Resident Evil was an unlicensed video game adaptation of Zombie which, I believe, is the overseas name for Dawn of the Dead (the 1970's version). The creator acknowledges he was inspired by Zombie but of course the idea of zombies are in the public domain and he didn't have to have any kind of IP license from the people who own Dawn of the Dead. (Who would have had less chance of prevailing in court than Universal did when they took Nintendo to court for the similarities between King Kong and Donkey Kong.) Now, if they come out with a video game based on the remake of Dawn of the Dead it will have limitations that Resident Evil didn't have to put up with.
Resident Evil has all kinds of stuff that wasn't in Dawn of the Dead, Hunters, zombie dogs, sharks, ravens, etc... If they had had to follow the movie license exactly, they wouldn't have been able to put all that stuff in there.
Oh, sorry, I thought you were pointing out a deficiency in the X-Box line up. I don't think very many games can beat DOA in that regard.... I'm thinking about getting an X-box for DOA Online, actually. (Well, that and the SNK games that are coming to the platform SNK's Xbox Plans (which will also, natch, have teenage Japanese girls in shorts skirts.... ) SNK Forever!
Now of course- when I say 'the games are great' that is just my opinion. But an opinion shared by a LOT of people. We may not have games with young Japanese girls with short skirts, but I'm not really into that sort of thing. Are you?
I could swear that the Dead or Alive series (including Extreme Beach Volleyball) were very big on the X-Box....
I don't know, I thought I detected British humor in the PC game Sacrifice... I could be wrong about that though... Well, like the Bovine Intervention spell which drops a cow on enemies...
I don't quite understand why the Gamecube hasn't picked up GTA, or does the decision reside with Rockstar not to produce for that platform?
Well, a few things here's a long response from famed Nintendo designer, Shigeru Miyamoto:
In previous years, Nintendo sold the most popular games in the world. Tastes have changed though. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is currently the biggest game in the West. What are your thoughts on such a violent game being so popular?
Mr Miyamoto: That is quite a tough question and I really don't have any quick answer to make. If we were just focusing on the games and if the game can sell then it's very good business and we would just sell that kind of title. It is not that simple for Nintendo as we are not making those kinds of games. After all, as long as people can realise what kind of morals they should have playing with a video game, many games are alike including the excessively violent games. But when we are talking about the mass audience, many people have different viewpoints and have different ways of making use of the technology in front of them.
As the makers, we have the responsibility to think about how it will be used and thought about by the mass audience. In Japan, no companies are willing to market Grand Theft Auto but it will become different if people become desperate to sell their software. Companies right now are not marketing Grand Theft Auto but people now have an idea of the danger of the current situation and the more important thing is that we need to think of a substitute for Grand Theft Auto in terms of video games sales. It is our mission to think of an alternative that is unique and not as violent .
So, I mean there is precedent. I think right now, they are OK with violent games (Resident Evil, for instance), as long as they aren't as 'controversial' as Grand Theft Auto. (Note, though, they still prefer non-violent fantasy type games.)
(I recently found out (to my disgust) that Nintendo was responsible for lobbying Joe Lieberman to go after violence in the game industry back when Sega were cleaning their clock: Volume 4 - Sega CD/Mega CD. Hey, somebody prove this is an urban legend, please, no one will be happier than me.).
How the Hell did the parent get modded as a Troll? If anything the grandparent is the troll.
For example, what about people who like Italian food but don't have any friends who like it. Are we just supposed to never eat it again? Pressure our freinds, wives and loved ones into eating foods that they don't like? It makes no sense.
I remember this as one of the great, "let's throw the disgruntled say-it-ain't-so Dreamcast fans a bone so they won't realize they've got a dead platform" stories that the Dreamcast sections of game magazines were running when it was clear that time was running out for the Dreamcast.
Oh, and if Soviet Russia is anything to go by, you can have a world class military long after your actual economy is completely hollowed out and everyone not in the military or part of the government is completely destitute. (Of course, in the Soviet Union I suppose every job was technically a government job, so I'm referring here to the people who actually governed.)
