We do have the benefit of hindsight but a lot of the effects her policies had had been predicted.
The social divide did indeed increase. But in all honesty stuck between miners, British Leyland and debt was not a comfy place to be.
I still maintain that she was the devil incarnate. But I will grant you her intentions were good. She could have gone about it a little bit subtler and not obliterate the unions and sell everything off to whoever showed up first with a lot of cash.
We could be silly buggers and dig her up and shoot her for treason. Which will with not the slightest bit of doubt be seriously considered in a The Guardian editorial within two months.
Which is moronic. That might bring her back. A stake through the heart, that's what you do. If she hadn't sold it 40 years ago.
As I recall she wasn't particularly keen on this Falklands thing. But the public opinion in a jingoist uproar demanded blood. So she roared with them.
Why not buy an election with a couple of ordinary human lives? That's a bargain! And we'll all be back for tea and medals in no time!
In a cruel repeat of then we've got the same bloody Falklands mess again. But that's the problems you've got when you own an island made of pure gold.
Grim Fandango doesn't lend itsself to a sequel. The story was finished.
But may I draw your attention to the huge "Ask Me About 'The Last Express'" badge on my shirt? Could be worth it...
LucasArts had the same problems a lot of old game companies have nowadays.
The original creative people have left and the new generation was mainly recruited from the fanbois who grew up with the games.
Lucas suffered from that, Blizzard suffers from that, SquareEnix suffers from that,...
The direct result is why the old hands make a killing on Kickstarter and the second generation fanbois at the huge companies only shovel crap upon crap into sequel after sequel.
The true and novel things that happen in the games industry seem to happen mostly at indies whith a shoe-string budget while big devs with a multi million budget manage to bork even the simplest things.
When was the last Resident Evil that was truly a survival horror game published?
When was the last truly good Sim City published?
How on earth can you fuck up something like Diablo 3?
I tell you the "creative" heads at a lot of the devs are simple fanbois with a lot of money on their hand bullied by grey-faced suits with Excel spreadsheets.
LucasArts was gutted before in an act of desparation the decided to go Star Wars only.
...or your monthly gaming rag which we also bought for the walkthroughs.
But yeah, the game discussions at school wer best. Kids nowadays can only say "And then I shot his nuts off."
We discussed the ideal weapon loadout for the spider boss in Xenon 2 and how to get past that "kneel down" section in Indy3. Or in very hushed voices what kind of lubber we got. YOU PERVERT!
And you still can pick up the old adventures and still enjoy them. They have aged quite well.
X-Wing and Tie Fighter have interestingly also aged quite well.
There are a lot of DOS era games that have aged very well and still are fun. GoG is chock full of them.
Others haven't aged very well at all. Wing Commander(1+2) for example. Back in the day we marvelled at those two. But now...hrm. Nostalgia does indeed have to kick in to enjoy those two.
Master of Magic is also a candidate for "hasn't aged very well". The gameplay and graphics are not the main cause for concern but rather the user interface.
And you can only say that Summer/Winter/California Games were any good when you are in full retard nostalgia mode. They were bad even back in the day. Never go full retard.
I was really prepared to hate Tie fighter when it was announced for the very same reason.
"Me? In a Tie fighter? Isn't their one redeeming value that they are cheap and you get lots of them? Why would I want to play as cannon fodder?"
Larry Holland pulled that stunt off beautifully. But let's not forget that a lot of the craft you got to fly in this game indeed had shields.
GK3 was the worst offender. Not only did you have to be at the right time at the right spot with little indication given. It also had the worst puzzles(and also some great puzzles). Having to molest a cat to get a fake mustache for your Mosley costume must be the worst thing ever done in an adventure game.
The only adventure that ever did the real time thing right was The Last Express which sadly has to be the best game nobody ever played. But even that had its fair share of problems. Putting an action sequence into an adventure game is propably lost on your audience. Fighting on the roof of a train may be fun in a fighting on the roof of a train game but not in an adventure game. Some did it right(you could skip the jump&run sequence in Rise of the Dragon) and some did it wrong(the kneel down sequence in Indiana Jones 3 springs to mind).
