ACK, for handhelds, at least the Nintendo ones its the same, GBA games where around 40-50EUR, while DS games are now 30-40EUR. Today there are also a lot of Platinum, Player or whatever Editions of games that cost only half the original price, in times of SNES such stuff simply wasn't there. On the PC its even better, wait a few month and almost any game will drop to 10-15EUR. Games these days are quite a bit cheaper then they used to be, so from that standpoint there is little to complain about. Sure on the other side the XBox seems to be the console with the most expensive games, but those who not like that should simply buy a Gamecube instead or wait for the Revolution.
Borg might work when done right. Borg don't have any individuallity, so a player shouldn't be controlling a single Borg, instead a Borg-player should control a whole ship with hundreds or thousands of Borg, more like a game of StarCraft then a MMORPG. It might get hard to balance the whole thing, but if done right it could be quite interesting.
### Things like leveling, loot, and equipment purchase are valid game mechanics,
Not in a StarTrek world where the next replicator is only five foot away.
### it would not be compelling to play without them.
How course it would be, given some good game design, some stupid braindead leveling might work well to stretch a game out, but its not necesarry to create a compelling game, for me its quite the reverse, stupid leveling borse me to death. If a game ever requires me to activly 'level' I turn it off and switch to something else. I don't mind some stats that are keept in the background, as long as they never become a dominant part of the game.
People, both players and devolpers have to get away from thinking in predefined genres. Good game mechanics are those that supports the story (be it a prewriten one or one that the player basically creates for himself), not those that have worked in half a dozen other games already. Sure, sometimes it might be helpfull to reuse already established concepts, but in a StarTrek world, where at least on the Federation side money is gone and wealth is everywhere it would be just plain stupid to start with looting and killing to optain wealth.
A StarTrek game when done right could be quite a bit of fun, but it should really feel like StarTrek, not like WorldOfWarcraft with StarTrek-Theme. Give me large ships with a large crew human controlled crew, give me planets to explore, alien races to negotiate with and a little bit of Borg maybe, but don't turn it into a Federation vs. Borg slay fest.
CDDL, MPL, BSD, etc. are not variations of the GPL, some of them are libraries which have more or less the same sprit, but they are still completly different licenses.
Wild guess, I have no idea about the actual situation, but as far as I know Internet Cafes are quite popular in China and Korea, while over here (germany) those don't play much of a role, especially when it comes to gaming. Those that play games, play them at home. So maybe the situation isn't different, it may simply be more visible, since the players play in the public Internet Cafes instead of at home.
One solution would be random respawning, ie. don't respawn the very same enemies in the same positions over and over again, but have multiple enemy formations per room and spawn only one of them at random, so that leaving and reentering a room doesn't give you the same formation. There also shouldn't be any enemy-locked rooms, ie. those rooms where you have to kill everything to open a door, while those might make sense on a pirate attack, they make absolutly no sense with respawned enemies, they just annoy. Many enemy types (pirates) should also not respawn at all, they should be handled more like mini-bosses, ie. fight them once and see them never again. I am also not sure if you really lose much if you simply don't respawn most enemies at all, after a while you have enough energie tanks that most enemies are zero danger to you, you can just ignore them, they only annoy you, so a ignored enemy would be much different from a non-existing one. Last not least it would also help if he world would be designed more 'alive', the Metroid world feels like a fishtank, everything is well designed and build up, but thats also how it feels, it doesn't feel like a living planet, it feels like a artificial construction. A simple example would be for example some crashes space ship, I never got the feeling that it was a ship, from the outside it was mostly covered in fog if I remember correctly and from the inside it simply looked like just another room, only this time with a metalic theme. Now if one would have seen that ship flying around before, seen it crashing, seen it down below from a high cliff and if the internals of the ship would be more logically arange things might have felt different, but thats not what Metroid did. Overall I think a Metroid more in the style of Ico would be something I would enjoy, not the third person view, even so I wouldn't mind that, but the level design. In Ico you also run through basically a single large level, however unless in Metroid you have far less back tracking to do and that backtracking that is in there is actually interesting, since often have places which you could already see, but only visit quite a while later in the game. In Ico you also had a much more persistant impression of the castle, the castle felt real and huge, Metroid on the other side is all indoor, even the outdoor environments are just rooms with a skybox. In the whole Metroid game you never stand high on a hill and look down to all those areas that you have already mastered, in Ico however you do exactly that (what, not a hill, but a high point in the castle) quite often. In Metroid backtracking feels more like repetition, it however should feel more like 'being home' again.
So in the end, yes, Prime might have captured many of the aspects of the 2D Metroids, but for me at least that isn't enough, since many of those just don't work for me in 3D, I would have prefered a larger more realistic world to explore than that fishtank design that it had.
### harsh efficiency of the Space Pirate invaders to win you over.
Speaking of Space Pirates, I don't like them, in the whole game they never seem real, they have basically no AI and act pretty much brainless, they also respawn, which makes them feel like just another bug to squish. I think one of the major problems for me is that Prime tries to kind of wrangle a story around the Metroid setting, but simply utterly fails to make that story believable. I never got the feel that evil Space Pirates do their dirty business in this place and I have to stop that, it was simply a bunch of levels stuck togother without ever feeling 'real', it always felt artificial.
