Mega Man X was to distinguish a significant fork from the Mega Man series which went all the way up to Mega Man 8 with no change in basic gameplay, and used the same exact sprites (aside from pallete swaps for the weapons, and sliding introduced in 3.)
True for 1-6, for the most part. 2 introduced the "8 boss rule", 3 introduced sliding, and 4 introduced the charged shot. But 7, 8, and 9 (Rockman & Forte) are MUCH more removed, from a gameplay standpoint, than MegaMan X is. They introduce various side games (like collecting robot information discs hidden in each level), buying items and abilities, and multi-path storylines. Now, I'm not arguing that the games are the very pinical of inventive game design, on the contrary, during it's two decade lifespan, the series adds very few unique concepts. But 7-9 are VASTLY different in gameplay, when compared to X.
But, and sadly I do understand, many of the youths of today do not appreciate good fidelity in music, hell I'd dare say that most of today's generations doesn't know what good sound CAN sound like...
Or some of us just concentrate on more important things, like the quality of the composition, the performance, and post-production. I've done a lot of audio engineering, I work as a A/V producer for a TV station, and I've worked in recording studios. But I'll be the first to tell you, this audiophile crap is a bunch of BS. All you're appreciating is the amount of $$$$ and whining you put into your music listening experience, instead of concentrating on the actual creative processes that went into it. I know audiophiles who will worship a Brittany Spears recording if it's played in 5.1 on a high-end JBL (or what have you) system, but won't give Dark Side of the Moon or Close to the Edge on a car stereo. To me, that's some fucked up priorities
I don't mind self-gratification if it means the valuing of some actual human effort, like doing great post-production, or writing a really good piece of music. But being too proud to listen to an mp3 just because "it's not the best audio quality" is simply shooting yourself in the foot. You're putting too much stock in something that should really mean much less.
Sure, if I pay attention to the "audio quality" I can tell the difference between a 192kbps MP3 and lossless digital audio, but hopefully I'm concentrating on more important things, like composition and production. Now, if the audio quality is bad enough that I become completely conscious of it, even if I'm not listening for it, then THAT'S a problem, but a little compression (even 192kbps mp3) doesn't really make me notice unless I'm listening for it... only if I'm doing a double blind test, and I don't want to listen to music that way!
As for the distraction argument, talking to someone who is in the car is a distraction, as is listening to the radio.
Wrong. People who are in the car are in the same situation as the driver, therefor, the driver's mind is, still, spacially, thinking about the area surrounding the car. When you talk on your phone, your mind subconciously tries to make sense of the space in which you are talking to the other person. THIS is one of the main causes of distraction. Also, a person in a car is easier to tell, "hold on, I need to concentrate on driving" just by body language or by them noticing your shift in concentration, and unless they're autistic, they'll probably get the hint even before you have to say anything. When you're talking on the phone, you actually have to say, "hold on, I need to concentrate on driving", and, well, accidents happen much faster than that. Thus, just by the nature of the interchange, it will take the brain longer to shift from one subject (the conversation) to the other (driving).
As for radio/cd/iPod listening, actually listening to music in a car has shown to actually HELP drivers concentrate on driving. It keeps their brain from wondering to something completely unrelated to the place in which they're in, which IT WILL DO if you're driving for any length of time, whether or not you're a "good driver" or not. So go ahead, pop in that CD.
I'm going to believe what studies show, not what individual people's experiences are. As this study says, even the people in the study flat-out deny that they were affected, where-as the evidence clearly shows that they're full of shit.
As for laws, I'm all for outlawing cell-phone use in cars. Not only will it make the roads safer, it will reduce insurence rates, highway maintence funding, and possibly keep businesses from making a habit of feeling like they can call their employees at any goddamn time! Any federal laws can be effective overnight, as it's much easier to spot someone on a cell phone than if they've had a little too much to drink. Passangers using handheld phones (not on speaker phones) is totally kosher, but as of today, I'm gonna make a deal with myself to always pull off before talking on the phone, or if I can't, just let voicemail pick it up, even if it's an irrate client, make 'em wait.
1-6 will be completely out of the question by that point. When the Wii hits, Square will probably release 1, 4, and 6 on the virtual console. Nintendo will most likely want exclusive rights back for those games. Not to mention, IV was just re-released on GBA, and V and VI are soon to follow, not to mention the remake of III... that leaves I and II, which were just re-released 2 years ago for GBA, and then 2 years before that for PS1.
With all of this, there's even a good chance that Nintendo won't release 1-6, even for the Wii, as all of the games will have been released for updated systems fairly recently. I'm hoping this isn't true, but I could well imagine it happening.
That leaves VII, VIII, and IX, which I deffenitely wouldn't mind having all on one DVD (all great games IMO, 3 out of 4 of the best games in the series, not including VI), except that the original versions of those games are actually still selling. The addition to these games being added to FF12 probably won't sway too many people in their decision to buy it, so they don't stand to make any money off of this venture. I could understand Square putting together a "Final Fantasy Collection" DVD at some point, which would be extremely cool, with games 1-9 on them, along the same lines as Nintendo's "Zelda Collection" (which was greatly appreciated, btw). But bundling them with FF12 is probably not a good idea.
Not half as bad as Xenogears though, where you literally go from "Do you want to Save?" to "Do you want to Save?" without ever being in control of the game!
