The original Metroid didn't have much backtracking, because it is fundamentally different from the new games in terms of freedom and branching (mainly because it had less 'keys' you needed to find). MZM (GBA) was a huge disappointment for me. It basically ignored the whole exploration deal and replaced it with big arrows pointing you around. Conveniently locked doors were abundant. I felt herded like a sheep.
In the original Metroid is just linear in the beginning and end. In the begining you have to get the morph ball, then the missiles in the golden corridor close to the Norfair elevator. After that you got some choices, but I either go for the Longshot or Bombs. Then I run through the blue waver corridor to the Bombs, then bomb down to get the Ice, then ice my way up to the green corridor, bomb up to the Varia, then I get the Longshot. That way I won't have to run through the same corridors much.
After that the game really opens up since you have most of the 'keys' already (20 mins into the game). Occasionally you do use the same corridors, but you never feel you're backtracking because there's so many branches. If you do backtrack, it's because you decided to go back the same way, not cuz the game decided to. What limits your progress is your skill and your character's skill (missiles and energy), not keys or linear map design.
Tourian (5 corridors in the end) is completely linear though, and you do need to defeat the two minibosses to get there (unless you manage to bomb up from the lava, but I never managed to do that).
The Zelda series were similarly ruined. The reason I liked Zelda was because of the freedom, and it's just not there anymore. I'd say if Zelda and Metroid are 6/8 on the 'freedom scale', then most new games in the series are 2/8... or less. It's like day and night.
You said it yourself. 512MB USB drive $70. Ten pack floppy $6.50. Floppy sounds cheaper to me. It all comes down to how many you need, no?
Anyways, you can give floppies away, or dump them in mailboxes, or throw them REALLY HARD IN THE WALL when you get angry. If you do that with USB keys you'll get broke in no time.
I've pretty much switched to USB keys myself though, but I miss the catharsis that comes from the breaking of storage media.
There's surely some distortion caused by the atmosphere, but what we got here is mainly an optical illusion of some sort. I didn't read the linked article, but eyeballed through a feature NASA had on it a few days ago. They had a photo of the moon moving (multiple exposures). There was no change in size. I'm not sure how much of the size change (if there were one) would show on a regular photo though. Cameras doesn't zoom in like the eye does, which you soon notice if you try to take a photo of a bird or stars with a regular camera. Birds just become a little black mark. I've heard the focus area of the eye is like a cookie held an arms length away. The rest is fuzzy. At the extreme edges and even outside the field of vision the brain/imagination fills in the details.
I would guess that stereovision of importance in the case of the moon illusion.
1: Anyone tried to see what happens if you close one eye?
2: Anyone tried to make a virtual (3D goggles) replication of the setup?
Well, isn't isometric views 3D? If you can jump in a game seen from such an angle, then you have a third dimension, and that's what gave you trouble, no?. Isometric graphics is sort of like flat projection 3D, so sizes doesn't change, but you still have the x,y,z mechanics for movement.
The Fallout characters where probably rendered from 3D models like in BG or Diablo. That often makes the figures a bit less 'iconic' and more blury. Since they can spin around there's more frames to recognize aswell. If we move to real 3D, you have lighting, angle, animation and distance to 'decypher' before you can recognize a character. With 2D you just have Animation (most angles are flipped). There's just no way you're going to confuse a Gomba and a Koopa in SMB 1, or a Octorock and Moblin in Zelda 1.
I'm fine with 3D, I really like Elite, Quake and Tribes to mention a few, but 2D is hardly being explored AT ALL on consoles or PC. There's a few handheld attempts, but the processing power of those systems are limited.
320*240 (or 256) rocks! It's a pity the DS uses 256*192 and the GBA 240*160 (correct me if I'm wrong). That's a tad low unfortunately.
Also, 3D graphics are considered better than 2D. When you pick 3D graphics, you get a few advantages, such as:
3D looks more real and familiar. You have another dimension, which can be both good and bad (see 3D jumping puzzles). You can have objects varying a lot in size, like a 20 meter scout swooping by a 3km cruiser, but it's harder to show scale because of the perspective.
With 2D however, you get a lot of gameplay advantages, such as destructable terrain, easy-to-read distances, scales and relations. Immidiately recognizeable characters (only seen from one angle). 2D physicas are much easier to code/process. The brain also goes through a lot of trouble 'unwrapping' or unskewing things because it prefers flat 2D.
