Personally I prefer to play on original hardware rather than emulation (it's a bit like the old CD vs vinyl debate!) That's not to say emulation isn't great in a lot of circumstances, but I tend to prefer the real hardware. Timing is one thing I often notice is inaccurate or erratic in emulated games, my favourite example being Samus' wall kick in Super Metroid, which I often use as a quick acid test of a SNES emulator.
I've put together a collection of various JAMMA games that are favourites of mine and use a Supergun to play them. While it's a bit of a pain swapping delicate boards (the encased boards of the CPS1 Q-sound era onwards are a godsend), it's great to be able to play the original hardware. Obviously certain early non-JAMMA games need extra wiring to work, but it can be worth the effort if you're into this sort of hobby.:)
I don't see why the chavs need this anyway. All the ones that live near me have already have PCs, mobile phones, cars, PS3s, Sky Sports subscriptions, etc all thanks to their generous benefits payouts.
I thought we were supposed to be cutting back on government spending, I'd like to know how much the dedicated helpline they're promising will cost for starters...
Re:Graphics are moving in the wrong direction
on
Review: Halo: Reach
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· Score: 1
I agree, Reach seems to be missing the more colourful and bright look of the previous main instalments. As well as the texture and frame rate issues you mentioned I noticed quite frequent AI bugs, with characters getting stuck and not moving, just popping out of existence and on one occasion Kat just teleported into the passenger seat of the Warthog after I left her behind. I often see the AI in Halo games used as the gold standard, but I wasn't that impressed with this one. Makes me wonder if maybe the game was a bit rushed to hit the launch date MS set for it...
Meh. Who needs graphics on netbooks anyway. It's not like you're going to use photoshop/CAD or play games on them...
I play games on mine!:) My current netbook plays stuff like GTA Vice City and Aliens vs Predator (1999) really well.
I'm about to replace it with an Alienware M11x so I can play modern stuff like Mass Effect 2 on the go. Basically it's a portable Xbox 360 for me. It should have the horsepower for most emulators too.
I hate this too. I'm still upset Shenmue II ended on a massive cliffhanger with Sega clearly not intending to finish the story.
More recently Ubisoft have been doing it in a lot of their games, and in the case of the Prince of Persia reboot, they've already abandoned it for a Sands of Time sequel to cash-in on the film coming out this summer.
The article talks about rating online games based on their demographics and moderation systems, but I believe even that is pointless. Just look at Nintendo, I lost count of the number of hairy dicks people had drawn on the front of their karts in Mario Kart DS, and that game has no text or voice chat and no webcam features. No matter how many people you ban for inappropriate behaviour, there will always be someone new on the game ready to mis-behave.
The ESRB can't rate online interactions and they're right not to try to do so. The only thing they should be doing is educating parents about the risks of playing games online and recommending that parents monitor who their kids are talking to in those games.
It's the same reason why Final Fantasy XIV is "exclusive" to PS3 initially, because Sony allow you game alongside players from other platforms, which in this case is the PC version. Microsoft policy is not to allow this, although there have been exceptions like Final Fantasy XI and Shadowrun.
Besides, do you really want 13 year old Xbox and PS3 owners with headsets in the same game together? It would instantly set a world record for the most times the word "gay" was said in a single minute.
You're right that I shouldn't be too impressed with something as basic as Wolf3D running properly on an iPhone, but have you seen some of the other attempts at 3D games on the iPhone?;) Some of them have really appalling frame rates and unresponsive controls.
Case in point, according to Carmack when Electronic Arts first ported Wolf3D to the iPhone they were just using the CPU for everything. It wasn't until Carmack took it on that the GPU was utilised. If you're interested Carmack talks about the development process here.
I probably played your Quake ports back in the day, as I used to enjoy putting all the games I could find on my Pocket PC. I remember enjoying Quake on there a lot, although the d-pads on the PDAs I owned were always a bit fiddly! IIRC there was a Casio Pocket PC with a d-pad that would only accept one direction press at a time! This port of Quake 1 on the DS works very well given the hardware it's on, with the stylus/touchscreen being used for aiming and the d-pad being used for movement.
Secret doors work like normal doors, so accidentally triggering them does happen every so often even without looking for them. That said, I have fond(?!) memories of walking against all the walls hammering my space bar looking for secrets, so I think automatic triggering might just be an improvement.
So far ammo hasn't been too bad, I don't know if that was tweaked or not but it wouldn't surprise me if it was. Generally, I find myself short on ammo at the start of a new chapter where you get stripped of all your weapons but your ammo reserves soon build up again.
