### Unfortunately, you are committed to looking exactly for something specific, the rootkit writer knows what you are looking for, and should be able to get by your defenses with some ridiculously bad disguise.
No, its actually very easy, just use some cryptography and sign all 'good' binaries with a private key, let the watchdog OS have the public key and check all the binaries. A rootkit can't break that check unless it breaks the encryption, which is extremly hard, almost impossible. The trick is simply to not look for a rootkit, but just anything that differs from a clean OS.
### Yes, it is entertaining how many people solve the problem that "this OS gets infected" by saying, aha, we'll write another OS to watch if this OS gets infected, and never wonder, what happens when the 'another' OS gets infected.
How should that watchdog OS get infected? Its not talking to the internet the whole day, but instead doesn't do anything other then watching files. Sure, there is still a tiny tiny chance that it might get infected by some good old buffer overflow, but that is really so extremly tiny compared to the chance that a normal OS gets infected these days, that it doesn't really matter.
Can't the same trick be used to make a rootkit-safe environment? Launch a watchdog application and let that watchdog application launch the real OS in a virtualized environment, as soon as a rootkit wants to fiddle the watchdog application takes notice and there would be no way for the rootkit to either detect or by pass the watchdog. Or even more drastic, launch each (or most) process in a virtualized environment, would probally be a little slow, but should provide a extremly secure OS.
Pandemonium was railbased from what I remember, gameplay was still 2d, only graphics where rendered in 3d, but the 3d added little or nothing to the gameplay (like Clockwork Knight and a lot of other early attemps to do something usefull with 3D). TombRaider on the other side was 3d, however it came after Mario64 (this however varried, in PAL regions TombRaider might have been earlier) and it was a lot less '3d' then Mario, since the controls where player oriented, not camera oriented as in Mario64 and controls where also digital, not analog. Now one might argue if that should be called '3d', but today almost all platform games control like Mario, while very very few go the TombRaider way, even TombRaiderLegend has switched to Mario style controls, which is why I said Mario64 basically invented 3D jump'n runs. There have been games before Mario that where jump'n run and 3D, but Mario64 as set the mark on how things should be done, while pretty much all other 3d jump'n run attemps of that age are dead now.
### The Resident Evil games just don't work for me - to me, they're too "arcadish" in that I find the story flimsy, an excuse for the gameplay.
The story of RE is certainly very B-movie like, but I still found the story extremly fun and enjoyable, nice characters, interesting places and best of all, all RE parts actually connect to each other quite well, some however better then other, RE0 and RE4 where pretty dissapointing in terms of story continuity.
### The gameplay was solid and fun, but it was always in service to the story: even your most basic actions were affected by a choice that you make in the first few minutes (which God you're aligned with affects how you interact with different monsters).
I found that choice in the beginning terrible, since it was a meaningless choice, if I remember correctly you are presented with a blue, green and red thingy and have to pick one, neither of which has any meaning at that point in the game, very annoying. Another thing that I found awful in Eternal Darkness was the character switching, nothing wrong with a few more characters to play, but Eternal Darkness switched between so many that it was extremly hard to keep track or fell anything for them, was just yet another random person to switch to.
### On top of that, they had a brilliant sanity system - as you lost sanity,
The sanity system was fun, but only for like the first three hours of the game, then it simply was annoying, since it had no influence on the gameplay at all, it was simply yet-another-sanity-sequence which one had to wait to get over. It certainly was a nifty idea, but the implementation was very non-impressive.
### If you have not played this game and you want a truly scary experience, give it a look.
Never found Eternal Darkness much scarry at all, just to much bones and blood and stuff, all just looked fake and uninteresting in terms of story, since there was nothing happening to care about. That said I never played through the game, only the first 8h or so, simply got bored of it.
### The next hallmark was X-Com, Mass destruction of the battlefield which to this day still hasnt been duplicated.
Speaking about X-Com, one current game that reminded me a lot of it was Full Spectrum Warrior, while it is far simpler then X-Com (no massive battlefield destruction beside some prescripted events, only prescripted mission, little to no enemy AI, no worldmap, etc.), it managed to cover that 'move your troup around in hostile environment, run from cover to cover'-feel extremly well, it really felt a lot like good old X-Com, but with a current look and gamepad based controls. Now, I am not saying that Full Spectrum Warrior is a great game, it has quite a lot of flaws, but I think the core gameplay mechanics have a lot of potential and they managed to provide a very round-based feel in a realtime environment. Now if just somebody could take that core gameplay of Full Spectrum Warriror and add all that around that made X-Com great, that might make a hell of a game, more interesting then just another X-Com remake with prettier tiles, like Aftermath and friends.
### Mario 64 was nothing more than a tech demo for the N64 system.
Mario64 was *much* more then just a tech demo, it basically invented the 3D jump'n run and also did it almost perfectly (only new thing I see in todays third person games is that objects go transparent if they obscure the player, everything else is still very much the same as in Mario64). The most important point of Mario64 isn't even just the graphics or camera control (which worked very well most of the time, far better then anything before), even so they where awesome for the time, but the gameplay. The gameplay in Mario64 is really nothing short of mindblowing, even till today I have seen very very few games, if any, that match the fun of playing Mario64 and its not only the fun of solving the levels, but the fun of simply controlling Mario, running around jumping and stuff. Very very few other games start to be fun when you just run around aimless, Mario64 however was fun, due to its great jumping mechanics and great dynamics (you have at least half a dozen different jumps at your disposal).
Mario64 looked and felt like Mario should feel and managed to be fun pretty much all the time, something which MarioSunshine miserably failed to accompilish.
