XBox 360 not quite Amiga I know

[Legerdemain]

The lockout stuff they put into consoles is interesting, but whats the point of it? Homebrew games on the consoles are usually very sub standard, and almost nobody playes them. ( Take a look at some of the dream cast home brews).

The Dreamcast homebrew scene is rather alive still. 80% of what I currently am running on my Dreamcast is homebrew applications. This I haven't even tried yet, but it was said to be rather interesting: http://www.drill.rr.nu/ ...but anyways, that wasn't my point. My point was that the point with lockout stuff, in my world, is to prevent the following:

1. If region lockout: That people will import games from regions releasing the games before their own region, making the launch of the title in their own region not as comercially succesful as planned.

2. If cd- or dvdr lockout: What do you think killed the Dreamcast (or at least made it last so extremely shortly) besides not all too many big titles being released?

I am pretty sure that if the Gamecubes lockout had been busted earlier than it was the console wouldn't be alive by today. For some reason the companies developing games seems okay with the fictious thought that if a game should be released for the Gamecube it must be adjusted to suit children, thus the lack of "mature" titles to be found. EVen when Square returned to Nintendo they didn't bring a blockbuster title to the Gamecube, no, they played along with this "it has to be for children"-thought and brought the world the extremely crappy multiplayer Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles which no one seems to like the slightest. The console is doomed, not due to lack of power, but due to lack of prejudice. And if it hadn't been due to nobody being able to bust the lockout all too early, I think it would have been dead as a console by today.

I wonder how well the AMiGA would be doing by today if every single commercial game being played at people's homes would have been bought. Utopia, yes, but just a thought anyways.

[Legerdemain]

oes anyone know if XBox 360 or PS3 runs games better than the previous systems, or if they are designed to run old software "as is"?

The XBox 360 won't support full backwards compitability as far as I know. There are even some criterias that must be met in order to be able to play the old games (but concerning how the actual emulation will work I don't know anything about):

1. In order to run old games your XBox 360 must not be of the "light" version without the harddrive... or...

2. The games released for the old XBox must have an inbedded emulator (which in other words means that only new games that includes this emulator software will run unless you have the non "light" version of the XBox 360).

To make things even more interesting... the "light" version of the XBox 360 will not be able to run some of the XBox 360 games, since some of them will require a harddrive. How great is that, not?

It may be that the PS2 never did run old games the way it initially was told to do (with better looking graphics and less loading times), but at least it ran all the old PS1 titles (as far as I've seen) wihtout any problems.

As far as ePSXe is concerning for running PS1 titles under Windows... well, I've finally managed to make a setup which seems to run what I've tested the way it is meant to be run... but the plugin system used really sucks. Not only is one confronted with the hassle of finding which plugins to use (and which are most compatible with the games that one wants to run), after that there is a mess of options to deal with. Yet I haven't found a good way to run Final Fantasy IX, the copy protection on the original CD's are to dependent on the emulator emulating the PS1 perfectly... and furthermore I still haven't managed to get Symphony Of The Night to run flawlessly... for some reason I always get down to the option of running it not in fullscreen, or in fullscreen always besides when the actual gameplay kicks in where I suddenly get big black borders on top and bottom of the screen. But, since the rest of my games seems to work so well, I just won't bother adjusting the settings any more, I will probably just end up screwing it all up again.

Why can't emulation work as well as in Shapeshifter... or in AmiMastergear which is one hell of an emulator (besides not running one of my favourite SMS games ever, the rather cute port of Ys).

Oh well.

[Legerdemain]

But, really... Doom 3 does anything but run smoothly on the XBox... =/ ...(my guess is that) it was a bit too demanding for the system thus the not really high framerate. But on the other hand, Doom 3 for the PC must be one of the worst written games ever... I mean, what hardware does it demand? It ain't that much nicer than Half Life 2 (if at all), and Half Life 2 runs rather nice on even a <2GHz Pentium with 256MB of RAM and a somewhat decent GFX-card. I am yet to see Doom 3 run really smooth on ANY system.

Alien Breed 3D II, anyone? I am still waiting... but running smooth it ain't, ever.

[Legerdemain]

I also like the Gamecube the most.

I just find it so sad that no one seems to dare to make any good ports or original games for the console. There are remakes and continuations of already existing series... but I have yet to see a large scale developed game to hit the cube the last few years. And I also find it sad that it is looked upon as a children console, but fact is, that there is no PS2 game that couldn't have been made and even made better on the Gamecube. It just so happens that there is something going on at the moment in the market where people seem to think that games for "adults" must be gray, green or dark and/or lots of blood and violence in them.

