The implications of this are pretty far-reaching. One the positive side, it potentially allows for some different ideas regarding game-play. The lower power is also probably going to translate into a lower (perhaps much lower) launch price, which could be an asset during the opening months of the next cycle, when the other consoles are still $400+.
However, it's not all good news. Less powerful hardware and a "different" control system is almost certainly going to have ramifications for cross-platform titles on the Revolution. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the vast majority of 3rd party developers just didn't bother. The simple fact is that most developers are, quite rightly, more concerned with making games that are going to sell well than games that will be fun for their programmers to work on. The nice thing at present with the X-Box and PS2 (and to some degree the Gamecube) is that they have a large shared library of games. You can play at least some titles from the Burnout, Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance, Silent Hill, Grand Theft Auto and Metal Gear Solid franchises on more than one system and these are all A-list games. A lower price-point isn't going to be such a big selling-factor for parents if little Johnny can't play the latest big-name cross-platform game on the system.
Had Nintendo been making these moves at the end of the SNES generation, they would have had a decent (perhaps overwhelming) chance of success. However, that was the last time that they really had the market share (and hence the clout with developers) to dictate the shape of the future of the games industry. If they can make the design decisions they want to push through with the Revolution into industry standards, then they will recapture their dominance of the market. However, with Sony now being the real brand leaders, the odds are stacked against them to an almost impossible degree. If they fail, they're going to further establish their reputation as a niche player. Mario, Metroid and Zelda alone are not enough to stay afloat. In these days of spiralling development costs for both hardware and software, they couldn't hold that status for long before being forced down the Sega route.
I've not been much of a Nintendo fan for quite a while now; not since it was clear that they'd lost the plot during the N64/PSX generation. However, it's almost refreshing to see a company taking such risks in today's marketplace. Sadly, I think they've picked the wrong risks to take and this is ultimately going to lead to their demise.
Yes, you're right. Grandparent poster here - I can't access the Playonline main page or a lot of other gaming sites from work (or remember my slashdot login).
I guess this is a pretty unambiguous "good thing" as it basically ensures that FFXI is going to be getting at least a couple more years of active support before retirement.
I've got mixed feelings on the importance of back-compatibility. I do think that it's always better to have it than not to, of course. There have been a lot of good reasons as to why it's a good thing given in other responses to this post, so I won't repeat those here.
However, the question of whether back-compatibility is actually necessary for a system to be successful is more important. The inclusion of back-compatibility in the PS2 was no doubt useful in helping it go get over an initially weak games-lineup until the big-name games could start appearing. However, the perhaps the most dramatic story in the history of the console industry, namely Sony's initial entry into the market, was based on a console which had no possibility of back-compatibility.
There can also, in some instances, be instances where making a console backwards-compatible could be seriously limiting. For example, Nintendo have not yet made a system which uses "standard" (ie. CD or DVD) optical media. For them to have stuck with SNES cartridges for the N64 or N64 cartridges for the Gamecube would probably have meant imposing pretty serious limitations on what they could do with games for their new system. As such, the decision to drop backwards compatibility was probably the right one. Of course, you could also make the pretty valid argument that not using standard media was a pretty short-sighted decision to begin with.
On balance, I think backwards compatibility is always a nice "optional extra" in a console and may help with sales during the very start of the cycle. In the long term, though, I wouldn't see it as a "make or break" factor.
The DS does not, by default, play GB or GBC games. It's apparently possible to play these by loading the images onto a GBA flash-cart, but that's still going to be beyond the reach of the average user. Moreover, back-compatibility with the GBA on the DS is a bit half-arsed. While you can play games, you can't do multiplayer via link-cable or link up with a Gamecube for multi-platform features.
I'm not sure about Gamecube/Revolution compatibility, but the fact that the machines will apparently use different size media doesn't necessarily bode well.
To be more specific, it was held against it on slashdot. However, this is because it fell foul of two of the most sacred orthodoxies:
1) Only Nintendo can ever be innovative. 2) Multi-functionality is a *bad* thing.
Will be interesting to see which of these lines win out of Nintendo ever produce a multi-functional console. Will this be an innovative *bad* thing?
If you want to respond to this post, please make sure you reference at least two of the following:
1) The battery life of the PSP. Make this as low as you want. Quote figures of 30 minutes. 2) The fact that Microsoft loses (or at least, used to lose) money on each X-Box sold. 3) Some mythical Japanese sales figures for the Gamecube, showing that more of them have been sold per week than packets of instant ramen. 4) The fact that your friend's, cousin's, boy-friend's uncle's PS2 once broke. 5) A general rant against Sony/Microsoft/The Milk Marketing Board for using underhand tactics to ensure the failure of the Dreamcast. 6) The fact that your younger sister's unborn foetus spends at least 12 hours a day playing Zelda/Mario/Mario-Kart.
Follow the advice above and... bingo... instant karma.
Alternatively, I have a full-time job, am out drinking at least one night per week, but don't do any mindless dribble-shit like watching TV, which leaves the rest of my evenings and weekends free for gaming.
It's amazing how much you can do when you organise your leisure time effectively:)
I think this is missing the point slightly. K1 was a simpler story than K2. No argument there. Thing is, though, that the "good" Star Wars movies (ie. 4, 5 and maybe 6) were also very simple movies. K1 basically sticks to their format; get as much of the exposition as you can done in the opening titles, keep the pace fast, have a big dramatic twist in the middle of the story and mix in some *actually funny* humour. K1 did this very well and, to my mind at least, managed to emulate the atmosphere of the original trilogy pretty much perfectly.
K2 was certainly more complex. It had some interesting ideas, although it didn't follow them through particularly well. The ending of the game was catastrophically weak. The problem was that it wasn't "Star Wars" in its plot or atmosphere. It drew much more inspiration, I think, from the "further removed" bits of the Expanded Universe. I'm thinking here of the New Jedi Order stuff, among others. Problem is, a lot of this source material isn't actually very good. So what you end up with in K2 is a plot that takes itself way too seriously, cheesy dialogue and mostly shallow characters. Oh, and far too many proper nouns with more xs and zs than vowels. I'll grant you that Kreia was a good character, but look at the other companions. Kreia has far and away more dialogue than anybody else. Atton and Handmaiden/Disciple have a fair bit. Visas, G0t0 and most of the others get just a few short snippets, which they basically repeat ad nauseam. As for the other villains... I can't even remember their names. Compared to them, Malak was of Shakespearean depth and complexity. They basically seemed to have been designed purely around the concept of "looking cool". Just see how well that worked out with Darth Maul.
As a non-Star-Wars sci-fi adventure story, K2 is OK. As Star Wars, K1 is by far the superior product.
I suspect it's a combination of Microsoft throwing large amounts of money for Bioware and the fact that it's so much easier to develop a game for X-Box only, rather than X-Box and PC. The X-Box at least has fixed hardware; for a PC version, you need to ensure that your game works on umpteen billion combinations of hardware and, at the very least, several versions of Windows.
Can't really blame Bioware on either count. Console games are where most of the sales are anyway.
Yes, you're probably right, although I've not read up on the specifics.
