I bought all 3 Midway Arcade treasures for my PS2 recently. At 10-13 bucks a compilation, I felt I was getting a good deal. Things to keep in mind:
1. These are ports of arcade games. They have timers/dead man switches on almsot everything as arcade games were intended to get you in & out of there fast. Some of these countdown timers are thankfully disabled(a few racing games on compilation 3).
2.The controls work right. I could NEVER get the controls to work right on certain games in MAME. Mind you, if I got APB to work right, the game would still suck horribly. I have a thrustmaster 2 for my PC, which is just like a PS2 controller + 2 buttons. For some reason, the right analog stick in MAME stuffs a z-rotation in there for dual-analog stick games(like Assault). Maybe I need a driver freshen.
3. You cannot access cheat codes, unlike MAME. That's 1 point for MAME.
4. I have more controllers for my PS2 than I do my PC(all keyboards aside). If I get a multitap, it's easily 3-4 player Gauntlet on the big screen. 1 point for the consoles.
5. Yes, the endless searchin' for uncorrupted ROMs for mame to get the games to work right. Then when a new version comes out, you sometimes have to get revised roms. 1 point for consoles.
Now if players could hook up over xbox live/whatever to play co-op or competitive on arcade games, oh man would that be fun.
I hope Midway continues to release more arcade ports for the PS2. The 3rd compilation didn't have many games, and you found out just how bad Race Drivin' was with the controls & physics. The load times between races in Rush: the rock were awful. They have plenty more atari coin-op games to port over. Sure beats out the Sega compilation.
Can you finally delete files/folders without it giving you a stupid "access denied" for no reason? Plase let me delete aging files with no guff. I'm the user at the computer, so do what I say.
Of course, delete the files in CMD(er, DOS), and it deletes them without guff.
The "Star Wars" entry on the list doesn't reflect sales of Star Wars franchise games, but actually the total of unique Star Wars games that are out there on the market.:)
I swear there's a new Star Wars-flavored game released every week.
There's one greasemonkey script that removes the embed(imbed?) tag as well as iframe from profiles.
Sadly, this also removes the text entry window(bloggers, forums, etc) but you can disable on the fly. The important part is that it removes embedded music videos. Who thought it would be a great idea to embed music videos that auto-play upon visiting your profile?
A few more greasemonkey scripts to install, and suddenly myspace is much easier to surf.
If parents want to get involved with their teens on myspace, how about teaching them not to post risque' images of themselves on their profile? Teach them some self-respect and dignity.
And I thought to myself "That's it?". Just like in Zonk's review, I was surprised by how little depth this game has.
C'mon, this is the 360! Next gen! I want a hundred tracks to race through(big ones, too, think Carmageddon or something), I want 30 unique weapons, I want 60 types of vehicles(cars, trucks, etc), and maybe some variants. how about a "defeat the big rig" a la The Road Warrior or something just to spruce things up? Crazy power ups? Power downs?
Nope, it appears to be a 187 ride-or-die like game.
So great, it's Vigilante 8, but with prettier graphics.
I was in a similar situation as you. my PS2 sat for several months after not wanting to play GTA much anymore. I started buying up Midway, intellivision & sega game compilations for a quick 5-10 minute play session or 3. Also bought True Crime: NYC and loved it. For 30 for true crime, and not more than 13 for the arcade compilations, I found great value & fun in them. Finding the games involved having to wade through what seemed like an infinite amount of snoozer PS2 titles, reminding me of all the bad Atari 2600 games that came out just before the crash, but at higher price points.
If the PS3 comes out, i hope the average price for "greatest hits" titles goes BELOW 20 bucks. That way, not-so-great games have a bit more appeal. Heck, I'd buy 187 ride or die for 6 bucks(below rental prices at my video store), but would never touch it for $50.
Yes, being a video game scavenger has its budgeting benefits.
When I had a Tandy 1000HX, you couldn't use standard IBM/Apple 2 controllers. So, you had the Tandy analog + 2 button joystick. It had 2 modes, one was full-travel among all directions, the other restricted the movement, moreso for just directional.
I broke it twice playing some 3/4 perspective ninja game. But some cement and it was good again.
Yes, the TI-994/A controllers sucked. There wasn't even an indicator on the stick which one was player 1 or 2. I just put a green sticker underneath #2. It required more effort to hit the mushy button or directions. Why? A piece of foam rubber on the inside. That, and it looked ugly. No doubt it helped sales of atari 2600 stick adapters.
