Ever played Planescape: Torment? The vast majority of all exposition is done through text. I'd say that the writing is a fair bit better than most books. (excluding true classics, of course) The advantage that (some) games have over even books is the ability for the gamer to make choices and see the effects of those choices.
By that logic, the Sega Genesis is 24 bits, as it has a 16-bit 68000 and an 8-bit Z80. I don't even want to think about how many bits the SNES would be, thanks to all the specialized chips it had for music and graphics and whatnot.
And something tells me that you had a Jaguar and are still a little bitter about it... (Oh, and no single chip on the Jaguar was 64-bit. In theory, it could process 64 bits of data at once, if you were using every single processor in the system. Most games just used the 68000 variant.)
Your so-called "second release" was actually the original japanese pad. The so-called "actual one" is the redesigned pad that was released in north america (though Sega eventually grew a brain and released the original version here, too).
The one pictured on the 1up site is a pad that Sega released very recently. I have one of these PS2 pads, and it's spot-on. It feels exactly like the real Saturn pad. Great for shooters and fighters.
Halo 2 was, in my opinion, the best fps of last year. More varied than Doom 3, less pretentious than HL2 and less stupidly difficult than the later levels of Farcry. Sure, the ending was a let-down, but it takes a while to get there and the journey is as entertaining as hell. Plus, it actually has an interesting and unique art style, rather than just going for the spec-overload of the PC rivals.
Guess you didn't play The Chronicles of Riddick. Halo 2 also has significant frame drops in certain sections (like the freakin' cutscenes! Where they could've precalced things!)
KOTOR is a superb game... one of the best RPGs I've played on any platform in the last few years. KOTOR 2 wasn't quite as good and the PC version was so buggy I took it back and got the X-Box version instead. X-Box version was fine and seemed finished to me.
I ran into a repeating crash bug on the Xbox. I ended up having to delete all the cached files and reload before a certain point. Bugs aside, did you notice that the ending of KOTOR2 felt rather empty? People have been delving into the game and finding all sorts of dialogue that wasn't used. It feels like they ran out of time and rushed everything after Dantooine. Before that point, it was fantastic and better than the first game in certain areas. After Dantooine, it felt rushed and thrown together.
I've never seen noticable slowdown in San Andreas on PS2 or X-Box. If you have, you may have a dodgy drive in your console. The control system was the same as that in GTA3 and Vice City, more or less. Most people seem to have figured it out by now. I'll admit I wasn't a huge fan of San Andreas (nor the other GTA3 games) myself, but I know I'm in the minority there and I can't pin down why I don't like it, other than the fact that the whole hip-hop culture sends me batshit.
I don't think San Andreas is as good as the previous two games. They included a lot more heavily scripted missions that, while impressive, removed the myriad of choices you had in GTA3 and Vice City. There's no equivalent to the golf assassination mission in Vice City, where there are about six different ways to approach it. I think this more rigid scripting removes a great deal of the charm of the two earlier 3D GTA games, where you had a goal and basically could go about it in any way you could think of. And if you've never seen slowdown in San Andreas, you've never flown a plane through cloud cover, gotten doused by a firetruck, or caused a line of cars on the freeway to explode. The slowdown isn't common, but it is there and can easily be encountered without specifically attempting to trigger it. As for the controls, I actually think San Andreas has a better control scheme on consoles than the previous two. Aiming (both auto-targeting and manually) is much improved, as is the camera control. On PC, it's a different story. The default keys are an absolute pain and while you can remap them, it never feels as good as the controls of the previous games.
MGS2 is a love-it-or-hate-it game. I loved it, so did a lot of other people. So did IGN's reviewer. They've hated games that I've loved before. Reviewers are individuals and are going to react to games as individuals, however objective they try to be.
I play games for the gameplay. MGS2's gameplay is actually decent, but the cutscenes are so long and frequent that it sometimes feels like a chore. I don't want to hear about Otacon's oedipal adventures, I want to flip people over and then shoot them in the head! I quite liked MGS2: Substance (which I think is a very apt title, considering the emphasis on gameplay in the added VR missions), but the original MGS2 did not impress me very much. The bait-and-switch with Snake and Raiden also annoyed me greatly.
