Tendo City

Why does it need to be any more clunky than simply "horror"?

Quote:Must have lots of video, huh?

I can't remember much of the story anymore, but there was something about a battle between fallen angels and heaven [I think, there were fallen angels at least] and the main character was at the heart of keeping the fallen angles from winning. Had quite a bit of FMV for that.

Aren't most games about "survival" anyway? I suppose in some, you get more than one life, but the term still seems redundant.

Quote:It just wasn't there, it didn't have what it takes. Japan and to a lesser extent Europe, got it though. And gave us characters to FEEL, stories to get in to and explore, even raise discussion.[quote]

Europe has indeed done a good job of this in the past decade, with the rise of the European adventure game. Of course almost all of those are on PC, aside from Quantic Dream's stuff, but there are a lot of them now, and adventure games as a genre have generally had more focus on story and characters than any other genre. They better, given that story, characters, and puzzles are the entire game; there is no running around shooting people scenes in most of them to distract people away from the lame plot and characters.

America used to do good adventure games too, though, back in the '80s and '90s... it's just this last decade where the genre pretty much entirely died here.

[quote]The art of the PC game design is to use the virtually limitless resources, the art of designing a console game is to engage the player. It took western developers a long time to understand that and with the competition streaming out of Japan they had to evolve or die.

... Sorry, I can't think of anything serious to say to such an absurd statement that I haven't said already severla times...

No games will be successful if they don't engage the player. That is just as true for PC games as console. And they did that.

Quote:So they hired writers, they commissioned artists. They started getting really fancy, paying a Lockheed/Martin aircraft designer to design their robot enemies or getting a Nasa scientist to come up with realistic weapons that could plausibly exist, but dont. They hired composers and arrangers, they sat down with designers who have schooling in art to understand color coordination and contrasts, texturing and etc not just 'what looks cool'. And suddenly, within the last decade, we have American games that outperform Japanese games by a large margin.

Here's what confuses me though, above everything else really: Here you are saying that last decade, Western games on consoles got better. Okay, we all agree on that point. I am saying that at the same time, Western PC games, and American PC games in particular, almost entirely vanished, replaced with multiplatform titles also on consoles. That the reason for that improvement in their console games was because of the move over from the PC. IT explains everything you're describing here pretty much perfectly... and yet you deny it with crazy claims about PC games that have not even the slightest connection to the reality of how computer gaems were in the '80s and '90s, which is the period I'm actually talking about! It's kind of bizarre really... we both agree on the end result, pretty much. Why do you deny the cause?

Quote:Look at Metroid Prime on Gamecube, its arguably better looking than Twilight Princess, Final Fantasy 13 or MGS3 and 50% of that is because of design, not graphics.

As I said before, the key people behind Metroid Prime had also made the Turok games on the N64 -- games I would definitely say had amazingly well designed worlds. Of course Metroid Prime went even beyond that, thanks to the greater capabilities of the system they were now on and Nintendo's influence which seems to improve the work of any developer they work with (versus games made by those same people without Nintendo's help), but the core of it was already there in their older works.

Quote:We improved our craft and that was a direct result of the software created for consoles to push the envelope of entertainment, to bring the emotional tonalities of film in to the interactive stage. PC games STILL dont deliver in that arena.

Interesting point here, but a lot of that is just because technology now made it possible, not because of anything else. Games by everyone changed, not just American ones.

Quote:Do you understand it now?

Not when you're still so deep in denial, no. :)

Great Rumbler Wrote:I...wow. Seriously? Okay, yeah, I think you could make that point for a few high profile games from Epic and even id, but that simply is not the case for most exclusive PC games then or now. It's patently absurd to argue otherwise!

Ow, shit nigga we got quotes within quotes!

I heard you like quotes, so I put some quotes in your quotes so you can read quotes while your reading quotes.

Best of the Decade (Taking into account that I haven't played much in the past few years)

--Perfect Dark
--Resident Evil (Remake)
--WoW (I'm a recovering WoW addict and haven't played in weeks but you can't deny it's colossal impact.)
--Return to Castle Wolfenstein
--Jedi Academy (sequel to Jedi Ouctast, which is sequel to Jedi Knight, which is sequel to Dark Forces... so, Dark Forces IV.)
--Half-life
--Majora's Mask
--Mario Kart: DD (was a lot of fun and one of the last console games I really got much use out of.)