How could it be that Metroid Prime 2 - Echoes were so overlooked? It is an "adult" game. But, no, when there are adult games released for the system they seem to be ignored. Last time it seemed to work was when Resident Evil 4 were released... but, alas, don't they just have to make a port for the PS2 aswell. My guess is that is because of the fact that they are realising that there is much more money to make out of that port than the original Gamecube release because now the game has got the hype that they were looking for and now the real consumers, the mass, will be treated with the game with some goodies added.

Thing is. The Dreamcast killed all the competition when it was released. But it didn't make it. It could easily have lived on and competed with the PS2 if there were larger developer support for the machine (and if it hadn't been so darn easy to play pirated games on the console). In fact, it does sometimes feel like the battle should have been between the Dreamcast and the PS2, not between the Gamecube, PS2 and XBox. But, at least nowadays the developers seems to have overcome the obstacles that made it so hard to develop games for the PS2 using what the hardware really had to offer. But, when I start to play games like Shenmue, Rayman 2 or Ikaruga on my Dreamcast... dear god... what could that machine have been able to deliver it it would have had the time to be explored, just like the PS2?

Oh, well... back to the Gamecube... I love the console for its potential... and the fact that most games, even the PAL ones, can be run in perfectly smooth 60Hz. Looking at the various versions of GTA for the PS2, I can't understand how people can even accept the crappy framerate (in Vice City they have tried to hide it behind some kind of blur filter when things are going to fast, but the effect is rather bad control at that times instead).

Why can't the world wake up and realise what they need to do?

*grumble*

[Legerdemain]

Hmmm. I played Alien Breed 1 & 2 and 3d. What I liked about 1 & 2 was the puzzle aspects along with the action. I'm now playing Metroid Prime on the GameCube and THAT is exactly what it is. It's Alien Breed 3D - 4 or something. It's just so beautiful, huge and awesome.

Alien Breed have never been about getting that item over there then backtracking ones way back to the very beginning of the game to realise that it can be used there to unlock something entirely new (as far as I've played the series, which isn't really that much). Alien Breed has always been about minor puzzles solved in each level just to progress to the next. Even the 3D ones in the series. Though, if they had developed their concept it could have gotten somewhere closer in touch with the Metroid series, maybe.

That is one thing I have always found lacking in AMiGA games in general. They didn't develop their concepts. Turrican II did try some daring things, like making three stages in the otherwise rather ordinary (but excellent, may I add) platform game shoot'em up ones... and it worked perfectly. Why didn't that game inspire other to dare aswell?

For one thing, most platformers used this concept of instead of creating really huge, smart laid out and intriguing stages, which held the player occupied for some time, making them short and too complex with so much crammed in there that was physically possible... just to lengthen the time of playing by adding something that needed to be collected before one could exit the stage... Super Frog, Zool, Kid Chaos, and so on... not that I consider Super Frog being a bad game, but it could have done so much better with nicer layout of the levels without that boring coincollecting.

Concerning Metroid, once again, Exile is often compared to that very game... I haven't played Exile much at all, but I have yet to find any similarities?

[Legerdemain]

Finally, many DC games were ported to the GC as director's cuts. Skies of Arcadia was incredible. Ikaranga (spelling?) was also ported...and it's sequel I believe.

Concerning the rest you said I agree. SEGA did themselves no favour when not getting EA onboard, and neither by releasing the SEGA CD, SEGA 32X and SEGA Saturn in a row. Not good planning.

But, back to the ports... the port of Skies of Arcadia was really a work of haste. Not only did they screw up the music (it sounds like bad midi music on the Gamecube) but also the blur-filter which was used on the Dreamcast (you can see it at approx 50% of the screen and upwards on both consles, the textures do get kind of blurry) probably mainly due to not making the game lose FPS was not needed on the Gamecube... but it is there anyways. They could have raised the FPS, but no. And another problem was that the Gamecube version became too sharp at times... grahicswise. Just look at the clouds in the very intro/titlescreen on the Dreamcast and compare them with the Gamecube dito... they look terrible...  =)

Oh well. Bad port, but fantastic game anyways. I love it!