God I wanted to like that game, but the story becomes ludicrus, you realize that the only "character developments" are sudden and unrealistic, and the second disk mostly consists of 6 hours of watching characters sitting in an arm chair TELLING YOU THE STORY: "And then we went through this cool dungeon, and then we fought the boss, and then we went to this town, and then we were betrayed by X, and then we fought him." I know it was a rush job, but I wanted to throw the game at the wall. Xenosaga (the first one) and FFX don't even begin to compare, and I thought those games were cutscene heavy.
My favorite story revolving around the game is that my friend (who had already played the game) was watching me go through it. There's a scene where the main character and the romantic lead are in the main character's room, talking. This extremely sappy, cringingly over-the-top dialog goes on FOREVER, so after a while, my friend starts saying, "just press the 'fuck button'", "just keep pressing the 'fuck button'" (refering to the action button), at the end of the scene, the screen fades to black, and then fades back in again, and it's the next morning, and you see the female lead in his bed with obviously no clothes on, and the male lead in his boxers. I suddenly yell, "holy shit, you really did mean the 'fuck button'!", and we just started laughing at how rediculusly bad it was. Oooh, sex in a video game, that must make it, ya know, all "adult like". Pleeeease...
At least some quality product is, however necessary for the games industry to even exist in ther first place, otherwise people would shy away from buying the gear necessary to get into gaming, or loose interest after they've been stung with a few expensive stinkers.
I think this is a pretty rosy picture of the gaming market. The fact is, most people are stupid, most people measure quantity over quality, and most people would rather buy 5 games to find one good one then take the small amount of times to do the research and find which games to buy. We at slashdot would like to think we're above that, and since slashdot has become somewhat of an informed consumer advocacy group, there is probably SOME truth to that, though you'd probably be surprised.
There is no doubt that a good quality title is more likely to sell more than a similarly marketted low quality title, but it may cost twice as much to make. A good investment for ANY company in the entertainment industry is to spread out their investments: make a bunch of smaller stinkers in order to make a few really quality titles. As long as those quality titles keep coming, and I can spot them, I, as a consumer, am not going to complain.
Currently, I am working as an advertisement producer at a local TV station. My goal is to raise the quality of our commercials. A lot of it is personal pride for making artistic work (yes, there is artistry, even in TV commercials). But to do so, I have to wade through a lot of crap. If I spent 8 hours on every commerical I editted, the station wouldn't be able to produce enough to keep in business, so I've excepted the fact that I have to produce a lot of crap along with it. I'll do the best I can with all of it, but I'll chose a few spots with potential promise, to really put all my artistic vision into.
Oh, and btw, the reason that 2006 console game sales have declined is because it's the final year of a generation, which is always a slump. People are sitting on the fence waiting for the Wii and PS3 before they run out and buy a bunch of titles. It's probably partially a subconcious thing, but because they know the end is neigh, people are becoming weary of this generation and are ready to move on.
It can be said, though, that the MAIN reason such devices failed is that everyone involved (consumers & developers) were NOT forced into them. If, suddenly, every developer had started developing for the PowerGlove before it came out, and then spent years afterwards honing their skills in developing for it, I guarentee that everyone would have switched. Within a year, it would be considered "standard", and people would be buying them left and right. Many early games for NES "paddles" were horrendous: side scrollers that used the "up" direction to jump, games where moving was jerky and unnatural, etc. We had to wade through a lot of crap just to get to where mid-gen NES games were, but the fact was, there were a few great games here and there to get us through that period, until everyone caught on. For the PowerGlove, there wasn't that kind of development. It was a controller that was used to play games that were not designed for it, didn't require it, and didn't improve on it. This time around, there will be 25 games coming out of the docket, that's probably about 5 times as many that were ever developed specifically for the PowerGlove, in there will be a few good ones, and from those, the Wiimote has at least a pretty decent chance of taking off.
I am guessing that the novelty of the Wiimote will last long enough for there to ammass a good number of games to get the ball rolling. Years from now, we'll be looking at things like "Wii Sports" and saying, "boy I'm glad we got through that phase" (not to wack Wii Sports or anything). But it is an adventure, it is a change, and I'm excited as hell to be able to experience it, for better or for worse. Developers have gotten too comfortable, and too secure in their design, they know it, and they even hate the fact that they've become that way, themselves (just look at the number of developers eager to take a wack at developing for the Wiimote).
Re:Ok, I was interested before but now....
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Wii-mote In Action
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· Score: 1
,i>The better way to think of it is this: your virtual character, who is constrained by the physics of the game, is the one swinging the sword. You, with your controller, are more like a ghost that the virtual character tries to imitate. Your job is to guide the character, not to *be* the character.
Exactly, if you think about it, it's no more a short coming than using a gamepad. In Super Mario Bros, you used (what we now know as) the d-pad as a sort of "guide" to walk Mario left or right, if he ran to the right, into a wall, the pad didn't suddenly jolt itself back to center as if you could "no longer physically hold down the d-pad right". No, Mario just acted like he was running in place facing the wall. Noone ever complained that the pad didn't respond as if it was immitating the walking motion. While it's true that the Wiimote is MORE natural, and closer to the real motions the game will depict, do not get caught up in the idea that it will be anything like the actual motion. The fact is, the mind will adapt itself to do whatever it is that it's trying to do. Similarly to using the d-pad to "walk" was second-nature in the sidescrollers of yester-year, this will too.
The biggest thing about the Wiimote isn't that it will more-accurately immitate reality, but that it will be a CHANGE, and force developers to come up with new concepts. Immersion will come naturally with any input device, as long as the game holds your attention well enough.
Re:Ok, I was interested before but now....
