What do you like to call it? A "reimagining"? Maybe it's closer to a sequel than a remake, but the point still remains that it was a brilliant way to bring back a classic series.
First of all, I don't know when every single alternate opinion became "trolling", but no, I'm not trolling.
Whether or not Nintendo is most fondly remembered or not, the fact I was pointing out was that they were last to release their classic games. Virtually every arcade game developer except nintendo, and most home console developers were first by several years. I don't want to see Nintendo getting credit for nothing.
Fallout never had team combat. You had... 'guys that followed you around' combat, but that's all you got, and that's all that's in Fallout 3 also. Besides, I'm 99% sure Fallout 2 (and maybe Fallout also) had a real-time mode that worked identically to Fallout 3's system.
In any case, that still doesn't count as a "radical" departure. "Radical" would be making Fallout 3 about a poor Japanese farmer who becomes a heroic samurai with the help of a magical talking rabbit in the 16th century. At best, it's a "slight" departure.
I think what really happened is that so many Fallout fans, convinced Fallout 3 would suck (even though they really had no reason to believe that) have seen that Fallout 3 does not, in fact, suck... well, all that pent-up rage has to go somewhere, and so we criticize it anyway!
FYI, the originals are on Xbox Live Arcade. (At least, Marathon and Marathon II.) If you want to see more Marathon, throw some money at it to encourage them.
It's crazy seeing Marathon II running at 60+ FPS, it used to chug like crazy on my good ol' Quadra 610.
A NES could beat a Atari 2600 hands-down, but there's no way it was superior to the Commodore 64. Plus, us Commodore owners didn't have the Nintendo Seal of Qualitcrap, so we could play games that featured bloody decapitations.
I know this is Slashdot, and therefore BOW BEFORE NINTENDO OUR GOD AND SAVIOR!!!!!
But companies like Midway, Namco, Tecmo, Atari, and Capcom had been putting out "Classics" game disks for Xbox, PS2, and even Gamecube for years before anybody offered the games for download. Even Intellivision got a package for Xbox (not sure what other platforms it was on.)
Unless you're going to limit your comment to downloads, in which case Xbox Live Arcade had that covered before Wii even existed.
Really, IMO, this is more a case of, "I was a huge old-school gamer, then ignored every game console until the Wii came out, and now I'm really impressed by something that's existed for ages on other consoles!"
One of the best remakes in recent years has to be Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. It perfectly demonstrated how to stay true to the original while simultaneously innovating new features to spice up the formula, then mixed that all with an emotionally-compelling, powerful plot and unique narrative framing device. And as an added bonus, it included all the original 2D games as a (trivially unlockable) easter-egg.
But it probably shouldn't have been called Fallout 3 since it is such a radical departure from previous games.
Ok, you have a different definition of the word "radical" than I do.
Fallout 3: 1) Has (virtually) the same setting 2) The same enemies 3) The same leveling system 4) The same targeting/criticals system 5) Extremely similar plotlines/quests 6) Even a virtually identical inventory system! (Which is something they should have changed, IMO)
What is so "radically" different about Fallout 3 compared to the other games?
Christ, we found the ONE GUY who's making everybody else suffer. Seriously, just spend the $5 on a cheap joypad and let us all have our Num Lock-less keyboards!
BONUS: Make it easily reconfigurable between Mac and PC. When I plug it into my MacBook, I'd like it to automatically detect that it was being plugged into a Mac, and re-map the option/cmd/alt/windows keys accordingly.
That already happened automatically with my Microsoft keyboard, when I used it on both my Mac and PC... I don't know what more you want Apple to do, unless you think a little robot should hop out and change the labels too.
If anybody knows of a way to do that in Windows, I'd be super-grateful.
I want to use "Num Lock" (the key) in games like World of Warcraft (which uses it by default as Run/Walk), but I don't want the damn "Num Lock" "feature" to ever turn off, nor can I imagine why anybody ever would....
