Okay so first of all, if you haven't heard, GDC's coming and everyone and their brother is saying that Nintendo has a new platform. They say 'Platform' not accessory, of course, Nintendo calls the Balance Board a platform... because it's actually a platform that you stand on, but this seems different. It could be vitality sensor oriented but I think that was a farce or a look in to a feature, ie: built in to a controller.
Other than that huge chunk o'news we have the new Metroid: Other M and Zelda: Something of Something to be shown finally, as well as Galaxy 2 and 'other surprises' which kinda falls in to the rumor mill of the hardware again. There is a lot of talk about the DS successor, a new hardware that is DS/DSi compatible but is built with new tech on-board. This is where the Tegra chip news comes in. Remember that partnership with Nintendo and the chip that allowed for HD 3-D graphics on par with 360 in a handheld device? And how Nintendo was getting the more powerful version of that? Who knows what they'll show, but if Nintendo feels the need, they'll let loose a flurry of info. It all depends on what the other company's are going to show and how Nintendo views its own stance on the market right now.
So GDC promises a lot of surprises, playable versions of the games we saw a year ago and even new hardware. But I just found this tidbit of info - Nintendo repurchased their trademark of "Eternal Darkness". This is odd because it just expired recently. Now as you probably know, companies will purchase trademarks JUST to make sure no one else can use it. But there's a whole generation of people out there who would enjoy a remake of Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem with 1:1 Moplus and freak us out with Wiimote speakers, batteries are dying, the Wii disk light, internet connection and more. The story, camera use, art direction, monsters, characters, etc are so well done all you'd have to do really is add some new areas, new scares, maybe some scenarios for the Mantorok alignment? I mean, the game doesn't need to be updated really, beyond making it Wii-friendly with motion controls and pointing, dont you think?
Make it like RE4 Nintendo! Over the shoulder while aiming/fighting and pin-point targeting (which is already there) would make a great addition to the gameplay that was called 'sometimes very clunky' - it would make everything more fluid. If you wanted to go all out, why not add use of the Wii Speak so we can actually talk out the runes for spells? Use the balance board for puzzles? There's a million things you can do to Eternal Darkness with today's technology and peripherals!
*imagines running around the converted church during world war 1 in RE4 style*
This is an obvious one, with PD hitting XBLA the need to have a N64 controller has become a necessity. I have tried every controller on the market but time and again the D-Pad with analog stick has become so precise for me it literally makes the difference between having to waddle my way through or start a new game on expert difficulties with little to no problem.
But the 360 controller is just not setup for this, so every FPS i've played on it has that clunky waddle feel to it. If the right stick is set to strafe and look with the left is on move and turn it's better, but still abnormally counterproductive in terms of being precise.
The N64 setup allowed the player to move and strafe on the C buttons (in a d-pad setup) and look freely using the stick. When I played against 'expert' call of duty players, when I had no previous experience with the game, I killed more people than AIDS and they started calling me the plague. This holds true for every FPS i've played on PC.
I know there will be some one who will say keyboard and mouse expert can smoke me but trust me, me with an N64 controller in a FPS is like Schwarzenegger with a broadsword. It's perfect. But I cant have the proverbial peanut butter and jelly bliss on 360 because there's no N64 controller made for the stupid thing. That brings me to my point.
SOMEONE FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD TELL ME HOW TO USE AN N64 PAD ON 360!!!!!! IF I CANT USE ONE I AM GOING TO EAT WAHBURGERS AND FRENCHCRIES ALL FUCKING DAY.
The "myspace culture" seems to have made companies think people don't care about privacy any more. Name, Age, Zip Code, now I know everything about you. That's why I never reveal the big 3. Others do, that's fine, but big companies have been ramping up the "share everything" options to the point where they don't even seem optional any more.
Just this morning I had to quickly shut OFF google's "buzz" service after finding out that it decided I wanted a page dedicated to myself (I didn't and never asked it to) and that I wanted everyone in the world to know who I've been e-mailing (again, I don't, and I'm just hopeful that some psychiatrist/patient confidentiality hasn't been compromised by this automatic opt-in policy).
Then I found out that yahoo did the same thing, so I had to find their own well hidden opt out option to shut THAT leak off.
Microsoft has been better, but it always came off as creepy when they introduced "view your friend's friends" as an automatic opt-in.
Now even Blizzard is throwing privacy to the four winds with their revamped Battle.net. It's manual opt-in, which is great, but the issue is that to even use it, called "RealID", you have to actually share your real name with, well, pretty much everyone. Isn't that a bit much Blizzard?