Remember that Nintendo was founded in 1889. A little known fact is that one of the reasons Nintendo made so much money in Hanafuda playing cards is because Yakuza insist on a new deck for every game.
Ah, I can remember one page from The Mystery of Chimney Rock:
Aaaah-Aaaaaaaaah-Aaaaaah---cht-thunk!
Or something like that. Anyone else remember the primarily solitare RPG, Tunnels and Trolls. Sorcerer's Solitaire, in that line, was pretty good. Oh, and Dargon's Dungeon (spoiler) Become one with the immortal sea (/spoiler)
I played Day of the Tentacle all the way through for the first time on my Dreamcast using ScummVM. Truly the developers on that project are kings among men...
It's actually that business-centric attitude which has ensured that EA is the only major third party publisher that's still around from the 80s.
Everyone else is on life-support or alive by name only simply for the free marketing and publicity one can milk from 'Midway' or 'Atari'. Not even 'Sierra' was that lucky.
Activision is still here too, they had a few hits this year, but they seem kind of similar to EA.
To be fair, I didn't want to buy a Sony Playstation. (I wasn't really a fanboy, but I've always stuck with one system per generation until the Dreamcast got abandoned on me.) I bought it because of a few different factors when the switch from 16 Bit to 32 Bit happened:
1. I had been burned by Sega twice. While there were some good games for the Sega CD, it never really lived up to it's potential (or even justified it's price tag. Too many Night Traps not enough Lunars.) The 32X was a joke along the lines of the Virtual Boy, while I knew it wasn't going to be big when I bought it, I didn't get how quickly it was going to be abandoned.
2. "3D games:" To me the whole introduction of polygons meant that gameplay was subordinated to graphics. Nintendo were the ones who really pushed this on N64. My favorite games were all side scrollers, 2d fighting games and RPGs. While I liked FPS, I didn't think I wanted a platform that was nothing but FPSs and Tomb Raiders. I chose a Playstation because they were still making sprite based games for it.
3. I didn't realize until later down the line that Sony was unspeakably evil and run by demons. It took them hitting me in the face over and over again with a rake. "Samurai Spirits 1 & 2? Not for you Americans! Last Blade? Forget it? Rockman Classic Series? Bah, not for you! You modded your Playstation to play imports! Well, we'll screw up the American version of Dino Crisis so that it won't work in your modded system (unless you get the pirate version.)" and on and on.
Now of course, I regret that I chose Playstation over Saturn, but I can't change the past. I can only hope to atone for my mistakes by never buying anything by Sony again!
The reverse of this happened with Shenmue II for Dreamcast. Sega made a deal with Microsoft that it would be an X-Box exclusive in the United States, so even though it was fully translated and subtitled in English it was never officially released in the US for Dreamcast. (Many stores carried the European version, though, even stores that don't ordinarily carry imports.)
I bought it, and used one of the many region circumvention devices available to play it on my American Dreamcast. It influenced my decision not to buy an X-Box, though to be fair Microsoft's evil behavior in the past probably had more to do with it.
As to Sony, they are evil and powerful in the gaming industry right now, there isn't much that anyone can do about them. I've known about their maliciousness since the American PS1 lockout of the Japanese Rockman classic games (even modded PS1s), something that still sticks in my craw. Basically, Sony's leadership said, "even though we are never going to allow these games to have an official release for the American PS1, we're still going to make sure that they are among the first games to detect mod chips and stop working. Don't worry though, I'm sure the pirate version that will be out soon will have a hack to get around it. You just can't play the legitimate version.") I guess if I were religious I could console myself by the fact that Sony's executives will spend the rest of eternity in the fiery pit of Hell, even if they are rich, happy and evil right now.
Remember when they made that movie, The Phantom a while back? How about The Shadow? Well, I don't know if those movies did well, but it is because of those sorts of income streams that they are protecting their copyright. (Both characters are old and not very popular these days.)
