Is there some way to play Arcadia without a Dreamcast? IIRC the GameCube version did not compare.
I thought they were the same game. You didn't get the little side adventure stuff that you could play on the DC memory card, though.
Is there a Dreamcast emulator that also emulates the crazy memory card?
I have no idea how that would work. It was a completely separate piece of hardware. Buttons and shit. You could literally remove it from the controller and play it like a tiny Gameboy. They actually used it in games like that.
There was a kind-of-shitty MMO called Project Entropia, where players were settlers on an alien world. If you explored one of the more dangerous areas, you'd eventually find a ruined city that didn't appear on any maps. As you explored the city, you would find Marathon-style comconsoles that detailed the history of the place, which turned out to be the first city founded on the planet. It was the site of a robot uprising, and fell to ruin and decay.
The rest of the game was kind of meh, but I really liked walking around that abandoned city. Every once in a while I'd spy another player wandering around there, and we'd share a moment of silence for our fallen forebears.
Midgar, hands down. I don't think a game has had an as fully realized a town/city as that, either before or after.
I do have to admit, FFVII had a pretty epic scope to it. I feel like you could've set an entire game in Midgar - and then you went outside.
Yeah, leaving Midgar in FFVII is pretty great. I do want a game like FFVII but set entirely in Midgar, though. Just playing a game where you're the ecoterrorists fighting against this huge corporation - None of the actual plot of FFVII, just the backdrop and intro plot.
Midgar, hands down. I don't think a game has had an as fully realized a town/city as that, either before or after.
I do have to admit, FFVII had a pretty epic scope to it. I feel like you could've set an entire game in Midgar - and then you went outside.
FF VII was the first JRPG I had played and as soon as I left Midgar I was like... what the fuck happened?! What is this weird world map thing? VII is still my favorite, yeah the story makes less and less sense the more you dissect it, but the locales are the best I've ever seen in a game. Xenogears is, in my mind as well, the only one that has come close at all with its development.
Storywise Xenogears is by far much better than FFVII that's for sure.
Well at its core its just a mother earth hippy story. It has a lot of plot holes, especially with some of backstory stuff, but I liked a lot of the side story stuff.
I remember there are some inconsistencies with the whole Cloud/Zack backstory that they tried to rectify with that PSP game. It's been a while but it had something to do with the events not matching the timeline correctly.
FF VII was the first JRPG I had played and as soon as I left Midgar I was like... what the fuck happened?! What is this weird world map thing? VII is still my favorite, yeah the story makes less and less sense the more you dissect it, but the locales are the best I've ever seen in a game. Xenogears is, in my mind as well, the only one that has come close at all with its development.
Storywise Xenogears is by far much better than FFVII that's for sure.
I'd add Grandia (especially Grandia 1) to the list of places with extremely well-developed locales, though it probably does lag a bit behind FFVII and Xenogears.
CRAZY. So does the Dreamcast emulator output a VMU ROM when you save your game?
I would assume there's some ways to make them work together. Sadly Dreamcast emulation is not the easiest thing, so I've not taken a good look at how things work in that area.
I want a game that's just sim-town in a Final Fantasy universe, but good and crunchy. Prison Architect + Sim City + Recettear + Dwarf Fortress.
Have you guys played "Towns"?
It's on Steam. You basically build a town like you'd find in a D&D module.
First, you build up your town's ability to generate food and materials. Then, you build stuff to attract townsfolk (and stuff to keep your townsfolk happy and productive). Then you build taverns, weapon shops, and so on, then you dig into a dungeon, and it attracts adventurers, who faff about in your taverns and buy your stuff (Thief-type adventurers will try to steal stuff, actually, but the other adventurers need them to get past traps) and harass your villagers, and will delve into the dungeon for loot. And, of course, they'll want your town to forge some of that loot into magic items, if you've got the proper facilities and workers.
And there's trading and sieges and stuff.
All Dwarf Fortress style. But, y'know, more user friendly, with graphics, and a basic tutorial.
Ald'Rhun and Sadrith Mora; they're everything I love about Morrowind. I also have many good memories of Goldenrod.
Everyone is liking these Morrowind towns. I have to say the Oblivion towns were pretty sad. My favorite wasn't even a town, it was the secret paladin outpost where I stored my badass armor and my armor bros.
Oblivion was a sad little game to follow Morrowind.
As far as game areas in general go, the bank in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory will always have a special place in my head. The lodge in Condemnded 2 also comes to mind, but mostly because of that
Anybody remember Kurik from Star Ocean 2? It probably had a lot more to do with me being at that impressionable age when I played the game, but it will always stick out in my mind. Spoilers for the 15 year old game down below:
Basically, you explore this awesome port town where everyone is totally happy for a while. There's awesome equipment and stuff you can't get anywhere else. Then this tsunami comes and destroys everything. Having that awesome city taken away from me was a total mind-fuck. I remembered thinking "Shit! I never got to try the crepe stand!!!"