Anonymous identity is still valuable. People should be in less of a rush to give it up like this. There's a reason I don't use Myspace. The other part of it is I have a healthy sense of shame. I don't consider the details of my life valuable at all to others, and consider the idea of sharing every little thought as it comes into my head unfiltered on Twitter the height of vanity, as it is basically saying "I am valuable as a person", when I know better.
People need to be a little more ashamed of themselves. A robot uprising reducing us to meat puppets would probably do the trick.
That is, for the original Xbox. Downloads are already gone, online play will follow in a few months.
On the one hand, honestly, it's kind of surprising that they even kept it going this long... this kind of thing has happened to PC games for as long as they have been online, and it has been a very frequent source of frustration. Companies often just ditch older services the first chance they can get. I know a lot of people have compared this negatively to PC games, but if you look at older PC games, most PC games more than a couple of years old which had built-in online services are now offline, and can only be played online through network spoofing on Gamespy Arcade and services like that, provided that the game allowed network play. It is actually only the bare few older PC games which still have their original online servies still running... Blizzard is still running battle.net for all of the games it supports, but they are very much the exception. Westwood Chat, for instance, which ran the multiplayer for all earlier Westwood titles (C&C Red Alert for instance), was shut down years ago. It was replaced by a fan-run server which the games can still see, so if you go online with those games they will still work, but it isn't the original service. There are other similar examples of fan-run servers saving officially disconnected online games, some with official sanction like that one, some with a sort of official sanction like NetStorm's, and some unauthorized like SubSpace (Continuum)'s.
For the less popular majority of titles, though, those online services are gone now unless emulators or replacements have stepped in. Anything that did its multiplayer through TEN, or MPlayer, or the other pay services... gone unless there's some IPX spoofing or something. Any of Sierra's games with online play... not via Sierra's online networks, Sierra is gone now. It's the same for any of Ubisoft's older titles, anything that ran on Microsoft's Internet Gaming Zone (later known as the MSN Gaming Zone), pretty much any online EA game not from the past year (this applies to almost all of their online console games too), etc. Unless there's a replacement fansite thing, those games' services are gone.
Of course, because they are PC games, things like fan-run servers, hacked games that can see the fan-run clients, agreements with the publisher to redirect the online service to a new fan-run client, IPX spoofer technology, or direct-IP options still leave many of these games with some kind of online play, if you know someone else to play against. On consoles these kinds of things are much harder to do; I know the Xbox has been hacked, though, so I wonder if anything like these things is possible for Xbox... perhaps not, consoles are always much more secured, but I don't know.
Of course, games that use player-run servers, such as the Gamespy server browser setup found in many FPSes, are mostly excempt from this. As long as someone wants there to be a server, there will be. But that mostly applies to FPSes, not other genres,
For another console example, look at the Dreamcast. Maybe five games have been successfully hacked to see fan-run servers (Phantasy Star Online) or have designs that allow it to still be played (Quake III Arena, 4x4 Evolution), but the rest are offline forever with no known workaround, or at least none that people care to try to figure out.
But anyway, on the one hand, yes, these things are awful. It makes playing games online much more difficult in the easy cases and impossible in the hard cases, and that's very frustrating. I know that finding games with older titles is harder, and maintaining a server that few people are using can seem like a waste of resources to the company, I guess, but still, it's cruel, and gaming would be better if we could start finding ways to keep this form happening, or to make workarounds easier, once official service has been terminated. Just because games are older does not mean that they are less worth playing!
Yes, that "Project Needlemouse" thing was revealed not long ago. It's episodic and download-only, for PSN, XBLA, WiiWare, and one unrevealed platform. The official site has the short reveal trailer:
Just a couple seconds of gameplay there, but it looks okay... definitely could be good. We'll see how long it is, though, considering that it's episodic, and how well it stands up to the Genesis games... they've made some attempts at 2d Sonic since then, such as Sonic Advance, Sonic Rush, etc, but while they've often been okay, they don't quite match the originals. What kind of levels will these games have, design-wise? We'll see...
Sega does have an interesting problem with Sonic games. On the one hand, many young kids like the modern Sonic games and don't mind the friends or that the games are mostly mediocre now. On the other hand, the longtime fans mostly hate the direction that the series has gone in, but considering that kids make up a big chunk of the Sonic audience, would aiming a game just at the hardcore make any sense? Probably not. This is obviously the compromise then, something trying to reach back to the originals, but clearly not on with the same kind of budget as the major Sonic titles. And while there have been a bunch of handheld Sonic games on handhelds over the past decade, there haven't been any on major consoles unless you count that Wii game... which is okay I guess, haven't played it. But anyway, check out the site, the game looks like it could be good.
