I'm not sure what I think, it's still the same concept we heard from GW2 several years ago, and I still think that turning the overworld into one area instead of instanced for each player is VERY un-Guild Wars and is definitely not a good idea. Will I like GW2 as much as I have loved the first one? I don't know, I don't know if it's going to be the same game anymore... hopefully, but we'll see. I mean, I'll probably like it, but without the gameplay of exploring zones with yourself and your heroes/henchies, doing quests and exploring out the zones, killing the enemies as you go and challenging the zone... if it's instead the way it'll probably be, just standard boring MMO "other people killed the monsters, wait for them to respawn" garbage (monsters don't respawn in GW until you go to another zone and come back and reset the zone!)... that's just not right. :(
Oh, Arena.net definitely still has some of the best artists in the industry, that's for sure... this trailer shows that yet again. :)
The upcoming season's edition of the Winter Classic will be held at Fenway Park (the Winter Classic is a new NHL tradition started in 2007-08, based off the success of the Heritage Classic in 2003, which was in turn inspired by the Cold War between Michigan and Michigan State in 2001. It's a regular-season game played outdoors). Awesome! It's not quite Yankee Stadium, which will happen in the future most definitely, but it's still going to be a pretty awesome event. The game at Wrigley Field last year was really cool and they incorporated some elements of the stadium (i.e. painting ivy on the boards) in pretty neat ways. I'm sure there will more of the same this year for Fenway.
I love the Winter Classic and it's great for the league. It's an awesome way to reach out to new fans and is a great service to old-time sports fans, even if they aren't hockey fans. I'm sure some long-time Cubs fans who never really cared about the Blackhawks were interested in the game at Wrigley last year. As great as they all have been so far though, none of them have really matched the success and magic of the 2003 Heritage Classic in Edmonton, which I was fortunate enough to attend. I got to see Gretzky and Messier and Kurri and Anderson and Fuhr and Lafleur play for the first time ever.
Apparently it was between Philly and Boston this year for the rights to hold the outdoor game, so maybe that means it will be in Philly for the 2010-11 season. New York will definitely hold one; they could pop the dome at Roger's Centre and the Leafs could have one; Calgary, Vancouver, Montreal, and Ottawa don't really have the proper facilities; Detroit would definitely be very popular. And with the surging interest of hockey in Ohio, why can't Columbus host the Winter Classic? Could you imagine filling up Ohio Stadium for a hockey game? There have also been talks of hosting the game in a warmer climate, and the Rose Bowl has sometimes been included in these discussions as a potential location. Holy shit, the fucking Rose Bowl.
I meant to post this at TC too earlier today, but didn't get around to it... but here it is. It's still the 14th, so it's accurate. :)
Yes, the Sega Genesis came out twenty years ago today, August 14th 1989. The system went on to great success, leading the generation for about five years before Sega's mistakes finally allowed for Nintendo to sneak past in 1994. The system is the most successful second-place major console ever worldwide, behind only the handheld PSP in this category, and ahead of the third-place second place system, the N64. The system sold 19 or 20 million systems in the US alone and somewhere between 36.5 and 40 million systems worldwide (see here for proof), versus the SNES's 24 million US and 49 million worldwide.
(The N64 was 20.63 million US, 32 million worldwide, for comparison, using Nintendo's official shipped numbers. The Genesis numbers are just estimates as unlike Nintendo, Sega has never released actual sales numbers for its systems.)
Supported with new releases in the US from 1989 to 1998, it had an around ten year lifespan. While the Japanese version, the Megadrive, had done poorly, losing to NEC's PC Engine (TurboGrafx), in America Sega quickly, and surprisingly to many analysts, crushed NEC and took the next-gen lead. They did not get past the NES for the first year, thanks to games like 1990's Super Mario Bros. 3, but clearly led among next-gen owners. Even the release of the SNES in mid 1991 would not change that, as Sega released its big title at around teh same time, Sonic the Hedgehog. Sega's high point came after this, from 1991-1993. Sonic took over America and the Genesis was the number one system in the country. Sega also released two addons for the system, the Sega CD in 1992 (late 1991 in Japan) and the Sega 32X in 1994, several console revisions, and a handheld version of the system in 1995, the Nomad. The system initially came with Altered Beast, and later Sonic the Hedgehog once it was released in 1991. Sega-16's interview with Kalinske where he describes convincing Sega of Japan to let him give away the system's biggest smash-hit game for free with system sales is interesting. That interview is here, and it should be required reading! http://www.sega-16.com/feature_page.php?...20Kalinske. "Sega does what Nintendon't" and better sports and action games marked it as the 'older gamers' system', though for Sega this mostly meant teenagers more than anything; Sony would expand gaming's base even farther. But compared to Nintendo's focus on children and 'all ages' games, Sega was expanding the base by aiming straight at people who considered Nintendo's focus to be aiming too young for them. Sonic was the perfect mascot to succeed with this teen audience and the attitude of the time. Here's Sega-16's history of the series: http://www.sega-16.com/feature_page.php?...g%20Series. Sonic 2, which came a year later, was if anything even better than the first, and by 1993 Sega's marketshare was 50% industrywide.
