Will people play GTA in 500 years? I would say no. That game, while not bad, doesn't really have much stuff in it that would survive a longer periods of time. The story isn't ground breaking, the gameplay could be done better (aiming, vehicle physics, etc) and in almost all aspects of the games you will have a easy time picking something that could be improved. And if I have the choice between something that is good and something that is better, I'd pick the better one and in a few hundred years we will have seen very many games that have cars and guns in them, so no reason to play GTA, except for historical interest.
However that doesn't mean that games from today will be completly forgotten. Such games as Tetris or Pong will survive in mobile phones or other portable devices for a long long time. There simply isn't a reason why they would disappear, they are cheap to produce, simple and basically perfect at what they do. Graphic improvments won't help and the gameplay is also so simple that there is little room for improvment. Games such as SuperMarioBros are similar, even so a lot more complex, they do what they do almost perfectly. A totally different kind of game that will probally survive for quite a while are some adventure games, those LucasArts games, while quite old, are still among the best, if not the best, of the genre. And again, they do what they do close to perfection and new technologie can't do much to improve the game experience those games provide.
So in the end many of the games released these days will probally completly forgotten in a few years, since there will be newer games that do, what they did, but simply a lot better. But all those games that focus on something that isn't limited by todays CPU power, be it pure gameplay or story, are here to stay Will they survive 500 years? Some might, especially those that broke new ground. But 500 years are a long long time and I doubt that many/any movies of today will survive for that amount of time.
### Nintendo is interested in selling games to adults. And kids. And girls.
Well, they might be interested in doing so, but they are not doing it very good. The PS2 had Shadow of the Colossus, Katamari, EyeToy, Singstar and a bunch of other innovative and original stuff. XBox has had Live. Nintendo on the other side had pretty much nothing groundbreaking for the Gamecube. The NintendoDS looks luckily a bit different (even so, as with the GBA, to many remakes/sequels and the online stuff is still pretty minimal) and hopefully Revolution will continue there and improve from that. But for the current generation of consoles the Gamecube just hasn't dilivered anything interesting. As I see it Nintendo is probally the one talking the most about innovation, but the real innovations are actually happening elsewhere.
If he would have said "influence" instead of "innovation" I might agree, after all there are already a handfull of Sims clones around, people are copying different aspects of ResidentEvil4 and so on. Innovation in commercial games often ends up getting copied by other games and thus more or less defines a new genre or gives an existing genre a new direction, so those games have quite a bit of influence. Indy games on the other side are pretty much on their own, I couldn't name a single indy game that had direct impact on a whole genre games. That however doesn't mean that indy games aren't innovative, its just that they are often to far away from the areas that commercial games currently explore, Gish was innovative, but the commercial sector hasn't touched the jump'n run genre for a long long time, so Gish ends up having pretty much no influence at all, since there simply aren't commercial games which could incooperate some of Gishs features. Same for Darwinia, when the whole commercial world is doing fantasy style games, a retro-future/cyberpunkt/whatever game just can't have very much influence.
### The real challenge isn't the number of articles, it's their quality, especially the bad writing in a lot of them.
I prefer a badly written article that has the information I need, over a good one that doesn't have the information I need, any day. In that sense, size matters, a lot, since it ensures that Wikipedia contains a *much* larger spectrum of information then a normal dead-tree encyclopedia and yet it manages to have a quality that is often superiour to other sources of information on the internet.
### On some games it seems to be bright enough to wash out the colors a bit. I hope the DS Lite's adjustable brightness isn't tipped even further.
The washes out colors aren't the result of the DSs brightness, but the darkness of the original GBA, which forced the developers to use colors brighter then you would normally use to compensate for the dark display. So GBA games look wrong on everything other then the original GBA. Some emulators might counter act that by applying a low gamma before displaying the graphics, sadly none of the original Nintendo hardware does that.
### I'm sure that releasing the nth sequel of a tired franchise will bring back their reputation for innovation.
There is nothing wrong with a sequel if its actually good and new enough in terms of gameplay. And as far as I can remember there hasn't been a decent TombRaider on the current generation of consoles, Angle of Darkness wasn't any good and the rest seems to be for PSone and friends, so doing a good sequel now would be quite ok. The annoying part with sequels is only if they recycle the same engine over and over again and add nothing to the gameplay, so that the result is more add-on then real sequel, TombRaider definitivly was a victim of that, that however doesn't mean that the next part will follow the trend, even so it of course doesn't gurantee success either.
### TR1 came out back in the day where 3d games were sparse, if non existant on consoles, especially adventure 3d games. This is one of the main reasons it sold well.
