Or know what it is?

Or discover the Games for Windows initiative still exists...

I'd been resisting buying it for fear of lost time, but if it's right there on Gametap I don't think I'll be able to hold off any longer.

(Alright, I admit, it was Ultima 9: Ascension. I LIKED that game. Also, I was curious if I finally owned a machine that could run it without occasionally turning into a slide-show)

Interplay's got a rocky past, but a fair number of classics I wouldn't mind seeing aside from the ones already mentioned:

Descent
Bards Tail
Star Trek: 25th Anniversary
Star Trek: Starfleet Command
Wasteland
Carmageddon
Alone in the Dark

But don't tease about X-Wing/T.I.E. Fighter unless you can pull it off guys...

It's #4 on their website: "4. All games are Vista and XP compatible."

Now what they mean by "compatible" is yet to be seen.

so... like Game Tap but you can buy just by the games you want, and keep them...

Yeah, I'll sign up for that.

Yeah, it's in the monster swarms, it was a key part of DOOM and the 4 or 5 monsters max you'd get in DOOM III just weren't the same. Serious Sam and Painkiller DID do it better.

It's got the monster closets, the teleporting monsters, every room with stuff sitting in the middle is a trap, etc. etc. The only DOOM era run-n-gun convention it's missing is the monster swarms, because it would have overloaded even top of the line game rigs.

Oh yeah, they had some modern conventions, like nice scripted events, cut scenes, and I really liked their interface for manipulating in game control panels (where your target reticle turns into the 'mouse' pointer when you're over a control) I don't know why more games haven't emulated it. But basically the game-play was ripped from DOOM unchanged which was their goal, remember, and it gets old pretty quick. Go back and play doom; it was fantastic back then, groundbreaking even, but now so many games later you'll find yourself getting bored.

Other games have done essentially the same thing better, Serious Sam for one, Painkiller more recently.

DOOM 3 has a killer engine though, never before or since have dark, claustrophobic industrial workspaces been so well rendered. I spent no small amount of time during my play through it just standing and watching the multiple colored light sources play over the normal mapped curved piping of some incomprehensible machine.

Until the next monster closet sprung open.

So I'm not really sure who benefits here, maybe Ubisoft has watched how well Marvel is doing (so far) with it's IP since taking the movie reins itself and realized that is a good idea.

I guess Prince of Persia will certainly LOOK good because of this...

What you're seeing is not hard, it's just really well put together, and with some really nice shaders as I said before.

You're not going to be seeing this quality at HD resolutions on a 360 or PS2, but a good gaming rig can throw this out at a decent frame rate.

(pardon if this is a dual post, but it looks like my last post got eaten. I can see it on my profile page, but it's not attributed to this article, or any article)

What you're seeing here is not really that hard, it's just put together really well (and has some nice shaders, like I mentioned before).

You're not going to see this quality of detail at HD resolutions on a 360 or a PS3, but a good gaming rig could throw that down with a decent frame rate.

I'm addicted to Mount & Blade on my PC.

Playing Rock Band and Lego Star Wars: The Original Trilogy with the wife on PS3.

If it had co-op for the wife and I we'd almost certainly get it.

What's with the pirate/ninja thing anyway? They're useful for different things, in a fight you want ninjas, at a party you want pirates.

The shading in those shots is fantastic, and it's not something you can photoshop in.

But it is something they may have to turn down to keep up the frame-rate :(

Right, and meta arguments that decry that there is an argument aren't pointless at all. But thanks for using almost 300 words to tell us that.

Yeah I guess two rhythm games with rock music that let you form bands with guitars, drums and a mic and take you on a virtual tour of the world aren't anything alike and can't possibly be compared.

Your argument is circular. If we're not to compare and contrast, pick which one we like and put our money in that one; if we instead just, what, pick one franchise and stick to it no matter what... how will that drive innovation?

Agreed, but I'm not willing to accept the lack of innovation as the status quo, there is lots of innovation in the industry, it's just not seen in the mainstream much.

"You seem to be assuming that this is just like GH3 with a couple of little features added, but I don't see it that way at all."

