But why is the Dreamcast the best console ever?
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But why is the Dreamcast the best console ever?
I've already admitted that was a mistake.Quote:
Originally Posted by A Black Falcon
Sony pretty much bailed out Square, shortly after the abysmal failure of the Final Fantasy Movie, by purchasing 9 million shares of Square's stock. There were many an article posted back in the day that talked about Square's loyalty to Sony. Sony could have easily dumped their shares and left Square back in financial turmoil, but they did not do that.
Yes, Sony allowed Psygnosis to operate as an independent company, until they finally absorbed the company into the Sony family.Quote:
As for Psygnosis, they were owned by Sony from the early '90s for sure, but for a while Sony allowed them independence. The Psygnosis that made those Saturn and N64 Wipeout games was absolutely a Sony subsidiary, so yes, Sony was allowing their games on other consoles. Of course, Sega had done that years earlier -- think of all of NEC's Sega-licensed games on the TG16/PC Engine, many of which also had Famicom releases as well of course (from Tengen, etc.). Sony finally cracking down on Psygnosis and forcing them to only develop for Sony consoles and only make what Sony wanted them to ended that for good; the only thing like it since are Microsoft-licensed or developed games on the GBA and DS, but as MS doesn't have a handheld they don't view handhelds as direct competition.
Anyway, to say it again, yes, Psygnosis was owned by Sony when they made those games. However, Sony at that point allowed Psygnosis its freedom to decide for itself what to make. Psygnosis wanted to develop for all the major platforms, and so they did, until ~1999 when Sony took a much more active role in Psygnosis, and told them that now they could only make what Sony wanted. This started Psygnosis on a downhill slide, in my opinion, that ended with their closure a couple of years ago after finishing the PS Vita Wipeout game. In between Psygnosis lost its name and just became another Sony studio.
Also, at the same time that they told Psygnosis to cancel their in-development N64 games (Wipeout 64 was not supposed to be their only N64 game), Sony also told Psygnosis that they could not develop PC games anymore -- and indeed, from that point on Psygnosis would never again develop a PC game. They were allowed to finish the two that were in development at the time, Lemmings Revolution and Rollcage Stage II, but they could not self-publish them, so they found another publisher to do it. In the US Rollcage Stage II also got renamed, so the US PC release is called "Death Track Racing" for some reason' Sony probably didn't let them use the real name on PC, just to be annoying. I don't really know why Sony did this, because Sony had, and still has, a PC division that makes online games so Sony making PC games was not some rare thing, but they did. The Lemmings franchise particularly would never be the same again.
CSK (Okawa) allowed Sega to operate as an independent company, in which he offered financial backing and being the Chairman of the board. He would finally take complete control (President) of Sega in 2000, after the resignation of Hayao Nakayama and the short tenure (as president) of Shoichiro Irimajiri. It was not a case of CSK running Sega since 1984.
http://segaretro.org/Isao_Okawa
It doesn't matter. SegaSoft was doing stuff before 1997.Quote:
SegaSoft did technically publish Bug Too, but I'm not sure why -- Sega PC, not SegaSoft, published all of the other Saturn-to-PC ports, as far as I know, and all of the Genesis and Sega CD to PC ports as well. It is pretty weird that their name is randomly on that one port (Bug Too), while every single other game they published on both Saturn and PC was an original title.
You pay for online services one way or another. Every online multi-player fps has multiple map-packs that must be purchased for a player to stay active within the online gaming community of that particular game. Every MMO requires a monthly fee to stay online with the game and upgraded expansion packs add even more costs to playing the game.Quote:
"Outstanding service" :lol: :lol: :lol:
No, no pay-to-play online service should ever be called "outstanding". It should only be called "a ripoff that no person should fall for unless they have no choice".
Heat.Net set the groundwork for just about every online gaming service since its inception. The service garnered a lot of respect from the online gaming community within the PC world, even long after it was gone.
True, though Square ended up getting bought by Enix, so that clearly only helped so much.Quote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
In both cases the subsidiary was still owned by the parent company even if they had their independence, though. Psygnosis might have been 'independent' until '99, but they were still part of Sony even so.Quote:
Yes, Sony allowed Psygnosis to operate as an independent company, until they finally absorbed the company into the Sony family.