I wouldn't say so. Sure, it might have had its faults, but it still has many aspects that even today are quite popular. For one there is the HUD-less screen, most of the time there is no HUD at all shown, only when an enemy aproaches you energie bar is shown, thus giving quite a cinematic experience. Then the gameplay, which is basically Prince of Persia turned into 3D. The game is basically all about puzzle solving, pressing switches, exploring and much less about shooting stuff. One other nice thing is that you don't kill any human at all in the first part, if I remember correctly you mostly just a few wolfs and bears in self defense. Having a female hero was also something new for the time, sure they overdid it quite a bit and turned her into a boob-monster, but still having a strong female lead isn't the worst thing you can do. There are also some noteworthy moments such when you first encounter the T-Rex, thats quite close to what Shadow of the Colossus provides these days, sure not as well done as toy, but still quite nice. The first TombRaider was really not that far of what are Prince of Persia:SoT, Ico or Shadow of the Colossus these days, it was quite a bit more then just one of the first 3d platform games.
### I realise that many people prefer FPS but are there really so few Sam and Max (resisting the opportunity to abbreviate it) fans out there?
I think the main problem is that the publishers tend to only support the stuff that works for the mainstream, adventures don't do that, while FPS do, at least in the eyes of the publishers. That doesn't mean that there arn't enough adventure fans out there to break even, but it means that the big money lies elsewhere and thats where the publishers send there money. Its sad, but its basically no different in holywood or other entertainment industries, the movies with the big explosions get the big budget, anything else often doesn't even get advertisement.
You hold it like a Gameboy and play with it like a Gameboy (no touch interface used in the vid for Halo), the problematic part is that it doesn't look very ergonomic and doesn't give you very many buttons to play with. Somebody else said it might have a tilt sensor, which would add another few axis to the system. In the end this doesn't look exactly to be designed for games, DS-style touch games would of course work, so would some strategie games, but anything which makes heavy use of buttons seems extremly problematic.
### Linux is *not* user friendly, and until it is linux will stay with >1% marketshare.
While Linux has still a few usability problems, for anything where you have a seperate administrator, has seems to be here the case, its perfectly ok, actually it has been perfectly ok for such installations for quite a long time.
### Take installation. Linux zealots are now saying "oh installing is so easy, just do apt-get install package or emerge package": Yes, because typing in "apt-get" or "emerge" makes so much more sense to new users than double-clicking an icon that says "setup".
You missed the point, apt-get is *FAR* superior and easier to use then anything on Windows (if you don't like command line use one of the GUI frontends). The problematic point is that you won't find all the software you might need in the repositories, even so their are gigantic they don't contain everything, and installing under Linux without apt-get or friends is what is really problematic, since its completly non consistend and throubled by binary incompatibilites and such. Ok, and you also have to be root to actualy use apt-get, no problem for your own computer, but if you want to install something that is actually available in the repository, but you don't have root access you have to take the hard root to install it, which sucks quite a bit.
About Quake3, yes, thats a classic case where you have a piece of software that comes in binary form and isn't available in the repositories accessable via apt-get. Those things definitvly need improvement.
Ok, the color of the DS isn't exactly the most important feature, never the less it bother me quite a bit that most 'cool new colors' that Nintendo announces for their consoles never make it into the stores or only quite some time after the original release. Changing the color of a console doesn't exactly sound like rocket science, so why does Nintendo not manage to actually provide a bit of color selection right up from the start?
### But with Xbox 360 or PS3, nobody can do that. You can't sell a new video card to 360 owners by telling them it will let them run games better.
While you can't buy a new gfx card for a XBox360 or a PS3 you actually can run the games in different resolution, thanks to HD-TV, so I am wondering if it makes any significant difference to run this or other games in PAL/NTSC instead of 720p HD-TV, it are after all only half or less the pixels to calculate.
First of the ocean was a lot of the time just solid blue, no texture, no difference in color, nada, plain solid blue-screen blue, that just doesn't look very interesting when you have to look at it for longer periouds of time. Secondly there was really nothing todo, steer in the direction you want, set wind in the right direction (watch always boring wind-spell animation) and wait. Would they have had any WaveRace-like water-dynamics or anything that actually made sailing fun it might have been interesting, but there wasn't nothing there.
PS: I never finished the game, got bored quite quickly by it, might have missed something interesting, but I kind of doubt it.
