Some time ago, I was kind of thinking "why is nobody porting Cube or something to DS and PSP (and N-Gage too, in case anyone cares)? Let's settle the console war/fanboy differences once and for all, get together in friendship and joy and harmony, load up the same game to all of our portables, then play a nice rousing round of a bloody FPS game" =)

But I'd definitely settle for Quake on DS, as described on GameSetWatch. That would be pretty good, and more advanced than Cube too. Quake's control scheme is very versatile, and it would work on both joysticks and touch screen. Quake doesn't need +mlook, but benefits greatly from it, and DS is able to provide all that stuff. And heck, if Nintendo 64 could run it, I guess DS can too, and even better...

Too bad this depends on PassMe. Would be much cooler if this were a real licensed DS card that came with an accessory module that has extra RAM, and flashRAM to store downloadable mods and maps in. A big hint to Activision/iD folks...

Okay, here's yet another of those opinion pieces that sure should have been published like million years ago, when the topic was still even borderline relevant. Kingdom Hearts.

Even seeing KH makes me worried. Reading about KH makes me even more worried.

Why? Wrong Disney, that's what's the problem. Wrong Disney.

Every time I see the game, I keep thinking of Disney animated movies. Now, I'm yet another random ignorant European. Disney stuff is big here, really big. But one should make it abundantly clear that it's not the animated movies that are so cool. It's the comics.

Let's see: In FF7, Cid was smoking all the time. Wikipedia says he got a frigging straw instead. Oo! Disney being kid-friendly. Can't smoke in a kiddie game, right? Er... one of the funniest random inconsequential jokes in the Finnish Donald Duck mag was a random poster on the background in one of the comics: "Tar your lungs with style!" Want more proof? Almost every bad guy has a stump of cigars in mouth. Not to even mention the police, dammit.

It's just my observation that the games seem to draw too much of inspiration from the movies and not quite enough inspiration from the comics. Or that's how the whole deal seemed to me when I looked at the materials. There's a great deal more material in the comics. Heck, there's tons of great material for a RPG in the Carl Barks stories.

In closing, um... I don't really have a good point, aside of the fact that I hereby declare that I won't be buying KH games until they have the trash dragon as a summon. =)

Here's one annoying thing I've noted: It's hard to start an interesting atypical MUD.

I've been thinking of starting a whole new kind of a multiplayer game. It might work as a web-based game, or ones with dedicated clients, but I think it would be best as something kind of like BattleTech: The Frontier Lands - a text-based MUD with an optional graphical frontend.

Anyway, starting writing something new is a daunting task. It seems to me that most MUD servers these days either assume too much about the underlying game, or require too much ripping apart to start from the clean table.

For me, an ideal starting point would be something that had

• Pre-made functionality for characters, rooms, inanimate objects and mobs (provided the game doesn't assume mobs behave in any way)
• No programming knowledge needed to create those
• A sane scripting language that allows expansion of everything

I've looked at LPMud derivants, which have kind of a sane scripting language, but most of the mudlibs are too intricate for this, and even if only marginal code use is needed, technically building areas needs writing code.

I also looked at MUCKs, which allow just about everything in this list in an elegant way, except that the MUF scripting language is just plain awful. (Multi User Forth? Has sounded quite unexciting to me for a long time!)

So what might I do? Write the whole MUD from scratch? Perhaps that would be the easy way - though that needs a lot of basic groundwork done, and that's just plain boring.

Here's my new random idea that I think might be worth doing.

Every time - well, not quite every time, but close enough - that I will complete a game, I'll try to think of contributing something to people who will be playing the game in future. A new informative piece or something.

When I first completed Ultima VII, I made a map. I took a raw world map that had been dumped from the game, then added labels to every building I went to. The end result was a... gigantic map. The next time I beat the game, I created a plot diagram - diagram of the stuff that had to be done to finish the game.

I'm not saying that every time anyone completes a game they should submit a new, complete walkthrough to GameFAQs. I'm saying people should contribute to some game-related cause while the game is still fresh in their memories. I've just beaten Final Fantasy VII; I may be hanging around the Final Fantasy Wikis and Wikipedia in near future, to fill in some of the details.

So that's a Random Good Idea of the Day. Hopefully, this might turn out to be interesting too.

The console game industry, of course, won't let anyone to make games for the consoles unless there is profit involved for the console makers. Therefore, they create a huge chasm between the publishing houses and amateur developers.

The big shame is, of course, that homebrew developers don't have much of a chance to get their games published on game consoles. But it also gives us a rather interesting obstacle: There are no ports of open source games for consoles, unless you happen to run Linux or something on the consoles, legitimately ported or not.

So, I'd just wish some big game companies, with "legitimate" console devkits and some financial muscle, could just pick up some of the open source projects, port them to consoles, and make ordinary releases out of them, without any hassle usually associated with running homebrew titles.

Here are some of my favorite projects that might be cool on consoles.

Let's start from the obvious end: Stepmania ought to kick butt on consoles. The only platform with proper dance games these days is Playstation 2, and I'd be dying to get a GameCube dance game. Also, if Stepmania could be ported, and the code would be given back to Stepmania developers, that might mean there would be more cheap releases of dance game collections - game houses could license a bunch of songs from the record companies, do moves for them, and release them, without paying much for game development.

Another project which we'll probably never see, but we can still hope: Something similar to Cube for N-Gage or Nintendo DS. Here we have a game that is almost perfect to run on "low end" (portable) platforms (well, it might be needed to trim down the details quite a bit, but it's theoretically doable, see Yeti3D), is actually fun to play, and would work wonderfully in Bluetooth-style environment. It might be a perfect portable multi-player game.

Or how about The Ur-Quan Masters? I know it's an old game, but it's still a great game by all standards. The only console it was ever released for was the freaking 3DO. Super-Melee for GameCube! Please!