I think many designers fall into the trap of wanting to define their everything as much as possible. They want their characters to be 'real', and for that they need 3D. In the end they're only another 'blip' you shoot though.
Just imagine what would happen if you combined ExciteBike, Blaster Master, Bionic Commando, and Scorched Tanks. You're speeding downhill, blow a piece of rock out of the way, jump off a ledge, fly through the air, fire a grappler into the cave roof, swing like Tarzan, disconnect and fall in an arc towards a cliff, and as you land the suspension nearly breaks, making the undercarriage grind against the cliff generating some neat sparks and a SFX stolen from Stunt Car Racer. You jump out with Jason and plant a turret and some sensor arrays a'la Tribes.
I also have a 440, and my machine is a year old. I'm not the kind of guy who can open up computers and fiddle with the insides, so I can't do anything about it.
Pretty lame how something like this should prevent a game from running. HL2 demo ran, and so did UT2004. What a waste of my time and bandwidth.
Imagine if they made gameplay cards instead. Then I might consider trying to upgrade. GFX.. pshht!
Oh well, I actually considered buying a game, maybe this one, but I think I'll go play Ur-Quan Masters instead.
Maybe I'm naive, but I'd like to think that atleast artists and maybe scientists do what they do because they have a passion for it. Money doesn't motivate me to do art. In fact, money just ruins my passion and forces me to make bad compromizes.
Would a writer make that investment if he knew that anyone at all would be free to copy his work without compensation?
There's no connection between having money and being worthy of experiencing art, and I doubt anyone thinks so. The problem is that you have to put food on the table, and are thus forced to make the connection above. It's all very unfortunate.
The investors are not the creators. Investors are suit people out to make money, not innovation.
I live in Sweden. There's a stand at the mall with DVD movies for 7.5usd each, and they did have some interesting oldies, like Hellraiser.
Next step is 13usd, I found Virus and Aliens for this price.
Most movies are around 22usd.
New movies like Robots, AvP, Van Helsing are usually 29usd, so I rent for 7.5usd or just skip seeing them.
New games can be around 80usd here, so I play Star Control 2 (UQM) and other great free games instead.
(I got the high prices from converting the SEK to USD. The USD used to be 11SEK but is now 7)
We also have "Save the rainforest" campaigns. The rainforest is full off unknown species but that doesn't stop the vegetarians from turning it into a giant soy plantage (It's Troll Tuesday right?).
Did I say share? I meant sell for as much money as possible! It's universal knowledge that there is a direct connection between having money and being worthy of experiencing art and enjoyment.
It's universal because if you use Sony's tools, you can put any kind of data on the disc (That doesn't violate the Universal Copyright and Content Laws), then you could in theory share that data with aliens that also has PSPs!
It was the parent's idea with inheritance. I probably wouldn't use it myself to be frank, especially since keeping stuff in a shared bank can work as a good natural way to give new characters an edge. Possibly, there could be physical lvl up items you can patch up new characters with.
The only idea I would be certain to use would be the graveyards. You could have little undead version of your characters walking around telling stories of the glory days, bragging about kills and the places they went. That would be something.
While I'm shooting ideas outta my ass:
How about having X number of lives and no penalty on death other then life=life-1 and teleport back to town? The player could get new lifes gradually, so it's really the players fault if he gets careless life hits 0 (permadeath).
The problem with any permadeath system is that the player still remembers stuff after the character is dead. The most realistic permadeath system would be to just stop playing the game after you died, and then go play another game. An interesting idea (for a 1P/LAN RPG) could be to generate all the creatures, enviroments and stuff with a formula, and reshape the world completely everytime the player dies.
Permadeath in Pen&Paper RPGs didn't stop me from playing. It was fun playing, the character was just a temporary vessel. In a way, Pen&Paper RPG's (improvisational) are like my formula idea above.
I think MMORPGs tie too much of the fun into the character stats part, and thus ends up using more or less inconsistant respawn systems.
When I mentioned player skill (you) and character skill (lvl) before, my point was that with a shift towards player skill would make your character skill worth less, thus dying wouldn't be as painfull, since you still have your player skill intact. I think it's fun to increase stats and all that, but those games tie almost all the fun into the character, whilst player skill games like Tribes1 or Quake1 are fun just playing any time.