Sure some good games can be addicting, but just because a game is addicting it doesn't mean that it is good. I for one find all those "addicting" elements (status bars, experince points, extra items, etc.) to be rather uninteresting, because they often add obsolutly nothing to the core game itself, but simply stretch it by forcing the player to do the same thing again and again just to raise his level a bit so he can continue with the next larger obstacle. I would much prefer if gamedesigners would make there game good by adding larger areas, less restricted levels, more complex controls (so that you, the player, has to learn, not just the hero has to collect more XP), more freeform gameplay and more dynamic in the AI (good games produce thrill by dynamic AI, not by prescripted events), instead of turning each and every game into a sort-of RPG with statusbars, XP and other stuff tacked on. I prefer games where I am the one who accomplishes something, not by XP-counter.
### 1. The controller is supposed to contain a gyroscopic sensor, like the one found in WarioWare Twisted. It may control more than one, since it's supposed to be able to detect pitch and yaw as well.
Wondering if the Revolution will actually use these, since the sensor in WarioWare Twisted is rather limited. It can only detect relative movment, not absolute and it is very easy to decalibrate it, not much an issue when you play the normal game modes, but if you play the same game (one that involves rotating the GBA into the same direction all the time) in WarioWare Twisted for a while the sensor starts to detect rotation when the GBA doesn't move, requires a reset to get out of that again. So with these it would be impossible to have a lightgun like behaviour.
In general I have a hard time to imagine how one actually plays Revolution games[1], sure the Rev Controller is kind of like a mouse with more axes, there is however one fundamental issue, a mouse can be lift up and repositioned, with the Rev Controller there would however be no such thing as 'lifting it up' for repositioning. So what if I want to turn left, then more left and then even more to the left? At some point I have to reposition and that either has to be done via some button press or some kind of advanced gesture detection, neither of these sound exactly intuitive or robust.
[1] Mostly refering to first person shooter games here, since that was one type of genre that was especially advertised to be played well with the Rev controller other type of games such as a Black&White style strategie game might not have such problems at all.
If its really a WORM-style of doing things I would skip regular filesystem completly and go with the most simple thing available, which would be good old Tar files. They are just file header and raw data, so their is not much that can go wrong in terms of filesystem integrity and even if it does they are reasonably easy to recover. They don't come with any build in ways to validate them but that might probally be add-able on top of them. There should be somewhere a tarfs floating around that would allow them to be mounted as you can a normal filesystem.
I think the point was more that the DVDs itself will be unreadable, so it won't help much when the filesystem on them might still be supported. Even DVD-RAMs have an expected life-time of 30 years only, some DVD-R are rumored to self destruct after just 2-5 years.
### Is having many sequels really such a bad thing?
There is nothing wrong with a good sequel, the throuble with todays sequels is that they come out far to quickly and change the gamemechanics almost not at all. Looking at SplinterCell1 vs SplinterCell3 its almost the same game, stuff like that shouldn't get released as full price sequel, but as a low-price add-on. Even worse is that there aren't not only sequels, but cloning of game-concepts all over the place, ie. NeedFor Speed Underground started the Pimp-my-Ride way of doing racing games and all of a sudden almost every racing game follows that same trend. So what might have been a fresh idea gets worn out extremly quickly since every game in that genre does the same stuff. The throuble today is that sequels come out faster then many people play through the first incarnation and that sequels are often forced onto a series without good reason. Prince of Persia:SoD for example was a great sequel to an very old series, PoP:Warrior Within on the other end was completly unnecessary, the story from the first part didn't require a sequel and Warrior Within didn't even try to stay true to its predecessor. They should have made it a completly different game instead of riding it under the PoP name. RE4 is another such game, while its a great game, there is absolutly no reasion why it has to be a ResidentEvil game, sure it recycles some characters, but since those characters have pretty much nothing todo with their previous incarnations it could have ended up as a different game as well.
### i would love to play an completely new mario game on the DS, not one that looks like its just a level redesign (from the few leaked shots ive seen so far).
The NewSuperMarioBros game looks nothing like a simple level redesign, ok some of the items seen there have been probally seen in previous titles, but the gameplay looks much more like SuperMario64 packed into a 2D world combined with tons of YoshiIsland-like pseudo-3D Effekts. I have no idea how the game will turn out in the game, but it definitvly seems to be something quite new, even so there is, as always with Mario game, reuse of elements of the older games. Given that there hasn't been a new Mario game on handhelds for 12 years I am really looking forward to that one, especially since it seems to offer a game dynamic that hasn't been shown in any 2d game before.
Re:"Non-hard-core gamers" aren't playing anymore
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Mario All Grown Up?