Although the technology is basically the same as that used for KOTOR 1, I found 2 to be a far inferior game. Not only is there a general shabbiness and laziness in terms of location and character designs, the game just feels unfinished. Dialogue is often badly written and contains a number of typos (yeah, I'm sure my slashdot posts do to, but I'm not selling these). The PC version in particular is plagued by some pretty horrible bugs, including a number of seemingly hardware-independent crash-to-desktop bugs. Even the X-Box version had a few dialogue trees and quests that just didn't work properly. Moreover, the general pace and tone of the game put me less in mind of the original Star Wars trilogy, as KOTOR 1 did, and more in mind of some of the badly-written and overly-geeky areas of the Extended Universe. I swear I could spy the hand of Kevin J. Anderson at work in a few places...
I think part of the difference comes from the approach to battles. Don't get me wrong, I loved FFX, but like other Final Fantasy games, it had the random-encounter system, which ensures near-constant interruptions for combat as you move around. Combat in Jade Empire is scarcer and generally tied in to a specific plot point. I'd say the content of the games in terms of plot/dialogue/locations is about the same.
Jade Empire is the best game I've played in a long time; certainly over the last year, quite possibly a good bit longer.
I've got a bit of an erratic history with Bioware games. The first Baldur's Gate left me a bit cold... it felt like a good idea badly executed and hindered by a determination to be a bit nastier to the player than was strictly necessary. Baldur's Gate 2, on the other hand, felt a lot more polished and I must have played it through half a dozen times. Neverwinter Nights was a huge let-down for me; the toolkit demanded more time and effort to use properly than I was willing to put in and the campaign basically sucked. KOTOR, on the other hand, was awesome. Then KOTOR 2 came along (yes, I know it's not strictly Bioware) and it just felt flat. The writing in particular was pretty horrible and the total bugfest didn't help either.
To be blunt, though, Jade Empire beats anything else Bioware have done into the ground. I'm about 15 hours into my first playthrough of it now and it's an incredible experience. It feels odd at first to be controlling the combat so directly in a game which obviously shares such a strong technical base with KOTOR, but the controls and combat system are pretty much flawlessly implemented. There's a superb learning curve; you can button-mash the first few fights, but successive enemies need increasingly sophisticated tactics.
I must admit I wasn't enthusiastic when I heard Jade Empire would be an action RPG. In my experience, most of these tend to degenerate into either boring button-mashing fests like the Dark Alliance games or tedious movement-puzzle crawls like Zelda. Kingdom Hearts pulled the genre off reasonably well, but even that had some real annoyances. However, one of the most striking things about Jade Empire so far is the relative scarcity of combat. Rather than being attacked constantly as you move around the map, or having to get past the same group of infinitely-respawning monsters every time you pass through a particular area, the vast majority of fights in the game actually seem to be tied into a specific plot point. You don't get randomly attacked by bandits or monsters; there's actually a *reason* for almost every encounter. Moreover, as in earlier Bioware games, it's possible (and sometimes preferable) to talk your way out of fighting.
Graphics are generally excellent. You can occasonally detect that the game is based on a now-aging engine, but the quality of the character and location designs is more than good enough to mask this. Sounds are excellent, particularly voice-acting. John Cleese's cameo (as an "English" explorer, come to enlighten the oriental savages) actually had me laughing out loud. The dialogue is back up to the high-standard of that in KOTOR.
If I'd add one complaint to the two in the review, it would be that the in-game journal doesn't always do a very good job of recording quest objectives. A few times now I've come back to the game after a break and had to think quite hard about where I needed to meet a character in connection with a subquest. Overall, though, it's a stunning game. The X-Box may have had a crap first year or two, but it's got to be the strongest late-cycle performer of the current generation by quite a margin.
I could have sworn I read a while ago that Uwe "take your favorite franchise, kill it and rape its corpse" Bol had acquired the rights to make the Silent Hill movie.
The general track record on movie-conversions of games is pretty terrible, but if any franchise should translate well, it's Silent Hill. Of course, this relies on having a director bright enough to know that big fire-fights and heros with super-powers are NOT scary. The absence of Uwe allows at least a faint glimmer of hope.
It seems there are some pretty fundamental misunderstandings going on, looking at the comments so far in this thread. The answer to the question "what sort of games do girls like" is quite simply "good games".
Honestly, all this talk about "simple" games, "real" games and so on is just patronising and untrue. Two of the most commonly cited "popular with females games" are complex and menu driven (The Sims and Final Fantasy X). By and large, with variations for individual taste and genre preferences, female gaming preferences are basically along the same lines as male. A good game in any genre will be recognised as such by players of either gender. Final Fantasy X, Resident Evil 4, Half-Life 2, Halo 2 and The Sims are good games; their appeal is fairly universal, although there are always a few fanboys (and it's almost always boys), who define themselves as "real gamers" and consider it somehow obscene to profess a liking for those games.
Indeed, if there's one big difference between male and female gaming habits, this is where it lies. By and large (and yes, I'm going to stereotype here, even though I don't like doing so), girls are brought up in an environment in which it's less acceptable for them to play games. They're less likely to have spent their childhoods talking about them with friends and they'll generally come to them later in life. For this reason, I've generally found women games less likely to be involved in, or impressed by, the willy-waving that characterises so much of the "male" gaming discussion. There's a trend among male gamers, particularly noticable here on slashdot, to attempt to accumulate Kudos by professing deliberately archaic tastes ("What, you like Final Fantasy X? Disgusting. They've not made a good installment since 2, when everything was in text and you controlled the game by throwing rocks at the screen!") or claiming to be a "real gamer" ("I only play Nintendo games because only Nintendo make REAL GAMES for REAL GAMERS").
By and large, if you exclude the small but unfortunately noisy demographic that think like this, male and female gaming tastes are the same. The same considerations of gameplay, graphics, sound and story all come into force, with the specific balance varying between individuals
All of the games you mention aside from Metroid basically fall into the "fun for an hour then tedious" category. Zelda Four Swords particularly grated because it had the "multiple GBAs and link cables compulsory for multiplayer" scam. If this had been optional, it would have been cool. As a compulsory mechanism, it's basically exploitation. Not everybody owns or wants a GBA. Oh, and if you traded in your GBA for a DS? So sorry...
Metroid Prime was slightly more interesting, but even this is basically just an exploration/combat fps with a poor control system. I mean, I appreciate the attempt at open-endedness, but all it translated to in practice was "wander around for ages until you find the next obscure switch or item to let you progress".
With the Square Enix games, I'll admit that the last year has been dry for them (as it has for Nintendo). However, remember that Square Enix sequels are usually a long way from being just plain old sequels. For example, FFX-2 completely reinvents the game's combat mechanics. Aside from location and character names, there's basically nothing carried over from FFX.
Most real fanboy idiots, when asked about some innovative game, will say "" and then fail to explain to any kind of intelligent audience exactly what is so innovative about rehashing 10 year old concepts.
Actually, the game was by no means the prettiest of this generation. Wind Waker looked better. However, Kingdom Hearts *did* have a better combat system. If you really played into it and got past the first few worlds (where things could be a bit button-mashy), you really started to notice how the combat needed both twitch reactions and tactics.