Not played a Tomb Raider game since the second, so for all I know you may have a point there.
Don't. They suck.
To cut a long story short, reviewers can never hope to reflect the opinion of everybody who buys
All of the choices in rhythm games are done outside of the internal context of the game - when you plan things out and think about foot positioning, etc, you aren't thinking in terms of the game. It's the equivalent of choosing a way to hold a controller or which handedness you'll use on a DigDug arcade machine. (I prefer using the joystick with my right hand and pumping with my left, but I digress). All of these choices have nothing to do with internal game logic. Rhythm games are simply whack a mole - you cannot develop internal strategies or think about your actions. The difference between that and other genres is that you can usually think about the reasoning behind a twitch reaction, albeit sometimes only after the fact.
For a good example, level 4-2 of Super Mario Brothers has a long gap, a really small landing area, and a second gap beyond that, all right at the beginning of the level. There are several options here: you can go slow and thus be more sure of landing on the small platform, but risk falling short. You can also go fast and reduce your speed in midair, removing most of the risk of falling short but increasing the chances of overshooting the platform. This is very different from external strategies (which, to continue the comparison, would be akin to choosing between a single thumb for the B and A buttons or using your index and middle finger and having a looser grip on the controller.)
Similar things apply to first-person shooters (choosing targets in order of apparent danger, weapons management, timing your reloads, etc) and just about every other action-oriented genre - with the aforementioned exception of laserdisc games.
Do you see my differentiation? Choices must be made within the game, not without. Otherwise you're just 'playing' Simon.
Heh. Stamina-based games such as all of the rhythm games you mentioned fail another right, and rightly so - The Right to Make Decisions. You might as well learn to actually dance or play an instrument. The result would be the same, and you'd end up with a genuine skill that non-gamers would appreciate. Dragon's Lair and Space Ace also fail this.
I'd personally amend The Right to Quit, Pause, Save and Resume the Game to allow no longer than half an hour between chances to save the game (as allowing the player to save anywhere would remove a great deal of challenge from various genres of games, like shoot-em-ups or platformers). Even better would be games that allow 'ironman saves' at any time (like Shenmue quicksaves - saving the game and immediately exiting, allowing the player to resume play at that exact spot another time, the savegame being deleted upon resuming the game), and 'save points' that allow one to save the game to a slot for later play, without having the save deleted if it is loaded again. That results in the best of both worlds - it allows the player to interrupt the game at any time if real life intrudes, doesn't remove any challenge from spacing save points between difficult sections, and lets the player save instances of the game at decent intervals.
That's true, if by 'decent' you mean 'four or five games, and just forget about it if you plan on saving your Virtua Fighter 2 data or your NiGHTS a-life data':P
The Saturn is one of my favourite consoles, and I don't think the built-in memory is anything spectacular. At least it's better than the Sega CD's amount, though...
A second controller is unnecessary for some people, but a memory card?! 95% of the games out there require saving, so there's just no excuse for not including a memory card with the system, since it is something you will almost certainly need. (Unless you have an xbox)
Being a doofus Canadian, could you please tell me the reference behind your comment about how to shoot a person in the head, put the gun in the wrong hand, drag the body through a forest, dump it, and then have the law enforcement professionals deem it a suicide.
As a representative of Satan & Co., I hereby inform you that we have held a patent on "running around naked with horns on our heads" for over 6000 years. We also have a patent on "doing evil for evil's sake" and demand $666,000,000,000 USD in compensation of your current infringement upon both of these.
The best solution to the 'problem' of an employee who can do a so-called 8 hour job in 2 hours is to... promote him.
Employees should be used to their fullest, like any other resource. This means finding a position that DOES take him 8 hours, and puts his obviously excellent computer skills to work. Of course, this new position should carry an appropriate pay increase in accordance with the extra effort required.