The 32X marked the end of Sega's lead, however, as Nintendo's Donkey Kong Country showed how you didn't need a very expensive addon to get great graphics from your older system, and gamers got tired of Sega's splitting up the market between too many systems. Splitting Sonic 3 into two parts, Sonic 3 and Sonic the Hedgehog, much have increased sales, but also did cause some ill will once people realized that Sonic & Knuckles was just the second half of Sonic 3, but they had to pay full price for it. The failure of the live-action-video FMV game market in 1994-1995 also hurt Sega, as the Sega CD was best known for those titles. In addition, an internal war between Sega's American and Japanese divisions sapped Sega's strength as the fighting led to competing ideas of gaming's future and even consoles. Wanting to move on from the failed Japanese Megadrive to the hopefully more promising Saturn, Sega of Japan halted game development for all three systems in late 1995, along with the Master System and Game Gear. The last Genesis (Megadrive) game came out in Japan in late 1996. Sega of America continued Genesis and Game Gear game development until 1997, however, and there was one third party release in 1998, but it still meant fewer titles than before. The last few years were not the system's best, but still saw a few great titles, such as the Vectorman games for instance, Sega's answer to DKC graphically.
The Genesis (Megadrive) saw even more success in Brazil, with the last title there not being released until 2000.
I didn't own a Genesis myself during its lifespan, but I didn't have any game platforms other than PC and Game Boy during its lifespan. I did know several people who owned a Genesis though, versus very few with SNES, so the vast majority of my gaming time at friends' houses that wasn't on PC, GB, or NES (as with most people then I imagine, I knew a lot of people with a NES) was on Genesis. I've always been a PC and Nintendo fan first, but I liked the Genesis too, from after Sonic's release at least. I have little memory of it before then, but Sonic was an amazing game I've always loved. I finally got a Genesis in 2006 and have a good-sized collection now. The system just has too many great games to list them all, the list would probably go on into the hundreds... :)
I've also never been sure which system of that generation I like better, SNES or Genesis... they're both such great systems and compliment eachother so well, with different strengths and weaknesses. Really, just get both.
The best Genesis-specific site is http://www.sega-16.com, which is an extremely good site I highly recommend visiting. The top highlight of their content, I would say, are the many interviews with people who worked on the Genesis in some way, from Sega of America personnel (up to the various presidents) and various American and European Genesis developers. They don't have much stuff with Japanese developers, presumably because of the language barrier, but still it's a fantastic resource for anyone interested in the system.
The other top resource for Sega history is probably The Scribe's classic articles on the history of Sega from its founding to the end of 2000, written back in 2001-2002. This can be found here: http://www.goodcowfilms.com/farm/games/w...nesis.html It is too bad that he never finished the Dreamcast section, from January 2001 to its end, and the entire set of articles is extremely biased, but still the sheer amount of depth really makes them must-reads for anyone who hasn't before and has any interest.
I'd post screenshots and such, but while I like writing posts I don't really like searching for screenshots, so I won't do that and hope someone else will, because this post needs some. :)
Also, where's that post with the awesome list of all Genesis games ranked by how genre and good the person thought they were... I need to link that too.
In conclusion, go buy some Genesis games, or a Genesis if you don't have one. It's one of the cheapest classic consoles around, and shouldn't cost you more than $25 or so for the system. Games are even more affordable; as very, very few US releases cost more than $8 or $10 so, in my experience. Most are well under that. Plus, there are lots of really good games... you really can't go wrong getting a Genesis.
I haven't played it, but Bionic Commando Rearmed was supposedly really good, this is too bad... but evidently their three big titles, Bionic Commando, Transformers, and Wanted: Weapons of Fate, all did poorly, and they just couldn't stay open.
I first heard of Grin from the demo of their first game, Ballistic for the PC. It's a futuristic tube racing game, and in the normal or hard difficulty had an interesting game model that made you actually think about which part of the tube surface you were on, because you'd be able to make turns much better on some parts of the tube (on the outer edge instead of the inside for example). It also had amazing graphics for the time, very nice stuff. There was a later arcade version of the game as well and I have also played that. So cool...
Anyway, it's always too bad when good developers shut down. :(
Quote:Happy Days - At Year's End, Three Writers examine Our Ties to Friends, Family, and Tradition.
August 10, 2009, 9:55 pm
Oh, Sting, Where Is Thy Death?
By Richard Conniff
Not long ago, I got stung by a yellow jacket, and after the usual ow-plus-obscenities moment, I found myself thinking about pain, happiness, and Justin O. Schmidt. He’s an Arizona entomologist and co-author of the standard text in the insect sting field, “Insect Defenses: Adaptive Mechanisms and Strategies of Prey and Predators.” But he’s more widely celebrated as the creator of the “Justin O. Schmidt Sting Pain Index,” a connoisseur’s guide to just how bad the ouch is, on a scale of one (“a tiny spark”) to four (“absolutely debilitating”).