Voicing was erratic, I admit, particularly on the Final Fantasy characters (although casting Angel as Squall was a great idea). However, the Disney voicing was very, very well done.
Well, except that the system went from semi-turn-based ATB in FFIX to fully turn-based in FFX, then to a near-real-time system in FFX-2 and is apparently going fully-real-time in FFXII. Also, ability names do indeed often stay the same, but their effects and the game balance are usually changed beyond recognition. The limit break system came in, went through several iterations and then left again, having changed beyond recognition.
Then there's the changes to the character system. There's very little consistency to the series moves here; in FF2, FF7 and FF8, we've had generic characters who the player could build up in any way he wanted. In FF1, FF9 and a few of the others, we've had characters put into very specific classes. Then we've had a few which fall in between, such as FFX and FFX-2.
Right, I'm not going to confine myself to the January 2004 limit, because of the 4 Gamecube games I mentioned, 3 of them were released before this point. I should know, I bought my Gamecube in November 2003 and got 3 of them within a month and that's here in the UK, where Nintendo always stiff us for releases. However, from mid-2003 (probably a fairer estimation), we've had Final Fantasy XI (in the territories accessible to me), Final Fantasy X-2 and Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. I know that's only three, but hell, of the 4 Gamecube games I've mentioned, only 1 was an actual Nintendo title. If you want me to name 4 good games in that period, or indeed since the start of *2005* on the PS2 or X-Box, I'll be happy to. It'll be keeping the list down to 4 that I'll find hard.
The Mario DS vs FF: Origins etc argument is kind of valid, but at least the Final Fantasy handheld remakes weren't allegedly wonderful platform-launching titles.
See, thing is, you call me an SE fanboy, but this just puzzles me. Read my other posts in this thread. I point to games by Bioware, Lucasarts and others as *good* games. I don't necessarily put SE above these (well, I'd put them above Lucasarts these days), they're just another good developer. You, on the other hand, seem to have a serious difficulty with the idea that Nintendo games might be compared to *any* other developer. I think we can see who the real rabid, moronic fanboy here is.
Ok, nice rabid response here which doesn't actually address any of the points I made in a coherent manner.
Sorry about the typo. It was pretty late when I typed this. If you don't believe I played the game, feel free to ask me any question about the content that anybody's who did a reasonable playthrough (but didn't get obsessive over subquests) should know the answer to.
You completely misunderstand my points about the jumping thing. I say I don't have a problem with the lack of a jump button. I then say that most of the puzzles are jump puzzles, even though there isn't a jump button. I'm not attacking the control system here; like I say, I have no problem with having the game decide when to jump for me. I just don't like jump puzzles.
I still fail to see anything about the execution of Zelda that sets it apart in any way. The combat system is shallow and doesn't really require either tactics or twitch-skill. Hell, I'm no great gamer, but I completed the game without any real difficulties, other than a couple of annoying jump sections. The game-world isn't as well fleshed out as it is in other games and I never felt immersed in it, or even intruiged by it at any point. Plus, you spend an annoyingly large amount of time travelling around the map on that tedious boat. It doesn't feel like you're sailing... it feels like you're playing an annoying minigame with an indifferent control system which is allowed to go on far too long. Sure, you can wander around the map if you want to, but you still basically have to go from A to B to C to complete the game. No real sense of freedom there; it's the same as KOTOR, Final Fantasy X-2 and many other games.
Incidentally, Grandia 2's combat system is virtually identical to FFX-2's. Not saying it's good or bad, just pointing it out.
Sorry, think you made a typo there. Where you meant to write "Nintendo", you wrote "Square Enix" and vice versa.
I know Square Enix get a lot of flak from the slash-horde for milking their franchise, but to be honest, they're nothing like as bad about this as Nintendo are. At least each new Final Fantasy game actually adds a serious new twist to the series, usually completely reinventing the combat and character systems from the previous installment. Nintendo games these days are looking more and more like carbon-copies of games that were released a decade or more ago. Hell, if you look at Mario 64 DS, it basically *is* a carbon copy. In value for money terms, the £100 I spent on my Gamecube is possibly the worst value-for-money I've ever had, second only to the annual extortion of the BBC license fee. I'm still waiting for the system to get more than 3 or 4 games which are actually worth playing for longer than an hour or two (Resident Evil 4, Perfect Dark, Rogue Leader and *possibly* Mario Kart 64 are the only ones I've found so far).
What exactly is all the fuss over Wind Walker about? I'm not going to make the usual cheap shots at it. I have no problems with the visual style, I don't howl in torment for the lack of a jump key and I'll even put up with the lack of voicing. However, I've played it through from start to finish and I still fail to see what makes in any any way better than the average action/platformer.
Basically, you go around from town to town. In each town, you talk to a few NPCs, do a few fed-ex quests and maybe play a minigame. You then play through a dungeon which is a mixture of combat and puzzles. Most of the puzzles are, in reality, jump puzzles, although there's no actual jump key. You fight the boss at the end of the dungeon, then you rinse and repeat. Eventually, you win the game. I fail to see what's so staggeringly innovative about this. The combat gets old *real* fast, the utilities such as the grappling hook are fun for 5 minutes, then get tired and the whole "Wind Walker" thing that the game's named after is generally pretty gimmicky.
Kingdom Hearts was by no means a perfect game, but at least the whole skills/magic system added a depth to the combat (and in a few of the battles, a real twitch-skill requirement) that puts it far ahead of Zelda in terms of depth.
Final Fantasy X-2 is in some ways a disappointing installment in the series, but... again... it has a fun combat system (once you work out how to not-die after 30 seconds in every fight). It also creates a fairly convincing and fleshed-out game-world, which is something Zelda singularly failed to do for me.
Of course, this being slashdot, I don't actually expect a sensible reply to this, but if somebody wants to enlighten me as to what exactly is so fantastic about the game that I was persuaded to shell out £100 for my Gamecube on (and which these days only ever gets use for Resident Evil 4 and the occasional blast of Mario Kart when I have friends over), I'd be most grateful.
Agreed completely. I can't speak for the older Zelda games, but Wind Walker only rates as an "ok" to me. Maybe 6/10 territory. Kingdom Hearts probably counts as "great, but flawed" (control system could have used some work, Disney plot elements made me puke), probably 8.5/10 territory. I'm still only 6 hours into Jade Empire and so far I've not seen a single thing about it I don't like and I've seen lots that I just love.
As for the "as good as, but not better than Zelda" title, I'd possibly go for something like FFX-2 on the PS2 (or maybe Ominusha 3), or KOTOR2 on the X-Box (just not as good as the first one).
OK, I'll bite on this one. I'm going to break this down into different types of "emotional" experiences, as trying to lump them all together under one heading is perhaps unhelpful.
I'll start with the generic sadness/surprise/exultation feeling that I think, looking at the other comments here, are what most of the other readers are thinking of. These kind of emotions are generally most commonly evoked by RPGs, as these have the time to establish characters and make you care for them. However, it's not exclusive to the genre.
Final Fantasy VI: I suspect I'm fairly unusual among the people posting comments here in that this is *not* my favorite installment in the Final Fantasy series. However, it's undeniable that it has a good plot with some pretty emotional moments, particularly given the technology it had to use. For me, the most powerful moment comes in the World of Ruin, when Terra decides to fight again.
