I am the Mario Kart and Mario Kart 64 battle mode god, or rather a god. I have hardly defeated every luckless soul in the world at Mario kart, but I am yet to meet my match, and many have tried.
Needless to say that I am very anxious to see this game. I hope its as great a game as it looks like it will be, I may be a fan-boy on this matter but I have very high expectations and I don't want to be disappointed (like I was with the GBA version)
News that they have boosted the default speed is very good, One of the things that I hated about Kart 64, was that the game wasn't really much fun until you made it up to the 150cc karts. I hope the oncoming trafic track returns...
THis is exactly the kind of publicity gaming needs on the eve of a new round of government involvment and editorial criticism regarding the impact and effect ot realistic depictions of violence on youth/adults/pets/whatever.
Though its pretty cool that the level design in the game reached this level of detail. If somebody would make a grand theft auto: Ann Arobr I could finally get back at all of those militant pedestrians that back up trafic and maybe even get the chance to drive through the art fair; years of pent up frustration could be shed in a few drunken afternoons of cathartic goodness!
War is war, if your going to complain about Vietnam being an inappropriate subject matter than you need in include all of them.
My father fought in that war, and was active with a number of Vietnam veteran organizations when I was growing up. The impression I got spending time with some of the other families as to the reason that nobody liked to talk about the war had nothing to do with the moral ramifications or justifiability of the conflict, but rather it was related to Vietnam being the first war that America "lost". Many of the Vietnam veterans disliked veterans of other wars for not welcoming them home, and the other veterans disliked the Vietnam vets because they "lost".
I would say that the Vietnam war changed the American perception of war and the rest of the world every bit as much as the first and second world wars, it removed that candy coating around what America was really about. We learned that we are not infallible or invincible, we learned that good and evil wasn't always black and white. It's no wonder that people are still so sensitive to the time.
But the only way over it is through it, if we never talk about it or come to terms with it how are going to avoid a similar quagmire. Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe games should only be about sunshine and kittens.
You know, I had this weird feeling the other night when that bluish-purple glowing portal opened up in my bathroom. I know now that I have obviously stumbled into the Bizzaro dimension because there is no way that I could have possibly read an article in which the movie industry just blamed text-messaging for their shrinking market in any kind of rational universe. If somebody knows when the portal home is due to open please give me a shout-out so I can escape this place.
The logic of the MPAA argument is so flawed I don't even know where to begin. I suppose the only choice they have to save their shrinking industry is to press congress to pass laws against people saying anything about Movies. I am sure that there is something in the DMCA that would allow them to extend their IP rights to include "opinions" of a given film to also be included under the copyright, and thus prohibit the discussion of any film currently in theaters, or in print for DVD, or still in existence.
It is all of our responsibilities to protect Hollywood, or something.
Don't get me wrong, I love the classics as much as the next bitter, cynical hardcore gamer, but c'mon SEGA, how many times are you just going to re-release the same titles over and over? Phatasy star received a good port to the GBA last year, Golden Axe was on the DC classics collection 2 years ago (or was it 3?) and while Fanatasy Zone hasn't seen the light of day for quite some time, it was never one of the "A-titles" anyway. Just because something is old, doesn't mean that it is good. And how many times are we going to see Sonic Adventure 1 &2 ported around with a name change?
We need more Panzer Dragoon Ortas, and Gun Valkyries not titles that have already been milked to the point of resembling raisins.
Um, maybe I'm a little out of things considering that I took the MCAT yesterday and have been more or less drunk since it concluded, but why was that article posted? Are the admins off this weekend?
Don't get me wrong, the subject matter could have been an interesting read, but My cat has buried things in his sand box that had more journalistic merit than that "article" did.
I liked the first game, its one of the few games that was hyped more than the second coming of Jesus, and still delivered a solid and most of all enjoyable game. For this reason, I am looking forward to the sequel.
Perfect? no, of course not. But it was fun. It's one of the only 3rd person shooters that I have played that had solid controls and most of all, the aiming was good enough that you could actually hit your target. The Bullet time while definately a gimick, was a really good gimick. If you want to see just how good they implemented "bullet time" in Max Payne Play Dead To Rights sometime, and see how poorly Namco used it in their Max Payne Rip Off.