### And if you want tension and scariness, that's one of the few places that MP2 Echoes exceeds MP1 in spades.
MP2 Echoes definitvly is a bit better, but the world still doesn't feel very real and believable, especially some of the boss fights are just way to boring and destroy any immersion that might have build up (I stopped playing at the morphball-based enemy, that just was zero fun).
### What's more, once you reach the main thrust of the game, you spend a lot of time running from safe spot to safe spot like a rat scurrying in the shadows.
Yes, that definitifly was the most fun in all of what I have played of Prime2. Sadly it was over a little bit to quickly with some suit upgrade.
Not saying that Prime or Prime2 are bad games, many people seem to enjoy them, but for me they never felt authentic, it felt mostly just like puppet theater, all lacking any real substance, gameplay also felt pretty tedious thanks to respawning enemies and a few badly places save rooms. One can of course say that the 2D ones weren't that different, for me however the 2D ones worked, playing all of them up to 100%, tryed a bit poor-mens-speedrunning, and such, the 3D ones however never even started to become real fun.
### Off the top of my head (not that these are good games): Blood Rayne, Mortal Kombat, BMXXX (or whatever), the Tom Clancy game(s?), Dead to Rights, Hitman, Red Faction, Blood Omen, the Die Hard game. There are some other FPSs.
How many of those are GC-exclusive and how many of them are actually good? And how about other kinds of 'mature' games, like racing games, GrandTurismo, Forza, etc.?
### Because the 2D Metroids did have story, characters, dialogue, and violence?
MetroidFusion had plenty of story, MetroidZero a little less, but still quite a bit, SuperMetroid didn't have much story on its own, but it had little details such as the creatures you could save in the end which made some lasting impact on me, can't remember a single situation in Prime that made me "WOW".
### Apparently you didn't even play Prime
I did from start to end, however I can't really say I enjoyed it much. Since it was quite a while ago I might have forgotten half of it, but anyway.
### Apparently you didn't even play Prime, because there is a lot of backstory spread through the whole thing in the multitude of log entries you can find.
Thats what I call "bore-me-to-death-with-post-its". There wasn't a single character in the game that I cared about, well there weren't any to begin with, and overall the story simply had zero impact on the game, it was never "Oh, I wanna know how this is gonna end", it simply was a going from one boss enemy to the other. Post-Its could be completly ignored.
### the log entries to give you an even more intense "explorer" feel
One of my biggest problem with Prime is probally that the enemies respawn, it just doesn't feel any real if you have to fight the very same monster formations over and over and over again. The whole level design feels like a game, not like a real world. In 2D games I can live with that, but from a 3D game I expect more. ResidentEvil for example also has plenty of story told via letters, instead of actually dailog, but there those stuff has impact on the gameplay, you need it to find out codes, places to go to, etc. and last not least ResidentEvil used very few letters, in Prime those log entries are scattered all across the world.
### Maybe you were just put off by the 3D.
Well, I didn't like the controls that much (to many flying enemies that were impossible to target without getting hit yourself), even so the lock-on feature was a very nice addition, but anyway the 3D look isn't a problem for me. The graphics itself are fine, its just the setting that is just to unrealistic, respawning enemies all those special spots to be triggered with morphball and such, just doesn't feel like a real world. It felt like "Oh, the game designer now wants me todo that... blah" not like "Oh, *I* wanna go there and find out what had happened".
### Games don't train people to be better killers, if it was the army wouldn't waste so much money using real ammo for traing soldiers.
Games don't train you to use a real gun, I agree on that, however I believe that they *do* help you to be a better killer. The thing is that a human normally won't shoot at another human, in many past wars that resulted in plenty of men never firing a single shoot[1]. These days the army does practice a lot to get away from that no-shooting-'reflex' and trains plenty of shooting at human silhouette. There is some study[2] says that video games do pretty much the same, they train you to shoot at human silhouettes. Of course that doesn't help you a thing if you don't have training with a real gun in addition, but if you stuck a non-gamer and a gamer into combat and only give them some basic gun training, I believe that the gamer would be more like to actually fire, simply because he trained to do that a lot, while the non-gamer might thing twice.
[1] Seen on some discovery channel docu [2] Sorry don't have a link at hand
### Nintendo does have mature games. Eternal Darkness, Metroid Prime, and Resident Evil are examples.
Sadly that is already half of the mature games available for the Cube, there really is not much more and especially nothing more that is Cube-exclusive. Speaking of MetroidPrime I don't even consider that very mature, sure you have a big gun, but hardly any story worth to talk about, no characters, no dialog (well, a tiny little bit) and hardly any violence worth to talk about. I really love the 2D Metroids, but Prime never really got me, kind of just bores me, I think it simply didn't went far enough, it basically never was scarry. Anyway, the throuble of the Gamecube isn't the non-existent mature games, it has some, but simply the lack of quantity and varity of games. Gamecube has the games that Nintendo produced and very little else, these days even the multiplatform games end up PS2 und XBox only, Gamecube gets ignored.