There's very few games today that are 50/50 player/character skill. Older games that did it pretty well is Zelda and Metroid. You can get pretty far in those without leveling up hearts and missiles.
The inheritance system would take even more focus off the character skill, since you'd be leveling up your account for creating characters.
Every time I want to check out a game I go straight for the screenshots. A picture says a thousand words and all that. Pictures at the start of the doc are a good way of quickly explaining what it's roughly about.
I think another important thing is to explain why you made certain decisions. Just stating things like facts and leaving out your justification and thought process will make you decisions seem like arbitrary opinions.
Naming characters Azearoth and Kyliandra is not game design. Keep things fuzzy, details later. The concept should work on an abstract level.
The 'inheritance' idea is an interesting one. Die and your next character will get X percent of the experience points.
Anyways, I think the key to getting permadeath to work is to put more emphasis on the player skill than on the character skill. Equipment could also be used to store the momentum you've built up. In real life, a toddler with a gun is more dangerous than a... real ninja. Assets like weapons and gold could be kept in a bank so the next character can use it. Stuff dropped in the field might get looted so there'll be some tactics in deciding what to use and what to keep safe.
A graveyard is a must, so you feel your character just didn't move to NIL. The graveyard could contain a little list of accomplishments the character made.
Herzog Zwei or Dune II was some of the first RTS games.
I agree on Tetris though. Lot's of clones.
Space invaders had a lot of clones too and later resulted in Galaga and the whole spaceship shooter genre.
SPACEWAR! probably inspired in Asteroids and Star Control.
Then there's TBS... I don't know here. I'd like to think that Archon indirectly inspired games like Advance Wars . There were also Gameboy wars and other earlier mostly japanese games had similar boardgame elements like that (Nadia for NES to mention an odd example).
Super Mario Bros 1 probably had a huge impact because it was so well executed with scrolling, levels, secrets, powerups.
I like Quake 1 the most of the old FPS games. Real 3D and nice physics. The FPS genre hasn't gotten much further, just some ragdolls and stack objects. You still can't blow terrain up like in 2D games from ages ago.
Which brings me to the 2D terrain destruction games. Which was first here? The gorillas with the bananas? I kinda liked Scorched Earth for the Amiga best of the early games. Well, it's not like the genre exist anymore, except for some hobby projects like DIRT (which I'm mentioning cuz I'm working on it).
StreetFighter II certainly did a lot for the Beat em up genre. Other good games worth mentioning are IK+, Yie Ar and Barbarian, and Bruce Lee (C64) cuz it's so charmy even though it was more of an adventure game.
Mario Kart really got the cute racing genre going, but I think there were GoCart racing games before it, just not very good ones.
Sorry for being a correction nazi, but the NES tiles are 8*8px and 4 colors. Below is a blurb if you're interested to know more. Else skip.
I wrote a program that extracts the tile tables from NES roms and thus had to do a bit of reverse engeneering. It seems the tiles are 8*8px and 2 bitplans, which means 4 colors. One of the colors is transparent though, so 3 is sort of correct. A tile only requires 16 bytes of memory (8*8 bits * 2 bitplans).
The tiles are arranged in 16*16 blocks or banks, and two of those can be kept in memory at the same time, which means that 256x2 tiles can be kept in memory at the same time.
When you get to a new area, the game will swich banks, and you get new enemies or whatever. The game can also switch palettes so the enemies come in different colors. To further save memory, the tiles can be flipped and stuff, so less angles will have to be drawn. The octorocs on Zelda 1 are just two tiles that are mirrored to make a fully symetrical creature, then there's two different palettes (red & blue).
Anyone got some more info on the artist? I think his/her interpretations of the game characters are excellent, especially the Solar Jetman stuff! Nester looked pretty accurate as Link too.
I couldn't see any Blaster Master or Metroid stuff, too bad.
Elite 1-3 are pretty much free to download now. Apparently Ian Bell and David Braben had some sort of dispute regarding free distribution of Elite.
I played a lot of Elite II on the amiga. I've tried many times to get into Elite 1 but the inteface and GUI is to cumbersome to me. Is it worth it? I also downloaded Elite 3 (First Encounters) and it was kind of nice with the planet terrain and all, but somehow it didn't appeal to me, maybe it was too bloated.