I bought Wolf3D for the iPhone on a whim, expecting it to be your typical iPhone game with stuttering gameplay and sluggish controls, but it really surprised me in how well it played.
I think it's easy to just think of Carmack as a genius programmer but he also really knows how to tune a game to be fun too, from reading Carmack's blog about developing iPhone Wolf3D it's clear he put a lot of thought and effort into streamlining the gameplay. He removed the high score from the game as it was fairly superfluous. He also dropped having a finite number of lives in the game so you can restart a level whenever you want. He rightly noticed that too many controls are a pain so he made door trigger automatic (like Quake). Best of all he added an auto-map to help make sense of the maze-like levels (using the old maze solving algorithm of hugging the left wall works well for most levels;) ).
On top of all that he also wrote a game that maintains a steady frame rate and has very responsive and comfortable controls (which is very unusual in iPhone games). So, with all that in mind, I'm really champing at the bit to get his port of Doom Classic, but it still hasn't been released. I can only assume they're waiting for Doom Resurrection sales to drop off before releasing another Doom game to avoid cannibalising sales. Doom Resurrection is OK, but the tilt controls aren't that great and being on-rails it's missing the fun of being able to explore a level yourself at your own pace.
Apparently Duke Nukem is on the way as well. I hope they do as good a job of porting that as Carmack did with Wolf3D. Now if LucasArts could be persuaded to port Dark Forces and Jedi Knight....;)
I couldn't agree more, the MX Revolution is fantastic for coding. Its best feature in my book is the SmartShift tech which makes scrolling through code such a breeze! It's a real shame that Logitech have abandoned SmartShift on all their newer mice, requiring the user to manually shift between modes rather than letting the mouse shift itself when it detects heavy scrolling. Still I'm sure I'll be able to pick up Revolutions on eBay for a few years to come...
If I were to post this anonymously, would/. keep a record that I used my/. account to post it, even though outwardly it's anonymous? Do they also keep a record of the IP I used to post?
I looked briefly at the privacy T&Cs linked at the bottom of the page and it makes various noises about keeping non-identifiable aggregate information for stats, but it's not clear what is done with the data or what would happen if they received a legal requirement to reveal all data held about an anonymous poster.
I was a little dismayed to see in TFA that SmartShift's "absence in more recent mice leads us to believe that consumers weren't too thrilled with it". I love the SmartShift on my MX Revolution, it's the best feature of the mouse by far and I really hope Logitech aren't dumping it for good.
In my job I'm always being sent huge source code files or CSV data that I need to quickly scroll through, and being able to give the scroll wheel a quick flick so that it switches to freewheel mode and zooms down the file has been invaluable. I wouldn't want another mouse without it. If Logitech dump SmartShift I'll probably have to subsist on second hand MX Revolutions on eBay for as long as I can....
I can't stand the application specific profiles though, I want my scroll wheel to operate consistently in every application, but for some reason even if I delete the profiles they reappear after a reboot.:/ I won't mourn the loss of that feature if Logitech want to remove it...
I'm glad to see someone in this thread is showing some decorum instead of making tasteless jokes or asking "who?"
I agree entirely with what you've said, the H2G2 radio shows were fantastic (and a regular fixture on my iPod), I was always disappointed they didn't continue the story after the end of the second series (although Dirk Maggs did a decent job more recently).
Another Perkins favourite of mine was KYTV, a spoof on satellite TV channels with lots of tacky low budget game shows and news channels.
I agree. Just as damning is that Jeffrey didn't even know if Yu Suzuki was working for Sega anymore! If Jeffrey doesn't even know if Sega's most prolific and successful game creator is still working for the company I find it hard to bother listening to what he has to say.
Now if only they'd let Suzuki make more than one game in 5 years (Sega Race TV). And preferably that game would be Shenmue III.
Yeah we have underbelly citizens in the UK, they're usually called chavs or pikeys. Sadly it seems the majority of people using a headset on Live are not the best representatives for their country...
We have real problems in the UK of violent teenage gangs and feral youths who hang around in packs causing problems. I should know I see these gangs every day. Many people won't leave their homes because of these "children". Years of namby pamby liberal Labour government and lax parenting skills in a rapidly breeding underclass has led to all these young thugs. I fully support placing as many of these devices around as possible. While it's true that it's unfair to people who are not causing trouble they are already the minority.
I've been tinkering since the NES days, so it's an old habit now!:)
I do actually have a second control Wii, I mainly use it for VC games, but if Nintendo ever get any decent online going I will be able to use it for that as well.