Thats tough but Ephemeral Fantasia on the PS2 has to be one of the worse RPGs in existence. I can't even begin with how bad it was, if you really want to know: just pick it up in a discount bin (should be about $1 by now) then take the disc and without bending or breaking it, shove it up your nose. Thats what it feels like.
Now the main feature:
I remember back when the X-box had just launched, and good titles were hard to come by, you had HALO, and then you had a lot of other stuff that sucked so bad, it forces me to use the word "suck". A friend of mine who had been to E3 that year was trying to get a few of us hyped up for the release of Azurik. It was to feature a complex fighting and magic system, open ended game play and killer grpahics, and the letter X and all those other things that the kids are into these days.
The thing is, that MS had kept the lid on this game, most of the previews that were available were nuetral or positive (since no media people actually seemed to be allowed to play the game) THis friend managed to convince a few other friends of mine that they should reserve it and so they did. I had my doubts though,
"blue skinned people fighting it out on a far away world" sounded a bit to much like something that was going to suck.
For a month I kept having to hear about how much everyone was psyched up for this game. I would say it looked like ass, they would say I didn't know what I was talking about. Finally it was released, and when I came home from work and asked my roomate how it was, he just handed me his copy and said try it.
I laughed so hard as i tried to play it, beer shot out of my nose. From that day on when ever somebody tried to disagree with me on a matter related to gaming, I would just bring up Azurik and my point was proven.
This is a really underated MMORPG, and while it had its share, and the share that should have gone to about a half dozen other games worth of problems it really is a pretty decent game.
You have a huge world, lots of different classes to choose from with very different abilities (build robots, pilot vehicles, use a matrixesque alternate world) Lots of randomly generated dungeons that you have to yourself or your party alone rather than having to share it with 400 other people crowding in to it, and relatively steady character advancement (that is, the treadmill moves along a little faster than most games)
That bad launch is still haunting them though; When I started playing it about a year ago during a free demo, and actually found it pretty good, my apporval for it was meet by laughter and disbelief by my other MMORPG playing friends.
Ok, I have to complain about something here (big surprise no?)
Has any "techie" in their entire life ever said "Hey, Politics are messed up! lets reboot the system!"?
Is it at all possible for an article to be written about "techies" without trying to sneak in at least one snide comment? I mean, if i write an article about the GOP, i don't ever include an "After they ate some babies and set fire to some poor people" comment.
I like Slash'em, and I like their large tile grpahics set better than Falcon's eye, the 3d just slows the flow of the game down and makes it harder to play.
While I appretiate all of the extra content that Slash'em intorduces, I still prefer NetHack over it's derivatives. There is something to be said about purity. Or I might just hold a little bit of sentimental value for the grandson of the first game on the PC that really stole my heart as a kid. Still though, Slash'em is a good change of pace.
No, you can use mouse, keyboard, pad or a combination. I use mouse and keyboard, and it was awkward at first but not bad when you get the swing of it. The camera controls still irk me a bit.
I don't think it's a "we are beaten" thing. I think its a "we don't want people standing in towns 24/7 lagging the servers and shouting "WHO WANTS TO BUY MY LEATHER COD-PIECE" over and over again.
As the system is now, you go to the auction house, specifiy the minimum price you will accept for the item and then wait. People will see the item listed, but not know what you want for it, so they enter a bid. If their bid is greater than the cheapest version of the item for sale, they get it. if it's to low, they have to try again. Its a good system because if your trying to sell a common item, you want to set your price a little low or else the other sellers will essentially cost cut. Rare items stil fetch good prices because there is never going to be more than 1 or 2 for sale at a time. There is even a "price history" that will tell you how much identicle items of the same type have sold for in the last 10 sales so the buyer and seller is more than likely going to be well informed on the true value of what they are trying to buy or sell.
We actually had a rule at Atari, which seems kind of quaint now, that you could blow up a tank, a plane, a car - but you couldn't do violence against a human."
THis coming from the company that paid their programers slave wages and gave no written credit for games authored. Yeah, Atari was a great comapny "back in the day"
I think it will sell well, and I think that it's going to be a solid game. Remember that a lot of people play Diablo 1 and 2 alone offline (not a majority mind you, but a fair number of people) so the lack of 4-player opportunities is not going to be a major disappointment for most people. The Gauntlet ports did fine in sales, Mario Party is a consistent series, and all of these games, by most people's standards, are not good single player games. Yet people buy them so we will just have to see.