I would wish to see something more simple and cute, like Spore appears to be. I really like the old elite ships because of the simplicity in design.
Utopia II - K240 (Amiga) was really nice too, speaking of space RTS.
Well, a regular new game for a consile is 400-550 SEK, or higher if you walk into the wrong store.
The american dollar is currently less than 7 SEK, it used to be 11.
40 bucks would be budget bin here.
Not everyone have a credit card. I have no doubt in my mind that most people would buy music if it was cheap and DRM bullshit free, AND easy to buy, as easy as P2P.
Ethics and morals are tricky. I think it's bad to use them in an argument cuz they're relative to an often unspecified valueground (god, you, a group, human majority).
I myself prefer to see as many people happy as possible. Putting a black or white label on piracy isn't possible with that valueground IMO. Consider:
Loss (or no gain): Possibly slightly harder to do products for a living, which means less commercial products to pirate.
Gain: A person has a richer life.
I don't mind realism, it's kind of neat to see them try out different styles.
My gripe however is the lack of consistancy. I don't think they follow up properly on the designs they establish. This new game just doesn't look 'Zelda' too me. The only way I could tell was because of Link's outfit.
What happened to Link's nose btw? It used to be TWO PIXELS LONG. Now he's just a regular manga 'pretty boy'.
Samus used to have brown hair (no varia), but they just had to make her into a blond bimbo to suit the american market (Metroid was not as popular in Japan).
Both the original Zelda and Metroid (NES) were really unlinear and none of that kind of gameplay is left either. It's hardly in any game nowdays.
For me the DS is more attractive with the stylus. I'd love to see some 'mouse control' games, like RTS or 2D games with 'Soldat' control. There's a serious lack of these kinda games for handhelds.
Most of all, I would like to see a gaming oriented hand-top with a touch screen. I've designed one just for fun, but I don't know how realistic it is (bottom of page): http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/main.php?id=retro
For the long explaination, you take 10 moms and explain it to them in common language until they all understand, then you compile that into the help text.
Slashdot Mirror
What happens if the 'polluters' mod 50% of the files correctly?
The original Metroid didn't have much backtracking, because it is fundamentally different from the new games in terms of freedom and branching (mainly because it had less 'keys' you needed to find). MZM (GBA) was a huge disappointment for me. It basically ignored the whole exploration deal and replaced it with big arrows pointing you around. Conveniently locked doors were abundant. I felt herded like a sheep.
In the original Metroid is just linear in the beginning and end. In the begining you have to get the morph ball, then the missiles in the golden corridor close to the Norfair elevator. After that you got some choices, but I either go for the Longshot or Bombs. Then I run through the blue waver corridor to the Bombs, then bomb down to get the Ice, then ice my way up to the green corridor, bomb up to the Varia, then I get the Longshot. That way I won't have to run through the same corridors much.
After that the game really opens up since you have most of the 'keys' already (20 mins into the game). Occasionally you do use the same corridors, but you never feel you're backtracking because there's so many branches. If you do backtrack, it's because you decided to go back the same way, not cuz the game decided to. What limits your progress is your skill and your character's skill (missiles and energy), not keys or linear map design.
Tourian (5 corridors in the end) is completely linear though, and you do need to defeat the two minibosses to get there (unless you manage to bomb up from the lava, but I never managed to do that).
The Zelda series were similarly ruined. The reason I liked Zelda was because of the freedom, and it's just not there anymore. I'd say if Zelda and Metroid are 6/8 on the 'freedom scale', then most new games in the series are 2/8... or less. It's like day and night.
You said it yourself. 512MB USB drive $70. Ten pack floppy $6.50. Floppy sounds cheaper to me. It all comes down to how many you need, no?
Anyways, you can give floppies away, or dump them in mailboxes, or throw them REALLY HARD IN THE WALL when you get angry. If you do that with USB keys you'll get broke in no time.
I've pretty much switched to USB keys myself though, but I miss the catharsis that comes from the breaking of storage media.
It doesn't show on photos.
Theory torn apart.
There's surely some distortion caused by the atmosphere, but what we got here is mainly an optical illusion of some sort. I didn't read the linked article, but eyeballed through a feature NASA had on it a few days ago. They had a photo of the moon moving (multiple exposures). There was no change in size.