At one point, Magnavox had a patent on interactions between moving objects in videogames. Basically collision detection. That's why the Intellivision originally came with Las Vegas Poker and Blackjack - all the object were static and never collided. Hell, Magnavox had a patent on videogame consoles at one point. Here's the abstract of Ralph Baer's patent:
"The present invention pertains to an apparatus [and method], in conjunction with monochrome and color television receivers, for the generation, display, manipulation, and use of symbols or geometric figures upon the screen of the television receivers for the purpose of [training simulation, for] playing games [and for engaging in other activities] by one or more participants. The invention comprises in one embodiment a control unit, an apparatus connecting the control unit to the television receiver and in some applications a television screen overlay mask utilized in conjunction with a standard television receiver. The control unit includes the control, circuitry, switches and other electronic circuitry for the generation, manipulation and control of video signals which are to be displayed on the television screen. The connecting apparatus selectively couples the video signals to the receiver antenna terminals thereby using existing electronic circuits within the receiver to process and display the signals generated by the control unit in a first state of the coupling apparatus and to receive broadcast television signals in a second state of the coupling apparatus. An overlay mask which may be removably attached to the television screen may determine the nature of the game to be played or the training simulated. Control units may be provided for each of the participants. Alternatively, games [training simulations and other activities] may be carried out in conjunction with background and other pictorial information originated in the television receiver by commercial TV, closed-circuit TV or a CATV station."
Well, sickle-cell anemia has a very good reason for sticking around... people who carry one defective allele are more resistant to malaria. Natural selection being what it is, this means that those with a single allele are more likely to survive in malarial areas than those without a defective allele. And this, in turn, means that there's a greater chance of people being born with two defective alleles and thus being afflicted with sickle-cell anemia.
Re:The "arbitrary barriers" are what annoy me...
on
A Gamer's Manifesto
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· Score: 1
Oni had piles of bugs, though. My particular favourite was the one where Oni crashed and somehow managed to remove my 3D drivers.
Incidentally, ICO manages to avoid many of the complaints levelled at most games in the article - the castle is very well designed, the puzzles in the game are internally consistent, there are NO onscreen indicators whatsoever (which I think really adds to the immersion), and the AI is decent though quite simplistic. I think the AI's entire goals can be summarized as "get Yorda unless ICO is being a problem, in which case knock ICO to the ground and resume trying to kidnap Yorda."
I also agree with the grandparent poster about arbitrary barriers - I'm currently stuck in Metroid Prime 2 because I want to get to an area where I can open a door via one of those translation tablets. I've been there before, but I think I was blocked off when I left that area for the first time. Metroid Prime 1 is much better, in my opinion.
Well, that article ignored the fact that Fahrenheit 451 has already been made into a game. But what can you expect from the snes kiddies at IGN...
Anyway, I'd like to see games made out of stories that don't exactly sound like gaming material. The classic Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber would make a unique game. With a plot primarily revolving around relationships between characters and the obligations that customs force upon them, gameplay would have to be very different from the standard action game (though it is amusing to try to imagine the story used in a 3d platformer). The most obvious gameplay choice is to use the 'choose-your-own-adventure' style of selecting choices from a menu at the bottom of the screen, but that type of gameplay is almost universally derided as boring. Just look at the reviews of Sprung to see how much people hate that style of game. A better way would be to give the player some general goals and (through an internal monologue of the character he's controlling) some hints on how to achieve them. Then, using some sort of relationship indicator that graphically represents how an npc views the pc and also shows the npc's personality traits (which are gradually filled in as the player converses with the npc) so as to give the player a way of learning how to influence the npc, the player could choose conversation options and have this indicator change as the npc's opinion of him changes. There would also be a relationship chart that is filled in (again) as the player converses, which tracks the relations of npcs to each other - which can change based upon what the player does or tells them.