### Was Hot Coffee actually in the game with a cheat code?
It was on the game discs, but only reachable via save-game hacking and neither via gameplay or via a simple cheat-code.
Does anybody know other games where affected by the aftermath of the 'Hot Coffee' dicussion. I know that the US Version of Indigo Prophecy had three scenes removed due to probally offending content, any other games that got cut for the US release? And what would have happened if they didn't cut those scenes (contain some nudity and sex), AO rating?
### I don't see how a smaller version of existing technology can be counted as breakthrough, when compared to innovations in tech, such as the nintendo voice recognition, or the facial imaging software, or even the stunning UE3.
There is nothing special about Nintendos Voice Recognition, if I remember correctly my Soundblaster2.0 already came with software that did exactly the same years ago. So like the PSP, it doesn't offer anything new, just in a smaller form factor then it used to be.
### What they should be doing is upping the poly counts on SD resolutions as much as possible to make it look better
Polycount won't help, with normal mapping you can already do extremly detailed looking creatures without using that much polygons at all. What games are laking graphical wise these days are three things in my eyes:
1) proper lighting, shadows are still the sharp ugly ones which we already had in the day of Starfox on the SNES, that just isn't very realistic, HDR helps quite a bit, but what is needed is some kind of realtime radiosity to get away from that odd-computer graphics look
2) motion, stil frames these days often look a lot better then the thing in motion, for the simple reason that animation is still a huge problem, motion capturing works fine for cutscenes, but in dynamic scenes it just doesn't look very good to always see the same prerecorded animation, beside from that it often is simply the wrong animation (classic example would be a player character walking against the wall, simply wouldn't work in reallife that way). Some kind of adaptive animation system is needed here, something that not only plays a prerecorded motion, but more or less simulates the human body.
3) information density, again not really a rendering thing, but what I mean with that is that the amount of 'information' that is presented in a game is nowwhere near reality. If I look around in a real room I might find shelfs full of books, all of which readable, cabinets full of cloths, all of them wearable, computers full of files, all of them browsable. In a game on the other side I might be able to find a table, a chair and a shelf with a few empty boxes, if there ever is a book in a game, I am happy when I can read a few pages of it, if at all. Same is true for games that play outside, GTA might give you a whole city, but each house is nothing more then a textured box, you can't walk into most of them, people that walk around on the streets are generated completly random and neither have goal or purpose. Sure, an artist probally will never close this information gap, but ProjectGutenberg might be able to fill the books with text and some kind of fractal algorithm should be able to build a wide varity of houses and rooms that are explorable, Elite did that a two decades ago and presented the player with a whole universe to explore, while it wasn't the most detailed universe, todays hardware should be able to accomplish quite a bit more.
### "19-year-old gunman Robert Steinhaueser was an avid Counter-strike player, leading to calls to limit violent games in Germany."
That argument is old and was very flawed right from the beginning. First of I don't think Robert was an avid CounterStrike player, he might have played it every once in a while, but so far I havn't seen any proof that he played more then every random gamer you might find. Secondly Robert used *real* guns, real guns he *legally* owned and with which he *legaly* trained, yes, even with germany's rather strict laws that was possible. So CounterStrike or not is completly a non issue, his training with real guns gave him the ability to kill 16 people (police and thus medical care only entering the building quite late helped quite a bit to, to kill the people).
And most ridiculuos, directly after the shooting new laws where approved that require to follow USK game ratings, thus no games for minors, unless they were rated such. Well, in the end it didn't matter anyway, since Robert was 19 already...
In germany it is already illegal to sell video games to people below the recomment age for a game (ie. the USK rating). Its also possible to 'index' very violent games, meaning not only it is forbitten to sell them to children blow 18 years, but its also forbitten to advertise those games at all, meaning you can't have them standing around in a shop where they might be spotted by children blow 18 or review them in magzines. So everything is already in place to ban those 'killer games' if needed. I get the feeling that those politicans simple haven't the slightest clue what the current laws are.
### I have lost several friends to overdose and hiv as a result of drug abuse.
HIV and overdoses are for most part the result of the 'War on Drugs', it has nothing to do with the addiction itself or the drug. Gaming doesn't involve needles and neither does gaming have a 'leathal dose', so you can't directly die from gaming, doesn't mean it can't cause addiction. Just look over at Korea and China a few people already have died there, not because of gaming itself, but because they gamed for multiple days without eating, drinkng or sleeping.
### The word addiction used to mean something that was physically addictive, like heroin or nicotine.
As far as I understand it games *can* make you physically addicted, only difference is that the drugs to which you are addicted do not come from the outside, but are what your body produces normally, that stuff however gets out of balance due to the gaming addiction, so to keep those stuff in the balance you have to continue to play.
### Microsoft, with their enourmous resources, have made the controller lighter, and moved some buttons.
Yes and thats exactly what I like about the XBox360, it didn't do anything revolutionary, but they took what they have and made it better, plain and simple, and from what I have seen they seem to have succeeded, the controller looks fine, the console itself as well, what was wrong with the old XBox seems to be fixed. Yes, its not an endless hype-o-ramma like the PS3 or some revolutionary thing like the Nintendo Revolution, for which we have seen zero games so far, XBox360 however is here now, well in a few weeks, anyway, you can buy it, there are games for it and its done.
