PixlBit

Oooh, I had this game on my old game boy. I loved it. I have never played the NES version, but I loved the GBA one. The gameplay was fun, the graphics where amaziing too. 

 

I certainly have a prefference for it over the NES versio, but that would most likely be the nostalgia playing it's part too. I remember the music being pretty awesome. I feel like playing it again, I still have my old brickboy and the game laying around, prolly should give it a go. :) 

Awesome review man, love the old style capcom games :) 

Same here, A sky has such a huge influence over the rest of the easthetics. It's really incredible how much difference the sky makes. It's also incredibly difficult to get it just right. 

It is. I truly believe that that's what makes good games great. It doesn't matter what genre it is, but people can tell when a certain kind of care has been put into a game and that's just as important as solid game design, actually, it should be part of game design imho.

Look at games like to the moon, Transformers: War for cybertron, Dues Ex : HR. VALVe's games and many more. The yhave talented artists working on them, and you can see they love working on these games. :)

And details get lost to many people, it's kind of like, if you didn;t have these details there, people will notice it, once they're there and used correctly, it enhances the experience. 

Fall of cybertron was good, but I prefer the first one. I think mainly because the first one felt like a huge nod to the old g1 cartoon. I also prefered the game mechanics of the first more then the 2nd.

In the end both games are incredibly well made and both games make up for almost every bad TF game that was made before it. I'd also like to mention Transformers Armada on the ps2. It was highly enjoyable and it had a pretty nice customization feature for your weapons.

It's very sad indeed. I find myself wondering what kind of mind such a person must have had to take a company like Nintendo and make it so succesful. Of course Iawata, Gunpei and others like them have had a huge share in the success of the company but I always find it food for thought to wonder about such things.

I still remember seeing his name during the credits of star fox, not knowing at the time, who's who. He did good by surviving the gaming industry and I have fond memroies playing with my NES, SNES, N64... I hope he's in a better place along with Gunpei. :)

That's right, I should've mention that of course the main reason for these beta's (and now also alpha's) is to gain input for the playerbase and improve these games. And it's incredibly valuable what kinds of bugs these gamers can find. They just do things that we, the designers, and even the playtesters, have never thought of. Using various exploits.

That being said, where does it end? Will developers try to go pre alpha in the future? Building a game from the ground up with input from players? When I look at games of old like Quake III Arena or Unreal Tournament, these games stand the test of time, and even with the exploits used they still remain highly playable. Sure the games are fundamentally very simplistic in nature. They don't use physics, bullet penetration and all that jazz. And perhaps that is something that should be taken into account. I'll drag the game I'm working on into the conversation once more to say that the complexity of our game is on a level that I think not going public with our beta would only hurt us in the long run, because they have showed us a number of exploits that we just never thought of.

I guess in the end what I'm trying to bring across is that I believe that a strong game design should come first and foremost before getting input from the community. It's fun to see games grow, but on the flip side it may taint a person's initial impression of a game. Which is a lot tougher to change then chaning the game itself. And that is where I think lies the true pitfalls of going aplha. When someone doesn't like something ,it's incredibly difficult to change their views even if you;d fix everything they complained about. But you can never satisfy everyone, Make a strong game, and then improve on it. It's been working for us and really well so far. :)

Thank you. I haven't gone too in-depth at the moment. I hope to post some more interesting bits in the future. 

Thank you very much, I've been enjoying the site for quite some time now. I aim to be a regular contributer eventhough I have little time at the moment. :P

The issue I have with alpha's, and to an extend beta's perhaps is what can the player expect from the finished game? Certain issues or easthetics, sound design, buggy AI, anything, how does that relate to the final build?

Even for the project I'm working for, we're in early beta with only a hundred people, I find it disheartening sometimes to see a YouTube vid go live with the current bugs, that I know will be gone in the next update. I'm certainly not against Alpha's nor Beta's, but I wonder what players expect from them, and how do they feel when certain aspects of the game aren't what the gamer thought it would or should be from what he or she expected.

Does anyone here perhaps has some experience seeing a game being shaped from alpha to release and what their expectations where, and did the end game meet those expectations? 

Ohh yes, I grew up with the original show. I played the ps2 game of armada and thought it was really cool. But I'm so happy that High Moon stepped up all these years later and gave us two amazing transformers games. I love these games, they're such works of fandom. Amazing.

As for TF:Prime, I loved it, I haven't seen any of the season 3 episodes, but I'll do that later. Certainly the best incarnation by far, it ranks up there just under Avatar: TLA.