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Wii-mote In Action
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· Score: 1
I do love this idea, it's very original, and quite possible to implement. And yes, first person -> third person transitions aren't really that bad at all. Metroid Prime does this quite fuidly, for instance. Many times you have to switch to morphball instantaneously, move, and then snap out of it. After a few minutes, it just became natural. If you setup the gameplay off-the-bat that you're going to do both first and third person views, some momentary switching is just going to become second nature. Heck, I was not really very concerned about this whole "stopping" issue in the first place, after all, it's NOT reality, it's a game, there are certain things we simply can't do, technologically, for gameplay to immitate real life, but that doesn't matter, because game developers still make fun games, even with those inconsitancies. But after hearing this, I really like this idea, not just because it will immitate the stopping of a sword, but because it will be an excuse for the game to pull back at times, give the person a broader scope of the game from a narrative perspective, while at the same time not making the game completely third person.
This said, this idea doesn't compansate for everything, like vertical sword blocks. You wouldn't want the camera doing lateral pans, or you'll most likely end up looking at the characters from underground. But hey, the primary goal of games is isn't to immitate reality, anyway. As we make more technological advancements, our possibilities broaden, but we'll never get there, I hope.
I'll just say, though, that this is one of the best game design ideas I've heard out of slashdot; very artistic, actually. It's ideas like this that, when strung together along with many other inventive design techniques, make up a great and truly revolutionary game. Hell, send off an email to someone at Nintendo, probably nothing will come of it, but ya never know.
Hours? Try a few minutes. I downloaded a bunch of LOST episodes a few months back. Each is approximately 45mins, a little under half the length of a feature film. Now, I have a fairly slow DSL connection (as DSL goes), it's the most basic service my ISP provides, anyway, and on top of that, I usually don't bother hooking my computer up to eithernet, and just use my 802.11g wireless card. And on top of that, I'm way up here in Alaska, and connection speeds up here aren't what they are in the "lower 48". Now, that said, I was able to download an episode in about 5-7 minutes. So let's say it takes 15-20 minutes to download a movie. During that time I could be doing other things: cooking dinner before the movie, jerking it, checking my email, CHECKING SLASHDOT, etc. Now, can I do those things while driving to Wallmart (which, btw, I refuse to shop at)? Plus, many people live quite a ways from their usual commercial center (and many shop at smaller, more local chains when doing normal grocery runs).
Not to mention, try this situation: you have a bunch of buddies sitting around, drinking beer, having a party, and one of them comes up with the great idea of watching "The Big Lebowski", which you unfortunately do not own. Do you really want to break up the party by waiting to sober up, driving to retailer/rental house, getting the movie, and driving back? OR, get on computer for 3 minutes, start download, drink more beer, play more music, get on GameCube and play SmashBros with friends, and by that time, have your download ready to watch? Hell, I'd be willing to pay the extra $7 to switch from "Rental" to "Buy" in this circumstance. Remember that watching a movie is, very commonly, a spontaneous decision during some gathering of friends/family, and many times, of which, fails because someone has to go get a movie, or reverts to having to rewatch one of the movies you've already bought.
The moment ANY internet movie distrobution opens up, no matter if it's $25 a pop, people will flock to it, and not just Wallmart will lose out on sales, but Blockbuster, as well. It will make the online success of music distrobution look like a failour, in comparison.
My boss (I work as a commercial producer for a TV station), is starting to consider dropping Nielson, as many other TV stations around the country are doing. Having a Nielson rating tends to do more harm than good (and trust me, in the rural area I live in, there is NOONE else even close to being able to compete with us for viewership). Large corporations, while still looking to Nielson for guidence, have been doing so less and less. From what I hear, it's quickly becoming one of the biggest concerns in the broadcast industry. So this move to branch out into other fields doesn't surprise me.
I'm kinda surprised Abuse didn't make the list. Now, I'm one of the LAST people to put PC games over console games (and believe that PC games are greatly overhyped here), but I gotta give props to Abuse. The sprite animations were so fluid, you'd think they were polygon based, one of the few 2D games that actually managed to be frightening in it's portrayal.
But I was also surprised to see that Symphony of the Night didn't make the list, and similarly Super Metroid, another one of the few 2D games that managed to be frightening. And Super Metroid gets my vote for best all-around sound design of any game.
Well, officially, at this point, Final Fantasy 6 is supposed to come out around the same as FF5 for the GBA. The only problem is, the DS is booming, and is quickly replacing the market the GBA once thrived in. Still no release date has been given to these games, so I'm starting to wonder whether they're pulling and reworking them for the DS. This would be my preference, and probably the preference of most fans, anyway, especially since they will be playing the SNES versions on their Wiis by that point. FF4 Advance came at a time when the GBA was doing one final push, but that's over now, a GBA FF5/6 is just not going to sell nearly as well.
Re:Best looking 2D game ever...
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5 Gorgeous 2D Games
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Worms 3D is a completely different game, and yes, Worms 3D is not good. The series you are missing are 3 games built on the Worms 2 engine: Worms 2, Worms Armeggedon, and Worms World Party (which is simply Armeggedon with a few extra goodies). But I've played the original worms as well, and unsurprisingly, it can't compete with the Worms 2 series, either in graphics or in gameplay, but hey, it was a great start, which ended up producing one of the best hotseat party games ever. Are there plans to release it on DS, because that would be PERFECT.
