Did you note the bit about the carcinogenic qualities of sassafras? Here’s more on the matter!
SPECIAL QUOTE:
“Oil of Sassafras is chiefly used for flavouring purposes, particularly to conceal the flavour of opium when given to children. In the United States of America it is employed for flavouring effervescing drinks.”
Because you know how hard it is to get the kids to take their opium!
Damned kids.
Sega claims that SA:DX (now named, in full, “Sonic Adventure DX: Director’s Cut“) has five hours of new gameplay in addition to all of the other additions.
A “mission mode” has been added, for COLLECTING JOY. This is where one unlocks “exclusive items”, “secrets”, and the Gamegear games. Whether this mode is what constitutes the five purported hours of new gameplay, I don’t know.
Personally, I don’t think that the emblem-hunting in the Sonic Adventure games counts as real gameplay. The story mode is the actual game. Being forced to go back in and perform inane stunts under arbitrary limitations just seems like a waste of time and energy to me.
I suppose it’s better that the emblems actually do something now, though. Or maybe it’s not. At least I knew I wasn’t missing anything by not bothering with a number of the more annoying ones.
My patience is really starting to wear thin with such thinly-veiled time sponges; tasks which have no substantial reason to exist, other than so as to keep the player glued to the game for an unnaturally, unhealthfully long time. As far as game design goes, it’s manipulative, lazy, and not at all intriguing. Worse, it’s becoming so omnipresent — even where it just doesn’t belong.
It’s… starting to make me dislike videogames in general, at least as they are at present.
I feel not unlike how I felt a decade ago. My levels of disgust and apathy are being strained.
I don’t intend to give up. That’d be too easy. I did it once before, and in the process, I missed most of a generation. Yet, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to care about a lot of what’s out there today.
The industry is entering a rut just as pathetic as the one of ten years ago. Not as damning as the one of 1984, but…
…
there’s a pattern here.
I’m starting to think that there really needs to be a shakedown.
For a while, I’ve been watching its approach. The old guard, as it were, is going to have to either get with the picture soon or it’s going to fall apart. The trouble has already long since begun, spreading the fallout of an industry’s greed and ineptitude as wide as possible so as not to choke the largest perpetrators in their own filth. Meanwhile, a new generation seems to be quietly, humbly (for the moment) emerging — far enough away that the garbage isn’t nearly as much of a problem.
The established head of the industry is flat out of ideas. It’s just going through the motions, without any real understanding anymore for why it does what it does. (Sort of like KoF2002, or any contemporary RPG you might choose to pick up.) There’s no foundation anymore. The old-world elite have been doing what they’ve been doing for so long that they don’t even remember why they’re doing it.
The benefit about new blood, from a separate world, is that it doesn’t have these problems; assuming that the newcomers understand where they are to begin with, and that they know what they’re doing, the ground is always still within reach. They can easily trace down to see how things stand. It isn’t so hard to retrace and start over if need be. They’re informed by the ideas of the older generation, but those ideas are adapted in such a way that is relevent to the newcomers in the context which they know most well.
This is, I think, the difference between the two things that Nintendo’s been doing lately.
The way that the apprenticeship thing seems to be going at the moment is that the methods are being taught by rote, for their own sake — rather than as possible answers to more fundamental questions.
But on the other hand, Nintendo is also supporting developers like Silicon Knights and Retro; contributing funding, polish, and advice — but allowing the newer houses to find their own direction.
It’s the difference between following a religion and being informed by its philosophy. Following in the footsteps of your forebears, or being inspired to do your own work by building upon what came before.
Mrrn.
I can see Eiji Aonuma presenting his game before Miyamoto. “This is how it goes, right?”
Yes, technically…
But… no.
I wonder if my toothpaste protects against demons. It doesn’t specifically claim anything on the package, so I’m tempted to think otherwise.