My bro bought me Megarace for my Birthday, but surprised me. He made it seem like he got me nothing, then bam! Megarace! I had to make a floppy boot disk to run it on our 486. The screenshots on the back of the boxed promised 3D graphics! This was the future!
The actually game was anything but. I mean it was sorta 3D? It was like your car was centered and a grainy film of graphics would be moving on a rail? I don't know, but it looked sloppy and felt like crap to control.
Novastorm a shooter from around that time was kind of the same. Where the graphics were prerendered as FMV? Novastorm was fun though and had a kick ass soundtrack!
Anyway, the host of Megarace would appear on FMV that looked like it came from the SegaCD and his voice sounded like shit. Okay I understand the crappy video? But his voice? Just use a wave file.
@Orionsaint: Every single one of these images is burned in my fraking head. When I am old, senile, and Alzheimer's ridden I will be spouting things about Mega Race my kids wont understand. It will sound like made up nonsense, but it is real to me.
GOG is a beautiful thing. I love how they make sure the game works on modern PCs before selling it. Saves SO much frustration and tweaking. I just hope they get Rocket Jockey, which is near impossible to get running on XP.
@ShaggE got that Mango Sentinel. SCOOPS!: GOG is a great service. I wish Steam would have more old games, but I can understand making sure the games are compatible being kind of headache for them and not really something they would want to deal with.
I bought Kingpin: Life of Crime from GOG and it works like a charm. I just wish there were some of the other old titles like Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold and Ultrabots. I hope business continues to go well for GOG so that they one day can get some of those more obscure titles on their site.
Once subscribed and after having played Planescape: Torment and the Baldur's Gate series again, I found the rest of their selection...underwhelming. In all fairness, though, I had already played the Sam and Max series; if you haven't had a chance to play those, it's work the price of admission for a couple of months.
Also, the Grimm crap is garbage and a waste of internets.
@DraconisXC: I subscribed for Sam & Max for a couple of months. After a couple of episodes, the repetition starts to set in, and having to go to the same location for 75% of the game each and every episode wears thin.
The lost of Uru hurt as well, for me at least. The few good games on the service are ones I either own outright or could not get to run properly. Given that so much of what is offer are budget PC games as it is, the recurring subscription fee is more likely better served just buying the games.
@Omnimon: They also need a service that works well before they'll be given money. I'm one of the users affected by their stubborn refusal to add 64-bit compatibility. They lost me as a customer because of that, I'm not paying for half-assed support.
I'm really into one or the other. If you check my GamerDNA page I'm totally into exploration. More than anything, when I pop in a new game, I want something I've never seen before, even if it sucks.
On the other hand, my long-term favorites are music, racing, fighting and puzzle games because I love refining my skills at something, so even though I may be rerunning the same level with the same configuration, if I can shave a little time off or get a few more points, it means it's played out differently.
Yes, that's pretty much directly conflicting. No, I don't really have a deeper point about it. '_';
Fable II was my disappointment of the year. I loved the first one but this one...I just don't appreciate. Perhaps I expect more out of games now. Molyneux's weak attempt to add consequences to a game somehow managed to turn the game into something where there were entirely no consequences whatsoever. I can force push my kid off a cliff. Bang one wife in front of the other and two pick up lines and an arm pump later; everything's great again.
Dead Space has consequences without even trying. Aim poorly. Manage your inventory poorly. Get your face eaten. Those are consequences I can embrace.
I haven't traded in a game in years and I traded in Fable II yesterday and I haven't a shred of regret about doing so...which is surprising.
@bigdaddygamebot: I am with you. I don't want to be teh bitter internet fanboy here, but I really expected better of Fable 2. It added some cool new things, but it didn't fix ANY of my issues with the first one. Well, it let me play as a girl, so I guess that was an issue. But the design of the world- everything coded like a series of interlocking rooms rather than an open landscape- a worse main story, and incredibly shallow social interaction, and other issues drove me nuts.