Of course it was intentional, but what they did was they compressed all the tracks to hell, so that it would be REALLY LOUD. I once saw a comparison chart of waveforms from about every third Rush album, and there was a tendancy over the years towards exponentially louder average amplitude, which means more and more compression. That's not neccessarily a bad thing if done with some good taste, I don't mind Test For Echo's production one bit, for instance. But VT went way overboard. They start to sound like either a really really slicked out garage band, or like a really slick band that was slumming it (which is obviously more the case). Rush never had "dirty = good" mentality, which is what separated them out from the lot of punk/grunge/alt rock bands. Their music doesn't reflect that mentality, but VTs production really sounds like they're desparately trying out sound garagey, which was just dumb.
Interestingly, "My Favorite Headache" (Geddy's solo album), which was released about a year previously, has FAR better production... and music, if you ask me.
As they should. That's at the heart of the matter of what's wrong with this case, in the first place. Such a bearbones interface SHOULD NOT BE PATENTABLE. It's one step away from patenting the text-based OS user-interface. Did you see SGI suing Microsoft when DOS came out? No. All these interfaces are NOT based on each other, they're based on years and years of similar kinds of interfaces being used for slightly different purposes. I've put WinAmp's music library window right next to iTunes, and they are virtually identical in makeup, but was that because iTunes copied WinAmp? No way. Multi-pane interfaces have been around for decades, hierarchical interfaces have been around for centuries (dating back far before computers), catagorical multi-pane interfaces have been around forever too. Suddenly, someone uses it for music, and it's some revolutionary new idea? I think not. Same with this, the iPod interface is FUCKING GENERIC, all companies making a portable music player would have basically come up with the same concept, whether or not they were looking over each other's shoulders.
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Misconception #552: "Multiplayer console game means split screen."
Fact: It doesn't... unfortunately
God I love that song! The live version is even better though, they have a pounding, industrial sounding bass pulse in the background that makes it sound even more intense! I had that song playing on repeat just after 9/11, that and Yes's "Gates of Delerium".
BTW, anyone else notice that Rush got a tip of the hat by the Blizzard guys in the ending credits of StarCraft? Go back and play it, I shit you not.
I really hope they decide to release another album... let's just hope it has better production than Vapor Trails... eugghh!!!
And actually, much less manpower went into those old games than newer games. And they certainly cost a lot less to make originally. And they've already recouped their dev costs over a decade ago.
Sure, and a lot less manpower went into "Sgt. Pepper" than Brittany's latest romp, but I guarentee that noone's selling that for 50x more.
$5 for a few hundred K for a 10 - 15 year old game? You can buy the original cartriges these days cheaper than that.
Where? Show me? Because, besides the dumbass aging parents selling stuff at garage sales, NES carts usualy go for $50+ on online auctions. That means, any time that I'm looking for a specific NES game, I have to pay that price.
For that matter, you can download the whole NES and SNES libraries in just a few minutes with a reasonable connection; they're that small.
That means nothing. They're simply that size because that's all they needed to be. Hundreds of hours of manpower still went into those games, and some are extremely enjoyable to play. People don't judge the quality of a game on how much space it took up on the media, but by how much fun it is to play.
I'm really glad to hear this. It means that there may be a push to at least marginally update some games, maybe not the gameplay or graphics, but maybe add some advanced options and controller setups that the original didn't offer... and most importantly, save features for all NES games.
But what I'm hoping for, even more, is a push to finally translate and release Japanese-only games, that have since (after being fan translated) become cult classics among the emulation crowd, which will be a lot of the same people buying the virtual console games. I have a feeling there will be quite a bit of pressure to update these games, which Nintendo could sell at higher cost (since they will be premiere releases for the US). I'm specifically thinking about games like Seiken Densetsu 3 (Secret of Mana 2), which, have since become almost as big as Secret of Mana in the classic RPG playing crowd. Rockman & Forte (Megaman 9, if I remember correct), is another one, arguably the best post-NES Megaman Game. All Nintendo has to do is hire a few interns to translate some old games, and then make a big deal about these games being premiere US releases, and they'd probably be some of the hottest items on the VC store. They could even sell them at a premium.
To be perfectly honest, I don't think anyone's going to actually use it like that, though, it looks incredibly un-ergonomic to hold is sideways, since it would be so thin from top to bottom, and way too deep. If people are going to get into the vitual console games, they're going to shell out $15, or whatever Nintendo decides to sell them for, for a Virtual Console Controller, and then they can not only play NES games, but SNES, Genesis, and N64 games as well (and many people will probably use it to play GameCube games too, if they don't have gamecube controllers sitting around).
Oh, here's an interesting thought. It looks like the VC Controller will be wired, and the controller ports on the Wii are GameCube ports. If the VC Controller can serve as a GameCube controller (which I'm guessing it will), will the VC controller work on a GameCube? Not that I would want to (GCN controller will be the best for playing GameCube games), but it's just an interesting thought.
Wait a minute, I agree that the prices are high, but this is overkill. Consider iTune's pricing 4minute tunes at $1, which I think is a very nice, simple business model. Average song length may be 3minutes, where, even if you listen to it 50x in your lifetime, is only 2.5 hours of enjoyment. Compared with $0.50 for Ocarina of Times, which supplies at least 30hours of enjoyment, and in one single playthrough. That seems a little off, to me.
I can actually understand $8 for N64 games, from a gameplay standpoint, they tend to be fairly contemporary in makeup; the only quantifiable improvements that modern games have over them are graphics and audio quality. N64 was the generation in which video started having budgets the size of small hollywood movies. Previous generations, though, should fall off considerably. $4 at most for SNES/Genesis games, $1 for NES games.
