sweetz

Mass Effect Trilogy full remake, seriously.

A lot of classic games would be cool with newer graphics but are fine as is. The thing about Mass Effect is that, even though the trilogy was good overall, there was sooo much untapped potential there. I see so many ways in which those games could be improved and make something truly amazing. I'd love a remake that basically pulls the best parts out of each game and then rebuilds it as one unified whole, with opportunities to fix up some of the weaker writing and expand the scope.

I agree that Dan should take the controls if he hasn't played them. I couldn't remember if he said he played them or not, but after having actually played them, I had the suspicion that he did not.

In particular...I remember where Dan talked up the "fist fight between Solid Snake and Grey Fox in a minefield". The reality is humorously underwhelming. It's a tiny square room with mines bordering the walls, where Grey Fox just kind of runs around like a fool and you take pot shots at him.

Only thing is, if Dan does play them, I'm guessing he would insist on doing original difficulty and I don't know if that's a good thing.

Having only ever played Metal Gear Solid in it's day, I was inspired by Metal Gear Scanlon (which I enjoying a great deal) to play the other games in the series. So I picked up the Legacy collection and just finished up the MSX originals Metal Gear 1 & 2.

I found the commonalities between MG1, 2 and Solid to be pretty surprising. For what it's worth, I think it would be great site content for Dan and Drew to play through both of the old games - but if only one can be done, then definitely MG2. The degree to which Metal Gear Solid borrows from MG2 in particular had me in awe quite a bit. I think Drew's reactions/perspective on how similar MG2 is would be cool to see. There's also probably a ton of people out there that have played Metal Gear Solid and later sequels, but never the MSX originals and would have interest in watching these.

Couple notes for the guys that should be helpful for planning should they somehow read this thread:

• The way you access these games is not immediately obvious. On the Legacy/HD collection you go into MGS3 first, then you can get to them from the MGS3 menu.
• I played on easy difficulty (added for the HD collection version) and would strongly recommend the same for you guys. As is typical for games of the era, on original difficulty the games are quite difficult to extend their play time - much more difficult than MGS on normal. I don't think there's much good in repeating sections of these old games ad nauseum. I was more interested in the historical perspective, not the challenge, and the game was still quite entertaining anyway. There are still plenty of insta-death possibilities regardless of difficulty that will keep the entertainment factor up.
• Metal Gear 1 requires some fairly ridiculous leaps of logic to progress that should be good entertainment - but also could lead to getting stuck. Following the same philosophy as the difficulty, I resorted to a guide when necessary and don't regret it. Keep one handy just in case. MG2 is far more reasonable to figure out.
• MG1 took me a little under 4 hours to finish, MG2 took me just under 5. I figure you'll tack on a couple hours for talking and general entertainment, but these shouldn't suck up too much time.

As a person who tried to use a 360 pad with other older space shooters, I'm guessing it won't work well.

The problem is round gate vs square gate joysticks.

Basically joysticks work by measuring position along two axes (like an X, Y graph). Say that the joystick coords for center is (0, 0), fully forward is (0, 100), fully right is (100, 0) for example. Proper flight sticks (and joysticks of yore) have a square "gate", meaning the opening at the base of the stick that determines its movement range. So when you move a flight stick all the way to the top right corner, you are at the full extent of the vertical range, and the full extent of the horizontal range - same as if you were just moving in one of those directions individually - i.e. top right would measure (100, 100).

Because gamepad joysticks have round gates, you can't actually get to the full extent of their range. When you point a 360 joystick to the top right, you're only around 70% as far forward as if you were moving it forward only and only 70% as far to the right as if you were moving it right only. I.e. it would measure (70, 70).

Newer games designed for analog gamepads are built to compensate for this (though usually in a pretty simple/weak manner by simply treating anything reporting values >= 70% of the joystick's range as 100%), . However, older games were built for flight sticks with square gates and expect full range movement at all possible stick angles. As a result, they don't feel right if you try to play with round gate gamepads. If you're trying to yaw and pitch at the same time (i.e. moving the joystick up/right, down/left, etc.) you'll only be rotating the ship at 70% the speed in either direction that it's capable of doing. This doesn't sound like much, but it's actually a far bigger impact than you might think, especially if the game was designed to have non-linear rotational speed based on the magnitude of the input. I've found it to render these old games more or less unplayable on a gamepad. They demand a basic flight stick.

