I'm sorry, but I think it should be the goal of someone who creates a game to make it as much fun for everyone interested in that particular genre as possible.
Yeah, except going the lowest-common denominator route can turn off a huge part of your potential audience. I enjoyed Ninja Gaiden partially because it was challenging (though not as hard as many people complain - think tactical, gamers!). If it was easier I wouldn't have enjoyed it so much, and I am far from alone.
And you can't ignore the fact (even though you attempt to) that Team Ninja made the game pretty fair in terms of difficulty. There are what, only two parts of the game with 'instant kill pits', done largely for good game design reasons (like under the monastery - you can't just let the player jump all the way down, but you don't want the player taking falling damage for the other 99% of the game)? Compare that to a game like the Shinobi remake or your average platformer (hell, even classic games like Mario64!), which are filled with that kind of 'one mistake=death' annoyance. NG also allows you to build up as much money as you want (via various bat areas), so you can buy as much health potions as your skill level requires. Try playing something like Genma Onimusha, which has similar mechanics (lots of respawning enemies), a camera that is literally ten times or so worse, and a complete inability to buy health potions. You have to beat the game with what the designers give you - get to the last boss without enough potions, too bad. May as well restart. Even the 'bad camera' you talk about is pretty damn good, because it is paired with the ability to block 95+% of attacks with the touch of a button, and all enemies make noises so you know when an attack is coming even if it isn't visible (another thing Genma Onimusha screws up). Ninja Gaiden isn't easy, and maybe some parts could be tightened up a little or smoothed out, but it is intensely fair.
If you just started playing games recently (say the PSX era), or if you predominently play all of the recent (and easy) Nintendo games, Ninja Gaiden just probably isn't for you. There's nothing wrong with people like Itagaki making games for the millions of old school (and nowadays mostly Western) gamers that are so often ignored by most other developers. We really, really appreciate it, and the game's sales reflect that.
The reason even the anti-Bush people shut up about the WMD is no one is supposed to freaking know that their children are having WMD launched at them.
Please. If WMD was being used against the country's 'children' and we still managed to have the relatively low casualties we do, Bush would be advertising that. His credibility and poll standings would sky-rocket, and many of the Democrats attacking him in public would be completely silenced. It would make no sense for Bush (or more accurately, Rove) to be silent about this!
It seems hard to believe that we took 90,000 years to develop agriculture and cities, yet going from simple civilization to landing on the moon took at most 8000 years.
That is because you are buying into the Progress Myth. People didn't develop our form of agriculture because they didn't need to. The predominant 'food production' method prior to the invention of totalitarian agriculture (i.e. all calories on planet = humans or food for humans) and for most of the period after it was hunter-gatherer. As far as anthropologists can tell, it certainly wasn't all that bad of a place to be - for comparison, apparently the average amount of work you had to do a day to feed yourself and your children was under three hours. Fairly egalitarian, secure, and a pretty healthy lifestyle (compared to all t. agriculturist societies until very recently) too. Why give up that just so you can spend potentially 12+ hours a day farming, just so you can then support non-farmers (military, organized religion, government, etc.) that are going to put you at the bottom of a new class system anyway?
The bigger question is why people would start using our form of agriculture at all. It eventually led to some arguably great benefits (and a lot of huge new problems), but it was at least thousands of years of misery for 99% of the people before that.
Around Mortal Kombat's release Sega held something like 55% of the American videogame market. Hardly a "blip on the radar", and not even close to mediocrety. And Sonic 1 was the real first big system seller for the Genesis.
It's almost a given that the first 24 months or so a console is out, most of the games suck, hard.
Eh, I don't think that is true for more than a couple consoles (maybe PS2, maybe GC?). The Dreamcast and Xbox (the last two consoles I purchased) had tons of great titles in their first 1.5 years...
The name was obviously not as valuable as the Matrix, but the fact that it was a new Prince of Persia games was certainly one of the things that got my attention and made me interested in the game (and glad it did; that game was awesome). I'm sure that's true of at least some other people as well.