The thing to understand, though, is that Gamecube games will continue to be sold (since they will be fully backwards compatable), but they will drop considerably in price. When the average GCN game falls to $10, it's going to be very difficult for Nintendo to justify buying an N64 game at the same price, so I think we'll see this current pricing system shift dramatically.
In the end, though, I hope to see the video game industry change their pricing system to reflect most other forms of media: New releases are at maximum, only about 200% the price of non-new release titles. I can expect pay $8 for an original edition of a 1988 CD, in a store that sells new releases for an average of $16. How are games any different? SNES games should only be 50% of new games... but NEW GAMES SHOULD BE CHEAPER!
Slashdot Mirror
True for 1-6, for the most part. 2 introduced the "8 boss rule", 3 introduced sliding, and 4 introduced the charged shot. But 7, 8, and 9 (Rockman & Forte) are MUCH more removed, from a gameplay standpoint, than MegaMan X is. They introduce various side games (like collecting robot information discs hidden in each level), buying items and abilities, and multi-path storylines. Now, I'm not arguing that the games are the very pinical of inventive game design, on the contrary, during it's two decade lifespan, the series adds very few unique concepts. But 7-9 are VASTLY different in gameplay, when compared to X.
Or some of us just concentrate on more important things, like the quality of the composition, the performance, and post-production. I've done a lot of audio engineering, I work as a A/V producer for a TV station, and I've worked in recording studios. But I'll be the first to tell you, this audiophile crap is a bunch of BS. All you're appreciating is the amount of $$$$ and whining you put into your music listening experience, instead of concentrating on the actual creative processes that went into it. I know audiophiles who will worship a Brittany Spears recording if it's played in 5.1 on a high-end JBL (or what have you) system, but won't give Dark Side of the Moon or Close to the Edge on a car stereo. To me, that's some fucked up priorities
I don't mind self-gratification if it means the valuing of some actual human effort, like doing great post-production, or writing a really good piece of music. But being too proud to listen to an mp3 just because "it's not the best audio quality" is simply shooting yourself in the foot. You're putting too much stock in something that should really mean much less.
Sure, if I pay attention to the "audio quality" I can tell the difference between a 192kbps MP3 and lossless digital audio, but hopefully I'm concentrating on more important things, like composition and production. Now, if the audio quality is bad enough that I become completely conscious of it, even if I'm not listening for it, then THAT'S a problem, but a little compression (even 192kbps mp3) doesn't really make me notice unless I'm listening for it... only if I'm doing a double blind test, and I don't want to listen to music that way!
Wrong. People who are in the car are in the same situation as the driver, therefor, the driver's mind is, still, spacially, thinking about the area surrounding the car. When you talk on your phone, your mind subconciously tries to make sense of the space in which you are talking to the other person. THIS is one of the main causes of distraction. Also, a person in a car is easier to tell, "hold on, I need to concentrate on driving" just by body language or by them noticing your shift in concentration, and unless they're autistic, they'll probably get the hint even before you have to say anything. When you're talking on the phone, you actually have to say, "hold on, I need to concentrate on driving", and, well, accidents happen much faster than that. Thus, just by the nature of the interchange, it will take the brain longer to shift from one subject (the conversation) to the other (driving).
As for radio/cd/iPod listening, actually listening to music in a car has shown to actually HELP drivers concentrate on driving. It keeps their brain from wondering to something completely unrelated to the place in which they're in, which IT WILL DO if you're driving for any length of time, whether or not you're a "good driver" or not. So go ahead, pop in that CD.
I'm going to believe what studies show, not what individual people's experiences are. As this study says, even the people in the study flat-out deny that they were affected, where-as the evidence clearly shows that they're full of shit.
As for laws, I'm all for outlawing cell-phone use in cars. Not only will it make the roads safer, it will reduce insurence rates, highway maintence funding, and possibly keep businesses from making a habit of feeling like they can call their employees at any goddamn time! Any federal laws can be effective overnight, as it's much easier to spot someone on a cell phone than if they've had a little too much to drink. Passangers using handheld phones (not on speaker phones) is totally kosher, but as of today, I'm gonna make a deal with myself to always pull off before talking on the phone, or if I can't, just let voicemail pick it up, even if it's an irrate client, make 'em wait.
1-6 will be completely out of the question by that point. When the Wii hits, Square will probably release 1, 4, and 6 on the virtual console. Nintendo will most likely want exclusive rights back for those games. Not to mention, IV was just re-released on GBA, and V and VI are soon to follow, not to mention the remake of III... that leaves I and II, which were just re-released 2 years ago for GBA, and then 2 years before that for PS1.
With all of this, there's even a good chance that Nintendo won't release 1-6, even for the Wii, as all of the games will have been released for updated systems fairly recently. I'm hoping this isn't true, but I could well imagine it happening.
That leaves VII, VIII, and IX, which I deffenitely wouldn't mind having all on one DVD (all great games IMO, 3 out of 4 of the best games in the series, not including VI), except that the original versions of those games are actually still selling. The addition to these games being added to FF12 probably won't sway too many people in their decision to buy it, so they don't stand to make any money off of this venture. I could understand Square putting together a "Final Fantasy Collection" DVD at some point, which would be extremely cool, with games 1-9 on them, along the same lines as Nintendo's "Zelda Collection" (which was greatly appreciated, btw). But bundling them with FF12 is probably not a good idea.
Not half as bad as Xenogears though, where you literally go from "Do you want to Save?" to "Do you want to Save?" without ever being in control of the game!