### Super Mario World
Well, SMW wasn't a bad game, but I consider it one of the lower points of the series, the graphics where pretty ugly compared to SMB3 (more colorfull yes, but drawing style was quite ugly) and the levels far less imaginatife then in SMB3. Beside standing on a slope made you automatically move down in SMW which was really extremly annoying. After having seen SMB3 SMW really had little to impress, the best of SMW was probally the worldmap and Yoshi, but the rest wasn't all that great. Why a lausy cape when you can have Racoon-suit =:)
Yoshi's Island on the other side was great again, the worldmap ended up being very primitive and annoying, but graphics style and gameplay where again groundbreaking and much more then just a little update on the Mario series as SMW was.
### Games, as they are now, are generally horrible.
Well, no. There are games that are horrible, but there is a easy solution: Don't play or buy the horrible ones. Psychonauts, Fahrenheit, Dreamfall, Advent Rising, Geometry Wars, Katamari Damacy, Shadow of the Collosus, NewSuperMarioBros, etc., there are plenty of very good or even great games around that aren't yet another first person shooter or FIFA, there is even a new Sensibble Soccer around if you want a different kind of soccer. The core problem is more with the gamers who often don't buy those games, then with the publishers who don't make them all that often. If the innovative and creative games don't get good sales its no wonder when publishers move to stuff that actually sells well.
Certainly true, I think the major problem with Wii is that Nintendo itself doesn't really know what games it is meant to work with. Sure, WiiSports is a nice example of something that works with it, but thats it, with almost all other games shown the Wiimote alone does not work, instead we have to plug in that Nunchuck attachment. The Nunchuk attachment however really looks more like a bug-fix then some well thought out desiged to allow 'normal' games, since it completly lacks any symmetry with the Wiimote itself, which just doesn't make all that much sense. Why have one device shaped like a remote and another one, which is held the same way, totally different? Wouldn't it have made more sense to go with a symetrical design, ie. a improved Wiimote (analogstick or such) for both hands? That not only would get rid of the stupid cable and allow full 3d for the other hand, it would also give you two Wiimotes for multipler gamers (assuming that most multipler games will work with one).
I am looking forward to what Nintendo will come up finally in terms of games and gameplay, however I don't expect anything great, since the overall design just has to many more or less obvious faults at the moment with no clear solution how they could be solved in a satisfactory way. Due to price and VirtualConsole Wii still is kind of a must-buy, but I don't see it as half that great like many people make it out to be.
Everything we can do to improve that situation makes the dream of going paperless more reachable.
To go paperless we need one simply thing, cheap ePaper, and that has nothing to do with GUI or general interface design, since no matter how good your interfaces are getting, you need a big display for efficent paperless work, and not just 21" large, but something as large as the desk infront of which you sit, heck actually making the whole desk a display and the wall behind it a display would be a good idea. Anyway, since large high quality screens will probally take a while to get cheap enough to be affortable and since you might want a easy way to carry your stuff around, the solution would be cheap ePaper, so instead of one large display you end up with half a dozen small DIN-A4 size ePaper tablets and if you press 'print' instead of getting a paper printout, it ends up in the memory of your wirelessly connected ePaper tablet.
Its a nifty demo, but sadly that type of interface is like 95% pure toying around, it doesn't make navitagion easier, it doesn't give you a better overview, it doesn't even try to provide a fulltext search, instead you can now move the same unintuitive icons around with physics engine... yeah, great... The first thing I would expect from any 'new' kind of interface is that makes icons go away, completly, and while at it, throw the applications out of the windows as well. I mean where is the use in having a dozen equally looking pdf icons? Why don't do the really intuitive thing instead and present the document itself instead of an icon to abstract it? The demo also shows that shortly, however it isn't able to handle that well, since there seems to be a completle lack of zooming, thus you only get very few documents visible on screen, which really isn't so much better of what we have today. Now simply adding zoom on the other side wouldn't be enough either, since you don't only want to zoom into a thumbnail, but you want to zoom into the document itself, so you don't get to launch an app, but instead just zoom into the document since it is large enough to read it. Now this has some problems itself, like where do you pack the menu and toolbars or how to handle multiple documents at once or how to actually zoom (press a button or use mousewheel or some completly new control device (Wiimote)?), but the demo doesn't even try to solve those problems, instead we simply get old icons rendered in 3d with physics engine, which is nifty to look at for a minute, but doesn't really help much at all.
To those interesting in new interface ideas I recomment to read The Humane Interface by Jef Raskins, who really does propose a new style of interface that is both a lot more intuitive then what we have today as well as a lot more efficient, instead of just adding bell and whistles like most other 'new' interfaces do.
Kirby Canvas Curse is actually suprisingly boring and challengless, the only reason why it is 'fun' is because its something new, but seriously, I was over that 'new' thingy after half an hour and then the resulting game was just pretty damn boring. Not that the other Kirby games were huge challenges, but direct character control at least provide a better feel for the game then that "look at the screen for the some time and draw a line here and there" Canvas Curse style gameplay. Trauma Center is more interesting, since the stylus is used in better ways there, its however also not without fault, since it allows very little freedom and thus boils down to some who-can-click-faster mini-game, thats however the fault of the game design, not the controls. The best use of the stylus I have seen so far was BrainAge, since that really felt quite different then normal games and went far bejoint of being just classic old game play with new controls. However seen as a game BrainAge is certainly a bit on the short side.
So far I still havn't seen a "killer-app" for the stylus, there are certainly some ok stylus games out there, but non gets anywhere near to what Mario64 did for the analog-stick. Most developers are still strugeling hard to find any use for the stylus and most of the great games on the DS make little or no use of it (Mario64, MarioKart, Castlevania, AdvanceWars). That doesn't mean that the second screen is useless, its nice to have the map on a seperate screen in Castlevania or Mario64, and doing camera control via touchscreen in Mario64 is also a nice way to compensate for the lack of buttons, but those could probally also been done by providing two analogsticks and a bigger screen instead of an additional touchscreen.
