Poor controls in 3D games is frankly unacceptable these days. Every console has an analogue stick and Zelda 64 had a basically perfect control system back in '98. When I first played Tomb Raider - this was an old PC demo of it, about two years after it came out - I was appalled by the control system. Sure, you could do lots of pretty somersaults, but it was complete garbage in a combat situation and not much better for precision platform jumping. I could not imagine how Eidos got it so wrong, and yet kept the obviously flawed system for so many sequels. There's no excuse for it.
I always loved the Zelda solution to this: no jump button, just run for the edge and Link will automatically jump off anything higher than his waist. It made the game much more enjoyable to play than it could have been.
As for FPSs - well, realistically, how high can a man jump off the ground? Maybe three feet? In a real combat situation, nobody jumps about to avoid being hit... I don't think GoldenEye or Perfect Dark suffered for lack of a jump button. Sure, sometimes you get stuck behind low walls, but these days that could be altered to make you climb up or hop over automatically, no problem.
Now there was an unashamedly insanely hard game. I consider myself an above-average gamer and think it took me something like three solid weeks to finally unlock Master mode, and roughly fifty continues to beat M3 alone, which is probably the hardest genuinely completable (as in, get good enough and you can seriously do it every time) level in ANY game, anywhere.
The beauty of SMB was that when you failed it was always entirely your fault. Though there were some really crazy levels (like the whirling pegs level in the Master section), there were no enemies, no AI, no "puzzles", no tricks or special tactics to be learned which would let you beat levels more easily. Your only enemy was harsh, meticulously-modelled physics, and the only way to get better was to keep playing. Success in SMB boils down to 100% white-hot skill, and I have nothing but respect for Amusement Vision for making it that way. SMB and the aforementioned Ikaruga are my top two GameCube games.
My original Genesis copy of John Madden American Football - that's right, the original, I believe it's from 1992 - has, if I remember correctly, no recognisable American football players on the cover, just Madden himself.
Personally, I think that if you get rid of all the malware for them, and they go and install all over again, then that's just natural selection. Technological Darwinism.
It looks like he did a voice-over for the UK TV ad for PD. I can't remember a voice that sounded like his, but it's more plausible. See here. Could of course be a different Tom Baker, heaven knows there's more than one of them.
If Rogue Agent gets good reviews, and turns out to be worthy of the name - which I doubt - then I will buy this game. However, right now my plan is to go into Game, pick up the game, um and ahh for a bit, and then leave, possibly buying another copy of the original GoldenEye just to spite EA.
Fleming's Bond did a whole lot less shooting than Brosnan, plenty of intrigue and spy stuff and sex, but not much in the way of firefights, which, while not making up the whole game, should at least be the main emphasis of a first-person shooter. Still, a baccarat sub-game could be nice.
I don't know who owns the rights to the books, but almost of all of them have been adapted into movies by United Artists, who may still own those rights. However, a remake of Casino Royale - the only Bond novel not to be turned into a (serious) movie - is planned, so I could be wrong.
Better yet, you could put it in a geostationary orbit and lower a space elevator from it. Then you could mine minerals from the rock and ship them down the elevator, incidentally generating a vast amount of energy/electricity as the mass falls into the Earth's gravity well.
This is obviously not something you worry about for the sake of yourself. The legal and technical hassle in getting your data back will be a nightmare for the people you leave behind unless you help them - and also, maybe there's stuff you don't want them to see, for their own sake. This is - like creating a will - something you do to help your loved ones after you're gone and they're left to pick up the pieces. I assume you have loved ones?
The other thing is, if Pixar take one year to put out each 100-minute movie on average, how long is it going to take to make a game with ten times as much gameplay, almost all of it interactive? The developments times don't bear thinking about. I'd prefer my games sooner.
Although I share your pessimistic viewpoint I believe a Half-Life movie - if handled correctly - could work. We have the great concept of Gordon Freeman adapting from lowly experimenter through determined survivor to hard-as-nails alien killing machine. He's not trained with weapons, and never shoots down a whole load of enemies with the skill that James Bond does, but nevertheless he survives the grunts and the zombies and the slaves by being smart. As he claws his way out of Black Mesa I can see him accumulating a whole slew of scientists, security guards and miscellaneous workers and facing the burden of getting them all out safely. I can see him desperately taking a crowbar to Nihilanth's eye. But I digress.