But the worst puzzles were those that referenced popular culture. In Day of the Tentacle you had to scare off a couple of morons. What you had was white paint and a black cat sitting on a fence. A friend of mine is from Romania and it took a couple of highly educational Pepe le Pew cartoons to explain to him why painting a white stripe on the back of a black cat was the obvious choice to do things.
It's the cultural equivalent of why none of us old farts will ever get why painting some obnoxious kid's hair orange and gel it into a spiky mess will scare off bullies. Kamekamehaha...whut?
I very rapidly understood why adventure games are best played with a walkthrough. And it is best to consult it only when needed. Being stuck was the worst thing that could happen to you. Being stuck because youd didn't pick up something at a place you can't get to anymore was even worse. And that is what never happened to you in Lucasfilm Games adventures and that was also something that made them awesome. That and you very rarely got stuck. And they were great fun. And they sometimes even made you think. They had great atmosphere. And diversity. They sent you on tropical islands, the afterlife, who knows where(Loom was odd), the future, the past, on a bike, on a zeppelin and even Atlantis(which would have been the better choice then looking for alien glass skulls)
Sadly they fell victim to the Doom clone craze and continued to produce rehash upon rehash of the least cerebral game concept since shooting gallery shareware was invented. Only with light sabres! And Jedi! Yay! http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/shooting-gallery/
If you want a true masterpiece you will have to gun for classics like The Last Express or Toonstruck.
But to be fair in most cases it is also enjoying to watch a Youtuber doing a Let's Play on them. Adventures lend themselves to that.
Worse still was being able to run MSCDEX, various drivers and still have enough memory to start the game. Now the whole thing runs on 10 year old phones.
SCUMMVM was ported to S60 yonks ago.
Wing Commander 1 only flight control animations if you had EMS. Which you propably hadn't if you had a 286. Fun times! ...and fun those times were. The games had focus. Focus that has been lost. Something like Lemmings or Populous would propably be considered 'casual' nowadays even if there wasn't anything casual about them in terms of difficulty the further you progressed.
Now we get murder simulators with Hollywood movie sequences with attached Sim City and naval battles. The naval battles being the best feature of the murder simulator. Go figure...
I played DOTT on my Nokia feature phone 5 years ago. It is doable.
And if you've got a USB mouse lying around then simply connect it to your phone or your tablet and it will work.
Ah, the blessed bliss of using devices that come with standard IO connections.
That was a great one and was copied by the whole of Europe.
What happened was that a lot of infrastructure payed for by the tax payer was sold off. The countries held onto a couple of shares. The services became cheaper but so became the policies.
While a government run Telco had to guarantee service for even the remotest bits of the country the privately held ones only had to go after the juiciest bits and leave the scraps for the plebs who dared to live in the sticks.
Same goes for the German railway system. While the lion share of it is owned by the public it is run as a for profit company. In which time they allowed the infrastructure to deteriorate in order to run the company cheaply on order to go public with better looking books. The going public bit never really materialized and the railway network is now so bad that we daren't run our high-speed trains at high speed. Every once in a while there will be a breakdown, the whole mess returns to the news and a fortnight later it is forgotten again.
Essentials should always be run by the state or with lots of oversight to make sure said essentials are equally available to everyone. Why else bother with having a country? To fund a huge military as a masturbatory aid for backbench MPs? That hardly seems worth the bother.
None of which even came close to the original games created by Lawrence Holland.
I remember picking up X-Wing Alliance back in the day and expecting something similarly epic. It was decent, but it wasn't as revolutionary.
Of course people would know. "I am missing the consistent fun I had on one of the big three consoles, where the presence of my favorite franchises meant that I could just pick a game and enjoy it. Even though game demos aren't costing me any money, they are costing my time, and time is money."
Fair enough. But franchises don't guarantee you fun either.
