Metroid Prime Comments by Tom Bramwell
Preview - Samus is back, and she's looking different
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Having taken a gander at the E3 videos I have to say that the screenshots don't do it justice. I think the screenies are a bit confusing, especially with the various visor views, but these become clearer once you see how they're supposed to work in action.
edit - oh, and are you going to tell us what happens if you finish the game quickly on the SNES then...??
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 29/05/02 @ 12:19
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Jesus: Action Figure
29/05/02 @ 11:39
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True, the control was pretty good. Though just a demo, I did notice a lot of the environment repeating itself (IE same corridors over and over again).
Hopefully this will be remedied in the real game... |
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"edit - oh, and are you going to tell us what happens if you finish the game quickly on the SNES then...??"
i'm assuming tom means the gratuitous samus-in-a-dayglo-leotard shot (well, it was the 80s). extra marks to nintendo if they reproduce it exactly, ie as a 2-colour 20 pixel high sprite, although a 'metroid extreme volleyball' affair would probably go down better with the current state of 'look! bouncies!' regression the industry seems to be going through... edit - er, like bystander says.
Edited 2 times,
most recently on 29/05/02 @ 13:07
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The control system is typically simple
So you don't have to aim your gun separately like you do in most console first-person shooters? Hey... I might even get on with this one. It's the 'move your guy with one stick, move your gun sight with the other, somehow find enough fingers to fire' thing that I hate. All of a sudden I'm interested again. |
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So you don't have to aim your gun separately like you do in most console first-person shooters? Hey... I might even get on with this one. It's the 'move your guy with one stick, move your gun sight with the other, somehow find enough fingers to fire' thing that I hate. All of a sudden I'm interested again.
So you've not played Halo or TimeSplitters to any great extent? Shame, it works brilliantly once you get accustomed to it. |
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it works brilliantly once you get accustomed to it
I've tried to get to grips with TimeSplitters many times, but I just can't. I find it a bit like 'patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time' - possible, but irritatingly difficult. I also find the analogue aiming infuriatingly difficult to position accurately - I end up whizzing wildly past my target or creeping up to it so slowly that I'm dead before I get there. After using mouse control on FPS games I fear I've been spoiled. |
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terminalterror
29/05/02 @ 17:33
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Does anyone know what will happen if you link up metroid Prime with Fusuion? Nnintendo would be crazy to miss out on at least something
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There's no way in hell GameCube could load it on the fly
Games like Soul Reaver 2 on the PS2 (and the original Soul Reaver on PS1) have proven that it's possible to have a massive, detailed world spooled directly from disc. With a bit of hard work and some tight code I don't see any reason why you couldn't spool just about anything from disc... Never say never, or someone will go out and prove you wrong just to be annoying. :-) |
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Max Diablos
30/05/02 @ 07:42
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ES,
And you're right, textures are the best part of the GameCube, but Xbox's textures are better. Metroid's coming out a year later than Halo, and it's textures don't look to be even getting anywhere near what Halo's got. Another disguised Microsoft fanboy comment. *yawn* Slick visuals alone don't make for a good game, and the GC has plenty of potential for good games. The whole world doesn't revolve around FPS. Get a clue. |
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"George, the "mini-disk is small so it loads faster" is probably one of the worst arguments a GameCube fan can make. The change in loadtimes is so minimal that it shouldn't even be brought up. The smaller the "circle" on the disk is, the faster the load. But XBox disks cover the same ground as GameCubes, there's just a lot more space. "
I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that both Xbox & Gamecube discs were designed to read from the outside in as opposed to inside out. This would result in faster loads/reading because rotational speed is greater on the edges. Or maybe I'm just deluded... |
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GameCube doesn't have the texture capabilities. 3mb's of texture memory? Ew. There's no way just that can do all the nice textures on top of all those polys.