I'm not a fan of ergonomic keyboards, but I have the Microsoft Comfort Curve 2000, and I love it to death.
Pros: Basic, non-ridiculous, media keys (Play/Pause, Volume Up/Down/Mute, Back, Forward, Home, Search, Mail, Calculator) all of which work perfectly with no drivers (on Windows and Mac, at least-- I can't speak for Linux.) Super-easy to disable Caps Lock (if only it was disabled by default).
Cons: Still includes all of those useless keys that all keyboards should have gotten rid of ages ago, keys like "Pause/Break," "Num Lock," and... well, "Caps Lock." Impossible to lock "Num Lock" on, or off, regardless of when I press the physical "Num Lock" key. (I want "Num Lock" to always be turned on, even if I'm using that key in a video game, i.e. World of Warcraft. The only ways I can find to make it possible to keep "Num Lock" on all the time also make the key useless for use in games. If anybody has a solution for that, please let me know!)
While I'm sure the Model M defeated Communism and will soon cure AIDS and cancer, I'd just like to point out that the pyramids don't actually contain "lots of metal."
Yeah, right. We got that song-and-dance from IBM/Lotus when 5 came out. "5's just as good as Outlook!" It ain't. Then when 6 came out. Oh look! Version 6, someone at IBM finally heard of this thing called a "scrollwheel" and it works... about a third of the time. And hey, guess what, it only took IBM until version 6.5 to get Notes working correctly on a multi-user Windows OS. That's only 10+ years after multi-user Windows OSes came out! Lightning development pace.
The number of extremely trivial, basic features that have *never* worked right is unbelievable-- hell, just try to get Out Of Office messages turned on in less than 3 hours. Oh, and my personal favorite was the lack of any kind of sanity-checking: Notes loved to schedule meetings that ended before they began, which of course broke syncing to every PDA known to man and resulted in an extremely busy helpdesk worker.
Notes is a lost product. Not only does it have a legendarily bad UI, but there's not a single Notes developer capable of writing a good UI; it's simply not in their DNA.
(Yes, yes, I know, now the Notes fan comes in and tells me that our install was "misconfigured", despite the fact that it was the default email configuration from the CD, and tell us that Notes is "more than just email", despite the fact that IBM sold it to us to do email, etc, etc. I've heard it all before; don't bother.)
Well, I'm not up-to-date because I left OS X because of the crappy quality of their UI.
I do know that those guidelines are bunk, they were when they were published, because Apple doesn't even come close to following them. The article you link to has this in the paragraph after summarizing Apple's "rules":
The big problem, obviously, is that Apple has simply ignored the HIG. The HIG states, "Don't use the brushed metal look indiscriminately", but indiscriminate is precisely the word to describe Apple's use of it.
Ah, using Lotus Notes makes sense at IBM. What really bugs me is the companies that *buy* Lotus Notes... your company has really, really good sales-people. I've had the misfortune to work at one before. (And, more to the point I think, knows how to sell to executives who don't actually use email.)
I'm coding with multiple windows open at the same time including but not limited to my browser, IM client, Lotus Notes, Rational Software Architect.
Lotus Notes is enough, alone, to bring any computer to its knees. Try using a groupware product that doesn't suck ass.
That aside, while you're probably right, you could give Vista a try. Don't believe all the crap you hear on Slashdot, it might pleasantly surprise you. Although it seems like it's probably moot, since your workplace IT department will either switch your company or not, right? And if they use Lotus Notes, they're probably the type of IT department that still thinks Windows 2000 is "brand new."
That article is either way out of date, stuck in some kind of alternate-universe fantasy, or a mix of both.
XP *can* do 64-bit, it has been able to for years now. (Since Vista was still called Longhorn.)
Vista has *always* had a 64-bit edition, and it's *always* shipped in the same box as the 32-bit edition. (Note: I'm not sure if this is true of all Vista variations, but it certainly is of Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate, since I've had retail box copies of those at one point or another.)