CSK (Okawa) allowed Sega to operate as an independent company, in which he offered financial backing and being the Chairman of the board. He would finally take complete control (President) of Sega in 2000, after the resignation of Hayao Nakayama and the short tenure (as president) of Shoichiro Irimajiri. It was not a case of CSK running Sega since 1984.
True.Quote:
It doesn't matter. SegaSoft was doing stuff before 1997.
They do now, but back in the '90s most of those addon maps were free! A game might have one or two retail expansion packs, which often did add a lot of maps, but it's nothing like what you see now with the mountains of DLC games have. Most of the stuff you now pay for as DLC was free back in the '90s and early '00s. It'd either be free or included as a part of a $30 addon that you may or may not need to buy to stay competitive online, depending on which game you're talking about. Some games didn't have any pay expansions and just had only free stuff, of course. Paid DLC has completely changed gaming in this way, and it's sad when you look at how much stuff used to be free but now you have to pay for.Quote:
You pay for online services one way or another. Every online multi-player fps has multiple map-packs that must be purchased for a player to stay active within the online gaming community of that particular game.
For MMOs, yes, MMOs have monthly fees, that or cash shops. They are expensive to run, and take huge numbers of hours to play, so people were convinced that paying for that was reasonable. But paying for online play in a normal PC is a completely different thing, and it was fantastic when all the stupid pay services died.Quote:
Every MMO requires a monthly fee to stay online with the game and upgraded expansion packs add even more costs to playing the game.
Hah, were you ever a PC gamer? Or were you some crazy Heat or MPlayer devotee or something? Sorry, but most people agreed with me that paid online play on PC games is CRAZY unless there's a very good reason for it (ie: it's an MMO), and the paid services thankfully all failed as a result. Online PC gaming has been free, MMOs excepted, ever since -- and even some MMOs started ditching the monthly fees once they figured out good (or bad and explotative, depending on the game) cash shop models.Quote:
Heat.Net set the groundwork for just about every online gaming service since its inception. The service garnered a lot of respect from the online gaming community within the PC world, even long after it was gone.
Yes, but Sony had almost as much stock in Square (18.9 %) as CSK had in Sega at 22%. They weren't that far from owning a majority share in the company.Quote:
Originally Posted by A Black Falcon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega
The only question is, was that 22% after CSK (Okawa) donated his majority share in Sega back to the company?Quote:
Originally Posted by wiki
Yes, but CSK did not interfere with the normal operations of Sega, until Okawa became infuriated with how Nakayama was running the company into the ground. It was not a matter of how SOA was doing their job and Okawa eventually put the company's future in SOA's hands with the very last gasp of breath the Dreamcast had.Quote:
In both cases the subsidiary was still owned by the parent company even if they had their independence, though. Psygnosis might have been 'independent' until '99, but they were still part of Sony even so.
Blizzard did not give away the StarCraft expansion Broodwar for free.Quote:
They do now, but back in the '90s most of those addon maps were free! A game might have one or two retail expansion packs, which often did add a lot of maps, but it's nothing like what you see now with the mountains of DLC games have. Most of the stuff you now pay for as DLC was free back in the '90s and early '00s. It'd either be free or included as a part of a $30 addon that you may or may not need to buy to stay competitive online, depending on which game you're talking about. Some games didn't have any pay expansions and just had only free stuff, of course. Paid DLC has completely changed gaming in this way, and it's sad when you look at how much stuff used to be free but now you have to pay for.
Heat.Net was a match-making service and it did it quite well. The Saturn and Dreamcast's online play really needed a service like that to be more relevant than they were. Even the PS2's online service totally blew, because it lacked things like a friends list and other options that were readily available through Xbox Live.
Those monthly fees for multiple MMOs wouldn't exist today, if a dedicated online match-making service like Heat.Net survived. Heat.Net might still be around today, if they didn't screw up the way degrees were awarded to players. There was also a free version of Heat.Net, that didn't offer the degrees awards. ;)Quote:
For MMOs, yes, MMOs have monthly fees, that or cash shops. They are expensive to run, and take huge numbers of hours to play, so people were convinced that paying for that was reasonable. But paying for online play in a normal PC is a completely different thing, and it was fantastic when all the stupid pay services died.