As for the 'keeping the player immersed'...anyone who thinks the way to do that is to keep me having to do things is barking up the wrong tree. I was completely immersed in TLJ and TLJ2
Remember the "fight" against the snapjaw or the "fight" against the gribbler? TLJ as a whole was great, but those scenes very far far away from being immersive. Use 'spear with snapjaw' isn't exactly engaging, Quick-Time-Events do a much better job of making those events feel real and meaning full while still keeping the game simple to play (no need to study complicated punch combos).
All I remember is that the controls were so annoying at start
Thats why there is a tutorial, the controls are very different from other games, but they are also very simple, since there are no buttons to remember. Its just left analogsticks lets you walk, right one lets you control the arm or whatever is relevant in the current situation and then all those Quick-Time events Beside from that the tutorial was actually the coolest tutorial I have seen in a long time.
Incidentally, I'm one of the people who hated Myst.
I think the reason people have problems with Myst, I don't like it myself either, is very simple, it lacks characters. Its just a sterile world full of logic puzzles with no NPCs or fun inbetween. Still it seems to have worked for many people and it certainly was something different then Sierra and LucasArts stuff.
And I'm not sure why Maniac Mansion is on the list...the ability to do different things different ways?
Maniac Mansion inventod pretty much everything in terms of point&click, before it, adventure games where mostly text-interpreters or at best text-interpreters with pictures added, Maniac Mansion added the whole mouse (joystick back then) driven point&click interface, almost everything that came after Maniac Mansion only polished a bit here (a bit less verbs, graphic icons in the inventory, etc.). And everything that is point&click today still plays pretty much the same as Maniac Mansion back 20 years ago.
The great thing of Indigo Prophecy was that it went bejoint was adventure games are, it wasn't just adventure game + shit action inserted like so many games before, instead the action was an integrated part of the game that almost never felt out of place, it all fitted together. And Indigo Prophecy never fell back to cutscenes, if they hero did something, the player did it as well, there was no sit back and watch, it was always 'do stuff'.
### What I'd like to hear is just exactly how the wii controller works with a fps.
Did you ever play TimeSplitters or PerfectDark? When you go into aim-mode in those games you get pretty much what the Wii will do or at least how the first games will do it, ie. you use the Wiimote basically the same as a lightgun when you aim at the screen and to turn you have to move your pointer out of the screen. The important point here is that the crosshair is *not* centered on the screen. OperationFlashpoint is another game that works with a non-center crosshair. Now the thing is that you won't get full turn-as-fast-as-you-can style of gameplay like with a mouse, turning left or right will still be very similar to a standard analogstick, just probally with a larger range of movement.
### Because what's perfect with the mouse is,
The mouse is precise, it is however not 'perfect', there is more to good controls then accuracy. For example I can easily imagine a controller that would be much more precise and easy to use for Guitare Hero then that plastic guitare, however, the point isn't to have precision, but something that works well with the game and in Guitare Hero half the fun comes from being able to manage that non-intuitive plastic guitare instead of just having to press a few buttons. And I imagine it being not much different with the Wiimote, lightguns are after all lots of fun, not because they are more precise then the mouse, but simply because they let you as a player get a more realstic feel for aiming then just move the mouse a bit up and down. Another advantage of the Wiimote is that it requires much less turning around then a mouse, since only the cursor moves, not the whole who, thus it probally will work great for those that suffer motion sickness. I am however not so sure if the Wiimote will ever work for pro-gamer matches in something as fast as UT.
My biggest unsolved problem with the Wiimote so far is what happens when you do not play, ie. what happens if you put your hand to a rest for a second and forget all aiming? Will your character start to spin around like crazy since your pointer points into pretty random direction or will there be some magic that stops it from happening? It simply doesn't look like there is an easy straight forward solution to that problem. The only real solution I could imagine is designing games that really are fundamentally different from todays games and for example don't use the Wiimote as just a mouse replacment, but really as 'your hand in the game', that however leaves the question open how you would then actually move.
The Wiimote is an intersting device, but I am far from certain that it will work half as good as most people seem to think it will. And there is of course the throuble with the games, will people figure out how to use it in a good way? Or do we get just classic games with a cursor added (Zelda, Mario, I am looking at you...)?
Man, when will these game developers get the idea that *story is not the point*.
They got that idea like 20 years ago and implemented a heck of a lot fun games in the meantime, storyless games have been done to death. That doesn't mean that there shouldn't be more games that focus more on the fun then on the story, but heavily story based games is something that hasn't been done all that much. Sure, there have been plenty of games with some sort of story, but most of them integrated them poorly or not at all into the actually gameplay and last not least most games story are very primitive, something along the lines of "shoot everything that moves" packed into a nice surrounding, but thats it.
Storys however can tell so much more then just about heros shooting the badguys, Facade is probally the most drastic example of a game that does something very different in terms of story then what you get in normal games. For those that don't know, Facade is about a couple who are having relationship throuble with the player inbetween them watching them and talking to them, thus influencing what is happening. The game itself is very primitive and doesn't go in terms of gameplay bejoint old school text adventures, but its also pretty much a very primitive 'Holodeck'-experince, meaning a story where you take part, which however doesn't only focus on you, but also has a life of its own. The Last Express kind of similar, the player has to solve a murder on the Orient Express, however the whole game is (almost) realtime, people move around in the train, talk and stuff, completly independ of the player. Most other games today are different, when the player doesn't act, nothing happens, the bad guys will run their same partrol routes forever without ever doing something that looks half intelligent and given the player nothing more then a gun to 'interact' with other people in the game.
###...that someone bitching about the narrative flow of a game had such stupid-ass things as 'button pumping endurance'.
The 'button pumping endurance' was their because your character went through some endurance requiring thingy at that very moment, it wasn't just there as a filler, it was there so that the player had to go through the very same throuble as his hero, no sitting back and watching a cutscene, Indigo Prophecy has from what I remember *NO* pure cutscenes, its all gameplay, not gameplay where you have 100% control, but it still keeps the player involved and that is the important part.