Besides, I think square is at it's turkey quota for this year (see Unlimited Saga)
You should check (if you haven't already)out the Total War series of games.(Shogun, Medeival and upcoming Rome) These games are all about tactics and formation. THere is no real-time resource management either, if your playing the campaign you have to manage you empire but when battles arise you must fight with what you have available. Two people playing with the same army could have the battle turn out completly differently everytime they play it just based on the tactics employed.
ANother game that took a decent and unique approach to RTS is the Kohan series; also fairly decent if not a little dry.
If some of these games would get a proper re-release I would gladly pay for them, but honestly who besides me cares about(let alone has heard of):
Blacktiger
Speed Rumbler
1943 Battle of Midway
Solar Warrior
Rygar
Time Soldiers
Tiger Road
Ahh the good old days, Everytime I smell fabric softner I remember all the games i used to play at my local Econ-O-Wash.
Until they do I guess i have to be a criminal.
Anyone else find it weird that this article appears on an MSN, site?
Isn't it funny that one of Nintendo's biggest competitors is the one reporting on this supposed "struggling" company. Nintendo actually exceeded stock holder expectations on profit last year, In stark contrast to the games division at Microsoft which finished deep down in the red.
Media consolidation at work. Maybe if Nintendo had it's own news network we could catch some stories about how badly MS is doing.
I wont argue with you on that one, but the problem is, that in any given mob, the overall intelligence of that mob is equal to the IQ of its slowest member. More freedom means more abuse, that is unless there is a level of accountability in the game.
UO was only entertaining in the days of the "PK-hell". When all of that got pushed aside it only served to reveal the true cause of the problems: THe game world was hideously boring with nothing to do other than crowd into one of 8, count em 8 dungeons supposed to provide thousands of players with areas to hack their way through.
When 6 people jump every single respawn anywhere in the world you are going to have some problems.
Now I understand a lot of content has been added since the bad-old-days when I used to play it. but as someone who played the game in its first year and watched them nerf everything to hell until there was nothing left to do, I can tell you that lofty ideals of the creators had less to do with the smoking crater the game turned into than the whip cracking suits that pushed it out the door a long time before it was ready to go live.
For a MMORPG player, this is the same thing. Characters take hours and hours to build up (weeks, months, years even), and to lose it all because the host of your game can't keep their servers protected is a very hard thing to over look. This combined with Gravity's past "its your fault you got hacked" attitude (im not kidding on that one, after a number of hacks during one of the betas their offical statement was that it was the users fault for not changing their passwords often enough, what kind of PR is that?)I just don't understand why people still play it.
And why was that reply posted as an AC? its not trolling or rude.
Go to GameFAQs (the best known and one of the largest FAQ sites) and watch the available FAQs for a game that hasn't been released yet.
Let me save you the trouble, the first FAQs will go up about 2 days after the guides ship to stores. These people are not playing the games through to completion, they are ripping out of guides. Simple as that.
In all my years of sailing the 7 seas, I have yet to meet a pirate that writes FAQs. Does it happen? Im sure once and a while for some very popular games a few dedicated souls will snag import copies or pirated copies and actually pen their own work, but I am confident in guessing that such cases account for less than 10% of all online FAQs.
The Ragnorok Online hint of the day (brought to you by mountain dew, when you level up do the dew)
Todays tip: stop playing ragnarok online
All kidding aside, Suppose I started an airline "Mofo air" and it suffered 2 major crashes in less than a month all due to sloppy security and terrible maintance. How many of you would still be buying tickets? How poorly does one have to run a company before people get the picture that it sin't going to get better?
Im sure there will be some law suits in the next couple weeks or so from angry Ragnarokers.
Slashdot Mirror
I am the Mario Kart and Mario Kart 64 battle mode god, or rather a god. I have hardly defeated every luckless soul in the world at Mario kart, but I am yet to meet my match, and many have tried.