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### but I think all you are experiencing is nostalgia
There is of course always a bit of nostalgia when talking about games of the past, but things definitvly have changed as well, for most part probally simple because the industrie got a whole lot more 'professional', thus every game has to appeal to the 'target audience' and the little crazy ideas never make it very far if the publisher doesn't think they follow certain 'standard'. This is probally most obvious when looking into the early days of gaming, C64, Amiga and such where there was a wild mix of genres around, today on the other side genres are quite fixed and only few games try to break the barrier and those that do get sequeled and cloned to death (see Prince of Persia, GTA, MetalGear, ResidentEvil, etc). Often those games that actually are innovative are recreations of games from the more or less distant past themself (see previous list). Part of this is certainly due to the technology, which is simply at a stage where there isn't any room left for huge jumps, so I will probally never again stare totally amazed at the screen as I did with AnotherWorld, DonkeyKongCountry or Mario64, but a large part is also simply due to the publishers trying nothing new. Just look at those genres that are popular today, most havn't changed much at all since their inital invention, ie. Doom, Dune, Diablo, sure finetuned here and there, new unit types, but nothing radical different and even the simplest improvments often took years, even as long as decade. In first person shooters for example the player was for a long long time just a floating arm with a gun, only recently some games, such as Riddick, try to fix that issue.
Another issue which I find very sad when looking at the past games is that a lot of genres simply have been mostly lost and forgotten. Coop play disappread almost completly once 3d was introduced, while it was almost a standard component in the 2d times. Games that require or even allow the use of a joystick are also almost non-existant these days. 2D-Jump'n runs are completly dead on the big consoles and even the handhelds get mostly just recycling ware of the old days. Good stories are seldomly seen these days in games and they almost never blend into the gameplay, but are just cutscenes, while in the past you often had quite good ones, thanks to the adventure genre, but even games that weren't typically story-telling often had them (WingCommander, StrikeCommander, etc.) and not just cutscenes. Strategie games that go bejoint Dune/Warcraft-style are also quite seldom (Syndicate, UFO).
Of course not all is lost and there are still coming out plenty of good games (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Katamari, Yager, Fahrenheit, etc.), but a new FIFA, NeedForSpeed, SplinterCell, etc. titel just can't get me excited at all. Nothing wrong with a good sequel, but if the same series is milked for a decade with each successor only containing minimal improvments over the old one its no wonder that some people start to complain.
Video games these days just to often feels like "been there done that", while to many nice places of the past got lost and forgotten.
Zip drives where quite popular, however only for a short time being, ie. between the days of floppies and before the internet and CD-R. The thing with Hard-Drive in cardridge was the Jazz-Drives if I remember correctly, came from Iomega as well.
Depends, if the players try to do the same thing the average would probally be a almost perfect play of doing whatever the players were doing. If however one player decides dodge a rock by flying over it and another by flying under it, well, the average rams them directly into the block, not so good.
Computer monitors should be pretty robust against burn-in these days, never actually seen one that had it. It however still seems to be a problem with plasma displays and some projectors. Anyway, I seriously doubt that a game will cause burn-in, people hardly play the same game for more then 100h normally, most often much less, 10-20h at most, that alone shouldn't cause burn-in on any type of system. Much more critical should be black borders when 4:3 is displayed on 16:9 screen or visa verse, since that is something that is the same for all movies and tv displayed in a non-fullscreen format.
### I want to feel like I'm in a movie or actually experiencing what I'm doing, and I can't do that with a HUD.
I wouldn't blame the HUD for that, while it might not help with the experince, I wouldn't say that it hurts much either. The problem is more in the underlying gamedesign that assumes things like a "linear health", in reality health isn't linear, if the arm gets hit, the arm is injured, your legs however are not, in most games however there isn't a leg and an arm, its just "player's health" and every hit gets added or substracted there. So three hits in the leg and up counting exactly the same as one in the head, thus both have exactly the same impact on the gameplay, most often that is actually none. I fully agree that games should go into a more realistic direction, they should try to actually model the human body much more realistically, starting with actually having a human body, in many FPS the player is still just two floating arms and a gun. The gun itself most often is completly invulnerable, in reality however a gun can get hit and damaged as well. Things like not being able to carry a dozens guns at once can add to the experince as well and not just in an annoying kind of way, but in one that makes the game more interesting. Many simulation games already do a good job of modeling the underlying system, be it a plane or a car, where each tire, gear or weapon-system can get damaged individually. With first person shooters many however still havn't even started to model any part of the human body, different hit-zones are a start, but as long as those only influence a linear help meter they add little to the actual gaming experince.