Final Fantasy VII: Ok, "that" moment in this game has been mentioned by quite a few of the people posting above this and it certainly deserves to be. Plenty of other good moments in this game, though; personally, I liked Barrett's back-story.
Final Fantasy VIII: A slightly odd inclusion here, as this game's plot is really quite weak and a lot of the moments that Square clearly intended to be emotional just fall flat (eg. the bit where the main characters regain their memories of their childhood). However, the scene where Seiffer's side-kicks basically give up following him and ask Squall to beat some sense into him struck me as pretty powerful and well-done.
Final Fantasy X: Two real scenes stand out here; Yuna's "I can fly" moment in the wedding scene and the scene where Auron confronts Yunalesca.
Final Fantasy XI: Yes, the MMORPG. The cutscene you get when you enter Norg for the first time after beating the Shadowlord is actually incredibly well done and sets a hell of a tone given the limited tools available. Of course, the fact that getting this far is the culmination of months of effort also helps.
Wing Commander III: While cheesy, the cutscenes you get after the Kilrathi blow up the big Death Star alike and you see the full version of Angel's death scene made quite an impression on me at the time.
Wing Commander IV: The final section of this game, where you confront Tolwyn in the debating chamber is superb. Not only is it a rare moment of decent acting in these games, but it's an incredibly brave way to do the final obstacle in a space-shooter - not through a big space battle, but through a debate.
Knights of the Old Republic: The scene where the main character's past is revealed is utterly superb. I'd suspected there was a big plot twist coming, but this just took my breath away. In the course of one cutscene, the entire game-world is turned upside-down. The parallels to the famous "Luke, I am your father" scene in ESB are undeniable, but in many ways this is even more shocking. Further proof that Bioware can write much better Star Wars than George Lucas can these days.
Ok, now I'm going to move on to perhaps the second most common emotional reactions that games seek to inspire; fear.
Doom 3: A flawed game in many ways, but the first few hours of this, until I worked out the tricks the game used, scared the crap out of me.
Silent Hill 2: The first three installments in this series were all great (although the fourth is a big let-down). However, I think that on balance it was 2 that did the best job of scaring me. There's no one scene I can really point to; the whole game is just plain creepy.
Darkseed: an old adventure game, which in many ways is utterly forgettable. In most respects, this was a distinctly average game; the gameplay and the quality of the puzzles were far inferior to what Lucasarts were doing at the time. However, the location and creature designs, by H. R. Geiger (think Alien) were creepy as hell.
Kingdom Hearts: Ok, I admit this is an odd choice for this section. It's a Disney game
It's funny, I don't remember seeing any anti-Japan or anti-Western sentiment from the Chinese in FFXI.
Monday nights we have our usual "why the Chinese government sucks and all its officials must be tortured to death in public" seminars in Lower Jeuno. There's always active participation in these from all sides, although our friends from the PRC generally display a level of bloodlust towards their own rulers that we in the west find incomprehensible. We really think they enjoy being able to hear our accounts of what it's like living in a free society, though. They always promise to share the good news with their neighbours.
Wednesdays are "Free Tibet" nights. We march around Bastok for a couple of hours shouting slogans and demanding immediate Chinese withdrawal from Tibet. Turnout usually numbers in the thousands.
Fridays are "Support an independant Republic of China!" night. This is where we celebrate a free, independant Taiwan and look forward to the day where it's finally in a position to take-over the mainland. This generally involves leaflet campaigns on the airships and the boats between Mhaura and Selbina. There's nothing quite like a captive audience.
Saturdays and Sundays are generally too weighed down by the human rights symposia for any organised demonstrations.
Now... if only somebody sufficiently senior in the Chinese government can read this post, maybe we can finally get rid of all those damned gil-sellers. ^^
Some reasonable enough picks in the article, but a lot of very strange omissions and perhaps a few unwarrented inclusions as well. Of course, it's hard to make just one pick per genre, so I'm not even going to bother trying.
Adventure:
I don't see how anybody can talk about genre defining adventure games without at least a nod to Zork. The license may have been driven into the ground since then, but it still has vast significance. Moving forwards, I guess the next big genre-definers were the Sierra adventures. I'm not sure which of these actually came first, so I'm just going to name the Police Quest, Space Quest, Kings Quest and Leisure Suit Larry games. Next came the Lucasarts games; I'm thinking particularly of Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max here, although Monkey Island also merits a nod. With the "no deaths" gameplay and the quirky humour, I think these basically represent the high-point of the genre. Finally, the Syberia games deserve a nod for trying to resurrect the genre on modern hardware.
First Person Shooters:
Wolfenstein3d and Doom were probably the big early genre-definers here. The former basically introduced gamers to the concept, while the latter really showed what the genre could do in terms of atmosphere and adrenelin. Quake probably represented the biggest technical advance, and hence has been massively important in defining the genre, but its single-player gameplay felt like a massive step back from Doom. Of course, it also popularised the idea of online gameplay to an extent that none of its predecessors have managed. I don't actually see Half-Life (or its sequel) as being particularly genre-defining... they were just examples of existing concepts done very well; they don't bring anything new to the genre.
Action/Platformers:
The early Mario games are obviously the most significant influences here, although I think Sonic also deserves credit for bringing a sense of fun to to the series (at least before the hideous 3d incarnations) that Mario never quite had.
Racing:
I think the most significant early racing game has got to be Outrun, which was massively popular in arcades for a while, with its big, shaking cabinet. Hard Drivin' was also significant; it had a more "realistic" feel than Outrun and its clones (despite the insane stunts) and I think modern racing games ultimately owe more to it than they do to Outrun. In the modern era, I think Ridge Racer was really responsible for bringing the genre onto modern hardware, while the Gran Turismo series have pretty comprehensively established the racing-sim category.
RPGS:
Ok, this is the section where I think the contributors to the article get it most "wrong". Very disappointing to not see a single nod towards the Ultima series. These defined the whole non-Japanese RPG world up until the early/mid-90s, even if the series did have a pretty dire ending. Of course, Ultima Online was also the first really successful MMORPG. Moving on to more modern games, it's probably right to recognise Baldurs Gate and its sequel, as they revived the fortunes of the "Western" RPG at a time when they were pretty low indeed. On the Final Fantasy front, I don't actually think VI is worthy of recognition, even though it's the one the fanboys like to drool over. It was essentially IV or V with a better story. I think you have to either point at II, which was the first to have any real story at all, or at VII, which was the first time that Square had the technical resources to do their story justice. Diablo probably deserves a nod as well, for largely inventing the action-RPG genre.
RTS
It's sad that so many people picked Starcraft here. Successful though it was, I fail to see how it defined the genre. Obviously, Dune 2 and Command & Conquer were the really important titles; I think C&C was more so, because it introduced the now-obligatory drag-click system, as well as multiplayer. Total Annihilation should get a nod for proving that RTSes don't have to look like crap.
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The implications of this are pretty far-reaching. One the positive side, it potentially allows for some different ideas regarding game-play. The lower power is also probably going to translate into a lower (perhaps much lower) launch price, which could be an asset during the opening months of the next cycle, when the other consoles are still $400+.