A lot of games need a lot of time investment before they become truly fun. The latest specimen of that breed that I encountered was Elder Signs: Omen. I had read about it, got interested and installed it. Took me 2 hours to figure out properly. That's two hours more than I would give a demo.
But demos is not what the Ouya is about. It's about try-before-you-buy. Their model would have mandated that I would have gotten the first campaign of Elder Signs for free and would have had to buy the rest of them if I liked it.
Which(because my time is also valuable...I do regularly attach a price tag to it) still doesn't answer how to choose what to try. And this is where I will smack you over the head with a confused but pretty lobster:
Review sites. They exist. Word of mouth. Youtube demo videos. Most games on Google Play have one. A lot of games dance seducively and waving their interesting bits in El Reg must own lists and there are a lot of other places where Android games earn their keep dancing around poles. Same fucking thing when it comes to goshdarn PC games. If I don't like those try-before-you-buy games enough to buy them I can spend the saved money wisely. On Batman comics. Better than waving my wallet at every Steam sale known to man or installing just about anything on your tablet/phone/Ouya.
I'm not worried about the first batch of games. A lot of them will already have some sort of Google Play success.
But since they propably don't have to jump through a lot of hoops to publish(like a couple of 10k$ to publish a patch on XBLA), a lot of devs will release inane crap. It all boils down how hard the Ouya people will watch that their rules are enforced. And even if that works out you will need some sort of review site to find good stuff. Sure as hell didn't work on Google Play.
But then again if no upfront payment is required and all games are basically "try before you buy" the worst thing that could happen to you is that you may not find that one game that would have been perfect for you. Which is tragic, But at least you won't know what you are missing.
Once it isn't a hassle anymore I will buy an Ouya. It would help if Amazon sold those because I'm lazy.
If the pricing is the same as on Google Play then in many cases they will give Steam/GoG a run for their money. I bought Puddle, Machinarium and Osmos for less on Google Play than on those other two.
If you have a sensible phone/tablet(one that has HDMI out and Bluetooth in) then a lot of indies would propably be best purchased for Android.
I didn't kickstart the Ouya thing but I will definitely get one for putzing around. Hell, just put XBMC on that thing and it has already earned its keep. Put DosBox on it and head over to GoG(although Tegra3 will have some trouble with Dungeon Keeper 1 but MoM and all ScummVM stuff will work fine) or your Friendly Neighbourhood Internet Pirate for an Amiga emulator and some nice disk images.
You haven't even tried what kind of mischief you can do with an Android device. there is of course MAME, a PS1 emulator, DosBox, Amiga Emulator, N64 Emulator, all without spending a dime(not neccessarily on Google Play anymore due to shades of gray; APKs to be had for those with the power to search).
That is a 100 bucks one time investment and a whole lotta stuff you can do with it.
NVidia not a major entrant? Heh...what drugs are you on and why aren't you sharing?
I have to second you on that.
NVidia has been strongarming, bribing, consulting and cocksucking any dev who would publish on the Android plattform. In fact there is propably a direct causality between nVidia not providing chips for the next gen consoles, Shield as a tech demo popping up(which is a bit of a laugh since we have been using tablets/phones with a PS3 controller for over a year now; add in an HDMI cable...yeah, you get the picture) and Ouya having no trouble whatsoever getting a lot of Tegra3 SoCs.
Remember the Ouya people saying they want to do regular updates to their console? Like a Tegra4 SoC? Gee, I wonder who they have been talking to.
The Ouya price point of a hundred bucks isn't even ambitious. The 104 games lineup at launch isn't ambitious(although Giana Sisters was something I only prayed for and didn't dare to hope) because MOST OF THE GAMES already existed.
I've been favouring Android as my preferred plattform for indie titles for the past two years. Guess what? I hardly ever regretted that because I have an HDMI cable, a PS3 controller and a brain. That is used. For smart making. and thoughts. And stuff. Like, duh.
nVidia not a major entrant into the mobile SoC arena? Welcome to 4 years ago. I also might want some of those drugs.