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Will people play GTA in 500 years? I would say no. That game, while not bad, doesn't really have much stuff in it that would survive a longer periods of time. The story isn't ground breaking, the gameplay could be done better (aiming, vehicle physics, etc) and in almost all aspects of the games you will have a easy time picking something that could be improved. And if I have the choice between something that is good and something that is better, I'd pick the better one and in a few hundred years we will have seen very many games that have cars and guns in them, so no reason to play GTA, except for historical interest.
However that doesn't mean that games from today will be completly forgotten. Such games as Tetris or Pong will survive in mobile phones or other portable devices for a long long time. There simply isn't a reason why they would disappear, they are cheap to produce, simple and basically perfect at what they do. Graphic improvments won't help and the gameplay is also so simple that there is little room for improvment. Games such as SuperMarioBros are similar, even so a lot more complex, they do what they do almost perfectly. A totally different kind of game that will probally survive for quite a while are some adventure games, those LucasArts games, while quite old, are still among the best, if not the best, of the genre. And again, they do what they do close to perfection and new technologie can't do much to improve the game experience those games provide.
So in the end many of the games released these days will probally completly forgotten in a few years, since there will be newer games that do, what they did, but simply a lot better. But all those games that focus on something that isn't limited by todays CPU power, be it pure gameplay or story, are here to stay Will they survive 500 years? Some might, especially those that broke new ground. But 500 years are a long long time and I doubt that many/any movies of today will survive for that amount of time.
### Nintendo is interested in selling games to adults. And kids. And girls.
Well, they might be interested in doing so, but they are not doing it very good. The PS2 had Shadow of the Colossus, Katamari, EyeToy, Singstar and a bunch of other innovative and original stuff. XBox has had Live. Nintendo on the other side had pretty much nothing groundbreaking for the Gamecube. The NintendoDS looks luckily a bit different (even so, as with the GBA, to many remakes/sequels and the online stuff is still pretty minimal) and hopefully Revolution will continue there and improve from that. But for the current generation of consoles the Gamecube just hasn't dilivered anything interesting. As I see it Nintendo is probally the one talking the most about innovation, but the real innovations are actually happening elsewhere.
If he would have said "influence" instead of "innovation" I might agree, after all there are already a handfull of Sims clones around, people are copying different aspects of ResidentEvil4 and so on. Innovation in commercial games often ends up getting copied by other games and thus more or less defines a new genre or gives an existing genre a new direction, so those games have quite a bit of influence. Indy games on the other side are pretty much on their own, I couldn't name a single indy game that had direct impact on a whole genre games. That however doesn't mean that indy games aren't innovative, its just that they are often to far away from the areas that commercial games currently explore, Gish was innovative, but the commercial sector hasn't touched the jump'n run genre for a long long time, so Gish ends up having pretty much no influence at all, since there simply aren't commercial games which could incooperate some of Gishs features. Same for Darwinia, when the whole commercial world is doing fantasy style games, a retro-future/cyberpunkt/whatever game just can't have very much influence.
### The real challenge isn't the number of articles, it's their quality, especially the bad writing in a lot of them.
I prefer a badly written article that has the information I need, over a good one that doesn't have the information I need, any day. In that sense, size matters, a lot, since it ensures that Wikipedia contains a *much* larger spectrum of information then a normal dead-tree encyclopedia and yet it manages to have a quality that is often superiour to other sources of information on the internet.
### On some games it seems to be bright enough to wash out the colors a bit. I hope the DS Lite's adjustable brightness isn't tipped even further.
The washes out colors aren't the result of the DSs brightness, but the darkness of the original GBA, which forced the developers to use colors brighter then you would normally use to compensate for the dark display. So GBA games look wrong on everything other then the original GBA. Some emulators might counter act that by applying a low gamma before displaying the graphics, sadly none of the original Nintendo hardware does that.
### I'm sure that releasing the nth sequel of a tired franchise will bring back their reputation for innovation.
There is nothing wrong with a sequel if its actually good and new enough in terms of gameplay. And as far as I can remember there hasn't been a decent TombRaider on the current generation of consoles, Angle of Darkness wasn't any good and the rest seems to be for PSone and friends, so doing a good sequel now would be quite ok. The annoying part with sequels is only if they recycle the same engine over and over again and add nothing to the gameplay, so that the result is more add-on then real sequel, TombRaider definitivly was a victim of that, that however doesn't mean that the next part will follow the trend, even so it of course doesn't gurantee success either.
### TR1 came out back in the day where 3d games were sparse, if non existant on consoles, especially adventure 3d games. This is one of the main reasons it sold well.
