Who actually heard his last words? This has been bugging me since I saw it. The greatest movie of all time has a big arse plot hole right from the start.
Well executed, great story, and yet there's this huge plot hole, at least I THINK so.
Please, could someone tell me if his room was wire tapped or if there was someone else in there, or outside with their ear to the door, or he left his phone off the hook, or something?
The early 90’s saw one of the biggest battles of console gaming history, between industry veteran Nintendo and young upstart Sega. After the stunning success of the NES, Nintendo was left with a decision to make with how to follow up on that success. Their idea became the SNES, a system more powerful and more versatile than its predecessor. It launched in November 1990 in Japan, August 1991 in the States, but was preceded by Sega’s Genesis console which launched in October 1988. And this time around Mario had stiff compeitition: Sonic the Hedgehog.
What followed was a might battle and Sega made inroads on Nintendo’s hardware base, but, in the end, it wasn’t enough and Nintendo left the battlefield as the ultimate victor. That’s what the history books say, but who REALLY won? In this multi-part series, the lineups of the two consoles will be dissected and picked apart as the truth float to the top and all the hyberpole and hype is filtered away.
Hardware power? Graphics? Sound quality? Controller? Catridge size? Doesn’t matter. This series will focus on the one thing that matters more than anything else: THE GAMES.
They have already released a port of Titus' SNES game Prehistorik Man for DSiWare, too. (One of Titus' few actual decent games...)
Because they haven't released an actual game in six years now, yet have miraculously avoided going out of business, and now in addition to their Fallout (sorry, "Project V13") MMO are one of the only Western developers doing Wii Virtual Console, they're expanding that to WiiWare and DSiWare too...
Descent and Stonekeep I'm betting will be ports, but Clayfighter... we'll see. The Genesis game is on Virtual Console already, so this one might be new or something? Or based on one of the other titles in the series? We'll see.
I guess it's nice to see this, it's better than nothing I suppose... (I don't think I will ever like Herve Caen...)
Oh, they have one other upcoming DSiWare title as well, an RTS, Legendary Wars: T-Rex Rumble. It's a cavemen vs. dinosaurs RTS on the DSi, apparently. http://www.interplay.com/games/t_rex_rumble.php
Quote: Interplay.com: What was the most difficult thing during the development?
Rob [Stevens]: There are a few issues with bringing real RTS gameplay to the DSI. The limited processing power, the small amount of RAM and low resolution screens. We also wanted to take maximum advantage of the DSi dual screens and the touch screen. These finally offer a truly viable alternative to a mouse for console based, RTS style gaming.
Eric [Caen]: DS & DSi are great consoles, but most of the games use the fact they’re handheld as an excuse to stay very basic. They underutilize the display and go with a simple AI. For T-Rex Rumble, Rob had to deal with 3D & 2D real time graphics. Make a sophisticated AI for the cavemen and their enemies. He also had to create an intuitive user interface for an RTS when most RTS’s are played with a mouse and not a stylus. Not easy tasks.
Rob: The user interface design was a challenge. What works best for players? What’s easiest and most intuitive? How do they select one, two, or ten cavemen? I especially wanted to minimize the number of inputs required to issue orders to multiple groups of men. It also had to work equally well for right and left-handed players.
Eric: We tried several ideas before we were satisfied. It’s an RTS, so players need to be able to control many characters with very little effort. And T-Rex Rumble is not a “tower defense” kind of a game. It has some sophisticated missions.
Rob: With a PC, you have a mouse that can be combined with multiple buttons or keys. It’s easy to draw a rectangle around units you want to select before picking a task from a list on the screen. But on DS/DSi we had to create a system that worked purely with a stylus or even a finger, without filling the screen with icons.
In the past few months Interplay released Prehistorik Man (a port of Titus' SNES version of the game, I believe) for DSiWare in February, and has also announced Clayfighter for DSiWare and WiiWare, Stonekeep for WiiWare, and Descent for WiiWare, but those have been mentioned here before (I see no mention of this game) and do not have any screenshots, artwork, or anything else released about them, just press releases that they exist. This one is obviously farther along. Interplay's site says that it's going to be released Spring 2010, so it's probably not far off...
I guess it's nice to see Interplay actually releasing something again, even if it is still the Caen's Interplay and not the Interplay that was great back in the '80s to the early '00s. The Caens should really call Interplay "The new Titus, because the old one went out of business five years ago"... and given that they founded and still ran Titus, they obviously had responsibility there... maybe that's not entirely fair, there are some old Interplay people working at the company and they are emphasizing Interplay's back library primarily, but when Interplay actually has a good back library while Titus released some of the most infamously horrible games ever (Superman 64 for instance), that is probably not surprising. :) Other than Prehistorik Man DSiWare, good luck finding much of anything Titus-related on the site. :)
I guess Legendary Wars is supposed to be an original title and not related to Prehistorik Man, but it obviously has some strong thematic similarities, both being cavemen and dinosaurs games. Anyway, it might be decent, we'll see...
All gamers go through a phase where it's "Us" versus "Them". You're favored gaming company or hardware against their favored gaming company or hardware. Arguments are waged and lines drawn. Members are quickly drafted, taught the rules, and then thrust into the middle of that hellish firestorm that is forum debate. The goal of all this is to "win", with winning meaning the eventual admittance of defeat by the other side. The only problem is that there never is any victory because the rules are constantly changing. What might be touted by one side can be quickly swept away following a decision by that side's company of choice to take things in a different direction. In a word: pointless.
The argument might be made that console wars are no different than sports. One side wants their group to win and the other side wants their group to win. There the similarities end. In the game industry, both sides can win because, while the two are competing with each other, the is enough room for both to flourish and make profits. This forces the console warriors to adopt increasingly obscure determinations of victory. Another problem is that there are no official rules to determine who wins. It's up to the warriors to figure that one out and both sides have different ides of what constitutes victory. To further distance itself from the sports analogy, each team in sports offers virtually the same experience. Both teams are playing the same sport. That's not entirely the case with game companies. Each company may offer a very different experience and that experience is readily available in all territories. One company might excel in RPGs, while another excels in platforming titles. Very different experiences. While there might be gamers who chose one over the other, many gamers will play and enjoy both.
Therein lies the problem with console warriors: they miss out. If you're a true console warrior, you'll stick to your console of choice and ignore the others. By doing that, the console warrior knowingly cut himself off from a supply of quality entertainment all because he, or she, wants to win an online battle, which, as stated before, will never actually ever be won.
Why then do we fight? Validation, simply put. We want to convince ourself, and others, that we made the right choice by picking one console over the other. Every time the other console loses an exclusive or sells poorly, it's a victory for us because it gives us one more notch in our belt. It's not about playing and enjoying games, it's about posturing, about back-patting, but without the eventual championship victory of your favorite sports team.
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