Additionally, there's no reason to install the 32-bit edition if Vista unless you: 1) Have hardware with 32-bit-only drivers (no computer with the Vista logo on the box will have this.) 2) Need to run 16-bit software.
In any case, 2008 is 3 days away from ending, and Microsoft still has a commanding OS lead, so.
Heh. I used to run a MUD, and the amount of bitching for every tiny change was astounding. Even for obviously superior changes that I couldn't even possibly fathom hating... "The MUD will auto-save characters every 5 minutes and whenever your inventory changes now, so no more lost items." "Great! Geez, even more lag! Why are you trying to turn the game to shit!?"
It might have been Quicktime 4, it's been a long time.
The Aqua vs. Metal thing isn't my only OS X complaint. Apple used to be the bastion, the example to follow, for creating a polished and consistent UI, but when OS X came around they threw that all in the trash. I left for Windows when it became apparent (around Mac OS 10.4) that they were never going to fix the Dock, or the Finder, and probably not a single Apple employee left even know what "spatial computing" meant by that point. Hell, they'd actually been making it worse by adding that godawful Smart Folder (or whatever Apple calls it now... Spotlight I think) interface to it.
The saddest, really saddest, part is that there was a series of articles on Ars Technica giving detailed descriptions of an OS X Finder that would satisfy both new and old OS X users. If Apple had implemented that, I'd have stuck with it.
In Vista, when your video card driver crashes (which happens to me all the time, shitty ATI drivers!), Vista can restart graphics on-the-fly without losing any of your work. It even works when 3D-heavy apps like World of Warcraft are running.
That feature alone makes Vista more stable than XP on my computer. (Of course, ATI's XP drivers are better, but not that much better.)
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Hey, the 1541 disk drive was super-solid, or you could have bought games on cartridge. Don't blame the poor C64!
What do you like to call it? A "reimagining"? Maybe it's closer to a sequel than a remake, but the point still remains that it was a brilliant way to bring back a classic series.
First of all, I don't know when every single alternate opinion became "trolling", but no, I'm not trolling.
Whether or not Nintendo is most fondly remembered or not, the fact I was pointing out was that they were last to release their classic games. Virtually every arcade game developer except nintendo, and most home console developers were first by several years. I don't want to see Nintendo getting credit for nothing.
Fallout never had team combat. You had... 'guys that followed you around' combat, but that's all you got, and that's all that's in Fallout 3 also. Besides, I'm 99% sure Fallout 2 (and maybe Fallout also) had a real-time mode that worked identically to Fallout 3's system.
In any case, that still doesn't count as a "radical" departure. "Radical" would be making Fallout 3 about a poor Japanese farmer who becomes a heroic samurai with the help of a magical talking rabbit in the 16th century. At best, it's a "slight" departure.
I think what really happened is that so many Fallout fans, convinced Fallout 3 would suck (even though they really had no reason to believe that) have seen that Fallout 3 does not, in fact, suck... well, all that pent-up rage has to go somewhere, and so we criticize it anyway!
So map the gamepad to the arrow keys. I guess you missed the "duh, let's think about this for a millisecond" part.
My post was tongue-in-cheek, but your idiotic reply has actually made me angry. Congratulations.
FYI, the originals are on Xbox Live Arcade. (At least, Marathon and Marathon II.) If you want to see more Marathon, throw some money at it to encourage them.
It's crazy seeing Marathon II running at 60+ FPS, it used to chug like crazy on my good ol' Quadra 610.
A NES could beat a Atari 2600 hands-down, but there's no way it was superior to the Commodore 64. Plus, us Commodore owners didn't have the Nintendo Seal of Qualitcrap, so we could play games that featured bloody decapitations.
I know this is Slashdot, and therefore BOW BEFORE NINTENDO OUR GOD AND SAVIOR!!!!!