How can I assume that? They're adding instruments, a music creator and online world tour, two of which features leapfrog Rock Band and one of which trumps Rock Band 2. I already agreed that Activision deserves props for taking the fight to Harmonix.

"Really? I didn't expect such a comment from a gamer. If you've played many AAA games and their sequels you'll realize that many of them fail to do that very thing."

If you're willing to accept a lack of innovation as the status quo, than yes, by all means, praise the observance of the obvious.

"I say kudos to Activision for trying to bring us a game with as many features as possible as well as trying to fix the mistakes of their past games."

And I agree with you here, kudos to Activision for not ceding the rhythm game wars without a good fight, although a keyboard would have been nicer than cymbal pads. And I'm still pissed at them for blocking Harmonix PS3 guitar patch.

That being said, I was always pissed that cooperative play wasn't available in Career Mode until III :)

Um, it's not their first outing, it's their THIRD (fourth if you care to include the 80's) so it's kind of hard to bless them for noticing the obvious.

It's not so great when the voice acting is BAD. I'm not saying this will be, I have some faith in Lionhead, but there's been more than one game where I turned off the voices and turned on the subtitles because reading was a much better experience.

In Theif: Deadly Shadows I muted the sound altogether before going into a store as the fake cockney accents were so horrible. Otherwise I thought it was a pretty decent Thief game, but the voice acting would jerk me out of the world completely.

The only game I think that's really ever influenced my music taste was Lucas Arts Outlaws from way back when, which introduced me to the guilty pleasure of Spaghetti Western music and had me go back and watch High Planes Drifter and A Fist Full Of Dollars with new appreciation.

But after reading this article I find myself oddly excited, feeling that 17 year old optimism I had thought was long dead starting to wriggle. I think it's because so many of the original team are on it, it give it some legitimacy I guess. It's feeling I haven't really felt since I saw that first Episode 1 trailer back in the late 1990's and realized Star Wars was coming back.

I hope it doesn't turn out the same way.

Ah cell shaded goodness. But while I can see that they'd want to mimic the minimalism of the original material that demo video make it look like a pretty empty game. If they just put the things that are there closer together it wouldn't be so bad...

Still, it's got the humor.

Quality time without the hassle of travel, being outdoors, actual personal interaction or gutting fish, perfect!

Although, with his gaming skills and sense of humor Toontown Online would probably be more appropriate.

The game industry will probably only ever offer as much stability as the TV or Film industry (or web development for that matter). You might have a good run if you land on an IP that has successful sequels and doesn't jump developers (like FIFA mentioned above), but the vast majority of people are going to go from job to job as the products come and go. This is true in TV and film and they have unions, it's just a result of the on-again-off-again cash flow model that is a product cycle.

Studios and game companies just can't afford to pay full time salaries for creative staff when there isn't an active, funded, project being worked on. It's not so bad for people who work in an area with lots of game development (SF Bay Area, Seattle, Boston, etc. etc.), where another company is probably ramping up (how many developers laid off from Lucas are going to land at 2K Marin which is staffing up for Bioshock 2?). But for those more remote and with a family it can be devastating. You're cash flow has stopped and you're looking at flying cross country for interviews and eventually having to move.

You CAN settle down in the games industry, you just either have to be upper management (above the individual product team level) or in a hi-density game development area. And it helps to have an SO that doesn't freak-out whenever it's time to start passing out the résumés again.

It's such an ugly cycle, but so many companies fall for it more than once. Some bean counter gets in power who's got a stack of power point slides showing all the investors how much money can be saved by outsourcing most of the development (look how cheap labor is in [current country of explosive tech growth]!) Then after a year or more of delayed development, botched milestones, missed release, buggy final products and the resulting escalating cost overruns someone in management decides "this next big title needs a focused, dedicated in-house team that can be managed without an 8 - 12 hour time difference" and so they start handling their own IPs again. A year or two later some bean counter gets in power who's got a stack of power point slides...

I once almost applied at Disney Interactive around five or six years ago when we were thinking of moving down to LA. Then around 6 months later they had massive layoffs and announced an aggressive outsourcing campaign (why had they been hiring earlier, I wondered). Then about a year and a half later in-house job adds start popping up all over the place again.

Sigh.