We will have to see if the XBox360 turns out a success, but unlike with the XBox, I have a hard time to find anything obviously wrong with the XBox360, its a simple solid console. Nintendo Rev on the other side could still turn into a VirtualBoy2 if they don't get any games for it soon. And PS3, I don't know, I don't like the design, I don't like the controller (same mistakes back from PS1-Dualshock all over repeated) and I especially don't like the end less hyping without actually having real games footage to show, everybody can do nice rendermovies. XBox360 is real where the others are still nothing more then fluffy dreams.
Re:Metroid Makes the Gender Arbitrary
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The Samus Mystique
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· Score: 1
### in fact is only revealed in the very end of Super Metroid in a 'look whos inside' type of way
Little correction, in the NES and Gameboy parts its only revealed in the end and only if you beat the game fast enough, in SuperMetroid, MetroidFusion and MetroidZero its already revealed when you die, since then the suit explodes away and you can see who is in there.
Beside from that you are right, the female in Metroid is nothing more then a running gag, it doesn't matter to the game itself at all.
While this sounds like a ugly hack to fake the advertised resolution, im not so sure on the reasons, might simply be that they couldn't exactly predict how fast the real XBox360 is going to be and ended up with a few more polygons then it could handle, so instead of cutting the poly count playing around with the resolution is far easier to increase the fps a bit. Thats kind of one of the problems when you have only development kits that aren't the final hardware, wouldn't even be the first time. Many early GBA titles suffered as well, since the devkits back then where quite a bit a bridghter then the final device was.
### Why should -any- restrictions last beyond the period of time that Nintendo is actively manufacturing and selling the system and/or games for it?
While I agree with you on the general point, Nintendo *is* selling NES games, just resently there was the NES classic series for GBA, soon there will be plenty of NES games for the Revolution for download and the Gamecube also had at least all the NES Zelda titles. While the games maybe old, Nintendo is still using them to make money. Sure, they probally won't sell much original NES systems these days, but the games are still of value.
### Yeah, and I was thinking about that patching too. Since the DS uses SD-technology for their games, I don't see why it wouldn't be feasible to just update the card. Seems easy enough...
The DS doesn't use SD-technology, the carts are still completly unrewritable ROM things. The largest rewritable Flash in DS games so far is Nintendogs with 2Mbit(256kb), they could of course use a equally large Flash in MarioKart, if that is enough for patching the game or if it will be used at all for patching however has to be seen.
### The games designed by Nintendo are primarily for kids.
Just repeating the old saying doesn't make it any more true. Nintendo games are familiy friendly, but they are not primarily for kids, they are for everyone that enjoys gaming. I mean references to tons of old NES or arcade games in WarioWare, that no kid will ever get, because it simply can't know most of the games don't sound exactly like 'designed for children', same with the difficulty, and lots of other aspect. Anyway, that has never been Nintendos problem, the familily friendly images works pretty well as it is.
Nintendo however has one core problem and that is third party support, it doesn't matter how good the hardware is, how familiy friendly Nintendos owns games are or whatever, as long as Nintendo is almost the only party producing games for their console it just isn't much good as first or only console. I have a Gamecube myself and I like it a lot, but for actual gaming I turn to PS2 or recently a bit XBox, simply because they get the third party games, while Gamecube is now basically completly ignored. Another problem is that the Nintendo titels havn't been up to the quality they used to be, I finished Mario64 three times each time collecting 150 stars, replayed MarioBros3, YoshisIsland and friends quite a lot, and loved the old Zelda games, but MarioSunshine, WindWaker, nope, never played either of them through completly, just to tedious and boring. They have that feeling of 'been there done that', nothing new to see and that what I see was already done better in the past. Pikmin, while a brilliant idea, didn't work out completly either, neither the first or the second part really got as good as it could have been. Gamecube really missed a 'system-seller' quality title.
### Nintendo wouldn't let a bug that big get out in one of their biggest titles ever.
Well, they sure would fix it when they notice it before the release, the problem is that such kind of bugs are extremly hard to find.
### And if there were any big ones, the testers would have found them by now...remember,
A dozend of testers can't replace hundreds of thousands of players. The throuble is that even a little bug, that you wouldn't care at all about in a singleplayer game, can be fatal in a multiplayer game. Such things have happened to plenty of online games in the past, but for most part the bugs were patchable, which might not be the case with MarioKart. On the other side it might of course also be the case that Nintendo added some kind of patching capability to the game, it couldn't be persistent, but downloading a patch on game startup, should be doable.
### Sure lag might be a problem but I can't see how their can be cheating unless some odd things happen.
Just look at MarioKart64, it had numerous bugs that allow you to cheat on tracks, ie. reverse directly after start, drop down some cliff and wait till you are placed back on track, if you then drive through the finish you have done a lap, repeat that a few times and you can beat the track in 20 seconds. If similar bugs pop up in MarioKartDS and are used a lot, it could make the game a lot less fun.
