[What is the best James Bond video game?]

On 4/4/2011 at 8:34 PM, high voltage said:

It's clear that Goldeneye is the game with the most votes, as USAers never even heard of the Domark titles, as they were available in UK/Europe only, and mostly on tape; and the Brits vote for Goldeneye because it's like 'you know, it's from Rare, they're British and they used to be 'Ultimate Play the Game', doing games for 'our' Spectrum', later NES, and now have a worldwide hit with Goldeneye, it's a British game, man'.

Haha, great rationalization, but still a nope - Goldeneye got the most votes because it really is the best. Not only the best Bond game, but one of the best games of all time in general. I'm actually replaying it now, first time in nearly 2 decades, and am amazed at how extremely playable and fun it still is.

 

Btw, I'm a PSX fanboi, who's from Europe (but not a Brit) and was exposed to all kinds of Bond games on microcomputers, including the tape Domark ones. Just sayin, in case there are more convoluted explanations incoming ?

[Name a pop song with Atari mentioned]

1 hour ago, zzip said:

New flame war thread idea:   Which band was better?  The Ataris or The Commodores? 

I'd like to say The Sinclairs, but it seems that in this particular case I'll have to concede defeat.

[Asteroids Deluxe?]

6 hours ago, Lynxpro said:

the Workbench GUI was so Cromdamn garish

I must say, I've heard quite a few "out there" comparisons in my day, but hearing this - from a presumably ST fan - really wins the  day. People who have never seen what TOS/GEM looks like (or better yet, how it behaves) are welcome to have a gander ?

 

@ParanoidLittleMan: for once we agree...

[Flashback: EGM's Top 100 (1997)]

On 7/18/2005 at 6:38 AM, spacecadet said:

they did the same thing for this list as they do for all their lists; they only consider games made while they've been in circulation (hence the Genesis/SNES version of Ms. Pac-Man being on the list, not the original), and as you would expect for a variety of reasons, they weight it pretty heavily towards what's current. I mean a) they want to sell some magazines, and b) these are the games they've got stuck in their own minds. I doubt there's anything nefarious about it.

 

I think it's kind of silly to try to look at a list like this in a gaming magazine as some sort of historical thing to stand the test of time. The point of this magazine is to make money. They're not interested in putting together a time capsule. It's fun to go and look back and laugh at some of their choices but let's not take this too seriously.

 

[Previous owner was a critic, apparently]

21 hours ago, BigO said:

VOLLEYBALL! - I'm not sure whether it's a step up or a step down from "stupid", but this one gets a "dumb"

A question for the ages! Seeing as there are only two dumbs and numerous stupids, I suppose the former is supposed to be a more serious charge.

 

The whole thing is rather brilliant, though admittedly I spent way too much time staring at the Armored Car sketch, trying to solve its mystery (the interpretation of Freudian symbolism of Cosmic Conflict and the subsequent review is a little bit easier to understand). Was the author an alien? A person with only imaginary knowledge of the opposite sexes anatomy? I guess we will never know. (bonus question: what is the possesive of "sex"? Sex's? Sexes' ? Try to put it in search engine and, oh, dear.)

 

I do love finding these little blasts from the past in game boxes or manuals, though I do prefer when they are less destructive than this one. Usually they're old receipts, high scores, tape counter positions, game codes - this sort of stuff, but once I had found a heavy metal poster tucked under the box's (oh, not again) cover, and some other oddities too.

[1987 Christmas Video Games Ad - What would you have chosen?]

NES is a no-brainer. You don't need to know the future: as a videogame nerd you can foresee it based on available data (NES's been out few years already and done rather well for itself, and Atari has been blundering for quite a while too).

 

However, I'd get a ZX Spectrum, or save up a bit and stretch it to C64.

[Piece of e-waste from Woz' garage prepping to sell for millions!]

"computer that started it all"

 

Hmmm. Citation needed, I guess.

[Are People Crazy on Ebay???]