My only controller annoyance as of recently were non-Sony PS2 controllers not recognized by certain games. So, it's back to the dualshock.
Next PSP generation will be able to make phone calls, I'm sure!
Yes, and the PSP phone will have:
1. a cost that's twice as much as the other cell phones 2. Downloadable games, at $29.95 each. 3. A proprietary memory card slot that won't have readers/writers available for it 4. A compilcated sync system where you have to give funny names to upload video files, ringtones 5. firmware upgrades every 2 months to prevent homebrewing 6. Dial a wrong number? You just bricked your psp-phone.
Mp3 is here to stay, like; txt, html, avi, csv, vi and ascii. The quality might not be as good, but you can rely on the fact that it will play on virtually everything. Encoders like LAME will help keep it alive too. It will be surpassed yes, but never usurped. It might be the lowest common denominator, but sometimes that's exactly what you reach for.
You might want to add.ZIP to that list. Plenty of compression methods have come and gone. It outlasted ARC(the oldest?),ZOO(Amiga?),LHA,ARJ,PAK, etc.
...require me to hit Fast Forward at least SIX times to skip his whole 'cast? I subscribed to it once, and foudn it on my "recently added" playlist. Didn't feel like listening to it, so I hit FF, nope, still on his podcast. Hit FF, nope, still on his podcast. I noticed tickmarks on the overall progress meter. His show is the only one I know of that does that(and it's irritating). Any reason why?
If I'm recalling right, Virtua Racer for the Genesis cost $100, due to the extra hardware. I played it on the Sega Classics collection for the PS2, and eh. It didn't have enough depth to justify the cost, but it's a fun game on the super-cheap.
Neo Geo games were $200, and the console was $600. It priced itself out of the market.
I remember on a Counterstrike server the word "jew" was banned from in-game chat. One player raised the question why the word for his heritage was banned.
I thought for a second(before I noticed the word "online") that this was going to be about swearing FROM the game. But those games are given an M rating anyway. I never have seen a game say the N word so many times than in GTA:SA.
Of course True Crime:NYC copies this to a bit when you first load the game. A rap song plays,and early in the lyric the N word is dropped, almost in a mandatory fashion.
If you want a subtle bit of social commentary, look again at GTA. Some of the friendly characters are talking, and the prospect of "Jeff"(the wannabe rapper) going to college comes up, and everyone laughs about it, like it was some sort of joke.
As a long time GTA fan, I was willing to give an impartial try to GTA-like games. I couldn't make it past the first mission in Driv3r, no matter how well I rode along with those police cars. It was the only game I returned to the video store early, out of frustration.
The rumormill says this time, "it" will consist of a rider on the segway carrying water bottles for the needy.
How about instead of just a $100 laptop, a $3 durable, easily fixable bicycle with add-on attchments for trailers? Or make some special type of wheel that, when used by a LOT of people in a common area, it paves a new road for them. Okay, now I'm thinking in Civilization terms(but those roads came in handy).
When I read the article title, I thought it was going to be made safer from a technical viewpoint. A little too much freedom is given in page design, resulting in the ultimate stress test for loading images in a single page in FireFox, over-decoration of a web page to the point of unreadability(how do you get a 50% pixel covering OVER an entire web page?), and the possibilities of trojans,etc.
What myspace needs(besides bandwidth) is a "safe mode" where it uses the default CSS layout.
We hitting a ceiling on video games?
on
What is Next-Gen?
·
· Score: 1
There was talk of hitting limits on processor speed.
Wonder if the same thing can be applied to video games.
Yes, Super Mario Brothers was a big step up from pong, or anything atari 2600.
Sure, Super Mario 64 was a big step up from super mario bros.
But when I tried Tony Hawk for the xbox360, it just looked like a cleaner crisper display(it was on an HDTV) version of Tony Hawk for my PS2.
Yeah, so, um, were gonna play hundreds of dollars for slightly crisper, probably more detailed graphics, but no revolution in gameplay?
I actually hope for another video game crash. Let the cycle of life happen("gotham must die!"). I'm not seeing the leaps and bounds video game consols are making as much now compared to 2 years ago. C'mon let's see more dud consoles that will be collector items in 10 years!
That, and I could buy a bunch of PS2 titles for cheap. It seems any time I visit a video game store I discover yet ANOTHER tv show or movie ported to a video game. C'mon Bad Boys? Predator(a version where you are the predator and just kill people ala the 2nd movie).
I'm just waiting for a group of drug dealers to protest GTA.