I wouldn't say so. Sure, it might have had its faults, but it still has many aspects that even today are quite popular. For one there is the HUD-less screen, most of the time there is no HUD at all shown, only when an enemy aproaches you energie bar is shown, thus giving quite a cinematic experience. Then the gameplay, which is basically Prince of Persia turned into 3D. The game is basically all about puzzle solving, pressing switches, exploring and much less about shooting stuff. One other nice thing is that you don't kill any human at all in the first part, if I remember correctly you mostly just a few wolfs and bears in self defense. Having a female hero was also something new for the time, sure they overdid it quite a bit and turned her into a boob-monster, but still having a strong female lead isn't the worst thing you can do. There are also some noteworthy moments such when you first encounter the T-Rex, thats quite close to what Shadow of the Colossus provides these days, sure not as well done as toy, but still quite nice. The first TombRaider was really not that far of what are Prince of Persia:SoT, Ico or Shadow of the Colossus these days, it was quite a bit more then just one of the first 3d platform games.
### I realise that many people prefer FPS but are there really so few Sam and Max (resisting the opportunity to abbreviate it) fans out there?
I think the main problem is that the publishers tend to only support the stuff that works for the mainstream, adventures don't do that, while FPS do, at least in the eyes of the publishers. That doesn't mean that there arn't enough adventure fans out there to break even, but it means that the big money lies elsewhere and thats where the publishers send there money. Its sad, but its basically no different in holywood or other entertainment industries, the movies with the big explosions get the big budget, anything else often doesn't even get advertisement.
### how are you supposed to play Halo?
= project%20origami
Judging from the video, available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV1WGDW37c0&search
You hold it like a Gameboy and play with it like a Gameboy (no touch interface used in the vid for Halo), the problematic part is that it doesn't look very ergonomic and doesn't give you very many buttons to play with. Somebody else said it might have a tilt sensor, which would add another few axis to the system. In the end this doesn't look exactly to be designed for games, DS-style touch games would of course work, so would some strategie games, but anything which makes heavy use of buttons seems extremly problematic.
### Linux is *not* user friendly, and until it is linux will stay with >1% marketshare.
While Linux has still a few usability problems, for anything where you have a seperate administrator, has seems to be here the case, its perfectly ok, actually it has been perfectly ok for such installations for quite a long time.
### Take installation. Linux zealots are now saying "oh installing is so easy, just do apt-get install package or emerge package": Yes, because typing in "apt-get" or "emerge" makes so much more sense to new users than double-clicking an icon that says "setup".
You missed the point, apt-get is *FAR* superior and easier to use then anything on Windows (if you don't like command line use one of the GUI frontends). The problematic point is that you won't find all the software you might need in the repositories, even so their are gigantic they don't contain everything, and installing under Linux without apt-get or friends is what is really problematic, since its completly non consistend and throubled by binary incompatibilites and such. Ok, and you also have to be root to actualy use apt-get, no problem for your own computer, but if you want to install something that is actually available in the repository, but you don't have root access you have to take the hard root to install it, which sucks quite a bit.
About Quake3, yes, thats a classic case where you have a piece of software that comes in binary form and isn't available in the repositories accessable via apt-get. Those things definitvly need improvement.
Ok, the color of the DS isn't exactly the most important feature, never the less it bother me quite a bit that most 'cool new colors' that Nintendo announces for their consoles never make it into the stores or only quite some time after the original release. Changing the color of a console doesn't exactly sound like rocket science, so why does Nintendo not manage to actually provide a bit of color selection right up from the start?
### But with Xbox 360 or PS3, nobody can do that. You can't sell a new video card to 360 owners by telling them it will let them run games better.
While you can't buy a new gfx card for a XBox360 or a PS3 you actually can run the games in different resolution, thanks to HD-TV, so I am wondering if it makes any significant difference to run this or other games in PAL/NTSC instead of 720p HD-TV, it are after all only half or less the pixels to calculate.
First of the ocean was a lot of the time just solid blue, no texture, no difference in color, nada, plain solid blue-screen blue, that just doesn't look very interesting when you have to look at it for longer periouds of time. Secondly there was really nothing todo, steer in the direction you want, set wind in the right direction (watch always boring wind-spell animation) and wait. Would they have had any WaveRace-like water-dynamics or anything that actually made sailing fun it might have been interesting, but there wasn't nothing there.
PS: I never finished the game, got bored quite quickly by it, might have missed something interesting, but I kind of doubt it.
