Gary Whitta Doesn't Like Wing Commander!

Indeed. I love the old ones and I'm a retro-gamer by trade. My favourite console is the trusty SNES, the PSX coming a nice second. After that, PS2, Cube, and NES tie. :p My favourite handheld is the GBA, because it REALLY pays a lot of homage to my beloved SNES. Castlevania, Fire Emblem, and others of my old favourites come back to haunt my dreams (tip: Flu + Fire Emblem = WEIRD DREAMS)...and of course there are the old standbys for PC: Wing Commander, Civ 2 (most balanced civ IMO and best made), Lords of the Realm 2 (GODLY), DESCENT (it's a flightsim and a shooter in one!), and nearly every Lucasarts adventure ever made (never finished a single one, though). :p

Still, though, there are plenty of new games I love too. My current favourite is UT2004 - I love the team emphasis and the Onslaught mode, and the graphics add a very nice touch, but if it looked like Quake 2 I'd still play it. Anything pre-Quake 2 is quite questionable since I found most shooters to be graphically bland enough to make your eyes go squinty...except Descent (never played Quake 1). I also of course have UE going right now and WCU, and Freedom Force vs the Third Reich is very cool...
 
Whitta is obviously the type of guy that thinks a Ferrari F40 is better than a 1967 Shelby Mustang. Sure the Ferrari sticks to the road better, has good body lines, and is damn quick but the Mustang is a classic.
The '85 Shelby edition Dodge Charger I "inherited" from my mom in High School was probably the most enjoyable car I ever drove. Sure it would only run on Chevron gas, for some strange reason, and you couldn't drive it in a straight line in the snow. But it was always fun to drive, even when I was spinning around on the freeway.
Yeah Whitta's all enamoured with the flashy groovy effects of today's games, and admittedly there were a lot of old games that were total crap, but then again you can only plastic seats in an F40. :)
 
ChrisReid said:
You're missing some killer XBox Live action with us every night Lehah. Disregard for new popular games is just as weird as people hating old nostalgic games to me.
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I'm not saying everything these days is bad but theres fewer games I'm really interested in. In fact, the only thing announced for this year that I'm interested in is Battlefront 2. I loved the original.
 
Battlefront was a good game although the online experience was pretty poor in my opinion. Always lagging all the time...quite glitchy. Also I found the the flying vehicles nigh impossible to control..which was a major disappointment. BF2 sounds quite good though...I'll definitely try it out. Lehah, do you have Ghost Recon 2? Maybe we could all play that sometime (co-op anyone?)
 
They just released a third downloadable content pack for Ghost Recon 2 I believe. The new Battlefront doesn't look bad.. I thought the first one was actually a bit of a watered down Halo that was popular based on its license.
 
Eh, nothing beats going back an playing an old game. For instance, if I go back and play WC2, it's not necessarily the game itself that makes me happy, but the stuff that was happening around the time I first played it. As a true lifelong gamer, most of my fondest memories are attached to remembering a certain game I was playing. Example; If I played "Bad Dudes" I would remember the old arcade at the local bowling alley where I first played it, or if I say "Batman: Return of the joker", that was when I got my first gaming console. Those were also two below average games, but I still play them from time to time.

-Rance-

P.S. The fact that he picks on wing commander shows he is a fool. I want to get paid to offer foolish opinions of something I don't know how to put into the context of when they were made.

Added note: He also sounds like a doctor that supports euthinasia for the sake of just hating things that are old.
 
vindicator said:
Added note: He also sounds like a doctor that supports euthinasia for the sake of just hating things that are old.
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hahahahaha

seriously, I think wc1 is one of the few old games that I think holds up tremendously well. It has great replay value, strong, somewhat simple gameplay, pretty animation, and a good story. I just don't get where Gary is coming from.
 
As someone has already very cleverly suggested, he's probably just the type of guy who thinks Casablanca sucks because "WTF? No colors?! This ruins my immersion factor!" or somesuch.

It's a pretty poorly written "article".
 
ChrisReid said:
I thought the first one was actually a bit of a watered down Halo that was popular based on its license.
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I really like Battlefront becuase it's just a Star Wars version of Battlefield. I've never, ever understood the popularity of Halo.
 
I think that the article is pretty bad, because he doesn't even justify his outrageous opinion. but I do think that there are several great new games and that most old stuff is crappy. Sure, WC1 is great, but i think it is kinda clunky. I'd rather play priv, for instance.

Dune 2 was fun back then, and it is a very important game. but it is really boring nowadays. You have to select EACH unit, click on a command and then click on the target. somthing you can do with 3 clicks in C&C demands 30 in dune 2... it's freacking unplayable, this day.

Civ 2 is kinda different, because it is so centered on using your brain that it doesn't age as much, but my ideal Civ would be a mix of 2 and 3. the whole culture/territory thing on 3 is amazing. Somthing hybrid with rise of nations would be neat too.

I think there are two kinds of sucession in games. you have those new games that add to the older ones, and you have the new games that substitute the new ones. For instance, there is no reason to play Civ1 when you have 2 and 3, which improve every issue. same with AOE 1 and 2, and Quake 2 and 3, and Diablo 1 and 2. but in wing commander and X-Com, you should play all of them. and also most RPGs.
 