Another idea of mine is a game based upon the Phantom of the Opera, which seems to have been adapted into just about every entertainment medium except for videogames (yes, there was even a pinball table). Like the movie of last year, I'd base it more upon the stage musical than the original book, though a game would work well for fleshing out elements of the Phantom's past that were revealed in the book but not in the musical. Anyway, I'd include several genres - (sword)fighting, platforming, rhythm (an obvious for a game based upon a musical), abstract puzzle-solving, and traditional puzzle-solving adventuring. I'd set it up so that losing is impossible. Instead of having to reload if a swordfight is lost, the game would shift to a non-action sequence. In other words, puzzle-solving is all that would be REQUIRED to finish the game, but I'd have alternate endings and more plot details if the action sequences are successfully completed. That way anyone would be able to finish the game, and they'd be motivated to replay it to try completing sequences that were failed. One major key aspect, though, would be to keep the failure invisible and keep the player unaware that he's slowly ending up with sequences that are impossible to fail. Then, only after the end credits and whatnot, would the status report be shown on how many sequences were successfully completed.
Actually, Dreamfall sounds awfully similar to this idea. I wonder if Funcom has developed mind-reading devices. Just like the ones Sega used to learn about cel-shading from me in 1996 (and honestly, I did sketch out ideas about flatshaded polygons with black borders selectively applied to certain edges.)
As I recall, the rights to Turrican lie with the publisher, Rainbow Arts, and not with Factor-5. Rainbow Arts is now known as THQ. One of the few good things THQ has done is allow fanmade Turrican games as long as there is no profit being made.
By the way, Mega Turrican (which was ported back to Amiga to become Turrican 3) is much better than the two SNES Turrican games.
Don't forget about the good games by Western developers. Aladdin on Genesis (by the people who would become Shiny) was fantastic. Goldeneye on N64, by Rare, was one of the best games on the system. Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (and its sequel, Judgement Rites) were excellent adventure games by Interplay. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay is also very good. Quite a unique FPS. And it's far better than the movie it's based on. Rainbow Six is an interesting case of a novel-based game series that has become more well-known than the novel it was originally based on.
On a side note, Macross has not exactly had many excellent games based upon it - it has had far more terrible games than good ones, though I did quite enjoy Do You Remember Love on Saturn.
It's closer to Ultima Underworld than any game in the core Ultima series. (apart from 9, which I tend to ignore. The Ultima series ended after Serpent Isle, as far as I'm concerned.) And even then, Arx Fatalis is even closer to Ultima Underworld - heck, its Ultima Underworld 3 in all but name.
But in a more general sense, the Elder Scrolls series seems to be the premier fantasy rpg series these days.
It isn't the only game in town, however. Ignoring the AD&D-based games (which have always been a seperate breed of CRPGs), the Gothic series is well worth playing, and Gothic 3 should be released quite soon.
I'm not saying that ALL Christians of the era believed it, but the basic perspective of the time was that any Christian text was by definition a greater work of art than a pagan text.
The Church did indeed value Classical works, but individual monastaries were more concerned with works relating to their own order.
Incidentally, your remark about gibberish is quite close to the truth - most monks and other clergymen could understand Latin, but Greek wasn't as widespread. This meant that Greek works (like the aforementioned Archimedes text) were literally gibberish, and whats the point of keeping something if you cannot understand it?
There's just a little more to the story than that. It was considered a virtuous act to cover over 'heathen' writings with Christian writings. More cynical/. readers will probably say that this is a nice way of justifying what the parent poster said.
One of the major problems with the whole palimpsest system of, er, 'recycling' is the difference in binding. Most Classical-era works were in scroll form, and by the time the monks started copying over them, the book was the dominant form of binding. This meant that scrolls were often cut up and rebound in books, almost always shuffled completely out of order.
I've played stupid amounts of Ikaruga on Dreamcast. The bomb/homing/whatever (since its effect differs based on how much you have charged) is also mapped to the right trigger by default.
By the way, Radiant Silvergun (on Saturn) is better.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever played Planescape: Torment? The vast majority of all exposition is done through text. I'd say that the writing is a fair bit better than most books. (excluding true classics, of course) The advantage that (some) games have over even books is the ability for the gamer to make choices and see the effects of those choices.