### Or The Longest Journey, where the only real cutscreens are speech
Speech yes, plenty of speech, tons of it, so much actually that most reviews complained about it. If you know what to do its almost like an audio book, click a bit here, sit back listen to dialog, click a bit there listen to yet another bit of dialog and so forth. I love TLJ, but its the very example of a game where you have very little control over the game, its simply sit back and listen to dialog and dialog is a cutscene, in Indigo Prophecy on the other side dialog is gameplay, no sit back and listen since its all time based and you only got limited amount of time to make your choices. Dreamfall/TLJ2 is ever worse, since there removed pretty much all puzzles, all that is left is run from A to B listen to dialog, run to C listen to dialog, run to D,... repeat till the game is over. Dreamfall still has a nice story, but the gameplay in Dreamfall is nothing short of plain awefull.
### Indigo Prophecy, on the other hand, was so annoying I ended up stopping it five minutes in.
Sorry for you, but then you missed the best thing the adventure genre (if you want to fit Indigo Prophecy there) had to provide since basically the The Longest Journey and the most innovative thing since probally Maniac Mansion (ok, Myst and The Last Express earn probally a place in there as well...).
### It doesn't do anything that, for example, "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis" didn't do in 1992, except be in 3D, which was done at least as far back as "Grim Fandango" in 1998.
I beg to differ, the whole gameplay is fundamentally different from Indy4 and pretty much all other adventure games. Indigo Prophecy has no real puzzles, is full of action, endurance section, timed dialog and timed events, in short its for most part realtime based, if you don't act you die, get catched or other stuff happens. Most adventure games are the very oposite, no timed stuff at all, nothing in the world ever moves until you do something and such. The whole paching in Indigo Prophecy is nothing like what you get in classic adventure games. The only game that I would say that is somewhat similar to Indigo Prophecy is The Last Express, which also plays almost completly in realtime and cares even less for what the player is doing. Indigo Prophecy is really more an interactive movie done right then a normal adventure game.
### It's also actually quite linear, and very short,
Short yes, but linear no. Its true that the whole story itself is linear and beside the three endings which you chose in the very final fight offers no choice, however in the single scenes you have a heck of a lot of freedom and get do pretty much whatever you want.
The story as a whole certainly has its faults, but it was still the most gripping one I have seen in the last years in gaming.
### Clearly someone at Microsoft severely fucked up if people are finding it necessary to modify their XBox 360's just so they don't overheat.
Is this really for the heat or more for the sound? In the last generation mods that replace the default fan with a more silent one have happened as well.
### Why is it too much? Games sell for $60 now new. They typically offer 15-20 hours of gameplay. Sounds to be the ratio is exactly right.
They can reuse a lot of artwork, models, engines an stuff in episodic content, so comparing it to a full game deveolped from scratch isn't fair, its additional content, not a new game so it should be priced lower. Beside from that new PC games are still more in the range of $40-$50, not $60 (thats only XBox360), so something like $15-10 seems like a much better price for an episode.
### You've already mentioned Castlevania, but there's also Meteos, Sonic Rush, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Sk8land (at last a fresh Tony Hawk's game),
While those are fine games, there is the throuble that not every third party games is as good as 'Castlevania', just look at NfS:Most Wanted or Burnout for the DS, those games are horrible, they look like junk and they play like junk. While the DS is a good bit away from the power of the PSP, there is really no excuse for releasing games in such a terrible state, especially since the DS is the only console around where those games downright suck. Now I don't know the reason why those games got released in the state that there are in, but it feels like somebody isn't taking the DS for full and simply rushing out some quick&dirty ports of a popular frenchise to get som money, while all other consoles get the 'full' version of those games.
Given this anwer to the question if a recently released XBox game will run on XBox360 I don't think they are doing a recompile, at least not with the source code, since Microsoft doesn't have that. Either they just tweak the emulator on a game by game basis or they are doing some kind of decompile/recompile thing to get a native XBox360 binary. However, so far I couldn't find any information of what they are really doing and why it is going so slowly.
http://ragnartornquist.com/?m=200603
Will it run on an xbox360 (emulated xbox) ?
Not for the time being, no. Microsoft alone makes the call whether or not to support a game through emulation, and if so, they'll issue a patch for download at a later stage. I hope they do, of course, but we have absolutely no say in that decision. They're good people, and they like the game, so maybe we'll get lucky. Fingers crossed.
What? What you just described was completely flashy and serves absolutely no functional purpose whatsoever.
Well, yeah, it doesn't have any "functional purpose", neither to almost all other interface things. Interfaces are not about adding functions, but about allowing you easier access to functions already there and adding preferences panels to the backside of a window seems like a good improvment, not earth shattering, but definitvly a good thing. Thats because it gives the preferences dialog a fixed position, its no longer a magic window that pops up out of nowhere, a much easier concept to get for the average user.
True, but thats kind of the point, all good uses of 3D in user interface design I have seen so far where basically just little additions to 2D, zooming interfaces/windows, drop shadows, rotating windows, etc. All of them leave the basic interface flat and only use the 3D emphasis things in that flat interface (the current focused window, give you a better overview by zooming out, etc.). Humans are really a lot better at flat stuff then full 3D, since with flat all that interface has a lot less room to go missing. You really don't want to end up with your preferences windows poping up behind your head were you can't see it, but thats basically what you get if you move interface design to full 3d.
### When you read a book, do you only read the last chapter because you now "have a more full life" ? Do you fast forward movies?
If the last page of the chapter before the final chapter says "Please restart at Chapter1, the last Chapter will only be unlocked after a second read through" would you do it? Well, thats how many games are build, these days a little less drastic then in the games of 2D, where some games where build exactly that way, but games are still filled with stuff that you can only reach by doing tedious tasks over and over and over again. Hardly anybody would mind if you can't skip through the story, but having to play the same level over and over again just to see that extra cutscene, extra area or whatever is just no fun for a lot of people.