Slashdot Mirror
ACK, for handhelds, at least the Nintendo ones its the same, GBA games where around 40-50EUR, while DS games are now 30-40EUR. Today there are also a lot of Platinum, Player or whatever Editions of games that cost only half the original price, in times of SNES such stuff simply wasn't there. On the PC its even better, wait a few month and almost any game will drop to 10-15EUR. Games these days are quite a bit cheaper then they used to be, so from that standpoint there is little to complain about. Sure on the other side the XBox seems to be the console with the most expensive games, but those who not like that should simply buy a Gamecube instead or wait for the Revolution.
### I'm not really sure Borg would work.
Borg might work when done right. Borg don't have any individuallity, so a player shouldn't be controlling a single Borg, instead a Borg-player should control a whole ship with hundreds or thousands of Borg, more like a game of StarCraft then a MMORPG. It might get hard to balance the whole thing, but if done right it could be quite interesting.
### Things like leveling, loot, and equipment purchase are valid game mechanics,
Not in a StarTrek world where the next replicator is only five foot away.
### it would not be compelling to play without them.
How course it would be, given some good game design, some stupid braindead leveling might work well to stretch a game out, but its not necesarry to create a compelling game, for me its quite the reverse, stupid leveling borse me to death. If a game ever requires me to activly 'level' I turn it off and switch to something else. I don't mind some stats that are keept in the background, as long as they never become a dominant part of the game.
People, both players and devolpers have to get away from thinking in predefined genres. Good game mechanics are those that supports the story (be it a prewriten one or one that the player basically creates for himself), not those that have worked in half a dozen other games already. Sure, sometimes it might be helpfull to reuse already established concepts, but in a StarTrek world, where at least on the Federation side money is gone and wealth is everywhere it would be just plain stupid to start with looting and killing to optain wealth.
A StarTrek game when done right could be quite a bit of fun, but it should really feel like StarTrek, not like WorldOfWarcraft with StarTrek-Theme. Give me large ships with a large crew human controlled crew, give me planets to explore, alien races to negotiate with and a little bit of Borg maybe, but don't turn it into a Federation vs. Borg slay fest.
CDDL, MPL, BSD, etc. are not variations of the GPL, some of them are libraries which have more or less the same sprit, but they are still completly different licenses.
Wild guess, I have no idea about the actual situation, but as far as I know Internet Cafes are quite popular in China and Korea, while over here (germany) those don't play much of a role, especially when it comes to gaming. Those that play games, play them at home. So maybe the situation isn't different, it may simply be more visible, since the players play in the public Internet Cafes instead of at home.
### What would be a better solution?
One solution would be random respawning, ie. don't respawn the very same enemies in the same positions over and over again, but have multiple enemy formations per room and spawn only one of them at random, so that leaving and reentering a room doesn't give you the same formation. There also shouldn't be any enemy-locked rooms, ie. those rooms where you have to kill everything to open a door, while those might make sense on a pirate attack, they make absolutly no sense with respawned enemies, they just annoy. Many enemy types (pirates) should also not respawn at all, they should be handled more like mini-bosses, ie. fight them once and see them never again. I am also not sure if you really lose much if you simply don't respawn most enemies at all, after a while you have enough energie tanks that most enemies are zero danger to you, you can just ignore them, they only annoy you, so a ignored enemy would be much different from a non-existing one. Last not least it would also help if he world would be designed more 'alive', the Metroid world feels like a fishtank, everything is well designed and build up, but thats also how it feels, it doesn't feel like a living planet, it feels like a artificial construction. A simple example would be for example some crashes space ship, I never got the feeling that it was a ship, from the outside it was mostly covered in fog if I remember correctly and from the inside it simply looked like just another room, only this time with a metalic theme. Now if one would have seen that ship flying around before, seen it crashing, seen it down below from a high cliff and if the internals of the ship would be more logically arange things might have felt different, but thats not what Metroid did.
Overall I think a Metroid more in the style of Ico would be something I would enjoy, not the third person view, even so I wouldn't mind that, but the level design. In Ico you also run through basically a single large level, however unless in Metroid you have far less back tracking to do and that backtracking that is in there is actually interesting, since often have places which you could already see, but only visit quite a while later in the game. In Ico you also had a much more persistant impression of the castle, the castle felt real and huge, Metroid on the other side is all indoor, even the outdoor environments are just rooms with a skybox. In the whole Metroid game you never stand high on a hill and look down to all those areas that you have already mastered, in Ico however you do exactly that (what, not a hill, but a high point in the castle) quite often. In Metroid backtracking feels more like repetition, it however should feel more like 'being home' again.
So in the end, yes, Prime might have captured many of the aspects of the 2D Metroids, but for me at least that isn't enough, since many of those just don't work for me in 3D, I would have prefered a larger more realistic world to explore than that fishtank design that it had.
### harsh efficiency of the Space Pirate invaders to win you over.
Speaking of Space Pirates, I don't like them, in the whole game they never seem real, they have basically no AI and act pretty much brainless, they also respawn, which makes them feel like just another bug to squish. I think one of the major problems for me is that Prime tries to kind of wrangle a story around the Metroid setting, but simply utterly fails to make that story believable. I never got the feel that evil Space Pirates do their dirty business in this place and I have to stop that, it was simply a bunch of levels stuck togother without ever feeling 'real', it always felt artificial.