However, it's not all good news. Less powerful hardware and a "different" control system is almost certainly going to have ramifications for cross-platform titles on the Revolution. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the vast majority of 3rd party developers just didn't bother. The simple fact is that most developers are, quite rightly, more concerned with making games that are going to sell well than games that will be fun for their programmers to work on. The nice thing at present with the X-Box and PS2 (and to some degree the Gamecube) is that they have a large shared library of games. You can play at least some titles from the Burnout, Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance, Silent Hill, Grand Theft Auto and Metal Gear Solid franchises on more than one system and these are all A-list games. A lower price-point isn't going to be such a big selling-factor for parents if little Johnny can't play the latest big-name cross-platform game on the system.
Had Nintendo been making these moves at the end of the SNES generation, they would have had a decent (perhaps overwhelming) chance of success. However, that was the last time that they really had the market share (and hence the clout with developers) to dictate the shape of the future of the games industry. If they can make the design decisions they want to push through with the Revolution into industry standards, then they will recapture their dominance of the market. However, with Sony now being the real brand leaders, the odds are stacked against them to an almost impossible degree. If they fail, they're going to further establish their reputation as a niche player. Mario, Metroid and Zelda alone are not enough to stay afloat. In these days of spiralling development costs for both hardware and software, they couldn't hold that status for long before being forced down the Sega route.
I've not been much of a Nintendo fan for quite a while now; not since it was clear that they'd lost the plot during the N64/PSX generation. However, it's almost refreshing to see a company taking such risks in today's marketplace. Sadly, I think they've picked the wrong risks to take and this is ultimately going to lead to their demise.
Yes, you're right. Grandparent poster here - I can't access the Playonline main page or a lot of other gaming sites from work (or remember my slashdot login).
I guess this is a pretty unambiguous "good thing" as it basically ensures that FFXI is going to be getting at least a couple more years of active support before retirement.
I've got mixed feelings on the importance of back-compatibility. I do think that it's always better to have it than not to, of course. There have been a lot of good reasons as to why it's a good thing given in other responses to this post, so I won't repeat those here.
However, the question of whether back-compatibility is actually necessary for a system to be successful is more important. The inclusion of back-compatibility in the PS2 was no doubt useful in helping it go get over an initially weak games-lineup until the big-name games could start appearing. However, the perhaps the most dramatic story in the history of the console industry, namely Sony's initial entry into the market, was based on a console which had no possibility of back-compatibility.
There can also, in some instances, be instances where making a console backwards-compatible could be seriously limiting. For example, Nintendo have not yet made a system which uses "standard" (ie. CD or DVD) optical media. For them to have stuck with SNES cartridges for the N64 or N64 cartridges for the Gamecube would probably have meant imposing pretty serious limitations on what they could do with games for their new system. As such, the decision to drop backwards compatibility was probably the right one. Of course, you could also make the pretty valid argument that not using standard media was a pretty short-sighted decision to begin with.
On balance, I think backwards compatibility is always a nice "optional extra" in a console and may help with sales during the very start of the cycle. In the long term, though, I wouldn't see it as a "make or break" factor.
The DS does not, by default, play GB or GBC games. It's apparently possible to play these by loading the images onto a GBA flash-cart, but that's still going to be beyond the reach of the average user. Moreover, back-compatibility with the GBA on the DS is a bit half-arsed. While you can play games, you can't do multiplayer via link-cable or link up with a Gamecube for multi-platform features.
I'm not sure about Gamecube/Revolution compatibility, but the fact that the machines will apparently use different size media doesn't necessarily bode well.
To be more specific, it was held against it on slashdot. However, this is because it fell foul of two of the most sacred orthodoxies:
1) Only Nintendo can ever be innovative.
2) Multi-functionality is a *bad* thing.
Will be interesting to see which of these lines win out of Nintendo ever produce a multi-functional console. Will this be an innovative *bad* thing?
If you want to respond to this post, please make sure you reference at least two of the following:
1) The battery life of the PSP. Make this as low as you want. Quote figures of 30 minutes.
2) The fact that Microsoft loses (or at least, used to lose) money on each X-Box sold.
3) Some mythical Japanese sales figures for the Gamecube, showing that more of them have been sold per week than packets of instant ramen.
4) The fact that your friend's, cousin's, boy-friend's uncle's PS2 once broke.
5) A general rant against Sony/Microsoft/The Milk Marketing Board for using underhand tactics to ensure the failure of the Dreamcast.
6) The fact that your younger sister's unborn foetus spends at least 12 hours a day playing Zelda/Mario/Mario-Kart.
Follow the advice above and... bingo... instant karma.
Alternatively, I have a full-time job, am out drinking at least one night per week, but don't do any mindless dribble-shit like watching TV, which leaves the rest of my evenings and weekends free for gaming.
:)
It's amazing how much you can do when you organise your leisure time effectively
I think this is missing the point slightly. K1 was a simpler story than K2. No argument there. Thing is, though, that the "good" Star Wars movies (ie. 4, 5 and maybe 6) were also very simple movies. K1 basically sticks to their format; get as much of the exposition as you can done in the opening titles, keep the pace fast, have a big dramatic twist in the middle of the story and mix in some *actually funny* humour. K1 did this very well and, to my mind at least, managed to emulate the atmosphere of the original trilogy pretty much perfectly.
K2 was certainly more complex. It had some interesting ideas, although it didn't follow them through particularly well. The ending of the game was catastrophically weak. The problem was that it wasn't "Star Wars" in its plot or atmosphere. It drew much more inspiration, I think, from the "further removed" bits of the Expanded Universe. I'm thinking here of the New Jedi Order stuff, among others. Problem is, a lot of this source material isn't actually very good. So what you end up with in K2 is a plot that takes itself way too seriously, cheesy dialogue and mostly shallow characters. Oh, and far too many proper nouns with more xs and zs than vowels. I'll grant you that Kreia was a good character, but look at the other companions. Kreia has far and away more dialogue than anybody else. Atton and Handmaiden/Disciple have a fair bit. Visas, G0t0 and most of the others get just a few short snippets, which they basically repeat ad nauseam. As for the other villains... I can't even remember their names. Compared to them, Malak was of Shakespearean depth and complexity. They basically seemed to have been designed purely around the concept of "looking cool". Just see how well that worked out with Darth Maul.
As a non-Star-Wars sci-fi adventure story, K2 is OK. As Star Wars, K1 is by far the superior product.
I suspect it's a combination of Microsoft throwing large amounts of money for Bioware and the fact that it's so much easier to develop a game for X-Box only, rather than X-Box and PC. The X-Box at least has fixed hardware; for a PC version, you need to ensure that your game works on umpteen billion combinations of hardware and, at the very least, several versions of Windows.
Can't really blame Bioware on either count. Console games are where most of the sales are anyway.
Yes, you're probably right, although I've not read up on the specifics.
