kisrael

The other side of that is, could it be that Vista is what urges some people to upgrade their hardware? Eh, the # of people who need Vista and the hardcore segment probably don't overlap too much, so maybe not. I mean, I'm sure Vista will become the default standard as the years wear on, and the hardware will continue to improve, but still.

Decent post there rockman! Thinking about the early shareware reminds me of that history of DOOM book, and how excited they were simply to be able to get Super Mario like scrolling... http://rome.ro/games_ddici.htm Also, consoles have been hooking up to TVs, and it can be more comfortable to play on a couch, especially split screen games. Plus console games tend to be reliably polished.

So one trend that's had longer legs than I expected is trying to make a Pac-Man that was better than the first 2600 port... admittedly a fairly low bar! But are people familiar with this new Pac-Man Champion Edition? An Xbox 360 downloadable game, with a 3 minute demo and a $8 download available. Here are two descriptions praising it: http://www.penny-arcade.com/2007/06/11 http://blog.dessgeega.com/?p=85 Iwatani was on the team for it even! It's pretty nifty. I've just enjoyed it but I know people who really got grabbed by its refinement of the classic formula Just based on screenshots, and its horizontal, wide-screen-friendly layout, it reminded me a bit of 2600 Pac Man. So I was wondering how much of it could be done in a 2600 port. There are of course some cosmetic upgrades... good use of trailing shadows, amd subtle shimmer and light effects... But here are the big differences: The basic game has a 5 minute cap The usual "eat every dot, board resets" pattern is gone. The board is fundamentally divided into two halves; clearing all of the dots on one half makes a fruit emerge. Eat the fruit, and more dots appear on the other half (generally not completely filling the board, at least 'til the game really gets going.) But not only that... actually the other half of the board gets redrawn as well, with a new layout! (The funny thing is, it actually took me a while to realize the actual layout of the other half of the board changes, because the draw in effect is subtle, and/or because my attention is always on the other side of the screen...) Another interesting features is you can chain power pills and the score multiplier, which is the way to wrack up mighty scores. There's this strategy to maximize that chaining, stuff like emptying both sides of almost everything but energizers, then chaining those energizers, then eating the new energizers that appear and so on, up to 4-6... So I dunno. This might be beyond the range of an unaided 2600, more plausible for a supercharger. I guess you could still keep the board in ROM... figuring out how to replenish dots might be a challenge. And you couldn't rely on a reflected playfield. Well, my time of 2600 ASM mojo is long gone. But it's an interesting thought experiment. Pac-Man CE is widely and rightly regarded as a remake (and a download!) done right.

Actually, to my knowledge, most laptops have hookups for external monitors. The one i'm useing currently for example. But I hear what you are saying. I mean, the expense in a laptop is the screen after all. You want anything else for a laptop, you'll pay through the nose, but if the screen goes bad, it's simply not worth getting it replaced as it costs as much as the computer almost. In one trade mag I did see what MRB described... it was a computer, w/ cd rom and all, tucked under a keyboard. In practice it looked a lot like a C=64! Not much in sales though, I think it was mostly meant for certain retail settings. You also see the idea with Media PCs, ones kind of meant to be plugged into a big HD TV, but without the integrated keyboard. I don't think its been setting the world on fire either. Actually I think there's a stronger trend toward tucking the PC stuff behind the screen in a desktop setting... Apples done this 3 different ways w/ the iMac, and I've seen some PCs following the lead. (I remember seeing one w/ a super crappy laptopish screen back in the late 90s) That said... laptops are a lot more fun. Eh. That's kind of what PS3 and Xbox 360 want to be. But I think, say web-browsing and console style game playing will never really meet.