Hmm, a short Best of the '00 Decade...

Only listing games that I've actually played...

Good
-Warcraft III
-Guild Wars and its expansions
-Eternal Darkness
-Fire Emblem games finally released in the US, and are exceptional
-Sony's PS3 strategy (what? I liked that they failed miserably! :D)
-Baldur's Gate II
-Neverwinter Nights 2 and expansions (esp. Mask of the Betrayer)
-Metroid Prime
-Capcom vs SNK 2
-Sting - Riviera and Knights in the Nightmare
-XGRA for being the most fun racing game of the 6th generation and F-Zero GX for being the one that would have been if it wasn't so incredibly hard and frustrating
-Panzer Dragoon Orta
-Zelda: Wind Waker and Twilight Princess (after playing them, see below)
-Skies of Arcadia
-Lots of other great games, might try listing more later (games I liked by platform or something? I don't know)
-WoW (I only played it for a few weeks during beta, but it's obviously great. I just don't like monthly fees...)
-San Franciso Rush 2049 (still the best racing game ever, N64/DC release in late 2000)
-Greyhawk: Temple of Elemental Evil (most accurate implementation of the D&D rules in a game ever)

Bad
-The collapse of high budget PC exclusive gaming
-Nintendo ripping people off (and profiting handsomely) by pricing the Wii at $250 to start

Disappointing
-Mario Sunshine (good game, but disappointing as a followup to one of the best games ever)
-Beyond Good & Evil (if you recall our many arguments about this one... :))
-Super Monkey Ball 2 - for erasing my main GC memory card
-Paper Mario 2 (the first one was great, somehow I didn't like the second as much)
-Zelda: Wind Waker (before I actually played it, and the triforce shard collection quest) and Twilight Princess (before I finally managed to get over how much I dislike some things about the plot, how much I hate fishing, and how linear it is early on and got past the second dungeon)
-Zelda Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks (good, fun games, but with lots of problems. They just aren't as great as the other Zelda games. PH has a horrible story too.)
-Mario Kart Double Dash - perhaps the worst Mario Kart game

Quote:--Jedi Academy (sequel to Jedi Ouctast, which is sequel to Jedi Knight, which is sequel to Dark Forces... so, Dark Forces IV.)

JO and JA were both so, so mediocre compared to JKII... not that I expected much better though, coming from Raven instead of Lucasarts (since LA had destroyed most of its internal development teams by that point).

Perfect Dark, RtCW, Half-Life 2 - Yeah, good games. Three of the best FPSes of the decade. I liked Tribes: Vengeance quite a bit too (not quite at a HL2 or PD level, but it was pretty good), but I was one of the only ones evidently...

A Black Falcon Wrote:-Mario Kart Double Dash - perhaps the worst Mario Kart game

You're so weird.

This is how I picture ABF in this thread



This is how I picture Great Rumbler in this thread

This is how I picture this thread:

Yeah, a big CORRECT penis. I agree.

Thanks, brorrito.

I enjoyed DD.

Maybe listing it there was unfair, but I remember trying it, being disappointed, and immediately losing almost all interest in buying the game... still don't have it. If I saw it for cheap, sure, but it's still like $20 or $30...

Mario Kart Wii, in contrast, impressed me greatly on its first impression, and playing it a bit more didn't change that. When I get a Wii it's a must have. Oh and I have MKDS, and that one's great too. MK64 is of course my favorite in the series.

MKDD may be better than the SNES one though, I just find that game really frustrating and not that fun too much of the time...

Speaking of Orange Box, I bought it probably 2 or 3 years ago but didn't install it until I read it in this thread. I installed it last night, or rather tried to install it, but believe it or not, the code key I entered is already in use. I might as well yell at a brick wall then try and seek product support. Go figger.

You got hacked, dude.

Steam tech support might be able to help you since you actually have the physical copy with the code sheet. It's worth trying anyway.

I got The Orange Box back when it was cheap a while back (last year I think), but never did finish Portal or Half-Life 2, so I never installed the two Half-Life 2 sequel/addon episodes... never installed or played Teamfortress 2 either, but I was never planning on playing that anyway.

