I always thought when he split off to form Lionhead that EA kept control of all the Bullfrog titles. I would love to see spiritual successors to these games. Even Magic Carpet and another "Theme" game would be cool. I would kill for a reenvisioning of Gene Wars. Cool idea, but such a weak implementation:(
Owning a Dell laptop myself, I'm glad they did this.
Did anyone else notice this in the TFA (emphasis added)?
"Dell, the world's largest PC maker, said the lithium-ion batteries were made by Sony and were installed in notebooks sold between April 2004 and July 18 of this year."
Sony must've really upset the karma gods or something recently. I'd be afraid for all the PSP owners out there.
First of all, until Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island this game was questionable "Mario canon", once Shy Guys started showing up in Yoshi's Island did this game truly become part of the series (in terms of mechanics, etc.). Until then, NONE of the Mario games shared any of the mechanics from SMB2/SMBUSA, this includes the differences in the characters. I don't know why the submitter thought that the panel roulette from SMB3 inherits off the slot machines in this game. Those are entirely different features in the game (with SMB2 requiring you to collect coins to power the slot machine and SMB3 giving you a single shot at a panel with the payoff occuring every 3 levels... totally different). The Super Mario Advance series started with retconning SMB2 into the rest of the series (with changes such as adding a scoring system, turtle shells now bounce off obstructions, etc.) and made changes to the rest of the games to accomodate that (SMA2:Super Mario World allows you to play as Luigi in single player mode, complete with SMB2 jumping and other subtle but interesting changes, SMA4:Super Mario Bros. 3 allows you to give Luigi "low gravity" and add SMB2 veggie sprouts to the SMB3 levels, but only if you have an e-Reader. There's also a couple of e-Reader levels in SMA4 that contain SMB2 elements).
Second, as has been mentioned earlier, there a lot better resources for the comparisons. They are more in depth, hit a lot more differences than the About.com article, and are presented a lot better on the web. Here's what I found just linked off the wikipedia entry for Doki Doki Panic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doki_Doki_Panic Which, by the way, has a nice list of all the changes on its own.
Number one, in many console games you don't get much freedom to change the mapping of button->action.
With the wii, you're probably going to need someway of calibrating the remote to a persons style. Do they make large movements or small precise ones? What's their resting height, etc.?
Also, with the Wii Sports demonstration it looks like players might have the option of creating a custom avatar for their in game persona. This could be stored on the remote, instead of a memory card (especially if it's a cross-game feature).
In terms of sound quality, it's a tiny speaker in a remote, you could put a 320 kbps mp3 in there and it'd sound like crap. Maybe they're using very low bitrate mp3 compression? Or they're streaming it over the bluetooth connection?
That's no joke, I remember being insanely confused when I was out of the loop about the Bioware NWN game. I remember people telling me about it and thinking about the old AOL game.
Real-time to me implies that your party and enemies are making decisions at the same time. In other words, if the game was truly real-time the monsters could attack while you had the menu opened up and were deciding what the current party member would do. I'm pretty sure that when you had the menu open and when an attack animation was going on, the fight clock was frozen. The only thing that was special about Mario RPG was that you could interact with the game by timing a button press correctly during an attatck animation.
No, you're right. The article has a bunch of errors in it, that was the most obvious of them. They also did the following:
* Forgot to acknowledge Donkey Kong '94, Mario Vs. DK and Mario Vs. DK 2 (Platforming or other section anyone?) * Said Mario was a playable character in VS. Golf (This is nit-picky but Golf was the NES release, VS. Golf was arcade, and let's not forget NES Open which was pretty much a sequel to Gol [or prequel to Mario Golf if you'd rather look at it that way]) * Mario RPG for the SNES didn't have real-time battles (very nitpicky, but the game was turn based to the core) * The DS remake of Mario 64 is Mario 64 DS, not Super Mario DS, and the "new" inflation ability is pulled right from Super Mario World * Does anyone know if Warp Pipe was a unaffiliated branch of Gamespy? This is news to me. * They forgot "Yoshi" in the puzzle game blurb
Actually, the PS3 controller is still the basic PS1 controller which itself cloned the SNES controller and only added two extra shoulder buttons. Everything that has been added to the controller has followed additions by nintendo: analog stick (OMG 2 MOREZ!!!), rumble (but its not battery powered), and I guess now the motion sensitivity...