Mandrake the Magician was a cartoon magician, but in the sense of illusionist. He had hypnotic powers that could convince people they were seeing things that weren't real.
I suggest they try contacting the Orson Welles estate to name the distribution CFKane, in honor of their demented persecutors who really live up to the Hearst tradition.
The reason why we don't have a Gold Standard is that politicians realized that if you tax people directly through things like income or sales taxes, people might eventually decide to vote you out of office.
If on the other hand they tax you by decreasing the value of paper money, people take it as an Act of God that no one could prevent. (Which it is, but only if you spell God S-t-a-t-e.)
My previous comment got modded down, and ordinarily I wouldn't care. However, I hope that honest criticism of Nintendo wasn't taken as Nintendo bashing. Personally, I like Gamecube the best of the consoles of this generation, but I still think they could have handled their promotion of Eternal Darkness better.
It's called "Eternal Darkness," and it's $50 worth of nightmares. Nintendo recently shipped this horror game to retailers, but not so you'd notice. The big N cautiously promoted it's first self-published M-rated game for the GameCube in publications catering to older audiences; so unless you monitored this game's four-year development cycle via the Internet or subscribe to jiggle books, it's likely this release slipped under your radar. Kudos to Nintendo for advertising responsibly (something this industry is not known for), but unless word-of-mouth reaches "Grand Theft Auto" levels, "Eternal Darkness" might have to settle for second-class status.
So, basically, Nintendo sabotaged it. I, myself, don't give Nintendo "Kudos" for this, they were protecting their family friendly image while hedging their bets with an "M" rated game. It was unfair to Silicon Knights and the game itself not to promote this, but business is business, I guess. I love summoning zombies, though, so I hope they make a sequel... best implementation of Call of Cthulhu ideas in an action RPG in my opinion, better than the most recent Alone in the Dark that I have for my Dreamcast. I particularly like the spell system.
Video games ended up pigeon holed as "juvenile" like comic books and animation did. While I'm familar with the political history that doomed comics and cartoons to the children's ghetto, I'm not sure why video games shared this fate... Can any one offer any theories about this?
At home I have some EC library editions of Tales from the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear and the Vault of Horror. In many of these issues there are letters sections, and some of the letters are from soldiers in Korea. These soldiers talk about how great EC comics are, etc, and usually the Old Witch or the Crypt Keeper replies by saying she/he is sending some free comics out to the unit.
So, some portion of the readership were not only adults, but adults seeing horrors that I hope I never have to see. However, when Congress and Dr. Frederick Wertham decided to go after comics, they treated them primarily as a passtime for teenage boys. This is because warping teenage boys is an easy charge to make, while warping hardened soldiers in Korea wouldn't stick.
Fast forward to the age of the SNES and Genesis. Video games were resurrected from the crash by Nintendo, which deliberately marketed their NES system in the United States as a toy to overcome the post crash jitters. (Remember the little robot that came out with it? That was purely as part of this marketing campaign, not because it was a good idea for a peripheral.) By the time the SNES comes along, the big games in the arcades are Street Fighter II and, cue sinister music, Mortal Kombat. (Oh, and by the time these reach the home systems, these horrible video disk games, notably Night Trap were being pushed for the Sega CD.)
Well, Congress's own Music Man, Senator Joe Lieberman, figures out a way to pull in the fretful soccermom's vote in his next re-election bid, "There's trouble, right here in River City, with a capital 'T' that rhymes with 'V' that stands for Video Games." It is in the interest of Lieberman and his ilk to portray video games as primarily children's entertainment, just as Nintendo had done to get away from the post-crash, "video games were a stupid fad," jitters to get places like Toy's R Us to carry their consoles.