Interesting topic. I think before asking the question "why did" you need to know your answer to "when did". People's perceptions of the Great Crash and what came after will always be influenced by how old they were at the time, and what hardware they and their friends were lucky enough to have. It's extremely difficult to have a truly objective view. Being the kid of ministers, we didn't have much money, but thanks to a lucky donation I had an Atari 800XL. Later I jonesed for and got a C=64 (better game piracy :-) that was a hand-me-down from my Uncle who was moving into IBM (w/ those weird mostly compatible Tandy clones)... that was late for the computer, like '87 or so. So I think most people will see the Apple II/C=64/Atari 800XL (and maybe TI and CoCo) as the main generation of home computers in the USA. So what happened then? I knew exactly one guy who was lucky enough to get an Amiga. No one with an Atari ST, and maybe I saw an Apple III in a school once. BUT, PCs weren't really in big use either, they were still dull and boring business machines. If you're lucky maybe you'd find one that played Ancient Art of War or Big Blue Disk or something. So I don't know if people call the Amiga/ST generation home computers, or how well that generation did relative to the 8-bits. (Note: Amiga was a brilliant machine for its time, but that greatness came through series of hacks and optimizations. Read up on how that machine did its palette stuff and what not to get an idea of how crazy it was... one of the reasons it started lagging after a bit, despite the PCs being built to sell faster processors and damn the idea of specialized chips...'til sound blasters and later video cards started making waves) So for me it was: Atari 2600 gen, with a touch of Intellivision or Colecovision Home computers NES (I knew the C=64 was more powerful, but wasn't no one making Metroid for the C=64...) 386-486 PCs (ah, Wing Commander) and then consoles, starting for me with the N64... after I spotted the PC hardware treadmill thanks to Duke Nukem 3D Anyway, I guess my point is, there's kind of a gap between the dominance of home computers and the dominance of PCs. For most people, the weren't competing, in terms of being a head to head choice, Home Computers died out when the Amigas and STs didn't really catch on at good prices, and NES started becoming a new standard.

Nor safe to hotlink, silly. We can't see it.

StarFox 64 on Wii VC. Gamecube Controller was PERFECT for it... much better than the "classic controller" or even the N64, in terms of super-intuitive button placement. I purposefully took mostly the easy routes. Overall this game has held up very well. I then put Star Fox Assault in... that is really an underrated game.

Reminds me of the PS3 kiosk at GameSpot, running whatever that dirt track racing game is. I think the loadtimes were about three times as long as the actual time I got to play. Videos integrated into the shopping channel would be great, but it feels like there might be some bandwidth issues, just based on how long the thing sometimes takes to load now! Also, maybe Nintendo doesn't want to do streaming, since stopping a video halfway through is unprofessional looking, and don't want to make you wait to see the whole thing either..

D,U,M,B. Teh Suxx0r. Though maybe I can get a cheap copy too... I think it's one of the last Xbox titles I care about that hasn't been ported, so I can ditch the old hardware.

MICROSOFT FOR TEH FAIL!

What the hell... Jet Set Radio Future is listed on the compatability list, but the emulator hasn't and won't download automagically... I'm signed into Xbox Live... what the hell do I have to do? Do I need a gold membership instead of a silver or something? This is on the combo disk with Sega GT. What the hell???

Can you download GC Saves the same way you can for Wii games? That's how I "unlocked" everything in ExciteTruck, without having too grind one player and be a lot better than my usual gaming buddies. And now I seem to have misplaced my memcard w/ all my GC saves :-(

Missed this thread, haven't been hanging out as much. In the Sky Mall catalog (Hammacher Schlemmer) I saw some food for thought for this topic, last December...dedicated single-game machines that plug into a TV and have some of the same interactivity the Wii offers: Star Wars Lightsabers Snowboarding Jet Ski Given the tremendous sales the 10-in-1 type joysticks see, I wonder if there's any Wii competition there?

With Batari BASIC it's pretty easy :-) Actually I was in your shoes a few years ago. Even if you want to tough it out and do it in assembly, bB can help give you hints about your ASM code...

How is Timesplitters? I almost picked that one up. Is it a good play?? I liked it quite a lot. Same core team that made Golden Eye I've heard. The co-op story mode is especially well done. Fun FPS that doesn't take itself too seriously and has fun with cliches of pop culture.

Is Free-For-All likely to stay a Gold thing? That's a little lame, innit?

Anyone do the Crackdown update?

