My Old Games Live

You think of videogames as being on the shelves for a few weeks and then disappearing forever, but it's actually not too hard to find and play my best games.

The latest Xbox 360 update made it possible to play Spider-Man 2 on the 360.  Don't bother with the missions, just swing around. 

You can play Die By The Sword on GameTap - although they disabled the limb-severing - which, hey, was half the fun.  But it's still got the unique, never-imitated swordfighting and there's a lot of cool stuff (much of which came from Mark Nau) in the levels.

And you can violate the copyright on Magic Candle 2 at Home of the Underdogs.  Steal this record.

This pleases me.

Comments

[Viridian]

I can't make up my mind on Underdogs...I mean, it's a pirate board, plain and simple.

On the other hand, if someone doesn't archive this stuff, it _will_ disappear. Physical media won't last forever. And what's the point of archiving it if that archive isn't publicly available? So you could make a "Library of Congress" argument for it.

On the other hand, it's a pirate board, plain and simple.

Argh.

[Chris Busse]

Mark Nau's level designs? Mark did the scripting events. The layout was me, except dwarf mining which was Phil and Puzzle level which was Tomo.

[Jamie Fristrom]

Well, okay, but wasn't it Mark who said, "Let's have a kobold loading crates on a raft and you can either hide in one of the crates...or kill the kobold and take the raft..." And wasn't it Mark who said, "Let's have the second level be nonlinear, you can either go this way or this way or this way," and then after seeing how it played said, "On second thoughts, let's rearrange it so you have to do this and this and this." And invented baby trog. And said, "Let's have this elevator at the end of the level - if you pull the lever and don't get on in time it'll go up without you and an orc will get on and come down to investigate." And said, "Let's have these pendulums - you go through once on the bottom level and they whack you, then you go back on the higher level, jumping from top of pendulum to top of pendulum." And didn't he create that block puzzle with the levers where there was the secret lever within the blocks? And wasn't having a kobold hanging from a rope - that you could either beat on or rescue - his idea? In short, the way I remember it, most of the unique stuff that gave the levels personality and made them something more than walk-fight-walk-fight came from him.

[Chris Busse]

That would be a disservice to the collaborative effort to attribute that all to one person. The puzzles and jumping was very much Tomo, for example. Other story bits here and there were Mark, myself, you, and others. Heck, one could argue that one of the most memorable things of the game was the voice over work that the actor who played Enric did. That direction came from Al Barasch down at Interplay. You know as well as anyone that creative direction was a shared effort on that project.

[Jamie Fristrom]

I know everyone contributed. I'm not trying to say Mark did the whole game. What I was trying to say was I thought Mark's contributions were particularly cool. Maybe "level designs" was a poor choice of words - how about "design ideas."