Actually the GC has a 1MB texture cache and a 2MB frame buffer and S3TC and so it(texture cache) can store about 6MB of textures. Note that you can use the GC main memory to store textures as well. The texture cache is merely there to help speed up access to frequently used textures. In fact the GC can store around 72-108MB of textures depending on how much the code and geometry takes up in GC memory. Here's my Source |
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I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that both Xbox & Gamecube discs were designed to read from the outside in as opposed to inside out. This would result in faster loads/reading because rotational speed is greater on the edges.
beep you're right on the ball. "Speed roughly comparable to a 13x to 20x CD-ROM. Developers would store information on the outer tracks first, so 20x speed would be more common. Not all that fast, but not all that slow." Source |
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AnotherMartin
30/05/02 @ 08:56
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I'm sure I heard that the GC load times where also down to Nintendo using their own format not just the size of the disks. People keep calling them mini DVD's but technicaly I don't think they are. Nintendo's two big selling points where load times and security, both of these where attributed to their proprietry (spelling?) format.
People keep saying that Halo was done on dev kits not final h/w but how different where the dev kits to the final h/w? It's not like they couldn't just go and buy the h/w of the shlef and slap it together. I mean, that's what M$ did after all ;-) |
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European Scum : And you're right, textures are the best part of the GameCube, but Xbox's textures are better
I wouldn't normally respond to you, butI will here because I can at least back it up fact and not opinion (for links, see the URLs provided by Bystander earlier). With reference to Bystander's earlier comments, the the GC has an exmtremly fast memory bus to shuffle texture back and forth main ram and the cache. This combined with spooling (which has been proven most recently in The Getaway) means the GC is more than a match for the Xbox in terms of texturing. You might want to frequent websites of those involved with development of games - you'll see that the Cube is widely acknowledged as the superior in terms of texture mapping, despite its lower overall polygon throughput. You may wish to obtain the Starfox screenshots for a demonstration of the Cube's abilities - I've yet to see a more realistic representation of hair/fur on any system. As correctly pointed out by AnotherMartin, the Cube and Xbox have data arranged on the outside of the disc and working inwards. Apart from piracy issues, this speeds up data access and undoutedly contributes to the Cube's extremely fast loading times. There's no way in hell GameCube could load it on the fly. It's too much information, it needs a harddrive. Utterly incorrect. Spooling is a proven technique. You could indeed copy the information to the HDD for improved spooling speeds, but this eats up HDD space and may cause problems if you owned a lot of titles (unless of course the temporary texture cache was wiped from the HDD when the next game was inserted, but a delay whilst the textures were copied to the HDD would be present). Before claims of fanboyism are put forward (as is often the case here), I'm an impartial PS2 owner who will argue the toss when incorrect statements are made. |
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Max Diablos
30/05/02 @ 10:20
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You ain't seen the colour of the shirt I'm wearing ;)
Sod shirts. Polo necks go with everything. Suits, blazers, tracksuit bottoms, and jeans. They're also low maintenance. |
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It might just be all the places that I have worked at in the past ten years, but the vast majority of suit wearers in the software development business are the scruffy bastards. Cheap ill fitting suits, dodgy shirts and the usual "tie I got for christmas". I will never work for a company that insists I wear a shirt and tie ever again.
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Weeeeeeeell, ok Diablo, but I hope it's not like this......
http://64.33.45.67/b/370ps383.jpg (edited link)
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 30/05/02 @ 11:31
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Max Diablos
30/05/02 @ 10:37
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It's a fine pink gingham double-cuffed poplin with a navy woven silk tie akshully
otto's beginning to sound more glammed-up than Pim Fontayne. |
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Thomas Pink shirts are really not bad, but they're too expensive and they have a tendency to shrink (also the collars curl). Blazer used to do the best shirts imo but they've gone now. Pink is pretty much the only place left in the UK to get decent shirts (I've got a few Paul Smith ones too but they're even more pricey).
edit - lunchtime - sushi & jaffacakes :)
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 30/05/02 @ 11:50
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Max Diablos
30/05/02 @ 10:54
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Fortuyn - and actually I quite liked the way he dressed :) But we part ways there...
Actually, I like a dash of the flamboyant myself. |
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"Actually the larger the circle on the disk the faster the load. As you should know the disc spins with Constant Angular velocity (CAV) so the outer part of the disc spins faster (more displacement per second) than the inner part of the disc which means faster loading times for data in the outer parts of the disc. Gamecube discs have the disadvantage of not being able to reach the same speeds in its outer parts because of its reduced radius. "
Par, that was the point I was trying to make. Do you not read entire posts? |
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