Actually no, I do not pirate games. I've been importing video games from the US and Japan since the days of the NES. I said it was ironic because if someone like myself had modded the system for imports and then bricked it, Nintendo would in theory have left them no choice but to pirate games or buy another Wii. Thankfully I have not bricked mine and can run imports without any problems. It simply seems odd to me that Nintendo would do something that would encourage piracy.
Next time try not to automatically assume modding = piracy, because it does not, no matter how much the hardware manufacturers like to say it does. If I could buy a mod chip that enables imports but not pirated games I gladly would. The constant erroneous association of modding with piracy by clueless people such as yourself has become extremely tiresome.
There is a way to remove updates, it's a small program called Wii Brick Blocker that patches isos. It is rather ironic that Nintendo essentially force people into piracy with their updates...
My theory on why N64 games still hold up well today is the texture filtering and anti-aliasing. I've been on something of a 32-bit era nostalgia trip lately revisiting lots of PS1/Saturn/N64 games and while I still enjoy the Saturn and PS1 games, they do look pretty terrible. Both the Saturn and PS1 have clipping errors, warping polygons, wobbly textures, gaps between triangles and grainy colours.
In comparison the N64's 3D is incredibly stable, there's no gaps between the polygons, the textures are all smooth and there are no jagged edges. While it's certainly true that the N64's graphics were often blurry with textures looking "smeared" and models having low poly counts, the graphics are so stable and glitch free they don't look as last-last gen as the other two systems.
Perhaps the other reason many N64 games still stand up so well today is because they helped define how modern 3D games play. It's certainly easy to look at Mario 64, Ocarina of Time and GoldenEye and see how they've influenced the design of many modern games. It's just a shame that level of innovation and originality didn't come over into the GameCube era... Maybe with the Wii's motion controls Nintendo will be able to define a whole new set of genre defining games?
I'd only recommend the 360 version
on
BioShock Review
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· Score: 1, Informative
My brother has the PC version and it's very buggy. Just saving and loading your game is a gamble for a BSOD. It's a shame since it's such a great game. I was hoping they would release a patch, but so far nothing.
They said "We hope it will be much better than the overrated Mario Kart DS.". Mario Kart DS cannot be overrated, it's awesome. There's no way Diddy Kong Racing can beat it, despite the N64 Diddy being a classic.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I prefer to play on original hardware rather than emulation (it's a bit like the old CD vs vinyl debate!) That's not to say emulation isn't great in a lot of circumstances, but I tend to prefer the real hardware. Timing is one thing I often notice is inaccurate or erratic in emulated games, my favourite example being Samus' wall kick in Super Metroid, which I often use as a quick acid test of a SNES emulator.
I've put together a collection of various JAMMA games that are favourites of mine and use a Supergun to play them. While it's a bit of a pain swapping delicate boards (the encased boards of the CPS1 Q-sound era onwards are a godsend), it's great to be able to play the original hardware. Obviously certain early non-JAMMA games need extra wiring to work, but it can be worth the effort if you're into this sort of hobby. :)
Don't forget all the Lotto scratch cards! ;)
I don't see why the chavs need this anyway. All the ones that live near me have already have PCs, mobile phones, cars, PS3s, Sky Sports subscriptions, etc all thanks to their generous benefits payouts.
I thought we were supposed to be cutting back on government spending, I'd like to know how much the dedicated helpline they're promising will cost for starters...
I agree, Reach seems to be missing the more colourful and bright look of the previous main instalments. As well as the texture and frame rate issues you mentioned I noticed quite frequent AI bugs, with characters getting stuck and not moving, just popping out of existence and on one occasion Kat just teleported into the passenger seat of the Warthog after I left her behind. I often see the AI in Halo games used as the gold standard, but I wasn't that impressed with this one. Makes me wonder if maybe the game was a bit rushed to hit the launch date MS set for it...
Meh. Who needs graphics on netbooks anyway. It's not like you're going to use photoshop/CAD or play games on them...
I play games on mine! :) My current netbook plays stuff like GTA Vice City and Aliens vs Predator (1999) really well.
I'm about to replace it with an Alienware M11x so I can play modern stuff like Mass Effect 2 on the go. Basically it's a portable Xbox 360 for me. It should have the horsepower for most emulators too.
I hate this too. I'm still upset Shenmue II ended on a massive cliffhanger with Sega clearly not intending to finish the story.
More recently Ubisoft have been doing it in a lot of their games, and in the case of the Prince of Persia reboot, they've already abandoned it for a Sands of Time sequel to cash-in on the film coming out this summer.