Considering how little I paid though and how good those games are it certainly was worth getting, even if I didn't play them all that much. That probably has as much to do with their genre and how many games I have as anything else... I should go back and finish them sometime though, they're obviously really good.

On that note, I've owned Half-Life 1 on Steam for over a year now (since when it was on sale for $0.98 for the 10th anniversary of its release), and yet haven't really played it much... just the first few levels...

I mean, the only FPSes I have ever finished are Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, its expansion pack Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith, Star Trek: Voyager: Elite Force and its cleverly titled expansion pack Star Trek: Voyager: Elite Force Expansion Pack (though perhaps this shouldn't count, I don't know if I beat the garden mission... beat the other ones though.), Return to Castle Wolfenstein, ... um, that might be it. Oh right, on consoles Perfect Dark (agent and all of the missions except for the last one on Special Agent), Goldeneye (Agent only), and SNES Doom (default difficulty). That's it though.

GR: I got hacked? How could I have? Like I said, the games been sitting on my shelf since I bought it.

FPSs are my favorite genre at the moment. I've just been totally rejuvenated after having finally succeeded at making Jedi Knight work... I've now beaten that whole slew of Star Wars FPSs: Dark Forces, Jedi Knight, Mysteries of the Sith, Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy. I wish there were more because I have always enjoyed Star Wars FPSs.

A Star Trek FPS sounds like it'd be at a natural loss, because Star Trek is always so flowery and avoidant of shedding blood. I imagine all but two of the missions end with the bad guys surrendering, and the rest of the time, phasers are set to tickle.

It used to be like that, but recently, Star Trek has gotten gritty and somewhat less ridiculously idealistic.

Darunia Wrote:GR: I got hacked? How could I have? Like I said, the games been sitting on my shelf since I bought it.

What I mean is somebody hacked the verification code for Orange Box and your number came up in a random generator.

Darunia Wrote:A Star Trek FPS sounds like it'd be at a natural loss, because Star Trek is always so flowery and avoidant of shedding blood. I imagine all but two of the missions end with the bad guys surrendering, and the rest of the time, phasers are set to tickle.

Uh...First Contact?

A Black Falcon Wrote:I got The Orange Box back when it was cheap a while back (last year I think), but never did finish Portal or Half-Life 2, so I never installed the two Half-Life 2 sequel/addon episodes... never installed or played Teamfortress 2 either, but I was never planning on playing that anyway.

How have you not finished Portal? It's like three hours long and has some of the best and funniest writing this side of Monkey Island. As for never playing TF2, that's your loss. There's no better multiplayer experience on the PC.

Darunia: Get ahold of Steam support. I've had to use them before and they're quite responsive, you'll likely have a response within a day or two.

EM, I sent them an e-mail two days ago. As of yet nothing. And GR, how DARE YOU utter a sarcastic "uh..." at me. It's a well established fact that Star Trek is to Star Wars what Doctor Seuss is to E.A. Poe. Contact was an outlyer, as was Wrath of Khan... they are not the mean, median or mode. From its inception in the 60s, it endeavoured to be politically correct and peaceful... which is fine, but it doesn't make for a good FPS platform.

There was also the Dominion War in Deep Space 9.

You can list off the occasional occurences of mild Star Trek violence to your heart's delight. My analogy rings true. And you know it.

Darunia Wrote:You can list off the occasional occurences of mild Star Trek violence to your heart's delight. My analogy rings true. And you know it.

It's pretty clear that there ARE instances within the Star Trek universe of the types of things that would make a perfectly suitable Star Trek FPS, which is the point of all these "exceptions to the iron-clad rule".

Darunia Wrote:You can list off the occasional occurences of mild Star Trek violence to your heart's delight. My analogy rings true. And you know it.

You wouldn't say that if you'd seen the last season of DS9, that's for sure. You want real, serious war in Star Trek, it had it.

There's also First Contact, the new Star Trek movie (that really is more Star Wars than Star Trek, to my annoyance -- sure I like Star Wars more, but they should be different!)... yes of course Star Trek is mostly idealistic, but sometimes people break from Roddenberry's general vision. The newest movie did a lot of that, which is a big part of why I didn't like it nearly as much as some (it's by far the most successful Star Trek movie ever).