LeHah said:
I really like Battlefront becuase it's just a Star Wars version of Battlefield. I've never, ever understood the popularity of Halo.
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Ahh.. well.. never really liked Battlefield too much either. Again, the sequel this year looks really good though. I like Halo more than the thousand other FPS games released in the last few years because of how incredibly polished it is. It's really hard to make an FPS that stands out above all the others, but that's really what they've done with this one. The dynamics of motion, shooting and completing objectives are very well done.

A lot of FPS games have a poorer sense of speed. In Halo you can really run around quick in small levels, while you really need a vehicle to move around the big ones fast. Many FPS games have weird stylized weapons or too many explosive superweapons. Halo does a great job at limiting the powerful weapons and making them accessible to multiple teams. There are dozens and dozens of preset modes as well. Rather than deathmatch over and over and over on a few levels, the multiplayer of Halo involves constant rotation between team deathmatch, capture the flag, king of the hill, holding a ball, playing "tag" and dozens of other modes. It's fresh for hours on end. It has the most comprehensive and complete feature set on XBox Live that automatically pits you against players of similar skill on a diverse set of maps and objectives. It also is increadibly great in LAN mode. If you got an XBox, Live and the game, I'm sure we'd have you hooked.
 
Dune 2 was fun back then, and it is a very important game. but it is really boring nowadays. You have to select EACH unit, click on a command and then click on the target. somthing you can do with 3 clicks in C&C demands 30 in dune 2... it's freacking unplayable, this day.
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I felt this way for several years, but now that I go back and play both games I find that I like Dune 2 a lot more specifically for this reason.

The key to almost any C&C/RA/Later Dune/etc. level is to build lots of units and swarm the enemy with them all at once. Dune 2 makes it much, much harder to do this - strategy becomes more important.

It's jarring to go back to Dune 2 after years of C&C, but once you get used to it it really does involve a lot more thinking.
 
This guy is an idiot. I never had the opportunity to play WC1 until after my mind had been contaminated with all the great graphics and nifty features of the newer games, but when I finally got a copy of WC1, I played it for 2 hours and made it to work late. When I got settled into work I thought to myself: "Wow, that is a great game."

The only game I have bought this year was "SM's Pirates!", mostly to get that nostalgia fix now that I think about it. I liked it, and when i step back and think about it, that's mostly because they changed so little. The heart of the game is the same, and though there are new features, I still get the same "feeling" I did when i played the original Pirates!
New games come out every day, and after a while it gets old. I'm a casual gamer. I want to play a good game, and I don't want to try tons of games until I find something I really like. This is why I load up old games sometimes while my Xbox gathers dust. Some games just "have it".

I find the fact that he uses half his article to babble about his dumbass warcraft character just sad. He has an obsession with the level cap and he's "proud" of his acomplishment, which basically equates to him having ungodly amounts of time in which he has no outside life (which on itself, isn't a bad thing. I don't want to insult any other people who play MMORPG's, but seriously, leave it out of the article, I don't care. Go for a run or go to the gym for a little bit each day and be proud of something tangible).

End Rant.
 
LOL!

Now thats a jerk. Not only most likely a 24/7 World of Warcraft nerd, but also no kind of critic whatsoever. Wing Commander is addicting, graphics or not. This guy has reallyn o sense for classics.
 
No doubt his article will get tons of letters to the editor. Classic games suck!? I recently went to an arcade with my brother and we enjoyed spending more time on PacMan than the newer games. I think new games have their own merits too, and poorly supported insults of these as a whole would be just as bad. It's hard to believe a respected professional magazine would make a sweeping unfounded insult on a whole well respected genre. If I had played WC1 and enjoyed it (I've never played it) I would suggest all of us WC people write a letter to the editor about how old WC's are awesome. I suppose WC's 3 and 4 could be considered old enough to be criticized by this article, and these were alot more fun for me than modern games I've played (Halo/Homeworld2). I would even go as far as to call WC's 3 and 4 "works of art", and it might even be arguable that they're "timeless". Can you imagine the publicity if they were swamped with 100's of letters talking about how awesome WC is?
 
It is odd that PC Gamer dedicated half of a column to begging for Worlds of Warcraft space money and then half to attacking classic games without explaining why, I'll grant you that.

I don't know much about the publishing industry, but if there's one area where it seems likely that all the doomsday predictions of print media dying because of the internet will come true then it's gaming magazines. PC Gamer should be trying to counter the Gamespots of the universe by providing higher quality content rather than poorly written filler.
 
PC Gamer's corpse began to 'ripen' about 4 years ago, IIRC... just when online gaming mags were coming up. After that, I stopped looking for PC Gamer. I abandoned a lot of other gaming magazines well before that, and I suspect outside of the company-run magazines which are basically ads and hype for their own games (Nintendo Power), that these will die off in short order - except the ones which have an online component, which may persist without the useless paper version.
 
Really, really disappointing. I remember a few years ago, PC Gamer posted a Top 50 Games of All Time section (one of the 2000 issues, I think), of which the now so-called "old crap" took about 80% of the spots. And now they flame them? I mean, WTF? When did they turn so graphic-suckers?

I've only recently gotten WC1 and WC2 and played them for the first time ever (The first WC game I played was Privateer, about 10 years ago). I've beaten WC1 and almost finished WC2, and I've to say they absolutely rock. I never put graphics on top of gameplay, ever.
 
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