Hah, were you ever a PC gamer? Or were you some crazy Heat or MPlayer devotee or something? Sorry, but most people agreed with me that paid online play on PC games is CRAZY unless there's a very good reason for it (ie: it's an MMO), and the paid services thankfully all failed as a result. Online PC gaming has been free, MMOs excepted, ever since -- and even some MMOs started ditching the monthly fees once they figured out good (or bad and explotative, depending on the game) cash shop models.
Yes, I've played online PC games in the early 2000's with titles like Star Wars: Galaxies and Unreal Tournament.
My current gaming platform of choice is PC. My current rig has an i5-2500k @ 4.7 Ghz with an EVGA GTX 780 Classified.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewjvYFqWb2A
Broodwar was not a "Map pack add-on". It contained 3 new campaigns with 10 missions each, with one bonus level(Same as the original game, save for +1 level), and introduced at least 6 units which changed the meta game overall. Price is justifiable.
A better comparison would be the likes of DOOM. Final Doom was an expansion that really could be better considered "Mission/Map packs" and even then you're talking about a total of 32 WAD-levels added. Similar with Doom II master levels at 21 WAD-levels. At best in comparison you'd be lucky to get a map pack of 5 today in groups if you're lucky.(Doom expansions were not free though.)
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Outside of Halo, I never found a game that did matchmaking "right".
As for online cost, part of me is not so much concerned with the cost(although free is nice) as it is the accessibility.
P2P didn't used to matter in the 90's because we had mods and software tools included in with PC games.
Quake, UT ect... used to come full with tool suites and stand alone dedicated server software, allowing you to host your own instances of games or play SysAdmin. While mods are still somewhat prevalent today, dedicated server software is pretty much dead in most instances, so while most games are free to play online after purchase, once the developer goes down, or the service hosting this game goes down, the multiplayer is most likely going with it. Back then this wouldn't be a problem, just open up a config file, redirect the IP or related functions and you were good to go. You and your friends could LAN or IP play to heaven and beyond. Not so the case today which to me is a far bigger issue than Online play itself being free.
I didn't call it a map-pack add-on. It was an expansion, that also required the original game to play.Quote:
Originally Posted by Occutell
Which he didn't deny howeverQuote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
Paying for any expansion, stand alone or otherwise was common place. Most games prior didn't have any sort of post launch support outside of patches. Even then there were always exceptions, to the first statement, such as Doom ---> Ultimate Doom. If you owned an original copy of the former, you could download a patch that would upgrade your base game to the latter free of charge, otherwise you can just pick up Ultimate Doom stand alone.Quote:
Most of the stuff you now pay for as DLC was free back in the '90s and early '00s. It'd either be free or included as a part of a $30 addon that you may or may not need to buy to stay competitive online, depending on which game you're talking about.
This may be true, but it's just a fact, not something which supports one side of this debate or the other I think...Quote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
But they did give away dozens of free maps for both Starcraft and Brood War. Any SC fan must remember Blizz's "Map of the Week" program! It gave you a free map officially from Blizzard every week for, like, a year at least. Pretty great. Now that kind of thing would be paid DLC in many games, of course. This was my point, though you don't seem to have paid attention to what I was actually saying -- as has been pointed out, I mentioned addons. Addons were for more than just a map pack.Quote:
Blizzard did not give away the StarCraft expansion Broodwar for free.
The point is, most addons were not just multiplayer map packs; multiplayer map packs were more often than not free content. An addon was a new single player campaign, first and foremost, often with some kind of new content (like new units in RTS expansions, etc.). Of course multiplayer games would usually also have new multiplayer maps that rely on the new game features and/or tilesets as well, but you were not buying the addon just for a map pack as you do now, those were free. Lots of games in the late '90s had free, official downloadable content, generally in the form of maps, units, cars, or the like. You almost never had to pay for that stuff -- the only major exception I can think of is the The Sims series, which of course has always been centered around item-centric addons. But even there I think there used to be more free stuff than you see in newer The Sims games.
You didn't need to pay money to get fine matchmaking on the PC -- Microsoft's free Zone.com service on the PC was pretty good in the late '90s, for example, as was Blizzard's free Battle.net, and the many games that used Gamespy technology for free online play (and player hosting of servers).Quote:
Heat.Net was a match-making service and it did it quite well. The Saturn and Dreamcast's online play really needed a service like that to be more relevant than they were. Even the PS2's online service totally blew, because it lacked things like a friends list and other options that were readily available through Xbox Live.