15 minutes ago, mimo said:

Which makes me wonder why? If the cart works, show it playing. They probably think the self test is a good thing, but to me it just rings very loud alarm bells

Look at the stuff in this shop, it's just some seller who doesn't know much about Atari or anything else and sells loads of scattergun ~vintage~ gear at heavily marked up prices (eg Amiga 500 @+250GBP, wtf).

 

I'm not a fan, obviously, but there's not really much to see here, it's just human nature and how it has been since the dawn of commerce. People will try whatever to maximize profits. Now we have this new paradigm with digital marketplaces, where "trying" is nearly effortless, so these people do just that. They put up stuff with stupid prices, then mark it down a little bit later so now it's "-20% off", and maybe some desperado in the meantime would have bought it anyway, and so it goes. And as you can see many of these items have multiple people watching, so if they sells they will contribute to the snowball effect of the watchers then setting the new price as BIN on their stuff, or thinking that's how high they should go in similar auctions.

 

Well, what can you do. Not much, I guess...a) try to oppose the monopolies b) exercise constraint and only buy in auctions and don't get caught in a bidding frenzy. Fat chance with the former, which leaves the latter as the only reasonable option...

[Was the Atari 7800more powerful than the NES?]

18 hours ago, MrMaddog said:

The Tramiels could have released a powerful transputer console with parallel processing and they still couldn't outsell the 8-bit NES!

Is this the same Tramiels responsible for the best selling microcomputer ever?

 

By the way, Sega has also tried to outsell NES, and failed, and so did NEC. Simply because

[No Mans Sky]

With the amount of content,  I'm kinda surprised the game can run on PS4 at all with any reasonable frame rate.

[Video Game Esoterica's Thread or rare, exotic and weird gaming videos and stuff and things lol]

1 hour ago, awbacon said:

I liked separate topic based ones too but I was asked to condense

I didn't. Thanks for "condensing"

[Amiga 1000 - Too Expensive at Introduction or not Priced High Enough?]

It's neither.  The real problem was lack of clear strategy and communication of what this machine can do, who is it for and so on, as well as not enough killer app software at the start. A500/2000 were great next-step models, but at that time 2 crucial years were sort of lost to the ST.

[Games for C64 not available for A8?]

Sam's Journey is a modern game, written with the advantage of nearly 3 decades of experience in squeezing the last bit of ooomph out of C64 and utilizing all its advantages so, yeah, probably mission impossible.  But I'm sure porting some of the older games would be a much easier task (though still not that easy of course). The likes of Pirates! or DotC should be possible, the former was on CPC and the latter on Spectrum after all.

 

Though personally I'm that keen on ports and would much rather see some original efforts - even if they might be objectively worse than the ones to be ported.

[Was the Atari 7800more powerful than the NES?]

15 hours ago, Ecernosoft said:

.... Welp, if the Atari 7800 could have a POKEY and output 320*240 at 25 colors, with VRAM, it definetly would beat the NES.

6 days, deary me....?

[Star Raiders - Arcade?]

Well, that's just not true, because a typical contemporary arcade game would still blow NES out of the water. These weren't exceptions but regularities. And VGA didn't even get a proper horizontal scrolling game till Commander Keen in 1990, and with a few exceptions later on never really mattered in the 2D space.

 

It'd be more realistic to say that with the arrival of PC Engine and Megadrive home market could get really close, but even so the arcades were still the technical top dog for years to come. Also, the fact that they weren't as popular as before the crash and home console spread, doesn't meant they weren't popular at all.

[Star Raiders - Arcade?]

1 hour ago, ddahlstrom said:

The two home systems that did that were the Nintendo NES in the console world and PC in the computer world (especially after EGA/VGA graphics and soundcard-based sound went mainstream).  By this time, the typical arcade game was no longer even trying to be generationally ahead of their home counterparts (and getting increasingly behind)

Sorry, but you're off by at least a decade, probably more. I was still going to arcades in the late Nineties to see the likes of Virtua Fighter 3. Games like these were still technically the best, even if consoles & PC were catching up quickly. And NES/VGA weren't even at the races when it comes to advanced 2D gfx compared to arcades at the time, this has only changed with the arrival of NeoGeo (obviously) and Saturn/PSX.