Me too, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking that a lot of the current gaming mass market remembers (i.e. has even played) the original series (or hell, let's just hope they forgot the terrible earlier 3D version of it). It probably helped build up preview/review hype though, since the average videogame reviewer at least should be a fan of the series.
Lately I keep seeing claims that Sega's last custom arcade hardware was the Naomi1. But unless I am massively mistaken/insane, Sega has created at least a couple of new hardware platforms since then, the Naomi2 (Virtua Fighter 4) being the most prominent and profitable. Hikaru is another one.
Is this just seeing some shoddy games journalism (oops, I repeat myself)? Or I am missing something?
(Gamespot reported that this was "first new Sega hardware since Naomi1", too - of course, they suggested that a 'Super Dreamcast' could be made out of the new Sammy Atomiswave arcade hardware, not knowing that the Atomiswave is basically just a slightly tweaked Dreamcast, strictly sub-Naomi1 level, so what can you expect?)
(a) The price (5 lb. equivilent bag of granulated Splenda costs about $8).
(b) Extremely limited availability. The only soda with Splenda is Diet Rite and Diet RC. Diet RC is hardly available, and Diet Rite comes only in caffeine free (insert vampire hiss here) form.
Well, until more people start deciding they need more chlorine in their diet, I can't see either of those problems changing. Of course, Splenda seems to be very popular in all the recent low-carb foods, so that might 'help' you. Couldn't stand the taste of it myself when I first tried it, and now that I know more about what it is I won't go near it.
Microsoft's managers still hang on to the silly dream that they can create a single platform that works for everybody. They can't. First, technically, people have needs and interests that are far too diverse to be served by any single platform.
I take it you didn't even glance at the interview. The point is that XNA will make it easier to make one 'game universe' run on multiple platforms at once. Practically the whole point of XNA is to address the very issue that a single platform doesn't work for everybody...
What I suspect Allard means by that statement is that we will see more games like Project Gotham 2. Sure you can play it online in a conventional sense, but online elements also apply during single player mode. Via Xbox Live you see how your scores compare to other people playing, you can download ghost racers to see how the best did what they did, etc. Sure, Zelda 11 may not have competitive multiplayer, but it might keep track of how fast you complete the dungeons, so you can compare/compete with your friends, or maybe you can trade special rare items with your friends, etc.
Having a game online doesn't mean you can't integrate a great single player experience into it. The online elements can just be used to add to that experience.
HDTVs generally cost more than an (already outrageously expensive) 23" Cinema Display, and have nowhere near the resolution or utility.
A. A 'PC games = best' type of person probably shouldn't whine that some kind of console gaming requirement is too expensive. A thousand dollars for a decent HDTV doesn't seem too crazy to me compared to how much money you save just by going the console route. No PC upgrades in five years more than compensates for a measly thousand dollars.
B. I don't watch much television myself, but an HDTV and appropriate television signal still provides quite a bit of utility. And you will be ready for the HD DVDs coming out 'any day now'.
C. Then just use the freaking VGA monitor you have. I have been doing that with consoles since 1999.
If you want the best gaming experience (ex: high resolution, DTS sound) you have to pay the price for it. No primary PC gamer should ever be complaining about that truism.
What exactly was GGX missing from the arcade version of GGX? The Dreamcast version was an exact port, with extra features, and AFAIK so was the PS2 version.
That is true - I should have clarified. Last year they made a huge push, that this GBA-GC connectivity was the wave of the future, better than online play, etc. No journalists really bought it, and AFAIK sales have really been not too hot for stuff like Crystal Chronicles. So basically I was just being a sarcastic bastard.:D
The dual weapons thing in Halo 2 is cool for the same reason the grenades and melee attack were so cool in Halo 1 - all of it has been done before, but Bungie did it different and far better.