### And if you want tension and scariness, that's one of the few places that MP2 Echoes exceeds MP1 in spades.
MP2 Echoes definitvly is a bit better, but the world still doesn't feel very real and believable, especially some of the boss fights are just way to boring and destroy any immersion that might have build up (I stopped playing at the morphball-based enemy, that just was zero fun).
### What's more, once you reach the main thrust of the game, you spend a lot of time running from safe spot to safe spot like a rat scurrying in the shadows.
Yes, that definitifly was the most fun in all of what I have played of Prime2. Sadly it was over a little bit to quickly with some suit upgrade.
Not saying that Prime or Prime2 are bad games, many people seem to enjoy them, but for me they never felt authentic, it felt mostly just like puppet theater, all lacking any real substance, gameplay also felt pretty tedious thanks to respawning enemies and a few badly places save rooms. One can of course say that the 2D ones weren't that different, for me however the 2D ones worked, playing all of them up to 100%, tryed a bit poor-mens-speedrunning, and such, the 3D ones however never even started to become real fun.
### Off the top of my head (not that these are good games): Blood Rayne, Mortal Kombat, BMXXX (or whatever), the Tom Clancy game(s?), Dead to Rights, Hitman, Red Faction, Blood Omen, the Die Hard game. There are some other FPSs.
How many of those are GC-exclusive and how many of them are actually good? And how about other kinds of 'mature' games, like racing games, GrandTurismo, Forza, etc.?
### Because the 2D Metroids did have story, characters, dialogue, and violence?
MetroidFusion had plenty of story, MetroidZero a little less, but still quite a bit, SuperMetroid didn't have much story on its own, but it had little details such as the creatures you could save in the end which made some lasting impact on me, can't remember a single situation in Prime that made me "WOW".
### Apparently you didn't even play Prime
I did from start to end, however I can't really say I enjoyed it much. Since it was quite a while ago I might have forgotten half of it, but anyway.
### Apparently you didn't even play Prime, because there is a lot of backstory spread through the whole thing in the multitude of log entries you can find.
Thats what I call "bore-me-to-death-with-post-its". There wasn't a single character in the game that I cared about, well there weren't any to begin with, and overall the story simply had zero impact on the game, it was never "Oh, I wanna know how this is gonna end", it simply was a going from one boss enemy to the other. Post-Its could be completly ignored.
### the log entries to give you an even more intense "explorer" feel
One of my biggest problem with Prime is probally that the enemies respawn, it just doesn't feel any real if you have to fight the very same monster formations over and over and over again. The whole level design feels like a game, not like a real world. In 2D games I can live with that, but from a 3D game I expect more. ResidentEvil for example also has plenty of story told via letters, instead of actually dailog, but there those stuff has impact on the gameplay, you need it to find out codes, places to go to, etc. and last not least ResidentEvil used very few letters, in Prime those log entries are scattered all across the world.
### Maybe you were just put off by the 3D.
Well, I didn't like the controls that much (to many flying enemies that were impossible to target without getting hit yourself), even so the lock-on feature was a very nice addition, but anyway the 3D look isn't a problem for me. The graphics itself are fine, its just the setting that is just to unrealistic, respawning enemies all those special spots to be triggered with morphball and such, just doesn't feel like a real world. It felt like "Oh, the game designer now wants me todo that... blah" not like "Oh, *I* wanna go there and find out what had happened".
### Games don't train people to be better killers, if it was the army wouldn't waste so much money using real ammo for traing soldiers.
Games don't train you to use a real gun, I agree on that, however I believe that they *do* help you to be a better killer. The thing is that a human normally won't shoot at another human, in many past wars that resulted in plenty of men never firing a single shoot[1]. These days the army does practice a lot to get away from that no-shooting-'reflex' and trains plenty of shooting at human silhouette. There is some study[2] says that video games do pretty much the same, they train you to shoot at human silhouettes. Of course that doesn't help you a thing if you don't have training with a real gun in addition, but if you stuck a non-gamer and a gamer into combat and only give them some basic gun training, I believe that the gamer would be more like to actually fire, simply because he trained to do that a lot, while the non-gamer might thing twice.
[1] Seen on some discovery channel docu
[2] Sorry don't have a link at hand
### Nintendo does have mature games. Eternal Darkness, Metroid Prime, and Resident Evil are examples.
Sadly that is already half of the mature games available for the Cube, there really is not much more and especially nothing more that is Cube-exclusive. Speaking of MetroidPrime I don't even consider that very mature, sure you have a big gun, but hardly any story worth to talk about, no characters, no dialog (well, a tiny little bit) and hardly any violence worth to talk about. I really love the 2D Metroids, but Prime never really got me, kind of just bores me, I think it simply didn't went far enough, it basically never was scarry. Anyway, the throuble of the Gamecube isn't the non-existent mature games, it has some, but simply the lack of quantity and varity of games. Gamecube has the games that Nintendo produced and very little else, these days even the multiplatform games end up PS2 und XBox only, Gamecube gets ignored.