### If you have to play 30 hours to finnish a game, whether you play those 30 hours in three days or in two months doesn't change the game.
Actually it does matter a lot, with some games less then with other, but in the time you don't play a game you forget a lot, if the game forces you to memorize some insanly long combos you might not have much throuble if you play 5h a day, but if you only play 30h every few days there a very good change that you will never memorize all those stuff you have to remember. Worst example is probally Zelda Majora's Masks, the game will *delete* your savegame (or at least the last few hours of it) if you switch the console off without going to a savepoint before, something that might not be dramatic if you play without time constrains, but if you haven't played for two weeks such a little detail can be easily forgotten and you can say bye,bye to your savegame.
Slashdot Mirror
### Unfortunately, you are committed to looking exactly for something specific, the rootkit writer knows what you are looking for, and should be able to get by your defenses with some ridiculously bad disguise.
No, its actually very easy, just use some cryptography and sign all 'good' binaries with a private key, let the watchdog OS have the public key and check all the binaries. A rootkit can't break that check unless it breaks the encryption, which is extremly hard, almost impossible. The trick is simply to not look for a rootkit, but just anything that differs from a clean OS.
### Yes, it is entertaining how many people solve the problem that "this OS gets infected" by saying, aha, we'll write another OS to watch if this OS gets infected, and never wonder, what happens when the 'another' OS gets infected.
How should that watchdog OS get infected? Its not talking to the internet the whole day, but instead doesn't do anything other then watching files. Sure, there is still a tiny tiny chance that it might get infected by some good old buffer overflow, but that is really so extremly tiny compared to the chance that a normal OS gets infected these days, that it doesn't really matter.
Can't the same trick be used to make a rootkit-safe environment? Launch a watchdog application and let that watchdog application launch the real OS in a virtualized environment, as soon as a rootkit wants to fiddle the watchdog application takes notice and there would be no way for the rootkit to either detect or by pass the watchdog. Or even more drastic, launch each (or most) process in a virtualized environment, would probally be a little slow, but should provide a extremly secure OS.
Pandemonium was railbased from what I remember, gameplay was still 2d, only graphics where rendered in 3d, but the 3d added little or nothing to the gameplay (like Clockwork Knight and a lot of other early attemps to do something usefull with 3D). TombRaider on the other side was 3d, however it came after Mario64 (this however varried, in PAL regions TombRaider might have been earlier) and it was a lot less '3d' then Mario, since the controls where player oriented, not camera oriented as in Mario64 and controls where also digital, not analog. Now one might argue if that should be called '3d', but today almost all platform games control like Mario, while very very few go the TombRaider way, even TombRaiderLegend has switched to Mario style controls, which is why I said Mario64 basically invented 3D jump'n runs. There have been games before Mario that where jump'n run and 3D, but Mario64 as set the mark on how things should be done, while pretty much all other 3d jump'n run attemps of that age are dead now.
### The Resident Evil games just don't work for me - to me, they're too "arcadish" in that I find the story flimsy, an excuse for the gameplay.
The story of RE is certainly very B-movie like, but I still found the story extremly fun and enjoyable, nice characters, interesting places and best of all, all RE parts actually connect to each other quite well, some however better then other, RE0 and RE4 where pretty dissapointing in terms of story continuity.
### The gameplay was solid and fun, but it was always in service to the story: even your most basic actions were affected by a choice that you make in the first few minutes (which God you're aligned with affects how you interact with different monsters).
I found that choice in the beginning terrible, since it was a meaningless choice, if I remember correctly you are presented with a blue, green and red thingy and have to pick one, neither of which has any meaning at that point in the game, very annoying. Another thing that I found awful in Eternal Darkness was the character switching, nothing wrong with a few more characters to play, but Eternal Darkness switched between so many that it was extremly hard to keep track or fell anything for them, was just yet another random person to switch to.
### On top of that, they had a brilliant sanity system - as you lost sanity,
The sanity system was fun, but only for like the first three hours of the game, then it simply was annoying, since it had no influence on the gameplay at all, it was simply yet-another-sanity-sequence which one had to wait to get over. It certainly was a nifty idea, but the implementation was very non-impressive.
### If you have not played this game and you want a truly scary experience, give it a look.
Never found Eternal Darkness much scarry at all, just to much bones and blood and stuff, all just looked fake and uninteresting in terms of story, since there was nothing happening to care about. That said I never played through the game, only the first 8h or so, simply got bored of it.
### The next hallmark was X-Com, Mass destruction of the battlefield which to this day still hasnt been duplicated.
Speaking about X-Com, one current game that reminded me a lot of it was Full Spectrum Warrior, while it is far simpler then X-Com (no massive battlefield destruction beside some prescripted events, only prescripted mission, little to no enemy AI, no worldmap, etc.), it managed to cover that 'move your troup around in hostile environment, run from cover to cover'-feel extremly well, it really felt a lot like good old X-Com, but with a current look and gamepad based controls. Now, I am not saying that Full Spectrum Warrior is a great game, it has quite a lot of flaws, but I think the core gameplay mechanics have a lot of potential and they managed to provide a very round-based feel in a realtime environment. Now if just somebody could take that core gameplay of Full Spectrum Warriror and add all that around that made X-Com great, that might make a hell of a game, more interesting then just another X-Com remake with prettier tiles, like Aftermath and friends.