So we get to today, when people forget that originally video games were in places like bars to entertain patrons and people start talking about that, "put away childish things, " nonsense. (Of course, we all know that the early Christians loved to party, especially the dour St. Paul. Remember if you are going to follow his 'childish things' advice that he's also the guy who basically believed "it is better to marry than to burn." No wonder he gets the nickname of Captain Fun. But I suppose this nonsense makes sense in the still heavily Puritan influenced United States.)
Well, I'm 35 and I still play a lot of games. Sometimes I go back to old favorites, and sometimes I play new ones.
For example, lately I'm playing through Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem for the Gamecube. It was one of the first games I bought when I got my Gamecube, but I didn't really start playing it until recently.
My opinion is this: If you are too busy to watch TV, you'll probably find yourself too busy to play games.
If I ever found myself saying, "Rather than playing a game, I'll watch that new My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance show," I seriously hope somebody will shoot me....
Slashdot Mirror
Resident Evil has all kinds of stuff that wasn't in Dawn of the Dead, Hunters, zombie dogs, sharks, ravens, etc... If they had had to follow the movie license exactly, they wouldn't have been able to put all that stuff in there.
I still have to think about it though...
I don't know, I thought I detected British humor in the PC game Sacrifice... I could be wrong about that though... Well, like the Bovine Intervention spell which drops a cow on enemies...
(I recently found out (to my disgust) that Nintendo was responsible for lobbying Joe Lieberman to go after violence in the game industry back when Sega were cleaning their clock: Volume 4 - Sega CD/Mega CD. Hey, somebody prove this is an urban legend, please, no one will be happier than me.).
For example, what about people who like Italian food but don't have any friends who like it. Are we just supposed to never eat it again? Pressure our freinds, wives and loved ones into eating foods that they don't like? It makes no sense.
Sega/Pace Dreamcast Set-Top-Box Revealed.
I think it is this one, but there isn't much information on the games:
IP420
I remember this as one of the great, "let's throw the disgruntled say-it-ain't-so Dreamcast fans a bone so they won't realize they've got a dead platform" stories that the Dreamcast sections of game magazines were running when it was clear that time was running out for the Dreamcast.
quiznos
Oh, and if Soviet Russia is anything to go by, you can have a world class military long after your actual economy is completely hollowed out and everyone not in the military or part of the government is completely destitute. (Of course, in the Soviet Union I suppose every job was technically a government job, so I'm referring here to the people who actually governed.)
Remember that Nintendo was founded in 1889. A little known fact is that one of the reasons Nintendo made so much money in Hanafuda playing cards is because Yakuza insist on a new deck for every game.
I played Day of the Tentacle all the way through for the first time on my Dreamcast using ScummVM. Truly the developers on that project are kings among men...
I could hazard a guess at some (Duke Nukem 3D, for instance) but I'm interested in your perspective.
1. I had been burned by Sega twice. While there were some good games for the Sega CD, it never really lived up to it's potential (or even justified it's price tag. Too many Night Traps not enough Lunars.) The 32X was a joke along the lines of the Virtual Boy, while I knew it wasn't going to be big when I bought it, I didn't get how quickly it was going to be abandoned.
2. "3D games:" To me the whole introduction of polygons meant that gameplay was subordinated to graphics. Nintendo were the ones who really pushed this on N64. My favorite games were all side scrollers, 2d fighting games and RPGs. While I liked FPS, I didn't think I wanted a platform that was nothing but FPSs and Tomb Raiders. I chose a Playstation because they were still making sprite based games for it.
3. I didn't realize until later down the line that Sony was unspeakably evil and run by demons. It took them hitting me in the face over and over again with a rake. "Samurai Spirits 1 & 2? Not for you Americans! Last Blade? Forget it? Rockman Classic Series? Bah, not for you! You modded your Playstation to play imports! Well, we'll screw up the American version of Dino Crisis so that it won't work in your modded system (unless you get the pirate version.)" and on and on.
Now of course, I regret that I chose Playstation over Saturn, but I can't change the past. I can only hope to atone for my mistakes by never buying anything by Sony again!