### Was Hot Coffee actually in the game with a cheat code?
It was on the game discs, but only reachable via save-game hacking and neither via gameplay or via a simple cheat-code.
Does anybody know other games where affected by the aftermath of the 'Hot Coffee' dicussion. I know that the US Version of Indigo Prophecy had three scenes removed due to probally offending content, any other games that got cut for the US release? And what would have happened if they didn't cut those scenes (contain some nudity and sex), AO rating?
### I don't see how a smaller version of existing technology can be counted as breakthrough, when compared to innovations in tech, such as the nintendo voice recognition, or the facial imaging software, or even the stunning UE3.
There is nothing special about Nintendos Voice Recognition, if I remember correctly my Soundblaster2.0 already came with software that did exactly the same years ago. So like the PSP, it doesn't offer anything new, just in a smaller form factor then it used to be.
### What they should be doing is upping the poly counts on SD resolutions as much as possible to make it look better
Polycount won't help, with normal mapping you can already do extremly detailed looking creatures without using that much polygons at all. What games are laking graphical wise these days are three things in my eyes:
1) proper lighting, shadows are still the sharp ugly ones which we already had in the day of Starfox on the SNES, that just isn't very realistic, HDR helps quite a bit, but what is needed is some kind of realtime radiosity to get away from that odd-computer graphics look
2) motion, stil frames these days often look a lot better then the thing in motion, for the simple reason that animation is still a huge problem, motion capturing works fine for cutscenes, but in dynamic scenes it just doesn't look very good to always see the same prerecorded animation, beside from that it often is simply the wrong animation (classic example would be a player character walking against the wall, simply wouldn't work in reallife that way). Some kind of adaptive animation system is needed here, something that not only plays a prerecorded motion, but more or less simulates the human body.
3) information density, again not really a rendering thing, but what I mean with that is that the amount of 'information' that is presented in a game is nowwhere near reality. If I look around in a real room I might find shelfs full of books, all of which readable, cabinets full of cloths, all of them wearable, computers full of files, all of them browsable. In a game on the other side I might be able to find a table, a chair and a shelf with a few empty boxes, if there ever is a book in a game, I am happy when I can read a few pages of it, if at all. Same is true for games that play outside, GTA might give you a whole city, but each house is nothing more then a textured box, you can't walk into most of them, people that walk around on the streets are generated completly random and neither have goal or purpose. Sure, an artist probally will never close this information gap, but ProjectGutenberg might be able to fill the books with text and some kind of fractal algorithm should be able to build a wide varity of houses and rooms that are explorable, Elite did that a two decades ago and presented the player with a whole universe to explore, while it wasn't the most detailed universe, todays hardware should be able to accomplish quite a bit more.
### "19-year-old gunman Robert Steinhaueser was an avid Counter-strike player, leading to calls to limit violent games in Germany."
That argument is old and was very flawed right from the beginning. First of I don't think Robert was an avid CounterStrike player, he might have played it every once in a while, but so far I havn't seen any proof that he played more then every random gamer you might find. Secondly Robert used *real* guns, real guns he *legally* owned and with which he *legaly* trained, yes, even with germany's rather strict laws that was possible. So CounterStrike or not is completly a non issue, his training with real guns gave him the ability to kill 16 people (police and thus medical care only entering the building quite late helped quite a bit to, to kill the people).
And most ridiculuos, directly after the shooting new laws where approved that require to follow USK game ratings, thus no games for minors, unless they were rated such. Well, in the end it didn't matter anyway, since Robert was 19 already...
In germany it is already illegal to sell video games to people below the recomment age for a game (ie. the USK rating). Its also possible to 'index' very violent games, meaning not only it is forbitten to sell them to children blow 18 years, but its also forbitten to advertise those games at all, meaning you can't have them standing around in a shop where they might be spotted by children blow 18 or review them in magzines. So everything is already in place to ban those 'killer games' if needed. I get the feeling that those politicans simple haven't the slightest clue what the current laws are.
### I have lost several friends to overdose and hiv as a result of drug abuse.
HIV and overdoses are for most part the result of the 'War on Drugs', it has nothing to do with the addiction itself or the drug. Gaming doesn't involve needles and neither does gaming have a 'leathal dose', so you can't directly die from gaming, doesn't mean it can't cause addiction. Just look over at Korea and China a few people already have died there, not because of gaming itself, but because they gamed for multiple days without eating, drinkng or sleeping.
### The word addiction used to mean something that was physically addictive, like heroin or nicotine.
As far as I understand it games *can* make you physically addicted, only difference is that the drugs to which you are addicted do not come from the outside, but are what your body produces normally, that stuff however gets out of balance due to the gaming addiction, so to keep those stuff in the balance you have to continue to play.