### Mario 64 was nothing more than a tech demo for the N64 system.
Mario64 was *much* more then just a tech demo, it basically invented the 3D jump'n run and also did it almost perfectly (only new thing I see in todays third person games is that objects go transparent if they obscure the player, everything else is still very much the same as in Mario64). The most important point of Mario64 isn't even just the graphics or camera control (which worked very well most of the time, far better then anything before), even so they where awesome for the time, but the gameplay. The gameplay in Mario64 is really nothing short of mindblowing, even till today I have seen very very few games, if any, that match the fun of playing Mario64 and its not only the fun of solving the levels, but the fun of simply controlling Mario, running around jumping and stuff. Very very few other games start to be fun when you just run around aimless, Mario64 however was fun, due to its great jumping mechanics and great dynamics (you have at least half a dozen different jumps at your disposal).
Mario64 looked and felt like Mario should feel and managed to be fun pretty much all the time, something which MarioSunshine miserably failed to accompilish.
### Super Mario World
Well, SMW wasn't a bad game, but I consider it one of the lower points of the series, the graphics where pretty ugly compared to SMB3 (more colorfull yes, but drawing style was quite ugly) and the levels far less imaginatife then in SMB3. Beside standing on a slope made you automatically move down in SMW which was really extremly annoying. After having seen SMB3 SMW really had little to impress, the best of SMW was probally the worldmap and Yoshi, but the rest wasn't all that great. Why a lausy cape when you can have Racoon-suit =:)
Yoshi's Island on the other side was great again, the worldmap ended up being very primitive and annoying, but graphics style and gameplay where again groundbreaking and much more then just a little update on the Mario series as SMW was.
### Games, as they are now, are generally horrible.
Well, no. There are games that are horrible, but there is a easy solution: Don't play or buy the horrible ones. Psychonauts, Fahrenheit, Dreamfall, Advent Rising, Geometry Wars, Katamari Damacy, Shadow of the Collosus, NewSuperMarioBros, etc., there are plenty of very good or even great games around that aren't yet another first person shooter or FIFA, there is even a new Sensibble Soccer around if you want a different kind of soccer. The core problem is more with the gamers who often don't buy those games, then with the publishers who don't make them all that often. If the innovative and creative games don't get good sales its no wonder when publishers move to stuff that actually sells well.
Certainly true, I think the major problem with Wii is that Nintendo itself doesn't really know what games it is meant to work with. Sure, WiiSports is a nice example of something that works with it, but thats it, with almost all other games shown the Wiimote alone does not work, instead we have to plug in that Nunchuck attachment. The Nunchuk attachment however really looks more like a bug-fix then some well thought out desiged to allow 'normal' games, since it completly lacks any symmetry with the Wiimote itself, which just doesn't make all that much sense. Why have one device shaped like a remote and another one, which is held the same way, totally different? Wouldn't it have made more sense to go with a symetrical design, ie. a improved Wiimote (analogstick or such) for both hands? That not only would get rid of the stupid cable and allow full 3d for the other hand, it would also give you two Wiimotes for multipler gamers (assuming that most multipler games will work with one).
I am looking forward to what Nintendo will come up finally in terms of games and gameplay, however I don't expect anything great, since the overall design just has to many more or less obvious faults at the moment with no clear solution how they could be solved in a satisfactory way. Due to price and VirtualConsole Wii still is kind of a must-buy, but I don't see it as half that great like many people make it out to be.
Its a nifty demo, but sadly that type of interface is like 95% pure toying around, it doesn't make navitagion easier, it doesn't give you a better overview, it doesn't even try to provide a fulltext search, instead you can now move the same unintuitive icons around with physics engine... yeah, great... The first thing I would expect from any 'new' kind of interface is that makes icons go away, completly, and while at it, throw the applications out of the windows as well. I mean where is the use in having a dozen equally looking pdf icons? Why don't do the really intuitive thing instead and present the document itself instead of an icon to abstract it? The demo also shows that shortly, however it isn't able to handle that well, since there seems to be a completle lack of zooming, thus you only get very few documents visible on screen, which really isn't so much better of what we have today. Now simply adding zoom on the other side wouldn't be enough either, since you don't only want to zoom into a thumbnail, but you want to zoom into the document itself, so you don't get to launch an app, but instead just zoom into the document since it is large enough to read it. Now this has some problems itself, like where do you pack the menu and toolbars or how to handle multiple documents at once or how to actually zoom (press a button or use mousewheel or some completly new control device (Wiimote)?), but the demo doesn't even try to solve those problems, instead we simply get old icons rendered in 3d with physics engine, which is nifty to look at for a minute, but doesn't really help much at all.
To those interesting in new interface ideas I recomment to read The Humane Interface by Jef Raskins, who really does propose a new style of interface that is both a lot more intuitive then what we have today as well as a lot more efficient, instead of just adding bell and whistles like most other 'new' interfaces do.
Kirby Canvas Curse is actually suprisingly boring and challengless, the only reason why it is 'fun' is because its something new, but seriously, I was over that 'new' thingy after half an hour and then the resulting game was just pretty damn boring. Not that the other Kirby games were huge challenges, but direct character control at least provide a better feel for the game then that "look at the screen for the some time and draw a line here and there" Canvas Curse style gameplay. Trauma Center is more interesting, since the stylus is used in better ways there, its however also not without fault, since it allows very little freedom and thus boils down to some who-can-click-faster mini-game, thats however the fault of the game design, not the controls. The best use of the stylus I have seen so far was BrainAge, since that really felt quite different then normal games and went far bejoint of being just classic old game play with new controls. However seen as a game BrainAge is certainly a bit on the short side.
So far I still havn't seen a "killer-app" for the stylus, there are certainly some ok stylus games out there, but non gets anywhere near to what Mario64 did for the analog-stick. Most developers are still strugeling hard to find any use for the stylus and most of the great games on the DS make little or no use of it (Mario64, MarioKart, Castlevania, AdvanceWars). That doesn't mean that the second screen is useless, its nice to have the map on a seperate screen in Castlevania or Mario64, and doing camera control via touchscreen in Mario64 is also a nice way to compensate for the lack of buttons, but those could probally also been done by providing two analogsticks and a bigger screen instead of an additional touchscreen.