Needless to say that I am very anxious to see this game. I hope its as great a game as it looks like it will be, I may be a fan-boy on this matter but I have very high expectations and I don't want to be disappointed (like I was with the GBA version)
News that they have boosted the default speed is very good, One of the things that I hated about Kart 64, was that the game wasn't really much fun until you made it up to the 150cc karts. I hope the oncoming trafic track returns...
I shut up now
Perfect!
THis is exactly the kind of publicity gaming needs on the eve of a new round of government involvment and editorial criticism regarding the impact and effect ot realistic depictions of violence on youth/adults/pets/whatever.
Though its pretty cool that the level design in the game reached this level of detail. If somebody would make a grand theft auto: Ann Arobr I could finally get back at all of those militant pedestrians that back up trafic and maybe even get the chance to drive through the art fair; years of pent up frustration could be shed in a few drunken afternoons of cathartic goodness!
War is war, if your going to complain about Vietnam being an inappropriate subject matter than you need in include all of them.
My father fought in that war, and was active with a number of Vietnam veteran organizations when I was growing up. The impression I got spending time with some of the other families as to the reason that nobody liked to talk about the war had nothing to do with the moral ramifications or justifiability of the conflict, but rather it was related to Vietnam being the first war that America "lost". Many of the Vietnam veterans disliked veterans of other wars for not welcoming them home, and the other veterans disliked the Vietnam vets because they "lost".
I would say that the Vietnam war changed the American perception of war and the rest of the world every bit as much as the first and second world wars, it removed that candy coating around what America was really about. We learned that we are not infallible or invincible, we learned that good and evil wasn't always black and white. It's no wonder that people are still so sensitive to the time.
But the only way over it is through it, if we never talk about it or come to terms with it how are going to avoid a similar quagmire. Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe games should only be about sunshine and kittens.
You know, I had this weird feeling the other night when that bluish-purple glowing portal opened up in my bathroom. I know now that I have obviously stumbled into the Bizzaro dimension because there is no way that I could have possibly read an article in which the movie industry just blamed text-messaging for their shrinking market in any kind of rational universe. If somebody knows when the portal home is due to open please give me a shout-out so I can escape this place.
The logic of the MPAA argument is so flawed I don't even know where to begin. I suppose the only choice they have to save their shrinking industry is to press congress to pass laws against people saying anything about Movies. I am sure that there is something in the DMCA that would allow them to extend their IP rights to include "opinions" of a given film to also be included under the copyright, and thus prohibit the discussion of any film currently in theaters, or in print for DVD, or still in existence.
It is all of our responsibilities to protect Hollywood, or something.
Don't get me wrong, I love the classics as much as the next bitter, cynical hardcore gamer, but c'mon SEGA, how many times are you just going to re-release the same titles over and over? Phatasy star received a good port to the GBA last year, Golden Axe was on the DC classics collection 2 years ago (or was it 3?) and while Fanatasy Zone hasn't seen the light of day for quite some time, it was never one of the "A-titles" anyway. Just because something is old, doesn't mean that it is good. And how many times are we going to see Sonic Adventure 1 &2 ported around with a name change?
We need more Panzer Dragoon Ortas, and Gun Valkyries not titles that have already been milked to the point of resembling raisins.
Um, maybe I'm a little out of things considering that I took the MCAT yesterday and have been more or less drunk since it concluded, but why was that article posted? Are the admins off this weekend?
Don't get me wrong, the subject matter could have been an interesting read, but My cat has buried things in his sand box that had more journalistic merit than that "article" did.
Thankyou
I like Troika, but comments like "we are the first" when they are very clearly not, do nothing but make if difficult to not like them less.
I liked the first game, its one of the few games that was hyped more than the second coming of Jesus, and still delivered a solid and most of all enjoyable game. For this reason, I am looking forward to the sequel.
Perfect? no, of course not. But it was fun. It's one of the only 3rd person shooters that I have played that had solid controls and most of all, the aiming was good enough that you could actually hit your target. The Bullet time while definately a gimick, was a really good gimick. If you want to see just how good they implemented "bullet time" in Max Payne Play Dead To Rights sometime, and see how poorly Namco used it in their Max Payne Rip Off.
One of the side effects, however, is an unpleasant body odour
Uhh, that and death resulting from renal failure, no big deal.
It's like this: You want to be in shape, you have to exercise, there is no safe shortcut that you can bypass the "work" part of the equation.
