And the time before that, we were punished with the likes of Pitfall!, River Raid, The Dreadnaught Factor, Microsurgeon, Ice Trek, White Water!, Truckin', and Demon Attack. Talk about shovelware! (Oh, wait a minute...)
> I'll take your word for it and try to purchase one of the solo albums next time I go music shopping
Accident Of Birth is closest to the Maiden sound, so you might want to start there. The Chemical Wedding is a bit meatier, though, and it's also interesting because they restrung their guitars with bass strings on the low end to get a super-downtuned sound.
Skunkworks and Psycho Motel's Welcome To The World have more modern rock elements in them, but they're great if that sort of thing doesn't turn you off.
> Maybe Queensryche will stop sucking too!
Now that Kelly Gray's gone, that might actually be possible...
> I'm so glad Bruce Dickinson and Adrian Smith returned to Maiden because now they are good again.
Oh, man, I couldn't disagree with you more. Bruce Dickinson's Skunkworks, Accident Of Birth, and The Chemical Wedding (the last two of which Adrian Smith also participated on) completely trounce anything Maiden's done since Seventh Son, if not before. Smith's Welcome To The World album with Psycho Motel is also great.
Reunited Maiden is certainly better than Blaze-era Maiden (then again, what isn't?), but it can't hold a candle to Bruce & Adrian's later solo work, IMO.
The Ancient Art Of War wasn't released until 1984. It also wasn't fully real-time, because all battles would be played out in sequence even if they should be occurring simultaneously, and reinforcements couldn't arrive in the middle of a battle.
Depending on how you choose to define RTS, you could go as far back as Sea Battle (1980) or Utopia (1981) on the Intellivision. Sea Battle had ship building, real-time deployment, and real-time combat, though it also had all of the battles play out in sequence instead of simultaneously. Utopia was fully real-time, but its military component was limited to building and deploying a PT boat and funding rebellions on the other island. Its focus was mostly on competitive society building, similar to Civilization.
If you want to talk about the progenitor of what we currently define as RTS, look no further than Herzog Zwei on the Sega Genesis, which I believe was released in 1989. Fully real-time with multiple unit types, production, base capturing, per-unit posture control, and great AI for the time.
This Daniel Moore guy clearly doesn't know his history.
> Would you buy my hypothetical kidnap-and-rape game for that same reason? Would you buy a game where the goal was to vivisect realistically-modelled babies?
If there were high-quality titles with strong gameplay that happened to veer into those areas, I wouldn't summarily reject them just because of their content. And even if the games that covered that material were crappy, I still think that the fact that they'd offer a unique experience (however grotesque) would give them some inherent value.
For example, in Postal 2 you can apparently urinate on people, which makes them vomit. Gary Coleman also appears as an NPC in the game. I don't know if Postal 2 is any good or not, but those are some pretty unique gameplay elements, and the title deserves recognition for that. Whether those gameplay elements are desirable or not is an entirely different issue.
> I haven't seen Seven, but if it's like most psychological thrillers then the killer isn't portrayed as the protagonist.
No, but he's a central fixture of the film, and he plays a very up-front and personal role toward the end. He also isn't treated like an evil caricature.
> The reason Manhunt disturbs me is because it is the player's character who is doing the brutal murdering for someone else's entertainment.
But within the context of the game, Cash is no better or worse than any of his opponents. They're all vicious murderers who have been put in a kill-or-be-killed situation. And your character isn't lionized for his actions -- in fact, the more violent you are, the more the antagonist cheers you on.
Manhunt is a meditation on violence, not a celebration of it. It doesn't make any judgment calls -- it just puts the situation in front of you and lets you decide how you feel about it. I don't see anything wrong with that.
...any form of entertainment that allows you to experience something that you've never experienced before automatically has value. You may not personally appreciate or approve of the experience that it offers, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have merit.