I have to disagree. WW may have had considerably more collectables and secrets, but did there have to be SO many (printing out the complete list from GameFAQs runs to over 16 pages) and did they have to be SO sparsely distributed? The ocean was huge and sailing, while fun for a while and relaxing for a while after that, became intensely boring for me. Attempts to add features like octopi, rupee-gathering games and sharks and varying weather didn't alleviate this - give me some actual scenery!
I'd have been happier with, say, a single gigantic ocean to sail across, ringed with traversable land (and maybe mountains). Or a gigantic island surrounded by ocean, with a (reversible) clockwise or anticlockwise wind enabling you to use sailing as a fast route from place to place. I have high hopes for WW2.
I find there's considerably more depth to the story in Half-Life than most people realise at first. I'm gonna assume all of you have played it and I reveal the following spoilers:
At the time of the original accident that Gordon Freeman is present for, Black Mesa has had working teleporters for at least a few months and has been able to go to and from Xen for at least a week. They've captured and domesticated a good few indigenous life-forms - witness the Barnacle weapon and the ecosphere set up for some houndeyes in the Opposing Force expansion. Gradually they've captured more and more fauna until they "start getting collected themselves..." They get as far as Nihilanth's lair and manage to retrieve a mysterious orange crystal.
Yup. The crystal at the start of the game is the same as the three powering the final boss. Look and you will see a hole in the wall where the fourth crystal was stolen from. No wonder there was resonance cascade. The original accident causes a lot of random teleportations to and from Xen and brings over a whole lot of dangerous animals, but it's only about 12 hours of game time after the original experiment that stronger enemies - the green slaves, and the huge alien grunts - begin appearing spontaneously. This isn't accidental: this is enemy action by Nihilanth, who is moving to attack Earth... which is something the Administrator, who observes pretty much the whole course of events, has been expecting, indeed, preparing for. Read Alan Shepherd's diary and you know this was actually expected to happen.
Realising what has gone wrong the grunts are sent in, find it's too difficult a task to take on, are pulled out and replaced with black ops who attempt to nuke the place as a last resort. Shepherd stops the nuke and between them, he and Gordon Freeman block the alien invasion and kill Nihilanth, thus solving the problem in a different manner from what the G-man expected, but successfully.
When I figured all this out I was mightily impressed with Valve's storytelling abilities. The inattentive player would have missed a whole lot. I have high hopes for HL2, and I think I heard whispers of a movie of Half-Life...?
The plans for a Mercedes are complicated. Unimaginably more so would be the uber-detailed plans that would have to include the exact chemical composition of each of X hundred thousand components AND their correct order of assembly. So 1) Those plans are gonna take a LONG time to download and 2) a manufactory capable of producing one whole (in parts would be ridiculous) will doubtless cost a fortune. Possibly a fortune every week, it depends. Also, you're gonna have to find all that raw iron yourself.
Clearly, you've never suffered (the immediate consequences of or) the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. Those people weren't fine.
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki I think most of the world as a whole learned its lesson about nuclear weapons, (though obviously not all the world). However, nanotechnology is dangerous. Even one incident, ONE event in which nanotech is used to kill other human beings, could wipe out a fair percentage of the planet.
It IS faked. It says so right there in the text of the story, let alone the article. It WAS made using an emulator.
This practice is called a "Time Attack" and is completely different from speed completions, which are indeed done legitimately. Time Attacks are not world records and are never claimed as such - they're just cool, is all. If you understand Japanese it actually says clearly on the website of the guy who made the 11 minute SMB3 video that he faked it. It was an unfortunate misunderstanding that most people accepted it as legit.
That's not to say that Time Attacks are easy to do. It takes a lot of time and effort to put one together.
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Poor controls in 3D games is frankly unacceptable these days. Every console has an analogue stick and Zelda 64 had a basically perfect control system back in '98. When I first played Tomb Raider - this was an old PC demo of it, about two years after it came out - I was appalled by the control system. Sure, you could do lots of pretty somersaults, but it was complete garbage in a combat situation and not much better for precision platform jumping. I could not imagine how Eidos got it so wrong, and yet kept the obviously flawed system for so many sequels. There's no excuse for it.
