Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:The market is getting tighter and tighter (Score 1) 203

1: I'm not complaining about the analog inputs on the N64, but more the "lets stick a trigger under neath the whole thing". Look at Wii games like Donkey Kong Country or New Super Mario Bros, and you'll be holding the joystick one way playing the game fine, but then have to shake the controller for another input which could simply have been another button. It disjoints your game play like having to switch from 2 handed keyboard to mouse and back on some web games.

2:I think calling when we're talking of quality reflex games that are fun to play, Battletoads doesn't really make my list for a game to be remembered. There are actually a lot of quality relfex games for the NES era such as The Legend of Zelda 1&2, SuperMario Bros, Contra, etc etc. Calling reflex games bad by nature by picking out one that isn't an example of a good one is disingenuous.

3:I think you simply misunderstood me: Cerebral has another definition than "Brain to computer interface", it means it feels good to your brain. Tasks that map well to the brain with low frustration are cerebral. I'm sure you've heard this before as a brain researcher. When I say link your brain, I'm talking NES/SNES or PS3/XBOX360 controllers, but some game developers should take the pressure off to map every last button to a unique action. Sometimes having less buttons and actions to select from puts the user in more of a comfortable box to play from with limited choices. Not every game would benefit from limited number of actions, but some would.

Comment Continued (dodging Slashdot filter) (Score 2) 203

Again, I'll say it that I think Nintendo would have a lot of success in Android/iOS/PC markets just making games and controllers. I mean what they could do easily is have their old games available on Android/iOS/PC through some sort of official emulator instead of the underground doing it. Then they could use Steam and people could buy old Nintendo games for whatever discounted price they wanted to sell them for. People living today can't get all those old games easily unless they go the illegal rom route, and not everyone feels it is right to use ROMs they didn't pay for. Sure some don't care, and I have nothing against piracy, but some do. I bet there would be a bunch of money in either: A: releasing those old games on other platforms, or B: Lowering the price drastically on the WiiU on those old games so they're not 30$, but maybe 1$. If people knew they could buy a WiiU and a ton of old games on the cheap, they would be buying the WiiU.

So yes, if I was CEO of Nintendo, I'd have as many old games to buy on WiiU for as cheap as possible: like 30-90 cents. If your WiiU system had such legacy dominance that people could know they had all the old games, more people would be buying WiiU. I bet they'd fly off the shelves. Then once having paid the overhead of having the system, they'd buy more premium games. It is time to stop pretending pirates aren't out there, and competing with them for your legacy software. Every sale of legacy software is one more than you'd have otherwise. Not every 12 year old has been around for the past 30 years or has parents who have been video gamers. You start giving kids the ability to play video game history on the cheap, and your system will be loved.

In fact I'd make it a selling point of every Nintendo system from here on out to provide an online network to buy legacy titles at the appropriate price point. There's a point where you don't want to sell the last generations titles which are still around for too cheap, but the general concept to allow legacy titles to be purchased on future Nintendo systems, and this could be a way Nintendo not only dodges today's storm, but sures up an unsinkable ship moving forward. It would be almost similar to a homebrew Steam store... Nintendo could even swing license deals with people who made old games to get them on there.

Comment The market is getting tighter and tighter (Score 1) 203

Between old games still being there for us to play, new free to play web games, playerbases condensing into specific multiplayer games, and the extra power XBOX and PS4 go, Nintendo can only offer us sequels to popular games they had. Cell phones and Tablets are huge competitors to Nintendo too. I think Nintendo could pull out a win by stop gimmicking it up with their controller. Better yet, they could make the defacto standard controller designed for cell phone/Tablets and continue to make software.

I know a lot of people had fun on the N64,gamecube,wii, and WiiU, but the last game system I took serious that Nintendo made was the Snes. It was the last game system which controller wasn't a gimmick, and before PC games became generally better in terms of content. Now don't get me wrong, there were a couple games there after SNES that I know are popular, but I didn't get into. I always thought the idea of console gaming was focused on the controller to be action reflex oriented, and hidden buttons underneath the controller, or motion sensors just distract. The best games link your brain with pure cerebral responses to what happens in the game. If your controller requires 200 extra milliseconds just to engage the button, or you can't hit all the buttons with any hand configuration, you screwed up as a game controller designer. The games should be the toys, not the gimmick controllers.

Comment Laugh at me, but Flash is still relevant (Score 1) 315

With Flash you can make: Destop/Web/Android phone+tablet/ios phone+tablet all in the same code!

Flash is a lot like C/C++ and Java, except it allows you to a couple things easier.

