how did you possibly beat that in 15 minutes? unless I'm mistaken it has limited credits, and it gets insanely hard too. I'm pretty sure I've never beaten it....unless you played it on the really easy difficulty modes.
Zero Gunner 2 is definitely a much, much better game though!
I looked for it but didn't find Cannon Spike (GunSpike in Japan) for Dreamcast on the list. Megaman is playable as a secret character in this 3-d rendered but mostly 2-D gameplay shooter.
Developed by Psikyo, and published by Capcom.
.
game engines, pricing, expectations.
on
Razor Blade Games?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Game programers should stop re-inventing the wheel and use common game engines, at least for the graphics. I realize that lots of games have been made by liscensing the Quake 3 engine or Unreal engine, this seems like a potential way for smaller developers to have access to reasonably good looking technology to drive the PS3, xbox 2 or N5.
One of the real problems is that there is little room for games with lower expectations. I'd be really happy to buy a bunch of ten hour games that had less technical wows but much heart, especially if their retail price was reasonable.
How many gamers do you know that buy the latest games at $50? Most games sold at $50 are the blockbusters that sell to the general public rather than the hardcore gamers. But it's the hardcore gamers who buy more than 1 game every few months. I buy a ton of games but I've learned to be patient and buy games a month or two or even 12 later than the release date, simply to get the game for $20 or less. There is a big market for new games at lower prices that is not being tapped.
Not everyone has 40 to 80 hours to sink into the latest rpgs and not every game needs to be Final Fantasy VII. I really love the Ikaruga's of this world. Final Fatasy VII cost $35 million to make and had a staff of over 100 people. On the other hand, 95% of Ikaruga was made by THREE people. (For instance, the music was written by the same guy who did the game's background art!)
I kinda get the feeling that the industry might be heading towards another major evolutionary period, similar to the market crashes of the late atari era... I'm just not sure what it will look like.
unless the comments are the same because they are both from an earlier, freely availible, program. Which many of the other comments in this thread suggest, that it is BSD code dating back to 1986.
if by "hottest selling" you mean "I am only talking about the USA"...
and if you rank the PS2 as an equal success as the Xbox, you're being misleading, considering that Sony has sold many times more PS2's than Microsoft has sold Xboxen.
Note than in Japan, the Xbox makes up 1.6% of hardware sales. That.6% better than the discontinued Wonderswan.
The more important thing is that they discussed it in a separate context from the Gamecube successor, and that Sony intentionally leveraged it's marketshare to FUD the Dreamcast out of existance. Since Sony was on top and having no problem selling PS1's at the time, they didn't have to worry about killing their sales by announcing a successor. Nintendo on the other hand does not want to supress their sales of the current system by hyping the successor system too loudly.
They want people to know about the "N5" console so that people know that they are not in any danger of leaving the market any time soon, but it is definitely not their primary focus.
Oh yeah, and lending more credibility to that suggestion is Myamoto's recent revelation that Mikami is very interested in working on a classic Nintendo franchise, the way Sega's Amusement Vision has done F-Zero GX and Namco is doing StarFox 2.
I hope it's true! After all these years, River City Ransom is finally getting an update (albeit just a touched up remake on the GBA), so I hope something can happen with Kid Icarus, my other long-hoped-for sequel/remake...
Ikaruga is my favorite game of all time. I've got about 70 hours racked up in the past year, on my dreamcast and on my gamecube... I'm getting close to beating it on one credit even! (on easy, haha.)
Shinji Mikami, the director and producer of the Resident Evil series, has publicly criticized Sony's cheap production quality of PS2's. He claims he has had to buy four PS2 simply because they break so easily, and said that PS2 sales figures are almost undoubtedly inflated due to people buying replacement machines.
He also is very public about his love of Nintendo. Why do you think he's producing PN.03, Viewtiful Joe, Killer 7, and Resident Evil 4 for the GC? (there was a fifth game, Dead Phoenix, but I suspect it has been cancelled.)