I always loved the Zelda solution to this: no jump button, just run for the edge and Link will automatically jump off anything higher than his waist. It made the game much more enjoyable to play than it could have been.
As for FPSs - well, realistically, how high can a man jump off the ground? Maybe three feet? In a real combat situation, nobody jumps about to avoid being hit... I don't think GoldenEye or Perfect Dark suffered for lack of a jump button. Sure, sometimes you get stuck behind low walls, but these days that could be altered to make you climb up or hop over automatically, no problem.
Monkey
Ball.
Now there was an unashamedly insanely hard game. I consider myself an above-average gamer and think it took me something like three solid weeks to finally unlock Master mode, and roughly fifty continues to beat M3 alone, which is probably the hardest genuinely completable (as in, get good enough and you can seriously do it every time) level in ANY game, anywhere.
The beauty of SMB was that when you failed it was always entirely your fault. Though there were some really crazy levels (like the whirling pegs level in the Master section), there were no enemies, no AI, no "puzzles", no tricks or special tactics to be learned which would let you beat levels more easily. Your only enemy was harsh, meticulously-modelled physics, and the only way to get better was to keep playing. Success in SMB boils down to 100% white-hot skill, and I have nothing but respect for Amusement Vision for making it that way. SMB and the aforementioned Ikaruga are my top two GameCube games.
My original Genesis copy of John Madden American Football - that's right, the original, I believe it's from 1992 - has, if I remember correctly, no recognisable American football players on the cover, just Madden himself.
Trust me, if a nuclear hand grenade was a) possible and b) practical, it would already exist.
Personally, I think that if you get rid of all the malware for them, and they go and install all over again, then that's just natural selection. Technological Darwinism.
It looks like he did a voice-over for the UK TV ad for PD. I can't remember a voice that sounded like his, but it's more plausible. See here. Could of course be a different Tom Baker, heaven knows there's more than one of them.
Um, what's your source on that? I don't recall any decently-acted voices in the game, I thought they were all acted by Rare staff members.
If Rogue Agent gets good reviews, and turns out to be worthy of the name - which I doubt - then I will buy this game. However, right now my plan is to go into Game, pick up the game, um and ahh for a bit, and then leave, possibly buying another copy of the original GoldenEye just to spite EA.
Fleming's Bond did a whole lot less shooting than Brosnan, plenty of intrigue and spy stuff and sex, but not much in the way of firefights, which, while not making up the whole game, should at least be the main emphasis of a first-person shooter. Still, a baccarat sub-game could be nice.
I don't know who owns the rights to the books, but almost of all of them have been adapted into movies by United Artists, who may still own those rights. However, a remake of Casino Royale - the only Bond novel not to be turned into a (serious) movie - is planned, so I could be wrong.
It's not Sega and EA's fault that people keep buying the updates of the same game over and over and over. It's irritating, but it's profitable.
Roughly the same as eight Statues of Liberty, or twelve football fields.
Better yet, you could put it in a geostationary orbit and lower a space elevator from it. Then you could mine minerals from the rock and ship them down the elevator, incidentally generating a vast amount of energy/electricity as the mass falls into the Earth's gravity well.
I'm still waiting for Spacewar! 2
My password is my dog's name.
Wait, perhaps I should rephrase that. My dog's name is "Password".
This is obviously not something you worry about for the sake of yourself. The legal and technical hassle in getting your data back will be a nightmare for the people you leave behind unless you help them - and also, maybe there's stuff you don't want them to see, for their own sake. This is - like creating a will - something you do to help your loved ones after you're gone and they're left to pick up the pieces. I assume you have loved ones?
The other thing is, if Pixar take one year to put out each 100-minute movie on average, how long is it going to take to make a game with ten times as much gameplay, almost all of it interactive? The developments times don't bear thinking about. I'd prefer my games sooner.
