'd have a really kick ass character for the next game.
As to the effect of the classes... a lot of puzzles would have different solutions depending on your character type. Some differed only slightly, while others had a rather significant change. Each character type also had their own unique subquests. They're very good games, and highly replayable.
Well, for the most part engines aren't very interesting.
For the PC, most people just licence either the latest engine from Carmack (who was mentioned), or the latest from Epic. The HL2 engine will probably make it into that list too when it finally comes out.
For the PS2, most companies just make an engine and stick with it as much as possible. Look at Capcom's games - most of them are based off the Resident Evil core.
On the Xbox and GC, who knows? No one ever really talks about it.
Really, people only really care about the engine if it's more important than the game itself. Quake 3 was on ok game, but it's engine was the important thing. It made a lot of money for id, and was used for a lot of good games. Doom 3 probably won't be a bad game, but it'll probably be remembered far more for its graphics than its gameplay. Think about it... we don't really know much about the game other than that it looks really good.
If this was written a few years ago, I could see including the Stamper Brothers of Rare. Bur first off, Rare's quality has greatly gone down hill over the past few years. More importantly, they want to get out of the business soon. That's why they sold all their stock of the company to Microsoft a year ago.
And how can you include all the big people at Nintendo except for Miyamoto?
Speaking of designers... anyone know what happened to Lori and Cori Cole from Sierra? They made some great games, but the Yosemite division got shut down a few years ago.
Raid 1 is the BEST for 2 drives, however you want the 2 drives either from different batches OR different manufacturers.
Different batches, possibly. Different manufacturer's, no. A 300 GB drive from manufacturer A and a 300 GB drive from manufacturer B usually aren't exactly the same size. Which means you'll have complications when mirroring.
It's more like the sports model, where Shaq and Tiger make more money from Reebok and Buick than they do from their team/winnings.
There's very, very few atheletes that's true for. It's only really going to happen for the top 1 or 2 athletes in any given sport.
It's not a business model you try for; it just sometimes happens if you're the best at what you do.
Pikmin - $20
Innovative Real-time strategy. Shigeru Miyamoto's first Gamecube game.
Not quite. Miyamoto made Luigi's Mansion, which was a launch title.
Next month Nintendo has Mario Kart with LAN play coming out. Considering Mario Kart 64 was huge in college dorms, a LAN enabled version should sell pretty well.
Storage is not addressed in a way that makes it particularly convenient to use base-2 units.
Yes it is. The smallest addressable unit of a hard disk is a sector - which is 512 bytes.
Let's say Netscape had patented HTML. (Just play along, ignore the fact that they didn't invent it)
A 3 year patent would have done absolutely nothing to help them. It took MS that long to make a decent version of IE anyway.
Or look at the time between when Windows CE was first announced and when it actually came out. Several companies got killed off despite having better products, simply because MS said they would have something out "real soon now".
My solution? Cut the time on software/business patents to 3 years. Plenty of time to build a lead based on a valid new idea - very little opportunity to "pre-patent" an obvious idea to extort with later.
3 years would be completely useless in the software world. That's currently roughly the amount of time it takes MS to catch up to someone else's idea and use it themselves anyway. The patent would be completely useless.
"From the available artwork, it looks like this disc will be included as a pack in with new GameCubes..." (emphasis mine)
IGN doesn't know crap about it other than the fact that new art has been released to the retailers. Everything else about how the game will be available is pure speculation on their part. Period.
Did you actually look at the picture? The picture included a GameCube box that had a sticker on it that said it included the Zelda disc. That sticker is where the contents of the disc are listed.
Their network got hacked. Badly. The code that got leaked was something like 23 megs compressed. And supposedly it's not even the complete code.
They have to verify the code to make sure nothing got inserted into it by whoever compromise their network. That'll take a while.
They also have to evaluate the code that got leaked, and see if that requires changing anything. They don't want their copy protection cracked, and they also don't want lots of cheats to be out as soon as the game is released.
Also, keep in mind that before this happened, they were hoping to have it out before the holidays, but totally confident they could do it. Add in a slight delay, and that makes a January release. The beginning of the year is terrible for game sales, as everyone spent all their game money on the big holiday releases. So businesswise, April is a much better release date than January or February. So releasing then will give more time to fix bugs and also result in better sales. Oh, and it'll give more time for current graphics cards to drop in price, resulting in more people being able to play the game.
First things first: yes, this is a stupid patent.
Second: I don't think software patents are inherently bad. If they really were only granted to new ideas that aren't obvious, then it would be great. Perhaps the time the patent is valid for might need to be adjusted, perhaps not, but that's a seperate issue.
Now, for this case. Remember how Microsoft got where there are: by repeatedly breaking the law and not getting punished for it. If someone can use the law to strike a significant blow against Microsoft, then I'm all for it.
I'm more than willing spend a little time modifying web pages if that's the side effects of hurting Microsoft. MS has already caused me far more harm than that.
it isn't the OS's fault, it is outlook and if linux blows up, then "outlook for linux" would be just as vunerable
Outlook Express isn't removable from Win2k onwards. MS considers it part of the OS. So it is the OS's fault.
If Linux came with unremovable email clients, then your argument would be valid.
Common practice at colleges is you have to have your MAC address registered to get an IP address through DHCP.
You could try taking someone else's MAC address, but you'd probably get noticied fairly quickly, and be in a lot of trouble.
No, Kirby's Air Ride was already finished when he resigned. There's another Kirby in the works. A 3D platformer.
Check the announcements when the head of HAL resigned. They mentioned that HAL was working on a 3D Kirby game to be released next year. It might've even been mentioned back at E3, because I remember hearing about it a while ago.
Now that that tab has made me take out my guitar, anyone know of tabs for other classic games? Like Zelda or Metroid?
the gamecube has dropped its price to 1/2 its real price and ITS NOT being produced anymore
It was a temporary stop in production. The same press conference that announced the price drop also announced that production was starting again soon.
This campaign ad is not for upcoming gamecube games, actually there are no plans for big gamecube games next year
You mentioned Metal Gear and Metroid. There's also:
Star Fox Armada (or Star Fox 2, or whatever they call it)
Zelda (another cell shaded game)
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
3D Kirby game
Pikmin 2
Resident Evil 4
Wario Ware
Mario 128 (working title)
In the press conference where they announced the price cut, they also announced that they would be resuming production shortly.