Uh, CS was just a revision of the Action Quake series for Half-life. Any 'advances' it had were stuff I had already been doing in Quake2 (via Action Quake 2) for a couple years. If Halo wasn't innovative (the original argument), than Counterstrike is even less so.
Dreamcast's Outtrigger stilll stands out to me as the best console FPS ever.
Wow. Never thought I would see the day when someone admitted they like Outtrigger. Do any AM2 guys even admit that?
Not to be nasty, but after that comment I wasn't surprised you find Rare's best games to not be fun. Or suggesting that Conker was ugly (I do admit a higher framerate would have been nice, but that was a problem in every N64 game save F-Zero, IMO). You have rarified (ha ha), if not unique, tastes in gaming...
N.A.R.C., Cobra Triangle, RC Pro Am, Cabal, Time Lord, Donkey Kong Country, DKC2, DKC3, Killer Instinct, KI2..
A large segment of those games aren't even really Rare games - merely ports of arcade games they did for the NES. (Example: I wonder why Midway is putting out that new NARC game, and not Nintendo?) Games like Cabal are classic because they were great arcade games - Nintendo had nothing to do with that.
It is widely known that the talented development team left Rare several years ago (hence talk of "the Goldeneye team" making games for various non-Rare studios).
Do any of you anti-Rare trolls realize how big Rare is? Three people from the Goldeneye team (only one being a major creator of it) creating Free Radical does not equal the only talented people at Rare...
Incidentally, does anyone know if the Dreamcast platform is still licensable from Sega? And if anyone is using it for anything?
Sammy's 'new' arcade platform, the Atomiswave, is actually just stock Dreamcast hardware with a new case and some attachments (including a cartidge reader for the games). Though fairly low power, I personally think it is still a little too powerful for a portable version just yet.
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And death is always followed by an excruciatingly long load screen
We are talking about Ninja Gaiden, right? You know, the game with 1-3 second, max, loading times (with the possible exception of when it first loads)?
Something is probably wrong with your disc or Xbox...
I'm sorry, but I think it should be the goal of someone who creates a game to make it as much fun for everyone interested in that particular genre as possible.
Yeah, except going the lowest-common denominator route can turn off a huge part of your potential audience. I enjoyed Ninja Gaiden partially because it was challenging (though not as hard as many people complain - think tactical, gamers!). If it was easier I wouldn't have enjoyed it so much, and I am far from alone.
And you can't ignore the fact (even though you attempt to) that Team Ninja made the game pretty fair in terms of difficulty. There are what, only two parts of the game with 'instant kill pits', done largely for good game design reasons (like under the monastery - you can't just let the player jump all the way down, but you don't want the player taking falling damage for the other 99% of the game)? Compare that to a game like the Shinobi remake or your average platformer (hell, even classic games like Mario64!), which are filled with that kind of 'one mistake=death' annoyance. NG also allows you to build up as much money as you want (via various bat areas), so you can buy as much health potions as your skill level requires. Try playing something like Genma Onimusha, which has similar mechanics (lots of respawning enemies), a camera that is literally ten times or so worse, and a complete inability to buy health potions. You have to beat the game with what the designers give you - get to the last boss without enough potions, too bad. May as well restart. Even the 'bad camera' you talk about is pretty damn good, because it is paired with the ability to block 95+% of attacks with the touch of a button, and all enemies make noises so you know when an attack is coming even if it isn't visible (another thing Genma Onimusha screws up). Ninja Gaiden isn't easy, and maybe some parts could be tightened up a little or smoothed out, but it is intensely fair.
If you just started playing games recently (say the PSX era), or if you predominently play all of the recent (and easy) Nintendo games, Ninja Gaiden just probably isn't for you. There's nothing wrong with people like Itagaki making games for the millions of old school (and nowadays mostly Western) gamers that are so often ignored by most other developers. We really, really appreciate it, and the game's sales reflect that.
The reason even the anti-Bush people shut up about the WMD is no one is supposed to freaking know that their children are having WMD launched at them.