I agree that XBLA's unified accounts were a popular idea, and you see that on the PC as well with Steam for example and the many annoying people who only buy PC games if they are available on Steam, but I personally have no problem with game-specific services. Having some kind of online service where you can see if friends are online in any game is great, but I can certainly understand how older consoles like the PS2 or Dreamcast could not have supported such a thing due to the resources it'd have taken... even now there are controversies over how much processor power outside-of-game apps should be able to use up on today's consoles like the PS4 and Xbox One.
I don't know what you're talking here about degrees, I guess I vaguely remember hearing the term in relation to Heat.net but never used it of course because it was a pay service, but seriously, no, it wasn't whatever that was that killed Heat. It was the attempt to force people to PAY for something which should be free, online gaming.Quote:
Those monthly fees for multiple MMOs wouldn't exist today, if a dedicated online match-making service like Heat.Net survived. Heat.Net might still be around today, if they didn't screw up the way degrees were awarded to players. There was also a free version of Heat.Net, that didn't offer the degrees awards. ;)
Heat.net and MPlayer in the '90s failed for this reason, and so did Microsoft a decade later when they tried to get PC gamers to pay to use Windows Live, just like how they managed to force console gamers to pay to use Xbox Live. The effort failed miserably, just as those past services had, and gamers were quite angry at Microsoft for trying to drag that stupid console idea, pay-to-play online services, onto the PC. Windows Live doesn't exist anymore in either pay or free forms because of the blowback from the push.
Overall Heat was fundamentally a bad idea, and PC gamers realized that and punished it for it. They did the same to Microsoft later on, and rightfully so.
As for paying to play MMOs, that dates at least to Ultima Online and probably earlier. Those games were considered separate from other games, due to the scale of online infrastructure required and because of the amount of time people have to play the games in order to keep up. MMOs and the rest of the online gaming market were separate and should not be combined.
That's nice, but most people very strongly disagree with you about the value of pay-to-play services on the PC.Quote:
Yes, I've played online PC games in the early 2000's with titles like Star Wars: Galaxies and Unreal Tournament.
My current gaming platform of choice is PC. My current rig has an i5-2500k @ 4.7 Ghz with an EVGA GTX 780 Classified.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewjvYFqWb2A
Well, these two things go hand in hand together -- the main reason game companies stopped including IPX LAN, direct modem to modem, direct IP multiplayer is that by allowing those things, they let people get around their walled, often paid services. Of course they use excuses about how it helps limit cheating and hacking, and that may be true, but that's not the real main reason; the real main reason is to not allow people to play online anywhere other than in their service, for financial reasons (for games with some pay or cash shop component), or so that once the company releases the next game in the series they can shut down the previous games' online and force everyone to buy the next one whether they want to or not. Obnoxious, but financially beneficial!Quote:
Originally Posted by Occutell
Heat.Net did not require everyone to pay for their online match-making service. The paying subscribers were offered degree points that they could use to get free games from SegaSoft. The non-paying players could use the service for match-making, without any of the bonus stuff the paying subscribers were offered. The paying subscribers abused the service, by finding ways to stay logged on and earn degrees, even while they were not physically playing a game online. It was the players that were abusing the rewards system that led to the downfall of Heat.Net. It wasn't the quality of the service, itself, that led to its downfall.Quote:
Originally Posted by A Black Falcon
Who are these most people?Quote:
That's nice, but most people very strongly disagree with you about the value of pay-to-play services on the PC.
You'll constantly hear PC gamers bitching about EA's Origin and Ubisoft's U-Play being needed to play their games online, or play them at all. Steam is about as close to a unified service that is available on PC, yet it lacks a lot of the stuff that is available for the PSN and Xbox LIVE users on the consoles. Why do we need to have Battle-Net, U-Play and Origin to play our games on the PC, when a much more streamlined service could eliminate all of the headaches that these programs create?
No, it was that you had to pay that killed it off. It's no coincidence that the other pay services died at around the same time, after all -- the growth of free options like BNet, Zone.com, Gamespy, and such rendered the already-archaic concept of paying for online gaming thoroughly outdated and irrelevant.Quote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
As I said, those services all failed for a reason: people are not willing to pay for something that should be free.Quote:
Who are these most people?
