News You Can Bruise for 2004 February 9 (entry 0)

(9) Mon Feb 09 2004 21:44 Proceedings Of The First Congress Of Future Old Farts: Resolved: that the newfangled video games the kids love nowadays can never be as inventive or interesting as Metroid or Mega Man.

Comments:

Posted by Brendan at Tue Feb 10 2004 00:05

Some of the newfangled video games the kids love nowadays ARE Metroid and Mega Man. Like, barely retouched Metroid and Mega Man.

Posted by Kristofer Straub at Tue Feb 10 2004 02:29

Oh come on, the Mega Man formula was hardly inventive. The programmers torture you with jumping puzzles before unveiling a robot boss built around a noun that usually didn't have much business being involved with a robot.

Posted by Leonard at Tue Feb 10 2004 08:56

Kris, the inventive thing about the Mega Man formula was not anything about the level design but the fact that you got weapons that did entirely different things and could switch between them. Even though the level themes were often lame and not robot-ish, there was usually thematic consistency between the level, the boss, and the weapon you got.

Brendan, where are these games? I was hoping to be proven wrong with examples of new innovative games, but I'll settle for recycled versions of old games.

Posted by Brendan at Tue Feb 10 2004 11:18

You'll have to buy a Game Boy Advance; they're putting out retouches of a lot of Nintendo and SNES titles, including Mario Kart and Donkey Kong Country, which I personally consider as classic as M&MM. Google for Metroid: Zero Mission, Metroid Fusion (which is actually closer to Super Metroid), and Mega Man & Bass.

If you want to shell out $150 for a GameCube and a GBA Player, you can even play them on the TV. Or so they tell me.

Posted by Kristofer Straub at Tue Feb 10 2004 13:00

I just... look back on the Leaf Shield and the tears well up all over again.

Posted by Jeremy Penner at Tue Feb 10 2004 17:33

There are certainly more strange games out these days than ever before. Examples of crazy games I've been playing lately:

Typing Of The Dead (Dreamcast): Zombie shoot-em-up meets typing tutor. You haven't lived until you've successfully dispatched the undead by correctly spelling "Winkle pickers".

Stretch Panic (Playstation 2): Use your demon scarf to dispatch women with breasts literally three times larger than the rest of their bodies. (They use them as a shield, so you have to sneak up behind them. They also use them as a helicopterish propeller if they happen to fall off a ledge or something.) Your demon scarf can also stretch the landscape at any particular vertex. Handy thing, that demon scarf.

Vib Ribbon (PS1, Japan): You're a vector bunny thing who dances along a ribbon and has to deal with weird obstacles on the ribbon, which appear according to the rhythm of the music, by pressing the corresponding button(s). Designed so that you can swap out the CD and use your own music. It's very meditative.

Bishi Bashi (MAME--I mean, arcade, PS1): A party-game style collection of minigames, back before that was cool. My favourite: A bride and groom are standing at the front of a church. The bride is holding a pie. You hit buttons to make the bride run towards the audience, the groom in tow keeping her dress off the ground. You then launch the pie into the crowd, getting points based on how many pews back the person whom you hit is sitting. Afterwards, everyone but your victim stands up and claps.

Wario Ware, Inc (Gameboy Advance): Really, really minigames. Like, 5 seconds apiece. They come at you at a frantic pace and they don't stop. Typically you are given one-word instructions as the game starts, like, "Jump!" or, "Avoid!" Personally, I think an open-source version of this, with the ability to easily script your own minigames, would be really cool.

robotfindskittenquest: robotfindskitten, only in old-school Sierra adventure game form! Written using the same game engine, even.

(That last one may not fully exist yet.)

Posted by Kristofer Straub at Tue Feb 10 2004 21:22

Posted by Kristofer Straub at Tue Feb 10 2004 21:22

Oh... you strip out images! Here: http://www.nightlightpress.com/macro/robotfinds.jpg

Posted by Brendan at Wed Feb 11 2004 09:53

I only just realized that participating in this thread makes us all Future Old Farts. Also, Proceeding.