I happen to enjoy movies and games with gritty content. They give me a window into a dark world that I'll thankfully never intersect with in real life, but that I still find conceptually intriguing. That being said, I can't play Manhunt for extended periods of time because the tension and the ultraviolence start to get to me...but that doesn't detract from my overall enjoyment of the game.
Out of curiosity, since you plan to stop buying games by Rockstar because of Manhunt, have you also boycotted all of the movie studios who have put out films with extremely gory content? I mean, you should clearly be skipping the Lord Of The Rings films because New Line Cinema also put out Seven...
Yes, you have control over your own blocking, and yes, timing and control are the keys to winning fights, especially later on. Tougher enemies block constantly, so you either have to time your attacks so you hit them right when they're trying to strike, or you have to pull carefully timed counterattacks or maneuver in such a way that you can hit them from behind. This can be fairly difficult when you have 4 tough guys ganging up on you, but the ability to rewind time certainly helps.:)
I will admit that I started relying a bit too heavily on the "jump over the enemy and chop him in the back of the neck" move, so I got a little frustrated when the enemies got wise to that and started chopping me down in mid-jump...
There's no difficulty selection on the PS2 version, though you could easily handicap yourself by never picking up any life or sand extensions.
Having said that, the experience of playing the game is so enjoyable that I'd go back to it over and over again even if there weren't a way to handicap myself. The game might seem a little overrated at first, but once you get into it it's almost impossible to break away.
I still think that the Jaguar version of "AvP" is the best of all the games based on that concept. It introduced the three-mode first-person gameplay that the subsequent computer games were based upon, and the space station with the Alien and Predator ships docked at opposite ends kept the game cohesive and gave it a claustrophobic, menacing feel. Infiltrating the Predator ship was scary as hell, and the moment where you first found the smart gun in the belly of that ship and 4 or 5 Predators immediately decloaked was one of the greatest moments in gaming history, IMO.
The Jaguar obviously wasn't a successful platform, but the Jaguar versions of "AvP" and "Tempest 2000" are all-time classic video games, and anyone who thinks otherwise is simply out of their gourd.
("Battlemorph" on the Jaguar CD was cool beans, too...)
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And the time before that, we were punished with the likes of Pitfall!, River Raid, The Dreadnaught Factor, Microsurgeon, Ice Trek, White Water!, Truckin', and Demon Attack. Talk about shovelware! (Oh, wait a minute...)
So where's the companion program "CRE ME"?
Elevator Action already got an update in '94 as Elevator Action Returns . Unfortunately, it felt more like Rolling Thunder than Elevator Action.
Accident Of Birth is closest to the Maiden sound, so you might want to start there. The Chemical Wedding is a bit meatier, though, and it's also interesting because they restrung their guitars with bass strings on the low end to get a super-downtuned sound.
Skunkworks and Psycho Motel's Welcome To The World have more modern rock elements in them, but they're great if that sort of thing doesn't turn you off.
> Maybe Queensryche will stop sucking too!
Now that Kelly Gray's gone, that might actually be possible...
Oh, man, I couldn't disagree with you more. Bruce Dickinson's Skunkworks, Accident Of Birth, and The Chemical Wedding (the last two of which Adrian Smith also participated on) completely trounce anything Maiden's done since Seventh Son, if not before. Smith's Welcome To The World album with Psycho Motel is also great.
Reunited Maiden is certainly better than Blaze-era Maiden (then again, what isn't?), but it can't hold a candle to Bruce & Adrian's later solo work, IMO.
Blind Guardian isn't bad -- but when it comes to power metal, the real masters are Gamma Ray.
Depending on how you choose to define RTS, you could go as far back as Sea Battle (1980) or Utopia (1981) on the Intellivision. Sea Battle had ship building, real-time deployment, and real-time combat, though it also had all of the battles play out in sequence instead of simultaneously. Utopia was fully real-time, but its military component was limited to building and deploying a PT boat and funding rebellions on the other island. Its focus was mostly on competitive society building, similar to Civilization.