Holy crap that's awesome, not sure why Jeff was unhappy with his delivery, I was cracking up.

It's absolutely valid. Steam is a privately owned store, it's their right to choose what products they do and do not want to sell. Nobody has a right to sell things on their store. Believing otherwise is over-entitlement to the point of absurdity. If I was running Steam, I would have stopped carrying his games for the "incompetent" comment alone. If you want to criticize my business, that's fine, but don't expect that you get to do that and still have your products carried by my store.

Note that there's also a downside for Steam which is that they no longer make revenue from selling his product - though that's obviously a teeny drop in the bucket for them.

Apologies if I'm off base here, but I honestly don't understand the purpose these stories serve. What is accomplished by highlighting the actions of one sociopathic individual? At worst you're encouraging them and inspiring copy cats. At best all you're accomplishing is giving exposure to the victim that may ultimately lead to more sales of their game (which is all well and good, but in theory could eventually lead to a dark outcome where some unscrupulous person feigns victimization for free marketing).

Is there really an endemic problem here worth highlighting, or is it just that a very small set of individuals with a disproportionately large impact? As long as people participate in world wide public communication, you're never going to stop bad eggs from finding a way to say nasty things, no matter how many articles are written about it.

I find the degree to which people are publicizing what is likely one socially maladjusted teenager, possibly not even in the US, making what are overwhelmingly likely to be hollow threats to be a little a surreal. Today's Twitter threat against a woman is yesterday's school bomb threat. The existence of dumb kids emboldened by anonymity is and will remain a constant.

There are 7 billion people on the planet, you're not going to stop a few bad eggs from happening, no matter how many sternly worded articles you write on the internet about it. I believe giving things like this publicity only further inspires the perpetrator and copy cats. However, no one seems to truly care about that or the actions of the individual, instead this is apparently just a convenient event around which to politically grandstand and make statements about entire groups of people. Not so different from world politics in that respect.

Are there really that many people actually doing that anymore? There certainly aren't in this specific comment thread.

Even back in the day, there wasn't too much hate about the client itself. Rather the problem is that we were forced to use it for new EA games and who wants to bother with maintaining another login and running another client when we were all already using Steam? Why can't we just buy and play the games through the client we were comfortable with? (Answer: Because Valve and EA had a pissing match about control over selling DLC). Origin isn't bad, but Steam wins simply by nature of being first and entrenched.

That said, while the client is fine, I feel EA has negatively exploited Origin exclusivity for their games more than Valve has exploited Steam exclusivity. Prime example is that because Origin is the only means through which you can buy DLC for newer EA PC games, they rarely or even never discount DLC. Mass Effect 3 DLC for example, has never gone on sale even though the game itself has been on sale multiple times. It still costs you $40 if you want just the the story based DLCs for that game.

Classic games being preserved and made available to more people is always a good thing...but to me this is kind of exemplifies of how a few people in the press with symbolic megaphones can affect the market in ways that the actual market doesn't want or care about. That's not a good thing; and I suspect is an underlying subtext driving others that are questioning this move even if they can't put words to it.

Vib Ribbon is unique, but it isn't a very good game. Regardless, it somehow became the avatar for the aging gaming press's nostalgia for quirky Japanese games we never got in the US (most with good reason); I doubt the market at large cares about the game, and yet here we are. Were resources dedicated to this port that would have better been spent on something else? Probably not, and because the press has been effusive about the game it will probably sell enough (to people that will probably play it for 20 minutes and then never again) to cover the cost of said porting, so in the end, not a big deal. But the hypothetical scenario where resources are invested in placating a few highly visible critics or members of the press to actual detriment of catering the game buying market at large is obviously undesirable.