Among connoisseurs of insect stings, it’s the equivalent of Robert Parker’s wine ratings. Schmidt has been stung by about 150 different species on six continents and seems to have opinions about all of them. In faux-Parker mode, he once described a bald-faced hornet sting as “Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.” Other researchers tend to regard his work with fascination. But hardly anyone tries to replicate his results.
A harvester ant ‘felt like somebody was putting a knife in and twisting it.’ A wasp known as the ‘tarantula hawk’ made him lie down and scream.
You are perhaps thinking that this does not sound like it has much to do with happiness, especially not on a hot summer day with the insect world chattering and buzzing just outside the screen door. But Schmidt struck me as a happy guy when I first looked him up a few years ago at the home in Tucson he shares with a wife, two kids, and a large collection of venomous arthropods. I was researching my book “Swimming With Piranhas at Feeding Time,” and he seemed like a good fit with my subtitle about “doing dumb stuff with animals.” We sat down to talk at the kitchen table. The only condiment was a tube of Itch-X.
Maybe I’d been reading too much positive psychology, but it struck me that you could make Schmidt’s work a case study — O.K., a somewhat perverse case study — in happiness. It was, for instance, all about “flow.” That’s the term happiness researchers use for the sense of well-being that comes from getting so caught up in what you’re doing, so focused and energized by it, that time passes by unnoticed. For athletes, flow is about being “in the zone.” For stock traders it’s about being “in the pipe” (but not “down the tubes”). And for Justin Schmidt, clearly, it was about being knee-deep in a nest of stinging insects.
DESCRIPTIONJamal Nasrallah/European Pressphoto Agency
He never gets stung on purpose, he said. Too artificial; the insect might not deliver a normal dose of venom. But his research on bees, wasps, and ants often requires him to hunt down and collect obscure species, so he has plenty of opportunity for instructive mistakes. “What happens is that you’ve been looking for a species maybe for years,” he told me. “You finally find a nest and by God you’re going to get every one of them. You get your buckets and your aspirators and you start digging away.” In the excitement, a few stings are almost inevitable.
Positive psychology types like to say that savoring the moment is a “crucial happiness skill,” and that’s what Schmidt does next: “So I pay a little attention to the type of pain it is, how long it lasts, how intense it gets.” A harvester ant, for instance, “felt like somebody was putting a knife in and twisting it.” A wasp known in the American Southwest as the “tarantula hawk” made him lie down and scream: “The good news is that by three minutes, it’s gone. If you really use your imagination you can get it to last five.” On the other hand, the sting of a bullet ant in Brazil (4-plus on the pain index) had him “still quivering and screaming from these peristaltic waves of pain” twelve hours later, despite the effects of ice compresses and beer.
When you get past the savoring, happiness researchers recommend, finally, “surrendering the self-centered perspective” and “recognizing the other,” and Schmidt was surely doing some of that, too. The pain index came into being, he said, because he wanted to understand the two ways stinging can be of defensive value to an insect. “One is that it can actually do serious damage, to kill the target or make it impaired. The other is the whammy, the pain.” He could quantify the amount of venom injected and its toxicity, but he had no way to measure pain other than through direct experience. So the pain index gave him a tool for interpreting an insect’s overall defensive strategy.
In fact, most insect stings do no damage at all, except to the two percent of people who suffer an allergic reaction. They just scare the wits out of us. And this is why they fascinate Schmidt: We typically outweigh any insect tormentor by a million times or more. We can outthink it. “And yet it wins,” said Schmidt, “and the evidence that it has won is that people flap their arms, run around screaming, and do all kinds of carrying on.” It wins “by making us hurt far more than any animal that size ought to be able to do. It deceives us into thinking serious damage is being done.” And that’s generally enough to deliver the insect’s message, which is: Stay away from me and my nest.
Not everybody gets it, of course. Bears figure out that bees are just bluffing and they learn to put up with the sting pain as a cost of getting honey from the hive. And there’s probably a life lesson in that: You will do better once you learn to distinguish between the things that can kill you and the ones that merely sting. But I think Schmidt was working around to the larger point, dear to the entomological heart, that stinging insects are in fact good. Most of the 60,000 stinging insect species don’t waste their venom on people; they use it primarily to attack tomato hornworms, cabbage loopers, and the like. And if they were not out there busily killing agricultural pests, we would starve. So the zen bottom line here is, next time you get stung, try thinking of it not as a curse, but as one of the small blessings of summer.
Schmidt and I wandered out into his yard just in time to see a tarantula hawk whip through at eye level. It had orange wings and metallic blue flanks, and looked about as menacing as a Chinook helicopter. “I can catch it if you want to get stung,” Schmidt offered. By now, the thought of three minutes of totally unbearable pain was sounding somewhere between a religious experience and drinking a wine with a 99 point Parker rating. But before I could say, “Sure, it’s Friday, let’s go for a four,” the wasp was out of reach.
Really, though, I was happy enough just knowing it was there.
The latest Nintendo Power also has a big article about it. Looks okay... nothing stunning, but hopefully at least a little interesting. It's a lot different from any of the past FFCC games though, for sure. One main character, etc...
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