By that logic, the Sega Genesis is 24 bits, as it has a 16-bit 68000 and an 8-bit Z80. I don't even want to think about how many bits the SNES would be, thanks to all the specialized chips it had for music and graphics and whatnot.
And something tells me that you had a Jaguar and are still a little bitter about it... (Oh, and no single chip on the Jaguar was 64-bit. In theory, it could process 64 bits of data at once, if you were using every single processor in the system. Most games just used the 68000 variant.)
Your so-called "second release" was actually the original japanese pad. The so-called "actual one" is the redesigned pad that was released in north america (though Sega eventually grew a brain and released the original version here, too).
The one pictured on the 1up site is a pad that Sega released very recently. I have one of these PS2 pads, and it's spot-on. It feels exactly like the real Saturn pad. Great for shooters and fighters.
Where in the world did you find a PSP for $190 CDN?! Everywhere I've looked, they've been at least $299 CDN.
Halo 2 was, in my opinion, the best fps of last year. More varied than Doom 3, less pretentious than HL2 and less stupidly difficult than the later levels of Farcry. Sure, the ending was a let-down, but it takes a while to get there and the journey is as entertaining as hell. Plus, it actually has an interesting and unique art style, rather than just going for the spec-overload of the PC rivals.
Guess you didn't play The Chronicles of Riddick. Halo 2 also has significant frame drops in certain sections (like the freakin' cutscenes! Where they could've precalced things!)
KOTOR is a superb game... one of the best RPGs I've played on any platform in the last few years. KOTOR 2 wasn't quite as good and the PC version was so buggy I took it back and got the X-Box version instead. X-Box version was fine and seemed finished to me.
I ran into a repeating crash bug on the Xbox. I ended up having to delete all the cached files and reload before a certain point. Bugs aside, did you notice that the ending of KOTOR2 felt rather empty? People have been delving into the game and finding all sorts of dialogue that wasn't used. It feels like they ran out of time and rushed everything after Dantooine. Before that point, it was fantastic and better than the first game in certain areas. After Dantooine, it felt rushed and thrown together.
I've never seen noticable slowdown in San Andreas on PS2 or X-Box. If you have, you may have a dodgy drive in your console. The control system was the same as that in GTA3 and Vice City, more or less. Most people seem to have figured it out by now. I'll admit I wasn't a huge fan of San Andreas (nor the other GTA3 games) myself, but I know I'm in the minority there and I can't pin down why I don't like it, other than the fact that the whole hip-hop culture sends me batshit.
I don't think San Andreas is as good as the previous two games. They included a lot more heavily scripted missions that, while impressive, removed the myriad of choices you had in GTA3 and Vice City. There's no equivalent to the golf assassination mission in Vice City, where there are about six different ways to approach it. I think this more rigid scripting removes a great deal of the charm of the two earlier 3D GTA games, where you had a goal and basically could go about it in any way you could think of. And if you've never seen slowdown in San Andreas, you've never flown a plane through cloud cover, gotten doused by a firetruck, or caused a line of cars on the freeway to explode. The slowdown isn't common, but it is there and can easily be encountered without specifically attempting to trigger it. As for the controls, I actually think San Andreas has a better control scheme on consoles than the previous two. Aiming (both auto-targeting and manually) is much improved, as is the camera control. On PC, it's a different story. The default keys are an absolute pain and while you can remap them, it never feels as good as the controls of the previous games.
MGS2 is a love-it-or-hate-it game. I loved it, so did a lot of other people. So did IGN's reviewer. They've hated games that I've loved before. Reviewers are individuals and are going to react to games as individuals, however objective they try to be.
I play games for the gameplay. MGS2's gameplay is actually decent, but the cutscenes are so long and frequent that it sometimes feels like a chore. I don't want to hear about Otacon's oedipal adventures, I want to flip people over and then shoot them in the head! I quite liked MGS2: Substance (which I think is a very apt title, considering the emphasis on gameplay in the added VR missions), but the original MGS2 did not impress me very much. The bait-and-switch with Snake and Raiden also annoyed me greatly.
