DanDeFool said:
Renegrade said:
I like the part around five minutes where he describes the two groups who might be interested in this title.
It's spot on. I'm part of the latter "setting the publisher's office on fire" group. I expect a re-imaging of a game to improve it, flesh it out, etc. Not dumb it down.
The people in the former "too young to remember it" group won't give a damn about any of that, so EA might as well just give it another name that doesn't involve any licensing issues.
I'm glad the X-Com shooter got pushed back and (hopefully) replaced with a more appropriate remake. If they go ahead with the shooter in the long run, they should ditch all the X-Com references. A clean slate would give them more creative freedom in the shooter, and avoid angering those of us who remember the old strategic game. Heck, if it works out under it's own franchise, that's another franchise for gamers to enjoy, and the publisher to sell.
Why can't more re-imagings be like Battlezone (1998) or Battlezone II? (problems with bugs and forward compatibility aside)
Sad and true. But if you think about it, there wasn't any reason to expect anything else. Since the PC exclusive is dead, and it'd be nigh on impossible to replicate old school Syndicate's gameplay on the home console, another bloody FPS is about all they could do with the property.
Besides, it's not like the transition to FPS didn't work for Fallout, right? It's just too bad EA didn't follow Fallout's example of maintaining the depth and complexity of the original.
To be honest, Fallout is still on my "to play" list. I heard horrible reports of bugs in an otherwise cool game, so I held off to give 'em time to patch, and um, the procrastination sort of got out of control. I wasn't aware they dumbed it down though
I'm actually hoping to see a revival of sorts in the PC scene with things like Steam. Obviously we're not going to see "AAA" titles anytime soon, but I can see up and coming studios releasing PC-exclusive games, especially if they can twig on to things like Steam and "not charging $79.95 for what's basically Quake 1 with higher res textures and a few mods thrown in for free".
If a developer could price something cheaply, and make a good effort that doesn't involve an art department that's better funded than most movie studios, I think we could see a resurgence in quality, complex gaming on the PC side, while leaving the playable-movie big-budget, lowest-common-denominator crud on the consoles.
In fact, I noticed that Carrier Command is getting a remake, and so far from the brief clips they've shown, it looks like a spiffied up version of the original, rather than a dumbed down FPS. The mantas and walruses (is that how you say that? walrus? walruses? walrii?) go under full AI control when you're not operating them, instead of just a very limited autopilot... If they distribute properly, for a reasonable price, and it even vaguely lives up to expectation, it could do very well. Especially if people would stop pirating everything that's made out of bits.
I wonder if we could start a grass-roots movement for this purpose?
Anyhow..I just hope they learn about forward compatibility this time -- it's not impossible, I still play around with a DirectX 3 game (that I wrote in the mid-late nineties) on a Win7/64 system. Even though somehow Star Trek Armada, which is what, DX7+? won't run on anything past Win98.