It's on my shelf now, having beaten the main story and just stopped, and someday I will likely pick it back up, with SEVERELY lessened expectations (i.e. hardly expecting it to even be fun) and have a much better time. But it's not really much of an upgrade on the first at all. Fix the core issues before you add new features next time, Molyneux.
Dangeresque (Kojima-san doesn't have to make Metal Gear any more) was starred
Dangeresque (Kojima-san doesn't have to make Metal Gear any more) was unstarred
Unfortunately, more developers seem to be dumbing down their games to make a broader audience of players. The old Baldur's Gate, System Shock, Deus Ex, and Fallouts were mind boggling compared to game released today. Personally, I enjoy the amount of depth given to those games compared to the new ones, I mean who cares if the Baldur's Gate UI and HUD took up half the screen, it didn't joke around! And I mean in System Shock you could play arcade games in your inventory screen. Where is that in BioShock? Oh, that's right, we're too stupid nowadays to have an inventory screen.
My problem with "games are dumbed down" elitism is it inevitably ignores any evidence to the contrary to suit it's own needs.
For instance, Fallout is used as one of the original examples. The original Fallouts used fast travel with random encounters but the originals didn't actually allow you to roam the wastes as you can in 3, all of that area, with interesting things and people to find and encounters that tie in to the rest of the game is an incredible amount of depth that doesn't use a quest target and didn't exist in the previous versions but is utterly ignored by the elitist crowd because it doesn't fit their narrative that games are not as deep as they used to be.
@Xorrel: First, open world is de rigueur nowadays. Second, not all randoms were combat, especially the luck-based numbers.
Third, "didn't actually allow you to roam the wastes as you can in 3" is somewhat deceptive. F1, F2, & F:T all allowed you to roam, and discover either set towns or the luck-stat based random encounters. You just didn't do so as a blip on a screen.
I agree that the F3 "hey, what's over there!?" bit is fun (though it was present under the only system as well, and slightly cut back by the impression you couldn't go to the store in the Fallout work for a carton of milk without being asked by some random passerby to help find the Jabberwock). But I don't think this is a grand progression of depth.
In fact, it goes to the point that the elitists always have, in that the new version is primarily interesting because it's all shiny, new, and pretty. Walking around in the environment is much more attractive than the blip on a screen. But it's not that different in terms of the grand analysis for what's changed between the games.
@Ravel: Unique story? Uh.. it was basically your typical "pauper hero" story that has existed since before Star Wars popularised it.
I mean, there's some unique touches, but really. Evil tyrant in a tower that happens to be a world-destroying weapon. And it's up to a formerly homeless Chosen One to take him down.
@notquitedeadyet: I mean, spoilers for the first five minutes, but beyond that... you know all that stuff for 99% of the game. And HikariOblivion is quite right- I found the story quite unoriginal, with some interesting twists, but overall dissatisfying.
Dodging spoilers here, but the kicker at the end, to me, really was a kick, only in the face. It seemed to spit on everything I'd done, make it as though the hours spent on this quest had been wasted, and left me with a very bad taste in my mouth for the game. It's too bad, it wasn't a bad game... I just focused too much on the story, and the story was less than just uninspired- thanks to the ending, it was kind of insulting.
Dangeresque (Kojima-san doesn't have to make Metal Gear any more) was starred
Dangeresque (Kojima-san doesn't have to make Metal Gear any more) was unstarred
Login
Enter your username and password.
Reset Password
Please enter your email address to have your password reset.
Register
Registering will give you a user profile and the ability to add other users as friends. To become a commenter, however, you need to audition.
04/30/09
The actually game was anything but. I mean it was sorta 3D? It was like your car was centered and a grainy film of graphics would be moving on a rail? I don't know, but it looked sloppy and felt like crap to control.
Novastorm a shooter from around that time was kind of the same. Where the graphics were prerendered as FMV? Novastorm was fun though and had a kick ass soundtrack!