Nintendo was 100% right when they said they wanted to wait on unveiling the Wii controller.
The more I look back on VII the more I think they were trying to adapt VI in a new setting. I find similiarity in Kefka and Sephiroth. Vincent's mystique is no different than Shadow's (only less so since Shadow's backstory is never made clear anywhere). Aeris and Terra are both "specimins" that the main antagonists are looking for.
I don't know if anyone agress with this either. It's been quite some time since I played both so I could be wrong...
Anyways, VII was a good game in the series. I would say it ranks highly within the series, but I am loathe to pinpoint the best game in an ongoing series.
Ummm... check your facts. It's sci-fi set in a modern context. You cut out the alien technology (sky runner, psi, phase distorter) and you're left with modern day.
Evermore is just a giant cyberworld where each area has a "theme" of some epoch.
Final Fantasy VI i guess is steam... Narshe is entirely run on steam... But there's always been some element of high technology mixed with fantasy in the series. Some games just gravitate to one side of the line more than others. VII and VIII being a couple of the more technology centered games.
I'm willing to take a safe bet and say that Mario 3 on 3 will have some sort of RPG element to the single player game. All the previous Mario sports games on the GBA have had RPG elements incorporated into them. I doubt this will be any different.
I will say that after losing a lot of the 3rd party support when the 64 came out they have started making pretty good progress getting most of it back. Although that is sometimes done by using the GBA as the carrot on a stick (Square-Enix anyone?).
Nintendo dominated the later years of the 16-bit generation through a good stable of 3rd party developers, and Sony's success has shown that 3rd party devs really make or break the system.
Like other people have said before, they say this every generation, so I'm skeptical about this, but E3 will hopefully offer up some proof to the validity of this statement. Also, the Revolution does have a lot to offer 3rd party developers: lower budget games (don't need to spend extra time developing HD-res textures), a (hopefully) cheap install price which hopefully results in a large player base, a chance to try something new, online connectivity, backwards compatibility (I wonder if this something indies could make use of (if Nintendo offers up cheaper dev kits for smaller games)) through the virtual console, and an online marketplace.
In the near future, G4 will acquire Spike TV. The new channel will be known as G4 Spike TV. Within 1-2 years, the station will be rebranded G4. Six months after that we will see an increase in programming of such things as "The Martha Steward Show"...
Granted this is from a Nintendo fan-site, but the 360 is only beating out the GCN in terms of sales by ~700 units. At the same time it's being soundly trounced by the the Game Boy Micro, Game Boy SP, and is getting a very large beat down by the PS2.
Unfortunately, they don't say where the stats come from, but I'm sure they can easily be found on the net (I just can't remember what company usually reports the Japanese sales figures)
Isn't that part of the point? Nintendo has reiterated that they are going in a different direction, and screw the cross-platform games.
If Nintendo is planning on offering a new experience, then having cross-platform games that are standardized across the board does not fit in their grand scheme. What's the point of having this new-fangled controller thingy if all people are going to do is shovel ports from the other two systems onto it?
The system will reward the developers that are willing to take some time and try something new, not just try to square-peg-in-a-round hole their current offerings.
Like games haven't been made on anything less powerful than a PSOne right?
Oh and lifting from Wikipedia:
"Companies developing or intending to publish games for the Revolution include Activision, AQ Interactive, Artdink, Atlus, Blitz Games, Clover Studio, Crossbeam Studios Entertainment, Electronic Arts, Grasshopper Manufacture, Koei, Kojima Productions, Konami, Kuju Entertainment, Midway Games, Namco Bandai, Natsume, N-Space, Inc., Sega, Square Enix, Ubisoft, Tecmo, Pandemic Studios and THQ."
If most of the heavy hitters in the industry is that "handful" I see no problems here.
Slashdot Mirror
I always thought when he split off to form Lionhead that EA kept control of all the Bullfrog titles. I would love to see spiritual successors to these games. Even Magic Carpet and another "Theme" game would be cool. I would kill for a reenvisioning of Gene Wars. Cool idea, but such a weak implementation :(
Owning a Dell laptop myself, I'm glad they did this.
Did anyone else notice this in the TFA (emphasis added)?
"Dell, the world's largest PC maker, said the lithium-ion batteries were made by Sony and were installed in notebooks sold between April 2004 and July 18 of this year."