Sure some good games can be addicting, but just because a game is addicting it doesn't mean that it is good. I for one find all those "addicting" elements (status bars, experince points, extra items, etc.) to be rather uninteresting, because they often add obsolutly nothing to the core game itself, but simply stretch it by forcing the player to do the same thing again and again just to raise his level a bit so he can continue with the next larger obstacle. I would much prefer if gamedesigners would make there game good by adding larger areas, less restricted levels, more complex controls (so that you, the player, has to learn, not just the hero has to collect more XP), more freeform gameplay and more dynamic in the AI (good games produce thrill by dynamic AI, not by prescripted events), instead of turning each and every game into a sort-of RPG with statusbars, XP and other stuff tacked on. I prefer games where I am the one who accomplishes something, not by XP-counter.
### 1. The controller is supposed to contain a gyroscopic sensor, like the one found in WarioWare Twisted. It may control more than one, since it's supposed to be able to detect pitch and yaw as well.
Wondering if the Revolution will actually use these, since the sensor in WarioWare Twisted is rather limited. It can only detect relative movment, not absolute and it is very easy to decalibrate it, not much an issue when you play the normal game modes, but if you play the same game (one that involves rotating the GBA into the same direction all the time) in WarioWare Twisted for a while the sensor starts to detect rotation when the GBA doesn't move, requires a reset to get out of that again. So with these it would be impossible to have a lightgun like behaviour.
In general I have a hard time to imagine how one actually plays Revolution games[1], sure the Rev Controller is kind of like a mouse with more axes, there is however one fundamental issue, a mouse can be lift up and repositioned, with the Rev Controller there would however be no such thing as 'lifting it up' for repositioning. So what if I want to turn left, then more left and then even more to the left? At some point I have to reposition and that either has to be done via some button press or some kind of advanced gesture detection, neither of these sound exactly intuitive or robust.
[1] Mostly refering to first person shooter games here, since that was one type of genre that was especially advertised to be played well with the Rev controller other type of games such as a Black&White style strategie game might not have such problems at all.
If its really a WORM-style of doing things I would skip regular filesystem completly and go with the most simple thing available, which would be good old Tar files. They are just file header and raw data, so their is not much that can go wrong in terms of filesystem integrity and even if it does they are reasonably easy to recover. They don't come with any build in ways to validate them but that might probally be add-able on top of them. There should be somewhere a tarfs floating around that would allow them to be mounted as you can a normal filesystem.
### I'll take my chances and go with UDF+ISO9660.
I think the point was more that the DVDs itself will be unreadable, so it won't help much when the filesystem on them might still be supported. Even DVD-RAMs have an expected life-time of 30 years only, some DVD-R are rumored to self destruct after just 2-5 years.
### Is having many sequels really such a bad thing?
There is nothing wrong with a good sequel, the throuble with todays sequels is that they come out far to quickly and change the gamemechanics almost not at all. Looking at SplinterCell1 vs SplinterCell3 its almost the same game, stuff like that shouldn't get released as full price sequel, but as a low-price add-on. Even worse is that there aren't not only sequels, but cloning of game-concepts all over the place, ie. NeedFor Speed Underground started the Pimp-my-Ride way of doing racing games and all of a sudden almost every racing game follows that same trend. So what might have been a fresh idea gets worn out extremly quickly since every game in that genre does the same stuff. The throuble today is that sequels come out faster then many people play through the first incarnation and that sequels are often forced onto a series without good reason. Prince of Persia:SoD for example was a great sequel to an very old series, PoP:Warrior Within on the other end was completly unnecessary, the story from the first part didn't require a sequel and Warrior Within didn't even try to stay true to its predecessor. They should have made it a completly different game instead of riding it under the PoP name. RE4 is another such game, while its a great game, there is absolutly no reasion why it has to be a ResidentEvil game, sure it recycles some characters, but since those characters have pretty much nothing todo with their previous incarnations it could have ended up as a different game as well.
### i would love to play an completely new mario game on the DS, not one that looks like its just a level redesign (from the few leaked shots ive seen so far).
The NewSuperMarioBros game looks nothing like a simple level redesign, ok some of the items seen there have been probally seen in previous titles, but the gameplay looks much more like SuperMario64 packed into a 2D world combined with tons of YoshiIsland-like pseudo-3D Effekts. I have no idea how the game will turn out in the game, but it definitvly seems to be something quite new, even so there is, as always with Mario game, reuse of elements of the older games. Given that there hasn't been a new Mario game on handhelds for 12 years I am really looking forward to that one, especially since it seems to offer a game dynamic that hasn't been shown in any 2d game before.
