kisrael

I don't find it that fun to level up. It kind of works in a game like Hulk:Ultimate Destruction or Crackdown, but just mild "realistic" improvements? The point is not that it's great to stop falling of your motorcycle, why did they make it so you fall off all the time anyway....

yeesh, i gotta start remembering to check back in here more often...

Do you think S.A. style leveling up adds much to the game? I like how I can pick up, say, a GTA:VC, and don't have to worried that my guy is some little hobbled weakling bobbing around. If I remember where some armor and guns are stashed, I'm good to go, even if I haven't made my cash reserve. For me unrealistic leveling up takes away from the whole game world; instead of being a wide open sandbox where you can go do pretty much anything you know about, suddenly you have to think "well gee, is my character ready for this?"

Yeah, that sounds like an expansion pack issue

Star Fox on the SNES. And NES Bionic Commando... it framed the story perfectly, especially as the ending revealed it was Joe telling it...

My comment in my media log was "a bit glitchy esp. at first, and sick of it by the end, but relatively decent story and decent missions"... You don't have to overstress on the empire management I still love the formula of reasonably ok storytelling and missions inside of a sandboxy world. I also like how your character doesn't have to level up much, or acquire an arsenal of items ala Link in Zelda. I hope the nextgen GTA doesn't mess it up (I didn't think the "skill building" in GTA:SA added much at all)

It's your list. You can do what you want. I still say alphabetical is useless. You can always do a search to find a title... this is a webpage, not a shelf full of boxes. Sorted by VC release date is interesting to me, more so than the original release date, though both are kind of cool. I'll pop in this thread when it updates on Mondays, just to see what's new, but still... I don't think the archive of all releases will be as interesting as it used to.

I actually saw that the other day, but my last criticisms (that it would then be nice to get the filter-by each system on my one page, the way this thread's list was for a while, and failing that, I might have to see if you can bookmark a filter and sort, or if you have to go through each page seperately) continues to make me sound petty and weirdly obsessed about appropriate organzational structure. Which I am, but still. I almost want to have a poll question, because I think it's related: IF you sort your DVD or book collection, do you A. sort the whole thing alphabetially, \ B. sort by genre C. sort by genre, then alphabetically D. something else (year? color of the cover?) FWIW, for me it's B. I don't find much value in sorting by title at all, but when I think of a DVD or book I want to get back to, usually I can think of its genre or category, and just search in that smaller group. (and the thing is with these VC lists, I don't care about searching for a title, since I can do a ctrl-F search, it's about browsing.)

It's NIH syndrome. Again, the sortable, searchable list that many people want is right here: http://www.vc-reviews.com/ complete with RSS feeds, decent reviews, PDF scans of retro reviews from the time of release (from Mean Machines magazine), a comments section, and forums. Ehh, some of us are just fussy about information presantation. (See: Edward Tufte) I just find it more fun in a geeky way to do it right once (and for me, this list used to be exactly right, and I had no urge to di it myself; now it's somewhat wrong, so it's not just NIH making me want to do this) then to have to do manual inspection each time. If that vc-reviews site allowed sorting by date while grouping by system, I'd be all over it. But for me, an NES game feels very different than say a TG-16 game, it doesn't make sense to me to lump them together. And I've already explained why I like browsing the entire catalog(s) in release order. As it is, maybe I'll see if you can hotlink to certain search settings on that site, even if its seperate links, or maybe it's better for page stripping than the Nintendo site. (it's still weird to me that Nintendo's site de-links random games on different loads)

I'm thinking about writing a script to take the raw data from http://wii.nintendo.com/virtualconsole.jsp and sort it, with links. (I know I'm crazy, I just think it's very useful to me to see a list of ALL games for the VC, grouped by console, then sorted by release date... plus this could link to Nintendo's page w/ the preview, and could be made to run automagically w/o a lot of manual tweaking..) One weird thing... it seems like periodically, that page makes certain game links unlinked. It's very odd, it's different when I view it from my local PC, and when I hit it from a webserver, and which games are unlinked seems to change now and then. Any thoughts?

Sorry man, I didn't want to sound unappreciative. I just thought when you had a list, grouped by console, sorted by release date, that EXACTLY met my needs; when I wanted to see what was new that week (and I do tend to think in terms of separate consoles) it was easy to scroll and look for your "NEW" text... when I wanted to get a feel for the flow of it, and remind myself that there was, say, a game released a month ago but I was busy then but might want to check out now, it was PERFECT for that, and when I wanted to look for a specific title, ctrl-F was just a keystroke away... (the ability of web browsers to do in-page searching makes an alphabetical sort much less important, IMO) Again, do what you like... if you love the idea of "last 2 weeks", I'd put that as a feature section on the top, and keep the rest of the list just as it was,INCLUDING the things listed in that feature section. (Again, I just love a chronological listing, so even if i don't fire up the virtual console store for 2 months, I can see what my options are...)

gotta admit I think the old layout was a LOT better. I appreciated this as a place where there was a clear "NEW" indicator, but still in the main list of games for each system. It gave it a sense of flow for each release. That jumble at the top is annoying... especially since it's 2 weeks worth, and no longer sorted chronoligically. Seriously, I don't know why ANYONE alphabetically sorts this kind of list, I mean one that's for "show me what's here" and not "I know what game I want, just let me find that one title in a hurrry"

I gotta admit, the GBA kind of took me by surprise, back in the day. I didn't think it was going to be such a hit, the formfactor and screen dimensions just seemed odd, and then all those Mario rereleases (with "hey! this one has the original mario bros! again!") Now I can see the beauty of having the portable equivalent of an SNES was... One thing the Gameboy line should get credit for: perpetuating the idea of backwards compatibility.