(well, the Resident Evil games are contractually exclusive to the Gamecube, not counting light gun and online games)
At one point, there was even talk of Capcom going exclusive on Gamecube, though talks broke down in January.
This new product is going to be announced in early 2004. The N5 is going to ship in 2005 or early 2006 (according to Nintendo at the same press conferance where they mentioned the new technology for 2004.)
This alone suggests strongly that they are not talking about the N5, simply because they wouldn't want to focus attention on a console that isn't coming out for over a year.
That's largely because by the time they started giving Zelda away for free, people like myself had bought a Gamecube on Zelda's release date, got Metroid Prime with it for free, and picked up our pre-orders of Zelda:Wind-Waker.
Realize that Zelda:Wind-Waker is one of the best sellers of the year, in the USA and Europe (and in Japan late last year.)
This GC sales boost happened in the first quarter of the year, not this past quarter.
ok then: Resident Evil Resident Evil 0 Resident Evil 2 Resident Evil 3 Resident Evil Code Name Veronica X Resident Evil 4 (coming next year) Dead To Rights Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem
and Metroid Prime, which is rated Teen, but is very serious and a "mature" game. Metroid Prime 2 is due next year. Too Human is due in the next two years.
Among the various styles of music I am keen on, I like a lot of death metal, particularly stuff along the lines of what Relapse records puts out. Unfortunately, one of the members of the band Nasum does production on a lot of records they put out, and they sound AWFUL, because of the use of a "finalizer", which does a hard digital compression of all the sounds on the record. My ear gets exhausted listening to Human 2.0, so I can't even tell if I like it or not.
Excellent advice! The cheap home pad won't last 4 months, though.:-)
I've been lucky, the $20 pad I got has lasted these 5 months.
The left arrow is somewhat uncooperative, but it works well enough that I can ignore it. I play out in arcades now a lot because it's a better environment to play in, you can learn tips from other players and the equiptment is better. So I worry about getting A ranks and what not at the arcade.
The soft pad is slow to recover from hits so I sometimes miss 1/8th notes on fast songs. If you get to the level of skill where this is a problem, you are almost certainly hooked on the game and won't mind buying a nicer pad anyway. ^_^
I must admit being mighty tempted by those $100 Red Octane pads...
If you like video games, Dance Dance Revolution might be the answer for you. It's working for me, (ie, I'm losing weight and feeling better) and in the past I've only been able to stick to an exercise schedule if I was paying for gym access. "Better go exercise, I can't let the monthly fee go to waste!"
The basic set up for DDR is a pad on the floor with arrows pointing front, back, left & right. The game has over a hundred songs to choose from, with difficulties ranking from 1 to 10 feet, and basic, trick, and maniac modes for each song. There's an immense amount of replay value.
During the game, arrows scroll up the screen and you hit the arrows on the pad with your feet, in time with the music. For fast songs on difficult settings, this is very challenging, but more to the point: it's exhausting.
The key to DDR is learning how to keep your balance while hitting all of the arrows. I found that at first, I would bounce my whole body up and down in time with the music. This was exhausting, even on the easy songs. Nowadays, 5 months later, I am playing some fairly hard songs (6 foot songs on basic and trick), and while I am moving significantly more efficiently, the game is still pushing my physical limits of endurance and dexterity.
Because it is a video game with a scoring system and several levels of difficulty, there is a built in incentive to achieve the next level of ability, whether that means getting an A rank on a song, or trying a 6 foot song for the first time. This keeps me going, as I set goals and attempt perfect runs of my favorite songs. I can easily keep playing for an hour or more, and afterwards I jump right into the shower and cool off.
Get the home version, a cheap dance pad, and a PSone, and you're set up for $100 (including the PS1!!)
Run through the lesson mode, and you will learn the basics. If you stick with the game and play at least a couple times a week for 4 months or so, you will definitely lose weight and gain some footwork skills. Not to mention it's fun to show off in the arcade!
"Everything about the Mac shines, except software tittles available,"
um, other than games and high end architectural/engineering apps, what's the mac lack? (and there are a lot more games on the mac than there used to be.)