But companies like Midway, Namco, Tecmo, Atari, and Capcom had been putting out "Classics" game disks for Xbox, PS2, and even Gamecube for years before anybody offered the games for download. Even Intellivision got a package for Xbox (not sure what other platforms it was on.)
Unless you're going to limit your comment to downloads, in which case Xbox Live Arcade had that covered before Wii even existed.
Really, IMO, this is more a case of, "I was a huge old-school gamer, then ignored every game console until the Wii came out, and now I'm really impressed by something that's existed for ages on other consoles!"
One of the best remakes in recent years has to be Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. It perfectly demonstrated how to stay true to the original while simultaneously innovating new features to spice up the formula, then mixed that all with an emotionally-compelling, powerful plot and unique narrative framing device. And as an added bonus, it included all the original 2D games as a (trivially unlockable) easter-egg.
Pity the sequels sucked.
But it probably shouldn't have been called Fallout 3 since it is such a radical departure from previous games.
Ok, you have a different definition of the word "radical" than I do.
Fallout 3:
1) Has (virtually) the same setting
2) The same enemies
3) The same leveling system
4) The same targeting/criticals system
5) Extremely similar plotlines/quests
6) Even a virtually identical inventory system! (Which is something they should have changed, IMO)
What is so "radically" different about Fallout 3 compared to the other games?
Christ, we found the ONE GUY who's making everybody else suffer. Seriously, just spend the $5 on a cheap joypad and let us all have our Num Lock-less keyboards!
BONUS: Make it easily reconfigurable between Mac and PC. When I plug it into my MacBook, I'd like it to automatically detect that it was being plugged into a Mac, and re-map the option/cmd/alt/windows keys accordingly.
That already happened automatically with my Microsoft keyboard, when I used it on both my Mac and PC... I don't know what more you want Apple to do, unless you think a little robot should hop out and change the labels too.
If anybody knows of a way to do that in Windows, I'd be super-grateful.
I want to use "Num Lock" (the key) in games like World of Warcraft (which uses it by default as Run/Walk), but I don't want the damn "Num Lock" "feature" to ever turn off, nor can I imagine why anybody ever would....
I'm not a fan of ergonomic keyboards, but I have the Microsoft Comfort Curve 2000, and I love it to death.
Pros: Basic, non-ridiculous, media keys (Play/Pause, Volume Up/Down/Mute, Back, Forward, Home, Search, Mail, Calculator) all of which work perfectly with no drivers (on Windows and Mac, at least-- I can't speak for Linux.)
Super-easy to disable Caps Lock (if only it was disabled by default).
Cons:
Still includes all of those useless keys that all keyboards should have gotten rid of ages ago, keys like "Pause/Break," "Num Lock," and... well, "Caps Lock."
Impossible to lock "Num Lock" on, or off, regardless of when I press the physical "Num Lock" key. (I want "Num Lock" to always be turned on, even if I'm using that key in a video game, i.e. World of Warcraft. The only ways I can find to make it possible to keep "Num Lock" on all the time also make the key useless for use in games. If anybody has a solution for that, please let me know!)
While I'm sure the Model M defeated Communism and will soon cure AIDS and cancer, I'd just like to point out that the pyramids don't actually contain "lots of metal."
Yeah, right. We got that song-and-dance from IBM/Lotus when 5 came out. "5's just as good as Outlook!" It ain't. Then when 6 came out. Oh look! Version 6, someone at IBM finally heard of this thing called a "scrollwheel" and it works... about a third of the time. And hey, guess what, it only took IBM until version 6.5 to get Notes working correctly on a multi-user Windows OS. That's only 10+ years after multi-user Windows OSes came out! Lightning development pace.
The number of extremely trivial, basic features that have *never* worked right is unbelievable-- hell, just try to get Out Of Office messages turned on in less than 3 hours. Oh, and my personal favorite was the lack of any kind of sanity-checking: Notes loved to schedule meetings that ended before they began, which of course broke syncing to every PDA known to man and resulted in an extremely busy helpdesk worker.