Although the technology is basically the same as that used for KOTOR 1, I found 2 to be a far inferior game. Not only is there a general shabbiness and laziness in terms of location and character designs, the game just feels unfinished. Dialogue is often badly written and contains a number of typos (yeah, I'm sure my slashdot posts do to, but I'm not selling these). The PC version in particular is plagued by some pretty horrible bugs, including a number of seemingly hardware-independent crash-to-desktop bugs. Even the X-Box version had a few dialogue trees and quests that just didn't work properly. Moreover, the general pace and tone of the game put me less in mind of the original Star Wars trilogy, as KOTOR 1 did, and more in mind of some of the badly-written and overly-geeky areas of the Extended Universe. I swear I could spy the hand of Kevin J. Anderson at work in a few places...
I think part of the difference comes from the approach to battles. Don't get me wrong, I loved FFX, but like other Final Fantasy games, it had the random-encounter system, which ensures near-constant interruptions for combat as you move around. Combat in Jade Empire is scarcer and generally tied in to a specific plot point. I'd say the content of the games in terms of plot/dialogue/locations is about the same.
Jade Empire is the best game I've played in a long time; certainly over the last year, quite possibly a good bit longer.
I've got a bit of an erratic history with Bioware games. The first Baldur's Gate left me a bit cold... it felt like a good idea badly executed and hindered by a determination to be a bit nastier to the player than was strictly necessary. Baldur's Gate 2, on the other hand, felt a lot more polished and I must have played it through half a dozen times. Neverwinter Nights was a huge let-down for me; the toolkit demanded more time and effort to use properly than I was willing to put in and the campaign basically sucked. KOTOR, on the other hand, was awesome. Then KOTOR 2 came along (yes, I know it's not strictly Bioware) and it just felt flat. The writing in particular was pretty horrible and the total bugfest didn't help either.
To be blunt, though, Jade Empire beats anything else Bioware have done into the ground. I'm about 15 hours into my first playthrough of it now and it's an incredible experience. It feels odd at first to be controlling the combat so directly in a game which obviously shares such a strong technical base with KOTOR, but the controls and combat system are pretty much flawlessly implemented. There's a superb learning curve; you can button-mash the first few fights, but successive enemies need increasingly sophisticated tactics.
I must admit I wasn't enthusiastic when I heard Jade Empire would be an action RPG. In my experience, most of these tend to degenerate into either boring button-mashing fests like the Dark Alliance games or tedious movement-puzzle crawls like Zelda. Kingdom Hearts pulled the genre off reasonably well, but even that had some real annoyances. However, one of the most striking things about Jade Empire so far is the relative scarcity of combat. Rather than being attacked constantly as you move around the map, or having to get past the same group of infinitely-respawning monsters every time you pass through a particular area, the vast majority of fights in the game actually seem to be tied into a specific plot point. You don't get randomly attacked by bandits or monsters; there's actually a *reason* for almost every encounter. Moreover, as in earlier Bioware games, it's possible (and sometimes preferable) to talk your way out of fighting.
Graphics are generally excellent. You can occasonally detect that the game is based on a now-aging engine, but the quality of the character and location designs is more than good enough to mask this. Sounds are excellent, particularly voice-acting. John Cleese's cameo (as an "English" explorer, come to enlighten the oriental savages) actually had me laughing out loud. The dialogue is back up to the high-standard of that in KOTOR.
If I'd add one complaint to the two in the review, it would be that the in-game journal doesn't always do a very good job of recording quest objectives. A few times now I've come back to the game after a break and had to think quite hard about where I needed to meet a character in connection with a subquest. Overall, though, it's a stunning game. The X-Box may have had a crap first year or two, but it's got to be the strongest late-cycle performer of the current generation by quite a margin.
I could have sworn I read a while ago that Uwe "take your favorite franchise, kill it and rape its corpse" Bol had acquired the rights to make the Silent Hill movie.
The general track record on movie-conversions of games is pretty terrible, but if any franchise should translate well, it's Silent Hill. Of course, this relies on having a director bright enough to know that big fire-fights and heros with super-powers are NOT scary. The absence of Uwe allows at least a faint glimmer of hope.
It seems there are some pretty fundamental misunderstandings going on, looking at the comments so far in this thread. The answer to the question "what sort of games do girls like" is quite simply "good games".
Honestly, all this talk about "simple" games, "real" games and so on is just patronising and untrue. Two of the most commonly cited "popular with females games" are complex and menu driven (The Sims and Final Fantasy X). By and large, with variations for individual taste and genre preferences, female gaming preferences are basically along the same lines as male. A good game in any genre will be recognised as such by players of either gender. Final Fantasy X, Resident Evil 4, Half-Life 2, Halo 2 and The Sims are good games; their appeal is fairly universal, although there are always a few fanboys (and it's almost always boys), who define themselves as "real gamers" and consider it somehow obscene to profess a liking for those games.
Indeed, if there's one big difference between male and female gaming habits, this is where it lies. By and large (and yes, I'm going to stereotype here, even though I don't like doing so), girls are brought up in an environment in which it's less acceptable for them to play games. They're less likely to have spent their childhoods talking about them with friends and they'll generally come to them later in life. For this reason, I've generally found women games less likely to be involved in, or impressed by, the willy-waving that characterises so much of the "male" gaming discussion. There's a trend among male gamers, particularly noticable here on slashdot, to attempt to accumulate Kudos by professing deliberately archaic tastes ("What, you like Final Fantasy X? Disgusting. They've not made a good installment since 2, when everything was in text and you controlled the game by throwing rocks at the screen!") or claiming to be a "real gamer" ("I only play Nintendo games because only Nintendo make REAL GAMES for REAL GAMERS").
By and large, if you exclude the small but unfortunately noisy demographic that think like this, male and female gaming tastes are the same. The same considerations of gameplay, graphics, sound and story all come into force, with the specific balance varying between individuals
All of the games you mention aside from Metroid basically fall into the "fun for an hour then tedious" category. Zelda Four Swords particularly grated because it had the "multiple GBAs and link cables compulsory for multiplayer" scam. If this had been optional, it would have been cool. As a compulsory mechanism, it's basically exploitation. Not everybody owns or wants a GBA. Oh, and if you traded in your GBA for a DS? So sorry...
Metroid Prime was slightly more interesting, but even this is basically just an exploration/combat fps with a poor control system. I mean, I appreciate the attempt at open-endedness, but all it translated to in practice was "wander around for ages until you find the next obscure switch or item to let you progress".
With the Square Enix games, I'll admit that the last year has been dry for them (as it has for Nintendo). However, remember that Square Enix sequels are usually a long way from being just plain old sequels. For example, FFX-2 completely reinvents the game's combat mechanics. Aside from location and character names, there's basically nothing carried over from FFX.
Most real fanboy idiots, when asked about some innovative game, will say "" and then fail to explain to any kind of intelligent audience exactly what is so innovative about rehashing 10 year old concepts.
Wrong.
I play FFXI. I'd say that, at a rough guess, the play-base is probably splut 40/40/20 between the US, Japan and Europe.
Actually, the game was by no means the prettiest of this generation. Wind Waker looked better. However, Kingdom Hearts *did* have a better combat system. If you really played into it and got past the first few worlds (where things could be a bit button-mashy), you really started to notice how the combat needed both twitch reactions and tactics.