As for Star Trek: Voyager: Elite Force, the plot is essentially a convenient excuse for you to fight virtually every kind of potentially villainous race in Star Trek. Voyager gets pulled into this alternate mini-dimension trap thing, which is a sort of graveyard of starships from multiple times and realities, and because there's only so much there the survivors are all evil pirate types trying to destroy you. You fight Klingons, Borg (with the convenient gun that always changes frequencies...), those Terran Empire evil universe people from an alternate reality, etc. Then you find a way out.

EdenMaster Wrote:How have you not finished Portal? It's like three hours long and has some of the best and funniest writing this side of Monkey Island. As for never playing TF2, that's your loss. There's no better multiplayer experience on the PC.

Easy enough. Played Portal for a few hours or something after getting it sometime last fall or so, then stopped and never picked it up again. It was good, sure, and portals are cool, but not 'game of the year' or anything. I'm not sure how far I am. I meant to go back and finish it, but just haven't gotten around to it yet... I don't launch Steam very often because I don't like the interface, other things about it, etc., so I don't play those games all that often, despite now having more of them particularly due to the sales a few months ago...

As for PC multiplayer, nah, FPS multiplayer bores me quickly. RTSes are the best kind of PC multiplayer. Online RPGs would probably follow that, I guess, or Guild Wars at least in specific.

Quote:It's pretty clear that there ARE instances within the Star Trek universe of the types of things that would make a perfectly suitable Star Trek FPS, which is the point of all these "exceptions to the iron-clad rule".

*Tears up Goron-Rumbler alliance*

The honeymoon is over. You've crossed me for the last time.

Operation Barbarossa goes into effect: Goron units all along the border immediately go on the offensive.

You do NOT... I repeat, NOT preach to me about the setting of Star Trek. It IS an idealistic fluffy foo foo land. Example: The Original Series episode ERRAND OF MERCY: Kirk and Spock and interned on a planet under Klingon occupation. The Federation and the Klingons are at war; at that very moment, a huge battle is about to take place. Kirk and Spock escape captivity and are going to kidnap the Klingon governor... and even as they are infiltrating his guarded domicile, Kirk and Spock use stun. Kirk says something like, "phasers to stun... we're after the big fish, not the little ones," or something asinine like that... even though THEY'RE AT WAR. No, no... your delusions of Star Trek will not work on me.

*Goron 1st, 3rd and 7th Armies cross into Northern Rumblonia, and seize the important port city of Grumble, brushing aside a token resistance. Meanwhile, 2nd and 10th armies strike in the south, capturing three vital industrial centers.*

*Peru alligns with the Goron empire, and sends 15 Peruvian Boy Scouts armed with super soakers to assist.*

Typical Goron response. When confronted with logic, they always resort to violence!

There are a couple of Star Trek FPSes from Activision actually, Star Trek Armada 1 and 2 from the early '00s. Plus Interplay did the mediocre Star Trek: New Worlds in the late '90s.

Typical Goron response. When confronted with logic, they always resort to violence!

My argument was never that in no way has there ever been any manner of violence or grittiness in Star Trek. My statement was a generalization which is wholly accurate: Star Trek, on the whole as a franchise, has always consistently been a more idealistic utopian universe where all the aliens speak English and nobody ever dies (through the 60s anyway... and the last I saw on Enterprise and Voyager, little had changed.) Now, that there have been periods of grittines during DS9, or The Wrath of Khan, or Contact I do not deny. I am speaking in generalities.

*Goron 1st army captures Rumbler capital city and puts it to the flame; Rumble Army surrenders unconditionally after a classic envelopment a la Wagram. Great Rumbler and his government flee their smoldering capital to the country side to continue the war, but are captured whilst disguised as women. Rumbler is forced to abdicate; his adjutant, Sir Rumblestiltskin, signs an unconditional surrender; two-thirds of Rumbler's territory is ceded, and a colossal indemnity is agreed upon. Furthermore, Goron troops are to occupy all strategic Rumbler positions for a period of either 25 years or until the full indemnity ($ 500,000 trillion trillion dollars and π cents) is paid in full, at a 25% annual interest rate.*

That'll teach you.