### Microsoft, with their enourmous resources, have made the controller lighter, and moved some buttons.
Yes and thats exactly what I like about the XBox360, it didn't do anything revolutionary, but they took what they have and made it better, plain and simple, and from what I have seen they seem to have succeeded, the controller looks fine, the console itself as well, what was wrong with the old XBox seems to be fixed. Yes, its not an endless hype-o-ramma like the PS3 or some revolutionary thing like the Nintendo Revolution, for which we have seen zero games so far, XBox360 however is here now, well in a few weeks, anyway, you can buy it, there are games for it and its done.
We will have to see if the XBox360 turns out a success, but unlike with the XBox, I have a hard time to find anything obviously wrong with the XBox360, its a simple solid console. Nintendo Rev on the other side could still turn into a VirtualBoy2 if they don't get any games for it soon. And PS3, I don't know, I don't like the design, I don't like the controller (same mistakes back from PS1-Dualshock all over repeated) and I especially don't like the end less hyping without actually having real games footage to show, everybody can do nice rendermovies. XBox360 is real where the others are still nothing more then fluffy dreams.
### in fact is only revealed in the very end of Super Metroid in a 'look whos inside' type of way
Little correction, in the NES and Gameboy parts its only revealed in the end and only if you beat the game fast enough, in SuperMetroid, MetroidFusion and MetroidZero its already revealed when you die, since then the suit explodes away and you can see who is in there.
Beside from that you are right, the female in Metroid is nothing more then a running gag, it doesn't matter to the game itself at all.
While this sounds like a ugly hack to fake the advertised resolution, im not so sure on the reasons, might simply be that they couldn't exactly predict how fast the real XBox360 is going to be and ended up with a few more polygons then it could handle, so instead of cutting the poly count playing around with the resolution is far easier to increase the fps a bit. Thats kind of one of the problems when you have only development kits that aren't the final hardware, wouldn't even be the first time. Many early GBA titles suffered as well, since the devkits back then where quite a bit a bridghter then the final device was.
### Why should -any- restrictions last beyond the period of time that Nintendo is actively manufacturing and selling the system and/or games for it?
While I agree with you on the general point, Nintendo *is* selling NES games, just resently there was the NES classic series for GBA, soon there will be plenty of NES games for the Revolution for download and the Gamecube also had at least all the NES Zelda titles. While the games maybe old, Nintendo is still using them to make money. Sure, they probally won't sell much original NES systems these days, but the games are still of value.
### Yeah, and I was thinking about that patching too. Since the DS uses SD-technology for their games, I don't see why it wouldn't be feasible to just update the card. Seems easy enough...
The DS doesn't use SD-technology, the carts are still completly unrewritable ROM things. The largest rewritable Flash in DS games so far is Nintendogs with 2Mbit(256kb), they could of course use a equally large Flash in MarioKart, if that is enough for patching the game or if it will be used at all for patching however has to be seen.
### The games designed by Nintendo are primarily for kids.
Just repeating the old saying doesn't make it any more true. Nintendo games are familiy friendly, but they are not primarily for kids, they are for everyone that enjoys gaming. I mean references to tons of old NES or arcade games in WarioWare, that no kid will ever get, because it simply can't know most of the games don't sound exactly like 'designed for children', same with the difficulty, and lots of other aspect. Anyway, that has never been Nintendos problem, the familily friendly images works pretty well as it is.
Nintendo however has one core problem and that is third party support, it doesn't matter how good the hardware is, how familiy friendly Nintendos owns games are or whatever, as long as Nintendo is almost the only party producing games for their console it just isn't much good as first or only console. I have a Gamecube myself and I like it a lot, but for actual gaming I turn to PS2 or recently a bit XBox, simply because they get the third party games, while Gamecube is now basically completly ignored. Another problem is that the Nintendo titels havn't been up to the quality they used to be, I finished Mario64 three times each time collecting 150 stars, replayed MarioBros3, YoshisIsland and friends quite a lot, and loved the old Zelda games, but MarioSunshine, WindWaker, nope, never played either of them through completly, just to tedious and boring. They have that feeling of 'been there done that', nothing new to see and that what I see was already done better in the past. Pikmin, while a brilliant idea, didn't work out completly either, neither the first or the second part really got as good as it could have been. Gamecube really missed a 'system-seller' quality title.
### Nintendo wouldn't let a bug that big get out in one of their biggest titles ever.
Well, they sure would fix it when they notice it before the release, the problem is that such kind of bugs are extremly hard to find.
### And if there were any big ones, the testers would have found them by now...remember,
A dozend of testers can't replace hundreds of thousands of players. The throuble is that even a little bug, that you wouldn't care at all about in a singleplayer game, can be fatal in a multiplayer game. Such things have happened to plenty of online games in the past, but for most part the bugs were patchable, which might not be the case with MarioKart. On the other side it might of course also be the case that Nintendo added some kind of patching capability to the game, it couldn't be persistent, but downloading a patch on game startup, should be doable.
### Sure lag might be a problem but I can't see how their can be cheating unless some odd things happen.
Just look at MarioKart64, it had numerous bugs that allow you to cheat on tracks, ie. reverse directly after start, drop down some cliff and wait till you are placed back on track, if you then drive through the finish you have done a lap, repeat that a few times and you can beat the track in 20 seconds. If similar bugs pop up in MarioKartDS and are used a lot, it could make the game a lot less fun.