God I wanted to like that game, but the story becomes ludicrus, you realize that the only "character developments" are sudden and unrealistic, and the second disk mostly consists of 6 hours of watching characters sitting in an arm chair TELLING YOU THE STORY: "And then we went through this cool dungeon, and then we fought the boss, and then we went to this town, and then we were betrayed by X, and then we fought him." I know it was a rush job, but I wanted to throw the game at the wall. Xenosaga (the first one) and FFX don't even begin to compare, and I thought those games were cutscene heavy.
My favorite story revolving around the game is that my friend (who had already played the game) was watching me go through it. There's a scene where the main character and the romantic lead are in the main character's room, talking. This extremely sappy, cringingly over-the-top dialog goes on FOREVER, so after a while, my friend starts saying, "just press the 'fuck button'", "just keep pressing the 'fuck button'" (refering to the action button), at the end of the scene, the screen fades to black, and then fades back in again, and it's the next morning, and you see the female lead in his bed with obviously no clothes on, and the male lead in his boxers. I suddenly yell, "holy shit, you really did mean the 'fuck button'!", and we just started laughing at how rediculusly bad it was. Oooh, sex in a video game, that must make it, ya know, all "adult like". Pleeeease...
I think this is a pretty rosy picture of the gaming market. The fact is, most people are stupid, most people measure quantity over quality, and most people would rather buy 5 games to find one good one then take the small amount of times to do the research and find which games to buy. We at slashdot would like to think we're above that, and since slashdot has become somewhat of an informed consumer advocacy group, there is probably SOME truth to that, though you'd probably be surprised.
There is no doubt that a good quality title is more likely to sell more than a similarly marketted low quality title, but it may cost twice as much to make. A good investment for ANY company in the entertainment industry is to spread out their investments: make a bunch of smaller stinkers in order to make a few really quality titles. As long as those quality titles keep coming, and I can spot them, I, as a consumer, am not going to complain.
Currently, I am working as an advertisement producer at a local TV station. My goal is to raise the quality of our commercials. A lot of it is personal pride for making artistic work (yes, there is artistry, even in TV commercials). But to do so, I have to wade through a lot of crap. If I spent 8 hours on every commerical I editted, the station wouldn't be able to produce enough to keep in business, so I've excepted the fact that I have to produce a lot of crap along with it. I'll do the best I can with all of it, but I'll chose a few spots with potential promise, to really put all my artistic vision into.
Oh, and btw, the reason that 2006 console game sales have declined is because it's the final year of a generation, which is always a slump. People are sitting on the fence waiting for the Wii and PS3 before they run out and buy a bunch of titles. It's probably partially a subconcious thing, but because they know the end is neigh, people are becoming weary of this generation and are ready to move on.
It can be said, though, that the MAIN reason such devices failed is that everyone involved (consumers & developers) were NOT forced into them. If, suddenly, every developer had started developing for the PowerGlove before it came out, and then spent years afterwards honing their skills in developing for it, I guarentee that everyone would have switched. Within a year, it would be considered "standard", and people would be buying them left and right. Many early games for NES "paddles" were horrendous: side scrollers that used the "up" direction to jump, games where moving was jerky and unnatural, etc. We had to wade through a lot of crap just to get to where mid-gen NES games were, but the fact was, there were a few great games here and there to get us through that period, until everyone caught on. For the PowerGlove, there wasn't that kind of development. It was a controller that was used to play games that were not designed for it, didn't require it, and didn't improve on it. This time around, there will be 25 games coming out of the docket, that's probably about 5 times as many that were ever developed specifically for the PowerGlove, in there will be a few good ones, and from those, the Wiimote has at least a pretty decent chance of taking off.
I am guessing that the novelty of the Wiimote will last long enough for there to ammass a good number of games to get the ball rolling. Years from now, we'll be looking at things like "Wii Sports" and saying, "boy I'm glad we got through that phase" (not to wack Wii Sports or anything). But it is an adventure, it is a change, and I'm excited as hell to be able to experience it, for better or for worse. Developers have gotten too comfortable, and too secure in their design, they know it, and they even hate the fact that they've become that way, themselves (just look at the number of developers eager to take a wack at developing for the Wiimote).
Exactly, if you think about it, it's no more a short coming than using a gamepad. In Super Mario Bros, you used (what we now know as) the d-pad as a sort of "guide" to walk Mario left or right, if he ran to the right, into a wall, the pad didn't suddenly jolt itself back to center as if you could "no longer physically hold down the d-pad right". No, Mario just acted like he was running in place facing the wall. Noone ever complained that the pad didn't respond as if it was immitating the walking motion. While it's true that the Wiimote is MORE natural, and closer to the real motions the game will depict, do not get caught up in the idea that it will be anything like the actual motion. The fact is, the mind will adapt itself to do whatever it is that it's trying to do. Similarly to using the d-pad to "walk" was second-nature in the sidescrollers of yester-year, this will too.
The biggest thing about the Wiimote isn't that it will more-accurately immitate reality, but that it will be a CHANGE, and force developers to come up with new concepts. Immersion will come naturally with any input device, as long as the game holds your attention well enough.