I'm not sure how much of the size change (if there were one) would show on a regular photo though. Cameras doesn't zoom in like the eye does, which you soon notice if you try to take a photo of a bird or stars with a regular camera. Birds just become a little black mark. I've heard the focus area of the eye is like a cookie held an arms length away. The rest is fuzzy. At the extreme edges and even outside the field of vision the brain/imagination fills in the details.
I would guess that stereovision of importance in the case of the moon illusion.
1: Anyone tried to see what happens if you close one eye?
2: Anyone tried to make a virtual (3D goggles) replication of the setup?
Well, isn't isometric views 3D? If you can jump in a game seen from such an angle, then you have a third dimension, and that's what gave you trouble, no?. Isometric graphics is sort of like flat projection 3D, so sizes doesn't change, but you still have the x,y,z mechanics for movement.
The Fallout characters where probably rendered from 3D models like in BG or Diablo. That often makes the figures a bit less 'iconic' and more blury. Since they can spin around there's more frames to recognize aswell. If we move to real 3D, you have lighting, angle, animation and distance to 'decypher' before you can recognize a character. With 2D you just have Animation (most angles are flipped). There's just no way you're going to confuse a Gomba and a Koopa in SMB 1, or a Octorock and Moblin in Zelda 1.
I'm fine with 3D, I really like Elite, Quake and Tribes to mention a few, but 2D is hardly being explored AT ALL on consoles or PC. There's a few handheld attempts, but the processing power of those systems are limited.
320*240 (or 256) rocks! It's a pity the DS uses 256*192 and the GBA 240*160 (correct me if I'm wrong). That's a tad low unfortunately.
Also, 3D graphics are considered better than 2D. When you pick 3D graphics, you get a few advantages, such as:
3D looks more real and familiar. You have another dimension, which can be both good and bad (see 3D jumping puzzles). You can have objects varying a lot in size, like a 20 meter scout swooping by a 3km cruiser, but it's harder to show scale because of the perspective.
With 2D however, you get a lot of gameplay advantages, such as destructable terrain, easy-to-read distances, scales and relations. Immidiately recognizeable characters (only seen from one angle). 2D physicas are much easier to code/process. The brain also goes through a lot of trouble 'unwrapping' or unskewing things because it prefers flat 2D.
I think many designers fall into the trap of wanting to define their everything as much as possible. They want their characters to be 'real', and for that they need 3D. In the end they're only another 'blip' you shoot though.
Just imagine what would happen if you combined ExciteBike, Blaster Master, Bionic Commando, and Scorched Tanks. You're speeding downhill, blow a piece of rock out of the way, jump off a ledge, fly through the air, fire a grappler into the cave roof, swing like Tarzan, disconnect and fall in an arc towards a cliff, and as you land the suspension nearly breaks, making the undercarriage grind against the cliff generating some neat sparks and a SFX stolen from Stunt Car Racer. You jump out with Jason and plant a turret and some sensor arrays a'la Tribes.
I also have a 440, and my machine is a year old. I'm not the kind of guy who can open up computers and fiddle with the insides, so I can't do anything about it.
Pretty lame how something like this should prevent a game from running. HL2 demo ran, and so did UT2004. What a waste of my time and bandwidth.
Imagine if they made gameplay cards instead. Then I might consider trying to upgrade. GFX.. pshht!
Oh well, I actually considered buying a game, maybe this one, but I think I'll go play Ur-Quan Masters instead.
There's no connection between having money and being worthy of experiencing art, and I doubt anyone thinks so. The problem is that you have to put food on the table, and are thus forced to make the connection above. It's all very unfortunate.
The investors are not the creators. Investors are suit people out to make money, not innovation.
I live in Sweden. There's a stand at the mall with DVD movies for 7.5usd each, and they did have some interesting oldies, like Hellraiser.
Next step is 13usd, I found Virus and Aliens for this price.
Most movies are around 22usd.
New movies like Robots, AvP, Van Helsing are usually 29usd, so I rent for 7.5usd or just skip seeing them.
New games can be around 80usd here, so I play Star Control 2 (UQM) and other great free games instead.
(I got the high prices from converting the SEK to USD. The USD used to be 11SEK but is now 7)
We also have "Save the rainforest" campaigns. The rainforest is full off unknown species but that doesn't stop the vegetarians from turning it into a giant soy plantage (It's Troll Tuesday right?).
