Good point; I stand corrected. It's too easy to forget IBM's contribution to the PC market given the current balance of power. But perhaps that's a more important consideration than what I originally postulated - even if Nintendo pulls this off, it doesn't necessarily mean their influence will survive the ravages of competition, even within the space of a single standardized platform. We may very well see something called Windows XB[ox] with integrated GameCube emulation fighting its way through the courts in years to come.
That's the same argument that relegated the Macintosh to a small fraction of the market share it might have garnered. IMHO, this is a brilliant move on Nintendo's part, if they can leverage it properly. With enough industry support, they could potentially achieve what Intel/Microsoft did in the PC market in the 80s. What with the impending XBox marketing onslaught though, they may be too late. Time will tell.
I knew I'd seen this before - you can play all the classic Infocom games via telnet; see http://infocom.elsewhere.org/ for details.
Sh00z is correct though - Lurking Horror, like many other Infocom games, requires information provided on trinkets included in the retail box. However, the Zorks don't require external information to complete, IIRC; incidentally, the original series has been released to the public domain: http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/download.html
If you're into Lovecraft, you definitely should check out Infocom's Lurking Horror. I don't have a link though; sorry:(
The reason these games are classics...
on
Ultima Revived
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· Score: 2, Insightful
... is that they either did something nobody else was doing at the time, or they did it better than everybody else. In other words, they were damn cool when they were current. The problem is, playing modernized versions of classic games often is about the same as hanging around your old high school at the age of 30 - you know you had good times there 14 years ago, but you can't for the life of you figure out WTF is going on now.
Every now and then a remake of a classic (be it a game, movie or TV show) does the legacy justice, but far too often the remake fails miserably because modernization destroys everything that made it a classic. Anybody remember Return to Zork? They decided to update the venerable series by making a graphical adventure that was fun for the 5 minutes it took to realize that whatever it said on the box, this most certainly was not Zork.
I'm not saying these projects are doomed to failure, I'm just saying that anybody modernizing a classic needs to be very careful about evaluating new features in the context of the original game. If the original had an isometric view, for God's sake don't remake it into a first person viewpoint just to demonstrate that you too can license a 3D engine. Keep the remakes true to the spirit of the original, and maybe we'll see something of note come of it.
... of a guy I once knew who built a PC in a briefcase because he couldn't afford a laptop. It seemed to work fine, even if he did need a monitor/kybd/mouse to plug in to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point; I stand corrected. It's too easy to forget IBM's contribution to the PC market given the current balance of power. But perhaps that's a more important consideration than what I originally postulated - even if Nintendo pulls this off, it doesn't necessarily mean their influence will survive the ravages of competition, even within the space of a single standardized platform. We may very well see something called Windows XB[ox] with integrated GameCube emulation fighting its way through the courts in years to come.
That's the same argument that relegated the Macintosh to a small fraction of the market share it might have garnered. IMHO, this is a brilliant move on Nintendo's part, if they can leverage it properly. With enough industry support, they could potentially achieve what Intel/Microsoft did in the PC market in the 80s. What with the impending XBox marketing onslaught though, they may be too late. Time will tell.
I knew I'd seen this before - you can play all the classic Infocom games via telnet; see http://infocom.elsewhere.org/ for details.
Sh00z is correct though - Lurking Horror, like many other Infocom games, requires information provided on trinkets included in the retail box. However, the Zorks don't require external information to complete, IIRC; incidentally, the original series has been released to the public domain: http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/download.html
If you're into Lovecraft, you definitely should check out Infocom's Lurking Horror. I don't have a link though; sorry :(
... is that they either did something nobody else was doing at the time, or they did it better than everybody else. In other words, they were damn cool when they were current. The problem is, playing modernized versions of classic games often is about the same as hanging around your old high school at the age of 30 - you know you had good times there 14 years ago, but you can't for the life of you figure out WTF is going on now.
Every now and then a remake of a classic (be it a game, movie or TV show) does the legacy justice, but far too often the remake fails miserably because modernization destroys everything that made it a classic. Anybody remember Return to Zork? They decided to update the venerable series by making a graphical adventure that was fun for the 5 minutes it took to realize that whatever it said on the box, this most certainly was not Zork.
I'm not saying these projects are doomed to failure, I'm just saying that anybody modernizing a classic needs to be very careful about evaluating new features in the context of the original game. If the original had an isometric view, for God's sake don't remake it into a first person viewpoint just to demonstrate that you too can license a 3D engine. Keep the remakes true to the spirit of the original, and maybe we'll see something of note come of it.
You mean something like this?
... of a guy I once knew who built a PC in a briefcase because he couldn't afford a laptop. It seemed to work fine, even if he did need a monitor/kybd/mouse to plug in to it.