Don't get me wrong. I love the X-wing series. I don't think they're suited for todays mass audience though. Reconfiguring your energy levels on the fly is a bit much for todays gamers that can't even handle health paks.
The current euphemism for this is "streamlining". We still call it "you kids suck". Every time I see somebody taking a couple of rockets to the face, dive behind a chest-high wall and emerge 10 seconds later right as rain I die a little bit inside. Halo ruined health management and Half-life ruined what used to be open shooters.
Not that the FPS genre was worth anything to begin with. First we had those shooting ducks shooting galleries. They were shareware. Then they thought "let's let the ducks move to and fro as well". And then they let the player move to and fro. And then we got multiplayer so the ducks were people who shot back. The whole thing had not too much depth to begin with and even that got taken away.
Now everybody makes those highly scripted regen health death-to-the-brown-people shooterthings. But at least they have a story. Handily presented in QTEs. Don't stand over there or you will be summarily exected for triggering the QTE in the wrong sequence.
You are propably right. A shooting duck's brain propably wouldn't be able to handle redirecting all power from the shield to overtake that imperial bastard/rebel scum and would write an angry email to the internet.
Wasn't The Dig that vaporware unmitigatedly bland thing they did with Thtephen Thpielberg?
Dude! I'm aware we are holding an Irish style wake for LucasArts(née Lucasfilm Games). But commemorating their poo goes a bit far.
Slashdot Mirror
I scream, you scream...
Thatcher flavoured soft ice.
We do have the benefit of hindsight but a lot of the effects her policies had had been predicted.
The social divide did indeed increase. But in all honesty stuck between miners, British Leyland and debt was not a comfy place to be.
I still maintain that she was the devil incarnate. But I will grant you her intentions were good. She could have gone about it a little bit subtler and not obliterate the unions and sell everything off to whoever showed up first with a lot of cash.
We could be silly buggers and dig her up and shoot her for treason. Which will with not the slightest bit of doubt be seriously considered in a The Guardian editorial within two months.
Which is moronic. That might bring her back. A stake through the heart, that's what you do. If she hadn't sold it 40 years ago.
As I recall she wasn't particularly keen on this Falklands thing. But the public opinion in a jingoist uproar demanded blood. So she roared with them.
Why not buy an election with a couple of ordinary human lives? That's a bargain! And we'll all be back for tea and medals in no time!
In a cruel repeat of then we've got the same bloody Falklands mess again. But that's the problems you've got when you own an island made of pure gold.
Ok, I'll take you up on your challenge and I will ask you about one puzzle in Monkey Island 1:
What did you have to do to die in that game?
Grim Fandango doesn't lend itsself to a sequel. The story was finished.
But may I draw your attention to the huge "Ask Me About 'The Last Express'" badge on my shirt? Could be worth it...
LucasArts had the same problems a lot of old game companies have nowadays.
The original creative people have left and the new generation was mainly recruited from the fanbois who grew up with the games.
Lucas suffered from that, Blizzard suffers from that, SquareEnix suffers from that,...
The direct result is why the old hands make a killing on Kickstarter and the second generation fanbois at the huge companies only shovel crap upon crap into sequel after sequel.
The true and novel things that happen in the games industry seem to happen mostly at indies whith a shoe-string budget while big devs with a multi million budget manage to bork even the simplest things.
When was the last Resident Evil that was truly a survival horror game published?
When was the last truly good Sim City published?
How on earth can you fuck up something like Diablo 3?
I tell you the "creative" heads at a lot of the devs are simple fanbois with a lot of money on their hand bullied by grey-faced suits with Excel spreadsheets.
LucasArts was gutted before in an act of desparation the decided to go Star Wars only.
I'm done ranting.
...or your monthly gaming rag which we also bought for the walkthroughs.
But yeah, the game discussions at school wer best. Kids nowadays can only say "And then I shot his nuts off."