[Realms Of Darkness - SSI 1987 - Info??]

There actually is a bit of info about it on the net  - see Wikipedia or Moby - which I guess is relative to its popularity. Gamebase 64 also has all the scans including manual. As for worth, it's really impossible to tell. A complete and uncommon SSI RPG could fetch anything between 30-500 USD, I suppose.

[Why not try port Super Mario 64 without vfx?]

You have some lovely games coming out on the Jag all the time. So why bother being perpetually hang up on the pie-in-the-sky stuff?

 

 

[Atari, Apple, & Radio Shack Hardware/Software - Giveaway (Free)]

If real, this lot is worth hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars, most likely was gone minutes after posting.

[Gunship on Atari 8-Bit?]

24 minutes ago, Jetboot Jack said:

after all I  designed one and produced another

SJG? ?

 

27 minutes ago, Jetboot Jack said:

post Apocalypse everything is rather dreadful…

Interesting. Do you mean the likes of Interceptor, or the Enemy Unknown series?

[Most ported computer games which weren’t on home consoles]

I'll put it a bit shorter: most computer games were a better fit on computers, for assorted reasons

 

Although it doesn't mean that these games were necessarily inferior, eg Starquake was a big hit and no worse than many NES games. I'm sure it'd do okay if it was released on consoles, but it's impossible to expect that everything was supposed to be ported back and forth, there was just limited number of people & time for that.

[need mame roms and I am fed up]

39 minutes ago, Asaki said:

You're supposed to use the provided tools to update your ROMsets when MAME itself updates.

 

Granted, it's a little confusing to figure out...I've done it once and I don't remember how I did it. I need to leave myself notes so I don't have to hope I can find the tutorial again.

This made sense in the days of limited internet bandwidth, or dl credit on torrent sites. Back then I used to download incremental updates, now I just grab the latest whole set once or twice per year.

[It’s a miracle the nes sold like hot cakes]

The thing is, the little "if onlys" don't really matter considering the bigger picture. So neither some hypothetical Lorraine based machine, better cart utilization nor an excellent zapper game would have helped much against NES, that's because that console had captured the-then zeitgeist and was a long needed breath of fresh air. The technical specs of some other machines don't really matter that much, seeing as NES brought to the table not only some new killer franchises but also a whole new style and perception of gaming. And that's what people clearly have wanted.

 

In some respects it is similar to what Sony has done with the PSX in the Nineties.

[MiSTer FPGA]

2 hours ago, Steven Pendleton said:

Each individual thing that adds lag isn't so bad, but once you add them all together it might be bad.

That's why I'm pretty sure there are people out there who bought MiSTer because of the whole no lag hype, but in fact have more of it due to bad configuration/additional laggy hardware than somebody who has a tight emulation rig.

 

Me, I don't really know even though I mulled this issue over countless times. Sometimes I think I can totally "feel" the lag, especially now after using MiSTer and OG HW for nearly exclusively for ~2 years, but sometimes I'm still unsure how much of it is "in the mind". The differences can be minuscule after all and people very suggestible. It sure would be very illuminating if there was a blind test conducted one day somewhere...

[First games with alter able environments?]

It's a good question, been pondering this a lot myself. Destructible environments are one of the game design's holy grails for me, next to proper AI & emergent gameplay. And of course now I can't remember any of the examples I thought about recently No, wait, of course - my favourite series from ZX Spectrum, Rebelstar/Laser Squad (which later morphed into XCom) had this as major feature, and probably is responsible for my fixation with it.

 

Gunslinger was probably the earliest one in the arcades, and then Space Invaders / Dig Dug.