### but I think all you are experiencing is nostalgia
There is of course always a bit of nostalgia when talking about games of the past, but things definitvly have changed as well, for most part probally simple because the industrie got a whole lot more 'professional', thus every game has to appeal to the 'target audience' and the little crazy ideas never make it very far if the publisher doesn't think they follow certain 'standard'. This is probally most obvious when looking into the early days of gaming, C64, Amiga and such where there was a wild mix of genres around, today on the other side genres are quite fixed and only few games try to break the barrier and those that do get sequeled and cloned to death (see Prince of Persia, GTA, MetalGear, ResidentEvil, etc). Often those games that actually are innovative are recreations of games from the more or less distant past themself (see previous list). Part of this is certainly due to the technology, which is simply at a stage where there isn't any room left for huge jumps, so I will probally never again stare totally amazed at the screen as I did with AnotherWorld, DonkeyKongCountry or Mario64, but a large part is also simply due to the publishers trying nothing new. Just look at those genres that are popular today, most havn't changed much at all since their inital invention, ie. Doom, Dune, Diablo, sure finetuned here and there, new unit types, but nothing radical different and even the simplest improvments often took years, even as long as decade. In first person shooters for example the player was for a long long time just a floating arm with a gun, only recently some games, such as Riddick, try to fix that issue.
Another issue which I find very sad when looking at the past games is that a lot of genres simply have been mostly lost and forgotten. Coop play disappread almost completly once 3d was introduced, while it was almost a standard component in the 2d times. Games that require or even allow the use of a joystick are also almost non-existant these days. 2D-Jump'n runs are completly dead on the big consoles and even the handhelds get mostly just recycling ware of the old days. Good stories are seldomly seen these days in games and they almost never blend into the gameplay, but are just cutscenes, while in the past you often had quite good ones, thanks to the adventure genre, but even games that weren't typically story-telling often had them (WingCommander, StrikeCommander, etc.) and not just cutscenes. Strategie games that go bejoint Dune/Warcraft-style are also quite seldom (Syndicate, UFO).
Of course not all is lost and there are still coming out plenty of good games (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Katamari, Yager, Fahrenheit, etc.), but a new FIFA, NeedForSpeed, SplinterCell, etc. titel just can't get me excited at all. Nothing wrong with a good sequel, but if the same series is milked for a decade with each successor only containing minimal improvments over the old one its no wonder that some people start to complain.
Video games these days just to often feels like "been there done that", while to many nice places of the past got lost and forgotten.
Zip drives where quite popular, however only for a short time being, ie. between the days of floppies and before the internet and CD-R. The thing with Hard-Drive in cardridge was the Jazz-Drives if I remember correctly, came from Iomega as well.
Depends, if the players try to do the same thing the average would probally be a almost perfect play of doing whatever the players were doing. If however one player decides dodge a rock by flying over it and another by flying under it, well, the average rams them directly into the block, not so good.
Computer monitors should be pretty robust against burn-in these days, never actually seen one that had it. It however still seems to be a problem with plasma displays and some projectors. Anyway, I seriously doubt that a game will cause burn-in, people hardly play the same game for more then 100h normally, most often much less, 10-20h at most, that alone shouldn't cause burn-in on any type of system. Much more critical should be black borders when 4:3 is displayed on 16:9 screen or visa verse, since that is something that is the same for all movies and tv displayed in a non-fullscreen format.
### Yoshi's Island did it, too. I'm sure there are more examples from the 2d era.
Another World (1991) didn't use any HUD at all and is probally as close as you can get to a cinematic experince in 2D.
### I want to feel like I'm in a movie or actually experiencing what I'm doing, and I can't do that with a HUD.
I wouldn't blame the HUD for that, while it might not help with the experince, I wouldn't say that it hurts much either. The problem is more in the underlying gamedesign that assumes things like a "linear health", in reality health isn't linear, if the arm gets hit, the arm is injured, your legs however are not, in most games however there isn't a leg and an arm, its just "player's health" and every hit gets added or substracted there. So three hits in the leg and up counting exactly the same as one in the head, thus both have exactly the same impact on the gameplay, most often that is actually none. I fully agree that games should go into a more realistic direction, they should try to actually model the human body much more realistically, starting with actually having a human body, in many FPS the player is still just two floating arms and a gun. The gun itself most often is completly invulnerable, in reality however a gun can get hit and damaged as well. Things like not being able to carry a dozens guns at once can add to the experince as well and not just in an annoying kind of way, but in one that makes the game more interesting. Many simulation games already do a good job of modeling the underlying system, be it a plane or a car, where each tire, gear or weapon-system can get damaged individually. With first person shooters many however still havn't even started to model any part of the human body, different hit-zones are a start, but as long as those only influence a linear help meter they add little to the actual gaming experince.