I think of all the languages though, Java has to be the winner. It has about the power of C/C++, except you don't need to dot the is and cross the ts. Java is superior to C/C++ in strings, garbage collection and arrays. For most projects you'd take code that has less bugs in it and develops faster than code that executes a slight % faster.

Comment Re:D&D influenced me and my game design HEAVIL (Score 1) 127

Thank you for that:

I made my own RPG influenced off D&D. Intergalactic Bounty Hunter (needs a webpage)

I had a dodge and an armor. Damage reduction is 1/2 your armor plus a roll of 1d(That 1/2 your armor number). Armor stops low damaging things for the most part only takes the edge off harder hitting stuff.

My weapons would be sorted between lots of rapid hitting small damage, or "armor piercing" high damage hits

Sometimes a lot of rapid damage deals a total higher damage than an armor piercer if someone isn't wearing armor.

It modeled pretty well until I did bad approximations for spraying an AK47 full clip at a tank... if the tank rolled low, and the AK47 rolled a high damage, and a high % of bullets hit, the tank style robot would take massive damage. The over all system was really good and the atmosphere was kinda like Futurama before its time... The game was heavily influenced by Spaceballs: What if warp drive did get really cheap all of a sudden and could be strapped onto any vehicle? You'd have stuff like airtight Winnebegos flying around space. Actually I've been thinking of my next step for my game design/programming career... maybe fine tuning this system and releasing it to the public might be good.

Comment There are modern day fruit tree efforts too (Score 4, Interesting) 71

Since fruit trees can bear annually without any specific farming, they're an okay food source supplement in places war torn, or recovering from deforestation

I have a tweet I do on twitter daily: Go #green & help the #poor @foodforthepoor Plant fruit trees in #Haiti http://www.foodforthepoor.org/...

Comment D&D influenced me and my game design HEAVILY (Score 1) 127

I was raised on Choose your Own adventure books bought at a thrift store. Then I got the Red Box when I was 12. I got all the boxes then. Later I got original AD&D from a friend.

Dungeons and Dragons got some things right, but I argue against some parts of their system such as armor. Their armor means you dodge more, but if you get hit, it is full damage. A better system makes armor reduce damage, and agility+dodge skill avoid attacks. There's no ways to overstate D&D's affects on modern games.

Comment That's nothing, I found something even worse (Score 1) 154

From my Crystalfighter blog

May 2nd, 2014: I just thought of a killer game with Occulus Rift. Imagine outerspace sports. Imagine one where if you extend your legs or arms out full, they have thrust. The thrust can propel you around, or push the ball around. You'd have to be in a sphere(suspended in a harness) which rotated around instead of the standard treadmill design. So this installation would only be good for amusement parks and... arcades(heh)? The downside of this game is that people will get HYPER sick. You got 3d vision of Occulus, and you're spun around by your waist. I don't even know if it is possible to suspend someone from their waist and spin them in 360x360 angles. There would be 2 variations of this game. One would be a plain ball. The other one might be a ball which is charged with a + or -. And people would have positive on one side of them and negative on the other. I didn't think it fully out... I do think your hand thrust could be weaker than your leg thrust. So the standard move will be to stretch out like superman, your arms in front and your legs in back, so you push the ball forward with your forward thrust. Another standard move will be to put your arms and legs straight in front of you to thrust in reverse. Or both legs behind you and arms behind you to get super forward thrust. I think starting out, people will just have trouble stabalizing themselves, so there should be an autostabalization "friction" that can be applied to new players, and slowly taken off the more skill the teams have.

Comment Only way I'd wear a smart watch (Score 2) 381

Is if it came with a red LED display and looked cheaply made. The people who wear watches anymore seem to be,"Hey look at how much money I have." so looking like you're going in the opposite direction would be art as fashion... if it didn't cost a lot of money. So maybe I'm thinking it is time to go invest in a 1$ LED watch off ebay to be a smart ass. Oh even better would be to leave it blinking 12:00 all day.

Comment Re:Outside of Valve I don't think many developers. (Score 1) 86

It is called throwing spaghetti to the wall to try and see what sticks. If you find people like a certain mechanic, you make a game around it. Another excuse is there are a bigger casual audience than ever, so the simplification of video games keeps getting more and more real. These start up companies barely have enough resources to put together anything. Just look at the Flash games on web portals. A lot of Flash games on web portals aren't as good as games you played in the NES. And there really isn't much money in free to play with advertisments unless your game goes viral, get a million plays, then you're looking at a couple grand anyway.

Slashdot Top Deals

Without life, Biology itself would be impossible.

Working...