Sorry, gang, for rising to the bait of the sig. Last thing I'll say: I don't have satellite either. Stern did the shtick when he was on regular radio. Other stations run these contests from time to time, or did before the tragedy, and the prize doesn't always make a cute pun on a word for piss. If Wii hadn't been the most sought-after, hard-to-get system at the time, the contest would have been for that. (PS3 was as hard to get, but not as sought after by children.) So I can "honestly tell you that had Nintendo named their machine something other than Wii" that woman would likely still be just as dead. It's unfortunate and rather evil, but the villain here is the radio station, not Nintendo. (And the radio station wasn't evil evil; this was more about humiliation and an incomplete understanding of human anatomy than murder.) So quit playing the goddamn "Won't somebody think of the CHILDREN????" card for a name you're just not sensitive enough to modern culture and marketing to understand. (hint: when your username is that of 25 year old american gaming system, maybe you're not quite the core demographic.) Wii is the products name, it's going to stay the name, the system seems poised to be a significant hit this generation, you'd generate less stupid threads if you weren't trolling like this in your .sig.

I think the nunchuck controller is a pretty decent replacement for a traditional controller. Besides then also allowing "point at a place on the screen", which is equivalent in most ways to the DS touch screen. (except you need an onscreen cusror because the calibration/mapping isn't 100%) 5200, your .sig is the dumbest thing I've read today. Radio Stations had been having that kind of contest for years: http://www.howardstern.com/rundown.hs?d=1091160000 Why aren't you trying to boycot Howard Stern?

I think Factor 5 has some more room to fail before they become another Rare. Besides my disagreement about the quality of the embedded RS2, I think RS3 is a bit underrated. The onfoot parts are pretty bad and weirdly robotron-like, but the starfighter missions are quality, and some of the alternate vehicles (like taking a walker through that giant generator structure) are good as well.

Yeah, it's so weird, such a fundamental lossage of the idea of what competitive Tetris should be. I mean, "Next Tetris" had the idea of clearing, rather than just avoiding being pushed to the top, so there's more than one way of making a decent head to head game, but time attacks are just pointless, unsatisfying, and generally less open to alternate strategies.

okay now fill me in what did they say? Yeah, what did they say? Last I heard they were making some dragon game for PS3... trying to be like Rogue Squadron plus more physical in flight combat. If you think this game is hard (I beat it back in the day) -- try the 2 player version of it included in Rogue Squadron 3. I cry for the lost opportunity... they could have kept it exactly the same, but 2 players, and then a veteran could guide a newbie along. But NO... twice the pilots? Twice the difficulty! Who cares that the core game is years old, and no one wants to sweat that much on an old title, or few want to develop "in tandem" skills. They went out of their way to make the game tougher -- worse, in my opinion, without even throwing in a difficulty setting or anything, and that really makes me upset with them. It would have been so much easier for them to just do the Right thing...

So I'm always on the lookout for "action puzzle" games for my Aunt and Mom... Tetris-derivatives, Tetris Attack stuff, etc... especially ones with decent head to head modes. She recently got a PS2 and I found Tetris Worlds. MAN DOES ITS MULTIPLAYER MODES SUCK. Because... they're all time trial. 2 minutes play, ok stop, how did every one do? Sucks! yeah you can send garbage but who cares, it hardly ever gets up that high that it matters I guess I gotta try to dig up another copy of Next Tetris... luckily at the same time I bought her Lumines, which actually is pretty nice, and slick as hell, it's like the Wipeout 2099 of puzzle games.

Download Starfox 64 last night. That is a very well done game, the branching structure really works well. Early N64 titles seemed to go out of their way to make interactive title screens, like the stretchable Mario head for Mario 64, or the way the team will look at the Star Fox logo if you move it around. I kind of miss that. Would a game like Star Fox have any kind of auto-save feature on the VC? How do you use it?

But if you find them arousing, then you're OK. "The Web brings people together because no matter what kind of a twisted sexual mutant you happen to be, you've got millions of pals out there. Type in 'Find people that have sex with goats that are on fire' and the computer will say, 'Specify type of goat.'" --Rich Jeni