Yes, we have everyone from all walks of life protesting GTA. All the good & bad people(depending on your perspective) are putting aside their differences to stop GTA. GTA is helping unite the world. Pimps will stop slapping their hoes, drug dealers will stop killing deadbeat buyers and Hatians will stop, um, whatever Hatians do for a moment to protest a freakin' video game.
Before GTA, wow, we were so blind to the social problems in the world. We only needed a video game to finally reflect it!
A Dalek would work. I was moreso thinking Kang from the TMNT series(I think in the original comics the "kang" race were good guys). Ie that brain-shaped creature inside the big humanoid robot body to walk around in.
Got it in '82. My mom said "the elves came early" and there it was, underneath a chair.
I had that computer for WAY too long(up until 1990). yes, I was one of the few people that actually got the Peripheral Expansion Box(disk drive, etc) that was built like a sherman tank. I wish I could find another one to make a PC case out of.
After that: Atari 800XL, Amiga 1000, Amiga 500, and then onto the regular PC where things got ho-hum. Magazines no longer offered programs for you to type in.
Those were the days. Kids nowadays with your AOl and your myspace don't know how good you have it. Meeting girls off of BBSes without ANY pictures to go off of? Heh. (BTW I'm 30 now).
Sure, Atari was a household name from the Atari 2600 from the late 70s to early 80s, but after that, things went downhill. The 5200, the 7800, the not licensing the NES(I bet they kicked themslves in the head after that, or they would have botched it), and the godawful Jaguar.
Atari was that rock star who had a big hit or 2 in the early 80s, but then had no career after that. They walk into the Viper Room, say who they are, and still don't get free drinks.
A company named Infinium Labs proclaimed an online purchasable "arcade" service for their Phantom console that has yet to be released. Microsoft, with their XBox Live service does the exact same thing. Do you...
1. Bash Microsoft for stealing & implementing the idea. 2. Laugh at Infinium that MS beat them to the punch 3. Say something about Steam
We'll have the answer after this commercial break..
Slashdot Mirror
I bought all 3 Midway Arcade treasures for my PS2 recently. At 10-13 bucks a compilation, I felt I was getting a good deal. Things to keep in mind:
1. These are ports of arcade games. They have timers/dead man switches on almsot everything as arcade games were intended to get you in & out of there fast. Some of these countdown timers are thankfully disabled(a few racing games on compilation 3).
2.The controls work right. I could NEVER get the controls to work right on certain games in MAME. Mind you, if I got APB to work right, the game would still suck horribly. I have a thrustmaster 2 for my PC, which is just like a PS2 controller + 2 buttons. For some reason, the right analog stick in MAME stuffs a z-rotation in there for dual-analog stick games(like Assault). Maybe I need a driver freshen.
3. You cannot access cheat codes, unlike MAME. That's 1 point for MAME.
4. I have more controllers for my PS2 than I do my PC(all keyboards aside). If I get a multitap, it's easily 3-4 player Gauntlet on the big screen. 1 point for the consoles.
5. Yes, the endless searchin' for uncorrupted ROMs for mame to get the games to work right. Then when a new version comes out, you sometimes have to get revised roms. 1 point for consoles.
Now if players could hook up over xbox live/whatever to play co-op or competitive on arcade games, oh man would that be fun.
I hope Midway continues to release more arcade ports for the PS2. The 3rd compilation didn't have many games, and you found out just how bad Race Drivin' was with the controls & physics. The load times between races in Rush: the rock were awful. They have plenty more atari coin-op games to port over. Sure beats out the Sega compilation.
Can you finally delete files/folders without it giving you a stupid "access denied" for no reason? Plase let me delete aging files with no guff. I'm the user at the computer, so do what I say.
Of course, delete the files in CMD(er, DOS), and it deletes them without guff.
The "Star Wars" entry on the list doesn't reflect sales of Star Wars franchise games, but actually the total of unique Star Wars games that are out there on the market. :)
I swear there's a new Star Wars-flavored game released every week.
There's one greasemonkey script that removes the embed(imbed?) tag as well as iframe from profiles.
Sadly, this also removes the text entry window(bloggers, forums, etc) but you can disable on the fly. The important part is that it removes embedded music videos. Who thought it would be a great idea to embed music videos that auto-play upon visiting your profile?
A few more greasemonkey scripts to install, and suddenly myspace is much easier to surf.
If parents want to get involved with their teens on myspace, how about teaching them not to post risque' images of themselves on their profile? Teach them some self-respect and dignity.
And I thought to myself "That's it?". Just like in Zonk's review, I was surprised by how little depth this game has.