Ikaruga, made by Treasure (oh, that company can make me wet my pants at times), yep... it is an indirect sequel to the Saturn/Arcade game Radiant Silvergun (it may be that the game has recieved an unbelievable amount of praise, but I have never spent so many hours with a shooter before... and that even though I just got hold of it a couple of weeks ago  for the Saturn). Radiant Silvergun to me is the best shooter ever, and Ikaruga is great aswell... but a tad too hard.

Speaking of shooters...  noticed some few shooters on the AMiGA which were rather good. The R-Type port is very playable... but not fantastic. R-Type 2 was better. But I had completely overlooked Disposable Hero and Z-Out... those games were great! Often I hear people praise Project X, but in reality I find that game nothing but very nice to look at and way too hard for its own good. I am quite an experienced shoot'em up player (a bit above average, maybe), but I have really much problems with getting past the very first levels of Project X.

Hahahaha... this must be one of the threads were I speak about most things... talk about having problems sticking to the very topic! I just got started, I guess... I can't help myself.

[Legerdemain]

@_ThEcRoW

Are you saying that the graphics improvement of ps1 titles isn't working. Well, among others, i played mgs1 with accelerated textures(instead of the blocky ones), and played very well. And for the other guy telling that the faster loading option didn't work, false, it works, the only thing it does is reducing the loading speeds in some games, not all.

Nope, I am saying that it never was realised the way it was intended (or the way I thought it was intended in the beginning when they announced the feature).

The only difference I've seen in the graphics is that the textures are somewhat dithered. Doesn't look much prettier, and pherhaps they never said that it would look much prettier, but in relation to what I came to expect after their announcement, let's just say that I got... not much. Even the unfinished and hacked Bleem! emulator that someone showed me, running some PS1 titles on the Dreamcast, made some of the old games on the PS1 look prettier than on the PS2... and that's rather sad... but yet somewhat funny...  =)

[Legerdemain]

The only thing I have against the XBos is the lineup of games. Yes, there are RPG:s. Yes there are platformers. Yes, there are some odd games... But... still... mainly the lineup feels like a PC-games lineup.

You have got them racing games.
You have got them sports games.
You have got them FPS games.

Not until rather recently I have actually started to notice that there are some games of interest that have been released for the system... not at all saying that racing/sports/FPS are bad, just that I've seen it all before and it feels very PC and not at all innovative. Sure, the XBox lineup was great for those that wanted to bring PC-like titles to their television sets and playing them using a console, and the best yet online based system ever having graced a console (not all too updated concerning what have happened or is happening in that very area, but this far it seems that XBox Live! have beaten all competition by far).

So. To sum it up. I have nothing against XBox as a console. But I would not go as far as saying that it is taking anything to the next level. It just takes already existing concepts, trying to perfect them.

Nintendo would be the ones I consider trying taking the console industry to the next level, if any company. It may work. It may fail. But they are certainly the ones avant garde at the moment.

[Legerdemain]

The XBox does have a lot of PC like games yes but also look at the Sega arcade back log and the the games by Temco the XBox alone is worth owning just for the fantastic games released by these two companies which are usually xbox exclusives. Plus you had a Metal Slug 3 which ran perfectly on the xbox, there are some real gems which are not pc like and are true arcade quality which people seem to miss for some reason.

In a way I am willing to agree. In another way I am about to disagree. I don't think people are unaware that there are good, unique and arcade perfect games having graced, say, the XBox. But I think that if there is an overall lack of certain prefered types of games one doesn't really search through the entire library of games for that specific console just to find those games one could consider gems.

I have never ever played a Neo Geo, for example, but I have heard people raving about Metal Slug for ages. But since like 90% of the entire catalogue for the Neo Geo consists of fighting games I have never been attracted to the system. Bad example, maybe, since that very game exists on many other system, but anyways. Point is, one game doesn't make me buy a console... it's the overall availabitlity of the types of games I prefer.

Last time I bought a console I bought the Gamecube. I love the console, but being into Japanese RPG:s it was really a bad choice. There's no option to owning a Playstation 2 (or Super Nintendo for that matter if one wants more old-school RPG:s) if one is locking for solid Japanese RPG:s. There's no real support for those kind of games on the XBox or the Gamecube (even though the Gamecube have been graced with rather some good RPG:s lately). Main reason for this is probably the huge lack of support of the original XBox in Japan. Even if there would be one major Japanese RPG released for the box which really looks awesome I wouldn't buy the system. Not for one game (or some few other gems).