Did I say share? I meant sell for as much money as possible! It's universal knowledge that there is a direct connection between having money and being worthy of experiencing art and enjoyment.
It's universal because if you use Sony's tools, you can put any kind of data on the disc (That doesn't violate the Universal Copyright and Content Laws), then you could in theory share that data with aliens that also has PSPs!
It was the parent's idea with inheritance. I probably wouldn't use it myself to be frank, especially since keeping stuff in a shared bank can work as a good natural way to give new characters an edge. Possibly, there could be physical lvl up items you can patch up new characters with.
The only idea I would be certain to use would be the graveyards. You could have little undead version of your characters walking around telling stories of the glory days, bragging about kills and the places they went. That would be something.
While I'm shooting ideas outta my ass: How about having X number of lives and no penalty on death other then life=life-1 and teleport back to town? The player could get new lifes gradually, so it's really the players fault if he gets careless life hits 0 (permadeath).
The problem with any permadeath system is that the player still remembers stuff after the character is dead. The most realistic permadeath system would be to just stop playing the game after you died, and then go play another game.
An interesting idea (for a 1P/LAN RPG) could be to generate all the creatures, enviroments and stuff with a formula, and reshape the world completely everytime the player dies.
Permadeath in Pen&Paper RPGs didn't stop me from playing. It was fun playing, the character was just a temporary vessel. In a way, Pen&Paper RPG's (improvisational) are like my formula idea above. I think MMORPGs tie too much of the fun into the character stats part, and thus ends up using more or less inconsistant respawn systems.
When I mentioned player skill (you) and character skill (lvl) before, my point was that with a shift towards player skill would make your character skill worth less, thus dying wouldn't be as painfull, since you still have your player skill intact. I think it's fun to increase stats and all that, but those games tie almost all the fun into the character, whilst player skill games like Tribes1 or Quake1 are fun just playing any time.
There's very few games today that are 50/50 player/character skill. Older games that did it pretty well is Zelda and Metroid. You can get pretty far in those without leveling up hearts and missiles.
The inheritance system would take even more focus off the character skill, since you'd be leveling up your account for creating characters.
Every time I want to check out a game I go straight for the screenshots. A picture says a thousand words and all that. Pictures at the start of the doc are a good way of quickly explaining what it's roughly about.
I think another important thing is to explain why you made certain decisions. Just stating things like facts and leaving out your justification and thought process will make you decisions seem like arbitrary opinions.
Naming characters Azearoth and Kyliandra is not game design. Keep things fuzzy, details later. The concept should work on an abstract level.
The 'inheritance' idea is an interesting one. Die and your next character will get X percent of the experience points.
Anyways, I think the key to getting permadeath to work is to put more emphasis on the player skill than on the character skill. Equipment could also be used to store the momentum you've built up. In real life, a toddler with a gun is more dangerous than a... real ninja. Assets like weapons and gold could be kept in a bank so the next character can use it. Stuff dropped in the field might get looted so there'll be some tactics in deciding what to use and what to keep safe.
A graveyard is a must, so you feel your character just didn't move to NIL. The graveyard could contain a little list of accomplishments the character made.
Herzog Zwei or Dune II was some of the first RTS games.
I agree on Tetris though. Lot's of clones.
Space invaders had a lot of clones too and later resulted in Galaga and the whole spaceship shooter genre.
SPACEWAR! probably inspired in Asteroids and Star Control.
Then there's TBS... I don't know here. I'd like to think that Archon indirectly inspired games like Advance Wars . There were also Gameboy wars and other earlier mostly japanese games had similar boardgame elements like that (Nadia for NES to mention an odd example).
Super Mario Bros 1 probably had a huge impact because it was so well executed with scrolling, levels, secrets, powerups.
I like Quake 1 the most of the old FPS games. Real 3D and nice physics. The FPS genre hasn't gotten much further, just some ragdolls and stack objects. You still can't blow terrain up like in 2D games from ages ago.
Which brings me to the 2D terrain destruction games. Which was first here? The gorillas with the bananas? I kinda liked Scorched Earth for the Amiga best of the early games. Well, it's not like the genre exist anymore, except for some hobby projects like DIRT (which I'm mentioning cuz I'm working on it).