Audio? nope, Logic Audio, Cubase, Pro Tools, Reaktor, Max/MSP, Reason, Melodyne, Digital Performer, Bias Peak, and even an open source smalltalk styled programing environment called Supercollider
Video? nope, Final Cut Pro, iMovie, Shake, etc.
Design? nope, Photoshop, InDesign, Quark, Illustrator, etc.
Emacs? built in.
Not to mention 10.3's new features (up to date with FreeBSD 5.0, X-11 windowing system, etc.) make it relatively easy to port from linux/unix to OS X.
The mac has thousands of apps. Lots of really, really solid ones. Of course there is less software than in the windows world, but that's going to be the case unless Apple gets another 30% of marketshare at least.
well, if you knew anything about the PPC 970 chip design, you'd understand.
even at 1.6 ghz, it's very, very fast.
On a per clock cycle basis, PPC has been faster than x86 forever, so this is in no way all of a sudden. It's just significantly more pronounced because the 970 chip can take advantage of high bus speeds while the G4 couldn't.
Way more articulate than my earlier "fuck you!" reply, heh.
Also, I just wanted to say that this sentence is the best 1 sentence description of ADHD I've ever heard:
The difference between someone with ADHD and someone without is not so much their general ability to concentrate, but their inability to control what they concentrate on.
And that this is very true for me:
I can easily follow five conversations at the same time, but I have problems to follow just one conversation when there are four other taking place in the same room
Slashdot Mirror
not to mention Zero from Megaman X being a playable character in the recent SNK vs Capcom for Neo Geo. (coming to ps2 early next year)
.
how did you possibly beat that in 15 minutes? unless I'm mistaken it has limited credits, and it gets insanely hard too. I'm pretty sure I've never beaten it.
Zero Gunner 2 is definitely a much, much better game though!
I looked for it but didn't find Cannon Spike (GunSpike in Japan) for Dreamcast on the list. Megaman is playable as a secret character in this 3-d rendered but mostly 2-D gameplay shooter.
Developed by Psikyo, and published by Capcom.
.
Game programers should stop re-inventing the wheel and use common game engines, at least for the graphics. I realize that lots of games have been made by liscensing the Quake 3 engine or Unreal engine, this seems like a potential way for smaller developers to have access to reasonably good looking technology to drive the PS3, xbox 2 or N5.
One of the real problems is that there is little room for games with lower expectations. I'd be really happy to buy a bunch of ten hour games that had less technical wows but much heart, especially if their retail price was reasonable.
How many gamers do you know that buy the latest games at $50? Most games sold at $50 are the blockbusters that sell to the general public rather than the hardcore gamers. But it's the hardcore gamers who buy more than 1 game every few months. I buy a ton of games but I've learned to be patient and buy games a month or two or even 12 later than the release date, simply to get the game for $20 or less. There is a big market for new games at lower prices that is not being tapped.
Not everyone has 40 to 80 hours to sink into the latest rpgs and not every game needs to be Final Fantasy VII. I really love the Ikaruga's of this world. Final Fatasy VII cost $35 million to make and had a staff of over 100 people. On the other hand, 95% of Ikaruga was made by THREE people. (For instance, the music was written by the same guy who did the game's background art!)
I kinda get the feeling that the industry might be heading towards another major evolutionary period, similar to the market crashes of the late atari era... I'm just not sure what it will look like.
.
I have an official Ikaruga DVD published by Treasure (ikaruga's developers) showing the three best players in Japan beating Ikaruga on 1 life.
With near perfect chains.
34 million points or so.
1 replay on easy, 1 on normal, 1 on hard. No lost lives.
Myself, after 70+ hours, I'm down to 3 credits on easy mode. ^_^
.
too bad your post got modded as Flamebait, when it really wasn't.
The duke nuke'em joke just wasn't funny.
unless the comments are the same because they are both from an earlier, freely availible, program. Which many of the other comments in this thread suggest, that it is BSD code dating back to 1986.
if by "hottest selling" you mean "I am only talking about the USA"...
and if you rank the PS2 as an equal success as the Xbox, you're being misleading, considering that Sony has sold many times more PS2's than Microsoft has sold Xboxen.