Not played a Tomb Raider game since the second, so for all I know you may have a point there.
Don't. They suck.
To cut a long story short, reviewers can never hope to reflect the opinion of everybody who buys
All of the choices in rhythm games are done outside of the internal context of the game - when you plan things out and think about foot positioning, etc, you aren't thinking in terms of the game. It's the equivalent of choosing a way to hold a controller or which handedness you'll use on a DigDug arcade machine. (I prefer using the joystick with my right hand and pumping with my left, but I digress). All of these choices have nothing to do with internal game logic. Rhythm games are simply whack a mole - you cannot develop internal strategies or think about your actions. The difference between that and other genres is that you can usually think about the reasoning behind a twitch reaction, albeit sometimes only after the fact.
For a good example, level 4-2 of Super Mario Brothers has a long gap, a really small landing area, and a second gap beyond that, all right at the beginning of the level. There are several options here: you can go slow and thus be more sure of landing on the small platform, but risk falling short. You can also go fast and reduce your speed in midair, removing most of the risk of falling short but increasing the chances of overshooting the platform. This is very different from external strategies (which, to continue the comparison, would be akin to choosing between a single thumb for the B and A buttons or using your index and middle finger and having a looser grip on the controller.)
Similar things apply to first-person shooters (choosing targets in order of apparent danger, weapons management, timing your reloads, etc) and just about every other action-oriented genre - with the aforementioned exception of laserdisc games.
Do you see my differentiation? Choices must be made within the game, not without. Otherwise you're just 'playing' Simon.
Heh. Stamina-based games such as all of the rhythm games you mentioned fail another right, and rightly so - The Right to Make Decisions. You might as well learn to actually dance or play an instrument. The result would be the same, and you'd end up with a genuine skill that non-gamers would appreciate. Dragon's Lair and Space Ace also fail this.
I'd personally amend The Right to Quit, Pause, Save and Resume the Game to allow no longer than half an hour between chances to save the game (as allowing the player to save anywhere would remove a great deal of challenge from various genres of games, like shoot-em-ups or platformers). Even better would be games that allow 'ironman saves' at any time (like Shenmue quicksaves - saving the game and immediately exiting, allowing the player to resume play at that exact spot another time, the savegame being deleted upon resuming the game), and 'save points' that allow one to save the game to a slot for later play, without having the save deleted if it is loaded again. That results in the best of both worlds - it allows the player to interrupt the game at any time if real life intrudes, doesn't remove any challenge from spacing save points between difficult sections, and lets the player save instances of the game at decent intervals.
That's true, if by 'decent' you mean 'four or five games, and just forget about it if you plan on saving your Virtua Fighter 2 data or your NiGHTS a-life data' :P
The Saturn is one of my favourite consoles, and I don't think the built-in memory is anything spectacular. At least it's better than the Sega CD's amount, though...
A second controller is unnecessary for some people, but a memory card?! 95% of the games out there require saving, so there's just no excuse for not including a memory card with the system, since it is something you will almost certainly need. (Unless you have an xbox)
Argumentum ad baculum. Thank you, play again.
Being a doofus Canadian, could you please tell me the reference behind your comment about how to shoot a person in the head, put the gun in the wrong hand, drag the body through a forest, dump it, and then have the law enforcement professionals deem it a suicide.
As a representative of Satan & Co., I hereby inform you that we have held a patent on "running around naked with horns on our heads" for over 6000 years. We also have a patent on "doing evil for evil's sake" and demand $666,000,000,000 USD in compensation of your current infringement upon both of these.
The best solution to the 'problem' of an employee who can do a so-called 8 hour job in 2 hours is to... promote him.
Employees should be used to their fullest, like any other resource. This means finding a position that DOES take him 8 hours, and puts his obviously excellent computer skills to work. Of course, this new position should carry an appropriate pay increase in accordance with the extra effort required.