C'mon, this is the 360! Next gen! I want a hundred tracks to race through(big ones, too, think Carmageddon or something), I want 30 unique weapons, I want 60 types of vehicles(cars, trucks, etc), and maybe some variants. how about a "defeat the big rig" a la The Road Warrior or something just to spruce things up? Crazy power ups? Power downs?
Nope, it appears to be a 187 ride-or-die like game.
So great, it's Vigilante 8, but with prettier graphics.
I was in a similar situation as you. my PS2 sat for several months after not wanting to play GTA much anymore. I started buying up Midway, intellivision & sega game compilations for a quick 5-10 minute play session or 3. Also bought True Crime: NYC and loved it. For 30 for true crime, and not more than 13 for the arcade compilations, I found great value & fun in them. Finding the games involved having to wade through what seemed like an infinite amount of snoozer PS2 titles, reminding me of all the bad Atari 2600 games that came out just before the crash, but at higher price points.
If the PS3 comes out, i hope the average price for "greatest hits" titles goes BELOW 20 bucks. That way, not-so-great games have a bit more appeal. Heck, I'd buy 187 ride or die for 6 bucks(below rental prices at my video store), but would never touch it for $50.
Yes, being a video game scavenger has its budgeting benefits.
When I had a Tandy 1000HX, you couldn't use standard IBM/Apple 2 controllers. So, you had the Tandy analog + 2 button joystick. It had 2 modes, one was full-travel among all directions, the other restricted the movement, moreso for just directional.
I broke it twice playing some 3/4 perspective ninja game. But some cement and it was good again.
Yes, the TI-994/A controllers sucked. There wasn't even an indicator on the stick which one was player 1 or 2. I just put a green sticker underneath #2. It required more effort to hit the mushy button or directions. Why? A piece of foam rubber on the inside. That, and it looked ugly. No doubt it helped sales of atari 2600 stick adapters.
My only controller annoyance as of recently were non-Sony PS2 controllers not recognized by certain games. So, it's back to the dualshock.
Next PSP generation will be able to make phone calls, I'm sure!
Yes, and the PSP phone will have:
1. a cost that's twice as much as the other cell phones
2. Downloadable games, at $29.95 each.
3. A proprietary memory card slot that won't have readers/writers available for it
4. A compilcated sync system where you have to give funny names to upload video files, ringtones
5. firmware upgrades every 2 months to prevent homebrewing
6. Dial a wrong number? You just bricked your psp-phone.
Mp3 is here to stay, like; txt, html, avi, csv, vi and ascii. The quality might not be as good, but you can rely on the fact that it will play on virtually everything. Encoders like LAME will help keep it alive too. It will be surpassed yes, but never usurped. It might be the lowest common denominator, but sometimes that's exactly what you reach for.
.ZIP to that list. Plenty of compression methods have come and gone. It outlasted ARC(the oldest?),ZOO(Amiga?),LHA,ARJ,PAK, etc.
You might want to add
...require me to hit Fast Forward at least SIX times to skip his whole 'cast? I subscribed to it once, and foudn it on my "recently added" playlist. Didn't feel like listening to it, so I hit FF, nope, still on his podcast. Hit FF, nope, still on his podcast. I noticed tickmarks on the overall progress meter. His show is the only one I know of that does that(and it's irritating). Any reason why?
The pulled the same shenanigans with the PS2, effectively killing the Dreamcast.
No, I'm sure the small library of craptacular games killed the Jaguar, um, I mean the Dreamcast.
I haven't seen it, but wasn't that the plot for Space Cowboys?
If I'm recalling right, Virtua Racer for the Genesis cost $100, due to the extra hardware. I played it on the Sega Classics collection for the PS2, and eh. It didn't have enough depth to justify the cost, but it's a fun game on the super-cheap.
Neo Geo games were $200, and the console was $600. It priced itself out of the market.
I remember on a Counterstrike server the word "jew" was banned from in-game chat. One player raised the question why the word for his heritage was banned.
I thought for a second(before I noticed the word "online") that this was going to be about swearing FROM the game. But those games are given an M rating anyway. I never have seen a game say the N word so many times than in GTA:SA.
Of course True Crime:NYC copies this to a bit when you first load the game. A rap song plays,and early in the lyric the N word is dropped, almost in a mandatory fashion.
If you want a subtle bit of social commentary, look again at GTA. Some of the friendly characters are talking, and the prospect of "Jeff"(the wannabe rapper) going to college comes up, and everyone laughs about it, like it was some sort of joke.