Note than in Japan, the Xbox makes up 1.6% of hardware sales. That
.
Seriously, how is this in anyway "thoughtful"?
The more important thing is that they discussed it in a separate context from the Gamecube successor, and that Sony intentionally leveraged it's marketshare to FUD the Dreamcast out of existance. Since Sony was on top and having no problem selling PS1's at the time, they didn't have to worry about killing their sales by announcing a successor. Nintendo on the other hand does not want to supress their sales of the current system by hyping the successor system too loudly.
They want people to know about the "N5" console so that people know that they are not in any danger of leaving the market any time soon, but it is definitely not their primary focus.
Oh yeah, and lending more credibility to that suggestion is Myamoto's recent revelation that Mikami is very interested in working on a classic Nintendo franchise, the way Sega's Amusement Vision has done F-Zero GX and Namco is doing StarFox 2.
I hope it's true! After all these years, River City Ransom is finally getting an update (albeit just a touched up remake on the GBA), so I hope something can happen with Kid Icarus, my other long-hoped-for sequel/remake...
.
I just read that suggestion on IGN today... I'd be so excited about it, especially if it shapes up to be to Kid Icarus as Metroid Prime is to Metroid.
Kid Icarus is one of those cruely underlooked games... Too bad the Gameboy sequel is so boring.
Ikaruga is my favorite game of all time. I've got about 70 hours racked up in the past year, on my dreamcast and on my gamecube... I'm getting close to beating it on one credit even! (on easy, haha.)
Shinji Mikami, the director and producer of the Resident Evil series, has publicly criticized Sony's cheap production quality of PS2's. He claims he has had to buy four PS2 simply because they break so easily, and said that PS2 sales figures are almost undoubtedly inflated due to people buying replacement machines.
He also is very public about his love of Nintendo. Why do you think he's producing PN.03, Viewtiful Joe, Killer 7, and Resident Evil 4 for the GC? (there was a fifth game, Dead Phoenix, but I suspect it has been cancelled.)
(well, the Resident Evil games are contractually exclusive to the Gamecube, not counting light gun and online games)
At one point, there was even talk of Capcom going exclusive on Gamecube, though talks broke down in January.
.
This new product is going to be announced in early 2004. The N5 is going to ship in 2005 or early 2006 (according to Nintendo at the same press conferance where they mentioned the new technology for 2004.)
This alone suggests strongly that they are not talking about the N5, simply because they wouldn't want to focus attention on a console that isn't coming out for over a year.
.
That's largely because by the time they started giving Zelda away for free, people like myself had bought a Gamecube on Zelda's release date, got Metroid Prime with it for free, and picked up our pre-orders of Zelda:Wind-Waker.
Realize that Zelda:Wind-Waker is one of the best sellers of the year, in the USA and Europe (and in Japan late last year.)
This GC sales boost happened in the first quarter of the year, not this past quarter.
btw, Zelda and Metroid Prime are both fantastic.
ok then:
Resident Evil
Resident Evil 0
Resident Evil 2
Resident Evil 3
Resident Evil Code Name Veronica X
Resident Evil 4 (coming next year)
Dead To Rights
Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem
and Metroid Prime, which is rated Teen, but is very serious and a "mature" game. Metroid Prime 2 is due next year. Too Human is due in the next two years.
There's more out there than you think.
Among the various styles of music I am keen on, I like a lot of death metal, particularly stuff along the lines of what Relapse records puts out. Unfortunately, one of the members of the band Nasum does production on a lot of records they put out, and they sound AWFUL, because of the use of a "finalizer", which does a hard digital compression of all the sounds on the record. My ear gets exhausted listening to Human 2.0, so I can't even tell if I like it or not.
Excellent advice! The cheap home pad won't last 4 months, though.
I've been lucky, the $20 pad I got has lasted these 5 months.