Anyway, the host of Megarace would appear on FMV that looked like it came from the SegaCD and his voice sounded like shit. Okay I understand the crappy video? But his voice? Just use a wave file.
For those too young to remember,
04/30/09
It was real to me.
04/30/09
04/30/09
I bought Kingpin: Life of Crime from GOG and it works like a charm. I just wish there were some of the other old titles like Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold and Ultrabots. I hope business continues to go well for GOG so that they one day can get some of those more obscure titles on their site.
04/30/09
04/30/09
Same with Rise of the Triad.
04/30/09
05/01/09
04/30/09
fuckin 'a
01/19/09
Also, the Grimm crap is garbage and a waste of internets.
01/19/09
The lost of Uru hurt as well, for me at least. The few good games on the service are ones I either own outright or could not get to run properly. Given that so much of what is offer are budget PC games as it is, the recurring subscription fee is more likely better served just buying the games.
01/19/09
01/19/09
11/09/08
On the other hand, my long-term favorites are music, racing, fighting and puzzle games because I love refining my skills at something, so even though I may be rerunning the same level with the same configuration, if I can shave a little time off or get a few more points, it means it's played out differently.
Yes, that's pretty much directly conflicting. No, I don't really have a deeper point about it. '_';
11/09/08
Dead Space has consequences without even trying. Aim poorly. Manage your inventory poorly. Get your face eaten. Those are consequences I can embrace.
I haven't traded in a game in years and I traded in Fable II yesterday and I haven't a shred of regret about doing so...which is surprising.
11/10/08
It's on my shelf now, having beaten the main story and just stopped, and someday I will likely pick it back up, with SEVERELY lessened expectations (i.e. hardly expecting it to even be fun) and have a much better time. But it's not really much of an upgrade on the first at all. Fix the core issues before you add new features next time, Molyneux.
11/09/08
11/10/08
My problem with "games are dumbed down" elitism is it inevitably ignores any evidence to the contrary to suit it's own needs.
For instance, Fallout is used as one of the original examples. The original Fallouts used fast travel with random encounters but the originals didn't actually allow you to roam the wastes as you can in 3, all of that area, with interesting things and people to find and encounters that tie in to the rest of the game is an incredible amount of depth that doesn't use a quest target and didn't exist in the previous versions but is utterly ignored by the elitist crowd because it doesn't fit their narrative that games are not as deep as they used to be.
11/10/08
Third, "didn't actually allow you to roam the wastes as you can in 3" is somewhat deceptive. F1, F2, & F:T all allowed you to roam, and discover either set towns or the luck-stat based random encounters. You just didn't do so as a blip on a screen.
I agree that the F3 "hey, what's over there!?" bit is fun (though it was present under the only system as well, and slightly cut back by the impression you couldn't go to the store in the Fallout work for a carton of milk without being asked by some random passerby to help find the Jabberwock). But I don't think this is a grand progression of depth.
In fact, it goes to the point that the elitists always have, in that the new version is primarily interesting because it's all shiny, new, and pretty. Walking around in the environment is much more attractive than the blip on a screen. But it's not that different in terms of the grand analysis for what's changed between the games.
11/09/08
You have to give them some credit for the blend of rpg with life-sim and the scale of what they made.
11/09/08
I also forgot to mention the uniqueness of the game in story and chracter, I can't see anything stereotypical about it.
11/09/08
I mean, there's some unique touches, but really. Evil tyrant in a tower that happens to be a world-destroying weapon. And it's up to a formerly homeless Chosen One to take him down.
11/10/08
11/10/08
Dodging spoilers here, but the kicker at the end, to me, really was a kick, only in the face. It seemed to spit on everything I'd done, make it as though the hours spent on this quest had been wasted, and left me with a very bad taste in my mouth for the game. It's too bad, it wasn't a bad game... I just focused too much on the story, and the story was less than just uninspired- thanks to the ending, it was kind of insulting.