Remember the "fight" against the snapjaw or the "fight" against the gribbler? TLJ as a whole was great, but those scenes very far far away from being immersive. Use 'spear with snapjaw' isn't exactly engaging, Quick-Time-Events do a much better job of making those events feel real and meaning full while still keeping the game simple to play (no need to study complicated punch combos).
Thats why there is a tutorial, the controls are very different from other games, but they are also very simple, since there are no buttons to remember. Its just left analogsticks lets you walk, right one lets you control the arm or whatever is relevant in the current situation and then all those Quick-Time events Beside from that the tutorial was actually the coolest tutorial I have seen in a long time.
I think the reason people have problems with Myst, I don't like it myself either, is very simple, it lacks characters. Its just a sterile world full of logic puzzles with no NPCs or fun inbetween. Still it seems to have worked for many people and it certainly was something different then Sierra and LucasArts stuff.
Maniac Mansion inventod pretty much everything in terms of point&click, before it, adventure games where mostly text-interpreters or at best text-interpreters with pictures added, Maniac Mansion added the whole mouse (joystick back then) driven point&click interface, almost everything that came after Maniac Mansion only polished a bit here (a bit less verbs, graphic icons in the inventory, etc.). And everything that is point&click today still plays pretty much the same as Maniac Mansion back 20 years ago.
The great thing of Indigo Prophecy was that it went bejoint was adventure games are, it wasn't just adventure game + shit action inserted like so many games before, instead the action was an integrated part of the game that almost never felt out of place, it all fitted together. And Indigo Prophecy never fell back to cutscenes, if they hero did something, the player did it as well, there was no sit back and watch, it was always 'do stuff'.
### What I'd like to hear is just exactly how the wii controller works with a fps.
Did you ever play TimeSplitters or PerfectDark? When you go into aim-mode in those games you get pretty much what the Wii will do or at least how the first games will do it, ie. you use the Wiimote basically the same as a lightgun when you aim at the screen and to turn you have to move your pointer out of the screen. The important point here is that the crosshair is *not* centered on the screen. OperationFlashpoint is another game that works with a non-center crosshair. Now the thing is that you won't get full turn-as-fast-as-you-can style of gameplay like with a mouse, turning left or right will still be very similar to a standard analogstick, just probally with a larger range of movement.
### Because what's perfect with the mouse is,
The mouse is precise, it is however not 'perfect', there is more to good controls then accuracy. For example I can easily imagine a controller that would be much more precise and easy to use for Guitare Hero then that plastic guitare, however, the point isn't to have precision, but something that works well with the game and in Guitare Hero half the fun comes from being able to manage that non-intuitive plastic guitare instead of just having to press a few buttons. And I imagine it being not much different with the Wiimote, lightguns are after all lots of fun, not because they are more precise then the mouse, but simply because they let you as a player get a more realstic feel for aiming then just move the mouse a bit up and down. Another advantage of the Wiimote is that it requires much less turning around then a mouse, since only the cursor moves, not the whole who, thus it probally will work great for those that suffer motion sickness. I am however not so sure if the Wiimote will ever work for pro-gamer matches in something as fast as UT.
My biggest unsolved problem with the Wiimote so far is what happens when you do not play, ie. what happens if you put your hand to a rest for a second and forget all aiming? Will your character start to spin around like crazy since your pointer points into pretty random direction or will there be some magic that stops it from happening? It simply doesn't look like there is an easy straight forward solution to that problem. The only real solution I could imagine is designing games that really are fundamentally different from todays games and for example don't use the Wiimote as just a mouse replacment, but really as 'your hand in the game', that however leaves the question open how you would then actually move.
The Wiimote is an intersting device, but I am far from certain that it will work half as good as most people seem to think it will. And there is of course the throuble with the games, will people figure out how to use it in a good way? Or do we get just classic games with a cursor added (Zelda, Mario, I am looking at you...)?
They got that idea like 20 years ago and implemented a heck of a lot fun games in the meantime, storyless games have been done to death. That doesn't mean that there shouldn't be more games that focus more on the fun then on the story, but heavily story based games is something that hasn't been done all that much. Sure, there have been plenty of games with some sort of story, but most of them integrated them poorly or not at all into the actually gameplay and last not least most games story are very primitive, something along the lines of "shoot everything that moves" packed into a nice surrounding, but thats it.
Storys however can tell so much more then just about heros shooting the badguys, Facade is probally the most drastic example of a game that does something very different in terms of story then what you get in normal games. For those that don't know, Facade is about a couple who are having relationship throuble with the player inbetween them watching them and talking to them, thus influencing what is happening. The game itself is very primitive and doesn't go in terms of gameplay bejoint old school text adventures, but its also pretty much a very primitive 'Holodeck'-experince, meaning a story where you take part, which however doesn't only focus on you, but also has a life of its own. The Last Express kind of similar, the player has to solve a murder on the Orient Express, however the whole game is (almost) realtime, people move around in the train, talk and stuff, completly independ of the player. Most other games today are different, when the player doesn't act, nothing happens, the bad guys will run their same partrol routes forever without ever doing something that looks half intelligent and given the player nothing more then a gun to 'interact' with other people in the game.
### ...that someone bitching about the narrative flow of a game had such stupid-ass things as 'button pumping endurance'.
... repeat till the game is over. Dreamfall still has a nice story, but the gameplay in Dreamfall is nothing short of plain awefull.
The 'button pumping endurance' was their because your character went through some endurance requiring thingy at that very moment, it wasn't just there as a filler, it was there so that the player had to go through the very same throuble as his hero, no sitting back and watching a cutscene, Indigo Prophecy has from what I remember *NO* pure cutscenes, its all gameplay, not gameplay where you have 100% control, but it still keeps the player involved and that is the important part.