The left arrow is somewhat uncooperative, but it works well enough that I can ignore it. I play out in arcades now a lot because it's a better environment to play in, you can learn tips from other players and the equiptment is better. So I worry about getting A ranks and what not at the arcade.
The soft pad is slow to recover from hits so I sometimes miss 1/8th notes on fast songs. If you get to the level of skill where this is a problem, you are almost certainly hooked on the game and won't mind buying a nicer pad anyway. ^_^
I must admit being mighty tempted by those $100 Red Octane pads...
If you like video games, Dance Dance Revolution might be the answer for you. It's working for me, (ie, I'm losing weight and feeling better) and in the past I've only been able to stick to an exercise schedule if I was paying for gym access. "Better go exercise, I can't let the monthly fee go to waste!"
The basic set up for DDR is a pad on the floor with arrows pointing front, back, left & right. The game has over a hundred songs to choose from, with difficulties ranking from 1 to 10 feet, and basic, trick, and maniac modes for each song. There's an immense amount of replay value.
During the game, arrows scroll up the screen and you hit the arrows on the pad with your feet, in time with the music. For fast songs on difficult settings, this is very challenging, but more to the point: it's exhausting.
The key to DDR is learning how to keep your balance while hitting all of the arrows. I found that at first, I would bounce my whole body up and down in time with the music. This was exhausting, even on the easy songs. Nowadays, 5 months later, I am playing some fairly hard songs (6 foot songs on basic and trick), and while I am moving significantly more efficiently, the game is still pushing my physical limits of endurance and dexterity.
Because it is a video game with a scoring system and several levels of difficulty, there is a built in incentive to achieve the next level of ability, whether that means getting an A rank on a song, or trying a 6 foot song for the first time. This keeps me going, as I set goals and attempt perfect runs of my favorite songs. I can easily keep playing for an hour or more, and afterwards I jump right into the shower and cool off.
Get the home version, a cheap dance pad, and a PSone, and you're set up for $100 (including the PS1!!)
Run through the lesson mode, and you will learn the basics. If you stick with the game and play at least a couple times a week for 4 months or so, you will definitely lose weight and gain some footwork skills. Not to mention it's fun to show off in the arcade!
for more info on DDR: http://www.ddrfreak.com/
.
The democrats aren't as good at fund-raising?
"Everything about the Mac shines, except software tittles available,"
um, other than games and high end architectural/engineering apps, what's the mac lack? (and there are a lot more games on the mac than there used to be.)
Audio? nope, Logic Audio, Cubase, Pro Tools, Reaktor, Max/MSP, Reason, Melodyne, Digital Performer, Bias Peak, and even an open source smalltalk styled programing environment called Supercollider
Video? nope, Final Cut Pro, iMovie, Shake, etc.
Design? nope, Photoshop, InDesign, Quark, Illustrator, etc.
Emacs? built in.
Not to mention 10.3's new features (up to date with FreeBSD 5.0, X-11 windowing system, etc.) make it relatively easy to port from linux/unix to OS X.
The mac has thousands of apps. Lots of really, really solid ones. Of course there is less software than in the windows world, but that's going to be the case unless Apple gets another 30% of marketshare at least.
.
well, if you knew anything about the PPC 970 chip design, you'd understand.
even at 1.6 ghz, it's very, very fast.
On a per clock cycle basis, PPC has been faster than x86 forever, so this is in no way all of a sudden. It's just significantly more pronounced because the 970 chip can take advantage of high bus speeds while the G4 couldn't.
"$1999 for an entry level G5?"
there is nothing entry level about any of the G5's. If there was, they'd be in a new iMac, not Power Mac.
Good post.
Way more articulate than my earlier "fuck you!" reply, heh.
Also, I just wanted to say that this sentence is the best 1 sentence description of ADHD I've ever heard:
The difference between someone with ADHD and someone without is not so much their general ability to concentrate, but their inability to control what they concentrate on.
And that this is very true for me:
I can easily follow five conversations at the same time, but I have problems to follow just one conversation when there are four other taking place in the same room