You want to be smart? Exercise your brain, bend spoons, project force fields, solve equations, read something, c'mon work it!
Thinking you can be smarter simply by using a drug to bypass the effort proves you are already too stupid to benefit anyway.
Worst game?
Thats tough but Ephemeral Fantasia on the PS2 has to be one of the worse RPGs in existence. I can't even begin with how bad it was, if you really want to know: just pick it up in a discount bin (should be about $1 by now) then take the disc and without bending or breaking it, shove it up your nose. Thats what it feels like.
Now the main feature:
I remember back when the X-box had just launched, and good titles were hard to come by, you had HALO, and then you had a lot of other stuff that sucked so bad, it forces me to use the word "suck". A friend of mine who had been to E3 that year was trying to get a few of us hyped up for the release of Azurik. It was to feature a complex fighting and magic system, open ended game play and killer grpahics, and the letter X and all those other things that the kids are into these days.
The thing is, that MS had kept the lid on this game, most of the previews that were available were nuetral or positive (since no media people actually seemed to be allowed to play the game) THis friend managed to convince a few other friends of mine that they should reserve it and so they did. I had my doubts though, "blue skinned people fighting it out on a far away world" sounded a bit to much like something that was going to suck.
For a month I kept having to hear about how much everyone was psyched up for this game. I would say it looked like ass, they would say I didn't know what I was talking about. Finally it was released, and when I came home from work and asked my roomate how it was, he just handed me his copy and said try it.
I laughed so hard as i tried to play it, beer shot out of my nose. From that day on when ever somebody tried to disagree with me on a matter related to gaming, I would just bring up Azurik and my point was proven.
This is a really underated MMORPG, and while it had its share, and the share that should have gone to about a half dozen other games worth of problems it really is a pretty decent game.
You have a huge world, lots of different classes to choose from with very different abilities (build robots, pilot vehicles, use a matrixesque alternate world) Lots of randomly generated dungeons that you have to yourself or your party alone rather than having to share it with 400 other people crowding in to it, and relatively steady character advancement (that is, the treadmill moves along a little faster than most games)
That bad launch is still haunting them though; When I started playing it about a year ago during a free demo, and actually found it pretty good, my apporval for it was meet by laughter and disbelief by my other MMORPG playing friends.
Ok, I have to complain about something here (big surprise no?)
Has any "techie" in their entire life ever said "Hey, Politics are messed up! lets reboot the system!"?
Is it at all possible for an article to be written about "techies" without trying to sneak in at least one snide comment? I mean, if i write an article about the GOP, i don't ever include an "After they ate some babies and set fire to some poor people" comment.
That is all.
I like Slash'em, and I like their large tile grpahics set better than Falcon's eye, the 3d just slows the flow of the game down and makes it harder to play.
While I appretiate all of the extra content that Slash'em intorduces, I still prefer NetHack over it's derivatives. There is something to be said about purity. Or I might just hold a little bit of sentimental value for the grandson of the first game on the PC that really stole my heart as a kid. Still though, Slash'em is a good change of pace.
No, you can use mouse, keyboard, pad or a combination. I use mouse and keyboard, and it was awkward at first but not bad when you get the swing of it. The camera controls still irk me a bit.
I don't think it's a "we are beaten" thing. I think its a "we don't want people standing in towns 24/7 lagging the servers and shouting "WHO WANTS TO BUY MY LEATHER COD-PIECE" over and over again.
As the system is now, you go to the auction house, specifiy the minimum price you will accept for the item and then wait. People will see the item listed, but not know what you want for it, so they enter a bid. If their bid is greater than the cheapest version of the item for sale, they get it. if it's to low, they have to try again. Its a good system because if your trying to sell a common item, you want to set your price a little low or else the other sellers will essentially cost cut. Rare items stil fetch good prices because there is never going to be more than 1 or 2 for sale at a time. There is even a "price history" that will tell you how much identicle items of the same type have sold for in the last 10 sales so the buyer and seller is more than likely going to be well informed on the true value of what they are trying to buy or sell.
Its a great system that i hope other games adopt.
We actually had a rule at Atari, which seems kind of quaint now, that you could blow up a tank, a plane, a car - but you couldn't do violence against a human."