Please. If WMD was being used against the country's 'children' and we still managed to have the relatively low casualties we do, Bush would be advertising that. His credibility and poll standings would sky-rocket, and many of the Democrats attacking him in public would be completely silenced. It would make no sense for Bush (or more accurately, Rove) to be silent about this!
It seems hard to believe that we took 90,000 years to develop agriculture and cities, yet going from simple civilization to landing on the moon took at most 8000 years.
That is because you are buying into the Progress Myth. People didn't develop our form of agriculture because they didn't need to. The predominant 'food production' method prior to the invention of totalitarian agriculture (i.e. all calories on planet = humans or food for humans) and for most of the period after it was hunter-gatherer. As far as anthropologists can tell, it certainly wasn't all that bad of a place to be - for comparison, apparently the average amount of work you had to do a day to feed yourself and your children was under three hours. Fairly egalitarian, secure, and a pretty healthy lifestyle (compared to all t. agriculturist societies until very recently) too. Why give up that just so you can spend potentially 12+ hours a day farming, just so you can then support non-farmers (military, organized religion, government, etc.) that are going to put you at the bottom of a new class system anyway?
The bigger question is why people would start using our form of agriculture at all. It eventually led to some arguably great benefits (and a lot of huge new problems), but it was at least thousands of years of misery for 99% of the people before that.
Good prediction there. :D
Unfortunately it still isn't the end of 2003. Xbox pulled ahead of GC worldwide post-Christmas...
Around Mortal Kombat's release Sega held something like 55% of the American videogame market. Hardly a "blip on the radar", and not even close to mediocrety. And Sonic 1 was the real first big system seller for the Genesis.
It's almost a given that the first 24 months or so a console is out, most of the games suck, hard.
Eh, I don't think that is true for more than a couple consoles (maybe PS2, maybe GC?). The Dreamcast and Xbox (the last two consoles I purchased) had tons of great titles in their first 1.5 years...
Me too, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking that a lot of the current gaming mass market remembers (i.e. has even played) the original series (or hell, let's just hope they forgot the terrible earlier 3D version of it). It probably helped build up preview/review hype though, since the average videogame reviewer at least should be a fan of the series.
Lately I keep seeing claims that Sega's last custom arcade hardware was the Naomi1. But unless I am massively mistaken/insane, Sega has created at least a couple of new hardware platforms since then, the Naomi2 (Virtua Fighter 4) being the most prominent and profitable. Hikaru is another one.
Is this just seeing some shoddy games journalism (oops, I repeat myself)? Or I am missing something?
(Gamespot reported that this was "first new Sega hardware since Naomi1", too - of course, they suggested that a 'Super Dreamcast' could be made out of the new Sammy Atomiswave arcade hardware, not knowing that the Atomiswave is basically just a slightly tweaked Dreamcast, strictly sub-Naomi1 level, so what can you expect?)
My only beef with it is:
(a) The price (5 lb. equivilent bag of granulated Splenda costs about $8).
(b) Extremely limited availability. The only soda with Splenda is Diet Rite and Diet RC. Diet RC is hardly available, and Diet Rite comes only in caffeine free (insert vampire hiss here) form.
Well, until more people start deciding they need more chlorine in their diet, I can't see either of those problems changing. Of course, Splenda seems to be very popular in all the recent low-carb foods, so that might 'help' you. Couldn't stand the taste of it myself when I first tried it, and now that I know more about what it is I won't go near it.
Microsoft's managers still hang on to the silly dream that they can create a single platform that works for everybody. They can't. First, technically, people have needs and interests that are far too diverse to be served by any single platform.
I take it you didn't even glance at the interview. The point is that XNA will make it easier to make one 'game universe' run on multiple platforms at once. Practically the whole point of XNA is to address the very issue that a single platform doesn't work for everybody...