So, yeah, looks like doom 3/half life. Where is the Duke Nukem irreverent humor and sass?

Duke Nukem was to Doom what Mad Magazine does to block buster movies. Where's the strip clubs? The adult Disneyland riff? The LA adult book stores? We don't need another Half Life/Doom 3/Halo game.

But then again this is a guy who's willing to judge your worth as a gamer based on what music you listen to or what kind of t-shirts you wear, so I have no idea why anyone would take his opinions seriously. This is someone who feels he needs to put quotes around "game development" (yet he also seems to think this typically involves big, fancy offices, I can assure you, it does not).

This sentence is pretty revealing: "hours into BioShock, which soon proves to be little more than a videogame, the possibility that the people in charge of music selection might have been confusing [Stephane Grappelli's "Beyond the Sea"] with that song from "The Little Mermaid" becomes strikingly relevant."

He's disappointed that the video game he's playing turns out to be a video game... and thus figures the artistic decisions he likes (which he himself lists as "underwater city, inspired art design, excellent music, political message, overt genetic enhancement as common and convenient as multivitamins") must have been mistakes?

For someone who obviously considers himself quite the intellect his complete failure to pick up on the significance of the protagonists chain tattoo is actually kind of funny.

I enjoyed the paragraph he spent describing how he'd "fix" the Big Daddy/Little Sister dynamic. He spent about 100 words saying "make the Big Daddy a boss character". A process he apparently would consider the "construction of actual thoughtful set-pieces".

So basically there's too much game in it for him. He wanted all the atmosphere and artistry to have more emotionally weight behind it and less running around trying to kill things. Not an original complaint.

But I do have to agree which his final conclusion:

"Ultimately, what we need is a game with BioShock's love of details and Gears of War's crunch and flow. Because God help us if all of our "intelligent" games are going to be boring to play, and all our exciting games are going to star oatmeal-skinned meatheads."

I dunno, I think they're more inhumanly formed Ds. Apparently breast implants and wonder bras are part of the "Demon Nurse" package. Frankly obviously fake tits never did much for me, but hey, some cleavage is better than none at all...

But the more I've looked at them the more "stiff" these picks look. And beige. Enough with the beige everyone!

I really would like to see a Silent Hill that reflected the original game on next gen hardware. I don't have high hopes that this is it, but I can hope.

Not a bad thing really.

Miyazaki is one-of-a-kind amazing, I'm gifting every nephew, cousin, and all other even vaguely related relative (and through proxy, their families) to Miyazaki DVDs on every gift giving holiday. I'm told they are often the favorite gifts received.

@FiendishMoogle: Learning not to read or do optional things that you don't like is a powerful skill that will serve you well in life. And will help you to annoy others less.

I mean this whole "music" industry is just one idea ripoff after another since a couple of guys beat rocks and sticks together in an African jungle some 100,000 years ago!

You want to play the original band game? Strip yourself naked, run into a forest and bang some sticks together. Other than that your just ripping someone else off!

Honestly! Notes? Clefts? Beats? Rhythms? That shit was old in Mozart's time! You'd think in thousands of years of evolution we'd have come up with SOME original music ideas, but no, it's all still these 'strings' and 'drums', 'guitars' and 'wind interments'. Blech.

So until I can play "Tribal Rhythm & Chant Hero", the only original music game, you idea pirates can just SHUT UP.

A Piñata!

Now we make party!

The Torque eingine is tied pretty closely to DirectX and Microsoft's XNA game studio so I'd think a port to PS3 would not be easy, requiring a lot of new code to handle things DirectX or XNA took care of for them.

That being said they've already ported it to the sMac and Linux so I'm guessing a PS3 port will not be long in coming. It's a pretty big market for GarageGames to ignore, and the 3D game engine market is starting to get crowded. The Current Game Developer lists 11, a couple of which could compete with Torque for the lower end market and most of which support PS3.

They can't afford to ignore it forever.

Let the katana dicing begin!

Good idea guys.

Also, did anyone else puzzle over this: "they saw see through notes that Neversoft really wouldn't comment on other than saying they're trying to patent it"

Patenting transparent notes? Really? Don't have anything better to do???

Sigh.