I do love this idea, it's very original, and quite possible to implement. And yes, first person -> third person transitions aren't really that bad at all. Metroid Prime does this quite fuidly, for instance. Many times you have to switch to morphball instantaneously, move, and then snap out of it. After a few minutes, it just became natural. If you setup the gameplay off-the-bat that you're going to do both first and third person views, some momentary switching is just going to become second nature. Heck, I was not really very concerned about this whole "stopping" issue in the first place, after all, it's NOT reality, it's a game, there are certain things we simply can't do, technologically, for gameplay to immitate real life, but that doesn't matter, because game developers still make fun games, even with those inconsitancies. But after hearing this, I really like this idea, not just because it will immitate the stopping of a sword, but because it will be an excuse for the game to pull back at times, give the person a broader scope of the game from a narrative perspective, while at the same time not making the game completely third person.
This said, this idea doesn't compansate for everything, like vertical sword blocks. You wouldn't want the camera doing lateral pans, or you'll most likely end up looking at the characters from underground. But hey, the primary goal of games is isn't to immitate reality, anyway. As we make more technological advancements, our possibilities broaden, but we'll never get there, I hope.
I'll just say, though, that this is one of the best game design ideas I've heard out of slashdot; very artistic, actually. It's ideas like this that, when strung together along with many other inventive design techniques, make up a great and truly revolutionary game. Hell, send off an email to someone at Nintendo, probably nothing will come of it, but ya never know.
Hours? Try a few minutes. I downloaded a bunch of LOST episodes a few months back. Each is approximately 45mins, a little under half the length of a feature film. Now, I have a fairly slow DSL connection (as DSL goes), it's the most basic service my ISP provides, anyway, and on top of that, I usually don't bother hooking my computer up to eithernet, and just use my 802.11g wireless card. And on top of that, I'm way up here in Alaska, and connection speeds up here aren't what they are in the "lower 48". Now, that said, I was able to download an episode in about 5-7 minutes. So let's say it takes 15-20 minutes to download a movie. During that time I could be doing other things: cooking dinner before the movie, jerking it, checking my email, CHECKING SLASHDOT, etc. Now, can I do those things while driving to Wallmart (which, btw, I refuse to shop at)? Plus, many people live quite a ways from their usual commercial center (and many shop at smaller, more local chains when doing normal grocery runs).
Not to mention, try this situation: you have a bunch of buddies sitting around, drinking beer, having a party, and one of them comes up with the great idea of watching "The Big Lebowski", which you unfortunately do not own. Do you really want to break up the party by waiting to sober up, driving to retailer/rental house, getting the movie, and driving back? OR, get on computer for 3 minutes, start download, drink more beer, play more music, get on GameCube and play SmashBros with friends, and by that time, have your download ready to watch? Hell, I'd be willing to pay the extra $7 to switch from "Rental" to "Buy" in this circumstance. Remember that watching a movie is, very commonly, a spontaneous decision during some gathering of friends/family, and many times, of which, fails because someone has to go get a movie, or reverts to having to rewatch one of the movies you've already bought.
The moment ANY internet movie distrobution opens up, no matter if it's $25 a pop, people will flock to it, and not just Wallmart will lose out on sales, but Blockbuster, as well. It will make the online success of music distrobution look like a failour, in comparison.
My boss (I work as a commercial producer for a TV station), is starting to consider dropping Nielson, as many other TV stations around the country are doing. Having a Nielson rating tends to do more harm than good (and trust me, in the rural area I live in, there is NOONE else even close to being able to compete with us for viewership). Large corporations, while still looking to Nielson for guidence, have been doing so less and less. From what I hear, it's quickly becoming one of the biggest concerns in the broadcast industry. So this move to branch out into other fields doesn't surprise me.
Abuse came out aftrr Yoshi's Island, around the time Yoshi's Story came out, so it definetly fits the bill.
I'm kinda surprised Abuse didn't make the list. Now, I'm one of the LAST people to put PC games over console games (and believe that PC games are greatly overhyped here), but I gotta give props to Abuse. The sprite animations were so fluid, you'd think they were polygon based, one of the few 2D games that actually managed to be frightening in it's portrayal.
But I was also surprised to see that Symphony of the Night didn't make the list, and similarly Super Metroid, another one of the few 2D games that managed to be frightening. And Super Metroid gets my vote for best all-around sound design of any game.
Well, officially, at this point, Final Fantasy 6 is supposed to come out around the same as FF5 for the GBA. The only problem is, the DS is booming, and is quickly replacing the market the GBA once thrived in. Still no release date has been given to these games, so I'm starting to wonder whether they're pulling and reworking them for the DS. This would be my preference, and probably the preference of most fans, anyway, especially since they will be playing the SNES versions on their Wiis by that point. FF4 Advance came at a time when the GBA was doing one final push, but that's over now, a GBA FF5/6 is just not going to sell nearly as well.
Worms 3D is a completely different game, and yes, Worms 3D is not good. The series you are missing are 3 games built on the Worms 2 engine: Worms 2, Worms Armeggedon, and Worms World Party (which is simply Armeggedon with a few extra goodies). But I've played the original worms as well, and unsurprisingly, it can't compete with the Worms 2 series, either in graphics or in gameplay, but hey, it was a great start, which ended up producing one of the best hotseat party games ever. Are there plans to release it on DS, because that would be PERFECT.
Two Things:
1. Ummmm... no
And 2. What does that have to do with anything?
Of course it was intentional, but what they did was they compressed all the tracks to hell, so that it would be REALLY LOUD. I once saw a comparison chart of waveforms from about every third Rush album, and there was a tendancy over the years towards exponentially louder average amplitude, which means more and more compression. That's not neccessarily a bad thing if done with some good taste, I don't mind Test For Echo's production one bit, for instance. But VT went way overboard. They start to sound like either a really really slicked out garage band, or like a really slick band that was slumming it (which is obviously more the case). Rush never had "dirty = good" mentality, which is what separated them out from the lot of punk/grunge/alt rock bands. Their music doesn't reflect that mentality, but VTs production really sounds like they're desparately trying out sound garagey, which was just dumb.