Because the PC is not a unified platform, of course. This is a completely absurd complaint -- the strength of the PC platform is that anyone can publish on it and it's got constantly changing hardware! This makes some kind of unified account like that thoroughly impossible. Microsoft was trying for that with Windows Live, and it crashed and burned. As you say Steam is the closest thing to that we have, but while it's got some issues (Valve's refusal to even consider used or return systems, for instance; even Origin has one!), fortunately Valve does not control the entire industry -- as you see on consoles, whenever one company completely controls a platform, consumers suffer. Higher prices, fewer games, publishing fees, etc. Yeah, this means greater quality controls, and I like console gaming a lot, but overall, in basic design, the PC is the superior platform. Prices are a LOT better on PC too, and the much greater level of competition is a key reason why that is!Quote:
You'll constantly hear PC gamers bitching about EA's Origin and Ubisoft's U-Play being needed to play their games online, or play them at all. Steam is about as close to a unified service that is available on PC, yet it lacks a lot of the stuff that is available for the PSN and Xbox LIVE users on the consoles. Why do we need to have Battle-Net, U-Play and Origin to play our games on the PC, when a much more streamlined service could eliminate all of the headaches that these programs create?
PC gamers complain about Uplay and various other forms of DRM because a lot of them can outright make playing a game outright impossible either before you go and do a bunch of stupid crap in the system files, or sometimes entirely not at all.
What I've found is that any feature that isn't really supported by steam, I can find in another application. No cross game chat? Don't really care because I have skype.
Like I said before, not everyone had to pay to use Heat.Net. The paying users had the opportunity to earn degrees that could be used to purchase games. The system was abused by those players that could earn up to $4 a day in degrees, thus making the money that they had paid for the premium service worth absolutely nothing to Heat.Net.Quote:
Originally Posted by A Black Falcon
Heat.Net was not a failure because of its lack of use to the PC gamer. It was a failure, because SegaSoft couldn't find a way to make it a profitable product.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ak9fXR2vnQs
Quote:
Originally Posted by JonJonPoPong
Since when is X86 not a unified platform? I could just as easily play a game that I'd played on my computer from 2002, on a PC that I'd built in 2010 and even in 2012.Quote:
Because the PC is not a unified platform, of course. This is a completely absurd complaint -- the strength of the PC platform is that anyone can publish on it and it's got constantly changing hardware! This makes some kind of unified account like that thoroughly impossible. Microsoft was trying for that with Windows Live, and it crashed and burned. As you say Steam is the closest thing to that we have, but while it's got some issues (Valve's refusal to even consider used or return systems, for instance; even Origin has one!), fortunately Valve does not control the entire industry -- as you see on consoles, whenever one company completely controls a platform, consumers suffer. Higher prices, fewer games, publishing fees, etc. Yeah, this means greater quality controls, and I like console gaming a lot, but overall, in basic design, the PC is the superior platform. Prices are a LOT better on PC too, and the much greater level of competition is a key reason why that is!
Microsoft was trying to charge PC developers to use the LIVE services with their games and that was a big part of why it didn't catch on with PC developers like MS had hoped it would. They eventually offered the LIVE features to PC developers for free, but by then they were already looking elsewhere, or had found better options for digital distribution of their products.
Yes, that is the biggest reason why gamers are complaining. It's also a huge problem when you want to play the game online, and Uplay or Origin's servers are having issues. All of this could have been avoided, if there was some kind of online service that was adopted by the PC community many years ago. Gabe is trying to do that with Steam, but it's pretty hard to convince everyone that your service doesn't have some hidden objective waiting to be unleashed upon the public years later.Quote:
Originally Posted by 16-bit
A matter of point of view. One thing is Sega over estimated western demand for Japanese arcade games.Quote:
Originally Posted by Zz Badnusty
Created lasting niche appeal, instead the mainstream their finances badly needed by then.
I just wanted to say, the DC might not have had the big poly count or power of the other three consoles, but even today the games look damn good. Everything is crisp and clear with lots of vibrant colors. Sonic Adventure 2, questionable gameplay elements aside, looks just as good as anything on the Gamecube or PS2. Only the Xbox seemed to match it's crisp vibrancy. That is when devs weren't orgasaming bloom lighting on everything. I wonder if it had to do with the fact that they both used graphics hardware originally designed for PCs.