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Wii Thread : Metroid! Lock this thread and make a new one
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Be sure to try to play through it with as close to 0 sanity as possible sometime.
I really think that this is one of the best features of the Wii. The sort of "history lesson" that you get from playing old games and seeing where the evolution happened. Unfortunately, they didn't just release every single old game all at once, because people would've bought ten games right up front, then gone "HOLY SHIT I JUST SPENT EIGHTY DOLLARS" and played maybe four of those games for fifteen minutes each, and then the next time they go to buy a game, they'll be like "well...I do have six other games I haven't even touched." This way, there's the hype of a "new release" every time a fifteen-year-old game comes out on the VC, plus you don't get overloaded with new content all at once, so you can't really develop an instant backlog of unplayed games. You'll buy more, and you'll buy more consistently, as long as your Wii is actually getting used.
I mean, THQ SUPPORTS THE WII was a headline for god sakes
so if these people just realized after launch that the Wii is going to have a large audience, they would have started making big games around then
and I'm assuming better games are going to take at least a year-ish to develop
so we should start seeing more high-profile third party games around the beginning of 2008 or a bit later
I am never going to buy another Sony product as long as I live. Our family had a Sony DVD player that broke after a year. I should not have to repair my playstation 2 six times only to have it crap out regardless. The Rootkit fiasco was a bit of a "what the fuck, dude" moment. In general, they treat their consumers like shit stuck to the bottom of their mighty corporate boot.
The 360 looks pretty dang neat. It has some great games, XBox Live sounds really cool, and Microsoft seems to be putting a lot of support behind it. However, about half of the games that come out for it will be on the PC, and I have one of those.
Nintendo is going to get a nice line of titles out once they hit their stride in a bit, and I'm really looking forward to seeing their eventual online network. I haven't owned a Gamecube, so at the moment I'm pretty content to sit back and finish the titles I missed until they start pumping out softeewaryes.
Has this replaced Cardboard Tube's Mario vs. Master Chief thread?
What in the who, now? Is this what G&T is like all the time?
Yeah. The rootkit thing was fucking horrible. I never owned a Sony DVD player (just used my PS2), and although my PS2 seems to be slowing down its disc-read time (which occasionally causes some games to lock), it has been in good working order since I bought it, which was one year after the PS2 came out. I don't know what happened with yours that it needed six repairs, but mine has only recently started to show its age. Sony's way of dealing with the public is fucking horrible. Their tech is the best out there (the PS3, I mean), but they seriously fuck it up with how they behave and what they say.
WHAT THE FUCK
Is that a joke or not? I can't tell. G&T is reputed to full of super-retarded Nintendo fanboys, so I could see a topic like this being serious.
And Sonic fanboys.
anyway, new Mario scans (spoiler'd because they're large)
e: welp, now they're there I think
Of course, I can believe that they actually made a hard game again. It's not what I'd expect, given their recent history, but I know that they know how to do it.
I may be wrong about this, but didn't Soul Reaver do the streaming worlds that allowed you to have almost real time interaction through the levels (as well as between worlds). There was some times when you would have to wait while opening doors, and the phasing between worlds took time (but was visualy impressive). I would imagine this type of game could be done but the game has to be designed that way from the start. It seems that a lot of developers do the seperate levels simply because it's easier to make from a coding standpoint. I do agree with Defender that the Wii is underpowered and starting with limited hardware is never good for developers.
Resident Evil?
Trauma Center?
Technically, SOTN was one big, streaming world. But they broke it up into areas and put little "loading" rooms between those areas. It was very clever; they knew your top movement speed, and they made sure that those rooms would take long enough to cross that you wouldn't be able to get to the other side before the next set of art assets could be loaded.
Soul Reaver used a similar trick. The area that you could see was fairly small, and traversing that area took a fairly long time, relatively speaking. The trick is the balance and the closed-off nature of both of these games. It wasn't like GTA or Oblivion or WoW where the world is pretty wide-open by design and by the "open, outdoor" nature of those games. In fact, some players of WoW even comment on the fact that there are just these super-steep cliffs all over the place, blocking sight and travel.
Even the Prince of Persia games on the PS2 use that trick. By making the player do a fixed series of moves to get from point A to point B, they can be certain that the player will take at least a certain amount of time.