What I suspect Allard means by that statement is that we will see more games like Project Gotham 2. Sure you can play it online in a conventional sense, but online elements also apply during single player mode. Via Xbox Live you see how your scores compare to other people playing, you can download ghost racers to see how the best did what they did, etc. Sure, Zelda 11 may not have competitive multiplayer, but it might keep track of how fast you complete the dungeons, so you can compare/compete with your friends, or maybe you can trade special rare items with your friends, etc.
Having a game online doesn't mean you can't integrate a great single player experience into it. The online elements can just be used to add to that experience.
HDTVs generally cost more than an (already outrageously expensive) 23" Cinema Display, and have nowhere near the resolution or utility.
A. A 'PC games = best' type of person probably shouldn't whine that some kind of console gaming requirement is too expensive. A thousand dollars for a decent HDTV doesn't seem too crazy to me compared to how much money you save just by going the console route. No PC upgrades in five years more than compensates for a measly thousand dollars.
B. I don't watch much television myself, but an HDTV and appropriate television signal still provides quite a bit of utility. And you will be ready for the HD DVDs coming out 'any day now'.
C. Then just use the freaking VGA monitor you have. I have been doing that with consoles since 1999.
If you want the best gaming experience (ex: high resolution, DTS sound) you have to pay the price for it. No primary PC gamer should ever be complaining about that truism.
What exactly was GGX missing from the arcade version of GGX? The Dreamcast version was an exact port, with extra features, and AFAIK so was the PS2 version.
That is true - I should have clarified. Last year they made a huge push, that this GBA-GC connectivity was the wave of the future, better than online play, etc. No journalists really bought it, and AFAIK sales have really been not too hot for stuff like Crystal Chronicles. So basically I was just being a sarcastic bastard. :D
The dual weapons thing in Halo 2 is cool for the same reason the grenades and melee attack were so cool in Halo 1 - all of it has been done before, but Bungie did it different and far better.
Uh, CS was just a revision of the Action Quake series for Half-life. Any 'advances' it had were stuff I had already been doing in Quake2 (via Action Quake 2) for a couple years. If Halo wasn't innovative (the original argument), than Counterstrike is even less so.
I've never felt the need to buy a huge screen that operates at less than VGA resolution.
Well jeez then, get one that does do VGA resolution.
Only a troll would suggest that Goldeneye and Halo have remotely similar controls...
Dreamcast's Outtrigger stilll stands out to me as the best console FPS ever.
Wow. Never thought I would see the day when someone admitted they like Outtrigger. Do any AM2 guys even admit that?
Not to be nasty, but after that comment I wasn't surprised you find Rare's best games to not be fun. Or suggesting that Conker was ugly (I do admit a higher framerate would have been nice, but that was a problem in every N64 game save F-Zero, IMO). You have rarified (ha ha), if not unique, tastes in gaming...
N.A.R.C., Cobra Triangle, RC Pro Am, Cabal, Time Lord, Donkey Kong Country, DKC2, DKC3, Killer Instinct, KI2..
A large segment of those games aren't even really Rare games - merely ports of arcade games they did for the NES. (Example: I wonder why Midway is putting out that new NARC game, and not Nintendo?) Games like Cabal are classic because they were great arcade games - Nintendo had nothing to do with that.
It is widely known that the talented development team left Rare several years ago (hence talk of "the Goldeneye team" making games for various non-Rare studios).
Do any of you anti-Rare trolls realize how big Rare is? Three people from the Goldeneye team (only one being a major creator of it) creating Free Radical does not equal the only talented people at Rare...
Nintendo showing (not including DS): Impressive, just like last year (though the konga game seems a bit silly).
:D
So in what alternate universe did Nintendo have an impressive showing at E3 last year?
For some strange reason they decided not to promote GBA-GC connectivity this time, I wonder why?
Incidentally, does anyone know if the Dreamcast platform is still licensable from Sega? And if anyone is using it for anything?
Sammy's 'new' arcade platform, the Atomiswave, is actually just stock Dreamcast hardware with a new case and some attachments (including a cartidge reader for the games). Though fairly low power, I personally think it is still a little too powerful for a portable version just yet.