Is there an Xbox Live Arcade list sorted by release date? I don't understand why more of the lists don't have that option, for people who come back to the Xbox every month or so and want to check out what's new, without relying on what Microsoft wants to feature... The Wii group has a simple list like that and its pretty useful...

I'll try fiddling w/ the classic controller. But in fairness, sometimes it seems like it would be easier to Just Press A (assuming the top left menu item is highlighted) to kick things off than to have to play that little recalibrate game of swing the controller around and get the hand on the icon. Ok, maybe it's petty, but swapping controllers while just wanting to play GC stuff is unfortunate.

Well, "computer" is only one extra syllable (and I think most people will realize you're not talking about a mainframe), and these days "desktop" and "laptop" are more useful distinctions, so "PC vs Mac" is a completely reasonable use of terms. I remember in fourth grade, 1984, or so, reading about the PC and thinking it was wrong, because the P was supposed to stand for "portable". So arguably, PC wasn't really strongly in use when IBM kind of grabbed the initials.

is it really that hard to go ahead and turn the remote sideways after excite truck? i dont think it takes that much effort. and they want to show off the pointer. if you have a main menu that doesnt need it, its like games that dont need it... then it's just like the playstation 3's motorstorm where you have the 6 axis support but you have the regular, basically saying you have no confidence in the new control method. i think its good, quick , and efficient to only have one control in the main menu. i WILL agree with you though that the gc support is sloppy on the wii. i understand that the wiimote needs to be on before you get to the wii channel, but for it to lose ALL connectivity so you cant exit to the wii menu like you can on any other game. thats what really doesnt feel well thought out. but , especially considering how often i play excite truck, i can honestly say ive never turned the remote to it's side and said "ughhh.. god damn that was way more effort needed than it should have been". Your utterly missing my point, but at least you tried to be a little funny about it, and maybe didn't realize I tend to travel with my Wii. It's not tough to turn the remote on its side, and I support the idea of using the controller in different ways for different games. What's annoying is either A. having to set up the sensor bar JUST to navigate the menu, when I want to play ExciteTruck or a GC or VC game, and B. having to put batteries in a WiiMote when I just want to play a GC game. The Wii menu is nicely arranged so that it should be easy to navigate with a crosspad or analog stick. Hell, I think even WiiSports supports crosspad use, and that's a game that doesn't even use the crosspad. If you have your system always setup maybe it's not such a big deal, but I also use a wireless sensor bar, and would have to go turn it on just to navigate. I'd say that's a bigger issue than losing Wiimote connectivity. I understand that you want GC emulation to be as deep as possible, and that might mean not reserving part of the processor to run an entirely different Operating System than the current game is using.

I just want to say, I hate how the ONLY way of navigating the home menu is with the Wiimote in pointer mode. Since there are games that don't use the Wiimote (ala the GC), and games that don't use the Wiimote in pointer mode (ala ExciteTruck) it's annoying that they didn't throw in a simple crosspad based interface for the Wiimotes and GC controllers, when I'm playing those games exclusively for a bit.

It is a good game. It doesn't do over the top Super Hero as well as Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, and it doesn't do weapons in a world as well as Mercenaries, but it's a nice blend of the two genres. Technically it was my "killer app" for buying a 360... haven't really gotten into anything else deeply on the system, though I enjoy the Arcade very much.

Very big agreement here. Well, Mac did a lot of this obviously, but for the PC side you're right on. I was so blown away when I realized what the clipboard was doing. Another thing they brought was standardized, across-app keyboard shortcuts, like Ctrl-c/x/v, alt-f4 (which is kind of odd), and using alt- kbd accelerators for menus. At the risk of going off on a tangent, I think Win95 got a ton of things right, UI-wise, with the dual taskbar/startbutton setup. For my money it's much more how people think, in terms of seperate tasks, not seperate apps, than say Mac's Dock.

!!!! Even after you change it to the ABXY control scheme?? If you do that, I feel like it plays like Smash TV on SNES or anything else that uses buttons as a second control pad. It has a slightly odd feel, w/ the guys thrusters, don't know if that's what you dislike. I'm surprised though, this game feels great to me.

I'd love to hear if they did an equally deep bit of ghost psychology for the recent Pac-Man CE on Xbox Live....

Just to nitpick, I don't think Battlezone vs Robot Tank is a good example of a 3rd party clone being better. Certainly some people think so, but a lot of people think otherwise. (It's a fair argument, one has fast, almost skitterish action and different weather and damage effects, the other models a 3D environment, has up to two enemies of three different types at once, and has multicolor enemies and a neat tread visual.) So it's not a clearcut example to hold up. Hmm. It might've helped the NES avoid a flood of truly horrendous games. Overall the NES library was fairly large and strong. (Also it was getting to the stage where porno games were becoming feasible, and i know there are some examples that made it despite the seal of quality.) Nintendo also got really greedy, but I don't think it was entirely a negative... I'd say the worst of the Atari library is worse than the worst of the NES.

I'd love to see a screenshot, this sounds really interesting! I have a few ideas about bringing life to Atari actors in some other format...

what's the best bet for getting decent 2600 controllers? The Marketplace board here? One of these odd after market things on Ebay like http://cgi.ebay.com/2X-NEW-JOYSTICKS-JOY-S...1QQcmdZViewItem Ideally it'd be something like Epyx 500XJ or Wico Ergostick, but failing those, I could go for something classic, as long as they were in good shape. I guess the crosspads would be ok too... not so authentic, but what folks have grown used to...