We discussed the ideal weapon loadout for the spider boss in Xenon 2 and how to get past that "kneel down" section in Indy3. Or in very hushed voices what kind of lubber we got. YOU PERVERT!
And you still can pick up the old adventures and still enjoy them. They have aged quite well.
...well the surfing bit was fine...
X-Wing and Tie Fighter have interestingly also aged quite well.
There are a lot of DOS era games that have aged very well and still are fun. GoG is chock full of them.
Others haven't aged very well at all. Wing Commander(1+2) for example. Back in the day we marvelled at those two. But now...hrm. Nostalgia does indeed have to kick in to enjoy those two.
Master of Magic is also a candidate for "hasn't aged very well". The gameplay and graphics are not the main cause for concern but rather the user interface.
And you can only say that Summer/Winter/California Games were any good when you are in full retard nostalgia mode. They were bad even back in the day. Never go full retard.
I was really prepared to hate Tie fighter when it was announced for the very same reason.
"Me? In a Tie fighter? Isn't their one redeeming value that they are cheap and you get lots of them? Why would I want to play as cannon fodder?"
Larry Holland pulled that stunt off beautifully. But let's not forget that a lot of the craft you got to fly in this game indeed had shields.
Let me join your rant.
GK3 was the worst offender. Not only did you have to be at the right time at the right spot with little indication given. It also had the worst puzzles(and also some great puzzles). Having to molest a cat to get a fake mustache for your Mosley costume must be the worst thing ever done in an adventure game.
The only adventure that ever did the real time thing right was The Last Express which sadly has to be the best game nobody ever played. But even that had its fair share of problems. Putting an action sequence into an adventure game is propably lost on your audience. Fighting on the roof of a train may be fun in a fighting on the roof of a train game but not in an adventure game. Some did it right(you could skip the jump&run sequence in Rise of the Dragon) and some did it wrong(the kneel down sequence in Indiana Jones 3 springs to mind).
But the worst puzzles were those that referenced popular culture. In Day of the Tentacle you had to scare off a couple of morons. What you had was white paint and a black cat sitting on a fence. A friend of mine is from Romania and it took a couple of highly educational Pepe le Pew cartoons to explain to him why painting a white stripe on the back of a black cat was the obvious choice to do things.
It's the cultural equivalent of why none of us old farts will ever get why painting some obnoxious kid's hair orange and gel it into a spiky mess will scare off bullies. Kamekamehaha...whut?
I very rapidly understood why adventure games are best played with a walkthrough. And it is best to consult it only when needed. Being stuck was the worst thing that could happen to you. Being stuck because youd didn't pick up something at a place you can't get to anymore was even worse. And that is what never happened to you in Lucasfilm Games adventures and that was also something that made them awesome. That and you very rarely got stuck. And they were great fun. And they sometimes even made you think. They had great atmosphere. And diversity. They sent you on tropical islands, the afterlife, who knows where(Loom was odd), the future, the past, on a bike, on a zeppelin and even Atlantis(which would have been the better choice then looking for alien glass skulls)
Sadly they fell victim to the Doom clone craze and continued to produce rehash upon rehash of the least cerebral game concept since shooting gallery shareware was invented. Only with light sabres! And Jedi! Yay!
http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/shooting-gallery/
Well, the Walking Dead seems to do allright.
If you want a true masterpiece you will have to gun for classics like The Last Express or Toonstruck.
But to be fair in most cases it is also enjoying to watch a Youtuber doing a Let's Play on them. Adventures lend themselves to that.
...and hardly anybody mistook themselves for Hollywood movie directors. Well, not after what happened to Chris Roberts.
Interactive Movies were at the butt of any joke in the second half of the nineties. Yet they seem to have won. Press A for victory!
Worse still was being able to run MSCDEX, various drivers and still have enough memory to start the game. Now the whole thing runs on 10 year old phones.
...and fun those times were. The games had focus. Focus that has been lost. Something like Lemmings or Populous would propably be considered 'casual' nowadays even if there wasn't anything casual about them in terms of difficulty the further you progressed.