Morrowind was revolutionary in terms of role playing games for me when I got it as a free game with the purchase of my first PC. The world was so expansive and imaginative for it's time. Oblivion was such a disappointment. While it improved the combat system, it's fairly mundane environments made the game a perfect example of "one step forward, two steps back". Luckily, Skyrim was quite an improvement, but I'd really like to see another game that expands the world like Morrowind did.
Morrowind was revolutionary in terms of role playing games for me when I got it as a free game with the purchase of my first PC. The world was so expansive and imaginative for it's time. Oblivion was such a disappointment. While it improved the combat system, it's fairly mundane environments made the game a perfect example of "one step forward, two steps back". Luckily, Skyrim was quite an improvement, but I'd really like to see another game that expands the world like Morrowind did.
To this day I don't understand why not one single game developer has "gone big." And by go big I mean take a known high quality single player experience, and just make it tremendous. Imagine a Super Metroid or a Symphony of the Night with a map 10x the size. Imagine an Elder Scroll that is literally as big as the 5 boros of NYC. It should take hours of real-time to walk all the way across. Make a top-down Zelda that has thousands of screens and tens of dungeons.
They don't have to develop anything new. They just have to take an existing engine, existing game, and just put all the resources they would have spent on other things into map making and level design. We have gigantic hard drives. We can hold it. We can even download new areas as we get close to them.
I think a good way to go about it is to combine procedural generation with manual creation. Right now we have manually created games with relatively small worlds, and we have procedurally generated worlds that are nearly infinite in size but sparse. Why not procedurally generate a humongous map and then populate it by hand? It could sell.
They sort of tried that in Daggerfall, but their procedural generation algorithms were very basic and the vast world didn't have much interesting stuff in it.
For my two cents, Midgar is also on top of my list because it is one of the few games I've ever played where the city felt gigantic. Also on my list are Lindblum from FFIX, the fair from Chrono Trigger, Moon Flower Palace from Dark Cloud 2, and Solaris from Xenogears.
Or allow modders to develop world beyond the borders as opposed to within them. One of my favorite things about elder scrolls is when someone makes a good mod treehouse city or something. And Ro, opportunity kicks sanctuary's ass.
Comments
http://dcemulation.org/?title=Emulators
VMU Emulators are at the bottom.
The rest of the game was kind of meh, but I really liked walking around that abandoned city. Every once in a while I'd spy another player wandering around there, and we'd share a moment of silence for our fallen forebears.
I do want a game like FFVII but set entirely in Midgar, though. Just playing a game where you're the ecoterrorists fighting against this huge corporation - None of the actual plot of FFVII, just the backdrop and intro plot.
Storywise Xenogears is by far much better than FFVII that's for sure.
I just now found this in a forum
http://www.ign.com/faqs/2003/final-fantasy-vii-plot-analysis-454384
I think it shows some of the other plot inconsistencies as well.
EDIT: Actually I think it tries to clarify some of them.
It's on Steam. You basically build a town like you'd find in a D&D module.
First, you build up your town's ability to generate food and materials. Then, you build stuff to attract townsfolk (and stuff to keep your townsfolk happy and productive). Then you build taverns, weapon shops, and so on, then you dig into a dungeon, and it attracts adventurers, who faff about in your taverns and buy your stuff (Thief-type adventurers will try to steal stuff, actually, but the other adventurers need them to get past traps) and harass your villagers, and will delve into the dungeon for loot. And, of course, they'll want your town to forge some of that loot into magic items, if you've got the proper facilities and workers.
And there's trading and sieges and stuff.
All Dwarf Fortress style. But, y'know, more user friendly, with graphics, and a basic tutorial.
As far as game areas in general go, the bank in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory will always have a special place in my head. The lodge in Condemnded 2 also comes to mind, but mostly because of that
They don't have to develop anything new. They just have to take an existing engine, existing game, and just put all the resources they would have spent on other things into map making and level design. We have gigantic hard drives. We can hold it. We can even download new areas as we get close to them.
I think a good way to go about it is to combine procedural generation with manual creation. Right now we have manually created games with relatively small worlds, and we have procedurally generated worlds that are nearly infinite in size but sparse. Why not procedurally generate a humongous map and then populate it by hand? It could sell.
And Ro, opportunity kicks sanctuary's ass.
I just love Sanctuary because I get to gamble. Also you have to appreciate that scene when Lilith uses her mega Angel powers to do that ultimate move.
"It's dangerous to go alone, jerkwad!"