If you want to talk about the progenitor of what we currently define as RTS, look no further than Herzog Zwei on the Sega Genesis, which I believe was released in 1989. Fully real-time with multiple unit types, production, base capturing, per-unit posture control, and great AI for the time.
This Daniel Moore guy clearly doesn't know his history.
If there were high-quality titles with strong gameplay that happened to veer into those areas, I wouldn't summarily reject them just because of their content. And even if the games that covered that material were crappy, I still think that the fact that they'd offer a unique experience (however grotesque) would give them some inherent value.
For example, in Postal 2 you can apparently urinate on people, which makes them vomit. Gary Coleman also appears as an NPC in the game. I don't know if Postal 2 is any good or not, but those are some pretty unique gameplay elements, and the title deserves recognition for that. Whether those gameplay elements are desirable or not is an entirely different issue.
> I haven't seen Seven, but if it's like most psychological thrillers then the killer isn't portrayed as the protagonist.
No, but he's a central fixture of the film, and he plays a very up-front and personal role toward the end. He also isn't treated like an evil caricature.
> The reason Manhunt disturbs me is because it is the player's character who is doing the brutal murdering for someone else's entertainment.
But within the context of the game, Cash is no better or worse than any of his opponents. They're all vicious murderers who have been put in a kill-or-be-killed situation. And your character isn't lionized for his actions -- in fact, the more violent you are, the more the antagonist cheers you on.
Manhunt is a meditation on violence, not a celebration of it. It doesn't make any judgment calls -- it just puts the situation in front of you and lets you decide how you feel about it. I don't see anything wrong with that.
I happen to enjoy movies and games with gritty content. They give me a window into a dark world that I'll thankfully never intersect with in real life, but that I still find conceptually intriguing. That being said, I can't play Manhunt for extended periods of time because the tension and the ultraviolence start to get to me...but that doesn't detract from my overall enjoyment of the game.
Out of curiosity, since you plan to stop buying games by Rockstar because of Manhunt, have you also boycotted all of the movie studios who have put out films with extremely gory content? I mean, you should clearly be skipping the Lord Of The Rings films because New Line Cinema also put out Seven...
Yes, you have control over your own blocking, and yes, timing and control are the keys to winning fights, especially later on. Tougher enemies block constantly, so you either have to time your attacks so you hit them right when they're trying to strike, or you have to pull carefully timed counterattacks or maneuver in such a way that you can hit them from behind. This can be fairly difficult when you have 4 tough guys ganging up on you, but the ability to rewind time certainly helps. :)
I will admit that I started relying a bit too heavily on the "jump over the enemy and chop him in the back of the neck" move, so I got a little frustrated when the enemies got wise to that and started chopping me down in mid-jump...
There's no difficulty selection on the PS2 version, though you could easily handicap yourself by never picking up any life or sand extensions.
Having said that, the experience of playing the game is so enjoyable that I'd go back to it over and over again even if there weren't a way to handicap myself. The game might seem a little overrated at first, but once you get into it it's almost impossible to break away.
I still think that the Jaguar version of "AvP" is the best of all the games based on that concept. It introduced the three-mode first-person gameplay that the subsequent computer games were based upon, and the space station with the Alien and Predator ships docked at opposite ends kept the game cohesive and gave it a claustrophobic, menacing feel. Infiltrating the Predator ship was scary as hell, and the moment where you first found the smart gun in the belly of that ship and 4 or 5 Predators immediately decloaked was one of the greatest moments in gaming history, IMO. The Jaguar obviously wasn't a successful platform, but the Jaguar versions of "AvP" and "Tempest 2000" are all-time classic video games, and anyone who thinks otherwise is simply out of their gourd. ("Battlemorph" on the Jaguar CD was cool beans, too...)
I'd say that merits a collective "No shit, Sherlock" from the peanut gallery...