Sony must've really upset the karma gods or something recently. I'd be afraid for all the PSP owners out there.
Where's my "bury this" option when I need it?
Oh wait... wrong site.
In all seriousness, why do we get this stuff posted? Slow news day?
Zonk is a recent convert from the house of MS to the house of N?
First of all, until Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island this game was questionable "Mario canon", once Shy Guys started showing up in Yoshi's Island did this game truly become part of the series (in terms of mechanics, etc.). Until then, NONE of the Mario games shared any of the mechanics from SMB2/SMBUSA, this includes the differences in the characters. I don't know why the submitter thought that the panel roulette from SMB3 inherits off the slot machines in this game. Those are entirely different features in the game (with SMB2 requiring you to collect coins to power the slot machine and SMB3 giving you a single shot at a panel with the payoff occuring every 3 levels... totally different). The Super Mario Advance series started with retconning SMB2 into the rest of the series (with changes such as adding a scoring system, turtle shells now bounce off obstructions, etc.) and made changes to the rest of the games to accomodate that (SMA2:Super Mario World allows you to play as Luigi in single player mode, complete with SMB2 jumping and other subtle but interesting changes, SMA4:Super Mario Bros. 3 allows you to give Luigi "low gravity" and add SMB2 veggie sprouts to the SMB3 levels, but only if you have an e-Reader. There's also a couple of e-Reader levels in SMA4 that contain SMB2 elements).
. html
Second, as has been mentioned earlier, there a lot better resources for the comparisons. They are more in depth, hit a lot more differences than the About.com article, and are presented a lot better on the web. Here's what I found just linked off the wikipedia entry for Doki Doki Panic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doki_Doki_Panic Which, by the way, has a nice list of all the changes on its own.
http://themushroomkingdom.net/smb2_ddp.shtml
http://progressiveboink.com/archive/dokidokipanic
When I see stuff like this hit the front page, it's not hard to see why sites like Digg are gaining in popularity.
Number one, in many console games you don't get much freedom to change the mapping of button->action.
With the wii, you're probably going to need someway of calibrating the remote to a persons style. Do they make large movements or small precise ones? What's their resting height, etc.?
Also, with the Wii Sports demonstration it looks like players might have the option of creating a custom avatar for their in game persona. This could be stored on the remote, instead of a memory card (especially if it's a cross-game feature).
In terms of sound quality, it's a tiny speaker in a remote, you could put a 320 kbps mp3 in there and it'd sound like crap. Maybe they're using very low bitrate mp3 compression? Or they're streaming it over the bluetooth connection?
I'd like to introduce you to my good friends: disco, adventure games, and traditional cell animation.
Don't forget a few are probably carrying badges from your favorite branches of law-enforcement: local, state and FBI
Right, and the net hasn't lied to you ever has it?
I've seen Street Fighter II Roms for the NES, but that doesn't mean they're actually legit either.
That's no joke, I remember being insanely confused when I was out of the loop about the Bioware NWN game. I remember people telling me about it and thinking about the old AOL game.
Real-time to me implies that your party and enemies are making decisions at the same time. In other words, if the game was truly real-time the monsters could attack while you had the menu opened up and were deciding what the current party member would do. I'm pretty sure that when you had the menu open and when an attack animation was going on, the fight clock was frozen. The only thing that was special about Mario RPG was that you could interact with the game by timing a button press correctly during an attatck animation.
No, you're right. The article has a bunch of errors in it, that was the most obvious of them. They also did the following:
* Forgot to acknowledge Donkey Kong '94, Mario Vs. DK and Mario Vs. DK 2 (Platforming or other section anyone?)
* Said Mario was a playable character in VS. Golf (This is nit-picky but Golf was the NES release, VS. Golf was arcade, and let's not forget NES Open which was pretty much a sequel to Gol [or prequel to Mario Golf if you'd rather look at it that way])
* Mario RPG for the SNES didn't have real-time battles (very nitpicky, but the game was turn based to the core)
* The DS remake of Mario 64 is Mario 64 DS, not Super Mario DS, and the "new" inflation ability is pulled right from Super Mario World
* Does anyone know if Warp Pipe was a unaffiliated branch of Gamespy? This is news to me.
* They forgot "Yoshi" in the puzzle game blurb
Actually, the PS3 controller is still the basic PS1 controller which itself cloned the SNES controller and only added two extra shoulder buttons. Everything that has been added to the controller has followed additions by nintendo: analog stick (OMG 2 MOREZ!!!), rumble (but its not battery powered), and I guess now the motion sensitivity...