The article talks about rating online games based on their demographics and moderation systems, but I believe even that is pointless. Just look at Nintendo, I lost count of the number of hairy dicks people had drawn on the front of their karts in Mario Kart DS, and that game has no text or voice chat and no webcam features. No matter how many people you ban for inappropriate behaviour, there will always be someone new on the game ready to mis-behave.
The ESRB can't rate online interactions and they're right not to try to do so. The only thing they should be doing is educating parents about the risks of playing games online and recommending that parents monitor who their kids are talking to in those games.
It's the same reason why Final Fantasy XIV is "exclusive" to PS3 initially, because Sony allow you game alongside players from other platforms, which in this case is the PC version. Microsoft policy is not to allow this, although there have been exceptions like Final Fantasy XI and Shadowrun.
Besides, do you really want 13 year old Xbox and PS3 owners with headsets in the same game together? It would instantly set a world record for the most times the word "gay" was said in a single minute.
You're right that I shouldn't be too impressed with something as basic as Wolf3D running properly on an iPhone, but have you seen some of the other attempts at 3D games on the iPhone? ;) Some of them have really appalling frame rates and unresponsive controls.
Case in point, according to Carmack when Electronic Arts first ported Wolf3D to the iPhone they were just using the CPU for everything. It wasn't until Carmack took it on that the GPU was utilised. If you're interested Carmack talks about the development process here.
I probably played your Quake ports back in the day, as I used to enjoy putting all the games I could find on my Pocket PC. I remember enjoying Quake on there a lot, although the d-pads on the PDAs I owned were always a bit fiddly! IIRC there was a Casio Pocket PC with a d-pad that would only accept one direction press at a time! This port of Quake 1 on the DS works very well given the hardware it's on, with the stylus/touchscreen being used for aiming and the d-pad being used for movement.
Secret doors work like normal doors, so accidentally triggering them does happen every so often even without looking for them. That said, I have fond(?!) memories of walking against all the walls hammering my space bar looking for secrets, so I think automatic triggering might just be an improvement.
So far ammo hasn't been too bad, I don't know if that was tweaked or not but it wouldn't surprise me if it was. Generally, I find myself short on ammo at the start of a new chapter where you get stripped of all your weapons but your ammo reserves soon build up again.
I bought Wolf3D for the iPhone on a whim, expecting it to be your typical iPhone game with stuttering gameplay and sluggish controls, but it really surprised me in how well it played.
I think it's easy to just think of Carmack as a genius programmer but he also really knows how to tune a game to be fun too, from reading Carmack's blog about developing iPhone Wolf3D it's clear he put a lot of thought and effort into streamlining the gameplay. He removed the high score from the game as it was fairly superfluous. He also dropped having a finite number of lives in the game so you can restart a level whenever you want. He rightly noticed that too many controls are a pain so he made door trigger automatic (like Quake). Best of all he added an auto-map to help make sense of the maze-like levels (using the old maze solving algorithm of hugging the left wall works well for most levels ;) ).
On top of all that he also wrote a game that maintains a steady frame rate and has very responsive and comfortable controls (which is very unusual in iPhone games). So, with all that in mind, I'm really champing at the bit to get his port of Doom Classic, but it still hasn't been released. I can only assume they're waiting for Doom Resurrection sales to drop off before releasing another Doom game to avoid cannibalising sales. Doom Resurrection is OK, but the tilt controls aren't that great and being on-rails it's missing the fun of being able to explore a level yourself at your own pace.
Apparently Duke Nukem is on the way as well. I hope they do as good a job of porting that as Carmack did with Wolf3D. Now if LucasArts could be persuaded to port Dark Forces and Jedi Knight.... ;)
I couldn't agree more, the MX Revolution is fantastic for coding. Its best feature in my book is the SmartShift tech which makes scrolling through code such a breeze! It's a real shame that Logitech have abandoned SmartShift on all their newer mice, requiring the user to manually shift between modes rather than letting the mouse shift itself when it detects heavy scrolling. Still I'm sure I'll be able to pick up Revolutions on eBay for a few years to come...
If I were to post this anonymously, would /. keep a record that I used my /. account to post it, even though outwardly it's anonymous? Do they also keep a record of the IP I used to post?
I looked briefly at the privacy T&Cs linked at the bottom of the page and it makes various noises about keeping non-identifiable aggregate information for stats, but it's not clear what is done with the data or what would happen if they received a legal requirement to reveal all data held about an anonymous poster.