Although I share your pessimistic viewpoint I believe a Half-Life movie - if handled correctly - could work. We have the great concept of Gordon Freeman adapting from lowly experimenter through determined survivor to hard-as-nails alien killing machine. He's not trained with weapons, and never shoots down a whole load of enemies with the skill that James Bond does, but nevertheless he survives the grunts and the zombies and the slaves by being smart. As he claws his way out of Black Mesa I can see him accumulating a whole slew of scientists, security guards and miscellaneous workers and facing the burden of getting them all out safely. I can see him desperately taking a crowbar to Nihilanth's eye. But I digress.
I have to disagree. WW may have had considerably more collectables and secrets, but did there have to be SO many (printing out the complete list from GameFAQs runs to over 16 pages) and did they have to be SO sparsely distributed? The ocean was huge and sailing, while fun for a while and relaxing for a while after that, became intensely boring for me. Attempts to add features like octopi, rupee-gathering games and sharks and varying weather didn't alleviate this - give me some actual scenery!
I'd have been happier with, say, a single gigantic ocean to sail across, ringed with traversable land (and maybe mountains). Or a gigantic island surrounded by ocean, with a (reversible) clockwise or anticlockwise wind enabling you to use sailing as a fast route from place to place. I have high hopes for WW2.
I find there's considerably more depth to the story in Half-Life than most people realise at first. I'm gonna assume all of you have played it and I reveal the following spoilers:
At the time of the original accident that Gordon Freeman is present for, Black Mesa has had working teleporters for at least a few months and has been able to go to and from Xen for at least a week. They've captured and domesticated a good few indigenous life-forms - witness the Barnacle weapon and the ecosphere set up for some houndeyes in the Opposing Force expansion. Gradually they've captured more and more fauna until they "start getting collected themselves..." They get as far as Nihilanth's lair and manage to retrieve a mysterious orange crystal.
Yup. The crystal at the start of the game is the same as the three powering the final boss. Look and you will see a hole in the wall where the fourth crystal was stolen from. No wonder there was resonance cascade. The original accident causes a lot of random teleportations to and from Xen and brings over a whole lot of dangerous animals, but it's only about 12 hours of game time after the original experiment that stronger enemies - the green slaves, and the huge alien grunts - begin appearing spontaneously. This isn't accidental: this is enemy action by Nihilanth, who is moving to attack Earth... which is something the Administrator, who observes pretty much the whole course of events, has been expecting, indeed, preparing for. Read Alan Shepherd's diary and you know this was actually expected to happen.
Realising what has gone wrong the grunts are sent in, find it's too difficult a task to take on, are pulled out and replaced with black ops who attempt to nuke the place as a last resort. Shepherd stops the nuke and between them, he and Gordon Freeman block the alien invasion and kill Nihilanth, thus solving the problem in a different manner from what the G-man expected, but successfully.
When I figured all this out I was mightily impressed with Valve's storytelling abilities. The inattentive player would have missed a whole lot. I have high hopes for HL2, and I think I heard whispers of a movie of Half-Life...?
The plans for a Mercedes are complicated. Unimaginably more so would be the uber-detailed plans that would have to include the exact chemical composition of each of X hundred thousand components AND their correct order of assembly. So 1) Those plans are gonna take a LONG time to download and 2) a manufactory capable of producing one whole (in parts would be ridiculous) will doubtless cost a fortune. Possibly a fortune every week, it depends. Also, you're gonna have to find all that raw iron yourself.
Clearly, you've never suffered (the immediate consequences of or) the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. Those people weren't fine.
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki I think most of the world as a whole learned its lesson about nuclear weapons, (though obviously not all the world). However, nanotechnology is dangerous. Even one incident, ONE event in which nanotech is used to kill other human beings, could wipe out a fair percentage of the planet.
Oh hell yes. Ideas like that transcend mere programming languages, man.
Perhaps you could implement a Tony Hawk's Skateboarding-style system, whereby the more you repeat a given move, the less damage it does.
It IS faked. It says so right there in the text of the story, let alone the article. It WAS made using an emulator.
This practice is called a "Time Attack" and is completely different from speed completions, which are indeed done legitimately. Time Attacks are not world records and are never claimed as such - they're just cool, is all. If you understand Japanese it actually says clearly on the website of the guy who made the 11 minute SMB3 video that he faked it. It was an unfortunate misunderstanding that most people accepted it as legit.
That's not to say that Time Attacks are easy to do. It takes a lot of time and effort to put one together.