mmmm, Terra Nova. Just found my disk for that the other day. I wonder if it works on Windows 7.
You don’t have to “scan every planet” to find anomalies. The ship will prompt you immediately upon entering orbit if there’s a surface mission to be had.
Matt, I got it to run well in DOSBox earlier this year under Windows 7.
That sounds promising. I played the heck out of that game. My son recently picked up the CD and was asking if he could play it. I’ll have to investigate.
Looking Glass made amazing games, but boy did they employ shitty programming. Never has one company made so many games that so reliably fail with the slightest technological shift.
I always like the idea of replaying Terra Nova, but going back to FPS games where the mouse doesn’t control the view… that’s tough.
Scanner apologist!
You heard it here first: Mass Effect Peggle.
At the time, was it the first shooter with squad mates? I’m rusty on gaming history, but it seems like around that era, Terra Nova and an EA Navy seals game did squad mates and missions, that took many years for others to do.
I still remember some of the articles from gaming mags about Terra Nova. The plan was to make it a long running franchise with squad mission based shooting, a space sim and some RTS games based upon the same game world. I wish Looking Glass been able to do more.
I must have a nack for liking buggy games doomed to fail. Terra Nova, Vampire: Bloodlines and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. have been in my top 10 games forever. Well S.T.A.L.K.E.R. isn’t a failure, just not a mainstream game.
I’d love a new Terra Nova, but nostalgia is just that. It would be hard to do that game now, and not be another CoD or Space Marine game.
FTFY. Dude. These guys programmed a true physics engine in System Shock. In 1994. And nobody really knew how to do a decent mouse-look until Quake. Well, except that Future Shock did it first, I guess.
Descent also did it well before Quake. They released the shareware version at the end of 94, about a year after Doom. And mouselook was the default control scheme, unlike Quake, where you had to know the commandline command to activate mouse look.
Yeah but everyone played Descent with a joystick though :)
I played Descent in lots of people’s houses. (“Oh you have AOL? You have to download this shareware game called Descent!”, “Oh you have Prodigy internet? You have to download this game called Descent”, etc.) And almost none of those people had joysticks, since they weren’t avid gamers. So I ended up playing it with a mouse a lot, and I really got to love that mouse-look control scheme. I was so disappointed in Duke3D for not having it, and then later Quake. (I didn’t know about the console command).
yay…
Ok, totally uninterested.
I quite liked the planet scanning. It was kind of a nice relaxing interlude. I think it helps if you aware of what upgrades are available, and conciously thinking to yourself if I find some [rarish needed mineral] here, I can get better/more [insert ability here]! You learn fairly quickly to only scan planets that are rich or have an anomaly, as well.
I know that I hold the ‘wrong’ opinion here, but I’m also not alone in that. It’s not universally hated, though I won’t miss it when it’s not in ME3.
I’d actually play a Call of Mass Effect if done well. Imo, Mass Effect 2 had some awesome shooter gameplay. Glad that ex-Raven are supposedly working on this… they’ve made really solid games… they know there shooters.
No, you don’t.
One other annoyance about ME2’s planetary scanning: you could only carry a set number of probes and fuel; and you could only resupply both at fuel depots and there was usually only one in each system. So if you wanted to strip-mine every planet by spamming probes - inefficient as hell and unnecessary, but I’m sure someone did it - you’d have to go back to resupply frequently.
So don’t do that then.
You also don’t need to upgrade everything in ME2. In fact, it’s not so challenging that upgrading is necessary for survival, hence the stuff you find on planets also isn’t a prerequisite for completing the game. We are still talking about an RPG here, not a full-on competitive shooter.
Wow, sounds like they made it more tedious than it needed to be.
Nothing’s perfect, you know?
Talk now is that it is indeed Mass Effect 3, according to a PlayStation Russia tweet.
http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/103/index/5283900 --> http://www.connectedconsoles.com/ps3-playstation-russia-confirms-bioware-title-as-mass-effect-3.cfm --> http://twitter.com/PlayStationRU/status/5614546668490753
Sure as hell didn’t look like it, unless we’re grittifying Mass Effect.
Yeah, I don’t really buy it either. Seems a bit too early for an official ME3 announcement.