Voicing was erratic, I admit, particularly on the Final Fantasy characters (although casting Angel as Squall was a great idea). However, the Disney voicing was very, very well done.
Well, except that the system went from semi-turn-based ATB in FFIX to fully turn-based in FFX, then to a near-real-time system in FFX-2 and is apparently going fully-real-time in FFXII. Also, ability names do indeed often stay the same, but their effects and the game balance are usually changed beyond recognition. The limit break system came in, went through several iterations and then left again, having changed beyond recognition.
Then there's the changes to the character system. There's very little consistency to the series moves here; in FF2, FF7 and FF8, we've had generic characters who the player could build up in any way he wanted. In FF1, FF9 and a few of the others, we've had characters put into very specific classes. Then we've had a few which fall in between, such as FFX and FFX-2.
Right, I'm not going to confine myself to the January 2004 limit, because of the 4 Gamecube games I mentioned, 3 of them were released before this point. I should know, I bought my Gamecube in November 2003 and got 3 of them within a month and that's here in the UK, where Nintendo always stiff us for releases. However, from mid-2003 (probably a fairer estimation), we've had Final Fantasy XI (in the territories accessible to me), Final Fantasy X-2 and Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. I know that's only three, but hell, of the 4 Gamecube games I've mentioned, only 1 was an actual Nintendo title. If you want me to name 4 good games in that period, or indeed since the start of *2005* on the PS2 or X-Box, I'll be happy to. It'll be keeping the list down to 4 that I'll find hard.
The Mario DS vs FF: Origins etc argument is kind of valid, but at least the Final Fantasy handheld remakes weren't allegedly wonderful platform-launching titles.
See, thing is, you call me an SE fanboy, but this just puzzles me. Read my other posts in this thread. I point to games by Bioware, Lucasarts and others as *good* games. I don't necessarily put SE above these (well, I'd put them above Lucasarts these days), they're just another good developer. You, on the other hand, seem to have a serious difficulty with the idea that Nintendo games might be compared to *any* other developer. I think we can see who the real rabid, moronic fanboy here is.
Ok, nice rabid response here which doesn't actually address any of the points I made in a coherent manner.
Sorry about the typo. It was pretty late when I typed this. If you don't believe I played the game, feel free to ask me any question about the content that anybody's who did a reasonable playthrough (but didn't get obsessive over subquests) should know the answer to.
You completely misunderstand my points about the jumping thing. I say I don't have a problem with the lack of a jump button. I then say that most of the puzzles are jump puzzles, even though there isn't a jump button. I'm not attacking the control system here; like I say, I have no problem with having the game decide when to jump for me. I just don't like jump puzzles.
I still fail to see anything about the execution of Zelda that sets it apart in any way. The combat system is shallow and doesn't really require either tactics or twitch-skill. Hell, I'm no great gamer, but I completed the game without any real difficulties, other than a couple of annoying jump sections. The game-world isn't as well fleshed out as it is in other games and I never felt immersed in it, or even intruiged by it at any point. Plus, you spend an annoyingly large amount of time travelling around the map on that tedious boat. It doesn't feel like you're sailing... it feels like you're playing an annoying minigame with an indifferent control system which is allowed to go on far too long. Sure, you can wander around the map if you want to, but you still basically have to go from A to B to C to complete the game. No real sense of freedom there; it's the same as KOTOR, Final Fantasy X-2 and many other games.
Incidentally, Grandia 2's combat system is virtually identical to FFX-2's. Not saying it's good or bad, just pointing it out.
Doh, typo
Rather than "Perfect Dark", I clearly meant "Eternal Darkness". My bad.
Sorry, think you made a typo there. Where you meant to write "Nintendo", you wrote "Square Enix" and vice versa.
I know Square Enix get a lot of flak from the slash-horde for milking their franchise, but to be honest, they're nothing like as bad about this as Nintendo are. At least each new Final Fantasy game actually adds a serious new twist to the series, usually completely reinventing the combat and character systems from the previous installment. Nintendo games these days are looking more and more like carbon-copies of games that were released a decade or more ago. Hell, if you look at Mario 64 DS, it basically *is* a carbon copy. In value for money terms, the £100 I spent on my Gamecube is possibly the worst value-for-money I've ever had, second only to the annual extortion of the BBC license fee. I'm still waiting for the system to get more than 3 or 4 games which are actually worth playing for longer than an hour or two (Resident Evil 4, Perfect Dark, Rogue Leader and *possibly* Mario Kart 64 are the only ones I've found so far).
And why would this be?
What exactly is all the fuss over Wind Walker about? I'm not going to make the usual cheap shots at it. I have no problems with the visual style, I don't howl in torment for the lack of a jump key and I'll even put up with the lack of voicing. However, I've played it through from start to finish and I still fail to see what makes in any any way better than the average action/platformer.
Basically, you go around from town to town. In each town, you talk to a few NPCs, do a few fed-ex quests and maybe play a minigame. You then play through a dungeon which is a mixture of combat and puzzles. Most of the puzzles are, in reality, jump puzzles, although there's no actual jump key. You fight the boss at the end of the dungeon, then you rinse and repeat. Eventually, you win the game. I fail to see what's so staggeringly innovative about this. The combat gets old *real* fast, the utilities such as the grappling hook are fun for 5 minutes, then get tired and the whole "Wind Walker" thing that the game's named after is generally pretty gimmicky.
Kingdom Hearts was by no means a perfect game, but at least the whole skills/magic system added a depth to the combat (and in a few of the battles, a real twitch-skill requirement) that puts it far ahead of Zelda in terms of depth.
Final Fantasy X-2 is in some ways a disappointing installment in the series, but... again... it has a fun combat system (once you work out how to not-die after 30 seconds in every fight). It also creates a fairly convincing and fleshed-out game-world, which is something Zelda singularly failed to do for me.
Of course, this being slashdot, I don't actually expect a sensible reply to this, but if somebody wants to enlighten me as to what exactly is so fantastic about the game that I was persuaded to shell out £100 for my Gamecube on (and which these days only ever gets use for Resident Evil 4 and the occasional blast of Mario Kart when I have friends over), I'd be most grateful.
Agreed completely. I can't speak for the older Zelda games, but Wind Walker only rates as an "ok" to me. Maybe 6/10 territory. Kingdom Hearts probably counts as "great, but flawed" (control system could have used some work, Disney plot elements made me puke), probably 8.5/10 territory. I'm still only 6 hours into Jade Empire and so far I've not seen a single thing about it I don't like and I've seen lots that I just love.
As for the "as good as, but not better than Zelda" title, I'd possibly go for something like FFX-2 on the PS2 (or maybe Ominusha 3), or KOTOR2 on the X-Box (just not as good as the first one).
OK, I'll bite on this one. I'm going to break this down into different types of "emotional" experiences, as trying to lump them all together under one heading is perhaps unhelpful.
I'll start with the generic sadness/surprise/exultation feeling that I think, looking at the other comments here, are what most of the other readers are thinking of. These kind of emotions are generally most commonly evoked by RPGs, as these have the time to establish characters and make you care for them. However, it's not exclusive to the genre.