So, what activities do YOU do to have fun?
Heh, I remember that glitch. Wouldn't it be nice if that glitch worked in real life as well?
At one point, Magnavox had a patent on interactions between moving objects in videogames. Basically collision detection. That's why the Intellivision originally came with Las Vegas Poker and Blackjack - all the object were static and never collided. Hell, Magnavox had a patent on videogame consoles at one point. Here's the abstract of Ralph Baer's patent:
"The present invention pertains to an apparatus [and method], in conjunction with monochrome and color television receivers, for the generation, display, manipulation, and use of symbols or geometric figures upon the screen of the television receivers for the purpose of [training simulation, for] playing games [and for engaging in other activities] by one or more participants. The invention comprises in one embodiment a control unit, an apparatus connecting the control unit to the television receiver and in some applications a television screen overlay mask utilized in conjunction with a standard television receiver. The control unit includes the control, circuitry, switches and other electronic circuitry for the generation, manipulation and control of video signals which are to be displayed on the television screen. The connecting apparatus selectively couples the video signals to the receiver antenna terminals thereby using existing electronic circuits within the receiver to process and display the signals generated by the control unit in a first state of the coupling apparatus and to receive broadcast television signals in a second state of the coupling apparatus. An overlay mask which may be removably attached to the television screen may determine the nature of the game to be played or the training simulated. Control units may be provided for each of the participants. Alternatively, games [training simulations and other activities] may be carried out in conjunction with background and other pictorial information originated in the television receiver by commercial TV, closed-circuit TV or a CATV station."
Well, sickle-cell anemia has a very good reason for sticking around... people who carry one defective allele are more resistant to malaria. Natural selection being what it is, this means that those with a single allele are more likely to survive in malarial areas than those without a defective allele. And this, in turn, means that there's a greater chance of people being born with two defective alleles and thus being afflicted with sickle-cell anemia.
Oni had piles of bugs, though. My particular favourite was the one where Oni crashed and somehow managed to remove my 3D drivers.
Incidentally, ICO manages to avoid many of the complaints levelled at most games in the article - the castle is very well designed, the puzzles in the game are internally consistent, there are NO onscreen indicators whatsoever (which I think really adds to the immersion), and the AI is decent though quite simplistic. I think the AI's entire goals can be summarized as "get Yorda unless ICO is being a problem, in which case knock ICO to the ground and resume trying to kidnap Yorda."
I also agree with the grandparent poster about arbitrary barriers - I'm currently stuck in Metroid Prime 2 because I want to get to an area where I can open a door via one of those translation tablets. I've been there before, but I think I was blocked off when I left that area for the first time. Metroid Prime 1 is much better, in my opinion.
Well, that article ignored the fact that Fahrenheit 451 has already been made into a game. But what can you expect from the snes kiddies at IGN...
Anyway, I'd like to see games made out of stories that don't exactly sound like gaming material. The classic Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber would make a unique game. With a plot primarily revolving around relationships between characters and the obligations that customs force upon them, gameplay would have to be very different from the standard action game (though it is amusing to try to imagine the story used in a 3d platformer). The most obvious gameplay choice is to use the 'choose-your-own-adventure' style of selecting choices from a menu at the bottom of the screen, but that type of gameplay is almost universally derided as boring. Just look at the reviews of Sprung to see how much people hate that style of game. A better way would be to give the player some general goals and (through an internal monologue of the character he's controlling) some hints on how to achieve them. Then, using some sort of relationship indicator that graphically represents how an npc views the pc and also shows the npc's personality traits (which are gradually filled in as the player converses with the npc) so as to give the player a way of learning how to influence the npc, the player could choose conversation options and have this indicator change as the npc's opinion of him changes. There would also be a relationship chart that is filled in (again) as the player converses, which tracks the relations of npcs to each other - which can change based upon what the player does or tells them.