SCUMMVM was ported to S60 yonks ago.
Wing Commander 1 only flight control animations if you had EMS. Which you propably hadn't if you had a 286. Fun times!
Now we get murder simulators with Hollywood movie sequences with attached Sim City and naval battles. The naval battles being the best feature of the murder simulator. Go figure...
I played DOTT on my Nokia feature phone 5 years ago. It is doable.
And if you've got a USB mouse lying around then simply connect it to your phone or your tablet and it will work.
Ah, the blessed bliss of using devices that come with standard IO connections.
That was a great one and was copied by the whole of Europe.
What happened was that a lot of infrastructure payed for by the tax payer was sold off. The countries held onto a couple of shares. The services became cheaper but so became the policies.
While a government run Telco had to guarantee service for even the remotest bits of the country the privately held ones only had to go after the juiciest bits and leave the scraps for the plebs who dared to live in the sticks.
Same goes for the German railway system. While the lion share of it is owned by the public it is run as a for profit company. In which time they allowed the infrastructure to deteriorate in order to run the company cheaply on order to go public with better looking books. The going public bit never really materialized and the railway network is now so bad that we daren't run our high-speed trains at high speed. Every once in a while there will be a breakdown, the whole mess returns to the news and a fortnight later it is forgotten again.
Essentials should always be run by the state or with lots of oversight to make sure said essentials are equally available to everyone. Why else bother with having a country? To fund a huge military as a masturbatory aid for backbench MPs? That hardly seems worth the bother.
Fry&Laurie put her policies best:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhpNqSSdThc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6CkltzGAxY
This is a good deal for Britain. A good deal.
None of which even came close to the original games created by Lawrence Holland. I remember picking up X-Wing Alliance back in the day and expecting something similarly epic. It was decent, but it wasn't as revolutionary.
But at least you won't know what you are missing.
Of course people would know. "I am missing the consistent fun I had on one of the big three consoles, where the presence of my favorite franchises meant that I could just pick a game and enjoy it. Even though game demos aren't costing me any money, they are costing my time, and time is money."
Fair enough. But franchises don't guarantee you fun either.
A lot of games need a lot of time investment before they become truly fun. The latest specimen of that breed that I encountered was Elder Signs: Omen. I had read about it, got interested and installed it. Took me 2 hours to figure out properly. That's two hours more than I would give a demo.
But demos is not what the Ouya is about. It's about try-before-you-buy. Their model would have mandated that I would have gotten the first campaign of Elder Signs for free and would have had to buy the rest of them if I liked it.
Which(because my time is also valuable...I do regularly attach a price tag to it) still doesn't answer how to choose what to try. And this is where I will smack you over the head with a confused but pretty lobster:
Review sites. They exist. Word of mouth. Youtube demo videos. Most games on Google Play have one. A lot of games dance seducively and waving their interesting bits in El Reg must own lists and there are a lot of other places where Android games earn their keep dancing around poles. Same fucking thing when it comes to goshdarn PC games. If I don't like those try-before-you-buy games enough to buy them I can spend the saved money wisely. On Batman comics. Better than waving my wallet at every Steam sale known to man or installing just about anything on your tablet/phone/Ouya.
Even if you disagreed with him you did better damn well listen to what he said.
His opinions were well founded and he will be sorely missed.
He would propably appreciate the irony that the biggest wreath of them all will come from Rob Schneider.
I'm not worried about the first batch of games. A lot of them will already have some sort of Google Play success.
But since they propably don't have to jump through a lot of hoops to publish(like a couple of 10k$ to publish a patch on XBLA), a lot of devs will release inane crap. It all boils down how hard the Ouya people will watch that their rules are enforced. And even if that works out you will need some sort of review site to find good stuff. Sure as hell didn't work on Google Play.
But then again if no upfront payment is required and all games are basically "try before you buy" the worst thing that could happen to you is that you may not find that one game that would have been perfect for you. Which is tragic, But at least you won't know what you are missing.