I bought it, and used one of the many region circumvention devices available to play it on my American Dreamcast. It influenced my decision not to buy an X-Box, though to be fair Microsoft's evil behavior in the past probably had more to do with it.
As to Sony, they are evil and powerful in the gaming industry right now, there isn't much that anyone can do about them. I've known about their maliciousness since the American PS1 lockout of the Japanese Rockman classic games (even modded PS1s), something that still sticks in my craw. Basically, Sony's leadership said, "even though we are never going to allow these games to have an official release for the American PS1, we're still going to make sure that they are among the first games to detect mod chips and stop working. Don't worry though, I'm sure the pirate version that will be out soon will have a hack to get around it. You just can't play the legitimate version.") I guess if I were religious I could console myself by the fact that Sony's executives will spend the rest of eternity in the fiery pit of Hell, even if they are rich, happy and evil right now.
It's called Brazil....
Remember when they made that movie, The Phantom a while back? How about The Shadow? Well, I don't know if those movies did well, but it is because of those sorts of income streams that they are protecting their copyright. (Both characters are old and not very popular these days.)
I suggest they try contacting the Orson Welles estate to name the distribution CFKane, in honor of their demented persecutors who really live up to the Hearst tradition.
If on the other hand they tax you by decreasing the value of paper money, people take it as an Act of God that no one could prevent. (Which it is, but only if you spell God S-t-a-t-e.)
'Eternal Darkness' scores high on insanity (require's registration).
The relevant quote:
So, basically, Nintendo sabotaged it. I, myself, don't give Nintendo "Kudos" for this, they were protecting their family friendly image while hedging their bets with an "M" rated game. It was unfair to Silicon Knights and the game itself not to promote this, but business is business, I guess. I love summoning zombies, though, so I hope they make a sequel... best implementation of Call of Cthulhu ideas in an action RPG in my opinion, better than the most recent Alone in the Dark that I have for my Dreamcast. I particularly like the spell system.So, some portion of the readership were not only adults, but adults seeing horrors that I hope I never have to see. However, when Congress and Dr. Frederick Wertham decided to go after comics, they treated them primarily as a passtime for teenage boys. This is because warping teenage boys is an easy charge to make, while warping hardened soldiers in Korea wouldn't stick.
Fast forward to the age of the SNES and Genesis. Video games were resurrected from the crash by Nintendo, which deliberately marketed their NES system in the United States as a toy to overcome the post crash jitters. (Remember the little robot that came out with it? That was purely as part of this marketing campaign, not because it was a good idea for a peripheral.) By the time the SNES comes along, the big games in the arcades are Street Fighter II and, cue sinister music, Mortal Kombat. (Oh, and by the time these reach the home systems, these horrible video disk games, notably Night Trap were being pushed for the Sega CD.)
Well, Congress's own Music Man, Senator Joe Lieberman, figures out a way to pull in the fretful soccermom's vote in his next re-election bid, "There's trouble, right here in River City, with a capital 'T' that rhymes with 'V' that stands for Video Games." It is in the interest of Lieberman and his ilk to portray video games as primarily children's entertainment, just as Nintendo had done to get away from the post-crash, "video games were a stupid fad," jitters to get places like Toy's R Us to carry their consoles.
So we get to today, when people forget that originally video games were in places like bars to entertain patrons and people start talking about that, "put away childish things, " nonsense. (Of course, we all know that the early Christians loved to party, especially the dour St. Paul. Remember if you are going to follow his 'childish things' advice that he's also the guy who basically believed "it is better to marry than to burn." No wonder he gets the nickname of Captain Fun. But I suppose this nonsense makes sense in the still heavily Puritan influenced United States.)
For example, lately I'm playing through Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem for the Gamecube. It was one of the first games I bought when I got my Gamecube, but I didn't really start playing it until recently.
My opinion is this: If you are too busy to watch TV, you'll probably find yourself too busy to play games.
If I ever found myself saying, "Rather than playing a game, I'll watch that new My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance show," I seriously hope somebody will shoot me....