Nintendo was 100% right when they said they wanted to wait on unveiling the Wii controller.
Huh. That would explain the sudden increase in the amount of pirate flags being raised on my way to work...
Anyone up for labeling this scandal "Hot Mead"?
I think they're missing the trailing W... I mean, ViiV worked for Intel right?
The more I look back on VII the more I think they were trying to adapt VI in a new setting. I find similiarity in Kefka and Sephiroth. Vincent's mystique is no different than Shadow's (only less so since Shadow's backstory is never made clear anywhere). Aeris and Terra are both "specimins" that the main antagonists are looking for.
I don't know if anyone agress with this either. It's been quite some time since I played both so I could be wrong...
Anyways, VII was a good game in the series. I would say it ranks highly within the series, but I am loathe to pinpoint the best game in an ongoing series.
Earthbound is steam universe?
Ummm... check your facts. It's sci-fi set in a modern context. You cut out the alien technology (sky runner, psi, phase distorter) and you're left with modern day.
Evermore is just a giant cyberworld where each area has a "theme" of some epoch.
Final Fantasy VI i guess is steam... Narshe is entirely run on steam... But there's always been some element of high technology mixed with fantasy in the series. Some games just gravitate to one side of the line more than others. VII and VIII being a couple of the more technology centered games.
I'm willing to take a safe bet and say that Mario 3 on 3 will have some sort of RPG element to the single player game. All the previous Mario sports games on the GBA have had RPG elements incorporated into them. I doubt this will be any different.
... Or will still be learning it.
I will say that after losing a lot of the 3rd party support when the 64 came out they have started making pretty good progress getting most of it back. Although that is sometimes done by using the GBA as the carrot on a stick (Square-Enix anyone?).
Nintendo dominated the later years of the 16-bit generation through a good stable of 3rd party developers, and Sony's success has shown that 3rd party devs really make or break the system.
Like other people have said before, they say this every generation, so I'm skeptical about this, but E3 will hopefully offer up some proof to the validity of this statement. Also, the Revolution does have a lot to offer 3rd party developers: lower budget games (don't need to spend extra time developing HD-res textures), a (hopefully) cheap install price which hopefully results in a large player base, a chance to try something new, online connectivity, backwards compatibility (I wonder if this something indies could make use of (if Nintendo offers up cheaper dev kits for smaller games)) through the virtual console, and an online marketplace.
http://www.twit.tv/ , http://digitallifetv.com/ and http://crankygeeks.com/ are your friend.
In the near future, G4 will acquire Spike TV. The new channel will be known as G4 Spike TV. Within 1-2 years, the station will be rebranded G4. Six months after that we will see an increase in programming of such things as "The Martha Steward Show"...
Granted this is from a Nintendo fan-site, but the 360 is only beating out the GCN in terms of sales by ~700 units. At the same time it's being soundly trounced by the the Game Boy Micro, Game Boy SP, and is getting a very large beat down by the PS2.
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http://www.nintendojo.com/editorials/view_item.ph
Unfortunately, they don't say where the stats come from, but I'm sure they can easily be found on the net (I just can't remember what company usually reports the Japanese sales figures)
Isn't that part of the point? Nintendo has reiterated that they are going in a different direction, and screw the cross-platform games.
If Nintendo is planning on offering a new experience, then having cross-platform games that are standardized across the board does not fit in their grand scheme. What's the point of having this new-fangled controller thingy if all people are going to do is shovel ports from the other two systems onto it?
The system will reward the developers that are willing to take some time and try something new, not just try to square-peg-in-a-round hole their current offerings.
Like games haven't been made on anything less powerful than a PSOne right?
Oh and lifting from Wikipedia:
"Companies developing or intending to publish games for the Revolution include Activision, AQ Interactive, Artdink, Atlus, Blitz Games, Clover Studio, Crossbeam Studios Entertainment, Electronic Arts, Grasshopper Manufacture, Koei, Kojima Productions, Konami, Kuju Entertainment, Midway Games, Namco Bandai, Natsume, N-Space, Inc., Sega, Square Enix, Ubisoft, Tecmo, Pandemic Studios and THQ."
If most of the heavy hitters in the industry is that "handful" I see no problems here.