Another idea of mine is a game based upon the Phantom of the Opera, which seems to have been adapted into just about every entertainment medium except for videogames (yes, there was even a pinball table). Like the movie of last year, I'd base it more upon the stage musical than the original book, though a game would work well for fleshing out elements of the Phantom's past that were revealed in the book but not in the musical. Anyway, I'd include several genres - (sword)fighting, platforming, rhythm (an obvious for a game based upon a musical), abstract puzzle-solving, and traditional puzzle-solving adventuring. I'd set it up so that losing is impossible. Instead of having to reload if a swordfight is lost, the game would shift to a non-action sequence. In other words, puzzle-solving is all that would be REQUIRED to finish the game, but I'd have alternate endings and more plot details if the action sequences are successfully completed. That way anyone would be able to finish the game, and they'd be motivated to replay it to try completing sequences that were failed. One major key aspect, though, would be to keep the failure invisible and keep the player unaware that he's slowly ending up with sequences that are impossible to fail. Then, only after the end credits and whatnot, would the status report be shown on how many sequences were successfully completed.
Actually, Dreamfall sounds awfully similar to this idea. I wonder if Funcom has developed mind-reading devices. Just like the ones Sega used to learn about cel-shading from me in 1996 (and honestly, I did sketch out ideas about flatshaded polygons with black borders selectively applied to certain edges.)
*builds an aluminum foil hat*
As I recall, the rights to Turrican lie with the publisher, Rainbow Arts, and not with Factor-5. Rainbow Arts is now known as THQ. One of the few good things THQ has done is allow fanmade Turrican games as long as there is no profit being made.
By the way, Mega Turrican (which was ported back to Amiga to become Turrican 3) is much better than the two SNES Turrican games.
Don't forget about the good games by Western developers. Aladdin on Genesis (by the people who would become Shiny) was fantastic. Goldeneye on N64, by Rare, was one of the best games on the system. Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (and its sequel, Judgement Rites) were excellent adventure games by Interplay. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay is also very good. Quite a unique FPS. And it's far better than the movie it's based on. Rainbow Six is an interesting case of a novel-based game series that has become more well-known than the novel it was originally based on.
On a side note, Macross has not exactly had many excellent games based upon it - it has had far more terrible games than good ones, though I did quite enjoy Do You Remember Love on Saturn.
It's closer to Ultima Underworld than any game in the core Ultima series. (apart from 9, which I tend to ignore. The Ultima series ended after Serpent Isle, as far as I'm concerned.) And even then, Arx Fatalis is even closer to Ultima Underworld - heck, its Ultima Underworld 3 in all but name.
But in a more general sense, the Elder Scrolls series seems to be the premier fantasy rpg series these days.
It isn't the only game in town, however. Ignoring the AD&D-based games (which have always been a seperate breed of CRPGs), the Gothic series is well worth playing, and Gothic 3 should be released quite soon.
I'm not saying that ALL Christians of the era believed it, but the basic perspective of the time was that any Christian text was by definition a greater work of art than a pagan text.
The Church did indeed value Classical works, but individual monastaries were more concerned with works relating to their own order.
Incidentally, your remark about gibberish is quite close to the truth - most monks and other clergymen could understand Latin, but Greek wasn't as widespread. This meant that Greek works (like the aforementioned Archimedes text) were literally gibberish, and whats the point of keeping something if you cannot understand it?
There's just a little more to the story than that. It was considered a virtuous act to cover over 'heathen' writings with Christian writings. More cynical /. readers will probably say that this is a nice way of justifying what the parent poster said.
One of the major problems with the whole palimpsest system of, er, 'recycling' is the difference in binding. Most Classical-era works were in scroll form, and by the time the monks started copying over them, the book was the dominant form of binding. This meant that scrolls were often cut up and rebound in books, almost always shuffled completely out of order.
I've played stupid amounts of Ikaruga on Dreamcast. The bomb/homing/whatever (since its effect differs based on how much you have charged) is also mapped to the right trigger by default.
By the way, Radiant Silvergun (on Saturn) is better.