### Or The Longest Journey, where the only real cutscreens are speech
Speech yes, plenty of speech, tons of it, so much actually that most reviews complained about it. If you know what to do its almost like an audio book, click a bit here, sit back listen to dialog, click a bit there listen to yet another bit of dialog and so forth. I love TLJ, but its the very example of a game where you have very little control over the game, its simply sit back and listen to dialog and dialog is a cutscene, in Indigo Prophecy on the other side dialog is gameplay, no sit back and listen since its all time based and you only got limited amount of time to make your choices. Dreamfall/TLJ2 is ever worse, since there removed pretty much all puzzles, all that is left is run from A to B listen to dialog, run to C listen to dialog, run to D,
### Indigo Prophecy, on the other hand, was so annoying I ended up stopping it five minutes in.
Sorry for you, but then you missed the best thing the adventure genre (if you want to fit Indigo Prophecy there) had to provide since basically the The Longest Journey and the most innovative thing since probally Maniac Mansion (ok, Myst and The Last Express earn probally a place in there as well...).
### It doesn't do anything that, for example, "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis" didn't do in 1992, except be in 3D, which was done at least as far back as "Grim Fandango" in 1998.
I beg to differ, the whole gameplay is fundamentally different from Indy4 and pretty much all other adventure games. Indigo Prophecy has no real puzzles, is full of action, endurance section, timed dialog and timed events, in short its for most part realtime based, if you don't act you die, get catched or other stuff happens. Most adventure games are the very oposite, no timed stuff at all, nothing in the world ever moves until you do something and such. The whole paching in Indigo Prophecy is nothing like what you get in classic adventure games. The only game that I would say that is somewhat similar to Indigo Prophecy is The Last Express, which also plays almost completly in realtime and cares even less for what the player is doing. Indigo Prophecy is really more an interactive movie done right then a normal adventure game.
### It's also actually quite linear, and very short,
Short yes, but linear no. Its true that the whole story itself is linear and beside the three endings which you chose in the very final fight offers no choice, however in the single scenes you have a heck of a lot of freedom and get do pretty much whatever you want.
The story as a whole certainly has its faults, but it was still the most gripping one I have seen in the last years in gaming.
### Clearly someone at Microsoft severely fucked up if people are finding it necessary to modify their XBox 360's just so they don't overheat.
Is this really for the heat or more for the sound? In the last generation mods that replace the default fan with a more silent one have happened as well.
### Why is it too much? Games sell for $60 now new. They typically offer 15-20 hours of gameplay. Sounds to be the ratio is exactly right.
They can reuse a lot of artwork, models, engines an stuff in episodic content, so comparing it to a full game deveolped from scratch isn't fair, its additional content, not a new game so it should be priced lower. Beside from that new PC games are still more in the range of $40-$50, not $60 (thats only XBox360), so something like $15-10 seems like a much better price for an episode.
If you define 'static graphics' as games with non-animated sprites and non-scrolling backgrounds it fits.
### You've already mentioned Castlevania, but there's also Meteos, Sonic Rush, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Sk8land (at last a fresh Tony Hawk's game),
While those are fine games, there is the throuble that not every third party games is as good as 'Castlevania', just look at NfS:Most Wanted or Burnout for the DS, those games are horrible, they look like junk and they play like junk. While the DS is a good bit away from the power of the PSP, there is really no excuse for releasing games in such a terrible state, especially since the DS is the only console around where those games downright suck. Now I don't know the reason why those games got released in the state that there are in, but it feels like somebody isn't taking the DS for full and simply rushing out some quick&dirty ports of a popular frenchise to get som money, while all other consoles get the 'full' version of those games.
Well, yeah, it doesn't have any "functional purpose", neither to almost all other interface things. Interfaces are not about adding functions, but about allowing you easier access to functions already there and adding preferences panels to the backside of a window seems like a good improvment, not earth shattering, but definitvly a good thing. Thats because it gives the preferences dialog a fixed position, its no longer a magic window that pops up out of nowhere, a much easier concept to get for the average user.
True, but thats kind of the point, all good uses of 3D in user interface design I have seen so far where basically just little additions to 2D, zooming interfaces/windows, drop shadows, rotating windows, etc. All of them leave the basic interface flat and only use the 3D emphasis things in that flat interface (the current focused window, give you a better overview by zooming out, etc.). Humans are really a lot better at flat stuff then full 3D, since with flat all that interface has a lot less room to go missing. You really don't want to end up with your preferences windows poping up behind your head were you can't see it, but thats basically what you get if you move interface design to full 3d.
### When you read a book, do you only read the last chapter because you now "have a more full life" ? Do you fast forward movies?
If the last page of the chapter before the final chapter says "Please restart at Chapter1, the last Chapter will only be unlocked after a second read through" would you do it? Well, thats how many games are build, these days a little less drastic then in the games of 2D, where some games where build exactly that way, but games are still filled with stuff that you can only reach by doing tedious tasks over and over and over again. Hardly anybody would mind if you can't skip through the story, but having to play the same level over and over again just to see that extra cutscene, extra area or whatever is just no fun for a lot of people.
### If you have to play 30 hours to finnish a game, whether you play those 30 hours in three days or in two months doesn't change the game.
Actually it does matter a lot, with some games less then with other, but in the time you don't play a game you forget a lot, if the game forces you to memorize some insanly long combos you might not have much throuble if you play 5h a day, but if you only play 30h every few days there a very good change that you will never memorize all those stuff you have to remember. Worst example is probally Zelda Majora's Masks, the game will *delete* your savegame (or at least the last few hours of it) if you switch the console off without going to a savepoint before, something that might not be dramatic if you play without time constrains, but if you haven't played for two weeks such a little detail can be easily forgotten and you can say bye,bye to your savegame.