As a long time GTA fan, I was willing to give an impartial try to GTA-like games. I couldn't make it past the first mission in Driv3r, no matter how well I rode along with those police cars. It was the only game I returned to the video store early, out of frustration.
The rumormill says this time, "it" will consist of a rider on the segway carrying water bottles for the needy.
How about instead of just a $100 laptop, a $3 durable, easily fixable bicycle with add-on attchments for trailers? Or make some special type of wheel that, when used by a LOT of people in a common area, it paves a new road for them. Okay, now I'm thinking in Civilization terms(but those roads came in handy).
Gotta transport that water & stuff somehow.
When I read the article title, I thought it was going to be made safer from a technical viewpoint. A little too much freedom is given in page design, resulting in the ultimate stress test for loading images in a single page in FireFox, over-decoration of a web page to the point of unreadability(how do you get a 50% pixel covering OVER an entire web page?), and the possibilities of trojans,etc.
What myspace needs(besides bandwidth) is a "safe mode" where it uses the default CSS layout.
There was talk of hitting limits on processor speed.
Wonder if the same thing can be applied to video games.
Yes, Super Mario Brothers was a big step up from pong, or anything atari 2600.
Sure, Super Mario 64 was a big step up from super mario bros.
But when I tried Tony Hawk for the xbox360, it just looked like a cleaner crisper display(it was on an HDTV) version of Tony Hawk for my PS2.
Yeah, so, um, were gonna play hundreds of dollars for slightly crisper, probably more detailed graphics, but no revolution in gameplay?
I actually hope for another video game crash. Let the cycle of life happen("gotham must die!"). I'm not seeing the leaps and bounds video game consols are making as much now compared to 2 years ago. C'mon let's see more dud consoles that will be collector items in 10 years!
That, and I could buy a bunch of PS2 titles for cheap. It seems any time I visit a video game store I discover yet ANOTHER tv show or movie ported to a video game. C'mon Bad Boys? Predator(a version where you are the predator and just kill people ala the 2nd movie).
I'm just waiting for a group of drug dealers to protest GTA.
Yes, we have everyone from all walks of life protesting GTA. All the good & bad people(depending on your perspective) are putting aside their differences to stop GTA. GTA is helping unite the world. Pimps will stop slapping their hoes, drug dealers will stop killing deadbeat buyers and Hatians will stop, um, whatever Hatians do for a moment to protest a freakin' video game.
Before GTA, wow, we were so blind to the social problems in the world. We only needed a video game to finally reflect it!
This could very well be the most pretentious article posted to Slashdot I've ever seen, and that's saying a lot.
I see Mondo 2000 is writing articles again, making up buzzwords from out of nowhere.
A Dalek would work. I was moreso thinking Kang from the TMNT series(I think in the original comics the "kang" race were good guys). Ie that brain-shaped creature inside the big humanoid robot body to walk around in.
Got it in '82. My mom said "the elves came early" and there it was, underneath a chair.
I had that computer for WAY too long(up until 1990). yes, I was one of the few people that actually got the Peripheral Expansion Box(disk drive, etc) that was built like a sherman tank. I wish I could find another one to make a PC case out of.
After that: Atari 800XL, Amiga 1000, Amiga 500, and then onto the regular PC where things got ho-hum. Magazines no longer offered programs for you to type in.
Those were the days. Kids nowadays with your AOl and your myspace don't know how good you have it. Meeting girls off of BBSes without ANY pictures to go off of? Heh. (BTW I'm 30 now).
Sure, Atari was a household name from the Atari 2600 from the late 70s to early 80s, but after that, things went downhill. The 5200, the 7800, the not licensing the NES(I bet they kicked themslves in the head after that, or they would have botched it), and the godawful Jaguar.
Atari was that rock star who had a big hit or 2 in the early 80s, but then had no career after that. They walk into the Viper Room, say who they are, and still don't get free drinks.
Again, maybe the name is just cursed.
Is it applying to just official landlords who have apartments, all the paperwork, yackety yack...
or...
Is it applying to homeowners that has a spare room for rent? Ie someone that can't get ratted out if the a/c breaks and the owner doesn't fix it?
Now it's time for Slashdot's "You make the call".
A company named Infinium Labs proclaimed an online purchasable "arcade" service for their Phantom console that has yet to be released. Microsoft, with their XBox Live service does the exact same thing. Do you...
1. Bash Microsoft for stealing & implementing the idea.
2. Laugh at Infinium that MS beat them to the punch
3. Say something about Steam
We'll have the answer after this commercial break..