StreetFighter II certainly did a lot for the Beat em up genre. Other good games worth mentioning are IK+, Yie Ar and Barbarian, and Bruce Lee (C64) cuz it's so charmy even though it was more of an adventure game.
Mario Kart really got the cute racing genre going, but I think there were GoCart racing games before it, just not very good ones.
Sorry for being a correction nazi, but the NES tiles are 8*8px and 4 colors. Below is a blurb if you're interested to know more. Else skip.
I wrote a program that extracts the tile tables from NES roms and thus had to do a bit of reverse engeneering. It seems the tiles are 8*8px and 2 bitplans, which means 4 colors. One of the colors is transparent though, so 3 is sort of correct. A tile only requires 16 bytes of memory (8*8 bits * 2 bitplans).
The tiles are arranged in 16*16 blocks or banks, and two of those can be kept in memory at the same time, which means that 256x2 tiles can be kept in memory at the same time.
When you get to a new area, the game will swich banks, and you get new enemies or whatever. The game can also switch palettes so the enemies come in different colors. To further save memory, the tiles can be flipped and stuff, so less angles will have to be drawn. The octorocs on Zelda 1 are just two tiles that are mirrored to make a fully symetrical creature, then there's two different palettes (red & blue).
This guy knows more than me: NES Architecture - by Marat Fayzullin
Anyone got some more info on the artist? I think his/her interpretations of the game characters are excellent, especially the Solar Jetman stuff! Nester looked pretty accurate as Link too.
I couldn't see any Blaster Master or Metroid stuff, too bad.
Elite 1-3 are pretty much free to download now. Apparently Ian Bell and David Braben had some sort of dispute regarding free distribution of Elite.
I played a lot of Elite II on the amiga. I've tried many times to get into Elite 1 but the inteface and GUI is to cumbersome to me. Is it worth it? I also downloaded Elite 3 (First Encounters) and it was kind of nice with the planet terrain and all, but somehow it didn't appeal to me, maybe it was too bloated.
I would wish to see something more simple and cute, like Spore appears to be. I really like the old elite ships because of the simplicity in design.
Utopia II - K240 (Amiga) was really nice too, speaking of space RTS.
Now I'll pimp my space projects. First out SCII:
http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/main.php?id=sce
Old and incomplete Elite clone, but I like the spaceship designs. Have more unscanned.
http://web.telia.com/~u48508900/temp/
Well, a regular new game for a consile is 400-550 SEK, or higher if you walk into the wrong store. The american dollar is currently less than 7 SEK, it used to be 11. 40 bucks would be budget bin here.
Not everyone have a credit card. I have no doubt in my mind that most people would buy music if it was cheap and DRM bullshit free, AND easy to buy, as easy as P2P.
Ethics and morals are tricky. I think it's bad to use them in an argument cuz they're relative to an often unspecified valueground (god, you, a group, human majority).
I myself prefer to see as many people happy as possible. Putting a black or white label on piracy isn't possible with that valueground IMO. Consider:
Loss (or no gain): Possibly slightly harder to do products for a living, which means less commercial products to pirate.
Gain: A person has a richer life.
I don't mind realism, it's kind of neat to see them try out different styles.
My gripe however is the lack of consistancy. I don't think they follow up properly on the designs they establish. This new game just doesn't look 'Zelda' too me. The only way I could tell was because of Link's outfit.
What happened to Link's nose btw? It used to be TWO PIXELS LONG. Now he's just a regular manga 'pretty boy'.
Samus used to have brown hair (no varia), but they just had to make her into a blond bimbo to suit the american market (Metroid was not as popular in Japan).
Both the original Zelda and Metroid (NES) were really unlinear and none of that kind of gameplay is left either. It's hardly in any game nowdays.
For me the DS is more attractive with the stylus. I'd love to see some 'mouse control' games, like RTS or 2D games with 'Soldat' control. There's a serious lack of these kinda games for handhelds.
Most of all, I would like to see a gaming oriented hand-top with a touch screen. I've designed one just for fun, but I don't know how realistic it is (bottom of page): http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/main.php?id=retro
I want the following buttons:
[Cancel] [OK] [Short explaination] [Long explaination]
For the long explaination, you take 10 moms and explain it to them in common language until they all understand, then you compile that into the help text.