Once it isn't a hassle anymore I will buy an Ouya. It would help if Amazon sold those because I'm lazy.
If the pricing is the same as on Google Play then in many cases they will give Steam/GoG a run for their money. I bought Puddle, Machinarium and Osmos for less on Google Play than on those other two.
If you have a sensible phone/tablet(one that has HDMI out and Bluetooth in) then a lot of indies would propably be best purchased for Android.
I didn't kickstart the Ouya thing but I will definitely get one for putzing around. Hell, just put XBMC on that thing and it has already earned its keep. Put DosBox on it and head over to GoG(although Tegra3 will have some trouble with Dungeon Keeper 1 but MoM and all ScummVM stuff will work fine) or your Friendly Neighbourhood Internet Pirate for an Amiga emulator and some nice disk images.
You haven't even tried what kind of mischief you can do with an Android device. there is of course MAME, a PS1 emulator, DosBox, Amiga Emulator, N64 Emulator, all without spending a dime(not neccessarily on Google Play anymore due to shades of gray; APKs to be had for those with the power to search).
That is a 100 bucks one time investment and a whole lotta stuff you can do with it.
NVidia not a major entrant? Heh...what drugs are you on and why aren't you sharing?
I have to second you on that.
NVidia has been strongarming, bribing, consulting and cocksucking any dev who would publish on the Android plattform. In fact there is propably a direct causality between nVidia not providing chips for the next gen consoles, Shield as a tech demo popping up(which is a bit of a laugh since we have been using tablets/phones with a PS3 controller for over a year now; add in an HDMI cable...yeah, you get the picture) and Ouya having no trouble whatsoever getting a lot of Tegra3 SoCs.
Remember the Ouya people saying they want to do regular updates to their console? Like a Tegra4 SoC? Gee, I wonder who they have been talking to.
The Ouya price point of a hundred bucks isn't even ambitious. The 104 games lineup at launch isn't ambitious(although Giana Sisters was something I only prayed for and didn't dare to hope) because MOST OF THE GAMES already existed.
I've been favouring Android as my preferred plattform for indie titles for the past two years. Guess what? I hardly ever regretted that because I have an HDMI cable, a PS3 controller and a brain. That is used. For smart making. and thoughts. And stuff. Like, duh.
nVidia not a major entrant into the mobile SoC arena? Welcome to 4 years ago. I also might want some of those drugs.
Especially Grim Fandango had stronger writing than any of the Star Wars movies themselves.
Much as I admire Grim Fandango, that is setting the bar pretty low.
Star Wars turned out be be really, really good at limbo dancing.
Don't get me wrong. I love the X-wing series. I don't think they're suited for todays mass audience though. Reconfiguring your energy levels on the fly is a bit much for todays gamers that can't even handle health paks.
The current euphemism for this is "streamlining". We still call it "you kids suck". Every time I see somebody taking a couple of rockets to the face, dive behind a chest-high wall and emerge 10 seconds later right as rain I die a little bit inside. Halo ruined health management and Half-life ruined what used to be open shooters.
Not that the FPS genre was worth anything to begin with. First we had those shooting ducks shooting galleries. They were shareware. Then they thought "let's let the ducks move to and fro as well". And then they let the player move to and fro. And then we got multiplayer so the ducks were people who shot back. The whole thing had not too much depth to begin with and even that got taken away.
Now everybody makes those highly scripted regen health death-to-the-brown-people shooterthings. But at least they have a story. Handily presented in QTEs. Don't stand over there or you will be summarily exected for triggering the QTE in the wrong sequence.
You are propably right. A shooting duck's brain propably wouldn't be able to handle redirecting all power from the shield to overtake that imperial bastard/rebel scum and would write an angry email to the internet.
Wasn't The Dig that vaporware unmitigatedly bland thing they did with Thtephen Thpielberg?
Dude! I'm aware we are holding an Irish style wake for LucasArts(née Lucasfilm Games). But commemorating their poo goes a bit far.