THis coming from the company that paid their programers slave wages and gave no written credit for games authored. Yeah, Atari was a great comapny "back in the day"
I think it will sell well, and I think that it's going to be a solid game. Remember that a lot of people play Diablo 1 and 2 alone offline (not a majority mind you, but a fair number of people) so the lack of 4-player opportunities is not going to be a major disappointment for most people. The Gauntlet ports did fine in sales, Mario Party is a consistent series, and all of these games, by most people's standards, are not good single player games. Yet people buy them so we will just have to see.
Besides, I think square is at it's turkey quota for this year (see Unlimited Saga)
You should check (if you haven't already)out the Total War series of games.(Shogun, Medeival and upcoming Rome) These games are all about tactics and formation. THere is no real-time resource management either, if your playing the campaign you have to manage you empire but when battles arise you must fight with what you have available. Two people playing with the same army could have the battle turn out completly differently everytime they play it just based on the tactics employed.
ANother game that took a decent and unique approach to RTS is the Kohan series; also fairly decent if not a little dry.
If some of these games would get a proper re-release I would gladly pay for them, but honestly who besides me cares about(let alone has heard of):
Blacktiger
Speed Rumbler
1943 Battle of Midway
Solar Warrior
Rygar
Time Soldiers
Tiger Road
Ahh the good old days, Everytime I smell fabric softner I remember all the games i used to play at my local Econ-O-Wash.
Until they do I guess i have to be a criminal.
Anyone else find it weird that this article appears on an MSN, site?
Isn't it funny that one of Nintendo's biggest competitors is the one reporting on this supposed "struggling" company. Nintendo actually exceeded stock holder expectations on profit last year, In stark contrast to the games division at Microsoft which finished deep down in the red.
Media consolidation at work. Maybe if Nintendo had it's own news network we could catch some stories about how badly MS is doing.
I wont argue with you on that one, but the problem is, that in any given mob, the overall intelligence of that mob is equal to the IQ of its slowest member. More freedom means more abuse, that is unless there is a level of accountability in the game.
UO was only entertaining in the days of the "PK-hell". When all of that got pushed aside it only served to reveal the true cause of the problems: THe game world was hideously boring with nothing to do other than crowd into one of 8, count em 8 dungeons supposed to provide thousands of players with areas to hack their way through.
When 6 people jump every single respawn anywhere in the world you are going to have some problems.
Now I understand a lot of content has been added since the bad-old-days when I used to play it. but as someone who played the game in its first year and watched them nerf everything to hell until there was nothing left to do, I can tell you that lofty ideals of the creators had less to do with the smoking crater the game turned into than the whip cracking suits that pushed it out the door a long time before it was ready to go live.
But their characters do.
For a MMORPG player, this is the same thing. Characters take hours and hours to build up (weeks, months, years even), and to lose it all because the host of your game can't keep their servers protected is a very hard thing to over look. This combined with Gravity's past "its your fault you got hacked" attitude (im not kidding on that one, after a number of hacks during one of the betas their offical statement was that it was the users fault for not changing their passwords often enough, what kind of PR is that?)I just don't understand why people still play it.
And why was that reply posted as an AC? its not trolling or rude.
Go to GameFAQs (the best known and one of the largest FAQ sites) and watch the available FAQs for a game that hasn't been released yet.
Let me save you the trouble, the first FAQs will go up about 2 days after the guides ship to stores. These people are not playing the games through to completion, they are ripping out of guides. Simple as that.
In all my years of sailing the 7 seas, I have yet to meet a pirate that writes FAQs. Does it happen? Im sure once and a while for some very popular games a few dedicated souls will snag import copies or pirated copies and actually pen their own work, but I am confident in guessing that such cases account for less than 10% of all online FAQs.
The Ragnorok Online hint of the day (brought to you by mountain dew, when you level up do the dew)
Todays tip: stop playing ragnarok online
All kidding aside, Suppose I started an airline "Mofo air" and it suffered 2 major crashes in less than a month all due to sloppy security and terrible maintance. How many of you would still be buying tickets? How poorly does one have to run a company before people get the picture that it sin't going to get better?
Im sure there will be some law suits in the next couple weeks or so from angry Ragnarokers.