The question is more about how much stuff you need to have loaded at a time and how fast you can load new stuff. Games like GTA can go on lower-end systems because the AI is dumb, the AI just spawns (it's not persistent) around you as you move, and the graphics are far lighter in terms of texture usage and animations (poly count doesn't generally matter as much as texture usage) than other games on the same platform. In other words, you can do streaming on a wide variety of systems, but streaming necessarily means using well under the system's maximum capacity. The smoother your streaming, the more resources need to be kept on standby.
As an example of a streaming game that basically maxes out the system, look at God of War. It's very smooth and distinctly uses streaming and very clever art assets to disguise its loading times. However, it does have weaknesses. The easiest way to make God of War show its weaknesses is simply to backtrack where you aren't expected to. It uses a streaming scheme that keeps a little space in FRONT of you loaded, but nothing BEHIND you. That way, the smallest possible amount of memory is used to store things that aren't immediately on-screen. Another thing that it does is lock you in certain areas while you fight monsters. When the monsters are dead, they vanish, and there's a forced pause in gameplay as you watch the magic barrier do an animation and then vanish. During that time, monster art assets can be unloaded and level-streaming can begin. It's an extremely well-made game, and it barely shows any seams, but part of that is because it is not very open; the design is very linear, and that helps the streaming process. There are similar ways to trip up Prince of Persia, but Prince is much more simplistic than God of War, and it uses much slower navigation, so it's harder to trip it up.
I doubt Miyamoto plays his games as much as he watches other people play them. That's just not the type of guy he is.
What good cook doesn't taste the food he's preparing?
It's like Rule Number One of game design that you should play your own game and the games of other people.
Sonic is radical.
Yeah, Miyamoto doesn't do that. He's not a gamer.
He did like Space Channel Five though.
Well, it certainly shows in his later games. Also, how do you know that?
EDIT: I mean I know the whole "people play my game and I watch to see their smiles" thing, but that's bullshit. You can't design a game that way. He's talking about focus-grouping a game, not creating one.
Because he looses at everygame he plays. Journalists beat him at Wii Sports. He dies a bunch in SMG. Reggie stomps him at Wii Fit. He has no gaming talent. Miyamoto is casual.
The system is a piece of shit that only simpletons who fell for the marketing bought and Nintendo doesn't put out 100 awesome games a year so, therefore, it is an awful system. Also, being excited for future games makes you a stupid fanboy!
You don't like it, check. Understood, got it. Now please shut the fuck up, christ. Go steal some kid's lollipop and ramble to him for twenty minutes about how he's a tool of the candy corporations for actually enjoying something. I usually don't mind your debates, Defender, but you're just being a dipshit.
he actually kinda stopped for a while there
also he has some pretty valid points
but I'm sure this is going to fix everything
I really don't know why people keep debating with him...
the dude knows what he is talking about. he makes some valid points, and whilst he is extreme in his views, they are indisputable.
and other people start the argument, dick. people egg defender on.
Yeah, good move there, Joon. Misrepresent what I said, and ignore all the perfectly valid points I made. Retard.
(It's fun.)
Yeah, I bet. Fun like a prostate massage: It's kinda interesting but holy shit there's stuff up my ass why am I doing this!
and some people like things in their ass, which happen to be the same people who like getting verbally sodomized by defender
Losing at a casual game has nothing to do with skill; that's the point of a casual game, that first-time players can beat people who have been playing for years. So ignore Wii Sports and WiiFit. I mean, shit, Conan O'Brien beat Serena Williams in Wii Sports tennis. I realize that it's not an accurate tennis simulator (and if I didn't realize that, well, this would prove it), but the point is that who wins a casual game is PURPOSELY unrelated to skill, strength, speed, intelligence, tactical thinking, planning, or any of the other elements that games traditionally use.
The guy created some fucking hard games. Don't tell me Zelda 1 was created to be a walk in the park. That game was anything but casual.
Now, there's at least one world-famous musician I can think of who was deaf, but he was a master of his art BEFORE losing his hearing. So I can believe that Miyamoto's old age has sapped his ability to play games, but I do not believe that he was never a gamer.
I don't think this can be summarized any better.
Q. How do you explain the number of changes to Mario's appearance over the years?
A. The main reason the character changed was because we have had different artists and programmers working on the Mario series from game to game. Also, the hardware technology has become more advanced and hardware limitations are the most important factor in influencing what we can and can't do. Who knows how Mario will look in the future. Maybe he'll wear metallic clothes!
On topic: I would like a wii for the small handful of games I know wont come out on other systems. It is a small price tag and I do not care for any of that casual bullshit, also being able to play all the old GC games is a plus.