I was a little dismayed to see in TFA that SmartShift's "absence in more recent mice leads us to believe that consumers weren't too thrilled with it". I love the SmartShift on my MX Revolution, it's the best feature of the mouse by far and I really hope Logitech aren't dumping it for good.
In my job I'm always being sent huge source code files or CSV data that I need to quickly scroll through, and being able to give the scroll wheel a quick flick so that it switches to freewheel mode and zooms down the file has been invaluable. I wouldn't want another mouse without it. If Logitech dump SmartShift I'll probably have to subsist on second hand MX Revolutions on eBay for as long as I can....
I can't stand the application specific profiles though, I want my scroll wheel to operate consistently in every application, but for some reason even if I delete the profiles they reappear after a reboot. :/ I won't mourn the loss of that feature if Logitech want to remove it...
I'm glad to see someone in this thread is showing some decorum instead of making tasteless jokes or asking "who?"
I agree entirely with what you've said, the H2G2 radio shows were fantastic (and a regular fixture on my iPod), I was always disappointed they didn't continue the story after the end of the second series (although Dirk Maggs did a decent job more recently).
Another Perkins favourite of mine was KYTV, a spoof on satellite TV channels with lots of tacky low budget game shows and news channels.
RIP Geoffrey.
I agree. Just as damning is that Jeffrey didn't even know if Yu Suzuki was working for Sega anymore! If Jeffrey doesn't even know if Sega's most prolific and successful game creator is still working for the company I find it hard to bother listening to what he has to say.
Now if only they'd let Suzuki make more than one game in 5 years (Sega Race TV). And preferably that game would be Shenmue III.
Yeah we have underbelly citizens in the UK, they're usually called chavs or pikeys. Sadly it seems the majority of people using a headset on Live are not the best representatives for their country...
We have real problems in the UK of violent teenage gangs and feral youths who hang around in packs causing problems. I should know I see these gangs every day. Many people won't leave their homes because of these "children". Years of namby pamby liberal Labour government and lax parenting skills in a rapidly breeding underclass has led to all these young thugs. I fully support placing as many of these devices around as possible. While it's true that it's unfair to people who are not causing trouble they are already the minority.
I've been tinkering since the NES days, so it's an old habit now! :)
I do actually have a second control Wii, I mainly use it for VC games, but if Nintendo ever get any decent online going I will be able to use it for that as well.
Actually no, I do not pirate games. I've been importing video games from the US and Japan since the days of the NES. I said it was ironic because if someone like myself had modded the system for imports and then bricked it, Nintendo would in theory have left them no choice but to pirate games or buy another Wii. Thankfully I have not bricked mine and can run imports without any problems. It simply seems odd to me that Nintendo would do something that would encourage piracy.
Next time try not to automatically assume modding = piracy, because it does not, no matter how much the hardware manufacturers like to say it does. If I could buy a mod chip that enables imports but not pirated games I gladly would. The constant erroneous association of modding with piracy by clueless people such as yourself has become extremely tiresome.
There is a way to remove updates, it's a small program called Wii Brick Blocker that patches isos. It is rather ironic that Nintendo essentially force people into piracy with their updates...
My theory on why N64 games still hold up well today is the texture filtering and anti-aliasing. I've been on something of a 32-bit era nostalgia trip lately revisiting lots of PS1/Saturn/N64 games and while I still enjoy the Saturn and PS1 games, they do look pretty terrible. Both the Saturn and PS1 have clipping errors, warping polygons, wobbly textures, gaps between triangles and grainy colours.
In comparison the N64's 3D is incredibly stable, there's no gaps between the polygons, the textures are all smooth and there are no jagged edges. While it's certainly true that the N64's graphics were often blurry with textures looking "smeared" and models having low poly counts, the graphics are so stable and glitch free they don't look as last-last gen as the other two systems.
Perhaps the other reason many N64 games still stand up so well today is because they helped define how modern 3D games play. It's certainly easy to look at Mario 64, Ocarina of Time and GoldenEye and see how they've influenced the design of many modern games. It's just a shame that level of innovation and originality didn't come over into the GameCube era... Maybe with the Wii's motion controls Nintendo will be able to define a whole new set of genre defining games?
My brother has the PC version and it's very buggy. Just saving and loading your game is a gamble for a BSOD. It's a shame since it's such a great game. I was hoping they would release a patch, but so far nothing.
Sounds like a recipe for generating candidates for the Darwin Award...
They said "We hope it will be much better than the overrated Mario Kart DS.". Mario Kart DS cannot be overrated, it's awesome. There's no way Diddy Kong Racing can beat it, despite the N64 Diddy being a classic.