Final Fantasy VI: I suspect I'm fairly unusual among the people posting comments here in that this is *not* my favorite installment in the Final Fantasy series. However, it's undeniable that it has a good plot with some pretty emotional moments, particularly given the technology it had to use. For me, the most powerful moment comes in the World of Ruin, when Terra decides to fight again.
Final Fantasy VII: Ok, "that" moment in this game has been mentioned by quite a few of the people posting above this and it certainly deserves to be. Plenty of other good moments in this game, though; personally, I liked Barrett's back-story.
Final Fantasy VIII: A slightly odd inclusion here, as this game's plot is really quite weak and a lot of the moments that Square clearly intended to be emotional just fall flat (eg. the bit where the main characters regain their memories of their childhood). However, the scene where Seiffer's side-kicks basically give up following him and ask Squall to beat some sense into him struck me as pretty powerful and well-done.
Final Fantasy X: Two real scenes stand out here; Yuna's "I can fly" moment in the wedding scene and the scene where Auron confronts Yunalesca.
Final Fantasy XI: Yes, the MMORPG. The cutscene you get when you enter Norg for the first time after beating the Shadowlord is actually incredibly well done and sets a hell of a tone given the limited tools available. Of course, the fact that getting this far is the culmination of months of effort also helps.
Wing Commander III: While cheesy, the cutscenes you get after the Kilrathi blow up the big Death Star alike and you see the full version of Angel's death scene made quite an impression on me at the time.
Wing Commander IV: The final section of this game, where you confront Tolwyn in the debating chamber is superb. Not only is it a rare moment of decent acting in these games, but it's an incredibly brave way to do the final obstacle in a space-shooter - not through a big space battle, but through a debate.
Knights of the Old Republic: The scene where the main character's past is revealed is utterly superb. I'd suspected there was a big plot twist coming, but this just took my breath away. In the course of one cutscene, the entire game-world is turned upside-down. The parallels to the famous "Luke, I am your father" scene in ESB are undeniable, but in many ways this is even more shocking. Further proof that Bioware can write much better Star Wars than George Lucas can these days.
Ok, now I'm going to move on to perhaps the second most common emotional reactions that games seek to inspire; fear.
Doom 3: A flawed game in many ways, but the first few hours of this, until I worked out the tricks the game used, scared the crap out of me.
Silent Hill 2: The first three installments in this series were all great (although the fourth is a big let-down). However, I think that on balance it was 2 that did the best job of scaring me. There's no one scene I can really point to; the whole game is just plain creepy.
Darkseed: an old adventure game, which in many ways is utterly forgettable. In most respects, this was a distinctly average game; the gameplay and the quality of the puzzles were far inferior to what Lucasarts were doing at the time. However, the location and creature designs, by H. R. Geiger (think Alien) were creepy as hell.
Kingdom Hearts: Ok, I admit this is an odd choice for this section. It's a Disney game
It's funny, I don't remember seeing any anti-Japan or anti-Western sentiment from the Chinese in FFXI.
Monday nights we have our usual "why the Chinese government sucks and all its officials must be tortured to death in public" seminars in Lower Jeuno. There's always active participation in these from all sides, although our friends from the PRC generally display a level of bloodlust towards their own rulers that we in the west find incomprehensible. We really think they enjoy being able to hear our accounts of what it's like living in a free society, though. They always promise to share the good news with their neighbours.
Wednesdays are "Free Tibet" nights. We march around Bastok for a couple of hours shouting slogans and demanding immediate Chinese withdrawal from Tibet. Turnout usually numbers in the thousands.
Fridays are "Support an independant Republic of China!" night. This is where we celebrate a free, independant Taiwan and look forward to the day where it's finally in a position to take-over the mainland. This generally involves leaflet campaigns on the airships and the boats between Mhaura and Selbina. There's nothing quite like a captive audience.
Saturdays and Sundays are generally too weighed down by the human rights symposia for any organised demonstrations.
Now... if only somebody sufficiently senior in the Chinese government can read this post, maybe we can finally get rid of all those damned gil-sellers. ^^
Some reasonable enough picks in the article, but a lot of very strange omissions and perhaps a few unwarrented inclusions as well. Of course, it's hard to make just one pick per genre, so I'm not even going to bother trying.
Adventure:
I don't see how anybody can talk about genre defining adventure games without at least a nod to Zork. The license may have been driven into the ground since then, but it still has vast significance. Moving forwards, I guess the next big genre-definers were the Sierra adventures. I'm not sure which of these actually came first, so I'm just going to name the Police Quest, Space Quest, Kings Quest and Leisure Suit Larry games. Next came the Lucasarts games; I'm thinking particularly of Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max here, although Monkey Island also merits a nod. With the "no deaths" gameplay and the quirky humour, I think these basically represent the high-point of the genre. Finally, the Syberia games deserve a nod for trying to resurrect the genre on modern hardware.
First Person Shooters:
Wolfenstein3d and Doom were probably the big early genre-definers here. The former basically introduced gamers to the concept, while the latter really showed what the genre could do in terms of atmosphere and adrenelin. Quake probably represented the biggest technical advance, and hence has been massively important in defining the genre, but its single-player gameplay felt like a massive step back from Doom. Of course, it also popularised the idea of online gameplay to an extent that none of its predecessors have managed. I don't actually see Half-Life (or its sequel) as being particularly genre-defining... they were just examples of existing concepts done very well; they don't bring anything new to the genre.
Action/Platformers:
The early Mario games are obviously the most significant influences here, although I think Sonic also deserves credit for bringing a sense of fun to to the series (at least before the hideous 3d incarnations) that Mario never quite had.
Racing:
I think the most significant early racing game has got to be Outrun, which was massively popular in arcades for a while, with its big, shaking cabinet. Hard Drivin' was also significant; it had a more "realistic" feel than Outrun and its clones (despite the insane stunts) and I think modern racing games ultimately owe more to it than they do to Outrun. In the modern era, I think Ridge Racer was really responsible for bringing the genre onto modern hardware, while the Gran Turismo series have pretty comprehensively established the racing-sim category.
RPGS:
Ok, this is the section where I think the contributors to the article get it most "wrong". Very disappointing to not see a single nod towards the Ultima series. These defined the whole non-Japanese RPG world up until the early/mid-90s, even if the series did have a pretty dire ending. Of course, Ultima Online was also the first really successful MMORPG. Moving on to more modern games, it's probably right to recognise Baldurs Gate and its sequel, as they revived the fortunes of the "Western" RPG at a time when they were pretty low indeed. On the Final Fantasy front, I don't actually think VI is worthy of recognition, even though it's the one the fanboys like to drool over. It was essentially IV or V with a better story. I think you have to either point at II, which was the first to have any real story at all, or at VII, which was the first time that Square had the technical resources to do their story justice. Diablo probably deserves a nod as well, for largely inventing the action-RPG genre.
RTS
It's sad that so many people picked Starcraft here. Successful though it was, I fail to see how it defined the genre. Obviously, Dune 2 and Command & Conquer were the really important titles; I think C&C was more so, because it introduced the now-obligatory drag-click system, as well as multiplayer. Total Annihilation should get a nod for proving that RTSes don't have to look like crap.