Notes is a lost product. Not only does it have a legendarily bad UI, but there's not a single Notes developer capable of writing a good UI; it's simply not in their DNA.
(Yes, yes, I know, now the Notes fan comes in and tells me that our install was "misconfigured", despite the fact that it was the default email configuration from the CD, and tell us that Notes is "more than just email", despite the fact that IBM sold it to us to do email, etc, etc. I've heard it all before; don't bother.)
The NeXT guys got the reins to Mac OS, and NeXT had a shitty UI. So OS X has a shitty UI. There's nothing more to it, sadly.
Way to ignore the thrust of the argument and focus on an insignificant nitpick. You're a true inspiration to us all.
Well, I'm not up-to-date because I left OS X because of the crappy quality of their UI.
I do know that those guidelines are bunk, they were when they were published, because Apple doesn't even come close to following them. The article you link to has this in the paragraph after summarizing Apple's "rules":
So I'm chalking this one up as a win for my side.
Ah, using Lotus Notes makes sense at IBM. What really bugs me is the companies that *buy* Lotus Notes... your company has really, really good sales-people. I've had the misfortune to work at one before. (And, more to the point I think, knows how to sell to executives who don't actually use email.)
I'm coding with multiple windows open at the same time including but not limited to my browser, IM client, Lotus Notes, Rational Software Architect.
Lotus Notes is enough, alone, to bring any computer to its knees. Try using a groupware product that doesn't suck ass.
That aside, while you're probably right, you could give Vista a try. Don't believe all the crap you hear on Slashdot, it might pleasantly surprise you. Although it seems like it's probably moot, since your workplace IT department will either switch your company or not, right? And if they use Lotus Notes, they're probably the type of IT department that still thinks Windows 2000 is "brand new."
That article is either way out of date, stuck in some kind of alternate-universe fantasy, or a mix of both.
XP *can* do 64-bit, it has been able to for years now. (Since Vista was still called Longhorn.)
Vista has *always* had a 64-bit edition, and it's *always* shipped in the same box as the 32-bit edition. (Note: I'm not sure if this is true of all Vista variations, but it certainly is of Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate, since I've had retail box copies of those at one point or another.)
Additionally, there's no reason to install the 32-bit edition if Vista unless you:
1) Have hardware with 32-bit-only drivers (no computer with the Vista logo on the box will have this.)
2) Need to run 16-bit software.
In any case, 2008 is 3 days away from ending, and Microsoft still has a commanding OS lead, so.
Heh. I used to run a MUD, and the amount of bitching for every tiny change was astounding. Even for obviously superior changes that I couldn't even possibly fathom hating... "The MUD will auto-save characters every 5 minutes and whenever your inventory changes now, so no more lost items." "Great! Geez, even more lag! Why are you trying to turn the game to shit!?"
It might have been Quicktime 4, it's been a long time.
The Aqua vs. Metal thing isn't my only OS X complaint. Apple used to be the bastion, the example to follow, for creating a polished and consistent UI, but when OS X came around they threw that all in the trash. I left for Windows when it became apparent (around Mac OS 10.4) that they were never going to fix the Dock, or the Finder, and probably not a single Apple employee left even know what "spatial computing" meant by that point. Hell, they'd actually been making it worse by adding that godawful Smart Folder (or whatever Apple calls it now... Spotlight I think) interface to it.
The saddest, really saddest, part is that there was a series of articles on Ars Technica giving detailed descriptions of an OS X Finder that would satisfy both new and old OS X users. If Apple had implemented that, I'd have stuck with it.
Have you ever used Vista?
In Vista, when your video card driver crashes (which happens to me all the time, shitty ATI drivers!), Vista can restart graphics on-the-fly without losing any of your work. It even works when 3D-heavy apps like World of Warcraft are running.
That feature alone makes Vista more stable than XP on my computer. (Of course, ATI's XP drivers are better, but not that much better.)