Interestingly, "My Favorite Headache" (Geddy's solo album), which was released about a year previously, has FAR better production... and music, if you ask me.
As they should. That's at the heart of the matter of what's wrong with this case, in the first place. Such a bearbones interface SHOULD NOT BE PATENTABLE. It's one step away from patenting the text-based OS user-interface. Did you see SGI suing Microsoft when DOS came out? No. All these interfaces are NOT based on each other, they're based on years and years of similar kinds of interfaces being used for slightly different purposes. I've put WinAmp's music library window right next to iTunes, and they are virtually identical in makeup, but was that because iTunes copied WinAmp? No way. Multi-pane interfaces have been around for decades, hierarchical interfaces have been around for centuries (dating back far before computers), catagorical multi-pane interfaces have been around forever too. Suddenly, someone uses it for music, and it's some revolutionary new idea? I think not. Same with this, the iPod interface is FUCKING GENERIC, all companies making a portable music player would have basically come up with the same concept, whether or not they were looking over each other's shoulders.
You forgot "America's got Starcraft" and "Starcraft or No Starcraft"...
GO NBC!!!
God I love that song! The live version is even better though, they have a pounding, industrial sounding bass pulse in the background that makes it sound even more intense! I had that song playing on repeat just after 9/11, that and Yes's "Gates of Delerium".
BTW, anyone else notice that Rush got a tip of the hat by the Blizzard guys in the ending credits of StarCraft? Go back and play it, I shit you not.
I really hope they decide to release another album... let's just hope it has better production than Vapor Trails... eugghh!!!
- Prime MoverSure, and a lot less manpower went into "Sgt. Pepper" than Brittany's latest romp, but I guarentee that noone's selling that for 50x more.
Where? Show me? Because, besides the dumbass aging parents selling stuff at garage sales, NES carts usualy go for $50+ on online auctions. That means, any time that I'm looking for a specific NES game, I have to pay that price.
That means nothing. They're simply that size because that's all they needed to be. Hundreds of hours of manpower still went into those games, and some are extremely enjoyable to play. People don't judge the quality of a game on how much space it took up on the media, but by how much fun it is to play.
I'm really glad to hear this. It means that there may be a push to at least marginally update some games, maybe not the gameplay or graphics, but maybe add some advanced options and controller setups that the original didn't offer... and most importantly, save features for all NES games.
But what I'm hoping for, even more, is a push to finally translate and release Japanese-only games, that have since (after being fan translated) become cult classics among the emulation crowd, which will be a lot of the same people buying the virtual console games. I have a feeling there will be quite a bit of pressure to update these games, which Nintendo could sell at higher cost (since they will be premiere releases for the US). I'm specifically thinking about games like Seiken Densetsu 3 (Secret of Mana 2), which, have since become almost as big as Secret of Mana in the classic RPG playing crowd. Rockman & Forte (Megaman 9, if I remember correct), is another one, arguably the best post-NES Megaman Game. All Nintendo has to do is hire a few interns to translate some old games, and then make a big deal about these games being premiere US releases, and they'd probably be some of the hottest items on the VC store. They could even sell them at a premium.
To be perfectly honest, I don't think anyone's going to actually use it like that, though, it looks incredibly un-ergonomic to hold is sideways, since it would be so thin from top to bottom, and way too deep. If people are going to get into the vitual console games, they're going to shell out $15, or whatever Nintendo decides to sell them for, for a Virtual Console Controller, and then they can not only play NES games, but SNES, Genesis, and N64 games as well (and many people will probably use it to play GameCube games too, if they don't have gamecube controllers sitting around).
Oh, here's an interesting thought. It looks like the VC Controller will be wired, and the controller ports on the Wii are GameCube ports. If the VC Controller can serve as a GameCube controller (which I'm guessing it will), will the VC controller work on a GameCube? Not that I would want to (GCN controller will be the best for playing GameCube games), but it's just an interesting thought.
Wait a minute, I agree that the prices are high, but this is overkill. Consider iTune's pricing 4minute tunes at $1, which I think is a very nice, simple business model. Average song length may be 3minutes, where, even if you listen to it 50x in your lifetime, is only 2.5 hours of enjoyment. Compared with $0.50 for Ocarina of Times, which supplies at least 30hours of enjoyment, and in one single playthrough. That seems a little off, to me.
I can actually understand $8 for N64 games, from a gameplay standpoint, they tend to be fairly contemporary in makeup; the only quantifiable improvements that modern games have over them are graphics and audio quality. N64 was the generation in which video started having budgets the size of small hollywood movies. Previous generations, though, should fall off considerably. $4 at most for SNES/Genesis games, $1 for NES games.
The thing to understand, though, is that Gamecube games will continue to be sold (since they will be fully backwards compatable), but they will drop considerably in price. When the average GCN game falls to $10, it's going to be very difficult for Nintendo to justify buying an N64 game at the same price, so I think we'll see this current pricing system shift dramatically.
In the end, though, I hope to see the video game industry change their pricing system to reflect most other forms of media: New releases are at maximum, only about 200% the price of non-new release titles. I can expect pay $8 for an original edition of a 1988 CD, in a store that sells new releases for an average of $16. How are games any different? SNES games should only be 50% of new games... but NEW GAMES SHOULD BE CHEAPER!